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Book Reviews Louvain Studies 38 (2014): 289-303 doi: 10.2143/LS.38.3.3105909 © 2014 by Louvain Studies, all rights reserved BOOK REVIEWS Eibert Tigchelaar, ed. Old Testament Pseudepigrapha and the Scriptures. Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium 270. Leuven, Paris, and Walpole, MA: Peeters, 2014. xxvi + 526 pp. €95.00. ISBN 978-90-429-3128-2. As usual with the proceedings of the Colloquium Biblicum Lovaniense, the new meeting on a topic from Old Testament studies – the 63rd Colloquium devoted to The Books of Samuel: Stories – History – Reception History (2014) – saw the publication of the papers presented at the previous meeting relating to the Old Testament. This nicely edited volume thus gathers the presidential address delivered at the 61st Colloquium (2012), eight invited main papers, the texts of the four seminars, ten essays selected among the sixteen offered papers, and an additional article specifically written for inclusion here. The result is a collection in which a wide variety of writings is discussed, without any further distinction between texts written before the establishment of the various canons of the Old Testament and later texts. More specifically, four authors focus on one or more Dead Sea Scrolls (Florentino García Martínez on the Aramaic texts, Hanna Tervanotko on the Testament of Qahat, Matthew J. Goff on the Book of Giants, and Devorah Dim- ant on Pseudo-Ezekiel and the Apocryphon of Jeremiah C); two more on the book of Jubilees, copies of which have also been discovered at Qumran (James Kugel and Atar Livneh); one on the book of Baruch (Georg Fischer); one on the Psalms of Solomon (Patrick Pouchelle); one on Pseudo-Philo’s Biblical Antiqui- ties (Christopher T. Begg); one on the Wisdom of Solomon (Stefan Koch); one on the Sybilline Oracles (John J. Collins); one on the Testament of Abraham (Françoise Mirguet); one on The Book of the Words of Jannes and Jambres (Jed Wyrick); three on 4 Ezra (Hindy Najman, Jason M. Zurawski, James R. Davila); one on (‘Syriac’) 2 Baruch (Liv Ingeborg Lied); one on the Life of Adam and Eve (Johannes Magliano-Tromp); one on the History of Melchizedek (Christfried Böttrich); one on the Narratio Zosimi, also known as The Life of the Rechabites (Jan Dochhorn); and one on the History of Joseph (Joseph Verheyden), while the final paper is concerned with the various appropriations of the Eden narra- tive in the Slavonic tradition (Florentina Badalanova Geller). Although the Colloquium explicitly asked its contributors to focus on their text’s relationship with the canonical scriptures, not a few papers are so focused on an individual text that scholars not working on the same text will find little interest in it. It needs to be pointed out, however, that several authors make efforts to render their work accessible for a wider scholarly audience by providing an introduction to the text they are dealing with, or treating it as part of a wider tradition familiar to readers of the Bible. Nevertheless, scholars with different specialities will probably benefit most from the presidential address, which 998312.indb8312.indb 228989 22/09/15/09/15 009:029:02 290 BOOK REVIEWS problematizes the corpus of ‘Pseudepigrapha’, and argues that they may ultimately be described as expansions of the Scriptures. Doing so, Tigchelaar seems to assume that a well-defined corpus of Scriptures existed as yet when each of these writings was composed, which for the earliest of them remains highly debatable. For the unsuspecting reader, it may appear as somewhat odd that, in the title of a series jointly edited by the Catholic universities of Leuven and Louvain- la-Neuve, the term ‘pseudepigrapha’ is used in its Protestant sense to denote books that are not included in the biblical canon. The editor justifies this use by referring to the common scholarly practice as it developed in the wake of Johann Albert Fabricius’ seminal collection published in 1713, but the problem remains that Fabricius worked on the basis of the now superseded assumption that a strong correlation existed between the false attribution of a certain book to some known biblical figure and its non-canonical status. Moreover, it quickly turns out that quite a number of the essays included in the present collection are focused on the literary device of pseudepigraphy rather than on the corpus of Pseudepigrapha, which some of the authors prefer to denote as ‘parabiblical’. The most clearly visible symptom of this confusion is the inclusion of two articles focused on the deuterocanonical books of Baruch and the Wisdom of Solomon, which are counted among the Apocrypha in the Protestant tradition and can only be called ‘pseudepigraphical’ in the sense of their being associated with a figure from the past – but the confusion extends well beyond these two articles. This lack of a clear focus may potentially be misunderstood as perpetuating Fabricius’ assump- tion that some form of connection exists between pseudepigraphy as a literary technique from antiquity and the modern corpus of Pseudepigrapha. Seen