R. H. Charles: A Biography (The Bible and the Humanities) 9780192869289, 0192869280

Table of contents :
Cover
R. H. Charles: A Biography
Copyright
Table of Contents
Preface
Why Write a Biography of R. H. Charles? Charles in Context
Developments in Scholarship on the Bible
Developments in Germany
Other Factors
Developments in Great Britain
Charles’s Scholarship
PART 1. THE EARLY YEARS (1855–1890)
Family
Early Education
Trinity College, Dublin
Ecclesiastical Service
A Year in Germany
PART 2. THE OXFORD YEARS (1890–1913)
Introduction
The University of Oxford
British Biblical Scholarship in the Late Nineteenth Century
Chapter 1. The Book of Enoch
Contents of the Book of Enoch
The Context for Charles’s 1893 Volume on Enoch
The Book
Reviews
The Context for Charles’s 1906 Volume on Enoch
The Book
Reviews
Legacy
The Context for Charles’s 1912 Volume on Enoch
The Book
Reviews
Legacy
Chapter 2. The Book of Jubilees
The Contents of the Book of Jubilees
The Context for Charles’s 1893–95 Translation and 1895 Volume
The Book
Reviews
The Context for Charles’s 1902 Volume on Jubilees
The Book
Reviews
Legacy
Chapter 3. 2 (Slavonic) Enoch
The Contents of Slavonic Enoch
The Context for Charles’s Volume on the Slavonic Enoch
The Book
Reviews
Legacy
Additional Note
Chapter 4. 2 (Syriac Apocalypse of) Baruch
The Contents of 2 Baruch
The Context for Charles’s Volume on 2 Baruch
The Book
Reviews
Legacy
Chapter 5. The Assumption of Moses
The Contents of the Assumption of Moses
The Context for Charles’s Volume on the Assumption of Moses
The Book
Reviews
Legacy
Chapter 6. Recognition and Syntheses 1898–1899
Appointments and Recognitions
Syntheses
The Context for Charles’s 1899 Book on Eschatology
The Book
Reviews
Chapter 7. The Ascension of Isaiah
The Contents of the Ascension of Isaiah
The Context for Charles’s Volume on the Ascension of Isaiah
The Book
Reviews
Legacy
Chapter 8. More Honors and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs 1901–1908
Appointments and Honors
The Contents of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs
The Context for Charles’s Articles and Volumes on the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs
The 1899 Article
The 1902 Article
The 1904–05 Article
The 1907 Article
The Books
Reviews
Legacy
Charles’s 1908 Article
Chapter 9. The Last Oxford Years 1909–1913 and The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament
Appointments and Lectures
Publications
Fragments of a Zadokite Work (1912)
The Contents of the Fragments of a Zadokite Work
The Context for Charles’s Volume on the Fragments of a Zadokite Work
The Book
Reviews
Legacy
The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament
The Context for Charles’s Volumes on the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha
The Book
Reviews
Legacy
Chapter 10. The Book of Daniel
The Context for Charles’s 1913 Volume on Daniel
The Book
Review
Charles’s 1929 Volume on Daniel
Reviews
Legacy
Postscript
PART 3. THE WESTMINSTER YEARS (1913–1931)
Chapter 1. Return to Priestly Service
Appointment as Canon
Westminster Abbey and Its Canons
Charles’s Early Days as Canon
Charles’s Volumes of Sermons
Theological Perspective
Charles’s Sermons
Sermon Traits
Sermon Themes
Westminster Activities
Chapter 2. The Topical Books
Books Regarding Divorce
The Context for Charles’s Volumes on Divorce
The 1921 Book
Reviews
The 1927 Book
The Gambling Book
Chapter 3. The Book of Revelation
The 1913 Book
The 1920 Book
Reviews
The 1922 Book
Legacy
Chapter 4. Scholarly Work 1914–1915
The 1914 Book
Reviews
A 1915 Introduction
Chapter 5. The Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu
The Content of the Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu
The Context for the 1916 Volume
The Book
Reviews
Legacy
Chapter 6. The Ten Commandments
The Book
Reviews
Chapter 7. The End of His Days
Health Issues
Death
Disposition of Papers and Payment of Royalties
Donations to Ripon Hall
Bibliography of the Works of R. H. Charles
Bibliography of Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

R. H. Charles: A Biography

THE BIBLE AND THE HUMANITIES General Editors

HINDY NAJMAN ELIZABETH SOLOPOVA KIRK WETTERS This series consists of scholarly monographs that re-integrate Biblical Studies into the Humanities by encouraging channels of communication from Biblical Studies into other Humanistic disciplines, and by bringing current theoretical developments to bear on biblical texts and traditions.

R. H. Charles A Biography JAMES C. VANDERKAM

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © James C. VanderKam 2023 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2023 Impression: 1 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2022947944 ISBN 978–0–19–286928–9 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192869289.001.0001 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

Table of Contents Preface

ix

Why Write a Biography of R. H. Charles?: Charles in Context

1

PART 1. THE EARLY YEARS (1855–1890) Family Early Education Trinity College, Dublin Ecclesiastical Service A Year in Germany

13 15 16 21 30

P A R T 2 . T H E OX F O R D YE A R S ( 1 8 9 0– 1 9 1 3 ) Introduction

37

The University of Oxford British Biblical Scholarship in the Late Nineteenth Century

37 40

Chapter 1. The Book of Enoch Contents of the Book of Enoch The Context for Charles’s 1893 Volume on Enoch The Book Reviews The Context for Charles’s 1906 Volume on Enoch The Book Reviews Legacy The Context for Charles’s 1912 Volume on Enoch The Book Reviews Legacy

Chapter 2. The Book of Jubilees The Contents of the Book of Jubilees The Context for Charles’s 1893–95 Translation and 1895 Volume The Book Reviews The Context for Charles’s 1902 Volume on Jubilees

46 46 47 50 65 69 74 77 78 79 80 86 88

91 93 93 106 112 116

vi    The Book Reviews Legacy

Chapter 3. 2 (Slavonic) Enoch The Contents of Slavonic Enoch The Context for Charles’s Volume on the Slavonic Enoch The Book Reviews Legacy Additional Note

Chapter 4. 2 (Syriac Apocalypse of ) Baruch The Contents of 2 Baruch The Context for Charles’s Volume on 2 Baruch The Book Reviews Legacy

Chapter 5. The Assumption of Moses The Contents of the Assumption of Moses The Context for Charles’s Volume on the Assumption of Moses The Book Reviews Legacy

Chapter 6. Recognition and Syntheses 1898–1899 Appointments and Recognitions Syntheses The Context for Charles’s 1899 Book on Eschatology The Book Reviews

Chapter 7. The Ascension of Isaiah The Contents of the Ascension of Isaiah The Context for Charles’s Volume on the Ascension of Isaiah The Book Reviews Legacy

Chapter 8. More Honors and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs 1901–1908 Appointments and Honors The Contents of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs The Context for Charles’s Articles and Volumes on the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs The 1899 Article

117 128 130

131 131 132 133 140 147 149

151 152 153 153 164 166

168 168 169 169 184 185

189 189 192 201 202 218

221 221 222 225 232 234

238 239 246 247 251

   The 1902 Article The 1904–05 Article The 1907 Article The Books Reviews Legacy Charles’s 1908 Article

Chapter 9. The Last Oxford Years 1909–1913 and The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament Appointments and Lectures Publications Fragments of a Zadokite Work (1912) The Contents of the Fragments of a Zadokite Work The Context for Charles’s Volume on the Fragments of a Zadokite Work The Book Reviews Legacy The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament The Context for Charles’s Volumes on the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha The Book Reviews Legacy

Chapter 10. The Book of Daniel The Context for Charles’s 1913 Volume on Daniel The Book Review Charles’s 1929 Volume on Daniel Reviews Legacy Postscript

vii 251 255 257 260 278 285 287

290 290 292 303 303 304 306 314 315 318 319 322 328 331

334 334 335 339 340 355 358 359

PART 3. THE WESTMINSTER YEARS (1913–1931) Chapter 1. Return to Priestly Service Appointment as Canon Westminster Abbey and Its Canons Charles’s Early Days as Canon Charles’s Volumes of Sermons Theological Perspective Charles’s Sermons Sermon Traits Sermon Themes Westminster Activities

365 365 367 369 372 377 382 382 387 395

viii

  

Chapter 2. The Topical Books Books Regarding Divorce The Context for Charles’s Volumes on Divorce The 1921 Book Reviews The 1927 Book The Gambling Book

Chapter 3. The Book of Revelation The 1913 Book The 1920 Book Reviews The 1922 Book Legacy

Chapter 4. Scholarly Work 1914–1915 The 1914 Book Reviews A 1915 Introduction

Chapter 5. The Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu The Content of the Chronicle of John, Bishop of Nikiu The Context for the 1916 Volume The Book Reviews Legacy

Chapter 6. The Ten Commandments

402 402 402 406 416 423 429

435 436 452 467 472 481

483 483 496 498

500 500 503 506 510 512

514

The Book Reviews

514 533

Chapter 7. The End of His Days

536

Health Issues Death Disposition of Papers and Payment of Royalties Donations to Ripon Hall

Bibliographies Bibliography of the Works of R. H. Charles Bibliography of Works Cited Index

536 538 540 543

547 553 571

Preface In the early 1970s when I began studying the Jewish literature composed from approximately 200 .. to 70 ..,¹ it was obvious that Robert Henry Charles (he always gave his name as R. H. Charles) was an extremely important scholar in the field. For many years the primary resource for annotated English translations of texts from that ancient time was the two-volume collection that he edited and to which he was the primary contributor, The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (1913). The opening paragraph of his Preface speaks about the role and timing of the publication (iii): For students both of the Old and New Testaments the value of the nonCanonical Jewish literature from 200 .. to .. 100 is practically recognized on every side alike by Jewish and Christian scholars. But hitherto no attempt has been made to issue an edition of this literature as a whole in English. Indeed, such an undertaking would have been all but impossible at an earlier date, seeing that critical editions of some of the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha have not been published till within the last few years.

Perhaps modesty prevented him from adding that he was the one who had researched and prepared many of those more recently available editions so that, in large part, it was because of him that the time for a work such as The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament had arrived. The prominence of this man as a scholar of early Jewish literature and the fact that he had edited the texts of and had written major commentaries on the two books that had most strongly attracted my attention—1 Enoch and Jubilees—sparked a wish to learn more about him and his work. Over the years I have had many opportunities to use both the two-volume collection and Charles’s separate editions and translations of pseudepigraphic works along with the thematic books he wrote about these ancient writings. I read what little information I could find regarding his life and even wrote a short entry about him in John H. Hayes, editor, Dictionary of Biblical Interpretation ¹ In expressing ancient dates, I have chosen for the sake of convenience to follow Charles’s practice of using .. and .. rather than BCE and CE as in much academic writing today.

x

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(2 volumes; Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1999) 1.176. The evidence I collected indicated that he was a different person than the one I had imagined and that his life had taken an unexpected course for such a renowned scholar. As it turns out, he was not only an energetic student of Jewish antiquity but also a churchman of considerable standing who used his pulpit to preach the scriptures and address contemporary issues. Recently I read what Robert A. Caro, the well-known author of the massive biography The Years of Lyndon Johnson (four volumes and counting), wrote about being overwhelmed by his task when first walking into the Lyndon Johnson Library in Austin, Texas. There he found four floors filled with boxes, some 40,000 of them, each containing on average 800 pages, totaling about 32,000,000 in all.² When I started to research and write this biography of Charles, I had a vastly different experience. There were his many books and articles, but it seemed that little else was known about his life. I began to fear that what F. C. Burkitt wrote in his obituary of Charles was accurate: “The external life of a scholar can usually be told in a few sentences, and it is true of the Venerable Archdeacon Charles, though, indeed, he saw many kinds of life in his time, and had many interests.”³ Through much exploring and wide reading, however, I have been able to find out considerably more about him than one will find elsewhere. Naturally, the articles about him in the standard biographical reference works and the obituaries commemorating his life provided helpful information, but other sources such as The Times of London, the Oxford University Gazette, and archival records at several places such as Oxford University Press, the University of Oxford, Merton College Oxford, Ripon College Cuddesdon, the British Academy, the National Library of Scotland, and Trinity College, Dublin have added much detail to the biography of this innovative, influential scholar. Far more abundant than the surviving information about his life is his literary legacy. I have read through, studied, and summarized what he wrote and have tried to incorporate the information as smoothly as possible into a chronological framework so that the book is really something of an intellectual biography. It was through his immense contributions to the study of Jewish apocalypses and eschatology that he became so influential both during and after his life. As a result, in the biography his work on texts such as 1 Enoch and Jubilees receives more space than the details of his life.

² Caro, Working: Researching, Interviewing, Writing (New York: Alfred Knopf, 2019). ³ “Robert Henry Charles 1855–1931,” Proceedings of the British Academy 17 (1931) 437.



xi

My interests have dictated to some extent where the focus of the biography lies. Charles wrote two kinds of publications: (1) technical works (editions, translations, commentaries, overviews, thematic studies, and dictionary or encyclopedia articles) and (2) ecclesiastical works (collections of sermons, comments on social issues). The first type embraces the scholarship for which he is justly famous, and which is, admittedly, of greater interest to me. The second, however learned, is of a different sort and of less permanent value—and I doubt that is my opinion alone. I must confess, however, that I warmed to it as the study progressed. Yet, the first kind of publication receives the bulk of attention, although the second is not at all neglected. In dealing with his editions, translations, and commentaries, I have attempted to do four things. 1. summarize each text and locate Charles’s work in the history of scholarship on it 2. summarize his book 3. survey the reviews his book elicited 4. assess how his conclusions have fared since his time. It would have been more difficult to go through the same steps for his overviews or thematic studies, so for them I have summarized his work and searched for reviews. For the ecclesiastical publications, I provide overviews and indicate, if possible, the context in the life of the Church of England in which he wrote them. Another decision should be explained. In several cases Charles wrote two or more studies of the same ancient work. Take 1 Enoch for example. He published his first translation of and commentary on the book in 1893, a critical edition of the text in 1906, and a new translation and commentary in 1912. One option for treating these contributions was to take up each at the appropriate chronological point in his life, but upon reflection I rejected this procedure because it would have presented difficulties that were worth avoiding. A chronological treatment would, it seemed, have involved too much repetition and cross-referencing. In the end, I decided to cover his work on 1 Enoch in the context of the time when he was first writing on it. So, the section about Charles’s work on 1 Enoch is located in the part of the book that treats the year 1893 (Part 2, Chapter 1). I think this approach is better than the chronological one, although in every case his publications in any particular year are also noted, if only by name, at the appropriate places.

xii

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Studying Charles has been immensely rewarding for me, but it has also been valuable to learn much more about the time and setting in which he worked. He did his research when critical biblical scholarship was still at a fairly early stage in Great Britain. In those circumstances, he worked alongside quite a number of experts whose names have lived on and with whom he interacted in various ways (e.g., Samuel Rolles Driver, Thomas Kelly Cheyne). Charles is a sterling example, one might say, of the level scholarship had reached and also of what in hindsight appears to have been a typical but inflated optimism about the results that higher criticism could achieve. I am grateful for the assistance I received from several institutions and individuals in using archival material (the abbreviations in parentheses are the ones used in references to these documents). 1. Oxford University Press (OUP): The file with papers relating to some of Charles’s publications, including his handwritten letters, is used by permission of the Secretary to the Delegates of Oxford University Press. I thank the Archivist, Dr. Martin Maw for his assistance. 2. Oxford University Archives (OUA): I am grateful to Faye McLeod, Keeper of the University Archives, for permission to use records from the Minute Book of the Faculty of Arts—Oriental Languages and the records regarding the DLitt degree awarded to Charles in 1907, and to Anna Petre for her assistance in making the materials available. 3. Merton College Oxford: Information from the College Register (MCR 1.5A) is used by permission of the Warden and Fellows of Merton College Oxford. My thanks are due to Julian Reid, Archivist, and Verity Parkinson, Resource Services and Support Librarian, for their assistance in making it available. 4. Ripon College Cuddesdon (Ripon): The photographs of Charles and one of the chairs that he made and on which he carved inscriptions along with the handwritten letters of Charles and Mrs. Charles to H. D. A. Major are used by permission of Humphrey Southern, Principal. I also thank Jacquie Gunn, Librarian/Archivist, for all of her work in locating these materials. 5. National Library of Scotland (NLS): I purchased a PDF of the file containing the correspondence between T. & T. Clark and Charles which extends from 1923 to 1931 and, in the same file, a few other documents also relating to Charles’s publications with Clark. The Clark letters (from Sir John Clark from 1923 to early 1924, and his son Sir Thomas Clark from 1924–31) are typed, those of Charles are



xiii

handwritten. I thank Sally Harrower, former Manuscript Curator, and Kirsty McHugh, Curator, for their assistance, and for the help rendered by Claire Weatherhead of Bloomsbury in the search for the owners of the file. 6. The British Academy: I have received permission, courtesy of British Academy Archives, to use the Minute Books 1, 3–5 of the Council of the British Academy and to print their photograph of Charles. I thank Karen Syrett, former Archivist, and Sharon Messenger, Archivist, for their assistance in making the materials available. Two graduate students, who demonstrated finely honed research skills, have been extraordinarily helpful in tracking down materials: Elizabeth Stell in Oxford and Kaitlynn Merckling in Edinburgh. I am most grateful to both of them. It would have been a bonus if these materials could have been supplemented by eyewitness accounts from Charles’s acquaintances, but the passage of years has rendered this impossible. When I first began collecting materials on Charles, Professor John R. Bartlett of Trinity College Dublin was kind enough to ask H. F. D. Sparks (1908–1996) to record his memories of Charles for me. Sparks did so in a letter sent via Bartlett and dated April 3, 1989. As he acknowledged, he did not know Charles but had heard him preach in Westminster and later dealt with Charles’s gift of books to Ripon Hall. Sparks, whose letter is cited several times in the biography, is the only person I have found who recalled having some contact with Charles. Let me say thank you once more to my wife Mary who read through the entire manuscript and made typically astute comments about it. I am also grateful to our daughter-in-law Susan VanderKam for generous assistance with tech questions and with her camera. It has been a pleasure to have this book accepted into the series The Bible and the Humanities by the editors, Hindy Najman, Elizabeth Solopova, and Kirk Wetters. Finally, my deep gratitude goes to Thomas Perridge, Jo Spillane, and Sandy Cooke of Oxford University Press for their skillful guidance through the publishing process, and to the staff at Straive, Balasubramanian Shanmugasundaram, Vaishnavi Anantha Subramanyam, Nivedha Vinayagamurthy, and Lesley Harris, for their careful and efficient work in producing the book.

Why Write a Biography of R. H. Charles? Charles in Context R. H. Charles: A Biography surveys the life and work of a scholar who pioneered a new field of study within the humanities. His name is very familiar to experts who work with the literature in that field, now called Early Judaism (roughly 200 .. to 100 ..), but it may not be as well known to others, perhaps not even to some whose scholarship focuses on the Bible. Charles deserves to be known to all who examine the biblical world, whether professionally or more informally, because he not only brought early Jewish apocalyptic texts to people’s attention but also applied what he learned from them to the study of biblical apocalypses and the history of Jewish thought. He worked at a time of fundamental importance in the evolution of biblical scholarship, practiced the new ways of interpretation that were being developed in his time, and engaged in the debates then current in church and state. Charles (1855–1931) is most widely known as the editor of a two-volume work, The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament.¹ The first large volume contains the books in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles that Protestants call the Apocrypha. These books, such as 1–2 Maccabees and the Wisdom of Ben Sira, were fairly familiar in 1913, but the volume offered learned treatments of them in light of the latest textual information. The second volume, Pseudepigrapha, furnished expert introductions to and heavily footnoted translations of the books of Enoch, Jubilees, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, and others. This innovative tome, through which generations of readers became acquainted with early Jewish literature outside of the Bible, contained far more contributions by Charles than by any other scholar, contributions that were somewhat abbreviated forms of his earlier publications on these texts. He was the obvious choice to edit the collection since he was the supreme expert for this extra-biblical literature in the Englishspeaking world. The second volume of The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha ¹ Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913.

R. H. Charles: A Biography. James C. VanderKam, Oxford University Press. © James C. VanderKam 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192869289.003.0001

2

     . . : 

of the Old Testament has been superseded in more recent times, but from 1913 when it was published until the 1980s it was the place to begin (and continue) study of such books. Charles’s scholarly career spanned some forty years, from 1890 to 1931. Those decades were momentous for changes in approaches to the Bible and for archaeological discoveries relevant to it. Knowing something about the setting for Charles’s remarkable scholarly career is vital for appreciating what he accomplished. The following paragraphs provide a very brief sketch of that background, especially as it took shape in Germany and Great Britain. The sketch focuses on changes in biblical scholarship that are the most relevant for understanding Charles’s work.

Developments in Scholarship on the Bible Traditionally in Western Christianity, the Bible had served as a sourcebook for doctrines, as a timeless treasury for the church’s teachings about God, the world, humans, and their relationship with the deity.² There were exceptions, of course, but the concerns of preaching and dogma were valued more highly than other uses to which the Bible might be put. And the Bible, in the form of the Latin Vulgate, was read under the guidance of the creeds and other authoritative statements of the church. It was generally assumed that books in it were written by the people whose names were associated with them and that the stories about ancient Israel and the life of Jesus accurately described what happened. Accordingly, Genesis told how the world began, Moses wrote the Pentateuch (Genesis–Deuteronomy),³ the Old Testament history books described what took place, Jesus performed the miracles attributed to him, and the Old Testament prophecies were fulfilled in him. Centuries before the time of Charles a few learned individuals in Europe brought about a sea change in the focus and forms of scholarship. The Renaissance was characterized by renewed study of ancient Greek and Latin

² Richard Marsden (“Introduction,” in The New Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 2 From 600–1450, ed. Richard Marsden and E. Ann Matter [Cambridge Histories; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012] 2, cf. 10–11) writes that in the monasteries “the Bible was still a bibliotheca [library], to be experienced as a whole, an ineffable synthesis of its many parts.” Changes were to come about in the cathedral schools and in the universities that were arising in the latter centuries of the period covered in the volume Marsden and Matter edited. ³ In a traditional chronology, Moses lived in the 1400s .. (see 1 Kings 6:1).

     . . : 

3

literature and by a greater awareness of the distance separating the present from the ancient world.⁴ One of those learned individuals was Petrarch (1304–74). The historian James Turner characterizes the effects of his work on subsequent humanists as threefold: “(1) policing the purity of contemporary writing (i.e., how closely it mirrored an idealized ancient usage); (2) finding, editing, and appraising ancient texts; and (3) pursuing historical and antiquarian research.”⁵ An early example of applying philological work to a text came from Lorenzo Valla (1407–57) who demonstrated, by studying the language of the document, that the Donation of Constantine was not authentic.⁶ The tools of these early humanists (especially Turner’s numbers 2 and 3) were, in a more developed form, the ones that later served biblical scholars and helped them address the Bible in a new fashion. Moreover, the Protestant reformers, with their tenet of sola Scriptura, directed increased attention to the Hebrew and Greek texts of the Bible, moving to a stage in the transmission of the text that antedated the Vulgate. Emphasizing ancient languages, manuscripts, and texts, and studying the books of the Bible in their historical contexts had, as might be expected, major repercussions for scholarship on the Bible. Closer to the time of Charles, there were more distinctive advances in biblical studies, primarily in Germany. True, a number of independent thinkers in earlier times had detected big problems in the traditional way of reading the Bible. Baruch/Benedict Spinoza (1632–77) and Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) are famous examples. Spinoza thought that much of the books Genesis–2 Kings were post-exilic in date (after 539 ..), at which time they had been written down, possibly by Ezra.⁷ Hobbes pointed out in Leviathan, part III, ch. 33 that Moses could hardly have written about himself words like “no one knows his burial place to this day” (Deuteronomy 34:6). He added that, lest one think this was the only passage in the Pentateuch that Moses did not write or that he received it through prophecy, there were other passages (e.g., Genesis 12:6 and Numbers 21:14) that indicated a time of composition after Moses. He was not able to say when the Pentateuch was written but thought that Moses was author of only part of it. Other books, too, were written later than the lifetimes of those individuals after whom they are named (e.g., Joshua).⁸ ⁴ James Turner, Philology: The Forgotten Origins of the Modern Humanities (The William G. Brown Memorial Series in Higher Education; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014) 34–8. ⁵ Philology, 34. ⁶ Philology, 36. ⁷ For a short summary of his scriptural scholarship, see E. M. Curley, “Spinoza, Benedict (or Baruch) de,” in John H. Hayes, editor, Dictionary of Biblical Interpretation (2 vols.; Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1999) 2.498–9. ⁸ For his comments about the Bible, see John Rogerson, Old Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth Century: England and Germany (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress, 1985) 148–9.

4

     . . : 

At the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, a number of experts were analyzing the biblical text in novel ways and, in part, for different reasons than had been the case before. As they read the scriptural texts in their original languages and examined how they were worded in the oldest and best manuscript copies, they drew new conclusions from them. For instance, the deity of the Old Testament is called Elohim (God) and Yahweh (rendered L in English Bibles), and in some stories that are told twice Elohim figures in one form of it and Yahweh in the other. The narrative of the flood in Genesis 6–9 is the parade example: in it two fully parallel stories, each employing one of the divine names, are intertwined. Among the other parallel units distinguished by their use of Elohim and Yahweh are what appeared to be two creation accounts—Genesis 1 with creation by God in six days followed by a seventh day of rest, and Genesis 2 with creation by the L, partially in a different order and without mention of days. Eventually, as the matter was scrutinized more closely, scholars determined that sources lay behind the Pentateuch—ones identified by which divine name was used as well as by other criteria—that were combined to form the first five books of the Bible. In addition, the book of Deuteronomy was written in a distinctive style, not like that of the other parts. Although these sources were for a time regarded as works used by Moses in writing the initial books of the Bible,⁹ clues in them entailed that they were written and combined later than the lifetime of Moses, that is, Moses was not the author of the Pentateuch. A characteristic of the new way of doing biblical scholarship was examining the text historically, that is, interpreting the different parts of the Bible in the ancient settings in which each writer worked and by which each was influenced. Some experts concluded that the Bible describes developments in religious concepts and practices, from earlier, more primitive kinds to later, more advanced ones. It was not a timeless book setting forth one unchanging system of doctrine. Rather, it should be viewed as a history of God’s revelation, not a revelation per se. The New Testament, too, underwent a different kind of reading. The gospels, for example, came to be seen, not as eyewitness reports of actual events, but as literary works written decades after the time of Jesus and crafted

⁹ An example often mentioned in surveys is Jean Astruc (1684–1766), the title of whose 1753 book Conjectures sur les mémoires originaux don’t il paroît que Moyse se servit pour composer le livre de Genèse (Brussels: Fricx) reveals that he retained Moses as the author of Genesis, although he used “mémoires” in writing it.

     . . : 

5

according to the distinctive viewpoints of the writers, who were not the apostles after whom they were named. The synoptic gospels, with Mark being the earliest and Matthew and Luke using it as well as a shared source called Q (German Quelle = source), received a large amount of attention.¹⁰ It is not so clear that they ever fully succeeded, but critical scholars were moving closer to reading the Bible as one might read any other ancient literary work, say a treatise of Aristotle or a dialogue of Plato. In other words, the same historical, literary, linguistic, and comparative tests could be applied to it as to other literature, without the encumbrances of theological assumptions and ecclesiastical authority. Treating the Bible exactly like other books would have been difficult in the pervasively Christian context of European scholarship, but the aim was there. The differences between the historical-critical and earlier approaches to the Bible were huge.

Developments in Germany The work of a number of German experts could be adduced, but it will serve the present purposes to mention just one. Wilhelm M. L. de Wette (1780–1849) was a scholar who, building on the work of predecessors, developed a comprehensive theory about the Pentateuch in his two-volume Beiträge zur Einleitung in das Alte Testament (1806–1807). John Rogerson says of de Wette’s Beiträge that it is the first work of Old Testament scholarship to use the critical method in order to present a view of the history of Israelite religion that is radically at variance with the view implied in the Old Testament itself. According to the Old Testament, Moses gave to the Israelites a fully-fledged legal system, sacrificial cult, and priesthood. According to de Wette, Moses did nothing of the sort. It is difficult, according to de Wette, to know in detail what Moses gave to the people; what is certain is that the developed legal, sacrificial and ¹⁰ For a succinct overview, see John Hayes, “Biblical Interpretation, History of,” in The New Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, edited by Katharine Doob Sakenfeld (Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 2006) 1.455–61. A controversial publication was David Friedrich Strauss’ Das Leben Jesu kritisch bearbeitet (2 vols.; Tübingen: C. F. Osiander, 1835–36). Strauss denied the possibility of miracles and showed how, given the surviving evidence, one could not write a biography of Jesus (see D. Lange, “Strauss, David Friedrich,” in Hayes, editor, Dictionary of Biblical Interpretation, 2.507–8). For a survey of later nineteenth century developments in Great Britain, see William Baird, “The Establishment of Historical Criticism in Great Britain,” in his History of New Testament Research, vol. 2 From Jonathan Edwards to Rudolf Bultmann (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2003) 54–84 (the chapter is mostly about the Cambridge trio of F. J. A. Hort, J. B. Lightfoot, and B. F. Westcott).

6

     . . :  hierarchic systems are much later than the time of Moses, and that the ascription of these mature systems to Moses is anachronistic, . . . .¹¹

The part of the Pentateuch that describes these systems most fully was the Priestly source which is found in much of the latter half of Exodus, Leviticus, and Numbers. De Wette maintained that 1–2 Chronicles, in which these systems are depicted as present from the time of King David on, were not reliable accounts of Israel’s past, as they were usually understood to be. The priestly systems are absent from the older history books 1 Samuel–2 Kings and are projections from after the exile (ca. 587–39 ..) onto the earlier period. De Wette thought there was no evidence for the kinds of religious systems described in the Pentateuch until the time of King Josiah of Judah (reigned 640–609 ..).¹² As study of the Old Testament progressed, scholars came to the conclusion that, far from being the earliest, as experts had thought, the Priestly source was in fact the latest. The evidence indicated that it was post-exilic in date, that is, later than 539 .. The scholar who defended the thesis most forcefully, thoroughly, and clearly was Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918) whose major works, which built on the research of predecessors, were published in the 1870s–1890s,¹³ thus overlapping with the time when Charles began his work. As Wellhausen argued, the literature from the pre-exilic period of Israel’s national history betrays no evidence of the law as expressed in the Priestly source: “As for the literature which has come down to us from the period of the Kings, it would puzzle the very best intentions to beat up so many as two or three unambiguous allusions to the Law, and these cannot be held to prove anything when one considers, by way of contrast, what Homer was to the Greeks.”¹⁴ He compared what the earliest legal material, Deuteronomy, and the Priestly source said about various topics such as sacrifice, festivals, and the clergy and showed that in each case the Priestly source was the latest. For

¹¹ Old Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth Century, 29. Turner (Philology, 211) comments about the work of de Wette’s predecessors: But none of these eighteenth-century philologists questioned the basic historical accuracy of the Bible narrative. Like earlier readers, they assumed the Old Testament to relate the history of ancient Hebrews pretty much as events had unfolded. . . . A philologist might need to decipher the mythology encoding this history; but the facts were there, much as the Iliad draped with gods and goddesses a real Trojan War. ¹² Old Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth Century, 30–4. ¹³ See Rogerson, Old Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth Century, 257–89. ¹⁴ Cited from Wellhausen, Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel (trans. John Sutherland Black and Allan Menzies; Edinburgh: A. & C. Black, 1885; repr. Meridian Books; Cleveland, OH: World, 1957) 5. Wellhausen’s book was first published in 1878.

     . . : 

7

decades after Wellhausen’s work critical scholars affirmed that four sources, two narrative ones (J and E, letters for the divine names [Yahweh = Jahweh in German, and Elohim (God)] used in them), Deuteronomy (D), and the Priestly source (P)—in that order (JEDP)—were the components from which the Pentateuch was formed. I have highlighted the growing scholarly conviction of how relatively late the Priestly source of the Pentateuch was because determining its date was more than a case of arcane squabbling, although it did produce a lot of squabbling with more conservative folk in Germany. It was significant because it remapped the history of Israelite religion and entailed that the prominence of the law, with its priesthood, Levites, and sacrificial cult, was a very late development, not a structure present from the beginning.¹⁵ Indeed, experts often compared this system unfavorably with the more spontaneous forms of religion found in earlier times and also among the prophets who ministered before the law became dominant. The kind of Judaism that focused on the law was considered to be a devolution from earlier forms, a heavily legalistic and ritualistic system. The thesis of a late law and priestly, ritual system also fed into the anti-Semitism that was a very present factor in the nineteenth century. The literature of the Rabbis, which centered on this law and the tradition of how to read it, came to be viewed as encoding a petrified religion lacking the spontaneity of earlier times and the righteous fervor of the prophets. In Protestant eyes, moreover, the system of post-exilic and Rabbinic Judaism seemed all too reminiscent of the Roman Catholic Church with its priestly hierarchy, ritual, and tradition. As we will see, all of this has significance for understanding the views of the Bible and of ancient Judaism held by Charles and many of his contemporaries.

Other Factors It was not only study of the text itself that brought about a revolution in reading the Scriptures. Another spur to altering the traditional approach was a spate of discoveries made during archaeological excavations in the nineteenth century. Once the cuneiform script was deciphered in midcentury, vast numbers of tablets unearthed in various Mesopotamian sites were published. Famous ones that impinged on the Bible included the Epic ¹⁵ The first sentence in Wellhausen’s Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel asks “ . . . whether the law is the starting-point for the history of ancient Israel, or not rather for that of Judaism” (p. 1).

8

     . . : 

of Gilgamesh, whose eleventh tablet contained a flood story that closely resembled the one(s) in the Bible. The text was demonstrably so ancient that, no matter who wrote Genesis, Moses or later writers, the version of the story in Gilgamesh was older than the biblical parallel and raised challenging questions about it. The results that were being produced by the physical sciences likewise exercised influence on biblical scholarship. The most famous were, naturally, those published by Charles Darwin in On the Origin of Species in 1859. His theses about evolutionary adaptation through natural selection cast doubts on the uniqueness of the human race. It seems as if Darwin’s work, while important and well known, was not as immediately significant for scriptural study as the conclusions reached by geologists about the immense ages that preceded the appearance of humans and how long humans had existed.¹⁶ Such hypotheses directly challenged the chronology that had been derived from the Bible.

Developments in Great Britain Early in the 1800s, some British experts took notice of biblical scholarship in Germany but generally frowned upon it. It is helpful to distinguish two kinds of criticism practiced by modern scholars of the Bible: (1) lower criticism, i.e., comparing manuscript copies of texts and trying to determine the best readings in them, or purely grammatical analyses, and (2) higher criticism, the processes of drawing literary and historical conclusions from the texts. The results of lower criticism were embraced in Great Britain, but the conclusions of higher criticism, were not. As Turner puts it (referring to the first half of the 1800s): For the next half century, Anglophone attitudes toward German biblical criticism careened between admiration and alarm. As a rule, the most competent British and American scholars devoured German philological expertise but choked on any serious revision of inherited biblical orthodoxy. In Eichhorn’s terms, they loved German textual (“lower”) criticism and loathed higher criticism.¹⁷

¹⁶ Rogerson, Old Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth Century, 252–3. ¹⁷ Philology, 214. Johann Gottfried Eichhorn (1752–1827), professor at Göttingen, introduced the term “higher criticism” into the field of biblical studies (211).

     . . : 

9

As time went by, the picture changed. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, more British scholars were adopting at least some of the conclusions reached by the German higher critics. The advance came, however, at a price. The scholars of the Bible in England, Scotland, and Ireland were in almost all cases members of the clergy who had taken vows of ordination to uphold the teachings of their churches. When clergy embraced higher critical theories that challenged such teachings, the authorities pushed back, and large parts of the public did as well. Two prominent examples were John William Colenso (1814–79) and William Robertson Smith (1846–94).¹⁸ Colenso was Bishop of Natal when he wrote The Pentateuch and the Book of Joshua critically examined (it eventually included seven large parts published from 1862–79). With mathematical precision he showed, among many other conclusions, the absurdities to which some biblical numbers led, such as the 600,000 men twenty-years-of-age and above who are supposed to have left Egypt (Exodus 12:37–8; see also 38:26; Numbers 1:46). He was later ousted from his bishopric by South African church authorities. Smith, who had spent time in Germany and was personally acquainted with some of the German critics, believed that reading the Bible in the way of modern criticism was vitally important for maintaining an evangelical faith. He adopted the system of four sources in the Pentateuch, with the Priestly source being the latest. His most famous book was The Old Testament in the Jewish Church (New York, NY: D. Appleton, 1881; 2nd ed. 1892). He was removed from his position in the Free Church College in Aberdeen in 1881 after a lengthy ecclesiastical trial.

Charles’s Scholarship Charles was educated in this environment when a critical approach to the Bible was possibly dangerous but gradually gaining acceptance, if done with prudence. His academic training took place in Ireland, most importantly at Trinity College, Dublin where there were excellent biblical scholars who could teach him contemporary methods of reading the Scriptures (see below Part 1). In his writings it is evident that he accepted the results of higher criticism for ¹⁸ For Colenso, see Rogerson, Old Testament Criticism in the Nineteenth Century, esp. 220–37. For Smith, see Rogerson, The Bible and Criticism in Victorian Britain: Profiles of F.D. Maurice and William Robertson Smith (Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Series 201; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995) 56–179. The controversy that greeted another publication, Essays and Reviews, in 1860 is treated below in Part 2, Introduction.

10      . . :  the Bible and used its methods both on canonical and non-canonical texts. He searched for manuscripts of ancient works and pored over their every word, emended readings in texts, identified sources for and interpolations in them, sought their historical background, and tried to determine their most ancient form. Like so many of his fellow scholars, he was an Anglican priest and thus owed his allegiance to the church and its doctrines. A feature that made Charles stand out from his contemporaries was that he focused the critical tools of biblical scholarship on Jewish texts that were not scriptural, at least they were present in no European Bible. One of the major achievements of biblical criticism, as we have seen, was to date the Priestly source of the Pentateuch to the post-exilic period. A result was that for Protestant scholars, whose Bibles lacked the books of the Apocrypha, the period between the Old and New Testaments, which was already regarded as of little import, came to have even less appeal. It now turned out to be the time when the most detailed Jewish legal material, only recently written, took on normative status. The negative attitude toward such a system in Protestant circles hardly enhanced interest in the “intertestamental” centuries. Thus, the whole period and the Jewish literature written during it attracted little attention, as it was not considered useful for understanding the Bible, especially the New Testament. Charles strongly disagreed. Although he wrote commentaries on the two apocalypses in the Christian Bible, Daniel and Revelation, most of his work was devoted to extra-biblical Jewish apocalypses. He insisted that they were essential for understanding the New Testament. His efforts, encouraged by discoveries of works believed to have been lost, created a new field in biblical scholarship in the English-speaking world, while his influence became international in scope. Charles was the exception for his time but only to a certain extent. Although he worked in excruciating detail with early Jewish literature, he shared the prejudices about Judaism that were prevalent at his time. Charles admired the apocalyptic writings of Jewish authors, but he decried what he considered the legalism that developed in the period and gave rise to Rabbinic literature. Law was acceptable, indeed even valuable, as long as it was coupled, as it was at first, with the more prophetic current, that is, with apocalyptic thinking. Yet, even in this respect, Charles remained a supersessionist. The better side of Judaism, which came to expression in the apocalypses, flowed, on his view, into Christianity where such thinking reached its finest expression. The legal side, detached from apocalypticism, became Rabbinic Judaism which he considered sterile, using a term like “puerilities” for Mishnaic and Talmudic

     . . : 

11

discussions. We will meet this prejudice, not to mention his anti-Catholic bias, on a number of occasions in the chapters that follow. Charles, then, while sharing the scholarly methods and prejudices of his time, innovated by engaging in a lifetime of research into Jewish apocalyptic texts. He demonstrated their importance in and for themselves and for reading the New Testament; in the course of doing so, he made many of the products of that research available to a larger audience. With the work of Charles one can truly say that Jewish apocalyptic literature entered the field of biblical studies in the English-speaking world. And with his publications a new field arose that today has become perhaps the most lively in the wide world of scriptural scholarship.

PART 1

THE E ARLY YEARS (1855 – 1890) Robert Henry Charles was born on August 6, 1855 in Cookstown, County Tyrone, Ireland.

Family Charles was the fifth of seven sons (there were no daughters) in the family of Annie Elizabeth (nee Allen) and David Hughes Charles, a prominent medical doctor. County Tyrone is located in the north of Ireland, and the Charles family were Anglican. “The Charles family had been long settled in Tyrone, seated at Moor Lodge in that county, and took their part in the desperate struggles and sacrifices by which the Ulster Protestants held their own against tremendous odds in the seventeenth century.”¹ The family into which he was born was no ordinary one. His father was an important physician, while his mother too was a resourceful individual. D’Arcy² writes about her that she was “ . . . a woman of strong character, deep religious convictions, and sound judgment. Her influence over her large family of strongwilled sons was one of the most potent forces which directed them in the ways which ultimately led them to lives of noble usefulness.” Two of Robert’s brothers became well known. The oldest of the seven was John James Charles (1845–1912). He followed in his father’s footsteps by going into the medical profession. After studies at various schools, including work abroad in Paris, Bonn, and Berlin, he became a lecturer and demonstrator in Anatomy at Queen’s College, Belfast, and, beginning in 1875, was professor of anatomy and physiology at Queen’s College, Cork. “He published

¹ C. F. D’Arcy, “A Brief Memoir,” in Charles, Courage, Truth, Purity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1931) xiii. ² D’Arcy, “A Brief Memoir,” xiii.

14    ( – ) a good deal on physiological and anatomical subjects, especially on oxygen and other gases of the body, including gaseous products of digestion.”³ The brother who became especially famous was the sixth of the seven in the family, Richard Havelock Charles (1858–1934). He too followed his father by entering the medical profession. He studied at Queen’s College, Cork and took his MD degree from the Royal University of Ireland in 1881. He scored most impressively on the examinations for the Indian Medical Service (IMS), thus paving the way for him to work in the place where he was to spend much of his career. He too studied in several cities overseas (Paris, Vienna, Berlin). During his many years in India, he served in sundry capacities—as the physician in charge of the field hospital for a boundary commission in Afghanistan (1884–86), professor of anatomy and comparative anatomy in Lahore (1886–94), and eventually professor of anatomy in the medical college and surgeon in the College Hospital, Calcutta (1894–1906). Late in this period he became directly associated with British royalty. In 1905–06 he accompanied the prince (the future George VI) and Princess of Wales as they toured India. In the years that followed he received a series of honors. Although he retired from the Indian Medical Service in 1908, he was with King George VI and Queen Mary in 1911–12 when they again traveled through India. For many years (1910–28) he was sergeant-surgeon to the king and became a baronet in 1928. In addition, he reached the rank of major general in the British Indian army. This son of the Charles family also tried his hand at writing. “He published on anatomy—especially of Indian races—in the British Medical Journal and elsewhere, and compiled biographies of IMS officers. He eventually became dean of the London School of Tropical Medicine and was president of the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine; he was also a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, and of the Royal Zoological Society.”⁴ The family was, thus, well represented in the medical profession (two other brothers also became physicians),⁵ and several of its sons had extensive international experience. Robert chose a different profession than most of his brothers, although he had considered medicine in his youth.⁶ Like them, he became very prominent in his field and spent considerable stretches of time outside the British Isles. ³ “Charles, John James,” Dictionary of Irish Biography, edited by J. I. McGuire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); electronic edition (last accessed 1-26-2022). ⁴ “Charles, Sir [Richard] Havelock,” Dictionary of Irish Biography (last accessed 1-26-2022). ⁵ One of the two, T. Cranstoun Charles, became a lecturer in physiology, St. Thomas Hospital, London. In 1925 R. H. Charles would perform the wedding ceremony for his only daughter Eileen, by which time this brother was deceased. See Part 3, Chapter 1. ⁶ D’Arcy, “A Brief Memoir,” xv.



15

Early Education Young Robert’s education began at a private school near where the family lived, but after a time he requested a transfer to the Belfast Academy because of its superior educational offerings. It was at the Belfast Academy that he began studying the classical languages (under an instructor he admired, a Mr. Mayben) and Latin prose composition (under another admired instructor, a Mr. Maxwell). He also discovered that, contrary to his experience to this point, he enjoyed mathematics. D’Arcy⁷ quotes from Charles’s own account: I must under no circumstances omit to mention one of the three or four greatest teachers whom I have known. His name was McNeill and he subsequently became head of Campbell College, Belfast. . . . In my earlier school days I simply abhorred arithmetic. Such being my unhappy experience, I cannot express the delight I felt when, under Mr. McNeill’s guidance, unrivalled in my opinion, I found that I was enthralled by his method of teaching mathematics.

As a result of his own ability and of the fine pedagogy on offer at the school, Charles was a candidate for scholarships in classics and mathematics. He finished in second place in the former and just missed out on the latter. After the Belfast Academy, Charles attended Queen’s College, Belfast where he studied from 1874–80 and to which he won a scholarship. The college was one of three institutions with the name “Queen’s College” set up in Ireland to encourage higher education among Catholics and Presbyterians. The one in Belfast had opened its doors in 1849. Charles entered the school in 1874 and earned two degrees from it—a BA (first-class honors in classics) in 1877 and an MA (first-class honors in classics) in 1880. With a focus on classics, Charles obviously performed extremely well because he won a number of prizes (also a first in economics) and took a First-Class Gold Medal in 1877. His comments about the professor of Greek, Charles MacDouall, will perhaps not surprise those who are familiar with his later publications: He was a grammarian of the first rank. His insight into and teaching on the minutest Greek particles and phrases I have never known rivalled. The bulk of my fellow students were probably bored by MacDouall’s seeming ⁷ D’Arcy, “A Brief Memoir,” xiv. D’Arcy never identifies the place where Charles recorded this and other autobiographical information, although it must have been accessible to him at the time when he wrote “A Brief Memoir” in 1931.

16    ( – ) subtleties. But I have not forgotten to the present day much that I learned at his feet. I have known only one other scholar whom I would place beside this now forgotten Greek linguist as an authority on questions of grammar and linguistic subtlety, and that scholar is Driver in his Studies on the Hebrew Tenses.⁸

Charles was becoming well versed in Latin and Greek and felt he was getting first-rate instruction in them.⁹ Archbishop D’Arcy reports that while Charles was at Queen’s College, he underwent a spiritual crisis that affected the course of his life. In his description of it, he quotes Charles’s own account. It would seem that a deep sense of inward imperfection and need overwhelmed him. Then it was that, under the influence of his mother and also of the Rev. F. Crawford, Rector of the Parish, whose help he acknowledged with gratitude, he resolved to face his trouble with prayer and study. “Some weeks passed,” he wrote, “when on one Sunday afternoon while I was thus engaged, I suddenly heard as it were a voice bidding me arise and walk. The words were not these, nor were they articulate, but their effect was instantaneous. I became a stronger man in every way, spiritual, moral, and mental. It was after this great change in my life that I resolved to take Holy Orders.”¹⁰

It would seem from this account that Charles had a revelatory experience worthy of the ones claimed by the ancient seers he would later study and not unlike the one that transformed St. Augustine’s life.

Trinity College, Dublin The place where his new resolve took concrete form was the most ancient and prestigious institution of higher learning in Ireland, Trinity College, Dublin. ⁸ D’Arcy, “A Brief Memoir,” xv. Driver is Samuel Rolles Driver (1846–1914) whose book A Treatise on the Use of the Tenses in Hebrew first appeared in 1874 and who later (1907) was one of the three editors (with Francis Brown and Charles Briggs) of the famous A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament. Driver and Charles knew each other when both were in Oxford. ⁹ Charles, in December 1922, forty-two years after graduating from Queen’s, made a donation to the school—“a small collection of papers and photographic material . . . consisting mainly of photographs (positive and negative) of original Aramaic, Greek and Ethiopic biblical manuscripts dating from the 10th to the 15th centuries” (Archive description, accessed 9-29-2017). Charles received an honorary DD from the school in 1923. For the gift and the degree, see Part 3 Chapter 1. ¹⁰ D’Arcy, “A Brief Memoir,” xvi.

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The school traced its origins to the late sixteenth century when Queen Elizabeth, responding to a request made in November 1591, authorized establishing the school which was to be called “the College of the Holy and Undivided Trinity near Dublin founded by Queen Elizabeth.”¹¹ It was incorporated on March 3, 1592. Perhaps the greatest of its early scholars was James Ussher (1581–1656), Archbishop of Armagh (thus the primate of the Church of Ireland) and author of the famous The Annals of the World.¹² He had been a student at Trinity and was associated with it in various capacities throughout much of his life.¹³ As the queen had directed, one of the aims of the new college was to offer “education, training and instruction of youths and students in the Arts and Faculties, so that they might be the better assisted in the study of the liberal arts, and in the cultivation of virtue and religion.”¹⁴ There was theological instruction from early on, with Ussher himself perhaps being the first to offer it. The school played a part in training students preparing for ecclesiastical orders in the Church of Ireland—a member of the Anglican communion¹⁵— but at first it had no special unit for theological instruction. Events in the late eighteenth century led to the establishment of a divinity school. “In 1790 the Irish bishops decided to admit to orders only such candidates as had graduated in arts and attended one year’s theological lectures. . . .”¹⁶ Hence a suitable place for educating the candidates was needed. Several decades were to pass, however, before a divinity school came into being. In 1833 the Divinity School course was reconstructed under Dr. Lloyd, Provost, and Dr. C. R. Elrington, Regius Professor, on the lines which, with subsequent modifications and improvements, remain to the present day [written in 1941]. A two-years’ course was established, Archbishop King’s Lecturer,¹⁷ with his Assistants, to conduct the first year, and the Regius ¹¹ Constantia Maxwell, A History of Trinity College Dublin 1591–1892 (Dublin: The University Press, Trinity College, 1946) 5. ¹² It was published in 1658, two years after his death. The work traced a chronology from the creation to the year 70 .. ¹³ Maxwell, A History of Trinity College Dublin 1591–1892, 53–7. ¹⁴ Maxwell, A History of Trinity College Dublin 1591–1892, 5. ¹⁵ The Church of Ireland was the established church until 1871, although the far larger part of the population of Ireland was Catholic. Despite its minority status, as the established church it was long supported by a tithe from the entire population. The last vestiges of the tithe ended with disestablishment in 1871. ¹⁶ Maxwell, A History of Trinity College Dublin 1591–1892, 201. ¹⁷ The position was named after William King, Archbishop of Dublin, who established the lectureship in 1718 when he gave the college funds “to found a Divinity Lecture ‘for the better instruction of such Bachelors of Arts as intended to enter Holy Orders’ ” (J. E. L. Oulton, “The Study of Divinity in Trinity College, Dublin, Since the Foundation,” Hermathena 58 [1941] 13). The position was

18    ( – ) Professor, with his Assistants, the second year. A general examination was to be held at the end of each year, which all students must pass.¹⁸

The changes along with tighter standards greatly improved the program so that the Divinity School came to acquire a very strong reputation. Not long after, it entered “upon the greatest period of its existence, both as regards the personnel of its Staff and the number of students who sought to be trained in it.”¹⁹ The names of faculty members that Oulton mentioned for the latter part of the nineteenth century, the time he called the golden age of the school, were George Salmon, John Gwynn, and John Henry Bernard. Salmon (1819–1904), who had served as Donegal Lecturer in Mathematics, was also a divinity lecturer before becoming Regius Professor of Divinity (1866–88). He published in the area of New Testament studies and on wider theological subjects as well. He became the Provost of Trinity College in 1888 and held the post until his death in 1904.²⁰ John Gwynn (1827–1917) was for years the Archbishop King’s Lecturer before becoming Regius Professor of Divinity after Salmon (1888–1907). He was a scholar of Syriac who discovered and edited a Syriac edition of Revelation that he argued was from the translation of the New Testament made for Philoxenus in the early sixth century.²¹ John Henry Bernard (1860–1927), who became a fellow in 1884, Archbishop King’s Lecturer in 1888, and Provost in 1919, was the author of commentaries on several New Testament books, including the Gospel of John.²² He was younger than Charles and thus probably not a factor in his education. In 1880, during the heady days of Salmon and Gwynn, Charles enrolled at Trinity College, Dublin in the status of Scholar—a high honor indeed. He was officially a student at the school from 1880 to 1887 during which time he earned two degrees. His first degree (undergraduate) was a BA that he took in winter 1881 (Senior Moderator Classics; Junior Moderator Ethics and Logic),

strengthened and improved in 1833 when, rather than being a one-year appointment for a senior fellow with very low pay, it became a post for a junior fellow who would retain it over the years until he became a senior fellow (Hermathena 58 [1941], 16–17). It was refigured as a professorship in 1906. ¹⁸ Oulton, “The Study of Divinity in Trinity College, Dublin, Since the Foundation,” 16. ¹⁹ Oulton, “The Study of Divinity in Trinity College, Dublin, Since the Foundation,” 19. ²⁰ Charles dedicated his 1902 book on Jubilees to Salmon. In his 1929 collection of sermons, The Resurrection of Man and Other Sermons, v–vi, he referred to Salmon’s “unanswerable” book The Infallibility of the Church: a course of lectures delivered in the Divinity School of the University of Dublin (London: J. Murray, 1890). ²¹ The Apocalypse of St John in a Syriac Version Hitherto Unknown (Dublin: Dublin University Press, 1897). Charles used this edition in his A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Revelation of St. John (2 vols.; ICC; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1921), e.g., vol. 1. clxxix. ²² Maxwell, A History of Trinity College Dublin 1591–1892, 202, 204, 215–18; Oulton, “The Study of Divinity in Trinity College, Dublin, Since the Foundation,” 19–21.

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and the second was an M.A. conferred on him in the summer of 1887— although he had finished his studies in residence in 1883.²³ By the time that he arrived in Dublin, the Anglican institution was allowing Catholics to attend and earn degrees.²⁴ Once again Charles distinguished himself by his scholarly accomplishments. He took a biblical Greek prize and the Elrington Theology Prize²⁵ in 1882, and the Ryan Prize as well as a Theological Exhibition (that is, a scholarship) in 1883.²⁶ He also excelled in leadership of the students who elected him the auditor of the Theological Society.²⁷ The auditor’s duties were to arrange the debates and summarize the discussions that took place during the meetings of the group. D’Arcy, who met him when they were both students at the Divinity School, says that by this time Charles had developed some nonorthodox views about certain subjects—not essentials of the faith but matters that he thought had been developed by the Medieval church. An area in which he harbored concerns had to do with aspects of the future life, and regarding it he had adopted a viewpoint under the influence of the book Eternal Hope, a collection of sermons published in 1878 by Frederic William Farrar, a canon of Westminster (Farrar was accused by some of holding a universalist position but energetically denied it). Charles was open about his controversial ideas when he was being considered for the auditorship but was still elected unanimously. D’Arcy recounted how he first became acquainted with Charles at Trinity College, Dublin and how impressed he was by him: It was about this time [when Charles became auditor] that the acquaintance between Robert Charles and the writer of this memoir began. The latter,

²³ He would also receive a DD from Trinity College, Dublin in 1898. ²⁴ Before the Relief Act of 1793 there had been nothing to prevent Roman Catholics from entering College. There are no entries as to religion in the Admission Registers before 18th March, 1794. Nevertheless, the position of Catholics at the school was challenging. As students under the Statutes they could not, however, take degrees without taking certain oaths which were obnoxious to them. In 1793 religious observances for Roman Catholics were dispensed with; certain disabilities remained, but these were gradually removed. Scholarships were thrown open in 1854, and in 1873 by Henry Fawcett’s Act . . . all tests in Trinity College were abolished. (Maxwell, A History of Trinity College Dublin 1591–1892, 128–9, n.) ²⁵ The Elrington Theological Prize was established by friends of Thomas Elrington, Provost 1811–20, to honor his memory (Oulton, “The Study of Divinity in Trinity College, Dublin, Since the Foundation,” 14). ²⁶ See Joseph Foster, Oxford Men and Their Colleges (Oxford and London: James Porter & Co., 1893) col. 111 (under “Matriculations, 1880–1892”); Who Was Who, vol. 3: Who Was Who 1929–1940 (2nd ed.; London: Adam & Charles Black, 1967) 241. ²⁷ The Theological Society had been founded in 1830.

20    ( – ) having become a scholar of the House, had the privilege of sitting at “Commons” among men many of whom were older and more developed than himself. Among these was Charles [he was about three and one-half years older than D’Arcy] with whom, up to this time, he had no association. One night the talk turned on matters of fundamental moment, and, as often among the young, a tone of flippant and somewhat skeptical comment could be detected. Suddenly Charles said a few words, quite simple and with no tincture of superiority, but revealing a depth of conviction and sincerity which made instant appeal to head and heart. Next evening an opportunity came, and the writer found himself sitting beside the man whose words had touched him. It was the beginning of a friendship which endured.²⁸

D’Arcy wrote about the same period at the college in his autobiography entitled The Adventures of a Bishop: Among the men who were my contemporaries there was quite a considerable number who had unusual powers of scholarship and thought. Some were friends or acquaintances more or less intimate; others, though not so closely associated, were more or less influential in forming the intellectual atmosphere. I remember especially Robert Henry Charles, who became famous in later years as the explorer of a new region of study, the Apocalyptic Literature [he then listed nine other high achievers].²⁹

Once he had completed his brilliant studies in Dublin in 1883 (he was not actually to receive his M.A. until the Summer of 1887), Charles and two friends spent an extended period of time in Germany and Switzerland. The fact that such a holiday was possible suggests that Charles could count on significant financial support, presumably from his family. The purpose of the trip was to enjoy a vacation after their studies, but Charles also made use of the opportunity to improve his knowledge of the German language which he had previously been able to read but not speak. The time spent abroad proved to be more significant than an on-site opportunity to learn a language. While in Heidelberg he met a young lady named Mary Lilias Bence-Jones (from Lisselan, County Cork).³⁰ The two would marry a few years later (for more about her see below). ²⁸ D’Arcy, “A Brief Memoir,” xvii–xviii. ²⁹ D’Arcy, The Adventures of a Bishop: A Phase of Irish Life: A Personal and Historical Narrative (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1934) 73. ³⁰ I have not found an explanation for why she was in Heidelberg at this time.

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Ecclesiastical Service After the European holiday, Charles entered the profession for which his education had prepared him. The veteran Bishop of London, John Jackson (he served there from 1869–85), ordained him in 1883 as a deacon for a curacy in the parish of St. Mark’s, Whitechapel. He remained in this post for around two years (1883–85). D’Arcy writes that Charles purposely went to work in the Whitechapel district of London because of “a strong desire to get into the thick of the struggle against adverse forces.”³¹ Whitechapel, part of London’s East End, was a poverty-stricken, over-populated area, a place into which immigrants crowded, and where crime was rampant (the Whitechapel Murders in the later 1880s may have had a connection with Jack the Ripper). There Charles went as a deacon and seems to have thrived. D’Arcy quotes him regarding the place (the passage comes after Charles noted how others described the challenging district and the misfortunes that too often befell them in it): My experience was different. I visited every Christian house in a district of 5,000, which contained many Jews. Everywhere I met with kindness, although my visits were sometimes as late as eleven o’clock at night. As Junior Curate a Bible Class of girls was committed to my charge. There were forty of them, of whom six formed a Committee. Nearly all of the forty were of the salt of the earth, which speaks well for residents in Whitechapel.³²

It is a nice picture—the future editor and translator of Semitic and Greek texts teaching a Bible class for girls in an impoverished parish and finding it a positive experience. Charles became a priest in the Church of England in 1884 while at St. Mark’s. At the time when he was a candidate for priestly ordination it again became clear that his hold on orthodoxy was shaky in places. As D’Arcy tells the story, the practice in those days was that, as supporting documentation, a candidate for the priesthood would submit two sermons from his time as a deacon. The same Bishop Jackson who had ordained him a deacon the previous year took exception to one of the sermons that dealt with the atonement. After Jackson and Charles discussed the matter, it was referred ³¹ D’Arcy, “A Brief Memoir,” xviii. D’Arcy reports that he made the choice to go to Whitechapel despite the fact that “inducements were held out to him to take up work in the West End” (“A Brief Memoir,” xviii). ³² D’Arcy, “A Brief Memoir,” xix.

22    ( – ) to another church official, the Suffragan³³ Bishop of Bedford (East End of London) William Walsham How (1823–97; suffragan from 1879–88), for adjudication. Bishop How approved of the sermon and apparently thought so highly of Charles that he wanted him to work with his publishers. Bishop Jackson, who was How’s superior, graciously accepted the verdict and Charles became a priest. It turns out that Charles was quite fortunate that How held the position he did because he and Jackson had a special arrangement. Owen Chadwick wrote about him: In 1879 Walsham How became suffragan to Bishop Jackson of London, though all his experience lay in the country. He was not a good preacher, and so tiny in stature that vergers³⁴ needed to provide a platform inside the pulpit to enable the congregation to see him. Everything else about him was delectable, and his books were read in thousands as aids to devotion or the parish worker. He was afterwards said to be worth a hundred curates, as he pulled together the work of the church in East London. Walsham How set the office of suffragan bishop in the national consciousness, as pastor and leader in his own right. But Jackson allowed him to be the effective diocesan of that part of London, and never interfered. When the stronger Temple succeeded Jackson, and could not countenance the same arrangements, Walsham How soon accepted the new see of Wakefield (1888).³⁵

Perhaps if Charles had been a candidate for the priesthood just a few years later, after the remarkable How left East London, things would not have gone so well for him. D’Arcy wrote that the controversial “sermon and the discussion that arose out of it led to further study which formed the basis of a volume, Forgiveness and other Sermons, published in 1887”³⁶—the earliest book listing Charles as the author. The description D’Arcy provides of Charles’s views on the atonement offers insight into his theological stance at the time—one he maintained throughout his long career—and D’Arcy’s hesitations about it. As he put it, in Charles’s book

³³ A suffragan bishop is an assistant to a bishop. The need for them was felt especially in the 1860s and 1870s as the workload of bishops grew (Chadwick, The Victorian Church, Part II [2nd ed.; An Ecclesiastical History of England V; London: Adam & Charles Black, 1970] 344–5). ³⁴ Some of the duties of vergers are those of a custodian. ³⁵ Owen Chadwick, The Victorian Church, Part II, 345–6. How was the author of a number of hymns, including “For All the Saints.” ³⁶ D’Arcy, “A Brief Memoir,” xix.

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was shaped a doctrine of forgiveness as “restoration to communion with God.” According to this view, God’s forgiveness is free to the true penitent, and requires no penalties, material or otherwise, thus forsaking definitely the doctrine of substitution, or the view that “Christ died in man’s place, bearing, in a sense, all man’s sins, and that man accordingly enters into a new and perfect relation to God, as a sinless being.” This book to its writer’s surprise was well received. To many thoughtful minds it may, however, seem that the view set forth in it can hardly be said to solve all the problems involved in a question so great and so profound as that of Atonement.³⁷

We will return to Charles’s book and his thoughts regarding forgiveness shortly. However positive Charles was about work in Whitechapel, it proved to be draining for him so that after two years a move was in order. His next curacy was in St. Philip’s, Kensington (also in London), where he remained for one year (1885–86). During his tenure there he and Mary Lilias Bence-Jones, the lady he had met in Heidelberg some three years earlier, were married (1886). Mary, who proved to be such a central influence and helper in Charles’s life,³⁸ came from a well-to-do family then living in Ireland. Her father, William Bence-Jones (the “Bence” part of the hyphenated name came from her mother Matilda’s family name—Bence Bence), was born in 1812, grew up in England and was a graduate of Oxford (B.A. 1834, M.A. 1836). After his schooling, he became involved with a 2,000-acre plot of land in Lisselan, County Cork, Ireland that his grandfather had purchased around the year 1800. In the decades following the acquisition, the land had been left in the care of an agent who supposedly supervised the tenant farmers. After charges of impropriety were leveled against the agent, William, who was practicing law at the time, was asked to look into the matter (1838). When he did so, he found the situation appalling—there was poor management of the property, where the tenants were using primitive farming methods. In response he instituted strict reforms in agricultural techniques and in collecting rent from the tenants (some had to be expelled). He himself took up residence on the land in Lisselan in 1843 and successfully practiced the kind of farming that he wanted the tenants to imitate. Between 1855 and 1865 he purchased another 2,000 acres of land in the encumbered estates court. Bence-Jones was the author of ³⁷ D’Arcy, “A Brief Memoir,” xix–xx. ³⁸ Henry Major wrote after Charles’s death that his “life was enriched by many friendships: what he gained by his marriage to one who entered into all his interests, intellectual, social, and spiritual, may not be written” (“Robert Henry Charles,” The Modern Churchman 46 [1956] 226).

24    ( – ) several publications, including The Life’s Work in Ireland of a Landlord Who Tried to Do His Duty (London: MacMillan & Co., 1880). It contains a number of chapters dealing with farming techniques (e.g., the importance of using manure), relations with tenants (the need for adhering to the terms of contracts), and the fruits of his experience in agriculture—all very much from a landlord’s point of view. In 1881 he moved to London where he died the next year. Mary Lilias was not the only child in the family (she had brothers), but she clearly came from wealth.³⁹ Charles’s study and preaching while at St. Philips, Kensington led to publication of the first book of which he was the author. It was noted above that his understanding of the atonement and related subjects had proved controversial in 1884 when he was being considered for ordination to the priesthood, although his candidacy was eventually successful. The situation caused the young priest to plunge into a prolonged study of the doctrine of the atonement; the fruits of that research came to expression in Forgiveness and Other Sermons, by the Rev. R. H. Charles, M.A. (London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co., 1887). In the one-page “Preface,” Charles noted that the sermons included in the book “were preached in St. Philips, Kensington, 1885–86,”⁴⁰ his second parish, and were being published “in compliance with the wishes of many friends” (v), although he did not say who they were (presumably Bishop How was among them). Charles acknowledged his indebtedness to a number of theologians and pulpiteers, among whom were Brooke Foss Westcott, Frederick Denison Maurice, John Henry Newman, Phillips Brooks, Horace Bushnell, and William Ellery Channing. He also listed four books he had used, along with sermons by some of the authors. Much later in his life Charles referred to a “nearly two years’ study of the Doctrine of Atonement” in which he had engaged in this very early stage of his career and before the book appeared.⁴¹ It seems exceptional that the sermons of a young priest would be considered publishable, but the style and content reveal the considerable abilities of the author as well as a certain earnestness in his approach to his audience. The sermons of the talented young priest are meticulously argued, conveniently arranged, well phrased, and always on topic.

³⁹ The sketch above is based on the entry for William Bence-Jones in the Dictionary of Irish Biography and on perusing The Life’s Work in Ireland of a Landlord Who Tried to Do His Duty. ⁴⁰ He dated the “Preface” November, 1886 and gave his address as 39, Upper Kennington Lane, S. E., since by that time he had moved to his third London parish. ⁴¹ The statement appears in his 1923 collection of sermons, The Adventure into the Unknown, 201. The occasion for it was the fact that he largely reproduced his sermons about forgiveness from the 1887 volume in the 1923 book—something he openly admitted to the readers.

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It is instructive to read Charles’s thoughts at this early stage in his career. They show that he had studied the issues carefully, had read fairly widely, and had come to some definite conclusions which he continued to defend to the end of his life. The 173-page book contains twelve sermons, most of which he organized under larger rubrics. The first five take up various aspects of the subject that gave the book its title—forgiveness, 6–7 are on the kingdom of heaven, 8–9 on faith, 10–11 on the freedom of truth, with the twelfth, on Christian humility and aspiration, being the only stand-alone message. The sermons regarding forgiveness, especially the first, take up the subject that had earlier led to difficulty with Bishop Jackson. Presumably Charles had, while still a deacon, written a sermon that, perhaps in somewhat revised form, was delivered at St. Philips, Kensington and eventually found its way into the book. He regularly, in the various sets of sermons, summarized what he had covered in the previous message (or messages) before launching into the next topic.⁴² Sermons 1–4 give a good idea of Charles’s theological positions. The first on forgiveness⁴³ takes Matthew 18:35 as its text: “So likewise shall My heavenly Father do also unto you, if ye from your hearts forgive not every one his brother their trespasses.” Here Charles set forth his understanding of what God accomplished through Christ in saving human beings. A central point for him was that, while a sin may be forgiven, its negative effects continue to exact a toll; in other words, the punishment is not erased. Examples he cited were “falsehood with the penalty of distrust, dishonesty with the loss of character, intemperance with disease of body and the reprobation of men” (6–7). Charles was unhappy with the doctrine of satisfaction as it was commonly understood in the Church. If a sin, once committed, could not be altered and continued to have negative effects, Christ’s satisfaction did not take the penalty away. What it did accomplish was the destruction of sin itself.⁴⁴ So Christ’s satisfaction does not mean that the totally innocent Savior took on himself the penalty of human sin. “God forgives, though he remits not the penalty of transgressions” (5). The following words encapsulate his thinking: There is only one way of escaping the doom of the sinful soul. If sin be expelled from the soul, the death which issues solely from it is prevented.

⁴² In some of the sermons he mentions the time of day in which the service took place—whether the morning (e.g., pages 19, 50, 89, 111, 145) or the evening (e.g., 1, 34). ⁴³ None of the five has a distinctive title; each one is called “Forgiveness” followed by a roman numeral. The scriptural passages in the summary of the book are quoted according to the version Charles used, the Authorized (King James) Version. ⁴⁴ Neither here nor elsewhere did he explain in any detail exactly what destroying sin means.

26    ( – ) This is the only salvation for men—salvation from sin itself, not from its consequences, either here or hereafter. (10)

He thought the doctrine of satisfaction—pardon of sin through the expiatory sacrifice of Christ on the cross which appeased an angry God—had been worked out by “men versed in Roman law” and was prevalent in the “Scotch Church of to-day, and elsewhere” (14). God’s forgiveness—the fundamental message of divine revelation—restores people to communion with him, and this in turn leads them to repentance for acts against God and others and greater efforts to live in his service. The second sermon on forgiveness uses as its text the same passage from the Gospel of Matthew. This time he centered his attention on human forgiveness and on the teaching that God’s forgiveness of a person is commensurate or goes together with one’s forgiveness of others. Human and divine forgiveness are of the same kind, although they differ in degree. Human forgiveness means restoring another to association with all that is holiest in a person, as God’s forgiveness restores one to communion with him. Charles spoke very directly about human failure to forgive and said that if one does not forgive, neither is that person forgiven by God: “The unforgiving is ever the unforgiven” (25). All true believers in Christ, not a succession of pontiffs, possess the priestly power to absolve from sins. Hereby we are enabled to understand the significance of the words of absolution declared by our Church to the repentant—“I absolve thee from all thy sins.” These words may be used by every faithful follower of the Son of Man, but are authoritatively pronounced by the minister as the representative of the Church, as representative of all that is best and holiest and godlike in our humanity. And restoration to this communion, the Communion of the Saints, is likewise restoration to communion with God. (31)

In “Forgiveness. III,” for which Charles listed five scriptural passages as texts, he set out “to trace with all brevity the three great periods of God’s dealing with mankind, and to show how the problem of forgiveness has been affected in each” (34). They are “(1) the Period of Moral Insensibility; (2) the Period of Law; (3) the Period of Grace” (34). Discussion of the three was a prelude to addressing the apparently conflicting commands in Matthew 5:39 (“Whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also”) and in Luke 17:3 (“If thy brother trespass against thee, rebuke him”). Forgiveness was different in the three periods listed above, as in each of them

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sin was understood differently. The period of moral insensibility (e.g., the situation of contemporary heathenism, the ancient Canaanites, and the Greeks of Homeric times) was amoral, not immoral. Sin offered a personal affront to someone else, and its result could be eliminated through penalty or payment. There was no real consciousness of sin and thus no real forgiveness. In the second period there is knowledge of the law and obedience or disobedience to it divides the good from the bad. In this stage one identifies with the person sinned against and entertains hatred for the person who sinned against him. Under such circumstances, forgiveness is impossible, although this stage prepares one for something better. In the period of grace there is “not only sympathy for the injured, but also sympathy for the injurer” (41). The law teaches that a human being is deeply in need, and God in mercy addresses that need. “And from the restored communion of the child with his divine Father there follows a progressive deliverance from sin, the child growing to be more like and like unto the Father in whom he now essays consciously to live and move” (41). With these distinctions in mind, Charles addressed the conflicting instructions in the two gospel passages. They apply to different situations. The command to turn the other cheek deals with how one should react to an “offending heathen” (42), while the order to rebuke relates to a fellow believer. The former (the heathen) had no consciousness of doing something wrong, while the latter (the brother, a category that included Jews, as the earliest Christian leaders were Jewish) did and should be treated accordingly. Jesus himself embodied these principles in dealing with others. At his trial he rebuked the high priest—an offending brother—while Pilate, a heathen, he “exonerated . . . from the chief guilt in His condemnation” (45). St. Paul taught the same about dealing with the heathen and with fellow believers. Believers were to tolerate mistreatment and not seek revenge in pagan courts. The fourth sermon on forgiveness takes up the subject of how the scriptural injunctions about forgiveness should function in the present time, now that the West has benefitted from the continuous approximation of the outer forms of social life to the Christian spirit, from the leavening of society with Christian ideas, and the more or less imperfect reconciliation of Church and State. The Christian can no longer hold aloof from his share in promoting social reform and maintaining social order, and to this end action in the case of wrong is imperative, where by wrong we mean deliberate insult or injury; but such action must in all cases be taken, not from personal motives, but for the sake of the offender and the brotherhood. (54–5)

28    ( – ) There is a place for righteous indignation, not a passive bearing of all wrongs; and forgiveness is to be offered to the contrite. Charles spoke firmly against censoriousness and ill-will towards others. Even partially correct attempts at forgiving can be instructive and show how much more is needed.⁴⁵ Some of the other messages in this early volume also offer sentiments that Charles would repeat at later times. For example, in the first sermon about the kingdom of God, he wrote: “Then, as in all subsequent times, two methods were taught with the view of bringing this golden age about: the one method was external, that of the world; the other internal, that of Christ” (77). The former, which he understood to refer to attempts to change the environment in which people live, he dismissed as inadequate: “Individual franchise, land nationalization, free trading between all countries, universal enlightenment, and every advance in social or economic reform, rather of real or fancied worth, will not one whit destroy the power of evil, unless with the establishment of these there be a concurrent purification of the heart of man by the Spirit of Christ” (80). He charged churches with adhering to the environmental approach when they confused the spreading of their opinions with extending God’s earthly kingdom. For him, being a member of the kingdom “is not constituted by mere accuracy of theological belief, but by faithfulness of life” (81). There is unity in the church through Christ, not through a fixed creed or ritual. The first of the two messages about faith allowed him to return to the issue of forgiveness. At this time Charles recognized the historical character of Christ’s death and resurrection—his thoughts about the nature of the latter would change—but emphasized their deeper spiritual significance. The spiritual import, then, of our Lord’s death and resurrection, lay in their being present experiences of our spiritual life. We have to die with our Lord to sin; “our old man is crucified with Him;” we rise with Him to life; and thus we share in our Lord’s death and resurrection; we re-enact the eternal sacrifice. (101)

One ought not to focus only on the outward aspects of Christ’s work but also on their inner spirit. Here he again addressed issues with the doctrine of satisfaction and the atonement: “Forgiveness, then, and reconciliation, are not external blessings obtained for us by a crucified and risen Christ, but states

⁴⁵ His fifth sermon on forgiveness treats the problem of the unforgivable sin.

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into which man is brought by union with Him—states which are gradually won through the life of faith” [103]). Finally, in the two messages regarding “The Freedom of Truth,” Charles articulated some other ideas that remained with him. He asked on what evidence one received God’s truth, on the evidence of authority or on its own. The Latin church adopted the former stance under the influence of Augustine’s teaching about divine transcendence and human depravity, while the Eastern churches emphasized God’s immanence. As for the former, if humans could not on their own grasp the truth, they had to receive it on the basis of external authority—a view that “prepared the way for the Papacy, wherein it was claimed this authority resided” (136–7). That was acceptable for more barbaric times but not for ages when people used their reason. Charles found Augustine’s teachings to be terribly wrong; they resulted in “utter unbelief in the immanence of God, in the divineness of man’s nature, and so in the reality of the Incarnation” (137). Charles traced John Henry Newman’s views to this tradition: “It is on this principle that we explain the perversion of John Henry Newman; for not to his faith, but to his profound unbelief in man’s capacity for truth, was due his submission to the Roman See” (138). Against such recourse to external authority, Charles declared: “The spirit of man being the self-revelation of God, can accept truth on no evidence save its own” (140). The church teaches her tradition to the young by authority, but the mature she tries to persuade: “She argues, exhorts, teaches, but her teaching only avails when it brings home conviction to the heart and reason of her people” (141). He perceived some fault in this respect in his own Church of England and its appeals to authority.⁴⁶ From St. Philip’s, Charles, now married, moved to St. Mark’s, Kennington (another London district) where he remained from 1886–89. Under different sorts of trying circumstances than at Whitechapel, he proved to be a strong leader who consistently applied rules, without regard to the social standing of the parishioners involved. D’Arcy relates two stories that illustrate how Charles handled his pastoral duties at the place to which the Rector of St. Mark’s, Kennington, Bishop Henry Montgomery (he served there from 1879 until 1889), had invited him:

⁴⁶ The final sermon, “Christian Humility and Aspiration,” is accompanied by a couple of footnotes that contain citations of Greek texts, including two passages from Aristotle’s Ethics. Charles did not neglect to read the Classical languages while immersed in pastoral work.

30    ( – ) The work here was of a very difficult and exacting kind. The new curate was given a free hand in the unconsecrated Church in Montford Place. He began with a congregation of one man and twenty women and children. In addition to the regular services, there were two Sunday Schools. The elder boys, varying in age from sixteen to nineteen, were utterly undisciplined. They knocked down women in the street, stoned their teachers, and committed even worse offences. Strong measures were necessary. Notice was given that unruly boys would, in future, be dismissed, and not re-admitted until after three months and an apology. This brought things to a climax. Two sons of a leading parishioner behaved very badly and were dismissed. Their father was furious. But Charles was immovable. He refused to break the rule. Shortly after he had to call on the parents of another boy who had been dismissed. Expecting a rebuff, he was astonished at receiving a hearty welcome from the mother of this boy. “Mr. Charles,” she said, “we have all been waiting to see if you would dismiss the great man’s son as you have done the others: my son will go back to school next Sunday and make an apology.” The winning of this struggle brought him a welcome in nearly every house in the district.⁴⁷

The other story shows an energetic Charles tackling another sort of difficulty. Some of the more thoughtful men of the district told him of atheistic teaching in Kennington Park. Charles immediately formed a class and gave a course of instructions on historical criticism. The Bible, he showed them, was a record of the Divine education of men, from primitive conditions to its highest level in the New Testament. At the end of the course the members of the class were able to challenge the leading atheists to a debate, which was refused.⁴⁸

He was clearly a forceful man who did not shrink from challenges, addressing them head on, no matter the cost. His definition of the Bible as a record of the divine education of people would become an oft-repeated theme for him.

A Year in Germany Charles’s labors as a deacon and priest in challenging parishes from 1883 to 1889 took a physical toll. As it turned out, this was not to be the last time that ⁴⁷ D’Arcy, “A Brief Memoir,” xx–xxi.

⁴⁸ D’Arcy, “A Brief Memoir,” xxi.

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health issues troubled him. The remedy chosen by him and his spouse was another extended stay—one year—in Germany (1889–90), a year that was to mark a major turning point in his life. It seems unlikely that Charles had earned enough money as a deacon or priest to tide them over for so long a time away from his work. There must have been other support for them, presumably from their families. In Germany, the Charleses first settled in the city of Weimar in Thuringia. Away from parish work, he regained his health and strength so that he could devote his energies to studying the Jewish literature written before and when Christianity came on the scene. There is reason for thinking that Charles had been studying the texts at an earlier time. In the Preface to his 1899 book A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life in Israel, in Judaism, and in Christianity, he wrote: “The present work is the result of studies begun over twelve years ago, and pursued unremittingly for the past ten” (p. v). He wrote those words in September, 1899 (see p. viii), so his studies of Jewish eschatology began in 1887 when he was still serving as a parish priest in London.⁴⁹ He had become convinced that the religious ideas maturing during the “intertestamental” period were an important but underdeveloped area of research.⁵⁰ But he, in approaching the period and the texts surviving from it, had an underdeveloped set of academic tools. He was of course well versed in Greek and Latin, but at this juncture in his career he had only the Hebrew he had learned in Divinity School and, apparently, knowledge of no other Semitic language. Charles, therefore, embarked on a course of self-instruction to prepare himself for scholarship on the Jewish texts from pre-New Testament times, especially the book now known as 1 Enoch. D’Arcy reports about this period of intense personal study: As a result, he soon recognized the overwhelming importance of the Book of Enoch for his purpose. This led him to Dillmann’s German edition of Enoch, which he studied thoroughly. And the more he studied the more convinced he became of the importance of Enoch as furnishing a guide to Jewish thought from 200 to 60 .. Visiting other Universities he made acquaintances among some notable German Scholars, one of whom was Zahn.⁵¹ ⁴⁹ See also D’Arcy, “A Brief Memoir,” xxi. ⁵⁰ Henry Major wrote about this time and decision that, when many held what he considered repugnant views about the last things, Charles selected as his life’s work a study of Jewish and Christian eschatology and that his motive was not academic but “was primarily the promotion of moral and religious truth” (“Robert Henry Charles,” The Modern Churchman 46 [1956] 221). ⁵¹ D’Arcy, “A Brief Memoir,” xxi–xxii. Theodor Zahn (1838–1933) was a professor at Leipzig when Charles was in Germany.

32    ( – ) It would be good to know more about Charles’s work at the time and how it was possible, that he, an unknown Anglican priest from the British Isles, managed to gain access to “notable German Scholars,” in an age when German academe was so hierarchical. After a few months in Weimar, the Charleses moved to Dresden in Saxony from which place he would make visits to Leipzig where he was able to find the books he needed for his studies. His research centered on apocalyptic literature, and he read German translations of the relevant texts and the comments of scholars on them. It seems that he considered what he found quite disappointing. But, as his studies advanced, he became dissatisfied with German editions of Apocalyptic writings, and finally recognized the necessity of studying directly the texts on which they were based. He found that no two editors agreed on any single text as to date, unity or composition, or as regards real contribution to the development of Jewish thought in Apocalyptic. After further study the reason became obvious. Hardly more than two scholars had published editions of more than one text in this literature. In fact no scholar had a grip of this literature as a whole.⁵²

While one may question the last claim that D’Arcy attributes to Charles, it is worth highlighting that this must have been the time when Charles (1) set his agenda to become acquainted firsthand and in minute detail with all the literature in question and (2) turned in earnest to a study of the languages he would need for the work and would use so impressively in his later scholarship. It certainly looks as if he had no plans to return to parish work. Charles could not devote all the time he and his wife stayed in Dresden to study of ancient languages and texts because the realities of life intruded. While in Dresden both Mary and he fell victim to the flu epidemic then sweeping through Europe from Russia—not just once as “both were prostrated by successive attacks.”⁵³ Once they had recovered, Charles returned to his research. But, rather than making trips to Leipzig, the Charleses moved there so that he could take advantage of the bookselling trade in the city and acquire the volumes he needed for his work. All of this sounds costly and once more raises the question of who was paying for their support and his growing library.

⁵² D’Arcy, “A Brief Memoir,” xxii. ⁵³ D’Arcy, “A Brief Memoir,” xxii. The 1889–90 flu pandemic killed more than one million people.

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Germany was the ideal place for Charles to pursue the subjects that interested him. Research on second temple texts and history had attracted more attention from its scholars than it did elsewhere in the academic world, just as German biblical scholarship then outstripped that of other countries. One of the major forces in study of the Jewish literature written between 200 . . and 100 .. was Christian Friedrich August Dillmann (1823–94), the noted scholar of the Old Testament who had published and translated the Ethiopic texts of Enoch and Jubilees. Dillmann, whose name will recur frequently in the subsequent chapters of this Biography, had studied under no less an authority than Heinrich Ewald (1803–75)⁵⁴ at Tübingen and, after completing his work with him, spent a couple of years visiting other universities and also examining and cataloging Ethiopic manuscripts housed in the Bodleian Library and the British Museum. His publications were most impressive and ground-breaking: an edition of Ethiopic Enoch in 1851 and his translation of and commentary on it in 1853 (the year he began publishing an edition of the Ethiopic Bible); the first European translation of Ethiopic Jubilees in 1850–51 and an edition of the Ethiopic text in 1859. Moreover, Dillmann published his Grammatik der äthiopischen Sprache in 1857 and his exhaustive and truly amazing Lexicon Linguae Aethiopicae in 1865 (it runs to 1,434 columns). When Charles was in Germany Dillmann occupied a professorial chair at the University of Berlin which he had held since 1869. He was clearly the leader in the field in the country with the most advanced scholarship.⁵⁵ D’Arcy implies that Charles actually met Dillmann: “ . . . a visit to Berlin extended the circle of learned friends. Most important of all these was Dillmann, the Doyen of the Semitic school, whose works had proved so essential, and whose Ethiopic Version of Enoch, together with his Ethiopic grammar and Lexicon, Charles had studied with minute care.”⁵⁶ So Charles was engaging in very serious study of the classical Ethiopic language in which Enoch and other Jewish works happened to be preserved, and he was learning it with the tools created by Dillmann. It is possible to trace the influence, one might almost say, the shadow of Dillmann over Charles’s work for years to come as he tried to improve on and outdo the pioneering efforts of his illustrious predecessor. We will see how that happened when we examine his first publications of Jewish texts.

⁵⁴ Among his many books, his seven-volume Geschichte des Volkes Israel (Göttingen: Dieterische Buchhandlung, 1852–64) was the best known. ⁵⁵ For the information on Dillmann, see Rudolf Smend, “Dillmann, Christian Friedrich August (1823–94),” in John H. Hayes, editor, Dictionary of Biblical Interpretation (2 vols.; Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1999) 1.300–1. ⁵⁶ D’Arcy, “A Brief Memoir,” xxii.

34    ( – ) Charles’ intense, self-directed course in second temple Jewish literature and the languages in which it survived proved to be remarkably productive. As a result, when the year in Germany came to an end, he was ready to begin the most extraordinary period of publishing in the history of scholarship on Early Judaism. Part 2 of the present book is devoted to that period when the Charleses resided in Oxford.

PART 2

THE O XFORD Y EARS (1890 – 1913)

Introduction When the Charleses returned from Germany in 1890, they decided to live in Oxford, where they remained for the next twenty-three years. On January 27, 1891, not long after arriving in the ancient city, Charles, aged thirty-five, matriculated from Exeter College and on January 29, 1891 incorporated there as a Master of Arts from Trinity College, Dublin,¹ that is, he joined the college which recognized his M.A. degree from Trinity College, Dublin as if it were earned at Oxford. Incorporating did not, however, mean that he had a salaried position in Exeter.² Without income from the post, he and Mary must have had support from elsewhere. The Oxford period would prove to be astonishingly productive, as during it Charles published almost all of his great textual works on ancient Jewish compositions and the earliest of his efforts to synthesize their teachings. In this introductory section we will first take a brief look at the University of Oxford as it was in the late nineteenth century and, second, glance equally briefly at the state of British biblical scholarship at the time.

The University of Oxford Oxford in 1891 was an institution lurching through a lengthy process of change. It had been “The Anglican University,”³ from the time when Henry VIII broke with Rome in 1534 and on through 1845, when John Henry ¹ Foster, Oxford Men and Their Colleges, col. 111, provides the date of January 27. The Exeter College, Published Register gives the date as “21 Mch 1891.” In the University Archives, the card register of those who matriculated between 1891 and 1932 gives both dates. ² Henry D. A. Major, who, as we will see in Part 3, became an important figure in Charles’s life, was admitted to Exeter in 1903 and remained there until 1905. He apparently became a student of Charles’s and greatly appreciated his lectures (Clive Pearson, Alan Davidson, and Peter Lineham, Scholarship and Fierce Sincerity: Henry D. A. Major The Face of Anglican Modernism [Auckland: Polygraphia, 2006] 33, 139). We, therefore, have evidence of Charles’s lecturing in this period. Major recalled that at his first meeting with him, Charles said: “To be but one and to be on the side of God, is to be in the majority” (“Robert Henry Charles,” The Modern Churchman 46 [1956] 226). ³ This is the title L. W. B. Brockliss gives to the period in his The University of Oxford: A History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016) 131–329. All the information about the university in the following paragraphs comes from this book.

R. H. Charles: A Biography. James C. VanderKam, Oxford University Press. © James C. VanderKam 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192869289.003.0002

38    ( – ) Newman left the university and became a Catholic. During that stretch of more than three hundred years, the sons of the well-to-do “went up” to Oxford where they resided in colleges in which tutors (mostly) offered them instruction in the arts curriculum. Oxford could then and for decades after hardly be termed a research university, as dons published little, probably no more than their lectures—and that at the end of their teaching careers. In this respect, they were little different from their peers in other European universities. Despite changes in society and the state, . . . Oxford remained locked in a past age through its tenacious defence of the Anglican monopoly and its adamantine commitment to tradition. Oxford in 1845 was still an Anglican seminary; undergraduates had to be Anglicans and fellows celibate and mostly in orders. It was also a world where custom rather than merit determined advancement . . .⁴

Change came about gradually and in good part, though not exclusively, from external pressures. An outside campaign to reform the university and bring it into the modern age eventuated in several royal commissions that identified areas requiring improvement. The traditional position at Oxford had been that the purpose of undergraduate education was not to transmit practical knowledge but to form character, and, to that end, studying classics, not science or anything modern, was deemed essential. Commissions in 1850, 1872, and 1877 (another was to come in 1919) looked into the situation at Oxford and Cambridge and called for far-reaching modifications. As a result, writes Brockliss:⁵ Within half a century, they had ceased to be clerical institutions whose primary function was to provide the next generation of Anglican clergy and landowners’ elder sons with an education in either classics or mathematics. Both universities remained residential and collegiate and the tutorial system flourished rather than withered. But, by the mid-1880s, college fellowships had been thrown open, the rules governing ordination and celibacy greatly eroded, and the universities opened to all faiths and none.

Thus, in the latter part of the nineteenth century, it became possible for males from a somewhat wider social spectrum to enter the university, and at the end of the 1870s women’s halls were established, although women could not take ⁴ Brockliss, The University of Oxford, 328.

⁵ The University of Oxford, 339.

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degrees until 1920.⁶ Throughout the decades of reform, Oxford remained largely an undergraduate institution. In view of the highly technical work Charles was to do in Oxford, it is interesting to read about the state of research at the university when he arrived. Brockliss reports, after mentioning the rise of the research doctorate in Germany in the nineteenth century:⁷ In this regard, Oxford could not but seem deficient. Although many of its professors and readers, and some of the tutors, in 1900 were actively engaged in research, and a number, particularly scientists, had spent time in Germany, there was nothing akin to an official research culture and very few postgraduate students. Before the First World War, Oxford did offer a number of taught postgraduate degrees and diplomas, most notably in medicine, which had remained, as in earlier centuries, a “higher” discipline, while new degrees with a research focus had been established in 1895 and 1900. But there was, as yet, no Oxford research doctorate, and none would be introduced until 1917.

Though the university was moving slowly toward a research program, it remained a widely held view that a system based on the continual interaction between teacher and pupil⁸ was judged far more effective in developing an undergraduate’s mental faculties than formal lectures, whatever the course of study. Residence of three to four years in a quasi-monastic community was also deemed to play a vital role in turning giddy youth into purposeful young men. The college was viewed as a large family where undergraduates from different schools, backgrounds, and confessions lived cheek by jowl and purportedly learnt to tolerate, respect, and cooperate with others, above all through playing intercollegiate sport.⁹

There was suspicion about specialization, and in an age of imperialism Oxford was expected to do its part. The “most enthusiastic imperialists” thought that Oxford’s role was to provide the empire with right-minded administrators, men who would treat Indians and Africans with courtesy and understand that risking life and limb in the service of the poor and deprived of the world ⁶ The University of Oxford, 372–4, 389–90. ⁷ The University of Oxford, 387–8. ⁸ That is, the tutorial system. ⁹ The University of Oxford, 400.

40    ( – ) was the noblest of careers. An Oxford education, especially in classics, would give such men the tools to do this. Morally armed with Greek philosophy and with some sense of the problems of empire from reading Thucydides, they were suitably prepared for the adventure.¹⁰

So, when the Charleses decided to live in Oxford, it was perhaps not the most obvious place for doing the kind of scholarship upon which he was embarking. Nevertheless, it did offer an impressive community of scholars in various fields akin to Charles’s areas of interest, and it had the resources of the Bodleian Library, with the British Museum not far away. Oxford became the base for his astonishing outpouring of publications from 1891 to 1913. We will soon turn to his earliest research there but should first survey developments in the biblical disciplines in the years leading up to Charles’s arrival in Oxford.

British Biblical Scholarship in the Late Nineteenth Century A few words about the state of biblical studies when Charles began his work with ancient Jewish literature will allow us to locate his scholarship in its contemporary setting. He was, as we have seen, a priest in the Church of England. That church which, like others in the nineteenth century, was being confronted with new information about the earth and innovative approaches to the Scriptures, had for some time been attempting to cope with their implications. Technical biblical studies in late nineteenth century Britain should be seen in an ecclesiastical context because most of the scholars engaged in scriptural research were, like Charles, clergymen whose vows of ordination made them answerable to church authorities. Historical study of the Bible and breakthroughs in other areas were motivating change in the Victorian era. The historian Owen Chadwick has written: Three forces were driving Christianity to restate doctrine: natural science, biblical criticism, moral feeling. Natural science shattered assumptions about Genesis and about miracles. Criticism questioned whether all history in the Bible was true. Moral feeling found the love of God hard to reconcile with hellfire or scapegoat-atonement.¹¹

¹⁰ Brockliss, The University of Oxford, 403. ¹¹ Chadwick, The Victorian Church, Part I (2nd ed.; An Ecclesiastical History of England V; London: Adam & Charles Black, 1970) 551.

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Doubts about a recent creation, Noah’s flood, Balaam’s verbal ass, Jonah’s big fish, and other Old Testament stories were raised. And the New Testament did not escape similar scrutiny. The natural sciences, represented by geology and most famously by Charles Darwin and his theory of natural selection, were perceived by some informed people in the church to be opposed to Christian teachings and the plain sense of the biblical text. Others, both academics and educated lay folk, saw little or no conflict between them and gave up the practice of reading some scriptural stories as history. The decades before Charles inaugurated his scholarly quest were decisive in some ways for ecclesiastical acceptance—or toleration—of results achieved by natural scientists. According to Chadwick, “ . . . the reception of the view, among more educated Christians, that evolution and Christian doctrine were compatible, can be dated to the twenty-five years from 1860 to 1885.”¹² He identified the 1884 Bampton Lectures delivered by Frederick Temple as a telling event. Temple, who was the Bishop of Exeter and years later (1896) would become Archbishop of Canterbury, spoke under the general title “The Relations between Religion and Science” and simply “assumed evolution as an axiom” (24). His stance showed that by 1884 it was permissible for a high-ranking clergyman to embrace such views and keep his job. Biblical criticism developed more gradually and moderately in England than in Germany. The atmosphere in Britain regarding biblical studies may be gauged by two publications: Essays and Reviews in 1860, at the beginning of the twenty-five-year period identified by Chadwick (for acceptance of evolution), and Lux Mundi in 1889, just after its end. Essays and Reviews: the collection of seven essays was edited by H. B. Wilson who was one of the contributors. He and five of the other six authors were clergy, including Frederick Temple (mentioned just above) who submitted a sermon as his paper. The essays covered a variety of topics. The one by Benjamin Jowett of Oxford, a classicist, dealt with biblical interpretation and advocated the idea that the Bible should be interpreted like any other book—an approach that, in his opinion, would show it was unique. Chadwick says that “certain leading ideas appear in several of the writers” (76) in Essays and Reviews, namely:

¹² The Victorian Church, Part II (2nd ed.; An Ecclesiastical History of England V; London: Adam & Charles Black, 1970) 24. The page references in the following paragraphs are for this volume. The survey leans heavily upon Chadwick’s classic account.

42    ( – ) (1) A gap had opened between the church’s doctrine and “the real beliefs of educated men” (76). The writers felt it was time to address the issue and no longer to conceal or ignore it. (2) “All truth is of God,” (77) so no one should fear responsible investigations because of religious concerns. (3) One should “not tie the truth of Christianity to the maintenance of the exact truth of a detailed record of events” (77). “Parable, myth, legend, poetry give religious truth, even if the event which the parable describes did not happen” (77). (4) One was not to “prove the truth of revelation by the traditional method of citing miracles and prophecy” (77). The truth of revelation was manifested by its moral impact. An observation made by Wilson—that the sixth of the Thirty-Nine Articles¹³ offered no definition for the term “inspiration” in connection with the Bible— caught the attention of critics and led to trouble for him. Publication of the seven essays unleashed vigorous public debate, with some applauding the efforts of the writers and others calling for removal of the clergy from their posts for contradicting church teachings that they had vowed to uphold. For various reasons, the ones who bore the weight of condemnation were the editor Wilson and Rowland Williams, both of whom were officially prosecuted and suspended from their ecclesiastical positions for one year. The judgment was rendered by Stephen Lushington, the Dean of Arches (the judge in the provincial ecclesiastical court of the Archbishop of Canterbury).¹⁴ But the suspensions handed down were on narrow grounds—only on points defended by Wilson and Williams that could be shown to be in violation of explicit statements in official church documents. Assertions that they made regarding matters not treated by the ecclesiastical formularies were allowed to stand, and in this limit some saw a victory for biblical scholarship. For although the dean of arches condemned both Wilson and Williams on momentous points, the traditional mind of churchmen was startled by the liberties (or errors) which Lushington sanctioned. A clergyman might freely deny the genuineness of any book of the Bible if he did not deny the divine authority; might deny that any prophecy in the Old Testament was Messianic; might interpret all historical narratives as parable, poetry or legend. (81) ¹³ The Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion, part of the Book of Common Prayer, provides authoritative expression of doctrine and practice in the Church of England. ¹⁴ “Dean of Arches,” Wikipedia, accessed 4-29-2019. Lushington held the position from 1858–67.

