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Explores the role of orality and oral‐performative tradition in the written literary activities of various scribal communities in Second Temple Judaism. It points out that true literacy was rare among Jews in this period, and was confined to various professional scribal groups associated with the Temple and its governing agencies. Even among scribal groups who created literary works, writing and literary transmission was highly oral in character. Nevertheless, these groups did not radically distinguish oral tradition from the written tradition of books claimed to stem from prophetic revelations. Rather, books were seen to stem from a kind of oral dictation from God to the prophet, as in the Testament of Levi and 4 Ezra, who functioned as a kind of scribe in transmitting the words of a divine or angelic author.

The history of scholarship on the Essenes has been one embedded within a large project to define Judaism at the time of Jesus. This was generally done with underlying assumptions about the continuities between Second Temple and Rabbinic Judaism, and displayed Christian bias, so that the Essenes were considered marginal to a mainstream that stood in continuity with later developments. A new paradigm of Second Temple Judaism allows for a more balanced assessment, with the Essenes placed rightly at the centre.

This chapter explores the good deal we know of the settings, Galilee and Judea, of Jesus’ life and much too of the varieties of Second Temple Judaism that shaped his message and his movement, its social, political, and religious, often apocalyptic, expectations. Not so for Muhammad. The Western Arabian background of his career and prophetic message is unclear to us since contemporary sources are either silent or nonexistent and life of his native Mecca is only uncertainly reconstructed from later sources.

This chapter establishes that most of the sexual ethics of Second Temple Judaism are similar to the ideological sexual codes of the Roman Empire. It examines works as diverse as Tobit, the writings of Philo and Josephus, and the Dead Sea Scrolls. It contends that the dominant sexual ideology among Second Temple Jews is “Procreationism,” which maintains that sex is for reproduction and not for pleasure. Furthermore, it suggests that most of the Jewish literature of the Second Temple period upholds the same hegemonic ideology of the Augustan marriage legislation, except for the writings of the Essenes.

This chapter contrasts the superficial LDS perception of intertestamental Judaism as apostate with the complicated cultural reality of that historical context. It argues that historical narrators should resist borrowing binary generalizations promoted by Victorian “Lives of Jesus” and should craft nuanced narratives that acknowledge cultural complexity and diversity. After reconsidering common LDS assumptions about Jews at the time of Jesus in light of modern scholarship, it suggests ways in which Latter-day Saints can reconceptualize the Jewish world of the New Testament in light of the unique Mormon scriptural tradition.

This final chapter sums up the argument of this book and considers the whole picture of the context of the Dead Sea Scrolls within the world of Second Temple Judaism, which is important as then the Scrolls can be properly situated as cultural artefacts within their own time. It is important, this conclusion states, to define the Essenes accurately because of the confusion as to whether the Scrolls can be attributed to them. The conclusion ends by stating that this book has been just the beginning of other lines of enquiry.

Through a case study of psalms, this chapter shows how the Bible sets the agenda for the study of early Jewish literature, and how removing biblical lenses reveals a new picture of the literary imagination. Conventional wisdom has it that the book of Psalms was the most popular book among the Dead Sea Scrolls and enjoyed great authority in early Judaism. But this is a mirage: the material and literary evidence suggests there is no such thing as the “book of Psalms” in early Judaism. Instead, diverse manuscripts preserve psalmic texts, in various genres, orders, and numbers, revealing practices of collection that cannot always be placed on a linear timeline of “the making of the Bible.” The psalms are not conceptualized as a “book” before the New Testament and rabbinic texts. Instead, they are imagined as an open genre, a heavenly archive only partially reflected in the extant texts. New metaphors suggested by theoretical work in book history—including efforts to describe the unbound textual world of the digital—can help reconceptualize a literary landscape not organized around books, but imagined in terms of overlapping clusters, mosaics of fragments, and expanding archives.

This chapter expands on the teaching of Nostra Aetate by enquiring into the ‘unity of life’ that gives Christianity its proper coherence—not apart from but precisely in dialogue with Judaism. The Church is inseparable from the beliefs, practices, and institutions which constitute ‘Second Temple Judaism’. In an important sense Judaism was, and in many ways still is, determinative of the nature of Christian faith; it is impossible to understand Christianity without some reference to Judaism. This perspective changes our view of Christian origins—or at least of the way they are read in dialogue with Judaism and raises some important questions, not least about the specificity of Christian faith—especially when and how it can be said to have begun. To put the question at its starkest: how can Christians talk about the newness of the New without consigning the Old to some secondary irrelevance?