from this perspective, it would have been better to restrict the volume to writings usu- ally included under the heading of the ‘Pseudepigrapha’, or to publish a separate volume dealing with pseudepigraphy in canonical and non-canonical writings alike. Further, this once more raises the question – also addressed in the panel discussion at the end of the Colloquium – whether it would not be preferable simply to ban the term ‘Pseudepigrapha’ from scholarly literature, and to distin- guish only between canonical and non-canonical – or apocryphal – texts (with the possibility of an intermediate category of ‘deuterocanonical’ books to accommo- date for the different canons in various religious traditions). That at least would set us free from a Babel-like confusion that has been haunting biblical scholarship over the past three centuries, the present volume included. Hans Debel Beate Dignas, Robert Parker, and Guy G. Stroumsa. Priests and Prophets among Pagans, Jews and Christians. Studies in the History and Anthro- pology of Religion 5. Leuven, Paris, and Walpole, MA: Peeters, 2013. xi + 248 pp. €47.00. ISBN 978-90-429-2974-6. This collection of essays signals an important contribution to the mapping out of the complex transformation of Greco-Roman religious landscapes spanning from the early to the late Empire. It is chiefly useful for critical engagement with an impressive variety of primary sources: Didymean temple inscriptions; early 998312.indb8312.indb 229090 22/09/15/09/15 009:029:02 BOOK REVIEWS 291 Greek novels (e.g., Heliodorus’ Aethiopica); Second Temple Jewish prophetic lit- erature; Gregory of Nazianzus’ Orations; the Acts of Chalcedon; and Manichaean fragments, to name a few. Where the essays lack exhaustive research, they make up in innovative syntheses of large bodies of evidence. J. Bremmer’s piece, for example, surveys the representation of priests in six different novels, some with multiple instances (e.g., Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Clitophon). On the whole the text is accessible to the non-specialist. The essays here form a particularly illuminating locus by which to survey the intersection of various strands of Late Antique theological reflection, literary persuasion tactics, political organization, and religious praxis. Especially adept on this point is K. Tramped- ach’s account of the rhetorical purposes of the Vita Danielis stylitae, an ancient source which narrates the relationship between the austere monk and the emperor Leo I. With the burgeoning of monasticism as a force of mysterious authority in society despite the constricting decrees of Chalcedon in 451 CE, individual hermits nevertheless became sources by which even political leaders like the emperor sought divine legitimation. By a kind of ritualistic humbling, Leo I could demonstrate his piety and gain a tangible means of persuasion in the public eye. Trampedach smoothly illustrates the connection between monasticism, politics, and theology. S. Elm, with a more theological-historical emphasis, casts Gregory of Nazianzus’ conception of the priesthood in terms of his interweaving and subtle transforma- tion of Stoic and pagan philosophical ideals. Those interested in the theological context of the rise of Islam will take note of G. Stroumsa’s False Prophets of Early Christianity. He furthers the thesis, advanced in 1877 by A. von Harnack, more recently by F. de Blois, that Jewish- Christian groups on the eastern shore of the Dead Sea were essential compo- nents of the conceptual matrix from which early Islam developed. Stroumsa’s contribution offers evidence that the dialectic of true prophecy and false proph- ecy prominent among early (2nd-3rd century) Jewish-Christian groups, first in the theology of the Ebionites, and later extended by the Syrian Elchasaites, formed a “channel” that would come to influence the religious imagination of those who impacted Muhammad’s life and thought (pp. 224-228; e.g. Bahira and Waraka). This compelling essay offers not so much a definitive argument about the inspiration of the Prophet Muhammad as it presents a neglected body of evidence and calls for further research into the possible “channels” of influ- ence for early Islamic theology and literary imagination. Those pursuing avenues of inter-religious dialogue would find this essay inspirational. The seasoned reader of Late Antiquity will be pleased by careful attention to lexicography and comparative philology. B. Dignas measures the uses of mantis, prophetes and hierus – words that existed in abundance throughout every period of Greek literature and offer little by way of consistent conceptual usage – in the context of oracular sanctuaries in three major sources from the first three centuries C.E. (Lucian’s Alexander of Abonouteichos, Plutarch’s priest of Apollo at Delphi, and Didymean inscriptions), demonstrating how these words are used to describe the same kind of religious elite exercising interpretative representation of the gods in order to introduce religious change throughout different historical contexts.
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