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Forgotten Scripture: Apocrypha

Introduction

Many readers of scripture, particularly in North America, are not aware that a substantial number of books were removed from their Old Testament.  These books, often known collectively as the Apocrypha, were considered scripture for centuries, and, for millions of Christians today, they still are. Our discussion will include some overview of the category ‘apocrypha’ and how the term has been used historically. Why, for example, do the Protestant and Catholic Bibles treat them differently?

By themselves, they are fascinating, and historically, they have much to tell us about the ancient state of religious thought. We’ll explore the relationships between apocrypha, deuterocanonical, pseudepigrapha, and Dead Sea Scrolls.

We will turn our focus on one of the most important texts in this corpus, known as 2 Esdras (also called 4 Ezra).  This forgotten text poignantly deals with the trauma of the Romans destroying the temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE by imagining the figure of Ezra express his unhappiness with God.  The ensuing dialogue between God and the angel Uriel results in one of the most expressive apocalyptic texts in the biblical tradition.  The work vividly describes the end of history and the restoration of the covenant.

Dr. Goff joined the faculty of the Religion Department at Florida State University in 2005 after completing his M.T.S degree in 1997 at Harvard Divinity School and his Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 2002, where he studied under John Collins. Dr. Goff’s most recent book is The Apocrypha: A Guide (Oxford, 2024).

Text from an Apocryphal Work

4 Ezra (or: 2 Esdras:3-10)

Chapter 3: 1- 27 (Beginning with the subtitle: Ezra’s Prayer of Complaint)

Scroll way down to chapter 7:1-25 (Beginning with the subtitle: Response to Ezra’s Questions)

Then scroll much farther down to chapter 14: 1-47 (Beginning with the subtitle: The Argument Recapitulated)

Transcript

Click here for a printable transcript (pdf file, opens in a new tab).

Shirley Paulson

Welcome everyone to our February 2025 Bible and Beyond discussion. I am your host, Shirley Paulson, and I’m delighted to introduce our guest scholar this evening, Dr. Matthew Goff. Our topic tonight is “Forgotten Scripture: Apocrypha.” Matthew has been a professor in the Religion Department at Florida State University since 2005. He completed his graduate studies at Harvard Divinity School and the University of Chicago. And his most recent book, The Apocrypha: a Guide, published last year, serves as the inspiration for our discussion. I was just going to ask you if you’d show it to us there.

It’s exciting to get an expert to guide us, to take us on this subject that most of us know so little about. So I’m really pleased that you could be with us tonight, Matt, to introduce us to these often overlooked texts called “Apocrypha.” So welcome and we’ll get started.

Matthew Goff

Thank you.

Shirley Paulson

I think probably many of us tonight here have probably heard the word “apocrypha.” That’s probably why everyone’s here! But my guess is that many of us even know that the books between the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament are called Apocrypha, but we’re still pretty vague about what it means or what’s in the Apocrypha, and I thought maybe you could start us off with that.

Matthew Goff

I’d be happy to, and I’m glad to be here. Thanks for inviting me and I’m glad you’re all here and interested in the topic. And I’d also say the Guide that I wrote is designed for a general readership. So it’s designed for someone who has heard a little bit about this stuff and would like to learn more. I think this is a good audience for that. Now, the word apocrypha literally means hidden, and it’s used in common culture to denote things which people say are true, but aren’t tales about Bigfoot, apocryphal, or loch ness monster. That’s apocryphal. And this echoes a longer legacy that we find where it’s particularly used where it refers to terms that refer to texts that were often regarded as rejected and different from scripture. So Shirley, you asked in your questions about how the term gets used as a general category for ancient texts, which aren’t in scripture, like New Testament apocrypha. What Shirley’s getting at is that it’s actually a little more complicated. There’s an historical way the Protestants, in particular, use the term.

It gets used as a general category—like, anything that’s not like ancient text that sounds biblical, but isn’t in your Bible. But Martin Luther and other Protestants took a large amount of texts—about 14 or so—about the size of the New Testament, and took them out of the Old Testament and put them in a third category of the Bible! They invented a third category of the Bible, and they called that Apocrypha. So if you look at the first edition of the King James Bible from 1611, you might expect that the Christian Bible would have two sections, Old Testament and New Testament.

But there are three: Old Testament, New Testament and Apocrypha. And what they emphasized was texts that had a lower status than the Old Testament, but obviously still considered scripture. And the reasons for it are actually kind of technical. It’s not about the content!

When I read the stuff with students, they’re not like, oh, thank God that stuff isn’t in my Bible. But it’s rather the idea, this Protestant idea, that the translation of Old Testament texts should be on the basis of Hebrew text. So any text that was in the Old Testament that didn’t have a Hebrew original—they questioned whether it has the same status.

But what Luther did, and what some of these other earlier Christian scholars like Jerome a thousand years ago basically said: “Still scriptural.” So the idea is that church doctrine should not be based on this stuff, but it is still good to read.

