Bible Review, Summer 1987

6 To this day, Jews throughout the world observe the Passover festival with a highly ritualized meal called a seder. The word means “order” and refers to the order of the service at the meal, including prayers, psalms, other readings, the retelling of the story of the Exodus from Egypt and the eating of special […]

If someone asked you to name the origin of a story about gods who take human wives and then give birth to a race of semidivine heroes, you might answer: It’s a Greek myth, or perhaps a Norse legend, or maybe a folktale from Africa or India. Surely this story couldn’t come from the sacred scriptures of Judaism and Christianity. Or could it?

You can’t understand Christian origins unless you understand the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. So says Professor James H. Charlesworth of Princeton Theological Seminary, and he is clearly riding the crest of modern scholarship.

Occupying a sometimes arcane world, the Pseudepigrapha are that collection of scripture-like books usually attributed to such ancients as Adam, Moses or the patriarchs, but actually composed, for the most part, between 200 B.C. and 200 A.D. The accompanying article (“Don’t Let Pseudepigrapha Scare You”) provides general background about the Pseudepigrapha. In this article, […]