Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 7, 1896.djvu/163

Rh intervallo, in the line of Christian tradition came an hypothetical Greek original of the lost Syriac text, of which our Armenian text is an abridgement. Of it the existing Greek text is a rhetorical expansion, made in the eighth century.

There is some ground for supposing that even the so-called non-Christian Arabic form translated by Rehatsek has been influenced by Christianity. For example, it contains the Christian apologue of the Sower, as well as a reference to the folly of worshipping idols which had to be locked up to prevent their being stolen. This last is a commonplace in early Greek apologies of monotheism, whether Jewish or Christian, and may very likely have had a place in The Preaching of Peter. But, however that may be, the evidence of the Georgian and Armenian texts proves that Boissonade's Greek text (i.e. the eighth century form of the story, commonly but wrongly ascribed to John of Damascus) is a very late development. I think there was once a simple and brief Christian and Greek form of the text, of which the Georgian is a translation either direct or indirect. This earliest Greek form probably originated in Bactria in the third century, in circles in which the religions of Jesus and Buddha met and mingled. I cannot otherwise explain the fact that the Georgian is often a literal rendering of our Greek text. This earliest Greek form set the apologues in the same order in which the Georgian and non-Christian Arabic has them; it followed the chronology of these texts, and, like the Georgian, had not yet the Apology of Aristides. For Professor Marr implies that the Georgian does not contain this apology.

The next stage in the growth of the Greek text was that which we have in the Armenian. In it the Greek nearly assumed its present form; the order of the apologues was changed; and the Apology of Aristides, with other edificatory matter, was added. At this stage the Greek passed into Syriac, and thence into the Armenian abridgement.