The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context

446 The Aramaic Bible: Targums in their Historical Context
commonly accepted view that it is a work written in the period of the
Second Temple. 50 If we pay attention to the developments of this literature
of lists of prophets, perhaps we can gain insight into the
origins of the Vitae Prophetarum itself.
The Apocryphon of Elijah
I would like to lay before you a final example of the way in whic he
movement of Jewish apocryphal material to the West may be observed
to have taken place. No complete apocryphon of Elijah has survived
from Jewish antiquity, although ancient testimonies to its existence and
fragments quoted from it survive. 51 One intriguing citation is found in
the strange apocryphal Epistula Titi discipuli Pauli de dispositione
sanctimonii. 52 The sole Latin manuscript of this work known is of the
eighth century (Wiirzberg University, Ms Th f28) and it is uncertain
whether the work was composed in Latin or translated into Latin
from Greek, though the latter is judged likely. 53 In it the idea occurs
that sinners in Gehenna are punished by being hung from a limb corresponding
to the sin they committed. Thus, to select some of the less
gory fates: 'Adulterers and pederasts are tortured in their genitals.
Those who hang by their tongues are the blasphemers and false witnesses',
and so forth.
The idea that souls suffer agonies according to their deeds is to be
found in the Byzantine Hebrew apocalypse, Sefer Eliyyahu (ed.
M. Buttenwieser) 15. This is a commonplace, however, and even the
shared association of it with Elijah would scarcely raise an eyebrow,
were it not for the following. An exactly analogous Hebrew text is to
be found in a work we have mentioned before, the Chronicle of
50. D. Satran, The Lives of the Prophets', in Jewish Writings of the Second
Temple Period (ed. M.E. Stone; CRINT; Assen/Philadelphia: van Gorcum/Fortress,
1984), 11.2, pp. 56-60.; idem, Biblical Prophets in Byzantine Palestine.
51. The testimonia and ancient citations of the Elijah apocryphon are assembled in
M.E. Stone and J. Strugnell (eds.), The Books of Elijah, Parts 1 and 2 (Texts and
Translations Pseudepigrapha Series, 5; Missoula: Scholars Press, 1979).
52. The relevant text was first published by D. de Bruyne, Revue Benedictine,
p. 37 (1925), p. 58; it is reprinted and translated in Stone and Strugnell, The Books of
Elijah, pp. 14-15. A previous translation was by A. de Santos Otero in E. Hennecke
and W. Schneemelcher (eds.), New Testament Apocrypha (Philadelphia:
Westminster, 1965), II, pp. 141-43 and 158, n. 1.
53. See Stone and Strugnell (eds.), Books of Elijah, 25, n. 2.