Duke Leto

You haven't disproven that Hegesippus was a separate author yet. The Hegesippus quoted by various Christian authors was Christian, how do we know he was a Jewish Christian other than that Eusebius says so? A lot of Jews outside of Judea Hellenized/Romanized to some degree. Philo comes to mind, as does his brother Alexander and his sons Tiberius and Marcus Julius Alexander. Agrippa I and Agrippa II both had Roman names, are THEY not Jews? Perhaps Hegesippus had been born a slave to Jewish parents and his master named him? And was an oratory fan? Then he became a Christian chronicler who used Josephus as a source for his chronology, and this passage on chronology was in turn quoted by Clement and the other writer, who got a little confused on who they were quoting based on the name similarity.

Then we have the Pseudo-Hegesippus, which a Christian obviously did use Josephus to rewrite, possibly passing it off as the real Josephus. And then some monk, who also had Hegesippus in his collection, also boggled the names.

Show it CAN'T be right.

You seem to set a lot of store by the Pseudo-Hegesippus text, are you actually asserting that it is the original and Eusebius or whoever you think was responsible took out all the Christian info to make the received text? Because that scenario simply is insane. Especially if the Gospels are in circulation. You're demanding that they falsify history so that their holy book is contradicted. Early Church Fathers were credulous but they simply weren't that stupid.

stephan huller

The place where I diverge from the pack is by not ignoring the testimony of Clement and the match with Epiphanius's bishops succession list dated to the "tenth year of Antoninus." Yes, to be certain most people take Hegesippus to be a separate Christian work in five volumes. But the testimony and argument of Clement's 'History of the Jews' written by 'Flavius Josephus' in the same year demolishes that argument. Josephus can only be Hegesippus. Unless of course it could be suggested that a Jew named 'Josephus' and a Jewish Christian named Hegesippus wrote two different chronologies dated to 147 CE. That's the only other possibility. But then we still have the problem of Clement's reference to 'Flavius Josephus' being a second century author or the text being seamlessly edited (presumably by the synergoi) in 147 CE. I use 'seamless' because Clement attributes the chronology still to 'Flavius Josephus.'

stephan huller

Stupid Jewish transvestite story from Josephus:

This account is so bizarre I have never ever read any serious commentary about what it means. Did the Jewish rebels really start taking themselves to transvestitism? This passage appears in pseudo-Hegesippus (the fourth century Latin translation) as:

Please tell me that you really believe the rebels were militarized versions of Ru Paul.

Duke Leto

Those are not themes they are historical corroborations. The Testimonium is widely disputed, brother of Jesus is likely an interpolation and there's no reason to think that Felix's Simon was Simon Magus.

I asked for indications in the Greek Text of the author having a Christian faith.

The Slavonic/Yosippon and so on all come from Christian copyists and are all obviously worked over by later Christian authors. The Greek text is regarded as authentic because it is largely free of this nonsense.

If the Greek Text originated from a Christian original, why was the Christian material present in all the other copies taken out of it?

If the Gospel writers had access to a Christian Josephus why was the contradiction in the infancy narratives allowed to take shape? If the Greek Text was released as Josephus circa Eusebius, why wasn't it fixed to gloss over the infancy narrative contradiction? Why not at least leave a basic outline of the Passion in the Antiquities?

It occurs to me that for someone who's sneering at the accuracy of the Josephus text compared to Tacitus, you are putting a LOT of stock in the accuracy early Church Fathers. (And the Talmud.)

stephan huller

But its not that simple. The beliefs of the Christian additions are not reflective of Russian orthodoxy or any normative beliefs of the Church. the question is - who made the "additions"?

Duke Leto

No it isn't.

The other possibility is quite simple. I've outlined it several times.

Josephus writes the received text of Antiquities circa 85ish CE. Hegesippus writes a non-extant Christian history, in which he calculates the number of years from Moses to his own time of 147 CE by quoting Josephus and adding 77 years. Epiphanus quoted this passage for his numbers and credited Hegesippus, Clement quoted it and attributed it to Josephus, even though the 77 years bit is actually Hegesippus' addition.

Duke Leto

Doesn't matter. Heretics happen. The "deletions" are what you NEED to explain away. Removing passages from a document instead of rewriting them to be more credible is very unusual behavior. Leaving almost nothing that reinforces the faith that you are presumably performing the forgery to promote is either very stupid or queen sacrifice level chess mastery, neither of which the Church Fathers possessed.

But propagating as history a document that reveals that your holy book contradicts itself? That's simply insane.

Duke Leto

That is a very illustrative passage and on that supports some of the points I've been trying to make nicely. I don't believe for a moment that it's credible history but I understand exactly why 1st Century Josephus made it up. Same reason Julius Caesar's enemies liked to claim he was King Nicomedes' "Queen" and Marc Antony said Octavian had inherited Caesar's estate and name by prostituting himself to his granduncle. (The false belief that this had happened was a red herring plot point on the show "Rome".)

