biblical literature
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- Introduction
- Influence and significance
- Old Testament canon, texts, and versions
- The canon
- Texts and versions
- Textual criticism: manuscript problems
- Textual criticism: scholarly problems
- Texts and manuscripts
- Early versions
- Versions after the 4th century
- Later and modern versions: English
- English translations after the Reformation
- The King James and subsequent versions
- Later and modern versions: Dutch, French, and German
- Greek, Hungarian, Italian, and Portuguese translations
- Scandinavian, Slavic, Spanish, and Swiss translations
- Non-European versions
- Old Testament history
- Old Testament literature
- The Torah (Law, Pentateuch, or Five Books of Moses)
- The Neviʾim (Prophets)
- The canon of the Prophets
- Hebrew prophecy
- Joshua
- Judges: background and purpose
- Judges: importance and role
- Samuel: Israel under Samuel and Saul
- Samuel: the rise and significance of David
- Kings: background and Solomon’s reign
- Kings: Solomon’s successors
- Kings: the second book
- Isaiah
- Jeremiah
- Ezekiel
- The first six minor prophets
- The last six minor prophets
- The Ketuvim
- Intertestamental literature
- Nature and significance
- Apocryphal writings
- The Pseudepigraphal writings
- Qumrān literature (Dead Sea Scrolls)
- New Testament canon, texts, and versions
- New Testament history
- New Testament literature
- Introduction to the Gospels
- The Synoptic problem
- The Synoptic Gospels
- The fourth Gospel: The Gospel According to John
- The Acts of the Apostles
- The Pauline Letters
- Background and overview
- The Letter of Paul to the Romans
- The First Letter of Paul to the Corinthians
- The Second Letter of Paul to the Corinthians
- The Letter of Paul to the Galatians
- The Letter of Paul to the Ephesians
- The Letter of Paul to the Philippians
- The Letter of Paul to the Colossians
- The First Letter of Paul to the Thessalonians
- The Second Letter of Paul to the Thessalonians
- The Pastoral Letters: I and II Timothy and Titus
- The Letter to the Hebrews
- The Catholic Letters
- The Revelation to John
- New Testament Apocrypha
- Biblical literature in liturgy
- The critical study of biblical literature: exegesis and hermeneutics
Intertestamental literature
Nature and significance
Definitions
A vast amount of Jewish literature written in the intertestamental period (mainly 2nd and 1st centuries bce) and from the 1st and 2nd centuries ce was preserved, for the most part, through various Christian churches. A part of this literature is today commonly called the Apocrypha (Hidden; hence, secret books; singular apocryphon). At one time in the early church this was one of the terms for books not regarded by the church as canonical (scripturally acceptable), but in modern usage the Apocrypha is the term for those Jewish books that are called in the Roman Catholic Church deuterocanonical works—i.e., those that are canonical for Catholics but are not a part of the Jewish Bible. (These works are also regarded as canonical in the Eastern Orthodox churches.) When the Protestant churches returned to the Jewish canon (Hebrew Old Testament) during the Reformation period (16th century), the Catholic deuterocanonical works became for the Protestants “apocryphal”—i.e., non-canonical.
In 19th-century biblical scholarship a new term was coined for those ancient Jewish works that were not accepted as canonical by either the Catholic or Protestant churches; such books are now commonly called Pseudepigrapha (Falsely Inscribed; singular pseudepigraphon), i.e., books wrongly ascribed to a biblical author. The term Pseudepigrapha, however, is not an especially well suited one, not only because the pseudepigraphic character is not restricted to the Pseudepigrapha alone—and, indeed, not even all Pseudepigrapha are ascribed to any author, since there are among them anonymous treatises—but also because the group of writings so designated by this name necessarily varies in the different modern collections. Theoretically, the name Pseudepigrapha can designate all ancient Jewish writings that are not canonical in the Catholic Church. The writings of the philosopher Philo of Alexandria (1st century bce–1st century ce) and the historian Josephus (1st century ce) and fragments of other postbiblical Hellenistic Jewish historians and poets, however, usually are excluded. Rabbinic literature (2nd century bce–2nd century ce) also is generally excluded; such literature existed for centuries only in oral form. The edition of the Pseudepigrapha edited by the British biblical scholar R.H. Charles in 1913, however, contains a translation of Pirqe Avot (“Sayings of the Fathers”), an ethical tractate from the Mishna (a collection of oral laws), and even the non-Jewish Story of Aḥiḳar (a folklore hero), though other genuine Jewish writings from antiquity are omitted. Some of the Jewish Pseudepigrapha were discovered only in the last two centuries, and the Dead Sea Scrolls (the first of them discovered in the 1940s), most of which belong to this category, are not yet all published. Thus, in the broader meaning of the terms, the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha are a bloc of Jewish literature written in antiquity from the later Persian period (c. 4th century bce) and not canonized by the Jews.
Texts and versions
A small portion of this literature is preserved in the original languages: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. Most of the Hebrew or Aramaic works, however, exist today only in various translations: Greek, Latin, Syriac, Ethiopian, Coptic, Old Slavonic, Armenian, and Romanian. All the works of the Apocrypha are preserved in Greek, because they have for the Greek Church a canonical value. Those books not considered canonical by the early church have often fallen into oblivion, and their Greek text was often lost; many of the ancient Jewish Pseudepigrapha are today preserved only in fragments or quotations in various languages, and sometimes only their titles are known from old lists of books that were rejected by the church.
Of this literature only the Apocrypha (contained in Latin and Greek Bibles) were read in the liturgical services of the church. The Pseudepigrapha, in their various versions, were in most cases nearly forgotten; and manuscripts of most of them were rediscovered only in modern times, a process that continues. The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls at Qumrān in the Judaean desert not only furnished new texts and fragments of unknown and already known Pseudepigrapha but also contributed solutions to problems concerning the origin of other Jewish religious writings (including some Old Testament books), the connection between them, and even their composition and redaction from older sources. The new original texts also strengthened interest in the Jewish literature of the intertestamental period because of its importance for the study of both ancient Judaism and early Christianity. As a result of such discoveries, better critical editions of the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, as well as new studies of their content, have been published.
The Apocrypha, whose texts originated mostly before the rise of Christianity, were regarded as canonical in the early church but contain no Christian interpolations. Many of the Pseudepigrapha, however, were interpolated by Christian writers. The nature and the extent of these Christian interpolations are often difficult to define since a Christian interpolator not only changes the text according to Christian views or introduces specific Christian terminology but also may introduce in a Jewish text ideas, motifs, or terminology that are common to both Judaism and Christianity. For these reasons it is sometimes difficult to decide if a passage in a pseudepigraphon, or even sometimes the whole work, is Jewish or Christian.
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