Page:LostApocryphaOfTheOldTestamentMRJames.djvu/81

 of Jeremiah in the Gospel. It may quite well be identical with the writing seen by Jerome. His interest in such things was not lively enough to make him use accurate language: he is oftener contemptuous and angry when apocryphal writings come into his ken.

Eph. v. 14, "Awake, thou that sleepest," etc., is said by George the Syncellus to be quoted "from what are called the Apocrypha of Jeremiah," and this attribution is found in a marginal note in some MSS. of the Epistles: one authority names the Paralipomena of Jeremiah, but, though an important part of that story is the seventy years' sleep of Ebed-melech and his awaking at the Return of the People from Babylon, the words of Ephesians are not in our texts of this book. Hippolytus (on Antichrist, 65) quotes them as said by "the prophet," and (on Daniel iv. 56) as from Isaiah. We have seen that Epiphanius assigns them to Elias.

Then there is a passage which Justin Martyr (Dial. with Trypho) accuses the Jews of having deleted from the Book of Jeremiah. He says it was still to be found in some synagogue copies, so that its deletion must have been recent. Irenaeus also quotes it not less than four times in varying forms, once as from Isaiah, once as from Jeremiah, and twice without naming the prophet. Justin's form, the only one we have in Greek, is:

"And the Lord God of Israel remembered the dead which slept in the dust of the earth, and came down unto them to preach (evangelize) His salvation."

In the Latin Acts of St. James the Great, which form Book IV of the so-called Historia Apostolica of Abdias, in a speech of St. James to the Jews, several Messianic prophecies are quoted, and among them this:

"Jeremiah adds: Behold, O Jerusalem, thy redeemer cometh, and this shall be his sign. He shall open the eyes of the blind and restore hearing to the deaf, and by his voice he shall raise the dead."

In a similar anti-Jewish oration of St. Silvester in his Acts (I quote from the text of George Cedrenus) is this: