Page:LostApocryphaOfTheOldTestamentMRJames.djvu/60

 personified; sometimes (as in Rev. xii. 15) he is the source of it. We may remember that it was after the Deucalion flood that the Python took up his abode at Delphi, where Apollo slew him. Some such myth as that lies, perhaps, at the bottom of the lost story of Og.

To Moses two entries are devoted in the lists. We have the Testament, 1100 lines long, and the Assumption, 1400. Besides that, an Apocalypse of Moses is named; George the Syncellus says that Gal. v. 6; vi. 15 (In Christ Jesus neither circumcision availeth anything, etc.) is from the Apocalypse of Moses: a marginal scholium in several MSS. of the Epistles agrees that it is "from an apocryphon of Moses." There must be some mistake. The only text in Galatians which could be plausibly assigned to such a source is iii. 19: "It was ordained by angels in the hand of a mediator," which might be an allusion to the Assumption (God foresaw me ... to be the mediator of His covenant): no conceivable Jewish book could have contained the statement of Gal. v. 6, and no Christian forger of early times ever did his work quite so badly. At some ancient date the marginal reference must have been attached to the wrong place, and our authorities have copied it in its dislocated state. (A passage which might more plausibly be referred to a book called the Apocalypse of Moses is 2 Cor. xi. 14 (Satan is transformed into an angel of light), for this does happen in the Life of Adam: and the Greek recension of that is called the Apocalypse of Moses.)

Two Apocalypses of Moses we have: the name is an alternative title of the Book of Jubilees, according to George Cedrenus; and there is a Greek Apocalypse of Moses (ed. Tischendorf, etc.) which is really nothing but a Life of Adam, identical in great part with the Latin Vita Adæ et Evæ. Besides this there is a (late?) Hebrew Apocalypse, of Moses' progress through the seven heavens.