Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1896 edition. Excerpt: ... CHAPTER XIX. SOME NOTEWORTHY TESTIMONIES. Josephus, the great Jewish historian, who wrote about A. D. 92, 93, says, concerning the canon of the Old testament: "With us," in contrast to the contradictions of Greek history, " there are, not myriads ot books innarmonious and conflicting, but two and twenty books only, containing the records of the whole time, and rightly believed to be Divine. Of these, five are those of Moses, which comprises as well the matters of law as the account of the generation ot man, to the time of his death. This period is little short of 3,000 years. But from the death of Moses to the reign of Artaxerxes, the King of Persia after Xerxes, the prophets after Moses wrote what was done in their times, in thirteen books. The four remaining books contain hymns to God, and suggestions to men as to their lives. From Artaxerxes down to our own times, events have been recorded, but they have not been accounted worthy of the same credit as those before them, because the exact succession of Prophets existed no longer. And it is evident indeed, how we stand affected by our own writings. For, so lone a period having now elapsed, no one has dared either to add or to take away trom them, or to change any thing; it being a thing implanted in all the Jews trom their birth, that they should account them as oracles ot God, and abide by them, and, if needful to gladly die tor them." He further says: "Since I see many attending to the blasphemies uttered by some out of hostility, and disbelieving what I have written about our antiquities, and making it a token ot the modernness of our race, that the celebrated Grecian historians have not accounted it worthy of mention, I thought it needful to write briefly of all these things...".