Joseph and Aseneth
[1] It concerns the Hebrew patriarch Joseph and his marriage to Asenath, expanding the fleeting mentions of their relationship in the Book of Genesis.
The text was translated widely, including into Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Early Modern German, Latin, Middle English, Old French, Romanian, Serbian and Syriac.
The first part of the story (chapters 1-21), an expansion of Genesis 41:45, describes the diffident relationship between Aseneth, the daughter of an Egyptian priest of Heliopolis, and the Hebrew patriarch Joseph; the vision of Aseneth in which she is fed honeycomb by a heavenly being; and her subsequent conversion to the god of Joseph, followed by romance, marriage, and the birth of Manasseh and Ephraim.
[2] The second part (chapters 22-29) involves a plot by the Pharaoh's son, who recruits Dan and Gad to kill Joseph, only to be thwarted by Benjamin and Levi.
Manuscript #17,202 is an anthology, a collection of a number of important writings compiled by an anonymous Syriac author called by scholars Pseudo-Zacharias Rhetor.
An anonymous Syriac individual, probably a monk, had been looking at manuscripts in Resh'aina (near the border of modern-day Turkey and Syria) in a library belonging to the line of bishops who had come from Aleppo.
The second covering letter provides Moses of Ingila's response, which According to explains the story as, in the words of Angela Standhartinger, "an allegory of Christ's marriage to the soul".
Brooks, Historia ecclesiastica Zachariae Rhetori vulgo adscripta (CSCO 83; Paris, 1919, reprinted 1053), vol 1, pp.
21–55, along with a Latin translation, Historia ecclesiastica Zachariae Rhetori vulgo adscripta (CSCO 87 Louvain, 1924, reprinted 1953), vol.
[13][8] In 1918 E. W. Brooks published a translation and introduction to Joseph and Aseneth in which he wrote: "that the book in its present shape is the work of a Christian writer will be at once recognized by any reader.
"[14] Two English anthologies of Old Testament Apocrypha/Pseudepigrapha include translations of Joseph and Aseneth, all based on Greek manuscripts later than the oldest extant Syriac version.
He writes: "Every competent scholar since Batiffol has maintained that Joseph and Aseneth is Jewish, with perhaps some Christian interpolations; no one has put the book much after A.D. 200, and some have placed it as early as the second century B.C.
Kuhn); and elsewhere in Egypt, relating to the Jewish temple in the nome of Heliopolis (founded c. 170 BCE), in the same area as the geographical setting of the story (Bohak).
[5] Cook endorsed the view of an earlier French scholar, Marc Philonenko, who thought that it was written by a Jewish author around 100 CE.
[20][21][22] The authors claim that the story of Joseph and Aseneth was already composed during Jesus' lifetime and precedes the canonical gospels.
