Irish Pseudepigrapha Lecture

I have posted Dr. Macaskill's lecture from last week, The Pseudepigrapha in the Irish Church," on the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha website.

Irish Apocrypha/Pseudepigrapha resources

As a follow up to Friday's lecture, I thought it might be helpful to post details of two very useful books.

First, the starting point for any research on the Irish texts is Martin McNamara's , The Apocrypha in the Irish Church (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1975), which provides full details of the actual manuscripts of the Irish texts.

The second resource to be mentioned is Maire Herbert and Martin McNamara, Irish Biblical Apocrypha: Selected Texts in Translation (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1989). This provides beautifully translated readings from the Irish texts and gives a real flavour of the material. The translations are accompanied by helpful notes that generally provide the essential critical information.

My apologies, by the way, to the respected authors listed above: I don't know how to get the appropriate accents for their Gaelic names in this blogging program and so their names have been represented in brute English!

I'm not sure if it crosses the Irish-Scottish divide but tha mi duilich, co dhuibh.

6 Ezra Lecture

I have posted last week's lecture on 6 Ezra here.

UPDATE: Bad link corrected.

Irish Pseudepigrapha

Tomorrow's class will examine some of the pseudepigraphal material maintained by the Irish Church. As we will see, that Church had a particular interest in Adam traditions, which parallel and draw upon the Apocalypse of Moses/Latin Life of Adam and Eve.

It may be helpful if students are able to read through the Life of Adam and Eve in volume 2 of J.H. Charlesworth, The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (New York: Doubleday, 1985), 249-295. Some of the comments I make about the distinctives of the Irish Adam and Eve material will make better sense if students have read this first.

Those inspired to learn Old Irish (not necessary for tomorrow, by the way) may be interested in the website run by the University of Texas at Austen's Linguistics Research Center:

http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/eieol/iriol-0-X.html

I have only glanced at the site, which provides lessons and readings from classic texts. I appreciated the Old Church Slavonic site that the same center produced, though, and if it is even remotely as helpful as that site then, frankly, I shall be spending a good deal of time there! The OCS site is:

http://www.utexas.edu/cola/centers/lrc/eieol/ocsol-0-X.html

Summary of Testament of Moses Seminar (13 April)

Here are some of the points that were raised during our discussion of the Testament of Moses ("Milan manuscript," "Latin Moses fragment") during the seminar on 13 April. The major methodological issue that arose in class discussion was how to balance the need to avoid harmonization of the data (i.e., oversimplifying to make the data fit together) with the need to apply Occam's Razor ("entities must not be multiplied" or "the simplest solution is to be preferred"). This dilemma arises both with the question of whether the Latin Moses fragment is sectarian (if so, which sect, or is it one we otherwise don't know?) and whether it should be identified with any of the lost ancient Moses books already known to us.

The question of the purpose of the of Latin Moses fragment came up a number of times. This important issue was outside the scope of the paper, so we devoted some class time to it. It was suggested that chapters 11-12 might offer some insight, in that they dealt with the question of leadership after Moses' death and they taught that the individual leader is not important, nor is the piety of the people, but rather the important thing is divine election and support. The potential inference is that the community was suffering a from a lack of leadership or a recently lost leader and this work was intended to encourage them. It was also pointed out that works that include an ex post facto review of future history frequently bring out their central concerns in the part of the review that culminates in the writer's present as eschatological end time. Chapters 8-9 fit this description and portray a time of persecution and an ideology of nonviolent passive resistance, perhaps hinting at the life situation of the writer. All this, of course, is speculative.

There is some reason to believe that the Latin Moses fragment is "sectarian" in the sense that it thinks its own group is right and righteous even in contrast to other Jewish groups (note, e.g., the hostility toward apparently Jewish rulers in chapter 7). But it is difficult to link the writer's group to one particular group or sect such as the Essenes/Qumran sectarians, Pharisees, or Samaritans. Kenneth Atkinson has argued that the Psalms of Solomon were written by an otherwise unknown Jewish sectarian group, and the Testament of Moses may have been produced by still another unknow sect.

