The Presbyterian Review Volume 1 (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: IV. THE APOLOGETICAL VALUE OF THE TESTAMENTS OF THE XII PATRIARCHS. r I AHEY tell a story of a botanical enthusiast, who left his - English home and travelled the world over in search of a mistletoe upon an oak. Returning after his long, but unsuccessful quest, he incidentally mentioned to his agent the cause of his long absence. " Why," cried the astonished man, " there is the very thing you have sought?at your own door!" This incident will illustrate much that occurs in far more serious researches. How often we fail to see and make use of the facts that lie at hand, in our eager search for the same facts through more difficult mediums, or in more recondite quarters. Every branch of human inquiry will furnish examples, patristic criticism no less than the rest. Thus, while eyes were worn out deciphering the " one only extant copy " of the Epistle of Clement of Rome, and conjecture balked in the effort to elucidate its errors or lacunae, two frequented European libraries each held an additional authority for the text. Again, while men were striving over certain readings of the Epistle of Barnabas until the world was tired of their wrangling, all the time at least two Greek manuscripts of that book, a simple glance at either of which would have forever settled all dispute, were lying hid in Eastern monasteries awaiting discovery. Even more strangely has the world dealt with the Testaments of the XII Patriarchs. It has not been hidden away in the East or in private libraries. It has been before the critical world for now near two centuries. Yet, though containing within itself no doubtful answers to several important questions, it has not been allowed to speak upon them. Its fortunes have been of the strangest. From the time of Jerome to the time of Robert Grosseteste no Weste...