Response to the Respondents

I would like to start my response by thanking the chairs of the SBL Pseudepigrapha Section, Kelley Coblentz Bautch and Jacques van Ruiten, and the chair of the session, Matthias Henze, for organizing the review session. I also want to thank my amazing respondents, Eva Mroczek, Elena Dugan, Jeff Childers, Roberta Mazza, and Matthias Henze for their thoughtful and stimulating contributions.

My response will engage some points from each of the respondents. I have chosen to focus on the points that may further ongoing discussions about textual scholarship in our fields.

Matthias Henze is my longtime partner in crime; he is that other guy who has spent large parts of his adult life on 2 Baruch. His 2011 monograph is indispensable for any student of 2 Baruch. Henze is also one of the editors of Textual History of the Bible. Volume 2: The Deutero-Canonical Scriptures (Brill, 2019), which is one of the most helpful recent publications in our field.[1]

Henze’s response illustrates particularly well how an approach that highlights the manuscripts brings out something other than the approach that has traditionally dominated the study of 2 Baruch. In the response he asks: is 2 Baruch really an Old Testament book, have I studied 2 Baruch itself, is 2 Baruch Jewish, how is 2 Baruch part of Second Temple Jewish literature, does my monograph tell us how Syriac Christians though about Baruch and his books, and what is the status of close readings of 2 Baruch in my work?

The answers to these questions will differ systematically, depending on the approach. If our point of departure is the general academic consensus and we explore 2 Baruch as a 1st or 2nd century ce apocryphal, or pseudepigraphal Jewish writing, focusing on the immaterial literary texts and using the manuscripts as witnesses to that early text, we will arrive at other answers  than the ones we reach if we take the surviving manuscript embodiments as our point of departure and understand the current consensus about 2 Baruch as an academic narrative with an unclear relationship to the source materials that survive.

In my response, I focus on two of Henze’s points. The first point I have selected concerns the question as to whether Syriac Christians saw 2 Baruch as an Old Testament book. Henze quotes me saying that 2 Baruch survives in Syriac transmission as an Old Testament book, that all the surviving manuscripts represent it as such, and that this is the only available identification of it in the materials that have come down to us. This is a precise rendering of the findings I present in my book. The 2 Baruch we have access to in Syriac manuscripts is in each and every case represented as an Old Testament book. No other representation survives.

Two aspects deserve further attention. The fact that all the preserved Syriac manuscripts that contain 2 Baruch represent it as an Old Testament book does not of course mean that 2 Baruch must have been an Old Testament book to everyone at all times and places. I have stressed this point repeatedly in my book. I neither claim that 2 Baruch was necessarily “canonical” for Syriac Christians, nor that we have access to a bird’s eye view (which hardly existed as a historical phenomenon), nor that this book was a permanent feature of all Syriac Old Testament codices. What we have access to through the surviving manuscripts are snapshots of preservation and traces of local, networked practices on the ground.

The geographical and institutional co-location of a large part of the surviving manuscripts that preserve 2 Baruch in one monastic settlement in the northern part of Egypt suggests that we are looking at a monastic hub (and its networks) that conceived of 2 Baruch and put it to use as an Old Testament book. I would certainly argue that 2 Baruch was conceived as an Old Testament book in this monastic milieu. When 2 Bar 72:1–73:2 is copied in the Monastery of the Syrians as one of the readings for Easter Sunday in a lectionary manuscript that contains the readings from the Old Testament and the Epistles, I find it hard to argue that 2 Baruch would not be understood as such by those who copied and engaged with that manuscript.

Note that the representation of 2 Baruch in the surviving sources differs systematically from the representation of 2 Baruch in scholarship. This is the methodological and epistemological point that I have aimed to make and that I encourage scholars of 2 Baruch to deal with. My concern is to ensure that the manuscript materials we actually have access to are taken seriously and to find out whether the analytical categories scholars have so far used to understand 2 Baruch are fruitful when we engage with these materials. Even though the categories “apocryphal,” “deuterocanical” and “pseudepigraphal” are all over the research history of this book, they are not inherent to 2 Baruch. They are etic categories that scholars have applied to categorize the book. If they are not helpful when approaching the actual manuscript materials that remain, then I would argue that we should come up with other categories that are—such as “Old Testament book.”

The second point from Henze’s response that I would like to address is the question whether I have studied “2 Baruch itself.” Henze suggests that my analysis of the Codex Ambrosianus says a lot about 2 Baruch in that manuscript, but very little about 2 Baruch itself. He also points out that a study of a manuscript is not the same as a study of 2 Baruch and asks the important question as to what the relationship between the manuscript and the text is.