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Wilson and Williams were eventually cleared of the charges against them. The book did indeed arouse much controversy, but Temple personified a measure of official acceptance when, not long after (1869) he was appointed Bishop of Exeter (and, as we have seen, Archbishop of Canterbury in 1896). These events, while important, did not mean that the newer forms of biblical criticism had carried the day. There were some celebrated cases in which writers who questioned the historicity of parts of the Old Testament and traditional ascriptions of authorship for some of its books suffered for their boldness, as we have seen in the cases of John William Colenso (1814–83), Bishop of Natal, and William Robertson Smith (1846–94) of the Aberdeen Free Church College in Scotland. But at least educated opinion in the latter half of the nineteenth century seems to have grown increasingly comfortable in identifying some Old Testament stories as legends or as belonging to other non-historical genres. In the decades that followed, issues raised by biblical scholars continued to be debated. The cause of the newer criticism was bolstered by the presence of experts who were respected both as academics and as orthodox churchmen. Among these were S. R. Driver, William Sanday, and Charles Gore—with all of whom Charles would come into contact. Gore was especially important in the second of the publications we are examining, although in later years he would hardly be a friend of the higher critics. Lux Mundi: some believed that informed people should not avoid speaking publicly about biblically related issues that had proved controversial, so another publication was planned to pave the way toward wider acceptance. Charles Gore, from the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church of England, served as the editor and as a contributor to Lux Mundi, a collection of 11 essays (ten of the authors were from Oxford) meant to explore challenging issues of the time. All of the writers were regarded as pious individuals, and they wrote their essays in a reverent way. Nevertheless, the volume generated strong protests from some quarters. The essay which gave most offence was Gore’s own essay on “The Holy Spirit and Inspiration.” It simply declared that inspiration is compatible with the opinion that Jonah and David are rather dramatic narrators than history. He used the term myth. A myth is not a falsehood. It is an apprehension of faith by a child or a primitive people, a faith not yet distinguished into the constituent elements of poetry and history and philosophy. And if Christ was ignorant of the authorship of David or the Psalms, that is because he became man and shared the condition of human life. (101)

44    ( – ) Gore thus touched on two sensitive points—the character of some Old Testament material and the nature of Jesus Christ himself. One of the more conservative arguments against such positions had been the either/or that H. P. Liddon articulated in his 1866 Bampton Lectures entitled “The Divinity of Our Lord.” Among other conclusions, he tried to show that since Jesus believed Moses to be the author of the Pentateuch, or David to have written Psalm 110, or Jonah to have lived in the whale, therefore anyone who did not believe these three facts would convict his Lord of error and therefore could not be a loyal Christian. (75)

Liddon renewed his argument after the appearance of Lux Mundi. Gore, some maintained, had raised doubts about Jesus’ divinity. In addition, “the general nature of the Old Testament was in question; whether it could be accepted that prophecy did not predict; whether inspiration could be maintained if the Bible was admitted to contain legend and pseudonymous books” (102). While the debate raged, Gore was supported by scholars like Driver and Sanday, and he aided his cause by offering helpful clarifications of his views. Not long afterwards he was named a canon of Westminster (1897) and a few years later Bishop of Worcester. Naturally, debate did not cease but continued in the different churches and in the varied schools of thought within the Church of England. Gore’s ecclesiastical elevation gave evidence, however, that the authorities considered his views compatible with high position in the Church. He would in fact go on to enjoy a long career as a conservative bishop, including serving as the bishop of Oxford. The Lux Mundi debate occurred at the end of the 1880s and into the 1890s, just when Charles was beginning his publishing career. From early on he proved to be an enthusiastic advocate of the higher critical approach to the Scriptures. His work with pseudepigraphic compositions was, in a sense, less subject to controversy than that of experts who commented on canonical texts, but his publications impinged on books in the Bible and the teachings of the Church. In the late 1890s, as we will see, Charles became associated with the Modern Churchmen, a group within the Church of England that adopted some rather startling positions on issues such as the bodily resurrection and substitutionary atonement of Christ. But, before dealing with that facet of his career, we should turn to his earliest research and writing on Jewish texts. The chapters that follow center on Charles’s books and take them up in their chronological order. In each case, as explained in the Preface, I summarize the content of the ancient text (e.g., Enoch or Jubilees) under

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consideration and set his work within the history of scholarship on that particular text, describe his contributions, summarize reviews of his book, and say something about the influence of his book to the present day. The first ancient Jewish composition on which he published was the Book of Enoch, to which we now turn.

Chapter 1 The Book of Enoch Charles began publishing on the Book of Enoch almost as soon as he settled in Oxford. We have seen that he had come to regard it as fundamental for understanding the religious thought of pre-Christian Judaism. He must have worked intensively with the book and the languages in which it survived in order, not long after taking up residence in Oxford, to begin producing impressive studies of it. His first monograph on Enoch—a translation and commentary—was finished in 1892 and published in 1893. The book, with its successor in 1912, was to alter the way in which experts viewed the ancient text for years to come. In all he would publish three books on Enoch and several articles, as well as summaries of its teachings in his thematic works. His studies on Enoch were to constitute the most famous of his contributions to scholarship on early Jewish literature.

Contents of the Book of Enoch It is not easy to describe the contents of the Book of Enoch, or 1 Enoch, as it has come to be known, because it is a complex, 108-chapter work, one not unified from beginning to end by a single developing storyline or theme. Scholars today, following largely in Charles’s footsteps, speak of it as consisting of five booklets: 1. Chapters 1–36 The Book of the Watchers: the composition opens with a section about the future judgment of the wicked and reward of the righteous before it describes marriages between angels and women (an early interpretation of Genesis 6:1–4) and their terrible consequences, including the flood. Enoch first appears in ch. 12 where he is in the company of angels. The angels who had sinned with women asked him to plead for divine leniency on their behalf. After a journey to the heavenly palace/temple of God where his intercession proved unsuccessful, he traveled through the cosmos under the guidance of good angels.¹ ¹ A number of early expositors thought that “Enoch walked with God” (Genesis 5:22, 24) meant that he spent time with angels.

R. H. Charles: A Biography. James C. VanderKam, Oxford University Press. © James C. VanderKam 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192869289.003.0003

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2. Chapters 37–71 The Parables/Similitudes of Enoch: the chapters include three “parables” that Enoch saw. In these visionary experiences, he observed the ways of wicked oppressors and the lot of righteous sufferers, with their exalted leader called usually the Chosen One or Son of Man, but also the reversal of fates the two groups will experience at the end. Enoch is identified as the son of man in the last chapter. 3. Chapters 72–82 The Astronomical Book: in a travelogue, the angel Uriel reveals to Enoch the details of the lunar (354 days) and solar (364 days) years and the 12 gates, six on the east and six on the west, through which the sun and moon pass each day. He also saw prominent geographical features of the earth. At the end of his tour, he was returned to his family to instruct his sons before his final removal from them. 4. Chapters 83–90 The Book of Dreams: a young Enoch received two dream visions, the first of which predicts and describes the destruction brought on by the flood (chs. 83–84). The second, called the Animal Apocalypse (chs. 85–90), recounts the highlights and lowlights of history, from creation until the judgment and new age. It represents humans under the imagery of various kinds of animals. 5. Chapters 91–107 The Epistle of Enoch:² Enoch gave instructions to his children and those yet to be born, exhorting them to follow the way of virtue and avoid that of evil. Chapters 106–107 are different from 91–105 in that they describe Enoch’s interpretation of miraculous signs accompanying the birth of his great-grandson Noah.

The Context for Charles’s 1893 Volume on Enoch The Book of Enoch is one of those ancient Jewish compositions that scholars knew had once existed but the text of which had long since disappeared from view. At a fairly early time it was translated into Greek and enjoyed a measure of popularity in the first centuries of Christianity. Later, however, it fell from favor in most places, leaving little incentive for making copies and thus preserving it. A series of allusions to and citations of it could be found in Greek³ and Latin sources; the most extensive set of them was lodged in the ² Chapter 108 seems to be an independent unit and even identifies itself as such (108:1 “Another book which Enoch wrote . . .”). One unit within the Epistle of Enoch is the Apocalypse of Weeks in chs. 93 and 91 (in that order in the Ethiopic version). ³ The most famous citation is the one in Jude 14–15 where the writer quotes 1 Enoch 1:9 and says that Enoch “prophesied” these words.

48    ( – ) Chronography of the Byzantine historian George (the) Syncellus (written ca. 800 ). Apart from such references and citations, the text was unknown to Western experts until the late eighteenth century. Few Westerners knew that from the Greek version of the Book of Enoch a translation was made into the classical language of Ethiopia (Ge‘ez) where it was held in high regard by the Abyssinian Church. It was from this country that the book became known to Western experts when in 1773 complete copies of the Book of Enoch first arrived in Europe. James Bruce (1730–94), a Scottish explorer, acquired a number of manuscripts during his years in Ethiopia (1769–73),⁴ including three or four⁵ copies of a Book of Enoch inscribed in Ge‘ez. Bruce disposed of the copies in this way: 1. one to the Bodleian Library; 2. one to King Louis XV in Paris (it was a specially made copy of number 3 below); it was soon placed in the Bibliothèque royale (now the Bibliothèque nationale); 3. one to himself (after his death it too went to the Bodleian); 4. one to the Antonelli Library in Italy. As a result of his efforts, copies of the entire 108-chapter book were known to exist—that is, European experts now were aware of them—and were accessible after centuries of being unavailable to anyone outside of Ethiopia. The first English translation of one of Bruce’s copies was made decades later by Richard Laurence (1760–1838)⁶ in Mas: hafa Henok Nabiy: The Book of :
⁴ Edward Ullendorff (“James Bruce of Kinnaird,” The Scottish Historical Review 32 [1953] 133) wrote: Perhaps the most important aspect of Bruce’s travels was the collection of Ethiopic manuscripts which he brought back with him from Abyssinia. They opened up entirely new vistas for the study of Ethiopian languages and placed this branch of Oriental scholarship on a more secure basis. It is not known how many MSS. reached Europe through his endeavours, but the present writer is aware of at least twenty-seven, all of which are exquisite examples of Ethiopian manuscript art. Ullendorff added on the same page that “the bulk of Bruce’s precious MSS. was purchased by the Bodleian Library, which now possesses twenty-five of his volumes . . . .” ⁵ So, Gabriele Boccaccini, “James Bruce’s ‘Fourth’ Manuscript: Solving the Mystery of the Provenance of the Roman Enoch Manuscript (Vat. Et. 71),” Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 27 (2018) 237–63. According to Boccaccini, Bruce left the fourth copy in Italy after meeting with Pope Clement XIV. For reports about the manuscript to which Boccaccini refers, see also Ted Erho and Loren Stuckenbruck, “A Manuscript History of Ethiopic Enoch,” Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 23 (2013) 93–4. ⁶ In 1814 Laurence became the Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford where he was also canon of Christ Church. In 1822 he received appointment as Archbishop of Cashel in Ireland. By the time he translated Enoch he had already published works on the Ethiopic texts of the Ascension of Isaiah and 4 Ezra. He expended some effort in the “Preliminary Dissertation” that introduces his translation of

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Enoch the Prophet, An apocryphal production, supposed to have been lost for ages; but discovered at the close of the last century in Abyssinia now first translated from an Ethiopic MS. in the Bodleian Library (Oxford: J. H. Parker, 1821). Laurence wrote that any excitement there may have been when it first became known that there were manuscripts of the Book of Enoch . . . seems to have long since subsided; as the copy deposited in the Bodleian Library has quietly slept there undisturbed to the present day. At length however I have ventured to break in upon its repose; and to employ myself in the subsequent translation of it. I have certainly spared neither time nor trouble in rendering it correct; but as the Bodleian Statutes, wisely in my judgment, preclude the use of books out of the library, I have been under the necessity of translating the work in it. (vi–vii)

Seventeen years later Laurence issued an edition of the Ethiopic text—Libri Enoch prophetae Versio Aethiopica Quae seculi sub fini novissimi ex Abyssinia Britanniam advecta vix tandem litterato orbi intulit (Oxford: J. H. Parker, 1838). It was only a transcription of the one manuscript Bruce had initially given to the Bodleian. Another thirteen years were to pass before a more important and soundly based edition was prepared by August Dillmann. Consulting five manuscripts (one of them was the copy used by Laurence), he edited the text in Liber Henoch aethiopice, ad quinque codicum fidem editus, cum variis lectionibus (Leipzig: Vogel, 1851). He soon followed the edition with a translation and full commentary: Das Buch Henoch übersetzt und erklärt (Leipzig: Vogel, 1853). This was the volume that Charles studied so carefully during his stay in Germany in 1889. Enoch to prove that he was the first to render the book into English (vi–viii). Dr. Charles Godfrey Woide (1725–90), a scholar of Coptic who was greatly interested in learning about the Book of Enoch, had traveled to Paris as soon as he heard that Bruce had deposited a copy of it there. According to Bruce, Woide made a complete translation of the text, but Laurence shows that Woide merely transcribed the text and attempted, unsuccessfully, to translate a few passages into Latin. No translation of the complete text could be found in the papers left behind by Woide at his death. According to Mary Clapinson and T. D. Rogers, Summary Catalogue of Post-Medieval Western Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library Oxford: Acquisitions 1916–1975 (SC 37300–55936), vol. I Catalogue (SC 37300–46393) (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991), item number 38128 consists of a: Transcript by Woide of an Ethiopic Text of Enoch, from a manuscript given to the Bibliothèque Royale, Paris, by James Bruce, with (fols. 3–6, 135–8) an account by Woide, and an English translation in his hand of Bruce’s letter of presentation of the manuscript, read before the Society of Antiquaries, 1774, 143 leaves; bound as 38118. (p. 72) Their Number 38129 reads: “Descriptions and notes relating to the Book of Enoch, including (fols. 11–14) ‘Memoire sur le livre d’Enoch (par Mr. Bruce)’. 40 leaves” (72). There is nothing in these entries about a translation of the Enoch text.

50    ( – ) Before Dillmann’s text and commentary appeared, students of the Book of Enoch had published a sizable amount of scholarship on it. Dillmann adopted a theory about the book that had garnered wider support: a substantial part of it was written by an author apart from several additions (6–16; 91:12–17; 93; and 106–7), some Noah passages (54:7–55:2; 60; 65:1–69:25), and a small number of other insertions.⁷ This was not the only hypothesis about the composition of the book—Heinrich Ewald,⁸ for one, thought it consisted of several independent works eventually combined into the large composition— but it was pretty standard. Put simply, it held that there was an original text containing much of the present contents (die Grundschrift) to which several additions were made. Against this view Charles raised strong objections and defended a different theory.

The Book The Book of Enoch translated from Professor Dillmann’s Ethiopic text emended and revised in accordance with hitherto uncollated Ethiopic MSS and with the Gizeh and other Greek and Latin fragments which are here published in full by R. H. Charles, M.A., Trinity College, Dublin, and Exeter College, Oxford (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1893). Charles opened the Preface by declaring: “It is unnecessary to apologize for the appearance of this book,⁹ as some such work has long been a desideratum to scholars. A knowledge of Enoch is indispensable to New Testament students” (vii). He called attention to four ways in which his book differed from previous studies of Enoch: (1) he based his translation on a superior, newly available manuscript of Enoch in the British Museum; (2) he rejected the Grundschrift theory, positing at least four authors; (3) he treated only briefly the book’s main teachings because he intended to write at greater length about them in a separate volume on Eschatology; and (4) he documented the influence the Book of Enoch exerted on later literature, including the New Testament (vii–ix). We have some information about the genesis of Charles’s 1893 book. Toward the end of the Preface, he wrote: “My best thanks are due to

⁷ Scholars also recognized that the Similitudes or Parables of Enoch, chs. 37–71, differed from the rest of the book. ⁸ “Abhandlung über des äthiopischen Buches Henókh: Entstehung Sinn und Zusammensetzung,” Abhandlungen der Königlichen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften zu Göttingen 6 (Göttingen: Dieterich, 1854) 107–78. ⁹ Similar words figure at the beginning of a number of his subsequent publications.

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Dr. Sanday, to whom I am under manifold obligations, and in connection with whose Seminar this work was primarily undertaken” (ix). At the time William Sanday (1843–1920) was the Dean Ireland Professor of Exegesis of Holy Scripture at Oxford (1883–95). His seminar would later focus on the Synoptic Gospels, but in the early 1890s the subject was different. While Charles did not disclose how his work on Enoch was done “in connection with” Sanday’s seminar, D’Arcy provides more information and reveals one of Charles’s activities during his early years in Oxford. The position of the higher critics was greatly strengthened by the adhesion of Dr. Sanday, a scholar of the widest attainments and of the greatest courage in the expression of his convictions, and of a character which attracted universal respect. His Bampton Lectures of 1893 on Inspiration had much to do with the newer way of regarding the manner in which the Divine and human elements are united in Holy Scripture and in the spiritual education of mankind. Charles imbibed these ideas and they became fundamental principles of all his critical work. He had indeed attended Dr. Sanday’s Seminar for Oxford Dons from 1890–1895 and become an ardent believer in the new methods.¹⁰

Doing his work in connection with Sanday’s seminar meant that from it he received a certain critical orientation to scripturally related subjects. Sanday and his seminar were important to Charles, and it is easy to see why. Sanday’s position apparently did not pay well at the time, so he also accepted an offer from Exeter College, the one where Charles later incorporated, to be the tutor in theology. Possibly their common association with Exeter brought them into contact with each other. In 1895 Sanday became the Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity and remained in the chair until 1919, the year before his death. Sanday was active, as D’Arcy’s words indicate, in making higher criticism of the Bible acceptable in the Church of England. He served as a bridge between the academic and ecclesiastical worlds in which capacity he helped clergy understand the reason why scholars were saying what they were saying and what was and was not acceptable.¹¹ He also encouraged young scholars; his seminar was a significant means for doing so.¹² ¹⁰ D’Arcy, “A Brief Memoir,” xxv. ¹¹ His name appeared in the Introduction to Part 2 (above), where note was taken of his role in making higher criticism more palatable during the 1880s and 1890s. ¹² Information about Sanday is drawn from Alan M.G. Stephenson, “William Sanday,” Modern Churchman new series 9 (1966) 257–72; “William Sanday (theologian),” Wikipedia, accessed 3-22-19. Sanday was among the first group of scholars to become Fellows of the British Academy in 1903 (Charles became one in 1906) and later, like Charles, joined the ranks of the English Modernists.

52    ( – ) At this time Sanday was still engaged in that early stage of his life’s work which he called lower criticism, or the study of texts. It was both a necessary and a fruitful field of study, and in his Inaugural Lecture as Dean Ireland’s Professor of Exegesis in 1883 he had issued a plea on its behalf: “The subject of all others in which youthful workers have a truly golden opportunity is Text. . . . I lay much stress on this particular subject, not because it is first in dignity, but because it is first in necessity, as a number of other subjects are being kept waiting for it, and also because it is a good subject on which to make a beginning.” He himself had concentrated his energies on the recovery of the Western Text, and in this connection had formed his seminar, which included such brilliant young men as Margoliouth, Turner, Winfrid Burrows, R. H. Charles, C. Harris, and A. S Peake.¹³

The seminar brought Charles into the orbit of Sanday and the other participants, and it taught him a discipline that would be fundamental to his work as a critical reader of ancient Jewish texts. At Oxford Charles not only benefitted from the influence of Sanday but also became a friend of Thomas Kelly Cheyne (1841–1915), who at the time was the Oriel Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture and canon of Rochester Cathedral. He had studied under Ewald, was a much-published author who was an important if controversial figure in introducing higher criticism into England, and with John Sutherland Black was the editor of the Encyclopaedia Biblica.¹⁴ Charles at some point expressed to Cheyne certain misgivings regarding Dillmann’s commentary on the Book of Enoch, concerns that arose chiefly from the fact that Dillmann had used later, corrupt manuscripts as the basis for his text of the book. Charles had also spotted a few mistakes in Dillmann’s translation. To his astonishment this great scholar urged him to undertake an edition of Enoch for the Oxford Press. It had never come into his mind to enter the arena with Dillmann, who was not only the Doyen of the Semitic school in Berlin University, but also the foremost Ethiopic scholar, whether as compared with scholars of the past or of the present, and also the first authority

¹³ Ronald Jasper, Arthur Cayley Headlam: Life and Letters of a Bishop (London: Faith Press, 1960) 37–8. Jasper was writing about the seminar because the subject of his biography was also one of its members. Headlam and Sanday co-authored A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans (International Critical Commentary; Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1895). ¹⁴ Twenty-two years later Charles would write a moving yet balanced obituary of his friend Cheyne in Proceedings of the British Academy 7 (1915–16) 545–51.

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on Apocalyptic then living or indeed that had ever lived. But the idea took hold and very soon Charles set to work, and in 1892 sent in his proposal to the Press.¹⁵

Despite Cheyne’s backing, not all went as smoothly as Charles could have hoped. D’Arcy’s account continues: The Delegates of the Press referred the matter to Professors Driver and Margoliouth.¹⁶ The latter rejected the proposal on the ground that Dillmann was a “faultless scholar.” Charles then asked Margoliouth to discuss the question in some detail by allowing him to compare Dillmann’s Ethiopic text and his German translation in a dozen or more passages. The request was granted, and after two hour’s discussion, Professor Margoliouth said that he had changed his mind and would support the proposal to the Press.¹⁷

The scene says much about Charles’s enthusiasm, not to say zeal, and Margoliouth’s openness and grace, not to mention patience. At any rate, Charles thus found a publisher for his first book-length treatment of an ancient text. Charles had already delved deeply into published scholarship on the Book of Enoch, as is evident from his two detailed reviews that appeared in the Jewish Quarterly Review 5 (1893). Under the title “The Recent Translations and the Ethiopic Text of the Book of Enoch. I,” (325–9) he treated the translations by Dillmann, George Henry Schodde, and Lazarus Goldschmidt (who had rendered the book into Hebrew), and in the second part of the essay (“The Ethiopic Text of Enoch. II,” 493–7) he dealt with the editions of Laurence and Dillmann and with the latter’s essay about the Gizeh Greek text (on this, see below). In the review of Dillmann’s work there are a number of examples that probably provided the ammunition Charles used in his discussion with Margoliouth. In the essay he was very deferential to Dillmann¹⁸ yet did not ¹⁵ D’Arcy, “A Brief Memoir,” xxiii. Charles dedicated the 1893 book to Cheyne and Sanday. ¹⁶ Driver is the famous Oxford scholar of the Old Testament, Samuel Rolles Driver, while Margoliouth is David Samuel Margoliouth (1858–1940). At the time he was in the early part of his long tenure as Laudian Professor of Arabic at Oxford (1889–1937). ¹⁷ D’Arcy, “A Brief Memoir,” xxiii–xxiv. ¹⁸ He wrote about Dillmann’s translation: it “is a masterly piece of interpretation, such as might reasonably be expected from the foremost Ethiopic scholar of the age” (326). At the end of the section reviewing Dillmann’s work, Charles commented: “It is thus clear that this translation is by no means a faultless one; yet, despite every defect, it will maintain a unique position in the Enoch literature, and likewise serve as a guide to future translators” (326). He was far less charitable to Schodde (1854–1917), who held a PhD from Leipzig (1876) and taught at Capital University in Columbus, Ohio. He had published the first American translation—The Book of Enoch translated from the Ethiopic, with Introduction and Notes (Andover: Warren F. Draper, 1882). Charles claimed that while Schodde said

54    ( – ) hesitate to point out places where the German scholar, even with the limited manuscript base at his disposal, could have improved his text. Moreover, he listed passages where he made other sorts of errors and noted several cases in which Dillmann, in his Lexicon (published in 1865), had printed readings that were corrections of ones he had given in the critical text of Enoch he issued in 1851. Charles was clearly immersed in the details of scholarship on Enoch and in the minutiae of the Ge‘ez text in which it survived. The 1893 book is fascinating from a number of angles, one of which is the opportunity to witness for the first time what might be called “the Charles approach”—the subjects he treated, the notes he wrote, the way he emended texts—an approach that would be duplicated in his other treatments of ancient compositions. Another is the fact that it shows Charles in mid-stride, as it were, in his labors on the Book of Enoch. As things transpired, an important discovery that could not be ignored came to his attention when his The Book of Enoch was already in press. As a result, the timing of the publication proved awkward and left some inconsistencies in it. This was the situation. While having the complete Ethiopic version of Enoch was a great boon, experts knew that the book had not been composed in that language. They recognized early on that Enoch was almost certainly composed in Hebrew or Aramaic, was later translated into Greek, and from Greek it was rendered into Ethiopic. When Charles was working on his translation of Enoch, the textual witnesses at hand, besides short citations in early Christian texts, were the growing number of Ethiopic copies of the entire text and Greek evidence of a much more limited scope: the citations of Enoch preserved in Syncellus’ Chronography and Codex Vaticanus 1809¹⁹ in which a Greek rendering of 1 Enoch 89:42–9 was copied in the margins. As Charles was working with this material, he did not know that a larger part of a Greek he was translating Dillmann’s edition of the text, at times he was clearly rendering Dillmann’s German translation. After providing examples, he added: In the face of such a list as the above—and it is far from exhaustive—it is hard to congratulate Dr. Schodde, for he has been most reprehensibly careless and inexact; and yet as students of Apocryphal literature we are grateful to him for re-introducing the knowledge of Enoch to the English speaking world. (327) The work by Goldschmidt (1871–1950) is entitled Das Buch Henoch aus dem Aethiopischen in die ursprünglich hebräische Abfassungssprache zurückübersetzt; mit einer Einleitung und Noten versehen (Berlin: Richard Heinrich, 1892). Charles was impressed that a twenty-year-old scholar had produced the translation but regarded it, not as a scientific reproduction of Dillmann’s text (he, too, according to Charles, at times translated Dillmann’s German, not his Ethiopic text), but one made more generally for Jewish readers or others who were interested in the literature (327–9). Goldschmidt studied with Dillmann in Berlin. ¹⁹ It had been published by the librarian at the Vatican, Angelo Mai, in his Novae Patrum Bibliothecae (Roma: Typis Sacri Consilii propaganda christiano nomini, 1844) 2.xi (a photographic plate of the text is on the facing page).

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translation of Enoch had been discovered in the winter of 1886–87. Several years later Ulysses Bouriant published an edition of the Greek manuscript found in a grave in a Coptic cemetery in Akhmim (Panopolis) in Upper Egypt.²⁰ The manuscript includes several Greek texts, among which are 1 Enoch 19:3–21:9 and, immediately after it, 1 Enoch 1:1–32:6a (the other works in the manuscript are parts of the early Christian compositions entitled the Gospel of Peter and the Apocalypse of Peter). Charles read Bouriant’s edition of the text (he, following Bouriant, referred to it as the Gizeh manuscript) and naturally wanted to incorporate the data from it into his book on Enoch that was then being set in type by Oxford University Press. There may not be many reasons to stop the presses for publications of ancient texts, but this one came close. Given the nature of printing at the time, only some of the many modifications Charles wanted were possible to incorporate at this late point. As he put it, “By the permission of the Delegates of the Press I was allowed to make such additional changes as would not interfere materially with the type already set up” (318). The changes he made led to some strange results in the book (see below). In his Preface to The Book of Enoch (dated April, 1893) he included a few statements about the growth in the textual evidence for the ancient composition, of which Bouriant’s manuscript was the latest example. Charles had begun searching for copies of Enoch soon after his return from Germany because within a year he was able to write a short notice, “The Ethiopic Manuscripts of Enoch in the British Museum,” Expository Times 3 (1891) 135. In it he drew attention to the Museum’s copies (how and when he first learned of them he did not say). He reported that there were nine of them and that they made it possible to improve on Dillmann’s text and thus on his and Schodde’s translations of it. He wrote: It is further noteworthy that amongst the nine MSS. in the British Museum, one is far superior to the rest. Whilst the other eight MSS. belong to the eighteenth century, this MS., which I shall designate G, dates from the beginning of the sixteenth century; and whereas the former bear the marks of a recension,—an earlier one apparently than that in which Dillmann’s MSS. belong,—this MS. G preserves many true readings which were lost through this recension.

²⁰ “Fragments grecs du Livre d’Énoch,” Mémoires publiés par les membres de la Mission Archéologique Française au Caire 9 (1892–93) 93–147; for the text see 111–36.

56    ( – ) He then provided a few examples to demonstrate the high value of G. In concluding the short article, he commented on how few copies of the book there were outside the British Museum and added some interesting notes: “The MSS. in the British Museum fell into the hands of the expedition which was sent against King Theodore. Their superiority to all MSS. previously known lowers the scientific value of Dillmann’s text, and renders a new edition a growing desideratum.”²¹ His last statement set up the need for his own work with the text. Also, Montague Rhodes James had allowed him to use and print (see Appendix E, pp. 372–5) a Latin translation of 1 Enoch 106:1–18 that James had found in a British Museum manuscript.²² It too permitted some textual progress, but with the newly published Gizeh Greek text of 1:1–32:6 there was even more opportunity for improvement over Dillmann’s edition. In connection with the Gizeh manuscript, Charles wrote about an oddity in his 1893 book—there were conflicting claims in certain sections of it:

²¹ The reference to the expedition against King Theodore puts in polite terms (“fell into the hands of ”) the fact that in 1868 a British force sent to free European hostages held by King Tewodros II (1855–68), Emperor of Ethiopia, took his fortress of Magdala after a battle and plundered it. Among the items removed from it, auctioned off, and purchased for the British Museum were manuscripts, including most of the ones of Enoch identified by Charles. His copies F and L had been acquired by the British Museum in 1861 and 1862 (see 1893, 2); the others came by right of conquest. ²² In his edition of 1906 (The Ethiopic Version of the Book of Enoch) Charles admitted a mistake he had made in the 1893 volume regarding the Latin text. He wrote about the location of the Latin Enoch material in the manuscript: “It follows a penitential edict of St. Boniface, while it is preceded by an anonymous tract ‘De vindictis peccatorum’ ” (372). James assessed the 1893 book in The Classical Review 8 (1894) 41–4 (see below for a summary). There he wrote about Charles’s comments regarding the Latin piece: With reference to the Latin fragment which I was so fortunate as to find in a British Museum MS., I have two corrections to make: first, the press mark of the volume is 5. E. xiii. not S. E. xiii.; for this my own handwriting may probably be to blame; next, I hope and believe that I did not say that the fragment ‘follows a penitential edict of S. Boniface and is preceded by’ another document. (43) Charles responded in “The Book of Enoch,” The Academy 45, number 1135 (1894) 127–8. On the point in question, he wrote: Mr. James hopes that he is not answerable for the statement made in reference to his Latin Fragment which he kindly communicated to me—‘that it follows a penitential edict of St. Boniface, &c.’ I am sorry that I cannot relieve him from any responsibility in this matter. From him and from him alone it emanates. (128) In The Ethiopic Version of the Book of Enoch (1906), after noting that James was not responsible for the nonsensical claim that both of the other works immediately preceded the Latin excerpt from Enoch, Charles went on to explain: When Dr. James rightly disclaimed responsibility in a review of my book, I wrongly maintained, in a rejoinder, his responsibility for the errors in question. I must either have replied without consulting the passage referred to, or else I consulted it but failed to observe the utter absurdity. I did not recognize it till much later. (xvi, n. 2)

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These instances [of change from Dillmann’s edition] are in all about six hundred. It will be remarked that on p. 4 they are said to be three hundred and twenty-two. The explanation of this discrepancy is to be found in the fact that the bulk of this book was already in type when the Gizeh MS. was published by M. [= Monsieur] Bouriant, and that I have allowed the Introduction to remain as it already stood before the publication of this Greek fragment. But as the examination of this fragment speedily made it clear that I had underestimated the value of these new Ethiopic MSS. [the copies from the British Museum], I was obliged to follow their authority in three hundred additional instances against Dillmann’s text. However, as I could introduce only a limited number of these new readings into the Critical Notes already in type, the reader will not unfrequently have to consult Appendix C for the text followed in the Translation in the earlier chapters. (vii–viii)²³

Since he left the General Introduction as it was before he received Bouriant’s publication, he did not change the sentence that says: “As the Greek fragment which has lately been discovered at Cairo²⁴ has not yet been published, I have not been able to avail myself of it” (p. 5).²⁵ Nevertheless, he added in the Preface that the Press had allowed him to print the entire text of the newly found Greek manuscript in Appendix C, pp. 326–70, with the two copies of 1 Enoch 19:3–21:9 arranged in parallel columns. He declared that the form in ²³ Charles tried really hard to change his notes to the translation in order to record the new information and wedge it into the space allowed by what had been typeset. But excise as I would, I could not at times make sufficient room for the fresh material, and so it occasionally happens that a text is followed in the Translation, the justification of which is given, not in the Crit. Notes which are immediately below, but in the Appendix. (318) ²⁴ It was not discovered “at Cairo” but at Akmim, more than 400 kilometers south of Cairo. ²⁵ Some years later he again had to correct a statement that was already set in print. In his book review of 1903, he wrote about Laurence’s 1838 edition of Ethiopic Enoch: Unfortunately I have not been able to see this last publication, but if the transcription is as accurately done as in other Ethiopic texts published by Laurence, then it may be taken as a very good representative of the MS. in question, and by no means deserving of the hostile criticism of Dillmann [who thought it was filled with typographical errors], . . . . Moreover, if Laurence’s edition of the MS. a was so faulty, was it right for Dillmann to trust to Laurence’s work wholly for his knowledge of this MS.? I have recollated the first ten chapters of a in connection with Dillmann’s text, and found no mistakes in chaps. i, ii, iii, iv, ix. In v, viii, and x I have found one each, in vii three, and in vi four. I hope to discover presently to whose account these should be set down. (“The Book of Enoch,” The American Journal of Theology 7 [1903] 689–90) However, in a footnote joined later to these comments he wrote: “I have just examined the Ethiopic text of Laurence above referred to, and find that Dillmann’s censure is more than justified” (690 n.). It is odd that for his 1851 edition Dillmann was able to use Laurence’s text (published in Oxford), while Charles, who was in Oxford for years, had not seen it before 1903.

58    ( – ) which he recorded it “will be found to be free from the serious blemishes of M. Bouriant’s edition” (viii). Charles incorporated into Appendix C of the book, where he printed the new Greek text, many detailed textual notes that compare the Greek and Ethiopic readings in chs. 1:1–32:6. In his introductory words to this section he restated the conclusions about their relations that he had set forth at the end of 1892. The Bouriant publication appeared in October of that year, and in a short notice in The Academy for November 26, 1892²⁶ Charles presented his understanding of the relative merits of the best Ethiopic readings, those of the Akhmim manuscript, and the citations of Enoch by Syncellus. 1. The text of the Gizeh MS. and that of the Syncellus fragments, though often diverging widely, repeatedly agree word for word for many verses together. Hence, they point to a single original translation from the Hebrew as their common ancestor. 2. The Ethiopic version approximates more closely to the text of the Gizeh MS. than to that of the Syncellus fragments; and this is true not only generally, but extends also at times to an agreement in unintelligible readings against a better text in Syncellus. 3. The Ethiopic version agrees occasionally with Syncellus against the Gizeh MS. 4. The Ethiopic preserves, in some instances, a better reading than either of the Greek fragments, and one from which the corruptions in the latter can be explained. Hence the presumption is that the Ethiopic version was made from a text which was the parent of that preserved in the Gizeh MS., and elder brother to that of the Syncellus fragments. A few lines later he added: But the most important service of this discovery is the criterion it provides for determining the value of the various Ethiopic MSS. of Enoch. The application of this test to these MSS. results in the practical condemnation of the MSS. used by Dillmann in his Ethiopic edition of the text, as being representatives of a most faulty and late form of the primitive Ethiopic version. I had already come to this conclusion nearly a year and a half ago;²⁷ and in my ²⁶ “The New Greek Fragment of Enoch,” The Academy 42, number 1071 (1892) 484. ²⁷ This would have been in mid-1891.

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edition of Enoch, the greater part of which is already in type, I have shown that Dillmann’s MSS. present a frequently corrupt text, and that the truer text is to be found in an ancient and hitherto uncollated MS. to which I have had access.

Since his subsequent studies simply confirmed them, he restated these conclusions in Appendix C. His analysis convinced him that the text in the recently discovered Greek manuscript and the one in the Ethiopic translation stemmed from the same Greek forebear. “The Ethiopic version was made from a text which was the ancestor of that preserved in the Greek MS.” (322, where the words are in italics). The Greek and Ethiopic were more closely related to each other than either of them was to the text of the citations in Syncellus’ Chronography (321). The fact that the Akhmim manuscript and the best Ethiopic readings coincided so frequently allowed Charles to propose the additional 300 changes from Dillmann’s text. He did add that Dillmann too had already published his comments about the Greek text from Egypt and realized its importance for improving his earlier edition at many points.²⁸ Charles²⁹ surveyed in the General Introduction to the 1893 volume all the textual evidence now available for establishing the text of the Book of Enoch. He was aware of 17 Ethiopic copies, i.e., 12 more than Dillmann had for his 1851 edition (2). He cited instances in which the ten³⁰ British Museum copies that he used, especially G, offered superior readings to those in Dillmann’s five copies. The fact that their readings also more often coincided with the ones in the Greek texts only confirmed the point. He added a survey of previous ²⁸ He was referring to Dillmann, “Über den neugefundenen griechischen Text des Henoch-Buches,” Sitzungsberichte der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin (Berlin: Verlag der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1892 [Erster Halbband, Januar bis Mai]) 1039–54, 1079–92. In the first section of his two-part report, Dillmann described the new manuscript, compared it with overlapping citations of Enoch by other authors (e.g., Jude, Syncellus), and showed how the Greek text could, on the one hand, be improved by comparison with the Ethiopic and how, on the other, the Greek reveals many errors and imprecisions in the Ethiopic. He added a section in which he argued that the new text sufficiently demonstrated that Greek was not the original language of the book, as it preserves transcribed Hebrew or Aramaic words; and he finished with a paragraph noting contributions the new text made to the Greek lexicon and some corrections it required in his own Lexicon Linguae Aethiopicae. In the second part (1079–92) he printed the text from the Gizeh manuscript. In it he entered several kinds of corrections/changes and added accents, punctuation, and chapter and verse notations (taken from his Ethiopic text and translation). ²⁹ Charles concluded his Preface, after words of appreciation to Sanday, Adolf Neubauer (1831–1907), a librarian at the Bodleian and Reader in Rabbinic Hebrew at Oxford, and Margoliouth, by extending thanks “finally and chiefly to my wife, whose constant sympathy and unwearied labour in the verification of references and the formation of indices have materially lightened the burthen of my work” (ix). ³⁰ Charles said there were ten, although he had earlier referred to nine, because his manuscript G contains a second version of Enoch 97:6b–108:10. That version he labeled G¹ and treated it as a separate copy because its text differs at points from the version of this section in manuscript G.

60    ( – ) studies (he called them “Critical Inquiries”), whether they were editions, translations, or commentaries. He explained at the beginning of the “Critical Inquiries” section: I had intended to give a critical history of all the work done on Enoch since 1850 and had collected almost sufficient materials for that purpose, when I found that my space would not permit of such a large addition to the book. I shall therefore content myself with enumerating these inquiries and adding occasional notes. (9)

Charles thought that the Book of Enoch had been written in Hebrew. For this he relied on the arguments furnished by Dillmann and Joseph Halévi. Halévi intended to retrovert the text of Enoch into Hebrew and in an article had adduced a series of examples favoring it as the author’s language.³¹ Dillmann had argued for Hebrew as the original language on the basis of the writer’s accurate geographical knowledge of the area around Jerusalem, his extensive familiarity with the Hebrew Old Testament, use of etymologies that rest on Hebrew explanations, and the Hebrew style everywhere present in the book.³² Charles also believed there was no questioning a Palestinian origin for the work (21–2). Since he considered the Book of Enoch to be an apocalyptic composition, Charles devoted a section of his General Introduction to “The Object of Apocalyptic Literature” (22–4). He explained that the conflict between the promises of God to the righteous, on the one hand, and the actual experiences of faithful people, on the other, was handled by the biblical prophets in a collective sense. That is, when they spoke of a much better future, they meant a future restoration of the nation to possess the earth. But as the claims of the individual grew more powerful, religious thinkers had to cope with this aspect of the theological conflict as well, not only with its corporate side. According to Charles, the apocalyptic writers continued the prophetic proclamation regarding the righteous community but focused on the individual members of that community. As for the destiny of the individual, and here lay the chief interest and service of Apocalyptic, this was finally to be determined according to his works. For ³¹ “Recherches sur la langue de la redaction primitive du livre d’Énoch,” Journal Asiatique (1867) 352–95. I have been able to find no evidence that he ever published a full translation of Enoch into Hebrew. ³² Das Buch Henoch übersetzt und erklärt, li–liii.

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though the righteous individual might perish amid the disorders of the world, his death could not fall out without God’s knowledge, and though cut off here apparently as a sinner, he would not fail to attain through the resurrection the recompense that was his due in the Messianic kingdom or in heaven itself. The conceptions as to this risen life, its duration and character, vary with each writer. (23)

The next section in the General Introduction holds an important place in the history of literary criticism of the Book of Enoch. Here Charles treated “The Different Elements in the Book of Enoch, with their respective Characteristics and Dates” (24–33) and set forth the thesis that the book consists of five originally independent booklets which are themselves “a fragmentary survival of an entire literature that once circulated under his name” (24).³³ He noted that several ancient works (e.g., Jubilees, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs) referred to Enoch’s books and also mentioned ones that are not part of the surviving Book of Enoch. So, in antiquity more books than the ones that have survived went under his name. A view widely accepted by the late nineteenth century was, as we have seen, that there were three elements in the book: 1. The Ground Work in chapters 1–36, 72–104. 2. The Similitudes in chapters 37–71 (Charles thought 71 was an interpolation). 3. Noah and Other Interpolations.³⁴ Charles held that the so-called Grundschrift (the Ground Work) actually included four booklets written by different authors at various times and with disparate teachings. The four with their dates as determined by Charles are: 1. 1–36: the oldest part, finished no later than 170 ..; 2. 83–90: written between 166 and 161 .., making use of 1–36; 3. 91–104 (105–7 are an interpolation and 108 is an addition): written between 134 and 94 or 104 and 94 .. by a Pharisee who denounced Sadducean ideas;

³³ In the Preface (viii–ix) he compared the manner in which certain kinds of books became associated with Enoch to the ways in which various groups of Psalms were connected with David and different kinds of wisdom texts with Solomon. ³⁴ Charles found more interpolations than others had—he listed twenty of them on p. 25.

62    ( – ) 4. 72–8; 82; 79 (79 is misplaced, and 80–1 are an interpolation): there is insufficient information for fixing the date of the section (see below on his 1912 volume where he offers a date range for it). These four units, with the Similitudes in 37–70/71 (written between 94 and 79 or 70 and 64 ..), constitute the Enochic Pentateuch which is preChristian. The editor who put together the entire composition was probably the one responsible for adding the interpolations.³⁵ The originally independent nature of these compositions is evident from their distinctive teachings. The categories of teachings Charles described disclose how he understood the messages in these individual works and, I think, why he believed the book was so important. For him, it seems, they were tracts offering a kind of systematic theology (especially eschatology), however unsystematic their literary forms might be. A major category is their teachings about what Charles called the messianic kingdom. Although the 108-chapter Book of Enoch uses the word messiah sparingly, Charles found teachings about a messianic kingdom—a term he did not define—in the various booklets. Following his chronological ordering of the sections, these are, according to Charles, their views about the messianic kingdom and related phenomena. 1–36: the writer advances little beyond the prophetic teachings regarding a messianic kingdom. It will begin with a resurrection of the righteous and wicked; directly afterward will come the final judgment. The wicked will receive the punishment appropriate to them, but the righteous will “become members of the eternal Messianic kingdom. The scene of the kingdom was to

³⁵ I think Charles was the earliest, unmistakable defender of this fivefold division of the Book of Enoch. The scholar before Charles who has the best claim to being first is Oskar Holtzmann (1859–1934) who wrote two sections about the book in the second volume (it was prepared by Holtzmann) of Bernhard Stade, Geschichte des Volkes Israel (2 vols.; Berlin: G. Grote’sche, 1887–88). On pp. 416–29 (the other section, 483–90, concerns the Similitudes) he spoke about three parts of Enoch (he did not give chapter numbers, but it is clear enough which ones he meant): 1–36 (consisting of four parts, 1–5, 6–11, 12–16, 17–36); 37–71; and 72–105 (consisting of three parts, 72–82, 83–90, 91–105 [106–7 and 108 are additions]). As one can see from the divisions within the major parts, he separated the units Charles did, but Charles did not find a threefold division in the entire book as Holtzmann had. Incidentally, it seems as if Charles was aware of Holtzmann’s position but had not read him. In 1893 (p. 13) he simply mentioned his contribution to Geschichte des Volkes Israel and gave the wrong date of the volume (1867) and wrong page numbers (201–2). In 1912 (xl–xli) he again listed the publication and wrote a description of Holtzmann’s view, but that description is a translation of what François Martin had said about it in Le livre d’Hénoch (Documents pour l’étude de la Bible, Les apocryphes de l’Ancien Testament; Paris: Letouzey et Ané, 1906) lxxi—something Charles acknowledged in a footnote (xli, note 1). This time he got the date and page numbers right.

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be the earth purged from all violence and sin” (26). Yet, after leading long, blessed lives, the righteous themselves will die in peace. 83–90: the author moves beyond the doctrine of 1–36 in that he, with the writer of Daniel, puts forth the idea of an “everlasting blessedness” (27). The military actions of Judas the Maccabee and the “Chasids” in the 160s .. open the last crisis in which the enemies of Israel meet their end. The fallen angels, the shepherds who had misruled (in the Animal Apocalypse, chs. 85–90), and the apostate Jews are then judged and condemned. It seems that after this the righteous Israelites experience a resurrection. They gather in the New Jerusalem where they are joined by “those Gentiles who had hitherto been neutral, but are now converted to the worship of Israel’s God” (27). Next, the messiah makes an appearance. “This is the earliest reference to the Messiah in non-canonical literature. But he has no role to play” (28). The messianic kingdom on earth is eternal as are the citizens who dwell in it. 91–104: here there is a “fusion” of prophetic and apocalyptic ideas. The messianic kingdom, when the righteous control the world, will extend for a time; there is no messiah in this messianic kingdom, but God helps the righteous destroy their wicked oppressors (Charles thought they were Sadducees). At its end the final judgment will take place, followed by “the risen spiritual life of blessedness in a new heaven” (28) lasting forever. The wicked suffer in Sheol eternally. One finds here a more spiritual conception, with the temporal messianic kingdom playing a less central role. 37–70: The righteous sufferers in these chapters do not complain against the Sadducees (as in 91–104) but against the Maccabean rulers. The Similitudes are distinctive in their teaching about the messiah that they, following Daniel, call the son of man, “who, possessing divine prerogatives, should destroy the wicked, and justify the righteous, and vindicate a transformed heaven and earth as their habitation for everlasting” (31). Chapters 72–8, 82, 79 really have no teachings about these topics, while 80–1 (an interpolation) have a moral tone but do not contribute to eschatology. The final unit in the General Introduction offers a comprehensive list of works and passages in Jewish and Christian literature influenced by the Book of Enoch (33–53). Charles included in the section not only citations of and allusions to the book but also passages where the teachings of Enoch, in his opinion, left their mark. He was hardly the first scholar to draw up such lists, and there are instances where one might question whether the Book of Enoch inspired something in another composition, but there is no doubting, as he and others showed, that the book was influential for a time in Jewish and Christian circles.

64    ( – ) The bulk of The Book of Enoch consists of the translation and notes (55–308). Charles furnished a “Special Introduction” for each of the five booklets that he distinguished. In these he described their structure and date and treated their relation to other booklets within the Book of Enoch. Most of the pages in the five sections contain his translation of the text—made from his as yet unpublished revision of Dillmann’s 1851 edition—supported by “critical³⁶ and exegetical notes” that take up much of each page. Despite his many “corrections,” he presented the text as it is, that is in its existing sequence, without removing from the translation parts that he considered interpolations³⁷ or rearranging chapters that he believed were out of order. It would not be accurate to call his notes a running commentary because he did not explain the entire text. Rather, he wrote notes on selected passages and topics. At times these are lengthy, at times passages are simply passed over in silence. This was to be his practice in his other translations as well. The volume includes five appendices: A Additional Bibliography (309–11) B “The Son of Man” (312–17)³⁸ C The Gizeh Greek Fragment (i–xxxii) with Introduction and Notes (318–70) D Additional Notes on xxxvii–cviii (371) E The New Latin Fragment, cvi. 1–18, with Introduction and Notes (372–5) Two indices (passages, names and subjects) occupy 377–91. In closing the survey of the 1893 volume, we should note Charles’s assessment of it in his 1906 edition of the Book of Enoch: In this work I attempted an exhaustive comparison of the Greek and Ethiopic texts, and carried the criticism of the materials several stages beyond previous scholars in this department. An overestimate, however, of the Ethiopic Version led me to make some unjustifiable changes in the Greek text. This error has been set right in the present edition.

³⁶ The critical notes deal with textual issues and are placed between the translation and the exegetical notes. The distinction between the two kinds of notes is not always clear-cut. ³⁷ He marked interpolated passages by putting them between brackets. ³⁸ The contents of this appendix also appeared in Charles’s article “Messianic Doctrine of the Book of Enoch, and its Influence on the New Testament,” Expository Times 4/7 (1893) 301–3. The first four paragraphs of the article (most of the first column on p. 301) summarize three of the four messianic titles in the Parables of Enoch (37–71) that also figure in the New Testament: anointed one, righteous one, chosen one. The remainder of the article treats the fourth title, son of man, and is identical to Appendix B in the book.

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Notwithstanding, the subsequent thirteen years of study have confirmed most of the suggestions made in 1893. (xi)

He would continue to refine his work on the manuscripts in later publications, but his 1893 book was at the time the most impressive publication on the Book of Enoch in English or any other language—one produced in a remarkably short time.

Reviews One of the reviewers of the 1893 volume was Dillmann himself.³⁹ He was the most qualified to evaluate it, given his earlier work on the Book of Enoch and his ongoing labors with the text as evidenced in his 1892 study of the Gizeh manuscript (see above). The Preface to Charles’s book is dated to April 1893; Dillmann’s review appeared in the September 2, 1893 issue of Theologische Literaturzeitung. If the two dates are approximately accurate for the times when the publications appeared, Dillmann must have received a copy very quickly and assessed it at once. He began the review by sketching his own work. He explained that for his 1851 edition of the text there were five–six manuscripts to which he had access. The reference to “six” is surprising because the title of his book mentions only five. He reported that in 1851 he was aware of more copies than the ones he used but was unable to examine one in Rome and, of the two in Paris, he was shown only one (it was the special copy that Bruce had given to Louis XV). The text that he established on the basis of the manuscripts available to him for the 1851 volume was what he termed the “Koine” (i.e., the common or vulgate) version of Enoch that was current in the last several centuries in Ethiopia. He also wrote that for his 1853 translation and commentary the lack of up-to-date reference works required that he engage in extensive research into the Ethiopic copies of biblical texts in his possession in order to understand some words and forms in the Book of Enoch.⁴⁰ In contrast to the circumstances prevailing in the early 1850s, now, some 40 years later, experts had at their disposal at least seventeen copies of the Ethiopic Enoch

³⁹ Theologische Literaturzeitung 18 (1893) 442–6. ⁴⁰ Presumably these labors formed part of the staggering amount of research represented in Dillmann’s Lexicon Linguae Aethiopicae (1865).

66    ( – ) (ten in the British Museum). Moreover, they could now use his grammar and lexicon and also had the Greek text of the first 32 chapters of the book. Dillmann granted that with the new tools numerous improvements could be made to his 1853 translation. He added that he had entered many of the changes in his Lexicon (as Charles had noticed) but others he had not been able to record there. These awaited a possible second edition of Enoch. As it turned out, Dillmann died less than a year after the date of his review—July 4, 1894—so no second edition ever appeared. In the context of the growing interest in matters apocalyptic, Dillmann welcomed Charles’s book and complimented him for the care and insight evident throughout its pages. He was, however, not convinced about everything Charles had to offer. A major objection had to do with Charles’s estimate of the value possessed by manuscript G (with G¹ and M)—Charles’s chief authorities among the British Museum copies. He agreed that it was right to prefer the readings of these older copies to the Koine text, but he rejected Charles’s claim that only these manuscripts preserved older readings. He cited Charles’s statement from p. 325: that the Ethiopic text of Enoch, which was part of the Old Testament in Abyssinia, “was transmitted (from the sixth century) with the greatest care and accuracy through successive copies till the sixteenth century, but after this date the text suffered much from ignorant corrections.” This Dillmann judged to be very much mistaken. In response to Charles’s assertion about the value of his best manuscripts, he noted the existence of at least eight more copies of Enoch beyond the ten in the British Museum. Dillmann said that he had collated four of these eight and found that no fewer than three of them at times preserved older readings—a statement he documented with a reference to his 1882 article in the Sitzungsberichte der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften where there is a preliminary list of examples (see above). When Charles’s book appeared, Dillmann compared the ca. 300 improved readings that Charles took from G (G¹ M) with the readings of the three manuscripts he had just mentioned. He found that there were many excellent readings in these copies that Charles had not used. From this he inferred that one could not establish an older text on the basis of G (G¹ M) alone; the other older manuscripts had also to be consulted. Dillmann noted that all copies were filled with errors and that only in the latter half of the sixteenth century was a scholastic version fashioned in Ethiopia. At that time, native scholars worked on the text and made emendations to it, though not always correctly; moreover, they did not understand many difficult passages. But through their efforts the Koine version developed. He also downplayed the importance of the differences between the texts in the older

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copies and in the Koine version: they usually involved minor matters, and in the most challenging passages the older copies offered no improvement. Regarding Charles’s translation, Dillmann adduced specific instances of mistakes and what he considered dubious emendations. He even charged that in some cases Charles’s comments about his own work betrayed an insufficient understanding of German idiom. He entertained doubts about his attempt to place the Greek citations in Syncellus, the Greek of the Gizeh manuscript, and the Greek text underlying the Ethiopic version in a genealogical relationship and from it to determine original readings. On his view, several versions of Greek Enoch had once been in circulation and the relations between them could no longer be determined. If Charles expected literal renderings of a Greek base in the Ethiopic versions, Dillmann wrote, he was not sufficiently knowledgeable about the ways of Ethiopian Bible translators. Finally, while he had some positive comments to make regarding Charles’s literary analysis of the book, he was skeptical about the presence in the booklets of a logical development in teachings about the future. In the last sentences of the review, he noted that there were 30–40 errors in the printed Ethiopic and that Charles always misspelled the name of Halévi as Hallévi (about twenty times).⁴¹ Montague Rhodes James (1862–1936) of Cambridge University evaluated the book in The Classical Review 8 (1894) 41–4. He began by writing: “Mr. Charles’s work must undoubtedly take its place at once as the authoritative edition of the Book of Enoch for English readers: I see no reason why he should not in future years produce what may be the final edition” (41). He gratefully welcomed the translation, but he repeated Dillmann’s hesitations about Charles’s reliance on three manuscripts as preserving the best text and his claim that the Ethiopic text of the book was very reliably transmitted from the sixth to the sixteenth century. He did think Charles’s coverage of scholarly literature on Enoch was a worthy contribution. After enumerating the positive contributions of the book, James turned to criticisms of his own. He admitted he was not able to deal with the Ethiopic ⁴¹ Charles, not one to take criticism lying down, responded briefly to Dillmann in the short note “The Book of Enoch,” The Academy 45, number 1135 (1894) 127–8. He observed that, in his review, M. R. James (see below) repeated some of Dillmann’s criticisms, and one he mentioned was the spelling of Halévi’s name. Charles wrote that Dillmann and James should have checked the facts because the scholar in question spelled his name differently over the years. At the time when he wrote the publication to which Charles regularly referred, he spelled it Hallévi, just as Charles gave it in the book. He said he would reply more fully to others of Dillmann’s points in the introduction to his edition of Jubilees which he was nearly ready to send to the press (it would be published in 1895). He added that he would also do so in the introduction to his Ethiopic edition of Enoch “which will appear, I hope, next year” (128; the book was published in 1906, twelve years later than the date of this essay).

68    ( – ) text, so he confined himself to introductory issues. One was Charles’s assertion that we have in Enoch only a selection of a larger literature under the patriarch’s name. He doubted that much of the ancient apocalyptic literature had disappeared and that the individual parts of Enoch distinguished by Charles circulated as separate works before being incorporated into the Book of Enoch. Perhaps successive authors wrote them “to occupy their present position” (42). He cited a number of “slips” on Charles’s part but had more serious reservations about the handling of the Gizeh Greek text: “. . . it seems to be quite impracticable to gather from Mr. Charles’s text and apparatus criticus exactly what the text of the MS. is. This is a grave fault” (43).⁴² Although Charles had acknowledged that his bibliography was not exhaustive, James added some titles that he thought Charles should have listed. After a few additional criticisms (e.g., the mixing of textual and exegetical matters in the two kinds of notes), he said about Appendix B ‘The Son of Man’ “I have this quarrel, that I cannot understand it” (43) and doubted Charles had a clear idea of what he was trying to say.⁴³ But he ended as he began with overall thanks to Charles for work well done and with gratitude that he and Morfill were about to publish a book on the Slavonic Enoch (on this, see below, Part 2, Chapter 3).⁴⁴ Charles published two more volumes on the Book of Enoch. We should now address them.

⁴² Charles did not reproduce the text exactly as it is in the manuscript. See p. 325 in the 1893 volume for the ways in which he edited it. ⁴³ In fairness to Charles, it is difficult to grasp why James had a problem with the section. In it Charles summarized the varied uses of the term in the Gospels, traced the origin of Jesus’s usage to the teachings about the son of man in Enoch 37–71, and showed that he combined this supernatural concept with that of Isaiah’s servant of the Lord. It is all quite straightforward. In his 1912 volume (Appendix II, 306–9) Charles largely repeated what he said here. As he wrote: “I will here republish with a few verbal corrections what I wrote in 1892” (306; he had finished this part of the 1893 book in 1892). ⁴⁴ In “The Book of Enoch,” The Academy 45, number 1135 (1894), 127–8 (mentioned above), Charles primarily responded to criticisms in James’ review. He forcefully rejected the suggestion that authors wrote the parts of Enoch for their present positions; a study of the dislocations to which editors subjected the sections, he thought, should disabuse James of this idea. He also claimed to be familiar with the publications that James thought it a mistake to have left out. Charles was aware of them but a quick glance at much of what was published before 1850 convinced him that they had nothing to contribute. “The scientific study of Enoch begins with the sixth decade of this century” (128). Although other reviewers did not have the same difficulty reading appendix B, he promised to write in a way James could understand if his book came out in a second edition. He ended by saying: “For one or two strictures I am grateful to my reviewer, as well as for his otherwise kindly and appreciative criticisms” (128). There were other reviews of the book such as the one by Cheyne (one of the people to whom Charles had dedicated it) that was published in Expository Times 4/11 (1893) 507–9. Cheyne made observations about connections with biblical passages and raised some questions, but admitted he could not handle the Ethiopic text and acknowledged “the reserve imposed upon me by the friendly personal relations” (507) between Charles and himself.

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The Context for Charles’s 1906 Volume on Enoch After 1893, scholarship on the Book of Enoch moved forward at a relatively rapid pace.⁴⁵ The year 1900 saw the appearance of the two-volume work Die Apokryphen und Pseudepigraphen des Alten Testaments (Tübingen: Mohr [Siebeck]) under the general editorship of Emil Kautzsch. The second volume (Pseudepigraphen) included Georg Beer’s excellent introduction to and annotated translation of “Das Buch Henoch” (pp. 217–310), in which he profited from using Charles’s translation. Shortly thereafter Johannes Flemming (1859–1914) and Ludwig Radermacher (1867–1952) published Das Buch Henoch: Herausgegeben im Auftrage der Kirchenväter-Commission der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller 5; Leipzig: Hinrichs. 1901). Flemming, an Ethiopicist, translated the entire book into German, while Radermacher, a classicist, edited the Greek text.⁴⁶ The 1901 book by Flemming and Radermacher, although it was a translation, marked another advance in determining the best text of Enoch. Flemming’s section of the Introduction (1–13) furnished a descriptive list of all the Ethiopic copies of which he was aware—now numbering twenty-six.⁴⁷ To designate the copies and to avoid confusion, he retained the designations employed by Dillmann, Charles, and Beer—capital letters in alphabetical order—but because of the growing number of them he extended the list to Zb. Manuscripts A–E were those used by Dillmann, F–O (there is no J) were the British Museum copies available to Charles, and P–Zb were the others.⁴⁸ Flemming established an Ethiopic text on the basis of fourteen manuscripts (he would publish it a year later; see below): Dillmann’s five for whose readings he relied on Dillmann’s edition, two of the British Museum copies (G M), and seven others (P Q T U V W Y). Flemming said that he collated G and M and

⁴⁵ Charles himself contributed the article “Enoch, (Ethiopic) Book of,” in James Hastings, editor, A Dictionary of the Bible (1898) 1.705–8. In it he summarized his conclusions in the 1893 book, to which he referred the reader, and also announced that he intended to issue an edition of the Ethiopic text (706). ⁴⁶ Charles wrote about Radermacher’s handling of the Greek material (he thought he edited it well): But, unless I am greatly mistaken, Dr. Radermacher is not a Semitic scholar. This deficiency in his equipment proved a sore handicap in the task he undertook. How is a purely classical scholar to edit a Greek text which is Greek in vocabulary, but largely Semitic in idiom? (“The Book of Enoch,” The American Journal of Theology 7 [1903] 699; cf. the 1906 edition [xii] and the 1912 volume [xv]) ⁴⁷ Included in his descriptions were indications of which additional compositions (e.g., other biblical books) figured in each manuscript bearing the text of Enoch. ⁴⁸ Some in this last set Dillmann had mentioned in his review of Charles’s 1893 volume.

70    ( – ) found many variants in them not recorded by Charles in his 1893 book, but this was not a reason for criticizing the latter’s work because the readings were more significant for formulating the Ethiopic text itself than for making a translation of it, as Charles had done (6). Flemming, signaling an advance in technology, reported using photographs of several manuscripts in his work. He divided the manuscripts into Group I (GQTU, with M) and Group II (the others), with the former containing older and the latter more recent copies (6). The criterion for dividing the copies into the two categories was their agreement with the Greek readings: Group I agreed with it more frequently than did Group II (8; both Dillmann and Charles had made the same point). He seconded Charles’s thesis that G was the most important Ethiopic manuscript but thought Charles had overestimated its value so that at times he regarded as solid readings ones that were actually scribal errors. Generally, however, he spoke favorably about Charles’s 1893 volume (12), though he found aspects of his statement about G¹ (the second version of 1 Enoch 97:6b– 108:10 in manuscript G) to be inaccurate (8–9 n. 3). In his own pages of the Introduction (13–15), Radermacher described his procedure with the Greek text and charged that Charles used the Ethiopic version too broadly as an aid in establishing the text of Enoch (14). In 1902 Flemming issued Das Buch Henoch: Aethiopischer Text (Texte und Untersuchungen 7.1/22.1; Leipzig: Hinrichs) in which he presented the Ethiopic text from which he had made his translation. In the introductory pages, he explained why the translation appeared before the text on which it was based. He had planned already in 1895, he said, to prepare an edition of Ethiopic Enoch and had spent five weeks in the summer of 1896 in London where he collated manuscripts. He became convinced, however, that he had to use the d’Abbadie manuscripts of Enoch (on them see below) for his edition but did not know where they were housed. He tried to obtain Dillmann’s collations of some of these manuscripts (see the description of Dillmann’s 1892 SPAW article above) but was unsuccessful. The reason was that the second edition of Enoch that Dillmann was preparing during his last years had been entrusted to another scholar to finish (Flemming did not name him). As a result, Flemming concluded he had to abandon the text edition portion of his project. So as not to lose all he had invested in the work, he decided to limit himself to the translation. When a few years later he heard that the other scholar was not after all going to finish Dillmann’s projected second edition, Flemming resumed his textual project, but by then the translation volume was so far along toward publication that it appeared first (pp. V–VI).

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The edition of Flemming was the most valuable contribution to date for establishing the text of the book. Because he had furnished in the 1901 volume most of the information about the manuscripts and the groups into which they fell, in the text volume he offered only a list of the manuscripts, his procedures for choosing between readings, and a list of corrections to the translation. Before and while this work was going on in Germany, Charles was preparing his edition of the Ethiopic text of Enoch.⁴⁹ His 1903 review of Flemming’s edition (and to a lesser extent, of the earlier volume of Flemming and Radermacher)⁵⁰ yields some information about his own work on the textual project. In it he surveyed the textual recovery of the Book of Enoch and, when treating his 1893 volume, pointed out, as he often did, the superior manuscript base for it compared with Dillmann’s text. But regarding his handling of the best manuscript, he granted: “ . . . g⁵¹ I collated throughout, on the whole accurately, but defectively, as I now find, in a relatively small number of passages” (690). He continued: From 1893 I have from time to time been engaged on the further study of the Ethiopic and Greek versions of Enoch. The result of these studies is at present with the printers and will probably be published toward the close of this year by the Oxford Press. These texts would have appeared sooner but for the publication of Dr. Flemming’s Ethiopic text in 1902. As this work gave a nomenclature to the Berlin [= q] and French [perhaps r–w] MSS. differing from that which I used in my Ethiopic text, I was obliged for the sake of my readers to bring my nomenclature into agreement with that of Dr. Flemming, who was first in the field. This was a task of no little difficulty. (690–1)

So, Flemming’s publication caused a delay in completing his text. At the time Charles did not know that his own edition would not be published until 1906, some three years later than he anticipated. The Orders of the Delegates of the Press (ODP, Oxford University Press) allow us to follow to some extent the preparations for publishing his edition of Ethiopic Enoch. The ODP for June 2, 1899, under the category of new ⁴⁹ Recall that he hoped it would be published in 1895 (“The Book of Enoch,” The Academy 45, number 1135 [1894] 128). He wrote nothing there about any arrangements with a publisher. ⁵⁰ “The Book of Enoch,” The American Journal of Theology 7 (1903) 689–703. ⁵¹ Although the practice had been to use capital letters to designate the manuscripts, from this point on Charles employed lower case letters in italic font.

72    ( – ) proposals read, mentions “An Ethiopic Text of the Book of Enoch, by the Rev. Prof. R. H. Charles, for the Anecdota Series.⁵² The consideration of this proposal was deferred.” The same source refers again to the project on February 27, 1903 where the book is said to be in preparation and is referred to the Anecdota Committee. Two weeks later (March 13, 1903) it is again said to be in preparation. By May 22, 1903 it has reached the point of “Ordered for Press and number,” with the number of copies to be printed given as 750. So apparently Charles was accurate in claiming in 1903 that his edition was “with the printers”; he was just a bit optimistic about when the Press would issue it. Charles commended Flemming for his thorough work with the manuscripts and considered his edition “an immeasurable advance on that of Dillmann and a considerable advance on Dillmann’s text as emended in my commentary in 1893” (692). Yet, while Flemming had personally collated three of the manuscripts in his first, older group (g m q), Charles found fault with the results and in the process emphasized how vital it was to photograph manuscripts: It was a fatal error on Dr. Flemming’s part that he did not photograph g m q, or, at all events, revise his collations of them.⁵³ The more a scholar works with MSS., the more distrustful he becomes of his own collations and of those of others. It is not unknown to some students of New Testament Greek MSS. that the successive collations of such scholars as Tischendorf, Scrivener, and Hort have failed to eliminate entirely the erroneous element in the representation of certain MSS. Hence one comes to regard photographic reproductions of the chief MSS. of a book as indispensable in his preparation of its text. The scholar must procure these; if not, he must revise his collations thoroughly, at least one or more times. (691)

Despite Flemming’s “fatal error,” Charles confessed that the German scholar had uncovered some places where Charles followed a poorer reading in his translation. His admission is somewhat backhanded, however: “I willingly admit my shortcomings in these respects. I could myself produce a much ampler catalogue than that adduced by Flemming, as will be manifest when my own text is made public” (692).

⁵² Charles’s edition of Jubilees (1895) had been published in the same series, Anecdota Oxoniensia. ⁵³ These are not among the copies for which Flemming said he had obtained photographs.

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Flemming’s failure to obtain photographs of the best manuscripts led to serious shortcomings in his text. On the whole, Dr. Flemming’s text is good, as might be expected from so excellent an Ethiopic scholar. But he has not risen to the opportunity. With the materials already accessible, it was possible for a scholar to make a definitive edition, and possibly to go down to posterity on the shoulders of this anonymous immortal [i.e., the compiler of the Book of Enoch]. But a definitive edition postulates an accuracy, a completeness (in respect to the first-class authorities), and a thorough knowledge of the subject-matter; and in all these qualities our editor shows himself defective. (692)

One suspects that Charles, whatever his thoughts regarding Flemming’s work, was also anxious to justify publication of his own edition. He devoted the rest of his review to an evaluation of how Flemming treated chs. 1–32, where there is both Greek and Ethiopic evidence (693–9), and the other chapters, where only the Ethiopic is available in almost all places and where, therefore, there is wider scope for disagreements about the preferred readings (700–2). The sections are pure Charles: there are six categories of shortcomings in Flemming’s text (e.g., “Inaccurate and defective collation of the MSS.”), and for each Charles amassed a seemingly excessive number of examples to make his point. Between these two sections about Flemming’s edition, he interposed comments on the Greek text edited by Radermacher in the 1901 volume, and after the two he added a few reactions to Flemming’s German translation in that same book. In this last section he again made detailed criticisms (e. g., his failure “to acknowledge the felicitous emendations of previous scholars” [703], including Charles, even when he accepted them). He ended the review in what seems a patronizing way after so many pages of fairly harsh criticism: However, faultfinding becomes irksome, and we would gladly conclude by drawing attention to the excellent points made by the editor in lxviii, 12; lxxix, 4; lxxxix, 10; civ, 6, and in expressing the hope that we may meet Dr. Flemming often in this department of research, in which he is fitted to achieve for himself a name, if he will but give himself the leisure for the task. (703)

Whether Flemming found this helpful—or even saw it—we do not know, but there is no record that he (or Radermacher) ever again published on the Book of Enoch.

74    ( – )

The Book The Ethiopic Version of the Book of Enoch: Edited from Twenty-Three MSS, together with the Fragmentary Greek and Latin Versions by R. H. Charles, M.A., Grinfield Lecturer on the Septuagint, Exeter College, Oxford, D.D. and Late Professor of Biblical Greek, Trinity College, Dublin, Fellow of the British Academy (Anecdota Oxoniensia, Semitic Series 11; Oxford: Clarendon, 1906).⁵⁴ After years of preparation and a long time at the press (see above on the press’s actions regarding the project), Charles’s edition appeared in 1906.⁵⁵ Since the volume is a text edition, Charles prefixed a shorter Introduction to it than to his translation of 1893. In the latter, the General Introduction ran to fifty-five pages, whereas in the 1906 edition the Introduction occupies only pages ix–xxxiii. The sub-title indicates that he had come across many manuscripts of the book that were not available to Dillmann when he produced his edition from five copies in 1851. He happened also to know of a few more than Flemming did. In the Introduction he mentioned experiencing a flash of insight: “In the course of editing the present work it suddenly dawned upon the editor that much of the text was originally written in verse. This discovery has frequently proved helpful in the criticism of difficult passages” (ix).⁵⁶ Charles now maintained, furthermore, that chs. 1–36 were probably written in Aramaic, while there was good reason for thinking Hebrew was the original language of 37–71, 83–104 (x). That is, Enoch, like Daniel, was a book written in two languages, Hebrew and Aramaic. He described the textual witnesses for the book in each language in which it is attested along with a summary of the studies devoted to the ancient versions. While the Ethiopic version and the readings in the Gizeh Greek manuscript are closely related, he concluded, Syncellus’ Greek citations from Enoch preserve a superior text form (xiii–xvi). The sub-title of the 1906 edition conveys the chief reason for issuing it—the availability of twenty-three manuscripts of the Ethiopic version. He had written in 1893 that there were seventeen copies in Europe (p. 2),⁵⁷ and in

⁵⁴ The titles and appointments listed after his name are treated in the following chapters dealing with the years in which he received them. ⁵⁵ He dedicated the book to his wife. He also thanked his niece, Madeleine La Vie Charles “for much help in making the Index Graecitatis” (iv). ⁵⁶ A comparison of the text layout in his 1893 translation and in the revised form he published in 1912 shows how large an effect this “discovery” had. He would have similar flashes of insight for other books, e.g., Jubilees and Daniel. ⁵⁷ He referred to twenty or more copies in “Enoch, (Ethiopic) Book of,” in James Hastings, editor, A Dictionary of the Bible (1898) 1.705–8.

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1901 and 1902 Flemming had referred to twenty-six. Charles explained in his section about the Ethiopic version (1906, xvii–xxi) that there were actually twenty-nine manuscripts of which he was aware. Though he drew upon only twenty-three for his edition, he partially collated four others as well but saw no reason to include readings from the remaining two (xvii–xviii). Manuscript G (now g) remained his best witness. In fact, the “Ethiopic text has been printed directly from a photograph of the chief MS. g with the necessary corrections from other MSS.; but the orthography of this MS. has been nearly always adhered to, although it very frequently confuses the aspirates and the sibilants” (iii). Charles innovated in a small way in his edition without explaining why he did so: rather than referring to the two categories of manuscripts as Group I and Group II, he designated them by the first two letters of the Greek alphabet, α for the older ones, β for the later ones (xxi). He would employ the new symbols in his translation of 1912 as well. He had photographs of fourteen of the copies, and several libraries and individuals loaned their manuscripts either to him or to the Bodleian for his use (iv). By 1906, it was no longer necessary to travel to museums and other repositories in order to transcribe or check readings in manuscripts; they could be more permanently and easily accessible to an editor sitting in his study (or in the Bodleian). Charles related the following about how he obtained materials for his edition: From Mme. D’Abbadie (r–w) Permission to collate four manuscripts Permission to photograph two others British Museum (f–o) Permission to photograph all ten copies The Paris (z zb?)⁵⁸ and Munich (y) manuscripts were loaned to the Bodleian Library for his use

⁵⁸ Manuscripts p and z are two of the three of which Charles’s knowledge was “indirect” (xvii), as problems developed in his attempts to use them. Of p he wrote: . . . this MS. formerly belonged to Lord Crawford and was lent by him to the editor of the German edition of the Ethiopic text of Enoch which appeared in 1901, but since that date this MS. has passed into the hands of a lady, who refuses to lend it or any other MS. in her possession to the Bodleian Library for the use of English editors. If he intended to be discreet in referring only to “a lady,” he lost his discretion two pages later when, in a list of the manuscripts, he said that p belonged to Mrs. Rylands (xix). Manuscript z, he wrote, “indeed was most kindly lent to the Bodleian Library for my use, but unhappily I was absent part of the time of its sojourn there, and whilst I was present the officials of the Bodleian did not notify me of its arrival” (xvii).

76    ( – ) The Berlin Library loaned its manuscript (q) and gave him permission to photograph it The Vatican gave permission to photograph its one manuscript. (x) Baron von Westenholtz (Hamburg, b¹) and Mr. Garrett (Philadelphia, a¹) loaned their copies for his personal use. The availability of both was arranged through the assistance of Enno Littmann, the German orientalist who had participated in Princeton University expeditions to Ethiopia in the early years of the twentieth century.⁵⁹ While photographs were crucial for Charles’s work, he also referred to travels to examine some of them. He thanked “the Trustees of the Revised Version Surplus Fund for a subvention towards the expenses incurred in my expedition to Abbadia at the foot of the Pyrenees” (iv; cf. xviii). The place in question was the chateau of Antoine Thomson d’Abbadie (1810–97) located in the town of Hendaye. He was, among other pursuits, a traveler in Ethiopia during the late 1830s and 40s. He had managed to gather several hundred manuscripts that were eventually housed in the chateau. To that appealing place Charles journeyed to consult his copies of Enoch.⁶⁰ The trip, whose date he did not specify, must have occurred after Antoine d’Abbadie’s death in 1897, because he thanked Mme. D’Abbadie (who also died before publication of the 1906 volume) for allowing him to collate four and photograph the two additional manuscripts in Abbadia. Charles knew of these copies from d’Abbadie’s Catalogue raisonné (1906, xx). Charles’s edition must have posed a challenge for typesetters. Of the 237 pages in the book, the text appears on 1–226. The critical text in Ethiopic font occupies the upper portion of most pages, while the apparatus of variants beneath it is of course sprinkled liberally with Ethiopic terms. Where there is evidence in Greek or Latin, the full parallel text is printed. In the first thirtytwo chapters of Enoch for which the entire Greek text has survived, sometimes in more than one form, the full text is printed on the page facing the Ethiopic. ⁵⁹ Robert Garrett (1875–1961) was a graduate of Princeton (1897), an Olympic medalist (1896, 1900), banker, and trustee of the university (from 1906). He brought Littmann to Princeton in 1902 to curate and catalog the manuscripts he owned and also funded the Princeton expedition to Abyssinia in 1905–06. Littmann purchased manuscripts there for Garrett. Garrett eventually donated some 11,000 manuscripts with texts in various languages to Princeton. See Ephraim Isaac, “The Princeton Collection of Ethiopic Manuscripts,” The Princeton University Library Chronicle 42, number 1 (1980) 33–52. ⁶⁰ D’Abbadie published Catalogue raisonné de manuscrits éthiopiens appartenant à Antoine d’Abbadie (Paris: Imprimerie Impériale, 1859). In it he described the 234 manuscripts then in his possession. The ones that include the Book of Enoch are #16 (pp. 16–18), #30 (35–7), #35 (42–3), #55 (65–8), #99 (110), and #197 (198). He continued to acquire manuscripts after his return from Ethiopia (see his statement about ##194–234 on p. xi). The manuscripts are listed in the Catalogue in the order of their date of acquisition (xi).

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Where there are two Greek texts (the Gizeh manuscript and Syncellus’ citations), they are given in parallel columns. The shorter Greek text at 89:42–9 and the Latin at 106:1–18 likewise appear alongside the Ethiopic. It is no wonder that Charles expressed thanks “to the officials, and especially to the readers and compositors of the Press for their skilled services in the publication of this text” (iv). There are two sections at the end: Appendix on VI. 7 (a study of the angel names in the verse and in other passages, 227–8); and Greek Index (229–37) that his niece helped prepare.

Reviews One would not expect many reviews of a complicated technical work such as Charles’s edition of Enoch, but there were a few. René Basset (1855–1924), a French orientalist who specialized in Arabic and Berber, reviewed it in Revue de l’histoire des religions 56 (1907) 126–8. He first surveyed the history of editing and translating the Book of Enoch and concluded with rather general remarks about Charles’s book. Of it he said that, while it outstripped its predecessors, one should not consider it definitive because textual discoveries could require modifications on some points. He did think, however, that the edition would for a long time serve as the basis for any study of the Book of Enoch. He judged it to be accurate, as one would expect from an Ethiopicist as learned as Charles, and deemed it an honor to Charles and the series in which it was published. Another general treatment was written by an American, William MussArnolt (1860–1927), an Assyriologist at the University of Chicago and later a librarian at the Boston Public Library. Early in his review in The American Journal of Theology 12 (1908) 660–1, he offered an appreciative comment: That we have now a practically exhaustive edition of the only extant version, the Ethiopic, together with the fragmentary Greek and Latin renderings, we owe to the painstaking labor of Professor Charles, the leading editor of Ethiopic texts and one of the best scholars of the Ethiopic language and literature. (660)

After that the review mostly consists of a summary of the Introduction, section by section. Regarding section 7 (relations between the Ethiopic manuscripts), he wrote: “It is in this section, especially, that Charles shows his complete mastery of the text and subject” (661). He ended his review with

78    ( – ) the same thought Basset expressed: the book was an honor to Charles and to the series Anecdota Oxoniensia.

Legacy It seems appropriate to treat the ongoing importance of Charles’s edition separately from the influence of the two translation volumes (1893 and 1912) which will be examined at the end of this chapter. His 1906 work has proved to be a, if not the, standard text edition even to the present. The comments of Michael Knibb, himself an expert on the text of Enoch, are helpful to cite in this respect. After describing Flemming’s edition, he wrote: Flemming’s collations of BM 485 [ = g], BM 491 [ = m], and Berl [ = q] are, as Charles indicates, not entirely accurate, but, apart from this, Flemming’s text-edition and translation are in many ways the most convenient and helpful of the tools hitherto available for the study of Enoch, since Flemming’s judgement on textual matters was often more sensible than that of Charles. The major difference between the editions of Flemming and Charles is that the latter provides a larger number of textual variants than the former. This increase is partly, but not entirely, the result of the use of manuscripts ignored by, or unknown to, Flemming.⁶¹

Later Knibb added: Charles’s text-edition contains the greatest amount of information hitherto available for the study of the Ethiopic text of Enoch, and certainly from this point of view his edition is superior to that of Flemming. Furthermore, his collations—although there are inevitably misprints in his edition—seem for the most part to be accurate. On the negative side, it should perhaps be pointed out that a fair proportion of the variants which Charles gives are of a purely orthographic character, and it may be questioned whether variants of this type should stand in the apparatus. Again, the overwhelming mass of information provided by Charles and the manner in which it is organized sometimes make the use ⁶¹ The Ethiopic Book of Enoch: A new edition in the light of the Aramaic Dead Sea Fragments (2 vols.; Oxford: Clarendon, 1978) 2.4.

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and interpretation of his evidence difficult. Despite this his text-edition is of considerable importance, and provides a very valuable tool for the study of Enoch. In any case, since Charles there has been neither a new edition of the Ethiopic text of Enoch nor a new translation, and while there have been various studies dealing with particular aspects of the text of this book, as well as various relevant manuscript discoveries, there has been no comprehensive re-examination of the Ethiopic text.⁶²

Knibb issued a work whose sub-title identifies it as a new edition of Ethiopic Enoch, but it is an edition in a different sense than those produced by Dillmann, Flemming, and Charles. That is, he did not establish an eclectic text of the book on the basis of the readings in the manuscripts but used one manuscript as the base, and photos of it serve as the text. Against this one manuscript he collated the readings of many others. So, in Knibb’s publication one will not find a critical text but will encounter a very large amount of textual data accurately recorded. Because of the nature of Knibb’s edition, it is still valid to say that Charles’s was the last critical edition of the Ethiopic text of Enoch to be published (see below for more recent discoveries).

The Context for Charles’s 1912 Volume on Enoch The final entry in Charles’s great trio of works on the Book of Enoch appeared nineteen years after the first and six years after the critical edition. There is really little to add about the context for the publication beyond what has already been said regarding Charles’s previous two books. Just one major study of Enoch appeared from 1906 to 1912—François Martin’s Le livre d’Hénoch of 1906. Martin’s work contains a lengthy introduction (xv–clii) in which he treated the sorts of topics Charles addressed in his introductions but had more to say about the teachings in the booklets (xix–lii) and provided both a description of earlier studies (e.g., in his section on “Le problème littéraire” [lxii–lxxxviii]) and a full bibliography of publications on Enoch (cxli–cli). He largely accepted the divisions Charles had traced in 1893. After considering chs. 1–5 which he viewed as an introduction to the whole book, he dealt with the five principal parts: 6–36, 37–71, 72–82, 83–90, and 91–105, with an appendix on 106–8. Charles summarized Martin’s conclusions and stated:

⁶² The Ethiopic Book of Enoch, 2.5–6.

80    ( – ) “There are many ingenious suggestions in Professor Martin’s Commentary, some of which I have accepted with due recognition” (1912, xlvi).

The Book The Book of Enoch or 1 Enoch⁶³ Translated from the editor’s Ethiopic text and edited with the Introduction Notes and Indexes of the first edition wholly recast enlarged and rewritten together with a reprint from the editor’s text of the Greek fragments by R. H. Charles, D. Litt., D.D., Fellow of Merton College, Fellow of the British Academy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1912).⁶⁴ Charles had been planning a new edition of the translation/commentary for some time as we learn from a letter he wrote to R. W. Chapman,⁶⁵ the secretary of Oxford University Press (OUP, March 11, 1908). It mostly concerns his edition of the Greek version of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, but towards the end he told Chapman: “I will call at the Press on my return [from a holiday], and we can then discuss the details of the 2nd ed of Enoch.” Charles opened the Preface by declaring: This is not so much a second edition as a new book. A brief comparison of the first edition [the 1893 volume] and the present work will make this clear even to the cursory reader. Alike in the translation and in the commentary it forms a vast advance on its predecessor. I cannot claim to be satisfied with it even as it stands, and yet twenty additional years spent in Apocalyptic and Biblical studies have not, I would fain hope, been fruitless with regard to the present work. (v)

Further along in the Preface he wrote about what he termed a revolutionary and a non-revolutionary feature of the book. The revolutionary feature, one he had mentioned in his 1906 edition (e.g., ix), was “the editor’s discovery ⁶³ He could refer to it as 1 Enoch because 2 Enoch, as the Slavonic Enoch came to be called, had been published in 1896 by himself and Morfill (see below, Chapter 2). ⁶⁴ Charles dedicated the book to “the Warden and Fellows of Merton College.” He had become a Fellow there in 1910, his first permanent position at Oxford. The warden in 1912 was Thomas Bowman, a mathematician also versed in classics, who held the post from 1904–36. The position of warden was held for life, but Bowman apparently became somewhat of a recluse and finally resigned under pressure from the tutors and others (G. H. Martin and J. R. L. Highfield, A History of Merton College, Oxford [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997] 325–6, 337–8). ⁶⁵ For more on Chapman and the role of the secretary, see Part 2 Chapter 8 below on the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs.

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of the poetical structure of a considerable portion of the work” (v). Recognizing poetry in numerous passages had major implications for his work of “correcting” the text. By its means the lost original of the text is not infrequently recovered, phrases and clauses recognized as obvious interpolations, and not a few lines restored to their original context, whose claims to a place in the text were hitherto ignored on the ground of the weakness of their textual attestation. (v)

Uncovering what Charles took to be poetic units thus led him to make textual decisions about what did and did not belong and even about the location of lines, at times in defiance of the manuscript testimony. His translation of 1 Enoch 5:6–7 is one example among many. It should be remembered that for the 1912 translation Charles used the Greek text that had become available too late for him to incorporate fully into the 1893 translation; it is longer than the Ethiopic for this passage and accounts for many changes in his 1912 rendition. But Charles’s rearrangement of the lines in 1912 is the striking feature (the lowercase letters indicate the actual order of the lines in the manuscripts for each verse). 1 Enoch 5:6–7 (1893) 6. In those days ye shall give your name for an eternal execration unto all the righteous, and they will evermore execrate you as sinners—you together with (all other) sinners.

1 Enoch 5:6–7 (1912) 6.a. In those days ye shall make your names an eternal execration unto all the righteous b. And by you shall all who curse, curse. c. And all the sinners and godless shall imprecate by you, 7.c. And for you the godless there shall be a curse.

7. But for the elect there will be light and joy and peace, and they will inherit the earth; but upon you, ye ungodly, there will be execration.

6.d. And all the . . . shall rejoice, e. And there shall be forgiveness of sins, f. And every mercy and peace and forbearance: g. There shall be salvation unto them, a goodly light.

82    ( – ) i. And for all of you sinners there shall be no salvation, j. But on you all shall abide a curse. 7.a. But for the elect there shall be light, and grace and peace, b. And they shall inherit the earth. Such drastic recasting of the text required plenty of explanation. Commenting on the two verses, he wrote in 1912: I have been obliged to rearrange the text of these verses, which is certainly in disorder. Thus in v. 6 there are ten lines,⁶⁶ one of which—the eighth (6 h) . . . is a doublet of 7 b. Strangely enough this line is repeated in an impossible place in v. 8. Now when we excise this line we have in vv. 6–7 the following arrangement: a tristich, a tetrastich, a distich, and a tristich. This of course cannot be right. Removing the tetrastich from consideration, 6 d e f g, which is right, we have a tristich, a distich, and a tristich. Now the first tristich deals with the curse that will befall sinners in many forms. A fourth line is wanting that deals with the same subject. There are actually two suitable, either the last line of v. 6 . . . or the last line of v. 7 . . . . But 6 j follows closely on 6 i; hence we have found the missing line of the first stanza in 7 e. Thus we have two complete tetrastichs in v. 6, i.e. 6 a b c, 7 c and 6 d e f g. It is now obvious that the remaining distich in v. 6 belongs to the distich in v. 7, and thus the stanza in v. 7 is completed. (11 n.)

The various features of the text that Charles considered impossible or clearly wrong are ones that did not fit his sense of how the poetry should have worked; hence he made changes without manuscript support. Such radical surgery—reordering that relies to a large extent on what seemed right to a twentieth century European reader working with translations, not the Aramaic text of the verses⁶⁷—remains a stunning feature of Charles’s work (and of many of his contemporaries) that detracts from its otherwise abiding value. ⁶⁶ He was referring to the longer Greek text. ⁶⁷ Verse 6 survives on 4QEna, but just a few letters can be read so that it offers little help in assessing Charles’s reworking of the text (for an analysis of the evidence, see Knibb, The Ethiopic Book of Enoch, 2.66). The Qumran copies of parts of 1 Enoch will be treated at the end of the chapter.

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It should be added that Charles’s “corrections” of readings were certainly not confined to rearranging poetic lines. Another striking emendation, made first in 1912, occurs at 71:14: 71:14 (1893) And he came to me and greeted me with his voice, and said unto me: ‘Thou art the son of man who art born unto righteousness, and righteousness abides over thee and the righteousness of the Head over thee and the righteousness of the Head of Days forsakes thee not.’

71:14 (1912) And he (i.e. the angel) came to me and greeted me with His voice, and said unto me: ‘This is the Son of Man who is born unto righteousness, And righteousness abides over him, And the righteousness of the Head of Days forsakes him not.’⁶⁸

This is an instance in which he altered the content. Charles, like many other readers of Enoch, found it implausible that the son of man, who seems to be someone other than Enoch in the earlier parts of the Similitudes (1 Enoch 37–71)—Enoch frequently sees him in his visions—is now suddenly at the end of the booklet identified as Enoch. That is, he would have been, unawares, looking at himself in the visions. Charles, therefore, rewrote the text rather than taking the safer course of translating the readings present in the Ethiopic copies (the only witnesses for the Similitudes) and confining his suspicions about them to textual notes.⁶⁹ But he had to do more in the context than make the changes he marked with bold font. In 1912 (but not in 1893) he claimed that a passage had been lost just before this verse. So, in his translation, after v. 13, he inserted: “[Lost passage wherein the Son of Man was described as accompanying the Head of Days, and Enoch asked one of the angels (as in 46³) concerning the Son of Man as to who he was.].” Because of his emendations in v. 14 he also had to change the pronouns in v. 16 (four times) from the second person forms in the manuscripts (“your/you” = Enoch) to “his/him” = the son of man (a being other than Enoch). The feature of the 1912 translation that Charles identified as nonrevolutionary was the commentary. He said that it followed the principles set forth in the 1893 volume, ones now widely accepted in the field. “The

⁶⁸ Charles printed the words of the angel as poetry in 1912 but as prose in 1893. ⁶⁹ In 1893 he categorized ch. 71 as an addition to the Similitudes and considered the use of “son of man” in it as differing from occurrences in the earlier chapters (183–4).

84    ( – ) critical advance made in the present volume is not of a revolutionary character, but consists rather in a more detailed application of the principles of criticism pursued in the first edition” (v–vi). In the Preface Charles directed words of exhortation to his fellow biblical scholars. In 1893 he had noted how indispensable knowledge of Enoch was for students of the New Testament. Now he added that it was of the utmost importance for Old Testament scholars as well, especially in their study of prophecy. “To the biblical scholar and to the student of Jewish and Christian theology, 1 Enoch is the most important Jewish work written between 200 .. and 100 ..” (vi). Such comments are what might be expected from an advocate of a new field of study, but Charles then penned a paragraph for Jewish scholars that makes for painful reading today, though it may not have sounded objectionable in his time: I cannot help expressing here my deep regret that Jewish scholars are still so backward in recognizing the value of this literature for their own history. Apocalyptic is the true child of Prophecy, and became its true representative to the Jews from the unhappy moment that the Law won an absolute autocracy in Judaism, and made the utterance of God-sent prophetic men impossible except through the medium of Pseudepigrapha, some of which, like Daniel, gained an entrance despite the Law into the O. T. Canon. It is true that eminent Jewish scholars in America and elsewhere have in part recognized the value of Apocalyptic literature, but, as a whole, Orthodox Judaism still confesses and still champions the one-sided Judaism, which came into being after the Fall of Jerusalem in 70 .., a Judaism lopped in the main of its spiritual and prophetic side and given over all but wholly to a legalistic conception of religion. It is not strange that since that disastrous period Judaism became to a great extent a barren faith, and lost its leadership in the spiritual things of the world. (vi)

Charles devoted almost all his prodigious scholarship to texts from pre-70 .. Judaism. He had little good to say about anything Jewish thereafter or indeed about the role of the law in pre-70  literature. The Introduction to the new volume occupies more than 100 pages (ix–cx), nearly twice the length of its counterpart in the 1893 book. Charles continued to hold that the Jewish apocalyptic writings “almost alone represented the advance of the higher theology in Judaism, which culminated in Christianity” (ix). He did not hesitate to say that some of the writers whose words found their way into the Book of Enoch “belonged to the true succession of the

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prophets” (x). The dominance of the law, regarded as the last word from God, forced these Spirit-led men to resort to pseudepigraphy to gain a hearing (a point he would make in many of his publications). The arrangement of the 1912 work mirrors that of the 1893 volume but offers more material in many places. New sections in the General Introduction treat “The Title” (§2, xii–xiii) and “The Canonicity” (§3, xiii–xiv). Gone are the little section he had called “Emendations” (§4, 5–6) and the one on “The Object of Apocalyptic Literature” (§9, 22–4). In §13 (“Characteristics and Dates of the Different Elements”) he assigned chs. 72–82, the section he could not fix chronologically in 1893, to a time before 110 .. because Jubilees, a book that he thought was written around this time, refers to it (liii).⁷⁰ Other new items in 1912 are §14 “The Poetical Element” (lvi), §15 “Original Languages of Chapters VI–XXXVI—Aramaic; of I–V, XXXVII– CIV—Hebrew” (lvii–lxx), and §17 “The Hebrew Book of Enoch” (lxxix–lxxxi). The format of the book changed somewhat from its predecessor. This time Charles did not distinguish between textual and exegetical notes. There is just one category of notes printed in smaller font beneath the translation; they regularly occupy half or more of the space on a page. He continued his practice of placing a special introductory section before each of the five units in 1 Enoch. He was, naturally, able to incorporate the evidence from the Gizeh Greek text in his translation and notes on 1:1–32:6. The 1912 volume contains two indexes familiar from the 1893 book: I The Gizeh Greek Fragment (i–xxxii) and the Greek Fragments Preserved in Syncellus’ Chronographia (273–305). II The Son of Man; Its Meaning in Jewish Apocalyptic and the New Testament (306–9). Charles still maintained that the “authors of all the sections belong to the Chasids or their successors the Pharisees” (xi), and, as in 1893, this identification allowed him to name the protagonists in the various parts of the Book of Enoch. He spoke about the nature of these authors in the section devoted to Theology (§20; it incorporates a good amount of material that is more scattered in 1893).

⁷⁰ He wrote regarding the annual calendar in 1 Enoch 72–82: “The writer puts forward a year of 364 days, but this he did only through sheer incapacity for appreciating anything better; for he must have been acquainted with the solar year of 3651/4 days” (150). The Qumran discoveries, made after Charles’s death, have provided a different perspective on the Enoch calendar.

86    ( – ) The books or sections of Enoch were written by orthodox Jews, who belonged to the apocalyptic or prophetic side of Judaism, and by Judaism is here meant, not the one-sided legalistic Judaism that passed as the sole and orthodox Judaism after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 .., but the larger and more comprehensive Judaism that preceded it. This larger Judaism embraced both the prophetic and the legalistic elements. No religion can make progress without both elements, and, if progress in spiritual development is to be realized, the prophetic element is absolutely indispensable. Most Jewish writers have ascribed the Book of Enoch and kindred literature to the Essenes. But this is indefensible. (ciii)⁷¹

That the authors of the Enochic booklets were the kind of Pharisees Charles envisioned was not one of his more lasting contributions to the field.

Reviews A few review notices should be mentioned. William Fairweather wrote a highly appreciative one in The American Journal of Theology 17 (1913) 273–4. He thought that everyone who studied such literature was in Charles’s debt for all his books on Enoch. “Not only does he write with competent knowledge and critical acumen, but there is also about his work a business-like air that commends it to the reader. While never diffuse, his treatment conveys at the same time an impression of thoroughness and sufficiency” (273). He hoped that the learned author may still further enhance the peculiar service he has rendered to theological study through his researches in the field of Jewish apocalyptic by bringing together into one full-orbed presentation the scattered rays of light thrown upon the New Testament by the pseudepigrapha as a whole. (274)

He wrote favorably about the translation and introductions and thought the notes

⁷¹ As reasons for denying an Essene ascription he mentioned the ancient reports that the Essenes rejected marriage and animal sacrifices—both of which he seems to have misunderstood.

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give evidence of finished scholarship, wide reading, untiring industry, and sound judgment. It may not be wise to accept without question all the author’s critical emendations of the text, especially where he only ‘feels’ that it is corrupt, but often they are ingenious, and his arguments in support of them weighty and convincing. (274)

Max L. Margolis included the book in his lengthy review article “Recent Biblical Literature,” Jewish Quarterly Review 4 (1913) 249–302 (290–2 deal with it). He spoke highly of Charles’s contributions to the field but pointed out some errors in Hebrew and Aramaic. More importantly, he addressed, from a Jewish perspective, Charles’s claims about a higher theology in the apocalypses that came to fruition in Christianity, while Judaism withered without it. If, as Charles maintains (p. x, e.g.,) the Book of Enoch and similar apocalyptic works represent the “higher theology” which culminated in Christianity, the rejection of that literature by contemporaneous Judaism and the lack of interest therein by “Orthodox” Jewish students cease to be an enigma. There is no reason of course, why a literature which, there is ground for believing, originated in sectarian circles should not excite the interest of all students of history, whether Jews or Christians. But the estimate of the ‘higher theology,” no less than that of its culminating-point Christianity, will naturally differ according as to whether the legalistic Judaism of Mishnah and Talmud is pronounced a ‘barren faith’ or appraised as a great spiritual potency ever upholding the purity of the monotheistic religion against all the attempts within and without to dilute it in the waters of all sorts of syncretistic systems. (291–2)

His is a polite reaction to the sort of degrading comments about Judaism that Jewish scholars endured at the time. A different kind of review of Charles’s work came from the pen of W. O. E. Oesterley in his Introduction to the 1917 republication of Charles’s 1912 translation (see below). Oesterley, for example, disputed Charles’s position that the writers of the Enoch booklets were Pharisees. He agreed that the pre-Maccabean ones came from Hasidim, but the bulk of the book presents some non-Pharisaic positions, e.g., regarding the Messiah, the attitude toward the law (e.g., xvii–xviii). After 1912, two publications of the Book of Enoch were to appear under Charles’s name. Neither represents new research on his part, but both, particularly the first, were to become widely disseminated.

