Tag: Josephus

More on Pseudo-Josephus, “Discourse to the Greeks on Hades”

Posted on by Roger Pearse

In my last post, I mentioned that this Pseudo-Josephus text is transmitted to us in a range of manuscripts, but is also transmitted in the “Sacra Parallela.”   The Sacra is an immense anthology of extracts from the Fathers.  Since then I have been trying to find out more about the Sacra.  It was originally in three volumes, often attributed to John Damascene, but only compilations derive from it survive.

The Sacra has only been edited once, by Michel Lequien, in 1712, in two volumes (here and here), with parallel Latin translation.  But in recent years a German team has been working on the text, and now they have issued an edition of two recensions of the second volume of the Sacra, in the Die Schriften des Johannes von Damaskos series.[1]  Each recension gets two volumes.  Sadly these do not contain a translation.

The edition by J. Declerck of the second recension of Book II of the Sacra Parallela (volumes 3 and  4 ) contains 2,007 extracts.  These are organised in alphabetical order, using 23 letters of the Greek alphabet.  Apparently this recension included no entries for “zeta.”

But the last entry given is out of sequence.  Indeed this entry is none other than pseudo-Josephus, “Against Plato, on the cause of everything”; in other words, our “discourse to the Greeks on Hades.”  The section is noticeably far longer than the short extracts that precede it.

Here’s the start of this part.

Even the reviewer, Paul-Hubert Poirier, had some difficulty understanding the abbreviations at the top!  *II2 is the second recension of book II of the Sacra.  The asterisk is inscrutable, apparently. “PMLb” is a group of manuscripts.

That it appears there, out of sequence at the end, must mean that it is an addition, added later on to the end of some copy of this recension of the text, and transmitted with it.  For the first recension ends with a short extract from Justin Martyr.  The fact that it is a comparatively long text in several chapters also suggests that it is not part of the original.

We’ve already seen that this version of pseudo-Josephus was edited a century ago by Holl from two manuscripts.  These also form the basis of the new critical edition.  But this edition also ends at the same place, earlier than the Barocci manuscript used for the English translation.

I would infer from this that the pseudo-Josephus text is a free-floating bit of text, on version of which accidentally became attached to the end of one recension of the Sacra Parallela.

So pseudo-Josephus is not a portion of the Sacra Parallela which has gone solo.  Rather it is an independent artist that has joined the band.

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  1. [1]T. Thum/J. Declerck, Die Schriften des Johannes von Damaskos, in the Patristische Texte und Studien series.↩

Pseudo-Josephus, “A Discourse to the Greeks concerning Hades” – an investigation

Posted on by Roger Pearse

There is a text floating around the web under the title of “Josephus’s Discourse to the Greeks concerning Hades.”  The full title is “An extract out of Josephus’s discourse to the Greeks, concerning Hades: wherein are contained the souls of the righteous and the unrighteous.”  Bill Thayer has the most reliable version of the piece on his site, here.

This item is from William Whiston’s 1737 version of the complete works of Josephus, and in the original edition it was printed as Dissertation V in volume one.  (Dissertation VI defended its authenticity).  While omitted in most reprints, these dissertations can be found in the 1741 reprint.[1] But the text is plainly not by Josephus, not least because chapter 8 starts with an apocryphal saying of Jesus.  This is found in other patristic texts and reads, “In whatsoever ways I shall find you, in them shall I judge you entirely.”  So we may call it pseudo-Josephus.

Whiston’s “Dissertation V”

We need to find the Greek text for this, before we can discuss it.  In his original edition, Whiston gives a note about this, which leads us down some quite interesting rabbit holes.  As we shall see, it leads to a number of what appear to be unresolved issues.

In the reference literature today, the text is assigned to Hippolytus of Rome, and given a title such as “Adversus Graecos” or “Oratio ad Graecos de inferno”.  It is hesitantly classified as fragment 1 of the lost “De universo,” περί τοῦ παντός, (Clavis Patrum Graecorum CPG 1898).  This classification is based on Photius, Bibliotheca 48, which mentions such a work and ascribes it to Josephus, just as the manuscripts do today.  But Whiston, despite his cranky ideas, was right when he noted that the basis for the proposed identification with De universo was unsound, as Alice Whealey recently discussed.[2]

The text is printed in the Patrologia Graeca 10, cols. 796-801, with a Latin translation copied from Etienne Le Moyne, of whom more anon. The first half of the same text appears in PG 96, 541-544, labelled as the “Rupefucaldinum” version of John Damascene’s Sacra Parallela (CPG 8056).  There is a modern edition of our own text in K. Holl Fragmente vornizanischer Kirchenvater aus den Sacra Parallela (TU 20, 2), Leipzig (1899), pp.137-143.

Whiston’s translation predates all of these editions.  Ordinarily that would not matter, but in this case, as we shall see, it does.