And that’s why Luther and these other folks actually kept it in the Bible, emphasizing the stuff as good to read.  But then, by putting it all together—and here I should emphasize one last point and then we can go to the next question—that was what the mainstream Protestants did at the time, 300 or 400 years ago. The more radical Protestants—the Puritans that came to North America—did not like this stuff. If you’re Catholic or Eastern Orthodox, they’re just in your Old Testament. They were there then, and they are there now. The Catholic Old Testament is much larger than the Protestant Old Testament, and so a lot of the more radical Protestants dismiss this stuff. The Apocrypha became kind of a wedge issue. It’s like, we don’t want Catholic stuff in our Bible.

And so the Protestants really didn’t like it. And that’s why, when Protestants started coming here and started printing their Bibles, the Protestants were  like, “Yeah, we’re not printing that stuff.” So particularly for North American readers, I’d say once you had a context in which Protestants were hegemony in this continent, it became less of a wedge issue and became kind of forgotten. And people forgot that they [Protestants] banned and didn’t like this stuff. And now you just have millions of people who really revere scripture and have no idea that a large amount of texts actually were considered scripture and still are by millions of people, but they’ve never heard of them before.

Shirley Paulson

Yeah, that’s really awesome. Thank you for that. So can you tell us really quick, why do the Catholics call it Deuterocanonical then?

Matthew Goff

Yeah, Deuterocanonical. And the idea was that it came out of the Counter-Reformation, like the Catholic response to the Reformation. And it’s interesting, you didn’t really have an official kind of statement until official books in the Old Testament were identified. It forced Catholics to kind of come down on this issue. Like, Protestant said, “Oh, these books shouldn’t be in the Old Testament.” And that kind of forced Catholics to say, “Well, where do we stand on these issues?” And with a couple exceptions, they affirmed the authority of this stuff and they call it that. So deuterocanonical is basically a Catholic term for the same texts we’re talking about, but it’s a category of Old Testament for them.

Shirley Paulson

Yeah, interesting. Okay. And I want to get into these texts, but I also want to clear up some more technical things for us here too. What’s the difference between the Dead Sea Scrolls and Apocrypha? They were written around the same time? or what?

Matthew Goff

They were written around the same time. And so the Apocrypha in that sort of Protestant sense is sort of a category that came in the early modern period to understand these ancient texts. But you’re quite right. The stuff that the Protestants call Apocrypha, in terms of the scriptural tradition, is later than a lot of these texts that we call Apocrypha: second century BCE, third century, BCE, or even later. So compared to what a lot of people would understand as the Old Testament, it’s kind of later. But it’s before the New Testament from a Protestant perspective, and between the Old Testament.

And what’s interesting is that it’s right when the Dead Sea Scrolls were written, so one of the things about the Dead Sea Scrolls, which is so interesting—and I don’t know if people here have a sense of this—but our understanding of the biblical tradition and the biblical text was primarily based on medieval manuscripts. The manuscript that all Old Testaments are based on—the Hebrew manuscrip—is actually produced in the year 1008 CE actually. And it has a prologue dated according to the Islamic calendar,  because it was done in Cairo.

And so this means it’s a medieval document, and biblical studies formed without a lot of actual ancient texts from ancient Israel. And then in the 1940s, some of you might know, we found the Dead Sea Scrolls! It’s like 900 texts. So now we actually have a lot of ancient texts, and it’s a longer story, but lo and behold, you actually have a window into how they were thinking about scripture.

And it’s not the same thing as how people in later centuries were thinking about the Bible. And it’s actually similar to how we’re thinking about some of these apocryphal texts. And here I’ll just make one final comment with some of these texts that people call Apocrypha.  They had an understanding that the history of ancient Israel and these texts were not simply fixed in the way we think of scripture, but it was kind of a heritage that could be expanded, interpreted, and changed.

So for example, in our Bibles, it emphasizes how the northern kingdom of Israel was destroyed by the Assyrian Kingdom and forcibly taken into exile. And one apocryphal text in the apocrypha, called the Book of Tobit, presumes that story and talks about it, but tells the story of one of those families that went into exile. It’s like they’re using the tradition to tell more stories about the tradition, and that’s what you get in the apocrypha and you actually get the same sort of thing in the Dead Sea Scrolls. So both of them are sort of complimentary windows into how some of these ancient scribes thought about scripture. And it’s so different in some ways from how we think about it.

Shirley Paulson

Yeah, for sure.

Matthew Goff

It’s great. It’s a great question.

Shirley Paulson

This is really helpful for us to really deal with this. In my annotated Bible, the New Revised Standard Version with the Apocrypha—which has apocryphal—I’ve got a book that’s got Esdras in there and 2 Esdras, and so forth. So is that similar to the name Ezra, or is it a different name?

Matthew Goff

No, it’s like …  what’s an analogy to this? It’s a tomāto-tomǎto thing. ‘Ezra’ is a term in Latin, and ‘Esdras’ is the form of the name in Greek. But the one I recommend to folks here in the room, the Study Bible that Shirley has is a really good Study Bible. There’s really good annotations from scholars. And that’s a new one too: the Westminster Study Bible, which is also good. For the first one you showed (New Oxford Annotated Bible:NRSV), I did the annotations for two of the texts, Baruch and the Letter of Jeremiah. But yeah, it’s a helpful text. It’s helpful because of the notes. It’s not just about the translation.

