Introduction
The Voice of Jacob
Alexander Kulik
The voice is the voice of Jacob, yet the hands are the hands of Esau.
Genesis 27:22
Jewish literature of the Hellenistic and Roman periods has attracted different groups of scholars for different reasons. In modern times, it was Western Christian scholars—or Western scholars interested in the beginnings of Christianity—who first took up the challenge. They were fascinated by the opportunity to reconstruct the context and background of the New Testament world and benefited from the accessibility of manuscript sources preserved in Greek, Latin, and the vernacular languages of the West. Eastern Christian scholars, in turn, often belonged to emergent national schools and were thrilled that their heritages, typically unknown to Western scholars, could also contribute to the study of an ancient and universal legacy.
It took some time, however, before Jewish scholars overcame their sense of alienation from the overtly non-Jewish modes of transmission of Second Temple sources and joined the venture. Their motives were diverse: some welcomed a Jewish alternative to Rabbinic tradition; others discerned instructive similarities in the conditions of the Jewish people in the GrecoRoman and modern periods; still others rediscovered for themselves important pages in the history of the Jewish people in its own land. This last interest, combined with the achievements of archaeology, opened new opportunities to juxtapose physical and textual evidence.
Without ignoring these extra-academic agendas, some scholars—among them the initiators of this volume—approach the field motivated by intellectual curiosity of another kind. Second Temple literature represents a methodologically fascinating object of research. The fact that the absolute majority of evidence about one civilization (early Judaism) has been preserved by another (late antique and medieval Christianity) creates an intricate set of challenges that overlap diverse academic disciplines yet are complexly intertwined.
An integrative analysis in this field should therefore involve the tools of linguistics, textual criticism, translation studies, literary criticism, comparative religion, history of art, cultural anthropology, folklore, thematic criticism, and more. From a purely philological perspective, we are often dealing with texts and traditions that have an especially complicated intercultural history, with ancient and medieval translations that usually involve more than one or two languages and scribal traditions. From a historical-cultural perspective, we face the most tangled knot of factors to be considered at every stage of analysis. To mention only a few:
1. The preserving civilization (Christianity) claims succession to the preserved one (Judaism), but largely neglects its ethnic elements and filters it theologically.
2. The earlier civilization at the same time seeks to maintain its national components as it develops over the centuries but nonetheless undergoes transformation in every respect, including politically, geographically, etc. Thus later versions of the preserved civilization almost completely erase from their memory the ancient tradition under discussion.
3. The divergence is also linguistic. The civilization that preserved the data is itself split into linguistically distinct traditions. These appertain to its various successors, which were themselves distinct in culture, religious confession, and political character.
4. Two subsequent catastrophes—the destruction of Jewish national life and the fall of the Roman Empire in the West—caused further divergence among and within all the traditions.
5. Yet, the situation of which we speak was even more complex, because the divergences were not unidirectional. Dialogue between the two traditions continued, even when not explicit, and inevitably affected the transmission of the older common heritage, making its reconstruction even more challenging.
As a result, the edifice of Second Temple Jewish culture, originally an amalgam of various Near Eastern, Greek, and Roman elements, crumbled, and its pieces were taken away separately by subsequent Christian authors and communities. These pieces must therefore be carefully excavated from the treasuries of the many later and equally diverse cultures. In this volume we aspire to contribute to reassembling such fragments and making sense of them. The format we have chosen for doing so is conditioned by two main considerations. First, we aim to introduce a certain balance into scholarly perspectives on early Jewish literature. There is a need to consider this corpus not from the point of view of a reconstructed product—that is, a body of hypothetical, unpreserved originals (as usually portrayed in accordance with the agenda of specific religiocentric disciplines)—but from the point of view of the extant materials (thus in a more philologically oriented framework), with a strong emphasis, where appropriate, on the manuscript evidence. This does not necessarily mean that we hold a hypercritical view on the possibility of such hypothetical reconstructions. In fact, the authors of this volume represent the entire range of
opinions on this matter. We simply agree in recognizing that such an integral survey is lacking. Although certain traditions have received focused attention, none of the standard surveys approach the corpus of early Jewish literature from the perspective of the transmission, reception, and, often, modification of the preserved sources. Instead, they present it as a reconstructed corpus, often ignoring the transmission history or at least making no attempt to deal with it in an integrated fashion.1 We believe that filling this lacuna will open new research perspectives and initiate a process of bridging the gap between scholars of early Judaism and of medieval Christianity.
Second, one finds much research pertaining to each distinct tradition and corpus, as well as some intertraditional insights here and there. But what we are missing—and this is most significant—is a systematic dialogue among scholars who are (understandably) often restricted to their own fields and to sources preserved in languages that they have mastered. In our view, this dialogue should commence with a presentation of the state of the field, that is, with a general survey of the research situation documented in a reference volume. This volume is designed to yield just such a result, and to take the most necessary step of providing a basic platform, a map for discussion, and a useful tool for scholars of various disciplines, approaches, and backgrounds.