Whiston encountered the text in the Addenda of the 1726 Havercamp edition, the basis for his translation of the works of Josephus.  This piece was in vol. 2, Addenda, p.145-7.[3]

But rather than using Havercamp’s text, he preferred that printed by David Humphreys, The Apologeticks of the Learned Athenian Philosopher Athenagoras, (1714).  This had a loose English translation on pp.292-9 and the Greek on pp.302-307.  Humphreys also collated it with a text printed in the end notes of David Hoeschelius, Photii Myriobiblon (1611).  The Notae at the end restart the page numbering from 1, so its on columns 9-12 at the back of the book.  Whiston mentions also Etienne Le Moyne, Varia sacra, ceu Sylloge variorum opusculorum graecorum, vol. 1 (1694), pp.53-62, whose Latin translation was adopted by Migne in the PG10.  Le Moyne attributes the text, without manuscript authority according to Whiston, to Hippolytus, Sermone contra Graecos, cuius titulus, contra Platonem de universi causa.

But here the mysteries begin.  Whiston prints the text in 8 chapters – the division and numbering are his own –, based upon the text of Humphreys.  But although Whiston himself states, “All the four copies … very nearly agree, till towards the latter end of § 6,” after that we have a problem.

I have only skimmed the texts, but it looks as if all the editions seem to agree as far as the last-but-one sentence in chapter 6.  Hoeschelius, the PG10 text, Le Moyne, and Holl also print a section of text equivalent to chapter 7.  The chapter 7 of Humphreys is rather different.  The chapter 8 of Humphreys is not present anywhere else.

Inevitably we have to ask what manuscript evidence each of these editions is based on.

The Pinakes database lists 10 manuscripts of our text:  Barocci MS 26 (9th c.) in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, BNF Coislin 131 (14th c.) in Paris, one in the Lavra on Mt Athos (K 113, 16th c.), Vatican gr. 723 (13-16th), and 6 more recent MSS also in the Vatican.  This from the online scan of a microfilm of Vatican gr. 723:

Vatican gr. 723, f. 239r (top)
Vatican gr. 723, fol. 240v (end)

So we can now look at the editions.

The Humphreys edition is based on MS Oxford Barocci 26.  Whiston tells us that this becomes nearly unreadable toward the end, but that this is the source of the material beyond chapter 6.  Sadly it is not online. He adds that the Barocci copy “is much the most valuable; because it is about a forth part larger than the other; and yet appears equally genuine.”[4]

Whiston also refers to the Coislin manuscript, which is online here.

Hoeschelius used an Italian manuscript, without specifying it.  He says only:

“Eius fragmentum ut ex Italia missum est pridem mihi a M.M. ita edo, pseudepigraphum, nec ne (non iniuria enim dubites) iudicent eruditi.  Equidem homini Christiano adscripserim.”

“I publish this fragment, just as it was sent to me some time ago from Italy by M.M., pseudepigraphical or not (for you would not be wrong to doubt), let the scholars decide. For my part, I would attribute it to a Christian author.”

So this was probably one of the Vatican manuscripts.  Whiston in “Dissertation 6” p.clxxxv tells us that “M.M.” was a certain Max Marguntius.

As far as I could tell from his rambling preface, Le Moyne does not identify the manuscript that he used for “Hippolytus”.

Pinakes also lists 39 manuscripts of the Sacra Parallela, from the 9th century onwards.  This work exists in various different recensions, and I am unclear whether pseudo-Josephus is present in all of these manuscripts.  Paris BNF gr. 923 (9th c.) and Venice Marciana gr. Z. 138 (10 med.) were used for the Holl edition, and there are three other manuscripts listed of recension “PMLb”, whatever that is.  But the mysteries of the Sacra Parallela will have to await another blog post.

It looks as if we have at least two recensions, and possibly three; the Barocci text via the Humphreys edition, the manuscript itself nearly unreadable at the end; the PG10 / Hoeschelius / Le Moyne text; and perhaps the Holl and PG96 text as a third group similar to the second.  Someone needs to collate these, collate the manuscripts, and establish a stemma.

I notice that even in the first sentence of the work, we find a separating variant.  Humphreys prints “Καὶ οὗτος μὲν ὁ περὶ δαιμόνων τόπος,” “And this is the place of demons.”  But other witnesses read “Καὶ οὗτος μὲν ὁ περὶ δαιμόνων λόγος,” translated by Whiston as “And this is the discourse concerning daemons.”

  • “topos” is the reading of Humphreys (and so, presumably, the Barocci MS), Hoeschelius, Le Moyne, and the PG10. It is also the reading of the Coislin MS, from which Whiston must have taken his reading.
  • “logos” is the reading of Holl, and also PG96, both based on the Sacra Parallela.
Paris BNF coislin 131, fol. 1r (top)

So there is editorial work to be done on the “ad Graecos”, or whatever we call the text.  The text, its authorship, and relationships between the text witnesses, all this would make an interesting subject for publication.  But not by me!

