Is That All There Is?: On Limits in the Study of Second Temple Literature

I want to thank Professor Liv Lied for a work that is astonishing in its ability to gather sound building materials from the very smallest of details and create a new way to study 2 Baruch and all the pseudepigrapha.

For a long time, scholars of the pseudepigrapha have been flummoxed by the problem of older works and younger manuscripts, and by the related issue of purportedly “Jewish” works in Christian transmission. Most, and here I include much of my own work, acknowledge the problem and then try and to complete our original task—the pursuit of that very ‘older’ ‘Jewish’ work. What Professor Lied has done, however, is changed course. She acknowledges that we might not be able to answer the questions we first posed because our evidence might not support it. There is great humility modeled in Professor Lied’s work, acknowledging the limitations of our evidence, and even more broadly in acknowledging the limitations of our modern minds (however trained or clever) when greeted with the partial, fragmented, and chaotic material evidence with which we reconstruct the ancient world. It cannot always be ‘mind over matter,’ Professor Lied chastens us. More often we must let the matter guide our minds. This reorientation of the scholarly quest fundamental to New Philological or Material Philological scholarship is undertaken in a clear and profitable manner in this book.

This intervention has the potential to reshape scholarship not only on 2 Baruch, but on all of the pseudepigrapha that belong to that category of ‘older-Jewish-works in younger-Christian-manuscripts.” New directions in research can be charted out for 1 Enoch (the apple of my eye),[1] Jubilees (as has been explored by Matthew Monger, among others),[2] 4 Ezra, the Apocalypse of Abraham, and more. Granular explorations of lines, words, and themes of these works in hypothetical and undocumented Jewish and/or early contexts may prove to have exceeded the boundaries of what is truly knowable and recoverable. It may be the task of scholars now to revisit previous scholarship and think carefully about where, and whether, we might have crossed the line from grounded historical hypothesis into less-grounded speculation. I suspect it will be rather earlier than previously thought. In what follows, I will outline some of the boundary lines shifted by Lied’s groundbreaking work.

2 Baruch and the Missing Mourning for the Temple

It is not only scholars of 2 Baruch proper that should be worried about the reevaluation of 2 Baruch. Instead, it is important to think carefully about where these works as early Jewish works have been harnessed in dragging certain historical models, as these are the sites ripe for reevaluation. One way that 2 Baruch has been a load-bearing work in scholarship is as one of the very few remaining Jewish works datable to the first two-centuries CE that clearly mentions, and mourns, the destruction of the Temple.[3] The references to the destruction of the Second Temple in the New Testament are enigmatic enough that scholars have dated most works belonging to the canonical collection both before and after 70 CE.[4] We find similarly a conspicuous absence of reflection upon the destruction of the Temple in the earliest strata of rabbinic literature.[5] It remains for 4 Ezra, 2 Baruch, and the Apocalypse of Abraham to illustrate the reality that must have been true: that the destruction of the Second Temple was greeted with mourning, fury, and theological despair by Jews in the first-century…right?

What if, as is suggested by Lied, 2 Baruch is not so easily traced to the earliest centuries CE, on account of its far later and Christian manuscripts? And, if we extend the problematic further, perhaps the Apocalypse of Abraham—found only in Old Slavonic manuscripts of the fourteenth century and later—is suspect as well. 4 Ezra, having more evidence of early readers (like Clement of Alexandria’s citation in his Stromateis), may have the strongest claim to positive evidence of early circulation.[6] But even so, the circulation of a version of the text may not be the same as the versions we have now. After all, as Lied so aptly puts it with reference to 2 Baruch, “What the epistle(s) developed into is indeed the only available source for what the epistle(s) might once have been.”[7] So even with some possible early readers of 4 Ezra, are we sure that our Christian manuscripts preserve a text so stable we can draw a line across centuries, regions, and languages to an earlier hypothetical version? And with no early readers of 2 Baruch, what can we know that is datable to those earliest centuries CE?

Let us sink further into this possibility—what if our only sources for Jews mourning at the Destruction of the Second Temple are Christian, and late? As Lied flags throughout with reference to 2 Baruch, we might want to be attentive to the particular function this focus might serve Christian communities. We are introduced to a new question—rather than asking why Jews might have mourned the events of 70 CE, we now ask: why might it suit late ancient and medieval Christians to have Jews mourning the fall of the Temple? This is a very different question.