Shirley Paulson

Great. Okay, that’s helpful. So now let’s talk about Ezra. So what’s the difference between the Ezra that we know in the Bible and the Ezra that’s in the Apocrypha talking about 4 Ezra or 2 Esdras?

Matthew Goff

So yes, so you all know that not a lot of people read it, not a lot of people find it exciting. It’s actually very interesting. But the Old Testament of Protestants and Catholics and the Jewish Bible has a book attributed to Ezra.

But what we have in the text that many people today called fourth Ezra is a later text attributed to that older patriarch. Which actually kind of fits what I was saying earlier, the idea that the tradition was kind of understood as more of an open archive than we think of as a fixed text. We’re on one side of the printing press, where the standardization of texts became the norm. So the idea of a text that we call 4 Ezra was written in around the year 100 CE, but it’s attributed to the older figure of Ezra.

And why the Esdras and Ezra are a little complicated, I’ll just quickly explain. So basically there’s Ezra and Nehemiah. One became understood as 1 Ezra. The other became understood as 2 Ezra. There’s also a book called 3 Ezra, which is in the Apocrypha, and then that’s why this one is called 4 Ezra. And then once Ezra and Nehemiah became their own book, then 3 Ezra became 1 Ezra ,and 4 Ezra became 2 Ezra. It’s more complicated than it really needs to be, but it’s a separate text attributed to this figure, Ezra who was in Babylon and had gone to Israel.

Shirley Paulson

That’s very helpful to know that it’s more complicated than it needed to be, but okay, so is 4 Ezra the same as 2 Esdras?

Matthew Goff

Yes. People use the terms interchangeably.  It’s in the King James Apocrypha, this text called 2 Ezra, and it was in the Gutenberg Bible. And that’s why when they started printing Bibles, this book began to be included in that. Although it’s canonical only in two Christian traditions today—in the Russian Orthodox Bible, it’s often printed and in the Ethiopian Orthodox Bible. But yeah, it’s a text written around the year 100 CE, and it focuses on the figure of Ezra. Was there a follow-up question? I’m not sure I answered your question,

Shirley Paulson

Yeah, you did fine. I just wanted to make sure that we get all the names and the people and things settled for us. But now I think it’d be a good idea for you to run us through the basic story.

Matthew Goff

Yeah, it’s a wonderful text and I encourage you all to read it if you haven’t. And I guess the thing to keep in mind is that it was written as a response. Basically it was written around the year 100 CE, right around the same time as the New Testament Book of Revelation. And they’re both dealing with the same basic issue: There was a failed Jewish revolt, and the Romans brutally suppressed it in the year 70 CE.

And it’s interesting, the book says it was written 30 years after the destruction of Judah. And so I want you to think about that. This is not just about the defeat, but a generation later! This means you can think about trauma as something that lingers over the years, but it’s not just the event itself. Also there was a form of state sponsored humiliation—like how the Roman Empire launched a series of coins, and they called them the Judea Capta.

Judah is defeated. And on the side of the coin, there was a woman, kind of like she’s hunched over and crying, and that’s Judah. And so what is the meaning? Imagine not just being defeated, but then sort of seeing images like that! And the state is kind of emphasizing your loss. If any of you have ever been to Rome, you can still see it. They made something called the Arch of Titus where they actually celebrated—which is part of what Rome did when they conquered a place. It commemorated the destruction of the temple. And it shows some Roman soldiers carrying off temple treasure, including a large menorah. So questions arose about  the destruction of the temple: how God could let this happen? And so it begins,

Shirley Paulson

Let me interrupt. Sorry. I think we need to get the chronology right.

You said that we’re talking about the 30 years after the destruction of Judah, but that’s way before Jesus, right?

Matthew Goff

No. So the suppression of the first Jewish revolt was 70 ce. And so this book was written 100 ce. So it was not clear that Christianity was a thing in the way it became, but there was a nascent Jesus movement when this book was written.

Shirley Paulson

But then, we’re not talking about Ezra and Nehemiah back after the exile…

Matthew Goff

Right. But the story is set in the sixth century BCE.

Shirley Paulson

Yes.

Matthew Goff

And so it’s using one trauma to talk about a later one … It’s like the trauma is so difficult. It’s like you can’t talk about it directly, is the idea. They’re talking about it without talking about it. And one of the things where you see this in rabbinic literature, is the use of the code word for Rome as ‘Babylon.’ And if you look, the Book of Revelation is written in its original context against Rome, and it talks about a city with mystery written on her forehead named Babylon. And in rabbinic tradition, the two events are conflated. So there’s something like this going on here. I’d emphasize that it’s a kind of historical trauma. They can’t talk about it, the thing that’s happening now, it’s too much. So they’re putting it in the past as a way to talk about it. And Ezra is sad, Ezra is sad. So it begins with the main theme as one of theodicy—kind of like the book of Job.

