Pharisaic editorship the Sadducæan trail could not be altogether obliterated; hence their condemnation. Highly improbable as this sounds at first, it will be seen, when we come to consider these books in brief detail, that in some cases the contention is not altogether unjustified. It is doubtless due to this Pharisaic hostility that almost all the Hebrew or Aramaic originals of these books have disappeared and that these writings are preserved only in translations. There can, moreover, be little doubt that this hostility was further nourished on account of the use of apocalyptic books in the early Christian Church. Another preliminary remark about this literature is necessary. All the known books belonging to it have false names in their titles, for which reason they are called the _Pseudepigrapha_. How are we to account for this apparent fraud on the part of writers who were clearly devout and earnest men? This strange procedure, as it appears to us nowadays, may to a large extent be explained if we remember that “the apocalyptic writers almost certainly drew their material from popular tradition. Many of the ideas which receive various embodiment in this literature were derived doubtlessly from the common stock of the popular consciousness; their ascription to or association with the great heroic figures of antiquity, like Enoch, Abraham, Isaiah, or the twelve Patriarchs, may also be a feature from the popular consciousness. The men who reduced the various elements to writing, or utilized them for enforcing religious views or lessons may, on this view, be acquitted from any charge of fraud or dishonesty; they implicitly trusted the popular tradition so far as to believe that the ideas to which they were giving expression really did go back to the heroic figures of old. Their estimate, moreover, of the function and importance of authorship probably differed fundamentally from that of the moderns; it was far less self-conscious, and was the natural outcome of a literary modesty which was _naïve_.”[277] It is likely enough that one way whereby the popular traditions came into being was owing to Haggadic homiletics, i.e. the explanation of Scripture teaching by narrative or parable; passages of Scripture would be explained and illustrated by means of imaginary narratives which were, of course, not intended to be other than explanatory; then, as these were repeated and handed on, they tended in process of time to be regarded as accounts of events which actually did happen, and which had been handed down by tradition. If this supposition be correct, it would in some sense be analogous to the somewhat similar process which happened in the domain of Halakah, i.e. that which is concerned with the legal and ritual elements in Scripture.