I. Jubilees as Hidden Knowledge

When Jerome described Jubilees as “apocryphal” to Fabiola, he did not necessarily mean this pejoratively. As William Adler has observed, Jerome “used the term apocrypha with respect, and held these books to be well worth reading. . . . His theological principle was that these books can and should be read for the edification of the people but not for establishing the authority of ecclesiastical doctrines.”Footnote ²⁶ For Jerome, apocrypha meant hidden, as the Greek etymology implies, not “anathema,” as the Decree of Gelasius later described them.Footnote ²⁷ Jerome recognized the continued presence of secret teachings within Christian tradition and was drawn to them as part of his larger appreciation of arcane, esoteric lore. Just as Greco-Roman philosophical explorations had appropriated the ancient, foreign, and esoteric to claim the inevitability of the Roman Empire, Jerome looked to Jubilees and other apocrypha as evidence that the new Christian world order represented the fulfillment of human history and divine will.Footnote ²⁸ Jubilees, as a text that dealt with the primeval time span of Genesis, satisfied Jerome's taste for the archaic and, perhaps, for the Hebrew. For Jerome, consulting biblical texts in Hebrew was to reach back to a “fountain of truth” that would unlock the real meaning of scripture.Footnote ²⁹

By going back to the Hebrew original, Jerome could solve interpretive problems of the Bible. His theory of Hebraica veritas allowed Jerome to downplay the importance of the Greek interpretive tradition as his prominence grew in the Latin-speaking Christian world. Yet, he used the phrase “Hebrew truth” not only to designate books of scripture but to refer to an entire Jewish interpretive tradition.Footnote ³⁰ For Jerome, then, Jubilees fell under the category of permissible apocrypha because of its philological potential to reveal misunderstandings of scripture. Yet Jerome also urged caution in reading such texts.Footnote ³¹ His warnings continued a Christian position on secret books that Origen had articulated at the end of the second century. As he defended Christianity against charges that its secret teachings were indicative of sinister motives, Origen acknowledged the existence of secret Christian traditions and explained that advanced students might learn them.Footnote ³² In fact, Origen, too, cited a tradition found in Jubilees as Hebrew apocrypha.Footnote ³³

If Jerome regarded Jubilees as a secret tradition, the text of Jubilees itself offered strong support for ancient Christian readers looking to accept the textual authority of such books. Christian esoteric readings of Jubilees extended from a natural reading of the text. As it told of its own origins in its opening frame narrative, Jubilees hinted that its own contents were esoteric and hidden. Apocryphal books often have stories of their own origins, tales of loss and rediscovery, and Jubilees opened with its etiology as Moses received revelation on Sinai. In doing so, Jubilees asserted itself as a superior record to that of Genesis and Exodus.Footnote ³⁴ In Jubilees's account of the revelation on Sinai, instead of simply receiving the law, Moses learned “what had happened beforehand as well as what was to come.”Footnote ³⁵ Thus, the text identified itself as a record of all human history—a time span that exceeded that of Genesis. The author of Jubilees wrote from a position of suspicion, anticipating a hostile audience who felt abandoned by the deity. Jubilees would be proof that future “offspring may see that [God has] not abandoned them because of all the evil they have done in straying from the covenant between [the deity] and you which [the deity is] making today on Mt. Sinai for their offspring.”Footnote ³⁶ Yet, Jubilees suspected its own contents would remain ignored. As the deity predicted: “I will send witnesses but they will not hear.”Footnote ³⁷ However, it also anticipated a time when it would be cited to prove that the deity has “been more faithful than they in all their judgments and in all their actions.”Footnote ³⁸ Because of Jubilees, eventually Israel would “recognize that [God has] been with them”Footnote ³⁹ despite future terrible suffering that indicated the contrary. Through its frame narrative, then, Jubilees suggested that the true significance of certain events remained obscure to the general observer; only the careful reader of Jubilees had access to accurate predictions of the future. In this sense, Jubilees presented the Second Temple reader with a reinterpretation of Jewish history.

