Cave of Treasures

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the Apostles in Africa, Western Asia, India and other countries was very great. Side by side with this apocryphal literature there appeared works in Egypt and Syria which dealt with Old Testament History and endeavoured to explain its difficulties. But though Patriarch and Bishop and Priest read the Scriptures and the commentaries on them to the people, and instructed their congregations orally on every possible occasion, there was much in the ancient Jewish Religion, out of which many of the aspects of the Christian Religion had developed, which the laity did not understand. On the one hand, the unlettered Christian folk heard the Jews denouncing Christ and His followers, and on the other, their teachers taught them that Christ was a descendant of King David and Abraham, and that the great and essential truths and mysteries of the Christian Religion were foreshadowed by events which had taken place in the lives of the Jewish patriarchs. Some of the Fathers of the Church in the Vth and VIth centuries wrote sermons and dissertations on the Birth of our Lord, and His Baptism, Temptation, Passion and Death and Resurrection, and proved by quotations from the Prophets that the son of the Virgin Mary was indeed the Messiah and the Saviour of the world. But copies of these works were not multiplied for the use of their congregations, most of the members of which were unlettered folk, and the influence of all written discourses was much circumscribed in consequence. The great monastic institutions possessed copies of the Old and New Testaments written in Greek and Syriac, but these were not available for study by the laity in general, and it is probable that only well-to-do people could afford to have copies of the Books of the Bible made for their private use. Thus the circumstances of the time made it necessary that the Fathers of the Church, or some of the learned scribes, should compile comprehensive works on the history of God's dealings with man as described in the Old Testament, and show the true relationship of the Christian Religion to the Religion of the Hebrew Patriarchs and the to kings of Israel and Judah. There is little doubt that many such works were written, and that their authors based their histories on the writings of their predecessors, and that Christian writers borrowed largely from the Hebrew "Book of Enoch" and the "Book of Jubilees," as well as the Histories and Chronicles which were then extant in Greek. Some of the latter works, i.e. those in Greek, were written by men who had access to information which was derived from Babylonian and Assyrian histories written in cuneiform, and, thanks to the labours of Assyriologists, the statements based on such information can, in many cases, be checked and verified. Further reference to this point will be made later on. The oldest of the Christian works on the history of God's dealing with man from Adam to Christ is probably the "Book of Adam and Eve" (see page 9), which, in its original form, was written sometime in the Vth or VIth century of our Era; its author is unknown. As there is no doubt whatever that the writer of the "Cave of Treasures" borrowed largely from the "Book of Adam and Eve," or from the same source from 7 of 130