us.]

The Apocryphal books of the Old Testament, especially the Jewish part
of the Sibylline verses, and the Book of Enoch, together with the Book
of Daniel, which is also really an Apocrypha, have a primary
importance in the history of the development of the Messianic
theories, and for the understanding of the conceptions of Jesus
respecting the kingdom of God. The Book of Enoch especially, which was
much read at the time of Jesus,[1] gives us the key to the expression
"Son of Man," and to the ideas attached to it. The ages of these
different books, thanks to the labors of Alexander, Ewald, Dillmann,
and Reuss, is now beyond doubt. Every one is agreed in placing the
compilation of the most important of them in the second and first
centuries before Jesus Christ. The date of the Book of Daniel is still
more certain. The character of the two languages in which it is
written, the use of Greek words, the clear, precise, dated
announcement of events, which reach even to the time of Antiochus
Epiphanes, the incorrect descriptions of Ancient Babylonia, there
given, the general tone of the book, which in no respect recalls the
writings of the captivity, but, on the contrary, responds, by a crowd
of analogies, to the beliefs, the manners, the turn of imagination of
the time of the Seleucidæ; the Apocalyptic form of the visions, the
place of the book in the Hebrew canon, out of the series of the
prophets, the omission of Daniel in the panegyrics of Chapter xlix. of
Ecclesiasticus, in which his position is all but indicated, and many
other proofs which have been deduced a hundred times, do not permit of
a doubt that the Book of Daniel was but the fruit of the great
excitement produced among the Jews by the persecution of Antiochus. It
is not in the old prophetical literature that we must class this book,
but rather at the head of Apocalyptic literature, as the first model