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IS THERE MORE TO THIS STORY THAN MEETS THE EYE?

Before we proceed to the inner meaning of the text, let’s remember that encoding secrets in the body of a Christian text is not something invented in 21st-century Hollywood thrillers. Even the Apostle Paul describes his insights into Jesus’ message as a “revelation of the mystery that was kept secret for long ages” (1 Corinthians 2:7). The Greek word mysterion means secret.¹ So finding an esoteric, secret level to a Christian text is as old as Christianity itself.

Recently, however, scholars have given up on identifying secret or esoteric Christian texts. In Kraemer’s words, any “texts that lack explicit Christian identifiers . . . are now uniformly classified as Jewish.” When these texts exhibit minor Christian features (e.g., a cross drawn in blood across a honeycomb), “such features are generally considered the results of Christian interpolation” (i.e., later Christian insertions into early Jewish texts). The result of all this “is that any anonymous or pseudonymous parabiblical text that does not scream Christian at us is almost certain to be labeled Jewish . . . thus greatly reducing the chances that we will ever identify a Christian parabiblical composition that lacks explicit Christian features.”² In other words, what this scholar is saying in very scholarly terms is that the game is rigged. The rules are that if it doesn’t scream “Christian” at us, it’s not Christian. And since—by definition—secret or esoteric texts don’t scream anything at us, they will never be labeled for what they actually are—that is, esoteric Christian texts. Kraemer goes on to say “I cannot think of a single, parabiblical narrative like Aseneth.”³ In other words, it’s unique and we have to be open to that uniqueness. To that end, Kraemer speculates that maybe the author of Joseph and Aseneth “was both Jewish and Christian.”⁴ If Kraemer is right on this point, the author of Joseph and Aseneth may be a member of the original group surrounding Jesus. This would situate the story in the 1st century.

We are aware that the secret history embedded in Joseph and Aseneth will arouse much controversy. Therefore, for the sake of caution, before we move on, let’s review for a moment why we think that the story that this text tells isn’t just an elaboration on the Biblical tale of Joseph and his wife Aseneth. In other words, why do we think that there is more to Joseph and Aseneth than the surface meaning? Here are the clues that motivated us to investigate this manuscript further.

Clue #1: The story in our manuscript is simply not the story found in Genesis.

Joseph and Aseneth describes Aseneth in great detail—her personality, her family home, her ten-room tower, and her first impressions of Joseph. In our manuscript, it’s her story. In contrast, the Biblical account which it purportedly comments on hardly mentions her name. In the Book of Genesis, it’s his story.

Joseph and Aseneth tells of an extensive love story between a Joseph and an Aseneth. Both are described in detail: they are pure, virginal, and committed to each other. In contrast, the Biblical account has no such story.

Joseph and Aseneth focuses prominently on Joseph’s and Aseneth’s physical relationship—touching, kissing, and, eventually, sexual relations. In contrast, the Bible makes no mention of any of this.

Joseph and Aseneth relates a mystical union between Aseneth and a Joseph-like angel. There is also a strange Communion-like rite that involves eating a honeycomb. In contrast, the Bible makes no mention of these mysterious rituals. In fact, in the Biblical text, honey is explicitly excluded from the list of substances that can be brought as a sacrificial offering to God (Leviticus 2:11).

In Joseph and Aseneth, Joseph is described as the “Son of God” (6:3). Aseneth is described as the “Bride of God” (4:1). The text also uses phrases such as the “cup of immortality” and the “oil of incorruption.” This is language that is completely foreign to the Book of Genesis where the original Joseph and Aseneth are introduced.

Joseph and Aseneth talks of a threat on Joseph’s life and those of his two sons. It also describes a plot to abduct his wife, Aseneth. This has absolutely nothing to do with the Biblical narrative.

Even from an initial superficial glance, it is not difficult to see that the narrative in the Joseph and Aseneth manuscript is not the story of the Biblical Joseph and Aseneth. It’s not even an elaboration on it. It’s a different tale altogether. Joseph and Aseneth simply uses these names for some mysterious and as yet undiscovered reason. What we do know is that Second Zacharias considered the story of the relationship between this Joseph and this Aseneth of world-shaping importance.

Clue #2: Something other than the Biblical account drives the narrative in Joseph and Aseneth.

The account of Joseph and his wife Aseneth in the Book of Genesis is not dictating the imagery and the language of our manuscript. In contrast to the Biblical text, there is no mention here of Joseph’s dreams, of his incarceration, of his release, of his reunion with his brothers and father, etc. There is not one thing that drives the plot in the Bible that also drives the plot in our text. Something else is going on. But, at this point, we don’t yet know what this something else is. We suspect that Joseph and Aseneth might be surrogates for other people—people much more germane to the lives of Christian monks than the Israelite Joseph or the Egyptian Aseneth.

Perhaps, we surmise, the story is historical, but it is about the life history of two individuals other than Joseph and Aseneth.

Our hunch is that this is a work of disguised history.

Clue #3: The manuscript is Christian, not Jewish.