Why do all these things happen? Why did God let the desolation of Zion happen? That’s the question that it’s trying to ask. It kind of understands the whole situation with the kind of catch-22. This idea that God gave Israel the Torah, the path to civilization, but then Ezra on his bed at night cries out to God. But you never, in the Latin, the term is the core malignant. You didn’t take the evil heart from Adam, meaning some sense of that. And this is one of the earliest texts where you have the sense that Adam did something in the garden that changed human nature, a propensity to sin. So meaning the dilemma as he sees it is that God gave us the path to salvation, but that we’re built in a way to disobey God is kind of the idea. It’s a catch-22, and he’s kind of like, why is it like that? And those kinds of questions are what the book is trying to get at.

Shirley Paulson

And I think we need to bring in the idea of apocalypticl writing at the same time. So—apocalyptic—how does that connect us to the end of Time?

Matthew Goff

Yes, I think maybe the term to use would be apocalyptic, if that’s what you mean. And it’s like the book of Revelation: they’re trying to deal with these questions. Apocalyptic literature is very good and powerful as a way to understand a crisis in the present. Why are the righteous suffering? Why are the wicked prospering? And what you have in apocalyptic literature is basically: if you look at the grand plan of history that an angel gives you, the present moment is actually supposed to be bad. If you look at the whole, there’s this period where evil is supposed to win. The beast is given authority for 42 months, according to Revelation, a time when evil’s supposed to win. It doesn’t mean things aren’t going according to plan, it means the opposite. Actually everything’s going exactly according to plan. So there’s an eschatological, theodicy.

Shirley Paulson

Let’s ask about that word… I don’t think we all know the word ‘eschatological.’

Matthew Goff

“The End Times,” the focus on the end. But yeah, so the book tries to answer these big questions. Why are things so horrible? Very much by appealing to a kind of eschatology that it’s all going to end soon and everything will be worked out. Justice is not supposed to happen. The present is supposed to happen in the near future is kind of what this book is saying.

Shirley Paulson

Okay, so then it feels like Ezra is arguing with God instead of going along with a plan. Is that right?

Matthew Goff

Yes. But there’s this wonderful transformation of the figure of Ezra where he starts out as a sad, angry man, and then he actually becomes a figure who consoles other people. And then at the end, he’s like a leader who actually restores the covenant. So some scholars have talked about the book as though it’s like ‘the Odyssey’ of Ezra’s soul. And it’s not by being given answers to those questions he is asking about when he’s upset. The key moment is actually when he sees an upset woman who’s crying about the death of her son and seeing the grief of another person. That’s actually the transition point. And here I’d emphasize that coin that was all over the place when this text was written: that Judah is the sad, forlorn woman.

And we could do similar things with the Book of Revelation where it’s written in the context of trying to spin Roman political propaganda at the time, and where the sad woman is for Ezra. He talks to this sad, mourning woman who represents Jerusalem in the coin, and then she turns into this magical city. It’s a bit like the New Jerusalem because New Jerusalem is called a bride in Revelation, the sad woman becomes this wonderful city.

Then Ezra is given more eschatological knowledge at the end, and we can talk about that. But the covenant gets restored by Ezra. So the means of salvation is restored under Ezra in this text.

Shirley Paulson

What in the world made Ezra turn around, what transformed him?

Matthew Goff

I guess it’s a difference between dealing with your own grief and seeing the grief of someone else, I think is the issue. It’s so interesting in chapter 10. He doesn’t know yet that the woman is actually Judah, and that her son who died on his wedding day is actually Jerusalem. The idea is, he says to her, “Be consoled by the desolation of Jerusalem”—which is a very interesting phrase. Exactly, what was depressing him was seeing the grief of another. I’d be interested to see what you all think about that, but my own sense is that it’s making a difference between individual trauma and national trauma. And the sense that national trauma is something bigger; it’s on a larger scale, it’s more devastating. But it’s also more of a shared experience. And then the woman he’s talking to is actually Judah herself. And that’s the fulcrum point in the book. And he’s not a kind of a sad, angry man. He’s a leader of Israel who restores the covenant. There’s a change in the book.

Shirley Paulson

That’s a fascinating thing for us to be thinking about. You’re right. I’d like to hear what people think about this, but let me ask you another question before we turn it over to everybody else. I am curious about this blur between Judaism and the Christianity. You seem to be saying anyway, it seems like 4 Esdras is kind of there embracing both [Judaism and Christianity]. Do you see this as more Jewish, or Christian, or what?

Matthew Goff

It’s a good question, Shirley. I gave a lecture on this text a couple years ago and 2 Ezra, and then the subtitle was “Jewish, Christian, Both, Neither?” And I think the idea is for us, Christianity is a thing, and rabbinic Judaism is a thing, and they’re related, but very different. But if you go to the first century CE, what was becoming rabbinic Judaism hadn’t been fully formed, and what was becoming Christianity wasn’t fully formed. And that’s when 4 Ezra is doing its thing and engaging all these traditions in some ways. It’s so similar to the apocalyptic thing, the eschatological thing, the idea that the time is short and that it’s all going to happen soon. And there’s even a Messiah in this text, the idea that that period is Messianic, it’s picking up on things that became kind of baked into the cake for Christianity.

