Page:Testament of Solomon.djvu/11

Rh unintelligible. And the passage about Jerusalem, beginning, "Jerusalem being signified," has all the appearance of a gloss which has crept into the text.

The fourth passage, from p. 127 of Fleck's text, is unmistakably Christian in tone, and involves the teaching of the virgin-mother. The word is not used of crucifixion in the N. T., though it occurs in this sense in writers of the second century. The apocryphal Book of Solomon, used by Lactantius in his Institutions, was so far Christian as to speak both of the birth from a virgin of Emmanuel and of the crucifixion.

In the fifth the humanity of the Saviour is asserted; whereas in the eighth (from p. 138 of Fleck's text) he is declared to be sole-ruling God, who is to be born of a virgin, crucified on a tree by the Jews, whom angels and archangels worship. The same patripassianism characterizes the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, especially that of Levi, in ch. 4 of which the crucifixion is spoken of as the passion of the Most High. In an exorcism published by Dieterich (Abraxas, p. 138) Jesus is in the same way called "the God of the Hebrews." This exorcism is found in the Paris Papyrus, 3009; and in the same document we have the following: "I adjure thee, every spirit of demon, to say whatsoever thou art. For I adjure thee by the ring which Solomon laid on the tongue of Jeremiah." And just below we have an allusion to the holy aeons, and a final exhortation not to eat pork as a condition of being able to control the demons. This papyrus belongs to that literature of charms and incantations which cannot be called exclusively either Christian or Jewish, but which formed the fringe of both religions. We hardly need affirm the Testament of Solomon to be a Christian work, unless we affirm the same of this papyrus, which Dieterich ascribes to a pre-Christian age.

In the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs we have the same mixture of equivocal Christianity with unequivocal Judaism. It is likely that in both we have a Christian