Page:Testament of Solomon.djvu/10

10 Saviour and appeal to his name was potent to frustrate all the demoniac beings who, in Paul's belief, menaced, while controlling, man and all man's circumstances.

The legend about the corner-stone can, still less than the passage of the Testament, which we have just considered, have been inspired by the N. T., even though Ps. cxviii. 22 and Isa. xxviii. 16 are combined in 1 Pet. ii. 6, 7 in just the same way. The passages of the N. T., in which the cornerstone is interpreted as the Messiah, could not have suggested a legend which is in all ways repugnant to them. If there is any connexion, it must be the Testament which lies behind the N. T., and not vice versa. Similarly, the Testament provides us with the key to the words of Luke x. 18, in which Jesus declares that he saw Satan fall as lightning from heaven. And the other approximations to the diction and thought of the N. T. must be regarded in a similar light. The Testament is in fact independent of the N. T., but opens before us a similar region of Graeco-Jewish beliefs and phraseology. The reference to the lost apocryph of Iannes and Iambres might well belong to the first century, when that book was in the hands of Christian writers. So also might the mention of the fallen angels and their offspring, of the three and more heavens, of the sons of the giants, of the eleven aeons. Many of these ideas are derived from the Enoch literature, which was so popular in the earliest age of the Church.

How then are the longer passages to be regarded which we have cited above in the original Greek? They are, of course, Christian, but not in such a way as to involve a literary connexion with the N. T. The first two of them belong to the same context, and contain an allusion to the miracle of Gadara, one of the oldest and most characteristic of the legends contained in the triple tradition. The allusion is not of such a kind as to involve our Gospel text in its present form, but rather reflects the oral tradition which went before it.

The third passage is so corrupt as to be wellnigh