The Books in the Room

When the modern Christian opens her New Testament, she opens it with a particular mental picture of the world it came from. The picture, in most cases, is something like this: there were the Jewish scriptures — the books we now call the Old Testament — and there was the surrounding pagan world, and the first Christians wrote into the gap between them, drawing on the Hebrew prophets and the Greek philosophers, putting Jesus at the center. The New Testament writers knew their Bible. They knew their world. They didn’t, the modern picture assumes, know much else.

The picture is wrong, or at least seriously incomplete. The Judaism of the first century — the Judaism Jesus and Paul and John and Peter and James were born into and worked inside — wasn’t a Judaism that read only the Hebrew scriptures. It was a Judaism that had been reading, writing, and arguing about scripture for several centuries between the close of the Old Testament canon and the appearance of the New. The world the first Christians lived in had a library. The library included the books we now call the Old Testament, but it also included a great deal more — apocalyptic visions, wisdom collections, rewritten biblical narratives, sectarian rule books, hymns, prayers, commentaries. The first audience of the New Testament had read or heard much of this material. The New Testament writers had read or heard it too. They sometimes quoted it. They more often echoed it. And reading the New Testament without knowing what else was in the room is like listening to someone in conversation while hearing only one side of the call.

A word of careful framing is in order before going further. The work ahead isn’t about expanding the Christian canon. Different Christian traditions have settled the canon differently — the Protestant tradition uses the shorter Hebrew canon for the Old Testament; Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox traditions include a longer canon with the deuterocanonical books; some Eastern churches preserve even more. The book takes no position on which canon is correct. The work here is more basic. It’s the recognition that whatever the canon contains, the first audience of the New Testament was reading a wider library than the canon alone. And knowing what was in that wider library sharpens the modern reader’s ear for what the New Testament writers were doing when they wrote.

the books the New Testament knew

A few specific places in the New Testament make the wider library visible.

The most direct case is in the letter of Jude. In Jude 14-15, the author writes that Enoch, the seventh from Adam, prophesied about them: “See, the Lord is coming with thousands upon thousands of his holy ones to judge everyone…” Jude isn’t paraphrasing from any book of the Old Testament. He’s quoting, almost word for word, a passage from 1 Enoch — a Jewish apocalyptic text that was widely read in the first century, that the Dead Sea Scrolls community at Qumran preserved in multiple copies, and that some early Christians considered scripture. The phrase Jude attributes to Enoch corresponds to 1 Enoch 1:9. He cites the book as a prophecy. He treats it as authoritative for his argument. Different Christian traditions have handled this in different ways — the Ethiopian Orthodox Church canonizes 1 Enoch; most other Christian traditions don’t — but the historical fact is plain. The author of Jude knew 1 Enoch and quoted it in scripture.

A second case is in the way the New Testament handles the “Son of Man” figure from Daniel 7. The phrase appears in Daniel as a vision: one like a son of man, coming on the clouds of heaven, receiving an everlasting kingdom from the Ancient of Days. Daniel uses the phrase once. By the time Jesus uses it as his preferred self-designation in the Gospels, the phrase has accumulated layers of meaning the modern reader doesn’t always recognize. Some of those layers come from the Old Testament alone. Other layers come from the apocalyptic literature that read and developed Daniel’s vision in the centuries before Christ. The Similitudes of Enoch — the second section of 1 Enoch, written sometime in the late first century BC or early first century AD — develops the Son of Man into a glorified pre-existent heavenly figure who will come to judge the wicked at the end of the age. The Jewish apocalyptic work 4 Ezra, written around 100 AD, develops the same figure. When Jesus called himself the Son of Man, he was reaching for a phrase whose connotations had been shaped by these texts as well as by Daniel. The first audience heard the layered phrase. The modern reader who knows only Daniel hears only one layer of it.

A third case is in the Christology of Hebrews 1. The opening verses of Hebrews describe the Son as the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being, sustaining all things by his powerful word. The Greek word for radiance — apaugasma — is a rare term. Almost the only place it appears in surviving pre-Christian Jewish literature is in Wisdom of Solomon 7:26, where Wisdom herself is described as a reflection of eternal light, a spotless mirror of the working of God, and an image of his goodness. The Wisdom of Solomon is a Hellenistic Jewish text written in Greek, probably in Alexandria, in the first century BC or AD. The author of Hebrews knew the book. He drew on its language. He took the categories Wisdom of Solomon had developed to describe divine Wisdom and applied them to Christ. A similar move is visible in Colossians 1:15-17, where Paul (or a close associate writing in Paul’s name) describes Christ as the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation, with cosmic creative agency — language that draws on the same Hellenistic Jewish Wisdom tradition. The deep Christology of the New Testament was developed using vocabulary the Jewish Wisdom literature had already prepared.

