Empsychoi Logoi- Religious Innovations in Antiquity: Studies in Honour of Pieter Willem Van Der Horst

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Author: Alberdina Houtman | Albert De Jong | Magda Misset-van De Weg

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Empsychoi Logoi Religious Innovations in Antiquity

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Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity Arbeiten zur Geschichte des antiken Judentums und des Urchristentums

Founding Editor

Martin Hengel (Tübingen) Executive Editors

Cilliers Breytenbach (Berlin) Martin Goodman (Oxford) Editorial Board

Friedrich Avemarie (Marburg), Pieter W. van der Horst (Utrecht), Tal Ilan (Berlin), Tessa Rajak (Reading), Daniel R. Schwartz ( Jerusalem), Seth Schwartz (New York)

VOLUME 73

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Empsychoi Logoi—Religious Innovations in Antiquity Studies in Honour of Pieter Willem van der Horst

Edited by

Alberdina Houtman, Albert de Jong, and Magda Misset-van de Weg

LEIDEN • BOSTON 2008

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This book is printed on acid-free paper. A Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Foreign churches in St. Petersburg and their archives, 1703–1917 / edited by Pieter Holtrop and Henk Slechte. p. cm. — (Brill’s series in church history ; v. 29) Proceedings of a congress held in Oct. 2003 in Saint Petersburg, Russia. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-16260-0 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. Saint Petersburg (Russia) — Church history. I. Holtrop, P. N. II. Slechte, C. H. III. Title. IV. Series. BR938.S25F67 2007 274.7'2107—dc22

2007029955

ISSN 1871-6636 ISBN 978 90 04 16597 7 Copyright 2008 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill NV provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

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CONTENTS Abbreviations .............................................................................. Preface ......................................................................................... Introduction ................................................................................

ix xv xvii

PART ONE

CONTEXTS ‘Judenthum’, ‘Griechenthum’ and ‘Christenthum’ as Parameters in Early Nineteenth-Century Jewish Political Thinking .................................................................................. I.E. Zwiep

3

Explaining Change in Judaism in Late Antiquity ..................... M. Goodman

19

The End of Sacrifice: Religious Mutations of Late Antiquity ... G.G. Stroumsa

29

Worshipping the Visible Gods: Conflict and Accommodation in Hellenism, Hellenistic Judaism and Early Christianity ..... D.T. Runia

47

PART TWO

THE IMPACT OF THE INDIVIDUAL Ammianus Marcellinus’ Judgement of Julian’s Piety ................. J. den Boeft

65

A quodam Persa exstiterunt: Re-Orienting Manichaean Origins .... A. de Jong

81

The Letter of Mara bar Sarapion: Some Comments on its Philosophical and Historical Context .................................... A. Merz and T. Tieleman

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107

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vi

contents

John the Baptist According to Flavius Josephus, and his Incorporation in the Christian Tradition ............................... J. Tromp

135

The Panegyris in Jerusalem: Responses to Herod’s Initiative ( Josephus, Antiquities 15.268–291) ........................................... J.W. van Henten

151

PART THREE

GROUP DYNAMICS AS AGENTS OF RELIGIOUS CHANGE Sabbath at Elephantine: A Short Episode in the Construction of Jewish Identity .................................................................... B. Becking

177

The Opponents in the Johannine Epistles: Fact or Fiction? ..... M.J.J. Menken

191

Is there a Heresy that Necessitated Jude’s Letter? ..................... G. Van Oyen

211

Jewish Monotheism and Christian Origins ................................ B.J. Lietaert Peerbolte

227

The Didache Redefining its Jewish Identity in View of Gentiles Joining the Community ............................................ H. van de Sandt

247

Bereshit Bara Elohim: Bereshit Rabba, Parashah 1, Reconsidered ........................................................................... P. Schäfer

267

PART FOUR

NEW TEXTS, NEW READINGS Manichaean Elements in an Early Version of the Virgin Mary’s Assumption ...................................................... R. van den Broek

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293

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contents Interpretative Thētas in the Strasbourg Empedocles .................. J. Mansfeld & K. Algra ‘Our Righteous Brethren’: Reflections on the Description of the Righteous Ones according to the Greek Revelation of Peter (Akhm. 2) ......................................................................... T. Nicklas The Evil Inclination in the Dead Sea Scrolls, with a Re-edition of 4Q468i (4QSectarian Text?) ........................... E. Tigchelaar A Greek Letter from Syria ......................................................... K.A. Worp

vii 317

329

347 358

PART FIVE

JEWISH AND CHRISTIAN TEXTS IN COMPARISON Close Encounters of the Third Kind: Heliodorus in the Temple and Paul on the Road to Damascus ......................... J.N. Bremmer The Untold End: 2 Maccabees and Acts .................................. H. Lichtenberger

367 385

The Fate of the Wicked: Second Death in Early Jewish and Christian Texts ........................................................................ A. Houtman and M. Misset-van de Weg

405

‘Why do the Nations Conspire?’: Psalm 2 in Post-Biblical Jewish and Christian Traditions ............................................. G. Rouwhorst and M. Poorthuis

425

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viii

contents PART SIX

THE DEVELOPMENT OF JEWISH LITERATURE The Composition of Prayers and Songs in Philo’s De Vita Contemplativa ............................................................................. J.H. Newman Life and Death in Pseudo-Phocylides ............................................. K.-W. Niebuhr

457 469

The Phrase ‘Good Works’ in Early Judaism: A Universal Code for the Jewish Law? ................................................................ E. Ottenheijm

485

The LXX Translation of Esther: A Paraphrastic Translation of MT or a Free Translation of a Rewritten Version? ......... E. Tov

507

The Hidden Reference: the Role of EDOM in Late Antique and Early Medieval Jewish Hymnography ............................ W.J. van Bekkum

527

PART SEVEN

THE DEVELOPMENT OF EARLY CHRISTIAN LITERATURE Rearranging the ‘House of God’: A New Perspective on the Pastoral Epistles ...................................................................... J. Herzer

547

Prayer as Theological Reflection: The Function of Prayer in Ephesians ................................................................................ G.E. Sterling

567

Reflections on the Apocryphal Gospels as Supplements ........... G. Mussies

597

List of Contributors .................................................................... Index ...........................................................................................

613 617

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ABBREVIATIONS AAA.A AB ABD ABRL AGJU AJEC AJP ALGHJ ANET ANRW AOAT ASE ATANT BARev BASOR BASP BBB BBET BETL BI Bib BibS(F) BICS BIS BK BN BSR BWANT BZAR BZAW

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Acta Academiae Aboensis, Ser.A Anchor Bible Series Anchor Bible Dictionary Anchor Bible Reference Library Arbeiten zur Geschichte des antiken Judentums und des Urchristentums Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity American Journal of Philology Arbeiten zur Literatur und Geschichte des hellenistischen Judentums Ancient Near Eastern Texts Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt Alter Orient und Altes Testament Annali di storia dell’esegesi Abhandlungen zur Theologie des Alten und Neuen Testaments Biblical Archaeology Review The Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research Bulletin of the American Society of Papyrologists Bonner Biblische Beiträge Beiträge zur biblischen Exegese und Theologie Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium Biblical Interpretation Biblica Biblische Studien (Freiburg, 1895–) Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies Biblical Interpretation Series Bibel und Kirche Biblische Notizen Brown Studies in Religion Beiträge zur Wissenschaft vom Alten und Neuen Testament Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für altorientalische und biblische Rechtsgeschichte Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft

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x BZNW CBET CCSA CCSG CEJL CIA CIL ConBNT CRINT CSCO CSCT CTJ DJD D-K DMOA ECC EdF EKKNT EPRO ÉtB EvQ EvT ExpTim FAT FGrH FRLANT GCS GNT GTA GTS HAR HAW HDR HNT.E HO HR

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abbreviations Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft Contributions to Biblical Exegesis & Theology Corpus Christianorum Series Apocryphorum Corpus Christianorum Series Graeca Commentaries on Early Jewish Literature Corpus Inscriptionum Atticarum Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum Coniectanea Biblica, New Testament Series Compendia Rerum Iudaicarum ad Novum Testamentum Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium Columbia Studies in the Classical Tradition Calvin Theological Journal Discoveries in the Judaean Desert H. Diels & W. Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker Documenta et Monumenta Orientis Antiqui Early Christianity in Context Erträge der Forschung Evangelisch-Katholischer Kommentar zum Neuen Testament Études préliminaires aux religions orientales dans l’empire Romain Études Bibliques Evangelical Quarterly Evangelische Theologie Expository Times Forschungen zum Alten Testament Die Fragmente der griechischen Historiker (F. Jacoby) Forschungen zur Religion und Literatur des Alten und Neuen Testaments Die griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller Grundrisse zum Neuen Testament Göttinger theologische Arbeiten Grazer theologische Studien Hebrew Annual Review Handbuch der Altertumswissenschaft Harvard Dissertations in Religion Handbuch zum Neuen Testament, Ergänzungsband Handbuch der Orientalistik History of Religions

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abbreviations HSCP HSS HTKNT HTR HTS HUCA ICC ICS IEJ IGR IGUR ILLRP ILS IOSPE ITQ JAC JAOS JBL JCP JHS JJS JNES JQR JRAS JRS JSHRZ JSJ JSJSup JSNT JSNTSup JSOTSup JSP JSPSup JTS KAV LCL

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xi

Harvard Studies in Classical Philology Harvard Semitic Studies Herders theologischer Kommentar zum Neuen Testament Harvard Theological Review Harvard Theological Studies Hebrew Union College Annual International Critical Commentary Illinois Classical Studies Israel Exploration Journal Inscriptiones Graecae ad Res Romanas Pertinentes Inscriptiones Graecae Urbis Romae Inscriptiones Latinae liberae rei publicae Inscriptiones Latinae Selectae Inscriptiones Oris Septentrionalis Ponti Euxini Irish Theological Quarterly Jahrbuch für Antike und Christentum Journal of the American Oriental Society Journal of Biblical Literature Jewish and Christian Perspectives Series Journal of Hellenic Studies Journal of Jewish Studies Journal of Near Eastern Studies Jewish Quarterly Review Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society Journal of Roman Studies Jüdische Schriften aus hellenistisch-römischer Zeit Journal for the Study of Judaism Journal for the Study of Judaism-Supplement Series Journal for the Study of the New Testament Journal for the Study of the New Testament-Supplement Series Journal for the Study of the Old Testament-Supplement Series Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha-Supplement Series Journal of Theological Studies Kommentar zu den Apostolischen Vätern Loeb Classical Library

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xii LNTS LQF LSJ MEFRA NETS NHC NH(M)S NIBC NICNT NIGTC NJPS NovTSup NRSV NTAbh NTApo NTG NTOA NTS OBO OCA ÖTK OTL OTP PaThSt PG PL PO PSBA PVTG QD RAC RB RE RGRW RGZM RHR RNT RSR RSV

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abbreviations The Library of New Testament Studies Liturgiegeschichtliche Quellen und Forschungen Liddell-Scott-Jones, Greek-English Lexicon Mélanges de l’école française de Rome: Antiquité New English Translation of the Septuagint Nag Hammadi Codices Nag Hammadi (& Manichaean) Studies New International Biblical Commentary New International Commentary on the New Testament New International Greek Testament Commentary New Jewish Publication Society Novum Testamentum Supplements New Revised Standard Version Neutestamentliche Abhandlungen Neutestamentliche Apokryphen (W. Schneemelcher) New Testament Guides Novum Testamentum et Orbis Antiquus New Testament Studies Orbis Biblicus et Orientalis Orientalia Christiana Analecta Ökumenischer Taschenbuchkommentar Old Testament Library Old Testament Pseudepigrapha ( J.N. Charlesworth) Paderborner theologische Studien Patrologia Graeca Patrologia Latina Patrologia Orientalis Proceedings of the Society of Biblical Archeaology Pseudepigrapha Veteris Testamenti Graece Questiones Disputatae Reallexikon für Antike und Christentum Revue Biblique Paulys Realencyklopädie der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft Religions in the Graeco-Roman World Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum Revue de l’Histoire des Religions Regensburger Neues Testament Recherches de Science Religieuse Revised Standard Version

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abbreviations RTP SBLCAS SBLDS SBLSCS SBLSP SBS SBT SC SCI SEG SIG3 SJ SJLA SJSJ SNTS.MS SP SPB STDJ StrThSt.S SU SUNT SVTP Syll2 TBü ThH ThLZ THWAT ThQ TLG TRE TSAJ TT TTZ TU TWAT TWNT TZ UF

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xiii

Revue de Théologie et Philosophie Society of Biblical Literature Christian Apocrypha Series Society of Biblical Literature Dissertation Series Society of Biblical Literature Septuagint and Cognate Studies Society of Biblical Literature Seminar Papers Stuttgarter Bibelstudien Studies in Biblical Theology Sources Chrétiennes Scripta Classica Israelica Supplementum Epigraphicum Graecum Sylloge Inscriptionum Graecarum (third edition) Studia Judaica Studies in Judaism in Late Antiquity Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series Samaritan Pentateuch Studia Post Biblica Studies on the Texts of the Desert of Judah Strassburger theologische Studien, Supplementband Schriften des Urchristentums Studien zur Umwelt des Neuen Testaments Studia in Veteris Testamenti Pseudepigrapha Sylloge Inscriptionum Graecarum 2nd ed. (W. Dittenberger) Theologische Bücherei Théologie Historique Theologische Literaturzeitung Theologisches Handwörterbuch zum Alten Testament Tübinger Theologische Quartalschrift Thesaurus Linguae Graecae Theologische Realenzyklopädie Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism Theologisch Tijdschrift Trierer theologische Zeitschrift Texte und Untersuchungen Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Alten Testament Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament Theologische Zeitschrift Ugarit Forschungen

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xiv UTR VC VCSup VTSup WBC WdF WUNT YJS ZAW ZNW ZPE

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abbreviations Utrechtse Theologische Reeks Vigiliae Christianae Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae Vetus Testamentum, Supplements Word Biblical Commentary Wege der Forschung Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament Yale Judaica Series Zeischrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft Zeitschrift für die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik

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PREFACE The appearance of a Festschrift traditionally coincides with a significant moment in the life of a prominent scholar: either the attainment of a certain venerable age or the retirement from a chair. Neither scenario obtains in the case of this Festschrift, which comes much too early to celebrate Van der Horst’s sixty-fifth birthday and much too late to mark his retirement from the Utrecht chair of the Interpretation of the New Testament, Early Christian Literature, and the Jewish and Hellenistic milieu of the New Testament, which unexpectedly took place in June 2006. The fact that there was little time between the announcement and the actual moment of his retirement meant that it was impossible to organize a volume of studies in his honour that would be able to meet his own standards of scholarship. Instead, it was decided—after consultation with a number of individuals and institutions we wish to thank collectively below—to organize an international symposium to mark the occasion (this took place in Utrecht on 15–16 June 2006). The papers of that symposium are all found in this volume, together with a substantial number of contributions that were not part of the symposium, but were requested from among his friends and colleagues. More scholars wished to contribute but for different reasons were unable to do so. Among them we should like to mention especially Van der Horst’s long-time friend and colleague Tjitze Baarda. What was impossible to us, proved possible to Van der Horst himself, who managed to have his retirement coincide with the publication of his ninth volume of collected essays: Jews and Christians in their GraecoRoman Context: Selected Essays on Early Judaism, Samaritanism, Hellenism, and Christianity (WUNT 196; Tübingen 2006). This contains a bibliography of his publications from 1970 to 2005 (pp. 287–320). A full list of publications, including those that have appeared since 2005, will be kept up-to-date on the website http://www.pietervanderhorst.com. For these reasons, we have refrained from publishing his bibliography in an already voluminous work. It is a pleasant duty to express our deeply felt gratitude to a number of institutions. The former Faculty of Theology of Utrecht University (currently the Department of Theology of the Faculty of Humanities)

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generously sponsored the symposium mentioned above, offered hospitality to its speakers and took care of most of its practicalities. Various staff members and students of the section of New Testament Studies did much work behind the scenes, making it all a memorable happening. The Netherlands School for Advanced Studies in Theology and Religion (NOSTER) gave a subvention to bear part of the costs of the preparation of the volume. We are very grateful to the members of the editorial board of Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity for accepting this work into their series. It is hard to imagine a more fitting series for this book. Finally, we are grateful to Brill Academic Publishers for their patient handling of a demanding manuscript, and to Dan Connolly for the preparation of the Index. May these empsychoi logoi indeed be living words for Pieter Willem van der Horst, whose own writings so often managed to breathe new life into old subjects! Alberdina Houtman Albert de Jong Magda Misset-van de Weg

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INTRODUCTION Although historians of religions are painfully aware of the shortcomings in current knowledge about the reality of religious life in antiquity, this is compensated by the undoubted advantage of being able to compare evidence from different times and different places. In that sense, we simultaneously know much less and much more than the believers of the ancient world. This truism bears repeating, if only because it suitably introduces two further well-known facts that are crucial to the contributions of the present volume. The first is that all religions, without a single exception, change; the second that believers frequently choose to ignore, obscure, or deny that fact. It requires little imagination to understand how a local farmer in any part of the ancient world could live a happy and rewarding—if probably demanding and tough—life without ever having to notice or worry about changes occurring in the religion he grew up with. Human memory has the splendid adaptive capacity of allowing each and every individual to forget changes in the routine aspects of life, unless they are of a particularly shocking kind.1 That capacity has no doubt contributed to the confidence with which religious specialists could, in antiquity as they can today, present their rituals and myths as a valuable inheritance from previous generations. This works especially well in oral civilizations, for oral traditions make it possible to cloak changes in ritual performance, provided that they are not too drastic.2 That option is less developed in written traditions. A sacred law engraved near the entrance of a sanctuary, specifying that all food dedicated in the sacred precinct must be consumed there (ou phora) is rather difficult to disregard, provided one can read. Although we dare not hope that most visitors to such a sanctuary could or actually did read that injunction, there must have been people around who could, and would in all likelihood act upon the prescription.

1 For illustrations of this capacity, see the contributions to H. Whitehouse & L.H. Martin (eds), Theorizing Religions Past: Archaeology, History, and Cognition, Walnut Creek/etc. 2004, especially D.L. Gragg, ‘Old and New in Roman Religion: A Cognitive Account’ (pp. 69–86). 2 See C.L. Bell, Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, Oxford 1997, 210–12.

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A striking illustration of the presence of such people comes from the famous cultic law for the Mysteries of Andania. This text not only specifies in considerable detail what the participants in the Mysteries were supposed to wear and do, but also shows how keeping to that prescribed behaviour was accomplished: by flogging and fining those who did not comply. This was the responsibility of officials known as ‘rod-bearers’, twenty of whom were appointed for each celebration. The cultic law ends with the words: ‘The rule is to be authoritative for all time’.3 The irony of this particular text, dated to 92/91 bce, is that it almost certainly documents an innovation, that is, the institution of this particular version of the celebration of the Mysteries.4 The inscription commemorates the institution of the celebration of the Mysteries under the tutelage of the city of Messene, made possible by the ‘donation’ of a chest and books by a certain Mnasistratos. The ‘chest’ mentioned fulfils an important role in the celebrations, for it contains the sacred objects necessary for the Mysteries. The books, it is generally assumed, contained cultic regulations. These were provided with a similar legend, known only from Pausanias,5 who writes that, generations earlier, the heroes Epiteles and Epaminondas, instructed by a dream-vision, ‘found’ and opened a brazen urn containing a scroll with the Mysteries, which was subsequently copied by priests. Although there is no direct evidence, it is likely that the books Mnasistratos provided to the council of Messene claimed to be these copied texts. He was lavishly rewarded for this, for the inscription duly mentions not only the prominent place he occupied in the Mysteries, as leader of the procession, but also the big cash rewards that befell him.6 This text adequately illustrates the central themes of the present volume: religious identity, authority, and change. The sincere wish to establish a once-and-for-all version of a particular ritual, the activities and rewards of an individual innovator, the involvement of the state

3 A translation of the sacred law, with references to further publications, can be found in M.W. Meyer, The Ancient Mysteries: A Sourcebook of Sacred Texts, San Francisco 1987, 51–9. 4 One finds this aspect of the novelty of the rites only with difficulty in K. HarterUibopuu, ‘Strafklauseln und gerichtliche Kontrolle in der Mysterieninschrift von Andania’, Dike. Rivista di studi del diritto greco ed ellenistico 5 (2002), 137–59, an otherwise exemplary study of the inscription. 5 Pausanias 4.26.6–4.27.6. 6 Harter-Uibopuu, ‘Strafklauseln’, 136 with n. 5.

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xix

and the use of the topos of the recovery of a lost ancient text, recovered—according to Pausanias—by means of a dream, are all subjects that will recur in the contributions gathered here, though not always as splendidly combined as they were in Andania. The reality is, of course, that innovations in antiquity were most often obscured by those who introduced them. Unlike modern Western societies, most communities in antiquity frowned upon the notion of change or innovation, especially in religious matters. The most famous and striking illustration of this is, of course, the exceptional difficulties early Christians had in explaining their existence. It is here that the benefit of modern scholars’ bird’s-eye view of ancient history is most apparent. For where it is true that the recent, and therefore undistinguished, origins of Christianity caused considerable problems in early Christian apologetics7—leading them to invent all kinds of noble ancestry—this was no longer a serious matter in late antiquity. It is not just that Christianity by then could boast a distinguished history itself, but the whole paradigm of authenticity had changed. This can be measured, as is suggested in the present volume by De Jong and by Stroumsa, by the responses to a religion that came after Christianity: Manichaeism. Two Western responses to that religion, which originated in third-century Mesopotamia, have been recorded. The first, old-style imperial one, stresses its recent origins in order to disqualify it. The second, Christian one, does not seem to be bothered at all by the fact that it is new, but insists on its not being true. The logical connection between these two concepts—taken for granted in earlier antiquity—had thus met its end. The organizational background of this volume has been explained in the preface. It remains here to explain how the many contributions seek not only to honour the dedicatee, but also to explain or illustrate the focus of this book. In order to do this, the articles have been grouped into seven headings, each with a slightly different focus. Other groupings of patterns of organization would have been possible, of course, and it is hoped that the Index to the volume will aid readers in finding out even more interconnections between the various contributions.

7 The basic reference is P. Pilhofer, Presbyteron Kreitton: Der Altersbeweis der jüdischen und christlichen Apologeten und seine Vorgeschichte (WUNT 39), Tübingen 1990. See also P.W. van der Horst, ‘Plato’s Fear as a Topic in Early Christian Apologetics’, Journal of Early Christian Studies 6 (1998), 1–13.

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The volume opens with four contextual papers, devoted not to the study of isolated cases or texts, but addressing broader questions. Martin Goodman gives an inventory of the various ways in which changes in the practice of Judaism were rationalized in the textual legacy of that religion. David Runia shows how the three main types of religion— Hellenism, Hellenistic Judaism and Early Christianity—accommodated insights from philosophical debates on a particularly thorny subject: the status of the heavenly bodies as ‘visible gods’. Guy Stroumsa traces the development of ‘religion’ and ‘culture’—broadly defined—in Late Antiquity and shows how social, political and technological innovations all came together in a veritable transformation of the ways in which the world, history and religion itself were apprehended, a series of crucial developments that have produced a lasting and still perceptible transformation. Irene Zwiep, whose contribution opens the volume, provides a finely tuned context for the practice of our scholarship, in sketching debates among European Jewish scholars of the early nineteenth century about cultural distinctiveness. That changes can be brought about by individuals cannot be doubted, although they are frequently difficult to account for—being magnified in surviving accounts either as exemplars of ‘salvation history’ or as archvillains and heretics. Both are represented here. Jan den Boeft shows how the restoration of pagan sacrifice by the emperor Julian was seen as problematic even by a pagan author whom one would otherwise expect to have welcomed this development. Albert de Jong confronts the problems surrounding the origins of Manichaeism, and the fragmentary evidence for its earliest formulation by the prophet Mani, in an attempt to situate it in its primary, Sasanian, context. Annette Merz and Teun Tieleman discuss the early Syrian author Mara bar Sarapion in the multiple contexts of his world and show how the often moving contents of his letter can be brought to bear on the fast-changing and poorly documented world of first-second century Syria. Johannes Tromp reopens the debate over the date of John the Baptist and makes a case for serious consideration to be given to the possibility that Josephus was correct in placing the time of John’s activity after Jesus. Finally, in this section, Jan Willem van Henten presents the dramatic consequences of an ill-guided political decision: Herod’s adornment of a theatre in (or near) Jerusalem with statuary. Alongside the impact of individuals, serious consideration needs to be given to group dynamics as agents of religious change. Although this cannot easily be separated from the activities of individuals, the third

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section of the volume is devoted to questions of identity and group formation. The matter of identity is discussed by Bob Becking in a survey of the sparse information about the keeping of the Sabbath among the Yehudites on the island of Elephantine. Two articles discuss the thorny issue of the ‘reality’ underlying the often bitter polemics against rivals or heretics in the New Testament. Maarten Menken reconsiders the evidence for the opponents in the Johannine Epistles and Geert van Oyen does the same for the references to the heretics in the Epistle of Jude. Both are deeply sceptical about the possibility of recovering ‘historical’ information, and both show how this search for historicity must be abandoned in favour of the question what the references to these perceived opponents can teach us about the development of Christianity and of its earliest literature. Bert Jan Lietaert Peerbolte tackles the central issue of self-understanding among Jews and Christians by scrutinizing the still widely held notion of the ‘monotheism’ of both and suggesting better, more nuanced, terminology and interpretation. Huub van de Sandt shows how the Didache can be used in the discussion of the ‘parting of the ways’ between Jews and Christians, by highlighting how the particulars of some of the central ritual commandments of that text can be explained if we imagine them as the reflection of a development of a Jewish group opening its membership to gentiles. Finally, Peter Schaefer shows how a careful reading of the first parashah of Midrash Bereshit Rabba, the rabbinic exegesis of the creation of the world, reveals tensions among the various interpreters about the nature of creation and connects these with broader Jewish theological developments, especially in an attempt to flesh out who the authorities were whose views were eventually rejected. The fourth section is devoted to new texts and new readings or interpretations. It is obvious that new texts can cause earlier reconstructions of historical events or developments to be reconsidered. This is also true of new, improved, readings of already published texts and of new interpretations. The focus is then not so much on historical changes, but rather on changes in the reconstruction of history. Roelof van den Broek convincingly recovers fugitive passages of Manichaean poetry or imagery from a Byzantine text on the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. Jaap Mansfeld and Keimpe Algra solve a thorny problem of pre-Socratic philosophy by arguing that one of the scribes of the newly found Strasbourg Empedocles fragments, in changing the crucial endings of verbal forms, introduced into Empedocles’ thought concepts that were not originally there. Tobias Nicklas, in studying an

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early Christian text that has often been neglected, shows how a careful reading of the patterns of literary organization of fragmentary texts can contribute to a more even-handed and multi-layered appreciation of the texture of early Christian Apocryphal literature. Eibert Tigchelaar gives a new reading of a lamentably fragmentary text from the Dead Sea Scrolls, and removes it from the dossier of ‘sectarian texts’. The only truly new text to be published in this volume is a Greek Christian letter from Syria, found in the collection of papyri of the monastery of Montserrat in Spain, expertly edited by Klaas Worp. The interpretation of religious change has always been particularly prominent in discussions of the origins of Christianity and its relations with Judaism and the wider, Hellenistic, background of both Jewish and Christian literature in Greek. Four articles contribute especially to a comparison, within this Hellenistic context, of Jewish and Christian texts, or of Jewish and Christian interpretations of the same text. Jan Bremmer compares narratives of physically experienced divine intervention (‘epiphany’) in two formative episodes for Judaism and Christianity: the attempted looting of the treasury of the Temple in Jerusalem by Heliodorus (2 Macc 3), and the ‘conversion’ of Paul on the way to Damascus (in the book of Acts). Hermann Lichtenberger also studies the books of Maccabees and Acts in comparison and asks the pertinent question why their authors withheld from their readers information about what really happened after the end of their narrative. Alberdina Houtman and Magda Misset-van de Weg present the evidence for the theme of ‘dying the second death’ in the Apocalypse and the Targums; this theme has sometimes been seen as a Christian element in Jewish texts, but a review of all the evidence fails to either substantiate or refute this idea and a solution must be found in careful consideration of what the Apocalypse and the Targums may have had in common. Finally, Gerard Rouwhorst and Marcel Poorthuis discuss the interpretations among Jews and Christians of Psalm 2 and use this discussion to present both religions as quarrelling siblings, an image that sticks to the mind. The comparative study of the literatures of two closely-related religions can help us gain understanding of each separately, their mutual relations and the cultural settings of both. Much further evidence for change and innovation lies hidden, of course, within these writings. The final two sections are therefore devoted to Jewish and early Christian literature, respectively.

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The range of subjects in the section on Jewish literature is particularly broad. Judith Newman discusses the composition of prayers and songs in the writings of Philo, with a special focus on Philo’s description of their ritual setting within the Therapeutae’s celebration of Pentecost. Karl-Wilhelm Niebuhr offers a close reading of the lines of PseudoPhocylides relating to life, death and the hereafter, in an attempt to discuss the merits of previous interpretations by Van der Horst and Collins. Eric Ottenheijm sketches the long career of the concept of ‘good works’ in a broad selection of relevant Jewish texts and traces its development as it passes through various geographical and temporal boundaries. Emmanuel Tov devotes much-needed attention to the Cinderella of Septuagint research: the Septuagint of the book of Esther, showing that it is not a paraphrastic translation, but a free translation of an earlier version of that book that differed considerably from the current Masoretic text. Wout van Bekkum, finally, analyses the role played by Edom in late antique and medieval Hebrew poetry. The final section is devoted to early Christian literature. Jens Herzer offers literary and historical reflections on the development of the Pastoral Epistles of the New Testament. By focusing on the concept of the ‘House of God’, he shows important new ways to understand the novelty of these early Christian documents. Gregory Sterling discusses the role of prayers in Ephesians. He shows particularly how and where, in departing from earlier models, these prayers served as a way to think about meaning. Finally, Gerard Mussies, with characteristic wit, uses the evidence of personal names as a guide to apocryphal Christian literature and shows how the wish to document the particulars of Jesus’ family led to the development of some of the most beloved, and most entertaining, Christian stories. Some of the innovations discussed here were pervasive and their impact can still be felt in modern times. Others were, perhaps, of minor consequence or restricted to a single person with a small following. That is, from any methodological point of view, irrelevant. The history of religions is not just a history of major changes, but also, perhaps especially, one of small, barely perceptible, new beginnings and experiments. The changes discussed here range, indeed, from a scribe transforming a third to a first person plural, via the emperor Julian performing hecatombs in an attempt to undo history, to the transformation of the ways in which the world and history are perceived and experienced. What they have in common, of course, is that they

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all continue to exercise the minds and curiosity of modern scholars. The need to grapple with the sadly fragmentary evidence for religion in the ancient world, and to see it in its wider social, legal, political, literary, philosophical and religious contexts is the only rule that is to be authoritative for all time. Albert de Jong

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PART ONE

CONTEXTS

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‘JUDENTHUM’, ‘GRIECHENTHUM’ AND ‘CHRISTENTHUM’ AS PARAMETERS IN EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY JEWISH POLITICAL THINKING Irene E. Zwiep Introduction: ‘jede Wissenschaft ist politisch’ According to a much-rehearsed truism, every attempt at writing history eventually culminates in a commentary upon contemporary life. The pioneering ventures of the earliest exponents of the Wissenschaft des Judentums into the field of critical historiography are no exception to this rule. Though generally much more preoccupied with (elitist) cultural history than with its everyday context, their pioneering publications aimed at spreading a shared ideology that concerned the present as much as the past. By devoting most of their efforts to scrutinizing, in good early nineteenth-century fashion, the Jewish literary heritage, the early Wissenschaftler remained cultural rather than political actors.1 However, without exception their cultural activism served a distinctly political agenda. First of all we find that their new scholarly ethos reflected the—then dominant—Idealist conception of Wissenschaft as a commanding moral, and therefore political, programme. Already in his earliest sermons, the movement’s acknowledged founder Leopold Zunz (1794–1886) is found invoking, on more than one occasion, the ‘heavenly triad of religion, virtue and science’.2 Near the end of his career Zunz still expressed

1 Following Miroslav Hroch’s well-known division of nineteenth-century nationalism into three consecutive phases (in his Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe, Cambridge 1985), we could classify the early Wissenschaft as a Jewish (minority) equivalent of ‘phase A nationalism’, i.e. the initial stage in which intense literary activity and scholarship aim at providing the basis for consolidating national consciousness. While in ‘phase B’ we witness the hesitant beginnings of actual political campaigning for the various ‘national ideas’, it is only in ‘phase C’ (i.e. roughly from the 1880s onwards) that these nationalist programmes were finally embraced by the masses. 2 Eng. transl. M.A. Meyer, The Origins of the Modern Jew: Jewish Identity and European Culture in Germany, 1749–1824, Detroit 1967, 155, from Zunz’ Predigten gehalten in der neuen israelitischen Synagoge in Berlin, Berlin 1823, 106, 141.

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the conviction that all scholarship was essentially political (‘Jede Wissenschaft is politisch’), since its task was not only to document the individual ‘schöpferische Gedanke’, but also to measure the effects of each creative thought upon society as a whole. And let us hope, he concluded, that ‘within our lifetime “political” will once again become synonymous with “moral” (“sittlich”) and “human” (“menschlich”)’,3 in other words, that scholarship would soon succeed in persuading politicians to ‘do the right thing’ by their citizens. For Jewish citizens, the Wissenschaft’s political effects, so eagerly anticipated by Zunz, indeed were as important as the scholarly effort itself. For European society had burdened them with a vital challenge, to which many felt only scholarship could provide the answer. Under the influence of Enlightenment thinking, society was forcing them to redefine their Judaism and formulate a new brand of Jewishness that would prove compatible with Western modernity. This was, in fact, a twofold challenge: not only did they have to show to the gentile world that the Jews deserved to become Europeans, they also had to explain to themselves why, under these changing circumstances, a man of ‘general culture’ should choose to remain a Jew rather than vanish without a trace among Europe’s Christian majority. The successful answer, one that would convince both parties in one go, seemed to lie in a more abstract identification with Judaism, which ensured maximum versatility and adaptability to future scenarios. As this article once more will illustrate, the result was a cultural reformulation of Judaism, which in the course of the nineteenth century would replace the traditional religious affinities in large parts of the Western Diaspora.4 To us modern scholars, this double task of demonstrating Judaism’s universal potential while simultaneously (re)defining its particular essence may seem somewhat paradoxical. Not so to the early followers of the Wissenschaft, whom contemporary scholarship supplied with both the intellectual legitimization and the conceptual tools for this complex enterprise. Continuing the descriptive model finalized by Georg Wil-

Original quotation (from Zunz’ Wahlrede, Berlin 1861) in R. Schaeffler, ‘Die Wissenschaft des Judentums in ihrer Beziehung zur allgemeinen Geistesgeschichte im Deutschland des 19. Jahrhunderts’, in: J. Carlebach (ed.), Wissenschaft des Judentums: Anfänge der Judaistik in Europa, Darmstadt 1992, 128. 4 In this respect the cultural reinvention of Judaism by Zunz and his colleagues can be seen as a prefiguration of the more abstract, symbolic—rather than concrete, traditional—identities that are gaining ground in so many diasporic communities today. 3

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helm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831),5 they usually began by presenting their reconstructions of Jewish history as part of a general and unified ‘World History’—a contextualization that was cleverly suggestive of Judaism’s universal qualities. Again following in Hegel’s footsteps, they would then go on to describe this all-inclusive historical framework as a dynamic succession of single, highly distinctive civilizations. The particular nature of each of these societies, they believed, was best articulated in contrast with its surrounding cultures. Thus, in order to unravel their own nation’s innate character, the Jewish scholars began to map out Judaism’s past in systematic reference to its two principal historical contenders, viz. das Griechenthum and, in later centuries, das Christenthum. In trying to distil the Jewish Volkstümlichkeit from the—often tempestuous and traumatic—relations with these two great cultures, they succeeded in establishing a topos that would be elaborated upon by generations of Jewish classicists, historians and philosophers who tried to define Jewish essence. As a tribute to Piet van der Horst, who in his many publications has always tried to integrate the discussion of Hellenistic, Christian and rabbinic texts into one comprehensive narrative, I propose to return to the roots of this longstanding topos by analyzing a few early attempts at defining Judaism in terms of its compatibility and, especially, its incompatibility with Hellenism and Christianity, the two pillars of Western civilization. As my point of departure I have chosen two complementary texts from a vast library of historical surveys that only seems to have increased as the nineteenth century proceeded. First I shall examine the seminal exposé ‘Über den Begriff einer Wissenschaft des Judentums’, written in the early 1820s by Hegel’s Berlin disciple Immanuel Wolf (who later changed his name to Wohlwill).6 Written

5 For the Wissenschaft’s indebtedness to Hegel’s teachings, cf. esp. N. Waszek, ‘Hegel, Mendelssohn, Spinoza: Beiträge der Philosophie zur “Wissenschaft des Judentums”? Eduard Gans und die philosophischen Optionen des “Vereins für Kultur und Wissenschaft der Juden” ’, Menora 10 (1999), 187–215 (who also discusses the relations between various Jewish students and the master at the universities of Heidelberg and Berlin), and Schaeffler, ‘Die Wissenschaft des Judentums’, esp. 123f. 6 I. Wolf, ‘Über den Begriff einer Wissenschaft des Judenthums’, Zeitschrift für die Wissenschaft des Judenthums 1.1 (1822/23), 1–24. Eng. translation L. Kochan, ‘On the Concept of the Science of Judaism’, Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 2 (1957), 194–204. Brief recapitulations of Wolf ’s outlook and/or methodology are given in Meyer, The Origins, 173–75; Schaeffler, ‘Die Wissenschaft des Judentums’, 122f.; Waszek, ‘Hegel, Mendelssohn, Spinoza’, 202–07, who focuses on Wolf ’s ‘Spinozism’; and, with special reference to the dilemmas of Jewish scholarship in post-war Germany, Ch. Schulte,

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partly as a vindication of the new intellectual endeavour, partly as its first comprehensive research agenda, Wolf ’s manifesto exploited the historical dynamic between Judenthum, Griechenthum and Christenthum in order to address the major dilemmas of his generation. The second text was written some two decades later by Leopold Zunz. Zunz had started publishing on ‘jüdische Philologie und Literatur’ as early as 1818,7 when ‘philology’ and ‘literature’ had still been novelties on the Jewish scholarly stage. His most systematic thoughts on the subject, however, were not expressed until somewhat later in his career, in the chapter on ‘Die jüdische Literatur’ that opened his volume of collected studies Zur Geschichte und Literatur.8 As we shall see, Zunz’ evaluation of Jewish-gentile interaction throughout the ages, too, was dictated to a large extent by the demands (and, by 1845, the disappointments) posed by his own environment. Wolf and Zunz on the dynamic of ancient history While Zunz’ introduction, as we shall soon find out, was not so much about Jewish literature as about the forces that would secure the Jews an equal position within European society, Wolf ’s memorandum skipped the question of how Jewish emancipation should be achieved and instead focussed directly on how the new ‘Jewish Europeanism’ should be fashioned. In the spirit of contemporary liberal bourgeois nationalism, he and other first-generation Wissenschaftler were convinced that it was possible for the Jewish minority to assimilate into the larger German society without abandoning former loyalties and without loosing their nation’s original Volkstümlichkeit.9 The Wissenschaft’s official stance on this dilemma was perhaps best expressed by Eduard Gans (1798–1839), first ‘Über den Begriff einer Wissenschaft des Judentums: die ursprüngliche Konzeption der Wissenschaft des Judentums und ihre Aktualität nach 175 Jahren’, Askhenas 7.2 (1997), 285–90. 7 In that year Zunz published Etwas über die rabbische Litteratur, Berlin 1818, which outlined the first ‘scientific’ approach to Hebrew literature ever, enumerating the various subdisciplines in a manner highly reminiscent of Friedrich August Wolf ’s Darstellung der Alterthumswissenschaft, Berlin 1807. NB: The fact that the Altertumswissenschaftler Wolf had been quite dismissive of ancient oriental culture (cf. Darstellung, 12ff.) never discouraged Zunz, which in turn may be indicative for the early Wissenschaft’s complex appreciation of Judaism’s oriental origins; see also below, n. 17. 8 L. Zunz, Zur Geschichte und Literatur I, Berlin 1845, 1–21. 9 Cf. E.J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, Cambridge 1990, 39.

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president of the Berlin Verein für Cultur und Wissenschaft des Judentums, who assured his fellow-members that emancipation did not imply eclipse: ‘Aufgehen ist nicht untergehen [. . .] noch kann das ganze Judenthum sich auflösen [. . .] es soll [. . .] fortleben, wie der Strom fortlebt in dem Ocean.’10 When it came to identifying that modest Jewish current within the vast European ocean, in other words, when it came to solving the tension between assimilating and maintaining one’s Volkstümlichkeit, Wolf was lucky to be able to fall back on one of the core strategies of contemporary philosophical Idealism. Of special relevance to his argumentation was the concept of Geist, which had played a key role in Hegel’s philosophy of history, where it had helped bridge the same gap between the universal and the particular Wolf was now facing. Where the Kantian concept of Vernunft allowed him to grasp the universal dimensions of human history and understand the world in its complex unity, the Hegelian notion of Geist would guide him towards its more narrow, national proportions, and help him identify and explain his own community’s specific differences. Hegel’s scheme was indeed designed to produce results on various levels: while research into a nation’s history would yield information on that nation’s overall Volksgeist, this ‘objective knowledge’ could in turn be translated into a set of fundamental insights into the researcher’s own (‘subjective’) Geist or identity. With the foundation of a Jewish branch of this new, double-edged Geisteswissenschaft, the Jews thus became, collectively and individually, both object and subject of modern ‘scientific’ research. Throughout his treatise, which depended heavily upon the complementary premises of Vernunft and Geist, Wolf appears very much aware of the fact that he was introducing not only a new scholarly strategy, but also an unprecedented intellectual concept: Judenthum, a familiar term that henceforth was to resound with new connotations, for which the Wissenschaft, again with the help of German Idealism, was to furnish the content.11 According to Wolf, the idea of Judaism (‘die Idee des Judenthums’) should embrace Jewish contemporary existence (‘das Bürgerleben’) as well as all previous history, which, following early

Quoted in Waszek, ‘Hegel, Mendelssohn, Spinoza’, 196. Prior to modern times, Jews had not felt the need to define their own condition by using abstract categories. Instead, their being Jewish was defined for them by concrete external factors, such as the political and economic exclusion by the non-Jewish world, and by the internal (rabbinic) communal organisation, which had incorporated and regulated all matters social, religious and cultural. 10 11

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nineteenth-century mores, he identified with jüdische Literatur, i.e., with the written monuments of Jewish culture only.12 Wolf did recognize, of course, that in being a culture that combined a continuous present with a rich literary past, Judaism hardly differed from other European civilizations. Its one differentia specifica, he believed, was of a religious nature, and lay in the fact that Judaism had been founded upon and determined by the belief in divine revelation. It was this abstract Uridee of an utterly transcendent God, who had become tangible only in the elusive letters of the Hebrew tetragram, that had fostered and shaped Jewish existence throughout the ages. In its early, primitive days, when Judaism had still been in its infancy,13 this purely spiritual, incorporeal idea of the divine still had been a bit too much to grasp for the tender Jewish mind. In those early centuries it had still needed some kind of material, institutional, embodiment. This early incarnation had taken the shape of the autonomous Israelite theocracy, the independent state in which the Kings of Israel and Judah had tied in their fate with the ruling priestly classes. Occasionally the prophets, aiming at a more mature (read: abstract and universal) interpretation of the divine idea, had tried to undermine the people’s reliance on institutionalized religion. But it was foreign pressure, under the guise of the Babylonian Exile, that had finally freed the nation from the immediate physical boundaries of Temple and state. It was only on alien soil that the Jewish nation could achieve the spiritual internalization (Verinnerlichung) necessary to attain the next phase in its development. From this evolutionary perspective, the building of the Second Temple in Jerusalem had been nothing short of a minor disaster. For Wolf, it had meant a relapse into primitive childhood, fraught with religious and cultural tensions.14

12 Wolf ’s exhaustive definition of Judenthum faithfully reflects Hegel’s insistence on ‘das Prinzip der Totalität’ in relation to the geisteswissenschaftliche paradigm; cf. Waszek, ‘Hegel, Mendelssohn, Spinoza’, 204. 13 Wolf readily continued the conviction that the history of mankind was best described in psychological terms, as a slow but steady transformation from naive childhood to adult maturity. 14 The rejection of Jewish national autonomy was a fundamental motif in early Wissenschaft writings. Cf., e.g., Isaac Marcus Jost’s (1793–1860) dialectic opposition of primitive, theocratic ‘Israelitentum’ and true, spiritual ‘Judentum’, which he defined as an independent Geist, ‘frei von den Hüllen des Staates’ (in Geschichte des Judentums und seiner Sekten Vol. 1, Leipzig 1857, 1). NB: The Zionist scholar Gershom Scholem was one of the first to criticize the Wissenschaft for its overtly diasporic agenda, in his essay on ‘The

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One of those tensions was brought about by the first confrontation of Second Temple Judaism with Western civilization, personified by the expanding Griechenthum, which Wolf considered utterly alien to Judaism (‘ein von ihm ganz verschiedenes Prinzip’). While the idea of Judaism was based upon divine revelation, he noticed, Greek thinking was governed by a purely anthropocentric ideology: the belief that truth did not lie hidden in transcendent revelation, but could be reconstructed by the deductive powers of the human mind. In Wolf ’s perception, principles of such fundamental difference where bound to be hostile (‘verschiedene Prinzipe sind feindsehlige Prinzipe’). Therefore Judenthum and Griechenthum, ‘die zwei bedeutendsten Momente in der Bildungsgeschichte des menschlichen Geistes’, he reckoned, were more than just mutually exclusive: their encounter constituted the first real clash of civilizations ever to occur in world history. For an early nineteenth-century Wissenschaftler who aimed at illustrating Judaism’s potential for cultural interaction and exchange, the fundamental hostility between Judaism and (Western, ‘European’) Hellenism would have been a frustrating conclusion. In Wolf ’s text, however, it was not so much a final conclusion as an intermediate stage in a dialectic argumentation of the dynamic Hegelian kind. In Hegel’s evolutionary scheme, the opposition between a thesis and its antithesis would never end in a frustrating, static cul-de-sac. Instead, theirs was a productive opposition that would bring forth a ‘delivering’ synthesis— in Wolf ’s inimitable German phraseology: it would give birth to ‘ein eigenthümliches Drittes’. In his dialectic recapitulation of the world’s first culture clash, the confrontation between Judenthum and Griechenthum, too, would not end in a frustrating tie-break; instead it gave birth to Hellenistic Judaism. And since the early nineteenth-century Dialektik was essentially an optimistic branch of reasoning, this composite synthesis was necessarily superior, both to the Jewish and to the Greek tradition that had fostered it. According to Wolf, the historical encounter between the two had been of the kind that had allowed them, again in good Hegelian fashion, to reconcile rather than annihilate their mutual differences. The Greeks, having strayed far from their native soil, had necessarily behaved in a less brutal and imperialistic manner. The Palestinian Jews, stunned

Science of Judaism: Then and Now’, eventually published in idem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality, New York 1971, 304–13.

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but not destroyed by the confrontation, had likewise displayed a more open, less introverted demeanour. In coastal Alexandria there had even arisen a superlative variant of the superior ‘third principle’, referred to by Wolf as ‘das Aegyptische’, a syncretistic compound of Greek, Jewish and Hellenistic elements, which had found its most eminent expression in the writings of Philo, the Gnostics, and the later Neo-Platonist philosophers. The birth of Christianity, a few centuries later, was depicted, along similar lines, as the outcome of the confrontation between the expanding Roman Empire and the desolate remnants of Temple Judaism, which had been prepared to move into a new direction by the calamitous course of first-century history. Once again the resulting synthesis was presented in bright evolutionary terms: being the outcome of a dialectical process, Christianity necessarily represented a higher, more sophisticated, state of Judaism. The Temple having been destroyed in the year 70 ce, Wolf argued, the autonomous Jewish state had fulfilled its destiny. Forced to leave behind its bodily husk, the Jewish Geist henceforth was free to develop along purely spiritual lines, under the dual guises of early Christianity and its closest, most intimate, relative: rabbinic Judaism. The former soon being chosen to serve as the Roman state religion (which in Wolf ’s worldview, as we saw earlier, meant rather a set-back), it was up to the sages to ensure the continuation of Jewish spiritual development. By transforming the Jewish heritage from a ceremonial state-religion into a private, if shared, Lebensweise, the rabbinic collective managed to secure the perpetuation of the divine idea within the realm of Jewish family-life, thus ensuring Jewish continuity through the ages, regardless of time, place, politics, and power.15 Norbert Waszek has drawn attention to the obvious dependence of historical enumerations such as Wolf ’s upon the boldly normative periodizations that dominated Hegel’s Geschichtsphilosophie.16 In his theoretical works, Hegel had portrayed world history as a succession of great civilizations, which together had served as building blocks for modern European society. In his stock enumeration it had been the orient that had laid down Europe’s foundation by furnishing mankind with the essential principle of monotheism, after which Hellas had enriched

15 16

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Wolf, ‘Über den Begriff einer Wissenschaft des Judenthums’, 11. Waszek, ‘Hegel, Mendelssohn, Spinoza’, 196 and 212, n. 40.

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the world by introducing the concepts of beauty and ‘the individual’. As a next step, bureaucratic Rome had regulated the role of the state vis-à-vis that individual, whereupon Christianity had endowed both with a universal, abstract spirituality. In Hegel’s descriptions, this succession of fundamental human achievements eventually culminated in the culture and institutions of the budding nation states of modern Europe, notably France, England and Germany. In Wolf ’s Jewish counternarrative, it was stateless rabbinic Judaism that emerged from a series of dialectical encounters as the fittest (in a mildly anachronistic Darwinian sense) of all ancient religious manifestations.17 Inevitably Wolf ’s choice for ‘portable’ rabbinic Judaism involved a drastic reinterpretation of both the meaning and the significance of Jewish Diaspora. In persistently postulating ‘Diaspora’ as an essential prerequisite for Jewish self-realisation, Wolf ’s evaluation of Jewish exile indeed differed sharply from previous, traditional appraisals. Ever since the early Middle Ages, Diaspora had been synonymous with ‘loss’—the loss of land, the loss of political and, especially, of cultural autarchy. In numerous writings, exile had been held accountable for the Jews’ loss of the holy tongue, of Hebrew poetic skills, and of Jewish scientific knowledge. This longstanding topos, in which exile had taken the blame for the lack of an autonomous, authentically Jewish, culture, was still widely represented in late eighteenth-century writings. Its Umwertung, in the early nineteenth century, from a predominantly religious into an exclusively political concept, marks a new era in the history of Jewish 17 In relation to Hegel’s periodizations, Wolf of course could not help but refer to Judaism’s original oriental background. Rather than rejecting this ‘orientalism’ as an obstacle to Jewish integration, he managed to turn it to his advantage. In an attempt at reconstructing the history of the human Geist, he suggested, contemporary scholars had begun to research the Orient, which they considered the cradle of human culture. In his opinion, this focus should help propagate the ‘scientific’ study of Judaism, ‘diese saftreiche und am weitesten verpflanzte Frucht des Morgenlandes’ (p. 22). Much less apologetically inclined, the social historian Jost (who had briefly joined the Verein but had resigned as early as 1821, cf. Meyer, The Origins, 170f.) had described the encounter between Judaism and Hellenism as a confrontation between the essentially oriental Jews (dedicated to heritage, tradition and routine, and imbued with a strong sense of authority) and the much more enterprising and adventurous ‘abendländische, Europäische, Griechische Welt’. In Jost’s dialectical scheme, the Jews, who had always distinguished themselves from their oriental brethren through their ‘natürliche Regsamkeit’, had adopted these Hellenistic values as far as their religion had allowed; cf. Geschichte des Judentums und seiner Sekten Vol. 2, Leipzig 1858, 291–97. By contrast, Wolf ’s close colleague Gans had distanced himself completely from the Jews’ oriental essence, e.g. when he lauded modern times for finally having broken ‘die schlechte Mischung eines halb orientalischen, halb mittelaltrigen Lebens’ (quoted in Waszek, ‘Hegel, Mendelssohn, Spinoza’, 199).

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self-definition. The Jewish future, it implied, henceforth was tied up with the political fate of a third party: exile, which in the writings of young German-Jewish scholars like Wolf and Gans was roughly synonymous with the emerging German Großstaat. As we shall see, Leopold Zunz, in the second text I wish to consider here, cherished a largely similar conviction, even if he voiced that conviction in somewhat different, and certainly less harmonious, terms. Like Immanuel Wolf, Zunz, in his 1845 exposé ‘On Jewish Literature’, appears fully convinced that Jewish history should be regarded as a legitimate, ‘von der Weltgeschichte anerkannte’ component of universal history.18 Contrary to Wolf, however, he chose to concentrate not on the creative potential that enabled intellectual exchange between the various protagonists in world history, but on the destructive side-effects of their actual encounters. In his opinion, both Hellenism and Christianity may not have been all that foreign to the abstract ‘idea of Judaism’, yet they had proven dangerously hostile to the concrete, historical, Jewish people and its civilization.19 It was all very well, he thought, that Wolf had celebrated the ‘Egyptian’ symbiosis that had sprung up in prosperous Alexandria; for the poor and oppressed Jewish communities of Palestine, being exposed to Greek literature had proven rather a harmful experience—it was common knowledge, Zunz claimed, that under the watchful eye of the prophets, the Greek doctrines (die Lehren von Hellas) had successfully tempted many Palestinian Jews into pagan apostasy. And as for the Christian daughter religion: where Wolf had dared to acknowledge Christianity’s dialectical superiority, even hinting at its initial spiritual affinity with rabbinic Judaism, Zunz preferred to concentrate on its pernicious historical impact. In a few lines he described how, already during the movement’s earliest years, the treacherous ‘Hellenised JewishChristians’ had used their new religion to undermine what little

18 Zunz’s phraseology echoed with Gans’s imagery (cf. above, 7) when he portrayed Jewish literature as ‘zugleich eine Ergänzung der allgemeinen Literatur, aber mit eigenem Organismus [. . .] Ist die Totalität der geistigen Betriebsamkeit ein Meer, so ist eben die jüdische Literatur einer von den Strömen, welche jenem das Wasser zuführen [. . .] die Schiffahrt auf dem einen Strome kann zu der Urquelle führen, der aller Geist entströmt [. . .]’ (Zur Geschichte und Literatur, 2f.). 19 Zunz’s comparatively negative perspective may well reflect his frustration over the prolonged failure to achieve a Jewish emancipation that would manifest itself on an institutional (esp. academic) level; see also below, concluding remarks.

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exchange there had been between the Greek and the Jewish cultural spheres. In later centuries, it had been, once again, the up-and-coming Christians who had robbed the Jews of their last spiritual strongholds, by dissolving the Palestinian patriarchate and closing down the country’s Talmudic academies. In Zunz’ narrative, no love was lost between the oppressed and fragile Jews, the learned-but-pagan Greeks, and the ruthlessly imperialistic Roman Christians. It had been up to another, younger, force to rescue Jewish culture from standstill and oblivion. In Zunz’ survey, that role was set aside for Arabic culture or, in the master’s own words, for the ‘Islamic revolution’ that had begun to take shape in the Middle East on the brink of medieval times. Though less explicit in its reliance on the evolutionary thesis-antithesis-synthesis model, Zunz’ reconstruction was just as determined by Hegel’s dialectics as Wolf ’s analysis had been. Once again we find Jewish culture portrayed as passively playing its archetypal role of sleeping beauty, waiting to be brought to life by the touch of a new, dominant culture. Yet where Hellenism, because of its original pagan content and later affinity with Christianity, had failed to fulfil the role of cultural catalyst, the more syncretistic Arabic culture, according to Zunz at least, had been more successful. What had made (monotheistic) Islam particularly suitable as a broker between the Jewish audience and world literature, he emphasized, was its relative unity—the fact that Islam was a clearly defined national movement, possessed by a single Geist, which had expressed itself in a unified culture that was universally accessible through one exclusive medium: the Arabic language, spoken and understood by all subjects in the newly conquered Islamic regions.20 What a contrast, Zunz acknowledged, with the medieval West, where Christianity had always neglected to impose such a unitary national Geist, where a handful of isolated intellectual networks had been condemned to struggle for survival amidst embarrassing ignorance, and where the chasm between Latin and Hebrew literacy had been as 20 In Zunz’ account, linguistic unity is repeatedly adduced as an important factor in processes of cultural exchange and integration. Zunz believed linguistic incompatibility had been particularly acute in antiquity, when the Aramaic vernacular of Palestine had not ‘suffered to be touched by the Greek verbs’ (‘Die Volkssprache, das aramäische, dem das griechische in mancherlei Substantiven sein Siegel aufgedrückt hatte, liess keine Berührung griechischer Zeitwörter zu’; p. 4) and when the Greek and Roman conquerors, in their turn, had been put off by Hebrew’s relative barbarity (‘die Juden zogen sich hinter das Palladium der heiligen Sprache zurück, die Griechen und Römern eine barbarische war’; p. 5).

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deep as the rift between the Old and the New Testament. In Islam, he concluded, we encountered just the right combination of empire, Bildung, and language that would foster a comprehensive Jewish cultural awakening. Indeed, when reading this passage, one almost feels one is reading a summary of Benedict Anderson’s famous monograph on the imagined communities that populated the budding nineteenth-century nation states. A summary in which ‘Germany’, for want of concrete materialization, had been substituted by its nearest historical prefiguration: medieval Islam.21 Concluding remarks Each from his own perspective, Wolf and Zunz presented us with texts that began as historical accounts of Judaism’s first encounter with Western civilization (personified by ancient Hellenism and Christianity), but culminated in—more and less implicit—verdicts on the importance of nationalism, be it Jewish or European. In his 1822 article, Immanuel Wolf exploited the Hegelian dynamic inherent in ancient history to renounce all claims to Jewish national autonomy. Consciously departing from the medieval topos, he no longer interpreted Diaspora as synonymous with political and cultural loss, but instead chose to understand it as the ultimate condition for all Jewish endeavour: in his opinion, it was only in exile that Judaism would be able to reach its full, spiritual potential. Leopold Zunz, in his turn, commented upon the other, non-Jewish end of the political scale. In a highly critical recapitulation of the historical encounters between the ancient Jews, Greeks, and Christians, he extolled the merits of the liberal Nationalstaat, embodied by the (multi-ethnic but culturally uniform) Islamic empire of the Middle

21 The Wissenschaft’s veneration for the culturally open and politically tolerant Islam, often identified with medieval al-Andalus, is well known. While over the course of the century it developed into a specialist tradition of Jewish orientalist scholarship (cf. e.g. M. Kramer [ed.], The Jewish Discovery of Islam, Tel Aviv 1999), the earlier references to Islam were more explicitly ideological. Cf. again Zunz’ alter ego Jost, who concluded that after their status had been finalized by the Pact of Omar, the Jews’ relation with Islam no longer had a (sc. dynamic, dialectic) history. Under the caliphs, all subsequent Jewish history had been ‘eine innere Entwicklung des Judenthums’, determined by the ‘Bildungsmittel seiner Unterdrücker’; in: Geschichte des Judentums und seiner Sekten 2, 234; cf. also his Allgemeine Geschichte des Israelitischen Volkes Vol. 2, Berlin 1832, 166–307 ( passim).

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Ages, which had offered its citizens a unified platform, literary as well as linguistic, for Bildung and spiritual growth. It is easy to see that Zunz’ seemingly objective observations on Islam barely concealed a contemporary plea. The platform offered by medieval Islam was precisely the platform he and other GermanJewish intellectuals were craving. It was the arena where they hoped to achieve, through geisteswissenschaftliche Studien, the civic emancipation the German Jews had long been anticipating, and would continue to anticipate for some decades. As Zunz so passionately believed, ‘die Gleichstellung der Juden . . . [würde] aus der Gleichstellung der Wissenschaft des Judentums hervorgehen’. To this end, he would point out on numerous occasions, Jewish scholarship should be fully integrated into the curricula of modern academia, ‘denn erst mit der Einfügung der Wissenschaft des Judentums in den gesammten staatlichen Lehrkörper werden die eigentlichen Mauern des Ghetto’s fallen’.22 If Zunz strove for Jewish equality, he wanted it formally acknowledged. Rather than subscribing to Steinschneider’s famous dictum that the spirit knew of no ghetto (‘für den Geist gibt es kein Ghetto’) he remained preoccupied, throughout his life, with actively obtaining formal and concrete ‘Recht und Freiheit statt Rechte und Freiheiten’.23 Wolf and Zunz were among the first to interpret the cultural symand antibiosis in the ancient Levant in relation to their own immediate context, but they were not the last. Right down to Hermann Cohen (1842–1918), who identified the tandem Griechentum and Judentum as the two core constituents of German culture,24 Jewish scholars working within the critical idealistic tradition would continue to adduce classical antiquity, and especially Jewish Hellenism, as the touchstone of Judaism’s universal potential. In his observations on Pseudo-Phokylides, whose

22 Cf. Die Gottesdienstlichen Vorträge der Juden, historisch entwickelt: Ein Beitrag zur Altertumskunde und biblischen Kritik, zur Literatur- und Religionsgeschichte, Berlin 1832 (reprint Frankfurt 1892; Hildesheim 1966), Vorrede. 23 Ibid., 32. 24 H. Cohen, ‘Deutschtum und Judentum’, in: B. Strauss (ed.), Hermann Cohens jüdische Schriften II: Zur jüdischen Zeitgeschichte, Berlin 1924, 237–301 (originally published Giessen 1915, with the subtitle ‘Mit grundlegenden Betrachtungen über Staat und Internationalismus’). According to Cohen, the innate national affinity (‘Kongenialität des Gefühls’, p. 253) between Jews and Germans should finally be acknowledged as a ‘kulturgeschichtliche Wahrheit’ and result in full political equality for the Jews of Europe. A similar constitutive role for Judaism within the Western value system was proposed by Max Weber (1852–1937), cf. e.g. W. Schluchter, ‘Altisraelitische religiöse Ethik und okzidentaler Rationalismus’, in: Idem (ed.), Max Webers Studien über das antike Judentum. Interpretation und Kritik, Frankfurt 1981, 11–77.

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moralizing hexameters had once been written to reconcile Judaism and pagan philosophy, the classicist Jacob Bernays (1824–1881) not only criticized Hellenistic Jewry for betraying the very tradition it claimed to preserve, but in the effort also dismissed the contemporary Jewish Reform movement.25 Pseudo-Phokylides’ first-century bce treatise had been unsuccessful because of the fundamental incompatibility of Jewish and Western thinking; the nineteenth-century Reform endeavour, Bernays believed, would fail on precisely the same grounds.26 Over the years, however, attitudes changed. Twenty years after the publication of Über das Phokylideische Gedicht, Bernays’ star disciple Jacob Freudenthal (1839–1907) no longer condemned the Jews’ flirtation with Hellenism, but preferred to attribute its relative failure to the necessarily secondary and ‘defensive’ nature of Jewish Hellenistic culture.27 Another forty years later, Freudenthal’s student Leo Baeck (1873–1956) can be seen to represent yet another stage. In his Antrittsvorlesung of 1913 he readily took the Gegnerschaft und Verwantschaft between Judaism and Hellenic culture as his point of departure in a comparison of the rabbinic sermon and its ancient Greek equivalent.28 Steeped in contemporary materialism, Baeck believed that ‘Ideen, wie organische Keime, [ fliegen] weit . . .’ and that, consequently, Greek Bildung could not help but penetrate each and every culture it had encountered during its expansion. Where Immanuel Wolf had argued for the dialectic superiority of Jewish Hellenism, epitomized in ‘das Aegyptische’, Baeck diagnosed that Palestinian Jewry, too, ‘trug keine Bedenken sich dessen zu freuen, was von der hellenischen Welt her kamm’.29

25 J. Bernays, Über das Phokylideische Gedicht: Ein Beitrag zur hellenistischen Litteratur, Berlin 1856; see also A. Grafton, ‘Jacob Bernays, Joseph Scaliger, and others’, in: D.N. Myers & D.B. Ruderman (eds), The Jewish Past Revisited: Reflections on Modern Jewish Historians, New Haven/London 1998, 16–38, esp. 32. 26 Significantly, when trying to sanction the Jewish Reform, Bernays’ contemporary Abraham Geiger (1810–1874) turned to a less dialectic, inner-Jewish precedent. In his Urschrift und Übersetzungen der Bibel in ihrer Abhängigkeit von der innern Entwicklung des Judenthums, Breslau 1857, Geiger pointed at the Pharisees who, interpreting the spirit rather than the letter of the holy writ, had succeeded in transforming and updating Judaism, thus securing its continuation; cf. S. Heschel, Abraham Geiger and the Jewish Jesus, Chicago 1998, esp. chapter 3. 27 J. Freudenthal, Hellenistische Studien, Breslau 1874–75; see also Grafton, ‘Jacob Bernays, Joseph Scaliger, and others’, 33. 28 L. Baeck, ‘Griechische und jüdische Predigt’, Sonderabdruck from Bericht der Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums, Berlin 1914, 8. 29 Ibid., 9.

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With the departure from the idealistic paradigm, scholars finally relinquished the notion of one-way traffic between Greek and Jewish culture. Starting with historians like Elias Bickerman (1897–1981), Jewish scholars began to postulate a more dynamic role for Greek culture, henceforth judging it a vital factor in the restructuring of Judaism. Focussing on the centuries immediately preceding the Common Era, Bickerman argued that the Jews had never been the passive recipients of Hellenistic stimuli previous scholarship had made them out to be. Instead, he came to the conclusion that ancient Judaism had actively drawn from Greek culture in order to reshape itself. Jewish traditionalism, according to Bickerman, did not imply the absence of Hellenism; rather, in trying to come to terms with the Greek heritage, Jewish tradition had succeeded in reinventing itself in Hellenistic terms (witness the Maccabean revolt and the work of Ben Sira).30 If, as we did with the previous accounts, we read this evaluation of Hellenistic Jewry as a comment upon the contemporary Jewish condition, we may conclude that by the time Bickerman and his generation entered the Jewish scholarly stage, the cultural reinvention of Judaism initiated by the Wissenschaft des Judentums had been fully internalized. One century after the pioneering efforts of Wolf, Zunz, and others, the reshaping of Judaism in European terms had become a paradigm in itself, a hidden prism, through which the historical Jewish Hellenistic encounter would henceforth be observed.

30 Thus M. Himmelfarb, ‘Elias Bickerman on Judaism and Hellenism’, in: Myers & Ruderman, The Jewish Past Revisited, 199–211, at 199–208.

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EXPLAINING CHANGE IN JUDAISM IN LATE ANTIQUITY Martin Goodman Why did Judaism evolve as it did in the last centuries of the Second Temple and the years of nascent rabbinic Judaism on which Pieter van der Horst has cast so much light in his many studies? It ought to be possible to find out, because Jews wrote a great deal over these years, not least because all the many varieties of Judaism in this period were based, unlike other contemporary religions, on a sacred text. It is true that most of what these Jews wrote has been lost, but a substantial amount has also been preserved, either (in Hebrew or Aramaic) by rabbis or (in Greek) by Christians, or through chance, by the climate of the Dead Sea region. A good number of these texts give explanations of the religious changes witnessed in their own times. The question to be tackled in this paper is the value to historians of these internal Jewish explanations, and their relationship to the rather different analyses of change often provided by modern scholars. Religions in the ancient world were generally conservative, for good theological and social reasons. It was a commonplace to argue, as did Romans in their appeals to mos maiorum, that traditional behaviour must be correct simply because it has gone on for a long time. For Pausanias describing the temples of Greece or Ovid analysing the aetiology of Roman cults, religion was regarded as part of the integrated fabric of society, not as an agent of innovation.1 Judaism in late antiquity was no different. Josephus in the Antiquities claimed to transmit the Torah in the form received from Moses: ‘All is here written as he left it: nothing we have added for the sake of embellishment, nothing which has not been bequeathed by Moses’,2 an attitude of principled conservatism close to the later rabbinic notion of Torah min haShamayim.3 Custom played a crucial role, as Philo insisted: ‘For customs are unwritten laws, the decisions approved by men of old, not inscribed on monuments nor

See Pausanias, passim; Ovid, Fasti, passim. Josephus, Antiquitates Judaicae 4.196 (tr. Thackeray). 3 On this, see most recently M. Shapiro, The Limits of Orthodox Theology: Maimonides’ Thirteen Principles Reappraised, Oxford 2004. 1 2

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on leaves of paper which the moth destroys, but on the souls of those who are partners in the same citizenship’.4 Any appearance of novelty was dangerous. Josephus insisted in his denigration of the ‘intrusive’ fourth philosophy which was introduced into Judaism (according to his account in the Jewish War) at the beginning of direct Roman rule over Judaea in 6 ce, that ‘an innovation [kainisis] and reform [metabolē] in ancestral traditions weighs heavily in the scale in leading to the destruction of the congregation of the people’.5 Josephus even claimed that when Agrippa II was induced by the Levites in the early sixties ce to allow them to wear the same linen clothing as the priests, just in order to introduce some innovation (kainopoiein) so that he might be remembered, this was contrary to the ancestral laws and thus led inevitably to punishment.6 Similar were the reported reactions of the Jews of Jerusalem to the gladiatorial games put on by Herod: ‘It seemed glaring impiety to throw men to wild beasts for the pleasure of other men as spectators, and it seemed a further impiety to change their established ways for foreign practices’.7 All the more striking against the background of such conservative rhetoric is the extent of actual change in Judaism over the five centuries or so from c. 300 bce to the compilation of the Mishnah. Jews adopted new religious practices, such as new purity rules and new ways of keeping the Sabbath. They espoused new religious ideas, such as notions of life after death, the pervasive influence of angels, and the transmission of Jewish identity through the maternal line. Ancient practices such as the sotah ceremony, the Jubilee, and the roasting of the Pesach lamb came to an end, and their cessation was openly acknowledged. Judaism in the third century ce was markedly different from Judaism at the start of the third century bce.8 How had such changes come about? The explanations offered by modern scholars, all helpful up to a point, generally depend on prior assumptions about how religions and societies work. The history of religions school, which traces the transmission of ideas, does not elucidate why particular ideas were transmitted: it is, for instance, reasonable to assert that speculation about angels owes

Philo, De Specialibus Legibus 4.149 (tr. Colson). Josephus, Antiquitates Judaicae 18.9 (tr. Feldman). 6 Josephus, Antiquitates Judaicae 20.216–218. 7 Josephus, Antiquitates Judaicae 15.275 (tr. Marcus). 8 See, in general, L.L. Grabbe, Judaism from Cyrus to Hadrian, 2 Vols, Minneapolis 1992, S.J.D. Cohen, From the Maccabees to the Mishnah, Louisville 20062. 4 5

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something in this period to the importance of angels in Persian religion, but why was this facet of Persian culture so influential in Judaism and not others?9 Other changes may be explained by acculturation, such as the adoption by some Jews of the notion of the soul ( psyche) as a product of hellenisation, but why did Jews faced by Greek ideas adopt them in some cases and reject them in others, even sometimes (as in the rejection of the gymnasium by the followers of the Maccabees) making a virtue of such rejection as an expression of Jewish identity?10 Yet other changes can be put down to social change—the Jubilee, it is alleged, was not an appropriate custom in a more developed society than is envisaged in the original biblical text—but why did some other practices which might seem equally inappropriate, such as the sabbatical year, continue to operate?11 Military necessity is said to have forced Jews to drop their taboo against fighting on the Sabbath,12 and economic restraints are said to have been responsible for the ending in the third century ce of the Jewish taboo on the use of gentile olive oil,13 but why was suffering for the sake of ancestral tradition seen to be inappropriate in these cases but not others? Some changes in religious practice, such as the introduction after the Bar Kochba war of periah in circumcision, are indeed ascribed to precisely a desire to prevent a cessation of practices which had come under threat: periah made more difficult the reversal of circumcision through surgery.14 The ancient explanations of change are just as varied as these modern views. The simplest technique used by Jews in antiquity was to ignore change altogether—it was after all, axiomatic that everything written in the Pentateuch was authoritative, and that any law found in the Pentateuch should be kept unless it applied to conditions clearly no On Iranian influences on Jewish angelology, see, for instance, T.H. Gaster, ‘Angel’, in The Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible, Nashville 1962, Vol. 1, 133–134. 10 See in general J.J. Collins and G.E. Sterling (eds), Hellenism in the Land of Israel, Notre Dame 2001. 11 On the Jubilee, see for example C.T.H. Wright, ‘Jubilee, Year of ’, in: ABD 3, 1208. 12 M.D. Herr, ‘The problem of war on the Sabbath in the Second Temple and the Talmudic periods’, Tarbiz 36 (1961), 242–56, at 248ff. (in Hebrew). See also B. Becking in this volume. 13 See M. Goodman, ‘Kosher olive oil in antiquity’, in: Idem, Judaism in the Roman World: Collected Essays, Leiden 2006, 201, with reference also to S. Applebaum, ‘Judea as a Roman province: The Countryside as a Political and Economic Factor’, ANRW II (Principate) 8 (1977), 373, n. 84. 14 N. Rubin, ‘On Drawing Down the Prepuce and Excision of the Foreskin ( peri’ah)’, Zion 54 (1989), 105–17 (in Hebrew). 9

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longer relevant, such as the rules for picking up manna in the desert during the wanderings of the Israelites on the way from Egypt to the land of Israel. It is therefore disconcerting to find that some laws found in the Torah were not in fact followed, even though they were quite feasible. So, for example, in Deuteronomy 23:12–13 the Israelites are enjoined to have ‘a designated area outside the camp to which you shall go. With your utensils you shall have a trowel; when you relieve yourself outside, you shall dig a hole with it and then cover up your excrement’. There is nothing complex about these instructions, nor anything to suggest that their application should be restricted to the past. But no Jews in the last days of the Second Temple seem to have done what they were told apart from the Essenes, as described by Josephus, who wrote that they ‘dig a trench a foot deep with a mattock—such is the nature of the hatchet which they present to the neophytes—and wrapping their mantle about them, that they may not offend the rays of the deity, sit above it. They then replace the excavated soil in the trench. For this purpose they select the more retired spots. And though this discharge of the excrements is a natural function, they make it a rule to wash themselves after it, as if defiled’; the fact that Josephus specially picked out such behaviour for mention strongly suggests that it was not standard in Jewish society in his day.15 Elsewhere in his writings Josephus waxed lyrical about the economic and social benefits of the Jubilee,16 even though by his day the injunctions in Leviticus 25:8–17 to redistribute land every fiftieth year to prevent the conglomeration of property in the hands of the rich had not been put into operation within living memory. Perhaps more common than ignoring change in this way was to recognise it, but to claim that it was not really new. This is the essence of various midrashic and similar techniques that elicit new meanings from texts even when they run counter to the plain sense. The technique was blatant in the treatment of the bible as a code in the pesher texts from Qumran and the allegorical works of Philo, in the use of ketib and qere in the Masoretic tradition, and in the rabbinic tendency to read texts out of context when it suited them.17 All Jews must have

Josephus, Bellum Judaicum, 2.148–149 (tr. Thackeray). Josephus, Antiquitates Judaicae 3.280–285 treats the Jubilee as being of the same status, as current law, as the sabbatical year. 17 On the study of Jewish bible interpretation in antiquity see M. Fishbane, ‘Bible interpretation’, in M. Goodman (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Jewish Studies, Oxford 2002, 680–704. 15 16

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read the text in this way to some extent, even if they might deny it when challenged. So, for instance, even the Sadducees, who, according to Josephus, were biblical fundamentalists who claimed that they rejected all regulations handed down by ancestral tradition except those written down in the law of Moses,18 read into the biblical law that an owner is responsible for damage done by his ox the assumption that he is also responsible for damage done by his slave.19 The principle that what seems to be new is actually ancient (and hence validated by antiquity) could be carried over into the receipt of oral traditions among those Jews who accepted their antiquity, as is nicely illustrated in a story in the Mishnah: They voted and decided that Ammon and Moab should give Poorman’s Tithe in the Seventh Year. And when R. Jose the son of the Damascene came to R. Eliezer in Lydda, he said to him, “What new thing had ye in the House of Study to-day?” He said to him, “They voted and decided that Ammon and Moab must give Poorman’s Tithe in the Seventh Year”. R. Eliezer wept and said, “The secret of the Lord is with them that fear him, and he will show them his covenant! Go and tell them, Be not anxious by reason of your voting, for I have received a tradition from Rabban Johanan b. Zakkai, who heard it from his teacher, and his teacher from his teacher, as a Halakah given to Moses from Sinai, that Ammon and Moab should give Poorman’s Tithe in the Seventh Year”.20

Most change was probably accommodated through these two techniques, which makes the occasional use of other types of explanation all the more interesting. In principle, Jews believed that God might intervene directly in history, as had, after all, happened quite frequently in the past according to the Bible. Such, according to Philo, was the origin of the Greek Pentateuch: he asserted that when the translators were gathered in seclusion on the island of Pharos to set about their task, they ‘became as it were possessed, and, under inspiration, wrote, not each several scribe something different, but the same word for word, as though dictated to each by an invisible prompter’.21 If Philo thought such divine inspiration had been possible in the time of Ptolemy Philadelphus, he may well have thought it equally possible in his own time, but it seems that by his time many Jews had developed a nostalgic view that prophecy as it had once been experienced in Israel

18 19 20 21

Josephus, Antiquitates Judaicae 13.297. m.Yad 4.7. m.Yad 4.3 (tr. Danby). Philo, Vita Mosis 2.37 (tr. Colson).

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had declined or come to an end because the present generation was no longer worthy of such divine favour.22 Related, though not identical, was the rabbinic conceit found in the Babylonian Talmud that direct divine intervention through a bat qol should not be allowed to disturb the halakhic discussions of the sages.23 The decline of the generations was also held to explain the abolition of some specific religious practices, according to the Mishnah: ‘When murderers became many the rite of breaking the heifer’s neck ceased . . . When adulterers became many [the rite of ] the bitter water ceased’.24 The logic of such change—that ancient rules are intolerable in modern conditions and have therefore been scrapped—also underlies ancient explanations of the decision to fight defensive warfare on the Sabbath. In 1 Maccabees the decision was ascribed to Mattathias and his friends, who learned of the deaths of a thousand men, women and children, killed, with their livestock, because they refused to fight on the Sabbath day: ‘So they made this decision that day: “Let us fight against anyone who comes to attack us on the Sabbath day; let us not all die as our kindred died in their hiding-places” ’.25 Josephus, recounting these events more than two and a half centuries later, ascribed to this decision the current practices of the Jews: ‘to this day we continue the practice of fighting even on the Sabbath whenever it becomes necessary’.26 It is significant that elsewhere, describing the siege of Jerusalem by Pompey in 63 bce, he asserted that this was simply the law: ‘the Law permits us to defend ourselves against those who begin a battle and strike us [on the Sabbath].’27 This assertion is in interesting contrast to the uncertainty expressed, also according to Josephus, by some of the supporters of Asinaeus and Anilaus, two Jewish bandits in northern Mesopotamia who broke away from Parthian rule a century after Pompey. While Asinaeus was resting on the Sabbath with his troops, the enemy was heard approaching. A scout, sent to reconnoitre, returned with the news that

22 R. Gray, Prophetic Figures in late Second Temple Jewish Palestine: The Evidence from Josephus, Oxford 1993. 23 b.BM 59b. 24 m.Sotah 9.9 (tr. Danby). 25 1 Macc 2:29–41. 26 Josephus, Antiquitates Judaicae 12.277 (tr. Marcus). 27 Josephus, Antiquitates Judaicae 14.63 (tr. Marcus).

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“we are caught in a trap like so many animals at pasture. There are all these horsemen approaching and our hands are tied because the commandment of our ancestral law orders us to do no work.” But Asinaeus, as it appeared, was not going to let the scout’s pronouncement decide for him the question of duty. He thought it better observance of the law, instead of gladdening the foe by a death without anything accomplished, to take his courage in his hands, let the straits into which he had fallen excuse violation of the law, and die, if he must, exacting a just vengeance.28

It seems that what ‘the law permits’ in Jerusalem in 63 bce was not known in the wilds of Mesopotamia some decades later, but that the same principle was applied that Jewish religious practices have to change to reflect what Jews can accept. But there were limits to this principle—for instance, widespread failure to observe properly the laws of the sabbatical year did not cause the sabbatical year to fall into abeyance; on the contrary, the inscription on the mosaic floor of the sixth-century synagogue of Rehov, incorporating specific details for the implementation of the sabbatical year in the vicinity of the building, strongly suggests its continued importance, as had the waiving of land taxes every seventh year by Rome in the first century bce.29 Changed circumstances of other kinds were deemed to explain other variations in the law which should not change. Rabbi Joshua is said by the Mishnah to have permitted an Ammonite proselyte to ‘enter into the congregation’ against the view of Rabban Gamaliel, arguing that the Ammonites and Moabites had moved: ‘long ago Sennacherib, king of Assyria, came up and put all the nations in confusion.’30 Most dramatic of the new circumstances to which change might be ascribed was the destruction of the Temple in 70 ce, since some practices which had once been constrained by their impact on the Temple service were now released from such constraints, as the Mishnah recorded: Beforetime they used to admit evidence about the new moon throughout the day. Once the witnesses tarried so long in coming that the levites were disordered in their singing; so it was ordained that evidence could be admitted only until the afternoon offering. After the Temple was

Josephus, Antiquitates Judaicae 18.319–323 (tr. Feldman). On disregard of the sabbatical year and the Rehov inscription, see M. Goodman, State and Society in Roman Galilee: A.D. 132–212, London 20002, 103; on the waiving of taxes, see Josephus, Antiquitates Judaicae 14.202. 30 m.Yad 4.4 (tr. Danby). 28 29

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martin goodman destroyed Rabban Johanan b. Zakkai ordained that they might admit evidence about the new moon throughout the day.31

We have seen both in this last case, in which the decision was taken by Yohanan b. Zakkai, and in the decision by Mattathias and his companions to fight defensive warfare on the Sabbath, that Jews might be quite prepared to attribute change to the fiat of individuals. In the Temple service, the High Priest could make major innovations: ‘Johanan the High Priest did away with the Avowal concerning the Tithe. He too made an end also of the “Awakeners” and the “Stunners” ’.32 Centuries later, so the Mishnah records, Rabbi Judah haNasi and his court permitted the use of gentile oil,33 even though a taboo against its use was believed to have been in operation since some five centuries earlier, when Seleucus Nicator was said to have settled Jews in his capital, Antioch, giving orders that ‘those Jews who were unwilling to use foreign oil should receive a fixed sum of money from the gymnasiarchs to pay for their own kind of oil’.34 The ban on gentile oil was still in operation in 66–70 ce, the time of the Jewish war against Rome, both in Antioch, where Jewish privileges to use their own oil were maintained by the Roman governor Mucianus,35 and in Galilee, where Josephus’ arch-rival John of Gischala made use of the taboo to earn himself a fortune by selling oil to the Jews of Caesarea Philippi.36 It is remarkable that the Mishnah can allege that a custom of such longevity and so widespread could be terminated by the simple decision of a rabbinic court. Also alleged to have been engendered by a single religious authority was the extraordinary contradiction of biblical law enshrined in the rabbinic traditions about the prosbul. The original biblical injunction was clear enough: ‘Every seventh year you shall grant a remission of debts. And this is the manner of the remission: every creditor shall remit the claim that is held against a neighbour, not exacting it from a neighbour who is a member of the community, because the Lord’s remission has been proclaimed’.37 According to the Mishnah, these instructions were overturned by the simple decision of one sage, Hillel:

31 32 33 34 35 36 37

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m.R.Sh. 4.4 (tr. Danby). m.M.Sh. 5.15 (tr. Danby). m.Ab.Z. 2.6. Josephus, Antiquitates Judaicae 12.120 (tr. Marcus). Ibidem. Josephus, Vita 74–76. Deut 15:1–2.

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[A loan secured by] a prosbul is not cancelled [by the Seventh Year]. This is one of the things that Hillel the Elder ordained. When he saw that the people refrained from giving loans one to another and transgressed what is written in the Law, Beware that there be not a base thought in thine heart . . ., Hillel ordained the prosbul. This is the formula of the prosbul: “I affirm to you, such-a-one and such-a-one, the judges in such-a-place, that, touching any debt due to me, I will collect it whensoever I will”. And the judges sign below, or the witnesses.38

This was not a reinterpretation of scripture, but a straightforward decision to bring to an end the practice enforced by one biblical precept (the remission of debts) in recognition of the failure of ordinary Jews to fulfil another (the giving of loans). What, in the end, is the value to the modern historian of these ancient explanations of religious change? The prosbul was certainly a real institution, for it can be seen in operation in a loan document, dated to the sixties ce, found in the Judaean Desert.39 Since the longterm indebtedness which it encouraged will have been as much to the advantage of the rich creditors who made such loans as to that of the debtors, the reform can perhaps be understood better as a way to enable the rich to invest than as a means to help the poor.40 At the least it would be rash to treat the rabbinic explanation as sufficient. But even if such ancient rationalisations have limited value as explanations of change, what they reveal more securely is how religious change could be accepted within so conservative a religious system. Ancient Jews used these rationalisations as a sort of plaster, smoothing over the cracks so that they and their co-religionists could continue to think of their Torah as perfect and fixed even as it evolved, sometimes quite considerably, to adapt to the new conditions in which they lived. And the armoury of rationalisations was, it emerges, both varied and formidable.

m.Shebi 10.3–4 (tr. Danby). P. Benoit, J.T. Milik & R. deVaux, Les Grottes de Murabba’at (DJD 2), Oxford 1960, no. 18. 40 M.D. Goodman, ‘The First Jewish Revolt: social conflict and the problem of debt’, JJS 33 (1982), 417–27. 38 39

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THE END OF SACRIFICE Religious Mutations of Late Antiquity Guy G. Stroumsa A series of major political, cultural and social changes affected all aspects of life in the Near East as well as around the Mediterranean under the Roman Empire. Religious beliefs and attitudes, in particular, underwent some dramatic transformations.1 Indeed, those scholars who, rejecting the Gibbonian paradigm of decline and fall, have taught us to look at the Roman Empire, in the longue durée, as to a time when new cultural frames were developed, have all insisted on the religious dimensions of late antique creativity. Each in his own way, Henri-Irénée Marrou, E.R. Dodds, Peter Brown, Robin Lane Fox, have been able to speak of the religious revolution of late antiquity.2 One might argue that our period is no less crucial for future developments than the Achsenzeit identified by Karl Jaspers with the middle of the first millennium bce.3 In order to do justice to the dramatic nature of the transformations in our period, from, say, Jesus to Muhammad, one can also speak of ‘religious mutations’. By borrowing this metaphor from the field of biology, I intend to highlight the fact that we do not only witness the passage from paganism to Christianity (to follow the traditional perception), or from polytheism to monotheism. I wish to claim, rather, that we can observe nothing less than a transformation of the very concept

1 The following pages seek to summarize, at the request of the editors of this volume, some of the salient points of my book, La fin du sacrifice: Les mutations religieuses de l’Antiquité tardive, Paris 2005. The book itself is based on a series of lectures given at the Collège de France in February 2004. There is no need to emphasize the necessarily schematic character of these pages. In order to allow for easy reference, I follow the chapters of the book in the four sections of this article. 2 See for instance H.-I. Marrou, Décadence romaine ou antiquité tardive? III e–IV e siècle, Paris 1977. For Marrou, the new religiosity constituted the main originality of Late Antiquity. E.R. Dodds, Pagan and Christian in an Age of Anxiety: Some Aspects of Religious Experience from Marcus Aurelius to Constantine, Cambridge 1965. R. Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, London 1986. P. Brown, ‘Brave Old World’ (a review of R. Lane Fox’s book), New York Review of Books, 12 March 1987, 27. 3 For a new analysis of Jaspers’ thesis, see S.N. Eisenstadt (ed.), The Origins and Diversity of Axial Age Civilizations, Albany 1986.

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of religion. To encapsulate the nature of this transformation, one may perhaps speak of ‘the end of sacrifice’, in reference to the fact that at the time of Jesus, religion meant, for Jews and Greeks alike, the offering of sacrifice, while the situation had changed in some radical ways in the sixth century. But the multifaceted nature of this revolution encompassed other areas than the ritual and its transformations. This is true, for instance, for psychological conceptions, for the place and role of books in religious life, and for the passage from an essentially civic to a mainly communitarian nature of religion. In a recent article, Jörg Rüpke has shown that one can identify within the polytheistic system itself a series of changing features, in particular in the third and fourth centuries.4 More precisely, he has singled out in this context the loss of public political space and its effect on the mental map, a new hierarchical structure of time, the loss of a philosophical basis of polytheism and the privatization of religious communication. Rüpke was thus able to conclude that it is the concept of religion itself that changed during this period. Similarly, Jonathan Z. Smith has argued that one can follow in late antiquity the blurring of the sharp difference between public and private religion in the archaic and ancient world, what he calls religion of the ‘there’ and of the ‘here’.5 For him, the new geographical, cosmographical and political contexts of late antiquity are reflected in the emergence and growth of a new kind of religion, that of the ‘anywhere’. I shall reach similar conclusions here, but through a rather different approach of the problem. One question that has often been asked is that of the nature of these transformations: are they Christian by nature, or do they rather reflect the Zeitgeist? Such a question, it seems to me, is fundamentally flawed. The kind of Christianity (or Christianities) that emerges from our period is not quite identical to the Christian beliefs of the early Church Fathers, and itself reflects the evolution of Christian beliefs and praxis during those centuries. The chasm between the study of Roman (and Greek) religion, on the one hand, and that of early Christianity (and Judaism) on the other

4 J. Rüpke, ‘Patterns of Religious Change in the Roman Empire’, in: I.H. Henderson & G.S. Oegema (eds), The Changing Face of Judaism, Christianity and other Greco-Roman Religions in Antiquity, (Studien zu den jüdischen Schriften aus hellenistisch-römischer Zeit 2), Gütersloh 2006, 13–33. 5 J.Z. Smith, ‘Here, There, and Anywhere’, in his Relating Religion: Essays in the Study of Religion, Chicago/London 2004, 323–39.

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is worrisome. One cannot overemphasize the fact that in the Roman Empire, polytheists and monotheists alike shared a religious culture and religious perceptions. In a sense, one can speak of a religious koinē. It is this koinē that transforms itself in our period. It is from the perspective of Christian texts, rather than from that of Hellenic literature or with the help of inscriptions and papyri, that I seek to analyze this transformation. I. A New Care of the Self In order to assess the mutations of religion in the first centuries ce, one should probably focus first on what happened to the self during our period. Following Pierre Hadot, who had offered subtle analyses of what he called ‘spiritual exercises’ in the practice of philosophy under the Empire, Michel Foucault sought in his later years to analyze ‘the care of the self ’ (epimeleia heautou) among ancient intellectuals.6 For him, the radical denigration of the body among early Christian thinkers and ascetics brought this care of the self to an end. It seems to me, however, that Foucault’s analysis is flawed in various ways. In particular, the corpus from which he drew his evidence was especially limited (Foucault used mainly texts from Cassian’s interpretation of Egyptian monasticism). It is true, of course, that he did not have the time to broaden and fully develop his analysis. Even if more time had been granted to him, however, he probably would not have been able to offer a convincing analysis of the psychological transformations accompanying the passage from paganism to Christianity. This is so, I submit, because of his attempt (an attempt he shares with many) to understand this passage as an internal transformation of the Greco-Roman world, thus ignoring the Jewish dimensions of Christianity. Arnaldo Momigliano, here, would have been a better guide, as he recognized the triple matrix of intellectual and religious life under the Empire: Jerusalem, together with Athens and Rome.7 Indeed, the oriental nature of early Christianity seems to remain often undervalued.

6 P. Hadot, Exercices spirituels et philosophie antique, Paris 2002, 19–74 and 313–19. M. Foucault, L’herméneutique du sujet: cours au Collège de France 1981–1982, Paris 2001. 7 See for instance A. Momigliano, ‘Religion in Athens, Rome and Jerusalem in the First Century B.C.’, in: Momigliano, On Pagans, Jews and Christians, Middletown 1987, 74–91. On Momigliano as a historian of religion, see G. Stroumsa, ‘Arnaldo Momigliano

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A crucial psychological transformation occurred in our period, with the new recognition that what happened after death was so much more important than what happened to one in this life. This transformation, of course, was endowed with a religious nature, and would have farreaching religious consequences. Think, for instance, of the profound differences between Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations and Augustine’s Confessions. Personal eschatology would soon radically transform both attitudes to the self and the foundations of ethics. Askēsis, the constant exercising through which one sought to work upon oneself, was then endowed with a new meaning. Askēsis now meant an attempt at re-forming rather than discovering oneself. Christian anthropology was built on conceptions, both explicit and implicit, which entailed quite different attitudes from those of both Stoic and Platonic philosophies (the two main schools of thought in our period). These conceptions were directly inherited from the Hebrew Bible (more precisely, from its Greek translation, the Septuagint). One such conception was the idea (Gen 1:26) that man had been created in the image of God (homo imago dei). That usually entailed, in contradistinction to Platonic thought, recognition of the intrinsic value of the human body, since the nature of man, for most Christian thinkers, encompassed both soul and body. Another example was the insistence on God’s transcendence: the whole cosmos had been created by Him ex nihilo. This entailed a refusal to accept the Platonist idea of a real kinship, or sungeneia, between the soul and the divine. Although Christian intellectuals accepted for a very long time many of the intellectual assumptions of the Platonists, without recognizing that this would lead them into some serious self-contradictions, they usually stopped short of thinking that the human soul could, thanks to its sungeneia with the divine, reach deification (theōsis) at the end of the ascetical praxis. This praxis, rather, was usually conceived in the terms of an imitatio Christi, leading to sanctification, sometimes through martyrdom. In contradistinction to the askēsis of the philosophers, Christian askēsis (as well as Jewish askēsis) sought more a metanoia (Hebrew teshuva) than an epistrophē, a repentance of one’s sins more than a turning over from matter to the divine. In the religious world of late antiquity, one can distinguish different Idealtypen of religious virtuosi. While the priest and the prophet seem to

and the History of Religions’, in: P. Miller (ed.), Arnaldo Momigliano and the Antiquarian Foundations of Modern Cultural History, Toronto 2007, 286–311.

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have either disappeared or retreated into the background, the stage is mainly left to the sage, the gnostic and the saint. To be sure, all three characters appear in the major religious trends. It stands to reason, however, that the various traditions show different constellations between these Idealtypen. It seems to me that while the Jews hesitate mainly between the figure of the sage and that of the saint, the main figures for the Christians are that of the saint and that of the gnostic, while ‘pagans’ value mainly the figure of the sage and that of the gnostic. For Christians and Jews, the revealed Scriptures entailed a ‘dialogical’ way of deciphering the self through a constant reading of the Scriptures (in particular of the Psalms). The growth of religious conceptions based on a revealed Book, in the centuries between Jesus and Muhammad, reflects indeed a major transformation of religion. II. The Rise of the Religions of the Book The first centuries of the Roman Empire witnessed what is probably the most radical revolution in the history of the book before Gutenberg. This revolution has two sides. On the one hand, the passage from scroll to codex—a passage at first slow and gradual, from the first to the fourth century, except among the Christians, who adopt the codex almost instantaneously—transforms the very appearance and circulation of the book. On the other hand, the development of silent reading (a very long process, to be sure, which would not be fully accomplished before the Middle Ages) permits a new attitude to the book and its contents, and introduces a new, reflexive dignity of the single reader. In a sense, both transformations point to a privatisation of reading, to a more personal, and less public, relationship between the reader and the text. Such a privatisation would in turn permit an almost unbounded spectrum of hermeneutical possibilities. Now, when such a new approach to books is linked to the emphasis on a single corpus of texts ennobled as revealed Scripture, it is easy to see the dramatic implications of this cultural revolution on religion itself.8

8 I have dealt with aspects of this revolution in G.G. Stroumsa, ‘Early Christianity: A Religion of the Book?’, in: M. Finkelberg & G.G. Stroumsa (eds), Homer, the Bible and Beyond: Literary and Religious Canons in the Ancient World, Leiden/Boston 2003, 153–73.

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In order to identify and highlight the common denominator of a series of religious trends from early Christianity to early Islam, the comparative historian of religion Wilfred Cantwell Smith has referred to ‘the scriptural movement’ of Late Antiquity.9 Indeed, a series of religious movements appeared in late antiquity throughout the Near East and the Mediterranean that were all identified through their Scriptures. While this view of things has much to commend itself, it does not tell the whole story. Indians and Orphics, for instance, had had a long tradition of sacred books, while both Jewish and Zoroastrian scriptures had been redacted much earlier. The Gathas seem to have represented, for perhaps as long as a millennium, a very special case of book: a book preserved orally, in a quite fixed form. (Similarly, the Qur’an seems to have existed, at least for some decades, only in oral form). The Gathas would be put in writing only much later, after the Muslim conquest of Iran, when the Zoroastrian community was much weakened and fearing for its identity. For the Rabbinic movement, a strong propensity to move away from the written text of the Bible to oral traditions (the Oral Torah) can easily be detected in the first centuries of the Christian era.10 The writing phase among the Jews had taken place earlier, in he Hellenistic times, when a plethora of works, eventually called Pseudepigraphical and Apocryphal books of the Hebrew Bible, had been written. Indeed, the library at Qumran seems to have been very significant. One has calculated that only in the ninth century, the library in the Sankt Gallen monastery would surpass Qumran in the number of volumes it held. Their relationship to books represents a major difference between Jews and Christians in late antiquity. Rabbinic Judaism seems to have been satisfied with one, revealed book, remaining therefore ignorant of all other books, preferring oral commentaries (in Talmud and Midrash). The Christians read their books mainly in order to follow Jesus Christ, the supreme exemplar, whose life (and death) one sought to imitate. For the Jews, there was no single Biblical figure comparable to that of Jesus for the Christians. The Christians had offered a radical simplification of myth, while the Jews proposed a radical simplification of the notion of holy text. The Christian ideal of W.C. Smith, What is Scripture? A Comparative Approach, Minneapolis 1993. See the most thorough study of Y. Sussmann, ‘Torah she-be-‘al peh peshutah ke-mashma‘ah’ (Hebrew), in: Y. Sussmann & D. Rosenthal (eds), Mehqerei Talmud, III, Jerusalem 2005, 209–384. 9

10

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imitatio Christi permitted the development of a puzzling phenomenon: the saint, the holy man, would soon be described in terms of writing: the saint would himself be presented as a book to be deciphered, read, commented upon.11 A puzzling parallelism can be observed in the redaction and canonization process of the Mishna and the New Testament. Both seem to have been edited at more or less the same time: in the years 80 of the second century. This synchronization has not been explained, and I suggest it reflects the result of the race, between the now distinct communities, throughout the second century, to identify themselves from their competitors. Both communities sought to offer the correct interpretation to the same text (a text that the Christians read in a [ Jewish] translation): the Hebrew Bible. In a sense, one can claim that Mishna and New Testament represent two different hermeneutical keys to the Bible. The Mishna (in Greek deuterōsis, repetition) represents, just like the New Testament, the kainē diathēkē, the way through which the community can read and understand the true religious meaning of the Bible. The respective registers of Mishna and New Testament, of course, reflect the deeply different religious structures of the two religions.12 Among the new religious movements of late antiquity, Manichaeism is perhaps the most fascinating. One deals, here, with a strongly dualistic movement perceiving itself, from the start, as a world religion, based upon revealed Scriptures. In various ways, Manichaeism appears as a radicalisation of some trends already delineated in early Christianity, and also as a preview of characteristics usually identified with early Islam. When he invented, in 1873, the locution ‘religions of the book’, F. Max Müller was seeking to modernize and generalize an early Islamic conception. While the concept of ‘people of the book’ (ahl al-kitāb) does not seem to appear before the Qur’an, Mani himself, around the mid-third century, was well aware of the various scriptural traditions of different religious systems. The first of the Manichaean Kephalaia represents in this regard an understudied key text. Mani lists various

11 See for instance P. Magdalino, ‘ “What we heard in the Lives of the saints we have seen with our own eyes”: The Holy Man as Literary Text in Tenth-century Constantinople’, in: J. Howard-Johnston & P.A. Hayward (eds), The Cult of Saints in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Oxford 1999, 83–113. 12 Developments in G.G. Stroumsa, Hidden Wisdom: Esoteric Traditions and the Roots of Christian Mysticism, Leiden/Boston 20052, 79–91.

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prophets, Jesus, Zarathustra, Buddha, who each made the mistake of not carefully committing to writing his oral teaching. The distortion of their respective teachings by their followers would be the unavoidable consequence of such a mistake. Therefore Mani, in contradistinction to his predecessors in the long chain of prophecy, took great pains to retain a written version of his message. One can clearly see in this text a deep anxiety about the falsification of Scripture, a fear also reflected in Jewish-Christian traditions and in the Qur’an about the Hebrew Scriptures. What is peculiar to Manichaeism, of course, is the total rejection of the Jewish claims, a rejection reflected in the absence of Moses from the list of prophets. This Manichaean rejection highlights the close connection, to be broken only by Marcionism, between Judaism and Christianity. Throughout their long polemics with the Jews in late antiquity, the Christian authors were not able to deny the advantage of the Jews over them: only the Jews could read their own writings in their original language. The Church Fathers perceived the Jews as librarii nostri,13 custodes librorum nostrorum (Augustine),14 and when the mob, encouraged by the local bishop, organized a pogrom, plundering Jewish houses and properties on Minorca, in 418, the pogromists took great care of salvaging from the fire the Torah scrolls from the synagogue.15 But the evidence is here too scarce to permit important conclusions. Another instance of the deep ambivalence toward the Hebrew Scriptures is highlighted in Justinian’s Novella 146, dating from 553. In forbidding the cultic reading of the Bible in Hebrew, the Novella reflects the Emperor’s perception of the symbolic power that the Jews derived from their knowledge of the revealed Scriptures’ original language.16 The Christians, who were not bound by cultural, religious or linguistic traditions, offered a new attitude to religious language. For them the traduttore was no traditore. On the contrary, the idea of translation, from an archaic to a common language, understood by all and sundry, was of the essence for their religion. The ease with which Christians Augustine, Enarrationes in Psalmos 56.9 (PL 36, col. 666). Augustine, Sermo 5.5 (PL 38, col. 57). 15 See S. Bradbury, Severus of Minorca: Letter on the Conversion of the Jews, Oxford 1996. 16 For the text of the Novella, see A. Linder, The Jews in Roman Imperial Legislation, Detroit/Jerusalem 1987, 402–11; see further L. Rutgers, ‘Justinian’s Novella 146, between Jews and Christians’, in: R. Kalmin & S. Schwartz (eds), Jewish Culture and Society under the Christian Roman Empire, Leuven 2003, 385–407. 13 14

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accepted, encouraged, and used translations of their Scriptures has no parallel in the ancient world, before the Manichaeans, who would offer an even more radical version of this approach. Their disregard for archaic language and hieratic forms of expression is also reflected in Christian polemics with Hellenic intellectuals about sublime language versus sermo humilis. Christian intellectuals insisted, against their Hellenic counterparts, that their religion was the same for philosophers and fishermen, a fact that explained and justified the Gospels’ low language. While the emperor Julian, in the second half of the fourth century, condemns and derides the Christians for the mediocre literary level of their Scriptures, his very polemics show the extent to which even he was influenced by the Christian conception of Scriptures. To give another example, when Proclus, the leader of the Academy, states that he would seek to retain, on a desert island, only Plato’s Timaeus and the Chaldaean Oracles, he too shows the deep influence of the concept of Scriptures. Together with their marked lack of emphasis on the power inherent in original language, the Christians, more than any other religious movement, were willing to reject the idea of an oral, esoteric tradition existing side by side with Scripture. This rejection, which fitted the ethos of Christianity as offering salvation equally to all, was certainly enhanced by the fight against such esoteric traditions, embedded in the Gnostic trends.17 The Christianization of the Empire entailed the subtle transformation of the educational system. Before the end of the fourth century, the Christians learned to teach also those texts of Greek mythology to which they had been so vehemently opposed. Hellenic culture, then, would now be transmitted thanks to its former enemies, the Christians. In order to do so, Christian intellectuals were brought to apply to the Hellenic tradition the same set of hermeneutic rules they had developed in order to appropriate to themselves the Israelite Scriptures. To borrow a metaphor invented by Cricks and Watson to describe the structure of DNA, one could perhaps speak here of a ‘double helix’. The Christian thinkers sought to find a series of similitudes and parallels between the two cultural systems of Athens and Jerusalem. It is this double helix that stands at the root of Christian culture, which was first elaborated in late antiquity, and which has informed European culture down to modern

17

See Stroumsa, Hidden Wisdom, passim.

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times. Christian culture, then, constituted itself, both in the East and in the West, through slipping from biblical to cultural hermeneutics.18 The monasteries are the locus classicus where this work on books was achieved, a complex effort involving reading, writing and interpreting. The complex cultural system developed in the monasteries was based upon the central figure of Jesus Christ, through which all mythology revolved. Similarly, the libraries were built, as a whole, around the one book of Scripture, which contained, if properly understood, all secrets and all wisdom. Like the Rabbinic Sages, who, borrowing the Greek concept of paideia, had transformed it into their central religious value, Christian intellectuals of late antiquity succeeded to a great extent in applying to the Greek intellectual tradition and to their own Scriptures the same hermeneutical rules. In both cases, such attitudes entailed quite a new place and role of books in religious life and thought. III. Transformations of the Ritual We have seen so far how some deep psychological and cultural transformations in the Roman world both permitted and imposed a radical restructuring of the very idea of ritual. The rise of Scriptures as the very backbone of religious movements transformed attitudes toward religious stories, or myths. It stands to reason that a similar transformation of the ritual should be discerned, as all religions hinge upon the two functions of myth making (or telling) and ritual action. To a new conception of historia sacra should correspond a new kind of religious praxis. I have noted above that the traditional distinction of polytheistic versus monotheistic religions is not always particularly useful from a heuristic viewpoint. Indeed, in the ancient world, both polytheists and monotheists used to offer blood sacrifice to the divinity or divinities, and considered such sacrifices to represent the very acme of religious life. Thus Macrobius, commenting upon Virgil, could claim that piety consisted in knowing how to offer sacrifices. The emperor Julian, in the second half of the fourth century, could write that ‘the Jews behave like the Gentiles, except the fact that they recognize only one god. On everything else, however, we share the same things: temples, sanctuaries,

18 See G.G. Stroumsa, Barbarian Philosophy: the Religious Revolution of Early Christianity, Tübingen 1999, 27–43.

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altars, purification rituals, various demands on which we do not diverge from one another, or else only in insignificant ways’.19 ‘Sacrificiorum aboleatur insania. Let the madness of sacrifices end!’ This law of Constantinus II, preserved in the Theodosian Codex, encapsulates the revolution started by Constantine and pursued by his successors.20 This revolution was radical in its consequences: it brought public sacrifices to an end. To be sure, the idea of animal (or for that matter human) sacrifice never quite disappeared, and various traces of it are retained in later forms of Christianity, while Islam has a feast of sacrifice (Id al-adha). Much before the fourth century ce, a major debate had been raging in Hellenic thought on the value of sacrifice. Lucian of Samosata, that second-century Voltaire, who knew how to poke fun at various ritual practices and religious attitudes, had sharply criticized sacrifices in his diatribe Peri thusiōn. In the third century, Porphyry, following Theophrastus and his Peri eusebeias, could claim that the philosopher was the true priest of the supreme god, and that his thought was the true temple. It is this identity that isolates the philosopher from the polis and its public rituals. In his treatise De abstinentia, Porphyry, drawing the logical consequence of his aversion to animal killing, argues in favour of vegetarianism. In this context, one should call attention to his belief that the Jews are a race of philosophers, precisely because their sacrificial practices, in contradistinction to those of other peoples, are due to historical necessities rather than to low instincts. For Porphyry, then, true sacrifice is the union with god, accomplished by the wise man through apatheia.21 Even a traditionalist like Iamblichus, who argues in favour of sacrifices, recognizes that they are not needed by the superior beings. Blood sacrifices, for him, are expected only by the lower gods, and represent only the material aspect of cult. Thus for him spiritual sacrifices exist side by side with blood sacrifices.22

19 Julian, Against the Galileans, fragment 72. See also the contribution to this volume by J. den Boeft. 20 Theodosian Codex XVI.10.2. See N. Belayche, ‘Le sacrifice et la théorie du sacrifice pendant la “réaction païenne”: L’empereur Julien’, RHR 218 (2001), 455–86. 21 Porphyry, On Abstinence 2.26–7. 22 Iamblichus, De Mysteriis 5.15.

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When their single Temple, in Jerusalem, was destroyed by Titus in 70 ce, the Jews had to dramatically reinvent their religion, while arguing that they were changing very little, and this only under duress. If Jews could be perceived by some as a race of philosophers (for instance by Numenius, who famously argued, in the second century ce, that Plato was ‘an atticizing Moses’), it seems to me that it is in no small measure due to the fact that they could now be perceived as bearers of a religion without blood sacrifice. Some dramatic consequences followed from the destruction of the Temple. The first one was the birth of two new religions, rather than one. Side by side with the birth of Christianity, the appearance of Rabbinic Judaism after 70 ce, and its growth in the following centuries represents a real mutation of the religion of Israel: indeed, a religion now without sacrifices, a religion whose priests were out of business, in which religious specialists had been replaced by the intellectual elite. In a way, early Christianity, a religion centred upon a sacrificial ritual celebrated by priests, represents a more obvious continuity with the religion of Israel than the religion of the Rabbis. The Temple’s fall, and the impossibility to offer sacrifice, brought about a transformation of the ritual: daily sacrifices were now replaced by prayers recalling the sacrifices of old. The absence of a Temple and the neutralization of priests, in turn, simultaneously led to a spatial explosion of Jewish ritual and to its democratization. There was no omphalos anymore, no obvious place that God could call His own house. According to a famous Rabbinic conception, the shekhinah, or divine presence (from the root shakhan, to dwell), exiled from the destroyed Temple, was now staying within ‘the four cubits of halakhah, within the small limits of personal religious duties.23 In other words, religion had now moved from the public to the private sphere. Askēsis, prayer, almsgiving: the various duties of private religion (duties to be ideally accomplished in private, even in secret) were all considered as due replacements for sacrifice. A Rabbinic text compares, for instance, the fat burnt during a fast to the fat of a sacrificial animal.24 When the Rabbis say that after the destruction of the Temple, an iron wall rose between God and Israel, they mean to insist on the fact that Judaism

23 24

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b.Ber 8a. b.Ber 17a.

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has become a religion of alienation, a religion of God’s absence.25 Man must behave as if he did not expect a clear and distinct voice to answer his prayers, as if the time-consecrated do ut des formula did not work anymore. In a way, this attitude is rather similar to that of the Church Fathers, about whom one could speak, in Weberian sense, of an Entzauberung. The religion of the Rabbis had replaced that of the prophets. The priests had disappeared for all practical purposes. They might have been a catalyst for the development of new mystical attitudes within the Jewish community. It stands to reason that some of the characteristics of mystical experience, as they are preserved for us in Late Antique Hebrew literature, and also in Gnostic and Judaeo-Christian texts and traditions, are similar to those developed by the priests in the Temple, who must have been feeling powerful experiences.26 In strong opposition to post-Yavneh Rabbinic Judaism, early Christianity unabashedly presented itself as a sacrificial religion, although one of a new kind, in which the central ritual was called anamnēsis, a re-actualization, or even re-activation—rather than our weaker term ‘memory’—of Jesus’ sacrifice. It was a religion without temples, in which the same sacrifice was offered perpetually, on a daily basis. It was offered by priests, organized in a hierarchy (in contradistinction to the basic equality of rank between the Rabbis). The very metaphorisation of biblical traditions by Christian thinkers permitted the preservation of the terms of Israelite religion. In Christian literature of the first centuries, one can follow the clear development of sacrificial vocabulary. The language of martyrdom, strikingly, is replete with allusions to sacrifice. The clearest testimony of this perception of martyrdom as a sacrifice is probably the Martyrdom of Perpetua and Felicity. Imitatio Christi, when it goes up to the willingness to give one’s life for one’s faith, transforms the martyr, like Jesus, into a sacrifice, more precisely, a human sacrifice. This is very significant, as both pagans and Christians in the Roman Empire considered human sacrifice as representing the very border between humanity and barbarism.27 As the historian of art Jas Elsner has been able to show, the transformation of Roman art from Augustus to Justinian

b.Ber 32b. See R. Elior, The Three Temples: On the Emergence of Jewish Mysticism, Oxford/Portland 2004. 27 See J. Rives, ‘Human Sacrifice among Pagans and Christians’, Journal of Roman Studies 85 (1995), 65–85. 25 26

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reflects a profound evolution of subjectivity in Roman culture. The martyrs do not offer sacrifice, they are the sacrifice, and no reciprocity, no immediate quid pro quo is expected from the divinity.28 In that sense, Christian martyrdom reflects a radical change in the conception of sacrifice, a fundamental break in the very nature of religion. One also finds in early Christian literature, as in Rabbinic texts, a metaphorical use of sacrifice: Clement of Rome, already, refers to ‘a contrite heart’ as the true sacrifice, whereas the fourth-century Euchites, or Messalians, developed, as was done in Qumran, a theory and practice of continual prayer in order to keep Satan away in terms alluding to the ‘perpetual sacrifice’ in the Jerusalem Temple. More than the Rabbis, the Church Fathers were quite aware of the novelty of their religion and of the originality of their thought. This awareness is reflected, for instance, in their ability to offer what one can call ‘histories of religion’, theses about the evolution of religious doctrines and practices, in particular sacrifice, from the earliest times onwards. Similar conceptions are much rarer among Jewish thinkers, and only Maimonides, in the twelfth century, developed a full-fledged historical and comparative theory of sacrifice, a theory that shows traces of a Christian influence.29 To conclude these brief reflections on the transformation of the ritual, one should perhaps point out once more the deep ambiguity of sacrifice. Transformed, reinterpreted, metaphorized, memorized, it seems never to have died out completely. Late antiquity experienced the end of public sacrifice as the core of religious praxis, but that did not mean the end of the very idea of sacrifice. IV. FOM Civic Religion to Communitarian Religion The end of sacrifices as a central, public religious practice, in late antiquity, led to a major crisis in the conception of ritual purity. Since the prophets of Israel, through Jesus and Mani, the value of the ancient

28 J. Elsner, Art and the Roman Viewer: the Transformation of Art from the Pagan World to Christianity, Cambridge 1995, esp. ch. 2, 157ff. 29 See G.G. Stroumsa, ‘Cultural Memory in Early Christianity: Clement of Alexandria and the History of Religions’, in: S.N. Eisenstadt et alii (eds), Axial Civilizations and World History ( Jerusalem Studies in Religion and Culture 4), Leiden 2004, 293–315, and G.G. Stroumsa, ‘John Spencer and the Roots of Idolatry’, HR 40 (2001), 1–23.

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ways of re-establishing ritual purity had been seriously questioned.30 The abandonment of the temples, and often their destruction through fits of iconoclastic violence, raised other questions regarding religious identity, which had usually been centred around the shrines. Traditionally, the temples had been built on central, clearly visible places, either within or outside the cities. Now the oikoumenē was being emptied from its temples, as it were, and churches were being built in their place, but not always quite in the same places. Various studies of the transformation of the urban texture of late antiquity show that churches were much more dispersed, in the different neighbourhoods of the cities, and not necessarily in their centre. Moreover, in most religious cults of the ancient world, the ritual was usually performed in the open, in public (Mithraic cult represents a striking exception), while synagogal and church ritual was almost only performed inside, for the community of the faithful. A central aspect of this ritual was the reading, singing, translating and commenting of Scriptural passages, a fact that imposed a closed building, usually of rather limited dimensions. The new forms of ritual, then, entailed new forms of cultic buildings. Such concrete transformations of religious life, and the new importance of religious communities, permit a better understanding of the nature of the changes than E.R. Dodds’ talk about a new spirituality. While Christian authors usually insisted with pride upon the novelty of their religion, this novelty was precisely what the traditionalists feared most. Thus, the emperor Julian expressed his wish to avoid novelty altogether, but in particular in the religious domain. This very expression of his fear, however, reflects the fact that such deep changes were precisely occurring at the time. While civic rituals, by definition open to all, were meant to reaffirm collective identity, the new forms of identity that were becoming prevalent were by nature religious, and open only to the members of the community—in contradistinction to the society at large. As argued by John Scheid, a deep transformation of religious practice had occurred in Rome since the end of the civil wars, and was amplified with Roman expansionism, and then under the Empire. With the growth of the cities, the direct participation of all citizens in the cult was eventually made impossible, and the cult became the business of their representatives. Hence, a more abstract religion, which had not

30

See Stroumsa, Barbarian Philosophy, 268–81.

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yet changed in nature, became more internalised: for many, religious participation was now intellectual, done through reading. Scheid, who sees here a praeparatio evangelica of sorts, suggests a parallel with the diaspora Jewish communities, who had learned to function without the Jerusalem Temple.31 This is certainly true, although one should be careful not to overemphasize the differences between the Jewish communities in Palestine and in the diaspora. The expression ‘scriptural communities’, coined by Brian Stock to describe medieval phenomena, is applicable in the ancient world to philosophers and Jews alike. Such communities were found in Palestine as well as in the diaspora, around the batei midrash, the synagogues where the Scriptures were interpreted. Psycho-sociological analysis, then, can bring us to a better understanding of the nature of the new religiosity emerging in the Roman Empire: the forms of ritual, focusing around Scriptures to be read and interpreted, and offering the basis to calls for personal repentance from sin. Already in the second and third centuries, the willingness of urban elites to retain the traditional values of the old civic model began to be questioned. In the fourth century, these elites too often showed no real interest in exercising their political duties. Together with the slow depopulation of the cities, this trend helps to explain the growth of religious communities. Such communities, to be sure, had existed for a long time. But under the Empire, in particular since the third century, what John North, using a metaphor borrowed from Peter Berger, has called ‘the supermarket of religions’ offered multiple possibilities for a religious identity freely chosen. Garth Fowden, on his part, argues that the broad acceptance of such conceptions of communitarian identity became characteristic of late antiquity.32 In Rome, religion had meant, almost exclusively, the observance of the ritual. Questions of truth were quite absent from the religious sphere. In order to understand the transformation of such a conception into that of Augustine, for whom vera religio represents, first of all, an internalised phenomenon, we must recognise the inversion of the relation of two couples of notions: sacred versus profane, and public versus

31 J. Scheid, ‘Religione e società’, in: E. Gabba & A. Schiavone (eds), Storia di Roma IV, Turin 1989, 631–59. See further J. Scheid, Religion et piété à Rome, Paris 20012, 119ff. 32 J. North, ‘The Development of Religious Pluralism’, in: J. Lieu et alii (eds), The Jews among Pagans and Christians in the Roman Empire, London/New York 1992, 174–93; G. Fowden, ‘Religious Communities’, in: G.W. Bowersock et alii (eds), Late Antiquity: A Guide to the Postclassical World, Cambridge MA 1999, 82–106.

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private. As both Cicero and the emperor Marcian tell us, religion, or the sacred, was in Rome essentially a public affair, while what remained private was profane.33 With the internalisation and subjectivisation of religion, the two couples would become inversed. Among both Jews and Christians, the field of the sacred was identified with the private domain, while the public domain remained essentially profane. This was certainly the case until the fourth century. With the progressive, but rapid, Christianization of the Empire, things changed, and religion (i.e., ‘orthodox’ Christianity) sought to reclaim the public sphere. From Constantine to Theodosius II, religion eventually became affair of state again, and received all the attributes of civic religion in ancient Rome, but with a twist. As the principle of religious authority was now rooted in personal conscience, and religion identified also with truth, the rejection of the right path (i.e., the interpretation of religion adopted by the Emperor) would have immediate and radical consequences. Since Gibbon, various explanations have been offered for the rise of religious intolerance and violence (two different but connected phenomena) in the world of late antiquity. As such violence and intolerance was mainly the work of Christians it is either in the nature of Christianity (i.e., its origins in Jewish exclusivism) or in its history (i.e., in the collusion, not before the fourth century, between state and church) that the roots of Christian violence and intolerance have been sought. It seems to me that both approaches err in their static character: they are unable to account for the deep transformation of mental patterns within Christian communities from the first to the fourth century. Early Christian communities, which remained entpolitisiert in the strongest sense of this Weberian expression, could, like the Qumran community, develop freely, upon a radical interpretation of their Scriptures, some violent ideas about the Endzeit and the final eschatological war. The trouble began when they were suddenly put in a position of power. Most were unable to realize at once that the new political fortune demanded a new hermeneutics. As we know too well, similar phenomena are known elsewhere, also in contemporary history.34 In order to understand the growth in religious intolerance and violence in late antiquity, one must recognize the new fact of an identity defined, more than ever before, in religious terms. People now perceived

33 34

Cicero, De Legibus 2.19; Marcian, Institutiones III, fr. 74. See Stroumsa, Barbarian Philosophy, 8–26.

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themselves as belonging to a freely chosen community. While Jewish exclusivism made space for non-Jews (for instance as ‘Godfearers’, fellow-travellers of sorts, or as ‘pious among the nations’), Christian universalism could not easily tolerate outsiders. By definition, such outsiders were either heretics, pagans or Jews. Only the latter could be, to a certain extent, tolerated on the fringes of society. With time, these fringes had a tendency to shrink. As we have seen, Justinian could not tolerate their use of Hebrew anymore, and in the early seventh century, forced baptism came to be demanded in the Byzantine Empire. Jews and Christians knew exactly the stakes of the conflict between them, and the rules of the game (true prophecy and the correct understanding of the common Scriptures). Between Christians and ‘pagans’, on the other hand, a dialogue de sourds was soon established. On both sides, it seems, there was a total lack of understanding of the nature of the other side’s religion. Both Christians and ‘pagans’ sought to understand each other in their own terms. From one of the most impressive intellectual testimonies to this conflict, Origen’s Contra Celsum (a text written around the mid-third century), it would appear that the main argument between them revolved around the idea of civic religion, or of the relationship between state and religion.35 To the extent that it claimed to be the sole representative of true prophecy, Islam was similar to Christianity. But its success in transforming the community of the faithful (the umma) into an imperial society, a transformation probably due mainly to the fast pace of the Arab conquests, permitted the Muslims to set a relationship between state and religion that forever evaded the Christian rulers, East and West.

35

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Developments in Stroumsa, Barbarian Philosophy, 44–56.

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WORSHIPPING THE VISIBLE GODS Conflict and Accommodation in Hellenism, Hellenistic Judaism and Early Christianity David T. Runia* The subject of this paper in honour of my dear friend Piet van der Horst is the divinization and worship of the heavenly bodies. By these I mean the stars and the planets, including—in the ancient perspective— the sun and the moon, and I will study the subject in three different but inter-related traditions, Hellenism, Hellenistic Judaism and Early Christianity. There are two reasons why I chose this theme for my paper. The first has to do with a communication that I had with Piet quite recently. He wanted to know about a text in Philo that he thought he remembered, in which the Alexandrian exegete speaks about the horatoi theoi, the visible gods. It was not hard to help him, although the specific question was in fact a little more complicated than he probably thought. But at the same time I thought he might appreciate a somewhat broader treatment of the subject. Of course I first made sure that he himself was not busy with the subject himself. The second pretext for alighting on this theme also has to do with Philo. A few years ago I was asked to review a valuable study on Jewish worship in Philo by a young German scholar, Jutta Leonhardt.1 In her opening chapter she first defines what she means by worship in the context of her study. There are two main terms that need to be taken into account, latreia and therapeia. Philo in fact seldom uses the former (only seven instances, plus three for the related verb latreuō), whereas the latter in its various forms occurs more than two hundred times). Leonhardt noted that therapeia was the more general term for worship, but she claimed that it was used for the more abstract and

* This paper is published in approximately the same form as it was presented at the Symposium Religious Innovations in honour of Pieter W. van der Horst in Utrecht in June 2006. I have retained some elements of the oral presentation. 1 J. Leonhardt, Jewish Worship in Philo of Alexandria, (TSAJ 84), Tübingen 2001; my review was published in JTS 55 (2004), 690–93.

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philosophical veneration of God, and so did not provide a defining scope for specific Jewish worship in the way that latreia did. I felt that, given the aim of her study, this was a legitimate move, yet it left me dissatisfied. There was more to the study of worship in Philo than was covered in this study. In this paper I shall examine the theme of worship in relation to the so-called visible gods, those stars and planets that move with their complex but regular motions in the heavens. I wish to look at religious attitudes towards these beings, including the question of whether they should be regarded as gods and whether they should actually be called ‘gods’. I readily admit that the subject is dauntingly broad. My motivation has been to give ear to the suggestion of the editors to focus on a subject in which religions interact and have positive or negative effects on each other. So I will embark on a comparative exercise, and may fortune favour the foolhardy. But let me say a little more on the subject of worship. What does it mean to ‘worship the visible gods’? It seems to me that the fundamental religious term ‘worship’ bifurcates in two main directions. It can mean ‘offer cultic service to’, whether through sacrifices or liturgy or any other kind of ritual act. It can also mean ‘serve or give honour to’, the fundamental attitude of religious devotion. The distinction that I have in mind is well brought out by the two German terms Gottesdienst and Gottesverehrung.2 The second meaning is broader and encompasses the first. All worship as Gottesdienst involves worship as Gottesverehrung, but not necessarily the other way around, because it is possible to worship God quite apart from the performance of any cultic acts. As is generally known, it is always difficult to transport the analysis of terms from one language to another, because the semantic ranges of words do not exactly correspond. There can be no doubt, however, that the meaning of ‘worship as Gottesdienst’ relates well to Greek verbs such as latreuō, leitourgeō and thrēskeō. At first sight the verb therapeuō does not seem all that dissimilar. It is of course linked to the noun therapōn (servant) and originally meant something like ‘attend on’ (which is also the source of its other meaning ‘heal’). In her excellent discussion of

2

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See Lexicon für Theologie und Kirche, Vol. 9, Freiburg/etc. 1995, 888 and 943.

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the term in connection with the Philonic Therapeutae,3 Joan Taylor has shown that the verb has strong cultic overtones, but that it can also be used in a more general sense, for example in philosophical contexts, and there it approximates the notion of ‘worship as Gottesverehrung’.4 She suggests as a translation of therapeuō in this sense ‘be a devotee of ’, and this seems to me to be just right. But there are also other verbs which express the concept of religious devotion more directly. One thinks of the basic verb timaō (honour), but especially of the verb proskuneō (bow down to, do obeisance to). This verb too has undoubted cultic overtones, since obeisance has to be expressed, yet can also have a quite general connotation primarily involving a mental state. As we shall see, this verb plays a crucial role in the Septuagint’s strictures against the worship of other gods. In a brief introduction to the Christian theology of worship D.A. Carson has made two interesting points.5 Firstly he pointed out that ‘worship’ is a transitive verb. It ordinarily has an object. Even when we say ‘let us worship’, an object must be understood. Secondly he argues, citing Jesus’ words to Satan in Matthew 4:10,6 that worship involves the matter of ultimate allegiance: whom do you serve? It is clear that he is using the term in the broader of the main senses outlined above. It seems to me that the point is valid, even if it has to be applied in various ways in differing cultural contexts. It is this theme of religious allegiance that gives our subject its particular relevance to our own situation, even if we would show little inclination to divinize the heavenly bodies ourselves. I shall return to this theme at the end of my paper. But let us now turn to our main theme, beginning with the world of Hellenic and Hellenistic religion. In Walter Burkert’s still unsurpassed handbook on Greek religion the final chapter is devoted to philosophical religion.7 The hero of the piece (or villain, depending on your point of view) is Plato. After the wide-ranging debates on the nature of divinity and the role of religion in the 5th century bce, Plato developed a new approach in which J.E. Taylor, Jewish Women Philosophers of First-Century Alexandria—Philo’s ‘Therapeutae’ Reconsidered, Oxford 2003, 54–68. 4 Cf. the use of therapeutai at Plato Phaedrus 252c5, Laws 740c1. 5 D.A. Carson, ‘ “Worship the Lord Your God”: The Perennial Challenge,’ in: D.A. Carson (ed.), Worship: Adoration and Action, Grand Rapids/Carlisle 1993, 13–18. 6 This text in turn cites Deut 6:13 from the Septuagint. 7 W. Burkert, Greek Religion: Archaic and Classical, Oxford 1985, 305–37. 3

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cosmic order is interpreted as divine presence, even if the origin of that order is sought in a higher transcendent realm. The cosmological dialogue the Timaeus can rightly be called the Bible of this revamped cosmic religion. Its hymnic language is quite deliberate:8 the cosmos as a totality is a ‘blessed god’ (34b8) and a ‘sense-perceptible god’ (92c7), while the heavenly bodies are ‘visible and generated gods’ (40d4).9 Straight after this last text Plato goes on to make some rather ironical or even sceptical remarks about the Olympian gods. The juxtaposition is surely deliberate. A further philosophical foundation was given to this cosmic theology in the Laws: the sun, moon and other planets are not ‘wanderers’, in spite of their name planētai, but follow pre-ordained courses precisely because they are living beings endowed with soul and intelligence (821b–c, 967a–c). The Epinomis, written as an epilogue to the Laws after Plato’s death by Philip of Opus, goes a step further: the first gods are the ‘visible gods, the greatest, most deserving of honour and the sharpest observers’ (984d5–7); they should be given a cult with honours, festivals and sacrifices (985d–e). These ideas, philosophical and theoretical though they are, did exert a strong influence in the Hellenistic and early Imperial age. A monograph remains to be written on how this exactly happened. Father Festugière’s study on ‘the cosmic god’, which is primarily a study of translated texts, is now seriously outdated.10 One might ask whether the notion of a ‘cosmic religion’ is more than a scholarly construct, based on texts rather than the realia of cultic worship. Certainly it makes extensive use of the imagery of worship, e.g., calling the cosmos a temple or a shrine, in its literary expression. Without being able to survey all the evidence, I remain convinced that such a notion is valuable in order to explain the background of works as different as Cicero’s Dream of Scipio and Philo’s De Opificio Mundi.11 It fits in with that broader conception of worship that was outlined earlier in my paper. Of particular significance, it seems to me, is the fact that the planets came to receive

8 See the fine treatment of this theme by P. Hadot, ‘Physique et poésie dans le Timée de Platon’, RTP 115 (1983), 113–33. 9 Plato also speaks at 37c6 on the heaven as ‘the agalma of the everlasting gods’. The phrase is difficult. Most commentators follow Cornford in rendering agalma as shrine, i.e. the phrase refers to the heavenly bodies rather than the ideas. 10 A.J. Festugière, La révélation d’Hermès trismégiste, Vol. 2: Le dieu cosmique, Paris 1949 (19812). 11 A survey of all the archaeological and iconographic evidence relevant to the question would be most valuable.

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the names of (some of ) the Olympian deities. At first there was only an association (for example, Plato calls the planet Mercury ‘sacred to Hermes’, Timaeus 38d5), but in time this turned to identification, giving us the names that we still use today.12 Under the influence of the Stoic doctrines of cosmic sympathy and logos determinism, the science of astrology became, in the words of Walter Burkert again, ‘a dominant spiritual force as a new kind of divination with scientific appeal’.13 It combined science and religion in a manner that appealed both to the intellectual elite and to more popular circles. Since the heavenly bodies determined the nature of earthly creatures through the time of their birth and also other events on earth, it was natural to worship and revere them. But it could also happen that they might be feared. They were the ‘rulers’ (archontes) or ‘masters’ (hēgemones), and their power could be exercised for good or for ill. In the middle of the third century ce the philosopher Plotinus had to work hard to defend Hellenic cosmic religion against his Gnostic opponents, who had nothing but contempt for the cosmos and the heavenly bodies.14 Our attention moves now to the religion of the Jewish people, and in particular to its scriptural foundation, the Torah. The key text relevant to our subject is Deut 4:19: And beware lest you lift up your eyes to heaven, and when you see the sun and the moon and the stars, all the host of heaven, you be drawn away and worship them and serve them, things which the Lord your God has allotted to all the peoples under the whole heaven.

This is the RSV translation of the Hebrew text. But it is important for our subject also to look at the version that the Septuagint gives of these words. This translation was made in early Hellenistic Alexandria, probably in the second half of the third century bce, so no doubt reflects something of its intellectual, religious and social context. Three things stand out when the texts are compared. Most strikingly the phrase ‘host of heaven’, usually translated with stratia in Greek, is rendered in the Septuagint by ‘all the kosmos (i.e. adornment) of heaven’. In addition, for the Hebrew word ‘drawn away’ or ‘lured away’15 the translators 12 Cf. T. Barton, Ancient Astrology, London 1994, 111–12. The practice is noted by Philo at De Decalogo 54. 13 Burkert, Ancient Religion, 329. 14 Enneads 2.9.4–5, 8. 15 The latter rendering is the one used by E. Fox, The Five Books of Moses (The Schocken Bible: Volume 1), New York 1995, 867.

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use planōtheis, ‘go astray’, the very same root that is used for the planets (and which Plato said should not be misunderstood). These renderings may well not be coincidental. Lastly we note the verbs for worship that the translators used, proskuneō and latreuō. No overtly cultic context is mentioned. All that is spoken about is ‘lifting up one’s eyes’. The terms seem to be used in the broader sense of worship as Gottesverehrung that we noted above. The details are subtle, but do suggest in my view that the context of Hellenistic cosmic religion was present to the translators’ mind. We might even take them as a further indication of an acquaintance with the philosophical terminology of Platonism, as controversially argued by Martin Rösel for the Book of Genesis.16 It is most intriguing that this is one of the texts which—centuries later—the rabbis report as being altered by the Septuagint translators.17 They claim that the words ‘for shining’ were introduced after the verb ‘allotted’. The motivation could only have been to make clear that God does not encourage any form of astral cult.18 There is, however, no trace of this addition in the extant manuscripts of the Septuagint. We should observe that there is in fact no mention of ‘gods’ in this text. The language of ‘visible’ or ‘senseperceptible gods’ is in fact wholly foreign to the Septuagint. But the paraphrase of this text later on at Deut 17:3 does speak of ‘other gods’, which are specified as the same ‘sun and moon and whole cosmos of heaven’. And there are of course many other Pentateuchal texts which speak without hesitation of ‘gods’ in more general terms, most notably Deut 10:17, ‘for the Lord your God, this is the God of gods and the Lord of lords, the God who is great and strong and fearsome . . .’. The original context of these prohibitions will certainly have been Babylonian star cults and the accompanying astrological practices.19 The Septuagint now introduces the same thought in the context of Hellenistic cosmic religion. In Hellenistic historiography Babylonia becomes Chaldea, famed for its astronomical and astrological lore. Here we should note the link that was made between the Chaldeans and the 16 M. Rösel, Übersetzung als Vollendung der Auslegung: Studien zur Genesis-Septuaginta (BZAW 223), Berlin/New York 1994. 17 Cf. E. Tov, ‘The Rabbinic Tradition Concerning the “Alterations” Inserted into the Greek Pentateuch and their Relation to the Original Text of the LXX’, JSJ 15 (1984), 64–89, esp. 82, 84. 18 Cf. C. Dogniez & M. Harl, La Bible d’Alexandrie: Le Deuteronome, Paris 1992, 138. 19 Cf. F. Lelli, ‘Stars’, in: K. van der Toorn, B. Becking, and P.W. van der Horst, Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, Leiden/etc. 19992, 809–15.

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Jews. Not only did the father of the Jewish nation Abraham come from Chaldea, but the Jews could be regarded as a branch of the Chaldeans or even (as occurs rather mysteriously in Philo) be called ‘Chaldeans’ themselves.20 In the book of Jubilees, originally written in Hebrew before 100 bce but subsequently translated into Greek, Abraham is described as contemplating the stars and using their movements to predict the weather, i.e. practising astrology.21 He recognizes that ‘all of the signs of the stars and the signs of the sun and the moon are in the hand of the Lord’, and concludes that ‘the Most High God’, the only God for him, is the one who has created them all. He prays to God: ‘Save me from the hands of evil spirits which rule over the thought of the heart of man, and do not let them lead me astray from following you, O my God’. This text reminds us of the prohibition of Deut 4:19, although the ‘spirits’ are not to be identified with the heavenly bodies, but rather with the demons descended from the Watchers of Genesis 6:1–4. As James Kugel has pointed out, this text explains how Abraham came to be a monotheist: his knowledge of astronomy and the heavens enabled him to discover that there was but a single God.22 We shall return to this powerful exegetical and theological motif shortly. The most important Hellenistic-Jewish text on our theme prior to Philo is undoubtedly Wisdom 13:1–9.23 Its Alexandrian location is fairly certain, its date much less so, but it surely pre-dates Philo.24 Three themes are crucial. Firstly the text recognizes a profound admiration for the beauty of the visible world. The people whom it attacks are unable to make the jump from ‘the visible good things’ to the Existent one (verse 1), or from the magnitude and beauty of the creatures to their maker (verse 5). Secondly this failure leads them to understand parts of the physical world as gods (verses 2–3). Various parts are named

20 On Philo’s practice see V. Nikiprowetzky, Le commentaire de l’Écriture chez Philon d’Alexandrie: son caractère et sa portée; observations philologiques (ALGHJ 11), Leiden 1977, 84 n. 44; C.K. Wong, ‘Philo’s Use of Chaldaioi’, The Studia Philonica Annual 4 (1992), 1–14. 21 Jubilees 12:16–20. 22 J. Kugel, Traditions of the Bible: A Guide to the Bible as it was at the Start of the Common Era, Cambridge MA/London 1998, 259–67. 23 I am indebted to the excellent commentary on this passage by D. Winston, The Wisdom of Solomon (AB 43), New York 1979, 247–57. 24 Cf. E. Schürer, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ (175 B.C.–A.D. 135), A new English version revised and edited by G. Vermes et alii, Vol. 3 part 1, Edinburgh 1986, 572–73. Winston, Wisdom of Solomon, 20–25, brings the book too close to the time and circle of Philo.

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and the order is a bit unusual, but prominence is certainly given to heaven and the stars, which are called ‘beamers’, the same term as in the Genesis creation account. The latter are also called prytaneis kosmou, ‘cosmic overlords’, an acknowledgement of their power with possible astrological overtones. The third point that is made is that these people are not as bad as other idolaters. ‘Little blame attaches to them’, we read, ‘because they perhaps go astray in their search for God and their desire to find him’ (verse 6). Yet they are not to be excused either, for if they had the ability to focus on the world, why could they not go on to find its author (verse 9)? It is noteworthy that, although the phrase ‘visible gods’ does not occur here, it is not far away because of the strong emphasis on the role of sight and visual appearance. ‘These people’, we read, ‘are persuaded by sight, since what they see is beautiful’ (verse 7). We can sense too the Platonic theme of the importance of sight as the origin of philosophy (Timaeus 47a–d), also prominent in Philo, adapted here to the requirements of Jewish theology and apologetics. It is time now to return to the writings and thought of Philo of Alexandria. It will be recalled that it was the phrase ‘visible gods’ and the theme of worship in his œuvre which formed the starting-point of our discussion. In fact, Philo, both the most copious and the most profound of Hellenistic-Jewish writers, presents us with so much material on this subject that there is a very real risk of becoming overwhelmed. In the context of this presentation, therefore, we can only follow the main lines of his contribution to our theme. In so doing we shall follow recent trends and pay particular attention to the context in which Philo makes his multifarious pronouncements. In his vast systematic exposé of the Torah known as the Exposition of the Law, Philo gives great prominence to the prohibition against worshipping the heavenly bodies as expressed in Deut 4:19. In his treatment of both the Decalogue and of the Special Laws, Philo links the theme directly with the First commandment. When he says at De Decalogo 52 that ‘no small delusion has taken hold of the majority of humankind in deifying the elements’, the word planos naturally recalls the ‘going astray’ in the biblical text. As in the Wisdom text, the various elements are mentioned, but the greatest prominence is given to the celestial bodies, and it is particularly noted how they have been given misleading titles, i.e. names derived from the Olympian gods.25

25

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De Decalogo 53–57; see also n. 12 and text thereto.

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Philo concludes that true piety entails not regarding any of the parts of the cosmos as an ‘autonomous god’, for ‘to pronounce (legein) as god something which previously did not exist and came into being from a certain point of time and does not have eternal existence is not sanctioned’ (§58).26 It is even worse if each of these is regarded as the ‘primal god’. This is like giving honours to the subordinate satraps rather than the Great King of Persia. In De Specialibus Legibus 1.13–20 the worship of the heavenly bodies is focused on even more specifically. Deut 4:19 is explicitly quoted and it is emphasized that people make the mistake of ascribing to them the causation of all events, i.e. in the practice of astrology. But we note that Philo does not feel the need to avoid calling them ‘gods’. People go astray in thinking that ‘these beings alone are gods’ (§16). So it must not be supposed that ‘the gods that sense-perception observes’ are autonomous (§19). What we must do is ‘give honour to the One who is not only God of gods both intelligible and sense-perceptible, but also Creator of all things’ (§20). Here the text of Deut 10:17 can be sensed in the background. Philo sees it as complementing the earlier text. Beside these exegetical aspects, the apologetic background of Philo’s discussion can also be strongly felt. In both passages discussion of the worship of the heavenly bodies is followed by a fiercer polemic against the makers of idols. The same sequence is found in the Wisdom of Solomon (13:10–14:11). Philo also agrees that the error involved in being a worshipper (therapeutēs) of the heavenly bodies is less than for the idolaters (De Decalogo 66). Unfortunately, unlike his Alexandrian colleague, he does not give us a reason for this. His main argument against the idolaters is that they worship lifeless images that are the products of human hands, so it may be surmised that he thinks the worship of the celestial beings at least involves recognition of their superior status. Elsewhere he is happy to report the view that these beings are ‘purely intelligent living beings’ (De Plantatione 12), by which he must mean, not that they only consist of mind (for then they could not be visible), but that they are purely rational. The same apologetic sequence is also found in the famous treatise De Vita Contemplativa, obviously inspired by the name of the Therapeutae.

26 This text is badly mistranslated by Colson in the Loeb edition of Philo’s works, as noted by H.M. Keizer, Life Time Entirety: A Study of AIŌN in Greek Literature and Philosophy, the Septuagint and Philo, diss. Amsterdam 1999, 240.

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They are ‘worshippers’ (as their name indicates), not of stars or idols, but of Being, the Platonizing epithet that Philo here uses for the Jewish God (§2). But this does not stop them from stretching their hands up to the rising sun as the climax of their nightly vigil (§89), a ritual act which Philo interprets symbolically as a request for truth and illumination. In the Allegorical treatises too there is a wealth of relevant material. One of the most intriguing texts is found at De Confusione 173. Philo expounds the puzzling plural in Genesis 11:7, where God is recorded as saying: ‘let us go down and confuse their tongue down there’. This does not mean that there is plurality in God, but he is surrounded by powers which form the intelligible cosmos as archetype for the visible one. Some people have been so struck with admiration for these worlds that they have deified them and felt no shame in calling them gods, including their most beautiful parts, the heavenly bodies, but Moses perceived their delusion when he says ‘Lord, Lord, king of the gods’. Here we have again the combination of the two Deuteronomy texts, even if the second is very inaccurately quoted. Philo hints strongly at what is his central insight in dealing with our theme, the doctrine of relative admiration for the created world. It is a philosophical doctrine, presuming the Platonic and Aristotelian theme of wonder as the source of philosophy, but it has obvious religious overtones, not to speak of a strong apologetic bias. But the central allegorical figure for our theme is Abraham, the Patriarch who departs from Chaldea, the land of his fathers. There is no doubt in Philo’s mind that the Chaldeans symbolize those people who honour and worship the visible world (and especially the heavenly bodies), attributing to it the ultimate causation of what happens on earth. They thus combine astrology with an erroneous theology.27 Abraham originally, therefore, was a ‘man of heaven’, but he metastasizes into a ‘man of God’ (De Gigantibus 62–64). At the same time he is the symbol of learning (mathēsis), and the chief thing he learns from his studies, which in the full allegory involve a detour through the analysis of human nature, is that God is the creator and ruler of visible and invisible reality. It is this intellectual conviction that enables him not to make the mistake of honouring and worshipping the cosmos and

27 See esp. De Migratione Abrahami 177–181, Quis Rerum Divinarum Heres Sit 97, De Congressu 50, De Abrahamo 69, Quaestiones in Genesim 3.1; mention of heavenly bodies at De Migratione 179, De Abrahamo 69, De Virtutibus 212.

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its parts instead of their maker. Abraham symbolizes the thinker who gets the doctrine of relative admiration right. There are a number of passages in which Philo apparently quite casually speaks about the heavenly bodies as visible or conspicuous or sense-perceptible gods, most notably at De Opificio Mundi 27, but also for example at De Providentia 2.84.28 In the De Aeternitate Mundi the cosmos is twice called a ‘visible god’ (§§10, 20, cf. §108). These passages have been controversial in the past, because they have been wrongly used to contest the authenticity of Philo’s philosophical treatises.29 A thorough analysis of these passages, which I cannot give now, will show that when Philo calls the cosmos a god, he as a rule does this imputatively, i.e. in attributing the phrase to someone else. A classic text in this regard is De congressu 103, where a symbolic interpretation of Leviticus 6:20 is given. The priests have learnt to rise above the apparent deity of the cosmos and worship the one who exists alone. The qualification indicated by the word dokēsei is crucial. In the case of the heavenly bodies, on the other hand, Philo’s practice differs. He is less reticent in calling them ‘gods’ or ‘divine images’.30 It would not be a mistake to regard this as a form of accommodation on the part of Philo the Jew.31 As an outstanding intellectual, he is of course aware of the Hellenistic cosmic religion. He argues against it firmly, but finds it acceptable and sometimes useful to take over some of its terminology. At the same time—and this is something I might have emphasized a bit more in my commentary on De Opificio Mundi—he is supported in his attitude to the ‘visible gods’ by the exegetical combination of the two Deuteronomy texts. We turn now, finally, to the Christian tradition, which not only develops out of Judaism (with a particularly strong link to Greek-speaking Judaism), but also shares its Sitz im Leben in the wider world of GrecoRoman culture. Early Christian literature and thought is a broad field. I will confine my treatment to just four themes.

It also occurs in other texts, e.g. Quaestiones in Genesim 4.157, De Opificio Mundi 144. The controversy has very recently been revived; see now K. Fuglseth, ‘The Reception of Aristotelian Features in Philo and the Authorship Problem of Philo’s De Aeternitate Mundi,’ in: D. Brakke et alii (eds), Beyond Reception: Mutual Influences between Antique Religion, Judaism, and Early Christianity (Early Christianity in the Context of Antiquity 1), Frankfurt 2006, 57–67, drawing on unpublished research by R. Skarsten. 30 De Opificio Mundi 55, De Abrahamo 159, cf. De Opificio Mundi 144. 31 As well observed by A.B. Scott, Origen and the Life of the Stars, Oxford 1991, 71. 28

29

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(1) In his famous attack on the unrighteous in the Letter to the Romans, Paul cites ‘those who have exchanged God’s truth for a lie and have honoured and worshipped the creation rather than the creator’ (1:25). In the context this is aimed primarily at idol worship, but elsewhere it is broadened to the ‘elements’ (stoicheia) of the cosmos.32 Paul does not focus on the heavenly bodies as such, but the continuity with Hellenistic-Jewish apologetic themes is palpable. Particularly impressive is the way that the Second century apologist Athenagoras combines these Pauline themes with the philosophical theme of the relative admiration of the cosmos which we already noted in Philo.33 ‘The cosmos is beautiful, he states, excelling in its size and the arrangement of the things in the ecliptic circle . . ., but not this but its maker must be worshipped’ (§16.1). The verb here is proskunēteon, familiar from Deut 4:19. Later in the chapter it is complemented by the verb therapeuō, when he states in the first person, ‘I do not abandon God to serve the elements, who can do no more than what they have been commanded’ (16.4). In the final section the argument is brought to a climax by invoking heaven as the cosmos’ most valued part: ‘If, then, I admire the heaven and the elements as works of skill but do not worship them as gods in the knowledge that they are subject to the law of dissolution, how can I call things gods of which I know that men were the makers’ (§16.5). There is nothing distinctively Christian here, unless we were to regard the Pauline terminology as such. (2) The Old Testament text Deut 4:19 continues to play a dominant role. In the early apology of Aristides it basically provides the framework for the entire work, as shown by the constant motif that ‘those who consider x to be gods have gone astray’, where x stands for all the various elements in turn, including the heavenly bodies. The word planaō and its related noun are used no less than 26 times in a short work.34 Similarly Clement in his overtly apologetic work, the Protrepticus, gives the same text prominence and links it with the views of the philosophers who confess that human beings have come into being most excellently Cf. also Gal 4:9, Col 2:8, 20. A direct link between Philo and Athenagoras cannot be proven. But Athenagoras was certainly acquainted with Hellenistic Jewish literature. See D.T. Runia, Philo in Early Christian Literature: A Survey (CRINT III 3), Assen/Minneapolis 1993, 105–07. 34 For the heaven see §4.2, the sun and moon §5. Note also the prominent role of the Chaldeans as worshippers of cosmic reality in this work; cf. §§2–3, 7.4. There is almost certainly a link to Hellenistic-Jewish apologetic. 32 33

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equipped for the contemplation of the heavens, but then make the mistake of worshipping the heavenly bodies.35 An exception is made for Plato, because he so obviously recognizes God the creator and the transcendent realm.36 Clement agrees with Wisdom that worshipping the stars is a lesser form of idolatry. In fact God granted the nations this form of piety so that they would not be completely godless, but would be able to ascend to knowledge of the true God.37 Here too the Jewish apologetic tradition is continued. (3) But perhaps the most interesting texts are where we have a three-way relation between Hellenism, Judaism and the new religion of Christianity. Among the early apologists there had been a comfortable assumption that Christians stood in the biblical tradition and could align themselves with Jewish polemic against star-worship and idolatry. But were they really obeying the first commandment of the Law if they worshipped Jesus as the Son of God? In Justin’s Dialogue with Trypho the Jewish interlocutor asks him to prove that there is a heteros theos (another God) beside the creator of the universe. And, he adds, don’t talk to me about the sun and the moon which God has allowed the gentiles to worship. He argues that in such texts, which refer yet again to Deut 4:19 (to which 10:17 is added), the word ‘god’ is used in an improper or metaphorical sense.38 In early Jewish-Christian debate worship of Jesus was a central issue, and here the Jews could claim that worshipping a dead human being was worse than worshipping the heavenly bodies, the concession that God has made to the gentiles. (4) Similar three-way discussions are also found in Origen. He has to defend the Jews against the ridiculous assertions of Celsus, who claims that they worship the heaven and angels in it, but not its most sacred parts, the sun and moon and stars’ (Contra Celsum 5.6). They obviously

35 Protrepticus 63.1 (where the Old Testament text is not recognized by Stählin), 66.2–5. 36 Protrepticus 67–70. 37 Stromata 6.110.3, 111.1. It should be noted that Clement perhaps assumes the reading συνεχώρησε instead of ἀπένειμεν at Deut 4:19; see the note of Dogniez and Harl, Le Deuteronome, (n. 18) 138–39. 38 Dialogue with Trypho 55.1–2, where the word παραχρώμενοι (conjectured from ὥσπερ χρώμενοι in the ms) recalls the rhetorical figure of katachrēsis. On the use of this figure in theological contexts see D.T. Runia, ‘Naming and Knowing: Themes in Philonic Theology with Special Reference to the De mutatione nominum’, in: R. van den Broek et alii (eds), Knowledge of God in the Graeco-Roman world (EPRO 112), Leiden 1988, 82–9.

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do not do this, because it would involve them in transgressing the Law, and the Christians follow them in the same refusal (5.10). No distinction is made here between Jews and Christians in their theology, but in an interesting text in Origen’s Commentary on John 1:1 he does make a four-fold distinction between the people of the election who have the God of the universe, the Christians who have the Son of God, those who worship the heavenly bodies and so go astray, but not as badly as the fourth group who worship idols and attach themselves to the socalled gods who are not gods at all.39 All of this is now quite familiar. We note, however, and this is our final observation, that Origen in his response to Celsus on the heavenly bodies makes much of the fact that they are visible, twice very deliberately saying that the Greeks call them ‘sense-perceptible gods’ (4.56, 5.10). It is unreasonable, he claims, that Christians should stand in awe of the visible light of the celestial bodies when they themselves possess the ‘light of the world’, i.e. the Logos (5.10). If there were any grounds for awe and admiration, it should be on account of the intellectual light that the stars as higher beings possess. This they may well have from their own free choice, whereas their physical light they received from the creator. Even though Origen is arguing fiercely against the pagan Celsus, he does in fact make a concession to Greek philosophical cosmology, but not to Greek cosmic religion. The stars are higher beings, of that there is no doubt,40 but they pray to God through his Son, so why should we pray to them? If our Saviour said ‘why do you call me good? there is none good but one, God the Father,’ how much more would the sun say to its worshippers, ‘why do you worship me? you shall worship the Lord your God, and him only shall you serve!’ (5.11, citing Mark 10:18, Matt 4:10). In his long scholarly career Piet van der Horst has always been fascinated by the phenomenon of religion and in particularly by the way that religious communities distill their experience in texts. In this paper I have shown how the subject of the status of the heavenly bodies gave rise to conflicting views, opposition and accommodation in the case of three different groups of people. Sadly, conflict occurs only too often between differing religious groups. Our honorand has also been very 39 Commentary on John 2.24–27; there are not five groups here, as the parallel with §§28–30 (on groups attached to Logos) makes clear. 40 But see further the extended discussion of Scott, Origen and the Life of the Stars, 137 on Origen’s view that the heavenly bodies, in being corporeal, must have sinned.

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preoccupied with the capacity that religion has to stir up enmity and violence between people who live in close proximity to each other. My paper has focused on texts rather than historical events. But it would be a mistake to regard the conflicting views which I have analysed as merely textual. They relate to interactions between real people and as such they could be deadly. Piet van der Horst has recently written extensively about the ‘first pogrom’ against the Jews that took place in Alexandria in 38 ce.41 It was sparked off by the desire on the part of the Emperor Gaius to be called a god and have his image placed in Jewish synagogues (Philo, Legatio ad Gaium 162–177, In Flaccum 41). He also identified himself with other gods such as Hermes, Apollo and Ares and dressed himself up to resemble them (Legatio ad Gaium 93–113). It is only a small step to the conflation of imperial and cosmic cults. In his impressive study of Christ the true Sun, Martin Wallraff has reminded us that the cult of Sol invictus, which became part of the State religion in the third centuries, led to the persecution and martyrdom of Christians in the reign of Diocletian.42 So the question of whom do you worship and whom do you serve can be a grim business, even in the case of the relatively bookish cosmic religion. No doubt this has to do with the claims of ultimate allegiance that religions make on their devotees, as we noted above. Rationalists may bewail this characteristic that religions have and wish it to go away. But events in recent history have taught us that this is no more than wishful thinking. May Piet van der Horst long continue to extend our knowledge in this central but fractious domain of human experience.

41 See esp. P.W. van der Horst, Philo’s Flaccus: The First Pogrom (Philo of Alexandria Commentary Series 2), Leiden/Boston 2003. 42 M. Wallraff, Christus Verus Sol: Sonnenverehrung und Christentum in der Spätantike ( JAC Erganzungsband 32), Münster 2001, 35.

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PART TWO

THE IMPACT OF THE INDIVIDUAL

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AMMIANUS MARCELLINUS’ JUDGEMENT OF JULIAN’S PIETY Jan den Boeft Around the spring equinox of 362, while he was residing at Constantinople, the emperor Julian wrote a theological treatise in honour of the Mother of the gods.1 Its final chapter consists of a prayer to the goddess, which ends with these words: δίδου πᾶσι μὲν ἀνθρώποις εὐδαιμονίαν, ἧς τὸ κεφάλαιον ἡ τῶν θεῶν γνῶσίς ἐστι, κοινῇ δὲ τῷ Ῥωμαίων δήμῳ μάλιστα μὲν ἀποτρίψασθαι τῆς ἀθεότητος τὴν κηλῖδα, πρὸς δὲ καὶ τὴν τύχην εὐμενῆ συνδιακυβερνῶσαν αὐτῷ τὰ τῆς ἀρχῆς πολλὰς χιλιάδας ἐτῶν, ἐμοὶ δὲ καρπὸν γενέσθαι τῆς περὶ σὲ θεραπείας ἀλήθειαν ἐν τοῖς περὶ θεῶν δόγμασιν, ἐν θεουργίᾳ τελειότητα, πάντων ἔργων, οἷς προσερχόμεθα περὶ τὰς πολιτικὰς καὶ στρατιωτικὰς τάξεις, ἀρετὴν μετὰ τῆς ἀγαθῆς τύχης καὶ τὸ τοῦ βίου πέρας ἄλυπόν τε καὶ εὐδόκιμον μετὰ τῆς ἀγαθῆς ἐλπίδος ἐπὶ τῇ παρ᾽ ὑμᾶς πορείᾳ (180 b–c).

Grant to all men happiness, the essence of which is the knowledge of the gods; grant to the Roman people collectively above all to rub off the stain of godlessness, and give it besides the favour of fortune to help it guide its empire for many thousands of years; grant me as the fruit of my service of you truth in the doctrines about the gods, perfection in theurgy, and in all actions which I undertake in the affairs of state and army virtue and good luck. May the end of my life be painless and glorious in the good hope2 of a voyage towards you, the gods.3

These are the words of a man who in spite of his Christian education had, as he said in a letter some six months later, ‘for twelve years walked on the road I was speaking of, with the help of the gods’.4 This road

1 There are two recent Italian editions with translation and commentary: J. Fontaine, C. Prato & A. Marcone, Giuliano Imperatore: Alla madre degli dei e altri discorsi, Milano 1987; V. Ugenti, Giuliano imperatore: Alla madre degli dei, Galatina 1992. 2 Both Marcone and Ugenti note the Eleusinian flavour of this phrase. 3 See J. den Boeft, ‘Knowledge of the gods is the essence of human happiness’, in: P.W. van der Horst (ed.), Aspects of Religious Contact and Conflict in the Ancient World, Utrecht 1995, 17–24. 4 Epistle 111. See for the dating of Julian’s letters the various introductory sections in Bidez’ edition (Paris 1924), which is used in this paper, the numbering of the letters

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was the (restoration of ) traditional polytheistic religiosity. Judging by this unique piece of information provided by Julian himself, he bade his personal farewell to Christianity when he was twenty years old.5 Understandably, he was not in a position to profess his religious transformation openly. Only when he had reached supreme monarchical power at the death of his cousin Constantius II on November 3, 361, his conviction could be shown publicly and also be made operational in a sustained programme of resuscitating and revitalizing pagan religious traditions. One can follow its development in the letters which he sent from December 361 onwards from Constantinople and Antioch to various addressees. There were more priorities on Julian’s list of actions—above all the preparation of the Persian expedition—but the restoration of true θεοσέβεια loomed large in his plans. Its demise had been caused by the Christians, or rather, as Julian preferred to call them contemptuously, the Galilaeans.6 Their madness, superstition and ungodliness7 had triumphed, but now the boot was on the other foot. After fifty years a convinced and ardent supporter of traditional religion was back on the imperial throne. During his stay at Antioch in the winter of 362–363 he wrote an attack on Christianity in three books, entitled Κατὰ Γαλιλαίων. According to Libanius he proved himself a competent polemicist, who even surpassed Porphyry.8 Understandably, Against the Galilaeans has not survived, but enough fragments have been

included. Consult also the handy chronological survey in M. Caltabiano, L’epistolario di Giuliano imperatore, Naples 1991, 279–84. 5 Λήθη δὲ ἔστω τοῦ σκότους ἐκείνου, ‘that darkness must be forgotten’, he said about the ‘Christian’ part of his life in the first chapter of his Praise of King Helios (131 a). Ammianus Marcellinus uses much vaguer phrases: adhaerere cultui Christiano fingebat, a quo iam pridem occulte desciverat (21.2.4), ‘he pretended to adhere to the Christian religion, from which he had secretly apostatized long before’; a rudimentis pueritiae primis inclinatior erat erga numinum cultum (22.5.1), ‘from his earliest boyhood (he) had nursed an inclination towards the worship of the pagan gods’ (tr. Hamilton). See for a discussion of Julian’s religious career K. Rosen, ‘Kaiser Julian auf dem Weg vom Christentum zum Heidentum’, JAC 40 (1997), 126–46, and, with special attention to the influence of (Neoplatonic) philosophy, J. Bouffartigue, ‘Philosophie et antichristianisme chez l’empereur Julien’, in: M. Narcy & E. Rebillard (eds), Hellénisme et Christianisme, Villeneuve d’Ascq 2004, 111–31. 6 See for Julian’s predilection for this appellation Kurmann’s commentary on Gregory of Nazianzus’ Oratio 4.76 (A. Kurmann, Gregor von Nazianz, Oratio 4 gegen Julian: Ein Kommentar, Basel 1988, ad locum), and S. Scicolone, ‘Le accezioni dell’ appellativo “Galilei” in Giuliano’, Aevum 56 (1982), 71–80. 7 ἀπόνοια (Epistle 46.404 c), δεισιδαιμονία (Epistle 54.380 d; Epistle 111.435 a), they were δυσσεβεῖς (Epistle 89a.454 b; Epistle 89b.305 b). 8 Oratio 18.178.

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preserved, especially in Cyrillus of Alexandria’s reply to the work, to notice at least two characteristics: the author’s thorough knowledge of the Bible and Christian doctrine and his contempt, indeed his hatred, of Christianity. Restoring the old cults entailed measures which could only result in serious consequences for the position of Christianity in general and individual Christians in particular. Julian’s guiding principles are clearly expressed in a letter to the praeses (governor) of the province Euphratensis, Atarbius: Ἐγὼ μὰ τοὺς θεοὺς οὔτε κτείνεσθαι τοὺς Γαλιλαίους οὔτε τύπτεσθαι παρὰ τὸ δίκαιον οὔτ᾿ ἄλλο τι πάσχειν κακὸν βούλομαι, προτιμᾶσθαι μέντοι τοὺς θεοσεβεῖς αὐτῶν καὶ πάνυ φημὶ δεῖν˙ διὰ μὲν γὰρ τὴν τῶν Γαλιλαίων μωρίαν ὀλίγου δεῖν ἅπαντα ἀνετράπη, διὰ δὲ τὴν τῶν θεῶν εὐμένειαν σωζόμεθα πάντες. Ὅθεν χρὴ τιμᾶν τοὺς θεοὺς καὶ τοὺς θεοσεβεῖς ἄνδρας τε καὶ πόλεις. (Epistle 83)

I affirm by the gods that I forbid the Christians to be killed or unjustly beaten or to suffer any evil; however, I firmly assert that the god-fearing should be preferred to them. Because of the Galilaeans’ folly almost everything was overturned, because of the gods’ favour we are all being saved. For this reason we must honour the gods and the god-fearing men and towns.

The implication is clear: Christians should be put back in their position of a deviant minority. The well-being of the empire and its citizens is only guaranteed by true religion. Such a conviction also inspired the remarkable Berufsverbot of June 17, 362. The official text (Codex Theodosianus 13.3.5) only requires teachers to excel in moral respect and in the domain of rhetoric. However, in Epistle 61c Julian makes his intentions fully clear. In the usual school system of his days the writings of great authors of the Hellenic past were the basic texts that were read, paraphrased and interpreted. According to the emperor it would be ridiculous that those who were teaching these courses were at the same time feeling contempt for the gods who are honoured by the great authors. Teaching one’s pupils subject matter which one does not regard as true is absurd. So Julian, in fact, entirely agrees with Tertullian’s similar conclusions reached from a strict Christian conviction in De Idololatria 10. The devout neo-pagan and the uncompromising Christian polemicist were both convinced of the incompatibility of paganism and Christianity. In the case of Julian this resulted in more than verbal warfare: he was in a position to suit the action to the word. Even if he himself abstained from all menaces of physical violence,

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there is something to be said for Bowersock’s cool verdict: ‘Julian’s policies were edging close to persecution’.9 Julian’s religious programme was supported by reflections of Neoplatonic stamp. This is quite clear in his writings and especially in those on the Mother of the gods and King Helios. A succinct and more systematic account was composed by one of his associates, about whose identity there is no scholarly consensus.10 The title of the brief treatise is Περὶ θεῶν καὶ κόσμου. Its tiny proportions contrast rather sharply with the mass of impressive theological literature produced by Christians, yet it illustrates the serious intellectual aspects of Julian’s revival movement. Moreover, knowledge of the gods was embedded in a larger concept of genuine Hellenic education. In his letter on the incompatibility of Christian faith and teaching the classics Julian said that in the eyes of Homer, Hesiod, Demosthenes and others θεοὶ πάσης ἡγοῦνται παιδείας (Epistle 61c.423 a), ‘the gods are the guides for all education’. This care for a theological foundation of the religious revival should be taken very seriously, but at the same time we have to bear in mind that the religions of Greece and Rome primarily consisted of traditional cults. Neither the Greek nor the Latin language had one specific term to denote religion. Continuing what former generations had practised in the indispensable communication with divine powers in prayer, sacrifice and other cultic activities was the normal and wellnigh natural custom. This is beautifully expressed by Cicero’s third personage partaking in the discussion ‘about the nature of the gods’, the Sceptic Cotta. At the beginning of the third book of De Natura Deorum Cotta affirms that he is fully aware of his task ‘to uphold the ideas about the immortal gods which we have received from our ancestors, and the rites and ceremonies and duties of religion’ (3.5). It is out of the question that any theory of whichever quality could change his mind about this fundament. The traditional cultus deorum prevails upon any attempt to render account of religion in a coherent system of a philosophical or

9 G.W. Bowersock, Julian the Apostate, London 1978, 91. An even more negative picture is drawn in S. Scicolone, ‘Aspetti della persecuzione giulianea’, Rivista di Storia della Chiesa in Italia 33 (1979), 420–34. 10 There are two candidates: Flavius Sallustius (Prosopography of the Later Roman Empire I, Sallustius 5), and Saturninius Secundus Salutius (PLRE I, Secundus 3). See for the most recent discussions of this question J.L. Desnier, ‘Salutius—Salustius’, Revue des Études Anciennes 85 (1983), 53–65; E.C. Clarke, ‘Communication, Human and Divine: Saloustios Reconsidered’, Phronesis 43 (1998) 326–50 (especially 347–50). Both authors opt for the second candidate.

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theological nature. Julian was obviously more optimistic about the possibilities of Neoplatonic philosophy, yet he too subscribed to the basic importance of the actual cult of the gods. Having described Julian’s arrival at Constantinople in November 361, the famous orator Libanius begins the survey of his measures and policies in various departments: ἀπὸ τῶν θεῶν τῶν τῆς πόλεως τῆς θεραπείας ἤρχετο, ‘he began with the cult of the gods of the city’ (Oratio 18.121). Libanius summarizes Julian’s program in this formula: ὥσπερ φύγαδα τὴν εὐσέβειαν κατήγαγε, ‘he brought piety as it were back from exile’ (Oratio 18.126). In a letter to his beloved master, the pagan philosopher and theurgist Maximus, which must be dated to late 361, shortly after he had revealed his devotion to traditional polytheism, Julian himself writes: θρησκεύομεν τοὺς θεοὺς ἀναφανδὸν καὶ τὸ πλῆθος τοῦ συγκατελθόντος μοι στρατοπέδου θεοσεβές ἐστιν (Epistle 26.415 c)

We are openly worshipping the gods, and the majority of the army which has followed me is god-fearing.

Such a restoration entailed the repair of places of worship. There is a reasonable amount of evidence about specific measures taken by Julian in this respect. The reader is kindly invited to consult the ‘standard’ commentary on Ammianus Marcellinus’ Res Gestae ad 22.5.2,11 where this evidence is critically surveyed. Here I only refer to an inscription in Thessalonica in which Julian is called ἀνανεῶτης τῶν ἱέρων, which may well be the equivalent of templorum restaurator on an inscription found in the north of modern Israel.12 To these two the more general formula on a Numidian inscription can be added: restitutor libertatis et Romanae religionis (CIL VIII 4326 = Conti nr. 167).13 ‘The shock troops of Julian’s reform were to be the priests’, to quote a striking phrase of Polymnia Athanassiadi. With their assistance the emperor ‘hoped to lay the foundations of a powerful and universal pagan Church’.14 This may be far too strongly put, but no doubt Julian fully realized the importance of Christianity’s vastly superior organization; in this respect the Church was a unique phenomenon in the ancient world. See note 20. See SEG 31 (1981) 641.2–3 (= S. Conti, Die Inschriften Kaiser Julians, Stuttgart 2004, nr. 95) and L’Année Épigraphique 1969/1970, nr. 631 (Conti nr. 18) respectively. 13 A recent survey of the institutional aspects of the restoration is provided by S. Olszaniec, ‘Restitutor Romanae religionis: Kaiser Julian als Erneuerer der heidnischen Bräuche’, Eos 86 (1999), 77–102. 14 P. Athanassiadi, Julian: An Intellectual Biography, London 19922, 181. 11 12

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Polytheism’s concentration on the traditional cults itself showed how far it lagged behind: such cults were in majority local or at most regional affairs. Paganism had no synods, no network, no unifying doctrine: plurality was its hallmark. Julian tried to cope with the problem by devising an efficient organization and by establishing intellectual and moral standards which priests had to live up to. In a large fragment, edited by Bidez as Epistle 89b, Julian inter alia sketches a programme of edifying reading: priests must refrain from Archilochus, Hipponax and novels; among the philosophers Epicurus and Pyrrho are taboo for them; they should rather learn by heart hymns in honour of the gods. Visiting theatrical shows is out of the question, as is being on familiar terms with actors and charioteers. There are two basic requisites for becoming a priest: τό τε φιλόθεον καὶ τὸ φιλάνθρωπον. The latter of these should manifest itself in turning to the people in need. Neglecting social welfare had played into the hands of the godless Galilaeans, who had made philanthropy a spearhead of their policy. Epistle 84, addressed to Arsacius, archpriest of Galatia, goes further into this aspect of Julian’s recommendations. Arsacius is to establish ξενοδοχεῖα, ‘hostels’, in each town, ἵν᾽ ἀπολαύσωσιν οἱ ξένοι τῆς παρ᾽ ἡμῶν φιλανθρωπίας (430 b), ‘in order that strangers can benefit from our philanthropy’. However, recently some telling arguments against the authenticity of this letter, which is only preserved by the church historian Sozomenus, have been put forward.15 In the final reckoning, Julian’s reflections and measures concerning the quality of the priests and their organisational role were directed at what was for him the heart of the matter: a pious and proper practising of traditional polytheistic cult. This consisted in a variety of rituals and festivals, but its most characteristic and conspicuous part had always been blood sacrifice. Textual and archeological evidence abounds. Acts 14:13 will readily occur to those who are well-versed in the Scriptures: at Lystra the priest of Zeus brought oxen and prepared to sacrifice them to Zeus and Hermes, whom the people had recognized in Barnabas and Paul respectively.16 Throughout antiquity a deviant view had been voiced, especially in the Pythagorean tradition, and perhaps most clearly worded in Porphyry’s long treatise Περὶ ἀποχῆς ἐμψύχων (De 15 P. van Nuffelen, ‘Deux fausses lettres de Julien l’Apostat (la lettre aux juifs, Ep. 51 [Wright], et la lettre à Arsacius, Ep. 84 [Bidez])’, VC 56 (2002), 131–50. 16 See R. Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, London 1986, 99–100 for an instructive analysis of this event.

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abstinentia), in which the author had inter alia incorporated some large passages from Theophrastus’ Περὶ εὐσεβείας with the same purport.17 The mainstream tradition remained faithful to blood sacrifice, but in the Christiana tempora of the fourth century it was over the hill. Constantine had already aired his aversion and in the course of time explicit prohibitions were to follow. This was obviously not without effect, but there were also other causes for the decline. In the concluding section of his enlightening survey of the matter Scott Bradbury writes: ‘Sacrifice did not decline according to any uniform pattern, since there was a wide diversity in local customs and the impact of imperial and episcopal authority varied from region to region and city to city. Public sacrifices and communal feasting had declined as the result of a decline in the prestige of pagan priesthoods and a shift in patterns of euergetism in civic life. That shift would have occurred on a lesser scale even without the conversion of Constantine, but it was accelerated by the hostility of the Christian court toward pagan cult’.18 Without doubt the most conspicuous part of Julian’s reform is his ardent endeavour to bring about a radical change in this situation. In the letter to Maximus, from which a few words were already quoted above, he jubilantly writes: ἡμεῖς φανερῶς βουθυτοῦμεν· ἀπεδώκαμεν τοῖς θεοῖς χαριστήρια περὶ ἡμῶν ἑκατόμβας πολλάς (415 a)

We are openly sacrificing oxen; we have offered many hecatombs to the gods as thank-offerings for their taking care of me.

In his necrology of Julian the famous orator Libanius says: πανταχοῦ βωμοὶ καὶ πῦρ καὶ αἷμα καὶ κνίσσα καὶ καπνός (Oratio 18.126), ‘everywhere altars, fire, blood, fat and smoke’. Later, in his autobiography he depicted his own joy at Julian’s restoration program: καὶ ἐγέλασά τε καὶ ἐσκίρτησα καὶ σύν ἡδονῇ λόγους καὶ συνέθηκα καὶ ἔδειξα, βωμῶν μὲν ἀπειληφότων αἷμα, καπνοῦ φέροντος πρὸς οὐρανὸν τὴν κνίσσαν, θεῶν δὲ ἑορταῖς τιμωμένων, ὥν ὀλίγοι τινὲς ἐπιστήμονες λελειμμένοι γέροντες (Oratio 1.119) See for a historical survey J. Haussleiter, Der Vegetarismus in der Antike, Berlin 1935. 18 S. Bradbury, ‘Julian’s Pagan Revival and the Decline of Blood Sacrifice’, Phoenix 49 (1995), 331–56. This development is placed in the wider perspective of a transformation of religiosity in general during the fourth century in G.G. Stroumsa, La fin du sacrifice: Les mutations religieuses de l’Antiquité tardive, Paris 2005; see especially ch. 3: ‘Transformations du rituel’ (and see Stroumsa’s contribution to the present volume). 17

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jan den boeft I laughed and danced, joyfully composed and delivered my orations, for the altars received their blood offerings, smoke carried the savour of burnt sacrifice up to heaven, the gods were honoured with their festivals, which only a few old men were left to remember (tr. Norman).

