Introduction to the Text:
The Apocalypse of Sedrach begins with a sermon about the importance of love for Christians. The second portion of the text, the apocalypse itself, is about Sedrach’s questioning of God’s ways. Near the end of the text, Sedrach even convinces God to decrease the required amount of time for repentance from 3 years to 20 days. Because of God’s mercy, Sedrach allows God to take his spirit to heaven.
The Apocalypse of Sedrach was written between the 2nd and 5th centuries CE, ultimately receiving its final form in the 10th or 11th century CE. In terms of the content, though, the text is derived and pieced together from two different circles: the sermon developed as a product of Byzantine Christianity and the apocalypse developed as a product of Judaism.
Historical Roots and Parallel Growth:
As I’ve demonstrated many times previously, Pseudepigrapha provide insights into the worldviews of various Jewish and Christian groups. In other words, they provide individual voices to history. This is an important point in reading the Apocalypse of Sedrach. The compiled text includes products of both both Byzantine Christianity and Judaism. Being from different traditions, each portion of text was composed at a different period of time and eventually merged into one document. This inconspicuous and essential detail, though, is important to understanding the historical relationship between Jews and Christians between the 5th and 10th/11th centuries.
In order for divergent traditions to come together in a single text, people or materials from each tradition must have been in each others presence at one time or other. While the Apocalypse of Sedrach does not clearly illuminate any specific moments of history, it more generally reflects the nature of the relationship between some Jews and Christians. The Apocalypse of Sedrach would have required conscious synchronization of Jewish and Christian ideas, indicating that religious cross-pollination was an active and important thing in some regions where both traditions were practiced. Methodologically speaking, it highlights the importance of focusing on more flexible categories of what constitutes religion and avoiding the tendency of developing rigid categories for what constitutes religion.
Although there are many primary source documents to explore the relationship between Jews and Christians during the period at hand, I intentionally did not refer to or even consider them. For my goal was to demonstrate that this particular Pseudepigraphon (singular of Pseudepigrapha) is an independent and autonomous attestation of the nature of Jewish-Christian relations during the Middle-Ages.
Bibliography:
S. Agourides. “Apocalypse of Sedrach”. J. H. Charlesworth, editor. Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, volume I. Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1983.
The Biblical Review 