Hear, also, what the learned and pious Dr. Prideaux says:—“The sacred books made use of among the Jews in their synagogues have ever been, and still are, _without the vowel-points_, which could not have happened had they been placed there by Ezra, and had, consequently, been of the same authority with the letters; for, had they been so, they would certainly have been preserved in the synagogues with the same care as the rest of the text.” He then goes on to say that no mention is made of the points in either the Mishna or Gemara, and continues: “Neither do we find the least hint of them in Philo-Judæus or Josephus, who are the oldest writers of the Jews, or in any of the ancient Christian writers for _several hundred years after Christ_. And, although among them Origen and Jerome were well skilled in the Hebrew language, yet in none of their writings do they speak the least of them. Origen flourished in the third, and Jerome in the fifth, century; and the latter, having lived a long while in Judæa, and there more especially applied himself to the study of the Hebrew learning, and much conversed with the Jewish rabbis for his improvement herein, it is not likely that he could have missed making some mention of them through all his voluminous works, if they had been either in being among the Jews in his time, or in any credit or authority with them, and that especially since, in his commentaries, there were so many necessary occasions for taking notice of them.” The Doctor then declares that after the Babylonish Captivity “the Hebrew language ceased to be the mother tongue of the Jews,” Aramæn, as we know, being the dialect of Judæa at the time of Herod. We may, then, safely fix the date of our earliest Hebrew MS. at a later period than 1000 A.D., for there does not exist one single ante-Masoretic or unpointed Hebrew MS. of the Bible. The Greek Septuagint was also written in Greek capitals, without accents and breathings and without divisions between the words, and continued thus until the eighth century, when accents and breathings came into use, which were followed, in the tenth century, by small letters, as we have them now in our Greek Bibles. The very same may be said about the New Testament MSS., all of which are written in continuous Greek capitals.