The present volume is therefore devoted to problems of preservation, reception, and transformation of Jewish texts and traditions of the Second Temple period in diverse ecclesiastical traditions. The chapters present (a) general up-to-date surveys of separate traditions (addressing, inter alia, recent developments in the state of research and perspectives for future research); (b) discussion of the fate of specific texts and corpora among diverse traditions; (c) methodological issues (including the distinction between originally Jewish and Christian material, modes of medieval transmission and compilation, early Jewish texts and motifs in liturgy and iconography, etc.); and, when possible, (d) innovations relevant to the topic. The central purpose of the book is to map the trajectories of early Jewish texts and traditions among diverse later cultures, and thus provide a comprehensive introduction to the field.
The volume consists of three main sections. Section A, “Traditions,” provides surveys of the Christian linguo-confessional traditions that preserve early Jewish materials, including Greek, Latin, Ethiopic, Slavonic, Syriac, Coptic, Armenian, Georgian, Christian Arabic, Celtic, and Germanic. To achieve a more stereoscopic and richer perspective, we
1. See, e.g., the surveys by E. Schürer, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ, rev. and ed. G. Vermes, F. Millar, and M. Goodman (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1973–1987); M. E. Stone, ed., Jewish Writings of the Second Temple Period (CRINT 2.1; Assen and Minneapolis, MN: Van Gorcum and Fortress Press, 1984); G. W. E. Nickelsburg, Ancient Judaism and Christian Origins: Diversity, Continuity, and Transformation (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2003); and A. Samely, Profiling Jewish Literature in Antiquity: An Inventory, from Second Temple Texts to the Talmuds, with P. Alexander, R. Bernasconi, and R. Hayward (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013). See also collections of translated sources, such as J. H. Charlesworth, ed., The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha (2 vols.; New York: Doubleday, 1983–1985); R. Bauckham, J. R. Davila, and A. Panayotov, eds., Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: More Noncanonical Scriptures, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2013); and L. B. Feldman, J. L. Kugel, and L. H. Schiffman, eds., Outside the Bible: Ancient Jewish Writings Related to Scripture (Philadelphia and Omaha: JPS and University of Nebraska Press, 2013).
then present a different cross-section of the same material, this time organized according to the most distinct corpora of Jewish literature preserved by Christians. Section B, “Corpora,” looks at different corpora of texts from the point of view of their Christian preservation. It includes a discussion of Old Testament pseudepigrapha as corpus and category; the works of Josephus, Philo, and minor Jewish Hellenistic authors; liturgical works; works found in Qumran in their connection to Christian traditions; Enochic books and traditions, and remnants of the ancient Jewish science as preserved by Christians.2 Section C, “Comparative Perspective,” offers surveys of alternative non- Christian tracks for the survival of early Jewish materials: Jewish (Rabbinic and Karaite), Islamic, and Manichaean traditions that also preserve elements or echoes of early Jewish texts.
Each chapter discusses early Jewish texts belonging to a certain tradition or corpus (including texts that are of dubious or Christian provenance but preserve early Jewish motifs), together with information, as appropriate, on their estimated dates of composition, translation provenance, and languages of Vorlagen. Special consideration is accorded to texts preserved uniquely (or primarily) in the tradition under consideration. The chapters aspire to examine the peculiarities of the given tradition or corpus in comparison to other traditions or corpora, the relation of the given tradition or corpus to Greek or other related linguistic traditions, the Sitz im Leben of translations and their connection to major cultural processes, and sometimes also the Nachleben of translations. The authors often pay attention to the functioning of texts; their incorporation into major collections; and, when possible, their reception in textual, visual, and oral traditions. Together, the chapters provide an outlook on the current state of research and on perspectives and tasks for future research, accompanied by a basic bibliography that gives the main editions, translations, and research works, often including projects in progress.
The present volume shares one trait with its object of research. It has been conceived and implemented by a diverse team, whose members belong to different fields of knowledge and when they do not, then to rival schools of thought—or, if neither of these, then they at least hold opposing views on cardinal issues. Although such diversity may come at the expense of uniformity of presentation, we view that, not as an inevitable constraint, dictated by the hitherto disciplinary disintegration of the topic, but as a positive and fundamental advantage of this project, which exposes the reader to a richness of views and approaches. Hence, united by our mutually complementary dissimilarity no less than by our common aspiration to catch the subdued voice of Jacob, as captured and preserved by brotherly hands, we submit our work to the judgment of the reader.
