BRIEF SUMMARY OF RECENT CRITICISMS

In the previous edition, a first attempt was made to clarify the various problems presented by the newly discovered book of Odes. The Psalms which were attached to them were treated in a rapid manner, as there did not seem any necessity to go over again in detail the various critical results at which scholars had arrived regarding their origin. It is sufficient to say that no considerations have been brought forward which should invalidate the connection of the Psalms of Solomon (a collection of eighteen Jewish poems from the 1st century BCE) to the period of the Roman Invasion of Judea by Pompey, and of the years that followed the desecration of the Temple (referring to Pompey's entry into the Holy of Holies in 63 BCE)¹. With regard to these Psalms, the critics have been moving in converging paths toward a conclusion from which there is no significant disagreement.

With regard, however, to the Odes and their place in the history of literature and of religion, no signs of such agreement or consensus are yet to be seen. On every side, doubts are expressed as to the explanations which I proposed. If, for example, it was suggested that they were Judeo-Christian in origin, the contradiction comes from two opposite sides: one school affirming that they are not Christian, the other that they are not Jewish. If, again, the suggestion is made that the time of their composition is the latter part of the first century AD, the arguments must be met that they are (1) nearly a hundred years earlier or (2) nearly a hundred years later than the time proposed.

If I suggest that the Odes frequently reveal a Johannine vocabulary (language similar to the Gospel of John), but at the same time decline to recognize actual borrowings from the Fourth Gospel, preferring to believe that the vocabulary in question is the theological language of a time and school which are not very remote from the time and school of thought of the author of the Fourth Gospel, one has to face the objections: on the one side that the theology is not that of a Christian but of a Jewish mystic, on the other side that it is the regular Christian theology of the Church after it has been filled to saturation with the thought—

¹ Professor Cheyne, in the Hibbert Journal A prominent quarterly review of religion and philosophy, expresses a hope that I shall see my way to the abandonment of the identification of Pompey with the "great dragon," and to the rejection of the chronology which is marked by the allusions to his death on the Egyptian shore. I am not to be tempted away from so certain a piece of critical investigation into the side-paths of ancient astrology.