REVIEW AND PROSPECTS
Hopefully, these
modest
contributions to the study of Jewish and
Christian
antiquity
underline the truth of the Gilbert and Sullivan line
“Things are
seldom what
they seem.”1 We are often dealing with what
I have called
elsewhere
“evolved literature,” not necessarily “authored”
pieces of the
sort to which
we have become accustomed in our modern
world.2 This is
especially
true of the Abraham recensions, the Testaments
of the
Patriarchs, parts of
the Enoch and Ezra cycles, and probably of
the Dialogue of
Timothy and
Aquila; on the “authored” side stands
Philo, almost
alone. Pliny
and Josephus are, in their own acquisitive ways, somewhere
in-between.
1 Gilbert and Sullivan,
“H.M.S. Pinafore” (1878) [variant, "Things are seldom as they seem"]
2 Barnabas and the Didache
(1965) 1.
How it is
possible to step
into these evolutionary streams at various
points in order
to derive firm
“historical” details and conclusions is a
major problem.
In addition
to the complex problems of continuities
and
discontinuities of ideas
and perspectives, of “borrowing” and
“adapting”
earlier
materials, we often neglect to take into consideration
the “physical”
realities of
the worlds with which we deal. How shall
we think about
“bible” in a
world of individual scrolls and similarly
constrained
early codices?3
Where there is no general educational
system in
place -- if, indeed,
that was the situation -- how do traditions
get transmitted
and
presentational methods developed? Where most
of our written
evidence
comes from copies of copies that have been
transmitted and
possibly
transformed over centuries of time through
many generations
of
users—and sometimes only in translations, even
translations of
translations -- how confident can we be of materials that
on other grounds
can be
shown to have been problematic at some
stages in the
process?
3 See my “The Codex and
Canon Consciousness” (2002) for some aspects of this problem.
While I am not
an advocate
of complete historical skepticism and
despair, my hope
is that
these essays may at least encourage the readers
and users to
become more
self-conscious about how they approach
<>such materials
and issues,
in hopes that more solid -- or at least less [[262]]
unstable -- grounds can be
established for moving the study of these
subjects
forward. New tools
are becoming available for the tasks, the
potential of
which has only
begun to be tapped. In some areas of
study, what took
untold
hours for the giants on whose shoulters we
stand to
accomplish (in
searching for relevant parallels, for example)
can now be done
in minutes,
leaving us with more time and opportunity
to evaluate the
older syntheses
and hypotheses and develop new
approaches, if
needed. New
information is being discovered as well as
created, and
equally
important, is increasingly available electronically
to the
discriminating
searcher. “Armchair archaeology,” and similar
“armchair”
manuscript study,
is becoming a necessary commonplace
to which the
researcher can
contribute as well drawing from it. The
horizon is
bright, but
desired destinations cannot be reached automatically
or effortlessly.
May we all
proceed with deliberate speed and due
caution in the
task of
understanding the complex past in the context of our equally
complex
present and future.4
4 Further musings on the
situation may be found in my 2006 SBL Presidential Address,
“Para-Mania:
Beside, Before, and Beyond Bible Studies,” JBL 126 (2007) 5–27 [available as a
full
electronic version with linked images].