Jacob are still preserved in Arabic and Ethiopic
(see James, _op. cit._ 140-161). See TESTAMENTS OF THE III. PATRIARCHS.

_Sibylline Oracles._--Of the books which have come down to us the main
part is Jewish, and was written at various dates, iii. 97-829, iv.-v.
are decidedly of Jewish authorship, and probably xi.-xii., xiv. and
parts of i.-ii. The oldest portions are in iii., and belong to the 2nd
century B.C.

III. NEW TESTAMENT APOCALYPTIC

When we pass from Jewish literature to that of the New Testament, we
enter into a new and larger atmosphere at once recalling and
transcending what had been best in the prophetic periods of the past.
Again the heavens had opened and the divine teaching come to mankind, no
longer merely in books bearing the names of ancient patriarchs, but on
the lips of living men, who had taken courage to appear in person as
God's messengers before His people. But though Christianity was in
spirit the descendant of ancient Jewish prophecy, it was no less truly
the child of that Judaism which had expressed its highest aspirations
and ideals in pseudepigraphic and apocalyptic literature. Hence we shall
not be surprised to find that the two tendencies are fully represented
in primitive Christianity, and, still more strange as it may appear,
that New Testament apocalyptic found a more ready hearing amid the
stress and storm of the 1st century than the prophetic side of
Christianity, and that the type of the forerunner on the side of its
declared asceticism appealed more readily to primitive Christianity than
that of Him who came "eating and drinking," declaring both worlds good
and both God's.

Early Christianity had thus naturally a special fondness for this class
of literature. It was Christianity that preserved Jewish apocalyptic,
when it was abandoned by Judaism as it sank into Rabbinism, and gave it
a Christian character either by a forcible exegesis or by a systematic
process of interpolation. Moreover, it cultivated this form of
literature and made it the vehicle of its own ideas. Though apocalyptic
served its purpose in the opening centuries of the Christian era, it
must be confessed that in _many_ of its aspects its office is
transitory, as they belong not to the essence of Christian thought. When
once it had taught men that the next world was God's world, though it
did so at the cost of relinquishing the present to Satan, it had
achieved its real task, and the time had come for it to