Page:Apocryphal Gospels and Other Documents Relating to the History of Christ.djvu/113

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An old anti-Jewish fiction of Latin origin, and the work of some one who was as ignorant as he was prejudiced. The details are absurd in the extreme, and have some connection with the piece called The Death of Pilate. Like that, it probably is of Gallic origin. A recension of it exists in an Anglo-Saxon book of about the eleventh century (see Anglo-Saxon Legends of Andrew and Veronica. C. W. Goodwin. Cambridge, 1851). Other forms of the story are met with, and most of them indicated by Tischendorf in his prolegomena to the Apocryphal Gospels, pp. 81-83. It shows what rubbish contented the popular taste a thousand years ago. The notion of baptizing Tiberius, and instructing him "in all the articles of the faith," is almost as amusing as connecting the circumstance with the capture of Jerusalem by Titus and Vespasian. The historic accomplishments of the author further appear in his making King Archelaus abdicate and commit suicide on the approach of the Romans (who went simply to avenge the death of Christ! a real holy war! the first crusade!). As a fact, Archelaus was deposed about A.D. 6, and Jerusalem taken sixty-four years