antiquity. Some of the details, however, may be fables or exaggerations, though, for the purpose of our argument, it is of no consequence whether the whole story be true or false. If true, it proves that some 277 years B.C. there were the twelve tribes in Judæa, in sufficient numbers to have six elders chosen out of each tribe, sufficiently skilled in the Greek language to be able to translate their law into it from their own Hebrew. If the story be not true, it at least proves that in the estimation of the author, who must have lived and written long before our era, and was probably himself of the Jewish nation, there were the twelve tribes then present in Judæa, and that out of each there might have been six elders chosen, sufficiently skilled in Greek to make the translation.
It has already been stated, that Josephus himself, and a vast number of other writers of the earlier ages, Jewish and Christian, received this history implicitly as true. It did not occur to any of them that it must have been a manifest imposture, if it were indeed the fact that there were no twelve tribes in Judæa, but only two, and the other ten on the other side of the Euphrates, or wandered away into some further country. This notable discovery was reserved for the learned Scaliger and later writers, who have curiously enough denied the authenticity of the history of Aristeas upon this very ground, that there were only two tribes at the time in Judæa, and the other ten carried away into Media; so that the story of six elders being chosen out of each tribe could not be true. This, however, as we have before contended, was only reasoning upon an assumption, borrowed, without examination, from rabbinical writers, who denied the fulfilment of prophecies that had taken place, and wished to make it be believed that these, with reference to the ten tribes, were yet to be looked for with the advent of their Messiah. But though this might suit the views of the Rabbins, it was contrary to the belief of all the older Christian writers, who, in every reference to the subject, seem to have had no idea of these ten tribes being lost or absent. Thus it is that Hegesippus, the first and most ancient writer of church history, expressly declares, that it was the custom for all the tribes to come up every year to the Passover, and that it was at one of these anniversaries that St. James, the first bishop of that city, suffered martyrdom. This extract from Hegesippus is preserved by Eusebius, book ii. ch. 23, without any dissent from the statement, and he therefore gives the weight of his authority also to the conclusion that there must have been then more than two tribes only
