Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Sacred Books and Early Literature of the East, 1917, Vol. 14: With Historical Surveys of the Chief Writings of Each Nation
Indeed, in reading the apocrypha we must keep clearly in mind the initial fact that the issuance of a book under some ancient name is not in itself evidence of an attempt to de ceive. In our own day, historical novels, poems, and even philosophies, are constantly being thus fathered upon some older authority. Usually the author prevents confusion by putting his own name on the title-page; but the books of two thousand years ago were very different from ours, and no such necessity would have occurred to an ancient Hebrew. We can well imagine a young religious enthusiast saying to the friendly rabbis, See, I have written a book showing all the wickedness of all the ages and foretelling the punish ments to come, and I have pictured it as the vision of Adam. And the rabbis would read the book and approve the doc trines, if these seemed sound, without ever thinking of in cluding the work in their Scripture as a Book of Adam. In fact, for such writings we have a special name. We call them not apocrypha, but pseudepigrapha, Which means epigrams or writings given out under a pseudonym or assumed name. Yet these works are still but a variety of the apocrypha class. Some generations after our enthusiast had composed his Book of Adam or another, some scholar would stumble on the forgotten fantasy and, according to his own disposition, either cry fraud or worship a new Scripture, and perhaps invent a legend to account for the holy book having been lost and found again. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
