Religious Motives of the Creation of Old Testament Pseudepigrapha

Abstract

There is explored in the article a hypothetical attitude of the authors of pseude- pigrapha, given that they had a religious consciousness, to their literary work. For such a purpose there is revealed a specifity of pseudepigraph as a special type of text, and different types of literary creativity and its motivation are examined in order to identify the most relevant mo- tives. There is also undertaken the review and criticism of existing hypotheses of the nature of the pseudonymity in parabiblical literature, including concepts relating to the background and conditions for the creation of a «rewritten Bible». There are clarified the reasons for which pseudepigraph, differing from both the canonical text and the literary fiction, but representing what its creators themselves consider to be a record of revelation, could not but be pseudony- mous in conditions of the literary process of the era that gave rise to it. At the end of the article, conclusions are drawn about the nature of relation between the pseudepigraphic corpus of texts and the canonical one.