Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. PAGAN WRITERS ON THE JEWISH RELIGION AND THE SABBATH.—CONTINUED. That the Alexandrian and other Greek works in which notices of Jewish history and religious rites occur, had some influence on the Roman writers who also presented Jewish accounts in their various compositions, we are far from disputing, although it is demonstrable in Tacitus only. This " grave personage" had evidently read and made use of a number of those Grecian works. Instead, however, of consulting for a true historical purpose the universally accessible Greek version of the Bible, and also the works of Philo and Josephus that had long before his time of writing been published, he preferred, from his haughty contempt for the Jewish people, to draw his information from those heathen sources, however turbid7 and incongruent with one another they were in regard to the description of the ancient historical events of the nation of Israel. He particularly copied, as we will later see, Lysimachus and Apion, Alexandrian authors whose names appeared already in our previous discussion. But that the hatred to the Jews which was found among the generality of the pagans, and is also encountered in Roman literature, should originally have emanated from Egypt, that is, from the Alexandrian writings of Manetho, Cheremon, Lysimachus, Apion, and others, as Dr. Joel, "Elicke in die Religionsgeschichte" ii. p. 106; 116-19, suggests, we cannot accept as resting on any plausible grounds. Nor can we agree with him as to his conjoined proposition, that Greek authors, such as Posidonius and Apollonius Molo who also wrote on Jewish matters, had already "long (before Apion ) thrown the Alexandrian fables, passed as Jewish history, on the Roman market, sothat it need not be wondered at that, as once Cicero who, as an ...