These elements of Jubilees shaped its authority as a revelatory text, one that attempted to challenge, supersede even, existing compositions like the Mosaic Torah.Footnote ⁴⁰ In its self-presentation, the text claimed to be a portion of divinely authored heavenly tablets.Footnote ⁴¹ Jubilees acknowledged the authority of the Mosaic Torah, alongside other holy books, as partial copies of these divine texts. However, Jubilees insinuated that the Mosaic Torah, while an accurate divine record, was not complete. Jubilees offered itself as a supplementary, perhaps superior, revelatory text, which contained additional material from the heavenly tablets.Footnote ⁴² While Second Temple scholars find this interesting for the history of Jewish canon formation,Footnote ⁴³ it also raises questions for Christian discussions about the role of revelatory writing.

For the later Christian reader, these predictions might have offered a model for esoteric readings of history—in his letter to Fabiola, Jerome had looked to Jubilees to find hidden meanings from obscure details in the Torah. Jubilees helped him demonstrate that the resting stations during the Exodus were not random but recalled other events in Israelite history. For Jerome, the encampment at Ressa recalled the spiritual chaos caused by the tower of Babel. Likewise, according to Jerome, when the Israelites “left Tarah and camped at Mithcah,”Footnote ⁴⁴ they remember the father of Abraham, whom Jubilees identified as “Terah.” Jerome was explicit in consulting Jubilees to create this link: “Even now, with these same letters, I met the father of Abraham, who in the previously mentioned apocryphal Genesis book, drove away ravens, who were laying waste to man's corn, by driving away or defending ‘casting of lots’ is his name.”Footnote ⁴⁵ It is not clear how Jerome saw the etymology of Terah's name as “casting of lots” in Latin. Nevertheless, Jerome's approach to the Jubilees material in this bewildering instance remains consistent with the previous example of Ressa. Jubilees, as a source of Hebraica veritas, provided a hermeneutical key to understand the esoteric meanings of the philology of the Torah.

In its self-referential descriptions and other references to books and writing, Jubilees promoted a model of textual authority that sanctioned new, corrective texts that reinterpreted past events.Footnote ⁴⁶ It admitted that the current authoritative texts were incomplete in their revelation. In its self-presentation, Jubilees was a divinely authored text, a “law and testimony” narrated to Moses through the Angel of the Presence, describing the history and future of Israel.Footnote ⁴⁷ However, Moses was also not the only approved revelatory figure. In Jubilees, other humans had unique opportunities to relay information about the divine when invited by angels. When intermediary figures appeared to deliver books, they purportedly conveyed a portion of the heavenly tablets of God's library.Footnote ⁴⁸ The heavenly tablets in Jubilees were not the equivalent to Torah but consisted of many concepts of heavenly books, including the Book of Destiny and Book of Life. By utilizing the heavenly tablets, Jubilees certified the authority of other revelatory figures, apart from Moses. The author of Jubilees further implied the Mosaic compositions were authoritative but not complete copies of the heavenly tablets. These tablets permitted the author of Jubilees to expand upon the Torah without claiming to alter it, in a manner not unlike the Oral Torah.Footnote ⁴⁹ In acknowledging the incompleteness of the Mosaic Torah and the possibility of new revelation, Jubilees even hinted at its own superiority to the Mosaic Torah because it included additional matter. It has been suggested that Christians read certain Jewish pseudepigrapha and apocryphal texts because they lent credence to early Christian authorial efforts, and Jubilees may have been one of these texts that offered such support.

Jubilees also provided readers with a method for discerning authoritative secret books from illicit secret books: good secret books derived their authority from angels while others were fabricated by humans. While it expanded on the flood narrative, Jubilees explained that, post-deluge, a fraction of evil spirits were permitted to remain among humankind and, as demons led the sons of Noah astray, angels provided Noah with secret information on how to combat these evil creatures.Footnote ⁵⁰ God permitted an angel to dictate means of defeating the demons. According to Jubilees, Shem and his descendants alone possessed the resultant “Book of Noah” that contained secret information about how to defeat evil demons.Footnote ⁵¹ In a similar vein, Jubilees acknowledged the authority of the Enoch books. It recognized Enoch's status as a scribe who possessed firsthand knowledge of the heavens. Enoch recorded the oral testimonies of angels and delivered them directly to humans. He wrote books of astronomy, testimonies and descriptions of his heavenly journeys.Footnote ⁵² Levi and his descendants were entrusted with this library, passed down through the patriarchs.Footnote ⁵³ Consequently, Jubilees—through its descriptions of revelatory books—provided a useful reading for Christians like Jerome to argue that some secret books could be beneficial to a few wise people selected to maintain their secrecy.

