and believing Gentiles, by this Antichrist; a forcible occupation of Judæa, by the same power; his coming to his end in that locality; the production of this event by a direct miraculous interference of the power of the true Christ; a resurrection of all or of part of the dead; an establishment of a kingdom in Judæa, under Christ as Supreme, but divided with the saints, in certain proportions, as reigning with him—and subordinately to him; a new Jerusalem, possessed of a living temple, the residence of the Incarnate Divinity; a perfect communion between heaven and earth, between angels and men; a resulting state of things, retaining all the essentials of a social state, as calculated for beings strictly humanand therefore necessarily requiring to be transacted among men, still possessed of the integrity of their proper nature, unaltered and unimpaired—and upon this earth, the same as at present constituted, and appointed to be the proper scene of their abode, with the exception only of the mixture of alloy and imperfection, both moral and physical, which coexists at present with the good and the perfection, of either kind, also existing in it and upon it a state of society, realising the utmost conceivable picture of happiness, innocence, and goodness, among beings strictly human, and not yet the same with angels and among the inhabitants of earth, not yet translated to heaven: upon these, and such points as these, the most orthodox millenarian of primitive times, and the author of the Sibylline Oracles, in my opinion at least, would have been entirely at unison together. The stress of the argument, indeed, founded upon the coincidence in all material or essential respects, between the particulars of the creed of a millenarian of primitive antiquity, and the testimony even of the Sibylline Oracles, considered as an apocryphal Christian production, rests upon the assumption that the testimony of these Oracles is contemporaneous with that period of Christian antiquity, which we have uniformly supposed to have been the time when the millenary doctrines and expectations were the current belief of the church; whatever they might become in the course of time afterwards. This period was comprehended between the end of the first, and the middle of the second century, more particularly. Within this period the Liber Esdræ, and the Liber Enoch, both were written; each of them containing more or less of testimony to the doctrines and expectations in question. Within this period flourished Papias and Polycarp, and the rest of the presbyters or elders; whose own belief in these truths was founded on the teaching of St. John, and of others of the apostles, or the apostolical men, all for more or less of their lifetime, contemporaries of theirs; and on whose testimony to the same truths, as thus delivered to them, both oral and written, Irenæus as we saw, (and no doubt others besides Irenæus, contemporaries of his,) founded their belief in the same doctrines also. Within this period flourished Justin Martyr, in whose time the millenarian was the current and orthodox belief of the church; and within this period his Dialogue with Trypho, which contains so many testimonies to his own individual concurrence in the common belief, was held and committed to writing. Within this time too, flourished Celsus, whose work against Chris tianity, little as we know of it from the extracts preserved in Origen's reply to it, yet contains clear allusions to certain peculiar expectations, entertained by the Christians of his day, which are too intimately connected with the millenarian doctrines, not to be identified with them. Within this period flourished Cerinthus, Marcion, and many others, who, heresiarchs as they were, and perverters of the truth in various respects, agreed in the belief of the millenary doctrines, as much as the orthodox themselves. In short, there is nothing extant of primitive Christian antiquity, either apocryphal or non-apocryphal, and belonging strictly to this period, in which the same belief is not, in one way or another, recognised; and the truth of the genuine millenary doctrines is not illustrated and confirmed even by the amount of error mixed up with it. This unity of character in all the writings of this period, with respect to so remarkable a feature of distinction as the common testimony which they render to a doctrine so peculiar as that of the millennium-must of itself materially conduce to the decision of the question, to what date the Sibylline Oracles, which abound in testimonies to the same doctrines, are in all probability to be referred; whether to some period, when such testimonies were characteristic of almost every thing that was written and published by Christians, or to some period when they were not; whether to the period, when the millenarian doctrines were still fresh from the birth, and currently believed in the church, or to some one of much later times, when they had become comparatively obsolete, and out of date ? We might contend, indeed, that if the Sibylline oracles, or any portion of them, such as is now extant, were known to Justin Martyr, (as they appear to have been,) they must have been in being before his time at least; or if the present collection, though not exactly that which was known to Justin Martyr, is the same which was known to Athenagoras, the author of the Legatio pro Christianis, or to Theophilus, the author of the work Ad Autolycum— then the present collection, or one which very nearly resembled it, was in being before the death of Lucius Verus, A. D. 169. (see my Supplem. Diss. xv. 299. sqq.) one of the emperors to whom the Legatio is addressed-or before the death of M. Aurelius, and the first year of Commodus, A. D. 180, which is the date of the work Ad Autolycum. On this point, however, something may be said hereafter, before we take our leave of the subject. At present, I will observe only, that the most satisfactory means of determining the age of a particular composition, whatever be its subject-matter, being such indications as its own internal evidence may be found to supply; I think it best to lay before the reader some of the testimonies furnished by the Oracles themselves—from which he will have it in his power to judge before what time they could not possibly have been written, (such parts of them at least as contain the testimonies in question,) and at what time, in all probability, they were: the result of which conclusions, I trust, will be to confirm the assertion, advanced at the beginning of this inquiry, that the true date of their composition is some time in the reign of the emperor Hadrian. First, there are passages in these Oracles, which prove the author of them to have been aware of the existence of Christians, as bearing that name in opposition both to Jews and to Gentiles. Thus, lib. i. 185, after specifying various particulars of our Saviour's personal history up to his Resurrection, he proceeds to predict his Ascension, line 7: ἐν νεφέλαις ἐπιβὰς εἰς οὐρανοῦ οἶκον ὁδεύσει, τοῦ καὶ ἐπωνυμίῃ βλαστὸς νέος ἀνθήσειεν 5, ἐξ ἐθνῶν Μεγάλοιο νόμῳ καθοδηγηθέντες. In one of these passages, the Sibyll classes herself among Christians, lib. viii. 789. 4: (τοῦνεκ ̓ ἄρ ̓ ἡμεῖς καὶ ') ὁσίης Χριστοῖο γενέθλης οὐρανίης πεφυῶτες, ἐπικλεόμεσθα σύναιμοι, and so on, in the first person, to the end of the book. It is an obvious inference from this fact, that these parts of the Oracles, at least, could not have been written before the point of time, when Christian became the denomination for the believers in Jesus Christ; that is, before U. C. 794 or 795. A.D. 41 or 42. (see Acts xii. 26. Cf. xxvi. 28, and 1 Pet. iv. 16.) Again, passages occur in the Oracles, which prove that the author of them was no stranger to the fact of persecutions, properly so called; or to the existence of persecutors, whom he calls, εὐσεβέων κεραϊσται, u πιστολέται, καὶ τῶν δικαίων φθισίνορες " ἀνδρῶν. Lib. ii. 281. 6. Here the use of so peculiar a term as πιστολέται, that is, "destroyers of the faithful," and the particu s Lege ἀνθήσουσιν. 345. 6: 346. 4: 350. 2. φθισήνορες. t Τούνεκα καί ῥ ̓ ἡμεῖς. and Cf. iii. Also iii. 331.9. u Perhaps, |