noble savage

Pseudo-Hegesippus’s use of Josephus settles the question of whether he knew Greek and used Greek sources. Your bare assertion that he shows little influence of other Greek sources prejudges the issue of whether he might have been influenced by Eusebius and sidesteps the question I asked about whether he had any predecessors in his particular use of Josephus other than Eusebius. Eusebius wrote fifty years earlier and was known to other roughly contemporary Latin writers who knew Greek, including Jerome, Rufinus and Ambrose. Pseudo-Hegesippus may well have been heavily influenced by Eusebius in his choice of genre, source, and theme. You can offer other possible explanations for these and other similarities between pseudo-Hegesippus and Eusebius, but it's not as though the Testimonium would be the only thing the two have in common that is not shared by earlier writers. You haven’t come close to justifying your initial assertion that "it is prima-facie unlikely that the author was influenced by Eusebius" in your replies to me or to Spin.

NS

JoeWallack

JW:
Let me interpolate here that it is generally asserted that there is no Manuscript support for no TF in Josephus. If you go Doherty though on the scholarship you can find this:

THE TESTIMONIUM FLAVIANUM CONTROVERSY FROM ANTIQUITY TO THE PRESENT Alice Whealey

Josippon

JW:
Unclear what the dating or sources of Josippon were. What is clear is there was a Manuscript (related) tradition of no TF. So I would encourage the Unfaithful here to gird the pork loins of Snapp, Holding, Pearse el-all, to rid the Internet of this vile falsehood.

As you attempt to read Whealey, best to have some Pepto standing by as her scholarship is not very good by the standards of this Unholy Forum:

Ugliest Scholarship I've Ever Seen


Joseph

ErrancyWiki

andrewcriddle

Jerome and Rufinus are later and part of a major attempt to make Greek theology available in the West.

Ambrose is contemporary or slightly later and I'm not sure how much he knew of Eusebius. (I agree he knew some.)

What other things are unique to Eusebius and pseudo-Hegesippus ?

Andrew Criddle

noble savage

I don’t see why an additional 25 years or so of circulation should have a decisive effect on Latin authors’ ability to know Eusebius. The 50 years it had been circulating is more than enough.

The main thing other than the Testimonium which is common to Eusebius and Hegesippus but not to earlier writers is the use of Josephus’s descriptions of the suffering of the Jews as proof that they were being punished for their crimes against Jesus and the disciples. Eusebius draws on this theme heavily in the first three books of his Church History and Hegesippus makes it the main theme of his. But Christians had not shown much interest in Josephus’s Jewish War, let alone made this use of it, for the two hundred years before Eusebius.

Hegesippus was part of a major attempt to make theological use of Josephus in ways that had been pioneered by Eusebius.

NS

andrewcriddle

4th century Latin interest in Eusebius

There was apparently some interest in Eusebius in the mid 4th century.
e.g. according to Jerome Eusebius of Vercelli produced a (lost) censored Latin version of Eusebius of Caesarea on the Psalms. This interest seems largely associated with Latin writers exiled to the East and was an interest in Eusebius as biblical scholar more than historian. little of this work survives.

Ambrose's interest in Eusebius e.g. in his commentary on Luke, seems associated with the middle to late period of his episcopate and is roughly contemporary with the attempts by Jerome and Rufinus to make Greek patristic material including Eusebius available on a large scale in Latin translation.

It is barely possible that pseudo-Hegesippus dates from the very end of the 4th century and is contemporary with Jerome et al, but on the standard dating (before the battle of Adrianople) this work was written before Eusebius became widely known in the West.

Internal Evidence of the Independence of Pseudo-Hegesippus from Eusebius

Pseudo-Hegesippus quotes Josephus on John the Baptist after Josephus on Jesus (as in Josephus). Eusebius quotes the passages the other way round (following the NT chronology).

There is no trace in Pseudo-Hegesippus of the idea that the death of James was a cause of the fall of Jerusalem. (Eusebius and Origen.)

Andrew Criddle

noble savage

The point that Hegesippus wouldn’t have known Eusebius in Greek because the other Latin writings which we know used Eusebius in Greek were probably slightly later than his is dubious.

The points about the internal evidence re: John and James are irrelevant.

1) You missed the first time Hegesippus tells the story of John’s death in II, 5, seven chapters before the Testimonium. In II, 12 Hegesippus groups his version of the Testimonium with a version of John’s death, as Eusebius does in the Church History, though in the reverse order. In Josephus they’re separated by two long chapters or about fifty sections. In the Proof of the Gospel Eusebius quotes Josephus on John in Book IX, six books after he quotes the Testimonium. All we can tell from this is that authors place the Testimonium and the John story in their work for reasons of their own that have little to do with their order in the New Testament and Josephus.

2) Eusebius mentions the death of James, the Lord’s brother, in Proof of the Gospel III, 5, with no reference to it being the cause of the destruction of Jerusalem or to Josephus. Hegesippus doesn’t mention James at all, despite the fact he knew the Antiquities. And despite the large amount of space he dedicates to Herod in Book I, Hegesippus does not have the story of the Massacre of the Infants from Matthew’s Gospel. We should not take an author’s failure to use specific material from a source to show he didn’t know that source.

