BMCR Review: Kraft, Exploring the Scripturesque

BMCR BOOK REVIEW:

Robert A. Kraft, Exploring the Scripturesque: Jewish Texts and Their Christian Contexts. Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism, 137. Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2009. Pp. ix, 313. ISBN $147.00. $9789004170100.

Reviewed by David Lincicum, Mansfield College, University of Oxford (david.lincicum@theology.ox.ac.uk)

Preview

Electronic versions of these essays available on Kraft’s homepage.

In this collection of previously published essays, Kraft presents a series of his most significant contributions to the methodological problems and possibilities of investigating Jewish texts that were transmitted, preserved, read and sometimes interpolated by Christian tradents. Part One examines ‘general context and methodology’ in five essays; the remainder of the book is devoted to specific studies of some texts from the so-called ‘pseudepigrapha’ (though Kraft wants to dispute the usefulness of the term), as well as particular problems in the Dialogue of Timothy and Aquila, Pliny the Elder, Philo of Alexandria and Flavius Josephus.

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