Faith & RitualGreek → English
Pseudepigrapha
/ˌsuːdɪˈpɪɡrəfə/noun
Jewish and Christian texts written under the borrowed name of a patriarch, prophet or apostle.
The Greek roots
ψευδής
pseudḗs
false, lying
ἐπιγραφή
epigraphḗ
inscription, title
Literally: “falsely titled writings”
The story of the word
The label is about the byline, not the contents. First Enoch, the Testament of Abraham and Third Corinthians all claim authors who were long dead when they were composed. Ancient readers did not always treat this as fraud; attaching a text to a great name signalled the tradition it belonged to. Protestant scholarship uses the term for books outside both canon and Apocrypha.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → English
- First recorded
- 17th century
Same family
pseudonymepigraphepigraphypseudoscience
In a sentence
The seminar spent a term on the Enochic pseudepigrapha.
Qumran turned up copies of pseudepigrapha known before only in Ethiopic.