A fourth case is in the way Matthew describes the chief priests at the foot of the cross. He trusts in God; let God rescue him now if he wants him, for he said, “I am the Son of God” (Matthew 27:43). The line echoes Wisdom of Solomon 2:18: if the righteous man is God’s son, he will help him, and will deliver him from the hand of his adversaries. Matthew’s audience, hearing his account of the mocking, would’ve caught the echo. The unrighteous in Wisdom of Solomon mocked the righteous one in exactly these terms. The chief priests, in Matthew, are speaking the lines of the unrighteous from Wisdom of Solomon. The echo is part of the meaning.

These four cases aren’t exhaustive. There are dozens more like them, scattered through the New Testament. They’re enough to establish the basic point: the New Testament writers were reading more than the Hebrew Bible. They lived in a Jewish library that included a wider range of literature, and they drew on it when they wrote. Knowing this doesn’t change the canon. It changes how the reader hears what the canonical New Testament is saying.

what was in the room

The standard scholarly survey of the literature is Jewish Literature Between the Bible and the Mishnah by George Nickelsburg, Emeritus Professor of Religion at the University of Iowa. Nickelsburg taught at Iowa for more than three decades, edited the major scholarly commentary on 1 Enoch, and co-edited the standard scholarly reference Early Judaism: Texts and Documents on Faith and Piety. His textbook, first published by Fortress Press in 1981 and substantially expanded in a second edition in 2005, is the work students of New Testament backgrounds reach for first. The book covers the literature systematically, organized by historical period, with attention to date, audience, themes, and reception. The following are the five collections of texts most worth knowing for the modern New Testament reader.

1 Enoch is the largest and most theologically influential of the Jewish apocalyptic writings outside the canonical Old Testament. It is, in fact, not a single book but a collection of five originally independent works, composed at different times between the third century BC and the first century AD, and eventually gathered into a single Ethiopic Christian text. The collection includes the Book of the Watchers (an expansion of the Genesis 6 story of the sons of God taking human wives, with the fallen angels named, judged, and bound in the depths), the Book of Parables or Similitudes (with the Son of Man material), the Astronomical Book (a complex solar calendar), the Book of Dream Visions, and the Epistle of Enoch. Fragments of 1 Enoch were found at Qumran in significant numbers, suggesting the Dead Sea community treated it as scripture. The book is canonical in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church and, in fragmentary form, in the Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo Church. It’s the only non-canonical Jewish text directly quoted in the New Testament (in Jude). The watchers tradition from 1 Enoch — fallen angels, judgment, the heavenly throne room — shows up in 2 Peter 2, in Jude, and in fragments throughout the New Testament’s apocalyptic vocabulary.

Jubilees is a retelling of Genesis and the first half of Exodus, written probably in the mid-second century BC, that fills in the gaps of the biblical narrative with extensive supplementary material. Names, calendar reckonings, expanded dialogues, angelic and demonic interventions, a strict 364-day solar calendar — Jubilees offers all of it. The book was preserved at Qumran in many copies and was evidently important to the Dead Sea community. It is canonical in the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox traditions but not elsewhere. For the modern reader, Jubilees offers a window into how at least some first-century Jews were imagining the patriarchal narratives — with much more apocalyptic and angelic detail than the canonical text supplies.

Sirach — also called Ben Sira or Ecclesiasticus — is a wisdom collection written in Hebrew around 180 BC by a Jerusalem scribe named Yeshua ben Eleazar ben Sira, and translated into Greek by his grandson a few decades later. Sirach is theologically conservative, deeply influenced by Proverbs, and full of practical wisdom for daily life. It’s deuterocanonical in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions — that is, considered scripture in those traditions and printed in their Bibles — and considered part of the Apocrypha in the Protestant tradition, where it’s sometimes printed in a separate section or omitted altogether. For the New Testament reader, Sirach is the closest surviving analogue to the kind of practical wisdom literature that James echoes in his epistle and that the Sermon on the Mount develops in its own direction.

Wisdom of Solomon is a later wisdom text, written in Greek probably in Alexandria, sometime in the first century BC or early first century AD. The book draws on the Greek philosophical tradition and the Hebrew Wisdom tradition together, developing a portrait of divine Wisdom as God’s personified attribute through which the world was made and is sustained. The Wisdom of Solomon, like Sirach, is deuterocanonical in the Catholic and Orthodox traditions and considered part of the Apocrypha in the Protestant tradition. Whatever its canonical status, the book had a significant influence on the language of the New Testament — directly, in the apaugasma of Hebrews 1:3, and in the image of the invisible God of Colossians 1:15, and indirectly in much of the New Testament’s developed Christological vocabulary.

