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THE OLD TESTAMENT
95

his wife bare a son, who stood up on his feet and prophesied of Christ and foretold his own death after thirty-three days. The tale, which comes to us in Latin, is said in the MSS. to be drawn from a Greek writer, Germanus (? the Patriarch of Constantinople). The Latin will be found in O. Schade's Narrationes de vita et conversatione B. Mariæ, etc. (Königsberg, 1876), from a Giessen MS. I have also found it in MS. CCCC. 365 and in Cosin's Library at Durham (V. iv. 9). I believe representations of it are among the sculptures on the Cathedral of Ulm.

The last passage I know about Hystaspes is in what is known as the Tübingen Theosophy (Buresch. Klaros, p. 95). It is an epitome, contained in a MS. at Tübingen (a transcript of the burnt Strasburg MS. that contained the Epistle to Diognetus and other apologetic writings), of a fifth-century treatise in eleven parts, of which Books I. to VII. dealt with the True Faith, and VIII. to XL were called Theosophy. "In the fourth (of the Theosophy) or eleventh (of the whole work) he produces oracles of Hystaspes, who was a most pious King, he says, of the Persians or Chaldeans, and therefore received a revelation of divine mysteries concerning the incarnation of the Saviour." He thus confirms, what the Clement-quotation suggested, that the book of Hystaspes was of Christian complexion.