The Isaiah tradition as Matthew prologue

Twelve months back I looked at Warren Campbell 2018, on an Isaiah apocryphon, the "Martyrdom and Ascension of Isaiah" (MAI). Campbell deemed it a conscious "pre-quel" to Matthew. He observes that Justin knew Isaiah's fate as a type for Christ, in Trypho 120, whether from this text directly or not.

This text as it survives is mostly stable, excepting 11:2-22 which is fluid. Internally it looks like a composite. The biography of Isaiah - his Passion, in fact - runs ch. 1-5 excepting 3:13-4:22, a "testament of Hezekías" (=Hezeqiah; we do own the Greek for that). Then follows from ch.6 a heavenly vision, like Enoch's. UPDATE 1/26/22: We return to the hacksaw at the five-chapter base, elsewhere.

Andrew K Helmbold, "Gnostic Elements in the “Ascension of Isaiah", New Testament Studies 18.2 (1972), 222f. had offered other intertext: here, in that "Vision" section.

Whoso composed this section, concluded Helmbold, was a gnostic. The author's scripture included Thomas 37. The Vision mostly agreed with the Apocryphon of John. Also implicated: "On The Creation Of The World" and the Hymn of the Pearl. The haeresiologists saw these motifs with Basilides and the Ophites. [INTERJECT 4/1/23: Acts of John?] Presumably the final editor was, like the Nag Hammadi monks, at least gnosis-curious.

Helmbold does not see this stuff drifting into chapters 1-5 ... excepting the Hezekías interpolation. That interpolation, as luck would have it, appears in the Amherst papyrus. Since Hezekías refers to the Vision, that papyrus witnesses to the whole text at least to 11:1. Campbell doesn't see that interpolation as owning any independent life of its own, instead citing scholarship that it parallels Jewish legend. The editor, then, composed that.

As for the Matthean material Campbell finds, they exist in all three or four segments: Hezekías, chapters 1-5, chapters 6-10, and 11:2-15. 11:2-15 isn't attested outside Ethiopic, and Hezekías is likely the last composed.

Excepting those regions, the only Vision parallel to Matthew is 9:17, on people who "ascend" with Christ on the third day. Campbell's table marks that as "Matthew only"; the discussion claims it has to do with the Resurrection Of The Saints. But maybe it has to do with the Gospel Of Peter. If we're dealing with Christian gnosticism, then I agree it all postdates Matthew; but this part of the "Ascension" seems not to relate to Matthew's somatic resurrection, but to something mystical - note the absent tomb. As pre-Paul doctrine goes, this agrees with 1 Corinthians' creed (with a burial) against Philippians'.

I note that Justin was unaware of the visionary lore here. Campbell doesn't see a direct quote but if not from this text, it is difficult to see to what other text.

Still, I don't see the bulk of chapters 1-5 (excepting Hezekías) going out by itself. If this OT pseudepigraph were not composed for the Vision, it would have gone out as the first book in a collection. Matthew's Gospel would have naturally followed - that, or some exegetical expansion (Justin was famously fond of such). Then, perhaps, other Matthew-like martyr material: 1 Peter would be natural, or Ignatius' letter to Rome. I'm thinking something like those codices at Nag Hammadi, or like Jacobowici's Syriac collection with "Asenath" in it. I am definitely looking at fraught western Anatolia.