The Dead Sea Scrolls are the most spectacular twentieth-century discovery in biblical archaeology. Found in caves at Qumran near the Dead Sea between 1947 and 1956, the scrolls are the library of a Jewish sectarian community that lived at Qumran from roughly the second century BC to 68 AD, when the community was destroyed during the First Jewish Revolt. The scrolls include the oldest surviving copies of every book of the Hebrew Bible except Esther; copies of 1 Enoch, Jubilees, Sirach, and many other non-canonical texts; and the sect’s own internal writings (the Community Rule, the War Scroll, the Habakkuk Pesher, the Thanksgiving Hymns, and many more). The scrolls aren’t scripture in any Christian tradition — they’re a sectarian Jewish library, not a Christian one — but they’re the single richest historical window on first-century Jewish reading the modern world possesses. Reading the New Testament without some sense of what the Dead Sea Scrolls show is reading it without one of the most important sources of background available.

These five collections — 1 Enoch, Jubilees, Sirach, Wisdom of Solomon, the Dead Sea Scrolls — don’t exhaust the wider Jewish library of the first century. There were also the works of Josephus, the works of Philo, the Psalms of Solomon, 4 Ezra, 2 Baruch, the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, and many more. Nickelsburg’s textbook surveys them all. But these five are the ones most worth knowing for the modern Christian reader, because these are the texts most visibly present in the New Testament’s vocabulary and conceptual world.

what changes when the room comes into view

Knowing what else was in the room doesn’t change the canon. The Protestant reader still has her sixty-six-book Bible; the Catholic reader still has her seventy-three-book Bible; the Orthodox reader still has her longer canon. The canon is the canon, settled by the church through long historical processes that this book isn’t litigating. What knowing the room does is sharpen the reader’s ear.

The reader who knows about 1 Enoch can read Jude 14-15 without the awkwardness of wondering what Jude is quoting. She can read 2 Peter 2 and Jude 6, with their references to the fallen angels chained in darkness awaiting judgment, and recognize that the writers are drawing on a developed Jewish tradition about Genesis 6 — a tradition the first audience knew, a tradition the New Testament writers assumed their readers would catch.

The reader who knows about the Similitudes of Enoch and 4 Ezra can hear Jesus’s Son of Man with the fuller weight it carried. Not the abstract human one alone, and not the Daniel 7 vision in isolation, but a charged messianic title that had been read, re-read, and elaborated for two centuries before Jesus claimed it. The New Testament writers didn’t have to explain what the Son of Man was. Their first audience knew.

The reader who knows about the Wisdom of Solomon can hear the deep Christological hymns of the New Testament — Colossians 1:15-20, Hebrews 1:1-4, John 1:1-18, Philippians 2:6-11 — with their full Jewish background. The New Testament writers didn’t develop their high Christology out of nothing. They developed it using vocabulary the Jewish Wisdom tradition had already prepared. Wisdom was God’s attribute, present at creation, the image of God, the radiance of God’s glory, the agent through whom the world was made. The New Testament writers took those categories and applied them, with deliberate and shocking specificity, to Jesus of Nazareth. The shock is sharper when the reader knows where the categories came from.

The reader who knows about Sirach can hear the connections between James and the wisdom tradition — James’s emphasis on the dangers of the tongue, on the testing of faith, on practical righteousness, on God’s gift of wisdom to those who ask, all of it has analogues and antecedents in Sirach. James isn’t copying Sirach. He’s writing inside the same wisdom tradition.

The reader who knows about the Dead Sea Scrolls can read the Sermon on the Mount, or John’s Gospel, or Paul’s epistles, with awareness that some of the New Testament’s distinctive vocabulary — sons of light, sons of darkness, the cosmic dualism of light and darkness, the emphasis on a new covenant, the urgent eschatological pressure — was vocabulary the Qumran community used too. Christianity didn’t arise in a vacuum. It arose inside a vibrant first-century Jewish world in which multiple sects were arguing about how to read scripture, how to wait for the Messiah, how to be the people of God in a fallen world. The New Testament writers were one Jewish voice inside that world. They believed the Messiah had come; the Qumran community believed they were waiting for one (or two). They used some of the same vocabulary. They came to different conclusions. The conclusions are sharper when the conversation is in view.

The first audience of the New Testament was reading more than the Hebrew Bible. They were reading inside a Jewish library that the centuries between the testaments had filled with apocalyptic visions, wisdom collections, sectarian writings, and rewritten biblical narratives. The New Testament writers knew that library. They drew on it. They sometimes quoted it directly; they more often echoed it; and the echoes are part of what the first audience heard. Knowing the library doesn’t change the canon. It changes how the reader hears. It’s the difference between reading a letter and reading half of a conversation. The library is the other half. The canon is the part that survived the long process by which the church decided what would be preserved as scripture. The other half — the books that didn’t survive that process, or that survived in a different status — is still there, still readable, still witnessing to what the first Christians took for granted. The modern reader who walks into the room with her eyes open finds out that her Bible is, in some quiet way, sharper than it was before. The words still mean what they meant. But she hears more of what was being said.