His entire schtick was that it was the unbelievable depravity and blasphemy of the rebels that had corrupted the Temple so greatly that Yahweh had no other option than to destroy it. This is just an extreme example of that calculated to convince both Greco-Roman and Jewish audiences that the rebels weren't just bad, but insanely evil.

So the effeminate transvestism may be a somewhat eccentric thing to invent, but we understand 1st Century Josephus' reason for inventing it.

Maybe it makes sense for 2nd Century Josephus the Jewish Christian.

But Drusilla's marriage? OK the marriage story shows Felix's depravity in picking up a teenage Princess, but what is her and their child dying at Pompeii supposed to prove? Or her and her sister being raped as children at Caesarea? And since you ripped off her name and made up her age, it was again pretty clever of you to put her birth in 38 CE around the death and deification of Julia Drusilla.

That's a lot for 2nd Century Christian Josephus to just make up on his own and I don't see a credible way the folk history could have evolved in that way for him to take up and re-report.

When people make up stories, they have a reason. A crazy reason sometimes, but they don't originate randomly.

DCHindley

You are thinking of the 2nd century writer Hegesippus who had also written five books of Recollections, which may have attempted to place early Christian figures in the context of Josephus' War and Antiquities. You are correct that this has perished except for citations in Church fathers.

Stephan is referring to a Latin reworking of Josephus' War sometimes attributed to a "Hegesippus" (which is how the Latin text approximates the Greek name Josephus), or to Ambrose of Milan. Unike Josephus' War, it is in 5 books, but also seems to draw on both the War and Antiquities. It is also known as Pseudo-Hegesippus.

One internet site describes it as follows:

There is a Latin text extant in numerous medieval manuscripts under the title of De excidio urbis Hierosolymitanae (On the ruin of the city of Jerusalem) or Historiae (History). The text is an original composition which borrows very heavily from the Jewish War of Josephus, and is sometimes considered as a free translation and rearrangement of that work.

The author is given in the manuscripts sometimes as Hegesippus -- which may be a corruption of Iosippus, the spelling of Josephus in many of the manuscripts. In other manuscripts it is ascribed to Ambrose of Milan, and indeed is sometimes transmitted to us together with some of his works. Scholars have sometimes attributed the work to him; others to Isaac, a Jewish convert active in Roman ecclesiastical politics in the 370's. Most scholars today consider the work anonymous, and by convention refer to it as Pseudo-Hegesippus. It should not be confused with the Latin translation of the Jewish War made by Rufinus, which is more literal and arranged in seven books, and was made later. It has nothing to do with the lost works of the second-century writer Hegesippus mentioned by Eusebius.

De excidio is arranged in five books. Books 1-4 correspond to the same books of the Jewish War; book 5 contains the material from books 5-6 and part of book 7 of Josephus. But material from Antiquities is also being used. In book 2 a version of the so-called Testimonium Flavianum can be found, although this might have come from one of the versions of the Jewish War into which that had been interpolated, or perhaps from Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History. But in book 2 chapter 4 the story of the seduction of Paulina comes from Antiquities 18.3. Likewise Book 1 chapter 38 contains material about a pestilence which followed Herod's execution of his wife Mariamne, which comes from Antiquities 15.7, 9. Neither appears in any version of the Jewish War, so indicating that the author had direct access to a manuscript of Antiquities.

The work is usually dated to between 370-c.375 AD. It contains in book 2 chapter 9 what seems to be an allusion to the recent reconquest of Britain by Count Theodosius, ca. 370 AD, so cannot be earlier than this. It also refers to Constantinople by name. There is a reference to a Latin translation of Josephus in letter 71 of St. Jerome, written between 386 and 400 AD. The author refers to the triumphant position of the Roman empire, which suggests that it must precede the imperial crisis brought on by the disastrous defeat and death of the emperor Valens in battle with the Goths at Adrianople in 378, and still more so the sack of Rome in 410.

The most recent critical edition was used for this translation : Hegesippi qui dicitur historiae libri V, edited by Vincente Ussani in the Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum series, volume 66, Vienna: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky (1932).

http://www.preteristarchive.com/Stud...us_pseudo.html

There is an English translation of it, HEGESIPPUS, TRANSLATED FROM LATIN INTO ENGLISH, by Wade Blocker, on the Web.

DCH

stephan huller

I am not claiming any of this is historically accurate. The point is to secure the understanding derived from Shaye Cohen and the Josephan hypomnema. There may well have been a first century text beneath all this incredible variety of later creations - but that text can't be identical our Greek material. What we have is a fourth century adaptation of something earlier. It is not the original text of Josephus. Once that is secured, the admission of 'synergoi' working on at least some of the Josephan corpus becomes an ominous development. Was this Josephus 'confessing' to their existence or - as I and many others would suppose - the second,. third or fourth century redactor of the mateiral attempting to put these words in Josephus's mouth to justify the newly created forgery?

I hope that you look at all the material and see that the development of the original material - whatever that was, possibly an Aramaic hypomnema - was developed in countless ways including a fourth century attempt at 'cleaning up' all the silliness.