The hyperbolic character of such statements should not be overlooked; nevertheless the Christians cannot but have been provoked. Julian was fully aware of the rift between the Church and his reviving of the sacrifices of animals. In a passage of his Against the Galilaeans he explicitly blames his opponents for refusing to bring victims to the altars and to sacrifice. He also chides them for being unable to understand that God’s acceptance of Abel’s sacrifice and his refusal of Cain’s offering were precisely caused by the former’s sacrifice of his first-born sheep and their fat. The reason for God’s decision was the following: τῶν ἐπὶ γῆς ὄντων τὰ μέν ἐστιν ἔμψυχα, τὰ δὲ ἄψυχα, τιμιώτερα δὲ τῶν ἀψύχων ἐστὶ τὰ ἔμψυχα τῷ ζωντι καὶ ζωῆς αἰτίῳ θεῷ, καθὸ καὶ ζωῆς μετείληφε καὶ ψυχῆς οἰκειότερα· διὰ τοῦτο τῷ τελείαν προσάγοντι θυσίαν ὁ θεὸς ἐπηυφράνθη ( fr. 84 Masaracchia, 21–26)

Some of the things on earth are animate, others are inanimate. The animate are more precious to the living God, who is also the cause of life, insofar as they partake of life and are more akin to soul. For this reason God rejoiced in the man bringing a perfect sacrifice.

This ‘theological’ foundation of bloody sacrifice tallies with the section devoted to the subject in On the gods and the world. There the author explains that between the life of the gods and human life a mean (μεσότης) is needed. Otherwise communion cannot be established, καὶ διὰ τοῦτο ζῷα θύουσιν ἄνθρωποι (16.2), ‘for this reason men sacrifice living beings’. So Julian’s insistence on the reintroduction of blood sacrifice was both historically and theologically founded.19 Julian’s own writings provide a large and indispensable part of the evidence about his life and career. But for his official career as Caesar 19 See N. Belayche, ‘ “Partager la table des dieux”: L’empereur Julien et les sacrifices’, RHR 218 (2001) 457–86, or the English version ‘Sacrifice and Theory of Sacrifice during the Pagan Reaction: Julian the Emperor’, in: A.I. Baumgarten, Sacrifice in Religious Experience (Numen Book Series 93), Leiden 2002, 101–26. In this well-documented paper, which amounts to a scholarly ‘apologia pro Iuliano’, the author aims to bring out the cohesion of Roman sacrificial traditions and Julian’s Neoplatonic convictions with his remarkable devotion to blood sacrifice. The plea would not have convinced Ammianus Marcellinus, and may not appear fully persuasive to modern scholars, but all those interested in Julian’s religiosity should study Belayche’s argument.

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and Augustus the contemporary historian Ammianus Marcellinus is an even more valuable source. Julian is the protagonist of the best part of what is left of Ammianus’ Res Gestae, books 14–31, in which the period 353–378 is dealt with.20 He enters the scene in chapter 8 of book 15, where it is described how the twenty-four-year-old was unexpectedly nominated Caesar and presented to the troops in Gaul by his older cousin, the Augustus Constantius II (November 6, 355), and he takes his leave in chapter 3 of book 25, on his deathbed, after he had been fatally wounded in a battle some ninety miles to the north of Ctesiphon, near the Tigris, during the katabasis of his Persian expedition ( June 26, 363). Even after this he is in a way still present, when the author, explicitly or implicitly, compares him with his much less competent successors. For there cannot be any uncertainty about Ammianus’ admiration for Julian. The necrology in chapter 4 of book 25 even begins with vir profecto heroicis connumerandus ingeniis, ‘a man who without question should be included in the list of great men of heroic stature’. It should immediately be added that this admiration did not impair the historian’s critical judgment. On the contrary, in a number of cases he expresses his disagreement with a specific action of Julian, sometimes implicitly, often in quite explicit terms. The most striking example is his categorical condemnation of the Berufsverbot for Christian teachers: illud autem erat inclemens obruendum perenni silentio (22.10.7), ‘that was a harsh measure, which deserves to be buried in eternal silence’, a judgment which he repeated in the necrology (25.4.20). This necrology essentially consists of two parts, a large one on Julian’s virtues (25.4.1–15) and a shorter one (25.4.16–21) on his vitia, such as his impulsiveness and his longing for public favour. Astonishingly, precisely Julian’s predilection for blood sacrifice as the hallmark of his restoration of pagan cult, is criticized and even ridiculed. The relevant passage runs as follows: superstitiosus magis quam sacrorum legitimus observator, innumeras sine parsimonia pecudes mactans, ut aestimaretur, si revertisset de Parthis, boves iam defuturos, Marci illius similis Caesaris, in quem id accipimus dictum: οἱ βόες οἱ λευκοὶ Μάρκῳ τῷ Καίσαρι χαίρειν./ἂν πάλι νικήσῃ, ἄμμες ἀπωλόμεθα (25.4.17)

20 Complete editions most in use are those of Clark (Berlin 1915), Rolfe (LCL 1935–1939), Seyfarth (Leipzig 1978), various editors in the bilingual Budé series (Paris 1968–1999). Between 1935 and 1982 P. de Jonge published philological and historical commentaries on the individual books 14–19 of the Res Gestae; this series is being continued by a team consisting of J. den Boeft, D. den Hengst and H.C. Teitler (books 20–21), and the same with J.W. Drijvers (books 25–26).

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jan den boeft In the cult of the gods he was deviant rather than keeping to the correct rules, sacrificing countless animals without restraint. As a result people reckoned that on his return from Persia oxen would be lacking. In this he was comparable to the emperor Marcus, about whom this epigram was written: ‘We, white oxen, greet the emperor Marcus. If you win another victory, we have had it’.

In 22.12.6 Ammianus had reported on Julian’s numerous and huge sacrifices during his stay at Antioch in more neutral terms, but in the necrology he throws off all the shackles and, so to speak, joins in the fun poked by the Antiochians at Julian’s thyomania: victimarius pro sacricola dicebatur (22.14.3), ‘instead of a devotee he was called a slaughterer’.21 The most remarkable term in Ammianus’ verdict on Julian’s religiosity is superstitiosus, which expresses deviation from the standards of correct religion. To make this clear, it is necessary to go into the meaning and the connotations of superstitio and superstitiosus in the religious history of the Romans. Fortunately, in the past decades some instructive studies on this subject were published.22 The critical surveys presented by the respective authors are very helpful for anyone trying to come to terms with the function(s) of the terms in a certain period. In the following I shall concentrate on those aspects of their history before Ammianus Marcellinus that are directly relevant for the historian’s use of them. In a famous passage of Cicero’s De Natura Deorum, book 2, the Stoic personage Balbus remarks that the Roman ancestors had separated superstitionem a religione, viz. in the following sense:

21 Julian’s stay at Antioch ( July, 362 until March 5, 363) was poisoned by the mutual dislike of the emperor and the populace. Julian gave vent to his irritations in his satirical Misopogon (Beard-hater). His personal participation in sacrifice is described by Libanius, Oratio 12.82: He did not remain aloft on his imperial throne, worshipping the gods by means of other people’s hands, ἀλλ᾽ αὐτουργεῖ καὶ περιτρέχει καὶ σχίζης ἅπτεται καὶ μάχαιραν δέχεται καὶ ὄρνις ἀνέρρηξε καὶ τὰ ἔνδον οὐκ ἠγνόησε, ‘he performs the sacrifice in person; he busies himself on the preparations, gets the wood, wields the knife, opens the birds and inspects the entrails’ (tr. Norman). 22 S. Calderone, ‘Superstitio’, ANRW I-2, Berlin 1972, 377–96; D. Grodzynski, ‘Superstitio’, Revue des études anciennes 76 (1974), 36–60; L.F. Janssen, ‘Die Bedeutungsentwicklung von superstitio/superstes’, Mnemosyne 28 (1975), 135–88; Idem, ‘Superstitio and the Persecution of the Christians’, VC 33 (1979), 131–59; D. Lührmann, ‘Superstitio—die Beurteilung des frühen Christentums durch die Römer’, TZ 42 (1986), 193–213; M.R. Salzman, ‘Superstitio in the Codex Theodosianus and the Persecution of Pagans’, VC 41 (1987), 172–88; M. Sachot, ‘Religio/Superstitio: Historique d’une subversion et d’un retournement’, RHR 208 (1991), 355–94.

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nam qui totos dies precabantur et immolabant, ut sibi sui liberi superstites essent, superstitiosi sunt appellati, quod nomen patuit postea latius; qui autem omnia quae ad cultum deorum pertinerent diligenter retractarent et tamquam relegerent sunt dicti religiosi ex relegendo. (2.72) those who spent entire days on praying and sacrificing, in order that their own children would outlive themselves, were called ‘superstitiosi’ and this term later came to cover a wider field; those who carefully reviewed and, as it were, ‘read over’ everything pertaining to the cult of the gods were called ‘religiosi’ from the verb ‘relegere’.

It is out of place here to discuss the etymology of religio(sus), which was later vehemently attacked by Lactantius from his specific religious viewpoint.23 Neither is it useful for the present subject to deal with the most probable etymology of superstitiosus according to modern methods of historical linguistics. We should rather turn our attention to the fact that the quoted passage shows that in discussing religious behaviour in the late Roman republic it had become indispensable to keep superstitio and religio well apart, the former being a negative term in this domain, the latter a positive one: alterum vitii nomen, alterum laudis.24 In two richly documented papers L.F. Janssen has taken the putative relation between superstitio and superstes as the guideline of the Roman rejection of superstitio, which was felt not to be healthy for the wellbeing of the Roman commonwealth: it ‘only sought for the rescue of the individual, who tried to break away from the community of the nomen Romanum’.25 That was exactly the dangerous error of the Christians, so that Pliny, Tacitus and Suetonius could denote Christianity as superstitio prava et immodica (Epistle 10.96.8), exitiabilis (Annales 15.44.3), nova et malefica (Nero 16.2) respectively. These are examples of superstitio characterizing ‘les mauvaises croyances de groupes entiers et non plus celles d’hommes isolés’ (Grodzynski 48) or, in Sachot’s terms, ‘un système de convictions erronnées’ (378). In the Christiana tempora of the fourth century the roles had been switched and polytheism was now denoted as superstitio. In a fierce attack on Cicero’s explanation of the difference between superstitiosus and religiosus Lactantius scornfully points out how unsatisfactory Cicero’s definitions are. They boil down to a mere question of quantity, and why would a larger amount of religious actions be wrong? Si una hostia placabilis, placabiliores utique hostiae plures, 23 24 25

Divinae Institutiones, book 4, ch. 28. Cicero, De Natura Deorum 2.72: ‘the words denote a vice and a merit respectively’. Janssen, ‘Superstitio and the Persecution’, 142.

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quia multiplicata obsequia demerentur potius quam offendunt (Divinae Institutiones 4.28.7), ‘when one sacrificial victim can gain a god’s favour, surely more victims will be more successful in this: multiplied piety produces merit rather than offense’. The correct delineation of the two terms is far more satisfying: Nimirum religio veri cultus est, superstitio falsi (DI 4.28.11), ‘Evidently “religio” is the cult of what is true, “superstitio” of what is false’. Of course, this lucid formula is not the end of all discussions. In the fourth century superstitio still occurs in various specific senses. An interesting ‘scholarly’ case can be found in Marius Victorinus’ comment on Cicero, De Inventione 2.165.26 There Cicero argues that one should not only avoid the opposites of the four cardinal virtues, e.g. cowardice in the case of courage, but also those qualities quae propinqua videntur et finitima esse, absunt autem longissime, ‘which seem akin and close to these, but are really far removed from them’ (tr. Hubbell). Cicero adds some brief illustrations of this category, inter alia superstitio, quae religioni propinqua est. Marius Victorinus makes this more explicit: religio virtus est, inreligiositas vitium; atque religioni vicina, vitium tamen, superstitio nominatur, quae etiam ipsa est vitanda. In a note to Virgil’s Georgica 1.269, Servius Auctus develops this definition: religiosi enim esse dicuntur, qui faciendarum praetermittendarumque rerum divinarum secundum morem civitatis dilectum habent nec se superstitionibus implicant, ‘we all know that those people are called ‘religious’, who in matters concerning the gods understand what has to be done and what should be left undone in accordance with the custom of society, and who are not involved in unacceptable religious practices’.27 These examples seem to concern primarily individual behaviour, but in some laws of the Codex Theodosianus superstitio denotes a heresy: ad nullam tamen ecclesiam haereticae superstitionis turba conveniat, ‘However, this crowd of heretical superstition shall not convene at any church’ (16.5.10, June 20, 383, tr. Pharr); Eunomianae superstitionis clerici seu Montanistae, ‘the clerics of the Eunomian and the Montanist superstitions’ (16.5.34, March 4, 398, tr. Pharr). The term is also used for traditional pagan cults, as in 16.7.6 (March 23, 396) about Christians who idolorum se superstitione impia maculaverint, ‘have defiled themselves with the impious superstition of idolatry’ (tr. Pharr). Concerning some earlier fourth century cases Michele Salzman has argued that superstitio C. Halm, Rhetores Latini Minores, Leipzig 1863, p. 302.29 sqq. The commentator Servius was active in the early fifth century, but his learning is usually regarded as deriving from Aelius Donatus’ commentary on Virgil, written in the fourth century. 26 27

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was an ambiguous term, which could be understood in two ways. A good example is 16.10.2 (some time in 341), which begins with these words: cesset superstitio, sacrificiorum aboleatur insania, ‘superstition shall cease, the madness of sacrifices shall be abolished’ (tr. Pharr). According to Salzman this law ‘could have been interpreted by sympathetic pagan administrators as directed primarily at divination and magical sacrifice’, whereas ‘Christian administrators in predominantly Christian areas, could have read superstitio as directed at paganism in general’.28 It is difficult or even impossible to prove that the imperial court deliberately aimed at the ambiguity of the terms, but no doubt in the fourth century superstitio could be used for several deviations: Christian heresy, paganism, pseudo-religious practices, wrong or perverted religiosity. In Ammianus’ Res Gestae superstitiosus only occurs in 25.4.17, but there are three instances of superstitio.29 In 15.13.2 he mentions that Constantius carefully investigated superstitionum . . . sectas, Manichaeorum et similium. This is quite close to the ‘Christian’ use of the term to denote heretical groups. Chapter 16 of book 21 contains the necrology of Constantius II, which consists of a short part on his virtues (§§1–7) and a far longer one on his vitia (§§8–21). In §18 Ammianus turns to Constantius’ religious conduct, and he straightaway notes Christianam religionem absolutam et simplicem anili superstitione confundens, in qua scrutanda perplexius quam componenda gravius excitavit discidia plurima, ‘the unambiguous and plain Christian religion was upset by the old women’s ‘superstitio’ of Constantius, who was indulging in detailed examinations rather than seriously trying to bring dissidents together’.30 Ammianus’ verdict on the Christian faith as such is obviously quite positive and this also brings out the contrast with Constantius’ disproportionate interest in abstruse dogmatic details. This is the most likely interpretation of superstitio here: his endeavours lacked the qualities of true religiosity. Some scholars have suggested that the term specifically refers to the Arian heresy, of which Constantius was an adept, but it is not easy to envisage the

Salzman, ‘Superstitio’, 179. In a phrase about king Sapor’s divinatory practices in 18.4.1 the authoritative editions of Clark and Seyfarth print et superstitiones omnes consulens de futuris, in which superstitiones is Heraeus’ emendation of the only manuscript’s praestionis. However, in their respective editions Sabbah (1970) and Viansino (2001) have wisely preferred Bentley’s praescitiones, which is well supported by Gelenius’ praescitionum in 29.1.31, where the ms has praescitiorum. 30 The reader is kindly invited to consult the extensive notes ad locum in the standard commentary. 28 29

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pagan historian being inclined to occupy himself with such internal matters of the Church.31 Ammianus’ third instance of superstitio is less interesting in itself: in 31.2.11 the Huns are said to be nullius religionis vel superstitionis reverentia aliquando districti, ‘without ever showing any respect for religion or superstition’. The complementary phrase expresses that they entirely lacked respect for whichever type of religion, good or bad. Nevertheless, it is a further illustration of what superstitio indicates: not just ‘superstition’, ‘Aberglaube’, ‘bijgeloof ’, but something far more negative: wrong religion, conflicting with the proper rules which apply in a given society of a certain period, and for this reason deserving disapproval and scorn, if not punitive measures. In Ammianus’ verdict on Julian’s religion the interpretation of superstitiosus is made more easy by its being the contrast of sacrorum legitimus observator, especially the adjective, which here denotes ‘abiding by the relevant rules’.32 That was exactly what Julian had failed to do.33 31 As to the adjective anilis in combination with superstitio, there are three instances in Cicero, and in three other cases this author uses a phrase quite near to it. Ad De divinatione 1.7 anili superstitione Pease notes: ‘It is doubtless due to the traditionally gossiping and inquisitive character of old women’. This may be Ammianus’ view too. Ad Cicero’s De Natura Deorum 2.70 superstitiones paene aniles Pease notes that i.a. Lactantius, Divinae Institutiones 5.13.3 and Firmicus Maternus, De Errore Profanarum Religionum 17.1 are also instances of this combination. He also aptly refers to Servius’ commentary on Virgil, Aeneid 8.187: aut ab aniculis dicta superstitio, quia multae superstites per aetatem delirant et stultae sunt. 32 In fact, Ammianus’ use of legitimus here is quite remarkable. The lemma in the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae (VII 2.1110.34–1114.73) shows that in its strict legal sense the adjective often functions in contexts of matrimony, inheritance and the like. It also occurs in the general sense ‘cum respectu quarumlibet normarum vel regularum’. In this category there are not many instances concerning persons; tamquam legitimi gladiatores (Petronius 117.5) and legitimi Christiani (Cyprianus, Epistle 69.12) are perhaps the nearest parallels. Eight of Ammianus’ other instances denote the legitimity of some authority, two that of children, one concerns legal business, one a date prescribed by law. From all these data it can be concluded that legitimus in 25.4.17 is a unique case. In his Ammiano e il cristianesimo: Religione e politica nelle ‘Res Gestae’ di Ammiano Marcellino, Bologna 1985, 151–52, Valerio Neri compares Ammianus’ condemnation of Julian’s cultic piety with some passages in Libanius which reflect comparable objections raised by the citizens of Antioch. Instead of strictly keeping to the correct religious rules (νόμων ἀνάγκαις ὑπηρετῶν, Or. 12.80), the emperor ‘extended the limits of his zeal in this matter’: ἐξέτεινε τῆς περὶ ταῦτα σπουδῆς τοὺς ὅρους (Or. 18.128). This comparison is certainly interesting, but Ammianus’ Roman readers were unacquainted with these discussions and, moreover, in the context the phrase sacrorum legitimus observator is much wider in scope than the reference to specific formal rules in Libanius. 33 The precise intention of magis ‘correctivum’ depends on the relation between the two qualities which are compared. If these do not contrast, magis quam is the equivalent of ‘not so much A as B’, e.g. in Celer disertus magis est quam sapiens (Cicero ad Atticum

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Restoration of the traditional polytheistic cult was the prime objective of Julian’s religious policy. In his view, blood sacrifice was the very essence of this cult and he readily took part in it, with a devotion that seemed to spring from the desire to make up for lost ground. The contemporary historian Ammianus Marcellinus, a pagan himself and an admirer of the neo-pagan emperor, looked at the evidence on what was characteristic of Julian’s religious conduct, and he concluded to a scathing judgment: superstitiosus. Julian was no better than his rival Constantius II. That devout Christian had gone beyond the limits of correct religion by his irresponsible dabbling in dogmatic intricacies. For his part, the pious pagan had revelled in the cultic side of religion, but exactly like his cousin he had lost sight of the correct standards, and so his pagan practice was as aberrant as Constantius’ love of dogmatic strife. Both of them were representatives of superstitio.34

10.1a) Cicero is not denying Celer all wisdom, but preferring his eloquence; in umbra es amantis magis quam amator (Plautus, Miles Gloriosus 625), however, the slave Palaestrio is jeering at young Pleusicles’ scruples: he is not a true lover, but merely a phantom of such a man. Ammianus’ Res Gestae has instances of both. In 16.12.64 meritisque magis quam imperio the author does not mean to say that Julian lacked all official power, he was after all the Caesar, but he ascribes his real influence primarily to his personal merits; the phrase quibus ad latrocinia magis quam aperto habilibus Marti (17.12.2) could in itself imply that the warriors in question have some qualities for fighting in open battles, though less than for guerrilla tactics, but it comes near the observation that they were in fact only capable of the latter type of fighting; when in 31.5.9 Lupicinus is said to have hastily gathered his soldiers and then temere magis quam consulte progressus, the latter action is definitely styled ill-advised: one cannot act temere (‘without due thought’) and consulte (‘prudently’) at the same time. Such a contrast occurs also in 25.4.17 superstitiosus magis quam sacrorum legitimus observator: it is impossible to keep strictly to the rules and to deviate from them. This is a clear case of ‘not A, but B’. 34 See for a brief indication of what Ammianus regarded as ‘true religion’ J. den Boeft, ‘Pure Rites: Ammianus on the Magi’, in: J.W. Drijvers & E.D. Hunt (eds), The Late Roman World and its Historian, London 1999, 207–15. I thank my ‘collegae Ammianei’ (see note 20) for their helpful suggestions.

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A QUODAM PERSA EXSTITERUNT Re-Orienting Manichaean Origins Albert de Jong Introduction On 14 April 216 ce, a boy was born in Parthian Mesopotamia who was destined to change the course of history.1 We do not know his given name, but he came to be known as Mani.2 Some sources report that he was born into a Parthian noble family—his father, Pattēg, was said to be of Arsacid descent, and his mother of the noble Kāmsarakān family.3 We do not know her name with certainty, for the reports concerning her are confused and at least five different names for her have been transmitted.4 In light of the biography of Mani, at any rate, her name or any other aspect of her personality would not be of great importance. She mainly figures as the person who gave birth to the prophet and surrendered him, when he was four years old, to his father, who wanted to raise him in a community of baptists to which he had attached himself. From that moment, she disappears from the narrative.

1 On the date of his birth, see G. Haloun & W.B. Henning, ‘The compendium of the doctrines and styles of the teaching of Mani, the Buddha of Light’, Asia Major, N.S. 3 (1953), 184–212, at 196–201. This was accepted by S.H. Taqizadeh, ‘The dates of Mani’s life’, Asia Major, N.S. 6 (1957), 106–21, who did not, however, accept Haloun-Henning’s computation of the date of Mani’s death. 2 It has been suggested that his given (Iranian) name was Kirbagīg or Kirbakkar (‘the virtuous’). See D. Shapira, ‘Manichaios, Jywndg Gryw and Other Manichaean Terms and Titles’, in: S. Shaked & A. Netzer (eds), Irano-Judaica 4, Jerusalem 1999, 122–50 at 129–30; J. Tubach & M. Zakeri, ‘Mani’s Name’, in: J. van Oort et alii (eds), Augustine and Manichaeism in the Latin West (NHMS 49), Leiden 2001, 272–86 at 284–86. 3 See the evidence of al-Nadīm’s Fihrist in: I. Gardner & S.N.C. Lieu, Manichaean Texts from the Roman Empire, Cambridge 2004, 46–7. 4 These are Mays, Marmaryam and Utākhīm, all in the Fihrist; Man-Yen (possibly *Maryam) in the Chinese document published by Haloun & Henning; Taqšīt and Nūšīt in various Christian sources, for which see W. Klein, ‘War Mani Priester der Perserkirche?’, in: L. Cirillo & A. van Tongerloo (eds), Atti del terzo congresso internazionale di studi: Manicheismo e Oriente cristiano antico (Manichaean Studies 3), Louvain/Napoli 1997, 201–16.

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It is characteristic for some of the trends in interpreting Manichaean history that will be discussed below, that the meagre information on Mani’s mother has seemed enough to at least one scholar to claim, repeatedly, that Mani was Jewish by birth (based solely on the name Maryam), had been circumcised, and was raised, subsequently, in a Jewish-Christian sect (the Elchasaites).5 Most scholars have fortunately been more cautious, but there appears to be widespread agreement on the importance of the latter idea: that Mani grew up in a JewishChristian community, to be identified as that of the Elchasaites. Important objections have been raised to this idea, however, on two counts: the question whether Mani’s baptists can confidently be identified with ‘the’ Elchasaites, and the question of the supposed Jewish elements in this alleged Jewish-Christian sect.6 Although these objections were voiced by eminent specialists, it seems that they have largely been disregarded in recent scholarship. This is where the present contribution intends to pick up the discussion.

5 This adventurous scholar is, of course, G. Quispel. See, for example, his review of A. Villey, Alexandre de Lycopolis (Paris 1985), VC 40 (1986), 199–201, 200: ‘Mani was a Jewish boy, whose mother was said to be called Mirjam and who grew up in Southern Babylonia, which happened to be under the Parthian sway. The report that he was of princely Parthian origin is absent from the Cologne Mani Codex and therefore should be considered as an unhistorical legend’. Likewise (and in many other places) G. Quispel, ‘Mani’, in: G. Trompf et alii (eds), Mehregan in Sydney, Sydney 1998, 53–7 at 53: ‘Mani was not an Iranian [. . .]. Since the discovery of the Köln/Cologne Mani Codex [. . .] we know better. Mani was a Jewish boy, who grew up in Babylonia, which strictly speaking was under “the occupation” of Persia’; ‘Mani, the Apostle of Jesus Christ’, in: J. Fontaine & C. Kannengiesser (eds), Epektasis: Mélanges patristiques offerts au Cardinal Jean Daniélou, Paris 1972, 667–72, 668: ‘So Mani once was a Jewish boy, circumcised and educated in the Law, before he was summoned by his Twin to preach his new revelation’. The references to the CMC are truly perverse, since that text (the importance of which will be discussed below) has not preserved anything about Mani’s origins; the entire first section of the text is, in fact, lost. 6 The problems pertaining to the Elchasaites (chiefly in the works of G.P. Luttikhuizen) will be discussed below. For the problem of Jewish aspects of Mani’s baptists, see J. Maier, ‘Zum Problem der jüdischen Gemeinden Mesopotamiens im 2. und 3. Jh. n.Chr. im Blick auf den CMC’, in: L. Cirillo & A. Roselli (eds), Codex Manichaicus Coloniensis: Atti del Simposio Internazionale, Cosenza 1986, 37–67. Maier’s conclusion is worth quoting in part: ‘Das Fazit einer kritischen Sichtung der Belege für den angeblichen “judenchristlichen” Charakter der CMC-Täufergruppe ergibt, daß das nachweisbar “Jüdische” sich auf einen spärlichen Rest reduziert. Dies so deutlich, daß nicht einzusehen ist, warum man diese Gruppe im Vergleich zu heidenchristlichen bzw. (und) großkirchlichen Gruppen als “judenchristlich” deklarieren soll’ (p. 67).

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The Elchasaites The fate of the Elchasaites in recent scholarship has been prodigious. This is an amazing accomplishment, for the sources for this movement are scanty and deeply beset with historical problems. The academic study of Elchasai, his book and the movement named after him was first attempted systematically by W. Brandt,7 professor of the history of religions in Amsterdam, whose main reputation lies in the field of Mandaean studies. He boldly presented Elchasai as the founder of a new religion, which he identified as a reform movement within Judaism. Although his views were contested immediately upon their publication, the fact that no systematic study of Elchasai was undertaken for seventy years ensured Brandt’s views a lingering influence for a very long period.8 A watershed in academic opinion about the movement was the publication of the Cologne Mani Codex (CMC), a miniature parchment codex from Egypt, containing a Greek version of a Manichaean text on the early history of Manichaeism, in which a few references to Alchasaios as the ‘leader’ or ‘founder’ of the Law of Mani’s baptists were found.9 Since this accorded well with information that had long been known from the Fihrist of al-Nadīm10 and appeared to be confirmed by the appearance of the name of Elchasai (written xlxsx ) in a Parthian Manichaean fragment (without, however, any recognizable context),11 a renewed interest in the Elchasaite movement naturally emerged. This led to the almost simultaneous publication of two monographs devoted to the subject, with opposing conclusions. In 1984, Luigi Cirillo, a noted

7 W. Brandt, Elchasai: Ein Religionsstifter und sein Werk: Beiträge zur jüdischen, christlichen und allgemeinen Religionsgeschichte in späthellenistischer Zeit, Leipzig 1912 (repr. Amsterdam 1971). 8 See G.P. Luttikhuizen, The Revelation of Elchasai: Investigations into the Evidence for a Mesopotamian Jewish Apocalypse of the Second Century and its Reception by Judeo-Christian Propagandists (Texte und Studien zum Antiken Judentum 8), Tübingen 1985, 15–25, for a full Forschungsbericht. 9 The edition of the CMC referred to here is that of L. Koenen & C. Römer, Der Kölner Mani-Kodex: Über das Werden seines Leibes. Kritische Edition aufgrund der von A. Henrichs und L. Koenen besorgten Erstedition (Papyrologica Coloniensia 14), Opladen 1988. For Alchasaios, see CMC 94–99. 10 See especially the appendix (pp. 53–60) to F. de Blois, ‘The ‘Sabians’ ( ābi ūn) in Pre-Islamic Arabia’, Acta Orientalia 1995, 39–61. 11 W. Sundermann, Mitteliranische manichäische Texte kirchengeschichtlichen Inhalts, Berlin 1981, 19.

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specialist in Manichaean studies, attempted to squeeze as much information from the sources as he could, chiefly by skilfully combining the disparate sources and framing them in a harmonic historical narrative.12 In 1985, Gerard P. Luttikhuizen published the revised version of his 1984 Groningen dissertation, in which he also scrutinized all the available sources, but warned strongly against combining them into a single history.13 To support this caution, he presented a clear-cut source-critical evaluation of the main sources (chiefly Hippolytus and Epiphanius), pointing at numerous discrepancies and manifestly unreliable elements, but he added to this an unfortunate observation that is unlikely to carry conviction. This was that the variety in spelling-forms of the name of Elchasai (reported as Alchasaios, Elchasaios, Ēlxai and numerous other forms) should not automatically be interpreted as referring to the same (historical) person.14 If the point is the historicity of the person, there is no doubt that he is right: the sources are excruciatingly vague about his identity, but there can be no uncertainty that all these names refer to the same ‘authority’ invoked. Responses to Luttikhuizen’s work, though generally commending it for its clarity and the fullness of its treatment of the sources, took on various shapes. Almost immediately, Reinhold Merkelbach attempted to discredit the main points Luttikhuizen made by simply restating everything Luttikhuizen had questioned, that is, by again harmonizing manifestly unrelated traditions.15 Other scholars apparently preferred to simply ignore the very real problems Luttikhuizen had noticed, reporting magisterially, for example, that ‘[c]ontroversies over the existence 12 L. Cirillo, Elchasai e gli Elchasaiti: Un contributo alla storia delle communità giudeo-cristiane, Cosenza 1984. 13 Luttikhuizen, Revelation of Elchasai. The dissertation was prepared under the direction of A.F.J. Klijn, who had himself gone through the matter (with different conclusions) earlier together with G.J. Reinink. See A.F.J. Klijn & G.J. Reinink, Patristic Evidence for Jewish-Christian Sects (NovTSup 36), Leiden 1973, 54–67. See also A.F.J. Klijn & G.J. Reinink, ‘Elchasai and Mani’, VC 28 (1974), 277–89, 289: ‘Before the discovery of the Kölner Codex, our information was scanty—as it still is’, a warning that has not been heeded. 14 Luttikhuizen, Revelation of Elchasai, 179–88. See also G.P. Luttikhuizen, ‘Elchasaites and their Book’, in: A. Marjanen & P. Luomanen (eds), A Companion to Second-Century ‘Heretics’ (VCSup 76), Leiden 2005, 335–64; ‘The Baptists of Mani’s Youth and the Elchasaites’, in: G.P. Luttikhuizen, Gnostic Revisions of Genesis Stories and Early Jesus Traditions (NHMS 58), Leiden 2006, 170–84; ‘Waren Manis Täufer Elchasaiten?’, in: A. Mustafa et alii (eds), Inkulturation des Christentums im Sasanidenreich, Wiesbaden 2007, 21–9. 15 R. Merkelbach, ‘Die Täufer, bei denen Mani aufwuchs’, in: P. Bryder (ed.), Manichaean Studies: Proceedings of the First International Conference on Manichaeism, Lund 1988, 105–33.

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of Elchasaios [. . .] have been relegated to the sidelines in Manichaean studies’, chiefly because of new materials that have emerged from Egypt (but without any justification of their relevance for this particular question).16 Thus, the identification of the baptist community in which Mani grew up with the Elchasaites of early Christian heresiography slowly came to be accepted as fact by many, which shows itself frequently in positive statements of the fact that Mani grew up in an ‘Elchasaite community’.17 It is important to stress here that no such claim can be found in any Manichaean source. There are, in fact, no primary sources from any ‘Elchasaite community’ and it is extremely unlikely that a term such as ‘Elchasaite’ was ever used as a term of self-designation. All we have are reports on purported Elchasaite communities18 and even this is far from certain with regard to the CMC. There, the community is referred to generally as ‘the Law’ (‘our Law’, ‘their Law’ etc.) and as the ‘religion (dogma) of the Baptists’, individual members are referred to as ‘a baptist’ and stray indications are given of the hierarchichal structure of the community.19 The information provided by al-Nadīm

Gardner & Lieu, Manichaean Texts, 35. By way of illustration: M. Stausberg, Die Religion Zarathushtras: Geschichte— Gegenwart—Rituale I, Stuttgart 2002, 220: ‘[Mani], der in seiner Kindheit und Jugend bis zu seiner eigenen Offenbarung der religiösen Bewegung der Elchasaiten angehörte’; J. van Oort, ‘Mani’, in: W.J. Hanegraaff (ed.), Dictionary of Gnosis and Western Esotericism, Leiden 2005, 756–57, 756: ‘The Cologne Mani Codex [. . .] confirms that the members of this sect of “Baptists” were (a group within the) Elchasai [sic]’; F. de Blois, ‘Elchasai—Manes—Muhammad: Manichäismus und Islam in religionshistorischem Vergleich’, Der Islam 81 (2004), 31–48, 34: ‘Über Manes’ Jugendjahre unter den Elchasaiten berichtet ausführlich auch der Kölner Mani-Kodex, wo der Prophet sich an einer Stelle ausdrücklich auf die Worte des “Alchasaios, des Stifters eures Gesetzes” beruft’; C. Reck, Zur Sozialterminologie der iranischen Manichäer: Eine semantische Analyse im Vergleich zu den nichtmanichäischen iranischen Quellen (Iranica 5), Wiesbaden 2000, 31: ‘Aufgewachsen in der einfachen bäuerlichen Lebensweise einer elchasaitischen Täufergemeinde tritt Mani jedoch früh, im Rahmen der von den Elchasaiten selbst betriebenen Mission sowie beim Verkauf der erzeugten Produkte auf dem Markt, in regelmäßigen Kontakt mit städtischen Schichten’. These examples, taken deliberately from scholars whose work is admirable in every respect, can be multiplied ad libitum. 18 Eusebius only knows of them through Origen (Church History 6.38) and reports on their shortlived succes during the reigns of the emperors Philip and Decius (244–251); Hippolytus does not know of an Elchasaite community, but merely reports on the activities of a Syrian missionary named Alcibiades in Rome (Refutation 9.13–17); Epiphanius generally describes the movement as moribund or almost extinct in Palestine and Transjordan, but ascribes to their ideas a new leash of life among the Ebionites (Panarion 18–20). 19 The text of the CMC was edited by L. Koenen & C. Römer, Der Kölner Mani-Kodex; the most recent almost complete translation in English can be found in Gardner & Lieu, 16

17

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in his Fihrist is similar and presumably goes back to (a version of ) the same text;20 he mentions the sect of al-mughtasilah, ‘they who wash themselves’, i.e. the CMC’s ‘baptists’. In both traditions (CMC and alNadīm), a leader (Greek archēgos, Arabic ra īs) is mentioned, who can certainly be identified with Elchasai, but it is unclear what the term here translated as ‘leader’ really means. All this shows sufficiently that the community to which Mani’s father belonged, and in which Mani grew up, was one of the many baptist sects21 and that the name of Elchasai was known among them. In most other respects, the information on the baptists’ beliefs is frustratingly sparse, as opposed to information on their way of life. The CMC gives information chiefly on those aspects of the baptists’ Law, their ritual and religious duties and their way of life, that were rejected by Mani and, as a consequence, in Manichaeism. Two crucial subjects are highlighted: purity laws (‘baptism’) and dietary rules, including (significantly) rules governing the way in which food is procured. Thus, there is evidence for a communal vegetable garden, for the felling of wood from a (communal?) grove and for the insistence by members of the community that they bake their own bread in their own (again, most likely, communal) baking oven. The first two aspects are highlighted because in Manichaeism, agricultural work (the picking of vegetables, cutting wood) was forbidden for the Elect (who are supposed to receive their food from the Hearers).22 From the text, it emerges that the baptists were vegetarians, who also rejected a range of (unspecified) vegetables and fruits as forbidden by their Law. The only foodstuff that is explicitly named as being forbidden is wheat for the making of bread. The question of ovens seems to be different: in the

Manichaean Texts, 47–73. A concordance has been prepared by L. Cirillo, Concordanze del Codex Manichaicus Coloniensis, Bologna 2001; the relevant sections can easily be found under the lemmata nomos, dogma and baptistēs. 20 See F. de Blois, ‘New Light on the Sources of the Manichaean Chapter of the Fihrist’, in: A. van Tongerloo & L. Cirillo (eds), Il Manicheismo: Nuove prospettive della ricercha (Manichaean Studies 5), Louvain/Napoli 2005, 37–45, for the sources underlying anNadīm’s account. 21 For which, see especially K. Rudolph, ‘Antike Baptisten: Zu den Überlieferungen über frühjüdische und frühchristliche Taufsekten’, in: Idem, Gnosis und spätantike Religionsgeschichte: Gesammelte Aufsätze (NHMS 42), Leiden 1996, 569–606 (first publication Berlin 1981). 22 Apart from being well known from later Manichaean practice, this point is illustrated in the CMC by Mani asking for the food he needs.

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CMC, the notion that bread must be baked in a special oven is flatly rejected. How this ties in with Manichaean practice is unclear, but it is likely that it is to be connected with the other subject of interest for the CMC: the purity laws. Like the alimentary rules, the purity laws are chiefly referred to in vague terms. The only thing that is clear is the practice of baptism, both the repeated washing of the body in running water and the washing of all vegetables.23 In Manichaeism, these washing rituals were rejected as pointless, since true cleansing could only be brought about by knowledge.24 A careful sifting of the evidence pertaining to specifically Jewish elements in the description of the baptist community has shown that there is almost nothing in the CMC to substantiate the claim that the movement was a Jewish-Christian one; therefore, this claim rests entirely upon the evidence presented by Epiphanius, who traces the influence of Elchasai in a number of ( Jewish-)Christian movements (chiefly the Ebionites), but remains wholly silent on this influence in his (very long) discussion of Manichaeism.25 The Christian background of the community, by contrast, is explicit: apart from a probable reference to ‘baptism’ as a ritual of inititation (as opposed to the daily ablutions),26 there is the clear reference to the words of the ‘Saviour’ (sōtēr) in a discussion of the eating of (‘Greek’) bread, followed by allusions to the Last Supper traditions and almost verbatim quotes from Matthew and Luke.27 It is thus evident that the Saviour is Jesus, and that the baptists are represented as Christians.

23 See G.G. Stroumsa, ‘Purification and its Discontents: Mani’s Rejection of Baptism’, in: J. Assmann & G.G. Stroumsa (eds), Transformations of the Inner Self in Ancient Religions (Numen Book Series 83), Leiden 1999, 405–20. 24 CMC 84. 25 Translated by F. Williams, The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis: Books II and III (Sects 47–80, De Fide) (NHMS 36), Leiden 1994, 219–308. 26 CMC 83.3–7: ‘For you have been baptized and purified once; why do you immerse yourselves again every day?’. 27 CMC 91–93. In spite of the words ‘as is written’ (hōs gegraptai), the CMC does not quote passages from the New Testament in reference to the Last Supper; this is clearly because the author wanted to highlight specifically the presence of bread in the meal.

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albert de jong Christianity in Parthian and Sasanian Mesopotamia

In the early third century, Christianity had already struck deep roots in Mesopotamia. Although the evidence is too sparse to trace developments exactly,28 it seems that there were few if any attempts by the Parthian (and later Sasanian) rulers of the area to interfere with the religious life of the various communities of their realm. While there can be no doubt that Zoroastrianism was the religion of the rulers and of the majority of the Iranian inhabitants of the Empire, there was no discernable concept of a ‘state religion’ enforced upon the inhabitants. The chief expression of religiosity in royal circles was a dynastic cult, in combination with the public celebration of Zoroastrian festivals (for which the evidence is, however, frustratingly limited). This has important consequences. Christians in the late Parthian and early Sasanian empire, like all other religious communities, were enabled by the absence of state repression and interference to develop their own communal and theological identities. They thus had an undisputable advantage over their brethren in the West, who lived under Roman rule. The development of these ‘Western’ Christian communities—for which the evidence is obviously much denser—began in a sphere of state repression and persecution. Soon after the so-called ‘edicts of toleration’, marking its change in status from religio illicita to a community with equal rights,29 Christianity in the Roman Empire became the object of state interference. Although this obviously did not mean that henceforth only one variety of Christianity would be current in the West—far from it—one senses a wider variety of theological, ritual and communal experiments in those parts of the Christian world that fell within the boundaries of the Parthian and Sasanian rulers (and their client-states). One marked example is the variety in cosmogonical myths involving more than one primal being. Apart from Manichaeism itself, with its obvious Iranian elements in the story of the origin of creation, there is the earlier experiment of Bardaisan, involving God

By far the most impressive attempt at reconstructing the spread of Christianity to Iran (including, as it should, Mesopotamia) is C. Jullien & F. Jullien, Apôtres des confins: Processus missionaires chrétiens dans l’empire Iranien (Res Orientales 15), Bures-sur-Yvette 2002. 29 An attempt at unravelling the many confusions in the process is T. Barnes, ‘From Toleration to Repression: The Evolution of Constantine’s Religious Policies’, Scripta Classica Israelica 21 (2002), 189–207. 28

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above, darkness below and the pure elements somewhere in the middle.30 Michel Roberge has recently demonstrated brilliantly that the original version of the so-called Paraphrase of Sem (NHC VII.1) also belongs to this milieu,31 which accounts well for its striking parallels with both Bardaisan and with Zoroastrian ideas: in the Paraphrase, there are three primeval powers, Light above, Darkness below and Spirit in the middle. The text is notorious not only for its impenetrability, but also for its abundant use of sexual metaphors in explaining the origins of creation.32 The latter aspect would not, at first glance, seem to be characteristic of Zoroastrian cosmogonical traditions,33 but this is caused, it seems, by the remodeling of such traditions in the course of the Sasanian period, allowing only one version to be preserved fully. There are many traces, however, of competing cosmogonical traditions, in which sexual metaphors are frequently found.34 Manichaean origins It has always been common to seek the ‘origins’ of Manichaeism, rather exclusively, in a single setting. Various possibilities have been suggested: since the first original Manichaean texts to emerge in the twentieth century were Iranian ones, an Iranian (i.e., a Zoroastrian) origin was widely adopted (it was, incidentally, also the ‘origin’ indicated by Manichaeism’s enemies).35 Although there were dissenting voices 30 See F. de Blois, ‘Dualism in Iranian and Christian Traditions’, JRAS 10 (2000), 1–19, for a vue d’ensemble. 31 See the long introduction to M. Roberge, La Paraphrase de Sem (NH VII,1) (BCNHT 15), Québec/Louvain 2000. 32 The Paraphrase of Sem has long been claimed as a ‘pagan’ text, but in light of Roberge’s work, this can no longer be maintained. See F. Wisse, ‘The Redeemer Figure in the Paraphrase of Shem’, NovT 12 (1970), 130–40. 33 A good summary is Ph.G. Kreyenbroek, ‘Cosmogony and Cosmology I. In Zoroastrianism/Mazdaism’, Encyclopaedia Iranica 6 (1993), 303–07. 34 These are discussed in R.C. Zaehner, Zurvan: A Zoroastrian Dilemma, New York 19722; see also A. de Jong, ‘Jeh the Primal Whore? Observations on Zoroastrian Misogyny’, in: R. Kloppenborg & W.J. Hanegraaff (eds), Female Sterotypes in Religious Traditions (Numen Bookseries 66), Leiden 1995, 15–41; S. Shaked, ‘Some Islamic Reports concerning Zoroastrianism’, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 17 (1994), 43–84. 35 The most explicit defender of the Iranian origins of Manichaeism was doubtless Geo Widengren. See his Mani and Manichaeism, London 1965. A characteristic quote is G. Widengren, ‘Stand und Aufgaben der iranischen Religionsgeschichte II’, Numen 2 (1955), 47–134, at 105: ‘Es war ein für das Verstehen der geschichtlichen Entwicklung in der parthisch-sassanidischen Periode verhängnisvoller Irrtum, dass man den für die ältere Forschung wie für die spätantike Welt ziemlich selbstverständlichen iranischen

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from the start,36 this Iranian interpretation managed to survive for a while the discovery of the Coptic Manichaica, which otherwise reflect very little that is immediately recognisable as Zoroastrian. Eventually, however, the discrepancies between the religious systems of Zoroastrians and Manichaeans became so obvious and so pervasive, that the thesis of a Zoroastrian origin of Manichaeism was abandoned by all but a few.37 Such a shift away from the dominant interpretation should have engendered lively debate of the question how it had been possible that generations of scholars had upheld an interpretation that was so patently improbable. This debate has, unfortunately, never taken place. Instead, most scholars moved from one extreme interpretation to another, finding ‘the’ origins of Manichaeism in Christianity.38 A landmark study in this respect is Peter Brown’s often quoted essay on the diffusion of Manichaeism in the Roman Empire.39 While there is much to recommend in Brown’s treatment of the history of Manichaeism in Africa, his remarks on Manichaean origins—locating Manichaeism in the culture of speakers of Aramaic (see below) and dissociating it entirely from Iran—seem to have done almost irreparable harm to the subject. They are paired, in this respect, with the contributions of Jacob Neusner,40 whose findings Brown occasionally quotes with approval. While neither of these scholars invented the notion of Parthian and Sasanian Mesopotamia as a region with barely any observable trace of Iranian culture, the fact that they gave it the

Ursrpung des Manichäismus anzuzweifeln begann, und ihn als hauptsächlich hellenistisch-christliche Gnosis betrachten wollte. Man versperrte sich dadurch den Zugang zu einem Verstehen des Charakters der iranischen Religion in der Art, wie sie sich im Westen verbreitete’. 36 Notably F.C. Burkitt, The Religion of the Manichees, Cambridge 1925, and several contributions by H.H. Schaeder, as collected in Studien zur orientalischen Religionsgeschichte, Darmstadt 1968. 37 A notable exception is Gherardo Gnoli. See, for example, G. Gnoli, De Zoroastre à Mani: Quatre leçons au Collège de France (Travaux de l’Institut d’Études Iraniennes 11), Paris 1985, 73–7. 38 Or, going even further, re-interpreting Manichaeism as a branch of Christianity. See, for example, N.A. Pedersen, Demonstrative Proof in Defence of God: A Study of Titus of Bostra’s Contra Manichaeos. The Work’s Sources, Aims and Relation to its Contemporary Theology (NHMS 56), Leiden 2004, 6–12. 39 P. Brown, ‘The Diffusion of Manichaeism in the Roman Empire’, JRS 59 (1969), 92–103. 40 J. Neusner, ‘How much Iranian in Jewish Babylonia?’, JAOS 95 (1975), 184–90; Idem, A History of the Jews in Babylonia, Leiden 1965–1970 (5 vols.).

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backing of their respected judgements certainly contributed to its persistence to the present day. The problem is this: it is common to interpret Parthian and Sasanian Mesopotamia—the undisputed homeland of Mani and his earliest following—as a country occupied by the Iranians, but not truly ‘theirs’.41 The ‘real’ inhabitants of that area, according to this reconstruction, were nameless, but are frequently described—somewhat vaguely—as ‘speakers of Aramaic’ and are generally distinguished only as religious communities: Jews, Christians, Mandaeans and ‘pagans’.42 Some importance is also generally attached to the fact that some cities of Parthian Mesopotamia—Seleucia-on-the-Tigris in particular—were ‘Greek’ in language and culture.43 The fact that the area was conquered by the Parthian king Mithradates I in 141 bce and had thus been part of the Iranian Empire for more than 350 years before Mani was born is made harmless by referring to the Parthians as a military aristocracy and by quoting distributions of inhabitants (few Iranians, many Semites, some Greeks) that are of necessity pure guess-work. Within such a framework, ‘Christianity’ (and in Neusner’s case, Judaism) is easily interpreted as something non-Iranian and by virtue of being non-Iranian, more ‘Western’ than ‘Eastern’, more ‘us’ than ‘them’. It is this aspect that was consistently highlighted by Brown in the early part of his essay. The publication of this essay coincided with the discovery of the Cologne Mani Codex, which seemed to confirm everything Brown had suggested. First of all, it was written in Greek, but more importantly—as recorded above—it contained clear evidence of the Christian origins of the community of Mani’s youth. From its publication onwards, therefore, the same confidence that was earlier displayed in interpreting Manichaeism as a debased form of

41

n. 5.

See the references to Gilles Quispel’s frequent statements to this effect, above

42 See, for the Sasanian period, A. de Jong, ‘Zoroastrian Religious Polemics and their Contexts: Interconfessional Relations in the Sasanian Empire’, in: T.L. Hettema & A. van der Kooij (eds), Religious Polemics in Context (Studies in Theology and Religion 11), Assen 2004, 48–63. 43 This fact is undeniable, but its relevance for the interpretation of early Manichaeism is unclear. The history of Seleucia occupies the better part of S.N.C. Lieu’s introduction to Mesopotamia in the Late Parthian period (S.N.C. Lieu, Manichaeism in the Later Roman Empire and Medieval China (WUNT 63), Tübingen 19922, 1–5), but by the time of Mani’s birth Seleucia had already been in ruins and generally abandoned for more than a generation.

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Zoroastrianism, was now invested in showing it to have been a variety of Christianity. The only way to do this, as had already been outlined by Schaeder,44 was to distill from Manichaean texts—in their bewildering variety—an original ‘core’, to which later ‘accretions’ had been added. This was the path also taken by those who defended a Zoroastrian origin, and like the earlier, Iranian, approach, it was largely taken uncritically. This left awkward facts to be dealt with. One of these, contested by none (least of all Peter Brown), was the fact that in addition to clear Christian elements in early Manichaeism—such as the structure of its organisation and the use of Pauline titles and ideas—there were other, equally early, elements that unquestionably belonged to the Sasanian context. One of them, without a doubt, was geography. As far as is known, Mani never left the confines of the Sasanian empire. It is true that he is reported to have gone to India, but India is a very imprecise term, and the areas he is said to have visited—Makran and Turan—were either incorporated into the empire, or semi-independent vassal states.45 Thus, Mani was born, grew up, and spent his entire life in the Iranian empire.46 The king of the land, for Mani, was the Sasanian king, and some of the local rulers he visited, and perhaps converted, were members of the Persian king’s family. Although the sources may not be very reliable in this respect, they at least lead us to believe that Mani knew how to behave at the Persian court.47 This geographical context also shows itself in Manichaean ideas about the lay-out of the world, distinguishing between Iran (including Mesopotamia), the realm of Zoroastrianism, as its centre, bordered by the West, the realm of Christianity, and the

44 See the programmatic title of his ‘Urform und Fortbildungen des manichäischen Systems’, Vorträge der Bibliothek Warburg 1924–1925, Leipzig/Berlin 1927, 65–157 (repr. in: Idem, Studien zur orientalischen Religionsgeschichte, 15–107). 45 E. Kettenhofen, Tirdād und die Inschrift von Paikuli: Kritik der Quellen zur Geschichte Armeniens im späten 3. und frühen 4. Jh. n. Chr., Wiesbaden 1995, 11–12. 46 For his journeys, see C.E. Römer, Manis frühe Missionsreisen nach der Kölner Manibiographie: Textkritischer Kommentar und Erläuterungen zu p. 121–p. 192 des Kölner Mani-Kodex (Papyrologica Coloniensia 24), Opladen 1994. 47 Sasanian court etiquette is known mainly from late sources, but was obviously very strict. See A. de Jong, ‘Sub specie maiestatis: Reflections on Sasanian Court Rituals’, in: M. Stausberg (ed.), Zoroastrian Rituals in Context (Numen Bookseries 102), Leiden 2004, 345–65.

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East, the realm of Buddhism.48 This plays a crucial role in the subject that will be discussed shortly, that is, the chain of prophets. Parthian and Sasanian Mesopotamia again Before we get to that, however, we need to address the changes that have been taking place in the study of the Parthian and Sasanian empires over the past two decades.49 The history of Parthian and Sasanian Iran, which includes Mesopotamia as one of its central provinces,50 has been plagued by a number of long-lasting false assumptions, the most damaging of which was concocted in Persian court circles presumably in the third century. This is the image of Parthian society as being somehow very un-Zoroastrian or, in modern terms, secular, coupled with the image of Sasanian society as being fanatically Zoroastrian. There are many reasons not to give too much credence to that image, on both counts, but it is remarkably resilient even in modern scholarship.51 When Ardashir mounted the throne of the Iranians, he had to be defended from the accusation of impiety, of which he was accused because he had extinguished a considerable number of dynastic fires, to leave only one fire, his own, burning.52 It is clear from this particular accusation, that a single ruler for a single empire, or the centralisation of power, was an important part of Ardashir’s propaganda, underscored in imagery by his coins, bearing the new design of his royal fire, and his rock-reliefs, where he is given the ring of sovereignty by the god Ohrmazd himself.53 We know very little, however, of his religious policies, 48 See F. de Blois, ‘The Four Great Kingdoms in the Manichaean Kephalaia’, in: P.O. Scholz et alii (eds), Orbis Aethiopicus: Studia in honorem Stanislaus Chojnacki (Bibliotheca Nubica 3), Albstadt 1992, 221–30. 49 The writer hopes to be forgiven for referring to unpublished work, but much of the following discussion draws on M. Boyce & A. de Jong, A History of Zoroastrianism IV: Parthian and Armenian Zoroastrianism, forthc. 50 R. Gyselen, La géographie administrative de l’empire sassanide: Les témoignages sigillographiques (Res Orientales I), Paris 1989, 77. 51 Since works destined for a general audience often reflect such trends more clearly, telling examples can be found in the treatment of Parthian and early Sasanian religion in M. Brosius, The Persians: An Introduction, London 2006, 125–26; 187–89, and Ph. Huyse, La Perse antique, Paris 2005, 139–43 (both, fatally, subsuming the Parthians under ‘Persians’). 52 M. Boyce, The Letter of Tansar, Roma 1965, 16–17. 53 A. de Jong, ‘One Nation under God? The Early Sasanians as Guardians and Destroyers of Holy Sites’, in: R.G. Kratz & H. Spieckermann (eds), Götterbilder —

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if there were any. The same is true for his son, Shapur, whose reign was also largely devoted to the expansion and consolidation of the empire. But it is during his reign, that the Zoroastrian priest Kerdīr, who eventually managed to have Mani executed, acquired considerable privileges.54 Since Kerdīr’s inscriptions are among the most important texts to have survived, the image of early Sasanian Iran as a country that was obsessed by religion has established itself firmly in the minds of many scholars. After all, Kerdīr proudly proclaims to have persecuted Jews, Christians, Hindus and Buddhists and Manichaeans and to have produced great joy and an exalted place for the religion of the Iranians. With the exception of the Manichaeans, however, such persecutions of religious minorities have not been safely attested.55 A second demonstrably false assumption current among students of the Sasanian Empire is that the various religious communities of the empire should be seen as remaining wholly isolated from each other. Since this has been discussed at length elsewhere, it can perhaps be treated only briefly here.56 It is true and of great importance for the history of religions that the textual traditions of the various communities of the empire—Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, Manichaeans and Mandaeans—often appear to pay little attention to religious interaction, except in negative terms. Strings of prohibitions and commandments, regarding purity laws, laws of inheritance and marriage, etcetera, seemingly created barriers to social interaction. Scholars who took these barriers to be rigid therefore came up with an image of Sasanian society as a rigid one, where one’s birth into a certain community largely determined the rest of one’s life. In doing this, they have had to face the following situation: whereas Iranian elements are readily detected in all aspects of society, especially in the large number of Iranian loanwords in the Mesopotamian dialects of Aramaic, and in those aspects of culture that do not require too many linguistic talents, such as dress, art, cookery, sports and games, etc., the religions of the Empire are neatly kept separate.

Gottesbilder —Weltbilder. Band I: Ägypten, Mesopotamien, Persien, Kleinasien, Syrien, Palästina (FAT/2 17), Tübingen 2006, 223–38. 54 For Kerdīr’s inscriptions, see Ph. Gignoux, Les quatre inscriptions du mage Kirdīr: Textes et concordances (Studia Iranica Cahier 9), Paris 1991 (with references). 55 De Jong, ‘Zoroastrian Religious Polemics’, 51. 56 De Jong, ‘Zoroastrian Religious Polemics’.

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This image, so comfortable for many because it relieves them of the duty of seriously engaging in the complex study of pre-Islamic Iran, is now rapidly crumbling and, ironically, it seems to be those areas where knowledge of language is of great importance where developments are taking place most rapidly. This is, first, the area of law, where Iranian influences have been detected and discussed at length and can no longer be denied.57 But there is also the area of literary or narrative traditions. Parthian and Persian epic traditions have recently been demonstrated to underlie stories found in Jewish texts, in Josephus and passages from the Talmud, by Geoffrey Herman, in the New Testament by Mario Frenschkowski and in Christian Syriac literature by Joel Walker.58 Such elements have, of course, long been detected also in the literature of the Mandaeans and the Manichaeans, the two religious traditions that took shape in the context of the Sasanian Empire. The chain of prophets As an example of how this changing vision of Parthian and Sasanian Mesopotamia should be brought to bear on the interpretation of the origins of Manichaeism, it is proposed here to address a subject of central importance in Manichaeism: the notion of the chain of prophets. The problems caused by what could be referred to as essentialist interpretations of ‘original’ Manichaeism can be well illustrated by having a closer look at the Manichaean views on the history of divine revelations in the

57 Pioneering work has been done by Maria Macuch, ‘The Talmudic Expression “Servant of the Fire” in the Light of Pahlavi Legal Sources’, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 26 (2002), 109–29; and especially Yaakov Elman, ‘Marriage and Marital Property in Rabbinic and Sasanian Law’, in: C. Heszer (ed.), Rabbinic Law in its Roman and Near Eastern Context, Tübingen 2003, 227–76; ‘ “Up to the Ears” in Horses’ Necks (B.M. 108a): On Sasanian Agricultural Policy and Private “Eminent Domain” ’, Jewish Studies, an Internet Journal 3 (2004), 95–149 (= http://www.biu.ac.il/JS/JSIJ/3–2004/Elman. pdf ); ‘Acculturation to Elite Persian Norms and Modes of Thought in the Babylonian Jewish Community of Late Antiquity’, in: Y. Elman et alii (eds), Neti ot LeDavid. Jubilee Volume for David Weiss Halivni, Jerusalem 2005, 31–56. 58 G. Herman, ‘Ahasuerus, the Former Stable-Master of Belshazzar, and the Wicked Alexander of Macedon: Two Parallels between the Babylonian Talmud and Persian Sources’, Association for Jewish Studies Review 29 (2005), 283–97; Idem, ‘Iranian Epic Motifs in Josephus’ Antiquities (XVIII, 314–370)’, JJS 57 (2006), 245–68; M. Frenschkowski, ‘Parthica Apocalyptica: Mythologie und Militärwesen iranischer Völker in ihrer Rezeption durch die Offenbarung des Johannes’, JAC 47 (2004), 16–57; J.T. Walker, The Legend of Mar Qardagh: Narrative and Christian Heroism in Late Antique Iraq, Berkeley etc. 2006.

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world. This is one of the areas where Christian influence, especially in the shape of Jewish Christianity, has often been claimed to be strong. It is also one of the most important aspects of Manichaean thought, crucial to its message, and without any doubt part of the earliest history of the religion. It can be shown that the case for an Elchasaite, and by extension a Jewish-Christian, origin, is weak and that an equally weak case can be made (and has, occasionally, been made) for a Zoroastrian origin to the notion of prophetic succession. The Manichaean notion Like every other founder of a new religion, Mani had to confront the obvious problem caused by his late appearance in human history. It is almost impossible to reconstruct historical awareness in third-century Mesopotamia, but Mani was confronted with at least two communities that could boast a long and distinguished history, the Zoroastrians and the Jews,59 and with one movement, Christianity, that had been around for several generations already. The Manichaen notion of a prophetic succession—as most other aspects of Manichaean doctrine and praxis—must be reconstructed from disparate sources in various languages. It is to be expected, therefore, that no single dominant theology can be traced in these sources, but there appears to be a limited consensus on the fact that the Coptic Manichaica offer the most important materials relevant to this question. It is in particular the first chapters of the Coptic Kephalaia (of the Teacher) that have often been invoked. In a thoughtful monograph largely devoted to these matters, John C. Reeves has summarized the prevailing opinion on the Manichaean prophetic succession as follows: According to this doctrine, a heavenly entity known as the Apostle of Light, who is in turn under the direction of the Light-Nous, has periodically manifested itself in human guise to proclaim the Manichaean message of redemption among humanity. The succession of such “prophets” is comprised initially of important biblical forefathers from primeval history and continues on to embrace renowned religious teachers of more recent

59 The evidence for the third and most ancient tradition—the traditional Mesopotamian religion—is too fragmented to allow for safe conclusions. It is not, however, wholly absent from Manichaean texts, which occasionally refer to ‘pagan’ temples (as happens famously in the story of Mani’s childhood: his father visits such a temple and hears a voice urging him, eventually, to join the community of baptists).

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vintage such as Zoroaster, the Buddha, and Jesus, before culminating with the self-declared “seal of the prophets”, Mani himself.60

Thus, according to this summary, Mani’s predecessors and Mani himself were all incarnations of the same spiritual being (‘the Light Apostle’). It is clear why Reeves has chosen to highlight this aspect of the Manichaean idea of prophetic succession, for it has a parallel in texts reporting on similar ideas in Jewish Christianity (to be discussed below).61 It is important, however, to stress that this notion of a continuing incarnation is not to be found in the most extensive of the Coptic texts he refers to (Kephalaia 9.24–14.4) and unclear in the other passage (Kephalaia 36.3–6). We shall begin with the latter. Since it is brief, it may be quoted in full here: The fourth father is the Light Mind, the one who chooses all the churches. And, again, he too summoned three powers after the pattern of Jesus (i.e. Jesus the Splendour, A.J.). The first power is the Apostle of Light; the one who shall on occasion come and assume the church of the flesh, of humanity; and he becomes inner leader of righteousness. The second is the counterpart, who shall come to the apostle and appear to him, becoming companion to him, sticking close to him everywhere; and providing help to him all the time, from all afflictions and dangers. The third is the Light Form; the one whom the elect and the catechumens shall receive, should they renounce the world.62

It is clear from this passage that the first two of these three powers reflect the fundamental notions of Mani’s own prophethood: Mani the prophet and his Twin (the syzygos). The third is also characteristically ‘Manichaean’, in the sense that it presupposes Manichaean praxis: it is the reward for those who ‘renounce the world’ by following the Manichaean teachings. Although the terms used in this passage occur

60 J.C. Reeves, Heralds of that Good Realm: Syro-Mesopotamian Gnosis and Jewish Traditions (NHMS 41), Leiden 1996, 8. 61 This point has been made explicitly by L. Cirillo, ‘Verus Propheta’, in: C. Jambet (ed.), Henry Corbin (Cahiers de l’Herne 39), Paris 1981, 240–55, and ‘From the Elchasaite Christology to the Manichaean Apostle of Light: Some Remarks about the Manichaean Doctrine of the Revelation’, in: A. van Tongerloo & L. Cirillo (eds), Il Manicheismo: Nuove Prospettive della Richerca (Manichaean Studies 5), Louvain/Napoli 2005, 47–54. 62 Kephalaia 36.1–11; ed. H.J. Polotsky, A. Böhlig & H. Ibscher, Kephalaia (Manichäische Handschriften der staatlichen Museen Berlin I), Stuttgart 1940; trl. I. Gardner, The Kephalaia of the Teacher: The Edited Coptic Manichaean Texts in Translation with Commentary (NHMS 37), Leiden 1995, 40.

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quite regularly in Manichaean Coptic texts, it must be noted that in the meaning they take on in this passage, they are almost unique.63 The Apostle of Light (ⲡⲁⲡⲟⲥⲧⲟⲗⲟⲥ ⲙ̅ⲡⲟⲩⲁ¸ ⲓⲛⲉ) always refers to (the historical) Mani and the ‘Counterpart’ (ⲡⲥⲁⲓϣ) to his Twin. Although the third power, the Light Form (ⲧⲙⲟⲣⲫⲏ ⲛⲟⲩⲁ¸ ⲓⲛⲉ) is mentioned in a number of other places, she too appears characteristically in the narrative of Mani’s life, as the Light Form appearing to him after his execution. In many other passages discussing this power as it reflects on the (after-) lives of other Manichaeans, she is referred to as the ‘Virgin of Light’ (ⲧⲡⲁⲣⲑⲉⲛⲟⲥ ⲙⲡⲟⲩⲁⲓⲛⲉ).64 The interpretation of the passage thus hinges on the exact meaning of the expression translated by Gardner as ‘on occasion’;65 if it is meant to express ‘on the destined moment’, the whole section may well refer to a pre-ordained appearance of Mani alone and not to a prototype of all prophets, to whom—at any rate—no systematic ‘Pair’ or ‘Light Form’ has been assigned in any other Manichaean text. The notion of the incarnating ‘Apostle of Light’ as reconstructed by Reeves (and others), thus becomes deeply problematic. In the first two sections of the Kephalaia (the introduction and the first kephalaion), we do not find it. Although parts of the text are sadly fragmentary, enough has been preserved to show that it presented a number of prophets, in distinct ages and distinct regions, establishing ‘churches’, all to be replaced by the final church of Mani. Two different lists appear to have been operative, both with variants. One of these lists gives three or four prophets, sometimes referred to (in scholarly literature) as the ‘national’ prophets. These are Zarathustra, the Buddha, Jesus and Mani. Other lists present a number of Biblical forefathers, especially Seth(el), Enosh, Henoch, and Shem. There appears to be a general consensus that the ‘Biblical’ list is more original, and therefore more important, than the ‘national’ list.

63 The only clear parallel is the moving prayer for a departed Manichaean in T. Kell.Copt. 2.A5 (I. Gardner, Kellis Literary Texts I (Dakhleh Oasis Project: Monograph 4), Oxford 1996, 13–15), but the exact meaning and the context of the references to the Apostle of Light in this text are unclear (as are its literary relations with the Coptic Kephalaia). 64 See P. van Lindt, The Names of Manichaean Mythological Figures: A Comparative Study on Terminology in the Coptic Sources (Studies in Oriental Religions 26), Wiesbaden 1992, 170–75. See also Van den Broek in this volume. 65 In the old translation of Polotsky/Ibscher, the expression is translated ‘jeweils zu seiner Zeit’.

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This has been argued particularly by Michel Tardieu, but on questionable grounds.66 Tardieu suggested that the national list, in which Mani included Zarathushtra and the Buddha, would have been produced while Mani was composing his Šābuhragān, the only of his compositions to be written in Middle Persian (and the only text of Mani to have been preserved).67 For the ‘earlier’ conception, Tardieu relied on the evidence of a homily of the early Manichaean teacher Baraies, preserved in the CMC.68 In this homily, which was the subject of Reeves’ monograph, five passages are quoted from ‘apocalypses’ of Adam, Seth, Enosh, Shem and Enoch, to establish the fact that each of these Biblical forefathers had a visual (or at least auditory) experience of God or a mediating being.69 The same experience is attributed to Paul (with a reference to 2 Cor 12), all in the interest of establishing that Mani’s visual (and other) experiences were real, that his knowledge of divine secrets was not found in books, but derived directly from divine sources. It is impossible to doubt that Baraies’ homily was composed after Mani’s death, with a clear apologetic purpose, and presumably in the service of missionary activities among Jews and/or Christians. Tardieu therefore argued himself in a position where he had to relegate a passage attributed to Mani himself—an attribution he did not doubt—to a second tier, in favour of one that was demonstrably composed after Mani’s death. Yet again, scholars have followed him uncritically, presenting his idea that Mani only thought of the national prophets when considering how to introduce his message to the Persian king as fact, whereas it is the only idea that can be directly attributed to Mani, the evidence for the ‘Biblical’ list coming only from later Manichaean sources. The list of ‘national’ prophets is indissolubly linked, moreover, with Manichaean views of geography, with Iran and Babylonia firmly in the centre.

66 M. Tardieu, ‘La chaîne des prophètes’, in: Inde-Asie centrale: Routes du commerce et des idées (Cahiers d’Asie Centrale 1–2), Tachkent/Aix-en-Provence 1996, 357–66. 67 This particular passage of the Šābuhragān has not been preserved, but is referred to by the Muslim author al-Bērūnī; its authenticity has never been doubted, however (certainly not by Tardieu). See E. Sachau, Albîrûnî: Chronologie orientalischer Völker, Leipzig 1876–1878, 190. 68 CMC 45–72. For Baraies, see J. Ries, ‘Baraiès le didascale dans le Codex Mani. Nature, structure et valeur de son témoignage sur Mani et sa doctrine’, in: Cirillo & Van Tongerloo (eds), Manicheismo e oriente cristiano antico, 305–11. 69 Reeves, Heralds of that Good Realm, passim; see also D. Frankfurter, ‘Apocalypses Real and Imagined in the Mani Codex’, Numen 44 (1997), 60–73.

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albert de jong The Elchasaite (and Jewish-Christian) notion

As noted above, many scholars have attempted to locate the origins of the Manichaean notion of a chain of prophets in his ‘Elchasaite’ heritage (a heritage that is itself questionable). That the Elchasaites believed in a chain of prophets, or a series of incarnations of Christ throughout history, is reported both by Hippolytus and Epiphanius, but their versions of this important idea are confused and its relation to Elchasai, whether as person or as book, is in fact not at all clear. Hippolytus attributes the idea to a certain Alcibiades, a heretical Christian teacher in third-century Rome, who taught a second baptism for remission of sins and also claimed to possess a book of revelations of Elchasai (Hippolytus, Refutation 9.14.1). Whether that makes him an Elchasaite, and whether that would allow us to attribute everything taught by Alcibiades to the Elchasaite movement remains problematic.70 In a seemingly disjunct passage in Refutation 10.29.2, Hippolytus attributes a similar idea, of a heavenly Christ who ‘is transferred into many bodies many times, and now in Jesus’ to an unnamed group who are accused of having ‘made’ a ‘strange book called after a certain Elchasai’. More or less the same is true for Epiphanius’ report, confused in itself, which attributes a similar prophetology—claiming that Christ appeared from time to time throughout history, first in Adam and finally, perhaps, in Jesus—to the sect of the Sampsaeans (Panarion 53.1.8), who were the Elchasaites proper, but also and especially to the Ebionites; in this case, he traces this element of Ebionite thought to the pernicious influence of a certain Elxaios (Panarion 30.3.1). In spite of the existence of a very long chapter on the Manichaeans in the Panarion, and in spite of the great efforts Epiphanius took in establishing chains of heretical movements, Epiphanius never entertained the possibility that Manichaean prophetology, of which he knew very little, could somehow be traced back to the influence of Elchasai. In fact, as we have seen, Epiphanius establishes no relation whatever between the Manichaeans and the Elchasaites. There is clear evidence that the notion of the incarnation of (a heavenly) Christ throughout history, from Adam up to Jesus, was found among various groups that are associated with so-called Jewish Chris-

70

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tianity. This evidence, particularly in the sources underlying the PseudoClementines, suggests that these texts derive from Syro-Mesopotamia.71 The case for a specific Elchasaite doctrine on this subject, however, which supposedly led Mani to formulate his celebrated view of the ancestral and ethnic teachers, remains weak. Not only is the ‘Elchasaite’ evidence deeply problematic—allowing only for the vague conclusion that some groups in some places had similar beliefs—the idea of a heavenly being incarnating in Adam and from him in a series of figures culminating in Christ has no sound Manichaean parallel, as will be demonstrated presently. The problem is Adam. Scholars who, unlike the present writer, are willing to combine the reports of Hippolytus and Epiphanius must take the statement in the latter author seriously, that the incarnations of Christ began with Adam. In Manichaean literature, however—again with a few exceptions—Adam is rarely included in the lists of prophets who came before Mani. As is the case with Mandaean literature, such lists usually begin either with Seth(el) or with Sem.72 There are many reasons for denying a prophetic role to Adam. He is an ambiguous figure, presented as someone who ‘knows’ or is instructed in his origin and the divine secrets, but does not wholly live up to his promise. He has no ‘church’ to found, since he is alone—or alone with his wife. And he is not known—the evidence of the CMC notwithstanding—for instructing mankind. The same ambiguity with regard to Adam as a prophet can be found in Mandaean texts—well-known for their plurality of Adams73—and, of course, in Islam, with its marked distinction in according to Adam the dignity of a nabī (‘prophet’), but not that of a rasūl (‘messenger’).74

71 References can be found in Cirillo, ‘From Elchasaite Christology’, 50. Cirillo’s claim that the Elchasaite christology influenced the Pseudo-Clementines is not supported by any evidence. 72 Some of the evidence for Manichaean Adam-traditions is presented by Reeves, Heralds of that Good Realm, 79–88; for the lists, see N.A. Pedersen, Studies in the Sermon on the Great War: Investigations of a Manichaean-Coptic Text from the Fourth Century, Aarhus 1996, 234, n. 211. The most important exception is Manichaean Homilies 14.16–32, discussed by Pedersen, Studies, 249–50. 73 See E.S. Drower, The Secret Adam: A Study of Nasoraean Gnosis, Oxford 1960, 21–33; K. Rudolph, Theogonie, Kosmogonie und Anthropogonie in den mandäischen Schriften (FRLANT 88), Göttingen 1965, 310–38. 74 See M.J. Kister, ‘Ādam: A Study of Some Legends in tafsīr and hadīt Literature’, Israel Oriental Studies 13 (1993), 113–74.

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Since the incarnation of Christ in Adam is so explicit in the ‘Elchasaite’ materials discussed by Epiphanius, and also in the Pseudo-Clementines, the absence of this notion in Manichaean texts (as opposed to the notion that Adam was instructed by heavenly beings, a Jewish-Christian-Gnostic commonplace) makes the ‘Elchasaite’ parallel a weak one at best. This raises even more doubts with regard to the central place assigned to the idea of the prophets as incarnations of a single heavenly being. As it happens, this uncertain and poorly attested notion (relying wholly on a single passage) is the exception that needs to be explained, not the key to unlock all secrets of early Manichaeism. The chain of prophets in Zoroastrianism On the Iranian side, too, there is a weak parallel. The existence of the notion of a prophetic succession in Zoroastrian literature has long been known, although it tends to be obscured in introductory surveys of that religion. The locus classicus for the concept is the first chapter of the seventh book of the Dēnkard, but traces of similar concepts can be found in other Zoroastrian texts as well. The Dēnkard is the largest and most important Zoroastrian Middle Persian text to have survived (although not entirely, the first two books and the beginning of the third having been lost in the transmission). It is a multi-layered composition, which was assembled at least twice in the course of the ninth century, presumably in Baghdad under the auspices of the Zoroastrian divān of that city. Two redactors are known by name: Ādur-Farrōbay the son of Farroxzād, who held the office of hudēnān pēšōbay (‘leader of the faithful’, the clerical head of the Zoroastrian community under Muslim rule) in the early ninth century, and Ādurbād son of Ēmēd, who held the same office one or two generations later. The text was copied in Baghdad in 1020 ce; the only surviving manuscript (ms B) is a seventeenth-century copy of that Baghdadi manuscript.75 Dēnkard 7 is often represented as a book devoted to the ‘legend of Zoroaster’,76 but it is much more than that. It is, in fact, a complete history of the religion (or the revelation), beginning before Zarathushtra 75 This manuscript was published by M.J. Dresden, Dēnkart: A Pahlavi Text. Facsimile Edition of the Manuscript B of the K.R. Cama Oriental Institute Bombay, Wiesbaden 1966. The ‘edition’ of D.M. Madan, The Complete Text of the Pahlavi Dinkard, Bombay 1911, is basically a typeset version of that manuscript. 76 See M. Molé, La légende de Zoroastre selon les textes pehlevis, Paris 19932.

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and ending only with the final renovation of the world.77 While the text cannot be dated with confidence, it contains such an astonishing amount of quotations from the Zand, the (Sasanian) commentary on the Avesta, that it is unlikely to be of the same date as, for example, book 3, which clearly belongs to early Islamic times. As I have shown elsewhere, there are two quite different versions of the process of revelation in Zoroastrian traditions.78 The one with which most scholars are familiar can be termed the ‘exclusive’ one: it relates how the supreme god, Ahura Mazdā, attempted time and again to bring the revelation to the world by offering it to an assorted number of persons, all of whom refused, fearing hardship or even death, until, finally, the prophet Zarathushtra accepted and brought the revelation to the world, thereby vanquishing the demons and creating the decisive turning point in history. Alongside this tradition, there is another tradition, as exemplified by Dēnkard 7.1, which tells a completely different story. It presents a revelation in stages, by claiming that the divine waxš, which means both ‘word’ and ‘spirit’, came in succession to the first man, Gayōmard, the first human couple, Mašya and Mašyāna, and many early kings, Taxmurat, Jamšēd, Frēdōn, etc. Included in this list are also foreigners, notably a king of the Arabs, and the chapter ends with the following statement: And there have also been other prophets, whose names are not recorded in the Mazdā-worshipping religion (that is the Avesta or the revelation, A.J.); for it is revealed that from time to time, a number of the spiritual beings have come to those who were great leaders. Humans have been eager to ask and inquire of them to the same extent they are presently eager to ask and inquire of the Revelation; it was necessary then, it is no longer necessary now, for all mankind has now been instructed by the Revelation.79

77 J. Josephson, ‘The “Sitz im Leben” of the Seventh Book of the Dēnkard’, in: C.G. Cereti et alii (eds), Religious Themes and Texts of pre-Islamic Iran and Central Asia: Studies in Honour of Professor Gherardo Gnoli (Beiträge zur Iranistik 24), Wiesbaden 2003, 203–12. 78 A. de Jong, ‘The First Sin: Zoroastrian Ideas about the Time before Zarathustra’, in: S. Shaked (ed), Genesis and Regeneration: Essays on Conceptions of Origins, Jerusalem 2005, 192–209. 79 Dk. 7.1.43. Molé, Légende, 156–57, suggests Islamic influence on this passage, but this can only be maintained by disregarding the broader Zoroastrian setting of the topos.

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It is clear that this particular tradition, of a chain of prophets before Zarathushtra, is backed by the Zoroastrian tradition itself, in the sense that there are many stories, already in the Avesta, that relate how Ahura Mazdā speaks to all those who have now been enlisted as prophets, and there are none that have him speaking to those after the Revelation, with the exception of a small number of worthy Zoroastrians, who were enabled to go up to heaven while still alive. So, where formerly the Wise Lord would speak to mortals on earth, since the Revelation mortals have to go up to the house of song, where he reigns, to communicate with the deity.80 The parallel is, again, not wholly satisfactory and there is the nagging problem of the dating of the sources, which are so late that a Manichaean influence on the Zoroastrian idea cannot be excluded.81 It is, therefore, not my wish to suggest that the chain of prophecy is a Zoroastrian element in Manichaeism.82 It is instructive, however, to show that there are parallels, all problematic, from Christianity and from Zoroastrianism, for Mani’s view of the history of divine instruction of humans. Similar double parallels, with little possibility of establishing precedence, have been observed with regard to Manichaean ritual, especially the daily meal, with regard to the use of hymns, prayers, and prayer-times and several other subjects.83 Manichaeism again What such parallels obscure is the radical novelty of Manichaeism. What was new about Manichaeism was its designer status. When the prophet was executed by the king of the Iranians, on unknown charges, the foundations for the religion, including its canonical texts, most of its ritual life, its missionary strategy, and the structure of its organisa-

80 See S. Shaked, ‘Quests and Visionary Journeys in Sasanian Iran’, in: Assmann & Stroumsa (eds), Transformations of the Inner Self, 65–86. 81 P.O. Skjaervø, ‘Iranian Epic and the Manichaean Book of Giants: Irano-Manichaica III’, Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 48 (1995), 187–223 at 192–94. 82 That idea has been put forward, of course, by G. Widengren, The Great Vohu Manah and the Apostle of God: Studies in Iranian and Manichaean Religion, Uppsala/Leipzig 1945. 83 J.B. BeDuhn, The Manichaean Body in Discipline and Ritual, Baltimore 2000; Idem, ‘Eucharist or Yasna? Antecedents of Manichaean Food Ritual’, in: R.E. Emmerick et alii (eds), Studia Manichaica. IV: Internationaler Kongreß zum Manichäismus, Berlin 2000, 14–36; Idem, ‘The Leap of the Soul in Manichaeism’, in: Van Tongerloo & Cirillo (eds), Il Manicheismo, 9–26.

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tion, had all been laid. The well known list of ten aspects in which Manichaeism was superior to the religions that had existed before, preserved in Iranian and Western texts, makes this absolutely clear.84 In that sense, Manichaeism was wholly new, but like the traditions it attempted to replace, it had to come up with a reason why it took God so long to make his final instructions to mankind clear. Since all in the Empire (Zoroastrians, Jews, Christians, and others) agreed on the one fact that God is good, he must obviously be protected from the charge of having failed to make known to man how to look after himself and the world. As had been done by many Christians, and by many Zoroastrians, this problem was solved by invoking the notion of a continuing process of revelation, culminating in a final one. As we know, but Mani could not foresee, this feat was to be repeated after him, with the foundation of Islam, and since that foundation, it has been repeated numerous times, though not always very successfully, by other prophets in the Middle East.85 But Manichaeism was the first of these movements, and perfectly illustrates the shift in late antiquity from the earlier Mediterranean religious koinē of myth, temple, and divine image,86 to the new one of prophet, holy book and cultic meal,87 or from the notion of religion as ancestral customs to that of living in the assuredness of having received definitive knowledge of God’s intentions. In spite of obvious differences, these notions are as characteristic of Sasanian Zoroastrianism as they are of Christianity and Manichaeism. Mani lived when the Roman empire officially still espoused the older religious koinē and when it suffered crushing defeats at the hands of the Persians.88 The awareness of similarities in the way the world was viewed—the shared culture of Sasanian Mesopotamia—and the relative security of life in the new Persian kingdom, must be taken into account when the rise of Manichaeism is explained.

Gardner & Lieu, Manichaean Texts 109; 265–68. Some success was only achieved by the Hurufis in Medieval Iran (S. Bashir, Fazlallah Astarabadi and the Hurufis, Oxford 2005) and lasting success, of course, by Baha’ullah, the founder of the Baha’i religion ( J.R.I. Cole, Modernity and the Millennium: The Genesis of the Baha’i Faith in the Nineteenth Century, New York 1998). 86 See for this notion W. Burkert, Babylon, Memphis, Persepolis: Eastern Contexts of Greek Culture, Cambridge MA/London 2004, 1–15. 87 G.G. Stroumsa, La fin du sacrifice: Les mutations religieuses de l’Antiquité tardive, Paris 2005 (and see Stroumsa in this volume). 88 D.S. Potter, The Roman Empire at bay: AD 180–395, London 2004. 84 85

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Two very different Roman authors, bien étonnés de se trouver ensemble, famously referred to Mani as a Persian or to Manichaeism as a Persian religion. The first was the emperor Diocletian, in his infamous rescript to Julianus, proconsul of Africa, of 302 ce.89 He interprets Manichaeism not only as something originating from Persia, but especially as a wicked innovation, ‘hitherto unheard-of ’. For the other, Augustine, the fault of Manichaeism was not so much that it was new, but that it was false.90 We have been warned that ‘[t]he Emperor has been taken a little too seriously’.91 So has, in many respects, the bishop of Hippo. But on this particular point—that Manichaeism originated in Persia, and that this should mean something—they cannot be taken seriously enough: it could have come from nowhere else.

89 For the text of the rescript, see Gardner & Lieu, Manichaean Texts, 116–18; for the dating of the rescript, which is itself undated and was previously thought to have been issued in 297, see T.D. Barnes, ‘Sossianus Heracles and the Antecedents of the “Great Persecution” ’, HSCP 80 (1976), 239–52 at 246–50. 90 Augustine, De Haeresibus 46.1 (Gardner & Lieu, Manichaean Texts 187). 91 Brown, ‘Diffusion’, 92.

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THE LETTER OF MARA BAR SARAPION Some Comments on its Philosophical and Historical Context Annette Merz and Teun Tieleman Introduction The Syriac Letter of Mara bar Sarapion bristles with varied and unresolved puzzles. No consensus exists as yet about its historical context and approximate date, which may go some way towards explaining why it still remains underused despite its potential importance to the study of early Christianity, ancient religion, Roman Imperial political and military history and Graeco-Roman philosophy alike. Within the compass of this article, however, we cannot hope to do more than address two main questions that seem to be of particular interest, not least because of the rather different treatment they have received in a few other studies of more or less recent date, viz. that of the author’s world-view (section 1) and that of the historical context (section 2). It should be said that even on these issues still more can and will be said. For a full treatment we refer the reader to our forthcoming monograph on this very intriguing document.1 1. Philosophy: Themes and Names 1.1. Preliminaries Rejecting Cureton’s view that Mara was a Christian,2 Schulthess adduced a number of parallels between the letter and Stoic literature

1 The research for this monograph is part of our joint research project ‘Habent sua fata libelli: “Text processing” in the philosophical and religious movements within the Roman Empire (1–300 ce)’ subsidized by Utrecht University in the context of its ‘High Potentials Programme’. We thank the other members of our research group for allowing us to try out on them our developing ideas on Mara’s Letter. 2 W. Cureton, ‘The Epistle of Mara, Son of Serapion’, Spicilegium Syriacum, London 1855, 43–48, 70–76, 101–02. Cureton’s edition of the letter, on pp. 43–48, still is the only one available.

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(almost exclusively from the Imperial period) to show that Mara was a full-blown Stoic.3 Since then most students of the letter have, more cautiously, spoken of the letter’s Stoic colouring.4 But the issue of Mara’s philosophy (if it can be called that) has remained contentious. McVey5 and, recently, Chin6 consider the philosophy or wisdom contained in the letter far too general, and indeed platitudinous, to be accepted as distinctively Stoic, asserting that the relevant statements are compatible with Platonism as well. McVey argues that the author is a fourth century Christian who in mounting an anti-Jewish polemic poses as a pagan intellectual. She points to the Testimonium Flavianum and certain passages of the Sibylline Oracles as parallels for such a ploy on the part of a Christian author with an axe to grind. Chin goes along with McVey’s dismissal of Mara’s Stoicism but explains what she sees as the clichéd nature of his pronouncements as typical of a so-called chreia elaboration, i.e., an elaboration of a moralistic anecdote, or chreia, in this case of the one we find appended to the letter; as such, the letter is a rhetorical exercise dating from a time when Greek educational practice had become thoroughly absorbed by Syriac culture, viz. probably as late as the fifth or sixth century ce.7 Ramelli8 and Rensberger9 have 3 F. Schulthess, ‘Der Brief des Mara bar Sarapion: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der syrischen Literatur’, Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft 51 (1897), 365–91. 4 E.g. F. Millar, The Roman Near East: 31 BC–AD 337, Cambridge MA/London 1993, 462; M.A. Speidel, ‘Early Roman Rule in Commagene’, SCI 24 (2005), 85–100, 95. 5 K.E. McVey, ‘A Fresh Look at the Letter of Mara Bar Sarapion’, in: R. Lavenant (ed.), V Symposium Syriacum 1988 (Roma 1990), 261–62. In fact McVey, ‘A Fresh Look’, 270 argues that if Mara had been a Stoic, he could not have failed to mention his school’s founder among the sages who had been persecuted (Schulthess ll. 143–55, Cureton 46:12–20), pointing to Cicero, De Natura Deorum (hereafter: ND) 3.82 and Plutarch, De Stoicorum Repugnantiis (hereafter: Stoic. Rep.) 1051C–D, where however not Zeno of Citium but rather Zeno of Elea is meant; cf. McVey, ‘A Fresh Look’, 264 (ignoring a note to this effect in Cherniss’ edition which she used for the latter passage). Zeno of Citium received great honours from the city of Athens, where he taught and died: see Diogenes Laertius 7.10–11, 29. 6 C.M. Chin, ‘Rhetorical Practice in the Chreia Elaboration of Mara bar Serapion’, Hugoye 9/2 (2006). 7 This chreia presents the imprisoned Mara as courageously laughing at Fate. A full treatment of its relation to the letter including a refutation of Chin’s thesis will be given in the monograph announced in the introduction to this article. 8 See e.g. I. Ramelli, ‘Gesù tra i sapienti greci perseguitati ingiustamente in un antico documento filosofico pagano di lingua siriaca’, Rivista di Filosofia Neo-Scolastica 97/4 (2005), 545, 554f. 9 D. Rensberger, ‘Reconsidering the Letter of Mara bar Serapion’, forthcoming in: E. Meyers et alii (eds), Aramaic Studies in Judaism and Early Christianity, Warsaw IN, 7, 32, 34.

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again accepted the presence of Stoic elements in the letter, approaching it as an authentic personal document. Rensberger characterizes the author’s project as a fusion of Greek (in particular Stoic) and Near Eastern notions. Given the status quaestionis, it seems necessary to study Mara’s philosophical orientation in a more systematic fashion than has been done before. There appears to be a tacit consensus that Schulthess’ list of parallels fails to support his thesis that Mara was a Stoic.10 However, this thesis deserves to be put to the test. So what does the letter, if examined systematically, disclose about its author’s philosophical outlook? Or does it reflect a broad level of Greek conceptuality and mood rather than specific schools of thought and technical doctrines? It will have become apparent that the question of the author’s philosophical profile bears directly on that of the letter’s dating. In particular, if we consider the letter to be predominantly Stoic in its outlook, late datings such as proposed by McVey and Chin become highly unlikely. Our documented evidence is slender but permits us to conclude that the last Stoic schools within the Roman Empire closed around the middle of the third century ce.11 Platonism came to dominate the philosophical stage. Its revival had started in the first and second centuries ce in Asia Minor in particular. During this period, however, Stoic schools and teaching still flourished, as is witnessed by Epictetus and other sources. One should not exclude Syria from this picture. Under the Empire chairs of philosophy were founded, not only in Athens and Rome but throughout the provinces. Our sources present this as a policy on the part of the emperors of the second century ce in particular, but a number of these chairs may have been of earlier date.12 Furthermore, chairs were founded for each of the main schools, Platonism, Aristotelianism, Stoicism and Epicureanism.13

10 Only Rensberger, ‘Reconsidering’, 29, deals with—and rejects—one of them, a passage from Seneca on Fate. 11 See, e.g., J.-B. Gourinat, ‘La disparition et la reconstitution du stoïcisme: éléments pour une histoire’, in: G. Romeyer Dherbey & J.B. Gourinat (eds), Les Stoïciens, Paris 2005, 17. 12 Gourinat, ‘Disparition’, 15–6; cf. J. Barnes, Logic and the Imperial Stoa, Leiden 1997, 5–6. 13 Thus Galen of Pergamon (129–c. 213 ce) studied with representatives of each of these schools in his native Pergamon: see, e.g., the discussion in T. Tieleman, ‘Galen and the Stoics: The Art of Not Naming’, forthcoming in: C.J. Gill et alii (eds), Galen and the World of Knowledge, Cambridge 2007.

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Syria had been exposed to Greek culture—including philosophy— from Early Hellenistic times onwards.14 Throughout the centuries Syria produced prominent philosophers, some of whom continued to live and teach in their native cities. Among them we find Stoics such as Posidonius of Apamea (130–50 bce), who (as has often been noted) was but one of several prominent Stoic philosophers of Near Eastern provenance.15 In addition, Syria produced Platonists such as Numenius of Apamea (middle or second half of the second cent. ce) and Nicomachus of Antiocheia Gerasa in Dekapolis (second half of the second century ce), both of whom are associated with the Neopythagorean revival. Another Pythagoreanizing Platonist, Iamblichus (c. 240–325 ce) of Chalkis in Syria, founded a school of his own in this town or more likely Apamea. These men were philosophers of note but their careers may be taken to presuppose a wider culture of philosophical teaching in Syria and its neighbouring regions. In sum, there is nothing a priori implausible about someone like Mara being taught by a representative of any of the main schools of Greek philosophy at the eastern fringes of the Empire. Considered in this light, Mara’s appeal to philosophy (ll. 28–9 Schulthess)16 deserves to be taken seriously. 1.2. Mara’s philosophical position At the outset of his letter Mara announces that he will summarize his world-view for his son Sarapion (9–10),17 having learned about the latter’s diligent studies, i.e., assuming his susceptibility for what Mara is about to expound (5–9). Mara indicates that his exposition will be based 14 Useful though focusing on late antiquity are the studies by G.W. Bowersock, Hellenism in Late Antiquity, Cambridge 1990, 29–40, and S. Brock, ‘From Antagonism to Assimilation: Syriac Attitudes to Greek Learning’, in: N. Garsoïan et alii (eds), East of Byzantium: Syria and Armenia in the Formative Period, Washington DC 1980; repr. as Study nr. V in: Syriac Perspectives on Late Antiquity (Variorum Reprints), Aldershot 1984. 15 E.g. the school’s founder Zeno (c. 334–261 bce) was born in Citium on Cyprus, a city with a mixed Greek and Phoenician population, and was at least in part of Phoenician descent. The third head of the Stoa, Chrysippus (c. 280–205), came from Soloi in Cilicia. His successor was Diogenes (c. 228–140), of Seleucia on the Tigris in Babylonia. The latter’s pupils include Stoics such as Antipater (c. 200–130) of Tarsus (Cilicia) and his compatriot Apollodorus (second century bce) of Seleucia. But all of them went to Athens to study philosophy. Max Pohlenz’ view that these men brought with them certain Semitic notions (e.g. of Fate) explaining certain features of Stoicism has long been superseded. 16 References give line numbers of Schulthess’ 1897 translation and, where necessary, page and line of Cureton’s edition. 17 Cureton 43:6. Schulthess, l. 10: ‘was ich in der Welt erforscht habe’.

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both on his personal experience of the human world and on his own education (10–11). Presenting himself as an example to his young son, he exhorts him to pursue literate education and wisdom (14–15), which requires much effort and discipline but is rewarding to the highest degree (17–20). The importance of wisdom is again stressed a little further on (24–34). Here this notion is linked to justice, virtue and philosophy (with the Greek term being used).18 Mara then may be taken to present himself as a philosophically educated man—an assumption that finds further support in the systematic use of Greek philosophical concepts throughout the letter.19 As we hope to show, we are not dealing with a concatenation of precepts but with a personal, at times moving letter based on a coherent world view in which specific conceptions of Fate or God are brought to bear on the condition humaine.20 Mara sees this philosophy as a guide to life. In concluding his exposition, he urges his son to bring it into practice (190–5). Mara does not refer to any specific school of philosophy but it would be rash to take this as an indication that he cannot be expounding what is basically one particular system. Referring to his Greek education in general terms,21 he may have studied with representatives of more than one school.22 The outcome was not necessarily a personal eclecticism (of whatever coherence and consistency) but could be the choice for one of them. If the latter is the case, there may be various explanations why Mara is not explicit about his philosophical affiliation in what is after all a personal letter.23 This being so, it can be excluded that Mara was an Epicurean, given the role he assigns to God (23, 114,

18 Pace Schulthess, ‘Der Brief ’, 382 the typically Greek term philosophy (PYLSPWT’; Cureton 43:19) in itself says little about the level of philosophical education on the part of the author, let alone that it identifies him as a Stoic. 19 The sentence at ll. 10–11 is corrupt and left untranslated by Schulthess but at any rate contains a reference to Greek learning, or education. Cureton 70:10–12 ventures a translation that makes Mara say that Greek education or learning perished at the birth of Christianity but this is both unwarranted in itself and inconsistent with the context. Schulthess ad locum suggests a slightly more plausible rendering which makes Greek education the road to freedom, a recurrent motif in the letter (e.g. 23, 194). 20 We do not know the age of Mara’s son at the time of writing but the letter contains a few hints that he still was a boy (5, 237). If so, this may have influenced the conceptual level and terminological technicality of Mara’s style. 21 See supra n. 19. 22 As was not uncommon in the Imperial period; see supra, n. 13. 23 The nature of his father’s education may have been known to his son so that a general reminder sufficed. Sectarian divisions are moreover unimportant at this time of crisis, it is (universal) wisdom that counts now.

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128, 150, 233) and Fate (75, 112, 218, 252) and his repeated warnings about lust (e.g. 163–64, 238). Furthermore, some scholars have argued that Mara’s outlook is reconcilable with Platonism—a point used in support of a late dating (see above). However, the following views of Mara are decidedly un-Platonic: (a) man is mortal: there is no personal afterlife (105–6, 153–5, 244), (b) virtue/wisdom is sufficient for living successfully (23–31), (c) the emotions are to be eradicated rather than mitigated (193–4); (d) God and Fate interfere directly in the lives of individuals and nations alike (see further below, 1.3).24 This set moreover is recognizably Stoic.25 Pace McVey and Chin, it is therefore wrong to argue that Mara’s statements are so general as to be compatible with Platonism as well. A closer reading of the letter shows Mara to be sensitive to the technical distinctions of Stoic moral theory. It is the emotions that are bad, whereas the external and bodily things at which they are directed are indifferent. One of the finer points of Stoic ethics is correctly used by Mara as well: joy (i.e., Greek chara) is not an emotion but a good feeling (eupatheia) accompanying wisdom (116, 193, 222). In addition we repeatedly come across translated technical terms, notably ‘the appropriate’26 (to kathēkon)27 and utility28 (ōphelos) in its moral sense.29 These points confirm that Mara had been the beneficiary of a rather full Stoic education. A full treatment of Mara’s version of Stoicism has to be postponed to another occasion. Here we single out for discussion one element which might at first sight seem to diverge from mainstream Stoicism, viz. Mara’s use of the term ‘Time’ in relation to the role of Fate and God.

24 Mara (153) refers to Plato as the author through whose works the memory of Socrates lives on. But this is merely one of three examples of how wise men may achieve immortal fame. Socrates and Pythagoras, as wise men, are mentioned three times (104–05, 144, 146, 153–54) but their names and the use made of them are not decisive for Mara’s philosophical affiliation either, see infra. 25 With the exception of Mara’s belief that there is no personal immortality, to which Epicureans and Aristotelians also subscribed. Views (b), (c) and (d) are also un-Aristotelian. 26 Ll. 14, 23, 165; Cureton 43:9.14; 46:26 (ZDQ’). 27 See Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta (hereafter: SVF) 3.491–9; cf. D. Tsekourakis, Studies in the Terminology of Early Stoic Ethics, Wiesbaden 1974, 1–30. 28 Ll. 71, 144, 197; Cureton 44:20; 46:12; 47:20 (using forms of the verb HN’). 29 See SVF 3.74–7, 625–27, 3.674 (‘nothing is useful for fools’); cf. Tsekourakis, Terminology, 68–75.

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1.3. Fate and Providence Schulthess’ translation of ‘Fate’ (Schicksal, Geschick) for Syriac ZBN’30 suited his view of Mara as a true-blue Stoic. But in fact ZBN’ is the ordinary word for time. Thus Cureton translated ‘time’, although he used a capital T in two of the passages where Schulthess renders ‘Fate’ (218, 252), thereby underlining that the word refers to the cosmic principle responsible for inevitable (bad) events as opposed to those occurrences where the term must bear an ordinary temporal meaning (e.g. Cureton 48:3, transl. 75:26). Clearly time does not function as a cosmic principle in Stoic philosophy (or in any other Greek philosophical school), at least not the way it does here.31 Although alternative renderings may have been available to Mara, the best explanation seems the one offered recently by David Rensberger who argues persuasively that Mara is trying to introduce a technical sense for ZBN’ (‘time’), one that accords with the Greek concept of Fate (i.e., heimarmenē). Rensberger is in a position to produce a few parallels from Semitic literature featuring the term in a very similar if not identical sense.32 A related observation made by Rensberger is that Mara uses Time/ Fate with reference to bad things that happen to him or others while associating God with the good things. This of course raises intriguing questions as to the world-view entertained by Mara. Is he opposing a good (God) and a bad principle (Fate)? Is God for him a transcendent Semitic-style deity? An affirmative answer to these two questions would mean that Mara diverges from Stoicism on a fundamental point after

Ll. 49, 75, 112, 200, 218, 233, 252; Cureton 44:7.22; 45:21; 47:22; 48:6.14.26. For the Stoics time is a mental abstraction which serves to measure the sequence of cosmic events. It is incorporeal and as such incapable of causing anything: see SVF 2.331, 509–21. The Stoic etymology relating Greek chronos to the god Kronos refers to the God devouring its own children, just as time can be said to consume everything, i.e. everything comes to an end with the passage of time: Cicero, ND 2.64 (SVF 2.1091); cf. SVF 2.1086. 32 Rensberger, ‘Reconsidering’, 25–32. Rensberger rightly observes that while one can see the semantic connection between time and fate, it is hard to say exactly how and why Mara developed this usage. But if we are correct in arguing that Mara does not differentiate between God and Fate/Time (as Rensberger believes he does), then Rensberger’s reference to Zurvan, the primal and supreme deity of Zurvanite Zoroastrianism, may be more apposite than he himself supposes (30: ‘There is no direct connection with Zervanism’) because, as he notes, Mara’s identification of Time with Fate seems intriguingly similar to the conception of Zurvan; cf. also Plutarch, De Iside et Osiride 370B. See further R.C. Zaehner, Zurvan: A Zoroastrian Dilemma, Oxford 1955, 55–9, 229, 254–55, 265–66. On another occasion we shall further pursue the question of the possible Iranian backdrop to Mara’s concept of Fate. 30 31

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all. In that case Rensberger’s characterization of Mara’s project as a fusion of Greek and Near Eastern concepts would be quite apposite. The Stoics use the terms God and Fate with reference to their active cosmic principle, alongside a few other terms such as Reason (logos) and the Cause. ‘God’ is the preferred term when they refer to manifestations of his providence, i.e., his care for mankind, in particular. Fate primarily refers to the fact that everything is determined or caused. The ineluctable things include those that harm humans, even including sages. Obviously this raised the problem of how to square Fate with God’s providence. This is not the place to discuss the various Stoic answers to this problem. But one of them was that the passive material principle does impose certain limitations upon God’s goodness, making some evils inevitable—which introduces a form of qualified dualism into Stoic cosmology. Seen in this light, Mara’s use of the relevant terms cannot be said to point to any real divergence from Stoic philosophy. Moreover, the problem of theodicy surfaces in the letter in a way implying that Mara does take Fate and God to be identical: in 110–12 he calls upon Sarapion not to be angry with ‘God and his Fate’ if something bad happens to him. The only reason for being angry with God can be that He can be held accountable in one way or another for the bad things that come Sarapion’s way, if only by omitting to intervene on his behalf.33 Mara justifies his advice by pointing out that God has equipped Sarapion with all the necessary means of coping with hardship, viz. wisdom. This is connected with the Stoic view that we are in principle capable of enduring such adversity as may happen to us and that this in fact is what gives meaning and purpose to our life (74–5).34 The Stoics faced the problem of how their belief in divine providence could be reconciled with the bad end met by good men such as Socrates and Pythagoras. The great Stoic scholarch Chrysippus (c. 280–205 bce) sought an answer by suggesting that this had occurred under the influence of bad demons.35 Another attempted solution (which glaringly failed to convince their opponents) is the one to which Mara The Syriac Sententiae Menandri 452–4 ed. Baarda, in: OTP 2, 591–606, also tells us not to be angry with God in case of misfortunes but the reason why one should not be angry with God is entirely different from that given by Mara. 34 Cf. Seneca Epistulae Morales (herafter: Ep.) 78.17, 96.5, De Providentia (hereafter Prov.) 5. 35 Plutarchus, Stoic. Rep. 1051B–D (SVF 2.1178), Cicero, ND 3.79–93, Seneca Prov. 5, 6. On the Stoic acceptance of the traditional notion of heroes and demons cf. 33

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has recourse at 139–152. Having raised the question how to respond to the fact that wise men suffer the violence of tyrants and are slandered while standing completely defenceless,36 Mara argues that the cases of Socrates, Pythagoras and Jesus have shown that God punished the wrongdoers later on and that these wise men were so to speak compensated by enjoying everlasting, if posthumous, fame.37 It might be supposed that Stoic determinism excluded the kind of intervention by God involved in the notion of divine retribution to which Mara subscribes. But in fact the Stoics combined the two ideas.38 The cosmic order extends to justice on the level of both the life of individuals and the history of nations. Within this broad providential framework the Stoics seem to have assigned a role to demons and gods.39 Their interventions are not arbitrary in the sense that they are motivated by emotions such as anger at human injustice40 or by human prayers for that matter.41 The Stoic Hierocles (fl. c. 120 ce) explains that the gods are not responsible for evil and do not wish to maltreat people. On the contrary, they direct their punishment at the bodily and external conditions of the guilty with the aim of improving their inner, moral quality.42 Thus, divine punishment really is an act of providential care. Hierocles believes that entire nations may be punished in the same way and for the same purpose. Disasters such as earthquakes, famine and pestilence occur mostly through natural causes but at some point in time the gods use them to punish the sins of many at a nation-wide level.43 An interval of some length may therefore pass between crimes K. Algra, ‘Stoic Theology’, in: B. Inwood (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics, Cambridge 2003, 171–72. 36 For another reflection of the discussion on divine providence see ll. 168–69. 37 For the Stoic argument that the culprits get punished sooner or later see Cicero, ND 3.79–93; cf. also Seneca Ep. 110.2, 95.50. The discussion in Cicero in particular (only parts of which have been included in SVF as frr. 2.1179, 1180, 1107, 1197) should be read in whole as illustrating the scholastic background of Mara’s statements concerning divine providence. For another reflection of the discussion on divine providence see ll. 168–9. 38 On punishment as compatible with Fate see also Diogenes Laertius 7.23 (SVF 1 Zeno 298). 39 Cf. Algra, ‘Stoic Theology’, 165. 40 See also Cicero, ND 3.91 (not in SVF ): God is incapable of anger (though in the context the Academic Cotta turns this Stoic belief against the idea of divine retribution as necessarily entailing anger on the part of the gods). 41 On Stoic prayer as a form of self-address see Algra, ‘Stoic Theology’, 174–76. 42 Similarly Seneca Prov. 5, 6. 43 Hierocles ap. Stobaeus Eclogae I, 3.54, p. 64.1–14 Wachsmuth. Similarly Seneca, Ep. 95.50; cf. also De Beneficiis 7.7.3–4.

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and their punishment (making it all the easier to explain disasters as manifestations of divine justice). From Cicero too we know that the Stoics saw the destruction of entire cities in terms of the dispensation of divine justice and hence as a sign of providence.44 Whatever we might think of this theology, it is one to which Stoics subscribed and which can be paralleled from Mara’s letter. 1.4. Philosophical martyrs: Socrates and Pythagoras Save for a reference to Plato’s works,45 the only two Greek philosophers mentioned by Mara are Socrates and Pythagoras, who feature as examples of wise men in two passages:100–07 and 143–55.46 In the former Socrates and Pythagoras are included in a list of historical figures—all Greek—whose fame lives on because of particular qualities or possessions they had—whether of a material or intellectual or moral kind.47 Socrates and Pythagoras are remembered for their wisdom and learning respectively. Even so, they were mortal like everyone else; what remains is their fame. Mara’s choice of exempla, which presupposes detailed knowledge of Greek history and literature, suggests that there may be more to his list than a simple reminder that immortality can be attained through fame alone, namely that it is related to the motif of wisdom running through the entire letter. All possessions listed led to a premature death.48 The latter liability, as the second passage (143–55) shows, is also exemplified by Socrates and Pythagoras, who are said to

See Cicero, ND 3.91 and supra, n. 37. See supra, n. 24. 46 Cureton 45:12–17; 46:12–20. 47 Darius III lost his empire to Alexander (or if Darius I is meant, this king suffered humiliating defeat at the hands of the Athenians). The mighty tyrant Polycrates of Samos was deceived and crucified by the Persian satrap of Ionia. Achilles famously preferred a life of military fame to immortality; his courage—fed by his almost complete invulnerability—made him incautious on the battlefield and caused him to be killed by Paris. Agamemnon was deceived by his wife Clytaemnestra with his cousin Aegistheus while he was leading the Greek army before Troy. On returning triumphantly, he met with a humiliating death at her hands. Priamus saw the death of many of his children before being brutally slaughtered himself when Troy was captured by the Greeks—the eventual consequence of the seduction of Helen by his son Paris. Archimedes lent his engineering skills to the defence of Syracuse against the Romans but was killed when the city fell. Palamedes’ cleverness secured Odysseus’ participation in the expedition against Troy but the latter took revenge through an intrigue which led to Palamedes being stoned to death as a traitor of the Greek cause. 48 See prev. n. 44 45

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have been persecuted as wise men. But both of them remained in secure possession of what they were famous for as long as they lived, whereas the possessions of all the other figures mentioned proved unreliable in the sense that they were lost even during life.49 Socrates’ death in particular was traditionally seen as a model of a philosophical life lived until the very end and indeed crowned by the way he met it. Mara’s point, then, seems to be that if fame is the only way to immortality, it is preferable to seek and be remembered for wisdom rather than anything else. The second passage is remarkable for its notion of divine retribution as well as the fact that Socrates and Pythagoras are aligned with ‘the wise king of the Jews’, which we take to be a reference to Jesus. As we have noticed, the theme of virtuous/wise men being unjustly put to death can be paralleled from Greek and Roman philosophical literature.50 The prime and standard paradigm is of course Socrates but Pythagoras and other names are used in this connection also. Thus Plutarch, De Stoicorum repugnantiis 1051B–D presents Socrates alongside Pythagoras and Antiphon as philosophical martyrs. Lacking from Plutarch, but present in Cicero (who refers to Socrates, Zeno of Elea and Democritus’ pupil Anaxarchus) is the idea of divine justice being dispensed to those responsible, which may concern entire cities (ND 3.82–83). As is also clear from Cicero’s discussion (put in the mouth of the Academic Cotta), the opponents of the Stoics argued that in the cases at issue divine punishment had never followed. Mara for his part presents the great plague of Athens as a divine retribution visited upon the city for having put Socrates to death. This, to be sure, reverses the chronological order, since the plague broke out in the summer of 430 bce, i.e., 31 years before Socrates’ death.51 That Mara should know about both the plague that struck Athens at the beginning of the Peloponnesian war and Socrates’ famous trial but gets their temporal relation wrong seems implausible. Rather he should be taken to be tampering with the historical facts so as to press them into the service of his theological point. Socrates, the arch-philosopher, was too obvious See supra, n. 47. See e.g. Cicero, ND 3.82, listing Socrates alongside Anaxarchus and Zeno of Elea; Plutarchus, Stoic. Rep. 1051B–D (Socrates, Pythagoras, Antiphon); cf. supra, n. 5. The allusion to Socrates’ fate at Plato, Respublica 517a may count as a precursor of this tradition. 51 See Thucydides 2.47–55. 49

50

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and too well-known a paradigm to omit. He possessed what may be called supra-scholastic status. As such, his presence is inconclusive as to Mara’s belonging to any particular school but all the more effective in persuading a readership of varying outlook and background (assuming Mara does not take his son to be the only potential reader of the letter; see further below). It should be noted that Mara connects the plague with famine (145) and, a few lines further on, speaks of famine alone (150–1). The same two disasters can be found in Thucydides’ account of the plague, viz. the passage where he reports that the Athenians disputed among themselves over the correct version of an old oracle associating the coming of the Dorians (i.e., the Spartans) with either hunger (limos) or a plague (loimos). Given the reality of the plague, the latter interpretation prevailed (Thucydides 2.54). So what according to Thucydides were two alternative interpretations have become two real occurrences in Mara’s letter. It is, however, not certain that we are dealing here with a direct, albeit distorted, echo from the pages of the great Athenian historian. Since the punishment of Samos mentioned by Mara can be paralleled from the Sibylline corpus (see below) and Thucydides is also concerned with a particular oracle, it is a fair assumption that the twofold punishment meted out to the Athenians according to Mara reached him through some oracular tradition.52 Of comparable stature was the legendary Pythagoras. His renown had exceeded the boundaries of Greek culture and the mere mention of his name would not betray Greek philosophical education. However, the reported manner of his death and the curious reference to the Greek goddess Hera place Mara’s report firmly within the Greek biographical tradition. As to the former, the fact that Pythagoras is said to have been burnt alive by his compatriots, the Samians, should be compared

52 The combination of the two terms is rather common in the Sibylline Oracles; the relevant predictions concern all mankind or particular nations, though never the Athenians: cf. e.g. Sibyll. Orac. 2.23: similarly 2.156, 3.332, 8,175, 8.352, 11.46, 14.213, fr. 1.33; cf. 11. 240 (the Jews), 13.106 (Rome). But it should be noted that it is already to be found in Hesiod, Opera et Dies 243, as the dual punishment Zeus visits upon a people for the sins of one bad man. Cf. also Herodotus 7.171, Cicero, De Divinatione 1.47. Interestingly Plutarchus, De Iside et Osiride 370B says the pair of disasters are sent by Areimanius at the destined time (chronos heimarmenos)—an expression recalling Mara’s use of Time in the sense of Fate. Cf. A. de Jong, Traditions of the Magi. Zoroastrianism in Greek and Latin Literature (Religions in the Graeco-Roman World 133) Leiden 1997, 196ff.

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with Greek accounts which likewise associate his death with fire. The dominant and most authoritative tradition recounts how envious citizens of Croton set ablaze the house in which Pythagoras and a group of his followers were staying. While many of his adherents died in the fire, Pythagoras escaped from the house but was pursued and killed (Diogenes Laertius 8.39–40). Plutarch, De Stoicorum Repugnantiis 1051C adapts this story in a way similar to Mara by saying that Pythagoras himself died in the fire.53 But all Graeco-Roman reports relate Pythagoras’ death to political intrigue in Magna Graecia, to which he had come, whether directly or not, from his native Samos many years before; that is to say, Mara is alone in specifying Samos as the scene of his death. This point is foreign to the biographical tradition concerned with Pythagoras’ death.54 Presumably Mara, just as he distorted history in the case of the plague of Athens, tampers with established tradition in the case of Pythagoras with the aim of connecting the latter’s murder with the oracular prediction about Samos known to him, viz. that the entire island will be covered with sand. This he can now present as an announcement of its punishment for what it did to Pythagoras.55 Oddly enough, Mara at l. 155 (Cureton 46:19) says that his fame lives on in ‘the statue of Hera’ (i.e., the goddess). It has been suggested that Mara has mixed up the philosopher with Pythagoras of Rhegium, a sculptor of note who was active during the first half of the fifth century bce. Pythagoras of Rhegium has often been identified with Pythagoras of Samos, a sculptor of lesser renown.56 Once this identification had been accepted,57 it gave Pythagoras the sculptor a career similar to that

53 At De Genio Socratis 583A Plutarch again seems to stick to the more precise and dominant version, viz. that Pythagoras himself did not die in the flames but soon afterwards. Cf. also Porphyry, De Vita Pythagorae (hereafter: V.P.), 56–7. 54 On the various accounts of Pythagoras’ death see also E. Zeller, Die Philosophie der Griechen in ihrer geschichtlichen Entwicklung, Darmstadt 19637, I, 420–23; A. Delatte, La Vie de Pythagore de Diogène Laërce, Brussels 1922, 241–44. 55 See Sibyll. Orac. 3.363. The etymological pun Samos-ammos is involved (ἔσται καὶ Σάμος ἄμμος). Note that in the same sentence, in the next line (364), Rome’s downfall is announced: καὶ Ῥώμή ῥὐμη (‘ruin’) cf. ibid. 4.91, 8.166. Knowledge of these lines may have been widespread: cf. e.g. Horace, Epode 16.2, Lactantius, Divinae Institutionem 7.25.7. 56 Schulthess, ‘Der Brief ’, 372 n. 2; McVey, ‘A Fresh Look’, 270; Rensberger, ‘Reconsidering’, n. 15. On Pythagoras of Rhegium see RE XXIV cols. 305–7 (= Pythagoras [14] Lippold); on his namesake from Samos RE XXIV col. 307–8 (= Pythagoras 15). Against their identification, persuasively, Lippold, RE s.v. Pythagoras 14. 57 The identification of the two bronze casters with the name Pythagoras is still widespread in modern studies: e.g. A. Stewart, Greek Sculpture, New Haven 1990, Vol. 1,

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of the philosopher, who also went from his native Samos to Magna Graecia (albeit first to Croton and in late age, presumably, to Metapontum).58 Moreover, Pythagoras of Rhegium was reputed for having been the first to have concentrated on proportion and symmetry.59 These two features of his work may have further encouraged his association with Pythagoras the philosopher and his teaching. However, crediting the great philosopher Pythagoras with a famous sculpture as his chief claim to immortal fame is very peculiar indeed and, to the best of our knowledge, without parallel. It is moreover inconsistent with the way Pythagoras is presented in earlier sections of the letter, with l. 150 featuring him as one of three wise men and l. 105 commending him for his doctrine. Our sources do not associate any statue of the goddess Hera with the name of Pythagoras of Rhegium or with his namesake of Samos for that matter, while mentioning other famous sculptures.60 In fact, the reference to Hera may suggest a different explanation, one not based upon the mistaken identification of the philosopher with one or two bronze casters. Pythagoras’ native island of Samos was home to one of the most important Hera cults in classical antiquity. Near Eastern kings and noblemen are known to have visited important Greek cult centres—including the great temple of Hera on Samos—where they left votive offerings.61 Mara, belonging to the Commagenean ruling class and perhaps to the king’s entourage (see below) may actually be referring to something he had seen on one of these occasions. Highly suggestive in this con138–39, G.M.A. Richter The Sculpture and Sculptors of the Greeks, New Haven/London 1970, 156–58. 58 At the end of his Life of Pythagoras Diogenes Laertius, drawing upon Demetrius of Magnesia’s Men of the Same Name distinguishes between these three and still other bearers of the name Pythagoras (8.47–8; on this source cf. ibidem 84, 85, 1.38). 59 Diogenes Laertius 8.47. 60 No attribution of an extant statue has won general support. Stewart, Greek Sculpture, 139 points to a statue of an enthroned goddess from Taranto (c. 470 bce) as being in the style of Pythagoras (though he acknowledges that it is not illustrative of the innovations ascribed to the artist.) For a picture of this statue (which is in Berlin) see e.g. Stewart, Greek Sculpture, Vol. 2, nr. 256. However, it is by no means certain that the portrayed goddess is Hera. 61 This from an early date onwards, cf. I. Kilian-Dirlmeier, ‘Fremde Weihungen in griechischen Heiligtümern vom 8. bis zum Beginn des 7. Jhs. v. Chr.’, Jahrbuch RGZM 32 (1985), 215–54. On the Commagenian kings see P.M. Fraser, ‘The Kings of Commagene and the Greek World’, in: S. ahin et alii (eds), Studien zur Religion und Kultur Kleinasiens (FS F.K. Dörner), Leiden 1978, 359–73. The most impressive gesture was the donation of 15 (!) talents to Chios by Antiochus IV on the occasion of his tenure of the eponymous stephanephorate.

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nection is the report preserved by Porphyry, On the Life of Pythagoras 3, about the votive offering made by Pythagoras’ son Arimnestes to the temple of Hera on Samos, with a reference in its epigram to his having found wisdom in logois (i.e., of his father), which suits Mara’s point. A similar ‘monument’ may have inspired Mara’s reference here.62 In fact, ancient biographical tradition associates Pythagoras with the goddess Hera in still further ways. Pythagoras’ moral preaching led the women of Croton to dedicate their expensive garments to Hera, patron deity of chastity and marriage, in her famous sanctuary near their town.63 This temple was much frequented throughout antiquity: if the garments had remained on display, they could have been said to preserve the memory of Pythagoras’ moral teaching. Admittedly, the story as narrated by Iamblichus does not refer to the statue of Hera as fulfilling any role, for example as being clad in some of the garments in question (but this seems implausible in itself ). But the shift from temple to statue is not a great one. If accepted, this line of explanation not only dispels the bizarre image of Pythagoras’ world-famous sculpture of Hera but shows that Mara actually aligns him with Socrates and Jesus with regard to the nature of their everlasting fame. All three of them now appear as great moral teachers who left no writings of their own but who are remembered indirectly,64 because of the different sorts of monument erected by others in their honour. The selection of Socrates and Pythagoras appears to be motivated by their status as universally recognized wise men who had been persecuted—which makes them exquisitely suited to Mara’s point about the divine retribution visited upon those responsible for their death. Their selection in itself is inconclusive as to scholastic preference let alone affiliation. Neither authority was or could be monopolized by the Platonists. Authors such as Seneca and Epictetus attest to the status enjoyed by Socrates within Stoic circles well into the Imperial period.

62 The report is in Porphyry concerned with the theft and subsequent disappearance of Pythagoras’ kanōn or ‘rule’ (i.e. for musical scales) from the temple and goes back to Hellenistic sources that are much earlier than Mara. 63 Iamblichus, De Vita Pythagorae 56. 64 On Pythagoras see Josephus, Contra Apionem 1, 163 (= fr. 14, 18 DK); cf. Plutarchus, De Alexandri Fortitudine 328a, Posidonius ap. Galen, De Placitis Hippocratis et Platonis 5.6.43 De Lacy; cf. Porphyrius, V. P. 57. A minority maintain that Pythagoras had written (no longer extant) works, see e.g. Diogenes Laertius 8.6; see further H. Diels & W. Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker, Hildesheim 1989, Vol. 1, 14 and 17–19.

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Posidonius and Seneca illustrate the fact that Stoics too could, and did, treat Pythagoras reverently. 2. The historical context of Mara’s letter 2.1. Preliminaries In 1856 Ewald argued in some detail that Mara’s letter refers to the events during and after the Roman conquest of Commagene in 72/73 ce about which we are informed by Josephus in a precise but rather anecdotic way in Bellum 7.219–243.65 Many historians since then have agreed that this is the most probable historical context for the letter. Until the present day, however, it has not seemed possible to present conclusive evidence for this early dating of the letter,66 or to find another historical situation that provides a more probable context. It is easy to see what has caused this uncertainty about the letter’s setting and date. Writing a private letter, Mara can take the addressee to be familiar with the decisive facts and so limit himself to allusions. Moreover, our knowledge of the events in 72/73 is far from complete, as is that of the alternative contexts which have been proposed, viz. the crises of 160–166 and 256 ce.67 But the main problem would seem to be an approach to the letter that is too narrowly focused on a few passages pertaining to military history68 at the expense of the indications provided by others that concern Mara’s assessment of the overall historical situation. If we concentrate on the latter and correlate these with the possible historical settings, the plausibility of an early dating is considerably heightened. 2.2. Pride and humiliation of the ‘friends of Rome’ D. Rensberger has pointed out that Mara’s letter is one of the rare testimonies in which the imperial policy of the Romans can be seen from the perspective of the victims of this policy.69 There can be no

Göttingische Gelehrte Anzeigen (1856), 661–64. Millar, Near East, 461 seems typical: ‘if there is an appropriate context, it is the early 70s’ (emphasis ours). Similarly Rensberger, ‘Reconsidering’, 6. 67 On details see McVey, ‘A Fresh Look’, 258–60 and Ramelli, ‘Gesù’, 546–51. 68 I.e. on questions such as: Which of the cities named Seleucia is mentioned by Mara? Was Samosata really taken by an army or did it surrender without fight? 69 Rensberger, ‘Reconsidering’, 4. 65 66

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doubt that Mara’s letter looks back on a military confrontation with the Romans which has left many wounded or dead. Members of the ruling class were held captive at some distance from Commagene by the Romans. At the time when he writes his letter, Mara himself is a member of this group, but he probably joined it later than the others. His mind oscillates between his hope to be released and the prospect of execution, which he anticipates with Stoic equanimity.70 So which conflict provides the context of the letter? We believe that everything points to a situation shortly after 72/73 rather than the conflicts of the second or third centuries ce. The crucial difference between the military campaign which Caesennius Paetus conducted against Commagene on the orders of Vespasian and all later confrontations with the Romans was that the campaign of 72/73 ce—to the complete surprise of the people of Commagene—entailed the deposition of the client king Antiochus IV, who had ruled since 37,71 and the transfer of Commagene to direct Roman administration.72 Later conflicts all concerned the maintenance of Roman rule and control over the region. The evaluation of the past, the present, and the future in Mara’s letter shows that he endeavours to make philosophical sense of a situation in which political independence has been lost—not a situation in which an attempt to regain independence has failed. When Mara speaks specifically of the past of his hometown Samosata, and when he reflects in general on the things that can be suddenly and unexpectedly snatched from the hands of human beings, he speaks of what the human person ‘possesses’ in a vocabulary that identifies See ll. 47–71.220–236 (Cureton 44:6–21; 48:7–16). Before their enthronement Antiochus IV and Agrippa I were both living at the Emperor’s court in Rome, having close relations to the later emperors Caligula and Claudius; Dio Cassius 59.24.1 calls them τυραννοδιδάσκαλοι of Caligula. On the dynasty of Commagene see R.D. Sullivan, ‘The Dynasty of Commagene’, ANRW II.8 (1977), 732–98; and now M. Facella, La dinastia degli Orontidi nella Commagene EllenisticoRomana (Studi Ellenistici XVII), Pisa 2006. 72 The alternative option for the Romans was either to let the regions in the SyroMesopotamian region be administered by members of local dynasties who were loyal to Rome or by Roman officials. Each instance called for an individual decision, which is why switches between the two forms of rule took place, e.g., in Palestine and in Commagene in the first century ce. The subject peoples themselves often held divergent views about which form of rule was preferable. It seems clear, however, that the local dynasties and their clientele regarded the monarchy as vital to preserving an appearance of independence, and that the ideological value of this fact vis-à-vis the people over whom they ruled should not be underestimated. It also played a significant role in their self-understanding. Speidel’s instructive analysis (‘Early Roman Rule’), despite its wealth of detail, does not pay sufficient heed to this perspective. 70 71

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him as a member of the elite of a confident society which enjoyed at least a partial autonomy in military, political, and financial terms: . . . auf was für einen Besitz kann sich der Mensch verlassen? oder von welchen Dingen reden als von bleibenden? Von vielem Reichtum?—der wird entrissen; von Festungen?—die werden ausgeplündert; von Städten (MRYNT’)?—die werden verwüstet; von Grösse (RBWT’)?—die wird erniedrigt; von Herrlichkeit?—die wird vernichtet; . . . von Gesetzen (NMWS’)?— die werden abgeschafft.73

Here speaks a man who belongs to the elite of statesmen, one who defines the wealth, the military institutions, the cities, and the laws of his country as his own possessions, and who is accustomed to derive his own status from the greatness and glory of these ‘possessions’. This interpretation is further borne out by the recurrence of central concepts when Mara speaks of the recent events. He looks back on the time ‘when our city (MRYNTN) still stood in all its greatness (BRBWTH)’, and it is clear that the correct political strategy was vigorously debated at that time.74 He emphasizes that he himself was always convinced that the city deserved his love and that he had always ‘gained prestige (P’YWT’: lit. beauty; comeliness) from its greatness (RBWTH)’.75 The Romans ought to show their greatness (RBWTHWN) by setting Mara and his companions free and not—as he writes in bitterness—‘treating us as tyrants (treat) slaves’.76 Obviously, the loss of honour which Mara has suffered through this unusual use of violence against members of the elite is almost a greater source of suffering to him than the prospect of death.77 This emotional response is in accord with the values of classical antiquity. Besides this, Josephus’ account of events presents the deliberate Roman policy of humiliation as well as the subsequent moderation of this harsh treatment (Bellum 7.238–243).78 It is probably impossible to determine whether Mara is with the royal family in Roman captivity or is held at another place. Independently of this question, it is clear that he is speaking of the humiliation suffered Ll. 91–98; Cureton 45:6–10. Ll. 214–216; Cureton 48:3–5. 75 Ll. 216–218; Cureton 48:5–6. 76 Ll. 231–234; 48:13–15. 77 Cf. also ll. 222–226; 48:8–10. 78 Pace McVey, ‘A Fresh Look’, 259 who wrongly maintains that there is ‘no indication that Antiochus or his associates were ever in fact imprisoned’, the king himself was put in bonds to be brought to Rome by a centurio according to Josephus, Bellum 7.238.240—an enormous humiliation! 73 74

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by a local aristocracy which hitherto had been de facto dependent on Rome, but had nevertheless been treated as a nominal friend of Rome and treaty partner—and this is conceivable only in the historical situation after 72/73 ce. It is indeed true that Commagene had already been subjected temporarily to the jurisdiction of a Roman praetor in the reign of Tiberius,79 but the three and a half decades which then passed before the unexpected annexation of Commagene had given every reason to cultivate illusions of a greatness that was continually increasing and would never be lost—all the more so, since Commagene gave considerable military support to the Romans,80 who had shown their gratitude by extending the territory which Commagene ruled.81 Similarly, the fact that Antiochus IV had helped Vespasian secure the imperial throne may have confirmed the Commagenean elite in their mistaken belief that they had thereby attained an unassailable position as Rome’s reliable partner. 2.3. Money as the real reason for the Commagenean War: Mara’s warning about avarice Mara’s extensive admonitions not to let oneself be enslaved by wealth are not to be understood exclusively in the sense of individual ethics, nor are they to be considered as a standard rhetorical topos: rather, they have a significant political dimension. In the list (quoted above) of possessions which were wrongly thought to be ‘enduring’, ‘great wealth’ occupies the first place,82 before the fortresses and cities which must be regarded as collective possessions. This ranking is unsurprising, if we bear in mind that ancient historians emphasize the outstanding wealth of Commagene, and that Josephus goes so far as to portray Antiochus IV as the Croesus of his age.83 Mara is even more outspoken when 79 Cf. Tacitus, Annales 2.42,5; 56,4; Strabo 16.2.3. The scanty nature of our sources makes it difficult to determine precisely the extent to which the Roman influence made itself felt at this period. On this, see the detailed study by Speidel, ‘Early Roman Rule’. 80 Tacitus, Annales 13.7 (during the Parthian crisis in 54 ce); Tacitus, Historiae 5.1,2; Josephus, Bellum 2.500; 3.68; 5.460–465 ( Jewish War). 81 Antiochus was made ruler over parts of Armenia in 60 (Tacitus, Annales 14.26). 82 l. 93; Cureton 45:7. 83 See Tacitus, Historiae 2.81 (Antiochus vetustis opibus ingens et servientium regum ditissimus); Josephus, Bellum 5.461 and the description of Commagene as ‘the land where iron grows’, which refers to the country’s most important source of income after the fertility of the soil; cf. K. Roesch, ‘Kommagene—das Land ubi ferrum nascitur’, Antike Welt 6 (1975), 15–17. Dio Cassius, Roman History 49.20.5, reports that the unsuccessful

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he refers to the courageous ones who acquire the glory of victory in war but then succumb to avarice (178–184), bidding farewell to every solid principle (185–189).84 It is true that these vigorous invectives are presented in the guise of a general summary of the fruits of Mara’s investigations and experiences; but when we read his wish ‘. . . Möchte doch diejenigen . . . Sinnesänderung treffen, die durch ihre Kraft siegen, aber von der Habsucht überwältigt werden’,85 the obvious allusion is surely to the Roman military campaigns in Palestine and Commagene which have just taken place. Modern historians correctly point out that the decision to wage the campaign against Commagene was taken primarily for strategic reasons and that it must be evaluated in the framework of Vespasian’s restructuring of the entire Euphrates region.86 Nevertheless, ancient sources certainly justify the surmise that in the case of Commagene, the financial profit was more than merely a negligible subsidiary consideration. The Commagenean elite attached great importance to their autonomous control over the tax revenues of the country, as the expression of a certain measure of autonomy. This is indicated very clearly by Suetonius, who tells us that Caligula reinstalled Antiochus IV as king in the realm of his father after the interregnum under Tiberius mentioned above. On this occasion, Caligula made over to Antiochus the tax revenues and income from the intervening period, which amounted to the gigantic sum of 100 million sesterces (Caligula 16.3). The most important source for the financial aspect of the Commagenean War is an inscription which summarizes as follows the successful mission of the mediator who was sent to Parthia: Epiphanem et Callinicum regis Antiochi filios . . . cum ampla manu tributariorum reduxit.87 Josephus gives the impression that the princes entered Parthian custody with only a handful of companions (Bellum 7.236), but this inscription shows that they were accompanied there by many members of the wealthy elite of the country, and that the reconciliation with the Romans was linked with the demonstrative acknowledgement of the Roman right to exact campaign of Antony against Antiochus I in 38 bce was motivated by the country’s enormous wealth. 84 Ll. 178–189; Cureton 47:8–15. 85 Ll. 181–183; Cureton 47:9–11. 86 Cf. J. Wagner, ‘Die Römer am Euphrat’, Antike Welt 6 (1975), 68–82, 74–5; idem, ‘Die Römer an Euphrat und Tigris’, Antike Welt 16 (1985), esp. 42–57; Millar, Near East, 81–2. 87 ILS 9200.

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tribute.88 Mara’s bitter accusation that the unprincipled action taken by the Romans against their reliable treaty partner was a consequence of avarice should therefore be seen as a one-sided and subjective reaction, which nevertheless makes good sense—but the only historically meaningful context for such a reaction is the Roman appropriation of the right to exact taxes in 72/73 ce. 2.4. Mara’s interpretation of the Jewish War and (pre-)Matthean Christianity in Syria If, as we have argued, Mara’s words pertain to the annexation of Commagene by the Romans, his mention of the ‘wise king’ is de facto the oldest non-Christian testimony about Jesus, one linked to an interpretation of the Jewish War as a divine punishment for his execution.89 Recently, this has been disputed from two different angles. McVey has shown that the anti-Jewish Christian theory of the punishment of the Jews was very widespread in fourth-century Syriac Christianity, and that this is an important argument in favour of a late dating of the letter.90 In view of the close similarities with the events related by Josephus, Fergus Millar dates the letter to the first century, although he believes that the paradigm must refer to Solomon, since we cannot assume the existence of a Syriac-speaking Christian community in the first century which could have mediated to Mara knowledge of the topos of divine punishment.91 We believe that neither of these arguments stands up to historical examination. There can be no doubt that the interpretation of the Jewish War as God’s punishment for the rejection and execution of Jesus arose among believers in Jesus in the immediate wake of these events and in the Palestinian-Syrian region. This thesis is supported both by attestation and by analogy. A widespread scholarly consensus dates the earliest Christian evidence for this view, the Gospel of Matthew (cf. Matt 22:6–7; 27:25), to the 80’s or 90’s in the Syrian region.92 And we find an analogy, which has not hitherto received the attention it deserves,

Cf. supra, n. 83 on Commagene’s well-known wealth. See G. Theissen & A. Merz, Der historische Jesus, Göttingen 1996, 84–6. 90 ‘A Fresh Look’, 268–69. 91 Millar, Near East, 461–63. 92 See U. Luz, Das Evangelium nach Matthäus (Mt 1–7) (EKK I/1), Düsseldorf/etc. 20025, 100–03 and R.E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament, New York 1997, 172 and 212–17; both narrow down the most probable place of origin to ‘the Antioch region’. 88 89

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in Josephus’ narrative of the defeat of Herod Antipas by the Nabataean king Aretas IV in 36 ce. Antipas was defeated, and could re-establish his position only with the help of Lucius Vitellius, the legate of Syria. Josephus writes: ‘to some of the Jews the destruction of Herod’s army seemed to be divine vengeance, and certainly a just vengeance,93 for his treatment of John, surnamed the Baptist’, whom Josephus regards as a ‘good man’ who taught the crowds nothing but justice towards their fellows and piety towards God.94 If such a minor defeat as Antipas’ could trigger the idea of divine vengeance, there is nothing implausible in the idea that the terrible fate of the Jews and the outcome of the war were discussed everywhere in the Roman empire in the late 60’s and early 70’s, and especially in the neighbouring regions whose royal houses had close family relations with the Herodian dynasty95 and had even participated personally, by leading considerable numbers of soldiers into battle.96 The Commagenean prince Epiphanes and his soldiers had played a particularly prominent and well-known role.97 We are therefore entitled to assume a general interest in Commagene in news about the Jewish War. Mara, whose reflections on Socrates and Pythagoras show that he is interested in historical paradigms of the divine punishment of tyrants who persecute wise men (see above), would therefore have listened intently to the Christian idea. Fergus Millar is very reluctant to accept that Mara is expressing a Christian idea here, partly because he does not wish to regard the letter as ‘evidence for Early Syriac Christianity’: ‘what is at stake is the question of a Christianity transmitted and, in communal terms, organized via the use of a Semitic language: in other words, of an early Syriac church’.98 We fully agree that this cannot be proven at such an early date. The letter is not to be regarded as evidence for the existence of a Christian community in Commagene, nor can one follow Ramelli in using the legendary traditions about the conversion of king Abgar 93 We should note the striking similarities in diction with Mara’s formulation in Cureton 46:15–16: ‘justifiably (BZDQ’) did God make recompense’! 94 Cf. Antiquitates 18.109–119. Josephus mentions the punishment theory twice, in §116 (quoted above, translation AM) and at the end of the passage (§119), where this appears to be the view taken by all the Jews. 95 Cf. R.D. Sullivan, ‘Die Stellung der kommagenischen Königsdynastie in den Herrscherfamilien der hellenistischen Staatenwelt’, Antike Welt 6 (1975), 31–9. 96 See supra, n. 80. 97 Josephus, Bellum 2.460–465. 98 Millar, Near East, 462–63.

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of Edessa in this context.99 Nevertheless, we believe that Mara bar Sarapion could easily have come into contact with the Christian idea that the Jewish defeat and the destruction of the temple were to be regarded as a divine punishment for the crucifixion of Jesus. In his letter, Mara presents himself as a cosmopolitan who teaches his son to be at home anywhere—and naturally, he would have understood Greek. It seems unthinkable that he would not have visited the Syrian metropolis of Antioch. As we know, Antioch was one of the earliest centres of Christianity, the starting point of the Gentile mission of Barnabas and Paul in the early 40’s and the place where ‘the disciples were first called ‘Christians’ (Acts 11:26) and thus became distinguishable from the Jews.100 Besides this, Antioch was one of the main quarters of the Roman army before, during, and after the war. Like many cities in Syria, it celebrated Titus’ victory, ‘providing lavish displays . . . and using the Jewish captives to demonstrate their own destruction’ by throwing them to the beasts and making them fight as gladiators.101 From a strictly historical point of view, Mara’s assertion that all the Jews were killed or driven out of their kingdom so that they live dispersed everywhere as a result of the war seems untenable. Mara’s exaggeration may have been inspired by the large-scale deportations that took place during the Jewish War. Interestingly, Josephus places a similar affirmation on the lips of Titus at Bellum 7.109. When the people of Antioch urge Titus to expel the Jews from their city, he replies: ‘Well, their native city, to which one would have to take them as Jews, is destroyed, and otherwise there is no place that would receive them’. So in the eyes of the spokesman of the Flavians, just as to Mara bar Sarapion, there is no possibility of returning home for the Jews. Josephus reveals the reason why: because their capital has been destroyed by the Romans! Again we meet here a typical upper-class view on life. We may conclude that there is nothing implausible in the suggestion that a Commagenean intellectual was acquainted with the Christian interpretation of the Jewish War. And Mara knows even more about Ramelli, ‘Gesù’, 550 and 562–63. See M. Hengel & A.M. Schwemer, Paulus zwischen Damaskus und Antiochien: Die unbekannten Jahre des Apostels, Tübingen 1998, 274–461. 101 Cf. Josephus, Bellum. 7.39–40, 96, 100; Millar, Near East, 78–9. Titus himself visited Zeugma some time after the fall of Jerusalem and received a golden crown from the Parthian king Vologeses—another opportunity for reflections on the Jewish War in Commagene! 99

100

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Jesus—if he is indeed speaking about Jesus. He calls him the ‘wise king’ who still lives ‘because of the new laws he promulgated’.102 This points to traditions that can be perceived above all in the Gospel of Matthew but which surely have a rather lengthy prehistory.103 Specific details (such as the Magi) and parallels from the history of religion have often led scholars to locate the origin of the legendary traditions about the birth and childhood of Jesus in the Egyptian and/or Mesopotamian regions.104 The confrontation described in Matthew’s infancy narrative between the ‘newborn king of the Jews’ who is visited by magi from the East105 and the legendary king Herod (Matt 2) could explain why Mara appears to suppose—inaccurately—that the Jews lost their kingdom upon being defeated in the Jewish War. History is telescoped when one looks back to the three generations symbolized by the great king Herod, the ‘wise king’ ( Jesus), and the victims of the Jewish War, leaving out all the details of the actual historical development.106 Of course it could also have been via the traditions of the Passion Narrative that Mara came to know about Jesus’ ‘kingship’, such as the pre-Matthean traditions of the glorious entry into Jerusalem, the mocking tradition and the crucifixion itself with the titulus crucis ‘king of the Jews’. In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus is not only a king, but a wise king: we are explicitly told that he transcends the wisdom of Solomon (Matt 12:42) in a probably very ancient tradition from Q.107 The pre-Matthean genealogy

Ll. 148.154–55; Cureton 46:15.19–20. G. Theissen has pointed out the special closeness between the pictures of Jesus in Matthew and in Mara: cf. Gospel Writing and Church Politics. A Socio-Rhetorical Approach, Hong Kong 2001, 61. 104 See the commentaries and M. Hengel & H. Merkel, ‘Die Magier aus dem Osten und die Flucht nach Ägypten (Mt 2) im Rahmen der Antiken Religionsgeschichte und der Theologie des Matthäus’, in: P. Hoffmann et alii (eds), Orientierung an Jesus: Zur Theologie der Synoptiker (FS J. Schmid), Freiburg 1973, 139–69. 105 The possible link between the star of the newborn king mentioned in Matt 2:2.7.10 and the horoscope of Antiochus I would repay further study. In general, we should note that Commagenean magicians enjoyed a reputation for their skills, and that the royal family of Commagene had very close family relationships to the astrologers at the emperor’s court in the first century ce. Cf. J. Wagner, ‘Dynastie und Herrscherkult in Kommagene: Forschungsgeschichte und neuere Funde’, Istanbuler Mitteilungen 33 (1983), 177–224, 216–17. 106 Compare also Matt 27:25 where the evangelist hints at the Jewish War when he reports that the people of Jerusalem spoke to Pilate: ‘His blood be on us and on our children!’. 107 On Q 11,31–32 see G. Theißen & A. Merz, ‘Gerichtsverzögerung und Heilsverkündigung bei Johannes dem Täufer und Jesus’, in: G. Theißen, Jesus als historische Gestalt, Göttingen 2003, 229–53, 237–51. 102 103

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authenticates him as a descendant of David.108 Prominent passages in the Gospel portray him as a law-giver, as a new Moses.109 His ethical teaching is interpreted as the fulfilment of ‘the law and the prophets’, and it is possible that it is presented in five discourses on the analogy of the five books of Torah. Finally, the risen Jesus sends his disciples out into the world with the commission: ‘Teach them to observe all that I have commanded you’ (Matt 28:20). If we may speculate a little, it is possible that the concluding sentence of the Gospel, which comes immediately after this missionary commandment—‘And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the world’—was interpreted by Mara or by his Christian sources as a presence in the form of the new laws which were promulgated by Jesus! 2.5. The rhetorical function of the triad of paradigms As we have noticed, the problem of the persecution of wise men such as Socrates and Pythagoras and Mara’s solution in terms of divine punishment can be considered against the background of the debate over providence in Hellenistic and Imperial philosophy. But it should be asked why Mara raises the issue in his present circumstances. It is also far from clear what intention guides the at first sight curious selection of paradigms, which begins with Socrates and Pythagoras, two well known figures from a distant past, but culminates in an unnamed ‘wise king’ and the fate of the Jews, which presumably had occurred very recently. These questions also can be brought to a solution if one considers the historical circumstances. It seems a fair assumption that Mara identifies himself with the persecuted wise men from the past. He has presented himself emphatically as wise or at least a philosopher at the outset (9–29). Like them, he may have to face execution (234–6; cf. 222–6) by ‘tyrants’ (‡TRWN’).110 If this is correct, the reference to divine punishment (which seems less functional in the address to his son) may function as an implicit warning pertaining to—and directed at—the Romans who have imprisoned

Cf. C. Burger, Jesus als Davidssohn: Eine traditionsgeschichtliche Untersuchung, Göttingen 1970, 91–104. 109 Cf. D. Zeller, ‘Jesus als vollmächtiger Lehrer (Mt 5–7) und der hellenistische Gesetzgeber’, in: L. Schenke (ed.), Studien zum Matthäusevangelium (FS W. Pesch) (SBSSonderband), Stuttgart 1988, 299–317, and D.C. Allison, The New Moses: A Matthean Typology, Edinburgh 1993. 110 Ll. 140.234; Cureton 46:11; 48:14. 108

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him.111 Indeed, Mara could expect them to read the letter before forwarding it to his son. After all, he was held captive under the suspicion of resistance against Roman rule in Commagene. His conciliatory talk and repeated assurances of loyalty to the Romans at ll. 227–36 clearly suggest that the Romans are present in the letter as potential readers, or secondary addressees. Here, then, his tactics are different but his purpose identical, viz. to be left alive and released. The fact that Mara speaks of the fact that the wise men of the past were denied the possibility of defending themselves against the slander of which they were the victims (139–43) is highly suggestive as to Mara’s own situation. It certainly is not applicable to Socrates or to Jesus. Mara also seems to suggest an obvious antagonism between the terrible fate of the Jews who killed the wise king and lost their kingdom and home country and the good prospects of the Romans, provided that they choose to act rightly, when he writes: ‘But if the Romans will permit us to return to our country . . . they will be called good and righteous, and the country in which they abide will also be in tranquillity’.112 The combination Socrates—Pythagoras—wise king makes perfect sense in the light of Mara’s aims. He links his fate to that of the most famous philosophers, thereby giving his appeal the strongest possible moral weight. Furthermore, he invokes the most horrible war in recent history that had involved heavy losses on all sides, which should appeal to the Romans’ sense of proportionality. 3. Questions for further study We end by listing a few lines of further inquiry, the results of which will be presented in our forthcoming monograph (see above p. 107): a) If our dating of the letter to the last third of the first century ce is correct, this text must be considered one of the earliest known documents in the Syriac dialect of Aramaic. From a philological point of view, the letter poses many problems, all of which require a closer

111 Mara may also intend the prediction about Samos to remind his Roman readers of what immediately followed in the same sentence of the Sibylline oracle: see supra, n. 55. 112 Cureton’s translation (p. 76), which probably is more correct here than Schulthess’ rendering. It has to be admitted that the text is open to different interpretations here.

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investigation and clarification. A new critical edition, carried out with great thoroughness, is urgently needed. b) Mara expresses the pain which the exiles feel because they are no longer able to offer appropriate worship to ‘our gods’ (‘LHYN; Cureton 44:9). The abiding fascination of the monuments of Nimrud Dağ and numerous new archaeological discoveries have stimulated scholars to write about the religious history of Commagene.113 Mara’s letter can make an important contribution to this discussion, being a testimony from inside the Commagenean ruling class to the history of the reception of the cultic reform of Antiochus I in the first century bce. We believe that the letter clearly indicates that Mara knew the cultic inscriptions of Antiochus I set up everywhere in the countryside of Commagene and that he was painfully aware of the failure of the great cultic reform, which had been meant to last forever. c) Mara’s confrontation with his situation as a Roman captive shows both clear parallels to, and characteristic differences from, the statements in the letters of two prominent early Christian captives, Paul of Tarsus and Ignatius of Antioch. We hope to be able soon to present an investigation of the genre of ‘captivity epistles from the imperial period’, from the perspective of social history and the ‘history of mentalities’, which will include Mara’s letter—for the history of Roman imperialism and of the literature which was composed in its wake is incomplete if the historian neglects the way in which its victims perceived it and the writings in which they formulated their own perspective.

113 To mention only a few contributions to this fascinating subject: H. Dörrie, Der Königskult des Antiochos von Kommagene im Lichte neuer Inschriften-Funde, Göttingen 1964; H. Waldmann, Die kommagenischen Kultreformen unter König Mithradates I. Kallinikos und seinem Sohne Antiochos I., Leiden 1973; W. Haase, ‘Voraussetzungen und Motive des Herrscherkultes von Kommagene’, Antike Welt 6 (1975), 17–31; J. Wagner, ‘Dynastie und Herrscherkult’, 177–224; H. Waldmann, Der kommagenische Mazdaismus, Tübingen 1993; J. Wagner (ed.), Gottkönige am Euphrat: Neue Ausgrabungen und Forschungen in Kommagene, Mainz 2000.

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JOHN THE BAPTIST ACCORDING TO FLAVIUS JOSEPHUS, AND HIS INCORPORATION IN THE CHRISTIAN TRADITION Johannes Tromp In Jewish Antiquities 18.116–119, Flavius Josephus includes a section on John the Baptist. His reason for including it was that it contained a widely circulating explanation for the victory of the Nabatean king Aretas over the tetrarch Herod Antipas.1 In my translation, it reads as follows: 116. Some Jews believed that the army of Herod was destroyed by God, who quite rightly avenged the fate of John, surnamed the Baptist. 117. For Herod had John killed, although he had been a good man. He had asked the Jews to lead a virtuous life and to come together for baptism,2 while practising righteousness towards each other, and piety towards God. In this way, it seemed to him, was baptism acceptable: they should not use it to obtain forgiveness for the sins they had committed, but as a purification of the body, inasmuch as their soul had already been cleansed beforehand by righteousness. 118. When others joined them—for they became highly agitated by his preaching—Herod feared his influence on people to be so great that it might lead to some uprising; for they seemed to be doing everything according to his advice. Therefore Herod decided that it would be much better to take the initiative to have him killed before he was able to cause some revolution, than to get involved in matters once the revolt had begun, and then be sorry. 119. Because of Herod’s apprehension, John was sent in chains to the aforementioned fortress of Machaerus and killed there. Among the Jews, however, the opinion prevailed that Herod’s army was destroyed as a revenge on John’s behalf, because God wished to harm Herod.

According to this passage, Herod Antipas had John the Baptist executed before the latter’s successful preaching could lead to a rebellion. John’s baptism, according to Josephus, was not a mechanical device to be redeemed from the burden of sin, but a purification of the body, as a

The passage has no parallel in Josephus’ Jewish War. K. Backhaus, Die ‘Jüngerkreise’ des Täufers Johannes: Eine Studie zu den religionsgeschichtlichen Ursprüngen des Christentums (PaThSt 19), Paderborn/etc. 1991, 268–72. 1 2

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symbol of people’s having already cleansed their souls through a life of righteousness.3 To judge from Josephus’ rendering of it, John’s definition of virtue was quite simple: he called upon people to practise the Golden Rule, that is, to be righteous in their dealings with other people, and pious in their dealings with God.4 It is unlikely that such a mild message could be expected to arouse a spirit of rebellion in Herod’s tetrarchy, so there must have been more to it.5 It is probable that the essence of John’s proclamation was eschatological. Josephus mentions many other preachers who spoke about redemption, who had a following of some substance, and who were killed by the authorities because they were suspected of inciting a rebellion. It is communis opinio in the scholarly community, that these prophets were announcing the imminent breakthrough of the kingdom of God, and that this was considered, by Romans and Jewish establishment alike, a dangerous kind of sedition, punishable by death. It is almost certain that John the Baptist was one such herald of the Day of Judgement.6 The evidence in the New Testament supports this conclusion.7 Although it does not explicitly describe John as an eschatological preacher, it does place him in the immediate vicinity of Jesus of Nazareth, of whom it is said that he continued John’s proclamation (cf. Mark 1:4 with 1:14–15), and there is no doubt that at least the

3 See e.g. J.P. Meier, ‘John the Baptist in Josephus: Philology and Exegesis’, JBL 111 (1992), 225–37, at 231; R.L. Webb, John the Baptizer and Prophet: A Socio-Historical Study ( JSNTSup 62), Sheffield 1991, 35, 186–96. 4 A. Dihle, Die Goldene Regel: Eine Einführung in die Geschichte der antiken und frühchristlichen Vulgärethik, Göttingen 1962; Idem, ‘Goldene Regel’, in: T. Klauser et alii (eds), RAC XI, Leipzig/Stuttgart 1981, cols. 930–940. 5 Cf. Webb, John the Baptizer, 36–37. 6 J. Ernst, Johannes der Täufer: Interpretation, Geschichte, Wirkungsgeschichte (BZNW 53), Berlin/New York 1989, esp. chapter 2; also E. Rivkin, ‘Locating John the Baptizer in Palestinian Judaism: The Political Dimension’, in: K.H. Richards (ed.), Society of Biblical Literature 1983 Seminar Papers, Chico 1983, 79–85. 7 I shall not discuss the extent to which the Gospels may have ‘Christianized’ the image of John; see on this, e.g., R. Uro, ‘John the Baptist and the Jesus Movement: What Does Q Tell Us?’, in: R.A. Piper (ed.), The Gospel Behind the Gospels: Current Studies in Q (NovT.S 75), Leiden 1995, 231–57; but already the history of scholarship as reviewed by S. von Dobbeler, Das Gericht und das Erbarmen Gottes: Die Botschaft Johannes des Täufers und ihre Rezeption bei den Johannesjüngern im Rahmen der Theologiegeschichte des Frühjudentums (BBB 70), Frankfurt 1988, 16–26. For the purpose of the present discussion it suffices to note that Josephus’ report alone makes the eschatological character of John’s message probable, and that this concords with the outlines given in the Gospel tradition.

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synoptic Gospels regarded Jesus as a prophet of the End.8 So if John’s exhortation to virtue aroused unrest and even led to his execution, for fear of rebellion, he is quite likely to have called upon people to change their sinful ways and from now on lead a life of righteousness and piety, because the day was near and divine judgement was soon to come over all unjust oppressors and their lackeys. The Gospel tradition not only regards the messages of John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth as essentially identical,9 but also holds that they stood in close personal contact. However, there is reason to assume that they were not so well acquainted in historical reality. One of the reasons to doubt the Gospels’ testimony in this respect, is that Josephus dates the activities of John the Baptist around the year 34 ce, whereas the evangelist Luke dates them to the year 28 ce (Luke 3:1). The chronological problem caused by these conflicting data was a matter of contention in late nineteenth-century scholarship. An important role in this respect was played by Theodor Keim (1825–1878), one of the most prominent representatives of the Leben Jesu-Forschung.10 Keim proposed accepting Josephus’ information on the death of John, re-dating it to the year 34 ce, and consequently shifting the date of Jesus’ crucifixion from the traditional year of 30 ce to 35 ce, one year after John’s death.11 His proposal won support from a number of scholars,12 but was also fiercely contested by others. In his Geschichte 8 See, e.g., M. de Jonge, Christology in Context: The Earliest Christian Response to Jesus, Philadelphia 1988, chapter 10: ‘Jesus as Herald of a New Age’. 9 The sociological and theological continuity of the movements of Jesus and John is the main thesis of Backhaus, Die ‘Jüngerkreise’. 10 A. Schweitzer, Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung, Tübingen 1984 (= 19667; first edition: 1906), 234–37. 11 T. Keim, Der geschichtliche Christus: Eine Reihe von Vorträgen mit Quellenbeweis und Chronologie des Lebens Jesu, Zürich 1866; Idem, Geschichte Jesu von Nazara in ihrer Verkettung mit dem Gesammtleben seines Volkes I–II, Zürich 1867–1872. 12 E. Schürer, Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes im Zeitalter Jesu Christi I, Leipzig 19013–4, 443, footnote 34, mentions Holtzmann, Hausrath, Sevin, Schenkel, Clemen and Hitzig as Keim’s supporters. In Geschichte Jesu von Nazara I, 621, footnote 1, Keim mentions Lamy and Van Til as earlier scholars who had seen the chronological evidence more correctly than usual. It would be wrong, however, to think that they held views comparable to Keim’s. Bernardus Lamy (1640–1715) argued in his ‘Tractatus de vinculis Joannis-Baptistae, methodo Geometris usitata dispositus’, reprinted in his Commentarius in Concordiam evangelicam et Apparatus chronologicus et geographicus II, Paris 1699, 210–230, that John was imprisoned twice, once by the Sanhedrin, and a second time by Herod. This would explain many apparent chronological inconsistencies (p. 211: ‘sine illis duobus vinculis non iniri posse concordiam inter Evangelistas’!). Lamy dates John’s death to the year 32, soon after Herod’s marriage to Herodias in 31. This was debated in a series of disputations on theses by the Leiden professor of New Testament, Salomo van Til

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des jüdischen Volkes, Emil Schürer (1844–1910) devoted an excursus to the matter (see below), and it seems that his verdict ended the debate. Schürer voted against Keim, and since then, the scholarly debate on the conflict between Josephus and the Gospels has almost fallen silent. In the 1973 English revision of Schürer’s standard work, the excursus on Keim’s hypothesis was left out, apparently regarded as one of those outdated bibliographical and inner-German polemical items.13 New treatments of the subject have been few in number. In 1912 K. Lake discussed the matter anew, but in an unpolemical article which attracted little notice.14 R. Eisler’s study on the historical Jesus from 1929–1930 reached the same conclusion as Keim with regard to the date of John’s death in 34 or 35 ce, but explained it by having John survive Jesus (who would have died in ca. 30 ce) by several years.15 In this reconstruction, then, John lived both before and after Jesus’ ministry. However, Eisler’s own arguments were based on questionably appraised Slavonic sources, and have met with little consent.16

(1643–1713), including J. van der Velden, Disputatio theologico-chronologica de Johannis Baptistae ministerio, ejusdemque temporibus, Leiden 1706; J. Haringh, Disputatio theologico-chronologica de Johannis Baptistae incarceratione fictitia Herodiana vincula antecedente, Leiden 1707; T. van der Vecht, Disputatio theologico-chronologica de Johannis Baptistae incarceratione unica, ministerio ejus publico finem imponente, Leiden 1708; Idem, Disputationis theologico-chronologicae de tempore incarcerationis Johannis Baptistae, ex Herodis Antipae itinere Romano eruendo, pars prior, Leiden 1708; A. Bock, Disputationis theologico-chronologicae de tempore incarcerationis Johannis Baptistae, ex Herodis Antipae itinere Romano eruendo, pars altera, Leiden 1708; all these dissertations were reprinted in 1710. According to Van Til, John was imprisoned only once, in the year 30, two years after the beginning of his ministry, because of his objections to Herod’s marriage to Herodias, and because of the unrest which these objections might bring about among the population; John remained in prison for two years, because Herod Antipas was afraid to have him executed, and was then beheaded on account of Herodias’ daughter’s ruse. Both Lamy and Van Til remain safely within the traditional limits of Jesus’ triennial public ministry (30–33 ce). It is remarkable to see that the harmonizing tendency of Van Til’s argument is still effective in H.W. Hoehner, Herod Antipas, Cambridge 1972, where information on John from the Gospels and Josephus is combined in an almost identical way; see, e.g., 136–46, 170–71. 13 G. Vermes et alii, eds and trans. of E. Schürer, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ (165 BC–AD 135) I, Edinburgh 1973, vi, 345–48. 14 ‘The Date of Herod’s Marriage with Herodias and the Chronology of the Gospels’, The Expositor, Eighth Series, Vol. 4 (1912), 462–477; see also A.D. Loman, ‘Het bericht van Flavius Josephus aangaande de oorzaak en het datum der executie van Johannes den Dooper, vergeleken met de verhalen der synoptici’, TT 25 (1891), 293–315. 15 R. Eisler, Iesous Basileus ou Basileusas: Die messianische Unabhängigkeitsbewegung vom Auftreten Johannes des Täufers bis zum Untergang Jakobs des Gerechten nach der neuerschlossenen Eroberung von Jerusalem des Flavius Josephus und den christlichen Quellen (Religionswissenschaftliche Bibliothek 9), II, Heidelberg 1930, part four. 16 Hoehner, Herod Antipas, 125–27.

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From more recent years, only two articles are known to me in which Josephus’ dates for John the Baptist are accepted. Like Eisler, but independent of him, W. Schenk in 1983 argued that John survived Jesus.17 N. Kokkinos in 1989, knowing both Keim’s and Eisler’s work, accepted the former’s thesis that Jesus’ death needed to be redated.18 In this article, I should like to have another look at Keim’s arguments, because I do not think that they have been rejected on sufficient grounds. Like Keim, I am convinced that Josephus dated the death of John the Baptist around 35 ce, and that Josephus’ dating is correct. I shall resume his argument in the first part of this contribution. However, I am not convinced that this date implies that Jesus died several years later than is traditionally assumed, as Keim concluded. The possibility that in historical reality, John the Baptist was not Jesus’ predecessor, but followed after him, will be explored in the second part of this article. 1. Josephus’ Dating of John the Baptist Josephus’ section on John the Baptist forms part of a longer passage about the dealings of Herod Antipas with the Nabatean king Aretas after the death of Philip, Herod’s half-brother and tetrarch in North-Western Palestine ( Jewish Antiquities 18.109–126).19 After having mentioned the fact of tetrarch Philip’s death in September 33 ce,20 Josephus relates that Herod Antipas traveled to Rome. On his way, he broke his journey to stay with his half-brother Archelaus, and fell in love with the latter’s wife, Herodias. Herodias agreed to marry the tetrarch (and leave her husband; cf. 18.136), and he accepted her condition that he must reject the woman who was then his wife, a daughter of the Nabatean king Aretas. Aretas found cause in this insult to wage war on Herod, and he routed the latter’s army. Herod sent word of this to the emperor Tiberius, who instructed Vitellius, the governor of Syria, to punish Aretas. Josephus then interrupts his account to comment that some Jews 17 W. Schenk, ‘Gefangenschaft und Tod des Täufers: Erwägungen zur Chronologie und ihren Konsequenzen’, NTS 29 (1983), 453–83, esp. 463–64. See the discussion in Ernst, Johannes der Täufer, 345, footnote 256. 18 N. Kokkinos, ‘Crucifixion in ad 36: The Keystone for Dating the Birth of Jesus’, in: J. Vardaman & E.M. Yamauchi (eds), Chronos, Kairos, Christos: Nativity and Chronological Studies Presented to Jack Finegan, Winona Lake 1989, 133–63, esp. 133–37. 19 On the structure of this passage, see Schenk, ‘Gefangenschaft’, 459–61. 20 For this exact date, see N. Kokkinos, The Herodian Dynasty: Origins, Role in Society and Eclipse ( JSPSup 30), Sheffield 1989, 237.

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ascribed Herod’s defeat to his execution of John the Baptist—the section quoted in the introduction to this article. Next, Josephus continues to relate that Vitellius embarked upon his campaign against Aretas, as Tiberius had instructed him, but recalled his army when news reached him of Tiberius’ death—it was usual for an emperor’s instructions to be cancelled by his death. Keim offered the following observations on the facts as presented by Josephus. (1) Vitellius, when commanded to punish Aretas, is unlikely to have tarried in carrying out his orders. Tiberius’ death occurred in March 37 ce, and Vitellius’ campaign must have begun almost immediately after Aretas’ victory. Allowing a certain period for the correspondence between Herod and Tiberius after the former’s defeat, the war between Herod and Aretas must have taken place in 36 ce.21 (2) This date is confirmed by the fact that Josephus places this episode after his account of Vitellius’ dismissal of Pilate in 36 ce. (3) Herod’s conflict with Aretas must have post-dated Philip’s death in 33 ce. Quite probably, Herod’s journey to Rome, during which he managed to contract Herodias, was directly connected with Philip’s death and the legacy.22 (4) John the Baptist’s death must of course have occurred before Herod’s war with the Nabatean king, but not long before it. If Herod’s defeat was associated with John’s death, the period elapsing between the events cannot have been too long.23 If it had been—if, in other words, John’s death had been remembered for many years—it would much more likely have been associated with Herod’s removal and banishment in 39 ce. Der geschichtliche Christus, 227–28. Der geschichtliche Christus, 228–29; Geschichte Jesu I, 625–26; this explanation of Antipas’ travel to Rome has now also been proposed by Kokkinos, The Herodian Dynasty, 267–68, without reference to Keim. 23 So also Schenk, ‘Gefangenschaft’, 463; Kokkinos, ‘Crucifixion’, 135; the latter gives parallels, from Josephus’ own work, of divine punishments immediately following a crime, rather than after a long time has elapsed. Van Til’s eloquent formulation of this argument is worth quoting: ‘Sequitur ergo recentem et vigentem adhuc fuisse pii et justi monitoris memoriam, scelerisque ab Herode adversus Johannem perpetrati sensum: solent enim ista hominum judicia huic potissimum fundamento niti, quod ira Dei pede presso et celeriori festinet ad vindictam, quando graviora ob crimina scelestos poena afficit, et infortunia ista non tam serio interpretari irae divinae effecta, nisi vicina observent scelera et supplicia, tanquam evidentem nexum habentia: soletque temporis protractio sensum et memoriam similium rerum hominum animis eximere’ (Haringh, Disputatio, §5). 21

22

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(5) It may furthermore be noted that the Gospels, too, see a connection between John the Baptist’s fate and Herod’s marriage to Herodias, even if this relation is of a somewhat different nature. However, this marriage cannot have taken place in or about 28 ce, as is often argued,24 because that would make Aretas’ reaction to the insult, many years later, totally incredible.25 Indirectly, therefore, there is evidence for John’s death around 35 ce in the Gospels themselves.26 Keim’s final conclusion was that John was arrested and executed in 34 ce. This date is as close to the war with Aretas as possible, but still leaves a year for Jesus’ ministry, which must fall within Pilate’s procurate (which ended in 36 ce)—it may be noted that Keim does not subvert the Gospels’ information that John was Jesus’ predecessor in time. It is not necessary to give a complete survey of the arguments of Keim’s opponents. They are strewn all over Keim’s exposé and footnotes, but in Schürer’s probably accurate summary, they boil down to one main obstacle: it is stated in Luke 3:1 that John was active in the fifteenth year of Tiberius (= 28/29 ce). Schürer admits that Luke’s precision in chronological data is not always flawless, but states that in this case the importance of a correct date must have been so great, that it obliged Luke to be very punctilious in his investigations. Schürer throws in a rather fierce argument: no doubt, the evangelist must carefully have R.S. Kraemer, ‘Implicating Herodias and Her Daughter in the Death of John the Baptizer: A (Christian) Theological Strategy?’ JBL 125 (2006), 321–49, even infers from Jewish Antiquities 18.148 that Herod and Herodias may already have been married in ca. 24 ce, that is, shortly after the death of Tiberius’ son Drusus (cf. 18.146). But Josephus gives no date for the events related in 18.145–147, concerning Agrippa’s financial ruin after his mother’s death; it may well have been several years before Agrippa had to move from Rome to Judea, to escape his creditors; Kraemer’s assertion that ‘Agrippa’s departure from Rome was prompted in part by the death of Drusus’ (p. 327) has no support in Josephus’ narration. 25 Probably for this reason, R.H. Pfeiffer, History of New Testament Times, with an Introduction to the Apocrypha, New York 1949, 34, turns Aretas’ attack against Herod into a guerilla-war, which finally ends in the defeat of Herod; but this is an unjustifiable prolongation of the affair, for which Josephus’ account offers no support. E.M. Smallwood, The Jews under Roman Rule from Pompey to Diocletian (SJLA 20), Leiden 1976, 185, asserts that Aretas ‘waited some ten years for the chance to avenge the insult,’ but does not comment on what constituted, after all those years, that particular ‘chance,’ let alone on what had prevented him from reacting sooner. Hoehner, Herod Antipas, 126, suggests that the struggle of the Romans with the Parthians in 36 ce prompted Aretas to wreak his long awaited revenge. 26 Kraemer, ‘Implicating Herodias’, 327–28, rightly observes that Josephus does not say that the Baptist had objections to the marriage of Herod and Herodias (even though Josephus himself did object; see 18.136); the only point made here, is that in the lore about John, there existed some kind of association with Herodias. 24

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asked around, so it is Josephus’s word against that of Christianity as a whole, for it is from his fellow-Christians that Luke must have obtained his information; and it is simply impossible that the entire Christianity of his day would have erred in dating Jesus’ death by a full five years (Schürer indignantly repeats this statement).27 A piece of information taken from Josephus cannot justify the attribution of such an enormous mistake on Luke’s part.28 Schürer continues with a concise discussion of Keim’s arguments:29 (1) there is no reason to assume that the people of Josephus’ time could not have regarded Herod’s defeat by Aretas in 36 ce as a divine punishment for the former’s execution of John the Baptist, seven years earlier; (2) the supposition that Aretas’ war against Herod must have begun immediately after the expulsion of the Nabatean princess, cannot be proven; Josephus himself says that the expulsion was only the beginning of the enmity between both kings;30 (3) Keim dates Herod’s marriage to 32–33 ce, because some time must have elapsed between the marriage and the war; if that is so, one might as well admit that Herod married Herodias in 29 ce. ‘There is no reason to assume . . .’; ‘the supposition cannot be proven . . .’; ‘one might as well admit . . .’: phrases like these mark Schürer’s discussion of Keim’s argument as defensive. Its outcome is telling and even surprising, considering that Schürer is not known as

27 Keim himself was kinder to Luke, excusing him for having miscalculated ‘nur um etwa fünf Jahre’; Geschichte Jesu I, 619. 28 Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes I, 444: ‘Man braucht nun die Zuverlässigkeit des Lucas nicht zu überschätzen (und in Betreff der Schatzung des Quirinius hat er sich allerdings bedeutend geirrt). Aber das ist doch wohl unmöglich, dass hier ein Irrthum von vollen fünf Jahren vorliegen soll. Augenscheinlich hat Lucas auf Erforschung dieses Zeitpunktes grosse Sorgfalt verwendet. Wir haben hier also nicht sowohl seine Absicht, als vielmehr die der gesammten Christenheit seiner Zeit vor uns. Sollte es möglich sein, dass diese über das Todesjahr ihres Herrn um volle fünf Jahre im Irrthum war? Es müssten stärkere Gründe vorliegen, als die aus Josephus entnommenen, um uns zu dieser Annahme zu berechtigen’. 29 Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes I, 444–45. 30 Schürer refers to Jewish Antiquities 18.113, and quotes: ὁ δὲ ἀρχήν ἔχθρας ταύτην ποιησάμενος. Apparently, the matter was so important to Schürer, that he had no qualms about offering distorted evidence. Since it is said in the main clause to which the phrase quoted belongs, that Aretas and Herod both appointed generals to command the armies they had gathered, and that a battle ensued, there can be no doubt that the quotation means that Aretas saw a casus belli in the ousting of his daughter, and acted immediately.

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an astute defender of traditionalism:31 ‘Nach alledem werden wir uns an’s N. T. zu halten . . . haben.’32 2. The Incorporation of John into the Story of Jesus’ Life If one does not let the authority of Luke’s Gospel automatically determine the outcome of discussions of chronology, various options remain to explain the variation between the Gospels and Josephus with regard to the dating of John the Baptist. For instance, Keim may have been right: the absolute chronology of the Gospels is erroneous, and Jesus died several years later than is usually surmised. Or perhaps Josephus was wrong, being misled by his sources, or having a particular reason to place John the Baptist a year later in his chronology.33 A third possibility was proposed by Eisler and Schenk, who suggested that John was active before Jesus, but also survived him by another four or five years—John’s death before that of Jesus is an invention of the evangelist Mark. It may in this connection be noted that, independent of the question of John’s dating by Josephus, F. Katz in 2001 argued that Jesus and John were contemporaries, but did not know each other, and that the subordination of John to Jesus is a later Christian invention.34 Another option has not yet been explored, insofar as I am aware: perhaps Josephus dated John the Baptist’s ministry correctly; in that case, John was not only executed after Jesus, but his activities also followed those of Jesus. There are several indications to support this view, as I shall now argue.

Loman’s commentary, however, is noteworthy: ‘Blijkens [Schürers] laatste uitlating [. . .] is zijn geest nog altoos in de apologetiek verward en schrikt hij niet terug voor grammaticale en exegetische buitensporigheden, indien daarmede, naar zijne meening, iets tot verdediging der evangelische verhalen kan verkregen worden’ (Loman, ‘Het bericht van Flavius Josephus’, 302). 32 Die Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes I, 445. The same point is made by Hoehner, Herod Antipas, 126: ‘it is better to base one’s chronology on the Gospels than on what is only an inference from Josephus’. 33 This possibility is discussed and denied by Kraemer, ‘Implicating Herodias’, 322–23. 34 F. Katz, ‘Hat Johannes der Täufer Jesus getauft? Überlegungen zu einem erledigten Thema’, in: P. Müller et alii (eds), « . . . was ihr auf dem Weg verhandelt habt » Beiträge zur Exegese und Theologie des Neuen Testaments: Festschrift für Ferdinand Hahn zum 75. Geburtstag, Neukirchen-Vluyn 2001, 27–36; see already M.S. Enslin, ‘John and Jesus’, ZNW 66 (1975), 1–18. 31

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Josephus discusses Jesus in 18.63–64, and John afterwards, in 18.116–119. This is not the place to deal thoroughly with the question of the authenticity of the section on Jesus in the Antiquities. Even if this section has been edited to some extent by a Christian redactor (which I think is plausible), it is still likely that it preserves the main outlines of Josephus’ own work. The paragraphs on Jesus form part of a series of instances of Pilate’s tactless dealings with the Jews in Judea and their religious sensitivities. 18.55–59 is about the introduction of the emperor’s bust into Jerusalem; 18.60–62 about the confiscation of holy money for the construction of an aqueduct. Then the famous testimonium flavianum about Jesus follows in 18.53–64. This is continued by two more examples associating Pilate with Rome’s harsh treatment of its subjects: the story of the Jews’ expulsion from Rome, traditionally combined with that of the scandal involving the Roman priests of Isis (18.65–84); and Josephus’ report of Pilate’s quelling of a Samaritan uproar (18.85–87). As to these last two events, one has nothing to do with Pilate, and the other has nothing to do with Jews, but taken together with everything that happened in the period of Pilate’s rule, they lead up to Pilate’s dismissal as procurator of Judea in 36 ce. Apparently Josephus wanted to draw an unfavourable picture of Pontius Pilate, whom he contrasts with the new Roman governor of Syria. According to Josephus,Vitellius deposed Pilate and sent him to Rome; Vitellius dealt much more congenially with the Judeans (18.88–95).35 Whereas Josephus places Jesus securely in the time of Pontius Pilate, he mentions John in the context of events during Vitellius’ subsequent rule (from 36 ce onwards), and Josephus is unaware of any connection between the two figures. According to Josephus, John did not belong to the era of Pilate; had he thought so, he would not have missed the opportunity to range John among the victims of Pilate, whom he detested. In Josephus’ perception, then, John’s ministry took place after that of Jesus. Not only did Josephus date John’s execution to around 35 ce, but he also places John in a period after Jesus.

