The salient feature of pseudepigraphy, the false attribution of authorship, appears no

longer to be relevant in the categorization of works as "pseudo-X." the term "pseudo

- " sometimes implies that the ancient author is consciously writing pseudepigrapha,
in other instances it means only that the work has some unexpressed relationship to
a biblical or other work on the same theme . While we need a common set of
references for these documents , our terminology should be more discriminating.
For students both of the Old and New Testaments the value of the non-Canonical
Jewish literature from 200 B.C. to a. d. 100 is practically recognized on every side
alike by Jewish and Christian scholars. But hitherto no attempt has been made to
issue an edition of this literature as a whole in English.

With the recovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls and related manuscript discoveries, and
with the number of documents now in the Old Testament Pseudepigrapha comes a
quite new awareness of the vast amount of Early Jewish literature we now possess.
Many of the texts we now consider paradigmatically important for the study of Early
Judaism and Early Christianity were simply unknown to such erudite and
indefatigable scholars as M.-J. Lagrange and W. Bousset. With each new discovery
of an old document should also come the question, 'How much more has been
irretrievably lost?' (see chapter 2, n. 51). First-century Judaism was intellectually
alive, new compositions poured forth from many segments of that complex we
misrepresent by the overworked word 'religion', as if we have a categorical container
into which we pour our undigested data.