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Feelings ran high about the second book of Esdras between the
Renaissance and the Enlightenment. The French mystic
Antoinette Bourignon regarded it as the finest book in the Bible.1
For the physician Sir John Floyer it was ‘the best Key to all the Old
and New Prophecies’.2 The learned Francis Lee admitted ‘that
there is no ancient Book I have ever met with, at which I have been
so much startled at as this: While on the one hand I find in it such
a multitude of Things to shock me, so that it was hard for me not
to throw it presently away with the utmost Contempt and
Indignation; and on the other hand, I think I find here so many
beautiful Passages, which seem not inferior to any Parts of the
undoubted Canonical Scriptures.’3 And a far more hostile inter-
preter, Richard Arnald, also conceded that ‘there are in it lofty
Sentiments, beautiful Similes, ancient traditions, the Appearance
at least of a prophetic Spirit.’4
The representatives of the visible Churches—the reformers
themselves and the spokesmen of the Church of Rome—repeat-
ed the view of Jerome who had included the book in his Latin
version of the Bible but who pronounced it apocryphal. It was
‘full of dreams’, ‘stuffed full of vayne fables, fitter to feede curi-
ous eares, then tending to edification’, as an English divine put it,
9 For a useful survey of the term and its significance see Bruce M. Metzger,
An Introduction to the Apocrypha (New York, 1977), 3–10, 175–80. On the canon
see J. C. H. Lebram, ‘Aspekte der alttestamentlichen Kanonbildung’, Vetus
Testamentum, 18 (1968), 173–89.
4 INTRODUCTION
now know, did once exist in Hebrew or Aramaic, but the only ver-
sions known to Jerome were in Greek.
The age, and indeed the content, of the apocrypha of the Old
Testament varied. Some—1 Esdras, Tobit, Judith, Ecclesiasticus
(or Sirach)—were almost certainly composed in the second cen-
tury BC, the earliest probably being the books of Tobit and
Ecclesiasticus. The additions to the book of Esther, the three sup-
plements to the book of Daniel (Azaraiah and the Three Young
Men, Susanna, and Bel and the Dragon), together with the Prayer
of Manasseh, were later. The first book of Maccabees seems to
date from about 100 BC, while the second may have been compiled
at any time between 120 BC and AD 50. The book of Baruch and
the Wisdom of Solomon have also been ascribed to the same
period.
The status of the apocrypha as a whole was not always clear. In
Catholic Bibles most of the apocrypha were usually presented as
part of the canon. By the early sixteenth century, however, there
was a tendency to distinguish at least some of the apocrypha, while
the Protestants would endeavour to make a more general distinc-
tion between canonical and extra-canonical. This could be done by
specifying the canon in a preface, by attaching a special heading to
apocryphal books, or by grouping them together in a separate sec-
tion usually preceded by a warning. It was generally agreed that the
apocrypha could serve as edifying reading matter but should never
be used to establish doctrinal or dogmatic points. But even this rule
had been infringed. Not only had passages from the apocrypha
crept into the liturgy, but certain teachings of the Church of
Rome, such as the doctrine of purgatory, had also been derived
from them.
Above all the apocrypha, however they might be presented or
used, were included in that most sacred of texts, the Bible. This
gave each of them an authority which, if anything, increased as the
Reformation focused attention on the Scriptures and diminished
the importance of much of the secular religious literature which
had proliferated in late antiquity and the Middle Ages.
The second book of Esdras was a particular beneficiary of this
tendency. It was an apocalypse, a narrative containing revelations
transmitted to a man by a being from another world and disclosing
INTRODUCTION 5
In this study I deal with two aspects of 2 Esdras. One is its status,
the debate about its date, its authorship and its authenticity. The
other, which is often linked to the first, is the use to which it was
put from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment.
The conflicting reactions to the second book of Esdras which I
examine raise a question which was central to the Reformation:
the question of authority. Which human or ecclesiastical authori-
ty should decide what was sacred and what not? Should Jerome be
given greater credence than the Fathers who had preceded him
and who had treated 2 Esdras as if it were canonical? What
authority, moreover, should be attributed to the Bible? Was it the
authority of the letter, as Luther claimed, or was it the authority
of the Spirit, which had inspired the authors of the sacred books
and which was evidently present in 2 Esdras and other apocrypha?
We shall see again and again that 2 Esdras had a particular appeal
for those individuals and movements that dissented from the
established Churches—for the Anabaptists, for the spiritualists
who believed the inspiration of the Holy Spirit to be more impor-
tant than the letter, for the disaffected Lutherans and for eirenic
Calvinists. And we shall see how those Roman Catholics who sup-
ported it managed to justify their enthusiasm in the face of the
decrees of the Council of Trent and the strictures of Cardinal
Bellarmine.
The question of authority could also be connected with the
question of authenticity. The admiration for 2 Esdras which start-
ed in the fifteenth century brings out one of the more paradoxical
aspects of the Renaissance. The humanists, with their knowledge
of classical antiquity, had developed a new sensitivity to the
authenticity of texts. Lorenzo Valla, perhaps the greatest practi-
tioner of the novel methods of philological analysis, had shown
that the Donation of Constantine, allegedly dating from the fourth
century and used to justify the temporal power of the papacy, was
in fact a late forgery concocted in the eighth or ninth century. He
did so on the basis of linguistic and historical inconsistencies.
Partly because of this interest in classical antiquity there developed
a veneration for the figure of Jerome, revered as a scholar, a stylist
and a theologian. For Desiderius Erasmus, who defined him as ‘the
only scholar in the church universal who had a perfect command
INTRODUCTION 7
separating the apocryphal books from the canonical ones but nev-
ertheless defending their antiquity. The more traditional scholars
who found themselves justifying the apocryphal status of 2 Esdras,
on the other hand, sometimes used arguments which, by modern
standards, seem just as unconvincing as the wildest hypotheses
advanced by the book’s supporters.
The second aspect of 2 Esdras which I shall examine is the use
that was made of it. In an age of keen biblical interpretation, when
predictions about the future were eagerly sought in the Scriptures,
2 Esdras was employed for the prophecy and explanation of a
number of significant political events. One of the most constant
was the advance of the Turks. The vision of the three-headed eagle
in Chapters 11 and 12 was applied to the Roman empire. The
Turks, the conquerors of Byzantium, were regarded as the succes-
sors of the Romans in the eastern and southern Mediterranean,
and their advent was seen as a sign of the approaching end of the
world. Despite Augustine’s disapproval of attempts to date such an
event, the chronological statements in 2 Esdras were added to those
in the books of Daniel and Revelation in order to serve that very
purpose.
From the fifteenth to the late seventeenth century the vision of
the eagle was also applied to the fate of the Habsburgs. In this case
it was mainly, though not exclusively, Protestants who analysed the
vision to compute the eagle’s life-expectancy and the moment
when it would be annihilated by the lion representing the true
Church. Because of the extensive description of the fate of the ten
lost tribes of Israel, moreover, 2 Esdras was consulted in connec-
tion with the origins of the American Indians, the future of the
Jews, and the role which the European powers were to play both in
the treatment of the inhabitants of the New World and in the prov-
idential return of the Jews to Jerusalem.
The second book of Esdras, therefore, was used above all as a
collection of reliable predictions of events to come. But there was
another dimension to this use. A number of the admirers of the
book identified themselves with the figure of Esdras himself. We
see this in the case of Hendrik Niclaes, the founder of the Family
of Love, and certain Paracelsians of the early seventeenth century.
Others, such as some of the New Prophets in the Thirty Years War,
10 INTRODUCTION