PSEUDEPIGRAPHY, AUTHORSHIP, AND THE RECEPTION OF ‘THE BIBLE’ IN LATE ANTIQUITY* Annette Yoshiko Reed “Who has made the simple folk believe that books belong to Enoch, even though no scriptures existed before Moses? On what basis will they say that there is an apocryphal book of Isaiah? . . . How could Moses have an apocryphal book?” In his 39th Festal Letter (367 ce), Atha- nasius thus voices his incredulity at the very phenomenon of biblical pseudepigraphy. In his view, the production of books in the names of biblical figures can only be a specious and pernicious practice, moti- vated by deceptive aims. “Heretics,” he proclaims, “write these books whenever they want and then grant and bestow upon them dates, so that, by publishing them as if they were ancient, they might have a pretext for deceiving the simple folk!” 1 Athanasius expresses these complaints about the pseudepigraphi- cal authors of “apocrypha” 2 in the same festal letter so famous for * An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Concordia conference on “The Reception and Interpretation of the Bible in Late Antiquity” in October 2006. The final form has benefited much from the questions and suggestions that I received during the conference as well as from the other papers and broader discussions. Warmest thanks to Lorenzo DiTommaso and Lucian Turcescu for the opportunity to participate in such a rich and thought-provoking event. This paper also integrates portions of another conference presentation: “Between ‘Biblical’ and ‘Parabiblical’: Pre-canonical Perspectives on Writing, Reading, and Revelation,” presented at the Society of Biblical Literature Annual Meeting, consultation on “Rethinking the Concept and Categories of ‘Bible’ in Antiquity,” November 2006. For feedback and critique of the written version, I am also grateful to Hindy Najman, Andy Chi Kit Wong, and Benjamin Fleming. This research was supported by a grant from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. 1 Translations of Ep. 39 follow D. Brakke, Athanasius and the Politics of Asceticism (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 326–32. 2 In this article, I use the term “apocrypha” only with reference to the late antique Christian discourse about “apocryphal” and “canonical” scriptures; in this usage, “apo- crypha” is a value-laden term denoting books deemed dangerously similar to biblical books by some ecclesiarchs. For our present purposes, it is significant that biblical pseude- pigrapha emblematized this danger. The negative connotations of the term are also important to note inasmuch as they were reapplied in modern times to speci fic groups of texts (“Old Testament apocrypha” = books traditionally in the Catholic Old Testament but not in the Jewish Tanakh, which were labeled with the polemical term “apocry- pha” during the Protestant Reformation and which were deemed “deuterocanonical”