So, what is “2 Baruch itself”? Is 2 Baruch a literary composition conceived of as a discrete work; is it the assumed early text; is it the text of the copy in the 6th or 7th century ce Syriac Codex Ambrosianus; or is it maybe the entity that the academic narrative of 2 Baruch says that it is?  

The copy of 2 Baruch in the Codex Ambrosianus has a very special place in the research history of this book. Its retrieval instigated 2 Baruch’s research history. It was the only known copy for 50 years and the only copy that provided access to anything close to a full text for 100 years. Even though one more manuscript was published in 1986,[2] the copy in the Codex Ambrosianus remains the only full—and by far the most used—copy of the text to date. This means that if you want to talk about the literary contents of 2 Baruch, its structure and composition, its use of concepts, or the appearance of particular ideas in the literary text—that is, the main features that scholars of 2 Baruch have been interested in—you depend on this 6th or 7th century copy for access.

However, a study of the manuscript as a 6th or 7th century artifact has been out of the question in the historical–critical matrix that has guided studies of 2 Baruch. Scholars have used this instantiation of 2 Baruch to access the early Jewish text and its context, while at the same time systematically overlooking the material embodiment of the copy in the manuscript.

As Hugo Lundhaug has pointed out, when a text is attested in one manuscript only, or when one copy serves as the predominant witness, that manuscript will very easily come to stand in for the early text.[3] Textual criticism was designed to alleviate the challenges of fields much richer in manuscripts and was supposed to help the text critic choose between a variety of readings. It was not designed to meet the opposite situation. For a long time, there was no other manuscript copy of 2 Baruch to remind scholars that the text also may have looked otherwise and that it may have changed over time. Furthermore, the first study of the embodied copy of 2 Baruch in the Codex Ambrosianus only appeared in 2016.[4] Under these circumstances, I find it fair to suggest that the research history of 2 Baruch has indeed used a 6th or 7th century copy as the stand in for the 1st or 2nd century text.

Hence, it is crucial to note that throughout the history of scholarship, the Codex Ambrosianus and 2 Baruch have in effect been profoundly entangled. And yet they have been equally profoundly kept apart in the academic imagination: the academic narrative about 2 Baruch leaves no place for the manuscript because it allegedly concerns a 1st or 2nd century text. Thus, in the academic imagination, I would say that 2 Baruch is this curious combination of a 6th or 7th century copy and what the academic narrative says that it is.

When I study the embodiment of 2 Baruch in the Codex Ambrosianus, I study the 6th or 7th century copy. I study one single snapshot of what I perceive of as a diachronically developing text in the context in which we have access to an instantiation of it. This particular instantiation is what remains for me and for everyone else to explore. It is what those who produced and preserved the manuscript have left us.

To me, the suggestion that this may not be a study of 2 Baruch itself is an indication as to how different approaches provide different answers. Undoubtedly, “2 Baruch” is a scholarly construct. Claiming that a study targets 2 Baruch “itself” or not is therefore an essentializing claim, and I want to avoid it. Having said that, the 6th or 7th century copy is what we have access to, and if anything were to be “2 Baruch itself,” this would be probably be the safest bet.

Henze’s claim—that I don’t engage much with the text of 2 Baruch in my book—is in some ways correct. My book does not provide a close reading of 2 Baruch in its entirety as a literary text. Instead, I offer a close reading of the material text of 2 Baruch. The book offers a study of the embodiment of 2 Baruch in selected manuscripts and the traces of engagement with it, surviving in the artifacts themselves. I let these material forms, contextualizations, and traces of use guide my study.

This does not mean that I would not find a close reading of the literary text as a Syriac text interesting in this context—I certainly would! I am eagerly awaiting the analysis Henze will present in the commentary he is currently preparing. I look forward to hearing about the overlaps between the text of 2 Baruch and other Syriac literature. I am certainly not surprised that he finds these overlaps, but I will certainly appreciate his close analysis of them. I would also be eager to have Henze think with us about the other two contexts he has identified in his work on the commentary, and the methodological challenges he may meet in his work in relation to them. When he establishes the Hebrew Bible as the first context of 2 Baruch, how do we know that the context of the text of 2 Baruch is not already the Syriac Peshitta Old Testament? Moreover, when he establishes Second Temple literature as the second context, how do we gain access to the texts of this period that serve as his comparanda? Are we not confronted with the same challenges that meet the study of 2 Baruch?

This selective reply to Henze’s response is meant to illustrate the differences between the approaches and the consequences of shifting the point of view from the immaterial to the material text. Thinking about these issues allows us to reflect on the relationships between the features that have fed into the imagination of 2 Baruch in the history of research, what it is we have access to as contemporary scholars when we want to study 2 Baruch and how limited manuscript accessibility paired with the matrix of dominant epistemologies and methodologies have shaped what 2 Baruch has come to be in our academic imagination.

