free reproductions of Sayings, which agree with them in substance, in the Synoptists; but they never quote exactly, and they are not dependent on one Synoptist to the exclusion of the others. In the same way, the Sayings which are entirely new, while never quoting the Fourth Gospel, have points of similarity in language and in mystical tone with it. They seem, then, to have originated at a time and in a circle where the four Gospels were not yet clearly separated off from all others and regarded with a special sanctity. It is quite conceivable that they represent a time when the material which they use only existed in an oral form; and both the editors and Dr. Sanday have accepted the date A.D. 140 as the latest date at which the collection is likely to have been made.

It seems at first sight a probable view that the collection was drawn from the Gospel according to the Hebrews, for one of the Sayings is quoted by Clement from that Gospel; but they do not give the impression of being drawn from a continuous narrative, and the reference to Thomas is inconsistent with all that is known about that Gospel. It is therefore at least as probable that that Gospel took the Saying from this collection as the reverse, perhaps more probable still that their knowledge of it is independent of each other,

The purport of the Sayings themselves carries us but little further. No single one has any clear stamp of heretical and local teaching. Though it is true that the stress on fasting from the world would fit in with Encratite tendencies, and though, according to Hippolytus, the Naassenes dwelt much on the significance that the Kingdom of Heaven is to be sought for within a man, and though the Pantheistic tendency and the stress on the knowledge of self would find a natural home in the Alexandria of the secLIVING AGE. VOL. XXIV.

1278

ond century, yet none of these thoughts is the exclusive property of any sect, nor is any found here pushed to an unbalanced and heretical extent. The 1897 Sayings do not seem linked together by any one thread of subject. In those of 1904 the Kingdom of Heaven is the link which unites the first three, and ne fifth seems to lay down the laws of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, and therefore is as closely connected with the first three as the sixth chapter of St. Matthew is with the fifth. The fourth, however, offers no direct point of connection with either the third or the fifth, and it is probably a fanciful refinement to attempt to trace any uniting bond.

There remain then only the introductory formulæ. Each of the Sayings is introduced with the formula "Jesus saith" in the present tense. But the use of the present is ambiguous; it is possible to press it quite strictly, as though the collection had been made in the Lord's lifetime. It is more likely that the present denotes the abiding value of the words of Jesus: "This is a saying of Jesus, still binding and true;" and this is probable if the collection was originally framed, as has been suggested by Dr. Burney, on the analogy of the Sayings of the Jewish Fathers, in which the decisions of the Jewish Rabbis were strung together with the formula, "Hillel said," "Shammai said." But further the whole set is now known to have had a more detailed heading, connecting them with a revelation made either to Thomas alone or to Thomas and some one or more other disciples. This has naturally led to the suggestion that the collector was compiling from the lost Gospel according to Thomas, but this view is waived aside by the editors on the ground that that Gospel, so far as is known at present, was a Gospel of the Childhood, and they hold that the writer meant to assert that St. Thom

as was the ultimate authority for the statements. This is a probable suggestion, to which we would add the conjecture that if we had the whole book we might find that this heading only applied to one section of it, and that other sections were connected by similar notes with other Apostles.

The consideration of all these facts leads us to a choice between two alternative theories of the origin of the collection. It might ultimately run back to the lifetime of the Apostles, when some Christian teacher was trying to collect all the Sayings of the Lord which he could find and learning them from the lips of individual disciples: if so, we are admitted to witness a Gospel in the making. This collection would represent a stage anterior even to the narratives implied in the prologue of St. Luke's Gospel. There would have been first a collection of Sayings, with the slightest possible account of the circumstances under which some of them were uttered; then there would follow many attempts to throw these into a more continuous narrative

(ἀνατάξασθαι διήγησιν ); finally the fuller, more authoritative, form of the canonical Gospels, chosen out of rival claimants and stamped with the sanction of the Church.

