Abstract
As the title suggests, Stone aims to open up new vistas for research into the Second Temple period and beyond by treating a variety of topics and methodological issues. Due to the broad focus of this work, there is no single thesis. Instead, each of the seven chapters represents a self-contained study of one or more relevant matters. A brief summary of the contents demonstrates its scope.
Chapter One is perhaps the most significant. It questions the assumptions with which scholars use ancient texts in order to reconstruct Judaism of the Second Temple period. Stone emphasizes the importance of understanding most texts as reflections of the dominant forms of Judaism and Christianity that transmitted them. By implication, some of the complexity of ancient Judaism has been muted or gone unrepresented in the available data, and the texts are not necessarily indicative of what was acceptable to Judaism of the Second Temple period itself. Thus, Stone suggests that one should consider what the data are not revealing (p. 24). Chapter Two deals with the pseudepigrapha at Qumran that explain evil and suffering as a direct effect of demonic intervention, rather than as the result of Adamic sin. Chapter Three underscores the innovation of apocalyptic historiography, which views history comprehensively from start to finish and organizes it into several standard structures. In Chapter Four, which is largely a consideration of pseudepigraphy, Stone presents a cogent argument that the stereotyped nature of pseudepigraphic visionary experiences does not eliminate the strong possibility that they represent actual religious experiences of their authors. Chapter Five probes the question of the status of certain literary delimitations in the Second Temple period and concludes that Judaism did not speak in terms of canon, but in terms of authoritative texts that were written with the holy spirit. Chapter Six presents the phenomenon of ‘textual clusters’, which are texts that stand in some relationship with each other that cannot be described with the conventional tools of literary and text criticism. Chapter Seven considers the sources that have survived from ancient Judaism, and addresses the significance of the fact that these were transmitted in Greek and by Christians. Finally, Stone discusses the broadening chronological focus of pseudepigrapha studies and the challenges that come along with this development.
Although this monograph will be stimulating reading for all who are interested in ancient Judaism and the pseudepigrapha, its primary significance may be in the shape that it gives to future research. Stone challenges some of the methodological assumptions that are normally at play in studies of ancient Judaism and early Christianity, and he repeatedly raises research questions that perhaps only a senior scholar with his level of expertise would think to ask in the first place. Therefore, students and scholars will find both methodological guidance and fruitful avenues for further research in this book.