In the Syriac Book of the Cave of Treasures, which in a general way we may reckon among the rewritten Bible texts, in ch. 27.6–11, an apocryphal fourth son of Noah appears, Yōnṭōn by name. This figure resides near the seashorein a far-easternland and possesses oracular and astrological wisdom. In 1980, Stephen Gero interpreted this figure against a Jewish background. Recently, however, Clemens Leonhard, following Witold Witakowski, has questioned this approach and denied any prehistory to Yōnṭōn; he regards him as an “invention” of the Syriac author of the Cave of Treasures. In the present article I aim to investigate whether it is possible indeed to trace a Jewish origin of Yōnṭōn's appearance in the Cave of Treasures. Taking Gero's interpretation as a starting point, I will first investigate the setting in which a figure like Yōnṭōn could have evolved within a Jewish context. Secondly, I will attempt to actually identify Yōnṭōn in earlier Jewish sources. In this I will follow a recent assertion of Su-Min Ri, that Yōnṭōn originates in the Biblical person of Yoqṭān (Gen 10:25). While Ri's assumption derives from the possibility of a misspelling, I will produce internal evidence which renders the identification of Yōnṭōn and Yoqṭān very probable, thus justifying the direction of thought taken by both Gero and Ri over against the allegations of Leonhard and Witakowski. Moreover, the following discussion will shed light on how Jews received influences from Hellenistic astronomy and astrology and how they read these concepts into, or set them in opposition to, the Bible.

What happened to the Essenes after the first Jewish revolt? The answer to this seemingly simple question has proven elusive. Prior to the war, the Essenes stood alongside the Pharisees and Sadducees as one of the most prominent social factions in Judaea. Josephus and Philo allege that they numbered in the thousands and that they could be found in cities and towns throughout the country.

Heracleon was a great second-century Christian thinker, and the author of the first known commentary on a New Testament text, the Gospel of John. Although we do not have Heracleon's commentary itself, Origen integrated a great deal of it into his own commentary on the fourth gospel.

Stephen C. Carlson's The Gospel Hoax sets out to validate the long-standing suspicion that Professor Morton Smith, late of Columbia University, forged his famous discovery of aletter of Clement of Alexandria, which quotes from a longer(“secret”)Gospel of Mark. This academic folklore has been passed on like an esoteric tradition since 1975, when Quentin Quesnell called on Smith to make the manuscript of this letter available for forensic testing in order to rule out the possibility of a recent hoax. Quesnell had difficulty substantiating his concerns. In his article in the Catholic Biblical Quarterly, he postulated that a modern scholar might have devised the letter as “a controlled experiment” in order to examine how scholars react to new evidence. Yet the manuscript of this letter, which Smith found in 1958, was inscribed on the last pages of a seventeenth-century book that purportedly was kept in a locked room of a monastery in the Judean desert. What modern forger would leave his creation there and gamble that someone would discover it in his lifetime? For this scenario to seem at all plausible, Quesnell needed to imply what he personally suspected, namely, that Smith forged it himself for this purpose. Accordingly, Quesnell described his hypothetical modern “mystifier” as someone who shared Smith's abilities, opportunities, resources, and interest in what people make of the document.

But I know that it can only be gained by abandoning everything.—St. Teresa of Avila

The Coptic text of the Gospel of Thomas is paralleled in three sections by Greek fragments from Oxyrhynchus. P.Oxy. 655, in the Houghton Library at Harvard, consists of small amounts of text, which correspond to sayings 24 and 36–39. P.Oxy. 1, in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, is a fragment of a codex containing sayings 26–33 (cf. also saying 77). This latter exemplar in particular shows that—with some exceptions—there is a good deal of correspondence between the Greek and Coptic versions, and therefore that it is quite possible that substantial portions of the Coptic version of Thomas go back to a Greek original.