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The Epistles of Heraclitus and the Jewish Pseudepigrapha: A Warning

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 June 2011

John Strugnell  and
Harold Attridge
Harold Attridge
Affiliation:
Harvard Divinity School
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Extract

The more complete of modern lists of ancient Jewish Pseudepigrapha include the 4th and 7th Epistles of Heraclitus. The suggestion that these are of Jewish origin goes back to Jacob Bernays; it met with little favour among classical philologians, who preferred to see in these letters typically Cynic or Stoic documents, but historians of the pseudepigraphical literature of early Judaism, though they sometimes take note of this rival explanation, continue to list these works in their uncanonical canon.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 64 , Issue 2-3 , July 1971 , pp. 411 - 413
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1971

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References

1 Die Herakleitische Briefe (Berlin, 1869Google Scholar).

2 So, e.g., Norden, E., Agnostos Theos (Berlin, 1913), 389Google Scholarff.; Heinemann, I., Poseidonios' Metaphysische Schrijten (Breslau, 1921Google Scholar), I, 124. E. N. Roussos’ forthcoming Heraklit-Bibliographie (Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt, 1971?) promises a section “zu den pseudo-herakleitischen Briefen.”

3 E.g., Schürer, E.; Riessler, P., Altjüdisches Schrifttum (Augsburg, 1928Google Scholar); Hengel, M., Judentum und Hellenismus (Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 10 [Tübingen, 1969]), 307Google Scholar.

4 Museum Helveticum 16(1959), 77–117Google Scholar: cf. P. Photiadés, ibid., 118–40, and G. C. Hansen, Klio 44(1965), 351–80.

5 In the case of the 4th Epistle, Bernays Thought only of interpolations. Bernays also suggested the 9th Epistle, but Norden, E. (Jahrbücher f. klass. Philol.: Suppl. 19(1893), 386Google Scholar, pointed out that the case for Ep. 9 would only be plausible had 7 and 4 been prove d to be Jewish. The 5th and 6th Epistles of Heraclitus, and the 28th of Diogenes, have also been mentioned in this connection, but the positive arguments in their cases are even weaker.

6 Attridge.