Is the Latin Moses fragment to be identified with either the Testament of Moses or the Assumption of Moses? In Jude and the Relatives of Jesus Richard Bauckham concludes that the Latin Moses fragment is the same as the Testament of Moses, which is also quoted in Jude 9. In The Provenance of the Pseudepigrapha I argue that, although the Testament of Moses is indeed quoted in Jude 9, the Latin Moses fragment is not to be identified either with the Testament of Moses or the Assumption of Moses, but rather it was a third work. This does multiply entities a bit, but I think in a way required by the evidence (in that what seems to be the description of the first part of the Testament of Moses in the Palaea Historica does not correspond well at all to the surviving material in the Latin Moses fragment). And I noted in class that we do know of a good number of Moses pseudepigrapha going back to antiquity. These include:

• The lost Archangelic Book of the Prophet Moses described in On the Origins of the World from the Nag Hammadi Library (NHC II 102, 7-9).
  
  
• The Eighth Book of Moses, a magical treatise that otherwise has nothing to do with Moses and which is found in Greek Magical Papyrus (PGM) xiii in two versions. The end of this papyrus also mentions the "Hidden Book of Moses Concerning the Great Name," which may be another lost Moses work.
  
  
• The Sword of Moses (Harba di-Moshe) is a Hebrew and Aramaic magical treatise that likewise has nothing in particular to do with Moses.
  
  
• The Greatness of Moses (Gedullat Moshe) is a Hebrew account of Moses' travels to paradise and hell.
  
  
• The Apocalypse of Moses is the title of a Greek version of the Latin Life of Adam and Eve. [26 April: I had the languages reversed and have now corrected them.] It is about Adam and Eve rather than Moses.
  
  
• The Colloquy of Moses on Mount Sinai is a Syriac work about Moses.

The Latin Moses fragment cannot be identified with any of the above, but they do establish that there have been a number of Moses pseudepigrapha from antiquity on.

Ladder of Jacob Class Session 23rd March

This post is a rather belated summary of our class session from 23rd March, which involved a student paper examining the Ladder of Jacob.

The paper argued that the Ladder of Jacob as a text draws upon several other works or traditions, including Jewish traditions associated with Jacob and Christian traditions such as the Tale of Aphroditianus. The latter work describes events in Persia at the time of Christ's birth and seems to have influenced chapter 7 of the Ladder. Scholars tend to assume that the first six chapters are Jewish but that the seventh is a Christian addition; this paper instead suggested that the work is much more composite in nature than often assumed.

Interestingly, the paper picked up on some strong similarities between the Ladder of Jacob and the Apocalypse of Abraham, suggesting that the latter influenced the editor of the Explanatory Palaea, in which the Ladder is found. This raises for us again one of the problems of the Slavonic Pseudepigrapha: where works are clearly related closely to one another but quite different to the other texts with which they are often grouped (i.e., the demonstrably Jewish pseudepigrapha of the Second Temple period), should we not be wary of assigning to them a Second Temple date and regarding them as representing the Judaism of that time?

The paper also highlighted the problem that we are essentially dealing with a text that has been extracted from its context in the Explanatory Palaea. In other words, we have no witnesses to the text in the form that it currently takes in English translation. Working with the text, we are faced with the problem that our English translation does not correspond to any actual manuscript and so we are kept from working with the text as it actually is.

All in all, the session opened up a difficult text on which little has been written, opening up some interesting lines of research that could be explored further, particularly concerning the extent to which the work is composite.

Testament of Moses Abstract

I have posted the abstract of Fiona Grierson's paper on the Testament of Moses here.

More on Moses Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha

M. R. James collected a great many fragments of Moses apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, some of which we will discuss in class tomorrow. See the Moses section of his The Lost Apocrypha of the Old Testament. And one more lost Moses apocryphon is mentioned in On the Origin of the World in the Nag Hammadi library. See here for details.