Genizah Psalms
Posted by David Lincicum in Uncategorized on May 15, 2013
Over the course of this academic year, the Graduate Colloquium in Biblical and Early Christian Studies (Markus Bockmuehl’s brainchild originally, but a meeting I now co-convene with him) has been considering hymns in ancient Jewish and Christian traditions. We meet every other week during term to discuss interesting Jewish and Christian texts, and have sampled a wide variety of texts: OT Psalms, late second Temple texts (Hodayot, PsSol, Tobit), putative NT hymns, LXX Odes, Odes of Solomon, the Didache, Ignatius, Pliny, Justin Martyr, Liturgy of St James, P.Oxy. 1786, the Syriac tradition (Ephraem, Jacob of Serug, and some later authors), Hilary of Poitiers, Ambrose, the te Deum, Prudentius, and some piyyutim (the El Adon, a long piyyut by Yannai on Genesis and the Az be-’En Kol). This week we had the pleasure of hearing from Dr. David Stec, from Sheffield, about some apocryphal psalms which he has translated for the first time into English in his new book, The Genizah Psalms: A Study of Ms 798 of the Antonin Collection 
Desiderata II: Hellenistic Jewish Texts in Greek and English
Posted by David Lincicum in Uncategorized on April 13, 2013
While I’m thinking of desiderata, wouldn’t it be relatively painless to produce one or two LCL-style volumes of ‘Hellenistic Jewish Texts’ in Greek and English? Just thinking off the cuff, if we included books that are a) excluded from other major corpora (LXX, Philo, Josephus); b) are not fragmentary (like Eupolemus, Ezekiel the Tragedian, etc. – these are readily available in Holladay anyway); and c) are probably extant in their original language of composition, Greek, we could include (z.B.) the following (even if the first two or three and some of the others may be Christian in whole or in part):
Ascension of Isaiah
T12P
Joseph & Aseneth
TAbr
TJob
LetArist
PrJacob
PrJos
There’s of course the SC volume for Aristeas in French/Greek, and various editions of the others as well, but can’t quite think of anything else that does facing pages of this stuff in English translation, and it would be useful, I think, to have this gathered as a corpus.
A more ambitious undertaking would be a sort of Studienausgabe multi-lingual edition of the OT Pseudepigrapha. For students of the New Testament and Second Temple Judaism, we have facing-page bilingual editions for Philo and Josephus in the Loeb editions, for the Dead Sea Scrolls in the Martinez-Tigchelaar and Parry-Tov editions, for the deuterocanonical books in the traditional LXX editions, but access to the original languages of the pseudepigraphical literature often requires many different and expensive books, sometimes prohibitive even for smaller libraries. Nevertheless, the study of this pseudepigraphical and apocryphal literature has blossomed over the past thirty years or so, no doubt in part due to Charlesworth’s two volume OTP. Might it be time to give serious students of the period a handy edition with original languages and English translation on facing pages? This might especially be so as much of this literature is outside the range of other modern language editions like the Sources chretiennes.
Of course, one of the complications of this type of work is that the documents are extant in a variety of different texts and textual traditions, and some difficult decisions might have to be made as to whether, say, a text that is extant in both Latin and Ethiopic should be displayed in one or both languages, etc. But it does not seem that such difficulties need be insurmountable, and even a less-than-perfect-in-every-respect edition would be better than what we have now. And even if most NT scholars are not highly proficient in languages like Ethiopic, the ability to do a bit of checking with a lexicon and so to increase the certainty of one’s own research would be a welcome advance. If relevant copyrights could be secured, etc., maybe it would even be possible to use some of the same contributors from Charlesworth’s volumes who could supply both original text and translation. Or one could attempt to extract text and translation from the de Gruyter Commentaries on Early Jewish Literature project.
Desiderata I: Handausgabe of the Targums in English Translation
Posted by David Lincicum in Uncategorized on April 13, 2013
We have compact editions and translations of the LXX, the OT Pseudepigrapha, the Mishnah, Josephus and Philo (though both of those could use a cheaper format than the Loeb, as useful as it is; hopefully someone can extract an English translation from the Josephus commentary series and the PACS and publish them as single volumes when they’re done), the Nag Hammadi library, the NT Apocrypha and other corpora. Why not a compact edition of the Targums in English translation?
