Cod. Karlsruhe 3378 26r (Speculum Humanae Salvationis). See Richard Bernheimer, “The Martyrdom of Isaiah.” The Art Bulletin 34.1 (1952): 30.
I’d like to position my comments on the Ascension of Isaiah around the sole Greek papyrus manuscript of this text, known as Amherst 1. This manuscript has been my own entry point into the Ascension of Isaiah and so affords a chance to refer to some thoughts I’ve had about this text, but I also find that this manuscript is illustrative of some other questions and critical issues in scholarship, and so I hope helpful to think with in this context.
First, a quick word about the manuscript. Papyrus Amherst 1 consists of four fragments of what was a single-quire codex originally made with 6 sheets, or 24 folios (see P.Amh. 1.1. here). P. Amherst I is now held at the Morgan Library in New York and was one of first items published by Grenfell and Hunt, the two papyrologists of the now-famed Oxyrhynchus expeditions. We don’t know where this manuscript was actually found since it was purchased by John Pierpont Morgan in 1912, rather than unearthed. It is dated by Grenfell and Hunt to the 5th- 6th c. The fragments attest about 1/6 of the Ascension of Isaiah (2.4–4.2). This portion of the text features a third-person summary of Isaiah’s vision of the Beloved as well as the ensuing troubling times after the Beloved’s ascension in which faithful disciples are difficult to find and true prophecy is largely abandoned.
1. P. Amh. I.1 and Matthew
Amherst Greek Papyrus 1.1. r (Amh. Gr. Pap. 1.1, Purchased by J. P. Morgan in 1912
In past interest in this text, I focused on the ‘gospel-like’ material found in the AscIs in light of the landscape of early Christian literature up through the second century CE. I find that the Ascension’s material on the ‘Beloved’ is deeply Matthean in terms of narrative and lexical detail. Here I would point to a number of distinctive similarities between these two texts: an angel of the Lord opening the tomb of the Beloved, details about Mary and Josephus only elsewhere found in Matthew, mutual reference to a mass resurrection at the time of the Beloved’s resurrection and ascension (?), similar pronouncements to instruct the gentiles, and a shared prediction that followers will later be scandalized by their leader.
Additionally, Isaiah as a character is, I think, modeled as a Matthean Christ-figure in certain respects: both are positioned as part of a prophetic critique of ruling powers, tempted by some kind of evil entity to renounce something and gain earthly status, and killed with a wooden instrument. The charge of prophesying against Jerusalem is crucial in the trials of Jesus and Isaiah. The title ‘the Beloved’ is also emphasized uniquely in Matthew’s gospel with a citation from the Book of Isaiah (Matt 12:18).
There has been some light debate whether the AscIs is interacting with what we call the ‘Gospel of Matthew’ (Verheyden, 1989) or some less concrete and finished Matthean material (Norelli, 1994). However this relationship is read, I think there is enough shared character and narrative architecture to suggest that the AscIs is a kind of reading of the Matthean stream of gospel tradition and that the Ascension’s Beloved mirrors Matthew’s Jesus in particular (see Campbell, 2020). Might the negative undertones against Jerusalem as a city which kills prophets and the pervasive indebtedness to the book of Isaiah for prophetic undergirding in Matthew provide a fitting tradition for the Ascension of Isaiah to use for its own interest in defending certain prophetic practices through the death of its own hero?
To my knowledge, there is no evidence that the Ascension was collected alongside Matthew, although this isn’t surprising given that texts which became part of the New Testament are rather hermetically sealed from collection with ‘other’ texts. I should add that, at least in the extant Ethiopic tradition, the AscIs was collected alongside the Book of Isaiah and also 4 Ezra and the minor prophets. There is, after all, an emphasis in the Ascension that the Book of Isaiah contains the full visionary record of the Beloved. Towards the end of chapter 4 we read that within Isaiah’s “book” one can find Isaiah’s vision “written in parables”. For instance, one can read about the “descent of the Beloved into Sheol” in the “section” surrounding Isaiah 52:13.
2. P. Amh. I.1 as ‘Gospel Fragment’?
Amherst Greek Papyrus 1.2. r (Amh. Gr. Pap. 1.2, Purchased by J. P. Morgan in 1912; https://www.themorgan.org/manuscript/349918
Panning out from Matthew for a moment but keeping on the idea of gospel, I want to think about P. Amh I.1 as a kind of ‘gospel fragment’ more generally. If we take Amh. 1 as a discreet object temporarily set apart from its larger textual tradition, I think we are more readily invited to explore this text with other, fragmentary gospel-like texts found generally in Egypt and which scholars tend to describe similarly as some variant of ‘Jewish-Christian’.