But then in other parts, like in rabbinic Judaism, Ezra is the second Moses, and that’s what he is in this text. And when they restore the covenant, this book says it restores 24 books of the Torah. And we can talk about it, but how many books are actually in there is kind of a complex accounting question. And if you just count them, it’s not actually 24! But if you look in rabbinic Judaism, that’s actually the tradition that there’s 24 books in their Bible, and Ezra is one of the first texts that say that. So it became kind of foundational in both, but for different reasons. But yeah, so it’s related to both, but also, how we understand both traditions weren’t really there when this text. They were in flux too, I guess is the way to put it.

Shirley Paulson

It is really fascinating to think that right there in these ancient texts, there’s a book that is pertinent to both. That’s just amazing. So do you think of this overall message as one of hope or doom and gloom?

Matthew Goff

Well, I’d say it’s hope, but you have to get through the doom and gloom to get there. But ultimately, it’s one of hope, I’d say. And it’s so interesting, the book never answers the question of, well, this catch-22 thing. God sends an angel to debate with him, named Uriel, and Uriel keeps emphasizing that salvation is for the few, not the many. But in the context of the book, it talks about the Torah as burnt, the Torah as lost. So the idea is that it’s still difficult. I think salvation is supposed to be difficult in this text, but it ends on a note with Ezra on a mountain copying out scripture.

And so the idea is that the Torah is made anew, that Ezra knew the Torah, it was lost. He knew it, he wrote it out again, and it’s another issue which we can talk about. But so he writes out the 24 books of the Bible, but then, and you can tell me what you think. He also writes 70 Books for the Wise, not for Israel as a whole. And there’s a whole debate about what to do with that. But it’s like, yeah, he writes 94 books in five days or something! But so the fact that it ends on a note of hope, I guess is the idea. But to get there, he really had to walk through the mud and deal with depression and grief. But it ends on—not that it’s easy, but that it’s possible, I guess—is the message of this book.

Shirley Paulson

Well, that sounds like it’s a realistic hope.

Matthew Goff

Yeah, I think that’s right. But it’s not trying to say there’s easy answers. So one way to think about it is that in Judaism at the time, there were really two pillars. One was the temple and one was the Torah. And it’s sort of like how Judaism reimagined itself after the destruction of the temple, which is the house of God, it was understood where God was.

You can think of Judaism as, I don’t know, like a donut. I mean, the hole at the center is my point. There’s an absence at the center. The center is gone. The Torah, and remembering the loss of the temple, is still very central in Judaism today. But the idea is that it used to be that a key way that Jews would follow the covenant was by participating in the temple sacrifice like offering sacrifices, having the pre-sacrifice.  That was a big part of it. That was like, it’d be sort of like what would happen to Catholicism if Rome was destroyed. That would be sort of the epoch level kind of question. And the idea is that salvation is really a text-based covenant, the Torah, and not the temple itself.

Shirley Paulson

It sounds like this is a text that is really important for us to read

Matthew Goff

I wish more people would read it!

Shirley Paulson

You have whetted our appetite in a really good way.

Matthew Goff

Yeah.

Shirley Paulson

We’re about to pass the mic over to our guests here, but before we do, I just want to pause a moment and make sure you’ve all found your way over to the new Bible and Beyond courses on our website and found the new course titled “Introducing Nag Hammadi and Related Texts.” So in fact, Matthew, maybe you could tell us in just one sentence or two, what’s the difference between the Apocrypha and Nag Hammadi?

Matthew Goff

So yes, so the Nag Hammadi texts were like the Dead Sea Scrolls found in the late 1940s. So they were found in some caves in Egypt, and it’s about 48, 49 texts that we have. Apparently one of the Bedouin or Arabs who found them used some as kindling to light a fire. We might’ve had more, but they’re from the fourth century CE and provide a fascinating window into the Christianity of the time, which is so different. And what they show is so different from how people understand Christianity today. But Shirley knows more about that stuff than I do.

Shirley Paulson

We do have a question in the chat that I thought was worth asking us here. Margi is asking: I thought the Dead Sea Scrolls included a full version of Isaiah, which I assumed was written much earlier.

Matthew Goff

It’s true, Margie. So one of the few scrolls that’s intact is a book of Isaiah. Some of you might’ve been to the shrine of the book in Jerusalem and you can see it, and it’s not exactly the same, but it’s very, very close to the book of Isaiah in our Bibles based on that medieval manuscript. And there, the key point is that some of that text shows that some of those later, what those scribes were writing in the medieval period definitely came, we’re copying ancient forms of this text. What I’d emphasize is that about the number of times when the Dead Sea Scrolls biblical text matches, the later medieval text matches it exactly is 41% of the time. And Ezra, this Isaiah case is one of the best examples of that. So yeah, they match some of the later stuff, but there’s much more biblical scriptural diversity than that. But your basic point is right, Margie,

Shirley Paulson

Very interesting. Thank you for that. So this is the time. If you’ve got a question, it’s helpful if you raise your electronic hand so I can see you.

But while you’re thinking, let me ask another question myself. The apocryphal books presents an image of the end of history, I think. So does Ezra have any particular ideas of redemption himself or is it just sort of like it’s all going to end up nicely because God does it that way? Or what is his own thought about that?

Matthew Goff

Well, so you mean sort of the image of: what’s it all going to look like when it happens? And so in a way, this gets at your doom-and -gloom, meaning it’s like the Book of Revelation in the sense that there’s kind of an evil empire now that needs to be destroyed. And it’s very clear this text talks about that as Rome, and imagines the fourth beast of Daniel as an eagle, the classic symbol of Rome. And then once that is destroyed, then what you get in a lot of apocalyptic literature—you don’t go to heaven. But it’s rather that this world is sort of like  in the Book of Revelation, the heaven—the New Jerusalem—descends. It’s not the rapture, it’s the opposite! It’s like this world changes, and evil’s gone. And there’s something like that here, in this text. So it’s kind of like a re-imagining of earth in a sort of radically new key.

Shirley Paulson

Oh, very good. Okay.

And so Sara has her hand up.

Sara

Okay. I’m having an image here that the way the Protestant Bible is kind of like the donut with the hole in the middle. Is there, in existence, or could there be, a Bible where all these things are in a continuum?

Matthew Goff

Yes. Meaning …

Sara

Like, not bothering with Old Testament, New Testament, in between, etc., but just one sweep?

Matthew Goff

Yeah. So thanks. If I understand you correctly, if you look in the Catholic Bible, all of these books that the Protestants called Apocrypha are just in there. Is that what you mean?

Sara

Well, I think so. I guess I’ve never had an opportunity to look into a Catholic Bible. So does it look like just a continuum, if you look into a Catholic Bible?

Matthew Goff

Some of the books… So, what I’d recommend… it’s not just there in one kind of section. Rather, they’re distributed throughout. But if you look at what Shirley showed, the New Oxford Annotated Bible, it’s the same one. Or the Westminster Study Bible that Shirley showed. This book [New Oxford Annotated Bible] has the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Apocrypha. And I designed my book to be one introductory chapter on every book in the apocrypha here [in the New Oxford Annotated Bible]. But this Study Bible follows the original, but lost, Protestant format of there being three sections, and the middle one being the Apocrypha. So you can find this stuff, I guess, but when you look at most Protestant Bibles, or what most people call the Bible, you won’t find this stuff.

Sara

Sure. And mixing in some of the Nag Hammadi texts, you could almost really have it stuffed full.

Matthew Goff

Yeah. And some of those texts, it’s the Gospel of Thomas and the pseudepigraphy  that we saw with Ezra, you find in an explicitly Christian context in the Nag Hammadi stuff. So there, it’s a similar thing in the sense that they understood these biblical figures as not simply characters but authors. And so it’s not just a fixed thing. And they were expanding the corpus.

Sara

Well, studying with Shirley, as a lot of us have, we’ve gotten a sense of: “By golly, we’ve been missing a lot by not studying the next…”

Matthew Goff

…That’s a good place!

Sara

And just what you’re saying tonight is giving me the same feeling that we’ve been missing a lot of important scripture by not paying attention to that apocryphal stuff.

Matthew Goff

You’re making me feel like I’m doing my job. So yeah, yes. And Luther said, “This stuff is good to read!” He wanted people to read this stuff. And Luther—if you look in his Bible—he had little prologues to these things and some of these books he really, really liked. It’s just that he didn’t have them in Hebrew, so he didn’t feel comfortable putting them, or keeping them, in the Old Testament. Some he didn’t like; but a lot of them, he really did. He did not like 2 Ezra, by the way. He did not like this book.

And I’ll answer your question, but I’ll briefly say why. At the time, a lot of the more radical Protestants, like the Anabaptists, were much more revolutionary, kind of alarmist and very much thinking toward an End Times format. And for those people, for a lot of them, both Revelation and 4 Ezra were central to those people. So actually some of them were radical Protestants who didn’t like a lot of Apocrypha stuff. But some of those people really, really liked this book, and Luther hated those folks. So that’s why he didn’t like this book.

Shirley Paulson

Wait, wait. Before you go on, you used another word I think you need to define. You were talking about the pseudepigrapha.  Can you tell us what that means?

Matthew Goff

Oh yeah. “Pseudepigrapha.” So I mean, the idea we have, they didn’t have the same sense of authorship that we do. If you write a book, you want to see your name on the cover, you wrote it, and we have intellectual copyright. If I take Shirley’s book and I put my name on it and sell, that’s a problem. But they didn’t think like that back then. And think of author in terms of authority, if I’m writing something important or if I see it in terms of a tradition relating to say Isaiah or Jeremiah or Ezra, like saying that that figure wrote it as opposed to what we would call the real name of the real author. So that’s kind of what I mean by psfa. And that’s all over the place in this time period. We’re talking about stuff gets attributed to Abraham and Ezra and Baruch and lots of figures and on this period, and then that’s something the Christians really picked up on. The Nag Hammadi things…

Margi

So I have here the Harper Collins Study Bible, and it has the Apocrypha in it.

Matthew Goff

Yes.

