I recently wrote about my excitement over Daniel Gurtner’s new book, Introducing the Pseudepigrapha of Second Temple Judaism: Message, Context, Significance (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2020). Baker Academic has just released this video interview with Dan. I highly recommend it.
Let me speak to professors and students: If you are teaching New Testament, especially to beginners, or if you are a student, let me make a suggestion: you might want to consider this video itself as homework. If you are a professor and you have some sort of course page, you should add a link to it there as a resource. If you have a Facebook account, post this video so your students can find it. Of course, scholars will always quibble with one another. On some minor point, you may put things slightly differently Dan does (e.g., I think pseudepigraphical writing was likely seen as involving more deception than Dan allows; I also have never encountered a Testa-mint [sp?]), but here is the truth: almost no one in the world knows this literature as well as Dan. Everyone can learn something from this.
So, if you want a basic introduction to what the Second Temple Jewish Pseudepigrapha is, here is the place to start. Also, if you teach this material, you can also learn a lot from the way Dan presents it here. Thanks very much to Baker Academic for releasing this!