Jesus Remembered: Christianity in the Making, vol. 1

§9.3 The Historical Context
(3) The difficulty of drawing firm lines between literary evidence from
within the land of Israel and that from the diaspora is well illustrated by the wisdom
literature. It is striking nonetheless that the only two which can be said to
have originated in Hebrew (ben Sira and Baruch) both make a point of focusing
universal divine wisdom explicitly in the Torah (Sir. 24.23; Bar. 4.1). Of the stories
of Jewish heroes and heroines which must have fed popular piety wherever
they were read, we might note how consistently they were portrayed as prospering
precisely because of their loyalty to the food laws and refusal to eat the food
of Gentiles. 97
Of other relevant pseudepigrapha there are two which deserve special mention.
The first is Jubilees, a reworking of Genesis and the early chapters of Exodus,
and clearly designed to promote more rigorous obedience to the stipulations
of the Torah. It probably comes from the early Maccabean-Hasmonean period,
and is now generally regarded as a precursor of the Qumran Essenes. The second
is the Psalms of Solomon: written in the aftermath of the Roman conquest of Jerusalem
(63 BCE), it wrestles with the consequent problem of theodicy — how to
square recent events with God's choice of Israel.
A major problem for us with all these documents is the question of how
representative and influential they were. Although we know, for example, that
portions of the Enoch corpus were evidently prized at Qumran and can see in CD
16.2-4 an allusion to Jubilees, we cannot deduce from this that they speak for
significant groupings within first-century Judaism. After all, an apocalypse could
have been the work of a single person and not speak for any party. At the opposite
extreme it would be equally unwise to list them all as expressive of disparate
Judaisms without any overlap or commonality. Just as it would be inadmissible
as a procedure to identify each document with a single community, as though no
sub-group could happily express the richness of its own communal selfperception
through several different writings. 98 In particular, the breadth of the
appeal of wisdom and heroic literature surely prevents us from seeing it as representative
of disparate Judaisms. Frustrating though our lack of information may
be here, then, we must be content to let these writings illuminate facets of Second
Temple Judaism without imposing a systematised coherence or grand
schema of our own.
97. Dan. 1.3-16; 10.3; Tob. 1.10-13; Jdt. 12.2, 6-9, 19; Add. Esth. 14.17; 1 Mace. 1.62-
63; Jos. Asen. 7.1; 8.5.
98. We have already observed this as a fallacy to which several NT scholars commit
themselves, e.g., in hypothesizing a distinctive (and distinctively) Q community (see above
§§7,4b and 8.6d).
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