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  1. [1]William Whiston, The Genuine Works Of Flavius Josephus, The Jewish Historian. Translated from the Original Greek : according to Havercamp’s accurate Edition, vol. 1 (1737), pp.clxxix-clxxxiv.↩
  2. [2]A. Whealey, “Hippolytus’ lost ‘De universo’ and ‘De resurrectione:’ Some new hypotheses”, in: Vigiliae Christianae 50 (1996), p.244-256.  JSTOR.↩
  3. [3]S. Havercamp, Flavii Josephi quae reperiri potuerunt, 2 vols (1726). BSB: Vol. 1. Vol 2.  The text begins on p.676 of the PDF download of vol. 2.↩
  4. [4]In “Dissertation VI”, p.clxxxvi.↩

Online: The Latin Josephus Project

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Here’s something that I had never heard of!  It’s a website, based at Google Sites, called the Latin Josephus Project.  The URL is https://sites.google.com/site/latinjosephus/.

It contains the full text of the Latin Josephus for both the Jewish War and Antiquities, given in parallel with the Greek, and Whiston’s translation.  These words were translated in the 6th century, probably by Cassiodorus.  They are found everywhere in medieval monastic libraries.

This is a very useful piece of work!

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Josephus in Ethiopian – a dissertation

Posted on by Roger Pearse

An interesting dissertation has come online here, Y. Binyam, Studies in Sefer Yosippon: The Reception of Josephus in Medieval Hebrew, Arabic, and Ethiopic Literature, Florida (2017).  The abstract reads:

In this dissertation I analyze the reception of Josephus in Ethiopia by way of the Hebrew Sefer Yosippon, its Latin sources, and its subsequent Arabic translations. I provide the first English translations and comparative analysis of selected passages from the Latin, Hebrew, Arabic, and Ethiopic texts that transmit Josephus’s Jewish War.

The first part of this project provides an introduction to four texts that play important roles in the transmission of Josephus’s Jewish War from first-century Rome to fourteenth-century Ethiopia: the fourth-century Latin De Excidio Hierosolymitano, the tenth-century Hebrew Sefer Yosippon, the twelfth-century Arabic Kitāb akhbār al-yahūd, and the fourteenth-century Ethiopic Zena Ayhud.

After discussing the critical issues related to these texts, the second part of the dissertation presents a detailed comparison of the receptions of the famous story of Maria found Josephus’s account of the siege of Jerusalem. I pay close attention to the redactional changes made by the author of each text and note the ideological, cultural, rhetorical, and historical factors that lie behind the various editorial activities.

Ultimately my research seeks to contribute to our understanding of the way in which non-western cultures receive the historiographical traditions of the classical period. In doing so, it will highlight the uniqueness of understudied literary and historiographical traditions that flourished in the medieval period.

The Latin text is the ps.Hegesippus which is online.

The thesis discusses the textual transmission of these four sub-Josephan texts.  Naturally this involves material known only to specialists.  Who of us knows much about the spread of texts into Ethiopic?   But I learn on p.61 that a “large number of translations were made into Ethiopic … during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries”, and of “the ecclesiastical reforms that take place with the ascendancy of Yekuno Amlka (1270-1285), who commissions the translation of large numbers of theological and ecclesiastical works into Ge’ez.”

My thanks to the kind correspondent who drew my attention to this, very worthwhile, study.

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A comparison in tabular form of various translations of Josephus on the Jotapata incident

Posted on by Roger Pearse

A gentleman named David Blocker has made a comparison of the English translations of the passage in Josephus Jewish War where he describes the episode at Jotapata.  Very kindly he has allowed this to appear here:

He writes:

[This is a] tabular comparison of different translations of Jotapata episode from Jewish War beginning with Lodge translation through Thackeray, and including Josephus variants: PseudoHegesippus, Slavonic Josephus, and the Jossipon.

I should have included the Latin as well, but I gave up, I would have to find a Latin text , then locate the proper section and dictionary bash a parallel translation, more work than I felt capable of.

There are some interesting differences between the Greek text and the non Greek versions as shown in the table, suggesting some passages may have dropped out of the Greek manuscript tradition, again showing the need for a study of the Latin text to see if these passages are in the earlier Latin manuscripts.

It is always interesting to see how different translators handle the same passage, and occasionally disturbing!  This should be of interest to Josephus people!

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Josephus in the hands of Sir Roger L’Estrange

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Sir Roger L’Estrange is probably mainly remembered today for his activities as a journalist and violent pamphleteer for the court during the reign of Charles II.[1]  As with others of Charles’ partisans, there was a strong element of ingratitude in all this.  L’Estrange had fought for Charles I in the civil war, but had received a pardon in 1653 from Oliver Cromwell, after which he had prospered under the commonwealth.  He was made surveyor of the press by the king in 1662, although the king did not see any reason to pay him a salary.

But how many of us are aware that this controversial figure was also a translator, and produced a translation of the works of Josephus?

A contemporary portrait of Sir Roger L’Estrange.

Yet so it is; the work appeared in 1702.  Even more interestingly, he became involved in a copyright dispute because of it!

