There is, however, one source to which we may legitimately repair, as next in authority to the Holy Scriptures themselves with respect to the forms of primitive tradition: I mean the earliest and most authentic sacred literature of the Hebrews. Not that in kind it can resemble the sacred records; but that it is at least likely to indicate what were the earliest forms of development, and the initial tendencies to deviation.
Since that nation became unhappily committed, through its chief traditional authorities, to the repudiation of the Redeemer, a sinister bias has operated upon its retrospective, as well as upon its present and prospective theology. There are nevertheless three depositaries of knowledge from which we may hope to learn what were the views, entertained by the ancient Hebrews themselves, with regard to the all-absorbing subject of the Messianic traditions.
In the first place it would appear, from the very nature of the prophecies of the Old Testament, that there must, in all likelihood, have existed along with them a system of authoritative contemporary exposition, in order that holy men might be enabled to derive from them the consolation and instruction which, apart from their other purposes, they were divinely intended to convey. The highly figurative character and frequent obscurity of their language supports, if it does not require, this belief: and the constant practice, attested by the later Scriptures, of public explanation of the sacred Books, including the Prophets, in the synagogues of the Jews, brings it as near as such a case admits to demonstration.
These expositions of the Sacred Text began, as it appears, to be committed to writing about the time of the Babylonish captivity; when the Chaldee tongue became the vernacular, and the old Hebrew disappeared from common use. They were collected in the Paraphrases or Targumim: and the fragments of the oldest of them, which had consisted of marginal notes, were consolidated into a continuous Targum by Onkelos, Jonathan, and others[46].
Apart from the Targumim, the sacred literature of the Jews appears, from the time of the captivity onwards, to have run in two main channels. One class of teachers and writers rested chiefly on the dry traditionary system condemned by our Saviour in the Gospels, and gave less and less heed, as time went on, to the doctrine of Scripture, and of their forefathers, concerning the Messiah. In the second century after Christ, this traditionary system was reduced by the Rabbi Jehuda into a volume called the Mischna. And in the sixth or seventh, there was composed a larger work, the Gemara or Talmud, which purported in part to comment on the Mischna, and which also presented a more extensive and more promiscuous collection of Rabbinical traditions. In the midst of the ordure of this work, says Schöttgen, are to be found here and there certain pearls[47].
Parallel with this stream of chiefly spurious learning, there was a succession of pious writers, who both searched the Scriptures, and studied to maintain and propagate the Messianic interpretations of them. Of this succession the Rabbi Simeon Ben Jochai was the great ornament; and by his disciples was compiled, some sixty years after his death, or about A. D. 170, the work termed the Sohar, which is so Christian in its sense, as to have convinced Schöttgen that Simeon was himself a Christian; although, perhaps from not being understood, he was not repudiated by the Jews[48]. Upon this work was founded the Cabbalistic or mystical learning.
From these sources may be derived many Messianic ideas and interpretations that were current among the ancient Jews.
Of them I proceed to extract some, from the work of Schöttgen, which may throw light upon the interior system of the Homeric mythology in its most important aspects.
1. First and foremost, these traditions appear to bear witness to the extraordinary elevation of the Messiah, and they fully recognise his title to the great Tetragrammaton[49].