5 - The Early Christian Readers of the Apocalypse of the Birds

Summary

So far, I have established that the text of the work I have called the Apocalypse of the Birds appears for the first time in our material record in fourteenthcentury Ethiopia. From there, we can imagine ourselves walking along a timeline backwards, looking for hints that a version of the work has come into existence. The material shape of the work we are looking for is something like the Animal Apocalypse we have attested in Gəʿəz; I have suggested above that the Apocalypse of the Birds most likely functioned as an addendum to the Vision of the Beasts, and did not circulate as a freestanding work. But we are looking in particular for references to the distinctive content and traditions of the Apocalypse of the Birds, since it is also possible to imagine the circulation of a version limited to the Vision of the Beasts, akin to what our Qumran manuscripts might have represented. This chapter will collate evidence from early readers of the Apocalypse of the Birds – Barnabas and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs – to establish a terminus ante quem in the second century ce.

Moving backward from the fourteenth-century, we can begin with our next available evidence: a tenth-century Byzantine codex featuring not only an extract from the Vision of the Beasts, but also a summary of the work from which the extract was drawn that seems to include the Apocalypse of the Birds. This document, the Codex Vaticanus Graecus 1809, features an extract from 1 En 89.42–9 in the margins of excerpts from the letters of Maximus the Confessor. The quoted section of the Vision of the Beasts tells the tale of David's conflict with the Ammonites, Amalekites, and Philistines.