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Summary Pseudepigrapha (part 2)
Summary Pseudepigrapha part 2 4. To avoid a credibility debate, the author has provided the Pseudepigrapha text as a convenience. The author's notes used to develop the summaries are embedded within the text to help the user locate areas of concern and speed up their research and understanding. The stories are outlined along with internal and external conflicts identified. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up.
To ask other readers questions about Summary Pseudepigrapha , please sign up. Be the first to ask a question about Summary Pseudepigrapha. Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Another approach would be to find long works by Christian authors whether anonymous or attributed to specific writers which contain Christian signature features, but which also include episodic stretches of narrative which lack such features. Evidence of this sort would establish that Christian authors sometimes told whole Old Testament stories without making reference to Christian matters, although it would not prove that they wrote complete works without doing so.
A study of these episodes would also shed light on how Christian authors interpreted and reformulated Old Testament stories and might give us a better understanding of the range of exegetical possibilities we can expect to find in Old Testament apocrypha and pseudepigrapha by Christians.
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I analyse extended passages from three works of this kind below. A third approach would be to find anonymous or pseudonymous works on Old Testament subjects which lack Christian signature features but which can be argued to be of Christian origin on other grounds. I shall consider one case of this type. First I look at two Christian sermons on Old Testament subjects whose Christian features can be redacted away without difficulty.
John Chrysostom, the fourth-century, Greek-speaking, priest of Antioch and Bishop of Constantinople, was one of the most prolific writers of the early church. Among his many works are about one hundred fifty homilies or sermons on Old Testament topics, including two series of nine and sixty-seven, respectively, on Genesis.
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The homily discussed here is from the second series, which may be the first set of sermons he delivered, while still a deacon. Sermon number 64 in the series has a summary of Gen It consists of approximately Greek words.
It is remarkable how much of this long homily consists of straightforward paraphrase and basic exegesis. Chrysostom is also concerned to explain difficult details of the biblical text, and to speculate on the inner states of the characters, especially the motivations and strategies of Joseph.
He aims throughout to show how God guided events inexorably toward the fulfilment of Joseph's dream. There is some hermeneutical material, but it consistently derives its lessons narrowly from the Old Testament stories and does not attempt to Christianize the instruction until the very end, when Joseph's attitude is held up as an example of the New Testament precept to love one's enemies. But this brief passage can be excised without interrupting the flow of thought and, under other circumstances, could easily be argued to be a secondary addition. Likewise, the sermon concludes satisfactorily if the Christian doxology in the last sentence is deleted as a gloss.
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Augustine of Hippo preached an enormous number of sermons in his lifetime and more than five hundred of these survive in written form, most of them transcribed at the time of preaching by stenographers. Sermon number 48 was preached at Carthage, apparently in May of a year late in Augustine's life, perhaps It is brief for one of his sermons about words, which the translator, Edmund Hill, suggests would have taken fifteen to twenty minutes to present. It is a philosophical reflection on the question of why God allows the wicked to prosper, using Micah 6: This is a fascinating, and admittedly very rare, case of an ancient sermon whose attribution to a named and well-known Christian author is not in doubt, yet which does not refer once to a single explicitly Christian doctrine or quote from the New Testament or any other early Christian literature.
It is not a long sermon, but neither is it so very short. In it Augustine speaks from within the world of the prophet and the psalmist and draws from their words only the lessons that he imagines they intended. The closest we come to a sure Christian signature feature is the line "But what is now in hiding, afterwards shall be in evidence.
On the one hand, that Augustine is alluding to the Lucan passage can scarcely be doubted, given the overall context. For example, the futility of hoping that one's sins will be hidden at the final judgment is a theme of the Epistle of Enoch 1 Enoch The apparent allusion could be a coincidence or it could be a scribal assimilation of the passage to the Lucan verse during copying. Neither argument could be dismissed out of hand. Early Christianity and ancient Judaism shared many themes and ideas and often these were expressed independently in similar language.
The parable of the sower in Mark 4: All this being the case, I was tempted to categorize this sermon as an example of a work on the Old Testament by a named Christian author which contained no Christian signature features, but I have kept to the route of prudence and accepted the phrase as an allusion rather than an echo, and therefore as a signature feature. Nevertheless, it should be underlined that if this level of Christianization and no more were present in an unattributed narrative having to do with the Old Testament, it is virtually certain that some scholars would argue that it was a Jewish pseudepigraphon.
