A Guide to Early Jewish Texts and Traditions in Ch Format: Hardcover

The Jewish culture of the Hellenistic and early Roman periods established a basis for all monotheistic religions, but its main sources have been preserved to a great degree through Christian transmission. This Guide is devoted to problems of preservation, reception, and transformation of Jewish texts and traditions of the Second Temple period in the many Christian milieus from the ancient world to the late medieval era. It approaches this corpus not as an artificial collection of reconstructed texts--a body of hypothetical originals--but rather from the perspective of the preserved materials, examined in their religious, social, and political contexts. It also considers the other, non-Christian, channels of the survival of early Jewish materials, including Rabbinic, Gnostic, Manichaean, and Islamic. This unique project brings together scholars from many different fields in order to map the trajectories of early Jewish texts and traditions among diverse later cultures. It also provides a comprehensive and comparative introduction to this new field of study while bridging the gap between scholars of early Judaism and of medieval Christianity.

Alexander Kulik is Associate Professor of Russian and Slavic Studies at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.
Gabriele Boccaccini is Professor of Second Temple Judaism and and Christian Origins at the University of Michigan.
Lorenzo DiTommaso is Professor of Religions and Cultures at Concordia University Montréal.
David Hamidovic is Professor of Jewish Apocryphal Literature and History of Judaism in Antiquity at the University of Lausanne.
Michael E. Stone is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Religions and Armenian Studies at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.