Theoretical background and methodology
Our starting assumptions are that the documents of ancient Jewish literature need to be appreciated, among other things, in their literary constitution (whether created in writing or orally). Providing a sound basis for such a literary description will contribute to the historical investigation of early Judaism and early Christianity, as well as to a comparative framework for the study of other kinds of ancient literature. In creating such a description, the conventional genre labels cannot be taken for granted. The same goes for the separation of the sources into the four corpora (pseudepigrapha, apocrypha, Dead Sea Scrolls, rabbinic literature) or their grouping into narrative versus discursive books. Such distinctions, rather than constituting the starting point for a fresh framework of description, should emerge from the detailed description of specific documents or documents groups.
Our concepts are influenced by the current wider academic discourse on texts, meaning in language, and the process of reading. Advances in the fields of general linguistics, text linguistics, pragmatics, hermeneutics and general philosophy, and literary studies have had an impact on our starting assumptions and are partly being tested by our empirical work. This includes concepts such as authorship (and the "death of the author"), document unity (and the historical-critical method), and coherence and cohesion. Basic conceptual dichotomies which we accept, although not always in an absolute sense, are the separation of synchronic analysis (the focus of our project) from diachronic analysis of sources within a document; the distinction between form and content; and the need to imagine the text's meaning in its own historical context (usually inaccessible to us) while keeping it separate from the text's meaning to a modern reader (including the historically trained scholarly reader).
Our Typology is partly shaped by the need to address explicitly the difficulties which these ancient sources can pose to the modern reader, including the following: the presupposition of an apparently very specific social-cultural context, the apparent lack of cogency in which thematic-discursive information is sequenced, and the apparently weak coherence of whole documents or books. We address these problems in two ways. (1) We treat a document as prima facie unified in its extant overall shape. In other words, we do not resolve problems of internal unity by dividing texts into the putative original components from which they may have been put together. Instead we tackle the task of describing the actual structural result of this "putting together". (2) We reflect on our own reading assumptions as modern academics to pinpoint more precisely what are the literary features of these ancient documents that cause (us!) these difficulties, and how these difficulties may also show up modern "prejudices" of reading which were not operative in antiquity.
Another aspect of the project's theoretical orientation lies in the analysis of perspective. We conceptualise anonymity and pseudepigraphy as literary stances linked to the self-presentation of a text's governing voice. A draft paper by Alex Samely explains this further. It was presented at the British Association of Jewish Studies annual conference during Manchester University's JudaicaFest in July 2008.