writing, and the words I have italicized show where something like our Latin fragment might have come in.
It is quite probable, I think, that the original Apocalypse contained all the ingredients that the fragments show us, descriptions of hell-torments, eschatological prophecy, descriptions of Antichrist and didactic matter. But neither of the extant Apocalypses can be supposed to represent the old book faithfully. The Coptic has been Christianized, the Hebrew abridged, and additions made to both.
In the Lives of the Prophets, attributed to Epiphanius, there is a bit of legend about Elijah which reads as if it might have originally stood in an apocryphal book. That apocryphal literature was to some extent employed by the writer of these Lives is considered probable or even certain by their latest editor, Schermann, on the evidence of the sections relating to Isaiah and Jeremiah, though, for much of the non-Biblical detail, current Jewish tradition may be responsible.
The life of Elias begins: "He was of Thesbis, of the land of the Arabs, of the tribe of Aaron, dwelling in Galaad; for Thesbis was a gift, given to the priests. And when his mother bore him, Sobac his father saw a vision, that men shining in white spoke to him (the child), and that they swaddled him in fire and gave him a flame of fire to eat. And he went to Jerusalem and told the priests and the oracle said: Fear not, for the habitation of this child shall be light, and his word a decree, and he shall judge Israel in the sword and in fire."
Another legend, common to Chrysostom (in Petrum et Eliam) and the Armenian Life of Elias (tr. Issaverdens), may well be only an embellishment of the Bible narrative. It is that at the sacrifice on Carmel the priests of Baal secreted a man under their altar with orders to light the fire at the proper moment, but that he was either suffocated or died at the word of Elias, who divined his presence.