Anti-Judaism and the Transmission of the Pseudepigrapha

Lied highlights some of the supersessionist and anti-Jewish functions that 2 Baruch serves in its current location in the Codex Ambrosianus, as the perceivably violent end to the Old Covenant, and harbringer of the New. She thereby opens particularly important avenue of research into pseudepigraphal manuscripts, that deserves greater attention across the field.

When Christian manuscripts contain a text attributed to a figure of pre-Jesus antiquity—Abraham, Baruch, Enoch, Solomon, or whoever—we should not simply think of this manuscript as a box in which an earlier tradition is stored, but a repackaging for a purpose. We should think carefully about what, if anything, the attestation might be saying about Jews or Judaism. Sometimes the answer may be not much, as we’ve all come across codices whose anthological principles are an enigma. But sometimes the answer may be something unusual, or even insidious and concerning.

Let me provide an example, from my own research into the manuscript history of 1 Enoch. One section of 1 Enoch, known as the body of the Epistle, is not found at Qumran. It first appears in a Greek papyrus codex, datable to around the fourth-century CE, and is currently split between the holdings of the Chester-Beatty library and the University of Michigan.[8] Not always mentioned in studies of the text is that this codex also includes a supersessionist, anti-Jewish homily purportedly written by Melito of Sardis. The homily is infamous for its explicit supersessionism, deriding the events of the Passover as now devoid of spiritual significance now that they have reached culmination in the crucifixion of Jesus as Christ, as well as its charge of Jewish culpability for the death of Jesus as Christ, and therefore the death of God.[9] But, for our purposes, it is important to note the ways that Melito emphasizes how the generations after Adam showed a marked decline, just like Enoch.

According to Peri Pascha, after Adam’s mistakes in the Garden of Eden, humanity found itself overtaken by a litany of corrupting sins. The specific sins find counterparts in the Epistle of Enoch—fathers killing their sons can be found in 1 En 100.1, mothers forsaking their children (99.5), and some sort of gender confusion and sexual transgression (1 En 98.2). The terrible outcome of these sins, of bodies subsequently being subject to the hegemony of death, and shut up in Hades, is explicitly explored in both the Christian homily and the Epistle. These correspondences are not word-for-word, nor are they especially startling—it is not so unusual for a work to muse on the nature of sin and death, as everyone here knows—but they have a layer that has been, so far as I am aware, unexplored.

I think it critical that the Christian homily is taking aim at the generations after Adam—but so, according to the imagined landscape of Enochic literature, is the Epistle. The Greek Epistle of Enoch is ostensibly set during Enoch’s lifetime, as is literature attributed to Enoch more generally. Should there be any confusion about the narrative timing here, the fourth-century Greek manuscript in question helpfully progresses right into the Book of Noah, where Enoch’s advice (he is, now, a great-grandfather) is sought on the peculiar and world-reversing nature of his strange great-grand-child Noah. So, the Epistle of Enoch, read alongside its Christian homiletical companion, is not just a voice joining the chorus condemning sinners in the world, but an on-the-ground witness to the descent into sin that Melito’s Peri Pascha seeks to spot in Israelite history. It is valued less as a timeless witness to certain ethical truths, and more as a time-and-spaced marker of a time when Israelites saw these deficiencies in their own tradition.[10]

An abiding concern of this Christian homily is the failures of Israel to spot the workings of God in their lives (not least of which is displayed in their failure to recognize Jesus as their Messiah.) Enoch, in this context, may be the shining exception, an Israelite (or, perhaps, though it depends how we parse Enoch as a pre-Mosaic patriarch from the perspective of the Christian assembling the codex in the fourth-century CE, a Jew) who saw his people descending into sin, and cried out against it. The Epistle of Enoch may thereby be a valuable member of this codex precisely because it is chronologically pre-Christian, describing a moment of Israelite history in a manner consonant with a Christian’s understanding of the same.[11] It might be subject to a kind of typological reading as a witness to the times of contemporary issues, but its tightest correspondences within its codicological context are with a passage that decries this very particular post-Adamic, pre-Noachic moment in Israelite history.

It is not inherently anti-Jewish for prophets to be critical of the practices, excesses, or mistakes of their time. The Epistle of Enoch is not an inherently anti-Jewish text. This probably goes without saying. But in the earliest context in which it is documented, it seems to be presencing an anti-Jewish agenda. Should we factor that in when we think about ‘extracting’ the text, and retroverting it to a Jewish context? As Lied notes with reference to 2 Baruch, “the witness that scholars have employed to gain access to the text may in fact have been used to meet the opposite demand by those who produced and engaged with that “witness.”[12] I have just echoed such a concern with a parallel instantiation from the history of the transmission of 1 Enoch. I submit that these examples could and should be joined with a myriad of others, waiting to be uncovered in the ‘reception history’ manuscript-study that Lied urges us to embark upon. For Lied demands we not only ask whether Jewish texts are found in Christian transmission, but why Christians cared for these texts, and how that care might have changed the text itself.

