Lawrence M. Wills here traces the literary evolution of popular Jewish narratives written during the period 200 BCE-100 CE. In many ways, these narratives were similar to Greek and Roman novels of the same era, as well as to popular novels of indigenous peoples within the Roman Empire. Yet, as a group, they demonstrated a variety of novelistic innovations: the inclusion of adventurous episodes, passages of description and of dialogue, concern with psychological motivation, and the introduction of female characters. Wills focuses on five novels: Greek Esther, Greek ,Daniel, Judith, Tobit, and Joseph and Aseneth.. Drawing on a wide range of theoretical works, he delineates the techniques and motifs of the Jewish novel, shows how the genre both initiated and distanced itself from nonfictional prose such as historical and philosophical writing, discusses its relation to Greco-Roman romance, and describes the social conditions governing its emergence and reception. Wills also places the novels in historical context, situating them between the Hebrew Bible, on the one hand, and subsequent developments in Jewish and Christian literature on the other. Wills sees the Jewish novel as a popular form of writing that provided amusement for an expanding audience of Jewish entrepreneurs, merchants, and bureaucrats. In an important sense, he maintains, it was a product of the "novelistic impulse": the impulse to transfer oral stories to a written medium to reach a more literate audience.

This volume brings together in translation all the ancient Jewish novels and fragments of novels. Included are texts from the Old Testament Apocrypha, several historical novels, and selections from the Testaments of the 12 Patriarchs.

The Acts of Peter, one of the Apocryphal Acts of the Apostles that detail the exploits of the key figures of early Christianity, provides a unique window into the formation of early Christian narrative. Like the Gospels, the Acts of Peter developed from disparate oral and written narrative from the first century. The apocryphal text, however, continued to develop into a number of re-castings, translations, abridgements, and expansions. The Acts of Peter present Christian narrative in an alternate universe, in which canonization did not halt the process of creative re-composition. Now, in this groundbreaking book, Thomas examines the sources and subsequent versions of the Acts, from the earliest traditions through the sixth-century Passions of the Apostles, arguing the importance of its "narrative fluidity": the existence of the work in several versions or multiforms. This feature, shared with the Jewish novels of Esther and Daniel, the Greek romance about Alexander the Great, and the Christian Gospels, allows these narratives to adapt to accommodate the changing historical circumstances of their audiences. In each new version, the audiences' defining conflicts were reflected in the text, echoing a historical consciousness more often identified with primary oral societies, in which the account of the past is a malleable script explaining the present. Although the genre most closely comparable to these works is the ancient novel, their serious historical intent separates them from the later, more self-consciously fictive novels, and maintains them within the realm of the earlier historical novels produced by ethnic subcultures within the Roman empire.

The educational curriculum in Chariton's Callirhoe / Ronald F. Hock -- Imitating imitation : Vergil, Homer, and Acts 10:1-11:18 / Chris Shea -- Die Entführung in das Serail : Aspasia : a female Aesop? / Richard I. Pervo -- Novel and mystery : discourse, myth, and society / Gerhard van den Heever -- Midrash as fiction and midrash as history : what did the rabbis mean? / Chaim Milikowsky -- Mimesis and dramatic art in Ezekiel : the tragedians' exagoge / Jo-Ann A. Brant -- Daniel 1-6 : a biblical story-collection / Tawny L. Holm -- 3 Maccabees : an anti-Dionysian polemic / Noah Hacham -- Third Maccabees : historical fictions and the shaping of Jewish identity in the Hellenistic period / Sara R. Johnson -- Humor and paradox in the characterization of Abraham in the Testament of Abraham / Jared W. Ludlow -- Resurrection and social perspectives in the apocryphal Acts of Peter and Acts of John / Judith B. Perkins -- The breasts of Hecuba and those of the daughters of Jerusalem : Luke's transvaluation of a famous Iliadic scene / Dennis R. MacDonand -- The choral crowds in the tragedy according to St. Matthew / J.R.C. Cousland -- The summaries of Acts 2, 4, and 5 and utopian literary traditions / Ruben Rene Dupertuis -- A biography of a motif : the empty tomb in the Gospels, the Greek novels, and Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet / Andy Reimer.

This book provides a series of essays from members of the Canadian Society of Biblical Studies' Special Seminar on Ancient Historiography.