Polygamy

Jewish or Christian?

Contrary to what used to be the case a century or so ago, in our days almost everyone agrees that there is no compelling reason to separate the final chap-ters 69–73 of 2Enoch from the bulk of the book. It is no longer regarded as an appendix that was added by a later hand. As a consequence, the ques-tion of how the presence of two superhuman heavenly highpriests, Enoch (chs. 1–68) and Melchizedek (chs. 69–73), within one document can be justified, is sometimes answered by positing that they could “share the stage” because the continuity between the reverence shown for Enoch and Melchizedek is found in their shared roles as exalted priestly mediators. When almost every-one agrees that the book is a literary unity and that there is no valid reason to assume that chapters 69–73 are from a later, let alone a Christian, hand, it is hard to maintain a dissenting position. But, for the sake of the argu-ment, let me play the devil’s advocate and try to defend a dissenting position (in which I do believe!).

After 68 chapters which deal solely with Enoch, there follow five chapters dealing with Methusalem, Nir and Nir’s wife, Melchizedek, and Noah. Only chapters 71 and 72 deal with Melchizedek, that is 2 chapters over against 68 on Enoch (not exactly a sharing of the stage). These final chapters come after an elaborate description of Enoch’s second and definitive departure to heaven formulated in a way that is typical of a book ending not a chapter ending.

After ch. 68 readers don’t expect anything to follow anymore. That chs. 69–73 sometimes refer back to events described in chs. 1–68 is no argument for unity, because anyone who wanted to add to or correct the contents of the book could easily create the impression of continuity by harking back to themes and events mentioned earlier in the book itself. But apart from these general con-siderations, there is more. The most recent translator and authoritative com-mentator of 2Enoch, Christfried Böttrich, says about the final chapters (and I now quote him in full):

Die eindeutigsten Spuren christlicher Bearbeitung finden sich in 71, 32ff und 72, 6f. Beide Zusätze stammen offensichtlich von einer Hand und lassen das Interesse eines Redaktors an einer Melchisedek-Christus bzw.

einer Adam-Christus Typologie erkennen. Dem Melchisedek des slav.

Henochs, der eine völlig jenseitige Figur bleibt, wird nun der Priesterkönig von Salem zur Seite gestellt. Beide fungieren als personeller Angelpunkt zweier Priesterreihen, die offensichtlich für zwei heilsgeschichtliche

Epochen stehen und schliesslich in Christus ihre Erfüllung finden. Zwar wahrt der Redaktor die urzeitliche Perspektive des Buches und vermeidet sorgsam jeden Anachronismus – die jenem letzten beigefügten Attribute verraten seine christologische Absicht jedoch deutlich genug.1

I could not agree more, the more so when Böttrich adds that in ch. 73 the tra-dition of Christian Byzantine chronography has clearly left its traces and that

“der Sprachgebrauch die Distanz zur jüdischen Tradition klar zum Ausdruck [bringt].”2 For that reason I very well understand why Annette Steudel in her article on Melchizedek in the Encyclopedia of Dead Sea Scrolls speaks about chs. 71–73 of 2Enoch as “a clear Christian interpolation.”3 Great, therefore, is the surprise when on the next page Böttrich states that there can be no doubt about the literary unity of the book as a whole and that chs. 69–73 certainly are an integral part of the whole work. “Vor allem lässt sich der immer wieder angesprochene christliche Charakter des Abschnittes nicht bestätigen.”4 This position (with which even Böttrich’s main opponent, Orlov, agrees)5 can only be maintained on the assumption that, once you have removed the Christian interpolations, what is left is the Jewish Grundschrift. But that is a deception.

When I was working on my commentary on the Hellenistic synagogal prayers (the Seven Berakhot for Shabbat) that have been incorporated in a christian-ized form in the church order called Apostolic Constitutions, one of the greatest challenges was to separate the Christian additions from the Jewish Vorlage.6 Previous scholars optimistically said that the Christian interpolations were easily discernible (“through Jesus Christ our Saviour” being an obvious case) so that after deleting them you could be pretty sure that you got the Jewish text of the blessings as they were then current. But in 1985, the American scholar David Fiensy discovered that large parts of the text that was supposed to be that of the Jewish berakhot contained the syntactical peculiarities and the

1 Chr. Böttrich, Das slavische Henochbuch (JSHRZ V/7), Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1995, 804.

2 Ibid. 805.

3 A. Steudel, ‘Melchizedek,’ EDDS 1 (2000) 535–537, here 536.

4 Böttrich, Ibid. 806.

5 See, e.g., A.A. Orlov, ‘Melchizedek Legend of 2 (Slavonic) Enoch,’ in his From Apocalypticism to Merkabah Mysticism: Studies in the Slavonic Pseudepigrapha (JSJS 114), Leiden: Brill, 2007, 423–439.

6 See P.W. van der Horst and J.H. Newman, Early Early Jewish Prayers in Greek (CEJL), Berlin – New York: W. de Gruyter, 2008, 1–93.

97 the provenance of 2enoch 69–73: jewish or christian?

preferred vocabulary of the compiler of the Christian church order.7 He deleted all passages that conformed to that criterium and what was left was very little, only a handful of short phrases that demonstrably belonged to the Jewish Urtext of these blessings. In my own translation and commentary, I marked all passages that were undoubtedly Christian by using italics, all passages that were undoubtedly Jewish by using bold type, and all the rest by using normal type. ‘All the rest’ is: the more than 90 percent of the text of these prayers of which it is impossible to determine whether it is of Jewish or Christian prov-enance. This ‘rest’ shows no traces of Christian provenance, but that should not make us believe that it is Jewish material. In a recent book, James Davila has made it painfully clear that in antiquity there were indeed texts of which we know for sure that they were written by Christian authors but which do not show any traces of Christian belief even though they sound very biblical.8 We cannot take them to be Jewish because we know their authors so we are on safe ground here. But what to do in the case of 2Enoch?

