Page:The Apocryphal New Testament (1924).djvu/21

Rh reprinted, and it has enjoyed a popularity which is in truth far beyond its deserts. For it is a misleading and an unoriginal book.

Misleading, because all its externals suggest that it is a supplement to the New Testament. Printed in double columns, with all the books divided into chapters and verses, with a summary prefixed to each chapter in italic type, with head-lines of the same character on every page, with an ‘Order of Books’ beginning ‘Mary hath Chapters 8’, it presents the familiar aspect of the English Bible to any one who opens it. Misleading, again, because about half the volume is occupied by the writings of the Apostolic Fathers—the Epistles of Clement of Rome, Barnabas, Ignatius, and Polycarp, and the Shepherd of Hermas—which are not apocryphal. Misleading also in a more serious way, because title-page and preface tell us that it contains the writings which were ‘not included in the New Testament by its compilers’ when it was first ‘collected into a volume’.

Unoriginal, because the whole contents of the book except the prefaces are borrowed bodily from two books about a hundred years older than Hone’s. All the apocryphal writings are taken—I think without any acknowledgement —from Jeremiah Jones’s New and Full Method of Settling the Canonical Authority of the New Testament, published in 1736, while the version of the Apostolic Fathers is that of Archbishop Wake—whose footnotes, by the way, recording various readings of the manuscripts in Greek and Latin, have suffered sadly at the hands of Hone’s, and subsequent, compositors.

It is, in fact, to speak frankly, a very bad book; and I should be justified in criticizing its composition and particularly its prefaces much more sharply than I do. Only I cannot forget that it was the first book on the New Testament Apocrypha which fell into my hands, and that it then exercised a fascination which has never lost its hold upon me. I feel, therefore, that if I could consign it to a more or less honourable grave by providing a better substitute for it, I should in some sort be paying a debt of gratitude and at the same time doing a service to the reading public.

I have said, and I think proved, that Hone’s is a quite unoriginal book: I have also said that it is misleading in