"THE ODES OF SOLOMON."

Colonist, Volume LVI, Issue 13491, 10 June 1914, Page 3

"THE ODES OF SOLOMON."

The- Syrian MS. of the "Odes of Solomon" has just been acquired by the Rylands Library, Manchester. The book, which is of very great value and importance, was discovered some five years ago by Dr. Rendel Harris in a parcel of Oriental MSS., and the hymns that it contains Avere composed in the very earliest days of the Christian faith, before the New Tastament itself was completed. "The possession of this little volume will make many a famous old library envious beyond measure," writes Professor James Hope Moulton. "Composed before the New Testament itself was completed, the hymns breathe the springtide air of the new faith in all its freshness and beauty, and furnish to the mystics of to-day a fragrant little book of devotion."

The unique MS. which now joins its peers in the richest of all modern libraries was sent to Dr. Harris from the East in a parcel of Orientalia collected for him by a commissioner of his. It lay for a while unnoticed on his library shelf till some urgent work was finished, and when the unsuspecting possessor found time to examine his new accessions it soon became clear that a document of primary importance had swum into his ken. Part of the MS. proved to be a new Syriac translation of the "Psalms of Solomon," a collection dating from the first century 8.C., already known in the Greek, and familiar to scholars in the standard edition by the Dean of Westminster and the Provost of King's College, Cambridge.