Historiographic and literary sources also point to a path for Jubilees to enter Christianity as a secret book. The existence of authoritative hidden books in early Christianity continues earlier Jewish traditions. Flavius Josephus documented the Jewish practice of maintaining a collection of secret books.Footnote ⁵⁴ The sect of the Essenes, he noted, kept private books, to be used only by those who had undergone the rigorous induction requirements. The evidence of Josephus indicates that not all Jewish sects kept secret books: the Pharisees asserted that an oral tradition supplemented scripture, while there is no evidence that the Sadducees approved of any sort of supplementary material to scripture. Literary evidence also describes a Jewish corpus of secret books: 4 Ezra, a Jewish composition roughly contemporaneous with Josephus's description of Jewish sects, endorsed a collection of secret books. This text, composed in Hebrew after the destruction of the Second Temple at the end of the first century, described several apocalyptic visions of the prophet Ezra during the Babylonian exile. It culminated in a final vision in which Ezra received the restored Torah. The deity compared Ezra to Moses, who was told miracles and shown cosmic secrets on Sinai.Footnote ⁵⁵ Likewise, God promised Ezra revelation and told him to publish some content but to keep other portions secret. During a forty-day sequester, Ezra dictated to five scribes in a language they did not know and produced ninety-four books: twenty-four books for the public and an additional seventy only for the “wise among the people.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Taken together, 4 Ezra and Josephus demonstrate that, as Christianity emerged in the first century, some Jews acknowledged the authority of secret revelatory books.

Among Christians, too, documentary evidence indicates that Jubilees circulated as part of a tradition of esoteric lore. A document from Oxyrhynchus (P. Oxy 4365) testifies to the popular use of Jubilees in Christian circles.Footnote ⁵⁷ It also testifies to the mystery surrounding Jubilees, speaking to the way Jerome and other early Christians viewed the text as esoterica. This mysterious slip of papyrus, written on the back of a petition,Footnote ⁵⁸ is dated broadly from the first to fourth century. The papyrus demonstrates that ancient Christian readers saw kinship between 4 Ezra and Jubilees. The brief note reads: “To my dearest lady sister: Greetings in the Lord. Lend the Ezra, since I lent you the little Genesis. Farewell from us in God.”Footnote ⁵⁹ The papyrus documented an exchange of books between a female Christian reader and an unidentifiable correspondent, possibly part of an ecclesiastical community.Footnote ⁶⁰ The term “little Genesis” was a well-attested way of referring to Jubilees, as Jerome demonstrated in his letter to Fabiola.Footnote ⁶¹ The original editor of this papyrus observed that the absence of personal names in such correspondence was unusual and suggested an element of secrecy and mystery in this exchange of books.Footnote ⁶² Why the secrecy? It could point to pre-Constantinian correspondence, when a Christian might need to be discrete.Footnote ⁶³ It may reflect the secretive nature of exchanging esoteric texts. Of course, these theories are speculative—the papyrus simply might have been a brief note written in a hurry.Footnote ⁶⁴ At the very least, P. Oxy. 4365 demonstrates that these two texts, both recognizing a tradition of hidden books for the wise, circulated together. Yet, the papyrus also suggests a Christian popular enthusiasm for esoterica. While such texts became the hallmark of Gnostic Christianities (a claim made by both its proponents and opponents),Footnote ⁶⁵ the presence of Jubilees in a broader Christian context also reminds us that esoteric books, residing outside canonical conversations, were one of the building blocks of early Christianity. Jerome had read both texts, consulting Jubilees for exegetical purposes and including 4 Ezra in his Vulgate. For some Christians, then, Jubilees was apocryphal in that it was associated with secrecy and endorsed the existence of a written esoteric tradition. Thus, an intellectual such as Jerome, with his antiquarian tendencies and fondness for esoteric knowledge, found use in consulting a text that exhibited these very values.

II. Jubilees as Christian Tradition

While for some Christians Jubilees belonged to an authoritative tradition of hidden books, Epiphanius's Panarion reveals another role for Jubilees in early Christianity.Footnote ⁶⁶ Epiphanius did not use the term “apocrypha” to describe the status of Jubilees. He did not consider the text secret, esoteric, or even Hebrew. Instead, Epiphanius knew Jubilees in its Greek translation.Footnote ⁶⁷ Most frequently, he cited information in Jubilees with no reference to the title at all. On one occasion, he referred to the text as the “Little Genesis,” and he also described Jubilees as a “tradition” or paradosis.Footnote ⁶⁸ While it is not evident that Epiphanius read Jubilees, or had access to the text, he did consider it a written document, as he described Jubilees as a “book.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Citing Jubilees in his Panarion allowed Epiphanius to show off his “antiquarian knowledge,”Footnote ⁷⁰ which he encouraged in others, as it distinguished an educated, orthodox Christian from a heretic.Footnote ⁷¹ In his logic, discussed below, Jubilees was not an apocryphal Jewish text but a public, Christian one.