Margi

Which is interesting. Well, I’m actually finding there are different things here, designations of books associated with Ezra and Nehemiah. Anyway, it’s a little confusing about the Ezra books

Matthew Goff

Because there’s 3 Ezra and there’s 4 Ezra. I think that edition was done in the nineties, and we just came out with a new edition, the SBL Study Bible.

Margi

Are you happy with that edition? Because I have read that the pages are so thin that they bleed.

Matthew Goff

I’ve heard that critique. Yes. Actually, I’m one of the editors on the Apocrypha side, so we helped put this together. But yes, you’re not the first person I’ve heard. That wasn’t my idea. But yes, the pages are a little too thin, and I’ve heard that before. So hopefully in the next edition, when it gets printed, they will change that.

Margi

Yeah, I think I’m going to wait. I already have two study bibles, and I’m like, I don’t know how many one needs to really have.

Matthew Goff

Yeah, in that one, I wasn’t involved in that as much, but there was a large effort to redo the translations of all these texts. But yeah,

Margi

It’s using the updated edition, right? NRSVue?

Matthew Goff

Yeah, that’s what it is.

Margi

Great. That’s interesting. Well, one other thing: I had a huge family Bible probably four inches thick with a real heavy cover that I felt like I couldn’t move when I was downsizing. And I sent it to my niece, who is the only person in that generation who has much interest in Christianity at all, as far as I can tell. But I did look through it first. It had a birth record and stuff. My brother and I are in there. I hadn’t carried it further, but it has the Apocrypha in it between the Old and  New Testaments.

Matthew Goff

Yes. Normally. Yeah, I guess that’s right. When a lot of the Protestants didn’t like the stuff. But when it came to… if you look in the 19th century, when they went into these kinds of big Bibles, family Bibles—which I’m imagining what you’re talking about—is a really big thing. And the idea is that bulk matters. You want it to be something that’s going to be on the mantle piece for generations. And there the idea is that for most people, a lot of that stuff like the apocrypha primarily had value as filler material. They wanted big books at the same time.

Then, when the Protestants were missionizing, they actually did the opposite thing because it was cheaper to send smaller Bibles. And they made a decision to not include the Apocrypha in Bibles that were being sent out to missionary context, because it was the exact opposite. They wanted cheaper, smaller Bibles. But yeah, you’re exactly right, Margie, that family Bibles would often have this stuff even among Protestants.

Margi

Yeah. I’m sorry, I didn’t keep it.

Shirley Paulson

Helen, I think you had a question.

Helen

I am just fascinated with the parallels that you made between the book of Revelation and 2 Ezra. And I wondered, first of all, if John, the prophet that came up with the Book of Revelation, knew about 2 Ezra, because certainly that Revelation is steeped with Jewish scripture.

And the second question is, because they’re so close together, eventually the Christian Bible incorporated biblical Revelation much to Martin Luther’s dismay and the Jewish canon incorporated 2 Ezra. And I wondered if you have any kind of understanding of why one community incorporated one and the other community incorporated the other?

Matthew Goff

Yeah, it’s a great question to think about. So your first question is really… I really like that. So yes, you’re exactly right. The more you look, the more you see in terms of the similarities between 2 Esdras and the Book of Revelation. They’re both apocalyptic and they’re both highly, highly engaged in the Apocalyptic tradition, and in particular, Daniel. So for example, they’re both reading Daniel 7 about the vision of the Fourth Beast as kind of this template for the End Times. And you look at that vision. It describes in vivid detail the first three beasts, but the fourth one, which is the worst, it doesn’t describe at all—which leads to the question of what does it look like? And then the beast in Revelation, it’s the fourth beast, but it’s like an amalgam of the three. And then the fourth beast according to 4 Ezra is this eagle with three heads that comes out of the sea, and it’s very strange.

So they’re both kind of asking the same question, like: what does that fourth beast look like? Now, my own sense, we don’t have a smoking gun to your question. Oh yeah, and the figure of Ezra doesn’t come up in Revelation. And so I think my own sense is to say they’re dealing with the same problems and turning to the same traditions at the same time. But I’m not sure there’s a direct way that they knew of each other or not. Well, it’s possible, but there’s no evidence for that. But it’s really good to think about those books together. There’s so many…  The more you look, the more you find there’s a dissertation in that.

Yeah, yeah, that’s exactly right. And those early radical Protestants saw that they read them together. But I’d also say, the Jewish Bible—they revere the figure of Ezra, and they revere traditions that you see in this book, but they don’t actually have this book. I’d say that there were Jewish traditions that this text picks up on. But this book and the whole issue of the 70 Books for the Wise—like the Hebrew in rabbinic Judaism, the common term for the rabbis or the sage is ham, which means “the wise.” So the idea, there’s some early conception of rabbis here, but it’s more kind of like proto-rabbinic than rabbinic, I’d say. But yeah, but it’s thinking about this stuff in relation to Judaism that’s really important. So thank you.

Shirley Paulson

Could you maybe tell us a little bit more about, or, describe the story a little bit more for us? Like the woman, and what was going on with her issue? I think we went over that so fast.

