Friday, March 09, 2007

Online Translations of Apocalype of Abraham Revisited

In my previous post on the online translations of Ap.Ab., I mentioned some of the flaws of the Box-Landsman edition. Reading that translation in preparation for today's class, it occurs to me that while it is indeed flawed in several ways, it also has something in its favour that is lacking from the translation in Charlesworth OTP 1. The appendix to the Box-Landsman translation contains extracts from the Palaeas that Ap.Ab. is found in. One of my concerns in working with the Slavonic texts is that our translations are somewhat inauthentic, the passages having been removed from the contexts in which they were originally embedded. The appendix to Box-Landsman gives us a better sense of how the pseudepigraphon was actually used and introduced in the Palaeas and for this reason students may find it helpful to read through that appendix.

The translation can be found here.