The Ascension is, for example, affiliated with P. Cairo 10759 (known as the Gospel of Peter); both depict a resurrected Christ standing on the shoulders of two angels (see Foster, 2010). Other fragments, like P. Oxy. 840 (Gospel of the Savior) and P. Egerton 2 (Egerton Gospel), also witness creative redeployments of previously curated gospel tradition (see Kraus, Kruger, and Nicklas, 2009; Zelyck, 2019). The Ascension should, I think, appear more frequently in discussions of this process of writing, even if it stands out from these texts in that its Jesus material is set within a vision occurring in the distant past and summarized as a third-person report. Yet, other texts from the second century mediate Jesus content through some larger literary apparatus. The Epistula Apostolorum frames its non-epistolary content as a letter from the apostles (see Given, 2017). As an aside, it is also interesting that, in the Epistula, Jesus transforms into the appearance of an angel to descend through the layers of the heaven (§ 13). My point here is only to say that I think the Ascension of Isaiah has something to add in the larger panoply of what we call gospel writing.
3. Reading P. Amh. 1
The last comment I have here concerns the readers of Amherst 1 and the Christian resonances of the Ascension’s reception more broadly. I should mention here that Thomas Kraus has a wonderful essay exploring the features of this manuscript more fully: the two identified hands, a series of corrections, some passages flagged in the margins, etc (Kraus, 2016). The manuscript was certainly in use, but who might be reading this papyrus in 5th century Egypt? It seems that by the fourth century, the Ascension had attained to a kind of disruptive popularity. We actually have a description of a fourth-century Egyptian reader of the Ascension, named Hieracas, in Epiphanius (Panarion 67.3.1). He is described as a highly educated Christian who could recite “the Old and New Testaments accurately,” proficient in Greek, Coptic, and literary studies, acquainted with medicine and Egyptian learning, and ‘dabbling’ in astrology and magic, who cited the Ascension to promote a particular view of the Holy Spirit. Of course, this figure is marginal and problematic for Epiphanius. Similarly, Athanasius wants to push the Ascension outside of emerging canonical boundaries, and is forced to name it as marginal, perhaps again speaking to the disruptive popularity of the text among Christian readers.
Going back to the second and third centuries, Justin Martyr (Dial. 120.5) and Origen (Ep. Afr. 9) both depict Jews as those who tampered with a text referring to Isaiah’ death in order to bring it into disrepute among Christians. I find these attempts to protect what might be the Ascension against the idea of dangerous Jewish editorial hands an ironic confession of the enduring memory of the Jewishness of the book as it passed through varying Christian readers. Shifting from here to the later Bavli, Manasseh and Isaiah are remembered more ambiguously in Yebamot. Here Isaiah is judged and sentenced by Manasseh for speaking against ‘Rabbi Moses’ and Manasseh’s line of questioning displays a kind of fidelity to the tradition of Torah rather than demonic allegiance. In the end, Isaiah opts not to answer Manasseh and is swallowed by a hollow tree. But, since his cloak sticks out of the tree and gives away his position, the tree is then cut in half and so with it Isaiah (b.Yebam. 49b–50a; cf. y.Sanh. 10.2, on these texts see Kalmin, 2014). I wonder if Isaiah’s death had been so subsumed within a Christian horizon that the Bavli attempts to shift the tradition back to Moses as uniquely authoritative (see AscIs 3.8–9: “Isaiah himself has said, ‘I see more than Moses the prophet’. But Moses said: ‘No man can see God and live’ [Ex. 33.20]. And Isaiah has said, ‘I have seen god and behold I live’). Might these rabbinic texts be influenced by or conversant with the reverberations of Isaiah’s death in Christian contexts from the second to the fourth century, such as the Testimony of Truth in Codex IV at Nag Hammadi, 4 Baruch 9.19–32, and Tertullian (De patientia 14.1), not to mention Justin and Origen?