Incredibly, when we set out to decipher the text, we found that up until Kraemer, the majority of 20th-century scholars have contended that the work was Jewish in origin. When we first began exploring the literature, this finding acted as a bombshell, stopping us right in our tracks . . . at least for a moment. As recently as 1996, Bohak was able to report that “current scholarship is almost unanimous in seeing Joseph and Aseneth as a Jewish work. Its protagonists are the Jewish patriarchs, its language and style are modeled on the Hebrew Bible (in its Greek translation), and it shows no familiarity with the New Testament or with typically Christian concepts and concerns.”⁵

This statement floored us. Surely, anyone familiar with Judaism would immediately realize that the idea that this is a Jewish text is a nonstarter. There is no reference to the work in any Jewish writings, rabbinic or otherwise. Nor was it preserved in any Jewish context whatsoever. The language and content of this text have nothing to do with Judaism. Quite the opposite, the text involves concepts and titles that are anathema to Jews. Joseph and Aseneth is without a doubt Christian.

But let’s quickly review the literature, looking this time at its likely place of origin, not its date of initial composition. Why did scholars latch on to the idea that its provenance was Jewish?

Since both Sparks and Charlesworth include Joseph and Aseneth in their collection of apocryphal or pseudepigraphal writings, they seem to think that the story has to do, in some way, with an elaboration on the Joseph story in the Book of Genesis. They seem to share the assumption, rife amongst scholars, that something having to do with the Biblical Joseph would, of course, have to be Jewish. The consensus opinion reflects the view that Joseph and Aseneth represents an elaboration upon the Book of Genesis’ account of the ancient Israelite patriarch’s relationship with Aseneth. These scholars call Joseph and Aseneth a midrash, a Jewish writing that fills in details missing from the original, providing a fuller story designed to satisfy the curious mind.

Building upon this assumption, scholars then looked for an appropriate historical fit. When, they asked, would an elaboration on the Biblical Joseph story have made sense within a Jewish context? The introductions provided in Sparks’ and Charlesworth’s translations of the later Greek text review the various interpretations of the manuscript. Thinking of its author as Jewish, some opined that the writer of Joseph and Aseneth could have been a member of a strict Jewish sect such as the Essenes, who lived in Israel, around the Dead Sea area. Or perhaps he was a member of the Essenes’ Egyptian counterpart, the Therapeutae.

But on the face of it, these suggestions do not work. After all, both the Essenes and Therapeutae groups seem to have been strict Torah-observant sects. Although there are, indeed, indications of Torah-observance in the manuscript—for example, Joseph follows Jewish dietary laws; he seems to avoid meeting Aseneth on the Sabbath; and he’s a monotheist rejecting pagan deities—the text as a whole does not reflect strict Jewish observance. Nor, like most of the books of the Hebrew Bible, is it advocating adherence to Torah. That’s simply not its focus or its message.

Alternatively, some scholars conjectured that the purpose of the document was to explain how a Jewish Joseph could have married a non-Jewish Aseneth—what she would have had to do to become a suitable Jewish bride. Thus, they interpret the work as dealing with a conversion experience. And yet, other than her embrace of monotheism, there is nothing in Aseneth’s behavior to suggest that she becomes Jewish. She does not convert. She simply embraces monotheism, throwing away her statues and votive offerings. We hear nothing about her taking on the obligations of the Torah or going through any ritual of conversion to Judaism. Her focus is on becoming the “Bride of God.”

The simple fact is that in the text she’s a non-Jew who remains a non-Jew. As we shall see, this gives us a vital clue as to who she really is.

Of course, we’re not the first to notice that Aseneth does not convert. This led some scholars to alternative, but related, theories. For example, Marc Philonenko suggested that perhaps Joseph and Aseneth deals specifically with the question of interfaith marriages. Perhaps, he speculated, the author was an Egyptian Jew concerned with intermarriage. Sparks appears to agree. Yet Philonenko and Sparks advance this position in the absence of any historical evidence that interfaith marriages and conversions from Egyptian religion to Judaism was an issue that perplexed ancient Jewish leaders. Judaism is, after all, a religion noted for not encouraging conversion or, for that matter, interfaith marriages. Joseph and Aseneth—whatever it is about—is by no means a manual on how to convert, nor a guide for the intermarried. In addition, no Jewish conversion process, or interfaith marriage, requires a heavenly Holy Communion within the bridal chamber.

For his part, Bohak proposes a different historical fit altogether. He links the narrative to a now-forgotten Jewish temple in Egypt during the Maccabean period—over 150 years before Jesus, and some fifteen hundred years after Joseph.

What drives all these theories is the assumption that the author of Joseph and Aseneth must be Jewish, just because the lead character in the story is one of the Jewish patriarchs. Clearly, that assumption has taken scholars on a lengthy wild-goose chase and they have ended up with speculations that are demonstrably off the mark. They can’t agree with each other and they really don’t know what to make of the manuscript.

