A University of Aberdeen biblical scholar has been awarded a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship to reevaluate the significance of the "biblical pseudepigrapha" as witnesses to philosophical cultures through antiquity.
The biblical pseudepigrapha are writings from the ancient and medieval world that are fictively associated with biblical characters such as Adam, Enoch, Abraham and Moses. Some traditions, including the Ethiopian and Eritrean Orthodox, regard specific pseudepigrapha as Scripture, but mostly they are categorized as ‘non-canonical.’ They are often treated as being of marginal significance.
Professor Grant Macaskill, the Kirby Laing Chair of New Testament Exegesis at the University of Aberdeen, has been awarded £191,005 for a project entitled "Biblical Pseudepigrapha and Eclectic Philosophical Cultures in Antiquity”.
It will fund a 3-year programme of research which will see him working with texts preserved in a number of ancient and medieval languages including Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syriac, Ethiopic, Arabic, Coptic, Armenian, Church Slavonic and Sanskrit.
While biblical scholars and theologians are expected routinely to engage with modern scholarship in French, German and Spanish, Professor Macaskill’s work will also demand extensive interaction with modern Slavic scholarship, particularly in Bulgarian and Russian.
The Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship is the second to be awarded in recent years to an academic from the department of Divinity at Aberdeen with Professor Joachim Schaper successful in 2021.
The project will build on Professor Macaskill’s previous funded projects on the Slavonic Book of Enoch and his arguments for the need to reconceptualise the study of ancient texts associated with the biblical traditions, moving away from models principally governed by the significance of groups and their identities and towards more complex accounts of geographical cultures.
Professor MacAskill said: “The significance of the biblical pseudepigrapha - works fictively associated with biblical characters - as a window onto the eclectic philosophical cultures of antiquity has been neglected, often because they don't conform to ‘western’ intellectual sensibilities.
“When paid appropriate attention, the pseudepigrapha reveal much of the eclectic philosophical and intellectual cultures that developed as Asian and North African intellectual traditions merged with those of the Mediterranean world, freshly generating recombinant philosophies, mediated through narrative and myth. We readily notice the elements from Stoicism and Platonism that have been woven into Jewish and Christian material, but we can overlook those from Buddhism, Zoroastrianism and Vedic material, all of which contributed to the intellectual world of antiquity.
“This project will develop and apply these insights more extensively.”
The award will run from September 1st 2025 for 36 months. Professor Macaskill will continue to be based in Aberdeen, but with visits to Harvard and Yale incorporated.