Yet Epiphanius's reliance on Jubilees seems to undermine one of the central arguments of his work, that the use of spurious books spreads heresy. His Panarion represented an effort to catalogue all past and present heresies. It is a heresiology, but it is also a history. For this reason, the Panarion has been regarded as an early model for the Christian chronographies proliferating in the Byzantine Empire.Footnote ⁷² The Panarion recorded a history of heresy from the creation of the world to Epiphanius's own era. Epiphanius honed in on names, places, and dates to fill in details of his historical narrative. Epiphanius was methodical in his descriptions and wrote systematic expositions of each sect: he would explain its geographical and intellectual origins, outline their key beliefs, name major leaders, make note of deviant ritual traditions, and conclude by offering his refutation.

In the logic of the Panarion, the creation and dissemination of books drove human history. Consistently, he commented upon a group's use of the written word, noting any abnormal textual behavior—if a heretical group disregarded a sacred book, excised a sacred book, or composed a sacred book. In this narrative, the misuse of books began with the first humans. According to Epiphanius, illicit composition practices originated among the five earliest heresies—Barbarism, Scythianism, Hellenism, Judaism, and Samaritanism.Footnote ⁷³ Barbarism, the primeval heresy existing from the time of Adam to the flood, was marked by an absence of sacred text. Instead, “there was no difference of doctrine yet, no different ethnic groups, no name for a heresy, neither was there idolatry. . . . Each person followed his own ideas.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Barbarism, in Epiphanius's taxonomy, was not technically a belief system. It marked an era of moral decline from Adam's disobedience and the first murder. However, Epiphanius carefully noted that Barbarism did not constitute systematic heretical thought. Perhaps drawing a comparison to the morally ambiguous biblical era of Judges, Epiphanius characterized the age of Barbarism, too, as a time when “everyone did what was right in their own eyes.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Thus, human reliance on instinct as a moral code flourished in a time marked by the absence of books.

The choice of Barbarism as the first heresy, as Young Richard Kim notes, may have been a deliberate move to signal that Greek culture was a further distortion of an ideal age.Footnote ⁷⁶ Epiphanius, like his predecessor Eusebius, had imagined the first humans as the first Christians, living before the law was given on Sinai and well acquainted with the deity, whom they worshipped without idolatry.Footnote ⁷⁷ In the era of the first heresies, Barbarism and Scythianism, humans were divided into categories of “pious” and “impious.” Epiphanius defined the age of Scythianism, a heresy widespread after the flood, as an era that continued the Barbarian period of no “learning from teaching or books.”Footnote ⁷⁸ In these instances, Epiphanius was primarily concerned with demonstrating that Christianity had been practiced before Adam's disobedience and the world's descent into moral cloudiness.Footnote ⁷⁹ The absence of systematic heretical thought reflected an absence of books.

In the narrative of the Panarion, heresies proliferated once knowledge became disseminated through teaching and books. After the tower of Babel fell and humanity scattered across the world, the Hellenism “error” was propagated by Egyptian, Babylonian, and Phrygian authors—historians and chronographers—who spread “erring mythology . . . giving rise to sorcery and magic arts.”Footnote ⁸⁰ These foreign books became vectors of heresy. By the age of Epicurus (circa 340–270 b.c.e.), the whole world was divided into two religious inclinations—Hellenism and Judaism. With these two groups came two competing canons: followers of Hellenism read the “poets, prose writers, historiographers, astronomers.”Footnote ⁸¹ Jews read twenty-seven books in addition to two “in dispute” and “some other secret books.”Footnote ⁸² Epiphanius observed that, in some hands, the texts were abused and misinterpreted. The texts were then rewritten with “the stupid ideas of individuals” and thus produced new heresies.Footnote ⁸³ Novel textual combinations produced new heresies. For example, the Samaritans combined Jewish and Greek scripture. Scribes, which Epiphanius named as one of fifteen heretical Jewish sects, possessed four versions of the Torah.Footnote ⁸⁴ Another sect of the Jews, the Nasaraeans, claimed all five books of Moses were fabricated.Footnote ⁸⁵ The Osseans, he noted, also rejected the books of Moses, and one of their teachers composed his own book of proper praxis.Footnote ⁸⁶ As Epiphanius enumerated the many Christian heresies sprouting in his own time, he consistently delineated heresies by their mistreatment, ignorance, and illicit creation of books.

