Page:The Classical Heritage of the Middle Ages.djvu/248

230 THE CLASSICAL HERITAGE [chap. happen, and, of course, miraculously. Yet the reader may be certain that the Lord Jesus will bring about the conversion of many people through his apostle, as well as that apostle's glorious martyrdom, just as the reader of the Greek romance may be sure that Fortune will bring hero and heroine to wedded bliss at last. Likewise, there is scant delineation of character in this Christian apocrypha; all the apostles suffer meekly, though miraculously destroying, for the example's sake, many of their tormentors ; all Jews and heathen rage, until their conversion; the purity of the Virgin Mary is the formal priggishness of a nun ; Joseph is uninteresting; the child-Saviour shows no character beyond malice, vengefulness, and premature powers of disputation. In many forms these apocryphal writings reappear in the Middle Ages. Their incidents are frequently reproduced, or an entire writing is translated, and is altered or added to according to the racehood, the en- vironment, and the individual taste of the translator or adaptor. In its literary and intellectual inferiority, the Christian apocrypha bore the same relation to the New Testament that the Jewish apocrypha bore to the Hebrew Canon of the Old Testament. The Jewish apocrypha was popular in the Middle Ages, and as authoritative as the books of the Hebrew Canon. Likewise, much from the Christian apocrypha was accepted by Church and people, and fills as large a place in popular literature as the canonical narratives.^ 1 " On ne s'est pas bornd k faire entrer le pr^tendu ^vangile de Nicodfeme dans la plupart des histoires de la passion et de la resur- rection de J(^8us-Christ ; 11 a pen^tre dans la litt^ratnre profane.