kristian heal

Kristian Heal, director of our Center for the Preservation of Ancient Religious Texts, has just published a translation of the Syriac History of Joseph in an important new edition of writings related to the Old Testament entitled Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: More Noncanonical Scriptures, Vol. 1.1 This volume is the product of an international project to expand upon a previous collection2 with a corpus of about 100 additional documents including “apocalypses . . . ; magical, oracular, exorcistic and mantic works attributed to prophets and sages such as Moses, David, Solomon, the Sibyl, and Jeremiah; songs and poetry attributed to Old Testament characters, especially David; ‘rewritten scripture’ that retells stories known from the Old Testament from the fall of Adam and Eve to the deaths of the Maccabean martyrs; legends and tales set in the Old Testament period . . . ; and various other obscure and intriguing works, including a legendary account of the hiding places of the Temple treasures, lost pre-exilic oracles of Balaam the seer, and a legend of how all human knowledge was preserved in the Great Pyramid during the Flood.”

“We live in perhaps the most archive-friendly moment in history . . . we have mushrooming digital compilations and ready access to documents of many flavors in unprecedented abundance.” —John Durham Peters, communications theorist

“In the almost complete absence of written records, one must be permitted to guess, because there is nothing else to do.” –Hugh W. Nibley