(DOWNLOAD) "Jewish Apocalypse of Ezra" by Scriptural Research Institute # eBook PDF Kindle ePub Free
eBook details
- Title: Jewish Apocalypse of Ezra
- Author : Scriptural Research Institute
- Release Date : January 06, 2020
- Genre: Judaism,Books,Religion & Spirituality,Bible Studies,
- Pages : * pages
- Size : 276 KB
Description
In the early centuries of the Christian era, a number of texts called the Apocalypse of Ezra were in circulation among Jews and Christians. The original is believed to have been written in Hebrew, Aramaic, or Syriac, and is commonly known as the Jewish Apocalypse of Ezra. This version was translated into Greek sometime before 200 AD, and circulated widely within the early Christian churches. This book claimed that the prophet Ezra wrote 240 books, and its popularity seems to have inspired a number of 'Christian' Apocalypses of Ezra, presumably beginning with the 'Latin' Apocalypse of Ezra which claimed to be the "second book of the prophet Ezra." This prophet Ezra is not the scribe Ezra from the Jewish scriptures, but a prophet named Ezra that lived several decades earlier.
There is no consensus of when this Apocalypse was written, and traditional dating for it, based on the combined Jewish and Latin Apocalypses found in Catholic and Protestant apocrypha, places its origin in the 1st or 2nd centuries of the Christian era, as the Latin Apocalypse is very pro-Christian, and anti-Jewish. However, this dating is invalidated by the fact that the Latin Apocalypse was not originally part of the Jewish Apocalypse. When viewed separate from the influence of the Latin Apocalypse of Ezra, the Jewish Apocalypse of Ezra appears to had been written by someone either following an archaic form of Judaism, or someone that was very ignorant of Judaism. It contradicts the Torah in significant and obvious ways, meaning the author could not have had access to the Torah when he wrote the Apocalypse.
The Apocalypse repeats and references some of the stories found in the Torah and the other books set before the fall of Judah, and so the author must have been familiar with the content, but was working from memory. This is similar to the story in the Talmud of Ezra rewriting the Torah from memory after it was lost during the destruction of Jerusalem. If this story was true, then could not have been the Ezra from after the fall of Babylon to Persia, as that Ezra would have never seen the Torah. This would have had to have been an earlier Ezra, one old enough to have been in Jerusalem before it fell to the Babylonians, which at least supports the idea that there was a priest called Ezra in the early Babylonian captivity era.