Freethought & Rationalism Archive

sky kunde · 09-18-2005, 04:46 PM

Hi, folks!

I have a little question about the sentence "SEDITION OF THE JEWS AGAINST PONTIUS PILATE. CONCERNING CHRIST, AND WHAT BEFELL PAULINA AND THE JEWS AT ROME" which we see in Antiquities of the Jews, book XVIII, at the beginning of the third chapter. Was that put into there by christians?

Thanks in advanced :thumbs:

PS: sorry for the bad english, i'm brazilian

spin · 09-18-2005, 08:26 PM

These descriptive headings are not in the Greek text. They were obviously added by Whiston as an aid to the reader.

spin

Peter Kirby · 09-18-2005, 08:37 PM

There are headings to the books in the Greek (see Loeb edition), but these headings have no mention of the Ant. 18.3.2-4 (including, no mention of the Christ passage in Ant. 18.3.3).

kind thoughts,
Peter Kirby

Toto · 09-18-2005, 08:43 PM

sky kunde - is your question about the word "sedition?" It seems a very anti-Jewish description of the political protests.

spin · 09-18-2005, 09:49 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Peter Kirby

There are headings to the books in the Greek (see Loeb edition), but these headings have no mention of the Ant. 18.3.2-4 (including, no mention of the Christ passage in Ant. 18.3.3).

Are you talking of anything other than "This being in the [first] (book) of Josephus's history of the Jewish Antiquities", Peter?

spin

Peter Kirby · 09-18-2005, 11:04 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by spin

Are you talking of anything other than "This being in the [first] (book) of Josephus's history of the Jewish Antiquities", Peter?

Yes, this is from an earlier thread here on IIDB.

Quote:

The Greek of the table of contents is available through Perseus.

Niese's Greek Text of Table of Contents for Ant. 18

Here is the English translation taken from Josephus, v. 9, with notes by Feldman.

----
(i) How Quirinius was sent by Ceaser to make an assessment of Syria and Judaea and to liquidate the estate of Archelaus. [�1. Some mss. add "after Judaea had changed from a kingdom to a procuratorship."]

(ii) How Coponius, a man of equestrian rank, was sent to be procurator of Judaea. [�2]

(iii) How Judas the Galilean [Some mss. add "and certain others."] persuaded the masses not to register their properties, [Some mss. add "and many followed their advice."] until Joazar the high priest induced them to give heed to the Romans. [�4. Some mss. add "and to give an evaluation of their properties."]

(iv) What and how many were the philosophical schools among the Jews and what rules they had. [�11]

(v) How Herod and Philip the tetrarchs founded cities in honour of Caesar [Augustus]. [�27]

(vi) How the Samaritans scattered bones of the dead in the temple [Some mss. add "during a festival."] and thus defiled the people for seven days. [�29]

(vii) How Salome the sister of Herod died leaving her estate [For "her estate" some mss. have "Jamnia and its territory, together with Phasaelis and Archelais."] to Julia the wife of Caesar. [�31]

(viii) How Pontius Pilate sought secretly to introduce busts of Caesar into Jerusalem, and how the people rose up against him and refused to permit it. [�55. For "how the people rose up against him and refused to permit it" some mss. have "how the people, having learnt of it, rose up against him until he withdrew them from Jerusalem to Caesarea." The table omits special mention of Jesus and of Paulina (��63-80).]

(ix) What happened to the Jews in Rome about this time at the instigation of the Samaritans. [�81. Some mss. have in, in place of "at the instigation of the Samaritans," "arising from the destruction in Samaria, and how Pilate slew many." Regardless of the reading, there is some confusion, since the troubles of the Jews in Rome arose not from the Samaritans but from certain unscrupulous Jews living in Rome who misled Fulvia, a Roman lady (��81-84).]

(x) The bringing of charges against Pilate by the Samaritans before Vitellius, and how Vitellius compelled him to proceed to Rome to render an account of his actions. [�88. Some mss. add "The ascent of Vitellius to Jerusalem and the honour accorded him by the people, and how he thereupon permitted them to keep under their own control the sacred robe that lay in Antonia in custody of the Romans" (��90-95).]

