Moving from Etic to Emic Terminology to Describe Pseudepigrapha: A Proposal

In a previous post, I made the following comment:

I refuse to call the author of the treatise Pseudo-Dionysius. This is etic, not emic terminology. The author’s pen name is Dionysius the Aeropagite. It is puerile to suggest that there is something “pseudo” about this. The use of the pen name is meant to point to a truth, to wit, that the literature’s author seeks to fill the shoes of Dionysius the Aeropagite, to be his voice for a readership of a time and place beyond the Aeropagite’s own. The author might be referred to as “the Dionysius of later Christian tradition.”

An immense variety of ancient literature has come to be termed pseudepigrapha by modern scholarship. The term, in my view, is singularly unhelpful. It is about as helpful as grouping together the book of Ben Sira and the works of Aristotle under the heading of misogynist literature.

An umbrella term of a different kind would be more appropriate. Unfortunately, “Jewish and Christian literature of the Greco-Roman Period” covers too much and too little territory at the same time. 

It is always better to identify a category of literature on its own terms. “Pseudepigrapha” doesn’t cut it. No native informant, if we could interview one, would say, “I love this pseudepigraphon I’m reading.” Only someone hostile to a particular work would have called it that.

Furthermore, a great deal of so-called pseudepigrapha is no such thing. It is anonymous. The implied author of a book like 1 Enoch and 2 Baruch is not respectively Enoch and Baruch. Enoch and Baruch are persona quoted by an anonymous narrator. In principle, the situation is identical to that of the book of Deuteronomy.

What term might be used to describe all three of these works? A legitimate genre identification for all three is biographical literature. The works contain, consist of, and relate to facts and events of the life of a specific individual. To be sure, works like Deuteronomy, 1 Enoch, and 2 Baruch are not interested in recounting the life of Moses, Enoch, or Baruch per se. The works are interested in presenting events situated in a past in such a way that they are relevant for a present.

Deuteronomy, furthermore, is a component of a larger work, a history, and components of Deuteronomy belong to other genres, for example parenesis and law. 1 Enoch and 2 Baruch are fittingly termed apocalypses in the sense John Collins and others use that term.

All of these genre identifications have a place. Some are more helpful than others, but all, in any case, are emic, not etic. Not so the identification of literature as pseudepigrapha.

Problem solved? I doubt it. The temptation to apply an etic category will undoubtedly raise its ugly head again. In the cases of Deuteronomy, 1 Enoch, and 2 Baruch, it might seem fair to speak of the works as fictionalized narratives which concentrate on dimensions of the life of biblical figures. While not inaccurate, a like characterization unless carefully qualified gives the impression that the implied authors of these works – equivalent to the anonymous narrators of their narrative frames – were faced with a choice: whether to narrate dimensions and events of the life of Moses, Enoch, or Baruch based on ascertainable facts, or by a creative act of the religious imagination. 

They did not face such a choice. If they were going to write anything at all, it was going to be by virtue of an act of the imagination. There were no ascertainable facts on which a historical narrative in the modern sense might have been based.

It is also misleading to think that the authors might have chosen to write in their own voices. Were there any precedents for doing so in the case of the book of Deuteronomy? Not that we know of. If John, the author of the Christian apocalypse, wrote in his own voice, why couldn’t the authors of 1 Enoch and 2 Baruch have done likewise? That overlooks a basic fact. The dramatic power of the latter works would be radically diminished if the reception of the visions they report was not situated in the precise moments of the biblical timeline in which they are in fact situated.

A modest proposal. Let the books of Deuteronomy, 1 Enoch, and 2 Baruch be described on their own terms first of all. The sense in which the attribution of many of the words they contain to a Moses, an Enoch, or a Baruch, is a literary construct is a question worth addressing, but conclusions relative to that question are etic by definition. It hardly makes sense to refer to a piece of ancient literature in terms that at the time would have signaled hostile intent. Unless, of course, that is the intent.

Comments

[Kevin P. Edgecomb]

Biblical Studies these days is all about the etic, just as high fashion is all about the temporary. Its distancing from the works, a distancing or conscious bracketing of faith in the attempt to achieve objectivity or making gold from lead, I forget which, is at the core of the "discipline." Oh, and fancy words, too. They're a tea party where everyone talks about the nutty aunt in the attic (whom several attendees secretly hate, but they only discuss it among themselves quietly), the old and dear Auntie who actually believes these things, which belief titillates, yet frightens and mystifies sippers and nibblers, which all the while keeping the conversation going. So Auntie stays in her etic attic, as the partygoers are so much better informed than she is, bless her heart.

The ancients accepted these works as authentic, or at least enough ancients did so to guarrantee them the acceptance as authority so as to be transmitted to us. And I have to ask: what does it hurt? What does it hurt to actually believe that these works are authentic? Saints have been and are being raised with these works as authentic, and they have traveled mystical roads with grander vistas to greater destinations than historical-criticism will ever lead anyone. In the case of the Areopagitica, this is how they were received for well over a thousand years: as the writings of St Dionysius whom Paul converted after speaking at the Areopagus in Athens, the first bishop in Athens, the first Attic convert. It hurts nothing and no one to believe it, as we can see from the record. It doesn't matter one whit whether it's "true" or not. The work is greater than its pseudepigraphy.