Matthias Henze and Liv Ingeborg Lied, eds. The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: Fifty Years of the Pseudepigrapha Section at the SBL, EJL 50 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2019). Pp. 468. $54.00. ISBN : 978-1628372588.
This fine volume commemorates the fiftieth anniversary (2019) of the SBL ’s Pseudepigrapha Section. This is an important anniversary well worth celebrating, because in a sense the history of the Pseudepigrapha Section mirrors the history of the field of biblical studies itself. The section was born at a time when the canonical categories of “Old Testament” and “New Testament” as well as the historical-critical method reigned supreme; it reaches middle age as those canonical categories are breaking down (although they have not yet entirely disappeared) and new methods of interpretation beyond historical criticism are becoming more and more prominent. The work of the scholars who have been involved in the Pseudepigrapha Section over the past fifty years has been seminal to these paradigm shifts.
The editors have divided the twenty-one essays into four sections: “Remembering Fifty Years of the Pseudepigrapha at the SBL ,” “The History of the Study of the Pseudepigrapha,” “Topics in the Study of the Pseudepigrapha,” and “The Future of the Study of the Pseudepigrapha.” The first set of essays, the remembrances, are all written by founding members of the section: Robert A. Kraft, Michael E. Stone, James H. Charlesworth (the first secretary), and George W. E. Nickelsburg. They in turn recall other founding members who are no longer with us: Walter Harrelson, Robert Funk, George MacRae, Harry Orlinsky, and John Strugnell, among others. The section was the brainchild of Walter Harrelson, then Dean of Vanderbilt Divinity School, who convened a breakfast of interested scholars at the SBL meeting in Toronto in 1969. The first papers of the newly authorized group were offered at the 1971 SBL meeting, including the first paper by a woman, Ann-Elizabeth Purintun, on the Paraleipomena Ieremiou (with Robert Kraft). The first woman on the steering committee was Martha Himmelfarb. The fruits of these early years were seen in the Texts and Translations: Pseudepigrapha Series (Scholars Press) that began in 1972, the series Septuagint and Cognate Studies, also begun in 1972, and the two volume The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, edited by James H. Charlesworth, which appeared in 1983 and 1985.
It is worth noting that the appropriateness of the term “pseudepigrapha,” inherited from earlier scholars such as R. H. Charles and M. R. James, was debated from the beginning (p. 4). That debate still resounds in the pages of this volume, since it is linked to the framework of the canonical Bible. The use of the term has also been debated in special session of the section in 2006, 2008, and 2018, with more and more dissatisfaction concerning the term being expressed. This and related issues are taken up in the second section of essays, featuring articles by Patricia Ahearne-Kroll, Benjamin G. Wright III , Eibert Tigchelaar, and Hanna Tervanotko. Ahearne-Kroll observes that the list of texts has grown so large that the classification is “losing its clarity” (p. 119). The deconstruction of the old categories of biblical texts, apocrypha, and pseudepigrapha, in which the former two are canonical in various traditions while the latter is not, or the broader term “intertestamental,” likewise tied to the Christian canon, means that these and other terms need to be retired, or at least redefined (essays by Ahearne-Kroll and Wright).
The third section, “Topics in the Study of the Pseudepigrapha,” contains substantive articles by Liv Ingeborg Lied and Loren Stuckenbruck, Lorenzo DiTommaso, Martha Himmelfarb, William Adler, John Collins, and Hindy Najman and Irene Peirano Garrison. In the interest of space I will discuss only one.
Lorenzo DiTommaso’s piece “Manuscript Research in the Digital Age” contains a wealth of information about the digital revolution and how it has affected the study of ancient and medieval manuscripts. Prior to digitization, scholars were limited in what they could catalogue and study by geography and library accessibility. For example, DiTommaso points out that M. R. James, based in Great Britain, was able to access collections in Oxford, London, Cheltenham (the Phillips Collection), Paris, and Trier (p. 235). Today, however, scholars can access the catalogues of collections all over the world from their laptops, opening up new sources of data. DiTommaso particularly notes two: the National Library of the Czech Republic and the Biblioteca Digital del Patrimonio Iberoamericano, the catalogue of a consortium of fourteen national libraries in Iberia and Latin America (p. 243 n. 41).
In spite of all the new wealth of digital resources available for scholarly exploitation, DiTommaso closes with a statement with which this researcher raised in the analog age heartily agrees: “there is something also to be said about physically working with manuscripts—holding a codex in one’s hands, thumbing through its pages, discovering its contents, inspecting its bindings, discovering its secrets” (p. 258).
The final section, looking to the future, features articles by James R. Davila, Randall D. Chesnutt, John R. Levison, Judith H. Newman, and John C. Reeves. Newman’s article, “Fifty More Years of the Society of Biblical Literature Pseudepigrapha Section? Prospects for the Future,” predicts that four approaches to the texts will continue to be prominent in the next few years: traditional philology, reception history, new philology, and embodied cognition (pp. 409-12). She also discusses the possibility of a name change for the section, noting wisely that the future of the Pseudepigrapha section is not separate from the changing character of the SBL (p. 407).
Her assertion, it seems to me, points up the fact that the institutions of our field remain more traditional than the actual scholarship taking place in it. The SBL ’s mechanisms for such things as nominations, the makeup of editorial boards, and even the selection of the President of the Society are still very much tied to the canonical categories of Hebrew Bible/Old Testament and New Testament, and to seeking a balance between them. However, when one considers the texts that have been the focus of the Pseudepigrapha section for the last fifty years, it is quickly evident that those are anachronistic categories that do not reflect the wealth of literary and theological writings in the Jewish and early Christian communities of the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman periods, nor the way in which twenty-first century scholars think about them. The essays in this excellent volume make that very clear, and constitute a call to action to our scholarly society to better reflect our own scholarship and understanding of our field.