The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context

434 The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context
of the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia, which was closely connected
with the Crusaders in the East. There is also a good deal of evidence
for some Armenian presence in Europe in the Middle Ages. 7 Despite
this, I wonder whether Heist has traced the document back to its very
origins; it may still incorporate older Jewish material.
Conceptually the document can be compared with ideas to be found
in apocalyptic literature, in rabbinic texts, as well as in Christian
sources. A schematic enumeration of signs or portents, occurring in a
fixed number of temporal divisions and preceding the last judgment, is
in itself not surprising: 2 Baruch 27-29 and b. Sank. fol. 97a provide
good ancient parallels. The Apocalypse of Thomas, considered by
Heist to be an indirect source of our text, speaks of a week which will
comprise seven signs before the ending of the world. However, no
ancient parallels were discovered to the idea that the signs of the end
will be distributed over a period of fifteen days.
This complexity serves to alert us to the fact that the channels of
communication between the Eastern traditions, including the Greek,
and the Western traditions, including the Irish, are very convoluted,
certainly as far as the transmission of pseudepigraphical materials is
concerned. 8 If indeed the Signs of the Judgment is an Irish composition,
dependent on the oriental Apocalypse of Thomas, a work not
preserved in Ireland nor (apparently) known on the Continent, then it
moved back to the East at some point, embellished with an attribution
to a Jewish source, and was translated into Armenian. As for the
Hebrew version, there is a sense in which it can be regarded as part of
the European tradition, but it is nonetheless an excellent example of
the way such material can wander.
Here, a careful study of the channels of transmission of the Signs of
the Judgment has shown that a text attributed to 'the Jews' or the
annales hebraeorum, may not be what it claims. Pseudepigrapha
scholars with an understandable interest in discovering ancient Jewish
documents have often naively wrested works from their mediaeval
7. The Cilician kingdom is discussed in many studies: a convenient overall
treatment is G. Dede"yan, Histoire des Armeniens (Privat: Toulouse, 1986), pp. 297-
339; on Armenians in Europe in the Middle Ages, see idem, 'Les Arme'niens en
Occident fin Xe-de"but Xle siecle', in Occident et Orient au Xe siecle (Paris: Les
Belles Lettres, 1979), pp. 123-43.
8. See n. 1, above, for some views concerning transmission of such material to
Ireland.