But we are not original in identifying Joseph and Aseneth as a Christian text. One of the few scholars to consider the possibility that the author of Joseph and Aseneth might not be Jewish was also one of the earliest to examine the document. In 1889, French scholar Pierre Batiffol published the first critical edition of Joseph and Aseneth. He presented it as a Christian composition.⁶ In 1918, he was followed in the English language by E. W. Brooks, who contended “that the book in its present shape is the work of a Christian writer will be at once recognized by any reader.”⁷ References to the sacred bread and cup, he observed, are clear indications of a Eucharist-like ceremony. This important observation was lost to 20th-century Joseph and Aseneth scholarship, which generally ignored Brooks’ translation and introduction. The resistance was partially theological. After all, if Joseph and Aseneth was Christian, then it was presenting a non-Pauline version of Christianity. We are so used to thinking inside Paul’s theological box that we have almost lost the capacity to see a Christianity that predates or differs from Paul’s. Writing against the idea that Joseph and Aseneth could be a Christian text, Randall Chesnutt states “there is in the conversion story in Joseph and Aseneth no Christ, no redeemer figure of any sort, no historical salvation event, no Baptism and no talk of such Christian Hauptbegriffe [key concepts] as faith, love, justification, salvation and Church.”⁸ Professor Chesnutt is wrong. There is all of that and more. His problem is that these “Christian Hauptbegriffe” are not packaged in Pauline terminology.

But we don’t have to go all the way back to the early 20th century to find allies for our reading. As Batiffol and Brooks had done before her, Israeli scholar Rivka Nir stated categorically in the title of her 2012 publication that Joseph and Aseneth is a Christian book. She has also underlined the Christian character of the honeycomb ceremony, including the use of the cross.⁹ Why, we wonder, did it take so long for somebody to notice the sign of the cross—written in blood, no less—across the honeycomb wafer? Surely that’s a dead giveaway.

Finally, Ross Shepard Kraemer, arguably one of the top scholars on the subject today, concludes “the arguments for its Jewishness are largely without foundation. . . . In particular, a strong case can be made for Christian composition and redaction.”¹⁰ We agree.

The strong case is as follows: Joseph and Aseneth is not a Jewish work about conversion to Judaism or interfaith marriages. We have already catalogued significant differences between the Biblical Joseph and the Joseph of Joseph and Aseneth. We have also raised critical questions about the language and imagery in the text. All these sound Christian rather than Jewish. The divinization of Joseph as “Son of God” and the heavenly Communion rite make this all too evident.

Furthermore, the context in which the Syriac manuscript is lodged has to do with events that have shaped the Christian—not the Jewish—world. A Syriac-speaking individual chose to include this writing in his compilation of works because it addresses an important concern of his community. For the devout Christian whom we call Second Zacharias, Joseph and Aseneth is right up there with the conversion of the pagan Emperor Constantine to Christianity.

It’s clear that Christians wouldn’t have had any interest in preserving a story that had to do with purely Jewish matters. Christians would certainly not have been interested in the story of an obscure Jewish temple in Egypt, or conversion to Judaism, or the problems of Jewish/non-Jewish intermarriage. These topics would have had absolutely no appeal to the early Christian monks who copied, preserved, transmitted, and translated this manuscript.

As Kraemer points out, it was Christians—not Jews—who preserved Joseph and Aseneth. All surviving manuscripts—without exception—come from Christian sources. A Jewish authorship cannot account for the popularity and spread of this text exclusively in Christian circles. There is also not one shred of evidence that Joseph and Aseneth was ever read, transmitted, or even discussed by Jewish writers or leaders. Writing about non-canonical Christian texts in general, Robert Kraft states “when the evidence is clear that only Christians preserved the material, the Christianity of it is the given.”¹¹

When it comes to Joseph and Aseneth, therefore, Batiffol, Brooks, Kraemer, and Nir are right. The majority of scholars have been searching for the writer and meaning of Joseph and Aseneth in all the wrong places. We contend that the author must be Christian.

The all-important question is: if the work is Christian, what does its origin tell us about its meaning?

Clue #4: We’re told it may contain a hidden meaning.

The anonymous letter-writer who commissioned the translation from Moses of Ingila in the 6th century requested him to do two things: translate the ancient Greek manuscript he had found in the episcopal library in Resh’aina into Syriac, and explain its inner meaning.¹² This was not a casual request. To ask for a text’s inner meaning is to inquire about its hidden meaning. A secret meaning indicates that the superficial reading cannot be the real meaning. As we shall see, many early Christians thought that Biblical and related writings contained hidden levels of meaning. We’ll discuss this approach to Biblical interpretation in due course.

In the British Library we have Moses of Ingila’s translation from Greek into Syriac. Unfortunately, part of the manuscript is missing and we do not have his decoding of the text, if he ever wrote one. But we do have part of his response where he alludes to a concealed message that is dangerous to discuss publicly. That’s a vital piece of evidence. Here we have two Christians in the 6th century—the anonymous letter-writer and Moses of Ingila—who clearly surmised that this writing contained more than just a literal story about two Old Testament characters.

We wonder why a century of scholarship would have missed this vital clue. We suspect that they simply ignored the Syriac text, concentrating only on later Greek editions. In this way, they missed the anonymous writer’s letter and his references to “hidden meanings.”

So, who is hiding behind Joseph?

Who is hiding behind Aseneth?

Why is the story encoded?

What heretical history might it be preserving?