Note 112 — Chapter II

Footnote 112:

(return)

The brilliant investigations of Bernays, however, have shewn how many-sided that philosophy of religion was. The proofs of asceticism in this Hellenistic Judaism are especially of great interest for the history of dogma (See Theophrastus' treatise on piety). In the eighth Epistle of Heraclitus, composed by a Hellenistic Jew in the first century, it is said (Bernays, p. 182). "So long a time before, O Hermodorus, saw thee that Sibyl, and even then thou wert" ειδε σε προ ποσουτου αιωνος, Ερμοδωρε 'η Σιβυλλα εκεινη, και τοτε ησθα. Even here then the notion is expressed that foreknowledge and predestination invest the known and the determined with a kind of existence. Of great importance is the fact that even before Philo, the idea of the wisdom of God creating the world and passing over to men had been hypostatised in Alexandrian Judaism (see Sirach, Baruch, the wisdom of Solomon, Enoch, nay, even the book of Proverbs). But so long as the deutero-canonical Old Testament, and also the Alexandrine and Apocalyptic literature continue in the sad condition in which they are at present, we can form no certain judgment and draw no decided conclusions on the subject. When will the scholar appear who will at length throw light on these writings, and therewith on the section of inner Jewish history most interesting to the Christian theologian? As yet we have only a most thankworthy preliminary study in Schürer's great work, and beside it particular or dilettante attempts which hardly shew what the problem really is, far less solve it. What disclosures even the fourth book of the Maccabees alone yields for the connection of the Old Testament with Hellenism!