35 The analysis of Josephus’ account of Pilate’s rule in AJ 18 by D.R. Schwartz, ‘Composition and Sources in Antiquities 18: The Case of Pontius Pilate’, in: Z. Rodgers (ed.), Making History: Josephus and Historical Method, Leiden 2006, 125–46, is based on sections 55–62 (for which there is a parallel in Jewish War 2.169–177) alone. Schwartz highlights the positive elements in this account, determined as such by Josephus’ sources. On the editorial level, however, Josephus’ judgment is negative (p. 141).

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It is possible that Josephus is simply in error, and has mistakenly placed John in the wrong historical context. Josephus’ work is not free of chronological errors. For instance, Roman historians usually date the Jewish expulsion from Rome (18.65–84, alluded to above) to a much earlier year than Josephus, who associates this episode with the rule of Pilate. However, Josephus’ account of John the Baptist is closely tied up with events that can be dated with certainty to around the year 36 ce; if one wished to establish a mistake on Josephus’ part here, one would also have to accuse him of fabricating facts. The possibility that Josephus would have interchanged them intentionally is virtually excluded: there is no conceivable advantage which could have made him want to do so. It should then be asked what caused the order of Jesus and John to be reversed in the early Christian tradition. In answer to that question, it can first be observed what the immediate effects of the supposed reversal may have been. If John the Baptist preceded Jesus in time, his role in history could become that of Jesus’ forerunner. In this reconstruction, John would originally have been an independent eschatological preacher, whose figure was transformed into that of the man who heralded the coming of Jesus as Christ. The immediate effect of this is that John could then be made to present himself as subordinate to Jesus Christ.36 In this way John could be incorporated into the history of the origin of the Christian movement. It would not have been possible to fit John into the Christian schema of history (of which Jesus Christ was supposed to be the fulfilment), if he had to be seen as a successor to Jesus. The next question must then be why Christians wanted to incorporate John the Baptist into the story of Jesus’ life (instead of, for example, ignoring him altogether).37

36 The often recurring assertion that pre-Christian Jewish tradition knew the expectation of a forerunner of the Messiah (e.g. Vermes, The History of the Jewish People II, 515–16) cannot be substantiated from the sources; see J.A.T. Robinson, ‘Elijah, John and Jesus: An Essay in Detection’, in: Idem, Twelve New Testament Studies (SBT 14), London 1962, 28–52; M.M. Faierstein, ‘Why do the Scribes say that Elijah must come first’, JBL 100 (1981), 75–86. 37 Cf. H. Stegemann, ‘Erwägungen zur Bedeutung des Täufers Johannes im Markusevangelium’, in: M. Becker & W. Fenske (eds), Das Ende der Tage und die Gegenwart des Heils: Begegnungen mit dem Neuen Testament und seiner Umwelt. Festschrift für Heinz-Wolfgang Kuhn zum 65. Geburtstag (AGJU 44), Leiden 1999, 101–16, esp. 114–16.

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An important factor may have been the existence of a following for John the Baptist, whose eschatological message probably resembled that of the earliest Christians to a high degree, except that it did not designate Jesus as Christ. If such a John-movement existed, it was probably in some kind of competition with the movement of Jesus Christ (even if the urgency of both groups’ eschatological proclamation would suggest that this competition was a friendly one).38 There is evidence for the existence of a John-movement, although it must be admitted that it is not obvious.39 The Acts of the Apostles mention people who had been baptized, not in the name of Christ, but ‘only’ in the way of John. In Acts 18:24–19:7 it is related how the Alexandrian Jew Apollos preached in Ephesus about the way of the Lord, although he only knew about the baptism of John. When Apollos had left for Corinth, Paul arrived in Ephesus and discovered that Apollos’ teachings had been imperfect. The converts of Ephesus, it appeared to him, were unaware that they had to believe in the one who came after John, namely Jesus, and were not yet baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. The weakness of this evidence lies in the possibility that the author of Acts may have invented this story in order to integrate Apollos into his biography of Paul: from the Corinthian correspondence it is clear that Paul’s relationship with Apollos was strained, and that it involved conflicting views on baptism (cf. 1 Cor 1:12).40 Even so, the passage in Acts may reflect an awareness of the real existence of a baptist movement, inspired by John, but unrelated to Jesus, and independent of the Christian movement.

The notion of competition is also introduced to explain the origin of Christian baptism by Katz, ‘Hat Johannes der Täufer Jesus getauft?’, 34. Cf., for the ‘friendly’ character of the competition P. Vielhauer, ‘Das Benedictus des Zacharias (Lk 1, 68–79)’, in: Idem, Aufsätze zum Neuen Testament I (TBü 31), München 1965, 28–46: the Christian movement did not fight against the movement of John, but fought to win it over (45); compare W. Wink, John the Baptist in the Gospel Tradition, Cambridge 1968, 107–15; Backhaus, Die ‘Jüngerkreise’, passim. The possibility of such friendly competition has been questioned by Uro, ‘John the Baptist’, 253–54, but on insufficient grounds. 39 I shall not discuss the later Baptist movements, whose derivation from John the Baptist may be secondary; cf. Robinson, ‘Elijah’, 49–51. On the Baptist movements, see J. Thomas, Le mouvement baptiste en Palestine et Syrie (150 av. J.-C.–300 ap. J.-C.), Gembloux 1935; K. Rudolph, ‘The Baptist Sects’, in: W. Horbury et alii (eds), The Cambridge History of Judaism III, Cambridge 1999, 471–500. 40 M. Wolter, ‘Apollos und die ephesinischen Johannesjünger (Act 1824–197)’, ZNW 78 (1987), 49–73. 38

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If a John the Baptist-movement existed, it must have entertained an image of a John who was not as submissive to Jesus as the Gospels present him. Apparently, John the Baptist was no follower of Jesus, nor were John’s own adherents. This is inexplicable if John had ever really spoken about Jesus in the way the Gospels claim.41 The existence of a John-movement in the second half of the first century is best explained if it originated and survived independently of Christianity. In light of the probably similar messages of both eschatological movements, this means that the Christian and the Baptist movements stood in competition with each other at some point.42 By subordinating John to Jesus as his forerunner, the tensions caused by this competition could be alleviated—at least from a Christian point of view.43 The existence of competition between the two movements also helps to explain the prominence of John the Baptist in the Gospel tradition. If in reality John had preceded Jesus and presented himself as Jesus’ forerunner, the evangelists would hardly have had reason to discuss John’s life and fate at such length as they appear to do—they might have disposed of him in two or three words.44 In the scenario proposed here, however, it was necessary to take John thoroughly seriously, and to pay much attention to allotting him a place in the history of salvation.45

Cf. Uro, ‘John the Baptist’, 249–52. Cf. J.A. Sint, ‘Die Eschatologie des Täufers, die Täufergruppen und die Polemik der Evangelien’, in: K. Schubert (ed.), Vom Messias zum Christus, Freiburg im Breisgau/etc. 1964, 55–163, esp. 102–36, who described traces of this competition in the Gospel narratives; so also Thomas, Le mouvement baptiste, 89–114. 43 Compare for this entire paragraph Katz, ‘Hat Johannes der Täufer Jesus getauft?’, 31–3. 44 This is also true with regard to the common theory that the Gospels relate Jesus’ baptism by John, because it was an actual historical event and the evangelists on that account felt obliged to introduce it, even if it was inopportune for them (e.g., K. Aland, ‘Zur Vorgeschichte der christlichen Taufe’, in: H. Baltensweiler & B. Reicke (eds), Neues Testament und Geschichte: Historisches Geschehen und Deutung im Neuen Testament, Oscar Cullmann zum 70. Geburtstag, Zürich/Tübingen 1972, 1–14, esp. 3). However, oral tradition, the eventual source of the Gospels, is highly capable of forgetting inconvenient elements, whereas the earliest written description of John the Baptist shows clear signs of Markan redaction (Schenk, ‘Gefangenschaft’, 468–70), so that it is hard to see how Mark’s own elaborate composition was inconvenient to himself. For an appealing explanation of Mark’s motives for telling the stories about John as he does, see Kraemer, ‘Implicating Herodias’. 45 Cf. Katz, ‘Hat Johannes der Täufer Jesus getauft?’, 35: ‘Die Behauptung, dass Jesus durch Johannes getauft worden sei, konnte von den Jesusjüngern im Blick auf die anerkannt große Wirkung und Ausstrahlungskraft des Täufers ohne Schwierigkeit aufgestellt werden. Diese captatio benevolentiae bot zudem die Gelegenheit, die eigentliche 41 42

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Finally, another important reason for incorporating John the Baptist into the history of Christianity may have been the simple fact that Christianity borrowed baptism from the John-movement. In the epistles of Paul, baptism already appears as a commonly accepted and practised ritual, and in the Gospels’ narrative tradition, including Q , its invention is closely associated with the figure of John the Baptist. Although baptism ‘in the name of Christ’ must have been common from a rather early stage, its institution was not ascribed to Jesus, apparently because people were still aware of the association of baptism with John. Since Christianity had baptism in common with the John-movement, and was still aware that John was its originator, this may have been an additional reason to integrate him into the story of the origin of Christianity. Conclusion Obviously, the assumption that John’s ministry took place after that of Jesus, necessitates a new reconstruction of an important part of early Christian history, perhaps along the following lines. (1) After Jesus’ death in ca. 30 ce, a number of his followers were convinced that their leader was taken up into heaven to sit on his throne at the right hand of God, and awaited his glorious return on the last day, when he would pronounce judgment, gather his people, and establish God’s kingdom forever. (2) In the meantime, John the Baptist emerged with a message that resembled the original proclamation of Jesus to a large extent: in light of the imminent eschatological judgment, he exhorted people to change their way of life while there was still time. John introduced baptism as a powerful ritual marking people’s repentance, and their entrance into a new life, worthy of the kingdom of God. (3) John’s message did not include a Messianic figure, let alone the recognition of Jesus as Christ. However, in the early years after John’s death in 37 ce, his followers’ hopes and expectations for the swift coming of the end were easily compatible with that of the early Christian movement. At least there was considerable overlap between the two, and it is even conceivable that groups merged locally; if there was a degree of competition between them, it is likely to have been a friendly Größe Jesu zu zeigen und zugleich ein für alle Mal die Beziehung zwischen Johannes und Jesus zu klären.’

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one. In any event, the Christian movement seems to have adopted the ritual of baptism at an early stage: in the 50’s, it was a natural Christian phenomenon in the eyes of the apostle Paul. (4) The revered figure of John came to be profoundly embedded in the Christian oral tradition about the life of Jesus. Justice was done to Jesus’ elevated status as Christ, as well as to the recognition of John’s importance as the inventor of baptism, by turning John into the predecessor of Jesus, and having Jesus baptized by John. (5) The incorporation of John into the Christian tradition must have taken place after some time, when the reversal of their places in time could plausibly overrule people’s blurred collective memory. However, that passage of time does not need to have been exceedingly long: people’s memories are flexible, and the Christian enthusiasm for Jesus as Christ was a forceful motivation. In any case, the Christian transformation of John into Jesus’ predecessor was complete by the time of the composition of Q , possibly in the 50’s or 60’s.

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THE PANEGYRIS IN JERUSALEM: RESPONSES TO HEROD’S INITIATIVE ( JOSEPHUS, ANTIQUITIES 15.268–291) Jan Willem van Henten Introduction A section of Book 15 of Flavius Josephus’ Jewish Antiquities deals with Herod the Great’s introduction of Graeco-Roman festivities in Jerusalem (Ant. 15.268–291). The chronological setting is the aftermath of the battle of Actium in 31 bce (Ant. 15.109; cf. 15.121, 161–162, 184–201). Herod founded a festival in honour of Augustus in Jerusalem, probably in the Spring or the Summer of 28 bce.1 The festival was intended to be celebrated every fourth year and included sport and musical contests, theatre plays, as well as wild animals fighting each other and fights between animals and convicted criminals.2 Since there was no tradition of Graeco-Roman style festivals in Jerusalem, Herod needed to erect several buildings for the realisation of his plan.3 Josephus tells us that the king arranged for a theatre within the city and an amphitheatre in the plain. The horse races that were part of the games suggest, perhaps, that Herod also built a hippodrome, but Josephus does not specify the location of these races (Ant. 15.268, 271). The narrative of the episode of the festival can be divided in three sections. Josephus first describes the arrangements for the festival and the new buildings in superlatives (Ant. 15.268–276). A second section (Ant. 15.277–279) describes the protest of Jerusalem’s indigenous population against Herod’s innovation in a way that recalls later collective protests against Caligula’s statue in the Jerusalem Temple4 or the Roman golden

1 M. Lämmer, ‘Griechische Wettkämpfe in Jerusalem und ihre politischen Hintergründe’, Kölner Beiträge zur Sportwissenschaft 2 (1973), 182–227, esp. 196 and 206. A. Schalit, König Herodes: Der Mann und sein Werk, Berlin 20012, 371. I warmly thank Emma England, Amsterdam, for making helpful suggestions and correcting my English 2 Cf. Ant. 16.137–141, about the Caesarea festival in honour of Augustus. 3 Josephus, War 1.415, also mentions a theatre and an amphitheatre in connection with the Caesarea festival, besides the agora: Lämmer, ‘Griechische Wettkämpfe’, 190. 4 Josephus, War 2.184–203; Ant. 18.261–309; cf. Philo, Legatio ad Gaium, 203–337.

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shields brought into Jerusalem by Pilate.5 Apparently, the protest was triggered by one detail connected with Herod’s theatre. Josephus tells us that the theatre included honorary inscriptions for Augustus as well as trophies of the peoples that the emperor had won in his battles (Ant. 15.272). These trophies were the main problem for the Jerusalem Jews. They may have been put outside on display on the eve of the festival.6 Herod tried to appease the protesters, but failed, at first: Yet, he truly did not persuade them, but they cried out, all together, out of annoyance about the things they thought he was offending them with, that even if they deemed everything (else) bearable, they would not bear images of humans in the city—speaking about the trophies. For it was not according to their ancestral customs, they said. (Ant. 15.277)7

The narrative suggests here that the trophies clashed with Jewish religion. If the trophies included images of living creatures, they would have implied, of course, a transgression of the Jewish laws, which is emphasized several times by Josephus (see below). Nevertheless, the continuation of the narrative makes one wonder whether such images were the real issue at stake. Herod finally countered the protest with a smart move. He took the most distinguished protesters to the theatre and started a discussion about what the trophies seemed to be to them. After they had cried out that they were images of humans, he ordered for the trophies to be stripped in order to lay bare their wooden frame. This stripping of the trophies is a strange move, which would not have made Caesar very happy.8 Herod could easily have brought the trophies outside Jerusalem, like Pilate eventually did with the Roman standards.9 One of Josephus’ phrases may hint at another problematic aspect of the trophies: ‘they were greatly displeased because it is not according to their ancestral practices to venerate such images’ (Ant. 15.276; emphasis added). This sentence may suggest that the trophies had a cultic function, which would have made them absolutely unacceptable to the Jews.

Josephus, War 2.169–174; Ant. 18.55–59; cf. Philo, Legatio ad Gaium, 299–305. After the protest the shields were placed in the Augustus temple at Caesarea. See P.L. Maier, ‘The Episode of the Roman Golden Shields at Jerusalem’, HTR 62 (1969), 109–21. 6 Lämmer, ‘Griechische Wettkämpfe’, 205. 7 Translations of Josephan passages are my own, unless stated otherwise. 8 Cf. Josephus, Ant. 18.57. 9 Josephus, Ant. 18.59. 5

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A third section, finally, describes the attempted assassination of Herod by ten anonymous male Jewish citizens, including a blind man who incited the other plotters (Ant. 15.280–291). Herod apparently satisfied most Jews by his handling of the trophies affair, but not all of them. These ten persons considered the king’s abolition of the ancestral practices and introduction of foreign habits ‘the beginning of great disasters’ (15.281). Although specific vocabulary is missing, the narrative seems to present Herod as a foreign tyrant, at least from the perspective of the conspirators.10 They decided to sacrifice their life, if necessary, in their attempt to get rid of someone who ‘was a king in name, but manifested himself, in fact, as the enemy of the entire people in his deeds’ (15.281). A crowded theatre was a perfect place to murder a tyrant, so this is what they decided to do. Of course, they did not stand a chance against Herod, who had a sophisticated network of informers. The plot was discovered and Herod escaped to his palace. After severe torture the conspirators were executed. This failed conspiracy, however clumsy it may look, nevertheless seems to have been the end of Herod’s festival. There is no reference to later celebrations of the festival in Josephus, nor in any other literary or documentary text. The episode triggers several questions, which I intend to discuss in the remaining part of this contribution: What exactly were Herod’s arrangements for the festival and buildings, and, in what ways did they clash with Jewish ancestral customs, as Josephus repeatedly suggests? What was the problem related to the trophies, did they include images of living creatures, or were they unacceptable for another reason? And finally, how should we interpret the Jewish responses to Herod’s festival, including the voice of Josephus as narrator?

10 Murdering a wicked tyrant during a festival and/or at the theatre is a topos in ancient Greek literature. Harmodius and Aristogeiton murdered Hipparchus during the Panathenaean games, H. Bengtson, Griechische Geschichte von den Anfängen bis in die römische Kaiserzeit, München 1950, 127. Amphitres murdered the tyrant Leodamas of Milete during the local Didymean games in honour of Apollo according to Nicolaus of Damascus (FGrHist 90.52). Josephus describes the murder of Gaius Caligula in great detail (Ant. 19.14–118). The emperor died during the Palatine Games, after he had left the theatre, T.P. Wiseman, Flavius Josephus: Death of an Emperor. Translation and Commentary, Exeter 1991. Cf. Bathybius’ statement in this passage: ‘Well then, Cluvius, the programme for to-day will include assassination of a tyrant’. (19.92, trans. L.H. Feldman, LCL). Josephus twice refers to the murder of Philip of Macedonia by one of his companions (Ant. 11.304; 19.95).

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1.1. The festival Josephus calls Herod’s festival a Panegyris (Ant. 15.269), which is the technical term for a combination of festivities: athletic and musical contests, entertainment such as drama, dance and drinking bouts, as well as cultic performances.11 It is unclear whether there were any activities belonging to the latter category; Josephus does not mention them explicitly. He does indicate that Herod added shows to the usual festivities of a Panegyris: wild animals fighting each other and criminals fighting these animals (Ant. 15.273–275). This addition demonstrates that the festival was a combination of Greek and Roman festive practices. Shows with wild animals were very common in Roman cultic festivities and entertainment events.12 These shows were, like gladiator combats, usually organized in Roman colonies and Greek cities in the East in connection with the ruler cult, the celebration of the emperor’s birthday, the inauguration of the rule of an emperor, or a military victory.13 They helped to demonstrate the local elite’s affinity with Roman culture and emphasised that its city was integrated in the Roman Empire.14 Josephus’ description of the athletic contests and their prizes implies that the status of Herod’s games was in between the so-called Periodos,

11 Several scholars assume that the festival was connected with the Aktia (or ludi Actiaci), the games that commemorated Octavian’s victory at the Battle of Actium. Organizers modelled other games in honour of Augustus after these games and sometimes claimed a similar status for them by calling them isaktios. W. Otto, ‘Herodes’ PRE Suppl. 2, 64–5; Schalit, König Herodes, 370–1; H.W. Pleket, ‘Games, Prizes, Athletes and Ideology: Some Aspects of the History of Sport in the Greco-Roman World’, Stadion 1 (1975), 49–89, 67. R. Gurval, Actium and Augustus: the Politics and Emotions of Civil War, Ann Arbor 1995, 65–81, notes that Octavian himself erected impressive memorials near the site of the battle (Suetonius, Augustus 18.2), and gave the local Actian games an isolympic status, but that games modelled on the Aktia were not founded before the second century ce. 12 L. Friedländer, Sittengeschichte Roms, Wien 1934, 487–500; L. Robert, Les gladiateurs dans l’orient grec, Paris 1940, 309–31. 13 Roman style spectacular shows were also an innovation in Judea, but members of the Hasmonaean and Herodian families were probably familiar with them. In a decree of 44 bce, Julius Caesar had allowed Hyrcanus II and his children, as well as Jewish delegates in Rome, the privilege of attending gladiatorial combats in Rome in the senatorial box ( Josephus, Ant. 14.210), Lämmer, ‘Griechische Wettkämpfe’, 195. At the end of the first century bce shows with gladiators and wild animals were a regular component of festivals in honour of the emperor, so Herod basically did what Augustus would expect from loyal client kings. 14 T. Wiedemann, Emperors and Gladiators, London 1992, 42–5.

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the circuit of the big games and various local games. This can be deduced from Josephus’ information about the prizes. The original four big games, the Olympian, Pythian, Nemean, and Isthmian Games, were later extended with other great games like the Actian Games in honour of Octavian. These were so-called ‘holy crown contests’. They were announced in the entire inhabited world. The winner would, in principle, receive only an olive wreath or a crown as reward. The main benefit was the huge glory that resulted from winning such a special contest, although considerable bonuses could follow afterwards. The second type of games had a more local character and offered the winner a crown as well as a prize consisting of a valuable object or money.15 Josephus mentions prizes first and honour only second (Ant. 15.269). Obviously, Herod had to offer expensive prizes in order to attract the best athletes for his new games.16 The scale of his invitations and the expenses paid, however, suggest a status for his festival that came close to the level of well-known big games. The king made announcements ‘to all living close to Judea’, which probably refers to the inhabitants of the Greek cities of Syria, Transjordan, Egypt and the Coastal Plain (Ant. 15.269).17 The passage continues by stating that he also invited ‘persons from every people’.18 The athletes themselves as well as everybody else connected with the contests, trainers, doctors, actors and other performers and attendants, were invited from every country (Ant. 15.269–270).19

Pleket, ‘Games’. Whether this included money is left open by Josephus, who refers to great gifts (Ant. 15.271), the biggest prizes (15.270) and prizes offered (15.269). 17 Lämmer, ‘Griechische Wettkämpfe’, 188. Making announcements about such contests was an official task executed by representatives called theoroi: see L. Ziehen, ‘Theoroi’, RE 5A, 2239–44. 18 Ant. 15.269. The mss reading συγκαλῶν ἀπὸ τοῦ παντὸς ἔθνους implies ‘invite from the entire Jewish people’, which is highly improbable, because the sentence suggests a progression from non-Jewish persons in the neighbourhood of Judea to an even larger circle of every people or state. This interpretation is supported by the parallel phrase ‘from every country’ in the next sentence. Lämmer, ‘Griechische Wettkämpfe’, 188 with n. 16, therefore proposes the reading τοὺς ἀπὸ παντὸς ἔθνους ‘the inhabitants from every state’. J. Chamonard’s conjecture to leave out the article τοῦ before παντὸς implies a similar meaning, see Oeuvres complètes de Flavius Josèphe traduites en français sous la direction de Théodore Reinach, Vol. 3, Paris 1904, 332. 19 Ant. 15.270 mentions musicians and θυμελικοί, which seems awkward at first glance because musical performers used to be identical with θυμελικοί, that is those who performed ‘on stage’. But Josephus’ formulation probably reflects a shift of meaning in line with Roman practice, implying that θυμελικοί were ‘actors’, Lämmer, ‘Griechische Wettkämpfe’, 187 with n. 10. 15 16

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Apart from the horse races (Ant. 15.271), Josephus does not provide details, which probably implies that the athletic contests included the nine standard Olympic disciplines.20 The organisation of three different types of horse races including four-horse chariots, chariots with pairs of horses as well as riding-horses is remarkable and again indicates Herod’s attempt to make the games into a spectacular show.21 These horse races may also reflect Herod’s own particular interest. 1.2. The theatre Josephus tells us briefly in Ant. 15.268 that Herod built a theatre in Jerusalem, and subsequently a huge amphitheatre in the plain, which were both conspicuous by their rich decoration. Both theatre and amphitheatre are part of Josephus’ cluster of superlative qualifications in this section: both are extraordinary because of their decoration and the amphitheatre is huge (15.268). This fits in with the festival being most spectacular (269) and equalling the very best in extravagance and splendour (271), the competitors being the best and most famous (269, 270), the prizes being the highest (270, 271), trophies of pure gold and silver (272), extraordinary service objects (273), and, last but not least, huge expenses (271, 274). The location of the theatre within the city is confirmed by the statement in 15.277 that images of human beings should not be brought into the city. Apart from our episode (Ant. 15.272, 284, 285), there are no further references to Herod’s theatre in Josephus, not even in passages where such a reference would come naturally, like the descriptions of Jerusalem in The Jewish War (1.401–402; 5.184–247). Archaeological remains might help to determine the precise location of Herod’s theatre.22 Remains that may have been part of an ancient stone theatre,

20 Single stadium running race (200 m), double stadium race (400 m), long distance race (4800 m), race in armour, pentathlon, wrestling, boxing and pankration. Lämmer, ‘Griechische Wettkämpfe’, 187; M.I. Finley & H.W. Pleket, The Olympic Games: the First Thousand Years, London 1976, 26–46. 21 Lämmer, ‘Griechische Wettkämpfe’, 187–8, 202. Also J.H. Humphrey, Roman Circuses: Arenas for Chariot Racing, London 1985, 438–539, and J. Patrich, ‘Herod’s Hippodrome-Stadium at Caesarea and the Games Conducted Therein’, in L.V. Rutgers (ed.), What Athens has to do with Jerusalem?, Louvain 2002, 29–68, esp. 41–6. 22 Several scholars have proposed locations for Herod’s theatre without the support of archaeological evidence, for example, Y. Aharoni & M. Avi-Yonah, The Macmillan Bible Atlas, New York 1977, 139. Cf. J. Patrich, ‘Herod’s Theatre in Jerusalem: A New Proposal’, IEJ 52 (2002), 231–39.

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in or close to Jerusalem, have been found at two locations, but unfortunately it is uncertain whether these were part of Herod’s theatre.23 The seventh-century Chronicon Paschale refers to a second theatre in Jerusalem, erected by Hadrian;24 the remains could also concern this theatre. Reich and Billig have recently published their findings of reused theatre seats near Robinson’s Arch close to the South-Western corner of the Temple platform.25 These seats could be from Herod’s theatre or from Hadrian’s theatre at Aelia Capitolina. The outline of these seats, however, is straight rather than curvilinear, which would indicate that the seats belonged to another entertainment building, like Herod’s amphitheatre or hippodrome-stadium (below), or the Hadrianic circus at Aelia Capitolina.26 Both the absence of further literary references to Herod’s theatre and the lack of persuasive archaeological evidence are successfully explained by an alternative hypothesis argued independently by Joseph Patrich and Achim Lichtenberger.27 They build upon the fact that wooden theatres, as well as amphitheatres, were standard Roman practice during the Late Republic and Early Empire. They argue that Herod followed Roman building conventions rather than the model of a stone theatre that was usual in Hellenistic-Greek contexts. Herod’s theatre was probably a temporary but nevertheless richly decorated wooden theatre.28 We can only speculate about its precise location within the city of Jerusalem. Josephus’ information about the trophies being located at, or close to, the theatre fits in with the hypothesis of a wooden theatre. The trophies were portable and had a wooden framework (see below). 23 In the nineteenth century Schick already discovered traces of a semicircular auditorium cut in the rock on the north side of a hill ca. 900 meter south of the city, south-south west of Bir Eyub, north of Wadi Yasul, C. Schick, ‘Herod’s Amphitheatre’ Palestine Exploration Quarterly 19 (1887), 161–66. Schick argues that these remains concern Herod’s amphitheatre, because Josephus locates the theatre within the city. Yet, the location of Schick’s site also goes against Josephus’ information about the amphitheatre, which is explicitly located in the plain. See also E. Schürer, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Christ (175 B.C.–A.D. 135) (English Version revised and edited by G. Vermes, F. Millar, M. Goodman and M. Black), Vol. 1, Edinburgh 1973, 304 n. 56; Lämmer, ‘Griechische Wettkämpfe’, 190–91. 24 Chronicon Paschale 1.473–4 (ed. L. Dindorf, Bonn, 1832); see also Chronicon Alexandrinum seu Paschale col. 613 (PG 92, 1865). 25 R. Reich & Y. Billig, ‘A Group of Theater Seats Discovered Near the SouthWestern Corner of the Temple Mount’, IEJ 50 (2000), 175–84. 26 Patrich, ‘Herod’s Theatre’, 231. 27 Patrich, ‘Herod’s Theatre’; A. Lichtenberger, ‘Jesus and the Theater in Jerusalem’, in: J.H. Charlesworth (ed.), Jesus and Archaeology, Grand Rapids 2006, 283–99. 28 Patrich, ‘Herod’s Theatre’, 233–34.

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If the trophies had been set up in the context of a stone theatre, they would probably have been presented in stone relief. 1.3. The amphitheatre, hippodrome or stadium Josephus mentions a huge amphitheatre in the plain as the second building erected by Herod in connection with his new festival. Scholars have again debated whether this was a wooden or a stone building, or a combination of both.29 Its location is also debated.30 There is even a third problem, because the amphitheatre may, in fact, have been a hippodrome or a stadium.31 The three types of horse race (Ant. 15.271) could not have taken place in an amphitheatre understood in the strictest sense. Josephus uses the terms ἀμφιθέατρος/-ον at other places rather loosely.32 The passage about the Caesarea festival in The Jewish War refers to a theatre as well as an amphitheatre (1.415), but the latter should probably be understood as a hippodrome.33 The archaeological evidence supports this interpretation: Josephus does not mention the Jerusalem amphitheatre elsewhere, but he twice refers to a Herodian hippodrome in Jerusalem (War 2.44; Ant. 17.255). This building was located south of the Temple (War 2.44). The likeliest interpretation seems to be that Herod constructed one elongated multi-functional building with one or, more probably, two semi-circles with seats at the end(-s). Two semi-circles would explain why Josephus uses the phrase ἀμφιθέατρον here instead of ἱππόδρομος, because it would point at the characteristic semi-circular ends of the building. A stadium sometimes also had a semi-circular end.34 A disadvantage to the hypothesis that the

29 K. Bieberstein & H. Bloedhorn, Jerusalem: Grundzüge der Baugeschichte vom Chalkolithikum bis zur Frühzeit der osmanischen Herrschaft (Beiheifte zum Tübinger Atlas des Vorderen Orients Series B 100), Wiesbaden 1994, Vol. 3, 400–1, argue for a wooden construction on a stone foundation; see also Patrich, ‘Herod’s Theatre’, 235. 30 Lämmer, ‘Griechische Wettkämpfe’, 191–92 with footnotes 45–57. Also Lichtenberger, ‘Jesus’, 291. 31 Lämmer, ‘Griechische Wettkämpfe’, 191, 208–9 and footnotes 49, 174–75; Patrich, ‘Herod’s Theatre’, 234–35. 32 Other references to amphitheatres in Josephus: War 1.415 and Ant. 15.341 (Caesarea); War 1.666, Ant. 17.161 (with conjecture Naber) and Ant. 17.194 ( Jericho); War 2.490, 492 (Alexandria); Ant. 19.335–336 (Berytus). 33 Cf. War 1.415 and Ant. 15.341 with War 2.172. Lämmer, ‘Griechische Wettkämpfe’, 216 n. 47; J. Humphrey, “ ‘Amphitheatrical’ Hippo-Stadia”, in A. Raban & K.G. Holum (eds), Caesarea Maritima: A Retrospective after Two Millennia, Leiden 1996, 121–29; Patrich, ‘Herod’s Hippodrome-Stadium’. 34 Lämmer, ‘Griechische Wettkämpfe’, 191 with n. 46.

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amphitheatre mentioned by Josephus was actually Herod’s hippodrome or stadium is the fact that Josephus refers elsewhere to a hippodrome south of the Temple (see above), while the amphitheatre was erected ‘in the plain’ (Ant. 15.268). This complication can be solved by the assumption that the hippodrome mentioned by Josephus was not a building, but a park.35 In short, the amphitheatre probably functioned as a hippodrome and a stadium. In that case the relatively flat area northwest of the Herodean city of Jerusalem would be its most plausible location, which would fit Josephus’ geographical marker ‘in the plain’.36 1.4. The trophies Josephus’ report clearly refers to the trophies (τὰ τρόπαια) as the pièce de résistance of the episode (Ant. 15.276).37 Together with the honorary inscriptions for Augustus the trophies were located all around (κύκλῳ περιεῖχον, 15.272) the theatre.38 The trophies’ surface consisted of refined gold and silver. Josephus attributes to them a universal function: they were memorials of all of Augustus’ victories. Josephus writes: ‘trophies of the peoples that he [Augustus] had won during war, all of them made for him . . .’ (15.272). Antiquities 15.276–277 adds that the trophies appeared to be images of humans surrounded by weapons and the continuation of the narrative suggests that they were statues with a wooden frame (15.279). The combination of this information is consistent and matches data about trophies elsewhere (see below). Trophies were originally memorials of a specific military victory situated at the place where the enemy started to flee, which explains their name (τρόπαια derives from τρέπω ‘to turn’).39 Josephus reports, for example, that Antiochus VII Sidetes erected a trophy at the River

35 Otto, ‘Herodes I’, 156, assumes that Herod built not only a theatre and an amphitheatre, but also a hippodrome in Jerusalem. Humphrey, Roman Circuses, 528, rejects this hypothesis, and Bieberstein & Bloedhorn, Jerusalem, 401, suggest that the hippodrome south of the Temple was just a park. Also Lichtenberger, ‘Jesus’, 296. 36 This is the only area in Jerusalem’s neighbourhood that would fit Josephus’ reference to ‘the plain’, as was pointed out to me by Dr. Karel Vriezen, Utrecht. 37 Interestingly, there is no reference to trophies in Josephus’ information about the Caesarea festival in honour of Augustus (Ant. 16.137–141). 38 Patrich, ‘Herod’s Theatre’, 236, specifies the location as the front side of the stage, which continued above and around the auditorium. 39 K. Woelcke, ‘Beiträge zur Geschichte des Tropaions’, Bonner Jahrbücher 120 (1911), 127–235. A.J. Janssen, Het antieke tropaion, Brussel 1957; R. Hurschmann, ‘Tropaion’, Der Neue Pauly 12.1, 872–3.

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Lycus after his triumph over the Parthian general Indates.40 The basic form of a trophy consisted of a tree-stump or a wooden pale with a crossbar (Diodorus Siculus 13.24.5), covered by a torso, which symbolised a defeated enemy soldier, and one or several of his weapons: lance, shield, sword, etc. It is important to note that trophies were usually anthropomorphic: they looked like human figures but they were, in fact, rough dummies holding armour.41 Inscriptions on or next to the trophies frequently explained the occasion for the erection of the trophies.42 In time, trophies developed in various ways, including maritime types.43 They were also represented en relief at public places, on vases and on coins.44 The Romans took the convention of erecting trophies over from the Greeks, but adapted it, among other means, by creating figures of captured males and females who were standing or kneeling beside or around the representation of captured arms. Such scenes were also depicted on triumphal or honorary arches.45 Josephus’ description of the form of Herod’s trophies stays close to the original Greek type of trophy, and also presupposes that Herod’s trophies were portable. The function of the king’s trophies, however, fits in with a trend during Augustus’ rule to display a kind of universal trophy that commemorated all of the emperor’s victories.46

Josephus, Ant. 13.251. Janssen, Antieke tropaion, 40. 42 Pausanias 5.27.11; Tacitus, Annales 2.18; Plinius, Naturalis Historiae 3.136. 43 P. Richardson, Herod: King of the Jews and Friend of the Romans, Columbia 1996, 224 n. 29, interprets the suits of armour, combined with carved ships, on the Hasmonaean mausoleum at Modein as trophies (1 Macc 13:29). The author of 1 Maccabees does not use the word τρόπαια, but the description of this memorial reminds one of trophies presented en relief (for references see n. 44). Josephus does not mention the suits of armour and the ships in his description of the mausoleum (Ant. 13.211–212), possibly because his readers could have easily considered them images of humans. See S. Fine, Art and Judaism in the Greco-Roman World: Toward a New Jewish Archaeology, Cambridge 2005, 64–5, 72, 74 and 79–80. 44 Details in Woelcke, ‘Beiträge’; Janssen, Antieke tropaion, 60–178. Coins minted in 34 bce in honour of Caius Sosius, the Roman governor of Syria who was instrumental in Herod’s capture of Jerusalem, bear the image of a Roman trophy flanked by a male and female captive representing Antigonus and Judaea, Fine, Art and Judaism, 75 with references. 45 E. Künzl, Der römische Triumph: Siegesfeiern im antiken Rom, München 1988, 76, 123–32. 46 G.C. Picard, Les trophées romains: contribution à l’histoire de la religion et de l’art triomphal de Rome, Paris 1957, 232–311. 40 41

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The trophies’ location at Herod’s theatre seems remarkable at first glance, but in the period of the Late Republic and the Early Empire it was not unusual to erect trophies within the city in or near a public place, such as the forum or a temple.47 An important issue for our discussion is the religious function of trophies, which brings us to what Josephus does not mention in connection to Herod’s new festival, at least not explicitly. 1.5. The religious aspects of festival and trophies Greek games as well as Roman festivals usually included cultic activities. Cultic performances in honour of Augustus would have been an obvious and important demonstration of Herod’s political loyalty towards his patron, and Herod did, as a matter of fact, organize a ruler cult for Augustus in Samaria-Sebaste, Caesarea Philippi as well as Caesarea Maritima.48 Significantly, Josephus does not write one word on such performances in his description of the Jerusalem festival. There is no explicit reference to a deity in his report, not even to the God of Israel. There is only some ambiguity in Josephus’ vocabulary concerning the trophies (see below). The comparison of the Jerusalem festival with the festive programme at Caesarea, after the completion of the building of this new city, is telling in this connection. Caesarea had a temple of Augustus and Roma, which was erected on a terrace close to the harbour and visible from far at sea.49 Herod’s Kaisareia or Kaisareia Sebasta festival was closely connected with this temple. This festival probably continued to be celebrated as long as the temple existed.50

47 E.g. Pausanias 5.27.7. The location at the theatre matches this tradition: Picard, Trophées romains, 238. Patrich, ‘Herod’s Theatre’, 283, refers to a relief from the Augustan era with naturalistic body armour found in Turin, perhaps part of a honorific arch, and one on the first century ce frieze of tomb 649 in Petra, but he offers no parallels within a theatre context. 48 M. Lämmer, ‘Die Kaiserspiele von Caesarea im Dienste der Politik des Königs Herodes’, Kölner Beiträge zur Sportwissenschaft 3 (1974), 95–164, at 106. Josephus emphasizes that Herod did not erect non-Jewish temples within the territory of the Jews (Ant. 15.329). See about the relationship between Herod and Augustus Schalit, König Herodes, 554–62; Richardson, Herod, 226–34. 49 Josephus, Ant. 15.339. L.C. Kahn, ‘King Herod’s Temple of Roma and Augustus at Caesarea Maritima’, in Raban & Holum (eds), Caesarea Maritima, 130–45; K.C. Holum et alii (eds), Caesarea Papers 2: Herod’s Temple, The Provincial Governor’s Praetorium and Granaries, The Later Harbor, A Gold Coin Hoard, and Other Studies, Portsmouth 1999, 12–40. 50 Lämmer, ‘Die Kaiserspiele von Caesarea’, 100.

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The Caesarea festival was dedicated to Caesar (ἀνετίθει δὲ καὶ τοῦτον τὸν ἀγῶνα Καίσαρι, Ant. 16.138).51 The close connection between such a festival and the ruler cult is apparent from the title of an ἀγωνοθέτης (‘judge or president of the games’) of the Caesarea games in Sardis from the second century ce. The honorary inscription refers to him as ἀγωνοθέτης of the big Sebasta Kaisareia of the goddess Rome and the Imperator Caesar God Son of Augustus.52 The differences between Josephus’ information about Herod’s games at Jerusalem and those at Caesarea are no doubt bound up with the different status of both cities and the makeup of their population. A significant part of Caesarea’s population was non-Jewish in this period. It included Hellenised Syrians and Phoenicians and other non-Jewish locals as well as Roman merchants, soldiers and officials.53 Apparently, the Jerusalem games were not explicitly connected with the cultic veneration of Augustus, but Josephus’ narrative suggests that, for the protesting Jews, the trophies were the main problem of Herod’s festival. The protesters assumed that the trophies included images of living creatures (Ant. 15.277) or humans (15.279), and, therefore, implied a transgression of the ancestral customs (15.277).54 However, one phrase suggests something else, namely that the trophies had to be venerated (15.276, above). Another phrase, which refers to the construction of the trophies (τὰς κατασκευὰς τῶν ἀγαλμάτων, 15.279), is ambiguous. It can refer to images, but it can also indicate that the trophies were statues, perhaps even statues in honour of a god.55 Significantly, a parallel passage about the statues of Augustus and Dea Roma in the Caesarea temple clearly implies the meaning ‘statue of a god’ for ἄγαλμα (ἔχων ἀγάλματα, τὸ μὲν ῾Ρώμης, τὸ δὲ Καίσαρος, Ant. 15.339).56 As a matter

51 Discussion of this formula in Lämmer, ‘Die Kaiserspiele von Caesarea’, 143, n. 37. Josephus’ formulation in Ant. 15.268 concerning the Jerusalem games is different (ἀγῶνα . . . κατεστήσατο Καίσαρι). 52 IGR IV 1756 ll. 100–1; Lämmer, ‘Kaiserspiele von Caesarea’, 142 n. 25. 53 In 66 ce, about 20.000 Jews were killed in the war according to Josephus, War 2.457, whose information suggests that the total number of Jews in the city was considerably higher. L.I. Levine, Caesarea under Roman Rule, Leiden 1975, 16–7, 22–3, argues that Caesarea had the largest Jewish population after Jerusalem, Alexandria, Rome and, perhaps, Antioch, about half the total population. 54 Josephus emphasizes that Herod’s festival and its buildings corrupted Jewish practices as well as the Jewish constitution, see Ant. 15.267–268, 276. 55 LSJ, s.v. ἄγαλμα sub 3 and 5. 56 See also War 7.136, 151; Ant. 15.329; 18.79. Lämmer, ‘Die Kaiserspiele von Caesarea’, 102–3, argues on the basis of parallels in Pergamum and elsewhere that

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of fact, there is only a remote resemblance between statues and trophies in their original form, which were dummies of human torsos that were, together with their armour, fixed onto a piece of wood. But trophies usually had an important cultic function. They were dedicated to the god or deities who had brought victory: anonymous war gods, Zeus, Nike, Mars, or the emperor himself.57 The dedication was sometimes accompanied by sacrifices to the gods concerned.58 Emperors, for example, dedicated enemy military equipment to the gods as a thanksgiving sacrifice after a victory. It is probably against this background that Picard concludes, rather boldly, that Herod intended his theatre and Augustus’ trophies to be a manifestation of the imperial Roman religion that he wanted to impose on his subjects. Jerusalem had no forum and the Temple was out of the question. The new theatre was, therefore, in Picard’s view, the obvious place for Herod to implement this strategy.59 Although the trophies in Jerusalem could easily be associated with Graeco-Roman religion, including the emperor cult, it remains highly implausible that Herod wanted to enforce ‘the imperial religion’ on his Jewish subjects. The continuation of the narrative does not suggest this at all. Neither does it match other evidence about the king’s religious policy for his Jewish subjects. Herod’s building projects in a Jewish environment show that the king took Jewish religious practices into account; the buildings usually did not have decoration with images of living creatures.60 The differences between the festival programs in Jerusalem and Caesarea (see above) clearly show that Herod was aware of the limits imposed by the Jewish religion on his ambitious projects. His main goals for the Jerusalem festival were probably not religious.61

both Augustus and Livia were venerated during the Caesarea festival as protector gods, Augustus as Zeus Olympius, and Livia as Hera-Roma. 57 Herodotus 8.37; Plutarch, Sulla 19; CIA II.1 no. 467 lines 27–8 (= Syll 2 521.27–8). Woelcke, ‘Beiträge’, 138: ‘Das Tropaion wäre demnach eine Art Waffenweihe’. 58 Woelcke, ‘Beiträge’, 138, 147–48. 59 Picard, Trophées romains, 283. 60 Lämmer, ‘Griechische Wettkämpfe’, 189, 196 and 200–1, 208; Richardson, Herod, 186, assumes that Herod was committed to Temple and commandments, including those about images and figurative art: ‘His commitment to Augustus was almost as strong as his commitment to Yahweh’. See also Levine, Caesarea, 156 n. 41; N. Kokkinos, The Herodian Dynasty: Origins, Role in Society and Eclipse, Sheffield 1998, 352; Fine, Art and Judaism, 74 and 78–9. 61 Lämmer, ‘Griechische Wettkämpfe’, 200–1, argues that the Jerusalem games were secular.

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The festival must have been intended, first, as an impressive demonstration of Herod’s gratitude to and loyalty for Augustus, his new overlord after Actium, and, secondly, as a spectacular show of his magnificent capabilities as organizer, benefactor and ruler of Jews and non-Jews alike.62 These goals were focused primarily upon the emperor and his entourage, as well as upon local Roman officers and the many invited non-Jewish guests from abroad. For them the cultic function of the trophies would have been self-evident. However, Herod must have been aware of the fact that he had to realize his goals in Jerusalem, i.e. within the margins of the ancestral Jewish practices. He may, therefore, have ignored or downplayed the religious dimension of the trophies, which may have looked rather harmless to him, also because they probably were only temporarily on display. The main clue to Herod’s policy towards the Jews is, however, how he responded to the Jewish protest about the trophies, which will be dealt with in the next section. In short, the function of the trophies is ambiguous in Josephus’ report. On the surface level of the text they appear to have been unacceptable for the Jerusalemite Jews, because they seemed to include images of living beings. This conclusion was most probably wrong for persons who knew about trophies and their functions, but Jews who were unfamiliar with them could easily interpret them as images of humans. However, a few details in Josephus’ text suggest something else: that the trophies were, in fact, statues that called for veneration, at least by non-Jews. Although Herod may have left the religious associations of the trophies implicit in order not to provoke the Jerusalemites, the Jewish responses to the trophies forced him to be explicit about their meaning. Assuming that consideration for the Jerusalemites’ religious scruples was an important parameter of his policy about the festival, he had no other option than to render the trophies harmless in a Jewish religious context.

62 Lichtenberger, ‘Jesus’, 287–88. Josephus explicitly mentions Herod’s ambition and aim for glory (Ant. 15.268–269, 271 cf. 16.140–141) as well as his gratitude and loyalty to Caesar (15.272; also 15.328; 16.137–138), but does not say a word about the enhancement of Jerusalem’s prestige. See also Lämmer, ‘Griechische Wettkämpfe’, 197–99 and 208, who suggests additional motives: display of control and stability, as well as a demonstration to the inhabitants of the Greek cities that Greek practices would be the model in the new Jewish state. Schalit, König Herodes, 417–18, argues that Herod attempted to breach the spiritual wall between Jews and non-Jews with his festival and behaved in line with conventions of Hellenistic rulers.

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2. Responses to Herod’s initiative One of the intriguing differences between Josephus’ reports about Herod’s festivals in Caesarea and Jerusalem is, that the Caesarea passages completely pass over how the festivities were received, while the Jerusalem report is mainly focused on the response. Josephus briefly notes that Herod celebrated his festival in a splendid way, inviting people from abroad (Ant. 15.269). Most, if not all, of these guests must have been non-Jews. As a matter of fact, the entire, highly positive, description of the set up of the festival (Ant. 15.268–276) is focused on the non-Jewish audience. Josephus clearly shifts his focus in 15.274, when he differentiates between the non-Jewish and the Jewish response: When these animals were actually fighting against each other and humans sentenced to the death penalty were combating them, the foreigners were perplexed about the expenses. At the same time they were entertained by the dangers involved in the spectacle. However, for the indigenous people there was manifestly an abolition of the customs they held in honour.63

The following sections deal almost exclusively with the Jewish response (Ant. 15.277–291), which can be divided into four categories: 1) 2) 3) 4)

the the the the

protesters against the trophies conspirators silent majority of indigenous Jews comments of Josephus himself as narrator.

The indigenous Jews are mentioned in Antiquities 15.274. They thought, in contradistinction to the non-Jews, that Herod’s festivities ran counter to Jewish customs (274); the trophies caused their greatest grief (276– 278). Josephus suggests in this way that all Jerusalem Jews protested. Herod responded to them by inviting their representatives to the theatre and managed to appease most of them (280). The conspirators, however, were not at all convinced and still assumed that Herod had abolished Jewish customs (15.281, 288). They were willing to sacrifice their life for the preservation of these customs. Their minimal goal was to force the king to reflect upon the outrageous acts he was committing (284). It is

63 Ant. 15.274–276 functions as a transitional passage that connects the protest with the description of the festival.

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important to note that the trophies are not mentioned in this section, which only refers to Jewish customs in a general sense. One group is not mentioned at all, although it may well have been the majority. The narrative tells us that the conspirators went to the theatre in order not to be noticed (284). This presupposes that many other Jews were attending the theatre, obviously without any trouble.64 What did the explicit protest against the trophies look like? 3.1. The protesters The middle section of our episode focuses on the trophies as the central grievance of the Jews. It is, in fact, the only specific grievance in the narrative apart from the brief and general remark that animal fights and combats between humans and wild animals do not concur with Jewish customs (15.274).65 The main objection against the trophies is clearly indicated in Ant. 15.277: the protesters could not accept images of humans within the city of Jerusalem. Herod’s reaction to this protest is remarkable. He did not use force to impose his will upon the Jews, like Pilate tried to do in a similar situation.66 Herod did not bring the trophies outside the city walls either. Josephus suggests that Herod understood the difficulties the Jews were having with the trophies (15.278). He arranged for a small demonstration at the theatre: Having called the most eminent amongst them, he directed them to the theatre, and having shown them the trophies he inquired what sort of things these possibly seemed to be to them. (279) When they cried out ‘images of humans’ (ἀνθρώπων εἰκόνες), he ordered for the decoration that covered (the trophies) to be taken away and showed them that the wood was bare. When they were stripped, the (trophies) immediately became a cause of laughter.

Thus, Herod had the trophies stripped up to the point that their wooden frame was laid bare. In this way, any possible association with images was, of course, demolished, which eliminated the reason for the protest.

64 The preparation of the festivities and the building activities presuppose a large working force, which probably involved many Judeans. The festival probably brought small bonuses to the population at large, like free food, cf. Josephus, Ant. 16.140; 19.93. Friedländer, Sittengeschichte, 438–39; Lämmer, ‘Griechische Wettkämpfe’, 202–3. 65 For Jewish objections to animal fights, see M. Landmann, Das Tier in der jüdischen Weisung, Heidelberg 1959, 86–8. 66 See footnotes 5 and 9.

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Nevertheless, the narrative does not stop with the stripping. Josephus notes that the trophies became a cause of laughter after they had been stripped. The final sentence of this section supports the interpretation that there is yet another aspect to the trophies: ‘What brought about the Jews’ amusement67 most was that previously they too had mocked68 the construction of the statues’. (15.279). What is the background of this mocking? If the point of the trophies was that they were images of living creatures, as the text shows elsewhere, there was no motive for mocking, because the second commandment had been violated, a most serious matter. Josephus’ report obviously hints at another possible role for the trophies. Actually, Herod’s performance in the theatre becomes perfectly understandable if we interpret it in the light of the well-established Jewish polemics against idols. This polemical tradition highlights that the veneration of statues of deities is stupid, because such statues can easily be exposed as deceptions: they are made by the hands of humans. They are exactly what they appear to be: a piece of wood with a precious metal covering. Such polemics can be found, for example, in the story of Daniel and Bel, the Epistle of Jeremiah as well as in Book 3 of the Sibylline Oracles (3.27–38, 586–90, 601–7). These writings include statements about the transitory nature of divine statues, their exposure as simply handmade artefacts (Bel et Draco 5; Ep Jer 3; 7–15; 39; 45; 50; 54–58; 70–71) as well as the mocking of the deities represented by them.69 These passages are well known, so one quote may suffice: Gods made of wood and overlaid with silver and gold are unable to save themselves from thieves or robbers. Anyone who can will strip them of their gold and silver and of the robes they wear, and go off with this booty, and they will not be able to help themselves. (Ep Jer 57–58, NRSV )

Herod’s performance with the trophies becomes meaningful in the perspective of the ridiculing of idols such as in the Epistle of Jeremiah. The point of Herod’s action in this context would have been the exposure of the trophies as images of gods, as idols. The Jewish response

Reading διάχυσιν with ed. Niese (1885–1895). Lämmer, ‘Griechische Wettkämpfe’, 225 n. 150 takes the Greek εἰρωνεία here to indicate the attitude of somebody who pretends not to know what he or she does in fact know. 69 See Daniel’s laughter in Bel et Draco 7 and 19, as well as the destruction of Bel’s statue in Bel et Draco 22. Also Ep Jer 8–72; Sib. Or. 3.606–7. 67 68

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to his handling of the trophies, laughter and amusement, matches this reading nicely. The implication of this interpretation of the trophies episode is that Herod decided to change his policy during the festival because of the Jews’ religious scruples. Eventually he must have realized that the trophies were not acceptable for some of the local Jews and apparently tried to find a way out of the precarious situation by exposing the function of the trophies. By doing this, he took the side of the Jewish protestors. Nevertheless, as we have seen, his move was not persuasive to all Jews involved. 3.2. Josephus’ own voice The final response that needs to be discussed concerns Josephus’ own role as narrator of this intriguing episode. Significantly, Josephus’ introduction to the report immediately characterizes Herod’s initiative very negatively: For this reason he departed even more from the ancestral customs (ἐξέβαινε τῶν πατρίων ἐθῶν)70 and gradually corrupted the constitution (τὴν κατάστασιν) with foreign habits,71 although it had previously been sacrosanct.72 (Ant. 15.267)

The beginning of this sentence (‘For this reason . . .’) refers to the narrative that immediately precedes the description of Herod’s festival. Josephus notes that Herod had managed to eliminate his potential competitors and that his rule was therefore secure from this moment on (Ant. 15.267). Josephus suggests, by this presentation of the events, that Herod had acquired a free hand and immediately took the opportunity to import all kinds of foreign habits. As a matter of fact, this accusation The ‘ancestral customs’ of the Jews is a container term that vaguely refers to the traditional way of life of the Jewish people. See War 2.279; 4.102; 7.424; Ant. 5.90, 101; 9.95, 137; 11.339; 12.255, 271, 280; 13.397; 14.194, 213, 223; 16.1, 35; 19.290; 20.100; Life 198; Apion 1.317; 2.10. Almost synonymous are ‘the holy customs’ (War 4.182), ‘the (ancestral) customs of the Jews’ (War 7.50; Ant. 13.397; 15.254, 255; 16.225; 20.17, 38, 139, 146) and ‘our customs’ (Ant. 16.43). Josephus also emphasizes in his Antiquities that Herod transgressed the ancestral laws (e.g. Ant. 15.266; 16.1–5, 184–185; 17.149–152, 159, 180–181). 71 Midrash Sifra Leviticus 18:3 interprets the foreign practices referred to in the biblical text (Lev. 18:3–4) as visiting the theatre, the circus or spectacles, Lämmer, ‘Griechische Wettkämpfe’, 222 n. 120. 72 See about the special character of the Jewish constitution according to Josephus, C. Gerber, Ein Bild des Judentums für Nichtjuden von Flavius Josephus: Untersuchungen zu seiner Schrift Contra Apionem, Leiden 1997, 269–84. 70

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by Josephus as narrator is repeated several times.73 It is significant that the narrative itself focuses on just one of the non-Jewish conventions introduced by Herod, the trophies. Apparently, the other innovations, shows at the theatre and contests at the amphitheatre or hippodromestadium, were not much of a problem for the Jerusalem Jews. Many of them may have tolerated or even welcomed most of Herod’s innovations.74 Nevertheless, the continuation of Josephus’ introductory remarks is again very critical about the king: ‘Because of this we ( Jews) suffered considerable harm, also in later times, because all the matters that led the masses to piety before, were neglected’.75 Two points are significant in this very serious accusation: firstly, Josephus emphasizes that the harm suffered by the Jewish people was great as well as prolonged, but he does not specify this harm. Secondly, if this phrase refers to the trophies, or perhaps to the festival in its entirety, the remark can only be a gross overstatement.76 The outcome of the episode implies that Herod learned his lesson. The festival was probably not even celebrated again, since there is no reference whatsoever that indicates its continuation. Josephus reveals his own disgust with another exaggeration in Antiquities 15.268: the theatre and amphitheatre were both conspicuous by their rich decoration, but foreign to the customs of the Jews (τοῦ δὲ κατὰ τοὺς Ιουδαίους ἔθους ἀλλότρια).77 Josephus’ negative comments make it very clear that Herod’s festival and the new buildings did not match

73 Ant. 15.268, 274, 275, 276, 281. Similar vocabulary in Ant. 15.328, which mentions Herod’s ambition to flatter the most important Romans as motive. Josephus emphasizes elsewhere that the ancestral customs should be guarded (Ant. 5.90) and not to be altered (Ant. 5.101) or transgressed (War 4.102; Ant. 9.95). 74 Cf. Lämmer, ‘Griechische Wettkämpfe’, 202. It is important to note that only a small group really took action by their attempt to murder Herod. Likewise only a limited group of youngsters decided to destroy Herod’s eagle on top of the sanctuary (War 1.648–655; 2.5–7; Ant. 17.148–164). 75 Cf. Ant. 15.365: Herod’s subjects believed that their religion would be put to an end and their habits change for the worse. See also Ant. 15.375–376 about Manaemus’ prophecy and van Henten, “Ruler or God? The Demolition of Herod’s Eagle”, in J. Fotopoulos (ed.), New Testament and Early Christian Literature in Greco-Roman Context: Studies in Honor of David E. Aune (NovTSup), Leiden 2006, 257–86. 76 With M. Smith, ‘The Gentiles in Judaism 125 bce–66 ce, in W. Horbury et alii (eds), The Cambridge History of Judaism, Vol. 3, Cambridge 1999, 229. L.H. Feldman, Jew and Gentile in Antiquity: Attitudes and Interactions from Alexander to Justinian, Princeton 1993, 41, acknowledges the possibility that Josephus is exaggerating here. He concludes that the trophies and golden eagle episodes show that there was fierce Jewish opposition to Herod’s innovations. 77 See footnote 70.

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the ancestral customs of the Jews (also above), but he clearly overstates his case by suggesting that Herod totally changed the Jewish practices with his innovations, as he does in 15.274–275 in connection with the animal fights: . . . for the indigenous people there was manifestly an abolition of the customs they held in honour (κατάλυσις τῶν τιμωμένων παρ᾽ αὐτοῖς ἐθῶν). (275) For, it was evident (for them) that it is godless to throw humans to the wild beasts for (other) humans’ enjoyment of the spectacle, and godless too to totally change their practices to foreign customs (ἀσεβὲς δὲ ξενικοῖς ἐπιτηδεύμασιν ἐξαλλάττειν τοὺς ἐθισμούς).

Even after Josephus has informed his readers that Herod had convinced most of the Jews that the trophies were harmless, the report about the conspiracy still includes stock-phrases that indicate that Herod’s innovations countered Jewish customs.78 The conspirators were willing to sacrifice their lives for ‘the common customs’ (15.288) in order to save the Jewish people from a king who was, in fact, an enemy of the people. The transition to the next section in book 15 of the Antiquities, about Herod’s building several fortresses, also supports the negative portrayal of the king: The persistence of the people and their undaunted faithfulness to the laws would not make Herod easy-going, unless he would rule with greater security. So he decided to enclose the people from every side, so that when they would revolt, the rebellion would not become manifest. (15.291)

Josephus’ point that Herod decided to build a series of fortresses because he felt he had a serious security problem and needed to contain his Jewish population is simply farfetched.79 These fortresses would not have helped the king against murder attempts like the one in the Jerusalem theatre. The fortresses obviously served other goals, including the demonstration of Herod’s loyalty to Rome.80

78 Josephus, Ant. 15.281: ‘but some of them persisted in being annoyed about the uncommon habits’ and ‘(Herod’s) abandonment of the ancestral customs’ (281); 15.284: ‘(Herod’s) outrageous acts’ (284). 79 So already H. Drüner, Untersuchungen über Josephus, Marburg 1896, 68. 80 See the parallel passages in War 1.401, 403, 417–421.

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3. Conclusion Herod’s games in Jerusalem, the first of a series of three festivals in honour of Augustus, turned out to be a fiasco. The negative aspects may be exaggerated in Josephus’ description, but the festival must have been a failure, as the events connected with the trophies show. It is plausible that the protest triggered by the trophies is historical. The Jerusalem Jews responded likewise to similar (apparent) violations of the second commandment within Jerusalem.81 The section about the murder attempt by the ten fanatics who were happy to sacrifice their lives just for giving the king a warning is, perhaps, Josephus’ own invention. In the present context, it suggests in any case that Herod’s spectacular shows turned into a disaster for its organizer.82 The king was lucky to escape with his life. Herod’s dealings with the protest against the trophies show his shrewdness, but could, of course, not be repeated.83 That would no doubt have harmed Herod’s relationship with Augustus, on whom the success of his rule depended so much. Although Josephus does not indicate this explicitly, the chain of the evens in the relevant books, The Jewish War 184 as well as Antiquities 15–16, suggests that Herod decided to follow a double strategy after his failure in Jerusalem. Firstly, he implemented his plan for a GraecoRoman style festival elsewhere, first at Samaria-Sebaste (27 bce),85 and later at Caesarea Maritima, this time with obvious connections to the ruler cult.86 Secondly, for Jerusalem he switched his focus to the most important Jewish institution and decided to renovate the Temple and enhance Jerusalem’s glory this way.

See above concerning Pilate’s initiatives with the Roman standards and the shields, as well as Caligula’s statue. 82 With Lämmer, ‘Griechische Wettkämpfe’, 206–7. 83 The lack of epigraphic references to the Jerusalem games in lists of victories is no indication for the continuation of the games or not. Usually only holy crown games (see above) were mentioned by name in such inscriptions, Lämmer, ‘Griechische Wettkämpfe’, 226 footnote 162. 84 See especially War 1.400–415. 85 Samaria-Sebaste was founded in 27 bce as a Greek polis. The remains of Herodean buildings include a huge temple for Augustus and a hippodrome. There was a cult for the emperor at Samaria-Sebaste as well as Caesarea games. See J.W. Crowfoot et alii, The Buildings at Samaria, London 1942, 31–129; Schalit, König Herodes, 358–65; N. Avigad, ‘Samaria (City)’, in: E. Stein et alii (eds), The New Encyclopedia of Archaeological Excavations in the Holy Land, Vol. 4, Jerusalem/New York 1993, 1300–10. 86 See above. 81

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Josephus’ description of Herod’s festival in Jerusalem is so negative that it is difficult to resist the temptation to consider the possibility that he may have invented the entire story in order to disqualify Herod as king of the Jews. A recent reviewer has, in fact, suggested that Josephus’ description is fictitious and modelled on conventional Roman cities with their public buildings.87 This seems highly improbable in the light of what I have argued about Herod’s policy and Josephus’ role as narrator. More compelling arguments for the hypothesis that Josephus’ report of the Jerusalem festival is fictitious have already been put forward by Hans Drüner in his Untersuchungen über Josephus. His main points are: 1) Josephus’ information about the Jerusalem festival is merely a general description; it is significant that specific information about, for example, the location of the buildings is missing. 2) The correspondences between the Jerusalem festival and the games at Caesarea are striking; the parallels in the vocabulary of the descriptions of both festivals are so great that the report about Jerusalem must be based on Josephus’ information about the Caesarea games. 3) There is no parallel report about the Jerusalem festival in the War, although such a report would have fit in with the list of tributes to Augustus in War 1.401–428.88 One could add that Josephus’ description of Herod’s theatre and amphitheatre in Jerusalem has not convincingly been backed up by archaeological evidence. Yet, this objection does not hold if one assumes that both buildings were wooden constructions, as has been argued by Joseph Patrich and Achim Lichtenberger (above). Drüner’s hypothesis can only be refuted by an argument of plausibility. There are indeed striking parallels in the vocabulary of Josephus’ descriptions of the Jerusalem and Caesarea festivals, but my discussion has also pointed out significant differences between the two festivals. In my opinion, these differences comply with a plausible interpretation of events suggesting that Herod tried to take the religious views of the Jerusalem Jews into account when he was organising his festival. This

87 H. Geva, Review of A. Segal, The Theatres in Eretz Israel in the Ancient Period, Jerusalem 1999 [Hebrew], Qadmoniot 34 (2001), 67–8 [Hebrew]. 88 Drüner, Untersuchungen, 66–8.

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reading does not reflect the view of the narrator, who consistently tries to disqualify Herod because of a supposedly all-embracing attempt to change the Jewish customs. Exactly the tension between the actual information offered by the report and the voice of the overt narrator seems to me to be the strongest argument that the report is not fictitious. It indicates at the same that the most critical respondent to Herod’s innovations may well have been Josephus himself.

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PART THREE

GROUP DYNAMICS AS AGENTS OF RELIGIOUS CHANGE

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SABBATH AT ELEPHANTINE A Short Episode in the Construction of Jewish Identity* Bob Becking Illi tamen causas ritus sui nouerunt; maior pars populi facit, quod cur faciat ignorat1

1. Sabbath as a Jewish Identity Marker In Judaism the observance of the Sabbath is an important identity marker until this day. This weekly returning day of rest—regardless of the character of the observance—is of great importance in Jewish culture.2 It should be noticed that it has deep roots in history and tradition. In the Babylonian Talmud there is the following section: Rab Judah said in Rab’s name: Had Israel kept the first Sabbath, no nation or tongue would have enjoyed dominion over them, for it is said, ‘And it came to pass on the seventh day, that there went out some of the people to gather’; which is followed by, ‘Then came Amalek’. R. Johanan said in the name of R. Simeon b. Yohai: If Israel were to keep two Sabbaths according to the laws thereof, they would be redeemed immediately, for it is said, ‘Thus saith the Lord of the eunuch that keep my Sabbaths’, which is followed by, ‘even them will I bring to my holy mountain’, etc.3

* It is a great honour for me to present this paper to my former teacher and long term colleague Pieter W. van der Horst. I seize the opportunity to thank him for his leading role in biblical scholarship by over and again pointing at the need for knowing the context of scripture before interpreting the texts. I would like to thank my colleagues Marjo C.A. Korpel and Maarten J.J. Menken for their valuable remarks on a previous version of this paper. 1 Seneca, De Superst., in: Augustine, De Civitate Dei, 6.11. 2 See, e.g., A.J. Heschel, The Sabbath: Its Meaning for Modern Man, New York 1978; I.M. Lau, Wie Juden leben: Glaube, Alltag, Feste, Gütersloh 1988, 112–57. For the Samaritan religion the observance of the Sabbath is of equal importance, see, e.g., R. Pummer, ‘Samaritan Rituals and Customs’, in: A.D. Crown (ed.), The Samaritans, Tübingen 1989, 650–90, esp. 676–78. 3 b.Shab 118b.

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Here a great time span is introduced. As the origin of the Sabbath is placed in the time of the Creation of Heaven and Earth, redemption will come as soon as Israel will be able to keep two consecutive Sabbaths. In the Mishnah, two tractates are devoted to the Sabbath: Shabbath and Erubim. The first mainly discusses the character of rest on the Sabbath, while the second presents a debate on the fusion of the Sabbath limits.4 Well known is m.Shab 7:2 that lists the thirty nine—or better forty save one5—classes of work that are forbidden on the Sabbath. In the writings of Philo and Josephus, the Sabbath is mainly characterized as a day of rest and study.6 Josephus describes the strict observance by the Essenes: Not only do they prepare their food on the day before, to avoid kindling a fire on that one [the Sabbath], but they do not venture to remove any vessel.7

At Qumran, the Sabbath was known both in its liturgical and in its moral character. 4Q400–407 and 11Q17 contain the ‘Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice’, also known as the ‘Angelic Liturgy’. This is a mainly liturgical work that contains sections for each of the first thirteen Sabbaths in the year. The earthly ritual is mirrored by angelic praise. The heavenly temple in its turn qualifies the Qumran-community and its worship.8 A Psalm Scroll containing both biblical and apocryphal hymns ends with the following colophon: David son of Jesse was wise and brilliant like the light of the sun; (he was) a scribe, intelligent and perfect in all his ways before God and men.

4 H.A. McKay, Sabbath and Synagogue: The Question of Sabbath Worship in Ancient Judaism (RGRW 122), Leiden 1994, argued that the Sabbath was only a day of rest and not a day of worship in Ancient Judaism, for a convincing criticism of this view see P.W. van der Horst, ‘Was the Synagogue a Place of Sabbath Worship Before 70 ce?’, in: S. Fine (ed.), Jews, Christians, and Polytheists in the Ancient Synagogue: Cultural Interaction during the Graeco-Roman Period, London/New York 1999, 18–43; P.W. van der Horst, Japheth in the Tents of Shem: Studies on Jewish Hellenism in Antiquity (CBET 32), Leuven 2002, 55–82. 5 On the system of subtractive numerals in antiquity see P.W. van der Horst & G. Mussies, ‘Subtractive Versus Additive Composite Numerals in Antiquity’, ICS 13 (1988), 183–202. 6 See, e.g., Philo, On the Life of Moses, 2.214–16; Philo, Apol., 7.12–14; Josephus, Contr. Apion., 2.175. On Apion and Josephus’ criticism of him see: L.H. Feldman & J.R. Levison (eds), Josephus’ Contra Apionem: Studies in its Character and Context (AGJU 34), Leiden 1996; Van der Horst, Japheth in the Tents of Shem, 207–21. 7 Josephus, Bel., 2.147. 8 C. Newsom, Songs of the Sabbath Sacrifice: A Critical Edition. Atlanta 1985.

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YHWH gave him an intelligent and brilliant spirit, and he wrote 3,600 psalms and 364 songs to sing before the altar for the daily perpetual sacrifice, for all the days of the year; and 52 songs for the Sabbath offerings; and 30 songs for the New Moons, for Feast days and for the Day of Atonement. In all, the songs which he uttered were 446, and 4 songs to make music on behalf of those stricken (by evil spirits). In all, they were 4,050. All these he uttered through prophecy which was given him from before the Most High.9

This fragment indicates the significance of the weekly Sabbath and its liturgical character.10 In the halakhic texts from Qumran, reference is made to the character of the observance of the Sabbath.11 The institution is referred to in the Damascus Document.12 The regulations are quite strict and mainly consist in a list of forbidden acts such as: No-one should stay in a place close to the gentiles on a Sabbath.13

Next to that a great variety of non-Jewish texts from antiquity gives evidence for the importance of the Sabbath for Jews. In Contra Apionem Josephus refers to a passage from the Greek philosopher and historian Agatharchides: There are a people called Jews, and dwell in a city the strongest of all other cities, which the inhabitants call Jerusalem, and are accustomed to rest on every seventh day on which times they make no use of their arms, nor meddle with husbandry, nor take care of any affairs of life, but spread out their hands in their holy places, and pray till the evening. Now it came to pass, that when Ptolemy,14 the son of Lagus, came into this city with his army, that these men, in observing this mad custom of theirs, instead of guarding the city, suffered their country to submit itself to a bitter lord; and their law was openly proved to have commanded a foolish practice. This accident taught all other men but the Jews to disregard such dreams as these were, and not to follow the like idle suggestions delivered as a law, when, in such uncertainty of human reasonings, they are at a loss what they should do.15

11QPsalmsa XXVII. Pace McKay, Sabbath and Synagogue, 51–60. 11 L.H. Schiffman, The Halakhah at Qumran (SJLA 16), Leiden 1976. 12 CD X:14–XI:23 // 4QDamDocc frag. 3 col. I. 13 CD XI:14–15. 14 A reference to Ptolemy I Soter who conquered Palestine and captured Jerusalem around 300 bce. 15 Agathargides of Cnidus apud Jos. Contr. Apion. I 209–211; M. Stern (ed.), Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism, Vol. 1: From Herodotus to Plutarch, Jerusalem 1986, no. 30; see: P. Schäfer, Judeophobia: Attitudes toward the Jews in the Ancient World, Cambridge/London 1997, 82–3. 9

10

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This fragment testifies—like a handful of other Hellenistic texts16—the importance of the Sabbath for the Jews, even from a Hellenistic point of view. 2. On the Origin of the Sabbath Within Jewish and Christian belief systems the origin of the Sabbath is construed as a sign of God for humanity. I would like to refer to the Apostolic Constitutions, a fourth century ce Christian text, which however can be construed as a Christian refurbishment of an existing Jewish text. In a prayer the following words are found: Lord almighty, you created the world [through Christ]17 and you have instituted the Sabbath in memory of this [. . .]18

This view has survived the ages. It can be found in the Cathechism of Heidelberg Question and Answer 103. On a website presenting contemporary Jewish faith in daily life the following remark can be found: An etiological origin for the Sabbath is supplied in Genesis 2:1–3, which speaks of God ceasing from the work of creation on the seventh day, blessing the day, and declaring it holy. Scholarly explanations of the Sabbath’s origins have focused on certain days in the Babylonian monthly calendar on which normal activities of the king and certain professions were restricted. These days, known as ‘evil days,’ were determined by the lunar cycle, corresponding with the quarters of the moon.19

According to biblical tradition, God destined in the beginning the seventh day as a day of rest. This becomes clear from the Book of Genesis:

On which see: Schäfer, Judeophobia, 82–92. See Van der Horst, Japheth in the Tents of Shem, 115; the words ‘through Christ’ are part of the later Christian layer. 18 Apostolic Constitutions (ed. M. Metzger, Les constitutions apostoliques 3, Paris 1987) VII.36; see also D. Fiensy, Prayers Alleged to be Jewish: An Examination of the Constitutiones Apostolorum, Chico 1985; P.W. van der Horst, ‘The Greek Synagogue Prayers in the Apostolic Constitutions, book VII’ , in J. Tabory (ed.), From Qumran to Cairo: Studies in the History of Prayer, Jerusalem 1999, 19–46; Van der Horst, Japheth in the Tents of Shem, 113–18. 19 http://www.myjewishlearning.com/daily_life/Shabbat/Overview_History_of _Shabbat/. 16 17

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And on the seventh day God finished the work that he had done, and he rested on the seventh day from all the work that he had done. So God blessed the seventh day and hallowed it, because on it God rested from all the work that he had done in creation.20

and is affirmed in the Decalogue. In a historical or religio-historical view, however, the origin of the Sabbath is not that easily filched from the darkness of the past. The origin of the Sabbath is buried in pre-history. Genesis 2:2–3 is part of the Priestly Source, a text composed in early post-exilic times. Moreover it is the final section in the Priestly creation account.21 Gen 2:2–3 reflect the views of this source on time and history. According to P, the world we live in is created in an orderly way. The lay-out of the cosmos and the animal kingdom is characterized by order. The world is to be seen as an intelligent design in which there are clear, often bi-polar distinctions, such as above-below; dark-light; clean-unclean. A comparable organizational idea is seen by the P-source when it comes to time as experienced by mankind. In other words, the seven-day scheme fits the ideology of the P-source.22 There is a tendency to construe the seven-day scheme as an early post-exilic ‘invention’. The consensus is based on the following four observations: (1) The fact that texts like Gen 2:2–3 that imply a sevenday scheme are post-exilic and fit the designed time ideology of the P-source. (2) The seven-day scheme cannot be consoled with the celestial rhythms. The lunar periods do not rhyme at seven days and the number of days in the solar year is not a plural of seven. (3) The seven-day scheme does not corroborate with the concepts of time from surrounding cultures. From the Ancient Near East, no calendrial systems that

20 Gen 2:2–3 translation by the author; see also the interesting rewriting in Jubilees 2:16–18: ‘And He finished all His work on the sixth day—all that is in the heavens and on the earth, and in the seas and in the abysses, and in the light and in the darkness, and in everything. And He gave us a great sign, the Sabbath day, that we should work six days, but keep Sabbath on the seventh day from all work. And all the angels of the presence, and all the angels of sanctification, these two great classes—He has bidden us to keep the Sabbath with Him in heaven and on earth’, where the Sabbath is actually mentioned despite its absence in Gen 2. 21 See e.g., Th.C. Vriezen & A.S. Van der Woude, Ancient Israelite and Early Jewish Literature, Leiden 2005, 188–98. 22 See also K. Grünwaldt, Exil und Identität: Beschneidung, Passa und Sabbat in der Priesterschrift (BBB 85), Frankfurt am Main 1992; J.A. Wagenaar, Origin and Transformation of the Ancient Israelite Festival Calendar (BZAR 6), Wiesbaden 2006, 80–2.

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reckon by a seven-day week are known. The hemerological traditions from Mesopotamia are for instance known in the iqqur-ipuš-almanac, which can be seen as some sort of dies fas et nefas system for days and months throughout the year on which certain activities—constructing houses; waging war—are favourable or unfavourable.23 The idea of Sabbath might be construed as an Israelite appropriation of the basic ideas behind the iqqur-ipuš-almanac, be it in the language of clean and unclean days, exaggerating the Sabbath into a day of taboo on all sorts of work, it is, however, not easy to reconcile the Mesopotamian timeconcept with a seven-day scheme. (4) In biblical texts that reflect preexilic circumstances the Sabbath seems to be related to the cycle of the moon. In 2 Kings 4, the great woman from Shunem wants to consult ‘the man of God’, Elisha, on Mount Carmel on the illness of her son. Her husband does not approve of her action with the argument: Why do you want to go today? It is neither new moon nor Sabbath.24

Such texts should be interpreted as an indication that the Sabbath, originally, was connected with the cycle of the moon and also that one of the aspects of this day was to consult ‘holy men’. A comparable conclusion can be drawn on the basis of Amos 8:5–6 where the prophet phrases the thoughts of the wicked elite: When will the new moon be over so that we may sell grain; and the sabbath, so that we may offer wheat for sale? We will make the ephah small and the shekel great, and practice deceit with false balances buying the poor with silver and the needy for a pair of sandals, selling even the sweepings with the wheat.25

It should be noted that the seven-day scheme is not absent in the Ancient Near East. In Ugarit, both epic and ritual texts refer to a seven-day scheme. I will present three examples. A scene from the Epic of Ba{lu is informative:

23 See R. Labat, Un calendrier babylonien des travaux des signes et des mois (séries iqqur îpus), Paris 1965. 24 2 Kgs 4:23. 25 See, e.g., F.I. Andersen & D.N. Freedman, Amos (AB 24A), New York 1989, 799–817.

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Look! For one day and a second fire raged in the mansion flames in the palace. For a third day; a fourth day fire raged in the mansion flames in the palace. For a fifth; a sixth day fire raged in the mansion flames in the palace. Then, on the seventh day the fire was removed from the mansion the flames from the palace.26

In the legend of Aqhat, the same literary pattern is applied when narrating that king Dan’il offered during six days to the goddesses of birth who then left his house on the seventh day.27 In a ritual text, the ceremonial acts and offerings for a period of seven days following the fifteenth of the month ‘First-of-the Wine’ are described in full detail, with ceremonies on each day.28 In the narrative texts, the seven-day scheme seems to function as a literary strategy to slow down the action. In the ritual texts, the seven-day scheme is not connected with a weekly returning day of rest or taboo. A connection between the tides of the moon and a seven-day scheme is made for the first time—as far as I can see—in the Babylonian Epic of Creation. After having created the moon, Marduk instructs this celestial body as follows: At New Moon, when you rise on the world, you will shine with horns to mark six days until half-circle on the seventh, at the fifteenth day, you will be in opposition at the dividing point of each [month] when the sun f[ace]s you from the horizon of heaven. then wane at the same pace and form in reverse on the day of di[sappeara]nce, approach the sun’s course on the [. . .] of the thirtieth day you shall be in conjunction with the sun again.29

The fact that the second interval—between the seventh day and the fifteenth day—consists of eight days, makes clear that although the

26 27 28 29

KTU 1.4 vi:24–32. KTU 1.17 ii:32–39. KTU 1.41. Enuma Elish V 15–22.

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seven day scheme is present in Babylonia in the sixth century, it was not (yet) connected with a week-scheme. In view of the evidence displayed, it seems better to understand the weekly Sabbath as part of the Grand Design of the post-exilic community in which festivals and holy days were no longer seen as connected to the agricultural tides, but part of a world view based on order and calculated time.30 3. The Garrison at Elephantine Elephantine is the Greek name for a small island in the Nile not far from present day Assuan.31 In the Persian Period this island was on the southernmost border of the Achaemenid Empire. In the beginnings of the twentieth century ce, German and French archaeologists discovered a great variety of ostraca and papyri from the Persian Period. These texts inform us on the following. On the island, as well as on the banks of the Nile, a garrison was encamped in order to defend the border. In this garrison two more or less ethnic groups are detectable: the ‫ יהודי‬and the ‫ארמי‬. The second group are certainly Arameans. The first group is often seen as Jews.32 In my view, this is an anachronism. In the fifth century bce—the age of the Elephantine material— Judaism had not yet developed from Yahwism into the form as we know 30 See L.L. Grabbe, A History of Jews and Judaism in the Second Temple Period. Vol. 1: Yehud, the Persion Province of Judah (LSTS 47), London, New York 2004, 220–23; M. Dijkstra, ‘Religious Crisis and Inculturation: The Example of Post-Exilic Israel’, in: M. Frederiks et alii (eds), Towards an Intercultural Theology: Essays in honour of J.A.B. Jongeneel (IIMO Research Publication 61), Zoetermeer 2003, 97–115; Wagenaar, Origin and Transformation, 121–55; for a more traditional view see G. Robinson, The Origin and Development of the Old Testament Sabbath (BBET 21), Frankfurt am Main 1988; McKay, Sabbath and Synagogue, 11–42; T. Veijola, Moses Erben: Studien zum Dekalog, zum Deuteronomismus und zum Schriftgelehrtentum (BWANT 149), Stuttgart/etc. 2000, 61–75. 31 See generally B. Porten, Archives from Elephantine: The Life of an Ancient Jewish Military Colony, Berkeley/Los Angeles 1968. 32 See, e.g., E. Sachau, Aramäische Papyri und Ostraka aus einer jüdischen Militärkolonie zu Elephantine, Leipzig 1911; B. Porten, ‘The Religion of the Jews of Elephantine in Light of the Hermopolis Papyri’, JNES 28 (1969), 116–21; B. Porten, ‘The Jews in Egypt’, in: W.D. Davies & L. Finkelstein (eds), The Cambridge Ancient History 1, Cambridge 1984, 372–400; K. van der Toorn, ‘Anat-Yahu, Some Other Deities, and the Jews of Elephantine’, Numen 39 (1992), 80–101; G.W. Ahlström, The History of Ancient Palestine from the Paleolithic Period to Alexander’s Conquest ( JSOTSup 146), Sheffield 1993, 869–72; H.-J. Stoebe, ‘Überlegungen zum Synkretismus der jüdischen Tempelgemeinde in Elephantine’, in: U. Finkbeiner et alii (eds), Beiträge zur Kulturgeschichte Vorderasiens: Festschrift für Michael Böhmer, Mainz 1995, 619–26; Schäfer, Judeophobia, 121–36.

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it from Hellenistic times onward. Therefore, I prefer to label them as Yehudites, implying that these soldiers were recruited either from the Persian Province Yehûd or from areas in Babylonia where new settlements are known from the Babylonian and Persian period, such as al Ya-hu-du, ‘City of Judah’, or uru ša pna-šar, ‘Eagletown’.33 4. Sabbath at Elephantine The inscriptions from Elephantine evidence the existence of the Sabbath-institution among the Yehudites. I will display the evidence here.34 4.1. A Request to Yedanjah on Provisions This private letter reads as follows: Greeting, Yedanjah! Now, were I to put [in] the stocks, then it would be commanded: ‘[Let] them [not] withhold him bread and water.’ [Now . . . let] Ahutab [take] out for me. But, [. . . d]ay of the Sabbath. Now, if they did not capture Nathan there, let him go out to me and I will go grind [. . . . . . . . .] Moreover, dispatch to me . . . [ . . . . . .] and I shall write [. . . . . .] and do not [. . .].35

This letter is not easily understood. The anonymous writer seems to be worried about the deliverance of food and stocks to him. The connection with the Sabbath is unclear. On the basis of this broken text no conclusions can be drawn as to the character of the Sabbath at Elephantine. 4.2. Instructions on Vegetables, Barley and more A second ostracon was written by a certain Islah, most probably a woman:

33 See L. Pearce, ‘New Evidence for Judaeans in Babylonia’, in: O. Lipschits & M. Oeming (eds), Judah and the Judaeans in the Persian Period, Winona Lake 2006, 399–411; Grabbe, History of Jews and Judaism, 317–18. 34 For reasons unknown to me, McKay, Sabbath and Synagogue, overlooked the evidence from Elephantine. 35 TADAE D7.10; see Porten, Archives, 126.277; B. Porten, ‘The Religion of the Jews of Elephantine in Light of the Hermopolis Papyri’, JNES 28 (1969), 116–21; Grabbe, History of Jews and Judaism, 221.

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bob becking Behold, I will send vegetables tomorrow. Meet the boat tomorrow on Sabbath, so that they will not get lost. By the life of Yahô, if not, (then) I will take your life. Do not rely on Meshullemeth or Shemaiah. Now, send me barley in return. Now, by the life of Yahô, if not, (then) you will be responsible for the account.36

This ostracon indicates that on the day of the Sabbath, there obviously existed some trade in grocery ware. It might, however, be that this was a case of emergency. The letter by Islah might have been a cry from the bottom of a crisis. Problematical in this interpretation is that the inscription does not hint at a case of emergency and that it contains no language of apology for trespassing the Sabbath. On the other hand, however, to conclude that this ostracon reflects standard procedures in Elephantine is premature. What can be adduced is the fact that at least a few Yehudites had no moral or religious problems with trade on a Sabbath. 4.3. Other evidence The other ostraca are not very informative. One inscription mentions that Sabbath came, but the context is very unclear.37 In two texts there seems to be a rather loose connection between salt and Sabbath.38 A fragmentary letter, in which mention is made of bread, reads: And now, bring to me on the Sabbath.39

This inscription, again, seems to imply that (economic) activities could take place on a Sabbath. 4.4. Military duties The Yehudites functioned as soldiers in the Persian army. This implies that they were supposed to be on duty everyday of the week. At this point there is a slumbering conflict. In case the seven-day scheme of the Sabbath as a day of complete rest was already in function in

36 TADAE D7.16:1–9; see Porten, Archives, 126; Porten, ‘Religion of the Jews of Elephantine’; Grabbe, History of Jews and Judaism, 221. 37 TADAE D7.12:9; Grabbe, History of Jews and Judaism, 221. 38 TADAE D7.28; 7.35; Grabbe, History of Jews and Judaism, 221. 39 TADAE D7.48:4–5; Grabbe, History of Jews and Judaism, 221.

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Elephantine, then moral or religious problems could have been possible, since one cannot expect the Persians to take into account a variety of religious wishes to be free from duty. The inscriptions from Elephantine do not witness such a conflict. This, however, is no proof of the absence of the Sabbath, but only an indication that the Yehudites had a liberal stand towards the demand of the powers that were.40 In sum, the tiny pieces of evidence only allow a few glimpses into the reality of ancient Elephantine. So much is clear, the Sabbath was not yet the weekly day of rest, as it was in early Judaism. Indications for a seven-day scheme are absent from the inscriptions of Elephantine. This absence of evidence is, however, not the evidence of absence. It should be noted that also no mention is made of days like ‘New Moon’, which could be seen as an indication that the weekly scheme was present in this post-exilic Yahwistic community. The suspension of almost all activities—as is so important in later Jewish tradition—is not attested, neither are there clues for worship in the form of celebrations or ritual. In other words, the Sabbath was known, but no strict observation is attested.41 It should be noted, however, that an easy comparison between the formative codes as known from the Hebrew Bible and later Jewish tradition, and these reports from daily life is not possible. Both groups of texts should be classified in different dimensions. The codes should be construed as part of the official, or book religion, while the texts from Elephantine reveal the religion at the level of the household. These two levels should not be confused, but at the same time the existence of a more open-minded or liberal practice reveals that the normativity of the religious and moral codes was not always mirrored in daily life and that the reality often was more refractory than the official documents of a religion want us to believe.42

1 Macc 2:41, later, allows warfare on the Sabbath, but as I see it only as an act of defence; see E. Nodet, A Search for the Origin of Judaism: From Joshua to the Mishnah ( JSOTSup 248), Sheffield 1997, 63–92; note that 1 Macc holds a view different from that of the Jews depicted by Agatharchides in the quotation above. 41 Grabbe, History of Jews and Judaism, 221. 42 For comparable remarks, see W.G. Dever, Did God Have a Wife? Archaeology and Folk Religion in Ancient Israel, Grand Rapids/Cambridge 2005. 40

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bob becking 5. Sabbath in a Multi-Cultural Environment

Contexts make a difference. It should be noted that Elephantine in the Persian Period cannot be construed as a purely Yahwistic community. Next to the Yehudites, there were Arameans in the garrison. The inscriptions give evidence of the existence of a temple for the Egyptian deity Khnum, as becomes clear from the correspondence regarding the rebuilding of the Temple for Yahô after its destruction caused by a conspiracy of the priests of Khnum with the temporary Persian officer Vidranag.43 The Achiqar-text, found at Elephantine,44 reflects the ancient Near Eastern wisdom in all its aspects and contains the names of a variety of deities, such as El and Shamash.45 Except for the conflict caused by the conspiracy of the priests of Khnum with Vidranag, the inscriptions from Elephantine mirror a peaceful cohabitation of various groups of people. Such cohabitation expresses itself in two ways. The Yehudite community did not feel a threat for its religious identity. This also implies that—except for the years surrounding the Vidranag incident—there was no need to look for an outspoken or fenced identity, such as developed by the community

TADAE A.4.7 // A.4.8; see, e.g., Porten, Archives, 105–22 ; B. Porten et alii, The Elephantine Papyri in English (DMOA 22), Leiden 1996, 139–45; Schäfer, Judeophobia, 121–36; J. Frey, ‘Temple and Rival Temple: The Cases of Elephantine, Mt. Gerizim and Leontopolis’, in: B. Ego et alii (eds), Gemeinde ohne Tempel: Community without Temple (WUNT 118), Tübingen 1999, 171–204; J.M. Lindenberger, ‘What ever happened to Vidranga? A Jewish Liturgy of Cursing from Elephantine’, in: P.M.M. Daviau et alii (eds), The World of the Arameans III: Studies in History and Archaeology in Honour of PaulEugène Dion ( JSOTSup 326), Sheffield 2001, 124–57; I. Kottsieper, ‘Die Religionspolitik der Achämeniden und die Juden von Elephantine’, in: R.G. Kratz (ed.), Religion und Religionskontakte im Zeitalter der Achämeniden, Veröffentlichungen der Wissenschaftlichen Gesellschaft für Theologie, Gütersloh 2001, 150–78; B. Porten, ‘Settlement of the Jews at Elephantine and the Arameans at Syene’, in: O. Lipschits & J. Blenkinsopp (eds), Judah and the Judaeans in the Neo-Babylonian Period, Winona Lake 2003, 451–70; R.G. Kratz, Judentum im Zeitalter des Zweiten Tempels (FAT 42), Tübingen 2004, 60–78. 44 TADAE C1.1. 45 See J.M. Lindenberger, ‘The Gods of Ahiqar’, UF 14 (1982) 105–107; J. Lindenberger, The Aramaic Proverbs of Ahiqar, Baltimore 1983; I. Kottsieper, Die Sprache der Ahiqar-Sprüche (BZAW 194), Berlin/New York 1990; J.C. Greenfield, ‘The Wisdom of Ahiqar’, in: J. Day et alii (eds), Wisdom in Ancient Israel, Cambridge 1995, 43–52; I. Kottsieper, ‘El—ferner oder naher Gott: Zur Bedeutung einer semitischen Gottheit in verschiedenen sozialen Kontexten im 1. Jtsd.v.Chr.’, in: R. Albertz (ed.), Religion und Gesellschaft: Studien zu ihrer Wechselbeziehung in den Kulturen des Antiken Vorderen Orients (AOAT 248), Münster 1997, 25–74, esp. 27–37. 43

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in Jerusalem in the era of Ezra and Nehemiah.46 In other words the generally open character of the multi-cultural society in Elephantine did not function as an incitement to develop a system of strict observation of the Sabbath. As far as I can see, it is only in the Hellenistic era that in the context of competing and tempting religions, the Sabbath as a strict identity marker was ‘invented’. The inscriptions from Elephantine give us an, unfortunately unclear, insight into a pre-final and obviously liberal phase in the construction of Jewish identity.

See, e.g., B. Becking, ‘Continuity and Community: The Belief-System of the Book of Ezra’, in: B. Becking & M.C.A. Korpel (eds), The Crisis of the Israelite Religion: Transformation of Religious Traditions in Exilic and Post-Exilic Times (OTS 42), Leiden 1999, 256–75; on the reshaping of the Sabbath by Nehemiah into a day of strict rest (Neh 13:15–22), see, e.g., H.G.M. Williamson, ‘The Belief System of the Book of Nehemiah’, in: Becking & Korpel, The Crisis of Israelite Religion, 276–87; Grabbe, History of Jews and Judaism, 305–07. 46

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THE OPPONENTS IN THE JOHANNINE EPISTLES Fact or Fiction? Maarten J.J. Menken The subtitle of this collection of essays contains the words ‘Religious Innovations’. ‘Innovation’ is at present a vogue word. Almost continually, one hears on television or reads in newspapers about the necessity of innovation, in industry, in education, in research, and so on, and one gets the impression that innovation, however it is precisely defined, is something to be valued very highly. In Antiquity, the appreciation of innovation, let alone of religious innovation, was considerably less, witness the principle ‘the older is better’.1 Of course, innovations of all kinds occurred, but they had to be legitimated by an appeal to tradition. In this essay, I will give attention to the conflict between the author of the Johannine Epistles (together with his community) and his opponents. This conflict concerns the right interpretation of a tradition common to both parties, so innovation is at stake here. At the same time, a recent innovation in modern discussion of this conflict is the view of some scholars that the opponents are the product of the author’s literary strategies. So we meet here ancient religious innovation and modern scholarly innovation; for both types of innovation, the question has to be asked—what is its value? 1. The problem of opponents in New Testament documents One of the problems that any New Testament exegete encounters, is the problem of reconstructing opponents. In many New Testament documents, the author of the document speaks, explicitly or implicitly, of groups or individuals who have ideas that are at odds with those of the author, and who are considered by the author as a threat to his addressees. A well known instance is Paul’s letter to the Galatians. Immediately after the prescript, Paul starts warning his addressees of ‘some who are 1 See P. Pilhofer, Presbyteron kreitton: Der Altersbeweis der jüdischen und christlichen Apologeten und seiner Vorgeschichte (WUNT 2/39), Tübingen 1990.

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confusing you and want to pervert the gospel of Christ’ (Gal 1:7).2 In the rest of the letter, one hears more about these people: ‘They make much of you, but for no good purpose; they want to exclude you, so that you may make much of them’ (4:17). ‘But whoever it is that is confusing you will pay the penalty’ (5:10). ‘I wish those who unsettle you would castrate themselves’ (5:12). ‘It is those who want to make a good showing in the flesh that try to compel you to be circumcised—only that they may not be persecuted for the cross of Christ. Even the circumcised do not themselves obey the law, but they want you to be circumcised so that they may boast about your flesh’ (6:12–13). From these direct statements of Paul about his opponents, it is evident that they are propagating circumcision to Paul’s gentile converts, and that Paul views them very negatively. Paul’s tendentiously negative view should make us very cautious in assessing the information he provides about his opponents: we hear about them only through their opponent Paul, he is our only source of information. However, to explain his letter to the Galatians, we need a picture of the people whom he considers to be a threat to his addressees. The usual and, to my mind, right procedure is then to look for statements in the letter with a polemical ring, that is, statements that are evidently directed against a certain point of view, and to consider whether these can be plausibly linked to the issue of circumcision. In the case of Galatians, Paul’s defence of the independence of his apostleship in Gal 1–2 and his disparaging of the Torah in chaps. 3–4 offer possibilities to fill in the picture of the opponents: these people must have been challenging the independence of Paul’s apostolate, and they must have been glorifying the Torah. A similar procedure is often followed in reconstructing the opponents who are supposedly targeted in narrative texts such as the Gospels, but the difficulty here is that there is only circumstantial evidence: precisely because they are narratives about Jesus, the Gospels do not contain direct statements about the opponents combatted by their authors. Nevertheless, reasonable guesses can be made. The Gospel of John, for instance, contains so many polemical statements directed by Jesus against ‘the Jews’, and it contains such an obvious anachronism in speaking of followers of Jesus being put out of the synagogue on account of

2 Translations of biblical passages have been taken from the NRSV, unless otherwise indicated.

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confessing Jesus as the Messiah ( John 9:22; 12:42; 16:2), that it seems to be reasonable to assume that the Johannine Jews represent Jewish contemporaries of the evangelist. There is evidence of opponents, but it is circumstantial evidence. The letters of John are other examples of New Testament documents in which opponents are figuring. In 1 John, there are two passages directly dealing with opponents (2:18–27; 4:1–6). In the first passage, the author gives the following information about them: As you have heard that antichrist is coming, so now many antichrists have come. . . . They went out from us, but they did not belong to us; for if they had belonged to us, they would have remained with us. But by going out they made it plain that none of them belongs to us. . . . Who is the liar but the one who denies that Jesus is the Christ? This is the antichrist, the one who denies the Father and the Son. No one who denies the Son has the Father; everyone who confesses the Son has the Father also. . . . I write these things to you concerning those who would deceive you. (2:18, 19, 22–23, 26)

The second passage contains the following direct statements on the opponents: [M]any false prophets have gone out into the world. . . . [E]very spirit that confesses Jesus as the Christ come in the flesh3 is from God, and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. And this is the spirit of the antichrist, of which you have heard that it is coming; and now it is already in the world. . . . They are from the world; therefore what they say is from the world, and the world listens to them. We are from God. Whoever knows God listens to us, and whoever is not from God does not listen to us. From this we know the spirit of truth and the spirit of error. (4:1, 2–3, 5–6)

In 2 John, there is another relevant passage; it apparently concerns the same opponents: ‘Many deceivers have gone out into the world, those who do not confess Jesus as the Christ coming in the flesh; any such person is the deceiver and the antichrist!’ (7).4 The picture is relatively clear and coherent: people who deny that Jesus is the Christ (whatever this may mean precisely) have separated

3 Here, and also in the translation of the parallel 2 John 7, I deviate from the NRSV; an explanation follows below. 4 The conflict with Diotrephes depicted in 3 John 9–10 differs from the conflict depicted in 1 and 2 John, and will not be considered here; see R.E. Brown, The Epistles of John (AB 30), New York 1982, 107–08, 728–39, 743–48.

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from the community, and appear to have some missionary success. The question is then whether these opponents can, in one way or another, be linked to the many polemical utterances found in 1 John, mainly the series of ‘if we say’-statements in 1:6, 8, 10 (see, e.g., 1:6: ‘If we say that we have fellowship with him [God] while we are walking in darkness, we lie and do not do what is true’), the series of ‘whoever says’-statements in 2:4, 6, 9 (see, e.g., 2:9: ‘Whoever says, “I am in the light”, while hating a brother or sister, is still in the darkness’), and the statement in 4:20 (‘Those who say, “I love God”, and hate their brothers or sisters, are liars’). Recently, some exegetes have turned against this polemical reading of 1 John (2 John is less in the picture); the two most pronounced ones of these are D. Neufeld and H. Schmid, who both base their view of the letter on an explicit literary theory.5 Instead of focussing on the polemical passages and considering these as pointers to the socioreligious context within which the document has to be interpreted, these authors advocate a non-polemical reading: the opponents are a pragmatic device by means of which the author of 1 John inculcates his message in his addressees. In certain respects, their view of 1 John is comparable to the view of the Gospels defended some years ago by R. Bauckham: according to him, the four canonical gospels were not written to meet the needs of a specific group but for the Christian church as a whole.6 In both cases, the idea that a New Testament document is directed towards a specific community in a specific situation, is abandoned in favour of the view that the document has, so to speak, an ‘open’ character, that it is intended for, or at least useful for, all Christians. In what follows, I shall first give a brief critical presentation of the views on 1 John of Neufeld and Schmid. Next, I shall try to develop my own thoughts on the problem of the opponents in 1 (and 2) John in confrontation with those of Neufeld and Schmid.

5 D. Neufeld, Reconceiving Texts as Speech Acts: An Analysis of 1 John (BIS 7), Leiden 1994; H. Schmid, Gegner im 1. Johannesbrief ? Zu Konstruktion und Selbstreferenz im johanneischen Sinnsystem (BWANT 159), Stuttgart 2002. Schmid has summarized his views in ‘How to Read the First Epistle of John Non-Polemically’, Bib 85 (2004), 24–41. 6 See R. Bauckham, ‘For Whom Were Gospels Written?’, in: Idem (ed.), The Gospels for All Christians: Rethinking the Gospel Audiences, Edinburgh 1998, 9–48.

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2. D. Neufeld and H. Schmid: the opponents as a literary construct In the introductory chapter of his book,7 Neufeld observes that 1 John is usually approached as a text that belongs to a very specific situation in the history of Johannine Christianity: it is supposed that a dissident group has left the community and that there is a conflict between this group and the community. However, the text of 1 John does not provide enough indications to reconstruct this conflict and to determine the identity of the opponents. This state of affairs makes Neufeld ask whether the historical critical approach is the right one for a document such as 1 John, that does not betray much about its origins. The alternative he proposes consists in the application of a modified version of the speech act theory of J.L. Austin to those passages from 1 John that are generally interpreted as directed against the opponents. Neufeld summarizes his contribution as follows: . . . this study argues that the author of I John employs a number of selfinvolving speech acts in the act of writing that leave neither the author and readers uninvolved and unchanged. The author uses these speech acts to create a literary world where the cash value of the christological statements is seen in corresponding ethical conduct and proper confession. Through the use of a series of creative antitheses expressed in the context of several apocalyptic speech-act circumstances the author makes explicit the outer boundaries of actions that constitute proper confession and ethical behaviour.8

Neufeld then gives a survey of past research of the relevant passages from 1 John.9 Almost all commentators reconstruct a specific situation of conflict in which the letter originated and then try to explain the letter on the basis of their reconstruction, but there is a thorough lack of unanimity among them. Other difficulties in situating 1 John are that our image of the opponents is based on what the author of the letter tells us about them, that there are no specific addressees, and that the author himself remains anonymous. In Neufeld’s view, all this makes a fresh approach necessary, an approach that takes the anonymity and the universal character of 1 John seriously. To my mind, Neufeld gives a somewhat distorted picture of the situation in historical critical exegesis of 1 John: he underestimates the 7 8 9

Neufeld, Reconceiving Texts, 1–5. Neufeld, Reconceiving Texts, 3–4. Neufeld, Reconceiving Texts, 6–36.

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amount of consensus in the field. It is true that there are differences among exegetes in the precise description of the historical context of the letter, which is not surprising given the fragmentary character of the evidence, but there is a consensus in that the large majority labels the opponents as ‘docetic’, ‘gnostic’, or something similar. Besides, the typically Johannine language of the letter with its many riddles gives the impression that its addressees were a specific group who had the knowledge required to understand it. That we are not able to solve a historical problem completely, does not mean that the problem does not exist. In the third chapter, Neufeld presents his speech act theory.10 A written text is a form of communication in which ‘[s]peech acts with the force of the expressive, commissive, representative, and the directive, used in the context of the language game of “confession”, produce transforming effects which act not only upon the author of I John but also upon the audience’.11 An important concept which he derives from Austin is ‘circumstance’; quoting Austin, Neufeld says that ‘circumstances in a given case must be appropriate for the invocation of the particular procedure invoked’.12 The application of speech act theory to New Testament texts is in itself a perfectly legitimate procedure. What is slightly surprising in Neufeld’s application, is that he takes into consideration only intratextual circumstances. One could also use speech act theory to describe the interaction between the historical author, his historical addressees and their historical opponents. It seems that there is no intrinsic link between speech act theory and Neufeld’s limitation of circumstances to intratextual ones only. In the remaining chapters, Neufeld examines a series of passages from 1 John: the prologue (1:1–4),13 the supposed ‘slogans’ of the opponents (1:6, 8, 10; 2:4, 6, 9; 4:20),14 the first passage on the opponents (2:18–24, under the heading ‘The last hour and the antichrist’),15 and the second one with some other materials (4:1–4, 15; 5:6, under the

Neufeld, Reconceiving Texts, 37–60. Neufeld, Reconceiving Texts, 58. 12 Neufeld, Reconceiving Texts, 48, referring to J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, ed. by J.O. Urmson & M. Sbisà, Cambridge MA 1962, 34. 13 Neufeld, Reconceiving Texts, 61–81. 14 Neufeld, Reconceiving Texts, 82–95. 15 Neufeld, Reconceiving Texts, 96–112. 10 11

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heading ‘The confessions and denials’).16 Time and again, he emphasizes that the author addresses readers who are unknown to him and tries to bring them to the right confession and the right conduct, and that the image of the opponents serves the aim of separating true and false Christians, irrespective of whether there were real opponents or not. He also draws attention to the improbability that the opponents would have boasted about their walking in the darkness (cf. 1:6) or their hate of their brothers and sisters (cf. 2:9), or that they would have denied the Son (cf. 2:23) or not have confessed Jesus (cf. 4:3). Neufeld is right in stressing that the author of 1 John is addressing his readers and that he tries to achieve certain aims with them, but that does not yet make the reality of the opponents an irrelevant point. If we take the author of 1 John seriously, we should start from the presupposition that he refers to a real conflict between the Johannine Christians and a group that left the community. Neufeld is also right in that it is not strictly necessary to read the boasts of the ‘if we say’statements (1:6, 8, 10), the ‘whoever says’-statements (2:4, 6, 9) and the statement in 4:20 as the opponents’ slogans; but when they are read in connection with 2:18–27 and 4:1–6, there is at least a good chance that they reveal something of the opponents’ views. Here, Neufeld seems to lose sight of the fact that we get a glimpse of these views only through what the author writes about them. To me, it seems highly improbable that the opponents would have recommended hate of their brothers and sisters or a total rejection of Jesus; however, in the eyes of the author their conduct and their confession amounts to this. We here meet a biased view of the author, and the opponents would very probably not agree. Schmid’s study has the telling title Gegner im 1. Johannesbrief ? Zu Konstruktion und Selbstreferenz im johanneischen Sinnsystem. He starts with criticizing the current model of interpretation of 1 John,17 which he calls ‘gemeindegeschichtlich’, that is, the letter is used in this model to reconstruct the history of the Johannine community, and the conflict with the opponents is supposed to be an essential part of this history. Schmid summarizes his criticism in four points: (1) The opponents are explicitly referred to in only two passages (2:18–27; 4:1–6). (2) It is very

16 Neufeld, Reconceiving Texts, 113–32 (Neufeld wrongly speaks of 4:16 instead of 4:15). 17 Schmid, Gegner, 13–25.

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much the question whether the criticism of ethical deficiency (mainly in the ‘if we say’- and the ‘whoever says’-statements, which I already mentioned) is indeed an implicit criticism of ethical deficiency of the opponents. (3) The profile of the opponents is often reconstructed by means of other known figures from early Christianity such as Cerinthus or the docetists of the letters of Ignatius, but we do not have direct information on these figures, so that their own profiles remain unclear. (4) The theoretical basis for the reconstruction of the profile of the opponents is insufficient. Over against the current model, Schmid then positions his own model of a non-polemical reading, which explains the text of 1 John as an expression of ‘das johanneische Sinnsystem’, the Johannine meaning system ( John’s Gospel is the other expression of this meaning system). Schmid rightly points to the hypothetical character of any reconstruction of opponents, but to my mind the hypothetical character of such an enterprise does not make it an invalid enterprise. We all know that our view of past figures and events is indeed our view, coloured by our perception, and that our historical reconstructions display many gaps. This does not necessarily mean, however, that we should abandon historical reconstruction altogether. What we should do, is realize continually how limited our historical knowledge is, and try to move the limits of our knowledge in a responsible way. But let us first look at Schmid’s text theory and the way it works out in his explanation of 1 John.18 He relates 1 John to the Fourth Gospel by considering the two documents together as an ‘intertextual space’. In this ‘intertextual space’, the dominant speech act of the gospel is the narrative, and the dominant speech act of the letter is the assertive; the gospel is addressed to those inside and outside the community (‘community’ to be understood as the readership of gospel and letter!), the letter to those inside only; the thematic core of the gospel is christology, that of the letter is ethics. According to Schmid, one can read the two documents together without determining their historical relationship. Next, he builds his own text theory with elements from radical constructivism, from the system theory of N. Luhmann, and from the speech act theory of J.R. Searle. In Schmid’s view, the text of 1 John is a construction of reality and not a picture of reality, and its function is to maintain the Johannine meaning system. This system

18

Schmid, Gegner, 26–80.

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is self-referential, that is, any reference to a world outside the system is in the end a self-reference: ‘Sie [the refence to the opponents] dient nicht der Beschreibung des anderen, sondern der Systembildung durch Abgrenzung’.19 The Johannine meaning system is not something ready for the reader to take or leave, but it comes into being only as the intertextual construction of the reader. I suspect that as soon as such a text theory is adopted, a decision about whether the opponents in the Johannine letters are fact of fiction, has already been taken. The theory determines the outcome. If any reference to the world outside the meaning system serves the construction of the system, such a reference may not necessarily become fictional, but at least its factual or fictional character becomes largely irrelevant. One could easily imagine a different text theory, in which it is of course recognized that language gives structure to reality but in which it is at the same time recognized that language refers to reality. In such a theory, Schmid’s static ‘Johannine meaning system’ could be modified into dynamic religious communication between the Johannine author and his real, historical addressees. Schmid continues his study with a thorough syntactic, semantic, intertextual and pragmatic analysis of the two passages in which the opponents figure prominently (2:18–27 and 4:1–6).20 Both passages have, according to Schmid, the character of an excursus in which the christological basis is laid for the ethical instruction. He emphasizes that the opponents are put on the stage not because of themselves but because of the encouragement and exhortation of the community. He further discusses those passages from 1 John that do not directly deal with the opponents but have been used in the past to flesh out the image of the opponents, because their polemical sound suggested to many exegetes that the author of the letter was counteracting some kind of opposition: the series of ‘if we say’-statements in 1:6–10, the series of ‘whoever says’-statements in 2:4–9, the statement in 4:20, and finally 5:6–8, the confession that Jesus Christ ‘came by water and blood, not with the water only but with the water and the blood’, a confession that is warranted by three agreeing witnesses: the Spirit, the water and the blood.21 All these passages can, according to Schmid, be understood in

19 20 21

Schmid, Gegner, 63. Schmid, Gegner, 81–185. Schmid, Gegner, 186–204.

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a nonpolemical way. The latter (5:6–8) is the integrating christological climax of 1 John, the others belong to the ethical debate that is part of the ‘Johannine meaning system’. Schmid finally gives a sketch of this ‘Johannine meaning system’ as far as it is relevant to 1 John: after having highlighted the intertextual relationship between Jesus’ farewell discourse in John’s Gospel (13:31–17:26) and 1 John, he focusses on the themes of eschatology, sin, love, and world (κόσμος).22 I agree with Schmid that the references to the opponents in 1 John serve the needs of the addressees. How could it be otherwise, in a letter directed to these addressees and aiming at strengthening their faith and mutual love? It is, however, a non sequitur that because the letter is addressed to the community and thus serves their needs, the opponents are fictional. The addressees have to be reassured because some from their midst have left the community and are now preaching a message that differs essentially from theirs, at least in the eyes of the author of the letter. The simplest explanation for the fact that the author prefers to encourage his addressees by means of referring to opponents, is that there were real opponents. If there were not, he could have limited his encouragement to, for instance, pointing to the example of Jesus (cf. 1 John 2:6), or to present or future salvation (cf. 3:2, 5). Schmid also tries to isolate the two passages in 1 John on the opponents by describing them as christological excursuses in a text that is otherwise of a predominantly ethical character.23 He admits that there are a few other similar christological statements in the letter,24 but these should be considered as an extension of the passages on the opponents, while the christological-soteriological statements, especially those on atonement,25 serve the ethical instruction.26 To my mind, this solution is too easy. If one simply counts the verses in 1 John which even in Schmid’s view contain christological statements, one arrives at 30 verses, which is almost 29% of the entire letter. Moreover, the constant interplay between christological and ethical statements, or, in other terms, between the indicative of salvation and the imperative of Christian conduct, is characteristic of 1 John. The prologue of the letter (1:1–4), which may be expected to have

22 23 24 25 26

Schmid, Gegner, 205–76. See esp. Schmid, Gegner, 139–41, 183–85. 3:23; 4:15; 5:1,5,20. 1:7,9; 2:1,2; 3:5,16; 4:9,14; 5:6. See the summary in Schmid, Gegner, 277–78.

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some programmatic value, is telling on this issue. The author and his circle declare to the addressees that ‘the word of life’ has appeared, audibly, visibly and palpably, ‘so that you also may have fellowship with us; and truly our fellowship is with the Father and with his Son Jesus Christ’. Two kinds of fellowship are at stake: with God through Jesus, who revealed God, and with each other. In Johannine theological thinking, the mutual fellowship of Christians flows from the fellowship with God and Christ, and in the Johannine Epistles, relations within the community receive more attention than in John’s Gospel. However, this should not tempt us into making christology, and thus the opponents, into no more than a side effect in the Epistles. I quote two other significant statements from 1 John: ‘And this is his [God’s] commandment, that we should believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ and love one another, just as he has commanded us’ (3:23); ‘We love because he [God] first loved us’ (4:19).27 To conclude my review of the positions of Neufeld and Schmid (which are similar in many respects): to my mind, the most obvious explanation for the references to opponents in 1 John is that there were such opponents. 3. A reconstruction of the opponents Turning now to my own reconstruction of the opponents, I would say that if in 1 John christology and ethics are closely interwoven, and if the opponents are attacked on account of their christology, there is a good chance that their ethics are under attack as well. And we see indeed that a Christian conduct that is wrong in the eyes of the author, is challenged several times in 1 John, not only in the ‘if we say’-statements (1:6, 8, 10) and the ‘whoever says’-statements (2:4, 6, 9), but elsewhere as well (2:11, 15; 3:4, 6, 8, 10, 14, 15, 17; 4:8, 20).28 In fact, a considerable 27 See also 3:16; 4:11,16. ‘Man wird nicht fehlgehen, wenn man . . . Glaube und Liebe in ihrem spannungsvollen Zueinander als die theologische Mitte des 1Joh ansieht’, so H.-J. Klauck, Der erste Johannesbrief (EKKNT 23/1), Zürich/Neukirchen-Vluyn 1991, 352. 28 According to S. Witetschek, ‘Pappkameraden? Die Auseinandersetzung mit den “Gegnern” im 1. Johannesbrief und die Darstellung des Judas im Johannesevangelium’, in: J. Schlosser (ed.), The Catholic Epistles and the Tradition (BETL 176), Leuven 2004, 519–30 (who joins Schmid’s views in several respects), Judas as depicted in John and the opponents of 1 John are similar figures: as Judas is both the one who betrays Jesus and neglects love of the brothers ( John 12:6), so the opponents are wrong in both their

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part of the letter is worded in antithetical terms, and much of it can be read polemically. But are we allowed to use all utterances which have a polemical ring about them but are not overtly directed against the opponents, in a reconstruction of the opponents? From a methodological perspective, there are, to my mind, two essential criteria for reconstructing an image of the opponents on the basis of a document such as 1 John, that is, a document that contains clear evidence that there were opponents: the resulting image of the opponents must be a coherent one, and it must be possible to anchor the resulting image in what we know from other sources, earlier or contemporary.29 I do not see major obstacles against using the polemically sounding statements as long as they correlate with the overt attacks on the opponents. After all, later Christian polemics against heretics made extensive use of formulae such as ‘if anyone says’ (εἴ τις λέγει, εἴ τίς φησιν) or ‘if anyone dares to say’ (εἴ τις τολμᾷ λέγειν)30 and the like, to combat not fictive but real opponents. But it is obvious that the explicit attacks on the opponents on account of their false confession have to constitute the starting point for a reconstruction of them.31 So we should first have a look at the various confessional formulae in 1 and 2 John. Of some of these, it is straightforwardly said that they are denied by the opponents (1 John 2:22; 4:2; 2 John 7); others (1 John 4:15; 5:1, 5) are not in an overtly polemical context, but because they are similar or even identical to the formulae in a polemical context, they may be considered to belong as well to the formulae which the opponents are supposed to reject and the community to hold. These are the formulae (all have been worded affirmatively): 1 John 2:22 Ἰησοῦς ἔστιν ὁ Χριστός, ‘Jesus is the Christ’ 1 John 4:2 Ἰησοῦν Χριστὸν ἐν σαρκὶ ἐληλυθότα, ‘Jesus as the Christ come in the flesh’

christology and their behaviour (1 John 3:17). The parallel makes the chance that the opponents’ ethics are under attack in 1 John even better. 29 Cf. K. Berger, ‘Die impliziten Gegner: Zur Methode des Erschließens von “Gegnern” in neutestamentlichen Texten’, in: D. Lührmann & G. Strecker (eds), Kirche (FS G. Bornkamm), Tübingen 1980, 373–400. 30 See, e.g., the third letter of Cyril of Alexandria to Nestorius (E. Schwartz [ed.], Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum I, 1, 1, 40–2). 31 To start a reconstruction with the boasts of 1:6,8,10 etc., as is done by J. Painter, ‘The “Opponents” in 1 John’, in: Idem, The Quest for the Messiah: The History, Literature and Theology of the Johannine Community, Edinburgh 19932, 437–64 (orig. in NTS 32 [1986] 48–71), is to my mind not correct from a methodological point of view. Direct evidence should precede circumstantial evidence.

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Ἰησοῦς ἐστιν ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ θεοῦ, ‘Jesus is the Son of God’ Ἰησοῦς ἐστιν ὁ Χριστός, ‘Jesus is the Christ’ Ἰησοῦς ἐστιν ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ θεοῦ, ‘Jesus is the Son of God’ Ἰησοῦν Χριστὸν ἐρχόμενον ἐν σαρκί, ‘Jesus as the Christ

coming in the flesh’

Some comments on the translation and meaning of 1 John 4:2 and 2 John 7 are required. First, in both cases the words quoted depend on the verb ὁμολογεῖν, ‘to confess’, and this verb is used with a double accusative or with an accusativus cum infinitivo,32 but not with an accusativus cum participio,33 so one cannot translate ‘that Jesus Christ has come/is coming in the flesh’. Second, in the four other formulae the subject is Ἰησοῦς, without further additions; the same is probably the case in the two formulae under consideration, and this means that Jesus is identified here as ‘the Christ come/coming in the flesh’.34 Third, the absence of the article with Χριστόν is not very relevant: it is also missing in the parallel text John 9:22 (ἐάν τις αὐτὸν ὁμολογήσῃ Χριστόν), where the titular use is evident, and omission of the article with Χριστός is generally rather usual.35 Fourth, the difference between the perfect participle ἐληλυθότα in 1 John 4:2 and the present participle ἐρχόμενον in 2 John 7 should probably not be stressed. In John’s Gospel, the earthly Jesus is called ‘the prophet who is to come (ἐρχόμενος) into the world’ (6:14), and ‘the Messiah, the Son of God, the one coming (ἐρχόμενος) into the world’ (11:27), while his coming into the world is at the same time described with a perfect indicative (3:19; 12:46; 16:28; 18:37) or an aorist indicative (9:39). Jesus’ words in John 8:14 are also relevant: ‘I know where I have come from (ἦλθον) . . . but you do not know where I come from (ἔρχομαι) . . .’. In 1 John 5:6 an aorist participle (ἐλθών) is used to indicate Jesus’ coming. In both 1 John 4:2 and 2 John 7, Jesus’ past coming into the world is referred to.36 So the v.l. ἐληλυθέναι in B pc in 1 John 4:2; see also Pol. Phil. 7:1. See W. Bauer, Griechisch-deutsches Wörterbuch zu den Schriften des Neuen Testaments und der frühchristlichen Literatur (ed. K. & B. Aland), Berlin 1988, s.v. ὁμολογέω 4; F. Blass & A. Debrunner, Grammatik des neutestamentlichen Griechisch (ed. F. Rehkopf ), Göttingen 198416, §§157,2; 397,2; 416,3. 34 For this explanation, see Schmid, Gegner, 164–67, with the literature mentioned by him on p. 166 n. 328. 35 See Blass & Debrunner, Grammatik, §260,1. 36 See H.-J. Klauck, Der zweite und dritte Johannesbrief (EKKNT 23/2), Zürich/Neukirchen-Vluyn 1992, 54–5; U. Wilckens, ‘Die Gegner im 1. Johannesbrief ’, in: A. von Dobbeler, K. Erlemann & R. Heiligenthal (eds), Religionsgeschichte des Neuen Testaments (FS K. Berger), Tübingen 2000, 477–500, esp. 490–91. In Phil. 7:1, Polycarp writes: πᾶς γάρ, ὃς ἂν μὴ ὁμολογῇ, Ἰησοῦν Χριστὸν ἐν σαρκὶ ἐληλυθέναι, ἀντίχριστός ἐστιν. If he indeed combines 1 John 4:2 and 2 John 7, he is the earliest known exegete of the 32 33

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In addition to the confessional formulae listed above, there are some very brief wordings that do not connect a predicate to a subject, but consist of a noun (or nouns) added as an object to the verb ὁμολογεῖν, ‘to confess’, or ἀρνεῖσθαι, ‘to deny’: ‘to deny the Father and the Son’ (1 John 2:22), ‘to deny the Son’ (2:23), ‘to confess the Son’ (2:23), ‘to confess Jesus’ (4:3). These succinct wordings always follow one of the longer formulae, and are very probably a kind of shorthand. ‘To deny the Son’ then means: to deny that Jesus is the Son (cf. 4:15; 5:5), and whoever denies that Jesus is the Son of God, eo ipso denies the Father who sent him (2:22–23). We find then in the Johannine Epistles three different formulae: ‘Jesus is the Christ’, ‘Jesus is the Son of God’, and ‘Jesus is the Christ come in the flesh’. In Johannine language, the first and second have approximately the same meaning (cf. John 11:27; 20:31; also 1:49). The third one is the longest, and is best considered as a more explicit version, or an interpretation, of the others: the confession ‘Jesus is the Christ’ is, in 1 John, tantamount to ‘Jesus is the Christ come in the flesh’.37 The noun σάρξ, ‘flesh’, denotes in Johannine language the human being in its frailty and mortality; in this confessional formula it refers to Jesus’ humanity, with a certain emphasis on his death (see esp. John 1:14; 6:51). This emphasis is confirmed by the circumstance that the formula of 1 John 5:5 is taken up in the words, ‘This is the one who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ, not with the water only but with the water and the blood’ (5:6). The noun αἷμα, ‘blood’, here denotes Jesus’ death.38 So the fullest formula of the three identifies Jesus as the Christ who has become a human being, unto death. This is the confession which the addressees are supposed to hold and the opponents to reject.39 The question is: what does the rejection of this confession tell us about the opponents? To my mind, it makes it highly improbable that the opponents were Jews or Christians who had returned to a Jewish point of

Johannine Epistles to consider the perfect and present of ἔρχεσθαι as equivalent in these passages. 37 See M. de Jonge, ‘The Use of the Word χριστός in the Johannine Epistles’, in: Studies in John (FS J.N. Sevenster; NovTSup 24), Leiden 1970, 66–74, esp. 67–9. 38 On σάρξ and αἷμα, see M.J.J. Menken, ‘John 6:51c–58: Eucharist or Christology?’, in: R.A. Culpepper (ed.), Critical Readings of John 6 (BIS 22), Leiden 1997, 183–204, here 189–92. 39 Similarly, at least in broad lines, Painter, “Opponents”, 459–62.

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view concerning Jesus.40 To the Jews in the Fourth Gospel, whom I take to be representative of Jews in the neighbourhood of the Johannine Christians, Jesus’ claim to be the Christ or the Son of God (both are identical in the Johannine view), or to have descended from heaven, is unacceptable because he is a human being (see John 5:18; 6:42; 10:33; 19:7). The problem for them is not his humanity but his alleged divine origin. They know that he is a human being, and therefore he cannot be in their view the Christ, the Son of God. The opponents of the Johannine Epistles, on the other hand, know that he is the Christ, the Son of God, and therefore he cannot, in their view, be a human being. Rejection of the confession that Jesus is the Christ who has become a human being, only makes sense to people who consider Jesus’ humanity as in some way problematic, and they cannot be Jews but must be Christians. If we further try to find out what kind of Christians they were,41 we should keep in mind two things. Firstly, the opponents were former Johannine Christians; so much is evident from 1 John 2:19. Secondly, the Johannine christology as presented in the Fourth Gospel easily arouses the idea that Jesus is a superhuman being. Not only his miracles and his omniscience, but also many of his words give this impression: the ‘I am’-sayings, or his words on his intimate relationship with God (e.g., 5:17, 19–30; 8:58; 10:30, 38; 14:10–11). It is true that John’s Gospel contains some counterpoise against this divine view of Jesus (1:14; 6:51c–58; 19:34–35; 20:20, 24–29), but the overwhelming impression it leaves with the reader is ’das Bild des über die Erde schreitenden Gottes Jesus’, to use E. Käsemann’s well known words.42 These two considerations make it probable that the opponents were Johannine Christians who read John’s Gospel (whether or not in the form in which we know it) somewhat tendentiously as presenting Jesus as a superhuman, divine being.43 Precisely because Jesus’ humanity is 40 This view was defended by A. Wurm, Die Irrlehrer im ersten Johannesbrief (BibS[F] 8/1), Freiburg 1903. Later adherents are mentioned in H.-J. Klauck, Die Johannesbriefe (EdF 276), Darmstadt 19952, 143–44; recent adherents are Wilckens, ‘Gegner’, and K. Erlemann, ‘1 Joh und der jüdisch-christliche Trennungsprozess’, TZ 55 (1999) 285–302. 41 It is unnecessary to assume that the author of 1 John aims at more than one dissident group, as it was supposed by, e.g., S.S. Smalley, 1, 2, 3 John (WBC 51), Waco TX 1984, xxiv–xxv. 42 E. Käsemann, Jesu letzter Wille nach Johannes 17, Tübingen 19713, 154. 43 For an extensive argument in favour of this view, which is, in various forms, held by several commentators (cf. Klauck, Johannesbriefe, 147–49), see Brown, Epistles of John,

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not yet a problem in John’s Gospel but becomes so in the Johannine Epistles, the Gospel must have been written before the Epistles.44 The tendentious reading of the Gospel by the opponents led them to deny Jesus as ‘the Christ come in the flesh’. The confessions ‘Jesus is the Christ’ or ‘Jesus is the Son of God’ were probably also considered by the Johannine author and his community as testimonies to the humanity of Jesus, in the sense that the human being Jesus was fully identified with the heavenly, pre-existent Christ or Son of God. Let us now consider the polemically sounding ethical statements in 1 John. The constant factor in them is the contradiction between the claims to know God and to be sinless on the one hand, and the actual sinning, consisting in the neglect of the commandment to love the brothers and sisters and in conforming to ‘the world’, on the other. If we assume that this description of behaviour (a tendentious description, of course) fits the opponents, can we then link it to their christological view? In both christology and ethics, the opponents seem to have considered themselves as having transcended earthly reality. Their Christ is a superhuman divine being, not a Christ who has come in the flesh and who has died on a cross; for them, salvation and ‘flesh’ are incompatible. The emphasis which the author of 1 John puts on the death of Jesus and its atoning significance (see 1:7, 9; 2:2, 12; 3:5, 8, 16; 4:10; 5:6) may well be explained by this view of the opponents. Their ethical stance is that of people who think they have already attained full salvation, and who therefore consider the verification of their faith in everyday reality as not very relevant—at least, there is not enough verification in the eyes of the author of the letter. It seems then that the opponents adhered to a type of ‘realized eschatology’, in which they saw themselves as followers of a heavenly Christ and as already fully participating in heavenly reality. It is possible that the slightly stronger emphasis in 1 John, in comparison with the Gospel, on future eschatology (see 2:28; 3:2–3; 4:17) is also an answer to the views of the opponents, although the pertinent statements in 1 John do not have an overtly polemical ring. The statements on the 69–115. There are no really sound reasons to consider the Johannine passages that emphasize Jesus’ humanity as due to redaction of a more original form of the gospel, to which the opponents would have appealed; tendentious reading of the gospel by them is, to my mind, a plausible assumption. 44 See M.J.J. Menken, ‘The Christology of the Fourth Gospel: A Survey of Recent Research’, in: M.C. de Boer (ed.), From Jesus to John: Essays on Jesus and New Testament Christology (FS M. de Jonge; JSNTSup 84), Sheffield 1993, 292–320, here 307–08.

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Spirit (see esp. 4:1–6, further 3:24; 4:13; 5:6–8, and cf. 2:20, 27) may similarly belong in the polemical context. It should be noted that such a ‘realized eschatology’ can also be based on a tendentious reading of the Fourth Gospel (see, e.g., John 3:14–16; 5:24–25; 6:47; 11:25–26). There is apparently coherence in the picture of the opponents that can be constructed on the basis of the overt references to the opponents and the statements with a polemical ring. Schmid’s attempt to assign an isolated position within 1 John to the passages on the opponents has turned out to be unconvincing. One question remains: can we connect the views of the opponents with other early Christian views? We know of early Christian groups or individuals who had problems with the humanity of Christ (I already mentioned Cerinthus and the docetists of the letters of Ignatius), but we know of them only through their opponents and thus in an imprecise way, and we know that there were several of them and that their views had similarities but were by no means identical.45 The opponents of the Johannine Epistles are just one more variant of this type of early Christianity, and it is not necessary (and in fact not possible) that we connect or even identify them in a very precise way with one of the others we know about.46 A relevant point is in any case that Ignatius in his Letter to the Smyrneans writes about people ‘not confessing that he [ Jesus] bore flesh’ (5:2). They hold that Jesus ‘suffered only in appearance’ (2), and that his sufferings, death and resurrection ‘were accomplished by our Lord only in appearance’ (4:2).47 The same people are said ‘to have no interest in love, in the widow, the orphan, the oppressed, the one who is in chains or the one set free, the one who is hungry or the one who thirsts’ (6:2).48 Here we see the same combination as in 1 John: both the humanity of Jesus and the ethical verification of belief in Christ

See the survey in Klauck, Der erste Johannesbrief, 36–40. See R. Schnackenburg, Die Johannesbriefe (HTKNT 13/3), Freiburg 19755, 15–23, esp. his remark: ‘Nach allem müssen wir feststellen, daß sich die in 1 und 2 Joh abgewehrte Irrlehre mit keiner der uns sonst aus jener Zeit bekannten häretischen Erscheinungsformen gleichsetzen läßt, wohl aber mit mehr als einer verwandte Züge aufweist’ (22). 47 I quote from the English translation of B.D. Ehrman (ed. and trans.), The Apostolic Fathers I (LCL), Cambridge MA 2003. 48 For the christological views of these people, see also Ign. Eph. 7–9; 18–19; Trall. 9–10, and cf. Smyrn. 1–9 as the context of the statements just quoted. It may well be that the same opponents are in view in Ign. Magn. 8–11; Phld. 5–9, and that the reproach of ‘Judaism’ (Magn. 8;1; 10:3; Phld. 6:1) refers to their explanation of Old Testament texts, see W. Uebele, ‘Viele Verführer sind in die Welt ausgegangen’: Die Gegner in den Briefen des Ignatius von Antiochien und in den Johannesbriefen (BWANT 151), Stuttgart 2001, 58–66, 74–82. 45 46

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are declared irrelevant. The docetists combatted by Ignatius constitute a close parallel to the opponents combatted by the Johannine author; moreover, both struggles have to be situated very probably in the same geographical area. There are, however, also clear differences between the two groups, as far as we can reconstruct their views.49 It is sufficient to establish that the opponents of the Johannine Epistles fit in well with other early Christian trends. 4. Conclusion I conclude that the picture of the opponents as it arises from 1 and 2 John is coherent and can be anchored in what we know from other sources. There is no need to consider the opponents as a creation of the author in the service of the Johannine meaning system. The letters must be considered against the background of a real process of interaction between two early Christian groups. Referring back to the beginning of this article, I would say that the modern scholarly innovation of Neufeld and Schmid has not been very successful. Another question is whether or not the two parties in the conflict valued their interpretations of John’s Gospel as innovations. We do not know what the opponents thought in this respect, but the author of the Johannine Epistles gives us a glimpse of his thought. He writes: Beloved, I am writing you no new commandment, but an old commandment that you have had from the beginning: the old commandment is the word that you have heard. Yet I am writing you a new commandment that is true in him and in you, because the darkness is passing away and the true light is already shining. (1 John 2:7–8)

Depending on one’s position in history, the old may very well appear as new, and that in a positive sense. Some years ago, I saw somewhere in France a billboard with an antique bed, and on the bed an equally antique doll with a china head; the caption read: ‘Que serait la modernité sans les vieilleries?’ Indeed: what would modernity be without old things?

49 For instance, the catch word δοκεῖν, ‘to seem’, found in Ign. Trall. 10:1; Smyrn. 2:1; 4:2, is missing in the Johannine Epistles, as well as a clear appeal to the Old Testament on the part of the opponents. The effort of Uebele, ‘Viele Verführer’, to demonstrate the ‘Nahverhältnis’ (163) between the two groups is a typical case of overstraining the evidence.

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Perhaps the best innovation is recycling. Early Jews and early Christians did a lot of innovatory recycling with their traditions. In many of his numerous publications, my esteemed colleague Pieter W. van der Horst has shown aspects of it.50 I am very grateful for what I learned from him on this topic (and on many others), and I hope that he will be granted opportunity to continue his research in the years ahead.51

50 One example: ‘ “I gave them laws that were not good”: Ezekiel 20:25 in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity’, in: J.N. Bremmer & F. García Martínez (eds), Sacred History and Sacred Texts in Early Judaism: A Symposium in Honour of A.S. van der Woude (CBET 5), Kampen 1992, 94–118 (repr. in P.W. van der Horst, Hellenism—Judaism—Christianity: Essays on Their Interaction [CBET 8], Kampen 19982, 122–45). 51 I thank Mrs K.M. Court for polishing my English.

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IS THERE A HERESY THAT NECESSITATED JUDE’S LETTER? Geert Van Oyen Introduction The letter of Jude is written not only in support of a group of believers, but also in reaction to ‘certain men, some’ (τινες ἄνθρωποι, v. 4) or ‘those’ (οὗτοι, v. 10), who alternatively are called in the literature dissidents, heretics, enemies, opponents, Gnostics, ungodly people.1 The reason for this rich gamma of characterisation of the opponents goes without saying. Not only the shortness of the letter or the unresolved questions about the date, authorship and origin, but more specifically the absence of a clear description of the identity, thoughts and deeds of the adversaries creates an empty field that gives opportunity for all kinds of speculation.2 As may be expected from biblical scholars, most of these reconstructions are supported by references to contemporaneous texts, religious-historical analysis, thorough word analysis and comparative study of the writings of the New Testament. From a methodological point of view this certainly is a very appropriate way to investigate religious texts of ancient times. But the global impression all those theories leave behind is that modern authors seem to know too much on the basis of only a few data. If one starts comparing the total length of the letter—no more than twenty-five verses—with the massive number of literary texts from the first and second century, there

1 G. Sellin, ‘Die Häretiker des Judasbriefes’, ZNW 77 (1986) 206–25; J.D. Charles, ‘ “Those” and “These”: The Use of the Old testament in the Epistle of Jude’, JSNT 38 (1990) 109–24; J. Frey, ‘Der Judasbrief zwischen Judentum und Hellenismus’, in: W. Kraus & K.-W. Niebuhr (eds), Frühjudentum und Neues Testament im Horizont Biblischer Theologie (WUNT 162), Tübingen 2003, 180–210; A. Gerdmar, Rethinking the JudaismHellenism Dichotomy. A Historiographical Case Study of Second Peter and Jude (ConBNT 36), Stockholm 2001. 2 Compare for instance the introduction in some of the most recent commentaries on the Letter of Jude: A. Vögtle, Der Judasbrief. Der zweite Petrusbrief (EKK 22), Zürich 1994, 3–14; D.J. Harrington, Jude and 2 Peter (Sacra Pagina 15), Collegeville MA 2003, 175–83; J.H. Neyrey, 2 Peter, Jude (AB 37C), New York 1993; R. Bauckham, Jude, 2 Peter (WBC 50), Waco 1983.

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will always be some resemblances with certain passages or expressions that strike the eye. However, one should be cautious to make very elaborated hypotheses out of—let us say—the parallelism between three words. In this contribution I would like to break a lance for less certitude and more vagueness in reconstructing the concrete situation, in particular our knowledge and description of the opponents. I want to clarify, however, that this plea should not be considered as the result of investigation fatigue or as inspired by an irresistible desire to be rebellious. On the contrary, I think that there are enough elements in the text of Jude that make clear that the message is not directed to a specific group of opponents that could be qualified by one single title. It is my conviction that the meaning of the text could be enriched by a more open approach to the opponents. Before I start, allow me to make two short remarks. First, honesty compels me to say that—of course—there have been scholars who already have taken the same position by criticising the concrete hypotheses of others. Especially the theory that the opponents the author of Jude had in mind were Gnostics (or pre-gnostics, or Christian-gnostics) has been more and more subjected to criticism, for instance by Michel Desjardins in 1987.3 But although doubts are reasonable, scholars continue to repeat the hypothesis of a Gnostic interpretation, as can be illustrated by the book on Die Intoleranz des Evangeliums of Gerd Lüdemann.4 In this book Gnosticism is the general term for a divergent system of belief that can be found independently in Christian communities as reflected in the Pastoral letters, Luke-Acts, 2 and 3 John, and probably in 2 Thessalonians: ‘Der Kernbestand der “gegnerischen” Predigt in allen hier genannten Schriften verdient die Bezeichnung “gnostisch”’.5 Second, it is not because I disagree with some scholars about their description in detail of the concrete situation of the opponents, that I

3 M. Desjardins, ‘The Portrayal of the Dissidents in 2 Peter and Jude: Does it Tell Us More about the “Godly” than the “Ungodly?”’, JSNT 30 (1987) 89–102. He gives six reasons why modern authors associate the dissidents with Gnosticism: (1) licentiousness, (2) their false ideas about angels, cf. v. 8, (3) esoteric revelation in dreams, cf. v. 8, (4) adherence to certain myths, (5) the use of some Gnostic words like ψυχικός, πνευμᾶ or πνευματικός, cf. v. 19, or (6) γνῶσις (2 Peter 1,5). His conclusion is that ‘Gnosticism, in whatever stage or form, had little or nothing to do with these communities’ (p. 95). 4 G. Lüdemann, Die Intoleranz des Evangeliums: Erläutert an ausgewählten Schriften des Neuen Testaments, Springe 2004. 5 Lüdemann, Die Intoleranz, 193.

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do not appreciate the enormous work that has been done on the literary, stylistic or narrative level of the letter.6 In the present study I shall proceed by taking the following steps: In part one I present the structure of the letter, because composition is one of the major rhetorical elements to influence the readers or audience. In part two I focus on a more specific aspect of rhetorical strategy, viz. the technique of the author to give himself authority. By way of conclusion I will add some insights from reader response criticism that will confirm my hypothesis. 1. Composition of the text Since clear external information about the letter’s background and content is missing, it is very important to focus on the literary composition and rhetorical techniques of the letter itself to understand what it is about. Structure is the first aspect of rhetoric, especially when we are talking about a short letter. The epistle of Jude has a very well built structure,7 although scholars have different opinions about some details.8 After the opening of the letter (vv. 1–2) and the immediate cause (vv. 3–4), two major sections can be distinguished. Vv. 5–16 (section A) about the opponents form the lengthiest part, containing a threat towards the heretics, a description of who they are, and a prediction of their fate and defeat.9 In the second section B (vv. 17–23) the author focuses on the faithful in his community. They are asked to be persistent in their commitment to the orthodox teaching and faith. Part A and B are put in a chiastic position vis-à-vis the vv. 3 (‘Beloved’) and 4 (the opponents). Both sections A and B, with their subdivisions, can be presented in the following scheme:

6 Apart from the articles, monographs and commentaries mentioned elsewhere in this article, I would like to refer to F. Hahn, ‘Randbemerkungen zum Judasbrief ’, TZ 37 (1981) 209–18; T. Wolthuis, ‘Jude and Jewish Traditions’, CTJ 22 (1987) 21–41; D.F. Watson, Invention, Arrangement, and Style: Rhetorical Criticism of Jude and 2 Peter (SBLDS 104), Atlanta GA 1988; J.D. Charles, ‘Literary Artifice in the Epistle of Jude’, ZNW 82 (1991) 106–24. 7 Most authors are aware of the mixed form of the writing which shows characteristics of a classic letter and of a theological treatise. 8 For a presentation of the proposed structures, see R. Heiligentahl, Zwischen Henoch und Paulus. Studien zum theologiegeschichtlichen Ort des Judasbriefes (Texte und Arbeiten zum neutestamentlichen Zeitalter 6), Tübingen 1992, 14–21; Neyrey, 2 Peter, Jude, 23–7. 9 Bauckham, Jude, creates a first section consisting of vv. 5–19.

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1–2

Opening of the letter 3–4 immediate cause for writing 3 appeal to believe (see further on section B) 4 because ungodly people are amongst you (see section A) A 5–16 Section about the adversaries 5–7 three examples of ungodly behaviour in the past 8 a) negative portrayal of opponents 9 b) positive attitude Michael 10 a) negative portrayal of opponents 11 three examples 12–13 a) negative portrayal of opponents 14–15 b) positive attitude Henoch 16 a) negative portrayal opponents B 17–23 Section for the community members 17–19 warning and support 20–23 paraenetical appeal 24–25 Doxology

{

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Within section A two units with a similar pattern can be distinguished. In vv. 5–10 a threefold series from the Old Testament about God’s condemnation or treatment of misbehaving people (vv. 5–7) is followed by a negative saying about the heretics in the present situation (v. 8), a positive counter-example of Michael who acted according the lines of God (v. 9), and again a negative description of the false teachers (v. 10). There is a development which can be summarized as thesis (v. 8)—antithesis—resumption in even stronger words of the thesis (v. 10). v. 8: opponents are dreamers: – defile flesh – reject authority – slander the glorious ones

v. 9: Michael contended with the devil and disputed about the body of Moses – no condemnation of slander – trust in the Lord’s judgment

v. 10: resumption of v. 8 in stronger words

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The same pattern can be recognized in vv. 11–16. Three examples of the history of Israel (v. 11) are followed by a negative interpretation of the opponents in the community (vv. 12–13), a trustworthy prophecy of Henoch (vv. 14–15) and again a negative portrayal of the adversaries (v. 16). And again we find thesis (vv. 12–13), followed by antithesis (vv. 14–15) and a strong repetition of the thesis (v. 16) along the lines of the elements of the antithesis (words and deeds). vv. 12–13 opponents have false ideas and act wrongly

vv. 14–15: Prophecy about execution of judgment because of – their wrong acts (a) – their false teaching (b)

v. 16: resumption of vv. 12–13 – grumblers (b) – indulge their own lusts (a) – bombastic in speech (b) – flattering people (a)

When the introductory parts of sections A (vv. 5–7) and section B (v. 11) are compared, a climactic line in the repetition of the negative examples can be noticed. While the former one is more elaborated and about events that happened in the past as a warning for the people in the present, the latter one is described in a staccato way and is informing the audience about what the opponents already have done wrong in the community (aorist: they have already acted like this). Section B, addressed to the beloved ones, contains on the one hand an apostolic prophecy as warning and support (vv. 17–19), and on the other hand a paraenesis to remain faithful (vv. 20–23). The whole letter is concluded by a doxological greeting (vv. 24–25), which is unusual for a letter but not impossible. The analysis of the composition of the letter is a useful element in the quest for the way the author has intended his writing. Rhetoric thus becomes a matter of content. It strikes us how very little information is given about the real content of the thoughts and deeds of both the heretical party in the community and the true believers. The message of the letter seems to be transmitted more through the composition

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than through contents. On the basis of the structure (section A versus section B) the readers or the audience get the impression that the text is intended to create or to reinforce a polarized interpretation of a situation. Two groups are put against each other. And there is only one alternative: salvation or destruction. The author himself has made his choice and stands by the chosen ones who will be saved. Let us therefore look at the details of the strategy the author uses to demonstrate that he takes the right position. 2. The strategy used by the author of the letter to reinforce his position Biblical exegesis over the last thirty years has been greatly influenced by narrative and rhetorical criticism and by sociological interested approaches. In its extreme forms these new approaches have been criticized because they would have no interest in the historical background or because they would unjustly project modern themes into old texts—and this change of paradigm was unacceptable for scholars who had grown up in a historical-critical era. But whatever one thinks about it, at least one element of the new approaches has become indispensable in modern exegesis: the attention for the discourse or the way how the text is constructed.10 A text can only be successful and influential if it makes use of rhetorical techniques and strategies which coincide with the audience world. This is exactly what happens in the letter of Jude. The author is doing all he can to make himself trustworthy and convincing. Therefore this should be the gateway to the interpretation of the letter: explaining how the author is imposing his interpretation of what is going on as the only and true interpretation possible. What rhetorical means does the author use to represent his subjective interpretation as an objective report of facts? Or as Lauri Thurén states in a 1997 article called Hey Jude: ‘I contend that when the techniques of communication in Jude are clearly perceived, many typical pitfalls

The distinction between story and discourse, or between how and what has entered biblical exegesis in the last quarter of the twentieth century through the work of S. Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film, Ithaca NY, 1978. For a clear exposition of the theme in Markan exegesis, see D. Rhoads, J. Dewey & D. Michie, Mark as Story. An Introduction to the Narrative of a Gospel, Augsburg 1999 (second revised edition). 10

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of interpretation will be avoided’.11 I will sum up three aspects of the author’s discourse technique: the construction of authority, the portrayal of the opponents, and the identification of himself with the beloved ones in the community. a. The author and his authority The author of the letter is using different techniques to give himself and his message authority. It starts already with the opening verse: ‘Jude, a servant of Jesus Christ and brother of James’. The juxtaposition of his own name Jude and Jesus Christ—the order and combination Ἰούδας Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ δοῦλος is not found elsewhere in the NT12—and the use of the ‘Pauline’ δοῦλος gives him a very high status of authority, especially when followed by the chiastically placed ἀδελφὸς δὲ Ἰακώβου who, according to most commentators, is the brother of the Lord. The choice for the textual form of pseudepigraphy under the name of Jude the brother of Jesus is a clear manifestation of the author’s choice to be linked with Jesus himself. It is remarkable that there are in this short letter six occurrences of Christ which are all used in combination with Jesus (vv. 1, 1, 4, 17, 21, 25). The author’s appeal to Jesus Christ (and to the Lord, κύριος) functions as the invocation of the highest form of authority. Jesus has become the key-figure of the tradition. And tradition—this is the second form of authority building—is exactly what the author is trying to create in his letter. Between Jesus and the community there is not only James and Jude himself, but at least in two other places the author suggests the existence of a common tradition. In v. 3 ‘the faith that was once for all (ἃπαξ) entrusted to the saints’ and in v. 17 ‘the predictions of the apostles (ὑπὸ τῶν ἀποστόλων) of our Lord Jesus Christ’ suppose or create the existence of a transmitted set of shared knowledge and belief. And it does not matter whether the prediction of the apostles (in v. 18) can be proven to be authentic or not. All the elements mentioned above are intended to give the audience a feeling of unity—they are part of a historical link chain—and are meant to give them a strong or stronger identity.

11 L. Thurén, ‘Hey Jude! Asking for the Original Situation and Message of a Catholic Epistle’, NTS 43 (1997) 451–65. 12 The closest parallel, but much longer in its wording, is James 1:1.

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There is, however, more than this. In creating authority the author scores with the stories in the Scripture in which negative figures or events of the past were punished by God (see vv. 5–7, 11). This means that Scripture teaches us that the conflict taking place in the community now is not new. And it also means that the condemnation of the intruders is already known from ‘long ago’ (πάλαι, v. 4). Ἀσέβεια has always existed. And all the believers need, in order to have the right insight in what is happening, is a reminder (ὑπομνῆσαι, v. 5: ‘I desire to remind you’). In the eyes of the author the history of salvation is a continuous battlefield and everybody needs to do the utmost to be saved.13 Conflict thus becomes an unavoidable part of history and this idea is used as a justification for the situation of the community. The members have to be conscious that what is happening now is part of God’s plan. It is important to be on the right side. b. The opponents A second strategy of influencing the audience consists of a radically negative description of the opponents. The author has a great interest in describing the enemies as badly as possible. We can speak about an intentional tactic. This is sociologically speaking a frequently used way of acting that is often found in apocalyptic literature.14 ‘The other ones’ (vv. 4, 8, 10, 12, 14, 16, 19) do just the opposite of what should be done in the community. A short summary of their attitude runs as follows: they are denying Jesus (v. 4); they are the ones who are causing divisions (v. 19); they are like Korah who did not accept Moses’ and Aaron’s authority (v. 11), and like Balaam who did not take into account God’s warning (v. 11); they defile the flesh, reject authority (κυριότης) and slander the glorious ones or the angels (v. 8). Desjardins has rightly shown that the fundamental issue at hand in this letter is the problem of accepting authority and in this sense the portrayal of the opponents goes hand in hand with the claim of the author for authority which we have considered above. Continuous repetition of their ungodly attitude (ἀσέβεια in vv. 4, 15 [three times], 18)15 and their 13 It is remarkable how many times the notion of salvation is repeated: σῴζω (vv. 1, 23), σωτηρία (v. 3), σωτήρ (v. 25). 14 It makes sense to compare this phenomenon with the Book of Revelation, where the author has a great interest in a stereotypical and exaggerated negative description of Rome. 15 Ἀσέβεια is used only six times in the NT and ἀσεβέω is a hapax in the NT.

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sexual licentiousness (vv. 4, 8, 12, 16, 18, 23) are further arguments to make these opponents reprehensible. But where do these opponents come from? On the basis of only one word (παρεισέδυσαν, v. 4: ‘to slip in secretly’) commentators generally think that they come from outside the community and are now in the community. But does this very rare word—παρεισδύω is a hapax in the NT—necessarily mean that they come from outside and infiltrated or intruded? It is also possible that this ‘unvermerkt eindringen’ (cf. Bauer) is not to be taken literally but in a metaphorical sense, expressing ‘a depreciating statement about false teachers in general (without them necessarily having intruded from outside)’.16 In that case the author would think that the false ideas (with their representatives) are just present in the community, a hypothesis that is supported by v. 12 that deals with their participation in the agape-meals. The issue of the actual position of the ‘heretic’ persons within the community is an important one and I will come back to it later. But if the false ideas are really present in the community and if it is not possible to draw a thick line between the good ones and the bad ones separating insiders from outsiders, the audience will have heard and interpreted the message of the author of Jude with different ears. His whole message then is not only about ‘those outside’ but also about the members of the community themselves. Unfortunately in most literature of the New Testament we do not have the perspective of the opponents and have to rely on the author’s interpretation, but there is no reason to doubt that ‘the infractions which are described and attacked are quite out of proportion with the actual behaviour of the dissidents, and that the distance separating these dissidents from their leaders is not as great as the letters [i.e. Jude and 2 Peter] lead us to suppose’.17 The opponents are accused in very general terms, as for instance in v. 11 where we find the comparison with three events from the Old Testament (the way of Cain, Balaam’s error, Korah’s rebellion). What do these accusations mean? Can one really conclude anything regarding the real identity of the heretics? In what sense could they be selfish rebels (according to Philo, De Agricultura, 20–22) or murderers of brothers like Cain; what did they do to be compared with the greed of Balaam; 16 See the commentary in Dutch by [ J.J.A. Kahmann and] B. Dehandschutter, [De tweede brief van Petrus.] De brief van Judas, Boxtel 1983, 113–50, esp. 126 (translation mine). 17 Desjardins, Dissidents, 96–7.

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against whom are they rebelling like Korah? Or are these comparisons a ploy to make them look worse than they are and becoming abusive? The topics were or became common paradigms in Jewish tradition as well as in early Christianity,18 so that they could be used as a stereotypical reproach.19 The same can be said about the series of repetitious metaphors in vv. 12b–13, which can be a rhetorical trick to convince the community how void the enemies are: waterless clouds, fruitless trees, wild waves of the sea, wandering stars. As long as there is no concrete indication as to what ‘the other ones’ are actually doing, this symbolic language says everything and nothing at the same time. Part of the negative portrayal of the opponents is painted by using apocalyptic language. One of the aspects of apocalyptic language and ideology is the dividing character. It makes a distinction between good and bad, between the earthly and the heavenly atmosphere, between now and later, and it predicts judgement. The opponents belong to the world, they are the bad ones and will not be saved later, unless the community will succeed in converting them (vv. 22–23). The letter makes use of apocalyptic language:20 angels, imminent eschatology (v. 18: ‘now’ is the ἐπ’ ἐσχάτου τοῦ χρόνου), intervention of God (vv. 14–15) or the mediator (v. 21). It is not by accident that there are two quotations of (or at least allusions to) two non-canonical writings which belong (partly) to the apocalyptic genre, because apocalyptic language and rhetoric go hand in hand and play an essential role in the ‘Konfliktstrukturierung’.21 These references are remarkable because 18 See for instance the link between false prophecy and greed in 1 Tim 6,5; Tit 1,11; 2 Pet 2,3; Did 11,12. 19 I wonder how long it will take before one will explore the possibility of a link between the heretics in the Letter of Jude and the Cainites about whom Irenaeus is writing in his Adversus Haereses (31,1) and in this way see a connection between the Letter of Jude and the Gospel of Judas: ‘Others again declare that Cain derived his being from the Power above, and acknowledge that Esau, Korah, the Sodomites, and all such persons, are related to themselves. On this account, they add, they have been assailed by the Creator, yet no one of them has suffered injury. For Sophia was in the habit of carrying off that which belonged to her from them to herself. They declare that Judas the traitor was thoroughly acquainted with these things, and that he alone, knowing the truth as no others did, accomplished the mystery of the betrayal; by him all things, both earthly and heavenly, were thus thrown into confusion. They produce a fictitious history of this kind, which they style the Gospel of Judas’. 20 See S.J. Joubert, ‘Language, Ideology and the Social Context of Jude’, Neotestamentica 24, 340. 21 H. Paulsen, ‘Judasbrief ’, TRE 17 (1988), 307–10, 308. Most authors agree that it is impossible to understand the letter of Jude without an apocalyptic framework. ‘. . . [T]he dominance of the apocalyptic outlook in Jude and his use of the Jewish

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of one other point: they prove how selection of material is essential in creating tradition. And though we are very well aware that it is anachronistic to talk about the existence of a canon at the end of the first century, one wonders to what extent the use of 1 Henoch and the Assumption of Moses did make Jude and his group a community distinct from the other Christians. Maybe the community around Jude was itself a small group with dissenting views from the more generally accepted traditions. Maybe Jude’s authority was itself questionable from the viewpoint of other groups of early Christian believers. In any case, I would not exclude the possibility that the dissidents are in reality part of the group of the addressees and that the division is for a large part artificially and rhetorically exaggerated by the author of Jude. About the use of Scripture and metaphors in Jude, Joachim Gnilka rightly notes: ‘Sie erschweren die konkrete Beschreibung dieser Leute, weil mit Klischees zu rechnen ist, besonders hinsichtlich der Beurteilung ihres sittlichen Lebenswandels’.22 Anticipating my later analysis of the believers, I shall visualise in a diagram how Jude represents the situation in his community and confront it with a possible reconstruction of the real situation.

author

heretics

faithful

Rhetorical representation of the situation by the author

author

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heretics

Situation in the community apocalypses at any rate locates him in circles where apocalyptic was not just one influence, but the dominant vehicle through which faith in Jesus found expression’, Bauckham, Jude, 10. 22 J. Gnilka, Theologie des Neuen Testaments (HTKNT Supplementband 5), Freiburg 1994, 438.

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c. The believers As the opponents are described in bad terms, ‘those who are called’ (v. 1) are portrayed as wholly good. At the crossroads of sociological analysis, linguistics and ideology criticism stands the term speech community to indicate the union between author and audience that makes communication possible when they share the same language. This is what is happening in the letter. The author makes a great effort by using positive terminology. The verbs and nouns used to describe who they are and what they do indicate that they are right: they have faith (πίστις, vv. 3, 20), they are the only ones who can save the opponents from the eternal fire or have mercy on them (vv. 22–23), they know about the tradition (ἐιδότας, v. 5), they pray to the Spirit (v. 20) while the others do not have spirit at all (πνεῦμα μὴ ἔχοντες, v. 19). He also creates unity between them and himself (our God, our Lord Jesus Christ, v. 4; ‘we’, vv. 21, 24). He calls them ‘beloved ones’, they ‘share’ the same belief, they ‘are kept safe for Jesus’ (v. 1) and they have ‘to keep themselves in the love of God’ (v. 21). Through the repetition of the same set of words in connection with the dissidents and the repetition of another set of words in connection with the true believers, the author wants to isolate the former from the latter.23 He creates ‘Communion and Community’, as the title of the book on New Testament Theology by Philip Esler says,24 but it is a selective community. The unity of the author with the members of the community strengthens the schism between the two groups the author has in mind. But one can ask oneself if the identification of the author with his community reflects the real situation. The description of the believers can also be a laudatio of the group, or an idealistic presentation of something that is not there but should be there, or a kind of wishful thinking. This might have been the case in order to give the commu-

23 For a list of words used four times or more in Jude, see J.D. Charles, ‘Jude’s Use of Pseudepigraphical Source-Material as Part of Literary Strategy’, NTS 37 (1990) 130–45, 132. There is another remarkable word statistical element in Jude, the high number of hapax legomena: apodiorizō (v. 19), aptaistos (v. 24), goggustēs (v. 16), deigma (v. 7), ekporneuō (v. 7), epagōnizomai (v. 3), epaphrizō (v. 13), mempsimoiros (v. 16), pareisduomai (v. 4), planētēs (v. 13), spilas (v. 12), hupechō (v. 7), phthinopōrinos (v. 12), phusiōos (v. 10). Without going into details it can be noted that Jude’s use of words as such is special as well, cf. Neyrey, 2 Peter, Jude, 27. 24 P.F. Esler, New Testament Theology: Communion and Community, Minneapolis 2005.

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nity a strong reason to purify itself and to expel the opponents from the infected community. The more the author and the community feel like being one and united, the more the others are wrong. Joubert has written two articles in which he clearly indicates, using the studies of B. Malina and J. Neyrey, that there is distance and inequality between Jude and the readers. The author of Jude has the power to define the church’s boundaries and to regulate the behaviour of its members. That is exactly what he does in vv. 17–23, where one finds five imperatives and four participles with imperative sense.25 From the available information in the letter—that is, Jude’s explicit commands, interpretations and evaluative remarks—it is then clear that an asymmetric distribution of power existed between him and his readers. Although the latter probably did not fully accept Jude’s interpretation of reality at the time of his writing, they still acknowledged his power base and therefore submitted to his influence and authority—as can be inferred from his positive presentation of them throughout the letter, which is of course based on his extra-textual knowledge of them and on the relationship which existed between them at the time of writing. Because of the readers’ acceptance of Jude’s position of superiority, they were left no other choice, short of completely rejecting the ideology he represented, than to acknowledge his right to exercise control over their behaviour. As a conclusion to section two, we can say that rhetorical criticism and sociological criticism together suggest that the problem in the community is particularly a problem from the perspective of the author! The gap between the others and the community is in real life probably smaller, and the gap between the community and the author is in reality probably larger than in his presentation. 3. Reader response criticism and the Letter of Jude It is difficult to know if the author of Jude has been successful or not. A very interesting item for further study in this regard would be the

25 Joubert, ‘Language, Ideology and the Social Context of Jude’, 347; S.J. Joubert, ‘Persuasion in the Letter of Jude’, JSNT 58 (1995) 75–87.

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comparison between Jude’s letter and 2 Peter,26 but I would like to ask myself another question at the end of this article. How does the reader deal with the ‘positive / negative strategy’ of the author ( Joubert)? However, I do not want to ask this question with regard to ‘readers in general’ or with an ‘implied or ideal reader’ in mind. In my opinion part of the task of exegetes involves a personal participation, if only because the particular text we are studying here has had a long Wirkungsgeschichte or is part of the biblical canon. So what follows are some elements of my personal reader perspective upon the Letter of Jude. How do I look upon this text at the beginning of the twenty-first century, realizing that it stands in the canon of the New Testament? More than ever before, in this post 9/11 era with all its international, political and military consequences, we are confronted with apocalyptic language and ideology on an almost daily basis.27 Especially in the justification of violence, biblical and universal motifs of dualism, imminent judgement, good and evil, God and Satan are used. In the letter of Jude there is no exhortation to fight, but there is a strong polarizing tendency. Does it make sense today for Christians (but not only Christians) to read such a text? And if it is read, how do readers have to deal with it? The rhetorical analysis of the text has shown that the use of apocalyptic language, the rhetorical strategy and the mist shrouding the original historical situation, prohibit a naive actualizing interpretation. But even on a deeper level the question remains whether there simply is a reality that fits the metaphoric and symbolic meaning of apocalyptic language (take for instance the return of the Lord or a final judgement of God)? Would it not be better to delete this letter from our horizon and give it back its status of ‘most neglected book of the New Testament’, as it once was called?28 I think that it is still possible to read the letter today under certain conditions. First, the letter is a document for internal Christian usage to focus on the fundamental issue of the central position of Jesus and God for Christians. Second, one should not read the letter to solve conflict situations by creating schisms. One should rather be cautious I will refrain from doing so here, as I realize that it could become a complementary part of the research program Annette Merz, Nicole Franck and Martin Ruf are working on at the Department of Theology of Utrecht University. 27 Apocalypticism has never been absent in history, see B. McGinn et alii (eds), The Continuum History of Apocalypticism, London/New York 2003. 28 D.J. Rowston, ‘The Most Neglected Book in the New Testament’, NTS 21 (1974–75), 554–63. 26

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to draw a sharp line between for instance orthodoxy and heresy, for we have seen that the apocalyptic language of the letter is situated within the context of a dominant ideology and a position of authority. Reading this letter makes sense when it stimulates to think critically about the contexts of power and authority in which a conflict is taking place. Who decides what is right and wrong? We should learn from the letter of Jude that it is more convenient to listen to the other than to reproach him. Third, apocalyptic language is not the only language within the Christian religious tradition and it should not be isolated from for instance the gospels. Severe apocalyptic language can help to keep the eye of the Christians focused on the majesty of God, while in the concrete attitude towards others the mercifulness of the gospel message is a practical guide. And if we can learn anything from apocalyptic language, it is that one should keep in mind that the final judgement always belongs to God and that no human being will ever be allowed to take this over. For those who are in search for appreciation of the relevance of literature like the letter of Jude, reader response criticism can offer some interesting perspectives. The focus of reader response criticism is not on the historical context. The purpose is rather to open the readers’ mind for the reception of the literary force and dynamics of the text. The question can be formulated in this sense: what is happening when a real reader today reads the letter of Jude?29 We only can give some preliminary remarks. When a real reader today reads the text and is identifying himself/herself with the addressees, the beloved ones (which would most reasonably be what the author intended), and s/he continues reading the letter till the end, s/he will be confronted with, even challenged regarding the meaning of his own tradition. This confrontation or challenge can happen in more ways than one. For instance by the reference to the apocryphal texts (Henoch), by the question who Jesus and God are and how it can be that people within the same community can believe in a completely different way in the same Jesus and God, by the language and the culture of the past that are no longer the language and the culture of the present; in short, by the fact that the reader’s community of today is completely different

29 For these final remarks I am tributary to Ruth Anne Reese, Writing Jude: The Reader, the Text, and the Author in Constructs of Power and Desire (BIS 51), Leiden/etc. 2000, especially 153–69.

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from that of 1900 years ago. The reader’s attitude to be challenged by the text is the necessary condition to respect the open character of the text, open in the sense that the meaning must be created by the readers. Once this insight is accepted by the readers, they will start struggling with every word of the text and there begins a competition between the authority (!) of the author and the reader. Who, finally, has the power over the text, the author or the reader? The author has written the words—that is certain—but the readers seem to be able to constantly rewrite the text. Ruth Ann Reese writes: ‘As she reads, she writes’ and ‘The author is not the controlling god of meaning and interpretation. Rather, the author is a combination of textual and readerly construction’.30 The readers are invited to a permanent self-interrogation. They will be challenged to reread the text and to find their own place within the tradition.31 When one compares the Bible to the roots and the tree of Christian tradition then the letter of Jude can be considered as a very small branch. But if that letter through its strange apocalyptical character may inspire in readers a better understanding of the whole tree, then it remains useful to read and do research on these 25 verses that are the letter of Jude. The text of the author will only continue to give meaning if we read it and rewrite it, if we turn from readers into writers.

Reese, Writing Jude, 164. Reese, Writing Jude, 160: ‘The letter itself may be a means of encouraging selfexamination’. 30 31

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JEWISH MONOTHEISM AND CHRISTIAN ORIGINS Bert Jan Lietaert Peerbolte The rise of the Christ movement within first-century Judaism is regarded by many as having caused an immediate rift between ‘Jews’ and ‘Christians’. This article examines the theological framework in which the cultic veneration of Jesus as a divine figure originated. It does so by focusing on what is called inclusive monotheism as a characteristic of early Judaism. Which options were there in early Judaism to speak in divine terms of heavenly persons other than God? The matter is important because the early Christ movement rapidly developed a discourse on Jesus Christ as the divine representative and envoy of God, even as a person who shares the divine status commonly ascribed only to God. If such a discourse on Jesus’ divine status is rooted in the religious vocabulary of early Judaism, the development of the christological speculations of the Christ movement was less of a rift than is often assumed. In that case, the reconstruction of the parting of the ways between Judaism and Christianity may be in need of some revision, and the exact moment at which ‘Christianity’ separated itself from Judaism may be less than easy to pinpoint. From this perspective, the many varieties of what is commonly regarded as first-century ‘Christianity’ may well be regarded as specific forms of Judaism, and the ultimate separation between the two religions should not be situated any time earlier than the second century of the Common Era. It may be clear that the point to be discussed in this contribution has important consequences, both historical and theological. The argument of this contribution is, that there was at least a tendency within early Judaism to speak of God in terms of inclusive monotheism. This tendency was essential for the early Christ movement with a view to interpreting Jesus’ status in terms of divine representation. It was this inclusive monotheistic framework that enabled Jewish followers of Jesus to identify him as God’s pre-existent wisdom, as God’s Logos, and to ascribe divine status to Jesus himself. First, in order to reconstruct the characteristics of inclusive monotheism within early Judaism, a brief discussion of early Judaism itself is necessary. Then, I will focus on inclusive monotheism within early Judaism. And finally, I will address

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the question of why the Christ movement is so often depicted as being fundamentally at variance with its Jewish context regarding the divine status it applied to Jesus Christ while there is reason enough to speak of a gradual development rather than a sudden break. Early Judaism The Judaism within which Jesus’ ministry and the early Christ movement should be situated can be characterized as ‘early Judaism’.1 It is important to start with a brief definition of this form of Judaism. The term ‘early Judaism’ can be taken to cover the period from Alexander the Great up to the Bar Kokhba revolt in the third decade of the second century ce. Alexander’s conquest of Palestine in 332 bce changed the face of the region because of the lasting impression that Hellenism had on both the region and the cultures that were absorbed into the Macedonian’s empire. After his death in 323 bce, Jerusalem and the surrounding area fell into the hands of Ptolemy I who ruled from Egypt. In Syria and further to the North-East, Seleucus I established his dynasty and the Ptolemies and the Seleucids would battle over Palestine for most of the century to come.2 The conquest by Alexander and the subsequent rule of the Diadochs brought the pervasive influence of Greek culture to the entire area. In the period that follows, Jerusalem and Judea gradually become thoroughly Hellenized, and the cross-cultural exchange that resulted from this process brought about many varieties within early Judaism.3

1 This term is now becoming the standard term for the Judaism of this period. In older publications like Kittel’s Theologisches Wörterbuch zum Neuen Testament the term ‘Spätjudentum’ is often used, but this is incorrect, pejorative, and misleading. For a discussion of the change in paradigm that took place in the last decades of the twentieth century, see G.W.E. Nickelsburg & R.A. Kraft, ‘The Modern Study of Early Judaism’, in: R.A. Kraft & G.W.E. Nickelsburg (eds), Early Judaism and its Modern Interpreters Atlanta/Philadelphia 1986, 1–30. 2 On the historiography of early Judaism, see S.J.D. Cohen, ‘The Political and Social History of the Jews in Greco-Roman Antiquity: the State of the Question’, in: Kraft & Nickelsburg (eds), Early Judaism, 33–56. A detailed reconstruction of the history of the Jews in antiquity is given by P. Schäfer, Geschichte der Juden in der Antike: Die Juden Palästinas von Alexander dem Großen bis zur arabischen Eroberung Neukirchen Vluyn/Stuttgart 1983, esp. 17–176 (on the period from Alexander to Bar Kokhba). 3 For a methodological discussion of the variety within early Judaism, see J.Z. Smith, ‘Fences and Neighbors: Some Contours of Early Judaism’, in: Idem, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown, Chicago/London 1982, 1–18.

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The fundamental change that ushered in the new era in Jewish history of the period was the Maccabean uprising that followed the desecration of the temple by Antiochus IV Epiphanes in 167 bce. This uprising resulted in an autonomous and independent city-state of Jerusalem. The Hasmoneans ruled this territory for a period of about a century, and gradually turned their state into a Hellenistic kingdom.4 Here, the irony of history is almost tangible: the independence of the Hasmonean state was obtained on the basis of an uprising against the Hellenization of Jerusalem and Judea, the temple, the cult, and the religion of Israel, but over the course of a century the state changed into a fully Hellenized territory. The Greek culture that triggered the uprising in the sixties of the second century bce eventually pervaded not only the administration, but also the politics, culture and religion of Judea to a high degree.5 From 63 bce onward, the Romans are finally in charge of the area. Pompey the Great, one of the members of the first triumvirate in Rome, conquers Jerusalem and changes the territory into a client state. In the period that follows this change it is especially Herod the Great (r. 37–4 bce) who appears to be influential. This Idumean obtains power, partly because of the strong influence of his father, Antipater, in Rome. Herod uses his power to create a semi-independent position for Judea and Jerusalem in relation to Rome.6 In the era following Herod’s death his dominion is divided among his sons. The areas that were thus formed eventually come under direct Roman rule. During the first century ce, tension between Romans and Jews gradually increases, until it finally comes to a head in the war of 66–72. The destruction of the temple in 70 ce had enormous consequences for the Jewish religion as well as for the social dimensions in Palestine. This moment is actually the starting point for the process of regrouping that ultimately resulted in the formation of Rabbinic Judaism. It was only in the third century ce that this newly formed Jewish orthodoxy came to a written fixation of its normative traditions in the form of the Mishna, compiled by Yehudah 4 This part of Jewish history is described in detail by Josephus in his Jewish Antiquities, books 12–14. 5 P.W. van der Horst has devoted much of his energy and attention to the influence of Hellenism on Jews and their religion. See among his many publications: Japheth in the Tents of Shem: Studies on Jewish Hellenism in Antiquity (CBET 32), Leuven/Paris 2002, and Jews and Christians in Their Graeco-Roman Context (WUNT 196), Tübingen 2006. 6 For a discussion of Herod and his rule, see P. Richardson, Herod: King of the Jews and Friend of the Romans (Personalities of the New Testament), Columbia 1996.

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ha-Nasi. It has long been thought that by the end of the first century, at the so-called ‘council’ of Yavneh/Yamnia, the form of Rabbinic Judaism was defined, and the development of this newly formed orthodoxy came to a conclusion. By now, however, this view has rightly become criticized. If there ever was something like this council, which is in no way clear, it should be considered the starting point rather than the conclusion of the development of rabbinic Judaism.7 The formation of rabbinic Judaism was also influenced by the Bar Kokhba revolt of the third decade of the second century ce. After this second failed uprising against the Romans, Jerusalem became inaccessible for Jews, and the Romans renamed the city Aelia Capitolina, a holy city dedicated to Jupiter. The prohibition for Jews to enter Jerusalem formed the final steppingstone toward the formation of a new form of Judaism, which is now known as rabbinic Judaism. The designation ‘early Judaism’ may wrongly suggest that we are dealing with a single phenomenon, culturally and religiously speaking. This was most certainly not the case. Early Judaism was characterized to such an extent by diversity, that many scholars use the plural in their description of it, i.e. ‘Judaisms’.8 To become acquainted with the religious views that were prevalent in early Judaism we have to study the sources of this period.9 Early Judaism produced a large corpus of literature in many different genres. There are rewritings of biblical stories such as the book of Jubilees or the Greek re-enactment of the story of Exodus by Ezekiel the Tragedian. There are numerous apocalypses such as 1 Enoch, 2 Baruch, 4 Ezra and many other writings.10 Of course the Dead Sea Scrolls have contributed hugely to our knowledge of early Judaism in Palestine. On the other side of this corpus there are the

7 For this, see J.P. Lewis, ‘Jamnia ( Jabneh), Council of ’, in: D.N. Freedman et alii (eds), ABD, Ann Arbor 1990, III.634–637. Lewis concludes that the old hypothesis that this council was the last step in the formation of rabbinic Judaism is outdated: ‘It should not be allowed to be considered a consensus established by mere repetition of assertion’. 8 For a brief description of this pluralism, see P.R. Davies, ‘Scenes from the Early History of Judaism’, in: D.V. Edelman (ed.), The Triumph of Elohim: From Yahwisms to Judaisms (CBET 14), Kampen 1995, 145–82. An excellent introduction to early Judaism and its pluralistic features, is given by S.J.D. Cohen, The Beginnings of Jewishness: Boundaries, Varieties, Uncertainties, Berkeley/etc. 1999. 9 For a survey of the literature of this period, see M.E. Stone (ed.), Jewish Writings of the Second Temple Period: Apocrypha, Pseudepigrapha, Qumran Sectarian Writings, Philo, Josephus (CRINT II/2), Assen/Philadelphia 1984. 10 A good introduction is given by J.J. Collins, The Apocalyptic Imagination: An Introduction to Jewish Apocalyptic Literature, Grand Rapids/Cambridge, 19982.