88    ( – ) 1. The “Book of Enoch” in Charles’s 1913 The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (2.163–281).⁷² None of the introductory material he wrote for the two-volume set explains exactly what went into the many pages on the “Book of Enoch,” but it is clearly a somewhat abbreviated version of the material in his 1912 translation and commentary. It is in this form that his work on Enoch was to become widely known and cited. 2. The Book of Enoch, with an Introduction by W.O.E. Oesterley (Translations of Early Documents Series 1 Palestinian Jewish Texts [Pre-Rabbinic]; London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1917). Oesterley (see above for his comments about attributing the various booklets of Enoch to Pharisaic authors) and G. H. Box, the series editor, thanked Canon Charles and the Delegates of the Oxford University Press for permission to reprint the translation from Charles’s 1912 volume. The translation is published without the notes, but with the system of brackets, parentheses, and bold font that indicate, among other functions, the sorts of editorial modifications Charles made. If readers wanted to know why he intervened in the text, they would have to consult the 1912 volume. Several of Charles’s other translations of texts were to be reproduced in the same series.

Legacy Where does Charles’s work with the Book of Enoch stand today? He remains a towering figure in scholarship on the ancient work—the indexes of recent publications reveal how frequently he is referenced in the secondary literature. Textual discoveries that took place after his books on Enoch were written have unavoidably rendered his contributions somewhat dated. Since his time the fourth-century Chester Beatty Michigan Papyrus with a Greek text of 1 Enoch 97:6–107:3 has been published, along with other small pieces of the text in Greek, Syriac, and Coptic. The number of available copies in the Ethiopic language has also grown considerably. The major find, however, has been the fragments of Aramaic manuscripts from Qumran cave 4: 4Q201–2, 204–12 preserve parts of the Book of the Watchers, the Astronomical Book, the Book of Dreams, and the Epistle of Enoch. They range in date from ca. 200 .. to the early first century .. ⁷² The two volumes will be treated below.

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While these finds have paved the way for advances on Charles’s work, the respect in which his contributions are still held emerges from words written about them by more recent translators. In 1985 Mathew Black issued The Book of Enoch or I Enoch: A New English Edition.⁷³ He wrote: it seemed best, instead of attempting to produce an entirely new version, to try to build on Charles’s revised version of 1912; and this I have endeavoured to do. So far from seeming to be taking liberties with the work of a renowned scholar, I feel I am paying tribute to the enduring character of his work. And for kindly allowing me to do so, I am grateful to the Oxford University Press. (VII)

He assessed the ongoing use of Charles’s 1912 volume as evidence of “the success of Charles’s efforts: there were some successful and some unsuccessful guesses, but there were many more textually and philologically sound observations and insights” (VII). George Nickelsburg, author of the Hermeneia commentary on 1 Enoch, included in it a history of scholarship on the book.⁷⁴ After describing earlier work in the nineteenth century, he referred to Charles’s 1893 book as ushering in “a new generation of scholarship” (110). He devoted an entire section of his survey to “Work on 1 Enoch from R. H. Charles to the Discovery of the Qumran Scrolls” (111–14). The generation of Enoch scholarship from 1890 to the beginning of World War I was dominated by Robert Henry Charles, a scholar with a rare and broad combination of intellectual talents and interests: classical and Semitic linguistic skills, a mastery of the newly emerging corpus of ancient Jewish apocalypses, theological interests, historical and literary inclinations, and a critical judgment expressed with candor and fairness. (112)

Nickelsburg did caution about a major methodological concern with Charles’s approach: “Charles’s rational Western mind, with its desire for consistency and its aversion to symbolic narrative, sometimes hindered his understanding of the ancient apocalyptic texts that he was otherwise so well informed and gifted to interpret” (112).

⁷³ Studia in Veteris Testamenti Pseudepigrapha 7; Leiden: Brill. ⁷⁴ 1 Enoch 1: A Commentary on the Book of 1 Enoch, Chapters 1–36; 81–108 (Hermeneia; Minneapolis, MN: Fortress, 2001).

90    ( – ) One final note: according to the indexes in the two volumes of the Hermeneia commentary on the Book of Enoch, Charles is referenced more often than any other scholar, including Dillmann.⁷⁵ The second early Jewish text on which Charles worked, Jubilees—the subject of the following chapter—is a very different kind of book. On it he was also to produce publications that have remained important to this day.

⁷⁵ The second volume is Nickelsburg and VanderKam, 1 Enoch 2: A Commentary on the Book of 1 Enoch Chapters 37–82 (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2011).

Chapter 2 The Book of Jubilees Before turning to his work with Jubilees, we should look at some aspects of Charles’s situation in Oxford. While he was researching the Book of Enoch ca. 1890–93, he was working on other projects as well so that in just a few years he produced an amazing amount of technical material. We have seen that he held no official post at Oxford, though he had incorporated at Exeter College in January 1891. Unless he had some position of which there is no record, he may have had a relatively large amount of time on his hands, time he devoted to gaining a comprehensive knowledge of Jewish literature from 200 .. to 100 .. Furthermore, he and his wife Mary had no biological children. In his obituary of Charles, Burkitt wrote: “they had no family of their own, but their home was made bright and cheerful by a number of nieces, whom Dr. and Mrs. Charles brought up as their own children till they married.”¹ So, the responsibilities of family life, while they existed, may have been somewhat limited for him, perhaps freeing up additional time for research. We know of scholars in Oxford who supported his work. “Dr. Cheyne’s friendship and advice were a constant help to Charles, though the latter found himself compelled to part company with his friend on certain important questions.”² Cheyne, as noted earlier, was important in advocating highercritical positions in England and exercised influence on Charles,³ as did Sanday whose seminar Charles attended from 1890–95 and from which he gained a critical perspective on the Scriptures. Thus, both men were important factors in shaping his career and ways of thinking. While Charles had time for his work, there were obstacles beyond his control.

¹ “Robert Henry Charles 1855–1931,” 437. Recall that he thanked his niece Madeleine La Vie Charles for her assistance with the Greek index to his 1906 edition of Enoch. In 1925 he would conduct the marriage ceremony of another niece, Eileen Cranstoun Charles. See Part 3, Chapter 1. ² D’Arcy, “A Brief Memoir,” xxv. Cheyne, no stranger to controversy, suffered from a serious illness and developed bizarre views later in his career—a matter that Charles treated in his obituary of Cheyne (“Thomas Kelly Cheyne 1841–1915,” Proceedings of the British Academy for 1915–16, 545–51). ³ He, as noted in the previous chapter, first suggested to Charles that he publish a volume on Enoch.

R. H. Charles: A Biography. James C. VanderKam, Oxford University Press. © James C. VanderKam 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192869289.003.0004

92    ( – ) Study was, however, interrupted by constant acute headaches, arising probably from the effects of previous illness. A permanent cure most happily resulted from a suggestion made by Mrs. Charles. She recommended some manual activity and fixed upon wood-carving. Friends who visited their house in later years did not realise perhaps that the large and elaborately carved pieces of furniture in their drawing-room had contributed in no small degree to the accomplishment of the life-work of a great scholar.⁴

In referencing “previous illness,” D’Arcy may have meant the results of overwork in his three East London parishes but possibly the effects from bouts with the flu while in Germany. At any rate, wood-carving proved salutary.

1. Chair made and carved by R. H. Charles (courtesy of Ripon College Cuddesdon)

⁴ D’Arcy, “A Brief Memoir,” xxiii. We will return to this topic in speaking about Charles’s last years.

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The second major Jewish pseudepigraph that Charles treated was the Book of Jubilees on which he eventually published two volumes. The dates of his earliest publications on Jubilees suggest that he was seriously engaged with it while he was first writing on the Book of Enoch. In the case of Jubilees, however, he reversed the order of publication he had adopted for Enoch: first he issued a critical text (1895) and then a translation/commentary (1902). For a century the two were standards throughout the scholarly world and continue today to be extremely important.

The Contents of the Book of Jubilees Jubilees presents itself as a revelation that God gave to Moses on Mt. Sinai and that he communicated to the great leader through an Angel of the Presence. The message takes the form of retelling scriptural stories, starting with creation and extending as far as the Israelites’ arrival at Mt. Sinai. Thus, familiar narratives from Genesis 1 to Exodus 24 figure in it, but they are dressed in a new literary garb that conveys the views and interests of the author. Among the novel features is a concerted effort to date events such that the history leading up to Israel’s entry into Canaan lasts fifty jubilee periods of forty-nine years each (hence the name Jubilees). The book holds a certain fascination as the oldest sustained interpretation of the early scriptural narratives.

The Context for Charles’s 1893–95 Translation and 1895 Volume Jubilees, in a number of respects, experienced the same fate as the Book of Enoch. When Charles dealt with it in the early 1890s, the text of the book had been available in Europe fewer than fifty years. In antiquity it had exercised some influence among Jews and Christians—probably not as much as the Book of Enoch—but it had disappeared after its appeal waned. As a result, and again like the Book of Enoch, its existence and some of its contents were known for centuries in the West only through a series of citations and references in Greek and Latin sources. These materials had been collected a couple of times, but the full text was unavailable in Europe until the midnineteenth century. The re-emergence of Jubilees in the West came about in much the same way as for Enoch but not until 1844. In an essay published that year

94    ( – ) Heinrich Ewald⁵ of the University of Tübingen, perhaps the most famous Old Testament scholar of his time, announced the arrival in Tübingen of a number of manuscripts from Ethiopia. A missionary, Johann Ludwig Krapf (1810–81), who was from Derendingen, a town located near Tübingen, and who had graduated from the university with a degree in theology in 1834, was responsible for obtaining them. Krapf, who worked in Ethiopia from 1837–42⁶ amid great difficulties, danger, and personal loss (including the deaths of his wife and daughter), had proved particularly successful in the search for manuscripts. He had gone to the most southerly parts of old Ethiopia, where he visited remote monasteries and gathered a tremendous number of manuscripts. Krapf sent a few of them to Europe in their original form but most in paper copies that he had commissioned Ethiopian scribes to prepare. Use of leather would have made the copying process too expensive, not to mention the difficulties in transporting them, once completed.⁷ Ewald had access to a number of Krapf ’s manuscripts and described them in the article referenced above. The first to which he turned his attention was a copy of a work called kufālē (Divisions) in the Ge‘ez language. One of Krapf ’s Abyssinian scribes had made the copy, so it dated from between 1837 and 1842. Ewald recognized it as an Ethiopic translation of the book known in Greek and Latin sources as Jubilees or the Little Genesis. It, like Enoch, had found a place in the Old Testament in Ethiopia where the scriptural canon was larger than in other churches. Their biblical status ensured that new copies of them continued to be made.⁸ Regarding this work, from whose name alone one could learn little, Ewald wrote: . . . as soon as I examined the manuscript more closely, I found that the name [kufālē] was in fact much abbreviated and could hardly be the original. In the work itself a genitive always follows it, like kufālē mawā‘el, i.e., the division of the days, or the like. After I made myself somewhat more familiar with the rather verbosely written work, I soon convinced myself that it must be the

⁵ “Ueber die Aethiopischen Handschriften zu Tübingen,” Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 5 (1844) 164–201. ⁶ In 1842 he received a doctorate from Tübingen for his work with Ethiopian languages. ⁷ The information about Krapf comes from “Johann Ludwig Krapf,” Wikipedia, last accessed 7-28-2019; and Paul E. Kretzmann, Johann Ludwig Krapf: The Explorer-Missionary of Northeastern Africa (Columbus, OH: The Book Concern, no date). ⁸ Ewald (“Ueber die Aethiopischen Handschriften zu Tübingen,” 177, n. 1) reported that Hiob Ludolf several decades earlier had made mention of a book named kufālē, based on a reference to it in another Ethiopic text called the Book of the Mystery of Heaven and Earth.

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very apocryphon to which the Greeks gave the clearer name τα Ιωβηλαια [ta Iōbēlaia] = the Jubilees, or Λεπτη Γενεσις [Leptē Genesis] = the Little Genesis—a book that to my knowledge was preserved in full in no other place than Ethiopia. Since this work deserves to be known among us little less than the Book of Enoch, I hope to be able to publish a translation of it soon. In the meantime, I content myself with making note of its existence, without allowing myself here to go further into its character. (177–8, my translation)

Ewald added that the manuscript lacked two traits of Ge‘ez texts—the Trinitarian formula at the beginning and “Amen” at the end. From this he concluded that the work it contained was rather old compared to many other Ethiopian books and that it came to Ethiopia from elsewhere. It was certainly fortunate that someone so learned in ancient Jewish and Christian literature as Ewald was the first European reader to see the composition and identify it. Ewald was not privileged to offer the initial translation of Jubilees to the learned world. That honor fell to his student August Dillmann, the scholar we have met in connection with Enoch. Dillmann explained⁹ that Ewald had been prevented from preparing a translation of Krapf ’s copy of Jubilees by other obligations and by his distance from Tübingen. In 1848 Ewald had returned to Göttingen, the school from which he had been dismissed for political reasons in 1837, and thus did not have access to the manuscript housed in the library in Tübingen.¹⁰ Ewald, not wishing to deprive scholars of the work any longer, invited Dillmann to make the translation. Dillmann commented that the one copy of the Ethiopic text made by Krapf ’s scribe was so riddled with errors that it was impossible to present an edition of it. In fact, even translating it was exceedingly difficult. Grammatical and spelling mistakes Dillmann could easily correct. Where there were errors in content, he tried to ascertain the meaning from the context or from the Hebrew version of Genesis; the resulting changes he printed in italics and enclosed in brackets. He left utterly obscure passages untranslated and marked their locations with brackets around a series of periods. He acknowledged that the translation could not claim to convey the exact details of the ancient text,

⁹ “Das Buch der Jubiläen oder die kleine Genesis,” Jahrbücher der Biblischen Wissenschaft 2 (1850) 230–56; 3 (1851) 1–96 (Ewald was editor of the journal). The next two paragraphs above summarize Dillmann’s comments on pp. 230–1. ¹⁰ He had refused “to accept the suspension of the constitution of Hanover” (J. W. Rogerson, “Ewald, Georg Heinrich August [1803–75],” in John H. Hayes, editor, Dictionary of Biblical Interpretation [2 vols.; Nashville, TN: Abingdon, 1999] 1.363).

96    ( – ) but it did permit one to recognize its nature and chief points. He added that he was responsible for the division of Jubilees into fifty chapters. He did not subdivide the chapters into verses, something that would prove inconvenient for readers over the next several decades. Dillmann published his introduction to and annotated translation of the only available copy of Ethiopic Jubilees in 1850–51, six to seven years after Ewald had announced its existence (1851 was also the year in which his critical text of Ethiopic Enoch appeared.) Because he was the first to treat the text, Dillmann set the agenda for the discussion of Jubilees for years to come. He faced the pioneer’s task of situating the book in its ancient setting while having very little evidence, other than the book itself, for answering basic questions about it. Dillmann, however, was just the person to take up the challenge and furnished an insightful introduction (72–96). As for the book’s purpose, he highlighted the fact that the writer wished to establish the temporal sequence of the early biblical history, just as the book’s title “the Division of the Days/Times” indicates. For his chronology, the ancient author used jubilee periods of forty-nine (not fifty) years as a basic chronological unit; these he divided into seven “weeks of years,” each of which consisted of seven years. The writer also interpreted difficult passages in the scriptural accounts, aided by Jewish exegetical traditions regarding Genesis and the first part of Exodus. To make the old story fit the needs of the age in which he lived, he subjected the history from the beginning to Moses to a thorough revision, not to suppress it, but in order to expand it.¹¹ Jubilees is related to Genesis and the first part of Exodus, wrote Dillmann, as an expanded targum—an expository rendering of scriptural antiquity for the edification of the writer’s contemporaries (72–6). The next sections of Dillmann’s comments deal with these characteristics. 1. Reckoning of time: the writer, who placed Israel’s entry into the land at the end of 2450 years from creation, was aware that a new jubilee period began at that point—according to Leviticus 25:2, the jubilee and sabbatical year system would take effect when Israel was in Canaan. He built his chronology around this given. The many chronological mistakes in his manuscript (he listed a substantial number on 77–8, n. 2) Dillmann attributed to a translator or transcriber. ¹¹ Dillmann noted that the term λεπτη [leptē] in λεπτη Γενεσις ([leptē Genesis] Little Genesis)—a book that is as long as or longer than Genesis—expresses the idea, not of size, but of “einzelne punkte” (individual points) of Genesis, a sort of compendium (“Das Buch der Jubiläen oder die Kleine Genesis,” 76).

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2. Solving problems in Genesis-Exodus: Dillmann provided a long list of passages illustrating the ways in which the author addressed gaps in the scriptural stories. Examples include furnishing the names of patriarchal wives to show that they came from appropriate families and showing that Jacob actually tithed at Bethel as he had promised (compare Genesis 28:12–22 with 35:1–4). 3. Adding stories to Genesis-Exodus: Dillmann provided another sizable list of examples. Among them are accounts regarding the death of Cain and wars fought by Jacob and his sons. Some of these the writer drew from other sources, some came from his own pen. With his vast knowledge of ancient literature, Dillmann spotted parallels to such stories in a range of other texts. 4. Retrojecting ideas current in the author’s time back into the early history: under this heading, Dillmann drew attention to (a) dogmatic matters such as the teachings about angels and demons; (b) the ancestors as models of piety who were obedient to the laws of Moses; (c) hatred toward Israel’s old enemies such as the Canaanites; (d) the illusion of Israel’s superiority over other peoples. Evil spirits rule the others, while God alone rules Israel whose priests are like the angels of the presence; (e) glorification of the law and religious system of Israel (the Sabbath and the festivals, for which the author gives a historical origin, existed from the beginning, and they, like all of the law, have a heavenly origin). Jubilees pictures a partial revelation of the law to the ancestors and a stream of secret teaching passed along through the generations from the beginning. Books written and read by the ancestors are often mentioned in it. Continuing under the fourth heading, (f) the writer of Jubilees makes the story of Genesis more consistent and thus better (or so he thought): An example is that Abraham, Isaac, and Rebekah interact with their grandchildren—contact that would have been possible according to the chronology of Genesis but that is never mentioned in it. (g) The writer scatters here and there views from his own time regarding the gradual approach of destruction, judgment, and the messianic future. 5. Finally, the writer of Jubilees draws a number of inferences from the text (e.g., a prohibition of public nudity from the story of clothing the first couple), explains the meaning of obscure words, and reads customs and practices of his time into the early history (76–87).

98    ( – ) Dillmann next took up the original language and date of Jubilees. He recognized that the book was thoroughly Jewish but did not think that the author’s ethnic identity settled whether he wrote in Greek or in Aramaic/ Hebrew. After all, in Ethiopia, from which the one copy of Jubilees came, biblical works were translated from Greek models. Moreover, there are many agreements between Jubilees and the Septuagint in wording, names, numbers, and other features (he provided a list of examples, 88, n. 2). Yet, alongside these are agreements with the Hebrew text of Genesis as well as Hebrew/ Aramaic etymologies of names. Hence, if the author wrote in Greek, he must have known Hebrew/Aramaic; or if he wrote in Hebrew/Aramaic, the person who translated Jubilees into Greek would have been responsible for inserting the agreements with the Septuagint. Dillmann, in deciding between the options, considered Jerome’s testimony to be decisive. In one of his letters (#78, to Fabiola) Jerome reported finding Hebrew words in a book that the Jews called Jubilees. He thus indicated that the book was written in Hebrew/ Aramaic and was known to Jewish readers. Dillmann added that the familiar hatred harbored by Hebrew Jews for the Septuagint indicated that the person who translated Jubilees into Greek was the one who introduced Septuagintal readings into Jubilees. He concluded that the book was composed in Aramaic and showed a surprising freedom with regard to the biblical text, just as one finds in the targums (88–90). Determining the date of the book Dillmann found to be more difficult. The earliest references to it were by Epiphanius and Jerome at the end of the fourth and beginning of the fifth century .. That period, however, was obviously too late for Jubilees. Dillmann’s evidence for the date of composition was its relation to other books: Jubilees used the Book of Enoch extensively, and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, which contains many of the same stories, shows signs of depending on Jubilees. Dillmann believed the Book of Enoch was written not long after the Parthian invasion of Palestine in 41 ..; therefore, Jubilees could not have been written before that time. The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs was written shortly after the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 .. As a result, the author probably penned Jubilees in the first century .. (90–4).¹² Dillmann concluded his comments by surveying the uses later writers made of Jubilees, especially Byzantine chroniclers such as Syncellus. He discussed some of the problems in how they employed and identified (or did not

¹² In later publications he was to move the estimated date of composition a little earlier.

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identify) evidence from Jubilees and the fact that at times they confused it with material taken from other sources such as Josephus (94–6). As soon as experts had Dillmann’s translation of Jubilees, they began writing about the book. Just four years later, Adolph Jellinek (1821–93) explored connections between Jubilees and several midrashim. In his Bet haMidrasch (1853–78), third part (issued in 1855), he published the texts of midrashim that offer material closely resembling passages in Jubilees. Jellinek maintained that Jubilees was an Essene work directed against Pharisaic views about the calendar (3.xi). The book’s opposition to these views, Jellinek argued, showed that Jubilees was composed at a time when the Jewish calendar was still flexible (3.xii). Another early contribution came from Bernhard Beer (1801–61) in Das Buch der Jubiläen und sein Verhältniss zu den Midraschim (1856). In the small monograph (80 pages) he dealt with Jellinek’s understanding of Jubilees and offered a comparison of the book with many midrashim. The evidence suggested to him that Jubilees was a sectarian composition (25–56). As it reflects the text of Genesis, Jubilees at times agrees with the Septuagint (against the Masoretic Text) in ways that could not be attributed to a translator, as Dillmann had maintained. Beer cited the extra generation in the patriarchal line after the flood (see Jubilees 8:1–4 for this Kainan), extra, that is, in comparison with the traditional Hebrew text of Genesis (the Masoretic Text; see Genesis 10:24). That extra generation, also found in the Septuagint, allowed the writer of Jubilees to say that Jacob arose after twenty-two generations, just as the Sabbath occurred after the twenty-two works of creation (Jubilees 2:23). It was, therefore, a structural feature of the book and most unlikely to be added by a translator (57–8). He finally determined that Jubilees came from Egypt where Samaritan (and other) influences affected the author (70–1). Zacharias Frankel (1801–75) agreed that Jubilees came from Egypt. He contended that the book was associated with the temple of Onias in Egypt and was written in Greek during the reign of the emperor Caligula (37–41 ..).¹³ One reason for rejecting Palestine as Jubilees’ place of origin was the difficulty scholars such as Beer and Frankel had in positing a nonRabbinic kind of Judaism in the land of Israel where, they assumed, more

¹³ “Das Buch der Jubiläen,” Monatschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums 5 (1856) 311–16, 380–400. He too saw that not all agreements with the Septuagint could have come from a translator and also cited the example of the extra generation in the post-flood genealogy.

100    ( – ) orthodox (that is, Pharisaic-Rabbinic) views prevailed and the Masoretic Text was the only form of the Bible. Not long after his translation appeared, Dillmann procured a second copy of Jubilees, an eighteenth-century manuscript, from Antoine d’Abbadie.¹⁴ Using the two copies to which he had access, he issued a critical text of the book in 1859: Mas:hafa Kufālē sive Liber Jubilaeorum.¹⁵ It was Dillmann’s : misfortune that his two manuscripts were among the poorest copies of Jubilees—something he could not have known fully at the time, although he described both as being saturated with errors. He designated the Tübingen copy T and the d’Abbadie manuscript A; the variant readings in the margins of A that came from another copy he labeled E (V–VI). As a result, fifteen years after Ewald had reported the existence of a complete copy of Jubilees, scholars could examine the text itself and not have to rely solely on Dillmann’s German translation of 1850–51.¹⁶ In 1861 Antonio Maria Ceriani (1828–1907), the librarian of the Ambrosian Library in Milan, published substantial sections from a Latin translation of Jubilees in “Fragmenta Parvae Genesis et Assumptionis Mosis ex Veteri Versione Latina,” in his Monumenta sacra et profana, vol. 1, fascicle 1, 15–54 (an introduction is on pp. 9–13; the text of another work, the Assumption of Moses, is on 55–62). He was able to decipher much of the text from the fifth or sixth-century palimpsest despite the fact that the translations of Jubilees and the Assumption of Moses are the underlying text that had been erased when the manuscript was reused. Jubilees occupies the first forty of the manuscript’s forty-eight folios.¹⁷ The Latin translation added considerably to the textual fund available for Jubilees—with many gaps it reproduces Jubilees 13:10–49:22 (altogether a little less than one-third of the full text)—and it was transcribed more than a millennium before Dillmann’s Ethiopic copies. In Monumenta Sacra et Profana, vol. 2, fascicle 1, 9–10 (published in 1863) Ceriani included a Syriac text that provided a list of the names of the patriarchal wives—from Cain’s wife to those of Jacob’s sons—taken from Jubilees. As he noted, he copied it from a manuscript in the British

¹⁴ It is #117 in d’Abbadie, Catalogue raisonné, 132–3. D’Abbadie reports that an Ethiopian Jew (a Falasha) sold it to him. See the preceding chapter for d’Abbadie’s copies of Enoch. ¹⁵ He dedicated the edition to d’Abbadie. ¹⁶ Dillmann raised the possibility of issuing a new translation but never produced one (see Mas:hafa : Kufālē sive Liber Jubilaeorum, X). ¹⁷ Ceriani reported that in its present state almost no two pages of the manuscript were connected; rather, there was a pile of separate pages that were not in order before he arranged them. The Latin translation is inscribed in uncial characters and lacks word divisions.

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Museum, Add. 12154, folio 180. The existence of the Syriac text prompted the question whether Jubilees had also been translated into that ancient tongue. The introductory sentence to the list, which reads “The Names of the Wives of the Patriarchs According to the Book Called Jubilees among the Hebrews,” became part of the evidence favoring Hebrew as the original language of the book. In 1874 Hermann Rönsch (1821–88), a Latinist and expert in the form of the language in the Jubilees translation, published the most detailed study of the book to date: Das Buch der Jubiläen oder die Kleine Genesis. It begins with a chapter on the Latin manuscript itself followed by one regarding the Ethiopic version. In the third chapter he placed his own edition of the Latin translation (with notes) on the left-hand pages, and opposite them he set Dillmann’s Latin translation of Ethiopic Jubilees for the same sections (with notes giving variant readings and other comments). In November 1869 Rönsch had asked Dillmann to prepare the translation and was very grateful that he was willing to do so (6). For ease of comparison, Dillmann made his translation of the Ethiopic version conform as closely as possible to the wording of the Ambrosian manuscript. The two Latin texts occupy pp. 9–95 in the book. Dillmann’s Latin translation was based on a revised form of his 1859 critical text of Ethiopic Jubilees. Rönsch followed the presentation of the parallel Latin texts with a section (95–168) in which he commented on the Ambrosiana translation. In addition to studying the language of the text, Jubilees’ readings that agreed (or disagreed) with those of the Masoretic Text and Septuagint, and the chronological data in it, he devoted other units to topics such as the ancient testimonies to the book and its contents, ancient names for it, and its date of composition. Like Dillmann, he traced it to the first century .. and believed it opposed Christian teachings (see 518–29, where he dates it around 50–60 ..). By the 1870s, then, experts knew the full text of Jubilees through Dillmann’s translation of one manuscript and critical edition based on two. The number of available copies of Jubilees grew more slowly than for the Book of Enoch, and, also unlike the case of Enoch, there were no major finds of Greek texts. Scholars had access to large portions of a Latin translation of the book and the Syriac list of wives’ names from Jubilees. Some citations and allusions in early Christian literature and parallels in midrashic sources supplemented these textual materials. Among the topics that scholars debated were the date of the book and its original language, where the author lived, and his party affiliation. Dillmann continued to work with the evidence in order to refine his text and views. His “Beiträge aus dem Buch der Jubiläen zur Kritik des Pentateuch-Textes,”

102    ( – ) Sitzungsberichte der Königlich Preussischen Akademie der Wissenschaften zu Berlin 1 (Berlin: Verlag der Königlichen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1883) 324–40 was based in part on new textual data. He reported that he had collated a British Museum manuscript (Orient. 485) that contained Jubilees (it is the manuscript that also offered the best copy of Enoch).¹⁸ This was the manuscript that would be Charles’s chief witness in his edition of Jubilees. But Dillmann’s purpose in his 1883 essay was not so much to revise his edition of 1859 as to examine what Jubilees divulged about the Hebrew text of the first five books of the Bible. Dillmann compiled a list of eighty-nine readings in which Jubilees and the Masoretic Text agreed but differed in some way from the corresponding ones in the Septuagint. These readings indicated to his satisfaction that the author of Jubilees used a Hebrew text in his rewriting of Genesis-Exodus. Dillmann next drew up a list of cases in which Jubilees agreed with the Septuagint against the Masoretic Text. We should remember that some scholars explained these agreements by positing that the author wrote in Greek. Dillmann accounted for them in three ways. (1) Most of the agreements with the Septuagint came from the Greek (or Latin) translator of Jubilees. (2) A smaller number resulted when the writer adopted exegetical traditions incorporated into the Septuagint, especially for interpreting rare expressions or terms (one cannot always tell whether this was due to the author or translator). And (3) the remaining agreements (a substantial list) originated from a Hebrew text used by the author, one that was not identical with the Masoretic Text of the Pentateuch. The readings in this third category often agree with the Septuagint and/or the Samaritan Pentateuch but harmonize in full with neither. Jubilees is, therefore, a valuable witness to a Hebrew text of the Pentateuch in the first century .. This was the situation when Charles began to work on Jubilees. His first publication on Jubilees was a translation that appeared in four journal installments: “The Book of Jubilees, translated from a text based on two hitherto uncollated Ethiopic MSS.,” Jewish Quarterly Review 5 (1893) 703–8; 6 (1894) 184–217, 710–45; 7 (1895) 297–328. The 1893 unit furnished an introduction to his translation (703–8) where he reviewed the textual witnesses for the book and offered a justification for another rendering of Jubilees. The chief reason was that there was new material not available to

¹⁸ “Beiträge aus dem Buch der Jubiläen,” 324, n. 1 (he labeled it B, just as Charles would).

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Dillmann when he published his German translation (1850–51) and edition (1859), namely, the Latin translation and two additional Ethiopic manuscripts that far exceeded in value the two Dillmann knew: B in the British Museum— Orient. 485—and A in the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris. Charles argued that the two, especially B, allowed many improvements on the text Dillmann had published and even on the revised version that underlay Dillmann’s partial Latin translation in Rönsch’s volume. Charles overstated the case when he claimed that both of his new texts were “hitherto uncollated,” since, as we have seen, Dillmann collated the British Museum copy at least a decade earlier. Charles’s interaction with Dillmann’ work parallels the approach he took with respect to the Book of Enoch. He first asserted that the two newly available copies were not only early Ethiopic manuscripts but also offered “a type of text which transcends immeasurably that of the two MSS. on which Dr. Dillman’s [sic] Ethiopic edition of 1859 is based” (703). While believing he could improve Dillmann’s readings, Charles, the much younger scholar, remained deferential to the master: It is worthy of note in the present connection that this Latin translation of Dr. Dillmann [in Rönsch’s book] is not made from the published Ethiopic text of 1859, but in reality from a revised form of this text, the revision being in the main carried out on the lines suggested by the Latin fragment. This continued advance to a more scientific text is quite in keeping with the method of this great scholar in other departments of work. With a mind biassed only in favour of truth and open to all fresh evidence from whatever quarter derived, he furnishes us with the beau ideal of a scientific scholar. It is therefore incumbent on those who follow in his footsteps to carry on still further the work that he has advanced so far. (704)

Bound by such a duty, Charles reported that he would show the superiority of his two manuscripts to those of Dillmann, even to his revised critical text in Rönsch’s book: We may dispatch in a word the result of this investigation, and state its conclusion briefly, i.e., that the text which is based on Dillmann’s two manuscripts, however much it may be revised or emended with the help of the Latin fragment [from the Ambrosian Library], can, in the presence of the better evidence now accessible, only be regarded as at the best late and corrupt. In the comparison of the Ethiopic MSS., which we shall presently institute, the Latin fragment will serve as a touchstone whereby to

104    ( – ) distinguish the false from the true in the variants presented by the two types of MSS. with which we have now to deal. (704)¹⁹

In this short introduction to his translation, he explained that he wanted to demonstrate two points. The first was to show that “every page we examine of the revised Ethiopic text presupposed by Dillmann’s Latin translation contains many corrupt readings where the demonstrably true reading is preserved by AB, or A, or B in agreement with the Latin version.” The second was that “in not a few cases Dillmann’s text is disfigured by corruptions that admit of easy and at times demonstrably certain emendation” (704, where both are in italics). He filled the next pages with examples, some more convincing than others; but the impression left by his rhetoric is that his translation and the text that it rendered would be far superior to those offered by his great predecessor. The translation itself followed in the three installments in the Jewish Quarterly Review for 1894–95. There are few notes to the translation; the ones present are textual and often involve no more than the word “Emended.” The 1902 translation would include far more ample notes (whether textual or explanatory), much like his 1893 translation of Enoch. Charles was not the first scholar to render Jubilees into English. That distinction fell to George H. Schodde who in 1888 had issued The Book of Jubilees Translated from the Ethiopic. His translation (and short introduction), like that of Charles a few years later, was serialized in a journal before appearing in a book: “The Book of Jubilees translated from the Ethiopic by Professor George H. Schodde, PhD,” Bibliotheca Sacra 42 (1885) 629–45; 43 (1886) 56–72, 356–71, 455–86, 727–45; 44 (1887) 426–57, 602–11. Schodde’s translation of Jubilees, like his 1882 rendering of Enoch, was not to be very influential,²⁰ but he did make a practical contribution to using the text, namely, adding verse numbers. Ge‘ez texts have their own system of punctuation, including marks separating sense units, but they are not uniform from manuscript to manuscript. When Dillmann produced the initial translation of Jubilees, he divided it into fifty chapters, as we have seen. For decades afterward, scholars referred to ¹⁹ Charles hoped to publish the critical text on which he based his translation “in the course of the year,” (704) that is, 1893, but it was not to appear until 1895. He was regularly too optimistic about publication dates. ²⁰ He, like Charles, took a decidedly negative view concerning what Jubilees said about the law. After summarizing the book’s teachings about it, Schodde wrote: This is the leading thought of the whole work, and, in some form or other, is found in nearly every chapter. It is a remarkable example of how willing the Jews in Christ’s day were to employ a most remarkable exegesis in order to make the records of revelation accord with their false view of its legal features. (The Book of Jubilees, xiii = Bibliotheca Sacra 42 [1885] 633)

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passages in the book by the page numbers in his translation or by chapter or both. For his edition of the Latin translation, Rönsch used Dillmann’s chapter numbers and entered numbers within them, but they are line numbers in the Latin manuscript, not verses. Schodde, however, changed the situation. He wrote in the introduction to his translation: “In order to facilitate the study of the book, the translator has not only adopted the division of Dillmann into chapters, but has also divided these again into verses. The lack of this latter feature in Dillmann makes the use of his version very difficult” (The Book of Jubilees, xv = Bibliotheca Sacra 42 [1885] 635). His sensible action, one might think, would have provided the model for others to use, but Schodde’s verse numbers, while they frequently overlap with the divisions that were to become standard, do not match them completely. So, for example, in Jubilees 1 the first fifteen verses are the same as the modern division, but v. 16 includes more. Chapter 1 contains twenty-four verses in Schodde’s version; there are twentynine in the latest editions and translations. No one, so far as I know, claims credit for establishing the verse divisions we use today, but Charles seems to have been responsible for it. In his translation of 1893–95 he numbered all the verses in the book but said nothing about the fact. These are almost the same as the present system. Starting from the beginning of the book, the first chapter to have a different number of verses

2. Pages in Charles’s Copy of H. Rönsch, Das Buch der Jubiläen with his notes and markings (courtesy of Susan VanderKam)

106    ( – ) is Jubilees 4: in Charles’s 1894 rendering it has thirty-two verses, in the current system it has thirty-three (Charles combined what are now separated as vv. 25 and 26 into one verse). By the time his critical edition of Jubilees appeared in 1895 the system now employed was fully in place. As an aside to the topic, I want to mention another bit of evidence. One of the prize volumes in my library is Charles’s personal copy of Rönsch’s Das Buch der Jubiläen. He seems to have read the book with care because he wrote many comments in the margins. One such section is in Rönsch’s (and Dillmann’s) edition of the Latin text. Charles crossed out some of the line numbers in the Latin text and replaced them with verse numbers according to the system he used in his translation (e.g., in chs. 15 and 16). Charles signed his copy of the Rönsch book in 1892, so he must have worked out his verse divisions around that time and inserted them in its pages.

The Book Mas: hafa Kufālē or the Ethiopic Version of the Hebrew Book of Jubilees, : Otherwise Known Among the Greeks as Η ΛΕΠΤΗ ΓΕΝΕΣΙΣ, Edited from four manuscripts, And critically revised through a continuous comparison of the Massoretic and Samaritan Texts, and the Greek, Syriac, Vulgate and Ethiopic Versions of the Pentateuch, and further emended and restored in accordance with the Hebrew, Syriac, Greek and Latin Fragments of the Book, which are here published in full by R. H. Charles, M.A., Trinity College, Dublin, and Exeter College, Oxford (Anecdota Oxoniensia, Semitic Series 8; Oxford: Clarendon, 1895). The edition of Jubilees that Charles mentioned in 1893 and on which he based his translation of 1893–95 appeared in 1895. The exhaustive sub-title gives a good impression of the research he carried out to produce the edition. It involved working with and comparing texts in an assortment of ancient languages and employing all of the material to arrive at what he took to be the best attainable text of Jubilees. Charles dated the Preface to November 1894. Dillmann had died on July 4, 1894, but Charles neither mentioned his passing nor relaxed his criticism of the German scholar’s pioneering work. Almost the first words in the Preface, after he declared the need for a new edition, were: For the latter text [Dillmann’s 1859 edition] students in the past were rightly grateful, and yet grateful with limitations; for unhappily that great scholar

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contented himself in the main with reproducing the one or the other of his MSS., however frequent or obvious their corruptions, and did not in a single instance attempt to grapple with these by means of the abundant materials for criticism collected by Fabricius and Fürst,²¹ or the still more abundant aids to criticism that lay ready to hand in the Hebrew and Samaritan texts, and the various Versions of Genesis and Exodus. Thus his text teems with corruptions that would have yielded to even a cursory study of the critical problem before him. In two later publications,²² it is true, Dillmann sought in some degree to atone for the inadequacy of his former work. (v)

His criticisms continue and become more detailed in the Introduction (see below). Charles also mentioned that research for the edition demonstrated how important Jubilees was as a witness to the Hebrew text [of the Bible] that was current in Palestine in the century immediately preceding the Christian era. For the Hebrew author of this book had before him a text that in scores of passages is at variance with the Massoretic, and in many passages is unquestionably earlier and purer. (v–vi)

He would cite numerous readings documenting the claim in his Introduction, but he failed to note at this point that Dillmann had argued at length for a similar conclusion in his 1883 article. It is also noteworthy that Charles here dated Jubilees to the first century .., though his predecessors had located it in the first century .. He did not supply the reasons, however, why he so dated the book (on the curious sequence of his statements about the date of Jubilees, see below). With the accumulation of textual evidence, however limited, and with the progress of research on it, Charles was able to reach more advanced positions on various topics and often to produce a better text than was possible

²¹ Charles refers to the two scholars who had compiled collections of Greek and Latin citations from and allusions to Jubilees. The first was Johann Albert Fabricius, “Parva Genesis,” in his Codex Pseudepigraphus Veteris Testamenti (Hamburg and Leipzig: Liebezeit, 1713; 2nd ed., 1722) 849–64; vol. 2 (Hamburg: Felginer, 1723) 120–2. The second, though Charles mentions “Fürst,” was A. Treuenfels who published “Die kleine Genesis ‫ ”בראשית זוטא‬in Fürst’s Literaturblatt des vorderen Orients 1 (1846) 7–12; 2 (1846) 28–32; 4 (1846) 59–64; 5 (1846) 65–71; 6 (1846) 81–6. Charles caught the mistake and corrected it in the Addenda et Corrigenda section on the last (unnumbered) page of the 1895 book where it is the first entry. ²² These were his contribution to Rönsch, Das Buch der Jubiläen and his 1883 article.

108    ( – ) beforehand. The Introduction to his edition of 1895 exemplifies what could then be said about Jubilees, but it also contains distinctive views adopted by him. The first unit in the Introduction (“The Book of Jubilees; Its Value and Original Language,” ix–x) is mostly taken up with arguments for Hebrew as the language of composition, but he prefixed to this material a general statement about the book: The Book of Jubilees, which is really a haggadic commentary on Genesis, is important as being the chief and practically sole monument of legalistic Pharisaism, belonging to the century immediately preceding the Christian era. As we have the other side of Pharisaism—its apocalyptic and mystical side—represented in the Book of Enoch, so here we have its natural complement in the hard and inexorable legalism under whose yoke, according to the author, creation was subject from the beginning, and must be subject for evermore. (ix)

How Charles could think of Jubilees, with its strongly predestinarian character and unusual calendar, as Pharisaic is difficult to understand, both in his time and in light of discoveries that were to come. Apparently a “hard legalism” made it Pharisaic. His view would later absorb heavy criticism from scholars who understood more fully than he the legal stances of groups in second temple Judaism. Following this statement, Charles drew attention to the mounting evidence for Hebrew as the language of the author. He noted Jerome’s statement about Hebrew words he found in the book, the title of the Syriac list of wives’ names, and the several midrashim that included lines from Jubilees. Additionally, he believed he had been successful in solving some textual difficulties in the book by assuming that Hebrew was its original language. Many of the remaining pages in the Introduction review the evidence for the different ancient versions of Jubilees. Charles thought the Syriac text with women’s names “points most probably to a Syriac Version as its source” (x) and found it “not an unreasonable inference from the title of the fragment” (x) that the translation was made from the Hebrew original of Jubilees. In his estimation, the Ethiopic version—itself a translation of a Greek rendering of the Hebrew original—was both a literal and faithful reflection of what the author wrote. For the most part it is free from changes that a translator or scribe could have introduced under the influence of the Ethiopic version of the Bible, although he found a few places where that version left its mark.

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The Latin translation of Jubilees (known from the Ambrosiana’s copy), Charles, thought, was a less reliable witness to the text than the Ethiopic version despite its earlier date. He highlighted its many corruptions and maintained that it contained changes that modified it towards the readings of the Septuagint and Vulgate. Charles’s lower estimate of the Latin contrasted sharply with the view of Rönsch who considered it superior to the Ethiopic. Charles took the opportunity afforded by his comments on the Latin translation to voice his opinion of Rönsch’s Das Buch der Jubiläen: With enormous industry Rönsch accumulated materials from every quarter, and though he made but little critical use of these himself, he has undoubtedly lightened the labours of subsequent scholars. His Latin text is disfigured with many corruptions, which I have been at pains to remove so far as possible; and his work, however learned, is strangely wanting in reasonable order and method. It has no perspective; things good, bad, and indifferent are thrust with equal emphasis on the attention of the weary and indignant student.²³ He has, nevertheless, done much to merit our gratitude, and we may with safety accept his conclusions that this Version was made in Egypt or its neighbourhood by a Palestinian Jew about the middle of the fifth century. (pp. 459–60) (xi)²⁴

He did excuse Rönsch in part because he knew most of Jubilees—the sections not preserved in the Latin palimpsest—only through Dillmann’s translation (apparently Rönsch did not read Ge‘ez). Charles described the four Ethiopic manuscripts of Jubilees and their interrelations (xii–xiv), but he also devoted a section to “Further Materials for the Criticism and Emendation of the Text,” (xiv–xvi). He recognized that Jubilees reflected an independent form of the Hebrew text of Genesis-Exodus, not one that agreed consistently with any of the ancient versions. He then ²³ In his 1902 commentary on Jubilees, Charles was no kinder about the book: “This work attests enormous industry and great learning, but it is deficient in judgment and critical acumen” (xxviii). ²⁴ The pages to which Charles refers are the last ones in a chapter on the language of the Latin translation, its date, and the place where the translator worked. The language suggested to Rönsch that the Latin translation was fairly early, but he deduced the more precise date in the mid-fifth century from two other texts: Jerome’s (early fifth century) way of referring to Jubilees suggested it was not known in Latin at that time, while reference to it as a forbidden book in the Gelasian Decree (very late fifth century) indicated it was known in Rome by then. Egypt as the place of the translation he inferred from its transcriptions of Greek words familiar from the Septuagint, while certain peculiarities in the representation of vowels in some names and the pronunciations they encoded led him to identify the translator as a Palestinian Jew.

110    ( – ) enumerated the early scriptural versions (and other texts that might be relevant in all of the languages in which Jubilees had existed) and how each allowed him to emend the text in some places (he lists these for each version). In addition, he wrote about the process of criticism, using all the materials surveyed earlier, by which he was able to move farther and farther back in the history of the text. For example, by eliminating the cases in which the Ethiopic copies were influenced by the Ethiopic version of Genesis, he was able to arrive at a more pristine stage of the text in Ethiopia. He did likewise for the other languages through which the book passed as it moved from the Hebrew original to the later versions. Charles betrayed here too how the ghost of Dillmann still hovered over him. He devoted the sixth section of the Introduction to “Dillmann’s Ethiopic Text and Its Later Revisions” (xvii–xx). He surveyed his edition of 1859, his contribution to the Rönsch volume, and his 1883 essay. About the edition of 1859 he commented: It will be obvious to the reader that it would be impossible to attain to any satisfactory result in a work based on such materials [the two poor Ethiopic manuscripts accessible to Dillmann]. So far, therefore, many shortcomings in his text are not only excusable but inevitable. But when we proceed from the question of materials to method, we cannot but regard him as most reprehensible. He acted emphatically therein as a scholar in a hurry. Dealing with a text which was explicitly and unmistakably a commentary on Genesis, he has not—save in a single solitary instance—adduced the evidence of the Mass. or Sam. texts, or of the LXX, Syr., or Vulgate Versions in order to remove the blemishes that deface every page of the MSS. on which he worked. Furthermore, the Book of Jubilees, as every student of Fabricius should have known, did not leave itself without many witnesses among the Fathers and Byzantine writers . . . , and yet not a single fragment of these has been placed under contribution for the criticism of the text. (xvii)

After additional negative comments about Dillmann’s efforts, Charles asserted that, while he could have offered a more extensive accounting of errors in the 1859 work, “I do not press these defects in execution, as accuracy is a thing so difficult to attain. It is the wrongness of his method that constitutes ‘the head and front of his offending’” (xviii). It seems not to have occurred to Charles that one of Dillmann’s aims was to make the textual material available to others as expeditiously as possible.

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Charles characterized Dillmann’s two subsequent publications as attempts to “atone” for the defects of his Ethiopic edition (xviii)—a remarkably uncharitable way to describe his predecessor’s strivings for more precise conclusions on the basis of newly available textual materials. Rather than rehearsing the specifics in the Introduction of the 1895 volume, Charles referred the reader to his 1893 Jewish Quarterly Review essay for the damning details. As for Dillmann’s 1883 study, Charles’s words about it are peculiar: “this Article, which I purposely refrained from perusing till my entire text was in print, . . .” (xviii). Why would one scholar purposely not look at another expert’s work until his own book was in print? He could not claim that the article became available too late to be considered in his edition, since it was published more than ten years earlier. It should be added that he actually praised Dillmann’s work evident in the essay. He noted his use of manuscript B and other materials in addition to the copies of the book, and he summarized Dillmann’s evaluation of the readings in Jubilees compared with those in the Masoretic Text and the Septuagint. Charles agreed with his view that many of the passages in which Jubilees sides with the Septuagint against the Masoretic Text are due to the Greek translator of Jubilees. He charged, however, that Dillmann had “a grossly exaggerated view of how many readings were peculiar to the LXX and Jubilees,” (xix), as some came from the Ethiopic version of Genesis-Exodus and others were not unique to Jubilees and the Septuagint. When Dillmann explained some readings in Jubilees as coming from a Hebrew text differing from the Masoretic Text, Charles actually wrote: “In this connection he collates the Samaritan text and frequently the LXX, and makes some emendations in which I am glad to find a confirmation of my own judgment” (xix). He then proceeded to criticize Dillmann even in this category (“he merely touches on the fringe of the subject” [xix]), although he and Charles explained the evidence in the same way. He concluded that in the 1883 article Dillmann made little headway toward improving the text of Jubilees, leaving it pretty much as it was in 1859. Charles devoted the last two sections of the Introduction to the affinities of the text of Genesis-Exodus underlying Jubilees with the readings of the ancient versions and its value in “Criticism of the Massoretic Text of the Pentateuch.” He provided lengthy but admittedly non-exhaustive lists of references (not the actual readings) in which Jubilees agrees with each of the ancient versions of Genesis-Exodus. The 1895 book is an attractive publication as versions of ancient texts go. The Clarendon Press printed the critical Ethiopic text and the Ethiopic words in the notes (1–177) in a far more elegant font than Dillmann’s publisher had

112    ( – ) used decades earlier. The apparatus of variant readings to the Ge‘ez text could be relatively simple because Charles was comparing only four copies of the book. Wherever other versional evidence existed, Charles placed it on the page facing the corresponding passage in the Ethiopic text and supplied it with its own apparatus of notes. Naturally, the Latin text is the major example, since it is, after the Ethiopic, the most extensively preserved version of Jubilees. A word met frequently in Charles’s notes is “Emended” or the like, as he was typically bold in “improving” readings in the manuscripts that, in his opinion, were not correct. Charles’s edition of Ethiopic Jubilees concludes with three helpful appendices. The first (179) offers the initial part of the Hebrew work that he, following Jellinek, called “The Book of Noah.” It is the opening section of the Book of Asaph the Physician where the text closely parallels Jubilees 10:1–14. The second (180–2) furnishes a section of Midrash Way-yissa‘u that parallels the story in Jubilees 37–8 about the war between Jacob and his sons, on one side, and Esau and his sons on the other. The same text relates a tale somewhat similar to the account of the battle of Jacob and his sons against Amorite kings in Jubilees 34:1–9, but Charles did not print that section, perhaps because it is not as closely parallel to Jubilees. The texts in appendices I and II are quoted from Jellinek, Bet Ha-Midrasch, iii.155–6 and 3–5. In the outer margins of both Charles listed the chapters and verses where parallels in Jubilees could be found. In the third appendix (183) he cited Ceriani’s transcription of the Syriac text giving the names of patriarchs’ wives drawn from Jubilees. A list of Addenda and Corrigenda completes the book. A scholar could, thus, find in the 1895 edition all of the material relevant to establishing the text of Jubilees.

Reviews Charles’s critical text of Jubilees elicited reviews from several experts. One was D.S. Margoliouth (Jewish Quarterly Review 7 [1895] 546–8), who, oddly, was one of the three people to whom Charles dedicated the book (the other two were S. R. Driver and Adolf Neubauer). Margoliouth, who was well acquainted with the classical Ethiopic language, began by praising Charles for the beautifully printed volume and the quality of the scholarship in it. He also noted that students of Jubilees “will find it of the greatest convenience to have all the materials for the restoration of this Apocryphon so carefully collected and so methodically arranged” (546).

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He was not so complimentary, however, about some aspects of the edition. His wise words in this regard are worth quoting at length. Most readers will regret the depreciatory tone which Mr. Charles has adopted towards the work of his predecessor Dillmann. This tone is both impolitic and unjust. Impolitic, because there is no name more highly reverenced among Orientalists than Dillmann’s, and most of those who know any Aethiopic owe it to his writings; and, moreover, the world has not yet had a year to lament his loss. Unjust, because more cannot be expected from a book than it professes to give. When a text of real value is to be published for the first time, the most important matter is that it should be done quickly. Dillmann employed for this purpose the MSS. that were at his disposal, which he used with faithfulness and skill. A later editor is without doubt bound to search for an elaborate critical apparatus, which is what Rönsch and, since him, Mr. Charles have done. Yet the new editor will probably be thought by many to have overrated the improvement which he has been able to effect in the text by the use of material which Dillmann either neglected or had no access to. He has introduced not a few better readings, and some quite felicitous emendations; but the difference between the two recensions is not thorough-going. This appears even from the fact that the new text is still an eclectic one—it follows no one source to the exclusion of any other. It is natural that Mr. Charles should overrate the improvement, for the collation of Aethiopic MSS. is ordinarily so fruitless in results, that new readings of consequence are hailed with very peculiar delight. (546–47)

Margoliouth added that, even if the difference between the two editions was far more to Dillmann’s disadvantage than it really is, Mr. Charles should still have given a complete record of Dillmann’s readings in his notes; the absence of this we regard as the most serious defect in his book; and it is probable that those reviewers who have in consequence of it to collate the two texts will take vengeance. (547)

Another issue he raised concerned those cases where the Ethiopic and Latin readings were at variance with each other. He recognized that one should correct the Ethiopic or Latin where the reason for the mistaken reading was transparent. But, “[w]here the cause of the discrepancy is not obvious it should certainly be noted, but to alter one text to suit the other is surely rash” (547).

114    ( – ) Margoliouth pointed out that Charles, like others, thought the Masoretic Text of Genesis could in places be corrected from readings in Jubilees, but he was unimpressed with the results. As he put it, “the ore (to use the language of miners) seems to the present writer very low grade” (548). After discussing an example, he wrote about Charles’s efforts at comparing the readings in Jubilees with those of ancient versions of Genesis: With regard to the rest, while the trouble he has taken in sorting the textual affinities of the book deserves recognition, it may be doubted whether the Jubilees has in any case the authority of a MS. For only those compilations and versions which are painfully literal have any such authority. (548)

The last point is debatable, as events were to show. It seems to have been fashionable at the time to close reviews by saying that one wearies of finding fault or the like, and Margoliouth followed suit. He commended Charles for writing a work which very few scholars, either here or abroad, would have been able to produce, and which is certain to be for a long period the standard work on the subject with which it deals. He will conclude therefore with the hope that unlike most of the Anecdota Oxoniensia, this Anecdoton may prove a source of profit to the Clarendon Press,²⁵ and that its author may find leisure and opportunity to do yet further services in the literature of Abyssinia. (548)

J. Barth published a fairly short but detailed review of the 1895 edition in Deutsche Litteraturzeitung 34 (1895) cols. 1062–3. One of the positive features in the book, he thought, was that Charles, through his text and notes, furnished the evidence that other scholars could use in defense of readings Charles rejected. Barth then offered a series of examples. But he was very complimentary about the volume and the expertise shown by Charles and looked forward to the appearance of his commentary. ²⁵ Margoliouth’s hope was not realized. The Press established four Anecdota series overseen by an Anecdota Committee. Anecdota Oxoniensia, the first paperback series issued by the Press, proved that the Delegates had not forgotten their ancient legacy, and satisfied the purists to whom Bartholomew Price’s [1818–98, secretary of the Delegates of the Press, 1868–85] stubborn commercialism was suspect. The series spluttered defiantly on from 1882 until 1914, and was never formally put to rest. A volume appeared out of the blue in 1929. (Sutcliffe, Oxford University Press, 46)

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F. Prätorius²⁶ (Theologische Literaturzeitung 20 [1895] 613–16) reviewed the edition in a somewhat different way. He not only commented on specific readings but also raised broader questions about it. Prätorius, who like Margoliouth thought Charles was unfair to Dillmann, offered some probing thoughts about what, given the textual materials at hand, the goal of an edition should be. He suggested that an editor should aim to establish the Ethiopic text, as nearly as possible, as it came from the pen of the translator— including all the mistakes of which he was guilty and those present already in the Greek text he was translating. Only inner-Ethiopic corruptions should be removed, and the readings of the manuscripts were to be rejected only when there were strong grounds for doing so. He found that Charles was guilty of departing from the readings in the Ethiopic copies too frequently. In fact, it seemed as if Charles wanted to edit an Ethiopic version of Jubilees improved with the aid of the Latin translation, parallel passages in the Masoretic text, in the Septuagint, and elsewhere. Prätorius also thought that, in those cases where the Ethiopic copies disagreed among themselves, it seemed at times as if Charles preferred the readings of A or B or AB because of a perhaps unconscious aversion to Dillmann’s edition that rested on the other two copies. He then offered criticisms of Charles’s procedure in various textual situations. Naturally, there could be differences of opinion in choosing which option among the Ethiopic manuscripts was the preferred reading. Yet when the Ethiopic copies and the Latin translation agree on a reading, it shows that they have transmitted their Greek base texts accurately. In such instances, again unless there were compelling reasons for doing so, one should not “correct” the reading. He cited as an example a change Charles made in Jubilees 15:26 (Barth too mentioned it). All of his Ethiopic copies and the Latin version word the sentence as “Anyone who is born, the flesh of whose private parts has not been circumcised by [literally: until] the eighth day . . .” Charles replaced “until” with “on” so that it read “on the eighth day,” in agreement with the Septuagint in Genesis 17:14. Prätorius also thought it rash, when the Ethiopic manuscripts agreed among themselves, to change their reading on the basis of the Latin translation. In addition, where the Ethiopic copies agree and the Latin is not available, the Ethiopic reading should not be altered.

²⁶ His name is usually spelled with an umlaut, but in the review it is spelled Praetorius.

116    ( – )

The Context for Charles’s 1902 Volume on Jubilees At the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, Jubilees garnered less attention than the Book of Enoch, but Charles was not the only one studying it. Among the other contributors was Friedrich Bohn who took the opportunity afforded by the fiftieth anniversary of Dillmann’s translation to summarize where studies of Jubilees stood and to make some noteworthy points of his own.²⁷ He commented that, while in the first twentyfive years after the initial translation, a number of studies had appeared, few had followed them in the next quarter century. In fact, he lamented how little Jubilees was known in comparison with Enoch (168). The common position was to date Jubilees in the mid-first century .., but no one had been able to establish the matter conclusively. Bohn disagreed with the accepted dating and argued that the author wrote Jubilees much earlier (170–2). One piece of evidence was the close relationship between it on the one hand and the Wisdom of Ben Sira and Enoch on the other. Also, the writer’s mixture of views that would later be the distinctive property of the different Jewish parties (Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes) pointed, as he saw it, to a time before they were separated from one another. He arrived at a date of composition in the mid-second century .., after the Maccabean Revolt, when the Hasideans, from which group the book came, were still cooperating with the new ruling family. The author’s aim was to effect a religious reform like the Hasmoneans’ political reform. Bohn thought that a study of the names given to people in Jubilees would be a profitable exercise and that the book might prove to be extraordinarily significant for analysis of the Hebrew text of the Old Testament (173–5). He went on to observe that the composition, which is a consistent whole, in a sense sets Enoch, Noah, and Abraham in Moses’ place as receiving revelations of the law; the disclosures at Sinai were merely a renewal and reestablishment of forms of religion revealed long before. The author’s glorification of the patriarchs meant glorification of the people; forebears and people as a unity are closely associated with God and his angels and opposed to the nations and the demons who mislead them (175–8). A monograph that may have been published too late for Bohn to include in his survey was Wilhelm Singer’s Das Buch der Jubiläen oder die Leptogenesis (1898). It offers a learned study by a Jewish scholar who was fully acquainted with Rabbinic literature and who brought his knowledge of it to bear on points ²⁷ “Die Bedeutung des Buches der Jubiläen: Zum 50jährigen Jubiläum der ersten deutschen Übersetzung,” Theologische Studien und Kritiken 73 (1900) 167–84.

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of connection between it and Jubilees. But he used his learning to a curious end. He accepted Dillmann’s dating of the book to the first century of the Common Era and Rönsch’s argument that it contained anti-Christian elements. He sharpened the latter point by claiming that Jubilees, composed by a Jewish Christian, is a blow-by-blow refutation of the Apostle Paul’s teachings about the abrogation of the law. However wrong he was about the context for the author, Singer’s work provides a mass of information that later scholars, including Charles, found very helpful. One additional publication deserves mention. Enno Littmann (1875–1958)²⁸ contributed the section on Jubilees (31–119) in the second volume of Kautzsch’s Die Apokryphen und Pseudepigraphen des Alten Testaments (1900). In the Introduction he seconded the criticisms raised by Prätorius regarding the procedures in Charles’s edition. As he observed, at times Charles failed to indicate that Dillmann’s two manuscripts supported a reading, preferring to mention only his manuscripts A and/or B as backing it. As a result, Littmann found that for his work he had to consult both the edition of Dillmann and that of Charles (32–3). He also made use of their translations—Charles’s in the form it took in the Jewish Quarterly Review, the only one then available. Littmann thanked Charles for sending him a part of his translation and said that, according to Charles, the translation would be improved in many places in his forthcoming commentary (33–4). Littmann was impressed with the arguments for a Maccabean date of the book about which Bohn had informed him (37).

The Book The Book of Jubilees or the Little Genesis Translated from the Editor’s Ethiopic Text and Edited, with Introduction, Notes, and Indices by R. H. Charles, D.D., Professor of Biblical Greek, Trinity College, Dublin (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1902).²⁹ Charles’s next major publication on Jubilees appeared seven years after his critical edition. He had, as recounted above, issued a translation of the entire book in a series of articles in the Jewish Quarterly Review for 1894–95 and had announced the eventual publication of a translation and commentary already

²⁸ Littmann was still a doctoral candidate when he translated Jubilees. He later helped Charles obtain manuscripts of Enoch for use in preparing his 1906 edition. ²⁹ Charles, who as the title indicates was teaching at his alma mater at the time, dedicated the book to the Reverend George Salmon. “Provost of Trinity College, Dublin, with an old pupil’s admiration and gratitude.” Charles’s appointment at Trinity College, Dublin will be treated later.

118    ( – ) in his 1895 volume: “An exhaustive treatment of this [the Hebrew text of the Bible used by the author] and other questions connected with the Book of Jubilees will be given in my Commentary on this book, which I hope will appear next year” (vi). He signed the Preface to the 1895 work on November 10, 1894, so at that time he anticipated that the commentary would see the light of day in 1895 (maybe 1896). The seven-year gap between expectation and reality was due not only to his customary over-optimism about such matters but also to a problem he was having with Jubilees. The issue frustrating him can be traced in two sources: Charles’s description and Burkitt’s account in his obituary of Charles. Charles’s account reads: I had hoped to issue this Commentary on the Book of Jubilees quite six years ago, as a sequel to my edition of the Ethiopic and other fragmentary versions of this work; but after writing a large portion of it, I was obliged to abandon the task, as I felt that somehow I had failed to give a satisfactory interpretation of the text, though at the time I could not understand wherein my disability lay. A year or two later when making a special study of the Testaments of the XII. Patriarchs, I came to discover that the source of my failure lay in my acceptance of the traditional view that Jubilees was written in the first century of the Christian era. So long as I wrote from this standpoint, my notes became more and more a labored apologetic for the composition of this work in the first century. The earliest approximation to the right date appeared in my article on the “Testaments of the XII. Patriarchs” in the Encyclopaedia Biblica, i. 241, 1899, where, after giving grounds for the view that the main bulk of that work was written before 100 .., I concluded that we should “regard both works (i.e. the Testaments and Jubilees) as almost contemporary and as emanating from the same school of thought.” This view was advanced in the following year by Bohn and by Bousset³⁰ on various grounds, and it is from this standpoint that the present Commentary is written. The difficulties that beset almost every page of Jubilees vanish for the most part once we understand that it

³⁰ For Bohn’s position, see above. Wilhelm Bousset (1865–1920) presented his case in the last part of his lengthy essay “Neueste Forschungen auf dem Gebiet der religiösen Litteratur des Spätjudentums,” Theologische Rundschau 3 (1900) 369–81 (the other sections of the article are on 287–302, 327–35). Bousset thought the presentation of Jacob’s son Levi and the ways in which various foreign nations were treated in Jubilees reflected Maccabean times. The Pharisaic and anti-pharisaic material in it he understood as evidence the author worked before the relations between the parties were fully formed. Oddly enough, however, he situated the book in the reign of Queen Alexandra (76–67 ..) when those party relations were definitely in place. He appealed to the apocalyptic chapter, Jubilees 23, and maintained that the author wrote in the “golden” age of the Pharisees (374–7).

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was written by a Pharisaic upholder of the Maccabean dynasty, who was also probably a priest. (vii–viii)

So, on his own admission, dating the book more than a century earlier than most did at the time—something he was the first to do—finally allowed him to write the commentary. Burkitt corroborated the story and added some details, including ones about Charles’s character. After noting that Charles had become the authority in his area of study and had succeeded in convincing specialists and even non-specialists of its importance, he continued: He had attracted to himself a band of younger students who accepted for the most part his conclusions, and—it must be confessed—he was not very patient of adverse criticism. While working at a new subject there was a period when his mind was eagerly assimilative of new ideas, new views, new conclusions; then he attained conviction, and from that point it was difficult to move him. Two stories may illustrate what has been said.³¹ In 1902 Charles brought out his translation and commentary on the Book of Jubilees, six [sic] years after he had published his recension of the text. He had begun the commentary when occupied with the text, but as he himself says in his Preface he “felt that somehow he had failed to give a satisfactory interpretation”. He had started with the then traditional idea that the work was written from the point of view of a “Pharisee” about .. I.³² Historical difficulties presented themselves as he proceeded, but he had an ingenious answer to each as it appeared—he always was most ingenious—and six sheets (so he once told me) were actually passed for press and printed off. Yet he could not escape the feeling of effort and opposition. Then a fresh study of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs converted him to the view that the Book of Jubilees was really a century older than the date he had defended. He persuaded his publisher to let him start afresh, and he rewrote his commentary from his new point of view that Jubilees was written when a victorious nephew of Judas Maccabaeus [that is, John Hyrcanus (134–104 ..)] was still on the throne, not yet in conflict with the religious leaders of Judaism. Now, he told me, all was easy; his ingenious argumentation was not needed, all the details fell naturally into their place. Charles’s new date was generally accepted:

³¹ The second story had to do with Charles’s interpretation of 2 Enoch and is treated in connection with that publication (Part 2, Chapter 3). ³² Since Burkitt used a Roman numeral I here, I assume he meant the first century, not the year 1.

120    ( – ) I have often thought of his description of his experiences in writing the two forms of his commentary as illuminatingly typical of the experience of a scholar working, in the one case on a wrong hypothesis, in the other on the right one.³³

Charles’s insight about the date of composition, apparently reached independently by others, became very influential indeed and remains so to the present day. But herein lies a problem. Charles was a very busy man who was producing large, impressive works at a rapid pace and was studying more than one book at a time. But there is something peculiar about his assertion regarding the date of Jubilees. 1. In his 1895 edition of Ethiopic Jubilees he wrote more than once that Jubilees was from the first century before the Christian era (v–vi, ix). Since he had finished the edition by 1894 when he signed the Preface, at this time he believed Jubilees was written in the first century .., not the first century .. 2. As we have just seen, he wrote in his 1902 commentary that he had hoped to issue the volume in 1895 or 1896 as a sequel to his edition and had written much of it when he had to put it aside. And, as seen in the lengthy quotation above, he claimed he was working at this time under the common assumption that Jubilees was written in the first century . . Note too Burkitt’s statement that he was working on the commentary as he was editing the text. 3. In the same quotation, he says that a study of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs a “year or two later” made him change his mind. So, why, if he wrote in 1894 or 1895 that Jubilees was a first century .. composition, was he working, around the same time or even later, under the assumption that it was a first century .. work? Did he confuse the two first centuries (.. and ..) in his 1895 statements?³⁴ 4. He asserted that the “earliest approximation to the right date” (i.e., in the second century ..) came in his article about the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. This too is strange—and on more than one score. The study to which he was referring and which he identified was a part of his

³³ “Robert Henry Charles 1855–1931,” 441–2. ³⁴ It would not have been the only time he did this. See Part 2 Chapter 9 below on his Fragments of a Zadokite Work.

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article “Apocalyptic Literature” that he contributed to the Encyclopaedia Biblica, vol. 1, cols. 213–50 (1899). In that essay he wrote detailed surveys of nine apocalypses, including Enoch, Jubilees, and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. As noted above, Charles said that in this article, after “giving grounds for the view that the main bulk of that work [that is, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs] was written before 100 ..,” he drew the conclusion that the Testaments and Jubilees were “almost contemporary.” I have read and re-read his entry on the Testaments in this article and see no place where he gave reasons for thinking that the major part of the Testaments dated from before 100 .. He there agreed with the view that the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs consisted of three parts: a. A Jewish work that, for each of Jacob’s sons, related his life and contained pertinent ethical exhortations; b. interpolations of apocalyptic sections into the Testaments by a Jewish editor (the dates of these different units extend from the second century .. to the first ..); and c. interpolations at a still later time by Christians—a process that lasted a long time (cols. 240–2). Charles dated what he calls the “groundwork,” by which he must mean a. above, to “about the beginning of the Christian era” (col. 241). In other words, he did not argue that the “bulk” of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs was written before 100 .. Further evidence that he had not become aware that Jubilees was a second century .. book in the research for this article may be gleaned from its section about Jubilees. There he wrote that it could not be later than 70 .. (since Jubilees assumes the temple, which was destroyed in that year, was still standing) nor earlier than ca. 60 .. by which time Enoch 1–36, 72–104 were written (as Jubilees refers to these units). He concluded: “Though there is some evidence that would place it nearer the earlier than the later date, we shall leave the date undefined for the present” (col. 232). Moreover, Charles was not the first scholar to argue for a second century .. date (or close to it) for Jubilees, if that is what he meant by speaking of the first approximation to the correct date for the book. Bousett³⁵ mentions several writers who had made brief proposals to this effect, though they did not offer

³⁵ “Neueste Forschungen auf dem Gebiet der religiösen Litteratur des Spätjudentums,” 375. Besides the two scholars named above, he also cited Moses Gaster (“The Hebrew Text of one of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs,” Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archaeology 16 [1894] 33–49) as placing the book in Maccabean times, but I have not been able to find in the article where he says this.

122    ( – ) detailed arguments for their position: Abraham Kuenen³⁶ suggested the book was a century or more older than scholars usually thought; and Kaufmann Kohler³⁷ believed Jubilees and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs should be dated to the time of John Hyrcanus (134–104). So, the whole matter of when Charles thought what about the date of Jubilees is a puzzle, if one goes by what he wrote. The solution may be that Charles confused two of his publications on the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. The 1899 piece to which he referred as he explained his frustration in writing about Jubilees is not where he came to the correct date. He did that in a later article, “Testaments of the XII Patriarchs,” in James Hastings, editor, A Dictionary of the Bible, vol. 4 (1902) 721–5. There he did place the Testaments in the second century where Jubilees would also belong, but the date of the article would cast even greater doubt on his claim to have made the first approximation to the correct date. Yet it remains a fact that whenever he decided Jubilees was written in the second pre-Christian century, it finally allowed him to write the commentary. The Introduction to the 1902 work is a gold mine of information about Jubilees, a fine reflection of Charles’s mature thoughts on the book. He arranged it much like the Introduction to his 1893 book on Enoch. The first section, “Short Account of the Book” (xiii–xiv), is not so much a summary of Jubilees’ contents as a statement of Charles’s understanding of the situation and message of the author: The Book of Jubilees was written in Hebrew by a Pharisee between the year of the accession of Hyrcanus to the high-priesthood in 135 and his breach with the Pharisees some years before his death in 105 .. It is the most advanced pre-Christian representative of the midrashic tendency, which had already been at work in the Old Testament Chronicles. As the Chronicler had rewritten the history of Israel and Judah from the basis of the Priests’ Code, so our author re-edited from the pharisaic standpoint of his time the history of events from the creation to the publication, or, according to the author’s view, the republication, of the law on Sinai. In the course of re-editing he incorporated a large body of traditional lore, which the midrashic process had put at his disposal, and also not a few fresh legal enactments, that the exigencies of the past had called forth. His ³⁶ “Der Stammbaum des masoretischen Textes des Alten Testaments,” in his Gesammelte Abhandlungen zur biblischen Wissenschaft (Freiburg: J. C. B. Mohr Paul Siebeck, 1894) 82–124, here 113–14. ³⁷ “The Pre-Talmudic Haggada,” JQR 5 (1893) 399–419, here 402–3.

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work constitutes an enlarged Targum on Genesis and Exodus, in which difficulties in the biblical narrative are solved, gaps supplied, dogmatically offensive elements removed, and the genuine spirit of later Judaism infused into the primitive history of the world. His object was to defend Judaism against the attacks of the Hellenistic spirit that had been in the ascendant one generation earlier and was still powerful, and to prove that the law was of everlasting validity. From our author’s contentions and his embittered attacks on the paganizers and apostates, we may infer that Hellenism had urged that the Levitical ordinances of the law were only of transitory significance, that they had not been observed by the founders of the nation, and that the time had now come for them to be swept away, and for Israel to take its place in the brotherhood of the nations. Our author regarded all such views as fatal to the very existence of Jewish religion and nationality. But it is not as such that he assailed them, but on the ground of their falsehood. The law, he teaches, is of everlasting validity. Though revealed in time it was superior to time. Before it had been made known in sundry portions to the fathers it had been kept in heaven by the angels, and to its observance henceforward there was no limit in time or in eternity. (xiii–xiv)

As he had in most parts of the Book of Enoch, he found teachings about a messianic kingdom in Jubilees: it was to come very soon, be led by a messiah from the tribe of Judah, and gradually develop on earth. With it would come a transformation of nature and an ethical improvement in humans until there arose a new heaven and earth. Charles traced the various titles under which Jubilees was known by ancient writers and surveyed the Ethiopic copies of the book and the editions and translations³⁸ that had appeared. Next came an overview of “Critical Inquiries” in which he offered comments on some earlier publications but simply listed the titles of others. In his review of the ancient versions of Jubilees, he continued to regard the Ethiopic text as very accurate but now considered

³⁸ He was especially complimentary to Littmann for his contribution to Kautzsch, editor, Die Apokryphen und Pseudepigraphen des Alten Testaments. He says that Littmann had chosen some better readings (from Dillmann’s manuscripts!) than the ones Charles had adopted in 1895 and added: “To Dr. Littmann I owe many corrections of my English translation in the Jewish Quarterly” (xxii). In the “Critical Inquiries” section of his Introduction Charles wrote about Littmann’s short Introduction to his rendering of Jubilees: “We have as good an introduction to our author as was possible from the stage of criticism at the time, and one that is meritorious alike for its learning and judgment” (xxvi). It is peculiar that Charles referred to “the stage of criticism at the time,” since Littmann’s contribution was published just two years before Charles’s volume.

124    ( – ) the Latin translation “almost of equal value with the Ethiopic” (xxviii). Contrary to his earlier view, he found the evidence for a Syriac translation of Jubilees to be “not conclusive” (xxix), since the only documentation for one was the list of patriarchal wives’ names. He provided a series of examples showing that the Ethiopic and Latin versions were translations from Greek Jubilees and that Greek Jubilees in turn had rendered a Hebrew original text. He devoted the tenth section to “Textual Affinities of the Text of the Book of Jubilees” (xxxiii–xxxix), that is, to lists of places where Jubilees, when it reproduces passages from Genesis-Exodus, agrees with one or several ancient versions of the Bible against others. From all the accumulated data he concluded: “our book attests an independent form of the Hebrew text of the Pentateuch,” one “midway between the forms presupposed by the LXX and the Syriac” (xxxviii, where the latter quotation is italicized). It is not surprising, given Charles’s enthusiasm for “correcting” ancient texts, that he also treated “Lacunae, Dittographies, and Dislocations in Our Text” (xxxix–xlii). Charles reported that he had benefitted greatly from discovering “the poetical element” in Jubilees, something he had also unearthed in the Book of Enoch. At a time when scholars were enthusiastically positing sources and multiple authors for texts such as the Pentateuch and Isaiah, to mention only the two best known examples, Charles believed one person had written Jubilees and used earlier writings and traditions in doing so (xliv– xlvii). Texts consulted by the author were a Book of Noah and most of the Book of Enoch. He also employed written legends about various wars of Jacob (attested in later sources as well) and material shared with the contemporary Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. Other items in the book, such as the names for many individuals, may also be traditional but there are no other earlier written sources for them. As we saw in the long statement about Jubilees that Charles put at the beginning of his Introduction, he thought that Jubilees was a later example of the same kind of midrashic process that the Chronicler carried out. As that writer rewrote the Books of Samuel and Kings, so the author of Jubilees rewrote Genesis and the first half of Exodus. In section 14 of the Introduction (“Jubilees—A Product of the Midrashic Tendency at work in the Old Testament Chronicler, but represented by its Author as an Esoteric Tradition,” xlvii–li), he spelled out what he meant by the claim. The author of Jubilees rewrote the early scriptural history to “show that the law had been rigorously observed, even by the patriarchs” (xlviii). In addition, and also like the Chronicler, where he found statements in the older text that did not fit his views he changed or omitted them. God had revealed himself from the

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beginning, and the patriarchs had passed that teaching along to their sons (this is the “esoteric tradition”). Another section that catches the eye is the fifteenth, “Object of Jubilees— The Defence and Exposition of Judaism from the Pharisaic Standpoint of the Second Century ..” (li–lvi). The section is replete with examples from the book in which the writer “glorifies the law,” introducing a number of its provisions already into the time of the patriarchs. He presented the ancestors as “models of piety” (li–liv) and magnified Israel; he insisted that the holy people was to be separate from the nations (liv–lv) and denounced those nations, especially Israel’s national enemies (lv–lvi). Charles prefaced this last topic by resorting to harsh words: “With the immeasurable arrogance of Judaism there went necessarily, hand in hand, an immeasurable hatred and contempt of the Gentiles” (lv). The prejudice in that statement is hard to miss, but the entire section about the “object” of Jubilees leaves one wondering what in all this accumulated material Charles found to be indicative of Pharisaic authorship. He never even implied there was a question about it; apparently it was self-evident that “glorifying” the law and the patriarchs and insisting on a strictly separated Israel were uniquely Pharisaic traits. After a unit devoted to the angelology and demonology of Jubilees, Charles turned to the question of when the author composed the book (lviii–lxviii). The section is especially meaningful in light of the debates about the topic that preceded Charles’s publications and also for clarifying what his position on the issue now was (see the discussion above). He realized that there was no direct, internal evidence for when the writer worked; there are only more indirect pointers. One strange feature of the section is that Charles refers to the views of no other scholars; he simply presents his own case. The first step in his argument was to define two points: a date after which it must have been written and one before which it had to have been composed. The upper (earliest) limit was set by the fact that the author wrote when the Maccabeans (Hasmoneans) ruled and not before 135 .. His proof was that in Jubilees 32:1 Levi is called priest of the Most High God, a title employed only by the Hasmonean high priests. John Hyrcanus, whose reign as ruler and high priest Charles dated to 135–105 .., was the first one who certainly used it, while it is not impossible that his father Simon did as well. As for the lower (latest) limit, Charles maintained that the book had to have been written before 96 .. when the Hasmonean high priest-king Alexander Jannaeus (103–76 ..) and the Pharisees were at war. If the author was a Pharisee, he would not have written so positively about the Maccabees after 96. Actually, a falling out between Pharisees and ruler had occurred already late in the reign of John

126    ( – ) Hyrcanus, although the year is not given in the sources. So, the book was written between 135 and 96, or more precisely, between 135 and the year John Hyrcanus and the Pharisees had their dispute. Thus, Charles’s dubious identification of the author as a Pharisee played a pivotal role in his dating argument. After defining the period within which the book was written, Charles adduced seven categories of evidence in support of the conclusion. The first four, he asserted, pointed clearly to 150–100 .. as the time of composition, while the final three documented more generally that the book was preChristian. The four categories in support of a date between 150 and 100 are: First, the book shows traces of a period of persecution now past after which certain laws were enacted. The laws forbidding nudity, the ones requiring proper circumcision at the right time, strict keeping of the Sabbath (e.g., no war on it), and no intermarrying with the nations are explicable as consequences of the policies of the Seleucid king Antiochus IV (175–64 ..) against Judaism. Second, the book comes from when the Maccabean dynasty was in its glory. It contains a promise to Jacob of world dominion (32:18–19), and its several battle accounts (against Esau and his sons, for example) are reflections of Hasmonean triumphs. Third, the apocalypse in ch. 23 traces the history of Hasmonean times. “Our author stands already on the threshold of that happy time” of the messianic kingdom (lxiii). It comes, therefore, from the reign of Simon or of Hyrcanus, the greatest of the Hasmonean rulers. Fourth, since the writer of 1 Enoch 91–104 used Jubilees, its latest possible date of composition is the beginning of the first century .. (lxi–lxiv) The arguments supporting a pre-Christian date more generally are: the textual affinities of the biblical citations in the book, the early forms of the narratives and laws in it (all of which he lists), and several other features—the unusual calendar, use of the divine title God Most High, and the author’s ignorance of the later name “the feast of Pentecost” for the Festival of Weeks. The remaining parts of the Introduction Charles devoted to topics such as the aid offered by Jubilees in dating the various sections of Ethiopic Enoch (and the lost Book of Noah) and the book’s relation to the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. He found that the conclusions he had reached in his 1893 volume on Enoch were confirmed by his study of Jubilees: the author used 1 Enoch 6–16, 23–36, and 72–90, while 91–104 is later than Jubilees and in fact

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used it. He also thought 1 Enoch 1–5 post-dated Jubilees. The writer of Jubilees drew upon the Book of Noah which is older than even the most ancient parts of 1 Enoch (lxviii–lxxii). As for the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, he determined that neither it nor Jubilees was dependent on the other; both, in overlapping sections, drew on common sources. In this context Charles said he hoped “to treat this question exhaustively in my edition of the Testaments” (lxxii), so he was planning such a work already at this time.³⁹ He maintained that the author of Jubilees was probably a priest, citing the major role of Levi and his descendants in the book (lxxiii). As he had for the Book of Enoch in 1893, so in 1902 Charles assembled a large number of places where, as he saw matters, Jubilees left its mark on Jewish, Samaritan, and Christian sources (lxxiii–lxxxiii). The section is certainly valuable, but he cast his net rather broadly in some cases. Thus, he found similar ideas in the Wisdom of Solomon and in 4 Ezra, but in neither case is there any firm reason for thinking Jubilees was a source for these later works. He likewise noted the correspondence in the ages that Jubilees and the Samaritan Chronicle attribute to the prediluvian patriarchs at the births of their first sons, but he failed to mention that the information is also present in the Samaritan Pentateuch. In surveying Christian literature, he divided the information into texts that cite Jubilees or the Little Genesis by name and those that use it but without designating it by title. He added a section in which he traced Jubilees’ influence on the New Testament (lxxxiii–lxxxvi). He was able to point out a number of similarities (e.g., in angelology and demonology), but that these even suggest influence from Jubilees seems unlikely. One remarkable parallel he adduced has to do with 1 Timothy 1:4 (“not to occupy themselves with myths and endless genealogies”); 4:6 (“Have nothing to do with profane myths and old wives’ tales”); and Titus 3:9 (“genealogies, dissensions, and quarrels about the law”). Regarding these he commented: “The Pauline phrases form a just description of a large portion of Jubilees. The ‘old wives’ fables’ may be an allusion to the large rôle played by women in it” (lxxxv). Statements like these make one suspect that Charles had little appreciation for this very important feature of Jubilees. A short section in which he quickly sketched the views of the writer about eschatological topics closes the Introduction (lxxxvii–lxxxix). Charles thought the author mentioned a messiah in 31:18 (from the line of Judah) and that he believed the messianic kingdom had already begun to appear in his time. He

³⁹ His edition and translation of the Testaments were published in 1908.

128    ( – ) taught an immortality of the soul for the righteous after death, not a bodily resurrection (see 23:31). The English translation with notes occupies pp. 1–261. In the volume, the notes fill much more space than they did in the 1894–95 translation. They more nearly resemble the size of the notes in his 1893 and 1912 books about Enoch. He placed the book’s dates for events in the margins of the translation. Dates are commonly expressed in Jubilees by indicating the jubilee period, the week of years within it, and the year in question, but Charles translated these confusing numbers into a running chronology, beginning with creation and ending with the year of the world 2450. There are two short indexes—of passages (263–5), and of names and subjects (267–75).

Reviews One of those who reviewed Charles’s commentary on Jubilees was Emil Schürer (1844–1910),⁴⁰ who had founded the journal Theologische Literaturzeitung in 1876, had become Professor of New Testament at Göttingen in 1895, and was best known for his multi-volume Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes im Zeitalter Jesu Christi (= History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ). Among other topics, Schürer took up the date of Jubilees. He agreed that it reflected Hasmonean circumstances and was pre-Herodian (the harsh treatment of Edom in Jubilees indicated as much [Herod was an Edomite]), but he did not think one could be so precise as Charles was in dating the book because the latest possible date, other than the time of Herod in general (37–4 ..), could not be determined. For example, Charles might have been right that the Pharisaic author would not have praised the priests so extravagantly at a time when the Hasmoneans had turned against the Pharisees, but this feature would fit the time of Alexandra (76–67 ..) as well as that of her son Hyrcanus because she restored the Pharisees to prominence. Schürer noted that the agreement of Jubilees with the Septuagint more than with the readings of the Masoretic Text, its calendar, and its earlier positions on various points favored a time before the first century .., but still within the limits he had established. He considered the apocalyptic section 23:12–31 the most important passage for determining the date. It speaks of the beginning of the Maccabean movement against the apostates, but it is not possible to state how far the history extended because ⁴⁰ Theologische Literaturzeitung 28 (1903) cols. 675–9.

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the text is unclear. Hence one should rest content with a date between the time of John Hyrcanus (134–104) and the rise of Herod (37 ..). Another review was by Stanley Arthur Cook of the University of Cambridge in The Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland for 1903, 205–8. One of the features in Charles’s book that caught the reviewer’s attention was what he said about the text of Genesis-Exodus underlying Jubilees. Cook greatly appreciated Charles’s collection of materials but thought that closer investigation was needed. It was not adequate to say that Jubilees agreed in a reading with, for example, the Septuagint in places where the best manuscripts of the Septuagint differ in their readings. The reviewer’s concluding paragraph is worth citing: The Translation and Commentary as a whole, and the excellent Introduction that precedes it, are far in advance of previous editions, and are marked by that clearness and scholarship which one is accustomed to look for, and to find, in Dr. Charles’ works. His notes throughout are extremely helpful and clear; some of them, as that on the later history of the myth in Gen. vi, 1–4, are veritable monographs. This class of literature, the study of which he has made so pre-eminently his own, has too long been neglected, and his series of commentaries on books which rank second to the canonical writings of the Old and New Testament are indispensable to everyone who is interested in early Christian and Jewish literature. (208)

The 1902 translation and commentary formed Charles’s last major contribution to study of Jubilees. As with the Book of Enoch, an abbreviated version of his 1902 publication appeared in The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, 2.1–82.⁴¹ In 1917 just the translation was published in The Book of Jubilees or the Little Genesis translated from the Ethiopic Text by R. H. Charles, D. Litt., D.D., Canon of Westminster; Fellow of Merton College; Fellow of the British Academy, with an Introduction by G. H. Box, M.A., Lecturer in Rabbinical Hebrew, King’s College, London; Hon. Canon of St. Albans (Translation of Early Documents Series 1; London/New York: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge). In his introduction (e.g., p. viii), Box took strong issue with Charles’s claim that the author was a Pharisee and showed that positions the writer expressed were often fundamentally opposed to those of the group (stressing that the 364-day calendar was not Pharisaic). ⁴¹ In this publication Charles narrowed the time limits between which the book was written to 109 and 105 .. (2.6).

130    ( – ) He believed one of the Hasidim (the pious) was a more likely candidate for authorship.

Legacy Since I have worked more closely with Jubilees than any other text on which Charles published, perhaps I can give my own assessment of how his work has weathered the years. As with Enoch, subsequent discoveries of texts have unavoidably rendered his work outdated in some respects. The most important of these discoveries are the fourteen fragmentary copies from Qumran, all in Hebrew. But Charles did the most important scholarship on Jubilees before the Dead Sea Scrolls were found, and his critical edition and commentary remain fundamental to anyone who wishes to work seriously with Jubilees. The earliest of the Qumran copies may come from ca. 125–100 .., approximately the time when Charles dated Jubilees, and thus it is likely that Jubilees was written earlier than he thought. In some instances, the readings on the Hebrew fragments show that Charles’s textual explanations were incorrect. Many more copies of Ethiopic Jubilees are now available as are a series of citations in Syriac and some additional quotations in Catena manuscripts of the Greek Bible. I published a critical edition of Jubilees in 1989, the first edition since Charles’s work of 1895. In 1989 twenty-seven Ethiopic manuscripts were identified and available, and today many more are known to exist. It is surprising that someone as well informed as Charles could maintain that Jubilees was written by a Pharisee, and already in his time experts were reacting against the inference. Box’s negative verdict was noted above. In 1930 the great scholar of rabbinic literature, Hanoch Albeck, devoted a short monograph to the legal material in Jubilees and showed in detail that the author was not a Pharisee but a member of a sect that did not adopt the Pharisaic tradition.⁴² So Charles missed the specific historical context in which Jubilees arose, but he worked so carefully with the text—at times incorrectly—and offered so much material for interpreting it that it is immensely profitable still today to turn to his books for studying Jubilees. I do. The next composition on which Charles worked, 2 Enoch, proved to be a surprise. Unlike Enoch and Jubilees, it was a composition of which he had heard only a short time before. ⁴² Das Buch der Jubiläen und die Halacha (Sieben und vierziger Bericht der Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums in Berlin; Berlin-Schöneberg: Druck von Siegfried Scholem, 1930).

Chapter 3 2 (Slavonic) Enoch During the mid-1890s, the Charleses continued to live in Oxford while he held no official position at the university. Whatever their financial circumstances may have been, he remained exceedingly active in research and publication. Charles, with two major publications to his credit by the end of 1895 (on Enoch and Jubilees)—ones that must have required an enormous amount of work—might have stopped for a moment to catch his breath, but there was no slowing his pace. In 1896 two more editions of Jewish texts came off the press. One of the books he was writing that year and that was published in 1896 was a commentary on 2 Enoch,¹ sometimes called Slavonic Enoch because of the language in which it was preserved or the Book of the Secrets of Enoch, its title in some textual witnesses.

The Contents of Slavonic Enoch Francis I. Andersen, who many years later also translated Slavonic Enoch into English, outlined its seventy-three chapters (at least there are seventy-three in his translation; see below) into two main parts, each of which has sub-divisions. 1. Life of Enoch a. Enoch’s Journey Through Seven (or Ten) Heavens (chs. 1–21) b. Enoch’s Interview with the Lord (22–35) c. Enoch’s Return to Earth (36–8) d. Enoch Instructs His Children (39–63) e. Enoch’s Final Call and Last Words (64–6) f. Second Translation of Enoch to Heaven (67–8) 2. Subsequent Events² a. Ministry of Methusalom (69:1–70:16) b. Ministry of Nir (70:17–26) ¹ The book received the title “2 Enoch” simply to distinguish it from 1 (Ethiopic) Enoch. ² For the way in which Charles viewed these units, see below.

R. H. Charles: A Biography. James C. VanderKam, Oxford University Press. © James C. VanderKam 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192869289.003.0005

132    ( – ) c. Birth of Melkisedek (71) d. Translation of Melkisedek (72) e. The Flood (73).³ It employs material known from 1 Enoch—e.g., the story about angels who sinned with women and teachings about astronomy—but is not a version or revision of it, nor is it necessarily the case that the writer of 2 Enoch used 1 Enoch itself as a source. The shared features may have come to the writer of 2 Enoch through other channels.

The Context for Charles’s Volume on the Slavonic Enoch The books of Enoch and Jubilees were, as seen above, relatively recent arrivals in Europe when Charles began his study of them. Slavonic or 2 Enoch was of even more recent re-discovery, at least in the English-speaking world, since it was not until 1892 that Charles first heard of it. He wrote that, while working on his Enoch commentary of 1893, he came across an article that mentioned a Slavonic Enoch work. The essay was by Eugen Kozak, “Bibliographische Uebersicht der biblisch-apokryphen Literatur bei den Slaven,” Jahrbücher für die Protestantische Theologie 18 (1892) 127–58. The fourth entry in Kozak’s survey was “Liber Enochi” (pp. 132–3) about which he wrote: “The content agrees in general with the familiar Ethiopic version of this book” (my translation). Kozak then referred the reader to Gfrörer’s 1840 publication on Ethiopic Enoch⁴ and to Dillmann’s 1853 commentary. When he saw the article, wrote Charles, I at once applied to Mr. Morfill for help, and in the course of a few weeks we had before us printed copies of two of the MSS. in question.⁵ It did not take much study to discover that Kozak’s statement was absolutely devoid of foundation. The Book of the Secrets of Enoch was, as it soon transpired, a new pseudepigraph, and not in any sense a version of the older and well-known Book of Enoch. (The Book of the Secrets of Enoch, xi; cf. viii) ³ Andersen, “Enoch, Second Book of,” Anchor Bible Dictionary 2.517. His translation is “2 (Slavonic Apocalypse of ) Enoch,” in James Charlesworth, editor, Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, 1.91–221. ⁴ The reference is to August Friedrich Gfrörer (1803–61), who in his book Prophetae veteres pseudepigraphi, partim ex abyssinico vel hebraico sermonibus latine versi (Stuttgart: Krabbe, 1840) included three sections regarding the Book of Enoch, two taken from Richard Laurence: “Enochi Liber, ex Aethiopico sermone anglice versus a Rich. Laurentio, jam latinitate donatus,” 169–266; “Fragmenta Libri Enoch, quae apud patres occurrunt, a Fabricio et Hoffmanno collecta,” 267–75; and “Richardi Laurentii dissertatio de libro Enochi, latine versa,” 276–302. ⁵ Charles’s wording may indicate that they received transcriptions, not photographs, of the manuscripts.

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Charles could have concluded that the Slavonic text had little or nothing to do with his current project (Ethiopic Enoch) and ignored it,⁶ but he did the opposite. He studied the composition of which he had just become aware and regarded it as a continuation of his work with Enoch traditions. In the process, he made a lasting contribution to the analysis of the text he could read only in translation. The passage of time had relieved him of the need to point out the superiority of his edition over Dillmann’s, since the latter had not published on 2 Enoch before his death in 1894. 2 Enoch, like 1 Enoch and Jubilees, was a work known and used in another culture for centuries before scholars in the West became aware of it. Not only had it been read there, but Russian experts had been publishing about it since 1842.⁷

The Book The Book of the Secrets of Enoch Translated from the Slavonic by W. R. Morfill, M.A., Reader in Russian and the Other Slavonic Languages and Edited with Introduction, Notes and Indices by R. H. Charles, M.A., Trinity College, Dublin and Exeter College, Oxford (Oxford at the Clarendon Press, 1896). The volume is not an edition of the text; rather it is, like his 1893 work on Enoch, a translation fortified by an introduction and notes of explanation. The title page indicates that Charles needed help in handling 2 Enoch because it existed only in Slavonic copies,⁸ and he did not read Slavonic. The person who translated the text into English was William Richard Morfill (1834–1909), an Oxford acquaintance.⁹ Charles himself contributed the Preface, Introduction, notes, and indices. The Introduction that Charles composed for the commentary on 2 Enoch is different from the ones in his earlier volumes because there were no certain ⁶ He had noted the “discovery” already in his 1893 The Book of Enoch, 1: “Only recently two Slavonic MSS., which belong to this literature [of Enoch], but are quite independent of the present book, have been printed in Russia.” On p. 190 he referred to Slavonic Enoch’s year of 365¼ days and on p. 357 to the δρακοντων [drakontōn] in 1 Enoch 20:7 in connection with the occurrence of the term chalkydri in 2 Enoch (on this topic, see below). ⁷ See Christfried Böttrich, Das slavische Henochbuch (Jüdische Schriften aus hellenistisch-römischer Zeit V/7; Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1996) 786, for references. ⁸ Slavonic is the language used in Orthodox churches in Eastern Europe. ⁹ Charles was understandably very grateful to Morfill: I must express my gratitude to Mr. Morfill for his great kindness in undertaking the translation of the Slavonic texts, and for his unfailing courtesy and unwearying energy in the prosecution of the task. It is to him that I am indebted for the account of the Slavonic MSS. in §2. (viii)

134    ( – ) references to it in ancient literature and no detailed publications on it from scholars in the West. Thus, all questions about it awaited their first answers— at least in English. Being a pioneer was a risky endeavor, as Charles himself recognized. It will be generally understood that great difficulties beset such an undertaking, and particularly in the case of a book of whose existence there had never been even a surmise in the world of scholarship, and to which there was not a single unmistakable allusion in all ancient literature. The editor in such a case has to pursue untraveled ways, and if, in his efforts to discover the literary environment, the religious views, the date, and language of his author, he has fallen once and again into errors of perception or judgement, he can therein but throw himself on the indulgence of his critics. (viii)

Charles tried to make a case in the Introduction that the work was old and, in many ways, similar in value to Ethiopic Enoch. Briefly stated, his thesis was that “[t]he Slavonic Enoch in its present form was written somewhere about the beginning of the Christian era. Its author or final editor was a Hellenistic Jew, and the place of its composition was Egypt” (xii). Because of the book’s nature and the lack of external information about it, these positions were not easy to establish, but Charles made a typically energetic effort. As we will see, he maintained that 2 Enoch was indeed quoted and/or alluded to a number of times in Jewish and early Christian literature, including the New Testament. A problem impacting all questions regarding 2 Enoch was the state in which the text survived. Morfill reported that the Slavonic copies known to him fell into two classes—the ones with the complete text (two manuscripts) and ones with “a shortened and incomplete redaction of the text” (three manuscripts). None of the five antedated the sixteenth century. Morfill added that he had direct knowledge of just two of the five existing copies: the one he labeled A (= P in current listings, offering the longer text) and the other B (= N, attesting the shorter text). He was aware of readings in the other manuscripts through the text prepared by Prof. Sokolov [M.I. Sokolov of the University of Moscow], which is based on all the above MSS. Unfortunately, however, this text has not fully discriminated these sources. Accordingly, to avoid misconceptions, this text, which is designated as Sok, is to be understood as representing all authorities other than A and B. (xiii–xiv)

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Morfill intended only to make a useful text available to his friend Charles and therefore left out discussions of linguistic matters. According to Charles, Morfill actually prepared three literal translations—of A, B, and Sokolov’s text. Of these Charles decided to follow A as his principal text and to use the others as needed (xiv–xv). He considered B to be a “résumé” of A (it is approximately half its length) but also believed that A contained interpolations. Some of these he removed from the text and placed in notes and others he left in the text but enclosed in brackets. His decision to present in full only the longer text entailed that the reader would not be able to see the shorter recension nearly as clearly—a defect that later translators were to rectify. Charles marshaled data to show that the author had written the work in Greek. The evidence he cited was the statement in 30:13 that the name Adam derived from the terms for the four directions. The four letters of Adam are the first letters of the four directions in Greek—a wordplay that does not work in Semitic languages.¹⁰ In addition, the writer follows the readings of the Septuagint when he references scriptural material and in a number of cases uses the wording of the Wisdom of Ben Sira and Wisdom of Solomon, texts found in Greek manuscripts of the Bible. Yet, Charles also hypothesized that some sections were composed in Hebrew (xvi).¹¹ He found Egypt to be the most likely place of composition—probably in Alexandria—and adduced in support the “speculations” the book shared with Philo and other Hellenistic writers, its failure to reproduce any of the Old Testament’s messianic teachings, and its syncretistic account of creation. To these he added an interesting argument: “The Phoenixes and Chalkydries, xii¹²— monstrous serpents with the heads of crocodiles—are natural products of the Egyptian imagination” (xvii). A remarkable section in the Introduction is the fifth, “Relation of the Book to Jewish and Christian Literature” (xvii–xxiv). One reason it is remarkable is the range of literature that Charles included in his survey of possible instances of literary influence from 2 Enoch or at least evidence for its existence. Another noteworthy feature is how unconvincing are most of the examples he amassed. Recall that a few pages earlier he had written that “. . . there was ¹⁰ The words are: anatolē (East), dusis (West), arktos (North), and mesēmbria (South) (xvi, 41 n. to v. 13 where Charles lists other sources for the wordplay). ¹¹ He drew the conclusion from his thesis that the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, a work Charles believed was written in Hebrew, derived material from 2 Enoch. Hence, those passages in 2 Enoch that were used in the Testaments were written in Hebrew (see xxiii–xxiv). Also, since the Testaments dated to about the beginning of the first century A.D., the Hebrew portions of 2 Enoch are pre-Christian. ¹² “xii” refers to ch. 12 in Slavonic Enoch where these creatures are mentioned.

