Gerbern S. Oegema - The Oxford Handbook of the Apocrypha

When Oxford University Press approached me in 2016 with the question whether I would like to edit their Handbook of the Apocrypha, I did not need long to think about it. The topic had interested me since I was a graduate student and the work of editing has appealed to me since the beginning of my career. As a bonus came the radically changing field of early Judaism, within which the Apocrypha need to be understood. This preface is a wonderful opportunity to thank those professors and colleagues who have introduced me to the various aspects of the Apocrypha in the context of early Judaism and early Christianity. Since my student years at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam they are Tjitze Baarda and Jan Helderman, as well as of the University of Leiden, Marinus de Jonge; at the Eberhard-Karls-Universitt Tbingen, they are Martin Hengel, Hermann Lichtenberger, Beate Ego, Ulrike Mittman-Richert, Jan Dochorn, and Andreas Lehnardt; at Princeton Theological Seminary, James H. Charlesworth; and in Montreal, Lorenzo DiTommaso of Concordia University. Furthermore, I thank Diedrich Steen and Tanja Scheifele of the Gtersloher Verlagshaus and finally the numerous undergraduate and graduate students attending my courses on early Judaism at McGill University for almost twenty years.

I am therefore pleased to present to you a Handbook with close to thirty articles, half with general introductions and overarching themes and half with introductions on the individual writings, all by leading scholars in the field and according to the latest research. While I thank every individual contributor for his or her painstaking workoften under high pressure due to the many other obligations in teaching, research, and family lifemy special thanks go to Steve Wiggins, editor of Oxford University Press, for his patience, expertise, and unwavering support during the past years. I am also grateful for my two graduate students David (Tony) Basham and Matheus de Carvalho for editorial support. But most of all I would like to express my gratitude to Sara Parks, my former graduate student and now my colleague, for her editorial skills and expertise and, above all, for her enthusiastic support of this Handbook in all its phases.

Gerbern S. Oegema, Montreal, April 2020