IF YOU WERE DISAPPOINTED to miss hearing about the imaginary Syriac Odes of Isaiah in my IOQS paper last week, do not despair! I have just agreed to give another paper from the same chapter of my book in the British New Testament Conference in Edinburgh at the beginning of September. I will have more time to present this one (45 minutes as opposed to 25 minutes in the IOQS meeting), so I will revert to the original planned paper and talk about the Odes of Isaiah. As usual, I intend to post the oral version of the paper here just before leaving for the conference. Meanwhile, here is the abstract:

The Odes of Isaiah: A Newly Discovered Syriac Pseudepigraphon - A Thought Experiment

Sorry, there isn't really a new pseudepigraphon called the Odes of Isaiah. Rather, this paper 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 Hodayot (as found in the manuscript 1QHa) 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 Isaiah. (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?

The abstract is slightly out of date (e.g., I'll be working with both a Greek extract and a Syriac manuscript) but it gives you the general idea.

Watch this space.