Customer Reviews

Exploring Jewish Literature of the Second Temple Period: A Guide for New Testament Students (Christian Classics Bible Studies)

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Larry Helyer does an excellent job of introducing most of the relevent literature of the Second Temple period and its general influence on the writers of the New Testament and the Early Church. Excellent review or introduction depending on your background. I think this should be mandatory reading for every pastor and bible student. Well written with many chapter breaks to keep the organization of this large volume. This is the context of the New Testament that most Christians are not even aware exists. I have already recommended this texts to many people.

I went into this book fairly hopeful; I'm interested in the literature written in the intertestamental period, and have never had much occasion to really dig into reading works like the apocryphal and pseudopigraphical writings of the Jews. Unfortunately, Helyer's book disappoints for a student desirous of anything other than Helyer's own summaries and outlines.

In the early sections, Helyer at least implies that he's going to generously excerpt the works to which his titling and mammoth book refer. Further, with the book clocking in at over 500 pages, it seems only natural to expect large portions of at least the major works of these times to be quoted. This is not the case, though. For every paragraph of quoted text, there are at least 5 or 10 pages of Helyer's own thoughts, commentary, introduction, and notes. You get a much greater sense of Helyer's style than the style of the works cited; you get a much better sense of Helyer's opinions than an ability to form your own.

The most useful portion of this work for me was a good reference as to which collections of the early Jewish works might be worth buying. Unfortunately, I'll have to make those purchases and then read these works myself. Very disappointing.

This book pretends to cover Jewish literature of the Second Temple Period. However it covers only a subset of it. I could hardly believe it (but on the other hand I have already had similar experiences with the editor, IVP). For example Helyer does not seem to know about important literature such as pseudo-orphic poetry. Another kind of example is very important literature which is only very partially covered (the so important Sibylline oracles are hardly covered, only book V is spoken of). I suspect that the cause may be that Helyer still identifies ancient Judaism too much with modern Judaism (i.e. the Pharisean strand) so that he spends too much much space on rabbinic Judaism or rather fundamentalist strands (related to the Dead Sea Scrolls). On the contrary the Jewish literature of the time was very broad, rich, open and enlightened by Hellenism. Only Philo gets an acceptable treat, the huge bulk of Hellenic Judaism is savaged or ignored. Would it be that Hellenism is not fit for fundamentalism?

The book would be OK (the advantage being that it is low-level, very accessible) if the subject had been limited, e.g. strands of rabbinic or cultic kinds, or hardly influenced by Hellenism (and then excise the part on Philo). But with such a broad title, the books totally fails to cover the huge subject claimed.
Extensive surveys of the Jewish literature of the time are found in very expensive volumes such as those by Albert-Marie Denis published at Brill's or Peters'. A cheap, intelligent and accessible introduction is John Collins' Between Athens and Jerusalem: Jewish Identity in the Hellenistic Diaspora (The Biblical Resource Series) (Eerdmans, 2000), e.g. covering the judaic Sibylline and Orphic literature. Collins, although not pretending to be a survey, will help the readers of the current book realize the kind of things they are missing if relying on Helyer's book.

Here is an absolutely excellent one volume survey of the second temple period Jewish literature: apocrypha, pseudepigrapha, Josephus, Philo, apocalyptic, dead sea scrolls, mishnah and targums. Helyer gives a historical and thematic intro with a fair amount of detail for a survey, into the Jewish literature between the "old testament" and on up to new testament times. He also shows the literary and thematic connections between the different literary collections and Christian origins. A superb book !!