Daniel 7 became a major scriptural resource for portraying eschatological authority in early Jewish literature and the early Jesus movement, but later texts did not simply reproduce a completed Danielic judicial figure. This article compares the Similitudes of Enoch, 4 Ezra 13, and Mark 14:62 by asking how each composition develops relations among authority, judgment, and manifestation that Daniel 7 itself does not fully specify. The Similitudes coordinate Danielic dominion with Isaianic endowment, enthronement, and judgment; 4 Ezra 13 places its cloud-associated human figure within a Zion-centered configuration informed by Daniel 2 and probably Psalm 2, while Isa 11:4 supplies a weaponless mode of judgment; and Mark 14:62 joins Danielic cloud-coming to the explicit right-hand session of Ps 110:1. The comparison shows that these compositions differ not only in the judicial functions assigned to Danielic imagery but also in how divine election, preservation, or authorization is related to the enactment and public disclosure of eschatological authority. Continuity in Danielic imagery therefore need not imply the transmission of one stable judicial office: shared Danielic features could be developed into materially different relations among authority, judgment, and manifestation.
The First Book of Maccabees is widely regarded as an instance of conservative, biblically oriented historiography in which Hellenistic influence on narrative composition is minimal or absent. This article challenges that consensus through a close analysis of two key passages. (a) The farewell speech of Mattathias (1 Macc 2:49–68) is shown to reflect the Hellenistic conventions of the dynastic Abschiedsrede, the paradeigma list, and the exitus illustrium virorum more closely than any biblical model: the structural architecture of the speech, the rhetorical function of the ancestral exempla as stimuli to mimesis, and the valorization of honorable death as civic immortality all belong to the Greek tradition, even as their content is drawn from the sacred history of Israel, a form of “Jewish exemplarity.” (b) The battle narrative of 1 Macc 9 is analyzed as an instance of what recent scholarship has termed “immersive historiography.” The article argues that these features are integral to the original compositional program of the work, not the product of the Greek translator’s intervention. Through them, the Jerusalem elite deployed the culturally dominant historiographical syntax as a political instrument. Calculated pathos acts as advocacy, guiding the reader’s judgment against the Seleucids and justifying Hasmonean dynastic power. In this sense, 1 Maccabees appears not as a protest against Hellenistic influences but as a key example of the complex nature of Hellenistic Judaism.
In the practice of editing and translating 1 Enoch, there are usually two ways of dealing with the textual evidence. Some translations represent an eclectic hybrid text, which is based on all textual witnesses, but historically never existed. In other cases, the translation is based on one textual witness because this either comes close to the postulated final text or offers a complete and text-critically trustworthy text. Both ways, however, are inadequate from a historical perspective because each fails to acknowledge the entire textual evidence. Therefore, I argue for a synoptic approach, which I will illustrate and explain using the example of a new synoptic edition and translation of 1 Enoch 22. This is the second part of a two-part publication where I present the new edition and synoptic translation of 1 Enoch 22.
In ancient Jewish and Christian intercessory traditions, one emerging trend insists that death is final with no allotment for postmortem mercy of any kind. By late antiquity, speculations about the in-between status of souls proliferated, eventually emerging, for Christians, as a nascent doctrine of purgatory. Scholars have long acknowledged the practice of efficacious prayers for the deceased, attested by at least the third century. The following article considers often neglected evidence from the Testament of Abraham arguing that the Testament of Abraham offers a compelling example of one early conceptualization of the practice of postmortem intercession.
The Ascension of Isaiah accords well with Sommer's or Bunta's fluidity models of divine embodiment. It envisions an alternate metaphysics, a universe full of divine glory "embodied" or "moving" not only in the Great Glory but also in seven glories suited to lower powers of sight, in angels and righteous humans, and finally visible from lowest to highest in the Beloved's humanity. "Extrinsic" and "intrinsic" participation in divine glory explains the Ascension's proto-trinitarian and incarnational thinking. Since a respiration of glory, participation in divinity, defines and nourishes every righteous intelligence, both angelic and human, the Beloved's humanity embodies highest glory so naturally that it accords as perfectly with what it means to be human as with what it means to be God.