Ephrem the Syrian was born in Nisibis in the first decade of the fourth century. Late in life he moved to Edessa, and he is remembered for his time there as a zealous opponent of heresies. He died in while coordinating a relief effort for the poor of the city during a famine. He appears to have written commentaries on most of the books of the Bible, although only those on Genesis and Exodus survive today and only the one on Genesis comments on the entire text.
Ephrem's commentaries generally focus on straightforward exegesis of the text and references to explicitly Christian matters tend to be few and far between. There are whole episodes that lack any Christian signature features. I comment here on three such episodes: Noah's Flood, the story of Joseph, and the early life of Moses the last covering Exodus As with Chrysostom's sermons, Ephrem's commentaries show a strong interest in basic biblical exegesis and the explanation of difficult passages. They being commentaries rather than sermons, they shows no particular hermeneutical interest.
The high density of parallels to Jewish, especially rabbinic, exegesis is striking. It seems likely that Ephrem had access to Jewish targums or midrashic works and he drew on them frequently. In addition, a number of times he alludes to Jewish customs or ideas of which he would have disapproved in the present, but which he presents in a positive light in their biblical context.
In the Joseph story Tamar longs to participate in the blessings of the circumcised Hebrews and is self-conscious of her own origin among the uncircumcised. Likewise, Sephora is condemned for preventing the circumcision of Moses' second son. Christians had access to Jewish exegesis and were capable of drawing on it freely. Allusions to Jewish exegetical traditions are by no means proof of Jewish authorship.
And Christians could make positive references to Jewish institutions and Jewish ethnicity if these were viewed in the context of the Old Testament period. A considerable corpus of epic poetry on biblical themes was produced in Latin in late antiquity. Following Reinhart Herzog, we can divide it into three groups.
The first can be labelled "canonical" and consists of works by Juvencus, Sedulius, Arato, and Avitus. The second consists of "noncanonical" works, those produced by named authors which survive only in a narrow manuscript base. Third are the noncanonical and pseudepigraphic works on various New Testament and Old Testament subjects. It is the third category that is of interest in this paper. The pseudepigraphic Latin epics on Old Testament themes seem mostly to have been written in or around the fifth century.
Herzog believes that, whether or not their authors were known originally, once they had been rejected from the canon they circulated anonymously until they were collected together in the Carolingian era, when they were assigned to well-known pre-Ambrosian prose authors. The Heptateuchos is a five-thousand-line epic about 32, Latin words which paraphrases the Pentateuch, Joshua, and Judges. Apparently the original work also included other Old Testament prose books. Some manuscripts assign the work to a Cyprianus, but nothing more is known about the author and Herzog is probably correct in concluding that this is a pseudepigraphic attribution to Cyprian of Carthage.
It is generally agreed on various grounds that the Heptateuchos was composed during the fifth century, probably in Gaul. It is an extended paraphrase of the Bible in ornate Latin poetry, and references in it to explicitly Christian matters are few and far between. Space does not allow for a complete analysis, so I will limit my comments to the section on Leviticus , which consists of lines about Latin words.
The internal evidence of the Leviticus portion of the Heptateuchos confirms the external evidence and leaves little doubt that it is a Christian work. It is a careful summary of the contents of Leviticus, written with an astonishing sympathy for the material from a Christian author, but it ignores all references to sacrifice, sabbath, festivals, and the eternal nature of the Levitical laws. A Jew might pass over some of these things, but it is hard to imagine one ignoring all of them. Much of what is covered is of potential interest to Christians, a few passages may be doctored to make them more relevant to Christians, and the single use of the word "Jew," in the retelling of story of the blaspheming half-breed Israelite in Leviticus 24, is quite uncomplimentary.
All this granted, the Leviticus poem is an extraordinary and in some ways disquieting example of a Christian composition with an Old Testament theme. It does not include a single Christian signature feature; it presents Jewish law and ritual in a very sympathetic light and offers criticism of them only obliquely, by omission or minor modification. If it had been removed from its context and transmitted independently, one could envisage it being misread as a Jewish pseudepigraphon.
Indeed, one commentator, Jacques Fontaine, was tempted to read the Heptateuchos as a Jewish work.