We are not in a position to check whether the syntactical peculiarities and preferred vocabulary of the author differ from that of the presumed interpola-tor because we have only a late translation in Slavonic. Is the style of the author of chs. 1–68 identical to that of chs. 69–73? We don’t know. Is the style of the blatantly Christian interpolations in chs. 69–73 different from the immediately surrounding text in these final chapters? We don’t know, because we don’t have the original text. When Böttrich argues that on the basis of all the textual evi-dence there can be no doubt that the Melchizedek story is an integral part of the book,9 it should have been added immediately that this verdict does apply to the late (Christian) Slavonic translation, but that it cannot automatically be assumed to apply to the supposed early Jewish original because we have no means of knowing how drastically the text may have been altered in the many intervening centuries. So what can we say? We cannot say that, although there certainly are Christian interpolations in the final chapters, the ‘non-Christian’

rest is Jewish. That would be too naïve after all that we have learnt in the past

7 D.A. Fiensy, Prayers Alleged to Be Jewish: An Examination of the Constitutiones Apostolorum (BJS 65), Chico: Scholars Press, 1985.

8 J.R. Davila, The Provenance of the Pseudepigrapha: Jewish, Christian, or Other? (JSJS 105), Leiden: Brill, 2005, 75–119.

9 See his ‘The Melchizedek Story of 2 (Slavonic) Enoch,’ JSJ 32 (2001) 446–449; also his ‘Die vergessene Geburtsgeschichte: Mt 1–2 / Lk 1–2 und die wunderbare Geburt des Melchisedek in slHen 71–72,’ in H. Lichtenberger und G.S. Oegema (eds.), Jüdische Schriften in ihrem antik-jüdischen und urchristlichen Kontext (JSHRZ/St. 1), Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2002, 222–248, esp. 224–225.

decades from the debates about the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, the Lives of the Prophets, the treatise Joseph and Aseneth, the Lives of Adam and Eve, the Hellenistic synagogal prayers, and so on. Moreover, nobody knows how to draw a sharp line between a Jewish text that has undergone a (slight or heavy) Christian reworking on the one hand and a Christian text that is based on Jewish motifs on the other.10 And this should admonish us to be modest in our claims.

In his OTP translation and notes, Andersen, who does believe that the final chapters are an integral part of the book, nevertheless does not fail to note that the closest parallels to the story of the conception and birth of Melchizedek are found in the second-century Christian Protevangelium Jacobi.11 There Mary’s mother Anna is an old but childless married woman. Her husband Joachim is a priest. They live in isolation from each other and do not engage in sexual intercourse, and while Joachim is in the desert for 40 days to fast and pray, Anna becomes pregnant. When Joachim hears about this, it is all explained to him by an angel. The child that is miraculously born, Mary, is precocious;

etc. All these strikingly close parallels to our Melchizedek story strongly sug-gest the possibility that this apocryphal gospel may have been the model for the chapters 71 and 72 of 2Enoch. The often heard objection that a Christian author could never have given Melchizedek parents since the NT Epistle to the Hebrews clearly states that he was ‘fatherless, motherless, without genealogy’

(7:3), is groundless. Apart from the fact that it is unwarranted to say that an early Christian (or Jew, for that matter) ‘could never have said or done’ this or that (how do we know?), the early Christian document usually dubbed The Story of Melchizedek (that we have in Greek, Coptic, Syriac, and Arabic versions) does precisely that: it mentions Melchizedek’s parents.12

I for one am not convinced that the final chapters of 2Enoch belonged to the original Jewish text. Quite apart from the vexing problem that we are at sev-eral removes from the supposed Jewish original in Greek or Hebrew because we have only late manuscripts of a late translation, there is the additional

10 That 2Enoch 69–73 is based upon a wide variety of Jewish haggadic and halakhic motives is not to be denied, but that is a phenomenon that is even observable in the Gnostic Nag Hammadi treatise called Melchizedek (NHC IX 1).

11 F.I. Andersen, ‘2 (Slavonic Apocalypsee of) Enoch,’ OTP 1.204–205.

12 See Chr. Böttrich, Geschichte Melchisedeks (JSHRZ.NF II/1), Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2010; S.E. Robinson, ‘The Apocryphal Story of Melchizedek,’ JSJ 18 (1987) 26–39; also M. Poorthuis, ‘Enoch and Melchizedek in Judaism and Christianity: A Study in Intermediaries,’ in M. Poorthuis and J. Schwartz (eds,), Saints and Role Models in Judaism and Christianity (JCP 7), Leiden: Brill, 2004, 117–119.

99 the provenance of 2enoch 69–73: jewish or christian?

problem that one cannot easily assume that a Jewish author could seriously consider the possibility that two highpriests could ‘share the stage’. Jewish highpriesthood always was an undivided function. Eternal highpriesthood in heaven – forget it if you want a part-time job for it is certainly not a task to be divided into two halftime jobs, or even two fulltime jobs. In none of the other Melchizedek documents does he have a competitor or colleague. So I venture to doubt whether the modern debate about the provenance of the final chap-ters of 2Enoch sufficiently takes these problematic aspects of the matter into consideration. Whether I am right in my criticism can perhaps only be judged by Enoch, or Melchizedek. Or both?

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