Bible studies, contributions chiefly from papyri and ... - Predestination

34 BIBLE STUDIES. [225, 226
assumed or protective names was found highly convenient by
such obscure people as felt that they must make a contribu-
tion to Hterature of a page or two ;
they did not place their own
names upon their books, for they had the true enough pre-
sentiment that these would be a matter of indifference to their
contemporaries and to posterity, nor did they substitute for
them some unknown Gams or Timon : what they did was to
write "letters" of Plato or Demosthenes, of Aristotle or
his royal pupil, of Cicero, Brutus or Horace. It would be
superfluous in the meantime to go into particulars about any
specially characteristic examples, the more so as the present
position of the investigation still makes it difficult for us to
assign to each its special historical place, but at all events
the pseudonymous epistolography of antiquity stands out
quite clearly as a distinct aggregate of literary phenomena.
Suffice it only to refer further to what may be very well
gleaned from a recent work,^ viz., that the early imperial
period was the classical age of this most unclassical manu-
facturinef of books.
IV.
13. The author's purpose was to write Prolegomena to
the biblical letters and epistles : it may seem now to be high
time that he came to the subject. But he feels that he
might now break off, and still confidently believe that he has
not neglected his task. What remains to be said is really
implied in the foregoing pages. It was a problem in the
method of literary history which urged itself upon him ; he
has solved it, for himself at least, in laying bare the roots by
which it adheres to the soil on which flourished aforetime
the spacious garden of God—Holy Scripture.
To the investigator the Bible offers a large number of
writings bearing a name which appears to be simple, but
which nevertheless conceals within itself that same problem
—a name which every child seems to understand, but upon
which, nevertheless, the learned man must ponder deeply
' J. F. Marcks, St/iitbola critica ad Epistolograpiios Gi-aecos, Bonn, 1883.