It is impossible to work with book-historical perspectives in Early Jewish Studies without engaging with Eva Mroczek’s publications. Eva is particularly well known for her superb and much cited 2016 monograph, The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity.[5]

Mroczek refers to my work as a humanistic work, and I feel genuinely understood. She focuses on the philosophical orientation of my book in her response, highlighting two aspects: “the evidence of human presence” and “other people’s hands and manuscripts.” She holds that these two aspects will aid our further thinking about the orientations of our field.

The discussion of the first aspect points out that my book presents “‘past actions’ of the people who ensured the survival of 2 Baruch.” Mroczek suggests that my book has a friend: Karen B. Stern’s Writing on the Wall: Graffiti and the Forgotten Jews of Antiquity.[6] I find that both fascinating and compelling. A large part of the discussion of my book is indeed about the remaining traces of human practices: active readers helping the next reader; owners branding the artifacts; donors and others having their deeds recorded and thus aiding their dead relatives and future selves on the day of judgment; correctors ensuring the right reading of a piece of text; and binders and scribes requesting prayers from readers in exchange for their efforts in producing and preserving the artefact.

To me, these traces of interaction with the artifact and the texts embodied in it makes the study of texts three dimensional in a new way. Some of the traces attest to the many different roles the manuscript had in the communities that engaged with it.

Others illustrate how deeply intertwined the embodied texts are with the codex that carries them and the larger culture they are part of. Prayer notes are one pertinent example. These notes, which are often formulaic and thus easily recognizable to a reader familiar with the cultural codes, prescribe that the ones who engage with the artifact and read the texts utter a prayer for those who ensured the manuscript’s wellbeing. Acts of reading—for instance the reading of 2 Baruch—and handling of the codex are thus connected to practices that were intended to improve the chances of a good afterlife for the one who cared for the artifact and left the note there.

The study of the traces of human presence also makes it clear that artefact survival depends on the hands that carried it through history. Were it not for them, the chances are that we would not have access to texts such as 2 Baruch.

This latter realization takes me to the second aspect Mroczek brings up in her response: other people’s hands and manuscripts. She notes: “It is both obvious and undertheorized that whatever remains of the past has been carried by others,” and she highlights the ambivalence in our thinking about access to ancient texts: these writings survive both because of, and despite, “someone else.” Mroczek shows how Jews have been seen as that “someone else” in Christian, and, I assume, Islamic theology, and as being the necessary but problematic carriers of scriptures. She also shows how other communities, such as Syriac Christians, have served in a similar role in the matrix of European Protestant and Catholic scholars who were interested in texts such as 2 Baruch. One of the explicit reasons for the 18th, 19th, and 20th century interest in Jewish antiquity was the concern for Christian origins. In the study of 2 Baruch, we still see remnants of the concerns of these European scholars, who applied the manuscripts of Syriac Christians to access early Judaism for the purpose of establishing their own religious genealogy. In this move, both Jews and Syriac Christians are instrumentalized. In the final part of Mroczek’s response, she shows how modern narratives of manuscript finds display the same rhetorical tension; the dependence on, yet threat from, the local “other.”

In light of this highly important response, I would like to have us, as a guild, think more about who we have learned from in the past, who the conversational partners of textual scholars have been, and whose work and what approaches we would benefit from entering into conversation with at the current moment. We have certainly learned a lot from traditional philological practices, but we have also inherited the epistemology, concerns and prejudice of our predecessors from the 18th through to the 20th century. Maybe textual scholars now have more to learn from colleagues who are specialists on material culture and heritage law; scholars who work on issues of archive, forgotten voices or minority positions, and scholars who work on professional ethics and positionality, to mention only some of the exciting options ahead of us.

I was insistent that I wanted to have Elena Dugan onboard for this review panel. She did her PhD on the manuscript history of 1 Enoch (forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press) and she has written several articles about it. I have learned a lot from Dugan’s work, and I am very grateful for her input to the panel.

I would like to acknowledge that in her response, Dugan has pointed out two crucial concerns both of which deserve to be put on the agenda of future research.

The first concern shows the clear need for a broader study of the functions of presumably early Jewish texts in the Christian manuscripts that contain them. For sure, much good work has already been done on this issue, but there is so more waiting to be explored here. We may find that the interpretations that we have traditionally assumed for the texts in their early contexts get accompanied by several new, and sometimes unexpected interpretations.

