Cave of Treasures

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history of the "Cave of Treasures" will find necessary for useful work. I have also added a translation of the "Testament of Adam," a popular apocryphal work which is based upon the Syriac "Cave of Treasures," and upon legends derived from books of a similar, and perhaps allied, character. The ancient tradition which asserts that the "Cave of Treasures" was written in the IVth century of our Era, is supported by the general contents of the work. These reproduce Ephraim's quaint and sometimes fanciful methods of exegesis and his hatred of the Jews, and supply many examples of his methods in religious argument with which we are familiar from his other writings. We may notice, too, his pride in the antiquity of the Syriac language. That it was written in Mesopotamia by a Syrian, there is no doubt, and if we reject Ephraim as its author, we are bound to admit that the author, or perhaps later editor, belonged to the school of Ephraim. Whichever view be taken is immaterial. For the book certainly contains a mass of historical information which can only have been derived from pre-Christian Hebrew works, or from post-Christian chronologies and histories written in Greek. The writers of such Greek works derived some of their information at first or second hand, from documents originally written in cuneiform. Of the general historical character of the "Cave of Treasures" there is no doubt, and it is this fact which gives it such importance for the history of the Hebrew Patriarchs, and for early Christian History, and the Christian Faith. This view was maintained by the eminent scholars Dillmann, Nöldeke, Sachau, Wright, Bezold and others during the last century, and it was firmly held by Christians in Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, Egypt, Nubia and Abyssinia for the fourteen centuries preceding. On the historical facts which form the framework of the "Cave of Treasures," the pious author, or editor, grafted a whole series of legends, many of which deserve the descriptions of "idle stories" and "vain fables" which have been applied to them by Assemani and the older European theologians. The reader having perused them will readily understand that such legends, containing as they do garbled history facts and anachronisms, are neither accepted nor endorsed by any member of the Committee of the Religious Tract Society or by myself. These legends were inserted with the view of making the "Cave of Treasures" a sort of religious "Wonder-book" which would appeal to the vivid and credulous imaginations of Christian natives in almost every country of the Near East; and religious "wonder-books" were intended by their authors and editors to amuse as well as to instruct. The "Cave of Treasures" possesses an apocryphal character it is true, but the support which its contents give to the Christian Faith, and the light which the historical portions of it throw on early Christian History, entitle it to a very high place among the apocryphal Books of the Old and the New Testament. These facts have induced the Committee of the Religious Tract Society to order the publication of this the first English translation of the "Cave of Treasures." 4 of 130