Re: Responses

Funny how the word "puzzling" kept coming up in your post, but I think that says
it all, ultimately :). This subject is a puzzle. It's a puzzle with missing
pieces, and we try to fill them in different ways. I think that's the bottom
line.

Thanks for the insight into Josephus...I had no idea he was captured and taken
to Rome. There are passages in Josephus that read to me like blatant Christian
interpolations -- they just SOUND like they were put there by someone else --
they don't even read the same in English. I can't imagine how different they
sound in Greek. I don't think the account of the mass killings of Jews by Jews
around the time of the Roman conquest of Jerusalem is one of these, though.

I didn't really mean that last sentence of mine to be an accusation, but just a
statement of what seems to me to be clear thinking about the issue -- really, we
think this way all the time. I think the truth about the establishment of a
canon is more complex than we've considered, and if we knew all the details (we
don't know a tenth of them) I don't think we'd be comfortable with any easy
answers either way.

Jim

"L. Manning Vines" wrote:

> 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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