INTRODUCTORY
The Sources.—Patristic Quotations
The object of this book is to collect in a form convenient to English readers the remains of some of the apocryphal writings connected with the Old Testament which have not survived in their entirety. That there were many such books we know; and the student may find, scattered in dictionary articles, or collected in such works as the—still unsurpassed—Codex Pseudepigraphus Veteris Testamenti of John Albert Fabricius, their names and fragments. But there is not a handy English guide to this information, such as I now attempt to supply.
It is impossible in most cases to assign anything like a precise date to these writings; the most we can say is that they are pre- or post-Christian (and even that is not always clear), and that they must have been in existence before the time of the writer who quotes them. That latter point at least is certain. But we shall not be far out if we regard the first century before and the first century after the Christian era (100 b.c–A.D. 100) as covering the period during which most of them were produced. Our uncertainty as to their chronological order forbids me to attempt any arrangement of them based upon date; and I have preferred the simpler plan of following the Biblical order of the personages to whom they are attributed, or of whom they treat.
Before, however, we consider any of them individually, it will be well to form an idea of the sources from which we get any information about them.
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