One early answer to all such difficulties was, like a similar answer to difficulties about the Homeric mythology, that there was a human as well as a divine element in the Old Testament: some things in it were true, and some were false: and “this was indeed the very reason why the Master said, ‘Be genuine money-changers,’[115] testing the Scriptures like coins, and separating the good from the bad.” But the answer did not generally prevail. The more common solution, as also in the case of Homer, was that Moses had written in symbols in order to conceal his meaning from the unwise; and Clement of Alexandria, in an elaborate justification of this method, mentions as analogies not only the older Greek poetry, but also the hieroglyphic writing of the Egyptians.[116] The Old Testament thus came to be treated allegorically. A large part of such interpretation was inherited. The coincidences of mystical interpretation between Philo and the Epistle of Barnabas show that such interpretations were becoming the common property of Jews and Judæo-Christians.[117] But the method was soon applied to new data. Exegesis became apologetic. Whereas Philo and his school had dealt mainly with the Pentateuch, the early Christian writers came to deal mainly with the prophets and poetical books; and whereas Philo was mainly concerned to show that the writings of Moses contained Greek philosophy, the Christian writers endeavoured to show that the writings of the Hebrew preachers and poets contained Christianity; and whereas Philo had been content to speak of the writers of the Old Testament, as Dio Chrysostom spoke of the Greek poets, as having been stirred by a divine enthusiasm, the Christian writers soon came to construct an elaborate theory that the poets and preachers were but as the flutes through which the Breath of God flowed in divine music into the souls of men.[118]