The first scholar to offer a reconstruction of Jewish religion based pri-
marily on the Pseudepigrapha was Wilhelm Bousset, whoseReligion des
Judentums im neutestamentlichen Zeitalterfirst appeared in 1903. It was
greeted by a storm of criticism from Jewish scholars (Wiese 2005: 159-215).
Bousset’s view of Judaism was more differentiated than that of Schürer. In
addition to the legalistic aspect of Pharisaism, he also detected a universal-
istic strand on which the teaching of Jesus could build. Some of his Jewish
critics objected to “this dogmatic reduction of Judaism to a ‘praeparatio
evangelica’ ” (Wiese 2005: 180). But there was also a fundamental disagree-
ment on the question of appropriate sources. Felix Perles praised Bousset’s
treatment of the piety of apocalyptic and Hellenistic Judaism but objected
to the prominence accorded to this material and the lack of a systematic
description of “normative Judaism,” as represented by rabbinic literature.
Bousset, he claimed, had missed the “center of the Jewish religion” (Perles
1903: 22-23; Wiese 2005: 181). Bousset responded that one must differenti-
ate between “the scholarship of the scribes,” which became normative after
70 c.e., and the more diverse “popular piety” of the earlier period, and he
charged that Perles was “incapable of understanding the richer and more
diverse life of Jewish popular religion before the destruction of the Jewish
nation, because he is focused on the Mishnah and the Talmud and the en-
tire later history of the scribes” (Bousset 1903b; Wiese 2005: 186). Few
scholars would now accept Bousset’s characterization of the Pseudepigra-
pha as “popular religion” without qualification, but the issue of the rele-
vance of rabbinic literature for the Second Temple period persists as a live
issue down to the present.
R. H. Charles, the scholar who did most to advance the study of the
Pseudepigrapha, did not attempt a comprehensive study of ancient Juda-
ism. While his own work focused largely on the apocalypses, he held that
“Apocalyptic Judaism and legalistic Judaism were not in pre-Christian
times essentially antagonistic. Fundamentally their origin was the same.
Both started with the unreserved recognition of the supremacy of the Law”
(Charles 1913: vii). Charles viewed the apocalyptic material positively, as a
bridge between the prophets and early Christianity. His view of Judaism in
this period as comprising two main strands is one of the major paradigms
that has been adapted with various nuances in later scholarship (see
VanderKam in Boccaccini and Collins 2007).
Perles’s criticisms of Bousset were echoed almost two decades later by
the American Christian scholar, George Foote Moore:5Early Judaism in Modern ScholarshipEERDMANS -- Early Judaism (Collins and Harlow) final text
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