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66 Alexander Golitzin 4 . A Monastic Setting for the Syriac Apocalypse of Daniel Just over a year and a half ago as I write, Professor Matthias Henze of Rice University published an edition with text, translation, annotations, and introduction of a Syrian Christian pseudepigraphon, which he entitled the Syriac Apocalypse of Daniel (hereafter, SAD).1 The document is preserved in a single manuscript, Harvard MS Syr 42, where it is placed toward the very end of a collection of ascetical literature dominated by a fairly complete assemblage of the works of John of Dalyatha (eighth century), and including brief selections from John bar Penkaye, Evagrius Ponticus, Basil the Great, Philoxenus of Mabbug, John Chrysostom, and the monks Gregory (of Cyprus?) and Simon (the Graceful?).2 Ostensibly quite unlike the materials that precede it, the SAD claims to offer its readers additional information about the life and prophecies of the biblical Daniel from the prophet’s own hand. Its first thirteen chapters , all in the first-person singular, combine narrative based on the canonical 1. Matthias Henze, The Syriac Apocalypse of Daniel: Introduction, Text, and Commentary, Studien und Texte zur Antike und Christentum 11 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001). I should like to take this occasion to thank Professor Henze for the gift of his book. The present essay is an expansion of the “response” I was asked to make to it for the “Christian Apocrypha Section,” at the Society of Biblical Literature annual meeting, November 19, 2001. 2. I am correcting Henze somewhat, in SAD 1–2, on the basis of Robert Beulay’s inventory over twenty years earlier of the same MS (then labeled Harvard Syriac 30) for his edition, La collection des lettres de Jean de Dalyatha, PO 39 (1978): 257–535, here 268–72. Henze’s summary of the MS contents does not take sufficient account of the overwhelming presence of John of Dalyatha. Over 90 out of 127 folio pages are devoted to John’s oeuvre. T h e S y r i a c A p o c a ly p s e o f D a n i e l 67 book and focusing on the prophet's adventures in the court of Babylon, with legendary materials which describe his further experiences with the Persian emperors and which, among other things, display a lively interest in the fate of the cult objects and priestly vestments attached to the service of Solomon's Temple, together with that king’s wonderful throne.3 The last two thirds of the book, chapters 14 to 40, present a single, unbroken vision of the last things, which culminates first in the appearance of Antichrist (chapters 21–24), and then in the manifestation of God in Zion (25–29), the enthronement of Christ on the temple mount (30–33), followed by the resurrection, last judgement, and entry of the righteous into the heavenly Jerusalem (34–39), and concluding with the messianic banquet (40).4 Professor Henze’s learned introduction and notes deal at some length— and chiefly—with the similarities to, and possible dependence of the SAD on, other works of apocalyptic literature from the late Second Temple era well into the centuries after Christ.5 His discussion here, together with the many parallels or affinities he indicates between this literature and the SAD, serves to set the latter firmly in the genre of apocalypse. More specifically, it is an “historical apocalypse.”6 According to the categories established just over twenty years ago by John Collins and others in Collins’s landmark edition of Semeia, this is a subgenre of apocalypse which does not focus primarily on an ascent to heaven, in the way of such pre-Christian and later, rabbinic-era apocalypses as 1 and 3 Enoch, or of such Christian exemplars as the Martyrdom and Ascent of Isaiah, nor does it feature a heavenly ascent as part of the narrative, as in the canonical books of Daniel and Revelation, but instead, like the pseudepigraphical 4 Ezra and 2 (Syriac) Baruch, concentrates exclusively on the end times, in particular on the ultimate manifestation of God that will usher in the eternal reign of heaven.7 At this point, however, Henze arrives at a couple of curious details about the SAD. If we allow (and I have no reason to contest) his dating of the work to the seventh century a.d., and his argument for placing it in a West Syrian, 3. SAD 2 and 4–11; Syriac, 33...

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