What Are the Pseudepigrapha?

Books written in the name of Enoch, Abraham, Moses or the sons of Jacob, centuries after those men lived. None made it into the Jewish or most Christian Bibles, but the apostles' generation read them, and Jude quotes one.

Writings under borrowed names

Pseudepigrapha is Greek for “falsely attributed writings.” Scholars use it for religious books, mostly Jewish and mostly written between about 300 BC and AD 200, that claim as their author a great figure of the Old Testament: Enoch, Abraham, Moses, Isaiah, Baruch, Solomon, or the twelve sons of Jacob. Writing in an ancient name was a common and accepted convention of the time, especially for visions of heaven and the end of the age; it gave a message the weight of a revered ancestor. Some of these books were later reworked by Christians, and a few, such as the Odes of Solomon, are Christian compositions.

Pseudepigrapha or Apocrypha?

The names depend on who is speaking. Protestants call the extra books of the Catholic and Orthodox Old Testament (Tobit, Judith, the Maccabees, Wisdom, Sirach and the rest) the Apocrypha, and call the wider group of books that no major church kept the pseudepigrapha. Catholics call the first group deuterocanonical, part of their Bible, and often use “apocrypha” for what Protestants call pseudepigrapha. The line is not perfectly clean: 1 Enoch and Jubilees are in the Ethiopian Orthodox Bible, and 4 Maccabees appears in an appendix to some Greek Bibles.

What kinds of books they are

Apocalypses describe journeys through the heavens and the end of the age (1 and 2 Enoch, 2 and 3 Baruch, the Apocalypse of Abraham). Testaments give the last words of a patriarch to his children (the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, the Testament of Job). Others retell and expand the stories of Genesis and Exodus (Jubilees, the Life of Adam and Eve, Joseph and Aseneth, Pseudo-Philo), offer wisdom (the Story of Ahikar, 4 Maccabees), or are hymns (the Psalms of Solomon). Many survive only in translations kept by churches far from where they were written: 1 Enoch and Jubilees in Ethiopic, 2 Enoch and the Apocalypse of Abraham in Slavonic, 2 Baruch in Syriac.

Echoes in the New Testament

These books were part of the reading world of the New Testament writers. Jude quotes 1 Enoch by name:

Other details in the New Testament come from the same body of tradition rather than from the Old Testament itself. Paul names the magicians who opposed Moses, Jannes and Jambres, who are unnamed in Exodus but known from Jewish legend:

Hebrews lists among the faithful those who were “sawn asunder,” and the tradition that the prophet Isaiah died that way under King Manasseh is told in the Ascension of Isaiah:

Early Christian writers also said that Jude's account of the archangel Michael disputing with the devil over the body of Moses (Jude 1:9) came from a book about the death of Moses, usually identified with the Assumption of Moses. Quoting or echoing a book does not make it scripture, and the New Testament writers quote pagan poets too, but it shows what their first readers knew.

Rediscovery

Most of these texts dropped out of use in the West and were recovered by European scholars from the eighteenth century onward, when travellers brought back Ethiopic manuscripts of Enoch and Jubilees. The Dead Sea Scrolls then turned up Aramaic fragments of 1 Enoch and Hebrew fragments of Jubilees, proving that they were read in Judea before the time of Jesus. R. H. Charles gathered the main texts in English in 1913, and James H. Charlesworth's two-volume collection (1983–85) brought together more than sixty.

On this site

The library's Old Testament Pseudepigrapha shelf carries some forty of these books in complete public-domain translations, most from the era of Charles and his colleagues, grouped as apocalypses, testaments, expansions of the Old Testament, wisdom, and psalms and odes. They are cross-referenced to the passages of the Bible they echo. Apart from 1 Enoch and Jubilees in the Ethiopian Orthodox Bible, none is part of the canon of any major church.