The facts may be found in an old article by A.W. Pollard, “Copyright in Josephus”, in The Library 30 (1917), p.173-6.  Curiously Oxford University Press modestly ask for $44 in return for 24 hours access to this 101-year old item, here.

In 1609 a certain Thomas Lodge, “Doctor of Physick”, produced a translation  of The famous and memorable works of Josephus, based on the Latin and French.  This went through a number of editions, and a new edition appeared in 1676, revised against the French translation of Arnauld d’Andilly.

In 1693 a bookseller named Richard Sare advertised a new translation, by none other than Sir Roger L’Estrange.  On the 3rd April a bill appeared, signed by a number of booksellers, threatening legal action!

it being the Resolution of the Proprietors of the present English Copy, to use all lawful Means to vindicate their Right, and recover Satisfaction for the Damages they shall sustain by this New Undertaking; they and their Predecessors having been in just and quiet Possession of the same for near One Hundred Years, and having expended above Eight Hundred Pounds in amending their Translation by a Learned and Ingenious Hand, and in Printing a large Impression newly finish’d, now upon their hands.

Sare issued his own bill the next day, stating his intention to go on with it and disparaging the Lodge translation as “senseless”.

The new edition of Lodge did really exist, and really did appear in 1693, printed by Abel Roper, one of the signatories of the first bill.

The L’Estrange translation did not appear until nine years later, with the preface dated 28th January 1702, only a couple of years before L’Estrange’s death.  By that time the Glorious Revolution of William and Mary had come and gone.  The translator must have seemed like a ghostly figure from another age, as of course he was.

Pollard attributes the delay to bribery.  He points out that the owners of the Lodge translation had already made a substantial investment, even in their own terms, and paying off Sare or L’Estrange would have been worthwhile.  The claim to perpetual copyright in the translation is in keeping with the strange ideas of that age, and indeed was recognised by the old Common Law.  This somewhat vague right was reinforced, as was thought, by an Act of Queen Anne in 1710, giving copyright of 21 years exclusively to the publisher.

But what happened when the Queen Anne act expired?  There was a lawsuit, of course.  The essayist Augustine Birrell in “Authors in Court”[2], whom it is always a pleasure to read, recounts the matter.

These proceedings found their way, as all decent proceedings do, to the House of Lords — farther than which you cannot go, though ever so minded. It was now high time to settle this question, and their lordships accordingly, as was their proud practice in great cases, summoned the judges of the land before their bar, and put to them five carefully-worded questions, all going to the points — what was the old Common Law right, and has it survived the statute? Eleven judges attended, heard the questions, bowed and retired to consider their answers.  On the fifteenth of February, 1774, they reappeared, and it being announced that they differed, instead of being locked up without meat, drink, or firing until they agreed, they were requested to deliver their opinions with their reasons, which they straightway proceeded to do. The result may be stated with tolerable accuracy thus : by ten to one they were of opinion that the old Common Law recognised perpetual copyright. By six to five they were of opinion that the statute of Queen Anne had destroyed this right. The House of Lords adopted the opinion of the majority, reversed the decree of the Court below, and thus Thomson’s Seasonsbecame your Seasons, my Seasons, anybody’s Seasons.

Big money rested on all this.  Thomson the poet had sold his right for three of the Seasons to a certain Millar for a £242.  When Millar died in 1729, after selling the work for more than 40 years, his heirs sold the Seasons to a certain Beckett for £505.  Beckett himself sold the item also for more than 40 years.

All the same, claiming copyright on any English translation of an ancient author required quite a bit of impudence.

What did Sir Roger L’Estrange get for his translation?  For his folio volume of 1,130 pages, he received £300, plus a sixth part of the gross sales, plus 25 ordinary copies and 25 on royal paper.  The ordinary copies were priced at 25s, and the royal paper copies at  45s.  The edition was obviously a success, for a new edition in three volumes was accidentally destroyed in 1712 by a fire in the printer’s office.  There seem to have been reprints well into the 19th century.

I have not been able to locate a copy of L’Estrange’s work online.  It wouldn’t meet modern standards, I am sure.  But the tale is an interesting corner of the history of literature.

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  1. [1]A short biography is here.↩
  2. [2]Res Judicatae, 1892, p.187, Archive.org here.↩

Porphyry on quotation practices in antiquity

Posted on by Roger Pearse

An interesting volume has come my way on the quotations in Eusebius.  It is Sabrina Inowlocki, Eusebius and the Jewish Authors: His citation technique in an apologetic context, Brill, 2006.  This, remarkably, was a PhD thesis in French.

The study is interesting enough that I should like to read the paper volume. I have a PDF but reading more than a bit on screen is impossible. But sadly the price at $150 renders that impossible.  However the PDF is indexed, and as a result I keep finding good things.

