The Odes and Psalms of Solomon

In the previous edition a first attempt was made to elucidate the various problems which were presented by the new book of Odes. The Psahns which were attached to them were treated in a rapid manner, as there did not seem any necessity to 1,^0 over again in detail the various critical results at which scholars had arrived with regard to their origin. It is. sufficient to say that no considerations have been adduced which should invalidate the reference of the Solomonic Psalms to the period of the Roman Invasion of Judiea by Pompey, and of the years that followed the desecration of the Templet With regard to these Psalms the critics have been moving in converging paths to a conclusion from which there is no appreciable dissent. With regard, however, to the Odes and their place in the history of literature and of religion, no signs of such convergence or consent 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 Judao-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 A.D., the contentions have to be met that they are (i) nearly a hundred years earlier or (2) nearly a hundred years later than the time proposed. If I suggest that the Odes frequently betray a Johannine vocabulary, but at the same time decline to recognise actual loans 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 charged to saturation with the thought

1 Prof. Cheyne, in the Hibbert Journal, expresses a hope that I shall see my way to the abandonment of the identification of Pompey with the great dragon, and to the desertion of the chronology which is marked by the allusions to his death on the Egyptian shore. I am not to be allured from so certain a piece of critical investigation into the by-paths of ancient…