The Children of Abraham, as
“Peoples of the Book,” are by their nature great storytellers. The stories told
by the adherents of these great religious traditions have come to serve as some
of the most enduring and influential in world history, affecting directly or
indirectly a large portion of the population through art, literature, and
liturgy. This is partly explained by the fact that the stories transmitted by
these tellers are more than simply stories, for believers, they carry the added
weight of divine revelation, that is, narratives inspired, sanctioned, and
even, as some of them have argued, communicated by God. The earliest of these
scripturalists, the Jews, have cherished a vivid account not only of God’s
creation of the universe and humanity, but, more importantly, of God’s ongoing
interest and care for one particularly resilient portion of that human
community—their ancestors, the Israelites—a story that is told in a rich and
variegated anthology of sacred Hebrew texts. The early Christians, formerly
Jews themselves, came to argue that the Judaic notion of God’s providential care
and commitment to humanity was most fully manifest in one Jew in particular—Jesus
of Nazareth—who in addition to being human, embodied God’s own aspect of divine
rationality, which they came to call “the Word” (Greek: logos). This
development, they insisted, was already implicit in the Jewish holy books, which
they appropriated and supplemented with their own set of divinely inspired Greek
documents validating their radical reinterpretation of the Covenant. The
Muslims, or “Submitters,” for their part, took issue with a perceived
degeneration in the previously established divine-human relationship and
presented themselves as restorers and guardians of God’s divine will as
originally revealed to Abraham. They bear witness (as many of them would continue
to argue) not simply to an authentic understanding of God’s will, but to God’s
very words, preserved “in clear Arabic” until the Day of Judgement in their
esteemed prophet’s holy “recitation”—the Qur’ān.
Each
of these communities took great care not only to preserve, but to publish,
their claims to spiritual superiority in the form of officially sanctioned
“holy books.” However, these “canonical” scriptures, as they are called,
represent only a fraction of the stories told, transmitted, and eventually
textualized by the dominant factions within each of these religious
communities. In fact, they are merely the most visible tip of a much larger
literary iceberg, one with a relatively consistent texture but with often
radically unfamiliar contours. This literary debris, as it has often been
pejoratively viewed, has come to be known collectively as apocrypha and pseudepigrapha.
The former term, Greek for “hidden things,” refers to those Jewish and
Christian writings that were excluded from the official scriptural anthologies
at various points in history: first, when after the destruction of the Second
Temple the early Jewish rabbis began to reconstruct their devastated tradition
and to disavow a set of writings from their bible seen as compromised by the
cultural norms of their Greek and Roman oppressors, and then, when the early
Christians began to refine their lists of new authoritative literature.[1] The
latter term, Greek for “falsely attributed writings,” encompasses a similar
body of Jewish and Christian literature that came to be seen as either forged
or derivative. Religious politics frequently lay at the root of these editorial
decisions, since many of these marginalized writings were rejected on the basis
of the mainstream communities’ perception that they contained dangerous or
simply erroneous ideas. This literature, which can perhaps be better qualified
as parabiblical, can be generally characterized as theologically
motivated writings connected to prominent figures from biblical tradition and
often, but not always, expressed in analogous literary genres. Frequently, as
in the case of Enoch, the motive seems to be a desire to fill in the blanks of
the biblical narrative or to re-imagine an aspect of that normative tradition
in a different way. This means that such traditions tend to be quite fluid and are
easily manipulated for polemical or apologetical purposes.
Modern
scholars have been far more forgiving in their (hopefully) non-theological
evaluation of this literature. Increasingly, it has come to be seen as a vast
reservoir of influential ideas or a testament to continued periods of
creativity and imagination among the literate and scribal classes of these religious
communities. For example, many have been enchanted by the notion that the
so-called pseudepigrapha, in particular, constitute the “missing-link” between
the Jewish Bible and the Christian New Testament.[2]
Those who have adopted this view maintain that most of these writings are
pre-Christian and as such ought to be situated in a corresponding social and
chronological context. More recently, however, it has been suggested that even
though much of this literature “appears” to be Jewish, it was in fact produced
(or at least substantially reworked) by later Christian authors and redactors.[3]
After all, most pseudepigraphal texts (with a few exceptions) have been
preserved in later “versions”[4]
found in the many languages of eastern Christian literature, such as Greek,
Coptic, Syriac, Ethiopic, Armenian, and Georgian. Very little, in fact, has
been preserved in Hebrew or Aramaic and can thereby be situated in a
demonstrably Judaic context, although even Aramaic evidence raises the
possibility, however remote, of Christian transmission.
What is
particularly striking, however, is the degree to which this vast reservoir of parabiblical
traditions continued to be used and reused, redacted and revised, often in
parallel with canonical material, from the Second Jewish Commonwealth through
to the late Roman and early Islamic periods. Frequently the use of parabiblical
material occurs at two distinct, though interrelated phases, first, discourse
formation, during which a new (or at least restated) religious claim is being
propagated, and second, discourse revision, during which this new
religious claim is refined or elaborated. For instance, while certain Jewish
sectarian groups made use of parabiblical material in addition to the Torah, as
evidenced at Qumran , the rabbis of Babylon continued to mine
it in support of their oceanic exegetical project culminating in the Talmud.
Similarly, while early Christian movements drew considerable inspiration from
these malleable traditions during the second and third centuries CE, in
particular Gnostics and Manichaeans, later proponents of orthodoxy also made creative
and often surprising use of parabiblical material. Finally, while a certain
amount of parabiblical material appears, in a typically enigmatic way, in the
Qur’ān, later Muslim commentators made (sometimes reluctant) use of “Israelite
tales” (Israiliyyat) in their exegetical and apologetic endeavours.
Although many
are content to point at this trajectory as evidence of mere borrowing or
derivation (read: unoriginality and inferiority), the real story to be read
concerns the ways in which late antique religious groups used this
material. What did they do with it? How did they draw from this well of
tradition and water their own branches?
[1] Much
later, during the Protestant Reformation, some European Protestants also
decided to exclude these works their bibles, while Catholics held on to
them,
[2]
Charlesworth, Old Testament Pseudepigrapha and the New Testament, 11.
[3] See
Davila, The
Provenance of the Pseudepigrapha: Jewish, Christian, or Other?; also Piovanelli,
“Le recyclage des textes apocryphes,” 277-295.
[4] In fact,
the tendency to call these works “versions” is problematic, since it
re-enforces the stereotype that they are derivative of earlier, more
“authentic” models.