What We Can Know: Colonial-Era Intellectual History

Finally, directly within the province of things that we can know, and should further explore, is a particularly knowable but often-ignored chapter of reception history—that belonging to the modern world, and the earliest scholarship which set the groundwork for what we practice today. Lied mentions the early-modern “distrust of medieval guardians,”[13] and the untrustworthy reports of visitors to manuscript repositories such as the Monastery of the Syrians.[14] I want to highlight the extent to which this early-modern distrust is not only ethically deplorable, but philologically significant, in setting the patterns of study for the text for hundreds of years to come.

It is important to remember that most 19th-century scholars of 2 Baruch would go their lives without seeing Egypt, or a Syriac monastery, or even a functioning manuscript culture, first-hand. Scholars would rely on travelers to provide illustrations of the living culture producing the artifacts to which they had devoted their attention. Accordingly, it can be instructive to consult such accounts to recover the ways that scribal practice—little mentioned but always assumed in academic treatises—would have been imagined. I will supply some accounts drawn from my own work on the early-modern study of Enoch, in accounts of travellers coming to Ethiopia. We should be cautious about overwriting narratives concerning Ethiopia—valenced by their own particular evils of anti-blackness and anti-Semitism—onto those concerning Syriac monasteries. But I hope they will suffice to convince the listener that this ‘distrust’ had historical and philological consequences to look out for today.

First—preservation was not credited by colonizers to colonized peoples in a vacuum, but  was imbricated in a network of vile racial and cultural constructions. Robert Curzon, mentioned in Lied’s book, was an English aristocrat and traveller, most renowned for his mid-19th-century travels of monasteries (and subsequent acquisition of various manuscripts held therein). In his account of an “Abyssinian” monastery, his apparent admiration for the Abyssinian scribal tradition sits uncomfortably beside his low opinion of Abyssinians. In his memoir of a time visiting an Abyssinian monastery, he remarks:

There were perhaps nearly fifty volumes, and as the entire literature of Abyssinia does not include more than double that number of works, I could easily imagine that what I saw around me formed a very considerable accumulation of manuscripts, considering the barbarous state of the country from which they came.[15]

He goes on to marvel over the “immense labor” that goes into the production of an Abyssinian manuscript, “worthy of being compared with the best specimens of calligraphy in any language.”

But such an appreciative attitude towards their cultural productions is seen as being completely consonant with a lament over their backwards practices and culture—for he remarks:

 …although they looked exceedingly slippery and greasy, they seemed to be an austere and dismal set of fanatics…poor fellows! they meant well, and knew no better; and what more can be said for the endeavours of the best of men?[16]

The apparent care and even beauty of the Ethiopian manuscript tradition, for Curzon, is set alongside an often-cheerful condescension, as a palatable exception to their elsewise inscrutable practices.

It is crucial to note the absolute preclusion of creativity in this portrait, as the attention of the scribe (as Curzon portrays it) is focused irrevocably on the act of replication and copying.

They have no cursive writing; each letter is therefore painted, as it were, with the reed pen, and as the scribe finishes each he usually makes a horrible face and gives a triumphant flourish with his pen. Thus he goes on letter by letter, and before he gets to the end of the first line he is probably in a perspiration from his nervous apprehension of the importance of his undertaking. One page is a good day's work, and when he has done it he generally, if he is not too stiff, follows the custom of all little Arab boys, and swings his head or his body from side to side, keeping time to a sort of nasal recitative.[17]

He addresses the idea of creativity obliquely in an aside on drawings and illuminations, lamenting that, “Some of these manuscripts are adorned with the quaintest and grimmest illuminations conceivable…the arts of drawing and painting are thus ruthlessly mangled on the pages of their books.” Clearly, for Curzon, the scribes are best suited to the act of copying, and copying alone.

Here, we see the dangerous other side of the scholarly assumption that the Ethiopic scribal tradition so neatly ‘preserved’ Enoch. Scribal practices that preserved texts that are so exciting to scholars are met with an Englishman’s disdain. It is ultimately alarming to note that the assumption of scribal passivity was so easily coupled with the racialized assumption that passive transmission was all Abyssinian scribes were capable of (and only with great effort). Preservation was necessarily twinned with scribal incapability, at least in this context.

