On the other hand, he came to look upon the Old Testament prophets as approved by their antiquity, sanctity, mystery and prophecies to be interpreters of the truth.
The same is true of the availability of trained interpreters.
On the contrary, Plato and other Attic writers use the word to include interpreters and admirers - in short, the whole " spiritual kindred " - of Homer.
His methods were not free from arbitrariness; he would attribute to " the wise " the opinion of a single authority which he regarded as correct; he would ignore conflicting opinions or those of scholars which they themselves had afterwards retracted, and he did not scruple to cite his own decisions.2 The period of the Amora'im, " speakers, interpreters," (about 220-500 A.D.), witnessed the growth of the Gemara, when the now " canonical " Mishnah formed the basis for further amplification and for the collecting of old and new material which bore upon it.
It has been asserted that " the writings of recent Jewish critics have tended on the whole to confirm the Gospel picture of external Jewish life, and where there is discrepancy these critics tend to prove that the blame lies not with the New Testament originals, but with their interpreters."