Dugan suggests a particularly interesting topic that deserves closer scrutiny in such a study: she describes it as “Pseudepigrapha in the service of supersession, and anti-Judaism.” I think I see a monograph, or potentially an anthology waiting to be written here. Dugan brings in a fascinating example from the manuscript history of 1 Enoch. She shows how the 4th century Greek codex that contains the Epistle of Enoch also includes the homily Peri Pascha, attributed to Melito of Sardis. This homily is famous for its explicitly supersessionist rhetoric. Dugan explores how the Epistle of Enoch functions in this codex and how it accompanies Peri Pascha, and hypothesizes how those who came across it in this repackaging could have interpreted it. I would like to know if there are other writings that have served the same purpose in Christian manuscript contexts. We could add 4 Ezra, and most certainly Josephus’s Jewish War, to the list. What else is out there? 

The second concern that this response brings up is the impact of 18th through 20th century attitudes and practices of philology. Dugan asks how racist and colonial attitudes towards, in this case, the Ethiopian other, have impacted the understanding of scribal practices and notions of textual stability. She suggests that these attitudes have created an impression of uncreative and passive scribes, incapable of deliberately changing the texts that they copied. Is this one part of the reason why our academic predecessors have bridged the millennium wide gap between old text and young manuscripts with such ease?

This question suggests a line of investigation that deserves to be explored alongside the research that currently devotes increasing attention to the colonial narratives and infrastructures that enabled the movement of manuscripts from the Middle East and Africa to Europe; and, in addition, to the investigations of the acquisition histories of European and US collections and provenance narratives associated with manuscripts; the entanglement of these processes and narratives with the origin and development of our academic disciplines; and the roles and responsibility of contemporary academics in all of this.

Jeff W. Childers works on Syriac literatures and manuscripts, with a profound interest in the materiality of texts. I highly recommend his monograph Divining Gospel: Oracles of Interpretation in a Syriac Manuscript of John, where he explores the function of hermeneia in a 6th century codex.[7] Childers has a command of the field of Syriac Studies that I can only dream about, so it was with a certain sense of awe that I opened the document that contained his response.

And yes, Childers is calling me out! He disagrees with my interpretation of an erased note on folio 259r of the Codex Ambrosianus—was this a running title or a liturgical annotation? I will not enter into discussion of this issue here. I just want to acknowledge Childers’ hunch: the five pages that contain my discussion of the note are precisely those that I was never really certain that I would keep. On several occasions, I was ready to delete them. When I decided to keep them, it was because I found it acceptable to present this analysis when clearly marking the options that I discuss as hypothetical. I am transparent and show you all my cards—including the less favorable ones. Furthermore, I weighed richness up against risk, and went for richness. I also have a feeling that it will not be long until we will know what the erasure says. The Biblioteca Ambrosiana just has to allow advanced imaging of this page to prove me wrong!

At the end of the response, Childers invites me to think about how the approach of New Philology can be scaled out. This is a very important point and I accept the invitation. As Childers rightfully points out, one of the reasons why it has been possible to write my book in the way that I did, is that there are relatively few surviving embodiments of 2 Baruch. How does New Philology work when we have a lot of manuscripts at hand, and not only one or a few as is the case here?  

Let me start by adding momentum to Childers’ point: I have not even exhausted the available materials in my study. For instance, I have not studied the passages extracted from 2 Baruch in the 15th century manuscript currently preserved in Kerala, and I barely scratch the surface of the surviving Arabic manuscript due to the simple fact that I do not know Arabic. In other words, even in a case where there are few manuscripts, it is impossible to cover everything. This may indeed suggest that New Philology is the best fit for qualitative studies—for close study of smaller quantities of manuscripts.

Having said that, let me try to untie the knot a bit more. First of all, it has never been my aim to present New Philology as the only viable perspective of textual scholarship. It will fit some studies better than others. I don’t aim for it to monopolize the field—just as I do not want any other approach to do so.

My goal has been to add New Philology to the flora of approaches to textual scholarship, and then also to argue that it has some basic tenets that matter to all of us:

a.     that the manuscripts and manuscript contexts matter;

b.     that a text is always an embodied text;

c.     that provenance (i.e., history of ownership) matter too. 

Furthermore, all studies do not have to go into the level of detail that I have done in my work on 2 Baruch. This is but one way of using the approach. It is not even the only way that I have employed it in my own research.

In fact, there are others out there right now who are using New Philology on large materials. For example, in the project Titles of the New Testament, Garrick Allen and his team explore titles and other paratexts in all non-lectionary Greek manuscripts, from this point of departure.[8] Likewise, in the EthiCodex project, Brent Nongbri is currently developing a database where he surveys early Latin and Greek codices, distinguishing which ones were legally acquired by their current owners and which ones were not.[9] We will have lots to learn from these projects as to how New Philology and related perspectives can be employed to large-scale materials.