Chapter 2 is about the way that ancient authors quoted sources.  In chapter 2E, Faithfulness to the Text Cited, we find the following statements:

The changes brought by an author to the cited passage vary substantially. They generally consist in the omission or addition of words, in grammatical changes, in the combination of citations, and in the modification of the primary meaning of the quotation. These changes may be deliberate, which means that they are made by the citing author specifically in order to appropriate the content of the citation.52 They may also be accidental. If deliberate, the changes result from the author’s wish to adjust the citation to his own purposes, to ‘modernize’ the stylistic expression of a more ancient writer, or to adapt the grammar of the cited text to that of the citing text. It may be noted that deliberate changes do not always stem from the citing author’s eagerness to tamper with the primary meaning of a passage, as modern scholars often suspect and harshly condemn.

A passage from Porphyry, cited in the Praeparatio, is particularly revealing. It shows the methodology applied to the cited text, even by an author who was eager to preserve the primary meaning of that cited text:

(I omit the Greek, since I can’t paste it and don’t have time to retype it tonight)

To such you will impart information without any reserve. For I myself call the gods to witness, that I have neither added, nor taken away from the meaning of the responses, except where I have corrected an erroneous phrase, or made a change for greater clearness, or completed the metre where defective, or struck out anything that did not conduce to the purpose; so that I have preserved the sense of what was spoken untouched, guarding against the impiety of such changes, rather than against the avenging justice that follows from the sacrilege.(53)

53.  De philosophia ex oraculis I, p.109-110 (Wolff) = PE IV. 7. 1.

The sense, in other words, is what Porphyry transmits, not the exact words before him.  This is perhaps easier to understand if we remember that the copies before him were manuscripts, and so could easily contain corruptions.

Inowlocki goes on to say:

This passage emphasizes the prominence of the meaning of the text over its phrasing: The nous is clearly opposed to the lexis.54 Porphyry claims not to have tampered with the noemata of the oracles but he does not claim that he has not changed the terms and expressions of the cited text.55 Yet it should be noted that the respect shown to the meaning of the oracles is due to their sacredness. Similar attitudes are also found among Jewish and Christian authors regarding the modification of the Scriptures. Such changes are even more harshly condemned in the Jewish and Christian traditions.56[1] This was not the case with secular texts, as can be seen from Porphyry’s use of citations in his De abstinentia.57 Porphyry was especially gifted in manipulating texts, although the concept of manipulation hardly applies to antiquity. At any rate, the neo-platonic philosopher was not the only one to do so. Plutarch, who is well known for his extensive use of quotations, does not hesitate to transform the passages he cites by omitting, adding or modifying terms or expressions occurring in the quotation. Not even Plato was spared by him.

However, it should be emphasized that our scholarly criteria of citation are not relevant to the practice of ancient authors. Purpose and methodology differ dramatically. Actually, that which we might consider falsification was viewed by ancient writers as a methodology in explicating the true, authentic meaning of a text. In a sense, in the ancient authors’ view, modifying the text cited was meant to express its essence more clearly.59

In addition to the distinction between sacred and secular texts, the treatment of prose citations differs from that of poetic citations. Indeed, it was more difficult to modify poetic texts because of the metric rules. Moreover, in many cases, the readership knew them by heart. This was especially the case with Homer. As Stanley has pointed out in a study on Paul,60 the status of Homeric poems in Hellenism was to some extent comparable to that of the Scriptures in Judaism and Christianity. Both texts constituted the most authoritative text. Homer had been critically edited in the Hellenistic period and this ‘vulgate’ was in general faithfully copied by second-century C.E. authors. This observation may probably also apply to Euripides’ and Sophocles’ tragedies.

However, the poetic text cited by the ancient authors is not always identical to that which has reached us through direct transmission, i.e., in manuscripts. Several explanations other than the responsibility of the citing authors may be suggested. Firstly, the authors often cited passages from memory and therefore made mistakes;61 secondly, in the case of Homeric quotations, the authors could use a text other than the Alexandrian ‘vulgate;’ thirdly, most authors excerpted passages from florilegia rather than from the original text;62 finally, some differences may be due to the corruptions to which medieval manuscripts were subject.

As for prose texts, they could be more easily modified thanks to the flexibility of their form. They could easily be summarized, paraphrased and transformed. It is worth noting that the faithfulness to the text also depends on the feelings of the quoting author towards the quoted author. An author such as Strabo, whose faithfulness to the Homeric text has been shown by Stanley, proves to be rather loose in his citations from Herodotus.63 Likewise, Plutarch quotes Herodotus faithfully only in half of the cases64 whereas it is well known that he cites Homer faithfully.

The different methodologies in modifying a text may be presented as follows:65 …

But here we must halt our quotation.  Most of the footnotes refer to studies.

Isn’t this fascinating stuff?  It is really useful to hear Porphyry’s statement.  It is really useful to hear some solid examples of how ancient writers handle these things.

The author, Sabrina Inowlocki, is a Eusebius scholar, and her study of the quotations in the Apodeixis (i.e. the Praeparatio Evangelica and Demonstratio Evangelica) is really interesting.  But it’s the kind of book to read through.

What a murder it is, that so useful a volume, funded by a tax grant, should be obscured by such a high price!