136    ( – ) not a single unmistakable allusion in all ancient literature” (viii, cited above) to the newly available book. He seems to have forgot the statement when searching for allusions to and even quotations from it because he made rather strong claims about some of them. He examined the literature in reverse of chronological order, working from later texts (Byzantine chronographers) to earlier ones. For example, he referred to two passages in the Book of Adam and Eve (written in fifth century ..) that he regarded as “quotations in sense more than in words” (xviii) from 2 Enoch. 2 Enoch 29:4–5 reads in Morfill’s translation: One of these in the ranks of the Archangels, having turned away with the rank below him, entertained an impossible idea, that he should make his throne higher than the clouds over the earth, and should be equal in rank to My power. And I hurled him from the heights with his angels. And he was flying in the air continually, above the abyss.

The parallel that Charles suggested was The Life of Adam and Eve 15:3–16:1 (Latin) where Satan is recounting to Adam a conversation he had had with the angel Michael: “If he [God] grows angry with me, I will place my seat above the stars of heaven and I will be like the Most High.” Then the Lord God grew angry with me and sent me forth with my angels from our glory. On account of you [Adam] we were expelled from our dwelling into this world and cast out upon the earth.¹³

There is a resemblance in content, as Charles noted, but the motif is more widespread than in just 2 Enoch and the Adam and Eve text and thus hardly evidence that the latter used 2 Enoch. Among his fourth-century examples, he located several cases of 2 Enoch’s influence in the Apocalypse of Paul. One is the passage in which a revealing angel sets Paul in Paradise where he sees a tree on which the Spirit of God rested (paragraph 45).¹⁴ Charles wrote about the passage: “ . . . beyond the possibility of question a Christian adaptation of the Slavonic Enoch viii.3: ¹³ The translation is from G. A. Anderson and M. E. Stone, editors, A Synopsis of the Books of Adam and Eve (2nd rev. ed.; Society of Biblical Literature Early Judaism and Its Literature 17; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1999) 17E. ¹⁴ For the text, see J. K. Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament: A Collection of Apocryphal Christian Literature in an English Translation based on M. R. James (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993) 640.

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‘And in the midst (of Paradise is) the tree of life, in that place on which God rests, when He comes into Paradise’” (xix). It seems overly enthusiastic to term this as evidence “beyond the possibility of question” for use of 2 Enoch here in the Apocalypse of Paul, although there are commonalities. The earliest reflections of 2 Enoch Charles found in the New Testament; the connection was a key plank in his argument that 2 Enoch was written in the first century .. He introduced his suggested parallels with a cautionary note: “In the New Testament the similarity of thought and diction is sufficiently large to establish a close connexion, if not a literary dependence” (xxi). Among his examples are exhortations in the Sermon on the Mount such as Matthew 5:34, 35, 37 about swearing: “Do not swear at all, either by heaven . . . or by the earth . . . or by Jerusalem, . . . Let your word be ‘Yes, Yes’ or ‘No, No’ [NRSV].” With this he compared 2 Enoch 49:1: “For I swear to you my children, but I will not swear by a single oath, neither by heaven, nor by earth, nor by any other creature which God made. God said: ‘There is no swearing in me, nor injustice, but truth. If there is no truth in men, let them swear by a word, yea, yea, or nay, nay’” (Morfill’s translation). There is no denying the similarity, but the issue is how to explain it. Charles, for whatever reason, appears to have assumed that when parallels exist, 2 Enoch must be earlier and thus the source for the other text. Perhaps an eagerness to demonstrate the early date and great significance of the book led him to omit mentioning the possibility that 2 Enoch borrowed from the New Testament or that both drew on more widespread traditions. Or so it seems from the Introduction because in the commentary, in his note to 2 Enoch 49:1, he cited parallels from Philo and referred to this as “a Jewish commonplace” (65). If it is so well attested, it is hasty to claim that Matthew took the statement about swearing from 2 Enoch. The same might be said about the Epistle of Barnabas 18:1 which teaches that there are two ways, the one of light, the other of darkness. These words, wrote Charles, “are derived from our text, xxx.15, ‘I showed him the two ways, the light and the darkness.’ Though the Two Ways are often described in early literature . . . , only in Barnabas are they described in the same terms as in our text” (xx). Charles did not live to see the Dead Sea Scrolls, but their extensive use of the light/darkness contrast in this kind of context shows how precarious such arguments are. The section regarding the literary influence of 2 Enoch provided the information needed by Charles to date the book (xxv–xxvi). He believed that the single author of 2 Enoch used the Wisdom of Ben Sira, Wisdom of Solomon, and the latest form of 1 Enoch. This relationship gave him a lower limit of 30 .. to .. 1 for the composition of 2 Enoch. It was not written later than

138    ( – ) 70 .. because it assumed that the temple was still standing (59:2 is his proof text, although it speaks fairly generally about sacrifices), and it was known and used by some New Testament and other early writers (like Barnabas). “We may, therefore, with reasonable certainty assign the composition of our text to the period 1–50 ..” (xxvi). Charles surveyed the book’s teachings about creation, anthropology, and ethics in a brief section (xxvii–xxix), but he devoted much more space to “The Value of the Book in elucidating contemporary and subsequent Religious Thought” (xxix–xlvii). Strangely, almost all of the unit (xxx–xlvii) deals with the idea of seven heavens. After swiftly mentioning five other concepts in 2 Enoch (e.g., death caused by sin, the millennium), he traced teachings about seven heavens (or at least multiple heavens) through Babylonian, Old Testament, Greek, Jewish, and Christian literature, concluding with the Qur’an (“Some form of the Slavonic Enoch seems to have been in Mohammed’s hands,” xlvii).¹⁵ He never states exactly why this topic deserved such extensive treatment compared to the others and does not expend much effort relating the contents of the many texts he covered to the doctrine as represented in 2 Enoch. In addition, he failed to report here that some manuscripts of the longer recension speak of ten heavens (see Charles’s notes on p. 27 where he dismissed the end of ch. 21 and the beginning of 22, verses mentioning the additional heavens, as interpolations; cf. Andersen’s n. on 22:1). A problematic feature of the Charles-Morfill publication of Slavonic Enoch is its treatment of the end of the text. Morfill’s translation concludes with 2 Enoch 68:7 where his manuscript P with the longer version ended; it is a verse that certainly sounds as if it is bringing the text to a close. After Enoch was taken to heaven and his son Methusalem (Methuselah) and others offered sacrifice, it reports: All the people came and the elders of the people; all the host of them to the festivity, and brought their gifts to the sons of Enoch, and made a great festivity, rejoicing and being merry for three days; praising God who had given such a sign by means of Enoch, who had found favour with Him. And

¹⁵ The previous year Charles had published this section in a two-part article with the very title that heads it in the book, “The Seven Heavens. An Early Jewish and Christian Belief,” Expository Times 7 (1895) 57–61, 115–18. The section in the book and the article agree word for word, but at the end of the article he wrote: “The Slavonic Enoch seems to have been in Mohammed’s hands” (118). In the form of the sentence in the book cited above, he altered the line by opening it with “Some form of the Slavonic Enoch. . . .” He also added a footnote at this point in the book that is not in the article.

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that they should hand it down to their son’s sons, from generation to generation, for ever. Amen.

Charles left the remainder of the page (84) blank and after it placed an appendix (85–93) in which he furnished additional textual material, about which he wrote: The following fragment of the Melchizedekian literature was found by Professor Sokolov in the chief MS. on which he has based his text. In this MS. it is given as an organic factor of the Slavonic Enoch. This is done by omitting all the words in A lxviii.7, after “merry for three days,” and then as we see below immediately proceeding “And on the third day,” &. No hint of this large addition is found in A or B, but Sokolov writes that it appears in several MSS. to which he had access. The reader will observe that in many passages it implies the Slavonic Enoch. (85)

Charles assigned separate chapter and verse numbers to the units that he regarded as supplementary, not authentic parts of 2 Enoch, despite the testimony of several manuscripts. The first lines of the section describe the appointment of Enoch’s son Methuselah to be priest after a divine appearance to him (Charles’s ch. I), while in the next part he experiences a second encounter with God who orders him to appoint his grandson Nir, Noah’s brother, as priest and predicts the coming of the flood. Methuselah obeys and soon breathes his last (II:1–17). Nir then serves as priest for many prosperous years, but the good times eventually devolve into a period of wickedness (II:18–26). The third chapter recounts the mysterious pregnancy of Nir’s wife Sopanima in her old age, Nir’s anger at seeing her condition, her death, and the birth from her corpse of the remarkably mature and verbal Melchizedek. Nir and Noah consecrate him a priest, and the Lord promises great things for his priesthood and for a future Melchizedek. In ch. IV Michael, at God’s command, takes the child Melchizedek to Eden to survive the flood there and Nir dies. In the fifth and final chapter Noah prepares for the flood which the deity then unleashes. Charles suggested that what he called “the Melchizedek myth” was written by “an early Christian heretic” (p. 85) who appended it to the Jewish text.¹⁶

¹⁶ His evidence for attributing these chapters to a Christian heretic consisted of a few vague allusions in III:34 and IV:8. Charles also summarized his findings about Slavonic Enoch in his article “Enoch, Book of the Secrets of,” in James Hastings, editor, A Dictionary of the Bible (1898) 1.708–11.

140    ( – )

Reviews The volume produced by Morfill and Charles elicited several reviews. One was by Gottlieb Nathaniel Bonwetsch (1848–1925), a scholar in Germany who was born in Russia. Bonwetsch, too, had come across the article by Kozak announcing the existence of a Slavonic book of Enoch and, like Charles, had resisted his claim that the Slavonic work was essentially the same as 1 (Ethiopic) Enoch. Initially Bonwetsch supposed that it was a free reworking of parts of 1 Enoch but later realized such was not the case. He published his own translation of both the long and short forms of the text in Das slavische Henochbuch at the end of 1896. He reported in the Introduction that his own translation of Slavonic Enoch into German was almost completed when he heard that the Morfill-Charles project was about to appear. When the English-language edition became available, he revised his translation, believing that two independently prepared renderings into western languages would be beneficial to those who did not know Slavonic (3). In the remainder of the introductory section, he described the manuscript evidence known to him (he was aware of and used more copies than Morfill) and outlined some of Charles’s conclusions with which he largely agreed (4–8). He also noted that for the chapter and verse numbers he adopted the ones used by Charles (8). In Theologische Literaturzeitung 21 (1896) cols. 153–6, Bonwetsch offered a favorable assessment of The Book of the Secrets of Enoch and, as in his own book, agreed with many of the points Charles had made (e.g., about the date of 2 Enoch). He too thought the Slavonic Enoch was Jewish and lacked any specifically Christian features. Although he did not accept all the passages Charles thought were influenced by 2 Enoch (e.g., the one in Matthew 5:35–7 about not swearing), he did think he was right about a number of them. With Charles, he believed the book was written in Greek and that the Slavonic texts contained interpolations (such as the reference in 2 Enoch 16:5 to the cycle of 532 years). Bonwetsch praised Morfill’s translation, but he did offer some corrections. He also regretted that, as a consequence of Morfill’s stated purpose—making a useful English version available for Charles, therefore omitting philological discussions—it was often not possible to see why he had preferred one reading over another. In Theologische Literaturzeitung 21 (1896) 347–50 Emil Schürer reviewed Bonwetsch’s book and in the process also offered comments on the MorfillCharles volume. He commended Bonwetsch for making translations of both the long and short versions available. His German rendering of the long version appeared on the top of the pages and the shorter one on the bottom,

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so the reader could see both in their complete form. In Morfill-Charles, as we have observed, a translation of the long version alone appeared, and information about the readings in the short recension was consigned to the notes. Schürer agreed that the work was mostly Jewish, but he thought one should reckon with a Christian revision at some point. He did have difficulty accepting the idea that the apocalyptic passages in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs identified by Charles actually betrayed influence from 2 Enoch (from the parts originally written in Hebrew) and devoted a considerable amount of space to making the point. The following year saw an unusual response to the appearance of The Book of the Secrets of Enoch. Montague Rhodes James, who had allowed Charles to use a Latin fragment of 1 Enoch and who had reviewed his 1893 book, noticed that the 1896 volume contained a translation of the longer recension alone. James thought that the shorter one deserved more attention than it had received and wrote in the Preface to a volume he was editing: When the edition of the Slavonic Enoch by Mr Charles and Mr Morfill appeared, it struck Professor Robinson¹⁷ (and myself) that the text which Mr Charles styles B presented such remarkable features that it would be well worth while to print it separately. I wrote to Mr Charles, and he very kindly gave his sanction to my doing this, and sent me Mr Morfill’s translation. The latter gentleman offered, most generously, to revise his work, and did so.¹⁸

At that point, however, James learned that Bonwetsch had issued a translation of both the long and short recensions. As a result, he reluctantly gave up the idea of including the shorter recension of Slavonic Enoch in Apocrypha Anecdota II. As we saw earlier, one indication that made Charles think 2 Enoch was written in Egypt was “the Phoenixes and Chalkydries” in ch. 12 (p. xvii). Morfill translated 12:1–2 as: And I looked and saw other flying creatures, their names phoenixes and chalkydri wonderful and strange in appearance, with the feet and tails of lions, and the heads of crocodiles; their appearance was of a purple colour, like the rainbow; their size nine hundred measures. Their wings were like ¹⁷ He was referring to Joseph Armitage Robinson (1858–1933), the general editor of the series Texts and Studies: Contributions to Biblical and Patristic Literature in which James’ volume later appeared. ¹⁸ Aprocrypha Anecdota II (Texts and Studies: Contributions to Biblical and Patristic Literature, vol. V, number 1; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1897) v–vi.

142    ( – ) those of angels, each with twelve, and they attend the chariot of the sun, and go with him, bringing heat and dew as they are ordered by God.

In his extended note to the passage, Charles cited many ancient references to the phoenix before turning to the more mysterious chalkydri. He thought the word was a transliteration of Χαλκυδραι, [Chalkudrai] which he took to mean “brazen hydras, or serpents” (13, n.). He related this information to 1 Enoch 20:7 which refers to “serpents” (called drakontōn in the Greek text) and “cherubim.” From this he concluded that chalkydri were seraphim (for a flying seraph, see Isaiah 14:29; 30:6). These he identified with the seraphim in Isaiah 6:3 where they sing, as 2 Enoch 15:1 says the phoenixes and chalkydri do. I mention this sample of Charles’s exegesis because it was a subject addressed by Burkitt in his obituary of Charles. There it is the second of two stories he told to illustrate the way Charles went about his work—specifically, how he did not change his mind once he had settled on a view (for the first story, see Part 2, Chapter 2). According to Burkitt: Charles’ edition came out in 1896. In the following year M. R. James published a miscellaneous work called Apocrypha Anecdota II. In the Introduction to this collection (which included the famous Gnostic Hymn of Jesus in the Acts of John) the present Provost of Eton discusses the nature of a “Chalkadry”, i.e. the crocodile-headed companion of the sun according to Slavonic Enoch, illustrating his remarks by certain late Byzantine documents. Among other things he points out that “every bird” in Slavonic Enoch xv.1 must be a rendering of παν ορνεον, i.e. “every cock”, and that the following verse gives the words of the song which the cocks are supposed to sing before sunrise. It was a neat piece of exposition, but it was ignored by Charles, and in his 1913 collection of Pseudepigrapha (p. 437) no notice of it whatever is taken.¹⁹ This was particularly unfortunate, as what underlay Dr. James’s criticism was a totally different theory as to the origin and nature of this so-called Jewish work.²⁰ The

¹⁹ Actually, Charles did mention something of the sort. In a note to 2 Enoch 15:1 he wrote regarding the expression “every bird”: “We should expect ‘all these winged creatures,’ i.e. the Phoenixes and Chalkidri. Or are we to take it that the early song of birds at sunrise is here referred to? but this is unlikely” (The Book of the Secrets of Enoch, 17). In the 1913 volume a note to the passage reads: “A parenthetic reference to the songs of birds at sunrise” (437). ²⁰ Perhaps Burkitt knew more about James’ views than James articulated in Apocrypha Anecdota II, but there, in his Introduction to what he called The Apocalypse of Baruch (= 4 Baruch), James wrote in detail about similarities between it and Slavonic Enoch. When he commented on the Chalkydri and referred to 2 Enoch 12 and 15 (lxiii–lxvi), he cited a text from the thirteenth century that mentions

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sequel was that Mrs. Maunder, for many years an “observer” at Greenwich, pronounced that the astronomy of Slavonic Enoch was not Alexandrian but Byzantine, and the point was very forcibly demonstrated by Dr. J. K. Fotheringham in the Journal of Theological Studies (xxiii, pp. 49–56). In other words, ‘Slavonic Enoch’ is not Jewish, but a Christian work of the seventh century ..²¹

Burkitt’s report suggests that Charles’s whole approach to 2 Enoch had been wrong and that he had failed to change his stance after solid contrary evidence had emerged. Burkitt was alluding to a dispute that broke out regarding Charles’s dating and identification of the text as Jewish. After his work on 2 Enoch had become more familiar through the form it took in the second volume of his Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (1913; on this work, see below, Part 2, Chapter 9), some experts on early calendars took strong exception to his handling of the material in 2 Enoch 13–16. The opposition came from an unexpected quarter. In the passage from the obituary of Charles cited above, Burkitt referred to Mrs. Maunder of Greenwich who argued that the astronomy of 2 Enoch was Byzantine, not Alexandrian. He had in mind A. S. D. Maunder, the author of “The Date and Place of Writing of the Slavonic Book of Enoch,” The Observatory 41 (1918) 309–16. She had trouble believing that a Greek work, which had been as widely influential over many centuries as Charles held, could have survived to the present in no Greek copy and yet was somehow available for translation into Slavonic in the twelfth century or later. But the focus of her criticism was astronomy, as one might expect from the nature of the journal in which it was published. Maunder maintained that the calendrical elements in Slavonic Enoch were Roman (e.g., the Julian calendar), not Egyptian. Moreover, they were ones employed for the Christian computation of the date of Easter. Examples she cited, both from 2 Enoch 16:5, were the lunar epacts (first attested by this name in the third century ..) and the grand cycle of 532 years (first attested in 457 .., possibly a few decades earlier). Charles was quite aware of the cycle, the date of its attestation, and its Easter usage, but he had bracketed the sentence in which it occurs in 2 Enoch as an interpolation (19). Maunder took the reference to be part of the text and a firm indicator that 2 Enoch was much χαλεδρις [chaledris] which he believed might be the same term. He said nothing about dating 2 Enoch to a time as late as Burkitt implies. In fact, at a subsequent point (lxxi) he stated that 4 Baruch, which he dated to the second century .., used 2 Enoch. ²¹ “Robert Henry Charles 1855–1931,” 442–4.

144    ( – ) later in date than Charles allowed. After a foray into Slavic literature and theology, she concluded that 2 Enoch was a Bogomil²² work, part of a literature that she termed a “Bogomil historiated Bible” (316). It dated from between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, at least a thousand years later than Charles put it. Maunder’s intriguing essay might have escaped the eyes of Charles and others in the field were it not for J. K. Fotheringham—also mentioned by Burkitt. He wrote a short piece—“The Date and Place of Writing of the Slavonic Enoch,” Journal of Theological Studies 20 (1919) 252—to call attention to Maunder’s “brilliant little paper” (since “[t]heological students do not often read astronomical journals”). He seems to have enjoyed summarizing her essay: After a little merriment at the flimsy evidence on which Dr Charles has assigned this work to an Egyptian Jew of the first century of our era, and the difficulty of supposing that a Greek work so widely current as Dr Charles imagines, though it survived to be translated into Bulgarian between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, should have disappeared altogether in its Greek form, Mrs Maunder goes on to examine the astronomy of this work. She has no difficulty in shewing that, while it ignores the Jewish calendar, it regards as of divine origin the Julian calendar and the Christian Easter calendar, including lunar epacts which we first meet in the third century .. and the 532 years cycle which is not found elsewhere till the fifth century.

He also noted that “Dr Charles had supposed that the reference to the 532 years cycle was one of a number of late interpolations. Mrs Maunder holds that it is easier to believe in a later author.” With a remark about her classifying it as Bogomil, he signed off. Charles responded to Maunder and Fotheringham (he referred to them as “Mrs Maunder and her disciple” [163]) in “The Date and Place of Writing of the Slavonic Enoch,” Journal of Theological Studies 22 (1921) 161–3, and he was not amused. He wrote that Mrs. Maunder had sent him “a reprint of this article. I was unable to accept the premisses or her conclusions, and I did not keep the article. I will, therefore, simply reply to the arguments which Mr Fotheringham reproduces from it” (161). Calling Charles’s arguments for the dating of 2 Enoch “flimsy” he deemed “lacking in courtesy” (162)

²² The Bogomils were a medieval dualist sect in the Balkans.

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and found it difficult to believe Fotheringham had actually reckoned with the evidence he furnished in both the 1896 and 1913 volumes. “The main conclusions as to date and authorship arrived at in these works have, so far as I am aware, been accepted by all Jewish and Christian scholars of every rank—with the exception of Mrs Maunder and Mr Fotheringham” (162). He dismissed the claim that the disappearance of such a work in Greek was problematic: “A scholar acquainted with this department of learning would experience no such difficulty” (162). He also rejected the charge that the notion of lunar epacts was unknown before the third century of this era, arguing that it is present already in the second-century .. astronomical chapters of 1 Enoch (though it was not known by this term before the third century ..).²³ As for the argument that the 532-year cycle mentioned in 2 Enoch 16:5 suggested a post-fifth-century date, he reiterated that the entire passage was an interpolation, as it has nothing to do with the context or with anything else in 2 Enoch (here he put his words in italics). The fact that the Slavonic Enoch attributes all of creation to God shows it could not have been written by a dualistic Bogomil who denied the goodness of creation. Charles ended his short rejoinder with sharp words about astronomers. For some reason or other astronomers are very much at fault in the field of apocalyptic. Sir Isaac Newton, the greatest of them all, makes a poor figure in his attempt to interpret the Apocalypse. Dupuis and many others who approach it from the astronomical standpoint are much worse. But for wild extravagance in interpretation the Russian astronomer, Professor Morosow, whose work, published in 1907, was translated into German in 1912, bears the palm. Morosow claims that he has established that the Apocalypse was written in .. 395 (the actual day and hour being given) and that its author was John Chrysostom! Mrs Maunder seems to me to be in the same class with the Russian scholar.

The dispute had by this time lapsed into name-calling and might better have ended there, with Charles not really answering the arguments about calendar issues with any new or convincing evidence. Fotheringham, nevertheless, had more to say when he returned to the topic in “The Easter Calendar and the Slavonic Enoch,” Journal of Theological Studies 23 (1921) 49–56 (the essay noted by Burkitt). He obviously did not ²³ “Epact” designates the difference between solar and lunar years. The term is used in 2 Enoch 16:5 (an interpolation, according to Charles).

146    ( – ) accept Charles’s contention that the 532-year cycle was added to an existing Jewish text. In the essay he went through every calendrical statement in 2 Enoch 13–16 and documented how late the evidence for some of them was. “It will be clear from this résumé that they not merely give termini a quo, of which the latest falls in the seventh century, but that they all form part of the Easter computus as developed in that century” (54). If one were to ask why Easter is not named in the book, Fotheringham suggested that it would have been considered by the author to be anachronistic for Enoch. I have found no further response by Charles, but it must be said that he really did not refute the claims that calendar data in Slavonic Enoch imply it is much later in date. Charles’s name is attached to one later publication of 2 Enoch—in the second volume of his The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (425–69). In the introduction to the translation of 2 Enoch Charles included an abbreviated and slightly modified version of the 1896 material. One sentence he altered was the first: rather than distinguishing the two books of Enoch as Ethiopic and Slavonic Enoch, he found it convenient to label them 1 and 2 Enoch (425). Another change was to refer to Morfill as “the late Professor Morfill” (he died in 1909). Charles did add a paragraph about the possible influence of 2 Enoch on Jewish literature, especially on the text he called the Hebrew Book of Enoch (sometimes designated 3 Enoch; 425; cf. also 428–9). The short statement about the two versions of 2 Enoch and the available manuscripts has the name of N. Forbes attached to it; he also explained the system of chapter and verse numbers he used—that of Morfill and Charles. Nowhere in the unit on 2 Enoch does Charles explain the role of Forbes; the only place where one learns about him is in the list of “Contributors to Volume II” (vi) where he is said to be “F, N, M.A., Reader in Russian and the other Slavonic Languages: 2 Enoch (translation).” That is, he held the very position at Oxford that Morfill had occupied. In 1896 Charles had printed Morfill’s rendering of the long version, although there he indicated that his colleague had also translated the short version, parts of which appeared in the textual notes. In the 1913 volume English renderings of both recensions of 2 Enoch are printed in full and in parallel columns. It is obvious that Forbes modified Morfill’s translation of A, and he furnished the entire text of B. A noteworthy feature of the translation is that the section Charles had consigned to an appendix in his 1896 edition is not reproduced at all. The translation ends at 68:7. In a note to 68:5–7 (469), Charles referred to the appendix in the 1896 volume but reproduced nothing of the text.

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Legacy Since Charles stood nearer the beginning of critical study on 2 Enoch than in the case of the other works he treated, it is especially appropriate to ask how his path-breaking conclusions have fared over time. There are several publications that provide good resources for what experts have been saying more recently about 2 Enoch: the introduction to and annotated translation of both recensions by F. I. Andersen in J. Charlesworth, editor, Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, 2.91–221; the commentary by Christfried Böttrich, Das slavische Henochbuch; and the collection of essays in Andrei Orlov and Gabriele Boccaccini, editors; Jason Zurawski, associate editor, New Perspectives on 2 Enoch: No Longer Slavonic Only (2012). It turns out, unsurprisingly, that some of Charles’s hypotheses have lived on, while others have not. First, regarding the complex of issues having to do with the text, Charles, as we have seen, preferred the longer recension and considered the shorter one to be an abbreviation of it. In addition, he regarded the sections about Methuselah, Nir, Melchizedek, and the flood to be an addition tacked on by a Christian at the end of the original Jewish book. Since his time, there have been several developments in connection with the text. One is that there are now known to be more copies of the book in Slavonic. Grant Macaskill lists nine complete manuscripts, three of the long recension, three of the short recension, and three of what he calls the very short recension. Besides these, there are a number of copies containing parts of the text.²⁴ As Macaskill’s terms indicate, experts often speak not of just two recensions but of three, four, or more in the Slavonic copies. An intriguing development has been the discovery of what are claimed to be fragments of the text in Coptic and coming from a manuscript dating from around the eighth-tenth centuries ..²⁵ If the identification and dating are correct, the four fragments would push back the manuscript evidence for 2 Enoch several centuries earlier than the most ancient Slavonic witnesses (they are from the fourteenth century). The three Coptic fragments (the fourth is too small to permit placement), as Hagen has interpreted them, agree significantly with the short recension of the Slavonic Enoch, thus possibly

²⁴ “2 Enoch: Manuscripts. Recensions, and Original Language,” in Orlov and Boccaccini, New Perspectives on 2 Enoch, 84–7. As he notes, “None of the texts is autonomous; all are part of collections . . . ” (84). ²⁵ Joost L. Hagen, “No Longer ‘Slavonic’ Only: 2 Enoch Attested in Coptic from Nubia,” in Orlov and Boccaccini, New Perspectives on 2 Enoch, 7–34. Hagen promises an official publication of the material in his dissertation, but it has not yet appeared.

148    ( – ) adding support to the thesis that it rather than the long one is the earlier version. The matter of which version is earlier, however, continues to be debated.²⁶ As for Charles’s contention that the “extra” material at the end of some of the Slavonic manuscripts is not original, the experts now regard most of it as part of the book.²⁷ Second, Charles dated 2 Enoch to the years 1–50 .. (with the outer limits being ca. 30 ..–70 ..; The Book of the Secrets of Enoch, xxv–xxvi; The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, 2.429). We saw above that several writers who were contemporary with Charles preferred a much later date, but Bonwetsch, Sokolov, and others agreed with his conclusion. That seems to be the case at present as well, although there is recognition that identifying its time of origin is challenging. Charles pointed to the sources used by the writer as an indication that it could not have been written before ca. 30 .. and to its references to sacrifice as demonstrating that it antedated 70 .. when the temple was destroyed and the sacrificial system ceased. He also thought that it influenced late first-century .. writings such as several books in the New Testament and the Epistle of Barnabas and thus must have preceded them. Importance continues to be attached to the references to sacrifice in 2 Enoch, but it is acknowledged that they need not imply the existence of the Jerusalem temple.²⁸ It appears that Charles’s claims about the use of 2 Enoch by many early writers are deemed to be overstated.²⁹ The first century .. is still, nevertheless, the date of choice for the book. It is not clear to me, however, that contemporary scholars have handled the arguments of Maunder and Fotheringham regarding the late date at which some of the calendar features in the book are attested. Charles was convinced, for example

²⁶ While a number of scholars have agreed with Charles that the long recension is the primary one (e.g., Böttrich, Das slavische Henochbuch, 788–90; “The ‘Book of the Secrets of Enoch’ [2 En]: Between Jewish Origin and Christian Transmission,” in Orlov and Boccaccini, New Perspectives on 2 Enoch, 41–9), several writers in New Perspectives on 2 Enoch consider the short recension to be closer to the original (e.g., Liudmila Navtanovich, “The Provenance of 2 Enoch: A Philological Perspective,” 71–6; Macaskill, “2 Enoch: Manuscripts, Recensions, and Original Language,” 87–91). The differences between the two recensions involve matters of content as well as length, and scholars who have dealt with the issue acknowledge that at least in some places each of the recensions probably contains original material. ²⁷ Several copies of the short recension extend the text through 72:10 and one partial text includes the rest of 72 and 73:1, but just one copy (of the long recension) includes 73:1–9. ²⁸ Böttrich considers the sacrificial references a strong argument for a pre-70 .. date in Das slavische Henochbuch, 812–13, but less so in “The ‘Book of the Secrets of Enoch’ (2 En): Between Jewish Origin and Christian Transmission,” in Orlov and Boccaccini, New Perspectives on 2 Enoch, 55. He arrives at a date before the destruction of the temple through analysis of a calendrical feature—what he takes to be the 17th of the month Tammuz as a joyful festival, a date later associated with mourning about temple destruction (Das slavische Henochbuch, 813; “The ‘Book of the Secrets of Enoch’,” 55–7). ²⁹ See Böttrich’s shorter, more defensible list in Das slavische Henochbuch, 801–2.

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that the reference to a cycle of 532 years in 16:5 was interpolated, but is that the case or is it a way of dismissing contrary evidence? Third, Charles thought a Jewish author wrote 2 Enoch in Egypt in Greek. All three points are widely accepted today (although there may be Christian additions/interpolations), but another possibility has been raised regarding the original language—that the (lost) Greek version was a translation of a Hebrew original.³⁰ The grounds for even considering a Hebrew original are the forms of some names and the presence of Hebrew expressions. It seems to be the case, nevertheless, that this is rated as only a possibility, one that would require significantly more evidence to demonstrate. In the final analysis, it is evident that Charles (with Morfill’s help) undertook a daunting task in The Book of the Secrets of Enoch and that in it, though there are exaggerations and missteps, he made a significant and lasting contribution to the scholarly clarification of 2 Enoch. His work still stands as a monument in study of 2 Enoch, just as it does for 1 Enoch, Jubilees, and other early works.

Additional Note The archival files of Oxford University Press contain records of negotiations with Charles toward a publication by another press. The information appears in several of the Orders of the Delegates of the Press. A notice dated October 21, 1898 reads: A renewed application was read from the Reverend R. H. Charles for permission to reprint his translations of the “Book of Enoch” in Ethiopic, and the “Secrets of Enoch” in Slavonic. The secretary was instructed to confer again with Mr. Charles and to bring up proposals for an arrangement between the Delegates and Mr. Charles and his publishers, on the basis of the payment of a royalty, at the next meeting of the Board.

The same source, in a notice dated one week later (October 28), reads: . . . the application was read from the Rev. R. H. Charles for permission to incorporate in a forthcoming work the translations of the “Book of Enoch”,

³⁰ See, e.g., the comments of Andersen, “2 (Slavonic Apocalypse of) Enoch,” in Charlesworth, Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, 1.94; Navtanovich, “The Provenance of 2 Enoch: A Philological Perspective,” 77.

150    ( – ) and of the “Secrets of Enoch”. It was resolved that the permission be granted to him on payment of a royalty £5 on each edition of 1000 copies.

The subject arose again on November 18. A letter was read from the Rev. R. H. Charles as to the royalties to be paid for the right of making use of the translation of Enoch published by the Clarendon Press, and it was resolved that the royalties originally asked by the Delegates be reduced to one pound (£1) for each edition of 500 copies. (See DOB, 1898, Oct. 28, ch. 11.)

Finally, a notice for December 2, 1898 reads: A letter (dated Nov. 26) was read from the Rev. Prof. Charles assenting to the revised proposal of the Delegates with regard to the premium payable on the reprint by him of the translations of “Enoch.” (See DOB, 1898, Nov. 18, ch. 8*.)

It appears that the records pick up the matter in progress, as the first notice refers to a renewed application from Charles. At any rate in late 1898 he was trying to arrange a reprint of both translations that was to be published by a press other than Oxford University Press. I have found no information identifying the other press. At this time Charles was dealing with T. & T. Clark for his articles on 1 and 2 Enoch among others in Hasting’s A Dictionary of the Bible, but he was in more direct contact with Adam and Charles Black who published his The Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch (1896) and The Assumption of Moses (1897) and over the following years would publish others of his books. Possibly Charles was trying to make arrangements with them for a reprint of the two translations. I have, however, wondered whether Charles was having some thoughts that would eventually lead to the second volume of The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament in English, although the Clarendon Press was the one that published it in 1913. The correspondence with the delegates in 1898 seems rather early for negotiations for reissuing his translations in the Translations of Early Documents (the first appeared in 1917), a series that did not include a translation of 2 Enoch. 2 Enoch was only one of the Jewish books on which Charles published in 1896. The second was a more familiar apocalypse that assumed a rather different shape than the ones on which he had worked. We should now examine his edition of 2 Baruch.

Chapter 4 2 (Syriac Apocalypse of) Baruch In 1896 a second volume by Charles appeared in print—a translation of and commentary on a work that he entitled The Apocalypse of Baruch (often called 2 Baruch). In his work on 1 Enoch and Jubilees he had demonstrated his impressive knowledge of several ancient languages—Hebrew (and Aramaic), Greek, Latin, and especially Ethiopic, with bits and pieces of Syriac thrown into the mix. For Slavonic Enoch he relied on Morfill to translate the text because he did not read Slavonic, and, uncharacteristically, seems not to have put in the time to learn it sufficiently for the task. Since the Apocalypse of Baruch survived only in Syriac copies, Charles had to put his knowledge of the language to a stern test. Syriac seems to have been a language that, like Ethiopic, he taught himself. Several ancient authors adopted Baruch as their protagonist. He is identified in the Book of Jeremiah as the prophet’s scribe, the one who copied his words in a scroll and, when Jeremiah was not permitted to enter the temple complex, read them to a national assembly at the sanctuary (Jeremiah 36:4–10). When King Jehoiakim later burned that scroll, Jeremiah dictated another to Baruch who rewrote the words that he had recorded in the first scroll and others like them (36:27–32). He was eventually charged by a group of Judeans with inciting Jeremiah against them so that they would fall to the Babylonians (43:1–3). These people compelled Baruch and Jeremiah to flee with them to Egypt (vv. 4–7). Something of Baruch’s importance can be gleaned from another passage in Jeremiah. At the time when he wrote down Jeremiah’s words, Baruch had become discouraged, but Jeremiah quoted a message from the Lord to him: I am going to break down what I have built, and pluck up what I have planted—that is, the whole land. And you, do you seek great things for yourself? Do not seek them; for I am going to bring disaster upon all flesh, says the Lord, but I will give you your life as a prize of war in every place to which you may go. (45:4–5 [NRSV])¹ ¹ Charles used these words as the text for sermons xiv–xvi, xviii in his The Resurrection of Man and Other Sermons Preached in Westminster Abbey (1929).

R. H. Charles: A Biography. James C. VanderKam, Oxford University Press. © James C. VanderKam 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192869289.003.0006

152    ( – ) Baruch, a close associate of Jeremiah and transmitter of his words, an eyewitness of Jerusalem’s destruction by the Babylonians, and one whose life God spared was selected by later writers as the bearer of moral and apocalyptic messages. The Apocalypse of Baruch that Charles edited and explained is one of those compositions.² It contains revelations given to Baruch, supposedly disclosed to him in the sixth century .. when Jerusalem and the temple fell to the Chaldeans, but actually addressing a crisis more than six centuries later when Jerusalem and the temple again suffered destruction, this time at the hands of the Romans. The author, using the voice of Baruch—whether speaking alone, in discussions with God, or instructing his contemporaries—explores searching questions that the loss of Jerusalem and the temple raised, such as the reason(s) for the catastrophe and the future awaiting the nation.

The Contents of 2 Baruch The outline of the book is not obvious, but one way of understanding it is to distinguish seven major parts, in each of which the same topics recur: 1–9 Destruction of Jerusalem 10–20 Instructions for Baruch, his lament, and discussions with God 21–34 Prayer of Baruch, discussion with God, the twelve parts of time, and Baruch’s speech to the people 35–47 Vision of a vine and its interpretation by God 48–52 Prayer of Baruch and ensuing discussion with God 53–77 Vision of a cloud filled with dark and bright waters and the angel Remiel’s interpretation 78–86 Baruch’s letter to the nine and one-half tribes in Assyrian exile 87 which is attested in just one manuscript (see below), concludes the book³ ² There are also Baruch (1 Baruch) in Catholic and Orthodox Bibles, 3 Baruch, which is a Greek apocalypse, and 4 Baruch or Paralipomena of Jeremiah, a Greek text with clear Christian elements, whatever may have been its origin. Both of the latter two may date from the second century .. ³ After surveying suggestions about the arrangement of 2 Baruch, Tom W. Willett (Eschatology in the Theodicies of 2 Baruch and 4 Ezra [Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha Supplement Series 4; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1989] 80–95) proposed a seven-part structure with two major units: the first contains an Introductory dialogue, 1–5; Vision 1, 6–9; Lamentations, 10–12; Dialogue 2, 13:1–21:1, and the second includes Dialogue 3, 21:2–34 (there is just one verse in ch. 34); Vision 2, 35–47; Vision 3, 48–77. He does not include the Epistle (78–86) or ch. 87 in the structure. The major break between chs. 21 and 22 found in the analysis of the structure is the major break for the argument also. In the first half, God convinces Baruch of the justness of his actions in bringing destruction upon Jerusalem, and in the second half Baruch convinces the people of the justness of God’s actions. In the first half the justice of God occupies most

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Some of the sections are more clearly demarcated than others. Examples are the visions with interpretations in chs. 35–47 and 53–77 (or 53–76) and the Epistle in 78–86.

The Context for Charles’s Volume on 2 Baruch The history of scholarship on 2 Baruch was brief before Charles produced his commentary. The text had disappeared from the West some 1,200 years earlier, and were it not for a single copy it would have been lost completely. It survived on a sixth-century manuscript that Ceriani had found in the Ambrosian Library in Milan (B. 21 Inf., folios 257a–67b). As Charles reported, “Of this MS. Ceriani published a Latin translation in 1866,⁴ the Syriac text in 1871,⁵ and the photo-lithographic facsimile in 1883” (xv).⁶ Prior to Charles’s publication, Ceriani’s 1866 Latin translation of the Apocalypse of Baruch was the only one. Quite a number of scholars over the next decades published their thoughts about it on the basis of the material that Ceriani had made available (surveyed in the fourth part of Charles’s Introduction). The common theory among them was that the Syriac version had been translated from a Greek text and that Greek was the author’s language, although a writer or two had broached the idea of a Hebrew original. It was generally thought to be the work of one person, while a few believed it was an amalgam of originally independent units.⁷

The Book The Apocalypse of Baruch translated from the Syriac, chapters I.–LXXVII. from the sixth cent. MS. in the Ambrosian Library of Milan and chapters of the discussion but in the second half the guilt of the people occupies center stage. Baruch’s concern about the continuation of the Jewish nation in the first half is answered in the second half with the promise of resurrection. Baruch’s concern about judgment upon the nations in the first half is answered by the historical overviews in the second half emphasizing the certainty of judgment. (96) ⁴ Monumenta sacra et profana, vol. 1, fascicle 2, i–iv, 73–98. ⁵ Monumenta sacra et profana, vol. 5, fascicle 2, 113–80. ⁶ Translatio Syra Pescitto Veteris Testamenti ex codice Ambrosiano sec. fere VI, photolithographice edita (Milan: A. della Croce and J. B. Pogliani, 1876–83) folios 257a–67b. ⁷ Examples of scholars who defended the latter thesis are Richard Kabisch, “Die Quellen der Apokalypse Baruchs,” Jahrbücher für Protestantische Theologie 18 (1892) 66–107; and Eugène de Faye, Les apocalypses juives: Essai de critique littéraire et théologique (Paris: Fischbacher, 1892) 25–8, 76–95, 97–103, 192–204. Both publications appeared while Charles was working on his book (see below).

154    ( – ) LXXVIII.–LXXXVII.—The Epistle of Baruch from a new and critical text based on ten mss. and published herewith; edited, with introduction, notes, and indices by R. H. Charles, M.A., Trinity College, Dublin, and Exeter College, Oxford (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1896).⁸ The Preface sketches the basic points in Charles’s understanding of the book. He considered it to be a composite text whose parts dated from between the years 50 and 90 .. “Its authors were orthodox Jews, and it is a good representative of the Judaism against which the Pauline dialectic was directed” (vii).⁹ He spotted in the book some anti-Christian elements that, he believed, led to its eventual abandonment or rejection by Christians. The Apocalypse of Baruch has had a strange history. Written by Pharisaic Jews¹⁰ as an apology for Judaism, and in part an implicit polemic against Christianity, it gained nevertheless a larger circulation amongst Christians than amongst Jews, and owed its very preservation to the scholarly cares of the Church it assailed. (ix)

He thought that 4 Ezra, a similar apocalypse written at approximately the same time, had undergone some Christian influence and thus proved more lastingly popular in the church than the Apocalypse of Baruch (viii–ix). Charles billed his work on the Syriac text as an editio princeps. There was just one manuscript available for the first seventy-seven chapters of the book (Ceriani’s manuscript, represented by the letter c), while chs. 78–86 (the Epistle of Baruch) survived in c (with ch. 87) and nine other copies.¹¹ Charles reported that he had collated eight of the ten copies (ix). More information about the wording of the text could be gleaned from 3 Baruch, a Greek text that borrowed from 2 Baruch. Charles seems to have been the first to state definitely that the Apocalypse of Baruch, though extant only in the Syriac language, was not written in that language or in Greek but in Hebrew. He found that only by positing a Hebrew base could he offer convincing ways to explain certain features in the text and correct corruptions that had found their way into it (x).

⁸ He dedicated the volume “To My Wife.” ⁹ His low opinion of Jewish literature after 70 .. comes to expression in the Preface. “In the Apocalypse we have almost the last noble utterance of Judaism before it plunged into the dark and oppressive years that followed the destruction of Jerusalem” (vii). ¹⁰ As with 1 Enoch and Jubilees, Charles consistently related apocalypses to Pharisees. ¹¹ Survival of the Letter in more copies than chs. 1–77 resulted from its inclusion in Syriac Bibles as a separate unit without 1–77.

 (    ) 

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In the Preface Charles also spoke about his own experience in working with the Apocalypse of Baruch. The interpretation of this book has been the severest task as yet undertaken by the editor. Insuperable difficulties confronted on every side, till at last he awoke to the fact that these were due to the plurality of authorship. When once this fact was recognised and the various sources determined, the task of interpretation was materially lightened, and the value of the work for New Testament and Jewish scholars became every day more manifest. As my studies in this direction began in 1891, my conclusions are, save in a few cases, the result of long study and slowly matured conviction. (x)

Charles here confessed that a fundamental insight about the book dawned on him after he had pondered it for some time, much as flashes of insight advanced his work on 1 Enoch and Jubilees.¹² Another noteworthy point in the statement is that he had been working on the Apocalypse of Baruch since at least 1891. It confirms, as we might have expected, that Charles worked simultaneously on more than one project. He was studying the Baruch apocalypse while preparing his volumes on 1 Enoch, Jubilees, and 2 Enoch. There are a couple of additional details in the Preface worthy of note. For one, he referred to a possible edition of 4 Ezra. He never produced the edition, but he apparently intended to do so.¹³ He thanked several people for the help they extended to him. Among them was Adolf Neubauer who assisted him with Talmudic issues and to whom Charles had expressed gratitude before.¹⁴ Another was Buchanan Gray (1865–1922)¹⁵ to whom Charles was grateful “for his revision of my proofs of the Hebrew original of Baruch.” As this statement implies, Charles had retroverted the entire book into Hebrew, his candidate for its original language. It is understandable that something so lengthy and uncertain as a Hebrew retroversion of an eighty-seven-chapter Syriac translation of a lost Greek intermediary text was not included in the 1896 edition. It did, however, underlie his comments about the text. Charles dated his Preface

¹² For 1 Enoch the flash of insight was that much of the book was written in poetry, and for Jubilees it was dating the book about a century earlier than was customary. ¹³ He wrote, after mentioning the more pronounced non-Jewish character of 4 Ezra: “To this subject I may return in an edition of the former work” (xi). His comparison of 2 Baruch and 4 Ezra shows how carefully he had studied both books. ¹⁴ In The Book of Enoch he thanked Neubauer, Reader in Rabbinic Hebrew at Oxford, “whom I have consulted with advantage in season and out of season” (ix). ¹⁵ He would later write the International Critical Commentary on Numbers (1903) and on Isaiah 1–27 (1912), among many distinguished works.

156    ( – ) to September 1896, thus perhaps favoring the inference that the book appeared after his translation of 2 Enoch of that same year (its Preface is undated). In his Introduction, Charles took up the expected topics—ones familiar from his earlier books. His overall theory about how the Apocalypse of Baruch had evolved and the fields of study for which it was important he described as follows. The book was put together about the close of the [first] century, from at least five or six independent writings. These writings belong to various dates between 50 and 90 .., and are thus contemporaneous with the chief New Testament writings. It is this fact which constitutes the chief value of the work. We have here contemporaneous records of the Jewish doctrines and beliefs, and of the arguments which prevailed in Judaism in the latter half of the first century, and with which its leaders sought to uphold its declining faith and confront the attacks of a growing and aggressive Christianity. (xvi)

His opinion about post-70 .. Judaism is hard to miss in his assessment of the contrasting fates of Judaism and Christianity at the time and his understanding of the Jewish work’s primary significance. Regarding the apocalypse itself, he hypothesized a process in which an editor assembled originally independent texts into one work. He had argued for a similar melding of separate units into 1 Enoch, but, as we will see, he thought the several sources were stitched together in the Apocalypse of Baruch in a way far different from what happened in 1 Enoch. The second section of the Introduction surveys additional ancient works that circulated under the name of Baruch (see above). In his opinion, none of the other books matched the importance of the Apocalypse of Baruch for students of Judaism and Christianity (xvi–xxii). The third section (xxii–xxx) describes the manuscript evidence for the apocalypse. As noted above, Ceriani had identified and published the only manuscript that contained all eighty-seven chapters ( = c); he had also published three copies (their sigla are a, b, d) of the Epistle of Baruch (chs. 78–86). Ceriani had not attempted to create a critical text of the Epistle; rather, in his Monumenta sacra et profana vol. 5, fascicle 2 (pp. 113–80) he had placed the variant readings of a, b, and d beneath the text of c. In other words, he contented himself with presenting the evidence. Charles found six more copies of the Epistle in the Bodleian Library and the British Museum (e–k, there is no j). He realized that, in order to establish a critical text of the entire apocalypse (i.e., a critically improved version of c), it would be essential to

 (    ) 

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compare the readings in the ten copies of the Epistle (of which c is one) and use the information gleaned from the comparison to appreciate more fully the nature of manuscript c (e.g., its characteristic mistakes) in those places (chs. 1–77, 87) where it is the only witness to the text. The remainder of the section is vintage Charles. It is crammed full of references to readings, to the families among the manuscripts, and to the relations of individual copies to one another. His detailed textual work allowed him to draw up a stemma of the witnesses. He identified two types of text—the one in c, and the one represented by the nine other copies of the Epistle (among which there are sub-groups). He found that the latter text type was more often the superior one—an unfortunate state of affairs since c was the only copy for 1–77 and 87. He thought the (Syriac) ancestor lying behind the two text types dated from no later than the fourth century. Sections five and six contain Charles’s case that the Syriac was translated from Greek and that the Greek was translated from a Hebrew original. It is no surprise that scholars universally regarded the Syriac as a translation from Greek because manuscript c states at the beginning: “Translated from the Greek into Syriac” (Charles was not sure whether the line came from the Syriac translator or a later scribe and bracketed it, p. 1). Whoever placed the words over the text, the phrase is demonstrably true because, for example, mistakes in the Syriac text could be explained on this assumption, Greek syntactical constructions were reflected in it, and it included transliterations of Greek words. The section containing the evidence for a Hebrew original constitutes one of Charles’s contributions to study of 2 Baruch. He noted the unanimity with which scholars concluded that Greek was the language in which the author composed the apocalypse. To this strong and unanimous tradition of the learned world I bowed without hesitation at the outset of my studies, but with an awakening distrust and an ever-growing reluctance during the subsequent years in which the present Translation and Notes were completed. In fact, the feeling grew steadily stronger that only a Hebrew original could account for many of the phenomena of the text. And yet my gathering certainty on this head did not lead to action till the MSS. of the Translation and Notes were partially in type. I then felt that I could no longer stay my hand, and with the kind permission of my publishers I have been enabled to introduce the necessary changes into the Translation and Notes. (xliv–xlv)¹⁶ ¹⁶ As we have seen with 1 Enoch and Jubilees, Charles had experience in asking publishers for changes when part of his work had already been set in type.

158    ( – ) His arguments for a Hebrew original were that (1) when the text quotes from the Old Testament it almost always agrees with the Masoretic Text against the Septuagint, (2) it contains translated forms of Hebrew idioms (such as use of infinitives absolute with finite verbs), (3) unintelligible features in the text can be explained by retroverting them into Hebrew, (4) there are Hebrew wordplays, and (5) a few passages from the Apocalypse of Baruch are preserved in Rabbinic writings (xlv–liii). Charles, as noted earlier, discovered that the problems he encountered in trying to explain the text became much easier to solve once he realized that 2 Baruch was a composite work. The evidence for the thesis and for the differing messages and dates of the various units he assembled in section seven of the Introduction (liii–lxv). He detected six sources that an editor combined to create the book, some written before the disaster of 70 .., some after. Charles did not think the sources were differentiated by mere subtle nuances or emphases: “the more thoroughly we study it, the more conscious we become of the impassable gulf which sunders the world-views which underlie the different parts” (liii). In general, he found two types: some of the sources (they are messianic apocalypses), to which he gave the siglum A, presented a more optimistic view about Israel and the future, while the others that he labeled B spoke more pessimistically—in differing degrees (on B¹ see below)—about such topics. The details of his source division are these. A¹ A² A³ B¹ B² B³

27:1–30:1 36–40 53–74 1–9; 43:1–44:7; 45:1–46:6; 77–82; 84; 86–87¹⁷ 9–12 (?); 13–25; 30:2–35:5; 41–2; 44:8–15; 47–52; 75–6; 83 85

The following sentences set forth his understanding of how the sources differed from one another. A¹, A², A³, B¹, agree in teaching the advent of the Messianic kingdom, but this doctrine is absolutely relinquished in B², B³. Thus, A¹, A², A³, B¹, agree in presenting an optimistic view of Israel’s future on earth, and in inculcating the hope of a Messianic kingdom; whereas in B²,

¹⁷ Charles regarded B¹ as a short, original apocalypse of Baruch (lv).

 (    ) 

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B³, such expectations are absolutely abandoned, and the hopes of the righteous are directed to the immediate advent of the final judgment and to the spiritual world alone. But at this point a difference between A¹, A², A³, and B¹ emerges. The former look for a Messiah and a Messianic kingdom, but the latter for a Messianic kingdom without a Messiah. (lv)

As he read the evidence, the A sections presupposed that Jerusalem was still standing and therefore were written before 70 ..; but the city had already suffered destruction according to the B units that were thus composed after the tragic events (lv). He went on to explain the different teachings of each source and how not only the A and B sections disagreed but the three components in A and the three in B distinguished themselves from one another. He did find evidence for yet another source: he employed the letter S to designate 10:6–12:4 that, Charles thought, could be a Sadducean writing unless it belonged to B² (lx). Also, he used the letter E to designate contributions by the final editor of the work (e.g., for ch. 26 which is not included in the listing above). The groundwork of the text was mainly B¹ and B² to which the A sections, which are not organic components of the book, were added (lvi, lxi). Charles had some harsh words for how the editor combined the sources. His B² in particular posed problems. Charles charged that the editor of 2 Baruch, in using it, “mutilated and transposed in every imaginable way” (lxi) what lay before him. Trying and failing to clarify these parts of the text led Charles to discover what was, on his view, the true explanation for how the book evolved, with chs. 13–25 in particular illustrating the problems. He referred to the perverse ingenuity of a redactor, by which the original text was dislocated and transposed, the original development of thought arrested and inverted, questions frequently recorded after their specific answers had already been given in full, and passages torn from their original setting in Baruch’s address to the people and inserted in Baruch’s prayers to God, where they are bereft of all conceivable meaning. (lxii)

The editor did not stop abusing the source at ch. 25 but continued his mischief elsewhere. It will not escape notice that Charles assumed, in these statements, that he was able to identify once-independent sources and their original internal sequence. Moreover, he did not raise very seriously the question why, if his theory were correct, an editor would treat a source text so badly.

160    ( – ) A closer look at the reasons for his assessment of chs. 13–25 is instructive. In a note Charles wrote: The text of these chapters is inexplicable as it stands. The difficulties are due not to corruption, though that undoubtedly exists, but to a recasting of the original text by the final editor. In this process many passages were torn from their original contexts and placed in settings which are quite unsuitable. Some of the incongruities thus produced are as follows: (1) The words “those prosperous cities” are represented as speaking in xiii.4 without a single note of introduction. (2) In the next verse the words, “thou and those like thee who have seen,” are similarly unexplained, and are in fact inexplicable in their present context; for though Baruch was to be preserved till the consummation of the times, his contemporaries were not, and hence they could not see the future retribution of the Gentiles. If, however, xxiv.2 originally preceded xiii.3b–5, the words “thou and those like thee who have seen,” would be perfectly intelligible. (3) Again the retribution of the Gentiles referred to in xiii.4, 5 has not been mentioned before, though the text presupposes some such mention. It is intelligible if xxv, or xxiv.4 precedes where Baruch asks what will befal [sic] the enemies of Israel. (4) In xiv.1 Baruch replies that God has shown him “the method of the times,” whereas in xx.6 this appears not to have been yet done, and it seems that a revelation of “the method of the times” is still to come. (5) In xxiv.4 Baruch asks what retribution awaits the enemies of Israel, and when the judgment will be? In xxv. we find the answer to the latter question, whereas the answer to the former is already given in xiii.4–12. (6) I can discern no adequate explanation of the “therefore” with which xx.1 begins in its present context. If xx. were read immediately after xiii. the text would at once become clear. On these and other grounds we must attempt to restore the original order of the chapters before they were broken up and rearranged, mutilated, and interpolated by the final editor. Owing to the paucity of materials the attempt to restore the original order can only be partially successful. This order was probably xiii.1–3a; xx.; xxiv.2–4; xiii.3b–12; xxv., xiv.–xix; xxi–xxiv.1; xxx.2. (20)

He then set forth how, in his opinion, the rearrangement made sense of the unit. Each of the incongruities Charles found in this stretch of text is open to debate. But, more importantly, all of his points proceed from the assumption that the writer would, of course, have presented everything in the order that seemed right to Charles as he worked in Oxford nearly 1800 years after the

 (    ) 

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author/editor composed 2 Baruch in Israel. The textual surgery made Charles’s task of interpretation easier, presumably because it produced what he expected. But that he actually believed he had recovered the original sequence of a source after an editor had mangled it boggles the mind. He might rather have wondered whether what he expected from an ancient seer was mistaken and where he was missing what that anguished individual was doing. Here it may be useful to recall that Charles’s way of reading Jewish apocalyptic language was a concern already in his time. T. W. Manson wrote in the article on him in the Dictionary of National Biography 1931–1940: Of Charles’s work on the Apocalyptic literature, on which his fame chiefly rests, two things fall to be said. He was a man of powerful intellect and unflagging industry who, by years of concentrated study, made himself master of the language of the Apocalypses. His knowledge was vast in extent and accurate in detail; and his commentaries are a wonderful storehouse of exact information. Yet there was a sense in which the language of Apocalyptic remained a foreign language to him. He could never be completely at home in the world of the Apocalyptists. And this made it impossible for him to achieve that perfect understanding which demands sympathy as well as knowledge.¹⁸

In his obituary of Charles, F. C, Burkitt wrote something similar. He cited a few lines in which Charles explained what he took to be inconsistencies in some Jewish eschatological statements and added: These are very characteristic sentences, and exhibit very well Dr. Charles’s habit of mind. If he came to have any respect for an ancient author he was unwilling to believe that such a person could have entertained conceptions which to Charles’s trained and logical western mind were ‘mutually exclusive’, and his favorite explanation was to postulate interpolations and a multiplicity of sources, each of which may be supposed to have been written from a single and consistent point of view.

He then included The Apocalypse of Baruch among “examples of the efforts made by him to apply strict logic to works whose writers were governed rather by hope and enthusiasm than by reason and consistency.”¹⁹ As we will see, ¹⁸ “Charles, Robert Henry (1855–1931),” 170. ¹⁹ Both quotations are from Burkitt, “Robert Henry Charles 1855–1931,” 443.

162    ( – ) Charles’s theory about sources, their sundry messages, and how a final editor treated them has not carried the day. His lengthy analysis led Charles to the conclusion that 2 Baruch as compiled by the editor was known to the writer of the Rest of the Words of Baruch (3 Baruch), which could be dated to 130–40 .. and that the Hebrew original would have appeared a decade or more before this (lxv). Charles again innovated in the eighth part of the Introduction. There he argued that Baruch’s letter to the Judean exiles (that is, the two and one-half tribes), which is mentioned in 2 Baruch 77 but never reproduced, actually does exist but not in 2 Baruch. In 2 Baruch 77:12 Baruch’s countrymen urge him: “write also to our brethren in Babylon an epistle of doctrine and a scroll of good tidings, that thou mayest confirm them also before thou dost depart from us” (Charles’s translation). The addressees would be the Judeans already in Babylon, but Baruch offers to do more in v. 17 (see also v. 19): “Nevertheless, as ye said unto me, I will write also unto your brethren in Babylon, and I will send by means of men, and I will write in like manner to the nine tribes and a half, and send by means of a bird.” The letter in 78–86 is directed to the nine and one-half tribes (see 78:1; for posting it by a bird [an eagle], see ch. 87), but Baruch’s missive to the two and one-half tribes in Babylon is not found in 2 Baruch. This is the lost letter that Charles had in mind, and he maintained that it was preserved in Baruch 3:9–4:29 (with the introduction in 1:1–3; p. lxxvii) because the description of the letter in 2 Bar 77:12 (“an epistle of doctrine and a scroll of good tidings”) matches the content of these sections. An important question in connection with the Apocalypse of Baruch is its relation to 4 Ezra, another apocalyptic reaction to the events of 70 .. that it so closely parallels. Charles, some of whose contemporaries thought the two had been written by the same person, examined the topic in the ninth part of the Introduction (lxviii–lxxvi). His answer about their inter-relations is complex because he thought that both documents were composite. As a result, he compared the views expressed in the eight sections of 2 Baruch with the six parts of 4 Ezra and found that in some cases units of the former were earlier, in others segments of the latter were. He did, however, establish that the two works could not have come from one author, since 2 Baruch is a purely Jewish composition while 4 Ezra approximates some Christian teachings. The final section of the Introduction treats the relation of 2 Baruch to the New Testament. Charles realized that not all of the many items shared by the two demonstrated literary dependence on the part of one; they could possibly be traced back to common sources. In a few instances, however, he maintained

 (    ) 

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that 2 Baruch was dependent on the New Testament “or some lost source” (lxxviii). An example is the following: 1 Corinthians 15:35 (NRSV) But someone will ask, “How are the dead raised? With what kind of body do they come?”

2 Baruch 49:2 (Charles) In what shape will those live who live in Thy day? or how will the splendour of those who (are) after that time continue?

Both texts are talking about the same subject about which they raise natural questions. But there is insufficient reason to posit dependence of either upon the other or even on a lost source. In his translation of the Baruch apocalypse, Charles marked in the margins, at the beginning of each of the sections he distinguished, to which of his sources it belonged. He attached his usual copious notes to elements in the text, although he again did not offer a running commentary. Charles’s work on the Apocalypse of Baruch was also incorporated into the 1913 collection that he edited, The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, 2.470–526, in an abbreviated, updated form. There he was able to report that two small sections of the Greek text were found in 1897 among the Oxyrhynchus Papyri: 12:1–13:2 on the verso and 13:11–14:3 on the recto of a fourth-fifth century .. fragment.²⁰ Discovery of the fragment buttressed the report in manuscript c that the Syriac was a translation from Greek. In their publication of the fragment, Grenfell and Hunt made this point but commented: though whether the Greek text is itself derived from Hebrew is disputed. Prof. Charles, who has published the latest and fullest edition of that Apocalypse, is strongly in favour of a Hebrew original, but his reasons are not very convincing, and the present fragment illustrates the precarious character of arguments based on retranslations into a supposed original through a version which is itself not extant. (3–4)

They observed that the Greek fragment whose text was hardly error free provided an opportunity to test the quality of the Syriac translation in a small portion of the book.

²⁰ The fragment was published by Bernard Pine Grenfell and Arthur Surridge Hunt, editors, The Oxyrhynchus Papyri, Part III (London: Egypt Exploration Fund, 1903) 3–7 (with plate I). They transcribed the verso on pp. 4–5 and the recto on p. 5.

164    ( – ) The impression created by a comparison of the two versions is that the Syriac translator was much less accurate than, for instance, the Ethiopic translator of the Ascension of Isaiah. In one passage (ll. 6–8) he has expanded the three verbs of the Greek into six by adding a synonym in each case. In another he seems to have misapprehended the meaning of the Greek, and to have introduced an idea which is quite inappropriate to the context (cf. n. on ll. 25–7). (4)

They acknowledged in their notes the help Charles had afforded them and also wrote: “The references at the side of the text and the translation of the Syriac are taken from the edition of Prof. Charles, whom we have to thank for several suggestions in the reconstruction of the fragment” (4).²¹ In the 1913 volume Charles printed the text of the Greek fragment at the appropriate points in his translation of the Syriac (487–90). He arranged the material in three parallel columns: his translation of the Syriac, his translation of the Greek, and the Greek text itself.²² Charles’s translation (with the 1913 improvements) also found its way into Translations of Early Documents Series 1, Palestinian Jewish Texts (prerabbinic) (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1917), with an introduction by W. O. E. Oesterley. Oesterley doubted the theory of separate sources and favored the idea that an author compiled it (x–xii). He also believed Charles had proved that Hebrew was the original language of the apocalypse (xiii).

Reviews The appearance of the first English-language edition of 2 Baruch evoked a number of reviews and reactions. F. Schulthess of Göttingen, writing in Theologische Literaturzeitung 22 (1897) cols. 238–41, regarded the confidence with which Charles defended a Hebrew original for the apocalypse astonishing and refuted point by point the arguments Charles marshaled in support, ²¹ Charles contributed the entry, “Baruch, Apocalypse of,” in James Hastings, editor, A Dictionary of the Bible, vol. I (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1898) 249–51. In it he argued that the Syriac was a translation from Greek (he apparently did not yet know about discovery of the Greek fragment) and Greek from a Hebrew original, summarized the book, briefly distinguished the sources in it (all written by Pharisees), and described its relation to 4 Ezra. He directed the reader to his book for more detail on the sources issue. ²² His translation was also taken up in 1984 into Sparks, editor, The Apocryphal Old Testament and modified by L. H. Brockington (835–95).

 (    ) 

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finding nothing definitive in them. While admitting that he had cleaned up some corruptions in the Syriac text, Schulthess spotted mistakes in the translation and enumerated them in detail. Interestingly, however, he did agree that some Hebraisms were recognizable in the Syriac version and thought that maybe a more systematic investigation would turn up others, despite the difficulty of deciding in many cases whether they did in fact reflect Hebrew features. An extensive, entertaining review in English came from J. Rendell Harris, “Mr. Charles’ Apocalypse of Baruch,” The Expositor 5 (1897) 255–65. He admired much about Charles’s work and even wrote that this was the first time there had appeared in England a piece of critical investigation of which one could say with perfect confidence that it was “made in Germany”; for there is nothing except the title page to the contrary, and it displays all the methods of modern criticism, which for all practical purposes is Teutonic criticism, to the best advantage. (255)

He added that it was “the best example that English literature has ever had of the modern analysis of ancient books” (256). One of the issues that concerned Harris, though, was Charles’s thesis about multiple sources/authors: we confess to have been startled at the number of authors that he has brought to light; they are not single spies, but Apocalyptic battalions of Pharisees, Sadducees, and Zealots. They are like the “never-ending line” of Wordsworth’s daffodils, only they are not a jocund company . . . . (258)

He raised some specific doubts about the source division (262–3, where he refers to a family likeness between several of the units Charles distinguished), but he emphasized the importance of 2 Baruch and 4 Ezra: “They belong to the environment if not to the antecedents of the New Testament; they reproduce for us the literary and intellectual air which was breathed by apostolic and subapostolic men, though perhaps the atmosphere is sometimes surcharged with sulphur” (259). He was open to the possibility that both apocalypses were composed in Hebrew and wondered whether the similarities between them could be explained adequately as arising from a basis in shared sources (260–2). Harris considered the notes of commentary that Charles attached to his translation to be “a mine of information on Judaeo-Christian matters,” citing as an example his comments on the image of Manasseh in 2 Baruch 64

166    ( – ) (264; see The Apocalypse of Baruch, 106–7). His final verdict on the book reads: “whether Mr. Charles succeeds in establishing all his positions or not, he has certainly written a very valuable work, for which the students of Apocalyptic literature will give him their hearty thanks” (265). A few years after publication of The Apocalypse of Baruch, Victor Ryssel, who provided the translation of “Die syrische Baruchapokalypse” in the second volume of Kautzsch’s Die Apokryphen und Pseudepigraphen des Alten Testaments, assessed Charles’s work in his introduction to the text. One of the issues he discussed was source division. He noted that for a time scholars had considered the Apocalypse of Baruch a unity, but in 1892 the picture had changed. That was the year in which Kabisch and de Faye (referenced above) published their theories that the apocalypse was compiled by an editor who inserted a number of sources into his basic text (he reproduced the details of their and Charles’s theories in a chart on p. 408). As a counter to such approaches, Ryssel adduced the views of C. Clemen (“Die Zusammensetzung des Buches Henoch, der Apokalypse des Baruch and des vierten Buches Esra,” Theologische Studien und Kritiken 71 [1898] 211–46, especially 227–37) who maintained that the inconsistencies should be attributed to ambiguities in sources employed (not incorporated) by the authors (409). Ryssel thought Charles’s suggestion about the presence of Baruch’s lost letter to the two and one-half tribes in the Book of Baruch had much to commend it (410). He had some difficulties with the notion that the author wrote the apocalypse in Hebrew but seemed finally to accept it (410–11). On p. 411 he repeated almost verbatim Charles’s claim that the apocalypse conveyed the kind of Judaism against which the Pauline dialectic was directed. Ryssel criticized Charles’s translation of the Syriac text. He charged that he had not maintained the necessary independence from Ceriani’s Latin translation and thus uncritically adopted the most glaring errors in it. Other translation errors he attributed to Charles’s misunderstanding the sense of the text and how sentences held together. In each case he offered a number of examples. He also thought Charles had made some unfortunate emendations (412).

Legacy There is little doubt that in connection with the Apocalypse of Baruch, as with the other Jewish works he examined, Charles made a fundamental, lasting

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contribution. There is more textual evidence available today,²³ especially for the Epistle of Baruch (chs. 78–86),²⁴ but whether it should be considered an integral part of the apocalypse, as Charles thought, is debated. In addition, the question whether the original language was Hebrew continues to arouse discussion. His theory about the six (or more) originally independent works incorporated by an editor into 2 Baruch is widely rejected or at least considered far less certain than Charles maintained.²⁵ No one doubts that the writer drew upon traditional materials in composing the apocalypse, but that it consists largely of previously independent documents whose world views were separated from one another by an “impassable gulf ” (liii) seems most unlikely. There are indicators of a sevenfold structure marked by four places where Baruch is said to fast for seven days (9:1–2; 12:5; 21:1; 47:1–2) and three when he speaks to the people (31:1–34:1; 44:1–46:7; 77:1–26). Throughout the entire work there is a progression from the dire situation at the beginning to the comfort offered in the visions later in the book. The contradictions that Charles and others spotted in it, especially in regard to the temple and messianic expectations, are not so obviously contradictory and are amenable to other readings.²⁶ Not long after the two books he published in 1896, Charles issued another groundbreaking study of a text, this time a work attributed to Moses. The intriguing issues it posed are the subject of Chapter 5.

²³ Besides the Greek fragment noted above, there is an Arabic version of chs. 3–77 (a folio is missing at the beginning) that was located in the Monastery of St. Catherine on Mt. Sinai, but it seems not to be a translation of the Syriac text known from manuscript c (see P. S. van Konigsveld, “An Arabic Manuscript of the Apocalypse of Baruch,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 6 [1975] 205–7). Whether the absence of the Epistle from the Arabic version is significant is not yet clear. There are a few pieces of 2 Baruch that were reproduced in Jacobite lectionaries (44:9–15 [in two lectionaries]; 72:1–73:2 [in three lectionaries]). See, for example, S. Dedering, editor, Apocalypse of Baruch, 4 Esdras (The Old Testament in Syriac according to the Peshit:ta Version IV/3; Leiden: Brill, 1973) iii–iv; A. F. J. Klijn, “2 (Syriac Apocalypse of) Baruch,” in Charlesworth, editor, Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, 1.615–16. ²⁴ There are now thirty-eight known copies of the Epistle in Syriac. ²⁵ See the analyses in Pierre Bogaert, Apocalypse de Baruch, introduction, traduction du Syriaque et commentaire (Sources chrétiennes 144–5; Paris: Le Cerf, 1969), 1.353–80 and 1.57–95 (he, like others, recognizes that a single writer used sources and that he was an author, not a compiler of previously existing, independent works). Regarding a possible Hebrew original, Klijn (“2 [Apocalypse of] Baruch,” 616) simply echoes Charles’s arguments. ²⁶ See the survey in John Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature (The Biblical Resource Series; 2nd ed.; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1998) 213–16.

Chapter 5 The Assumption of Moses Charles’s almost unbelievable pace of producing major works on ancient Jewish texts continued into 1897. By this time, he had already published his book on Enoch, his edition of Ethiopic Jubilees, and his commentaries on 2 (Slavonic) Enoch and 2 (Syriac) Baruch. Every one of them reveals a huge amount of reading and research, not to mention hunting for manuscripts. What he accomplished is truly astounding, and he did it largely on his own as there were no others in Great Britain doing this sort of work at the time. He was a man of tremendous energy and directed it toward making available noncanonical Jewish works that were important for understanding both the Old and New Testaments.¹

The Contents of the Assumption of Moses It is understandable that Moses was selected by later Jewish writers as the bearer of divine messages. The great lawgiver had been in intimate communion with God throughout the forty years Israel was in the wilderness, right to the end of his life. The setting adopted by the writer of the Assumption of Moses is that of a testament—a conversation between the elderly Moses and his successor Joshua—that builds upon Deuteronomy 31–4. As he addresses the future leader just before his own death, Moses offers an apocalyptic forecast of Israel’s history, from its time in the land to the exiles of the ten and the two tribes, the return to the land, and the subsequent tragic history. But at the end, says Moses, God will exalt the people of Israel who will rejoice over the fate of their enemies (chs. 1–10). Joshua then objects that he will not be able to lead the nation whose enemies will exploit the absence of Moses, but Moses assures him that God is in control and calls upon Joshua and the people to be faithful to the commandments (11–12).

¹ Burkitt (“Robert Henry Charles 1855–1931,” 437–8) wrote: “It was characteristic of Dr. Charles that he was always entirely absorbed in the piece of work upon which he was engaged. This singleness of aim gave force and vigour to his writing and, as a characteristic, was known to all his friends.”

R. H. Charles: A Biography. James C. VanderKam, Oxford University Press. © James C. VanderKam 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192869289.003.0007

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The Context for Charles’s Volume on the Assumption of Moses In The Assumption of Moses Charles edited, translated, and annotated a work that had first come to the attention of Western scholars in 1861. The Assumption (or Testament),² though mentioned in several ancient sources, had, like the other compositions on which Charles had worked, disappeared from Western view far in the past. The situation changed when Ceriani published a Latin text preserved in the manuscript that also contained the remains of Latin Jubilees—that is, a manuscript bearing two Mosaic texts. He offered a transcription of it along with the Latin Jubilees sections in his Monumenta sacra et profana, vol. 1, fascicle 1 (1861); the Assumption of Moses is on pp. 55–62, and the Jubilees material is on pages 15–54 (there are notes to both texts on 62–4). Jubilees occupies the first forty folios of the palimpsest, and the text of the Assumption of Moses appears on the next eight. The first lines of the latter text are missing, elsewhere various letters, words, and passages are illegible, and at the end it breaks off in midsentence. Hence, only part of the composition has survived. When Charles wrote his volume on the Assumption of Moses, he was, because of his work with the Jubilees section, very familiar with the manuscript in question. Ceriani did not attempt to “correct” the text of the Assumption of Moses but only to present what he could read on the manuscript (he did spell out its abbreviations). In the decade after his publication several treatments of the Assumption of Moses appeared, including four editions of the text (for these, see below). One of the issues discussed in the examinations of the text was the original language—was it Greek or a Semitic tongue? Most scholars dated the book to the first century .., although some numbers in the text proved difficult to interpret, while vaguely described persons were challenging to identify.³ Most who wrote about the Assumption of Moses believed the author composed it in Palestine.

The Book The Assumption of Moses, translated from the Latin sixth century MS., the unemended text of which is published herewith, together with the text in its ² The distinction between and significance of the titles “the Assumption of Moses” and “the Testament of Moses,” will be examined later in the chapter. ³ See Johannes Tromp, The Assumption of Moses: A Critical Edition with Commentary (Studia in Veteris Testamenti Pseudepigrapha 10; Leiden: Brill, 1993) 94–6, for a brief summary of the disputed passages.

170    ( – ) restored and critically emended form, edited with introduction, notes, and indices by R. H. Charles, M.A. Trinity College, Dublin, and Exeter College, Oxford. (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1897).⁴ In the Preface, Charles, as was his custom, first expressed his general understanding of the book, but in this instance he spent more time distinguishing his views from those of other scholars. The opening words state his thesis: Written in Hebrew shortly after the beginning of the Christian era, this book was designed by its author to protest against the growing secularisation of the Pharisaic party through its fusion with political ideals and popular Messianic beliefs. Its author, a Pharisaic Quietist, sought herein to recall his party to the old paths, which they were fast forsaking, of simple unobtrusive obedience to the Law. He glorifies, accordingly, the old ideals which had been cherished and pursued by the Chasid and Early Pharisaic party, but which the Pharisaism of the first century .. had begun to disown in favour of a more active rôle in the life of the nation. (vii)

The writer’s efforts proved futile, as the Pharisaic movement eventually contributed to the revolt and thus to the destruction of 66–70 .. Charles declared that the Assumption of Moses was especially interesting because “it was written during the early life of our Lord, or possibly contemporaneously with His public ministry” (viii). The bias in how he evaluated the worth of an ancient Jewish text is transparent, but perhaps he was just trying to arouse interest in the book. He added that the writers of Jude and Acts knew the composition, and other New Testament authors very likely did as well. Charles used pp. viii–x in the Preface to distinguish his edition from previous ones in two respects. The first centered around the text itself. He reported that he was providing “a fuller and more critical treatment of the Latin text, and of the Greek and Semitic background which it presupposes” (viii). He referred to four earlier treatments of the Latin text, in only one of which did the editors recognize its Semitic origins. But even that one—the text of Schmidt-Merx (they thought it had been written in Aramaic; see below)— “is often brilliant indeed, but oftener arbitrary, alike in its emendations and restorations” (viii). Charles, himself a fine Latinist,⁵ examined the particular ⁴ Charles dedicated the book to his parents. ⁵ D’Arcy, “A Brief Memoir,” xiv (quoting Charles regarding his study of Latin under a Mr. Maxwell at the Belfast Academy): “It was customary for Mr. Maxwell to hand us an historical work—not a difficult one—and require us to translate it at sight into Latin, and this practice I sought to pursue in later years.”

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kind of Latin in which the text survived, compared it with similar linguistic features in a fifth-century Latin manuscript of the gospels (k = Codex Bobiensis), and consulted the writings of authorities such as Hermann Rönsch (mentioned above in connection with Charles’s work on Jubilees). The idiosyncrasies of the text have likewise been carefully summarised, and its derivation from the Greek exhibited on grounds in many respects new. At the next stage of the investigation I have been obliged to part company with all scholars but Rosenthal⁶ in my advocacy of a Hebrew original.⁷ That the book was derived from a Semitic original, it is no longer possible to doubt. (ix)

He maintained that there were no cases favoring the thesis of an Aramaic base text and some that “are explicable only on that of a Hebrew original” (ix). The second feature separating his edition from others concerned its exegesis. Most experts had treated only select problems or themes, while those who had actually commented on the entire book had been parsimonious with their notes. “This exegetic meagreness of past scholarship on the subject has made the task of the present editor more arduous than might have been expected. It has, however, been beneficial in necessitating a first-hand study of all the questions involved in the text. As a result of this study, I have been obliged to differ from all preceding scholars on the interpretation of several of the most important facts and chapters in the book. With what success I must leave to others to determine” (x). Charles ended the Preface by thanking his friend Dr. Cheyne “for his revision of my proofs of a Hebrew original” (x). Thus, he had, as he did for 2 Baruch, retroverted the book into Hebrew (again, as with 2 Baruch, the retroversion was not printed in his edition). Another he thanked was

⁶ Ferdinand Rosenthal was the author of Vier apokryphische Bücher aus der Zeit und Schule r. Akiba’s: Assumptio Mosis, das Vierte Buch Esra, die Apokalypse Baruch, das Buch Tobi (Leipzig: Schulze, 1885). As the title implies, Rosenthal dated all four texts to the period between the first (66–70 ..) and second (132–35 ..) revolts against Rome (Rabbi Akiba died around the end of the second revolt). He treated the Assumption of Moses on pp. 13–38, dating it to just after the destruction of 70 .. It was written, he believed, by an author from among the general Jewish populace who had suffered so much from the war and whose leaders had abandoned them, fleeing to Jamnia. The writer composed the work in the Aramaizing Hebrew used by his community in Palestine. ⁷ This was a strange claim to make, since Heinrich Ewald had written thirty-five years earlier that the original was certainly in Hebrew (see his review of Ceriani, Monumenta sacra et profana 1/1 in Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen, vol. 1 for 1862, 6). It is true that only a few years later Ewald wrote favorably about Aramaic as the author’s language. See his review in the same journal for 1867, of Joseph Langen, Das Judenthum in Palästina zur Zeit Christi, and of Hilgenfeld, Novum Testamentum extra canonem, especially 110–18 (the entire review is on pp. 100–18). For Hilgenfeld’s volume, see below.

172    ( – ) Dr. Sutherland Black⁸ who had gone through the proofs of the book and offered many corrections. His Introduction to the commentary starts with a “Short Account of the Book.” In it he immediately raised a central issue in study of the text he was translating. Charles entitled his edition The Assumption of Moses but did not think that was the ancient name of the text with which he was dealing. The Assumption of Moses was, in all probability, a composite work, and consisted of two originally distinct books, of which the first was really the Testament of Moses, and the second the Assumption. The former was written in Hebrew, between 7 and 29 .., and possibly also the latter. A Greek version of the entire work appeared in the first century .. (xiii)

In other words, Charles believed that the text he was publishing was a work called “the Testament of Moses” and that another unit incorporated into a composite book with it had circulated in antiquity under the title “the Assumption of Moses.” The Greek version of the combined work was translated into Latin by the fifth century. The text published by Charles was, then, only a part of what was once a larger composition and should be entitled “the Testament of Moses.” A Quietist Pharisee had written it to oppose “the growing Zelotic spirit of the party” (xiv). Charles and other scholars used the title “The Assumption of Moses” only because Ceriani had so named the text he found (see below). In the second part of the Introduction he enumerated other Moses books in Jewish, Christian, and Gnostic literature. He admitted that they supplied “little or no help to the explanation of the present book” (xiv), but summarized them anyway (he had done the same when he listed Baruch books in The Apocalypse of Baruch). A more useful third part deals with the previous editions of the Latin text. The first, really only a transcription, was, of course, by Ceriani—a publication that Charles considered very accurate. After the Ceriani volume became available, A. Hilgenfeld⁹ had done “the finest textual work that has been produced on this book” (xviii), though his achievements were reduced in ⁸ John Sutherland Black (1846–1923) was for many years (1878–89) an assistant editor for the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and later (1894–1903) a joint editor of the Encyclopaedia Biblica. ⁹ Adolf Hilgenfeld (1823–1907) had presented and treated the text for the first time in his Novum Testamentum extra canonem receptum, part 1: Clementis Romani Epistulae edidit, commentario critico et adnotationibus instruxit; Mosis Assumptionis quae supersunt nunc primum edita et illustrata (Leipzig: Weigel, 1866) 93–115. Hilgenfeld was responsible for dividing the book into twelve chapters.

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value by his erroneous assumption that Greek was its original language. Hilgenfeld later published a retroversion of the book into Greek, “on the whole with admirable success” (xix).¹⁰ Charles was less charitable in assessing the work of Gustav Volkmar.¹¹ He acknowledged some contributions from him but “his work is disfigured by many errors, and at times by gross ignorance” (xix). The edition of Moriz Schmidt and Adalbert Merx¹² that he had mentioned in the Preface received more attention. The two had begun working with the text as soon as they received news of its existence. In their painstaking labors, they retroverted the Latin into Greek and eventually into Hebrew and Aramaic. They preferred Aramaic over Hebrew as the original language of the Essene author because of the word order and the way in which participles were used. Yet, though they correctly perceived that the language of composition was Semitic, not Greek, and made valuable suggestions for emending and restoring the Latin text, their proposals, thought Charles, were “at times . . . wholly beside the mark and unreasonable” (xx). The final predecessor who had edited the text was Otto F. Fritzsche¹³ who benefitted from the work of Hilgenfeld, Volkmar, and Schmidt-Merx and also made contributions of his own. Charles’s verdict on his results was: “It is a saner text than that of Schmidt-Merx, but not half so brilliant” (xxi). Fritzsche had placed the readings of the Milan manuscript on the left-hand page and on the facing page had given his emended version of it, fortified with extensive notes. Charles imitated his manner of presentation in his volume on the Assumption of Moses. The fourth section of the Introduction contains Charles’s assessment of the previous “Critical Inquiries” (xxi–xxviii). Here he leaves out of consideration those whose editions he had reviewed in the previous section, apart from Hilgenfeld who had, in addition to editing the text, formulated a theory about the situation of the book. Charles considered his exegetical work

¹⁰ The publications that included his Greek retroversion with notes and “sachliche Erklärung” were “Die Psalmen Salomo’s und die Himmelfahrt des Moses, griechisch hergestellt und erklärt,” Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Theologie 11 (1868) 273–309, 356 (Hilgenfeld was the founder of the journal); and the volume he edited, Messias Judaeorum: libris eorum paulo ante et paulo post Christum natum conscriptis illustratus (Leipzig: Fues, 1869) 435–68. See also his “Volkmar und Pseudo-Moses,” Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Theologie 10 (1867) 217–23 (a rather sharply worded review!). ¹¹ Mose Prophetie und Himmelfahrt, eine Quelle für das Neue Testament, zum erstenmale deutsch herasgegeben im Zusammenhang der Apokrypha und der Christologie überhaupt (Leipzig: Fues, 1867). ¹² They published their results in “Die Assumptio Mosis mit Einleitung und erklärenden Anmerkungen,” Archiv für wissenschaftliche Erforschung des Alten Testaments 1 (1868) 111–52 (Merx edited the journal). ¹³ Fritzsche published his edition as the last selection in his Libri apocryphi Veteris Testamenti graece, recensit et cum commentario critico edidit Otto Fridolinus Fritzsche (Leipzig: Brockhaus, 1871) 700–30. He divided Hilgenfeld’s chapters into verses.

174    ( – ) weak in comparison with his textual accomplishments (xxii). The writers Charles surveyed usually dated the work to some point in the first century .., although there were a few exceptions, and several attributed it to a Zealot author. Those who thought the original language was Semitic favored Aramaic over Hebrew. The lengthy fifth section of the Introduction, “The Latin Version of the Assumption: Its Linguistic Character and Critical Worth” (xxviii–xxxvi), offers the in-depth study of the Latin translation that Charles had promised in the Preface (viii–ix). He maintained that the text in the sixth-century Ambrosian manuscript was only a copy of the Latin translation, not the original; its “style and orthography,” however, dated the translation itself to the fifth century (xxx). To these introductory remarks he added two sections. The first deals with its linguistic character, under which rubric he treated paleography and orthography as well as syntax. The second examines its “Critical Worth.” He found the version to be very literal and generally to be “extremely trustworthy” (xxxiv). He then went on, however, to point out its defects—omissions, interpolations, dittographies, transpositions, corruptions, and mistakes caused by carelessness. He presents in the sixth section his reasons for thinking the Latin version is a translation from Greek (xxxvi–xxxviii). The point was not controversial, since the other commentators agreed. As Charles put it, “Of the derivation of our Latin text from the Greek there can be no question” (xxxvi). Nevertheless, he listed and documented five by now quite familiar categories of evidence that proved the matter: some Greek words are transliterated in the Latin text, Greek forms and idioms appear, in places a retranslation into Greek uncovers the text the Latin translator misunderstood, the sources of some “incoherencies” emerge (xxxviii), and fragments of the Greek version are found in the works of authors who used the Assumption of Moses. The seventh part of the Introduction takes up the more debatable claim that Hebrew was the author’s language (xxxviii–xlv). Charles swiftly dismissed the arguments of those who thought Greek was the language of origin (he deemed the obstacles Hilgenfeld saw to affirming a Semitic original as “mainly the offspring of his own imagination” [xxxix]). But, since many experts agreed the Assumption of Moses was written in a Semitic language, the problem was deciding between Aramaic and Hebrew. Charles thought that most of the passages that Schmidt-Merx believed favored Aramaic could as easily be explained from Hebrew, and he offered detailed explanations for why their strongest examples were unconvincing. On the positive side, he gave five rather predictable reasons for settling on Hebrew as the author’s language:

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Hebrew idioms can be found in the Latin text (e.g., implebuntur manus [“hands will be filled”], a literal translation of the Hebrew expression for ordaining [10:2]),¹⁴ some of which cannot be explained in Aramaic; “[s]yntactical idioms probably survive” (xlii); at times one must translate the Hebrew underlying the Latin, not the Latin itself; retranslation into Hebrew allows one to discover the source of corruptions and the presence of wordplays. The issue mentioned above—the correct name for the text in the Milan manuscript—is the subject of the eighth part of the Introduction. Ancient lists of apocryphal books refer to a Testament of Moses and an Assumption of Moses. All scholars who had worked on Ceriani’s text imitated him by calling it “The Assumption of Moses,” a name Ceriani adopted on the basis of an ancient reference. Gelasius of Cyzicus, who compiled a Collection of the Acts of the Council of Nicea,¹⁵ cited 1:14 and named as its source “the Assumption of Moses [αναληψεως μωυσεως (analēpseōs mōuseōs)]” (below is my translation of Gelasius’ text as Charles quotes it): Gelasius

Charles’s translation of 1:14 (Moses is speaking to Joshua)

When the prophet Moses was about to depart this life, as has been written in the book of the Assumption of Moses, he summoned Joshua the son of Nun and said to him: “God . . . He prepared me before the foundation foresaw me before the foundation of the world, that I should be the of the world to be the mediator mediator of His covenant. of his covenant.” Although Gelasius claimed the information derived from a book named the Assumption of Moses, Ceriani’s text said nothing about Moses’ being taken to heaven at the end of his earthly life. The conclusion of the text is missing from the Milan manuscript, but, as Charles indicated, several sentences in the existing parts suggest that Moses would die in a normal way.

¹⁴ The plural form, however, is unexpected if a Hebrew text with this meaning is here reflected; see Tromp, The Assumption of Moses, 230. ¹⁵ According to F.L. Cross and E.A. Livingstone, editors, The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (3rd ed.; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997) 658, he was active around 475 .. “He wrote a ‘Syntagma’, or collection of the Acta of the Nicene Council (325), to refute the Monophysite claim that their faith was identical with that professed by the Nicene Fathers.”

176    ( – ) In light of this situation, Charles made four points. First, the text published by Ceriani is a testament, a final statement from Moses to his successor Joshua. Second, in the preserved text it is anticipated that Moses will die an ordinary death, for which it uses a common biblical expression: (Moses is speaking to Joshua): “And now I declare unto thee that the time of the years of my life is fulfilled and I am passing away to sleep with my fathers even in the presence of all the people” (1:15). In 3:13 the people say: “Behold these things have befallen us after his death . . . ,” and in 10:14 Moses again predicts he is going to sleep with his fathers. Third, the ending missing from Ceriani’s manuscript survived in another text—a catena¹⁶ on the Pentateuch. “At the time when Moses was about to die a luminous cloud surrounded the place of the sepulcher and blinded the eyes of the bystanders. Therefore nobody could see either the dying lawgiver or the place where his body was buried.”¹⁷ It says nothing about an assumption into God’s presence. Rather, its description of Moses’ end seems to follow Deuteronomy 34:5–6 in that he simply dies; the only unusual feature is that no one knew where he was buried. Fourth, a series of ancient writers, including early ones such as the author of the New Testament Epistle of Jude and Clement of Rome, quoted from a book whose primary concern was the assumption of Moses. “This we take to have been the original Assumption of Moses” (xlvii), but it was not the text that Ceriani had published. Among the theories that scholars had formulated to account for the confusing evidence, Charles found himself most in agreement with that of Emil Schürer. He proposed that the two names, the Testament of Moses and the Assumption of Moses, “were the titles of two separate divisions of one and the same work, the first of which has been preserved, whereas the quotations in the Fathers almost all belong to the second” (cited on xlvi).¹⁸ Charles nuanced Schürer’s theory by positing that the two were not separate divisions of the same work but “two originally independent works subsequently put together and edited into one” (xlvi). Why should one think there were two independent Mosaic compositions that later found their way into one book? There was Gelasius’ reference to a

¹⁶ Catenae are manuscripts with explanatory comments placed in the margins opposite the scriptural passage(s) they interpret. ¹⁷ Quoted from James Kugel, Traditions of the Bible: A Guide to the Bible As It Was at the Start of the Common Era (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998) 862. ¹⁸ Charles cited from Schürer’s A History of the Jewish People in the Time of Jesus Christ (2 vols.; Edinburgh: Clark, 1885–90) vol. 2, part 3, 73–83 (quotation on 82).

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passage (1:14) now present in the testamentary section (Ceriani’s text) yet attributed to a work he called “the Assumption of Moses,” but there was more. In 10:12 Moses says: “For from my death—(my) assumption—until His advent there will be CCL times.” The noteworthy feature here is the presence in one sentence of both key terms—death and assumption—a sentence in the Testament text where Moses expects to die in the normal way. Charles theorized that “ . . . the word ‘assumption’ can best be explained as an insertion of the editor in order to adapt the text of the Testament to the main subject of the second work which he incorporates, i.e. the Assumption” (xlix). A second category of support for his thesis of a combined work comes from external sources. One was Palaea Historica (ninth century ..) in which, in successive lines, the writer adduces material drawn from both the Testament and the Assumption. Concerning the death of Moses: Moses said to Joshua son of Nun, “Let us go up on the mountain.” After they ascended, Moses saw the land of promise and told him, “Go down to the people and report to them that Moses has died.” Joshua went down to the people, and Moses reached the end of his life. Sammael attempted to bring down his body to the people so that they might deify him. But Michael, the captain of the Lord’s host, on the command of God came to get the body and remove it. Sammael opposed him, and they fought. So the captain of the host became incensed and rebuked him, saying, “The Lord rebukes you, Devil.” In this way, the adversary was defeated and took flight. The archangel Michael removed the body of Moses to a place ordered by Christ our God, [and no one saw Moses’ tomb].¹⁹

While Palaea Historica is a later text, Josephus at the end of the first century (Antiquities 4.326) seems to know of both opinions about Moses’ final state: “And, while he bade farewell to Eleazar and Joshua and was yet communing with them, a cloud of a sudden descended upon him and he disappeared in a ravine. But he has written of himself in the sacred books that he died, for fear lest they should venture to say that by reason of his surpassing virtue he had gone back to the Deity.”²⁰ And Jude may also reflect knowledge of both (see

¹⁹ The translation is by William Adler, “Palaea Historica (‘The Old Testament History’),” in Richard Bauckham, James R. Davila, and Alexander Panayotov, editors, Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: More Non-Canonical Scriptures (vol. 1; Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2013) 647. ²⁰ The translation is by H. St. J. Thackeray, Josephus IV Jewish Antiquities, Books I–IV (Loeb Classical Library; Cambridge: Harvard University Press/London: Heinemann, 1930) 633.

178    ( – ) below). If so, the editorial process of combining the two had occurred as early as the first century. As we saw, Charles categorized the author as a Pharisaic Quietist. He defended the identification through a process of elimination. The author was not a Sadducee because he hoped for a future kingdom that God would establish, one in which the righteous would enjoy a blessed existence. He was not a Zealot (despite what a number of scholars had proposed) because he was silent about the Maccabean revolt and thus did not approve of their (or others’) resort to arms. It is God, not people, who will bring about the future kingdom. And finally, he was not an Essene because of his nationalism and his interest in the temple and sacrifice.²¹ That left only the Pharisees, and, as the author advocated the old tradition of “quietude and resignation” (liv), he could be characterized as a Pharisaic Quietist. The date of the book (at least as we have it) was the next topic treated by Charles (lv–lviii). He quickly dismissed the suggestion of two scholars that it was a second-century composition,²² since according to the author the temple would remain in its place until the messianic kingdom, and it was still standing when he wrote. If the temple had been destroyed by that time, the writer would certainly have mentioned it. Hence, he wrote before 70 .. The great majority of experts placed the book in the first century but at different points in it. Charles located it between 7 and 30 .. The writer indicates that Herod was dead, and the war of Varus had taken place (both happened in 4 ..); therefore, he could not have composed the book before 3 .. Specific dates that frame the possible time when he penned the book arise from two passages. In 6:7 the author wrote (6:6 mentions the thirty-four-year rule of Herod): “And he will beget children, who succeeding him will rule for shorter periods.” Herod’s son Archelaus did indeed rule a shorter time (ten years, 4 ..–6 ..) than his father, but Herod’s sons Philip and Antipas, in their respective kingdoms, enjoyed longer reigns than his. Charles, like others, drew an interesting conclusion from the verse: “Hence the book must have been written before these princes had reigned for thirty-four years, i.e. before 30 ..” (lvii). The words in 7:1 “And when this is done the times will be ended” entail that the writer had reached his own time; and the reference in the same

²¹ His reasons for rejecting Essene authorship seem quaint after the Qumran discoveries but were convincing to most at his time. They rest on a certain way of reading statements in Josephus’ description of the Essenes. ²² They were Volkmar (see above) and M. Colani, “L’Assomption des Moïse,” Revue de Théologie 6 (1868) 65–94. Both thought that chs. 8–9 dealt with Hadrian’s persecutions and placed the text at the end of his reign. Hadrian was the Roman emperor in the years 117–38.