Alexander Kulik Editor-in-Chief
2. We do not include as a separate corpus the works known as “Deutero-canonical books” or “Apocrypha.” The history of the transmission and reception of these works follows what may be called a “biblical” trajectory, alongside other early Jewish books, such as Daniel and Esther, and in contrast to a vast majority of the texts that constitute the subject of this volume.
Greek
William Adler
Works and Authors Discussed
Alexander Polyhistor
Athanasius of Alexandria
1 Enoch
Book of Jubilees
Clement of Alexandria
Pseudo-Eupolemus
Flavius Josephus
George Syncellus
George Cedrenus
Eusebius of Caesarea
Justus of Tiberias
Michael Glycas
Origen
Philo of Alexandria: Photius of Constantinople
What survives of early Greco-Jewish literature depends mainly on the efforts and preferences of Christian witnesses and copyists. That includes the writings of the two bestknown representatives of Hellenistic Judaism: Philo of Alexandria and Flavius Josephus. Modern scholarship owes the early church a great debt for having preserved, largely intact, the Greek texts of so many of the writings of Josephus and Philo.1 Other works either
1. For the Christian preservation and reception of Philo, see esp. D. Runia, Philo in Early Christian Literature: A Survey (CRINT 3.3; Assen: Van Gorcum, 1993), 3–7. On Josephus, see H. Schreckenberg, Die
originally composed in Greek or translated into that language did not fare nearly so well, however. Absent the smattering of excerpts preserved mainly in Eusebius’s Praeparatio evangelica, we would know nothing of the works of Artapanus, Aristeas “the exegete,” Demetrius the chronographer, Aristobulus the philosopher, Ezekiel the tragedian, and Philo the epic poet—each an important witness to the cultural world of Hellenistic Judaism.2 What survives of other Hellenistic Jewish authors is sometimes little more than their names. Included among those lost works are what must have been substantial works of history. Were it not for the testimony of Second Maccabees, the five-volume history of Jason of Cyrene, an account of the Maccabean revolt that extends to Judas’s defeat of Nicanor in 161 bce, would now be entirely unknown.3 According to Photius, the Jewish historian Justus of Tiberias (first century ce) published a history of the Jewish war and a chronicle of Jewish history in the form of a genealogy of kings extending from Moses down to the death of the Herodian king Agrippa II.4 Justus’s proofs for the antiquity of Moses—a pet theme among Jewish and Christian apologists—did draw praise from Eusebius.5 But apart from a few stray notices in the writings of Christian authors and a scathing review of his account of the Jewish war in Josephus’s Vita, nothing of either work survives.6
1. Principles of Transmission and Selection
Because so many Greco-Jewish sources survive only in scattered fragments in works of a much later date, the contents of the original works, the identities of their authors, the avenues of their transmission, and the principles of selection are in many cases irretrievable. Fortunately, Eusebius of Caesarea, the single most important witness to Hellenistic
Flavius-Josephus-Tradition in Antike und Mittelalter (Leiden: Brill, 1972); and Schreckenberg, “The Works of Josephus and the Early Christian Church,” in L. R. Feldman and G. Hata, eds., Josephus, Judaism, and Christianity (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 315–24. In addition to the preservation of Josephus and Philo in direct Greek transmission, there is a substantial collection of witnesses to their writings through secondary channels. See Schreckenberg, Die Flavius-Josephus-Tradition, 68–171; and J. R. Royse, The Spurious Texts of Philo of Alexandria: A Study of Textual Transmission and Corruption with Indexes to the Major Collections of Greek Fragments (ALGHJ 22; Leiden: Brill, 1991), 14–58 (excerpts from Philo in Greek catenae and florilegia).
2. For edition and English translation of the fragments of Hellenistic Jewish authors preserved by Eusebius and other sources, see C. R. Holladay, ed. and trans., Fragments from Hellenistic Jewish Authors (4 vols.; SBLTT; Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1983–1996).
3. See 2 Macc 2:23, where the author claims to have condensed Jason’s work into a single volume. For other lost Jewish histories composed in Greek, see E. Schürer, English translation revised and edited by G. Vermes and F. Millar, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ (175 b.c.–a.d. 135) vol. 1 (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1973), 19–43.
4. Photius, Bibliotheca, ed. R. Henry (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1959–1977), 33 (6b).
5. Euseb., Chronici canones, ed. R. Helm, Die Chronik des Hieronymus (3rd ed.; GCS Eusebius Werke 7; Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1984), Praef. 7. 11–17.
6. For Josephus’s critique of Justus, see Joseph., Vita, 336–67. On Justus of Tiberias, see T. Rajak, “Justus of Tiberias,” CQ 23 (1973): 344–68. On the polemical exchange between Josephus and Justus, see Rajak, “Josephus and Justus of Tiberias,” in Feldman and Hata, eds., Josephus, Judaism, and Christianity, 81–94; and S. J. D. Cohen, Josephus in Galilee and Rome: His Vita and Development as a Historian (Columbia Studies in the Classical Tradition 8; Leiden: Brill, 1979), 114–20.
