AJR on Lied, Invisible Manuscripts (of 2 Baruch)

ANCIENT JEW REVIEW: Lied's Invisible Manuscripts: a Review Forum.

The book that serves as the point of departure for our discussion today is my recently published book, Invisible Manuscripts: Textual Scholarship and the Survival of 2 Baruch (2021), which is available open access via the publisher, Mohr Siebeck.

In Invisible Manuscripts, I explore an omission in scholarship on early Jewish writings in Christian transmission: the general inattention paid to the manuscripts that preserve these writings as cultural artefacts. ...

AJR has also posted the first essay responding to the book:

What Can Manuscripts Tell Us about the Texts They Preserve? A Response to Liv Ingeborg Lied’s Invisible Manuscripts (Matthias Henze).

I consider the scholarly turn to the reception histories of the ancient texts, and especially the new interest in the lives of the manuscripts, the single most significant development in recent decades in the study of the texts that are traditionally called the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha. I have learned a great deal from you, Liv, and from many of our colleagues. Thank you. But I also appreciate where my own thinking and vocabulary have yet to change and evolve further (here I think in particular of New Philology).

My work receives favorable mention in the second essay.

For more on the Syriac manuscript Codex Ambrosianus B.21, which contains the only complete manuscript of 2 Baruch, see here (with photos of a facsimile of the first page of 2 Baruch) and here (with photos of the original manuscript in Milan and of Professor Lied and others, including me), and here.

For some other PaleoJudaica posts on 2 Baruch, notably links to Phil Long's blog series on the book at Reading Acts, see here and here and links, plus here.

I have linked to Liv's blog posts on 2 Baruch here and here, and on Codex Ambrosianus B.21 here, here, and here.

I have presented the case for the Jewish provenance of 2 Baruch in my book, The Provenance of the Pseudepigrapha (Brill, 2005), pp. 126-131. I argue that 2 Baruch promotes Torah observance, a Jewish ethnic identity, and a Jewish (and distinctly not Christian) concept of the Messiah. I have not yet seen Liv's book, so I don't know if she has replied to my arguments.

Cross-file under Old Testament Pseudepigrapha Watch.

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