Re: Responses

Jim said:
<< When I referenced the destruction of the temple I didn't intend to say
that the damage was limited to that, but the quotation from Josephus was
rather nice. You could have gone on and quoted his passage about an insane
rage gripping the
inhabitants of Jerusalem so that they started killing each other. I always
wondered where the heck that came from and why it was there -- it sounds
like an apocryphal story, but at the same time, Josephus sounds like an
eyewitness at times. If you have any light to shed on that, please do. >>

I don't immediately remember that passage (there's a lot of Josephus), but
it could be referring to the in-fighting between the various sects, of which
there was quite a bit. Josephus' stories are probably the most consistently
easy to swallow of the ancient historians, and history by his time was
probably becoming something more like what history is to most of us.
Herodotus, for instance, who was the first we know to use the word in a way
like we do (Greek "historia," which is literally "inquiry" or
"investigation") claims to be an eyewitness to all manner of crazy and
impossible things.

But Josephus sounds like an eyewitness because he was one. He was an
aristocratic Jew who lived in Jerusalem and was involved, apparently in
something of a leadership position, in the revolt that began the whole
business. He was intimately involved in the war and was right in the heat
of it.

Ultimately, he was captured. The man who defeated him, Vespasian, would
shortly become Emperor when Nero killed himself, and after the war Josephus
was taken to Rome where he was granted citizenship, a pension, and lodging
on Vespasian's estate. No kidding. He had become something of a Roman
collaborator. After his death, a statue of him was raised in the Roman
library. As a Roman, of course, he wrote books greatly concerned with the
Jews, but he went by a Latinized name, and, while we do not know how he
RAISED his children, we know that he gave them the names of gentiles.

He is a very puzzling figure.

And:
<< The dissemination of Biblical texts throughout the Roman Empire and Asia
Minor isn't really a matter at all of the literacy of the average Jewish
household. The NT records, in the book of Acts, that Paul found a Jewish
synagogue in virtually every city he evangelized[. . . .] Historians assert
that Rome in Paul's day had 70 synagogues -- since a synagogue only required
12 Jewish men to start with, that's not unbelievable. >>

I had not considered this, and I think you're probably correct. Of course,
the Jewish War was felt and even fought outside of Jerusalem (Josephus was
actually defeated and captured while fighting far away from Jerusalem, and
was brought back there as hostage with the Romans), but I do not know or
have a good way of supposing how much outside of Jerusalem would have been
so decimated, or how much literature would have survived. The war was
essentially the end to the ancient political life of the Jews as a people,
and of the Sadducees, Essenes, and probably also several or many minor
sects. It is not inconceivable to me that the majority of Hebrew
manuscripts could have been destroyed, but the synagogues throughout Rome,
it seems, would have had at least a much stronger shot of maintaining them
than I was considering.

So it's still a great mystery. Perhaps it happened in the century or so
before Jesus, for utterly unknown reasons, or perhaps it was still a result
somehow of the disruption of the war. Perhaps it was beginning to happen in
the one place, and the final blow was in the other.

And:
<< I suspect that since Josephus wrote in Greek he was representing the
canon as understood by a Hellenic Jew, but I'm not sure about this and
haven't followed up. I don't think it's a coincidence that the LXX came to
be in order to meet the needs of hellenic Jews in Egypt... >>

I would presume this to be correct, and like I think I said much earlier in
the conversation, the coming together of the Septuagint would have provided
a much greater degree of standardization for those to whom Hebrew was not
readable. Josephus surely knew about the Greek translations, and they might
even have been the texts of the Hebrew Bible that he thought of as the
Bible.

But as a descendent of the Hasmonean priestly class, and thus as a Jewish
aristocrat in Jerusalem before its destruction, I would presume that he
could read Hebrew. And all he needed to do was READ the Hebrew that would
become called the Masoretic text, and READ the Greek that was or would
become the Septuagint, and he would become aware of great variation, whether
or not the Hebrew had already been standardized.

Yet he does not ever indicate knowledge of substantial variation and seems
even to demonstrate ignorance of it.

This is very puzzling.

And:
<< There's a point where it's more of a stretch to deny the existence of a
canon of sorts than to affirm it, recognizing
there are still problems with that affirmation. >>

I think you've said that, or something to that effect, a few times now, and
I'm afraid you're waving it at me like something of an accusation.

I really don't think I'm stretching anything, though. I'm not even DENYING
the existence of a canon at the time of Josephus' writing, really. I do
assert that there was no standardized book with the status of a modern Bible
in the first or second century B.C.E. And I am unsure of the existence of
such a thing in 30 or 60 C.E. You seem to be utterly convinced of the
latter, and I simply do not share your conviction. There might have been,
it seems to me, but I'm just not sure of it. My immediate guess at a
probable time for the relevant shift of perspective is the time shortly
following the war, so shortly after 70 C.E. A passage of Josephus that you
quoted makes me wonder about that. But it's not enough that I'm sure. The
fact that Josephus should have known about substantial variation, it seems
to me, regardless of a standardized Hebrew text, by virtue of familiarity
with both Greek and Hebrew and access to both copies of the pertinent books,
makes the suggestive passage even more puzzling and even less convincing.

-robbie
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Received on Sun Aug 4 04:41:50 2002