1 PREPRINT – A.Y. Reed, “Beyond Revealed Wisdom and Apocalyptic Epistemology: Early Christian Transformations of Enochic Traditions about Knowledge,”

In recent years, research on early Judaism has deconstructed the traditional distinction between “Wisdom ” and “Apocalyptic. ” Rather than dramatizing the differences between sapiential and apocalyptic writings in dichotomous terms, a growing number of scholars are seeking to explore their many overlaps and common concerns.1 Instead of categorizing texts either as the products of this-worldly Wisdom teachers or as the products of apocalyptic visionaries, scholars have further speculated about the shared scribal and/or priestly settings that shaped multiple genres of early Jewish literature.2 As a result, points of contrast and conflict in our extant texts have been profitably re-read in terms of the complex dynamics of contact and competition among Jewish circles, schools, and communities in Second Temple times.3 In the process, fresh analyses of sapiential and apocalyptic writings have helped us to recover a more nuanced understanding of early Jewish cosmology, eschatology, and epistemology.4 Arguably, this new perspective on “Wisdom ” and “Apocalyptic ” has transformed our understanding of early Judaism and Christian Origins. In what follows, I would like to push these insights a bit further, asking whether and how they might also shed light on second-and third-century Christianity, in general, and the use of Jewish apocalyptic texts and traditions by early Christian apologists and philosophers, in particular. Towards this goal,