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Since, barring the small book treating of Ardeshir's adventures, no original Pahlavi document in the domain of historical or romantic literature has descended to us and even the Arabic recensions made directly from the original general history in Pahlavi have perished, we are altogether left in uncertainty touching many most important points.
But it has survived in a considerable quantity in the Avesta. The most recent and pregnant exposition is by Lehmann. It existed also in official writings of the Sasanian times, recensions of which, we possess in several Arab histories and in the Shah Nameh.
"The main point is that practically all the experts assure you that in scores of material points the Old Testament history has been discredited, and has only been confirmed in a few unimportant incidental statements; and that the books are a tissue of inventions, expansions, conflations, or recensions dating centuries after the event."
The actual tales as we get them were no doubt retold in much later times; and it is these late recensions that we have. What will remain of England in the memory of three or four thousand years hence?
Yet each Veda exists in several recensions handed down by oral tradition in separate schools, and though the exact text and pronunciation are matters of the utmost importance, diversities of opinion respecting them are tolerated and honoured. Further, though the early scriptures were preserved with scrupulous care the canon was never closed.
The Brahmans always recognized that the most holy and most jealously preserved scriptures could exist in various recensions and the Mahabharata shows how generations of respectful and uncritical hearers may allow adventitious matter of all sorts to be incorporated in a work. Something of the same kind happened with the Pitakas.
There still survive probably over a hundred "Lives" possibly one hundred and fifty; this, however, does not imply that therefore we have Lives of one hundred or one hundred and fifty saints, for many of the saints whose Acts survive have really two sets of the latter one in Latin and the other in Irish; moreover, of a few of the Latin Lives and of a larger number of the Irish Lives we have two or more recensions.
To none of these books, which have, for the most part, reached us in various recensions often showing considerable discrepancies and obviously later interpolations, is it possible to ascribe any definite date.
But while those three different recensions of the Shih all disappeared, with the exception of a single treatise of Han Ying, their unhappy fate was owing not more to the convulsions by which the empire was often rent, and the consequent destruction of literary monuments such as we have witnessed in China in our own day, than to the appearance of a fourth text, which displaced them by its superior correctness, and the ability with which it was advocated and commented on.
Others are so gentle in stating their views that they might be called schools rather than sects, were the word not too intellectual. The notion that any creed or code can be quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus, is less prevalent than in Europe and even the Veda, though it is the eternal word, is admitted to exist in several recensions.
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