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verse to “four hours,”²³ some of which would already have passed, should be speaking about the time immediately after Archelaus was deposed (6 ..). Hence, 7 .. is the earliest possible date of composition (lvii–lviii, 23). After many pages devoted to introductory issues, Charles addressed the author’s views about four central topics (lviii–lxi). The first was Moses himself, whom the writer considered to be a mediator (even after his ordinary death), one prepared before the foundation of the earth. Second, regarding Israel, he kept all twelve tribes in view, despite their separation and their different places of exile. Third, the messianic or theocratic kingdom would be established by God; the book has no place for a messiah. Charles suggested that the rise within the Pharisaic party of the notion that the messiah would be a man of war influenced the author not to include one. Fourth, far from teaching that human righteousness gained merit with God, he declared that even the greatest Israelite, Moses, believed it was through no virtue of his own that God called him to his ministry. The final unit in the Introduction is “New Testament and Later Writers acquainted with the Assumption” (lxii–lxv). Here Charles focused on New Testament passages and for later ones referred the reader to pp. 107–10 where he collected Patristic and other citations. The Epistle of Jude provides the clearest evidence for the book, that is, the composite work containing the Testament and the Assumption. Jude 9 clearly drew on the latter: “But when the archangel Michael contended with the devil and disputed about the body of Moses, he did not dare to bring a condemnation of slander against him, but said, ‘The Lord rebuke you!’” There were several other expressions in Jude that made Charles think the writer had passages from the Testament section in mind. Jude 16 says: “These are grumblers and malcontents; they indulge their own lusts; they are bombastic in speech, flattering people to their own advantage” (NRSV). With these he compared descriptions from 5:5; 7:7, 9: complainers (7:7); “though their hands and their minds touch unclean things, yet their mouth will speak great things”; and 5:5 “many in those times will respect the persons of the rich and receive gifts”. There are also parallel terms for “mockers” and “the wicked.” It is not easy to see why Charles found such general charges and terms to be evidence for influence from the Moses text, but he added: “Now, lest the full force of these parallels should escape us, we should observe that the accounts in both books are actually or nominally prophetic” (lxii–lxiii). ²³ Exactly what is meant by these “hours” is very unclear, and in the commentary Charles did not offer an explanation.

180    ( – ) He found parallels with passages in 2 Peter but thought those with Stephen’s speech in Acts 7 were “remarkable.” The one he considered “most remarkable” is in Stephen’s summary of Israelite history: Acts 7:36 He led them out, having performed wonders and signs in Egypt, at the Red Sea, and in the wilderness for forty years.

Assumption of Moses 3:11 . . . who suffered many things in Egypt and in the Red Sea and in the wilderness during forty years.

About these passages Charles commented: “The likeness is too close to be accidental. We must either assume that Acts vii.36 is derived from our text, or that III.11 b of our text is interpolated. The evidence of Apoc. Bar. lxxxiv.3 is against the latter supposition: likewise also the word ‘suffered’” (lxiii–lxiv).²⁴ His comment about “suffered” is on target, but it should have led him to question whether there was a connection between Acts and the Assumption, as both convey familiar information about Moses but do so differently. Charles also thought that a passage from the Gospel of Matthew might derive from the Assumption of Moses: Matthew 24:29 . . . the sun will be darkened,

Assumption of Moses 10:5 And the horns of the sun will be broken and he will be turned into darkness; and the moon will not give its light; And the moon will not give her light, and be turned wholly into blood. the stars will fall from heaven, And the circle of the stars will be disturbed. and the powers of heaven will be shaken. To his credit, he recognized the two could have come from a common source. As the lines about the luminaries echo passages in the prophets, they do not justify thinking Matthew’s words came from the Moses text.

²⁴ Exactly how 2 Bar 84:3 contributes to the question I do not see. In Charles’s translation it reads: “And other things also he used to say unto you when ye the twelve tribes were together in the wilderness.” The context in ch. 84 is reminiscent of parts of the Moses text (in v. 2 he called heaven and earth to witness; disobedience to the law will lead to exile, keeping it to security; in vv. 4–5 the people disobeyed and what Moses predicted took place), but Charles’s point is unclear. There is nothing in the passage that the writer could not have derived from the Pentateuch.

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Charles, concluded, nevertheless, that the book “was known to the writers of the Epistle of Jude and of Acts vii, and most probably to the writers of 2 Peter and Matt. xxiv.29 . . . ” (lxv). An important question regarding the Assumption of Moses has to do with the original location of chs. 8–9. Charles mentioned the issue in section 9 of the Introduction, but rather than discussing it there, referred the reader to his notes on pp. 28–30. He insisted that “The interpretation of these two chapters will remain an impossibility so long as scholars attempt to deal with them in their present position” (li). He believed they had been dislocated from where the author put them to their current home between chs. 7 and 10. The two chapters describe a “second visitation” (8:1; cf. 9:2) that will include severe physical and religious persecution and during which time a man from the tribe of Levi named Taxo and his seven sons will go to a cave to die rather than transgress the Lord’s commands. Their unjust deaths would then unleash divine vengeance on their foes. Charles’s predecessors had interpreted chs. 8–9 in two ways: a few thought they described persecutions of the Jews in the aftermath of the Bar Kokhba revolt (say, 136–8 ..) late in the reign of the Emperor Hadrian; but most understood them as predicting the final woes before the arrival of the theocratic kingdom. Charles considered both views “impossible” (he used the word several times on pp 28–30 in dealing with various positions). For him, the first view could not be correct because the book was written in the first century, while the second misconstrued the chapters as dealing with the final woes. These, wrote Charles, could hardly be described as a “second visitation” (the first was under King Nebuchadnezzar). The two chapters were rather to be read as recounting the persecution under Antiochus IV in 167–4 .. They accurately describe those times under the guise of predicting them. If chs. 8–9 speak of the Antiochan persecution, a serious problem arises: they would be out of chronological order with what precedes them. The earlier chapters in the book, as Charles read them, do not refer at all to the persecutions ordered by Antiochus, not even profaning the temple which would certainly have been mentioned. In addition, there is a gap in the book’s historical coverage between chs. 5 and 6: ch. 5 traces history to the time of the high priests Jason (175–72 ..) and Menelaus (172–62 ..) who served during the reign of Antiochus, while ch. 6 begins with the Maccabean princes, starting with Jonathan (152–42 ..), and continues to the time of Herod and his sons. In other words, there is no reference to the persecution or to the defilement of the temple, events that occurred after those of ch. 5 and before those of ch. 6. So Charles proposed that the original location of chs. 8–9 was

182    ( – ) between chs. 5 and 6. This would give a chronological sequence and supply the missing treatment of the persecution in the 160s .. Charles thought the final editor was responsible for displacing the two chapters (pp. 28–30), but he neglected to say why a writer committed such a chronological blunder. Charles’s translation and often lengthy interpretive notes for the twelvechapter book occupy pp. 1–51 of The Assumption of Moses—the shortest text he had treated to date. He supplemented the Introduction and translation/ commentary with a unit he entitled “Assumptionis Moysi Fragmenta: The Latin Version of the Assumption of Moses Critically Revised and Emended together with the Unemended Latin Text of the Sixth Century MS. in the Milan Library” (53–101). He placed his revised version of the Latin on the lefthand page and a transcription of the Milan text on the right-hand page. He supported his own version of the Latin text with copious notes. The final and shortest part of the book Charles called “Original Assumption of Moses” (103–10). In these pages he attempted to reconstruct from ancient testimonies the structure and in places the wording of the part of the composite work not extant on the Milan manuscript—the Assumption of Moses. He first presented what he, on the basis of the ancient witnesses, took to be the order of the material in the Assumption section: 1. 2. 3. 4.

The angel Michael is commissioned to bury Moses Satan opposes his burial²⁵ Michael charges Satan with making the serpent tempt the first couple The assumption occurs in the presence of Joshua and Caleb. “A twofold presentation of Moses appears: one is Moses ‘living in the spirit,’ which is carried up to heaven; the other is the dead body of Moses, which is buried in the recesses of the mountains” (106).

Charles then gave the Greek for each of these elements as derived from the ancient sources that preserved them. The last pages offer the citations themselves. Among the most important and early are (besides Jude 9 cited above): Clement of Alexandria (ca. 150–ca. 215), Stromateis 6.15: . . . Jesus [=Joshua] the son of Nave saw Moses, when taken up [to heaven], double,—one Moses with the angels, and one on the mountains, honoured

²⁵ Satan contended that, since he was lord of matter, the body should be given to him. Michael countered that God, the true Lord of matter, rebukes him. Satan then charged that Moses was guilty of murder.

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with burial in their ravines. And Jesus saw this spectacle below, being elevated by the Spirit, along also with Caleb.²⁶

Origen (ca. 184–ca. 253) We must now see how, according to the scriptures, the opposing powers and the devil himself are engaged in a struggle with the human race, provoking and inciting men to sin. First, a serpent is described in Genesis as having seduced Eve; and in regard to this serpent, in the Ascension of Moses, a book which the Apostle Jude mentions in his epistle, Michael the archangel when disputing with the devil about the body of Moses says that the serpent was inspired by the devil and so became the cause of the transgression of Adam and Eve.²⁷ (On First Principles, Book 3, ch. 2.1) in a certain small book (which, to be sure, is absent from the canon), an image of this mystery is described; it is said that two Moseses were visible: one alive in the spirit, and the other dead in the body.²⁸ (Origen, Homily on Joshua 2.1)

The notion that the devil accused Moses of being a murderer since he had killed the Egyptian is found in catenae to Jude. An example is a comment to Jude 10 (picking up on the word “blasphemy” or “slander” in v. 9): “Moses having died on the Mount, Michael is sent to transfer the body to heaven. The devil subsequently slandered Moses, and accused him of being a murderer, because he had slain the Egyptian. But the Angel did not bear his slander, but said to the devil: ‘May God rebuke you!’”²⁹ Passages of these sorts allowed Charles to reconstruct the lost Assumption of Moses. As with his previous editions, Charles’s publication on the Assumption of Moses became part of his The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (2.407–24). This version, like the others, is an abbreviated and

²⁶ The translation is from Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, editors, Fathers of the Second Century: Hermas, Tatian, Athenagoras, Theophilus, and Clement of Alexandria (Entire) (Ante-Nicene Fathers 2; Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994 [original 1885]) 511. ²⁷ The passage is quoted from G.W. Butterworth, Origen On First Principles (New York: Harper & Row, 1966) 211. ²⁸ Cited from Tromp, The Assumption of Moses, 284. ²⁹ From Tromp, The Assumption of Moses, 276–7.

184    ( – ) otherwise slightly modified form of the material in the book, with no notable changes of interpretation.³⁰

Reviews The reviewer of the book in Theologische Literaturzeitung 22 (1897) 507–9 again was Emil Schürer. His comments, typically learned and detailed, also give an impression of the reputation Charles had established by this time. Schürer opened by noting that the interest in apocryphal studies in England was now almost greater than in Germany. One of the most energetic students in the field was Charles who was making contributions almost every year. In the course of surveying the Introduction, he drew attention to the way in which Charles accepted but nuanced his own view that the Testament of Moses and the Assumption of Moses were names of the two parts of the original book. He commented that one would need a powerful magnifying glass to find any appreciable difference between their two theories. He also thought that the author did not always take a Pharisaic viewpoint, since in the final prediction he sounds like a Zealot. He considered it unfortunate that Charles had made no fresh examination of the Milan manuscript itself, as that was essential for the kind of work he was doing. He found some of his emendations excellent but others arbitrary—something, he said, one would expect from Charles, judging by his previous publications. He wanted to reflect further on Charles’s proposal about the location of chs. 8–9 but felt that simply transposing them between 5 and 6 did not solve the problem. He made two points about the commentary. First, he objected to Charles’s treatment of 6:1 where he emended the text. It reads “priests of the Most High God,” but Charles emended the expression to “high priests of God” on the grounds that the Maccabees did not claim the title in the text, nor was it used for the other Jewish high priests (see pp. 20–1). Schürer cited a number of passages where the title was attributed to the Hasmoneans.³¹ The second point concerned the mysterious name Taxo in ³⁰ His rendering did not become part of the 1917 Translations of Early Documents, series I (PreRabbinic) published in London by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, as many of his other translations were. The Assumption of Moses in this series was introduced, translated, and explained by William John Ferrar, vicar of East Finchley. His introduction largely repeats Charles’s positions, but, as he wrote on p. 18, he based his translation of the Latin text on Clemens’ edition in the series Kleine Texte (1904 [see below]). Ferrar’s work was bound together into one small volume with Charles’s translation of 2 Baruch (with Oesterley’s introduction), with no explanation why Charles’s translation of the Assumption of Moses was not used. ³¹ Charles’s 1913 translation (2.418) reads: “priests of the Most High God,” supported by a note showing that the Hasmoneans did employ the title. He did not, however, thank Schürer for the correction.

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ch. 9. Charles maintained on the basis of a Samaritan text which in part drew on the Assumption of Moses that an original ‫( תקסא‬taqsō’ = Taxo) was corrupt for ‫( הקנא‬haq-qannā’ = the zealous; see p. 36). Schürer believed his proposal was better than many others.³² Another reaction to Charles’s positions came from Carl Clemens who introduced and translated the Assumption of Moses in the second volume of Kautzsch, Die Apokryphen und Pseudepigraphen des Alten Testaments (“Die Himmelfahrt Moses,” 311–31).³³ He frequently agreed with conclusions Charles had reached (e.g., “assumption” in 10:12 is an editorial insertion signaling the combination of the book’s two parts [312, 328 n. e]), but he was more cautious in some ways. One point on which he disagreed was the supposed dislocation of chs. 8–9. Clemens thought they actually related to the future, not to the persecution of Antiochus, though they derived some literary coloring from the terrible times of the Seleucid king. With Charles, he believed the author was a Pharisaic quietist (and rigorist), but he found the arguments for a Hebrew original, as well as those for an Aramaic base, to be unconvincing. Rather, one could be certain only that the Latin was translated from Greek. Whether Greek was the author’s language he did not know. Clemens also cautioned that editors should not emend the Latin text, however unclassical its language, but should repair only scribal errors.³⁴

Legacy All in all, Charles produced a valuable volume regarding the Moses text and advanced theses that in part differed from the views of others: (1) the text published by Ceriani was a Testament of Moses, composed in Hebrew in the first third of the first century .. and subsequently translated into Greek and from Greek into Latin; (2) it was once an independent work that an editor conjoined with another Moses book, the Assumption of Moses, to form a single composition. The Testament or Assumption of Moses is for modern scholars an important Jewish apocalyptic text from the late second temple period. Unlike the case for some other works in this category, there have been no new manuscript ³² On this point too Charles changed his mind by 1913 when he, following Burkitt, took the name to be gematria for Eleazar (2.421). ³³ He later edited Die Himmelfahrt des Mose (Kleine Texte für theologische Vorlesungen und Übungen 10; Bonn: A. Marcus and E. Weber, 1904)—the edition that Ferrar (mentioned just above) used for his translation. ³⁴ Ceriani (Monumenta Sacra et Profana 1/1.12) and Schmidt-Merx (“Die Assumptio Mosis,” 113) had made the same point.

186    ( – ) discoveries so that, at present, the manuscript from the Ambrosian Library remains the only copy. Charles’s book is still a standard resource in study of the text, although a few of his positions (to say nothing of his emendations) have failed to convince later experts. One is his understanding of 10:12 as containing a hint about the editorial blending of a Testament of Moses with an Assumption of Moses, and another is his view regarding the dislocation of chs. 8–9. As for 10:12 and the editorial history of the book, Johannes Tromp evaluates the situation quite differently than Charles: Receptio [assumption] is often taken to be a redactional gloss on mors [death], added after the supposed amalgamation of the Testament and the Assumption of Moses . . . The argument is that the Testament of Moses originally contained no assumption of Moses, and ended, in accordance with the genre of the testament, with Moses’ death and burial. Mors would then be the word used in the Testament. The Assumption of Moses, however, would originally have been a different document and would have replaced the original conclusion to the Testament. The redactor who wove both works together would accordingly have found it necessary to redefine mors in 10:12 as receptio, “assumption”. But there is no need to assume such redactional activity. For receptio does not necessarily mean “assumption into heaven”. There are indeed instances in which recipi means something like “to be taken (sc. to heaven)”, but one can as well “be taken (sc. to [the realm of] death)”, a translation which recommends itself in the present context. The simple translation must be: “For there will be 250 times from my death, my being taken away, until his (sc. God’s) arrival”.³⁵

Chapters 8–9 and their place in the text have continued to arouse interest. It was noted above that Clemens thought the two chapters referred to the last evil days, with their depiction partly influenced by the difficulties during the time of Antiochus. These chapters do seem to reflect aspects of the persecution in the 160s and the early response to it. Why would the writer use such heavily Antiochan/Maccabean coloring to depict the post-Herodian period? Jacob Licht³⁶ noted that ch. 9, with its description of Taxo, his seven sons, and their resolve to die an unjust death to provoke divine vengeance on their enemies, is tightly related to ch. 10 in which that vengeance follows (e.g., 10:2). ³⁵ Tromp, The Assumption of Moses, 239 (see also 101). ³⁶ “Taxo and the Apocalyptic Doctrine of Vengeance,” Journal of Jewish Studies 12 (1961) 95–103 (the lengthy quotation below is from pages 102–3). A number of scholars had earlier spotted the connections between chs. 8–10.

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Moreover, Taxo’s speech refers to the persecution in ch. 8 as the reason for what he does. Hence, chs. 8–10 belong together, and 8–9 cannot simply be removed as Charles suggested. Licht, with hesitation, offered a hypothesis: Let us assume that the Assumption of Moses as it has come down to us is not a wholly original work but rather an adaptation, made in post-Herodian times, of an earlier one. The first version will have been written at the beginning of the Hasmonaean revolt, slightly earlier than the apocalyptic parts of Daniel. It contained a review of history up to the times of Jason and Menelaus (chapter v), described the persecution under Antiochus IV (ch. viii) and suggested that the deeds of the Hasidean Martyrs had the eschatological significance of provoking divine vengeance (Taxo, ch. ix). An adapter, who lived in post-Herodian times, rewrote the book so as to make its message suitable to his own generation. Since he did not sympathize with the Hasmonaeans he saw no sense in a description of their wars, but mentioned briefly the late and “wicked” Hasmonaean rulers (beginning of ch. vi). He added a long description of Herod’s rule and thus brought the work up to date (ch. vi). In accordance with the general apocalyptic scheme he also added a description of the wicked of the last—i.e. his own—generation (ch. vii). Chapters viii and ix thus acquired a new, metahistorical, meaning. In other words, chapters vi and vii may be regarded as interpolations.

On this approach, chs. 8–9 are not the problem; 6 and 7 are. George Nickelsburg³⁷ further developed Licht’s views. He traced a literary pattern deriving from the last chapters of Deuteronomy and present in other Jewish literature of the time: Pattern Sin Punishment Repentance Salvation

Assumption of Moses38 chs. 2 and 5 3:1–4 and 8 3:5–4:4 and 9 4:5–9 and 10

Deuteronomy 28:15 28:16–68 30:2 30:3–10.

³⁷ Resurrection, Immortality, and Eternal Life in Intertestamental Judaism and Early Christianity (expanded ed.; Harvard Theological Studies 56; Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006) 43–4, n. 89 (I have modified the order of the columns in his chart). ³⁸ As the references in this column show, the pattern, according to Nickelsburg, recurs in the first and second parts of the book.

188    ( – ) Charles’s scheme upsets the pattern and should thus be rejected. Nickelsburg’s solution is to regard ch. 6 as an interpolation. A composition written during the persecutions of Antiochus was updated after the Herodian period by inserting ch. 6. He is less certain about ch. 7 and merely suggests that it was a description of Hellenizers and was located between chs. 5 and 8.³⁹ So, scholars continue to posit that a chapter or two at first did not figure where they do in the text of the Milan manuscript, just as Charles proposed; they disagree about which the offending units are.⁴⁰ Tromp, however, has defended the unity of the work along the lines indicated by Clemens.⁴¹ Thus, the literary integrity of the text Ceriani published continues to be debated. A helpful way of ending the treatment of Charles’s The Assumption of Moses is to cite what Johannes Tromp says about his contributions. In his survey of the history of research on the composition, he entitles the second chapter “Towards Consensus: The Editions of R. H. Charles (1897, 1913) and C. Clemens (1900, 1904).” He noted that the two scholars had “summarized all previous discussion and put forward opinions and arguments that gained almost general approval for a long period.” Of Charles’s book he writes: Charles’s work has been of great importance and far-reaching influence. It is not always as critical as it intends to be, and at times it is somewhat hasty and careless. His edition of As. Mos. is marred by drastic emendations, frequently based on the Hebrew original Charles presupposed.⁴²

Charles’s passion for emending ancient texts was criticized already in his time, and the criticism continues to the present. With the Assumption of Moses, Charles’s impressive pace of producing editions and translations of ancient works slowed for a time. In the next few years he turned his attention to different kinds of publications as his fame grew.

³⁹ In his Jewish Literature between the Bible and the Mishnah: A Historical and Literary Introduction (2nd edition; Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005), Nickelsburg treats the work in two places: The Testament of Moses in ch. 3 (“Reform—Repression—Revolt,” i.e., the Hasmonean revolt, pp. 74–7) and Testament of Moses—Revised in ch. 7 (“The Romans and the House of Herod,” 247–8). Here too he regards Testament of Moses 6–7 as consisting of later units inserted into an older work from the 160s .. “The net result of this interpolation is the transformation of the description of Antiochus’s time into a kind of ‘eschatological tableau’ that recapitulated the earlier events that transpired during the terrible times of the 160s. The repetition of such events would usher in the end time” (248). ⁴⁰ See the overview in Norbert Johannes Hofmann, Die Assumptio Mosis: Studien zur Rezeption massgültiger Überlieferung (Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 67; Leiden: Brill, 2000) 21–6. ⁴¹ The Assumption of Moses, 120–3 (with a detailed argument against Nickelsburg’s hypothesis). ⁴² All quotations in this paragraph are from Tromp, The Assumption of Moses, 99.

Chapter 6 Recognition and Syntheses 1898–1899 With publication of The Assumption of Moses in 1897, the flow of books from Charles paused temporarily. The next edition of an ancient text was not to appear until 1900 and the next volume of any kind not until 1899. These years, however, were hardly spent in idleness. It is a period when we see wider recognition of Charles’s accomplishments and his first efforts at synthesizing the teachings of the books he studied.

Appointments and Recognitions From 1891–97, as we have observed, Charles seems to have held no official, paid position in Oxford, and there is no evidence that he, an Anglican priest, exercised any ministerial function. The situation changed in 1898 when he was appointed Professor of Biblical Greek at his alma mater, Trinity College, Dublin. He held the post until 1906. I have found no specific information about his duties, but they obviously called for spending some time in Dublin in order to offer language instruction. It did not, however, induce the Charleses to move their permanent home from Oxford. Evidence for this comes from the prefaces of books Charles published before, during, and after this period. At the end of the Preface to his 1896 The Apocalypse of Baruch (iv) he gave his residential address as 17 Bradmore Road, Oxford. He listed the same address in subsequent books until a new Oxford address, 24 Bardwell Road, appears for the first time in the Preface to his 1908 commentary on the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs (ix; he dated the Preface to Oct. 2, 1907). Thus, while holding the position in Dublin, the Charleses retained their residence in Oxford.¹ In addition to serving as Professor of Biblical Greek, Charles received a DD degree from Dublin in 1898. This was the first in a series of degrees that would ¹ In a postscript to a letter to the secretary of Oxford University Press (OUP, October 23, 1902), Charles mentioned that he was leaving the next day for Dublin where he would remain for the Michaelmas term and where his address would be Trinity College. Presumably he would be there to carry out his duties as Professor of Biblical Greek.

R. H. Charles: A Biography. James C. VanderKam, Oxford University Press. © James C. VanderKam 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192869289.003.0008

190    ( – ) be conferred on him in recognition of his distinguished scholarship,² and the initials for the degree appear after his name on the title page of his subsequent books. Additional recognition came in the form of a lectureship. Charles was appointed to deliver the Hibbert Lectures for 1898 in Oxford. The Hibbert Trust, originally called The Anti-Trinitarian Fund, was set up in 1847 by Robert Hibbert (1769–1849), a West Indian merchant and a Unitarian. He had instructed the trustees, all of whom were supposed to be heterodox, that when his widow, Elizabeth Jane, died (she passed away in 1853) they should apply the income from the Trust “in such manner as they deem most conducive to the spread of Christianity in its most simple and intelligible form, and to the unfettered exercise of the right of private judgement in matters of religion.” The trustees set up the lectureship and later established the Hibbert Journal which began publication in 1902.³ The first of the lecturers was Max Müller in 1878, and among those in subsequent years were well known scholars such as Ernst Renan (1880), Abraham Kuenen (1882), Archibald Sayce (1887), Edwin Hatch (1888), and Claude Montefiore (1892).⁴ The Oxford University Gazette announced in its issue for January 20, 1899, with the heading Hibbert Lectures: The Rev. R. H. Charles, D.D., Professor of Biblical Greek, Trinity College, Dublin, will deliver in Manchester College, three public lectures on “The Doctrine of the Last Things, in Israel and Judah,” on Thursday, January 26; Monday, January 30; and Thursday, February 2, at 5 . (p. 240; see also p. 266)

Charles thus devoted the lectures, delivered in early 1899, to a subject that would be central to the syntheses he was preparing (see below). Appointment to the Hibbert Lectureship was no trifling matter (for the Jowett Lectures see below). One other facet of Charles’s life that likely belongs in this period is becoming a member of the Churchmen’s Union. This association of “Modernists” had officially begun in 1898 and included among its tenets

² Both the academic appointment and the degree are mentioned in the obituaries and other notices about Charles’s life. For the degree, see also Kenneth Claude Bailey, A History of Trinity College Dublin 1892–1945 (Dublin: University Press, 1947), 233, where he lists Charles as among “the eminent divines of the period” (229). ³ “Robert Hibbert (Anti-Trinitarian),” Wikipedia, last accessed 1-31-2022. ⁴ “Hibbert Lectures,” Wikipedia, last accessed 7-31-2019.

   ( – )

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To give all the support in their power to those who are honestly and loyally endeavouring to vindicate the truths of Christianity by the light of scholarship and research, while paying due regard to continuity, to work for such changes in the formularies and practices of the Church of England as from time to time are made necessary by the needs and knowledge of the day.⁵

When writing about the year 1900, Alan Stephenson recorded that “several well known persons were now members—like . . . Dr R. H. Charles, the authority on apocalyptic.”⁶ More will be said later about the significance of his membership in the group and of Ripon Hall that was associated with it. Others recognized Charles’s expertise by calling upon him to write dictionary and encyclopedia articles. The first of these was a short piece, “Ethiopic Version,” in James Hastings, editor, A Dictionary of the Bible, vol. I (1898) 791–93. The Dictionary was a monumental accomplishment, published in four large volumes (ca. 900 pages per volume, each containing two columns of small print) from 1898 to 1904, with a fifth supplementary volume also in 1904. Charles had displayed his knowledge of Ge’ez, the classical language of Ethiopia, in his translation of the Book of Enoch and in his translation and edition of the Book of Jubilees. Especially in connection with Jubilees it was important for him to make use of the Ethiopic Bible. His experience with the Ethiopic language and biblical version made him an ideal candidate to write the article. The subject drew Charles once more into a domain where Dillmann was the master. The article falls into six parts and demonstrates his knowledge of the scholarly literature on the topic. The Ethiopic Old Testament consists of forty-six books: those of the Septuagint less the books of Maccabees, with others such as Enoch and Jubilees, although there is disagreement between the lists on which books to include. The New Testament has thirty-five books— the familiar twenty-seven with Sinodos, a church order divided into eight books. In the section about the manuscripts of the Ethiopic version, Charles referred to the published catalogs listing the manuscripts present in libraries and other collections. He then dealt with the printed editions, praising Dillmann for his publications of apocryphal books but pointing out how his ⁵ Alan M. G. Stephenson, The Rise and Decline of English Modernism (The Hulsean Lectures 1979–80; London: SPCK, 1984) 62. Among the objects of the Union as stated at its opening meeting in 1898 was a similar declaration: “To unite Churchmen who consider that dogma is capable of reinterpretation and restatement in accordance with the clearer perception of truth attained by discovery and research” (57). ⁶ Stephenson, The Rise and Decline of English Modernism, 63. Another of the five “well known persons” he listed was the Egyptologist Dr. E. A. Wallis Budge.

192    ( – ) own 1893 translation of Enoch corrected Dillmann at many points (Charles gave the wrong date—1894—for his edition of Jubilees). Under the rubric “Source of the Text,” he sketched Dillmann’s original view that the Ethiopic Old Testament translation was made from a Greek text and that it was later corrected on the basis of the Hexapla, and his subsequent theory of three stages: an original translation, a later form revised and completed from a Greek text, and a still later revision on the basis of a Hebrew text. Charles thought there was reason for retaining Dillmann’s earlier view, yet suggested that agreements between the Ethiopic Old Testament and the Hebrew text could be explained by positing that the original Ethiopic translation had been based not only on a Greek but also on a Hebrew text. Dillmann’s theory about two stages in the development of the New Testament text, like any theory about the Old Testament translation, he wrote, had to await the production of critical editions before they could be evaluated properly. He added that the Ethiopic texts of the Old and New Testaments had text-critical value and maintained that the translation was made before the seventh century.

Syntheses While Charles’s labors from 1891–97 centered on translating and editing ancient Jewish compositions, his introductions and notes to the texts required that he deal with wider issues of content, meaning, and significance. Synthesizing the fruits of such reflection was to become a large part of his work over the following years when he wrote several studies of early Jewish thought, especially in the area of eschatology. This hardly meant that he had stopped preparing editions. More were to follow, and in fact some of his first survey articles include announcements of those forthcoming editions. An early instance of systematizing the teachings of the texts came in his lengthy (cols. 213–50) entry “Apocalyptic Literature” in the first volume of the Encyclopaedia Biblica (published in 1899). The essay, consisting of ninetyeight sections, surveys nine texts that Charles considered the corpus of apocalyptic works for the period with which he was dealing: the Apocalypse of Baruch, Ethiopic Book of Enoch, Slavonic Book of Enoch, Ascension of Isaiah, Book of Jubilees, Assumption of Moses, Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, Psalms of Solomon, and the Sibylline Oracles. By the time the article appeared he had published translations/commentaries on four of them (Baruch, 1–2 Enoch, Assumption of Moses) and a translation as well as a text edition of another (Jubilees). His approach in the dictionary entry was to treat each work

   ( – )

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separately and to cover a standard set of topics as he did so. The sections examining texts on which he had already published naturally echoed his results—even the wording—from the earlier studies but with minor updates, e.g., in bibliographical references. Curiously, Charles did not disclose in the article how he defined the category “Apocalyptic Literature,” nor did he distinguish works that were fully (or largely) apocalyptic (e.g., the Apocalypse of Baruch) from those that were only partially apocalyptic (e.g., Jubilees). The Book of Daniel was not included in the essay, presumably because the Encyclopaedia Biblica contained a separate article on it. Before taking up the individual texts, Charles addressed some topics germane to the apocalypses in general. His second paragraph, entitled “Problem,” explains in words closely related to remarks in his 1893 commentary on Enoch⁷ his view of the circumstances that gave rise to the writing of apocalypses. The object of apocalyptic literature in general was to solve the difficulties connected with a belief in God’s righteousness and the suffering condition of his servants on earth. The righteousness of God postulated the temporal prosperity of the righteous, and this postulate was accepted and enforced by the Law. But while the continuous exposition of the Law in the post-exilic period confirmed the people in their monotheistic faith and intensified their hostility to heathenism, their expectations of material well-being, which likewise the Law had fostered, were repeatedly falsified, and a grave contradiction thus emerged between the old prophetic ideals and the actual experience of the nation, between the promises of God and the bondage and persecution which the people had daily to endure at the hands of their pagan oppressors. The difficulties arising from this conflict between promise and experience might be shortly resolved into two, which deal respectively with the position (1) of the righteous as a community, and (2) of the righteous man as an individual. (213)

He went on to note that the prophets had been concerned primarily with Israel’s restoration/resurrection as a nation. As time passed the claims of the individual demanded greater attention. Thus, in order to justify the righteousness of God, there was postulated not only the resurrection of the righteous nation but also the resurrection of the righteous individual. Apocalyptic literature, therefore, strove to show that, in ⁷ The comparable lines can be found in The Book of Enoch, 22–3.

194    ( – ) respect alike of the nation and of the individual, the righteousness of God would be fully vindicated; and, in order to justify its contention, it sketched in outline the history of the world and of mankind, the origin of evil and its course, and the final consummation of all things; and thus, in fact, it presented a Semitic philosophy of religion . . . The righteous as a nation should yet possess the earth either in an eternal or in a temporary Messianic kingdom, and the destiny of the righteous individual should finally be determined according to his works. For, though he might perish untimely amid the world’s disorders, he would not fail to attain through the resurrection the recompense that was his due in the Messianic kingdom, or in heaven itself. The conceptions as to the duration and character of the risen life vary with each writer. (213–14)

He did acknowledge that besides the messianic kingdom the writings he was treating dealt with the law (examples are the Apocalypse of Baruch and Jubilees), and all of them, thought Charles, were expressions of different sides of Pharisaism. Charles saw a distinction between prophecy and apocalyptic in that prophecy relies on the spoken but apocalyptic on the written word. The prophet mostly spoke to his own time and its concerns. The apocalyptic writer, on the other hand, almost wholly despairs of the present; his main interests are supramundane. He entertains no hope of arousing his contemporaries to faith and duty by direct and personal appeals. His pessimism and want of faith in the present thus naturally lead him to pseudonymous authorship, and so he approaches his countrymen with a writing which purports to be the work of some great figure in their history, such as Enoch, Moses, Daniel, or Baruch. The standpoint thus assumed is as skillfully preserved as the historical knowledge and conditions of the pseudonymous author admit, and the future of Israel is ‘foretold’ in a form enigmatical indeed but generally intelligible. All precision ceases, however, when we come to the real author’s own time. . . . (214–15)

Charles sounded another characteristic note in the fourth section where he opposed “the gross misperception” of several Jewish scholars who held that apocalyptic literature had no value for the history of the Jewish religion. To such statements it is sufficient to answer that from 200 .. to 70 .. the religious and political ideals that really shaped the history of Judaism found their expression in this literature. It is not in the discussions and logomachies

   ( – )

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of the Rabbinical schools that we are to look for the influences and aims that called forth some of the noblest patriotism and self-sacrifice the world has ever witnessed, and educated the nation for the destinies that waited it in the first century of our era, but in the apocalyptic and pseudepigraphic books which, beginning with Daniel, had a large share in preparing the most religious and ardent minds of Galilee and Judaea either to pass over into Christianity, or else to hurl themselves in fruitless efforts against the invincible might of Rome, and thereby all but annihilate their country and name. (215)

He did grant that “the work of the scribes and the exposition of the schools had opened the way for this new religious and literary development” (215). But, for Charles, in this essay and in his earlier books, the true heirs of the prophets were the apocalyptic seers, not the legal scholars, and he made no effort to hide on which side his sympathies lay. The survey of the nine compositions follows the introductory paragraphs. Each of the sections deals with the sorts of issues that Charles discussed in his editions. Along with paragraphs in normal font, there are ones in smaller print (really small!) in each section; in some of them he summarized a book’s contents and in others he offered extra detail regarding the view of another scholar (or scholars) or of himself. For the first three apocalypses—2 Baruch, 1 Enoch, 2 Enoch—he furnished summaries of what he wrote in his books about them. The first one on which he had not published a volume is the fourth, the Ascension of Isaiah (on which he would issue a book in 1900; see below, Part 2, Chapter 7). He viewed the work, written in Greek but preserved fully only in Ethiopic, as a composite of two or three originally independent texts, with some parts of Jewish and some of Christian authorship. The compositions were conjoined and the full book written by the late first century .. In dealing with the Ascension of Isaiah, Charles made reference to his forthcoming book in which, he said, he would treat, besides the Ethiopic text, a Greek “recast” of it, as well as the Latin and the Slavonic versions. His short section about the Ascension of Isaiah in the encyclopedia article summarizes the contents of the work but does not offer a sketch of its teachings. After a unit on the Book of Jubilees (reflecting, naturally, what he had written in his 1895 edition),⁸ Charles took up the Assumption of Moses on

⁸ As in 1895 (p. ix), he here dates the book to “the century immediately preceding the Christian era” (230), although his article “Eschatology” published in vol. 2 of the Encyclopaedia Biblica (1901) includes Jubilees among the Jewish writings of the first century .. (see below).

196    ( – ) which he had most recently published (1897). The seventh text he addressed, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, was a new one for him and one on which he would later prepare a text edition and a translation/commentary. He detailed the names under which the work and its individual components circulated in antiquity and, in an exceedingly brief summary of its contents, indicated that each of the twelve units consisted of three parts: (1) the patriarch recounts his life to his children, stressing the virtues or vices that characterized it; (2) exhorts his children to imitate the virtues or avoid the vices mentioned; and (3) predicts the sins of his descendants, the captivity they will bring about, and their defections from the tribes of Levi and Judah. The predictions, wrote Charles, were generally of Jewish authorship but some were Christian (see col. 238). Charles accepted in part the position maintained by some scholars—that the work consisted of a Jewish base text (he dated it to the early first century ..) supplemented by a series of interpolations. He specifically adopted the version of the interpolation theory advocated by Friedrich Schnapp,⁹ i.e., there were Jewish and Christian interpolations. Charles nuanced that view by hypothesizing that the Christian interpolations came from several individuals (from the late first until the third or even fourth century), not just one (238–9). Against most critics who considered the Testaments a Christian work and thought it had been composed in Greek, he argued that it was written in Hebrew and supplied detailed reasons for the conclusions (the sorts of arguments he used for determining that Hebrew was the original language of other texts). The Jewish interpolations had also been written in Hebrew. Some of the Jewish interpolations which are apocalyptic in character dated from the second century .. down to 30 ..¹⁰ Because of the book’s complicated course of development, he thought it not useful to present its views on “Christology.” In his discussion of the language issue, Charles referred to his forthcoming edition of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs (col. 239)—a work that appeared nine years later. The remaining units in the article also examine compositions on which Charles had not yet published. The eighth of the nine is the Psalms of

⁹ He was the author of Die Testamente der Zwölf Patriarchen (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1884) and provided the translation of the Testaments in E. Kautzsch, editor, Die Apokryphen und Pseudepigraphen des Alten Testaments, 2.458–506. See the chapter about Charles’s publications on the Testaments (Part 2, Chapter 8). ¹⁰ This is the place that Charles referenced in his 1902 The Book of Jubilees, where he claimed that in it he had first approximated the correct date for Jubilees by relating it to the Testaments, the bulk of which came from the late second century .. The only bits of text he dates to the second century are some of the Jewish interpolations, the date of whose composition seems, on his view, to have long antedated the Testaments.

   ( – )

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Solomon, a collection of poems which he believed were of Pharisaic authorship and written in Hebrew in the mid-first century .. Psalms 1–16 were from one writer, Psalms 17–18 from another. One pointer to multiple authorship is the messiah, son of David, in Psalms 17 and 18 who fails to appear in Psalms 1–16. He will expel the nations and the wicked, purify Jerusalem, and bring about the return of the exiles, but he is only a man whose days are limited. The final text studied by Charles is the Sibylline Oracles. They stem from a Hellenistic Jewish background and were meant to address non-Jews in a form familiar to them—the inspired oracles of the Sibyl. They “ . . . offered to the missionary spirit of Hellenistic Judaism a form of literature which would readily admit the disguised expression of its highest beliefs, and at the same time procure for them a hearing in Gentile circles” (246). The disparate oracles in the collection were in part Jewish but in greater measure Christian. Charles understood most of the third oracle and its opening section to be the oldest parts: the former came from the second century .., and the latter was meant to be an introduction to it. Charles wrote briefly about books 4–8 as well, but recognized that very much about them remained hypothetical. Another of his essays in the multi-volume Encyclopaedia Biblica was entitled “Eschatology.”¹¹ Though it was in the second volume (cols. 1335–92) and thus did not appear in print until 1901, Charles indicated in the Preface to his 1899 A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life that the essay was significant for the book: Finally, I wish to express my thanks to Messrs A. & C. Black, the publishers of the Encyclopaedia Biblica, and to its editors, Drs Cheyne and Black, for permitting me to use my article on Eschatology in that work as a basis of the present work. (vii)

The entry is more massive than the one on “Apocalyptic Literature” and even has its own index. ¹¹ He had also composed the entry “Eschatology of the Apocryphal and Apocalyptic Literature,” in James Hastings, editor, A Dictionary of the Bible, vol. I (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1898) 741–9. In it he treated the texts by century (second century .. to the first century ..), just as in the above article (see sections 51–81 in it). After listing the works in chronological order, he wrote about “Some of the Conceptions which gave birth to and controlled the Evolution of Later Jewish Eschatology” (view of God, the individual, messianic expectations). He surveyed each text for its eschatological teachings and ended with a section called “Systematic Exposition of Jewish Eschatology (.. 200–.. 100),” treating in particular the teachings about the last woes, the messiah, the messianic kingdom, the return from the dispersion, resurrection, and judgment. He added a couple of small-print paragraphs listing secondary literature and indicated he hoped “to edit, towards the close of next year (1899), a critical work on Jewish Eschatology from the earliest OT times to .. 100” (749). The book in question is reviewed below.

198    ( – ) Charles organized the 104 sections of the “Eschatology” article under three major headings: A. Hebrew Old Testament Writers (1–50) B. Apocryphal and Apocalyptic Writers (51–81) C. New Testament Writers (82–103; section 104 is a bibliography). Each of these titles stands over several sub-headings which are further differentiated. In the first unit, “Hebrew Old Testament Writers” he treated the topic under two sub-headings: The Individual (1–33), and the Nation (34–48), with the last two units (49–50) offering a synthesis. The lengthy section about the individual contains much detail about “Antique elements” that to a large extent Israel shared with other Semitic peoples and that “advancing thought” tried to expel. “Early Yahwism had no distinctive eschatology regarding the problem of the individual; it concerned itself only with the nation. The individual, accordingly, was left to his hereditary beliefs” (1335–6). Ancestor worship, involving sacrifices to the dead, was a significant feature of this early stage of religion, and it accounts for the emphasis on the family—household gods, sons to provide ancestor worship, levirate marriage (for continuation of the family), and the like. Charles examined beliefs about the dead, Sheol, soul, body, and spirit as examples of these “antique elements.” The rise of individualism, however, paved the way for “a higher doctrine of the future life” (1343). Here he treated the oft-cited words from the prophecies of Jeremiah (31:29–30) and Ezekiel (see ch. 18) regarding individual, not collective, responsibility for actions—an approach also taught and applied in Psalms and Proverbs. He traced objections raised by Ecclesiastes and Job against the idea that rewards match deeds. Charles thought that there were “gleans” of belief in a future life in Job in which the soul, not the body, lives on (e.g., 19:25–9). Similarly, Psalms 49 and 73 give more definite expression to the notion of immortality. He concluded, however, that never in Palestinian Judaism down to the Christian era did the doctrine of a merely individual immortality appeal to any but a few isolated thinkers. The faithful looked forward to a blessed future only as members of a holy people, as citizens of a righteous kingdom that should embrace their brethren. (1347)

He next turned to the beliefs about the future of the nation articulated primarily in the prophetic literature. As he saw it, “the eschatology of the

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nation centres in the future national blessedness introduced by the day of Yahwè” (1348). Charles distinguished popular, nationalistic conceptions of the day of the Lord from those of the prophets. Pre-exilic prophets such as Amos saw it as a time when Israel in particular (and the nations) would be punished as God intervenes to defend the righteousness. Eventually the notion of a righteous remnant from Israel arose; they alone would experience the new time, after worldwide destruction on the day of the Lord. They would return to their land where they would live in a messianic kingdom (around the time of the exile we find the first references to a messianic leader), while the nations would suffer annihilation. There were, however, more universalistic conceptions in which the nations too will come to the truth (in 2 Isaiah, for example). Charles also drew attention to two passages that speak about a resurrection— Isaiah 26:1–19 and Daniel 12—with the former depicting a resurrection of the righteous and the latter of some among the righteous and wicked, both groups of whom would receive the appropriate reward. Charles concluded that the Old Testament has an eschatology that to a large extent takes its character from the conception of Yahwè. As long as his jurisdiction was conceived as limited to this life, there could be no such eschatology with reference to the individual. When at last, however, Israel reached real monotheism, the way was prepared for the moralisation of the future no less than of the present. The exile contributed to this development by making possible a truer conception of the individual. The individual, not the nation, became the religious unit. Step by step through the slow processes of the religious life, the religious thinkers of Israel were led to a moral conception of the future life and to the certainty of their share therein. These beliefs were reached, not through deductions of reason, as in Greece, but through spiritual crises deep as the human personality and wide as human life. (1355–6)

The second part of “Eschatology” deals with apocryphal and apocalyptic literature (he defined the period of their composition as 200 .. to 100 .., divided into three segments of one century each). Charles began by apologizing for not using the large amount of comparative evidence from other cultures—something he regarded as necessary—because doing so would exceed the bounds of an encyclopedia article. His procedure was to list the Jewish texts for each of the centuries and to summarize their views, century by century, regarding soul and spirit, judgment, places for the departed, resurrection, messianic kingdom, and the gentiles. There was little development in

200    ( – ) some of these categories (e.g., soul and spirit), while in others there was, e.g., in the increasingly dominant role of a messiah in the messianic kingdom. The section regarding New Testament writers (82–103) opens with general comments. Charles noted that earlier eschatological ideas are “subordinated to the central force of the Christian movement” and that “the teaching of Christ and of Christianity at last furnished a synthesis of the eschatologies of the race and the individual” (col. 1372). Because the New Testament writers received much traditional material, they could not be expected “to be free from inherited conceptions of a mechanical and highly unethical character [e.g., Hades, eternal damnation]” (1372); moreover, some writers assimilated Jesus’s basic teachings more fully than others. Charles devoted most units in the section to a survey of the New Testament books in an order meant to highlight progress in eschatology (83–101), but the last two he reserved for the development of “special conceptions.” In connection with the Synoptic Gospels, the differing understandings of Christ’s return—whether it would be soon or farther off—and the teaching of a resurrection of the righteous alone receive much of his attention. When dealing with the Revelation of John, which retains many “survivals of traditional Judaism” (1376), he treated the same topics under the particular form they take in this apocalypse. Naturally, the letters of Paul merited extensive attention. Charles thought that his letters showed an evolution: Paul started largely from Jewish ideas but transformed everything “under the influence of great fundamental Christian conceptions” (1381). Charles traced four stages, as he followed the chronological sequence of the epistles. In them Paul moved toward more consistent views about subjects such as the timing of the resurrection of the individual believer and the nature of Christ’s kingdom. The two units that focus on “special conceptions” (102–3) cover the same topics that Charles took up in connection with the apocryphal and apocalyptic writers. Only with regard to the category “soul and spirit” did he make any extended comments: he found that Paul, unlike the Old Testament authors and the other New Testament writers, works with a trichotomy—body, soul, and spirit. The weighty article on “Eschatology” demonstrates that Charles possessed in-depth knowledge not only of early Jewish texts but also of the Old and New Testaments and scholarship on them. Charles’s next book came off the press in the year 1899. It was the first volume from the Oxford years that was not a translation/commentary or edition of an ancient text. In it he gave the fullest expression to date of how he thought ideas developed in early Jewish and Christian works.

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The Context for Charles’s 1899 Book on Eschatology As noted above, Charles received permission from the publisher and editors of the Encyclopaedia Biblica to use his article “Eschatology” as the foundation for the book. The book in turn first took shape as the text for the Jowett Lectures that Charles gave in 1898–99. Appointment to the position reflects the considerable standing Charles had achieved in Oxford by this time and furnished, we may hope, some income for him. The Jowett Lectureship, which Charles was the first to hold, was instituted in memory of the famous Oxford scholar, administrator, and reformer Benjamin Jowett (1817–93). Jowett became the Regius Professor of Classics in 1855 and published translations of Plato, Aristotle, and Thucydides. He also became an enthusiastic practitioner of the higher-critical approach to the Scriptures, so that his ideas in the areas of theology and biblical studies— e.g., the Scriptures were to be examined by the same criteria as other literary texts—made him a controversial figure. Plato and Christ tended to merge into one in his thought. But he was also a Christian rationalist who became notorious for his historical and sceptical approach to the Scriptures through his contribution to the infamous Essays and Reviews of 1860.¹² The last thing he wanted an Oxford education to do was to release doctrinal bigots on the world.¹³

Among the reforms he supported was ending the religious, that is, Anglican test as a requirement for obtaining degrees. Jowett was a strong advocate of the tutorial system (he himself was a tutor for nearly thirty years) and was famous for being dedicated to his students. He thus opposed increased spending for research—something that would have changed the character of an Oxford education. He was the master of Balliol College from 1870 to 1893 and vicechancellor of the university in the years 1882–86.

¹² To it he contributed a long paper entitled “On the Interpretation of Scripture” (330–433). On p. 377 he wrote: Interpret the Scripture like any other book. There are many respects in which Scripture is unlike any other book; these will appear in the results of such an interpretation. The first step is to know the meaning, and this can only be done in the same careful and impartial way that we ascertain the meaning of Sophocles or of Plato. The volume, as we saw in the Introduction to Part 2, spawned strong reactions, whether positive or negative. ¹³ Brockliss, The University of Oxford, 398.

202    ( – )

The Book A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life in Israel, in Judaism, and in Christianity; or, Hebrew, Jewish, and Christian Eschatology from Pre-Prophetic Times till the Close of the New Testament Canon, being the Jowett Lectures for 1898–99, by R. H. Charles, DD, Professor of Biblical Greek, Trinity College, Dublin (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1899). Since A Critical History contains the text of his Jowett Lectures, Charles must have given an extended series of them.¹⁴ The work runs to 417 pages although the print is easy on the eyes, and a liberal supply of marginal notes squeezes the lines in the body of the text. In the Preface, he explained the order in which he had approached the material: “After a severe and prolonged examination of the Apocalyptic and Apocryphal literature of Judaism, I proceeded to carry my investigations backward into the Old Testament and forward into the New, and in both cases, I hope, with fresh and fruitful results” (v). He followed this statement with a confession of inadequacy: “I am painfully aware, however, of the unsatisfactory treatment of some of the books of the New Testament, such as the Apocalypse,¹⁵ and of the need of a deeper and fuller treatment of the Messianic hope of the Nation in the Old Testament” (v). Charles insisted that one had to study material not only in its textual but also in its historical context, that is, its place in the history or development of religious thinking. “As in nature, so in religion, God reveals himself in the course of slow evolution” (vii).¹⁶ As we will see, he believed that divine revelation did not stop with the New Testament but continued to the present.

¹⁴ The Times of London for October 8, 1898 (35,642, p. 5) announced that Charles would deliver the first Jowett Lecture at the Passmore Edwards Settlement at 5:15 on October 25 (see also the issue for October 22 [35,654, p. 14]). On January 31, 1899 (35,740, p. 6) the newspaper reported: Professor R. H. Charles will deliver his second lecture on “The Doctrine of a Future Life in the New Testament” at the Passmore Edwards Settlement to-day at 5 15. Having dealt in his first lecture with the teaching of the Synoptic Gospels, the lecturer will proceed in the two next lectures to deal with the subject as it is presented in the Apocalypse, the Gospel of St. John, and the Epistles. The concluding lecture on February 7 will deal with the teaching of St. Paul. The lectures mentioned in The Times are ones on New Testament books, possibly only a selection of his lectures. ¹⁵ In 1920 he would atone for the perceived deficiency with his two-volume commentary on Revelation. ¹⁶ Charles included a curious note in his Preface: “A learned book on the same subject as the present work has recently been published by Principal Salmond. Since, however, our method and treatment have taken different lines, I have refrained throughout from referring to the work of this well-known scholar” (vii). The publication was by Stewart Dingwall Fordyce Salmond (1838–1905) of the University of Aberdeen, The Christian Doctrine of Immortality (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1895).

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The book follows the same outline as the “Eschatology” article, but it does not arrange the material in three units; rather it spreads the contents over eleven chapters. One might infer that the eleven reflect the number of lectures he gave, but that seems unlikely since the chapters are disproportionate in length. So, for example, ch. 3 has seventy pages, while ch. 4 has nine. The first four chapters cover the Old Testament material, the next four the apocryphal and apocalyptic texts, and the final three the New Testament. The text in the book is more expansive than the encyclopedia article but hews closely to it otherwise. Charles supplied some new evidence, and further expanded the article by quoting scriptural passages only referenced in the former, by presenting in standard font size paragraphs in small print in the encyclopedia, and by adding and enlarging footnotes. The book retains a hint of the original oral setting as well. On the very first page Charles referred to “these lectures”; elsewhere, however, he spoke of “the following chapters” (e.g., p. 4). He entitled the first chapter “Eschatology of the Individual in the Old Testament Prior to the Origin of the Belief in Immortality” (pp. 1–50). The introductory paragraphs are new compared to the encyclopedia article and set up the project for the Old Testament section. He stated that “we can impart some degree of coherence and intelligibleness to the subject by considering the development of the conception of God in Israel. On this conception hinges ultimately every other conception of the nation” (2). He illustrated his point with an example: How comes it that in the second century .. the conception of the afterworld is mainly moral and retributive, whereas from the fourth century back to Moses’ time it is non-moral, being in fact a piece of pure Semitic heathenism.¹⁷ This change of conception is mainly due to monotheism, which, partially apprehended by the great prophets of the eighth century, and more fully by those of the sixth, was at last carried to its logical results. No part of the Universe created by God, religious men felt and religious men reasoned, could be withdrawn from His influence. Hence in due course the rejection of the heathen Semitic view of Sheol for one that was moral and retributive. Till, however, monotheism was the accepted belief of the nation, this transformation of Sheol was impossible. (2–3)

God revealed himself to Israel over time, ever considering the people’s capacity to comprehend what he told them. ¹⁷ The sentence is clearly a question, but in the book a period follows it.

204    ( – ) The chapter falls into two major parts: I. Preprophetic Yahwism (= from Moses to the eighth century), and II. Monotheistic Period of Yahwism (that is, prophetic Yahwism), with the latter topic containing three subheadings: Eschatology of the Individual, Eschatology of the Nation, Synthesis of these two Eschatologies in the fourth century. Charles considered Moses the founder of Yahwism, yet even he had to appeal to the people’s previous beliefs to convince them. Once Yahweh became the God of the nation, the religion and history of the people were inseparably connected. . . . the unfailing inspirations of the former so influenced the march of the latter that Israel’s spiritual development is absolutely unique in the world: for despite frequent halts and retrogressions, its advance was steadily from strength to strength and truth unto truth, till at last it was consummated in the final revelation of the personality of the Christ. (8)

Yahweh was the war God of Israel and went with them into battle; but he was also the God of justice and purity. Early Israel acknowledged that the gods of the nations existed, and certain of their unethical traits were attributed to Israel’s God (e.g., irrational outbursts of anger, identification with the concerns of the nation). Yet, “[w]hile the heathen gods always remained on the same moral level as their worshipers, it was otherwise in Israel. To serve Yahwè aright involved spiritual effort and personal sacrifice, and consequently led to growth in righteousness” (15). He concluded that “the essential superiority of Yahwism to the neighboring Semitic religions lay not in its moral code, in which indeed it was unquestionably superior, but in the righteous character of Yahwè which was progressively revealed to His servants” (15–16). As for the monotheistic period, the eighth- and seventh-century prophets taught that Israel’s relation with God was ethical—he chose them to achieve his good purposes, and these he could accomplish without them, should the need arise. With religion and nation separated, destruction of the nation would not entail the end of the religion but rather a turn to the individual as the “religious unit” (17)—something that Charles thought prepared for Christianity. It also led him to make one of his familiar negative comments about post-70 .. Judaism. He argued that Jeremiah’s conception of monotheism saw the one God as shaping the destinies of Israel and the nations, while that of Ezekiel was a doctrine for Israel but not for the nations who had no share in its benefits. “Such a false conception of Yahwè’s relation to the nations in due time reacted on Judaistic monotheism, and explains in large measure its subsequent barrenness” (17).

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This is the point where Charles introduced material from the beginning of the encyclopedia article. In speaking about the eschatology of the individual he inserted, at times verbatim, the sections about ancestor worship (including the subjects of Sheol, soul and body—paralleling the contents through section 21 in the article). The second chapter (51–80; see sections 22–37 in “Eschatology”) bears the title “Eschatology of the Individual—Rise of the Doctrine of an Individual Immortality.” Following the custom in lecture series, Charles first summarized the preceding address before moving on to the new subject. He also spoke about eliminating the “false life in Sheol” from Israelite religion and introducing something innovative: as it destroyed the false view, Yahwism was steadily developing in the individual the consciousness of new life and a new worth through immediate communion with God. Now it is from the consciousness of this new life, and not from the moribund existence in Sheol, that the doctrine of a blessed future—whether of the soul only immediately after death, or of the soul and body through a resurrection at some later date—was developed in Israel. (53)

He noted that there were four “heralds and preludings” of a doctrine of a blessed future life, two of which did not prove productive for Jewish developments—the creation of humanity in God’s image and the tree of life (54–5). The two more influential ones were the translations of Enoch and Elijah and belief in the power of the Lord to bring the soul back from Sheol (56). After these preliminaries, Charles inserted an expanded form of the relevant material from the article, especially regarding individual responsibility in Jeremiah and Ezekiel (with Psalms and Proverbs) and the resulting personal relation between the Lord and the individual, not the nation. Questions about that view occupied the writers of Job and Ecclesiastes. The idea of individual immortality arises in Job and becomes more distinct in Psalms 49 and 73. It is an idea that would be replaced by one regarding a resurrection to life in a messianic kingdom. The material in the second chapter led naturally to the topic of the third, “The Eschatology of the Nation and the Synthesis of the Two Eschatologies in the Doctrine of the Resurrection. Doctrine of the Soul and the Future Life among the Greeks” (81–151). Here he takes up, as in the article but in fuller form¹⁸ and

¹⁸ A prominent case is his treatment of resurrection in Isaiah 26 and Daniel 12.

206    ( – ) with some modifications in order, the varying concepts of the day of the Lord.¹⁹ A summary statement here lacks an exact parallel in the article: Thus, when the doctrine of the blessed immortality of the faithful is connected with that of the coming Messianic kingdom, the separate eschatologies of the individual and of the nation issue finally in their synthesis: the righteous individual, no less than the righteous nation, will participate in the Messianic kingdom for the righteous dead of Israel will rise to share therein. (125, italics in the original)

The last section of the chapter (“Doctrine of the Soul and Future Life among the Greeks,” 137–51) is new relative to the article. In fact, in the encyclopedia article Charles referred the readers to the book for the information (1356, n. 1). He concluded that while some Greek thinkers accepted the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, “an immeasurable gulf ” divides even Plato’s view from Jewish and Christian teaching (150). The brief fourth chapter (152–61) contains a “Summary of Old Testament Teaching on Individual Conceptions.” It begins with words drawn from section 51 (a review) in the article; to them he added a positive note. The eternal life, the life in God, cannot admit of death as its goal, and to the apprehension of this truth Israel’s saints rose through first realising that life to be the one supreme fact of the present, before the necessities of their spiritual experience forced them to postulate its continuance in the future. Thus in fact they reasoned: he that hath God hath eternal life. (153)

The remainder of the chapter is given over to summaries of Old Testament teachings about soul and spirit, judgment, heaven, Sheol, Gehenna, the pit, resurrection, the messianic kingdom, and gentiles. Chapters 5 through 8 cover the eschatologies in the apocryphal and apocalyptic literature, with ch. 5 taking up the works from the second century .., ch. 6 those from the first century .., and chs. 7 and 8 those from the first century .. Chapter 5 (162–99; see “Eschatology,” sections 57–63)²⁰ opens with two books, Ecclesiasticus and Tobit, which showed no signs of development in

¹⁹ In “Eschatology,” 1348 (section 35), when writing about the popular conception of the day of the Lord, Charles said that it was not ethical but “national.” In the book, the text reads that it was not ethical but “natural” (85; in both cases the italics are in the originals). Presumably the word in the book is a misprint. ²⁰ In “Eschatology,” Charles had included section 52 in which he wrote about the necessity of using comparative data in studying religious ideas but omitted because it would have become too long. He supplied a footnote (col. 1356, n. 1) referring to the book where such subjects are addressed. Other than

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eschatology.²¹ From them, as in the article, he moved to the writings of the Hasids or Asidaeans (who were forerunners of the Pharisees), a group on whose history he supplied additional information. In the book he added some positive comments about them: To this comparatively small body of men was entrusted for some decades the defence, confirmation, and development of the religious truths that were to save the world. How nobly and with what prodigal self-sacrifice they proved themselves worthy guardians of this sacred trust is told for all time in the Enoch and Maccabean literature, and set forth in pregnant strength and simplicity in the New Testament book of the Hebrews (xi. 35–9), which describes them as those “of whom the world was not worthy.”²² Through their agency the spiritual aspirations of the Old Testament few became in the course of a century the unshakeable convictions of Palestinian Judaism. (168)

Also new in the book is a section distinguishing “apocalyptic” from prophecy, out of which “apocalyptic” arose. Charles highlighted the role played by the problem of unfulfilled predictions and the centrality of Ezekiel in the move from prophecy to “apocalyptic.” In Ezekiel, the word of God is written, and the role of the prophet becomes mechanical. And as the personal element disappears in the conception of the prophetic calling, so it tends to disappear in the prophetic view of history, and the future comes to be conceived, not as the organic result of the present under divine guidance, but as mechanically determined from the beginning in the counsels of God, and as arranged under certain artificial categories of time. (170)

A major non-fulfilled prophecy was the arrival of the messianic kingdom; Jeremiah, who predicted it would come in seventy years, provides a good example. When those years passed and no kingdom emerged, the problem was solved in two early apocalypses, Daniel and the Animal Apocalypse (1 Enoch 85–90), by reinterpreting the number “70 (years).” Charles added the extra section about Greek views regarding the immortality of the soul and a briefer unit (pp. 134–6) on Mazdean religion, his treatments of the comparative material are found only in footnotes in the book. ²¹ In the article he said that Ecclesiasticus is “purely conservative” (1356). In the book he wrote that it is “uncompromisingly tory” (162)—perhaps a light touch to entertain the audience for the lecture. ²² These words from Hebrews 11:38 served as the text for three sermons on John Wycliffe that Charles would preach at Westminster and publish in his The Resurrection of Man (1929).

208    ( – ) to this discussion material paralleling what he had written in “Apocalyptic Literature” (214–15). The apocalyptic writer despairs of the present, hides behind a pseudonym, entertains a wider view of history, and has a deterministic understanding of it. Such preliminary comments introduced the survey of the texts from the second century .. As in the article, he first listed the texts (in the book he removed Judith) and treated them under the heading “General Eschatological Development in the Second Century ..” But rather than placing the title “The theodicies of the several writers” over his discussion of the individual works, as in the article, he considered them under the rubric “Eschatological Systems of the various Writers of the Second Century ..” In both publications he ended the unit with a study of “Special Conceptions.” The survey of texts proceeds in the order of the article and is distinguished from it mostly by the more expansive treatment of the topics. This is particularly the case for 1 Enoch 1–36: it is simply mentioned in the article (with a reference to section 27 of “Apocalyptic Literature”), while in the book it receives treatment that draws from material in “Apocalyptic Literature” and from his The Book of Enoch. Here he quotes 1 Enoch 22:1–13, with its description of the abodes of four classes of spirits/souls of the dead, two for different kinds of righteous folk and two for different sorts of evil ones (184–6; Charles said the chapter describes Sheol). He wrote: From this view of Sheol the chief heathen features have disappeared. We have thus here a vast advance on the conception of Daniel. Instead of being a region where existence was at its lowest possible ebb, and the presence of moral distinctions was inconceivable, it has now become a place where there is a vigorous conscious existence, where ethical considerations are paramount, and the soul’s lot is determined on moral grounds, and on moral grounds alone. (187)

But there was no room for moral progress or regress in this Sheol; one’s fate was determined at death. “Hence, at its best, Sheol thus conceived is only a place of petrified moralities and suspended graces” (187). Three of the kinds of souls in 1 Enoch 22 will experience a resurrection: the evil not punished during their lives will be raised for their ultimate punishment,²³ and the two righteous kinds will rise with bodies and enjoy life in the earthly messianic kingdom. ²³ The other class of evil souls are those who suffered punishment during their lives. They apparently remain in this place forever. There are two classes of righteous ones, though they are not clearly defined; perhaps they are those martyred on earth and those who were not (cf. Charles, The Book of Enoch [1893], 94–5).

   ( – )

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Coverage of the second century closes with surveys of 1 Enoch 83–90, especially the Animal Apocalypse in chs. 85–90, and the oldest apocalyptic sections of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. The unit regarding “Special Conceptions” explains the same concepts as the article did and in the same order. The sixth chapter takes up the works from the first century .. (200–241, article, sections 64–70). They are the same as in the article, with the exception of Judith which Charles moved from the second to the first century. His summary of the general eschatological development in this century closely reflects what he wrote in the article. When he turned to the systems in the individual texts, however, he made changes. The article offered few comments about 1 Enoch 91–104 (section 65), but the book treats it on pp. 203–12. One new topic in it is retribution, specifically the relation between wealth and righteousness. While Ezekiel taught that a person could appeal to wealth as proof of his righteousness, the writer of 1 Enoch 91–104 believed that wealth deludes its possessors into such thoughts. He found in the booklet a debate with Sadducees regarding the fates of the wicked and righteous, and he quoted several sections from it. He ended the account with some words of warm appreciation for 1 Enoch 91–104: We cannot part from this book without confessing how nobly it maintains the cause of goodness in the face of triumphant evil, how unhesitatingly it concedes that this world gives its best to the unrighteous and the sinner, and that godliness can find no stay or encouragement therein. Yet though the lot of the latter is thus one of contumely and rebuke and shame, they are not for one moment to regret their high calling, but to be steadfast and hopeful; for the day of their glorification is at hand. (212)

The section on 1 Enoch 37–71 expands on its remarkable picture of a messianic figure, while in the few lines devoted to 1 Maccabees (little more than in the article) he noted that, since the author was a Sadducee, it lacked an eschatology. Charles divided his study of the first century .. works into two parts, examining those dating between 1 and 60 in ch. 7 (242–68), and those from between 60 and 100 in ch. 8 (269–305). Nevertheless, he listed all of them at the beginning of ch. 7 (Jubilees is still among them).²⁴ ²⁴ On p. 245 he dated Jubilees “before 10 ..” He gave it no specific first-century date in the article (section 72).

210    ( – ) In ch. 7 the unit regarding “General Eschatological Development of the First Century ..” closely parallels the section in “Eschatology” (section 71). Those on Jubilees and the Assumption of Moses are likewise much like the ones in the article, except that Charles had space in the book to quote lengthy passages. Before he turned to the Hellenistic texts, however, he added an introductory section where he listed and explained the “chief fundamental doctrines of Alexandrian Judaism, as distinct from Palestinean [sic]” (252): 1. “The eternity of matter, and its essentially evil nature” 2. “the doctrine of the soul’s preexistence is taught, not, however, as it appears in the Platonic philosophy, but in such a way as to be consistent with monotheism” 3. “Souls enter immediately after death on their final award, whether of blessedness or torment.” (252–3) Charles placed the books in a different order than he had in the article. In the book he put the Wisdom of Solomon before Philo and Slavonic Enoch, whereas in the article it follows them. The treatments of the books are, however, much the same but with quoted passages rather than allusions to them. The eighth chapter is devoted to the remaining first-century works. In writing about the Apocalypse of Baruch, Charles used content and language from his own book and in this way, besides quoting texts, expanded the shorter section in the article (78). However, between his accounts of its A sections (the apocalypses) and its B units, Charles inserted his verdict on the ethical picture of the messianic kingdom in the former: But, on the other hand, and this criticism applies to all Jewish representations of the Messianic kingdom, but particularly to the later, there is no adequate account given of the cause of the spiritual transformation. This transformation is brought about catastrophically and in the main mechanically. By the eternal fiat of the Almighty, sin is banished at once and forever from the hearts of the members of the Messianic kingdom. This catastrophic change is in itself at variance with all the spiritual experience of mankind. Godlike character cannot come from without as an external gift, nor can it be won in a moment, but can only be the slow result of the spiritual travail of the human heart in communion with the divine. (276–7)

   ( – )

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He carried on in this homiletic tone for another paragraph in which he criticized other aspects of the view of the kingdom. Banishing all but a few people from it is the thought of men whose notions of perfection were mechanical, and whose chief aspiration was not the salvation of mankind at large but that of a few individuals, whose future comfort and blessedness could only be secured through the local separation of the good and the evil. But a goodness which can only maintain itself through local separation from evil cannot be called divine. (277)

The chapter includes shorter considerations of the Book of Baruch and of the writings of Josephus. The former barely found a place in the article where the reader is referred to the encyclopedia article on the Apocrypha and note is taken of one passage in it (1368, section 78). As it has very little of an eschatological nature, it merits one short paragraph in the book. Josephus too receives scant attention, as in the article. The remaining pages in the eighth chapter provide “Development of Special Conceptions” in all the books treated in both chs. 7 and 8. Here he nearly repeated what he had written in “Eschatology,” with some minor changes of phrasing and a little extra material regarding resurrection. Charles added a bibliography for chs. 5–8 (p. 305). He noted that the “bulk of the preceding four chapters is mainly based on various books edited by the present writer and referred to in the text” (305). He then supplied a list of titles by other authors that the reader could consult; he also included his articles entitled “Eschatology” in Hasting’s Dictionary 1.741–9²⁵ and in the Encyclopaedia Biblica. The final three chapters take up the New Testament teachings on eschatology. The ninth (“General Introduction—the Synoptic Gospels”) offers an enlarged form of the introductory section in the article (1372–3, section 82). As he had argued in both the article and the earlier parts of the book, the synthesis of national and individual eschatologies was broken up in the last centuries .. in favor of the individual. By the Founder of Christianity, however, the synthesis of the two hopes was established in a universal form finally and forever. The true Messianic kingdom begins on earth, and will be consummated in heaven; it is not temporary, but eternal; it is not limited to one people, but embraces the ²⁵ The article is entitled “Eschatology of the Apocryphal and Apocalyptic Literature.”

212    ( – ) righteous of all nations and of all times. It forms a divine society in which the position and significance of each member is determined by his endowments, and his blessedness conditioned by the blessedness of the whole. (308–9)

He reiterated at greater length that the New Testament preserves survivals of unworthy elements from Old Testament thinking. They should not be accepted by the church because they are inconsistent with “the Christian fundamental doctrines of God and Christ” (309). In the pages devoted to eschatology in the Synoptic gospels (306–44), Charles had more to say about the kingdom of God, both present and future, than the few sentences in the article. At first Jesus believed the kingdom would come during his earthly life, but as acceptance of him turned to rejection he realized it would have to be introduced by God himself or his own return. The next three topics he treated (second coming, judgment, resurrection) were the three he discussed in the article. He fleshed out the two pictures, in the one case of a kingdom coming suddenly, without warning, and, in the other, of its arrival amid great signs (a little textual surgery on Mark 13—excision of fifteen verses—took care of the conflict of views in the chapter). Charles held that the apocalypse in Mark 13 was originally a Jewish work, written in 67–68 .., after which it was adapted by a Christian writer. Christ himself taught that his return would be unexpected. Charles, as he had in the article, took pains to explain that there was really no error (or at least it was inconsequential) in Jesus’s thinking the consummation would come in his time and in the future. “But the error is not material. It is in reality inseparable from all true prophecy. For the latter, so far as relates to fulfilment, is always conditioned by the course of human development” (331). In this the prediction differed from apocalyptic in which all such things are fixed from the beginning. Chapter 10 (345–78) centers on eschatology in the remaining New Testament books (with a few exceptions) other than Paul’s letters. Charles opened with a defense of the order in which he was treating them—neither in canonical nor in chronological sequence. His aim was to show the process of transforming the Jewish heritage of beliefs. The Revelation of John is the most “Judaistic” and is thus handled first. Of the book he wrote: “It is admittedly a conglomerate of ill-according elements. The ripest products of Christian thought and experience lie side by side with the most unadulterated Judaism” (347; for example, the teaching about the millennium in Revelation 20 does not to belong to “the sphere of Christian doctrine” ([350]). The four topics he examined are the same as the four in the article, with each elaborated to a greater or lesser degree. He again studied Jude and 2 Peter together but in

   ( – )

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reverse of their sequence in the article. James, Hebrews, and the Johannine texts follow, just as in the article. For James and Hebrews he largely reproduced the text from “Eschatology,” while for the Johannine literature he covered the three topics of the encyclopedia article (in discussing the resurrection, he inserted an examination of John 5:28–9 which he thought had to be excised as contrary to the teachings elsewhere in the fourth gospel [370–1]). The paragraphs regarding Petrine eschatology are likewise largely a reworking of the parallel sections in the article. The final chapter contains a study of Paul’s eschatology and a “Special Conceptions” section for the entire New Testament. Once more the epistles are arranged to show a development of the apostle’s thought in four stages, as he moved from his Jewish heritage to a fuller Christian conception. It is difficult to find much that Charles changed from his article in these sections, apart from a little reordering and re-phrasing. The same may be said about the “Special Conceptions” units; they echo the article apart from a few points such as addition of a short section comparing Paul’s and Philo’s psychologies (414–15). At the end (417) Charles added a bibliography for the New Testament and included his “Eschatology” essay at the end of the list. A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life in Israel, in Judaism, and in Christianity; or, Hebrew, Jewish, and Christian Eschatology from PreProphetic Times till the Close of the New Testament Canon, being the Jowett Lectures for 1898–99, by R. H. Charles, D.D., D. Litt., Speaker’s Lecturer in Biblical Studies, Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, Fellow of the British Academy; second edition, revised and enlarged (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1913). Charles dated the “Preface to Second Edition” to January, 1913, thus strongly suggesting the book preceded another major publication of that year, his The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament. There is no need to provide a full survey of the second edition, since in it the reader encounters largely the same text and rubrics as in the first. Even the marginal notes are virtually unchanged. Charles wrote in the “Preface to Second Edition” that he had expanded the original by sixty pages (viii). The additional material consists mostly of enlarging a few sections of the 1899 book on the basis of the scholarship he had published in the intervening years, especially his 1902 translation and commentary on Jubilees, the 1906 text of and 1912 commentary on 1 Enoch, his two 1908 volumes on the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, his 1912 Fragments of a Zadokite Work, and The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament of 1913 (he referred to it [e.g., 302 n. 1]), though it must have been published a few months after this

214    ( – ) second edition. Naturally, he updated the bibliographies and some of the notes with reference to these as well as to articles he had composed after 1899.²⁶ Whenever in the second edition he quoted from Jubilees or 1 Enoch, he of course used the more recent form of his translations. Often the changes from the first to the second edition were made such that the page layout of the original was maintained. Presumably, in this way the publisher could reuse plates from 1899 with minimal alterations. One minor change made several times was to insert the word “Appendix” before the sections entitled “Development of Special Conceptions” (in chs. V, VI, VIII, and X).²⁷ This was a better way to indicate that the units were somewhat unlike the others. Another alteration was changing the designations of a few ancient works; for example, the Book of Enoch is now 1 Enoch, and the Apocalypse of Baruch is 2 Baruch. In “Preface to Second Edition” Charles summarized the relation between the 1899 and 1913 versions in this way: In this Edition many slips and inaccuracies of the first edition have been corrected. The sections dealing with some of the authorities have been wholly rewritten, the significance and data of which were unknown on the issue of the first edition. But these changes and additions, which amount to sixty pages, have not affected the main conclusions arrived at in the first edition and the lines of eschatological development traced therein. (viii)

Among the additions and changes in the second edition are these: 1. In ch. V (The Eschatology of Apocryphal and Apocalyptic Literature during the Second Century ..), the first edition (indicated below by 1. followed by page number[s]) briefly discussed the origins of apocalyptic in prophecy and also pointed out the essential ways in which the two differed (1.168–75). Charles placed in this location in the new edition a section called “Prophecy and Apocalyptic.” The result was that eight pages in the 1899 volume grew to twelve (173–84) in the second edition. About this material he wrote: ²⁶ Charles was open about his use of earlier materials. For example, at 164 n. 1 he mentioned use of an article in Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible, and at the beginning of his bibliography for ch. VIII he wrote: “The bulk of the preceding four chapters is mainly based on various books edited by the present writer and referred to in the text” (361). ²⁷ The words “—An Appendix to the Preceding Chapters” were placed after the title of the very short chapter IV (compare 152 in the 1899 edition with 157 in the 1913 volume), perhaps also to call attention to the difference between it and the other chapters.

   ( – )

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The most important addition in the present work is that which contains the hitherto unpublished results of the author as to the nature of Apocalyptic, its relation to Prophecy, and the causes which on the one hand forced the Jewish seers to issue their visions under the cloak of pseudonymity, once and for all after-time, and which on the other hand led the Christian seers to fling aside this disguise and come forward in their own persons with the disclosures entrusted to them by God. (viii)

Here Charles explained first how prophecy and apocalyptic were “essentially at one” (2.174) and then how they diverged. As for agreements, he listed (1) the channels through which prophets and apocalyptists were able to discern and express God’s will (visions and trances, an elevated form of spiritual experience in which the soul is in direct contact with the deity and which is described in symbolic language, allegory) and (2) the fact that each had an eschatology. Those eschatologies, however, differ. The eschatology of the prophets dealt only with the destinies of Israel, as a nation, and the destinies of the Gentile nations, but it had no message of light or comfort for the individual beyond the grave. For all men ultimately, whether of Israel or of the Gentiles, Sheol, the unblessed abode of shades, was the final and everlasting habitation. (2.178)

He considered this view “heathen” and declared that all advances on it were attributable to apocalyptic. There were four such advances: the doctrine of a blessed future life, the doctrine of a new heaven and a new earth, the doctrine of a catastrophic end of this world, and the development in apocalyptic of a Semitic philosophy of religion dealing with the past, present and future. 2. Somewhat farther along, Charles expanded two pages (1.173–4) to seventeen (189–205) in the new version. After his discussion of unfulfilled prophecy (1.173) and in place of a unit arguing that “Prophecy still believes that this world is God’s world, and that in this world His goodness and truth will yet be justified” (1.173–4, where the sentence is italicized), he inserted a section that takes up several topics. He first attended to the manner in which the apocalyptists studied the story of creation and turned it into an eschatological expectation (e.g., the days of creation prefigure the duration of world history). The next section makes the point that apocalyptic is “essentially ethical” (2.191). In a

216    ( – ) third he argued that there were two forms of pre-Christian Pharisaism— the apocalyptic and the legalistic—with the former being the predecessor of Christianity and the latter of Talmudic Judaism. In both types the law was central, though as they developed they diverged and became antagonistic. Finally, he explained why apocalyptic, unlike prophecy, was usually pseudonymous (due to the influence of the law and closure of the prophetic canon). At this juncture, he returned to the text of the original edition. 3. 1.176, which lists the “authorities” for the second century .., underwent two changes in the second edition. He added Jubilees to the list, since he had argued in his 1902 volume that it dated from the late second century, whereas in the first edition he included it among the first century .. witnesses (1.243). The second change is that in the first edition, after the title “Test. xii Patriarchs,” he had added “—Some of its apocalyptic sections.” In the new edition he referred simply to “Test. xii Patriarchs” (2.207), because he had concluded that the original form of the work was written in the late second century .. 4. The unit devoted to the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs in ch. V (1.193–4) became much longer (2.224–34) in light of his research for his two books of 1908. In addition, because he now considered Jubilees a second century composition, he included a section on it in this chapter (2.235–40). It differs from the unit he devoted to it in a later chapter (VII) in 1.245–9 in that it describes the second-century context to which the writer responded by defending the law against the eroding effects of Hellenism on Jewish practices such as circumcision and Sabbath. The changes arising from inclusion of the Testaments and Jubilees here, especially the latter, can be seen in his use of them in the paragraphs on Resurrection (1.198; 2.244–5), Messianic Kingdom, and Messiah (1.198–9; 2.244–6).²⁸ 5. To the list of authorities for the first century .. (for the second edition he defined this “century” as extending from 104–1 ..) in ch. VI, Charles added the Fragments of a Zadokite Work. He was unaware of its existence in 1899, since it had not yet been published. He inserted references to it in the various units of the chapter, while pp. 278–87 (taken verbatim from his edition of the work) deal specifically with it.

²⁸ Although he removed the Jubilees section from ch. VII—on texts from the first century ..—and transferred it two chapters earlier in the 1913 edition, in a few spots he forgot to delete references to it in units devoted to the development of ideas in the first century .. (e.g., 2.299, 300).

   ( – )

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6. In ch. VII he enlarged the section about the Wisdom of Solomon (1.254–8; 2.306–12) by dealing with its treatment of broad principles, its contradictory statements, and its position regarding Jews and Gentiles. Perhaps the publisher was no longer able to make the change when Charles noted a problem regarding Wisdom, but in the 1913 volume, as in the 1899 edition, Charles listed it among the authorities for the first century .. In a note to it in the list he wrote: “This book should have been included in the first century .. literature” (2.298). He left the section about it in ch. VII, though it should have been in the preceding one.²⁹ 7. Also in ch. VII, he added a lengthy footnote about 4 Ezra. He thought the reader might like to know how it compared with 2 Baruch and explained the situation in n. 1 (compare 1.283 and 2.337–8). In the same context, he supplied an extra note (2.338–9) about Box’s commentary on 4 Ezra and his division of the sources in it. So, the section on 4 Ezra is longer in the second edition because of these two footnotes, but the text itself is the same as in the first edition. 8. In ch. X (the second of the chapters on the New Testament books) he offered some extra introductory material about the Revelation of John (e.g., why it was not pseudonymous) and noted that he hoped to publish in the next year the fruit of his long-term work on the Apocalypse (2.403–5).³⁰ The 1899 version has an Index of Names and Subjects, while the 1913 edition has an Index of Subjects only. In 1913 Charles anticipated that readers would expect him to react to Albert Schweitzer’s views on eschatology. His Von Reimarus zu Wrede: Eine Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung (1906) had appeared in English as The Quest of the Historical Jesus, translated by W. Montgomery (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1910) and had aroused strong feelings. In the preface to the second edition of 1913, Charles was utterly dismissive of the famous scholar: “Since Schweitzer’s Eschatological studies show no knowledge of original documents and hardly any of first-hand works on the documents, and since

²⁹ He may have been influenced by Samuel Holmes’s dating of the Wisdom of Solomon to 50–30 .. for the first part (chs. 1–10) and 30 ..–10 .. for the second (11–19) in Charles’s The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, 1.520–1. ³⁰ His Studies in the Apocalypse also appeared in 1913, but his commentary on Revelation was not to be published until 1920, and his Schweich Lectures on the Apocalypse followed two years later.

218    ( – ) further they make no fresh contribution to the subject, no notice is taken of him in this edition” (viii).³¹

Reviews The first edition of A Critical History elicited a number of reviews. The unnamed author in the Athenaeum number 3779, March 31, 1900, p. 392 (a triple-column page) appreciated the appearance of the book. The theme chosen is one of the most difficult and intricate in the whole range of theological science, but the clearness of treatment and lightness of touch which characterize the book throughout enable the reader to pass pleasantly through the various stages of a long and exhaustive investigation. The title page is probably the most cumbrous part of the whole book.

The reviewer entertained some doubts about the way in which Charles traced the history of individual and national eschatology in the Old Testament, but in the apocryphal and apocalyptic literature Charles was in an area where “his mastery over their strange and varied contents is acknowledged by all.” But here too there was room for criticism: “It appears to us that Dr. Charles might with great advantage have dealt more fully with the marked differences between the Pharisaic and Sadducean schools of thought in this part of the book.” The writer closed his review by noting that the whole subject might be approached in a different manner and from other points of view. Yet he added that Charles had supplied what he intended to give: “a scholarly and connected attempt to deal with the historical development of eschatological doctrine from the earliest Biblical times down to the close of the New Testament canon.” In The New World: A Quarterly Review of Religion, Ethics and Theology 9, 35 (September 1900) 593–5, C. H. Toy of Harvard University offered an evaluation. After some descriptive remarks and a note acknowledging that Charles was “a recognized authority” in Jewish apocalyptic literature, he observed: “A special merit of the work lies in its full treatment of the Apocrypha and its exhibition of the organic connection between the New Testament and the immediately preceding literature” (593). He took exception to some of what Charles said about the ‫( נפש‬nephesh) in the Old Testament ³¹ For more on Charles’s reactions to Schweitzer, see the section on his address to the 1910 Church Conference in Part 2 Chapter 9.

   ( – )

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and declared that in it the soul is not said to die. He also opposed the inferences Charles drew from Psalms 49 and 73: But apart from the fact that the Hebrew text is here corrupt and the rendering of the Revised Version highly improbable if not impossible, the view that Heaven is the abode of the pious dead is found nowhere else in the Old Testament, and is hardly possible for any pre-Maccabean period. (593–4)

He was very positive about the later sections of the book. “It is unnecessary to say that his presentation of the eschatology of the Apocryphal and Pseudepigraphic books is full and distinct, and the same is true of his treatment of the New Testament” (594). At the end of his review Toy stated: “The present notice leaves unmentioned a great number of special points of interest. No such collection of the facts of Biblical eschatology is to be found elsewhere. The book should be in the hands of all students of the subject” (595). Milton S. Terry reviewed A Critical History in the American Journal of Theology (4 (1900) 819–21). He opened by writing that “The author of this volume has a well-earned reputation in the field of pseudepigraphic literature, and any new contribution to religious thought coming from his pen is sure to command the attention of scholars” (819). He gave an overview of the contents and, like the other reviewers, found chs. V–VIII on the noncanonical texts to be especially noteworthy. They “constitute perhaps the most valuable portion of the whole. The author here appropriates largely from his own previous works, but furnishes a comprehensive outline of the subject not easily obtained elsewhere” (820). He found the chapters on the New Testament “less satisfactory,” but the treatment of Paul’s eschatology was “comprehensively and admirably presented” (820). Terry at the end offered a general assessment. There is large room for differences of opinion in the details of a work so comprehensive as this. The dates assigned to the different books and sections of books are in not a few cases open to question. In many instances we think the author draws inferences and conclusions which are not fairly warranted by the sources referred to. The analysis of certain parts of the New Testament, and the removal of important texts out of their connection, will be regarded by many as arbitrary and fanciful. But the work as a whole is one of the most important and valuable extant contributions to the subject of eschatology. (820–1)

220    ( – ) As the nineteenth century ended, Charles could look back on a most successful decade of publication in Oxford. The beginning of the twentieth century saw the arrival of his next edition of an early text, the Ascension of Isaiah, which presented new kinds of problems for the experienced editor to solve.

Chapter 7 The Ascension of Isaiah We have seen that Charles’s publications in 1898 and 1899 consisted of dictionary or encyclopedia articles, some very large in scope, and his A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life, the published form of his Jowett Lectures. In the years that followed he continued as Professor of Biblical Greek in Dublin (until 1906) and resumed his work of editing ancient texts. It was also in this period that he was first named to the post of Select Preacher, Dublin (1900); he held the same position in 1902 and 1903.¹ To be a select preacher was to have one’s name on a list of approved Anglican clergy who could be called upon to preach in a university church or chapel if, for some reason, a fellow was unable to occupy the pulpit at the service. The appointment is the most concrete evidence that Charles functioned as a priest during his Oxford period. After a three-year hiatus, Charles returned to textual publication when he issued his study of the Ascension of Isaiah.

The Contents of the Ascension of Isaiah The Ascension of Isaiah differs from the works that Charles had analyzed to date—in its existing form, it is Christian, although it contains Jewish elements. Even on first glance one can see that it consists of two distinct parts: chs. 1–5 depict a time in the twenty-sixth year of King Hezekiah of Judah when the monarch summoned his son Manasseh and the prophet Isaiah who was accompanied by his son Josab. Isaiah predicted that Manasseh would do evil and torture him to death. All of this would eventually take place, with Beliar (= Belial, a Satan-like figure) misleading Manasseh into all sorts of crimes. Following the interview with the king, Isaiah withdrew to Bethlehem and later to a mountain in the desert where other prophets came to him (2:7–11). After two years their hideout was betrayed by the false prophet Belchira. He charged ¹ Merton College Register 1900–1964, With Notices of Some Older Surviving Members (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1964) 76.

R. H. Charles: A Biography. James C. VanderKam, Oxford University Press. © James C. VanderKam 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192869289.003.0009

222    (–) Isaiah with opposing Moses: Moses said that no one could look at God and survive (Exodus 33:20, and Ascension of Isaiah 2:12; 3:1–10), but Isaiah reported that he had seen God (Isaiah 6:1) and lived to tell about it. King Manasseh had Isaiah executed by cutting him in half with a wooden saw (5:1, 6, 11, 13, 14; cf. 11:41),² but before he died the prophet told the other prophets with him to go to the region of Tyre and Sidon (5:13). A unit in this first section, 3:13–4:22, contains a prediction of the coming of Christ, his life, and the times after his resurrection. It is presented as the contents of a vision Isaiah received in the king’s twentieth regnal year (cf. 1:6) and as the reason why Beliar, who incited Manasseh against Isaiah, was so angry with the prophet. Chapters 6–11 tell of another visit by Isaiah and Josab to Hezekiah six years before the one in chs. 1–5, in the king’s twentieth regnal year. When they heard Isaiah would have an audience with the king, forty prophets and sons of prophets came to greet him, to hear his words, and to have him place his hands on them so that they would be able to prophesy in his presence (6:3–5). The bulk of the unit describes a vision of Isaiah—one he told to the prophets who believed he had been raised above the earth—in which he was led by an angel through the firmament and the seven heavens and learned about the descent of the Son (the Beloved One) through them to the earth, his birth and life, and his return to the seventh heaven. The book concludes: “Here endeth the vision of Isaiah the prophet with his ascension” (Charles’s translation).

The Context for Charles’s Volume on the Ascension of Isaiah As he had done in others of his editions, Charles opened the Preface by declaring that “[a] new edition of the Ascension has long been needed” (vii). In this case, as for 1 Enoch and Jubilees, Dillmann had preceded him with an edition that Charles found useful but wanting: That of Dillmann was in its time a most helpful and meritorious work, though his commentary is too brief, and his Ethiopic text less good than it

² The motif of cutting Isaiah in half with a wooden saw may have arisen from misunderstanding a Hebrew expression: “a saw of wood” was interpreted to mean “a saw (made out) of wood” rather than the correct “a saw for cutting wood.” It is attested more widely and came to have a Christian application: “From the second century on, the motif became a common one in works by Christian authors . . . these authors found in Isaiah, slain by means of wood, a figure of Christ who died on the wood of the cross” (Claudio Moreschini and Enrico Norelli, editors, Early Christian Greek and Latin Literature: A Literary History, vol. 1: From Paul to the Age of Constantine [Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2005] 93).

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might have been, owing to his somewhat faulty collation of the MSS. and his failure to use for critical purposes the Latin versions at his disposal. (vii)³

Dillmann’s edition had appeared in 1877 as Ascensio Isaiae Aethiopice et Latine, cum prolegomenis, adnotationibus criticis et exegeticis, additis versionum latinarum reliquiis. The first to publish it had been Richard Laurence, Ascensio Isaiae vatis, opusculum pseudepigraphum, multis abhinc seculis, ut videtur, deperditum, nunc autem apud Aethiopas compertum, et cum versione Latina anglicaque publici iuris factum (1819). Laurence, also the first editor of Ethiopic Enoch, presented the text of one Ethiopic manuscript and, as the title indicates, translated it into Latin and English. The manuscript evidence had grown by the end of the nineteenth century so that Charles was able to base his edition on more witnesses than his predecessors, Laurence and Dillmann, had at their disposal. The textual evidence for the Ascension of Isaiah is fairly plentiful and quite varied. It is yet another of those early works that are mentioned in ancient sources but that over time fell out of circulation in the West. Like the books of Enoch and Jubilees, it was eventually translated into Ge’ez, the ancient language of Ethiopia, where it was copied on manuscripts that included scriptural works—often directly after the Book of Isaiah—although it is not named in lists of biblical books. Laurence apparently purchased a copy of it in London and later published it.⁴ When Dillmann and Charles prepared their editions, they used three copies of the Ethiopic version (designated a, b, c), the first of which was in the Bodleian Library in Oxford (Aeth. D. 13, Laurence’s manuscript) and b and c in the British Museum (Or. 501, 503).⁵ Manuscripts a and b date from the fifteenth century, while c was made in the eighteenth century. Manuscript a is the best among them (xv–xvi).⁶ Ge’ez, however, was not the original language of the Ascension of Isaiah, and several witnesses of earlier versions had become available. The two Latin ³ See also p. xv where he says that Dillmann’s collation of the Ethiopic copies was “defective and inaccurate.” ⁴ Th. Petraeus in 1660 had announced the existence of an Ethiopic composition on the life of Isaiah entitled “The Ascension of the Prophet Isaiah.” The copy he saw seems to be the one that came into Laurence’s hands over a century and a half later. Dillmann wrote about this in Ascensio Isaiae, vi–vi n. 10. For a summary, see Pierluigi Piovanelli, “Un nouveau témoin éthiopien de l’Ascension d’Isaie et de la Vie de Jeremie (Paris, BN Abb. 195),” Henoch 12 (1990) 349. ⁵ The two were among the manuscripts obtained by the expedition against the emperor Theodore in 1868 and deposited in the museum. ⁶ Charles believed that Dillmann had collated manuscript a and made some mistakes in doing so (xvi–xvii), but, as Schürer pointed out in his review of Charles’s volume (Theologische Literaturzeitung 26 [1901] 169), Dillmann had used Laurence’s publication of a. Thus, any mistaken representations of its readings were attributable to Laurence, not to Dillmann.

224    (–) versions of the text were labelled L¹ and L², neither of which contains the complete Ascension of Isaiah. L¹, which was published by A. Mai in 1828,⁷ contains only 2:14–3:13 and 7:1–19. Charles found Mai’s transcription to be “somewhat inaccurate and defective, but these shortcomings are now set right in the texts presented on pp. 87–92 and 102–8. For the corrections in question I am indebted to the assistant Librarian in the Vatican, Father Mercati, whose kind services were secured for me by Mr. C. H. Turner of Magdalen College” (xviii–xix).⁸ L², which had been made available already in 1522 by Antonius de Fantis,⁹ includes only chs. 6–11. Charles was unable to access the 1522 publication, so he took the text of L² from Dillmann’s edition (xviii). The Greek evidence was limited but valuable. When Charles was writing his book, B. P. Grenfell and A. S. Hunt were publishing a papyrus fragment containing text from the Ascension of Isaiah 2:4–4:4 (the copy likely contained the first part of the composition in the pages missing from the beginning) and dating from the fifth or sixth century (see below). Besides the text it supplied, it proved important in determining the relative worth of the other versions. There is another Greek witness, but it is of an indirect kind. Just over twenty years before the appearance of Charles’s edition, Oscar von Gebhardt¹⁰ had published a work that Charles called the Greek Legend. It is not a Greek version of the Ascension of Isaiah but a composition whose author used a Greek text of the Ascension and incorporated it into his own work. The Legend gives a shorter version of the material in Ascension of Isaiah 1, after which it places a revised form of chs. 6–11 followed by content from chs. 2–5. Its reordering of the text relieves the chronological disorder found in the Ethiopic version (see below). Enough material from the Ascension was used in the Greek Legend that one could draw inferences from the latter about the Ascension’s content and at times even about its wording. ⁷ Scriptorum Veterum Nova Collectio e Vaticani Codicibus, vol. 3, part 2 (Rome: Typis Vaticanis, 1828) 238–9. ⁸ In his Preface (viii) Charles thanked Mercati (“for a new and more accurate collation of the Vatican Latin fragment”) and Turner. Giovanni Mercati (1866–1957) had recently (1898) begun working as a librarian at the Vatican (he was to become Prefect of the Vatican Library in 1919; “Giovanni Mercati,” Wikipedia, last accessed 8-1-2019). Turner is Cuthbert Hamilton Turner (1860–1930) of Oxford who in the previous year (1899) had begun publishing his multi-fascicle Ecclesiae Occidentalis Monumenta Iuris Antiquissima (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1899–1939)—a collection of early documents of canon law. Work on the project involved use of materials at the Vatican, and this was presumably the way in which Turner had come into contact with Mercati. ⁹ Opera nuper in lucem providentia (Venice: J. de Dinslaken, 1522) folios 155v–160r. The whereabouts of the manuscript is unknown. The text had, however, been made available by J. C. L. Gieseler, “Vetus translatio Latina Visionis Isaiae,” Programma quo Academiae Georgiae Augustae prorector et senatus sacra Pentecostalia anni MDCCCXXXII pie concelbranda indixerunt (Göttingen, 1832). ¹⁰ “Die Ascensio Isaiae als Heiligenlegende. Aus Cod. Gr. 1534 der Nationalbibliothek zu Paris,” Zeitschrift für Wissenschaftliche Theologie 21 (1878) 330–53.

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There is a Slavonic translation of the Ascension of Isaiah, or rather of Ascension of Isaiah 6–11 alone. Charles, who did not read Slavonic, apparently requested a translation of the Slavonic text from an expert in such languages, N. Bonwetsch (see below). The latter rendered the Slavonic into Latin for him; this allowed him to compare it with the two existing Latin witnesses and thus to locate the Slavonic version in the textual history of the Ascension of Isaiah.

The Book The Ascension of Isaiah translated from the Ethiopic Version, which, together with the new Greek fragment, the Latin Versions and the Latin translation of the Slavonic, is here published in full, edited with introduction, notes, and indices by R. H. Charles, D.D., Professor of Biblical Greek, Trinity College, Dublin (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1900). Charles dedicated the volume to three experts whom we have met before in connection with his work. The first is Bonwetsch, the German scholar who produced a translation of 2 Enoch in the same year Charles/Morfill did (1896) and who reviewed Charles’s volume. The other two are Grenfell and Hunt who had earlier published a Greek fragment of the Apocalypse of Baruch. All three of these scholars made contributions to the present book. As we have seen, Bonwetsch prepared for Charles a Latin translation of the Slavonic version of the Ascension of Isaiah, while Grenfell and Hunt made available to him the proofs of their edition of the Greek text.¹¹ After listing their names on the dedication page, Charles wrote about them: “to whom I am so much indebted in the present work.” A topic treated by Charles in his Introduction was the relationships between the sundry textual witnesses. The Ethiopic manuscripts supply the fullest and apparently the only complete version of the Ascension of Isaiah, but the fragmentary remains of the other versions, with the readings of the Greek Legend, furnish earlier bits of text and data that allow one to locate the

¹¹ The Ascension of Isaiah and Other Theological Fragments: The Amherst Papyri, being an Account of the Greek Papyri in the Collection of the Right Hon. Lord Amherst of Hackney, F.S.A., at Didlington Hall, Norfolk (London: H. Frowde, 1900) 1.1.1–22. William Tyssen-Amherst (1835–1909) was a baron and member of parliament who was a noted collector of books and manuscripts. The fragment of the Ascension of Isaiah was found in his large Egyptian collection for which he had constructed a museum at his country estate called Didlington Hall (“William Tyssen-Amherst, First Baron Amherst of Hackney,” Wikipedia, last accessed 8-2-2019).

