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THEODORE A. BERGREN, Sixth Ezra: The Text and Origin (New York/ Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Pp. xiv -+ 282. $49.95.
Sixth Ezra is a part of the 2 Esdras Corpus (4, 5, 6 Ezra) that has not attracted much attention from scholars in the last one hundred years. Perhaps Bergren's study on the text and other introductory matters relating to 6 Ezra will change that. This study is a logical development of B.'s earlier work on 5 Ezra: Fifth Ezra: The Text Origin and Early History (SBLSCS 25; Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1990) and, no doubt, will be equally well appreciated by students of early Jewish and early Christian literature.
Sixth Ezra is a short oracular work that takes up 2 Esdras 15-16. It has survived in two Latin recensions, though a two-verse fragment of a Greek text found in Egypt suggests that the Latin version was based on a Greek Vorlage. B. shows that the vocabulary and character of the Latin also support the hypothesis of a Greek original. As the subtitle of B.'s study suggests, the bulk of his work focuses on the text of 6 Ezra. B.'s principal goals are to provide a critical analysis of the Latin text and to establish the...