This book compares five major groups of texts of the same pseudepigraphal book. This book is not appropriate for someone who has not read previous works containing or discussing the Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament.

This book does not describe the textual problems with the work; nor does it discuss how the work fits into Jewish or Christian literature. This book is purely intended to be source material, from which the reader can choose to draw his or her own conclusions about the work. This synopsis contains Greek, Latin, Armenian, Georgian, and Slavonic manuscripts of the book. There are major textual differences between these, coming from the book having passed through many hands, many of which had their own ideas to share. Additionally, there are differences within each group; the Latin texts are in four subgroups, and differences among them are marked in the book.

The Greek and Latin texts are presented in the original tongues; the Armenian in an English translation; the Georgian in a French translation; and the Slavonic in a German translation. The commentary is entirely in English. Yes, if you do not have a reading knowledge of French, German, Latin, and Biblical Greek, then you will miss out on at least one of the variant texts. This alone means this book is not for the casual reader.

It was fascinating, however, to see the problems that a serious scholar of ancient texts must face. It gave me a new understanding of the little footnotes on textual differences that one finds in a modern Bible.

This book successfully does what it sets out to do (give the naked texts with bibliographic references to other studies that do analysis). The fact that this was not what I had expected when I bought it is not the author's fault. I did find that the notations used in the text -- to show differences within a particular language group of texts -- were not always clear and not fully explained. It may well be that they would have been clear for the scholars who are this book's intended audience.

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