Jewish literature, is also the most forthcoming in explaining how he gained access to these documents and his motives for citing them.7 In his Ecclesiastical History, which contains a relatively full inventory of Philo’s writings, Eusebius praises the richness of Philo’s thought and the subtlety of his exposition of sacred scripture, and recognizes Philo’s role in laying the groundwork for apostolic teaching.8 He holds Josephus in equally high regard. For Eusebius, Josephus’s account of the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple, narrated by an eyewitness observer with unassailable credentials, confirmed his own interpretation of these events as divine retribution against the Jews, both for rejecting Christ and for killing James the Just. In the Antiquities and Josephus’s two books against Apion, Eusebius found valuable confirmation of the antiquity of the Jews and the authority and unity of their sacred texts, and a spirited vindication of Jewish institutions—issues that were all central to Eusebius’s defense of Christianity against its learned detractors.9
The desire to establish the antiquity of the Jews and the priority of their doctrines and practices was also the motive underlying Eusebius’s selection of source material for his Praeparatio evangelica, a sprawling work of fifteen books composed sometime after 313 ce. It was occasioned by an accusation all too familiar to Christian apologists—namely, that Christianity required its adherents to abandon their ancestral customs and cut “for themselves a new kind of track in a pathless desert.”10 In response, Eusebius promises to demonstrate to his readers that Christianity had restored the wisdom of the “Hebrews,” an ancient and godly ethnos, preceding Moses and the Jewish nation, much older than the Greeks and far superior to them in both their teachings and customs.11 To document his argument that the renowned wisdom of the Greeks was both late and derivative, Eusebius, a bookish scholar with access to the copious resources of the library of Caesarea, lays out a vast array of citations from older sources, many of them composed by Jewish or Samaritan authors of the Hellenistic age.
Spanning the history of the Jews from Abraham down to the fall of Jerusalem to the Babylonians, Eusebius’s citations from these latter sources make up an assortment of fragments from various literary genres: commentaries and exposition, epic and tragic poetry, and various genres of historiography. From the Jewish philosopher Aristobulus, Eusebius extracted two substantial excerpts attempting, among other things, to demonstrate Plato’s and Pythagoras’s familiarity with a Greek translation of the Mosaic law. Four excerpts from Demetrius “the chronographer” deal with events from Genesis and Exodus. Four fragments from the Jewish historian Eupolemus concern the achievements and reigns of David, Solomon, and the last three kings of Judah, along with a computation of the years
7. On Eusebius’s citations from Jewish literature, see A. J. Carriker, The Library of Eusebius of Caesarea (VCSup 67; Leiden: Brill, 2003), 155–77.
8. Euseb., Hist. eccl. 2.17.23–18.8.
9. Euseb., Hist. eccl. 3.9.3–10.
10. Euseb., Praep. evang., ed. K. Mras (GCS 43; Eusebius Werke 8; Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1954), 1.2.4.
11. See A. Johnson, Ethnicity and Argument in Eusebius’ Praeparatio Evangelica (Oxford Early Christian Studies; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
from Adam down to the author’s own day. A citation from an anonymous author erroneously attributed to Eupolemus deals with postdiluvian history and the contributions of Enoch and Abraham to the celestial sciences. Several citations from Artapanus recount the exploits and the contributions of Abraham, Joseph, and Moses to Egyptian civilization, society, and religious life. A fragment from Cleodemus Malchus contains a genealogy of Abraham’s descendants, which includes in his family tree the Greek hero Heracles. A single excerpt from the historian and exegete Aristeas treats the figure of Job, identified here with the Edomite Jobab, the great grandson of Esau. The epic poet Philo (not to be confused with Philo of Alexandria) provided Eusebius with twenty-four lines of hexameter verse dealing with Abraham, Joseph, and the city of Jerusalem. From the tragic poem of Ezekiel the tragedian, Eusebius excerpted a lengthy poetic rendition of events described in Exodus 1–15.
