The Book of the Cave of Treasures

The Cave of Treasures, sometimes referred to simply as The Treasure, is a book of the New Testament apocrypha. This text is attributed to Ephrem Syrus, 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 tha...

The Cave of Treasures, sometimes referred to simply as The Treasure, is a book of the New Testament apocrypha. This text is attributed to Ephrem Syrus, 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 AD, is supported by the general contents of the work. These reproduce Ephraim's quaint and sometimes fanciful methods of exegesis 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.