226    (–) Ethiopic version in the textual development of the book. In order to determine the relations between the witnesses and their rightful slots in the stemma of textual transmission, Charles selected as a test case the first half of ch. 7 because it is preserved in Ethiopic and in both Latin copies—the only place where this happens: Ethiopic (= E) 7:1–37 (= the entire chapter) L¹ 7:1–19 L² 7:1–29, 31–4, 36–7. A comparison of the readings in the three revealed close agreement between L¹ and E against L². “Even within this limited portion of the text it becomes clear that L¹ and E on the one side, and L² on the other, are not directly derived from one and the same Greek text, but only indirectly through the medium of two distinct recensions of it, G¹ and G², which in nine-tenths of their matter presuppose a common parent G” (xix). Charles was able to fortify his inference when he received Bonwetsch’s Latin translation of the Slavonic version. L² and the Slavonic often agree in their readings, whether in what appear to be additions to or omissions from the text, against the combined witness of L¹ and E. Charles then extended the comparison of readings beyond the limits of ch. 7 to the remaining parts of chs. 6–11 for which L¹ is not extant. In those sections the same pattern generally prevails, with L² and Slavonic combining against the Ethiopic readings, whether in omissions or additions. He argued that these differences did not develop during the history of transmitting the text in Ethiopia and adduced material from the Greek Legend to support his contention. The Greek Legend “was based on the same form of text that is preserved in E and L¹. It does not, indeed, make a continuous use of our text, but yet uses it sufficiently to show beyond possibility of doubt that its writer had before him, not G² but G¹” (xx). So, the witnesses in chs. 6–11 show the following alignments as translations/ reflections of the two hypothetical Greek forms of the text: G¹ L¹ E Greek Legend G² L² Slavonic. The two Greek recensions, he believed, were usually faithful renderings of a shared ancestor text for which he used, as we saw, the siglum G. Charles maintained that the differences between the hypothetical G¹ and the even more hypothetical G were the work of the person who put the entire composition called the Ascension of Isaiah together. The points that separate G² from

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G are, however, “due to the editor of this independent edition of vi–xi” (xxi). The other Latin piece from the Vatican Library that contains only 2:14–3:13 proved to be of the same textual type as L¹ in ch. 7, as it aligns frequently with the Ethiopic readings. Once he had charted the relationships between the Ethiopic, Latin, and Slavonic texts (with the Greek Legend) for chs. 6–11 and determined that two recensions of the Greek version underlay them, Charles devoted the seventh section of the Introduction to arguing that “The Fuller Text of G¹ as a Rule is Derived from G” (xxi–xxiv). Exceptions exist, but in significant additions the text of L¹ E is more likely to represent G than the shorter text in L² S (he noted 10:25–8 and 11:27–30). The passage on which he concentrated, however, was 11:2–22 in which the stories about the conception and birth of Jesus and his earthly life until the ascension are recounted and in which it is said more than once that people did not recognize who he was. L² lacks almost the entire passage (it retains only a part of v. 19). Charles thought the unit was present in G¹ because E preserves it and the Greek Legend in part attests it. Not only did it figure in G¹, but it existed in G, since the content of 11:2–22 agrees with the larger context, “for from x. 8 to xi. 19 the concealment of the real nature of Christ is the underlying thought of the entire passage” (xxii). The abbreviated version of 11:2–22 found in L² S lacks elements that the context leads one to expect. Hence, in this passage and in the other two he noted, the L² S version (= G²) had abridged G, with G¹ faithfully representing the parent text. The next two sections introduce the Slavonic version and the Greek Legend. The tenth section Charles devoted to the new Greek fragment edited by Grenfell and Hunt. It preserves the text of 2:4–4:4 and therefore was primarily helpful for establishing the text of the first part of the Ascension of Isaiah (chs. 1–5). The fifth-sixth century piece, the first direct evidence for a Greek version, was a valuable addition to the pool of witnesses, but its readings do not align neatly with the two Greek recensions Charles had posited for chs. 6–11. “Now even a cursory examination shows that L¹, notwithstanding the very imperfect form in which it exists, is more nearly related to E than to the Greek fragment which we shall call G²” (xxx). His siglum for the Greek fragment leads one to think that he considered it a representative of the same sort of text in chs. 1–5 as the one he also labelled G² for chs. 6–11. That, nevertheless, was not exactly the conclusion he drew: we must explain, I think, the differences between E L¹ and the Greek fragment as due to the errors and variations incidental to the process of transmission, whereas the differences between E L¹ and S L² in vi. –xi. are due to a deliberate

228    (–) recension. Thus all the differences between E L¹ and the Greek fragment arose subsequently to the formation of the complete work of the Ascension, whereas the substantial differences between E L¹ and S L² were the result of deliberation, and had practically attained finality on the publication of these distinct recensions. (xxxi)

His conclusion presupposes his theory, explained below, about the Ascension of Isaiah as consisting of originally independent units. Charles distinguished three components in the Ascension of Isaiah, each of which had a Greek parent text that developed into two recensions already during its transmission in the Greek language (see xxxiii, xl–xliii). Vision of Isaiah Martyrdom of Isaiah Testament of Hezekiah

6:1–11:40 1:1, 2a, 6b–13a; 2:1–8, 10–3:12; 5:1b–14¹² 3:13b–4:18.¹³

In the three cases the sigla G¹ and G² have their own meaning, referring to that particular building block of the composite Ascension of Isaiah. In connection with the Vision of Isaiah (6–11), G² refers to the recension reflected in L² S, while in the Martyrdom and the Testament of Hezekiah G² refers to the text preserved in the Greek fragment. All students of the Ascension of Isaiah, other than Laurence, discerned in it the hand of more than one writer. The most common division was into two: chs, 1–5 and 6–11 (xxxvi). While some regarded 1–5 as being Jewish in origin, they also recognized that there was Christian material in it (they could hardly miss it). As Charles put the matter, 2:1–3:12 “has been forcibly sundered from 5:1b–14 by a piece of writing alien to it, iii. 13–iv. 22” (xxxviii). But he found other problems in the finished book. For one, its chronology is confusing. Testament of Hezekiah (3:13b–4:18) 15th year of Hezekiah (1:4) Vision of Isaiah (6:1–11:40) 20th year of Hezekiah (1:6; 6:1) Most of ch. 1 26th year of Hezekiah (1:1)¹⁴ Manasseh kills Isaiah (2:1–3:12; 5:1b–14) at least four years later. (xxxix) ¹² The passages missing from the verses listed for the Vision of Isaiah and the Martyrdom of Isaiah, apart from 3:13b–4:18, were contributions of the editor. ¹³ He assigned the name “Testament of Hezekiah” to the section because the Byzantine historian Cedrenus wrote that material in 4:12, 14 (and vv. 15–18) came from a work with this title. It is not known, however, whether Cedrenus applied the title to 3:13b–4:18 alone rather than, say, to all of chs. 1–5. ¹⁴ The Coptic version, which was published long after Charles’s edition and which will be treated below, reads “15th” and the Greek Legend “25th.” The date in the Ethiopic version (26th) is problematic, but these other two readings raise their own chronological issues. See André Caquot, “Bref commentaire du Martyre d’Isaie,” Semitica 22 (1973) 67–8.

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Charles doubted a single author would have fashioned a sequence so disturbed. “On the other hand, if he was dealing with existing materials which did not admit of disintegration (such as vi.–xi., and in a less degree iii. 13b–iv. 18) and easy incorporation into his work, the present disorder of the work becomes more intelligible” (xxxix). He realized that the Vision of Isaiah (chs. 6–11), an originally independent composition, shared many points with the Testament of Hezekiah (3:13b– 4:18)—so many that they could have come from the same writer (possibly two closely related ones). Yet, the Testament of Hezekiah, a Christian work, was based on a Jewish text, since Hebrew or Aramaic idioms surface in it. In the final analysis he favored the thesis that one editor made use of three independent units: Martyrdom of Isaiah Jewish, first century .. (reflected in Hebrews 11:37)¹⁵ Testament of Hezekiah Christian, between 88 and 100 ..¹⁶ Vision of Isaiah Christian, end of the first century .. (xliv–xlv). These the editor expanded or abbreviated according to his goals, and to them he added a few redactional touches (xliii). He worked perhaps in the early third or possibly in the late second century .. (xlv). The final two sections of the Introduction contain Charles’s analysis of themes in the Ascension of Isaiah. He summarized a few of them in §16 (entitled “Value of the ‘Ascension’ for the History of Outlying Religious Thought”): the seven heavens, rise of Docetism, view of the Trinity, use of the phrase “one like a son of man,” and the resurrection (xlix–li). The much longer §17 offers an extended discussion of “The Antichrist, Beliar, and Neronic Myths, and their Subsequent Fusion” (li–lxxiii). This complex of topics he considered “the most difficult question in Jewish and Christian Apocalyptic literature” (li). He divided his treatment into three parts. The first furnishes a study of the independent development of the three myths before they were joined. “Antichrist” he took to mean someone of human origin who fundamentally opposes God. The first one so identified was

¹⁵ Charles used §15 of the Introduction to explore other references to the fate of Isaiah. For example, he cited, besides passages such as Hebrews 11:37 and early Christian sources (e.g., Justin Martyr), a Talmudic text (Yabamot 49b) according to which Isaiah was swallowed by a cedar tree that was then sawed in two. He ventured further afield in exploring at greater length Persian sources for similar stories of execution (xlvii–xlix). ¹⁶ See lxxi–lxxii for the evidence that led him to these dates. The former he determined from the nature of the Nero myth reflected in it, the latter from 4:13 which refers to believers who had seen Christ (by 100 .. there would have been no eyewitnesses of the earthly Jesus remaining; see 30–1). Whether 4:13 deals with people who had seen Jesus on earth is debatable.

230    (–) Antiochus IV (Daniel 11:36–8, though the term is not used), followed by Pompey (in the Psalms of Solomon) and the ruler of the fourth empire (Rome) in 2 Baruch and 4 Ezra. The Johannine epistles are the first literary works to use the term; in them it is a designation for false teachers. The Beliar myth involves a superhuman being. The term first appears in Jubilees as a name for a satan or the Satan. Charles understood what he regarded as the Beliar passage in the Ascension of Isaiah (7:9) to be a Jewish form of the Babylonian myth about a dragon who attacked heaven.¹⁷ Beliar works his wicked purposes through evil spirits. Charles concluded that by the beginning in the first century .., Beliar was thought to be a “Satanic spirit” (lvii). As for the Nero myth, Charles recounted the ancient belief that the emperor had not really died in 68 .. and would soon come back from the East to avenge himself upon his enemies in Rome. As evidence he cited passages from the Sibylline Oracles and the New Testament (Revelation 17), in addition to Roman sources. The second part of his presentation deals with an initial combination of the antichrist and Beliar myths, followed by their fusion with the Nero myth. He argued that the first combination of units occurred before 60 .. The antichrist came to be considered a “God-opposing man armed with miraculous powers” in Christianity before 50 .. and a “purely Satanic power” earlier than 70 .. (lxi, where both descriptions are italicized). 2 Thessalonians, which he thought was genuinely Pauline, contains the evidence for their amalgamation in ch. 2. By combining in one being—the man of lawlessness—both antichrist and Beliar traits, 2 Thessalonians humanizes Beliar. For Beliarantichrist as a “purely Satanic power” he appealed to Revelation 11:7. The combined myth was eventually joined with the one about the reappearance of Nero, this time in the form of his return to life. The evidence for it Charles found in Revelation 13 and 17. The final part of the long section he labelled “Fusion of the Antichrist, Beliar, and Neronic myths in various degrees and forms” (lxvii– lxxiii). He distinguished three versions that differed in the way Nero was conceived (as alive, as dead [this is the form it takes in Ascension of Isaiah 4:2–4], as restored to life). Charles at an earlier point in the book had justified taking up so many pages to pursue this topic (viii):

¹⁷ He translated the verse: “And we ascended to the firmament, I and he [i.e., Isaiah and his angelic guide], and there I saw Sammael and his hosts, and there was great fighting therein and the angels of Satan were envying one another.” Sammael is the name of a satanic figure in parts of the book. In a note on pp. 7–8 Charles detailed the similarities (and differences) between Beliar and Sammael.

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Since the account it furnishes of the Antichrist is in some respects unique, I have brought the Introduction to a close with a Critical Essay on the Antichrist, Beliar, and Neronic myths as they appear in Jewish and Christian literature between 200 .. and 120 ..

The unit does, nevertheless, seem somewhat excessive, like the long section about the idea of seven heavens in his Introduction to 2 Enoch. Also, his analysis rests on some remarkably precise dates for texts that are difficult to assign to specific times. The annotated translation of the Ascension of Isaiah occupies pp. 1–82. In the translation Charles used a complex set of symbols to mark passages as: appearing only in certain witnesses, added by the editor, supplied to fill omissions in the Greek papyrus, emendations, corrupt readings, or interpolations. The reader must consult the list on p. lxxiv and do so often to become familiar with the symbols, not all of which are clearly distinguishable from others. He could have eased the reader’s burden (and his own) by recording such information in the notes to the text rather than marring the translation with them (see below). In the margins of the translation he indicated to which of the book’s components a passage belonged, including the additions made by the final editor. Typically for Charles, the explanatory notes which support his textual decisions and explain the content often fill more of a page than the translation. One of the new features of the edition compared with his earlier ones, apart from Jubilees and the Assumption of Moses, is that in it Charles reproduced all the early textual evidence. On pp. 83–139 he printed the extant versions of the book, each in its own script, with the exception of the Slavonic for which he gave Bonwetsch’s Latin rendering. Where more than one version survives, he placed them in parallel columns. The result is that on many pages there are two or three such columns, in some cases even four (e.g., ch. 7). Beneath the evidence of the versions, Charles added textual notes in which he gave variant readings (for the Ethiopic), evaluations (such as whether a reading was corrupt), emendations, and more. It seems that with the information supplied in these notes he could have dispensed with the symbols that disfigure his translation. At any rate, the student of the Ascension of Isaiah has in Charles’s edition the full textual evidence then available as well as an Introduction and annotated translation. While he strongly emphasized textual issues, he did not ignore questions of meaning and significance. Already in the Preface (viii) he wrote: The Testament of Hezekiah and the Vision of Isaiah (especially the former)

232    (–) cast an illuminating, though at times lurid, light on certain outlying provinces of Christian belief and conduct towards the close of the first century. It bewails the fewness of the prophets, the prevalence of heresies, the sad declension in Christian character. It touches incidentally on the fact that there were Church Guilds, whose sole object was to keep believers in a state of readiness for the Advent of Christ, but expecting withal to experience first the dreaded coming of the Antichrist.

In the Introduction (xii) he added concerning the Testament of Hezekiah: Its descriptions of the worldliness and lawlessness which prevailed among the elders and pastors, i.e. the bishops and priests, of the widespread covetousness and vainglory as well as of the growing heresies among Christians generally, agree with similar accounts in 2 Peter, 2 Timothy, and Clement of Rome (ad Cor. iii, xxiii). This work, moreover, is the first and oldest document that testifies to the martyrdom of St. Peter at Rome.¹⁸

The last pages of the book offer additional helpful information. He wrote an Appendix called “The Use of the Names ‘The Beloved,’ ‘Beliar,’ and ‘Sammael,’ in the Various Constituents of the ‘Ascension’” (140). On pp. 141–8 he gave the full text of the related parts of the Greek Legend, with a few textual notes. In the margins he inserted references to the passages in the Ascension of Isaiah reflected in the text. Finally, he provided indices of passages in ancient texts and of names and subjects (149–55).

Reviews The edition by Charles elicited several reviews, ones showing that he was by this time widely recognized as a leading authority in the field. Stanley Arthur Cook of the University of Cambridge reviewed The Ascension of Isaiah in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (1901) 165–9. About Charles he wrote “whose valuable series of early apocalyptical and apocryphal writings is so well known” (165). Of the present volume he said that “now, for the first time, all the existing materials are collected, edited, and arranged in a critical form that

¹⁸ The relevant passage is 4:3. The preceding lines refer to Beliar’s appearing as a man, “a lawless king, the slayer of his mother” (v. 2) who will persecute “the planting” of the twelve apostles. Verse 3 then adds in Charles’s translation: “Of the Twelve one will be delivered into his hands.”

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leaves nothing to be desired” (165). Cook found Charles’s study of the antichrist, Beliar, and Nero myths to be “an important chapter” (166) occasioned by the “absolutely unique” (166) portrayal of the antichrist in the Testament of Hezekiah. He added: “It need scarcely be said that Dr. Charles’s edition will be indispensable to all future workers in the field of apocalyptic research, who, we doubt not, will agree with his general results” (167). To such positives Cook added criticisms of particular editorial decisions and explanations given by Charles, even thinking that he had been too cautious in some instances. He spent the last part of the review (167–9) dealing with specific readings and offered some fairly speculative suggestions about them. Another early reviewer was Emil Schürer in Theologische Literaturzeitung 26 (1901) 169–71. He too expressed appreciation for Charles’s numerous contributions to the field of Jewish-Christian apocrypha (169). After summarizing the book, Schürer voiced concern that Charles was too dependent on Grenfell and Hunt for some changes he made in the Greek text. He also noted the close agreement between the literary conclusions of Dillmann and Charles and found only two significant differences between them: (1) Dillmann judged all of ch. 1 to be an addition, whereas Charles assigned only selected verses to the editor; and (2) Dillmann believed the unit 11:2–22 was an addition, while Charles viewed it as original and demanded by the context. On both issues Schürer thought Dillmann’s theory more likely to be correct (170). He commended Charles’s study of the three myths (antichrist, Beliar, Nero) to the attention of experts. The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, the two-volume work that Charles edited in 1913, contains a very abridged form of his earlier book. In the Pseudepigrapha volume the reader finds a text entitled “The Martyrdom of Isaiah” (pp. 155–62), that is, only one of the three components that he distinguished in the Ascension of Isaiah. The appearance of just this portion of the complete text makes sense because it alone meets the criteria for inclusion in the volume—non-canonical Jewish works for the period 200 .. to 100 .. (see 2.iv). A short introduction stands before his translation of 1:1–3:12; 5:1–14 (minus editorial insertions). In the Introduction he reproduced material from the 1900 book, with some changes such as a more explicit statement that the author of the Martyrdom of Isaiah wrote in Hebrew (158). By including only the Martyrdom in his collection of Pseudepigrapha, Charles was imitating the example in Kautzsch, Die Apokryphen und Pseudepigraphen des Alten Testament (1900), the German predecessor of The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament. The Pseudepigraphen volume contains Georg Beer’s “Das Martyrium Jesajae” (119–27). Beer supplied even less than

234    (–) Charles did in 1913: he introduced and translated only Ascension of Isaiah 2:1–3:12; 5:2–14, that is, closely reflecting Dillmann’s conclusions about the material to be attributed to the Martyrdom. Charles’s translation was reprinted in Translations of Early Documents Series 1, Palestinian Jewish Texts (pre-rabbinic) (London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1917) where it was bound together with Box’s translation of the Apocalypse of Abraham.

Legacy Since 1900 much has been published on the Ascension of Isaiah, but Charles’s work is still considered fundamental, however much scholars disagree with some of his conclusions. On the textual front, the available evidence has grown but not dramatically. A noteworthy development was publication of Coptic fragments of the Ascension of Isaiah. There are remnants of two manuscripts. One, in an early Akhmimic dialect and possibly dating from the fourth century, contains bits and pieces of almost all the chapters (1:1–5; 3:25–28; 5:7–8; 6:7–11; 7:10–15, 28–32; 8:16–17; 9:9–11, 28–30; 10:9–11, 27; 11:14–16, 35–7).¹⁹ The other fragmentary copy is in the Sahidic dialect (late fourth century) and preserves 3:6–9, 9–12; 11:24–32, 35–40.²⁰ The two Coptic versions, which offer material from both of the major parts of the Ascension of Isaiah, suggest that by the late fourth century they had been combined. The number of the accessible copies of the Ethiopic version has grown to twelve.²¹ More recently there has been a change in understanding the entire work. As we have seen, Charles and others thought the Ascension of Isaiah was a

¹⁹ L. Th. Lefort, “Fragments d’apocryphes en copte akhmîmique,” Le Muséon 52 (1939) 7–10, with plate II (for four of the fragments); P. Lacau, “Fragments de l’Ascension d’Isaie en copte,” Le Muséon 59 (1946) 453–67 (for all the fragments). ²⁰ L. Th. Lefort, “Coptica Louvaniensia (Suite),” Le Muséon 51 (1938) 24–30, with plate IVa. He noted that, while the Coptic text is poorly preserved, it is important since it is the oldest witness and, as it seemed to him, the one nearest to the original text in the parts that survived. ²¹ Ted Erho, “New Ethiopic Witnesses to Some Old Testament Pseudepigrapha,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 76 (2013) 95–7. The most recent edition of the Ethiopic version is that of Lorenzo Perrone (with facing translation by Enrico Norelli) in Ascensio Isaïae: Textus (Corpus Christianorum, Series Apocryphorum 7; Turnhout: Brepols, 1995) 1–129. He was able to use nine copies in establishing the text. The same volume includes fresh editions and translations of the remaining textual material as well: Norelli for the Greek (Amherst) papyrus, Paulo Bettiolo for the Coptic, Claudio Leonardi for the Latin, Alda Giambelluca Kossova for the Slavonic (Old Bulgarian; there are now seven copies), and Norelli for the Greek Legend (two copies). The editors have not attempted to establish an “original” text; rather, they present the editions separately. A companion volume by Norelli (Ascensio Isaïae: Commentarius [Corpus Christianorum, Series Apocryphorum 8; Turnhout: Brepols, 1995]) offers, as the title indicates, an interpretation of the book.

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composite book. This continued to be the accepted position for some time. According to J. M. T. Barton, who edited and introduced a revised form of Charles’s translation for The Apocryphal Old Testament, the “generally agreed solution” was that originally independent units were joined by an editor, with the final stage reached by the mid-fourth century.²² The next year Michael Knibb defended a source division like that of Charles in his contribution to The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. His introduction to and translation of what is entitled “Martyrdom and Ascension of Isaiah” appear, not in the first volume which is devoted to apocalyptic literature and testaments, but in the second which includes “Expansions of the ‘Old Testament’ and Legends.”²³ Knibb divided the book into the same three divisions that Charles isolated, along with editorial contributions. Also, like Charles, he considered 3:13–4:22 and chs. 6–11 to be Christian works, while the Martyrdom is Jewish. Knibb did not dismiss outright the possibility that the entire composition is an authorial unity but thought there were adequate reasons for not accepting the conclusion. One argument for the independent existence of chs. 6–11 is that we actually have this work in L² and the Slavonic version (a point others had made), and a second is that these chapters have their own title “The Vision of Isaiah.” Moreover, 3:13–4:22 “forms a very harsh break in the narrative between 3:12 and 5:1.”²⁴ He did question whether 3:13–4:22 is the Testament of Hezekiah to which Cedrenus refers—it is placed in the mouth of Isaiah, not Hezekiah. Knibb also entertained the idea that the historian referred to all of chs. 1–5 by that name and believes that the editor compiled the finished work in the third or fourth century. For his translation, he used five Ethiopic copies, the fifth of which contains only parts of chs. 1–2. Despite the views of Barton and Knibb, there is a greater emphasis today on the unity of the Ascension of Isaiah. Earlier scholars, who maintained that the person responsible for the eleven-chapter composition was an editor who conjoined previously existing sources and adjusted them to their new settings, recognized that the editor tried to impose a measure of uniformity on the sources by means of redactional touches. An example is 1:2b–6a which

²² “The Ascension of Isaiah,” in H. F. D. Sparks, editor, The Apocryphal Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984) 780–1. ²³ “Martyrdom and Ascension of Isaiah,” in James Charlesworth, editor, The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (2 vols.; Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1983, 1985) 2.143–76. C. Detlef G. Müller (“The Ascension of Isaiah,” in Wilhelm Schneemelcher, editor, New Testament Apocrypha, vol. II: Writings Related to the Apostles, Apocalypses and Related Subjects [revised ed.; Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1992] 604–5) speaks of a compiler of documents who interpolated Christian material into them, although, at least in the English translation, the word “author” is also used for him. ²⁴ “Martyrdom and Ascension of Isaiah,” 147.

236    (–) prepares for both 3:13b–4:22 and chs. 6–11 and in this way connects them with the martyrdom story. But in more recent times a number of experts have called the person to whom we owe the Ascension of Isaiah an author who worked with and arranged traditional materials in his book.²⁵ The tendency is to date the complete work to the second century. Robert Hall, for one, has pointed to two sources rewritten by the author—a Martyrdom of Isaiah and a Vision of Isaiah;²⁶ this author also composed 3:13–31, which stands before a document he quoted, and ch. 6 which introduces the Vision.²⁷ He explains the placement of the vision at the end of the text where it is out of chronological order as a way of emphasizing its importance. . . . the author’s goal from the beginning is to win a hearing for this Vision from a reluctant audience. The martyrdom tale systematically breaks down prejudice against the author’s favorite doctrine and his or her prophetic school. By reminding the readers that Isaiah took heavenly trips to see God, the author removes one objection to the Vision. By depicting an embattled prophetic school in a positive light and by attributing to Beliar opposition to that school, the author softens objections to a school like his or her own.²⁸

²⁵ Some earlier scholars opposed the sources/editor theories. Francis Crawford Burkitt (Jewish and Christian Apocalypses [The Schweich Lectures; London: For the British Academy H. Milford, Oxford University Press, 1914] 45) put the matter well (one suspects he had Charles in mind): I sometimes fancy that the spirit of Beliar must be dwelling in some of my friends when they use the wooden saw to dissect the Ascension of Isaiah. Notwithstanding their efforts it continues to speak with a Christian voice, just as Isaiah did. I shall venture here to treat it as a unity, and as the work of a Christian throughout. Of course, I do not mean to deny that some details in the fanciful story of Isaiah’s martyrdom may have been ultimately derived from Jewish sources. But that is a very different thing from regarding the narrative portions of the Ascension of Isaiah as a Jewish document which can be detached from the rest of the work and represented as an independent whole. On the contrary, I regard it as an integral part of the Ascension, . . . . Burkitt, who dated the work to the early second century, thought the unevenness present in it arose, not from independent sources, but from the author’s attempt to do two things: in good apocalyptic fashion focusing on the importance of the end, but also, in good Christian fashion, emphasizing the importance of the incarnation. He made an exception for 11:2–22 that he regarded as either interpolated in the Ethiopic version or else as having an appearance very different from the one it had in the original (noting the much shorter reading in L² and Slavonic; pp. 46–7). ²⁶ For Hall, the contention that the earlier, independent existence of the Vision of Isaiah (chs. 6–11) is documented by L² and Slavonic which contain only these chapters is not convincing. These two witnesses may offer merely an excerpt from the complete text (Hall, “Isaiah, Ascension of,” in John J. Collins and Daniel C. Harlow, editors, The Eerdmans Dictionary of Early Judaism [Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2010] 773). ²⁷ Hall, “The Ascension of Isaiah: Community Situation, Date, and Place in Early Christianity,” Journal of Biblical Literature 109 (1990) 289–92. ²⁸ “The Ascension of Isaiah,” 299.

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Hall’s comments exemplify the interest that researchers are showing in the Christian prophetic school that they see reflected in the presentation of Isaiah and the prophets around him in the Ascension of Isaiah. Jonathan Knight, who also speaks of an author for the Ascension of Isaiah, has noted how Christian prophecy seems to have been downplayed by the second century, after it had been considered an important medium for teaching in the New Testament period.²⁹ As the institutional church took shape, there was less room for such a claim to inspired authority. The author of the Ascension of Isaiah identified himself as a member of a marginalized prophetic community. Knight also thinks that a dedicated person like this was likely to fail the test of loyalty mentioned in Pliny’s correspondence with the Emperor Trajan;³⁰ the anti-Roman material in chs. 4–5 may be explained in this context. The author wrote to assure his audience that, despite the difficulties of the present, the kingdom of the Beloved would soon materialize and that he had already defeated Beliar.³¹ The emphases in modern scholarship on the Ascension of Isaiah are different than they were in 1900, but it would be highly unusual today to find a serious study of the composition that lacks reference to Charles’s work, so lasting has his influence proved to be even for a Christian text. In the years that followed publication of the Ascension of Isaiah, Charles, who became a member of the British Academy, turned his attention increasingly to one of the compositions on which he wrote the most—the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. The culmination of that period was the publication of two hefty volumes on the Testaments, as we shall see in Chapter 8.

²⁹ The Ascension of Isaiah (Guides to Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha; Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1995) 9–10, 26, 31–8. ³⁰ Pliny the Younger, the Roman governor of Bithynia in Pontus from 111–13 .., mentioned in a letter means by which people could prove they were not Christians (e.g., praying to the Roman gods, cursing Christ), while the Emperor Trajan (98–117) replied that if people denied they were Christians they could demonstrate the point by worshiping the gods. ³¹ Knight, The Ascension of Isaiah, 26, 37, 42–3.

Chapter 8 More Honors and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs 1901–1908 By 1900 Charles had published six translations with commentaries, one critical edition, a thematic volume, and several substantial articles. All of this in itself—and within just a decade—would have constituted a highly successful scholarly career, but much more was to come. Charles continued to be an exceptionally productive scholar in the years that followed, and he received more public recognition for his accomplishments. It remained the case, nevertheless, that in the period under consideration in this chapter he held no permanent position at the University of Oxford. We have examined several of Charles’s publications dating from 1901–08 in connection with books that he had written in the 1890s. One is the lengthy 1901 entry “Eschatology” in Cheyne and Black, editors, Encyclopaedia Biblica 2.1335–90. Another is The Book of Jubilees or the Little Genesis in 1902. His growing list of articles included the “The Book of Enoch,” The American Journal of Theology 7 (1903) 689–703 that offered an in-depth review of the books by Flemming and Rademacher. Around this time (1902–03) he contributed the article “Apocalyptic and Apocryphal Literature” to the tenth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica 25.486–500, and his text edition of Ethiopic Enoch appeared in 1906.¹ The text on which he focused a great deal of energy throughout the period is the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. Besides incorporating its teachings in his dictionary/encyclopedia pieces and in A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life, he published a series of articles dealing specifically with the Testaments in the early years of the new century. He wrote the entry “Testaments of the XII Patriarchs” for Hastings, editor, A Dictionary of the Bible, 4.721–5 (1902) and an essay by the same name in the Hibbert Journal 3 (1904–05) 558–73. A few years later he teamed with A. E. Cowley in writing “An Early Source of the Testaments of the Patriarchs,” Jewish Quarterly ¹ In view of all he had accomplished to this point, it is astonishing to learn that he, as he put it, lost two years to influenza between 1889 and 1903 (NLS, June 1, 1926).

R. H. Charles: A Biography. James C. VanderKam, Oxford University Press. © James C. VanderKam 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192869289.003.0010

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Review 19 (1907) 566–83. Charles capped off his work on the Testaments with a translation/commentary and a text volume, both of which appeared in 1908. These publications are the central subject of this chapter.

Appointments and Honors Before turning to Charles’s work with the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, we should record the forms of recognition that came to him. In 1905 he was appointed the “Grinfield Lecturer on the LXX. Version of the Hebrew Scriptures” and held the position until 1911.² The lectureship had been set up by Edward William Grinfield (1785–1864) who in 1859 endowed it with a sum of £1,000 (later he added a further £500). According to the arrangements for it, the Hebdomadal Council of the University of Oxford elected the lecturer who served for a two-year term, but he was not to be considered a university professor or reader. The lecturer, who was supposed to be in Holy Orders and hold at least an M.A. degree, was paid, so Charles had some income from the post.³ Something of the prestige attaching to the Grinfield Lectureship can be gleaned from the names of others who held it, e.g., Edwin Hatch (1882–84), Alfred Edersheim (1886–90), Henry Adeney Redpath (1901–05), and later H. St. J. Thackeray (1920). The appointee was to deliver three lectures per academic year, and as the terms of a few predecessors and of Charles show, the appointment could be renewed beyond two years.⁴ The June 20, 1905 issue of the Oxford University Gazette (p. 680) reported: “At a meeting of the Hebdomadal Council holden on Monday, June 19, the Rev. R H. C, M.A., Exeter College, was elected Grinfield Lecturer on the Septuagint.” The Gazette regularly announced the titles and dates for the Grinfield Lectures, so we have a record of the ones that Charles gave. They were distributed over the Michaelmas, Hilary, and Easter and Trinity terms and hence were called “terminal” lectures. Each of them was delivered at 2:15 pm at Charles’s college, Exeter.

² The Oxford University Gazette printed several announcements in successive editions to the effect that the Hebdomadal Council would elect the next Grinfield Lecturer on June 19, 1905 (May 30, 1905, vol. 35, p. 610; June 6, 1905, vol. 35, p. 637; and June 14, 1905, vol. 35, p. 663). The announcement included the line: “Candidates for the appointment are requested to make known their wishes to the Vice-Chancellor on or before Saturday, June 17.” ³ His predecessor as Grinfield Lecturer, H. A. Redpath, was paid £72 s. 0 d. 8 for the preceding year, according to the Abstracts of Receipts and Payments in vol. 35 of the Gazette. ⁴ For information about the position, see The Oxford Ten-Year Book: A Register of University Honours and Distinctions Completed to the End of the Year 1870 (Oxford: James Parker, 1872) 132.

240    ( – ) December 8, 1905: Linguistic Problems of the Book of Daniel (Gazette of October 13, 1905, p. 20) March 7, 1906: Linguistic Problems of the Book of Daniel (January 19, 1906, 255) April 24, 1906: The Greek Versions of the Book of Daniel (April 20, 1906, 469) November 7, 1906: The Book of Daniel, I–II, 4, Greek Versions (June 12, 1906, 710; cf. October 12, 1906, 18) February 5, 1907: Daniel II.4–VII: The Aramaic Section and the Versions (January 18, 1907, 267) May 28, 1907: Book of Daniel, Chapters III, IV (April 26, 1907, 507). At this point, Charles’s two-year term ended. The lectureship was again advertised in the Gazette (e.g., May 22, 1907, 628), and on June 17, 1907 the Hebdomadal Council re-elected him to another term (Gazette, June 18, 1907). The lectures continued the series he delivered in his first term. November 5, 1907: Daniel IV and V (October 29, 1907, 117) January 21, 1908: Daniel V–VI: The Massoretic Text and the Greek Versions (January 17, 1908, 273) May 26, 1908: The Aramaic Text and the Greek Versions of Daniel VI (April 24, 1908, 519) November 3, 1908: The Aramaic Text and the Greek Versions of Daniel VII (June 16, 1908, 793) January 19, 1909: The Hebrew Text and the Greek Versions of Daniel VIII (January 15, 1909, 291) April 27, 1909: The Hebrew Text and the Greek Versions of Daniel IX (April 23, 1909, 535). Here his second term ended, but again the Hebdomadal Council re-elected him (Gazette, May 25, 1909, 667). The lectures in his third term were: October 26, 1909: The Hebrew Text and the Greek Versions of Daniel X (June 15, 1909, 800) February 1, 1910: Hebrew Text and Greek Versions of Daniel ix.24–7; xi.1–9 (January 14, 1910, 275) May 10, 1910: The Hebrew Text and Greek Versions of Daniel xi.10–25 (April 22, 1910, 525)

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November 1, 1910: The Hebrew Text and the Greek Versions of the Book of Daniel xi.18–33 (June 14, 1910, 794) February 7, 1911: The Hebrew Text and Greek Versions of Daniel xi.35–xii.1 (December 6, 1910, 290) May 2, 1911: The Hebrew Text and Greek Versions of Daniel xii.2–13 (April 27, 1911, 645). In 1906 Charles became a Fellow of the British Academy. When he joined the illustrious group of academics, the Academy was in its infancy. Its origins can be traced to the end of 1901, with a royal charter coming in 1902. It was formed as a British association of scholars in the humanities and social sciences resembling counterparts in Europe, an association that promoted work in the fields of its members and could represent Britain at international scholarly gatherings. According to Minute Book 1 (1901–08) of the Council of the British Academy, the chair of section II (Philology, Including History of Literature)⁵ communicated to the Council that four individuals proposed by the section at its meeting of February 21, 1906 be elected Fellows of the Academy, including “Mr. Charles” (p. 101). We know which Fellows nominated Charles, as the nomination form bears the names of T. K. Cheyne, S. R. Driver, and W. Sanday (dated Jan. 26, 1906). At its meeting of May 23 that year, the Council listed Charles’s name among those proposed for election at the Annual General Meeting (p. 118). The Fellows at the Annual General Meeting held on June 28, 1906 elected “Dr. Charles” as a Fellow (p. 123). The president, at the General Meeting held on October 31, 1906, welcomed “the Rev. Dr. Charles” and the other new Fellows (p. 125). Charles’s name first appears as a Fellow in vol. 2 of the Proceedings of the British Academy for the years 1905–06, with a note that he was elected in 1906. He remained a member until the end of his life, and, as was his right, always listed “Fellow of the British Academy” with his academic degrees on the title pages of his books. The Minute Books of the Council allow one to trace some of Charles’s activities as a Fellow of the Academy. At the July 4, 1907 Council meeting, the president drew “attention to the lack of promises of Papers to be read before the Academy, and made suggestions for urging Fellows of the Academy, and particularly newly elected Fellows, to contribute papers” (Minute Book 1, p. 150). ⁵ At the time the Fellows of the British Academy were divided into four sections defined by areas of study. Each section was allowed to propose to the Council the names of people who might be elected Fellows that year. The roster of sections was changed in 1920. In the new arrangement, Charles was a member of III. Biblical Criticism and Archaeology (Minute Book 4, p. 8). In 1922 he was added to IV. Oriental Studies (p. 147).

242    ( – )

3. Charles, ca. 1906 (courtesy of British Academy Archives)

The Council Minutes for July 25, 1907 record: “It was reported that promises of Papers to be read before the British Academy had been received from Dr. Charles” and five others (p. 151). It was to be some time, however, before he presented one—not until 1915. Minute Book 2 (1908–12) has gone missing, but Minute Book 3 (1912–19) refers to Charles a number of times. At the May 27, 1914 meeting he was among the nominees for election to the Council (p. 51). The Fellows then voted him in at the Annual General Meeting held on July 10, 1914 (p. 52). Thus, in Proceedings 6 (1913–14) he is listed as a member of the Council. He attended his first Council meeting on October 28, 1914 (p. 55), at which “he expressed his willingness to read a paper on March 10th, next, on ‘An attempt to reconstruct the Source or Sources used by John in Rev. xvii 1–10, xviii’” (p. 56).⁶ He served as a member of the Council from 1914–17 and again from 1925–30. During his first term on the Council, he contributed to the life of the Academy in several capacities. ⁶ For the paper, under a different title, see Part 3 Chapter 3.

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1. He was added to sectional committee I (History, Including Archaeology) in addition to his membership in section II (Minute Book 3, May 5, 1915, p. 71).⁷ 2. He served on several committees appointed by the Council: (a) one dealing with issues relating to electing Honorary Fellows and with some questions having to do with Fellows (January 26, 1914, Minute Book 3, pp. 86–7). The committee brought its report to the Council on May 16 (p. 90). (b) He was appointed as a member of a committee to watch the question of alterations in the educational system so far as they affected the respective claims of the Humanities & Natural Sciences, & that it is to be suggested to the committee that they might communicate with the Royal Society on the subject, the committee to have power to take such action as they may think desirable. (July 4, 1916, pp. 94–5)

(c) At the same meeting he was appointed to a committee to examine “plans for a practical scheme for the transliteration into English of words & names belonging to (a) Russian & other Slavonic languages, & (b) the languages of the Near East” (95). (d) On October 25, 1916 he became a member of a committee considering a proposal by Sir George Walter Prothero, a Fellow, to increase the number of Fellows from one hundred to two hundred (97–8). The Council sent the proposal to a general meeting for consideration (100–1), and it was eventually accepted (March 28, 1917, pp. 107, 108, 110). (e) On December 21, 1916 Charles along with others was made a member of a committee “to consider the question of Occasional Social gatherings of the Fellows & to report to the Council” (104–5). 3. Charles and Professor W. P. Ker “were appointed additional persons to sign cheques” (January 31, 1917, 106). Charles’s first term on the Council ended in 1917, but the minutes of the June 5, 1918 meeting of the Council include among nominees for election to the Council “the Dean of Westminster [Ryle] (or failing him Canon Charles)” (161). The minutes for July 4, 1918, however, note that all the nominees to Council were willing to serve (162), so Charles was not elected for a second consecutive term. ⁷ Minute Book 3, p. 71, which noted his membership in a second section, states: “At the same time it was agreed that the Council should at some time consider the question of procedure to be followed for assigning Fellows to more than one Sectional Committee.”

244    ( – ) His second term as a member of the Council began in 1925. Minute Book 5 (1924–29) reports for the meeting on October 28, 1925, after noting the death of Bishop Ryle, that “Archdeacon Charles⁸ was appointed member of the Council in place of Bishop Ryle” (32). The report about the July 1, 1925 meeting of the Council includes the notice: “It was resolved on recommendation of Section III to award medal for Biblical Studies to the Venerable Archdeacon Charles, Fellow of the Academy” (p. 28). The Times of London for Thursday, July 9, 1925 (44009), p. 17 reported: “The first British Academy Medal for Biblical Studies, given to the Academy by Professor Burkitt,⁹ was awarded to Archdeacon Charles, in recognition of the many services rendered by him to the text and elucidation of both Canonical and Uncanonical Scriptures” (the award had been established in 1923 and later would be called the Burkitt Medal for Biblical Studies; see Part 3 Chapter 1). At the Council meeting on February 23, 1927 Charles was named to a committee charged with handling the celebration to mark the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Academy’s incorporation. The members were given “executive powers,” with permission to spend what they thought appropriate for the occasion (p. 56). While Charles had been serving on the Council in place of a deceased member since 1925, he was elected in his own right to another term at the May 25, 1927 meeting (p. 59). During this term he was appointment to the Schweich Committee of the Academy (January 25, 1928, p. 73). At the same meeting (he was not present for it) he was appointed to a committee whose task was to handle details regarding rooms in the new quarters for the Academy (the July 28, 1927 minutes referred to the Civil Service Commission Building, Burlington Gardens, made available by the government, p. 63; see the minutes for the meeting of May 30, p. 96).¹⁰ The last meeting for which his presence is noted in the minutes of the Council was held on May 22, 1929 (p. 109). According to D’Arcy, Charles became a force in the Academy. In that august and exclusive company he was soon recognized as a power. He threw himself into the administration of its affairs with zealous interest. As a member of the Council, and as, for a considerable time, Chairman of the

⁸ The secretary actually wrote “Ryle” but crossed it out and placed “Charles” above the deleted name. ⁹ That is, F. C. Burkitt, a Fellow of the British Academy who himself would be awarded the medal in 1926 and would write an obituary of Charles in 1931. ¹⁰ The minutes for the May 30, 1928 meeting refer to a subcommittee on rooms that was handling the details in connection with the twenty-fifth anniversary celebration, including the luncheon.

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Sectional committee dealing with Biblical criticism and Archaeology, and also a member of the Committee on Oriental Studies, he was in the thick of its activities.¹¹

The obituary of Charles in The Times of London noted about his time as a Fellow that he “continued to take an eager, not to say a sometimes stormy, part in its proceedings” (The Times for Monday, February 2, 1931 [45736], p. 14) (“Archdeacon Charles: A Great Apocalyptic Scholar”). The line is tantalizing but nothing more is said about his storminess. In 1907 Charles received a D. Litt. degree (Litterarum doctor = Doctor of Letters) from Oxford. The university in which he held only a temporary lectureship thus honored him for his scholarly contributions. The process of receiving the degree can be followed in the minute book of the Faculty of Arts—Oriental Languages preserved in the Oxford University Archives (FA 4/14/1/1’ pp. 164–7). On March 11, 1907 Charles applied for the degree, on May 13 two judges were appointed, D. S. Margoliouth and Archibald Sayce, and on June 3 the judges submitted their report (FA 4/1/.2/1’ p. 138), concluding that Charles should be given the certificate of the board because of the evidence he submitted: his 1902 book on Jubilees and his 1906 edition of Ethiopic Enoch (“original contributions to the advancement of learning”). The Ancient House of Congregation conferred the degree on him on June 20, 1907 (Oxford University Gazette, June 25, 1907, p. 780).¹² It is surprisingly easy to find information about the public occasion for conferring D. Litt.s in 1907 because that year Mark Twain received one as well. The New York Times for June 27, 1907 reported about the ceremony held the day before in the Sheldonian Theatre. Some thirty men, with Twain and Charles, received the degree, including General William Booth and Rudyard Kipling. However, the great ovation was reserved for Mark Twain, who was the lion of the occasion. Everyone rose when he was escorted up the aisle and he was applauded for a quarter of an hour. When Dr. Ingram Bywater, Regius Professor of Greek, presented the American humorist to the convocation, the students started a fire of chaff about his books and their heroes, mixed with frequent questions, such as “Where is your white suit?” Mark Twain ¹¹ “A Brief Memoir,” xxxii–xxxiii. D’Arcy himself later became a Fellow. ¹² The certificate is preserved in the Oxford University Archives (UR 3.4.5) and is, oddly, dated June 30, 1907. It also mentions the two books he submitted as evidence and adds that they qualified him to “supplicate” for the degree.

246    ( – ) said afterward that he wanted to reply, but was determined to observe the etiquette, which demands that recipients of degrees be silent.

Charles was not the star attraction, but he was definitely a worthy recipient of the degree. He listed it as well on the title pages of his books published after 1907. The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs ranks, with 1 Enoch and perhaps Jubilees, as the ancient Jewish¹³ text to which Charles devoted the most sustained attention. As we have seen, he wrote a number of essays about it and published two major volumes, one providing a translation and commentary and the other offering a critical text.

The Contents of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs consists of the deathbed addresses that Jacob’s sons delivered to their children. It is often suggested that the twelve units were written in imitation of Jacob’s final “blessing” of his sons in Genesis 49. There he refers to a trait or traits of each one or an incident in which a son was involved and tells all of them “what will happen to you in days to come [literally: at the end of days]” (Genesis 49:1). Once Jacob had finished speaking the “blessings,” he gave instructions for burial with his ancestors in Hebron and then breathed his last (Genesis 49:29–33). The units for the sons in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs do not appear in the same order as in Genesis 49 or in the accounts of their births in Genesis 29–30, with 35:16–21. Rather, the order is according to the mothers: first the six sons of Leah, then the two sons of Rachel’s maid Bilhah, the two of Leah’s maid Zilpah, and finally Rachel’s two sons. Each of the twelve units contains, to one degree or another, three elements: 1. An autobiographical account; some of the stories are found in Genesis (e.g., Reuben’s sin with his father Jacob’s wife Bilhah [Genesis 35:22]), some are not (e.g., two wars led by Judah). 2. Exhortations to the children to imitate or avoid the behavior of their father. 3. Predictions about what will happen to the children and their offspring. At the close of the testament, the patriarch gives orders that he be interred in Hebron, dies, and is buried. The Testaments of Levi, Judah, and Joseph are ¹³ Whether “Jewish” is the proper way to describe the Testaments is an issue that is treated below.

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the longest; these three sons are frequently mentioned in the other testaments as well. Joseph is a model of wisdom and self-control, while Judah and Levi are to be the leaders of the entire clan. From their progeny will come kings and priests who will rule the nation springing from the twelve. The text of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs survives in a number of Greek manuscripts; from Greek it was translated into Armenian and Slavonic. Although so much of the Testaments is Jewish in nature, there are in it some statements that are undoubtedly Christian. Accounting for these features has stimulated much debate among the experts.

The Context for Charles’s Articles and Volumes on the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs The Testaments endured a fate that in some respects resembles that of other texts Charles edited, while in others it differed. Once the author/editor had penned the work, it left marks on other ancient compositions and was mentioned in early sources, but later it fell out of circulation. Unlike Enoch and Jubilees, it did not find its way into Europe via Ethiopia, but apparently had always been available although it attracted little or no notice. The first evidence for it in Western Europe came from Robert Grosseteste (ca. 1175–1253), the Bishop of Lincoln in England, who translated a Greek copy of it into Latin. The way in which he obtained the manuscript is a story worth repeating. Charles wrote about it in his first article on the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. In it he cited from the earliest source of information for Grosseteste’s translation, the Historia Anglorum by the chronicler Matthew Paris (or Matthew of Paris) that he issued in the 1250s. At this time Robert, Bishop of Lincoln, . . . accurately translated the Testaments of the XII. Patriarchs from Greek into Latin. These had been for a long time unknown and hidden through the jealousy of the Jews on account of the prophecies of the Saviour contained in them. The Greeks, . . . who were the first to come to a knowledge of this document, translated it from Hebrew into Greek, and have kept it to themselves till our times. And neither in the time of the blessed Jerome, nor of any other holy interpreter, could the Christians gain an acquaintance with it, owing to the malice of the ancient Jews (4.232; cited in Charles, “The Testaments of the XII. Patriarchs.” Hibbert Journal 3 [1904–05] 559)

248    ( – ) Charles also summarized a passage from Matthew Paris regarding Grosseteste’s translation and recounted its early fate: In the fifth volume of this work the chronicler recurs to this subject, and informs us how the Bishop of Lincoln got knowledge of this work through John de Basingstokes, who, while studying at Athens, had lighted on the Greek MS., and induced the Bishop to procure a copy of this work from Greece. From this MS., which is at present in the library of the University of Cambridge, a Latin translation was made by the aforesaid Bishop, with the help of a Greek named Nicolaus, of the Abbey of St. Albans. This translation gained an immediate and widespread popularity, and from it, in course of time, translations were made into most of the languages of Europe. (559)

Henk J. de Jonge has investigated the episode in greater detail.¹⁴ As he explains, John de Basingstoke was an English student who had learned to read Greek and who traveled extensively in pursuit of his scholarly interests. Eventually he reached Athens, where he spotted the manuscript in the library of the Archbishop of Athens, Michael Choniates. Michael (ca. 1140–1220) served as Archbishop (Metropolitan) of Athens from ca. 1175 until 1204 when crusaders captured the city, an event that eventually caused him to flee to the island of Ceos. He was a noted collector (and copier) of manuscripts, and it is apparently among the ones in his possession that John de Basingstoke, at some time before 1204, saw the copy of the Testaments. Since the manuscript in question dates from the tenth century, it had a history before Michael acquired it, but nothing is known about its earlier days. Several decades after seeing the manuscript, John reported the information to Grosseteste who also knew Greek and who by this time occupied the episcopal office (hence the report came no earlier than 1235, the year Grosseteste became Bishop of Lincoln). Grosseteste sent a delegation to Athens to find and purchase the manuscript, and they succeeded in their mission—wherever the manuscript itself may have been at the time (Choniates had died years earlier). They brought it to England where Grosseteste, assisted by a Greek cleric named Nicolaus, translated it into Latin in 1242.¹⁵

¹⁴ “La bibliothèque de Michel Choniatès et la tradition occidentale des Testaments des XII Patriarches,” in M. de Jonge, editor, Studies on the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs: Text and Interpretation (Studia in Veteris Testamenti Pseudepigrapha 3; Leiden: Brill, 1975) 97–106. ¹⁵ The manuscript (Cambridge University Library, Ff. i.24, folios 203a–262b) is designated b in editions of the Greek text. In its margins, it contains notes that Grosseteste himself supposedly wrote, but if they are his it is curious that they do not figure in the part of the manuscript with the text of the

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Why were Basingstoke and the bishop so interested in making the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs available to literate people in Western Europe? According to Matthew Paris, the translation was meant to strengthen the Christian faith and cause confusion to the Jews. There has been some debate about whether Grosseteste also hoped to convert Jews, but it seems more likely that his intent was apologetic—to show that the Jews were wrong to reject the Savior predicted by their own ancestors.¹⁶ His confidence in the authenticity of the Testaments—that it contains the actual words of Jacob’s sons, though the book was not part of Scripture—was to be shared for the next several centuries. Since the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs became available in Western Europe at a relatively early time, it had experienced a long history of study before Charles trained his critical eyes on it. Matthew Paris had reported that the book contained prophecies of the Savior and that the Jews had therefore suppressed it. He also said that Greeks had translated it from Hebrew. These two topics—the nature of the messianic prophecies and whether Hebrew was the original language—became central points of debate. One early treatment of the Testaments following its introduction into Western Europe came from the Oxford scholar Johannes Ernestus Grabius (Grabe, 1666–1711), the author of Spicilegium SS. Patrum (1698, second edition, 1714).¹⁷ He argued with some hesitation that the Testaments was indeed a Jewish work written in Hebrew but that, far from including prophecies of Christ, its predictive passages were Christian interpolations into the Jewish composition. He observed that patristic references to the book placed it with other pre-Christian Jewish works and that, while some of its messianic expressions were Jewish (e.g., T. Reuben 6:12 where the messiah seems to be pictured as a warrior), others were added to the Jewish work by a Christian. He was able to adduce Rabbinic passages that parallel a number of the messianic statements in the Testaments, thus showing that they certainly could be Jewish. The view that had stood since the thirteenth century—that the Testaments was a Jewish work prophesying the coming of Christ—was Testaments. Grosseteste’s translation and the parts excerpted from it by Vincent de Beauvais, perhaps in 1253, both proved very popular and were frequently copied and translated (de Jonge, “La bibliothèque de Michel Choniatès,” 195). ¹⁶ Marinus de Jonge, “Robert Grosseteste and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs,” Journal of Theological Studies 42 (1991) 115–25. ¹⁷ Grabe wrote Spicilegium SS. Patrum in three volumes (Oxoniae: e Theatro Sheldoniano). Charles referred to the posthumous 1714 edition. In the first volume Grabe, besides treating problems connected with the Testaments and many other subjects, published the Greek text (using manuscript b but including the variants of a, a copy in the Bodleian Library) and Grosseteste’s Latin rendering. Hence, his was the first publication of the Greek text.

250    ( – ) altered in a major way by Grabe: it was a Jewish work, but certain of the prophecies it now contains were spliced into it by a Christian. Some decades after Grabe’s work, Heinrich Corrodi (1752–93) wrote in opposition to his conclusions.¹⁸ He argued that if the presence of Jewish elements in a text entailed that it was Jewish, a composition like the New Testament Revelation of John would have to be considered Jewish. He believed the Testaments was a Jewish Christian writing and that the notion of a warrior messiah does not constitute contrary evidence because it is found in the Book of Revelation as well. More importantly, neither Grabe nor Corrodi thought it furnished authentic predictions about Jesus Christ. For the next century or so, Corrodi’s thesis that the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs was an early Christian work¹⁹ stood as the dominant position. There was disagreement about the identity of the Christian group to which the author belonged (Jewish Christian, Gentile Christian), but the text was understood to be an intriguing expression of what some early Christians believed, including a patripassianistic Christology. In his history of research on the Testaments, H. Dixon Slingerland summed up the period as “1820–1883: Is the Testaments a Jewish-Christian or a Gentile-Christian Document?”.²⁰ These appear to have been the only options. A reversal back toward Grabe’s view resulted from the work of Friedrich Schnapp who devoted a short (88 pages) book²¹ to the evolution of the Testaments. A survey of recent views on the problem—with the many proposals about the sort of Christian who had written it—led him to posit that uncertainties arose because scholars assumed the text was a unity when it was not. With Grabe, he believed a Jewish text had grown through interpolations and demonstrated his position, first by studying the Testament of Levi and then the other relevant material. He established internal criteria for detecting interpolations and concluded that the base work focused on the lives of the patriarchs and their moral advice. To this text Jewish apocalyptic lines were added (they were not part of the original as Grabe thought) and Christian interpolations were placed in those additions. Schnapp’s arguments proved so influential that they led to a fundamental change in the scholarly consensus.²²

¹⁸ Kritische Geschichte des Chiliasmus (Frankfort/Leipzig [no publisher given], 1781). ¹⁹ It was usually dated to the late first or more likely to the second century .. ²⁰ The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs: A Critical History of Research (Society of Biblical Literature Monograph Series 21; Missoula, Montana: Scholars Press, 1977) 8–18. Slingerland’s book has been very helpful in preparing my survey of scholarship undertaken before Charles. ²¹ Die Testamente der Zwölf Patriarchen untersucht (Halle: Max Niemeyer, 1884). ²² Schnapp also contributed the section on the Testaments in Kautzsch, editor, Die Apokryphen und Pseudepigraphen des Alten Testaments, 2.458–506.

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This was the state of affairs when Charles started to study the Testaments (for Frederick Conybeare’s essays on the Armenian version, see below).

The 1899 Article His first published statement about the Testaments appeared in cols. 237–41 of his “Apocalyptic Literature” (cols. 213–50) in Cheyne and Black, editors, Encyclopaedia Biblica, vol. 1 (1899). There he briefly described its contents and explained that the original Jewish work, composed around the beginning of the Christian era, was later enlarged by Jewish interpolations and subsequently by several Christian additions. He also surveyed the ancient names for and attestations of the book, the history of scholarship on it, and the manuscript evidence for it.

The 1902 Article Charles’s second treatment was published three years later in another reference work: “Testaments of the XII Patriarchs,” in Hastings, editor, A Dictionary of the Bible, vol. 4 (New York: Charles Scribners’ Sons, 1902) 721–5. The entry is in some respects a repetition of what he had written in the 1899 article and in others it advances beyond it. It so happened that in the period between when he finished the one and completed the other new textual material had come to his attention, and scholarship on the Testaments had taken several steps forward. In 1902 Charles continued to maintain that the Testaments was a Jewish work into which first Jewish and then Christian interpolations were made, but by this time he had developed a clearer idea of when the base text was written. 1. The original Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs was composed late in the second century .. It reflects the multiple offices, including that of prophet, held by John Hyrcanus (135–104 ..), and by him alone, and glorifies Maccabean rule. Into this work a Jewish interpolator, working in the mid-first century .. (60–40), inserted anti-Hasmonean sections. (Charles’s dating of the base text to the late second century makes me wonder whether he meant this essay, not the previous one, when he wrote about first discerning the correct date for Jubilees [above, Part 2 Chapter 2].)

252    ( – ) 2. Wilhelm Bousset had recently argued that the Christian interpolations came from a single writer (that is, Schnapp’s view),²³ but Charles insisted, as he had in 1899, that conflicts between the teachings of the various Christian interpolations betrayed the presence of several hands. 3. He was able to elaborate further on some of the ancient versions of the Testaments. In the 1899 article he said nothing about an Aramaic text related to the Testaments, but he had now learned of a discovery that had just recently been announced (see below). He added that the only Syriac fragment of the text, preserving a short passage differing in wording from the other ancient versions, agreed in its readings with the new Aramaic piece. Furthermore, an edition of the Armenian version that he had mentioned as forthcoming in 1899 had appeared; there seemed to be two recensions among the several Armenian manuscripts. Charles, who knew of four Greek copies at the time of the 1899 article, noted that other manuscripts existed but had not yet been published. 4. Charles had more to say in 1902 regarding the teachings of the Testaments. He wrote about its eschatology, its understandings of the three or seven heavens, and its view concerning the reunited twelve tribes of Israel. In the 1902 entry, Charles referred to the contributions of Frederick C. Conybeare who had written several studies on the Armenian version of the Testaments.²⁴ In “On the Jewish Authorship of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs,” Jewish Quarterly Review 5 (1893) 375–98,²⁵ Conybeare accepted Grabe’s approach to the text and believed the Armenian translation, made from a Greek text in the fifth or sixth century, provided evidence to back it. He was able to show, by comparing the readings in two Armenian copies ²³ “Die Testamente der XII Patriarchen: I. Die Ausscheidung der christlichen Interpolationen,” Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 1 (1900) 141–75. The second part of his article appeared in the same volume: “Die Testamente der XII Patriarchen: II. Composition und Zeit der jüdischen Grundschrift,” 187–209. ²⁴ Charles also wrote appreciatively of the work of Erwin Preuschen, “Die armenische Übersetzung der Testamente der zwölf Patriarchen,” Zeitschrift für die Neutestamentliche Wissenschaft 1 (1900) 106–40. Preuschen, among other points, showed there were two recensions present among the Armenian manuscripts. ²⁵ Others of his publications were: “A Collation of Sinker’s Texts of the Testaments of Reuben and Simeon with the Old Armenian Version,” Jewish Quarterly Review 8 (1896) 260–8 (using four Armenian manuscripts, he collated them against Sinker’s Greek text [for this, see below] of the two testaments named in the title); and “A Collation of Armenian Texts of the Testaments of (1) Judah; (2) Dan; (3) Joseph; (4) Benjamin,” Jewish Quarterly Review 8 (1896) 471–85 (a continuation of the previous exercise with four other testaments). Both studies provided experts with information about the readings in the Armenian version of which there was, at the time, no published edition.

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with those in the Greek version, that some of the most telltale Christian passages in the Greek were not present in the Armenian text. As he saw the matter, the text reflected in the Armenian version demonstrated that, when the translation was made, the process of Christian interpolation had begun but had not gone as far as it did in the surviving Greek manuscripts. The recently published Aramaic text, to which Charles alluded in the 1902 article, introduced an entirely new element into study of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. Two years earlier, Herbert Leonard Pass²⁶ and J. Arendzen had issued a study of one complete manuscript leaf and part of a second containing an Aramaic text whose content was related to passages in the Testament of Levi and perhaps that of Judah.²⁷ The authors wrote about their fragment: “The MS. from which our text is taken is one of the many treasures which are contained in the ‘Taylor-Schechter’ collection of MSS. brought by Prof. Schechter from the Cairo Genizah in 1896, and now in the University Library at Cambridge; we owe it to the kindness of these gentlemen that we are enabled to give this fragment to the public” (651). In a footnote, Pass added that “It was my good fortune to discover the MS. in February last” (651). The Taylor-Schechter collection was named after the Hebraist Charles Taylor, Master of St. John’s College, Cambridge from 1881 to 1908, and Solomon Schechter, Reader in Rabbinics at Cambridge since 1892. With Taylor’s generous support, financial and otherwise, Schechter had traveled to Egypt in 1896–97 to search for the source from which a series of texts (about 100) had been surfacing in Cambridge and Oxford starting in 1891. Schechter had been alerted to the likelihood that they came from Cairo by those intrepid twin sisters Margaret Gibson and Agnes Lewis.²⁸ They had included Cairo in their latest journey to the Near East (in 1896) and had acquired a number of manuscripts and fragments there. Upon their return to Cambridge with their purchases, they invited Schechter to examine some of them, and among them he found a fragment of the Hebrew version of the Wisdom of Ben Sira. Schechter, who at the time was embroiled in a dispute about whether ²⁶ He “was a student of Jews’ College, the Orthodox London seminary, who continued his studies at Cambridge and, having there converted to Christianity, was ordained as an Anglican priest in 1916” (Stefan C. Reif, A Jewish Archive from Old Cairo: The History of Cambridge University’s Genizah Collection [Culture and Civilisation in the Middle East; Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 2000] 66). At the time of the article, he was a temporary employee of the University Library of Cambridge. He largely dealt with material from the Hebrew Bible and prepared a summary of the biblical contents of the Taylor-Schechter collection (more on this below) as well as apocryphal and pseudepigraphal material, and so on (238). ²⁷ “Fragment of an Aramaic Text of the Testament of Levi,” Jewish Quarterly Review 12 (1900) 651–61. They did not include a photograph of the fragment. ²⁸ In the literature, the Smith sisters are called by their married names, though both marriages lasted only a short time due to the deaths of their husbands.

254    ( – ) Hebrew was the original language of the book, eagerly made the journey to Egypt where he learned of the genizah²⁹ in the Ben Ezra synagogue located in Old Cairo (Fustat). He gained permission from the rabbi and leaders of the congregation to study the thousands of texts in it and to take as many of them as he wished. He would later send some 140,000 items from the genizah to the University Library.³⁰ Among those nearly innumerable scraps, Pass found the Aramaic fragment that he and Arendzen published. In their article the two dated the handwriting on the fragment no later than the eleventh century .. (651). A major issue was how the Aramaic text related to the Testament of Levi known especially from the Greek and Armenian versions. The title of their article, “Fragment of an Aramaic Text of the Testament of Levi,” implies that they thought it preserved part of the Semitic original of the work. Some of their comments indicate the same. For example, they noted that a comparison of the Armenian with the Greek version disclosed that the writer of the Greek handled his material with considerable freedom, both omitting from, adding to, and remoulding the original text. It was therefore to be expected that the Aramaic Text should show some considerable divergence from the Greek, and this will be seen to be the case, although their verbal identity in many places is an almost certain testimony to their common origin. (652)

They placed the Aramaic (from the full leaf) and corresponding Greek text (from Testament of Levi 11–13) side by side to show their relationship. This involved some rearranging of the Greek since the material in the Aramaic was not always in the same order and some passages were lacking. To show how the relevant Greek text actually read they appended its full form to their essay (661). They were unable to find matching Greek text for the words on the small piece of the second leaf but thought it belonged to an autobiographical section, since it seemed to be related to the events at Shechem (Genesis 34) in which Levi played a principal role, while it also bore some resemblance to Testament of Judah 5 (652–3). In addition, they reproduced the text of the one Syriac fragment, a text with which the Aramaic agreed closely (657). ²⁹ A genizah is a storage place for manuscripts no longer in use but which, for various reasons, it was thought improper to destroy. ³⁰ For a detailed account about Taylor, Schechter, and the Cairo Genizah, see Reif, A Jewish Archive from Old Cairo, 47–97. Reif also describes the contributions of Mrs. Gibson and Mrs. Lewis (75–8) and their visit to see Schechter in Cairo (81). There is a fuller picture of their part in the events in Janet Soskice, The Sisters of Sinai: How Two Lady Adventurers Discovered the Hidden Gospels (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009) 22–37.

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The 1904–05 Article Charles’s next study of the Testaments appeared as “The Testaments of the XII. Patriarchs,” Hibbert Journal 3 (1904–05) 558–73.³¹ He wrote that his aim was “to introduce the reader to a veritable romance in the region of ancient religious literature” (558). After summarizing the three parts of each testament, he briefly sketched the early references to the work and the story about the translation by Grosseteste in 1242 (it was cited above). He noted that its messianic prophecies were for a long time understood, as in the account given by Matthew Paris, to be genuine predictions of Christ. Later, however, they became a reason why students of the Testaments decided it was not a Jewish work but the product of a Jewish Christian author. To illustrate the nature of the material, he cited some of the prophecies in question. He held that these could only have been written by Christians while only a Pharisaic Jew could have written most of the book. To explain how the Jewish and Christian (“a dozen or more clauses,” 560)³² parts of the work came to be included in it, he summarized the main lines in the history of scholarship on the Testaments (see above, especially for Grabe, Corrodi, and Schnapp who returned to Grabe’s hypothesis “but developed it to rather illegitimate extremes” [561]). All the textual evidence, especially that of the Armenian version, led to the conclusion that several Christians had added material to an originally Jewish text. Grabe had maintained that the Testaments was written in Hebrew, but his successors opted for Greek as the language of composition. Two Jewish scholars (Kohler³³ and Gaster³⁴) had recently revived the idea of a Hebrew

³¹ Charles did include a short section on the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs in his essay “Apocalyptic and Apocryphal Literature” in Encyclopaedia Britannica (10th ed.; edited by Donald Mackenzie Wallace, Arthur T. Hadley, and Hugh Chisholm; Edinburgh/London: Adam & Charles Black, London: ‘The Times’ Printing Company, 1902–3), 25.486–500. The paragraphs about the Testaments (pp. 492–3) cover the earliest references to it, the translation by Grosseteste, the three elements in each testament, a brief history of scholarship, its original language, versions, and date. ³² As we will see, the number of Christian interpolations would grow in Charles’s subsequent analyses. ³³ Kaufman Kohler, “The Pre-Talmudic Haggada,” Jewish Quarterly Review 5 (1893) 399–419. He included the Testaments (400–6) among several texts that he adduced to draw the attention of scholars to midrashim that, he believed, dated from Maccabean times and thus to illuminate the subject of early haggada (that is, story or narrative). Presumably if, as he thought, the Testaments was written during the reign of John Hyrcanus, the author composed it in Hebrew. ³⁴ Moses Gaster, “The Hebrew Text of One of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs,” Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archeology 16 (1893) 33–49. Gaster argued that the Testaments was thoroughly Hebrew, and that the Greek translator had horribly abused the Hebrew original. He also published a translation of a Hebrew Testament of Naphtali that he took to be the original behind the Greek

256    ( – ) original but had failed to offer compelling evidence. Charles said he had been studying the question for several years and added in a footnote that The present writer hopes within the next twelve months to publish, through the Oxford University Press, a critical edition of the Greek text, with the supplementary evidence of the Armenian and Slavonic versions and of the Hebrew and Aramaic fragments; and also a translation and commentary, through Messrs A. & C. Black. (562; they appeared in 1908)

In the article, he summarized the evidence for a Hebrew original, the most convincing being the obscure passages in the Greek that, upon being retroverted into Hebrew, became clear in meaning (562). He followed this with several examples, some of which involve disagreements between the two groups of Greek manuscripts. The next point he attempted to establish was that “the book was written by a priest who was also a Pharisee; for it emphasises the distinctive doctrines which marked off the Pharisees from the Sadducean party” (564). He highlighted places where the text exalts Levi and his descendants, picturing them as priests and warriors. However, there are other passages (the Jewish interpolations) that speak very negatively of the Maccabean priests, criticizing the members of the dynasty (“the basest of men,” 566) who ruled in the first century .. So, the author of the original text must have written in the second century when the Pharisees still supported the Hasmonean dynasty, not in the first century when they were often at odds with representatives of it. Moreover, Testament of Levi 8:15 ascribes to one of the high priests prophetic gifts along with kingship; this could only have been John Hyrcanus the dates of whose rule Charles gave as 137–105 .. “The discovery of the true date of the Testaments has transformed this work from being a mere literary curiosity of the second century .. into an historical document of first-class importance of the second century ..” (566). According to Charles, the teachings about a priestly messiah were conditioned by or a reflection of the positions held by the Maccabean high priests of the second century (here he quoted Testament of Levi 18). Testament of Naphtali. The two testaments differ in major ways; Gaster blamed all the differences on the challenged Greek translator and others who corrupted the text. He added the novel suggestion that the Testaments was originally a part of Jubilees. On pp. 109–17 of the same journal and volume he published the Hebrew text with notes. A German translation (by Kautzsch) of this Testament of Naphtali was included in Schnapp’s “Die Testamente der 12 Patriarchen,” in Kautzsch, editor, Die Apokryphen und Pseudepigraphen des Alten Testaments, 2.489–94, where it appears after his rendering of the Greek Testament of Naphtali. Gaster’s thesis that the Hebrew text was the original behind the Greek Testament of Naphtali has not fared well in scholarship on the Testaments, although the composition is frequently mentioned and even translated in publications on it (see below).

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Charles devoted the final pages of the article to three points. As for the first, “the use of the Testaments as a handbook of morals in the Jewish Church” (568), the Talmud seems to refer to the confessions about unchastity uttered by Reuben and Judah in their testaments. It says that a judge should reference these examples when urging a suspected adulteress to confess her sin (Kohler had cited the Talmudic passage, b. Sota 7b and related it to the Testaments). Second, Charles adduced passages where he thought New Testament writers were influenced by the Testaments. He collected a number of verses and expressions from the Pauline Epistles that resemble the wording of lines in the Testaments (e.g., 2 Corinthians 6:14–15 and Testament of Levi 19:1). The author of the Epistle of James could have used the work, and the writers of the Gospels of John and Matthew may have as well. Charles brought the section to a close by listing passages suggesting that “the great doctrine of forgiveness as taught by our Lord was in part the same with and in part a development of that taught in the Test. Gad vi. 3–7” (571). The passage teaches that the offended party was to forgive a person who confessed his sin against him. He compared it with Luke 17:8 and Matthew 18:15. For the meaning of forgiveness in both cases is the highest and noblest known to us—namely, the restoring the offender to communion with us, which he had forfeited through his offence. This is the essence of the doctrine of forgiveness—God’s restoration of us to communion with Him—a communion from which our sin had exiled us. I confess that until I had studied this passage in the Testaments I had regarded our Lord’s teaching in this matter as unique. (572)

His language here is reminiscent of a point that he underscored in several of the messages in his 1887 collection Forgiveness and Other Sermons. More briefly, Charles treated the third topic, the ethical teachings in the Testaments. Here he quoted passages condemning such evils as hatred and envy. He ended the essay by citing the glorification of wisdom in Testament of Levi 13:3–4, 7–8.

The 1907 Article Charles’s name next appeared in connection with the Testaments in 1907 when he co-authored an article with Arthur Ernest Cowley, a Fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford, and expert in Semitic languages. The essay is

258    ( – ) “An Early Source of the Testaments of the Patriarchs [sic],” Jewish Quarterly Review 19 (1907) 566–83 (with photographs of cols. a and b of the Aramaic manuscript in question). Charles had been grateful for Cowley’s help with some earlier projects³⁵ and was now working with him on a newly available text. Their article built upon the one by Pass and Arendzen, as they acknowledge, although they credit only Pass with the earlier publication. Charles and Cowley offered some additional text from the manuscript to which the Pass/ Arendzen fragment belonged. With Pass’s permission, they reprinted his fragmentary text altered by corrections made by Pass and by Charles/ Cowley. Into it they integrated the remains of several columns that had come to their attention. Charles/Cowley are not very forthcoming in the article about how they happened upon the new Aramaic evidence and who contributed what to the essay. They wrote only: “The remaining part of the Aramaic is contained in a single leaf found some time later among the Geniza fragments in the Bodleian Library, and briefly described in the Catalogue, No. 2835, 27” (566).³⁶ The new Aramaic lines were not the only supplements to the fragment that Pass and Arendzen had published. Charles/Cowley made reference to an unusual text made available by Kirsopp Lake who had photographed a manuscript of the Greek Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs at Mount Athos in Greece. It “proved to contain a long passage not found in any other known MS., but agreeing, where the two overlap, word for word with the Aramaic, and clearly derived from the same source” (566–7). There is more information about the roles of Charles, Cowley, and Lake in Charles’s edition of the Testaments published in 1908. There he wrote about the new Aramaic text (after a reference to Pass’s work): “The Oxford fragment was found some time later by Mr. Cowley among the Geniza fragments in the Bodleian Library, and briefly described in the Catalogue, 2835, 27” (The Greek Versions of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, liii). Then, regarding the 1907 article they co-authored, Charles explained: “The deciphering and translation of the Oxford fragment was almost wholly the task of Mr. Cowley, my

³⁵ For example, in the Preface to his 1902 The Book of Jubilees or the Little Genesis, ix, he thanked Cowley for “his help in verifying references in the Talmud”; and in his 1906 The Ethiopic Version of the Book of Enoch, he was grateful to him for “revising the reconstructions of the Semitic original in the first thirty chapters” (iv). ³⁶ Texts from the Cairo Genizah reached several European centers, including the Bodleian Library, when travelers returned from Egypt with fragments and even complete manuscripts in their possession. One person who sold fragments to the Bodleian was Rabbi Solomon Aaron Wertheimer from Jerusalem; another was the Assyriologist Archibald Henry Sayce (Reif, A Jewish Archive from Old Cairo, 16, 83).

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part being limited to occasional suggestions and corrections, and attempts at getting behind the Aramaic and Greek fragments to the original presupposed by them” (liii).³⁷ As for the Greek manuscript that Lake had photographed, Charles reported: “The Greek fragment [the extra portion in the copy of the Testaments] was found by me in a tenth century MS. of the Testaments, which Professor Lake photographed for me on Mount Athos” (liii).³⁸ He added that the additional fragment “is interpolated in the midst of a verse in the Testament of Levi, i.e. xviii. 2” (liii). Charles was thus being assisted in his work by two younger scholars, both of whom had Oxford connections. The central contribution of the Charles/Cowley article was to present much more of the manuscript to which Pass and Arendzen had drawn attention. To the Cambridge fragment they could now add several columns and also the Greek unit that agreed with the Aramaic where it existed (they reproduced only those parts of the Greek with Aramaic parallels). They were able to infer the order of the columns preserved in the Cambridge and Oxford fragments and to estimate how much was lacking between the extant pieces. After supplying all of the surviving textual information, they gave a translation of the Aramaic text. The title of the Charles/Cowley article shows that they assessed the Aramaic text (with Greek parallels) differently than Pass and Arendzen. The latter proposed that the Aramaic was part of the original text behind the Greek translation of the Testaments, whereas Charles/Cowley regarded it as “An Early Source of the Testaments of the Patriarchs.” So, for them, the Aramaic work now partially available was consulted by the writer of the Testaments; it was not a text that he authored. They phrased the matter in this way: The common source of these Greek and Aramaic texts is not the Testaments of the XII Patriarchs, but a work based partly on the Testaments and partly on the Book of Jubilees, or else a work from which the authors of these books drew some of their materials. The evidence is decidedly in favour of the latter alternative, and therefore postulates a date not later than 150 .. (567)

³⁷ Cowley (1861–1931) had been working with the genizah material in the Bodleian Library for some time. Soon after Schechter announced the existence of a fragment of ben Sira in Hebrew, Cowley and Adolf Neubauer (1832–1907) published another genizah contribution to the text in The original Hebrew of a portion of Ecclesiasticus (XXXIX.15 to XLIX.11) together with the early versions and an English Translation; followed by the quotations from ben Sira in rabbinical literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1897). Cowley had, by the time he and Charles co-authored the article, already produced his translation from German of Gesenius’ Hebrew Grammar (1898 for the first edition from the Clarendon Press) and would later (1923) issue the widely used Aramaic Papyri of the Fifth Century .. (also from the Clarendon Press). ³⁸ Kirsopp Lake (1872–1946), who held degrees from Oxford, was very active in visiting libraries in Europe and the Near East as well as the one at Mount Athos and photographing manuscripts in them.

260    ( – ) The next question they addressed concerned the original language of the Aramaic work that was now coming into focus. Oddly enough, they (perhaps this was just Charles’s contribution) did not think the author composed it in Aramaic; rather, the Aramaic was translated from a Hebrew original (just as, on Charles’s view, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs was originally in Hebrew). They (Charles?) cited some examples of what they took to be mistranslations or mis-readings that could be explained by assuming an underlying Hebrew text, but there is some dubious argumentation in the section. An egregious instance concerns a list of twelve trees whose names imply that the author wrote in Aramaic. . . . the list of trees in the Greek corresponding to Bodleian col. c shows several transliterations of Aramaic names of trees. But this argument is not conclusive. For it would not be unnatural to use, even in a Hebrew document, in the second century . the popular Aramaic names of trees, where a large number is given. Moreover in certain cases the Hebrew name may either have been forgotten or have become so unfamiliar as to make it advisable to give the ordinary names which these trees bore even amongst the minority who knew Hebrew. (568)

Since the list of trees figures among priestly instructions—it names the trees whose wood is fit for incinerating sacrifices—it seems unlikely a Hebrew writer would resort to allegedly more popular Aramaic terms for them.

The Books The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs translated from the editor’s Greek text and edited, with introduction, notes, and indices by R. H. Charles, D. Litt., D. D., Grinfield Lecturer on the Septuagint, Oxford, Fellow of the British Academy (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1908). Charles’s years of research into the Testaments and related literature culminated in two volumes that appeared in 1908. The book containing the translation and commentary was published first. Charles dated the Preface to October 2, 1907 and dedicated the book to his wife. In an aside, he commented that the labor on the text had been heavy indeed, but the “joy of discovery” compensated for it. Or, as he put it, “The pleasures of fox-hunting are not to be compared with those of the student in full quest of some truth, some new fact showing itself for the first time within his intellectual horizon. But to return” (vii).

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Charles wrote about the difficulties besetting earlier attempts to solve the many problems raised by the Testaments and the positive contributions made by Schnapp, Conybeare, Kohler, Gaster, and Bousset—“and not a few of the conclusions arrived at by these scholars have been confirmed by my own investigations” (vii). He declared that the “main questions as regards the date, original language, and object of the author, are, I am convinced, now practically settled beyond the range of dispute” (vii). The volume supplied all the textual information (in translation) needed to address other kinds of problems. He clearly thought that the great turning point in scholarship on the Testaments had at last taken place. From the time of Grosseteste to the previous decade, the Testaments was “a sealed book, misunderstood and misdated on every hand. The research of the last few years has, however, as I have just indicated, succeeded in discovering its true date, purpose, and character” (viii). A “Chasid,” that is, an early Pharisee, had written it toward the end of the second century ..³⁹ “on behalf of the high-priesthood of the great Maccabean family, and especially on behalf of the Messianic claims of John Hyrcanus” (viii).⁴⁰ The Testaments made this clear, but the book’s even greater significance was being the sole representative of the loftiest ethical standard ever attained by pre-Christian Judaism, and, as such, attesting the existence of a type of religious thought in pre-Christian Judaism that was the natural preparation for the ethics of the New Testament, and especially of the Sermon on the Mount. (viii; see also xvii)

Charles’s long Introduction covers the expected topics. Once he had sketched the basics about the Testaments and his views concerning it, he turned in the next ten sections to the textual witnesses. He described the Greek copies but left aside for the time being a study of their interrelations so that he could first survey the manuscripts of the other versions. By 1908 he was aware of nine Greek copies of the Testaments (labeled a–i), each of which he described (xviii–xxii). His notes on some of them reveal the role of photography in his work—and how the results of technology at times fell short of expectations. Regarding manuscript b—the one used by Grosseteste in making his Latin translation—he wrote that it formed the text of the only recent

³⁹ On p. xv he dated it between 109 and 106 .. ⁴⁰ Exactly where anyone, Hyrcanus or others, made Messianic claims about him, besides the passages in the Testaments that Charles so interpreted, he did not say.

262    ( – ) edition of the Greek Testaments. Robert Sinker (1838–1913) of Trinity College, Cambridge had prepared Testamenta XII patriarcharum ad fidem codicis Cantabrigiensis edita; accedunt lectiones Cod. Oxoniensis; The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs; An attempt to estimate their historic and dogmatic worth (Cambridge: Deighton, Bell; London: Bell and Daldy, 1869).⁴¹ While he had accurately reproduced the text of manuscript b (he designated it C), he had also collated the readings of manuscript a (the Oxford copy mentioned in the book title) and had apparently not been as careful with it. Nevertheless Charles, on the basis of a report by M. R. James regarding Sinker’s work with b—“Dr. James has tested its accuracy for me, and found it to be above all praise,” xix—used Sinker’s transcription for the readings of this manuscript. Charles regarded his c (Vatican Library, Cod. Graec. 731) as the “most important of all the MSS” (xix).⁴² Although Sinker, in his supplementary volume, had included Guidi’s collation of its readings, Charles arranged to have a photograph of the manuscript made for him in Rome. Manuscript d, another Vatican copy, had been collated by Conybeare, “but I thought it advisable to have the MS. photographed for this edition” (xx). His e was the manuscript Kirsopp Lake had photographed on Mount Athos for him. Here Charles supplied more information about it than he had in the article he wrote with Cowley. It so happens that the manuscript contains not one but three major additions to the Greek text of the Testaments: at Testament of Levi 2:3 a prayer of Levi is inserted; at 18:2 the supplement that matches the Aramaic text finds its place; and at Testament of Asher 7:2 there are “22/3 columns of certain Christian disquisitions on love and the Trinity” (xx). Manuscript f from Paris was one that Sinker had collated in 1887, according to Charles, but had never published the results of his work; Charles had it photographed. ⁴¹ The English part of the title refers to an essay that he inserted before his edition of the text, and which had won the Norissian Prize in 1868. Sinker said of his edition that he rarely evaluated the worth of variants between the two manuscripts; he simply recorded their readings, b in the text and a (O for him) in the notes (vi). Ten years later Sinker published a supplement: Testamenta XII Patriarcharum; Appendix containing a Collation of the Roman and Patmos MSS. and Bibliographical Notes (Cambridge: Deighton, Bell; London: Bell, 1879; the two manuscripts he mentions have the sigla c and g in Charles’s list, see below). Sinker had not actually seen either of the two manuscripts of which he had become aware after 1869 (p. v) but received a collation of the Roman copy from Ignazio Guidi and a transcript of the Patmos manuscript from George Williams, with assistance from the Metropolitan of Chios (Patmos was in his jurisdiction). In his seventy-nine-page supplement, Sinker listed the variants of the two manuscripts and prefaced to these collations his bibliographical notes about each of the versions, including the Armenian (pp. 23–7). He believed that the Testaments was a Christian work written in Greek. Consistent with this view, he translated it into English in the Ante-Nicene Christian Library (edited by Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson; Edinburgh: Clark, 1871), vol. XXII, vol. II, 7–79 (this second book under the designation volume XXII includes “The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs and Fragments of the Second and Third Centuries”). ⁴² In neither of his books on the Testaments did he explain why c was the most important manuscript.

 —— 

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Manuscript g from Patmos was one of the two Sinker collated in his supplement. The last two Greek copies came from St. Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai. The first (h), which lacks the end of the text (after Testament of Joseph 15:7), “was copied for Dr. Sinker by Mrs. Gibson in Feb. 1892. This copy, together with photographs of T. Jos. i–xii. 3, xv. 1–7, Dr. Sinker most kindly placed at my disposal” (xxi). Manuscript i was found by Mrs. Gibson as she was trying to locate h on a visit to Sinai in 1906. She was searching for h, with a view to more correct collation, on my behalf. Notwithstanding every effort, she, like the Archbishop of Sinai, who had previously sought for it, failed to find it. Just before leaving Mount Sinai, however, she came across this second MS and photographed the greater part of it for me, i.e. down to T. Ash. vii. 6, when her camera broke down. Unfortunately, the negatives of T. Naph. viii. 2b–ix. 2b; T. Gad i. 9–iv. 1, v. 3b–vi. 2b; T. Ash. i. 7b–ii. 7, iv. 5–vi. 3d, were either lost or proved to be failures. When the photographs of this MS. reached me, the first ninety-six pages of my text had already passed through the press. Accordingly I have added in Appendix VI., in my edition of the Text, a collation of the Testaments of Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Jud. i–xx, where it differs from h, with which it is closely connected. (xxi–xxii)

The following section takes up the Armenian translation, the second most important witness for the Testaments. There was no need for Charles to be able to read Armenian for his previous editions, but familiarity with the language was vital for an editor of the Testaments. In the two 1908 volumes he showed that he was indeed conversant with it. He drew upon the readings of nine manuscripts, the first five of which were the textual base for the only prior edition of the version—one prepared by the Mechitarist fathers.⁴³ Charles had a very low opinion of it since the editors based it on what he considered the poorest manuscript of the second recension (e.g., xxii–xxiii, xxviii). Charles, by one means or another, was able to correct some errors in the collations of these manuscripts. Of the remaining four, he used Conybeare’s collations for two and handled the other two himself. One of the latter pair (Charles’s Af) had been photographed by Conybeare in 1891,

⁴³ H. Sargis Josepheanz in Treasury of Old and New Fathers: I., Non-Canonical Writings of the Old Testament (Venice: Mechitarist Press, 1896) 27–151.

264    ( – ) and Charles used the reproduction and at the same time exhibited his zeal for textual details. Unfortunately the negatives reproduced the pages of the Edschmiadzin MS. on so minute a scale, that it was impossible to print them. Moreover, a few of the columns were out of focus. Notwithstanding, the present editor has been able to decipher five-sixths of the text by holding the negatives between himself and the sunlight and studying the negatives letter by letter and word by word. (xxiii)

He added that he was aware of three additional copies, which he listed, but was not in a position to use. In the following section he described the two recensions of the Armenian version and their relations with the Greek copies (the Armenian generally agrees with the second class of Greek manuscripts; see below). There is some confusion in this section because, to this point, Charles had not explained the division of the Greek manuscripts into two categories (he would do that several sections later) but assumed the reader was familiar with the results and used the abbreviations for the Greek “versions” (his term) and copies that he had not yet introduced. Despite its great textual worth, Charles considered the insight the Armenian version gave into the Christian interpolations to be its real value (xxvii). He said little about it in his previous publications, but there is also a Slavonic version of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. In describing it he again assumed the reader understood his conclusions about and symbols for the Greek manuscripts (the Slavonic was translated from a Greek model). The copies of this version too mostly reflected the second type of Greek text. Morfill, who had helped him with 2 Enoch, contributed a short section on the two recensions of the Slavonic version, their origins, and the surviving copies of them (xxxi–xxxii). Once he had described the Greek manuscripts and the Armenian and Slavonic versions, Charles finally furnished his analysis of the Greek copies, how they interrelated, and the two “versions” they represented. He wrote about version α (manuscripts chi) and version β (the other six copies, among which two text types were distinguishable), finding the former to be superior (there is chart on p. xxxv). Note that in this configuration, manuscript b, the only one that had been used in previous editions, belongs to the inferior version. Charles followed the section with ones in which he listed the previous publications of the Greek text (always manuscript b) and translations of it into English and German before he turned to the relations between the Greek

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copies and the Hebrew text of the book.⁴⁴ However, he did not deem α and β to be recensions of a common Greek ancestor—the Greek translation from the Hebrew—but independent translations of two versions present already on the original Hebrew level of textual transmission. He first adduced the evidence that had led him to posit a Hebrew original behind the Greek (§13 [Hebrew constructions, dittographies, paronomasiae]) and then argued that “α and β derived respectively from two lost Hebrew recensions, Hα and Hβ” (this is the title of §14, p. xlvii). He cited cases in which there are different words in the two Greek versions that can be explained as representing, in the one instance, the correct Hebrew word, and in the other a look-alike Hebrew term with which the correct one was confused. The difference would not be a development on the Greek level but a reflection of variant Hebrew texts. His first example comes from Testament of Benjamin 12:2: Greek α Greek β He died in a beautiful and good sleep. Benjamin died . . . at a good old age. The Greek words for “sleep [υπνω = hupnō]” and “old age [γηρει = gērei]” are not likely to be confused (hence the difference did not evolve on the Greek level), but the two Hebrew words behind them—‫( שינה‬šēnāh) and ‫שיבה‬ (śêbāh)—are. A reasonable explanation for such pairs (he claimed there were more than thirty of them, xlviii, with a reference to §12 in his Text volume) is that Greek translations were made from Hebrew copies representing two recensions. So, the Greek α version was a rendering of Hα and Greek β of Hβ (he placed a stemma for all the versions on p. l), although the latter translator also used the α version in his work (this is how Charles accounted for the strong similarities between the two Greek versions). The section about dating the original Hebrew of the Testaments (§15) repeats the sorts of arguments he had given before in support of a point in the reign of John Hyrcanus, more specifically between 109 and 107 .. The unit (§17)⁴⁵ that he devoted to the questions of the integrity, authorship, and sources offers his thoughts, some of them surprising, about these significant topics.

⁴⁴ In another strange decision about order, Charles inserted “§12 Critical Inquiries” between the sections he devoted to the Greek manuscripts, editions, and translations (§§9–11) and the ones (§§13–14) in which he dealt with the relations between the Greek and Hebrew. ⁴⁵ “§16 Title of the Book” is really short, since there is little variation in the name given the work in the few ancient references to it.

266    ( – ) The groundwork, which consists of about eleven-twelfths of the Testaments, after the removal of the Jewish and Christian additions . . . , presents, it must be confessed, a want of coherence at times, and the parts dealing with the duty of submission to Levi, or to Levi and Judah jointly, come in occasionally very abruptly. Notwithstanding, the present editor adheres to the idea of the unity of the book; for the two phenomena referred to—the strictly Chasid element in the book, and its loyal acceptance of the Maccabean dynasty— were exactly characteristic of the period to which our author belongs, and to none other before or after. Furthermore, both these parts of the book are alike universalistic in tone. On the other hand, much of the unevenness of the book may be due to faulty transmission. (liv–lv)

Naturally, the author of this groundwork drew upon sources (e.g., the Levi text attested by Aramaic and Greek fragments) in composing his book. Charles thought the Greek version was made prior to 50 .. because Paul used it (the apostle was familiar with the α version). Whether Jesus’s words drawn from the Testaments reflect the first Hebrew version or its Greek translation,⁴⁶ he was not sure. Charles had mentioned the presence of Jewish interpolations in his various publications on the Testaments, just as his predecessors had, but in §19 he provided a full list of them (lvii–lix). He found eleven that were added between 70 and 40 .. These were characterized by their anti-Maccabean sentiments (much like the Psalms of Solomon), their claims that a messiah would come from Judah rather than Levi, and their citations from the Book of Enoch. He distinguished a second set of six Jewish additions coming from different dates but not echoing the themes of the first set. The much-debated category of Christian additions is the subject of §20 (lxi–lxv). By this time he had identified thirty-two of them but granted that some identifications were more convincing than others. It will be recalled that a number of them are lacking in the Armenian version. Examples of what Charles considered Christian interpolations in the Greek copies include two lines found in Testament of Levi 4:4 (using the translations in his notes to the passage, p. 37): “All the nations in the tender mercies of His Son,” and “Nevertheless thy sons shall lay hands upon Him and crucify Him.”

⁴⁶ Presumably, it would have been used when Jesus’s words were translated into Greek in the Gospels.

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Sections 21–23 of the Introduction treat three other texts that have some relation with the Testaments. (1) The Testament of Judah tells stories about wars fought by Jacob and his sons against different enemies; parallels occur in the Book of Jubilees and Midrash Way-yissa’u. Charles thought the writers of all three drew on a common source for this material. (2) The Hebrew Testament of Naphtali, which Gaster claimed was the original behind the Greek translation, was not that, but it was in “part based directly or indirectly on the primitive Hebrew text from which the Greek text was translated” (lxvii). Moreover, the Hebrew of Gaster’s text was late, and his Testament of Naphtali did not end like all twelve Testaments do. Finally, (3) the Aramaic text about Levi (with parallels and supplements in the Greek copy from Mount Athos) was a source for the authors of Jubilees and the Testaments. Here Charles maintained the Mount Athos Greek is not part of a translation of the Aramaic; both are translations of a Hebrew original (lxx–lxxiv). The short twenty-fourth section lists the passages in Jewish literature that, according to Charles, were influenced by the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. After dismissing several possibilities such as Jubilees and the Psalms of Solomon, he mentioned five places in the Babylonian Talmud that “are probably to be traced to the Testaments” and four in Targum PseudoJonathan to Genesis (lxxv). The somewhat longer §25 contains those few passages in Patristic literature that betray the influence of the Testaments. Only Origen and Jerome cite it by name, as do some lists specifying that it did not belong to the canon of Scripture. If the impact of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs on Jewish and Patristic literature was slight, one would get the impression from §26 (lxxviii–xcii) that its influence on the New Testament was pervasive. Charles began by adducing lines from Matthew that resemble ones in the Testaments. “The passages in St. Matthew which show the influence of the Testaments are almost exclusively those which give the sayings and discourses of our Lord” (lxxviii). An interesting case is Matthew 22:37–9 where love of God with one’s whole heart, soul, and mind is the great and first command, and love of neighbor as oneself is likened to it. With this Charles compared Testament of Dan 5:3: “Love the Lord through all your life,/And one another with a true heart” (his translation). Anther instances is (translations are from the NRSV and Charles): Matthew 25:35, 36 Testament of Joseph 1:5, 6 . . . for I was hungry and you gave me I was beset with hunger, and the Lord food . . . I was sick and you took care of himself nourished me . . . . I was sick

268    ( – ) me, I was in prison and you visited me.

and the Lord visited me, I was in prison, and my God showed favour unto me.

He cited a strange example from the Book of Acts. In 7:16 Stephen makes a surprising claim regarding Jacob and his sons that “their bodies were brought back to Shechem and laid in the tomb that Abraham had bought for a sum of silver from the sons of Hamor in Shechem.” Although Abraham’s burial place was in the Hebron area according to Genesis 25, Charles thought that the concluding lines in each of the testaments—burying the ancestor in Hebron— were parallels to Acts 7:16: “The statement here in Acts that the bones of the patriarchs were carried up to Shechem is found first in our text” (lxxxiv). He seems to have missed the fact that Hebron and Shechem are different places. Altogether, he included forty-one readings in the Gospels and Acts for which he found parallels in the Testaments. In the Epistles attributed to Paul in the New Testament he located another thirty-six. The first two he treated are especially noteworthy because he called them “direct quotations from the Testaments” (lxxxv). 1 Thessalonians 2:16 Testament of Levi 6:11 . . . for God’s wrath has overtaken them But the wrath of the Lord [variant: at last God] came upon them to the uttermost⁴⁷ Roman 1:32 . . . yet they not only do them but even applaud others who practice them.

Testament of Asher 6:2 . . . for they both do the evil thing and they have pleasure in⁴⁸ them that do it.

He added to the examples of Pauline parallels a list of seventy-two Greek words that are “common to the Testaments and the Pauline Epistles but are not found in the rest of the New Testament” (lxxxix; the list is on lxxxix–xc). He wrapped up the section on New Testament parallels with another fifteen in the letters of James, 1-2 Peter, Jude, and in Revelation. Critics could easily argue, and soon did, that, if the Testaments is a secondcentury .. work, the relation is reversed—the Testaments was influenced by the New Testament books. Yet, even if one agreed that the Testaments was ⁴⁷ The English translations do not reflect the fact that the verbs in the two are forms of the same word, and the Greek expression rendered “at last” and “to the uttermost” is identical in the two texts. ⁴⁸ The translations “applaud” and “have pleasure in” render the same Greek word.

