Apocalypses of Ezra

In the early centuries of the Christian era, several texts called the Apocalypse of Ezra were in circulation among Jews, Christians, Gnostics, and related religious groups. The original is believed to have been written in Judahite or Aramaic and is commonly known as the Jewish or Judahite Apocalypse of Ezra, as Ezra is believed to have been an ancient Judahite. This version of the Apocalypse was translated into Greek sometime before 200 AD and circulated widely within the early Christian churches. This prophet Ezra is not the scribe Ezra from the books of Ezra, but a prophet named Shealtiel who lived a couple of centuries earlier. In the apocalypse, he is called Ezra by the messenger Uriel, which translates as ‘helper’ or ‘assistant.’ In the book, it is claimed that the prophet Ezra wrote 904 books, and its popularity seems to have inspired a number of Christian-era Apocalypses of Ezra, presumably beginning with the ‘Latin’ Apocalypse of Ezra which claimed to be the ‘second book of the prophet Ezra.’ The ‘second apocalypse’ was strangely attributed to Ezra the Scribe, and not the earlier exilarch Shealtiel, suggesting the author of the second apocalypse was not entirely familiar with the first apocalypse.

The Judahite Apocalypse of Ezra was adopted under a variety of names into the Bibles of most older churches before the Protestant Reformation. In the 4th century, it was called 3rd Ezra by Archbishop Ambrose (Aurelius Ambrosius) of Milan, who numbered it in sequence after the 1st and 2nd Ezras from the Septuagint. This name continues to be used in Slavic, Armenian, and Georgian Eastern Orthodox Bibles, however, Jerome (Eusebius Sophronius Hieronymus) rejected the majority of books attributed to Ezra when he translated the original Latin Vulgate Bible. At the time, there were a large number of Apocalypses of Ezra in circulation, most of which had been written recently, and as a result of this confusion, Jerome rejected everything other than the Septuagint’s 2nd Ezra, for which there was a Hebrew translation that could be used for comparison. This book was subsequently split into two books of Ezra and Nehemiah, based on the internal division of the text.