So that’s three times you haven't addressed the point about the correlation between Hegesippus and Eusebius in genre, source, and theme – writing a history using Josephus as witness from the Jews to Jesus and to the punishment of the Jews for their crimes against Jesus and his disciples – which are not found in Christian literature before Eusebius, and have introduced instead other considerations.

NS

spin

This overlooks what the fragment of Hegesippus's text implies, Andrew. First note how Hegesippus suggests the results of the crime against James:

Let us take the just man for he is unprofitable to us. Yet they shall eat the fruit of their works. So they went up and threw down the Just [James]... (EH 2.23.15f)

The fruit of the murder is seen in the way Eusebius ends this quote:

And they buried him [James] on the spot by the temple. He became a true witness both to Jews and to Greeks that Jesus is the Christ, and at once (ευθυς) Vespasian began to besiege them. (EH 2.23.19)

The ευθυς suggests a strong chronological link with what came before and that is what is provided for the fruit of their work, their work being the murder of James, while the fruit is the siege of Vespasian. Eusebius understands it this way, given his comment:

This account is given at length by Hegesippus, but in agreement with Clement. Thus it seems that James was indeed a remarkable man and famous among all for righteousness, so that the wise even of the Jews thought that this was the cause of the siege of Jerusalem immediately after the martyrdom, and that it happened for no other reason than the crime which they had committed against them.

Eusebius uses Hegesippus for the notion that the siege was the consequence of the death of James.

JoeWallack

JW:
"influenced by Eusebius"? You're narrowing the Goayl Posts and according to spin that's naughty. Here's how the question should be phrased:

Assuming that Eusebius created the TF c. 310 Eusebius is it unlikely that Pseudo-Hegesippus c. 380 Pseudo-Hegesippus would have been aware of it?

Now that the question has been properly presented let's look at your possible points:

1) Eusebius' TF is Greek, Pseudo-Hegesippus' is Latin.

There were 70 years available to translate one paragraph.


2) Pseudo-Hegesippus was written c. 375.

See 1).


3) Pseudo-Hegesippus was probably written in Rome.

See 1).


4) Unlikely that the author was influenced by Eusebius.

See 1). Also, I know it's not saying much but Eusebius would have been the outstanding Christian author of his time as well as the most read Christian author of the 4th century. Regarding Greek verses Latin Eusebius would have been the most International Father of his time.

It's not like Latin was a small exclusive nichea of Christianity at the time. Western Christianity was Latin. Would it have been interested in a Greek paragraph having a first century Jewish historian praise Jesus? Does a Bar take a Peshitta to read in the woods?


5) Little internal evidence suggesting such an influence.

See 1). Also, Pseudo-Hegesippus is not a translation of Josephus, it was just used as the primary source, so parallel evidence will have less weight.


Joseph

ErrancyWiki

Robert Tulip

What a stunning comment! Spin has drawn attention to this bad excuse for an apology, but it is worth drilling down further into Mr Criddle's thought processes to examine this case study in the anti-intellectual nature of Christianity.

In the century that started Christendom, a time of abundant inventiveness regarding the true cross and other artefacts, Mr Criddle would have us believe that decades were somehow not long enough 'prima facie' for a very convenient and unique independent purported corroboration of the existence of Jesus Christ to find its way from a major Greek historian to a Latin one.

It is passing strange that the alleged corroboration of the Historical Jesus by Josephus was miraculously prophetic of arguments that only emerged in the fourth century. "Prima facie" there is plenty of time for orthodox dogma to get its ducks in a row between Eusebius and Hegesippus.

This is boggling at best. Less prima facie than prima facepalm. I hope Andrew is just having a bad hair day.

Why, the reader may ask, did Origen not notice any of the TF, in a book, Contra Celsus, designed to argue for a historical Jesus, in analysis of Josephus that closely reads the very chapter where the TF supposedly appeared?

The only sane reason is that Eusebius fraudulently inserted the TF - after Origen and before Hegesippus - in order to shore up the threadbare fiction of the New Testament by providing a purported independent historical testimony, there being none otherwise.

andrewcriddle

Hi Spin

I think you are confusing Hegesippus (2nd century) and pseudo-Hegesippus (4th century). I do think FWIW that Hegesippus as quoted by Eusebius does not clearly present the death of James as a cause of the fall of Jerusalem, but whether I'm right or wrong this is not the point I was making.

I was saying that pseudo-Hegesippus does not make any mention of James' death. If he knew Josephus' Antiquities but not Eusebius then this is straightforward. The death of James is not prominent enough in Josephus to make pseudo-Hegesippus insert it in his paraphrase of the Jewish War. If however he knew Eusebius then the prominence given to the death of James by Eusebius makes the absence of any mention in pseudo-Hegesippus surprising.

(I think we can discount knowledge of the Demonstratio Evangelica let alone the Theophany in a 4th century Latin writer. These works do not seem to have circulated in the West.)

Andrew Criddle