From Metanoia to Apocalypse: Paradise Lostand the Apocryphal Lives of Adam and Eve

Stella P. Revard, Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville

As long ago as 1913, when R. H. Charles published The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the Old and New Testament, Milton scholars realized the importance of the so-called Books or Lives of Adam and Eve to Paradise Lost. E. C. Baldwin in the 1920s, Arnold Williams in the 1940s, and still later J. Martin Evans in the 1960s all remarked upon the parallels between the Greek Life, The Apocalypse of Moses, and the Latin Vita Adae et Evae and passages in Paradise Lost. The recent revival of interest in the Lives of Adam and Eve by Michael Stone, Gary Anderson, and others has also renewed interest in the question of the relevance to Milton's seventeenth-century English epic of these ancient books, which were composed in the early centuries of the Christian era.