Testimonies, Vol. 1 (Classic Reprint) - Hardcover

Inhaltsangabe

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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