It is also worthy of noting how the preservation of apocrypha and other non-scriptural works has its own explanatory path, one that (unsurprisingly) denigrates the communities in question as uncreative, but also misguided.

George Schodde, an American Enoch scholar of the 19th century, has a rather violent way of bringing together a derogatory opinion of Ethiopian scribes and the preservation of works such as Enoch, reliant upon the language of petrifaction and death. Schodde believed “the Ethiopic Church of today is, as it has been for centuries, the petrifaction of the Greek Church,”[18] “the petrification of teaching and life in the Church,”[19] or the “petrification of the Greek Christian civilizations of the fifth and sixth centuries.”[20] He does not use the language of petrifaction lightly, as he elsewhere bloodily glosses the emergence of the Abyssinian church that happened when “the Abyssinian Church severed its connection with the Church of the Roman Empire and became a hermit body,” contrasting its “dead orthodoxy” with a “living Christianity.”[21] When it comes to the literature in their libraries, Schodde plays the coroner again, and declaims “the Abyssinians can make but little use of this literature themselves. For them it is practically a dead letter.”[22] The rich literatures of Ethiopia, among which he counts (and feminizes![23]) Enoch as “the queen of uninspired apocalyptic literature,”[24] are nothing but fossils, remnants of “the time when the country enjoyed a vigorous Christian life” (albeit consisting mostly of translations from elsewhere, as he concedes in the very next sentence).[25] Schodde hatefully characterizes Ethiopia as petrified, sleeping, and even dead. For Schodde, it is lucky that Ethiopians preserved Enoch—it is impossible that they wrote it, or anything like it.

An insistence upon the incapability of the communities keeping the manuscripts implies the impossibility of textual change. Said differently, textual stability across the centuries (whose unspoken assumption so vexes Lied throughout her monograph) is safeguarded, at least in part, by a particularly low estimation of the literary and intellectual capabilities of the guardians. We would certainly reject this today, and yet the tacit assumption of textual stability that we often hold was born from it.

So, these are three ways in which Lied’s book has fundamentally reoriented my view of antiquity and Second Temple literature in particular. I am no longer so sure that we have any stable cases of late-Second Temple voices mourning the loss of the Temple. I am galvanized to check and see just how much of the material reception-history of the pseudepigrapha is in service of Christian supersession, and anti-Judaism, and suspicious that it may be more than we might have imagined. And I am worried about the extent to which the textual stability on which scholars of the ancient world tacitly rely to build our archive is built on particularly vile early-modern attitudes towards our manuscripts’ careful and tireless guardians. In short, I am rethinking much thanks to Lied’s groundbreaking work, and it remains only for me to thank her greatly for it.

[1] Elena Dugan, “On Making Manuscripts, Genre, and the Boundaries of Ancient Jewish Literature,” Metatron 1, no. 1 (2021); Elena Dugan, “Enochic Biography and the Manuscript History of 1 Enoch: The Codex Panopolitanus Book of the Watchers,” Journal of Biblical Literature 140, no. 1 (2021): 113–38.

[2] Matthew P. Monger, “The Development of Jubilees 1 in the Late Second Temple Period,” Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 27, no. 2 (2017): 83–112; Matthew P. Monger, “4Q216 and the State of Jubilees at Qumran,” Revue de Qumran, no. 4 (104) (2014): 595–612; Matthew P. Monger, “The Many Forms of Jubilees: A Reassessment of the Manuscript Evidence from Qumran and the Lines of Transmission of the Parts and Whole of Jubilees,” Revue de Qumran 30, no. 2 (2018): 191–211.

[3] I am grateful to Martha Himmelfarb for discussing this topic with me at length, and for opening this avenue of thought with her work, especially Martha Himmelfarb, “3 Baruch Revisited: Jewish or Christian Composition, and Why It Matters,” Zeitschrift für antikes Christentum/Journal of Ancient Christianity 20, no. 1 (2016): 41–62.

[4] For example, the controversial but much-engaged work of John A.T. Robinson which redates the entirety of the New Testament to pre-70 CE, on the grounds that this event is never explicitly mentioned (or at least, not mentioned as explicitly as he would like). See John A. T. Robinson, Redating the New Testament (London: S.C.M. Press, 1976). Specific examples can be sought in the history of scholarship on individual books, e.g. Adela Yarbro Collins notes the controversy over the dating of Mark has to do with “whether the Gospel was written before or after the destruction of the temple,” in Adela Yarbro Collins, Mark : A Commentary, Hermeneia. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 11.