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Sibylline Oracles, put in Greek hexameters and composed as a counterimage to the pagan Sibyl11 or the Sentences of Pseudo-Phocylides that formed the basis for Pieter van der Horst’s dissertation.12 And of course there are the writings by Philo of Alexandria and Flavius Josephus. In other words: there is an enormous amount of literature that was originally composed in Greek, Aramaic or Hebrew. These texts have been preserved in part in these three languages, but many writings were transmitted in Latin, Syriac, Ethiopic, Armenian, Slavonic or other, more exotic languages. This makes the study of these writings a matter for experts. A methodological question raised by this literature is how these texts relate to the different social groups in early Judaism. To what extent do these texts reflect the views of some of these groups? To take two extreme examples: There is hardly any doubt that the War Scroll (1QM) found in Qumran reflects the ideas of the Qumran community on the events that were expected to happen during the days preceding the end. This is clearly a sectarian writing reflecting sectarian eschatological views. On the other side, there are the Sibylline Oracles that must have been written in imitation of the pagan Sibylline Oracles. The Roman author Varro mentions ten Sibyls spread from Cumae to Persia being worshipped across the Empire.13 The Hebrew Sibyl may have been number eleven; she may also have been intended as a counter-image of the pagan Sibyl. The fact that a Jewish Sibyl existed proves that pagan poetic and cultic forms were not only known in Jewish circles, but they were also used to a certain extent. Neither the War Scroll of Qumran nor book III of the Sibylline Oracles or any other single text dating from this period describes the views of early Judaism in general. In studying early Judaism one has to be aware of its great variety as well as of the interaction between the many forms of Judaism in this period and the dominant, Hellenistic culture. Its influence is tangible when forms or genres are copied, but also when writings are composed for polemical reasons to oppose Hellenism.

On book 3 of the Sibylline Oracles, see R. Buitenwerf, Book III of the Sibylline Oracles and its Social Setting: With an Introduction, Translation, and Commentary (SVTP 17), Leiden/ Boston 2003, esp. 124–134. 12 P.W. van der Horst, The Sentences of Pseudo-Phocylides: With Introduction and Commentary (SVTP 4), Leiden 1978. 13 Varro mentions this in his Res Divinae, which unfortunately has not been preserved. The passage is quoted though by Lactantius in his Divinae Institutiones 1.6.8–12. 11

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bert jan lietaert peerbolte Inclusive monotheism

Within the many varieties of early Judaism there was, to say the least, a tendency toward inclusive monotheism. This designation is used for the view in which YHWH is envisioned as the supreme deity, the only God, surrounded by a heavenly hierarchy of angels and other beings who are subjugated to the power of this one God. In this tendency early Judaism takes up the legacy of ancient Israel in so far as originally the cult of YHWH had been one of many cults that eventually obtained a leading position.14 Several texts from the Jewish Bible attest to this stratum of Israel’s religion (cf. below). Early Judaism takes up this legacy of inclusive monotheism by speaking of YHWH as the one and only God who rules over a heavenly host of angels and other beings. Thus a theological framework is created that makes it possible to speak of pagan deities as heavenly beings that hold a lower rank in the heavenly hierarchy. In an important article of 2004, William Horbury argues that this inclusive form of monotheism characterized Judaism of especially the Herodian period.15 Horbury’s argument is important and convincing, and for this reason it is worth the effort to summarize his findings here. What follows is a summary of Horbury’s argument, followed by a brief reflection on his view. First of all, Horbury points out why he focuses on Judaism of the Herodian era. According to Horbury, this is the Judaism that formed the immediate context of Jesus’ ministry and the rise of the Christcult. For this reason, Herodian Judaism shaped the rise of the Christ movement, and formed the theological framework in which the interpretation of Jesus as the Anointed One, and of Jesus Christ as divine envoy came about. Horbury defines the Herodian era as the period from Antipater’s accession (Herod’s father) until the Bar Kokhba revolt. Hence this period starts approximately in the mid-first century bce and 14 In the words of Johannes Tromp: ‘In the strict sense the religion of ancient Israel was not, nor had it ever been, “monotheistic”.’ Cf. J. Tromp, ‘The Critique of Idolatry in the Context of Jewish Monotheism’, in: P.W. van der Horst (ed.), Aspects of Religious Contact and Conflict in the Ancient World (UTR 31), Utrecht 1995, 105–20 (106). Cf. 108: ‘It is unlikely that the monotheism of Judaism as we know it emerged before the Hellenistic period.’ 15 W. Horbury, ‘Jewish and Christian Monotheism in the Herodian Age’, in: L.T. Stuckenbruck & W.E.S. North (eds), Early Jewish and Christian Monotheism (ECC/JSNTSup 263), London/New York 2004, 16–44. Also in: W. Horbury, Herodian Judaism and New Testament Study (WUNT 193), Tübingen 2006, 2–33.

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lasts until the third decade of the second century ce. The most important language in which Jews communicated in this period was probably Aramaic, immediately followed by Greek. It is also very likely that in some circles Hebrew was still spoken. Throughout the Mediterranean region, there were many forms of interaction between Judaism and the surrounding Greek culture, also in Palestine. In the evidence mentioned by Horbury there appears to be a tendency to incorporate deities other than YHWH into the monotheistic views of Israel. A mutual interaction between the religion of Israel and cults from surrounding cultures can be discerned here. The image of a Supreme Deity, the Highest God, who rules over a pantheon of lower deities, is found in both Jewish and pagan texts. In pagan sources this deity is often described as Zeus, who rules over the other Olympic gods. In some Jewish sources a similar picture is found, but here the lower heavenly beings are described as angels, demons or spirits, and the term ‘God’—θεός—is only used for YHWH. The dividing line between monotheism and polytheism is apparently fluid here. Horbury’s second point is that Jewish and Christian apologetics offer descriptions of pagan polytheistic views that stress the agreements between the two systems rather than the differences.16 A remarkable example of this type of apologetics is found in the Letter of Aristeas 16. Here, the Jew Aristeas addresses king Ptolemy in order to free a group of captive Jews. His argument is: ‘the god whom they (= the captives; LP) worship is he whom all worship, and we too, O king, though we address him by names other than Zeus and Dis’. Horbury also points to a Christian apologetic text in which Jews are described as suffering from a lack of knowledge: they, ‘thinking that they alone know God, do not understand, worshipping angels and archangels, month and moon’.17 Furthermore, he points to the connection with Gal 4:8–10

16 Michael Mach indicates the importance of Jubilees 11:16, 1 Enoch 6 and 1QM 13:11–13—texts that explain the origins of evil through the existence of demons, supernatural beings that are subjugated to God in the divine hierarchy, but that do play an independent, evil part. Cf. M. Mach, ‘Concepts of Jewish Monotheism in the Hellenistic Period’, in: C.C. Newman et alii (eds), The Jewish Roots of Christological Monotheism: Papers from the St. Andrews Conference on the Historical Origins of the Worship of Jesus (SJSJ 63), Leiden/etc. 1999, 21–42. 17 Kerygma Petrou fr. 4, kept in Clement, Strom. VI.5,41; Horbury, ‘Jewish and Christian Monotheism’, 12.

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and Col 2:18.18 Also the description of wisdom in Ben Sira and the Wisdom of Solomon and that of the Logos in the writings of Philo and Justin Martyr betray the existence of a kind of inclusive monotheism in Jewish circles.19 A remarkable point described by Horbury is the Jewish acknowledgement of gentile monotheism. Especially in the writings of Philo and Josephus passages are found that credit the monotheistic tendency in some pagan writings.20 Moses, for instance, is depicted as the great originator of pagan monotheism. In Josephus’ version of the Letter of Aristeas a speculation is found on Zeus using the names Zena and Dia.21 Here, this deity is equated with the god of the Jews. Aristaeus, as Josephus calls him, says that Jews and Greeks both worship ‘the God who constructed all things, calling him Zena because he breathes life into all’.22 Thus, an etymology of the name Zeus is related to the God of the Jews and Aristaeus argues, according to Josephus, that this God Zeus is the same as the God of the Jews, but worshipped under a different name. Horbury here mentions the fact that the same etymology is found in the writings of Aristoboulos, a Jewish philosopher from the second century bce.23 In his fourth section, Horbury discusses a number of texts from the Herodian era that legitimize polytheism among Gentiles.24 He points to a tradition based on Deut 4:19, that states that YHWH apportioned the veneration of heavenly elements to the nations of the earth as a form of (lower!) religion. Gentiles are therefore seen as people whose gods had been appointed by YHWH himself to be worshipped by the Gentiles. Other texts that indicate this frame of reference are Exod 7:1 and Deut 17:3. These texts are loci probantes for the veneration of lower deities by the Gentiles and the fact that this veneration was approved by YHWH himself. Here, YHWH is seen as the highest deity, who has decided that lower ranking heavenly beings be appointed as gods for the Gentiles.

18 It is very likely that angels should be reckoned among the ‘powers’ mentioned in Gal 4:9. Col 2:18 is indicative here, since it reveals the existence of angel veneration in at least some Jewish circles. 19 It is this element in early Judaism that is decisive for Daniel Boyarin’s reconstruction of the partition of Judaism and Christianity. Cf. below, footnote 50. 20 Horbury, ‘Jewish and Christian Monotheism’, 15–19. 21 Josephus, Antiquitates Judaicae 12.22. 22 Horbury, ‘Jewish and Christian Monotheism’, 16. 23 This comment is preserved in Eusebius, Praeparatio Evangelica XIII.12.7. 24 Horbury, ‘Jewish and Christian Monotheism’, 19–29.

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Of course, those who worship the Highest God—YHWH—know that he is in fact the only God. The final section of Horbury’s contribution deals with the modern reconstruction of ancient Jewish and Christian monotheism.25 As interesting as this may be, it can be left out of consideration here. It is impossible to discuss all the texts Horbury deals with in detail here. What should be discussed, however, is his important conclusion. According to Horbury, Judaism of the Herodian era at least shows a tendency toward inclusive monotheism: a situation in which deities other than YHWH, as worshipped by pagans, were subsumed under the heavenly hierarchy and included in a system in which YHWH was not only the highest, but also the only God. The two points seem to contradict each other, but apparently for at least some strains of early Judaism they did not. Of course early Judaism also knew a tendency toward exclusive monotheism: a vision in which only YHWH is acknowledged as God and the existence of other gods is simply denied.26 This exclusive type of monotheism, however, is not the only vision prevalent in early Judaism, and it is also thanks to Horbury’s work that this can no longer be denied. Two elements in Horbury’s argument have been elaborately treated by other specialists in early Judaism and early Christianity: the veneration of angels as part of the Jewish religion and the tradition in early Judaism that speaks of Wisdom or the Logos of God as personifications of God’s divine power. Both elements deserve some closer attention. The veneration of angels The veneration of Jesus Christ as God’s ultimate envoy, his ‘Son’ or even as divine (θεῖος) or ‘God’ (θεός) himself by the early Christ movement raises the question of whether or not this veneration indicates a total break with the Jewish setting out of which the Christ movement rose. Horbury, ‘Jewish and Christian Monotheism’, 29–33. Mach even describes three forms of monotheism in early Judaism: polemic, exclusive monotheism (which sees the God of Israel as the only God who is being worshipped over against the Gentiles), an open, exclusive type of monotheism (which considers the Gentiles as subjugated to the authority of the God of Israel), and inclusive monotheism. Mach labels this inclusive type of monotheism as the final step in the development of Jewish monotheism. Mach considers the Book of Judith to be the clearest expression of a polemic, exclusive type of monotheism. Cf. Mach, ‘Concepts of Jewish Monotheism in the Hellenistic Period’, esp. 24–5. 25 26

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Should we speak of a new species here or is it just a gradual difference in which the members of the early Christ movement move just beyond the vocabulary that already existed in early Judaism? It seems to me that the latter option is the more likely, especially when the veneration of angels in early Judaism is taken into account. In a number of publications, Loren T. Stuckenbruck indicated the importance of this type of veneration of angels in early Judaism.27 In the same volume in which Horbury published his discussion of inclusive monotheism in Herodian Judaism, Stuckenbruck takes a stand against the position defended by Larry Hurtado. Hurtado deals with the binitarian worship of Christ as reflecting a saltation over its Jewish context that is decisive for the difference between Judaism and Christianity.28 According to Stuckenbruck, the picture is more nuanced than this.29 He points to a set of evidence that leads him to conclude that early Judaism did include a certain kind of veneration of angels in which they were acknowledged as divine envoys in a manner that apparently did not contradict the monotheistic worship of God. To prove his point, Stuckenbruck quotes from a series of polemical comments in early and rabbinic Jewish texts as well as in early Christian sources in which the veneration of angels is criticized. Furthermore, he discusses a number of texts in which angels are actually portrayed as venerated alongside God himself. Two of these passages should be treated here by way of example: first I will treat a passage from Joseph and Aseneth 15 followed by 4Q400 fr. 2. Joseph and Aseneth is a Hellenistic Jewish novel that describes the conversion of Aseneth, an Egyptian princess, who ultimately becomes Joseph’s wife. The writing is dated to the period around the turn of the Common Era. Chapter 15 of Joseph and Aseneth describes how an angel visits Aseneth. The angel is a messenger from God and brings word to Aseneth that God gracefully accepts her repentance concerning her former worship of idols. In response to this message Aseneth

27 Cf. esp. L.T. Stuckenbruck, Angel Veneration and Christology: A Study in Early Judaism and in the Christology of the Apocalypse of John (WUNT II/70), Tübingen 1995. 28 L.W. Hurtado, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity, Grand Rapids/Cambridge 2003, 134–53; also in Hurtado, ‘The Binitarian Shape of Early Christian Worship’, in: Newman et alii, Jewish Roots, 187–213. 29 See L.T. Stuckenbruck, ‘“Angels” and “God”: Exploring the Limits of Early Jewish Monotheism’, in: Stuckenbruck & North (eds), Early Jewish and Christian Monotheism, 45–70. Beside the examples mentioned above, Stuckenbruck also treats T.Levi 5,5–6; Tobit 11,14; 4Q418 fr. 81, lines 1–15; and Ps-Philo, LAB 15,6.

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addresses the angel and praises his name. The terminology used here clearly has a cultic ring to it. The passage under discussion is absent from M. Philonenko’s edition,30 but the new edition by C. Burchard does contain it:31 11. καὶ ὡς ἐτέλεσεν ὁ ἄνθρωπος λαλῶν τὰ ῥήματα ταῦτα ἐχάρη ᾽Ασενὲθ χαρὰν μεγάλην ἐπὶ πᾶσι τοῖς ῥήμασιν αὐτοῦ καὶ ἔπεσεν ἐπὶ τοὺς πόδας αὐτοῦ καὶ προσεκύνησεν αὐτῷ πρόσωπον εἰς τὴν γῆν καὶ εἶπεν αὐτῷ· 12 εὐλογημένος κύριος ὁ θεός σου ὁ ὕψιστος ὃς ἐξαπέστειλέ σε τοῦ ῥύσασθαί με ἐκ τοῦ σκότους καὶ ἀναγαγεῖν με ἀπὸ τῶν θεμελίων τῆς ἀβύσσου καὶ εὐλογημένον τὸ ὄνομά σου εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα. 12x τί ἐστι τὸ ὄνομά σου κύριε ἀνάγγειλον μοι ἵνα ὑμνήσω καὶ δοξάσω σε εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα χρόνον! καὶ εἶπεν αὐτῇ ὁ ἄνθρωπος· ἵνα τί τοῦτο ζητεῖς τὸ ὄνομά μου’ Ασενέθ τὸ ἐμὸν ὄνομα ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς ἐστιν ἐν τῇ βίβλῳ τοῦ ὑψίστου γεγραμμένον τῷ δακτύλῳ τοῦ θεοῦ ἐν ἀρχῇ τῆς βίβλου πρὸ πάντων ὅτι ἐγὼ ἄρχων εἰμὶ τοῦ οἴκου τοῦ ὑψίστου. καὶ πάντα τὰ ὀνόματα τὰ γεγραμμένα ἐν τῷ βίβλῳ τοῦ ὑψίστου ἄρρητά ἐστι καὶ ἀνθρώπῳ οὔτε εἰπεῖν οὔτε ἀκοῦσαι ἐν τῷ κόσμῳ τούτῳ ἐγκεχώρηται ὅτι μεγάλα ἐστὶ τὰ ὀνόματα ἐκεῖνα καὶ θαυμαστὰ καὶ ἐπαινετὰ σφόδρα .

In translation: 11. After the man32 had finished speaking these words, Aseneth became very happy concerning all his words and she fell onto her feet, worshipped him, and said to him: 12. ‘Blessed be the Lord your God, the Most High, who has sent you to save me from the darkness and guide me away from the vaults of the abyss, and blessed be your name forever. 12x. Tell me what your name is, Lord, that I may praise and glorify you forever!’ And the man said to her: ‘Why do you want to know my name, Aseneth? My name is written in the heavens in the book of the Most High, written down by the finger of God, in the beginning of the book, before all names, because I am the leader of the house of the Most High. And all names that are written in the book of the Most High are ineffable, and it is impossible for any man to either speak or hear them in this world, because those names are great and wondrous and very awe-inspiring.’33

In itself, the act of proskunēsis, worship, described in this passage can be understood as a form of veneration given to a high-ranking human being. However, it is plausible that the description here implies

30 M. Philonenko, Joseph et Aséneth: Introduction, texte critique, traduction et notes (SPB 13), Leiden 1968. 31 C. Burchard, ‘Ein vorläufiger Text von Joseph und Aseneth’, in: Idem, Gesammelte Studien zu Joseph und Aseneth (SVTP 13), Leiden/etc. 1996, 163–209. 32 The designation ἄνθρωπος is used for the angel. 33 Burchard, ‘Ein vorläufiger Text’, 184–85; translation LP.

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something else: not only is the use of the verb προσκυνέω indicative of this, but also the fact that the εὐλογημένος-formula for both God and the angel stresses this point. Also the use of the verbs ὑμνόω and δοξάζω points at this. The fact that Aseneth asks for the angel’s name should be read in the context of early Jewish angelology, where many names of angels circulated as objects of speculation. It is likely that Aseneth’s rebuke, the refusal of the angel to reveal his name, reflects a certain restrictiveness on the part of the author with regard to the veneration of angels. That angels were indeed venerated in certain Jewish circles is clear from, for example, a passage from the songs for the Sabbath found in Qumran. The Shirot Olat ha-Shabbath describe how God is worshipped in the midst of ‘the most holy ones’ (4Q400, fr. 2). It is evident that heavenly beings are implied here. Unfortunately, the text is rather fragmentary, but nevertheless its setting and content are clear. What we have here is a description in which the angels are described as part of the hosts of heaven: [‫להלל כבודכה פלא באלי דעת ותשבוחות מלכותכה בקדושי ק]דושים‬ [. . . ‫המה נכבדים בכול מחני אלוהים ונוראים למוסדי אנשים פ]לא‬ [‫ בכול‬. . . ]‫מאלוהים}ים{ ואנשים וספרו הוד מלכותו כדעתם ורוממו‬ [. . .]‫שמי מלכותו ובכול מרומי רום תהלי פלא לפי כול‬ ‫כבוד מלך אלוהים יספרו במעוני עומדם‬

1 2 3 4 5

1. [. . .] to praise your glory wondrously with the divinities of knowledge, and the praises of your kingship with the m[ost] holy ones. 2. They are honoured in all the camps of the gods and revered by the councils of men, wo[nder . . .] 3. from gods and men. And they will recount the splendour of his kingdom, according to their knowledge, and they will extol [. . . in all] 4. the heavens of his kingdom. And in all the exalted heights wonderful psalms according to all [. . .] 5. the glory of the king of the gods they will recount in the residences of their positions.34

Even though discussion is possible as to the status of the doxological language used in the description of the angels here and in other sources, Stuckenbruck is right in stressing that these texts do seem to imply that angels as envoys of God shared in the high, divine status of God himself and could become objects of veneration. Most scholars today regard the Qumran community as either a group of Essenes or

34 Text and translation F. García Martínez & E.J.C. Tigchelaar, The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition, Leiden/Grand Rapids 1998, II.808–811.

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a sectarian group of former Essenes.35 Josephus describes the Essenes as a group that regarded the names of the angels as secret, esoteric knowledge that could be shared only within their own group. He mentions a number of characteristics of the Essenes and describes how a would-be member of the community had to go through a probation period of a year. After this period the novice was made to swear a solemn oath that he would not trespass against the code of the group nor betray its secret knowledge to outsiders. The point mentioned explicitly here, is that the novice swears that he will not mention the names of the angels to outsiders:36 πρὸς τούτοις ὄμυσιν μηδενὶ μὲν μεταδοῦναι τῶν δογμάτων ἑτέρως ἢ ὡς αὐτὸς μετέλαβεν, ἀφέξεσθαι δὲ λῃστείας καὶ συντηρήσειν ὁμοίως τά τε τῆς αἱρέσεως αὐτῶν βιβλία καὶ τὰ τῶν ἀγγέλων ὀνόματα. τοιούτοις μὲν ὅρκοις τοὺς προσιόντας ἐξασφαλίζονται.

He swears, moreover, to transmit their rules exactly as he himself received them; to abstain from robbery; and in like manner carefully preserve the books of the sect and the names of the angels. Such are the oaths by which they secure their proselytes.37

In his Dutch translation of the passage, Pieter van der Horst stressed the fact that the names of the angels obviously held magical and mystical meaning for the Essenes.38 Although it is too simple to equate the Essenes with the worshipers of angels mentioned in Col 2:18, it is evident that this important group within early Judaism did indeed regard the names of the angels as pivotal and treated them as esoteric knowledge. This makes it very likely that this group indeed formed the social context of texts like 4Q400, and perhaps links them to Col 2:18. The evidence discussed above shows that in at least some parts of early Judaism angels held an important position and were venerated as heavenly beings. The passage quoted from Joseph and Aseneth forms evidence that the veneration of an angel in a narrative context was not considered as something strange, while the setting of 4Q400 depicts 35 On the identity of the Qumran community, see among many publications: G. Vermes, The Dead Sea Scrolls: Qumran in Perspective, London 19943, 100–19 (Essene hypothesis), and F. García Martínez, The Dead Sea Scrolls Translated: The Qumran Texts in English, Leiden/etc. 1992, lii–lvi. 36 Josephus, De Bello Judaico II, 142. 37 Text and translation H.St.J. Thackeray, LCL. 38 P.W. van der Horst, Bronnen voor de studie van de wereld van het vroege christendom: Joodse en pagane teksten uit de periode van Alexander de Grote tot keizer Constantijn, Kampen 1997, I.160, note 759.

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God as being surrounded by a heavenly host of angels who were also venerated by human beings. The fact that Josephus mentions the names of the angels as part of the secret knowledge of the Essenes indicates that ‘worshipers of angels’ (Col 2:18) indeed did exist within early Judaism. Stuckenbruck rightly adds a caveat in that there is no proof for any cultic worship of angels,39 but he also stresses that the doxological language and the proskunēsis of angels found, for example, in the texts discussed above, apparently did not present a theological problem. The worship of God as the only God did not preclude the existence of a heavenly hierarchy in which God rules in the midst of his angels. These angels were apparently believed to act autonomously, more or less independent of God. Nonetheless, they derive their status from the fact that they act as divine envoys. Wisdom and the Logos as personifications of God Divine attributes such as Wisdom (sophia) and the Logos figure in a number of sources as personifications of God. Every now and then these personifications are described in ways that seem to imply that these attributes function as independent persons, separate from God. In sapiential texts a development can be seen in which Wisdom is presented first as the firstborn creature, and later even as a mediator at the creation. The idea of Wisdom as the first creature is found in Prov 8:22 where Wisdom speaks and says: ‘the Lord created me at the beginning of his work, the first of his acts of long ago’.40 Here Wisdom is presented as the first of all creatures, a situation that is comparable with the description of Jesus’ role as the ‘image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation’ in Col 1:15. The picture in Wisdom of Solomon, dating from some time during the late first century bce, differs from what we find in Proverbs. Here, Wisdom is depicted in a way that raises the question of whether it is a personification we find here or perhaps

39 See esp. Stuckenbruck, ‘“Angels” and “God”’, 68–9. Here, Stuckenbruck distinguishes between ‘veneration’ and ‘worship’ of angels. He points out that ‘in none of the passages discussed is there any hint that in Judaism a cultus was being organised around angelic beings’. But, he hastens to add, ‘at the same time, the Jewish sources containing language in which angels are venerated cannot be pressed so neatly into a non-cultic category’ (italics Stuckenbruck). 40 Translations from the bible have been taken from the New Revised Standard Version.

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something more than that. The clearest example is Wis 7:21, where ‘Solomon’ (his name is not mentioned in the writing, but it is clear that he is intended as the author of the work) speaks about Wisdom in his eulogy on her and says: ‘I learned both what is secret and what is manifest, for Wisdom, the fashioner of all things, taught me’. The Greek word that is used here, τεχνῖτις, implies that Wisdom was not only present at the process of creation, but also actively involved in it. Although the difference is a matter of nuance, it is clear that here Wisdom is depicted as engaged in the process of creation, together with God himself.41 In later Gnostic sources such as the Apocryphon of John, Wisdom or Sophia is portrayed as a lower goddess who is responsible for the creation of Yaldabaoth, who, in turn, created the material world.42 There, Sophia is the one who wants to bring forth offspring on her own, without the intervention of another divine being. Because of this wrong choice, she fails and the result is that her son, Yaldabaoth, is a lower deity. He copies his mother’s choice and tries to generate his own offspring, fails in his plan, as had his mother, and unfortunately generates the material world. This Apocryphon of John, however, is a much later writing that reflects Gnostic, non-Jewish views, and the picture of Sophia does not directly relate to that of Wisdom in Wisdom of Solomon.43 In view of early Judaism, it is important to be aware that Wisdom of Solomon describes Wisdom as a figure that can be identified separately from God, a figure that also shares in God’s divine status. This figure of speech apparently formed the background to Philo’s presentation of the divine Logos as the ruling principle of the world.44

41 For a further discussion of this passage and its relationship to the Apocryphon of John, see my contribution ‘The Wisdom of Solomon and the Gnostic Sophia’, in: A. Hilhorst & G.H. van Kooten (eds), The Wisdom of Egypt: Jewish, Early Christian, and Gnostic Essays in Honour of Gerard P. Luttikhuizen (AJEC 59), Leiden/Boston 2005, 97–114. On Wis 7:21, see page 107. 42 See ‘The Wisdom of Solomon and the Gnostic Sophia’, 98–100. 43 For a discussion of the Apocryphon of John, see G.P. Luttikhuizen, Gnostic Revisions of Genesis Stories and Early Jesus Traditions (NHMS 58), Leiden/Boston 2006, esp. 17–43. According to Luttikhuizen, the Apocryphon of John reflects ‘a form of Platonism that was influenced by Aristotelian thought’ (42). 44 The word Logos is left untranslated in the above, because it has so many connotations. It stands for the ‘word’ (cf. John 1:1), but also for the ‘divine principle’ or the ‘rational principle’ that rules the cosmos. In Philo’s work one of the latter options is usually the correct one.

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Philo of Alexandria speaks about God’s Logos as an independent entity who has the power and authority to act on his own. With this view, Philo goes beyond the picture of the personification of Wisdom.45 A telling example of Philo’s use of the Logos is found in De Confusione Linguarum 146. There, Philo discusses the concept of ‘sons of God’, which he takes from Deuteronomy 14:1, and points out that this designation is reserved only for those who fully focus their lives on God. Those who are unable to do so, Philo argues, should place themselves under the authority of the Logos. Here he describes the Logos as ‘God’s firstborn’ (τὸν πρωτόγονον αὐτοῦ λόγον), the ‘overseer of angels’ (τὸν ἀγγέλων ὑπάρχοντα). In his next paragraph Philo says that the Logos is nothing less than ‘God’s oldest image’.46 Elsewhere Philo describes the ‘divine Logos’ as the ‘ruler of all that is’,47 or the power through which God has created and still creates all things. According to Philo, God is ‘the most important one, and the Logos is the second one’, and ‘all things exist merely because of the Logos’.48 Once Philo even goes so far as to speak of the Logos as the ‘second God’.49 Philo’s speculations on the Logos and the way in which this theology is taken up by, for instance, Ignatius and Justin Martyr, are reason enough for Daniel Boyarin to speak of a Logos-theology within early Judaism. In his book Border Lines Boyarin offers a reconstruction of what he calls the ‘partition of Judeo-Christianity’ on the basis of this Logostheology.50 According to him, in pre-Christian Jewish circles a Logostheology existed that enabled the followers of Jesus to identify him as such. The ultimate expression of this Logos-theology is, of course, the prologue to the gospel of John: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’. For Boyarin, this identification of the Logos with Jesus Christ, combined with the denial of Jesus’ divine status by other Jews, is a crucial point in the development of Rabbinic Judaism. This form of Judaism takes up the legacy of the strict and exclusive form of monotheism that was present in early Judaism. Christianity is the heir to the Logos-tradition within the same cultural and religious context.

See e.g. Legum Allegoriae 1.65; Quis Rerum Divinarum Heres 191; De Somniis 2.242–245. Cf. §147: θεοῦ γὰρ εἰκὼν λόγος ὁ πρεσβύτατος. 47 De Cherubim 36: κυβερνήτης τοῦ πὰντος λόγος θεῖος. 48 Legum Allegoriae 2.86. 49 Quaestiones et Solutiones in Genesin 2.62. 50 D. Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Divinations), Pennsylvania 2004. 45 46

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Indeed, the Logos-concept in early Judaism is an important example of the fact that this form of Judaism was not entirely focused on exclusive monotheism. Apparently there was a certain freedom of speech with regard to the status of heavenly envoys and divine representatives. This freedom could be used to such an extent that Wisdom and the Logos could be presented as personifications, as divine entities that could even be positively distinguished from God himself. Apparently this was no problem with regard to the monotheistic character of Judaism. Unique for the Herodian era? In the above I have argued, on the basis of a number of recent publications and the sources they treat, that early Judaism knew the option of an inclusive type of monotheism. YHWH was seen as the only God, but this did not exclude the possibility of the existence of heavenly figures that, for example, could act as his representatives. The idea of a heavenly hierarchy headed by YHWH enabled early Jewish authors to regard pagan deities as subordinate heavenly beings, in line with the old view of Deut 4:19 and similar texts from ancient Israel. Speculations on Wisdom and the Logos point out that in early Judaism, God-talk was not limited to God himself, but could also include other heavenly beings. These observations raise the question of whether this open, inclusive form of monotheism was limited to the Herodian era or not. With regard to its pre-history, several Old Testament passages show that this same line of thought was already present in earlier stages of Israel’s history. Perhaps the clearest example of this view is found in Psalm 82:1: ‘God has taken his place in the divine council; in the midst of the gods he holds judgment’. Here we have an example of YHWH depicted not as leader of the heavenly hierarchy, but as one of the many heavenly gods. Several other texts can be mentioned as proof that YHWH counted as such in early Israelite literature.51 The difference with the situation discussed above is that in early Judaism only YHWH counts as ‘God’, whereas the other heavenly beings are degraded to lower ranks. Thus, it seems that the inclusive monotheism of early Judaism forms the next stage in the development of monotheism: the situation of Psalm 82:1 can perhaps best be described as henotheism. Jewish

51 See among other examples Exod 15:11; 18:11; Num 33:4; Deut 10:17; Pss 50:1; 86:8; 89:7; 97:9.

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sources from the post-Herodian period mainly belong to the rabbinic corpus and reflect a stricter, exclusive form of monotheism.52 However, there is still enough evidence to infer that exclusive monotheism was not the only type of Judaism, even after the Herodian era. Special note should be taken in this respect of the magical papyri in which the God of Moses is called upon as one among many other deities. (Not all of this material is of pagan origin.53) A detailed discussion of the magical papyri would exceed the scope of this contribution, but it should be noted here that the material found in these papyri indicates that traces of inclusive monotheism can be found there too. Perhaps even the meaning of the term ‘monotheism’ is inadequate in this case. With regard to the magical papyri, Pieter van der Horst notes: ‘If syncretism is to be found anywhere, it is in the world of ancient magic’.54 The magical papyri show us that borders between at least some Jews and some pagans were fluid, even in late antiquity. Exclusive monotheism in Jesus’ day: a distorted image? Given the argument I presented above, the following question arises. How did the idea take shape that the Judaism of Jesus’ day was exclusive in its monotheism and that the Christian worship of Jesus as God’s Son, initially in a binitarian, and later in a trinitarian context, meant an incomprehensible rupture with the kind of Judaism in which Jesus himself had lived? Even today many scholars still regard the worship of Jesus as a divine person as the most important non-Jewish element in the Christ movement. In my view, there are two important elements to answering this question.

52 Midrash Tehillim, of uncertain date, related Ps 82:1 to the corrupt judges mentioned in Deut 1:17: ‘These words are to be considered in the light of Moses’ charge to the judges in Israel: Ye shall not respect persons in judgment [. . .] for the judgment is God’s. [. . .] Hence the verse He is a Judge between Elohim is to be read He is a Judge among judges. What can Elohim signify except judges as in the verse The cause of both shall come before the judges (Elohim) (Ex. 22:8)?’ This approach is characteristic of the monotheism of rabbinic Judaism. Quotation from W.G. Braude, The Midrash on Psalms (YJS 13), New Haven 1959, II.59. 53 This is a point I also argued in my contribution ‘The Eighth Book of Moses (PLeid. J 395): Hellenistic Jewish Influence in a Pagan Magical Papyrus’, in: M. Labahn & L.J. Lietaert Peerbolte (eds), A Kind of Magic: Understanding Magic in the New Testament and its Religious Environment (LNTS 306), London/New York 2007, 184–94. 54 P.W. van der Horst, ‘The Great Magical Papyrus of Paris (PGM IV) and the Bible’, in: Labahn & Lietaert Peerbolte (eds), A Kind of Magic, 173–183 (177).

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In the first place, it should be noted that the worship of Jesus as a divine messenger by members of the Christ movement was less of a novelty than is often thought. It is merely a new step in an existing development: the inclusive monotheistic line of early Judaism had already enabled talk of heavenly beings as divine messengers who shared God’s status to a certain extent, but were also regarded as subjugated to his authority. The manner of speech in which angels, Wisdom or the Logos were thought at the same time to represent God and act independently prepared the way for the early Christ movement to identify Jesus as such an envoy. The novelty in that identification is that here a historical person was pointed out as a divine envoy, even a crucified one. In the second place, the distorted image of Judaism in Jesus’ day as fully exclusive goes back to an old, but incorrect reconstruction of that specific Judaism. It has long been customary to reconstruct Jesus’ context on the basis of rabbinic sources. These texts are then used to create an image the contours of which are subsequently traced in earlier Jewish texts.55 The study of early Judaism has shown that this old approach to Judaism in Jesus’ day is flawed by a serious anachronism. Rabbinic writings such as the Mishnah and the two Talmudim, important as they are, date from a post-Christian period. Their views have been thoroughly influenced by the rise of Christianity. For this reason they not only do not reflect the Judaism of Jesus’ day, but rather they testify to a type of Judaism that was formed in response to the rise of Christianity.56 This is where a tragic misunderstanding comes to life: early Judaism and its inclusive monotheism shaped the context in which followers of Jesus identified him as the Christ, and came to consider him as a divine being. In response to the need to reshape Judaism after the fall of the temple and the rise of the Christ movement, rabbinic Judaism focused entirely on exclusive monotheism, whereas the Christ movement—gradually turning into ‘Christianity’—followed the inclusive line of thought in early Judaism. By reconstructing early Judaism on the basis of rabbinic sources a distorted picture grows, as if the Christ movement by identifying Christ as a divine envoy immediately exceeded the boundaries of Judaism. It is this tragic misunderstanding

55 Even E.P. Sanders’ classic revision of the characteristics of Judaism works along these lines; cf. Paul and Palestinian Judaism: A Comparison of Patterns of Religion, London 1977. 56 Precisely this point is reason for Boyarin to speak of Judaism and Christianity as twins, joint at the hip (Border Lines, 74–86).

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of history, caused by an uncritical reconstruction of early Judaism, that causes many of the theological misunderstandings between Judaism and Christianity. If there is one thing that follows from the above, it is that the study of early Judaism, to which Pieter W. van der Horst gave so much of his time and energy, is absolutely crucial for the understanding of both Christianity and rabbinic Judaism.57

57

I sincerely thank Ms. Renuka Wikramasinha for correcting my English.

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THE DIDACHE REDEFINING ITS JEWISH IDENTITY IN VIEW OF GENTILES JOINING THE COMMUNITY Huub van de Sandt The growing scholarly consensus over recent decades is that early Judaism exhibited great variety. There was no monolithic, uniform, orthodox Judaism at the end of the first century, but rather an enormous variety of Jewish communities. Jewish groups ranged from Galilee to Antioch, and it may be assumed that religious tradition and observance played an important role in maintaining their distinctive identity. Religious ideas were key factors in the framework which enabled individuals to share a common view of reality and confirm each other’s assumptions about the nature and purpose of life. More recently, a greater awareness that early Christian communities were long bound up with Judaism has developed. These communities understood themselves to be part of a wider community of Judaism. What about the group or groups behind the first-century Didache? Is it possible to frame the Didache community within the social history of the Jews? Or was it a sect ‘outside Judaism’, showing a qualitative otherness vis-à-vis Judaism? Does the Didache text represent the organisation, interests, strategies, and ideology of a fundamentally Jewish faction, or does it reflect the orientation of a group establishing and maintaining an identity separate from Judaism? The Didache is a compilation of several older sources which are structured into four clearly separated thematic sections: the Two Ways document (Chaps. 1–6), a liturgical treatise (Chaps. 7–10), a treatise on church organisation (Chaps. 11–15), and an eschatological section (Chap. 16). Each individual part belongs to a different literary genre, evolved over a period of time, and makes up a coherent unity. Especially the first two sections of the Didache are considered below. The additional regulations in the third section (Did. 11–15), specifying how transient outsiders must be tested so as to protect the community from troublesome visitors, are not dealt with here. In order to check the Jewishness of Did. 1–10, attention will be drawn to three interrelated textual segments in the following pages. The teaching of the Two Ways in Did. 1–6 will come up for discussion first

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(section 1). We will see that the earlier layer of the doctrine is closely connected with a Jewish pattern of the Two Ways. This Jewish form was modified, however, once the Two Ways came to be used as an initiatory catechesis for Gentile catechumens in the Didache community. In the next section, the focus will be on the ritual text presented in Did. 9–10 (section 2). The meal prayers of Did. 9–10 ultimately derive from the Hebrew form of Grace at meals, the Birkat Ha-Mazon: that is, the prayer that concludes the Jewish ritual meal. At first sight, the community whose traditions are reflected in the extant liturgical text of the Didache seems to have been composed of Christian Jews whose religious life and outlook remained close to their Jewish roots. In view of the refashioning of the strophes in Did. 9:4 and 10:5, however, we have every reason to believe that these liturgical texts were rewritten for a mainly Gentile Christian community. In the final section, the sharp polemic against the ὑποκριταί (‘hypocrites’) in Did. 8:1–2 is examined (section 3). Readers are required to deviate from the ‘hypocrites’ by observing different days of fasting and divergent customs of prayer. It will become clear that this criticism probably reflects the emergence of tensions between the Didache community and contemporary Judaism. Apparently, the contact of the members of the Didache community with Gentiles was intense enough to justify this kind of attack against its parent body. 1. Redefining the Two Ways in Didache 1–6 The opening line of the Didache, ‘There are two ways, one of life, the other of death’ (1:1), introduces the subject treated in its first part. The Way of Life (Did. 1–4) contains moral instruction which is expounded at greater length than the Way of Death, which contains a mere list of warnings (Did. 5). Then, after the warning in 6:1 to sustain and observe the aforesaid prescriptions, the subsequent verses (6:2–3) present a reduction of the previous standards for those who are unable to ‘bear the entire yoke of the Lord’. 1.1. The Two Ways Two things may be noted about the form of the Two Ways in Did. 1–6. First, one would expect the exhortation in 6:1 to conclude the Two Ways section of the Didache in its entirety: ‘See to it that no one leads you astray from this way of the doctrine, since [the person who

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would do so] teaches apart from God’. Both formulation and content suggest that the Two Ways doctrine comes to a close in Did. 6:1; this impression is strengthened by the predominant tenor in the following verses (6:2–3), which appear to reflect an atmosphere of concession. At the end of the comprehensive ethical treatise, Did. 6:2 suddenly grants that partial compliance with all previous admonitions suffices. Furthermore, with respect to food, everyone is allowed to determine what is to be eaten, and only a minimum requirement is laid down (6:3). It is important to note, therefore, that the statements in Did. 6:2–3 appear to be a later addition to a basic tradition of the Two Ways. A second remarkable feature occurs in Did. 1:3b–2:1. The passage clearly interrupts the connection between Did. 1:3a and 2:2 and it stands out from the immediate context in Chaps. 1–6 with respect to its high number of close parallels to the Gospels of Matthew and Luke. This is the more striking because a similar accumulation of traditional Gospel motifs is absent from the remainder of the Two Ways manual of Did. 1–6. The situation is in fact such that apart from the collection of Jesus tradition in 1:3b–2:1 (and the leniency in 6:2–3), there is hardly any reference to the specific Christian doctrine in the Two Ways manual of the Didache. Nowhere are obvious soteriological and Christological motifs such as the passion, death, and resurrection of Christ to be found. On the other hand, it has been observed that the text in Did. 1:1–3a. 2:2–6:1 displays numerous links with materials in sources of early Judaism. It is closely related to traditional Jewish materials in the Testament of Asher,1 the Pseudo-Clementine Homilies 7.3.3 ff.; 7.1 ff., and the Sentences of Pseudo-Phocylides.2 For these reasons, it was argued as

1 Pace M. de Jonge, who claims that ‘the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs do not offer any real help to those who want to go back to the Jewish roots of the “Two Ways”/ “Two Angels”-instruction found in the Didache, Barnabas and related sources’; see his ‘The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs and the “Two Ways”’, in: C. Hempel & J.M. Lieu (eds), Biblical Traditions in Transmission: Essays in Honour of Michael A. Knibb ( JSJSup 3), Leiden 2006, 179–94. 2 See W. Rordorf & A. Tuilier, La Doctrine des douze Apôtres (Didachè) (SC 248 bis), Paris 19982, 24; K. Niederwimmer, Die Didache (KAV 1), Göttingen 19932, 57–58 and 84–87; English Translation: The Didache (Hermeneia), Minneapolis 1998, 36–38 and 59–63, respectively. With regard to Pseudo-Phocylides, it may be argued that both instructions, like many others, belong to the gnomic literary genre; cf. K. Berger, ‘Hellenistische Gattungen im Neuen Testament’, in: ANRW II.25.2, Berlin/New York 1984, 1031–1432; 1831–85, esp. 1058–59; and M. Küchler, Frühjüdische Weisheitstraditionen: Zum Fortgang weisheitlichen Denkens im Bereich des frühjüdischen Jahweglaubens (OBO 26), Göttingen 1979, 236–302. Furthermore, both the Two Ways and Pseudo-Phocylides are confined to fairly general, comprehensive, and universal moral exhortations reflecting

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early as the end of the nineteenth century that this or a similar form of the Two Ways is derived from a Jewish origin.3 The view that a Jewish tradition is behind the present form of the Two Ways in the Didache—with the exception of Did. 1:3a–2:1 and 6:2–3—may be corroborated as follows. In addition to the Didache, the Two Ways tradition ranges across a variety of Christian documents from the first five centuries, including the Doctrina, the Letter of Barnabas 18–20 and some five later writings.4 Each of these writings is an independent witness to the ancient Two Ways tradition, in which the basic pattern is essentially the same, particularly the appearance of the two ways and the presence of a double catalogue of virtues and vices in which each of the ways consists. It is interesting to see, however, that the various forms of the Two Ways demonstrate no familiarity with the collection of Jesus tradition in Did. 1:3b–2:1 and the supplement in Did. 6:2–3. Moreover, they do not display any acquaintance with Did. 7–16. The obvious explanation for this phenomenon is that these writings are somehow affiliated with a form of the Two Ways tradition lacking these parts. In fact, it appears that these early Christian writings attest to a separate circulation of a form of the Two Ways, closely related to Did. 1–6 but without the Christian materials in 1:3b–2:1 and 6:2–3. The close resemblances between these different versions of the Two Ways (including Did. 1–6) are generally explained in modern research by their—direct or indirect—dependence upon an earlier Jewish Two Ways document which is no longer known to us.5 There are thus good particularly Jewish concerns but also commonplaces of Greek teaching. It is obvious, though, that both writings are interested in ethics, not in theology; see also P.W. van der Horst, The Sentences of Pseudo-Phocylides with Introduction and Commentary (SVTP 4), Leiden 1978, 77–80. 3 Especially the work of C. Taylor, The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles, with illustrations from the Talmud, Cambridge 1886, has been most influential in this respect. For the history of research of the Didache, cf. A. Ehrhard, Die altchristliche Litteratur und ihre Erforschung von 1884–1900. 1: Die vornicänische Litteratur (StrThSt.S 1), Freiburg im B. 1900, 37–68; C.N. Jefford, The Sayings of Jesus in the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles (VCSup 11), Leiden 1989, 1–17; J.A. Draper, ‘The Didache in Modern Research: an Overview’, in: J.A. Draper (ed.), The Didache in Modern Research (AGJU 37), Leiden/etc. 1996, 1–42. 4 As represented by the Apostolic Church Order, the Epitome of the Canons of the Holy Apostles, the Arabic Life of Shenute, the Ps.-Athanasian Syntagma Doctrinae, and the Fides CCCXVIII Patrum; see H. van de Sandt & D. Flusser, The Didache: Its Jewish Sources and its Place in Early Judaism and Christianity (CRINT III/5), Assen/Minneapolis 2002, 59–70. 5 David Flusser and I have attempted to reconstruct the Jewish prototype of this teaching, which we called the ‘Greek Two Ways’ (GTW). Because we do not have a copy of the original source extant, our knowledge is at best indirect, being only deduc-

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grounds for arguing that the materials in Did. 1–6 represent at least two layers of composition, related to two different stages in the literary history of the Two Ways. The (hypothetical) version of the pre-Didache source, except the Christianized sections of 1:3b–2:1 and 6:2–3, is reflected by and large in the wording of the Didache.6 1.2. A Gentile-Oriented Redaction of the Two Ways The basic tradition of the Two Ways doctrine put forward in Did. 1:1– 3a.2:2–6:1 may have circulated for a long time in Jewish and Christian communities apart from its eventual incorporation and modification in the Didache. In the Didache community, however, the Two Ways doctrine served a specific function as it developed into a prescriptive code as a result of Gentiles joining the community. The Two Ways came to be used to provide instruction for Gentiles in a Jewish community which had made Jesus the core of its beliefs. As a result of their education, Jews would generally have grasped what God required of them. For non-Jews, however, who had grown up in households in which pagan gods and pagan standards of morality abounded, the line of former beliefs and conduct had to be changed. The Two Ways dichotomy served as a framework for understanding the radical alteration in behaviour and commitments that the Gentile convert was expected to make. Thus, the rules for Jewish life were modified into a pre-baptismal catechesis for Gentiles entering the community, an adjustment which is shown by the phrase ‘Having said all this beforehand, baptize in the name of the Father . . .’ in Did. 7:1b. Mastery of the teaching became a prerequisite for baptism. The Two Ways’ new function of providing instruction for Gentiles brought about some changes in its form. The alterations are reflected first of all in the doctrine’s supplementary long title (‘Doctrine of the Lord [brought] to the Nations by the Twelve Apostles’) prefacing the Didache after its short title (‘Doctrine of the Twelve Apostles’). Considering the intention of the community with respect to the Gentiles and bearing in mind the character of the Two Ways in this stage as a pre-baptismal catechesis for Gentiles, the section in Did. 1:3a–2:1 is specifically a

ible from the Doctrina, Didache, and Barnabas; see Van de Sandt & Flusser, The Didache, 112–39. 6 See Van de Sandt & Flusser, The Didache, 120–22.

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Christianizing segment. The Gentiles are called upon to leave behind customary pagan values of morality and instead to embrace a higher standard of conduct. After all, the basic norms of conduct displayed in the early form of the Two Ways might equally be suited for training a Gentile to become a Jew.7 It was, therefore, important to prevent the danger that Gentile converts would be attracted by the beliefs and practices of Judaism. By inserting the lengthy collection of Jesus tradition right after 1:3a, the explanation of the double love command and the Golden Rule (1:2) was Christianized while the traditional Jewish interpretation of 1:3a in Did. 2:2–7 accordingly became the ‘second commandment’ (2:1).8 There is a strong possibility that the section of Did. 6:2–3 was also added to the Two Ways, and again by reason of the conversion of Gentiles. The passage is directed at Gentile Christians, who are not capable of bearing the entire ‘yoke of the Lord’ and may have difficulties in observing Jewish dietary laws. It represents a tuning to the perspective of Gentile believers and recommends that they keep the Mosaic Law as far as they can. An observant Jew does not have the choice mentioned here. Because the Torah was given to Israel, Jews were strictly charged to keep the Law at all costs. The same holds true for Christians of Jewish origin. Because they were convinced that the real way to ‘perfection’ was to submit to the whole Law, they faithfully observed the Torah.

7 A. Milavec, ‘The Pastoral Genius of the Didache: An Analytical Translation and Commentary’, in: J. Neusner et alii (eds), Religious Writings and Religious Systems: Systemic Analysis of Holy Books in Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Greco-Roman Religions, Ancient Israel, and Judaism 2: Christianity (BSR 2), Providence RI 1989, 89–125, esp. 121–23. 8 In this respect one might also refer to the many offences going beyond the traditional prohibitions of the second half of the Decalogue prohibiting specifically Gentile sins, like pederasty, magic, sorcery, abortion, and exposure of infants. The mention of these wrongdoings is not a specific Christian feature, however, since they are commonly found in Jewish literature. The extension was probably introduced with the purpose of providing a more thorough outline of moral standards against what were common accusations in Jewish literature against Gentile society; cf. J.-P. Audet, La Didachè: Instructions des Apôtres (ÉtB), Paris 1958, 286–89; Rordorf & Tuilier, La Doctrine des douze Apôtres, 149–51 (nn.); W. Rordorf, ‘Un chapitre d’éthique Judéo-Chrétienne: les deux voies’, in: idem, Liturgie, Foi et Vie, 155–74; published previously in RSR 60 (1972), 109–28, esp. 118; English Translation: ‘An Aspect of the Judeo-Christian Ethic: The Two Ways’, in: Draper, The Didache in Modern Research, 148–64, esp.155–56; G. Bourgeault, Décalogue et morale chrétienne: Enquête patristique sur l’utilisation et l’interprétation chrétiennes du décalogue de c. 60 à c. 220, Paris 1971, 51–53; M. Slee, The Church in Antioch in the First Century C.E. Communion and Conflict ( JSNT 244), Sheffield 2003, 78–79; A. Milavec, The Didache: Faith, Hope, & Life of the Earliest Christian Communities, 50–70 C.E., New York 2003, 131–42.

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In sum, the Two Ways tradition transmitted in the Didache has all the signs of a redacted tradition on the points that are not paralleled in the Doctrina, Barnabas, or other early recensions of the Two Ways. By supplementing the basic tradition, the independent Jewish document of Two Ways became a text of instruction intended for Gentiles who wanted to associate themselves with the Judeo-Christian community of the Didache. 2. Redefining the Birkat Ha-Mazon in Didache 9 –10 The eucharistic prayers in 9:2–4 and 10:2–5 encircle a real meal and the food consumed is not considered as ordinary food, but is regarded as something special.9 It was set aside for only the baptized members of the community, while the non-baptized were prohibited from taking part in the Eucharist ‘since the Lord has said, “Do not give what is holy to the dogs”’ (9:5d).10 2.1. The Birkat Ha-Mazon In order to properly assess the situation represented by the eucharistic prayers, it is important to recall that only in recent decades has it come to be generally accepted that the ultimate roots of the Christian Eucharist in Did. 9–10 lay in Jewish liturgical practice. The benedictions before the meal in Did. 9 evolved out of the synagogue service and the prayers after the meal in Did. 10 are probably a reworking of the Birkat Ha-Mazon that concludes the Jewish ritual meal.11 While the blessings in

9 See K. Wengst, Didache (Apostellehre). Barnabasbrief. Zweiter Klemensbrief. Schrift an Diognet (SU 2), Darmstadt 1984, 43–48; K.-G. Sandelin, Wisdom as Nourisher: A Study of an Old Testament Theme, its Development within Early Judaism and its Impact on Early Christianity (AAA.A: Humaniora 64,3), Åbo 1986, 224; R.D. Middleton, ‘The Eucharistic Prayers of the Didache’, JTS 36 (1935), 259–67, esp. 259–63; J.M. Creed, ‘The Didache’, JTS 39 (1938), 370–87, esp. 386–87; E. Mazza, The Origins of the Eucharistic Prayer, Collegeville 1995, 16–30; B. Kollmann, Ursprung und Gestalten der frühchristlichen Mahlfeier (GTA 43), Göttingen 1990, 91–98. 10 For a more elaborate discussion on the ritual text in Did. 9–10 related to the present theme, see H. van de Sandt, ‘Was the Didache Community a Group Within Judaism? An Assessment on the Basis of its Eucharistic Prayers’, in: M. Poorthuis & J. Schwartz (eds), A Holy People: Jewish and Christian Perspectives on Religious Communal Identity ( JCP 12), Leiden 2006, 85–107. 11 Most scholars nowadays agree that this is the case. See the references in Van de Sandt & Flusser, The Didache, 312, n. 122 and A.J.P. Garrow, The Gospel of Matthew’s Dependence on the Didache ( JSNTSup 254), London/New York 2004, 17–19.

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Did. 9 are compiled from different Jewish sources, those in Did. 10 come from one coherent Jewish liturgical source. Assuming ‘that the closer we get to a primitive Jewish-Christian setting, the more likely it is that a prayer would have been composed from a single similar source’ lacking a composite character, ‘Did. 10 may well be the earlier prayer’.12 In comparing the Birkat Ha-Mazon with the eucharistic Prayer in Did. 10, one notes that certain linguistic usages, structural patterns, and thematic elements are similar. Louis Finkelstein13 examined these prayers closely and presented the two texts in parallel columns. His reconstruction of the original wording of the Birkat Ha-Mazon has been preserved in manuscripts from the ninth and tenth centuries, however, and his version consequently remains a hypothetical restoration. Moreover, one must be careful about the presumption of any fixed form of Hebrew prayers in the first century ce. It seems probable that there was some variation in the phraseology of these prayers.14 On the other hand, the general structure and themes of Finkelstein’s text reflect ancient traditions and some form of his restored Birkat Ha-Mazon must have been in regular use at the end of the Second Temple period.15

12 J.W. Riggs, ‘From Gracious Table to Sacramental Elements: The Tradition-History of Didache 9 and 10’, Second Century 4 (1984), 83–101, esp. 93. Another argument showing that Didache 10 is more primitive than Didache 9 is found in J.D. Crossan, The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant, Edinburgh 1991, 361–64. See also Van de Sandt & Flusser, The Didache, 313. 13 L. Finkelstein, ‘The Birkat Ha-Mazon’, in: Idem, Pharisaism in the Making: Selected Essays, New York 1972, 333–84; published previously in JQR n.s. 19 (1928–29), 211–62, esp. 215–17. 14 See J. Heinemann, Prayer in the Talmud: Forms and Patterns (SJ 9), Berlin/New York 1977, 37–64; E. Fleischer, ‘On the Beginnings of Obligatory Jewish Prayers’, Tarbiz 59 (1990), 397–441 (Hebrew); P.F. Bradshaw, The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship: Sources and Methods for the Study of Early Liturgy, Oxford 20022, 139–40. 15 The antiquity of the Birkat Ha-Mazon as reconstructed by Finkelstein is corroborated, firstly, by the book of Jubilees (second century bce), which gives an account of Abraham, who, after a ‘good thank offering’ (22:5), pronounces his Grace after meals (22:6–9). Secondly, Finkelstein’s reconstruction roughly corresponds to the outline of the three berakhot echoed in the Mishna (m Ber. 6:8). Thirdly, there are striking parallels between the Anaphora of Addai and Mari and the Birkat Ha-Mazon; see G. Rouwhorst, ‘Jüdischer Einfluss auf christliche Liturgie’, in: A. Gerhards & H.H. Henrix (eds), Dialog oder Monolog? Zur Liturgischen Beziehung zwischen Judentum und Christentum (QD 208), Freiburg 2004, 70–90, esp. 83–84, and the references mentioned there. Finally, recent studies into the extant non-sectarian materials from the community of the Dead Sea Scrolls confirm that the initial step in the formation of fixed prayers had already been taken in the Second Temple period; see Van de Sandt & Flusser, The Didache, 271–72 and references there. Compare also E.G. Chazon, ‘Hymns and Prayers in the Dead Sea Scrolls’, in: P.W. Flint & J.C. VanderKam (eds), The Dead Sea Scrolls after Fifty Years: A Comprehensive Assessment (Vol. 1); Leiden 1998–1999, 244–70; S.C. Reif, ‘The Second Temple Period,

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If the eucharistic Prayer in Did. 10 was modelled after the Birkat Ha-Mazon, it clearly shows an inversion of the order of the first two strophes. While the Birkat Ha-Mazon is divided into three strophes, its structure has been adapted to a bipartite use in Did. 10.16 The blessingthanksgiving-supplication pattern of the Birkat Ha-Mazon becomes a prayer of thanksgiving and supplication. This reshuffle is not as improbable as it seems. It is likely that the Hellenistic Jews preferred the second benediction of the Hebrew version of Jewish Grace to be the opening blessing. The Greek verb εὐχαριστεῖν (‘to be thankful’, ‘to return thanks’) may already have been the common designation of ‘to bless at table’ in Hellenistic Judaism,17 where this alternate form of Grace probably began with the word εὐχαριστεῖν.18 Another difference between the Hebrew Grace and Did. 10 concerns the spiritualisation of the prayer in the Didache. Since the Birkat Ha-Mazon expresses the religious experience of Israel in its own particular Palestinian setting, it did not survive transplantation into the Hellenistic world without enduring profound transformations. Note, for example, the replacement of physical by spiritual food and spiritual drink (10:3), and the ‘land’ by the Name (10:2). This process of modifying the Grace after meals by spiritualising the prayers may be assigned to circles in Hellenistic Judaism.19 All this leads to the conclusion that Did. 10 is a reworking not of the Hebrew but of the Greek version of

Qumran Research, and Rabbinic Liturgy: Some Contextual and Linguistic Comparisons’, in: E.G. Chazon (ed.), Liturgical Perspectives: Prayer and Poetry in Light of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Proceedings of the Fifth International Symposium of the Orion Center for the Study of the Dead Sea Scrolls and associated Literature, 19–23 January, 2000 (STDJ 48), Leiden/Boston 2003, 133–49. 16 Cf. R.D. Middleton, ‘The Eucharistic Prayers of the Didache’, JTS 36 (1935), 259–67, esp. 263; Th.J. Talley, ‘From Berakah to Eucharistia: A Reopening Question’, Worship 50 (1976), 115–37, esp. 125–29 and, also for the following, Van de Sandt & Flusser, The Didache, 313–25. 17 Cf. Rom 14:6; 1 Cor 10:30; 1 Tim 4:3–4; and Philo, De Specialibus Legibus 2,175. 18 J. Laporte, La Doctrine eucharistique chez Philon d’Alexandrie (ThH 16), Paris 1972, 82– 84; P. Drews, ‘Untersuchungen zur Didache’, ZNW 5 (1904), 53–79, esp. 77. 19 L. Wehr, Arznei der Unsterblichkeit: Die Eucharistie bei Ignatius von Antiochien und im Johannesevangelium (NTAbh NF 18), Münster 1987, 346–47; Sandelin, Wisdom as Nourisher, 212–18; M. Dibelius, ‘Die Mahl-Gebete der Didache’, ZNW 37 (1938), 32–41; repr. in: H. Kraft & G. Bornkamm (eds), Botschaft und Geschichte: Gesammelte Aufsätze von Martin Dibelius 2: Zum Urchristentum und zur hellenistischen Religionsgeschichte, Tübingen 1956, 117–27, passim; L. Clerici, Einsammlung der Zerstreuten: Liturgiegeschichtliche Untersuchung zur Vor- und Nachgeschichte der Fürbitte für die Kirche in Didache 9,4 und 10,5 (LQF 44), Münster 1965, 37. See also Rordorf & Tuilier, La Doctrine des douze Apôtres, 179, n. 4.

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the Birkat Ha-Mazon.20 Instead of taking for granted that the eucharistic prayer of the Didache has only one layer of tradition, we must consider several stages of development. 2.2. A Gentile-Oriented Redaction of the Birkat Ha-Mazon The supplication in Did. 10:5, the second strophe of the eucharistic prayer in the Didache, is a prayer for the church and its gathering into the kingdom. The supplication, which runs parallel to Did. 9:4, is phrased as follows: Be mindful, Lord, of your church, to preserve it from all evil [or, from every evil being] and to perfect it in your love. And, once it is sanctified, gather it from the four winds, into the kingdom which you have prepared for it. For power and glory are yours forever.

The petition for the gathering of the church ‘from the four winds’ and its being brought home into the ‘kingdom’ reflects the Jewish desire that the people of Israel be gathered and united. According to Finkelstein’s reconstruction, the earliest version of the third benediction of the Jewish Grace after meals may have read as follows: Have mercy, O Lord, our God, on Israel, your people, and on Jerusalem, your city, and on Zion, the resting-place of your glory, and on your altar and on your temple. Blessed are you, O Lord, who buildest Jerusalem.21

The Didache prayer traces its origin to the third benediction of the Jewish Grace after meals.22 Surprisingly, however, the elements which constitute the substance of the supplication in the Birkat Ha-Mazon 20 See also H. van de Sandt, ‘The Egyptian Background of the “Ointment” Prayer in the Eucharistic Rite of the Didache (10:8)’, in: A. Hilhorst & G.H. van Kooten (eds), The Wisdom of Egypt: Jewish, Early Christian, and Gnostic Essays in Honour of Gerard P. Luttikhuizen (AJEC 59), Leiden/Boston 2005, 227–45, esp. 233–42; G. Alon, ‘The Halacha in the Teaching of the Twelve Apostles’, in: Draper, The Didache in Modern Research, 165–94, esp. 185, n. 67; Kollmann, Ursprung und Gestalten, 80–89; Wengst, Didache (Apostellehre), 48–49; 53, n. 177; 57, n. 192; H. Lietzmann, Messe und Herrenmahl: Eine Studie zur Geschichte der Liturgie (Arbeiten zur Kirchengeschichte 8), Berlin 1926; English Translation: Mass and Lord’s Supper: A Study in the History of the Liturgy, with Introduction and Further Inquiry by R.D. Richardson, Leiden 1979, 233–34; R.J. Ledogar, Acknowledgment: Praise-verbs in the Early Greek Anaphora, Rome 1968, 127–28; H. Koester, Synoptische Überlieferung bei den apostolischen Vätern (TU 65), Berlin 1957, 193. 21 Finkelstein, ‘The Birkat Ha-Mazon’ (1928–29), 233. 22 See, e.g., Rordorf & Tuilier, La Doctrine des douze Apôtres, 181, n. 7; Niederwimmer, Die Didache, 198–99; Finkelstein, ‘The Birkat Ha-Mazon’ (1928–29), 216; 230–33; Riggs, ‘From Gracious Table’, 93.94 and 97.

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(‘Jerusalem, your city’, ‘Zion’, ‘your altar’, and ‘your temple’) do not return in the Didache prayer. True, we don’t know to what extent the Hellenistic Jewish model behind the Didache prayers already reflected this expectation as the Greek version of the Jewish table prayers has been lost to us. Therefore, the deficiency in the third strophe of the text in Did. 10 need not necessarily reflect a deliberate de-judaization innovated by the Didache community but may witness to an archaic tendency which was already firmly rooted in Hellenistic Judaism. The abandonment of the hope that the people of God would return to Jerusalem may have occurred before the Christianization of the Birkat Ha-Mazon. In order to decide whether terms like ‘Jerusalem’, ‘Zion’, and ‘temple’ were already lacking in the third berakhah of the Hellenistic synagogue, it is particularly instructive to see, firstly, that first-century Jerusalem was a pillar of Jewish identity inside and outside Israel. Jerusalem was a boundary-defining term. The eyes of all pious Jews—in the Land as well as in the Diaspora—were directed to Jerusalem. Those abroad sent gifts to the Temple in order to contribute to the sacrificial cult. If they were able, they went on pilgrimage during the three great feasts.23 For all Jews, in Palestine and in the Dispersion, Jerusalem is the ‘holy city’ (ἱερόπολις)24 or the ‘mother-city’ (μητρόπολις).25 Secondly, the hope that the Diaspora would return to the lofty city was kept alive. The longing for the triumphant reunion of Israel is reflected in the biblical expectation of salvation for the people of Israel.26 23 E.S. Gruen, Diaspora: Jews Amidst Greeks and Romans, Cambridge MA/London 2002, 243–47; S. Safrai, ‘Relations between the Diaspora and the Land of Israel’, in: S. Safrai & M. Stern (eds), The Jewish People 1 (CRINT 1/1), Assen/Philadelphia 1974, 191–201. 24 See Philo, Legatio ad Gaium 281; cf. also 225; 288; 299; 346. Cf. also Gruen, Diaspora, 239. 25 See Philo, In Flaccum 46 and compare also his Legatio ad Gaium 203; 278; 281; 294; 305; 334. See also J. Leonhardt, Jewish Worship in Philo of Alexandria (TSAJ 84), Tübingen 2001, 293–94; Gruen, Diaspora, 242–43; M.R. Niehoff, Philo on Jewish Identity and Culture (TSAJ 86), Tübingen 2001, 33–44; P.W. van der Horst, Philo’s Flaccus: The First Progrom (Philo of Alexandria Commentary Series 2), Leiden/Boston 2003, 142. Other indications of the centrality of Jerusalem are found in Jub. 8:19 where Mount Zion is called the ‘midst of the navel of the earth’ (cf. also Josephus, Bellum judaicum 3.52) and in apocalyptic apocrypha where Zion-Jerusalem is referred to as the mother of all Israelites (4 Ezra 10:7, 38–44; cf. also 2 Bar 3:1–3) who has brought up her children (Bar 4:8–10). 26 See Deut 30:1–5a; Isa 11:12; 27:13; 43:5–7; 49:22; 56:8; Jer 23:8; 31:8.10; 39:37 (LXX); Ezek 11:17; 20:34; 28:25; 34:11–16; 37:21; 39:27; Mic 2:12–13; 4:12; Pss 106:47; 147:2; Neh 1:8–9; Zech 2:10 (LXX); 8:7–8; 10:6–13; 1 Chron 16:35; 2 Macc

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These ideas continued to flourish in later Judaism,27 and the future hope of a restored Jerusalem is sustained by prayers.28 Jerusalem was the city of salvation in the eschatological age, where God would take up his residence again and inaugurate his royal rule. The dispersion was seen as a painful experience, the bitter destiny of God’s chosen people.29 They had to survive the hard fate of the Diaspora and envisaged the restoration to be reserved for the messianic age. Jerusalem is thus one of the cardinal tenets of Second Temple Judaism, a principal factor accounting for the uniqueness of first-century Judaism. In sum, the transfer of the gathering of Israel to the Christian church in Did. 10:5 (and 9:4), without any reference to the symbolic centre of Jewish ethnicity, is a conspicuous characteristic of a Gentile-oriented refashioning.30 The prayer for the political restoration of Israel in the third benediction of the Birkat Ha-Mazon has turned into a prayer for the gathering of the church. It represents a discontinuity in the peopleof-God concept, since the Christians’ eschatological hope is no longer linked to Palestine and Jerusalem. The Didache liturgy thus shows indications of a community which has lost this sense of group identity within a Jewish matrix.

2:7.18; Tob 13:5; Sir 36:11; 51:12 (f ). 27 2 Macc 1:27; 2:18; 1 En 57:1; 90:34; Pss Sol 8:28; 11:2–6; 17:26.28.31.34–36.43– 44; 2 Bar 77–78; 4 Ezra 13:39; Philo, De Praemiis et Poenis 117; De Exsecrationibus 165; b.Meg 29a; b.Pes 117a; etc.; cf. P. Volz, Die Eschatologie der jüdischen Gemeinde im neutestamentlichen Zeitalter, Tübingen 1934, 344–50. 28 Ps 147:2; Sir 36 (33):1–16; 51:12a-q (Hebr.); 2 Macc 1:24–29; Ps Sol 8:27–28; 17:30–31; and the 10th benediction of the Tefilla; cf. Clerici, Einsammlung der Zerstreuten, 65–102; Niederwimmer, Die Didache, 188 and n. 54. 29 R. Feldmeier, Die Christen als Fremde: Die Metapher der Fremde in der antiken Welt, im Urchristentum und im 1. Petrusbrief (WUNT 64), Tübingen 1992, 63–69. 30 The situation among early Christians was quite different. At variance with the Jewry of Alexandria and Philo, some early Christian writings toned down the importance of the earthly and physical city of Jerusalem in favour of the celestial one. In the polemical passage of Gal 4:25–26, Paul clearly attacks his opponents, who claim that the present Jerusalem is their mother, probably suggesting that their views emphasizing the observance of the Law were supported by Jerusalem. For Paul, however, earthly Jerusalem stands in sharp contrast to the celestial one. 1 Peter and the Epistle to the Hebrews also reveal that the present city of Jerusalem, to which the Christians should have no desire to return, has been replaced as the centre of hope. The letter to the Hebrews (13:13–14) makes it clear that the new and better covenant provides access to the heavenly Jerusalem, the city of the living God.

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3. Redefining Former Jewish Identity by Polemicizing in Did. 8 It is primarily the directives at the beginning of the liturgical treatise in Did. 8:1–2 which reveal social tensions: Let your fasts not [coincide] with [those of ] the hypocrites. They fast on Monday and Thursday; you, though, should fast on Wednesday and Friday. And do not pray as the hypocrites [do]; pray instead this way, as the Lord directed in his gospel: ‘Our Father in heaven, . . .’ (8:1–2a)

The congregation is required to deviate from the ὑποκριταί (‘hypocrites’) by fasting on different days and observing divergent prayer customs. Opponents are disparagingly characterized as ‘hypocrites’ here and again in the next verse. Who were these ‘hypocrites’?31 What particular group was targeted by this Didache accusation? A possible suggestion, which is widely advocated, proposes that the term reflects the rivalry between a JewishChristian faction within the boundary of Judaism and another Jewish group. In recent years it has repeatedly been suggested that the label ὑποκριταί might refer to Pharisees in particular. According to Peter J. Tomson, the polemical demarcation vis-à-vis the ‘hypocrites’ in Did. 8 reflects the schism between the Didache community and the Pharisees. The conflict comes down to two points. First, the Didache chooses Wednesdays and Fridays as fasting days in deliberate contrast to the Pharisees and rabbis, who favoured Mondays and Thursdays. Second, the Didache maintains an alternative Jewish tradition when requiring the Lord’s Prayer to be recited three times a day.32 Marcello Del Verme also takes the term ‘hypocrites’ to refer to the Pharisees. He considers the problem raised here to be a calendar conflict. The Essenes used a solar calendar, while the Pharisees employed a 31 We do not focus at length here on the precise meaning of the expression, but agree with Kurt Niederwimmer and Jonathan Draper that the term involves strong negative associations including deviance, dishonesty, and apostasy, expressing ‘the contrast between two groups’; cf. Niederwimmer, Die Didache, 165–66; J.A. Draper, ‘Do the Didache and Matthew Reflect an “Irrevocable Parting of the Ways” with Judaism?’, in: H. van de Sandt (ed.), Matthew and the Didache: Two Documents from the same Jewish-Christian Milieu?, Assen/Minneapolis 2005, 217–41, esp. 230–31. 32 P.J. Tomson, ‘The wars against Rome, the rise of Rabbinic Judaism and of Apostolic Gentile Christianity, and the Judaeo-Christians; elements for a synthesis’, in: P.J. Tomson & D. Lambers-Petry (eds), The Image of the Judaeo-Christians in Ancient Jewish and Christian Literature (WUNT 158), Tübingen 2003, 1–31, esp. 9–10 and n. 40; idem, ‘The Halakhic Evidence of Didache 8 and Matthew 6 and the Didache Community’s Relationship to Judaism’, in: Van de Sandt, Matthew and the Didache, 131–41.

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lunar or luni-solar one. The group criticized in Did. 8 (called ὑποκριταί) was of Pharisaic origin, while the other reproaching them was the Essene/Enochic offshoot. The argument, then, is about the question of fasting in a context of Jewish rival groups, both of whom adhere to Jesus’ teachings. Both groupings were searching for their own identity in the new communal situation of Christian Judaism. Those Christian Jews retaining the Enochic tradition (represented by the editor of the Didache) accused the ὑποκριταί of being dissident by considering Monday and Thursday eligible for days of fasting as they ‘perpetuated the ancient Pharisaic error (“hypocrisy”)’.33 They preferred the festival days of Wednesday and Friday as fast days on account of their particular importance in the ancient solar calendar. Finally, Jonathan A. Draper also claims that the term ὑποκριταί refers to a particular category of Jews, i.e., the Pharisees, since there is no reference that pious Jews ‘in general’ kept the Monday and Thursday as fast days and prayed three times a day.34 The word ‘hypocrite’ in Did. 8:1–2 is not directed against Judaism, but expresses opposition of a Jewish community to the practice of the nascent rabbinic movement. It points to a Jewish quarrel. In his opinion, the wording ‘hypocrites’ reminds us of the accusation of hypocrisy made against Pharisees in the Gospel of Matthew. The close relationship between Did. 8 and Matthew 6:1–18 indicates that the first document, or materials akin to it, might have been the design underlying Matthew’s choice. The strong agreements between Matthew and the Didache, he states in a recent article on the subject,35 point out that these documents come from the same Jewish community at a different stage of development. According to Tomson, Del Verme, and Draper, the Didache community was still embedded in Judaism when the Didache was edited. The writing was probably composed after the Jewish war, in the period when the influence of the rabbis, the successors to the Pharisees, grew. The rise of rabbinism in this period is coupled with the consolidation of the rabbinic academy in Yavne ( Jamnia), and led to the promulgations of legal decisions which laid claim to religious authority. Members of the Didache community felt bitter about the Jewish central authority’s

33 M. Del Verme, Didache and Judaism: Jewish Roots of an Ancient Christian-Jewish Work, New York/London 2004, 185. 34 See J.A. Draper, ‘Christian Self-Definition against the “Hypocrites” in Didache VIII’, in: idem, The Didache in Modern Research, 223–43. 35 Draper, ‘Do the Didache and Matthew Reflect’, 230–35; 240–41.

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attempts to manage their lives and resented the rabbis gaining control of the public sphere. However attractive the Pharisees-hypothesis may be, it seems unjustified to associate the ‘hypocrites’ in Did. 8:1 with the Pharisees of the Gospels. Two points may be noted. First of all, there is Aaron Milavec’s comment on the ‘hypocrites’ in Did. 8:1–2. He explains that the custom to fast twice a week was by no means characteristic of Pharisees: ‘Nothing in the Gospels or the Mishnah includes any hint that the Pharisees distinguished themselves by fasting, whereas the rest of the Jewish population failed to fast or fasted on different days’. Mondays and Thursdays were the favoured fasting days. These were also market days and because the villagers used to gather in town on these days, they offered a good opportunity for Scripture reading and tribunal sessions. Since fasts were connected with the public assemblies, Milavec concludes that ‘when a public fast was in effect, therefore, it was evident that the Jews who assembled fasted in solidarity, irrespective of whether they were Pharisees or not’.36 The second and main point relates to the immediate context of Did. 8:1–2. The statement in Did. 7:4 points towards considering the term ὑποκριταί an assault against Jews generally. According to the description in Did. 7, the ritual of baptism had to comply with several requirements in order to be in accordance with the rules. One such regulation mentioned in 7:4 is the practice of fasting prior to baptism:37 Before the baptism, let the person baptizing and the person being baptized—and others who are able—fast; and you shall urge the one being baptized to fast one or two [days] before.

A pre-baptismal fast extending over one or two days is obligatorily imposed here upon the candidate.38 The text also requires the celebrant to fast with him and invites the community at large to share the novice’s fasting to express their solidarity with the novice.

Milavec, The Didache, 302–03. For a more elaborate argumentation concerning the days of fasting and baptism on the basis of Did. 7:4 in 8:1, respectively, see F.R. Prostmeier, ‘Unterscheidenes Handeln. Fasten und Taufen gemäss Did 7,4 und 8,1’, in: J.J. Bauer, ΦIΛOΦΡONHCIC: für Norbert Brox (GTS 19), Graz 1995, 55–75. 38 The verb κελεύω (‘to command/urge’) is used here to show that, in comparison to the preceding imperative προνηστευσάτω, a higher degree of compulsion is implied in the carrying out of this instruction. 36 37

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In order to make it possible for members of the community to join the novice in fasting, the choice of these individual fast days probably was in line with community practice. To some extent, those days probably matched the official fast days stated in Did. 8:1. Whereas the ‘hypocrites’ fasted on Mondays and Thursdays, the readers of the Didache should keep Wednesdays and Fridays as their fast days. It is difficult to escape the impression that fasting on Mondays and Thursdays was out of the question at all events. When a baptismal candidate undertook a private fast for a two-day period, therefore, only Tuesday-Wednesday or Friday-Saturday was eligible. In the latter case, the days concerned were the preparation day for Sabbath and the Sabbath itself. In line with the above considerations, a further question is in order. On which day were the initiates to be baptized? The Didache specifies no day of the week. According to Did. 9:5, baptism conveys the right to participate in the Eucharist and, on further reflection, there probably was a direct link between baptism and Eucharist. The baptismal ritual is likely to have taken place immediately before the sacred meal. Evidence in Christian communities supporting this assumption is found in Justin Martyr’s 1 Apology 65–66 and the Apostolic Tradition 21,39 where initiation is followed by ‘prayers of the faithful’, the ‘kiss of peace’, and the Eucharist.40 Relevant to our present discussion with respect to the day most suited for baptism in the Didache community is the temporal indication κατὰ κυριακὴν δὲ κυρίου (‘on the Sunday of the Lord’) in Did. 14:1. This pleonastic phrase emphasizes the Sunday as the day of the celebration of the Eucharist.41 The gathering on this day offered 39 ‘The core material’ (of this chapter) ‘may well go back to the mid-second century’; cf. P.F. Bradshaw, M.E. Johnson & L.E. Phillips, The Apostolic Tradition (Hermeneia), Minneapolis 2002, 124. 40 Additional evidence is found in J.A. Draper, ‘Ritual Process and Ritual Symbol in Didache 7–10’, VC 54 (2000) 121–58, esp. 127–28. Jonathan Draper argues that the basic structure of instruction, that is, fasting, baptism, prayer, and sacred meal, represents the final stage in a process of initiation. See also W. Rordorf, Der Sonntag: Geschichte des Ruhe- und Gottesdiensttages im ältesten Christentum (ATANT 43), Zürich 1962, 257–68; Milavec, The Didache, 239. 41 Cf. also Prostmeier, ‘Unterscheidenes Handeln’, 68, n. 50; Milavec, The Didache, 238–39. The emphasis on the Sunday as the κυριακὴν δὲ κυρίου (‘Sunday of the Lord’) might indicate a polemic against those who still preferred the Sabbath to the Lord’s day for the weekly celebration of the Eucharist; cf. Rordorf & Tuilier, La Doctrine des douze Apôtres, 64–5. Evidence from other sources (Gal 4:8–11; Col 2:16–17 and Ignatius, Letter to the Magnesians 9:1–2) indicating that some Christian circles continued to observe the Sabbath strengthens this impression. Some scholars have argued that κυριακή seems to refer to Easter Day; cf. A. Strobel, ‘Die Passa-Erwartung als urchristliches Problem in Lc. 17,20f ’, ZNW 49 (1958) 157–96, esp. 184–85 and n.

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a good opportunity for welcoming newly baptized novice(s) as most of the members of the community would be present. If this applies, we are dealing here with a serious neglect of the Sabbath. Fasting one or two days in advance of the ceremony of baptism occurring on a Sunday would entail a violation of the Sabbath.42 Even the strictest Jewish sects objected to fasting on this weekly feast day. The seventh day of the week was the Jewish day of rest, on which it was forbidden to go without food until midday.43 The only fixed fast day that was celebrated on a Sabbath was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. All the other days of fasting, if they coincided with Sabbath, were postponed or advanced by a day. The conclusion to be drawn from the implicit choice of the Sabbath as a fast day might signal that the Didache has dropped—at least in this respect—the observance of the Jewish Sabbath. The statement formulated in 7:4 reflects a non-Jewish vantage point rather than a particularly Jewish position and perspective. As noted above, a similar situation obtains with respect to Did. 9:4 and 10:5. The Christian longing for a gathering of the dispersed church into the kingdom reflected in the eucharistic prayers of Did. 9–10 does not include the Jewish hope for a restoration of Israel and Jerusalem. The material is extensive enough to at least suggest that the silence regarding Sabbath observance and the omission of the Jewish expectation in the meal ritual are the product of

104; C.W. Dugmore, ‘Lord’s Day and Easter’, in Neotestamentica et Patristica, 272–81, esp. 275–78. This hypothesis, however, is doubtful; cf. Niederwimmer, Die Didache, 235, n. 8. According to a recent proposition of Tidwell (‘Didache XIV:1’), the expression κατὰ κυριακὴν δὲ κυρίου in the opening phrase of Did. 14 refers to a Jewish-Christian observance of Yom Kippur. This suggestion is not convincing either; see Van de Sandt & Flusser, The Didache, 303, n. 99. 42 It was a duty to enjoy the Sabbath with a good meal (Neh 8:10; Tob 2:1). Fasting was not allowed on the Sabbath because it was a feast day ( Jub 50:10.12) and according to Judith 8:6 this prohibition also applies to the day preceding it; cf. E. Schürer, The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ (175 B.C.–A.D. 135), rev. by G. Vermes, F. Millar & M. Goodman (Vol. 2), Edinburgh 1979, 470, n. 30 and 483, n. 109. In b.Taan 17b (= b.RH 19a) the prohibitory rule is phrased as follows: ‫‘( שׁבתות רימים טרבים הן אסורין לפניהן ולאחריהן מותרים‬On Sabbaths and Holy days, it is forbidden [to fast]; on [the days] preceding and following them, it is permitted.’). 43 ‫‘( אסור להתﬠנות ﬠד שׁשׁ שׁﬠות בשׁבת‬It is forbidden to fast until the sixth hour on the Sabbath’) in p.Taan 3, 67a (= p.Ned 8, 40d). The same law may be referred to by Josephus in his Life 54: ἕ̈κτη ὥρα, καθἣν τοῖς σάββασιν ἀριστοποιεῖσθαι νόμιμόν ἐστιν ἡμῖν (‘[and a riot would inevitably have ensued], had not the arrival of the sixth hour, at which it is our custom on the Sabbath to take our midday meal, [broken off the meeting]’); cf. H.St.J. Thackeray, Josephus in Nine Volumes. 1: The Life. Against Apion (LCL 186), Cambridge MA/London 1976 (repr.), 105.

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a Gentile refashioning. The invalidation of former hallmarks of Jewish identity suggests a Gentile Christian influence and a polemic use of the term ‘hypocrites’ against Jews in general.44 Conclusion The Didache community was a congregation in transition from a Jewish-Christian context to an increasingly Gentile one. The shifts in the practice of fasting and the content of the eucharistic prayers indicate that new sociological boundaries between insiders and outsiders were drawn. The clash in Did. 8:1–2 with the community’s adversaries shows that the congregation may have experienced difficulties, occasioned by the fact that many of its members retained residual loyalty to Jewish traditions. It may be assumed that individual members of the Didache community still kept the Sabbath and used some form of the Birkat Ha-Mazon in prayer. As the number of Gentiles in the community increased, these practices doubtless caused considerable tension between non-Jewish Christians and Judaizing Christians within the Didache community. It might, therefore, be somewhat misleading to designate this firstcentury manual a ‘church order’ as though it were a comprehensive church manual. It does probably not represent an accurate picture of all aspects of life of the community behind the document. It rather seems to embody a selective collection of rules seeking to settle particularly controversial questions in the sphere of community discipline.45 In 44 Many scholars agree that the term ‘hypocrites’ refers to pious Jews generally; cf., for example, R. Knopf, Die Lehre der zwölf Apostel. Die zwei Clemensbriefe (HNT.E 1), Tübingen 1920, 23; Koester, Synoptische Überlieferung, 203; Audet, La Didachè, 367–68; Wengst, Didache (Apostellehre), 29–30; Niederwimmer, Die Didache, 165–67; Jefford, The Sayings of Jesus, 102, n. 25 and 106. There are other views as well. Aaron Milavec (The Didache; 304–06; cf. 800–02) believes that the hypocrites were Jews and Jewish Christians who promoted temple piety among Gentile converts. Willy Rordorf and André Tuilier suggest that the hypocrites were Judaizing Christian dissidents, that is, Jewish Christians who subscribed to the ritual practices of Judaism; see La Doctrine des douze Apôtres, 37. For arguments against this view, see Wengst, Didache (Apostellehre), 29–30, n. 109. Michelle Slee argues that the opponents were members of a Christian Pharisaic group who sought ‘to undermine the Didachist’s teachings’ (The Church in Antioch, 93). 45 See also G. Schöllgen, ‘Die Didache als Kirchenordnung. Zur Frage des Abfassungszweckes und seinen Konsequenzen für die Interpretation’, in: JAC 29 (1986) 5–26; English translation: ‘The Didache as a Church Order: An Examination of the Purpose for the Composition of the Didache and its Consequences for its Interpretation’, in Draper, The Didache in Modern Research, 43–71, esp. 20; G. Schöllgen, ‘Die literarische

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Chapters 1–10, in any case, the Didache, by reinforcing its social identity, attempts to overcome the fear that the community would fall apart. The assault against outsiders is used as a criticism of insiders serving as a means to prevent people within the Christian community from imitating Jewish practices. It is not so much a request of the gentiles who believed in Jesus, but rather the fear of disintegration of the community which caused the characteristics of Jewish identity to cede to those necessary for maintaining a common Christian distinctiveness. The Didache attempts to overcome the tension by strengthening the community’s social identity. Syria (the region where the Didache most likely was composed), and Antioch in particular, boasted a mixture of different peoples, religions, and traditions.46 The Didache community may have been engaged in a process of social dissociation and reorganisation of its former JewishChristian identity and tradition. Jewish traditions and prayers which might have been operative earlier in the community were replaced with a modified and transformed worship reflecting the liturgical traditions that were maintained by the majority at the time. The required pre-baptismal catechesis was Christianized. The keeping of Sabbath was abrogated. This and, in addition, the use of the complete set of eucharistic prayers as a substitute for the Jewish Birkat Ha-Mazon, were intended to prevent a seemingly irreversible division within the community.

Gattung der syrischen Didaskalie’, in: H.J.W. Drijvers, et alii (eds), IV Symposium Syriacum 1984. Literary Genres in Syriac Literature (OCA 229), Rome 1987, 149–59. 46 M. Zetterholm, The Formation of Christianity in Antioch: A Social-scientific Approach to the Separation between Judaism and Christianity, London/New York 2003, 18–41.

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BERESHIT BARA ELOHIM Bereshit Rabba, Parashah 1, Reconsidered Peter Schäfer The Jewish creation theology as it is reflected in the Midrash Bereshit Rabba (BerR), is by no means a new subject. Since BerR is the first rabbinic text that unequivocally refers to the question of the creation out of nothing (creatio ex nihilo),1 it has attracted considerable attention among scholars.2 But the no doubt exciting yet highly charged problem of whether the world was created out of nothing or out of some pre-existent material was clearly not BerR’s main concern; rather the Midrash presents itself as a carefully crafted document, composed by a sophisticated editor, who uses a wide variety of available exegetical material dealing with creation. Most scholars agree that BerR was edited in the first half of the fifth century in Palestine, at approximately the same time when the Talmud Yerushalmi was edited.3 The first parashah of BerR, entirely devoted to Gen 1:1, is a particularly rich kaleidoscope of creation material. Instead of treating certain topics in isolation, however theologically relevant they might be, I will focus on the structure of the parashah. That is, I will analyze the parashah as a literary unit, deliberately put together by an editor, who, in the peculiar way in which it has been fashioned, wants to convey a message. In other words, I am interested in the meaning of the parashah’s individual components (sub-units) and how they are combined to form an integrated whole with, presumably, a distinct

1 BerR 1:5 and 1:9 according to the critical edition by J. Theodor & Ch. Albeck, Midrash Bereshit Rabba: Critical Edition with Notes and Commentary, Jerusalem 19652. 2 One of my own earliest articles dealt, in quite a preliminary way, with this question (‘Bereshit bara’ ’elohim: Zur Interpretation von Genesis 1,1 in der rabbinischen Literatur’, JSJ 2 (1971), 161–66). See most recently M.R. Niehoff, ‘Creatio ex Nihilo Theology in Genesis Rabbah in Light of Christian Exegesis’, HTR 99 (2005), 37–64; M. Kister, ‘Tohu wa-Bohu: Primordial Elements and Creatio ex Nihilo’, JSQ 14 (2007), 229–256. 3 G. Stemberger, Einleitung in Talmud und Midrasch, München 19928, 275. The attempt to locate Bereshit Rabbah more precisely in Caesarea (Maritima) stems from the desire to connect it with Christian exegesis, in particular with Origen; see Niehoff, ‘Creatio ex Nihilo’, 41f.

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message. In doing so, I follow the lead of Jacob Neusner4 and, in particular, Philip Alexander.5 Whereas Neusner has contributed some rather impressionistic insights into the literary make-up of the parashah, Alexander has paved the way to a deeper understanding of its theological message. I will use the Theodor-Albeck critical edition of BerR and the translations provided by Harry Freedman6 and Jacob Neusner.7 Furthermore, I follow the numbering and sequence of the parashah’s sub-units employed by Theodor-Albeck who used the manuscript British Museum Add. 27169 as their basic text.8 Constraints with regard to the size of this article prevent me from quoting the respective sub-units of the parashah verbatim; the reader is advised to refer to the translations in Freedman and Neusner. BerR 1:1 This first sub-unit that opens the Midrash BerR is a petihah, linking the Seder verse Gen 1:1 with the petihah verse Prov 8:30, a verse from the Ketuvim. Its alleged author is R. Oshaya, a Palestinian Amora of the first generation and student of Bar Qappara (who figures prominently in the parashah: see 1:5 and 1:10) as well as the teacher of R. Yohanan b. Nappaha (see 1:3), who flourished in Sepphoris and (later) Caesarea. The unit is divided into two sections, (1) a series of interpretations of the difficult word amon in Prov. 8:30, followed by (2) a midrash that is built upon the reading of amon as uman (‘workman, craftsman’). The Torah reveals itself as the ‘working tool’ (keli umanuto) of God: just as a

4 J. Neusner, Genesis Rabbah: The Judaic Commentary to the Book of Genesis. A New American Translation, Vol. 1, Parashiyyot One through Thirty-Three on Genesis 1:1 to 8:14, Atlanta 1985, 1–20. See also his ‘Genesis Rabbah as Polemic: An Introductory Account’, HAR 9 (1985), 252–65. 5 P.S. Alexander, ‘Pre-Emptive Exegesis: Genesis Rabbah’s Reading of the Story of Creation’, JJS 43 (1992), 230–45. 6 H. Freedman, Midrash Rabba, Vols. 1–2 (Genesis), London 1939. 7 Neusner, Genesis Rabba, 1–20. 8 On this choice and the other manuscripts of BerR, see Stemberger, Einleitung, 276– 78. In ms Vatican Ebr. 60, the earliest BerR manuscript but not known to TheodorAlbeck (10th century?), the very beginning of the work is missing, and the manuscript begins in the middle of what is in the Theodor-Albeck edition unit 6 of the first parashah; then it goes on to unit 7, units 2, 3, 4, and unit 8. So in all likelihood it corresponds to the order in the London manuscript used by Theodor and Albeck. ms Vatican Ebr. 30, slightly younger than Ebr. 60, is of no use for our purpose because the beginning is missing (the first page of the surviving manuscript belongs to the third parashah).

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human king, when he wants to build a palace, uses an architect who in turn employs work-plans, in the same way did God consult the Torah when he set out to create the world.9 Hence, the Torah is the uman (the workman as well as the work-plan) of God, and the beginning of the verse Gen 1:1 (bereshit bara elohim) must be understood, in the light of Prov 8:20, not as ‘In the beginning God created heaven and earth’ but ‘By means of reshit = Torah did God create heaven and earth’.10 This famous parable is a dramatic beginning of the Midrash BerR. It presents the Torah as the blueprint of the world in the double sense of the master plan that God follows in creating the world but also of the document that contains in it, in nuce, everything that will eventually unfold during the process of creation in its full historical dimension. Our editor could not state more dramatically and more clearly that there exists nothing more important than the Torah—and by ‘Torah’ he unquestionably means the book of the Torah known to the rabbis. World and Torah are intimately and intrinsically linked. The Torah, origin and goal of all creation, is indeed what holds the world together at heart. There is no world without Torah, and no Torah without world. One could hardly think of a more rabbinic explanation of the first verse of Genesis. BerR 1:5 This is a petihah connecting Gen 1:1 with the petihah verse Ps 31:19, put in the mouth of Rav Huna in the name of Bar Qappara. Bar Qappara is a Tanna of the fifth and last generation that leads to the first generation of Amoraim (early third century). He was the teacher, among others, of R. Oshaya who opens the very first sub-section of BerR and founded an academy in the ‘South’, presumably in Lydda.11 Similar to the first sub-section, the petihah begins with interpreting a difficult word in the petihah verse, this time te alamnah: ‘Let the lying lips be made dumb (te alamnah)’, translating it into Aramaic and making clear that it indeed

Interestingly enough, whereas in most rabbinic parables referring to a human king God is portrayed as acting differently from the human king, here he does precisely the same: he uses an architect/work-plan. 10 That reshit refers to Torah is proven by yet another verse from Proverbs: ‘The LORD made me as the beginning (reshit) of his way’ (Prov 8:22). 11 Stemberger, Einleitung, 90; Niehoff, ‘Creatio ex Nihilo’, 55, opts for Caesarea— again because of the proximity to Origen. 9

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means ‘be bound’, ‘be made dumb’, ‘be silenced’. The lying lips that must be silenced, the petihah continues explaining the petihah verse Ps 31:19, are the lips ‘that speak arrogantly against the righteous’. ‘The righteous’ is understood as referring to God, and speaking arrogantly against him as revealing things that God wants to be kept away (kept secret) from his creatures. And finally, the continuation of the petihah verse ‘with pride and contempt’ (Ps 31:19) is interpreted as proudly expounding the ‘work of creation’ (ma aśeh bereshit) and contemptuously disgracing the honor of God. The reference to the ‘work of creation’ alludes, of course, to the well-known mishnah in Æagiga 2:1: ‘Forbidden sexual relations may not be expounded (en doreshin ba- arayot)12 by/to13 three, nor the work of creation (ma aśeh bereshit) by/to two, nor the Merkabah by/to an individual, unless he is wise [a scholar] and understands14 on his own’. The ‘work of creation’—that is, the exegesis of Gen 1—belongs to the topics that the Mishnah wants to be restricted, taking a middle position between expounding forbidden sexual relations (least restricted) and expounding the Merkabah (that is, Ezek 1: most restricted). From this it becomes clear that it is the ‘work of creation’ that God wants to keep secret from his creatures: whoever expounds Gen 1, disgraces God’s honor. As in the first petihah, a parable is added to explain what precisely this means—and to lead back from the petihah verse Ps 31:19 to the Seder verse Gen 1:1: If a human king builds his palace at a place of sewage, garbage, and rubbish—does not one of his subjects, who passes by and publicly points to this unpleasant fact, disgrace the king? Similarly, everyone who publicly points to the fact that ‘this world is created from15 tohu and bohu and darkness—does he not disgrace [God]?’ The petihah climaxes in another dictum by Rab Huna in the name of Bar Qappara which closes the circle and explicitly refers to Gen 1:1f.:

Lit. ‘One does not expound arayot.’ Here and in the following two cases all Mishnah manuscripts have the preposition be- (‘by’); only ms Cambridge reads le- (‘to’); see D. Halperin, The Merkabah in Rabbinic Literature, New Haven 1980, 11, n. 3. 14 So mss Cambridge and Munich; mss Parma and Kaufmann have ‘and has understood.’ 15 The shift from the palace created at a place of sewage, garbage, and rubbish in the mashal part of the parable to the world created from tohu, bohu, and darkness in the nimshal part does not concern our author. 12 13

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If the matter were not (explicitly) written [in Scripture], it would be impossible to state it: God created heaven and earth (Gen 1:1)—from what? From: and the earth was tohu and bohu etc. (Gen 1:2).

This is an exceptionally bold and clear statement, presumably the earliest one in rabbinic Judaism that refers to a doctrine of creation out of pre-existing matter (creatio ex hylis). Obviously, Bar Qappara reads Gen 1:1–3 in the same way as, much later, Rashi understood it (and the JPS English version translates it), namely: ‘(1) When God began to create (reading bereshit bero elohim instead of bereshit bara elohim) heaven and earth—(2) the earth being unformed (tohu) and void (bohu), with darkness (hoshekh) over the surface of the deep (tehom) and a wind (ruah) from Good sweeping over the water—(3) God said: Let there be light!’ According to this translation, the first thing that God created was light, and what is listed in the parenthesis was already there, as pre-existent matter, when God started his creation with the light. The philosophical or theological context of this statement is difficult to determine—whether, still untroubled by a doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, it ‘innocently’ propagates a creatio ex hylis, or, on the contrary, whether it explicitly and aggressively argues against an already existing doctrine of creatio ex nihilo—but what seems to be clear is the fact that Bar Qappara draws his conclusion about God using pre-existing matter for his creation from the Bible: I would rather prefer to not make this point, he says, but unfortunately the biblical text compels me to make it.16 Moreover, Bar Qappara evidently does not contest the idea of the creatio ex hylis as such (it is unavoidable, he implies, if we read the Bible properly); rather, he speaks against those who make God’s ‘secret’ public by proudly and spitefully advertising it and thereby putting God in a dubious and unfavorable light. What the Bible says is certainly correct, but one should not speak openly and publicly about this shameful case.17 Finally, despite Bar Qappara’s attempt to

16 The phrase ‘If the matter were not (explicitly) written [in Scripture], it would be impossible to state it’ is generally used when a rabbinic author introduces a theologically difficult or even dangerous statement. 17 I do not see any reason for ‘splitting’ Bar Qappara in an earlier (and more original) Bar Qappara, who adheres to the ‘old’ doctrine of creatio ex hylis, and a ‘new’ Bar Qappara, created by the editor of our sub-section BerR 1:5, who needs to be understood in the context of the ‘new’ creatio ex nihilo theology, as Niehoff suggests (‘Creatio ex Nihilo’, 56–59). This rather artificial ‘split’ of Bar Qappara’s persona underlines the real problem in Niehoff ’s approach: the probably artificial separation of an earlier creatio ex hylis theology from a later creatio ex nihilo doctrine. Instead of neatly reconstructing historical

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connect the creatio ex hylis with the Bible, it is obvious that this doctrine is well-grounded in Greek philosophy, following a literal reading of the cosmology in Plato’s Timaios.18 If we now look at the first two sub-units of our parashah from the point of view of the editor, we observe a stark contrast between the two. Whereas 1:1 emphasizes that the world was created by means of the Torah, 1:5 claims that the world was created by means of preexisting matter. The first option is the essence of what the rabbis of rabbinic Judaism have to offer; the second option is the essence of what pagan philosophy suggests. To be sure, according to Bar Qappara even pagan philosophy has its origin in the Hebrew Bible; but this (for the rabbis self-evident) insight cannot conceal the fact that 1:5 presents the antidote to 1:1, or, to put it differently, that the first two sub-sections produce an almost unbearable tension between a rabbinic-theological and a pagan-philosophical worldview. There can be no doubt that our editor favors 1:1, and one could therefore more precisely speak of the two sub-sections as the thesis (1:1) and the antithesis (1:5) of the parashah—the thesis and antithesis that define the subject that the editor sets out to unfold in what follows. BerR 1:6 This sub-unit is again a petihah, composed of two sections and put in the mouth of R. Yehuda b. Simon (a Palestinian Amora of the fourth generation, teaching in Lydda). At first, the petihah verse Dan 2:22 is expounded in several steps: ‘He [God] reveals deep (‘amiqata) and hidden things (mesatrata). He knows what is in the darkness (hashokha), but the light (nehora)19 dwells with him’. (1) ‘Deep things’ (‘amiqata) is explained, with the help of Prov 9:18, as referring to Gehinnom (which is called ‘imqe she’ol, the ‘depths of the Netherworld’) and ‘hidden things’ (mesatrata), with the help of Isa 4:6, as referring to the Garden of Eden (because it is called mistor, a ‘hiding place’). stages in which one leads to the other, it might be better to presume that neither exists independently of the other, that both are two different sides of the same coin. 18 Timaios 27d–29b; 29e–30a; 52d–53b; see the discussion in Niehoff, ‘Creatio ex Nihilo’, 41–44. 19 This is the qere, whereas the qetiv reads nehira.

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(2) ‘Deep things’ (‘amiqata) may also refer to the deeds performed by the wicked, who try to deeply hide (ma‘amiqim lastir) their plans from God (Isa 29:15). (3) Correspondingly, the continuation of Dan 2:22 (‘He knows what is in the darkness’) refers to the wicked as well because it is written of them that their deeds are performed in darkness (Isa 4:6: mahshokh). (4) Yet the last part and climax of Dan 2:22 (‘but the light dwells with him’) refers to the righteous because Ps 97:11 declares: ‘Light is sown for the righteous’. (5) And finally, R. Abba of Serongaya (a little known Palestinian Amora of uncertain time) relates the light of Dan 2:22 to the King Messiah (with no biblical proof text). In other words, God reveals, through a proper exegesis of Dan 2:22, that there are two places prepared by him, one known as Gehinnom and the other one known as the Garden of Eden. Any informed reader of this exegesis immediately understands its implication. Both places are the final destination for the people of Israel, allocated to them according to their deeds on earth: the wicked go down to Gehinnom or the Netherworld, and the righteous will live forever in the Garden of Eden or Paradise. So the first part of our petihah marks out the realm of history—from the present time of the reader/listener to the ultimate goal of all human kind, Gehinnom or Garden of Eden. In a second step the author/editor makes clear that God knows all the deeds of the wicked and the righteous: whatever the wicked try to hide in darkness—God sees it. And even more so does he know the deeds performed by the righteous—because their deeds dwell within the light of his presence. R. Abba of Serongaya gives this last interpretation a slightly different twist: the light that dwells with God is not the deeds of the righteous but the light of the King Messiah. Yet this different explanation of the last section of Dan 2:22 comes only to reinforce the historical-theological reading of our petihah verse: the King Messiah dwells with God until his time will come—the end of history and the redemption of the people of Israel (with some of them ending up in Gehinnom, and some in the Garden of Eden). In the second part of the petihah, R. Yehuda b. Simon establishes the connection between the petihah verse Dan 2:22 and the Seder verse Gen 1:1. What do these two verses have in common? Read together, he claims, they mean that from the very beginning of his creation of the

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world20 God revealed deep and hidden things. Whereas in Gen 1:1–3 the Bible only states the fact that God created heaven, earth, and light and does not explain how he performed his creation, the how is made explicit in a number of relevant verses applied from other parts of the Bible, namely Isa 40:22 (the heaven was stretched out as/like fine cloth or a curtain: doq), Job 37:6 (God said to the snow: ‘Become21 earth!’), and Ps 104:2 (God wrapped himself with light as with a garment or a robe when he created heaven and earth). Hence, we need to read the Bible in its entirety in order to understand it fully. God did not want to hide anything from us when he did not explain the details of his creation in Gen 1:1–3. On the contrary, he meant the Bible, the blueprint of creation, to be read simultaneously; and therefore R. Yehuda b. Simon can rightly claim that God made everything clear from the very beginning: it is all there, in the Torah; one only needs to study the Torah and to connect, through proper exegesis, the relevant verses in the Bible. This sub-unit strongly reinforces the ‘thesis’ of the first sub-unit 1:1 against the ‘antithesis’ of the second sub-unit 1:5. Surely, our editor argues, it is solely the rabbinic Torah that counts. The Torah contains in it everything, and what is needed is only the wisdom of the rabbis to discover this and to make it explicit because that is what God wanted to begin with. More concretely, what we do not need is some other cosmological information outside of the Torah—such as pre-existing matter evading the control of the creator God, as proposed by some pagan philosophers. Although, quite conspicuously, the elements of Gen 1:2 (that gave rise to the exegesis in sub-unit 1:5) are left out here, there can be no doubt that in ignoring them and moving from Gen 1:1 (heaven and earth) directly to Gen 1:3 (light) our editor grandiosely declares that he is not worried about Gen 1:2. Ultimately, he claims, there is nothing that escapes the control of God and, indeed, the control of the rabbis who read and understand the Torah properly.

20 Neusner misunderstands the punch line of this midrash when he translates (Genesis Rabbah, 6): ‘To begin with, when the world was being created [. . .]’. 21 This is the meaning of hewe here, and not ‘fall on the earth’ as Neusner, ibidem, translates (following the JPS translation of Job).

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BerR 1:7 The following petihah, in the name of R. Yitzhaq (presumably R. Yitzhaq b. Nappaha, the Palestinian Amora of the third generation and student of R. Yohanan b. Nappaha, who taught in Tiberias and Caesarea) explains Gen 1:1 through Ps 119:160: ‘The beginning (rosh) of your word is truth [and all your righteous ordinance(s) endure22 forever].’ Hence, in opening his Torah with ‘in the beginning’ (bereshit) God has made clear that, from the very beginning, he, God, speaks truth, that is, that it is the one and only God who created the world. Accordingly, God’s righteous ordinances endure ‘forever’ (le-‘olam), that is, from the beginning of the creation of the world until the present time, as well as ‘for the (whole) world’ (le-‘olam),23 that is, for all of God’s creatures. Temporally and spatially, everybody is included and expected to accept his righteous ordinances: the midrash speaks explicitly of God’s ‘creatures’ (beriyyot) and not just of ‘Israel’. In particular, no creature is allowed to deviate from the basic truth that there is only one God and that this one and the same God created the world. Despite the plural of elohim, the midrash argues, the verb attached to it is always in the singular—for example, ‘God spoke’ (sing.) in Exod 20:1 instead of ‘gods spoke’ (plur.), and ‘God created’ (sing.) in our Seder verse Gen 1:1 instead of ‘gods created’ (plur.). Whoever the opponents are against whom this petihah is directed—the most likely candidates are members of one of those groups that are as conveniently as misleadingly subsumed under the umbrella of what is labelled ‘gnosis’, who distinguish between the hidden supreme God and the (evil) creator god, the demiurge—there can be no doubt that our midrash, in its present context, wants to emphasize that the one and only God of the Hebrew Bible created everything, including the raw matter some people declare to have been pre-existent. There is no such thing as pre-existent matter, the petihah argues, that the inferior creator god used for the creation of the material world; everything, the material as well as the spiritual world has been created by the God, who is mentioned in Gen 1:1. Within the structure set up by the editor of the first parashah of BerR, the petihah again reinforces the ‘thesis’

MT: ‘and all your righteous ordinance endures’ (sing.). The literal meaning of le-‘olam. The author plays here with both meanings of le-‘olam. 22 23

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of sub-unit 1:1 against a certain reading of Gen 1:1–3 as proposed in sub-unit 1:5. BerR 1:2 This petihah is transmitted through R. Yehoshua of Sikhnin24 in the name of R. Levi, again a Palestinian Amora of the third generation and another important student of Yohanan b. Nappaha; like Yohanan, he flourished in Tiberias. R. Levi, in using Ps 111:6 as petihah verse, makes a very sophisticated argument about the Bible as a book of history. Gen 1, he claims, is not so much concerned with questions of the material stuff of creation, let alone pre-existent matter (that is, cosmology); rather, it deals with history: it tells us, what God created on each day because his creation set history in motion, in particular the subsequent history of Israel and the nations. Again, it is the whole Bible that needs to be taken into account, not just Gen 1. Therefore, when Ps 111:6 declares ‘He has told his people the power of his works, in giving them the heritage of the nations’, this means that from the very beginning of his creation God has made it clear that, in the course of history, he would give the land of Israel to his people. True, the nations, who claim the land for themselves, might argue that Israel has stolen it from the Canaanites; yet they are rebuked by Deut 2:23, according to which the Caphtorim (presumably the people of Crete) conquered the coastal plain from the Philistines. It is precisely these ups and downs of history that the Bible describes; but ultimately, this is the essence of R. Levi’s argument, it is Israel that owns the land by the decree of God, revealed to his people from the very beginning of his creation. Who are the ‘nations’ that our petihah is arguing against? Certainly not Israel’s historical competitors for the land, such as the Canaanites, the Caphtorim, and the Philistines. Obviously, R. Levi uses these biblical examples to claim the land of Israel for his people at his own time and under his own circumstances—Palestine of the last third of the third century ce. The first candidate, of course, would be the Romans as the foreign nation that occupies the land and against whom our author asserts Israel’s legitimate claim to the land. This is certainly possible, but it is equally possible and even more likely that towards the end of

24

A Palestinian Amora of the fourth generation and student of R. Levi.

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the third century the boundaries between the political power of ‘Rome’ and the theological argument of ‘Christianity’ are already blurred, that in fact the petihah addresses the claim to the land as expressed by Christian theologians. Not only is Israel the purpose of God’s creation, our author argues, but also, and more specifically, this privileged position comes with very concrete ramifications: the perpetually secured ownership of the land of Israel. Nobody can dispute Israel’s right to the land—not the remote biblical nations, not the Romans, and certainly not the last offspring of the nations, Christianity, which uses our own Bible to prove its alleged claim. BerR 1:3 This petihah takes up and reinforces sub-unit 1:7: God is the sole creator of the world, and there was nobody who helped him in performing this task. It is framed by a statement by R. Tanhuma (presumably Tanhuma b. Abba, a late Palestinian Amora of the fifth generation), which applies to Gen 1:1 the petihah verse Ps 86:10: ‘You are great and do wonderful things, you alone are God’. In a first section, R. Tanhum b. Hiyya (a Palestinian Amora of the third generation who lived in Tiberias) proves, not from the Bible but from observing nature, that God alone is the creator: if a skin has just one hole, even as tiny as the eye of a needle, all the air in it will immediately escape—but not so the human body which has many apertures and holes and yet its spirit25 does not escape, thanks to the wonderful things that God alone performs. This is followed by a second section in which the question is asked ‘When were the angels created?’ R. Yohanan (the well-known Yohanan b. Nappaha of Sepphoris and Tiberias) proposes the second day, whereas his colleague R. Hanina (most likely Hanina b. Pappos of Caesarea, the contemporary of R. Yohanan) prefers the fifth day of creation. Their colleague R. Yitzhaq (b. Nappaha of Tiberias and Caesarea) makes clear that he does not care whether it was the second or the fifth day; what only matters, he emphasizes, is the fact that the angels were not created on the first day—in order to avoid the conclusion that they might have helped God with the subsequent creation. God is not like a human governor of a province, a parable explains further,

25

Ruah, which means both ‘wind, air’, and ‘spirit’.

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who has his nobles supporting him and being honored together with him—God alone created his world, and he alone deserves the honor for his wonderful deeds. BerR 1:4 With this sub-unit we leave the formal structure of the petihot. Instead, the parashah seems to move now to a consecutive exegesis of the biblical verse Gen 1:1, focussing in a first step on the word ‘in the beginning’ (bereshit).26 It begins with a sophisticated exposition of the anonymous statement that ‘six things preceded the creation of the world’, some of which were actually created, whereas the creation of others was only contemplated by God but not actually performed.27 This famous midrash, which is preserved in a number of versions, has attracted considerable attention.28 In this context, I am only interested in the way the sub-unit is arranged and fits into the overall structure of the first parashah of BerR. Of the first category, the things that were actually created, the midrash lists only two, namely the Torah and the throne of glory (God’s throne in heaven). It does not explain, why precisely these two things were created (it presents only biblical proof texts), but both are quite self-explanatory: of the Torah we have heard already (1:1) that God used it as the blueprint of his creation; hence, it is obvious that it must have existed before the creation of the world started. As far as the throne of glory is concerned, the author of our midrash seems to imply that God, before he started his creation somewhere in nowhere, must have had a place where to sit: his throne. Under the second category, the things that were only conceptually created, the midrash lists the patriarchs, Israel, the Temple, the name

26 Or, more precisely, on the first two words of Gen 1:1 according to the sequence in Hebrew (bereshit bara), which both happen to begin with the letter beit. 27 In Hebrew ‘alu be-mahashavah lehibar’ot, lit. ‘they occurred to [God’s] mind to be created’, that is, they were only conceptually created. 28 See A. Goldberg, ‘Schöpfung und Geschichte: Der Midrasch von den Dingen, die vor der Welt erschaffen wurden’, Judaica 24 (1968), 27–44 = Idem, in: M. Schlüter & P. Schäfer (eds), Mystik und Theologie des rabbinischen Judentums: Gesammelte Studien I, Tübingen 1997, 148–61; P. Schäfer, ‘Zur Geschichtsauffassung des rabbinischen Judentums,’ JSJ 6 (1975), 167–88 = Idem, Studien zur Theologie und Geschichte des rabbinischen Judentums, Leiden 1978, 23–44.

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of the Messiah and, according to one rabbi, repentance.29 In making the distinction between actually and only conceptually created, the midrash apparently tries to point to the difference and at the same time connection between creation and history: the patriarchs, Israel, the Temple, and the Messiah are not static entities that could simply be created by God; here, he depends on human collaboration throughout history. Creation and history belong together; but if history is not to be determined from its beginning, it needs human input, for better or for worse, since human beings are able to change the course of history. In this sense, repentance is not on the same level as the other four things but a necessary tool to rectify history on the individual as well as on the national plane. In a second step, the midrash asks what comes first among the actually and just conceptually created things. With regard to the former, the clear answer (by R. Abba b. Kahana, another student of R. Yohanan) is: the Torah—even before he sat down on his throne, God created the Torah (presumably, because it was the blueprint also for his throne). As to the latter, it will not come as a surprise that here, too, it was Israel that came first (according to the same R. Yitzhaq whom we encountered already in 1:7 and 1:3). For, as a parable explains, the Torah is useless without Israel. Israel and the Torah are inextricably linked. To be sure, God needed the Torah to create the world, but this same Torah can only be fulfilled by Israel throughout history. Finally, a third step is added which claims that the world was created only for the merit (zekhut) of the Torah,30 of Moses,31 and the fulfilment of certain commandments, such as dough-offerings, tithes, and first fruits.32 What we have here, again, is a strong emphasis on history, more precisely salvation history through the fulfilment of the Torah, as opposed to cosmology. In an ironical twist against the possibility of pre-existent material used by God for his creation (1:5), our midrash argues: there were indeed certain things that preceded the creation of the world, but, God forbid, they were not pre-existent (that is, eternal); on the contrary, they were created, albeit before the creation of the world

29 This is why some versions list six and others seven things, depending on whether or not one counts ‘repentance’. 30 According to R. Benaya, a Tanna of the fifth generation (often quoted by R. Yohanan). 31 According to R. Berekhya, a Palestinian Amora of the fifth generation. 32 According Rav, a Babylonian Amora of the first generation.

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as described in Gen 1. So creation—and its extension into history as performed by human beings—covers everything, even the dangerous zone before the actual creation of the world. The creator God rules everything; nothing is left out of his control. BerR 1:8 This sub-unit expands the subject of the ‘six things’ in 1:4. In a first step it argues (in the name of R. Levi, presumably not the third generation Palestinian Amora whom we encountered in 1:2 but Levi bar Sisi, the Tanna of the fifth generation and contemporary of Bar Qappara in 1:5)33 that God, like any human builder, used six things for his creation, namely water, dust, wood, stones, reed, and iron. If one wants to object that reed is used exclusively by poor people, he is referred to Ezek 40:3 which explains that God employed ‘reed’ only as a measuring reed and not as building material. The second step clearly serves as the decisive statement of the midrash. It points out that the Torah preceded these six things, emphasizing once more that the Torah was the first thing that God created (using Prov 8:22 as proof text, as in 1:1). In having the Torah precede the six things used as building material and measuring reed, the midrash casually makes clear that they, too, were created and surely not pre-existing materials. This may well be a sideswipe at Bar Qappara’s exegesis of Gen 1:1–3 in 1:5 (‘water’ is explicitly mentioned in Gen 1:2). BerR 1:9 And here the subject of 1:5, the ‘anti-thesis’ to 1:1, is indeed raised again, no doubt the climax of the whole parashah. The anonymous philosopher, engaged in a discussion with Rabban Gamliel (in all probability Gamliel III, the son of Rabbi and fifth generation Tanna, and not Gamliel II of Yavne, the second generation Tanna),34 reopens the Because his dictum is transmitted through R. Menahem (a fourth generation Tanna) and R. Yehoshua b. Levi (the famous first generation Amora and student of Bar Qappara, who lived in Lydda). 34 As Niehoff, ‘Creatio ex Nihilo’, 45ff., assumes without any further discussion. All the Tannaim in the main section of the parashah (1:1–1:11) are Tannaim of the fifth generation (for details see below). Any speculations about the historicity of his character and teachings (Niehoff, ibidem, 48f.) are therefore unnecessary. 33

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problem of sub-unit 1:5 and maintains that God in fact did use preexistent materials that assisted him in his creation, namely tohu, bohu, darkness, water, wind, and the abyss—precisely the elements listed in Gen 1:2. It is, of course, no coincidence that these elements amount to the number of six. So what the philosopher is doing here is to reinforce the ‘antithesis’ of 1:5, namely that the six elements listed in Gen 1:2 were the ‘dirty stuff ’ out of which God created the world, an insight supported by the Bible that better should not be made public. This time, however, this dangerous proposition is put in the mouth of a (pagan) philosopher and fiercely opposed by a rabbi as eminent and respected as Rabban Gamliel: Gamliel proves, with appropriate verses from the Bible (Isa 45:7; Ps 148:4 f.; Amos 4:13; Prov 8:24), that all these elements were also created by God and therefore cannot be regarded as pre-existent. Hence, this sub-unit again comes to emphasize that it is a mistake to refer only to Gen 1 as the matrix of creation—not just a few verses of the Bible or even a chapter should be singled out as evidence for a certain subject; rather, the Hebrew Bible as a unified and meaningful whole needs to be addressed and used if one wants to understand its message. So Rabban Gamliel’s biblical interpretation serves as the ultimate rejection by the editor of our parashah of sub-unit 1:5: everything that exists was created by the one and only God; there is no such thing as pre-existent material outside the power of the creator God. Whoever claims this, needs to be refuted. In inserting here Gamliel’s refutation of the stereotypical pagan philosopher and having him cursed with the ultimate rabbinical curse (‘May the breath of that man [= your breath] expire,’ that is, ‘May you immediately drop dead!’), the editor of the parashah no doubt wants to argue also against his rabbinical colleagues who might be tempted to follow that dangerous idea of primeval and eternal matter not created by God. BerR 1:10 With this sub-unit (transmitted again by R. Levi, either the third generation Amora of 1:2 or the fifth generation Tanna of 1:8)35 the parashah

35 In favour of the former alternative speaks the fact that he is quoted by R. Yonah, a Palestinian Amora of the fifth generation; in favour of the latter the fact that his statement is followed by a dictum by Bar Qappara, the Tanna of the fifth generation.

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moves to a series of alphabet-midrashim, beginning with the question of why the world was created with a word that begins with the letter beit and not with the letter aleph. The first answer given refers to the famous mishnah in m.Æag 2:1 which states: Anyone who gazes at (mistakkel be-) four things, it would be merciful to/fitting for him36 if he had not come into the world: what is above (lema‘lan) and what below (lemattan), what is before (lefanim) and what after (le’ahor).

Just as the Hebrew letter beit is closed on all sides except for its front, R. Levi argues, so one has no right to expound concerning what is above and what below, what is before and what after. This rather enigmatic dictum is explained further by Bar Qappara, using Deut 4:32 as proof text (‘For ask now concerning the first days, which were before you, from the day that God created man upon the earth and from one end of the heavens to the other end of the heavens’): According to Bar Qappara, the first part of Deut 4:32 makes clear that one may only speculate about the mysteries of creation from the day that days were created (that is, from the first day of creation) but not about what was before (that first day).37 And the last part of the biblical verse defines the space that is allowed for human curiosity and investigation: the physical realm marked out by the ‘ends’ of heaven, that is, presumably, the cosmos of earth, heaven, and Netherworld as it was known to the rabbis.38 The version of this midrash as preserved in BerR is abbreviated and probably also truncated,39 but for our context it is sufficient to note that Bar Qappara, following a certain reading of the Mishnah, ostentatiously restricts the temporal and spatial realm of what he considers appropriate for a cosmological inquiry: anything before day one 36 The manuscripts vary between ratui lo and ra’ui lo; see Halperin, Merkabah in Rabbinic Literature, 12, n. 7. 37 This explanation refers to the second part of m.Æag 2:1. The ‘after’ is conspicuously left out in Deut 4:32 and in Bar Qappara’s explanation. The shape of the letter beit, which is open only to the left, seems to point to the temporal space of history beginning with the first day of creation. 38 See P. Schäfer, ‘In Heaven as it is in Hell: The Cosmology of Seder Rabba di-Bereshit’, in: R.S. Boustan & A. Yoshiko Reed (eds), Heavenly Realms and Earthly Realities in Late Antique Religions, Cambridge 2004, 233–74; Idem, ‘From Cosmology to Theology: The Rabbinic Appropriation of Apocalyptic Cosmology’, in: R. Elior & P. Schäfer (eds), Creation and Re-Creation in Jewish Thought: Festschrift in Honor of Joseph Dan on the Occasion of his Seventieth Birthday, Tübingen 2005, 39–58. 39 See the parallels in t.Æag 2:7; y.Æag 2:1/33 f., fol. 77c; b.Æag 11b.

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of God’s creation and beyond the visible cosmos is off limits.40 This is the same Bar Qappara who in 1:5 pointed out that the existence of primeval and eternal matter should not be openly discussed, although it is undoubtedly referred to in the Bible (namely in Gen 1:2). Whether or not the Bar Qappara of 1:5 and 1:10 contradicts himself, is not particularly important (and arguably the wrong question);41 what matters is the fact that the editor of our parashah puts up another red light against cosmological curiosity. Space and time are confined to the visible cosmos and the history beginning with God’s creation—that’s it, nothing else counts and is of real importance. The following answers to the sub-unit’s question all emphasize the soteriological aspect of creation (as opposed to inappropriate cosmological curiosity): the world was created with a word beginning with the letter beit because • beit has the numerical value of ‘two’, referring to this world and the world to come; • beit is the letter with which the word ‘blessing’ (berakhah) begins, whereas aleph is the first letter of the word ‘curse’ (’arirah); • the shape of the letter beit points upwards, to its creator. However, when aleph openly complains that the world was not created with a word beginning with aleph, God comforts it with the hint that soon he will give Israel the Torah on Mount Sinai (the most essential part of which, the Decalogue, begins with an aleph, namely anokhi in Exod 20:2) and that ‘the world and everything in it has been created only though the merit (zekhut) of the Torah.’ This line of argument is completed by Bar Huta (a Palestinian Amora of the fourth generation), who adds that the letter aleph denotes the word eleph (‘thousand’), referring to the thousand generations to which God intended to give his Torah (Ps 105:8). Hence, it is ultimately again the Torah, so dramatically introduced in 1:1 and repeated in 1:6, 1:4, and 1:8, that is of crucial importance for the creation and its success in history.

40 The spatial aspect is new in our parashah and comes in through the reference to m.Æag 2:1. 41 About which Niehoff, ‘Creatio ex Nihilo’, 55ff., is concerned. The two viewpoints can be harmonized, if one pays attention to the fact that in 1:5 Bar Qappara does not advocate unlimited inquiry into pre-existent matter; rather, he cautions against making this knowledge public.

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peter schäfer BerR 1:11

This sub-unit continues the subject of 1:10: Even the custom that certain letters of the Hebrew alphabet assume a different shape when appearing at the end of a word42 is a halakhah revealed to Moses on Mount Sinai (R. Yehoshua b. Levi, a Palestinian Amora of the first generation in Lydda, a student of Bar Qappara) or has been instituted by the seers (R. Hiyya b. Abba II, a Palestinian Amora of the third generation and student of R. Yohanan). Everything in the Torah, even what seems to be most minute, has been revealed by God to Moses. BerR 1:12 Now the parashah moves to the word ‘God’ in Gen 1:1 (‘in the beginning God created’). It is conspicuous that all of the following interpretations are put in the mouth of Tannaim. Sub-unit 1:12 presents two parables (one in the name of Aqilas, the enigmatic translator of the Hebrew Bible into Greek, regarded as a Tanna of the second generation; the other one in the name of Shimon b. Azzai, also a second generation Tanna) that illustrate how God differs from human beings: a human king demands praise even before he has done something for the population of his provinces, and likewise, human dignitaries always have their name precede their title—but God is different: he created the world before he could receive the appropriate praise from humankind, and he mentioned his name only after he created the world, hence: ‘In the beginning created God’43 (Gen 1:1). In other words, only God does his job properly and deserves to be called God. Moreover, with his creation he sets something in motion that depends on human recognition: history as a process of divine and human interplay. BerR 1:13 First, R. Shimon b. Yohai (a third generation Tanna) continues the subject of 1:12: also with regard to sacrifices, God’s name must be

42 43

The MaNTZaPaK letters. This is the sequence of the words in the original Hebrew: bereshit bara elohim.

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mentioned after the sacrifice, not before (proof text Lev 1:2: ‘an offering for the Lord’). After this, the midrash moves to the next few words in Gen 1:1: ‘the heavens and the earth’. A first explanation is provided by ‘the’ rabbis (rabbanan, an indication of tannaitic origin) who again point, with a parable, to the difference between human beings and God: human beings, when they construct a building, may need to modify their original design according to the circumstances that become apparent only during the process of construction. But not so God. Since the Bible says that God created the heaven and the earth (with the definite article), it clarifies that God created precisely the heaven and the earth that he had originally planned (as laid out in his blueprint, the Torah), with no need for any changes whatsoever. So again, God alone is the only real and true creator. Finally, R. Eliezer, the son of R. Yose ha-Gelili (a third generation Tanna), adds a soteriological dimension: even the new heavens and the new earth were created from the six days of creation, that is, are contained in the primeval creation. The proof is again the definite article: since Isa 66:22 speaks of the new heavens and the new earth, it becomes clear that these were precisely the heavens and the earth that God had already planned when he created the first heavens and the first earth. Again, history and its culmination in the eschatological future are laid out in God’s creation of the world as described in Gen 1. Or, to put it differently, primeval creation is not a task in itself; it requires completion through the course of history and ultimately salvation. BerR 1:14 Having discussed the definite article the heavens and the earth, the parashah moves on to explain the accusative particle et before the definite article. Since R. Aqiva is well known for his expertise in extracting deeper meanings from all the apparently superfluous fillers in the Hebrew Bible—such as akh (‘except’), raq (‘only’), et (accusative particle), and gam (‘also’)—R. Yishmael asks him about the particular meaning of et in Gen 1:1.44 Aqiva’s45 sophisticated answer: the accusative particle is

44 R. Yishmael and R. Aqiva, the famous contemporaries, are both Tannaim of the second generation. 45 Neusner, Genesis Rabbah, 18, changes the sequence of the two answers: he attributes

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absolutely necessary because without it we might understand ‘heavens’ and ‘earth’ as subjects of the word ‘create’, on an equal footing with ‘God’, hence: ‘In the beginning God, heavens, and earth created’.46 R. Yishmael,47 not satisfied with this answer, proposes that the accusative particle et needs to be understood as inclusive, namely that the et before ‘heavens’ serves to include sun, moon, stars, and planets and the et before ‘earth’ includes trees, grass, and the Garden of Eden. This sub-unit comes again to underline the crucial point, made several times in the parashah (1:7, 1:3, 1:9, 1:12), that God is the only creator and that he did not need any helpers who might be mistaken for gods besides him. Against whom the first explanation is directed remains open, but one can easily see a pantheon of pagan gods behind the alleged deities ‘heavens’ and ‘earth’—if not a trinity behind the three deities ‘God’, ‘heavens’, and ‘earth’ (although it seems to be difficult to identify members of the Christian trinity with ‘heavens’ and ‘earth’, unless one wants to allocate the heavens to the Holy Spirit and the earth to Jesus). BerR 1:15 The parashah’s last sub-unit, drawing attention to the sequence of the words ‘the heavens and the earth’ in Gen 1:1, asks what was created first: the heavens or the earth. If one follows the biblical order, the answer can only be: the heavens, and this is indeed the opinion of the House of Shammai. But, as in most cases, the House of Hillel objects immediately and proposes, against the biblical order, that the earth was created first. In a long discussion, these two contradicting viewpoints are supported with a variety of Bible verses, until finally R. Shimon (b. Yohai, the third generation Tanna) comes up with the Solomonic solution that both were created as a pot and its lid, that is, at the same time. A later addition clarifies that the sequence of words the first to Yishmael and the second to Aqiva (the Hebrew text does not provide explicit attributions: it is only because Yishmael asks Aqiva that one is inclined to attribute the first answer to Aqiva and the second to Yishmael). However, the inclusive interpretation of et, as proposed in the second interpretation, is precisely what is generally attributed to Aqiva. 46 Aqiva conspicuously avoids referring to the singular of bara which grammatically does not go well with three subjects—presumably because the same argument could be made for the plural of elohim. 47 Or R. Aqiva; see n. 45.

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or phrases in the Bible does not mean much. Sometimes the sequence of the same words or phrases changes, only to point to the fact that the word order does not imply a chronological sequence or a hierarchy but that, in fact, the persons or objects in question are equal. There is no echo in this sub-unit of the problem of pre-existent material: in discussing the sequence of the creation process, it takes it for granted that everything was created by God. The structure and message of the first parashah of BerR can now be summarized as follows: 1. With regard to its literary form, the parashah moves smoothly from a number of petihot (1:1–1:5–1:6–1:7–1:2–1:3) to a consecutive exegesis of each word of Gen 1:1: bereshit bara (1:4–1:8–1:9–1:10–1:11), elohim (1:12), et ha-shamayim we-et ha-aretz (1:13–1:14–1:15). 2. The subject of the parashah revolves around the tension between a worldview dominated by speculations about the nature and a worldview guided by the rabbinic Torah. The first may be labelled scientific-cosmological, the second theological. The editor of our parashah was clearly aware of the implications inherent in a scientific-cosmological approach to the mysteries of creation, and the whole strategy in his structuring and editing the material collected by him is dictated by the anxiety caused by these implications and the desire to fend them off. He does so in a deliberate and sophisticated way, setting up the two options as a kind of thesis and antithesis at the beginning of the parashah (1:1 and 1:5) and arguing against the antithesis in all the subsequent sub-units, with a final showdown in 1:9. 3. The gist of his counter-argument against the notion of pre-existent, that is, eternal matter outside of the control of the creator God, is his insistence on the Torah and Israel as the center of creation: the Torah was not only the master plan used by God when he initiated and executed his creation; since it can only be observed and fulfilled by Israel, it is also the tool that connects creation and history or, to put it differently, that extends the act of creation into the dimension of history. Hence, for the worldview of the rabbis as presented by our editor, creation is not an autonomous act decreed and performed solely by God; rather, it is an act that sets history in motion and, therefore, depends on the cooperation of the people of Israel. As such, history can only be salvation history because it is temporally limited and will come to its fulfilment with the appearance of the

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Messiah and the final judgement. Salvation history versus cosmology is the alternative that our editor discusses and that he solves, unequivocally and firmly, in favour of salvation history. 4. Within this theological framework, marked by creation, Torah, and salvation and determined by God and his people of Israel, there is no place for other gods than the one and only God. He is the sole creator, with no other gods helping him. 5. The Torah as the master plan of creation contains everything than can and needs be known; there is no cosmological information outside the Torah. Moreover, the relevant cosmological information is not restricted to Gen 1: one needs to take the Torah in its entirety (that is, not only the Torah in the strict sense of the word but also the Prophets and the Writings) into consideration if one wants to discuss and discover the mysteries of creation. 6. The parashah is structured by a web of rabbis, many of whom are closely related. Prominent among them are R. Oshaya (1:1) and Bar Qappara (1:5 and 1:10)—the two ‘heroes’ of the thesis and antithesis—the latter a fifth generation Tanna and the former his student and a first generation Palestinian Amora. From Bar Qappara and Oshaya the chain of transmission continues with R. Yohanan b. Nappaha, the second generation Palestinian Amora and student of Oshaya, as another prominent figure in the parashah: he appears in 1:3, and his students Levi (third generation Palestinian Amora), Yitzhaq b. Nappaha (same), Abba b. Kahana (same), and Hiyya b. Abba II (same) are mentioned in 1:2, 1:7, 1:4, and 1:11. Other Palestinian Amoraim of the third generation are Tanhum b. Hiyya and Hanina b. Pappos (1:3). As a student of Bar Qappara we encounter Yehoshua b. Levi (first generation Palestinian Amora) in 1:11. All the other rabbis mentioned in sub-units 1:1–1:11 are fifth generation Tannaim, that is, contemporaries of Bar Qappara (R. Levi b. Sisi in 1:8 and presumably also 1:10, and Rabban Gamliel III in 1:9), except for one late Amora: Yehuda b. Simon in 1:6, a Palestinian Amora of the fourth generation. Hence, the rabbinical orbit in which the bulk of the parashah moves, extends from fifth generation Tannaim to a fourth generation Palestinian Amora, with a clear emphasis on third generation Amoraim. Only the last sub-units 1:12–1:14 present a conspicuously different rabbinical makeup: they are composed solely by Tannaim of the second and (in one case) third generation. They clearly belong to a

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different layer of tradition and are much less concerned (if at all) about the problems which bother the sub-units 1:1–1:11. If we finally consider the academies in Palestine at which our rabbis taught, we encounter the usual suspects: Sepphoris (Oshaya and Yohanan b. Nappaha), Tiberias (Yohanan b. Nappaha, Levi, Yitzhaq b. Nappaha, and Tanhum b. Hiyya), Caesarea (Oshaya, Yitzhaq b. Nappaha, and Hanina b. Pappos), and Lydda (Bar Qappara, Yehoshua b. Levi, and Yehuda b. Simon). A preponderance of Caesarea—allegedly because of the rabbis’ proximity to Christian schools flourishing in Caesarea—seems highly unlikely. 7. The addressees of our editor’s ire, that is, the representatives of a cosmological worldview against whom he builds up his Torah and history centred alternative, remain obscure. Obvious candidates are advocates of Greek philosophy—but whether of Greek philosophy in its originally Platonic garb or in its ‘gnostic’ or some other Christian incarnation must be left open.48

48 Some preliminary answers are offered by Niehoff, ‘Creatio ex Nihilo’, but the subject deserves further investigation.

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PART FOUR

NEW TEXTS, NEW READINGS

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MANICHAEAN ELEMENTS IN AN EARLY VERSION OF THE VIRGIN MARY’S ASSUMPTION Roelof van den Broek Introduction In 1955, Antoine Wenger published a collection of Byzantine texts on the Dormition and the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. One of them contained an early version of the Virgin’s Transitus, of which only one manuscript has survived (Vaticanus Graecus 1982, f. 181–189v; 9th century).1 The most striking feature of this work is its great number of remarkable apocryphal elements and puzzling expressions of a dubious orthodoxy, which, obviously for that reason, were almost completely suppressed in the later textual tradition. Vat. Gr. 1982 belongs to the group of texts that represents what is called the ‘Palm of the Tree of Life’ tradition of the Virgin’s Falling Asleep and Assumption. This textual family is characterized by the presentation of a ‘palm’2 to Mary at the beginning of the story and by the location of the whole course of events surrounding her death in Jerusalem. The second major family of texts represents the ‘Bethlehem’ tradition, which is characterised by Mary’s flight from Jerusalem to her house in Bethlehem, where the Apostles meet and from where they are all miraculously transported to Jerusalem for the Dormitio proper.3

1 A. Wenger, L’Assomption de la T.S. Vierge dans la tradition byzantine du VI e au X e siècle. Études et documents (Archives de l’Orient Chrétien 5), Paris 1955, 17–67 (introduction), 209–41 (text and French translation). F. Manns reprinted this text, with a few corrections, a French translation and a facsimile of the manuscript, in his Le récit de la Dormition de Marie (Vatican Grec 1982): Contribution à l’étude des origines de l’exégèse chrétienne (Studium Biblicum Franciscanum, Collectio Maior 33), Jerusalem 1989. An English translation, based on the editions of Wenger and Manns, was published by St.J. Shoemaker in his Ancient Traditions of the Virgin Mary’s Dormition and Assumption, Oxford 2002, 351–69. There are two Italian translations of Vat. Gr. 1982: M. Erbetta, Gli Apocrifi del Nuovo Testamento, Vol. I.2, Turin 1981, 465–74, and L. Moraldi, Apocrifi del Nuovo Testamento, Vol. III, Casale Monferrato 1999 (first ed. 1994), 181–96. 2 In fact a ‘prize of victory’ (βραβεῖον), see below p. 296f. 3 The main lines of the Transitus tradition have been mapped out by M. van Esbroeck, ‘Les textes littéraires sur l’Assomption avant le Xe siècle’, in: F. Bovon et alii, Les Actes

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The unorthodox elements are all found in the first group, of which Vat. Gr. 1982 is the earliest Greek representative. Wenger was able to show that the tradition represented by the Greek text had influenced a number of Byzantine and Latin homilies on the Assumption,4 of which the two versions of a homily by John of Thessalonica († ca. 630) are the most interesting.5 The well-known Transitus Mariae of PseudoMelito is a thoroughly expurgated member of the same family.6 More important for our purpose is Wenger’s discovery of a Latin Transitus in Karlsruhe (Codex Augiensis CCXXIX, f. 184v–190v; 9th century), which he published in the same volume.7 At that time, this text was the only one known that showed a close relationship with Vat. Gr. 1982. It clearly represents an abridgement of the Greek version, but it has also preserved original elements which are lost in Vat. Gr. 1982. This became evident when three other close relatives came to light, all published in 1973. The first is a long Ethiopian text called Liber Requiei, edited with a Latin translation by Victor Arras.8 There is no doubt that this work is the best representative of the earliest ‘Palm’ tradition: it contains most Apocryphes des Apôtres: Christianisme et monde païen (Publications de la Faculté de Théologie de Genève 4), Genève 1981, 265–85 (reprinted in: M. van Esbroeck, Aux origines de la Dormition de la Vierge: Études historiques sur les traditions orientales, Aldershot 1995, I), and S.C. Mimouni, Dormition et Assomption de Marie. Histoire des traditions anciennes (Théologie Historique 98), Paris 1995. An extensive study of the earliest Dormition traditions can be found in Shoemaker, Ancient Traditions, 9–77, who convincingly demonstrates that it is impossible to construct an evolution of the traditions from a simple Dormition through a Dormition + Assumption to a Dormition + Assumption + Resurrection, as had been argued by Mimouni. The various traditions appear at the same time, in the first half of the fifth century. 4 Wenger, Assomption, 58–67. 5 M. Jugie (ed.), Homélies mariales byzantines (PO 19), Paris 1925, 344–438. The second, interpolated, version, and especially its manuscripts B and O, often agree with the Vatican text. Jugie’s text of the first version was reprinted, with a Spanish translation, by A. de Santos Otero, Los Evangelios Apócrifos, Madrid 1956, 645–85. Italian translations in: Erbetta, Apocrifi, I.2, 510–23, and Moraldi, Apocrifi, III, 235–56. 6 M. Haibach-Reinisch, Ein neuer ‘Transitus Mariae’ des Pseudo-Melito: Textkritische Ausgabe und Darlegung der Bedeutung dieser ursprünglicheren Fassung für Apokryphenforschung und lateinische und deutsche Dichtung des Mittelalters (Bibliotheca Assumptionis B. Virginis Mariae 5), Rome 1962. 7 Wenger, Assomption, 68–95 (introduction), 243–56 (text and French translation). 8 V. Arras (ed.), De Transitu Mariae Aethiopice I, (CSCO 342, 1–84 (text); CSCO 343, 1–54 (Latin translation)), Louvain 1973. See also Appendix II (‘Annotationes in Librum Requiei’) to the translation of volume II (CSCO 352), Louvain 1974, 75–105. Manns, Le récit, presents an appendix with a useful synopsis of the Liber Requiei, Vat. Gr. 1982 and the Latin Codex Augiensis; the same in: Shoemaker, Ancient Traditions, 415–18. English translation by Shoemaker, Ancient Traditions, 290–350, Italian translation by Erbetta, Apocrifi, I.2, 421–56.

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of the unorthodox elements that are also found in Vat. Gr. 1682 and is able to explain some awkward passages in the Greek text as abridgements of the original. The other texts are two fragmentary Transitus in Georgian, published, also with Latin translations, by Michel van Esbroeck.9 These editions by Wenger, Arras and Van Esbroeck have made it clear that the long-known Syriac fragments of the Obsequies of the Holy Virgin and the Gaelic Testament of Mary are of greater importance for the literary history of these texts than had been realised before.10 There is no doubt, however, that neither the Liber Requiei, nor Vat. Gr. 1982, nor any other known text contains the original story of this version of the Assumption. On the contrary, even a superficial comparison of the corresponding passages in these texts shows that each of them has its own omissions, abridgements and additions and that, therefore, we have to assume a lost common source. The unorthodox elements in the ‘Palm’ tradition suggest that this story of the Virgin’s Assumption originated outside the mainstream of early Byzantine Christianity. In recent research two different milieus of origin have been suggested. Scholars of the Studium Biblicum Franciscanum in Jerusalem, and Frédéric Manns in particular, have argued that the traditions concerning Mary’s Dormition and Assumption have their origin in a second-century Jewish-Christian milieu.11 But this explanation is very unlikely. Apart from the undeniable fact that there is no trace of any report on the Virgin’s death before the fifth century, it should be noted that the Jewish and early Christian motifs that are said to point to a Jewish-Christian origin were widespread in later Christian literature. Stephen J. Shoemaker has argued that a gnostic milieu is a more suitable candidate for the explanation of the unorthodox elements in the ‘Palm’ tradition: ‘the earliest Palm narratives certainly betray evidence of considerable contact with such a milieu at an early stage in their history’.12

9 M. van Esbroeck, ‘Apocryphes géorgiens de la Dormition’, AB 91 (1973) 55–75 (= idem, Aux origines de la Dormition de la Vierge, V). 10 W. Wright, Contributions to the Apocryphal Literature of the New Testament, London 1865, 42–51; Ch. Donahue, The Testament of Mary: The Gaelic Version of the Dormitio Mariae together with an Irish Latin Version (Fordham University Studies, Language Series 1), New York 1942. There is also a second version of this apocryphon, translated in: M. Herbert & M. McNamara (eds), Irish Biblical Apocrypha: Selected Texts in Translation, Edinburgh 1989, 119–31. 11 Manns, Le récit, esp. 121–237. A discussion of the arguments in favour of a JewishChristian origin in Shoemaker, Ancient Traditions, 212–32. 12 Shoemaker, Ancient Traditions, 232–56, the quotation on p. 239.

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Not all his arguments in favour of this thesis are equally convincing, but it cannot be doubted that a number of unorthodox expressions can best be explained from a gnostic perspective. He also rightly observes that this fact alone ‘does not allow us to conclude that the Palm traditions had their origin within some sort of gnostic group: we cannot know with any certainty whether these gnostic features are ‘original’, or if instead they merely reflect transmission through a gnostic milieu at an earlier stage in their history.’13 In the following, I would like to argue that the unmistakable gnostic features are due to Manichaean influence. I am pleased to dedicate this study to my long-time colleague Piet van der Horst. His interest in the religious phenomena of late Antiquity is almost unlimited—almost, for he has always kept himself far from the gnostic area. Nevertheless, I hope he will read the following pages as a token of my gratitude and friendship. A prayer of thanksgiving The story of the Virgin’s Dormition in Vat. Gr. 1982 and the texts related to it begins with the appearance of ‘the great angel’ (ὁ μέγας ἄγγελος) to Mary.14 He says to her: ‘Rise, Mary, take this βραβεῖον which He who planted Paradise has given to me, and hand it over to the apostles, so that they may take it and sing hymns before you, for after three days you will lay down your body’. The first question to be answered here concerns the nature of the object given to Mary. The word βραβεῖον belongs to the world of sports and tournaments. It denotes the award or prize of victory that was given to the winner, which could be a wand or baton; it could also be used in a metaphorical sense.15 However, in the stories about the Dormition of the Virgin—and in these stories only—it has become customary to translate the word βραβεῖον with ‘palm’. The reason for this was the remark at the end of the narrative where a leaf of the βραβεῖον is mentioned, which according to the second, interpolated, homily of John of Thessalonica was a

Shoemaker, Ancient Traditions, 253. Although the language is somewhat ambiguous, the text leaves no doubt that the great angel (not ‘a great angel’ as Shoemaker, 351, translates) is no other than Christ himself. 15 LSJ, s.v.; G.W.H. Lampe, A Patristic Greek Lexicon, Oxford 1961, 304, s.v.; E. Stauffer, βραβέυω, βραβεῖον, TWNT I, Stuttgart 1933, 636–37. 13 14

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palm leaf.16 It is of interest, however, to note that throughout the whole story of Vat. Gr. 1982 this divine award is called βραβεῖον, that at the end of the story (§43) the leaf is not explicitly mentioned (Peter gives something ‘from the βραβεῖον’; but here the word θαλλεῖον may have been lost), and that in the Syriac Obsequies of the Holy Virgin the Greek words were translated as ‘a branch (the Greek loanword θαλλός is used) from this staff ’ or ‘rod’.17 There is, therefore, no compelling reason to translate the βραβεῖον in the Dormition narratives as ‘palm’. The word is obviously used here in its usual meaning of ‘prize of victory’, which most probably was interpreted as a wand or baton. After some instructions and answers to Mary’s questions, the angel became all light and ascended to heaven. As Mary entered her house it was shaken by the glory of the βραβεῖον she held in her hand. She entered her secret chamber and put the prize in a linen cloth. Then she took off her clothes, washed her body and put on other clothes, while saying a prayer of thanksgiving. This prayer or hymn, in §§10–12 of Vat. Gr. 1982 and some of its related texts, expresses some very remarkable views, which are so inconsistent with the theological ideas of the early Byzantine period that it is a small wonder that they have survived at all. The prayer consists of eight praises of which seven begin with Εὐλογῶ σε. These praises are rather short, with the exception of the fifth, which comprises the whole of §11. It is not impossible that in that case the words Εὐλογῶ σε have been dropped from the text once or twice. In the following, I shall reproduce and translate the text as established by Wenger; the numbering of the praises is my own. §10 1.

Εὐλογῶ σε τὸ σημεῖον τὸ ϕανερωθὲν ἐξ οὐρανοῦ ἐπὶ τὴν γῆν ἕως ἂν ἐκλέξῃ με καὶ κατοικήσῃς ἐν ἐμοί.

1.

I bless you, Sign that appeared from heaven on earth until you elected me and dwelled in me.

John of Thessalonica, II, 5 (ed. Jugie, 414, 7). See Lampe, Patristic Greek Lexicon, 304, s.v., 1.b. 17 See Shoemaker, Ancient traditions, 40–2, 351–53 (n. 2 to p. 351), who was the first to raise questions about the nature of the βραβεῖον. Because of the ‘palm’ in the later Greek and Latin tradition, Shoemaker opted for a combination of palm and rod and accordingly translated the word as ‘palm-staff ’, for which he was criticised by A.H. Becker in his review of Shoemaker’s book, in Bryn Mawr Classical Review, 2004, 01.07. 16

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roelof van den broek Εὐλογῶ σε καὶ τοὺς συγγενεῖς 2. μου τοὺς παραλήμπτοράς μου καὶ ἀοράτως πρὸ σοῦ ἐξελθόντας ἵνα σε ἀγάγωσιν.18 Εὐλογῶ σε ὅτι ἐμέτρησάς με ἐν 3.

2.

3.

ἀνδρείᾳ εἰς τὰ μέλη τοῦ σώματός σου19 καὶ κατηξιώθην τοῦ ἀσπασμοῦ τοῦ νυμϕῶνός σου ὃ προεπηγγείλω μοι.

4.

Εὐλογῶ σε ἵνα20 καταξιωθῶ τῆς 4.

§11. 5.

πεπληρωμένης εὐχαριστίας καὶ τῆς προσϕορᾶς τῆς εὐωδίας σου μεταλαβεῖν ἥ ἐστι χορηγία ἅπασι τοῖς ἔθνεσι. Εὐλογῶ σε ἵνα μοι δώῃς τὸ ἔνδυμα21 ὃ ἐπηγγείλω μοι λέγων· ὅτι ἐν αὐτῷ γνωσθήσῃ ἀπὸ τῶν συγγενῶν μου

I bless you and my relatives who are my receivers and who invisibly went out before you in order to lead you. I bless you, because you have adapted me in a manly spirit to the members of your body and because I have been deemed worthy of the kiss of your bridal chamber, which you promised me. I bless you, for I have been deemed worthy to partake of the perfect Eucharist and the fragrant sacrifice, which is abundance for all the nations.

5.

I bless you, for you have given me the garment that you promised me, saying: ‘By that you will be recognized by my

An emendation of this text will be proposed on p. 313. This obscure sentence has been variously interpreted. Wenger, L’Assomption, 215; ‘Je te bénis de ce que tu m’aies mesurée dans la force en vue de former les membres de ton corps’; Manns, 241: ‘Je te bénis, parce que tu m’as mesurée avec la force virile pour former les membres de ton corps’; Shoemaker, Ancient Traditions, 357: ‘I bless you because you gave me a measure of virility for the parts of your body’; The Ethiopic Liber Requiei, 36, reads: ‘Benedico te, quia numerasti me in illud quod est corpus tuum’ (transl. Arras, 14; Shoemaker, Ancient Traditions, 310: ‘I bless you, because you (MSS: ‘he’) counted me in what is your body’). See below, p. 310. 20 Here and in similar cases below, ἵνα has the same meaning as ὅτι in §10, 3; it explains the reason why Christ is praised, cf. Lampe, Patristic Greek Lexicon, 674 s.v. ἵνα, 8. 21 See the text critical remark on p. 307 below. 18 19

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relatives’, and you have made that I am brought to the seventh heaven, [I bless you?], for I have been deemed worthy of your perfect fragrance together with all those who believe in you, [I bless you] for you have assembled them with me in your kingdom. For you are hidden with those who are hidden, looking at those who are not seen. You are the hidden race, and you are also the Fullness (Pleroma). You are the Fullness (Pleroma) and I have painfully given birth first to you and then to all those who set their hope on you.

καὶ ποιήσῃς με ἀχθῆναι εἰς τὸν ἕβδομον οὐρανὸν ἵνα καταξιωθῶ τῆς πεπληρωμένης εὐωδίας σου μετὰ πάντων τῶν πιστευόντων εἰς σε ἵνα σὺν ἐμοὶ συναθροίσῃς αὐτοὺς εἰς τὴν βασιλείαν σου, ὅτι κρυπτὸς εἶ μετὰ κρυπτῶν, ὑποθεωρῶν τοὺς μὴ ὀρωμένους. Σὺ εἶ τὸ γένος τὸ κρυπτὸν καὶ σὺ εἶ πάλιν τὸ πλήρωμα, σὺ εἶ τὸ πλήρωμα καὶ σὲ ἐν πρώτοις ὀδύνησα22 καὶ πάντας τοὺς ἐλπίζοντας ἐπὶ σοί.

§12. 6.

7.

8.

299

(after remembering Jesus of his promise that he himself would come to her soul in the hour of death, Mary continues:) Εὐλογῶ σε καὶ τοὺς τρεῖς 6. I bless you and the three servants διακόνους τοὺς ἀποσταλέντας ἀπὸ σοῦ εἰς who have been sent by you for the διακονίαν τῶν τριῶν ὀδῶν. service of the three ways. Εὐλογῶ σε καὶ τὸ ϕῶς τὸ 7. I bless you and the eternal light αἰώνιον ἐν ᾧ κατοικεῖς. Εὐλογῶ πᾶσαν ϕυτείαν τῶν χειρῶν σου, ἥτις μένει εἰς τὸν αἰῶνα.

8.

in which you are dwelling. I bless every plantation of your hands, which remains into eternity.

22 ὀδυνάω, ‘cause pain’, seems to have here the meaning of ὠδίνω, ‘be in travail, bring forth painfully’.

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In the following I will only discuss the notion of ‘the three servants and the three ways’ (§12.6) and the ideas concerning ‘the heavenly garment and the relatives’ (§§11.5, and 10.2). The former can only be explained from a Manichaean perspective. For the latter this is less certain but quite possible; in any case, there can be no doubt that these ideas derive from a heterodox milieu. Much more could be said about this hymn of praise and other peculiar ideas and expressions in this version of the Falling Asleep and Assumption of the Virgin, but that would exceed the scope of this contribution. I hope to come back to them in another connection. The three servants and the three ways One of the most enigmatic utterances of Mary is found in § 12, 6: ‘I bless you and the three servants who have been sent by you for the service of the three ways’ (Εὐλογῶ σε καὶ τοὺς τρεῖς διακόνους τοὺς ἀποσταλέντας ἀπὸ σοῦ εἰς διακονίαν τῶν τριῶν ὀδῶν).23 The only text to have preserved this element is the Ethiopian Liber Requiei, 37: ‘I bless you and your three servants who are sent by you to serve on the three ways’.24 There is little doubt that we are concerned here with an echo of well-known Manichaean ideas concerning the fate of the soul at death.25

23 Cf. Wenger, Assomption, 217, n. 2: ‘Nous n’avons pas réussi à trouver la clé de cette énigme’. Erbetta, Apocrifi, I.2, 473, n. 18, suggested that the three ways refer to ‘il mondo del caos, dei planeti e della luce pura (il paradiso), il cui percorso sarebbe facilitato da tre angeli, noti nell’angelologia giudaica: Raffaele, Michele e Gabriele’. See also Arras’ suggestions in note 24. 24 According to the reading of ms B (BN (Paris), d’Abbadie 158, f. 87r–115v); the ‘three ways’ are not mentioned in ms A (BM, Or. 692, f. 47r–83v: in via), which is the text edited and translated by Arras: ‘Benedico te et tres servos tuos qui mittuntur ad te ut serviant in via’. The better text is obviously represented by ms B and Vat. Gr. 1982: Christ’s servants are of course sent by Christ and not to him, which makes the addition of the possessive pronoun (tuos) superfluous. In his notes to this passage (CSCO 352, 86), Arras points out that also in this ms only a small emendation is needed to read ‘a te’ instead of ‘ad te’, and then he continues: ‘Si ad te legendum est, signantur tres virgines Mariae comitatus in coelo, sed in tribus viis obscurum est. Si a te legendum sit, forse signantur angelus malitiae, angelus iustitiae et mors’, which in both cases is very unlikely (see below). Shoemaker, Ancient Traditions, 311, translates the reading of ms B: ‘I bless you and your three servants that were sent by you to minister in the three ways’. 25 For a thorough discussion of the Manichaean views, see S.G. Richter, Die Aufstiegspsalmen des Herakleides: Untersuchungen zum Seelenaufstieg und zur Seelenmesse bei den Manichäern (Sprachen und Kulturen des christlichen Orients 1), Wiesbaden 1997.

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According to Manichaean doctrine, the first of a series of stages of the ascent of the soul is the encounter with a heavenly figure (interpreted as the soul’s twin, Mani, the Saviour, or a light deity) that is accompanied by three angels. The three angels bring a prize of victory (mostly called βραβεῖον, sometimes the Coptic word бро, ‘victory’, is used), a light garment, a crown, a diadem, and a wreath. A few texts may be quoted. Chapter VII of the Coptic Kephalaia gives an enumeration and short characterizations of the ‘Five Fathers’. The third power of the fourth father is called the Light Form: ‘the one whom the elect and the catechumens shall receive, should they renounce the world’. The Light Form is at the same time the fifth father (36, 12–21): And also the fifth father is this Light Form; the one who shall appear to everyone who will go out of his body, corresponding to the pattern of the image of the apostle; and the three great glorious angels who are coming with her. One angel holds the prize in his hand. The second bears the light garment. The third is the one who possesses the diadem and the wreath and the crown of light. These are the three angels of light, the ones who come with this Light Form, and they appear with her to the elect and the catechumens.26

One of the new Manichaean texts found at Kellis contains a prayer probably spoken by the believer in the face of death. It describes the stages of the ascent of the soul and begins with the arrival of the image of the twin with its three angels: The image of my twin came to me with its three angels. It gave me the garment, the crown, the palm and the prize of victory.27

Though more texts could be mentioned, two other quotations will suffice. In the Coptic Manichaean Psalm Book, Hymn 267, 17–20, it is said:

26 H.J. Polotsky & A. Böhlig (eds), Kephalaia, fasc. 1 (Manichäische Handschriften der Staatlichen Museen Berlin I), Stuttgart 1940, 36, 12–21; I follow here the English translation by I. Gardner, The Kephalaia of the Teacher: The Edited Coptic Manichaean Texts in Translation and Commentary (NHMS 37), Leiden 1995, 40. 27 T.Kell.Copt.2, text A 5, 120–123, in: I. Gardner, Kellis Literary Texts I (Dakhleh Oasis Project: Monograph No. 4), Oxford 1996, 14–15. Diadem and wreath are often omitted, apparently ‘weil sie überflüssige Pendants zur Krone waren’ (C. Colpe, Die religionsgeschichtliche Schule: Darstellung und Kritik ihres Bildes vom gnostischen Erlösermythus (FRLANT 78), Göttingen 1961, 104, note 5).

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roelof van den broek Let the three angels come forth before me, and give me now my wreath, the garment and my prize, according to your true promises, which you made to those who believed in you.28

And in one of the so-called Psalms of Heraclides, in the same Psalm Book, the believer says (Psalm 285, 17–21): I have received your words, o my Father, stretch out to me now your right hand, in order that the seven demons before me see it and go away from me. I myself, however, I have received the three holy gifts, which the three holy angels reached forth to me.29

According to Manichaean doctrine, the second stage of the ascent of the soul is that it is brought before the heavenly judge. Then it becomes evident that there are three possibilities for the further fate of the soul, called the three ways. There is a way for the elect that leads to Paradise, a way for the catechumens that brings them to reincarnation in a new life, and a way for the unbelievers that ends in eternal death. In Kephalaia XXIX, 4–8, it is said: The eighth throne is established in the atmosphere. The Judge of truth sits upon it, he who judges all mankind. Three paths shall be distinguished before him: one to death, one to life, one to the mingling.30

In the tenth century, the Arabic writer al-Nadim gave a useful description of these Manichaean ideas about the fate of the soul.31 According to him, a light shining deity and three other deities, who bring the prize, the garment, the diadem, the crown and the light wreath,32 come to the soul at death. If the dying person is an elect they are accompanied by 28 C.R.C. Allberry (ed.), A Manichaean Psalm-Book, II, (Manichaean Manuscripts in the Chester Beatty Collection 2), Stuttgart 1938, 84, 17–20. 29 Edition Allberry, 108, 17–21; new edition, with German translation, by S.G. Richter, Die Herakleides-Psalmen (The Manichaean Coptic Papyri in the Chester Beatty Library. Psalm Book, Part II, fasc. 2 = Corpus Fontium Manichaeorum, Series Coptica, I: Liber Psalmorum, Pars II, Fasc. 2), Louvain 1998, 44/45. For the seven demons, see p. 304f. below; for a gnostic tradition about three ‘toll collectors’ that take away souls, see note 63 below. 30 Polotsky & Böhlig, Kephalaia, 83; English translation Gardner, Kephalaia of the Teacher, 85. See also Kephalaia XC, 223, where three kinds of ways are distinguished: four ways leading to the light (for the elect), eight ways leading to transmigration and, finally, to the light (for the catechumens), and three ways also leading to transmigration, but, in the end, to hell (for the disbelievers). 31 A German translation and discussion of al-Nadim’s report in: C. Colpe, Religionsgeschichtliche Schule, 100–17; an English translation in: B. Dodge, The Fihrist of an-Nadim. A Tenth-Century Survey of Muslim Culture, New York/London 1970, 795–96. 32 I follow here Colpe’s translation, Religionsgeschichtliche Schule, 100.

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‘a virgin who resembles the soul of that member of the Elect’ (apparently the soul’s twin). After a description of the different fates of the three classes of mankind al-Nadim continues by ascribing the doctrine of the three ways to Mani himself: Mani said, ‘These are the three roadways upon which the souls of men are divided. One of them leads to the Garden [of Paradise] and is for the Elect. The second one, leading to the world and things horrible, is for those who guard the cult and help the Elect. The third leads to the underworld and is for the man who is a sinner.’33

It is of interest to note that according to al-Nadim the three ‘deities’ are active on each of the three ways: at death they do not only appear to the souls of the Elect but also to those of the catechumens and the unbelievers.34 They deliver the soul of the catechumen from the demons who threaten it and send it back to the world. The catechumen has to go through a series of reincarnations ‘until his light and spirit are rescued, so that he becomes attached, adhering to the Elect, donning their garments after the long period of his [transitional] uncertainty’. At the death of an evil man the demon takes hold of him: ‘As those [good] deities are also present with the same garments, the evil man supposes that they have come to save him. But, instead, they have come to reproach him, to remind him of his evil deeds, and to substantiate proof of his having neglected to aid the Elect’.35 The sinner is also sent back to the world, until the final punishment, when he is cast down into the underworld. So it could be said that the three angels or deities discharge their duties, ‘serve’, at the beginning of the three ways that open for the soul at death. In the Manichaean sources the three angels are, as far as I know, never indicated as the ‘three servants’. Nevertheless, the words of Mary: ‘I bless you and the three servants who have been sent by you to serve on the three ways’, can be best explained as a clear echo of the Manichaean doctrine of the fate of the soul immediately after death. In this connection, attention must be drawn to another peculiar element in the tradition of Vat. Gr. 1982 that has a close, albeit not exclusive, parallel in Manichaean literature. Immediately after her prayer of thanksgiving Mary assembles her relatives and friends in

33 34 35

Dodge, Fihrist, II, 796. See also the text mentioned in note 26 (“to the Elect and the catechumens”). Dodge, Fihrist, II, 796.

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order to inform them of her coming death. She then tells them that two angels are present when the soul is about to leave the body, the angel of righteousness and the angel of unrighteousness. If the dying person has done good deeds, the angel of righteousness rejoices and other angels of righteousness bring the soul to the place of the righteous. In that case the angel of unrighteousness weeps because he has no part in that soul. But if the dying person has done evil, then this angel rejoices and other evil spirits take the soul out of the body and bring it to hell. Then it is the angel of righteousness who weeps abundantly. This story is found in the Greek, the Eastern and the Western branches of the tradition represented by Vat. Gr. 1982, which shows its authenticity, but it is missing in the preserved Greek text of Vat. Gr. 1982 itself.36 What is of interest here is that in both the Eastern and the Western tradition it is said that the evil angels or spirits who take away the soul of an evil man are seven in number.37 The same idea is found in Manichaean descriptions of what happens at the death of a person. In one of the Psalms of Heraclides, which was already quoted above, the dying person says (Psalm Book, 108, 17–19): I have received your words, o my Father, stretch out to me now your right hand, in order that the seven demons before me see it and go away from me.38

And in another psalm of the same collection, Psalm Book, 282, 29–31, he says: The seven fearful daemons have withdrawn from me, their defiled hands empty of my blood, their heart laden with grief and sorrow, because they were unable to trap me in the snares of lust, for I have never been a slave of iniquity, which does evil.39

36 John of Thessalonica, I, 5 (PO 19, 382), II, 4 (PO 19, 410–411); Liber Requiei, 40 (Arras, CSCO 343, 15); Georgian Transitus (van Esbroeck, 65); Transitus in Codex Augiensis, 5 (Wenger, Assomption, 247); Gaelic Transitus, 8 (Donahue, 35), and idem, other version, 5 (Herbert & McNamara, 121). 37 Liber Requiei: ‘And he takes seven other angels with him, and they take that soul and lead it away’ (Shoemaker, Ancient Traditions, 313–14); Georgian Transitus: ‘et adducit septem etiam alias malas, et adducit animam et dilacerant eam’; Transitus in Codex Augiensis: ‘et adducit secum alios spiritus septem peiores se et tollunt animam, euellentes eam a corpore’. John of Thessalonica and the Gaelic text have dropped this specific element. 38 See note 29 above. 39 Allberry, Psalm-Book, 103, 29–34; Richter, Herakleides-Psalmen, 34/5.

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The latter text shows that, just as in the Dormition narrative, the seven demons not only come for the soul of the deceased but also withdraw with grief and sorrow if a righteous person is involved. This might be an instance of Manichaean influence on the early traditions of Mary’s Assumption, but it is equally possible that both are dependent on a gnostic doctrine that was already known in the second century.40 According to Celsus, in his True Doctrine, there were gnostics who taught that there are seven angels standing on either side of the soul when the body is dying, the one group being angels of light and the other of what are called archontic angels.41

Unfortunately, we know nothing about these gnostics. It is of interest to note that neither the Manichaean texts nor the Assumption narratives make mention of seven good angels. In the Manichaean view there was no need for them, because in the case of a righteous person it was the light figure and the three angels with their gifts that came for his soul. This might be an indication of Manichaean influence on the traditions about Mary’s Assumption. It remains possible, however, that in the latter the seven good angels were left out by accident. The heavenly garment In Vat. G. 1982, §11, 5, Mary says: ‘I bless you, for you have given me the garment that you promised me, saying: “By that you will be recognized by my relatives” ’ (Εὐλογῶ σε ἵνα μοι δώῃς τὸ ἔνδυμα ὃ 40 In early Christianity, it was a well-known idea that at death good angels came for the good soul and bad demons for the bad soul; see Lampe, Patristic Greek Lexicon, 12, s.v. ἄγγελος, 8, and 329, s.v. δαίμων, 4.e. See also R. Roukema, ‘Les anges attendant les âmes des défunts: une comparaison entre Origène et quelques gnostiques’, in: L. Perrone et alii (eds), Origeniana Octava: Origen and the Alexandrian Tradition (Bibliotheca Ephemeridum Theologicarum Lovaniensium CLXIV), Vol. I, Louvain 2003, 367–74. Unfortunately, Roukema does not discuss the passage in Contra Celsum VI, 27. 41 Origen, Contra Celsum, VI, 27, ed. M. Marcovich, Origenes: Contra Celsum libri VIII (VCSup 55), Leiden 2005, 404. Translation by H. Chadwick, Origen: Contra Celsum, Third Printing (with corrections), Cambridge 1979, 342. Chadwick compares this statement with ‘the Valentinian doctrine of good angels of the Right and bad angels of the Left’ (342, n. 3), which, however, has nothing to do with the two groups of seven angels and demons mentioned by Celsus’ source. The texts mentioned by him are no parallels at all: Marcovich rightly did not include them in his rich apparatus of parallels and sources. The only valid parallels to this passage in Celsus are the Manichaean and Transitus texts mentioned above.

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ἐπηγγείλω μοι λέγων· ὅτι ἐν αὐτῷ γνωσθήσῃ ἀπὸ τῶν συγγενῶν μου). The question is how the promise of Christ should be translated. Wenger interpreted γνωσθήσῃ ἀπό as ‘you will be distinguished from’ and tacitly corrected μου into σου: ‘Par lui tu seras distinguée de tous ceux de ta race’.42 For this he was influenced by the only witness he could know of, namely Cosmas Vestitor.43 Of this Byzantine author (second half of the eighth century) four sermons on the Dormitio Mariae are known, which unfortunately have survived in a Latin translation only. In the second homily, the author relates that Mary praised her Son and God, ‘adjuring (. . .) that before the common resurrection of all people she should be clothed with incorruptibility in order to be distinguished from her relatives according to the flesh’ (obsecrans (. . .) ut ante communem omnium resurrectionem, ipsa incorruptionem indueret ad distinctionem cognatorum secundum carnem suorum).44 Cosmas Vestitor apparently interpreted the garment, which he did not mention, as incorruptibility (cf. 1 Cor 15:53). The Ethiopian Liber Requiei, 37, has preserved an even closer parallel to Vat. Gr. 1982: ‘I bless you for giving me my garment that you mentioned to me, saying: “By that you will be distinguished from your relatives” ’.45 In view of these parallels Wenger’s tacit substitution of σου for μου seems justified; his translation ‘you will be distinguished from’ also finds support in Cosmas Vestitor and the Liber Requiei. Shoemaker followed Wenger’s interpretation, but retained the reading μου: ‘I bless you so that you will give me the garment that you promised me, saying: “By this you will be distinguished from my relatives” ’.46 But, of course, another translation is also possible and even more likely, namely that Christ says about the promised garment: ‘By that you will be recognized by your relatives’. In this way, the sentence was interpreted by Mario Erbetta (‘con esso sarò conosciuta da tutti i miei affini’) and Frédéric Manns (‘Par lui tu seras reconnue de tous mes parents’), though both retained the reading μου.47

42 43 44

319).

Wenger, Assomption, 217. Wenger, Assomption, 39. Cosmas Vestitor, Laus in celeberrimam dormitionem . . ., II, 1 (ed. Wenger, Assomption,

45 Arras’ translation, 14: ‘Benedico te ut des mihi vestimentum meum quod dixisti mihi dicens: quia per illud distingueris a cognatis tuis’; Shoemaker, 310: ‘I bless you so that you will give me my garments, [about] which you told me, saying: “By this you will be distinguished from your relatives”’. 46 Shoemaker, Ancient Traditions, 357. 47 Erbetta, Apocrifi, I, 2, 466; Manns, Récit, 241.

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Before passing on to the meaning of what the Virgin is saying here, one other text-critical remark has to be made. In the first version of John of Thessalonica’s homily on the Assumption, the whole of §11 has been left out, but in the second version an important part of it has been preserved. There, Mary says about the garment: ‘I praise you, Jesus, for you have given me the first garment, which you promised me’ (Εὐλογῶ, ’Ιησοῦ, ἵνα δώῃς μοι τὸ πρῶτον ἔνδυμα, ὅ ἐπηγγείλω μοι). The addition of the word ‘first’ is so strange that Wenger considered this the better reading.48 It is in any case the lectio difficilior; its omission is much easier to explain than its addition. Moreover, the reading ‘first garment’ makes good sense, as will be shown below. Therefore, I suggest that the text originally read: Εὐλογῶ σε ἵνα μοι δώῃς τὸ πρῶτον ἔνδυμα ὃ ἐπηγγείλω μοι λέγων ὅτι ἐν αὐτῷ γνωσθήσῃ ἀπὸ τῶν συγγενῶν σου, which should be translated as: ‘I bless you, for you have given me my first garment, which you promised me saying: “By that you will be recognized by your relatives” ’. What is the meaning of this? The first observation to be made here is that in the preceding chapters this promise is not mentioned. The same holds for another promise, in §10, praise 3: ‘I bless you, (. . .) because I have been deemed worthy of the kiss of your bridal chamber, which you promised me’. In itself it is conceivable that these promises once occurred in the text and were left out at a later stage of the textual transmission. But they are nowhere mentioned in the textual tradition of the Dormition narrative, not even in its most elaborate representative, the Liber Requiei. It seems more likely, therefore, that these and other praises in this prayer of thanksgiving are not due to the writer of the narrative but stem from another context or once had an independent circulation. Though some of the praises allow for an orthodox Christian explanation, most of them do not and the whole is better understood as a Manichaean or more generally heterodox composition. As a matter of fact, references to promises made by the Saviour are frequently mentioned in the Manichaean texts on the fate of the soul after death. In the discussion of the motif of the three angels, I have quoted already the Coptic Psalm Book, 267, 17–20:

48

Wenger, Assomption, 39.

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roelof van den broek Let the three angels come forth before me, and give me now my wreath, the garment and my prize, according to your true promises, which you made to those who believed in you.49

The same idea is found in Psalm 250, 12–14: I shall pasture (or: anchor) in your congregation, I the (new?) man, and receive all the gifts that you have promised me.50

and in Psalm 257, 8–10: Come you too, o angels, and . . . the Saviour, bringing me the gifts that were promised me.51

The idea that after death the righteous soul is invested with a new or white or radiant garment was well known in early Christianity.52 It is, however, often very difficult to decide what this metaphor exactly meant to say. In most cases it simply expressed the idea that the soul had entered the divine realm of light and glory. Especially in texts of a more dubious orthodoxy we find the idea that the heavenly garment is the soul’s spiritual body, left behind at its descent to earth or waiting for it as a glorious substitute for its earthly body. The latter view is frequently expressed in the Ascension of Isaiah, chapter 9. In the seventh heaven Isaiah saw, for instance, ‘Enoch and all who were with him, stripped of their robes of the flesh; and I saw them in robes of above, and they were like the angels who stand there in great glory’ (9, 9).53 The fact, however, that Mary speaks of her ‘first garment’ (τὸ πρῶτον ἔνδυμα) seems to indicate that we are concerned here with the idea of a heavenly garment that the soul had left behind when it was incarnated in the carnal body, which apparently is considered the ‘second garment’. A fine parallel to this idea of a first or original garment is found in the so-called Hymn of the Pearl, which is preserved in the Acts of Thomas, 108–113.54 In this oriental tale, a young prince is sent out See note 28. Allberry, Psalm-Book, 59. 51 Allberry, Psalm-Book, 69; see also Psalm 277, 28–30: ‘As your Apostle promised me from the first, nod to me in assent, give me the three gifts of Light’ (Allberry, 98; Richter, Herakleides-Psalmen, 20/21). 52 See Lampe, Patristic Greek Lexicon, 469, s.v. ἔνδυμα; A. Kehl, ‘Gewand (der Seele)’, RAC 10 (1978), 990–97. 53 Translation by M.A. Knibb in: J.H. Charlesworth (ed.), The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, Vol. 2, Garden City NY 1985, 170; see also Ascension of Isaiah 9, 17 and 4, 16. 54 The Greek and Syriac texts show considerable differences, which, however, are not important for the present discussion. The Greek text was edited by M. Bonnet, in: 49 50

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on a dangerous mission. Before his departure his parents took off from him the beautiful garments that they had made for him. And they made the following covenant with him: If you go down to Egypt and bring the one pearl, which is in the land of the devouring serpent, you shall put on that garment set with stones and the robe which lies over it.55

After his arrival in Egypt, the prince forgot his royal descent and his mission and became a slave of the Egyptians, which is described as a deep sleep. Then his parents sent him a letter in which they exhorted him to arise from his sleep and to remember that he is a son of kings: Remember your gold-spangled garment. recall the pearl for which you were sent to Egypt.56

The young hero arose from his sleep, remembered his descent and his mission, took the pearl from the serpent and went back to the East. He stripped off the filthy and unclean dress of the Egyptians and left it in their country. Still on his way back home, his parents sent him through the intermediary of two royal treasurers the bright garment and the robe, which he had left in the royal palace: But, when suddenly I saw my garment reflected as in a mirror, I perceived in it my whole self as well and through it I knew and saw myself. For though we originated from one and the same we were partially divided. Then again we were one, with a single form.57

Whatever the origin of this oriental story may have been, it is evident that in its present form it is full of symbolic meaning. There is a scholarly

R.A. Lipsius & M. Bonnet (eds), Acta apostolorum apocrypha, II, 2, Leipzig 1903 (reprinted Darmstadt 1959), 219–24. A translation of the Greek text in: J.K. Elliott, The Apocryphal New Testament: A Collection of Apocryphal Christian Literature in an English Translation, Oxford 1993, 488–91. For the Syriac text and a French translation, see P.-H. Poirier, L’Hymne de la Perle des Actes de Thomas: Introduction—Texte—Traduction—Commentaire (Homo Religiosus 8), Louvain-La-Neuve 1981 (with an extensive and very useful ‘Histoire de la recherche’, 29–167); English translation of the Syriac text in: A.F.J. Klijn, The Acts of Thomas: Introduction—Text—Commentary (NovTSup 108), Leiden 20032, 182–98 (with commentary). 55 Acts of Thomas, 108, 12–14 (transl. Elliott, 488). 56 Acts of Thomas, 110, 45–46 (transl. Elliott, 489). 57 Acts of Thomas, 112, 76–87 (transl. Elliott, 490).

