Page:Ginzburg - The Legends of the Jews - Volume 5.djvu/13

 lem. I call special attention to those Notes where apparently philosophic utterances of Philo reveal themselves on close scrutiny as sound rabbinic doctrine, the philosophical tinsel of which can be easily removed.

Notwithstanding the early claim of the Church to be the sole and true interpreter of the Bible, the products of later Jewish thought and imagination found their way into it. The channels through which they reached the Christian world were two. The Church had at its very beginning adopted the pseudepigraphic literature as well as the Hellenistic writings, especially those of Philo. Besides this literary influence of later Judaism upon the Church, cognizance must also be taken of the oral communications made by Jewish masters to their Christian disciples. Not only the Church Fathers, Origen, Eusebius, Ephraem and Jerome, of whom it is well known that they studied the Bible under the guidance of Jewish teachers, have appropriated a good deal of Jewish legendary lore, but also Tertullian, Lactantius, Ambrosius, Augustine and many other teachers and leaders of the Church have come under direct influence of Jews. It is true that the Church Fathers sometimes sneeringly refer to the fabulae Judaicae, but more often they accept these fabulae and even refrain from betraying the source from which they drew them. The large material culled from the writings of the Church Fathers to illustrate their dependence upon Jewish tradition will be, I hope, of some value to the student of the patristic literature. At the same time the student of Jewish literature will be interested to learn that many a Haggadah first met with in Jewish literature in a Midrash composed in the seventh or eighth century, and even later, was transmitted as Jewish tradition by the Church Fathers of the fifth or fourth or even the third century. Not infrequently the patristic literature throws also some light upon the origin of a Haggadah which often owes its existence to the desire of combating Christian interpretation of the Bible. An interesting example of such a Haggadah is pointed out in the very beginning of this volume on page 3, note 3.

The problems that presented themselves to the author were so manifold and diverse that it was quite impossible to deal fully with them. What I strove to achieve, and I hope that I have not failed, was to have the legendary material as complete as possible. There are very few Jewish legends bearing on biblical events or persons that will not be found, or at least referred to, in the seven volumes of this work. When a legend has several variants, I give them if they are essential, other-