During more than 15 years that New Philology has aided my thinking, much has changed. When I started working and presenting on it, it was not a particularly well-known perspective in Early Jewish and Christian Studies. Now, it is a household term. There were at least two sessions at the 2021 SBLAAR Annual Meeting explicitly dedicated to it, and there are several scholars out there who are doing important work on early Christian and Jewish texts and manuscripts. The turn to the manuscripts does not only happen under the umbrella of New Philology, though. Textual criticism, for instance, is developing too. There are many ways of getting to the importance of the manuscripts and the materiality of texts in textual scholarship.

Our guild has much to thank famous papyrologist Roberta Mazza for. She has been a major voice in bringing perspectives on ethics and the importance of provenance research into our fields. She is currently working on a monograph on material texts that I am very eager to engage with.

I am very happy that P.Oxy. III 403 caught Mazza’a attention. These papyrus fragments would certainly benefit from more research. They play a relatively minor role in my book and I would be eager to see what a trained papyrologist may get out of a more focused study of them. Indeed, one of my main experiences writing Invisible Manuscripts has been a deepfelt sense of awe and humbleness with regard to the expertise of others. I think this is a side effect (or maybe it is a major outcome) of doing interdisciplinary work.

In her response, Mazza compares my work on 2 Baruch and the work of documentary papyrologists. She suggests that we actually do many similar things: we publish and study manuscripts and fragments in the condition in which they have survived in order to reconstruct a snapshot of a certain place and society at a certain point in history. Mazza is right. The main difference may be that while documentary papyrologists have been doing this for quite a while, scholars of 2 Baruch have not done it before. We obviously have lots to learn about method, epistemology, and ethics from fields that see their academic professionals as experts of material texts. Let us allow ourselves to speculate a little: what would the field of Early Jewish Studies—or the larger field of Biblical Studies, for that matter—look like if we rebooted the entire thing, and started our investigations with the material fragments that actually remain?

Mazza’s response also adds yet another element to the discussion that Childers instigated about New Philology. The study of fragmented remains of manuscripts shows how an approach will always be in need of adjustment when we use it on new and different materials. Both my study and the studies that documentary papyrologists do, start with the material remains. However, in my study of the Syriac manuscripts, I have had access to whole codices, even some medieval bindings, to colophons and notes, to churches that still stand, and to monasteries that are still active. This enables other kinds of study than studies of fragmented materials, such as P.Oxy. III 403. How do we work on highly fragmented manuscripts that reach us with little material context, or sometimes without documented archaeological context or clear provenance? These concerns deserve more attention, and also by scholars of early Jewish texts. The issues have been debated by scholars of the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Cairo Genizah for quite a while, but there is certainly room for more work here. 

Liv Ingeborg Lied, MF Norwegian School of Theology, Religion and Society

[1] Matthias Henze, Jewish Apocalypticism in Late First Century Israel: Reading 2 Baruch in Context, TSAJ 142 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2011); Frank Feder and Matthias Henze, eds., Deuterocanonical Scriptures, vol. 2 of Textual History of the Bible (Leiden: Brill, 2019).

[2] Fred Leemhuis, Albertus F.J. Klijn and Geert J.H. van Gelder, The Arabic Text of 2 Baruch: Edited and Translated with a Parallel Translation of the Syriac Text (Leiden: Brill, 1986).

[3] Hugo Lundhaug, “An Illusion of Textual Stability: Textual Fluidity, New Philology, and the Nag Hammadi Codices,” in Snapshots of Evolving Traditions: Jewish and Christian Manuscript Culture, Textual Fluidity, and New Philology, ed. Liv Ingeborg Lied and Hugo Lundhaug, TUGAL 175 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2017), 20–54.

[4] Liv Ingeborg Lied, “2 Baruch and the Syriac Codex Ambrosianus (7a1): Studying Old Testament Pseudepigrapha in Their Manuscript Context,” JSP 26/2 (2016): 67–107.

[5] Eva Mroczek, The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).

[6] Karen B. Stern, Writing on the Wall: Graffiti and the Forgotten Jews of Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018).

[7] Jeff W. Childers, Divining Gospel: Oracles of Interpretation in a Syriac Manuscript of John, Manuscripta Biblica 4 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020).

[8] https://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/critical/research/researchclusters/biblicalinterpretation/titles-of-the-new-testament/ (accessed 29 November 2021).

[9] https://earlyhistoryofthecodex.com/ (accessed 29 November 2021).