Anti-Christian Polemic in the Apocalypse of Abraham: Jesus as a Pseudo-Messiah in Apoc. Ab. 29.3–14

The Apocalypse of Abraham describes a man from the heathen who is alternately shamed, struck, and worshiped by Gentiles and by some of Abraham's descendants (29.3–14). Most scholars have identified the man as Jesus of Nazareth but then excised the passage as a Christian interpolation. This article proposes that the passage is integral to the work and that it allusively depicts Jesus as a false messiah—a foil to the true messiah from Abraham's line. The passage coheres with the entire work's overriding concern to juxtapose false worship with true worship of the one God. Its polemic against veneration of Jesus is achieved through a deliberate distortion of New Testament traditions, a phenomenon not without parallel in roughly contemporaneous literature.