THE SBL PSEUDEPIGRAPHA SECTION'S PROGRAM for the November 2006 meeting in Washington D.C. has not yet been published, but Pierluigi Piovanelli has kindly sent me an abstract of the paper he will be presenting in the session on my book. Here it is:

In Praise of "The Default Position," or Reassessing the Christian Reception of the Jewish Pseudepigraphic Heritage

It is well known that many ancient Jewish Pseudepigrapha have been preserved in their integrality only through secondary versions and Christian late antique and medieval manuscript traditions. Building on such evidence, a large majority of specialists of Second Temple literature is still eager to identify newly discovered parabiblical narratives bearing no explicit Christian signatures with new Jewish Pseudepigrapha. However, during the last two decades some authoritative voices - Marinus de Jonge, Robert A. Kraft, and Enrico Norelli, to mention just few of them - have begun to argue that early Christian authors could have written at least some of those texts. In the same vein, James R. Davila's new monograph on The Provenance of the Pseudepigrapha (2005) provides us with a useful survey not only of Christian "Old Testament Pseudepigrapha That Appear to Be Jewish" (Ch. 2) but also of "Pseudepigrapha of Debatable Origin" (Ch. 4) that were previously deemed to be Jewish but that probably are of Christian origins. The plausibility of such a paradigmatic shift is independently confirmed by the major changes that another great specialist of Second Temple Judaism, George W. E. Nickelsburg, has just introduced into the revised and expanded edition of his 1981 masterful introduction to Jewish Literature between the Bible and the Mishnah (2005). In this new edition, some Pseudepigrapha are now relegated into a newly created limbo of "Texts of Disputed Provenance" (Ch. 9), while others are purely and simply omitted. Following the same line of thought, I will discuss some examples of Jewish Pseudepigrapha copied and translated by Christian scribes (the so-called Coptic Jeremiah Apocryphon), Christian rewritings of Jewish Pseudepigrapha (the Paraleipomena of Jeremiah), and Christian original compositions (the Melchizedek Story). This new approach will help us to emphasize the natural continuity existing between ancient Jewish and early Christian pseudepigraphic trajectories.

Pierluigi Piovanelli
University of Ottawa

Pierluigi is translating the Coptic Jeremiah Apocryphon and the Story of Melchizedek for our More Old Testament Pseudepigrapha Project. The session looks promising.