NEW BOOK REVIEWS from the Review of Biblical Literature:

Runia, David T. and Gregory E. Sterling, eds.
In the Spirit of Faith: Studies in Philo and Early Christianity in Honor of David Hay

Azevedo, Joaquim, ed.
A Simplified Coptic Dictionary (Sahidic Dialect)

Carson, D. A., Peter T. O'Brien and Mark A. Seifrid, eds.
Justification and Variegated Nomism: A Fresh Appraisal of Paul and Second Temple Judaism

The last has been reviewed twice before in RBL, by John Byron and Pamela Eisenbaum (same URL). Eisenbaum's is the most probing. Allow me to add a few comments of my own. I was disappointed that some of the authors made use of Pseudepigrapha texts as evidence for Judaism without being very critical about what they were using. I have written elsewhere about the problem of telling Jewish pseudepigraph transmitted by Christians from Christian compositions meant to look biblical (and the final draft of this paper is to be a chapter of a book I'm writing on the subject). Until recent years the tendency has been to treat Pseudepigrapha as Jewish as long as they don't contain obvious Christian elements (or as long as one can delete these elements as secondary redactions without too much difficulty). But this won't do. Rather, we should follow Bob Kraft in starting with the manuscripts in hand and moving backwards to earlier contexts only as required by the evidence. By these criteria, none of the texts used by Craig Evans in his essay count as reliably Jewish. Joseph and Aseneth may be, but I doubt very much that the Martyrdom and Ascension of Isaiah (suitably edited), the Life of Adam and Eve, or the Lives of the Prophets are. In any case, one should make a positive case for them before using them. Likewise, Robert A. Kugler uses the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs as evidence, although he acknowledges that the form we have is Christian and we don't know that there ever was a Jewish version of the Greek twelve testaments. I should be very hesitant to use it at all for these purposes. Ditto for the Testament of Job, which he also uses (it may be a Jewish work but there isn't really any positive evidence for this). I don't mean to single out this book and these writers. This problem is common among NT specialists writing about the Jewish background of the NT. Mark Elliott in his recent The Survivors of Israel: A Reconsideration of the Theology of Pre-Christian Judaism (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 2000, does the same thing, using the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs as one of his major "Jewish" texts. This is one of my hobby-horses, so expect to hear more from me about it.