have sinned if you had not given me the limbs with which I did evil."
And the body to the soul, "But it was you who thought of the evil
which I carried out." Thus one will try to throw the blame on the
other; but is either of them free from guilt?

Others of these apocryphal books are designed to show how important
some special virtue, or how dangerous some particular sin, may be.
Thus, there is a book called The Testaments (or Last Words) of the
Twelve Patriarchs, in which each of the twelve sons of Jacob, when he
comes to die, calls his children to him and tells them about his own
life, and warns them against his own besetting sin, or shows how he
has been helped by practising some good habit: Simeon speaks about
envy, Issachar about simplicity, Zebulun about kindness, and so on.
And many others there are which are merely, one would say, meant to
tell us more about the lives and deaths of the great men of the old
times than we can learn from the Bible.

Perhaps I have now said enough to show of what sort the tales are
that are told in this book--some of them told for the first time in
English. They are not true, but they are very old; some of them, I
think, are beautiful, and all of them seem to me interesting. In case
anyone should wish to know more about them, I will put down here the
names of the books from which I have taken them.

The first part of the story of Adam is shortened from Mr. S. G.
Malan's translation of The Book of Adam and Eve, and from Dillmann's
German translation of the same (Das christliche Adambuch des
Morgenlandes). The second part is from the Greek Revelation of Moses
(in Tischendorf's Apocalypses Apocryphae), and from the Latin Life of
Adam, edited by W. Meyer.