United States or Sri Lanka ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
This is one of the few pieces of theology in the Antiquities, and we are fain to believe that he borrowed it from Nicholas, who is quoted immediately afterwards, or from pseudo-Hecataeus, a Jewish pseudepigraphic historian, to whom a book on the patriarch was ascribed. So, later, following the Hellenistic tradition, he represents Abraham as the teacher of astronomy to the Egyptians.
It bears all the traces of the pseudepigraphic tendency of a period that produced the first works of the Cabala, the Seder Olam Zutta of Rabbi Joshua, and the neo-Hebraic apocalypses. The attempt to write an archaic Hebrew is marred by the presence of Rabbinical and novel terms. Reference to events or things only known to later times is combined with the pretension of an ancient chronicle.
False indications of authorship exist, some foisted upon insignificant works in order to enhance their value, some appended to works of merit in order to serve the reputation of a particular person, or to mystify posterity; and there are a hundred other motives which may easily be imagined, and of which a list has been drawn up: the "pseudepigraphic" literature of antiquity and the middle ages is enormous.
Word Of The Day