Perhaps the easiest way to do this would be to take the full translation of the Targums from the Aramaic Bible series but delete almost all of the notes and the introductions, perhaps with a general introduction to the whole thing. There would be some books in which two or three targums of the same book exist (see below), and one would need to decide whether to print them in parallel or subsequent to one another. So the end result would be about as large as a full Bible, I think, and could even be presented the way OUP’s New English Translation of the Septuagint was (for example). But if it were comprehensive in this way, then I think you would get lots of interest from scholars in related fields – OT, NT, early Judaism, history of interpretation, late Antiquity, etc. – who would find it useful to have these translations as a reference on their shelves, but couldn’t possibly afford all the individual 22 or so volumes, which retail in the US for $65-100 each. It would be extremely useful to have the full, stripped-down translations as a reference set (2 vols?), for quick checking of references, comparison of interpretative renderings or sustained reading.
Here is what is in the Aramaic Bible series, with volume numbers in brackets (n.b., no targums on Daniel, Ezra or Nehemiah):
v. 1A.Targum Neofiti 1, Genesis /translated, with apparatus and notes by Martin McNamara –v. 1B.Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, Genesis /translated with introduction and notes by Michael Maher –v. 2.Targum Neofiti 1: Exodus /translated with introduction an apparatus by Martin McNamara.Targum Pseudo-Jonathan: Exodus /translated with notes by Michael Maher –v. 3.Targum Neofiti 1, Leviticus /translated, with apparatus, by Martin McNamara; introduction and notes by Robert Hayward.Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, Leviticus /translated, with notes by Michael Maher –v. 4.Targum Neofiti 1, Numbers /translated with apparatus and notes by Martin McNamara.Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, Numbers /translated, with notes by Ernest G. Clarke with assistance of Shirley Magder –v. 5A.Targum Neofiti 1, Deuteronomy /translated, with apparatus and notes by Martin McNamara –Prophets /by Daniel J. Harrington and Anthony Saldarini –v. 5B.Targum Pseudo-Jonathan /translated, with notes by Ernest G. Clarke –v. 11.The Isaiah Targum /introduction, translation, apparatus, and notes by Bruce D. Chilton –v. 12.The Targum of Jeremiah /by Robert Hayward –v. 13.The Targum of Ezekiel /translated, with a critical introduction, apparatus, and notes by Samson H. Levey –v. 14.The Targum of the Minor Prophets /by Kevin J. Cathcart and Robert P. Gordon –v. 17A.The Targum of Canticles /translated, with a critical introduction, apparatus, and notes by Philip S. Alexander –v. 17B.The Targum of Lamentations /translated, with a critical introduction, apparatus, and notes by Philip S. Alexander –v. 18.The two Targums of Esther /translated, with apparatus and notes by Bernard Grossfeld –v. 19.The Targum of Ruth/translated, with introduction, apparatus, and notes by D.R.G. Beattie.The Targum of Chronicles / translated, with introduction, apparatus, and notes by J. Stanley McIvor.
I’m sure the rights will be a question, but surely Liturgical Press has made most of the money it will make on the full editions by now anyway, and specialists will always need to consult the full notes in the Aramaic Bible volumes (and of course the original Aramaic in Sperber and other places). But it would be useful to have these and, in my opinion, they would sell well.
Oxford New Testament Seminar, Trinity Term 2013
Posted by David Lincicum in Uncategorized on April 12, 2013
Here’s the programme for the NT Seminar this term (HT: Mary Marshall). Anyone in the area or passing through is more than welcome to attend by permission. All sessions take place 2.15-3.45 p.m. in the Gibbs Room, Keble College (unless otherwise stated). Refreshments are provided after the seminar.
2nd Week – 2nd May
James Carleton Paget (Cambridge)
The Second Century from a New Testament Perspective
4th Week – 16th May (2-5.30 p.m. The Pusey Room, Keble College)
**POSTPONED DUE TO ILLNESS**
Marking the retirement of Prof. Christopher Tuckett.
Tobias Nicklas (Regensburg)
What Christian Apocrypha tell us about the History of the Canon
Mary Marshall (Oxford)
“The leaven of the Pharisees”: A case study in recognising the Evangelists
6th Week – 30th May
Catrin Williams (Trinity Saint David)
Unveiling Revelation: The Spirit-Paraclete and Apocalyptic Disclosure in the Gospel of John
7th Week – 6th June
Jonathan Norton (Heythrop)
Paul: A zealot for the law
The Consequential Jesus
Posted by David Lincicum in Uncategorized on April 10, 2013
In my lectures and tutorials on the ‘historical Jesus’, I have sought to find ways to introduce my students to shifts in the terrain of HJ scholarship in recent years. While there has, since at least Form Criticism in the early 20th century, been an awareness that any attempt to grasp the historical figure of Jesus must make some sense of the gospel tradition as a whole, in recent years – in line with historiographical shifts more broadly – we have all been more aware of the crucial importance of the earliest impact of Jesus in its manifold form for ascertaining something about the earthly Jesus (think Dunn, Allison, Watson, le Donne, Keith, et al.). Scholarship is divided as to whether one can ever leap the gap and cross from memory to event, and there are real questions about what it might even mean to reach an uninterpreted Jesus – as if one could, in some Emersonian dream, become a transparent eyeball, seeing all as a part or particle of God. I’ve tried to speak with my students of the shifts from criteria of authenticity to plausibility, to recurrence, to memory. I have sometimes borrowed the language of my supervisor, Markus Bockmuehl, to speak of the ‘footprint’ of Jesus in the memory of the early church, or to contend for an elision of the adjective historical to ‘historic’.
