Friday, June 10, 2005

THE JOURNAL FOR THE STUDY OF THE PSEUDEPIGRAPHA has a new issue out (14.3 -- May 2005). Here's the table of contents [NOTE: History Carnival readers, please note the update at the end of this post]:
Daniel M. Gurtner
The �House of the Veil� in Sirach 50
Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 2005 14: 187-200.

Timo Nisula
�Time has passed since you sent your letter�: Letter Phraseology in 1 and 2 Maccabees
Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 2005 14: 201-222.

David Rothstein
Joseph as Pedagogue: Biblical Precedents for the Depiction of Joseph in Aramaic Levi (4Q213)
Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 2005 14: 223-229.

Alexander Toepel
Planetary Demons in Early Jewish Literature
Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 2005 14: 231-238.

Jonathan von Kodar
Book Review: The Medieval Popular Bible: Expansions of Genesis in the Middle Ages
Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 2005 14: 239-243.

John J. Collins
Book Review: Book III of the Sibylline Oracles and its Social Setting, with an Introduction, Translation and Commentary
Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 2005 14: 243.

Lorenzo DiTommaso
Book Review: A History of Biblical Interpretation. I. The Ancient Period
Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 2005 14: 244-246.

Requires a paid personal or institutional subscription to download the articles.

It happens that just this morning I got the good news that my article "(How) Can We Tell if a Greek Apocryphon or Pseudepigraphon Has Been Translated from Hebrew or Aramaic?" has been accepted by this journal. You can read an early conference-paper version of it here.

UPDATE: Further to the above, I've been meaning to comment on Ed Cook's post regarding Maurice Casey's attempts at retroverting Greek passages from Mark into their original Aramaic. Ed writes:
I've been reading Maurice Casey's Aramaic Sources of Mark's Gospel, and so far (I haven't read much) it's good, especially on the methodological side.

I think Casey's methodology is weak. His discussions of translation theory and bilingualism don't feed directly into the rest of the book in any way that is clear to me. And he neglects or ignores a considerable secondary literature on problems with retroversion of Hebrew and Aramaic from Greek (Beyer, Maloney, Martin, Fitzmyer, Barr, Tov, Wright, etc.). Some of them are discussed in the conference-paper link above. Casey approaches the issue as though retroversion problems always have one solution, which is by no means the case. He has created some possible solutions to some retroversion problems, but how much his reconstructions represent Mark's actual Aramaic sources is debatable. Retroversion of substantial passages in Hebrew or Aramaic from a Greek source (as opposed to establishing that there was Semitic interference in the Greek) is inherently problematic and I am skeptical that it can be done with any hope of accuracy. For a long treatment of the whole issue, including a discussion of Casey's work, see my forthcoming JSP piece.

UPDATE (15 June): Welcome, readers of History Carnival #10! For lots more on the Old Testament pseudepigrapha, see this post. And note also the list of Memorable PaleoJudaica Posts on my links page, most of which have something to do with history.

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