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Or a 2Baruch Reader's Guide to the New Testament

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Or a 2Baruch Reader's Guide to the New Testament A NEW TESTAMENT READER’S GUIDE TO 2BARUCH: OR A 2BARUCH READER’S GUIDE TO THE NEW TESTAMENT* George W.E. Nickelsburg Although Second Baruch must be read in its own right as a testimony to the social history and religious thought of first-century and perhaps early second-century Judaism, its dating makes it potentially a valuable resource for the study of the early church and the interpretation of its foundational texts. Having dealt briefly elsewhere with the former,1 I turn here to the latter issue. How do the book’s testimonies to contemporary Judaism shed light on passages in the New Testament that we might otherwise skip over or take for granted? I acknowledge at the start that I have more questions to raise than I have answers to give and that my observations are only an initial foray into a subject that requires further and more detailed study, which I leave to others.2 A. Some Major Points of Comparison 1. “Baruch”—Scribe or Prophet? The author of our text takes on the persona of “Baruch, the son of Neriah” (2Bar 1:1). I take this to be an attribution to Baruch the son of Neriah, the scribe of the prophet Jeremiah (Jer 36:4–32; cf. Bar 1:1), although 2Baruch never refers to its author as a “scribe.”3 It is, of course, natural that a text * My special thanks to Matthias Henze, who read a previous draft of this paper and made some important suggestions and corrections, which I have incorporated in my exposition— for which, of course, I take full responsibility. 1 George W.E. Nickelsburg, Jewish Literature Between the Bible and the Mishnah (2nd Ed.; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005), 277–285. 2 For a detailed discussion of a number of major issues, see Matthias Henze, Jewish Apoc- alypticism in Late First Century Israel: Reading Second Baruch in Context (TSAJ; Tübingen: Mohr-Siebeck, 2011), 321–349. 3 Matthias Henze makes this last point in correspondence. That Baruch the son of Neriah, an associate of Jeremiah at the time of Jerusalem’s destruction is not supposed to be the same as Baruch, the son of Neriah, the scribe of Jeremiah in Jeremiah 36, seems to me highly unlikely, even if he is not here called “scribe.” 272 george w.e. nickelsburg related to the destruction of the second temple should be associated with the prophet who predicted the destruction of the first temple. But why is this text not ascribed to the prophet himself? And why does the author of 2Baruch explicitly play down the role of Jeremiah and describe Baruch as a prophet (“… the word of the Lord came to Baruch/me,” 2Bar 1:1; 10:1; cf. Jer 1:4; 2:1; 7:1; 11:1, et al.), who has authority over Jeremiah and sends him on his way to Babylon (2:1; 5:5; 10:1–5)? By comparison, the Paraleipomena of Jeremiah, a text roughly contemporary with 2Baruch, naturally portrays Jeremiah as its central figure and Baruch as his subordinate. One possible answer to this question is to be found in the fact that two other Jewish apocalypses of the second temple period are also attributed to scribes. This is the case with parts of 1Enoch (1 En. 12:3, 4 [cf. 13:4, 6; 14:1, 4; 15:1; 92:1 [cf. 101:6]; see also Jub. 4:18–19, 23). Perhaps more to the point is 2Baruch’s sister apocalypse, 4Ezra. Its alleged author is a certain Ezra, a captive in Babylon (3:1), who, in the wake of the Torah being burned, is given the responsibility to “write everything that has happened in the world from the beginning, the things that were written in your law, that men may be able to find the path, and that those who wish to live in the last days may live” (14:22).4 Although this author’s alleged date thirty years into the Babylonian exile (ca. 557bce) hardly fits the dating for the historical “Ezra, the priest, the scribe, learned in matters of the commandments of the Lord and his statutes of Israel,” who returned from Babylon more than a century and a half later (ca. 398bce).5 Unfortunately, these observations only beg the question, which remains: why do these texts—whose alleged authors are said to be scribes (Enoch) or are identified with biblical scribes (Baruch and Ezra)—claim prophetic, or prophet-like, revelatory authority for their authors?6 4 Translations of 4Ezra, with a few modifications, are those of Michael E. Stone, Fourth Ezra: A Commentary on the Fourth Book of Ezra (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1990), which in turn are modifications (for text-critical reasons) of the RSV. Unless otherwise spec- ified, translations of the Bible in this paper are drawn of the RSV with a few modifications. 5 Again, 4Ezra’s alleged author is never called a “scribe,” but he writes the twenty-four books and is thus closely associated with the Torah, as was Ezra the post-exilic scribe. See Stone, Fourth Ezra, 56, “Yet it remains incontrovertible that our apocalypse was really attributed to Ezra the Scribe, as is particularly evident from chapter 14.” 6 On the prophetic elements in 1Enoch, see George W.E. Nickelsburg, 1Enoch 1: A Com- mentary on the Book of Enoch Chapters 1–36, 82–108 (Hermeneia; Minneapolis, 2001), 30–31, 59–61. On 2Baruch see 1:2. On 4Ezra see his visions in chaps. 11–13, as well as the parallel to Moses in 14:1–9..
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