Or, again, it may be a second-century collection, made perhaps for teaching purposes, gathered partly from oral tradition, partly perhaps from written collections and with a knowledge of the canonical and the earliest uncanonical Gospels, but made at a time when the Christian teacher felt himself at liberty to expand freely the exact form of the traditional Saying, possibly even to incorporate with it truth borrowed from other sources. Thus the second Saying, which we have quoted fully above, would be a fusing of the reference to the fowls of the air in St. Matt. vi. 26 with St. Luke xvii. 21, "The Kingdom of God is with

in you," and with the well-known Greek saying, "Know thyself." We can imagine a young Christian teacher, trained in Greek philosophy at Alexandria, wishing to show what form the view of nature and the stress on selfknowledge which he had been taught would take when brought under the shadow of the teaching of Jesus. "This is what Jesus says, Animal life will draw you towards the Kingdom, but the Kingdom is not there, it is within you, it rests upon self-knowledge; but such knowledge will show you that you are not your own, you are sons of a Father, your nature is a reflection of the Divine."

As between these two alternatives it is difficult, if not impossible, at present to decide. If the former be true, it is interesting to note how at that early date Sayings akin to the Synoptists lie side by side with a tone and with expressions more closely allied with the Fourth Gospel, and strengthen the presumption that both are true representatives of the many-sided teaching of Him who spake as never man spake.

If we wish to get beyond this point, we shall have to wait for further light which may well come hereafter, since from the nature of this fragment the editors conjecture that the collection may well have included several hundred Sayings. Meanwhile all praise is due to Messrs. Grenfell and Hunt, who have not only carried on their excavations with undaunted perseverance and extraordinary insight, but who have deciphered and reconstructed and commented upon their discovery with a combination of ingenuity, of wise caution in emendation, and of knowledge of their subject which makes this a model of what an edition should be. The whole volume of the Oxyrhynchus papyri which they have just issued is, like its predecessors, beautiful in form, thorough in execution, and equipped with excellent indices, and they have

done a great service to theological students by issuing The New Sayings of Jesus as a separate pamphlet, which The Church Quarterly Review.

contains nearly the whole of their comment upon these Sayings, in a very cheap and most readable form.

This work is published in place of a second edition of the translation of the Psalms, with commentary, which was issued by Professor Cheyne in 1888. That volume is justly valued for its vigorous renderings and its terse and pointed notes. It was followed in 1891 by the Bampton Lectures on "The Origin and Religious Contents of the Psalter in the Light of Old Testament Criticism and the History of Religions." Though the premisses are often precarious and the conclusions questionable, these lectures are a monument of learning, stimulating and suggestive. To those who know the debt which Old Testament studies owe to Professor Cheyne for his earlier works, the present volumes will be melancholy reading. It is difficult to treat them seriously, but as the work of a scholar of reputation they cannot be ignored. They are intended for Hebrew scholars, and a detailed examination of them would be out of place here; but rumors of their contents may reach some of our readers, and while we do not anticipate that their speculations will be accepted, except perhaps by a narrow circle of admirers, it is quite possible that they will be paraded by those who are hostile to modern Biblical criticism as a typical example of its pernicious results, with the consequence that serious injury may be done to the cause of reasonable and reverent criticism of the Old Testament. The treatment of

"The Book of Psalms," translated from a Revised Text, with Notes and Introduction. By T. K. Cheyne, D.Litt., D.D., Oriel Professor

the Psalms in these volumes will be painful and repellent to all who love them. It will seem to many to be nothing short of profanity. But we do not protest against it on these grounds, though we might do so with reason. Truth must be welcomed, however painful it may be to our traditional ideas. We hold no brief for the infallibility of the text of the Old Testament. We do not claim for it exemption from any legitimate methods of criticism. But the methods employed in this book are not criticism but a caricature of criticism. They would be equally objectionable if they were applied to a classical author. They would have to be classed along with what H. A. J. Monro, in the preface to his edition of Horace, calls "the maunderings of a Gruppe or Peerlkamp."

Readers of the "Encyclopædia Biblica" and "Critica Biblica" will to some extent be prepared what to expect; but even they, we fancy, will hardly have anticipated the thoroughness with which Professor Cheyne has found it possible to "Jerahmeelize" the Psalter. He holds that "the Old Testament is not altogether in its original form; it has undergone not merely corruption, but editorial manipulation. This is plainer in some books than in others, but nowhere, perhaps, is it more manifest than in the Psalter." The conclusion to which he has come "is briefly this-that we have in our

of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture in the University of Oxford, and Canon of Rochester. Two volumes. (Kegan Paul, 32s. net.)

hands, closely but not inseparably united, two Psalters-a newer and an older. The newer is preserved in two chief forms-the Greek of the Septuagint and the Massoretic Hebrew text." Underneath these he believes it possible "to recognize an earlier text of the Psalms, which approaches the form which they received from the writers or from the earliest editors." It is an approximation to this text-he would not claim that it is more, for his method is one which vires acquirit eundowhich is presented to us in these volumes. He is willing to allow that the newer-i.e., the existing-Psalter still possesses a certain value. It is even, from a theological point of view, the richer; and it is not superseded by the discovery of the older one. But the older one is, of course, in his view, the only source of any real historical information as to the circumstances of the Psalmists.

