Abstract
This volume of collected essays contains twenty-three of the numerous journal articles and contributions to edited volumes written by Professor Richard Bauckham over the course of thirty years (between 1976 and 2008). The collection was originally published by Mohr Siebeck in 2008 and has already received high acclaim as the co-recipient of the Franz-Delitzsch Award for 2010. The essays address a very wide range of topics, but they are bound together, as the title suggests, by Bauckham's conviction that “the New Testament writings belong wholly within the Jewish world of their time” (p. 1). He therefore brings New Testament texts and traditions into a close—and highly productive—conversation with Jewish texts such as the writings of Josephus, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and early rabbinic material, although the collection displays his particular interest in the Apocrypha and the Old Testament pseudepigrapha, especially apocalyptic texts and traditions. Quoting an instructive essay that he first published in 1995 (and which appears as Chapter 14 in the current volume), Bauckham also stresses that “the NT student and scholar must use the Jewish literature in the first place to understand Judaism. Only someone who understands early Judaism for its own sake will be able to use Jewish texts appropriately and accurately in the interpretation of the NT” (p. 1). This interpretative principle underpins most, if not all, of the essays included in this volume.
While some of the chapters will appeal to a wide spectrum of readers (such as Chapter 4: The Rise of Apocalyptic, Chapter 14: The Relevance of Extra-Canonical Jewish Texts to New Testament Study, and Chapter 17: What if Paul had Travelled East rather than West), most of the essays are undoubtedly geared towards scholars and advanced students of the New Testament and early Judaism. Close textual study and meticulous argumentation— with virtually no stone left unturned— characterize the volume from beginning to end. The collection also defies division into neat thematic categories, which must account, to a large degree, for the author's decision to set out the essays in the chronological order of their original publication. The essay topics range from the martyrdom of Elijah and Enoch (Chapters 2–3) to “the parting of the ways” between early Judaism and Christianity (Chapter 12), belief in resurrection and afterlife in late Second Temple Judaism (Chapter 16), covenant, law and salvation in the Jewish apocalypses (Chapter 18), the restoration of Israel in Luke-Acts (Chapter 19), the use of Latin names by Paul and other Jews in the early Christian movement (Chapter 20), and the Book of Tobit as a parable of the history and destiny of Israel (Chapter 23). Other chapters are more exegetically oriented, including the investigation of Josephus's references to the Temple, priests and practices in Contra Apionem 2.102–9 (Chapter 15), the examination of the reference to “Kainam the son of Arpachshad” in Luke's genealogy (3:36) in the light of the Enochic Apocalypse of Weeks (Chapter 10), and the study of the possible quotation from the Book of Eldad and Modad in James 4:5 (Chapter 22). Two chapters dealing with the much-debated issue of the Jewish or Christian provenance of the Old Testament pseudepigrapha do, nevertheless, serve as unifying “bookends” for the volume as a whole (Chapters 2 and 24).
Many of these essays have stood the test of time and continue to be highly influential; they are widely acknowledged as shedding significant light on the biblical/Jewish interpretative matrix of the New Testament writings, as well as offering rich methodological insights into the use of Jewish (and early Christian) sources in the scholarly debate on subjects such as the origins of apocalyptic and the identification of criteria for determining authentic and pseudepigraphic letters. Their publication as an accessible collection of essays in this—more reasonably priced— edition by Baker Academic is therefore to be greatly welcomed. Some of the unrevised chapters would have benefited from further updating with reference to subsequent scholarship, particularly the review article of the first volume of The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha edited by J. H. Charlesworth (Chapter 8), while numerous typographical errors have been left uncorrected (see, for example, ‘Qumram’, ‘sence’, ‘Apoclaypse’, ‘producted’ in Chapter 8). However, these are minor criticisms of a volume whose essays are essential reading for those engaged in the study of the New Testament in relation to early Judaism.