Some Notes about the Apocalypse of Abraham

As you may have noted, unfortunately I have not had the time to post as much as I would like to here on Heavenly Ascents. I have been bogged down with multiple papers and presentations for my classes which have taken up most of my time.  I would like, however, to share with you some notes from one of the presentations I did for my Apocalyptic Literature class on the Apocalypse of Abraham.

The Apocalypse of Abraham is an ancient Jewish document (likely written in the first century AD) that was eventually preserved and passed down by Christian hands. Today we only have access to it through the Slavonic (Slavic) manuscripts kept by the Russian Orthodox church for centuries. It only became known in Western circles towards the latter half of the 19th century. In fact, the first English translation of this text appeared in the Improvement Era (an LDS publication) in 1898. The LDS Church obviously had an interest in this text because of its many similarities to their own Book of Abraham, which Joseph Smith had translated from some Egyptian papyri that he had obtained in the 1830s. Interestingly, the Apocalypse of Abraham has many parallels with the Book of Moses as well.

I am providing you with a link here to the notes I made for use in my presentation. Unfortunately, not all of the information I gathered is particularly interesting, as my assignment was to present the “State of the Question,” an analysis of current scholarly opinion on the text, with emphasis on its origin, dating, and other technical issues. Towards the end, I did note some theological themes in the text that would be of interest to our class. So, for whatever it’s worth, I give you my notes. If you have any further questions on them, please feel free to ask me.  Here is the link:

http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=df9gpgs4_2gqzqcnfc

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