Chris Weimer

What about, and this is a stretch I know, "Luke 24.18-21, [25-27]"?

ynquirer

Yes, it appears as if Luke had taken AJ 18:63 as a model for 24:18-21 and - albeit less clearly - AJ 18:64 for 24:25-27. Frankly, I wasn’t aware of this.

It poses a question, though. Is Josephus here used by Luke as a model of a purely literary description, or is there anything else? Could it possibly be a marker or something to attract attention of those non-Rabbinical Jews - as Josephus himself - that were partisan of the Romans, and on that account an invitation to re-read the TF?

PhilosopherJay

Hi. S.C.,

Could you clarify your use of the term "witness"? Generally we think of witnesses as providing supporting evidence for something. Is this what you are implying here?

Warmly,

Philosopher Jay

S.C.Carlson

In this case, most of them constitute the "indirect tradition," that is, they provide evidence for the forms of text for the (post-Eusebian) testimonium as transmitted outside of the direct manuscript transmission of Eusebius and Josephus. It is conceivable, in theory at least, that they furnish a more primitive form of the Eusebian testimonium than the extant copies of the latter.

Stephen

Roger Pearse

If we look at a critical edition of any text, we will usually find a list of testimonia -- quotations of the text found in later authors. These are 'witnesses' to the text as received by these authors. By definition they tend to record what the text before them was.

If these quotations are long, or of importance, they tend to be known as the 'indirect tradition' of the text. (The extant more or less complete manuscripts are the 'direct tradition' of a text). Often we have but one manuscript, often late, of some ancient text. In this case the indirect tradition can sometimes correct copyist errors or fill gaps.

Porphyry, De abstinentia (On abstinence from animal food) is an example of this and I have compiled some notes on his tradition here. All the manuscripts are late and have suffered damage. The long quotations from it in Eusebius Praeparatio Evangelica reflect a text with fewer mistakes in it, and so can be used to patch holes.

In this case I was seeking all the direct quotations of the TF passage that exist in later writers.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

PhilosopherJay

Hi Stephen and Roger,

Thank you both for the clarification. Also thanks to Stephen for bringing all this material together into one place.

What strikes me about the list is how small it is.

After Eusebius, we have:
4. Gregory, bishop of Nyssa, about 380 C.E.
5. Isodorus Hispanlensis (circa 570-636)
6. Scripta Anonyma Adversus Judaeos ?
7. Œcumenius, Bishop of Trikka (now Trikkala) in Thessaly about 990
8 and 9. Georgius Monachus AKA George Hamartolus (Greek Γεώργιος Ἁμαρτωλός) a monk at Constantinople under Michael III (842-867)
10. Suda Lexicon (a work of a 10th century Greek lexicographer)
11. Constantine VII (905-959) Byzantine Emperor
12. Symeon Logothetes (10th century)
13. Georgius Cedrenus Georgios Kedrenos (fl. 11th century)
14. Oannes Zonaras, (flourished 12th century)

We have just 2 or posibly 3 quotes over the next 500 years after Eusebius, and then 7 or 8 quotes from within the Byzantine Empire over the next 300 years.
Given the importance of the Testimonium, this suggests that very few copies of Josephus was available. It seems possible that only one or two copies were in existence through the 12th century.

It would be interesting to compare this list to the number of authors who quote other passages from Josephus and do not quote the Testimonium. This would give us an idea of how many copies of Josephus may have been in circulation during these years.

Warmly,

Philosopher Jay

Minimalist

Far more compelling is the fact that there are none before Eusebius.

Roger Pearse

Glad to help.

An excellent thing, I agree: my thanks also.

Um. I wish we had a dozen independent quotes of every passage of interest from antiquity! It seems like a huge list to my uneducated eye. One would have to carry out some tests to know whether that impression is accurate, of course.

Probably more than that, in view of what exists today from that period, but perhaps not much more?

We know from current manuscript copies that the TF was transmitted independently; there are manuscripts in which it is the only portion of Josephus copied. So it is unsafe to presume that knowledge of the TF = knowledge of books 1-20 of Antiquities. It may have figured in collections of testimonia.

Complete copies of Antiquities must always have been uncommon, given its size. Like other long works it was transmitted in decades. Thus knowledge of part of Antiquities is not evidence of knowledge of the TF. In fact to the best of my knowledge only two authors before Eusebius show any knowledge of the second decade, in which it is located: Julius Africanus, and Origen.

I would guess that perhaps a single uncial copy of each decade reached the 9th century, and each was then copied into minuscule. (Lucky for us that both were; Diodorus was less fortunate) All subsequent manuscript copies would be derived from those. How many existed at any given point might be a moot point. Someone speculated that only one copy of Pausanias existed for most of antiquity.

An excellent point, and the output of such an exercise would infallibly be interesting, I think. Indeed I suspect it would be publishable. I don't know how complete the TLG is for Byzantine authors, so it might be hard work. One could start by searching for the *name* Josephus and see how often it is referenced.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Ben C Smith

By my count, unless you are for some reason excluding some of these, we have about 7 quotes between Eusebius and circa 800:

1. Gregory, century IV.
2. Pseudo-Hegesippus, century IV.
3. Jerome, century V.
4. Sozomen, century V.
5. Isidorus, century V.
6. Scripta anonyma adversus Iudaeos, century V or VI.
7. The Religious Dialogue, century V or VI.

(If you stated or implied somewhere a reason why you were excluding some of these texts, I apologize; I missed it.)

Ben.

Roger Pearse

In fact it tells us nothing except that none of our extant texts before that time contain it. Since only 2 writers seem to know *any* portion of books 11-20, this means little. Indeed Hermias isn't mentioned by any other author of antiquity at all, and first reappears at the renaissance. Macarius Magnes is mentioned only twice (iirc) before the late 19th century, when a single badly damaged manuscript appears, is printed, and then vanishes again. When 99% of ancient literature is lost, we can read nothing into absence of mention in what remains.

Eusebius tends to be the first mention now known to us of all sorts of things, extant or not, because of way that he wrote his works. Nearly all of them contain long extracts from other texts. This indeed makes them extremely valuable, when the other text is lost or (as remarked above under "testimonia") not in very good shape.

All the best,

Roger Pearse