Abstract

Until recently, research on the Ascension of Isaiah could not establish whether (some of) Paul’s letters were among the sources of that ancient Christian apocryphon. Ascension 11,34 reproduces a sentence quoted as Scripture in 1Cor 2,9, but that passage, contained only in two late ancient or medieval translations stemming from a revised textual form, is almost certainly an interpolation. In two articles, published respectively in 2015 and 2016, Tobias Nicklas and Richard Bauckham endeavoured to show, in different ways, that some passages or themes from Pauline or Deutero-Pauline epistles (mainly, but not only, Phil 2,5- 11) were tacitly used by that author, who inserted them into his/her own ideological framework. The present article checks their methods and arguments. The outcome is that they cannot stand a thorough examination, so that an influence of the Pauline correspondence on the Ascension remains as yet unproven.