Saturday, July 30, 2005


OLD TESTAMENT PSEUDEPIGRAPHA WITH GREEK MORPHOLOGY is another promising project from Logos Bible Software. The project's web page opens:
The Pseudepigrapha are among the most important non-canonical texts for biblical study, second only to the Dead Sea Scrolls. Students of the Bible engage the literature of the Pseudepigrapha (Greek portions as well as those in Hebrew and Aramaic) because this material provides sharp insight into how the Jewish community of Jesus’ day approached and interpreted the Hebrew Scriptures.

...an invaluable resource for the study of both early rabbinic Judaism and Christianity. —Eerdmans Dictionary of the Bible

Old Testament Greek Pseudepigrapha with Morphology will include morphologically tagged and lemmatized Greek texts for all the Greek Pseudepigrapha included or referenced in Charlesworth’s The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (2 vols., Doubleday) and M. Denis’s Concordance grecque des pseudépigraphes d’Ancien Testament. Concordance, corpus des texts, indices (Louvain-la-Neuve, 1987). We have also been supplied with Greek texts from Craig Evans and the Online Critical Pseudepigrapha project.

In total, the Logos edition will include 81 books, letters, and fragments, making it the most complete electronic assemblage of Greek pseudepigraphal texts available. A number of texts left out of other electronic editions on the market (e.g., Apocalypse of Daniel and the Psalms of Solomon) will be included in the Logos edition! The complete list of included texts is at the bottom of this page.

The Logos edition will also include brand new introductions, written by Dr. Michael Heiser, PhD. (see samples below). These introductions provide a summary of the significant features of each text and explain how each plays a role in biblical studies.

There's lots more on the page, so have a look. This is a prepublication announcement, which I think means that they will come out with it if enought people sign up to buy it. So if you're keen to have it, sign up now.

This sounds exciting, but I'm afraid I have to allow myself one criticism. The sample introduction to The Life of Adam and Eve tells us that it "can inform us as to Jewish conceptions of the appearance and significance of the throne chariot of Ezekiel 1, 10." Most, if not all of the scholars currently working on this text agree is it probably a Christian rather than a Jewish composition. I hope very much that these introductions reflect cutting-edge research on the pseudepigrapha rather than the naîve approach that has been characteristic of much of their use until recently. But aside from this one point, it looks like a great project.

No comments:

Post a Comment