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consensus that the story was most likely adopted by the Manichaeans and that they were responsible for its inclusion in the Acts of Thomas.58 The prince may have been interpreted in various ways, but it seems quite obvious that he was also seen as a symbol of the soul, which after its descent from the world of light has to endure a dangerous earthly existence before returning to the realm of light. That in the Hymn of the Pearl the Prince sees his own self reflected in the garment and becomes one with it, ‘with a single form’, implies that it is identical with his heavenly counterpart which he had left behind at his departure. In the same way, Mary’s πρῶτον ἔνδυμα may be her true self, her spiritual body, which waited for her in heaven. This interpretation might be able to explain another enigmatic sentence in Mary’s hymn of thanksgiving, in Vat. Gr. 1982, 10: Εὐλογῶ σε ὅτι ἐμέτρησάς με ἐν ἀνδρείᾳ εἰς τὰ μέλη τοῦ σώματός σου καὶ κατηξιώθην τοῦ ἀσπασμοῦ τοῦ νυμϕῶνός σου ὃ προεπηγγείλω μοι. This can be understood as referring to the union of the female soul with its male counterpart (σύζυγος) in the heavenly bridal chamber. The verb μετρέω + dative means ‘adapt to, moderate’, especially when used with respect to opinions or doctrines that are adapted to the limited understanding of others.59 The verb μετρέω + εἰς is not mentioned in the dictionaries, but it possibly means ‘adapt to something of greater size’, ‘make equal to’. If correct, this interpretation leads to the translation given above: ‘I bless you, because you have adapted me in a manly spirit to the members of your body and because I have been deemed worthy of the kiss of your bridal chamber, which you promised me’. One gets here, once again, the impression that a text that originally referred to the fate of the pious soul after death has been applied to the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. The relatives According to Vat. Gr. 1982, §11, 5, Mary’s relatives (συγγενεῖς) will recognize her by the garment Christ had given to her. These relatives are also mentioned in 10,2, which reads: Εὐλογῶ σε καὶ τοὺς συγγενεῖς μου τοὺς παραλήμπτοράς μου καὶ ἀοράτως πρὸ σοῦ ἐξελθόντας ἵνα σε ἀγάγωσιν. This sentence is not found in any of the other representa-

58 See already W. Bousset, ‘Manichäisches in den Thomasakten’, ZNTW 18 (1917– 1918), 1–39 (cf. Poirier, Hymne, 113–16) and Poirier, Hymne, 310–17. 59 Lampe, Patristic Greek Lexicon, 866 s.v. 4.

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tives of the ‘Palm’ tradition, which implies that there are no external witnesses that could suggest a better Greek text or clarify its meaning.60 Nevertheless, there is one emendation that suggests itself immediately, i.e., the substitution of με for σε: it seems more probable that Mary’s ancestors went out to lead Mary to heaven than that they had to lead Christ to Mary. This will become evident if we look more closely at the meaning of the word παραλήμπτωρ (or παραλήμπτης), ‘receiver’, in this context. It often occurs in connection with the fate of the soul after death, indicating both positive and negative heavenly powers that lead the soul after its departure from the body. The term is mostly used in plural, but sometimes only one Receiver is mentioned. It is noteworthy that it almost exclusively occurs in gnostic texts.61 A few examples may suffice to show the function of these Receivers. In the Coptic fragment of the Acts of Andrew the Receiver is taken in a positive sense: I tremble entirely in all my limbs and I glorify the Receiver (ⲡⲡⲁⲣⲁⲗⲏⲙⲡⲧⲱⲣ) who comes after the souls of the saints.62

The Apocryphon of John (Nag Hammadi Codex III, 32, 22–36, 15 parr.) deals with the fate of the souls of both righteous and evil men. Those who have the Spirit of Life and are not affected by the passions during their life in the flesh are, NHC III, 34, 16–19: 60 Wenger, Assomption, 38, interpreted this text as referring to Mary’s ancestors: ‘elle bénit ces ancêtres, dont la lignée devait amener le Christ’, and accordingly his very free translation runs as follows (215): ‘Je te bénis, toi et mes ancêtres, nés avant toi pour t’amener’. Mann’s translation does much more justice to the Greek text, Récit, 241: ‘Je te bénis, toi et mes parents et ceux qui doivent me recevoir. Ils sont sortis invisiblement avant toi pour te conduire’. Shoemaker, Ancient Traditions, 356: ‘I bless you and all my relatives, those who will receive me, who came forth invisibly before you, in order to bring you along.’ 61 Most of them are already mentioned by Shoemaker, Ancient Traditions, 356–57, n. 12, who, however, ascribed to the Receivers an exclusively positive function, namely ‘to guide it (the soul) safely past the Demiurge and his minions to the Pleroma’. It is noteworthy that the word is apparently not found in the Coptic Manichaean texts, though the idea itself occurs frequently: it is not mentioned in S. Clackson, E. Hunter & S.N.C. Lieu (eds), Dictionary of Manichaean Texts, I: Texts from the Roman Empire: Texts in Syriac, Greek, Coptic and Latin (Corpus Fontium Manichaeorum, Subsidia II), Turnhout 1999. 62 Coptic ms Utrecht 1, p. 14, 2–7. Edition and French translation in ‘Le Papyrus Copte Utrecht 1. Édition du texte copte par R. van den Broek et traduction annotée par J.-M. Prieur’, in: J.-M. Prieur, Acta Andreae. Textus (CCSA 6), Turnhout 1989, 666–67; the same Coptic text with an English translation in: D.R. MacDonald, The Acts of Andrew and the Acts of Andrew and Matthias in the City of the Cannibals (SBLCAS 1), Atlanta 1990, 248–49. Prieur, 666, n. 2, suggests that here the Receiver might indicate God himself, which is very unlikely.

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roelof van den broek looking expectantly for the hour when they will be received by the Receivers (Ⲛ̅ⲛⲡⲁⲣⲁⲗⲏⲙⲡⲧⲱⲣ) into the dignity of eternal life.63

In this section of the Apocryphon of John, the Receivers are mentioned only once, but they occur frequently in what seems to be a free elaboration of this passage, which is found in the Pistis Sophia, 111–112.64 In the whole of this long gnostic treatise the Receivers play an important part,65 but it is in this specific passage that their role is most clearly described. Jesus explains what happens after death, both to evil and to good souls. In the case of an evil man, the ‘Avenging Receivers’ (Ⲙ̅ ⲡⲁⲣⲁⲗⲏⲙⲡⲧⲱⲣ ⲛ̅ⲉⲣⲓⲛⲁⲓⲟⲥ = οἱ ἐριναῖοι παραλήμπτορες) take his soul from his body and, after a long series of punishments, it is brought before the judge, the Virgin of the Light. She seals the sinful soul and gives it to one of her Receivers (ⲛⲉⲥⲡⲁⲣⲁⲗⲏⲙⲡⲧⲏⲥ) in order to cast the soul into

63 NHC III, 34, 16–19 par., edited by M. Waldstein & F. Wisse, The Apocryphon of John: Synopsis of Nag Hammadi Codices II, 1; III, 1; and IV, 1 with BG 8502,2 (Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies XXXIII), Leiden 1995, 148: Synopsis 69, 7–12. In NHC II, 25, 35–26, 1, and NHC IV, 40, 11–13, the same idea is expressed in Coptic words. Waldstein and Wisse add an erroneous explanation to their translation of NHC IV and II: ‘the receivers (of the body)’. M. Tardieu, Écrits gnostiques: Codex de Berlin (Sources Gnostiques et Manichéennes 1), Paris 1984, 150–51, translates the word παραλήμπτωρ in NHC III and BG as ‘contrôleur’. In his commentary he writes, p. 331: ‘Les ‘contrôleurs’ sont les douaniers ou péagers célestes, qui font subir aux âmes des défunts l’examen de passage’, which in view of the evidence presented here is certainly wrong. Nevertheless, there were gnostics who identified the Receivers with the ‘toll collectors’. The (First) Apocalypse of James even speaks about three collectors, NHC V, 33, 5–11: ‘And, in particular, three of them will seize you—they who sit there as toll collectors. Not only do they demand the toll, but they also take away souls by theft’ (also 34, 20–24). The whole section of V, 34, 28–35, 25 has a close parallel in Irenaeus and Epiphanius, but they do not mention the three collectors who take away souls; see A. Veilleux (ed.), La première Apocalypse de Jacques (NH V, 3). La seconde Apocalypse de Jacques (NH V, 4) (Bibliothèque Copte de Nag Hammadi, Section Textes 17), Québec 1986, 85–90. It seems that in the later transmission of this early piece of gnostic literature the Manichaean view of the three angels that appear at death was incorporated into the tradition about the toll collectors. 64 Pistis Sophia. Text edited by Carl Schmidt, Translation and Notes by Violet MacDermot (NHS IX), Leiden 1978, 284–91. See also the valuable German translation by C. Schmidt, Koptisch-Gnostische Schriften, I, Die Pistis Sophia, die beiden Bücher des Jeû, Unbekanntes altgnostisches Werk, 4th ed. by H.-M. Schenke, Berlin 1981, 184–89. Similar discussions of the fate of the souls are to be found in chapters 96 and 97 (Schmidt-MacDermot, 228–29, 235–37; Schmidt-Schenke, 145–46, 150–51). 65 According to chapter 88, the apostles preach the mysteries ‘to the whole race of men, so that they . . . are saved from the hands of the harsh Receivers of the outer darkness’ (Schmidt-MacDermot, 201; Schmidt-Schenke, 130). The Untitled Gnostic Treatise, 9, knows the difference between the Receivers of the world of Light and those of the realm of darkness: the former are recognizable by the crown on their head (The Books of Jeû and the Untitled Text in the Bruce Codex. Text edited by Carl Schmidt, Translation and Notes by Violet MacDermot (NHS 13), Leiden 1978, 241; Schmidt-Schenke, 346).

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a body that is worthy of the sins it has committed. Only after a long cycle of ‘changes of the body’ the soul will be released. In chapter 112 of the Pistis Sophia, Jesus discusses the fate of good souls. In this connection it may suffice to pay some attention to the fate of the initiated into ‘the mysteries of the first space’. They are also brought forth from the body by the Avenging Receivers. The soul takes the path to the heights; it proclaims ‘the mystery of the releasing of all the bonds and all the seals, with which the archons bound the Counterfeit Spirit to that soul’. Then the Receivers (ⲙ̅ⲡⲁⲣⲁⲗⲏⲙⲡⲧⲱⲣ) of the soul come and snatch it from the hands of the Avenging Receivers. The Receivers of the soul become wings of light and garments of light for that soul and bring it to the judge, the Virgin of Light. She and her seven virgins of light recognize their own signs in it. The Receivers of the Light baptise and anoint the soul and give it into the hands of the Great Sabaoth, who seals it again. Melchisedek, ‘the great ⲡⲁⲣⲁⲗⲏⲙⲡⲧⲏⲥ of the Light’,66 does the same, and also the Receivers of Melchisedek seal that soul and bring it to the Treasury of Light. The evidence presented above is sufficient to make clear that the Receivers are psychopomps, powers of the world of light as well as that of darkness that lead the soul to the place it deserves on account of its earthly behaviour. This implies that in Vat. G. 1982, §10, 2, where Mary speaks of ‘my Receivers who invisibly went out before you in order to lead you (σε)’, the text should be emended into ‘ . . . in order to lead me (με)’. There is, however, one great difference between the texts discussed above and Vat. Gr. 1982: Mary identifies her Receivers (παραλήμπτορες) with her relatives (συγγενεῖς). In the Graeco-Roman world, it was a widespread idea that the ancestors of the deceased person waited for his soul at the entrance of the underworld.67 In Rome there existed the view that, just as the images of the ancestors headed the funeral procession of high-ranking people, their ancestral manes guided the soul 66 ‘Melchisedek, the great Receiver of the Light’ is also repeatedly mentioned in chapters 24–26 and 86 (Schmidt-MacDermot, 34–6, 194; Schmidt-Schenke, 20–2, 125); cf. also the nameless ‘great Receiver of the Light’ in chapter 93 (Schmidt-MacDermot, 217; Schmidt-Schenke, 138). 67 Not only the souls of relatives but also those of former friends or colleagues were expected to receive the soul of the deceased; see C.B. Welles, ‘The Epitaph of Julius Terentius’, HThR 34 (1941) 79–102, esp. 87–88 (the souls of gladiators receive the soul of a colleague).

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to the land of the dead.68 The ancient ideas of the fate of the soul after death persisted when the journey to the underworld was transformed into a journey to heaven.69 The guide (ἡγεμών) who in the early Greek view led the soul to the underworld now did the same on the road to the stars. Hermes remained the pre-eminent psychopompus, but also the Sun and other divine entities could fulfill this function. In the Christian tradition, angels or saints guide the soul to the heavenly Paradise.70 However, in Vat. Gr. 1982, §10, 2, Mary praises her relatives, as her Receivers, for having invisibly gone out before Christ to lead her. As far as I know, this idea of the deceased’s relatives, whether taken in a literal or spiritual sense, as accompanying his soul on its journey to heaven was unknown in the Graeco-Roman and the Christian worlds. The only passage I know of which at least seems to suggest a more active role of the soul’s relatives during its ascent to heaven is, again, found in a Manichaean text, one of the Psalms of Heraclides, Psalm 285 of the Coptic Manichaean Psalm Book: and I shall rise up and look and see [. . .] the whole family of my kinsmen, my fathers that look out, those who take care of me in what manner I may go to the shining land.71

We have seen already that according to Vat. Gr. 1982, §11, 5, the relatives recognized the soul of Mary by its garment. It seems that they were also thought to take care of the soul during its journey to the land of light. This would contrast with the view upheld in the rest of the text that is was Christ and his angels who accompany Mary to Paradise, but it would become understandable if the prayer of thanksgiving originated within another religious context. It might be that also on this point the tradition of the Byzantine Transitus was influenced by Manichaean ideas.

68 See F. Cumont, Lux perpetua, Paris 1949, 58, and 392–95 (Note complémentaire III: ‘La réception des morts par les mânes’). 69 See I.P. Couliano, Expérience de l’extase: Extase, ascension et récit visionnaire de l’Hellénisme au Moyen Âge, Paris 1984, 46–48. 70 See O. Nussbaum, ‘Geleit’, RAC 9 (1976), 1006–20; for later liturgical traditions: A.D. Nock, ‘Postscript’ (to the article by C.B. Welles, mentioned in note 67 above), HThR 34 (1941) 103–09. 71 Edition Allberry, 108; ed. Richter, 44.

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Concluding remarks The present study has shown that at least some elements of Mary’s prayer of thanksgiving reflect typically Manichaean ideas about the fate of the soul after death. Mary’s repeated references to promises made by Jesus, of which no mention is made in the preceding text, suggest that they derive from another context, most probably a Manichaean hymn on the fate of the soul. The incorporation of these ideas in the apocryphal story about the death and glorification of Mary may have been triggered by the occurrence of the name of Mary in the final doxology of many Coptic Manichaean Psalms. The identity of this Mary is not specified, though it seems quite certain that she was neither Mary Magdalene nor the mother of Jesus,72 but in Antiquity there might have been Manichaean catechumens or Christians with Manichaean inclinations who thought that the Virgin Mary was meant. Two examples of these doxologies may suffice. In one of the Psalms of Heraclides, which contains a long description of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, the last verses read: Praise to you, o God, and your exalted Father. Victory and crown may be given to the soul of Mary.73

Similar doxologies are very common in the so-called Psalms of the Sarakōtōn, for instance: Praise and glory to Jesus, the king of the holy ones! Victory to the soul of the blessed Mary.74

There are strong indications that not only the prayer of thanksgiving but also the apocryphal Transitus Mariae as a whole originated in a heterodox milieu.75 The later textual tradition of Vat. Gr. 1982 and its relatives shows a process of on-going expurgation of all kinds of strange and heterodox ideas. Two authors on the Assumption of Mary, John 72 J.K. Coyle, ‘Mary Magdalene in Manichaeism?’, Le Muséon 104 (1991), 39–55; idem, ‘Twelve Years Later: Revisiting the “Marys” of Manichaeism’, in: D. Good (ed.), Mariam, the Magdalen, and the Mother, Bloomington 2005, 197–211 (both with earlier literature). 73 Richter (ed.), Herakleides-Psalmen, 4, Nr. 6, 7–8 (= ed. Allberry, 197, 8). 74 Ed. Allberry, 182, 18–19; idem in: Allberry, 182, 19; 183, 18; 185, 27; 188, 24; see also 189, 28–29: ‘Peace and life be there to the soul of the blessed Mary’. 75 See, for instance, §20, where Mary gives a book to John saying: ‘Father John, take this book which contains the mystery. When the Teacher was five years old he made the whole creation known and he also inscribed you, the Twelve, in it’.

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of Thessalonica and Pseudo-Melito, explicitly state that their narratives of Mary’s death and Assumption are meant to replace earlier heretical versions of the same facts.76 For reasons which I hope to present in another study, it seems very unlikely that the early Byzantine narrative of the Virgin’s Assumption was an original Manichaean production. But it seems certain that it came into existence in circles that did not much care about ecclesiastical orthodoxy and saw no problem in adopting Manichaean ideas. The present study may have shown that such an origin is very likely.

76 See Shoemaker, Ancient Traditions, 209–12. Pseudo-Melito, Transitus Mariae, prologue (ed. Haibach-Reinisch, Ein neuer ‘Transitus Mariae’, 64, explicitly ascribes an apocryphal Transitus to the notorious but elusive heretic Leucius (see on him int. al. Haibach-Reinisch, 32–39).

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INTERPRETATIVE THĒTAS IN THE STRASBOURG EMPEDOCLES Jaap Mansfeld and Keimpe Algra The sensational publication in 1999 of very fragmentary fragments of a papyrus text of Empedocles (presumably second century ce), which inter alia added a number of fragments of new lines to the lines already known from the indirect tradition, has made a noteworthy impact on Presocratic studies.1 Its impact on the study of the larger environment of the New Testament, to which Pieter van der Horst has devoted most of his working life, is nil. Hence the present modest attempt to fill in this lacuna, in recognition of Pieter’s so to speak omnivorous curiosity and encyclopedic involvement. A traditional problem in the interpretation of Empedocles, inherited from the scholarship of the nineteenth century, is concerned with the relation between his physics on the one hand and his ethics and so-called religious thought, focusing on the career of a daimōn, often believed to represent the (human) soul, on the other, although Empedocles’ physics is not much more rational than the rest of his doctrine. Linked with this issue is that of the distribution of the extant fragments over Empedocles’ works. The titles of two epic poems have been transmitted, viz. Purifications and On Nature, and though most fragments are not attributed to either of these in the ancient sources, a few among them are. Most scholars have been in favour of a rather rigorous distinction between physics and religious thought. As a consequence, fragments dealing with the vicissitudes of the daimōn and with the ban on killing and the consumption of meat were attributed to Purifications. But the 1 See the magisterial edition with introduction, translation and commentary of A. Martin & O. Primavesi, L’Empédocle de Strasbourg (P. Strasb. gr. Inv. 1665–1666 ), Berlin/New York 1999. The reconstructed text is distributed over four so-called Ensembles of lines. Overview and discussion of subsequent literature by M. Nucci, ‘L’Empedocle di Strasburgo. La questione delle [sic, instead of ‘dei’] tre Theta’, Elenchos 26 (2005), 379–401. A revised reconstruction has been published (too late for Nucci) by R. Janko, ‘Empedocles, On Nature I 233–364: a new reconstruction of P. Strasb. gr. Inv. 1665–6’, ZPE 150 (2004), 1–26. We have not seen R. Janko, ‘Empedocles’ Physica Book I: A New Reconstruction’, in: A. Pierris (ed.), The Empedoclean Kosmos (Proceedings of the Symposium Tertium Philosophiae Antiquae Myconense), Patras 2005.

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scholarly view of Empedocles has been changing even before the publication of the Strasbourg fragments: an appreciable number of scholars believe that the physics and the religious thought are largely compatible.2 Some scholars, in the face of the ancient evidence, even posit that On Nature and Purifications are alternative titles for a single epic.3 The editors of the Strasbourg papyrus have argued that their new text proves this compatibility to be a fact. They are right if their Ensemble d belongs with On Nature, for it contains two lines usually attributed to Purifications4—but one cannot be certain, for scraps from both poems may be extant as Strasbourg fragments. This is an issue we shall not discuss here. We are concerned with their other argument in favour of the presence of what they call the ‘démonologie’ in contexts which undeniably belong with physics, and so belong with On Nature. They do not, of course, deny that it is still far from easy to understand how exactly the demonology fits in.5 A much simplified preliminary account of Empedocles’ physics and religious thought may be necessary. The other argument depending on the Strasbourg papyrus will be discussed in a moment.

2 An early example is W. Nestle, ‘Der Dualismus des Empedokles’, Philologus 65 (1906), 545–57, repr. in his Griechische Studien, Stuttgart 1948, 151–72. For Martin & Primavesi see Pap. Strasb. 83–6; 90–7. See further, e.g., Chr. Riedweg, ‘Orphisches bei Empedokles’, Antike und Abendland 41 (1995), 34–59, with emphasis on the religious thought, and G. Betegh, ‘Empédocle, Orphée et le papyrus de Derveni’, in: P.-M. Morel & J.-F. Pradeau (eds), Les anciens savants, Strasbourg 2001, 47–70, who compares Orphic theogony and Empedoclean cosmology (an issue we cannot deal with here). For a cautious mise à point of the evidence provided by the Orphic lines quoted in the Derveni papyrus see W. Burkert, ‘Die altorphische Theogonie nach dem Papyrus von Derveni’, in: W. Burkert, Kleine Schriften III: Mystica, Orphica, Pythagorica, (ed. by F. Graf ), Göttingen 2006, 95–111 (paper first published 2005). 3 C. Osborne, ‘Empedocles Recycled’, Classical Quarterly 37 (1987) 24–50; B. Inwood, The Poem of Empedocles, Toronto etc. 1992, revised ed. 2001; S. Trépanier, Empedocles: An Interpretation, New York/London, 2004; Janko, ‘New reconstruction’, 1–2. Against, e.g., D. O’Brien, ‘Empedocles revisited’, Ancient Philosophy 15 (1995), 403–70, and O. Primavesi, ‘La daimonologia della fisica empedoclea’, Aevum Antiquum N.S. 1 (2001), 3–68. 4 Ensemble d5–6 Martin-Primavesi = Empedocles fr. B 139 D–K. Trépanier’s attractive analysis of this Ensemble as a ‘meditation on the role of Strife in the world’, Empedocles 5, is compatible with its location in another, more ethical and religious work. 5 See further, e.g., Primavesi, ‘Daimonologia’, and O. Primavesi, ‘Apollo and other gods in Empedocles’, in: M.M. Sassi (ed.), La costruzione del discorso filosofico nell’età dei Presocratici, Pisa 2006, 51–77, as well as, especially, his forthcoming paper ‘Empedocles: physical divinity and allegorical myth’ (we thank Professor Primavesi for sending us the PDF file).

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The Empedoclean cosmic stage is occupied by four divine elements, viz. Fire, Earth, Air and Water, and two divine moving forces, unifying Love (Philotēs) and divisive Strife (Neikos). Each element is moved by selflove to the extent that its parts strive to combine or remain with their likes, e.g. water with water, while Philotēs is needed to combine parts of different elements, e.g. water with fire and earth. Conversely, each element strives to be or remain separate from the others (aversion being other-directed), while Neikos is needed to separate parts of one and the same element from each other, e.g. water from water. It follows that Philotēs combines what is separate through other-directed aversion or has been separated by Neikos, and that Neikos separates what is united through self-love or has been combined by Philotēs. These contrasting processes of combination and separation go on forever, and among other things produce a cosmic cycle, with at its one pole a complete separation of the elements from each other under the dominion of Neikos, and at its other their complete mixture, in the form of a perfect and divine Sphere, when they come together under the dominion of Philotēs. All combinations are temporary, because eventually self-love and Neikos become stronger than Philotēs. All separations are temporary as well, because Philotēs eventually becomes stronger than aversion from what is different and Neikos. On the cosmic scale, four periods may be distinguished: the Sphere of Philotēs with its total blending of the elements, the period of increasing Neikos, the period of the total separation of the elements under the dominion of Neikos, and the period of increasing Philotēs (which culminates in the Sphere, and so on).6 Whether a cosmogony and a zoogony ensue both times, that is to say both in the period of increasing Neikos and in that of increasing Philotēs, is a difficult issue which need not be addressed here. It is at any rate clear that the creation of living beings through the combination of elemental parts can only be the work of Philotēs, even during the period when Neikos is becoming predominant. A number of fragments traditionally attributed to the Purifications deal with crime and punishment.7 The shedding of blood and the

6 Information about the relative chronography of these periods is provided by Byzantine scholia on Aristotle first published by M. Rashed, ‘La chronographie du système d’Empédocle: documents byzantins inédits’, Aevum Antiquum N.S. 1 (2001), 237–59. See now O. Primavesi, ‘Empedokles in den Florentiner Aristoteles-Scholien’, ZPE 157 (2006), 27–40. 7 Among them the lines cited n. 4 above.

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consumption of meat are criminal, and the daimōn guilty of shedding blood, having to his own disadvantage put his trust in Neikos, is banished ‘for thirty thousand seasons’ from the company of the divine (no further specification), and has to migrate from temporary abode to temporary abode in the world of nature (or Nature).8 As the persona loquens in one of the fragments says: ‘I have already been at some time a young man, and a young woman, and a shrub, and a bird, and a dancing fish from the sea’.9 We note that the incarnated daimōn has not only inhabited the earth, but also other elements: air and water. Another fragment describes this unhappy migration in fuller detail: the wandering ‘exile from the gods’ (φυγὰς θεόθεν) is chased from air to sea, from sea to earth, from the earth to the rays of the sun, and from these again into air: all, without exception, loathe him, so he is always out of his element.10 As already intimated above, how one should explain these occurrences as well as, perhaps, the physical constitution of the daimōn in the terms of Empedocles’ physics is a moot point.11 But here the new evidence of the papyrus published by Martin and Primavesi appears to come to the rescue, at least insofar as the vicissitudes of the exiled daimōn in the world of Nature are concerned. In the verbatim fragments transmitted by the indirect tradition we are told that (parts of ) the elements ‘are all coming together through Philotēs’ to form ‘a single whole’ at one end of the cycle (viz., the Sphere);12 or, again ‘through Philotēs’, (what are proleptically called) ‘limbs’ are ‘coming together’ to confect a ‘single whole’ in the form of, e.g., a human person;13 or, ‘through Philotēs’ again, to form ‘a single cosmos’, e.g. a living being (a sort of microcosm, we might say);14 or, ‘when Neikos arrives at the outer depth of the whirl, and Philotēs reaches the center of the revolving mass’, ‘all the things here come together to be one’.15 This

Emp. fr. B 115 D–K. Emp. fr. B 117 D–K. 10 Emp. fr. B 115 D–K. 11 Comparing Heraclitus does not help. In Heraclitus’ cycle of cosmic change (fire—water—earth—water etc.) souls may represent fire, see fr. B36 D–K, so their elemental constitution is clear. That of Empedocles’ daimones in relation to the four elements and the two moving forces is not. 12 Emp. fr. B 17.7 D–K, ἄλλοτε μὲν Φιλότητι συνερχόμεν᾽ εἰς ἓν ἅπαντα. 13 Emp. fr. B 20.1–3 D–K, ἄλλοτε μὲν Φιλότητι συνερχόμεν᾽ εἰς ἓν ἅπαντα / γυῖα κτλ. 14 Emp. fr. B 26.4–5 D–K, ἄλλοτε μὲν Φιλότητι συνερχόμεν᾽ εἰς ἕνα κόσμον κτλ. 15 Emp. fr. B 35.3–6 D–K, ἐν τῆι δὴ τάδε πάντα συνέρχεται ἓν μόνον εἶναι. 8 9

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may also be expressed as ‘when they come together Neikos disappears to the farthest limit’.16 Four times this ‘coming together’ is expressed by means of the neuter plural form of the present participle, viz. three times in the nominative and once in the genitive: συνερχόμεν(α) / συνερχομένων ‘([they] are coming together’), and once by means of the present indicative συνέρχεται ‘([they] come together’). The references involved are indeed without exception to a ‘they’. The evidence of the papyrus is in part different. In one new line, which we need not therefore discuss, the scriba of the papyrus also writes συνέρχεται, ‘([they] come together’).17 But in the Ensemble containing the second passage cited in the previous paragraph, he has written a first person plural: συν]ερχομεθ, i.e. συνερχόμεθ(α), (‘we come together’), while the indirect tradition of the same lines, as we have seen, reads the participle here.18 In an earlier and larger Ensemble providing bits of new text this first person is found too: συνερχο]μεθ᾽ εἰς ἕνα κόσμον, ‘we come together in a single cosmos’.19 Both times, however, a later owner, or user, of the text has corrected this reading by writing an Ν above the Θ, thus introducing a participle.20 Martin and Primavesi argue that this first person plural is correct and should be accepted as the right reading: ‘we come together’.21 This entails that in these new passages Empedocles does not say that, in some way or other, and to some extent or other, and for some purpose or other, (parts of ) the elements come together, but proclaims disertis verbis that ‘we’ (re)unite. This was interpreted by Martin & Primavesi in 1999 as the (re)unification with love of daimones, taken to be representing human

16 17

35.5.

Emp. fr. B 36 D–K, τῶν δὲ συνερχομένων ἐξ ἔσχατον ἵστατο Νεῖκος. Ens. a(ii)20 Martin-Primavesi, line reconstructed on the basis of Emp. fr. B.

18 Ens. c3 M–P ~ Emp. fr. B.20.2 D–K. Note that according to the editors the still visible remains of a correction by a later hand (two horizontal strokes) may be an Ν as well as an Η. It is odd that they declined to choose: an Η, obviously, does not make sense. 19 Ens. (ai)6 M–P, the first fragmentary new line after the line corresponding to the last line of the large cosmological fr. B 17.35 D–K; Janko prefers συνηρχο]μεθ’. ενε has been corrected to ενα by the first hand, an Α above the Ε, see the editors ad loc. We leave out Ens. A(ii)17 M–P ειση]ρχόμεθ’, where (as far as one can make out) a later user of the text has not corrected the Θ by writing an Ν above it, as the context is too fragmentary. 20 See Empédocle de Strasbourg, ad loc., and 23, where Martin & Primavesi think of ‘une collation du papyrus avec un autre manuscript, portant un texte qui, sur un point, s’écartait systématiquement du nôtre’. 21 So also Primavesi in his later publications.

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souls.22 A daimōn would be a lump of Philotēs, of love, as other scholars had already claimed without the support of the new fragments.23 The demonology thus found an anchor in the physics, and the daimōn was awarded a physical constitution. In a recent paper Primavesi has abandoned this view.24 He now brilliantly argues that the demonology corresponds to the physics in what he calls an ‘allegorical’ way. The daimōn does not represent the human soul, but is a fallen and exiled (Olympian) divinity to whom even a name can be given, and the career of this divinity is described in terms and according to stages which correspond to and in some cases largely coincide with the stages of the cosmic cycle, without however being identical with them. This fascinating reconstruction unavoidably entails new interpretative problems, which is one of the reasons why, with some reluctance, we shall not address it here. We believe, moreover, that the explanation for the first person plural written by the scriba of the papyrus, which we shall argue below, is simpler than that provided by the allegorizing demonology advocated by Primavesi. A few years ago, we have argued against accepting the first person plural of the prima manus of the papyrus.25 We claimed that the subsequent substitution of Ν’s for Θ’s is correct. But perhaps our argument was not sufficient, because we failed to distinguish between corrections made by this first hand and those of one or more later hands in the papyrus, and attributed the corrections involved to a diorthotēs, the ancient equivalent of a professional proofreader.26 On the other hand, for what reason should one reject some of these subsequent corrections qua corrections and accept others? Martin & Primavesi did accept three other corrections, placed above the line and between a point to the left and one to the right, which have been inserted by a later hand.27 So the fact that corrections have not been added by the first hand is not decisive. Opting for a first person plural instead of a participle Empédocle de Strasbourg, 115–19, 211–14. First, apparently, F.M. Cornford, From Religion to Philosophy, London 1912, 238–39. 24 O. Primavesi, ‘Apollo’. See further the forthcoming paper cited above, n. 5. 25 K.A. Algra & J. Mansfeld, ‘Three Thêtas in the “Empédocle de Strasbourg”’, Mnemosyne 54 (2001), 78–84. 26 See Primavesi, ‘La demonologia’, 56. On the various hands and corrections in the papyrus see Empédocle de Strasbourg, 22–4. 27 All in one Ensemble, viz. d5 M–P = Emp. fr. B 139.1 D–K, where the indirect tradition confirms the correction of the later hand (accepted by Janko); d10 M–P (not accepted by Janko); and d15 M–P (not accepted by Janko). 22

23

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does not, in some neutral way or other, depend on the ancient recensio plus emendatio of the papyrus text, but is tantamount to preferring, for whatever reason, one variant to another. A further debatable point in our paper of 2001 is our explanation of the introduction of the first person plural συνερχόμεθ᾽, ‘we come together’. We assumed that the form συνερχομεν in the text that was copied out was seen as representing a solecism, viz. a (non-existent) active form of the verb, and was, so to speak, automatically corrected to the medium συνερχόμεθ᾽ by means of a Verschlimmbesserung. Oliver Primavesi has argued that this is unlikely,28 but we still believe that it is not impossible. Another and better explanation however is also available. P. Kingsley has insisted that the fact that the text of the papyrus contains ‘tell-tale signs of textual annotation’, ‘of alternative readings’, ‘of textual variants’, is significant. It is. He acutely suggested that ‘someone [. . .] changed the impersonal “all things come together through love” into “we all come together through love”, so as to exact a more immediate sense of hope and meaning, of personal involvement and belonging’.29 Kingsley’s hunch is good, but in need of confirmation. One not only forgets what others have written, but also what one has written oneself. The explanation for the purposeful change from neuter participle (qualifying a ‘they’) to first person plural (qualifying a ‘we’) is to be found by comparing the evidence studied in a seminal paper of Walter Burkert, and in a subsequent paper of one of the present authors.30 Burkert proved that Middle Platonists (Plutarch, Numenius), Early Christians (Clement of Alexandria, Hippolytus), and Neoplatonists (Plotinus, Hierocles), in support of their treatment of the vicissitudes of the soul which descends into the world and ascends again towards, or to, its original abode, cite choice fragments and views of Empedocles and Heraclitus in centos where these are combined with quotations from Plato and the Pythagoreans (and even sometimes with references

‘La demonologia’, 56. P. Kingsley, ‘Empedocles for the new millennium’, Ancient Philosophy 22 (2002), 333–413, at 337–38 with n. 6. 30 W. Burkert, ‘Plotin, Plutarch und die platonisierende Interpretation von Heraklit und Empedokles’, in: J. Mansfeld & L.M. de Rijk (eds), Kephalaion. Studies in Greek Philosophy and its Continuation (FS C.J. de Vogel), Assen 1975, 137–46; J. Mansfeld, ‘Heraclitus, Empedocles, and others in a Middle Platonist cento in Philo of Alexandria’, VC 39 (1985), 131–56, repr. in: J. Mansfeld, Studies in Later Greek Philosophy and Gnosticism, London 1989. 28

29

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to others as well).31 Quite often these established and accepted quotations, seen clearly as belonging with a palaios logos (ancient view etc., possessing a certain authority), are made to attest that the world is evil, and statements pertaining to the explanation of what goes on in the cosmos were interpreted as applying to the soul.32 Burkert rightly concluded that these authors depend on a shared interpretative tradition, and suggested as its source an Alexandrian Platonist prior to Plutarch.33 He added that no reverberations pertaining to these interpretative centos are to be found in Philo of Alexandria,34 but this is not true. Quite a few echoes and (semi-) quotations belonging with this context are found in Philo’s writings.35 The exegesis of the story of Cain and Abel at Philo’s Quaestiones in Genesim 1.70–6, for instance (a passage which for the most part is extant only in Armenian), combines echoes of Plato, Heraclitus, and Empedocles. Heraclitus’ statement ‘immortals mortal, mortals immor-

31 A very full cento, Plato, the Pythagoreans, Heraclitus and Empedocles being corroborated by quotations from other luminaries, is at Clement, Stromata III.iii.14.1–21.1. It is introduced at iii.12.1–2: Plato and the Pythagoreans, just as later Marcion and his followers, ‘assumed coming to be/the world we live in is bad’ (κακὴν τὴν γένεσιν ὑπειλήφεσαν). At 14.1 we hear about ‘Heraclitus, apparently saying that coming to be/ living in this world is not good’ (Ἡράκλειτος γοῦν κακίζων φαίνεται τὴν γένεσιν—the prooftext cited is fr. B20 D–K). Empedocles is made to agree with him (consecutively prooftexts frs. Emp. B108, 115, 124 D–K are quoted, lines traditionally attributed to Purifications, the first of which is spoken by the persona loquens or daimōn). Next follow the Sibyl (one prooftext), Theognis (one prooftext), Euripides (two consecutive prooftexts), Herodotus (one prooftext), Homer (two separately cited prooftexts), then Plato Cratylus 400 b–c, on Orpheus or rather some Orphics on the punishment of the soul in the body and the body as its tomb, which leads to quotations of Philolaus (confirming Crat. 400b–c) and a Pindar quotation said to be ‘about the mysteries of Eleusis’, and again to a lot of Plato, viz. a minicento from Phaedo followed by a number of quotations incorporated in what follows, the whole ending (Ringkomposition) with a quotation of Heraclitus fr. 21 D–K, who again says that to be born/to live in the world is death, a view resembling views shared by Pythagoras and Socrates in Gorgias. Clement, from 22.1, quoting choice bits from tragedy, continues in a pessimistic vein. [Note that Heraclitus B21 D–K, to adapt it to the present context, has been quoted in a modified form: swap the participles, see J. Mansfeld, Aldus sprak Heraclitus, Groningen 2006, 62.] 32 For this (Neo-)Platonist interpretation of Empedocles see also D. O’Brien, Pour interpreter Empédocle, Leiden 1981, 73–90, Primavesi, ‘Apollo’, 61–2, and J. Mansfeld, Heresiography in Context: Hippolytus’ Elenchos as a Source for Greek Philosophy, Leiden 1992, 208–30; for Heraclitus ibid., 230–42, and for later Pythagoreanism ibid., passim. Hippolytus and several Neoplatonist commentators make Empedocles’ physics wholly subservient to the doctrine of the ascent and descent of soul. 33 Burkert, ‘Plotin’, 139. 34 Burkert, ‘Plotin’, 143. 35 Studied at some length in Mansfeld, ‘Middle Platonist cento’.

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tal, living the others’ death, dying the others’ life’,36 which refers to a general or at any rate unspecified ‘they’, is echoed in Philo’s comment that evil men ‘die the true life’, and so becomes ethical, and closer to us.37 Cain’s punishment is commented upon in terms which clearly echo the Empedoclean lines about the sorry experiences of the murderous and exiled daimōn briefly cited above:38 In Gen 4:11 Cain is cursed by (or rather away from the face of ) the earth. Philo explains: ‘if this curses him, it is understandable that appropriate curses will be laid upon him by the other elements as well, viz. by springs, rivers, sea; air, winds; fire, light, the sun, the moon and the whole heaven together’. Cain (like Empedocles’ daimōn) is ‘driven out and a fugitive’. Heraclitus is also alluded to here, as we have noticed. A quotation in Greek of the second part of the fragment that is involved, identical with one in Hierocles studied in Burkert’s paper,39 is preserved in another Philonian treatise containing ingredients that belong with the cento. Both Philo (who this time mentions Heraclitus’ name) and Hierocles have a modified text:40 no longer an indetermined ‘they’,

36 Heraclitus fr. B 62 D–K = 47 (a) Marcovich, F 62 Mouraviev. At Quaestiones in Genesim 4.152 (= fr. 47 (d1) Marcovich, T 334 Mouraviev), Philo says that Heraclitus has stolen this idea from Moses. 37 A handful of Heraclitean allusions in Philo (as well as the significance of the contexts in which they appear) have escaped both M. Marcovich, Heraclitus: Greek text with a short commentary, Sankt Augustin 20012, and S. Mouraviev, Heraclitea II.A.1, Traditio (A), Sankt Augustin 1999. 38 Text to n. 10. 39 Legum allegoriarum 1.107, in the final chapter of the first book, cf. Hierocles, In carmen aureum 24, 98.7–9 Koehler = Heraclitus fr. 47(d1) Marcovich, F 80C Mouraviev. Note that the insufficiently critical Mouraviev believes that the version in Philo and Hierocles is an independent fragment, see Heraclitea III.3. Recensio: Fragmenta, B/iii, Sankt Augustin 2006, 96. Numenius fr. 30 Des Places (Heraclitus fr. 47 (d4) Marcovich) apud Porphyry, De antro nympharum 63.20–1 Nauck, paraphrases this half-quotation: ζῆν ἡμᾶς (‘we live’), and—closer to the original ‘they’—ζῆν ἐκείνας, (‘they’, sc. the souls, ‘live’). This text too is awarded independent fragment status by Mouraviev (F 77b), who even restores oratio recta. Fragmenta non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem. [The version of the allegorist Heraclitus (probably first century ce), Quaestiones homericae 24.4 = Heraclitus fr. 47 (b1) Marcovich, listed as a secondary source for F 62 Mouraviev, is much closer to the original wording. The version of Heraclitus fr. B12 quoted in the next note comes next in this chapter of Quaestiones homericae.] 40 Compare the parallel modification (though the context is not concerned with the soul, cf. previous note ad finem) in Heraclitus, Quaestiones homericae 24.5, who instead of the participle ἐμβαίνουσι ‘those who step into’, as at Heraclitus fr. B12 D–K = 40 (a) Marcovich, F 12 Mouraviev (‘upon those who step into the same rivers other and other waters flow’), has the first person plural ἐμβαίνομεν, ‘we step into’, at Heracliuts fr. 49a D–K = 40 (c2) Marcovich, F 49A Mouraviev (‘we step into and do not step into the same rivers’). One of Plato’s paraphrases already introduces a personal relationship,

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but a resounding ‘we’—no longer the participles ‘living’ (ζῶντες) and ‘dying’ (τεθνεῶτες), but first persons plural: ‘we live (ζῶμεν) the others’ death, we die (τεθνήκαμεν) the others’ life’. The soul is only truly alive when liberated from the prison, or tomb, of the body, and this will come about if we take care. The number of letters that has been changed is small, but the meaning of the statement has become very different indeed. ‘A more immediate sense of hope and meaning, of personal involvement and belonging’ has been achieved, to quote Kingsley’s words again. From this vantage point it is not hard to understand the motivation behind our first person plural in the Strasbourg papyrus. The ancient sage from Acragas is believed to belong with a Pythagoreanizing tradition that is eloquent about the incarnation and the transmigration, the descent and the ascent, of the soul, and teaches a doctrine which explains suffering but also offers hope. The readings of the first hand of the papyrus emphasize this aspect of the doctrine for Empedocles. Ideas such as these, that is to say forms of pessimism balanced by varieties of optimism, can be rather widely paralleled in the first centuries ce; these things were in the air. Burkert mentioned Gnosticism.41 One may for instance also quote The First Epistle of John:42 ‘we know we are from God, while the whole cosmos is plunged in evil.43 But we also know that the Son of God has come . . .’. The change of a single letter, from Ν to Θ, introduced a basis for such hope into the Empedoclean document.44 But a pedantic user, or at any rate one with a philological turn of mind, comparing the text

viz. a ‘you’: Cratylus 402a = fr. 40 (b1) Marcovich, F 91a Mouraviev: ‘you cannot step into the same river twice’ (οὐκ ἂν ἐμβαίης). For Mouraviev’s multiplications cf. previous note. 41 Burkert, ‘Plotin’, 144. 42 1 John 5:19–20: οἴδαμεν ὅτι ἐκ τοῦ θεοῦ ἐσμεν, καὶ ὁ κόσμος ὅλος ἐν τῷ πονηρῷ κεῖται. οἴδαμεν δὲ ὅτι ὁ υἱὸς τοῦ θεοῦ ἥκει κτλ. The formula ἐκ τοῦ θεοῦ is surprisingly close to θεόθεν at Empedocles fr. B 115.13 D–K, see text to n. 10 above. 43 Modern commentaries explain this as ‘dominated by the Evil One’, but this interpretation is not shared by the majority of Early Christian exegetes. For ἐν τῷ πονηρῷ ‘in evil’, ‘in what is evil’, see Olympiodorus, In Platonis Gorgiam 23.3. 44 Compare e.g. the modifications of the Plato text studied by J. Whittaker, ‘Textual comments on Timaeus 27 C–D’, Phoenix 27 (1973), 143–48, reprinted in his Studies in Platonism and Patristic Thought, London 1984, and J. Dillon, ‘Tampering with the Timaeus: Ideological emendations in Plato’, AJP 11 (1989), 50–72, reprinted in his The Golden Chain, Aldershot 1991.

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of our papyrus with another witness (Dorandi suggested45 he may have looked at the original from which it was copied, but this is perhaps less likely) twice put back the N, thus restoring the reference to a ‘they’ also generally attested in passages in the indirect tradition. Those who want to integrate the demonology into the physics should rest content with the two lines in Ensemble d of the Strasbourg papyrus traditionally attributed to Purifications.46 The presence of the demonology in On Nature need not be overdetermined by the textual change introduced by an ancient reader with a philosophical agenda.47

45 T. Dorandi, ‘Qualche considerazione di metodo’, Aevum Antiquum N.S. 1 (2001), 197–203. 46 Above, n. 4 and text thereto. 47 As to the first person plural, there are only three instances in the Empedoclean fragments of the indirect tradition, all active: frs. B 38.2 ἐσορῶμεν ‘we see’, 109.1 ὀπώπαμεν ‘we see’, and 120 D–K ἠλύθομεν ‘we came’. The plural συνερχόμεθ(α) ‘we come together’ is found a mere six times on the E version of the TLG, whereas forms of the participle occur close to four hundred times.

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‘OUR RIGHTEOUS BRETHREN’ Reflections on the Description of the Righteous Ones According to the Greek Revelation of Peter (Akhm. 2) Tobias Nicklas Before Richard Bauckham devoted a remarkable series of articles to it, the Revelation of Peter was one of the most neglected early Christian writings.1 Among many other things, Bauckham showed that none of the extant textual witnesses of the Revelation exactly represents its ‘original text’, which often is dated to the first half of the second century ce, sometimes even to its first three decades. It is likely that the extant Ethiopian translation of the original Greek text comes closest to the oldest textual form of the Revelation.2 Despite renewed interest in the Revelation of Peter, however, one of the most extensive (and simultaneously quite independent) witnesses of its text has been neglected so far.3 This is a Greek fragment that can be found in the so-called Akhmim-Codex, which is dated to the sixth or early seventh century ce. Because it is one of two Petrine apocrypha in this manuscript, I shall refer to it as Akhmim 2. The other Petrine apocryphon in the Akhmim-Codex is our main witness to the Gospel of Peter (Akhm. 1).4 It should be noted that Akhm. 2 shows clear affinities with the Revelation of Peter as it is known

1 See particularly R. Bauckham, ‘The Apocalypse of Peter: An Account of Research’, ANRW II.25.6 (1988), 4712–50, and Idem, ‘The Apocalypse of Peter: A Jewish Christian Apocalypse from the Time of Bar Kokhba’, Apocrypha 5 (1994), 7–111 = Idem, The Fate of the Dead: Studies on the Jewish and Christian Apocalypses, Leiden/etc. 1998, 160–258 [I shall quote from the latter publication]. 2 Compare Bauckham, ‘Apocalypse of Peter’ (1994/1998), 162–65, esp. 165: ‘Priority must be given to the Ethiopic version’. Unfortunately the announced edition in the series Corpus Christianorum has not yet appeared. The Ethiopic text must be taken from: P. Marrassini, ‘L’Apocalisse di Pietro’, in: Y. Beyene et alii (eds), Etiopia e Oltre: Studi in onore di Lanfranco Ricci, Napoli 1994, 171–232. 3 This can be illustrated by the fact that the new French translation of apocryphal texts Écrits apocryphes chrétiens I (Paris 1997) gives a translation of the Ethiopic text, but not of Akhm. 2. 4 Edition: T.J. Kraus & T. Nicklas (eds), Das Petrusevangelium und die Petrusapokalypse: Die griechischen Fragmente mit deutscher und englischer Übersetzung (GCS N.F. 11. Neutestamentliche Apokryphen 1), Berlin/New York 2004, 102–20. All Greek texts of the Revelation of Peter and all English translations of the text are taken from this edition.

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from citations in ancient Christian authors, from the Ethiopic translation and the two Greek fragments Bodl. MS Gr. Th.f. 4 [P] + P.Vindob. G 39756, which originally belonged to the same miniature codex.5 But this text differs in several details from the other witnesses of the Revelation of Peter, even its whole structure bears a strikingly independent character. Thus it does not help us very much to understand the original secondcentury Revelation of Peter.6 This could be the reason why there has not been much scholarly interest in Akhm. 2 until now. There are, however, several reasons for a close examination of this apocryphal text. It can still be seen as an important witness to the development of the text of the Revelation of Peter. Also, its relationship with the text of the Gospel of Peter found in Akhm. 1 should not be underestimated.7 In the present contribution, I shall try to follow a third path. Without neglecting this text’s literary relationships to both Gospel and Revelation of Peter, I shall interpret a short passage of Akhm. 2 as a Petrine apocryphon on its own. As far as I know no commentary on Akhm. 2 has appeared since A. Dieterich’s Nekyia (19132). Moreover, my own approach will differ from Dieterich’s. While Dieterich interpreted the text in the context of Orphic-Pythagorean traditions, I shall

5 See P. van Minnen, ‘The Greek Apocalypse of Peter’, in: J.N. Bremmer & I. Czachesz (eds), The Apocalypse of Peter (Studies on Early Christian Apocrypha 7), Leuven 2004, 15–39, esp. 34–39, and T.J. Kraus, ‘P.Vindob.G 39756 + Bodl. MS Gr. th. f. 4 [P]: Fragmente eines Codex der griechischen Petrusapokalypse’, BASP 40 (2003), 45–61. 6 Compare Bauckham, ‘Apocalypse of Peter’ (1994/1998), 164–65: ‘In any case, although it may sometimes help us to clear up an obscurity in the Ethiopic version of the Apocalypse of Peter, it must be used with great caution in studying the Apocalypse of Peter’. 7 Following M.R. James I have argued elsewhere that the relation with Akhm. 1 (= the Gospel of Peter) is also of great importance for the understanding of Akhm. 2— perhaps Akhm. 2 even could be regarded a copy of a passage taken from the Gospel of Peter. Cf. T. Nicklas, ‘Zwei petrinische Apokryphen im Akhmim-Codex oder eines? Kritische Anmerkungen und Gedanken’, Apocrypha 16 (2005), 75–96. M.R. James has argued repeatedly that Akhm. 2 should in fact be regarded as a copy containing passages from the Gospel of Peter: see M.R. James, ‘A New Text of the Apocalypse of Peter’, JTS 12 (1911), 573–83, esp. 577–82; Idem, ‘The Recovery of the Apocalypse of Peter’, Church Quarterly Review 159 (1915), 1–36, esp. 20–3; Idem, ‘The Rainer Fragment of the Apocalypse of Peter’, JTS 32 (1931), 270–79, esp. 275–79. Eventually, however, L. Vaganay’s thesis, that Akhm. 2 does not give a part of the Gospel has been generally accepted. See his L’Évangile de Pierre (ÉtB), Paris 1930. For the history of research on that subject see also Bauckham, ‘Apocalypse of Peter’, ANRW, 4719–20, and D.D. Buchholz, Your Eyes will be Opened (SBLDS 97), Atlanta 1988, 88–92.

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mainly focus on the text’s relation to Biblical and apocryphal Jewish and Christian traditions.8 It is impossible, of course, to provide a full commmentary on Akhm. 2 here. The long descriptions of the pains of the damned that are found in the text do not, at any rate, seem to be a particularly appropriate subject for a Festschrift. I shall therefore concentrate on another passage, the description of a vision of two ‘righteous brethren’, who already ‘had gone forth out of the world’, and its role within the context of Akhm. 2. Some remarks on the structure of Akhm. 2 It immediately becomes evident from the first words of the extant text of Akhm. 2—‘many of them’—that the text we have in front of us is a fragmentary one. That very fact, of course, determines every further effort to analyse its structure. Nevertheless, Akhm. 2 offers such a long coherent text that such an analysis definitely makes sense.9 1. Vv. 1–3 form the conclusion of an (eschatological) speech of the ‘Lord’.10 Although the extant text does not tell us anything about the speaker, at least v. 3 leaves no doubt that it is Jesus who speaks (see the words ‘my faithful ones’).

8 Dieterich also did not have access to the Ethiopic witnesses of the text. Compare A. Dieterich, Nekyia: Beiträge zur Erklärung der neuentdeckten Petrusapokalypse, Leipzig/Berlin 19132 (repr. Darmstadt 1969). See also E. Norden, ‘Die Petrusapokalypse und ihre antiken Vorbilder’, in: Idem, Kleine Schriften zum klassischen Altertum, Berlin 1966, 218–33 (first publication 1893; Norden concentrates on the description of the hell). For a discussion of Dieterich’s observations see M. Himmelfarb, Tours of Hell: An Apocalyptic Form in Jewish and Christian Literature, Philadelphia 1983, 41–67, and J.N. Bremmer, ‘The Apocalypse of Peter: Greek or Jewish?’, in: Bremmer & Czachesz, The Apocalypse of Peter, 1–14. Van Minnen, ‘The Greek Apocalypse of Peter’, mainly concentrates on questions of palaeography, codicology, and philology. 9 I analyse the structure of the text as it is found in Akhm. 2 and not a structure made according to the Ethiopian Apocalypse of Peter as it is found in NTApo6. 10 See A. von Harnack, ‘Bruchstücke des Evangeliums und der Apokalypse des Petrus. Zweite Mittheilung (1892)’, in: Idem, Kleine Schriften zur Alten Kirche: Berliner Akademieschriften 1890–1907, Leipzig 1980, 92–108, esp. 95. Vv. 1–3 are unparalleled in the Ethiopic text of the Revelation of Peter; they seem to be related to an otherwise lost passage of the text. See Dieterich, Nekyia, 15: ‘Es muß . . . etwas vorausgegangen sein, auf das sich das αὐτῶν und ἐκεῖνοι gleicherweise beziehen kann’. This lost text could not have a parallel in the Ethiopic (or the original Greek) text of the Revelation of Peter— another argument in favour of an interpretation of Akhm. 2 as a Petrine apocryphon on its own.

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V. 1 points to the eschatological appearance of false prophets, whose doctrines ‘will lead to perdition’.11 It is not absolutely certain whether v. 2 directly refers to v. 1 or to some lost earlier passage. The words ‘but these’ (v. 2: ἐκεῖνοι δέ) could refer to the ‘false prophets’ of v. 1, or to a more extensive group of which the ‘false prophets’ are considered to be a part (see the words πολλοὶ ἐξ αὐτῶν in v. 1).12 In any case, vv. 1 and 2 are linked by the motive of ‘perdition’. In contrast, v. 3 creates its own short unit and is devoted to God’s coming to ‘my faithful ones’. The words καὶ τότε (‘and then’) and the new subject ὁ θεός (‘God’) clearly separate this unit from vv. 1–2. V. 3 contrasts God’s coming to the faithful ones with his judgement of the ‘sons of lawlessness’ (υἱοὶ τῆς ἀνομίας, v. 3), who are probably identical with the ‘sons of perdition’ (υἱοὶ τῆς ἀπωλείας) mentioned in v. 2. V. 4 bridges two units. The Lord’s speech continues, but his next words are marked by a new introduction (καὶ προσθεὶς ὁ κύριος). Besides, ‘the Lord’ commands a change of place (εἰς τὸ ὄρος) and a new activity (εὐξώμεθα). With v. 4 the speech ends—a new unit can begin.13 With v. 5 two principles of structure occur next to each other. On the one hand the text offers a series of revelations:

11 See the parallels Matt 24:24 and 2 Peter 2:1. For further information compare R. Bauckham, ‘2 Peter and the Apocalypse of Peter’, in: Idem, The Fate of the Dead, 290–303, esp. 294; T.J. Kraus, Sprache, Stil und historischer Ort des zweiten Petrusbriefes (WUNT 2.136), Tübingen 2001, 392–94, and Idem, ‘Die griechische Petrus-Apokalypse und ihre Relation zu ausgewählten Überlieferungsträgern apokalyptischer Stoffe’, Apocrypha 14 (2003), 73–98, esp. 78–81. 12 I cannot agree with J. Bolyki’s identification of the ‘false prophets’ with Rabbi Akiva (and his followers). Compare J. Bolyki, ‘False Prophets in the Apocalypse of Peter’, in: Bremmer & Czachesz, The Apocalypse of Peter, 52–62, esp. 62. On the one hand the relation between Akhm. 2 and the original text of the Revelation of Peter is very problematic. On the other hand neither Bauckham’s thesis that the original Revelation of Peter goes back to the times of second Jewish war (132–135 ce) is undisputed, nor do we have exact information about Rabbi Akiva’s role in this situation. Moreover, Akhm. 2, uses the motive of ‘false prophets’ in a very general way and does not connect it to a ‘false messiah’. See also the arguments by E. Tigchelaar, ‘Is the Liar Bar Kokhba? Considering the Date and Provenance of the Greek (Ethiopic) Apocalypse of Peter’, in: Bremmer & Czachesz, The Apocalypse of Peter, 63–77, and T. Nicklas, ‘Christliche Apokryphen als Spiegel der Vielfalt frühchristlichen Lebens: Schlaglichter, Beispiele und methodische Probleme’, ASE 23 (2006) 27–44. 13 Perhaps John 14:31b can be regarded a canonical parallel: ‘Rise, let us be on our way’. Besides, Luke 9:28–29 shows the connection between a prayer (of Jesus!) and the transfiguration.

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1. vv. 5–13 The ‘Righteous Brethren’ 2. vv. 14–20 The Country of the ‘Righteous Ones’ 3. vv. 21–34 The Place of Punishment On the other hand several passages refer to ‘the twelve’,14 while others concentrate on Peter. While the ‘twelve’ see the ‘two men’ who suddenly appear (v. 6), the interpretation of the vision is addressed only to Peter, who approaches the ‘Lord’ (vv. 12–13). The second revelation (from v. 14 onwards) again follows after a question asked by Peter, while the other disciples seem to have disappeared (but cf. v. 16, where the text has ‘us’ again). The interpretation of the second revelation (in v. 20), however, refers to the ‘twelve’ again. Finally, from v. 21 onwards the ‘twelve’ disappear from the stage; the text only refers to Peter and does not mention whether or not the other disciples see the ‘place of punishment’, too. Unfortunately, the extant text ends with this third revelation. However, these few observations show why structuring the text according to a change of recipients of the revelations does not suggest itself. In other words, this is apparently not a guiding principle in the structure of the text. Thus, it seemingly aims to describe three revelations which are (probably) addressed to all twelve disciples but are told from Peter’s perspective. Therefore I propose the following structure of Akhm. 2: 1. Eschatological Speech of the Lord 1.1 The ‘sons of perdition’ 1.2 God’s Coming 1.2.1 ‘to my faithful ones’ 1.2.2 judgment of the ‘sons of lawlessness’

1–3

3b

Bridge: Command to go and pray

4

1–2 3 3a

2. Three Revelations directed to Peter (and the Twelve) 5–32 2.1 The Righteous Brethren 5–13 2.1.1 The Twelve Asking for a Revelation 5 2.1.2 Appearance of the Righteous Ones 6–10 14 It is, of course, interesting that the text speaks about twelve disciples. If Akhm. 2 tells about a post-Easter revelation, it actually should have ‘eleven disciples’. Of course, there are several examples that refer to the ‘twelve’ also in Post-Easter accounts. See, e.g., 1 Cor 15:5, but also Akhm. 1 (v. 59 of the Gospel of Peter).

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2.1.3 Reaction of the Twelve 11 2.1.4 Question of Peter & Interpretation of the Revelation 12–13 2.2 The Country of the Righteous Ones 14–20 2.2.1 Peter asks for a Revelation 14 2.2.2 Description of the Country and its Inhabitants 15–19 2.2.3 Interpreting the Words of the Lord 20 2.3 The Place of Punishment 21–34 2.3.1 Introduction 21 2.3.2 Description of thirteen places within Hell and the corresponding Punishments 22–34 2. Interpretation of the textual unit v. 5–13 V. 5: 5

ἀπερχόμενοι δὲ μετ’ αὐτοῦ ἡμεῖς οἱ δώδεκα μαθηταὶ ἐδεήθημεν ὅπως δείξῃ ἡμῖν ἕνα τῶν ἀδελφῶν ἡμῶν δικαίων τῶν ἐξελθόντων ἀπὸ τοῦ κόσμου, ἵνα ἴδωμεν ποταποί εἰσι τὴν μορφὴν καὶ θαρσήσαντες παραθαρούνωμεν καὶ τοὺς ἀκούοντας ἡμῶν ἀνθρώπους.

But going with him, we, the twelve disciples, begged (him) that he would show us one of our brethren, a righteous one, who had gone forth out of the world, in order that we might see of what manner of form they are, and having taken courage, might encourage the men who hear us.

The text does not indicate where Jesus’ eschatological speech (vv. 1–3) is located. V. 4 presents a change of place. If vv. 1–3 formed the conclusion of an eschatological speech corresponding to Mark 13 par. Matt 24, or Luke 21, ‘going up to the mountain’ could correspond to the walk to the mount of Olives narrated in the canonical passion stories.15 However, it is also possible that the mountain mentioned here is mount Hermon, where several early Jewish and Christian texts, such as the Book of Watchers, the Testament of Levi or Matt 16, locate important revelations.16 See Buchholz, Your Eyes, 363, regarding the Ethiopic Revelation of Peter. 2 Peter 1:18, too, does not speak about a certain mountain either, but about the ‘holy mountain’. For further arguments see, e.g., G.W.E. Nickelsburg, ‘Enoch, Levi, and Peter: Recipients of Revelation in Upper Galilee’, JBL 100 (1981), 575–600; Idem, 1 Enoch 1: A Commentary on the Book of 1 Enoch: Chapters 1–36. 81–108 (Hermeneia), Minneapolis 2001, 238–47, and Tigchelaar, ‘Is the Liar Bar Kokhba’, 76. For observations 15 16

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V. 5 is logically connected to vv. 1–3 which deal with eschatological torments: because of the things they have heard, the disciples are sorrowful now. They need to be encouraged, because they will have ‘to encourage the men who hear’ them.17 As far as I know, the disciples’ self-description in the words ἡμεῖς οἱ δώδεκα μαθηταί, has only one exact correspondence, in v. 59 of Akhm. 1, the Gospel of Peter. More remote parallels can be found in the Ethiopian but not the Coptic version of Epistula Apostolorum 19 (here ‘we, the twelve’), in the Coptic Homily about the Life of Jesus and his Love for the Apostles (sometimes wrongly titled the Gospel of the Twelve Apostles), where the words ‘but we, the apostles’ (once reconstructed in a lacuna) occur twice,18 along with the Acts of Peter and the Twelve Apostles (NHC VI,1; 1:1–12:22), which, however, speak about ‘eleven disciples’. Thus none of these parallels is an exact one. The idea of ‘justice’ and its reward seems to be one of the leading themes of the text (cf. vv. 13, 14, 20, 22, 23, 27, 28). But here this theme does not find any further explanation.19 The word ‘brother’ (and ‘sister’) is used for members of the Christian community—many examples of this use of the word can be found in the New Testament (e.g., Acts 1:15,16 et al.; and many Pauline texts like 1 Cor 1:1; 6:6; 8:12; 16:12; Rom 14:10,13,15; 16:23).20 The temporal perspective of the text clearly goes beyond the time of Jesus’ life. This can be substantiated by two observations: the words ‘in order that we . . . might encourage the men who hear us’ seem to require a post-Easter situation of unsuccessful and frustrating mission on the term ‘mountain of God’ in 1 Enoch 17:1–3 see K. Coblentz Bautch, A Study of the Geography of 1 Enoch 17–19: No one Has Seen What I Have Seen ( JSJSup 81), Leiden/Boston 2003, 41–69. 17 The verb παραθαρσύνω does not occur in the NT, its only occurrence in the LXX is 4 Macc 13:8. 18 For this text see F. Morard, ‘Homélie sur la vie de Jésus’, in: P. Geoltrain & J.-D. Kaestli (eds), Écrits apocryphes chrétiens II, Paris 2005, 103–34. 19 The term ‘justice’ will be developed later in the text in the context of the punishments in hell, which all, more or less, have to do with retaliation. For more details see: Bauckham, ‘The Apocalypse of Peter’, 209–15; L. Roig Lanzillota, ‘Does Punishment Reward the Righteous? The Justice Pattern Underlying the Apocalypse of Peter’, in: Bremmer & Czachesz, The Apocalypse of Peter, 127–57.—More general observations on the terms ‘justice’ and ‘mercy’ in apocalyptic literature can be found in R. Bauckham, ‘The Conflict of Justice and Mercy: Attitudes to the Damned in Apocalyptic Literature’, in: Idem, The Fate of the Dead, 132–48. 20 For more details on the meaning of the ancient Christian address ‘brothers’ and ‘sisters’ see T. Nicklas, ‘The Letter to Philemon: A Discussion with J. Albert Harrill’, in: S.E. Porter (ed.), Paul’s World (Pauline Studies 4), Leiden/Boston 2008 [forthcoming].

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experience. Besides, the text argues from the perspective of a situation when at least some of the ‘righteous brethren’ have already died. The text presupposes the idea of a kind of bodily resurrection that obviously takes place directly after death (and not just after an eschatological final judgment). The word ‘to die’ is here paraphrased by the words ‘to go forth out of this world/this cosmos’ (ἐξέρχομαι ἀπὸ τοῦ κόσμου instead of ἀποθνῄσκω or τελευτάω). This is surely not just an euphemism, but is intended to introduce the idea that the deceased are already located at certain places outside of this world—the very places that will be described from v. 15 onwards. The text, however, seems not to be interested in the question of how the deceased come to these places. The disciples’ question picks up a theme that also plays a certain role in Paul’s discussion of resurrection in 1 Cor 15. Obviously Paul is confronted by the sceptical question how—if there is something like a resurrection—the body of the risen ones can be described: ’Αλλὰ ἐρεῖ τις· πῶς ἐγείρονται οἱ νεκροί; ποίῳ δὲ σώματι ἔρχονται; While these words in 1 Cor 15 are formulated as the sceptical question of Paul’s opponents, v. 5 of Akhm. 2 formulates a legitimate question of Jesus’ twelve disciples. In contrast to Akhm. 2, Paul does not use the word μορφή, (‘form, shape, fashion, appearance’),21 but σῶμα (‘body’). Moreover, while Paul tries to speak in metaphors, Akhm. 2 describes the answer in a concrete vision.22 V. 6: 6

καὶ εὐχομένων ἡμῶν ἄφνω φαίνονται δύο ἄνδρες ἑστῶτες ἔμπροσθεν τοῦ κυρίου, πρὸς οὓς οὐκ ἐδυνήθημεν ἀντιβλέψαι·

And as we prayed, suddenly two men appeared standing before the Lord on whom we were not able to look.

While the question of v. 5 was formulated on the way to ‘the’ mountain, Jesus and his disciples have obviously now arrived. During their prayers ‘suddenly’ an epiphany takes place (for the adverb ἄφνω in texts that

21 Within the NT the word μορφή can be found only in two passages: in Phil 2:6,7 telling about Jesus Christ who was in the form of God, but took the form of a slave, and in the secondary conclusion of the Gospel of Mark 16:12, which says that the Risen Christ appeared to two disciples ‘in another form’. 22 While v. 5 speaks about the μορφή of the deceased brother, v. 8 uses the term σῶμα.

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describe the appearance of otherworldly powers or beings see, e.g., Acts 2:2; cf. also Acts 16:26).23 The appearance of two men does not exactly correspond to the disciples’ prayer in v. 5: there they actually asked to see one of their righteous brethren—here two men appear. Of course, this can be explained by the fact that Akhm. 2 reworks the transfiguration scene of the original Revelation of Peter with its canonical backgrounds Mark 9:2–10 par. and 2 Pet 1:16–18 (see esp. Luke 9:30: ἄνδρες δύο). The appearance of the two men in Akhm. 2 corresponds to the appearance and description of Moses and Elijah in chapters 15 and 16 of the Ethiopian Revelation of Peter, which very probably again corresponds to the original Greek form of the text.24 While Akhm. 2 motivates the appearance of the two men by the help of the disciples’ question (v. 5), the Ethiopian text (and very probably the original Greek) have/had no parallel to this. Besides, the Ethiopian text does not state that both were ‘standing before the Lord’ (v. 6). Akhm. 2 does not use the name ‘Jesus (of Nazareth)’, but, instead, the title ‘Lord’. This is a striking parallel to Akhm. 1, which also calls Jesus ‘Lord’ several times (vv. 2, 3, 6, 8, 10, 19, 21, 24, 50, 59, 60), without ever using the name ‘Jesus’.25 Thus, the text creates a certain distance between ‘the Lord’ and ‘the twelve disciples’, who cannot look at the two men standing before the Lord. Only Peter reduces this distance, when he approaches the Lord in v. 12. Also without exact parallel in the Ethiopian text is the passage in which the disciples are unable to look at the two men. The composite verb ἀντιβλέπω can neither be found in the New Testament nor in the Septuagint:26 it implies that the disciples cannot look into the faces of the two men. Obviously their eyes are blinded by the rays of light coming from the two men.

23 Sometimes also the word ἐξαίφνης is used in these contexts. Compare for example Mark 13:36; Luke 2:13; Acts 9:3 and 22:6. 24 For a more detailed comparison cf. Buchholz, Your Eyes, 364. 25 The question of the christology of the Gospel of Peter (Akhm. 1) is still a matter of considerable controversy. See, e.g., M. Myllykoski, ‘Die Kraft des Herrn: Erwägungen zur Christologie des Petrusevangeliums’, in: T.J. Kraus & T. Nicklas (eds), Das Evangelium nach Petrus: Text, Kontexte, Intertexte (TU 158), Berlin/New York 2007, 301–26. 26 Liddell-Scott-Jones, s.v., translate: ‘look straight at, look in the face’.

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V. 7: 7 ἐξήρχετο γὰρ ἀπὸ τῆς ὄψεως αὐτῶν ἀκτὶν ὡς ἡλίου καὶ φωτεινὸν ἦν αὐτῶν τὸ ἔνδυμα, ὁποῖον οὐδέποτε ὀφθαλμὸς ἀνθρώπου εἶδεν οὐ γὰρ27 στόμα δύναται ἐξηγήσασθαι ἢ καρδία ἐπινοῆσαι28 τὴν δόξαν ἣν ἐνεδέδυντο καὶ τὸ κάλλος τῆς ὄψεως29 αὐτῶν.

For there came forth from their countenance a ray as of the sun, and their raiment was shining, such as the eye of man never saw the like. For no mouth is able to express nor a heart to conceive the glory with which they were clad, and the beauty of their appearance.

V. 7 explains why it is impossible to face the two men. Again several extant parallels are relevant here: the text can be compared to the account of Jesus’ transfiguration according to Matthew (the motif is absent from Mark 9:3 and Luke 9:29). The choice of words, however, is different in both texts. Matt 17:2b has: καὶ ἔλαμψεν τὸ πρόσωπον αὐτοῦ ὡς ὁ ἥλιος. The only word to be found in both texts is ‘sun’, though Akhm. 2 has a ‘ray as of the sun’. Another point of comparison between ‘righteous ones’ and the sun can be found in Debora’s song in Judg 5:31. Here those who love God are compared to the sun as it rises in its power (see also 2 Sam 23:4 about the righteous ruler, and Dan 12:3).30 But Akhm. 2 also links the image of the ‘two righteous brethren’ with God himself, just as Hab 3:4 shows. There God’s brightness will be like the sun at his coming, while rays come forth from his head (see also Hab 3:11). Perhaps the idea that it is impossible to see God’s face and to stay alive should also be considered as a possible background (Exod 33:20; cf. also John 1:18). Some New Testament parallels are helpful, too: v. 7 can be understood as an exegesis of Matt 13:43, which of course reworks the Old Testament motifs mentioned above: τότε οἱ δίκαιοι ἐκλάμψουσιν ὡς ὁ ἥλιος ἐν τῇ βασιλείᾳ τοῦ πατρὸς αὐτῶν.—So Akhm. 2 offers an exact In my reconstruction of the text I follow A. von Harnack. O. von Gebhardt’s reconstruction with the words οὐδὲ γάρ seems to be too long. 28 In this case O. von Gebhardt’s reconstruction seems to be more probable than Harnack’s. 29 Reconstruction according to O. von Gebhardt. 30 Further parallels regarding the motif of ‘shining’ are: 1 Enoch 38:4; 51:5; 104:2; 108:13–15; 4 Ezra 7:97; 2 Bar 51:3,10. See also G.W.E. Nickelsburg, Resurrection, Immortality and Eternal Life in Intertestamental Judaism (HTS 26), Cambridge MA 1972, 11–26. Simultaneously the ‘sun’ is used to express beauty: See, e.g., Wisd 7:29, Sir 26:16. 27

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description of what Matt 13:43 says about the the fate of the ‘righteous ones’ in the ‘kingdom of their Father’. A passage in the Revelation of John is also interesting. Rev 1:16 speaks about the face of the risen Lord in his glory: καὶ ἡ ὄψις αὐτοῦ ὡς ὁ ἥλιος φαίνει ἐν τῇ δυνάμει αὐτοῦ (see also the description of the angel according to Rev 10:1). Interestingly this text also uses the word ὄψις (twice in Akhm. 2) for face instead of πρόσωπον. While the same word occurs in v. 9 of the Gospel of Peter in the New Testament it can only be found in John 11:44 and Rev 1:16.31 The second statement about the two men also has its parallels in the canonical accounts about Jesus’ transfiguration. However, a closer look again reveals differences in the language of the two accounts: Mark 9:3

καὶ τὰ ἱμάτια αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο στίλβοντα λευκὰ λίαν, οἷα γναφεὺς ἐπὶ τῆς γῆς οὐ δύναται οὕτως λευκᾶναι. Matt 17:2c τὰ δὲ ἱμάτια αὐτοῦ ἐγένετο λευκὰ ὡς τὸ φῶς. Luke 9:29 καὶ ὁ ἱματισμὸς αὐτοῦ λευκὸς ἐξαστράπτων.

While the synoptic stories describe Jesus’ clothes as ἱμάτια or ἱματισμός, Akhm. 2 uses the word ἔνδυμα (cf. also vv. 7, 17, 30 where the verb ἐνδύω occurs). So the description of the angel at Jesus’ grave according to Matt 28:3 seems to be a closer parallel here: ἦν δὲ ἡ εἰδέα αὐτοῦ ὡς ἀστραπὴ καὶ τὸ ἔνδυμα αὐτοῦ λευκὸν ὡς χιών.32 Again, correspondence to the language of the Gospel of Peter can be observed: GosPet 12 speaks about Jesus’ ἔνδυματα, which are divided under the cross. Nonetheless, the canonical parallels Mark 15:24; Matt 27:35; Luke 23:34 and John 19:23 have ἱμάτια αὐτοῦ. In contrast to the synoptic accounts of the transfiguration, Akhm. 2 does not describe the clothes of the two men as ‘white’; they are ‘shining’. The adjective φωτεινός also occurs in the synoptic accounts, but it is used as an attribute of the cloud (Matt 17:5).33

31 Matt 26:67 and Mark 14:65 use the word πρόσωπον, too. My colleague Dr Thomas J. Kraus gave me the clue that in the LXX psalms πρόσωπον is regularly used for God’s face. Perhaps that is the reason to avoid it here. 32 Within the NT the word ἔνδυμα can only be found in the Gospel of Matthew. 33 Other texts that refer to the eschatological garments of the righteous ones are, e.g., the Revelation of John (see below), the Ascension of Isaiah 8:26, and the Pastor Hermae 68:2–3.

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The description of the ‘glory’, with which the two men are clad, resembles that in Isa 63:4 and 1 Cor 2:9:34 ἃ ὀφθαλμὸς οὐκ εἶδεν καὶ οὖς οὐκ ἤκουσεν καὶ ἐπὶ καρδίαν ἀνθρώπου οὐκ ἀνέβη, ἃ ἡτοίμασεν ὁ θεὸς τοῖς ἀγαπῶσιν αὐτόν. The correspondences are clear—v. 7 of Akhm. 2 could even be interpreted as an exegesis of 1 Cor 2:9. In this case the otherworldly glory of the righteous ones would be ‘what God has prepared for those who love him.’ Both the ‘glory’ with which the two men are clad, and the ‘beauty’ of their faces cannot be described. The text again uses the term ὄψις here. The attribution of the risen righteous ones with the word δόξα creates a relationship between them and God, who is attributed with heavenly glory (in the New Testament cf., for example, Matt 16:27; Mark 8:38; Luke 2:9; 1 Thess 2:12; 2 Thess 1:9), and the Son of Man, who at his parousia will come ‘in (his) glory’ (cf. Matt 24:30 par. Mark 13:26; Luke 21:27; cf. also Luke 9:26). Two further parallels in the book of 1 Enoch are of interest in this respect: 1. 1 Enoch 14 describes God’s throne: ‘And from beneath the throne issued streams of flaming fire. And I was unable to see. And the Greater Glory sat upon it; his raiment was like the appearance of the sun and whiter than much snow’ (14:19–20).35 2. 1 Enoch 62:13 expresses the idea that the Righteous and the Elect Ones will be saved. The text continues as follows: ‘The righteous and the elect ones shall rise from the earth and shall cease being of downcast face. They shall wear the garments of glory. These garments of yours shall become the garments of life from the Lord of the Spirits. Neither shall your garments wear out, nor your glory come to an end before the Lord of the Spirits’ (62:15–16).36 34 For this parallel see A.D. Menzies (ed.), Ante-Nicene Christian Library. Additional Volume: Containing Early Christian Works Discovered since the Completion of the Series, and Selections from the Commentaries of Origen, Edinburgh 1897, 145 n. 7. 35 Very probably Ezek 1:26–28 forms a background of this text. Translation by G.W.E. Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch 1, 257 (see also ibidem, 264). 36 Translation: E. Isaac, ‘1 (Ethiopic Apocalypse of) Enoch’, in: J.H. Charlesworth (ed.), The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha 1: Apocalyptic Literature and Testaments, New York/etc. 1983, 5–90, esp. 44.

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V. 7 of Akhm. 2 thus supplies the righteous ones with the attributes of heavenly glory. Vv. 8–9 8

οὓς ἰδόντες ἐθαμβώθημεν· τὰ μὲν γὰρ σώματα αὐτῶν ἦν λευκότερα πάσης χιόνος καὶ ἐρυθρότερα παντὸς ῥόδου,9 συνεκέκρατο δὲ τὸ ἐρυθρὸν αὐτῶν τῶν λευκῶν, καὶ ἁπλῶς οὐ δύναμαι ἐξηγήσασθαι τὸ κάλλος αὐτῶν·

And as we saw them, we were shocked, for their bodies were whiter than any snow and redder than any rose. But their red was mingled with the white, and I am utterly unable to express their beauty.

The motive of being ‘shocked’ cannot be found in the Ethiopian parallel of the text, but it regularly occurs in texts describing epiphanies or angelophanies (cf., for example, Luke 1:12 using the verb ταράσσομαι plus the motive of ‘fear’, or Luke 1:29 using διαταράσσομαι). The revelation told here finds a parallel in chapter 9 of the Ascension of Isaiah. In the seventh heaven Isaiah sees the righteous ones (9:7–8). These do not wear their fleshly garment but ‘higher garments’, comparable to those of the angels, who ‘stand in great glory’ (9:9). However, they still lack their crowns and their thrones, which they will not receive before the ‘Loved One’—the most important Christological title according to the Ascension of Isaiah37—will descend to earth (9:11–12). The description of the two men’s bodies in v. 8 again resembles the canonical transfiguration accounts, which have already been cited. A clearer parallel, however, can be seen in the angel at the grave (Matt 28:3) with garments ‘white as snow’. Further parallels can be found in the following texts: Several times the Revelation of John speaks of white garments of the righteous ones (not of white bodies): for example, Rev 3:4–5 promises

37 The term ‘the Loved One’ is the most important christological title according to the AscIsa. For more details regarding the christology of this text see, e.g., M. Simonetti, ‘Note sulla cristologia dell’Ascensione di Isaia’, in: M. Pesce (ed.), Isaia, il diletto e la chiesa. Visione ed esegesi profetica cristiano-primitiva nell’Ascensione di Isaia. Atti del Convegno di Roma, 9–10 aprile 1981, Brescia 1983, 185–209; A. Acerbi, L’Ascensione di Isaia. Cristologia e profetismo in Siria nei primi decenni del II secolo (Studia Patristica Mediolanensia 17), Milano 1989, 99–209; J. Knight, Disciples of the Beloved One. The Christology, Social Setting and Theological Context of the Ascension of Isaiah ( JSPSup 18), Sheffield 1996, 71–185.

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eschatological white garments to everyone who ‘conquers’.38 Rev 3 creates a link between the ones who conquer and the ones who have not soiled their garments. So ‘white’ here expresses purity, unimpeachability, and sinlessness. Besides, not only the 24 oldest ones around God’s throne wear white garments (Rev 4:4), a white robe is also given to those who have suffered martyrdom for their belief (6:11). And, finally, they are an attribute of the ‘great multitude that no one could count’ (7:9), which stands in front of God’s throne (7:13–14). Although Revelation does not directly contrast ‘white’ and ‘red’ as Akhm. 2 does, perhaps the idea that the righteous ones have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb (Rev 7:14), could be interesting for our text, too. If this was one of the backgrounds of the words ‘whiter than any snow and redder than any rose’ (Akhm. 2, v. 8), v. 8 would mean that the righteous ones have reached their unimpeachability by martyrdom. The context of vv. 1–3 with its theme of eschatological torments could at least be a plausible argument for that. However, another parallel seems to be more helpful. An even clearer literary correspondence to the comparison with the ‘Red’ of the roses can be found in the description of the new-born Noah in 1 Enoch 106, where Noah’s body is described as ‘whiter than snow and redder than a rose’ (106:2,10).39 G.W.E. Nickelsburg interprets the connection of both attributes in 1 Enoch 106 as a sign of simultaneous purity and beauty.40 This interpretation would perfectly fit vv. 8–9 of Akhm. 2, too: after all v. 9 explicitly deals with the two men’s beauty. Besides, the paradox of the simultaneous occurence of ‘white’ and ‘red’ can also be linked with the idea that something is indescribable, which of course has to do with the fact that both men belong to the ‘otherworld’, where elements can be linked with each other which seem to be incompatible in this world (see, for example, 1 Enoch 14:9 which describes a wall of hail surrounded by tongues of fire).41

Another parallel is Hermas 68:1–3. Cf. for example C. Osiek, The Shepherd of Hermas (Hermeneia), Minneapolis 1999, 201–02. 39 Translation: Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch 1, 536. 40 Cf. Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch 1, 543. 41 This parallel is mentioned also by Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch 1, 543. 38

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V. 10–11 10

ἥ τε γὰρ κόμη αὐτῶν οὔλη ἦν καὶ ἀνθηρὰ καὶ ἐπιπρέπουσα αὐτῶν τῷ τε προσώπῳ καὶ τοῖς ὤμοις ὡσπερεὶ στέφανος ἐκ νάρδου στάχυος πεπλεγμένος καὶ ποικίλων ἀνθῶν ἢ ὥσπερ ἶρις ἐν ἀέρι· τοιαύτη ἦν αὐτῶν ἡ εὐπρέπεια. 11 ἰδόντες οὖν αὐτῶν τὸ κάλλος ἔκθαμβοι γεγόναμεν πρὸς αὐτοὺς ἐπειδὴ ἄφνω ἐφάνησαν.

For their hair was curly and bright and fitting on both their face and shoulders, as it were a garment woven of spikenard and diverse-coloured flowers, or like a rainbow in the sky. Such was their comeliness. Seeing their beauty we stood before them shocked, since they had appeared suddenly.

In contrast to the new-born Noah in 1 Enoch 106:2 the righteous ones do not have white but curly hair, which is described as ‘bright’ (or better: ‘blooming’—ἀνθηρός). This, of course, fits the description of the hair woven ‘as it were a garland of spikenard and diverse-colored flowers’, but also the description of their land as a kind of paradise garden (v. 15). The earth there is ‘blooming’ (ἀνθέω) ‘with unfading flowers’ (ἄνθος). Other spices and plants are ‘fair-flowering’ (εὐανθής), and the land’s ‘perfume’ (again: ἄνθος) is carried even to the disciples. The most important point of the description seems to be the motif of the great ‘comeliness’ of the righteous ones (εὐπρέπεια, v. 10). Interestingly, a connection of the words ἄνθος, πρόσωπον and εὐπρέπεια can also be found in Jas 1:11: James, however, wants to illustrate the transience of wealth and therefore speaks about the beauty of the flower that perishes in the heat of the sun. Instead, Akhm. 2 employs the image in the context of imperishable other-worldly beauty. Perhaps the word στέφανος (‘crown’) also resembles the eschatological crown of victory given to the righteous ones. This idea is expressed by many early Christian texts (very clearly: 2 Tim 4:8; 1 Peter 5:4; but see also 1 Thess 2:19; Jas 1:12; Rev 2:10; 3:11; 4:4,10; Pastor Hermae 68:1; Ascension of Isaiah 9; Acts of the Martyrs of Vienne and Lyon 36). It should be noted, however, that actually Akhm. 2 does not speak about a real crown, but compares the hair to a ‘garland’. This garland is described as being woven out of the ears of ‘spikenard’ and ‘diverse-coloured flowers’. As the bloom of the spikenard bears the shape of an ear, the words νάρδου στάχυς can also be translated as ‘the bloom of a spikenard’. Again the text uses plant metaphors. The second point of comparison is the ἶρις ἐν ἀέρι: ‘a rainbow in the sky.’ This resembles the description of the ‘mighty angel’ in Rev 10:1 with a rainbow over his head, who has occasionally been

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identified with Christ since Victorinus of Pettau.42 The image of the rainbow connects the ‘mighty angel’ of Revelation with the image of the ‘throne of God’ (4:3) around which there is a ‘rainbow that looks like an emerald’. In Akhm. 2, the image of the rainbow, however, must be connected to the image of the ‘ray as the sun’ that comes forth from the countenance (v. 7). V. 11 again speaks about the beauty of the two (v. 7: beauty of their appearance, v. 9: indescribable beauty; v. 10: comeliness). The motifs of ‘beauty’ and ‘glory’ (vv. 7; 14) thus seem to be decisive for the description according to Akhm. 2. The text tries to put together attributes in order to express the indescribable beauty of the inhabitants of another world. Through these attributes the beauty and the glory of the righteous ones are connected to God’s glory.43 For the motive of ‘sudden appearance’ cf. v. 6; for the motif of being ‘shocked’ cf. v. 8. Vv. 12–13 καὶ προσελθὼν τῴ κυρίῳ εἶπον· τίνες εἰσὶν οὗτοι; 13 λέγει μοι· οὗτοί εἰσιν οἱ ἀδελφοὶ ὑμῶν οἱ δίκαιοι ὧν ἠθελήσατε τὰς μορφὰς ἰδεῖν. 12

And I approached the Lord and said: ‘Who are these?’ He said to me: ‘These are your righteous brethren, whose forms you desired to see.’

Obviously, Peter alone overcomes the ‘shock’ (vv. 8.11) and approaches the ‘Lord’ (cf. v. 4).44 In the Ethiopian parallel to this text, which lacks a counterpart to Akhm. 2, v. 5, Peter’s question makes quite good sense. But here Peter does not seem to be aware of the relationship between his and his fellows’ request expressed in v. 5 and the following vision.45 Perhaps this is an indication that Akhm. 2 provides a later text than the Ethiopic translation.

42 For the history of the interpretation of this text cf. J. Kovacs & C. Rowland (eds), Revelation (Blackwell Bible Commentaries), Oxford 2004, 118–19. For a criticcism of this particular interpretation, however, see P. Prigent, Commentary on the Apocalypse of St. John, Tübingen 2004, 327. 43 See also Von Harnack, ‘Bruchstücke’, 96–7: ‘[M]an hat hier den Typus der Seligen, wie ihn sich die ältesten Christen dachten und wohl auch darstellten’. 44 The Ethiopic parallel speaks here of the ‘God Jesus Christ’. 45 Von Harnack, ‘Bruchstücke’, 97, moreover pointed to the parallel Rev 7:13.

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‘our

righteous brethren’

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The Lord’s speech repeats the words ‘righteous brethren’, ‘forms’, and ‘see’ from v. 5. V. 5 and 13 thus can be seen as a frame of the whole unit. Conclusion: 1. The structure of vv. 5–13 can now be described more precisely: 5 6 7–10

11 12 13

Request for a Revelation: ‘Seeing’ the ‘Form’ of one of the ‘Righteous Brethren’ Sudden Appearance of two men Description of the glorious and beautiful form 7 Face—Garment: Light and glory, beauty 8a Shock of the Disciples 8b–9 The bodies of the two men: beauty 10 The hair of the two men: comeliness Shock of the Disciples about their beauty, and their sudden appearance Request for an Interpretation of the Revelation Interpretation: ‘Seeing’ the ‘Form’ of the ‘Righteous Brethren’

2. The text clearly shows many correspondences with the Ethiopian Revelation of Peter. Nevertheless I wanted to emphasise its originality here:46 Vv. 5–13 were surely developed from a more original version of the Greek Revelation of Peter, which also had its background in stories like the synoptic transfiguration accounts. Through the insertion of v. 5, however, a verse without parallel in the Ethiopian text, the whole scene receives a new function. The disciples’ request to see one of their ‘righteous brethren’ who already had gone forth out of this world, provides the background for a text that can no longer be called a transfiguration story. The text, moreover, describes the otherworldly glory and beauty of the righteous brethren. This passage will form the starting point for the question about the place where they dwell, and thus the starting point for the following revelation of otherworldly places, too. The parallel in the Ethiopian text, on the contrary, follows after the revelation of the otherworld and the events around the final

46

For further differences in detail see Buchholz, Your Eyes, 364–66.

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judgement. It is connected to the command to Peter to go ‘into the city of the west’, i.e., Rome (chapter 14).47 According to Akhm. 2 the revelation of the two righteous brethren is linked with a (fragmentary) speech of the Lord (vv. 1–3) on the eschatological appearance of ‘false prophets’ (v. 1)—again a text that has no parallel in the other extant witnesses of the Revelation of Peter. 3. There are some—less obvious—links of our passage in Akhm. 2 to the Gospel of Peter of Akhm. 1: the fact that both texts never speak of ‘Jesus (of Nazareth)’, but about the ‘Lord’, is well known. Besides, in both texts, but nowhere else in the ancient Christian literature, the disciples speak about themselves as ἡμεῖς οἱ δώδεκα μαθηταί (‘we, the twelve disciples’). The fact that both Akhm. 1 and 2 are Petrine apocrypha makes the connection between both texts even more obvious. Moreover, there are some other but surely less important details to be observed: both texts use the word ὄψις in passages where their New Testament parallels use the word πρόσωπον, and both texts use the word ἔνδυμα instead ἱμάτια and ἱματισμός. 4. Of course, many of the images to be found in our passage have their origins in an earlier form of a Greek text of the Revelation of Peter, which very probably came close to the extant Ethiopian version. In my interpretation I have concentrated on early Jewish and early Christian traditions that could help to interpret the text.48 This mainly had to do with limited space and does not mean that Dieterich’s approach to understand the text with the help of pagan parallels is worthless.49 In any case, as Pieter van der Horst’s work has shown more than once, the complex world of ancient Christianity does not allow for limited one-dimensional answers to sophisticated questions.

47 For this passage see T. Nicklas, ‘“Drink the Cup which I promised you” (Revelation of Peter 14:4): The Death of Peter and the End of Times’, in: P. Piovanelli & T. Pettipiece (eds), Bringing the Underground to the Foreground: New Perspectives on Christian Apocryphal Texts and Traditions, Turnhout 2008 [forthcoming]. 48 Contrary to the Ethiopic version, Akhm. 2 has no direct citations from the Old Testament. See also R. Bauckham, ‘A Quotation from 4Q Ezekiel in the Apocalypse of Peter’, in: Idem, The Fate of the Dead, 259–68; J. van Ruiten, ‘The Old Testament Quotations in the Apocalypse of Peter’, in: Bremmer & Czachesz, The Apocalypse of Peter, 158–73. 49 Important lines of this argumentation can be found at Himmelfarb, Tours of Hell, 127–40; Bremmer, ‘The Apocalypse of Peter: Greek or Jewish?’, and Kraus, ‘Die griechische Petrus-Apokalypse’.

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THE EVIL INCLINATION IN THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS, WITH A RE-EDITION OF 4Q468I (4QSECTARIAN TEXT?) Eibert Tigchelaar In a contribution to the Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible, Piet van der Horst introduced the ‘evil inclination’ as follows: ‘The concept of an evil inclination is typically rabbinic. This notion does not occur in the Bible, but the rabbis did derive it from biblical texts (esp. Gen 2:7; 6:5; 8:21). This inclination or drive is sometimes personified as a demonic figure or the Satan.’1 In his discussion of the ‘evil inclination’ he therefore almost exclusively refers to rabbinic texts, although he mentions the possibility that the theory of two ye arim (‘inclinations, desires, drives, bents of mind’) ‘may have had precursors in writings such as Test. Asher 1:3–9 and 1QS 3:13–14’.2 Boyarin, however, points out that there were different rabbinic views on the evil inclination (or, in his words, ‘evil desire’), namely a dualistic one ‘considering the human will to be composed of good and evil instincts at war with each other’ and a monistic, dialectical one.3 The question then is what exactly was the rabbinic innovation, and to what extent is there a development from Genesis to the rabbis. There is no lack of studies that argue that the use of the term ye er or the concept of an evil inclination in Second Temple Judaism differs essentially from that of the rabbis.4 Most studies on the evil inclination in the Dead Sea Scrolls stem from before the publication of the Cave 4 fragments,5 and the first objective of this

1 P.W. van der Horst, ‘Evil Inclination ‫’יצר הרע‬, in: K. van der Toorn et alii (eds), Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible. Second Extensively Revised Edition, Leiden 1999, 317–19, at 318–19. See also P.W. van der Horst, Het vroege jodendom van A tot Z: Een kleine encyclopedie over de eerste duizend jaar, Zoetermeer 2006, 10 (lemma ‘Aandrift ( jetster))’. 2 Van der Horst, ‘Evil Inclination’, 318. 3 D. Boyarin, Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture, Berkeley 1993, 64–5. 4 See esp. J. Hadot, Penchant mauvais et volonté libre dans la Sagesse de ben Sira (L’Ecclésiastique), Brussels 1970, and G.H. Cohen Stuart, The Struggle in Man between Good and Evil: An Inquiry into the Origin of the Rabbinic Concept of Ye er Hara , Kampen 1984. See also H. Lichtenberger, ‘Zu Vorkommen und Bedeutung von ‫ יצר‬in Jubiläenbuch’, JSJ 14 (1983), 1–10. The opposite view, namely of the attestation in the second century bce of the concept of two inclinations, is argued for by J. Cook, ‘The Origin of the Tradition of the ‫ יצר הטוב‬and ‫’יצר הרע‬, JSJ 38 (2007), 80–91. 5 See R.E. Murphy, ‘Yē er in the Qumran Literature’, Biblica 39 (1958), 334–44;

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contribution is to present a brief overview of the references in the scrolls, and to evaluate the Dead Sea Scrolls’ innovations relating to the evil inclination. The second part of this paper will present a new reading of a Qumran Cave 4 prayer fragment that mentions the ‘evil inclination of our heart’.6 1. The Evil Inclination in the Dead Sea Scrolls According to the most recent concordance, the noun ‫ יצר‬is found seventy-six times in the non-biblical Dead Sea Scrolls.7 This number includes six overlaps, parallel textual occurrences in different manuscripts,8 resulting in seventy cases.9 It is not the purpose of this contribution to discuss all of these occurrences, of which more than half are found in one manuscript, 1QHa. Instead, I will focus on those cases where the noun ‫ יצר‬is qualified explicitly as evil. Jub. 35:9 ‘. . . For you know the inclination of Esau, that he has been evil from his youth . . .’ has been largely preserved in 1Q18 (1QJubb) 1–2 3 and 4Q223–224 (4QJubh) 2 i 49, the combined evidence of which indicates that the Hebrew text read ‫כי יודע אתה את יצר עשו אשר‬ ‫)הוא( רע מן נעוריו‬.10 Since the Ethiopic translation of Jubilees has here xellinā,11 Lichtenberger has examined whether the other occurrences of xellinā in Jubilees might also reflect Hebrew ‫יצר‬, but the uncertainties of retroversion are illustrated by Jub. 5:2, where the plausible assumpCohen Stuart, Struggle in Man, 94–100; H. Lichtenberger, Studien zum Menschenbild in Texten der Qumrangemeinde, Göttingen 1980, 77–81 (esp. on the ‫ יצר‬in the Hodayot). 6 It is fitting to dedicate this re-edition of a tiny prayer fragment to Piet van der Horst, my teacher in 1978–79, and a colleague in more recent years, who has an ongoing interest in the evil inclination, prayer texts, and Qumran. 7 M.G. Abegg, Jr. et alii, The Dead Sea Scrolls Concordance. Volume One: The Non-Biblical Texts from Qumran, Leiden 2003, 319. The Accordance module Qumran Sectarian Manuscripts 2.6, lists 75 cases (ignoring words inside brackets), omitting 4Q418 43–45 i 13. 8 CD II 16 // 4Q270 1 i 1; 1QS VIII 3 // 4Q259 II 11; 1QHa 3 5 // 4Q428 13 8; 1QHa XXIII 12 // 4Q428 14 3; 4Q416 1 16 // 4Q418 2 + 2a–c 8; 4Q417 1 i 17 // 4Q418 43–45 i 13 (using the references utilized in the Concordance). 9 A few may be considered uncertain or disputed. E.g., is ‫ יצרו‬in 4Q417 1 i 17 // 4Q418 43–45 i 13 a noun with suffix (‘his inclination’) or verb with suffix (‘he formed him’)? Also in 4Q299 8 6 and 7 it is not certain whether ‫ יצר‬is a noun or verb. 10 See the discussions in Lichtenberger, ‘Vorkommen und Bedeutung’, 5–6, and J.C. VanderKam, Discoveries in the Judaean Desert XIII, Oxford 1994, 105. 11 The noun xellinā is related to the verb xallaya, ‘to consider, think, devise’. Chr.Fr. A. Dillmann, Lexicon Linguae Aethiopicae cum indice latine, Lipsiae 1865, 579, indicates that xellinā renders Greek μελέτη, λογισμός, διαλογισμός, νόημα, διανόημα, νοῦς, ἔννοια, φρόνησὶς, βουλή, and more.

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tion that xellinā corresponds to ‫ יצר‬of Gen 6:5 is not validated by the traces in 11Q12 (11QJub) 7 4. Nonetheless, one may agree with him that there is no evidence of an external evil inclination that works in the human heart. The verses in Jubilees that refer to a xellinā refer to human reasoning which is located in one’s heart. In 4Q370 (4QAdmonition Based on the Flood) 1 i 3 the text reads ‫וישפטם יהוה כ]כ[ל דרכיהם ומחשבות יצר לבם ה]רע‬, ‘And YHWH judged them according to [al]l their ways and according to the thoughts of the [evil] inclination of their heart’.12 Even though ‫ יצר‬is badly damaged and ‫ רע‬is lost in a hole of the manuscript, the available space and the context make this reading highly plausible. The other references in this fragment to the Genesis account of the flood indicate that this line refers to Gen 6:5b ‫וכל יצר מחשבת לבו רק רע‬, ‘and every inclination of the thoughts of their hearts (sc. of mankind) was only evil’. The difference of order, from ‫ יצר מחשב)ו(ת‬to ‫מחשב)ו(ת יצר‬, is not due to free quotation, but seems to reflect a general interchangeability of the two collocations.13 This variation, as well as the fact that in the three LXX renderings of ‫ יצר מחשבות‬the Greek has only one word indicating thought or planning for the two Hebrew terms,14 should warn us to put too much emphasis on the use of the noun ‫יצר‬. Whatever the case, 4Q370 does not in itself suggest a concept of an evil inclination different from that of Gen 6:5. It has been suggested that another case of ‫ יצר רע‬is found in 4Q422 (4QParaphrase of Genesis and Exodus)15 I 12, ‫ביוצר רע ולמעש]י רשעה‬, ‘in evil inclination and for deed[s of injustice’ if one interprets ‫ יוצר‬as a qutl form of ‫יצר‬. The fragment is small and damaged, but seems to be related to Gen 2–3, the preceding line ‘he rose against Him and they forgot’ referring to the first sin in Gen 3. Elgvin therefore argues that the use of ‫ יצר רע‬here, and not in the context of the flood generation, ‘indicates a conscious reflection on the beginning of sin on earth with Edited by C. Newsom in Discoveries in the Judaean Desert XIX, Oxford 1995, 85–97. In Gen 6:5 the ‫ יצר מחשבות‬is qualified as evil, whereas in 1 Chron 28:9 and 29:18 the phrase is used in a neutral sense. In 4Q381 76–77 2 and 4Q525 7 4 there is not enough context to determine how ‫ יצר מחשבות‬is characterized. On the other hand, all Dead Sea Scroll attestations of ‫ מחשבות יצר‬are used negatively. In CD II 16 and 4Q286 7 ii 7–8 (par 4Q287 6 7) the ‫ יצר‬is qualified as of ‫אשמה‬, ‘guilt’; in the above mentioned phrase of 4Q370 and in 4Q417 1 ii 12 (see below) the ‫ יצר‬is called ‫רע‬, whereas the context of 1QS V 5 shows that it is negative there too. 14 Gen 6:5 (διανοεῖται; it is possible that the translator read ‫ יצר‬as a participle); 1Chron 28:9 (ἐνθύμημα); 29:18 (διανοίᾳ). 15 Edited by T. Elgvin in DJD XIII, 421–23. 12 13

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Adam’.16 However, there is no reason why one should not choose the easier reading of a participle ‫יוצר‬, and read ‘by the planner/former of evil’. In either case, it is noteworthy that a few lines earlier (line 7) this short fragment has a reference to a holy spirit, and one may speculate on a dualistic background of this fragment. The reference to an ‘evil inclination’ in 4Q417 (4QInstructionc) 1 ii 12 is given in the instruction ‫אל תפתכה מחשבת יצר רע‬, ‘Let not the thought of an evil inclination seduce you’. The context is too fragmentary to specify whether the ‘thought of an evil inclination’ is here of a general or a more specific (e.g. sexual) nature.17 Different from the previous occurrences are two cases of ‫ יצר רע‬in a context that does not refer to thoughts or to the human heart. The first is the much-discussed prayer in the so-called Plea for Deliverance in the Cave 11 Psalms Scroll (11Q5 XIX).18 The prayer asks God for forgiveness and purification, and to be granted a spirit of faithfulness and knowledge, and then reads in lines 15–16: ‫אל תשלט בי שטן ורוח‬ ‫טמאה מכאוב ויצר רע אל ירשו בעצמי‬, ‘Let not a satan rule over me, nor an unclean spirit; neither let pain nor evil inclination have power over my bones’.19 Soon after the publication of this prayer, Flusser published an article in which he discussed the trajectory from Ps 119:133 ‘let not iniquity rule over me’ via Levi’s Prayer in the Aramaic Levi Document and the Plea for Deliverance, to three later Jewish prayer texts, in which ‘iniquity’ (‫)און‬, (any) satan, unclean spirit, evil inclination, and physical affliction are associated, and in part interchanged.20 Whereas in 11Q5 ‘satan and unclean spirit’ replace ‘iniquity’ of the Ps 119 prayer, in the later rabbinic prayers ‘iniquity’ is replaced by ‘the evil inclination’. The formulation in Levi’s Prayer, ‫אל תשלט בי כל שטן‬, ‘Let not any

Elgvin, DJD XIII, 423. Cf. J. Strugnell & D.J. Harrington S.J., in: DJD XXXIV, Oxford 1999, 171–2. D.J. Harrington S.J. Wisdom Texts from Qumran, London/New York 1996, 56 associates this verse with ‘the yē er ra that can cause a person to sin’. 18 First edition: J.A. Sanders, DJD IV. The Psalms Scroll of Qumran Cave 11 (11QPsa), Oxford 1965, 76–9. Large portions of the same psalm have also been preserved in 11Q6 4–5. 19 For ‫ ירשו‬as derived from ‫( רשה‬instead of ‫)ירש‬, see R. Polzin, ‘Notes on the Dating of the Non-Massoretic Psalms of 11QPsa’, HTR 60 (1967), 469–70, n.9. 20 D. Flusser, ‘Qumrân and Jewish “Apotropaic” Prayers’, Israel Exploration Journal 16 (1966), 194–205 (this publication has been overlooked by both Hadot, Penchant mauvais, and Cohen Stuart, Struggle in Man). Dutch translations of the Greek version of Levi’s Prayer and of the prayer in b.Ber 16b which is recited in the Amidah, have been provided by P.W. van der Horst, Gebeden uit de Antieke Wereld, Kampen 1994, 60–1 and 87. 16 17

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satan rule over me’, as well as the formulations in other texts, indicate that ‫ שטן‬is a category of evil spirit, and not a proper noun.21 It is not entirely certain how the ‘evil inclination’ in the Plea for Deliverance is to be understood, whether as an outward or as an inward force, but in any case it seems to have gained a substance of its own, independent of a human’s heart. Comparable is the case in the Barkhi Nafshi text (4Q434–438), where the hymnist sings: ‫יצר רע גער]תה‬, ‘evil inclination [you] have rebuked’ (4Q436 1 i 10).22 The editors reconstruct the entire phrase as follows: ‫יצר רע גער]תה מן כליותי ורוח קוד[ש שמתה בלבבי‬, ‘The evil inclination [you] have driven with rebukes [from my innermost parts and the spirit of ho]liness you have set in my heart’.23 The clause is part of a longer hymnic section referring to the removal of ‘adulterousness of the eyes’, the sending away of ‘the stiffness of neck’, the removal of ‘wrathful anger’, and the carrying away of ‘haughtiness of heart and arrogance of eyes’. The ‘evil inclination’ may belong to the same category of the following vices, especially since the combination of ‘thoughts of a guilty inclination’ and ‘adulterous eyes’ is also found in CD II 16. On the other hand, the verb ‫גער‬, ‘to rebuke’, is commonly used with satan or evil spirits, and the question is whether here the verb is used metaphorically, as a mere synonym of ‫ הסיר‬or ‫שלח‬, ‘remove’ or ‘send away’, or in a more technical sense. From a literary perspective, one must observe the intertextual relation of the Barkhi Nafshi text with Zech 3: 4Q436 1 i–ii and 4Q437 4 (par 4Q438 4 ii) use the verbs of Zech 3, ‫גער‬, but also ‫הסיר‬, ‫העביר‬, ‫הלביש‬, and ‫ שים‬in a different sense. In Zech 3 ‫ גער‬is used to rebuke the Satan, and the other verbs refer to the change of clothing and apparel of the high priest Joshua. In the Barkhi Nafshi text the

21 J.C. Greenfield et alii, The Aramaic Levi Document: Edition, Translation, Commentary, Leiden 2004, 129–31. Cf. also ‫‘ תגער בכול שטן משחית‬you will rebuke every destructive satan’ in 1QHa XXII 25; ‫‘ כל שטן ומשחית‬every satan and destructive’ in 1QHa XXIV 19; ‫‘ ואין שטן ופגע רע‬without satan or mishap’ in 4Q504 1–2 iv 12–13. For the parallelism of ‫ יצר רע‬and ‫ פגע רע‬in the rabbinic prayers, see Flusser, ‘Qumrân and Jewish “Apotropaic” Prayers’, 199. 22 M. Weinfeld & D. Seely, in: DJD XXIX, Oxford 1999, 297. 23 The reconstruction ‫ רוח קוד[ש‬is based on the context, but foremost on Ps 51:13. Note that the preceding clause has the ‫ לב טהור‬of Ps 51:12. Note how Flusser, ‘Qumrân and Jewish “Apotropaic” Prayers’, 203–04, without any knowledge of the Barkhi Nafshi texts, already referred to Ps 51 as a remote ancestor of this type of prayer. Also the Greek version of Levi’s Prayer, preserved in the Mount Athos (ms e) manuscript of the Greek Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, prays δειχθήτω μοι, δέσποτα, τὸ πνεῦμα τὸ ἅγιον.

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clothing and apparel has been replaced by virtues and vices, whereas God’s rebuke of the Satan in Zechariah corresponds to the rebuke of the evil inclination.24 From a phenomenological perspective, one may observe that there is not always a clear distinction between virtues and vices, and spirits as personifications of those virtues and vices. Both in the Plea for Deliverance and in the Barkhi Nafshi texts these vices (and virtues) are connected with bodily parts, and one is reminded of later magical texts which refer explicitly to spirits that can take possession of bodily parts and influence a person’s behaviour.25 In both texts the ‘evil inclination’ is something extraneous to man, that can enter its body, but also can be rebuked. Those few explicit references to an ‘evil inclination’ in the Dead Sea Scrolls indicate on the one hand the influence of Gen 6:5, which relates the ‘evil inclination’ to ‘thoughts’ and the ‘heart’, and on the other hand a new development where the ‘evil inclination’ is personified, perhaps in the form of a spirit. Two issues are of importance. First, the personification of the ‘evil inclination’ is part of a broader attested tendency to personify virtues and vices. Second, in 4Q436 (Barkhi Nafshi) this personified ‘evil inclination’ has become part of a dualistic system. This innovation can best be illustrated by quoting Flusser, who describes the differences between the prayers found near Qumran and Ps 51: ‘the Psalm does not demonize the sin—no Satan, impure spirit or spirit of wickedness is named as a counterpart of the Holy Spirit and the right, willing spirit.’26 4Q436 1 i–ii, in using elements of Ps 51,27 however, does exactly that: in rebuking the ‘evil inclination’ it demonizes sin.28 From a systemic point of view, this innovation can best be explained as influenced by the Iranian dualism and the character of the Zoroastrian spiritual entities as designating at the same time a ‘psychological faculty,

24 Cf. also the reference to Zech 3:8 ‫רעיך הישבים לפניך כי אנשי מופת המה‬, in 4Q437 2 i 12 ‫עדת אנשי[ מופת הושבת לפני‬, ‘the congregation of men] of portent you have made to sit before me. 25 Cf. more in detail my ‘Catalogue of Spirits, Liturgical Manuscript with Angelological Content, Incantation? Reflections on the Character of a Fragment from Qumran (4Q230 1). With Appendix: Edition of the Fragments of IAA #114’, in: M. Labahn & L.J. Lietaert Peerbolte (eds), A Kind of Magic: Understanding Magic in the New Testament, Its Ancient Environment and Its Later Impact, London/New York 2007, 133–46. 26 Flusser, ‘Qumrân and Jewish “Apotropaic” Prayers’, 204. 27 Apart from sharing common terminology such as ‫חסד‬, ‫ רב רחמים‬and ‫עון‬, there are also more telling correspondences, such as ‫( לב טהור‬Ps 51:12 and 4Q436 1 i 10) and ‫לב‬ ‫( נדכה‬Ps 51:19 and 4Q436 1 i 1). 28 Cf. also ‫רוח שקר אבדת‬, ‘a spirit of deceit you have destroyed’ in 4Q435 2 i 5.

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a metaphysical entity and a divine being (angel or demon)’.29 However, as García Martínez has pointed out: ‘in its fully developed form it is only found in the writings of the Sassanian period. So, in the end we lack the linguistic link’.30 If one compares the Dead Sea Scrolls to the rabbinic concept of the evil inclination, one may perceive several precursors. The association of the ‘guilty inclination’ and ‘evil inclination’ with the ‘adulterous eyes’ in CD II 16 resp. 4Q436 may be seen as the backdrop of the rabbinic association of the ‘evil inclination’ with the sexual urge.31 Also, the ethical dualism of the Barkhi Nafshi texts which, if the editors’ reconstruction is valid, opposes the ‘evil inclination’ to the ‘holy spirit’ may be a large step towards the rabbinic dualism. Thirdly, the juxtaposition of satan and ‘evil inclination’ in the Plea for Deliverance reminds one of the identification of Satan and evil inclination in some Talmudic texts (b.BB 16a).32 Scholars have emphasized that the rabbinic concept of the ‘good inclination’ as opposed to the ‘evil inclination’ is not attested in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Second Temple Judaism, although these texts abound with ethical, cosmological and anthropological dualism. Reference is often made to 1QS III 13–IV 24, the Two Spirits Treatise, which in III 18–19 refers to ‘two spirits’ entrusted to man, the spirits of truth and injustice. Yet, the dualism found in most Dead Sea Scrolls is not anthropological, but manifested in opposing spiritual beings, which are named and characterized differently in the separate scrolls. On the other hand, the rabbinic dualistic theory of a ‘good inclination’ and an ‘evil

29 S. Shaked, ‘Qumran and Iran: Further Considerations’, Israel Oriental Studies 2 (1972), 433–46 at 436. Cf. also Tigchelaar, ‘Catalogue of Spirits’. 30 F. García Martínez, Qumranica Minora 1: Qumran Origins and Apocalypticism, Leiden 2007, 237. He continues: ‘Therefore, although the influence of Iranian dualism on the development of the Dualism of the Dead Sea Scrolls provides the best available explanation, and due to the presence of the same general theme and several concrete details can be considered probable, it cannot be considered proved.’ 31 Cf. the suggestion by Boyarin, Carnal Israel, 63: ‘My hypothesis is that the Rabbis inherited the term “Evil Instinct” from a first-century Judaism much more averse to sexuality than they were, and unable to dispense with it, they ironized the term’. 32 Cf. e.g. Cohen Stuart, Struggle of Man, 214–18.

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inclination’ is relatively rare, and it is questionable whether the rabbis embraced one specific concept of the ‘evil inclination’.33 2. A Re-edition of 4Q468i A hitherto unnoticed and unrecorded mention of an evil inclination is found in the small fragment 4Q468i, which was published as ‘4QSectarian Text?’.34 The editor transcribed and translated the fragment as follows: ]‫ליץ‬ ֯ ‫[בלי‬ ֗ ‫[ כיא חזק עורפם‬ ‫[צר לבני הרע ֗ה ֗שיבונו‬ ֗ ‫בותינו‬ ֗ ‫מעול ֗ם כיא ֗א‬ ֗ ‫[לנו‬ ֗ ‫נא[ררו מכול שלת לבם‬ ֯ ‫ת אויב‬.[ 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

1 2 3 4 5 6

]without scorning[ ]because their neck is hard ]enemy? to the sons of evil, they returned us ]l us from eternity, because our fathers ]they [were cu]rsed because of all the insolence of their hearts ].t enemy

The editor characterizes the fragment as a Sectarian Text: ‘By contrasting recalcitrant sinners (‫כיא חזק עורפם‬, ‘because their neck is hard’, line 2; ‫לבני רע‬, ‘for the sons of evil’, line 3) with a group of insiders (referred to in first and third plural [‫השיבונו‬, ‘they returned us!’]), 4QSectarian Text expresses the idea of a chosen minority which understands itself as separated from the evil, sinful majority of the people’.35 Recognizing that the fragment has some aspects of penitential prayer,36 he suggests that the fragment may have been ‘part of a historical sketch of the

Cf. the somewhat provocative statements in Boyarin, Carnal Israel. A. Lange, ‘4Q468i. 4QSectarian Text?’, in: DJD XXXVI, Oxford 2000, 416–17. The transcription and translation of this fragment are also found in D.W. Parry & E. Tov (eds), The Dead Sea Scrolls Reader 6: Additional Genres and Unclassified Texts, Leiden 2005, 306–07. This is not the same fragment presented as ‘4Q468i 4QHistorical Text H’ in F. García Martínez & E.J.C. Tigchelaar, The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition, Leiden 20002, 946–47, which is now officially referred to as ‘4Q468f 4QHistorical Text G’. 35 Lange, ‘4Q468i,’ 416. Note the typo ‫ רע‬for ‫הרע‬. 36 Lange refers to J.M. Baumgarten, who was the editor of the other fragments from the same Museum Plate, namely 4Q264a (4QHalakha B) and 4Q284 (4QPurification Liturgy). 33 34

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founding of the community (cf. CD I) or as a confession of sins (cf. e.g. 1QS I 24–II 1)’, and mentions ‘the contrast between recalcitrant sinners and a changed group of insiders’. The comments are brief, and neither discuss issues such as the strange phrase ‫בני הרע‬, nor why the first person plural in ‫ השיבונו‬would refer to a ‘changed group of insiders’,37 nor who these ‘recalcitrant sinners’ are. Line 3 seems to be crucial for Lange’s interpretation, but the translation of this line does not impart much meaning to the text. In a few cases the reading of the fragment should be corrected.38 The most important are the following: in line 2 the last word is ‫עורפנו‬, ‘our neck’, and not ‫עורפם‬, ‘their neck’; in line 3 read ‫ לבנו‬and not ‫לבני‬.39 I also suggest different readings in lines 1 and for the first word of line 5, but those are of minor importance. My reading is as follows: ]‫לוא‬ ֯ ‫[בלו‬ ֗ ‫[ כיא חזק עורפנו‬ ‫י[צר לבני הרע ֗ה ֗שיבונו‬ ֗ ‫בותינו‬ ֗ ‫מעול ֗ם כיא ֗א‬ ֗ ‫[לנו‬ ֗ ‫[ו֯ רו מכול שלת לבם‬ ‫ת אויב‬.[

1 2 3 4 5 6

Unvocalised Hebrew in fragmentary context is often ambiguous. Some words may therefore be understood different from the DJD edition. In line 2, ‫ חזק‬may be an adjective (‘our neck is hard’), or a piel perfect (‘he hardened our neck’).40 In line 3, I read ‫י[צר לבנו הרע‬, ‘the evil inclination of our heart’,41 as against the editor’s ‫[צר לבני הרע‬, ‘enemy? to the sons of evil’. The last word of the line, ‫השיבונו‬, can be a perfect third plural with suffix, an imperative with suffix, or a perfect first plural. In line 5 ‫ שלת לבם‬need not be ‘the insolence of their hearts’, which would be a

37 ‘Changed’ because of the verb ‫ ?השיבונו‬Also, it is not clear to me why the use of first person plural forms implies a ‘group of insiders’. 38 See the photograph in DJD XXXVI, pl. XXIX, taken from the PAM photograph 43.310. Cf. also PAM 41.707. 39 In this hand the main distinction between waw and yod is the larger, triangular head of the latter, compared to the hooked head of waw. 40 The choice for adjective or perfect (or even imperative!) is related to the understanding of the genre of the text. If the text is a confession, than we may read an adjective, but if it presents an historical overview, then read a perfect. Note that the phrase deviates from the common collocation ‫( קשה‬adjective or hifil) with ‫ ערף‬to express stiffneckedness. 41 Grammatically, the clause may also be translated ‘the inclination of our evil heart’.

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rare Aramaism,42 but can also be ‘the desire(s) of their heart’.43 In view of the association of the evil inclination with sexual desire or desires in general, I prefer ‘desire’ above ‘insolence’. Different interpretations might even be offered for the form ‫מעולם‬, which one normally would read as ‘from eternity’, ‘from old’.44 The most important changes vis-à-vis the editor’s transcription and interpretation are in lines 2 and 3. The corrected reading shows that there is no contrast between ‘recalcitrant sinners’ and the first person plural (‘a group of insiders’); the speakers themselves are the recalcitrant sinners. Line 3 does not have the unique phrase ‘sons of (the) evil’,45 which might indeed have suggested polemics against outsiders, but ‘the evil [in]clination of our heart’, the phrase which was also attested in 4Q370 1 i 3 (though there with the third person plural suffix), and which qualifies not the outsiders but the speakers as sinners.46 In short, what we have here are first person plural utterances in lines 2, 3, and 4, and references to others in lines 4 and 5. In line 4 those are ‘our fathers’, whereas ‘their’ in line 5 in ‘their heart’ might also refer to the fathers. In view of these forms, it is best to interpret ‫ השיבונו‬also as a perfect first person plural form, rather than as a reference to a third person plural with first person suffix. Lack of context precludes a precise understanding of ‫ השיב‬here. First person plural forms are relatively rare in the Dead Sea Scrolls, and are found predominantly in hymns or prayers. Thus, e.g., ‫אבותינו‬, ‘our fathers’, occurs some thirteen times in the Scrolls, but only once or twice in a non-hymnic/prayer setting.47 In half of the cases,48 references to ‘our fathers’ are found in confessions of the sins of the speakers, who

Lange, ‘4Q468i’, 417, refers to Dan 3:29 ketiv ‫שלה‬, ‘insolence’, which derives from Akkadian šillātu or šillatu. 43 For ‫ שלה‬as an orthographic variant of ‫שאלה‬, cf. 1 Sam 1:17 ‫שלתך‬. For other examples of dropping of radical (quiescent) alef in medial position cf. E. Qimron, The Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls, §100.61. For the expression ‫ שאלת לב‬cf. Ps 37:4 ‫משאלות‬ ‫לבך‬. 44 Note also that syntactically ‫ מעולם‬at the end of a sentence is not quite usual. 45 The phrase ‫ בני הרע‬is neither attested in the Hebrew Bible nor in the Dead Sea Scrolls, but cf. perhaps Matt 13:38 οἱ υἱοὶ τοῦ πονηροῦ. 46 Cf. below for the different forms of the expression ‘evil inclination.’ 47 CD XX 29; 1QS I 25–26; 1QM XIII 7; XIV 8; 4Q266 11 11; 4Q381 46a+b 4 (?); 4Q393 3 6; 4Q504 1–2 ii 8; vi 6; 4Q506 131–132 12. In a curse 4Q377 2 ii 5. The genre in 4Q392 6–9 3 (if ‘fathers’ are to be read here at all) is not clear. References to ‘my fathers’ or ‘our fathers’ are also found in other early Jewish prayers. 48 CD XX 29; 1QS I 25–26; 4Q504 1–2 ii 8; vi 6; 4Q506 131–132 12. 42

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confess they have sinned as their fathers. References to the stiffneckedness of the fathers can be found in Neh 9:16 and in 4Q506 131–132 13 (par 4Q504 4 7) where these fathers are called ‘stiffnecked’ (‫)קשו עורפם‬. The ‘evil heart’ is found mainly in Jeremiah, in the clause /‫שררות לבם‬ ‫לבו הרע‬,49 ‘stubbornness of their/his evil heart’, in prophetic sermons that sometimes compare the iniquities of the present people to those of the fathers.50 In this context of sins, one might even speculate on the possibility that ‫ מעולם‬is not ‘from eternity’, but ‘their disloyalty’, the root ‫ מעל‬being a stock element in the confession of sins.51 The first person plural’s confession of stiffneckedness and evil inclination can only, it would seem to me, be read either as part of a historical review, in which it would refer to the past, or as part of a confession or penitential prayer.52 The perfect ‫ השיבונו‬may suggest the former, but the overall correspondence with the prayers mentioning the speakers’ iniquities in connection to that of their fathers, suggests the latter. The lack of a second singular address to God makes it difficult to decide whether the fragment contains only a confession, or also a petition. In neither case is there any reason to qualify this fragment as a specifically sectarian text. The text does not contrast insiders with outsiders, but the first person plural speakers confess or refer to their guilty state before God. The interest of this small fragment is that it presents the first case where the evil inclination of one’s heart is not attributed to sinful others, but is part of a confession of one’s own human nature.

Jer 3:17; 7:24; 11:8; 16:12; 18:12. Jer 7:22–24; 16:10–12. 51 Reconstruct, for example, ‫אל תזכור [לנו מעולם‬, ‘do not account] to us their disloyalty’. However, for ‘their disloyalty’, one would either expect the noun ‫ מעל‬with suffix, or the infinitive construct with suffix according to the ‫ כותבם‬rather than the ‫ כתובם‬pattern. Cf. for those patterns Qimron, The Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls, §311.15. 52 In view of the limited remnants of the text, it is not possible to determine its genre with any exactitude, and I use the phrase ‘penitential prayer’ in a loose sense. The lack of direct address to God and the absence of petition may or may not be due to the fragmentary state of the text. 49 50

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A GREEK LETTER FROM SYRIA Klaas A. Worp A contribution to a Festschrift offered to a special person should offer something special. Such a requirement is particularly appropriate in the case of a contribution dedicated to a most distinguished classical scholar and historian of Early Christianity, Piet van der Horst. My contribution presents the first edition of a Greek papyrus text now belonging to the papyrus collection of the Benedictine Abbey at Montserrat (near Barcelona, Spain).1 In fact, in an earlier period it belonged to the private collection of papyri and parchments of Dr Ramón Roca Puig, bequeathed by him after his death to the said Abbey. This private collection used to be named ‘Papyri Barcinonenses’ and officially it belonged to the ‘Fondación S. Lucas Evangelista’, but after its transfer to Montserrat, this collection should now be referred to as ‘P.Monts.Roca’,2 distinguishing it from another papyrus collection kept in Montserrat Abbey, ‘P.Montserrat’.3 I am deeply indebted to the curator papyrorum of the collection, Padre Pius Tragan, and to the scientific advisor of the collection, Dr Sofia Torallas Tovar, for their gracious permission to publish a first edition of this Greek papyrus separately from the series of monographic publications of P.Monts.Roca. P.Monts.Roca inv. 241 contains 2 fragments of a Greek private letter broken into two pieces. Fragment ‘A’ measures 12.2 (H.) by 7.2 (W.); fragment ‘B’ 12.4 (H.) by 10 (W.) cm. The interval between the two

1 All papyri cited in this contribution are referred to by the abbreviations found in J.F. Oates et alii, Checklist of Editions of Greek, Latin, Demotic and Coptic Papyri, Ostraca and Tablets (BASP, Supplements 9), Oakville CT 20015. 2 The first volume of this series has just appeared, cf. S. Torallas Tovar & K.A. Worp, To the Origins of Greek Stenography (= P.Monts.Roca, Vol. I), Montserrat 2006. Publications of other P.Monts.Roca texts are forthcoming, cf. the presentation of two such texts (inv. 65 and inv. 995) by the same authors in the Proceedings of the XXIVth International Congress of Papyrology in Helsinki, 2004, and the paper titled Three Greek Montserrat texts related to the monastery of Apa Apollo, contributed by the same authors to a forthcoming volume dedicated to the memory of Sarah Clackson. 3 For this separate collection, brought together by P. Bonaventura Ubach, see A. Mundo, ‘La colleció de papirs de Montserrat’, Studia Papyrologica 2 (1963), 35–42; M. Manfredi, ‘La Collezione di papiri dell’Abbazia Benedettina di Montserrat’, Proceedings of the XVIIIth International Congress of Papyrology I, Athens 1988, 61–6.

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fragments seems to be only 1–1.5 cm. On both the recto and the verso the writing runs parallel with the fibers. Provenance: Syria? Date: fourth/fifth century CE. Recto 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Fragment A [ ]Fragment B Κυ%ρίωι π[οθεινοτάτῳ ἀδ]!ελφῶι ∆ιοσκόρωι Ἀνδρέας καὶ Ἡρακλεί!δ[ης ] χαίρ!ε$ιν. Τὸ!ν !περὶ τὸ⟦ν⟧ κα#λ .[. . . . . . .].!μον τῆς! σῆς ἐρας! μίου δι!α!θέσε!ως! [εἰ]δότες καὶ [εὖ ἐπιστά]!μενοι μελ!εῖν σοι τῆς κατὰ τὴν δικαιο!σύ[ν]!η!ν κατορ[θώσεως . .].ομεν ἐκ τῶν κατὰτὰ Συρίας ἐκκλησιῶν· λο[ι]πὸν ἠ!ν!α!γ[κασμένοι] σὺν τῇ τοῦ πανευφήμου πατρὸς ἡ!μῶν καὶ δι!δ[ασκάλο]!υ Καλλιοπίου εὐκερδίᾳ καὶ σὺν θεῷ φάναι καὶ τὴν [. . . . . . .] σπε!υσούμεθα μετ!ὰ ὑπολύποσιν εἰρηνικοῖς [?ἀνθρώπο]!ις ἐπὶ τοῖς τῆς δικαιοσύνης ἀνα!γ!ν[ω]!ρισμοῖς [?λαβόντες] καὶ τὰς παρὰ τοῦ Κρείττονος δωρεὰς ἀς! μ[ένως. Τυχ]ὼν γὰρ τῆς !δικαι[ο]σύνης! καὶ αὐτ!ὸσ φρόντ!ι!σ[ον ἵνα σὺ] ε[ἰ]κότως ἂν τ[ο]ῦτο ποιήσ!ε[ι]ας προσε[ ].[ 8 σπευσόμεθα, ὑπολείπουσιν (2nd upsilon from correction)

Verso (written at the back of fr. A): !Κ[υ]ρίῳ !ποθει!ν!ο!τ!ά!τῳ ἀδελφῷ [∆ιοσκόρῳ To (their) dearest brother Dioskoros, Andreas and Herakleides (send) greetings. Knowing the. . . . of your loving disposition concerning the. . . . and well aware that the correction in fairness is a matter of care to you, we [verb] from the churches distributed over the (various parts) of Syria. Furthermore, as we have been forced (to this) with the profit/gain of the wholly blessed father and teacher Kalliopios and with God so to speak, we shall really hasten to make the [ journey to you?] with the remaining peaceful (i.e. Christian?) people, gladly receiving in the recognition of justice the gifts of the Almighty. For in the possession of justice you by yourself, too, must think that you can do this reasonably . . .

The date of the handwriting of this private letter may be assigned to the late fourth/early fifth century and its ‘Textheimat’ seems to be Egypt.4 The names of the senders of the letter and of its address are not informative and its precise contents are not easy to determine with complete certainty, but two things stand out:

4 There is no reason to think that any of the papyri originally acquired by Dr R. Roca Puig does not come from Egypt.

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a greek letter from syria

361

1. The letter apparently refers to churches in Syria (cf. line 5) and its authors, Andreas and Herakleides (cf. lines 1–2) seem to be reporting about their situation directly from this country (in that case the letter’s ‘Schriftheimat’ would be Syria);5 2. It mentions a personal name which is unusual in the documentary papyri from Egypt, i.e. a certain Kalliopios who is perhaps to be linked to one or more persons living in Syrian Antiochia, ca. 390 CE (see line 7, note ad loc.). It is unclear what the authors mean precisely when using the phrase ‘with the profit/gain of Kalliopios’ (for σύν indicating a necessary connexion or consequence cf. LSJ s.v., 6). Only so much seems certain that the concept of ‘fairness and justice’ (δικαιοσύνη) is prominently on the authors’ mind, cf. the repeated use of this noun in lines 4–5, 9, and 11. Notes: 3. Probably a neuter noun needs to be restored with the (corrected) article τὸ; if so, a restoration Τὸ!ν π! ερὶ τὸ κάλ!λ[ος ? ca. 5 ].!μον imposes itself in which τὸ!ν is the article belonging to a masc. noun in -].!μον. That noun forms the object to εἰδότες καὶ ἐπιστάμενοι, participles of verbs meaning ‘to know something’ (cf. next note), but I have not been able to retrieve the noun in question. 3–4. For the use of the word διάθεσις see G.W.H. Lampe, Patristic Greek Lexicon (hereafter: PGL) s.v. It is frequently used in complimentary addresses; for its use in the papyri see H. Zilliacus, Untersuchungen zu den abstrakten Anredeformen und Höflichkeitstiteln im Griechischen, Helsingfors 1949, 66, 88. The word combination ἐράσμιος διάθεσις is attested neither in the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (hereafter TLG) nor in the Duke Data Bank of Documentary Papyri, both available on the Internet. The dicolon εἰδότες καὶ ἐπιστάμενοι (or v.v.) occurs 15 times in the TLG; it is found already with authors of the classical period. 5. Within the present context (note the female article τῆς, l. 4, most probably to be followed by a noun), a word beginning in κατορ- brings us automatically to the genitive of the noun κατόρθωσις = ‘reform, amendment, rectification’; the verb κατορθόω, or the neuter noun κατόρθωμα are excluded here, of course. After that one may reckon with a verb, e.g., ‘we report / write’; the size of the lacuna allows probably no more than 2 or 3 letters before the ending in -ομεν. and the trace of the letter before the verb’s ending is so small that one cannot come further with determining the verb in question. The following preposition ἐκ may probably best be taken in a spatial sense, though other uses of the preposition are known; cf. E. Mayser, Grammatik der griechischen Papyri aus der Ptolemäerzeit, II.2, Berlin 1934, 382–90. Συρία is mentioned to date in the documentary papyri a number of times in the famous Zenon archive (mid-third century BCE) and rather sporadically in documents

5 For the relatively few Greek papyrus texts from Syria see E. Crisci, Scrivere greco fuori d’Egitto: Ricerche sui manuscritti greco-orientali di origine non egiziana dal IV secolo a. C. all’ VIII d.C. (Papyrologica florentina 27), Firenze 1996, 7–31.

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from Roman Egypt; cf. A. Calderini & S. Daris, Dizionario dei nomi geografici e topografici dell’Egitto greco-romano, IV, Milano 1986, 320 s.v. (add there now P.Yale III 137.3 [216/217p]). Between 250–800p one finds among the Egyptian documentary papyri references to Syria in the following texts (in chronological order): 1. P.Oxy. XLIII 3109.21 (Oxy., 253–256p): people selected for receiving ploughingoxen in Egypt and delivering them in Syria, undoubtedly for Valerian’s campaign in the East. 2. P.Oxy. XLII 3054.6 (Oxy., 265p?): a women from Bostra in Syria registers the sale of a slave. 3. P.Bingen 113. 6–7 (Karanis, 272/3p?): context very uncertain, perhaps reference made to events related to the emperor Aurelian and his campaign against Zenobia of Palmyra. 4. P.Oxy. IX 1205 = CPJud. III 473.8 (291p): manumission of a female slave, reporting that an amount of money has been paid by i.a. a βουλευτὴς Ὀνιτῶν τῆς Συρίας Παλαιστίνης as representative of the Jewish community (παρὰ τῆς συναγωγῆς τῶν Ἰουδαίων). 5. P.Laur. I 19.4–5 (IIIp): -------]κησεν ἐν Συρίᾳ; context not informative. 6. P.Oxy. XIV 1722.3 (315/323p): fragment of a document sent to a princeps of the praef. Aegypti by someone from Eleutheropolis in Syria, who is now residing in Oxyrhynchus. 7. PSI VII 771.2 (Oxy., 321p): a person states to be from Bostra in Syria. ! ντῆσαι εἰς Καισάριαν τῆς Παλαιστίνης Συρίας 8. P.Lond. VI 1913.6ff. (334p):—[ἀ]!πα ! ε! ρ! [ὶ] κ[α]θαρισμοῦ <τοῦ> !ἁγ! ίου Χρηστ! ι! α ! νικοῦ [π]!λή ! θ! ο! υ ! ς! —, i.e. πρὸς διάκρισιν π ‘—to proceed to Caesarea in Palestinian Syria to come to a decision concerning the purgation of the holy Christian body—’. 9. PSI IV 311.24–26 (Oxy., IVp?); letter to be sent to Laodicea in Coele Syria (πρὸς τὴν Λαυδίκιαν τῆς κοίλης Συρίας). 10. P.Iand. II 15.fr. 3.9–10 (IVp): something needs not to be brought to Syria ( ἵνα μὴ εἰς τὴν Συρίαν [ ]| ἐνέγκαι· After the fourth century, references to Syria in papyri from Egypt are apparently lacking in the documentation presently available. In general, for various aspects of the relationship between Syria and Egypt, cf. W.M. Brashear, ‘Syriaca’, Archiv für Papyrusforschung 44 (1998), 86–127 (esp. 87–92: A. Syriac Texts from Egypt; 101–104: E. Syrians in Pagan Greco-Roman Egypt; 104–106: F. Syrians in Christian Egypt). Also to be mentioned within this context is the famous early fourth-century Theophanes archive containing, among other things, information about a journey made from Egypt to Syria (for this archive, see in latest instance CPR XVIIA 6,1n. and XVIIA 18 introduction, 3n.) and the geographical papyrus SB XXVI 16607 (containing a list of place names in Egypt, Palestine, Syria and Asia Minor). I think it most attractive to take the preposition κατά + acc. in its geographical sense ‘distributed over, in’. In this view the wording κατὰ τὰ Συρίας (sc. μέρη) can be taken as ‘distributed over the various parts of Syria’. Within this context it is worthwhile to remember that under Diocletian Syria was split up into 4 parts, viz. Arabia, Palestine, Fenice and Coelesyria, cf. Der Kleine Pauly V 472. While it has been suggested to me that one should interpret αἱ κατὰ τὰ Συρίας ἐκκλησίαι as ‘the churches according to the Syrian rite’, I have not found parallels sufficiently endorsing such an interpretation. 7. For a Kalliopios mentioned in the documentary papyri see P.Laur. III 85.3 (Prov. unknown, IVp). There seems to be no good reason to identify this person with the Kalliopios in our text. For five prominent men named Calliopius living in late Antiquity and mentioned in late fourth century sources, see cf. PLRE I s.n., 174–175 s.n. Calliopius, esp. nos. 3 and 4. While the Calliopii nos. 1–4 are all mentioned by Libanius, it is to be noted especially regarding Calliopius 3 and 4 that these were assistant teachers

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under Libanius, who came from Antiochia, in Syria (cf. line 5!); Calliopius 3 was active ca. 388–390, Calliopius 4 died in 392. The Calliopii 1 and 2 were high officials in the imperial administration (i.e. Calliopius a governor of Bythinia, Calliopius 2 a consularis of Macedonia), while Calliopius 5 was an editor of Terence and is not mentioned in the East. It cannot be excluded that either Calliopius 3 or Calliopius 4 may be identified with the man who authored the Theban inscription (executed in uncial letters, but no further date suggested) I.Syringes 467: Καλλιόπι<ο>ς Ἀντιοχεὺς . . . ἐθαύμασα. There seems to be no connection with the Kalliopios occurring in another Greek graffito from Egypt (SB I 1036; This; date ?). 7–8. For the expression σὺν θεῷ φάναι, ‘with god, so to speak’: cf. P.Flor. II 127. A.2; P.Oxy. XXXVI 2788.9n. 8. Possibly something like ὁδὸν πρός σε/ὁδόν εἰς σε may be restored, cf. IG XIV 1729. 9. For εἰρηνικός = ‘peaceful, peaceable’ (said especially of Christians etc.) cf. Lampe, PGL, 421 s.v. The preposition μετά is used here with the dative instead of with the genitive; this is caused, of course, by a confusion with the preposition σύν (which governs the dative). 10. For τὸ κρεῖττον = ‘the Almighty’ see Lampe, PGL, 777a. s.v., 2. 12–13. The use of the optativus + ἄν reflects a certain amount of education. In general, B.G. Mandilaras, The Verb in the Greek Non-Literary Papyri, Athens 1973, 272 § 604, notes that the use of optatives is characteristic of fourth-century letters.

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PART FIVE

JEWISH AND CHRISTIAN TEXTS IN COMPARISON

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CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND Heliodorus in the Temple and Paul on the Road to Damascus Jan N. Bremmer At the beginning of the First World War, soon after the English had beaten back the Germans at Mons despite fearful odds, there arose a legend that has become known as that of ‘the Angel of Mons’. One version, from 1915, relates that an officer ‘plainly saw an apparition representing St George, the patron saint of England, the exact counterpart of a picture that hangs to-day in a London restaurant. So terrible was their plight at the time that the officer could not refrain from appealing to the vision to help them. Then, as if the enemy had also seen the apparition, the Germans abandoned their position in precipitate terror’. The legend clearly fulfilled a need and soon became extremely popular; many versions arose, it was put to music, incorporated into films, and illustrations helped to promote its popularity. St George was one possible identity of the apparition, but angels figured in the various re-tellings of the story more often, and it was they who gave their name to the legend.1 The Angel of Mons was perhaps the last of a series of influential mutations of an old theme: the epiphany of a hero or god, later a saint or angel, on the battlefield. Divine intervention in a critical situation was a standard feature of ancient descriptions of battles, and the saving intervention of supernatural beings had a long and happy life, even if it seems to have had its run by now.2 In most of these descriptions there is a clear moment of crisis requiring divine intervention, as in Mons. In ancient Greece, the genre of the ‘historical’ battle epiphany starts only around the turn of the fifth century and is in the

D. Clarke, The Angel of Mons, Chicester 2004, 113 (quote). F. Graus, ‘Der Heilige als Schlachtenhelfer: zur Nationalisierung einer Wundererzählung in der mittelalterlichen Chronistik’, in: K.-U. Jäschke & R. Wenskus (eds), Festschrift für Helmut Beumann, Sigmaringen 1977, 330–48; D. MacDonald, ‘The Vision of Constantine as Literary Motif ’, in: M.A. Powell Jr & R.H. Sack (eds), Studies in Honor of Tom B. Jones, Kevelaer/Neukirchen-Vluyn 1979, 289–96; W. Speyer, Frühes Christentum im antiken Strahlungsfeld, Tübingen 1989, 269–91; 499–501. 1 2

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beginning mainly limited to heroes.3 One of the earliest cases must be the battle at the river Sagra in the later sixth century where the Locrians defeated Croton.4 The Locrians had left a place open for Ajax in the first row of their phalanx, which was not to be attacked, as the Crotonian Leonymus learned through his wounds (Pausanias 3.19.12). It is perhaps not surprising that we do not hear of heroes appearing in battle before that time, since the concept of the religious hero as a category between gods and mortals was in fact not developed until the late sixth century.5 It is rather striking that the next appearance of heroes on the battlefield seems to have been that of the Dioscuri on horseback at the battle of Lake Regillus in about 495 bce.6 Yet the discovery of the more or less contemporary dedication at Lavinium to Castorei Podlouqueique qurois (ILLRP 1271a) strongly suggests that the idea of a successful heroic intervention must have reached central Italy from Magna Graecia very quickly. The stories of the intervening heroes during the battles of Marathon, Salamis and, perhaps, Plataea show how popular the idea soon proved to be.7 It would not be until the Galatian invasion in 279 bce that we hear of the epiphany of a god in war since Archilochus (Fr. 94 West2) had mentioned Athena’s help in battle. This time it naturally had to be Apollo, who could hardly have deserted his own sanctuary,8 and subsequent years saw an explosion of divine epiphanies during battle with even Demeter taking part, albeit in the shape of an old woman, in the urban warfare against Pyrrhus

3 For epiphanies of heroes see J. Bravo, ‘Heroic Epiphanies: Narrative, Visual, and Cultic Contexts’, ICS 29 (2004), 63–84. 4 For the battle see M. Sordi (ed.), Sagra: Contributi dell’Istituto di storia antica I, Milano 1972; M. Giangiulio, ‘Locri, Sparta, Crotone e le tradizioni leggendarie intorno alla battaglia della Sagra’, MEFRA 95 (1983), 473–521; A. Sgobbi, ‘Stesicoro, Falaride e la battaglia della Sagra’, Acme 56 (2003), 3–37. 5 See now J.N. Bremmer, ‘The Rise of the Hero Cult and the New Simonides’, ZPE 158 (2006), 15–26. 6 See A.S. Pease on Cicero, De Natura Deorum 2.6 (Cambridge MA, 1955–1958). 7 S. Hornblower, ‘Epic and Epiphanies: Herodotus and the “New Simonides”’, in: D. Boedeker & D. Sider (eds), The New Simonides, New York 2001, 135–47 (Plataea); T. Harrison, Divinity and History: The Religion of Herodotus, Oxford 20022, 83–4 (Marathon, Salamis). 8 Justinus 24.8.5, cf. G. Nachtergael, Les Galates et les Sôtéria de Delphes, Brussels 1977; C. Champion, ‘The Soteria at Delphi: Aetolian propaganda and the Epigraphical “Record” ’, AJP 116 (1995), 213–20; A. Chaniotis, War in the Hellenistic World, Oxford 2005, 157f. Note for Apollo’s assistance also a contemporary decree from Kos (SIG 3 398).

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of Epirus.9 But those decades were an exception, and appearances of divinities in battle always remained relatively rare.10 The phenomenon of the epiphany in battle, then, can be traced in its transformations over a period of at least 2500 years.11 In the limited space allotted to me it is of course impossible to give a full survey of the field of epiphany. A proper analysis would have to look at questions such as who appears to whom, in what manner, where, when and to what effect. Moreover, as the Angel of Mons illustrates, the idea of epiphany also has its history and we should always try to pay attention to diachronic and synchronic concerns. In illustration of such an approach I have chosen two epiphanies that have been relatively neglected by classical scholars in their studies of epiphanies. These are the appearance of a rider in shining armour to the Seleucid grandee Heliodorus, and the appearance of Jesus to the apostle Paul on the road to Damascus. Both epiphanies have been repeatedly compared with each other and the latter has even been seen as depending on the former.12 However, the parallels are to be viewed as structural rather than due to a genetic influence, as the author of Acts does not betray any influence from 2 Maccabees. Still, it might be illuminating to look at these two stories, as they can also show us the pervasiveness of Greek influence on ancient Israel.

E. Bickerman, Studies in Jewish and Christian History II, Leiden 1980, 177. For the evidence see K. Garbrah, ‘On the theophaneia in Chios and the Epiphany of Gods in War’, ZPE 65 (1986), 207–10; M. Launey, Recherches sur les armées hellénistiques, Paris 1950, Vol. 2, 897–901; Chaniotis, War in the Hellenistic World, 157–60. 11 The most important studies are F. Pfister, ‘Epiphanie’, RE Suppl. 4 (1924), 277–323; H.S. Versnel, ‘What Did Ancient Man See When He Saw a God? Some Reflections on Greco-Roman Epiphany’, in: D. van der Plas (ed.), Effigies dei, Leiden 1987, 42–55 (with excellent bibliography); A. Henrichs, ‘Epiphany’, in: S. Hornblower & A. Spawforth (eds), Oxford Classical Dictionary 3, Oxford 1996, 546; F. Graf, ‘Epiphanie’, in: Der Neue Pauly 3 (1997), 1150–52; R. Piettre, ‘Images et perception de la présence divine en Grèce ancienne’, MEFRA 113 (2001), 211–24; special issue of Illinois Classical Studies 29 (2004) on epiphany; B. Gladigow, Religionswissenschaft als Kulturwissenschaft, edited by C. Auffarth and J. Rüpke, Stuttgart 2005, 73–84 (‘Epiphanie, Statuette, Kultbild: Griechische Gottesvorstellungen im Wechsel von Kontext und Medium’, 19901). 12 H. Windisch, ‘Die Christusepiphanie vor Damaskus (Act 9, 22 und 26) und ihre religionsgeschichtlichen Parallelen’, ZNW 31 (1932), 1–23. 9

10

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The first story is related in 2 Macc 3, which was probably written in the 150s bce, but of which only an epitome has been preserved.14 Even this epitome may have been revised a number of times, but in our analysis we will stick to the final version. The episode I want to discuss took place under the rule of Ptolemy IV Philopator (187–175 bce) and the pontificate of Onias III (d. 172/1 bce), in about 180 bce. It relates how the financial supervisor of the Temple in Jerusalem,15 a certain Simon, became embroiled in a dispute with the high priest about the supervision of the markets (4). When he could not win, he told Apollonius son of Thraseas, the stratēgos of Syria Coele and Phoenice, that the treasure room of the Temple was filled with innumerable coins (5–6). Apollonius reported this information to Seleucus IV (r. 187–175 bce), who charged Heliodorus,16 his chancellor (ho epi tōn pragmatōn),17 to seize the money (7). It is striking how well the author of 2 Macc is informed about the technical language of the Seleucid kingdom and the finances of the Temple,18 and the combination of these business-like terms and the emotional atmosphere evoked by the author prevents the episode from becoming totally melodramatic. Heliodorus next travelled to Jerusalem (8–9), where the high priest told him that the money consisted partly of private deposits and partly of deposits by widows and orphans (10). The latter were held in high repute in Israel and the story thus also shows something of the representation of the different values of Greeks and Jews.19 When the day arrived on which Heliodorus had intended to inspect the treasure room, the situation in the city became highly dramatic: priests cast themselves

In this section all references in the text are to 2 Macc 3. Bickerman, Studies II, 159–91 (‘Héliodore au temple de Jérusalem’, 1939–441) still is the best analysis. 15 For the function see G. Aperghis, The Seleukid Royal Economy, Cambridge 2004, 173, 287. 16 Heliodorus appears on the bases of Delian statues: Inscriptiones Graecae XI 4, 1112– 14. 17 For the function see J. & L. Robert, Fouilles d’Amyzon en Carie, Paris 1983, 176–77, overlooked by Aperghis, Seleukid Royal Economy, 276. 18 Bickerman, Studies II, 162–66. 19 For the high Jewish regard for widows and orphans see K. van der Toorn, ‘The Public Image of the Widow in Ancient Israel’, in: J.N. Bremmer & L.P. van den Bosch (eds), Between Poverty and the Pyre: Moments in the History of Widowhood, London 1995, 19–30. 13 14

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before the altar and prayed loudly (15), the high priest walked around pale and trembling (16–7), people left their houses in droves and sent up supplicatory prayers (18), women filled the streets in mourning dresses, girt under their breasts, and even girls left their secluded rooms to pray on the doorsteps or at least to look out of the windows of their houses (19).20 The situation was absolutely desperate. Heliodorus, though, was un-impressed and approached the treasure room with his bodyguards, the doryphoroi (23–4). But before the epiphany took place the author had already announced that the Lord ‘made an epiphaneian megalēn’ (24) so that they all became highly fearful. Habicht translates this as ‘trat . . . grossartig in Erscheinung’, whereas Goldstein has ‘miraculously intervened’. The former is better as it keeps the notion of appearance, but it seems as if the author wants to express both meanings of epiphaneia, namely the appearance and its impact, with the combination, just as Cicero does with his well-known pronouncement praesentes saepe di vim suam declarant (De Natura Deorum 2.6).21 In fact, the expression megalas epiphaneias now has turned up in a decree of Carian Olymos (SEG 39.1135.5), where it must have the same meaning of both appearance and impact. The actual epiphany occurred only after Heliodorus had entered the treasure room (24). The timing is of course highly dramatic, namely the very moment that Heliodorus was about to commit his act of sacrilege. As we shall see with Paul, these moments are well chosen, and the ‘where’ and ‘when’ of an epiphany always have to be taken into account in an analysis of epiphanies. What happened then? Those present saw (ὤφθη) an awesome rider in golden armour on a splendidly adorned horse that charged straight at Heliodorus with his front hoofs (25). It is important to note that the rider was seen by all who were present (24), whereas in Homer and ancient epic, Callimachus and Apollonius of Rhodes, it usually is only the hero who actually sees the divinity who, for that reason, often stands close to the addressee.22 This model also seems to have been 20 In 3 Macc 1:18 girls also leave their secluded rooms during a catastrophe. For the problem of the seclusion of Jewish women see now P.W. van der Horst, Philo’s Flaccus: The First Pogrom. Introduction, Translation and Commentary (Philo of Alexandria Commentary Series 2) Leiden 2003, 179f. 21 The phrase is wrongly quoted as praesentiam saepe suam divi declarant by Versnel, ‘What Did Ancient Man See’, 52, who then draws the wrong conclusion from it. 22 B. Fenik, Typical Battle Scenes in the Iliad, Wiesbaden 1968, 75; Latacz et alii on Iliad

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followed by Lucan in Book 1 of his epic Civil War, when he describes the epiphany of the personified Roma to Caesar in order to stop him from crossing the Rubicon. Although she addresses the viri and cives (191–2), the narrative focuses on Caesar alone, so that he appears to be the only one to see her (visa duci patriae trepidantis imago: 186). Yet even Homer is much more sparing in his description of a divinity during its epiphany than we perhaps realize. Usually, he provides only a minimal description of the god and limits himself to the description of the divine voice.23 Epiphanies are often much less informative about the gods than we would wish. The presence of the rider’s horse is an interesting example of the Seleucid influence on Israel, as horses did not play a real role in Israel due to its mountainous terrain. The Macedonians, however, had an excellent cavalry that must have made a great impression on the Jews.24 It is tempting to think that the king and/or his grandees paraded in such golden panoply, even if I have found no examples to illustrate the idea. Yet it is clear that these shining knights had impressed the author of 2 Maccabees. He mentions that at the time of Antiochus’ second expedition against Egypt, that is ca. 170–168 bce, people saw another epiphaneia. This apparition lasted forty days, during which horses ran through the skies with knights dressed in robes interwoven with gold and armed with spears (5.2), a kind of vision that is still attested in early modern times and, as we have seen, even in the First World War.25 And in the legendary battle against a certain Timothy there appeared (ephanēsan) five splendidly dressed men on horses with golden reins from heaven in order to assist Simon the Maccabee (10.29). Finally, in the battle against Lysias there appeared to the Jews a rider, dressed in white, who waved a golden sword and shield and commanded their army (11.8). Bickerman comments that the action of the horse against Heliodorus was not that of a horse in battle but rather that of one in a circus or riding school. It is true that it would be difficult for a horse in

I.197–98, compare Iliad II.167ff., XI.196ff., XV.243ff., XX.330ff. and 375ff., XXII.214ff., XXIV.169ff.; Odyssey 16.159ff.; Meropis, fr. 3 Bernabé; note also Aeschylus, Choephori 1061, Callimachus, Hymn to Apollo 9; Apollonius of Rhodes 4.855. 23 Iliad II.182, X.512, XX.380; see the perceptive comments of P. Pucci, The Song of the Sirens, Lanham 1998, 81–96. 24 Bickerman, Studies II, 176. 25 W. Frijhoff, Embodied Belief: Ten Essays on Religious Culture in Dutch History, Hilversum 2002, 145–52 (with interesting observations on the phenomenon); Clarke, Angel of Mons, 25–36.

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such a position to kill, but any veteran of the riots of the 1960s—expertus loquor—will remember what a terrifying experience it was to be chased by police on horseback and will recall the healthy respect one had for horses: Heliodorus must have been scared to death. But whereas all those present saw the rider, the text stresses that Heliodorus also saw ( prosephanēsan) two young men, clearly very strong, very handsome and magnificently dressed, who flogged him incessantly (26).26 As no reaction of the bystanders is mentioned, we may assume that the author here employed the already mentioned motif of the protagonist as the only person who sees the divine epiphany. Bickerman concluded from the presence of the rider and the two youths that the author drew on two different versions.27 That is perhaps correct, but it is always difficult to draw such conclusions on the basis of an epitome and I am not convinced of the absolute necessity of this proposal. It is normal to interpret the youths as angels,28 and two angels are indeed present at the empty grave (Luke 24:4) and at the ascension of Christ (Acts 1:10). Yet a possible influence from records of the appearance of the Greek Dioscuri, whose presence in epiphanies is so well attested,29 can hardly be excluded in this Hellenistic treatise. It is interesting that the rider does not speak. It seems that the author found it sufficient to demonstrate the Lord’s power, but did not want to dwell too much on his anthropomorphic shape. This divine violence was too much for Heliodorus and he lost consciousness (27). But the Jews praised the Lord and joy abounded because ‘the almighty Lord had appeared (epiphanentos)’ (30). Such joy and praise are typical of the Hellenistic aretalogy.30 Given that the fall of Heliodorus had taken place in the Temple, it is understandable that The flogging is also mentioned in 2 Macc 5:18. Flogging angels occur in the Babylonian Talmud (b.Æag 15a), the fourth-century Visio Pauli (2) and Visio Dorothei 131, 145 Kessels/Van der Horst, and in the much later Martyrium Petri (17) of Pseudo-Linus. It hardly is a ‘thème folklorique’, as postulated by Bickerman, Studies II, 181. 27 Bickerman, Studies II, 174. 28 Bickerman, Studies II, 180. 29 E. Pax, Epiphaneia: Ein religionsgeschichtlicher Beitrag zur biblischen Theologie, München 1955, 160; L. Thuri, ‘Die Epiphanie der Dioskuren’, in: H. Froning et alii (eds), Kotinos: Festschrift für Erika Simon, Mainz 1992, 114–22; H.A. Shapiro, ‘Cult warfare: the Dioskouroi between Sparta and Athens’, in: R. Hägg (ed.), Ancient Greek Hero Cult, Stockholm 1999, 99–107. Note also the interesting passage in Marinus, Life of Proclus 32, where the inhabitants of Adrotta wonder about the identity of two young horsemen that had been seen on the road to Adrotta. 30 A. Henrichs, ‘Horaz als Aretaloge des Dionysos: Credite Posteri’, HSCP 82 (1978), 203–11 at 210. 26

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some of his friends requested Onias to bring a propitiatory sacrifice (31). During that sacrifice, the two angels made another appearance (ephanēsan) to Heliodorus, once again exclusively, thus showing the force of the high priest’s intervention. They exhorted him to proclaim God’s majestic power and then disappeared forever (33–4). Heliodorus now sacrificed in turn in order to thank God, as we would have expected.31 Such a sacrifice after an epiphany is well attested. This is what the inhabitants of Abunoteichos do after they have seen the ‘god’ Alexander, and in Acts 14:13 ‘The priest of Zeus, whose temple was just outside the city, brought bulls and wreaths to the city gates because he and the crowd wanted to offer sacrifices’ to Paul and Barnabas after they had been identified as Zeus and Hermes.32 After the sacrifice Heliodorus returned home and ‘bore testimony to all concerning the deeds of the supreme God, which he had seen with his own eyes’ (36). In other words, the epiphany culminates in the conversion of the outsider, who is now on the side of Israel. One could even say that the Heliodorus episode ends like a Hellenistic aretalogy, since it is typical of the Hellenistic aretalogies that the object of the miracle and its witnesses relate the magnalia dei to their environment.33 In normal circumstances our discussion of the Heliodorus episode would have had to stop here. However, by one of those chance findings that make epigraphy such an exciting branch of classical scholarship, Heliodorus has turned up again in a very recently published stele with a set of three letters dating from mid-summer 178 bce: from Seleucus to Heliodorus, from Heliodorus to Dorymenes, and from Dorymenes to Dophanes.34 From the first letter, which is the most important one, we learn that the king had appointed a certain Olympiodoros as royal

31 For an interesting analysis of Hebrew and pagan reactions to God’s intervention see S.J. Cohen, ‘Alexander the Great and Jaddus the High Priest According to Josephus’, American Jewish Studies Review 7 (1982), 41–68 at 56–60. 32 For these and other examples see M. Dickie, ‘Divine Epiphany in Lucian’s Account of the Oracle of Alexander of Abonuteichos’, ICS 29 (2004), 159–82 at 177f. For the Lystra episode see most recently L.H. Martin, ‘Gods or ambassadors of God? Barnabas and Paul in Lystra’, NTS 41 (1995), 152–6; M. Fournier, The Episode at Lystra: a Rhetorical and Semiotic Analysis of Acts 14, 7–20a, Bern 1997; D.P. Bechard, ‘Paul Among the Rustics: The Lystran Episode (Acts 14:8–20) and Lucan Apologetic’, CBQ 63 (2001), 84–101. 33 Mark 1:45; John 19:35, cf. W. Ameling, ‘Evangelium Johannis 19, 35: ein aretalogisches Motiv’, ZPE 60 (1985), 25; Tacitus, Historiae 4.81.3; Apuleius, Metamorphoses 11.13; Henrichs, ‘Horaz als Aretaloge’, 210f. 34 H.M. Cotton & M. Wörrle, ‘Seleukos IV to Heliodoros: A New Dossier of Royal Correspondence from Israel’, ZPE 159 (2007), 191–205.

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supervisor of the sanctuaries in the satrapy Coele Syria and Phoenike, just as in other satrapies. Evidently, the Temple hierarchy in Jerusalem did not like this threat to its autonomy and had tried to rebuff the attempt to get hold of the Temple treasury, which will have taken place shortly after the appointment of a supervisor but, in any case, before Seleucus’ death in early September 175. In the first instance the resistance must have been successful and its, perhaps unexpected, success will have led to the legendary epiphany of 2 Maccabees. However, less than a decade later Antiochos IV would enter Jerusalem with his army and loot the Temple.35 Even heavenly epiphanies cannot always stop earthly powers. In the introduction to 2 Maccabees (2:19–23), the author of the epitome tells us that the original version by Jason of Cyrene contained the wars of Judas the Maccabee and his brothers, the purification of the Temple and the heavenly epiphanies to those who chased the Seleucids out of Israel, re-conquered the Temple and restored the laws. The collection of the epiphanies of which I have given several examples in my exposition firmly dates the author to the Hellenistic period. That was the time that collections of divine epiphanies were recorded to promote faith and to serve religious propaganda in cults of such gods and heroes as Apollo (Istrus FGrH 334 F 50–52), Asclepius (Inscriptiones Graecae IV.12, 121–24), Athena (FGrH 532 D), Heracles (Istrus FGrH 334 F 53), the Maiden of Chersonesus on the Black Sea,36 Sarapis (P.Oxy. 11.1382; Artemidorus 2.44) and Zeus (Phylarchus FGrH 81 T 1).37

P.F. Mittag, Antiochos IV. Epiphanes: eine politische Biographie, Berlin 2006, 225–81. IOSPE I2 344 = FGrH 807 T 1 = A. Chaniotis, Historie und Historiker in den griechischen Inschriften, Stuttgart 1988, E 7. 37 M. Rostovtzeff, ‘Epiphaneia’, Klio 16 (1919), 203–6; P. Roussel, ‘Le miracle de Zeus Panamaros’, Bulletin de Correspondence Hellénique 55 (1931), 70–116; A.D. Nock, Conversion, Oxford 1933, 90ff.; V. Longo, Aretalogie nel mondo greco I, Genoa 1969. On the Lindian Chronicle see now C. Higbie, The Lindian Chronicle and the Greek Creation of Their Past, Oxford 2003. Note also the mention of the epiphaneias of Artemis in Magnesia on the Maeander, cf. most recently A. Chaniotis, ‘Empfängerformular und Urkundenfälschung: Bemerkungen zum Urkundendossier von Magnesia am Mäander’, in: R.G. Khoury (ed.), Urkunden und Urkundenformulare im klassischen Altertum und in den orientalischen Kulturen, Heidelberg 1999, 51–69; H.-J. Gehrke, ‘Myth, History, and Collective Identity: Uses of the Past in Ancient Greece and Beyond’, in: N. Luraghi (ed.), The Historian’s Craft in the Age of Herodotus, Oxford 2001, 286–313; in Knidos, as one reason to honour the goddess (SEG 38.812A.7–8, B 9–10), and in Carian Bargylia (SEG 50.1101.1). 35 36

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jan n. bremmer 2. Paul on the road to Damascus

I now turn to my second case, the epiphany to the apostle Paul on the road to Damascus. The episode is justly famous, if not because of Paul himself.38 Surprisingly, although he mentions his vision twice, he is extremely sparse with details. In 1 Cor 9:1 he rhetorically asks: ‘Have I not seen Jesus our Lord?’, and in 15:8 he just mentions that Christ ‘was seen also by me’, where the Greek word ὤφθη, which we also met in the episode of Heliodorus, is the standard expression for such visions in person already in the Septuagint,39 whatever German commentaries may make of it. Finally, in Gal 1:17 he mentions Damascus. It is therefore remarkable that Luke’s Acts of the Apostles (9:1–30; 22:3–21; 26:9–20) relates the episode thrice, each time in descending order of length. Moreover, whereas Luke relates the first version in the third person, he lets Paul relate the other two as a kind of autobiographical narrative.40 The three versions all have rather different purposes. The longest one is situated in Damascus, aims at tying Paul closely to the nascent Christian church and mentions pupils, apostles and the peaceful growth of the church. The second takes place in Jerusalem, is directed to the Jewish people and emphasizes Paul’s loyalty to Jewish culture and society, but it also prefigures his future as the apostle for the non-Jewish world. The last one takes place in Caesarea in front of King Agrippa and stresses Paul’s role as the preacher of Christ. It seems not unreasonable to conclude from these differences that Luke did not have a fixed detailed tradition at his disposal. He probably knew an outline of the story of Paul’s conversion but felt free to apply it to varying circumstances with varying emphases. In other words, none of the three is the authentic one and I will present a running commentary on the main pattern, while trying to keep an eye to the occasion of the narrative, if necessary. There are clearly problems with this procedure from a

38 R. Lane Fox, Pagans and Christians, London 1986, 102–67, 700–11 neglects this episode in his extensive discussion of pagan and Christian epiphanies. 39 Gen 12:7; 17:1; 18:1; 26:2 etc.; Luke 24:34; Acts 9:17; 13:31; 26:16; Acts of John 87, 89; Acts of Thomas 1; Longus 2.26. 40 See especially E. Pfaff, Die Bekehrung des H. Paulus in der Exegese des 20. Jahrhunderts, Rome 1942; G. Lohfink, Paulus vor Damaskus: Arbeitsweisen der neueren Bibelwissenschaft dargestellt an den Texten, Stuttgart 1966; C.W. Hedrick, ‘Paul’s Conversion/Call: A Comparative Analysis of the Three Reports in Acts’, JBL 100 (1981), 415–32; I. Czachesz, Commission Narratives: A Comparative Study of the Canonical and Apocryphal Acts, Leuven 2007, 60–91.

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narrative point of view, but for the purpose of understanding the topoi of epiphany it does not seem too problematic. In his two ‘autobiographical’ accounts Paul presents his epiphany as an apology, and in front of the royal couple he even assumes the posture of an ancient orator. Luke relates that he stretches out his hand (26:1), which must mean his right hand, as Quintilian instructs us.41 Clearly, it is not a simple Jew that is speaking here, but someone who has authority and knows the rules of the art. Paul begins by telling that he was charged by the high priest to persecute followers of Jesus in Damascus (22:5, 26:12). It is characteristic of Luke’s history that he focuses on Paul alone. The apostle had clearly left Jerusalem with a group of attendants, who are mentioned in the course of the epiphany (9:7, 22:9, 26:13), but neither their status nor their number is elaborated in any detail. It is only the first version that specifies where the epiphany happened. It took place ‘when he approached Damascus’ (9:3). Evidently, it is not such a dramatic moment as in the case of Heliodorus who had already entered the treasure room, but it is still a significant location. Paul had already as good as reached his goal and the start of the persecution was only a matter of days, if not hours, away. Then exaiphnēs, ‘suddenly’, something happened (9:3, 22:6). The notion of ‘suddenness’ and ‘speed’ is traditional in pagan and Jewish miracle stories before being taken over by the New Testament and the Manichaeans. Solon already knows that Paeon ‘quickly restores to health with the touch of his hands’ (13.62) and in the Epidaurian miracles, the mute ‘suddenly’ speaks and the blind ‘suddenly’ sees.42 Both suddenness and speed ‘characterize a supernatural event as contrary to expectation’.43 Although in the case of Heliodorus we did not hear about the time of the epiphany, Luke is very precise. It took place ‘about noon’ (22:6) or ‘at midday’ (26:13). For this moment of time Luke most likely drew on Greek tradition, although a certain influence from Jewish tradition cannot be totally excluded. Abraham is sitting near the oak of 41 Acts 21:40, 26:1, see U. Maier-Eichhorn, Die Gestikulation in Quintilians Rhetorik, Frankfurt 1989, 114ff. 42 Inscriptiones Graecae IV 951–2; O. Weinreich, Antike Heilungswunder, Giessen 1909, 197– 98; D. Daube, The Sudden in the Scriptures, Leiden 1964; P.W. van der Horst & G. Mussies, Studies on the Hellenistic Background of the New Testament, Utrecht 1990, 145f. 43 A. Henrichs, ‘The Timing of Supernatural Events in the Cologne Mani Codex’, in: L. Cirillo (ed.), Codex Manichaicus Coloniensis, Cosenza 1986, 183–204 at 202, with several examples from the Cologne Mani Codex.

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Mamre at the hottest moment of the day when Jahweh appears to announce that his post-menopausal wife Sarah will bear a son (Gen 18:1). We may perhaps also mention that Luke employed the motif in his description of the crucifixion when the sun disappeared for three hours, starting at noon, before Jesus died (Luke 23:44). Yet the time of the midday sun was the traditional moment of the appearance of gods, ghosts and demons in antiquity, just as in modern times ghosts tend to appear at midnight. The motif must already predate Homer, as in the Odyssey (4.400) Proteus appears to Menelaus when the sun is at its zenith. In Callimachus’ Bath of Pallas the encounter between Teiresias and Athena takes place at the mesambrinai hōrai (73–4),44 just as in Apollonius of Rhodes Jason meets the Libyan heroines ‘at the middle of the day; all around the rays of the sun at their fiercest were burning Libya’ (4.1312).45 According to Theocritus (1.15), it is highly dangerous to pipe at noon, as that is the time to arouse the wrath of Pan; indeed, we have an epigram that Pan appeared ‘openly, not in a dream, but in the middle of the day’.46 Finally, Ovid (Metamorphoses 3.144–5) lets Actaeon fatally meet Artemis at noon. In short, there would have been plenty of examples from poetry to inspire Luke. The motif can even be easily followed into later Antiquity. For example, in Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe, Philetas encounters Eros ‘about noon’ (2.4),47 and in the Vision of Dorotheus, which was published about two decades ago, the protagonist receives his vision when he ‘was sitting alone in the palace in the midst of the day’ (4).48 All these parallels strongly suggest that Luke employed a literary topos rather than that he recorded an authentic experience,49 even though this tradition may of course have occasionally conditioned real experiences. J.-R. Heath, ‘The Blessings of Epiphany in Callimachus’ “Bath of Pallas”’, Classical Antiquity 7 (1988), 81–6; C.W. Müller, Erysichthon, Mainz 1987, 46–64. 45 Note also the nymphs playing at noon in Callimachus, Hymn to Demeter 78. 46 Kaibel 802 = Inscriptiones Graecae XIV 1014 = IGUR 1.184; cf. J. Bousquet, ‘Epigrammes romains’, Klio 52 (1970), 37–40 at 39. 47 K. Nickau, ‘Zur Epiphanie des Eros im Hirtenroman des Longos’, Hermes 130 (2002), 176–91. 48 I quote from the text and translation by A.H.M. Kessels & P.W. van der Horst, ‘The Vision of Dorotheus (Pap. Bodmer 29)’, VC 41 (1987), 313-59; note also the list with errata of the editio princeps supplied by E. Livrea, Kressona baskaniês: Quindici studi di poesia ellenistica, Messina/Florence 1993, 147f. 49 R. Caillois, ‘Les démons de midi’, RHR 115 (1937), 142–73 and 116 (1937), 54–83, 143–86; A. Cameron, ‘The Form of the Thalysia’, in: Miscellanea di studi Alessandrini in memoria di Augusto Rostagni, Turin 1963, 291–307 at 301–2; A. Kambylis, Die Dichterweihe und ihre Symbolik, Heidelberg 1965, 59–61; J.B. Friedman, ‘Euridice, Heurodis and the 44

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At this fateful moment, Paul saw a light coming from heaven that shone around him and his attendants (26:13), although in the first two versions it was only Paul who saw the light (9:3, 22:6). On the other hand, in the first two versions the attendants hear the voice, but in the third one it is only Paul who hears the voice speaking (23:14). It seems as if Luke is trying to strike a balance between the traditional motif of only the hero seeing the divinity and the need for authentication of the epiphany by noting that all those present heard or saw it happening.50 The light was brighter than that of the sun. One is easily reminded of Noel Coward’s 1932 song ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’ with its immortal lines: At twelve noon the natives swoon and no further work is done, But mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the midday sun.

For the Jews themselves, the sun at noon was so bright that several texts from the Old Testament contrast it with darkness or twilight, as in Deut 28:29: ‘you shall grope about at noon as blind people grope in darkness’; Isa 59:10: ‘we stumble at noon as in the twilight’; or Job 5:14: ‘They meet with darkness in the daytime, and grope at noonday as in the night’. The Greek verb used in chapter 26 is perilamptō, which is the same verb that is used in the Christmas story when the angel appears to the shepherds (Luke 2:9). The other two accounts use the stronger verb periastraptō (9:3, 22:6). The American classicist Frederick Brenk has devoted a whole study to the aspect of light in Paul’s experience. He translates periastraptō with ‘flashes around them’ and suggests that Luke used the ‘normal word for lightning’, drawing on a large amount of Greek material that hardly seems to be relevant here, such as the religious effects of being struck by lightning.51 Brenk does not notice Noon-Day Demon’, Speculum 41 (1966), 22–9; N. Fernández Marcos, Los Thaumata de Sofronio, Madrid 1975, 39–40; N.J. Perella, Midday in Italian Literature, Princeton 1979, with an excellent bibliography; E. Livrea, Gnomon 58 (1986), 707; T. Papanghelis, ‘About the hour of noon: Ovid, Amores 1, 5’, Mnemosyne 42 (1989), 54–61; G. Leopardi, Poesie e prose, ed. R. Damiani, Vol. 2, Milano 19902, 705–12 (probably written in 1817); J.N. Bremmer, The Rise and Fall of the Afterlife, London/New York 2002, 128. 50 For the latter need see F. Graf, ‘Trick or Treat? On Collective Epiphanies in Antiquity’, ICS 29 (2004), 111–30. 51 F.E. Brenk, ‘Greek Epiphanies and Paul on the Road to Damascus’, in: U. Bianchi (ed.), The Notion of ‘Religion’ in Comparative Research, Rome 1994, 415–24, reprinted in F.E. Brenk, Relighting the Souls, Stuttgart 1998, 354–63.

