Cave of Treasures

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The Cave of Treasures, sometimes referred to simply as The Treasure, is a book of the New Testament apocrypha, which was later declared heretical by the Roman Catholic Church. This text is attributed to Ephrem Syrus, or Ephraim the Syrian, who was born at Nisibis soon after A.D. 306 and died in 373, but it is now generally believed that the form in which we now have it is not older than the 6th century.

The assertion that the "Cave of Treasures" was written in the 4th century CE, is supported by the general contents of the work. These reproduce Ephraim's quaint and sometimes fanciful methods of exegesis and his hatred of the Jews, and supply many examples of his methods in religious argument with which we are familiar from his other writings. We may notice, too, his pride in the antiquity of the Syriac language. That it was written in Mesopotamia by a Syrian, there is no doubt, and if we reject Ephraim as its author, we are bound to admit that the author, or perhaps later editor, belonged to the school of Ephraim.

The oldest of the Christian works on the history of God's dealing with man from Adam to Christ is probably the Book of Adam and Eve, which, in its original form, was written sometime in the 5th or 6th century CE; its author is unknown. It is accepted that the writer of the "Cave of Treasures" borrowed largely from the "Book of Adam and Eve," or from the same source from which its writer derived his information.

The discovery of the existence of the Book called the "Cave of Treasures" we owe to Assemânî, the famous author of the Catalogues of Oriental Manuscripts in the Vatican Library, which he printed in Bibliotheca Orientalis in four thick volumes folio. In Vol. ii. page 498 he describes a Syriac manuscript containing a series of apocryphal works, and among them is one the title of which he translates Spelunca Thesaurorum. He read the manuscript carefully and saw that it contained the history of a period of 5,500 years, i.e. from the creation of Adam to the birth of Christ, and that it was a historical chronicle based upon the Scriptures. He says that fables are found in it everywhere, and especially in that part of it which treats of the antediluvian Patriarchs, and the genealogy of Christ and His Mother. He mentions that the Patriarch Eutychius also describes a cave of treasures in which gold, frankincense, and myrrh were laid up, and refers to the "portentosa feminarum nomina," who were the ancestresses of Christ. No attempt was made to publish the Syriac text; in fact, little attention was paid to it until August Dillmann began to study the Book of Adam and Eve in connection with it, and then he showed in Ewald's Jahrbüchern (Bd. V. 1853) that the contents of whole sections of the "Book of the Cave of Treasures" in Syriac and the "Book of Adam and Eve" in Ethiopic were identical. And soon after this Dillmann and others noticed that an Arabic manuscript in the Vatican (No. XXXIX; see Assemânî, Bibl. Orient. i. page 281) contained a version of the "Cave of Treasures," which had clearly been made from the Syriac. In 1883 Carl Bezold published a translation of the Syriac text of the "Cave of Treasures" made from three manuscripts (Die Schatzhöhle, Leipzig, 1883), and five years later published the Syriac text of it, accompanied by the text of the Arabic version.

The author of the Book which is commonly known as the "Cave of Treasures" called his work "The Book of the order of the succession of Generations (or Families)," the Families being those of the Patriarchs and Kings of Israel and Judah; and his chief object was to show how Christ was descended from Adam. He did not accept the genealogical tables which were commonly in use among his unlearned fellow-Christians, because he was convinced that all the ancient tables of genealogies which the Jews had possessed were destroyed by fire by the captain of Nebuchadnezzar's army immediately after the capture of Jerusalem by the Babylonians. The Jews promptly constructed new tables of genealogies, which both Christians and Arabs regarded as fictitious. The Arabs were as deeply interested in the matter as the Christians, for they were descended from Abraham, and the genealogy of the descendants of Hagar and Ishmael was of the greatest importance in their sight, and it is due to their earnest desire to possess correct genealogical tables of their ancestors that we owe the Arabic translations of the "Cave of Treasures." The Nubians and Egyptians were also interested in such matters, for the former were the descendants of Kûsh, and the latter the descendants of Mizraim, and Ham was the great ancestor of both these nations. And it is clear that Syrians, Arabs, Egyptians and Ethiopians regarded the "Cave of Treasures" as an authoritative work on their respective pedigrees.

In the title "Cave of Treasures" which was given to the "Book of the order of the succession of Generations" there is probably a double allusion, namely, to the Book as the storehouse of literary treasures, and to the famous Cave in which Adam and Eve were made to dwell by God after their expulsion from Paradise, and which by reason of the gold, and frankincense, and myrrh that was laid up in it, is commonly called "The Cave of Treasures" (in Syriac "Me`ârath Gazzê," in Arabic "Ma`ârah al-Kanûz," and in Ethiopic "Ba`âta Mazâgebet").

The Syriac work, though called the "Cave of Treasures," tells us very little about the real Cave, which was situated in the side of a mountain below Paradise, and nothing about the manner of life which Adam and Eve lived in it. But in the "Book of Adam and Eve" the whole of the first main section is devoted to the particulars of the physical Cave.

Of the subsequent history of the Syriac Cave of Treasures very little is known. The knowledge of parts of it made its way into Armenia soon after the book was written, and more than one translation of it was made into Arabic, probably in the 7th and 8th centuries. In connection with the Arabic translations it must be noted that they all end with the account of the cruelties perpetrated by Archelaus and Sâlûm after the death of Herod. (See Bezold's text, page 247.) The last paragraph of the Arabic text mentions the twelve Apostles who went about with Christ, and refers to His baptisim by John the Baptist, and says that He lived on the earth thirty-three years, and then ascended into heaven. Thus for the last twenty-six pages of the Syriac text there is no equivalent in the Arabic version or translation. And the same is substantially true for the Ethiopic text of the "Book of Adam and Eve" The section of the Syriac for which there is no rendering in Arabic or Ethiopic contains a series of statements addressed by the author to his "brother Nemesius." It is possible that these have been added to the work by a later writer, but I do not think so. As they do not deal with matters of genealogy, and do treat almost exclusively of the life of Christ and His crucifixion, it is probable that they failed to interest the Arab translator, and he left them untranslated. It may be, however, that the complete Arabic translation has not come down to us.

That the Syriac "Cave of Treasures" was known and used by Solomon, Bishop of Perâth Maishân (Al-Basrah) in 1222 is proved by the earlier chapters of his work the "Book of the Bee." He excerpted from it many of the legends of the early Patriarchs, although his object was not to write a table of genealogical succession, but a full history of the Christian Dispensation according to the views of the Nestorians. It is interesting to note that we owe the best manuscript of the "Cave of Treasures" which we have to the Nestorians, for Brit. Mus. MS. Add. 25875, was written by a Nestorian scribe in the Nestorian village of Alkôsh, and was bound up by him in a volume which included a copy of the "Book of the Bee," whose author, Solomon, was the Nestorian Bishop of Al-Basrah early in the 13th century.