recension of a Jewish book. Is it possible then that the Testament in its original form was the very collection of incantations which, according to Josephus, was composed and bequeathed by Solomon? The passage is in his Antiquities, viii. 2. 5:—
God enabled him to learn also the art of overcoming demons for the help and healing of man. And he composed incantations by which diseases are assuaged, and modes of exorcisms, by which persons bound may expel demons so that they shall not return. And this therapy, even up to now, has the greatest power among us.
Josephus proceeds to relate how a certain compatriot of his, Eleazar by name, had drawn a demon out of a man possessed by holding to his nose a ring which had under the seal one of the roots revealed by Solomon. The possessed snuffed at it, and fell down; and Eleazar adjured the demon, as it left the man's nostrils, never more to return into him, mentioning Solomon, and repeating over him the incantations which Solomon composed. "This incident," concludes Josephus, "was a patent demonstration of the understanding and wisdom[1] of Solomon." All this tallies quite well with the Testament, for in it the heaven-sent ring is described, and the power of Solomon over the demons ascribed to the sophia, or wisdom, communicated to him from God. The incantations prescribed against the kosmokrators may very well be the particular ones which Josephus knew and ascribed to Solomon.
It is impossible to say when and where the Christian elements present in the Testament were worked into it, but the stress laid on the name Emmanuel and on its numerical value, on the writing of the name on the forehead, the use of the word τανυσθείς, the patripassian conceptions, all have a very archaic air, and seem to belong to about 100 A.D. The demonological shapes set before us are those with which Celsus was familiar, and in Origen's sixth book, ch. 30, we have a clue to the sort of Christians whose souls
- ↑ σύνεσις καὶ σοφία.