An older paradigm of scholarship saw the Ascension as a Christian interpolation of what were originally Jewish sources, whereas now the text is increasingly approached as a unified ‘Christian’ composition (see e.g., Dochorn, 2021). I appreciate this shift, especially the more capacious understanding of the term Christian which it advances, but I also find that the history of readers suggests a more complex relationship between ‘text’ and ‘religion’. The Ascension emerges among Christians of the second through fourth century with an enduring mark of Jewishness, yet is also appropriated as a normative Christian text, marginalized as ‘apocryphal, and seemingly generates later rabbinic qualification. Throughout these centuries the same text is marked as Jewish, Christian, normative, marginal, popular, and apocryphal.
The concluding point I want to draw here is simply to note once again our lingering tension between the origins of pseudepigrapha as perhaps ‘Jewish’ and accounting for their readerly afterlife as ‘Christian’ (see Kraft, 2001). What might a ‘life history’ of the Ascension of Isaiah as text and object reveal about how and why texts are valued, what shifts take place in the process of reading, and how religious affiliation is ascribed to the text? I wonder if something fruitful and similar might be done with 4 Ezra or the Pseudo-Clementines; texts that are both meaningfully Jewish and/or Christian, depending on time, place, and manuscript context. What might we observe from these texts if we approach them not as containers of a religion, but as textual vehicles or literary technologies through which scribes and perhaps even whole communities continue to transmit and otherwise promote their interests by variously ascribing religious affiliation to them?
Warren Campbell is a PhD Candidate in Judaism and Christianity in Antiquity at the University of Notre Dame.
Campbell, Warren. “The Residue of Matthean Polemics in the Ascension of Isaiah.” New Testament Studies 66 (2020): 454–470.
Dochorn, Jan. “The Trial of Isaiah: On Alleged Jewish Backgrounds of the Ascension of Isaiah.” Pages 85–96 in Beyond Canon: Early Christianity and the Ethiopic Textual Tradition. Edited by Meron T. Gebreananaye, Logan Williams, and Francis Watson. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 2021.
Foster, Paul. The Gospel of Peter: Introduction, Critical Edition and Commentary. Texts and Editions for New Testament Study 4. Leiden: Brill, 2010.
Given, J. Gregory. “Four Texts from Nag Hammadi amid the Textual and Generic Fluidity of the ‘Letter’ in the Literature of Late Antique Egypt.” Pages 201–220 in Snapshots of Evolving Traditions: Jewish and Christian Manuscript Culture, Textual Fluidity, and New Philology. Edited by Liv Ingeborg Lied and Hugo Lundhaug. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2017.
Grenfell, B. P. and A. S. Hunt, The Amherst Papyri, Being an Account of the Greek Papyri in the Collection of the Right Hon. Lord Amherst of Hackney, F.S.A. at Didlington Hall, Norfolk: Vol. I, The Ascension of Isaiah and Other Theological Fragments. London: Oxford University Press, 1900. (pp. 4–14)
Kalmin, Richard. “‘Manasseh Sawed Isaiah with a Saw of Wood’: An Ancient Legend in Jewish, Christian, Muslim, and Persian Sources.” Pages 29–52 in Migrating Tales: The Talmud’s Narratives and Their Historical Context. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014.
Kraft, Robert. “Setting the Stage and Framing Some Central Questions.” Journal for the Study of Judaism 32.4 (2001): 371–95; repr. in Exploring the Scripturesque: Jewish Texts and their Christian Contexts, JSJSup 137. Leiden: Brill, 2009. (pp. 35–60).
Kraus, Thomas J. “The P.Amh. I 1 (Ascension of Isaiah) – What a Manuscript Tells about a Text and its World.” Pages 387–402 in The Ascension of Isaiah. Edited by Jan N. Bremmer, Thomas R. Karmann, Tobias Nicklas. Leuven: Peeters, 2016.
Kraus, Thomas J., Michael J. Kruger, and Tobias Nicklas, eds., Gospel Fragments. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.
Norelli, Enrico. “L’AI e il vangelo di Matteo.” Pages 116–42 in L’Ascensione di Isaia: studi su un apocrifo al crocevia dei cristianesimi. Bologna: Dehoniane, 1994.
Verheyden, Joseph. “L’Ascension d’Isaïe et l’Évangile de Matthieu: Examen de AI 3, 13–8.” Pages 247–74 in The New Testament in Early Christianity: La réception des écrits néotestamentaires dans le christianisme primitif. Edited by Jean-Marie Sevrin. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1989.
Zelyck, Lorne. R. The Egerton Gospel (Egerton Papyrus 2 + Papyrus Köln vi 255). Leiden; Boston, MA: Brill, 2019.