An Introduction to the Book
The book that serves as the point of departure for our discussion today is my recently published book, Invisible Manuscripts: Textual Scholarship and the Survival of 2 Baruch (2021), which is available open access via the publisher, Mohr Siebeck.
In Invisible Manuscripts, I explore an omission in scholarship on early Jewish writings in Christian transmission: the general inattention paid to the manuscripts that preserve these writings as cultural artefacts. That is, the lack of attention to the material constitution of the manuscripts that carry them, to manuscript presence in time and place, to the embodiment of the text, as well as the lacking acknowledgement of the relationship between the manuscripts and their historical stewards.
The case that I explore is 2 Baruch. Inspired by New Philology, and following the lead of the scholars in the field of Early Jewish Studies that have walked these roads before me, I explore the manuscripts that ensured 2 Baruch’s survival. Most of them are Syriac manuscripts. Taking these manuscripts as my point of departure, I engage the academic narrative that has shaped the research history. I am interested in the methodological, epistemological and ethical consequences of the missing attention to the manuscripts and in building a new, provenance aware, material philology for future studies.
The chapters that make up my book explore aspects of the manuscripts that have not so far been taken into consideration as “source” in the study of 2 Baruch but which suggest new ways of studying it.
The first three chapters I dedicate to the 6th or 7th century Syriac Codex Ambrosianus, which contains the only surviving, full copy of 2 Baruch. The first chapter explores the function of the book in the material and collection context of this codex. The codex is an Old Testament pandect (full-bible codex) that orders its books chronologically, starting with Genesis and thus creation and ending with Flavius Josephus’s Jewish War, book 6—called 5 Maccabees in the codex—and the destruction of the second temple in Jerusalem. I argue that 2 Baruch is included in this codex as an Old Testament book to provide more information about the destruction of the first temple and that it is part of a historiographical Old Testament codex that ends with violent destruction – before the New Testament takes over.
Chapters two and three trace the circulation history of this codex and the embodied copy of 2 Baruch, as different hands carried it through history. I explore notes from donors, binders, and owners that through their care for the codex ensured 2 Baruch’s survival. I also assess additional notes and marks in margins and intercolumns of the codex, left there by active readers that engaged with the text in this material form. The exploration of the notes take me to the Monastery of the Syrians in the Wadi al-Natrun. In the embodiment of the Codex Ambrosianus, the circulation history of 2 Baruch is monastic, connected in particular to this monastery in the northern part of Egypt.
In chapter four I focus on one historical context of engagement with a passage from 2 Baruch: chapter 72 verse 1 to 73 verse 2. This passage survives as a lection from the Old Testament, scripted to be read on Easter Sunday, in the 13th century lectionary manuscript London, British Library, Add 14,687. Based on the information available in this manuscript, in the colophons and notes of other manuscripts, and in church architecture, art and inscriptions, I reconstruct a hypothetical yet likely setting of reading and interpretation of this passage in a monastic, liturgical context.
In chapter five, I explore the paratextual identifications – in this case titles – of the epistle that is recorded in 2 Bar 78-86 and the epistle that the Peshitta transmit as the First Epistle of Baruch the Scribe. These two epistles share a large part of the textual contents, but they are systematically recorded under different titles in the 53 Syriac (and the 1 Arabic) manuscripts that survive. Titles provide us with an indication as to how Syriac Christians conceived of the epistles. I argue that instead of employing the manuscripts as witnesses to one single Epistle of Baruch, as editors have done, we should respect the information that the titles provide, that is, that Syriac scribes and readers addressed and probably conceived of them as two different works.
Based on the finds of the other chapters, chapter 6 traces the main lines of transmission and transformation of 2 Baruch over time. I note that the only 2 Baruch we have access to depends thoroughly on the Christian manuscripts that mediate it and the cultural practices of the communities that produced and preserved the manuscripts. I conclude that 2 Baruch was probably a diachronically developing text that over time became seamlessly Jewish-Christian, but that 2 Baruch comes down to us in the shape of snapshots of that longer history in Christian manuscripts.
As I point out in the conclusion, my book offers the Syriac reception history of 2 Baruch. It provides a new, critical look at the traditional academic narrative of this writing. And, it offers a critical and constructive engagement with approaches to textual scholarship in the field, paving the way for a provenance aware material philology.
What Can Manuscripts Tell Us about the Texts They Preserve? A Response to Liv Ingeborg Lied’s Invisible Manuscripts
“It is not only useful but, indeed, methodologically imperative to distinguish between 2 Baruch, a Jewish composition of the late first century CE, and its Syriac translation as preserved in the Ambrosianus.”
Other People’s Hands: A Response to Lied’s Invisible Manuscripts
by Eva Mroczek
“This distinctively theological Christian supersessionism is just one iteration of a larger historiographical structure: one that involves claims to be the legitimate ‘heirs’ and best caretakers of a tradition, alongside the grudging and anxious awareness that the survival or access to that past is dependent on ‘someone else.’”
Is That All There Is?: On Limits in the Study of Second Temple Literature
by Elena Dugan
“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?”
Celebrating the Remedy of Neglect: a review of Liv Ingeborg Lied, Invisible Manuscripts: Textual Scholarship and the Survival of 2 Baruch.
But if we wished to correlate other embodiments of this work, whether whole or partial, in Bible manuscripts, lectionaries, and catenae, in order to approximate the richness of Lied’s study of the embodiments of 2 Baruch—even if we were to confine ourselves just to the Syriac versions of Isaiah—we would quickly find ourselves swimming in deep waters, with a veritable tidal wave of varied manuscripts and possible contexts of use piling up and threatening to overwhelm us.
Response to the Respondents
“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.”