Associations, Synagogues, and Congregations: Claiming a Place In Ancient Mediterranean Society (original) (raw)
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The Testimonium Flavianum Canonicum: Josephus as a Witness to the Biblical Canon, 1566–1823
2016
Even after the heady discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the mid-twentieth century and their subsequent study, Josephus's Contra Apionem 1:37-44 still contain the earliest extant explicit witness to a closed canon of Jewish Scripture. One might call this passage the "Testimonium Flavianum Canonicum". Yet unlike the Testimonium Flavianum, a text long ascribed to Josephus that has likewise fascinated scholars for centuries, this testimony is not spurious. It presents a genuine historical testimony to the Jewish biblical corpus in the decades before and immediately following the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem, and therewith the Bible of the first Christians. As a witness to the history of Jewish and Christian Scriptures, it is all the more valuable in that it predates the normative formulations of Scriptural canons of Rabbinic Judaism and of the early Church. This essay takes a close look at a set of scholars in different cultural contexts and intellectual traditions and of different scholarly temperaments and confessional loyalties across the long early modern period, and asks what role this passage played in their biblical scholarship, and in particular, their study of the canon. What weight did Josephus’s description carry? What kind of witness was he taken to be? These scholars are Sisto da Siena (1520–1569), Robert Bellarmine (1542–1621), William Whitaker (1547/8–1595), John Cosin (1594–1672), Johannes Hoornbeek (1617–1666), Richard Simon (1638–1712) and Johann David Michaelis (1717–1791). They are each too sophisticated to be taken as neat representatives of a larger group, much less as points on a graph that connect to an unmistakeable linear trend. The selection is driven rather by a wish to present a wide panorama of ways Josephus was read across three centuries by scholars with a particular question in mind, to understand the weight he was given as a historical witness and to reconstruct the scholarly ends to which that testimony was put. Given that the passage in question consists of a mere seven lines in Josephus’s final work, this approach offers a way to trace one thread in the long and expansive tapestry of Josephus’s reception and, given the magnitude of modern scholarship on Josephus, a way to make virtue of a necessity.
JSJ 28 (1997), 154-194
A systematic study of the first four books of Josephus’ Jewish Antiquities shows that for his loose translation he used a Hebrew Pentateuch, as he states himself. His scrolls came from a Jerusalem official library, where they had been much used and revised. In spite of many glosses and alterations, they display a text-type close to the Vorlage of the Septuagint.
Throughout his writings Josephus plays the historical critic.' The Jewish War opens with an attack against the Greek historians of the war of 66-70 CE: they disregard the truth, base their narratives on little data or false data, vilify the Jews, and magnify the Romans (Jewish War 1.1-8).2 Greek historians care more for rhetoric than truth (Jewish War 1.13-16). In the Jewish Antiquities Josephus criticizes Polybius, "a good man," for ignoring the true explanation of the death of Antiochus Epiphanes (Jewish Antiquities 12.358-359),' and criticizes Nicolas of Damascus for being biased in favor of his patron Herod (Jewish Antiquities 16.183-187). In the Vita Josephus devotes a long digression to the malfeasance of Justus of Tiberias as both politician and historian (Vita 336-367).4 These and other passages show that Josephus practiced historical criticism in all his works, but it is the Against Apion that contains his most detailed reflections on the duties and methods of the historian.