Review of the book "Introduction to the Apocrypha: Jewish Books in Christian Bibles" by L.M. Wills

Abstract

The ever-growing editions of Pseudepigrapha have helped to destabilize the notion that Jewish books produced in the Hellenistic period held either a canonical or heretical status. But it was the 2020 publication of The Jewish Annotated Apocrypha, which Wills edited with Jonathan Klawans, that brought this idea to a mainstream audience. In the present work, Wills returns to the idea that, rather than thinking of ancient Jewish texts as canonical or noncanonical to all, modern readers should treat both biblical and apocryphal texts as having once been authoritative to many.....

The most interesting implications of Introduction to the Apocrypha are theological. As Wills puts it, “If different religious traditions grant authority to a Bible as a sort of constitution, the extra texts then indicate a shadow zone where the constitution is negotiated or expanded.” This theological cliff-hanger raises the stakes of Wills’s historical argument. Does the dissolution of boundaries between holy and profane texts dissolve the boundaries that keep the people of Israel separate from the rest of humanity? When the collection of Jewish scriptures dissolves, what is left that makes the Jewish people special? (from Conclusion)