British New Testament Society

Sorry, there isn't really a new pseudepigraphon called the Odes of Isaiah. Rather, this paper is a thought experiment to explore in a new way the problem of the transmission of Jewish Old Testament pseudepigrapha in Christian hands and how or to what degree we can hope to know whether such works actually originated in Jewish rather than Christian circles.

The approach is to treat demonstrably (mostly by external criteria) ancient Jewish works as if they had been transmitted as pseudepigrapha in Christian manuscripts, and to explore the implications of the "alternate histories" of these works as analogies for works whose transmission histories cannot now be reconstructed by conventional means. The method is informed by poststructuralist and reader-response concerns; the philosophy of counterfactuals and possible worlds; the exploration of counterfactual histories by science fiction writers and by historians; and some conceptual insights and categories formulated by the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum physics.

This paper postulates an "alternate history" for the Qumran Hodayot (as found in the manuscript 1QHa) in which, rather than being abandoned at Qumran, this work was transmitted outside sectarian circles, translated first into Greek and then, into Syriac, thence surviving only in a late antique or early medieval Syriac copy attributed to the prophet Isaiah. (One can point to the transmission of the Psalms of Solomon as a partial analogy.) To what degree could we show that this text was originally Jewish, and even sectarian Jewish? What literary-critical, prosodic, and linguistic criteria, if any, would be likely to be helpful in tracing its history of transmission and ultimate origin?

Although a number of terms may qualify as Jewish identity markers which have subsequently been given a Christian reinterpretation in early Christian literature, this is especially so for the term "election." Among the many early Christian documents which emphasise "election" 1 Peter stands out. "Election" can be shown to be a central motif in the OT, the DSS and 1 Peter.

The aim of this paper is to detect, if possible, a tradition common to both 1 Peter and the DSS with regard to the concept of "election." The first task is to look briefly at the OT position on election. Secondly, I shall examine the concept of election and its related terms in some key passages of 1 Peter, focusing on 1 Peter's particular reinterpretation of election. Finally, I shall look into some representative Qumran texts for their use of election as an identity term.

It shall be demonstrated that although the DSS use the same OT ideas and images for election, which could suggest parallels to 1 Peter, there are also significant differences in regard to the reinterpretation of the common tradition. The conclusion which suggests itself is that while both the DSS and 1 Peter have Jewish roots, they draw different conclusions when actualising election. There is no evidence that "Peter" used Qumran texts. This means that even if "Peter" draws on a tradition, he also adapts that tradition to fit his Christian context.

"Behold, the heifer has given birth, and has not given birth." This saying, attested in four Church Fathers and the Acts of Peter, has been thought by nearly all interpreters to have been part of an Ezekiel Apocryphon, an apocryphon which is lost except for various fragments cited in various early Christian writings. In this paper it will be argued that the reasons for attributing the saying to the apocryphal Ezekiel are very tenuous. A critical examination of all the data suggests that it is most unlikely that the Ezekiel apocryphon included this saying. It will then be suggested that this saying derives from an otherwise lost version of the Animal Apocalypse which had been revised by a Christian redactor. It will be argued that such an explanation easily accounts for the assumed narrative logic of the saying. Moreover, such an explanation also coheres well with the extensive evidence that the Book of Enoch once existed in a form substantially differed from that preserved in our Aramaic, Greek and Ethiopic manuscripts.