Expressions of Pseudepigraphy in the Qumran Aramaic Fragments and First Impressions of the Nag Hammadi Codices

Speaking of Pseudepigraphy …The past is never strictly past tense.On the one side of the spectrum looking back, source criticism and redaction criticism have taught us that, not unlike an archaeological site, ancient literature has layers.On the other end looking ahead, reception history and studies in scribal culture have reminded us that those layers are not sedimentary accretions that turn up on their own with the tides of time.Communities, scribes, authors-and yes, real, live peoplecultivated, circulated, and performed traditions.They did so in view of everchanging cultural, political, and religious contexts, which, in turn, enabled the continued development of traditions.The production of texts, then, was neither a one-shot deal nor isolated from larger networks of traditions.While the canons of Judaism and Christianity have enshrined selective snapshots of ancient traditions, discoveries such as the Dead Sea Scrolls and Nag Hammadi Codices have revealed a diversity and development of both the literatures and socio-religious makeup of groups and movements behind them.The literature left behind in both collections attests to what were until very recently forgotten, or at least marginalized, forms of Judaism and Christianity.Both groups/movements clearly had a lot to say and had many fresh ideas.Yet, most often, they anchored their thought and literatures in traditions and lore inherited from the past.The topic of pseudepigraphy, then, provides an interesting space for a comparative study or, at least, a conversation starter.Despite continued misuse in some areas, our understanding of the term "pseudepigraphy" has come a long way from descriptions of writings as "falsely attributed," which implies both a value statement on the literature produced and caricatures scribes as perpetrators against, rather than participants in, developing traditions.1While there is some precedent for a pejorative use of the term for spurious or falsely titled works among some Graeco-Roman or early Christian authors,2 that selective usage does not adequately account for the formation of texts by way of this mechanism.Similarly, we can no longer retain the category of "pseudepigrapha" as if these were a group of writings, i.e., the Pseudepigrapha, existing in some codified collection.As Annette Yoshiko Reed demonstrated, such a corpora is at best an eighteenth-century innovation and its (re)configuration is informed by several factors related to the colonialism of theological and scholarly constructs on the publication and study of ancient texts.3While these terms, and other cognates, have acquired some baggage, they can remain useful with sufficient qualification and focused use.In the technical sense, pseudepigraphy is a compositional mechanism, not a category.It is one that has shaped traditions before, within, and beyond the Bible.At its root, pseudepigraphy is the strategic authorial ascription or attribution of some or all of a work to an individual revered, remembered, or recreated from the past.Such pseudepigraphic material is often, though not necessarily, couched in the first-person voice of that figure, effectively collapsing the gap between long ago and a reader/hearer/performer's present.This technique both extends a tradition and draws upon the authority attached to certain figures.4As Lange remarked, this ascription is often achieved by various mechanisms, for example, "by way of title, content, or tradition."5Writers may engage in this type of compositional activity for a variety of reasons, which may result in as many 2 Stuckenbruck, for example, noted the report of Serapion, bishop of Antioch, dismissing the Gospel of Peter as "pseudepigrapha" ("Pseudepigraphy and First Person Discourse," 295-326, regarding Euseb.Hist.eccl.6.12.2). 3 Reed, "The Modern Invention of 'Old Testament Pseudepigrapha,'" 403-36.In the end, Reed noted that, "like all categories, 'the Old Testament pseudepigrapha' has both a specific history and a shifting semantic field" (434).As VanderKam commented, in common usage the term "pseudepigrapha" has often become a "catch-all" for anything outside the Bible, Philo, Josephus, and the Dead Sea Scrolls (An Introduction to Early Judaism, 58).This problem is perpetuated by its continued imprecise use, for example, in the recent volume Bauckham, Davila, and Panayotov, Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: More Noncanonical Scriptures.As one reviewer critiqued, "The title is, of course, unavoidably problematic (each word requires some qualification)" (Collins, review of Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: More Noncanonical Scriptures).4 In this sense, I find Bernstein's earlier proposal of "authoritative pseudepigraphy" to be the most helpful in his initial exploration of the levels, roles, and functions of pseudepigraphy as a compositional strategy in the Dead Sea Scrolls (Bernstein, "Pseudepigraphy in the Qumran Scrolls," 1-26).For recent studies focusing on the voicing techniques of the Aramaic texts in particular, and their relation to composition techniques in Qumran Hebrew materials, see Fröhlich, "From Pseudepigraphic to Sectarian," 395-406; and Stuckenbruck, "Pseudepigraphy and First Person Discourse."5 Lange, "In the Second Degree," 40.

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