Michael Stone, Ancient Judaism: New Visions and Views. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.

ISBN
978-0-8028-6636-3. 256 pages, $30.00. 2011.

Reviewed by Jim West

Chapter Four-
Visions and Pseudepigraphy

Chapter four commences with a summary of how scholars have viewed apocalypses as visions
and moves on to the very contentious topic of religious experience in scholarly analysis.
Attempting to reconstruct the inner religious sentiments of apocalyptic and pseudepigraphic
authors is more than hazardous. But Stone believes that it is possible and perhaps even essential.

So, using 4 Ezra as his text, Stone explains the contents of the book and the religious
environment in the mind of the author who created it. He suggests that one of the main issues of
the book is the question,

How is it that God created so many in the world and will redeem
so few? The angel responds that God rejoices over the few
righteous but does not grieve over the many who perish (7:49-61)
(p. 97).

Stone’s analysis means that he is

… proposing that a fairly complex psychological process took

place that involved a conversionlike ‘intensification’ experience, a
very powerful waking vision, and then a ‘death’ experience, a
revelatory vision and blessing (p. 100).

The ‘test case’ lays the foundation for the remainder of the chapter which explores the function
and rise of pseudepigrapha.

Stone shows, quite deliberately, that Enoch became the central figure around which
pseudepigraphic works ‘clustered’ (p. 113). But why? And here’s where Stone’s efforts in this
chapter become so worthwhile:

…pseudepigraphy provided a way of handling the authoritative

written tradition of the past’

and

Even though the apocalyptic authors claimed to possess an

independent, authoritative way of understanding the central truths
of the divine, they nonetheless felt impelled to use pseudepigraphy
to set this revealed, potentially rival understanding in the context
 of the ancient, inherited tradition: this indicates the enormous
influence of authoritative writings (p. 118).

Now this is particularly interesting from my point of view because it suggests that an ancient
(biblical) texts had to have been viewed as authoritative, and received and used as such, before
the counter revelatory pseudepigrapha and apocalyptic could have arisen.

Even more interesting, the presence in the canon of apocalyptic texts suggest that the organizers
of the canon were willing to include ‘dueling’ perspectives. This all leads to the conclusion that
the bible itself contains ‘dueling ideologies’. But we don’t need apocalyptic texts to tell us that.
We have the Deuteronomist and the Chronicler; the Synoptics and John; Malachi and Ezra. All
nicely absorbed into one ‘Bible’. The presence of apocalyptic merely shows that the process was
quite entrenched even later on. Pseudepigrapha, on the other hand, never achieved the same
status. They always remained on the boundaries, as a ‘minority’ report.

Next, the Bible and Apocrypha.