12. I fear that we cannot regard the writer of Philo as a man of very lofty mind or of great literary talent. He has some imagination, and is sensible of the majesty of the Old Testament literature, but he has not the insight, the power, or the earnestness of the author of 4 Esdras, nor again the ethical perception of him who wrote the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. From this point of view the obscurity which has hung over his book is not undeserved. Nevertheless it is a source by no means to be neglected by the student of Christian origins and of Jewish thought, and for that reason I have suggested that it should find a place in this series of translations.
I hope that the pretensions of this edition will not be misconceived. It is not a critical edition in the sense that it presents all the variants of all the authorities and lays the whole body of evidence before the reader. Such a presentation would only be possible if the text as well as the translation were included in this volume. (I do not myself, let me say in passing, believe that the result of a complete statement of various readings would differ very importantly from what the reader now has before him, seeing that the text depends upon a single thread of tradition.) Nor, again, will every available illustrative passage be found in such notes as I have written on the subject matter in Rabbinic literature especially it should be possible to find many more parallels. Notes of