Philonenko, who thought that it was written by a Jewish author around 100 CE. Its purpose, he maintained was twofold: to present inter-faith marriages between Gentiles and Jews in a positive light, and, secondly, to persuade Jews as to the advantages of such unions. Cook thought that this view was "likely." All these authors contended that the author was Jewish and written around the dawn of the 1st century CE. And the anthologizers Charlesworth and Sparks seem to concur, with Charlesworth labelling the translation, "First Century B.C. – Second Century A.D." Some recent scholars, however, have challenged that interpretation. Recent scholarship In the last two decades some scholars have argued that the work is fundamentally Christian. These include Ross Shepard Kraemer, When Aseneth Met Joseph; and Rivka Nir, Joseph and Aseneth: A Christian Book. According to Angela Standhartinger, a covering letter by Moses of Ingila included with the manuscript explains the story "as an allegory of Christ's marriage to the soul". As a lost Gospel encoding the Jesus bloodline A 2014 book by Simcha Jacobovici and Barrie Wilson, The Lost Gospel: Decoding the Ancient Text that Reveals Jesus' Marriage to Mary the Magdalene, argues for the marriage of Jesus to Mary Magdalene through a decoding of Joseph and Aseneth, according to the Jesus bloodline myth. The book has been compared to The Da Vinci Code in 2003, as a conspiracy theory.Assessing the Lost Gospel by Richard Bauckham The authors claim that the story of Joseph and Aseneth was already composed during Jesus' lifetime and precedes the canonical gospels. The Syriac manuscript, being the oldest manuscript, and its accompanying cover letters are given great weight; the authors commissioned multi-spectral photography to "see through" smudges and other marks on the manuscript to ascertain the original underlying text. The translation into English was by Tony Burke, translator of The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, author of Secret Scriptures Revealed, and editor of Fakes, Forgeries, and Fictions: Writing Ancient and Modern Christian Apocrypha''. Burke worked independently and was not informed of the overall project objectives. Burke also prepared the first-ever English translation of the two covering letters in Syriac, which was more difficult than translating the main text, owing to damage to the manuscript. References 1st-century Christianity 6th-century Christian texts Joseph (Genesis) Syriac Christianity Old Testament pseudepigrapha Texts in Syriac Jewish apocrypha