IOQS PAPER: Next Tuesday at the International Organization of Qumran Studies conference, I'm scheduled to present a paper entitled "The Odes of Isaiah: A Newly Discovered Syriac Pseudepigraphon � A Thought Experiment." In the interval since the paper was accepted, it has taken a somewhat different turn and it now has a slightly different title and uses a different "newly discovered" document to make the points I want to make. I have now put it online, so, as a special perk only for PaleoJudaica readers (i.e., anyone who reads PaleoJudaica), you can read the oral-presentation version now. Look for my other paper, the one for the International SBL meeting, sometime on Saturday. (I leave for Groningen early Sunday morning.) Here is the slightly revised abstract of the IOQS piece, with a link to the paper itself:

The Apocalypse of Daniel: A Newly Discovered Syriac Pseudepigraphon - A Thought Experiment

Sorry, there isn't really a new pseudepigraphon called the Apocalypse of Daniel. Nor is this paper about the work with the same name published recently by Matthias Henze. Rather, this is a thought experiment to explore in a new way the problem of the transmission of Jewish Old Testament pseudepigrapha in Christian hands and how or to what degree we can hope to know whether such works actually originated in Jewish rather than Christian circles.

The approach is to treat demonstrably (mostly by external criteria) ancient Jewish works as if they had been transmitted as pseudepigrapha in Christian manuscripts, and to explore the implications of the "alternate histories" of these works as analogies for works whose transmission histories cannot now be reconstructed by conventional means. The method is informed by poststructuralist and reader-response concerns; the philosophy of counterfactuals and possible worlds; the exploration of counterfactual histories by science fiction writers and by historians; and some conceptual insights and categories formulated by the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum physics.

This paper postulates an "alternate history" for the Qumran War Scroll (as found in the manuscript 1QM) in which, rather than being abandoned at Qumran, this work was transmitted outside sectarian circles, translated first into Greek and then, into Syriac, thence surviving only in a late antique or early medieval Syriac copy attributed to the prophet Daniel. (One can point to the transmission of the Psalms of Solomon as a partial analogy.) To what degree could we show that this text was originally Jewish, and even sectarian Jewish? What literary-critical, prosodic, and linguistic criteria, if any, would be likely to be helpful in tracing its history of transmission and ultimate origin?

It opens:

This paper is a painfully brief summary of part of the third chapter of a monograph I am currently writing on the problem of Christian transmission of Jewish apocrypha and pseudepigrapha. You see from the handout that I have taken the liberty of changing the title, for reasons I will explain presently. If you were especially hoping to hear about a new Syriac Odes of Isaiah, I apologize for disappointing you. However, assuming you read my abstract or the online version of this paper before coming here, you will already know that there isn't really an Odes of Isaiah and I hope that you will be content instead with an equally imaginary Syriac Apocalypse of Daniel. I assure you that the overall arguments and their connections with the Dead Sea Scrolls remain essentially the same.

As always, feedback or comments are welcome. Do keep in mind that this is a 25 minute summary of a 161 MS-page chapter.

I have published summaries of other parts of the same book-in-progress online as I have presented them at various conferences. There are oral presentations of chapter one, chapter two, and a bit from chapter six. The International SBL paper will summarize chapter four. Please read them as very preliminary and provisional drafts. For more of my conference papers and online book reviews, see the relevant section of the links bar to the right.

UPDATE (24 July): More, including link to promised SBL paper, here.