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that when the women go to the grave of Jesus they see two men en esthēti astraptousei (24:4), which means no more than ‘in shining clothes’. It is true, though, that light and radiance are classic features of the epiphany, and Luke’s readers would have had no problem in recognising the scene.52 Paul and his followers all fell down on the ground. We may note that this was also the fearful reaction of the women of the chorus in Euripides’ Bacchae (605) after Dionysos had shaken the earth. The traditional Greek reaction would have been either fear or astonishment, normally expressed by the verb thambeō. Both reactions already occur in Homer and they can be followed all through Greek literature.53 Here the force of the light must have been such that fear was the normal reaction. Subsequently, Paul heard a voice saying: ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?’ It is interesting to note that this question is one of the few motifs that is the same in all three accounts (9:4, 22:7, 26:14). Apparently, it was such a well-known part of the epiphany that Luke could not have omitted it. The third account adds that the voice spoke in Hebrew (26:14). The emphasis on God’s language fits the context of Paul’s apology in which he himself emphasizes that he is a proper Jew: it would surely have been inappropriate to let God use Greek at that particular moment. Contrary to what Dodds and Versnel state, it is only in this apology before the royal couple that Paul also hears the words ‘it hurts to kick against the goads’ (26:14).54 It is hardly necessary for me to point out that the verse is a quote of a Greek proverb that appears in several works of fifth-century Greek literature and is best known from Euripides’ Bacchae. Here Dionysus advises Pentheus: ‘I would sacrifice to him (Dionysos) rather than get angry and kick against the goads, a mortal against a god’ (795, tr. R. Seaford). The proverb was used several times precisely in connection with resistance against a divinity.55 This is

52 Pfister, ‘Epiphanie’, 315–6; N.J. Richardson, The Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Oxford 1974, on Homeric Hymn to Demeter 188–90, 275ff., 278; Gladigow, Religionswissenschaft, 74f. 53 See the excellent collection of passages by Richardson on Homeric Hymn to Demeter 188–90; Lexikon des frühgriechischen Epos s.v. thambeō; Dickie, ‘Divine Epiphany in Lucian’s Account’, 168. 54 Contra E.R. Dodds, ed. Euripides Bacchae, Oxford 1960, 795; H.S. Versnel, Ter unus, Leiden 1990, 192. 55 F. Smend, ‘Untersuchungen zu den Acta-Darstellungen von der Bekehrung des Paulus’, Angelos 1 (1925), 34–45 at 36f.

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already noticeable in Pindar’s Second Pythian Ode, where after stating that ‘One must not contend with a god’ (88) Pindar finishes his exhortation with the words ‘and kicking against the goad, you know, becomes a slippery path’ (94–6). In the final part of the Agamemnon (1624), Aeschylus makes Aegisthus use the same proverb to argue that it is useless to resist fate, and in the Prometheus Vinctus (323), Okeanos points out to Prometheus that it is useless to fight against a cruel monarch, that is, Zeus. Euripides, then, employed the proverb in a traditional manner, but more effectively and pointedly than his predecessors. Luke probably made Paul use the proverb and the allusion to Euripides in order to present him as a highly cultured man. Euripides was very popular in Hellenistic times, as the steady flow of papyri with fragments and hypotheseis of his tragedies as well as archaeological representations show. He was even well read in Jewish circles, as can be seen from the Exagōgē of the Jewish tragedian Ezekiel, whose play is, ‘both in small points of phraseology and style and in the larger realm of dramatic technique and structure, much influenced by Euripides’.56 As is well known, there may be some other possible allusions to Euripides’ Bacchae in Acts as well. For example, the use of the quite rare verb theomachein (5.39), which occurs several times in the Bacchae (45, 325, 1255), and the liberation of the apostle Peter from prison (12:7), which resembles the episode of the imprisoned women in the Bacchae (443–8).57 The evidence is circumstantial and perhaps not decisive. Yet we may add that the combination of a voice and a supernatural light occurs twice in the Bacchae. First, when Dionysos appears to the chorus, they hear the god’s voice (567ff.) and see a fire (596–99). And at the dramatic moment that the maenads begin to see Pentheus, the messenger tells us: some voice from the air of heaven, Dionysos’ one may guess, cried out “oh young women, I bring the one who makes you and me and my mystic rites a mockery; but take revenge on him!” And as the voice spoke these 56 H. Kuch, ‘Zur Euripides-Rezeption im Hellenismus’, Klio 60 (1978), 191–202; W. Luppe, ‘Literarische Texte: Drama’, Archiv für Papyrusforschung 37 (1991), 77–91 at 78–86; A. Seeberg, ‘Tragedy and Archaeology, Forty Years After’, BICS 46 (2002–2003), 43–75. Ezekiel: H. Jacobson, The Exagoge of Ezekiel, Cambridge 1983, 23. 57 W. Nestle, ‘Anklänge an Euripides in der Apostelgeschichte’, Philologus 59 (1900), 46–57; G. Rudberg, ‘Zu den Bacchen des Euripides’, Symbolae Osloenses 4 (1926), 29–34; J. Hackett, ‘Echoes of Euripides in Acts of the Apostles’, ITQ 23 (1956), 218–27; O. Weinreich, Religionsgeschichtliche Studien, Darmstadt 1968, 172ff.

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jan n. bremmer words a light of holy fire towered between heaven and earth’ (1078–83, tr. Seaford, adapted).

The same combination also occurs in the divinization of Empedocles, even if it is supposed to have occurred at midnight, when someone heard a voice calling Empedocles and seeing a light in the heavens and the glitter of lamps.58 In these cases the voice came first and the light afterwards, but a much closer parallel can be found in Sophocles’ Oedipus Coloneus. Here the heroization of Oedipus is announced first by thunder and lightning (1460–71, 1606), after which, ‘suddenly’ (exaiphnēs: 1623) a divine voice is heard (1623–29); both phenomena are accompanied by expressions of fear by the bystanders (1464–6, 1606–7, 1624–5). It seems reasonable, then, to conclude that Luke was inspired by classical examples in his picture of this epiphany. The combination of lightning and voice is also interesting from another point of view. In Homer gods always appear as they are or in a metamorphosed state, but Luke does not describe an epiphany of a personal appearance in a visual form. Jesus clearly manifests himself only through signs and sounds. Of course, it might not have been proper for a self-professing orthodox Jew to let a divinity appear in person, but we may perhaps also connect this detail with the fact that Luke could hardly have let Paul relate the personal experience of the appearance of an anthropomorphic god before the royal couple. In the enlightened world of Greek and Roman intellectuals this would probably have been too much. We may remember that in the novel it is always the less educated or socially inferior that believe in a real epiphany.59 On the other hand, authors may like to portray their protagonists as intellectually superior and should not be unconditionally believed. We may note that Pausanias still records many an epiphany, and so do the inscriptions.60 In any case, it seems that epiphanies became somewhat disembodied in the course of time. Surely, in a more enlightened company it was easier to believe in the manifestation of the powers of a god than in his personal appearance.61 The question Paul poses to the voice, ‘Who are you, κύριε?’ (9:5, 22:8, 26:15), is also recorded in all three versions and thus also seems Heraclides Ponticus, fr. 832 Wehrli (= Diogenes Laertius 8.68). T. Hägg, Parthenope: Studies in Ancient Greek Fiction, Copenhagen 2004, 141–55 (‘Epiphany in the Greek Novels: The Emplotment of a Metaphor’, 20021) at 146. 60 SEG 41.1245 (Pisidia). 61 Cf. Pax, Epiphaneia, 38; Bickerman, Studies II, 177. 58 59

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to belong to the core of the epiphany. Many commentaries and translations prefer to capitalize the word κύριε and to translate it with ‘Lord’. But this is unlikely. Paul does not yet know who is speaking to him and therefore uses the term of deference to a superior that had recently become popular, kyrios,62 even though kyrios can be used to invoke a god in Hellenistic times: the well known kyrie eleison occurs first in Epictetus (2.7.12). However, Paul is soon informed: ‘I am Jesus whom you persecute’ (9:5, 22:8, 26:15), an answer also attested in all three versions. The answer fits well with the self-revelation of Hellenistic gods, who liked to proclaim themselves with formulae starting with egō eimi. The formula is often found in the Old Testament and depends on a Near Eastern tradition that surfaced in Egypt in Hellenistic times with the well-known aretalogies of Isis who frequently proclaimed herself as ‘I am Isis’. It should be noted that the formula entered Greek culture at an early time. When presenting himself to the Phaeacians, Odysseus says: eim’ Odysseus Laertiadēs (Odyssey 9.19); at the end of his encounter with Tyro, just before diving into the sea, Poseidon announces: autar egō toi eimi Poseidaōn enosichthōn (Odyssey11.252), and in her Homeric hymn, Demeter reveals herself with the words eimi de Dēmēter timaochos (268). Given the recent attention to Oriental features in early Greek epic, this formula should be taken into account as well.63 In the first two versions Paul is blinded by the light and has to be guided to Damascus, where a Jew, Ananias, baptises him after he has regained the light of his eyes (9:18, 22:13). It is clear that there is something symbolic in this blindness. This is confirmed by the sequel to Jesus’ words. He tells Paul that he will be sent to the gentiles to open their eyes in order to turn them from darkness to light (26:18). It is only when Paul can really see that he is worthy to be baptised and to become a proper disciple of Christ. In the last version, however, there is no mention of baptism or of any preaching to the Christian community. Paul’s main emphasis is on legitimating himself before the royal couple. This is an interesting twist to the traditional Greek epiphanies. The latter were often the occasion for the institution of a

62 E. Dickey, ‘ΚΥΡΙΕ, ∆ΕΣΠΟΤΑ, domine: Greek Politeness in the Roman Empire’, JHS 121 (2001), 1–11. 63 For the formula see E. Norden, Agnostos Theos, Leipzig 19232, 186–239; Richardson on Homeric Hymn to Demeter 268; Versnel, ‘What Did Ancient Man See’, 43; G. Mussies, ‘Identification and self-identification of gods in classical and Hellenistic times’, in: R. van den Broek et alii (eds), Knowledge of God in the Greco-Roman world, Leiden 1988, 1–18.

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cult or honours to the divinity,64 but Jesus’ proclamation does not so much exalt his own position as the position of his servant. Let us try to formulate some conclusions. First, a study of Greek epiphany has to pay attention to the whole of Greek literature, including that of the early Christians, who were often no less Greek than many an inhabitant of Asia Minor or Egypt, pace the prejudices of great classicists as Mommsen and Wilamowitz. Second, the study of these two epiphanies shows how much Jewish culture had become hellenized in the relatively short time after Alexander the Great. Third, epiphanies often function in a larger context that has to be analyzed as well, if we want to find their meanings. Fourth, when we compare the various elements of epiphany over time we can see that the epiphany has a history as well. Tempora mutantur et dei mutantur cum illis. Yet we have hardly been able to pay full attention to the gods. Which gods appeared to whom, and did their activities remain the same over time, or did some gods become more ‘visible’ than others? And what about the persons to whom the gods appeared? I have discussed two episodes with supernatural beings appearing to males. But what about women? Is there a gender factor to be taken into account? Even a superficial student of Greek epiphany will immediately notice a striking contrast with Roman-Catholic tradition. If we think of Bernadette of Lourdes or Joan of Arc, we immediately realize that Greece has very little to offer in this respect. Admittedly, Alexandra of Miletus, a third-century priestess of Demeter Thesmophoros, recorded that ‘the gods appeared to girls and women, but also to men and children’.65 Yet it is clear that the power structure of ancient Greece did not leave much room for women to open up their own niche in society through epiphanies.66 Why this was the case is only one of the many questions that still have to be resolved in the fascinating subject of Greek epiphany.67

Richardson on the Homeric Hymn to Demeter 188–90, 268ff. I. Didyma 496, cf. L. Robert, Hellenica 10–11 (1960), 543f. 66 But women were not easily believed by the Catholic clergy either, cf. W. Christian, Jr., Apparitions in Late Medieval and Renaissance Spain, Princeton 1981, 197–99. 67 This contribution has profited from audiences in Exeter (2004), Groningen (2005), Chicago and Utrecht (2006), as well as from observations by Annemarie Ambühl. Kristina Meinking kindly corrected my English. 64 65

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THE UNTOLD END 2 Maccabees and Acts Hermann Lichtenberger I. Introduction* The books of 2 Maccabees and Acts have often been compared. Both are examples of dramatic historiography featuring miracles and heavenly epiphanies. Both are representatives of a Hellenistic historiography which has its roots not in Thucydides or Polybius but rather in Phylarchus, Poseidonius and Plutarch and finds an equivalent in the work of Josephus’ Antiquities.1 This literature has also been labelled ‘Sensationsgeschichtsschreibung’.2 In a special way 2 Macc and Acts are similar: 2 Macc starts with the programmatic preface of the author—his relation to the earlier work of Jason of Cyrene is discussed below—in which he summarizes his work: ‘The story of Judas Maccabeus and his brothers, and the . . .’ (2 Macc 2:19ff.). In the two-volume work of Luke we find for each part (Luke 1:1–4; Acts 1:1–2) a preface explaining the historiographical programme of the author. At this point we do not take into account the question of historicity, but simply read the prefaces as a statement of the author’s self-understanding. Luke presents himself as a historian, whereas the author of 2 Macc diminishes his role as a historian. We will come back to this strange behaviour (see 2:19–32). In spite of its title, the ‘Acts of the Apostles’ focus on a few central figures only. At least from chapter 13 onwards it is the history of the

* The section on 2 Macc makes use of H. Lichtenberger, ‘Geschichtsschreibung und Geschichtserzählung im 1. und 2. Makkabäerbuch’, in: E.-M. Becker (ed.), Die antike Historiographie und die Anfänge der christlichen Geschichtsschreibung (BZNW 129), Berlin 2005, 197–212 (translated by Dr. Benjamin Wold); that on Acts of idem, ‘Jews and Christians in Rome in the Time of Nero: Josephus and Paul in Rome’, ANRW II.26.3 (1996), 2142–76 (translated by Dr. Dennis Slabaugh). 1 E. Plümacher, ‘Terateia’, in: J. Schröter (ed.), Geschichte und Geschichten: Aufsätze zur Apostelgeschichte und zu den Johannesakten von Eckard Plümacher, Tübingen 2004, 36f. 2 Plümacher, ‘Terateia’.

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Pauline mission; his co-missionaries play only a secondary role, as do the brothers of Judas in 2 Macc (quite differently from 1 Macc). Both works, 2 Macc and Acts, concentrate on a special part of history and on certain persons. They are far from being a history of the Hasmonean revolt or of the acts of the apostles. Despite the central role of the respective heroes the purpose of both works is not a biography of Judas or Paul, but the main topic is connected to their respective mission: the re-dedication of the Temple and the re-conquest of the Holy City on the one hand, and the spread of the gospel to Rome on the other. There are many further similarities that may be added: – God’s interference by miracles, especially his epiphany for salvation. – The overcoming of God’s enemies: the conquering of Heliodorus and Antiochus IV has rightly been seen as some kind of predecessor to the overcoming of the persecutor Saulus/Paulus.3 – In decisive situations the heroes have visual and auditory experiences.4 – The role of prayers and speeches; Israel’s history in prayers and speeches. – The centrality of Jerusalem. Most of the similarities are due to the genre of the literature: a dramatic and emotional historiography in both cases. In principle there is no difference with pagan Greek (and Roman) historiography. Of course the way in which the deity intervenes might be different in pagan historiography, but it is also by miracles and supernatural circumstances and coincidences that the story comes to its happy end.5 To be sure, we do not speak of romances with the common plot of two lovers being separated, experiencing the dangers of seduction, robbers and shipwreck and who are finally brought together by a friendly Fortune, but of historiography. This kind of historiography could not do without supernatural interference. 2 Macc and Acts belong to this genre. 3 Ch. Burchard, Der dreizehnte Zeuge. Traditions- und kompositionsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zu Lukas’ Darstellung der Frühzeit des Paulus (FRLANT 103), Göttingen 1970. See also J.N. Bremmer in this volume. 4 See B.J. Koet, ‘Trustworthy Dreams? About Dreams and References to Scripture in 2 Macc 14–15, Josephus’ Antiquitates Judaicae 11.302–347, and in the New Testament’, in: P.W. van der Horst et alii (eds), Persuasion and Dissuasion in Early Christianity, Ancient Judaism and Hellenism, Leuven 2003, 87–107. 5 See Plümacher, ‘Terateia’.

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The genre, however, does not settle the question of historicity (see L. Alexander).6 In pagan historiography the use of supernatural events has not found unanimous consent. Alongside credulity we encounter doubts and even mockery. But for the ancient readers of 2 Macc or Acts, divine intervention was explicitly a proof of historicity. There is one trait in each work which has especially puzzled readers and commentators: the open end. 2 Macc ends with the victory of Judas over Nicanor: ‘This, then, is how matters turned out with Nicanor. And from that time the city has been in possession of the Hebrews. So I too will here end my story’ (2 Macc 15:37). When the author wrote this, he knew very well that Jerusalem was not always in possession of the Maccabees from that time onwards; and even more importantly: that Judas was killed afterwards. None of this is mentioned. The author of Acts ends his work similarly: with the unhindered (akolytos) proclamation of the Gospel in Rome by Paul, although Luke must have known that this time had ended soon, that is, with the martyrdom of Paul.7 Why do both authors remain silent about the end? This question has, of course, been debated for decades, especially with regard to Acts. Concerning 2 Macc the question has been of much less interest because 1 Macc does mention subsequent events; therefore the lack of an account of Judas’ death was not felt as strongly as the absence of the account of Paul’s death in Acts, where we have no comparable counterpart. The parallel end of the two books, with their silence about the death of their heroes, has only rarely been commented upon. First we should have a look at the historiography of 2 Macc and Acts. We do this on the assumption that the silence on the death of Judas and Paul is grounded in the literary design of the authors. We do not maintain that there is a literary dependence of Acts to 2 Macc, but the two texts are closely related to each other because of their genre.

6 L.C.A. Alexander, Acts in its Ancient Literary Context: A Classicist looks at the Acts of the Apostles, London/New York 2005. 7 ‘Unhindered’ (Acts 28:31) has its counterpart in 2 Macc 15:37 where it is stated that after the victory over Nicanor, Jerusalem never again fell in the hand of enemies, see Plümacher, ‘Terateia’, p. 26 note 54, where he refers to 2 Macc as an example for partiality in historiography.

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hermann lichtenberger II. The Book of 2 Maccabees

1. The Literary Character and Theological Framework of 2 Maccabees 8 The author of 2 Maccabees is unknown to us. However, by his own account (2:23), the work is the epitome of a much larger (and now lost) composition of five books by the otherwise unknown Jason of Cyrene, who had recorded the history of political and religious suppression under Antiochus IV Epiphanes and of the liberation of the Jews from these conditions by the Maccabees. The editor’s own words and ideas surface in the text in the introduction (2:19–32), conclusion (15:37–39) and occasional comments (4:17; 5:17–20; 6:12–17). In addition, it is not certain which sections of the main body of the composition cannot be ascribed to Jason. One may at least note that the two introductory letters to the Jewish diaspora in Egypt (1:1–10a; 1:10b–2:18) are independent, and the possibility remains that the same is true with regard to chapters 3 and 7. Both the larger work of Jason of Cyrene and 2 Macc were composed in Greek. While 1 Macc participates in the tradition of historiography already established in the Jewish scriptures, 2 Macc displays in its historical presentation a dependence on Hellenistic conventions, expressed through its use of rhetoric and speech patterns. Its style seeks an emotional response from readers in the way it recounts unsettling and often savage tales, such as martyrdoms (6:18–7:42; 14:37–46), the awe-inspiring appearance of heavenly assistance (‘epiphany’) by means of angelic beings, and the overcoming and horrible destruction of God’s enemies. The miraculous accounts (which are not infrequently found in ancient historiography) of 2 Macc were probably taken from Jason of Cyrene’s work. The author uses documents (e.g. ch. 11) and has knowledge of historical details. Even the short summary in chapters 3–5 of the historical events leading up to the main story demonstrates the extent to which the writer was acquainted with sequences and details of historical events, sometimes even more so than what would have been known to and reported by the author of 1 Macc.

8 See F.-M. Abel, Les livres des Maccabées (ÉtB), Paris 1949; J.A. Goldstein, 2 Maccabees: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (AB 42), Garden City NY, 1983; W. Dommershausen, 1 Makkabäer, Würzburg 1985; S. von Dobbeler, Die Bücher 1/2 Makkabäer, Stuttgart 1997; and D.R. Schwartz, Second Maccabees (CEJL), Berlin/New York 2007.

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The fundamental understanding of history reflected in 2 Macc emphasizes sin, punishment and demonstration of God’s mercy, as is illustrated by the martyrdom of the mother and her seven sons (ch. 7), who bring into effect divine assistance in the fight for liberation. In the story itself God’s mercy is revealed in miraculous rescues and heavenly epiphanies that are followed by military successes. Much more than in 1 Macc, the enemies are conquered less by means of bravery in battle than through trust in and reliance on God’s help (8:18–20) and visible intervention (‘epiphany’). In this vein, acts of supplication and prayer before battle as well as worship after the victory in battle underscore the theocentric orientation of the work. Jerusalem and the Temple, the dangers posed to them, and the Temple’s desecration and rededication are the central themes from the first to the last page of the book. Although God has no need for a temple, he has chosen to dwell in the Temple of Jerusalem (14:35). The fate of the temple and the people of Israel are inseparably intertwined; in the end the Temple plays only a part in the destiny of the people (5:17–20). Despite the great sufferings of his people, God remains steadfast in his election of Israel (8:15) and ‘will have compassion on his servants’ (7:6, a citation of Deut 32:36). The sufferings of God’s people thus function as a form of training (6:12–16) through which God protects his people from even worse sins. The lesson seems to be: if the people keep the whole Torah—as shown through the martyrs’ death of Eleazar and the mother and her seven sons (6:18–7:42)—then God will be merciful once again. And so, from the martyrs’ deaths onwards, Judas and his army go from one victory to another (ch. 8), the wicked king Antiochus IV dies an agonising death (ch. 9), and the Temple is taken back and rededicated (10:1–8). In this way, the book explains the origin of the Hanukkah festival, which is to be observed even throughout the Diaspora (10:8; 1:9, 18; 2:16; concerning Jerusalem, see John 10:22). Strict adherence to the Torah is expressed through keeping the Sabbath holy (5:25–26; 8:26–28; 12:38; 15:1–5), the celebration of festivals (12:31, the Feast of Weeks), and especially through the categorical refusal to eat pork (6:18–7:42). The martyrdom account in chapter 7 not only portrays unswerving loyalty to the Torah, but also provides an eloquent witness to a hope for the resurrection of mutilated bodies at the end of time (see also the death of Razis in 14:37–46). The reason for confident belief in the resurrection is found in 7:28, where

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God is described as the one who created the world ‘out of things that already existed’ (7:29). The notion of retaliation and just punishment for sinners characterises the theology of the book: the enemies of God must die in the place of their wrongdoing and suffer in the same way they have inflicted suffering on others (9:28; cf. 1:13–16). By contrast, after the deaths of those faithful to the Torah (6:18–7:42; 14:37–46), God shows compassion to his people (8:5) and himself battles on their behalf in order that the Temple may be retaken and the people can lead a life in accordance with the Torah without hindrance. The dating of 2 Macc must be considered in connection with its Vorlage, the work of Jason of Cyrene. The last event reported in it dates to 161/160 bce, and one may assume that Jason was a contemporary and, at times, perhaps an eyewitness of the events about which he wrote. As far as the date of the work of the redactor (i.e., 2 Macc) is concerned, the date of the first letter (1:1–10a), 124 bce, is decisive. It is likely that the composition of the main body of the work is to be associated with this date. Later additions, such as the second letter in the introduction (1:10b–2:18), found their way into the composition some time before the destruction of the Temple in 70 ce. The place of composition is often presumed to be Egypt (Alexandria) because of the addressees mentioned in the introductory letters (1:1–10a and 1:10b–2:18); however, Jerusalem is more likely. 2. Prayer and the Understanding of History The main body of 2 Macc (chapters 3–15) is clearly divided into two parts. The first section (3:1–7:42) describes the deepening religious crisis, illustrated by the accounts about the abandonment of the observance of the Jewish Torah and service to God, the desecration of the Temple, and the martyrdoms of Eleazar and the mother and her seven sons through which ‘the wrath of the Almighty’ against the Jews comes to an end (7:38). The second section (8:1–15:36) describes Judas and his companions involved in one military successful battle after another, since ‘the wrath of the Lord had turned to mercy’ (8:5). With the exception of chapter 3,9 Heliodorus’ seizure of the Temple treasury, and the prayers in response to the apparition of a heavenly

9

This does not take into account the two letters given in chapters 1–2.

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army (5:2–4), the first section is ‘prayer-less’. Even in the martyrdom account, in which the characters declare their trust in God,10 no formal prayers are uttered, while in the transition from chapter 7 to 8 (at 7:37) the seventh brother appeals just before his death that God ‘show mercy soon to our nation’.11 Significantly, the second section, which begins by describing the activities of Judas (8:1), reports in verse 2: ‘They implored the Lord to look upon the people who were oppressed by all’ and culminates, after the military victory over Nicanor and his shameful death (15:34), by declaring: ‘And they all, looking to heaven, blessed the Lord who had manifested himself (τὸν επιφανῆ κύριον), saying, ‘Blessed is he who has kept his own place undefiled!’ This second section is thoroughly shaped by prayers; they are uttered in times of distress and impending battle, or come as declarations of praise after divine intervention, often experienced as an ‘epiphany’ (ἐπιφάνεια). This term is already found in the author’s preface (2:19– 32)12 in which he describes the work as follows: The story of Judas Maccabeus and his brothers, and the purification of the great temple, and the dedication of the altar, and further the wars against Antiochus Epiphanes13 and his son Eupator, and the appearances that came from heaven (τὰς ἐξ οὐρανοῦ γενοµένας ἐπιφανείας) to those who fought bravely for Judaism . . . (2:19–21).

In the first section, the term ἐπιφάνεια occurs once again in the just mentioned Heliodorus legend (3:24), where it gives the opening signal that unleashes the rest of the book; the threat of destruction to the Temple, its miraculous rescue, and the heavenly ἐπιφάνεια occur at the beginning of the conflict with Antiochus IV in 5:2–4: And it happened that, for almost forty days, there appeared over all the city golden-clad cavalry charging through the air. . . . Therefore everyone prayed that the apparition might prove to have been a good omen.14

10 For example, about God’s power as creator and as one who raises from the dead. 11 See A. Enermalm-Ogawa, Un langage de prière juif en grec: le témoignage des deux premiers livres des Maccabées (ConBNT 17), Stockholm 1987, 89ff. 12 The redactor of the work of Jason of Cyrene is meant. 13 It is debatable whether the author considers the notion of divine ‘epiphany’ as a counterpart for the designation used for Antiochus IV. 14 In addition see the omens recounted by Josephus before the first Jewish war (War 6.288–315, esp. 289–90).

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In 12:22, 14:15 and 15:27 the term ἐπιφάνεια stands for the visible appearance of God or divine help that is connected with a petition. A divine epiphany is thus attributed directly to prayer. The foregoing observations may be summarised as follows: The understanding of history in 2 Macc is closely bound up with prayer. Except for the Heliodorus legend of chapter 3, which in nuce summarises the entire book (as a work concerned with danger and deliverance), and apart from the prayers that follow upon the heavenly epiphanies in 5:2–4, the period of God’s wrath during the persecution and martyrdoms is essentially a ‘prayer-less’ time, that is, until the indirectly formulated prayer attributed to the seventh brother in 7:37. By contrast, the time of God’s mercy—which correlated with the victories of Judas, the restoration of the Temple, and the retaking of Jerusalem—is punctuated by prayers which alternate between petitions for or thankful responses to visible manifestations of God. Excursus: Jason of Cyrene and the 2 Maccabees Epitomator Early scholars have occasionally questioned the veracity of the statement of the redactor (cf. esp. 2:23) that 2 Macc abbreviated a work composed by Jason of Cyrene, since they doubt whether the latter existed at all.15 Wolfgang Richnow, adopting the same perspective in his Göttingen dissertation of 1966,16 has given further arguments for assuming the fictitiousness of Jason and his work. Richnow argues that the silence of the 2 Macc author about Jason must be treated with suspicion and asks whether it would have been necessary at all to abbreviate such a fivevolume work. He mentions a number of references in late Hellenistic writings to fictitious sources, i.e., sources that were created because a given author wished to appear erudite by taking on the authority of an underlying source.17 Richnow then asks, ‘Wäre es nicht denkbar, daß der Autor des II Makk. den Namen Jason von Kyrene erfand?’18 15 See, e.g., A.H.H. Kamphausen, ‘Das zweite Buch der Makkabäer’, in: E. Kautzsch, Die Apokryphen und Pseudepigraphen des Alten Testaments I, Tübingen 1900, 81: ‘Nennen wir jetzt den Verfasser . . . kurzweg den Epitomator, so wird damit die Möglichkeit nicht ausgeschlossen, daß der angebliche Auszug lediglich eine Sache der schriftstellerischen Einkleidung sein könnte, eine bloße Maske, die dazu dienen sollte, das Ansehen eines ausführlicheren Geschichtswerks für den vorliegenden Bericht geltend zu machen’. 16 W. Richnow, Untersuchungen zu Sprache und Stil des zweiten Makkabäerbuches: Ein Beitrag zur hellenistischen Historiographie, Dissertation Göttingen 1966. 17 Richnow, Untersuchungen, 10. 18 Richnow, Untersuchungen, 11.

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Two main reasons convince Richnow that Jason of Cyrene is fictitious. The first is that it lends greater credibility to the book by appealing to the authority of another, and the second is that the author is thereby relieved from the task of having to write a clear, logically unfolding sequence of events and to produce a story containing details in which the author is not interested. By appealing to a fictional source, the author secures for himself a free hand to devote himself to a form of language that is more suitable to his own purposes.19 Now, Bezalel Bar-Kochva has taken a position that opposes this view. In doing so, he has asked a crucial question: ‘Why should any author describe his work as an abridgement of a non-extant work, attributing it to a man of no reputation and placing him in Cyrene, so far from the site of events?’20 Bar-Kochva’s question is just as suggestive as that of Richnow, so much so that to make any headway with the problem, further criteria need to be brought into consideration. Especially important for consideration are those portions of the text in which the author himself speaks. In addition to the preface (2:19–32) and conclusion (15:37–39), these include 4:17; 5:17–20; and 6:12–17. Each of these texts is cited below: The story of Judas Maccabeus and his brothers, and the purification of the great temple, and the dedication of the altar, and further the wars against Antiochus Epiphanes and his son Eupator, and the appearances that came from heaven to those who fought bravely for Judaism, so that though few in number they seized the whole land and pursued the barbarian hordes, and regained possession of the temple famous throughout the world, and liberated the city, and re-established the laws that were about to be abolished, while the Lord with great kindness became gracious to them—all this, which has been set forth by Jason of Cyrene in five volumes, we shall attempt to condense into a single book. For considering the flood of statistics involved and the difficulty there is for those who wish to enter upon the narratives of history because of the mass of material, we have aimed to please those who wish to read, to make it easy for those who are inclined to memorize, and to profit all readers. For us who have undertaken the toil of abbreviating, it is no light matter but calls for sweat and loss of sleep, just as it is not easy for one who prepares a banquet and seeks the benefit of others. Nevertheless, to secure the gratitude of many we will gladly endure the uncomfortable toil, leaving the responsibility for exact details to the compiler, while devoting

Richnow, Untersuchungen, 11. B. Bar-Kochva, Judas Maccabaeus: The Jewish Struggle Against the Seleucids, Cambridge 1989, 170. 19 20

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hermann lichtenberger our effort to arriving at the outlines of the condensation. For as the master builder of a new house must be concerned with the whole construction, while the one who undertakes its painting and decoration has to consider only what is suitable for its adornment, such in my judgment is the case with us. It is the duty of the original historian to occupy the ground, to discuss matters from every side, and to take trouble with details, but the one who recasts the narrative should be allowed to strive for brevity of expression and to forego exhaustive treatment. At this point therefore let us begin our narrative, without adding any more to what has already been said; for it would be foolish to lengthen the preface while cutting short the history itself. (2:19–32) So I will here end my story. If it is well told and to the point, that is what I myself desired; if it is poorly done and mediocre, that was the best I could do. For just as it is harmful to drink wine alone, or, again, to drink water alone, while wine mixed with water is sweet and delicious and enhances one’s enjoyment, so also the style of the story delights the ears of those who read the work. And here will be the end. (The conclusion at 15:37b–39) It is no right thing to show irreverence to the divine laws—a fact that later events will make clear. (4:17) Antiochus was elated in spirit, and did not perceive that the Lord was angered for a little while because of the sins of those who lived in the city, and that this was the reason he was disregarding the holy place. But if it had not happened that they were involved in many sins, this man would have been flogged and turned back from his rash act as soon as he came forward, just as Heliodorus had been, whom King Seleucus sent to inspect the treasury. But the Lord did not choose the nation for the sake of the holy place, but the place for the sake of the nation. Therefore the place itself shared in the misfortunes that befell the nation and afterward participated in its benefits; and what was forsaken in the wrath of the Almighty was restored again in all its glory when the great Lord became reconciled. (5:17–20) Now I urge those who read this book not to be depressed by such calamities, but to recognize that these punishments were designed not to destroy but to discipline our people. In fact, it is a sign of great kindness not to let the impious alone for long, but to punish them immediately. For in the case of the other nations the Lord waits patiently to punish them until they have reached the full measure of their sins; but he does not deal in this way with us, in order that he may not take vengeance on us afterward when our sins have reached their height. Therefore he never withdraws his mercy from us. Although he disciplines us with calamities, he does not forsake his own people. Let what we have said serve as a reminder; we must go on briefly with the story. (6:12–17)

These passages, formulated by the author himself, are not linguistically very different from the rest of the main body of the work (excluding, of course, the introductory letters and documents). Indeed, a colleague

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who has expertise in examining vocabulary and the use of particles in consideration of authorship, has examined the language of these passages and has reached the conclusion that a single person composed the entire book.21 Another point is striking: the instructive tone of these passages is not in keeping with the flow and direction of the remaining narrative. Thus the author interrupts his account with these parenthetical remarks and, turning his attention in 6:12–17 to the reader, expressis verbis, he consciously provides a connective piece of communication. Even if the editor recedes into the background in the preface and conclusion, one nevertheless encounters an authorial personality that not only offers information about the methods and sources of the book, but also expresses something of a theological framework for his understanding of history. It therefore seems to me that the last word has not yet been said about the epitomator and Jason of Cyrene.22 III. Acts of the Apostles 1. Paul and Rome Rome was both the goal and a new starting point for the Pauline mission. The Letter to the Romans shows the significance that Paul gave to Rome and to the Roman congregation for this plan. Here he speaks repeatedly of various plans to visit the Roman congregation,23 and mentions his plan to carry the mission from there to Spain.24 Paul first wants to visit Jerusalem, in order to deliver the collection there.25 He,

21 B. Meißner (Halle-Wittenberg) has confirmed in correspondence, dated January 25, 2004, the section’s statistical inconspicuousness; the words of the ‘redactor’ himself find the same distribution as is found in the rest of the composition (apart from the introductory letter): ‘Insgesamt ergibt sich ein Bild, das, soweit die Häufigkeitsstatistik es zeigen kann, recht homogen ist’. 22 In the work of D. Timpe, ‘Antike Geschichtsschreibung’, in: U. Walter (ed.), Studien zur Historiographie, Darmstadt 2007, 18, I find the reference to the ‘angebliche Archeget der sikeliotischen und italiotischen Historiographie, Hippys von Rhegion’, who was allegedly epitomized by a certain Myes and who is thought to be a ‘frühhellenistische Mystifikation’ (see already Jacoby, FGrH 554 T 1 and his commentary on pp. 482f.); K. von Fritz, Die griechische Geschichtsschreibung, Vol. I.2, Berlin 1967, 238; L. Pearson, The Greek Historians of the West: Timaeus and His Predecessors, Atlanta GA 1987, 8f.; K. Meisner, in: Der neue Pauly, Vol. 5, 611f. 23 Rom 1:10–15; 22, 28, 32. 24 Rom 15:22, 24, 28. 25 Rom 15:25–28.

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in fact, came to Rome from Jerusalem, but in another manner than he had imagined and the Roman congregation could expect. 2. The Sojourn in Jerusalem: The Chronology It is possible to date Paul’s captivity and journey to Rome by the years in which Felix and Festus served as procurator. In relation to this stands, moreover, the date of the appearance of the Egyptian agitator Agabus, who is supposed to have appeared earlier than Paul.26 Josephus reports about him at the time of Felix.27 The term of office of the High Priest Ananias (ca. 47–59),28 is too long to establish even approximately the date of Paul’s hearing before the Sanhedrin. Because of the danger in Jerusalem,29 Paul is transferred to Caesarea and is placed in detention by Felix. When, after Paul has been in prison for two years, Felix is replaced by Festus, Paul remains imprisoned. 3. The Journey to Rome The route and the course of the journey should not concern us further;30 only the most important particulars of the journey will be recorded. 1) Paul is sent to Rome because of his appeal to the Emperor.31 Thus the controversial problem of Paul’s Roman citizenship is posed, which is attested only by Acts.32 2) The journey to Rome shows some features which, in view of Josephus’ journey to Rome as reported by himself, are important:

Acts 21:38. War 2.261–263; Antiquities 20.169–172. 28 Acts 23:2. 29 Acts 23:12ff. 30 C.-J. Thornton, Der Zeuge des Zeugen, Tübingen 1991. 31 Acts 22:25; 23:27; 25:21; 26:32; on the journey to Rome, compare also 23:11. 32 See, as the basic literature on this point, Th. Mommsen, ‘Die Rechtsverhältnisse des Apostels Paulus’, ZNW 2 (1901), 81–96; see there 82: ‘Daß er, wenngleich ein gelernter Handwerker, einem ansehnlichen Bürgerhaus angehörte, geht daraus hervor, daß er von Kind auf die römische Civität gehabt hat’; H.J. Cadbury, ‘Roman Law and the Trial of Paul’, in: F.J.F. Jackson & K. Lake, The Beginnings of Christianity: Part I, The Acts of the Apostles, Grand Rapids 1979, 297–338; W. Stegemann, ‘War der Apostel Paulus römischer Bürger?’, ZNW 78 (1987), 200–29; see especially M. Hengel, ‘Der vorchristliche Paulus’, in: M. Hengel & U. Heckel (eds), Paulus und das Antike Judentum (WUNT 58), Tübingen 1991, 193–208; literature p. 193, note 58. Additional literature in G. Schneider, Die Apostelgeschichte (HTKNT 6), Freiburg 1980–1982, 324. 26 27

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(a) As Josephus is the central figure of his own report, so Paul is the chief person in Luke’s entire portrayal. (b) The sea journey is endangered by a shipwreck. Further dangerous situations are the storm at sea (27:20), the snake bite (28:3–6), and especially the intention of the accompanying soldiers to kill the prisoners (27:42). (c) G. Schneider has pointed out the other side of the dangers, the rescues, which indeed emerge out of the accumulation of words connected with σῴζω.33 Paul must reach Rome in order to proclaim the Gospel (23:11). 4. The Arrival and the Stay in Puteoli The end of the sea journey is Puteoli, where there is a Christian congregation (ἀδελφοί, 28:14) which asks Paul to stay for seven days. Under what circumstances this was possible (for him and for his companions—‘we’) is not explained.34 5. The Reception by the Roman Congregation35 Acts 28:14b mentions in advance what it reports explicitly in verse 16. In between stands the ἀπάντησις by the Roman congregation (v. 15) that comes to Forum Apii and Tres Tabernae to meet him. The ‘brethren’ are for Paul a reason for thanks and courage (15b). Luke must report about Christians in Rome here, although he really would like to make Paul the preacher of the Gospel to Rome.36 6. The External Circumstances of the Stay in Rome Paul’s imprisonment in Rome is treated only summarily: 1) Verse 16 states that Paul is allowed to live by himself, together with the soldier who guarded him. How strict this guarding by one soldier was (chaining?), is not clear. Also, it cannot be determined whether this is his ‘own rented house’ of verse 30. It is unclear, moreover, whether Schneider, Apostelgeschichte, 379ff. E. Haenchen, Die Apostelgeschichte (KEK 3), Göttingen 1957, 651, correctly calls attention to the difficulty: ‘οὗ εὑρόντες ἀδελφοὺς klingt, als befänden sich die Reisenden auf freiem Fuß und machten die dortigen Christen ausfindig’. 35 Acts 28:14b–16. 36 Acts 28:30–31; 23:11. 33 34

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there is room enough at this place of imprisonment to receive the representatives of the Roman congregations.37 2) The Reading of the Western-Text in Acts 28:16 ‘And when we came to Rome, the centurion delivered the prisoners to the στρατοπεδάρχης; but Paul was allowed to dwell by himself with a soldier that kept him.’ The Prefect of the Pretorian Guard in the years 51–62 was Burrus. The expansion of the text, however, does not want to say that Paul, along with the other prisoners, was delivered to him, but rather the contrary: ‘The other prisoners were delivered to him; Paul however, was allowed . . .’. It is questionable whether Burrus was occupied with Paul’s trial at all. It is, therefore, mere speculation to consider whether Burrus and, together with him, Seneca advised Nero on Paul’s trial. 3) Paul stays two years in his rented quarters (28:30) (there is no longer any talk of a guard!) and receives all who come to him (few manuscripts insert here ‘Jews and Greeks’): ἀκωλύτως (28:31). This appears to be intended to make us forget that Paul is a prisoner and is waiting for his trial. 7. The Acts of the Apostles and the End of Paul In conclusion, the question might be raised why Luke concludes his report in this way. The following possibilities present themselves: a) Luke knew nothing about the outcome of the trial and the further fate of Paul. This is quite improbable in view of 1 Clement 5. b) Luke was quite aware of the outcome of the trial (see Acts 20:25.38). In reference to the two years in the hired quarters, it must be noted that someone who talks of a period of two years knows that after that time the conditions changed—not for the better. c) The readers of Acts are aware of the outcome; therefore, Luke does not need to report it. That Luke intended to discuss Paul’s martyrdom in an additional work is rather improbable; if this were the case, one ought to expect some indication of it. The peculiar end of Acts can best be explained by assuming that Luke, and his readers as well, are aware of the outcome of Paul’s fate.

37

Cf. Acts 28:17ff.

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According to the Letter to the Romans, Paul himself had the urgent wish to visit the Christian congregation in Rome. The last report about his future plans is found in Romans 15:31: he requests intercession so that he might be delivered from those in Judaea who do not believe, and that his service for Jerusalem might be welcome to the saints. He knows, on the one hand, of a danger in Jerusalem and, on the other hand, he voices the problems which are connected with the collection. In Rom 15:23 Paul then speaks (as in 1:10ff.) of his plan to visit the Roman congregation. This is supposed to occur, according to 15:32, after his stay in Jerusalem. 8. Paul and the Jewish Communities in Rome A. The Account in Acts (a) The Calling of the Representatives After three days, Paul summons ‘the local leaders of the Jews’ (28:17— RSV). i. Paul’s address: he has done nothing against the people nor against the customs of the fathers; the Jews have forced him to appeal to the Emperor. He has summoned the leading men in order to present to them his case, that is, ‘since it is because of the hope of Israel that I am bound with this chain’ (28:17–20). ii. The Answer of the Leading Men. They have received neither letters nor messengers which report anything evil about Paul. They would very much like to hear what he thinks, for it is known to them that this αἵρεσις is spoken against everywhere (v. 21f.). (b) Paul’s Missionary Sermon to the Jews i. On a day determined by them, many of them come to Paul in his ξενία38 where Paul preaches to them from morning to evening: ‘And he expounded the matter to them from morning till evening, testifying to the kingdom of God and trying to convince them about Jesus both from the law of Moses and from the prophets’ (28:23). ii. The Success—Failure of the Sermon. The sermon leads to the separation between believers and non-believers (cf. 17:4): ‘And some were convinced by what he said, while others disbelieved’ (28:24). iii. The Hardening of the Jews. Disagreeing among themselves, they leave him when Paul applies to them the hardening spoken of in Isa 38

30.

Relationship to place of imprisonment and to hired quarters? Cf. vv. 16 and

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6:9 and proclaims the sending of salvation to the Gentiles: ‘Let it be known to you then that this salvation of God has been sent to the Gentiles; they will listen’ (28:28).39 B. The Problem in the Account In the following, a series of questions are raised which result from Luke’s account. These questions will, in part, later be taken up anew. (a) The Summoning of the Leading Men Among the Jews of Rome i. How can he simply summon them? ii. Whom—in view of the organization of the Jewish congregations— does he summon? (b) His report about the course of his trial up to this point and about his imprisonment is not devoid of contradictions (role of the Jews, the Romans and the Christians of Rome). (c) Why does he want to speak with the Jewish representatives at all? Does he want to convince them that he wears chains for the sake of the hope of Israel, not because he is a rebel?40 (d) The Jews of Rome, according to Luke’s account, have heard nothing prejudicial about Paul (neither through letters nor through messengers). They know about his sect, however, that it is spoken against everywhere (28:21–22). The uncertainties refer to the following circumstances: – Why do the Jewish representatives come to Paul if he is still unknown to them? – Is the Pauline mission supposed not to have reached Rome yet? (cf. Romans 3:8) – According to their own words they know virtually nothing about Christianity, only that this αἵρεσις is spoken against everywhere. A portion of the questions are due to Luke’s account; in it, Paul’s relationship to the Christian congregation is quite unclear. Another contradiction is hardly solvable: the representatives of the Jews of Rome come to a prisoner who must have been so prominent that they feel compelled to come after all, but about whom, on the other hand, they

39 40

On the stay in Rome and on Paul’s unhindered preaching, see above. Cf. Acts 23:6, 24:21.

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knew nothing beforehand. And could the representatives of Roman Jewry have disregarded a sect which is spoken against everywhere? The entire account is subordinated to Luke’s intended theme: salvation has been passed from the Jews to the Gentiles (28:28: ‘Let it be known to you then that this salvation of God has been sent to the Gentiles; they will listen’).41 What does not speak for a fiction contrived by Luke is that Paul here preaches to Jews, against the agreement in Galatians 2:9. The account in Acts regularly leads him to preach in the synagogue, which historically is likely to correspond to the facts. Since he cannot visit the synagogue in Rome, at first the representatives and then a larger number of Jews come to him.42 IV. Conclusion What are the reasons for the silence on the deaths of Judas and Paul? Generally speaking it is the dramaturgy of the authors which leaves no room for the death of their heroes. The two books come to their end and the work of the respective protagonist is crowned by either the victory over Nicanor and the possession of Jerusalem by the ‘Hebrews’ or by the coming of Paul to Rome and the unhindered preaching of the Gospel. All heavenly rescues would have been in vain if the glorious end were marred by the death of the heroes—be it as noble as it may. Why could not both authors end their history by the death of the protagonists? Here quite different reasons are to be named:

41 Compare, on this point, Josephus a few years before in the War: The tyche has been passed to the Romans; see H. Lindner, Die Geschichtsauffassung des Flavius Josephus im Bellum Judaicum (AGJU 12), Leiden 1972, 85ff. 42 Paul preaches in the synagogue: Salamis, 13:5; Pisidian Antioch, 13:14ff. (cf. 13:42ff.); Iconium, 14:1; Thessalonica, 17:1ff.; Berea, 17:10f.; Athens, 17:17ff.; Corinth, 18:4; Ephesus, 18:19 and 19:8. Paul at the Jewish place of prayer in Philippi, 16:13ff. Yet, precisely in the synagogues are found gentile visitors: Antioch, 13:16,26,50; Iconium, 14:1; Berea, 17:12; Athens, 17:17; Corinth, 18:4,7.

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In the case of 2 Macc: First, it should be noted that the author of 2 Macc writes after the death of Judas and must have had knowledge of his death on the battlefield. This death differs fundamentally from the martyrdoms the author depicts in detail: the martyrdom of Eleazar and the mother with her seven sons and that of Razis. They mark the end of a time of wrath. In the same way as after the martyrdoms of chapters 6 and 7, the time of God’s wrath is over and Judas with his fellows march from victory to victory, so only after Razis’ noble death the victory of Nicanor can be achieved. Martyrdom for the author is preparatory for victory, not a victory in itself. Judas died in battle. Why did the author not take the opportunity to let his hero show his devotion to the Temple and Jerusalem in a noble death on the battlefield? The answer is given by 2 Macc 11:39–46: death on the battlefield is the consequence of sin; or even more precisely, of idolatry. Judas had nothing to do with all that. This means for 2 Macc: death in martyrdom and death on the battlefield have a precise and determined function, which could not be used for the description of the end of Judas. In the case of Acts: Here it is even more evident that the author had knowledge of Paul’s martyrdom. Luke comments on the farewell speech of Paul in Miletus: ‘What distressed them most was his saying that they would never see his face again’ (Acts 20:38; see 25). It too is not by chance that in the story of the calling of Saulus/Paulus, Annanias is told by the Lord in respect to Paul: ‘I myself will show him what he must suffer for my name’s sake’ (Acts 9: 16). Why did the author not describe the martyrdom of Paul just as he did in the case of Stephen (Acts 7) or at least as in that of James (Acts 12:1)? Why did the close connection of Saulus-Paulus with the martyrdom of Stephen not lead to a counterpart of Stephen’s death in Paul’s noble death? An answer can only be tentative. First: Stephen sees, in the hour of his death, Jesus Christ (‘the son of man’). Paul has encountered Jesus already when he was overwhelmed near Damascus. Second: If Paul’s martyrdom were a counterpart to the martyrdom of Stephen

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the notion could arise that Paul’s martyrdom was at least implicitly a retribution for his presence at the martyrdom of Stephen. The main reason for the silence on Paul’s death seems to me to be based in the dramaturgy of Acts: despite the fact that Acts indeed can be read as a historical monograph on Paul,43 the real protagonist is not Paul, but Jesus Christ who by the Holy Spirit44 brings the apostle and the Gospel to Rome. Paul must come to Rome in order to preach the Gospel. His martyrdom would add nothing to that. Just as the noble death of Judas would add nothing to the fact that the Temple and the Holy City are saved by God through the hands of Judas. Both works end—and please allow the imagery of musicology—with a long accord in the dominant. The cadence has to be played in the heads of the readers. They know the theme.45

43 E. Plümacher, ‘Die Apostelgeschichte als historische Monographie’, in: E. Plümacher et alii (eds), Geschichte und Geschichten: Aufsätze zur Apostelgeschichte und zu den Johannesakten (WUNT 170), Tübingen 2004, 8, note 35. See also H. Cancik, Mythische und historische Wahrheit: Interpretationen zu Texten der hethitischen, biblischen und griechischen Historiographie (SBS 48), Stuttgart 1970, 122. According to Plümacher, ‘Rom in der Apostelgeschichte’, in: Idem, Geschichte und Geschichten, 140 note 20, the book of Acts is not a biography of Paul as 2 Macc is not a biography of Judas. Here Plümacher adds the observation: ‘Über den Tod seines ‘Helden’ berichtet auch der Verfasser des 2. Makkabäerbuches nicht’. See J. Geiger, Form and Content in Jewish-Hellenistic Historiography (SCI 8), Jerusalem 1988, 120–29, 121, note 7. 44 Acts 1:1f.: ‘In the first book, O Theophilus, I have dealt with all that Jesus began to do and teach, until the day when he was taken up, after he had given commandment through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen’. 45 The question may be raised whether there are further examples of an ‘untold end’. A quite different candidate may be found in the end of Mark’s Gospel. Here, the silence veils a history of success, not one of a deadly end.

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THE FATE OF THE WICKED: SECOND DEATH IN EARLY JEWISH AND CHRISTIAN TEXTS Alberdina Houtman and Magda Misset-van de Weg Introduction The wish to work on a joint project in which we could combine our respective disciplines rabbinic and New Testament studies—has existed since the time we were both writing our dissertation under the guidance of Piet van der Horst, who instilled in us the feeling for and interest in studying texts not in isolation from each other, but in a broad intercultural context. The present Festschrift in his honour provided an excellent opportunity to start putting our plan into effect. The subject of the present article surfaced while studying a passage in the Targum of Isaiah featuring the Second Death, a concept that is mostly known as a Christian idea.1 An initial investigation into the presence of the concept in rabbinic literature in general, the Targums in particular and the New Testament, led to many intriguing questions concerning the meaning of the concept in both traditions, the (im)possibility of a common source, and a possible process of interaction, the latter being prompted by the fact that the concept Second Death is very specific and it hardly seems self-evident that such an idea originated at the same time in two separate groups or traditions. The aim of this article is to provide at least some tentative answers to the

1 We are certainly not the first to take up this subject. See, e.g. H.L. Strack & P. Billerbeck, Kommentar zum Neuen Testament aus Talmud und Midrasch, 5 Vols (6 bindings), München 1922–61, III.830–31; M. McNamara, The New Testament and the Palestinian Targum to the Pentateuch, Rome 1966, 118–25; I. Abrahams, Studies in Pharisaism and the Gospels, New York 1967 (single volume reprint of first editions of 1917 and 1924), II.41–49; M. Jurgrau, ‫מדרשי חז״ל בתרגום יונתן לספר ישיהו‬, Ph.D. Diss., Bar Ilan University, Ramat Gan 1979, 173–87; G. Rochais, ‘Le règne des mille ans et la seconde mort: origines et sens’ (Ap 19,11–20,6), Nouvelle Revue Théologique 103 (1981), 831–56; P.-M. Bogaert, ‘La “seconde mort” à l’époque des Tannaïm’, in: A. Théodoridès et alii (eds), Vie et Survie dans les civilisations orientales, Leuven 1983, 199–207; H. Sysling, Te iyyat Ha-Metim: The Resurrection of the Dead in the Palestinian Targums of the Pentateuch and Parallel Traditions in Classical Rabbinic Literature (TSAJ 57), Tübingen 1996, 210–28.

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challenging questions. First, however, the texts in which the Second Death occurs will be listed and discussed. I. New Testament Evidence In the New Testament ὁ θάνατος ὁ δεύτερός (the Second Death) occurs only in Revelation, where it is used four times, in: 2:11, 20:6 and 14, and 21:8. The term is introduced right after the opening and further developed near the end of the book. As such this is an example of the kaleidoscopic-cyclical manner in which the author presents his prophetic vision ‘on what is and what is to take place hereafter’ (1:19);2 his visions form a coherent entity in which the same theme is presented with growing intensity.3 The first passage in Revelation concludes the letter to the angel of the church in Smyrna and reads: 2:8

And to the angel of the church in Smyrna write: The words of the first and the last, who died and came to life. [. . .] Be faithful unto death, and I will give you the crown of life. 2:11 He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches. He who conquers shall not be hurt by the second death.4

The letter is the second one of the seven letters John is ordered to write (1:11). All of these letters are structured in a similar fashion: – Each letter has an opening in which John refers back to and intensifies elements of his preceding description of Jesus in 1:4–18;

2 It is remarkable that the author in all this does not dissociate the lived reality from future ‘realities’, but rather exposes the readers to what is ‘real’—real evil, violence and vengeance in the world—through the symbols of the supernatural and the magical. Cf. T. Pippin, ‘The Revelation to John’, in: E. Schüssler Fiorenza (ed.), Searching the Scriptures, Volume Two: A Feminist Commentary, London 1995, 109–30, at 124. 3 See for example: E. Schüssler Fiorenza, The Book of Revelation: Justice and Judgment, Minneapolis 1998, Second Edition, 3; J.W. van Henten, ‘De Openbaring van Johannes’, in: J. Fokkelman & W. Weren (eds), De Bijbel Literair: Opbouw en gedachtegang van de bijbelse geschriften en hun onderlinge relaties, Zoetermeer/Kapellen 2003, 745–59, esp. 747–48. 4 All translations of the New Testament Texts are quoted from the Revised Standard Version.

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– this is followed by the positive and/or negative evaluations of the communities by the apparently well-informed author [‘I know . . .’] and/or exhortations; – each letter concludes with the dictum: ‘He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches’, followed by promises for the victorious; promises that return in the last chapters of the book (21 and 22). In the letters to Pergamum and Philadelphia the promise includes receiving a new name, a subject to which we will return later.5 The letter to Smyrna revolves around death and life. Jesus is referred to as the prōtos and the eschatos, the one who died and came to life (2:8, cf. 1:8). An explicit negative evaluation is absent in the case of the church in Smyrna. Instead, the Christians, who are experiencing serious lifethreatening opposition, are encouraged to endure and to be faithful unto death, for which they will receive the crown of life.6 Moreover they shall not be hurt by the Second Death. Thus the promise to the victorious of Smyrna is twofold. The precise meaning of the Second Death is still left undefined. However, John returns to that subject in the final section of his book. In chapter 20 he writes: 20:4

5

Then I saw thrones, and seated on them were those to whom judgment was committed. Also I saw the souls of those who had been beheaded for their testimony to Jesus and for the word of God, and who had not worshiped the beast or its image and had not received its mark on their foreheads or their hands. They came to life again, and reigned with Christ a thousand years. The rest of the dead did not come to life again until the thousand years were ended.

5 Other promises concern: the tree of life (2:7/22:2); [not dying] the Second Death (2:11/21:8 and 20:6.14); the morning star (2:28/22:16); name in the book of life (3:5/21:10 and 22:4); sitting on the Father’s throne, or nearness to the throne (3:21/22:3). The promise of a new name returns in 22:2. 6 The ‘crown of life’ is generally seen as an eschatological symbol that does indeed refer to the reward of eternal life for those who endure and remain faithful. See, e.g. R.W. Wall, Revelation (NIBC 18), Peabody MA 1991, 73 and J. Massyngberde Ford, Revelation: Introduction, Translation and Commentary (AB), Garden City 1975, 394, who notes a local touch and points to a similar concept in 1 QS 4:6–8.

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11 12

13 14 15

This is the first resurrection. Blessed and holy is he who shares in the first resurrection! Over such the second death has no power, but they shall be priests of God and of Christ, and they shall reign with him a thousand years. [. . .] Then I saw a great white throne and him who sat upon it; from his presence earth and sky fled away, and no place was found for them. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Also another book was opened, which is the book of life. And the dead were judged by what was written in the books, by what they had done. And the sea gave up the dead in it, Death and Hades gave up the dead in them, and all were judged by what they had done. Then Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire. This is the second death, the lake of fire; and if anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire.

Here, the context of the Second Death is the complicated passage featuring the promise of the thousand-year reign, the final defeat of Satan and the victory of the faithful. We do not have the opportunity now to add anything to the ongoing discussions about the meaning of the passage, but shall restrict ourselves to the function of the Second Death in this passage. First John recapitulates as it were the essential point in the letter to Smyrna that the Second Death will not hurt the victorious. This time they are envisioned as Christians who had already lost their lives because of their convictions or because they refused to worship the idols of the social order.7 But the martyrs come to life again and will reign with Christ a thousand years (20:4). This is the first resurrection and those who share therein are safeguarded from the Second Death.8 Again John 7 Since Cyprianus (Ad Fortunatum 12) the view is held and defended that John refers to two groups: 1. the martyrs in the strictest sense of the word, that is those who paid with their life for their convictions and 2. the witnesses who are suffering because of their testimony. Müller, for example, points out: ‘Im übrigen trennt die Konjunktion “und” vor dem Relativsatz die beiden Satzteile. Es empfiehlt sich also, zwei Gruppen anzunehmen’, see U.B. Müller, Die Offenbarung des Johannes (ÖTK 19), Würzburg 1984, 337. 8 The rhythm is: life and remaining faithful—death (violent or not)—coming to life again, id est the first resurrection and being safeguarded from the Second Death.

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does not, or not yet, elaborate on the meaning of the Second Death; nor for that matter on the meaning of another interesting concept: the first resurrection.9 In the following section John sees how after the thousand years are ended Satan will be let loose so that he can once more set to work on deceiving the world. But in the end the devil is thrown into the lake of fire and brimstone, where he will join the beast and the false prophet (19:20); Death and Hades—the results of evil in the world—will follow him. John then reveals that the lake of fire is the Second Death. Prior to that, he dramatized how the dead stand before a great white throne. Books are opened, among them the Book of Life.10 The dead are judged by what is written about them in the books and anyone whose name is not written in the Book of Life will be thrown into that lake of fire! With the obliteration of all evil, the way is paved for the positive vision of a new heaven and a new earth. All things will be ‘made new’, water will spring from the fountain of the water of life. The victorious, to whom the promise of the crown of life applied and whose names are written in the Book of Life, shall inherit this water of life and receive the assurance: ‘I will be his God and he shall be my son’ (21:7, cf., e.g. 2 Sam 7:14; Ezek 11:20). A totally different fate, however, awaits the wicked: 21:8

But as for the cowardly, the faithless, the polluted, as for murderers, fornicators, sorcerers, idolaters, and all liars, their lot shall be in the lake that burns with fire and brimstone, which is the second death.

Here, as in the previous passage, the Second Death is defined as a lake that burns with fire to which the brimstone is added again.11 Moreover,

9 The first resurrection is understood by, for example, Massyngberde Ford and Wall as a symbol for the eschatological priority accorded to the ‘victorious’, see Massyngberde Ford, Revelation, 350; Wall, Revelation, 239, who states that ‘John employs this idiom as an exhortation for those in his embattled audience to overcome evil’. In line with this the Second Death might be interpreted as the fate of those who did or do not meet the conditions of faithfulness, and their destiny will therefore be a Second Death. 10 We shall return to the concept ‘book of life’ that is also present in TJ Isa 4:3 and TJ Ezek 13:9. 11 Cf. 20:10. Interestingly, in Collins Cobuild English Dictionary, the definition of ‘brimstone’ reads: ‘1. Brimstone is the same as sulphur; an old-fashioned use. 2. If someone threatens you with fire and brimstone, they are referring to hell and emphasizing how

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a graphic description is now presented which completes the image of the unfaithful who are not written in the Book of Life.12 It is well known and attested that John uses and moves abundantly and freely in Hebrew Scriptures and Jewish apocalyptic language and traditions,13 that he develops apocalyptic material present in the Synoptic writers,14 and had access to Johannine, Pauline and possibly other traditions.15 In other words, ‘he drew on and fused together traditions, motives,16 and patterns at home in very different cultures and mythologies’.17 This does not necessarily imply a direct literary interrelationship, but could well point to a dialectical exchange of theological thought. We shall later focus on (possible) relations with Jewish traditions; at this point we restrict ourselves to touching briefly on the interrelationship between Revelation and the Synoptic tradition.18 Even though the exact term Second Death only occurs in Revelation, the authors of the Gospels may have been familiar with the concept as such and it is even quite possible that John used or was inspired by such texts as we find in Matt 10:28 and Luke 12:4–5 where the term Second Death does indeed not appear, but the concept might be presupposed:

people are punished there after death in order to make you behave in a better way; a literary expression’. 12 The list of vices is, as it were, a summary of typical sins that John has been warning the churches against. See G.K. Beale, The Book of Revelation: A Commentary on the Greek Text, Grand Rapids/Cambridge 1999, 1059. 13 Patterns from Hebrew Scriptures are especially derived from Exodus, Ezekiel, Isaiah, and Daniel; for similar apocalyptic language and traditions see, e.g., 2 Macc 7:9.14 and 12:41ff., Wisd 1:15–16; and 1 Henoch 6. 14 Rev 3:9 and context, for example, has the same function as Mk 13:14//Mat 24:15c and has a parallel form in Mk 13:18. 15 See H. Kraft, Die Offenbarung des Johannes (HNT 61a), Tübingen 1974; Schüssler Fiorenza, The Book of Revelation, ch. 3. 16 For example, the crown of life, which is also present in James 1:12 and 2 Tim 4:8; see also n. 6. 17 Schüssler Fiorenza, The Book of Revelation, 18. 18 We are well aware of references made by NT scholars to other and different texts on which John might have drawn for his concept Second Death, for example texts from the Egyptian collection known as the ‘Coffin Texts’ which includes the title: ‘Spell for not dying a second death’, or from other Egyptian mythological texts also featuring the lake of fire, or from Plutarch’s Moralia. As it seems impossible to prove that the author of Revelation might have been familiar with any of those texts, or because it can be established that in some cases the ‘sense’ is totally different, and in view of the limitations of this article, these texts will not be dealt with.

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the fate of the wicked Matt 10:28

Luke 12:4 5

411

And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell. I tell you, my friends, do not fear those who kill the body, and after that have no more that they can do. But I will warn you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has power to cast into hell; yes, I tell you, fear him! (Luke 12:4–5)

As in Revelation these texts function in a context in which the communities are called to faithful endurance, to accept suffering and to be prepared to even lose their lives for Christ’s sake, but they are also encouraged to trust in God’s eschatological vindication of the faithful. In line with this, the distinction, either explicitly or implicitly, that is made between human beings who can ‘only’ kill the body, and God, who can destroy both body and soul in hell, calls to mind the passage in Revelation where the martyrs are said to take part in the first resurrection and over whom the Second Death has no power. If we try to recapitulate the picture that is found in the NT, particularly in Revelation, we find that the Second Death is described as a lake of fire and is the fate of all forces of evil.19 At the beginning of the thousand-year reign the martyrs are brought to life in the first resurrection. The steadfast are in any case exempt from the Second Death. After the thousand-year reign the other dead arise and are judged according to the accounts. For the ones written in the Book of Life there will be eternal bliss, but the sinners await torture in a lake of fire, which is the Second Death. Some Concluding Remarks Revelation is not easy reading material. Despite numerous investigations and publications much of this book remains an enigma and thus leads to different interpretations. Revelation is, for example, seen as a document that proclaims a promise of hope, justice and salvation and functions

19 I.e. the unrighteous (Rev 21:8), the false prophet and the beast (Rev 19:20), Satan (Rev 20:10), and Death and Hades (Rev 20:14). See A.E. Bernstein, The Formation of Hell: Death and Retribution in the Ancient and Early Christian Worlds, London 1993, 259–60.

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as a wake-up call exposing the social and political violence in the ‘real’ world, calling for active resistance; or as a text with grotesque violent images and female archetypes of good and evil, virgin and whore; a text that encourages exclusivity, rather than openness to different religious traditions.20 Whatever one concludes regarding the over-all message, affects interpretations of specific passages and/or images, because, as we stated earlier, Revelation is a coherent entity, which implies that all the images, symbols, concepts, are interrelated and make ‘sense’ only within the entire dramatic movement of the book.21 What then might John wish to communicate by means of the concept Second Death? To begin with, the threat of a Second Death is embedded in passages containing both promises and admonitions. The promises are diverse, appealing, motivating and amount to salvation and life (eternal) as the ultimate hopeful promise. But salvation is not a given and accomplished fact, a gift that can no longer be lost. Christians are living in time and history and Christian actions and life remain a precondition.22 Hence the book of Revelation also voices ethical choice, social and political. One may choose Caesar and his cult over Christ or the life-giving power of God over the death-dealing power of Rome.23 The consequences are clear, those who make the right choice will receive the crown of life; their name is written in the Book of Life; they shall inherit the water of life and God will be with them. The Second Death, which separates human beings from God forever and ever, shall not hurt them. In our view, then, the concept Second Death functions as a warning in the overall message of life, hope and salvation for the faithful and steadfast on the one hand, but as a message of ultimate threat, death

20 For different points of view, see, e.g., A. Yarbro Collins, Crisis and Catharsis: The Power of the Apocalypse, Philadelphia 1984, esp. ch. 3; Schüssler Fiorenza, The Book of Revelation; Pippin, ‘The Revelation to John’, 110 and 126. 21 See Schüssler Fiorenza, The Book of Revelation, 188. 22 See Schüssler Fiorenza, The Book of Revelation, 125. 23 We agree with Yarbro Collins that even if ‘the evil in the Roman order outweighed the good, one must ask whether prayers (and their equivalent) for the destruction or impoverishment of one’s enemies should even be encouraged. Justice may seem to call for them at times, but there is also the very real danger of becoming like the oppressor in one’s opposition’, A. Yarbro Collins, ‘Persecution and Vengeance in the Book of Revelation’, in: D. Hellhom (ed.), Apocalypticism in the Mediterranean World and the Near East: Proceedings of the International Colloquium on Apocalypticism, Uppsala, August 12–17, 1979, Tübingen 1983, 729–49, esp. 746–47.

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and annihilation for the weak and unbeliever on the other hand. A message containing both pastoral love and apocalyptic thunder. II. Jewish Evidence The Jewish evidence consists almost completely of targumic data. We restrict ourselves here to explicit references, although there are also cases where it seems that the meturgemans, the Aramaic translators, presupposed the concept without actually naming it.24 An analysis of those cases would go beyond the scope of this article. Explicit References in Targumic Literature There are six occurrences of the expression Second Death within the official Targums Onqelos and Jonathan, namely Deut 33:6, Isa 22:14, 65:6.15, and Jer 51:39.57. Moreover, it occurs in some of the Palestinian Targums to Deut 33:6, and in a variant reading to Targum Psalms 49:11. Let us start with the sole reference in Targum Onqelos Deut 33:6.25 The biblical text reads, MT Deut 33:6 May Reuben live and not die, though few be his numbers.26

This is rephrased in the Targum as, TO Deut 33:6

May Reuben live in eternal life and not die the Second Death and let his sons receive their inheritance according to their number.27

This verse is part of the blessing with which Moses bade the Israelites farewell before he died, which was quite some years after Reuben died. This begged for an explanation. So, apart from the general wish of the meturgemans to insert their theological views in the text wherever this was appropriate, there was also an inherent textual reason to do so at this place. In SifreDeut 347 this textual problem and its answer are worded explicitly:

E.g. TJ Isa 53:9 and PsJon Gen 46:30. For a thorough treatment of this passage, see Sysling, Tehiyyat Ha-Metim, 210–19. 26 The translation of passages from the Hebrew Bible is according to The New JPS Translation, Philadelphia/Jerusalem 1985. 27 Italics indicate deviation from the Hebrew text. 24 25

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alberdina houtman and magda misset-van de weg ‘May Reuben live and not die’, but is he not dead already? So what does the teaching in the scriptural text ‘and not die’ intimate? For the World to Come!

The same explanation of the phrase ‫‘ לא ימת‬may not die’ as concerning the World to Come is also used in the Talmud. In the Babylonian Talmud b.Sanh 92a, where this verse is adduced as scriptural proof of the resurrection of the dead it says: Raba said: Whence is resurrection derived from the Torah? From the verse, ‘May Reuben live, and not die’, meaning: may Reuben live, in this world, and not die, for the World to Come.

In the development of the concept of resurrection in Judaism, at first only some special individuals were granted new life after death, such as the Patriarchs, Moses, and Elijah. The next stage also included the martyrs, and still later all the righteous. The ultimate stage was the resurrection of all the dead, righteous and wicked alike.28 Apparently, the school responsible for the mentioned interpretation of Deut 33:6 assumed a resurrection of the righteous. It seems therefore that the concept Second Death in Targum Onqelos does not refer to a state of torture but rather to a refusal of resurrection, which means annihilation.29 It is remarkable, by the way, that although Targum Onqelos was already held in high esteem in the time of the redaction of the Talmud, the Talmud does not refer here to the concept by the name used in Targum Onqelos. In Targum Neofiti and the Fragment Targums to Deut 33:6 the two expressions of ‘dying the Second Death’ of Targum Onqelos and ‘not live for the World to Come’ of Sifre and the Talmud are combined:30 May Reuben live in this world and not die the Second Death by which death the wicked die for the World to Come.

The Second Death is explained as the death by which the wicked die for the World to Come. Moreover, we see that instead of the expres28 P. Volz, Die Eschatologie der jüdischen Gemeinde im neutestamentlichen Zeitalter: Nach der Quellen der rabbinischen, apokalyptischen und apokryphen Literatur, Hildesheim 1966, 235–47. 29 I. Abrahams, ‘The Second Death’, in: Idem, Studies in Pharisaism and the Gospels, 2 Vols, Cambridge 1917–24, repr. in one binding, New York 1967, II.41–49, at 43. 30 Codex Neofiti I, Fragment Targum ms Hébreu 110, Fragment Targum ms Vatican Ebr. 440.

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sion ‘eternal life’ in Onqelos, the Palestinian Targums read ‘this world’. Small as this difference seems, it has rather drastic consequences for the interpretation. In the Palestinian Targums there are two separate wishes: may Reuben live in this world and may he live in the World to Come. In Targum Onqelos on the other hand, the second clause is an explication of the first one: may Reuben live in eternal life, i.e. may he be spared the Second Death. Given the observation that Reuben had already died a physical death in this world, the interpretation of Onqelos makes more sense. Furthermore, the Palestinian Targums add a clarification of the Second Death. In their view it is ‘the death by which the wicked die’. This expression is a set phrase in the Palestinian Targums. It is the opposite of ‘the death by which the righteous die’, an expression borrowed from Num 23:10 where the non-Israelite prophet Balaam desires to die the death of the upright.31 In Targum Pseudo-Jonathan and the Cairo Geniza Fragments the ordinal ‘second’ of the expression ‘Second Death’ is missing, but because they do have the explanation of the concept, it is clear what is meant. The Cairo Genizah Fragments provide additional information concerning the reasons for the plea for Reuben’s welfare: May Reuben live in this world on the merit of what he did with Joseph and not die because of the question of Bilha the death by which the wicked die for the World to Come.

God is asked to judge Reuben according to his merits rather than according to the illicit intercourse with his father’s concubine. In Targum Jonathan to Isaiah we find three occurrences of the concept Second Death. The first occasion is Isa 22:14, where the Bible reads: MT Isa 22:14

Then the Lord of Hosts revealed Himself to my ears: ‘This iniquity shall never be forgiven you until you die’, said my Lord God of Hosts.

This is rendered in the Targum as: TJ Isa 22:14

31

The prophet said, with my ears I was hearing when this was decreed from before the Lord of Hosts: ‘This iniquity shall never be forgiven you until you die the Second Death’, said the Lord God of Hosts.

Sysling, Te iyyat Ha-Metim, 216.

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The context of this verse is an oracle against the Epicureans,32 who amidst horrible disaster decided not to weep and lament as ordered, but instead spoke their famous adage ‘Let us eat and drink for tomorrow we die’. According to the Hebrew text of this verse God’s response was ‘This iniquity shall never be forgiven you until you die’. Apparently the wrong inference of the people concerned was, in the eyes of the meturgeman, that they thought that death was the end. According to the Epicurean view, the sentence of the Hebrew text was not a real threat. Until their death they would eat, drink and be merry, and then it would be over and done with. So who would care whether God would forgive or not? The warning of the meturgeman is that death is not the end. In his view, after physical death judgment awaits and God will decide who will live an eternal life of bliss and who will die an everlasting death.33 The second occurrence is in Isa 65:6, which should be read together with the last part of the preceding verse: MT Isa 65:5b These are a smoke in My nose, a fire blazing all day long. 65:6 See, this is recorded before Me; I will not stand idly by, but will repay, deliver their sins into their bosom.

This is rendered in Targum Jonathan as: TJ Isa 65:5b 65:6

These, their anger is as smoke before Me, their retribution is in Gehenna, where fire blazes all day long. See, this is recorded before Me, I will not give them respite while they live, but theirs is the retribution of their sins, and I will hand over to the Second Death their bodies.

32 In rabbinic usage the term ‘Epicureans’ does not denote followers of the philosopher Epicurus, but is rather a wordplay on √‫‘ פקר‬to be free, irreverent, sceptical’. In rabbinic literature several known wicked persons are accused of ‘Epicureanism’. Within targumic literature we find the example of Cain, who in the Palestinian Targums on Gen 4:8 is made to say to Abel ‘there is no judgment and no judge and there is no other world; there is no bestowal of recompense for the just and there is no reckoning for the wicked’. This nihilistic worldview made it easy for him to kill his brother. 33 This fits in with the mishnaic teaching of m.Sanh 10:1, where the Epicureans are explicitly mentioned as one of the three categories that do not share in the World to Come. The other categories consist of those who deny the resurrection of the dead and those who deny the heavenly origin of the Law. Abrahams suggested in his article on the Second Death that the inference of the targumic interpretation would be that the Second Death was an expiation, with the consequence that forgiveness would ensue. See Abrahams, ‘The Second Death’, 44.

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These verses in Isaiah are part of God’s complaint against his people Israel about their detestable behaviour. The opening words of verse six were probably considered as an allusion to the Day of Judgment, in which according to tradition the written account plays an important role,34 an aspect we also came across in the New Testament material.35 One gets the impression here that in the eyes of the meturgeman the concepts of Gehenna and the Second Death are synonymous and consist of a place where fire rages unrelentingly. This is reminiscent of the lake of fire we encountered in Revelation. It should be noted that according to this targumic interpretation, the Second Death is physical rather than spiritual.36 This is comparable to Rev 20:15 where it says that anyone whose name was not found written in the Book of Life ‘was thrown into the lake of fire’.37 The last occurrence in Targum Isaiah is the interpretation of the difficult verse Isa 65:15: MT Isa 65:15

You shall leave behind a name by which My chosen ones shall curse: ‘So may the Lord God slay you!’ but his servants shall be given a different name.

The Targum of this verse reads as follows, TJ Isa 65:15

You shall leave your name as an oath to My chosen. And the Lord God will slay you with the Second Death. But His servants, the righteous, He will call with a different name.

The context of both this and the preceding occurrence is the destiny of the wicked within Israel. Accordingly, the punishment that is described does not concern the gentiles, but the apostates of God’s own people. It is they who are the addressees of this verse, whose names are left as an oath for the chosen. They are the ones who are being threatened with the Second Death. On the other hand, there is a promise for the 34 For the concept of the divine bookkeeping in the Targum, see also TJ Isa 4:3, where it says ‘And he who remains [true] shall return to Zion and he who has observed the Torah will be established in Jerusalem—holy he will be called. Whoever is inscribed for eternal life, will behold the consolation of Jerusalem’. 35 Rev 20:15, see above 408–09. 36 As opposed to the view of the medieval exegete Kimhi, who suggested in his commentary on Isa 22:14 that the Second Death refers to the death of the soul in the World to Come on the basis of TJ ad loc. Remarkably Kimhi does not refer to TJ in his commentary on Isa 65:6. 37 See above, ad loc. The wording in that passage also suggests something physical.

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righteous, that they will be called with a different name. It is not entirely clear what this promise means, but it is probably related to the concept of a new name that is also known from Revelation. The next occurrence in Targum Jonathan is in Jer 51:39, MT Jer 51:39

TJ Jer 51:39

When they are heated I will set out their drink and get them drunk, that they may become hilarious and then sleep an endless sleep never to awake—declares the Lord. Bring distress upon them, and they shall be like drunkards, so that they shall not be strong; and they shall die the second38 death, and not live for the World to Come, says the Lord.

Other than the cases in Isaiah, the object of the punishment is here Babylon, which may be considered as a cipher for the Roman Empire.39 The inhabitants of Babylon are likened to drunkards who initially are in high spirits, but soon fall into a stupor from which they will not awake. This ‘endless sleep’ is interpreted by the translator as the Second Death. The expression ‘die the Second Death’ is further clarified by the words ‘not live for the World to Come’, making explicit, as it were, what we conjectured in the case of Targum Onqelos on Deut 33:6, namely that it implies annihilation rather than punishment. The Second Death would then mean the deprivation of the second life.40 In Jer 51:57, we find still another explicit reference to our concept: MT Jer 51:57

TJ Jer 51:57

I will make her officials and wise men drunk, her governors and prefects and warriors; and they shall sleep an endless sleep, never to awaken—declares the King whose name is Lord of Hosts. I will make drunk her officials and her wise men and her governors and her prefects and her warriors and they will die the Second Death and not live for the World to Come, says the King whose name is Lord of Hosts.

This verse refers to Babylon as well. The resemblance to the previous case is striking though not surprising given the fact that it occurs in the same chapter, and need not be commented upon. The cases in TJ to 38 The word ‘second’ is missing in ms H. 116, just as was the case in Pseudo Jonathan and the Cairo Genizah Fragments on Deut 33:6 (see above ad loc.). 39 C.T.R. Hayward, The Targum of Jeremiah, Edinburgh 1987, 37. 40 Abrahams, ‘The Second Death’, 44.

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Jeremiah seem to suggest that the wicked Babylonian rulers will not rise to eternal life, which differs from the occurrences in Isaiah, where the wicked of Israel will first rise and then be condemned to the Second Death. Actually, the ordinal ‘second’ makes less sense when there is no resurrection involved, so that the original concept will have developed in tandem with the idea of resurrection. It may be that the expression at a certain stage developed into a kind of symbol for Gehenna, or hell, as Christians would say. The last occurrence of the expression in Targumic literature can be found in some manuscripts of the Targum of Psalms 49:11. The Hebrew text may be translated as, MT Ps 49:11

For one sees that the wise die

This is translated in the Targum as, TgPs 49:11

For the wise see that the wicked are punished in Gehenna.

The meturgeman disconnected the positively coloured word ‘wise’ from the negative concept of dying, by taking the wise as the subject of the sentence and adding ‘the wicked’ as direct object. This interpretation reminds of Isa 33:17 and 66:24, where the Targumic renderings read respectively: TJ Isa 33:17 TJ Isa 66:24

Your eyes will behold the glory of the Shekhinah of the Eternal King in his fame, you will see and behold those who go down to the land of Gehenna. They shall go out and gaze on the corpses of the sinful men who rebelled against My Memra: their souls shall not die, nor their fire be extinguished and the wicked shall be punished in Gehenna until the righteous will say: ‘We have seen enough’.

A variant reading of Targum Psalms 49:11a is found in ms Hébreu 110, (Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris) and in ms H. 116 (Montefiore Endowment, Lauderdale Rd synagogue, London).41 ms Hébreu 110 reads:42

41 S. Speier, ‘Sieben Stellen des Psalmentargums in Handschriften und Druckausgaben: 3,7 44,17 45,6 49,11 68,15.20 126,1’, Biblica 48 (1967), 491–508, at 495–96. 42 The reading of ms H. 116 has some small orthographic variants, but is essentially the same.

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alberdina houtman and magda misset-van de weg For one sees the shrewd in wickedness who die a second death and are condemned to Gehenna.

This interpretation stays closer to the Hebrew in considering the clause as an empirical fact. Of course this interpretation does not yet settle the friction between the positively laden word ‘wise’ and the negative concept of dying. Hence, the meturgeman solved this by interpreting the wise as those who are shrewd in wickedness.43 In this way the dogma of just punishment was saved: only the wicked are punished. From the continuation of the Targumic rendering of the verse it can be inferred that these wicked will remain in their graves forever (49:12)44 and will accordingly not participate in the resurrection (49:13).45 Other Rabbinic Literature Apart from the references in the Targums, there is only one tradition in rabbinic literature where the expression occurs. In this tradition, the concept of the Second Death is connected to the belief in a second god, which in itself raises strong suspicion that it has polemic intents. It occurs with minor variations in three corpora, i.e. Midrash Tannaim, Pirqe de Rabbi Eliezer, and Yalqut Shimoni. Midrash Tannaim is the designation given by David Hoffmann to his reconstruction of a halakhic Midrash on Deuteronomy.46 Because of its reconstructed and fragmentary state, it is difficult to date. It seems, however, that it is related to the larger corpus of halakhic Midrashim, which date from the early Amoraic period. Pirqe de Rabbi Eliezer is a work that appears to have originated in the eighth or ninth century, though the contents are to a large extent older.47 Yalqut Shimoni is a midrashic thesaurus of the twelfth or thirteenth century.48 Because of the complicated nature of these corpora, it is difficult to put a date to the tradition. If, however, the tradition cited in the reconstructed Midrash Tannaim indeed belongs to an early halakhic 43 In b.Sanh 21a the expression ‫איש חכם‬, that is applied to the wily Jonadab in 2 Sam 13:3, is explained as ‫‘ איש חכם לרשעה‬a man who is wise in evil-doing’. 44 ‘In their tomb they will abide forever, and they will not rise from their tents for all generations, because they have exalted themselves; and they have acquired an evil name upon the earth.’ (Translation © 2001 E.M. Cook http://www.tulane.edu/~ntcs/pss/tg_ps_index. htm). 45 ‘And a wicked man will not lodge in glory with the righteous; he is likened to a beast, he is worth nothing.’ (Translation E.M. Cook). 46 G. Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, Edinburgh 19962, 273–75. 47 It belongs to the genre of ‘rewritten Bible’. See Stemberger, Introduction, 328–30. 48 Stemberger, Introduction, 351–52.

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Midrash on Deuteronomy, then the earliest still extant occurrence in rabbinic literature outside the Targums would be the third century. The concept of the Second Death occurs here in an exegesis of Deut 32:39 that reads: See, then, that I, I am He; There is no god beside Me. I deal death and give life; I wounded and I will heal: none can deliver from My hand.

Midrash Tannaim explains:49 All Gentiles50 who say that there is a second god, I will slay them with a second death wherein is no resurrection; and all Gentiles who say that there is no second god, I will quicken them for the life of the World to Come, slaying those and quickening these, wherefore it is said ‘I deal death and give life’.

We see that here the Second Death is pictured as a punishment for non-Israelite polytheists, or probably more specifically for Christians. It is explained as a death in which there is no resurrection, in the same manner as we saw in Targum Jeremiah. III. Conclusions The meaning of the concept Second Death in Judaism is varied. On the one hand it seems that the term Second Death implies a general resurrection for all humankind after which judgment is passed, including the decision about who will live for eternal life and who will die an eternal death. This is probably the meaning of the occurrences in Targum Isaiah.51 On the other hand there are texts that suggest an exclusion from the resurrection. To these may be reckoned the occurrences in Targum Jeremiah, where the Second Death is likened to an intoxication out of which one cannot be roused, suggesting that it concerns exclusion from the resurrection. In the same manner the 49 MidrTan Deut 32:39 (D. Hoffmann, Midrasch Tannaim zum Deuteronomium, 2 parts, Berlin 1908–09, reprint Jerusalem 1984, II.202); for the text of Pirqe de rabbi Eliezer see the edition of M. Higger, Horeb 8 (1944) 82–119; 9 (1946) 94–166; 10 (1948) 185–294. This is also the text that is incorporated in the Bar Ilan Responsa CD. The Yalquttext can be found in Yalqut Shimoni, parashat ha’azinu, §946 (D. Hyman, D.N. Lerrer & I. Shiloni (eds), Yalqut Shim‘oni al ha-Torah le Rabbenu Shim‘on ha-Darshan, 9 Vols, Jerusalem 1973–91, VI.656). 50 The word used is ‫גוי‬, which may also mean people or nation. In Yalqut Shimoni and Pirqe de Rabbi Eliezer it says simply ‫כל מי‬, ‘whoever’. 51 So e.g. J. Ribera Florit, El Targum de Isaías, Valencia 1988, 53.

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tradition that occurs in Midrash Tannaim, Pirqe de Rabbi Eliezer and Yalqut Shimoni speaks of the Second Death as a state from which resurrection is impossible. The meaning of the concept in the New Testament seems to be that after the general resurrection, the human race is judged on the basis of their records. Whoever is not found written in the Book of Life, will die the Second Death, which is described as a lake of fire. There seems to be a strong relation between especially the material in Targum Isaiah and the book of Revelation, but there is no complete overlap. The elements of a first resurrection and the thousand-year reign of the righteous that are prominent in Revelation are absent in the Targum. The distribution of the concept Second Death is very restricted. Because of the occurrence in the NT, we seem to have a fairly early terminus a quo for the concept. Although there is no agreement as to the exact date of the book of Revelation, the consensus among modern scholars is that the book was composed near the end of the first century.52 It is also broadly accepted that the author of Revelation was a non-native speaker of Greek, whose mother tongue was probably Hebrew or Aramaic,53 and who was well versed in Jewish apocalypticism. The traditions in Jewish literature cannot be reliably dated. The Targums in their present 52 For an overview of the arguments on both an early (between 64 and 70 ce) and a later date (around 95 ce) see Beale, The Book of Revelation, 3–27, who concludes—quoting from J.P.M. Sweet, Revelation, London 1979—‘To sum up, the earlier date may be right, but the internal evidence is not sufficient to outweigh the firm tradition stemming from Irenaeus’. The tradition stemming from Irenaeus concerns his statement in Adversus Haereses 5.30.3; Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiae 3.18.3; 5.30.3, that John’s visions were ‘seen not long ago, but almost in our time, at the end of the reign of Domitian’. However, that internal evidence should be preferred over external witnesses and the internal evidence suggests that the book was written in 69 ce, is, e.g. argued by Th.B. Slater, ‘Dating the Apocalypse to John’, Biblica 84 (2003), 252–58. And, still others suggest a date around 114 ce, see D.E. Aune, Revelation 1–5 (WBC 52), Dallas 1997, lvi–lxx; and H.J. de Jonge, ‘The Function of Religious Polemics: The Case of the Revelation of John versus the Imperial Cult’, in: Th.L. Hettema & A. van der Kooij (eds), Religious Polemics in Context: Papers presented to the Second International Conference of the Leiden Institute for the Study of Religions (LISOR) held at Leiden, 27–28 April 2000, Assen 2004, 276–90, at 277 n. 4, who concludes that the allusions in Revelation (6:2, 9:14–19 and 16:12.14) to a threat from the Parthians are indicative of a date during the reign of Trajan. 53 See, e.g. Aune, Revelation, lvi; R.H. Charles, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Revelation of St. John, 2 Vols, Edinburgh 1920, I, xliv; G. Mussies, The Morphology of Koine Greek as Used in the Apocalypse of St. John: A Study in Bilingualism, Leiden 1971. The strongest supporter of Aramaic as the original language of composition is C.C. Torrey, The Apocalypse of John, New Haven 1958, 27–48.

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state stem from the third century ce at the earliest, but they certainly contain older traditions. Each tradition must therefore be assessed on its own merits. The tradition in Midrash Tannaim is a reconstruction and can therefore not be relied upon for dating. So we have here an interesting methodological problem of an undated Jewish tradition and a well-dated tradition that was transmitted in Christian circles.54 The eschatological tradition of the young church is at least partly based upon the intertestamental Jewish literature. Apart from the concept that was the object of our investigation, there are many related notions such as ‘final judgment’, ‘World to Come’, ‘lake of fire’, ‘divine book-keeping’, ‘new name’, ‘crown’, etc. that are all derived from early Jewish literature, including the Targums, especially Targum Isaiah. Since the founders of Christianity were deeply rooted in Judaism, it is not surprising that many Jewish concepts found their place in the new religion. In the case of Revelation, whose author was possibly a Palestinian Jew and thus a native speaker of Hebrew or Aramaic,55 this influence is clear. He probably was even familiar with some of the targumic interpretations discussed above. A more difficult problem is the question of why the expression Second Death is virtually absent from the rabbinic literature outside the Targums. Let us try to give some tentative answers. It seems clear that the expression Second Death was generally known at the end of the first century ce, considering the self-evident way the author of Revelation uses it. The absence from the canonical rabbinic texts may be partly due to the general reluctance evident in the Talmudic period towards apocalyptic subjects.56 It does not explain, however, why at places where it could be helpful, as in the exegesis of Deut 33:6 for example, the expression was avoided even though on other occasions they referred to the Targum as an authoritative source. That evasive behaviour may be due to the fact that in the meantime the expression had become part of the Christian theological vocabulary.57 It is one thing, however, See P.-M. Bogaert, ‘La “seconde mort” à l’époque des Tannaïm’, 200. Charles (see n. 53) is the most important proponent of this position and he has been followed by many generations of scholars. Although we are aware of opposing views, we find his arguments convincing. 56 See, e.g., P.S. Alexander, ‘Late Hebrew Apocalyptic: A Preliminary Survey’, in: Apocrypha: Le champ des apocryphes 1 (1990), 197–217, at 212. 57 See also the contribution of Poorthuis and Rouwhorst in this volume, who noticed (p. 441) that ‘early Jewish notions have influenced early Christian ideas and were 54 55

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to stop using an expression, but could it be possible that the reluctance went so far as to even cleanse existing sources of the expression given the great store that is set by correct transmission? After all, it is well known that the Talmudim and Midrashim make extensive use of older traditions. Did the expression occur there? And was it then perhaps rephrased in the later transmission? And if that was the case, how then did it remain in the Targums even though it is known that at various stages the Targums underwent editing and revision in the Talmudic period? These questions are difficult to answer. They are, among other things, connected with the question of whether the Targums should be considered rabbinic literature or not. There is doubt about the extent to which the Sages exercised control in the case of the Targums, witness the fact that the Targums are at times at odds with explicit rabbinic devices.58 Maybe also in this case the translators kept making apocalyptically oriented interpretative translations and using the expression Second Death in defiance of the general aversion to the apocalyptic in the Talmudic period and the Christianization of the concept Second Death. In his interesting article on Hebrew apocalyptic writings, Philip Alexander suggested that the revival of apocalyptic literature in the post-Talmudic period might be explained by the fact that it was never completely absent. In his words, ‘it may have run shallow, but it never totally ran into the sand’.59 The Targums may have functioned as one of the small rivulets that kept the tradition alive.

subsequently suppressed by rabbinic Judaism. This explains why early Christianity often contains old Jewish themes and motives—be it utterly transformed—which have disappeared in ‘rabbinic Judaism’. 58 See, e.g., W.F. Smelik, The Targum of Judges, Leiden/etc. 1995, 38–9. 59 Alexander, ‘Late Hebrew Apocalyptic’, 212–15.

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‘WHY DO THE NATIONS CONSPIRE?’ Psalm 2 in Post-Biblical Jewish and Christian Traditions Gerard Rouwhorst and Marcel Poorthuis Introduction The study of the relationship between Jewish and Christian interpretations of Scripture has long suffered from a methodological naiveté that was characteristic of the overall approach to the relationship between Judaism and Christianity. The direction of the influence between Judaism and Christianity was generally assumed to be one-sided only, from Judaism to Christianity, and not vice versa.1 This conviction was quite often coupled with the equally naive assumption that this influence could be described as a sort of copying of a Jewish original by Christians.2 Undoubtedly, this was in itself a reaction to an age-old theological bias, which considered Judaism as no more than the forerunner of Christianity, or as a promise towards its fulfilment. In reaction to that triumphant attitude, many scholars tended to emphasize the indebtedness of early Christianity to Judaism in general, and in the field of interpretation of Scripture in particular. These scholars felt an outspoken theological interest in and sympathy for Judaism, whereas others, motivated by the same reaction to triumphant theology, tried to keep aloof from a theological approach to the early Jewish and Christian sources whatsoever. They limited themselves to a historical and philological research, assuming that serious historical research and theology could not go together. Still, whether this historical approach is 1 Cf. for the following for instance: A.Y. Reed & A. Becker, ‘Introduction. Traditional Models and New Directions’, in: A. Becker & A.Y. Reed (eds), The Ways that Never Parted (Texts and Studies in Ancient Judaism 95), Tübingen 2003, 1–33; G. Rouwhorst, ‘Identität durch Gebet: Gebetstexte als Zeugen eines jahrhundertelangen Ringens um Kontinuität und Differenz zwischen Judentum und Christentum’, in: A. Gerhards et alii (eds), Identität durch Gebet: Zur gemeinschaftsbildenden Funktion institutionalisierten Betens in Judentum und Christentum, Paderborn 2003, 37–55. 2 A typical example is provided by the monumental collection of L. Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, which suffers from a methodological flaw in its purpose to retrieve lost midrashim in the works of Church Fathers. The transformations of these midrashim to fit the Christian context has not been given its due.

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inspired by a theological fascination with Judaism or, on the contrary, by an outright distrust of any form of theology, the result remains one-sided, even from a merely historical perspective. The undeniable roots of Christian traditions in Judaism do not exhaustively clarify the significance of these traditions in their proper Christian contexts. Put differently, to understand Christianity, it does not suffice to retrace its pre-Christian, more specifically, its Jewish roots.3 In addition to that, the considerable influence exerted by Christian thoughts and practices upon Jewish tradition, materialized either as unconscious adaptation or as conscious though veiled polemic, tends to be ignored. The last decades, these new insights, the significance of texts in their proper context and the influence of Christianity upon Judaism, were increasingly acknowledged in research. This has led to the development of more sophisticated models that do better justice to the complex forms of interaction that occurred between Judaism and Christianity in the world of Antiquity on the basis of a common biblical heritage.4 Next to these historical deliberations, a theological reflection remains of great relevance. New historical models which are being developed should be tested for their (unavoidable) theological or ideological presuppositions. Positively, a sound theological approach to the relationship between Judaism and Christianity, based on solid historical research, can and should contribute to a better understanding of both religions and to their mutual relationships. By making one’s theological and ideological concerns and presuppositions explicit, one may avoid or at least reduce the pitfalls of unconscious ideologies. Hence, in our view, it is appropriate to combine a sound historical and methodological approach to

We are leaving aside here the undeniable rootedness of both Judaism and Christianity in the milieu of Antiquity. 4 Somewhat trendy but basically sound, Daniel Boyarin advocates a ‘wave theory’ to account for similarities between rabbinic Judaism and early Christianity: D. Boyarin, Dying for God: Martyrdom and the Making of Christianity and Judaism, Stanford, California 1999, esp. 1–21 (‘Introduction. When Christians Were Jews: On Judaeo-Christian Origins) and: Idem, ‘Semantic Differences; or, “Judaism”/“Christianity”’, in: Becker & Reed, The Ways that Never Parted, 65–86. See for a similar model based on the study of Medieval Jewish and Christian Bible commentators, H. Hailperin, ‘Jewish “Influence” on Christian Bible Scholars in the Middle Ages’, Historia Judaica 4 (1942), 163–74. Noteworthy is I.J. Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Berkely 2006, whose methodological approach is similar to ours. See also: Idem, ‘Easter and Passover as Early Jewish-Christian Dialogue’, in: P. Bradshaw & L. Hoffman (eds), Passover and Easter: Origins and History to Modern Times (Two Liturgical Traditions 5), 1999, 98–124. 3

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the sources with a genuine theological reflection upon the relationship between Judaism and Christianity in their formative period. Psalm 2 The interpretation of Psalm 2 in Judaism and Christianity is a striking example of the complicated forms of interaction that took place between both religious traditions from the period of post-biblical Judaism and early Christianity until the Middle Ages. The psalm occurs in the Dead Sea Scrolls and plays a remarkably prominent role in the New Testament.5 Moreover, the text has continued to be commented upon in both rabbinic and patristic sources during Late Antiquity and even during the Middle Ages. The question, then, arises as to what forms of interactions might have taken place between Jewish and Christian interpretations of the psalm? What makes this question all the more relevant is that the exegesis of this psalm leads us to the heart of the relationship between Judaism and Christianity in all its complexity and ambiguity, showing both the common ground of both religions as well as the polemics and the tensions between them, an issue which in turn unavoidably calls for theological evaluation. While dealing with the interpretation of Psalm 2 in Jewish and Christian traditions as an example of (possible) interaction between both religions, we shall proceed in a way which slightly differs from other similar studies. Instead of first reviewing the Jewish evidence, derived from both early and (very) late periods—i.e. from pre-rabbinic times until well into the Middle Ages—and then going back in time to trace the development of Christian exegesis from its very inception in the New Testament period,6 we shall adopt a more refined chronology to do more justice to the far-reaching changes and discontinuities in both religions—not only in Christianity—over the centuries. After 5 See especially P. Maiberger, ‘Das Verständnis von Psalm 2 in der Septuaginta, im Targum, im Qumran, im frühen Judentum und im Neuen Testament’, in: J. Schreiner (ed.), Beiträge zur Psalmenforschung: Psalm 2 und 22, Würzburg 1988, 85–181; R. Watts, ‘The Psalms in Mark’s Gospel’, in: S. Moyise & M. Menken (eds), The Psalms in the New Testament, London 2004, 25–46, esp. 26–9; M. Labahn, ‘The Psalms in Q’, ibidem, 47–60, esp. 54–6; P. Doble, ‘The Psalms in Luke-Acts’, ibidem, 83–118, esp. 102–11; H.W. Attridge, ‘The Psalms in Hebrews’, ibidem, 197–212, esp. 199–203; S. Moyise, ‘The Psalms in the Book of Revelation’, ibidem, 231–46, esp. 231–34. 6 This method is for instance followed by Maiberger, ‘Das Verständnis von Psalm 2’. See also the articles published in Moyise & Menken, The Psalms in the New Testament.

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having mapped out the psalm’s significance in post-biblical Judaism (I), more specifically in sources prior to or contemporaneous with the New Testament period, we shall deal with the Christian evidence of the first four centuries, starting with, but not limiting ourselves, to the New Testament writings (II). Next, we shall examine Jewish, mainly rabbinic, sources which are generally later than the New Testament era and can be dated to the Christian patristic period (fourth–fifth century), if not later (III). While following this chronological order, we will be particularly alert to the possibility of (mutual) influences. In conclusion, we will highlight the harvest of this research for a theology of JewishChristian relations (IV). First we offer an English translation of the Hebrew text to be followed by a brief clarification of structure and context of Psalm 2 and of its protagonists. The Hebrew text in translation (RSV) 1 Why do the nations conspire, and the peoples plot in vain? 2 The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord and his anointed, saying, 3 ‘Let us burst their bonds asunder, and cast their cords from us.’ 4 He who sits in the heavens laughs; the Lord has them in derision. 5 Then he will speak to them in his wrath, and terrify them in his fury, saying, 6 ‘I have set my king on Zion, my holy hill.’ 7 I will tell of the decree of the Lord: He said to me, ‘You are my son, today I have begotten you. 8 Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage, and the ends of the earth your possession. 9 You shall break them with a rod of iron, and dash them in pieces like a potter’s vessel.’ 10 Now therefore, O kings, be wise; be warned, O rulers of the earth. 11 Serve the Lord with fear, with trembling 12 kiss his feet, lest he be angry, and you perish in the way; for his wrath is quickly kindled. Blessed are all who take refuge in him.

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Psalm 2 and its relationship with Psalm 1 Already the very choice of Psalm 2 as a single text raises important historical questions. There is clear evidence that both in Jewish as well as in Christian traditions, this psalm was sometimes considered to form a whole together with Psalm 1.7 The Dead Sea Scrolls contain a florilegium in which Psalm 1 and 2 figure side by side (4QFlorilegium or 4Q174). When in Acts 13:33 according to the Western text, Paul quotes the famous verse: ‘Thou art my Son, today I have begotten thee’ (Ps 2:7), he refers to the first psalm, thereby showing to be heir to this same tradition,8 just as Tertullian,9 Cyprian,10 Hilary of Poitiers,11 as well as Justin Martyr who, in Apology 1.40 quotes both psalms as if they are constituting one single text.12 The Babylonian Talmud seems to convey the same message where it states: ‘every chapter that was particularly dear to David, he commenced with Ashrei (happy) and terminated with Ashrei. He began with ‘happy’ as it is written: ‘Happy is the man’ (Ps 1:1), and terminated with it as it is written ‘happy are all they that take refuge in him’ (Ps 2:12) (b.Ber 10a).13 Likewise, the Palestinian Talmud counts 18 psalms from the first to the beginning of Psalm 20, again taking the Psalms 1 and 2 as one (p.Ber 4.3, 8a). Apparently, all of these sources are aware of the other way of counting as well whereby Psalms 1 and 2 are separated. This at first sight merely technical question of counting may have important repercussions for the interpretation of the content of the psalm. If the second psalm is considered to form a unity with the first

7 Cf. for the following observations: Maiberger, ‘Das Verständnis von Psalm 2’, 85–9. 8 See for the text critical background of Acts 13:33, B. Metzger, A Textual Commentary on the Greek New Testament, London 1975, 412ff. 9 Adversus Marcionem IV, 22. 10 Ad Quirinum I, 13; II, 8.29; III, 20.56.112, in some manuscripts. 11 Tractatus super psalmos, CSEL 22, 50/PL 9, 279A. 12 Several Church Fathers make mention of a Jewish tradition considering the first two psalms as an unity. Thus, Origen reports about two Hebrew manuscripts, of which one separates the psalms 1 and 2, whereas the other combines them (Selecta in Psalmos, PG 12, 1100; cf. Maiberger, ‘Das Verständnis von Psalm 2’, 85 and 120, note 9). See further: Eusebius of Caesarea (Explanatio Psalmi II, PG 23, 73); Athanasius (Argumentum in Psalmos, PG 27, 56), Jerome (Breviarium in Psalmos, PL 26, 823); Diodore of Tarsus, In Psalmos II (ed. J. Olivier, CCSG 6, Turnhout 1980, 17). 13 Other Rabbinic sources even count no more than 147 psalms, apparently joining even more psalms together, e.g. 114 and 115, and 117–118 or possibly 9 and 10 (Midrash Psalms 22:19). Likewise, the LXX is notorious for a division different from the Hebrew.

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psalm, it is quite natural to interpret the latter from the perspective of the former and to connect the entire second psalm with the theme of the Torah or with wisdom, which is the theme of the first psalm. Traces of such sapiential interpretation are to be found in the LXX which renders v. 12a (kiss the feet) by δραξασθε παιδειας (grasp the teaching).14 On the other hand, in that perspective, the figure of the anointed king (vv. 6–9) will tend to become less prominent, unless the king, identified with David or otherwise, is presented as a paragon of obedience to the Torah. Conversely, if Psalm 2 is viewed as an independent text, the figure of the anointed king will probably come to the fore more prominently. If then this royal figure is interpreted as the Messiah, this will stimulate the interpretation of the entire psalm from a messianic perspective. The Protagonists of Psalm 2 Psalm 2 falls into four sections: ° vv. 1–3 describe the rebellion of the nations and the peoples and their kings and rulers against the Lord and his anointed; ° vv. 4–6 depict the Lord’s mockery and his support of the king; ° in vv. 7–9 the king himself tells of the decree of the Lord which established him as king and promised him victory over his enemies; ° vv. 10–12 conclude the psalm with a final warning by the king (or the psalmist) to the hostile rulers to submit to the Lord.15 Apart from the author of the psalm, three protagonists may be distinguished, namely the nations and their rulers (section 1 and 4), the Lord (section 2) and the anointed king (section 3). In order to understand post-biblical interpretations of the psalm, it is essential to know with which persons or groups they identified these protagonists. Who are the nations ( goyim) and peoples (le{umim) of which the first line speaks? And do they form one or rather two groups?

Cf. Maiberger, ‘Das Verständnis von Psalm 2’, 90. See C. Rodd, in: The Oxford Bible Commentary (ed. J. Barton and J. Muddiman), Oxford 2000, 367. 14 15

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Although the biblical poetry of the parallellismus membrorum makes an identification of the two plausible, post-biblical interpretations rather detect in the seeming repetition an opportunity to distinguish two groups, based upon the principle that the Bible never repeats itself. Then in line 2 we meet ‘the kings of the earth’ together with the ‘rulers’. Again, do they constitute one or rather two groups? And how are they related to the nations and the peoples, mentioned earlier? And who is the subject of the puzzling v. 3: ‘Let us burst their bonds asunder, and cast their cords from us?’ Are the nations and peoples speaking here, or the kings and rulers, or rather God himself and His anointed? And whose bonds should be cut and whose cords cast off and what can be the nature of these ties? Further, it may naturally be asked who is the ‘king’, the son begotten by the Lord and His anointed one, who is to receive the nations as his heritage (vv. 2, 7–9). Does this word refer to an individual or rather to a collective entity, to a community or a group of people? And is this king a historical or rather a messianic figure, or perhaps a combination of both? As we cannot claim to give an exhaustive treatment of the whole of Psalm 2 in Jewish and Christian sources, we will focus on the identification of the protagonists of the first section (vv. 1–3) who in vv. 8–9 are subdued by the figure of the king. We shall deal with the other verses only insofar as they throw light upon the question as to which rebellious and hostile individuals and groups can be distinguished in this psalm, according to post-biblical interpretations. I. Early Judaism In the period of early Judaism, i.e. in the centuries prior to the beginning of the rabbinic era and the emergence of Christianity as an independent religion, Jewish sources give evidence of a variety of interpretations of Psalm 2, which may have some important characteristics in common, but at times also differ considerably. As stated above, there is a widespread tendency to interpret Psalm 2 in light of the preceding psalm, whether it was believed to form a unity with that text or not. This implies that observance of the Torah is considered to be a major key to the understanding of the psalm. Not only the LXX version of this psalm, but, as Paul Maiberger has pointed out, also the Targum on Psalms betrays a similar view on the text:

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tellingly, v. 12a is translated as ‘accept the teaching’ (‫!)קבילו אולפנא‬16 It does not become clear from the LXX and the Targum what this implies for the identification of the protagonists. It may be guessed that the anointed king is understood to be either the people of Israel or king David. The conspiring nations and their rulers were doubtless in some way interpreted as enemies of the Torah and of the righteous Torah-observers of Psalm 1. In a fragment of a document that has been found in the fourth cave of Qumran, the earlier mentioned 4QFlorilegium, we encounter an explanation of the psalm which has some basic elements in common with the LXX but at the same time exhibits some features which are characteristic of the Qumran community. The text of the passage which is of particular interest to our issue, runs as follows: Midrash: ‘Blessed the man who does not walk in the counsel of the wicked’ (Ps 1:1). The interpretation ( pesher) of this word: they are those who turn aside from the path of the wicked, as it is written in the book of Isaiah, the prophet for the last days: ‘And it happened that with a strong [hand he turned me aside from walking on the path of ] this people (Is 8:11)’. And this refers to those about whom it is written in the book of Ezekiel, the prophet, that ‘they should not defile themselves any more with all their idols (Ez 44:10)’. This refers to the sons of Zadok and to the men of their council, those who seek justice eagerly, who have come after them to the council of the community. ‘Why are the nations [in turmoil] and hatch the peoples [idle plots? The kings of the earth t]ake up [their posts and the ru]lers conspire together against the Lord and against [his anointed one’. Interpre]tation ( pesher) of the saying: [the kings of the na]tions [are in turmoil] and ha[tch idle plots against] the elect ones of Israel in the last days.17

This interpretation of the beginning of Psalm 2 has in common with the LXX and the Targum that the first two psalms are considered a unity, the second being explained in the light of the first one. The just and Torah observing man of Psalm 1 is a prototype of the sons of Zadok who have remained undefiled by corruption and idolatry and who constitute the community of Qumran, living ‘at the end of the days’. It is against this select group of elect Jews that the nations and the kings, mentioned in the first two verses of Psalm 2, are hatching Maiberger, ‘Das Verständnis von Psalm 2’, 111. Translation according to: F. Garcia Martínez & E. Tigchelaar, The Dead Sea Scrolls in English, Leiden 1997; slightly altered. 16 17

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plots. The question then arises with whom these enemies of the Qumran community are identified. There can be no doubt that the pesher refers first and foremost to the Jews who did not belong to the Qumran community and were believed to have become defiled and gone astray. This opens up the possibility of going one step further and hypothesizing that the ‘peoples’ and nations of v. 1 are identified with the (rejected) Jewish people in Jerusalem and the ‘kings and rulers’ of v. 2 with its unworthy priesthood, but perhaps the text is too fragmentary to warrant such a reading. For that matter, the question may also be raised of who the anointed of v. 2 is according to the pesher. Is he perhaps identified with the Qumran community18 or rather with an individual Messiah? Or is the pesher simply not interested in the interpretation of this figure? Unfortunately, the text of the florilegium is too fragmentary and too succinct to allow for any certain conclusion. Anyway, we find ourselves in the eschatological setting of the war between the elect and the wicked which will be the drama of the End of Days. In some of the Jewish pseudepigrapha, we find traces of another way of explaining Psalm 2 which differs from the preceding ones in at least two respects. For one, it does not explicitly interpret Psalm 2 from the perspective of the preceding psalm. What is, however, more remarkable is that the ‘anointed one’ is not identified with a community at all, but with an individual, namely a royal Messiah. This interpretation can in particular be encountered in the Psalms of Solomon, a source which, contrary to many other pseudepigrapha, appears to have remained free of Christian interpolations and reworkings and reflects the messianic expectations of Judaism in the first century ce, in the period following on the invasion of Palestine by Pompey in 63 bce.19 In the seventeenth Psalm of Solomon, God is asked to let arise the Son of David, God’s king, so that he may ‘rule over Israel, God’s παις (child/servant) (v. 21), to destroy the unrighteous rulers, and to [purge Jerusalem from gentiles and chase away the sinners from the patrimony’ (v. 22)]. While describing this Messiah’s action against Israel’s enemies, the author of the psalm makes use of images borrowed from

18 This solution has been advanced by some scholars but has been questioned based on powerful arguments by Maiberger, ‘Das Verständnis von Psalm 2’, 96–97. 19 See for the Psalms of Solomon: H. Drijvers, ‘Salomo III’, in: TRE XXIX (1998), 730–32.

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Ps 2:9, God’s king will ‘smash the arrogance of sinners like a potter’s jar and shatter all their substance with an iron rod’ (v. 24).20 There is no doubt that the object of this messianic retribution are first and foremost the gentiles. Still, it does not become entirely clear from the text whether the Messiah will punish non-Jews only. The unrighteous rulers are possibly Jewish.21 Note further that the nations are transformed into ‘sinners’ without a clear indication whether they are to be found inside or outside the Jewish people. Finally, an echo of a very similar eschatological and messianic interpretation of Psalm 2, more specifically v. 6, is to be found in 4 Ezra, generally dated to 100 ce. In this source the Messiah is described as ‘My son’, standing on the top of mount Zion (13:32,35), and reproving the assembled nations for their godliness (ibidem, v. 37). Both the son-ship, the mount Zion and the reproof of the nations are themes that can be found in Psalm 2.22 II. Early Christianity Psalm 2 is one of the most frequently quoted psalms in the New Testament. It is generally agreed that the words ‘you are my son’, mentioned in the story of Jesus’ baptism and echoed in the narrative of the transfiguration, allude to Ps 2:7, the reference being made even more explicit in the Western text of Luke 3:22 which adds: ‘today I have begotten you’.23 This means that Jesus is identified with the royal and anointed son of the psalm. Apart from v. 7, other passages of the psalm are quoted or alluded to as well. In the Acts of the Apostles (4:25–27), the conspiring and plotting of the nations and peoples together with their kings and leaders is associated with the conspiracy against Jesus which led to his execution. The nations are identified with the gentiles, the peoples with the Jewish people, the kings with Herod and the rulers with Pontius Pilate. The Book of the Revelation, finally, is the only New Testament text to offer an eschatological explanation of the psalm: various motifs derived from the psalm, for instance the iron rod and 20 See also Maiberger, ‘Das Verständnis von Psalm 2’, 105–06; Watts, ‘The Psalms in Mark’s Gospel’, 27–8. 21 In PssSol 17:15, the strangers acted lawless and idolatrous in Jerusalem and the children of the covenant joined them, whereas the devout flew to the desert. 22 Cf. Maiberger, ‘Das Verständnis von Psalm 2’, 108. 23 Cf. Maiberger, ‘Das Verständnis von Psalm 2’, 116.

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the pots of clay are used to describe the future victory of the Messiah and his sovereignty over the nations (2:27, 12:5 and 19:5).24 The history of the interpretation of the psalm in early Christianity has been determined in a decisive way by the role it plays in the New Testament, with the sole exception of the passages in the Book of Revelation. More concretely, some interpretations encountered in early post-Biblical Judaism, are not found in early Christian interpretations. Thus we do not find examples of early Christian explanations which associate the ‘anointed’ with a community or with a group of people. Even more noteworthy is the fact that the eschatological interpretation found in the Psalms of Solomon, 4 Ezra, but also in the Book of Revelation—which identifies the anointed one with a future Messiah—is all but absent in early Christianity. By contrast, the starting-point for the overwhelming majority if not all early Christian interpretations of the psalm, is a propheticchristological reading of this text. They are based on the conviction that Jesus, who was proclaimed as the Messiah at his baptism and during the transfiguration, and who was sentenced to death, suffered, died and resurrected, is the anointed one of v. 7 and the entire psalm is understood from that perspective. As a result, nascent Christianity regarded the whole of Psalm 2 as a prophecy of the passion of Jesus, an interpretation which of course was further stimulated by Acts 4:25–27, a passage frequently quoted in connection with Psalm 2. This interpretation already underlies the first early Christian texts which are dealing with the psalm at some length. We encounter it in the writings of authors who in other respects differ from each other, such as Justin,25 Tertullian,26 Origen27 and Hippolytus.28 Suffice it to quote here the last-mentioned author who in his remarkable homily on the Psalms briefly and pithily states that the first of the two opening psalms carrying no title ‘displays the birth of Christ, the second his passion and that it is therefore clear that through these psalms

Cf. Moyise, ‘The Psalms in the Book of Revelation’. Apology I, 40. 26 Adversus Marcionem IV, 42. 27 See especially his Selecta in Psalmos, PG 12, 1099–1118. 28 See his Homily on the Psalms. Edition of the Greek text and French translation: P. Nautin, Le dossier d’Hippolyte et de Méliton, Paris 1953, 161–183. English translation: A. Stewart-Sykes, Hippolytus: On the Apostolic Tradition, Crestwood NY 2001. See for this homily also: H. Buchinger, ‘Die älteste erhaltene christliche Psalmenhomilie’, TTZ 104 (1995), 125–44; 272–98. 24 25

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is betokened the Word, the Wisdom, the only-begotten Son of the Father’.29 It hardly comes as a surprise that explanations dating from a somewhat later period, i.e. the third and fourth century, who advocate a prophetic-typological reading of the Old Testament, such as those of Eusebius of Caesarea, continue this tradition.30 What is, however, more remarkable is that even the Antiochene exegetes who are wellknown for their mistrust of allegorical and typological interpretations and exhibit an outspoken tendency to reduce typological explanations to an absolute minimum in favour of a ‘historical’ reading, explain the entire psalm from such a christological-typological perspective.31 It is noteworthy that Theodore of Mopsuestia even explicitly criticizes and denounces Jewish (!) attempts to identify the anointed one with David and to understand the psalm in that light, although he explicitly favours such an approach with numerous other psalms! This interpretation, then, also constitutes the starting-point for the interpretation of the enemies of God and his anointed one (Christ). In the various ways in which early Christian writers try to identify the raging nations and their rulers, several tendencies may be distinguished. What all of them have in common is that, on the basis of Acts 4: 25–27, they blame both the Jews and the Gentiles, as well as their prototypes, Herod and Pilate, for the death of Jesus. Nonetheless, it may be observed that the various early Christian authors value the respective roles of the Jews and the Gentiles in different ways. Origen, for instance, carefully distinguishes four categories, namely the raging nations who were foreigners to the belief in Christ; the ‘peoples plotting in vain’, who were the Jews occupied with vain things while not understanding the prophecies of their Scripture; the kings and the rulers who, without further differentiation, are associated with Herod and Pontius Pilate; and the leaders of the Jews.32 Moreover,

Homily on the Psalms, ch.19. Eusebius of Caesarea, Explanatio psalmi II, PG 24, 79–92. 31 Cf. Diodore of Tarsus, In Psalmos II (ed. J. Olivier, CCSG 6), Turnhout 1980, 11–17; Theodore of Mopsusestia, In psalmum II (ed. R. Devreesse, Le commentaire de Théodore de Mopsueste sur les Psaumes (I–LXXX)), Città del Vaticano 1939, 7–16. Note that both Diodore of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia interpret even the major part of Ps. 22 cited by Jesus at the cross in this way (cf. G. Dorival, ‘L’interprétation ancienne du Psaume 21 (TM 22)’, in: G. Dorival (ed.), David, Jésus et la reine Esther: Recherches sur le Psaume 21(22TM), Paris/Louvain 2002, 225–314, esp. 266–67 and G. Rouwhorst, ‘De interpretatie van psalm 22 door de kerkvaders’, in: M. Poorthuis (ed.), Mijn God, mijn God, waarom hebt Gij mij verlaten?, Baarn 1997, 94–115. 32 PG 12, 1101. 29 30

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in his interpretation of the remainder of the psalm, Origen shifts his attention from the four specific categories of enemies to the sinners in general. Thus, while discussing v. 3, he puts these words not into the mouth of God’s enemies but attributes them to Christ who would have addressed the angels descending with Him to the earth (and who, for their part, would have been the subject of the first two verses!). Christ then exhorts the angels to follow his example by breaking asunder the bonds by which the sinners are bound and by casting away the yoke that weighs on them. This explanation is followed by an exhortation addressed to Origen’s readers to liberate themselves likewise from the bonds of sin.33 In the same vein, vv. 8 and 9 are understood to refer to God’s punishment of the sinners, here compared with a shepherd who herds his sheep with an iron rod—in vs. 9, the LXX translates the Hebrew word ‫ תרעם‬by ποιµαινεις (grazing, shepherding)—and with the (re)modelling of a vessel by a potter.34 By contrast, Theodore of Mopsuestia focuses much more on the nefarious role played by the Jews and his explanation accordingly betrays a polemical anti-Jewish tendency. Thus, he argues right at the beginning of his explanation against the Jews who according to him err in applying the words of the psalm to David or Zerubbabel: ‘In the second psalm, David narrates everything that was fulfilled by the Jews at the time of the Passion of the Lord’.35 Several details confirm the anti-Jewish tenor of Theodore’s explanation. Thus, the rulers taking counsel (against the Lord) are identified with the Scribes and the Pharisees and, while explaining v. 4, Theodore states that the Lord laughs in order to show that the ‘attempts’ of the Jews have proven to be without effect.36 For the Antiochenes, the theological debate with the Arians determines their explanation. The Arians interpret Psalm 2 christologically as well, but argue from the adoption of the Messiah, that Christ’s eternal sonship is denied here. The Antiochenes point to the humanity of Christ to explain this feature, hereby saving Christ’s divinity.37 Hence Theodore of Mopsuestia wages a battle on two fronts, against the Jews, by denying that David or Zerubbabel are the subjects, and against the Arians by emphasizing that David as the

PG 12, 1103–05. PG 12, 1107–11. 35 Devreesse, Le commentaire, 7. 36 Devreesse, Le commentaire, 9–10. 37 M.J. Rondeau, Les commentaires patristiques du Psautier (III e–V e siècles), volume II, Rome 1985, 282–87. 33 34

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author of the psalm was talking about Christ’s humanity. Theodore reads Psalm 2 from his theological perspective on the two natures of Christ as a description of how the humanity of Christ was assumed by the divine Logos and was installed as the King of the universe (Ps 2:6).38 He does not play down the eternal divinity of Christ in favour of an adoptianist theology, but argues that the humanity of Christ received from Christ’s divinity the dominion over the universe (v. 8).39 In prophetic foresight David announced all this, Theodore claims. A final example which may illustrate the varying attitudes with regard to the Jews that Psalm 2 provoked amongst early Christian writers, is verse 3: ‘Let us burst their bonds asunder, and cast their cords from us.’ We have seen above that Origen attributes these words to Christ descending together with his angels and liberating the sinners, whether Jew or Gentile, from their bonds and yokes. This explanation is also mentioned by Eusebius of Caesarea.40 Tertullian, however, gives a different interpretation of the verse which is mentioned by Eusebius as well. In his extensive polemic against Marcion, Tertullian tries to convince the reader that Christianity worships the same biblical God as revealed in the Old Testament and not a new God as Marcion claims. How then should Christianity value the commandments as revealed by the same biblical God? Boldly, Tertullian attributes the breaking of the bonds neither to God’s enemies—whom he identifies with the Romans and Herod—nor to Christ (as Origen does), but to the Christians in general. The Christians claim that they loosen the bonds and cast away the yoke of the Jewish Law (against the Jews), while nonetheless believing in the same God (against Marcion).41 Challenged by Marcion to abandon the God of the Hebrew Bible in order to follow a different God, identified by Marcion with the Father of Jesus Christ, Tertullian sticks to his faith in the biblical God, the Creator who revealed the Torah at Sinai. But why then do the Christians not observe these commandments?, Marcion would have rebutted. Tertullian underscores the temporary character of the dispensation of the commandments by referring to Ps 2:3, the bonds and cords are admittedly divine injunctions but are no longer See for Theodore’s theory of the assumption of Christ’s humanity by the divine Logos: J. Pelikan, The Christian Tradition. Part 1. The Emergence of the Catholic Traditions (100–600), Chicago/London 1971, 254–55. 39 Theodore, In psalmum II, 6. 40 PG 24, 84. 41 Adversus Marcionem V, 22. A similar motive appears in Cyprian, Ad Quirinum I, 15; III, 119. 38

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valid after the coming of Christ. Christians themselves may state now: ‘let us loosen their bonds!’ This ingenious exegesis did not remain without response from rabbinic side, as we shall see later on. The Antiochenes waver between two interpretations: whereas Diodore of Tarsus and Theodore of Mopsuestia attribute this psalm verse to the enemies of God and His anointed, whose rule they want to subvert, Theodoret of Cyrus sees here an invitation to the believers to cast off both the bonds of the pagans and the yoke of the transgressing Jews.42 Clearly, the interpretation of the bonds as the Jewish commandments to be rejected by the Christians, surprising as it may seem, was not confined to Tertullian; we find it in Eusebius and in the Antiochene Theodoret, a sure indication of how widespread this interpretation was. III. Rabbinic Literature Turning to rabbinic interpretations of the same psalm, it may come as a surprise to us that the vivid image of the retribution by a personal Messiah, known from pre-Christian Jewish tradition and which has been further developed in early Christianity, recedes into the background, in spite of the psalm’s wording which certainly could invite such an interpretation. One of the most remarkable features of the rabbinic exegesis of Psalm 2 is a strong and widespread tendency to identify the anointed of verse 2 with the collective entity of the people of Israel. The People of Israel as God’s Anointed and Its Enemies A characteristic example of this approach which is part and parcel of the rabbinic explanation of Psalm 2, is to be found in a passage of the Midrash on Psalms. The first line: ‘Why do the nations conspire?’ is interpreted as a complaint of the righteous against God, which is for the midrash a reason to ask whether they have the right to do so. When a man says to his friend: ‘Why do you do this or that?’ the friend gets angry. But when the righteous complain against God about the

42 See Theodoret of Cyrus, In Psalm 2,3 (PG 80, 876C–877A). Cf. Rondeau, Les commentaires patristiques, II.282.

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nations, God does not get angry and the righteous are not punished. Why not? Because the righteous seek no boon for themselves, but only for the children of Israel (MidrPss 2:2). The explanation perceives a distinction between the victim of the conspiracy (the people of Israel), and the speaker of the first line (the righteous). It implicitly acknowledges that not all Israel is righteous, but, in spite of this, Israel as a whole is identified with the anointed (and this is why God approves of the protest and complaint of the righteous who intercede on behalf of other members of the community). Another interesting example is provided by the Mekhilta de Rabbi Ishmael (Shirata 7). This text locates the psalm at the moment of the song at the Red Sea after the people of Israel had been rescued from the Egyptians. The Pharaoh boasts that he will pursue them and will overtake them and divide the spoil (Ex 15:9), but ‘Thou, O Lord shall laugh’ (ibidem). In the same vein ‘the nations conspire . . . let us break their bonds asunder . . . but He that sits in heaven laughs’ (Ps 2:1–4). This midrash is rather succinct. Why would the nations wish to break their bonds? Whose bonds are meant? Pharaoh and the Egyptians are presented as tyrannical enemies who want to prevent Israel from fulfilling the commandments, ‘the bonds and cords’. Here the experience both of the Maccabean martyrs and of the Roman oppression may have contributed to that idea, projected onto the period of slavery in Egypt. Even an anti-Christian tendency cannot be excluded. Still, the anachronism of this midrash is clear, as the people of Israel at the time of the Exodus had not yet received the Torah! In an elaboration of the role of Pharaoh, the following midrash separates his doings from the conspiracy of the nations. Pharaoh tried to kill both Israel and its offspring. Similarly, Gog and Magog both fight ‘against the Lord and against his anointed’. The train of thought is quite twisted, but a clear distinction is made between the doings of Pharaoh in the past and of Gog and Magog in the future (Esther Rabbah 7:23). Only that last eschatological battle is dealt with in Psalm 2, according to this midrash.43 We notice how the collective notion of the people of Israel as anointed is combined with the location of the psalm in the future of the

43 With ‘eschatological’ we mean that the scene of the psalm is envisaged in the future, in the eschaton, not that this interpretation always entails a belief in a personal Messiah.

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eschaton. Rabbinic tradition neither draws upon the pre-Christian Jewish notion of only a select group within Israel that is elected, nor upon the equally Jewish idea of wicked leaders within the Jewish people and of the battle against the anointed as an imminent reality. Undoubtedly, the development of Christian exegesis of this Psalm, claiming Christ as the anointed one, persecuted by Jewish leaders and their people (together with the Romans), was one of the principal factors which instigated this shift in Jewish interpretation.44 Curiously, it emerges that certain pre-Christian Jewish notions, such as criticism of wicked leaders have been preserved in Christianity better than in Judaism. The classical dichotomy between Jewish and Christian concepts should therefore be refined in a dialectical relationship: early Jewish notions have influenced early Christian ideas and were subsequently suppressed by rabbinic Judaism. This explains why early Christianity often contains old Jewish themes and motives—be it utterly transformed—which have disappeared in rabbinic Judaism. Traces of a Personal Messiah The notion of a personal messiah is not wholly absent in rabbinic interpretations of Psalm 2. The most explicit connection between Psalm 2 and the personal Messiah dates from the early rabbinic period, as the following Talmudic dictum demonstrates. In a famous digression on the Messiah and the Evil Inclination, the Rabbis teach:45 The Holy One, blessed be He, will say to the Messiah the son of David, may he reveal himself speedily in our days: ‘Ask of me anything and I will give it to you’, as it is said: I will tell of the decree. This day I have begotten thee, ask of me and I will give the nations for thy inheritance (Ps 2:7–8). But when he will see that the Messiah the son of Joseph is slain, he will say to Him: ‘Lord of the universe, I ask of thee only the gift of life’. As to life, He would answer him, ‘Your father David has already

Compare how the metaphor of the winepress becomes a bone of contention between Jews and Christians, Jews condemning Christians by it, no doubt in reaction to Christian appropriation of the metaphor of the winepress to condemn Judaism. See J. Schwartz, ‘A Holy People in the Winepress: Treading the Grapes and Holiness’, M. Poorthuis & J., Schwartz (eds), A Holy People: Jewish and Christian Perspectives on Religious Communal Existence, Leiden 2006, 39–51, esp. 45. 45 b.Suk 52a. 44

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gerard rouwhorst and marcel poorthuis prophesied this about you’, it is said: He asked life of thee, Thou gavest it him, length of days for even and ever (Ps 21:5).46

The tension between the Messiah who will wage battles for Israel and God, and the Messiah as harbinger of peace, is here resolved by introducing two figures: the Messiah son of Joseph who will fight and will be slain, and the Messiah son of David, who will be the king of peace. This quotation from the Talmud can probably be dated before 200 ce, as the introduction indicates a tannaitic provenance. The Messiah son of Joseph, belonging to the tribe of Ephraim, is known from other Talmudic texts as well (see b.Sanh 98b). In later midrash texts, his whereabouts are dealt with in more detail (see Pirqe de Rabbi Eliezer 18, again connected to Psalm 2:2). We would not dare to be as outspoken as Israel Yuval who identifies the rabbinic son of Joseph with Jesus son of Joseph. Still, we have to admit that there are striking similarities between both personages. The rabbinic idea of the son of David as the real Messiah of peace, reigning after the death of the son of Joseph, would reflect Jewish polemic against the Christian persuasion of their Messiah, Jesus Christ risen from the death. In this respect it is noteworthy that especially in the late midrash Pesiqta Rabbati (seventh century or later), the description of the Messiah named Ephraim (son of Joseph), is highly similar to the Passion narrative, including the use of Psalm 22.47 However, the idea of two Messiahs seems to play no role here, a fact that seems to weaken Yuval’s theory somewhat. The Gentile Proselyte Our next example of rabbinic interpretation again does not know of a personal Messiah. It deals with the curious figure of the gentile proselyte, which will permit us to trace a direct influence from the Church Fathers to this rabbinical motif. Its context is the well-known apologetic description of the (non-Jewish) nations who, upon seeing the benefits of the messianic times, will argue that they will observe the

46 Cf. b.Sanh 92b and J. Heinemann, ‘The Messiah son of Ephraim and the Premature Exodus of the Tribe of Ephraim’, in: L. Landman (ed.), Messianism in the Talmudic Era, New York 1979, 339–53. 47 See I.J. Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, Berkeley 2006, 33–7.

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Torah as well if offered to them anew (b.AZ 3a–b; a different version in TanB Shoftim 9). God will decide to give the nations a chance to build a booth, which is an easy commandment for God does not rule as a tyrant over his creatures (‫ < טרוניא‬θυραννία). However, then it will become clear how the nations will trample down the booths and go away. This is illustrated by the verse: ‘Let us burst their bonds asunder, and cast their cords from us.’ (Ps 2:3). It is an ingenious interpretation, widely differing from the rabbinic one offered above. ‘Their bonds and cords’ are Israel’s indeed, but here the nations have appropriated ‘their bonds’ for themselves! The bonds and cords turn out to be the religious commandments God gave to Israel, although here the heathens as ‘would-be proselytes’ are the spokesmen. In reaction to their behaviour, God will laugh, under reference to Ps 2:4, ‘He that sitteth in heaven laugheth’. In another description of the Messianic times, proselytes-underpressure, i.e. not out of conviction, are described as idol worshippers who nevertheless put on phylacteries and wear fringes. However, when the eschatological battle of Gog and Magog will come about they will be asked: ‘why have you come?’ And they will answer: ‘Against God and His anointed’, as it is said: ‘Why do the nations conspire and the peoples plot in vain?’ (b.AZ 3b). Apparently, according to this interpretation, the ‘plotting in vain’ refers to the calculating motives of the heathens to become proselytes only after they have seen the benefits of it. However, their proselytism will not endure under pressure. This Rabbinic interpretation sees Psalm 2 as a description of the Messianic times, by understanding ‘His anointed’ as referring to a future Messiah, although his exact task may remain obscure. This eschatological moment will be a demasqué, not so much of pagans in general, but especially of those who wish to join Israel only at that moment by putting on the phylacteries, that were initially rejected. This will be of no avail, because in the end these opportunistic proselytes will throw away their yoke of the commandments and will turn themselves against God and his Messiah. In search of the context of this midrash, we might wonder what kind of proselytes are meant here. These curious people first reject bonds and yoke, i.e. they first refuse to acknowledge the significance of the commandments. In the future they will try to take upon themselves at least some of the commandments but they will not succeed. Then they will throw off the bonds once more. Obviously, this cannot refer to gentiles as such who do not have a stake in the commandments at all.

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Undoubtedly, Christians are intended here who argue that the validity of bonds and yoke has been abolished, a widespread theologoumenon from the second century onward. But we can even be more precise in locating this Christian conviction. Tertullian (and after him Cyprian, Eusebius of Caesarea and Theodoret) read exactly the verses 2–3 of this same psalm as the Christian rejection of the ceremonial laws, as we have seen earlier! There is no doubt then that this rather twisted argument in the midrash is directed not to gentiles as such, but to Christianity. This midrash appears to be fully aware of the Christian exploitation of this psalm verse. The rebuttal from Jewish side becomes now even more poignant, for those proselytes who abolished the ceremonial laws can indeed be identified with those Christians who argued from the same Psalm 2:3 that the ceremonial law was abolished. Such an intimate knowledge at the Jewish side of this early Patristic testimony in Tertullian, is not at all improbable, since there are several proofs of a direct contact between this Christian author and Jewish spokesmen in the city of Carthago.48 The midrashic argument remains more or less incomprehensible without assuming this historical influence of Christian interpretations of this same psalm verse. Apparently, these verses from Psalm 2 constituted a bone of contention between Jews and Christians in presumably oral interactions. Israel as God’s Anointed In the Aggadat Bereshit 2, the context is likewise the Messianic times of Gog and Magog.49 Whereas the wicked ones in the past stood up against the people of Israel and left God in peace, Gog wants to go against God and His anointed simultaneously, hence: ‘the rulers plot

48 While dating Tertullian’s Adversus Marcionem to around 210 ce, the midrash might be dated at the end of the third century. See for Tertullian’s interaction with Judaism, mainly orally: C. Aziza, Tertullien et le Judaisme, Nice 1977. A clear proof of interaction is Tertullian on the gold and silver from Egypt (Adversus Marcionem 2: 20), to be compared with b.Sanh 91a and parr. On Jewish presence in Carthago, see E. Schürer et alii, The History of the Jewish People, III.1, Edinburgh 1986, 63. 49 See for this midrash, which is dated to the tenth century ce, L. Teugels, Aggadat Bereshit: Translated from the Hebrew with Introduction and Notes ( JCP 4), Leiden 2001. Psalm 2 in connection with Gog and Magog plays an important role in Jewish apocalypses after the rise of Islam, such as the Otot of Rabbi Simon bar Yohai, Aggadat HaMashiach, and Midrash Wa-yosha. See J.C. Reeves, Trajectories in Near Eastern Apocalyptic, Leiden 2006.

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against God and His anointed’ (Ps 2:2). It should be observed that here ‘the anointed’ cannot be an individual but must refer to a collective entity. We may detect here a similarity with the Qumranic text quoted earlier. Still, here the collective entity concerns all of the people of Israel, not just an elect group, as might have been the case in Qumran. Hence, there is no polemic against a supposedly unworthy priesthood in Jerusalem, as we saw in earlier texts, both from Qumran and the pseudepigraphic Psalms of Solomon. This midrash then sees a parallel between the persecution of the Jewish people (‘the anointed’) and the denial of the God of Israel. Although the midrash Aggadat Bereshit contains some anti-Christian elements, it is difficult to assess this in this particular instance.50 Still, the persistent identification of the Messiah with the collectivity of the people of Israel is noteworthy.51 Equally noteworthy is the persistent location of the psalm in the eschaton. Although Theodore of Mopsuestia knew of Jewish interpretations that identify God’s anointed with a past hero such as king David, we do not find a trace of that line of interpretation in the midrash. Still, both lines can be explained out of the same urge to refute a christological interpretation of the psalm.52 Biblical past and remote messianic future both serve to repudiate Christianity’s claim of fulfilment in the not so distant past. The following midrash, already quoted in part before, heightens the apocalyptic atmosphere still more. Again ‘the anointed’ is a collective entity of the whole people of Israel, as we saw before, without any reference to ‘wicked leaders’. The wicked are firmly located outside the people, at least according to rabbinic perception. Cain, Esau, and Pharaoh were fools, according to this midrash, because they did not reckon with Israel’s offspring when they persecuted the people of Israel. Slightly shifting the argument, the midrash proceeds with Gog and Magog, both eschatological enemies of Israel, who want to be cleverer than these biblical arch-enemies. They realize that Israel has a protector (‫ < פטרון‬Greek πάτρων) in heaven, and state: 50 See for anti-Christian elements in the Aggadat Bereshit: L. Teugels, ‘The Background of the anti-Christian Polemics in Aggadat Bereshit’, JSJ 30 (1999), 178–208. 51 Compare the later Jewish interpretation of the Suffering Servant as a collective identity, in reaction to the Christian application of it to Christ. 52 In the midrash on Psalm 72, these two lines go along together. See M. Poorthuis, ‘King Solomon and the psalms 72 and 24 in the debate between Jews and Christians’, in: A. Gerhards & C. Leonhard (eds), Jewish and Christian Liturgy and Worship ( JCP 15), Leiden 2007, 257–78.

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gerard rouwhorst and marcel poorthuis I will not act thus but I will first join issue with their protector and then I will join issue with them. Hence it is written: ‘The kings of the earth stand up and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord and His anointed’ (Ps 2:2).

In an apocalyptic vein, God answers: Wretch, do you come to join issue with Me? How many hosts are at My service, how many lightnings, how many thunders, as it is said: The Lord thundered with great thunder (1 Sam 7:10); how many Seraphim and how many angels! But My might shall go out and wage war with you, as it is said: ‘Then shall the Lord go out and fight the nations’ (Zech. 14:3). (Esther Rabbah 7:23; cf. Leviticus Rabbah 27:11)

The psalm is here transformed into an apocalyptic imagery of the End of Times, with no doubt as to the final victory of all of the people of Israel. Not the Messiah but God himself appears here as a warrior who wages battles for His people. Just like in the case of Abraham, four kings engaged (‫ < זוג‬ζευγον) him in battle, the nations engage Israel in battle. But the Holy One will fight for Israel, just as He did for Abraham (TanB lekh lekha 12). Traces of a self-critical concept of eschatological judgment, known from the Hebrew Bible, or of Jewish criticism of Jewish leaders as we encountered them in pseudepigraphic and Qumran literature are wholly absent in this midrash: the anointed is the whole of the Jewish people.53 Again we may assume that Christian criticism of Jewish leadership and of the presumed ‘stubbornness’ of the Jewish people, causing their rejection as chosen people, has favoured this inner-Jewish transformation from a judgment of people and its leaders towards a concept of salvation for the whole people of Israel. God and His Anointed In another digression, the midrash deals with the relationship proper between the Holy One and His anointed. The heathen is likened to someone who hates the king but cannot master him. What did he do? He went to the king’s statue and was about to cast it down, when

53 Compare how rabbi Simlai transforms the the prophecy of doom of Amos 5:18 into a judgment for the gentiles (read: the Christians) and into salvation for Israel (b.Sanh 98b). The Christian counterpart to such transformation of Biblical prophecy from self-criticism to condemnation of the opponent can be found in the Epistle of Barnabas 2–3.

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fear of the king seized him lest he should be slain. He then decides to undermine the wall beneath. (ExodR 51:5). This does not only explain the line: ‘against the Lord and His anointed’, but also throws new light upon the subsequent verse: ‘Let us burst their bonds asunder, and cast their cords from us’ (Ps 2:3). This midrash, in the name of rabbi Hiyya bar Abba (end of the third century ce), compares the anointed, again Israel, to the statue of the king. This serves to illustrate the strategy of the enemy not to attack Israel directly, but to weaken its religious existence (‘to undermine the wall’) by forbidding a life according to the Torah.54 Here the ‘bonds and cords’ are Israel’s own religious obligations! Again, it is striking that ‘the anointed’ does not refer to an individual Messianic figure, although that interpretation would be ready at hand. The suppression of an individual Messianic figure in favour of the collective entity of the people of Israel as anointed can only be explained as a conscious, be it a veiled, polemic against christocentric interpretations of this same psalm. A striking example of the same tendency is provided by the following midrash, which argues, surprisingly, that the person referred to in Ps 2:7 is not God’s son! God does not say: ‘I have a son’, but: ‘Thou art like a son to me’, as when a master wishing to give pleasure to his slave, says to him: ‘Thou art as dear to me as a son’.55

The expression, although meant as praise, does not indicate a real status as son!56 The Christian application of this verse as referring to Jesus’ sonship is widely attested from the New Testament onwards and apparently has not escaped Jewish eyes or rather ears.57

54 See for a similar concept the parable about the fox who invites the fish to live together with him on land. The fish answers that he is already in danger in the water, how much more so on land. Rabbi Akiba tells this parable to explain his continuation of the study of Torah, despite the Roman sanction of the death penalty (b.Ber 61b). 55 A little earlier, this midrash states that the children of Israel are called ‘son’ in Ps 2:7, again in conformity with the tendency in later Rabbinic texts to diminish the significance of a personal Messiah. Even the ‘son of man’ in Daniel 7:13 is demythologized in its application to Israel! See MidrPss 2:8. 56 The other device, to shift the sonship to the collective identity of the people of Israel, under reference to Exod 4:22, is common in rabbinic literature. 57 In the editio princeps, the Yalqut Shimoni on psalm 2 has actually preserved an anti-Christian application which was subsequently removed by Christian censorship. See D. Hayman, Meqorot Yalqut Shimoni, part 2, Jerusalem 1965, 234.

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gerard rouwhorst and marcel poorthuis A Parable of the Final Judgment

An apocalyptic setting combined with an outright polemic against Christianity can be detected in the following parable of the straw, the chaff and the stubble. In contrast with the previous midrash, here Israel’s privileged position is emphasized, whereas the obvious notion of ‘son’ has been interpreted away. The straw, the staff and the stubble were arguing that it was for their sake that the ground had been sown. The wheat said: ‘Wait until the threshing times comes’. When it turned out that the farmer scattered the chaff to the winds, he threw the straw upon the floor and the stubble he cast into the fire. The wheat he piled up in a heap and all passersby when they saw it kissed it, as it says: ‘Kiss ye the corn’ (Ps 2:12).58 In the application, the polemical context is clear: Some of the nations say: ‘We are Israel and for our sake the world was created’, and others say: ‘We are Israel and for our sake the world was created’. Says Israel to them: ‘Wait until the day of the Holy One blessed be He, comes, and we shall see for whose sake the world was created’ (CantR 7:3).

This rather far-fetched interpretation of Ps 2:12 points to complications in the biblical text. The verse is in some translations understood as: ‘yearn for purity’ (based on the meaning ‘pure’ of the word ‫)בר‬, whereas the RSV reads ‘‫ ’בר‬as the beginning of ‘‫’ברגליו‬, ‘his feet’. Still, the meaning of this interpretation can be understood from the psalm’s general apocalyptic setting. The verse: ‘kiss the corn’, is interpreted as Israel’s ultimate vindication over against the nations. Israel is the corn, the gentiles (i.e. the Christians) are only chaff and stubble, although they pretend to be the corn. The ‘nations’ can hardly be interpreted as gentiles in general, but are here clearly identified with the Christian church, given the latter’s claim to be the true Israel! The idea that the world was created on behalf of the Christians can be found in several early Christian texts and is itself a transformation of a Jewish idea.59 Although the ultimate condemnation of the heathens is unambiguous, rabbinic tradition sometimes hesitates at the consequences. The

58 The pun-like use of the word ‘bar’ is highly intricate, as it can refer to ‘corn’, to ‘son’ and to ‘pure’, which is itself interpreted as the pure teaching of the Torah (LXX: παιδεια; Vulgate: disciplina). See Maiberger, ‘Das Verständnis von Psalm 2’, 111ff. 59 See Epistle to Diognete 6:7; Aristides, Apology 16, both from the second century ce.

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condemnation seems to negate freedom of action and the possibility of repentance, concepts central to the rabbinic tradition. This explains an equally far-fetched explanation encountered in Midrash Psalms that the ‘smashing of the pottery’ concerns clay not yet baked, so that a better pottery (read: a change of fate for the better), remains possible.60 This same idea might provide the background for the use of the LXX reading of Ps 2:9, ‘he will herd (ποιµαίνω) the nations with an iron rod’. Rv 2:26–27 uses the same verb and manages herewith to avoid the idea of a total destruction of the gentiles.61 Surprisingly, the anointed here appears not as an individual but: ‘Everyone who conquers and continues to do My works to the end, I will give authority over the nations; to herd them with an iron rod, as when clay pots are shattered’ (Rv 2:26–27). Like in the Qumran Florilegium and in several rabbinic texts, ‘the anointed’ is interpreted in this text from Revelation as the community of true believers.62 Elsewhere the victory belongs to ‘the Lord and His anointed’ (Rv 11:15), whose arch-enemies are the ‘kings of the earth’ (Rv 19:19), likewise inspired upon Psalm 2. It is surprising how similar Revelation is to later Jewish interpretations as condensed in the midrash, especially in its eschatological outlook, wholly lacking in all other Christian texts. Even as an ultimately Christian document, Revelation has preserved the eschatological perspective. Conclusion The earliest Jewish interpretations of Psalm 2 display a tension within the Jewish people: wicked ( Jewish) leaders together with lawless pagans are the enemies of the anointed, whether the chosen ones or the chosen

60 R. Isaac said: It is not said: ‘an earthen vessel’, but ‘a potter’s vessel’, which can be reshaped before being put through the fire. (GenR 14:7; MidrPss 2:11). The context, dealing with the notion of resurrection connected to pottery that can be reshaped, (MidrPss 2:11) is secondary. 61 See Moyise, ‘The Psalms in the Book of Revelation’, 231–34, who points to the similarity between ‫ = רעה‬to shepherd, and ‫ = רצצ‬to shatter, without however drawing the analogy with the midrash quoted above. 62 Rev 12:5 (the child) and 19:15 (the white horseman) likewise rule with an iron rod, probably indicating Christ. In addition, there might be a connection between the three woes (Rev 8:13; 9:12) and MidrPss 2:9, where Rav Huna states that suffering is divided in three portions: one for the Patriarchs, one for the Roman persecution and one for the Messiah.

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individual. This breach within the Jewish people is heightened even more in the New Testament application of this psalm to the suffering of Christ. The imminent eschatological outlook, already present in Qumran and pseudepigraphical works, is transformed into a description of present reality, embodied in the suffering and subsequent vindication of God’s anointed, Christ. Both the application of Psalm 2 to a personal Messiah and the reading of the psalm as a scenario of present realities disappear completely in subsequent rabbinic interpretations. The individual concept of the anointed as the Messiah in older layers of rabbinic interpretation, and even clearer in pre-rabbinic pseudepigraphic Jewish literature, is taken over by the collective notion of the people of Israel in later Jewish literature. There, the people of Israel as such are the anointed, forming a unified chosen entity without any reference to unworthy leaders or a misbehaving people, whereas the pagans are probably more often the Christians than the gentiles, even if this is not explicitly stated and only allusion is made to it. All this may indicate the shift from first century Judaism with its rival parties and its resistance against the Roman occupation, to the Byzantine period with Christianity as the wielder of power. Moreover, Psalm 2 is interpreted in post-biblical Jewish tradition as a future apocalyptic/Messianic event, rather than as an episode from the past. Not once we found a reference to David as the subject of the psalm. This is all the more surprising since in other instances rabbinic tradition does not hesitate to connect psalms to biblical figures (e.g. Psalm 22 to Esther; Psalm 110 to David or Abraham; Psalm 24 and 72 to Solomon).63 The reason might be that the ‘raging of the nations’ could not so easily be associated with rabbinic perspectives on David’s reign, which was supposed to be one of peace and prosperity. We have to wait until the Middle Ages, before Jewish exegetes like Rashi, Ibn Ezra and Kimhi point to David’s anointing and his battle with the Philistines as the proper context for this psalm.64 Our research has demonstrated that the more traditional picture of Christianity as wholly dependent upon Judaism no longer stands up to

63 See M. Poorthuis, ‘King Solomon and the psalms 72 and 24 in the debate between Jews and Christians’. 64 See M. Signer, ‘Kings/Messiah: Rashi’s exegesis of Psalm 2’, Prooftexts 3/3 (1983), 273–78.

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critical historical research. Instead of a father–son or mother–daughter relationship, the image of two quarrelling sisters, or twin brothers, or the elder brother teaching the younger, might be coined. The theological implications of such metaphors still need to be thought over thoroughly, both on the Christian side and on the Jewish side. Our psalm offers a wonderful opportunity for that, both in its clashes of interpretations and in its perspectives of a Messianic future. Seen from this perspective, the later Jewish emphasis upon the collective identity of Israel as the anointed can be seen as a rebuttal of the Christian claim to be the true Israel combined with the accusation that the Jews and their leaders, together with the Romans and Pilate, had been responsible for the death of Jesus. This accusation had already been made in Acts but it was carried further by the Church Fathers and remained in full force, whereas, incidentally, from Eusebius of Caesarea onwards, the accusations against the Romans tended to become less sharp.65 The Christian interpretation of this psalm pointed to different layers. Tertullian and Cyprian consciously took issue with Jewish ceremonial practices and defended the abolishment of the ceremonial laws as the ‘breaking of the bonds and the yoke’. In response, the midrash could be read as a conscious rebuttal of that claim. Likewise the Christian claim to recognize Jesus as Son of God met with polemics in the midrash, clearly recognizable as such because of its farfetched character. Other Christian interpretations developed a less historical-polemical attitude, but aimed at the application of the psalm to the human soul, freed from bondage of sin and death, just as Christ was freed from bondage of death by descending into the nether world. Here salvation presents itself simultaneously as individual and as encompassing all of human nature, by transforming it into divine life. The historical dimensions tend to recede into the background however. From a theological point of view, the interpretations of this psalm pose provoking questions concerning the Jewish and Christian identities. The Christian conviction that history has met its fulfilment in Christ, faces the challenge of how to deal with a world that still ‘lies in chains’. This should not be seen as a rebuttal of the Christian faith as such, although in Jewish-Christian dialogue this is sometimes brought 65 See in particular Eusebius, In Ps. II, 9 (PG 24, 89). The conversion of Constantine and the Roman Empire prompted Eusebius to undertake a wholesale revision of the role of the Romans who instead of being the persecutors of the Christians, are now subduing the enemies of the Church with an iron rod.

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forward (hereby denying human freedom to answer the Messianic call of Christ). It should rather be seen as an appeal to Christians to live up to their redeemed existence. The Jewish expectation of the Messianic future on the other hand and the indispensable role of the Jewish people therein, should not be seen as a mere error—although Christianity often interpreted it as such—but rather as a reminder that real salvation does not occur outside history and is not a mere individual matter. The different attitudes taken by Christians and Jews towards salvation history: the former imitating Christ, the latter observing God’s commandments, have been seen as mutually incompatible in all of the interpretations of Psalm 2 surveyed above, be they Jewish or Christian. As such, the history of the interpretation of the psalm documents a sad history of mutual denial, which infringes upon the Messianic perspective of the psalm both for Jews and for Christians. A second theological challenge to both Christianity and Judaism concerns the highly apocalyptic outlook of Psalm 2. The world seems to be divided into God and His anointed on the one hand, surrounded by enemies and pagans on the other hand. This dichotomy between good and evil may lead to a dangerous vindication of oneself and to demonizing the ‘others’. Fortunately, many other psalms contain a strong self-criticism, which ‘counterbalances’, as it were, this apocalyptic psalm. The apocalyptic outlook of Psalm 2 may be understandable from the position of a persecuted minority, but if it is maintained when this minority attains a position of power, the risk of abusing God’s authority for one’s own benefit is just around the corner. Especially in concrete political situations, this danger looms large. Thus, it may happen that the psalm is made the guiding principle on the Israeli side for their attitude towards the Palestinians and towards the world at large.66 As for the Christians, they definitely quite often did not resist the temptation of dividing the world into the realm of light and the realm of darkness, comfortably locating themselves in the former and the Jews in the latter. Christians should realize that the commemoration of the death and resurrection of Christ should not incite

66 At the Christian side especially fundamentalist groups are prone to apply this Psalm 2 to the political situation of Israel in the Middle East.

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a search for old and new ‘enemies’ of Christ, but should invite a truly redeemed Christian life for the benefit of all mankind. The theological challenge for both Christianity and Judaism will undoubtedly be the acceptance of religious difference as a mutual exhortation to a ‘good competition’ on the road to God’s future.

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PART SIX

THE DEVELOPMENT OF JEWISH LITERATURE

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THE COMPOSITION OF PRAYERS AND SONGS IN PHILO’S DE VITA CONTEMPLATIVA Judith H. Newman This essay takes up a rather well-worn subject in the study of Philo by considering the Therapeutae of Philo in De Vita Contemplativa. I want to focus on a topic that has been hitherto rather neglected however, that is, the nature of their liturgical compositions and how these various and sundry hymns and prayers mentioned in the treatise are related to their performance in a ritual setting, in this case the Therapeutae’s chief feast of Pentecost according to Philo.1 As a reclusive learned Jewish voluntary group living according to a prescribed code of behavior particularly with regard to regular prayer and study, the Therapeutae can fruitfully be compared with the Qumran community. For want of space, I will focus here chiefly on the Therapeutae, but both groups use ritual performances as a means of extending and reinforcing their traditions which concomitantly stimulates the production of scripture. In the manner of shorthand, we might label this phenomenon ‘rites for holy writ’ but in order not to obscure the important dimension of orality involved in the ritual process, we will adopt a more cumbersome but accurate academic term for this phenomenon: the ‘ritualization of scholasticism’. The word ‘ritual’ itself begs elaboration if we are to consider it from a cultural anthropological perspective. Ritual studies has been gaining ground in recent years as a means for analyzing certain experiential dimensions of religious culture in antiquity.2 Without unpacking any more theory than necessary in the brief compass of this

1 I am very pleased to offer this article in honor of my esteemed colleague Pieter van der Horst, whose broad-ranging knowledge of Jewish life and prayer culture in GrecoRoman antiquity, including the neglected subject of the role of women, has informed my own work in countless ways. I would also like to thank the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study for their generous support in offering both Pieter and me fellowships during 2006–2007 to complete work on our commentary on early Jewish prayers in Greek and in whose gracious quarters this article was researched and written. 2 The launching of the Journal of Ritual Studies in 1987 is one bellwether of interest and influence. C. Bell’s work has had a seminal impact on the field of religious studies with her two books Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, Oxford 1997, and Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice, Oxford 1992.

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essay, let me indicate that I understand ritual along the lines of Roy Rappaport, as ‘the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not entirely encoded by the performers’.3 I would also add as one point of elaboration that ritual contains a superabundance of meaning that exceeds the literal words and manifest actions that comprise it, hence it contains ‘encoding’ that must be understood within a larger cultural nexus. Contemporary purchase on ‘decoding’ ritual performances from antiquity is of course limited by historical and cultural distance, and the possibility of multiple ‘decodings’ should be admitted at the outset depending upon the definition and delineation of ritual and which dimension of ritual is stressed. So for example, whereas Jonathan Z. Smith emphasizes sacred place as the primary and necessary focus for ritual, I would stress that ritual involves an interaction of three elements: space, time, and energy.4 For the purposes of this essay I use the term ‘ritualization of scholasticism’ to mean the enshrouding of a practice or set of practices—in this case, the production of scripture—in formal ceremonial and other ritual acts which invests the practice/s with a sacrosanct character and legitimacy for the community among which it is performed, and perhaps extending beyond the immediate community to associated groups. The aim of the broader study of which this essay is part is to determine whether there are similarities between the ways in which learned Jewish groups, whether we identify them as voluntary associations along a Greco-Roman model, or sectarians according to a sociological construction of that term, conducted their rituals that might shed light on the composition and production of scripture in the first century bce when oral and written scriptural traditions were interacting in vital ways. Such an understanding of ritual context in relation to textual production stands in contrast to the recent attempts

3 R.A. Rappaport offers a condensed definition of ritual which he proceeds to expound in the course of his lengthy book, Ritual and Religion in the Making of Humanity, Cambridge 1999, 24. I depart from his understanding of ritual at various points, most significantly in his understanding of what he calls ‘the numinous’. Rappaport holds that ‘the numinous’ is somehow generated by ritual. I would otherwise define ‘the numinous’ as non-material energy, sometimes referred to as spirit, that is made available in uniquely channeled ways through ritual and liturgical orders. His definition nonetheless offers a good initial framework for evaluating the practices of the Therapeutae. 4 Smith’s theory of ritual space is developed in his collection of essays, J.Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward Theory In Ritual, Chicago 1987. See also the evaluation of R.L. Grimes, ‘Jonathan Z. Smith’s Theory of Ritual Space’, Religion 29 (1999), 261–73.

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of William Schneidewind and David Carr to describe the process of scriptural production and canon formation primarily as a scribal phenomenon closely linked to centralized state power.5 I propose that compositional practices closely linked to highly ritualized settings stand in tension with other forms of scholasticism, namely scribalism, as a means of composing and preserving sacred traditions and texts in the first and second centuries bce. Moreover we can see ongoing sectarian and inter-Judaic rivalries played out through the production of texts by means of pseudepigraphic attribution but in an even greater measure by the nuanced interpretation of scriptural tradition contained in new compositions and reedited versions of old compositions. In our more narrow focus, we will first consider the group’s daily practices of ritualized scholasticism, then evaluate the Therapeutae’s ritual practices in their celebration of Pentecost on the seventh Sabbath, in order to provide the necessary context for understanding the composition of hymns and prayers in their pluriform state. Before turning to a closer examination of the treatise, it warrants mentioning that Philo’s description of the Therapeutae in the treatise is likely draped in an apologetic scrim through which we see the group. I assume that Philo’s portrayal of the Therapeutae has historical veracity, if however idealized and reflecting his own various interests in writing De Vita Contemplativa. The Therapeutae’s Daily Practices of Ritualized Scholasticism The composition of the hymns during the ‘great feast’ of Pentecost cannot be isolated from the rest of the Therapeutae’s activities, but is

5 W.M. Schniedewind, How the Bible Became a Book, Cambridge 2004 and D.M. Carr, Writing on the Tablet of the Heart, Oxford 2005. Schniedewind argues that the making of books and the development of their authority was primarily rooted in their close connection to the central institutions of state and temple from the pre-exilic period onward. David Carr traces the emergence and stabilization of the Hebrew Scriptures, what he refers to as a ‘hardened Hebrew collection’ of scripture to the second century bce attempts by the Hasmonean dynasty in an ‘education-enculturation’ process that was meant to create a Jewish identity as a counterpart to Hellenistic forms of textuality. See in particular chapter 11, 253–85. His argument is problematic in the sense that the Homeric and classical Greek corpus did not play a role in Greco-Roman culture analogous to the Hebrew Scriptures in early Judaism. We may also point out that while Carr recognized the role of priests as teachers in such an education process, he curiously neglects their cultic or liturgical role in the process of scripture ‘hardening’ let alone scripture production.

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closely related. How did they live their lives on the outskirts of Alexandria? Philo, of course, provides us only selected details about the group’s activities in De Vita Contemplativa. So, for example, although Philo notes their abstemious diet and their general ascetic habits, he gives no explicit indication aside from a description of some of their practices whether or not the group follows some particular form of halakah. We can nonetheless piece together some essential information. On a daily basis, each member of the group lives in isolation in her or his own house in which she or he ‘practices philosophy’ to use Philo’s phrasing.6 Each house contains its own shrine, which Philo refers to as a ‘sanctuary’ (σεµνεῖον) and ‘cubicle’ (µοναστήριον). These words are depicted as the group’s own terminology because Philo glosses them using his own term, ‘holy room’ (οἴκηµα ἱερόν) (Vit. cont. 25).7 The shrine was a place for contemplation and devotion. Each member takes into her sanctuary ‘laws (νόµοι), oracles (λόγοι) delivered through the mouth of prophets, hymns and anything else that helps with their ultimate end (τελειοῦνται) of perfecting their knowledge and piety’ (Vit. cont. 26). Using the language of mystery cults, Philo describes the purpose of the rooms as the place of initiation into the mysteries for the sanctified life in which these teachings are internalized by the members. In other words, Philo is describing part of a process of scholasticism, one in which study of the tradition encompasses not just the holy scriptures ( ἱερὰ γράµµατα) but also the writings of their founders, who he says left for their successors models of allegorical interpretation as

6 On the basis of Philo’s description in Vit. cont. and comparative evidence of Egyptian monasteries in the vicinity of Lake Mareotis where the Therapeutae are said to have settled, P. Richardson has reconstructed the typical architecture of the group—‘Philo and Eusebius on Monasteries and Monasticism’, in: P. Richardson, Building Jewish in the Roman East, Waco 2006, 151–64 [reprinted from B. McLean (ed.), Origins and Method: New Understandings of Judaism and Early Christianity. Essays in Honour of John C. Hurd Jr., Sheffield 1993, 334–59]. 7 Philo’s gloss reflects his own interpretation in which he describes the group’s activities in language both of the cult and philosophy. Cult and philosophy were understood as two quite distinct spheres in antiquity, one pertaining to the public veneration of the gods and sacrificial offerings in temples; the other to the ethical and philosophical dimension of life followed often in different schools. Using both cult and philosophy results in a rhetorical fusion that reflects Philo’s own view that the two are complementary. See J.E. Taylor, Jewish Women Philosophers of First-Century Alexandria: Philo’s ‘Therapeutae’ Reconsidered, Oxford 2003, 106.

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memorials (µνηµεῖα) (Vit. cont. 29). The founders are thus said to have imparted methods for interpretation. The teachings are interiorized to such a degree that Philo states that even during sleep while dreaming they give voice to the decrees of their ‘holy philosophy’ (Vit. cont. 26) in a kind of autonomic functioning. The scholastic training is thus a process of anamnesis, in which they keep the memory of God alive by continual repetition and study. Divine teaching as well as the proper way to interpret it thus become an ever-present and retrievable resource. Moreover, such isolated immersion in the holy writings also generates the members’ own authorship. Part of their daily activity is also to compose hymns and lyric odes (ἄσµατα και ὕµνος) which are written down with musical notation.8 Philo notes their ordinary Sabbath observance of a communal gathering and teaching, which does not include a banquet, but on the Sabbath their strict ascetical practices are relaxed to a degree. We may note at this juncture that Philo does not mention the composition of scripture as a part of the normal Sabbath routine for the Therapeutae. In their customary Sabbath observance, the group at Mareotis seems to have been like other Jewish groups that Philo describes, in which the Sabbath is observed by communal study and cessation from normal work habits.9 After describing in some detail the Therapeutae’s way of life at the beginning of the treatise, Philo turns to discuss their festal celebration on Pentecost which includes its own symposium.10 Yet before he describes the Therapeutae’s great feast, Philo devotes roughly a quarter of the treatise (Vit. cont. 40–63) to a thorough denigration of the excesses of Greek symposia, described at length in explicit and graphic terms. As Maren Niehoff has argued, in doing so, Philo adopts a typical Roman critique of Greek licentiousness and pederasty at such symposia.11 This description provides the necessary rhetorical contrast to his description of the Pentecost celebration of his exemplary Therapeutae.

8 J. Leonhardt notes that ‘ἁσµα, ὕµνος and ᾠδή’ are interchangeable for Philo and that he also uses the term ὕµνος frequently to refer to psalms as well; J. Leonhardt, Jewish Worship in Philo, Tübingen 2001, 157. 9 Cf. Philo’s discussion of Sabbath observance in De Decalogo 96–101; De Vita Mosis 2.209–216; De Specialibus Legibus 2.61–63; Hypothetica 7.10–14. 10 For a broader discussion of the meal of the Therapeutae in the larger context of the Greco-Roman symposium tradition, see M. Klinghardt, Gemeinschaftmahl und Mahlgemeinschaft: Soziologie und Liturgie frühchristlicher Mahlfeiern, Tübingen 1996, 183–216. 11 See M. Niehoff, Philo on Jewish Identity and Culture, Tübingen 2001, 146–50.

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Philo’s description of the Therapeutae’s ‘symposium’ on the eve of Pentecost includes the following elements: As a prelude to events, all recite a prayer said while standing that their feasting might be acceptable to God. Then follows the presider’s teaching on a question in the ‘holy scriptures’ either a question of his own or one posed by someone else. Philo describes this as a slow-paced session conducive to imprinting the lesson on the minds of the audience rather than conducted as a flowery rhetorical demonstration and in so doing he again adopts an apologetic tone. He also indicates that the presider (πρόεδρος) treats ‘the inner meaning conveyed in allegory’ which provides an insight into Philo’s conception of their scriptural interpretation as allegorical: ‘For to these people the whole law book seems to resemble a living creature with the literal ordinances for its body and for its soul the invisible mind laid up in its wording’. (Vit. cont. 78) Philo also depicts the members of the group as raptly engaged with the teaching of the leader. This, too, is an essential part of their scholastic training. The Therapeutae applaud after the speech in anticipation of the second stage of the ceremony in which the presider stands to sing a hymn to God, either a new one of his own composition or an old one of poets of an earlier day. After the presider has finished, each of the members also takes a turn in order, the others listening in contemplative silence as the hymn is sung. Philo mentions a range of sorts of hymns, ‘in many measures and melodies’. Philo’s attention to detail in the discussion of musical composition is in keeping with his own knowledge of music theory and practice of the time. As Jutta Leonhardt has discussed in the context of Philo’s view of worship generally, for Philo, the singing of hymns, that is, words accompanied by music, was a highly regarded activity because through such hymnody mortals might harmonize with the universe, the mind and sense perception perfectly tuned.12

12 See the discussion of Leonhardt, Jewish Worship, 159–74. ‘The sung psalm is the complete form of ἐυχή, which combines both meanings: the prayer as conversation with God and the vow with its aspect of dedicating one’s whole person by singing and praising God’ (p. 174). Her observation that ‘It appears that Philo interprets the biblical text against the background of the singing of the Therapeutae, as his description of Ex. 15 does not correspond to the biblical text.’ (p. 170) ignores the development of interpretive traditions that underlie this and other ‘non-biblical’ interpretations of Philo. On the development of exegetical traditions connected with the song at the Red Sea, see P.E. Enns, ‘A Retelling of the Song of the Sea in Wis 10, 20–21’, Biblica 76 (1995), 1–24; J.L. Kugel, Traditions of the Bible, Cambridge MA 1998, 593–98 and S. Weitzman, Song and Story in Biblical Narrative, Bloomington 1997, 70–2.

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After the performance of the hymns, in a third stage, the Therapeutae dine on an ascetic banquet of bread, water, and hyssop, eaten while reclining on austere wooden couches, men on one side, women on the other.13 The austerity of the meal also rings true in terms of historical veracity, because in this respect its complete departure from Greek symposium meals provides another occasion for an apologetic aside by Philo to his readers not to laugh at the meager meal consumed. In the fourth stage of the ritual, the Therapeutae launch an all-night vigil.14 The men and women stand up in the middle of the banquet hall to form two choirs male and female, the leader of each chosen on the basis of musical ability and esteem. The choirs sing more hymns, and accompanied by this music, they inaugurate choric dance. Philo describes the effect of the dancing as having the inebriating effect of the strong wine of divine love (θεοφιλία) thus comparing it to the actual wine imbibed at the Bacchic rites, in which drunkenness results in loss of control and all manner of debauchery. It seems that Philo wants to downplay any suggestion of ecstatic nature of the dancing, owing to his own understanding of virtue which highlights self-control. Indeed earlier in the treatise, Philo praises the Therapeutae’s self-discipline (ἐγκρατεία) as the foundation on which they build the other virtues (Vit. cont. 34). Yet assuming continuity with other references to choric dance in the Septuagint, one can presume some less inhibited dancing was taking place. Perhaps we should not envision anything as energetic as contemporary ‘moshing’, but think more along the lines of the sema dance of whirling dervishes, those Sufi ascetics who are likewise transported into another psychic state through physical movement. It is significant that the dancing does not take place by individuals in isolation, but is described as being coordinated as part of this pentacontad festival. Such dance generates an inspired communal energy. Radcliffe-Brown’s interpretation of the social effects of ritualized dance among the Adaman Islanders seems to capture what may lie behind Philo’s description: ‘As the dancer loses himself in the dance, as he becomes absorbed in

13 P. Richardson’s article on the site and presumed setting outside of Alexandria includes helpful diagrams of the Therapeutae’s buildings as described by Philo—‘Philo and Eusebius on Monasteries and Monasticism’, Building Jewish, 159. 14 According to G.W.H. Lampe, Philo’s use of the phrase τὴν ἱερὰν παννυχίδα was one factor in Eusebius’ mistaken identification of the Therapeutae as a group of ascetic Christians; see entry for παννυχιδα, A Patristic Greek Lexicon, Oxford 1961, 1003.

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the unified community, he reaches a state of elation in which he feels himself filled with an energy beyond his ordinary state . . . at the same time, finding himself in complete and ecstatic harmony with all the fellow-members of his community’.15 We might add that the Therapeutae’s dance comes as a part of the crescendo of the ritual sequence and as a consequence of preparatory steps. The fifth stage of the ritual occurs as the two choirs join together as one, becoming a single choir, which Philo describes as a mimesis of the choir formed in response to God’s defeat of the Egyptians at the Red Sea (Vit. cont. 85). His own interpretive account of the victory at the Red Sea is three lines long. The song at the Red Sea, both in De Vita Contemplativa and elsewhere in Philo’s writing, is the most important biblical psalm, to which he refers more often than any other psalm.16 The ecstasy or enthusiasm experienced by the Israelites as they witness the wonderful sight and experience of the event (λόγος) at the Red Sea is compared to the experience of the Therapeutae as they enthusiastically dance and sing hymns of thanksgiving in concert. Such enthusiasm is understood elsewhere by Philo to refer to prophetic inspiration, indeed, not only the inspiration of Moses in prophesying, but in Philo’s own role as he understood it as an inspired, and hence prophetic, interpreter of scripture in his own work.17 Philo refers to Moses specifically as a prophet and Miriam as a prophetess in their composition of the hymnody, thus combining the gifts of prophecy and poetry in one, and again illustrating his indebtedness to Greek culture in which the two were thought to be closely linked.18 The communitas generated from the physical movement and music of dance is thus reflected in his exegetical account of all the Israelites singing in ‘one accord’ after their salvation at the Red Sea. The interpretive motif of unified singing and communal dancing, exegetically derived from some problematic elements in the text of Exodus 15, is found in a number of

15 A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, The Andaman Islanders, Glencoe 1964 (first published Cambridge 1922), 252, cited in Rappaport, Ritual and Religion, 221. 16 Leonhardt, Jewish Worship, 173. She mentions De Agricultura 79–82; De Vita Mosis I 180; II 256 to support her contention. 17 J.R. Levison, ‘Philo’s Personal Experience and the Persistence of Prophecy’, in: M.H. Floyd & R.D. Haak (eds), Prophets, Prophecy, and Prophetic Texts in Second Temple Judaism, London 2006, 194–209. 18 On this interconnection also as reflected in the Hebrew literary corpus, see the introduction and varied essays in J.L. Kugel (ed.), Poetry and Prophecy: The Beginnings of a Literary Tradition, Ithaca 1990.

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Second Temple texts, but here it is made manifest in liturgy as inspired songs and ecstatic communal dancing.19 The experience of salvation wrought by God, both for the Israelites at the Red Sea as expressed in Exodus 15 with its songs of Moses and Miriam, and for the Therapeutae in the present, in their anamnesis of the event experiencing the same victory at Pentecost, gives rise to songs of thanksgiving and praise and jubilant dance. The last phase of the celebration occurs as dawn breaks and the revelers turn their bodies toward the east, stretch their hands toward the rising sun, and pray for three things: ‘bright days, knowledge of the truth and the power of keen-sighted thinking’. The morning prayers of the Therepeutae should be understood not simply as the closure of the vigil and the festivities, but also a beginning of the next cycle of daily morning and evening prayer and daily scholastic preparation which Philo first describes toward the beginning of the treatise in Vit. cont. 24–27.20 Having reviewed the daily activities and the activities of the pentecontad celebration of the seventh Sabbath, we may note some essential similarities between ordinary time and festal time in the Therapeutae’s community. Both involve the initial offering of prayer, study of scripture which comprises both Jewish traditions as well as the traditions of the school’s founders, and composition of hymns. But whereas daily life occurs in isolation, and involves the writing down of hymns and psalms with accompanying musical notations, Sabbaths and especially the Sabbath of Sabbaths, are communal performative events which foment a particular kind of inspired energy, a liturgical order which apparently did not involve the immediate use of written materials. There is no mention of reading from scrolls, whether in the presider’s ‘didascalia’ or in the hymnic performance of the presider and the group members. The participants use only voice and movement. The communal dimension of the festival is however necessary for the completion, the perfection of the group’s life and allows Philo to describe the Therapeutae

19 Compare for example the hymn in Judith 16 which alludes to Exodus 15 offered by the victorious Israelites and their dance while approaching the temple after their salvation from the Assyro-Babylonians; for a discussion of these ‘new songs’ in connection with a song of Miriam in 4Q365, see G.J. Brooke, ‘Power to the Powerless: A Long-Lost Song of Miriam’, BAR 20/3 (1994), 62–5. 20 F. Dölger, Sol Salutis: Gebet und Gesang im christlichen Altertum, Münster 1925, 45–6.

