Josephus in the catenas
February 18th, 2010 by Roger Pearse
Reading Devresse last night, I was amused to discover that one author quoted in the medieval commentaries composed of chains of quotations from the Fathers is … Josephus! In fact Philo is also quoted.
Josephus is actually quite often quoted in the catenae.
Compare:
Catenarum Graecarum Catalogus
http://www.archive.org/details/CatenarumGraecarumCatalogus
In Evagrius Ponticus’ scholia on the Psalms (that can be recovered in the collections of scholia attributed to Origen and Athanasius) he quotes Josephus regarding the sack of Jerusalem.
I wonder in what form such texts reached him. I doubt that he had a copy of the Jewish Wars in his cave in Egypt.. Any ideas?
As far as I remember in the manuscripts section of Roger Pearse’s pages there is a listing of all Josephus manuscripts. They are so many that some have even stayed in Greece, unlike those say of some classical which were smuggled to the West a long time ago
The Jewish War is not an uncommon book, and I don’t see that copies would not be accessible to Evagrius. However it is equally possible that he read the material in some Byzantine anthology.
Do you know of a good source for further study on such anthologies? I have similar questions regarding passages that he quotes from Clement of Alexandria for instance. It would be interesting to find out whether these passages from Clement and Josephus are present in such anthologies..
Not off-hand, no.