Category:Second Temple Studies--1700s

Second Temple Studies in the 1700s--Works and Authors

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Overview

The rise of critical scholarship in the 18th century produced a first, important turn. As a result of the new critical interest in history and philology, Christian theology began to admit that, to a certain extent, post-biblical Judaism served to prepare for the coming of Jesus. At the beginning of the 18th century, Humphrey Prideaux (1648-1724), clergymen and scholar, dean of Norwich, reinvented "Second Temple Judaism" as the “intertestamental” period. His work (The Old and New Testament Connected in the History of the Jews, and Neighbouring Nations; from the Declension of the Kingdoms of Israel and Judah to the Time of Christ, 2 vols., London 1716-1718) dominated the field for more than a century with numerous editions and translations in French, Italian, and Germany. It also prompted interest in the literature of the period. The Codes Pseudepigraphus Veteris Testamenti (Hamburg 1713-33) by Johann Albert Fabricius (1668-1736) was the first published collection of Old Testament Pseudepigrapha. The age "from Malachi to Jesus" emerged in Christian scholarship as a distinct historical period--it was the necessary "connection" between the Old and the New Testament, the time in which God's providence acted to create the right conditions for the spreading of the Christian message.