AT 12:48 A.M. LAST NIGHT the fire alarm went off in my hotel. I got up, threw on some clothes, grabbed my wallet and brief case, and got out in a few minutes. It took ten or fifteen minutes to get the all clear from the fire service and they said it was a false alarm, even though I and others smelled smoke in the lobby. Maybe some one on the night staff burned their toast.

Anyhow, I went to the Judaica session last night and heard two papers on a project collecting the poetic fragments in the Talmud. I look forward to the book. Today I've been running from room to room, Hermione-like, trying to be two places at once. (Okay, I skipped half the morning for a gym session, but after that, I mean.) I heard some good papers on the Syriac lexicography project. Peter Williams presented on elements in the Greek New Testament that don't match well in the Syriac translation, pointing to some phenomena that I''m also going to mention in my paper tomorrow when talking about the Septuagint translation.

James K. Aitken gave a paper on his way cool Database of Septuagint Greek, which you can look at yourself.

Today's Apocrypha session dealt with "Gnosticism." I heard Tuomas Rasimus speak on "Who Founded Gnosticism" and Ky-Chun So speak on "Jewish Influences on Gnosticisim in the Apocalypse of Adam." The abstracts are online at the SBL site (see Saturday's post for the link - I don't have the time to put links in now). Rasimus passed out a detailed handout and So gave us his whole paper. I have both in front of me and, herewith, some friendly, polemical comments that I also made, more or less, in the session.

1. The Nag Hammadi texts (and all Gnostic texts) were transmitted by Christians in the form we have them. The burden of proof lies on anyone who wishes to assert that we need to move backwards to a pre-Christian (in these cases, Jewish) origin for any of the documents. Bob Kraft has made this point in his paper "The Pseudepigrapha in Christianity," and I have developed it further in my online essay "Jewish Pseudepigrapha and Christian Apocrypha: (How) Can We Tell Them Apart?." The latter is an early draft of a chapter of the book I'm writing on Christian transmission of Jewish Pseudepigrapha. You can find both by going to the links section to the right, clicking on the "Courses Online" link, then clicking on the link to my Old Testament Pseudepigrapha site. Again, I don't have time to put in the links myself right now.

2. "Heresy" in ancient Judaism, insofar as we can use the term at all, revolved around disagreements about ritual praxis rather than about beliefs or theology. By and large, ancient Jews argued about praxis, not beliefs.

3. The biblical demiurge myth has profound implications for Jewish ethnic/national identity issues and issue of halakhah, Torah observance, and ritual purity and praxis. These issues are entirely ignored, not only in the Apocalypse of Adam, but in the corpus of Gnostic texts as a whole. This is a very serious problem for anyone who wishes to assert a Jewish origin for Gnosticism.

4. The ApocAdam has elements that can be read most naturally as Christian: a suffering redeemer, baptism, and even (if memory serves - I don't have the text in front of me) a play on the name "Jesus of Nazareth" near the end: Yesseus Nazareus or Mazareus or the like. It is possible to find ways to read these in ways not involving Christianity, but this is specious and unnecessary. The ApocAdam makes perfectly good sense as a document by Christians who believed in the biblical demiurgic myth.

5. The paper on ApocAdam cited no Jewish primary sources to support its assertion that the ApocAdam used Jewish sources that could not have been available to Chrisitians. Even if it could be shown that the work uses Jewish midrashic or apocalyptic sources, as it may well have, this proves nothing unless it addresses Jewish issues (such as ethnic identity or halakhah) which were mostly not of interest to Christians.

6. The argument appears to be that Jewish apocalyptic exegetical techniques could only have been used by Jews, since only Jews knew them. But the Jewish apocalypses that have come down to us were transmitted by Christians, not Jews.

7. I believe it was Jack Neusner who said "What we cannot show, we do not know." It applies here. The case for Jewish origins of Gnosticism has not been made and I myself doubt that it can be, given the evidence we have available at present.

I let Dr. So know that I would be blogging on this and I will e-mail him and Dr. Rasimus and invite them to send me any comments in response which they wish me to post.

I spent 45 minutes waiting in line to get to this computer and I don't intend to do that again. More blogging in Cambridge (after this session) depends on a short queue in future. If not, look for me on Saturday. Again, apologies for any hasty typos and half-digested thoughts.