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Medes ( o enter into an alliance with him ; that he collected together a large army of Babylonians and Medes , conquered Jerusalem , and took Jehoiakim prisoner ; and that , having seized upon the gold , and silver , and brass of the temple , he sent them to Babylon . " With this exception , there is not a single sentence , among the numerous fragments preserved by Eusebius , which contains the remotest allusion to any of the Jewish prophets ; much
less any passage in which mention is made of their written predictions . This fate , however , many valuable Heathen works have shared in common with the writings of the Jewish prophets . The History which we now have under the name of Velleius Paterculus , and which brings us acquainted with some things not mentioned by any other historian , * is not known to have been quoted by any writer till the time of Priscian , who lived about five hundred years after the author ; and from this period we hear no more
of it again till the time of Aventinus , a further interval of nine hundred ; rears : f yet no one doubts the authenticity or credibility of that work . It ) y no means follows , therefore , that the writings of the Jewish prophets , ) ecause they are not quoted by early Greek writers , were composed at a later period than the one usually assigned for the composition of them . The literary intercourse between the Greeks and the Jews , before the Babylonish captivity , and for a very considerable time after the re-establishment of the
latter as a nation , was certainly far less than that which now subsists between the English and the Brahmins , and yet it was not without great difficulty that Warren Hastings , Governor-General of India , obtained a complete code or digest of the Brahminical laws and customs in Sanscrit ; which it was necessary to translate first into Persian , and afterwards into English , before it could answer any useful end . The truth is , that Greeks and Jews , at the period in question , were notoriously ignorant of the literature of each other ;
and that we might with just as must reason contend that the " Iliad" and " Odyssey" of Homer , and the " Theogony" and " Works and Days" of Hesiod , are the fabrications of a later age , because they are not quoted in the books of the Old Testament , as that the writings of the Jewish prophets are spurious , because they were unknown to early classical Greek authors . These writings were composed in a language , the genius of which was
totally different from that of the Greek , and the knowledge of which Heathens had few inducements , and still fewer opportunities , for cultivating ; and as no Greek translation of them existed before the time of Antiochus Epiphanes , it is altogether unreasonable to look for evidences of their existence , much less for passages tending to establish their authenticity and credibility , in the works of Greek writers prior to the middle of the second century before Christ .
There are various methods , however , of establishing the date of a composition , besides producing passages with that view from the works of authors who lived in or near the time when such composition professes to have been written . It sometimes happens that the age of a work may be ascertained by collecting and analyzing the peculiar modes of expression found in it , or by comparing the sentiments which it contains with those which are known to have prevailed in the country , and at the period in which the supposed author flourished : and sometimes the sense , or even the orthography , of a
• ** Quaedam habet , quae baud alibi iuveinas . " See an extract from G . J . Vossius De Historlcis Litinis , prefixed to Mattaire ' s Velkius Paterculus . t Bentley ' s Dissertation upon the Ejribtlcs of Phalaris , &c . Ed . l 6 S > $ ) , p . 508 , Ed . 1817 , p . 366 * .
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658 Canonical Authority of the Books of the Prophets .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Sept. 2, 1827, page 658, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1800/page/26/
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