Old Testament Pseudepigrapha Blog: a weblog created for DI4716, a course on the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha at the Divinity School of the University of St Andrews. By Jim Davila and Grant Macaskill.
This blog (or weblog) is ancillary to a one-semester undergraduate course (DI4716) that we are teaching in 2007 at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. Our names are Dr. Jim Davila, Reader in Early Jewish Studies and Dr. Grant Macaskill, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow. This course (or “module,” as they say in the British system) explores the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, a loose collection of ancient quasi-Biblical writings fictionally attributed to biblical characters or set in the Old Testament period but rejected from the mainstream scriptural canons of both Judaism and Christianity. We shall study the orthodox and heretical interests and concerns of these documents; the reasons for their exclusion from the major canons; the problem of sorting out who wrote and edited them, when, and why; and the influence of these works after antiquity. The focus this year will be on texts preserved in exotic ancient church languages including Coptic, Ethiopic, Latin, Slavonic, and Syriac, but all texts will be read in English translation and no knowledge of any ancient languages is required or assumed (…) The blog opens on 9 February 2007 and will close sometime in May.