Pseudepigrapha

The Pseudepigrapha (Greek for “false writings”) is a body of Jewish writings from the Second Temple period attributed by title to ancient biblical figures, such as 1 Enoch, 2 Enoch, 2 Baruch, the Apocalypse of Abraham, Jubilees, and the Testament of Moses, who did not actually write them.¹ Unlike the Apocrypha, which the Septuagint transmitted alongside the Old Testament and which Rome later declared deuterocanonical, the Pseudepigrapha was never part of any Jewish or Christian canon.² The New Testament quotes it once: Jude cites 1 Enoch by name (Jude 14-15).

Confessional Witness

No confession names the Pseudepigrapha specifically. The Second London Baptist Confession excludes only “the books commonly called Apocrypha” from the canon, declaring them “no otherwise to be approved, or made use of, than other human writings.”³ The confession’s underlying principle, that the canon is closed and no writing outside it carries divine authority, applies to the Pseudepigrapha with at least as much force: unlike the Apocrypha, these writings were never transmitted within the Septuagint or proposed for inclusion in the biblical canon by any council the confession’s own tradition recognizes.

Biblical Basis

The one point at which the New Testament touches the Pseudepigrapha directly is Jude’s citation of 1 Enoch: “Enoch also, the seventh from Adam, prophesied of these, saying, Behold, the Lord cometh with ten thousands of his saints” (Jude 14). Michael Kruger notes that this citation became, “according to Jerome,” a reason some in the early church hesitated over Jude’s own place in the canon, even though Jude was otherwise well received: named in the Muratorian canon, acknowledged as apostolic Scripture by Tertullian, cited in a now-lost commentary by Clement of Alexandria, received as fully canonical by Origen, and placed by Eusebius among the books “used publicly with the rest in most churches.”⁴

Historical Development

The Pseudepigrapha shares a common literary shape across its various titles. Philip Sears, surveying the corpus alongside the Dead Sea Scrolls and the book of Daniel, describes its characteristic apocalyptic form: its mysteries “were mediated through dreams, angelic intermediaries, and heavenly journeys,” with “past events or historical figures… reimagined as prefigurations of eschatological realities.”⁵ Attaching a composition to a figure such as Enoch or Abraham let a Second Temple author cast a contemporary message inside that figure’s own voice, framed as revelation rather than as the author’s own words.

Whether that framing was itself understood as a legitimate literary convention or as a false claim to authority became a live question once scholars began applying the same category to certain New Testament letters. Kruger reports Richard Bauckham’s defense of pseudonymity as an accepted device: “the pseudepigraphal device is… not a fraudulent means of claiming apostolic authority, but embodies a claim to be a faithful mediator of the apostolic message,” and that a pseudonymous author “was not consciously deceiving anybody.”² Kruger argues this does not fit the historical record: J. A. T. Robinson, addressing the evidence for such a convention within the church, concluded, “If we ask what is the evidence for orthodox epistles being composed in the name of the apostles within a generation or two of their lifetime, and for this being an acceptable literary convention within the church, the answer is nil.”² The early church, on this reading, received a work as Scripture because of its actual apostolic or prophetic origin, not because a pseudonymous attribution succeeded in evoking one. By that same standard, the Pseudepigrapha’s own attributions to Enoch, Abraham, and Moses did not give it a place in the canon.

Objections and Responses

Ancient readers accepted pseudonymous attribution as a normal literary convention, so it shouldn’t count against a work’s authority. Kruger answers that no evidence supports this for writings claiming apostolic or prophetic origin specifically: the church “consistently rejected books that were known to be forged in the name of an apostle,” and Robinson found no evidence any orthodox writer accepted such a name as literary convention within the church.² A pseudonymous work also faces a further problem where its author writes as though personally present for events he did not witness, the same difficulty Kruger raises against treating 2 Peter’s claim to have seen the transfiguration (2 Pet. 1:16-18) as harmless convention.²

Jude quotes 1 Enoch as prophecy, so the New Testament itself treats at least one pseudepigraphal work as inspired. Kruger’s account of Jude’s reception answers this by separating quotation from canonization: Jude’s use of Enoch was, if anything, a source of hesitation about Jude, not evidence that Enoch itself gained canonical standing. The early church that eventually received Jude, the Muratorian canon, Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Eusebius, never extended that reception to 1 Enoch itself.⁴ Quoting a true statement from a non-canonical source, as Paul also does with pagan poets (Acts 17:28; Titus 1:12), does not certify the source’s own inspiration.

Related Doctrines

References

Michael J. Kruger, The Question of Canon: Challenging the Status Quo in the New Testament Debate (Nottingham: Apollos, 2013), “Abbreviations,” 9. ↩
Michael J. Kruger, Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2012), chap. 5, “The Apostolic Origins of the Canon.” ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵
The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 1, “Of the Holy Scriptures,” para. 3. ↩
Kruger, Canon Revisited, chap. 8, “Problem Books and Canonical Boundaries.” ↩ ↩²
Philip Chase Sears, “The Jewish Apocalyptic Mystery Schema,” in “Mysterion and the Salvation of ‘All Israel’ in Romans 9-11” (PhD diss., The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, 2019), 60. ↩