 —— 

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earlier in date than the writings of the New Testament, the parallels could be dismissed as echoes of common ethical teachings. In the case of the two “direct quotations,” it is difficult to understand why one should conclude that Paul drew such general sentiments from the Testaments. Charles, however, did not raise these issues. His only concession was to admit that some of the examples were not as convincing as others. The twenty-seventh and final section of the Introduction centers on the doctrines set forth in the Testaments. Its title is “Teaching of the Author on Forgiveness, the Two Great Commandments, Universalism, the Messiah, the Resurrection, the Antichrist, and its Influence on the New Testament” (xcii–xcix).⁴⁹ 1. Forgiveness: he contrasted what he took to be the Old Testament view— that one who receives forgiveness from God may still harbor bad feelings about others—with the New Testament theme that God’s forgiveness and one’s pardoning a neighbor go hand in hand. As he had observed in his Hibbert Journal article, there was a strong resemblance, with differences, between Testament of Gad 6:3–7 and Matthew 18:15, 35 and Luke 17:3. The noble way in Testament of Gad 6:3–7 was practiced by the Chasidim, but when Pharisaism turned more to political interests and greater concern with the letter of the law, it soon ceased to offer scope for the further development of such a lofty system of ethics as the Testaments attest, and so the true successors of the early Chasids and their teaching quitted Judaism and found their natural home in the bosom of primitive Christianity. (xciv–xcv)

2. Duty of loving God and one’s neighbor: see the passage adduced above. Here Charles added a unit, not mentioned in the section title, on “Various ethical teachings.” Among those he treated are the kinds of actions forbidden (e.g., hatred, envy) and enjoined (such as temperance) by the patriarchs in the Testaments. 3. Universalism: The original text proclaims salvation for the Gentiles as do the Jewish additions from the first century .. 4. The Messiah: The author presents a messiah from Levi, while the firstcentury supplements anticipate one from Judah. 5. The Resurrection: Both the righteous and wicked will rise; there will be a future kingdom on earth that will last forever. ⁴⁹ In the Table of Contents, the section is entitled “Jewish Theology at the Close of the Second Century .. and its Influence on New Testament Theology.”

270    ( – ) 6. Demonology (it is not included in the section title): The book has an advanced demonology and understanding of Beliar’s roles. 7. The Antichrist: Testament of Dan 5:6, a first-century addition, is the earliest source for a connection between the antichrist and the tribe of Dan. This explains the absence of Dan from the list of the twelve tribes in the Book of Revelation (7:4–8). 8. The Two Ways (also not in the section title): Testament of Asher 1:3–9 is the earliest instance of this phrase. Charles seems to have forgotten to relate most of these topics to the New Testament, despite the claims of the section title. A page explaining brackets and abbreviations separates the Introduction from the translation and commentary (1–218). The notes, as in his previous books, regularly dominate the page. In this volume too they are printed in a very small font, are replete with abbreviations, and are arranged in double columns on each page. In the translations of some of the testaments, Charles set the texts of major witnesses, when they differ in substantial ways, in parallel columns; several examples occur in the Testaments of Levi (pp. 27–36, 53–7) and Judah (pp. 74, 94–7). The notes, which are extraordinarily detailed and extensive and yet set forth with an economy of words, are a gold mine of information for clarification of the text. The book contains two appendices. The first is “Translation of a Late Hebrew Testament of Naphtali, Which Contains Fragments of the Original Testament” (221–7, Charles’s English rendering of Gaster’s Testament of Naphtali, fortified with some textual notes). He indicated in italics which parts of the text preserved bits of the original testament, and in the margins of the translation he gave references to parallels, mostly in the Greek Testament of Naphtali but elsewhere in the Testaments as well. The second appendix offers his “Translation of Aramaic and Greek Fragments of an Original Source of the Testament of Levi and the Book of Jubilees” (228–35). Here too he indicated in the margin of his translation parallels to passages in the Testaments. On pp. 237–47 are two indices (ancient texts, names and subjects); the volume ends with a few corrigenda, also on p. 247. The Greek Versions of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, edited from nine MSS together with the Variants of the Armenian and Slavonic Versions and Some Hebrew Fragments,⁵⁰ by R. H. Charles, D. Litt., D. D., Grinfield

⁵⁰ It is strange that he did not refer to any Aramaic fragments in the book title but did mention Hebrew fragments (e.g., of midrashim with parallels to material in the Testaments), none of which he considered texts of the Testaments.

 —— 

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Lecturer on the Septuagint, Oxford, Fellow of the British Academy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908). The second book by Charles in 1908 was a companion to the commentary, a volume in which he established a critical Greek text of the Testaments using the evidence from all the ancient versions. The records in the Archives of Oxford University Press permit us to follow some of the planning for publication. Charles wrote on October 23, 1902 (that is, the year of his first independent article devoted to the Testaments) to Charles Cannan, who was secretary of the Press from 1898 to 1917,⁵¹ requesting that he bring to “the Delegates who control the Anecdota Series” his proposal “to prepare for the Anecdota Series the Greek Version of the Testaments of the XII Patriarchs together with the variants (in Greek) of the Armenian and Slavonic Versions of the same work, and to print in parallel columns with the above the Syriac and Aramaic fragments. . . .” He went on to describe the Greek, Armenian, and Slavonic versions and the importance of the Testaments. The Orders of the Delegates of the Press also contain entries having to do with the book. Cannan must have soon presented the proposal of October 23, 1902 to the Delegates because for their November 7, 1902 meeting the minutes record: “Prof. R. H. Charles,- Testaments of the XII Patriarchs On the proposition of Dr. Sanday, seconded by Dr. Magrath [both were Delegates of the Press], resolved to accept this book and to consider next week how it shall be listed.” At the November 14 meeting the decision was confirmed, and on December 12, 1902 the vice-chancellor signed a memorandum of agreement.⁵² Here once again Sanday⁵³ makes a positive appearance in Charles’s life. John Richard Magrath (1839–1930) was at the time the Provost of Queens College (1878–1930). From 1894 to 1920 he served as a Delegate of the Press and from 1894 to 1898 was vice-chancellor.⁵⁴ The records of the Press mention accepting a subsidy from the Hibbert Trustees toward publication of the book and refer to a letter of May 12, 1904 that seems not to be preserved. Charles, however, dealt with the subject on

⁵¹ The secretary to the Delegates was the chief executive of the Oxford University Press and the one who represented the Press to the university (“Oxford University Press,” Wikipedia, accessed 3-30-20). For the life and work of Cannan (1858–1919), see Peter Sutcliffe, The Oxford University Press: An Informal History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978) 107–89; “Charles Cannan,” Wikipedia (accessed 4-11-20). ⁵² Despite Charles’s request, the book was not published as part of one of the Anecdota series. ⁵³ He had been a Delegate since 1896 (Sutcliffe, Oxford University Press, 115). ⁵⁴ “John Richard Magrath,” Wikipedia, accessed 4-2-2020.

272    ( – ) June 7, 1904. Writing to C. E. Doble,⁵⁵ he said that “I am glad the matter is settled regarding the publication of the Test. XII Patr. I hope to send in a formal application for a subsidy towards the publication from the Hibbert Trustees.” He also requested that his copy of “The Test. XII Patr.” be returned to him. The letter raises some questions. First, what matter was settled regarding publication of the book or rather why was there a matter to settle when the proposal had been accepted by the Press in 1902? The following sentence suggests that a subsidy was needed to cover the costs of printing something so complicated as the edition Charles was preparing. That the Press could refer to the subsidy before Charles had formally applied for it may mean that inquiries and arrangements had already been made. The subsidy from the Hibbert Trustees turned out to be £302 5s 7d. Second, one wonders what Charles meant by asking that his copy of the Testaments be returned to him. What copy would that be? He had entered into the memorandum of agreement that he would submit the “whole matter” by April 1905 (he succeeded in meeting the deadline), though some appendices and the Greek index would have to come later. So, in June of 1904 he would not have had a complete manuscript less a few isolated parts. Perhaps the copy to which he referred was a section of the edition or possibly the translation volume described above. The Press agreed to print 1000 copies, with fifty meant for presents, five hundred for Great Britain, three hundred for export, and 150 for America (apparently considered distinct from “export”). As happened more often, Charles exceeded the allotted number of corrections to the proofs and had to bear the cost for the excess. He was supposed to receive 60 percent of the profit on the book, once the account showed a net profit. The publication date was March 25, 1908. Charles dedicated the volume to four scholars who had helped him and “who have rendered yeoman service towards the recovery and elucidation of this ancient text” (iii). 1. Robert Sinker (Cambridge): As explained above, Sinker had issued the text of manuscript b with a collation of a in 1869, added a supplement with collations of two more manuscripts in 1879, and had been gathering more manuscript information since then. Charles mentioned in his

⁵⁵ Doble was appointed assistant secretary in 1879 and remained at the Press for more than thirty years. Among his duties were “ ‘to exercise a general superintendence over the printing of all Delegates books’, and to correspond with authors” (Sutcliffe, Oxford University Press, 64).

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1902 Encyclopaedia Britannica article “Apocalyptic and Apocryphal Literature” that “This scholar has long promised a new edition from six MSS.” (493). In the Preface to the present volume, he wrote that Sinker, “when I informed him of my intention of editing the text, most generously lent me the collation of h, the first Mt. Sinai MS., which had been made for him by Mrs. Gibson” (vi). Nearly forty years after his initial edition Sinker may have been happy to pass the torch to a younger, most energetic scholar. 2. Frederick C. Conybeare (Oxford): Charles saw in Conybeare’s work the crucial contributions that freed experts from assuming that the Testaments was a Christian text. “By means of the Armenian Version this scholar established the high probability that all the Christian allusions in the Testaments are the interpolations of Christian scribes in an originally Jewish work, and therein confirmed the earlier hypothesis of Grabe and Schnapp” (v). For the text volume, Conybeare made available to Charles his collations of three Armenian manuscripts (v). In his letter to Cannan proposing the volume Charles had said Conybeare was willing to provide him with collations of four Armenian manuscripts if needed. 3. Wilhelm Bousset (Göttingen): Bousset dated the Testaments to the second century .., with additions made in the first. He also used the Greek (preferring other manuscripts to the Cambridge text published by Sinker) and Armenian evidence to demonstrate that Christian supplements in the Testaments are not as extensive as Schnapp had thought, although some are present. Bousset accepted Charles’s argument (in the Encyclopaedia Biblica) that Hebrew was the original language of the book. “The sustained study of the intervening years has turned a good working hypothesis into an indispensable postulate” (vi). Bousset’s and Charles’s views on the Testaments had much in common. 4. William R. Morfill (Oxford): Morfill, who had been so helpful to Charles in translating Slavonic Enoch for him, had also contributed his expertise to study of the Slavonic version of the Testaments. He wrote a small unit in the Introduction to Charles’s translation and commentary (xxxi– xxxii), but he did much more for the textual project: “My warm thanks are specially due to Professor Morfill, who retranslated into Greek for this edition the two recensions of the Slavonic Version” (vi). His work may be seen in Appendices IV and V where his Greek renderings fill pp. 257–94. These generous efforts must have greatly eased the process of comparing the readings in the Greek manuscripts with those in the

274    ( – ) Slavonic copies. In his letter to Mr. Doble (June 7, 1904) Charles had referred to Morfill’s contribution: “Towards the end of the week I hope to send in Morfill’s Greek reproduction of the Slavonic Version (recension B). This is to be printed as an appendix . . . ,” Publication of a volume that involved the repeated use of several foreign scripts (Hebrew, Greek, Syriac, Armenian) and included hundreds of pages that would have been difficult to typeset was an expensive venture. Charles was grateful for a subvention from the Hibbert Trustees to offset the cost of publication (see above)—not the first time the Trust had supported his work.⁵⁶ He also thanked the readers and compositors of the Press for their skilled execution of the task. Among the others to whom he recorded his gratitude were Mrs. Gibson and Mrs. Lewis (“for the endless pains they took in securing for me a photographic reproduction of i, the second Sinai MS.” [vi]); the directors of the Paris and Vatican libraries for allowing photographs of their copies to be made; Kirsopp Lake for the photographs of the Mount Athos manuscript; and Cowley (“for his ever ready help in regard to the Aramaic fragments” [vi]). A Miss Poole received thanks for preparing the Greek index. The fact that it is twenty-five pages in length shows that she too made a sizable contribution to the book. A letter of Charles’s dated March 11, 1908, just two weeks before the publication, provides confirmation of how Charles valued her work. Writing to R. W. Chapman, who had become assistant secretary in 1906,⁵⁷ he included this paragraph: I am very much obliged indeed to the Delegates for the grant of £10 towards the expenses of indexing &c. Now that I think of Miss Poole’s work, I should be glad if the Delegates presented her with a copy of the Testaments; for I believe that it took her six weeks working four hours a day to make the Index. For such work the fee of £5 is not real remuneration. Indeed at the time I told her the fee was merely a nominal one.

⁵⁶ He had delivered the Hibbert Lectures in 1898. ⁵⁷ Sutcliffe, Oxford University Press, 119. Chapman (1881–1960) would become secretary in 1920, after returning from service in the War, and continued in the post until 1942. Sutcliffe covers his career throughout large parts of Oxford University Press, especially from p. 190 on. See also “Robert William Chapman (Scholar),” Wikipedia, accessed 4-11-20. He was an expert on Jane Austen and Samuel Johnson.

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In his first volume on the Testaments, Charles had notified the reader that “Some of the sections in this Introduction will of necessity appear in the Introduction to my Text, which will be published immediately by the University Press” (ix). He wrote something similar in the Preface to the present book (vi), so the very large amount of repetition between the two Introductions—it is extensive and usually verbatim—should come as no surprise. The Introduction to the translation/commentary volume has twenty-seven sections, but the Text volume has just twenty-one. Since in the latter he focused on textual issues, he left out sections about modern translations of the Greek text and the influence of the Testaments on Jewish, Patristic, and New Testament literature. He did add one new unit—§13 Linguistic Character of the Greek Version (xl–xlii). He opened the Introductions to both the first and the second volume with a section entitled “Short Account of the Book,” but the version in the Text volume provides a better statement of his views regarding the Testaments. The Testaments were originally written in Hebrew by a Pharisaic upholder of the Maccabean priest-kings in the closing years of the second century .. In the course of the next century the Hebrew text was interpolated with additions emanating from bitter opponents of the Maccabean dynasty. In the early decades of the Christian era the text was current in two forms, which are denoted by Hα and Hβ in this edition. The former of these was translated not later than .. 50 into Greek, and this translation was used by the scholar who rendered the second Hebrew recension into Greek. The first Greek translation was used by our Lord,⁵⁸ by St. Paul, and other New Testament writers. In the second and following centuries it was interpolated by Christian scribes, and finally condemned indiscriminatingly along with other apocryphs. (ix)

The next sections that introduce the versions and the surviving copies of each are mostly word-for-word reproductions of the corresponding sections in the first volume. Little time separated the two publications, so there were no new manuscript discoveries to describe and include in the analyses of the versions. ⁵⁸ This is a little different than what he wrote in the translation volume. There he commented that if the Greek expression behind “they disfigure their faces” in Matthew 6:16 either in itself represents the actual words in Greek of Christ, or as is more likely, if they are an exact translation of the original Aramaic words of Christ, then it is probable that our Lord used either α in the Greek, or Hα in the Hebrew. (lvii)

276    ( – ) As his views about the stemma of the texts did not change, the charts from the first volume are reprinted in the second. In a few cases, he expanded a section; for these he provided a note to that effect in the first volume (e.g., §11 The Greek Version—a translation from the Hebrew—H; cf. the translation/ commentary, xliii; or §16 Title of the Book; see translation/commentary, liv). In these instances, the section in the Text volume grew through full citation of more examples. Conversely, at times in the Text volume he referred the reader to the commentary for more detail (e.g., §14 on the date of the Hebrew original, xliii). He may have changed his mind about a few minor matters; a possible example is in §17 Jewish Additions to the Text where he left out the paragraph from the first book in which he had maintained that there were clear references to the later Maccabees in some of the Jewish additions (see translation, lviii, text, xlvii). His Introduction also incorporated the sections about Christian additions (here he omitted Testament of Gad 8:2 from the list in the first volume), Midrash Way-yissa’u, the Hebrew Testament of Naphtali, and the Aramaic and Greek fragments of a source text. Two pages of corrigenda (lviii–lix) and one explaining brackets and abbreviations (lx) stand between the Introduction and the critical text. The Greek text and critical apparatus occupy pp. 1–233, and every last page is Charles personified. The Greek that he deemed the best attainable text stands at the top of the page. Various kinds of brackets mark off words and phrases that, for example, are not in the Armenian version or were, in Charles’s opinion, interpolations. The margin alongside the critically established text is also filled with symbols that required an explanation on the page devoted to brackets and abbreviations: T T. The printed Greek text represents α except in a few cases. Where words are printed in thick type the reader is to understand that the text of β differs, and that this is found in the margin. Only the chief variants are thus denoted. (lx)

So, his text differed from those of his predecessors in not being based on manuscript b which belonged to Charles’s β group but on manuscripts chi— the α manuscripts. The major variants in the β group he marked in the margins with this siglum and supplied the reading. There he also indicated which β manuscripts supported the variant, if not all of them did, and whether the Armenian (Aα or Aβ) and/or Slavonic (S¹ or S²) did so. It is no wonder Charles thanked the workers at the University Press for their skillful work in setting such complicated pages. It is also no surprise that he said he would be

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grateful to receive corrections from readers (vi). As in the translation volume, so here he sometimes, when the witnesses attested strongly divergent readings, presented a double or triple text (e.g., much of Testament of Levi 14, a chapter for which he has eighty-four textual notes), placing them in parallel columns and identifying above each the version(s) supporting it.⁵⁹ At the end of the book Charles supplied six appendixes. 1. The Hebrew text of Midrash Way-yissa’u, giving references to the parallels in the margins and, in the text itself, underlining the Hebrew words that are equivalents of Greek words in the Testament of Judah. In an apparatus he supplied the Greek words in question. There are also a few footnotes containing variants in the version of the midrash found in another medieval text, the Chronicles of Jerahmeel. 2. The Hebrew Testament of Naphtali, with an apparatus of variant readings occurring in the different copies. Parallels especially with the Greek Testament of Naphtali he underlined and included the references in the margins. 3. The Aramaic and Greek fragments of the Levi text: For passages where the two are extant, he presented them in parallel columns; where only one survives, there is a single column. He underlined words and phrases agreeing with the Testament of Levi (and Jubilees) and gave the references in the margins. There is an apparatus for both the Aramaic and the Greek texts. At the appropriate point, he placed the text of the Syriac fragment alongside that of the Aramaic (p. 254). 4. Christian Additions Made by the Slavonic Scribe in S¹: Charles assembled here Morfill’s Greek retroversions of seventeen passages that meet the description in the title of the appendix, including the long plus after Testament of Joseph 19:12. 5. Retranslation of the Second Recension (S²) of the Slavonic Version by Professor Morfill (with additions unique to the Slavonic version in brackets; 263–94). 6. Collation of the second Sinaitic MS. i where it diverges from h for the Testaments of Reuben, Simeon, Levi, and Judah i–xx: This is the list that Charles had mentioned in the Preface (xii), where he explained that he received the photographs for these testaments only after pp. 1–96 (the

⁵⁹ At Testament of Naphtali 2:8 he placed in a parallel column a Hebrew text—The Alphabet of Rabbi Akiba—that in some places resembles the verse. He underlined the Hebrew words that correspond with ones in the Greek text.

278    ( – ) pages containing these testaments) of his text had been set in type by the press. Under the circumstances, he was not able to add the readings to his apparatus of variants for those pages and had to consign them to an appendix (295–7).

Reviews Publication of two substantial volumes in 1908 elicited quite a number of responses from fellow scholars. Everyone was amazed at the amount of work Charles put into them and was grateful to him for making so much material available in a convenient form. However, many of his principal conclusions came in for sharp criticism, including his theories about the original language of the book, two Hebrew recensions from which two Greek versions were made, preference for manuscripts chi, especially c, the date of the book, and a related question—whether it really did influence New Testament writers. An especially appreciative review came from William Muss-Arnolt⁶⁰ in The American Journal of Theology 13 (1909) 453–9. He spent most of the pages describing the two books by either quoting or tightly paraphrasing Charles’s words. About Charles he wrote: “The two volumes appearing, thus, almost simultaneously are a new evidence of the great learning and scholarly sagacity of the Grinfield lecturer on the Septuagint in the University of Oxford, the worthy successor of Edwin Hatch and others” (453). Muss-Arnolt noted that a number of points advanced by Charles awaited further discussion and added that if Schürer (see below) was correct that those lines in which the Testaments expressed its loftiest ethical standards, ones that so impressed Charles, were actually Christian additions, “Charles’s whole position becomes untenable” (458). But regarding the critical text and apparatus he wrote: “The whole is a most outstanding result of the happy union of philological acumen and indefatigable industry” (459). He concluded his review with words of gratitude for Charles and his work: . . . we beg leave to join the host of students of both Testaments, the Old and the New, who have now, or will shortly, express their sincere thanks to the editor and translator for this, the most important contribution toward the ⁶⁰ Muss-Arnolt held a Johns Hopkins PhD and compiled A Concise Dictionary of the Assyrian Language (Berlin: Reuther & Reichard, 1905). At the time he reviewed Charles’s books, he was a librarian at the Boston Public Library (“William Muss-Arnolt,” Wikipedia, last accessed 8-6-2019). He had reviewed Charles’s critical edition of Ethiopic Enoch in the previous year in the same journal.

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true reading and interpretation of the text of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, and give voice to the hearty appreciation of the spirit which pervades both volumes from beginning to end. (459)

Emil Schürer reviewed the two books in Theologische Literaturzeitung 33 (1908) cols. 505–9 (text) and 509–11 (translation). He too was impressed with how Charles had carried out a very demanding task in a relatively short time. “When one looks at the critical apparatus, he is amazed at the extent of the work here accomplished” (505 [my translation]). He drew attention to the advantages of using photographs of manuscripts in producing editions. Regarding the two versions that Charles distinguished among the Greek copies, he made a point of saying that there was no sharp divide between them (Charles, too, was aware of this) and appreciated the reader-friendly way in which Charles recorded the most important Greek variants in the margins (506–7). Schürer was not so sure the Aramaic Levi was a source for the Testaments and Jubilees. He commended Charles for being a pioneer in supplying in his notes of commentary the basis for explaining the text, though he would have preferred it if he had paid more attention to the narrative sections (509). He thought that Charles had failed to prove the existence of two Hebrew recensions from which two Greek versions were translated. The examples of readings Charles adduced—cases in which Greek variants could be explained by confusion of look-alike Hebrew words—were instances of inner-Greek corruptions. He also doubted that Charles had established Hebrew as the original language of the book, although the earlier one dated it the more likely it became. For Schürer, Charles’s weakest arguments were those he formulated to date the original to the late second century .. A linchpin of his case for seeing John Hyrcanus in the Testaments—Testament of Levi 8:14–15—was a Christian addition. In general, he charged that Charles defined the Christian interpolations too narrowly (510). By so doing he mistakenly identified the highest ethical utterances (e.g., love of God and neighbor) as part of the original Jewish composition when they were in fact Christian supplements (511). At the end he expressed appreciation to the tireless author for the gift of these two volumes (511). Since Charles and Bousset had articulated detailed arguments that the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs was pre-Christian and Charles had drawn up extensive lists of parallels (more than ninety) between the Testaments and the New Testament to show dependence of the latter on the former, New Testament scholars had reason to weigh in on the matter. Alfred

280    ( – ) Plummer, author of many commentaries including one on Luke,⁶¹ contributed an article entitled “The Relations of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs to the Books of the New Testament,” The Expositor 6 (1908) 481–91. He asserted that the number of parallels was even higher than Charles thought (ca. 130–40) and was especially interested in the large number in Matthew, the most popular gospel in the Early Church. The parallels were too numerous to dismiss as accidents; there must be a relation of dependence, but in which direction did it go (481–2)? He wondered why there would be so many parallels with Matthew if, as Charles maintained, Jesus himself had used the Testaments. If he had, one would expect many similarities with it in all four gospels. Plummer posited that the numerous parallels were Christian additions to the Greek Testaments, a work already known to have been Christianized through interpolations (485–6). The Greek Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs was thus influenced by the New Testament, especially by such popular works as Matthew and the letters of Paul. This, he thought, made better sense of the general lack of evidence for the Testaments in Patristic literature. If the Testaments had exercised influence on New Testament authors, one would have expected to find its imprint among the Fathers as well (487–9). Another New Testament expert, F. C. Burkitt, responded in “Dr. Charles’s Edition of the ‘Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs’,” Journal of Theological Studies 10 (1908) 135–41. He began with a few of those familiar “yes-but” lines that populate book reviews: The excellence of a work of learning may be measured by its usefulness to those who cannot accept the special conclusions of the writer. Tried by this severe test, Dr Charles’s edition of the Greek text of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs is a most excellent work. Dr Charles has put a vast quantity of new material into our hands; he has arranged it clearly on the page, and if some of his textual theories appear hazardous, it is our duty to remember that the problems have been to a great extent raised by the new evidence which he has brought towards the elucidation of this most interesting relic of Jewish and early Christian literature. (135–6)

He highlighted two points: (1) the date and language of the Testaments, and (2) the history of its textual transmission (136). For the former he thought ⁶¹ An Exegetical and Critical Commentary on the Gospel according to Saint Luke (International Critical Commentary; Edinburgh: Clark, 1901).

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Charles made a good case, for the latter not so much. He agreed the Testaments was Jewish and written in Hebrew (“But it is difficult to understand what the insistence upon the future glories of Levi would mean, if the work proceeded originally from a Christian hand,” 136). In a Jewish work magnifying John Hyrcanus, the Christological passages in the Greek and subsequent versions must be Christian supplements (137). He noted that all the versions of Testament of Levi 4:4 read or reflect an unusual expression for crucifixion (του ανασκολοπισαι αυτον [tou anaskolopisai auton])⁶² so that all of them must have a common origin for the term and for the reference to God’s Son also present in the verse. He took up Charles’s thesis about two Hebrew recensions issuing in two Greek translations and wondered how, if this had happened, the Christian addition in Testament of Levi 4:4 found its way into all the texts (137–8). He thought both of what Charles regarded as direct quotations by Paul from the Testaments were Christian additions to the work; Charles had certainly not made a convincing case that Paul used the Testaments (138). About his arguments in support of two Hebrew recensions he wrote: Dr Charles generally tries to explain the origin of all these variations by referring them back to a pair of Hebrew terms which look more or less alike to the Aryan eye, but I very much doubt if palaeographical error be the most frequent cause of the variations. I imagine that the most frequent cause was deliberate alteration. The alteration was sometimes suggested by the look of the original reading, sometimes it was not. And the only reason that our MSS do after all agree so much together is simply that it is much less trouble to copy out a text than to rewrite it. (139)

Burkitt likewise questioned Charles’s adoption of the α manuscripts as his chief authorities. He noted that these copies spoke of “three” heavens in Testament of Levi 2–3, while the β manuscripts read “seven.” This suggested to him that the reading “three” was due to a Christian scribe, since the notion of seven heavens was not accepted by all in the early Church. In fact the impression I have gained from weighing a large number of variations between chi and the other texts, is that chi represents nothing more than an edition of the Testaments made by an editor who did not

⁶² The verb means “to impale.” A variant in manuscript b is αποσκολοπισαι [aposkolopisai], “to remove stumbling blocks.”

282    ( – ) scruple to alter, and alter for the worse, a Greek text which he did not fully understand. (139)

This was an attack on a basic thesis of Charles and was to find an echo in much subsequent scholarship.⁶³ Burkitt took up Charles’s example from Testament of Benjamin 12:1, 2, cited above, in which he explained a Greek variant “sleep/ old age” as arising from a confusion of two similar-looking Hebrew words. Burkitt argued that in the Testaments (e.g., Testament of Zebulon 10:6) the word “sleep” occurs in a similar context. Moreover, the reading fits with the phrasing in the verse and with other notices about the end of the patriarchs’ lives. “In other words, Dr Charles’s hypothesis of rival Hebrew recensions of the Testaments is not really indicated by this series of passages” (140). Burkitt, after dealing with a couple of other issues, concluded on a positive note: It would not be fair to leave the Testaments without once more calling attention to the great debt of gratitude which all students of the quasicanonical writings must feel to Dr Charles. He has introduced to all students, and to English scholars in particular, a whole series of works which go a long way towards making up the background of Bible ideas and Bible phrases. And if all the theories and reconstructions which he brings forward do not carry conviction to some of his readers, we shall do well to remember that it is in very great part due to his unwearied labours that the discussion of these questions has been made possible. (141)

Charles’s work was reviewed in other kinds of journals as well. T. Nicklin evaluated it in The Classical Review 23 (1909) 83–4. He began with appreciative comments but soon turned to criticism. He charged that Charles weakened his presentation by his method: He throws together proofs strong and feeble, and gives the reader no hint that he is conscious of any difference in their cogency. The result is that he

⁶³ A few years later, J. W. Hunkin developed Burkitt’s thesis in “The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs,” Journal of Theological Studies 16 (1914) 80–97. He showed, by comparing their major variants for the Testaments of Reuben, Simeon, Levi, Zebulun, and Gad, that the β family was superior to the α group and thought the Armenian evidence demonstrated that b should be the basis for reconstructing the text (83–9). He judged α to be “little more than a late and free recension of the β text” (89). The Armenian translation was frequently only a free rendering of its base Greek text, an abridgement of it, with Aα often being defective, a corrupt and shortened form of Aβ (94–5). For similar assessments of the textual situation, see below.

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runs a grave danger of having the strength of his case misunderstood and indeed of having judgment given against it because the evidence may not be completely examined. (83)

He then assessed each of Charles’s arguments that the Greek was a translation of a Hebrew original. For the Hebraic constructions and expressions he detected throughout the Greek text, Nicklin pointed out parallels in Greek papyri. Regarding paronomasiae that become evident upon retranslation into Hebrew, he argued that these proved only that the writer knew Hebrew, not that he wrote in it (84). The amount of subjectivity in some of Charles’s claims also came in for condemnation. Among his other complaints, he found Charles’s arguments for two Hebrew recensions from which two Greek translations arose to be unproven. An unsigned review of both books in The Athenaeum (number 4201, May 9, 1908) commends Charles for his great labors in the Text volume but maintains that the poor materials available—the direct and indirect witnesses—make establishing a text most difficult: Dr. Charles has included in his volume all the fragments in Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, and Greek which show connection with the book; but these only add to the confusion. Every page of the text with its apparatus criticus bears witness to the fact that certainty, or even an approximation to certainty, is impossible. Any one who may undertake to edit the book has to select many of his readings according to his own taste and fancy, with the knowledge that the next editor may dispute his decisions. (533)

The reviewer sincerely doubted one could demonstrate Charles’s primary literary conclusions on the basis of the textual evidence: “But how can a book be trustworthy of which the authorship is unknown, the language vague, and the MSS. prepared by inaccurate transcribers, who took the greatest liberties with the manuscripts they were copying?” (533). Among the issues was the original language; for settling the question he thought the data at hand to be inadequate. He suggested the absence of some Christian passages from the Armenian version could be due to deliberate omission by the translator, since they express views considered heretical when the translator worked (533–4).⁶⁴

⁶⁴ Charles seemed unaware that the Armenian omissions could be explained in other ways than as pointers to an earlier form of the text. N. Messel (“Über die textkritisch begründete Ausscheidung vermütlicher christlicher Interpolationen in den Testamenten der zwölf Patriarchen,” Beihefte zur

284    ( – ) In his opinion, Charles offered some good arguments for a Hebrew original, but they were not conclusive. Those for the date of the original, however, were more problematic, being based on just a couple of passages. He examined Testament of Levi 8:11–15 (where prophecy is associated with a new priesthood and the phrase “priest of the Most High God” appears—all, for Charles, pointing to the Maccabean priests and especially John Hyrcanus) and argued that none of the specific indicators Charles found here stands up to scrutiny. He concluded the review by summarizing difficulties with Charles’s claim that the Testaments influenced New Testament writers. All of the textual witnesses in our possession are Christian. “It is far more likely in the circumstances that the passages came from the Christians who had to translate or transcribe the work” (535). There is no indication that Charles was convinced by—or even that he paid attention to—the criticisms. In 1913 he contributed the lengthy section on “The Testaments of the XII Patriarchs” (2.282–367) in his The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, where the composition is classified as an apocalypse. The introductory material is patterned on that in the 1908 translation/commentary volume, and, of course, the translation stems from the same source. In 1913 he was still aware of just nine Greek manuscripts and also listed the same number of Armenian copies as in 1908. The charts representing the relations of the versions and copies are thus unchanged as well. His views about issues such as the date of the book, the two Hebrew versions, and the like, are those of 1908. In the short bibliography, the only updated entry is his article on “Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs” in the latest edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (the eleventh, published in 1911), vol. 26, pp. 666–8, in which he advanced his familiar views and several times simply reproduced (between quotation marks) what he had written in 1908. On the pages following his annotated translation in the 1913 volume, he included two appendices: his translation of the Hebrew Testament of Naphtali, and his translation of Aramaic and Greek fragments of the Levi text. It was through the much-used 1913 publication that his theories about the Testaments were to become most widely disseminated. His 1908 translation, virtually unchanged, was republished in The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs (Translations of Early Documents, Series I Palestinian

Zeitschrift für die alttestamenliche Wissenschaft 33 [1918] 355–74) wrote strongly against Bousset’s and Charles’s use of this version. Messel, who doubted the Testaments was at base a Jewish work (e.g., 357), charged that the two scholars overrated the Armenian. Only some of the Christian “interpolations” are missing from the Armenian which also omits many other passages found in the Greek manuscripts. He totaled up the omissions and showed that only a very small percentage of them are of what Bousset and Charles identified as Christian interpolations (see his chart, 373).

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Jewish Texts [Pre-Rabbinic]; London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge, 1917). To save space, the decision was made to give only one translation where Charles had multiple columns reflecting the different witnesses (v).

Legacy In the small world of scholarship on the Testaments and related works—in contrast to several of the reviews—Charles’s positions proved dominant for decades. Slingerland, in his summary of research on the Testaments, describes the period from 1908–51 as “The Charles Consensus.” Also, in connection with the previous period, the one ending in 1908, he commented: “So, then, Charles is at the center. He takes the past to himself and molds from it a way of looking at the Testaments which even now [that is, 1977] prevails and which, until about 1950, rarely was questioned.”⁶⁵ In contemporary studies, the view that the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs was Christian from the beginning has taken on a new life, largely due to the publications of Marinus de Jonge (1925–2016) of Leiden University. His book The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs: A Study of their Text, Composition and Origen (Assen: van Gorcum, 1953) offered, in direct opposition to Charles, a defense of the hypothesis that it is a Christian composition written in Greek around the year 200, although the writer used some Jewish sources. He argued against the possibility of identifying Christian interpolations by textual means. For him, the β manuscripts, especially b, were better, while the α group constitutes a reworking of the β version. The Armenian version is related to β but is a short form of it and not appropriate for the use to which Conybeare and Charles put it. De Jonge has been a major contributor to the study of the Testaments since 1953. Besides writing a series of articles, he prepared the first full edition of the text since 1908: The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs: A Critical Edition of the Greek Text (Pseudepigrapha Veteris Testamenti Graece 1 i; Leiden: Brill, 1978)⁶⁶ and with H. W. Hollander authored The Testaments of the

⁶⁵ The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs: A Critical History of Research, 29. On p. 40 he remarks that Charles had so carried the day that the contributions of earlier scholars were largely forgotten. “His position had obliterated the past; the long period from 1908 to 1950 assumed his work as conclusive, and even the new researches of the past twenty years have not dimmed its prominence.” ⁶⁶ Other contributors were H. W. Hollander, H. J. de Jonge, and Th. Korteweg. De Jonge was able to use five more Greek manuscripts than Charles, in addition to some marginal notes in manuscript d. He rated b the best manuscript of his family I and considered c a poor representative of Family II (xxxiii– xli). De Jonge had earlier published Testamenta XII Patriarcharum, edited according to Cambridge University Library MS Ff 1.24, fol. 203a–262b, with Short Notes (Pseudepigrapha Veteris Testamenti

286    ( – ) Twelve Patriarchs: A Commentary (Studia in Veteris Testamenti Pseudepigrapha 8; Leiden Brill, 1985). This latter volume offers a new translation and the most complete commentary since Charles’s first book of 1908. De Jonge has somewhat modified his position over the years. He was responsible for the section “The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs” in H. F. D. Sparks, editor, The Apocryphal Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984) 505–600. There he maintained that neither thesis—that the Testaments is Jewish or that it is Christian—in its extreme form can be maintained. As he put it: “if the Christian interpolations are held to be numerous in the one case and the basic Jewish material to be extensive in the other, the difference between the two in practice is nothing like so great as might be supposed” (509–10). A factor in more recent study of the Testaments has been publication of Qumran texts that contribute information relevant to some of the testaments, although no copy of any of the testaments has been found. Aramaic Levi Document (1Q21, 4Q213, 213a, 213b, 214, 214a, 214b): The seven additional copies of the text that was known previously from the Cairo Genizah fragments and extra Greek material in the Mt. Athos manuscript of the Testaments demonstrate its antiquity and increase the amount of text available. Naphtali (4Q215): The birth and naming of Bilhah section of the text, in which Naphtali is speaking, parallels material in Testament of Naphtali 1:6–8. Three other texts, Testament of Judah (4Q538), Testament of Joseph (4Q539), 4Q540–1 Apocryphon of Levia-b (all in Aramaic), are very poorly preserved. The stretches of text that have survived indicate an interest in the sorts of settings one finds in the Testaments, with the patriarchs speaking. Little survives from these texts, yet none seems to be a copy of one of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. The theory that the Testaments is a Christian text is by no means the only one defended today, as both options, that the work is Christian but incorporates Jewish traditions or Jewish with Christian additions,⁶⁷ are supported. Graece 1; Leiden: Brill, 1964). It is based on the idea that the β manuscripts are superior and was largely a publication of b, with some use of other material. Michael Stone, with Vered Hillel, published An Editio Minor of the Armenian Version of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs (Hebrew University Armenian Studies 11; Leuven: Peeters, 2012). He lists sixty-five known manuscripts and used eleven for the edition. The volume contains both a critical Armenian text and an annotated English translation. In addition, it includes the text and translation of an Epitome of the Testaments. ⁶⁷ For two defenses of the thesis that the Testaments was written by a Hellenized Jew and subsequently interpolated, see Jürgen Becker, Untersuchungen zur Entstehungsgeschichte der Testamente der zwölf Patriarchen (Arbeiten zur Geschichte des antiken Judentums und des Urchristentums 8; Leiden: Brill, 1970), and Howard C. Kee, “Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs,” in James Charlesworth, editor, The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, 1.775–828 (especially 776–8).

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In the absence of new evidence, it is unlikely there will be a definitive resolution to the debate any time soon. As John Collins wrote in 1984: “Much of the material in the Greek Test. 12 Patr. is compatible with either Jewish or Christian authorship.”⁶⁸ While that seems right, a couple of facts deserve repeating. 1. The text of the Testaments in its present form, with the Greek copies offering the earliest attainable wording, is Christian in the sense that some passages definitely allude to Jesus and events in his life. 2. The text, apart from a small number of passages (see #1), can be read as a Jewish work. 3. The Greek Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs is the most ancient instance of a collection of twelve units associated with the twelve sons born to Jacob and his wives. There are other early texts that center around one or another of the brothers and may even take testamentary form (see the Qumran texts listed above). But there is no evidence these latter works (or others) were gathered into a collection with twelve parts corresponding to the number of the sons. The question raised by Burkitt in his review of Charles is still a good one: If the Testaments was composed by a Christian author, why does is it so positively concerned with Levi and his priesthood. Without more textual finds, it will have to remain a question lacking an answer.

Charles’s 1908 Article This is the place to mention Charles’s article “Man’s Forgiveness of His Neighbour—A Study in Religious Development,” The Expositor 6 (1908) 492–505. A footnote on the first page reports “Delivered before the General Meeting of the Congress of the History of Religions at Oxford on Friday, September 18, 1908” (492). It develops thoughts that Charles had expressed in his Hibbert Journal article, his commentary on the Testaments, and his treatment of the relevant New Testament teachings in several messages published in his 1887 Forgiveness and Other Sermons. He here set forth at ⁶⁸ “Testaments,” in Michael Stone, editor, Jewish Writings of the Second Temple Period (Compendia Rerum Iudaicarum ad Novum Testamentum, Section Two: The Literature of the Jewish People in the Period of the Second Temple and the Talmud, vol. 2; Assen: van Gorcum/Philadelphia Fortress, 1984) 343.

288    ( – ) greater length his reading of the Old Testament instructions regarding God’s forgiveness and ours—though there are some more enlightened passages in the Hebrew Bible, most of the pertinent verses express an eye-for-an-eye mentality or an unforgiving approach to another person. From the two conflicting series of passages on forgiveness we have now dealt with, we see that there was no such thing as a prescribed and unquestioned doctrine of forgiveness in the Old Testament, and that a Jew, however he chose to act towards his personal enemy, could justify his conduct from his sacred writings. It is easy to deduce the natural consequences of such a state of ethical confusion. (497)

He contrasted this with the New Testament teaching about humans forgiving as God forgives them and extending that forgiveness even to strangers (498–9). However, the New Testament approach is not an original contribution of Christianity as one can see from the apocryphal books that had come to light (500). He analyzed passages from the Wisdom of Ben Sira that show development of the better side of Old Testament doctrines about forgiveness (500–2) and then introduced the key passage from the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, Testament of Gad 6:3–7 which he quoted. Again he asserted that the passage parallels Jesus’s teachings on the subject, and the strong resemblances in language and thought mean “we must assume our Lord’s acquaintance with them” (503). Though he was largely repeating ideas he had expressed before, he introduced an additional one that does not figure in his other statements about the Testament of Gad 6:3–7. It would be hard to exaggerate the importance of this passage. It proves that in Galilee, the home of the Testaments of the XII. Patriarchs and of other apocalyptic writings, there was a deep spiritual religious life, which having assimilated the highest teaching of the Old Testament on forgiveness, developed and consolidated it into a clear consistent doctrine that could neither be ignored nor misunderstood by spiritually-minded men. This religious development appears to have flourished mainly in Galilee. (504)

He does not explain the basis for his geographical claim, though it clearly had important implications for him. As he wrote, even a Sadducee like the writer of Sirach could not fully escape this Galilean influence. The Pharisees with their legalism, had their “stronghold” in Judah, but it was “from Galilee, the land of the religious mystic and ethical eschatologist, that Christ and eleven of His

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apostles derived their origin and their religious culture. Christ’s twelfth apostle was from Judea” (504–5). In the Sermon on the Mount Jesus lifted this teaching to its highest level. The one who forgives an enemy is forgiven by God and thus shows his kinship with him (505). Though Charles had written much the same about forgiveness in other places, only more briefly, it is strange that he associates the Testaments with Galilee, since he thought a Pharisee wrote it and that the Pharisees had their center in Judah. Charles’s extraordinary volumes on the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs marked a high point in his editions of early Jewish texts. His future work would, for the most part, consist of other sorts of publications. The following years that turned out to be his last in Oxford saw him issue several more books, including his best known one, The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament. We will examine them in Chapter 9.

Chapter 9 The Last Oxford Years 1909–1913 and The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament The five years that concluded Charles stay in Oxford were as productive as any period in his career, as he continued writing prolifically and making other contributions to the study of ancient Judaism.¹ The steady stream of books hardly stopped at the end of the period, though in 1913 his life underwent a major change.

Appointments and Lectures 1. Through most of the years—until 1911—he retained the post of Grinfield Lecturer on the Septuagint that he first occupied in 1905. The stipulations of the Behest were, as we have seen, that there be three lectures per year. 2. In 1910 Charles finally received an official position at the University of Oxford. He became a Fellow of Merton College, one of the oldest in the university. The Oxford University Gazette issued the following announcement on December 6, 1910: “The Rev. R H C, M.A., D.Litt., F.B.A., of Exeter College, Grinfield Lecturer on the Septuagint and Speaker’s Lecturer in Biblical Studies,² has been elected to a Fellowship, tenable for five years, under Statute III. 7 (ii), on the understanding that he prosecutes his researches in Biblical and Apocryphal Literature” (see also the Minutes of the Governing Body of

¹ Charles wrote to Henry Major in 1910 that he had taken on so much that it would take him ten– fifteen years to complete. He also said that his workday was four hours (due to illness?) and that he had hired a young scholar to help him with his research for half of the year (Ripon, December 28, 1910). A few years later he informed Major that his time for the next eight–ten years was already pledged to publishers (Ripon, October 30, 1913). ² See number 5 below.

R. H. Charles: A Biography. James C. VanderKam, Oxford University Press. © James C. VanderKam 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192869289.003.0011

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Merton College, December 5, 1910). He was to hold the position until 1914.³ 3. On September 27, 1910 he gave an address at the annual Church Congress; it was published in The Official Report of the Church Conference (see below). 4. In 1912 he delivered the Drew Lecture on Immortality. He gave the lecture on October 11, and it was published later that year (see below). 5. He was appointed Speaker’s Lecturer in Biblical Studies at Oxford and occupied the position from 1910 until 1914. The information about the lectures he gave is recorded in the Oxford University Gazette (according to the notice of the lectureship, February 15, 1910, the lecturer received about £100 annually). May 14, 1910: The Hebdomadal Council elected Charles whose proposed topic was “The New Testament Apocalypse treated in the main philologically having regard to its relation to preceding Apocalyptic literature, its diction and style, date, authorship, &c. with a systematic study of the text” (Gazette, May 18, 1910, p. 660). February 14, 1911: Apocalyptic: Its Nature and Scope February 21 and 28, 1911: History of the Interpretation of the New Testament Apocalypse (December 6, 1910, 290; January 19, 1911, 348). May 9, 1911: History of the Interpretation of the Apocalypse from 1730 to 1910. May 16 and 23, 1911: New Testament Apocalypse, chaps. vii–ix (April 27, 1911, 645). February 27, 1912: Critical Exposition of the New Testament Apocalypse: Chapter IV. March 5, 1912: Critical Exposition of the New Testament Apocalypse: Chapter V. March 12, 1912: Critical Exposition of the New Testament Apocalypse: Chapter VI (October 25, 1911, 94; January 18, 1912, 297). May 7, 10, and 14, 1912: New Testament Apocalypse: Chapters VI–VII (April 25, 1912, 587). ³ The Minutes of the Governing Body for October 7, 1913 mention that the Warden read a letter in which Charles resigned his Fellowship as of December 31, 1913. However, he is still listed among the Fellows in 1914, and on March 12, 1914 he was made an honorary member of the Common Room. There is also a record of his attending some meetings of the governing body and donating books to the College Library (e.g., October 31, 1912).

292    ( – ) January 21, 23, 28, 30, February 4, and 6, 1913: New Testament Apocalypse (VIII–XII) (January 9, 1913, 329). His three-year term ended at this point, after eighteen lectures, but he applied for renewal and was re-elected for one year, from October 1913. For the year he proposed to lecture on Revelation xiii–xxii (May 14, 1913, 793). November 4 and 11, 1913: The Thirteenth Chapter of the Book of Revelation November 18, 1913: The Seventeenth Chapter of the Book of Revelation (June 11, 1913, 981; October 22, 1913, 111) January 27, February 10, and 13, 1914: The Apocalypse (Chapters XIV– XVI) (January 15, 1914, 331; February 4, 1914, 433). On March 16, 1914, not long after the end of his extended term, Charles was appointed an elector to the Speaker’s Lectureship in Biblical Studies, filling out the term of S. R. Driver who had passed away (March 19, 1914, Supplement [5] to Number 1424). The Gazette for November 25, 1914, 202, noted that was re-appointed as an Elector.

Publications Address to the Church Congress (September 27, 1910): The Official Report of the Church Congress, Held at Cambridge, on September 27th, 28th, 29th, and 30th, 1910 (edited by the Rev. C. Dunkley; London: George Allen & Sons, 1910) 70–5. The historian Roger B. Lloyd wrote about the phenomenon of the Church Congresses in Great Britain: Although the Congress had never been, and was never to become an official function, yet it had won for itself a recognised place in the life of the Church, and it fulfilled a necessary purpose. Year after year, ecclesiastics and the more leisured laypeople from all over the country met for a week in one or another of the great centres of population. They assembled in their hundreds, they listened to episcopal sermons, they received civic welcomes, they were assured of true sympathy and deep fellowship by nonconformist deputations, they listened to the reading of carefully prepared papers and to the delivery of less well prepared speeches until their heads ached. The Church Congress was certainly not the least exhausting of the events in the Church’s year. Its function was to consider the chief spiritual and social problems of

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the day, to provide a platform for the most thoughtful and active churchpeople to have their say about them. Most of the leading prophets of the day could be heard in the Congress, and the quality of the papers read frequently reached a very high level.⁴

Since the first Church Congress had met in Cambridge in 1861, the 1910 meeting, also in Cambridge, was the Jubilee gathering. The initial congress fifty years earlier had attracted some 300 people. Since that time, the annual event had moved from city to city in England mostly but also in Wales and Ireland. According to the “List of Church Congresses, with Numbers in Attendance and other Particulars” in the official report of the 1910 assembly,⁵ the size of the gathering grew rapidly so that by the time of the third one 1,918 were present. The attendance for the Jubilee Congress is given as 3,597. The report mentions the “Particulars” that highlighted the special occasion: “No afternoon Sessions, Excursions to places of interest. Brilliant reception on eve of Congress, and social amenities throughout the week, imparted a festival character to the Jubilee Congress” (xii). The Congresses, apart from formal features, consisted of sessions arranged by topic. Those for the 1910 meeting included education, theology, Christian unity, poor law, science, prayer-book, national service, missions, and philosophy. Each such unit would have a presider in the chair as several papers were delivered and a number of responses (the Discussion) followed. Charles, identified as the Rev. R. H. Charles, D.D., Grinfield Lecturer in the University of Oxford, presented a paper in the theology section which met on the evening of Tuesday, September 27. The presider was “The Right Worshipful the Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge University,” the Rev. Canon A. J. Mason, D.D., and Charles was the third to present a paper, after ones by two church officials. The fourth paper came from Vincent Henry Stanton, D.D., Professor of Divinity at Cambridge and Canon of Ely. Their papers preceded seven rather brief responses (although they do not seem to address any specific paper), one of which was offered by F. C. Burkitt; none of the papers or responses bears a title. The session proved very popular: On account of the large attendance an overflow meeting was held in the small room adjoining the Examination Hall. The Rev. S. A. Donaldson, D.D., ⁴ The Church of England in the Twentieth Century (2 vols.; London: Longmans, 1946), 1.70 (in a chapter entitled “New Testament Criticism and the Doctrinal Crisis”). ⁵ The Official Report of the Church Congress, x–xii. The page numbers in parentheses in the text are from this publication.

294    ( – ) Master of Magdalene, occupied the chair, and the same papers on theology were read as at the preceding meeting, though in a different order. (84)

The theology section had for its subject “The Apocalyptic Element in Our Lord’s Teaching: Its Significance for Christian Faith and Ethics” (60). The topic was most timely due in large part to the work of Albert Schweitzer. He had famously undermined the labors of his predecessors who searched for the historical Jesus, and, in Schweitzer’s opinion, ended up creating one (or, rather, several) in their own image. The destructive side of his work was one thing, but his own contributions were deeply unsettling to people of faith: he envisaged a deluded and thoroughly eschatological Jesus who, after several other attempts misfired, tried to force the coming of the kingdom by bringing, as the suffering Servant of Isaiah, the final tribulation upon himself but failed in the effort. Moreover, Jesus, he thought, had set forth ethical instructions applicable only for the brief interval between the present and the end (the so-called interim ethic), ones so demanding that only a few could actually obey. Schweitzer, among other powerful lines, had written: At that last cry upon the Cross the whole eschatological supersensuous world fell in upon itself in ruins, and there remained as a spiritual reality only that present spiritual world which Jesus by His all-powerful word had called into being within the world which He contemned. That last cry, with its despairing abandonment of the eschatological future, is His real acceptance of the world. The ‘Son of Man’ was buried in the ruins of the falling eschatological world; there remained alive only Jesus ‘the Man.’

The Jesus who remained after Schweitzer’s analysis was hardly the one of traditional Christianity. As he had so eloquently written: He comes to us as One unknown, without a name, as of old, by the lake-side, He came to those men who knew Him not. He speaks to us the same word: “Follow thou me!” and sets us to the tasks which He has to fulfil for our time. He commands. And to those who obey Him, whether they be wise or simple, He will reveal Himself in the toils, the conflicts, the sufferings which they shall pass through in His fellowship, and, as an ineffable mystery, they shall learn in their own experience Who He is.

Schweitzer’s Von Reimarus zu Wrede: Eine Geschichte der Leben-JesuForschung (1906), which was translated by W. Montgomery as The Quest of

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the Historical Jesus,⁶ had aroused much controversy. So, the congress considered the challenge posed by Schweitzer’s book. Lloyd describes the situation: The Congress of 1910 at Cambridge was perhaps the most impressive and valuable of the whole series. What made it so was the contribution made to it by a great Christian scholar, Albert Schweitzer. He was not himself present at the Congress. While it was being held, he was still in his native Alsace, laboriously learning medicine so that he might make his life the more fit to be offered for the healing of diseased and dispirited negroes in the Congo forests. But in absence he so dominated the proceedings at Cambridge that week that ever since the Congress has been nicknamed the Schweitzer Congress.⁷

Charles was widely recognized as the great expert on Jewish apocalyptic literature and eschatology, subjects most pertinent to the topic of the theology session. A couple of the speakers on the program praised his work in their addresses. The first one in the session, the Very Rev. J. H. Bernard, D.D., Dean of S. Patrick’s (a specialist in the Gospel of John), said of Charles’s contributions: “At any rate, the study of the later Jewish literature, for which Dr. Charles has done so much, has made it probable that the language used by Christ was the language of contemporary Apocalyptic” (64). One of the discussants, the Rev. Canon G. Hartford of Liverpool, stated: “Professor Charles has given us a most inspiring view of those strange products of Jewish hopes—the Apocalypses” (83). For his presentation (70–5), Charles began with a paragraph that set up the problem: The world of religious thought is just now divided as to the degree in which the apocalyptic element enters into Christ’s teaching. Of the divergent views propounded on this question, we can consider only the two most prominent at the present juncture. The first of these, which is maintained by the liberal school of theology, is that the apocalyptic element in the teaching of our Lord was non-essential and transitory, and that it ceased to have any meaning as soon as Christianity was firmly founded. The second is that advocated by

⁶ The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of Its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede (translated by W. Montgomery [London: Adam and Charles Black, 1910]). The citations above come from a paperback edition published in New York by the Macmillan Company (1961), pp. 285 and 403 respectively. ⁷ The Church of England in the Twentieth Century, 1.70.

296    ( – ) Schweitzer, that Eschatology was the soul and essence of Jesus’ teaching and life, but that it was wholly abandoned by Him on the cross. (70)

His next words would have sounded familiar to readers of his earlier works. He said that he wanted to make clear to the audience the nature of apocalyptic and the lasting contributions it had made, “for most writers who refer to it have inadequate or faulty conceptions of it” (70). As he had before, he distinguished eschatology and apocalyptic, emphasizing the wider scope of the latter as it embraced past, present, and future and showed the working out of God’s plan for the eventual victory of righteousness. Moreover, apocalyptic was “intensely ethical” (71), far outstripping the Old Testament in this regard and preparing for the New. Among the “imperishable elements of the Christian faith” (71) owed to apocalyptic were belief in a blessed future, expectation of a new heaven and earth, and anticipation of a catastrophic end to the present world (71–2). Charles intended these brief comments to disprove the notion that “the apocalyptic element in the Gospels has only a passing significance. We have now, I hope, seen that the apocalyptic element in the Gospels is an essential one” (72). Schweitzer held that both the teaching and life of Jesus were to be understood from a thoroughly eschatological perspective that led to the final tragedy. As he turned to a summary of Schweitzer’s theory, Charles acknowledged that he was “a brilliant young writer” (72). He sketched his views, interspersing some critical comments as he did so (72–4). He ended the overview with: “Such is Schweitzer’s account of our Lord’s life. Its bizarreness is only equaled by its cocksureness. He reminds one of the old Epicurean teachers, who, according to Cicero, spoke with as much assurance as though they had just come down from the council chamber of the gods” (74).⁸ Charles charged that Schweitzer displayed “a halting knowledge of Apocalyptic” (74) and listed several examples. He also challenged Schweitzer’s assertion that “all of Christ’s ⁸ These comments of Charles drew the attention of Lloyd: the Congress’s proceedings in the matter of Schweitzer were conducted at a very high level indeed. The prepared papers contained much that was of permanent value, and the unprepared speeches were worthy both of a Christian and a scholarly assembly. Only once did a speaker slip for a moment into a personal attack on the man whose work, after all, seemed to constitute a deadly threat to the personal faith of every person in the congress hall, whether protestant, Anglo-Catholic, or modernist. This was when Archdeacon Charles [he was not yet Archdeacon, something Lloyd notes a few lines later], at the end of a long paper, qualified his appreciation of “the brilliant young writer,” by adding that [he here quotes the words cited above]. It was the one and the only personal remark made that day; and this one was immediately answered by Professor Burkitt, in a moving and glowing testimony to Schweitzer’s personal holiness. (The Church of England in the Twentieth Century, 1.74)

    ( – )

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teaching is eschatological and not directly ethical. Now such a statement would not be true of any of the greater Jewish Apocalypses, but when made of the Gospels the statement is grotesque” (74). This led Charles to inveigh against the idea of an interim ethic—an aspect of Schweitzer’s case that other speakers at the session also opposed. For him, Christ taught “the nucleus for a code valid for all time” (75). He also took issue with what Schweitzer had written about the title “Son of Man” in the gospels. Charles held that Jesus had transformed the concept by combining it with the notion of Isaiah’s suffering Servant (75). Charles’s final words to the audience were: Schweitzer’s reconstruction of the teaching and life of our Lord appears to me therefore wrong in most of its positions. This teaching and life cannot be made intelligible by a school which sees nothing but Eschatology in the Gospels any more than it can by a school which rejects the permanent nature of the apocalyptic element in the teaching of our Lord. (75)

Lloyd wrote a short summary of the contributions (“the onslaught made upon Schweitzer’s arguments”) offered by “two great scholars,” Bernard (regarding the interim ethic) and Charles. Of the latter he said: “Archdeacon Charles, moving happily and skillfully in his own chosen field, had no difficulty in convicting Schweitzer of a chronic failure to distinguish between Eschatology and Apocalyptic, and of giving an inadequate meaning to the latter.”⁹ He also summed up something of the feeling present at the close of the proceedings: The Cambridge Church Congress, by its mingled charity, learning, and fairness, had given the impression of having passed a righteous judgement, based upon a cool and competent examination of the evidence, and had done a great service to the whole Church. It had steadied it at a moment of incipient doctrinal panic.¹⁰ To describe Charles’s paper as “long” (it is six pages in the published version) seems odd, unless the published form was only an abstract (nothing in the publication suggests this), and the remark about Schweitzer does not come at its end. Perhaps Lloyd knew more about the occasion than The Official Report implies, but Burkitt, who spoke of the “enthusiasm” Schweitzer showed in the book for “our Lord” (85), is there presented as the fifth of the respondents, so that he does not seem to have “immediately answered” Charles’s comment, although he alludes to some of the issues Charles raised. ⁹ The Church of England in the Twentieth Century, 1.74 (so too the other short quotations in this paragraph). ¹⁰ Ibid., 1.75.

298    ( – ) In this instance we see the scholar-priest Charles making a timely contribution to the life of the Church. Immortality: The Drew Lecture Delivered October 11, 1912 by R. H. Charles, D. Litt., D.D., Speaker’s Lecturer in Biblical Studies, Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, Fellow of the British Academy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912). Another lecture that led to a publication was the Drew Lecture of 1912. Though it consisted of a single lecture, it was nevertheless issued as a separate volume. The small book (thirty-eight pages) has the title Immortality, but on the first page of the text the caption is: “The Rise and Development of the Belief in a Future Life in Judaism and Christianity, being the Drew Lecture on Immortality, 1912.” Thus, the series of which his lecture was a part was called “The Drew Lecture on Immortality,” while the longer caption is the name of Charles’s contribution. At the beginning, Charles told his audience: It was with much pleasure that I accepted the invitation to deliver this year the Drew Lecture on Immortality. The invitation came to me overwhelmed with the pressure of tasks in various stages of incompleteness, but the practical character of the subject overcame my reluctance to add to the freight of an already overladen ship. (4).

The nature of the subject led him to accept the invitation when he was too busy, but he seems to have eased the burden on himself by reproducing, although in greatly abbreviated form, much of what he had already written or was preparing for other outlets, especially the second edition of his A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life which would appear in 1913. He opened the lecture by citing from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Ernst Renan regarding the significance of a belief in an afterlife or immortality. The belief arose in ancient Israel, not through abstract thinking, but out of “the mortal strife of spiritual experience” (5). Charles waxed eloquent about the subject as he attempted to draw the audience to it: For in this progress from the complete absence of such a belief in Israel to a positive and spiritual faith in a blessed future life, all alike can read writ large in the page of history from 800 .. to .. 100 a transcript of their own spiritual struggles as they toil up the steep ascent that leads to the city of God. It is a national Pilgrim’s Progress, which every child of man must repeat in

    ( – )

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his own spiritual experience, whatever his mental or moral endowments may be, and the goal is as assured to the wayfaring man, though a fool, as it is to the learned and wise. (4)

From these rhetorical heights he swiftly descended to more mundane, welltrodden paths. He distinguished between apocalyptic and eschatology and summarized their similarities and differences. He also drew attention, once again, to the three truths Christianity owed to apocalyptic: a blessed future life, a new heaven and earth, and the present world will end catastrophically (4–6). Once more he traced the history of eschatology from pre-prophetic times onward to the rise of monotheism and eventually to the discovery through practical experience of a blessed future life, not just a national hope for a messianic kingdom on earth (9–11). Until Israel came to recognize the truth about a future life, the difficult and painful problem posed by the suffering of the righteous and the prosperity of the wicked remained unsolved. If there were only this life, how could such circumstances be reconciled with belief in an all-powerful God of justice? Texts such as Deuteronomy held that “the righteousness of the righteous and the wickedness of the wicked must be recompensed in this life” (12, where the words are italicized), but eventually in the prophecies of Jeremiah and Ezekiel there arose a greater focus on the individual, not just the nation. Later still, the writers of Ecclesiastes and Job¹¹ (with some psalmists) attacked the idea that there was a just recompense in this life (12–20). When the teaching about a blessed immortality for the righteous was combined with the hope for a messianic kingdom (a national concept), the eschatologies of the individual and of the nation were brought together. The righteous dead too would rise to life in this kingdom, thus preserving the idea of a happy future in company with others of a like character, not simply as individuals (21–2). Charles informed his audience that a few people in Israel were responsible for developing a higher theology in Judaism, advancing beyond concepts in the Old Testament and preparing for Christianity. In the last two centuries .., their ideas could be found in writings such as 1 Enoch, Jubilees, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, and the Psalms of Solomon. Around 100 .. there occurred a great change in that the idea of an eternal kingdom on earth was abandoned. There arose, too, a more spiritual view of resurrection, with the righteous, at least eventually, rising to life in ¹¹ Charles maintained that in Job and some of the Psalms, unlike in Ecclesiastes, there is a glimmering of hope for an afterlife.

300    ( – ) heaven. During this time there was constant change and development in ideas, including those of Sheol and Gehenna (23–5). After he had guided the listeners to this point, Charles raised an issue that, he thought, might be troubling them in light of charges made by some thinkers: the ethical concerns raised by the idea of looking to another life for compensating one’s earthly actions. He termed it an objection that is made on many sides to the grounds which led the Old Testament saints to look forward to another life which would readjust the inequalities of the present, and bring character and condition ultimately into harmony. The ethical rightness of these grounds has been impugned. The idea of compensation, as it has been termed, has been brushed aside as an idea only befitting the childhood of religion and not its maturer years, while from the side of science arguments have been advanced from time to time attempting to show the impossibility of a personal immortality. (25–6)

To this Charles offered several responses. First, he granted that one could not prove the object of such a hope on scientific or philosophical grounds but added that no grounds of that sort could be offered to disprove it either. If one could demonstrate it like a Euclidean theorem, it would not be a religious belief. It was a hope won by Israel through experience and must be preserved in that way. Second, regarding the idea that compensation in another world provides a dubious motivation for moral action, he replied: “Crassly conceived, the idea is no doubt open to this criticism. He who does right solely for the hope of future reward or desists from wrongdoing solely from the fear of future punishment is, it is true, merely a prudent Epicurean” (26). Such people are, however, rare, and most have impulses to both right and wrong. For that great majority of individuals, “the idea of requital has a pedagogic value” (27). The thought of requital is primarily meant as “a foe of the evil” (27) until a person learns to select the right option for the right reason. He referred to Schleiermacher’s thesis that an interest in immortality was “a sign of a selfish and therefore irreligious disposition” (27). But he considered the great theologian’s claim that immortality consists of being one with the infinite as a kind of immortality that no one could enjoy except momentarily and imperfectly. Charles spoke of how the need for progressing spiritually leads us to anticipate and to enunciate the true and highest motive of immortality on which every faithful man comes ultimately to act, the motive which has received its briefest and aptest expression in the words of our Lord: “Be ye perfect even as your Father in heaven is perfect.” This motive

    ( – )

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has for its object the absolute transformation of the entire man; but for the achievement of this transformation is needed—not the brief span of a few and evil days—but an immortal’s immemorial years. Immortality alone is commensurate with our task and eternity cannot exhaust the possibilities of the soul’s progress to God. (27–8)

He also dealt with the thesis that a righteous person’s present experience of peace with God is the highest and sufficient good. To this he responded that even the best experiences of the righteous are inadequate and lead one to a hope for immortality, while evil people are hardly punished sufficiently by their problems in this world. In fact, he thought the worst sinners were the least likely to be affected by anything negative that happened to them (28–9). They actually develop an immunity to it. Legal systems do not fully address the wrongs committed. From this it follows that if this world were the be-all and the end-all here, it would in many essential respects be a kind of moral nightmare. Thus the need of another world to redress the inequalities of the present is practically confessed by humanity at large, and this need forms the ground for the expectation that the future life shall have a judicial character that shall transcend and fulfil the broken promises of the present, and shall bring into ultimate harmony man’s character and man’s condition. . . . (29–30)

After this excursus, he returned to the historical survey he was offering. He said that the New Testament transformed ideas from the Jewish past, subordinating them to the new situation created by the coming of Christ. He acknowledged, as he had elsewhere, that Christianity took over some unworthy ideas from Judaism such as Sheol (as a place of no ethical progress) and eternal damnation. The mere presence of such incongruities within the New Testament gives them no claim on the acceptance of the Church. Standing at variance as they do with the Christian fundamental doctrines of God and Christ, they must be condemned as survivals of an earlier and lower stage of religious belief. (32)

About eternal damnation he wrote: The theology of the New Testament with its doctrine of the Fatherhood of God demands a transformation of the Jewish doctrine, and postulates our acceptance either of Conditional Immortality, or, as Origen of old taught, of

302    ( – ) Universalism. So far as the Christian Churches hold fast to the doctrine taken over from Judaism at the Christian era, their eschatology is nearly two thousand years behind their doctrine of God and Christ. We are all ready, I hope, in some fashion to recognize the possibility of a further probation. Some of us may go only so far as to hold probation as a purely speculative question and a matter of grace on the part of God. But there are others amongst us who regard it in quite a different light, and who cannot simply relegate it to the region of God’s uncovenanted mercies, seeing that it affects so deeply the character of God Himself. Nay, they would hold it a dishonour to the God they revere and serve even to admit the possibility that He should visit with a never-ending punishment the errors and shortcomings, nay more, the wilful sins of a few dim and mistaken years of earth, and limit to a handbreadth of time the opportunities and irremediable issues of a neverending eternity. (33–4)

In addition, he opposed the idea that those who have died are assigned to different departments, depending on the levels of their goodness or vice in this world. “The divine education of man is carried on by the mingling of unlike souls here, and there appears to be no ground for the belief or conclusion that it will be otherwise in the world to come” (35). Does the hope for immortality amount to self-delusion? Charles rejected the idea and asserted: “We cannot distrust the intuitions of those whose guidance we have hitherto followed and found divinely good, and in whose spiritual insight we can all share in our best and highest moments” (37). At the close he reverted to the idea that Israel had attained its belief in a blessed immortality through its experience, and it is in this way that one now keeps what they grasped and advances to a fuller life. “Only through personal communion with the Fount of Life is man enabled to rise into the eternal life” (38). One would not expect a thirty-eight-page book to garner much attention, but the work was reviewed. H. R. Mackintosh of Edinburgh contributed a short, positive one in Theologische Literaturzeitung 38 (1913) 605. He wrote: “This brochure is . . . a quite masterly popularization, by an eminent scholar, of the conclusions of modern Biblical research.” He briefly summarized the main points and observed: “In the concluding pages the writer’s positions are more speculative and naturally more disputable, but as a whole the pamphlet is delightful reading.” The American Journal of Theology 17 (1913) 473 ran an unsigned review that merely summarized the contents of Immortality. Beside the appointments and presentations reviewed in the previous pages and in part in connection with them, Charles published several articles and

    ( – )

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books in the years 1909–13. Some of them we have met in connection with earlier volumes related to them. So, for example, the second edition, or, as Charles thought of it, a new work entitled The Book of Enoch or 1 Enoch appeared in 1912 and the second edition of A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life in 1913. We should include here the eighteen articles he contributed to the eleventh edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Some of the articles in question are updated versions of what he had written for the tenth edition,¹² but he also composed pieces on several individual books, on some of which he had published and on some on which he had not.¹³ Among the new ones was an entry on the Book of Revelation, on which he was preparing a commentary. Further new books belonging to the years 1909–13 are three: Fragments of a Zadokite Work (1912), The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament (1913), and a short commentary on the Book of Daniel (1913). We will survey the first two in this chapter. To avoid making it inordinately long, the commentary on Daniel will be reserved for the next chapter where it will be considered with the second and longer such commentary that Charles published in 1929.

Fragments of a Zadokite Work (1912) Two copies of a previously unknown Hebrew text had only recently become available through an edition by Solomon Schechter.

The Contents of the Fragments of a Zadokite Work The text that Schechter translated begins with an exhortation to those who know righteousness and announces a controversy that God has with all people. The exhortation, which runs from col. 1 through col. 8 (copy A), with a partial parallel in 19 and 20 (copy B), says that Israel’s sin led God to abandon his sanctuary and hand his people over to the sword, until he remembered the covenant with the ancestors and left them a remnant. Three-hundred and ¹² His one article in the tenth edition was entitled “Apocalyptic and Apocryphal Literature”; in the eleventh he covered the subject in two articles: “Apocalyptic Literature” and “Apocryphal Literature.” ¹³ Articles on non-canonical compositions on which he had published extensively are the Book of Enoch, the Ascension of Isaiah, Jubilees, the Assumption of Moses, and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. Articles on books to which he had not devoted previous publications are Baruch, Additions to Daniel, Additions to Esther, 3 and 4 Ezra, Epistle of Jeremiah, Judith, Prayer of Manasseh, Psalms of Solomon, and Testaments of the Three Patriarchs.

304    ( – ) ninety years after handing them to Nebuchadnezzar, he established a new group who recognized their guilt. Twenty years later he raised up a teacher of righteousness for them at a time when Israel was being misled into errors by a scoffer; their sins are described at some length. The writer then turns to those who have entered the covenant, assuring them that God had punished the sinful while leaving a remnant. After urging his audience to do what was right, he surveyed the ways in which past sinners had gone astray, beginning with the pre-flood Watchers and continuing through to the Israelites in the land (the patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were righteous exceptions). But God confirmed his covenant with those who were left and revealed hidden things to them. The others were caught in the three nets of Belial (fornication, wealth, and pollution of the sanctuary). At some point penitents in Israel left Judah and went to the land of Damascus where they entered into a new covenant. They eventually returned and settled in the cities of Israel. A legal section occupies cols. 9–16 of copy A. It covers a range of topics including rules regarding the Sabbath and ones regulating the life and leadership of the community.

The Context for Charles’s Volume on the Fragments of a Zadokite Work Fragments of a Zadokite Work—so called because it refers several times to “the sons of Zadok”—had, as noted above, only recently become available when Charles examined it. The manuscripts attesting it were two, labeled A (tenth century, with sixteen columns) and B (twelfth century, with two columns, numbered 19–20). Solomon Schechter (1847–1915), whom we have met in connection with the Aramaic Levi Document (see Part 2 Chapter 8), had identified them among the texts he removed from the Cairo Genizah and shipped to the university library of Cambridge. Schechter published them in Fragments of a Zadokite Work (Documents of Jewish Sectaries I; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1910).¹⁴ In the book, he provided

¹⁴ The book appeared some eight years after he had left Cambridge to become president of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York. He served in the latter position from 1902 until his death in 1915. Schechter had brought with him to New York the manuscripts of the Zadokite Fragments with other Genizah material; he was not to return manuscripts A and B to Cambridge until 1910 when he visited England (Stefan C. Reif, “The Damascus Document from the Cairo Genizah: Its Discovery, Early Study and Historical Significance,” in Reif, Jews, Bible and Prayer: Essays on Jewish Biblical Exegesis and Liturgical Notions [Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 498; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2017] 21–2).

    ( – )

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an introduction, an annotated translation of both manuscripts (as noted above, they partially overlap),¹⁵ an index of references to ancient works mentioned in his notes, a transcription of the Hebrew texts of both copies, and photographs of the first page¹⁶ in copy A and of the second in copy B. His book also included sections called “Corrections to the Hebrew Text” (for both copies)¹⁷ and “Additions and Corrections to Translation and Notes.”¹⁸ Schechter did not explain why, but he furnished photographs of only two pages, not of the other sixteen (there are no photos of pp. 2–16 of copy A and the first page of copy B). As a result, no one could check the accuracy of his transcription for most of the columns. He did, however, write about the challenges presented by the text in the manuscripts: The risk of giving a translation of such a defective text as the F   Z W unfortunately represent, was great indeed, and I was fully aware of it. This risk I felt not less when writing the Introduction and the Notes to the text, but I preferred to be blamed for my mistakes and be corrected, than be praised for my prudence of non-committal, which policy I do not always think worthy of a student. All I could do was both in the Introduction and in the Notes to call the attention of the reader to the unfortunate condition of our text. In the Notes in particular, I have especially marked many passages as obscure, the meaning of which was unclear to me. The literalness of the translation, to which I kept throughout, will, I believe, make the inherent shortcomings of the original fairly transparent. Words or phrases based on an emendation of the original which was evident to me are marked by asterisks. No student who has had experience in editing texts can

¹⁵ Since the contents of manuscript B parallel copy A from col. 7 line 6 to the end of col. 8, Schechter printed his translation of the two side-by-side. Copy B then ends with some material not paralleled in A. ¹⁶ Schechter referred to the columns as pages. ¹⁷ He explained in the Preface that he did not have an opportunity to read the final proofs of A (by this time he was in New York and thus far removed from Cambridge). He was able, however, to recollate the text and found some new readings that are included in this section. ¹⁸ I have not found a place where, in his edition, Schechter dates the text. Solomon Zeitlin (The Zadokite Fragments: Facsimile of the Manuscripts in the Cairo Genizah Collection in the Possession of the University Library, Cambridge, England [Jewish Quarterly Review Monograph Series 1; Philadelphia: Dropsie College, 1952] 4–5) claimed that he dated it between 196 and 176 .., but he confused Schechter’s dating of when the events recorded in manuscript A col. 1 occurred with his dating of the text. Schechter in fact found Roman elements in the work (Fragments of a Zadokite Work, e.g., xxiii), hence it would not have preceded about the mid-first century .. It also follows from his discussion of the sect behind the text and their debates with the Pharisees that it was composed when these groups existed, that is, in late second temple times. Louis Ginzberg, a friend of Schechter and fellow student of the Zadokite Fragments, thought the sect arose in the time of Alexander Jannaeus (103–76) but that the text was written later and underwent some evolution (An Unknown Jewish Sect [Moreshet Series 1; New York: Jewish Theological Seminary of America, 1976] 265–73).

306    ( – ) fail to see at once that very little can be taken for certain, and the largest part of the commentary and the conclusions based on it in the Introduction can only be regarded as tentative. (v)

Since the Hebrew composition was previously unknown, Schechter had no information about it other than that it came from the genizah and that the surviving copies were medieval in date. He correctly perceived that the principal opponents in it were Pharisees (e.g., xvi–xviii) and thought the sect to which “the sons of Zadok” belonged was the Dositheans, a Samaritan group somewhat related to the Sadducees and opposed to the Pharisees. He recorded the similarities between the new text and works like Jubilees (e.g., the calendar) and found echoes of its teachings in other places, such as Qaraite literature. Schechter added to his analysis of the Zadokite Fragments, which in his opinion, had to have arisen from a sect “decidedly hostile to the bulk of the Jews as represented by the Pharisees” (xxviii), comments about some current studies of early Jewish texts. In particular, he dealt with recent attributions of pseudepigrapha such as 1 Enoch, Jubilees, and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs to various sorts of Pharisaic authors (xxvii–xxix)—the position defended by Charles (Schechter refers to him in this general context). About this Schechter wrote: Naturally, all this class of Pseudepigrapha is of supreme importance for the history of Christianity, which undoubtedly was the consummation of all sectarian endeavour preceding it, and must have absorbed all the hostile elements arrayed against official Judaism; but for this very reason it cannot be considered as a factor in the development of Pharisaic Judaism. (xxix)

As he saw the situation, “The only authoritative source for it [Pharisaism] is and will always remain the Talmud, and the ‘great Midrashim,’ in their Hagadic and not less in their Halachic parts” (xxix). For Schechter, the Pharisees represented official Judaism and therefore a text polemicizing against them had to come from a sect.

The Book Fragments of a Zadokite Work, translated from the Cambridge Hebrew Text and edited with introduction, notes and indexes by R. H. Charles, D. Litt., D.D., Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, Fellow of the British Academy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1912).

    ( – )

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In the short book (xvii + forty-two pages, including two indexes), Charles assessed the circumstances behind the Zadokite Fragments much differently than Schechter had. Whereas Schechter, who believed the Pharisees represented official Judaism, insisted it was sectarian and assigned it to an obscure (to us) group, Charles thought the community reflected in it consisted of priests and Levites who broke away from their Sadducean priestly colleagues. Their dissatisfaction arose from a dispute about temple-related issues; when reform attempts failed, they went their own way. For Charles, the text was indeed anti-Pharisaic, but it came from a group centrally situated in Jewish society. They went to Damascus, led by a lawgiver called “the Star.” When they returned to Israel, they settled in the cities and came into conflict with Pharisees. At some point they adopted for themselves the name “the sons of Zadok.” For the deeply religious and ethical dissidents, the prophets were extremely important, unlike the view of them held, so Charles thought, by Pharisees and Sadducees. He considered it possible that eventually some of the Zadokites, who also opposed the oral law, became Christians (vi, referring to Acts 6:7).¹⁹ He concluded that the text itself was written near the end of the first century .., specifically between 18 and 8 .. His precise dating followed from his interpretation of the four messianic references in the text. In three places the Zadokite text uses the phrase “messiah of Aaron and Israel” (12:23–13:1; 14:18–19; 19:10–11) and in one “messiah from Aaron and from Israel” (19:33–20:1). The expressions naturally made experts wonder whether they designated one messiah (from the combined Aaron and Israel) or two (one lay and one priestly). Charles believed that they could best be interpreted as referring to one messiah who would be descended from a priestly line on his mother’s side and a lay line on his father’s side. Such an expectation could only be explained, so far as I am aware, in reference to the two sons of Mariamne and Herod, i.e., Alexander and Aristobulus. Herod was an Israelite . . . while Mariamne combined in her own person all the royal claims of the Maccabean house. Since Alexander and Aristobulus were descended from Aaron on the spindle side, they could not legitimately inherit the priesthood. But the technically non-priestly character of Mariamne’s sons could not stand in the way of the Messianic hopes attached to them by the Zadokite party, since the all but universal expectation of Israel was directed to a Messiah sprung not from Levi but from Judah. But since the Zadokite Party rejected the expectation of a Messiah from Judah they described their expected Messiah as sprung from ¹⁹ Acts 6:7: “a great many of the priests became obedient to the faith” (NRSV).

308    ( – ) Aaron (i.e. from the Maccabees through Mariamne) and from Israel (i.e. from Herod). (xv)²⁰

Since Herod had his young sons executed in 8 .., the book was written between 18 (the year of their return from Rome) and 8 .. Schechter, who thought the one messiah of the sect was a priest, wondered whether “and Israel” indicated that the mother of the messiah would come from a lay family (xiii, n. 6). In his book Charles expressed strong opinions about Schechter’s publication. When objecting to publishing photographs of just two out of eighteen columns, he also unveiled some details about his own book and the reason for the absence of the remaining photographs from Schechter’s edition. In the Preface Charles wrote: The “Fragments of a Zadokite Work” were first published by Dr. Schechter in 1910. This work, which exhibits many instances of fine insight into the text and a vast knowledge of Talmudic literature, did not, owing to various preoccupations, engage my attention till late in 1911. I then undertook a serious study of the book, and this study soon showed me the need of a new text . . . , or at all events a reproduction in facsimile of the MSS., a new English translation, and a new Commentary. I have been unable to edit a new text, as under the conditions of Dr. Schechter’s gift to Cambridge University Library no scholar is allowed access to the MSS. for five years after publication of Dr. Schechter’s text. For permission to make a translation from the Cambridge text, my thanks are due to the Syndics of the Cambridge University Press and to Dr. Schechter. (iii)

So, Charles, like all others, was forced to do his work from Schechter’s transcription of the Hebrew text because of a restriction on access to the manuscripts that Schechter had imposed. Presumably Charles could have waited until the end of the five-year period (1915), but he was unwilling to delay his work.

²⁰ One could conclude from his references to the two sons, Alexander and Aristobulus, that Charles found two messiahs in the text, but on p. v he wrote that the messianic hope centered on just one of them. He gave no indication he was aware of how unconvincing his interpretation sounded. Herod was of Idumean, not Israelite extraction, and if lacking a priestly father disqualified a son from the priesthood it is lame to assert that the Zadokites ignored a basic fact that would have disallowed their view.

    ( – )

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His Preface also contains a few words about his translation of the Zadokite text. As regards the translation, the student will observe that I have frequently been obliged to give many different renderings of the text from Dr. Schechter—most of which are supported by Lévi and Lagrange²¹—although both my translation and Commentary were completed before I saw their translations. In some instances I have changed my renderings and adopted those of Lévi, and in one or two instances those of Lagrange, while in others I have been obliged to take a fresh direction altogether. The discovery of the parallel structure of a considerable portion of the text, a fact that has escaped scholars hitherto, has been most helpful in the criticism and elucidation of the text. (iii)

Charles added that he also disagreed with Schechter regarding the general interpretation of the Zadokite work. He returned to the missing photographs and Schechter’s edition in the short bibliography at the end of his Introduction: As yet there is only one text, since owing to Dr. Schechter’s arrangement with the University Library, Cambridge, no scholar is to be allowed to see the MSS. for five years after the publication of Dr. Schechter’s edition. Even if Dr. Schechter’s edition were thoroughly satisfactory this extraordinary action on his part could hardly fail to call forth the reprobation of scholars generally. (xvi–xvii)

But his edition was not “thoroughly satisfactory”: “Scholars are indeed grateful to Dr. Schechter for the discovery of these valuable MSS., but they cannot be expected to feel it in such measure for the way in which the text has been edited. It is carelessly done” (xvii). After drawing attention to Schechter’s own sections of corrigenda and giving several other examples from one of the pages of which Schechter had furnished a photograph, he wrote: If Dr. Schechter chooses to edit his text so carelessly that is of course his own concern, but in that case he ought at all events to have published a facsimile ²¹ Israel Lévi, “Un Écrit Sadducéen antérieur à la ruine du Temple,” Revue des Études Juives 61 (1911) 161–205; Marie-Joseph Lagrange, “La secte juive de la nouvelle alliance au pays de Damas,” Revue Biblique 9 (1912) 213–40, 321–60. They too worked without photographs of sixteen of the eighteen columns.

310    ( – ) of the entire MSS.—only a matter of eighteen pages. To publish such a text and then to deny all scholars access to the original MSS. for five years is strange conduct on the part of a seeker after truth. The world of scholars from Lévi, who first expressed the need of a facsimile, to the latest students of the text, look to Dr. Schechter either to remove this unscholarly embargo or himself to publish a facsimile without delay. (xvii)

It turns out that Charles, who was not averse to speaking harshly about other scholars, had had a frustrating experience with Schechter, himself no stranger to scholarly polemics. We learn of the experience from Schechter who a few years later wrote a lengthy essay in response to one of his critics, “Reply to Dr. Büchler’s Review of Schechter’s ‘Jewish Sectaries’,” Jewish Quarterly Review 4 (new series) (1913–14) 449–74.²² At the end of the article, Schechter reminded readers that, as noted in his book, the poor state of the Zadokite fragments ruled out certainty and would engender differences of opinion (see the citation from p. v above). He said he had read most of the reactions to his 1910 edition. “The only exception are [sic] papers appearing serially in periodicals, as I have an inveterate objection to reading scientific matter in instalments” (474). This is the context in which he turned to Charles. Another exception is also Dr. Charles’s translation and commentary of this Fragment. It is one of the books which can wait. But I learned through the papers of his complaint about my refusal to let him have a facsimile of the MS., which meant practically a second edition of the Hebrew text. This was a thing which I had to decline, not only because I was contemplating a second edition of the text, accompanied by full facsimile, which would have given me the opportunity of improving and correcting errors and misprints (which privilege of editing texts correctly was the only reward which I have ever received from my labours in the Genizah for nearly these last eighteen years), but also because I considered the new Canon of Westminster not fitted for such a task.²³ When Dr. Charles cabled to me for permission to make use of ²² He was referring to Adolph Büchler, “Schechter’s ‘Jewish Sectaries’,” Jewish Quarterly Review 3 (new series) (1912–13) 429–85. ²³ In Schechter’s initial typed version of this sentence, he had written: “ . . . Canon of Westminster unfit to edit a Hebrew text altogether.” He crossed these words out and replaced them with the ones cited above. For this information and for that in the next note, see Alex P. Jassen, “The Early Study of Jewish Law in the Damascus Document: Solomon Schechter and Louis Ginzberg in Conversation and Conflict,” in From Scrolls to Traditions: A Festschrift Honoring Lawrence H. Schiffman (edited by Stuart S. Miller, Michael D. Swartz, Steven Fine, Naomi Grunhaus, and Alex P. Jassen; The Brill Reference Library of Judaism 63; Leiden: Brill, 2020) 205 (204–6 for the dispute between Charles and Schechter). I am grateful to Dr. Jassen for sending me both a prepublication and the published form of his

    ( – )

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my English translation I granted it at once, as I knew he was in need of it, and as far as I understand, it did do him much good.²⁴ From a friend who made a careful study of Dr. Charles’s edition I learn that he derived a great deal of benefit from my notes and Introduction, copying occasionally even my mistakes. However, with this question and many others besides I hope D.V. to deal in a work on the Zadokite Fragments which will contain also a full facsimile of the manuscript. (474)

Schechter, who died in 1915, never produced the anticipated second edition with facsimiles and thus never made the manuscripts or photographs of them available. The photographs of all columns of copies A and B were not published until 1952.²⁵ Schechter’s arrangements, his “embargo” on the manuscripts, do indeed look self-serving, even bizarre. Then, too, he did not explain why he found Charles “not fitted for such a task” as editing the text. Moreover, the way in which he described Charles’s use of his translation (and notes) is embarrassing, almost a charge of plagiarism. He, by his own admission, had not read Charles’s book and simply reported hearsay as if it were fact. At any rate, he supplied no documentation. A comparison of their translations reveals that Charles did not copy Schechter, and in fact he had strong reservations about parts of it. Charles wrote about Schechter’s rendering: The translation of a text for the first time is obviously a piece of pioneer work, and should therefore be treated with all consideration. It betrays, as might be expected, frequent failures to apprehend the meaning of the writer, but on the other hand in many passages Dr. Schechter has shown great insight and his encyclopaedic knowledge of Rabbinic literature has helped to clear up many a difficulty from the outset. (xvii) fascinating essay and for sharing with me, with permission, photographs of Schechter’s draft of his article. The draft is found in the Solomon Schechter Family Collection Series II, The Library of the Jewish Theological Seminary, New York, N.Y., ARC.101 (Box 13, Folder 3) (Jassen, ibid., 205 n. 108). ²⁴ In the initial version Schechter had written after this sentence: But when he arrogated to himself the task of editing Hebrew texts (and such a difficult text), I had to refuse, as I have never received the impression from all that I have ever read of Dr. Charles that his knowledge of Hebrew literature is first-hand, and I consider it only a presumption on his part to put such a request to me. He crossed all of this out, so that it did not appear in the printed edition of the essay (see Jassen, “The Early Study of Jewish Law in the Damascus Document: Solomon Schechter and Louis Ginzburg in Conversation and Conflict,” 205). ²⁵ They appeared in Solomon Zeitlin, The Zadokite Fragments: Facsimile of the Manuscripts in the Cairo Genizah Collection in the Possession of the University Library, Cambridge, England. Zeitlin dated the text to the Middle Ages and thought a Qaraite had written it (e.g., pp. 4–5).

312    ( – ) I suspect that Schechter’s friend who, he said, had made a careful study of Charles’s book was his colleague at the Jewish Theological Seminary, Louis Ginzberg (1873–1953). During the years 1911–14 he wrote in thirteen installments a lengthy piece on the Zadokite Fragments—the sort of serialized study disliked by Schechter and probably intended by him—entitled “Eine unbekannte jüdische Sekte,” all published in Monatsschrift für Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums.²⁶ A review of the scholarly literature on the Zadokite fragments, which, according to his son, he wrote around the same time, contains several pages devoted to Charles’s work.²⁷ Ginzberg, who, strangely, thought the author of the Zadokite Fragments was a Pharisee,²⁸ found Charles’s results regarding the origin of the party to be “entirely untenable” (307) and listed the anti-Pharisaic points Charles spotted in the text with his own reactions to them. An example is that, according to Charles, the text prohibits divorce while Pharisees permitted it. Ginzberg, with his far superior knowledge of Rabbinic texts, undermined some of Charles’s specific claims, but he also thought Charles brought an anti-Pharisee bias to the text. One piece of evidence he adduced to support the charge was his explanation of 5:7 which reads in Charles’s translation: “And they also pollute the Sanctuary since they separate not according to the Law, and lie with her who sees the blood of her issue” (his 7:8 [p. 12]).²⁹ In a note Charles referred to a nearly identical charge in the Psalms of Solomon (8:13). There, he said, “the Sadducean priests are charged with similarly profaning the altar and temple, . . . But the charge here is brought against the Pharisees” (12). Ginzberg found this to be special pleading: ²⁶ They eventually were assembled in a book entitled Eine unbekannte jüdische Sekte (New York: self-published, 1922), a publication delayed by the circumstances of the World War. It was supposed to be the first part of a larger work that would include a critical text, translation, and other studies. An English translation of the 1922 book with additional material (e.g., a literature review) also by Ginzberg, bears the title An Unknown Jewish Sect. See the Forward by his son Eli, ix–x. ²⁷ The section in An Unknown Jewish Sect regarding Charles’s book is pp. 306–13. ²⁸ Schechter brought Ginzberg to the Jewish Theological Seminary in 1902 as Professor of Talmud. The relations between the two men changed over time, and Ginzberg came to a very different conclusion about the point of view in the Damascus Document than Schechter did. For their relationship, see Jassen, “The Early Study of Jewish Law in the Damascus Document: Solomon Schechter and Louis Ginzberg in Conversation and Conflict,” 178–208; Reif, “The Damascus Document from the Cairo Genizah: Its Discovery, Early Study and Historical Significance,” 10–33, especially 19–24. ²⁹ Charles’s system for referring to passages in the Fragments of a Zadokite Work can be confusing. Schechter in his translation employed two kinds of divisions. “Page 1, 2, 3 etc.” (written in the margin) is his way of designating the columns, and he numbered the lines of each column; he also divided the text into twenty sections designated by Roman numerals, but he did not number the lines in each section separately. Charles abandoned the page = column references and the line numbers in them; he used only Schechter’s twenty sense divisions (marked by Arabic rather than Roman numerals) but numbered the lines in each of them separately. Hence, Charles’s reference to 7:8 is to the eighth line in Schechter’s seventh sense division. Ginzburg used only the column and line numbers.

    ( – )

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Any unbiased scholar would draw the conclusion: the almost literal similarity between this sectarian passage and the Pharisaic reference in the Psalms of Solomon suggests that the sectarian charge is not brought against the Pharisees but against the Sadducees. Not so Charles; he manages to have the sect level the charge of disregarding a biblical injunction (Lev. 15:19) about purity against the Pharisees, whose very name probably derives from their strict observance and abstinence in matters of purity! (310)

Ginzburg added a number of notes on textual matters. He charged that “wherever he [Charles] deviates from Schechter’s translation, he misunderstands the text” (310). Some of his examples are actually objections to emendations suggested by Charles. In col. 1:19 Charles (= his 1:14) placed his translation between daggers to indicate a problem in the text: “And they chose the best of the neck.” The word for “the neck [‫ הצואר‬has: sawwā’r]” : was probably, he thought, corrupt for “the flock [‫ הצאון‬has: -s: ’ôn],” so that it meant “they chose the best of the flock” for themselves. Ginzburg pointed out that “the best of the neck” comes from Hosea 10:11 and should be retained (310).³⁰ Or, at 20:4–5 (Charles’s 9:32) the text reads ‫‘( אנשי מעות‬anšhê m’wt) which Schechter translated as “men of perversion.” Charles noted that the second word, which he parsed as a singular pual participle, did not agree in number with “men” which it modified and translated (“corrected”) the phrase as “a perverted man.” He commented about Schechter’s translation: “How he can explain this Hebrew construction in ‫ אנשי מעות‬I cannot see” (23). Ginzburg, who found ‫ מעות‬to be “a quite acceptable form” and was able to cite examples where it is used as a substantive, wrote: “How could he, indeed, with all due fairness, expect of a Schechter the most elementary rudiments of Hebrew philology and grammar!” (313).³¹ Charles never did edit the Hebrew texts of the Fragments of a Zadokite Work, as they were temporarily off limits in the University Library, Cambridge. His 1912 book was simply reproduced verbatim (less the little Preface) in the second volume of The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the

³⁰ Charles, Fragments of a Zadokite Work, 4. He also thought the verb might be wrong and that one should read “and they laid waste the best of the flock.” Schechter (Fragments of a Zadokite Work, xxxii, n. 31) too suggested emending the passage by reading, not ‫( הצואר‬has: -s:awwā’r), but ‫( העובר‬hā-‘ôbēr) “the goods that are passing/perishable.” In addition, he missed the allusion to Hosea 10:11. Ginzburg failed to criticize Schechter in his discussion of Charles’s proposal (310) and in his notes to the text (7). ³¹ Schechter, Charles, and Ginzburg may all have been wrong about the reading. The debated form could well be ‫( דעות‬dē’ôt = knowledge), which would make better sense in the context. Charles and Ginzburg should not be faulted for their reading, however, because they were not able to examine the photographs.

314    ( – ) Old Testament (on which see the next section). Not only that, but even the formatting and page layout of the two are exactly same—as if the 1912 edition was printed to be part of the 1913 work. One result was that even an obvious error was repeated. In the 1912 book Charles wrote in the Introduction regarding the date of the text: “The phrase ‘man of lies’ receives its most easy explanation as applied to Herod the Great, who reigned forty-one years” (viii). The line in the text that refers to the “man of lies” says that certain warriors walked with him “about forty years” (Charles’s 9:39; col. 20:15), and for that reason Charles added the note about the length of Herod’s reign. Whatever one might think of identifying Herod as the “man of lies,” Herod did not rule for forty-one years. His reign lasted from 37 to 4 .. Charles in fact changed .. to .. to arrive at his mistaken figure—he does this in the third sentence after the words quoted above. Nevertheless, these sentences in exactly the same wording appear in the 1913 collection (2.788). A difference between the two printings is that the 1912 book has two indices (ancient passages, subjects), while the 1913 publication includes only a subject index for all of the texts in the two volumes. The entries from the second index of the 1912 volume are absorbed into it.

Reviews Since Charles’s little book on the Zadokite Fragments had only a short independent life, it may not have been a prime candidate for reviews. A thoughtful one did appear, however, in The American Journal of Theology 19 (1915) 150–1. The author, Clyde Weber Votaw, a New Testament scholar at the University of Chicago, referred to Schechter’s two manuscripts and offered a more prosaic explanation for the five-year moratorium on viewing them: “the purpose presumably being that his publication of the work might within five years sell sufficiently to pay for the cost of its production” (150–1). After recording Charles’s objection to the stipulation and his assessment of Schechter’s work, Votaw wrote: “As the restriction expires this year, a new edition directly from the MSS may be expected at once from Dr. Charles” (151). He said of Charles’s small book that it was “a preprint from, and is now incorporated in, the great two-volume edition by Charles of the Old Testament Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha” (151). He compared the ways in which Schechter and Charles understood the Hebrew composition, including Charles’s suggestion that the Zadokites may have become Christians. “If Dr. Charles’s hypothesis should prove the true one, we are in possession of important new facts concerning the religious life of the Jewish priests in the period when Christianity was evolving out of first-century Judaism” (151).

    ( – )

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Another review, this time of “Fragments of a Zadokite Work” in The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament in English, came from G. Margoliouth of the British Museum (The International Journal of Apocrypha 37 [1914] 36–7). Margoliouth, who had written elsewhere on Schechter’s text, limited his remarks to criticizing three of Charles’s proposals. The first had to do with whether the sect, after going to Damascus, had returned to Jerusalem. The text does not provide an explicit answer, so Charles had argued from use of the word “sanctuary” in it that it presupposed the second temple was standing and the sect was concerned about those who were polluting it. Margoliouth disagreed and thought the references to the sanctuary pointed to the past. His second concern was Charles’s interpretation of dates. Charles claimed that the 390 years mentioned in the first column, when subtracted from the date when the first temple was destroyed (586 ..), led one to 196 .. for the founding of the sect which consisted of “Chasidim” who were arising around that time. Margoliouth appealed to traditional Jewish calculations of the Persian, Greek, and Roman periods. If these were used, the sect would have come into being between 30 and 4 .. and thus could not be Chasidim. He charged that Charles seemed unaware of these Jewish calculations. He also rejected Charles’s dating of the text between 18 and 8 .., since it was unlikely that the sect would regard as a messiah a son of Herod who, according to Charles, was the man of lies in the text. Margoliouth’s final point had to do with the identity of the teacher of righteousness. Charles did not know who he was but thought the beginning of the text gave some idea about when he was active—in the period of wrath. Margoliouth disputed Charles’s translation of the word ‫( קץ‬qēs) : as “period” and said it meant “end” in the passage in question—the teacher arose at the end of the period of wrath.

