fore stems from a non-Christian Jewish tradition (e.g., many parts ofTe s-
taments of the Twelve Patriarchs).
Nevertheless, when non-Christian Jewish and Christian traditions
have come together in a composition, scholarship in recent years has be-
gun to shift from the assumption that a Jewish source has been reworked
by Christians to a default view that attributes the essential form of the doc-
ument to Christians who were inspired by Jewish traditions. Such a shift
has been noticeable in recent treatments ofTestaments of the Twelve Patri-
archs(de Jonge, in numerous works from 1953 to 2003),Ascension of Isaiah
(Norelli 1995),Lives of the Prophets(Satran 1995),3 Baruch(Harlow 1996),
andJoseph and Aseneth(Kraemer 1998; Nir 2012). A methodological corol-
lary to this shift is that, when the earliest evidence for such documents ex-
ists in Christian manuscripts, it is these Christian contexts that should
provide the point of departure for study and analysis (Kraft 2001; Davila
2005). With regard to Early or Second Temple Judaism, then, it becomes
crucial to identify and make use of criteria which might (or might not) as-
sist in determining the extent to which pseudepigraphal writings origi-
nated among Jewish (or Jewish-Christian) groups. Scholars will continue
to debate about how far each of these writings can be classified in precisely
the ways outlined above. However, the different possibilities listed here il-
lustrate (a) the complexities students of the materials face when attempt-
ing to determine their date and religious provenience, (b) the occasionally
stark differences between Jewish and Christian tradition, and yet (c) how
similar and, indeed, often indistinguishable, Jewish, Jewish-Christian, and
non–Jewish-Christian traditions could be.Conclusion
Today the terms “Apocrypha” and “Pseudepigrapha” refer to collections of
writings of which many do not strictly reflect the literal meaning of these
terms. The Apocrypha (or, for Roman Catholicism, Deuterocanonicals) is
a fluid collection if one compares the lists of them among the different ec-
clesiastical traditions. However, within each ecclesiastical tradition, their
identification has been remarkably stable. These writings may be confi-
dently regarded as Jewish in origin; in addition, they all date to before the
Bar Kokhba Revolt (132-135c.e.) and, except for4 Ezra,were all originally
composed before the destruction of the Second Temple (70c.e.). At the
same time, the free use of the term “apocryphon” for a number of docu-200loren t. stuckenbruckEERDMANS -- Early Judaism (Collins and Harlow) final text
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