Consequently, the citations of Jubilees in the Panarion demand attention. His references to the text were deliberate: Epiphanius rarely referred to literature outside his own canon list at the risk it might appear that he was promoting texts he was criticizing, thus “encouraging those with unstable, empty minds.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Yet Epiphanius was not concerned about the capacity of Jubilees to corrupt Christian minds. In his logic, Jubilees did not fall into the category of esoteric, secret books. Instead, he placed it as part of the “traditions of the Apostles, holy writings and successions of teachers”Footnote ⁸⁸ that marked out “boundaries and foundations for the edifice of our faith.”Footnote ⁸⁹ For Epiphanius, Jubilees counted as “paradosis.”

The term paradosis means “that which is handed down.” In its early Christian context, paradosis described esoteric, unpublished traditions, which scholars have compared to the rabbinic tradition.Footnote ⁹⁰ In fact, in his own understanding of the term, Epiphanius saw paradosis as a form of rabbinic teachings. Refuting the Valentinian Christian Ptolemy, who insisted that not all of the Old Testament was God's law but that some “came from Moses and the Law of the elders,” Epiphanius remarked:

In this passage, Epiphanius equated tradition (παραδόσις) with “repetition” (δευτερώσεις).Footnote ⁹² When he claimed “the traditions of the elders are called repetitions,” Epiphanius accurately code-switched the term Mishnah “to learn by repetition” from Hebrew into Greek. In rabbinic circles, the Mishnah gradually became identified as a revelatory tradition, the Oral Torah received in tandem with the written Torah on Sinai.Footnote ⁹³ Within the earliest stratum of rabbinic literature, the Hebrew term for tradition, masoret, referred to knowledge passed down orally from ancestors or practices not fully explained in the biblical texts.Footnote ⁹⁴ A Jew writing in Greek explained tradition in similar terms: in Galatians, Paul claimed that he was persecuted for upholding “the traditions of [his] ancestors” (ὑπάρχων τῶν πατρικῶν μου παραδόσεων).Footnote ⁹⁵ Epiphanius's taxonomy of four Jewish “repetitions” is fascinating and demonstrates his understanding of tradition as a designation that carried the weight of authority, not simply commentary. As he identified Jubilees as paradosis, he suggested that the text possessed intrinsic authority and was not simply a commentary on older, authoritative texts.

In Epiphanius's own fourth-century Christian context, tradition also described authoritative beliefs and practices that were not in the New Testament. John Chrysostom acknowledged the existence of traditions of the church that were unwritten but “worthy of credit.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Rituals such as baptism, the Eucharist, or making the sign of the cross properly were all performed according to “tradition.” Eusebius recorded a disagreement between Cyprian and Stephen on qualifications for baptism—tradition mediated this dispute.Footnote ⁹⁷ When one could not consult texts to learn how to conduct a baptism or Eucharist, knowledge of these traditions could identify an orthodox Christian. Gregory of Nyssa vehemently objected to Eunomius's disparaging “sacramental tokens,” arguing instead that faith was confirmed by such traditions.Footnote ⁹⁸ Being knowledgeable about tradition indicated that one had gone through proper instruction and sufficient acculturation to know what to do or say even without written guidelines. As a “tradition,” then, the status of Jubilees may be compared to other emerging orthodox practices in the fourth century not prescribed in detail through canonical text, such as baptism or a ritualized Eucharist.