[5] For a famous exchange on the extent to which rabbinic literature can be extracted from its later manuscript tradition, see Peter Schäfer, “Research into Rabbinic Literature: An Attempt to Define the Status Quaestionis,” Journal of Jewish Studies 37, no. 2 (1986): 139–52; Peter Schäfer and Chaim Milikowsky, “Current Views on the Editing of the Rabbinic Texts of Late Antiquity: Reflections on a Debate after Twenty Years,” in Rabbinic Texts and the History of Late-Roman Palestine, ed. Martin Goodman and Philip Alexander (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 79–88.

[6] Of course, the Stromateis itself has a far younger manuscript tradition than the work as it is traditionally dated—manuscripts beginning in the eleventh or twelfth century for a purportedly second-century work! Perhaps the ‘early’ citation is not so determinately early at all, thinking further along with Lied.

[7] Liv Ingeborg Lied, Invisible Manuscripts: Textual Scholarship and the Survival of 2 Baruch, Studien Und Texte Zu Antike Und Christentum 128 (Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2021), 217.

[8] For the initial publication of the manuscript (TM 61462 / LDAB 2608), see Campbell Bonner, The Last Chapters of Enoch in Greek (London: Christophers, 1937); Frederic G Kenyon, Fasciculus 8: Enoch and Melito, The Chester Beatty Biblical Papyri Descriptions and Texts of Twelve Manuscripts On Papyrus of the Greek Bible (London: Walker, 1941). The manuscripts themselves can be accessed at: https://viewer.cbl.ie/viewer/image/BP_XII_f_8/1/, and https://quod.lib.umich.edu/a/apis/x-3967/5552_19v.tif.

[9] For a recent treatment, see Lynn H. Cohick, The Peri Pascha Attributed to Melito of Sardis: Setting, Purpose, Sources (Providence: Brown Judaic Studies, 2000), 52–87, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvzgb90c.

[10] Note that Cohick, on the Peri Pascha, suggests, “in our homily, the probability that the author was only speaking about Jews from biblical times should caution against drawing general conclusions about the possible impact the second or third century Jewish community might have had on our author.” In Cohick, 87. While I might not let ‘the author’ off the hook for his contemporary opinions so easily, I think it fair to note that the framing of the homily is restricted to ‘biblical’-era Jews.

[11] Here I follow Lied’s work tracing 2 Baruch as a pseudepigraphic work meaningful as it is tied not only to a particular historical person, but a historical time—perhaps it might be worthwhile to think of this work as fulfilling a literary function that moves beyond pseudepigraphy, to something like pseudechronography.

[12] Lied, Invisible Manuscripts: Textual Scholarship and the Survival of 2 Baruch, 268.

[13] Lied, 4.

[14] Lied, 100.

[15] Robert Curzon, A Visit to Monasteries in the Levant (New York: George P. Putnam & Co., 1852), 84–85.

[16] Curzon, Visit, 83–84.

[17] Curzon, Visit, 87–88.

[18] George Henry Schodde, “The Church of Ethiopia,” Presbyterian Review VIII (1887): 20.

[19] George Henry Schodde, “The Church of Abyssinia,” The Independent, February 6, 1896, 185.

[20] Schodde, “Hermit Christian Nation of Africa,” 252.

[21] Schodde, "Hermit Christian Nation of Africa," 252. Note also that he connects this with “the most brutal of Oriental despotism, such as is characteristic of the untamed Semitic heart and is yet seen in the treacherous Arab Bedouin, is found allied closely with a fervency of prayer, fasts and religious observances that would be psychologically considered enigmatical were it not known that centuries of isolation and stagnation in mind and spirit changed into dead forms what had originally been living principles.”

[22] George Henry Schodde, “The Abyssinians and Their Church,” Lutheran Quarterly XXI (1891): 178.

[23] On the fear of corruption of texts gendered as feminine, see Yii-Jan Lin, “Who Is the Text? The Gendered and Racialized New Testament,” in The Oxford Handbook of New Testament, Gender, and Sexuality, ed. Benjamin Dunning (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 137–53.

[24] Schodde, “The Church of Ethiopia,” 28.

[25] George Henry Schodde, “Specimens of Ethiopic Literature,” Bibliotheca Sacra 39 (1882): 75.