Intertestamental literature

Definitions

A vast amount of Jewish literature written in the intertestamental period (mainly 2nd and 1st centuries bce) and from the 1st and 2nd centuries ce was preserved, for the most part, through various Christian churches. A part of this literature is today commonly called the Apocrypha (Hidden; hence, secret books; singular apocryphon). At one time in the early church this was one of the terms for books not regarded by the church as canonical (scripturally acceptable), but in modern usage the Apocrypha is the term for those Jewish books that are called in the Roman Catholic Church deuterocanonical works—i.e., those that are canonical for Catholics but are not a part of the Jewish Bible. (These works are also regarded as canonical in the Eastern Orthodox churches.) When the Protestant churches returned to the Jewish canon (Hebrew Old Testament) during the Reformation period (16th century), the Catholic deuterocanonical works became for the Protestants “apocryphal”—i.e., non-canonical.

In 19th-century biblical scholarship a new term was coined for those ancient Jewish works that were not accepted as canonical by either the Catholic or Protestant churches; such books are now commonly called Pseudepigrapha (Falsely Inscribed; singular pseudepigraphon), i.e., books wrongly ascribed to a biblical author. The term Pseudepigrapha, however, is not an especially well suited one, not only because the pseudepigraphic character is not restricted to the Pseudepigrapha alone—and, indeed, not even all Pseudepigrapha are ascribed to any author, since there are among them anonymous treatises—but also because the group of writings so designated by this name necessarily varies in the different modern collections. Theoretically, the name Pseudepigrapha can designate all ancient Jewish writings that are not canonical in the Catholic Church. The writings of the philosopher Philo of Alexandria (1st century bce–1st century ce) and the historian Josephus (1st century ce) and fragments of other postbiblical Hellenistic Jewish historians and poets, however, usually are excluded. Rabbinic literature (2nd century bce–2nd century ce) also is generally excluded; such literature existed for centuries only in oral form. The edition of the Pseudepigrapha edited by the British biblical scholar R.H. Charles in 1913, however, contains a translation of Pirqe Avot (“Sayings of the Fathers”), an ethical tractate from the Mishna (a collection of oral laws), and even the non-Jewish Story of Aḥiḳar (a folklore hero), though other genuine Jewish writings from antiquity are omitted. Some of the Jewish Pseudepigrapha were discovered only in the last two centuries, and the Dead Sea Scrolls (the first of them discovered in the 1940s), most of which belong to this category, are not yet all published. Thus, in the broader meaning of the terms, the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha are a bloc of Jewish literature written in antiquity from the later Persian period (c. 4th century bce) and not canonized by the Jews.

Texts and versions

A small portion of this literature is preserved in the original languages: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. Most of the Hebrew or Aramaic works, however, exist today only in various translations: Greek, Latin, Syriac, Ethiopian, Coptic, Old Slavonic, Armenian, and Romanian. All the works of the Apocrypha are preserved in Greek, because they have for the Greek Church a canonical value. Those books not considered canonical by the early church have often fallen into oblivion, and their Greek text was often lost; many of the ancient Jewish Pseudepigrapha are today preserved only in fragments or quotations in various languages, and sometimes only their titles are known from old lists of books that were rejected by the church.

Of this literature only the Apocrypha (contained in Latin and Greek Bibles) were read in the liturgical services of the church. The Pseudepigrapha, in their various versions, were in most cases nearly forgotten; and manuscripts of most of them were rediscovered only in modern times, a process that continues. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumrān in the Judaean desert not only furnished new texts and fragments of unknown and already known Pseudepigrapha but also contributed solutions to problems concerning the origin of other Jewish religious writings (including some Old Testament books), the connection between them, and even their composition and redaction from older sources. The new original texts also strengthened interest in the Jewish literature of the intertestamental period because of its importance for the study of both ancient Judaism and early Christianity. As a result of such discoveries, better critical editions of the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, as well as new studies of their content, have been published.

The Apocrypha, whose texts originated mostly before the rise of Christianity, were regarded as canonical in the early church but contain no Christian interpolations. Many of the Pseudepigrapha, however, were interpolated by Christian writers. The nature and the extent of these Christian interpolations are often difficult to define since a Christian interpolator not only changes the text according to Christian views or introduces specific Christian terminology but also may introduce in a Jewish text ideas, motifs, or terminology that are common to both Judaism and Christianity. For these reasons it is sometimes difficult to decide if a passage in a pseudepigraphon, or even sometimes the whole work, is Jewish or Christian.