Together with the citations from some of the same sources preserved by Clement of Alexandria, Eusebius’s excerpts offer an impressive testimony to sources that would otherwise have been almost entirely lost. But it is only a glimpse, and a highly refracted one at that. Eusebius did not have direct access to any of the works from which he quoted. For most of these, he acknowledges his dependence on an intermediary work, the Peri Ioudaiōn of Alexander Polyhistor, a Greek grammarian of Miletus and manumitted Roman slave of the first century bce.12 Thanks to Eusebius’s efforts, we know more about Polyhistor’s treatise on the Jews than many of his other ethnographies. But Polyhistor undertook the work for reasons quite removed from those of Eusebius. As in other Hellenistic ethnographies, Polyhistor’s treatment of the Jews, and of various other peoples of the world, seems to have been antiquarian in character, tailored to readers’ appetites for topographic descriptions, narratives of origins, and the genealogies of cultures and peoples.13 His eclectic selection of reading material was neither exclusively of Jewish origin nor even unequivocally sympathetic to the Jews. Alongside Artapanus’s effusions about Moses, Polyhistor reproduces, without comment, a passage from Apollonius Molon’s tract Against the Jews, the latter a work that according to Josephus helped to propagate some of the more rabid calumnies against the Jews.14 But there would have been little reason for Eusebius to have retained
12. On Polyhistor’s work on the Jews, see J. Freudenthal, Alexander Polyhistor und die von ihm erhaltenen Reste jüdischer und samaritanischer Geschichtswerke (Hellenistische Studien 1; Breslau, Poland,1874); and W. Adler, “Alexander Polyhistor’s Peri Ioudaiōn and Literary Culture in Republican Rome,” in A. Inowlocki and C. Zamagni, eds., Reconsidering Eusebius: Collected Papers on Literary, Historical, and Theological Issues (VCSup 107; Leiden: Brill, 2011), 225–40.
13. For testimonia and fragments of Alexander Polyhistor’s writings, see F. Jacoby, Die Fragmente der Griechischen Historiker, IIIa (Leiden: Brill, 1993), #273, 96–126 (T 1–8; F 1–145).
14. In Euseb., Praep. evang. 9.19.1–3. The small passage from Molon’s work Against the Jews that Eusebius quotes is a relatively unexceptional notice about Noah and Abraham. Eusebius, for his own reasons, may have elected to exclude other works in Polyhistor’s collection that were unfavorable to the Jews. On Polyhistor’s choice of sources as a measure of his attitude toward Judaism, see E. Gabba, “The Growth of Anti-Judaism, or the Greek Attitude toward the Jews,” in Cambridge History of Judaism, vol 2: The Hellenistic Age, ed. W. D. Davies and L. Finkelstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 651–52; and B. Z. Wacholder, Eupolemus: A Study of JudaeoGreek Literature (HUCM 3; Cincinnati, OH: Hebrew Union College and Jewish Institute of Religion, 1974), 49. On Polyhistor’s neutrality, see also Jacoby, Die Fragmente der Griechischen Historiker: “For him it is more important that he has collected the material in a completely neutral way (this term is probably better than ‘objective’),
material that was either incidental to or even antithetical to his purposes. When Eusebius tells his readers: “After some other passages, Alexander Polyhistor says . . . ,” we can only speculate as to what might been expunged along the way.15
2. Jewish, Christian, Samaritan, or Something Else?
Because so many Christian citations from Hellenistic Jewish sources are either unidentified or pseudonymous, modern scholarship on this literature has poured enormous effort into sorting out the religious affinities and ethnic identities of the authors. This is not simply a matter of distinguishing “Jewish” from “Christian.” Uncertainties abound even for sources that predate Christianity, especially for those that survive only in fragments. Everyone is more or less agreed that Eupolemus, Artapanus, Demetrius, Philo the poet, and Ezekiel the tragedian were Jews. An account of how Abraham was received with hospitality on Mount Gerizim has convinced most, but not all, critics that a passage Polyhistor attributed to Eupolemus in fact originated in the work of an unknown Samaritan writer.16 After that, the consensus dissolves. Theodotus, the author of the epic poem on the Jews, has been called a Samaritan and a violently nationalistic Jew.17 On Ezekiel the tragedian, opinions waver between Jew and Samaritan.18 Theophilus may have been a Samaritan, a Jew, or a pagan. Cleodemus Malchus is the real chameleon, variously described as a Jew, a Samaritan, a Syrian, and a Phoenician.19 This fine-grained ethnic and religious profiling is strictly modern nomenclature. Only rarely do citations from sources now assumed to be Jewish identify the ethnic identity of their authors. Josephus treats Philo, Eupolemus, Demetrius, and Theodotus as if they were Greek historians.20 There is nothing in the extracts preserved in the Praeparatio to suggest that either Eusebius himself or his authority Polyhistor ever cared to sort out any of his informants according to our categories of Jew, Samaritan, Greek, Phoenician, and Syrian. Artapanus, the Hellenistic Jewish propagandist for Moses; Apollonius Molon, the Greek propagandist against the Jews; and pseudo-Eupolemus, the Samaritan, are, along with all the rest, simply authorities on the subject.
just as he does for the Egyptians, Lycians and Carians; he is neither a philo-Semite nor an anti-Semite but here, too, simply a collector” (Kommentar zu nr. 273, 249).
