So, these are three ways in which Lied’s book has fundamentally reoriented my view of antiquity and Second Temple literature in particular. I am no longer so sure that we have any stable cases of late-Second Temple voices mourning the loss of the Temple. I am galvanized to check and see just how much of the material reception-history of the pseudepigrapha is in service of Christian supersession, and anti-Judaism, and suspicious that it may be more than we might have imagined. And I am worried about the extent to which the textual stability on which scholars of the ancient world tacitly rely to build our archive is built on particularly vile early-modern attitudes towards our manuscripts’ careful and tireless guardians. In short, I am rethinking much thanks to Lied’s groundbreaking work, and it remains only for me to thank her greatly for it.For previous essays in the AJR forum (SBL 2021 panel) on Liv Ingeborg Lied's book, Invisible Manuscripts, see here and here.
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