The Apocryphon of Jannes and Jambres the Magicians: P. Chester Beatty XVI.

• Author: Desjardins, Michel

Jannes and Jambres, the legendary Egyptian magicians who opposed Moses and Aaron (Exod. 7:11-22) and attracted considerable attention in late antiquity, have until recently been all but forgotten. Their names occur only once in the Bible (2 Tim. 3:8), but Christian (e.g., Origen, Cyprian), Jewish (e.g., the Damascus Document, Targum Pseudo-Jonathan), and other (e.g., Pliny, Numenius) sources make it abundantly clear that stories about these men circulated widely and that a book recounting their exploits was well known by at least the third century C.E. Not much of this has remained, however, and until the 1970s only a few lines of the book were known in Latin (published in 1861 by T. O. Cockayne and popularized by M. R. James in 1901).

The last quarter century has seen a revival of interest in these traditions. At the heart of the revival lie three manuscript discoveries. Fragments of a relevant Chester Beatty papyrus, subsequently titled "P. Chester Beatty XVI," were first made known by A. Pietersma in "Greek and Coptic Inedita of the Chester Beatty Library," Bulletin of the International Organization for Septuagint and Cognate Studies 7 (1974): 10-18. This was followed by P. Maraval's "Fragments grecs du livre de Jannes et Jambre (Pap. Vindob, 29456 et 29828 Verso)," Zeitschrift fur Papyrologie und Epigraphik 25 (1977): 199-207, linking H. Oellacher's 1951 publication of this papyrus to Jannes and Jambres. Finally came L. Koenen's announcement ("Notes on Papyri," Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists 16 [1979]: 109-16) that "Papyrus Michigan inv. 4925 verso" had ten fragmentary lines of Greek text documenting the genealogy of Jannes and Jambres. Fueling the revival of interest has been the work of A. Pietersma. Since recognizing, on his first visit to the Chester Beatty Library in 1971, the significance of some previously unpublished and largely unidentified Jannes and Jambres papyrus fragments, Pietersma has devoted a considerable part of his academic career to making sense of the fragments while piecing together the traditions concerning the two Egyptian magicians. Fruits of his labors have already appeared in his (and R. T. Lutz's) "Jannes and Jambres" sections of The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, ed. J. H. Charlesworth (Garden City: Doubleday, 1985), 2:427-42; and The Anchor Bible Dictionary, ed. D. N. Freedman (Garden City: Doubleday, 1992), 3:638-40. The Apocryphon of Jannes and Jambres the Magicians represents the...