(xi) The war of Herod the tetrarch with Aretas the king of the Arabians and Herod's defeat. [�109. The table omits special mention of the listing of Herod the Great's descendants (��130-142) and of Agrippa's upbringing in Rome, his voyage to Judaea, and his proposed suicide (��143-150).]

(xii) [This section and section xiii belong before section xi.] How Tiberius Caesar sent instructions to Vitellius to induce Artabanes [Artabanus in the text of this book (��48 ff.).] the Parthian to send hostages to him and make war on Aretas. [�96]

(xiii) The death of Philip and how his tetrarchy became provincial territory. [�106. The Latin version adds "Concerning John the Baptist" (��116-119).]

(xiv) The voyage of Agrippa to Rome [Some mss. add "to Tiberius Caesar."] and how, after being accused by his own freedman, he was thrown into chains. [�155. The table omits special mention of the thwarting of Tiberius' scheme to bestow the succession to the empire upon his grandson Gemellus (��205-223).]

(xv) How he was released by Gaius after the death of Tiberius and became king of the tetrarchy of Philip. [�237.]

(xvi) How Herod, upon making a trip to Rome, [Some mss. add "and after being accused by Agrippa."] was banished, and how Gaius presented his tetrarchy to Agrippa. [�240.]

(xvii) The civil strife of the Jews and Greeks in Alexandria and the dispatch of delegates by both groups to Gaius. [�257.]

(xviii) The charges brought against the Jews by Apion and his fellow delegates on the score of their permitting no image of Caesar. [�257.]

(xiv) How Gaius in his resentment sent Petronius to Syria as governor [Some mss. add: "giving him orders to collect a force and ..."] to open hostilities against the Jews if they did not agree to accept an image of him. [�261. The table omits special mention of Agrippa's successful plea with Gaius to give up the proposal of setting up the statue in the temple (��289-301). It also omits Petronius' escape, through the intervention of Gaius' death, from the death penalty for insubordination.]

(xx) The disaster that befell the Jews in Babylonia because of the brothers Asinaeus and Anilaeus. [�310.]

This book covers a period of thirty-two years.
----

I am interested in defining how "rough" this table is and how "very brief" the summary is in numerical terms. In order to do so, I need some kind of metric.

There are 289 Greek words in the table of contents as given by Niese. There are 15,577 Greek words in the eighteenth book of the Antiquities as given by Niese. At first, this does not seem very promising. But comparing simply the number of words is not a very useful metric for our purposes. If the summary said as little as "Concerning Jesus" at the appropriate point, then we would know that a form of the Testimonium was present in the manuscript used by the epitomizer, even though only a couple words would have been used to refer to the passage. We are concerned with the level of passages, because the table of contents refers to passages with a few words on each passage mentioned, and because we wish to discover the probability that the empitomizer would have passed over a form of the Testimonium passage entirely if he knew of it. We do not care how "brief" or wordy the summary is for each portion mentioned, but we are concerned about how "rough" the table is and how many portions are skipped.

In the Whiston translation, there are nine chapters and fifty-seven sections within chapters. We are concerned with the sections within chapters, as the Testimonium is one such section (18.3.3). Now I will indicate which portions we can deduce to have been in the epitomizer's manuscript from the references given in the table of contents.

(i), (ii), and (iii) refer to 18.1.1.

(iv) refers to 18.1.2-6.

(v) refers to 18.2.1.

(vi) and (vii) refer to 18.2.2.

18.2.3 receives no mention (building of Tiberias).

18.2.4 receives no mention (murder of Phraates and rise of Artabanus).

18.2.5 receives no mention (death of Antiochus).

(viii) refers to 18.3.1.

18.3.2 receives no mention (Pilate's use of Temple funds for an aqueduct).

18.3.3 receives no mention (testimony to Jesus Christ).