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  1. [1]56. See, e.g. Josephus, Antiquities I. 17, X. 218 and Against Apion I. 42; Letter of ps.Aristeas 310…↩

Words, Words, Words: A response to Richard Carrier on Feldman and Eusebius

Posted on by Roger Pearse

It’s always nice when my blog posts attract attention. I learned last week that an old post of mine, from 2013, has attracted a response from a professional atheist polemicist named Richard Carrier. In a rather excitable post here on his own blog he roundly denounces my casual remarks, and indeed myself (!), and offers a new theory of his own. A correspondent drew my attention to this, and asked me to comment.

My original post was written after I happened to see an article by the excellent Josephus scholar Louis Feldman. This tentatively endorsed the fringe idea that Eusebius of Caesarea (fl. early 4th century) may have composed the so-called Testimonium Flavianum (TF), the rather odd passage in Josephus Antiquities 18 which mentions Christ.[1] This claim is not one that anybody has previously had much time for, and I didn’t see any purpose in rebutting it. Feldman was only summarising work by others, I felt.

But then I saw something interesting. The article made the claim that, if you search the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae database for a phrase towards the end of the TF, “And the tribe of Christians has not died out even to this day” (eis eti te nun – even/still to this day),[2] then it gives a bunch of hits in Eusebius’ works, and pretty much nowhere else.

I do computer searches. I’m interested in Eusebius. So I did the search for the phrase, but I got only a handful of results. Disappointed, I blogged about it, added some cautions on rushing to conclusions from these kinds of matches, and thought no more about it.

Last week I learned that, after four years, Richard Carrier has written a blog post in which he asserts rather over-enthusiastically that I simply did the search wrong – that instead I should have searched for eis eti nun; the te is just a particle, with the vague sense of “and”, and the two phrases are pretty much the same in meaning. Of course the two are indeed more or less identical in meaning.

Carrier’s search produces splendid results. It gets 94 matches.[3] Of these, 6 are later than Eusebius; one each in six authors. The other 88 are entirely in Eusebius. In other words, practically nobody in all Greek literature ever uses the phrase other than Eusebius, if we can trust this search.  It looks like the claim that Eusebius wrote the TF is proved!

But 88 out of 94 is not just a good result for the theory. It’s a fabulous result! In fact, it’s too good to be true. It’s like a Soviet election result with 99% voting for the official candidate. The number is supposed to produce confidence in the result, and does the opposite. It’s a sign that we need to sanity-check what we are doing.

Doing so produces instant discomfort. Surely “even to this day” is a trivial phrase? Are we really saying that Eusebius invented something as obvious as that? It seems unlikely. Imagine a Greek, complaining about his neighbour, as man has done since time immemorial. Would he not say, “How long has this been a problem?” “Oh it started when we landed, and it has continued even to this day.” How else would you express that idea?[4]

In fact, if we look at little further we find that the idea in rather similar words is indeed kicking around well before Eusebius, six centuries earlier, in the third century BC.   Apollonius Rhodius uses the idea in his Argonautica. He uses it to tie together past and present, in precisely the way that Eusebius does. [5]   The historian Polybius uses it, the poet Callimachus uses it. Nobody in our corpus uses it like Eusebius does; but then nobody is writing quite the kinds of works that Eusebius is.

So why didn’t these authors appear in the results, when we do the search? Because these rely on searching for versions of eiseti nun, which differs only by a word-division and means much the same thing.[6] We can omit te; we can replace it with the stronger equivalent kai; we can run eis and eti together, especially when we know that Greek manuscripts did not feature word division.  Any claim that depends on the presence of a space in the text is a pretty fragile one.

In fact there are quite a number of things we can do to twiddle the search, once we start thinking about it. Let’s just give the numbers from the TLG for a few versions of this search string, all of which mean much the same:

  • eis eti te nun – 4 hits. Josephus (1 hit), Eusebius (3 hits).
  • eiseti te nun – 7 hits. Eusebius (4), Sozomen (2), Oecumenius (1).
  • eis eti nun – 94 hits. 88 are from works of Eusebius, and the other 6 are later: Didymus the Blind (d.398) On Genesis, Procopius of Gaza (5th c.) Commentary on Isaiah, Stobaeus (6th c.), Chronicon Paschale (6th c.) and two 12th century Byzantine writers.
  • eiseti nun – 142 hits. Mostly pre-Eusebius; 7 hits in Apollonius Rhodius (3rd c. BC), Timaeus Historicus (3rd c. BC), Polybius (2nd c. BC), Philo (1st c. AD), Aelius Aristides (2nd c. AD), Lucian (2nd c.), Oppian (2nd c.), Clement of Alexandria (ca. 200), and others.  But Eusebius (63 hits) and Sozomen (41 hits) do appear.
  • eis eti kai nun – 23 hits. 2 hits from Porphyry (3rd c.) from different works. Some from Eusebius, Gregory of Nyssa, Gregory Nazianzen, and then Byzantine writers.
  • eiseti kai nun – 110 hits. Callimachus (3rd c. BC), Herennius Philo (ca. 100 AD), Lucian, the Book of Jubilees (ca. 150 BC), Eusebius (56 hits) – especially in the commentaries on Isaiah and Psalms – Eutropius, Chrysostom, Palladius, and Byzantine writers.  Also an LXX variant reading for Isaiah 9:6 (given by Eusebius).