15. See, e.g., Praep. evang. 9.19.4: Τοσαῦτα
16. Eupolemus, fr. 1 (Holladay, Fragments, 1.172.15) = Euseb., Praep. evang. 9.17.5–6.
17. Freudenthal, Alexander Polyhistor, 99–100. Cf. J. J. Collins, “The Epic of Theodotus and the Hellenism of the Hasmoneans,” HTR 73 (1980): 93–104.
18. For review of the question, see Holladay, Fragments, 2.303, 317–18 and 324, n. 31; and H. Jacobson, The Exagoge of Ezekiel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 14–15.
19. For the arguments, see Holladay, Fragments, 1.245–46.
20. Joseph., Ag. Ap. 1.216, 218. For discussion of the problem, see S. Inowlocki, Eusebius and the Jewish Authors (Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity 4; Leiden: Brill, 2006), 274–75. See further, F. Siegert, “Early Jewish Interpretation in a Hellenistic Style,” in M. Saebø, ed., Hebrew Bible, Old Testament: The History of Its Interpretation, I,1: Antiquity (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1996), 190, n. 309, who theorizes that Josephus’s representation of these writers as Greeks casts his direct knowledge of them into doubt; and G. Sterling, Historiography and Self-Definition: Josephos, Luke-Acts, and Apologetic Historiography (NovTSup 64; Leiden: Brill, 1992), 282–84.
Pseudepigraphy, a common practice in the ancient world, adds another layer of ambiguity. Generally, there is now a consensus that the Sentences of pseudo-Phocylides, a sapiential poem composed in the Ionic dialect, was written by a Jewish propagandist of the Hellenistic age, and not by the Greek philosopher from a much earlier time.21 Excerpts from a work known either as Peri Ioudaiōn or Peri Abramou and attributed to Hecateus of Abdera betray the unmistakable imprint of a Jewish author. The same is true of portions of the third book of the Oracula Sibyllina. And while the Epistle of Aristeas claims to have been composed by an official in the court of Ptolemy Philadelphus II, its vigorous justification of Jewish practices and description of the Septuagint as a work of philological perfection and providential guidance leave little doubt about the true identity of the author. But the detection of all these works as pseudepigraphic represents the findings of modern philology. Christian authors entertained no misgivings about the authenticity of any of these documents. Even if they had had their suspicions, they had good reason to suppress them. Works celebrating the antiquity of the Jews and championing an ethical monotheism certainly gained in stature from their association with respected Greek historians, philosophers, and oracles. For these and other reasons, some of them achieved enormous importance in the Church. Confidence in the reliability of the Septuagint was predicated on pseudo-Aristeas’s characterization of the translation as a work of divine inspiration— a tradition that became progressively embellished over time. Although the Sentences of pseudo-Phocylides was not quoted by the early Church fathers, the work’s subsequent adoption as a schoolbook in Byzantium ensured its survival in over 150 manuscripts, along with early print editions.22
Because of their own ambivalence toward Judaism, Christian writers further contributed to the blurring of identities. In many cases, an author’s Jewish identity or a work’s “Jewish” character might call its credibility into question. Starting from the time of Origen, Christian authors warned readers that because of Jewish corruptions, extrabiblical sources like the Ascension of Isaiah should be treated with caution.23 Photius, in a rather lukewarm assessment of Justus of Tiberias, grants that Justus’s chronicle of Jewish history touched on the essential points. But by failing to say even a word about the coming of Christ and his many miracles, Justus revealed the symptoms of the Jewish “affliction” (τὰ Ἰουδαίων νοσῶν).24
For a more highly regarded author such as Philo of Alexandria, one could ease misgivings about his Jewishness by adopting him as a Christian or, in the words of David Runia, at least as a Christian causa honoris.25 Although none of Philo’s writings make
21. For discussion, see P. van der Horst, The Sentences of Pseudo-Phocylides (SVTP 4; Leiden: Brill, 1978); and W. T. Wilson, The Sentences of Pseudo-Phocylides (Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 2005).
22. On the manuscript witnesses to the work, see P. Derron, “Inventaire des manuscrits du Pseudo-Phocylide,” RHT 10 (1980): 237–47.
