The Book That Changed: Narratives of Ezran Authorship as Late Antique Biblical Criticism

The historiography of biblical criticism typically frames modern critical insights about the composite nature of the biblical text as a break with traditional Jewish and Christian modes of engaging with the Bible. This article seeks to demonstrate, however, that one can find critical themes in even the earliest Jewish and Christian traditions concerning the nature and history of the biblical text. As an illustration of this phenomenon, I analyze the critical strains threaded through late antique Jewish and Christian narratives about a second edition of the Bible produced by Ezra the Scribe.