Legacy If Charles’s Fragments of a Zadokite Work had not been incorporated into The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, it may well have been forgotten. In contemporary bibliographies, only the form in the two-volume collection is mentioned.³² This is due in part to events that transpired after he wrote it. We saw earlier that photographs of copies A and B were first published in 1952 by Solomon Zeitlin, forty-two years after Schechter’s initial ³² For instance, in the bibliography to 1969 prepared by Joseph A. Fitzmyer for a reprint of Schechter’s book (Documents of Jewish Sectaries, volume I Fragments of a Zadokite Work [New York: KTAV, 1970] 25–34), only the version in The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament is listed (p. 25).

316    ( – ) publication. However, his stipulation that the manuscripts themselves were not to be consulted by others was valid for just five years. After that, scholars could examine the originals and apparently have photos made. So, Flemming Frils Hvidberg’s 1928 translation of the text was based on photographs (Menigheden af den nye Pagt i Damascus [Copenhagen: G.E.C. Gad]), and a few years later the same was true for Leonhard Rost’s Die Damaskusschrift (Kleine Texte für Vorlesungen und Übungen 167; Berlin: de Gruyter, 1933). C. Rabin, The Zadokite Documents (Oxford: Clarendon, 1953; second edition, 1958) also used photographs. The bigger development in study of the Zadokite Fragments, one that occurred two decades after Charles’s death and quickly dated all previous scholarship, was discovery of pieces from ten copies of what is now called the Damascus Document in Qumran caves 4, 5, and 6 (4Q266–73, 5Q12, 6Q15). These remains of scrolls have disclosed important information about the text itself, its shape and historical situation, its relation to other Jewish works, and the place of the genizah copies in the transmission of the text. The original editor of the Qumran fragments, J. T. Milik, determined that cols. 15–16 in Schechter’s manuscript A should be placed directly before col. 9. That is, the Qumran fragments attest the order 1–8, 15–16, 9–14 for the columns preserved in the A manuscript. Besides this rearrangement, the evidence of the Qumran copies suggested to Milik the following structure: After page VIII and the conclusion to the historical section (missing in A, preserved in B, page XX, . . . ), but before page XV, we can detect the loss of several pages in the Cairo manuscript A. Numerous fragments from the Cave IV manuscripts belong to this missing section. . . . To sum up, the original order of the work was as follows: Opening columns (4Q, missing in Cairo manuscript), CD.³³ I–VIII (and a text parallel to fin. XIX–XX), missing part (partly preserved in 4Q), XV–XVI, IX–XIV, final columns (4Q: penal code, and liturgy for the feast of the Renewal of the Covenant,..).³⁴

³³ The letters CD stand for Cairo Damascus and refer to Schechter’s manuscripts. ³⁴ Ten Years of Discovery in the Wilderness of Judaea (Studies in Biblical Theology 26; London: SCM Press, 1959) 151–2 (from the third of his Additional Notes). Milik’s discoveries about the order and placement of the different parts of the work must have occurred after publication of the French original (Dix ans de découvertes dans le desert de Juda [Paris: Les Éditions du Cerf, 1957]), where nothing is said about this on pp. 34–5 (the pages about the Damascus Document), and before the writing of his Additional Note 3 in the English translation.

    ( – )

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Milik’s proposals can be summed up as follows (New = Qumran text[s]; Pages = genizah copies): New + Pages 1–8, with 19–20 partially paralleling the end + New + pages 15–16, 9–14, + New. Schechter, who, of course, knew only the genizah copies, anticipated some of these conclusions about the contents and order of the text. He wrote in his Introduction regarding manuscript A: The MS. is possibly defective at the beginning and is certainly so at the end. Pages 13–16 are badly mutilated, both on the edges and at the bottom of the page. The MS. is also torn and obliterated in some other places, by which a few words or letters are affected. Besides the missing pages at the end and at the beginning, there is a lacuna between p. 8 and p. 9, the MS. breaking up at the end of a line, and perhaps in the middle of a sentence. It is impossible to determine how many pages may be missing here. I have also indicated such a lacuna at the end of p. 12, but have subsequently come to the conclusion to consider it as continuous. (ix–x)

He did not explain why he thought material was missing at the beginning, but the bottom of column 16 is torn away or deteriorated. His comment about the end of column 8 is verifiable: in copy A, the last words are “All the men who entered the new covenant in the land of Damascus.” The parallel line in copy B (col. 19:33–4) places “Thus/so” before these words and continues the text for another 36 lines that are not in copy A. There was insufficient evidence available to Schechter to show that the disturbed text in col. 8 (copy A) was part of an even bigger problem in that 15–16 also belonged after it (and after the longer text in copy B). He did, however, notice that the end of p. 14 (dealing with the constitution and organization of the group) lacked a sequel in 15–16 where other sorts of laws receive attention (x).³⁵ The editor of the cave 4 copies of the Damascus Document in the Discoveries in the Judaean Desert series, Joseph Baumgarten, supplied a convenient summary of his conclusion regarding the text in his entry

³⁵ Schechter accounted for the lack of order by hypothesizing that the text as represented in A leaves “the impression that we are dealing with extracts from a larger work, put together, however, in a haphazard way, with little regard to completeness or order” (x). He thought this was the case particularly in the legal section.

318    ( – ) “Damascus Document” in Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls.³⁶ There he listed the ten copies, their paleographical dates, and their contents. 4Q266 is the oldest and most extensively preserved among them. It was copied in the first half of the first century ..³⁷ and includes material from the original beginning and end of the text, along with many additions to the legal section. Baumgarten divided the full text of the Damascus Document into three parts, the last two of which could be subdivisions of a single legal section: The Admonition: It begins with a teacher calling on the sons of light to separate from sinners (the new introduction) and continues with material in genizah copy A 1–8. The Laws: Baumgarten divided the unit into sixteen sections, the first seven of which are attested only by copies from Qumran, not by copy A from the genizah. Communal Rules: Of the four sections, the last two (Penal Code, Ritual for expulsion of guilty members at the annual covenantal ceremony and conclusion of the document) are attested only in Qumran copies. It seems likely, on the basis of the evidence from Qumran, that the Damascus Document was composed in circumstances quite different from those Charles envisaged. His hypothesis that the group reflected in the work was a priestly one related in some way to the Sadducees, as Schechter too maintained, is closer to the picture emerging from the Dead Sea Scrolls, while Ginzberg’s theory that the work is Pharisaic seems even more implausible than when he propounded it. Charles’s and Schechter’s forced explanations for the messianic references can be shown, in light of passages in the scrolls that speak of two messiahs, to be rather wide of the mark. It is more likely that the text, like other scrolls, reflects a belief that there would be two leaders in the future, one from the family of Aaron and one from Judah.

The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament After Charles had given some twenty years of his life to bringing Jewish apocalyptic literature to the attention of scholars, someone conceived the

³⁶ Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls, edited by Lawrence H. Schiffman and James C. VanderKam (2 volumes; Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2000) 166–70. ³⁷ Paleographical analysis has, therefore, made it very likely that Charles’s dating of the work between 18 and 8 B.C. was inaccurate.

    ( – )

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idea to collect translations of these compositions into a single publication. Charles did not disclose whether the proposal was his or came from the Clarendon Press, but, in whatever way the project originated, he was the obvious choice to serve as its guiding editor.³⁸

The Context for Charles’s Volumes on the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha The great collection that Charles edited was not the first of its kind. The Jewish literature written during what has sometimes been called the Intertestamental Period had attracted less attention from most people, including scholars, than the books of the canonical Scriptures, but a few experts had attempted to gather the surviving texts. One was a scholar from Hamburg, Johann Albert Fabricius (1668–1736) who printed many Greek and Latin texts in his Codex Pseudepigraphus Veteris Testamenti (1713).³⁹ The massive work contained some 240 sections, with texts arranged by alphabetical order of the names with which they were associated. He printed texts and excerpts of compositions as well as references to them. An example is the Book of Jubilees (his #162, Parva Genesis), for which no complete text was known to him; he included excerpts from the book as well as references to it in the writings of Epiphanius, Jerome, and four Byzantine chronographers (849–65). He assured the reader that he was not publishing the texts said to have been written by patriarchs and prophets because he believed they were authentic (in his Ad Lectorem); as the title of his work indicates, he regarded them as incorrectly attributed to these ancient figures. In this way he differed from those who, for instance, deemed the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs (also in Fabricius’s collection) to be genuine statements from Jacob’s sons.⁴⁰ More than a century later, Otto Fridolin Fritzsche published a similar collection of Greek and Latin texts under the title Libri Apocryphi Veteris Testamenti Graece, recensuit et cum commentario critico . . . accedunt libri Veteris Testamenti pseudepigraphi selecti (Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1871). He

³⁸ See the Additional Note at the end of Part 2 Chapter 3. ³⁹ The full title is Codex Pseudepigraphus Veteris Testamenti, Collectus Castigatus, Testimoniisque, Censuris & Animadversionibus illustratus. It was published in Hamburg and Leipzig by Liebezeit. Before editing this collection, he had prepared large compilations of Greek and Latin works and of New Testament apocrypha. Noteworthy is his use of the term Pseudepigraphus for the literature. ⁴⁰ See the analysis of Fabricius’s work and context as well as the ways in which his collection was used by people like William Whiston (1667–1752), the translator of Josephus who regarded some of these compositions as authentic, in Annette Yoshiko Reed, “The Modern Invention of ‘Old Testament Pseudepigrapha’,” Journal of Theological Studies 60 (2009) 414–21.

320    ( – ) composed a lengthy introduction and supplied a set of ancient texts, each supported by a critical apparatus. For the Apocrypha he printed the texts of 1 Esdras, Esther, the Additions to Daniel, the Prayer of Manasseh, Baruch, the Letter of Jeremiah, Tobit, Judith, 1–4 Maccabees, Wisdom of Jesus Son of Sirach, and Wisdom of Solomon. The pseudepigrapha he selected were the Psalms of Solomon, 4 Esdras, 5 Esdras, the Apocalypse of Baruch, and the remains of the Assumption of Moses. A more accessible publication that appeared much closer in time to Charles’s volumes, and one to which he made reference in his various editions, was written by William John Deane (1823–96), Pseudepigrapha: An Account of Certain Apocryphal Sacred Writings of the Jews and Early Christians (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1891). In it he included studies of the Psalms of Solomon, 1 Enoch, the Assumption of Moses, 2 Baruch, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, Jubilees, the Ascension of Isaiah, and the Sibylline Oracles. He wrote that his book “aims at giving a succinct account of these productions for readers who are not familiar with the originals” (v). It consists of lightly revised articles he had written on the individual compositions—articles that reveal impressive knowledge of scholarship on them. It was not his purpose to present the reader with English translations of the books; he limited himself to writing about them. Neither the publications of Fabricius and Fritzsche nor that of Deane offered contemporary translations of the ancient works they included. The former two furnished Greek and Latin texts and were thus meant for a limited audience, while the latter described the compositions. The publication most nearly parallel to Charles’s collection, both in extent of coverage and use of a modern language, was the two-volume work under the general editorship of Emil Friedrich Kautzsch (1841–1910), Die Apokryphen und Pseudepigraphen des Alten Testaments (Tübingen, Freiburg, and Leipzig: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1900)—an anthology mentioned already a number of times in this biography. The publisher had issued a translation of the Old Testament (Die heilige Schrift des Alten Testaments) some years earlier and wanted to supplement it; Kautzsch’s collection was meant to put the plan into action. In his Preface, he described the difficulties that beset the work—finding scholars who had devoted the requisite years to the languages and texts of the respective books and allowing them sufficient time to carry out their work. Naturally, the pseudepigraphic texts posed the most severe problems in that they were not easily accessible and were preserved in a variety of languages (1.v–vi). Kautzsch’s work originally appeared in fascicles, beginning in 1898 and continuing until 1900; during its gestation period, it apparently grew considerably larger than first envisioned (vi).

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Kautzsch composed a substantial introduction to the two volumes (1.xi–xxxi). He began with a history of the two principal terms—apocrypha and pseudepigrapha—and their usage (and that of related concepts) from ancient to modern times. He also explained the principle by which the texts in the two volumes were selected for inclusion, since there were many that failed to make the cut. For the volume containing Apocrypha the principle was to incorporate the ones in the Luther Bible or even those printed in popular German editions of the Bible (like the Zurich Bible). The result was a list of thirteen works in four categories: Apocryphal History Books 3 Ezra (= 1 Esdras) 1–3 Maccabees Religious Instructions in Narrative Form Tobit Judith Additions to Canonical Books of the Old Testament The Prayer of Manasseh The Additions to Daniel The Additions to Esther Religious Instructions in Pedagogical Form Baruch The Letter of Jeremiah The Proverbs of Jesus, the Son of Sirach Wisdom of Solomon. For the pseudepigrapha, the decision was made to include only texts of Jewish authorship. Hence, entirely Christian compositions were bypassed, and sections deemed by experts to be Christian and other interpolations in Jewish works were left out or otherwise indicated to be secondary. In addition, texts that had only the remotest connection with the Old Testament were excluded (xv). The books were not categorized by their place of origin (Palestine or the Hellenistic diaspora) but by literary categories. The result for the Pseudepigraphen volume is another collection of thirteen texts: Pseudepigraphic Legends Letter of Aristeas Book of Jubilees Martyrdom of Isaiah (i.e., only parts of the Ascension of Isaiah 1–5, the Jewish material)

322    ( – ) Pseudepigraphic Poetry Psalms of Solomon Pseudepigraphic Instruction The so-called Fourth Book of Maccabees Pseudepigraphic Apocalypses The Sibylline Oracles Book of Enoch Assumption of Moses 4 Ezra (= 2 Esdras) The Apocalypses of Baruch Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch Greek Apocalypse of Baruch The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs (with the Hebrew Testament of Naphtali) Life of Adam and Eve. Kautzsch recognized that there was no sharp line separating the texts included in each volume, since some of the apocryphal works are pseudepigraphs (e.g., Baruch), while some of the pseudepigrapha do not falsely claim an ancient worthy as the author (e.g., Martyrdom of Isaiah—Isaiah is not said to be the writer). He surveyed the categories under which the texts were arranged in the two volumes and the individual works listed under each, devoting more space to the apocalypses and their characteristics and voicing some appreciation for what they had to offer. He added a section listing “select literature” regarding the ancient texts—manuscripts, editions, commentaries, and even bibliographical updates that arrived too late to be considered by the authors of the annotated translations. The collection that Kautzsch edited soon became the definitive source in the German-speaking world and beyond for accessing the apocryphal and pseudepigraphal texts.⁴¹

The Book The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament in English with introductions and critical and explanatory notes to the several books, edited ⁴¹ In a short list of editions of the Apocrypha that Charles appended to his introduction to the first volume of The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, he wrote about Kautzsch’s publication: “This is the best work that has hitherto appeared on this literature as a whole. But many parts of it are already antiquated” (I.x).

    ( – )

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in conjunction with many scholars by R. H. Charles, D. Litt., D.D., Fellow of Merton College, Oxford, Fellow of the British Academy (2 volumes; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1913). The first two nouns of the title serve as the names respectively of the two hefty volumes: Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha. They became Charles’s most famous, enduring, and widely used publication. By the time the volumes appeared and possibly while he was still working on them, Charles was named a canon of Westminster Abbey, meaning that his long stay in Oxford had come to an end. Charles, besides explaining in a Preface the procedures followed by the editors of all the texts—e.g., the ten topics they were expected to address— composed special introductions for each volume. In the introduction to vol. 1, he began, as Kautzsch had, by treating the term apocryphal, although his point was that the origin of the concept Apocryphal Books remained to be determined (vii). He then defined the Apocrypha Proper—those apocryphal works written between 200 .. and 120 ..: “we shall find that the Apocrypha Proper constitutes the excess of the Vulgate over the Hebrew Old Testament, and that this excess is borrowed from the LXX” (1.vii), with a few exceptions. Charles thought the difference between the Protestant canon of the Old Testament and that of the Catholic Church reproduced the one between “the Canon of the Palestinian and the Alexandrian Jews” (viii). For the first volume of his collection, 3 Maccabees, not part of the Apocrypha Proper (it is not in the Vulgate), was added, since it is found in many septuagintal manuscripts. The third section of the Introduction treats “Various meanings of the term ‘apocryphal’.” The first usage he distinguished was the earliest, to refer to works “withheld from public knowledge because they were vehicles of mysterious or esoteric wisdom, which was too sacred or profound to be disclosed to any save the initiated” (viii). A second sense of apocryphal was for works withheld from the public “because their value was confessedly secondary or questionable” (ix); and a third was to designate a writing as false or heretical. This section led to the fourth in which Charles surveyed the changing attitudes to the Apocrypha within the Church. Here too he distinguished three views: 1. Especially the Greek fathers but also Augustine and several early church councils accepted these books as Scripture. 2. Writers like Jerome and Africanus who were familiar with the Hebrew canon of Scripture regarded the books not in the Hebrew Bible to be apocryphal.

324    ( – ) 3. Some believed that, while these books did not enjoy the same status as biblical works, they were valuable for their moral teachings and ought to be read in worship services (they were called “ecclesiastical books”). These views remained viable until the Reformation when the Protestant churches adopted the canon of the Hebrew Bible (with some still regarding the apocryphal books as valuable for reading), while the Catholic Church at the Council of Trent (1545–63) defined the canon of the Old Testament as including the Apocrypha Proper (without 1 and 3 Ezra and the Prayer of Manasseh). Charles brought his Introduction to a close by declaring how important the apocryphal (and pseudepigraphic) books were for understanding religious developments from 200 .. to 100 .. His last sentence reads: If the Canonical and Apocryphal Books are compared in reference to the question of inspiration, no unbiased scholar could have any hesitation in declaring that the inspiration of such a book as Wisdom or the Testaments of the XII Patriarchs is incomparably higher than that of Esther. (x)

The works included in volume 1 are exactly those in Kautzsch’s Apokryphen but in a slightly different arrangement: Historical Books 1 Esdras (= 3 Ezra) 1 Maccabees 2 Maccabees 3 Maccabees Quasi-Historical Books Written with a Moral Purpose Tobit Judith Wisdom Literature Sirach Wisdom of Solomon Additions to and Completions of the Canonical Books 1 Baruch Epistle of Jeremy Prayer of Manasses Additions to Daniel Prayer of Azariah and Song of the Three Children

    ( – )

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Susanna Bel and the Dragon Additions to Esther The Apocrypha volume has not had the same impact as its sister publication Pseudepigrapha, since translations of these books were and continue to be widely available in English Bibles, but it incorporates some truly valuable studies. For example, if a reader were interested in comparing 1 Esdras with the corresponding material in 2 Chronicles, Ezra, and Nehemiah, the edition by S. A. Cook would be a very convenient place to look, as he printed English translations of the two in parallel columns. The edition of Sirach by G. H. Box and W. O. E. Oesterley is a book in itself, running to nearly 250 large pages (268–517). Charles mentioned in a footnote to his Preface (1.iii, n. 2 = 2.iii, n. 2) that “In the case of Sirach and Tobit the editors have been allowed much beyond the normal number of pages for their critical apparatus, which they have used to good purpose.” The notes to the translations in both are more extensive than the text, with the apparatus in Tobit (edited by D. C. Simpson) being especially prominent. The evidence for the text of Sirach was growing rapidly as the copies of it found in the Cairo Genizah were becoming available, so it is understandable that its editors were allotted more pages for their work. Of the fifteen contributors to Apocrypha, seven were or had been at Oxford, and four had Cambridge connections. The second volume, almost two hundred pages longer than the first (871 to 684), came to define the corpus of pseudepigraphic texts for readers of English—unless they could use more technical studies of individual texts— and nicely showcases the magnitude of Charles’s contribution to the field. In the Preface that appears in both volumes he wrote, not very accurately, that the second one “contains all the remaining [that is, besides the Apocrypha] extant non-Canonical Jewish books written between 200 .. and . 100 with possibly one or two exceptions. The greater part of these books have hitherto been accessible only in expensive editions . . .” (2.iv = 1.iv). There are seventeen texts that met his definition; these appear under six rubrics (the asterisked titles are those also present in Kautzsch’s Pseudepigraphen): Primitive History Rewritten from the Standpoint of the Law *The Book of Jubilees Sacred Legends *The Letter of Aristeas *The Books of Adam and Eve

326    ( – ) *The Martyrdom of Isaiah (that is, the Jewish sections) Apocalypses *1 Enoch *The Testaments of the XII Patriarchs *The Sibylline Oracles *The Assumption of Moses 2 Enoch, or the Book of the Secrets of Enoch *2 Baruch, or the Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch *3 Baruch, or the Greek Apocalypse of Baruch *4 Ezra (= 2 Esdras) Psalms *The Psalms of Solomon Ethics and Wisdom Literature *4 Maccabees Pirkē Aboth The Story of Ahiḳar : History The Fragments of a Zadokite Work Besides writing the Introduction, Charles provided seven of the seventeen pseudepigraphic entries (Jubilees, Martyrdom of Isaiah, 1 Enoch, Testaments of the XII Patriarchs, Assumption of Moses, 2 Baruch, Fragments of a Zadokite Work) and co-authored one more (2 Enoch).⁴² All of his contributions are shorter forms of editions he had earlier prepared, with the exception of Fragments of a Zadokite Work (785–834). As we have seen, in the previous year Charles had published a short book, Fragments of a Zadokite Work. It was simply reproduced almost without change in vol. 2 of the 1913 collection. Charles offered a few words in the Preface to explain why he had included the last three items (the only ones, apart from 2 Enoch, not in Kautzsch’s Pseudepigraphen). About Pirkē Aboth⁴³ and the Story of Ahiḳar : ⁴² Since the Clarendon Press had published some of his books, he could re-use material from them without difficulty. In the Preface printed in both volumes (e.g., 1.iv) he thanked A. and C. Black “for permission to reprint the translation and make use of the introduction and notes” in his editions of Jubilees, Martyrdom of Isaiah, Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, Assumption of Moses, and 2 Baruch. ⁴³ In his Introduction to vol. 2, Charles, who stressed the ethical side of ancient Jewish apocalyptic literature, said about the presence of Pirkē Aboth: “The chief work on Ethics in the Talmud, which is reproduced in the Jewish Book of Common Prayer, i.e., The Sayings of the Fathers, has been translated and added to this volume, in order that the student might have before him the best that Later Judaism produced in the domain of Ethics. It will be obvious even to the most cursory reader that a great gulf divides the Ethics of the Testaments of the XII Patriarchs, and even those of 2 Enoch, from these

    ( – )

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he wrote: “ . . . it is not necessary to make any apology for their introduction into the present work, although they do not properly fall within the true limits above defined, but they were used, at all events partially, by Jewish readers within this period, nor can they be rightly designated Pseudepigraphs. The Fragments of a Zadokite Work are of an historical character, and are valuable in throwing light on a lost chapter of Jewish religious history. They contain likewise apocalyptic material of an interesting nature” (2.iv = 1.iv). His “nonapology” highlights the difficulty of defining a category so unhelpful and inadequate as “the Pseudepigrapha,” however well-meant and traditional it was (note the titles of the collections surveyed above). Of the fourteen contributors to the second volume (there is some overlap with the editors of vol. 1), seven were or had been connected with Oxford, and two with Cambridge. It is worth noting that a woman made the list—Agnes Smith Lewis, one of the famous twins; she translated the Arabic version of The Story of Ahiḳar. : Charles’s “Introduction to Volume II” (vii–xi) offers some thoughts familiar from his earlier statements about “apocalyptic” and “legalistic” Judaism. He was convinced that these two “sides” of Judaism agreed about the centrality of the law. Even before the Christian era each of these two sides of Pharisaism necessarily tended to lay more and more emphasis on the chief factor in its belief and study to the almost complete exclusion of the other, and thus legalistic Pharisaism in time drove out almost wholly the apocalyptic element as an active factor (though it accepted some of its developments) and became the parent of Talmudic Judaism, whereas apocalyptic Judaism developed more and more the apocalyptic, i.e. prophetic, element, and in the process came to recognize, as in 4 Ezra, the inadequacy of the Law for salvation. From this it follows that the Judaism that survived the destruction of the Temple, being almost wholly bereft of the apocalyptic wing which had passed over into Christianity, was not the same as the Judaism of an earlier date. (2.vii)

excellent but very uninspiring sayings of Jewish sages belonging to the legalistic wing of Judaism. It is quite true that many a fine saying is found in the other tractates of the Talmud and other Rabbinic writings, but the harvest that rewards the diligent reaper is slight in comparison of the toil, and the number of really fine sayings that were uttered before .. 100 is far from great” (2.xi). At the end of his section about the theology of Pirkē Aboth, R. Travers Herford, who edited it for this volume, warned readers that Ferdinand Weber’s System der Altsynagogalen Palästinischen Theologie aus Targum, Midrasch, und Talmud Dargestellt (Leipzig: Dörffling & Franke, 1880) “presents the results of great learning from a standpoint entirely mistaken and by a method fundamentally wrong” (2.690). Weber was a German pastor involved in missions to the Jews. To this Charles saw fit to add in a footnote: “The student, however, should bear in mind that Rabbinic Pharisaism after the destruction of the Temple in 70 .. differs largely from Pharisaism before that date. See the Introduction to this Vol.”

328    ( – ) He maintained, as he frequently did, that after 200 .. apocalypses had to be pseudonymous because the law had become supreme and left no role for prophecy whose legacy survived in apocalyptic. Moreover, around that time the prophetic section of the canon was closed, meaning there could be no more such inspired works. Apocalyptists, to be heard, had to adopt the name of an ancient hero. Like prophecy, apocalyptic was characterized by its ethical element. The teaching of these writers “is a vast advance on that of the O. T., and forms the indispensable link which in this respect connects the O. T. with the N. T.” (2.xi).⁴⁴ There is little doubt about the perspective from which the Jewish texts are presented.

Reviews In light of the considerable influence The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament wielded for decades, it is instructive to see what Charles’s contemporaries thought about it. One early review (unsigned) appeared in The Athenaeum 4471, July 5, 1913, pp. 9–10. The reviewer’s first words were: “It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of this great and scholarly work” (9). But he quickly offered a criticism that is quite understandable, one involving what he termed “an excrescence in the scope of the collection” (9). The chief offense was Charles’s inclusion of Pirkē Aboth and Ahiḳar, neither of which was at : home in the collection in the reviewer’s opinion. He also had doubts about Fragments of a Zadokite Work but allowed that, if Charles were correct in his assessment of it, it would belong. In some respects, he thought, Charles was guilty of arguing in a circle—his reconstructions rested on his interpretations, and his interpretations were based on his reconstructions. The criticism arose in connection with his claim that Pharisees wrote the various apocalypses. The reviewer noted that, according to many, the laws in Jubilees differed from those in the Mishnah which are supposed to reflect Pharisaic positions. Naturally, this would cast doubt on Pharisaic authorship for Jubilees. After briefly surveying the contributions of the various writers in the two volumes,

⁴⁴ There are two pages of “Addenda et Corrigenda to Volume II” (xii–xiii). They too are almost all from Charles (he signed each of his notes as “G. E”). Most of the section is given over to his remarks about a commentary on 4 Ezra by Box (the editor of 4 Ezra in the Pseudepigrapha volume) and the views he expressed in it about 2 Baruch, regarding which he had adopted the position of Rosenthal. Charles tried to show in detail how wrong Rosenthal was.

    ( – )

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the reviewer concluded by expressing gratitude to Charles and the others “for these magnificent contributions to the history and literature of religion” (10). John M. Powis Smith of the University of Chicago wrote about the volumes in The Biblical World 43 (1914) 59–61. His evaluation appeared under the rubric Book of the Month, Uncanonical Writings of the Old Testament. He began by highlighting the importance of the apocryphal literature and how much Protestants had lost by rejecting it. He was most complimentary about Charles. The general editor of this work was the man of all men to undertake this task. Dr. Charles has devoted the scholarly energy of his life to the study and interpretation of this kind of literature. He knows the field as few, if any other, scholars do. (60)

About him he added: “The general oversight of the editor is, of itself, a sufficient guaranty of the high quality of the work as a whole and in detail” (61). He realized that the two thick volumes were mostly for scholars but believed there was much in them for the non-specialist as well. He did complain about the high cost of the books ($19.25 for the set) and hoped for a smaller, less-expensive edition. Frank C. Porter of Yale University wrote a lengthy review in the American Journal of Theology 18 (1914) 106–18 (“A Source-Book of Judaism in New Testament Times”). He, like Smith, wrote about the extra-biblical literature and its value, and, to anticipate a point he would make, he surveyed the range of Jewish writing in the period in question. About it he offered three remarks. First, the Pentateuch was important for all Jewish groups; second, the New Testament is the best source for the Judaism of its time; and third, in the first two centuries, relations between Jews and Christians were close, so that at times it is difficult to tell whether a text is Jewish or Christian. Turning to the anthology under review, Porter wrote: “The first and last word of the reviewer of these significant volumes ought to be one of praise and gratitude, and the principal word might well be one of exhortation to ministers and other students of the Bible to get and use this collection” (110). He observed that these ancient texts were the ones to which the student of the New Testament should turn first after the Old Testament to “understand the Judaism out of which Christianity came” (110). He too complimented Charles in strong terms. For twenty years past the student in this field has been in ever-increasing and quite incalculable debt to Dr. Charles—now Canon of Westminster—the

330    ( – ) general editor of these volumes. One can have only sincere and grateful admiration for his untiring industry and amazing productivity in this obscure and difficult region of research. There is an intellectual and spiritual energy behind such labors that is our wonder and despair. (112)

Porter found the Charles volumes to be generally more technical than the ones Kautzsch had overseen and believed the size and textual detail of the Tobit and Sirach entries were not appropriate for this kind of publication. Its price would also set limits to its usefulness. Porter thought there could have been less elaborate treatments of the texts, a procedure that would have allowed inclusion of more compositions. He was perturbed that the preface to each of the two volumes made the claim that vol. 2 included all the remaining non-canonical Jewish books, with two exceptions. He told the reader that a glance at his own survey at the beginning of the review or at Schürer’s history would show the statement was far from true. In addition, the three works included in the Charles collection but not in Kautzsch’s—Pirkē Aboth, Ahiḳar, and Fragments of a Zadokite Work—could have been put in a : third volume on “selections from Hebrew and Aramaic Sources” (114). He found it understandable that Charles would be partial to apocalypses because he had done so much work on them. Also, ethics, which Charles considered so important in the apocalypses, could be found in the various kinds of literature of the time, although in each, including apocalypses, it was mixed with less important material. Porter likewise objected to some of Charles’s favorite theories. He did not think that Enoch was the most important Jewish book written between 200 .. and 100 .. In addition, “The line that reaches from prophecy to Christianity does not run so straight through Daniel and Enoch” (115). The Judaism to which Jesus attached himself was that of John the Baptist who was a prophet, not an apocalyptist. And Jewish apocalypticism did not migrate solely into Christianity but is more widespread in later Jewish texts. Despite his concern about the price of the volumes, Porter returned to his point that Charles should have incorporated more works, both early and late. He thought Charles should have traced the sources for the two kinds of apocalypses, the cosmic and the historical. An ideal source book, Porter ventured, would have had a third volume for Rabbinic material and a fourth for Philo and Josephus. Nevertheless, he noted the depth of religious feeling, the beauty, and the power contained in the books and concluded: “For the texts themselves, in English form, and for the study of their place and meaning, these two volumes must for a long while maintain their place as the standard edition” (118).

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Legacy The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament continues to be used and cited, but the collection has been superseded by larger anthologies of “Pseudepigrapha,” a term that has proved rather flexible in meaning.⁴⁵ The newer anthologies are fuller than Charles’s second volume, in part because they include texts that, for whatever reason, were absent from his collection, though available, and in part because more texts have surfaced since 1913. Several of these publications in English may be listed here, some of which still bear the impress of Charles’s work. A feature worth noting is how the word “pseudepigrapha” has more recently disappeared from the titles of such collections. James H. Charlesworth, editor, The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (2 vols.; Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1983, 1985). Included are fifty-two compositions or parts of them, compared with Charles’s seventeen in Pseudepigrapha. The editor’s Introduction for the General Reader (1.xxi–xxxiv) explains the broad sense in which “pseudepigrapha” is used (especially xxiv–xxv) and defines the period covered as 200 .. to 200 .. Two works from Charles’s second volume were left out—Pirkē Aboth and Fragments of a Zadokite Work—because they belong to other collections. H. F. D. Sparks, editor The Apocryphal Old Testament (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). Sparks notes in the Preface (ix–xviii) that the idea for the collection arose when the stocks of Charles’s two volumes were running low. Were they to be reprinted or in some way replaced? A new set of texts, intended to be a companion to M. R. James, editor, The Apocryphal New Testament, would include, it was anticipated, revisions of translations in Charles’s second volume as well as additional texts. A number of complications arose and led to further reflection on the plan for the new volume. The editor wrote that Our single criterion for inclusion has been whether or not any particular item is attributed to (or is primarily concerned with the history or activities of) an Old Testament character (or characters). And we have tried to include all the more important and interesting items that satisfy this criterion, irrespective of date, and irrespective, too, of whether or not a convincing claim can be put forward on behalf of any one of them for a respectable Jewish pedigree. (xv)

⁴⁵ The Apocrypha, strictly speaking, forms a set group of texts and has, consequently, not grown.

332    ( – ) Of the texts in Charles’s second volume, it was decided to omit the Fragments of a Zadokite Work, Ahiḳar, the Sibylline Oracles, and the Letter of Aristeas. It : was determined, too, that 4 Ezra (2 Esdras) really belonged in the Apocrypha, so it too was left out, as was 4 Maccabees. Added were sixteen texts not in Charles’s Pseudepigrapha, and the approach of Charles (and others) to the texts was modified so that, for example, the Ascension of Isaiah includes all three of the parts Charles found in it, not only the single one he placed in his second volume. Of the twenty-five texts included in The Apocryphal Old Testament, six are identified as revisions of translations in Charles’s second volume (Jubilees, Assumption of Moses, Ascension of Isaiah, Syriac Apocalypse of Baruch—all revisions of Charles’s translations; Life of Adam and Eve, a revision of Wells’s translation, and Greek Apocalypse of Baruch, a revision of Hughes’s translation). Richard Bauckham, James R. Davila, and Alexander Panayotov, editors, Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: More Noncanonical Scriptures (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2013). The criteria for inclusion are two: first, texts composed before the rise of Islam; and second, texts of any provenance, whether Jewish, Christian, or “indigenous polytheistic” works (xxviii). Most of the thirty-nine texts or units in their collection are not part of other such publications. The editors have cast their net more widely than in the anthologies mentioned above and have avoided using texts that appear in Charlesworth or Spark’s collections. A second volume is planned. An interesting feature of the 2013 publication is the dedication to editors who produced related collections, three centuries (Fabricius, 1713) and one century earlier (Charles, 1913). Louis H. Feldman, James L. Kugel, and Lawrence H. Schiffman, editors, Outside the Bible: Ancient Jewish Writings Related to Scripture (3 vols.; Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 2013). The scope of Outside the Bible is wider than for the other anthologies listed here. It includes in its 3000-plus pages examples from the Septuagint, commentaries (including selections from Philo and Josephus), testaments, prayers and psalms, wisdom writings, Philo’s philosophical treatises, stories from biblical and post-biblical times, and sectarian texts from Qumran. The editors write that they have incorporated works “written by Jews in the period between the end of the Babylonian exile (538 ..) and the transmission of the Mishnah (200 ..)” (xv). They have organized them “in a way that highlights their closeness to the Hebrew Bible, . . . ” (xvii).

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So, Charles’s volumes are now dated but retain their value in the history of scholarship on the texts they contain. After surveying these publications from Charles in the years 1909–13, we will take up in Chapter 10 another of his books from this period. It marked the first time, after writing so much on extra-biblical texts, that he prepared a commentary on an apocalypse in the Bible—the Book of Daniel.

Chapter 10 The Book of Daniel Consideration of Charles’s publications on the Book of Daniel was postponed from Chapter 9 so as not to overload it, though the first of them appeared in 1913. Since Daniel is more familiar than the other texts Charles studied, its contents are not summarized here.

The Context for Charles’s 1913 Volume on Daniel Charles had, to this point, devoted his scholarship to texts outside the canons of the Western churches. That changed in 1913 with the appearance of his commentary on Daniel, the first and shorter of the two he would write on the scriptural book. We should recall, however, that his Grinfield Lectures (1905–11) focused on the textual evidence for the Book of Daniel, so he had been doing serious work on it for some years before 1913. The Book of Daniel places its hero in the days of the Babylonian captivity when Nebuchadnezzar’s forces removed some residents from the land of Judah, in the time of his successor, and in the reigns of the first Persian monarchs. The earliest date in the book is the third year of King Jehoiakim (1:1), ca. 606 .., while the latest would be a little after 539 .. when Cyrus captured Babylon. The traditional way of reading the book was to assume it came from the time indicated by these dates and to believe that the references in Daniel’s visions/dreams to much later occurrences were genuine predictions made centuries before the events occurred. Not everyone agreed about what was predicted in the book, but in Christianity the dominant interpretation was that the Roman Empire (the fourth beast of Daniel 7)¹ and the appearance of Christ were among the forecasts. A notable dissenter was the third century .. Neo-platonic philosopher Porphyry who thought the fourth beast was the Seleucid Empire and that the book referred to the time of Antiochus IV Epiphanes (175–64 ..), the monarch who banned the practice of Judaism. ¹ 4 Ezra, a late first century .. Jewish apocalypse, also interprets the fourth beast as the Roman Empire (12:10–16, where it is recognized as different than the explanation given to Daniel).

R. H. Charles: A Biography. James C. VanderKam, Oxford University Press. © James C. VanderKam 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192869289.003.0012

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Moreover, he maintained, it did not predict the reign of Antiochus but was written at that time. The interpretation of the book changed with the rise of modern criticism of the Bible. Although they had predecessors, a number of scholars especially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries defended a position much like that of Porphyry: the fourth beast is the Greek/Seleucid Empire, and the Book of Daniel in its final form dates to near the end of Antiochus IV’s reign (ca. 165 ..). There were scholars who held fast to a sixth-century date for the book and saw in it genuine prophecies, but many experts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were convinced it was a second-century composition containing “predictions” after the fact, a more widely attested practice in antiquity.

The Book The Book of Daniel, Introduction, Revised Version with Notes, Index and Map edited by R. H. Charles, D Litt, DD, Fellow of Merton College, Fellow of the British Academy (The New-Century Bible; New York: Henry Frowde, Oxford University Press, American Branch; Edinburgh: T. C. & E. C. Jack, 1913).² There is no preface in the book, hence there was no opportunity for Charles to offer any information about the genesis of the work, but, given his extensive research into Jewish apocalyptic literature, he was an excellent choice to write the commentary. The New-Century Bible series, by design, called for relatively brief introductions to and commentaries on the text of the Revised Version (the reference to “Revised Version” on the title page refers to the Revised Version of the Bible, not to a second edition of the commentary). The Introduction covers pp. ix–xlv, and the biblical text plus commentary (with the Index) fills pp. 3–152. The twelve-part Introduction to the commentary opens with a section on “Historical antecedents of Book of Daniel: its pseudonymous character: originally unilingual, but subsequently bilingual: its various versions” (ix–xiii). Charles swiftly sketched the historical background of the book in the secondcentury Antiochan decrees and the Maccabean response, both occurring in the 160s .. He thought that the Book of Daniel appeared at a time of “mingled hope and despair” (xi) and cited a lengthy passage from the German scholar ² Whenever the publisher recorded this information, Charles had not yet been appointed canon of Westminster, as the title is not listed here.

336    ( – ) Heinrich Ewald describing the marvelous contribution it made in such trying days. Included in that encomium is the sentence: “No dew of heaven could fall with more refreshing coolness on the parched ground, no spark from above alight with a more kindling power on the surface so long heated with a hidden glow” (xi). Charles offered his by now familiar explanation for why post-exilic writers, such as the author of Daniel, had to resort to pseudonymity. He suggested that the author wrote the entire book in Aramaic, with some parts then translated into Hebrew. A quick statement about the earliest translations of Daniel brings the section to a close. The next three sections take up points on which Charles had written before. The second deals with features shared by prophecy and apocalyptic, such as revelations through visions and trances. The third explains at greater length his theory about why apocalyptic was forced to become pseudonymous, and the fourth sets out the ethical character of apocalyptic with several examples. In a footnote (p. xix, 1) he acknowledged that this section was quoted from the second edition of his Eschatology, i.e., A Critical History of the Doctrine of a Future Life, also published in 1913. With section 5 Charles reached a fresh topic, the bilingual character of the Book of Daniel. In the present form of the text, Daniel 1:1–2:4a and chs. 8–12 are in Hebrew, while the intervening material (2:4b–7:28) is in Aramaic. Why, when there was no change of subject, is there a switch from Hebrew to Aramaic at 2:4 and from Aramaic back to Hebrew at 8:1? He summarized various possibilities and also noted the divergence between the two Greek translations of the book—the Septuagint version (= LXX) and the later one by Theodotion (for more on both, see below). Charles adopted the theory that the original text, all of it in Aramaic, was partly—at the beginning and end of the book—translated into Hebrew because for ancient Jewish people a work entirely in Aramaic could not be admitted into the canon of Scripture. Once parts of it were in Hebrew, it became eligible for inclusion in it (xxv–xxvi). He did not explain how he knew about linguistic conditions for a book’s canonicity. The sixth section of the Introduction describes the ancient translations of Daniel. Charles dipped fairly deeply into the complicated issue (xxvi–xxxi), although he noted (xxix) that the limits imposed by the New-Century Bible series precluded a fuller treatment—a constraint to which he appealed several times (e.g., the note to 8:11–13, p. 87). He dealt especially with the set of questions arising from the existence of two Greek versions—the Septuagint (made, he thought, around 145 .. but surviving in just one manuscript) and the translation associated with Theodotion who lived in the latter part of the

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second century .. Particularly puzzling were citations of Daniel that matched the wording in the translation of Theodotion but that appeared in the works of pre-Theodotion writers of Greek, such as New Testament authors (first century ..) or Justin Martyr (mid-second century ..). How was it possible to quote from that translation before it was made? After adducing much of the evidence bearing on the puzzle, Charles concluded that “ . . . there were two pre-Christian Greek versions of the Book of Daniel, one of which was the LXX and the other a revised LXX” (xxix). He thought both rested on a Semitic base text, that is, that there were two Semitic versions of Daniel in circulation. Some experts had thought the Septuagint form of chs. 4–6 was not a translation but a revision. Charles, however, responded that his extensive study led him to believe that it is just in these chapters that the LXX makes its greatest contribution to the reconstruction of the original text, particularly in chapter iv. The bulk of the evidence for this conclusion cannot of course be given here, but some of the grounds are enumerated in the short introduction to chapters iv–vi, p. 37–9. (xxx)

Section 7 bears the title “All Authorities Go Back to a Glossed Text.” Typical of his work on other ancient compositions, Charles thought there were what he called intrusions, glosses, and interpolations in the texts that eventually found their way into the surviving versions of Daniel. Some of these are omitted by one or more of the versions, while others are supported by all of them. He listed some twenty-five passages that he so identified, the largest of which is Daniel’s prayer in 9:4–19 (found in all the texts but regarded by Charles as an addition to the original). After his discussion of the various texts and versions, Charles supplied a genealogical chart tracing their inter-relations (xxxiii). A controversial question regarding the Book of Daniel is its date of composition. Charles noted that for the first eighteen centuries of this era expositors assumed that the book was written around the time in which the stories about Daniel and his friends are set. With the rise of higher criticism in biblical studies, Porphyry’s date for the book started attracting considerable scholarly support. Charles listed among the arguments in favor of the later date of composition the fact that the book is never mentioned before the reign of Antiochus, and the writer’s knowledge of history becomes accurate only for the third and second centuries (xxxiv–xxxvii). He maintained that Daniel was written “before 165 .. and after 167 ..” (xxxvii; also p. 89).

338    ( – ) The tenth section of the Introduction offers the reader a helpful set of chronological lists for the Babylonian, Persian, Seleucid, and Ptolemaic monarchs and for events in Jewish history from the reign of King Jehoiakim of Judah (609–598) to Antiochus Epiphanes (175–64; xxxvii–xli). The information was essential for a reader attempting to follow Charles’s many references to people and events in his Introduction and commentary. The eleventh section advances a few thoughts about the theology of the book. Its eschatology looks to a kingdom on earth and a special future for “those individuals who have in an extraordinary degree helped or hindered the advent of this kingdom” (xli). The rest remain in Sheol. The kingdom would arrive catastrophically, when Antiochus was most cruelly oppressing the holy ones; at that point God would conduct the judgment. All the nations will be subject to the kingdom into which the especially righteous people rise. Charles also drew attention to Daniel’s teaching about the angelic patrons of the nations and the various practices (e.g., prayer toward Jerusalem three times a day) set forth in the book. The last section of the Introduction is a bibliography, largely a list of more recent commentaries, with occasional terse notes of evaluation.³ In the series, the text of the Revised Version appeared at the top of the page, with its marginal notes, usually giving alternate or literal translations, in smaller, italic font beneath it. The commentator’s contributions occupied the lower part of each page. In his commentary, Charles prefaced to his treatment of each chapter a short paragraph about its purpose. In this location he at times addressed critical issues connected with the chapter. Examples may be found before ch. 4 where he explained that it existed in two forms and adduced an ancient parallel to its account of Nebuchadnezzar’s madness; before ch. 5 (Belshazzar’s feast) where he took up its historical difficulties; and before ch. 7 where he discussed the identities of the four world empires in the vision and the meaning of its symbols. A general note introduces chs. 10–12 which form a unit within the larger composition. As for the comments themselves, the scriptural term or passage under discussion (the lemma) is printed in bold font, the explanations in regular print. These lemmas from and comments on the Revised Version appear in smaller type than the scriptural text and are sometimes preceded by short

³ Examples of evaluation, enclosed in parentheses, can be found for two of the commentaries he cited most frequently. Regarding Anthony Ashley Bevan, A Short Commentary on the Book of Daniel for the Use of Students (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1892), he wrote “very original,” and about Samuel Rolles Driver, The Book of Daniel with Introduction and Notes (Cambridge Bible; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1900), he said “very learned” (xlv). For his comments about the two commentaries in a letter to R. W. Chapman of Oxford University Press, see below.

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introductions to larger units of text. The notes, true to the nature of the series, tend to be brief, unless Charles was commenting on a special issue raised by a verse or section—or by something that piqued his interest. Among the matters that receive more extended treatment are: the historical problems raised by the reference to Nebuchadnezzar’s third year in 1:1 (p. 3); reasons for thinking a verse or section was interpolated, e.g., on 1:2 (4) or at 9:3 (96–7); the appearance of the word “Aramaic” immediately before the Aramaic section begins in 2:4 (16–17);⁴ the phrase “in the latter days” in 2:28 (23); the seventy weeks in 9:24 (104–5); and many others. His practice was to represent Semitic words in transliteration, but primarily from ch. 9 on he used Hebrew script more often. It was deemed acceptable in a more popular series to print Greek words and phrases in script. Charles, to no one’s surprise, made frequent reference to extra-canonical Jewish literature in his comments (e.g., in his explanation of “a watcher” in 4:13, p. 43), and also, as was his practice, freely offered corrections and changes to the translations in the Revised Version (see on 2:25, 27, 45; 9:25–7 for a few cases). In addition, he suggested that the Revised Version should have set a number of passages as poetry (cf. 2:20–3, p. 21). While writing this shorter volume, Charles was at work on a larger commentary on Daniel and called attention to it a number of times. Note for instance what he says in the introductory words to ch. 4: “A close study of the texts and versions has forced me to conclude that the older order of the text is preserved in the LXX and not in the Aramaic. The complete evidence for this conclusion will be found in my larger Commentary” (37; see also 26, 32, 34, 39, 52, 76, 105, and so on). These statements—and his Grinfield lectures—leave the distinct impression that by 1913 work on the major commentary was at an advanced stage. As events transpired, however, it did not appear until 1929, sixteen years after its smaller forebear. We do know that in the interval he was working on other projects (e.g., the commentary on Revelation). Also, the World War disrupted the work of publishing as it did so many aspects of life.

Review A brief statement about the commentary appeared in the Journal of Theological Studies 14 (1912–13) in a section entitled “Chronicle: The Old Testament and Related Literature” by S. A. Cook and A. H. McNeile. On ⁴ The passage reads: “The Chaldeans said to the king (in Aramaic), ‘O king, live forever . . . ’ ” (NRSV).

340    ( – ) p. 623, the writer noted that Charles’s commentary brought the New-Century Bible series to completion, a collection of small commentaries that was widely praised. That by Dr. Charles is especially attractive for its introductory sections on Apocalyptic (pp. xiii seqq.) in which he rightly protests against the attempt ‘by advanced liberals’ to differentiate prophecy and apocalyptic (p. xvi).⁵ The familiar problems of Daniel are briefly noticed, but I miss a treatment of Winckler’s view touching the quasi-historical background.⁶

What I found more interesting than the review is what follows in the “Chronicle.” The writer said he was moving on from a series just completed—the New-Century Bible—to one just beginning—the Oxford Church Bible Commentary—and listed individuals whom he called “prospective contributors” to the new series. Among them was Charles who was supposed to write the commentary on Daniel—something he never did.

Charles’s 1929 Volume on Daniel A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Daniel, with Introduction, Indexes and a New English Translation, by R. H. Charles, DD (Dublin), D Litt and Hon DD. (Oxford), Hon D Litt. (Belfast), Archdeacon of Westminster, Fellow of the British Academy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929). The last treatment of an ancient text by Charles was his commentary on Daniel that the Clarendon Press issued on July 18, 1929.⁷ The title of the book is surprising. Volumes in the distinguished series The International Critical Commentary (ICC) were entitled A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on [+ the name of a biblical book], and just two years before Charles’s work appeared T. & T. Clark had issued James A. Montgomery’s ICC commentary under the title A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Daniel. Why Charles’s book received the very same title is not explained in the

⁵ It is not clear from the words of the reviewer, but Charles, who carefully differentiated between prophecy and apocalyptic, was here speaking about ethics. The “advanced liberals” were not aware that “apocalyptic” was thoroughly ethical, just as prophecy was. ⁶ Hugo Winckler (1863–1913) and others found in recently published information about Nabonidus the background for the story of Nebuchadnezzar’s absence from Babylon in Daniel 4 (e.g., Altorientalische Forschungen II.2 [Leipzig: Pfeiffer, 1900] 200–1, 213–14). ⁷ The date is given on production sheets from the Archives of the Press.

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volume, but his was not a part of the ICC series (his 1920 commentary on Revelation was). The correspondence between Charles and T. & T. Clark (NLS) includes some exchanges about the ICC commentary on Daniel. Charles wrote to Clark (NLS, February 3,1926): When will the Commentary on Daniel in the International Series be ready? Has the editor given up the task? I hope to have my larger Commentary on Daniel ready towards the end of the year. If yours is ready I shall like to see it before mine sees the light. If yours is in a state of suspended animation or if your editor has failed, might I ask if you would consider the possibility of accepting mine in its place? I think I can promise that it will contain much of the best work I have done.

The publisher (NLS, February 9, 1926) replied that John P. Peters was to write the ICC Daniel but, due to the high cost of producing volumes in the series they had “allowed the matter to remain in a state of suspended animation.” He did not know whether Peters had made any progress on it and said there was no one he would rather see write the commentary than Charles. It happened that Peters, an American scholar and clergyman, had invited Montgomery in the summer of 1918 to write the commentary with him. When Peters died on November 10, 1921, the publishers gave responsibility for it to Montgomery.⁸ The publisher in this instance must have been Charles Scribner’s Sons in New York (the name is listed below that of T. & T. Clark in the ICC volumes) because Clark did not know about this arrangement in early 1926. Clark, a few months later (NLS, June 17, 1926) wrote to Charles that Scribner had asked Montgomery to write the commentary, that he had written it, and that it was to appear in the Autumn of 1926 (it was published in 1927). Thus, the closest Charles came to having his larger Daniel commentary appear in the ICC series was to give it the same title as Montgomery’s Daniel. Charles, reluctantly it seems, turned to Oxford to have his commentary published.⁹ Some lines Charles wrote to Chapman, the secretary, on June 5, 1929 (OUP), show that Charles himself was responsible for the title it received ⁸ Montgomery, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Book of Daniel, vii. ⁹ Charles was grateful that the Press had published texts for him that no private firm could undertake. But he preferred to go with Clark, charging that Oxford printed too slowly and provided no support once a book was published. He added that prospects for a book were better if it was part of a good series (NLS, February 15, 1926).

342    ( – ) and that he rejected a slightly different one that was proposed. So, while knowing about Montgomery’s commentary, he used the same title. The dedication to the volume reads: “This also to my wife without whose help this contribution to the Book of Daniel could never have seen the light.” The Archives of Oxford University Press preserve information relating to the commentary. Documents record that on April 4, 1927 the manuscript had gone down to press, that 1500 copies were to be printed, and that the book would bear a price of 30 shillings. This time too Charles seems to have exceeded the allotted number of corrections. A letter of October 13, 1927 (OUP) shows him in the process of reading and correcting proofs (“slips”) and trying to coordinate the ones for the various parts of the complex publication: Early in the next year Charles expressed continuing concern about receiving the slips expeditiously. The same letter also offers a rare opportunity to learn about health¹⁰ issues with which he was dealing. He wrote to Chapman (OUP, February 14, 1928), asking for greater speed in getting proofs to Charles, since his next “residence”¹¹ at the Abbey would be in April, when he would have to stop work on the commentary for some time. He added: I am at present a semi invalid and have to rest nearly 18 hours a day on my back, as contrary to the Surgeon’s orders I did not, or rather could not, owing to “residences,” take a long rest after my operation last year. I am giving practically all my time to “Daniel”. Can you prevail on Mr. Johnson¹² to furnish me with the remaining “slips”—16 or 18—within the next fortnight, and to revise in page with all possible haste. In the Summer I aim (?) to take a long rest in the sun. That is all I require the Doctors Surgeons say to make me a stronger man than I was before. But in the meantime I trust in your kind offices & those of Mr. Johnson to grant my request—as well for the sake of the Press as for my own. If you do so, I think I could mark for press the entire commentary within nine weeks. A few weeks later and the Introd. could be in your hands.

He added a P.S. “Of the many commentaries I have written I think this is the best.” ¹⁰ “Personal” is written at the top of the letter and underlined twice. ¹¹ A residence was the period of time that a canon of Westminster was responsible for preaching and other duties at the Abbey. ¹² John de Monins Johnson (1882–1956) had been assistant secretary to the Delegates and in 1925 became “Printer to the University at Oxford” (“John de Monins Johnson,” Wikipedia, accessed 4-3-20). He continued in the position until 1946 (Sutcliffe, Oxford University Press, 161, 176, 193).

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The letter makes clear not only Charles’s eagerness to handle the proofreading as swiftly as possible but also the constraints that limited his work. His duties as canon of Westminster during a residency seem to have precluded attention to the book, but his health, never the best, had suffered a setback. He must have had the operation he mentions in 1927. He did not specify its nature, but it required long hours of rest on his back. The circumstances would understandably make him more anxious to finish the Daniel commentary in the near future. If the timetable he proposed in the letter worked out, he would have finished proofreading the commentary around the end of April/beginning of May and the Introduction not long afterward. It is of interest in light of the projected schedule that Chapman scribbled a note related to this letter: “What may I say to him? He may die!” As it turned out, Charles was not quite able to meet his own deadline, as his letter to Chapman on June 6, 1928 (OUP) indicates. In it he said that he could not send him the Introduction in June because of his other duties but that the Translation was nearly finished and would be delivered that month. The work of preparing the commentary extended almost to its date of publication. Charles wrote again on May 14, 1929, just over two months before the book appeared, to A. L. P. Norrington:¹³ I was wrong as to the month for the Vacation Term for Biblical Study in Cambridge.¹⁴ It is Aug 3–17. I enclose a printed list of the books which it is suggested the members should use. Already three applications, at the suggested price 30/ each have been made to me for the book. My reply has been that the Book of Daniel is the absolute property of the Clarendon Press. The Cambridge Univ. Press has published two editions of Daniel—the first by Professor Bevan—a work of very fine scholarship, but as it was published before 1900 it is wholly behind the time, not only on the ground of recent discoveries (i.e., Elephantine Papyri, etc. [?]) but on the graver ground that its editor like Professor Driver, the editor of the second edition, though a master of Semitic knew nothing about Apocalyptic. There is a third edition

¹³ A. L. P. Norrington began as junior assistant secretary in 1925; in 1948 he became the secretary (Sutcliffe, Oxford University Press, 202). ¹⁴ The Vacation Term was inaugurated in 1903 to provide an annual opportunity for those seeking a greater understanding of the Bible and modern scholarship on it (“Summer Biblical Study in Cambridge,” Wikipedia, accessed 4-4-20). It continues to the present day.

344    ( – ) in the I.C.S.¹⁵ by Montgomery (published by T. & T. Clark). It is a learned work but its failings are numerous. I am trusting to you to send me at your earliest convenience the Indexes to be marked for press.

The last line indicates that at this late date the indexes had yet to be approved by him in their final form. But does the earlier part of the letter also suggest that he was scheduled to teach the Book of Daniel in the Vacation term or that Daniel would be included in the content of the course for which his commentary should be available to those attending? That may be why he evaluates commentaries on Daniel from Cambridge University Press, neither of which he considered a sufficient explanation of the scriptural work. He also seems pleased that people have contacted him about purchase of his commentary even before it appeared in print. In the Preface Charles acknowledged that in the commentary, “I have often been obliged to break with the tradition of the elders—alike ancient and modern—and to pursue my path unaccompanied by any of my great predecessors in this field of research” (vii).¹⁶ He added that all predecessors except Montgomery were limited by the lack of an Aramaic grammar that set forth the evolution of the language in which a large portion of Daniel was written. That of course did not stop Charles who made his own study of the Aramaic language in its historical development (see sections 17–21 in the Introduction). Recent discoveries in this area turned the commentary on Daniel into another instance in which changes were needed in Charles’s manuscript after he had submitted chunks of it to the press. Some months after my Commentary had been sent to the Oxford Press, I had the great satisfaction of receiving from Professor Baumgartner an elaborate sketch of this development which confirmed in the main the conclusions at which I had already arrived, and helped to enrich my own treatise. Fortunately for my readers and myself my Introduction was only in part written though a vast accumulation of materials, digested and undigested, was at my disposal for the completion of this task in the briefest form possible. (viii)¹⁷ ¹⁵ Charles did not have the series abbreviation quite right. ¹⁶ He expressed the same sentiment in his commentary on Revelation. ¹⁷ Baumgartner’s sketch is “Das Aramäische im Buche Daniel,” Zeitschrift für die Alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 4 (1927) 81–133. The year of the essay is the one when Charles’s manuscript of the commentary went to press.

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Charles provided a couple of examples from his study of other Aramaic sources to illustrate how they contributed to dating and understanding the text of Daniel. He acknowledged that he did not have the space to discuss fully the ancient translations of Daniel. He used them, of course, but believed that all of them still awaited critical editions. He did not treat the three Additions to Daniel found in manuscripts of the Septuagint and referred the reader to the first volume of his The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament for them. Also, he had planned to “give a brief historical sketch of the history of the Eastern Empires, so far as our author was concerned with them” (ix), but the space for this was not available. He recognized that great scholars of Semitic languages had edited Daniel but thought none of them possessed the requisite knowledge of apocalypses, other than Daniel, to understand the book. Charles explained as his goal: “In publishing this Commentary my chief claim is, so far as possible, to recover the oldest form of the text, and to interpret that text in conformity with the usages of Jewish Apocalyptic” (x). He noted that the publisher of his 1913 commentary had agreed that he could reproduce in the larger volume “paragraphs or sections contained in the small Commentary” (x, n.1). The second Daniel commentary is another of Charles’s works¹⁸ in which there are discrepancies between the Translation and the text cited in the commentary proper; in such cases the Translation located at the end of the volume contains his latest views as that was the last part set in type (x). He thanked no scholars for assistance in writing the work other than Baumgartner. Rather, he reserved his words of appreciation for people at the Oxford University Press for their unfailing courtesy, patience and skilled service in the publication of a Commentary and Translation, which involved a continuous revision of the entire text, and which has proved to be the most difficult of all my studies in an experience of nearly forty years of research in apocalyptic literature. (x)¹⁹

It sounds as if Charles’s ever-evolving manuscript laid quite a burden on the staff.

¹⁸ The same happened in his commentary on Revelation. ¹⁹ In his 1896 book on 2 (Syriac) Baruch he had written that interpreting it was “the severest task as yet undertaken by the editor” (x).

346    ( – ) The Introduction extends from p. xv to cxxviii and falls into twenty-eight sections, most of which are summarized in an expanded table of contents (xi–xiv). In the first (Short Account of the Book, xv–xxi) he started by sketching the historical background for the appearance of Daniel and reused the lengthy quotation from Ewald that he had cited in the 1913 commentary. He repeated very briefly his standard explanation for why Daniel had to be pseudonymous and again advanced the argument that the complete book was composed in Aramaic. Soon after its completion in the mid-160s, three translators, working between 161 and 153 .., rendered parts of the original into Hebrew: 1:1–2:4a, chs. 8–10 and 12, and ch. 11. The book, however, “suffered much from interpolations and dislocations” (xviii) as well as from careless copyists. The first section of the Introduction ends with a short account of the ancient versions/translations of Daniel, the Masoretic Text,²⁰ and the second-century date for the book. The second section (xxi–xxiii) should sound familiar to readers of Charles’s earlier works because in it he repeats in more detail his explanation for why Jewish apocalyptic became pseudonymous.²¹ From the life of Ezra on, the dominance of the Law drove every other form of religion into the background and allowed no room for genuine prophets. For anyone aspiring to the role, “[t]he tyranny of the Law, and the petrified orthodoxies of his time, compelled him to resort to pseudonymity” (xxiii). Also, once the prophetic canon was closed, it was believed that no book could be considered sacred if it did not go back at least to Ezra’s time. As a result, every Jewish apocalypse written between 200 .. and the thirteenth century .. was pseudonymous (John’s Revelation, of course, was not). Section three (xxiv–xxviii) also will not strike a reader of Charles as breaking new ground. Here he spelled out similarities and differences between apocalyptic and prophecy (with another reference to the second edition of his Eschatology for more on the topic). The two shared certain forms (e.g., visions), but prophetic eschatology focused on the fate of the nation Israel in this world, with no message of comfort for the individual beyond the grave. The apocalypses do speak of a blessed future for the righteous person, at first in a messianic kingdom on earth but by ca. 100 .. of an eternal, spiritual blessedness in a new heaven and new earth (the eschatology of Daniel has not yet reached this stage). Charles referred to unfulfilled prophecy as a factor in ²⁰ Charles imagined that the text endured all sorts of ills in the early years after its completion when this work, composed secretly, necessarily passed quickly from hand to hand (xx). ²¹ He directed the reader to the second edition of his Eschatology, 196–206, for a fuller discussion (xxii).

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the development of apocalyptic thought, but added that prophets spoke in their own person and were concerned with the present as well as what would arise from it. The apocalyptist spoke in the name of an ancient hero and rewrote history as if it had not yet happened, with heavy use of the nonprophetic idea of determinism and regular resort to prediction. Charles devoted the fourth section (xxviii–xxx) to the tenfold structure he saw in Daniel. The book falls naturally into an introduction followed by nine units. The Septuagint, the oldest version, gives dates at the beginning of each section except the fifth (5:1–30; the date is at its end); the other versions, including the Masoretic Text, lack some of these and are thus defective in those places. Section five takes up some issues connected with the bilingual character of the Book of Daniel (xxx–xxxvii). The fact that Daniel is spoken of in the third person in 1–6 and speaks in the first person in 7–12 is only natural, given the character of the material: narratives in 1–6 where there are several actors including Daniel, and visions in 7–12 where Daniel alone figures. The change in person does not betray a difference of authorship for the two sections. Then, too, at the places where there is a switch of languages there is no change of subject matter. How can one account for this feature? Also, the two Greek versions of Daniel—the Septuagint and Theodotion—differ widely from each other. Why? Charles surveyed some of the theories that had been offered to answer these questions. He concluded that the bilingual state of the book was not due to the author; also, different origins did not account for the material in the two languages. The sixth section (xxxvii–xxxix) gives Charles’s solution to these problems: the entire book was written in the Aramaic language, the vernacular of the time, by an author who used but rewrote sources in the narrative chapters. The sections now in Hebrew were translated by three individuals from the Aramaic original. Charles included in the section a smaller-print critique of Gustav Dalman’s hypothesis that the book divides into two (1–6, 7–12).²² Charles thought Dalman’s and others’ separation of the visionary ch. 7 from the narratives in 2:4b–6:28 was an “unintelligible error” (xxxix). He focused, in section seven (xl–xliv), on showing that ch. 7 came from the author of 2:4b– 6:28: the shared vocabulary, verbal prefixes and tenses used, and word order showed that both 2–6 and 7 were written by the same hand. The

²² Dalman (1855–1941) presented his case in Die Worte Jesu (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1898) 11. T. & T. Clark published an English translation of the book in 1902: The Words of Jesus Considered in the Light of Post-Biblical Jewish Writings and the Aramaic Language (see 13–14).

348    ( – ) commonalities in language are all the more remarkable in view of the difference in genre between 2–6 (where the writer reworked sources) and 7 (which contains “an immediate vision of the author,” xliv). According to the eighth section (xliv–xlv), the Aramaic of ch. 7 could date from the second half of the third century .., but the Aramaic of 2:4b–6:28 shows signs of originating no earlier that ca. 200–150 ..²³ Charles drew an inference in section nine (xlv) that seems to stand on rather shaky ground: since ch. 7 is in Aramaic, it stands to reason that 8–12, which also offer visions, were as well. They too were written in the vernacular language by which the author was making an appeal to a wide audience, not only to the few who knew Hebrew. The next three sections take up questions relating to the Hebrew units in Daniel. In the tenth (xlvi–xlviii) he maintained that idiomatic usages separated the style of 1:1–2:4a from that of 8–12, while those in 11 differed from both. Charles thought (section 11, xlvi–xlviii) that a person with a good grasp of history translated ch. 11 into Hebrew, although he was not a very good Hebraist. This person may also have translated ch. 12. Section 12 (xlix–l) contains his arguments for the approximate dates when the three Hebrew translators worked. Charles believed that the two verses, Daniel 1:20–1, were in the wrong place and originally belonged after 2:29a; he used this thesis as a means for dating the translation of the three units into Hebrew. On his view, the Septuagint translation of the book was made ca. 145 ..²⁴ By that time the dislocation of 1:20–1 to their present position had already occurred, since that is where these verses figure in the Septuagint. Moreover, the person who translated 1:1–2:4a into Hebrew also found these verses in the first chapter. So, the Hebrew translator of 1:1–2:4a would have worked before Judas the Maccabee’s death in 161 or during the time of his brother Jonathan about a decade later. All of the Hebrew translating work now present in 1:1–2:4a and in 8–12 was done between 164 (the date of the Aramaic original) and 145, the date of the Septuagint. Charles next (l–lviii) turned to the ancient versions attesting the Book of Daniel. After declaring that the Masoretic Text is often defective, he wrote at greater length about the two Greek versions, especially that of Theodotion, and the likely existence of a Theodotionic text before the time of Theodotion (midsecond century ..). Charles spelled out his opinion of the Masoretic Text in

²³ The differing time periods could be problematic if one thought the same person wrote both sections. ²⁴ He does not explain how he knew this rather early and precise date.

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the fourteenth section (lix–lxviii). It is generally less reliable than the Septuagint and must always be checked against the versions. He provided a lengthy list of cases in which, he believed, the Masoretic Text was inferior where one or several of the versions preserved a preferable reading. The relationships between the many textual witnesses for Daniel Charles represented in a chart (section 15, lviii–lix). The date of the book is the subject of section 16 (lxx–lxxv). There is no evidence in works written before 190 .. for a Book of Daniel, while some compositions written after 145 .. attest it and attestations increase in number with the passage of time. The information from the external witnesses is corroborated by the internal evidence of the book whose writer had an unclear knowledge of earlier events but became more accurate as he neared his own day (especially the years 200–167). Then when he turned to the future he again became vague. References in Daniel itself indicate that the book was written no earlier than 165 .. Sections 17–21 constitute Charles’s treatise on the Aramaic language, and section 22 is related to them. He first compared the Aramaic of the books of Ezra and Daniel, the two bilingual scriptural works (section 17, lxxvi–lxxix). Ezra, on his reading, is considerably older than Daniel though the two have much in common. He argued in section 18 (lxxix–lxxx) that one cannot differentiate Aramaic into Eastern and Western kinds before the first century .., if that early. In addition, one cannot distinguish regional dialects among the texts surviving from ca. 800 .. to about 100 .. Thus the Aramaic language should be treated as a single developing whole. On the basis of its Aramaic alone, one could not determine whether Daniel was written in the East or West. In the nineteenth section (lxxx–lxxxii) he sketched five periods in the development of the Aramaic language from 800 ..–100 .. and listed the sources for each of them. He placed Ezra in period IIIa (near the end of the fourth century) and Daniel in period IV (early second century). The long twentieth section (lxxxii–ciii) presents a highly detailed survey of developments evident in grammatical forms and phrases during the five periods; here he included a number of references to Baumgartner’s essay.²⁵ In section 21 (ciii–cviii) he treated the evidence of word order in the various texts and in 22 (cviii) listed the Aramaisms in the Hebrew sections of Daniel. Section 23 (cix–cxi) consists of chronological tables (of rulers and events) for the convenience of the readers. Only when he reached section 24 (cxii–cxv) ²⁵ The detail of the grammatical sketch may be compared with the one he wrote on the Greek of Revelation in his ICC commentary.

350    ( – ) did Charles take up the book’s theology. He found that the writer anticipated a messianic kingdom of Israel on earth; into it the preeminently righteous would rise, while the wicked of Israel would be assigned to eternal contempt (all others could look forward to Sheol). The advent of that kingdom would be catastrophic when it defeats the nations. The book also presents an increasingly transcendent God who rules through intermediaries, in particular, the angelic guardians of the various nations. The concepts of dualism and determination come to expression in various ways: the opposition of Israel and the nations, the unity of history, each phase of which was another stage in God’s plan, and the attempts to calculate the time of the end. Finally, the book contains condemnations of idolatry along with teachings about food laws, alms, and prayer three times each day. The writer does not, however, reveal a consciousness of sin in his heroes; such a consciousness is present only in an interpolated section, 9:4–20. Charles entitled the twenty-fifth section (cxvi–cxxii) “A Fragment of the pre-Theodotion Version—Dan. 79–28.” In the course of his studies he became convinced (another conclusion that “flashed” upon him) that Justin Martyr (mid-second century ..) in his Dialogue with Trypho 31 quotes “a genuine fragment of the lost pre-Theodotion version” of Daniel 7:9–28. He noted that Justin (and Tertullian, late-second, early third century) offered a form of the text closely aligned with the Septuagint but agreeing in a small number of places with Theodotion. The pre-Christian text reflected here (ca. 50 ..) was one that Theodotion later used in making his version. Other pieces of information led to the conclusion that the pre-Theodotion version was based on a Semitic original, although the translator used the Septuagint where possible. Charles printed the Greek text of Justin for 7:9–28 and indicated in it the agreements with the Septuagint (bold font) and Theodotion (underlined). The final three sections of the Introduction offer different kinds of material. Section 26 (cxxii–cxxiv) has translations of the “Annalistic Tablet of Cyrus” and the Cyrus Cylinder; the twenty-seventh (cxxv–cxxvii) provides a bibliography (preceded by a survey of views in the first eighteen centuries or so of commentary on Daniel); and the twenty-eighth (cxxvii–cxxviii) explains the abbreviations²⁶ and brackets used in the commentary. The remainder of the book places before the reader the commentary itself (1–341) and Charles’s Translation of the Book of Daniel (343–94). This must ²⁶ Various signs were used to mark in the translation passages that Charles, true to his longestablished practice, rejected as corrupt or additions to the original, or altered in some way (e.g., taking a word or words from a version or versions other than the Masoretic Text, “restorations” of lost text, or emendations).

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have been the order in which the Press set the sections because, as Charles explained in the Preface, the Translation, where it differed from the one cited in the commentary, was his latest word. It must not have been possible or feasible to make those changes in the commentary once it was set in print. The commentary on Daniel is a highly detailed and critical work in the Charles mold, and it reflects his practices and interests, ones more widely acceptable in his time. As an illustration of his procedure, we can look at how he handled ch. 1. Before actually explaining the first verse, he supplied eleven short sections (pp. 1–3) of introductory material (with some references to parts of the Introduction for more detail). He started helpfully with a unit on the “Object of this chapter,” but the other ten differ from it. In them he pointed out unhistorical statements in the chapter, how its Hebrew is distinguished from that of chs. 8–12, the late Hebrew elements in the chapter, and dislocations of the text. He also dealt with the date of the Hebrew version, Aramaisms in the Hebrew, lost words and phrases, interpolations, corruptions, and the Hebrew rendering of an Aramaic phrase. Finally, after all this, one reaches the commentary itself. The explanation of Daniel 1:1 (bottom of p. 3 to the top of p. 6) consists mostly of documenting how the date in the verse (the third year of King Jehoiakim) cannot be historically correct, along with shorter discussions of the spelling of Nebuchadnezzar and how the title “king of Babylon” was not appropriate for him at the time. The comment on v. 2 (pp. 6–11) includes a lengthy demonstration of how the wording cannot be correct as it stands in the Masoretic Text and various solutions proposed to fix it (including the one he gave in 1913, which he now found inadequate). The passage reads: “The Lord let King Jehoiakim of Judah fall into his power, as well as some of the vessels of the house of God. These he brought to the land of Shinar, to the house of his god, and placed the vessels in the treasury of his gods. Then the king commanded his palace master Ashpenaz to bring some of the Israelites of the royal family . . .” (NRSV modified). Now, in 1929, he rejected the phrase “the house of his god” in v. 2 as a gloss and supplied what he took to be words missing from the first sentence—ones referring to the taking of Judean captives, whereas the verse now mentions only appropriating temple vessels from Jerusalem. The reference to Judean captives that Charles supplied and that is presupposed by the reference to “the Israelites of the royal family,” was, he suggested, omitted at an early time through repetition of a term before and after it. So, through two substantial changes, Charles arrived at a text that read as he thought it should have read, the words the author meant to write.

352    ( – ) He proceeded through ch. 1 supplying large amounts of information about names, terms, problems in the text, linguistic usages, and the like. He took a different approach to Daniel 1:20–1, the concluding verses of ch. 1. As he had indicated in the Introduction, he thought they were out of place and believed that a more natural spot for them was between 2:48a and b. The verses read in Charles’s translation (where they appear in ch. 2): “And in every matter of wisdom and understanding, concerning which the king inquired of them, he found them ten times better than all the magicians and enchanters that were in all his realm. And Daniel continued unto the first year of Cyrus the king” (351). The points he made about these verses were: v. 20, at an early stage, was dislocated from its original position (near the end of Daniel 2),²⁷ and v. 21 “which I have bracketed as an interpolation, was an addition of the Hebrew translator. The Hebrew of that verse is very late and unclassical” (52). He maintained that the two verses are unnatural at the end of ch. 1 where v. 19 had concluded the content: “And the king spake with them; and amongst them all was found none like Daniel, Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah: therefore stood they before the king” (345). He claimed that v. 20 “is at variance with all that precedes it in chapter 1, and with all that follows it in chapter 2 down to 249a” (52). For example, if, as 1:20 reports, the king found the Jewish young men ten times more capable than his other advisors, why did he not consult them first regarding the interpretation of his dream in ch. 2? Verse 21 also has no connection with its context in ch. 1, and there was no reason for Daniel to be mentioned at this point. One wonders what Charles thought followed from his analysis of historical issues in Daniel 1 (and elsewhere in the book). The problems he mentioned were not discoveries on his part; some of them had been discussed since antiquity. But pointing them out is one thing; explaining them, as a reader might expect from a commentary, is another, and here Charles has little to offer. Did he think, for instance, that the author of Daniel was ignorant or at least not as well informed about history as modern Western scholars? He may have believed that and, if he did, may have been right, but he does not give the impression of having asked whether the historical inconsistencies in the book might serve a literary purpose, such as announcing to the readers that the book was intended to be something other than a historical account. It is not difficult to challenge Charles’s evaluations of 1:20–1 and what they may or may not contribute to their context in ch. 1 and before ch. 2. For one, if the stories in each chapter were originally independent narratives, there would ²⁷ With his familiar confidence, he wrote about 1:20: “We have here restored this verse to its original context” (52).

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be no problem with the two verses fitting poorly before ch. 2. And v. 21 could simply be looking forward to how long Daniel’s career extended (to the time of Cyrus). Charles approached the text as critical scholars of his time did—with firm confidence that a modern European (or American) could uncover the original wording or location of a verse, written by an ancient Jew—and all this entirely apart from manuscript support. The units regarding purpose that he placed at the beginning of his commentary on each section show that Charles was alert to the messages they conveyed. For the first chapter he wrote: “To enforce loyalty to the Law: to set forth the principles of a right education, i.e. obedience to the prescripts of the Law” (1). Those are indeed points made in Daniel 1, with or without his manipulations of the text, but here too he shows that he writes from a definite standpoint: “And yet the emphasis is laid expressly on that element in Judaism which is the least valuable and least essential in true religion—the law of clean and unclean meats” (1). Many examples of Charles’s emendations of the text could be mentioned, but a few will suffice. In Daniel 7:9 God is called “one old of days” or as it is usually rendered in English, an Ancient of Days or “an Ancient One” (NRSV). Charles objected to such a descriptor for God on the grounds that apocalyptic writers always spoke of the deity most respectfully: “we find it impossible to accept this irreverent designation of God as original in its present form. If this be so, it is more than probable that, instead of ‘an ancient of days’ the text originally read ‘one like an ancient of days’” (181–2). In this case, he had the support of the Septuagint, not for 7:9 but for the next instance of the title in 7:13. In other words, the Septuagint in 7:9 has the “irreverent designation of God,” the Septuagint of v. 13 does not. Charles thought that each instance of the title in the Greek translation was preceded by ως (= hōs, like, as), though it is now present in just one of the two places; moreover, in the spot where it occurs (7:13) it could be a mistake for εως (= heōs, until, up to, unto), since the one like a son of man is there approaching the Ancient of Days. Whatever may have been the septuagintal reading in 7:13, v. 9 in it lacks a word for “like.” One could argue that “like” was added in v. 13 of the Septuagint to address the very problem Charles raised; in that case, however, why would the translator do so in only one instance instead of both? But a look at Charles’s translation reveals something unexpected: he changed the text in v. 9, without manuscript support, to “ an ancient of days,” but in v. 13, where he could cite the Septuagint in support of the change from the reading of the Masoretic Text, he rendered as “And he came even unto²⁸ an ancient of days.” ²⁸ Hence, he assumed that εως (heōs) reflected the correct text.

354    ( – ) So, he was inconsistent in his translation which is supposed to contain his final word on the text. Also, to emend the Aramaic text of v. 9 as Charles did and to claim that apocalyptic writers were more reverent in referring to God seems strained. Is the title irreverent? If it is, and this appears unlikely, would “one like an ancient of days” be more reverent? Before turning to reviews of the commentary, we should record what D’Arcy wrote about it. Through his long study of the whole Apocalyptic literature Archdeacon Charles had become the acknowledged Master in this subject. It might seem that, with his Commentary on the Apocalypse of St. John the Divine,²⁹ his labours were ended. But one book of signal importance remained. The Book of Daniel is the great Apocalypse of the canonical Old Testament. Upon this book he brought to bear, as the final effort of his lifework, all his accumulated stores of special learning. His Commentary is indeed a great achievement. It was the writer’s good fortune to spend some time as a visitor in the house of his old friend when this master-piece was approaching completion, and to observe the concentrated attention which the great scholar gave to every detail. While working at his proofs, all his faculties were alert, his mind seemed to gather together the materials for each distinct part of the subjectmatter, drawing freely upon the stores of a life-time, and also taking account of all that was newest in research and discovery. The historical value, for example, of the discoveries at Elephantine interested him especially. But if his attention were suddenly called away to some other subject, no matter how familiar, he would seem to be at a loss. It was as if his mind were called up out of some great depth where everything was in its place and ordered in relationship with all the contents of the vast store-house of specialized knowledge which he had made his own. When the Commentary appeared it was hailed with enthusiastic approval by those whose learning qualified them to form an opinion. Archdeacon Charles himself considered it the best of all his works,³⁰ and also held that in it had come to light many things which he had not realized before.³¹

²⁹ It was published in 1920. ³⁰ Recall the P.S. to Charles’s February 14, 1928 (OUP) letter to Chapman: “Of the many commentaries I have written I think this is the best.” ³¹ D’Arcy, “Brief Memoir,” xxx–xxxi. D’Arcy mentioned in his autobiography that he would visit the Charleses from time to time. He recalled stays in Oxford during the period when he was Select Preacher in Oxford and Cambridge. Of one of his visits, he wrote:

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Despite having been a churchman for many years by 1929 (for this see Part 3), Charles remained a scholar to the end.

Reviews Charles did not live to see the key reviews, but his large commentary was evaluated by major figures. One of them was James A. Montgomery (1866–1949), who taught at the University of Pennsylvania from 1913 to 1948 and was the author of the classic work on Daniel in the International Critical Commentary series (1927) mentioned above. He reviewed Charles’s commentary as one of the five Daniel-related works he canvassed in the Journal of the American Oriental Society 51 (1931) 317–27, a review that appeared late in the year of Charles’s death. Montgomery began with words of praise: All who knew him personally and all who are indebted to his manifold work must rejoice that the distinguished scholar was given the happy lot of rounding out a full programme of labor in the field of Judaistic Apocrypha and Apocalyptic, to which he has contributed more than any other scholar; following his Commentary on the New Testament Apocalypse with what proved to be his last book, the Apocalypse of the Old Testament, he must have felt that he had achieved the crown of his labors. (323–4)

He summarized the contents of the commentary and expressed appreciation for the cross-referencing from the translation at the end of the book to the commentary itself—“an especially useful part of the book as it enables the reader at once to observe the results and reasons of the author’s criticism” (324). The first negative point that Montgomery made was Charles’s rejection of the thesis, defended by Dalman and Montgomery, that ch. 7 is a translation

. . . we stayed with my old college friend Dr. R. H. Charles and Mrs. Charles. Dr. Charles was already famous in the world of learning for his immense researches into the apocalyptic literature, a study in which he was the pioneer, and in which he retained an undisputed preeminence. (The Adventures of a Bishop, 161) He recalled meeting interesting people at their house. The time to which he refers appears to be around 1910. He mentioned seeing Charles at the 1910 Swansea Church Congress: “Especially I recall delightful meetings with two great scholars with whom I was already well acquainted, Drs. Rashdall and Charles” (169).

356    ( – ) from Hebrew into Aramaic. As he noted, Charles listed verbal and stylistic features shared by chs. 2–6 and 7 and believed they pointed to Aramaic as the original language for 7. Montgomery thought they did not touch on the main argument: “Rather, there is to be accentuated the distinction in subject matter, pure romance and pure apocalyptic, as between cc. 1–6 and 7–12, as also the more delicate question of style and diction. Further for Apocalyptic we should expect the last six chapters to be in Hebrew, the Holy Tongue” (324). A second, related point had to do with Charles’s strong statement “there is no rational or conceivable ground for the author’s forsaking the vernacular language of his day and having recourse to Hebrew for the three remaining visions in 8–12” (xlv). Montgomery charged that he here “appears to make a rash statement as to linguistic conditions in Palestine for the age of the book; yet he allows, p. xviii, that a few years after its composition, by 161, or at the latest 153, the present Hebrew translations were made” (325). Why would Hebrew be acceptable then and not just a few years before? A third problem for Montgomery was Charles’s low opinion of the Masoretic Text of Daniel and his strong preference for the readings of the Old Greek translation. He cited several of Charles’s emphatic statements about the matter and gave his own considered judgment. “The present writer in the course of preparation of his Commentary on Daniel came to quite the opposite conviction and reached the conclusion that in the most difficult portions of the text the versions read what we now possess despite their apparent discrepancy” (325). Having recorded their sharp disagreement on the issue, he commented charitably: “Perhaps it is well that two practically contemporaneous commentaries take such opposite extremes, so that the absurdities of either may be revealed and others helped to a more rational mean” (326).³² He thought Charles made selections among the readings of the versions “according to subjective taste” (326). A fourth point had to do with Montgomery’s claim that the Aramaic plural ‫‘( אלהין‬elāhîn, literally, “gods”) can, like the cognate Hebrew form, be used with the meaning “God or rather the abstract Deity” (326). He argued his case by citing a number of examples from various Semitic languages and the Bible. Montgomery concluded his review with gracious words: “These Auseinandersetzungen [= disputes] with Dr Charles’s book were made with more zest if the distinguished author were still in this life, but they may be

³² He mentioned that in his own commentary he had objected to Charles’s thesis as expressed in the shorter 1913 commentary.

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taken as proof of its rich and stimulating value and permanent worth. It is our loss that we may expect nothing more from his illustrious mind” (327). Another weighty review came from Marie-Joseph Lagrange (1855–1938),³³ the founder of the Ecole Biblique in Jerusalem and a scholar whose highercritical views embroiled him in controversy with Vatican authorities. His evaluation, published in Revue Biblique 39 (1930) 276–83, began by noting the great care Charles showed in dealing with the Aramaic and Hebrew text and the versions, especially the Septuagint. He sketched Charles’s thesis about the Aramaic of ch. 7 being like that of 2–6 and about the unity of the entire book. He applauded his understanding of the Hebrew sections as coming from translators, although he did think Charles failed to draw the necessary inference regarding the date of the Aramaic from the fact that the single author based himself upon earlier Aramaic traditions. On his view, the greatest novelty in Charles’s commentary was the textual preference that he gave to the Septuagint, although Charles was aware of its faults. The text of Daniel lying before the translators was, according to Charles, already terribly corrupt, but they contented themselves with reproducing what they found. Hence the Septuagint allows one to see the most ancient form of the text available. The Masoretic Text and Theodotion were revisions made between 145 .. and 400 .. by scholars and thus less reliable reflections of its earlier form. Lagrange thought Charles argued like those New Testament scholars who preferred the text of Codex Bezae to that of Vaticanus: they assumed that the text that is more corrupt is also more ancient. Lagrange objected that a revision was not necessarily made capriciously. On a different note, he found fault with Charles’s application to Daniel of what he took to be an apocalyptic practice—namely, not mentioning names of contemporary peoples. Hence, he could reject the references to Edom, Moab, and Ammon in Daniel 11:41 without manuscript support, yet he inconsistently inserted at 3:1, on the basis of the Septuagint, a reference to the people who inhabited the Earth from India to Ethiopia. He added that Charles was the first to recognize that Daniel, although it has some traits of apocalyptic, expects salvation on the earth—a trait it shares with prophecy. Lagrange mentioned Charles’s idea that by the second century writers with a prophetic message had to adopt pseudepigraphy to gain a hearing and noted that in Catholic theology it was acceptable to think thus about the Wisdom of Solomon. But the case of Daniel was more complicated and not settled by the ³³ As we saw in Chapter 9, Charles used his study of the Fragments of a Zadokite work in preparing his own translation and commentary.

358    ( – ) notion that an author wrote it at one time in 165 .. He thought one would have to devote more attention than Charles did to the amazing information in ch. 5 (information that goes back to the Chaldean period) and that he erred in attributing to the author serious historical errors that should be charged rather to copyists and editors. The first instance he noted was the famous crux of Darius the Mede. Charles, who thought the book presented him as the conqueror of Babylon or at least as the first to reign after the conquest and the predecessor of Cyrus, believed that the person responsible for this historical error (there is no Darius the Mede on record) did so in order to make the prophecies of Isaiah (13:17; 21:2) and Jeremiah (51:11, 28) come true—that the Medes would defeat Babylon. Lagrange found this a strange conclusion regarding an author to whom Charles attributed high moral standards. If the writer did so, however, he would be opposing other scriptural givens, e.g., that Cyrus took Babylon (Isaiah) and that he preceded Darius (Ezra) in order to make a prophecy come to fruition. Daniel, said Lagrange, attributes the conquest to the Medo-Persians as a single kingdom (e.g., in ch. 8). In 5:30 this is also the reading of the Septuagint, while in 6:1 it lacks the epithet “the Mede” for Darius. Lagrange examined two other texts with dates and royal names (6:28 and 9:1) and for them proposed his own solutions (some involving changes in the text) opposed to those of Charles. He thought Charles failed to appreciate properly the content of the cuneiform text, published by Sidney Smith in 1924, in which Nabonidus confers royal authority on his son Belshazzar—a text that verified he was a king as Daniel 5 says. He concluded the review with words of appreciation for Charles’s work—a book rich in textual and literary criticism, as well as in philology and history— and acknowledged that his long labors with the apocalypses had given him an advantage in studying Daniel.³⁴

Legacy It is not easy to assess Charles’s place in the history of commenting on the Book of Daniel. So very much has been written about Daniel since 1929, but at least one can say that contemporary scholars often refer to Charles’s larger ³⁴ Lagrange said that his own essay on the seventy weeks of years in Daniel 9 had already been set in print and corrected when he read Charles’s commentary (276 n. 1) and that the present review would attempt to make up for what was lacking in the article. One form his effort took was to present a French translation of Charles’s English rendering of Daniel 9:24–7 (282–83), accompanied by a few textual notes.

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commentary. It does not seem as if his book enjoys the esteem that Montgomery’s ICC commentary has earned, but there is appreciation for Charles’s careful study of the text. John Collins offered this assessment in 1993: The most important contributions of the last century include Gunkel’s Schöpfung und Chaos, which raised the issue of religio-historical background; R. H. Charles’s commentary, remarkable for its attention to the Greek text; Montgomery’s commentary, which is preeminent for its comprehensiveness and balanced judgment and remains invaluable in its discussions of textual problems; Bentzen’s slight commentary, which posited Canaanite influence in Daniel 7; and Ulrich’s recent publication of the fragments from Qumran.³⁵

Postscript What we may call the afterlife of Charles longer commentary on Daniel can serve as a postscript to this chapter. The Archives of Oxford University Press preserve correspondence relating to it, messages that track its sales and furnish an evaluation of it. The book was published, as noted earlier, on July 18, 1929. A note (typed) from someone at Cuddesdon, whose signed name I have not deciphered, was written on July 25, 1929 (OUP), just a few days after the book emerged from the Press. It includes the line: “I am glad you are cautious about Charles’s book.” The last line is tantalizing: why was Chapman, the secretary, “cautious about Charles’s book”? Was there something wrong with it? Was he worried about sales (the press printed 1,500 copies)? Subsequent letters indicate that, yes indeed, sales were a concern. It appears that Chapman, as secretary, inquired of Rev. Professor David Capell Simpson, DD Oriel College, Oxford,³⁶ about Charles’s book and perhaps about others of his works published by Oxford University Press. Simpson wrote on July 22, 1933 (OUP):

³⁵ Daniel: A Commentary on the Book of Daniel (Hermeneia; Minneapolis: Fortress, 1993) 123. ³⁶ Simpson (1883–1955) was the Oriel Professor of the Interpretation of Holy Scripture from 1925–50 (“David Capell Simpson,” Wikipedia, accessed 3-29-20). His major publications concerned the texts of the Book of Tobit and Pentateuchal Criticism, the latter published by Oxford University Press in 1924.

360    ( – ) Charles’s Book of Daniel is essentially a book for specialists—not merely specialists in the subject matter of the Old Testament but specialists in Hebrew & Aramaic. To a far greater extent than was necessary he introduced the Hebrew-Aramaic characters into every part of the book—consequently any one who is not a Hebrew-Aramaic scholar is just throwing his money away in buying the book—and, as you know, Hebrew-Aramaic scholars are few these days. The volume is essentially for the College Library not for the ordinary theologian’s bookshelves. In addition in the very same year as that in which you published Charles’s Book of Daniel, the editors of the International Critical Commentary produced their Daniel!³⁷ True it’s by an American [!], but he’s a well-known man, and he had the sense so to arrange his commentary that 3/4 of it is intelligible to the non-Hebrew & non-Aramaic scholar—and what is more, he tells the reader about the views of other scholars to a far greater extent, and with far less prejudice, than does Charles. So I am compelled, when asked by a non-Semitic student to advise him as to a commentary on Daniel, to call his attention to the Inter. Nat. Critical rather than to Charles. But the man who has no one to advise him—the average country parson shall we say?—but wants a commentary on Daniel, finds that you publish one by Charles at 30/- and that Charles wrote another one on Daniel in the Century Bible price 3/6, you can guess which he buys! Charles’s Apocrypha, on the other hand, is definitely constructed to suit the requirements (at any rate in the greater part of it) of the general reader rather than the specialist.³⁸ I should think that during the next 20 years the average sales of books such as Charles’s Patriarchs will be below rather than above the average of, say, the last six years.—and Charles’s Enoch, a pioneer work in its day, must

³⁷ Simpson was a little off the mark in claiming the two books appeared in the same year. Montgomery’s commentary was published in 1927, two years before Charles’s book. If Simpson had read Charles’s Daniel commentary with care, he would have noticed that he refers to Montgomery’s work a number of times. ³⁸ Simpson contributed “Tobit” to The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament, 1.174–241. It is ironic that, as Charles wrote in a footnote to the Preface: “In the case of Sirach and Tobit the editors have been allowed much beyond the normal number of pages for their critical apparatus, which they have used to good purpose” (iii, n. 2). The notes with variant readings in Simpson’s apparatus are filled with words written in Greek and Hebrew/Aramaic scripts and regularly occupy one-half or more of the pages that give the translation of Tobit—all this in a work that Simpson himself considered to be more for the general reader. Could he have been referring to his own contribution with his parenthetical “at any rate in the greater part of it”?

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inevitably become, and that fairly soon, a back-number—referred to by the student in libraries once in a while but not bought.

Apart from saying the obvious about the commentary on Daniel—that it is a very technical work dealing at length with textual issues, one not likely to be a bestseller—Simpson’s only useful criticism is that Charles was not as generous as he should have been in reporting the views of others. His comments about Charles’s books on the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs and Enoch sound strange in view of how important they remain today. Chapman replied to Simpson on July 24, 1933 (OUP): “Very many thanks for taking such trouble. What you tell me is rather depressing, but never the less helpful.” Problems with sales of Charles’s commentary are quantified in a letter (OUP, June 21, 1937) from Chapman to Godfrey Driver. Charles’s Book of Daniel, after selling about 250 copies in the first 18 months, dropped to an average of 8 copies a year and last year sold no copies. Ought I to suspect that the great editor was failing when he did his last book. He himself certainly thought it was one of his most important. What do you think of its prospects? I have a great many copies and am inclined to think that not more than 100 will really ever be wanted. There is no hurry about this. Perhaps you will tell me when we meet.

Driver, who would later (1954) publish Aramaic Documents of the Fifth Century .. with the Press and would perhaps have been a better person to ask about the commentary than Simpson, was being asked for his opinion about continued sales. If 1,500 copies had been printed and only about 275 had been sold, the Press had a lot of extra copies on its hands. The Archives lack a reply from Driver who may have given one orally at the meeting Chapman mentions, but a memo dated May 9, 1952 (OUP) has an underlined heading Charles: Book of Daniel. “Stock now appears to be exhausted, so will you please embulletin as out of print.” Unless the book had proved unexpectedly popular, it may be that only 100 copies were kept in 1937 and that this supply was exhausted by 1952. Yet the Archives do contain a letter from a Dutch scholar, written in 1969, inquiring whether the commentary (with two other Oxford publications) could be considered for reprinting. We have now reached the end of Charles’s time in Oxford. During that time, he became the supreme expert in the early Jewish apocalyptic texts and

362    ( – ) others related to them. He had also attained a university position as Fellow of Merton College and had achieved high stature in British academe as a Fellow of the British Academy and as holder of several distinguish lectureships. His remarkable career as a scholar was to continue after this but in a rather different setting, as will be shown in Part 3.

PART 3

THE WESTMINSTER YEARS (1913–1931)

Chapter 1 Return to Priestly Service The long Oxford stay for Charles (1890–1913) came to a sudden, surprising end in the Summer of 1913 when he became a canon of Westminster. His years in Oxford had been incredibly productive in books, articles, and lectures, and with his appointment as Fellow of Merton College in 1910, he at last had gained an official position in the university. 1913, as we have seen, was probably as fruitful in publications as any year in the Oxford period. So there seemed to be little reason for suspecting he would leave the university when his academic career was going so well. But leave it he did, never to return. In this chapter we will follow the events leading to his appointment as canon and will note the reports about his preaching, the books of sermons he published, the major emphases in his preaching, and some of his ecclesiastical duties.

Appointment as Canon We should recall that Charles was an Anglican priest who had served for six years in challenging London parishes (1883–89), but there is no evidence that he put his priestly credentials to practical use in Oxford. We do know that he was active at least to a degree in the life of the church as shown, for example, by his participation in two church conferences in 1910 (Swansea, mentioned by D’Arcy, and Cambridge, described above). It was not unusual, in fact it was common, in the early twentieth century for an academic to serve in an ecclesiastical office (a “living”),¹ whether in addition to his university post (the two were often connected) or as a replacement for it. So, for instance, Samuel Rolles Driver was both the Regius Professor of Hebrew and a Canon of ¹ In his obituary of Charles, Burkitt wrote about his appointment as canon: “This honour was generally recognized at the time as a tribute to meritorious theological learning, independent of any ecclesiastical party” (“Robert Henry Charles 1855–1931,” 440). Charles was hardly “independent of any ecclesiastical party,” as we will see, but perhaps Burkitt meant “regardless of the ecclesiastical party with which one identified.”

R. H. Charles: A Biography. James C. VanderKam, Oxford University Press. © James C. VanderKam 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780192869289.003.0013

366    ( – ) Christ Church, Oxford.² Or Herbert Edward Ryle was for many years a Professor at Cambridge before becoming Bishop of first Exeter and then Winchester and finally Dean at Westminster.³ As nearly as one can tell, however, and as D’Arcy confirms (see below), Charles was not looking for a new position in the Church. D’Arcy wrote about the circumstances of his becoming a canon of Westminster. It was in 1913 that Charles was offered and accepted a Canonry of Westminster. At the time, worn out with his scholarly labours, he was, with Mrs. Charles, taking a holiday in Scotland, when, to his astonishment, a letter from the Prime Minister overtook