I’ve learned much from the recent emphasis on memory, but have sometimes wondered whether the connotations of the word could suggest to students something slightly too narrow, and need to be set in a slightly broader framework assessing the impact of Jesus. Memory need not be understood in purely cognitive terms, of course, and there is a capacious usage that would encompass what I have in mind. But as in reception history one can draw a meaningful distinction between Auslegungesgeschichte (history of interpretation) and Wirkungsgeschichte (effective history or history of effects), with the former bearing more of an emphasis on a self-conscious intellectual stance toward the subject in question, might it be possible to include memory as one key component in a broader assessment of the impact of Jesus – and so to speak not simply of the remembered Jesus but of the consequential Jesus?
I’m sure I’ve stolen the phrase ‘consequential Jesus’ from someone (if anyone knows its derivation do speak up), but think I’ll hang on to it as a way to help my students understand these important shifts.
Seduction in 1 Tim 2:14 v.l.?
Posted by David Lincicum in Uncategorized on March 29, 2013
The simple verb ἀπατάω only occurs three times in the New Testament (Eph 5:6, 1 Tim. 2:14, James 1:26), though ἐξαπατάω is more common (6 times, all in the corpus Paulinum: Rom. 7:11; 16:18; 1 Cor. 3:18; 2 Cor 11:3; 2 Thess 2:3; 1 Tim 2:14). In 1 Tim 2:14, both forms occur, with no appreciable difference: Adam was not deceived (ἠπατήθη), but Eve was deceived (ἐξαπατηθεῖσα). One can note the unsurprising variant, ἀπατηθεῖσα here (א2 D2 byz). Is this simply the substitution of a synonym? It’s possible, maybe even likely, that this is the case. It is also, however, worth noting that the variant may reflect an understanding of ἀπατάω as sexual seduction (cf. Eratosth. 22, 10; T.Jud. 12.3; Ps.Sol. 16.8). ἀπάτη, the nominal form, does have the connotation ‘pleasure’, as the Greek author Moeris had noted: ἀπάτη ἡ πλάνη παρ᾽ Ἀττικοῖς, ἀπάτη ἡ τέρψις παρ᾽ Ἕλλησιν. F. Zorrell and C. Spicq made the case that ἀπάτη sometimes bears the sense of ‘pleasure’ in the NT, above all drawing attention to the parallel between Matt 13:22=Mark 4:19 (ἀπάτη) and Luke 8:14 (ἡδονή). Might it then be the case that some later copyists, familiar with the traditions about Eve being sexually seduced by the serpent (4 Macc 18.7-8; b. Yeb. 103b; b. ‘Abod. Zar. 22b; b. Sabb. 146a; 2 Enoch 31:5-6; Vit. Ad. 10.4), chose the form that best accorded with this understanding? This is speculation, of course, and one would want to hold against it the fact that in 2 Cor 11:1-3, Paul uses the compound form ἐξαπατάω that is also used in the Genesis account to speak of Eve’s deception. But it is at least an intriguing, if unverifiable, possibility.
Septuagintal daydreams: corpus papyrorum graeco-judaicarum?
Posted by David Lincicum in Uncategorized on March 29, 2013
I’ve been working on a couple of (overdue) lexical articles for a new LXX lexicon edited by E. Bons and J. Joosten (Mohr Siebeck). In the process, apart from realizing that I am no lexicographer, it struck me that it could be useful to have an updated version of the Tcherikover-Fuks Corpus papyrorum judaicarum (CPJ) – now almost 60 years old – but one that focused specifically on Jewish Greek *literary* papyri (broadly conceived to include parchment MSS as well), as opposed to documentary papyri.
A quick glance at Tov’s index to the DJD series indicates the following list of non-documentary Greek texts from Qumran and surrounding areas. As far as I recall, the only one of any length is the Greek minor prophets scroll, so perhaps it wouldn’t be worth doing, even if it would be nice to have a cheap edition of that one, important as it is for the history of the LXX text (cf. Barthélémy’s famous study, Les devanciers d’Aquila and Tov’s edition in DJD 8). Read the rest of this entry »