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in his closing line, as ‘citizens of heaven and the world,’ (Vit. cont. 90) an exceedingly high accolade for Philo. In such a description, Philo recognizes their realized telos from his perspective, their achievement of an ascetical ideal through ritual behavior that has permitted them an inspired transformation in their manifestation of that prize of all Greek philosophical aspiration, virtue (ἁρετή). The culmination of the celebration of the foundational moment of salvation with its mimetic action by all the members of the Therapeutae makes them all poets, prophets, and performers, men and women alike, as they reenact the victory at the Red Sea and their proper response of harmonized mind and body in thanksgiving to the God who delivered them. The Pluriform Character of the Group’s Compositions Having now reviewed the major features of the Therapeutae’s ‘ritualized scholasticism,’ I want to suggest three salient characteristics of the hymnic compositions that are important for understanding the production of scripture both within the community and further afield. The first is their inspired, interpretive nature. Philo describes the group as allegorizers, though it is unclear whether, or to what degree, that would include the method of scriptural interpretation woven into their compositions.21 In any case, they develop and thus extend earlier scriptural traditions, both ancestral Jewish traditions as well as the writings of their own founders’ philosophy. A second characteristic is that their oral performance suggests flexibility rather than fixity in composition. Gregory Nagy’s work on the performance of poetry in the context of the Greek symposium is of relevance to this point, especially if Philo’s characterization of the Therapeutae’s sacred meal as a symposium reflects their own understanding and practice. Nagy has argued that the performer, the re-enactor of the poetry, whether the composition derives from the ancient 21 At the 2006 Society of Biblical Literature meeting session at which this paper was first presented, Ellen Birnbaum made the compelling suggestion that an allegorical interpretation of the Exodus event in terms of the Therapeutae’s own immediate context in Egypt would understand their ‘salvation’ as a spiritual one from the lot of the surrounding Egyptians. J. Taylor, in her excellent discussion of women and gender in the treatise, makes a related but distinct point that the strict ascesis of the community through their lived practice of extreme allegory permits them escape from what would normally be the segregation of men from women, see in particular 126–53 in Taylor, Jewish Women Philosophers.

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bard Homer himself or other classical poets, offers variations anew each time it is recited in sympotic performance.22 The rhapsode, that is the poet-performer, might have scripts that prepare for the performance, but the performance itself is an oral creation. Textual fixity in terms that might be likened to canon formation, occurs only when the context for ritual performance is no longer in existence, that is to say, after the institution of the symposium is defunct. The third point is that the hymns should be understood as scripture themselves, as holy writ, in the pre-canonical era of Philo’s time. They are sanctified by their ritual context and play an important role in constituting and revivifying the community. It is possible to illustrate with the range of psalm and hymnic material that is found as part of the warp and woof of the Hebrew Bible, and of course in the Septuagint, where there are psalms and hymns aplenty: Judith 16, the so-called ‘additions to Daniel’ and the compositions of Greek Esther, to name a few examples. Most scholars who have ventured a guess about the nature of the hymns composed by the Therapeutae point to the psalms and odes, whether biblical or extra-biblical, as analogies. It is equally important to consider models for composition in the latter prophets, such as the ‘new song’ mentioned in Second Isaiah 42:10 in the larger context of understanding the return from Babylonian exile interpretively as simultaneously a new redemption and a new creation of the people. The new song can be understood self-referentially to refer to the composition of the prophetic voice in second Isaiah as a poesis and retrieval of the voice of the poet-prophet of old.23 Indeed, a similar context of cultic ritual recitation by inspired authors may well have provided an ongoing Sitz-im-Leben which sheds light on understanding the composition of the Tanakh. To conclude, even bracketing certain dimensions of the description of the Therapeutae’s practices as a product of Philo’s apologetic shaping of the work, we can still discern ‘the performance of more or less invariant sequences of formal acts and utterances not entirely encoded by the performers’. We rely on Philo as a Jewish Hellene who seems to G. Nagy, ‘The Transmission of Archaic Greek Sympotic Songs: From Lesbos to Alexandria’, Critical Inquiry 31 (2004), 26–48, and ‘Homeric Poetry and Problems of Multiformity: the “Panethenaic Bottleneck’”, Classical Philology 96 (2001), 109–19. See also his Poetry as Performance: Homer and Beyond, Cambridge 1996. 23 The new song now turned to lament and petition can also be heard in Third Isaiah as well, in the long composition of Isaiah 63–64, which again recalls the exodus in vivid imagery. 22

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recognize the encoding of the performance, but who nonetheless, presents his readers with his own version of ritual events as they combine both traditional Jewish religion and the Greek practice of symposia. The combination of the Therapeutae’s intense study of scripture during the week results in an experiential anamnesis, a recalling of the past in the present such that the difference between past and present is elided in the enthusiasm generated by the ascetical festal dance. The Therapeutae in their reenactment of the songs of Moses and Miriam are not imitative at a distance but are mimetically capable of continuing composition by living the experiential moment in which the Israelites have just tasted and seen their new freedom from the Egyptians. And while we have a depiction of the performative composition of songs in the context of a festal celebration, one can well imagine that such performative composition of other kinds of texts, whether prayers or narrative tales might well have occurred regularly in other settings. In any case, this curious group of Therapeutae, who provide Philo with an example of perfected lives, provide for us a glimpse of learned and ‘ritualizing scholastics’ whose prophetic experiences provide grist for the continuing composition of scripture. Philo thus also provides a picture of what ritual life might be like at some distance from the Temple from which we may draw varying lines of continuity, both with the development of Christian liturgy and literature and also prayer and practice in the evolution of post-temple destruction Judaism. But these connections must await further exposition elsewhere.

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LIFE AND DEATH IN PSEUDO-PHOCYLIDES Karl-Wilhelm Niebuhr When Pieter W. van der Horst, in 1977, read his paper on ‘PseudoPhocylides and the New Testament’ at the SNTS annual meeting in Tübingen, he could claim that since the didactic and gnomic poem of Pseudo-Phocylides had been introduced by Martin Dibelius into New Testament exegesis fifty years ago ‘not much attention has been paid to Ps-Phoc. by N.T. scholars’.1 Thanks to Van der Horst’s major commentary, published in 1978, this is not the case anymore.2 Today we are able to state that Van der Horst initiated a new epoch in Pseudo-Phocylides research. In addition to his own commentary, another comprehensive philological commentary to the didactic poem has appeared recently,3 as well as a new text edition with an extensive introduction and a short commentary.4 Moreover several commented translations5 and numerous monographs which entirely,6 or to a great extent,7 deal with PseudoPhocylides have appeared. Beyond these investigations, many comments

1 P.W. van der Horst, ‘Pseudo-Phocylides and the New Testament’, ZNW 69 (1978), 187–202, esp. 187. 2 P.W. van der Horst, The Sentences of Pseudo-Phocylides. With Introduction and Commentary (SVTP 4), Leiden 1978. Van der Horst himself gave a first interim survey on secondary literature of the new epoch in research, see P.W. van der Horst, ‘Pseudo-Phocylides Revisited’, JSP 3 (1988), 3–30. 3 W.T. Wilson, The Sentences of Pseudo-Phocylides (Commentaries on Early Jewish Literature), Berlin/New York 2005. 4 P. Derron, Pseudo-Phocylide. Sentences: Texte établi, traduit et commenté, Paris 1986. 5 P.W. van der Horst, ‘Spreuken van Pseudo-Phocylides. Vertaald, ingeleid en toelicht’, in: Idem, De Pseudepigrafen 3, Kampen 1982, 11–41; N. Walter, Pseudo-Phokylides ( JSHRZ IV/3), Gütersloh 1983; P.W. van der Horst, ‘Pseudo-Phocylides’, OTP 2, 565–82; L. Troiani, ‘Pseudo-Focilide’, in: P. Sacchi et alii (eds), Apocrifi dell’Antico Testamento, Torino/Brescia 1981–1997, Vol. 5, 137–46 (non vidi). 6 J. Thomas, Der jüdische Phokylides: Formgeschichtliche Zugänge zu Pseudo-Phocylides und Vergleich mit der neutestamentlichen Paränese (NTOA 23), Freiburg/Göttingen 1992; W.T. Wilson, The Mysteries of Righteousness: The Literary Composition and Genre of the Sentences of Pseudo-Phocylides (TSAJ 40), Tübingen 1994. 7 M. Küchler, Frühjüdische Weisheitstraditionen: Zum Fortgang weisheitlichen Denkens im Bereich des frühjüdischen Jahweglaubens (OBO 26), Freiburg/Göttingen 1979, 236–302; K.-W. Niebuhr, Gesetz und Paränese: Katechismusartige Weisungsreihen in der frühjüdischen Literatur (WUNT II/28), Tübingen 1987, 5–72.

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and references to the poem can be found in particular studies written in the research field of Judaeo-hellenistic literature.8 In the past, the passage about life after death (Ps.-Phoc. 97–121) has repeatedly been of special interest for research due to the peculiar mixture of specific Jewish conceptions and common Hellenistic-Roman motifs intertwined here.9 Recently, this passage has evoked new attention. In this regard, Pieter van der Horst has joined the discussion again to defend his interpretation of the passage against the objections which John J. Collins had raised.10 The matter of dispute between the two parties is mainly the relationship between the seemingly antagonistic statements about the physical resurrection on the one hand and the immortality of the soul on the other. While Van der Horst tends to accept the coexistence of the two conflicting concepts,11 Collins tries to demonstrate that Pseudo-Phocylides offers us a synthesis of two different anthropological and eschatological concepts.12 With reference to the terminology used in Ps.-Phoc. 105–7 (ψυχαί, πνεῦµα, σῶµα) Collins even assumes that the poem emanates from a ‘trichotomic’ anthropol-

8 Cf. the bibliographies of A. Lehnardt, Bibliographie zu den Jüdischen Schriften aus hellenistisch-römischer Zeit ( JSHRZ VI/2), Gütersloh 1999, 373–75 and L. DiTommaso, A Bibliography of Pseudepigrapha Research 1850–1999 ( JSPSup 39), Sheffield 2001, 785–91. See also: A.-M. Denis, Introduction à la littérature religieuse judéo-hellénistique (Tome II), Turnhout 2000, 1037–57; G.S. Oegema, Poetische Schriften ( JSHRZ VI/1,4), Gütersloh 2002, 63–75. 9 Cf. Thomas, Der jüdische Phokylides, 205–12; U. Fischer, Eschatologie und Jenseitserwartung im hellenistischen Diasporajudentum (BZNW 44), Berlin/New York 1978, 129–43; H.C.C. Cavallin, Life After Death: Paul’s Argument for the Resurrection of the Dead in I Cor 15. Part I: An Enquiry into the Jewish Background (ConBNT 7/1), Lund 1974, 151–55; F. Christ, ‘Das Leben nach dem Tode bei Pseudo-Phokylides’, TZ 31 (1975), 140–49. 10 J.J. Collins, ‘Life after Death in Pseudo-Phocylides’, in: F. García Martínez & G.P. Luttikhuizen (eds), Jerusalem, Alexandria, Rome: Studies in Ancient Cultural Interaction in Honour of A. Hilhorst, Leiden 2003, 75–86 (= J.J. Collins, Jewish Cult and Hellenistic Culture: Essays on the Jewish Encounter with Hellenism and Roman Rule ( JSJSup 100), Leiden/Boston 2005, 128–42 [cf. 139–42: Postscript with a response to the rejoinder of P.W. van der Horst]); P.W. van der Horst, ‘Pseudo-Phocylides on the Afterlife: A Rejoinder to John J. Collins’, JSJ 35 (2004), 70–5. 11 Van der Horst, Sentences, 188: ‘However, belief in the immortality of the soul as an inherent quality, distinguishing it from the body that will be dissolved without any resurrection, seems to be maintained in vv. 106–108; this apparently contradicts vv. 103–104’. Cf. Wilson, Sentences, 138–39, who stated recently: ‘this sort of incongruity reflects the situation in Second Temple Judaism generally, which tolerated a wide range of perspectives on post-mortem existence. This phenomenon, in turn, can be understood against the background of similar inconsistencies on the subject within the broader Hellenistic world’. 12 Collins, ‘Life after Death’, 138: ‘Pseudo-Phocylides combined different ideas of the afterlife, but strung them together in a way that achieved a measure of coherence’.

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ogy.13 However, Van der Horst claims that the author considers ψυχαί and πνεῦµα as synonymic notions, i.e. Pseudo-Phocylides states a ‘dichotomic’ view of the human being.14 Another conflict between Van der Horst and Collins concerns the phrase ἁρµονίην ἀναλυέµεν ἀνθρώποιο (‘to dissolve the human frame’, Ps.-Phoc. 102). With reference to ancient medical literature, Van der Horst interprets the phrase as a hint to the practice of dissection and takes this as proof for the origin of the poem from Alexandria.15 However, Collins presumes—following F. Christ here—, that the phrase has to be read as an indication for ossuary burial practices.16 1. Life after Death in Ps.-Phoc. 97–121 The passages Ps.-Phoc. 103–8 and 111–5 belong to the most difficult of the entire poem and are indeed hard to interpret. Meanwhile, the expression at the end of v. 104: ὀπίσω δὲ θεοὶ τελέθονται (‘afterwards they become gods’),17 has become less controversial;18 at least insofar as one sees here—according to Martin Hengel—a reminiscence of the widespread denotation of pious Israelites before and after death, respectively of angels/cherubs as ‘sons of God’, in early Jewish texts.19 Collins, ‘Life after Death’, 134–38. Van der Horst, ‘Pseudo-Phocylides on the Afterlife’, 74. In contrast, Collins, ‘Life after Death’, 141–42, adheres explicitly to the statement which he had made in response to Van der Horst: ‘It makes much better sense to accept that the poet was distinguishing three elements of the human being, the body (v. 103), the soul, which remains among the dead (v. 105) and the spirit, which returns to God, to the air above. This reading also has the advantage of allowing Pseudo-Phocylides a measure of coherence, rather than the mere juxtaposition of contradictory ideas’. 15 Van der Horst, Sentences, 183–84. 16 Collins, ‘Life after Death’, 131–32, 142; cf. Christ, ‘Das Leben nach dem Tode’, 141. 17 All translations from Pseudo-Phocylides are quoted from Van der Horst, Sentences. 18 For earlier discussion see Van der Horst, Sentences, 186–88. 19 M. Hengel, ‘Anonymität, Pseudepigraphie und “Literarische Fälschung” in der jüdisch-hellenistischen Literatur’, in: K. von Fritz (ed.), Pseudepigrapha I, Vandœuvres/Genève 1972, 229–329, esp. 297; Idem, ‘Das Begräbnis Jesu bei Paulus und die leibliche Auferstehung aus dem Grabe’, in: F. Avemarie & H. Lichtenberger (eds), Auferstehung —Resurrection (WUNT 135), Tübingen 2001, 119–83, esp. 163. For more recent discussion on the scope and limits of early Jewish ‘Monotheism’ see L. Stuckenbruck, Angel Veneration and Christology: A Study in Early Judaism and in the Christology of the Apocalypse of John (WUNT II/70), Tübingen 1995, 45–204; L.W. Hurtado, One God, One Lord: Early Christian Devotion and Ancient Jewish Monotheism, Philadelphia 1988, 17–92; Idem, Lord Jesus Christ: Devotion to Jesus in Earliest Christianity, Grand Rapids/Cambridge 2003, 27–48. 13 14

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Moreover, it seems to be clear that the phrase λείψαν’ ἀποιχοµένων (‘the remains of the departed’) has to be related to the ‘mortal remains’ of those who passed away and not to the eternal soul.20 Thus, vv. 103–104 formulate an obvious confession of the promise of physical resurrection of the dead. A similar lucid statement about the immortality of the soul is made in v. 105: ψυχαὶ γὰρ µίµνουσιν ἀκήριοι ἐν φθιµένοισιν (‘for the souls remain unharmed in the deceased’) and particularly in v. 115: ψυχὴ δ’ ἀθάνατος καὶ ἀγήρως ζῆι διὰ παντός (‘but our soul is immortal and lives ageless forever’). Much harder to grasp is the accurate relationship between souls, spirit and body in vv. 105–108. Even after Collins’ and Van der Horst’s comprehensive discussion of the passage, it appears impossible to me to favour one of the controversial text interpretations. At first glance, the succession of the three vv. 105–107 speaks for Collins (and thereby for the ‘trichotomic anthropology’), since the three verses 105–107 start with the terms ψυχαί, πνεῦµα, σῶµα, which are connected by γάρ. By contrast, according to Van der Horst, the statements about God’s sovereignty over the souls and regarding Hades in vv. 111–112 should rather be interpreted as a bipolar anthropological concept, through which spirit and soul become identified. In addition to Van der Horst’s objection it can be said that the three sentences of Ps.-Phoc. 105–7 cannot be interpreted as parallel running statements explaining vv. 103–104—in spite of the triple repetition of γάρ. In fact, only v. 105 accounts for the statement of hope in 103–104, i.e., that in the future the deceased will become ‘gods’ because of the integrity of their souls which dwell in ‘the remains of the departed’. Vv. 106–108 are syntactically subordinated to this keynote for which Regarding the concepts of the resurrection of the dead, life after death and the immortality of the soul in early Judaism, in addition to the comprehensive study of Hengel, ‘Das Begräbnis Jesu bei Paulus’ (see above), 150–72, cf. the overviews of O. Schwankl, Die Sadduzäerfrage (Mk 12,18–27 parr): Eine exegetisch-theologische Studie zur Auferstehungserwartung (BBB 66), Frankfurt 1987, 142–292, and C.D. Elledge, Life after Death in Early Judaism: The Evidence of Josephus (WUNT II/208), Tübingen 2006, 5–52 (of course Ps.-Phoc. is not considered here), and with focus on the epigraphic documents: J.S. Park, Conceptions of Afterlife in Jewish Inscriptions: With Special Reference to Pauline Literature (WUNT II/121), Tübingen 2000; L.V. Rutgers, ‘Jewish Ideas about Death and Afterlife: The Inscriptional Evidence’, in: Idem, The Hidden Heritage of Diaspora Judaism (CBET 20), Kampen 1998, 157–68. Regarding the concepts of afterlife in Greek epigraphy see I. Peres, Griechische Grabinschriften und neutestamentliche Eschatologie (WUNT 157), Tübingen 2003, 20–105. 20 According to Van der Horst, ‘Pseudo-Phocylides Revisited’, 4, against Fischer, Eschatologie und Jenseitserwartung, 134–35.

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they constitute a twofold claim. This statement is semantically determined by the bipolar opposition of ‘spirit’ versus ‘body’. Structurally, the statement is designed as an inclusio: The assertions about the spirit as God’s loan to men (v. 106) and about the return of the spirit in the (divine) Aër (v. 108b) after death, frame the well known biblical anthropological concepts of the earthly origin and future of the human body (vv. 107–108a). Thus, the structure of these statements points to the connection of two different bipolar anthropological patterns—each of them coherent in itself: ‘body—soul’ versus ‘body—spirit’. According to the poet’s reshaped interrelation, these patterns are to be connected with the dichotomic model ‘body’ versus ‘soul/spirit’, leading up to the identification of soul(s) and spirit. The difficulties intertwined with such an interpretation certainly persist because of the statements regarding the sovereignty of God over the souls in v. 111b which support an understanding of Hades in vv. 112–113 as the dwelling-place of the intact and immortal souls after death. This way Hades has to be identified with the Aër in v. 108,21 at least as long as one takes for granted that the poem is preconditioned by an anthropology which is consistent in itself and strictly aligned with the assumption of the continuity of the soul after death in a temporal sense.22 In the following I will not be able to contribute new arguments to the exegetical discussion around the interpretation of the verses Ps.Phoc. 103–15. Instead, I will try to explore the narrower and broader context of the statements and look for further assertions concerning life and death in Pseudo-Phocylides. Retrospectively, then, it may be possible to shed new light on the verses about the immortality of the soul and the physical resurrection of the death. 2. Death as Reality of Life in Ps.-Phoc. 97–121 In his investigation of Ps.-Phoc. 103–15, Johannes Thomas has rightly referred to the close relationship of the passage to its paraenetic 21 Analogies to such a concept are to be found in Van der Horst, Sentences, 191–92; Idem, ‘Pseudo-Phocylides on the Afterlife’, 74; the opposite has been reconsidered by Collins, ‘Life after Death’, 141–42. 22 As an alternative understanding of v. 111, for which the text gives little evidence, cf. Walter, Pseudo-Phokylides, 208, n. 111 b: ‘D. h.: die Seelen nimmt Gott zu sich in seine himmlische βασιλεία auf ’.

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context. The passage centers on the ‘Verhalten angesichts von Leid und Tod . . . Im Übrigen wird das Thema von der praktischen Seite her, nämlich an welche Verhaltensaufgaben es erinnert, aufgenommen’.23 The statements on the physical resurrection and the immortality of the soul are embedded in a larger paraenetic argument which runs from v. 97 to v. 121. Focusing on the situations of daily life, to which the appeals are directed, the argument can be subdivided as follows:24 97–8 99 100–8 109–15 118–20 121

Behaviour in mourning25 Contact with an unburied corpse Protection of the tomb and of the buried corpse Insight into the vanity of wealth (expectation of Hades) Changes of fate Antithetic concluding appeal

Walter Wilson also acknowledges the paraenetic structure and interprets the passage in the context of the ancient canon of the ‘cardinal virtues’, more precisely in the context of courage (ἀνδρεία): ‘The moral problem of how best to respond to life’s varied forms and sources of distress generally belonged to the ancient discussion about courage (ἀνδρεία) and the related virtues of fortitude (καρτερία) and endurance (ὑποµονή)’.26 This interpretation suggests that the passage on resurrection and immortality is not primarily meant to support doctrines or theories of life after death. The statements of this passage rather aim at the goal of dealing with death experiences during lifetime: ‘The point of the passage is not to develop for the readers a coherent thanatological doctrine, but to encourage them not to grieve excessively (vv. 97–98, 118)’.27 This assumption not only corresponds to the intention of the entire poem but can be verified on the basis of the mentioned situations of everyday life in the chapter interpreted here—regardless of 23 Thomas, Der jüdische Phokylides, 206 (with reference to the paraenetic character of the whole poem, ibidem 205). 24 According to Thomas, Der jüdische Phokylides, 206. Vv. 116–117 have to be eliminated as a result of textual criticism. 25 This is based on an interpretation (including a conjecture in v. 98: γόοισι for θεοῖσι), that can be found in the commentaries of Van der Horst, Walter and Wilson ad loc. 26 Wilson, Sentences, 137. This interpretation has to be seen in the context of his general view on the poem, which is supposed to be structured according the four cardinal virtues, cf. ibidem, 23–30, esp. 28. 27 Wilson, Sentences, 139.

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all the difficulties in text tradition and translation of vv. 97–98.28 The meaning of these verses can be grasped best if one takes seriously the intended function of the actual mourning customs and rituals which are described here. They are supposed to warn against excessive mourning practices. The following claim for burying the dead belongs to the core of the paraenetic exhortations, as can be found in the traditional examples of early Jewish Torah paraenesis.29 In addition, the following vv. 100–102 are dealing with the appropriate attitude towards dead bodies. Here the thread leads us from fundamental to more specific principles: v. 100a exposes comprehensively the protection of the tomb (τύµβος); according to vv. 100b, 101, it is forbidden to exhume dead bodies; and according to v. 102, exhumed corpses must not be abused. In this connection, it remains controversial how the expression ἁρµονίην ἀναλυέµεν ἀνθρώποιο has to be understood precisely.30 The context argues rather for the prohibition of any kind of outrageous interaction with (already buried) dead bodies.31 There is no proof whether this is meant to be applied to the practice of dissection for medical purposes, which is confirmed as a praxis in Alexandria but not for the Roman period.32 Even less approvable than the practice of dissection is the supposed reference to ossuary burial practices which has occurred only in a narrow geographical space during a very limited period.33

28 For the complicated text tradition and its interpretation problems cf. Van der Horst, Sentences, 179–80; Walter, Pseudo-Phokylides, 206; Derron, Pseudo-Phocylide, Notes Complémentaires 25f.; Wilson, Sentences, 141–43. 29 Cf. Niebuhr, Gesetz und Paränese, 35, 40–3, 204–05. 30 See above p. 471. 31 There is plenty of evidence for this, especially in epigraphic sources, cf. P.W. van der Horst, Ancient Jewish Epitaphs: An introductory survey of a millennium of Jewish funerary epigraphy (300 BCE–700 CE) (CBET 2), Kampen 1991, 54–60; Park, Conceptions of Afterlife, 37–9; cf. also Wilson, Sentences, 144; Van der Horst, Sentences, 182–83. 32 Rather critical to this statement posed by Van der Horst also Wilson, Sentences, 144: ‘Given the gnomic ethos of the poem, with its tendency toward universalizing, such a localized meaning seems unlikely’. 33 Van der Horst, ‘Pseudo-Phocylides on the Afterlife’, 73, has a point in saying that ossuary burial practices are only proven for Palestine. R. Hachlili, Ancient Jewish Art and Archaeology in the Diaspora (HO I/35), Leiden/etc. 1998, 263–310 (‘Burial and Funerary Practices’), does not give any evidence to support it. Moreover, the lack of any literary evidence for this kind of burial practice—at least to my knowledge—not only in Philo but in Josephus too, has to be considered. Therefore the argument in Collins’ response to Van der Horst is not convincing, cf. Collins, ‘Life after Death’, 142: ‘I do not see any basis for Van der Horst’s apparent assumption that an Alexandrian

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The syntactical conjunction καί connects the following verses (which are stating a promise beyond death, vv. 103–108) with the previous topic of human practical behaviour in relation to dead bodies. Therefore this theme defines the interpretation of the following verses too. One has here to take into account the formulation in the first person plural in vv. 103 and 107–8, which constitutes an inclusio around the passage about life after death! Because ‘we’, the living, ‘hope, that the remains of the departed will soon come to the light again out of the earth’, we are supposed to treat the dead with respect.34 This intends on the one hand to allow for the natural process of decay and not to disturb this process, e.g., by exhuming corpses. On the other hand, this includes the hope for everyone to be brought to the light after one’s death, like those who died before, and then to pass over the spirit into the Aër (v. 108).35 Consequently in vv. 109–115 the thread of the poem will be continued with certain exhortations of how to prepare appropriately for death, i.e. a typical memento mori. Here the wealthy are addressed (in the gnomic second pers. sing.), to whom the inescapable fate of death is shown: they cannot take any of their possessions into Hades, this ‘common eternal home’ (µέλαθρα δόµων αἰώνια), ‘fatherland’ ( patris) for all humans, ‘common place’ (ξυνὸς χῶρος) for beggars and kings (vv. 112–113). In equal measure, ‘all alike are corpses’ (πάντες ἴσον νέκυες, v. 111). This small chapter closes again in the first person plural (in vv. 114–115), with one general insight for all those who are (still) alive: ‘We humans live not a long time (οὐ πολὺν χρόνον) but for a season (ἐπίκαιρον). But our soul is immortal and lives ageless forever (διὰ παντός)’.36 Finally, in the last paragraph of the passage which deals with the death and the dying (i.e. Ps.-Phoc. 97–115), the appeals (expressed again in the gnomic second pers. sing.) are focused again on the right way of life. The exhortation in vv. 118–120 calls for emotional temperance towards the vicissitudes of life according to the maxim of the right Jew would not have known about a practice that was common in Palestine, or have been concerned about it’. 34 Here one is reminded of the Pauline phraseology in 1 Thess 4:15–17. 35 It is noteworthy that also according to Paul, those who will still be alive at the Parousia of Christ, will ascend toward the sky and meet the Lord in the Aër (cf. 1 Thess 4:17) as will those who have died already. 36 For a thorough interpretation of the whole paragraph cf. Wilson, Sentences, 146–51.

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measure.37 The final and concluding exhortation is associated here and once again directed to the moment of life, the καιρός: To embrace the moment of life is essential, also and foremost in the face of death, and one must not ‘blow against the winds’ (v. 121). The entire passage Ps.-Phoc. 97–121 is conceptualized as an appeal to human beings to develop the adequate attitude towards death and the dead during lifetime. This interpretation of the passage follows both from its connection to the gnomic poem and because of its text structure. The statements about life after death and the different anthropological concepts mentioned in the text are strictly subordinated to the central intention of the passage, which is to lead the addressee to the right way of life while facing death. Inconsistencies in terms of some notions and conceptions about the underworld, the afterlife, or the world of the gods, can be accepted if the intention of the text is convincing and consistent with a view of the way of life of the addressees. 3. Death as Reality of Life in the Remaining Parts of the Gnomic Poem Other passages of the poem, in which the author deals with death, confirm the paraenetic intention of the statements on death and interaction with the dead. In fact, there is no other paragraph dealing explicitly with the theme, but it is repeatedly referred to though in connection with other topics. The theme is mentioned very generally in v. 27 and v. 41 with reference to the uncertainties and vicissitudes of life. Here the misery of the socially disadvantaged is at stake and the author calls for charity and justice towards the needy.38 The actual context here is the exhortation to aid the poor and the suffering, due to the fact that misfortune may happen to everybody.

This again is an inclusio, cf. v. 98! For the arrangement cf. Wilson, Sentences, 84–7, who structures the second main part of the poem, i.e. Ps.-Phoc. 9–131, according to the canon of the four cardinal virtues. Thus, Wilson assigns vv. 9–54 to justice, vv. 9–21 to questions of justice in a narrower juridical sense and vv. 22–54 to relationships between men in a broader sense: philanthropy and solidarity. The second chapter is subdivided in two sub-chapters. Vv. 22–41 is focused on the deeds of charity and vv. 42–54 on the sources of injustice. Wilson’s structuring of Ps.-Phoc. 9–131 is justified comprehensively and in detail in Wilson, Mysteries of Righteousness, 75–118. 37 38

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The series of short imperative appeals for merciful behaviour towards the poor are followed by a recapitulating and aphoristic statement in v. 27, which together with v. 30 brings the first set of exhortations to an end.39 These two verses contain a double hint to life itself (ὁ βίος) and anybody’s common goods (κοινός) which are affiliated to suffering as well as to the goods of life. In connection to the theological justification of the appeal for merciful behaviour in v. 29: ‘of that which God has given you, give of it to the needy’ (ὧν σοι ἔδωκε θεός, τούτων χρήιζουσι παράσχου), the short collection of sayings in Ps.-Phoc. 27–30 causes an impressive theological and anthropological consolidation of the paraenetic appeal of the whole chapter. All human beings undergo the same suffering, the same threats and uncertainties; therefore they are committed to the pleasure of all goods of life in unity and solidarity as well. The next series of sentences in Ps.-Phoc. 32–4 interrupts the train of thought concerning the welfare problem under conditions of social distress. Human life is exposed to danger not merely by misfortune but also by the actions of others. In this paragraph the use of the sword is at stake and according to the text its use should be avoided entirely: even the killing of the enemy blemishes the one who bears the sword. Here the impurity of the hands: ‘you stain your hand’ (σέο χεῖρα µιαίνεις, v. 34), due to the killing of another human being is not to be understood ritually in the sense of cult. The same can be claimed for Ps.-Phoc. 4: ‘nor stain your hands with blood’ (µήθ’ αἵµατι χεῖρα µιαίνειν). Both verses reflect the perception of purity and law in diaspora Judaism.40 According to the Torah, even the legitimate killing of the enemy is considered as blood-guilt and demands atonement by purification. Philo explicitly explains this in Vita Mosis 1, 313–4 in connection with the interpretation of Num 31:19. Here, we are confronted with a far reaching rejection even of the legitimate killing of another human being ‘neither without the law nor justly’ (µήτ’ ἔκνοµα µήτε δικαίως, v. 33) and the killing due

V. 31 is text-critically a secondary addition. Cf. K.-W. Niebuhr, ‘Tora ohne Tempel: Paulus und der Jakobusbrief im Zusammenhang frühjüdischer Torarezeption für die Diaspora’, in: B. Ego et alii (eds), Gemeinde ohne Tempel—Community without Temple: Zur Substituierung und Transformation des Jerusalemer Tempels und seines Kults im Alten Testament, antiken Judentum und frühen Christentum (WUNT 118), Tübingen 1999, 427–60, esp. 430–46; Idem, ‘Hellenistisch-jüdisches Ethos im Spannungsfeld von Weisheit und Tora’, in: M. Konradt & U. Steinert (eds), Ethos und Identität: Einheit und Vielfalt des Judentums in hellenistisch-römischer Zeit, Paderborn 2002, 27–50, esp. 33–42. 39 40

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to self-defense (‘to protect’, ἐς ἄµυναν, v. 32). This rejection does not follow directly from the prohibition against killing in the Decalogue. Nevertheless, Ps.-Phoc. 4 bases its pointed interpretation on the commandment of the Decalogue mentioned above.41 Focusing explicitly on the prohibition against killing an enemy, this rejection reminds one of the final scene of the Judaeo-hellenistic novel Joseph and Aseneth ( Jos. Asen. 29:1–3). Here Pharao’s son is gravely injured and laying on the ground, and Jacob’s son Levi keeps his brother Benjamin from killing Pharao’s son with the sword (ῥοµφαία). Levi bases his behaviour on the basic principle: ‘it does not befit a man who worships God to repay evil for evil (ἀποδοῦναι κακὸν ἀντὶ κακοῦ) nor to trample underfoot a fallen (man) nor to oppress his enemy till death (ἐκθλῖψαι τὸν ἐχθρὸν αὐτοῦ ἕως θανάτου)’.42 Everyday life experience which characterizes the whole poem also teaches that a marginal occasion can cause life-threatening violence.43 The small collection of sentences dealing with the theme of greed for money (Ps.-Phoc. 42–7), dramatically preludes the second sub-chapter of the gnomic poem. This chapter concerns the cardinal virtue ‘justice’ and indicates several sources of injustice.44 Here, the ‘love of money’ (φιλοχρηµοσύνη), respectively gold and silver, appears as the ‘mother of all evil’ (µήτηρ κακότητος ἁπάσης, v. 42) and as ‘destroyer of life’ (βιοφθόρος, v. 44). Because of money, ‘there are battles and plunderings and murders’ between men (σεῦ γὰρ ἕκητι µάχαι τε λεηλασίαι τε φόνοι τε, v. 46), even between children, parents, sisters and relatives (v. 47). The following main part of the poem, Ps.-Phoc. 55–96, can be subordinated to the virtue of temperance (σωφροσύνη).45 Here, especially in vv. 57–58, the life-threatening consequences of rage are merely mentioned casually in connection to different ethical topoi: ‘Be not rash with your hands, but bridle your wild anger (ἄγριον ὀργήν). For often someone who has dealt a blow has unintentionally committed a murder Cf. Niebuhr, Gesetz und Paränese, 17. Jos. Asen. 29,3, translation by C. Burchard, ‘Joseph and Aseneth’, in: OTP 2, 246; Greek text: Idem, Joseph und Aseneth (PVTG 5), Leiden/Boston 2003, 330. 43 For the sapiential character of Ps.-Phoc. cf. the comprehensive studies of Küchler, Frühjüdische Weisheitstraditionen, 261–302, and Thomas, Der jüdische Phokylides, 25–56. 44 For Wilson’s arrangement, see above n. 38. The topic of greed for money in early Jewish Torah paraenesis is discussed in Niebuhr, Gesetz und Paränese, 100, 107, 116–17, 132, 175–78. The Graeco-Roman background of the gnomic tradition is illustrated by Wilson, Sentences, 107–09. 45 Cf. Wilson, Sentences, 113; more extensively, Idem: Mysteries of Righteousness, 91–103. 41 42

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(πλήξας ἀέκων φόνον ἐξετέλεσσεν)’. The vv. 63–64 continue with the theme of anger (θυµός) and rage (ὀργή) but without referring to violent quarrels. Once again, vv. 77–78 deal with mutual malice and quarrels (ἔρις) without especially mentioning their life-threatening character. After all, the topos of violent conflicts between men in everyday life is a central theme of the exhortations and reveals likewise the stated pragmatic intention of the poem. In a similar manner, the statements regarding the interaction with criminals and violent perpetrators in vv. 132–136 are integrated in a series of different ethical topoi. According to Wilson’s arrangement the chapter marks the beginning of the third part of the poem (Ps.-Phoc. 132–227). This part is dedicated to the different fields and layers of human relationships in society.46 Once again, we find a reference to violent death here but now with a focus on dealing severely with the evil-doers. If necessary, the criminal has to be punished by means of coercion since ‘those who are with the bad often die together with them (συνθνήισκουσι)’ (v. 134). Finally in vv. 184–185, the prohibition of abortion and of abandoning a child must also be read in the context of assault which leads to death. The exhortations are embedded in a series of several instructions on matters of sex and reproduction (Ps.-Phoc. 175–94) which are based on the legal rules in Lev 18–20. Thus, the passage has to be understood as an updated interpretation which applies the commandments of the Torah to particular situations of contemporary life, i.e. as being in line with early Jewish Torah paraenesis.47 While the instructions are mostly48 directed to (married) men, in these two verses women are explicitly and exclusively addressed. Nevertheless, considering the main intention of the entire context, which is to ensure the success of family

46 Cf. Wilson, Mysteries of Righteousness, 119–45; Idem, Sentences, 164. Wilson, Mysteries of Righteousness, 119, by himself accentuates, that the third main part of the poem takes up several ethical topoi of the previous main part, which is structured according to the four cardinal virtues. 47 Cf. Niebuhr, Gesetz und Paränese, 26–30. Especially the prohibition of abortion and child abandoning reflects a specific Jewish and afterwards Christian ethos within the frame of common ancient concepts; cf. Van der Horst, Sentences, 232–34; Wilson, Sentences, 192–93. 48 The only exception (beside vv. 184–185) is v. 192. In this connection same-sex intercourse between women is evaluated according to the paradigm of male homosexuality, which is also condemned as unnatural by the author: ‘And let not women imitate the sexual role of men’ (µηδέ τι θηλύτεραι λέχος ἀνδρῶν µιµήσαιντο, cf. vv. 190–191).

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politics in terms of descendants (cf. vv. 175–176!), this single instruction, directed to women, remains subordinated to the interests of men and patriarchs. 4. Livelihood and the End of Life in Pseudo-Phocylides The sentences about life-threatening and violent death give a realistic picture of human everyday life. The references to ageing and the end of human life provide the same calm insight into the limits of human life. Acquirement, commerce and trade of material goods are to serve livelihood and not excess and luxury.49 ‘In the beginning be sparing with all things, lest in the end you come short’, v. 138 advises succinctly although without explaining in detail the paraenetic context of the concept of τέρµα which points to the end of life. In a similar realistic manner v. 175 faces the fact of remaining single without descendants, i.e., the possibility to ‘die nameless’ (νώνυµνος ὄληαι). In contrast, vv. 153–174 instruct forcefully and comprehensively to earn one’s living with one’s own hands: ‘Work hard so that you can live (βιοτεύσηις) from your own means’ (v. 153). ‘Eat without shame from what you have earned yourself (ἀπὸ τῶν ἰδίων µισθῶν φαγέοις)’ (v. 157). ‘Life has every kind of work (ἔστι βίωι πᾶν ἔργον), if you are willing to toil’ (v. 159). ‘There is no easy work without toil for men, not even for the blessed themselves. But labour gives great increase to virtue’ (vv. 162–163). This worldly wisdom is illustrated by a number of examples from the field of seafaring and agriculture, as well as by metaphors taken from the animal kingdom. Likewise, the exhortations regarding the household in Ps.-Phoc. 175–227 are aimed at the right way of life—which naturally ends up in death—but this is not at stake here. So, the poet reminds the reader of lifelong marital love and fidelity (vv. 195–197): ‘Love your own wife, for what is sweeter and better than whenever a wife is kindly disposed towards her husband till old age (γήραος ἄχρις) and a husband towards his wife, without strife interfering as a dividing force?’ The respect for age is considered as an equal value here. One has to esteem the ‘white heads’ (πολιοκροτάφους), to concede places of honour for the aged (γέρουσιν) and to salute them in honour. In a similar manner, honour

49

Cf. also, beside the quoted verses, vv. 69a, 80–81, 91–94.

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shall be given to the old man who is of the same age as one’s own father (πρέσβυν ὁµήλικα πατρός, vv. 220–222). The very end of the poem (vv. 229–230) presages a ‘good life’ (ζωὴν ἀγαθήν) ‘up to the threshold of old age’ (µέχρι γήραος οὐδοῦ), for those who know and obey ‘the mysteries of righteousness’ (δικαιοσύνης µυστήρια). 5. Death and Life in Pseudo-Phocylides—The Outline of an Early Jewish Idea of the Human Being As demonstrated here, the gnomic poem of Pseudo-Phocylides turns out to be an extraordinary positive-minded and life-affirming document of Hellenistic diaspora Judaism. It has become clear that death is not suppressed in the poet’s thought which indeed includes and exceeds the boundaries of earthly life. Already in life everybody is confronted with the reality of death and every human being has to deal with death in daily life: when one has to bury the dead and to protect their graves; when one finds oneself in life-threatening situations or undergoes violence; or when one is in danger of posing a threat to other people’s life. As the poem states explicitly and implicitly, again and again: death and life, the dead and the living are a central part of the human condition. The author accentuates the theme of life after death only within this specific framework. And, as the central position of vv. 103–115 seems to suggest, the theme takes centre stage in his thoughts. Nevertheless, the structure and train of his thoughts is mainly determined by the opening and the concluding instructions. At the beginning as well as at the end of the poem, the reader becomes instructed in the right way of life according to God’s will.50 The author nowhere states explicitly that a life corresponding to the demands of justice would affect the coming life after death. This is a kind of thinking the author seems not to be really familiar with. The author understood his instructions first of all as ‘gifts of blessing’ (ὄλβια δῶρα, v. 2) for everyday life. They will help to lead to ‘a good life, right up to the threshold of old age’ (v. 230). However, the poem provides an important theological connection between the exhortations to lead an everyday life in justice 50 On this model of early Jewish Torah paraenesis see Niebuhr, Gesetz und Paränese, 232–42.

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and the perspective on life after death. This connection is indicated by the author’s concept of God who is considered the origin and future of human life. In spite of all the conceptual inconsistencies and the difficulties in expression, the distinctive intention of the central passage about life after death is to establish a relationship between human life and God’s deeds in the past, present and future. In fact, God is not explicitly specified as creator throughout the entire poem. But in vv. 106–108 the life of men, its spirit and guise is ascribed to God: ‘For the spirit is a loan from God to mortals, and his image. For we have a body out of earth, and when afterwards we are resolved again into earth we are but dust; but the air has received our spirit’. There is no doubt, that the God to whom the author and the addressee direct their hope for the future and upon whom their self-image as creature is based, is the same God who promises a fortunate life for those who obey his advices (vv. 1–2). The biblical understanding of God constitutes the theological framework in which the outline of human life is drawn. God is the creator who has given to his people the life-affirming and life-saving instructions of the Torah. It is the same God whose holy impact on men does not stop at the boundaries of death. The language and thought of Pseudo-Phocylides’ gnomic poem is of Hellenistic-Roman origin and influenced by its traditions and conventions. Nevertheless, this cannot conceal that the author’s idea of man and his concept of God has primarily and consistently been shaped by early Jewish biblical traditions. These traditions had survived under the conditions of Hellenistic-Roman society and had not lost their power.

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THE PHRASE ‘GOOD WORKS’ IN EARLY JUDAISM A Universal Code for the Jewish Law? For Piet van der Horst, ‘doctor universalis’ Eric Ottenheijm At the opening of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus admonishes his disciples: ‘Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works (τὰ καλὰ ἔργα) and give glory to (δοξάσωσιν) your Father who is in heaven’ (Matt 5:16, RSV). Why does the evangelist use the phrase ‘good works’? In his lucid commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, Ulrich Luz notes: ‘Gute Werke’ ist eine fester Ausdruck, der auf zwei Arten verstanden werden kann: Versteht man ihn als Übersetzung der jüdischen ‫מעשים‬ ‫טובים‬, so ist an die von der Tora nicht gesetzlich vorgeschriebenen Forderungen Gottes gedacht, nämlich von allen Liebeswerke und Almosen. Andererseits ist der Ausdruck in späteren urchristlichen Schriften [. . .] auf die christliche Ethik ganz allgemein bezogen.

Luz favours a general meaning of the phrase, as referring to ‘einen jüdischen Topos von der Bewährung von der Menschen durch gute Werke [. . .] der nicht spezifisch rabbinisch ist und eher in allgemeinen Sinn an gute Taten denken läßt’.1 What should we consider, however, to mean ‘in allgemeinen Sinn’? And why would Jesus speak of doing ‘good works’ when he continues with a programmatic statement: ‘Think not that I have come to abolish the law and the prophets; I have come not to abolish them but to fulfil them’ (Matt 5:17)?2 How does the phrase relate to the Mosaic commandments? Remarkably, the phrase ‫מעשים‬ ‫( טובים‬or derivatives) is absent in the Hebrew Bible.3 The expression 1 U. Luz, Das Evangelium nach Matthäus I–7 (EKK 1/I), Neukirchen-Vluyn 19974, 224. Luz explains the phrase by referring to the preceding Beatitudes (Matt 5:3–12) and the following ‘antitheses’ (Matt 5:21–48). 2 Moreover, in the following ‘antitheses’ (Matt 5:21–7:23) Jesus interprets Mosaic commandments. 3 The most related expressions are ‫‘( טובותיו‬his good acts/deeds’), e.g. in Neh 6:19 (‘Also they spoke of his good deeds (LXX λόγους) in my presence, and reported my words to him’) or ‫‘( חסדיו‬his pious works’, e.g. 2 Chron 32:32; 35:26). They have no relevance for our problem.

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(‫ עשה טוב)ה‬occurs 32 times, denoting both divine and human actions.4 In general, doing good is not specified and often juxtaposed with words such as those derived from the root ‫צדק‬, righteousness. Frequently it is used to indicate the opposite to sinning or doing evil. See for example Eccl 7:20: ‘For there is no righteous man in the world who does good and does not sin’.5 If more specific actions are intended, other verbs are used.6 It seems, however, that the contents of doing good can be ethical as well as religious, as is implied in Deut 6:18: ‘and you shall do the right and the good (‫ )הישר והטוב‬in the eyes of the Lord’.7 Also in the Septuagint, the phrase is missing.8 Nonetheless, it is feasible to suppose, that the phrase itself entered the world of early Judaism through its earlier use in the Greek world.9 In Jewish sources it became associated with the system of Mosaic commandments. In general, as we shall see, it came to denote the practicing of ritual and ethical commandments. In particular, merciful actions, ascribed by biblical texts to a divinely ordained deliverer or even to God himself, lists of benevolent actions as in Job 31:16–20, or images of messianic deliverance in Isa 61:1–2 colour the specific content of the phraseology in early Judaism. The remainder of this study seeks to discuss its occurrences in early Jewish sources.10 What does the phrase mean and how does it function? What legal, theological and rhetorical connotations does it have?11 Presupposing that ‘good works’ was already a stock phrase at the time of the gospel of Matthew (around 80–85 ce), we look for earlier and/or

THWAT, 362. TWAT VI, 420. 6 THWAT, 362: ‘Je konkreter das Objekt ist, desto stärker wird das unspezifische ‘sh durch andere Verben bedrängt.’ 7 The labeling of benevolent acts as ‘doing good’ is attested in an Akkadian text from the seventh century bce: ‘Give food to eat, date wine to drink; the one begging for alms honor and clothe. Over this his God rejoices; this is pleasing unto the God Shamash. He rewards it with good. Be helpful, do good’ (ANET, 426). 8 See, however, the discussion on Tobit, below. 9 The phrase is used already by Empedocles (fifth century bce) and Pindarus (fourth century bce); see references in LSJ, col. 870. 10 The concept of ‘good works’ can also be present in verbal constructions such as ‘doing good’ (καλῶς ποιεῖν or ἀγαθωποιεῖν). 11 Remarkably enough, apart from ‘Exkurs 23’ in the commentary of Strack Billerbeck (Exkurse zu Einzelnen Stellen des Neuen Testaments, München, 1940) on ‘Die altjüdische Liebeswerke’, and respective lemmas in the Theological Dictionaries, this has not been done. Note that the ‘Exkurs’ is dedicated mainly to the acts of lovingkindness, ‫גמילות‬ ‫חסדים‬, rabbinically spoken only a part of the ‫מעשים טובים‬. 4 5

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contemporary occurrences of the terminology. Due to the limitations set for this study, we have to discuss the New Testament occurrences and the rabbinic sources elsewhere.12 Our method will be quite simple: a close reading of the relevant texts, finding out the narrative function of the phrase and/or the references and looking for the legal and theological concepts involved. In doing so, we present a historical approach based on three premises. First, to let the source texts speak for themselves. Second, to be aware of the variant types of Judaism in the era concerned. Third, to avoid ideologically based divisions between the Greek and the Hebrew/Aramaic branches of early Judaism. Having said that, let us survey the relevant sources. Qumran The phrase ‘good works’ occurs in the opening section of the Community Rule (1QS).13 The (new?) members of the Community are enjoined ‘that they may seek God with a whole heart and soul, and do what is good and right (‫ )לעשות הטוב והישר‬before Him as He commanded by the hand of Moses and all His servants the prophets; that they may love all that He has chosen and hate all that He has rejected; that they may abstain from all evil and hold fast to all kinds of good works (‫;)ולבדוק בכול מעשי טוב‬14 that they may practice truth, righteousness, and justice upon earth and no longer stubbornly follow a

12 Its frequency in tannaitic sources is rather limited: m.Abot 3:11; 4:11; 4:17; 6:19; t.Ber 6:12 (ed. Lieberman); Mek Yithro 1; Sifre Deut 29 and 30; MidrTann 3:23–29, 5:14; 11:12; 23:22. The contents of ‫ מעשים טובים‬are not specified and it can denote both ‘doing commandments’ and ‘doing acts of charity or loving-kindness’. The main discourse here is that of the tension between study and practice, and the redemptive power of ‘good works’. Interestingly, in Col 1:10, as in Rabbinic tradition, ‘good works’ is coupled with knowledge/study; see also 1 Tim 2:10. We will discuss this phenomenon elsewhere. 13 The manuscript dating points to a probable date of composition somewhere in the second half of the second century bce; thus D. Dimant, ‘Qumran Sectarian Literature’, 498, note 82, in: M.E. Stone (ed.), Jewish Writings of the Second Temple Period, Assen/Philadelphia 1984. 14 E. Lohse, Die Texte aus Qumran, Darmstadt 19864, 5: ‘aber anzuhangen allen guten Taten’; F. García Martínez & E.J.C. Tigchelaar, The Dead Sea Scrolls: Study Edition, Vol. I, Leiden/Grand Rapids 1997, 71: ‘and to become attached to all good works’; J. Charlesworth (ed.), The Dead Sea Scrolls: Vol. I, Rule of the Community and Related Documents, Tübingen/Louisville 1994, 7 (‘adhering to all good works’) and see for the grammar of the verbal construction note 3.

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sinful heart and lustful eyes to do all manner of evil (‫’)לעשות כול רע‬.15 A close look at the passage reveals how doing ‘good deeds’ is part of a rhetorical structure that opposes good and evil, without specification of the acts involved. Indeed, in 1QS 2:4–5, the Levites have to curse all the men of Belial’s lot with the words: ‘cursed be you in all your guilty (and) wicked works (‫’)בכול מעשי רשע אשמתכה‬. We note the dualism so characteristic of Qumran (good versus evil, love versus hate). Nevertheless, the rhetorical structure is also reminiscent of the biblical dichotomy of following/transgressing God’s laws in the Deuteronomistic literature. It is clear that the phrase ‫ מעשי טוב‬is not used to designate specific commandments. In fact, all actions are dimensions of one and the same law.16 The expression ‘good work’ possibly also occurs in the ‘Messianic Apocalypse’ (4Q521), an eschatological text replete with biblical motifs (e.g. Ps 118, Isa 40 and Isa 61:1–3). The text is, however, defective. One of the fragments seems to allow for a reconstructed reading ‫ופר]י‬ ‫מעש[ה טוב לאיש לוא יתאחר‬, ‘and the fruit of a good work will not be delayed for anyone’.17 The contents are not specified but the eschatological, soteriological meaning of the expression ‘good work’ is manifest. Tobit The apocryphal book of Tobit—deuterocanonical in the RomanCatholic Old Testament—was probably written in Aramaic. Eventually, it was translated into Hebrew and Greek and preserved in those languages. In the Septuagint, it is extant in a short and a long recension, of which the long version seems to be the older.18 Its date of origin is uncertain, although strong suggestions for the third century bce are given.19 The story is situated in the setting of the Diaspora, and prob-

15 1QS,1–7 in the translation of G. Vermes, The Dead Sea Scrolls in English, Sheffield 19954, 70. 16 See 1QS 1:20: ‫לעשות ככול החוקים האלה‬, ‘to do all these statutes’ and the recurring phrase ‫עושה התורה‬, ‘doing the Tora’ (1Pes.Hab 7,11; 8,1; 12,4). 17 E. Puech, Qumran Grotte 4 XVIII, Textes Hebreux (4Q521–4Q528, 4Q576, 4Q579) (DJD 25), Oxford 1998, 10–11, 15. 18 J.A. Fitzmeyer, Tobit (CEJL), Berlin 2002, 25, and see p. 5: ‘Greek Short Recension is [. . .] an effort to improve the Greek phraseology and literary character of the Tobit story’. An example is the elimination of Semitisms. 19 G.W.E. Nickelsburg, ‘Stories of Biblical and Early Post-Biblical Times’, in: Stone, Jewish Writings, 45: ‘It surely antedates the persecution of Antiochus. [. . .] a

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ably was also composed there.20 It tells us about a pious Jew, Tobit, his wife Anna, his son Tobias and the unfortunate Sarah who lost seven husbands during the nuptial night. The story is complex in structure and rich in motifs. The main line of the plot leads the righteous and pious Tobit as well as the unfortunate Sarah through suffering to healing.21 In a way, it treats the same theme as does the Book of Job: how to account for the suffering of the righteous man. Essential in the process of suffering and healing are the pious deeds performed by Tobit. These deeds are only rewarded at a later stage, which both accounts for God’s righteousness and gives an answer to the question of the suffering of the righteous person.22 Tobit is a pious man, who not only scrupulously carries out Mosaic commandments such as tithing (1:5–8) but also gives charity (1:3) to his fellow man and carries out acts of mercy (1:17; 2:2,7–8): providing clothes for the naked and food for the hungry. Also, Tobit is occupied with burying corpses (1:17).23 When his son leaves, Tobit delivers a farewell speech in which he lists the following elements: Do not hold over till the next day the wages of any man who works for you, but pay him at once; and if you serve God you will receive payment. Watch yourself, my son, in everything you do, and be disciplined in all your conduct. And what you hate, do not do to any one. Do not drink wine to excess or let drunkenness go with you on your way. Give of your bread to the hungry, and of your clothing to the naked. Give all your surplus to charity, and do not let your eye begrudge the gift when you make it. Place your bread on the grave of the righteous, but give none to sinners. Seek advice from every wise man, and do not despise any useful counsel. Bless the Lord God on every occasion; ask him that your ways may be made straight and that all your paths and plans may prosper. For none of the nations has understanding; but the Lord himself gives all good things, and according to his will he humbles whomever he

date before 200 bce is permissible’. Fitzmeyer, Tobit, 52 dates the story somewhere between 225–175 bce. 20 Fitzmeyer, Tobit, 52–4 discusses the eastern Diaspora but favours Palestine. 21 See the analysis of the several plot lines and the motifs in Nickelsburg, ‘Stories’, 41–4. 22 See especially the prayer of Tobit in 2:2–6 and the eulogy in chapter 13. 23 Fitzmeyer, Tobit, 118 refers to Job 31:16–20, Isa 58:7 and Ezek 18:5–9 for ‘counsels about such works in the Jewish tradition’. Burying the dead was a biblical act of great importance (see e.g. Gen 23, 25:9, 49:31; 50:26) and non-burial was considered a disgrace (Deut 28:26; Eccl 6:3, etc.). The burial of a non-Jew is also discussed in rabbinic literature; see b.Meg 3b.

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eric ottenheijm wishes. So, my son, remember my commands, and do not let them be blotted out of your mind. (Tob 4:14–19, RSV)

The phrase ἐργα ἀγαθα/καλὰ as such does not appear in the Greek text. However, the concept of ‘good works’ as a designation for specific religious and ethical commandments may have been familiar. Several elements of the story support this hypothesis. First, we encounter some of the actions designated by the term ‘good works’ in later sources. Burial is explicitly labelled as ‘doing good’ (ἀγαθοποιῶν, Tob 12:13). Giving clothes, providing for food and almsgiving are mentioned as well, as is fasting. The author, however, designates these acts as δικαιοσύναι and ἐλεηµοσύναι (e.g. in 2:14; 12:8; 14:11).24 Second, in his farewell address to Tobias (12:7), Michael, the angel of God, reveals his identity by expressing hortatory aphorisms: ‘Do good, and evil will not find you’.25 Indeed, this line serves as an introduction to the verses 8–11 that stipulate doing ‘(the) good’. Here we also learn about the theological significance of ‘doing good’. In his speech, Michael refers to the theological dimensions related to the performing of these acts. First, they have a protective and even atoning quality; second, they are an intermediary between God and man. As to the first aspect, the text states: [. . .] Do good, and evil will not overtake you. Prayer is good when accompanied by fasting, almsgiving, and righteousness.26 A little with righteousness is better than much with wrongdoing.27 It is better to give alms than to treasure up gold. For almsgiving delivers from death, and it will purge away every sin. Those who perform deeds of charity and of righteousness (οἱ ποιοῦντες ἐλεηµοσύνας και δικαιοσύνας)28 will have fullness of life; but those who commit sin are the enemies of their own lives’ (Tob 12:7–10).

24 Unfortunately, these verses are not extant in the Aramaic and Hebrew fragments discovered; see overview in Fitzmeyer, Tobit, 10. 25 ἀγαθὸν ποιήσατε (short version); το ἀγαθὸν ποιεῖτε (long version). 26 Compare Sir 7:10, 29:11–12 and Fitzmeyer, Tobit, 292. For the redemptive force of almsgiving as wiping out sin, see also Sir 3:30 and Dan 4:47; for almsgiving as saving from death, see Sir 4:7–10. Nickelsburg, ‘Stories’, 44 note 59, points to the similarity between the particular collocation of these three acts with Matt 6:2–18 and the liturgy on Yom Kippur. 27 See Prov 16:8. 28 The longer version, which is closer to the Qumran fragments (Nickelsburg, ‘Stories’, 45), reads ὁι ποιοῦντες ἐλεηµοσύνας.

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The second, intermediary aspect is visible, where God observes a man’s actions while he performs ‘good deeds’. Michael relates how he was present when Tobit performed his good works and how he, afterwards, acted as a messenger: I will not conceal anything from you. I have said, “It is good to guard the secret of a king, but gloriously to reveal the works of God.” And so, when you and your daughter-in-law Sarah prayed, I brought a reminder of your prayer before the Holy One; and when you buried the dead, I was likewise present with you. When you did not hesitate to rise and leave your dinner in order to go and lay out the dead, your good deed ( ἀγαθοποιῶν)29 was not hidden from me, but I was with you. (Tob 12:11–13, RSV)30

Finally, leading a pious life has a redemptive quality. Good actions generate God’s blessing, albeit in non-direct ways. Nickelsburg suggests that the story elaborates on the intimate relation between man’s actions of mercy and God’s mercifulness.31 Indeed, Tobit stipulates that by being pious and acting out deeds of loving-kindness (4:7–11), God’s mercy will be aroused and He will lead the dispersed of Israel back to the Land (13:5–6). Moreover, the author suggests that in this chain of events, ultimately, God will be praised by the Gentiles, who will come to Jerusalem (13:13). In short, it is this redemptive power of pious acts that seems to be the hidden force behind the narrative that leads Tobit and his family from suffering to a blessed life. Letter of Aristeas The ‘letter of Aristeas’ presents itself as an eyewitness account in the form of a report or letter, addressed to a certain Philocrates, on the translation of the Hebrew Bible in Greek (Septuagint) at the Egyptian court of Ptolemy II Philadelphus (283–247 bce). Actually, the ‘Letter of Aristeas’ is a ‘court novel’ and was written much later, probably

Missing in the longer version. Fitzmeyer, Tobit, 294. 31 Nickelsburg, ‘Stories’, 42 note 50: ‘It is most probable, at least on the level of the Greek translation, that there is a relationship between the characterisation of God as ‘merciful’ and ‘doing mercy’ and the frequent occurrence of the noun ἐλεηµοσύνη (‘alms’, ‘charity’, etc.)’. 29 30

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in the second century bce.32 It can be seen as an apologia for Jewish religion, Jewish law and the Jewish people in general. The writer must be Jewish, but he assumes a Greek personality in order to ‘strengthen the force of the argument and commend it to non-Jewish readers’.33 Its historical Sitz im Leben is the Greek speaking Jewish Diaspora, probably in Alexandria.34 The ‘letter’ shows great interest in Jewish law, and its allegorical explanations of dietary laws are noteworthy. It tries to show that Hellenistic culture and Jewish life and practice are reconcilable. The author is ‘counseling rapprochement without assimilation’.35 This is especially visible in his narrative on the translation and in his explanations of the Mosaic Law: ‘The divinely revealed Law is one of the two strands of a cord that can bind Jews and Greeks together; it contains the prescriptions for the Jewish life style and a universal philosophy with ethical principles that guide both Jews and Greeks’.36 The phrase ‘good works’ occurs several times. It has a double narrative function, as referring to specific benevolent actions toward one’s fellow man and as a set of practices held up as an example to other people. Apparently, the phrase is used to depict the Jewish Law in its dimension of a universal code for humanity. A closer look at some passages makes this clear. The first time we meet the phrase is in a comment given by the author after he has prayed for a successful intervention with the king: ‘[. . .] for insofar people, who in the interest of righteousness and attention to good deeds, practice in piety (ὅ γὰρ πρὸς δικαιοσύνην καὶ καλῶν ἔργων ἐπιµέλειαν ἐν ὁσιότητι νοµίζουσιν ἄνθρωποι ποιεῖν), God, the Ruler of all, guides their efforts and purposes’ (18).37 The immediate reference is to the I-person himself, who has pleaded with the King for the release of Jewish prison-

32 See already the extensive discussion by Andrews in R.H. Charles, Pseudepigrapha, Oxford 1913, 85–7. Compare J.C. VanderKam, An Introduction to Early Judaism, Michigan/Cambridge 2001, 81: ‘[. . .] some time in the second century bce’; Nickelsburg, ‘Stories’, 77: ‘Linguistic considerations suggest a date in the second half of the second century bce.’ So also G.S. Oegema, Unterweisung in erzählender Form ( JSHRZ VI,1/2), Gütersloh 2005, 53. 33 Charles, Pseudepigrapha, 84. 34 Oegema, ‘Aristeasbrief ’, 53. 35 Nickelsburg, ‘Stories’, 79. Oegema, ‘Aristeasbrief ’, 56 qualifies Aristeas as ‘eine Synthese, die sich griechischen Denken weit öffnet und zugleich die eigenen Wurzeln in der Tora nicht preisgibt, sondern stets allem Assimilierungsdruck zum Trotz ganz zentral in dem Mittelpunkt des jüdischen Selbstverständniss rückt’. 36 Nickelsburg, ‘Stories’, 79. 37 Revised translation, based on Charles, Pseudepigrapha. An edition of the Greek text is offered by A. Pelletier, Lettre d’Aristée à Philocrate (SC 89), Paris 1962.

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ers, taken captive and deported to Egypt by the King’s father. This is clearly seen as an example of ‘righteousness’ and ‘noble deeds’. The line is an interjection of the author, as an afterthought which provides for a philosophical explanation of his behaviour, i.e. praying for the success of his intervention with the king. Theologically, Aristeas holds that virtue (ἀρεθή) may be the starting point of ethical behaviour, but the very realization and even virtue itself results from God’s initiative. Indeed, virtue (ἀρεθή) is considered the source of ‘good deeds’ (καλῶν γὰρ ἔργων ἐστὶν ἐπιτέλεια; 272), but at the same time it is God who helps to continue to do good deeds or effect self-control (226, 231, 248). What we encounter here is a specific amalgam of Jewish and biblical wisdom (‘good deeds’, ‘righteousness’) on the one hand and Greek practical philosophy on the other hand (see e.g. 127, 128 and 171). The main part of the letter (187–294) consists of an account of seven successive banquets presided over by the king and attended by the seventy-two translators, Jewish sages. During these banquets, the king asks series of ten questions. In this section, doing good is depicted as imitating God. Because God is the source of all good, it is obligatory to imitate Him (κατακολουθεῖν; 205). When the king poses a question as to the essence of Godliness, he is answered: ‘For, as God does good to the whole world (εὐεργετεῖ τὸν ὄλον κόσµον), so you by imitating him by being without offence (µιµούµενος ἀπρόσκοπος ἄν εἴης)’ (210). A third, peculiar, political motive sheds additional light on the associative framework of ‘good deeds’ in Aristeas. When the author concludes his plea for the release of the prisoners, he finishes with these words: ‘Set all mankind an example of magnanimity by releasing those who are held in bondage’ (16). In fact, this motive of the political value of benevolent actions recurs often in the letter. The king asks, for example, how he can continue to be rich. The answer starts by summing up what has to be avoided and finally states positively ‘[. . .] but by well doing (εὐεργεσίᾳ) made all his subjects well disposed towards himself ’ (205). Although the source of all good is seen in God’s action, it is clear that the interpersonal relations have their own political as well as theological dynamics. Crucial in these dynamics is the performance of ‘good deeds’. For example, when the king asks how one despises one’s enemies, the answer is: ‘Show kindness to all men and win their friendship, you need fear no one. To be popular with all men is the best of good gifts to receive from God’ (225).38 38

Translation Charles, Pseudepigrapha.

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Although contents of ‘good deeds’ are not specified, the author suggests that working for the release of prisoners is one of them. Furthermore, ‘good deeds’ have a propagandistic, political aspect, i.e. they are able to avoid enmity and arouse sympathy and respect among others. Theologically, man is able to perform ‘good deeds’ because he has virtues, but it is God who sanctions his actions by granting them success and providing them with fruit. Doing good is the positive way of imitating God in His goodness. Finally, in Aristeas’ use of ‘good works’, Jewish legal wisdom and Greek anthropology meet and merge. As said already, Aristeas does discuss and explain extensively those Mosaic laws that place a division between Israel and the nations, such as dietary laws, purity laws, the cult etcetera (128–171). It is, however, in those dimensions of the Law that pertain to both Jews and non-Jews that the phrase ‘good works’ is used. Sibylline Oracles The Sibylline Oracles, twelve books in two collections, were written over a span of more than 200 years. In itself a pagan phenomenon, the Sibyl being an old woman uttering prophesies and oracles, the figure and the genre proved to be very influential in Jewish and Christian tradition.39 Our concern is a passage in book 3, the oldest collection, of which the main part (97–349) is dated between 80–31 bce.40 The book is considered a Jewish work from the Diaspora.41 The passage concerned runs as follows: ‘There is a city down in the land of Ur of the Chaldees, from which comes a race of most righteous men, who ever give themselves up to sound counsel (βουλὴ ἀγαθή) and good deeds (καλὰ ἔργα)’ (3:218–220). Clearly, according to the writer the behaviour of these people—the descendants of Abraham—deviates from the traditional practices of astrology and astronomy, a science supposed by the writer to originate in Babylonia.42 The contents of these ‘good deeds’ are not specified, but further on some clues are given in the form of moral exhortation: ‘But these diligently practice justice and virtue, and J.J. Collins, ‘The Sibylline Oracles’, in: Stone, Jewish Writings, 357ff. See now R. Buitenwerf, Book III of the Sibbyline Oracles and its Social Setting, Leiden 2003, 127–29. Collins, ‘Sibylline Oracles’, 367 opts for a dating between 163–45 bce. 41 Buitenwerf, Sibbyline Oracles, 130–31 considers Asia Minor a ‘plausible candidate’. 42 See for this topos Philo’s treatise On the Migration of Abraham, 32. 39 40

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not covetousness, which is the source of myriad ills to mortal men, of war and desperate famine.’ (3:235).43 The theme covetousness recurs later, together with numerous warnings against practicing homosexuality and idolatry.44 Again, we meet the use of the phrase ‘good deeds’ in a rather unarticulated way, but in opposition to vices, here lust and (presumed) sexual abominations. Notwithstanding the vagueness, the readers will have had a positive association with correct behaviour. The message of book 3 is, that both Jews and Gentiles ‘shared one humanity with common interests’.45 It seems, that the phrase ‘good deeds’ serves to underscore this message. Philo Philo of Alexandria, who lived about 15 bce–50 ce, dedicates much of his literary efforts to an exposition of biblical narratives in the light of Greek philosophy.46 The method he uses is the allegorical explanation, according to which narrative elements and literary motives are explained as referring to virtues or vices of man in his relation to God and the divine Law. Philo uses the phrase τὰ καλὰ τῶν ἔργων in discourses on the virtuous man, who acts in accordance with the requirements of the divine call. The aspect of immediate compliance is very important to Philo. This is the major issue in his comment on the story of Cain and Abel. Philo explains the reason why God did not accept Cain’s offering from the fact that Cain did not give thanks to God immediately (οὐκ εὐθὺς εὐχαριστῆσαι θεῷ) and, therefore, that he did not offer the first fruits (τῶν πρώτων καρπῶν).47 Philo finds proof for this allegation in Gen 4:3, ‘and after some days, it happened [. . .]’. These words indicate, according to Philo, that Cain did not do it immediately. Cain is a man who indulges in ‘self love’, as opposed to a man who loves God. Philo concludes: ‘Our good deeds should be done (δεῖ πράττειν τά καλὰ τῶν ἔργων) in the spirit of eagerness to anticipate the call; and with slackness and hesitation put right away; and the best of deeds is to do without delay the pleasure of the Primal Good (ἔργον Also Buitenwerf, Sibbylline Oracles, 199. Collins, ‘Sibylline Oracles’, 367. 45 Collins, ‘Sibylline Oracles’, 367. 46 On Philo and his works, see P. Borgen, ‘Philo of Alexandria’, in: Stone, Jewish Writings, 233ff. We follow the translations of the LCL. 47 On the Sacrifices of Abel and Cain, 53. 43 44

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δὲ ἄριστον ἡ πρὸς τὸ πρῶτον καλὸν).’48 This teaches, that a man who loves God, should redeem his vow immediately, without any delay. The eagerness to do good is a token of divine inspiration. In his treatise On the Confusion of Tongues, Philo comments on the answer of the Israelites at Mount Sinai, that they would ‘do and listen’ (Exod 19:8). The words ‘do and listen’—a strange inversion, Philo notes—teach that the Israelites were under divine inspiration and ‘that so they may be seen to go forwards to good deeds not by teaching or instruction, but through the self-acting, self-dictated instinct of their own hearts (καί αὐτοκελευστῳ διανοίᾳ πρὸς τά καλὰ τῶν ἔργων)’ (59).49 Elsewhere, Philo discusses the fact that some virtuous and righteous men are not esteemed in society because they lack eloquence. Others, on the other hand ‘are doubly successful; their mind is secured by wisdom in counsel and good deeds (τὴν µὲν διάνοιαν εὐβουλίᾳ καὶ ἀγαθοὶς ἔργαις), their speech to the acts of eloquence’.50 It is in this discourse on the virtuous man that Philo uses the phrase καλὰ τῶν ἔργων. The phrase is opposed to unfitting deeds (ἔργας δέ ἀτόποις) and implies general virtuous actions, both in the relation to the divine and in the relation between human beings.51 Finally, in his exposition on the dreams of Joseph (Gen 37), Philo offers an allegorical explanation of the name Issachar, one of Joseph’s brothers, which indicates his knowledge of Hebrew. The name refers to the rewards for performing good deeds. Philo teaches: ‘rewards rendered as recompense for noble deeds, the deeds themselves, it may be, constituting the perfect reward (οἳ ἐπι ἔργοις καλοῖς ἀποδίδονται ὁ τέλειος µισθὸς ἦν)’.52

On the Sacrifices of Abel and Cain, 32; see also 68. Note that Moses was a man of utmost virtue, who had ‘so long carefully tested his excellence (καλοκἀγαθίας) in words and deeds’ (On Virtues and Rewards, 56). 50 The Worse Attack the Better, 35. 51 On the Posterity and Exile of Cain, 81. Redemption of a vow, offering and performing the commandments. Another prototype of a man who indulges in self-love is Onan (Gen 38). Interesting is the list of virtuous actions Onan misses, because he is not able to do these without gaining some profit from them: ‘honour paid to parents, loving care of a wife, bringing up of children, happy and blameless relations with domestic servants, management of a house, leadership in a city, maintaining of laws, guardianship of usages, reverence towards elders, respect for the memory of the departed, fellowship with the living, piety in words and actions towards the Deity (τὴν πρὸς τὸ θεῖον ἐν λόγοις καὶ ἔργοις εὐσέβειαν)’ (On the Posterity and Exile of Cain, 181). 52 On Dreams II, 34. The name Issachar ‫יששכר‬, ‘hireling’, contains the Hebrew word for ‘reward’, ‫שכר‬. For a related theology of the reward of performing commandments, 48 49

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Josephus In his works, the Jewish-Roman historian Flavius Josephus uses the adverb ‘good’ (ἀγαθος/καλός) to designate the personal quality of individuals, usually in combination with ‘just’ (δίκαιος). One passage may be relevant to our theme. In his last work Contra Apionem (further CA), Josephus defends the Jewish people and Jewish Law against allegations as to its historical antiquity and against mere slander, put forward by Hellenistic authors (e.g. the Egyptian author Manetho and the Alexandrian rhetor Apion).53 In so doing, Josephus tries to ‘make comprehensible in Greek terms, here the terms of Greek political theory, the nature and excellence of Jewish tradition’.54 In the last part of this apologetic treatise (CA 2:145–220), Josephus defends the Mosaic Law as being superior both in theory and in practice to the laws of the Greeks. He adds a critical comparison between the religion and laws of the Jewish lawgiver, Moses, and those of the Spartans or Lacedemonians (CA 2:220–286). It is in this section, that Josephus recounts several of the legislations of Moses, in particular as to the way interpersonal relations in Jewish society are regulated (e.g. marital relations, birth, burial, honouring parents, propriety etc.). Now before continuing his legal exposition with other, Pentateuchal laws (moderation in the execution of war, non-brutal handling of animals) he adds a note on the possibility that Gentiles could observe these laws. In this respect, he adds the following: ‘However, there are other things which our legislator ordained for us beforehand, which we are obliged to share with others (ὧν ἡ µετάδοσίς ἐστιν ἀναγκεία); fire, water, food to all who want it (πᾶσι παρέχειν τοῖς δεοµένοις); to show them the roads; and not to let any one unburied’ (CA 2:192). These deeds are not Mosaic laws in themselves. They are, however, phrased in a rather esoteric pattern: providing for shelter (which seems to be the meaning of ‘fire’), drink, food, showing strangers the way (a politically sensitive issue in a situation of Roman occupation) and the obligation to bury the dead. It is possible that Josephus knew these actions as ‘good works’. see the expression of Ben Azzai in m.Abot 4:2: ‫שכר מצוה מצוה‬, ‘The reward of a commandment is the/a commandment’. 53 Contra Apionem, written after his Jewish Antiquities (93–94 ce) and considered the last book of Josephus, is dated in the last years of Domitian (81–96) or the first years of Nerva (96–98); H. Attridge, ‘Josephus and his works’, in: Stone, Jewish Writings, 227–228. 54 See Attridge, ‘Josephus’, 230.

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In his work, he uses the expression ‘doing good’ merely in the meaning of acting with common sense.55 However, it is possible he knew the phrase. He uses it in his comparison between the observance of the law by the Spartans and the way the Jews steadfastly held to their law. Josephus rather sarcastically notes: Nay, if any one will consider it, the difficulties and labours laid upon us have been greater than what appears to have been borne by the Lacedemonian fortitude, while they neither ploughed their land, nor exercised any trades, but lived in their own city, free from all such painstaking, in the enjoyment of plenty and using such exercises as might improve their bodies, while they made use of other men and their servants for all the necessaries of life, and had their food prepared for them by the others and these good and humane actions (τὸ καλὸν ἔργον καὶ φιλάνθρωπον) they do for no other purpose but this, that by their action and their sufferings, they may be able to conquer all those against whom they make war.56

I am not sure whether we can derive from the allusion to providing for food and the ‘necessaries of life’ (ἅπαντα τὰ τοῦ βίου χρώµενοι) an existing tradition or concept of ‘good works’.57 Nevertheless, Josephus contrasts the behaviour of the Jews with that of the Spartans: Jews provide food and life-necessities even for other people, the Spartans use other people to provide these. Moreover, the motivation for the performance of these ‘humane actions’ is negative in the philosophy of the Spartans, i.e. waging war, but positive in the philosophy of the Jewish lawgiver Moses, i.e. respect for every human being. Josephus differentiates between prescriptions of the Mosaic Law that govern the specifically Jewish way of serving God (Temple, sacrifice), prescriptions that structure inner-Jewish society and some universally applicable rules that extend respect for life to non-Jews (shelter, food, drink, burial, showing the way). These last actions are not formally commandments by Moses, but are nevertheless understood as part of his Law and valid beyond the borders of the Jewish tribe.

Bello Judaicae 1.643: καλῶς δὲ ποιήεις. CA 2.230. Translation W. Whiston, The Works of Josephus, Massachusetts 1988. 57 The Latin translation of Josephus (ed. Boysen) may have understood it as such: ‘hoc solum opus bonum atque clemens [. . .]’. 55 56

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Apocalyptic Literature (4 Ezra, 2/3 Baruch) After the fall of the Second Temple, some apocalyptic works were written that react to this traumatic event and make it the object of serious, theological consideration. One of these works made it into the Vulgate, but remained also available in various ancient translations: Second Esdras (Vulgate), also known as the Apocalypse of Ezra or as 4 Ezra. Written between 95 and 100 bce, it is a narrative about seven visions, granted to Ezra the scribe by the angel Uriel.58 Within this literary structure, the book deals with questions about God’s justice, the fate of Israel and God’s purposes with humanity. Ezra the Scribe, who received and restored the Law of Moses, is the central figure in the narrative. Performing ‘deeds of righteousness’ or ‘good deeds’ is seen in the light of eschatological events, in particular in a context of eschatological divine judgment: ‘But judgment alone shall remain, truth shall stand, and faithfulness triumph. And recompense shall follow, and the reward be made manifest; deeds of righteousness shall awake, and deeds of iniquity shall not sleep’ (7:34–35).59 In a passage concerning the situation of the soul after death and before his final judgment, the following appears: ‘And he answered me, and said: I will show this also unto thee; but do not thou mingle thyself with them that have scorned, nor number thyself with those that suffer torment. For thou hast a treasure of works laid up with the Most High, but it shall not be showed thee until the last times.’ (7:76–77).60 It is not clear from the text what kind of works are meant, but the same image occurs in 2 Baruch 14:12. Most probably, the phrase points to a combination of the carrying out of the Mosaic commandments together with charity and acts of loving-kindness.61 In any case, some universally applicable code of law

M.E. Stone, ‘Apocalyptic Literature’, in: Stone, Jewish Writings, 412. Text according to Charles, Pseudepigrapha. J. Schreiner, Das 4. Buch Esra ( JSHRZ V/4), Gütersloh 1981, 347, presupposes the Hebrew ‘tsedakot’. 60 For the motive of the ‘treasure of works’, see Matt 6:19–20; Ps.Sal 9:9 and 2 Bar 14:12. Schreiner, Das 4. Buch Esra, 347: ‘gute Werke’, based on the Aramaic and Armenian translations. 61 See footnote in Charles, Pseudepigrapha, 587. Narrative elements corroborate this interpretation. A moving example is the vision in chapter 10, of a bereaved mother, whose son died at the moment he entered his wedding chamber: ‘Then I removed the lights and all my fellow townsfolk rose up to comfort me’. Not only the concept of comforting the mourners is woven into the narrative, also the bereaved mother is spoken to in terms that are traditional: ‘be consoled by reason of Jerusalem’s sorrow.’ 58 59

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must be meant also. This interpretation receives its plausibility from the reference to the Law and to precepts given to the nations in the foregoing verses: For this reason, therefore, shall the sojourners in the earth suffer torture, because having understanding they yet wrought iniquity, and receiving precepts they yet kept them not, and having obtained the Law, they set at naught62 that which they received. What then will they have to say in the Judgment, or how shall they answer in the last times?’ (7:72–73).63

2 Baruch is part of a complex of Baruch-literature, and was written after the destruction of the Second Temple. Originally Jewish, it contains some Christian interpolations. It differs from 4 Ezra in its more relaxed discussion of the topic of reward and punishment, less disturbed by the theodicy questions or the anguish caused by the loss of the Temple.64 2 Baruch is available in a Syriac and an Arab manuscript and partially in Greek fragments. It was probably composed around the end of the first and the beginning of the second century.65 It is less concerned with eschatology. Its main theme is the relation between acting and recompense. ‘Good works’ have an atoning quality, on account of God’s love for Sion (14:7). It is not clear though what kind of works is meant. Again, probably, it is a collective term for religiously and ethically appropriate acts that make a man righteous. The Greek apocalypse of Baruch (3 Baruch)66 also mentions ‘good works’. It is debated what part of the text has Jewish origins and what parts are Christian interpolations or even additions.67 This is especially true for chapter 15, where the author is shown the following picture of the angel Michael bringing ‘the merits of men to God’ (14:2): And in that very hour Michael descended, and the gate was opened; and he brought oil. And as for the angels which brought the full baskets, he filled them with oil, saying: Take it away, reward our friends a hundredfold,

Consoling mourners is one of the acts of loving-kindness in rabbinic tradition; see sources in Strack-Billerbeck, ‘Exkurs’. 62 The Latin recension has ‘fraudaverunt’. 63 Compare 8:52, where good works figure in an eschatological context, as part of the reconstituted reality. 64 Stone, ‘Apocalyptic Literature’, 411–12. 65 Stone, ‘Apocalyptic Literature’, 411. 66 Also known from an old-Slavic translation of a Greek original. On the versions see D. Harlow, The Greek Apokalypse of Baruch (3 Baruch) in Hellenistic Judaism and Early Christianity, Leiden 1996, 5–10. 67 See discussion in Harlow, Baruch.

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and those who laboriously wrought good works. For those who sowed virtuously, also reap virtuously’ (15:1–3).68

Earlier, the merits and the ‘good deeds’ of the righteous were brought together in an extremely large vessel by Michael and brought before God (11:8–9). It seems clear, that ‘good deeds’ again functions as a technical term, denoting religiously and ethically virtuous acts. In a negative sense, the text presents a list of vices (13:4, but possibly a Christian interpolation), which is opposed to doing ‘any good work’.69 Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs (further T. 12 Patr.) contain farewell discourses pseudepigraphically attributed to the 12 sons of Jacob. These discourses contain retrospective elements, i.e. narratives about the speaker’s life, ethical exhortations and prophetic or apocalyptic elements, looking forward to the deliverance of Israel from exile. Peculiar are the so-called ‘Sin-Exile-Return’ patterns, reminiscent of the Deuteronomistic history.70 Both the textual history and the historical whereabouts of the T. 12 Patr. are complex. It is clear, that in their final form these texts are Christian. Scholars are divided, however, as to how the relation between the Christian and the Jewish elements should be evaluated. According to one group of scholars the T. 12 Patr. are in essence Jewish texts with Christian interpolations, according to the school centred around M. de Jonge, however, these texts were fabricated by Christian authors who drew on Jewish sources.71 This debate has repercussions for the positions regarding date and provenance. The final form is dated somewhere between the second half of the second and 68 Translation Charles, Pseudepigrapha. For sowing-reaping, see also 2 Cor 9:6 and Ps 126:5–6. See on the problem of the different reading ‘oil’ (Greek text) and ‘mercy’ (Slavonic text), Harlow, Baruch, 149 note 128. 69 ‘Murder, jealousy, drunkenness, strife, envy, murmurings, whispering, idolatry, divination, and such like’ (13:4). For these lists there are both Jewish and Christian parallels; see Pseudo-Phocylides, Sent. 3–7; Didache 5:1, etc. Interestingly, murder and idolatry are part of the so-called Noachitic commandments, incumbent on all mankind and valid for Jew or Gentile. See on this topic now H. van de Sandt & D. Flusser, The Didache: Its Jewish Sources and its Place in Early Judaism and Christianity, Assen/Minneapolis, 2002, 166–67. 70 J.J. Collins, ‘Testaments’, in: Stone, Jewish Writings, 325. As noted by Collins, the ‘Sin-Exile-Return’ pattern was identified by H.W. Hollander & M. de Jonge, The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs: A Commentary, Leiden 1985, 83–6. 71 See overview in Collins, ‘Testaments’, 342–43.

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the beginning of the third century ce. There are indications, however, of a much earlier date for the main material, with passages even reaching back as far as the Maccabean era. Parallels with Qumranic texts are important in this regard. In general, however, the material is hard to date, being in a way timeless, and applicable to either a Jewish or a non-Jewish environment.72 We should keep this in mind when discussing the relevant passages. Three passages are important regarding the phrase ‘good works’. The result of performing ‘good works’ is compared with the result of educating a child: the fruits of a good education are visible to all men, in the behaviour and character of the child: ‘For as when someone brings up a child well (ἐκτρέψῃ καλῶς), he is kept in good remembrance, so also for a good work, there is a good remembrance before God (τοῦ καλοῦ ἔργου µνήνη παρὰ θεῷ ἀγαθή)’ (T. Naphtali 8:5).73 The implicit notion here is that good works testify to the inherent religious and ethical ‘quality’ of following the laws of the God of Israel. ‘Good works’ are a visible means of validating the virtues inherent in faith in God. This extends to the world of the angels and even to the heathens, who will be stirred to glorify God on behalf of the ‘good works’: ‘If ye work that which is good (ἐὰν ἐργάσησθε τὸ καλόν), my children, both man and angels shall bless you, and God shall be glorified among the Gentiles (ἐν τοῖς ἔθνεσι) through you’ (T. Naphtali 8:4; see opposite in 8:6). The motif of angels reacting to the performance of ‘good works’ is reminiscent of Tobit. Performing ‘good deeds’ also has a proclamatory, even propagandist as well as theological value (‘And the Lord shall love you’; 8:4). More generally, ‘doing good’ is the ultimate proof of the ‘good life’ and of being a good man. A related term, ‘working mercy’, is used to designate the task of the messianic figure who will bring back the scattered tribes of Israel: ‘And the Lord scatters them upon the face of all the earth, until the compassion of the Lord comes, a man working righteousness and working mercy unto all (ἄνθρωπος ποιῶν δικαιοσύνην καὶ ποιῶν ἔλεος εἰς πάντας) who are far off and who are near’74 (T. Naphtali 4:5). The

Collins, ‘Testaments’, 344. Translations follow Hollander, The Testaments; Greek text edited by M. de Jonge, The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs: A Critical Edition of the Greek Text (PVTG 1), Leiden 1978. 74 For the literary motif ‘far/near’, see especially Isa 57:19 and compare Hollander, Commentary, 310. 72 73

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reciprocal quality of human mercy evoking divine mercy is also attested in T. Zevulon 8:1–3 (compare also 5:1–5). The immediate issue here is showing forgiveness (see the example of Joseph in 8:4–5) but the narrative also stresses acts such as providing strangers with food and clothes (T. Zevulon 6:4–5). Even an example is given where an act of loving-kindness is performed by committing a transgression: ‘I saw a man in distress through nakedness in wintertime, and had compassion upon him, and stole away a garment secretly from my father’s house, and gave it to him who was in distress’ (T. Zevulon 7:1). The example given shows that acts of loving-kindness are an example of showing mercy, but it also points to the importance given to these acts. This takes us to the third function of ‘doing good’. In T. Asher the phrase ‘good works’ occurs in the discussion of anthropology. Man is subject to both a good and a bad ‘inclination’ or ‘disposition’, and his works are twofold, good or bad: ‘God has given two ways to the sons of men and two inclinations/dispositions (δύο διαβούλια),75 and two kinds of action [. . .]’ (T. Asher 1:3). As already known, the teaching of a good and an evil inclination is a classical topos in rabbinic Judaism and a modification of the more dualistic anthropology of predestination known from Qumran.76 As in Qumran, however, the anthropology of T. 12 Patr. is operative in the ethical teaching of the two ways. Besides, an apparent dualism involving God and Beliar is noticeable.77 The text discusses the importance of clinging to the good inclination. For if man gives in to the bad inclination, he is governed by Beliar, the personification of evil. Beliar can turn even good works into evil (T. Asher 1:8–9). One might conclude that ‘good acts’ are effective only when performed from an undivided ‘good drive’ (see T. Asher 2–3). If a person does good deeds for the sake of evil, the outcome is evil. Indeed, in order to let the good inclination govern his actions, man has to abstain from all kinds of evil. If he succeeds in doing that, all his acts will have a good outcome, even if some of the acts themselves

75 Thus Charles, Pseudepigrapha, 344. Hollander, Commentary, 341 translates ‘disposition’, see also 339. 76 Collins, ‘Testaments’, 340. See however Hollander, Commentary, 338–41: ‘Every person has one διαβούλιον which has two options and is, after the choice has been made, either good or bad’. According to him, διαβούλιον means disposition, in the Greek sense of choice. 77 See also lists in 1QS 3,13–4,26; Didache 1–6 and Barnabas 18–20. On the topos of the Two Ways in Early Judaism, see now Van de Sandt & Flusser, Didache, 140ff. and Van de Sandt’s contribution in this volume.

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appear bad, such as killing sinners (4:1–5).78 The text stresses the necessity of a continuous struggle against the bad inclination and abstention from evil. Moreover, it is also stated that through the performing of ‘good works’ man can destroy the devil or evil, the principle of his ‘evil inclination’: ἀναιροῦντες τὸν διάβολον ἐν ταῖς ἀγαθαῖς ὑµῶν πράξεσιν (T. Asher 3:2).79 In general, the texts do not specifically define or characterize ‘good works’, but the narrative suggests some of the content. Besides its emphasis on correct sexual behaviour, the performance also of (some?) Mosaic commandments and ethical acts of loving-kindness are implied in the phrase.80 As in the passages discussed from T. Zevulon, T. Joseph 3:5–6 also mentions giving food and drink to the poor and the sick. T. Joseph (1:1–7) mentions a list of good works very similar to the eschatological discourse of the Son of Man in Matt 25.81 It should be noted, however, that essential commandments in early Judaism (Sabbath) are not mentioned or only in a metaphorical way, such as purity. Others (such as tithing, circumcision) are mentioned only rarely or in an eschatological context (Temple service).82 On the other hand, in itself this is not an isolated phenomenon. Virtues as the main contents of the Mosaic Law are also dominant in the Jewish part of the Didache and in literature attributed to pious teachers, the ‘chassidim rishonim’. In more than one respect, T. 12 Patr. shares features with this type of hortatory wisdom literature.83 Finally, this brings us back to the problems concerning the Jewish or Christian provenance of the texts. The rhetorical and theological elements discussed do not deviate fundamentally from what we have seen before. This is true especially for the proclamatory function of ‘good deeds’, their universal appreciation and for the implicit theology Compare also T. Benjamin 5:3 and 6:7. Hollander, Commentary, 349: ‘the devil’ (but see Notes, ‘the evil’). The word play on διάβολον and διαβούλιον (the bad inclination or disposition) is apparent from the context of the verse. See also the opposite mechanism in 1:8–9! 80 T. Benjamin 10:3: ‘do truth and righteousness each to his neighbour, and justice unto preservation and keep the law of the Lord and his commandments’; 10:5: ‘keep the commandments of God, until the Lord will reveal his salvation to all the nations’. Hollander, Commentary, 412–13 discusses the theme of the ‘good man’ in T. Benjamin. 81 Including release from slavery, taking care of the captives, nourishing the hungry, comforting the lonely, visiting the sick. 82 Collins, ‘Testaments’, 337. 83 See the extensive discussion, also on the similarity with T. 12 Patr., in Van de Sandt & Flusser, Didache, 172–90. 78 79

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(God/angels being present and brought to bless God, evoking God’s mercy). The eschatological quality of good acts as stimulating the deliverance of Israel was seen in earlier sources (Tobit). As for the new elements, the anthropology of the two inclinations and the teaching of the two ways, these are prominent themes in early Jewish sources and rabbinic Jewish tradition. Conclusions The phrase καλὰ ἔργα/ἐργα ἀγαθα (and derivate forms) is first attested in Diaspora Judaism, in Greek Diaspora literature of third century bce Egypt (Aristeas). It would continue to serve as a stock phrase in Hellenistic Judaism (Philo). Somewhere in the second century bce, however, its Hebrew/Aramaic equivalents must have entered Palestinian Judaism (Hebrew or Aramaic ‘Vorlage’ of Tobit, Qumran). From the second century ce onwards, it can be detected in Palestinian Jewish sources and Diaspora sources. The phrase can serve several aims in religious, political or social discourses. Its origin in the Diaspora context sheds light on its apologetic or even propagandistic use. The phrase ‘good works’ is a rhetorical tool to present, explain and even propagate the Mosaic Law. Good works designate its universal acceptability and ethical sublimity, being the practical means available to men for leading a good life. Moreover, good works show the eminent religious values upheld by the respective community. Good works also have a political dimension, inasmuch as they help to maintain good relations between the (non-Jewish) rulers and the community. Interestingly, they also point to the moral quality or even superiority of a specific community. In this relation, the ethical and universal implications of the Law are stressed and propagated. Theologically, ‘good works’ can have a revelatory, atoning and even redeeming power, both for the individual and for the collective. In particular, ‘good deeds’ lead the Gentiles to an acknowledgement of Israel’s God. As to the contents, there is a clear tendency to define ‘good acts’ as the ethical part of the Mosaic Law, those commandments identified in rabbinic and early Christian theology with the ‘second tablet’ of the Law. In particular, non-formally commanded practices such as charity, burying the dead, comforting mourners, providing for food, clothes and life-necessities, releasing prisoners, raising children, are also covered by

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the phrase καλὰ ἔργα/ἐργα ἀγαθα. This emphasis notwithstanding, the phrase can also denote cultic commandments, such as vows, tithes and offering (Aristeas, Qumran). Nevertheless, ethical requirements are prominent. Finally, seen from this perspective, Luz’ explanation of the phrase ‘good deeds’ in Matt 5:16 (‘in allgemeinen Sinn an gute Taten denken läßt’) needs some reconsideration and amplification. And so, at last, we can rephrase the subtitle without a question mark: in early Judaism, the phrase καλὰ ἔργα/ἐργα ἀγαθα could be understood, universally, as a code for the Jewish Law.84

84 I would like to thank mrs. Helen Richardson-Hewitt for her valuable corrections of the English text.

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THE LXX TRANSLATION OF ESTHER A Paraphrastic Translation of MT or a Free Translation of a Rewritten Version? Emanuel Tov It can be said that the Septuagint version of Esther (Esth-LXX) has been the stepchild of LXX research over the past half century. While several monographs, some of them book-length, have been devoted to the ‘other’ Greek version, invariably named ‘Lucianic’,1 ‘A’, ‘alpha’ Text, or AT,2 little attention has been paid to the main Greek version. To the best of my knowledge, the text-critical value of this translation has not been studied in depth.3 The present paper is limited to brief 1 This version is contained in manuscripts that in other books contain the ‘Lucianic’ revision, but has little to do with that tradition, see R. Hanhart, Esther, Septuaginta, Vetus Testamentum graecum etc., VIII, 3, Göttingen 19832, 87–95. 2 In chronological sequence: C.A. Moore, ‘A Greek Witness to a Different Hebrew Text of Esther’, ZAW 79 (1967), 351–8; H.J. Cook, ‘The A Text of the Greek Versions of the Book of Esther’, ZAW 81 (1969), 369–76; E. Tov, ‘The ‘Lucianic’ Text of the Canonical and the Apocryphal Sections of Esther: A Rewritten Biblical Book’, Textus 10 (1982), 1–25, Revised version: The Greek and Hebrew Bible—Collected Essays on the Septuagint (VTSup 72), Leiden/etc. 1999, 535–48; D.J.A. Clines, The Esther Scroll—The Story of the Story ( JSOTSup 30), Sheffield 1984; J.-C. Haelewyck, ‘Le texte dit ‘Lucianique’ du livre d’Esther: Son étendue et sa coherence’, Le Muséon 98 (1985), 53–95; M.V. Fox, The Redaction of the Books of Esther (SBLMS 40), Atlanta GA 1991; K.H. Jobes, The AlphaText of Esther—Its Character and Relationship to the Masoretic Text (SBLDS 153), Atlanta GA 1996; A. Lacocque, ‘The Different Versions of Esther’, BI 7 (1999), 301–22; K. De Troyer, The End of the Alpha-Text of Esther: Translation and Narrative Technique in MT 8:1–17, LXX 8:1–17 and AT 7:14–41 (SBLSCS 49), Atlanta GA 2000; Idem, ‘Translation or Interpretation? A Sample from the Books of Esther’, in: B.A. Taylor (ed.), Proceedings of the Xth Congress of the International Organization for the Septuagint and Cognate Studies, Oslo 1998 (SBLSCS 51), Atlanta GA 2001, 343–53; Idem, ‘The Letter of the King and the Letter of Mordecai’, Textus 21 (2002), 175–207. For earlier studies see Ch. Torrey, ‘The Older Book of Esther’, HTR 37 (1944), 1–40 (the LXX and AT versions of Esther derive from Aramaic originals, from which the text of MT has been abbreviated); H. Howorth, ‘Some Unconventional Views on the Text of the Bible, VIII. The Prayer of Manasses and the Book of Esther’, PSBA 31 (1909), 156–68. 3 Especially valuable are the studies by E. Bickerman, Studies in Jewish and Christian History (AGJU IX), Leiden 1976, 225–45 (‘The Colophon of the Greek Book of Esther’), 246–74 (‘Notes on the Greek Book of Esther’); W.H. Brownlee, ‘Le livre grec d’Esther et la royauté divine—corrections orthodoxes au livre d’Esther’, RB 73 (1966), 161–85; R.L. Omanson & P.A. Noss, A Handbook on the Book of Esther: The Hebrew and Greek Texts (UBS Handbook Series), New York 1997.

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remarks on Esth-LXX as a rewritten version of MT, while a major study is still needed. An evaluation of the differences between Esth-LXX and MT poses many challenges. The LXX is very free and sometimes paraphrastic; it also contains six large narrative expansions (the so-called Additions A–F) that are traditionally considered to be independent units. However, the use of the term ‘Additions’ gives a false impression of their nature and may lead to wrong conclusions. They are better described as Expansions A–F, adding more than 50% to the amount of words in the Greek book.4 A correct understanding of Esth-LXX is relevant to the textual and literary analysis of the book. In as far as a consensus exists regarding the textual value of the Greek version of Esther, it is negative.5 This view is challenged in the present study. We suggest that (1) Esth-LXX is a free translation of its source text, as is shown by an analysis of its translation technique, and (2) that it sometimes paraphrases its Hebrew source. We add a new dimension to the analysis when asserting (3) that some paraphrases were triggered by the translator’s misunderstanding of the Hebrew. We will attempt to establish that (4) Esth-LXX reflects some Hebrew variants in small details, and that (5) Expansions A, C, D, and F were translated from a Hebrew source. This assumption is accompanied by the suggestion of (6) unity of the Greek translation of the canonical text and the expansions. We next turn to the central issues, arguing that (7) Esth-LXX reflects a rewritten version of a composition similar to MT.6 Finally, we describe (8) the characteristic features of the 4 Due to the uncertainty pertaining to the Vorlage of the LXX, calculations of the size are little more than exercises. According to the calculations of C.V. Dorothy, The Books of Esther: Structure, Genre, and Textual Integrity ( JSOTSup 187), Sheffield 1997, 16 the LXX added 77%, the AT text 45%, and Josephus 32%. 5 This judgment was probably best formulated by Clines: ‘Almost everyone agrees, however, that no matter how free the Septuagint translator has been, it is essentially the Masoretic Hebrew text that was his Vorlage’ (Clines, Esther Scroll, 69). A similar view had been expressed earlier by Th. Nöldeke, in: T.K. Cheyne & J.S. Black (eds), Encyclopaedia Biblica, s.v. ‘Esther’, New York 1902, II.1406: ‘The tendency, so common at the present day, to overestimate the importance of the LXX for purposes of textual criticism is nowhere more to be deprecated than in the Book of Esther. It may be doubted whether even in a single passage of the book the Greek manuscripts enable us to emend the Hebrew text’. In recent years, this view was defended at length by H. Kahana, Esther, Juxtaposition of the Septuagint Translation with the Hebrew Text, Leuven/ etc. 2005, 441–62. 6 The possibility that the LXX reflects a different book has been mentioned in the past. Four studies refer much to the LXX: L. Day, Three Faces of a Queen: Characterization in the Books of Esther, Sheffield 1995; Dorothy, The Books of Esther; R. Kossmann, Die

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Hebrew source of the LXX, we turn to (9) a comparison of Esth-LXX with other rewritten compositions from Qumran and elsewhere, and lastly (10) to canonical issues. 1. Esth-LXX is a Free Translation of Its Source Text Scholars are in agreement that Esth-LXX reflects a free translation, and therefore a few examples will suffice. However, we should constantly be open to the possibility that many such renderings may be explained differently as representing a slightly deviating Vorlage, on which see §§4–7. In the examples below, the first item is the NJPS translation of MT,7 and the second one, in italics, represents the NETS translation of the LXX.8 a. Unusual equivalents 1:3 MT ‘for all the officials and courtiers’—(he gave a feast) for his Friends, and for the other nations. The term ‘Friends,’ which is capitalized in the translation, is an official title used at the Ptolemaic court for the king’s close associates. The same term is used in v. 13 for the king’s ‘sages learned in procedure’ (MT). 8:1 MT ‘Haman’s household’ (literally: ‘Haman’s house’)—everything of Haman’s. A similar translation occurs in v. 7. Esthernovelle: Vom erzählten zur Erzählung (VTSup 79), Leiden/etc, 2000; C.D. Harvey, Finding Morality in the Diaspora? Moral Ambiguity and Transformed Morality in the Books of Esther (BZAW 328), Berlin/New York 2003. All four monographs compare the content of the two Greek versions with MT and the other sources without analyzing the Greek versions first regarding their internal merits. Disregarding the internal dynamics of the LXX and the A-Text, these authors compare the Greek evidence with the content of the other sources without distinguishing between elements deriving from the translator, his parent text, and possible scribal developments. In our view, in each individual case the ancient sources need to be contrasted in order that meaningful conclusions be drawn from the differences among them. In order to evaluate the A-Text we are also in need of a detailed analysis of its relation to the LXX, since the A-Text may have derived from the LXX, as several scholars believe. If that is the case, the A-Text cannot be examined as an independent witness. Therefore, the approach of these studies makes them less relevant to the present analysis. L.M. Wills, The Jew in the Court of the Foreign King (HDR 26), Minneapolis 1990, 153–91 reconstructs the early history of the Esther novella without reference to the LXX (see the conclusion on p. 197 there). The studies of the A-Text (see n. 2 above) occasionally also refer to the LXX. 7 JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh: The Traditional Hebrew Text and the New JPS Translation, Philadelphia 19992. 8 A. Pietersma & B.G. Wright (eds), A New English Translation of the Septuagint and the Other Greek Translations Traditionally Included Under That Title, Oxford 2007.

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b. Variation in equivalence The translator only rarely uses the same Greek equivalent twice when representing a Hebrew word.9 c. Contextual renderings 2:11 ‫( )לדעת את( שלום אסתר ומה יעשה בה‬how Esther was faring and what was happening to her) τί Εσθηρ συµβήσεται—(what will happen to Esther); 4:5 ‫( מה זה ועל מה זה‬the why and wherefore of it all)—τὸ ἀκριβές (the facts); 8:3 MT ‘the plot that he had devised against the Jews’—what he had done to the Jews. d. Omission of words and phrases Some words and phrases were removed as superfluous in the context.10 The elements omitted are placed in parenthesis: Names: 1:13 ‘And (the king) said’; 1:15, 8:7, 10 ‘King (Ahasuerus)’; 8:1 ‘(Queen) Esther’; 8:2 (‘Esther’); 8:3 ‘Haman (the Agagite)’; 8:5 ‘(Haman) son of Hammedatha the Agagite’; 8:7 ‘to (Queen Esther and) Mordecai the Jew’; Other words: 1:4 ‘For (no fewer than) a hundred and eighty days’; 1:5 (‘high and low alike’); 1:5 ‘in the court of the king’s palace (garden)’; 1:12 ‘was (greatly) incensed’; 3:2 ‘All (the king’s courtiers)’; 3:2 ‘at the (king’s) gate [NRSV]’; 8:3 ‘falling at his feet (and weeping)’. Some such omissions involve larger elements: 1:22 MT ‘to all the provinces of the king, to every province in its own script and to every nation in its own language’—throughout the whole kingdom, to every land in its own language. The translator may have considered the mentioning of script to be superfluous, being closely connected with ‘language’. 3:6 (MT ‘But he disdained to lay hands on Mordecai alone; having been told who Mordecai’s people were’.) 3:12 MT ‘The orders were issued in the name of King Ahasuerus (and sealed with the king’s signet)’. 3:13 MT ‘all the Jews, (young and old, children and women)’ 8:10 ‘couriers (riding steeds used in the king’s service, bred of the royal stud)’.

9 For examples, see B. Jacob, ‘Das Buch Esther’, ZAW 10 (1890), 241–98, esp. 266–70. 10 See Kahana, Esther, 446.

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e. Omission of parallel words 3:2 MT ‘would not (kneel or) bow low’. See v. 5 for a similar reduction. 3:8 MT ‘scattered (and dispersed)’. 3:13 MT ‘to destroy, (massacre, and exterminate)’. 8:5 MT ‘If it please your majesty, and if I have won your favor and the proposal seems right to your majesty, and if I am pleasing to you . . .’—If it pleases you, and if I have found favor. f. Small additions11 1:6 MT ‘silver rods’—gold and silver blocks. 1:7 MT ‘golden beakers’—the goblets were made of gold and silver. 1:18 MT ‘the ladies of Persia and Media’—the other princesses of the rulers of the Persians and Medes. 3:3 MT ‘said to Mordecai, Why do you disobey the king’s order?’—the king spoke to Mardochaios, ‘Mardochaios, why do you disobey what the king says?’ g. Clarifications 1:5 MT ‘At the end of this period . . .’—and when the days of the wedding feast were completed. The LXX gives the general description of MT (‘this period’ [literally: ‘these days’]) a very specific twist by describing the ‘banquet’ of MT as a ‘wedding feast’, against all other sources. This understanding of the banquet runs parallel to the wedding banquet the king arranged for Esther (2:18), likewise called a ‘wedding feast’ in the LXX. In a similar vein, in the LXX of v. 11, the king calls upon Vashti for her coronation ceremony. 2:7 MT ‘He was foster father to Hadassah—that is, Esther—his uncle’s daughter’—And this man had a foster child, a daughter of Aminadab, his father’s brother, and her name was Esther. The name of Esther’s father, given later in the story in 2:15 (MT ‘Abihail,’ LXX Aminadab), is introduced in the LXX already in this verse. 2:23 MT ‘This was recorded in the book of annals at the instance of the king’—Then the king commanded to record a memorial in the royal archive in praise of Mardochaios’s loyalty. The LXX was more specific than MT in connecting this event to the continuation of the story.

11

See Kahana, Esther, 449.

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emanuel tov 2. Esth-LXX Paraphrases its Hebrew Source

Esth-LXX goes far beyond freedom, variation, addition and omission of details as described above. It sometimes adds new ideas and restructures sentences in such a way that it is almost impossible to indicate the word-for-word equivalence between the Hebrew and the translation, as in 2:7 and 3:12. While at least some of these paraphrastic renderings go back to the Hebrew source of Esth-LXX (see §§4–7), the following examples characterize the paraphrastic rendering of the canonical sections: 1:6 MT ‘alabaster, mother-of-pearl, and mosaics’—mother-of-pearl, and marble. There were gossamer throws in many colors embroidered with roses all around. Although not all the technical terms are clear in either language, the LXX expanded MT with details reflecting the display of riches, possibly at wedding feasts of the wealthy, in Hellenistic times (see v. 5). Indeed, from various historical sources it is known that great opulence was displayed in the Persian cities of Susa and Persepolis. Earlier in the verse, the ‘silver rods’ of MT were expanded in the LXX to ‘gold and silver blocks’ ( just as ‘golden beakers’ were expanded to ‘gold and silver’ in the LXX of v. 7) and the ‘alabaster columns’ to ‘pillars of marble and other stones’. 1:7 MT ‘beakers of varied design’—and a miniature cup made of ruby was on display that was worth thirty thousand talents. The cup described in Esth-LXX was worth an enormous amount of money. 8:6 MT ‘And how can I bear to see the destruction of my kindred!’—And how can I be saved during the destruction of my kindred? In the second part of the sentence, in MT Esther expresses concern for her relatives, while in the LXX she is concerned about her own safety. This interpretation in the LXX is probably directly related to Mordecai’s warning in 4:3 ‘Do not imagine that you, of all the Jews, will escape with your life by being in the king’s palace’. 8:7 MT ‘and they have hanged him’ (NRSV)—and I hanged him. In the LXX, the king has a more active role in the hanging than in MT. Likewise, in 2:23 LXX, the king plays an active part in the hanging of the two eunuchs: ‘So the king interrogated the two eunuchs and hanged them’ (MT: ‘The matter was investigated and found to be so, and the two were impaled on stakes’). 8:9 MT ‘and letters were written, at Mordecai’s dictation to the Jews . . .’—and they wrote to the Jews what had been commanded. According to MT, the king allowed Mordecai to formulate a letter in his name

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and to send it as a royal edict to the Jews. In the Greek version of the edict, Mordecai’s name was omitted, possibly in order to lend the royal edict more credence. More importantly, in the rephrased Greek version, the letter was sent only to the Jews, quoting commands that had been given earlier to the ‘administrators and rulers of the satrapies’. MT, on the other hand, explicitly mentions separate dispatches of the letter to the ‘Jews and to the satraps, the governors and the officials’. In the rewriting in the LXX, the king first sent a letter to the Jews (v. 9). This was Mordecai’s letter, sent in the name of the king (see v. 8 in the LXX). The contents of a second letter, to the satrapies, implied by the wording of the Greek v. 9, is contained in the long Expansion E after v. 12. That letter represents a novelty in the story and is phrased along the lines of contemporary royal Hellenistic edicts. It skillfully imitates the heavy bureaucratic prose of the time with its long sentences, use of rare words, and highly moralizing tone. 8:11 MT ‘to assemble and defend their lives, to destroy, to kill, and to annihilate any armed force of any people or province’ (NRSV)—and to deal with their adversaries and their enemies as they wished. The Greek version, probably meant not only for Jews but also for Gentiles, mitigates the harsh language of the revenge by the Jews in MT, for example in the LXX’s omission of the killing of ‘women and children’ and of the command to ‘plunder their possessions’. At the same time, the killing of Jewish ‘children and women’, as instructed in Haman’s edict in 3:13, is likewise lacking in the LXX. 3. Some Paraphrases were Triggered by the Translator’s Misunderstanding of the Hebrew Sometimes the paraphrasing of Esth-LXX was probably triggered by the translator’s difficulties in understanding his Vorlage. In such cases, the translator sometimes changed the whole context.12 1:8 MT literally ‘and the drinking was according to the convention, no one compelled [the guests to drink]’—Now this wine party was not by established law. The description of the drinking practice in the LXX, 12 This phenomenon is also known in other translation units, though not to the same extent. See my monograph The Text-Critical Use of the Septuagint in Biblical Research, Second Edition, Revised and Enlarged ( Jerusalem Biblical Studies 8), Jerusalem 1997, 168–71. Likewise, G. Gerleman, Esther (BK), Neukirchen-Vluyn 1973, 72 ascribes several renderings of the LXX, Peshitta, and Vulgate to misunderstanding of the Hebrew.

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according to which the drinking at the banquet differed from the normal custom (probably, the customary restrictions), is diametrically opposed to that of MT. These words in MT need to be viewed in light of those following, ‘to comply with each man’s wishes’, which are understood in the same way by the LXX. Usually the king determined the amount imbibed; when he drank, everybody drank. However, at this banquet ‘no one compelled’ the guests to drink. The background of the LXX rendering is probably the translator’s misunderstanding of the words ‘according to the convention, no one compelled’ that led him to add a negative (no). 1:14 ‘. . . His closest advisers were . . .’—So Arkesaios . . . approached him. In vv. 14–15, the LXX created an action and dialogue instead of the parenthetical remark in MT on the content of v. 13. MT lists the names of those who were close to the king, while in the LXX they approached him. The LXX probably misunderstood the consonants of MT, reading we-ha-qarov (‘and the one who was closest [to the king]’) as we-hiqriv (‘and he approached’). 8:7 Then King Ahasuerus said to Queen Esther and Mordecai the Jew, ‘(Hinneh) I have given Haman’s property to Esther, and he has been impaled on the stake for scheming against the Jews’—Then the king said to Esther, ‘If everything belonging to Haman I gave and turned over to you, and I hanged him on the pole, because he plotted to lay hands on the Jews, what more do you (sg.) seek?’ Turning to Esther, the king points out to her that he has done everything that could be done. The addition in the LXX at the end of the verse may imply a mild rebuke to Esther. These words were probably added in the LXX because the translator misunderstood the syntax of the verse. In the beginning of the sentence, the translator took hinneh (‘behold’) as ‘if ’ (cf. Aramaic and sometimes also Hebrew hen). Therefore, the independent sentence (‘Behold . . .’) has become a subordinate clause (‘If . . .’), necessitating the addition of a supplementary phrase. The supplement in the LXX may have been influenced by 7:2 ‘What is your wish, Queen Esther? It shall be granted you. And what is your request? Even to half the kingdom, it shall be fulfilled.’ 4. Esth-LXX Reflects Some Variants in Small Details That Esth-LXX reflects Hebrew variants in small details hardly needs any proof, since all books of the LXX reflect such variants. Nevertheless, this point needs to be established since most scholars assert that

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this translation is of little use for text-critical purposes (see n. 5). BHQ13 rarely reconstructs any such variants from the LXX, ascribing most of the deviations of the LXX to the translator’s exegesis or not recording them at all.14 However, the LXX does reflect variants.15 In addition, Hebraisms in the LXX undeniably show the Hebrew background of that translation: 1. Hebraisms in the translation of MT 1:2 and 9:12 ‫—בשושן הבירה‬ἐν Σούσοις τῇ πόλει (non-Greek sequence)16 3:17 ‫—מיום ליום ומחדש לחדש‬ἡµέραν ἐξ ἡµέρας καὶ µῆνα ἐκ µῆνος (contrast the good Greek rendering in v. 4 ‫—יום ויום‬καθ ̓ ἑκάστην ἡµέραν as well as in 2:11). 8:9 ‫—מדינה ומדינה‬κατὰ χῶραν καὶ χῶραν (κατὰ χῶρας or κατὰ [πᾶσαν] χῶραν as in 3:12, 14; 4:3; 8:17 would have sufficed) 6:13 ‫—נפול תפול‬πεσὼν πεσῆ17 2. Hebraisms in the translation of variants 1:1 καὶ ἐγένετο µετὰ τοὺς λόγους τούτους = ‫ויהי אחר הדברים האלה‬. This typical Hebrew phrase is needed in the Greek version after the long section of text added in Expansion A prior to this verse. This addition shows more than anything else that Esth-LXX is based on a Semitic Vorlage.

Biblia Hebraica Quinta, Stuttgart, 2004–, Part 18: General Introduction and Megilloth; ed. P.B. Dirksen et alii; 2004. 14 Thus the deviations in 1:13 are not even mentioned in BHQ. 15 The LXX reflects several scribal transmission variants, in BHQ usually ascribed to the translator. In addition to the variants mentioned in the next paragraphs, see 1:14 (‘lib-synt’; the note of BHS in 1:14 is preferable); 2:6 (the possibility of a variant is accepted in the commentary, p. 139*); 2:7 (‘explic’); 2:14 (‘substit’); 3:7 (‘assim-cultur’); 6:1 (‘theol’), etc. MT also contains an occasional homoioteleuton as compared with the LXX (3:7), thus also BHQ (see the commentary on pp. 141*–42*). In addition, the LXX reflects many variations from MT that could have derived from a variety of reasons: scribal mistake, a different Hebrew Vorlage, or the translator’s freedom (see further below). In chapter 1, for example, note 1:2 MT ‘in those days’ omitted in the LXX (BHQ: ‘ampl’); 1:4 MT ‘many days’ omitted in the LXX (‘facil-styl’); 1:10 Mehuman represented in the LXX as Haman (BHQ: ‘err-hist’). See further n. 33. 16 This sequence reflects late biblical Hebrew. See B.K. Waltke & M. O’Connor, An Introduction to Biblical Hebrew Syntax, Winona Lake IN 1990, 277–79; E. Qimron, The Hebrew of the Dead Sea Scrolls (HSS 29), Atlanta GA 1986, 85–6. 17 On the other hand, the infinitive absolute in 4:14 is not represented in the LXX. 13

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1:5 ἡµέρας ἓξ = ‫‘( ימים ששה‬days six’) instead of ‫‘( שבעת ימים‬seven days’) in MT.18 2:16, 21; 3:12 MT ‘King Artaxerxes’—‘Artaxerxes the king’ (non-Greek sequence LXX ≠ MT) 5. Expansions A, C, D, and F were Translated from a Hebrew Source Most scholars believe that the original language of Expansions A, C, D, and F was Hebrew or Aramaic,19 and that Expansions B and E were composed in Greek.20 The linguistic study of Martin who identified the original language of Expansions A, C, D, and F as Greek with the aid of seventeen syntactical features used as criteria to distinguish between ‘Greek-original’ and ‘translation Greek’ is especially valuable.21 In addition, καὶ ἰδού = ‫ והנה‬in A 4, 5, 7 and the wording of A 3,22 17 also indicate that the expansions were based on a Hebrew text.23

18 This detail is interpreted differently in BHQ (‘theol’) and the different sequence is disregarded in the commentary on p. 138*. The sequence of the LXX (substantive before numeral) reflects late Hebrew usage, see W. Gesenius – E. Kautzsch, Hebrew Grammar, Oxford 19102, § 134c; R. Polzin, Late Biblical Hebrew: Toward an Historical Typology of Biblical Hebrew Prose (HSM 12), Missoula, 58–60. 19 See J. Langen, ‘Die beiden griechischen Texte des Buches Esther’, Tübinger Theologische Quartalschrift 42 (1860), 244–72, esp. 264–66; A. Scholz, Commentar über das Buch ‘Esther’ mit seinen ‘Zusätzen’ und über ‘Susanna’, Würzburg 1892, xxi–xxiii; C.A. Moore, ‘On the Origins of the LXX Additions to the Book of Esther’, JBL 92 (1973), 382–93; Idem, Daniel, Esther, and Jeremiah: The Additions (AB), Garden City 1977, 155. Some scholars maintain that the Expansions were written in Greek, without providing detailed philological arguments. Thus S. Jellicoe, The Septuagint and Modern Study, Oxford 1968, 295 asserts ‘It is generally agreed that the additions to Esther are based on no Hebrew or Aramaic original, but are additions in the interests of piety’. 20 These two Expansions are close in style and content to 3 Maccabees. See Moore, Daniel, Esther, and Jeremiah, 195–99. 21 R.A. Martin, ‘Syntax Criticism of the LXX Additions to the Book of Esther’, JBL 94 (1975), 65–72. 22 A 3 ‘Now he was one of the exiles whom Nabouchodonosor king of Babylon took captive from Ierousalem with Iechonias, the king of Judea’. This verse is based on the MT of the canonical verse 2:6: ‘who was an exile from Ierousalem, that Nabouchodonosor king of Babylon had taken captive’. The LXX deviates from MT there (‘. . . had been exiled from Jerusalem in the group that was carried into exile along with King Jeconiah of Judah, which had been driven into exile by King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon’). The wording of A 3 reflects MT in Esth 2:6 because it mentions Jeconiah, and its structure is preferable to that of the LXX where the feminine pronoun ἣν (‘that’) must reflect an earlier text referring to an antecedent αἰχµαλωσίαν that had been omitted. 23 In other instances the assumption of Hebrew diction is less convincing since the wording could also have been influenced by the canonical sections: A 1 ἐκ φυλῆς

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6. Unity of the Greek Translation of the Canonical Text and the Expansions Determining the relation between the Greek versions of the canonical sections and the Greek Expansions is crucial to our understanding of Esth-LXX. Since Expansions A, C, D, and F were originally written in Hebrew, one’s first intuition would be that they belonged to the same composition as the canonical sections. The segments originally written in Greek (Expansions B, E) were probably created by the translator.24 There is no reason to distrust the ancient evidence according to which all of Esth-LXX indeed represents one integral unit. We should not be influenced by Jerome’s removal of Expansions A–F from their context, thereby mutilating the translation.25 His action was arbitrary and inconsistent since by the same token one could excise equally large segments from the Greek translation of 3 Kingdoms (for example, 3 Kingdoms 2:35a–o, 46, a–l; 12:24a–z) and place them at the end of the book.26 Furthermore, the canonical segments and the expansions are intertwined in an organic way in chapters 4 and 5, making it impossible to mark an uninterrupted group of verses as constituting ‘Expansion D’.27 The unity of the canonical text and the expansions Βενιαµιν (= ‫ )משבט בנימין‬equals the description of Mordecai in 2:5 LXX as opposed

to MT ‫איש ימיני‬, a Benjaminite. Presumably LXX 2:5 reflects the same reading as A 1. A 2 ἐν Σούσοις τῇ πόλει = ‫ בשושן הבירה‬and A 13 ‘Artaxerxes the king’, see above, § 4. 24 Moore, Daniel, Esther, and Jeremiah, 166 recognizes the Hebrew background of most of the expansions, but treats them as an entity separate from the translation of the canonical segments. Moore does not discuss evidence such as adduced in this paragraph, so that the possibility that the expansions derive from the translator himself is not even mentioned by him. 25 The term is used by Brownlee, ‘Le livre grec’, 162. After the translation of 10:3 Jerome noted that he rendered the Hebrew text with ‘complete fidelity’, while placing the Latin version of these Greek segments after 10:3. 26 By doing so one would ‘improve’ the Greek translation of 3 Kgdms, since these sections are secondary in the context. See my paper ‘The LXX of 1 Kings’ (n. 38). 27 The scope of D is presented in different ways in the text editions. The edition of A. Rahlfs, Septuaginta, Id est Vetus Testamentum graece iuxta LXX interpretes (Stuttgart 1935) indicates the different origin of the sixteen verses of Expansion D by distinguishing in its numbering system between the canonical text and Expansion D. On the other hand, the Göttingen edition (see n. 1) and the NETS translation (see n. 7) present these verses in the traditional way as ‘Addition D’, and by doing so they conceal the canonical status of 5:1–2 that form part of that Expansion. These two editions present the text following 4:17 as Addition C (‘Prayers of Mordecai and Esther’) immediately continued with Addition D (‘Esther’s Audience with the King’) including the canonical verses 5:1–2. In these two editions 5:1 is named D 1 (that is, the first verse in the ‘apocryphal’ Addition D), and 5:2 is named D 12 located in the middle of an expansion counting 16 verses. These complications come to light even more so in the Vulgate

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is further supported by several close connections in content between the two segments:28 (1) The LXX translation of 2:20 includes the following short addition to MT in Mordecai’s instructions to Esther, ‘to fear God and to keep his commands . . . So Esther did not change her way of life’. This instruction runs parallel to Esther’s prayer in C 14–30. (2) 8:9 as analyzed in § 2. (3) Mordecai’s words to Esther in 4:8 that are additional to MT, ‘Remember your humble days when you were brought up by my hand, for Haman, the second to the king, has spoken against us to put us to death. Call upon the Lord, and speak to the king about us and deliver us from death’ run parallel to Esther’s prayer in Expansion C. The medium-sized addition in 4:8 and the longer one in Expansion C were probably inserted by the same hand.29

where these verses are duplicated. The main text of V translates the Hebrew, including 5:1–2, while these verses are repeated in the so-called Additions (based on the LXX) that are placed at the end of the book. Addition D is named here ‘chapter 15’. The verses are thus indicated as follows in the editions: Canonical verse 5:1 Rahlfs = D 1 Göttingen. Added verses 1:a–f Rahlfs = D 2–11 Göttingen. Canonical verse 5:2 Rahlfs = D 12 Göttingen. Added verses 2a–b Rahlfs = D 13–15 Göttingen. Canonical verse 5:3 Rahlfs = 5:3 Göttingen. 28 The translation of Daniel includes several long additions now considered ‘apocryphal’. However, those additions do not form an integral part of the story, as in Esther. Furthermore it is unclear whether there ever existed an expanded Semitic book of Daniel on which the Greek translation would have been based. By the same token, there never existed an expanded Semitic book of Jeremiah that included Baruch even though one translator rendered both Jeremiah and Baruch. See Tov, The Septuagint Translation of Jeremiah and Baruch. 29 Other agreements between the translation of the canonical sections and the apocryphal sections do not provide conclusive evidence for the identity of the Greek translator and the Additions since the latter could have been influenced by the former. Thus both units are characterized by the addition of a religious background to the original story (2:20; 4:8; A 9–11; C 1–30). In both segments Haman is named a Macedonian (9:24 and E 10) as well as Bougaios (a ‘Bougaian’?) (3:1; 9:10 and A 17). The wording of A 16 θεραπεύειν ἐν τῇ αὐλῇ reflects the special rendering 2:19 ἐθεράπευεν ἐν τῇ αὐλῇ (6:10 similarly) differing from MT ‫ומרדכי יושב בשער המלך‬.

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In light of the preceding analysis, we suggest that the Vorlage of EsthLXX included the Expansions A, C, D, and F.30 The royal edicts in Expansions B and E were probably added by the translator himself.31 7. Esth-LXX Reflects a Rewritten Version of a Hebrew Composition Similar to MT If the premises of §§1–6 are correct, the Vorlage of Esth-LXX reflects a Hebrew32 composition that rewrote a book similar to MT.33 Conflicting features recognized in the translation complicate the reconstruction of the parent text of Esth-LXX:

30 The basic unity of the translation and the ‘apocryphal’ Additions is maintained also by Bickerman, ‘Notes’, 246, but for him this unity pertained to the book in its Greek shape: ‘The Greek Esther, of which the “Rest Chapters” are integral and essential parts, is not the Megillath Esther, couched in Greek language and letters, but its adaptation designed for the Diaspora’. The following two critical commentaries of the Hebrew book of Esther incorporate the six Expansions of the LXX in their natural contexts so as to cater to different audiences: L.B. Paton, The Book of Esther (ICC), Edinburgh 1908; J.D. Levenson, Esther: A Commentary (OTL), London 1997 (see p. 28). 31 Therefore, the view of Moore, Daniel, Esther, and Jeremiah, 155 ‘All six of the Additions to Esther are secondary, i.e. they were supplied after the Book of Esther had been written’ cannot be substantiated. This view, shared by many scholars, is probably influenced by the position of the Expansions at the end of the book (see n. 25 above). By the same token, the suggestion that these Expansions, or some of them, were rendered from Aramaic is without base since it is based on the assumption that the Expansions had a separate existence. For this suggestion, see A. Sundberg, The Old Testament of the Early Church (HTS 20), Cambridge/London 1964, 62; Moore, ‘Origins’, 393 (regarding Expansion C). Clines, who describes the development of the various texts in a diagram (p. 140), suggests that the original translation of Esther was made from a Hebrew original that did not contain the Expansions. However, elsewhere (p. 186, n. 3 relating to p. 71) he admits, ‘I must confess that I cannot prove this nor can I reconstruct the process by which the LXX acquired Additions from two sources’. 32 Bickerman considers Esth-LXX a Greek Midrash, but in spite of the thoroughness of his study ‘Notes’, he does not prove the following statements: ‘. . . the translation reflects an adaptation designed for the Diaspora’ (p. 246) . . . ‘Further, being read in the Synagogue and describing the origin of a feast, the story of Esther naturally attracted haggadic embellishments’ (p. 255) . . . ‘The Hebrew Esther being no sacred writing, Lysimachus was free to adapt the original to the needs and requirements of the Greek-speaking Jews’ (p. 257). 33 A similar conclusion regarding Esth 4:13–14 was reached by K. de Troyer, Rewriting the Sacred Text (SBL Text-Critical Studies 4), Atlanta 2003, 9–28.

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a. Esth-LXX reflects a free translation of its source text (§§1–2). b. The source text reflects a Hebrew composition different from MT (§§4–6). These features may require the revision of some of our earlier assumptions: i. It is not impossible that some of the features ascribed to the free translation character of Esth-LXX in §§1–2 derived from its deviating Hebrew Vorlage. Thus, some short readings of the LXX vis-à-vis MT that differ in small details as well as some of the presumed contextual clarifications could have derived from a different Vorlage. ii. By the same token, some of the features ascribed to the translator’s deviating parent text could be assigned to his free translation style.34 It seems to me that we can still maintain the view that the translation is free, while at the same time embarking on the reconstruction of some elements in the Hebrew parent text of the translation. My point of departure is that the Greek translation forms an integral unity, that its Additions (Expansions) A, C, D, and F are based on a Hebrew source, and that this composition reworked MT rather than vice versa. The reverse process is not likely, the main argument being the revisional tendencies visible in Esth-LXX, such as the addition to the story in the LXX of a religious background that is also known from the Midrash. We assume that this composition inserted the phrase wa-yehi ahar hadebarim ha-’eleh in v. 1 to accommodate for the addition of Mordecai’s dream (Expansion A) before the beginning of the canonical book. Returning to the question posed in the title, we regard Esth-LXX as a free translation of a rewritten version of MT rather than a paraphrastic translation.

34 BHQ ascribes many instances to the freedom of the translator that in our view reflect Hebraistic renderings or Hebrew variants (see n. 15). Among other things, most instances described in BHQ as ‘abbr’ probably reflect a shorter Hebrew parent text. For example, 1:1 ‘to Nubia’, 1:13 ‘learned in procedure’, 2:6 ‘in the group that was carried into exile along with King Jeconiah of Judah’, 2:19 ‘when the virgins were assembled a second time’, 2:21 ‘Bigthan and Teresh’, 3:10 ‘son of Hammedatha the Agagite, the foe of the Jews’, 3:13 ‘on the thirteenth day’, 6:8 ‘and on whose head a royal diadem has been set’, 8:7 ‘and to the Jew Mordecai’, etc. See further n. 15.

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8. Characteristic Features of the Hebrew Source of the LXX The following features characterize the rewriting of a text like Esth-MT in the Hebrew source of Esth-LXX: 1. Addition of large narrative expansions at key points in the story, A and F before the beginning and after the end (‘Mordecai’s Dream’ and its ‘Interpretation’), C (‘Prayers of Mordecai and Esther’) and D (‘Esther’s Audience with the King’) after the last verse of chapter 4. 2. Probably the most characteristic feature of the LXX is the addition of a religious background to the earlier MT version that lacks the mentioning of God’s name. Such details are added not only in the large expansions but also in small pluses such as 2:20; 4:8; 6:13. Likewise, God’s involvement is mentioned everywhere in the Midrash.35 3. Addition of new ideas in small details. For example, the identification of Ahashuerus as Artaxerxes; description of the first banquet as a wedding feast for Vashti (1:5, 11); length of the second banquet (1:5); description of the opulence at the banquets (1:5–6); identification of Mehuman as Haman (1:10); the king’s active participation in the hanging of the two eunuchs (2:23) and of Haman (8:7); the king’s placing the ring on Haman’s hand (3:10); naming of Haman as a Macedonian (E 10; 9:24); Esther’s concern for her own safety (8:6). 4. Removal of some phrases that may have been considered verbose or less important (e.g. 3:12, 13; 5:6) as well as the addition of some clarifications. Admittedly, it is hard to distinguish between changes made at the Hebrew level and similar changes made by the Greek translator.36

35 Thus Esther’s concern for dietary laws in C 27–28 should be compared with b.Meg 13a, Targum Rishon, and Targum Sheni 2:20. See B. Grossfeld, The Two Targums of Esther: Translated with Apparatus and Notes (The Aramaic Bible, Vol. 18), Collegeville 1991. For LXX Esth 2:7 ‘he trained her for himself as a wife’ (MT ‘Mordecai adopted her <Esther> as his own daughter’) cf. b.Meg 13a ‘A Tanna taught in the name of R. Meir: Read not “for a daughter” [le-bat], but “for a house” [le-bayit] ’. For a different view on the relation between the LXX and the Midrash, see M. Zipor, ‘When Midrash Met Septuagint: The Case of Esther 2, 7’, ZAW 118 (2006), 82–92. 36 Interestingly enough, also the Vulgate adds and omits many segments in Esther, more than in the other books of V, almost all without connection to the LXX. For examples, see Paton, Esther, 24–8.

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The technique used by the Hebrew source of Esther is that of rewriting an earlier composition. Within the LXX the closest parallel for this assumed technique are the translations of 3 Kingdoms and Daniel 4–6. The Hebrew sources of the translations of these three books freely rewrote their source texts in a manner resembling other rewritten Bible compositions. It remains unclear why these three books were singled out for reworking. The Hebrew/Aramaic versions of Esther and Daniel share certain features at the content and language level,37 but these features are not shared with 1 Kings. One possible reason may be the similar milieu in which these translations were created. Another possibility would be the assumption that the three translations were created at a later stage than most other Greek translations. At that time such rewritten Hebrew/Aramaic books were circulating, and less so in earlier periods. The resemblances between the three Greek books have been analyzed elsewhere.38 We now expand our observations to other rewritten Hebrew Bible compositions as found among the Qumran scrolls and in the Samaritan Pentateuch. The Samaritan version of the Torah rewrote a composition like MT. The rewriting is partial, as all rewriting, but it is manifest. The rewriting in the SP does not bear a Samaritan character, since earlier nonsectarian texts from Qumran (named pre-Samaritan)39 carry the exact same content as the SP with the exception of the Samaritan sectarian readings. Together these texts are named the ‘SP group’. Some of the Qumran compositions likewise resemble the rewriting in the LXX books, even more so than the SP group. The best preserved rewritten Bible texts40 from Qumran are 11QTa cols. LI–LXVI, 4QRP See Collins, Daniel, 40. ‘Three Strange Books of the LXX: 1 Kings, Esther, and Daniel Compared with Similar Rewritten Compositions from Qumran and Elsewhere’—Die Septuaginta—Texte, Kontexte, Lebenswelten (ed. M. Karrer & W. Kraus; WUNT; Tübingen 2008), forthcoming. 39 Esp. 4QpaleoExodm and 4QNumb; see Tov, ‘Rewritten Bible Compositions’. 40 For the evidence and an analysis, see G.J. Brooke, ‘Rewritten Bible’, in: L.H. Schiffman & J.C. VanderKam (eds), Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Oxford/New York 2000, 2:777–81; E. Tov, ‘Biblical Texts as Reworked in Some Qumran Manuscripts with Special Attention to 4QRP and 4QParaGen-Exod’, in: E. Ulrich & J. VanderKam (eds), The Community of the Renewed Covenant: The Notre Dame Symposium on 37

38

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(4Q158, 4Q364–367), the Genesis Apocryphon (1Q20), and Jubilees.41 These parallels strengthen our aforementioned assertions relating to the rewriting in some LXX books and reversely the LXX helps us in clarifying the canonical status of the Qumran compositions. The main feature these compositions have in common with the reconstructed sources of the LXX translations relates to the interaction between Scripture text and exegetical additions. All these Qumran compositions present long stretches of Scripture text, interspersed with long or short exegetical additions, especially 4QRP (4QReworked Pentateuch). Among the Qumran rewritten Bible compositions this text exhibits the longest stretches of uninterrupted text that may be classified as Scripture as found in either MT or the pre-Samaritan text. As far as we can tell, it has a relatively small number of extensive additions. The exegetical character of this composition is especially evident from several pluses comprising 1–2 lines and in some cases more than 8 lines.42 This composition also rearranges some Torah pericopes.43 11QTa cols. LI–LXVI (constituting a paraphrase of the legal chapters of Deuteronomy)44 changes the text sequence more frequently than 4QRP and also adds several completely new sections (for example, cols.

the Dead Sea Scrolls (Christianity and Judaism in Antiquity Series 10), Notre Dame 1994, 111–34; M. Segal, ‘Between Bible and Rewritten Bible’, in: M. Henze (ed.), Biblical Interpretation at Qumran (Studies in the Dead Sea Scrolls and Related Literature), Grand Rapids/Cambridge 2005, 10–29; Harrington, ‘Palestinian Adaptations’. 41 Pseudo-Philo’s Biblical Antiquities and Josephus’ Jewish Antiquities also provide valuable parallels, but they are less relevant since they make no claim to sacred status. 42 The most clear-cut examples of this technique are the expanded ‘Song of Miriam’ in 4Q365 (4QRPc), frgs. 6a, col. ii and 6c counting at least 7 lines. By the same token, the added text in 4Q158 (4QRPa), frg. 14 counts at least 9 lines. 4Q365 (4QRPc), frg. 23 contains at least ten lines of added text devoted to festival offerings, including the Festival of the New Oil and the Wood Festival. Further, if 4Q365a, published as ‘4QTemple?’, is nevertheless part of 4Q365 (4QRP), that copy of 4QRP would have contained even more non-biblical material (festivals, structure of the Temple) than was previously thought. 43 In one instance, a fragment juxtaposing a section from Numbers and Deuteronomy (4Q364 23a–b i: Num 20:17–18; Deut 2:8–14) probably derives from the rewritten text of Deuteronomy, since a similar sequence is found in SP. In the case of juxtaposed laws on a common topic (Sukkot) in 4Q366 4 i (Num 29:32–30:1; Deut 16:13–14), one does not know where in 4QRP this fragment would have been positioned, in Numbers, as the fragment is presented in DJD XIII, or in Deuteronomy. 44 The close relation between that scroll and Hebrew Scripture is reflected in the name given to the scroll by B.Z. Wacholder & M. Abegg, ‘The Fragmentary Remains of 11QTorah (Temple Scroll)’, HUCA 62 (1991) 1–116.

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LVII:1–LIX:21, providing the statutes of the king).45 The SP group likewise inserts a number of extensive additions.46 The recognition of a group of rewritten Bible compositions at Qumran and elsewhere is accepted among scholars, even though they disagree with regard to the characterization of specific compositions and the terminology used for the group as a whole.47 In the past, the LXX translations were not associated with the Qumran rewritten Bible texts. When making this link, we recognize the similarity in the rewriting style of Scripture books. More specifically, the LXX translations meet some of the characterizing criteria that Segal set for rewritten Bible compositions: new narrative frame, expansion together with abridgement, and tendentious editorial layer.48 In all these matters, 1 Kings, Esther, and Daniel in the LXX resemble several rewritten Bible texts from Qumran and elsewhere, including the SP: The Hebrew source of Esth-LXX rewrote a composition very similar to MT. The most salient technique used in the course of the rewriting is the addition of the large Expansions A, C, D, and F. These Expansions give a special twist to the story and to the meaning of the book. The interaction of previously accepted Bible text and long expansions may be compared with the Qumran rewritten Bible compositions. These compositions exercise freedom towards their underlying text by adding large expansions wherever their authors wished.49 10. Canonical Issues The recognition that the Greek versions of 1 Kings, Esther, and Daniel represent rewritten versions of MT has important implications for our understanding of the canonical status of these books and of canonical issues in general. All three Greek books were considered to be authoritative by ancient Judaism and Christianity alike. In due course,

For additional material supplementary to the Pentateuchal laws, see the list in Y. Yadin, The Temple Scroll, Vols. 1–3, Jerusalem 1983, 1.46–70. 46 For a detailed analysis, see Tov, ‘Rewritten Bible Compositions’. 47 See Bernstein, ‘Rewritten Bible’. 48 Segal, ‘Between Bible and Rewritten Bible’, 20–6. 49 For a comparison of the other two rewritten LXX books (1 Kings, Daniel) with the Qumran compositions, see Tov, ‘Three Strange Books’. 45

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they were rejected within Judaism, but for Christianity they remained authoritative in different ways. It is no coincidence that two of the three books (Esther, Daniel) suffered a similar fate within the Christian canon, since they have much in common. They share large expansions that were considered disturbing and therefore were ultimately removed from the running text in the case of Esther. The large expansions of Esth-LXX now have a deuterocanonical status in the Catholic Church even though they never existed separately. At the same time, the medium-sized expansions were left in the text. The medium-sized expansions of Daniel were likewise left in the text (4:17a, 33a–b, 37a–c). However, two book-sized appendixes were placed at the beginning or end of the book (Susanna, Bel and the Serpent), while the large expansion named the ‘Prayer of Azariah and the Song of the Three Young Men’50 was left in the text between 3:23 and 3:24 but given deutero-canonical status. 3 Kingdoms could have undergone the same fate, but all the expansions including the large ones in chapters 2 and 12 were left in the text. When the LXX translation was produced, the Hebrew source of 3 Kingdoms was considered to be as authoritative as 1 Kings, at least in some circles. Otherwise it would not have been rendered into Greek. This pertains also to the assumed Hebrew (Aramaic?) sources of Esther and Daniel.51 The Greek translators and the Alexandrian Jewish community considered the original Hebrew and Aramaic versions, as well as their Greek translations, as authoritative as Baruch52 or any other book included in those collections. Several scholars assume that the canonical conceptions behind the ‘Alexandrian canon’ reflect the views of the mother community in Palestine.53 The link with Palestine is even closer for Esther, as there is strong evidence that this book was translated in that country.54

50 Although placed in the text itself, this added text is usually believed to have enjoyed a separate existence. This Addition is composed of three or four separate compositions: the Prayer of Azariah (vv. 1–22), the prose narrative (vv. 23–28), the Ode (vv. 29–34), and the Psalm (vv. 35–68). See Moore, Daniel, Esther, and Jeremiah, 40–76. 51 See Collins, Daniel, 195–207, 405–39. 52 The book was translated by the same translator who rendered Jeremiah into Greek and was revised by the same reviser who revised at least the second part of the LXX of Jeremiah. See my study The Septuagint Translation of Jeremiah and Baruch. 53 Esp. Sundberg, The Old Testament, 60–5. 54 The main manuscripts of the LXX contain a note at the end of the book, the only such note in the LXX, translated by Bickerman, ‘Notes’, 245 as follows: ‘In the fourth year of the reign of Ptolemy and Cleopatra <78–77 bce>, Dositheus—who

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The Greek canon includes 3 Kingdoms, Esther, and Daniel, constituting rewritten versions of earlier books such as now included in MT. The rewritten books were considered authoritative in their Semitic as well as Greek forms, although by different communities. The SP, likewise a rewritten version of MT, as well as its pre-Samaritan forerunners, enjoyed similar authority. Rewritten versions, as well as the earlier versions on which they were based (for example, the MT of 1 Kings, Esther, and Daniel), were considered equally authoritative, by different communities and in different periods.55 In sum, we regard Esth-LXX as a free translation of a rewritten version of MT rather than a paraphrastic translation. We described the characteristic features of this rewritten composition, especially its large expansions, and suggested that these expansions formed an integral part of the original composition underlying the LXX. Finally, we compared this composition with other rewritten compositions from Qumran and elsewhere, and turned to matters of text and canon.

said he was a priest,—and Levitas, and Ptolemy his son deposited the preceding Letter of Purim, which they said really exists and had been translated by Lysimachus (son of ) Ptolemy, (a member) of the Jerusalem community’. The implication of this note is that the Greek version of Esther was produced in Jerusalem and deposited (eispherō) in the year 78–77 bce in an archive in Egypt. 55 For a further analysis of the canonical status of the Qumran rewritten compositions, see Tov, ‘Three Strange Books’.

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THE HIDDEN REFERENCE The Role of EDOM in Late Antique and Early Medieval Jewish Hymnography Wout Jac. van Bekkum I The striking scarcity in Judaism of tractates and writings dedicated entirely to polemics with Christianity and Islam has attracted the attention of scholars and has received various explanations. The one most commonly advanced is the need for caution when Jewish authors wrote against the two dominating religions, although there is no denying that oral polemics between people of various beliefs were a common practice. The realia of these discussions are reflected in many sources, but when such disputations were used as the formal setting for a written polemical treatise, it is rather difficult to trust their authenticity, as Piet van der Horst has repeatedly demonstrated in his scholarly research.1 In the minds of Jewish authors and hymnists, polemical considerations were indeed present, but criticism of Christianity and Islam was prudently limited to vague allusions, and followed a standard terminology with a long history in biblical and rabbinic exegesis. Most of this terminology originated in the Hellenistic period and was closely connected with the generally accepted interpretations of the book of Daniel, particularly chapters 2 and 7. The Danielic vision of world history was informed by the idea of four successive empires and the main question, self-evidently, was the identification of these four kingdoms. Daniel 2 was sometimes understood as referring to four representative successive kings within the Neo-Babylonian kingdom—for instance, Nebuchadnezzar as gold, Evilmerodach as silver, Neriglizzar, Labashimarduk or Laborosoarchod as bronze, with Nabonidus as a mixture of iron and clay. A more conventional interpretation of Daniel 2 was to take it as indicating, respectively, the Chaldean kingdom of 1 P.W. van der Horst, Hellenism, Judaism, Christianity: Essays on Their Interaction, Leuven 1998; P.W. van der Horst, Philo’s Flaccus: The First Pogrom, Leiden 2003. See also S. Stroumsa, ‘Jewish Polemics against Islam and Christianity in the Light of JudaeoArabic Texts’, in: R. Hoyland (ed.), Muslims and Others in Early Islamic Society, Aldershot 2004, 201–10.

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Nebuchadnezzar, the Median kingdom of Darius, the Persian kingdom of Cyrus, and the Greek kingdom of Alexander and the latter’s successors. Other exegetes opted for a more broadly general course, in supposing that Daniel 2 referred to the Chaldeo-Medo-Persian empire, the Greek, the Roman, and the divided states of Europe from the fifth century onwards. Daniel 7 was equally understood as alluding to the Babylonian empire of Nebuchadnezzar, the Persian empire of Cyrus, the Greek empire of Alexander, and the empire of Alexander’s successors.2 Still others held the four kingdoms to be Babylonian, Median, Persian, and Greek. Late Greek and Roman sources sometimes used a list of five monarchies, including Rome as the fifth one, but most Christian exegetes incorporated Rome within the Danielic scheme, as the fourth empire.3 In Judaism, the discussion of the four empires was to have great significance for the elaboration of a standardized worldview, shaped by two aspects: political reality and eschatological outlook.4 For that matter, the theme of the four empires could easily be invoked whenever there was a reason to provide an explanation for the number four.5 Jewish authors and hymnists adhered to the vision of the four great beasts as supplying an outline for the actual history of four successive empires: Babylon, Persia, Greece and Rome. Ultimately, the Roman empire would be overthrown and a messianic king would establish the hegemony of Israel. The latter eschatological conception, also defined as ‘the Roman View’, often draws upon the account of Gen 25:23, ‘Two nations are in your womb, and two peoples, born of you,

2 H.H. Rowley, Darius the Mede and the Four World Empires in the Book of Daniel: A Historical Study of Contemporary Theories, Cardiff 1935, 61–173. 3 J.J. Collins, ‘Jewish Apocalyptic against its Hellenistic Near Eastern Environment’, BASOR 220 (1975), 27–36. 4 M. Hadas-Lebel, Jérusalem contre Rome, Paris 1990, 453–88. 5 The number four plays a crucial role in rabbinic exposition, not just in a four-part structure of motifs in midrashim but also in the quality of a rhetorical pattern repeating and comparing words and ideas in parallelisms and paradoxes. As has been suggested by Aharon Mirsky, in his ground-breaking article ‘‫( ’מחצבתן של צורות הפיוט‬Studies of the Research Institute for Hebrew Poetry VII), Jerusalem 1958, 3–129, a four-part model derived from the principles of logic by which the Bible may be expounded, the middot, had a great influence upon Hebrew liturgy and poetry. Within the lines of early {avodot by Yossi ben Yossi, a sophisticated fourfold pattern of lines is apparent. In the verses of the classical, Byzantine-Jewish hymnists, the basic prosodic features consist of a quatrain of versets and rhyming quatrains or strophes, the dominant model for medieval Jewish hymnists throughout the Mediterranean world and in central and eastern Europe.

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shall be divided; the one shall be stronger than the other, the elder shall serve the younger’. The twin brothers Esau and Jacob represent the two peoples of Rome/Byzantium and Israel, and the typological representation of Rome, in the biblical image of Esau or Edom, as an obverse of Jacob or Israel enabled the sages and the hymnists to apply the traditional worldview to the situation of their own days.6 Numerous traditions from midrashic literature dealt with the concept of Edom as the eternal political and religious adversary of Israel, without being too specific about actual history. Genesis Rabbah 44,17 adduces Gen 15:12, ‘A dread and great darkness fell upon him’, in order to portray the four-part division of world history. A striking fact is that this biblical verse is interpreted twice in a reversed order of allusions: ‘Dread’ refers to Babylon . . . ‘darkness’ refers to Media . . . ‘great’ refers to Greece . . . ‘fell upon him’ alludes to Edom (Rome) . . . Some reverse it: ‘Fell upon him’ alludes to Babylon . . . ‘great’ alludes to Media . . . ‘darkness’ alludes to Greece . . . ‘dread’ alludes to Edom (with reference to Daniel 7:7, ‘There was a fourth beast, dreadful’).

II Midrashic literature was the most important source for those who wanted to create poetry for the sake of Jewish liturgy, and specifically for that on the occasion of a festival or a special Sabbath. The Jewish hymnographers or paytanim of Late Antiquity defended the credibility of the Jewish religion by highlighting what they considered to be the superior qualities of rabbinic Judaism. In their own times these composers must have been aware of the increasing hostility towards Judaism on the part of Roman and Byzantine Christianity. These attacks were of both a religious and a political nature, and they evolved into an infinite stream of Adversus Iudaeos literature intended to prove the imperfection and unworthiness of Judaism vis-à-vis the truth of the Christian

6 G.D. Cohen, ‘Esau as Symbol in Early Medieval Thought’, in: A. Altmann (ed.), Jewish Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Cambridge MA 1967, 19–48; J. Maier, ‘Israel und ‘Edom’ in den Ausdeutungen zu Dt 2:1–8’, in: G. Stemberger et alii (eds), Judentum: Ausblicke und Einsichten, Festschrift für K. Schubert zum 70. Geburtstag, Frankfurt/M 1993, 135–184; also in: J. Maier, Studien zur jüdischen Bibel und ihrer Geschichte, Berlin/New York 2004, 285–325; G. Hoekveld-Meijer, Esau, Salvation in Disguise, Kampen 1996; A. Butterweck, ‘Die Begegnung zwischen Esau und Jakob (Gen. 33,1–18) im Spiegel rabbinischer Ausdeutungen’, BN 116 (2003), 15–27.

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religion. However, the synagogue composers did not consider themselves as prominent controversialists; it was their objective to enrich Jewish liturgy with Hebrew-written poems or piyyutim, and their literary works were intended for strictly religious purposes. In their days Byzantium was the major hostile political power and Christianity the strongest opposing faith, against the claims whereof apologetic and polemical arguments could be deployed. In a composition related to Gen 32:3, ‘And Jacob sent messengers before him to Esau his brother Esau in the land of Se’ir, the country of Edom’, the sixth-century Byzantine-Jewish composer Yannai explicitly equated the name of Esau with the name of Edom. Whoever heard or read these lines could easily interpret them as a condemnation of the power of the Christian empire:7 He loved to shed blood, therefore his name is Edom; he is Esau and he is Edom. Remember, Lord, against the sons of Edom, the destruction that Edom’s daughter wrought. A great slaughter will be in Edom’s land; a glowing fire in Edom’s field . . . From above the ruler of Edom will fall; toss your sandal upon Edom.

Yannai occasionally formulated his ideas about Christianity in contradistinction with Judaism. In a composition related to Gen 25:19, ‘These are the descendants of Isaac’, the poet offers a remarkable explanation in the following lines:8 Esau and Jacob, Edom and Israel: Esau is named after his deeds, Jacob is defined by his name. Edom makes a face blush, and Israel will struggle with God; when one is visible the other is hidden.

These lines can only be clarified by leaning heavily upon biblical and midrashic passages of which the most prominent is Genesis Rabbah 71,3 when Rabbi Jose ben Hanina declares: Names of people fall into four categories: some have fair names while their deeds are foul; others have ugly names while their deeds are fair; some have ugly names and their deeds are foul; and others have fair names and their deeds are fair. Some have fair names while their deeds are foul, that is Esau, whose name denotes, he does (‫ )עושה‬the will of

7 Z.M. Rabinovitz, The Liturgical Poems of Rabbi Yannai according to the Triennial Cycle of the Pentateuch and the Holidays I, Jerusalem 1985, 198. 8 Rabinovitz, The Liturgical Poems of Rabbi Yannai, 164.

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God, although he actually did not; Ishmael, whose name implies, he obeys God ( ‫)שומע אל‬, although he did not.

Jacob, however, was given a name by God according to some traditions as in Tanhuma Exodus 4 (‘Jacob is a name offered to him by the Holy One blessed be He’), as it is said in Gen 25:26, ‘So his name was called Jacob’, whereas Esau received his name from his father and mother, as it is said in the previous verse: ‘So they called his name Esau’. The names Edom and Israel are of their own accord equated with Esau and Jacob, to which Yannai adds obvious explanations in the first part: Edom makes a face blush because of Gen 25:25, ‘The first came forth red’, and Israel will struggle with God because of the episode in Gen 32:24–32 and the words in Hosea 12:3, ‘And in his manhood he strove with God’. The relationship between the twin brothers is described in terms of mutual exclusion: when one is seen the other is hidden, when one has fallen the other will rise, when one is extinguished the other will shine. A major midrashic source for this characterisation employing the motif of light is Genesis Rabbah 6,3 when Rabbi Nahman makes the following observation: ‘As long as the light of Esau prevails, the light of Jacob cannot be distinguished; but when the light of Esau sets, that of Jacob shall be distinguished’. This exegetical motif was repeatedly employed by Yannai in order to discuss the religious and political oppression of the Jews under Christian-Byzantine rule. In a composition related to Num 8:1, ‘When you [Aaron] set up the lamps’, the same employment of contrast between Edom and Zion returns:9 The lamps of Edom became powerful and numerous; the lamps of Zion are destroyed and ravaged. The lamps of Edom burned increasingly stronger; the lamps of Zion are extinguished and quenched. The lamps of Edom are everywhere present; the lamps of Zion are set back. The lamps of Edom, their light is bright; the lamps of Zion are blacker than soot. The lamps of Edom are haughtily risen; the lamps of Zion went down and are crushed. 9 Z.M. Rabinovitz, The Liturgical Poems of Rabbi Yannai II, Jerusalem 1987, 37–8; W.J. van Bekkum, ‘Anti-Christian Polemics in the Piyyut’, in: J. den Boeft & A. Hilhorst (eds), Early Christian Poetry, Leiden 1993, 297–308; S. Schwartz, ‘Some Types of Jewish-Christian Interaction in Late Antiquity’, in: R. Kalmin & S. Schwartz (eds), Jewish Culture and Society under the Christian Roman Empire, Leuven 2003, 197–210.

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wout jac. van bekkum The lamps of Edom are respected and adorned; the lamps of Zion are seized and turned over. The lamps of Edom shine because of a dead man; the lamps of Zion are passed out of mind like a dead man.

Yannai seems to use the name of Zion deliberately in direct reminiscence of the days of the Temple in Jerusalem, when the lampstand burned continuously as an outstanding symbol of Jewish independence and freedom. Although the references to the customs and concepts of Christianity are oblique, the mentioning of ‘a dead man’ could very possibly allude to Jesus; the same phrase recurs once more in Yannai’s poetry, amidst a number of intriguing descriptions, within a composition for the Day of Atonement:10 Those who call a fool noble; those who choose detestable abominations; those who rejoice in the idol with a naked body; those who cling to a dead man rather than a living one; those who rant and rave and go astray in falsehood, inveterate evildoers; those who pollute themselves with offerings for the dead; those who dissent from your commandments; those whose deeds are hidden in the dark; those who [. . . . . .] for the death of their god; those who kneel and bow down for the bent and kneeling one; those who are burning to do their wrong deeds; those who believe [. . . sufferance]; those who are grieved by their distress; those who are keen on those who see their mysteries; those who prepare an offering of swine’s blood; those who indulge in bastardism, in accordance with their origin; those who fast and chastise themselves in vain; those who acquire a collection of bones; those who adore them during their festivals; those who are utterly vain; those who hold the world with their lies.

What is described here seems like a fair description of Christian religion in Yannai’s days, with references to Jesus (‘fool’, ‘a dead man’, ‘their god’), the crucifix (‘the idol with a naked body’, ‘the bent and kneeling one’), the consecrated host (‘offerings for the dead’), the holy relics (‘a collection of bones’), and possibly to monastic life (‘fast and chastise’).11 Yannai’s choice of a series of participles in an acrostic order is deliberate, and it aims at the avoidance of direct criticism of Christianity. In the same composition a kind of counter-poem has

Z.M. Rabinovitz, The Liturgical Poems of Rabbi Yannai II, 221–22. The abstruseness of these poetic characterisations of Christianity has led some scholars to believe that this composition was originally intended to make a general condemnation of evil conduct within Israel: J. Maier, ‘The piyyut Ha-Omrim le-Khilay Shoa’ and anti-Christian Polemics’, in: J.J. Petuchowski & E. Fleischer (eds), Studies in Aggadah, Targum and Jewish Liturgy in Memory of Joseph Heinemann, Jerusalem 1981, 100–10. 10 11

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been inserted, in which the hymnist enumerates the virtues of Israel’s faith and tradition:12 Those who say: one is our God; those who are tested by fire and by water; those who rush down like water after you; those who are bound to you like a belt round a waist; those who study your Law day and night; those who declare that they are your witnesses; those who are favored by the merits of their ancestors; those who are signed by your covenant; those who cling to you as if they were from your origin; those who are unique by professing your unique name; those who are bound to eternal love; those who are picked like a rose from amidst thorns; those who believe and are the descendants of believers; those who are put like a seal on your heart; those who are dear to you more than any nation; those who have been carried since they were born; those who have been upheld since they were conceived; as sheep to be slaughtered because of you; those who have been called by your name; those who have been noted and distinguished to you; those who obey their laws; those who are attached to you without shame.

These verses can be regarded as a form of Jewish apologetics, containing a defence of the Jews as faithful and truthful bearers of a revered tradition, with hidden criticism of Christian belief and doctrine. Similarly, in a composition related to Deut 6:4, ‘Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord’, the general characteristics of Yannai’s view of Christianity are indicated. Most conspicuous is the use of the expression shonim or malkhut shonim, by which Yannai seems to establish a distinction from meyachadim: those who accept two gods are not like the Jews, who strictly adhere to one God. The shonim are believers who admit an element of dualism in their religion and define two eternal beings as their gods. One would normally expect that the shonim would primarily describe the Christians, and that Yannai’s religious allegations would therefore concern the Christian attack on the unity and supremacy of the true God, incorporating Jesus as a second god within their religious doctrine and beliefs. However, the general connotation of the expression may have included all those who, in one way or another, admitted the existence of gods other than the one God:13

Z.M. Rabinovitz, The Liturgical Poems of Rabbi Yannai II, 223–24. Probably Manichaeans, Magians or Zoroastrians, cf. Babylonian Talmud Berakhot 33b and other sources: ‘Analogous to the heretics who say: There are two powers dominating the universe’. Yannai’s intent to show the falseness of the shonim equals the Islamic opposition to shirk or ‘association’, accepting the presence at God’s side of other (pseudo-)divinities; Z.M. Rabinovitz, The Liturgical Poems of Rabbi Yannai II, 140–42. 12 13

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wout jac. van bekkum Uproot the kingdom of those who accept two [gods]: one and [another] one; restore Your kingdom to the one nation . . .

In one of the poems within the same composition, Yannai skilfully plays with the words ‘one’ and ‘two’: You must know that there is one, and a second there is none; the one and only [God] has neither son nor brother. There is no second, there is just one; yet there is a second [world] and not just one [world]. Also there is no second god, there is one God; enough is a world of two and not a world of one.

The sources for these lines are found in midrashic tradition, as in Exodus Rabbah 29,5, where Rabbi Abbahu echoes the following observation: ‘A human king may rule, but he has a father or brother or son; but God said: I am not like that; I am the first, for I have no father, and I am the last, for I have no brother, and beside Me there is no God, for I have no son’. In the latter two lines Yannai hints at Deuteronomy Rabbah 2,31 where it is stated: ‘God said to Israel: My children, all that I have created I have created in pairs . . . this world and the world to come are a pair, but My glory is one and unique in the world’, in conjunction with Genesis Rabbah 46,3: ‘It is I who said to My world, enough! And had I not said, enough, to My world, the heaven would still have been spreading and the earth would have gone on expanding to this very day’ . . . ‘It is I whose Godhead outweighs the world and the fullness thereof. Aquila translated the word ‘enough’ (Hebrew: ‫)די‬: sufficient, incomparable’. Yannai was not alone in condemning the ruling religious and political power in Byzantine Palestine. He was joined by a number of contemporary or younger colleagues, such as Simeon ha-kohen ben Megas and Yehudah, who in a similar way prayed for judgment upon Byzantium. These hymnists were active within the Jewish communities of Palestine and neighbouring countries, where their high social status within the Jewish communities was recognised and their artistic poetic qualities were appreciated as an integral part of Jewish culture. Their poems were seen in some sense as ‘official’ works, with great influence on the evolution of synagogue worship. Obviously these compositions were not considered as a major vehicle for the expression of Jewish attitudes towards the increasing marginalisation of Jews within the Christian world; however, the somewhat unlikely medium of Hebrew poetry may after all provide an indication of certain currents of Jew-

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ish opinion. Megas has sufficient reason to turn to the biblical fate of Sodom to make his point:14 We shall see you [dressed] in red garments; God will treat Edom just as Sodom was overthrown; then it will be destroyed and silenced.

The midrashic origin of these lines in Genesis Rabbah 75,4 is closely linked to the biblical portion for which the hymn was composed, Gen 32:3, ‘In the land of Se’ir, the country of Edom’ (‘red’): ‘He was red, his food red, his land red, his warriors were red, his garments were red, his avenger will be red, clad in red’. In one, still unpublished, manuscript fragment, Megas described Edom as ‘the one who is compared to a pig’ (‫)לחזיר משול הוא אדום‬: Eating and thrashing about with split hooves; this wart of a pig will return to chaos; his purity is in his feet and his impurity is in his mouth.

The midrashic image of the pig as the kingdom of Edom has its roots in Dan 7:7 where it is stated, ‘A fourth beast . . . crushed and devoured its victims and trampled underfoot whatever is left’. Consequently, the sequence of four kingdoms was interpreted as four unclean animals: ‘The camel alludes to Babylon, the rock-badger alludes to Media, the hare alludes to Greece, the pig alludes to Se’ir . . . The pig alludes to Edom, but does not use the throat [to chew the cud], in that it does not extol the Holy One, blessed be He, and it is not content with not extolling, but reviles and blasphemes, saying, Do I have someone in heaven, and earth has nothing I desire’ (Leviticus Rabbah 13,5). Megas’ colleague Yehudah presented an obvious explanation for this parallel between Edom and the pig: Until when shall the daily offering be void from your multitudes? And in the hands of those who eat pork shall your residence be given? Be zealous for our zeal to return it to your dwelling. Let my prayer be counted as incense before you (Ps 141:2).

14 J. Yahalom, Liturgical Poems of Shim‘on bar Megas, Jerusalem 1984, 133. The rhyming words Edom and Sodom enable Megas and many other composers to draw the parallel between the biblical example of the destruction of Sodom and the wish for the annihilation of Edom. Moreover, Qilir in one of his laments for the Ninth of Av: ‘Woe, the chewing one [= Edom, cf. Avot de-Rabbi Natan I, 34] has occupied the footstool (‫ ;)הדום‬he fixed upon me like a pig in order to overcome me (‫ ;)לקדום‬scum and refuse like the overthrow of Sodom (‫ ;)סדום‬how many years has Esau subjugated me, the father of Edom (‫’?)אדום‬

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The expression ‘those who eat pork’ is probably a direct allusion to the Christians, and a close association of Christianity with the ruling power of Rome-Byzantium seems obvious. In later hymns the combination is found of ‘those who eat pork’ with ‘those who eat camel meat’, a designation of both Christians and Muslims. The late ninth-century Babylonian hymnist, El‘azar birabbi Qillar, versifies: How can we be pure when we have become filthy by the impurity of the uncircumcised? We are oppressed in the kingdom of Edom and Ishmaelites. We have been weakened by our dispersion and assimilation among the nations. These are the ones who eat pork and these are the ones who eat camel meat.15

Of course, Yehudah made no mention of a double reference to both Christians and Arabs, but rather focused on the one kingdom of his times and his powerful ruler, the Byzantine emperor. The following verse is more explicit, in giving vent to a clear opinion on the future of the emperor’s position: Until when shall we sit outside the Land, and will the ruler of the kingdom of Edom be extolled unto heaven? Humiliate him and pull him down into the depths of the earth, and let the heavens be glad, and the earth rejoice (Ps 96:11).16

III The complicated transition from Persian and Christian rule to the dominance of Islam triggered new expectations and implicitly prompted a reconsideration of the Danielic scheme of the four kingdoms, because a new, fifth one unexpectedly appeared.17 It is essential to focus upon this specific moment in history, in order to understand better the Arab conquest, which, in the words of the exegetes and hymnists, was seen as the advent of Ishmael. These may have been the days of the greatest liturgical composer of all, El‘azar birabbi Qilir, who flourished in Palestine in the first decades of the seventh century. His allusions to

S. Elizur, The Piyyutim of Rabbi El‘azar birabbi Qillar, Jerusalem 1988, 378. W.J. van Bekkum, Hebrew Poetry from Late Antiquity, Liturgical Poems of Yehudah, Leiden 1998, xv–xvi. 17 R. Hoyland, Seeing Islam as Others Saw it: A Survey and Analysis of the Christian, Jewish and Zoroastrian writings on Islam, Princeton 1997, 527, 532–35. 15 16

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any historical situation are strikingly few, but in one of his dirges—for the Ninth of Av—Qilir employs the familiar pattern of Edom as the opposite to Zion: Edom said: there is no limit; and Zion hoped for the end. Edom relied upon its treasures; and Zion was in trouble; how can I be consoled? Edom was high like the eagles; and Zion remained like a hut in the vineyards. Edom said: I am [powerful], and there is none besides me; and Zion’s ankles slipped; how can I be consoled? Edom was poisoned by injustice, and Zion became its tribute. Edom’s manner is towards darkness; and Zion grew dim; how can I be consoled? Edom is a whore and an adulteress; and Zion is neglected and squeezed out. Edom has polluted the land; and Zion has been destroyed by violence; how can I be consoled? Edom has arranged a massacre; and Zion’s safety has ceased to exist. Edom sits in security; and Zion is stupefied; how can I be consoled? Edom is like a well-adorned bride; and Zion is like a cast-out menstruating woman. Edom has seized rule; and Zion is crushed; how can I be consoled? Edom makes its furrows long; and Zion is in fasting. Edom is expanding; and Zion is put to ruins; how can I be consoled? Edom enjoys worshipping a dead man; and Zion’s power is like a dead man. Edom is powerful and haughty; and Zion is in shame; how can I be consoled? Edom has increased wrongdoing; and Zion is in mourning. Edom succeeded in attaining rule; and Zion has been faint; how can I be consoled? Edom received a glorious crown; and Zion’s wreath has been rejected. Edom’s salvation has grown; and Zion was far from salvation; how can I be consoled? Edom bows to idols; and Zion is considered invalid. Edom errs in all these; and Zion cries about all these; how can I be consoled?

Qilir’s hidden polemic against Christian rule and religion kept close to the traditional structure of Edom-Israel without any clear reference to the Arab conquest and the advent of Islam.18 Other composers were

18 Following Leviticus Rabbah 13,5, Qilir in a composition for Shabbat Eykhah (Lam 1:1) compares the Arabs as ‘those who devour their camels’, but this designation does not adduce any historical evidence for Arabs approaching or conquering Palestine.

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equally involved in religiously inspired political observations according to the biblical scheme. However, the seventh-century hymnist Yohanan the Priest was more specific in his allusions to the coming to power of the Arabs. He viewed the newcomers as fitting into a divine plan to wipe out the Byzantine empire, and he therefore versifies:19 Dispossess the mountain of Sexir and Edom, speak to Ashur: he has to make haste and hurry, to plough down a godless nation by your mighty sceptre, to tread them down by the kingdom of the wild ass; this is how to make them weak.

The name ‘Ashur’ refers to the Arab conquerors, according to Hosea 8:9, ‘For they have gone up to Assyria, a wild ass wandering alone’. It is clear to Yohanan that the Arabs were expected to play a significant role in the messianic-apocalyptic drama. With the aid of Ps 83:7, ‘The tents of Edom and the Ishmaelites’, the centuries-old scheme of the four kingdoms was adapted to the permanence of Arab rule and Muslim domination. However, other seventh-century hymnists preferred to envisage a new scenario for world history that assigned to the kingdoms a double name representing two successive powers. In the liturgical poems of Pinhas the Priest, who was active as a hymnist in the Galilean town of Kafra near Tiberias, we find a startling harmonisation of ancient motifs and contemporary perception, as in a composition for Hanukkah:20 You have destroyed the lion, the bear and the panther; their power is crushed; their end has been bitter; now [it is] the pig—his verdict will be completed. O living One, like angels we will sing to you . . . You have torn apart the kingdom of Babylonia and Chaldea by strife, You have moved away Media and Persia, Greece and Macedonia, Qedar and Edom you will now set to destruction, In sight of all you will raise your voice unto us, O Lord.

In accordance with Dan 7:4–8 Pinhas inserted the theme of the four kingdoms in his verse, but occasionally he enumerated four pairs of kingdoms, which makes a total of eight: Babylon and Chaldea, Persia 19 N. Weisenstern, The Piyyutim of Yohanan ha-Kohen birabbi Yehoshua’, Jerusalem 1984, 78; J. Yahalom, ‘The Transition of Kingdoms in Eretz Israel (Palestine) as Conceived by Poets and Homilists’, Shalem 6 (1992), 1–22. 20 S. Elizur, The Liturgical Poems of Rabbi Pinhas ha-Kohen, Jerusalem 2004, 210–12, 509–10, 662–65.

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and Media, Greece and Macedonia, Edom and Ishmael. The double number of empires enabled the composer to incorporate the Arab conquest of Palestine into a comprehensive view incorporating both historical past and future expectation. Pinhas prayed for imminent redemption of Israel; both Roman and Arab or Christian and Muslim rule have to come to an end, as he states in a hymn for the Sabbath of the reading of Isa 54:11, ‘O afflicted city, lashed by storms and not comforted’: Four with four prevailed against her [Israel] in shrewdness until iron will be crushed into dust. They raged against her like the raging of the seas, until You will appear and return to her in mercy. A severe rule was it when the kingdom of the Chaldeans was coupled [to Babylonia], until you will grant Your people the justice of their righteous ancestors. Fifty-two [years] were assigned to the kingdom of Media, until You will bring salvation and [. . . . . .] my desires. To the Median kingdom Persia was coupled, until You will accompany Your people and pull down the arrogance of the enemy. One hundred eighty [years] Greece ruled, until You will give comfort and take revenge [. . . . . .]. [Israel] was closed in [. . . . . .] the kingdom of Macedonia, until You will eradicate evil from every valley. Nine hundred eighty-six [years] was [Israel] dispersed in the kingdom of Ishmael and Edom, until You, radiant and ruddy lover [God], will grant justice to Your people. Her respect was gone in coupling the rule of the Ishmaelites, until You will show compassion with Your children and infants. Four hundred and thirty-three [until] the end of clay in the world, until You will [. . . . . .] Your people to break the bars of their yoke.

IV A hymnist like Pinhas chose an exceptional way of describing Edom and in so doing he provides some reasons for us to speculate about the then current political developments. As soon as Islamic rule was established and consolidated, there was a perceptible return to the traditional scheme among the Jewish hymnists in the Islamic East, where Christian realm and religion were less known at the time. Many important composers—such as Saadiah Gaon, Nehemiah ben

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Shlomoh, Shlomoh Sulayman al-Sanjari, Yehoshua bar Khalfa and his father Khalfa birabbi Yitzhaq, Yehudah birabbi Binyamin, El‘azar birabbi Qilar, and Joseph ben Hayyim al-Baradani—were active in the period from the ninth until the eleventh centuries, predominantly in Egypt and in Babylonia, the prosperous centre of Jewish religious and political activities.21 One of the poets in the East was an outstanding person, who was born in Palestine and later very frequently visited or settled in Fustat (Old Cairo) in Egypt. His status in the hierarchy of Jewish leadership is clarified by his name and title: Samuel the Third or Shmuel ben Hosha‘nah ha-Shelishi. At a certain point in his life he became the third in rank directly after the Gaon and the Head of the Beth Din. Samuel the Third is uniquely relevant for our discussion because of the availability of historical documentation about him. His vast poetic oeuvre bears many features of both the early Palestinian and contemporary Babylonian ‘schools’. A large collection of hymns, known as yotzrot, has been brought together from numerous manuscripts by Joseph Yahalom, whereas the prosodic and stylistic merits of these hymns have been described by Naoya Katsumata.22 The original texts will be published by Yahalom in a forthcoming critical edition, and this collection will reflect the richness of the ‘Edom’-tradition in this period. In a hymn for the Sabbath, on which Gen 12:1, ‘Go from your country’, was read, Samuel combined well-known motifs with a significant addition: Wretched people were dragged along and moved by aggressive agitators; how many years does this go on; they are tossed around by ruler after ruler. They wandered from lion to bear, and from panther to wild donkey and Seir. Release the ties of their yoke; remember the one who stirred up from the east [Abraham] . . .

In this verse Samuel has mentioned five powers in midrashic and biblical fashion: Babylonia, Persia, Greece, Arab and Christian domination. He did not hesitate to add the appellation for the kingdom of Ishmael, ‘a wild donkey’, alongside the name for Byzantium, ‘Seir’, but the conventionality of the terminology and its adaptation for thematic and 21 E. Fleischer, The Yozer, Its Emergence and Development, Jerusalem 1984, 367–472. Important editions of so-called ‘Late Eastern’ hymnists have been published, among others, by M. Zulay, S. Elizur, T. Beeri, N. Katsumata and E. Cohen. 22 N. Katsumata, Hebrew Style in the Poetry of Shmuel Hashlishi, Leiden 2003, 19–22.

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prosodic purposes obscures the discovery of any historical ingredient.23 Of course, Samuel had much more to do with Muslim authority, and his closeness to the midrashic purport of Edom’s role in world history bears an element of escape from historical reality. A classical motif from the poetry of El‘azar birabbi Qilir, a comparison between the biblical fate of Egypt and the future fate of Edom (also expressed under the name of Tyre), was imitated by later composers. Samuel himself used this motif in a poem for Exod 10:1, ‘Go in to Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart’, in which he contrasts the plagues afflicting those (‘the Egyptians’) and these others (‘Tyre’ or ‘Edom’):24 The punishments you have inflicted on Egypt were very admirable in the eyes of the creatures; the Egyptians crawled forth in great distress. You will likewise deal harshly with the strongmen of Tyre: the moment their foot will slip, pain and anguish will grip them . . . O Rock, by these decrees you will judge the hosts of Edom; when word of Egypt comes to the leaders of Tyre, they will be crushed by anguish. Those were struck by blood; these will stick in blood and fire; those were killed by the noise of frogs; these will be hit by a loud uproar. Those were hit by gnats like dust; the dust of these will burn like sulphur; a heavy plague of flies for those; these will have the owl and the raven; those were struck by a plague; these will be judged by a luring plague; festering boils weakened those; the flesh of these will swiftly rot. Those were perplexed by the plague of hail; hailstones will pour down on these from all sides; those were punished by locusts; these will be sentenced by all kinds of birds; those collapsed because of the darkness; these will be afflicted by fog and the measuring line of chaos; each first-born of the house among those passed away; the prominent leaders of these will be defeated.

