PREFACE. A MYSTERIOUS SILENCE rules over the period of nearly five hundred years, which separates the events chronicled in the Old Testament from those that are recorded in the New Testament. Yet the New and the Old hang together. There are Scriptures, which refer to these times, and they form part of the Greek version of the Hebrew Canon, of the Septuagint, which was published during the three last centuries of the pre-Christian era. That Alexandrian collection of holy writ was preeminently, if not exclusively, the Canon of the Apostles, and of their Divine Master. Those Scriptures which were excluded from the Hebrew Canon, for reasons hitherto not generally known, form not a supplement, but the very centre of the Greek Canon, and they explain, why the Septuagint is a freely handled version, and not a literal translation of the Hebrew Canon. These Scriptures were called Apocrypha, because they referred to what had, in earlier times, been hidden. Can it be proved, that some of these Scriptures were composed, essentially in the form we now possess them, before the captivity, during the same, and during that eventful period, which commenced with the return to the holy land, and which culminated in the commencement of |