In a heresiological context, paradosis measured the criteria for something to be true and excluded the errors of sectarian Christians.Footnote ⁹⁹ Consequently, Epiphanius found knowledge of tradition a useful barometer for measuring heresy. For example, in his refutation of a group he called “Nazareans,” he noted that they did not participate in sacrificial activities in the temple and abstained from meat—practices derived from rejecting the Hebrew Bible in favor of “some other legislation.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In his refutation, Epiphanius looked outside the Hebrew Bible to meet the Nazareans on their terms.Footnote ¹⁰¹ He sought to prove the veracity of the Mosaic Torah by demonstrating that it recorded historical events, such as the Passover. Epiphanius pointed to a ritual (which he described as paradosis) concerning a “lamb being slaughtered in the land of Egypt a tradition still practiced by the Egyptians, even the idolatrous ones. Since the time the Passover took place . . . Egyptians take red paint—without knowing why—and anoint their lambs.”Footnote ¹⁰² For Epiphanius, this tradition, still prevalent among Egyptians, was residual of the Passover event and demonstrated the authenticity of the Mosaic Torah to an audience that questioned its authority. Just as the Mishnah expounded on the Hebrew Bible while simultaneously consulting it, tradition could explicate scripture but also confirm it—as the Egyptian practice of painting lambs red verified the biblical text. When identifying Jubilees as “tradition,” Epiphanius suggested such a role for the text: it upheld an orthodox narrative of history while simultaneously proving its correctness.

Yet, in the fourth century, one Christian's paradosis was another Christian's apocrypha. In part, this reflected the growing unease about the presence of secrecy within Christianity and the disagreement about the value of hidden books for the church. Between Jerome's acceptance of apocrypha as esoteric and the Decree of Gelasius’s stringent insistence that apocrypha were anathema and inimical to Christian interests, others urged caution around these texts. Epiphanius was more suspicious about the collection of books he described as apocrypha than Jerome. He admitted to consulting them on occasion but was wary of their esoteric and confusing content.Footnote ¹⁰³ While he did not consider the term synonymous with heretical, he argued that apocrypha were dangerous because they were too easily forged, and forgery, as he demonstrated in the Panarion, was an agent of heresy.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In sum, where Jerome saw potential for the apocrypha to edify the academic elite, Epiphanius focused on its capacity to lead readers astray.

Christians could take a third stance towards these texts: their contemporary Evodius rejected apocryphal authority completely. He made his position known in a letter he penned to Augustine inquiring about what happens when the soul leaves the body. If the soul is completely disembodied, he reasoned, after death each soul would join a single, celestial, super-soul. Yet a corroboration of eyewitness accounts, including ghost sightings, indicated to Evodius that souls remain separate from one another after death and preserved a measure of corporeality. In his exploration of this issue, Evodius cited an instance in “the apocrypha, the Mystery of Moses—a writing without any authority,”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ which described Moses's ascent to a mountaintop to die. This text claimed that the body of Moses was committed to the ground but also that an angel accompanied his body, protecting the soul, into heaven. Evodius firmly rejected the evidence of the Mystery of Moses and was not compelled to believe it without Augustine's approval.

Epiphanius, on the other hand, knew a similar story but presented it not as apocryphal text but as an authoritative tradition. He cited an instance of angels burying Moses in his polemics against certain Samaritan purity laws that indicated they were “completely crazy.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ According to Epiphanius, the Samaritans were wont to bathe in urine after returning from a foreign land and submerge in water fully clothed if they touched a gentile. They also avoided physical contact with the dead. In their reading of Leviticus 11:24–25, which describes the impurities transmitted by animal carcasses, Samaritans believed purification was impossible after touching a corpse. The Samaritans only accepted the five books of Moses as authentic, so, again, Epiphanius presented his rebuttal on their terms by only using the Torah; he cited several examples of patriarchs burying their dead. He observed: “So Joseph buried Israel, but was not defiled. Even after he died, Joseph fell upon his face and kissed him, and it is not written that he washed to be purified.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Moreover, Epiphanius pressed, not only did patriarchs touch the dead but so did angels: “As the tradition passed down to us holds, the angels buried Moses and did not wash, but they were not defiled by the holy man's body.”Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Epiphanius, like Evodius, had heard that Moses received an angelic burial, but this information is missing from the biblical text. Deuteronomy indicated that he was buried in Moab and that no one knew the location of his tomb. In the absence of specifics, Jewish and Christian biblical interpreters conjectured that angels buried the body. The author of the Epistle of Jude alluded to this theory, mentioning that an angel and the devil fought over his body.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Several rabbinic and patristic sources also mention his angelic burial.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The “Mystery of Moses” that Evodius mentioned may or may not be the equivalent to the extant Testament of Moses, whose ending (which would presumably contain an account of Moses's burial) is missing. While it is not clear whether Epiphanius was directly consulting the same text Evodius read, he did exhibit knowledge of Moses's extra-biblical burial tradition. Evodius described it as apocryphal and textual. Epiphanius did not refer to this angelic incident as apocrypha but as paradosis. By classifying a story as paradosis instead of apocrypha, Epiphanius could accept ideas in certain works that other Christians doubted.

