Josephus and the Pentateuch (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Historical Value of Josephus’ Jewish Antiquities xi. 297-301
Journal of Theological Studies ns 28, 49-66, 1977
I N his Jewish Antiquities, Book xi. 297-301, l Josephus recounts the murder of Jesus by his brother Joannes, the high priest, in the temple, and the consequent imposition of a tax on the daily sacrifices by Bagoses, the governor. Since our knowledge of the history of Jerusalem during the fourth century B.C. is so notoriously limited, it is only natural that scholars should have been anxious to derive the maximum amount of information possible from this account. Despite this, however, discussion of it has generally been rather uncritical, with no real attempt made to distinguish between the material that Josephus may have derived from an earlier source and the manner in which he himself has then used it. It is this necessary first step that is to be discussed in the present article. We may start by observing that, despite the half millennium which separates Josephus from the Persian period, there is nothing inherently improbable in supposing that he may have had sources that preserved reliable material, but which have not come down to us. Such a supposition, indeed, has received remarkable confirmation from an even earlier period, the closing years of the Judean monarchy, for which comparison with the Babylonian Chronicle suggests that he had two, and possibly three, such pieces of information. 2 Secondly, it is clear that on one matter of Persian history, Josephus did in fact have independent knowledge, namely the order of the first Persian kings (Cyrus-Cambyses-Darius-Xerxes-Artaxerxes). 3 Indeed, on the basis of this knowledge, he sought to 'correct' the Biblical chronology, notably in the problematic Ezra iv (1 Esdras ii) at Ant. xi. 21 ff., but also in Ezra vii. 1 (1 Esdras viii. 1) at Ant. xi. 120. Josephus only needed to do this, however, because he believed that his source was 1 Text and translation of all Josephus' works are cited throughout from the edition in
How the Writings Attributed to 'Josephus' Were Produced
2019
We hear a lot about fake news in the media. But compared to the church fathers of Caesarea 1800 years ago, the modern fake news is the work of amateurs. Complete books of fake news were written by hundreds of scribes with pen and ink on manuscripts, eight pages at a time. They had rows of codex sheets laid out on tables, and then folded and sewed the sheets together in a collated codex. In developing a manuscript, they could remove the stitching easily and change the sheets eight pages at a time. One of the works they produced was Antiquities which they attributed to a fictitious writer Josephus. But Antiquities had, an earlier life as a Jewish prophetic scroll or bookroll. This recorded an actual prophetic history, which was then heavily edited and expanded by the church fathers who were experts at creating false text. Josephus, an unlikely character, was invented by the church fathers, who were predisposed to re-write or create history. For example, in Antiquities 20.17-23, they created the characters Izates, Helena and Monobazus out of Nero, Agrippina and Claudius, when they were supposed to be covering events in the life of Nero. They could change Antiquities easily by editing a sheet of a codex instead of re-writing a complete bookroll. At the same time they created the New Testament and a fictitioius Jesus.
The Text Of 1-2 Kings Used By Josephus
The Books of Kings : Sour¬ces, Composition, Historiography and Reception (ed. André Lemaire and Baruch Halpern ; Leiden-Boston : Brill, 2010), p. 41-66.
This paper aims at demonstrating two statements : first, Josephus never used any known Greek translation of the Bible for 1-2 Kings, al-though he was aware of the Letter of Aristeas ; incidentally, the same is true from Genesis through 1 Maccabees ; second, his source for 1-2 Kings has some contacts with the source of £, but on the whole it is quite close to the Massoretic text ; however, it has some peculiar fea-tures which suggest that he did not have 2 Chronicles as we know it.
Tommaso Leoni, “The Text of the Josephan Corpus: Principal Greek Manuscripts, Ancient Latin Translations, and the Indirect Tradition”, in Honora Howell Chapman and Zuleika Rodgers (eds.), A Companion to Josephus, Wiley-Blackwell, Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World, Malden, Mass.-Oxford-Chichester 2016, pp. 307-321.