Sinopsis
Excerpt from Testimonies, Vol. 1
It may naturally be supposed that a race which laid stress on moral progress, whose religious services had variable elements of both prayer and praise, and which was carrying on an active propaganda, would have, among other books, manuals Of morals, of devotion and of controversy. It may also be supposed, if we take into consideration the contemporary habit of making collections of excerpta, and the Special authority which the Jews attached to their sacred books, that some of these manuals would consist of extracts from the Old Testament. The existence of composite quotations in the New Testament and in some of the early Fathers suggests the hypo thesis that we have in them relics of such manuals.
Manuals of controversy, such as Dr Hatch imagines to be the apparatus of a Jewish missionary in early times, might perhaps be described as Testimonia pro Jadaeis, and, if such existed, there is nothing to forbid their having been produced by the Hellenists of the prae-christian period, as well as by those of a later date. What we are concerned with, however, is not Testi monies On behalf Of the Jews, whose force would not be very great except with those who were already well on the way to conviction of the truth of Judaism; but Testimonies against Jews, of the nature of a series of argumenta ad hominem, where the man was identified with his own religion and then refuted from it. And it is only necessary to say here of the very illuminating sentence quoted from Dr Hatch, that if such collections of Testimonies on behalf of the Jews existed in early times, before the diffusion of Christianity, then there must have been, a fortiori, Similar collections produced in later times, when the Christian religion was being actively pushed by the Church in the Synagogue. It is, of course, possible also that those phenomena on which Hatch's observations turned, such as the early existence of composite quotations from the Septuagint, may belong to the class of Testimonies against the Jews, and not to Testimonies on behalf of them. In which case the error in not recognizing their character would be due to the want of a right Sense of the antiquity of this form of Christian propaganda.
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Reseña del editor
Excerpt from Testimonies, Vol. 1
The existence in the early Church of collections of Testimonies, extracted from the Old Testament for use against the Jews, has for a long time been a matter of suspicion. It was in the highest degree probable that such collections should arise, and their value for controversial purposes was so obvious that they would readily pass into the form of written books, and be subject to the correction, amplification, or excision of editors in such a way as to constitute in themselves a cycle of Patristic literature, the main lines of whose development can easily be traced and the variations thereof from one period of Church life to another can often be detected. They arose out of the exigency of controversy, and therefore covered the wide ground of canonical Jewish literature; but they were, at the same time, subject to the exigency of the controversialist, who, travelling from place to place, could not carry a whole library with him. It was, therefore, a priori, probable that they would be little books of wide range. The parallel which suggests itself to ones mind is that of the little handbook known as the Soldiers Pocket Bible, which was carried by the Ironsides of Cromwell, and was composed of a series of Biblical extracts, chiefly from the Old Testament, defining the duty of the Puritan soldier in the various circumstances in which he found himself, and arranged under the headings of questions appropriate to the situation.
About the Publisher
Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com
This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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