23. See below, sect. 4.
24. Photius, Bibliotheca 33 (6b).
25. Runia, Philo in Early Christian Literature, 3. See also chapter 14 of this volume by Gregory Sterling.
any explicit reference to Christians or Christianity, he enjoyed a standing in the Greekspeaking church rivaling that of Josephus. His commentaries laid the foundation both for the integration of Platonism into Christian thought and for the allegorical method that was destined to become the hallmark of Christian biblical exegesis in Alexandria. By Eusebius’s time, the Christian adoption of Philo was in full swing. According to Eusebius, Philo’s learning, like that of Josephus, was officially recognized in Rome; after Philo publicly read his work against Gaius (known as Concerning the Virtues) to the Roman senate, its members voted to have the work “granted a place in libraries.”26 Apocryphal stories told by Eusebius about Philo’s meeting with Peter in Rome and his supposed description of the Christian way of life in Egypt in Vita Contemplativa further enhanced his standing in the early Church.27 Embellishments of these traditions, legends about his baptism and leadership of the Alexandrian school, and quotations from his writings in Byzantine catenae that appeared under the lemma “from Philo the bishop” show that, at least in some circles, Philo had gained the standing of a father of the Church.28
The one author of any repute whose Judaism proved to be an asset, or at least was not suppressed, was Josephus.29 Awareness of Josephus’s Jewish identity was deeply rooted in Christian tradition and abundantly plain from his own writings. According to Eusebius, Josephus, in Eusebius’s words, “the most famous of the Jews of that time,” was also recognized in Rome. A statue in his honor was erected in the city, and his writings “were deemed worthy of a place in a library.”30 Although Eusebius’s story about the official recognition of Josephus hardly squares with the general ignorance of Josephus’s works among Greek and Roman authors, it does reflect the Christian investment in promoting Josephus’s standing as a historian of universal acclaim.31 Christian authors thus took great satisfaction in the fact that the estimable Josephus, a disinterested third party, offered such compelling validation for their interpretation of the causes of the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple as an act of divine judgment. Allying him too closely with the interests of the Church would only erode the value of his testimony. When Origen first introduces Josephus to his readers in Contra Celsum, he acknowledges that, despite his worth as an independent witness to the events preceding the fall of Jerusalem, Josephus himself did not “believe in Jesus as Christ.”32 The subsequent circulation of an interpolated text of Josephus’s Antiquities (the so-called Testimonium Flavianum) that acknowledged Jesus as the fulfillment of messianic prophecy did nothing to alter the recognition of his
26. Euseb., Hist. eccl. 2.18.8.
27. Euseb., Hist. eccl. 2.16–17.
28. On the Christian adoption of Philo, see Runia, Philo, 3–7; and J. E. Bruns, “Philo Christianus: The Debris of a Legend,” HTR 66 (1973): 141–45. On Philo “episcopus” in Byzantine catenae, see Royse, Spurious Texts of Philo of Alexandria, 14–25.
29. See chapter 13 of this volume by Michael Tuval.
30. Euseb., Hist. eccl. 3.9.2.
31. His name appears in only two incidental references, in Cassius Dio (Hist. 66.1.4) and Suetonius (Vesp. 5). While both writers are silent about his writings, each notes Josephus’s prediction that Vespasian would become emperor.
32. Origen, C. Cels. 1.47.
Jewish identity.33 Eusebius himself, the first author to attest the Testimonium, never claims Josephus for the Church.
Among Christian writers after Eusebius, Josephus did have his detractors. But if the number of references to him, textual interpolations, and false attributions in Byzantine literature are any measure, Josephus’s authority only strengthened over time—although never at the expense of his Jewish identity.34 The testimony of “Josephus the Hebrew” about the prophet Daniel is trustworthy, writes Theodoret, because, “even if he did not accept the Christian kerygma, he could not stand to conceal the truth.”35 In his Bibliotheca, Photius speaks with admiration of the purity of Josephus’s style, his persuasiveness, his refusal to succumb to partisanship, and the supreme importance of his testimony about the portents of divine wrath that accompanied the fall of Jerusalem. Photius also reports the existence of a work attributed to Josephus, known variously as On the Universe, On the Cause of the Universe, or On the Nature of the Universe. But Photius himself doubted Josephus’s authorship on the grounds that its views on the human body did not conform with the “Jewish ideas” of human physiology expressed in the writings of the genuine Josephus.36 For Photius and other Christian writers, he was always, in the words of John Chrysostom, a “Jew through and through” (σφόδρα Ἰουδαῖος).37 Suspended between two gravitational fields, Josephus remained a writer who, though being a “lover of truth” and (allegedly) recognizing Jesus as the prophesied Messiah of the Jews, somehow never embraced Christianity.38
3. Jewish Pseudepigrapha in Greek Transmission
The trends we have already identified also figure prominently in the corpus of pseudepigrapha either composed in Greek or translated into Greek from Hebrew or Aramaic.39 To judge from the testimony of Clement, the number of such works known to the church fathers in Greek already, by the end of the second century, must have been substantial; in addition to Enoch, Clement variously refers to pseudepigraphic works attributed to the “prophets” Ezra, Ham, Ezekiel, and Zephaniah.40 But for most of these works, we have
33. Euseb., Hist. eccl. 1.11, and Dem. ev. 3.5.
34. See S. Bowman, “Josephus in Byzantium,” in Feldman and Hata, eds., Josephus, Judaism, and Christianity, 362–85.
35. Theodoret, Interpretatio in Danielem 12.14 (PG 81.1544).
36. Photius, Bibliotheca 48 (11b).
37. John Chrysostom, Comm. Matt. 76.1 (PG 57.695).
38. See Isidorus Pelusiota, Ep. 1259.25–27, in Lettres (1214–1413), ed. Pierre Évieux (SC 422; Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1997). After reporting the Testimonium Flavianum, Isidorus states, “I am really amazed at the truthfulness of the man (Josephus) in many things, especially when he says, ‘He was a teacher of men who gladly receive the truth.’ ” For Josephus in early Christianity (including the question of the Testimonium Flavianum), see most recently, J. C. Paget, Jews, Christians and Jewish Christians in Antiquity (WUNT 251; Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010), 185–265.
