quality of the biblical prophets. Apocalyptic literature, with its eschatological focus, was a foil to the ethical emphasis in wisdom literature. In general, however, Christian scholarship—taught in seminaries and preached from the pulpit—portrayed Judaism as a whole as the dark religious backdrop before which were played out the liberating events of the life of Jesus and the rise of the early church. Jewish scholars, for their part, ignored the writings of the so-called Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha,