THE following twelve books are biographies written between 107 and
137 B.C. They are a forceful exposition, showing how a Pharisee with
a rare gift of writing secured publicity by using the names of the
greatest men of ancient times. "There were intellectual giants in
those days" and the Twelve Patriarchs were the Intellectual Giants!
Each is here made to tell his life story. When he is on his deathbed
he calls all his children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren
about him, and proceeds without reservation to lay bare his
experiences for the moral guidance of his hearers. If he fell into
sin he tells all about it and then counsels them not to err as he
did. If he was virtuous, he shows what rewards were his.
When you look beyond the unvarnished--almost brutally
frank--passages of the text, you will discern a remarkable
attestation of the expectations of the Messiah which existed a
hundred years before Christ. And there is another element of rare
value in this strange series. As Dr. R. H. Charles says in his
scholarly work on the Pseudepigrapha: its ethical teaching "has
achieved a real immortality by influencing the thought and diction
of the writers of the New Testament, and even those of our Lord.
This ethical teaching, which is very much higher and purer than that
of the Old Testament, is yet its true spiritual child and helps to
bridge the chasm that divides the ethics of the Old and New
Testaments."
The instances of the influence of these writings on the New
Testament are notable in the Sermon on the Mount which reflects the
spirit and even uses phrases from these Testaments. St. Paul appears
to have borrowed so freely that it seems as though he must have
carried a copy of the Testaments with him on his travels.
Thus, the reader has before him in these pages what is at once
striking for its blunt primitive style and valuable as some of the
actual source books of the Bible.