All of these do show significant use by Eusebius. Some of these show pre-Eusebian use; others don’t.

In fact Carrier is quite well aware of the pre-Eusebian results, which he proceeds to mention briefly in a paragraph that reads as if it was tacked on afterwards.   But it’s terrible stuff. Clement of Alexandria is just a Christian, so he doesn’t count (?!).  Polybius doesn’t count because no other historical writer after him uses this phrase.  In fact Carrier has changed his argument; from “only Eusebius uses this, so it proves that Eusebius forged the TF” – a defensible argument, if wrong – to “Eusebius uses this more than anyone, so that proves that he forged the TF”.  Which, of course, it does not.  Carrier has defeated himself.[7]

Here’s the rub; the success or failure of our search comes to depend on us, on our judgement, on our ingenuity, on our knowledge of Greek.   This subjectivity was precisely why, in my first blog post, I never proceeded beyond the exact match.

There are further possible issues with this method. Only 1% of Greek literature has survived. Much of that is biased towards technical, classical or ecclesiastical writings, those that were useful to copyists in the Dark Ages. The TLG contains only a portion of that 1%. Someone who knew more about computational linguistics than I do could easily point out more problems.

The database itself is not “clean”;[8] it is comprised of texts edited by many different editors, whose choices from the manuscript tradition will reflect their preferences. One example of this may be found in searching outside the TLG for eis eti nun. The TLG gives no hits before Eusebius. But I find that the 1831 R. Klotz edition of Clement of Alexandria, Protrepicus, has three hits for it.[9] In the TLG, based on the GCS edition, eis eti is replaced by eiseti. There is no indication in the apparatus as to why. The results of each database search are therefore a reflection of editorial choices.

Stylistic analysis, whether manual or automated, can be something of a trap. It’s terribly easy to forget how little we really know about the texts before us, the language which none of us speak as a native and which changes considerably over the thousand years before us, the vagaries of editors, the influence of ammanuenses and copyists, and of the non-literary spoken language, which surrounds the literary text like a warm bath at every instant but is almost invisible to us.

To sum up, we saw that a search for the exact phrase does not confirm Carrier’s claim. A search for revised phrases which mean the same does not confirm the claim either.  Attempts to dodge this simply destroy the argument.

*   *   *   *

Now let’s go back to where we started. The argument in Feldman’s article was that the use of this phrase proved that Eusebius wrote the TF.   We don’t want any implicit assumptions here, so let’s lay the argument out explicitly.

The claim is: (1) we have no evidence that eis eti te nun (etc) was used in Greek literature before Eusebius; (2) the search proves that Eusebius uses it extensively; therefore (3) any use of the term proves that Eusebius composed that bit of text; and (4) the TF as found in the Church History of Eusebius does contain it; so (5) Eusebius composed the TF.

The second point is correct. Eusebius does use the eis eti nun phrase extensively, once or twice in every book of the Church History, and elsewhere.

But the first point is dodgy, and so is the third. We have seen that in fact we do have evidence of its use for 6 centuries before Eusebius.

But let us suppose for a moment that the TLG searches did in fact show, as Carrier contended (before he discovered otherwise), that nobody used eis eti nun before Eusebius. The argument still is flawed. For this argument is an argument from silence – that we have no evidence that anyone else … so it must have been him. Arguments from silence are not valid.

The archaeologists never tire of telling us that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. It is the first thing that we must remember. And we’re searching only a subset of 1% of Greek literature, as we saw.  According to Carrier this means that we don’t have any evidence of use before Eusebius … very well. But even then we don’t have all the evidence. We have only a fraction of it.

In conclusion, the claim that examining the use of eis eti nun proves that Eusebius composed the TF is not correct. The claim itself seems to involve an argument from silence. And the silence itself can only be sustained by ignoring the exact matches, using a related search, and then finding reasons to ignore other related searches.

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  1. [1]There is another brief mention in Ant. 20 which also does so.↩
  2. [2]I have transliterated the Greek so that general readers can follow along.↩
  3. [3]This from a search of the TLG-E disk; I am currently unable to access the online system.↩
  4. [4]In fact it would be rather interesting to know how this was expressed in the classical period, as eis eti nun does not seem to be classical.↩
  5. [5]M.P. Cuypers, “Apollonius of Rhodes”, In: Irene J. F. De Jong, René Nünlist, Angus M. Bowie, “Narrators, Narratees, and Narratives in Ancient Greek Literature: Studies in Ancient Greek Narrative”, vol. 1. Brill, 2004, p.56 and n.24.↩
  6. [6]My thanks to Ken Olson for pointing this out in a comment on my original post. Dr O. is clearly no bigot, for he did so despite this information working against the interest of his theory: clearly a gentleman and a scholar.↩
  7. [7]Full disclosure: I wrote the majority of this post without Carrier’s post before me, so I did not remember his change of mind at this point.↩
  8. [8]See further M. Eder, “Mind your corpus: systematic errors in authorship attribution”, Literary and Linguistic Computing 28, 2013, 603-14.↩
  9. [9]Page 9 line 29, p.12  l.17, p.18 l.16. The first of these reads “καταδουλοῦται καὶ αΐκίζεται εἰς ἔτι νῦν τοιὶς άνθρώπους,”↩