18.3.4 receives no mention (incident with Paulina).

(ix) refers to 18.3.5.

(x) presupposes 18.4.1 and refers to 18.4.2.

The Latin translation and the AMW manuscript family (Ambrosianae, Medicaeus, Vaticanus 984) refer to 18.4.3.

(xii) refers to 18.4.4-5.

(xiii) refers to 18.4.6.

(xi) refers to 18.5.1.

The Latin translation refers to 18.5.2 with the words "de baptista Iohanne" between (xiii) and (xiv).

18.5.3 receives no mention (preparation for war between Vitellius and Aretas).

18.5.4 receives no mention (descendants of Herod), although there is a sentence that ties this explanatory passage to the subesequent narrative on Agrippas.

Chapter 6 forms a continuous, seamless narrative and an interesting one at that. (xiv) presupposes 18.6.1-2 and refers to 18.6.3-7. (xv) refers to 18.6.8-11.

(xvi) refers to 18.7.1-2.

(xvii) and (xviii) refer to 18.8.1.

(xix) refers to 18.8.2.

18.8.3-9 receive no mention (protest of Jews to Petronius, request of Agrippa before Gaius, death of Gaius).

(xx) refers to 18.9.1-9.

kind thoughts,
Peter Kirby

spin · 09-18-2005, 11:51 PM

Quite interesting information, Peter. I hasn't noticed that there was a table of contents at the beginning of each book. Whiston has amalgamated those relating to each chapter and added information when a paragraph in his text lacked a description. I just checked another book and there was a big discrepancy between the table of contents and the number of paragraphs.

I wonder just how one would then discover when the Greek summaries were incorporated into the work, especially when the text we have is so late and no intermediate fragments that I know about.

spin

sky kunde · 09-19-2005, 06:32 AM

Thank you a lot, guys! :notworthy

09-18-2005, 04:46 PM	#1
sky kunde Junior Member Join Date: Sep 2005 Location: Brazil Posts: 26	Little Doubt About Antiquities of the Jews Hi, folks! I have a little question about the sentence "SEDITION OF THE JEWS AGAINST PONTIUS PILATE. CONCERNING CHRIST, AND WHAT BEFELL PAULINA AND THE JEWS AT ROME" which we see in Antiquities of the Jews, book XVIII, at the beginning of the third chapter. Was that put into there by christians? Thanks in advanced :thumbs: PS: sorry for the bad english, i'm brazilian

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09-18-2005, 08:26 PM	#2
spin Contributor Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: nowhere Posts: 15,747	These descriptive headings are not in the Greek text. They were obviously added by Whiston as an aid to the reader. spin

09-18-2005, 08:37 PM	#3
Peter Kirby Veteran Member Join Date: Jul 2001 Location: the reliquary of Ockham's razor Posts: 4,035	There are headings to the books in the Greek (see Loeb edition), but these headings have no mention of the Ant. 18.3.2-4 (including, no mention of the Christ passage in Ant. 18.3.3). kind thoughts, Peter Kirby

09-18-2005, 08:43 PM	#4
Toto Contributor Join Date: Jun 2000 Location: Los Angeles area Posts: 40,549	sky kunde - is your question about the word "sedition?" It seems a very anti-Jewish description of the political protests.

09-18-2005, 11:51 PM	#7
spin Contributor Join Date: Mar 2002 Location: nowhere Posts: 15,747	Quite interesting information, Peter. I hasn't noticed that there was a table of contents at the beginning of each book. Whiston has amalgamated those relating to each chapter and added information when a paragraph in his text lacked a description. I just checked another book and there was a big discrepancy between the table of contents and the number of paragraphs. I wonder just how one would then discover when the Greek summaries were incorporated into the work, especially when the text we have is so late and no intermediate fragments that I know about. spin

09-19-2005, 06:32 AM	#8
sky kunde Junior Member Join Date: Sep 2005 Location: Brazil Posts: 26	Thank you a lot, guys! :notworthy

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