The Introduction claims that the ancient romance Joseph and Aseneth moves a minor character in Genesis from obscurity to renown, weaving a new story whose main purpose was to intervene in ancient Jewish debates surrounding gentile access to Israel’s God. Aseneth’s story is a tale of the heroine’s transformation from exclusion to inclusion. It is simultaneously a transformative tale. For Second Temple-period thinkers, the epic of the Jewish people recounted in scriptural texts was a story that invited interpretation, interruption, and even intervention. Joseph and Aseneth participates in a broader literary phenomenon in Jewish antiquity wherein authors took up figures from Israel’s mythic past and crafted new stories as a means of explaining their own present and of envisioning collective futures. By incorporating a gentile woman and magnifying Aseneth’s role in Jewish history, Joseph and Aseneth changes the story. Aseneth’s ultimate inclusion makes possible the inclusion of others originally excluded.

Chapter 5 sets Joseph and Aseneth’s intervention in ancient debates about gentile inclusion alongside that of Jubilees and that of the apostle Paul—both of whom also play with the epithet “living God” as they wrestle with questions of gentile access to Israel and Israel’s God. Like Joseph and Aseneth, Jubilees depicts Israel’s “living God” as the creator God, but whereas Joseph and Aseneth exploits the theme of universal creator to universalize (potential) inclusion, Jubilees employs creation imagery to underscore the exclusivity of the relationship between God and (gentile-free) Israel. By contrast, Paul employs the epithet as scriptural warrant for gentile inclusion. Joseph and Aseneth and Paul share a discursive project: to construct a “myth of origins” for gentile inclusion. A comparison of the two myths proves productive for articulating the radical definition of insider identity that Joseph and Aseneth espouses.

Joseph and Aseneth shows us that we need to expand our categories of inclusion if we want to capture accurately the full range of ways in which ancient Jews, including those affiliated with the Jesus Movement, imagined the possibility of gentile access. “Jewishness” was not the only end goal of gentile inclusion and, correspondingly, circumcision was not the only mechanism of accomplishing incorporation. We also miss what is important about Joseph and Aseneth for conversations about shifting Jew-gentile boundaries in antiquity if we focus only on Aseneth’s own movement from the veneration of “idols” to the worship of Israel’s “living God”—that is, if we see her merely as an intended model. For Joseph and Aseneth, the heroine’s acceptance marks a moment in Israel’s story in which God-worshiping gentiles can not only see themselves but see their own mythic protector who mediates God’s mercy to them.

Chapter 1 addresses the disputed date and provenance of Joseph and Aseneth. The question of whether the tale is “Jewish or Christian?” is the central frame in which its provenance has traditionally been sought. Yet, this formulation assumes that “Judaism” and “Christianity” were distinct entities without overlap, when it is now widely acknowledged that they were not easily separable in antiquity. This chapter suggests that the question of whether Joseph and Aseneth is Jewish or gentile is more profitable for contextualizing Aseneth’s tale and offers fresh evidence for historicizing its origins in Judaism of Greco-Roman Egypt. Placing the narrative’s concerns for boundary-regulation alongside the discursive projects of other ancient writers who engaged the story of the patriarch Joseph suggests that the author of Joseph and Aseneth was a participant in an ongoing Hellenistic Jewish interpretive tradition in Egypt that used Joseph’s tale as a platform for marking and maintaining boundaries.

Despite the ubiquitous use of the word ‘apostate’ to malign the Emperor Julian’s religious beliefs—largely based on an uncritical reading of the writings of Gregory of Nazianzus—there has been little effort to evaluate the appropriateness of the charge. This chapter explores one moment in the literary history of the Greek word ‘apostasia’, the Maccabean period of Second Temple Judaism, to suggest that Julian’s religious identity is more nuanced than the emperor’s detractors would have us believe. Raised in a Christian household yet a protector of the Greek and Roman gods—what the emperor described as his commitment to ‘Hellenismos’—Julian, I propose, earned his infamous reputation for acts of accommodation that brought him into conflict with the more rigorous defenders of the faith. Although this development says little about pagan–Christian conflict, it casts new light on social fault lines within fourth-century Christianity.

The divine title “(the) living God” in Joseph and Aseneth is used in conjunction with the narrative’s other language and imagery of “life” and “living” to construct a totalizing paradigm of life-versus-death that initially excludes Aseneth but ultimately, because of her shift in cultic loyalty and subsequent transformation by God, embraces her. Chapter 2 presents manuscript evidence in order to show that each of the earliest families of witnesses to Joseph and Aseneth employs creation language and imagery from Genesis 1–2 LXX to represent Aseneth’s transformation as a re-creation by the life-giving, creator God. Aseneth’s story draws on the inaugural Genesis creation narratives as it constructs an ideology of Israel’s “living God” which allows for, and even hopes for, gentile inclusion in the people of this God.