The Messiah of the Gospels

THE Jewish people did not cease to produce a rich and varied religious literature, consisting of history, poetry, wisdom, and prophecy, during their subjection to the Greek and Roman yoke. The various types of character and schools of thought, which are represented in the sacred writings of the Jewish canon of the Old Testament, did not cease with the prophet Malachi in the Persian period, as the uncritical traditional opinion. of former times supposed. These types and schools. perpetuated themselves in numerous writings deep down into the Greek period, and even into the Roman period and the times of the New Testament. After the fixing of the canon of the Pentateuch by the priestly lawyers and narrators, who were especially active during the exile and the early years of the Restoration, the priestly school produced the memorials of Ezra and Nehemiah. in the Persian period, and the work of the chronicler in the Greek period. The priestly tendency passed over

into the schools of the scribes and renewed its life in oral traditional instruction, which found little expression in literature until the second century of the Christian era. The prophetic tendency, after the fixing of the canon of the former and latter prophets, was active in pseudepigrapha and in historical didactic stories such. as the books of Daniel, Esther, and Ruth, which found their way into the third canon; and in a great number of other pseudepigrapha and didactic stories, some of which were taken up into the apocryphal books of the Hellenistic canon, a still larger number remaining in an uncertain condition outside the collection of sacred books of the Hebrew and Hellenistic Scriptures, but making their way, in part, into the Ethiopic and other ancient versions of the Old Testament Scriptures, and, in part, into canonical recognition in the private opinion of certain early Christian writers.

The writings of the third Hebrew canon also represent the lyric type of the Psalter and Lamentations, and the type of Wisdom in the books of Proverbs, Job, Song of Songs, and Ecclesiastes. Both of these types had a long literary development. The Psalter embraces many psalms from the Greek period, and a considerable number of Maccabean psalms. The Wisdom Literature includes Ecclesiastes, which belongs to the Greek period. These were taken up into the third canon. But other writings of the same types were subsequently composed, some of which appear in the Apocrypha, others among the Pseudepigrapha. The lines between the canonical and the extra-canonical writings were drawn by the pious judgment of those who fixed the several successive canons. The judgment of later ages has in the main confirmed these lines, although there are some writings with regard to which opinion has fluctuated.

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