39. For survey of this literature, see A.-M. Denis, Introduction aux pseudepigraphes grecs d’Ancien Testament (SVTP 1; Leiden: Brill, 1970).
40. For Clement’s citations from parabiblical works, see (i). Paed., ed. M. Harl (SC 70; Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 1960), 1.9.84.2–4 and 10.91.2: Apocryphon of Ezekiel, cited simply as Ezekiel; (ii) Strom., ed. O. Stählin and L.
little more than a handful of fragments and notices. Chance discoveries of fuller copies of some of them in other languages (as, for example, the Ethiopic texts of Jubilees and Enoch) are a telling reminder of just how much Jewish literature that was once available to Greek readers has been lost or corrupted in transmission. The fragments of Enoch and Jubilees found in Qumran have established the Jewish provenance and original languages of their earliest known versions of these works. For much of the pseudepigrapha preserved in Greek, however, the question of provenance remains unsettled, and often rests on debatable assumptions about what is distinctively “Christian” or “Jewish.”41
One question somewhat unique to this literature concerns its authority vis-à-vis the books that ultimately came to define the canon of the Christian Old Testament. Because the Book of Enoch generated the most public controversy, modern discussion tends to treat the reception history of this apocalypse as paradigmatic. To judge from early Christian witnesses to the work, Enoch got off to a promising start. In the epistle of pseudo-Barnabas, for example, the work is cited using a formula usually reserved for sacred scripture: περὶ οὗ γέγραπται, ὡς Ἐνὼχ
What further boosted its standing was a quotation from the work, prefaced with words “Enoch prophesied,” in the New Testament epistle of Jude (14). From the fourth century, however, the reaction to it became decidedly more guarded, especially following Athanasius’s denunciation of the Book of Enoch as “apocryphal” in the famous 39th Paschal Letter (367). “Who has made the simple folk believe,” Athanasius asks, “that books belong to Enoch, even though no scriptures existed before Moses?”43 At least outwardly, then, the Christian reception of Enoch vindicates the received wisdom that the tightening of the boundaries between “canonical” and “noncanonical” marginalized books that before that time had, at least in some circles, commanded high respect. Paradoxically, however, the best Greek witnesses to Enoch and other pseudepigrapha appear in relatively late Byzantine sources, and well after the fixing of the Christian canon. Nor are these works products of Christian fringe movements.44 The longest excerpts from Enoch in Greek appear in the universal chronicle of the monk George Syncellus, a high official in the Byzantine church of the early ninth century. How did this and other works manage to surmount the stigma attached to the category “apocrypha”?
Früchtel (GCS 52; 2nd ed.; Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1960), 3.16.100.4: 4 Ezra 5.35, cited as the prophet Ezra; (iii) Strom. 5.11.77.2: Apocalypse of Zephaniah, cited as “Zephaniah the prophet”; and (iv) Strom. 6.6.53.5 (from Isidore’s Expositions of the Prophet Parchor), citing the “prophecy of Ham.”
41. For general orientation, see J. Davila, The Provenance of the Pseudepigrapha: Jewish, Christian, or Other? (JSJSup 105; Leiden: Brill, 2005); and R. Bauckham, J. Davila, and A. Panayotov, eds., Old Testament Pseudepigrapha: More Noncanonical Scriptures, vol. 1 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans 2013), xx–xxii. For close examination of this problem as it relates in particular to two notoriously difficult cases (the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs and the Greek Life of Adam and Eve), see M. de Jonge, Pseudepigrapha of the Old Testament as Part of Christian Literature: The Case of the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs and the Greek Life of Adam and Eve (SVTP 18; Leiden: Brill, 2003).
42. Ep. Barn. 4.3.
43. See Athanasius, Paschal Letter, 39, 21. This part of the letter is attested only in a Coptic version; for English translation, see D. Brakke, “A New Fragment of Athanasius’s 39th Festal Letter: Heresy, Apocrypha, and the Canon,” HTR 103 (2010): 47–66.
44. See R. A. Kraft, “Pseudepigrapha in Christianity,” in J. C. Reeves, ed., Tracing the Threads: Studies in the Vitality of Jewish Pseudepigrapha (SBLEJL 6; Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1994), 68–71.