The “Testimonium Flavianum” in al-Makin

Posted on by Roger Pearse

The so-called Testimonium Flavianum of Josephus has provoked extensive discussion down the years, not all of it either measured or even sensible.  One witness to the text is the Arabic versions.  These were handled in a rather mangled way in 1971 by Shlomo Pines,[1] who introduced the world to their existence in the World History of Agapius (a.k.a. Mahbub ibn Qustantin), the 10th century bishop of Hierapolis.  Pines made use of the CSCO edition, which rather misled him, and proposed that this version of the Testimonium preserved features corrupted in the Greek as it now stands.

Part of Agapius’ work is extant only in a single damaged manuscript in Florence.  But the CSCO editor of Agapius, Louis Cheikho,[2] believed that his text was quoted at length by the 13th century Coptic writer al-Makin Ibn-al `Amid, and so included extracts from the latter’s unedited work in an appendix.  Pines made use of the latter on the basis that this was “Agapius”.  But the actual text of Agapius is given in the Florence manuscript.  What al-Makin says may now be considered, since Martino Diez has kindly edited and translated the text for us.[3]

It is as follows:

tf_al-makinIn English:

And likewise Josephus the Hebrew says in his writings on the Jews: in those days, there was a wise man named Jesus.  He lived a good life, distinguishing himself by his learning, and many people, as many Jews as of other nations, became his disciples.  Pilate condemned him to crucifixion and death.  But those who had become his disciples did not cease to be so, and affirmed that he had appeared to them three days after the crucifixion and that he was alive.  Perhaps he was the Messiah of whom the prophets speak.

The text is preserved only in the “expanded” recension of al-Makin, which may or may not be the original version of the text (see here).  It appears towards the end of the life of Jesus, where the “expanded” edition includes a series of quotations from pagan authors on the subject of the events on and following Good Friday. (These are probably — I say this without seeing them — taken from collections of sayings, gnomologia, that circulated in the Arabic world.)

Diez edits the text from the single manuscript of the “expanded” recension accessible to him, Ms Paris BNF, arab. 4729, where it appears on folio 108r, lines 1-6.  Pines made use of Paris BNF ar. 294, f.162v-163r.[4]  As Diez rightly remarks, a study of the other witnesses to this recension of the text of al-Makin is necessary before much more is done.

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  1. [1]S. Pines, An Arabic Version of the Testimonium Flavianum and its Implications, Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Jerusalem, 1971.↩
  2. [2]Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium 65 (Scriptores arabici 10), Beirut 1912.↩
  3. [3]M. Diez, “”, Studia Graeco-Arabica 3 (2013), 221-140, esp. 134-5.↩
  4. [4]Pines, p.6-7, n.6.↩

Diez on al-Makin and the Testimonium Flavianum

Posted on by Roger Pearse

Just a quick note to signal an important article: Martino Diez, “Les antiquites greco-romaines entre ibn al-`Amid et Ibn Khaldun. Notes pour une histoire de la tradition, in: Studia Graeco-Arabica 3 (2013), 121-140 (Online here).  (In this and what follows, don’t presume I have every letter just correct: WordPress won’t allow me to!)

The abstract tells it all:

The Coptic Historian al-Makin Girgis ibn al-`Amid (1206 – after 1280) is the author of a universal history known as al-Magmu` al-Mubarak (‘The blessed collection’). This work is divided into two parts: a section on pre-Islamic history, still unpublished, and a summary of Islamic history, edited by Erpenius in 1625 and completed by Claude Cahen. The article analyzes the two recensions of the first part of the Magmu` through the comparison of three manuscripts, in particular as regards the sections on Hellenistic, Roman and Byzantine history. After discussing the particular version of the Testimonium Flavianum which can be found in the longer recension of the Magmu`, the article traces the fortune of al-Makin in subsequent Islamic historiography, especially al-Qalqašandi, al-Maqrizi and Ibn Khaldun.

Al-Makin is the big unpublished Arabic Christian history.  His version of the Testimonium Flavianum in the first half of al-Makin’s work was referenced by Shlomo Pines in his well-known article on the subject, when discussing Agapius, but a look at the French translation of Agapius reveals that Pines must have used Al-Makin’s version extensively.

The article is in French, but promises to be very interesting!  Watch this space!

Update (16th Dec. 2013): I had not realised that the article was online.  I’ve added the link, and also corrected a typo in the title.

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