ometime before, or at the same time with,
Christ. I do not think St. Paul's parallel passages amount to any proof
of quotation or allusion;--they contain the common doctrine of the
spiritualized Judaism in the Cabala;--and yet the work could scarcely
have been written long before Christ, or it would certainly have been
quoted or mentioned by Philo, and most probably by Josephus. And this,
too, is an answer to the splendid and well-supported hypothesis of its
being a translation from a Chaldaic original, composed by Jerubbabel.
The variations of the Syriac translation,--which are so easily
explained by translating the passage into the Chaldaic, when the cause
of the mistake in the Greek or of the variation in the Syriac, is seen
at once,--are certainly startling; but they are too free; and how could
the Fathers, Jerome for example, remain ignorant of the existence of
this Chaldaic original? My own opinion is, as I said before, that the
Book was written in Greek by an Alexandrian Jew, who had formed his
style on that of the LXX., and was led still further to an imitation of
the Old Testament manner by the nature of his fiction, and as a dramatic
propriety, and yet deviated from it partly on account of the very
remoteness of his Platonic conceptions from the simplicity and poverty
of the Hebrew; and partly because of the wordy rhetoric epidemic in
Alexandria: and that it was written before the death, if not the birth,
of Christ, I am induced to believe, because I do not think it probable
that a book composed by a Jew, who had confessed Christ after the
resurrection, would so soon have been received by the Christians, and so
early placed in the very next rank to works of full inspiration.

Taken, therefore, as a work 'ante', or at least 'extra, Christum', it is
most valuable as ascertaining the opinions of the learned Jews on many
subjects, and the general belief concerning immortality, and a day of
judgment. On this ground Whitaker might have erected a most formidable
battery, that would have played on the very camp and battle-array of the
Socinians, that is, of those who consider Christ only as a teacher of
important truths.

In referring to the Cabala, I am not ignorant of the date of the oldest
Rabbinical writings which contain or refer to this philosophy, but I
coincide with Eichorn, and very many before Eichorn, that the
foundations of the Cabala were laid and well known long before Christ,
though not all the fancifu