Matthew Goff

So it begins with these dialogues between Ezra and this angel Uriel, and they go back and forth, and it’s a theological debate between a prophet and an angel in this very interesting way. And at first, Ezra doesn’t like his answers. And in chapter 4, he says it’s better not to have been born than to suffer and not know why. At first he doesn’t want to tell him. He asks him, “Well, tell me, can you measure the wind?” In the context of the time, they couldn’t do that. And he’s like, “No, I can’t.” And then the angel is like, “Well, if you can’t, then you can’t know basic things about this world. How am I supposed to tell you about the ways of God?” So they get this where they don’t really … the angel actually gets kind of cagey in interesting ways, but I’d say it’s not when it really changes from a sort of theological debate and more about how it goes from lamentation or the odyssey to consolation to restoration, I’d say. And the key point is with him watching, seeing that woman grieving over the death of her son. And then it becomes less of a theological debate and more of consoling. And then he’s less of this angry, sad man, and then he becomes more of a leader.

Joy

So I picked up on that when I read through 2 Esdras, and I think I see where the healing comes, because most of that book, up until number 10 is all about how God made it, right? But humans messed it all up and there doesn’t seem to be a solution. But then, when it gets into 10, and he’s dealing with trying to console this woman, he says to her, “Shake off your great sadness so that the mighty one can be merciful to you again.” And I think that’s what it all was about: “Stop mulling around with all the things that we’ve done wrong! And what made it all happen bad, shake that off, and give God a chance to show mercy to you.” And that’s when it’s coming to him too, because when he talks, her face starts to shine and then he looks up. So they’re both changing their whole perspective and starting to see that it isn’t about trying to fix all these bad things, but to put it off and pay attention to God, who will show you the reality that there is a city being built.

Matthew Goff

Yeah. Yeah. That’s great. I like that. So kind of trust the process kind of thing! And it’s not about answering these questions, it’s about, yeah, I think that’s right. This idea of trying to console this woman, and then Ezra—he gives visions there, and he’s less questioning. You’re right, it’s not simply the woman’s grief, but him trying to console her and seeing how they actually talk about him being given more visions because of how he reacted to her grief. So when it came to those theological questions, like the angel was kind of cagey, but you’re right: after that interaction between him and the woman, he’s more like the angels. Now he’s like, “I’m going to tell you more about how it’s all going to end. It is all going to happen soon.” And let me mention one other point, which I think relates to what you’re talking about, maybe. But we can think of this whole thing as historical fantasy, meaning if you read the text as the claims of the text, we know it was written in like 100 CE, but in the context, it’s Ezra in the sixth century BCE in Babylon, in the context of exile.

And then he’s saying that it’s all going to end soon. So meaning at that level, the temple we’re actually talking about—which was destroyed—was never built it. I don’t know what the word is, but where it’s on some TV shows where they imagine that if history went a certain way… One that comes to mind is the Man in the High Castle. What would’ve happened if the Nazis had won World War II?– Where they’re sort of imagining what it would be like in a… we’re not just historical fiction, but historical fantasy, I guess is the idea where it’s kind of set in the real world, but imagining that certain things had happened differently. And that’s kind of what 4 Ezra is doing. The Second Temple was never built. So the whole thing where it—and I think this is related to your comment, I’m not fully sure—but the idea that they’re trying to make sense of this grief in this kind of imagined space, and then those final eschatological visions, he actually tells Ezra to enter the visionary city of Jerusalem, so it’s a woman, and it’s a city, but it’s the woman is this imaginary way.

So it’s not just a woman, it’s kind of this imagined space and where God gives him visions. And so your comment, I think is how the new Jerusalem—well, not using the phrase “New Jerusalem” but it’s like that—and that’s the response to the grief that opens up the visionary Jerusalem. So it’s a very good comment.

Shirley Paulson

Oh, thank you so much, Joy. Thank you so much for that wonderful kind of conclusion for us. That was very helpful.

And thank you for your response to that too. I can’t believe our hour is up already. I feel like we’re just getting our teeth into this text, but maybe Matt, could you show us your book one more time?

Matthew Goff

So it’s designed for a general readership, and I think the folks here … I made a real effort to write something for a general audience, not for the ivory tower. And so I had my undergrad students read chapters, and so it’s kind of designed for a lot of people here, meaning if you’ve heard something about these texts or something about the apocrypha and you want to learn more, that’s what this is for.

Shirley Paulson

Wonderful. We found the right guy to do this. And I want to tell everybody that Matt is going to reappear on a podcast coming up in a couple of months. He and Dylan Burns will be talking together about the Dead Sea Scrolls and Nag Hammadi. So we’ll have that on a podcast coming up fairly soon.

Before we wrap up, let me mention how much we appreciate your support. If you enjoy our Bible and beyond discussions, would you please consider becoming a sponsor by joining our Patreon community? Just go to patreon.com/bibleandbeyond.

So now what’s happening next month? Dr. Ally Kateusz is returning, and she’ll be talking about “The Easter Women.” As always, she has some fascinating ancient artwork to show us.

And I want to thank Matt Goff for opening up the pages of the apocrypha for us tonight and helping us figure out why we want to learn more. Thanks so much for being with us tonight, everybody.

Matthew Goff

Thank you. I enjoyed the discussion.