In addition to this one (possible) reference to the Mystery of Moses, the quotation of the Apocryphon of Ezekiel, and the multiple citations of Jubilees, Epiphanius referenced other pseudepigrapha in his work.Footnote ¹¹¹ He wrote favorably about the Acts of Thecla and the Protoevangelium of James as well.Footnote ¹¹² However, these positive references came at the exclusion of other texts, such as 1 Enoch, which enjoyed wide Christian readership. His sensitivities to the textual practices of heretics indicate that these choices were deliberate, and casting Jubilees as Christian tradition served Epiphanius's agenda well. In particular, the text provided a non-allegorical method of reading Genesis. Allegorical interpretation remained a persistent problem for the nascent orthodox Christianity.Footnote ¹¹³ It was a central concern for Epiphanius, who viewed Origen, the architect of Christian allegory, as the “epitome of heresy.”Footnote ¹¹⁴ Thus, tradition equipped Epiphanius with an alternative to allegory as a hermeneutical device: he argued that the deity's words “do not require allegory to comprehend. One needs perspective and acumen to perceive the power of each issue. Now tradition must also be used, for it is not possible to receive everything from the holy writing.”Footnote ¹¹⁵ In the ancient culture wars over literal or figural reading, allegorical interpretation was in direct competition with the methods Epiphanius promoted.

Epiphanius drew on paradosis routinely in the Panarion to refute allegory. For instance, Jubilees provided Epiphanius with an alternative to Manichean explanations of astronomy. According to Mani, the moon waxes as Manicheans died and it absorbs their “luminary” souls. The moon then wanes as it transports their souls onto the sun, which subsequently deposits them into the “aeon of the blessed ones.” Epiphanius challenged this claim that “the moon waxes and wanes because it becomes filled with souls which have died in the knowledge of his unbelief.” He interpreted Mani literally and wondered how the moon could wax and wane long before the first human death, which did not occur until one hundred years after creation: “But at the beginning of the making of the world, around Adam's one hundredth year, Abel was killed around at the age of thirty. . . . But the sun and the moon and the stars on the fourth day of creation had been set as the centerpiece. Now . . . may we agree that your idiocy is refuted?”Footnote ¹¹⁶ Epiphanius extracted from Jubilees that “in the fourth week (of the second Jubilee) she bore Abel. . . . At the beginning of the third Jubilee, Cain killed Abel” to estimate Abel was killed around thirty years of age. The calculations in Jubilees allowed Epiphanius to preserve a natural interpretation over the Manichean allegorical explanation of time and call Mani and his followers ignorant for not knowing this basic material. Jubilees, for Epiphanius, was “the most authentic of proofs.”Footnote ¹¹⁷

Additionally, by adopting Jubilees as Christian tradition, Epiphanius found support for his own primitivist outlook of human history. Jubilees and Epiphanius shared an outlook on history that expected the continued decay of civilization until the end times.Footnote ¹¹⁸ In an age where historians were increasingly thinking of Christianity as the culmination of civilization, this stance was unique.Footnote ¹¹⁹ While Eusebius, witnessing the rise of Constantine, joyfully presumed the inevitable triumph of the Christian age, Epiphanius saw Christianity as perpetually under attack from corrupting forces. For Epiphanius, Jubilees confirmed this historical trajectory: Jubilees and the Panarion presented themselves as histories of the world, opening with creation, an ideal time when the law was uncorrupted. Jubilees recorded “both what was in the beginning and what will occur” in the future.Footnote ¹²⁰ Epiphanius similarly began his Panarion with creation: “Beginning to report and speak about faith and lack of faith, right belief and wrong belief, I am going to call to mind the beginning of the world—its creation and progression.”Footnote ¹²¹ For Epiphanius, orthodoxy existed in an ahistorical realm that was gradually corrupted by the activities of humans—five original heresies existing from primeval times gave way to an additional seventy-five by Epiphanius's day. He compared their propagation to mushrooms sprouting in fetid fertilizer or snakes growing additional heads after decapitation.Footnote ¹²² Jubilees had expressed a similarly grim outlook on history and viewed civilization as corrosive: it altered the Genesis narrative to claim that God chose his people on the seventh day of creation and sanctified them.Footnote ¹²³ Yet, the text foresaw that this sacred people would be corrupted through a proliferation in child sacrifice, polytheistic worship practices, and complete abandonment of the purity laws, all corruptions of a heavenly law that only a few righteous individuals embodied.Footnote ¹²⁴ Anticipating the level of divine retribution for such transgressions, Jubilees predicted that humanity would claim God had abandoned it.Footnote ¹²⁵ While other historians celebrated the dawn of a Christian era, as Epiphanius surveyed the proliferation of heresy, he could find intellectual kinship in the grim historical outlook Jubilees presented.