How has Professor Cheyne succeeded in disinterring the original Psalter, which has lain buried since, at the latest, the beginning of the first century B.C.? Expanding Winckler's theory of a North Arabian kingdom of Musri, probably in vassalage to the larger empire of Meluhha, which is supposed to be frequently referred to in the Old Testament under the name of Asshur, he assumes that "the deportation of the Jews which has left most traces on the later writings of the Old Testament was, not to Babylonia, but to that part of N. Arabia which was called by the Jews Jerahmeel or the Negeb." Jerahmeel was the name of a tribe, or perhaps a collection of tribes, located in the Negeb, near the kingdom of Musri. The Jerahmeelites and other neighboring tribes were the leaders of the opposition to the Jews commemorated in many of the Psalms. In fact, "the Psalms in their original form provided the necessary vent for the pent-up feelings of the Jews under

"The

N. Arabian oppression." Psalter is throughout colored by a reaction against N. Arabian tyranny and heathenism." But, strangely enough, the temple ministers at Jerusalem, or at any rate the singers, and the guilds to whose custody various groups of Psalms were committed, were of Jerahmeelite-i.e., North Arabian origin. Consequently, Professor Cheyne's restoration of the text presents this startling phenomenon, that in the titles of the Psalms Jerahmeelite and kindred names denote the custodians of the sacred poetry of the Jews, while in the Psalms themselves (and occasionally in the titles also where these refer to the subject of the Psalms) they denote the bitterest enemies of the chosen people. We rub our eyes as we read, but we believe we are not misrepresenting Professor Cheyne. The obscurity of the Psalm-titles is notorious, but he has only to touch them with his magic wand, and Alamoth and Mahalath and Al-tasheth are seen to be corruptions of "the Ishmaelites," "the Jerahmeelites," "the Maachathites," and SO forth. "The Chief Musician" becomes "Jerahmeel-Ashhur"; "A Song, a Psalm," becomes "Ashhur-Jerahmeel.' Our old friend "Selah" has often supplanted Jerahmeel. We thought that we knew what "Hallelujah" meant, but we were wrong. It is corrupt. It must be replaced by "Of the Jerahmeelites." But the supreme triumph of this conjuring is the transformation of "David" into "Arab-ethan." These words and phrases relate to the singing guilds:

If there was any general term for the singers other than [the word which is generally rendered "singers"] it was probably (as we may infer from the titles of the Psalms), "Asshur-jerahmeel," or "Jerahmeelites," or "Ishmaelites." The last of these names has also perpetuated itself (in a disguised form) in the title of a later collection of Psalms, the so-called Ψαλμοὶ Σολομῶντος· Arabethan, however, is little less widely

But, as we have mentioned already, some of the titles refer to the contents of the Psalms; and here we meet with the same names as the enemies of the Jews. Thus on the titles of Psalms xviii., xxxvi., we read, "After 'of Jerahmeel-asshur' ('Deposited') read 'Of Arab-jerahmeel'; and in Psalm xviii., after 'Of Arab-ethan' insert 'Of Jerahmeel-asshur.'" And for the contents of Psalm xviii., "The words of Israel in the day that Yahwè delivers him from the hands of all the Arabians and from Jerahmeel (Ishmael)." That of Psalm xxxiv. is apparently (for one version is given in the commentary and another in the introduction) to be read:

O Lord! thou wast our stronghold,
Our God age after age,

Before thou didst exalt Jerahmeel,
And didst magnify Missur and Ishmael.
Mayest thou put Ishmael to flight,
And say, Be disappointed, ye sons of
Edom!

For the Jerahmeelites tread thy people down,

The Ishmaelites, the Arabians, and the Misrites.

The following, we are told, may represent something like the opening verses of Psalm cxxxix., concerning which Professor Cheyne justly remarks (supposing his theories to be true) that "no psalm shows more clearly the liberty taken by the editors of the Psalms, and the skill with which they