Abstract
This celebration of James H. Charlesworth’s contribution to biblical studies begins tellingly with a list of some of his major works: all forty-two books have him as editor or co-editor. And therein lies his strength as an entrepreneur scholar. He has been able to anticipate the direction of the scholarly wind and has created and brought to fruition many projects, both major and minor, any one of which might have been enough for most of us. And in doing so, Charlesworth has infected audiences worldwide with his enthusiasms and encouraged several generations of junior scholars.
While some of the best recent Festschriften have been tightly organized around a theme, Charlesworth’s multiple initiatives are indeed best honoured in a wide-ranging manner as in Fountains of Wisdom. The thirty-three essays are presented in five sections: Hebrew Bible and New Testament; Greco-Roman and Jewish World; Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha; Dead Sea Scrolls; and History of Scholarship. The sections are understandable but they undermine one of Charlesworth’s significant contributions, namely that the Bible or the Pseudepigrapha or the Dead Sea Scrolls should not be compartmentalized separately, but all understood as manifestations of Jewish life in the southern Levant in the few centuries either side of the turn of the era.
In fact, many of the essays also undermine the titles of the compartments in which they are placed. Indeed, all those in Part 2 could equally have been placed with those in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament section, since they treat in turn Deuteronomy 28:1-14, John the Baptist, historiography and the Gospels, Caesarea in Acts, Revelation 3:21, and early Jewish and New Testament ethics. In a similar way most of the contributions in Part 3 could be re-allocated: they discuss the character of Second Temple Judaism, Enoch’s prayer for rescue from the flood, Cain, the Assumption of Moses and early Christianity, and the Psalms of Solomon. Part 5 contains essays on the Greek Life of Adam and Eve set alongside Joseph Smith’s Book of Moses, on early twentieth century debates about the miracles of Jesus set alongside Apollonius of Tyana, and on Italian scholarship on Second Temple Judaism and Christian Origins; the essay on the Nephilim and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein might also have been allocated to this Part.
For the Dead Sea Scrolls the studies seem more obviously placed, but recent attempts to put the Scrolls in a wider context mean that the essays should all be read with wider questions in mind as is indeed implied in the studies of the textual environment of 1QIsaa, of the Psalms manuscripts, of the luxury scrolls, of manuscript readings in agreement with the Septuagint, and of dating-scheme parallels with the Jesus movement.
Through raising the question of how these fountains of wisdom might have been organised it has been possible to mention briefly many of the stimulating subjects offered in this rich volume and to highlight the all-important issue of how best all the cultural crosscurrents and their echoes in late Second Temple Jewish and early Christian texts should be identified and understood.