Jubilees and the Panarion also agreed that illicit books were responsible for the deterioration of human history. In the logic of Jubilees and the Panarion, the preservation of righteousness and health, or advancement of heresy and decay, was regulated by writing. As Epiphanius explained the dissemination of heresy through the proliferation of heretical texts, so Jubilees had explained the spread of lawlessness through the absence of sacred books: Abraham's father, Terah, purportedly possessed copies of sacred Hebrew texts but practiced idolatry in an effort not to offend his neighbors. Terah's actions explained the loss of these texts and the perseverance of idolatry. The existence of these books testified to the existence of a pure Israelite religion that existed before Abraham. Terah was unable to read Hebrew, and Abraham painstakingly taught himself the language in order to recover the lost esoteric lore contained in these texts. Like the Christian chronographers who posited that Christianity was the original pure religion of humankind and gradually corrupted, Jubilees imagined an untarnished, ancient Judaism that had become confused after the tower of Babel complicated human communications. Jubilees and (by implication) the Panarion argued that only proper books could recover proper religion.

In a similar vein, the wrong books contributed to the corruption of these religions. Jubilees narrated a tale absent from Genesis in which Shem's grandson Cainan consulted some tablets that rogue angels had given to humankind.Footnote ¹²⁶ When Cainan discovered some writing engraved on a stone, he “copied it down, but he did not tell about it because he feared Noah would be angry.”Footnote ¹²⁷ Cainan had discovered an old astrological tablet which his ancestors had engraved. This tablet was a relic of the angelic Watchers’ seduction of humankind—it imparted angelic secrets of sun omens and signs of heaven. Cainan transcribed these illicit writings, and, the text observes, he “sinned because of it.”Footnote ¹²⁸ With this narrative, Jubilees showcased the dangers of writings authored by humans. As Eva Mroczek has observed, the text's “biblically rich world contains dangerous texts as well, secrets inscribed long ago, waiting to draw unwary readers into their ancient power.”Footnote ¹²⁹ Similarly, Epiphanius routinely pointed to instances where access to secret books promoted the growth of heresy and, consequently, the demise of humankind.Footnote ¹³⁰

Additionally, in both texts, the right books had the capacity to heal. The Jubilees narrative testified to the existences of divinely-authored medical books. After the flood, the deity commanded the angels to narrate healing knowledge to Noah and his sons. Noah wrote down the angelic dictation in a book. This book described the diseases spread by demons and offered “every kind of medicine,” including herb lore, to cure the demonic plagues.Footnote ¹³¹ It was passed down from Noah to righteous descendants, protecting against the ills caused by the continued presence of demonic forces in the world. Thus, for Jubilees, the possession of a medicinal book delineated a class of righteous people. This dovetailed nicely with Epiphanius's own position on the healing power of books, which is evident from the title of his heresiography. The Panarion, or “medicine chest,” provided the antidote to each heresy plaguing humankind. Remarkably, Epiphanius's descriptions of heresies as dangerous insects were not just rhetorical flourishes but had foundations in ancient science.Footnote ¹³² Jubilees's demons and Epiphanius's heresies operated according to rules of the natural world. Demonic plagues could be defeated through medicinal cures, just as heresies could be understood by studying the behavior of poisonous creeping creatures. These similarities indicate that Jubilees appealed to Epiphanius because its literary worldview validated his own writing project. As he castigated heretics for producing new compositions, Epiphanius must have been acutely self-conscious about explaining his own authorial efforts.Footnote ¹³³ Jubilees, in its promotion of certain kinds of books, particularly a book on healing, provided the justification he needed.