Fortunately, Samuel’s literary legacy not only includes liturgical poetry but also a number of important letters from the Cairo Genizah collection. As one of the leading personalities in Palestinian rabbinic 23 E. Fleischer, ‘An early Jewish Tradition about the Date of the Collapse of Byzantine Rule in Palestine’, Zion 36 (1971), 110–15. 24 Cf. Tanhuma, ed. S. Buber, 43–45: ‘All plagues which the Holy One, blessed be He, has brought over Egypt, in the future He will bring them over Edom’.

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culture, Samuel wrote a letter to Abraham bar Sahlan, the leader of the Babylonian Jewish community in Fustat, about the internal war in Palestine that had begun in the year 996.25 This letter was apparently written in 1001 or in the first months of the year 1002, when the Jews of Palestine suffered from the wars between the Arabs and the Turks. In this letter Samuel inserted a poem with direct reference to the historical circumstances, using familiar appellations: the ‘Edomite uncircumcised people’ (‫)ערלים‬, the ‘ferocious Agagites’, the ‘ill-wishers of the chosen’, ‘the one residing in Egypt’ and ‘the one residing in Palestine’. One may assume that the ‘Edomite uncircumcised people’ are Palestinian Christians who favoured the Byzantine presence in neighbouring Syria. It is uncertain who exactly are indicated by the other terms, but Samuel continues his letter by stating that ‘the one residing in Egypt’ was finally drowned in the water of the Nile, and ‘the one residing in Palestine’ mistreated the Jews: ‘He tormented the people of Zion, incited against the inhabitants of Acre, expelled the people of Tyre, robbed the dwellings of Ashkelon, wounded the people of Gaza, and made the congregation of Caesarea wander’. Indeed, these had been years of great turmoil since caliph al-Hakim came to power in 997. Samuel the Third was aware of the trouble and later became personally involved in an incident during the funeral of a colleague hymnist and cantor in Fustat, Rabbi Paltiel, who fell victim to a plague raging in the city in 1011–1012. Apparently he and other mourners were attacked by Muslims, who threw stones at them, cursing them and accusing them of infringement of the law of burial. Twentythree people were arrested, among them Samuel the Third. They were to be executed the next day, but the Jews of Fustat asked the caliph to save the lives of the men condemned to death. Al-Hakim responded to this request, ordering them to be released and that all their belongings should be restored to them.26

M. Gil, A History of Palestine, 634–1099, Cambridge 1992, 366–69. The account can be found in the ‘Egyptian Scroll’, a rhymed text preserved in several versions in the Genizah as well as in some personal letters, cf. M. Gil, A History of Palestine, 376–77. 25 26

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V Despite the fortunate outcome of this episode, historical accounts like these show that the situation of the Jews in Egypt and Palestine was precarious and could easily lead to acts of violence. Samuel the Third and other hymnists had sufficient reason to reflect on the actual situation, but they scarcely seem to have done so. The ‘unhistorical’ or ‘universal’ approach of the paytanim is a general characteristic of Jewish hymnography throughout its long history, from the biblical and rabbinic periods down to modern times. Stylistic analysis of each hymnist and his poetry reveals unique features pertaining to the hymnist or to his place and time. On the other hand, any Jewish poet composing for the sake of liturgy shares a number of characteristics common to other composers of different times and places. The tradition of such a motif like the reference to Edom, implies biblical, rabbinic-midrashic and actual aspects which cannot be detached one from another. Whatever historical role was attributed to Edom, the many other religious ideas contained within the originally biblical concept of Edom are not to be ignored, and they explain the over-generalising attitude of Judaism towards non-Jewish authority. The question remains open as to what kind of information may be judged as historical fact and what kind as literary fiction. For the Jewish hymnists in Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages the art of Hebrew poetry came first and served the purpose of spreading Jewish points of view and interpretations of events. The references to Edom belong to the ideological tendencies of their liturgical verse; on the other hand, the precise historical references often remain obscure.

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PART SEVEN

THE DEVELOPMENT OF EARLY CHRISTIAN LITERATURE

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REARRANGING THE ‘HOUSE OF GOD’ A New Perspective on the Pastoral Epistles Jens Herzer Knowing Pieter Willem van der Horst and his outstanding scholarship for many years, one of the most interesting things to learn from him is that there is no topic or area in antiquity which is not worth of earnest consideration or reconsideration. This encourages me to contribute to his Festschrift a fresh look or—using the now common terminology in New Testament research—a new perspective on the Pastoral Epistles, which historically and theologically appear to be rather marginal compared to other writings of the Corpus Paulinum. Admittedly, the expression ‘new perspective’ should rather be read as ‘new old perspective’, since it in fact considers anew older views on the Pastoral Epistles, particularly on their relationship to each other challenging the actual communis opinio about them. Focusing on an exemplary analysis of the ecclesiological terminology of the letters, I will question the common ‘dogma’1 of the compositional unity of the Pastoral Epistles, which is broadly accepted at least in German scholarship, whereas English speaking research always acknowledged different approaches. Thus, in this article I propose a more differentiated perception of these letters which points to an alternative perspective on their relationship.2 The Thesis of the Literary Unity of the Pastoral Epistles in Scholarship Despite their rather marginal standing, it is impressive to see what huge commentaries have been written on the Pastoral Epistles over the last 1 For this term see L.T. Johnson, The First and Second Letters to Timothy: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary (AB 35A), Garden City 2001, 52. 2 The thesis of this article has been first presented at the 2005 SBL Annual Meeting in Philadelphia and is part of a commentary project on the Pastoral Epistles. It might be mentioned that I consider this a ‘Problemanzeige’ and not a comprehensive attempt to solve a question which has been neglected in scholarship for a long time. Some considerations presented here have already been made in J. Herzer, ‘Abschied vom Konsens? Die Pseudepigraphie der Pastoralbriefe als Herausforderung an die neutestamentliche Wissenschaft’, ThLZ 129 (2004), 1267–82.

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two decades.3 Given this comprehensive research, we actually should know everything about them, and many scholars think that we do have a broad consensus about their interpretation. The most important element of this consensus is the assumption that the so-called Corpus pastorale forms a literary unity.4 The idea of a corpus has initially been brought up in German scholarship of the early nineteenth century by Ferdinand C. Baur in his dispute with Friedrich D.E. Schleiermacher.5 After Johann E.C. Schmidt (1804), Schleiermacher was the first critical scholar who argued extensively that the language and content of 1 Tim differs from the Pauline letters (including 2 Tim and Tit!) to such a high degree that it has to be identified as a pseudepigraphical writing which depends on Tit and 2 Tim.6 Following Schleiermacher’s view on 1 Tim, Johann G. Eichhorn claimed in 1812 that all three letters have to be treated the same way, mainly because of their similarity in style.7 For Baur, too, Schleiermacher’s argument referring only to 1 Tim was of no ‘Haltpunkt’,8 because of the specific relationship between the three letters. Considering only 1 Tim and separating it from 2 Tim

3 Cf. for example J.D. Quinn, The Letter to Titus (AB 35), Garden City 1990; L. Oberlinner, Die Pastoralbriefe, 3 Vols. (HTKNT XI/2.1, 2.2, 2.3), Freiburg/etc. 1994–96; J.D. Quinn & W.C. Wacker, The First and Second Letters to Timothy, Grand Rapids/Cambridge 2000; Johnson,The First and Second Letters to Timothy; L.T. Johnson, Letters to Paul’s Delegates: 1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, Titus (The New Testament in Context), Valley Forge 1996; A. Weiser, Der zweite Brief an Timotheus (EKKNT XVI/1), Düsseldorf/Zürich 2003. For a critical overview see Herzer, ‘Abschied vom Konsens?’. Cf. also (among others) I.H. Marshall, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Pastoral Epistles (ICC), Edinburgh 1999; W.D. Mounce, Pastoral Epistles (WBC), Nashville 2000; and most recently P.H. Towner, The Letters to Timothy and Titus (NICNT), Grand Rapids 2006. Mounce, Johnson, and Towner argue for the authenticity of the Pastoral Epistles. 4 This term has been introduced by P. Trummer, ‘Corpus Paulinum—Corpus Pastorale: Zur Ortung der Paulustradition in den Pastoralbriefen’, in: K. Kertelge (ed.), Paulus in den neutestamentlichen Spätschriften: Zur Paulusrezeption im Neuen Testament (QD 89), Freiburg/etc. 1981, 122–45 (see below). 5 F.C. Baur, Die sogenannten Pastoralbriefe des Apostels Paulus aufs neue kritisch untersucht, Stuttgart/Tübingen 1835; F.C. Baur, ‘Abgenöthigte Erklärung gegen einen Artikel der evangelischen Kirchenzeitung’, herausgegeben von D.E.W. Hengstenberg, Prof. der Theol. an der Universität zu Berlin. Mai 1836, in: F.C. Baur, Ausgewählte Werke in Einzelausgaben, Vol. 1: Historisch-kritische Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament, ed. by K. Scholder, Stuttgart/Bad Cannstatt 1963, 267–320 (= Tübinger Zeitschrift für Theologie 1836, 179–232). 6 F.D.E. Schleiermacher, Ueber den sogenannten ersten Brief des Paulos an den Timotheos: Ein kritisches Sendschreiben an J.C. Gass, Berlin 1807. 7 J.G. Eichhorn, Einleitung in das Neue Testament, Leipzig 1812. Eichhorn, however, still assumed an indirect authenticity of the Pastoral Epistles. Cf. H.J. Holtzmann, Lehrbuch der historisch-kritischen Einleitung in das Neue Testament, Freiburg 18923, 274–76. 8 Baur, Die sogenannten Pastoralbriefe, 3.

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and Tit would put this letter as close to Paul as any other of them.9 Yet, despite of all their closeness, even Baur conceded that 1 Tim has specific characteristics among the Pastoral Epistles. Therefore the proof of pseudonymity is not as easy and convincing for 2 Tim and Tit as for 1 Tim.10 Nevertheless, Baur argued that because the three letters have to be considered as a unity and because 1 Tim is certainly pseudonymous, it is necessary to conclude that 2 Tim and Tit cannot be authentic either.11 In 1834, a year before Baur, Wilhelm M.L. De Wette in his Lehrbuch der historisch-kritischen Einleitung presented a similar view by combining Schleiermacher’s and Eichhorn’s theory. He assumed that 1 Tim is a compilation of 2 Tim and Tit.12 Obviously in nineteenth century research scholars were well aware of the differences in character of 1 Tim on the one hand and 2 Tim and Tit on the other hand, even though different scholars drew different conclusions. In his analysis of the Pastoral Epistles, Baur went far beyond Schleiermacher’s critique of the authenticity of 1 Tim by relating this issue to the problem of the opponents addressed in the letters. Unlike Eichhorn, Baur sees the ‘objective’ reason for the assumption that all three letters are forgeries in his general identification of the opponents as Gnostics. Baur got this idea from 1 Tim 6:20, where the writer mentions the ‘falsely so called Gnosis’. Since Baur thought the Gnosis to be a phenomenon of the second century and evaluated all three letters as a unity in terms of composition and content, his conclusion necessarily led to a second century dating for all of them.13 Although acknowledging Baur’s Gnosis theory, Richard Rothe objected to his Baur, Die sogenannten Pastoralbriefe, 4. Baur, Die sogenannten Pastoralbriefe, 4: ‘. . . mit dem ersten dieser Briefe (verhält es sich) in kritischer Hinsicht im Ganzen auch wieder anders . . ., als mit den beiden andern, und der von Schleiermacher in Beziehung auf jenen (sc. 1 Tim) geführte negative Beweis kann in Beziehung auf diese wenigstens nicht auf dieselbe Weise geführt werden’. 11 Yet, he still holds: ‘Den sichersten Standpunkt für diese Untersuchung muß der erste Brief (sc. 1 Tim) geben’, Baur, Die sogenannten Pastoralbriefe, 5. 12 W.M.L. De Wette, Lehrbuch der historisch-kritischen Einleitung in die kanonischen Bücher des Neuen Testaments. Zweiter Theil die Einleitung in das N.T. enthaltend, Berlin 18343, 243–44: ‘So ist die Annahme Schleiermachers, dass er (sc. 1 Tim) aus den andern, besonders aus dem Br. an Titus, compilirt sei, so begründet, als nur eine Hypothese dieser Art seyn kann; sie lässt sich aber mit der Ansicht Eichhorns vereinigen, welcher alle drei Briefe für unpaulinisch erklärt. Freilich hat diese Hypothese noch mehr Wahrscheinlichkeit, wenn man die nachgeahmten Briefe für ächt hält, wie Schleiermacher thut’. 13 Baur, Die sogenannten Pastoralbriefe, passim; Idem, ‘Ueber den Ursprung des Episcopats in der christlichen Kirche: Prüfung der neuestens von Hrn. D. Rothe hierüber aufgestellten Ansicht’, in: Idem, Ausgewählte Werke, 321–505 (= Tübinger Zeitschrift für Theologie 1838, 1–185), esp. 335–36. See also E.E. Ellis, ‘Ferdinand Christian Baur and 9

10

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forgery thesis from early on. Yet, Rothe tried to defend the authenticity of the Pastoral Epistles by pre-dating the Gnosis to the middle of the first century ce.14 While Baur’s dating of the Gnosis into the second century has convinced most scholars, all other arguments of his thesis are in my view unfounded, in particular his proposition of the literary unity of the three letters. Given the enormous impact of Baur’s thesis on subsequent scholarship, it is remarkable that Baur grounds his argument for the pseudonymity of all three letters solely on 1 Tim, although he recognizes the differences between 1 Tim and the other two letters. Baur does not give any substantial reason for his assumption of the unity of the Pastoral Epistles, nor does the following scholarship.15 Being mostly unquestioned since Baur, the unity of the Pastoral Epistles as finally established by Heinrich J. Holtzmann16 became almost a dogma for modern interpreters, especially for comprehensive studies on the Pastorals’ theology, Christology, and ecclesiology. Unfortunately, scholars who argue against this view have mostly tried to prove the authenticity of all three let-

His School’, in: Idem, The Making of the New Testament Documents (BIS 39), Leiden/etc. 1999, 435–45, esp. 441–42 on the influence of Hegel’s philosophy on Baur. 14 R. Rothe, Die Anfänge der christlichen Kirche und ihrer Verfassung: Ein geschichtlicher Versuch, Wittenberg 1837. Baur’s essay ‘Ueber den Ursprung des Episcopats’, was actually the answer to Rothe. M. Baumgarten, Die Aechtheit der Pastoralbriefe, mit besonderer Rücksicht auf den neuesten Angriff des Herrn Dr. Baur, Berlin 1837, also argued for the authenticity of the Pastoral Epistles, yet understood the opponents not as Gnostics but as heretics of a cabbalistic way of Judaism, see Baur, ‘Ueber den Ursprung des Episcopats’, 337–38. Baur only counted four letters of Paul as authentic (Rom, 1 Cor, 2 Cor, Gal) and gave reason for Bruno Bauer’s critique who declared all of the Pauline Epistles as forgeries of a later time, see B. Bauer, Kritik der paulinischen Briefe (1850–1852), reprint Aalen 1972. 15 See Oberlinner, Die Pastoralbriefe I, XLII: ‘Da die Abfassung als zusammengehöriges Briefkorpus anzunehmen ist, ist die Frage nach der Reihenfolge der Entstehung der einzelnen Briefe kaum mehr zu klären und letztlich für die Interpretation belanglos’. In the volume on 1 Tim, Oberlinner suggests Tit—1 Tim—2 Tim as intended order of reading, see also Quinn, The Letter to Titus, 19–20. In the volume on 2 Tim, Oberlinner proposes the order 1 Tim—2 Tim—Titus. For different assumptions see J. Roloff, Der erste Timotheusbrief (EKKNT XV), Neukirchen-Vluyn 1988, 45: 1 Tim—Titus—2 Tim (so also M. Wolter, Die Pastoralbriefe als Paulustradition (FRLANT 146), Göttingen 1988, 21); in the 19th century, De Wette, Lehrbuch, assumed Titus—2 Tim—1 Tim, whereas H.J. Holtzmann, Die Pastoralbriefe kritisch und exegetisch behandelt, Leipzig 1880, 253–56, assumed the order 2 Tim—Titus—1 Tim. Interestingly, in the early critical research 1 Tim was mostly seen as the last. 16 Holtzmann’s commentary, Die Pastoralbriefe kritisch und exegetisch behandelt, was the most influential adaptation of Baur’s theory for subsequent scholarship, see W. Schenk, ‘Die Briefe an Timotheus I und II und an Titus (Pastoralbriefe) in der neueren Forschung (1945–1985)’, ANRW II 25.4 (1984), 3404–38, 3407.

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ters.17 They, too, rely on the doubtful assumption of their homogeneous character in terms of authorship, even if they draw opposite conclusions.18 Furthermore, for the hypothesis of the authenticity of all three letters, historical arguments seem to be most important.19 I have already suggested elsewhere that assuming the authenticity of all three letters is obviously a false alternative that does not lead to a more appropriate understanding of the character of the Pastoral Epistles.20 Among scholars of the twentieth century, Peter Trummer revived Baur’s thesis in his article ‘Corpus Paulinum—Corpus Pastorale’, which has been most influential on this issue.21 Trummer posits that the Pastoral Epistles have been written by a single author and that they were from the beginning related to a growing Corpus Paulinum.22 Relying on Baur and Holtzmann, Trummer simply states his thesis without providing any convincing arguments but analyses and interprets all the structural, literary, and theological aspects with regard to this presupposition. Although Trummer admits that the author would have been able to meet his intention also with a single, perhaps a little longer letter,23

Cf. for this constellation already Holtzmann, Die Pastoralbriefe, 53. See for example the recent commentaries by Johnson (see note 1) and Towner (see note 3). See also R. Fuchs, Unerwartete Unterschiede: Müssen wir unsere Ansichten über ‘die’ Pastoralbriefe revidieren?, Wuppertal 2003. Fuchs shows, however, in what degree the Pastoral Epistles differ from each other not only with regard to form and proposed situation, but also and more importantly in terms of content. He focuses on Christology, pneumatology, and ethics, but does not engage the issue of ecclesiology. 19 Interestingly, even Baur considered Eichhorn’s historical arguments against the authenticity to be unconvincing, see Baur, Die sogenannten Pastoralbriefe, 5–7: ‘Ist alles dieß etwas anderes, als dieselbe Hypothesensucht, die Eichhorn an den Vertheidigern der Aechtheit dieser Briefe rügt . . .?’ 20 Herzer, ‘Abschied vom Konsens?’. 21 Trummer, ‘Corpus Paulinum’, but see already A. Hilgenfeld, Historisch-kritische Einleitung in das Neue Testament, Leipzig 1875, 764, who—like Baur—proposed a date of the three letters in the middle of the second century related to the dispute with Marcionite Gnosticism. 22 Trummer, ‘Corpus Paulinum’, 123: ‘Die Past sind nicht bloß als pseudepigraphe Paulusbriefe geschaffen, sondern als pseudepigraphes Corpus pastorale konzipiert, d.h. sie setzen nicht nur das pln Briefformular als solches oder eine disparate Anzahl von Paulusbriefen voraus, sondern ihre eigentliche Bezugsgröße ist das oder besser: ein bereits im Wachsen begriffenes Corpus paulinum’. Similarly already Holtzmann, Lehrbuch, 274 and 290–91; see also (among others) Wolter, Die Pastoralbriefe als Paulustradition, 18–20; Roloff, Der erste Timotheusbrief, 43–5; Oberlinner, Die Pastoralbriefe I, XXVI; Weiser, Der zweite Brief an Timotheus, 29; H. von Lips, ‘Von den “Pastoralbriefen” zum “Corpus Pastorale”: Eine Hallische Sprachschöpfung und ihr modernes Pendant als Funktionsbestimmung dreier neutestamentlicher Briefe’, in: U. Schnelle (ed.), Reformation und Neuzeit: 300 Jahre Theologie in Halle, Berlin/New York 1994, 49–71, 63. 23 Trummer, ‘Corpus Paulinum’, 126. 17 18

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he assumes that the number of three similar letters meets the author’s intention most appropriately: the ecclesiological orders addressed to Timothy and Titus are parallel to each other and the two letters to Timothy are linked together by their common addressee, and thus they build a ‘literarisches Triptychon’.24 Supposing their fictitious character,25 Trummer even argues that in choosing two single addressees the letters address in fact a broader audience.26 For Trummer, the local specifications of Ephesus and Crete also suggest an open and ‘catholic’ validity that transcends any individual or time-bound horizon. Although Trummer’s reconstruction consequently follows his presuppositions, it is by no means convincing, because it contains much circular reasoning. For example, the personal address and the concrete localisations hardly make sense under a pseudepigraphical perspective. An author who wanted to write in the name of Paul and at the same time in a ‘catholic horizon’ would certainly not have reached his goal with a concept like the more concrete, the more fictitious, the more general.27 Such an enterprise—if considered to be accepted pseudepigraphy—would be unique not only in the New Testament but also within the literature of Late Antiquity. There are illuminating examples of pseudonymous letters in the New Testament which have highly general addressees as one would expect from this kind of literature (see esp. Eph, 1 Pet, James). Even recognized Pauline letters like, e.g., Gal, 1 Cor, or 2 Cor offer a more general horizon than the Pastoral Epistles. Finally, one has to weigh that the early church of the late first and 24 Trummer, ‘Corpus Paulinum’, 127. See already Holtzmann, Die Pastoralbriefe, 7: ‘unzertrennlichere Drillinge, als Epheser- und Kolosserbrief Zwillinge sind’. 25 See esp. W. Stenger, ‘Timotheus und Titus als literarische Gestalten’, Kairos 16 (1974), 252–67; and recently A. Merz, Die fiktive Selbstauslegung des Paulus: Intertextuelle Studien zur Intention und Rezeption der Pastoralbriefe (NTOA 52), Göttingen/Fribourg 2004. 26 Trummer, ‘Corpus Paulinum’, 128. 27 This formulation takes up the characteristic of precise data in literary forgery given by W. Speyer, Die literarische Fälschung im heidnischen und christlichen Altertum: Ein Versuch ihrer Deutung (HAW 1/2), München 1971, 82: ‘je genauer die Angaben desto falscher sind sie’. See also Trummer, ‘Corpus Paulinum’, 129, for the special profile of 2 Tim: the letter shows that ‘eine sich als legitim verstehende [. . .] kirchliche [. . .] Pseudepigraphie’ reached its limits. ‘Dies gilt sowohl hinsichtlich der zeitlichen wie sachlichen Entwicklung, aber auch der literarischen Durchführung: Sie treiben die Fiktion und literarische Form bis ins äußerste, sie betreiben “totale Pseudepigraphie” und sind wohl überhaupt das “Kabinettstück” einer ntl Pseudepigraphie’. The term ‘totale Pseudepigraphie’ was coined by A. Deissmann, Licht vom Osten: Das Neue Testament und die neuentdeckten Texte der hellenistisch-römischen Welt, Tübingen 19234, 74–5; the term ‘Kabinettstück’ by N. Brox, Falsche Verfasserangaben: Zur Erklärung der frühchristlichen Pseudepigraphie (SBS 79), Stuttgart 1975, 24.

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the beginning second century accepted the Pastoral Epistles as private letters, not as ‘timeless’ writings for the entire Christianity, and exactly for this reason used them rarely.28 Moreover, scholars so far provide opposing descriptions of the intention of this pseudonymous pupil of Paul creating such a Corpus pastorale. For Trummer, the purpose of the ‘Triptychon’ is to conclude the collection of the Pauline Epistles,29 whereas Lorenz Oberlinner assumes that the number of ‘three’ was intended to corroborate the significance and importance of this apostolic legacy.30 Both assumptions raise the question whether and how these letters could fulfil the ascribed function for the readers. Are in fact the Pastoral Epistles an appropriate interpretation of Pauline theology in an (uncertain) later time? While this is certainly plausible for Ephesians as a characteristic pseudepigraphon,31 it does not pertain to the Pastoral Epistles, because they are not dealing with major topics of Pauline theology at all. Despite the seemingly broad consensus on the general understanding of the Pastoral Epistles, there have always been voices questioning the assumption of a coherent corpus. Pointing to differences between 2 Tim on the one hand and 1 Tim and Tit on the other hand, Jerome Murphy-O’Connor and Michael Prior presented an alternative solution concerning the relationship of the three letters. Murphy-O’Connor argues that the author of 2 Tim cannot be the same as of 1 Tim and Tit because of major differences in style.32 According to Murphy-O’Connor and also Prior, 2 Tim may be authentic, whereas 1 Tim and Tit are

28 Cf. C. Looks, Das Anvertraute bewahren: Die Rezeption der Pastoralbriefe im 2. Jahrhundert, München 1999, esp. 77–129, who tries to prove a broad reception of the Pastoral Epistles very early in the second century. See also G.W. Knight, The Pastoral Epistles (NIGTC), Grand Rapids 1992, 50–2. At least, Looks is aware of the fact that his thorough analysis brings up no case in which one could be absolutely sure (122). Cf. also A.E. Barnett, Paul Becomes a Literary Influence, Chicago 1941, 104: ‘no convincing traces’. 29 Trummer, ‘Corpus Paulinum’, 127. 30 Oberlinner, Die Pastoralbriefe I, XXVII. See also Wolter, Die Pastoralbriefe als Paulustradition, 19, who stresses the analogies of ancient letter collections; Roloff, Der erste Timotheusbrief, 44; Von Lips, ‘Von den “Pastoralbriefen”’, 63–4. 31 See M. Gese, Das Vermächtnis des Apostels: Die Rezeption der paulinischen Theologie im Epheserbrief (WUNT II/99), Tübingen 1997. 32 J. Murphy-O’Connor, ‘2 Timothy Contrasted with 1 Timothy and Titus’, RB 98 (1991), 403–18. On the contrary, Von Lips, ‘Von den “Pastoralbriefen”’, 64, could argue that the three letters ‘sich zu einem wohl konzipierten Ganzen zusammenfügen,’ particularly because of their specific characteristics; see also Oberlinner, Die Pastoralbriefe II, 4; Weiser, Der zweite Brief an Timotheus, 29.

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seen as pseudonymous.33 The stylistic features of 2 Tim point to its character as a private letter; it addresses a single person, an assistant of Paul, and it is highly personal as if written by Paul himself (without a secretary).34 Under different presuppositions, William A. Richards reaches similar conclusions in his analysis of the Pastoral Epistles.35 He argues that they are three distinct writings by different authors at different times: an ‘elder’ writes to ‘Titus’ between 70 and 80 ce, a ‘pastor’ writes 2 Tim to ‘the beloved Timothy’ between 90 and 95, and finally, a ‘teacher’ writes 1 Tim to ‘Timothy, the true’ in the second century.36 Although assuming pseudonymity, Richards calls the letters ‘authentic’, because they deal with authentic circumstances.37 Richards comes to the conclusion that 1 Tim depends on Tit and 2 Tim. In my view, this differentiation—which after all goes back to Schleiermacher and De Wette38—is the most promising perspective for revealing the ‘mystery’ of the Pastoral Epistles. Over against Richards, I might add that taking the three letters separately provides new aspects for a differentiated view on authenticity, which in spite of the usual hesitation in critical scholarship deserve serious consideration.

33 M. Prior, Paul the Letter-Writer and the Second Letter to Timothy ( JSNTSup 23), Sheffield 1989, 84, 89–90, arguing with the old but unlikely hypothesis of a release of Paul from the first imprisonment in Rome and another period of missionary activity; see already A. von Harnack, Neue Untersuchungen zur Apostelgeschichte und zur Abfassungszeit der synoptischen Evangelien (Beiträge zur Einleitung in das Neue Testament IV), Leipzig 1911, 72. For the problem and its history see B. Wander, ‘Warum wollte Paulus nach Spanien? Ein Forschungs- und motivgeschichtlicher Überblick’, in: F.W. Horn (ed.), Das Ende des Paulus: historische, theologische und literaturgeschichtliche Aspekte (BZNW 106), Berlin/New York 2001, 175–95, esp. 177–87, and H. Löhr, ‘Zur Paulus-Notiz in 1 Clem 5,5–7’, in: Ibid., 197–213, esp. 206–12. 34 Like Prior, also R.E. Brown, An Introduction to the New Testament (ABRL), New York/etc. 1997, 640, states that ‘it is not inconceivable that II Tim was written first (perhaps by Paul) and that after his death an unknown writer composed Titus and I Tim, imitating the style of II Tim in order to deal with issues of church structure that had now become acute’. Yet he adds: ‘In short, any order of composition is possible’ (which is in fact true with regard to the numerous propositions in scholarship, see also above note 15). Brown, by supposing the order 2 Tim—Tit/1 Tim, finally comes to the conclusion that each letter was written pseudonymously in a different situation reacting on different actual problems (ibid., 669.675). Against Prior see A. Weiser, ‘Review on M. Prior’, ThLZ 115 (1990), 430; Idem, Der zweite Brief an Timotheus, 56. 35 W.A. Richards, Difference and Distance in Post-Pauline Christianity: An Epistolary Analysis of the Pastorals (Studies in Biblical Literature 44), New York/etc. 2002. 36 Richards, Difference and Distance, 238–39. 37 Richards, Difference and Distance, 241. 38 See above.

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A new look at the Pastoral Epistles has to start out from the content of each letter. This essay seeks to establish such a differentiation with regard to one aspect of the important issue of ecclesiology. Yet, it is only under the presupposition of a Corpus pastorale that we are able to ask for the ecclesiology of the Pastoral Epistles. A close examination of some characteristics of these letters discloses that the issues are rather multilayered and at least more complex as scholars usually take into account. I will demonstrate this complexity by examining the common argument that the ‘House of God’ forms the ‘center’ of the Pastorals’ ecclesiology. Recent Approaches to the Topic of the ‘House of God’ First of all, it is important to note that the lexeme οἶκος θεοῦ (‘House of God’) appears only once within the Pastoral Epistles in 1 Tim 3:15. Despite its singularity, scholars have chosen this lexeme as a general characteristic of the Pastorals’ ecclesiology. I will explain the problem by presenting some characteristic positions. For example, in 2001 David Horrell published an article entitled: ‘From ἀδελφοί to οἶκος θεοῦ: Social Transformation in Pauline Christianity’. Assuming the unity of the Corpus pastorale, Horrell proposed a significant change within Pauline ecclesiology, ‘from the model of an egalitarian community of ἀδελφοί toward the model of a hierarchical household-community, a community with masters and subordinates, structured according to the relative positions of different social groups . . . In Weberian terms, we move from a charismatic form of domination toward a traditional form’.39 This thesis not only takes the Pastoral Epistles as a unit (as most scholars do); it also assumes—as Ernst Käsemann already suggested in 194940—that a charismatic profile of the church represents the typical pattern of Pauline ecclesiology. Yet, we find clear indications for a 39 D.G. Horrell, ‘From ἀδελφοί to οἶκος θεοῦ: Social Transformation in Pauline Christianity’, JBL 120 (2001), 293–311. For an overview of the English speaking scholarship cf. also M. Harding, What Are They Saying About the Pastoral Epistles?, New York/Mahwah 2001, 50–4. 40 Though with regard to a Gnostic background of the heresy, E. Käsemann, ‘Amt und Gemeinde im Neuen Testament’, in: Idem, Exegetische Versuche und Besinnungen, Berlin 1971 (= Göttingen, 19642, orig. 1949), 56–81, esp. 74–7. Cf. also H. Schlier, ‘Die Ordnung der Kirche nach den Pastoralbriefen’, in: Idem, Die Zeit der Kirche, Freiburg 19582, 129–47 (orig. 1948). For an overview see Marshall, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Pastoral Epistles, 512–18.

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charismatic community only with regard to the Corinthian congregation. By mentioning ‘bishops and deacons’ (Phil 1:1), the letter to the Philippians at least indicates that a Pauline congregation at an earlier time—to which Paul had perhaps the closest relation (cf. Phil 4)—may have had a very different and probably even ‘hierarchical’ structure.41 Thus, the Corinthian situation was by no means per se representative for Pauline Christianity.42 Not to speak of the problems Paul had to address regarding the charismatic attitude in Corinth. In his Corinthian correspondence Paul pleaded for an adjustment to certain social standards and to the appreciation of apostolic authority as he was concerned about the impressions outsiders would get of an ‘untidy’ Christian community.43 In German speaking scholarship, Jürgen Roloff’s book on the Kirche im Neuen Testament has been most influential for the discourse on Pauline ecclesiology. Being also one of the major interpreters of the Pastoral Epistles,44 Roloff deals with them under the headline ‘Gottes geordnetes Hauswesen’45 (God’s settled household), stating: ‘Das Bild des Hauses, die zentrale ekklesiologische Metapher der Pastoralbriefe, hat nicht das Haus als Bauwerk, sondern vielmehr als gegliederte und nach bestimmten Regeln geordnete soziale Grundstruktur im Blick’.46 He further argues that ‘house’ as the central ecclesiological metaphor implies that the church has already become an institution, solidly grounded in the truth (1 Tim 3:15).47 Whereas Ian Howard Marshall carefully limits the significance of 1 Tim 3:15 to 1 Tim itself,48 Roloff understands the verse as the theological center not only of 1 Tim, but of all the Pastorals.49

41 With regard to a Christian community, however, the use of ‘bishops’ and ‘deacons’ does not necessarily implicate a hierarchical structure in terms of an authoritarian leadership. 42 On this issue see R.Y.K. Fung, ‘Charismatic versus Organized Ministry? An Examination of an Alleged Antithesis’, EvQ 52 (1980), 195–214. 43 Cf. W.C. van Unnik, ‘Die Rücksicht auf die Reaktion der Nicht-Christen als Motiv in der altchristlichen Paränese’, in: W. Eltester (ed.), Judentum-Urchristentum-Kirche (FS J. Jeremias), (BZNW 26), Berlin 1964, 221–34. 44 Cf. particularly his commentary on 1 Tim: Roloff, Der erste Timotheusbrief. 45 J. Roloff, Die Kirche im Neuen Testament (GNT 10), Göttingen 1993, 250. 46 Roloff, Die Kirche im Neuen Testament, 254. 47 Roloff, Die Kirche im Neuen Testament, 259. 48 Marshall, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Pastoral Epistles, 498. 49 Roloff, Der erste Timotheusbrief, 190. See also his ‘Pfeiler und Fundament der Wahrheit: Erwägungen zum Kirchenverständnis der Pastoralbriefe’, in: E. Gräßer & O. Merk (eds), Glaube und Eschatologie (FS W.G. Kümmel), Tübingen 1985, 229–47. See further

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At this point, a brief examination of the text of 1 Tim 3:15 is necessary, although this article can not present a complete picture of all the ecclesiological aspects in 1 Tim. After assessing the meaning of 1 Tim 3:15 in the context of the letter, I will explore whether the same meaning of οἶκος θεοῦ is also relevant for Titus and 2 Tim and thus for the Pastoral Epistles as a whole. The Ecclesiological Metaphor in 1 Timothy 3:15 I have already mentioned that 1 Tim 3:15 is the only verse in the Pastoral Epistles, in which the lexeme οἶκος θεοῦ appears. After giving instructions for the social behaviour and the virtues of the bishop (singular!) and the deacons (plural!)—or rather ‘supervisor’ (ἐπίσκοπος) and ‘helpers’50 (διάκονοι)—in 1 Tim 3:1–13, the author constructs a situation of Paul being possibly late (3:14–5) and thus giving instructions to Timothy for appropriate behaviour in the congregation.51 With regard to the context, it is obvious that the ταῦτα at the beginning of v. 14 does not only refer to the behaviour of the church leader, but reaches back at least to 2:8 and thus includes also the instructions to other social groups.52 Yet, appropriate behaviour and the virtues of D.C. Verner, The Household of God: The Social World of the Pastoral Epistles (SBLDS 71), Chico 1983. Verner holds that the Pastoral Epistles present a ‘coherent concept of the church as the household of God’ (Ibid., 1). Similarly and most recently—with a meaningful title—L. Fatum, ‘Christ Domesticated: The Household Theology of the Pastorals as Political Strategy’, in: J. Ådna (ed.), The Formation of the Early Church (WUNT 183), Tübingen 2005, 175–207, who uncritically relies on the established household theory and regards this as a strategic move in order to adjust Christian communities to Roman society, though with specific interest in ‘the construction of gender through the re-sexualization of women in the Pastorals’ (204). Interestingly, Marshall notes that Margaret Davies in her 1996 book on the Pastoral Epistles does not discuss the issue of the church at all (cf. M. Davies, The Pastoral Epistles (NTG), Sheffield 1996). In her PhD thesis, Ulrike Wagener takes Roloff’s thesis as a starting point for her feminist sociological study on the ecclesiology of the Pastoral Epistles, and does not analyse 1 Tim 3:15 separately (U. Wagener, Die Ordnungen des ‘Hauses Gottes’: Der Ort von Frauen in der Ekklesiologie und Ethik der Pastoralbriefe (WUNT II/65), Tübingen 1994, 1–2). 50 This terminology is preferred by Johnson, The First and Second Letters to Timothy, 212–37. 51 Assuming Pauline authorship of 1 Tim, Johnson states: ‘The judgement that this is all a fictional representation must deal with the fact that both the words and the modus operandi are recognizable Pauline’, (Idem, 230). This is true, of course, but getting close to the master’s style is also a major characteristic of accepted school pseudepigraphy. 52 ταῦτα has to be understood as anaphoric pronoun, see Marshall, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Pastoral Epistles, 505, who even extends the reference of

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leaders are fundamental issues in 1 Tim and they seemingly do not fit to such a simple concern like being late with travelling. This is not just ‘clumsy style’, as Marshall states.53 The note on travelling in this specific form and intention can be seen as typical for a pseudepigraphical letter style,54 which seeks to vivify the author’s main concern about the congregation as the ‘House of God’. The congregation’s strength is fundamentally based on the appropriate behaviour of its members as well as on the virtues of its leaders, who shall not discredit the congregation’s integrity and thus the truth of faith while the apostle remains absent. Although 1 Tim clearly distinguishes the single ἐπίσκοπος (3:1–2) from the group of the διάκονοι (3:8), the letter does not seek to establish a certain hierarchy in the community.55 Instead, the way the author speaks about these offices suggests that they are already established and structured. The problem is rather to find qualified persons in order to fill these positions. There is already an ἐπισκοπή to ‘strive after’ (3:1), as ‘the sentence supposes that the position is attainable through some process other than direct divine appointment’.56 The same applies to the deacon’s office addressed in 3:8–13. Accordingly, in 1 Tim we find no instruction to appoint leaders in the congregation like in Tit 1:5. Instead, the main interest of 1 Tim and the duty of ‘Timothy’ is not the installation of a hierarchy but to teach ‘God’s economy of salvation’ (οἰκονοµία θεοῦ ἡ ἐν πίστει) as laid out in 1:3–5. 1 Tim 3:15 refers to this goal with the term ἀλήθεια (‘truth’), which shall not be discredited by an inappropriate behaviour of the congregation. Since the congregation is the place where God’s οἰκονοµία becomes reality in social relations as well as in teaching, this place can certainly be called ‘House of God’ and ‘a pillar and fortification of the truth’ (3:15). Given this particular context, the lexeme οἶκος θεοῦ is not related to a certain structure but to a certain behaviour (πῶς δεῖ ἐν οἴκῳ θεοῦ ἀναστρέφεσθαι), which is identified by reference of ταῦτα in v. 14 with all the instructions for the

ταῦτα to the whole letter. Holtzmann, Die Pastoralbriefe, 323, relates it to the instruction

from 2:1 onwards. 53 Marshall, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Pastoral Epistles, 506. 54 See Stenger, ‘Timotheus und Titus als literarische Gestalten’, 255–56; Wolter, Die Pastoralbriefe, 132; critically Marshall, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Pastoral Epistles, 506. 55 An often used keyword is ‘monarchischer Episkopat’, see e.g. Käsemann, ‘Amt und Gemeinde im Neuen Testament’, 76. 56 Johnson, The First and Second Letters to Timothy, 212.

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life of the community (2:8–3:13).57 From this perspective I doubt that the lexeme οἶκος θεοῦ in this particular context functions as a metaphor of the community structured according to ancient household codes and that in this semantic framework the common translation of οἶκος as ‘household’ is appropriate at all.58 In order to justify this translation, Luke T. Johnson, for example, points to the household theme in 1 Tim 3:4–5 and 12,59 although he concedes that ‘the imagery of the temple is not entirely absent in Paul’s reference to the stylos . . .’.60 Furthermore, it is not per se plausible to conclude from the instruction how to lead one’s own house properly (1 Tim 3:4, 5 and 12) that the lexeme ‘House of God’ in 3:15 also means ‘household’, especially as this verse identifies the ‘House of God’ with the ‘congregation of the living God’. In order to understand the lexeme ‘House of God’ properly, it is inevitable to look at the semantic field in which it appears, and thus first of all also to the addition ‘pillar and fortification of the truth’. The problem is: what is the reference point of this postposition? The lexeme οἶκος θεοῦ or the behaviour of the members of the church? The latter is preferred by Johnson: ‘It also makes better sense of the metaphorical point: the community is the oikos, and the members should behave so as to be supports and pillars for it’.61 But this is not what the sentence says, for it deals not with supports and pillars for the community but of the truth. Thus, it is the truth of which the community as οἶκος θεοῦ is a ‘support and pillar’,62 or as I would rather translate ‘a pillar and fortification’. The church should be like a strong fortress (NRSV: bulwark) where the truth of faith is preserved. The confession formulated in 1 Tim 3:16 finally states what constitutes the truth. Even Roloff ’s

See above note 52. For this understanding see for example Verner, The Household of God, passim; Oberlinner, Die Pastoralbriefe I, 151; Roloff, Der erste Timotheusbrief, 198–99 (‘Hauswesen’); N. Brox, Die Pastoralbriefe (RNT), Regensburg 1969, 157–59, H. von Lips, Glaube—Gemeinde— Amt: Zum Verständnis der Ordination in den Pastoralbriefen (FRLANT 122), Göttingen 1979, 143–45 (‘Hausgemeinschaft’); Marshall, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Pastoral Epistles, 508. 59 1 Tim 3:5, though, is uncertain. 60 Johnson, The First and Second Letters to Timothy, 231. See also—among others—Brox, Die Pastoralbriefe, 158. 61 Johnson, The First and Second Letters to Timothy, 231. 62 See also Marshall, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Pastoral Epistles, 510. Thus, in 1 Tim 3:15 the term στῦλος is used differently to Gal 2:9 (against Johnson, The First and Second Letters to Timothy, 232–33). 57

58

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understanding of the church as grounded in the truth (see above) is in my view not supported by the text. With regard to the semantic field, I propose that οἶκος θεοῦ primarily evokes the idea of the congregation as God’s temple,63 which can also be found elsewhere in early Christian traditions.64 More importantly, in the Old Testament the expression οἶκος θεοῦ is the most common term to describe the real temple.65 In early Jewish traditions, for example in Qumran, either temple or ‘House of God’ serve as a metaphor for God’s community.66 Paul himself uses the metaphor of the church as the (holy) temple of God (ναὸς θεοῦ, 1 Cor 3:16–7; 2 Cor 6:16; see also 1 Cor 6:19 and 2 Thess 2:4) in order to admonish the Christians to behave appropriately.67 Paul could also call the members of the church as οἰκεῖοι τῆς πίστεως (Gal 6:10, cf. Eph 2:19: οἰκεῖοι τοῦ θεοῦ). Accordingly, 1 Tim 3:15 parallels the οἶκος θεοῦ with the ἐκκλησία θεοῦ ζῶντος

See Marshall, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Pastoral Epistles, 509, 515. See Heb 3:6, 10:21; 1 Pet 2:5, 4:17; cf. also Eph 2:21. 65 See for example Gen 28:17 (from Bethel); Exod 23:19, 34:26; Deut 23:19; Josh 9:23 (including the congregation); 1 Kgs 5:17–19, 8:17–20; 1 Chron 9:27; 22; 28 and passim; Ezra 1–10 passim; Neh 1–13 passim; Pss 42:5, 52:10, 55,15, 84:11, 92:14, 135:2; Isa 2:3; Jer 35:4; Ezek 10:19; 11:1, 5; Dan 1:2, 5:3; Joel 1:13–16; Mic 4:2; Hag 1:14; Tob 14:7; Bar 3:24; Mark 2:26; Luke 6:4. Marshall, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Pastoral Epistles, 508, argues that ‘the shape of ethical thought in 1 Tim speaks against’ the temple imagery which thus cannot be ‘the dominant thought’. Also Towner, The Letters to Timothy and Titus, 273, claims that οἶκος in 1 Tim 3:15 does not refer to the temple-motif. Neither Marshall nor Towner recognise the strong semantic field of the lexeme οἶκος θεοῦ with regard to the Septuagint, which—especially if one claims Paul to be the author of 1 Tim as Towner does—cannot be neglected here. 66 For Qumran see 1QRule of the Community 5:5–6, where the metaphor of the house is connected to the foundation of the truth: ‘Instead he should circumcise in the Community the foreskin of his tendency and of his stiff neck in order to lay a foundation of the truth (‫ )מוסד אמת‬for Israel, for the Community of the eternal covenant. They should make atonement for all who freely volunteer for holiness in Aaron and for the house of truth (‫ )בית האמת‬in Israel and for those who join them for community . . .’ (transl. F. García Martínez & E.J.C. Tigchelaar (eds), The Dead Sea Scrolls Study Edition, Vol. 1: 1Q1–4Q273, Leiden/etc. 1997, 81); see further 1QRule of the Community 8:9, 9:3–8. See also B. Gärtner, The Temple and the Community in Qumran and the New Testament: A Comparative Study in the Temple Symbolism of the Qumran Texts and the New Testament (SNTS.MS 1), Cambridge 1965, 66 on 1 Tim 3:15: ‘a text reminiscent in certain of its forms of expressions of Qumran ideology’; G. Klinzing, Die Umdeutung des Kultus in der Qumrangemeinde und im Neuen Testament (SUNT 7), Göttingen 1971, esp. 50–2; L.H. Schiffman, ‘Community Without Temple: The Qumran Community’s Withdrawal from the Jerusalem Temple’, in: B. Ego et alii (eds), Gemeinde ohne Tempel—Community Without Temple (WUNT 118), Tübingen 1999, 267–84. 67 See C. Böttrich, ‘“Ihr seid der Tempel Gottes.” Tempelmetaphorik und Gemeinde bei Paulus’, in: Ego et alii, Gemeinde ohne Tempel, 411–25. 63 64

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(cf. 2 Cor 6:16: ‘for we are the temple of the living God’).68 It is highly plausible that the pseudonymous author of 1 Tim deliberately preferred the term ‘house’ instead of ‘temple’, because it would better fit his purpose to include this Pauline idea into his concern of the οἰκονοµία θεοῦ (1 Tim 1:5).69 In this perspective, the congregation represents the house of God—a new kind of spiritual temple, whose primary function is to be solid and strong, a fortification to protect and keep the truth of the faith,70 that is, the mystery of godliness exposed as a confession in the last verse of the chapter (3:16). Ecclesiological Patterns in Titus and 2 Timothy How does this understanding of the ‘House of God’ in 1 Tim relate to the other two letters? I start with the letter to Titus because most scholars see its intention closely related to 1 Tim. Whereas in 1 Tim ecclesiology is indeed an important issue, the letter to Titus conveys a completely different picture. As to ecclesiology, there is only one short passage in Tit 1:5–9 about the appointment of presbyters and supervisors by Titus in Crete. Contrary to 1 Tim, the author of Tit does not differentiate between πρεσβύτερος and ἐπίσκοπος, because the introduction of the ἐπίσκοπος in Tit 1:7 is in fact an explanatory extension to the list of virtues a leading presbyter generally should have. Thus, ἐπίσκοπος serves as another term for πρεσβύτερος, and the singular form ἐπίσκοπος refers to each single person of the same group of leading people (πρεσβύτεροι). One of their major characteristics mentioned in Tit 1:7 is the Pauline idea of a person in charge as οἰκονόµος θεοῦ (‘God’s steward’), a term Paul uses in 1 Cor 4:1 in order to characterize himself and Apollos as deacons of the Corinthian community—without implying a hierarchical structure. Some would further argue that also in Tit 2:1–10 ecclesiology is a main issue, but here the author deals primarily with the behaviour of the young and old people, thus with the relations between the generations.

Roloff, Der erste Timotheusbrief, 198, assumes that the author used 2 Cor 6:16 as a ‘Vorlage’. 69 See Gärtner, The Temple and the Community, 68. This has a strong equivalent in Eph 2:19–21, where also household imagery is linked with the idea of the congregation as God’s temple, see Idem, 60–6; Gese, Das Vermächtnis des Apostels, 195–206. 70 See Marshall, A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on the Pastoral Epistles, 511, who rightly refers to the difference to the θεµέλιος-imagery in 1 Cor 3:11 and Eph 2:20. 68

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At the same argumentative level, the last admonition to the slaves (Tit 2:9–10) indicates that the author focuses on social relations rather than on ecclesiological hierarchies, though social problems could have ecclesiological consequences, indeed. Thus, I suggest that the social setting proposed and described in Tit 1–2 as well as its assumed ecclesiology differ considerably from 1 Tim. From this perspective, it is not by accident that the metaphor ‘House of God’ as a solid fortification of the truth does not appear in the letter to Titus. The next step would be to ask for ecclesiological terminology or patterns in 2 Tim. It is broadly accepted in scholarship that the genre of 2 Tim is unique within the pastoral corpus. 1 Tim and Tit are mostly identified as so called mandata principis letters,71 whereas 2 Tim is usually characterized as testamentum.72 While this difference in genre might not be a strong argument for the distinctiveness of 2 Tim, it is interesting that in 2 Tim 2:20 the author also uses the metaphor ‘house’ in order to describe a certain reality in the life of the community. Therefore, the conclusion seems likely that even though being of different genre, 2 Tim attests to the same ecclesiological pattern as 1 Tim. A closer look, however, reveals a different terminology in the two letters. Instead of the term οἶκος in 1 Tim 3:15, the author of 2 Tim uses οἰκία. Scholars who presuppose the unity of the pastoral corpus may consider the difference as irrelevant and thus propose the same meaning for οἰκία in 2 Tim 2:20 and οἶκος θεοῦ in 1 Tim 3:15. Even

71 See Wolter, Die Pastoralbriefe als Paulustradition, 164–65; Johnson, The First and Second Letters to Timothy, 139–40. Johnson refers to the Tebtunis Payprus no. 703 of the third century bce, which contains orders of an Egyptian official, but see the substantial critique of M. Mitchell, ‘PTEBT 703 and the Genre of 1 Timothy: The Curious Career of a Ptolemaic Papyrus in Pauline Scholarship’, NovT 44 (2002), 344–70. Mitchell rightly states that PTEBT 703 is not a letter but a memorandum and therefore the identification as a mandata principis letter by Johnson cannot be confirmed and does not help to interpret the Pastoral Epistles, cf. also Wolter, Die Pastoralbriefe als Paulustradition, 163 and 169–70. However, Mitchell does not provide her own proposal for the determination of the genre of 1 Tim; instead she holds: ‘. . . the Pastorals are an odd mix of the personal and the public, of church order and personal exhortation, of instruction and command, of the particular and the general’, Mitchell, ‘PTEBT 703’, 344. 72 A. Weiser, ‘Freundschaftsbrief und Testament: Zur literarischen Gattung des Zweiten Briefes an Timotheus’, in: G. Risse (ed.), Zeit-Geschichte und Begegnungen (FS B. Neumann), Paderborn 1998, 158–70, and Weiser’s Introduction to 2 Tim in: Idem, Der zweite Brief an Timotheus. Wolter, Die Pastoralbriefe als Paulustradition, 222–23, calls 2 Tim a ‘testamentarische Mahnrede’, cf. also Oberlinner, Die Pastoralbriefe II, 2. Käsemann, ‘Amt und Gemeinde’, 76, argued that 2 Timothy is said to be a testamentum, but is ‘in Wahrheit ein Bischofsspiegel’. See also S.C. Martin, Pauli Testamentum: 2 Timothy and the Last Words of Moses (Testa Gregoriana Serie Teologia 18), Rome 1997.

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Johnson, who pleads for the authenticity of the Pastorals and assumes different settings, explains 2 Tim 2:20 with regard to 1 Tim 3:15: ‘this “great house” is, in fact, the oikos theou that is the community and the living Temple of God’.73 However, this connection is not as natural as it seems. It would not only suppose the unity of the Pastoral Epistles at least in terms of authorship, but even if one would agree it also assumes a semantic synonymy between οἰκία and οἶκος θεοῦ, and most importantly that the reader would foster the same idea in both cases. Since the lexicographic significance of both terms may be relatively open,74 the addition θεοῦ as a genitivus subjectivus to οἶκος establishes a clear semantic notion of οἶκος, which cannot be claimed for οἰκία in 2 Tim 2:20. As I have argued, οἶκος θεοῦ primarily evokes the notion of the temple as the ‘House of God’ represented by the community of believers.75 This does certainly not work for the term οἰκία, especially as the genitive θεοῦ is missing.76 Moreover, 2 Tim 2:20 does not address the issue of right behaviour in the same way as 1 Tim. The οἰκία with its various vessels being of different material serves as an illustration of the argument that not everyone in the congregation contributes positively to its growth (cf. 3:16–19)—it is not a metaphor identifying the church as οἶκος θεοῦ. The context of 2 Tim 2 focuses on two persons, Hymenaios and Philetos, who claim that the resurrection already happened (2:17–18) and thus disturb the faith of many. Introducing the different vessels used in a household, the author equates those two persons with vessels of shame and instructs others implicitly to cleanse themselves from such vessels, which perhaps means to exclude them from the community (cf. 1 Cor 5:7 with the same word ἐκκαθαρεῖν). Thus, in 2 Tim the illustrating metaphor οἰκία serves a different purpose as the theological motif of the οἶκος θεοῦ in 1 Tim, and it implies a different idea.

73 Johnson, The First and Second Letters to Timothy, 388. See also Gärtner, The Temple and the Community, 71. 74 See F.W. Danker, A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and other Early Christian Literature, Chicago/London 20003, s.v. οἶκος and οἰκία. 75 Whereas in the Septuagint οἶκος θεοῦ always refers to the temple of God (see above note 65), the term οἰκία exclusively relates to the household as a functional unit and is never used to translate words related to the temple or the house of God. 76 1 Tim 3:15 deals with the strength and solidness of the οἶκος. With regard to 2 Tim 2:20, Johnson relates the term θεµέλιος in v. 19 to the foundation of the οἰκία: ‘It simply has a foundation (themelios) with an inscription (sphragis), and within are various vessels’, ( Johnson, The First and Second Letters to Timothy, 387). This, however, is not supported by the text, because v. 19 is not directly related to the metaphor in v. 20.

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Conclusion: A New Perspective for the Interpretation of the Pastoral Epistles The οἶκος/οἰκία-motif is only one aspect, but its analysis may indicate certain implications for an appropriate understanding of the Pastoral Epistles. It is not possible to assume a coherent ecclesiological pattern pertaining to all of the Pastoral Epistles on the basis of one single reference to the lexeme ‘House of God’ in 1 Tim. Proposing the ‘House of God’ as the central ecclesiological metaphor of the Pastoral Epistles would not only need the assumption of their literary and compositional unity. It would also neglect and level out the specific profile of each letter. If my reading of the different ecclesiological terminologies and ideas is correct, there are clear indications that 1 Tim relies on the other two letters,77 and represents exactly the late situation of an already established congregation, which most scholars propose for all letters. In short, I would argue that the pseudonymous writer of 1 Tim took the term οἰκία from 2 Tim and linked it in a more general sense to other motifs taken from Tit. He also relates to the Pauline temple imagery in order to confirm a situation which already existed—a situation of a community struggling for the preservation of the truth in view of a new uprising movement called ‘Gnosis’ (6:20). The distinction between Tit and 2 Tim on the one hand and 1 Tim on the other even allows to consider anew the Gnosis-theory brought up by Baur,78 because it avoids the problems regarding the identification of the opponents which appear when the Gnosis-theory is applied to all three letters. Thus, the assumed order of the letters would be Tit, 2 Tim, and—in a longer distance—1 Tim, as similarly Richards has suggested though with conclusions I would hesitate to follow.79 1 Tim might then even be dated into the second century. In my interpretation of the Pastoral Epistles, I propose to suspend the scholarly consensus of their unity, and I hold that from this perspective we can reach a more appropriate understanding of these three small letters within the Pauline tradition, their social setting, and theological profile. What I have presented briefly in this article on ecclesiology is just one aspect which might illustrate my intention. There are, of

See above. See above. 79 Richards, Difference and Distance, and also note 15. See also J. Herzer, ‘Juden—Christen—Gnostiker: Zur Gegnerproblematik in den Pastoralbriefen’, BThZ 25 (2008), forthcoming. 77 78

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course, many more. In order to maintain the assumption of a Corpus pastorale, it would not only be necessary to establish any possible reason for writing three similar letters—and the solutions for this are speculative enough and even occasionally contradict each other. In terms of readerresponse criticism it must also become plausible how the reception of such a letter collection could have functioned the way it is supposed in modern scholarship. What was the intended order in which they should be read?80 Was it possible and is it plausible to assume that ancient readers, who certainly regarded these letters as authentic (!), would have been able to identify the ecclesiology, the Christology, the ethics of the three letters by collecting evidence back and forth and across the three letters as practiced in modern scholarly research? Is it plausible that these writings, which basically differ from the original Paul with regard to style and content as modern scholarship claims, could have been recognized as genuine Pauline by the original addressees, who possibly held other Pauline writings in hand? And last but not least, would the original addressees have been able to recognize their own situation and problems within a corpus of letters, in which each letter assumes a different situation and addresses different problems, not to speak of the different locations of Ephesus and Crete? From all we know about ancient pseudepigraphy we should be more skeptical about the common theories. The research on pseudepigraphy in Antiquity has to be received more differentiated than it has been in New Testament scholarship so far. In particular, more attention should be paid to the difference of accepted pseudepigraphy within the context of a so-called ‘school’ and of a type of pseudepigraphy that must be identified as forgery—including the consequences this had even in Antiquity.81 In

80 This is perhaps the most difficult issue within scholarship, for even a single interpreter could suggest more than one order (see note 15). 81 The important work of Speyer (see note 27) was explicitly a first attempt to elaborate different types of pseudonymity and pseudepigraphy in Late Antiquity. Despite the honourable merits particularly of N. Brox in his various publications on this issue (see for example Brox, Falsche Verfasserangaben; Idem, ‘Zum Problemstand in der Erforschung der altchristlichen Pseudepigraphie’, in: Idem (ed.), Pseudepigraphie in der heidnischen und jüdisch-christlichen Antike (WdF 484), Darmstadt 1977, 310–34), Speyer’s research has not yet been sufficiently evaluated for the study of the New Testament. Instead, Brox’ reception of Speyer’s results has been the main reference for New Testament scholarship. For a first but still not sufficient attempt to go further regarding this issue see for example M. Frenschkowski, ‘Pseudepigraphie und Paulusschule: Gedanken zur Verfasserschaft der Deuteropaulinen, insbesondere der Pastoralbriefe’, in: Horn, Das Ende des Paulus, 239–72.

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doing so, one would gain a more appropriate picture of the history and intention of the three letters, and one may also be able to deal anew and differently with the issue of authenticity, especially regarding 2 Tim and Tit. Giving up the ‘dogma’ of the literary unity of the Pastoral Epistles may even enable us to reconsider the issue of (probably partial) authenticity as well as pseudonymity in more detail. In order to clarify this last point: It is neither possible nor reasonable to claim authenticity for all three of the Pastoral Epistles in general as recently Johnson or Towner did, just as it is not reasonable to generally claim pseudonymity of a threefold Corpus pastorale. Assuming authenticity would, at least in fact, allow recognizing each letter as an ‘independent literary entity’.82 Yet, as the interpretation of 1 Tim 3:15 and 2 Tim 2,20 by Johnson and Towner particularly shows, it would necessarily suppose more or less coherent ideas on similar issues because of the assumption of Paul as the single author of all three letters.83 It does also raise several other problems, and would therefore be a misleading alternative to the general assumption of the pseudonymity of the letter corpus.84 Thus, what I am suggesting is that even by supposing pseudonymity we are able to better understand the Pastoral Epistles if we receive them as distinct writings that are related to each other, but differ in their theological, historical, and social setting. Yet, I would even go beyond this. Supposing the legitimacy of the assumption of pseudonymity with regard to these letters would even allow reconsidering the issue of authenticity. Following this new—and old—methodologically differentiated perspective, it would now be the time to search more carefully for a new description of the inner relations between the Pastoral Epistles.85

Towner, The Letters to Timothy and Titus, 88. See also Towner, The Letters to Timothy and Titus, 53–68, although after all pointing out the awareness of the problem. 84 Thus I hold that the same applies to recent attempts to deny pseudepigraphy in the New Testament in general such as, e.g., by A. Baum, Pseudepigraphie und literarische Fälschung im frühen Christentum. Mit ausgewählten Quellentexten samt deutscher Übersetzung (WUNT II/138), Tübingen 2001, or T.L. Wilder, Pseudonymity, the New Testament, and Deception: An Inquiry into Intention and Reception, Lanham 2004. See J. Herzer, Constructing Pseudonymity: The Pastoral Epistles between Claim and Criticism (forthcoming). 85 Manuscript finished in September 2006. 82 83

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PRAYER AS THEOLOGICAL REFLECTION The Function of Prayer in Ephesians Gregory E. Sterling Ludwig Wittgenstein once wrote: ‘To pray is to think about the meaning of life’.1 Wittgenstein wrote this while serving as a soldier in the Austrian Eleventh Army during the Russian offensive known as the Brusilov Offensive on the eastern front. The statement is one in a series that he offered in response to the question, ‘What do I know about God and the purpose of life?’ The question and his answers mark a shift in the Notebooks in which he began to combine his probes into the foundations of logic with more personal, ethical reflections.2 The statement is remarkable for several reasons. It reveals the ethically devout character and the intellectual orientation of the philosopher in a succinct but powerful way. It also invites us to think about the function of prayer.3 How is prayer a reflection on life? At the end of the first century, a student of Paul’s used a number of the Apostle’s letters in an attempt to develop an understanding of the church that Paul had created. The disciple understood that his master’s letters had been community specific: they had not attempted to address the church as a whole.4 The disciple decided to use Paul’s letters as a base and extend their thought to the church that Paul had

L. Wittgenstein, Notebooks 1914–1916, ed. by G.H. von Wright & G.E.M. Anscombe, Oxford 19792, 73. Wittgenstein wrote this on June 11, 1916. 2 On the significance of this statement and the surrounding lines see R. Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, New York 1990, 140–42. 3 Wittgenstein’s relationship to religion, more specifically to Catholicism as a form of Christianity, was complex. When he died, his students and friends were perplexed over the arrangements for his burial. Although he was not a Catholic and neither practiced Catholicism nor believed a number of the tenets of Catholicism, he had a great enough sympathy for Catholicism that his students (some of whom were Catholic) had a priest offer prayers at his graveside. For details see Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 576–80. 4 The particularity of Paul’s letters was perceived as a problem in the Early Church, especially as the letters became used for communities other than those to whom they were addressed. See N.A. Dahl, Studies in Ephesians: Introductory Questions, Text- & EditionCritical Issues, Interpretation of Texts and Themes, ed. by D. Hellholm, V. Blomkvist, and T. Fornberg (WUNT 131), Tübingen 2000, 165–78. 1

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spent his life building. Ephesians, in this way, is a creative reading of Paul’s and some of his disciples’ letters.5 It is striking that in a work that is not community specific, the author devoted more space to prayer than had the Apostle or any of his previous disciples. Was this simply a development of the epistolary tradition that the author inherited or did the author have a different understanding of prayer that led him to expand the tradition? We can consider the same question from a different perspective. The author placed prayers or comments about prayer in strategic positions within the letter: at the outset, at the transition of the two halves of the letter, and at the end. Does the letter simply follow the conventions of the Pauline tradition or does it reflect an attempt to create a new perspective on prayer? I suggest that the author of Ephesians thought of prayer as an avenue ‘to think about the meaning of life’ from a Pauline perspective. While this was not life in a trench or field with death all around, it represented a significant moment when a disciple attempted to make sense of what Paul had accomplished with his life and how he and his contemporaries could relate to it. I will use a form of reader response criticism to examine the major prayers or references to prayer in this letter as a means of testing this hypothesis. We will ask how the text sets up the implied reader within the prayers in order to determine how prayer functions for the reader.6 Do the prayers create an interplay between the reader and the text so that prayer becomes a vehicle for understanding or are the prayers simply another part of the text? It is a pleasure to offer this analysis of the function of prayer in Ephesians to my friend and colleague, Pieter van der Horst, who has done so much to elucidate prayer in the ancient world.

5 On the nature and purpose of Ephesians see my forthcoming article in ZNW, ‘From Apostle to the Gentiles to Apostle to the Church: Images of Paul at the End of the First Century’. 6 I thus side with those critics who argue that the text has some control over the experience of the reader. The basic terminology was set out by S. Chatman, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film, Ithaca/London 1978, 149–50. W. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction, Chicago/London 19832, emphasized the importance of the text. For a summary of the different views of the reader see R.M. Fowler, ‘Who is “the Reader” in Reader Response Criticism?’, Semeia 31 (1985), 5–23.

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A Berakhah The opening section of Ephesians is striking in a number of ways. One of the unusual features of the opening is that the disciple has expanded his master’s standard thanksgiving into two prayers: a berakhah (1:3–14) immediately followed by the thanksgiving proper (1:15–23). The expansion of the work at the place where we expect a typical thanksgiving is a characteristic of the early Deutero-Pauline letters (2 Thessalonians, Colossians, and Ephesians). The expansions took their cue from the precedents set by Paul. The Apostle wrote two or three thanksgivings in 1 Thessalonians,7 depending on whether we judge the second thanksgiving in the manuscript tradition to be an interpolation or not.8 A student of Paul’s used 1 Thessalonians as a precedent to write 2 Thessalonians and included two thanksgivings (1:3–12 and 2:13–14). In his letter to the Philippians, Paul separated his thanksgiving report from the intercession report that he made on behalf of the community (1:3–6 and 9–11).9 A disciple followed suit when he addressed a community that the Apostle had not. Like Paul in Philippians (Phil 1:3–6; 9–11), the author of Colossians distinguished between the thanksgiving report and the intercession report (Col 1:3–8; 9–14).10 The author of

7 1 Thess 1:2–5; 2:13–16; 3:9–10. For an analysis see P.T. O’Brien, Introductory Thanksgivings in the Letters of Paul (NovTSup 49), Leiden 1977, 141–66. 8 The most important work arguing for an interpolation is B.A. Pearson, ‘1 Thessalonians 2:13–16: A Deutero-Pauline Interpolation’, HTR 64 (1971), 79–94. The most important defenses of the authenticity of the text are I. Broer, ‘ “Antisemitismus” und Judenpolemik im Neuen Testament: Ein Beitrag zum besseren Verständnis von 1 Thess 2,14–16’, BN 20 (1983), 59–91; Idem, ‘“Der ganze Zorn ist schon über sie gekommen”: Bemerkungen zur Interpolationsthese und zur Interpretation von 1 Thess 2,14–16’, in: R.A. Collins (ed.), The Thessalonian Correspondence (BETL 87), Leuven 1990, 137–59; and R.A. Collins, Studies on the First Letter to the Thessalonians (BETL 66), Leuven 1984, 96–135. W. Schmithals, Paul and the Gnostics, Nashville 1972, 123–218, argued that the multiple thanksgivings in 1 and 2 Thessalonians were evidence of fragments of letters that have been combined, a view that has not won wide assent. 9 O’Brien, Introductory Thanksgivings in the Letters of Paul, divided the Pauline thanksgivings into three basic groups: thanksgivings that combine a thanksgiving report with an intercessory report (Phil 1:3–11; Phlm 4–6; Col 1:3–14); thanksgivings that contain only the thanksgiving report (1 Cor 1:4–9); and mixed categories (1 Thess 1:2–5; 2:13; 3:9–13; 2: Thess 1:3–4, 11–12; 2:13–14; Rom 1:8–17). 10 Cf. also Phlm 4–5, 6, which is not as clear in my judgment. For an analysis of the author of Colossians’ dependence on the authentic Pauline letters see O. Leppä, The Making of Colossians: A Study on the Formation and Purpose of a Deutero-Pauline Letter, (PFES 86), Helsinki/Göttingen 2003, esp. 59–83. The author of 2 Thess also split the thanksgiving and intercession (1:3–10 and 11–12) in the first thanksgiving. The separations are marked by the repetition of the petition verb or an equivalent. In the

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Ephesians followed the lead of Colossians and included two successive prayers, but altered Colossians by making them separate prayers. Like 2 Corinthians, Ephesians substituted a berakhah for the section where we expect a thanksgiving.11 The author then combined the thanksgiving report, the intercessory report, and the Christological hymn of Colossians to create a single thanksgiving.12 Ephesians is unique in providing both a berakhah and a thanksgiving.13 While the specific way in which Ephesians expanded the standard thanksgiving is unusual, the fact that it expanded the thanksgiving is similar to the practice of the other early Deutero-Pauline letters. The first prayer is a berakhah. There has been a great deal of discussion about the nature and structure of Ephesians 1:3–14. The text has most frequently been considered a hymn or hymnic or a prayer, although there have been other classifications.14 I have called it a berakhah because it opens like other berakhot: ‘Blessed is God’. In this way, it begins like

case of Colossians, the intercession report is virtually an independent thanksgiving. See the analysis below. 11 2 Cor 1:3–11. Cf. also 1 Pet 1:3–5. There is an earlier Jewish example of a letter opening with a berakhah, Hiram to Solomon in Eupolemus (F 2 [=Eusebius, Prep. evang., 9.34.1]); however, this is based on a statement in the biblical text and does not establish an epistolary practice (see 2 Chron 2:11 and 3 Kgs 5:21 [=1 Kgs 5:21]). It appears likely that the use of a berakhah as an epistolary opening is a Christian creation. So R. Deichgräber, Gotteshymnus und Christushymnus in der frühen Christenheit: Untersuchungen zu Form, Sprache und Stil der frühchristlichen Hymnen (SUNT 5), Göttingen 1967, 64–5. Dahl, Studies in Ephesians, called the berakhot of 2 Cor 1:3–11; Eph 1:3–14; 1 Pet 1:3–5 ‘Briefeingangs-Eulogie’, an appropriate name that is difficult to translate into English by less than a phrase. I would render it ‘introductory epistolary eulogies’. See Dahl, Studies in Ephesians, 315 and passim. This essay was first published in 1951. Dahl was followed by Deichgräber, Gotteshymnus und Christushymnus, 64. 12 In this contribution, I am assuming that the author of Ephesians had Colossians in front of him. The most important treatments of this relationship are E. Percy, Die Probleme der Kolosser- und Epheserbriefe, Lund 1946; C.L. Mitton, The Epistle to the Ephesians: Its Authorship, Origin and Purpose, Oxford 1951, 55–97; M. Gese, Das Vermächtnis des Apostels: Die Rezeption der paulinischen Theologie im Epherserbrief (WUNT 2/99), Tübingen 1997, 39–54. Cf. also J.K.B. Maclean, ‘Ephesians and the Problem of Colossians: Interpretation of Texts and Traditions in Eph. 1:1–2:10’, Diss. Harvard University 1995. For a challenge to the opinio communis see E. Best, ‘Who used Whom? The Relationship of Ephesians and Colossians’, NTS 43 (1997), 72–96 and Idem, Ephesians (ICC), Edinburgh 1998, 20–5. 13 The unusual character of the opening in Ephesians has been recognized by many, e.g., P.T. O’Brien, ‘Ephesians 1: An Unusual Introduction to a New Testament Letter’, NTS 25 (1979), 504–16. 14 For a summary of the major views from 1904 through 2001 see the discussion and summary chart in H.W. Hoehner, Ephesians: An Exegetical Commentary, Grand Rapids 2002, 153–61.

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many Jewish prayers and should be considered a prayer.15 This particular berakhah is one long, complex sentence in Greek.16 The structure is marked by a doxological refrain that appears three times: once in vv. 5–6 (‘in accord with the good pleasure of his will to the praise of the glory of his grace’), again in vv. 11–12 (‘in accord with the counsel of his will . . . to the praise of his glory’), and finally in v. 14 (‘to the praise of his glory’).17 I take the presence of this doxological refrain (‘to the praise of his glory’) to be a structural marker, denoting the conclusion of units just as each of the books in the Psalter18 and some of the letters of the New Testament end in a doxology.19 As we will see below, doxologies often stand at the end of prayers. The practice of placing a doxology at the end of a literary unit suggests that there are three sections in the berakhah. While it is tempting to push the analysis further (there are a number of other repetitions), the positing of subunits becomes too subjective and problematic.20 The first unit (vv. 3–6) celebrates what God has done for those in Christ. The subject of the verbs or participles is God (‘who blessed us’, v. 3; ‘just as he chose us’, v. 4; ‘who predestined us’. v. 5; and ‘he highly favored us’, v. 6). The only exception to this is in the subordinate clause of v. 4 that explains why God chose us: ‘so that we might be holy and blameless’. The thrust of the unit is a celebration of what God has done for us. The verbs in the second unit have a mixed set of subjects. The unit opens and closes in the first person plural: ‘we

15 E.g., Gen 24:27; 1 Sam 25:39; 1 Kgs 1:48; 1 Chron 29:10–19; Ps 144:1; Tob 11:14–15; Jos. Asen. 3.3. Cf. also the mishnaic tractate Berakhot and the Gemara in the Talmudim that provide guidelines for saying blessings. Observant Jews pray berakhot to this day. 16 NA27 breaks it into four sentences (vv. 3–6, 7–10, 11–12, 13–14), but I do not see the syntactical rationale for doing so. Vv. 7, 11, and 13 all begin with ‘in whom’. The anaphora is striking, but the prepositional phrase is dependent on the preceding material. The main verb is still the understood ‘be’ in ‘Blessed be the God and Father . . .’. C.J. Robbins, ‘The Composition of Eph 1:3–14’, JBL 105 (1986), 677–87, analyzed the sentence on the basis of periods in ancient rhetoric. 17 A significant number of interpreters have recognized the function of this phrase. One of the most important treatments is J. Cambier, ‘La Bénédiction d’Éph. 1,3–14’, ZNW 54 (1963), 58–104. There is a similar pattern in Did. 10.2–6, esp. 2, 4, 5, where doxologies serve as a refrain. Cf. also 6. 18 Pss 41:13 (a berakhah); 72:18–19 (two berakhot); 89:52 (a berakhah); 106:48 (a berakhah); and Pss 146–50 or 150 (Pss 146–150 all begin with ‘praise Yah!’ [‫)]הללו יה‬. 19 Rom 16:25–27, a secondary ending; 2 Pet 3:18; Jude 24–25. Cf. also 1 Tim 6:16; 2 Tim 4:18; Heb 13:21; 1 Pet 5:11, where a doxology stands at the end of the letter, but where some concluding epistolary elements come after it. 20 For a review of the basic positions see Hoehner, Ephesians, 153–61.

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have’, v. 7; ‘we were called’, v. 11; ‘having been predestined’, v. 11; ‘so that we might be’, v. 12. Between these there are a series of verbal elements that celebrate God’s actions: ‘he lavished upon us’, v. 8; ‘he disclosed to us’, v. 9; ‘he purposed’, v. 9. The mixture emphasizes the human experience of what God has done in Christ. The final unit changes person yet again to the second plural: ‘you also heard’, v. 13; ‘in whom you also believed and were sealed’, v. 13. The shift from the first person plural to the second person plural suggests that the berakhah has turned directly to the readers.21 The effect of these shifts in person is to move the berakhah from God (vv. 3–6) to the author and the Pauline tradition (vv. 7–12) and on to the readers (vv. 13–14). The content of the berakhah is a celebration of what God has done for humanity in Christ. In this way the berakhah functions as a proem to the entire letter that will unpack the meaning of the mystery that God has disclosed in Christ in both historical and personal terms. The reader is invited to begin the letter by joining in a prayer of celebration for what God has done for humanity, including what God has done for the readers. A Thanksgiving The second half of the opening is the thanksgiving. This is not a prayer proper, but a prayer report. The text is in the third person rather than second person. Like Paul, the author informs the community about

21 The identity of the groups denoted by the pronouns has been a matter of debate. There is a long-standing view that the ‘we’ refers to Jewish Christians and the ‘you’ to Gentile Christians (e.g., J.-N. Aletti, Saint Paul Épître aux Éphésiens: Introduction, traduction et commentaire (ÉtB 42), Paris 2001, 78–9). Still others think that the shift denotes different groups of Christians (e.g., R.A. Wilson, ‘“We” and “You” in the Epistle to the Ephesians’, in: F.L. Cross, Studia Evangelica 2 (TU 87), Berlin 1964, 676–80, suggested that the ‘you’ were recently baptized Christians). The best explanation, and the one that is held by most recent commentators, is that the ‘you’ is intended to refer directly to the readers (A.T. Lincoln, Ephesians (WBC 42), Nashville 1990, 36–8; R. Schnackenburg, Ephesians: A Commentary, Edinburgh 1991, 64–5; Best, Ephesians, 144–45, 148; and Hoehner, Ephesians, 231–35). I concur with the last view. The author moves back to ‘our’ in v. 14, a move that would not make sense if he were trying to distinguish sharply between two groups. It makes sense if we understand the ‘you’ to refer to the readers and the ‘our’ to be inclusive. As we will see below, the shift takes place at the end of the berakhah, just as it does at the end of the prayer in 3:14–21. In both cases the author reaches out to the readers. The same ambiguity also occurs in Col 1:24–2:5. For a fuller treatment see D. Jayne, ‘“We” and “You” in Eph 1:3–14’, ExpTim 85 (1974), 151–52.

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his unceasing thanksgiving to God for them and his request on their behalf. The language is close enough to an actual prayer that it would be easy to convert it from the third person back into the second person and make it an actual prayer. It is added to the berakhah as the flip side of a single coin: the berakhah celebrates God’s work; the thanksgiving gives thanks for it and asks that the readers come to understand the meaning of God’s work in their own lives.22 The inspiration for this thanksgiving is primarily the compound thanksgiving and Christological hymn in Colossians, although it is structurally very similar to the thanksgiving in Philemon 4–6 as well. The relationship between Ephesians and Colossians can be quickly recognized through the following synopsis. I have used italics to mark the lines in Colossians that are parallel to those in Ephesians but out of sequence. I placed their proper location in parentheses. This will give the reader a sense of the extent of the borrowing as well as the sequence of both texts. I have tried to translate the text in the same sequence in which it appears in Greek while making sure that the English is intelligible.23 There is a debate about the extent of the thanksgiving in Ephesians: some think that it ends at the conclusion of the intercession in 1:19,24 others that it concludes with 1:23,25 and still others that it extends all the

22 J.M. Robinson, ‘The Historicality of Biblical Language’, in B.W. Anderson (ed.), The Old Testament and Christian Faith: A Theological Discussion, New York 1963, 124–58 and Idem, ‘Die Hodajot-Formel in Gebet und Hymnus des Frühchristentums’, in: W. Eltester & F.H. Kettler (eds), Apophoreta: FS Ernst Haenchen (BZNW 30), Berlin 1964, 194–235, pointed out that the berakhot and the hodayot were related and that the opening refrains could be substituted for one another. Rabbinic Judaism tended to move in the direction of ‘blessings’, while Christianity tended to prefer ‘thanksgivings’. O’Brien, Introductory Thanksgivings in the Letters of Paul, 237–39 and Idem, ‘Ephesians 1: An Unusual Introduction to a New Testament Letter’, NTS 25 (1979), 513, pointed out that a berakhah praises God for blessings in which the author also participates, while a thanksgiving gives thanks for God’s work in the lives of the readers. 23 All translations are my own. 24 P. Schubert, Form and Function of the Pauline Thanksgivings (BZNW 20), Berlin 1939, 34, and O’Brien, ‘Ephesians 1: An Unusual Introduction to a New Testament Letter’, 504–16. 25 G.P. Wiles, Paul’s Intercessory Prayers: The Significance of Intercessory Prayer Passages in the Letters of St. Paul (SNTS.MS 24), Cambridge 1974, 158 n. 5; 164 n. 1; Lincoln, Ephesians, 50 and Best, Ephesians, 156.

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way to 2:10,26 or possibly to the doxology in 3:20–21.27 Since 1:15–23 is one sentence in Greek,28 I think that the syntactical unit matches the conceptual unit. The sentence makes perfectly good sense as a thanksgiving. It consists of a thanksgiving (1:15–16a), an intercession (1:16b–19), and a liturgical expansion (1:20–23). As we will see below the structure is very similar to the prayer in 3:14–21, a fact that suggests that the author thought of this sentence as the thanksgiving. Here are the texts: Colossians 1:3–8, 9–14, 15–20

Ephesians 1:15–23

Thanksgiving Report We always give thanks to God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, by praying for you, For this reason we also (1:9) 4 since we have heard of your faith in Christ Jesus and the love that you have for all the saints, 5 because of the hope that is laid up for you in heaven. You previously heard about this hope through the word of truth, the gospel, 6 that is present with you. Just as it is in the entire world bearing fruit and growing, so it is also in you, from the day that you heard it and truly came to know the grace of God. 7 You learned it from Epaphras, our beloved fellow servant, who is a faithful minister of Christ 3

For this reason, I also, since I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints, 15

26 J.T. Sanders, ‘The Transition from Opening Epistolary Thanksgiving to Body in the Letters of the Pauline Corpus’, JBL 81 (1962), 348–62, esp. 356–57, argued that the thanksgiving extended to 2:10. 27 C. Maurer, ‘Der Hymnus von Epheser als Schlüssel zum ganzen Briefe’, EvT 11 (1951–1952), 151–72, esp. 152. 28 I am not sure why NA27 places a full stop before the relative clause that introduces 1:20. 1:20–23 is syntactically dependent on the preceding.

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Table (cont.) Colossians 1:3–8, 9–14, 15–20

Ephesians 1:15–23

on your behalf, 8 who also disclosed to us your love in the Spirit. Intercession Report 9 For this reason we also— from the day that we heard (about you)— do not cease

praying on your behalf and asking that

you may be filled with the knowledge of his will in all spiritual wisdom and understanding; 10 so that you may live worthy of the Lord and be pleasing in every way: bearing fruit in every good work, growing in the knowledge of God,

what are the riches of the glory (1:27) for a portion of the inheritance of the saints in light (1:12) being empowered with every power

11

according to his glorious strength

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do not cease to give thanks by making mention of you in my prayers 17 that the God of our Lord, Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you 16

a Spirit of wisdom

and revelation in the knowledge of him; 18 so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope of his calling, what are the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints, 19 and what is the surpassing greatness of his power for us who believe according to the working of his mighty strength.

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Table (cont.) Colossians 1:3–8, 9–14, 15–20

Ephesians 1:15–23

for all endurance and patience, joyfully 12 giving thanks to the Father who has qualified you for a portion of the inheritance of the saints in light. 13 He delivered us from the control of darkness and transferred us into the kingdom of the Son he loves, 14 in whom we have redemption, the forgiveness of sins The Christological Hymn 15 He is the image of the invisible God; the firstborn of all creation, 16 for in him all things were created

in the heavens and on the earth, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities,

He demonstrated his strength in Christ: he raised him from the dead; He set him on his right hand in the heavenly places, 20

over every ruler and authority and power and sovereignty and every name that is named not only in this age but also in the age to come; 22 He subjected all things under his feet; 21

—all things were created through him and for him; 17 he is before all things and in him all things hold together; and he is the head

18

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and He made him head over all things

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Table (cont.) Colossians 1:3–8, 9–14, 15–20

Ephesians 1:15–23

of the body, the church. He is the beginning, the firstborn of the dead, so that he might have pre-eminence in all things; 19 for in him all the fullness

for the church 23 which is his body,

was pleased to dwell. and through him to reconcile all things to himself, by making peace through the blood of the cross —whether they are on earth or they are in heaven.

the fullness of the one who fills all in all.

20

The thanksgiving in Ephesians falls into three components. The first component is the thanksgiving proper (1:15–16a). The modern understanding of a Pauline thanksgiving is rooted in the work of Paul Schubert.29 Schubert identified two forms of thanksgivings in the Pauline tradition:30 the first type follows the main verb offering thanks (εὐχαριστέω) with a participle or a series of participles in the first person that are in turn succeeded by a final clause that is subordinate to the participles (introduced by ἵνα, ὅπως, or εἰς τό plus the infinitive);31 the second type does not employ participles after the verb of thanksgiving but a causal clause (introduced by ὅτι) followed by a complementary clause (introduced by ὥστε).32 The thanksgiving in Ephesians belongs to the first type. If we look more carefully, we find that it has the majority of the constituent elements that Schubert identified for this form:33 a principal Schubert, The Form and Function of the Pauline Thanksgivings. Schubert, The Form and Function of the Pauline Thanksgivings, 10–39. 31 Eph 1:15–23; Phil 1:3–11; Col 1:3–8, 9–14; 1 Thess 3:9–10, 11–13. The limits of the thanksgivings are mine. Schubert thought that the three thanksgivings in 1 Thess were in reality one. I have treated them separately and so excluded 1 Thess 1:2–10 from this category since it lacks an intercession. 32 1 Cor 1:4–9; Rom 1:8–15; 1 Thess 2:13–16; 2 Thess 1:3–12; 2:13–14. 33 The following is a modification of Schubert’s list. See his chart in The Form and Function of the Pauline Thanksgivings, 54–5. 29 30

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Element

1 Thess Phil Phil Col Col Eph 3:9–10 1:3–6 1:9–11 1:3–8 1:9–14 1:15–23

I/We give thanks to God Temporal reference For you Cause for thanksgiving Verb of petition Final clause

1 2 4 3 5 6

1 2 3 5 6 4

1 2

1 2 3 4 6 5

5 6 1 2 3 4

3 2 4 1 5 6

verb of thanksgiving,34 (it lacks the recipient of the thanksgiving),35 a temporal reference indicating the frequency of the thanksgiving,36 a pronominal object specifying on whose behalf the thanksgiving is offered,37 a participial or verbal clause that indicates the cause or basis of thanksgiving,38 a participial clause that refers to an intercession,39 and a final clause that states the content of the intercessory prayer.40 The elements can appear in different orders in these thanksgivings. Here are the elements and the order in which they appear in their respective Pauline and Deutero-Pauline texts. I have numbered each element in the order in which it appears in the text and listed them. I have given the compound thanksgivings in Philippians and Colossians two sets of numbers: one for the thanksgiving and one for the intercession. This permits the reader to see why I have called the thanksgiving in Colossians a compound thanksgiving: both the thanksgiving report and intercession report have virtually all of the elements. The variety in order is striking, especially in the intercession report in Colossians and the thanksgiving in Ephesians. How can we explain the form of the thanksgiving in Ephesians? The answer lies in the way that the author reshaped Colossians. The author took the first phrase from the intercession report in Colossians to form a connection with the preceding context (Col 1:9a in Eph 1:15a). In this case, the con-

Eph 1:15. Cf. Phil 1:3; Col 1:3, 12; 1 Thess 3:9. Cf. Phil 1:3; Col 1:3, 12 (note that it is missing in 1:9); 1 Thess 3:9. 36 Eph 1:16. Cf. Phil 1:4; Col 1:3, 9. 1 Thess 1:10 has a temporal expression, but uses it for the intercession rather than the thanksgiving. 37 Eph 1:16. Cf. Phil 1:4; Col 1:3, 9; 1 Thess 3:9. 38 Eph 1:15. Cf. Phil 1:5; Col 1:4–8. 39 Eph 1:16. Cf. Phil 1:4, 9; Col 1:3, 9; 1 Thess 3:10. 40 Eph 1:17–19. Cf. Phil 1:9–11; Col 1:9–14; 1 Thess 3:10. 34 35

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nection looks back to the berakhah, and more specifically to 1:13–14 where the author turned the berakhah from the first person plural to the second person plural in order to address the communities and readers. It is because they have participated in the blessings of God in Christ that the author gives thanks. The author then went back to the first thanksgiving in Colossians and indicated that he has heard of the readers’ faith and love. While the two virtues are commonplace in the Pauline tradition,41 the close agreement in wording with Colossians makes it clear that Ephesians has taken its inspiration from Colossians.42 The author dropped the remainder of the first thanksgiving in Colossians. The reason is that this section in Colossians set out some of the specifics for the community in Colossae. The author of Ephesians was content with two basic virtues that all Christians should possess and omitted any reference to the specific situation of the readers. He then picked up the formulae in the intercession report in Colossians as a way to round out his own thanksgiving (Col 1:9 in Eph 1:16). In this way the author fashioned a single thanksgiving out of the compound thanksgiving in Colossians. The second element is the intercession proper (1:16b–19).43 Unlike the compound thanksgiving in Colossians that separates the intercession from the thanksgiving by delaying the intercession and repeating the language of petition before the intercession (Col 1:3, 9), Ephesians made the two a seamless whole. The intercessions are prefaced with a verb or a participle that introduces the petition. The author reports that in his prayers he asks God to give them ‘a spirit of wisdom and revelation’. The purpose of this gift is ‘so that, with enlightened eyes’,44

41 They are only linked together in the Pauline tradition in the New Testament. They appear together in opening thanksgivings in Eph 1:15; Col 1:4; 1 Thess 1:3 (see also 3:6); 2 Thess 1:3; Phlm 5. They are linked elsewhere in 1 Cor 13:13; 2 Cor 8:7; Gal 5:6, 22; Eph 6:23; 1 Thess 5:8; 1 Tim 1:5; 2:15; 4:12; 6:11; 2 Tim 1:13; 2:22; 3:10; Titus 2:2. 42 Cf. also Phlm 5 which is very close. 43 The intercessory prayers of Paul have been carefully studied by G.P. Wiles, Paul’s Intercessory Prayers: The Significance of the Intercessory Prayer Passages in the Letters of Paul (SNTS.MS 24), Cambridge 1974, esp. 156–229, that deal with the intercessory prayer-reports in the thanksgivings. 44 The syntax of the Greek is problematic. Some understand πεφωτισµένους τοὺς ὀφθαλµοὺς τῆς καρδίας [ὑµῶν] to be a second object of δώῃ, although there is no conjunction linking the two objects. I prefer to understand the phrase as an accusative absolute that looks to the ‘you’ (ὑµᾶς) that immediately follows. It could be an accusative of respect, but its placement suggests that it is an accusative absolute. For a survey of the major views see Hoehner, Ephesians, 260–61.

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the reader ‘may know’ three things, each introduced with the indirect interrogative pronoun ‘what’: ‘the hope of his calling’, ‘the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints’, and ‘the surpassing greatness of his power’. There is a real sense in which the prayer is for them to realize the meaning of the preceding berakhah.45 It would, however, be a mistake only to look backwards. The petition has a Janus-quality: it looks both backward and forward. It looks forward to the third element, the description of God’s power that was demonstrated in the exaltation of Christ. Many have thought that this text is a hymn or contains a hymn (1:20–23).46 I am not confident that we can reconstruct a hymn from these verses, although the language is elevated and may reflect liturgical language. There is another factor to consider. The passage is similar to Paul’s comments about the resurrection of Christ in 1 Corinthians 15:20–28. Compare the two texts: 1 Corinthians 15:20–28

But now Christ has been raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep. 21 For since death came through a human being, so the resurrection of the dead is through a human being. 22 For just as in Adam all die, so also in Christ all will be made alive. 23 But each in his own order: Christ the first fruits, then those who belong to Christ at his coming. 20

Ephesians 1:20–23 20 He demonstrated his strength in Christ: He raised him from the dead;

45 My analysis is context specific. O’Brien, ‘Ephesians 1: An Unusual Introduction’, 514–15, suggested that the basic functions of 1:3–14 and 1:15–19 were didactic, paraenetic, and epistolary. 46 There has been little agreement about the reconstruction of the hymn. Two sober attempts have been J.T. Sanders, ‘Hymnic Elements in Ephesians 1–3’, ZNW 56 (1965), 214–32, esp. 220–23 and Deichgräber, Gotteshymnus und Christushymnus, 161–65. I agree with Deichgräber that the author composed the text, although he may have drawn on hymnic material (p. 163). See the comments below.

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Table (cont.) 1 Corinthians 15:20–28

Then comes the end, when he will hand over the kingdom to God the Father, when he will abolish every ruler and every authority and power.

24

For it is necessary for him to reign until he sets all enemies under his feet. 26 The last enemy to be abolished is death. 27 For he subjected all things under his feet. When it says that all things have been subjected, it is clear that it does not include the one who subjected all things to him. 28 When all things are subjected to him, then the Son himself will be subject to the one who subjected all things to him 25

so that God may be all in all.

Ephesians 1:20–23 He set him on his right hand in the heavenly places,

over every ruler and authority and power and sovereignty and name that is named not only in this age but also in the age to come;

21

He subjected things under his feet;

22

and he made him head over all things for the church 23 which is his body, the fullness of the one who fills all in all.

While the two texts have different points of orientation, Paul is arguing for the resurrection of the dead in 1 Corinthians while the author of Ephesians is relating the power of God in Christ, there are several striking similarities between these two texts. They follow a common sequence beginning with the resurrection of Christ from the dead, noting his reign (whether viewed from the end [as in 1 Corinthians] or from the beginning [Ephesians]), citing the subjection of all things to

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him in the language of Psalms 110:1 and 8:7, and concluding with a reference to the fullness of God. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of this sequence is the citation of Ps 110:147 and 8:748 in the same order. The combination of the two texts in the New Testament is unusual, although some think that the combination goes back to an exegetical tradition.49 There are also two noteworthy verbal echoes. The first is the sequence of ‘ruler’, ‘authority’, and ‘power’—the only time in the Pauline corpus where the three appear together in this order.50 The second is the concluding expression, ‘all in all’.51 The combination of a common sequence and these verbal parallels leads me to believe that the author of Ephesians conflated Colossians and 1 Corinthians. For this reason, I am reluctant to posit an underlying hymn and prefer to think of the text as the author’s composition, a composition based on Pauline precedents as well as possible liturgical pieces.52 The Christological text of Ephesians celebrates God’s actions in Christ, especially his exaltation. There are four verbs in the text: two participles and two finite verbs. God is the subject of all four. The two participles appear in verses 20–21: ‘he raised’ and ‘he set’. They refer to the enthronement of Christ. The two finite verbs accentuate his sovereignty over both the cosmos and the church: ‘he subjected’ and ‘he gave’. The point of these affirmations is not that we should engage in metaphysical reflection on the ontological status of Christ; on the contrary, the text sets up the point that will come in the next section when the author uses the same two participles—only qualifies them by 47 1 Cor 15:25, ‘he sets [all] enemies under his feet’ (Ps 110 [109 LXX]:1b) and Eph 1:20, ‘he set him on his right hand’ (Ps 110 [109 LXX]:1a). 48 1 Cor 15:27, ‘he subjected all things under his feet’; and Eph 1:22, ‘he subjected all things under his feet’. Both cite Ps 8:7b. It is worth noting that the LXX reads ὑποκάτω for ‘under’ while 1 Cor 15:27 and Eph 1:22 use ὑπό. 49 See also Heb 1:13 and 2:6–8 and 1 Pet 3:22. For a summary of the history of scholarship on the relationship between these two texts see T. Moritz, A Profound Mystery: The Use of the Old Testament in Ephesians (NovTSup 85), Leiden/etc. 1996, 9–22. Mortiz challenges the existence of an exegetical tradition that combined the two and suggests that the author of Ephesians is responsible for the combination. I am arguing that the author learned of the combination from Paul in 1 Cor 15:25–27. 50 There are a number of texts where ‘ruler’ and ‘authority’ are mentioned in the same order as here in Colossians (1:16; 2:10, 15) and elsewhere in Ephesians (3:10; 6:12). While the list in Col 1:16 may serve as the basis for Eph 1:21, the agreement with 1 Cor 5:24 makes me suspicious that it has played a role in the shaping of Ephesians. 51 The phrase is literally ‘all things in all things’ (τὰ πάντα ἐν πᾶσιν). The same expression occurs in Col 3:11 and 1 Cor 12:6. There are problems with the manuscript tradition. Some manuscripts of 1 Cor 15:28 and Col 3:11 omit the first definite article. NA27 brackets the definite article in both cases. 52 I consider Col 1:15–20 to be a hymn.

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noting our participation with Christ—to suggest that God has exercised the same power in the lives of the readers by which he elevated Christ. Compare the following two texts:

Ephesians 1:20–21

Ephesians 2:6–7

He demonstrated his strength in Christ: he raised him from the dead; He set him on his right hand in the heavenly places,

6

20

over every ruler and authority and power and sovereignty and name that is named not only in this age but also in the age to come . . .

21

He raised us up with him and seated us with him in the heavenly places, in Christ Jesus, 7 so that he might demonstrate

in the coming ages the surpassing riches of his grace by his kindness to us in Christ Jesus.

There is an unambiguous connection between these two texts. The intercession report asks for God to help the readers to reflect on the meaning of God’s action in Christ until the reader grasps that it is the same power that works in the lives of believers. The reader is to do this through hearing the letter and reflecting on it. Does this involve prayer on the part of the reader or is the reader only aware of the request for enlightenment in the prayer of the author? Prayer as Transition We can not answer this question until we have examined the remaining references to prayer. The next prayer is a prayer-report situated at the transitus between the theological reflections (argumentatio) of the first three chapters and the paraenesis in the last three chapters (exhortatio).53 53 The text uses a Pauline formula to mark the shift from argumentatio to exhortatio: ‘Therefore I, the prisoner in the Lord, encourage you . . .’ Compare 1 Thess 4:1,

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The author appears to follow the lead of 1 Thessalonians by placing the prayer here: Paul added a prayer in 1 Thessalonians (3:11–13) to the third and final thanksgiving (3:9–10). The author of Ephesians, who may have known 1 Thessalonians,54 used the same device for the structure of Ephesians and situated a prayer at the end of the theological discussion (3:14–21). The prayer-report that appears in the transition is similar to the thanksgiving in chapter 1. Here is a synopsis of the two that will permit us to compare them.55

Ephesians 1:15–23

Ephesians 3:14–21

Invocation

Invocation

For this reason, I also, since I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints, 16 do not cease to give thanks

14

15

For this reason,

I bow my knees to the Father 15 from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named,

‘Finally therefore brothers (and sisters), we ask and encourage you . . .’, and Rom 12:1, ‘Therefore I encourage you, brothers (and sisters) . . .’ 54 Compare the following texts: 1 Thess 1:6 and Eph 5:1; 1 Thess 2:12 and Eph 4:1; 1 Thess 4:11 and Eph 4:28; 1 Thess 4:13 and Eph 2:12; 1 Thess 5:5–7 and Eph 5:8–14; 1 Thess 5:8 and Eph 6:14–16. The factor that makes these similarities striking is that the similarities between Ephesians and other letters in the Pauline corpus (excluding 2 Thess and the Pastorals) is greater than what is true in other letters. This increases the likelihood that the author of Ephesians knew a number of Paul’s letters. For a thorough review see Mitton, The Epistle to the Ephesians, 98–158 and Geze, Das Vermächtnis des Apostels, 54–85, esp. 76–8, where there is a helpful chart. 55 For an extensive comparison see Ch. Karakolis, ‘ “A Mystery Hidden to be Revealed?”: Philological and Theological Correlations between Eph 3 and 1’, in: M. Wolter, Ethik als angewandte Ekklesiologie: Der Brief An die Epheser (Monographische Reihe von Benedictina. Biblisch-Ökumenische Abteilung 17), Roma 2005, 65–108, esp. 72–88. He argues that 3:1–13 is parallel to 1:3–14 and 3:14–21 is parallel to 1:15–23.

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Table (cont.) Ephesians 1:15–23

Ephesians 3:14–21

Intercession

Intercession

by making mention of you in my prayers 17 that the God of our Lord, Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a Spirit of wisdom and revelation in the knowledge of him; 18 so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope of his calling, what are the riches of the glory of his inheritance in the saints, and what is the surpassing greatness of his power for us who believe according to the working of his mighty strength.

19

Liturgical Conclusion

so that he

16

may give you– according to the wealth of his glory– to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inner person; 17 that Christ may dwell

in your hearts through faith; that you be rooted and founded in love, 18 so that you may have the strength to grasp with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth,

and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge;

19

so that you may be filled into all the fullness of God. Liturgical Conclusion To the one who is able to do infinitely more than all that we ask or think

20

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Table (cont.) Ephesians 1:15–23

Ephesians 3:14–21

He demonstrated his strength in Christ:

according to the power that is at work in us, 21 to him be the glory

20

He raised him from the dead; He set him on his right hand in the heavenly places, 21 over every ruler and authority and power and sovereignty and name that is named not only in this age but also in the age to come; 22 He put all things under his feet; and He made him head over all things for the church 23 which is his body, the fullness of the one who fills all in all.

in the church and in Christ Jesus for all the generations of eternity. Amen.

The structure of the two prayers is identical. Both prayer-reports open with invocations, move to intercessions, and conclude with pieces that have been taken from or heavily influenced by liturgical celebrations. There is some common vocabulary that also suggests that the author is working with the same concerns as he had in the thanksgiving: ‘for this reason’, ‘may give you’, ‘Spirit’, your heart(s)’, ‘what is’, ‘surpassing/surpasses’, ‘church’. The similarities are strongest at the structural level and the basic content; the specifics vary. The invocation is certainly different. It begins, like the thanksgiving in chapter 1, with a reference to the preceding context. In this case, it refers back to 3:1 where the same phrase appears forming an inclusio that makes 3:1–13 a parenthetical digression. The ‘reason’ therefore looks back to the second chapter and the demonstration of God’s power in the lives of the readers (2:1–10) and the union of Jews and Gentiles (2:11–22). The invocation indicates a standard posture for prayer,56 56

E.g., Ezra 9:5; Dan 6:10; Luke 22:41; Acts 7:60; 9:40; 20:36; 21:5.

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although it is by no means the only posture: standing (with outstretched hands) was also a recognized posture in prayer.57 The author expanded the address to God with a note of praise that forms an inclusio with the doxology that concludes the prayer. The intercession report in the prayer is similar to the intercession report in the thanksgiving of chapter 1; however, it is also based on Col 2:1–10. The strongest evidence for the dependence on Colossians at this point is the sequence of the two texts: Ephesians used Colossians 1:24–29 in 3:1–13, uses Col 2:1–10 in 3:14–21, and returns to Colossians in 4:17–24 when it draws on Col 3:5–11. Ephesians omitted the polemic against the heresy in Col 2:11–3:4. This fits the pattern of the letter: the author of Ephesians followed the basic sequence of Colossians consistently, although as we see here, he felt free to recast the text.58 In this case, he has recast the opening warning against the heresy in Colossians into an intercession report that is similar to the intercession that he had already written. We must therefore keep both Ephesians 1:16b–19 and Colossians 2:1–10 in mind when we read Ephesians 3:16–19. Here are the parallel texts of Colossians and Ephesians.

Colossians 2:1–10

Ephesians 3:16–19

1 For I want you to know how greatly I contend for you, for those in Laodicea, and for all who have not known me personally. 2 (I want) their hearts to be encouraged and for them to be held together in love so that they may have the wealth of a full understanding

16

and have the knowledge of the mystery of God, namely Christ, 3 in whom all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge are hidden.

so that he may give you—

according to the wealth of his glory—

57 E.g., 1 Sam 1:26; 1 Kgs 8:22; Mark 11:25; Luke 18:11, 13. There are instances of individuals who lie prone under great duress, e.g., Mark 14:35//Matt 26:39. 58 There are examples of dependence in the intervening material (cf. Col 3:12–15// Eph 4:1–4 and Col 2:19//Eph 4:15–16); however these are out of sequence.

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Table (cont.) Colossians 2:1–10 I say this so that no one may trick you with specious argumentation. 5 For if I am absent in person, I am nevertheless present in spirit rejoicing as I view the stability and steadfastness of your faith in Christ.

Ephesians 3:16–19

4

Therefore, as you have received Christ Jesus as Lord, live in him, 6

rooted and built up in him, established in faith— just as you were taught— and overflowing with thankfulness. 7

Beware lest someone carries you off through philosophy and vain deceit according to human tradition. according to the elements of the cosmos, and not according to Christ. 9 For in him dwells all the fullness of the Deity bodily. 10 and you are full in him, 8

who is the head of every ruler and authority.

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to be strengthened with power through his Spirit in the inner person; 17 that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you be rooted and founded in love,

so that you may have the strength to grasp with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, 19 and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge; 18

so that you may be filled into all the fullness of God.

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The verbal agreements in this section are much less than they are in other units; ‘rooted’ is a noteworthy exception. The basic request is, however, similar. The author of Ephesians elided the material in Colossians that was context specific, especially the reference to Paul’s own situation (Col 2:1–1) and the first of the four specific warnings against apostasy (Col 2:4–5).59 He has likewise altered the identification of the mystery with Christ since he has just explained the mystery as the inclusion of the Gentiles. There are three requests in the intercession, all introduced by ‘so that’: ‘so that he may give you’, ‘so that you may have the strength to grasp’, and ‘so that you may be filled’. The first request asks that they will be strengthened by the Spirit, just as the intercession report in chapter 1 asked ‘that they might have a Spirit of wisdom and revelation’ (1:17); that Christ will dwell in their hearts, a reversal of the exhortation to live in Christ in Colossians (2:6); and that they may be rooted and built up in love, a request that is parallel to the paraenesis of Colossians (2:7). The second request was so that the readers would have the capacity to grasp the dimensions of and know the love of Christ.60 The third request was so that the readers may be filled with the fullness of God, the equivalent of the statement in Colossians 2:9–10: ‘because in him dwells all the fullness of the deity bodily and you are filled in him.’ As the author of Colossians had suggested that the fullness of the deity resided in Christ and that Christians shared in this fullness through Christ, so the author of Ephesians prayed that the readers might attain the fullness of God (see also 4:13). The final component is a doxology.61 As we noted above in our discussion of the berakhah, it was common for a doxology to mark the end of a literary unit;62 it was also common for a doxology to stand at the end of a prayer.63 The simple doxologies in the New Testament and Early

Cf. also Col 2:8, 16, 18. The Greek is ambiguous. It offers four directions in three dimensions but does not provide an object for the dimensions. The reader is forced to ask: the breadth, length, height, and depth of what. There are a number of possible explanations. I understand the two infinitives to be dependent on the subjunctive verb and treat them as parallels so that the dimensions refer to the love of Christ. 61 On doxologies see Deichgräber, Gotteshymnus und Christushymnus, 25–40. 62 On the uses of doxologies see Deichgräber, Gotteshymnus und Christushymnus, 34–5. 63 The most famous example of this is the doxology added to the Pater Noster, probably on the basis of 1 Chron 29:11–13, e.g., Did. 8.2. The doxology is in several forms. A doxology concludes the thanksgiving in 1 Tim 1:12–17. The Didache concludes the 59 60

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Christian literature consist of four elements: a pronoun or a phrase in the dative case specifying to whom the doxology is addressed, a reference to glory or another predicate or series of predicates, a temporal expression denoting the scope of time the doxology is relevant, and an Amen.64 A good example is Galatians 1:5: ‘to whom be glory for eternity, Amen’. There are also fuller doxologies that preface the four elements of the simple doxology with a construction that typically begins with a participle and describes what God can do. The most common form of this participle is ‘to the one who is able’, the construction that we have in our doxology.65 The doxology in Ephesians has a number of unusual elements. It is the only doxology in the New Testament that mentions the church, hardly a surprise in this letter. It also has an exceptionally full temporal reference, ‘for all generations of eternity’: eternity is a common element, but the combination of ‘all generations’ with eternity is not.66 The expansiveness of the phrase was probably an attempt to elevate the language. More importantly, the author has altered the grammatical number from singular to plural: from ‘I bow my knees’ to ‘we ask or think’. Through this shift, the author has invited the readers to join in the prayer and give glory to God as they realize what God has done for them. A Final Exhortation With the doxology, the text moves from argumentation to the business of living. Just as the author had used a prayer to mark the end of the argumentatio and set up the exhortatio, so he concluded the exhortatio with a command to pray. Unsurprisingly, the exhortation was based on the final units of paraenesis in Colossians.

prayers at the eucharist with doxologies, Did. 9:2, 3, 4 (Note: it serves as a refrain in 10:2, 4, 5). 64 There are a significant number of examples of doxologies with these four elements. The following NT texts have this simple form: Gal 1:5; Phil 4:20; Rom 11:36; 1 Tim 1:17; 6:16; 2 Tim 4:18; Heb 13:21; 1 Pet 4:11; 5:11; 2 Pet 3:18; Rev 5:13; 7:12. Some Early Christian examples include the following: Did. 8:2; 9:2; 9:3, 4; 10:2, 4, 5; 1 Clem. 20.12; 32.4; 39.4; 43.6; 45.7; 50.7; 58.2; 64; 65.2; Mart. Pol. 14.3; 21; 22.3; Diogn. 12.9. 65 Cf. also Rom 16:25–27; Jude 24–25; 1 Clem. 61.3; and Mart. Pol. 20.2. Cf. also Rev 1:5–6 and 2 Clem. 20.5, which have the same construction but use different participles to introduce the doxology. 66 Cf. also 1 Clem. 61.3.

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Ephesians 6:18–20 In every prayer and supplication pray at all times in the Spirit. For this purpose remain vigilant, with all perseverance and supplication for all the saints 19 and for me, so that a word may be given to me when I open my mouth to disclose with boldness the mystery of the Gospel, 20 for which I am an ambassador in chains, so that I may boldly declare it just as I ought to speak. 18

Perservere in prayer,

2

remaining alert in it with thanksgiving, 3 praying, at the same time, for us, so that God may open a door of the Word for us to speak the mystery of Christ, for which I am bound, so that I may make it known just as I ought to speak. 5 Live wisely towards outsiders by making the most of each opportunity. 6 Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you know how to answer each person.

The exhortation to pray is the third part of the author’s exhortation to urge the readers to be firm (6:10–20 which divides into 10–13, 14–17, 18–20). The section is not part of the military imagery of vv. 14–17, but adds something new.67 The unit falls into two parts: the first uses the language of petition to combine prayer with vigilance. It follows Colossians by making two exhortations, but expands the reference to prayer, placing more weight on it: the simple ‘persevere in prayer’

67 The syntax is, again, problematic. Some think that the participles ‘pray’ and ‘remain vigilant’ depend on the verb ‘stand’ in v. 14 (Lincoln, Ephesians, 451 and Best, Ephesians, 604; however, there is another main verb between ‘stand’ and the participles in v. 18. Others think that the participles depend on ‘take’ in v. 17 (Hoehner, Ephesians, 855); however, it is not easy to see the specific connection between ‘take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit’ and the participles ‘pray’ and ‘remain vigilant’ i.e., why would prayer be related to them but not to the other pieces of armour? I prefer to understand the participles as the equivalents of imperatives that stand in a series of exhortations.

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becomes ‘in every prayer and supplication pray at all times in the Spirit’. The second part deals with the supplication. Rather than Colossians’ ‘pray for us’, the author asks the readers to pray ‘for all the saints’ and ‘for me’. Just as the author eclipsed Paul’s co-sender, Timothy, in the epistolary opening of Colossians and dropped all references to other individuals in the conclusion except for Tychicus, so here the focus is on Paul.68 Why? The author wants to make it clear that it is Paul’s vision of the church that should be embraced, the vision that the reader has just heard in the reading of the letter. The author asks the readers to pray for Paul to speak the mystery of the gospel (not Christ as in Colossians) with boldness, a quality mentioned twice. The request for Paul may be part of an effort to create verisimilitude. On the other hand, it is surely also a request on behalf of the proclamation of the message the readers have just heard. In this way the author has made a full circle from the prayers of intercession in chapters 1 and 3. Intercession works both ways: the author prays on behalf of the reader and asks the readers to pray on his behalf. The result is that the letter is framed by intercession. Conclusion We have now looked at the four major prayer texts in Ephesians. In each case, we have noted that there was a basis for the reference in the Pauline tradition. This is not a surprise: there is a basis for virtually everything in Ephesians in the Pauline tradition. The question is why did the author give so much attention to prayer. We can be more specific. There are two ways in which we can see the emphasis on prayer. First, Ephesians devotes as much or more space to prayer than any other letter in the Pauline tradition. By my count, the NA27 edition of Ephesians has 2395 words.69 Of these 549 are in the four texts that we have just examined or 23% of the total words.70 The only other letter in the Pauline corpus that devotes a similar amount of attention to prayer is 1 Thessalonians: 333 or 23% of the 1467 words in 68 Cf. Col 1:1//Eph 1:1, where Ephesians drops the reference to Timothy and Col 4:7–18//Eph 6:21–23, where Ephesians omits Col 4:9–18b. For details see Sterling, ‘From Apostle to the Gentiles to Apostle to the Church’. 69 I omitted all words in brackets. 70 Eph 1:3–14=202 words; 1:15–23=168 words; 3:14–21=123 words; and 6:18– 20=56 words.

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1 Thessalonians are either prayers or exhortations to pray.71 If we drop 1 Thessalonians 2:13–16 as an interpolation, then 224 words out of 1358 or 16% of the total deal with prayer. By either count, the place of prayer is important. The weight of this material changes the feel of the text as we read the letter. The experience of reading or hearing 1 Thessalonians or Ephesians is very different from the experience of reading 1 Corinthians or Romans. This is especially true for Ephesians where the presence of a significant amount of prayer material is given even more weight through the use of elaborate constructions that create a liturgical feel.72 The second way that we realize the emphasis on prayer is through the placements of the prayers in the letter: the prayers serve as structural markers. In this regard, there is once again a noted similarity to 1 Thessalonians. Some have claimed that all three thanksgivings of 1 Thessalonians should be read as a single whole;73 however, I think that it is better to understand the thanksgivings as structural markers. There are three or four prayers in 1 Thessalonians, depending on whether we consider 1 Thessalonians 2:13–16 authentic or not. All of them mark major units of thought. If we accept 2:13–16 as authentic, then 1 Thessalonians 1:2–5 is the thanksgiving that opens the letter; 1 Thessalonians 2:13–16, marks the end of Paul’s apologia; 1 Thessalonians 3:9–13, marks the end of the apostolic parousia; and 1 Thessalonians 5:23–24, concludes the paraenesis. If 1 Thessalonians 2:13–16 is an interpolation, an assessment that I am inclined to accept,74 then the first and second thanksgivings (1:2–5 and 3:9–10 with the prayer in 3:11–13) form an inclusio that brackets Paul’s relationship with the

1 Thess 1:2–5, 78 words; 2:13–16, 109 words; 3:9–10, 39 words; 3:11–13, 64 words; 5:17, 25, 6 words; 5:23–24, 37 words. If we restricted the second thanksgiving to 2:13, there would only be 34 words in this text or 258 total. This would be 18% of the total. 72 On the style of Ephesians see Mitton, Epistle to the Ephesians, 9–11; Lincoln, Ephesians, xliv–xlvii. The syntax has reminded a number of scholars of the hodayot at Qumran. See K.G. Kuhn, ‘The Epistle to the Ephesians in the Light of the Qumran Texts’, in: J. Murphy-O’Connor (ed.), Paul and Qumran: Studies in New Testament Exegesis, London/Dublin 1968, 115–31, esp. 116–20. 73 Schubert, Form and Function of the Pauline Thanksgivings, 26; Wiles, Paul’s Intercessory Prayers, 45–7, 175–86; and O’Brien, Introductory Thanksgivings in the Letters of Paul, 141–66, esp. 143–46. 74 The decisive factor in my mind is the statement in 1 Thess 2:16 which, on my reading, refers to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 ce. This may help to explain why 2 Thess has two thanksgivings rather than three. 71

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Thessalonians.75 Ephesians uses prayer in a similar way from an epistolary perspective. Prayers mark specific units: the berakhah and thanksgiving open the letter and the prayer at 3:14–21 serves as the final bracket in the inclusio. It also sets up the exhortatio. The exhortation to pray at the end concludes the exhortatio. The prayers are thus key structural markers in the letter. Why use prayers as structural markers? Perhaps it was because they had already been used this way in the Pauline tradition; however, I think that something more is at play. We may now ask how these prayer texts functioned for the readers. Prayers in the authentic letters of Paul not only had an epistolary function,76 they also had a pastoral function. The prayers expressed Paul’s genuine concern for the readers whom he addressed. This is certainly the case in 1 Thessalonians where the prayers express Paul’s appreciation and concern for the Thessalonians. The prayers are almost exclusively reports of Paul’s actions for the Thessalonians. The situation is different in Ephesians where the author does not know the readers. While the prayers may express pastoral concern for the implied reader, this is not their primary function. In Ephesians, the prayers address the implied readers directly and invited them to participate. The letter opened with a prayer that praised God. The prayer culminated with a direct reference to the readers that brought them into the prayer as they listened to the reading of the letter. The berakhah created both a frame of mind for the readers and set out the basic contents of the letter. In this way it set up an interchange between praying and reflecting. This dialectic was reinforced immediately by the thanksgiving that asked for understanding for them and urged them to reflect on the power of God in Christ as a way of thinking of the power of God in their own lives. The fact that it did this in a prayer report should not be overlooked. It is prayer that helps us to move beyond what we know to what we need to know. The juxtaposition of these two prayers at the outset of the letter and their joint insistence on reflection sets the frame of mind by which Ephesians should be read and heard. The author returned to prayer as he brought the argumentatio to a close. He again brought the readers directly into the prayer by including them in the doxology: the reader is invited to join in by attributing glory to

75 So, for example, A. Malherbe, The Letters to the Thessalonians (AB 32B), New York 2000, 78–81. 76 Thanksgivings were part of the letter tradition.

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God. The move is thus very similar to the move made at the conclusion of the berakhah. The reader first listened and then realized that the prayer included them. The direct appeals to the reader in 1:13–14 and 3:20–21 to join in the prayer, means that the argumentatio is framed by the readers’ participation in prayer. We begin and end the argumentatio by praying. There is a similar inclusio for the exhortatio. As the author brought his paraenesis to a conclusion, he turned to intercession for the second time. Only this time, he asked the readers to intercede on his behalf in the proclamation of the message. So the author and readers frame the letter by praying for one another: the author for the readers to understand and the readers for the author to proclaim boldly. Their mutual prayers are intended to assist them in writing and reading the letter. Thus 1:3–14 works together with 3:14–21 and 1:15–23 works together with 6:18–20. These references to the participation of the readers in the prayers suggest that the letter was to be read by those who could move back and forth between prayer and theological reflection. Luke Timothy Johnson grasped this when he wrote: ‘In Ephesians, theology informs prayer, and prayer itself is the vehicle for theology’.77 This is true for the reader as well as the author. Ephesians was a letter that invited prayer as a means of reflection. It is in this way, that prayer is a way ‘to think about the meaning of life’.78

77

412.

L.T. Johnson, The Writings of the New Testament: An Interpretation, Minneapolis 19992,

During the medieval period, this dialectic became a recognized form of prayer. Guigo II, The Ladder of Monks: A Letter on the Contemplative Life and Twelve Meditations, Kalamazoo, Michigan 1981, 67–86, wrote a letter in which he advocated a four-step process: reading, contemplation, prayer, and contemplation. The practice became known as lectio. While Guigo II developed this out of a tradition and not directly from Ephesians, it is a logical extension of the relationship between reading and praying in Ephesians. 78

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REFLECTIONS ON THE APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS AS SUPPLEMENTS Gerard Mussies Reading through the various ‘apocryphal’ gospels, it is difficult to escape the impression that many of them were composed in reaction to the synoptic Gospels and the Gospel of John. Only a few apocryphal texts are held to have made an independent use of sources that also underlie the four canonical gospels and are therefore considered to be of comparatively early origin: the Gospel of the Egyptians,1 the Coptic Gospel of Thomas (NHC II.2),2 and the Dialogue of the Savior (NHC III.5).3 But most other apocryphal texts seem to share the idea that the four gospels were in many ways deficient and incomplete. They appear, in other words, to express a feeling of discontent, which must have grown in force when these four developed into the generally accepted gospels and were, accordingly, restricted to that number. Patristic evidence shows that in the final quarter of the second century a kind of communis opinio had already been reached about the exclusive authority of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. For Irenaeus (around 180 ce), it was an established fact that these four were the only gospels with general authority (Against Heresies 3.11.7–8). Interestingly, he defends this opinion both against those who used more gospels than these four, and against those who advocated a more rigorous restriction and used only one: that is, for example, against the Ebionites, who used Matthew only; against

1 J.D. Crossan, The Cross that Spoke: The Origins of the Passion Narrative, San Francisco 1988. 2 H. Koester, ‘One Jesus and Four Primitive Gospels’, in: J.M. Robinson & H. Koester (eds), Trajectories through Early Christianity, Philadelphia 1971, 158–204, e.g. at p. 186: ‘The basis of the Gospel of Thomas is a sayings collection which is more primitive than the canonical gospels, even though its basic principle is not related to the creed of the passion and resurrection’. 3 H. Koester & E. Pagels, in: S. Emmel (ed.), Nag Hammadi Codex III,5: The Dialogue of the Savior, Leiden 1984, 16. Cf. J.V. Hills, ‘Dialogue of the Savior’, ABD 2, 188a–189a.

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Marcion, who preferred Luke (even in a curtailed version); and against the Valentinians who cherished John.4 Likewise, according to the quotations from the gospels which their works contain, the slightly later church fathers Clement of Alexandria (d. before 215) and Tertullian (d. after 220), and also Origen (d. 253/ 254) shared Irenaeus’ opinion. Thus, around 200 ce, a more or less spontaneous selection from among a plurality of gospels had already been reached and a kind of canon had arisen. This canon had not, however, been consciously drawn up—as it was by Athanasius in his 39th Festal Letter of 367 ce5—and predated the decisions of the church councils of Rome (382), Hippo Regius (393) and Carthage (397; 419) by about two centuries.6 If we ask the question ‘In which respects were the gospels, which we now call ‘canonical’, felt to be deficient?’, the answer can be summarized as follows: both in the religious field (ethics, beliefs, doctrines), and in the narrative field (names, facts, events). In actual practice, i.e. in the apocryphal texts themselves, these two fields cannot always be separated. When, for example, a text intends to advocate a specific virtue, such as chastity, it can put the exhortation or command to be chaste in the mouth of a priest, as a religious statement, or it can—in a much more lively way—tell a story about a girl who does not want to marry at all, thus combining religion and narrative. As to the question of how the apocrypha tried to mend the supposed deficiencies, it appears that they did so in a number of different ways. 1) They could accentuate or reinforce data or doctrines already present in the canonical gospels; 2) they could make minor changes in them by way of correction or interpret them in a new sense; or 3) they could overtly contradict them on the basis of another, newer, doctrine.7 More often, however, they resorted to adding new materials as supplements, usually in combination with one of the methods just described. In the following, I shall try to breathe some life into this schematic inventory, by illustrating these strategies with examples taken from apocryphal

Irenaues does not mention the Diatessaron in this passage, but he condemns Tation in Against Heresies 1.28. 5 PG 26, 1437. 6 Cf. E. Hennecke & W. Schneemelcher, Neutestamentliche Apokryphen I. Evangelien, Tübingen 19593, 12–15. 7 Cf. M.R. James, The Apocryphal New Testament: Being the Apocryphal Gospels, Acts, Epistles, and Apocalypses with other Narratives and Fragments, Oxford 1956, xii. 4

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texts from the early Christian period up to and including the Middle Ages. 1. Stressing Already Present Facts or Doctrines The virgin birth, as told by Matthew and Luke of Jesus, the son of David (Matt 1:1; Luke 18:38–39), was probably not always considered to have been well substantiated in these gospels, since both authors inserted a genealogy which shows only Joseph’s Davidic descent, but none that does the same for Mary. The apocrypha respond to this uncertainty, if uncertainty there was, by stating in so many words that Mary was descended from David (Protevangelium Jacobi 10.1; Nativity of Mary 1.1; cf. Heliand 255: ‘the daughter of David’), or that her mother was (Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew 1.2), or that both her parents were (Ascension of Isaiah 11.2). The virgin birth itself is described in much greater detail than it is done in Matt 1:18–24 and Luke 1:26–38. The Protevangelium and Pseudo-Matthew pay much more attention to the fact that Mary had had no sexual intercourse before her pregnancy, and that Joseph abstained from sexual intercourse with her. The whole matter is stressed to the extreme in the Nativity of Mary (an eighth-ninth century revision of the Protevangelium): the word virgo occurs there in almost every chapter with regard to Mary and is repeated three times in the famous passage ‘virgo concipies, virgo paries, virgo nutries’, ‘you will conceive as a virgin, give birth as a virgin, and suckle as a virgin’.8 2. Minor Corrections A minor correction is evident in the Gospel of the Nazarenes, according to Jerome’s commentary on Matt 23:35 (‘that upon you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of innocent Abel to the blood of Zechariah the son of Barachiah’, RSV): ‘In the Gospel which the Nazaraeni use, we find written instead of son of Barachias son of Joiadas’.9 Here, indeed, the NT textual tradition is unanimous in having Jesus speak of ‘Zacharias the son of Barachias’ (υἱοῦ Βαραχίου), 8 R. Beyers, Libellus de nativitate Sanctae Mariae. Textus et commentarius (CCSA 10), Turnhout 1997, 321 and 323 (ch. 9). Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are the author’s. 9 PL 26, 174.

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with the exception of the Codex Sinaiticus, which omits the apposition altogether. This would make this Zechariah identical with the wellknown Old Testament prophet about whose manner of dying, however, nothing is known (Zech 1:1). In 2 Chron 24:20–22, however, it is indeed a Zechariah son of Jehoiada who was stoned in the fore-court of the Temple. Evidently, the purpose of this correction was to protect Jesus from the charge of having made a possible mistake. 3. Open Disagreement Open disagreement is expressed in the Acts of John. Although this is certainly not a gospel, but an account of the apostle’s work after the ascension, it contains a flashback to the time of Jesus’ earthly ministry (chapters 87–102, probably with an interruption between 89 and 90).10 This section, which is rather aberrant, is practically an apocryphal gospel by itself. It tells us how Jesus, by his miraculous appearances, made John his disciple (88–89); how he was twice glorified on the mountain where he used to pray (90–91); how, one night, he had a discussion with his double (92); and how the disciples danced around him in a circle while he was singing a hymn (94–96), which contains a new ‘I am’-saying (‘I am a mirror for you who are contemplating me (τῷ νοοῦντί µε) (95). The final part, chapters 97–102, is devoted to what happened during the crucifixion. After the other disciples have fled in all directions from Jesus (who was apparently about to be executed), John too, when he sees Jesus suffer, flees to a cave in the Mount of Olives. Jesus, however, appears to him in this cave to explain that he is not really now hanging on the cross and suffering, but only seemingly so. He offers an extensive but cryptic explanation of what the secret significance of all this is. Pivotal remarks in this explanation are: ‘Nothing have I suffered of what one will say about me’, and ‘You hear that I suffered when I did not, (and) that I did not suffer when I did’ (101). This explanation turns the whole passion into an illusory event. After this discourse, Jesus is taken up to heaven (102). All this is, of course, the expression of a purely docetic doctrine, which is quite alien to the canonical gospels.

10 Chapters according to the edition of M. Bonnet, Acta Apostolorum Apocrypha II.1 (Hildesheim 19592 (first ed. 1898). For this lacuna in C of about eight to ten letters, see E. Junod & J.-D. Kaestli, Acta Johannis. Praefatio—Textus (CCSA 1), Turnhout 1983, 192, n. 1; 193.

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It is, incidentally, also to be found in the Second Treatise of the Great Seth (NHC VII.2, 55–56). More often, however, when new doctrines, such as gnostic doctrines about the origin and destiny of the universe, are introduced, the apocrypha proceed less drastically and take recourse to having them propagated by the risen Jesus in a discussion with one or several of his disciples. Although some of these texts entitle themselves as gospel or apocalypse, they are now commonly referred to as ‘Resurrection Dialogues’ or ‘Resurrection Discourses’.11 No less than eight of these have been preserved in the Nag Hammadi Library, such as the Apocryphon of James (NHC I,2), the Book of Thomas the Contender (NHC II,7), the Sophia of Jesus Christ (NHC III,4), etc. Another example is provided by the Gospel of Mary, who is apparently Mary of Magdala (Codex Berolinensis Graecus 8502). Such doctrines as docetism and gnosticism, however, later came to be considered as heresies by the official church, and as a consequence their literature was gradually suppressed. A longer lifetime was granted to those apocrypha that merely intended to extend and supplement the canonical gospels in the ‘historical’ field, without any admixture of new doctrines. It appears that there were three periods in the life of Jesus that aroused special interest and required replenishing: a) Mary’s life up to her engagement to Joseph; b) Jesus’ life up to his twelfth year; and c) the time between Jesus’ death and resurrection. a) The life of Mary With regard to Mary’s life, the apocryphal gospels inform us about the following subjects: who Mary’s parents were; that, like several Old Testament persons (such as Isaac, Samuel, etc.), she was born after a long period of childlessness of her mother Anne; that she was famous already at an early age for her piety and chastity; and that she was brought to the temple to remain there (like Samuel, the Old Testament Anna’s son) with other virgin girls, until she would be given in marriage to someone. When that time had come, she refused to marry, whereupon by a miraculous casting of lots she was engaged to the aged Joseph, who would be her protector. Then follows the story

11

S.J. Patterson, ‘New Testament Apocrypha’, ABD 1, 295a–b.

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of the annunciation, and when she is found to be pregnant both she herself and Joseph are submitted to a miraculous test of chastity, and are found to be innocent and to have had no sexual intercourse at all. Then Jesus is born. This sequence of events is recorded by the Protevangelium Jacobi, the Nativity of Mary, and the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew. These stories have a double purpose: they underline the truth of the virgin birth and fill in the lack of biographical information about Jesus’ parents and grandparents. b) Jesus’ youth The Infancy Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew and the Arabic Infancy Gospel inform us about all that happened during Jesus’ youth up to his twelfth year. It is mostly a backward extension of what he did during his later ministry. Thus, he already performs miracles and healings during his stay in Egypt: a young marriageable man there had been turned into a mule through the sorcery of some jealous women. The little Jesus is placed on the animal’s back and at the request of Mary he restores the animal to its former human shape (Arabic Infancy Gospel 20–21). When he is somewhat older, Jesus is depicted as playing with the boys of the village; they occasionally tease him, whereupon he—in a rather un-Christian way—takes severe revenge. There are also stories about his being well ahead of the various schoolmasters who try to teach him the Hebrew alphabet. These infancy stories about Jesus do not stand by themselves, but have parallels in the many legends all over the world about the youth of gods, heroes, and other famous men, of which nothing would have been known otherwise, such as Hermes, Heracles, Flavius Josephus, the original Danish Hamlet, etc. They serve to bring out the later importance of the person in question. c) Events after Jesus’ death In the canonical New Testament, there is a series of events that starts immediately after Jesus’ death. When he had died, the Gospel of Matthew (dated between 80 and 100 ce)12 relates that there was a severe earthquake so that the tombs were opened and many ‘holy’ deceased were raised from the grave, went into Jerusalem and showed themselves to many people (Matt 27:51–52). The First Letter of Peter (dated between

12

W.G. Kümmel, Einleitung in das Neue Testament, Heidelberg 197317, 90.

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90 and 95 ce)13 writes that Jesus was ‘put to death as to the body, but made alive as to the spirit’, in which he also went to preach to the souls kept in prison, who had been disobedient in Noah’s days (1 Pet 3:18–20). In this passage, it is not clear when exactly this is supposed to have taken place, but the Apostles’ Creed as formulated in Rufinus’ commentary on it dates this event to the short period between Jesus’ death and resurrection.14 These two brief passages apparently called for some supplementing, and this is done extensively in the second part of the so-called Gospel of Nicodemus, which is usually entitled Descensus ad Infernos or Descent to Hell. Here the two notes have been made explicit and combined into a single story. We are told how Jesus went to the underworld and liberated, against the will of Satan and his companion Hades, who is the jailor of hell, the souls of Adam, the patriarchs and the prophets up to John the Baptist, and takes them with him to paradise. Among these are also the souls of Simeon who blessed the little Jesus in the temple (Luke 2:25–35), and of his two sons. They stay for some time on earth, have themselves baptized in the Jordan and are requested by Annas and Caiaphas to write down a report of all that had happened to them in hell. Having finished this report they handed it to the high priests and were no longer visible (9.27: ἐγένοντο ἄφαντοι). A similar, but very summary account of these events is contained in the late Report of Pilate to Tiberius the Roman Emperor (version A, 8–10). Such almost purely narrative apocrypha had the immediate purpose of filling in the biographical lacunas, where the canonical gospels said nothing or very little. Sometimes they even openly admit their supplemental character (Nativity of Mary 9), or refer to their canonical model by ‘the perfect gospel’ (Arabic Infancy Gospel 25) or just ‘the gospel’ (Nativity of Mary 10; Arabic Infancy Gospel 30; 42), or the ‘holy evangelists’ (Nativity of Mary 10). Thus, Jesus’ youth up to his twelfth year is represented in the New Testament only by Luke 2:40: ‘And the child grew up and became

Kümmel, Einleitung, 375. Rufinus, Commentary on the Apostles’ Creed 14 (PL 21, 352). He refers inter alia to 1 Pet 3:18 and Ps 68/69:3 (Commentary 28; PL 21, 363–64). Rufinus wrote this about the year 404. Earlier versions of this creed do not always contain the descent to hell: compare, for example, Hippolytus, Apostolic Tradition 21, or Marcellus of Ancyra’s letter to Pope Julius (c. 340) in Epiphanius, Against Heresies 72.3. 13 14

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strong. He was filled with wisdom and the grace of God was upon him’. The various infancy gospels do not fail to give concrete examples to illustrate this wisdom and grace, but in doing so they also pay more attention to the ordinary and human side of Jesus. In the canonical gospels we only hear of his solemn ministry of preaching and healing, while his everyday life hardly ever comes to the fore. The infancy gospels, by contrast, depict Jesus as a little boy, playing in puddles after a rain shower, as a schoolboy, as being teased by other boys of the village and as being taken by the ear and led home by Joseph (Infancy Gospel of Thomas 5.2). That historical novels about biblical persons continue to be written in our own time partly arises from the same need.15 It is likewise with the little Mary, of whose youth the New Testament says absolutely nothing: we now hear of her first steps (Protevangelium Jacobi 6), and how she could already climb the stairs to the temple in her third year (Nativity of Mary 6). Such supplementing stories, that are also more down to earth, apparently enjoyed great popularity and contented an audience that missed much of everyday life in the canonical gospels. Although the official church never acknowledged this group of more narrative apocrypha, it cannot be said that these writings were harshly suppressed either. The Protevangelium Jacobi was condemned with many other writings, for instance by Pope Innocentius I (r. 402–417; Sixth Letter 7: ‘Not only to be repudiated but even to be condemned’)16 and in the so-called Decretum Gelasianum. Nevertheless, its prolific textual tradition;17 its various translations; its use in the Byzantine liturgy on Mary’s birthday (September, 8), as well as its having been combined with the infancy stories about Jesus in the sixth-century Pseudo-Gospel of Matthew, all testify to its lasting popularity. This is also evidenced by its influence on the visual arts well into Renaissance times, as shown, famously, by Albrecht Dürer’s woodcuts about the life of Mary (1510). This same need for ordinary details has also doubtlessly encouraged the ongoing tendency of assigning names to persons who are anonymous in the canonical writings, and of drawing up exact family So, for instance, Marianne Fredriksson’s biography Enligt Maria Magdalena (i.e. ‘According to Mary Magdalene’) of 1997, in which Jesus laughs just like everybody else, etc. 16 PL 20, 502. 17 According to Hennecke-Schneemelcher 277, there are well over 30, according to W.S. Vorster, ‘James, Protevangelium of ’, ABD 3, 631b, there are over 147 manuscripts and fragments. 15

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relationships between persons who are there said to be ‘relatives’ without further specification, or whose family relationship is simply assumed. In this way the more important New Testament characters are placed in a concrete and personal setting.18 This tendency is already present within the canonical New Testament. Where the synoptists simply say that one of Jesus’ companions in Gethsemane cut off the ear of the high priest’s servant (Matt 26:51; Mark 14:47; Luke 22:50), John knows that the perpetrator was Simon Peter and the victim Malchus ( John 18:10).19 The names of the robbers crucified with Jesus are unknown to the gospel writers, but some manuscripts of the Latin version mention them: Zoatham and Camma (Matt 27:38c), Joathas and Magatras (Luke 23:32); in the apocrypha they are also known as Dysmas and Gestas (Gospel of Nicodemus 9). Similarly in the Descent to Hell, the sons of Simeon are still nameless in the Greek version, but they carry the names of Leucius and Carinus in the two Latin versions (e.g. version A, 17/1, 3; 27/11). Many of such New Testament name-givings have been collected by B.M. Metzger in his famous article ‘Names for the Nameless in the New Testament’,20 in which he deals with over twenty anonymous New Testament (groups of ) persons, as well as some anonymous locations, such as the Mount of Transfiguration. As a matter of fact, the instances do not exclusively come from the New Testament apocrypha, but from every genre of Christian literature up to and including the Middle Ages.21 This collection is the most comprehensive of its kind, 18 This does not apply, of course, to the list of the names of the (nameless) seventy apostles of Luke 10:1–20. They seem, rather, to have arisen from the collector’s hobby of some historians, such as the anonymous author of the Chronicon Paschale, who records up to 629 ce. He fills these gaps with names taken from the Book of Acts and the Pauline Epistles; thus, for instance, Epaphras from Col 1:7; 4:12; Phlm 23 (PG 92, 521–24). This ‘biographical fact’ has rightly been neglected in the historical novel devoted to this man by W. Slenk, Epafras: het verhaal van een vreemde bekering, Gorinchem 1993. 19 See A. Meyer, ‘Namen der Namenlosen’, in: E. Hennecke et alii (eds), Neutestamentliche Apokryphen, Tübingen 19242, 78. 20 In: P. Granfield & J.A. Jungmann (eds), Kyriakon: Festschrift Johannes Quasten, Münster 1970, Vol. I, 79–99. 21 This phenomenon was not, of course, restricted to the New Testament apocrypha, but occurs even more abundantly with regard to the many Old Testament ‘blanks’. F.L. Utley could even write an article on ‘The one hundred and three Names of Noah’s Wife’ (Speculum 14 (1941), 426–52). As the many textual variants are here also counted as separate names, their number is actually much lower than 103. The Talmud, too, contains some comments on the matter. With regard to the fact that R. Chanan recorded in the name of Rab the names of the mothers of Abraham, Haman, Shimshon and David, the question is asked: ‘In what [respect] do [these names] matter?’

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but as a systematic search for instances is hardly possible, some additions can be made to it. That the Magi who came from the east to worship the newly born king of the Jews (Matt 2:1–12) have each received a name is perhaps the best-known instance of naming the nameless. Less well known is that in the section Stories of the Druids (i.e. of the Magi), chapters 87–96 of the Irish apocryphon called the Leabhar Breac Infancy Narrative, even their riding-animals, which are here horses, have received names, being called, respectively, Dromann Darii, Madian, and Effan (94.6). These names have been borrowed from the Vulgate version of Isaiah 60:6: dromedarii Madian et Epha (MT: ‘young camels of Midian and Epha’). As the meaning ‘camel’ of dromedaries was not so appropriate for a horse (cf. also Jerome, Life of Malchus 10: ‘camels which they call dromedaries because of their speed’), it was apparently reinterpreted as ‘dromas of Darius’ or ‘runner of (king) Darius’.22 A second addition concerns Jesus’ sisters (Matt 13:35, ‘his sisters all’; Mark 6:3, ‘his sisters’). If the Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew 42.1 can only say that Joseph had two daughters, the History of Joseph (2.3) also has names for them: Lisia and Lidia.23 When names occur with some addition by way of identification, as is done for the women at the cross (Matt 27:56; Mark 15:40; John 19:25), and the women at the tomb (Matt 27:61; Mark 15:47–16:1), one might conclude that these persons were still sufficiently identifiable for the original audience of the gospel in question, sometimes even personally known. Very soon, however, that is for the next generation, this may no longer have been the case, and then one could follow either of two procedures: a) leave out such identifications or even the names themselves in subsequent writings; or b) make them more understandable by additional information, for instance about family relations. The answer is: ‘In respect of a reply to the heretics (minīm)’. To the question of why the Torah does not mention them, the answer is that the oral tradition provides for what the Torah omits (b.BB 91b). 22 See M. McNamara et alii, Apocrypha Hiberniae I: Evangelia Infantiae (CCSA 13), Turnhout 2001, 368 and n. 123. See also M. Herbert & M. McNamara, Irish Biblical Apocrypha: Selected Texts in Translation, Edinburgh 1989, 41. 23 So the Coptic-Bohairic version; see A. de Santos Otero, Los Evangelios Apócrifos: Colección de textos griegos y lations, versión critica, estudios introductorios, comentarios e ilustraciones, Madrid 1956, 362. In the Arabic version the names are Assia and Lydia; see K. von Tischendorf & F. Wibrandt, Evangelia Apocrypha, Hildesheim 1956 (repr. of ed. Leipzig 18762), 123.

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The former procedure may have been put into practice in connection with the blind man Bartimaeus, whose name occurs in Mark 10:46, but no longer in Matt 20:29–34, where moreover there are two blind men, nor in Luke 18:35–43, and also in the case of Simon of Cyrene, who is said to be the father of Alexander and Rufus in Mark 15:21, but no longer so in Matt 27:32 and Luke 23:26.24 The latter procedure was followed in connection with the women at the cross and at the tomb, in combination with some of the disciples (Matt 10:2–4 par.) and in contradistinction to some of Jesus’ homonymous brothers (Matt 13:55–56; Mark 6:3). In other words, the various women called ‘Mary’ and the various men called ‘James’ etc. required an explanation and were given one. A second problem was the exact relationship between Mary and Elizabeth. This whole genealogical puzzle was eventually solved in the rather complex manner that is called the ‘Holy Family’, but all this did not happen overnight. In the Protevangelium Jacobi, written after 150 ce, Mary’s parents are for the first time mentioned by the names of Joachim and Anne (1.1, 2.1; cf. Pseudo-Matthew 1.2, 1.2; Nativity of Mary 1). From Pseudo-Matthew 1.2 we also learn the name of her maternal grandfather, Isachar, but who Joachim’s father was is not said. In its final chapter (42), one of the problems indicated above has been partly solved. This problem is whether there were three or four women standing at the cross. John 19:25 reads: ‘Near the cross of Jesus stood his mother, his mother’s sister, Mary of Clopas, and Mary of Magdala’. In Pseudo-Matthew 42.1 we read: ‘. . . Jesus and his mother Mary with her sister Mary, the daughter of Clopas, whom the Lord God had given to her father Clopas and her mother Anne, because they had dedicated Mary the mother of Jesus to the Lord’. Here we see how the passage from John has been interpreted: a) ‘Mary of Clopas’ is taken as apposition to the preceding ‘his mother’s sister’, so that there were three women there. This would be in line with Matt 27:56 and Mark 15:40, who do not, however, mention Jesus’ mother as such. b) The ambiguous ‘Mary (daughter, sister, mother, wife?) of Clopas’ is taken to imply ‘daughter’, whereas modern translations often insert the word ‘wife’ here.

24

See Metzger, ‘Names for the Nameless’, 99.

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From a) and b) it followed logically that the virgin Mary had a homonymous sister by the same mother, and that Anne had remarried after Joachim’s death.25 The Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew 41.1 also makes it clear, by calling James Joseph’s ‘first-born son’, that Jesus’ four brothers and two sisters (42.1) were the offspring of Joseph’s first marriage (41.1; see also History of Joseph 2–4). In the Historiae Sacrae Epitome 2.3,26 which dates from the ninth century, the author—either, as the case may be, Haymo of Auxerre (d. after 875) or Haymo of Halberstadt (d. 853)—says that this second daughter Mary married Alpheus and became the mother of the disciple James the Younger and of Joseph,27 and that her father Cleophas and Joseph the Carpenter were brothers. Haymo is also the first writer known to make mention of Anne’s so-called trinubium. His source for this detail (apocryphon, commentary, chronicle?) remains a mystery. He says that she had a third daughter, also named Mary, from her third marriage to a man called Salome or Salomas. This Mary married Zebedee and became the mother of the disciples James the Elder and John the Evangelist. Now, of the women at the cross, Salome (Mark 15:40) could easily be identified with ‘the mother of Zebedee’s sons’ (Matt 27:56), but in the latter passage, for some unknown reason, the codex Sinaiticus reads ἡ Μαρία ἡ τῶν υἱῶν Ζεβεδαίου. This gave rise in medieval writings to the combination of ‘Maria Salome’, for instance in the widely used dictionary of Papias (around 1053). It is supposed that from the alternative orthography Maria Salomae it was concluded that this meant ‘Maria (daughter) of Salomas’.28 In a Late Old English prose version of the trinubium (twelfth century) as well as in its Latin counterpart (thirteenth century), it is said that Anne’s second and third

25 See Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica 3.11.1: Cleophas and Joseph were brothers according to Hegesippus (about 180 ce); Beda (d. 735), In Marci Evangelium Expositio 4.15 (ad Mark 15:40), calls this Mary ‘the Lord’s aunt’ (PL 92, 292). 26 PL 118, 823–24. 27 In later sources, she is the mother of James the Younger, Josephus Justus, Simon Zelotes and Judas Thaddeus. Their first names match exactly those of the sons of Joseph the Carpenter (Matt 13:55; Mark 6:3). 28 M. Förster, ‘Die Legende vom Trinubium der hl. Anna’, in: W. Keller (ed.), Probleme der englischen Sprache und Kultur: Festschrift Johannes Hoops zum 60. Geburtstag überreicht von Freunden und Kollegen, Heidelberg 1925, 125–27. Compare the trinubium in the thirteenthcentury ms Paris, Sainte Geneviève 2787 fol. 200v: ‘et cognominata est Maria Salome [i.e. -ae] propter patrem suum Salomam’, ‘and she was surnamed Maria Salomae after her father Salomas’; text published in McNamara et alii, Apocrypha Hiberniae, 886–87.

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marriages were concluded ‘according to the Law (of Moses)’,29 which may imply that these were thought to have been leviratic marriages. As a consequence Joachim, Cleophas and Salomas would have been brothers, but Cleophas was usually seen as a brother of Joseph the Carpenter. Remarks on Mary’s and Elisabeth’s precise family ties cannot be found in Haymo’s Historiae Sacrae Epitome. This gap was filled by Heriger, abbot of Lobbes, who wrote in the year 979 that according to some people (quidam), St. Servatius, the tenth bishop of Tongres and the first bishop of Maastricht (d. 384), was descended from Jesus’ family. Unfortunately, Heriger does not disclose his source and is himself somewhat sceptical about the chronology of this assertion: But for whom it is acceptable that after the stoning of the first martyr Stephen, about three hundred years later the man who found the holy cross, Judas surnamed Quiriacus, was the grandson of Simon the brother of the same first martyr, he may just as well accept that about four hundred years after the Lord’s birth or passion, the blessed Servatius has been the great-great-grandson of the maternal aunt of the holy mother of God.30

Although no names are filled in here, it may be clear that the author has at least seen a genealogy from Anne’s sister Emeria31 down to St. Servatius, perhaps also combined with a statement about Mary and Elisabeth, as found later in the Vita Sancti Servatii of Jocundus (1076)32 and in the Gesta Servatii (completed after 1126). There we read that Anne had a sister (H)esmeria, who was the mother of Elisabeth and her brother Eliud. The latter’s son was Emiu/Emin, the father of St. Servatius. This genealogy was repeated by several later authors, with Förster, ‘Legende’, 116 (Cotton ms Vespasianus D XIV fol. 157b–158a); 114–15 (mss Ashmole 1280 fol. 175b–176a and Ashmole 1524, II fol. 8a). 30 PL 139, 1024 (= ch. 20); R. Koepke, Herigeri et Anselmi, Gesta Episcoporum Tungrensium, Trajectensium et Leodiensium (Monumenta Germaniae Historica Scriptores 7), Hannover 1846, 172. See also S.M. Lejeune, De legendarische stamboom van St. Servaas in de Middeleeuwsche Kunst en Literatuur (Publications de la Société historique et archéologique dans le Limbourg à Maestricht 77), Maastricht 1941, 11–12. 31 Variants: Esmeria, Hesmeria, Hymeria, Ismeria, Hismeria, Ismarie. According to Förster, ‘Legende’, 118, Emeria could be the Latinized form of the Old Irish woman’s name Emer (wife of Cúchulainn). Anne’s sister and Elisabeth’s mother appears, however, as Esameria in the Irish apocryphon called the Liber Flavus Fergusiorum Infancy Narrative 46.1; its only manuscript O dates back to the first half of the fifteenth century (see McNamara, Apocrypha Hiberniae, 137; 198. 32 Edited by P.C. Boeren, Jocundus: Biographe de St. Servais, The Hague 1972, 4 (p. 137); 7 (p. 140); 102 (p. 184). 29

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many name variants,33 for instance by Henric van Veldeken in 1176, up to the Legenda Aurea (composed before 1264) of Jacobus de Voragine (d. 1298), who combined, apparently for the first time,34 a) Anne’s trinubium; b) Anne’s family tie with Elisabeth; c) her connection with St. Servatius.35 The names of Anne’s parents, as well as those of the in-laws, were added to the Holy Family in later times. Thus, St. Anne’s trinubium became an established fact. Although it existed for a long period in the margins of mainstream Christianity,36 it exerted enormous influence in the further development of the devotion to St. Anne, especially in Northern France, the Rhineland, and the Netherlands. This later development has been thoroughly described and analysed, as has its iconographical expression in the many paintings that show the genealogy of the Holy Family and its Davidic roots arranged mostly around the central figures of Mary, Jesus, and Anne.37 One aspect, however, has hardly been discussed: what was the origin of the names of the missing links in this genealogical construction, especially in Elisabeth’s branch? Although one is faced here with many textual and iconographical variants, one thing may be clear: the starting point for the creation of these names was the name of Elisabeth itself. For her brother the name Eliud (variant: Elius) was chosen. This name was undoubtedly taken from Joseph’s genealogy in Matt 1:14–15, a name that shares its initial component with that of his sister, whereas the name of Eliud’s son Emiu has the same vowels as that of his father.38 The remaining persons of this branch of the Holy Family are called respectively: Emerentia (Elisabeth’s daughter-in-law and Eliud’s wife), 33 It is also found in the Vita S. Lupi recentior (Acta Sanctorum Junii V.77): ‘Servatius . . . son of Emmui, son of Elius, who was the second cousin of the blessed virgin Mary’, but the date of this life is very disputed; see Lejeune, Stamboom, 12, n. 17; 14–18. 34 Lejeune, Stamboom, 24. 35 Legenda Aurea 129.1 (8 September); see also 65.1 (1 May), and 157.1 (28 October). 36 The cult of St. Anne was officially approved by Pope Urbanus VI in 1378. 37 B. Kleinschmidt, Die heilige Anna: ihre Verehrung in Geschichte, Kunst un Volkstum (Forschungen zur Volkskunde 1–3), Düsseldorf 1930; T. Brandenbarg, Heilig familieleven: verspreiding en waardering van de Historie van Sint-Anna in de stedelijke cultuur in de Nederlanden en het Rijnland aan het begin van de moderne tijd (15de/16de eeuw), Nijmegen 1990; T. Brandenbarg et alii (eds), Heilige Anna, Grote Moeder: De cultus van de heilige moeder Anna en haar familie in de Nederlanden en aangrenzende streken, Nijmegen/Uden 1992. 38 The sequence ‘miu’ was exceptionally susceptible to variation because these three letters were all vertical strokes in medieval handwriting and could easily be misread. Some of the variants are Emin, Enim, Emmin, Emmui, Eminen, Emineu, Emineo, Emyne, Eminus. If the name was Emiu, it could derive from Num 1:10 Ἐµιούδ/‘Ammihud.

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Esmeria (Elisabeth’s mother, and sister of Anne), Ephraim (Elisabeth’s father), Emerentiana (Elisabeth’s grandmother, mother of Esmeria and Anne). All these additional names begin with the vowel E—like Elisabeth, Eliud and Emiu. The exceptions are Stollanus (father of Anne and Esmeria), Memelia (wife of Emiu and mother of St. Servatius), and St. Servatius. The leading principle that seems to be at work here was alliteration and also that of assonance or rhyme in the case of Eliud/ Emiu. All these names are Hebrew or Latin or have a Hebrew or Latin appearance. Only the name of Eliud requires some extra comment. It has clearly been lifted from Joseph’s genealogy in Matt 1:14. It could represent Elihud, ‘my God is majesty’, but this is not found in the Old Testament.39 Probably the name was here modelled after Abimelech: Elimelech, on the basis of the preceding Matt 1:13—Ἀβιούδ. This, in turn, represents Abihud, ‘my father is majesty’, and occurs once, in 1 Chron 8:3. There, however, it arose as ‘Gera Abihud’ from ‘Gera ab-Ehud’, ‘Gera, the father of Ehud’ (cf. Judg 3:15), who is referred to in the following 1 Chron 8:6, ‘the sons of Ehud were . . .’. Through this rather elaborate construction, Jesus has been made part of a more natural family, which counted many more members than the parents, brothers, sisters, and the one maternal aunt found in the New Testament ( John 19:25). Apparently, the ancient and medieval readers of the New Testament, for whom the extended family was of the greatest importance,40 could not content themselves with these meagre New Testament data about Jesus and had to rewrite or even reform the tradition in this respect.

39 Ἐλιούδ is found, it is true, in 1 Chron 12:21 (thus A, against B—Ελιµουθ), but matches MT Elihu. 40 See Brandenbarg, Heilige Anna, 20.

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LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS Keimpe Algra is Professor of Ancient and Medieval Philosophy at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. Bob Becking is Professor of Old Testament in the Faculty of Humanities at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. Wout J. van Bekkum is Professor of Semitic Languages and Cultures at the Department of Languages and Cultures of the Middle East, University of Groningen, The Netherlands. Jan den Boeft is Emeritus Professor of Hellenistic Religions at Utrecht University and of Latin at the Vrije Universiteit of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Jan Bremmer is Professor of Religious Studies at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands. Roelof van den Broek is Emeritus Professor of History of Christianity at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. Martin Goodman is Professor of Jewish Studies in the University of Oxford, UK. He is a Fellow of Wolfson College and a Fellow of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. Jan Willem van Henten is Professor of New Testament and early Christian and Jewish Hellenistic literature at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Jens Herzer is Professor of New Testament at the University of Leipzig, Germany. Alberdina Houtman is Professor of Jewish Studies and Lecturer of Semitic Languages at the Protestant Theological University, location Kampen, The Netherlands.

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Albert de Jong is Lecturer in Religious Studies in the Faculty of Religious Studies, University of Leiden, The Netherlands. Hermann Lichtenberger is Professor for New Testament and Early Judaism at the Eberhard Karls-University of Tübingen, Germany. Bert Jan Lietaert Peerbolte is Lecturer for New Testament and Biblical Theology at the Protestant Theological University, location Kampen, Leiden, The Netherlands, and Research Associate of the University of Pretoria, South-Africa. Jaap Mansfeld is Emeritus Professor in the History of Ancient Philosophy at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. Maarten J.J. Menken is Professor of New Testament Exegesis at the Faculty of Catholic Theology, University of Tilburg, location Utrecht, The Netherlands. Annette B. Merz is Professor of Culture and Literature of Earliest Christianity at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. Magda Misset-van de Weg is Lecturer for New Testament at the Protestant Theological University, location Kampen, The Netherlands. Gerard Mussies is retired Senior Lecturer in the Hellenistic Background of the New Testament, Utrecht University, The Netherlands. Judith H. Newman is Associate Professor of Religion and Hebrew Bible/Old Testament at Emmanuel College of Victoria University in the University of Toronto, Canada. Tobias Nicklas is Professor of New Testament Exegesis at the Catholic Theological Faculty, University of Regensburg, Germany. Karl-Wilhelm Niebuhr is Professor of New Testament at the Theological Faculty of Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena, Germany. Eric Ottenheijm is Lecturer in Jewish Studies and New Testament at the Department for Theology, Utrecht University, The Netherlands.

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Geert Van Oyen is Professor of New Testament at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. Marcel Poorthuis is Lecturer for Jewish-Christian relations at the Faculty of Catholic Theology, University of Tilburg, location Utrecht, The Netherlands. Gerard Rouwhorst is Professor in the History of Christian Liturgy at the Faculty of Catholic Theology, University of Tilburg, The Netherlands. David Runia is Master of Queen’s College at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Huub van de Sandt is Lecturer in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies, University of Tilburg, The Netherlands. Peter Schäfer is the Perelman Professor of Judaic Studies and Professor of Religion as well as the Director of Princeton’s Program in Judaic Studies at Princeton University, USA. Gregory E. Sterling is Professor of New Testament and Christian Origins in the Department of Theology and Executive Associate Dean of the College of Arts and Letters at the University of Notre Dame, USA. Guy G. Stroumsa is the Martin Buber Professor of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. Teun Tieleman is senior researcher in Ancient Philosophy at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. Eibert Tigchelaar is Professor of Religion at the Florida State University, Tallahassee, Florida, USA. Emanuel Tov is the J.L. Magnes Professor of Bible at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel. Johannes Tromp is Lecturer for Judaism in the Greco-Roman Period at the University of Leiden, The Netherlands.

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Klaas A. Worp is Professor of Papyrology at the University of Leiden, The Netherlands. Irene E. Zwiep is Professor of Hebrew and Jewish Studies at the University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands.

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INDEX Hebrew Bible/Old Testament Genesis 1:1

1:1–3 1:2 1:3 1:5 1:26 2:2–3 2–3 2:7 4:8 4:11 6:1–4 6:3 6:5 8:21 11:7 12:1 12:3 12:7 15:12 17:1 18:1 23 24:27 25:9 25:19 25:25 25:26 26:2 28:17 28:26 32:3 32:24–32 37 38 49:31 50:26 71:3

HOUTMAN_index_617-646.indd 617

267, 270, 275, 285 271, 280 271, 281 274 274 32 181 349 347 416 325 53 489 347, 347 56 539 531 376 529 376 376, 489 571 489 530 531 531 376 560 489 530 531 496 496 489 489 530

268, 269, 271, 273, 277, 278, 274, 275, 274, 280,

349, 352

378

Exodus 4:22 10:1 15:9 15:11 18:11 19:8 20:1 20:2 22:8 23:19 33:20 34:26

447 541 440 243 243 496 275 283 244 560 338 560

Leviticus 1:2 6:20 18–20 25:8–17

285 57 480 22

Numbers 1:10 8:1 20:17–18 23:10 29:32–30:1 31:19 33:4

610 531 523 415 523 478 243

Deuteronomy 1:17 2:8–14 2:23 4:19 4:32 6:4 6:13 6:18 10:17 14:1 15:1–2 16:13–14 17:3

244 523 276 51, 53, 55, 58, 59, 234, 243 282 533 49 486 52, 55, 59, 243 242 26 523 52

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618 23:12–13 23:19 28:29 30:1–5a 32:36 33:6

index 22 560 379 257 389 414

Joshua 9:23

560

Judges 3:15 5:31

611 338

1 Samuel 1:17 1:26 7:10 25:39

356 587 446 571

2 Samuel 7:14 13:3 23:4

409 420 338

1 Kings 1:48 5:17–19 5:21 8:17–20 8:22

571 560 570 560 587

2 Kings 4 4:23

182 182

1 Chronicles 8:3 8:6 9:22 9:27 9:28 12:21 16:35 28:9 29:10–19 29:11–13 29:18

611 611 560 560 560 611 257 349 571 589 349

2 Chronicles 2:11 24:20–22 32:32 35:26

570 600 485 485

HOUTMAN_index_617-646.indd 618

Ezra 1–10 9:5

560 586

Nehemiah 1:8–9 1–13 6:19 8:10 9:16 13:15–22

257 560 485 263 357 189

Esther 1:1 1:2 1:3 1:4 1:5 1:5–6 1:6 1:7 1:8 1:10 1:11 1:12 1:13 1:14 1:14–15 1:15 1:18 1:22 2:5 2:6 2:7 2:11 2:14 2:16 2:18 2:19 2:20 2:21 2:23 3:1 3:2 3:3 3:6 3:7 3:8 3:10 3:12

515, 515 509 510, 510, 516, 521 511, 511, 513 515, 521 510 510, 520 514, 514 510 511 510 517 515, 511, 510, 515 516 511 518, 518, 516, 511, 518 510, 511 510 515 511 520, 510, 521

520 515 511, 512, 521 512 512 521 514, 515, 515

516, 520 512, 515 515

520 521 520 512, 521 511

521 512, 516,

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index 3:13 3:17 4:3 4:8 4:13–14 4:14 4:17 4:17a 5:1–2 5:6 6:8 6:10 6:13 7:2 8:1 8:2 8:3 8:5 8:6 8:7 8:8 8:9 8:10 8:11 8:12 9:12 9:24 10:3 33a–b 37a–c Job 5:14 31:16–20 37:6 Psalms 1:1 2:1 2:1–3 2:1–4 2:2 2:3 2:4 2:4–6 2:6 2:6–9 2:7 2:7–8 2:7–9 2:8

HOUTMAN_index_617-646.indd 619

510, 520, 515 512 518, 519 515 517 525 517, 521 520 518 515, 514 509, 510 510 510, 512, 510, 521 513 513, 510 513 513 515 521 517 525 525

511, 513, 521 521

518

521 510 511 521 514, 520, 515, 518

379 486, 489 274 429, 433 430, 440 431, 431, 444, 437, 430 434, 430 429, 441 430, 438

432 431 442, 446 437, 438, 443, 447 443 438 434, 435, 447 431

619 2:8–9 2:9 2:10–12 2:12 2:12a 2:21 2:24 6:8 8:7 21:5 22 24 31:19 37:4 41:13 42:5 49:11 50:1 51:13 51:19 52:10 52:15 52:55 69:3 72:18–19 82:1 83:7 84:11 86:10 89:7 89:52 92:14 96:11 97:9 97:11 104:2 105:8 106:47 106:48 110 110:1 111:6 119 126:5–6 135:2 141:2 144:1 146–50 147:2 148:4

Proverbs 8:20 8:22

431, 434, 430 429, 430, 433 434 243 582 442 450 450 269, 356 571 560 419 243 351 352 560 560 560 603 571 243, 538 560 277 243 571 560 536 243 273 274 283 257 571 450 582 276 350 501 560 535 571 571 257 281

437 449 448 432

270

244

269 240, 280

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620 8:24 8:30 9:18 16:8

index 281 268 272 490

Ecclesiastes 7:20

486

Isaiah 2:3 4:3 4:6 6:9 8:11 11:12 22:14 27:13 29:15 33:17 40:22 42:10 43:5–7 45:7 49:22 54:11 56:8 57:19 58:7 59:10 60:6 61:1–2 63:4 65:5b 65:6 65:15 66:22 66:24

560 409 272, 273 400 432 257 415 257 273 419 274 467 257 281 257 539 257 502 489 379 606 486 340 416 416 417 285 419

Jeremiah 3:17 7:22–24 7:24 11:8 16:10–12 16:12 18:12 23:8 31:8 31:10 35:4 39:37 51:39 51:57

357 357 357 357 357 357 357 257 257 257 560 257 418 418

HOUTMAN_index_617-646.indd 620

Lamentations 1:1

537

Ezekiel 1:26–28 10:19 11:1 11:5 11:17 11:20 13:9 18:5–9 20:25 20:34 28:25 34:11–16 37:21 39:27 44:10

340 560 560 560 257 409 409 489 209 257 257 257 257 257 432

Daniel 1:2 2 2:22 3:29 4:47 5:3 6:10 7 7:4–8 7:13 12:3

560 527 272, 273 356 490 560 586 527 538 447 338

Hosea 8:9

538

Joel 1:13–16

560

Amos 4:13 8:5–6

281 182

Micah 2:12–13 4:2 4:12

257 560 257

Habakkuk 3:4 3:11

338 338

Haggai 1:14

560

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index Zechariah 1:1 2:10 3

621 8:7–8 10:6vv 14:3

600 257 351

257 257 446

New Testament Matthew 1:1 1:14 1:14–15 2 2:1–12 2:2 4:10 5:3–12 5:16 5:17 5:21–7:23 5:21–48 6:1–18 6:2–18 6:19–20 10:2–4 10:28 12:42 13:35 13:38 13:43 13:55 13:55–56 16:27 17:2b 17:2c 17:5 20:29–34 22:6–7 23:35 24:15c 24:24 24:30 26:39 26:51 26:67 27:25 27:35 27:38c 27:51–52 27:56 27:61 28:3 28:20

HOUTMAN_index_617-646.indd 621

599 611 610 130 606 130 60 485 485, 485 485 485 260 490 499 607 410, 130 606 356 338, 608 607 340 338 339 339 607 127 599 410 332 340 587 605 339 127, 339 605 602 606, 606 339, 131

506

411

339

130

607, 608 341

Mark 1:4 1:14–15 1:45 2:26 6:3 8:38 9:2–10 9:3 10:18 11:25 13:14 13:18 13:26 13:36 14:35 14:47 14:65 15:21 15:24 15:40 15:47–16:1 16:12

136 136 374 560 606, 607, 608 340 337 338, 339 60 587 410 410 340 337 587 605 339 607 339 606, 607, 608 606 336

Luke 1:1–4 1:12 1:29 1:68–69 2:9 2:13 2:25–35 2:40 3:1 3:22 6:4 9:27 9:28–29 9:29 9:30 10:1–20 12:4–5 18:11 18:35–43 18:38–39

385 341 341 146 340, 337 603 603 137, 434 560 603 332 338, 337 605 410, 587 607 599

379

141

339 411

3/5/2008 8:56:50 PM

622 21:27 22:41 22:50 23:26 23:32 23:34 23:44 24:4 24:34 John 1:1 1:14 1:18 1:49 3:14–16 5:17 5:18 5:19–30 5:24–25 6:14 6:42 6:47 6:51 6:51c–58 8:58 9:22 10:22 10:30 10:33 10:38 11:25–26 11:27 11:44 12:6 12:42 13:31–17:26 14:10–11 14:31b 16:2 18:10 19:7 19:20 19:23 19:25 19:34–35 19:35 20:4 20:5 20:6 20:10 20:14 20:20 20:24–29

HOUTMAN_index_617-646.indd 622

index 340 586 605 607 605 339 378 373 376 241 204, 338 204 207 205 205 205 207 203 205 207 204 205 205 193, 389 205 205 205 207 203, 339 201 193 200 205 332 193 605 205 409 339 606, 205 374 406, 406 406 409 406 205 205

20:31 21:7 21:8 21:10 22:2 22:3 22:4 22:16

205

203

204

607, 611 408

Acts 1:1 f. 1:1–2 1:10 1:15 1:16 2:2 4:25–27 7 7:60 9:1–30 9:3 9:4 9:5 9:7 9:16 9:17 9:18 9:40 11:26 12:1 12:7 13:5 13:14 ff. 13:16 13:26 13:31 13:33 13:42 ff. 13:50 14:1 14:13 16:13 16:26 17:1 17:4 17:10 ff. 17:12 17:17 18:4 18:7 18:19 18:24–19:7 19:8 20:25–38

204 409 406, 409 406 406 406 406 406 403 385 373 335 335 337 434, 435 402 586 376 337, 377, 379 380 382, 383 377 402 376 383 586 129 402 381 401 401 401 401 376 429 401 401 401 70, 374 401 337 401 399 401 401 401 401 401 401 146 401 398

3/5/2008 8:56:50 PM

index 20:36 20:38 21:5 21:38 21:40 22:3–21 22:5 22:6 22:7 22:8 22:9 22:13 22:25 23:2 23:6 23:11 23:12 ff. 23:14 23:27 24:4 24:21 25:21 26:1 26:9–20 26:12 26:13 26:14 26:15 26:16 26:18 26:32 27:20 27:42 28:3–6 28:14 28:14b–16 28:15b 28:16 28:17 ff. 28:17–20 28:21 28:21–22 28:23 28:24 28:28 28:30 28:30–31 28:31 87–102 Romans 1:8–15 1:8–17 1:10 ff.

HOUTMAN_index_617-646.indd 623

586 402 586 396 377 376 377 337, 380 382, 377 383 396 396 400 396, 396 379 396 380 400 396 377 376 377 377, 380 382, 376 383 396 397 397 397 397 397 397 397, 398 399 399 400 399 399 400, 397, 397 398 600 577 569 399

377, 379 383

397

379 383

398, 399

401 398, 399

623 1:10–15 1:22 1:25 1:28 1:32 3:8 11:36 14:6 14:10 14:13 14:15 15:22 15:23 15:24 15:25–28 15:28 15:31 15:32 16:23 16:25–27

395 395 58 395 395 400 590 255 335 335 335 395 399 395 395 395 399 399 335 571, 590

1 Corinthians 1:1 1:4–9 1:12 2:9 3:11 3:16–17 4:1 5:7 6:6 6:19 8:12 9:1 10:30 12:6 13:13 15 15:5 15:8 15:20–28 15:25 15:27 15:28 15:53 16:12

335 577 146 340 561 560 561 563 335 560 335 376 255 582 579 336 333 376 580 582 582 582 306 335

2 Corinthians 1:3–11 6:16 8:7 9:6 12

570 560, 561 579 501 99

3/5/2008 8:56:50 PM

624 Galatians 1–2 1:5 1:7 1:17 2:9 3–4 4:8–10 4:8–11 4:9 4:17 4:25–26 5:6 5:10 5:12 5:22 6:10 Ephesians 1:1 1:3–6 1:3–8 1:3–14 1:4 1:5–6 1:6 1:7–13 1:9–14 1:11–12 1:13–14 1:14 1:15 1:15–23 1:16–19 1:16b–19 1:19 1:20–21 1:20–23 1:23 2:1–10 2:6–7 2:10 2:11–22 2:12 2:19 2:20 2:21 3:1–13 3:10 3:14–21 3:16–19

HOUTMAN_index_617-646.indd 624

index 192 590 192 376 401, 559 192 233 262 58, 234 192 258 579 192 192 579 560 592 571 578 569, 592 571 571 571 572 578 571 572, 571 579 569, 584, 579 587 573 582, 580 573 586 583 574 586 584 560 561 560 584, 582 574, 592, 587

570, 584,

595 574, 578, 592, 595

583

586, 587 584, 587, 594, 595

3:20–21 4:1 4:1–4 4:13 4:15–16 4:17–24 4:28 5:1 5:8–14 6:12 6:14–16 6:18–20 6:21–23 6:23

574, 595 584 587 589 587 587 584 584 584 582 584 591, 592 592 579

Philippians 1:1 1:3–6 1:3–11 1:9–11 2:6 2:7 4:20

556 569, 578 569, 577 569 336 336 590

Colossians 1:1 1:3 1:3–8 1:3–14 1:4 1:7 1:9 1:9–11 1:9–14 1:10 1:15 1:15–20 1:16 1:24–2:5 1:24–29 2:1 2:1–10 2:4–5 2:6 2:7 2:8 2:9–10 2:10 2:11–3:4 2:15 2:16 2:16–17 2:18

592 579 569, 574, 577 569 579 605 579 578 569, 574, 577 487 240 574, 582 582 572 587 589 587 589 589 589 58, 589 589 582 587 582 589 262 234, 239, 240, 589

3/5/2008 8:56:50 PM

index 2:19 2:20 3:5–11 3:11 3:12–15 4:2–6 4:9–18b 4:12 1 Thessalonians 1:2–5 1:2–10 1:3 1:6 2:12 2:13 2:13–16 2:19 3:6 3:9–10 3:9–13 3:11–13 4:1 4:11 4:13 4:15–17 4:17 5:5–7 5:8 5:23–24

587 58 587 582 587 591 592 605 569, 577 579 584 340, 569 569, 343 579 569, 593 569, 584, 583 584 584 476 476 584 579, 593

3:12 3:14 3:14–15 3:15

593

584 577, 593 578, 584, 593 593

584

2 Thessalonians 1:3 1:3–4 1:3–12 1:9 1:11–12 2:4 2:13–14

579 569 569, 577 340 569 560 569, 577

1 Timothy 1:5 1:12–17 1:17 2:1 2:8 2:8–13 2:10 2:15 3:1–2 3:1–13 3:4–5 3:8–13

561, 579 589 590 558 557 559 487 579 558 557 559 558

HOUTMAN_index_617-646.indd 625

625

3:16 3:16–19 4:3–4 4:12 6:5 6:11 6:16 6:20

559 558 557 556, 560, 563, 559 563 255 579 220 579 571, 549,

557, 558, 561, 562, 566

590 564

2 Timothy 1:13 2:20 2:22 3:10 4:8 4:18

579 562, 563, 566 579 579 343, 410 571, 590

Titus 1:7 1:11 2:1–10 2:2 2:9–10

561 220 561 579 562

Philemon 4–5 4–6 5 6 23

569 569, 573 579 569 605

Hebrews 1:13 2:6–8 3:6 10:21 13:13–14 13:21

582 582 560 560 258 571, 590

Epistle of James 1:11 1:12

343 343, 410

1 Peter 1:3–5 2:5 3:18 3:18–20

570 560 603 603

3/5/2008 8:56:51 PM

626

index

3:22 4:11 4:17 5:4 5:11

582 590 560 343 571, 590

2 Peter 1:5 1:16–18 1:18 2:1 2:3 3:18

212 337 334 332 220 571, 590

1 John 1:1–4 1:6 1:6–10 1:7 1:8 1:9 1:10 2:1 2:2 2:4 2:4–9 2:6 2:7–8 2:9 2:11 2:12 2:15 2:18–24 2:18–27 2:19 2:20 2:22 2:22–23 2:23 2:27 2:28 3:2 3:2–3 3:4 3:5 3:6 3:8 3:10

HOUTMAN_index_617-646.indd 626

196 194, 201, 199 200, 194, 201, 200, 194, 201, 200 200, 194, 201 199 194, 200 208 194, 201 201 206 201 196 193, 205 207 202, 204 197, 207 206 200 206 201 200, 201 201, 201

196, 197, 202 206 196, 197, 202 206 196, 197, 202 206 196, 197, 196, 197, 196, 197,

197, 199 204 204

206 206

3:14 3:15 3:16 3:17 3:23 3:24 4:1–4 4:1–6 4:2 4:3 4:8 4:9 4:10 4:11 4:13 4:14 4:15 4:16 4:17 4:19 4:20 5:1 5:5 5:6 5:6–8 5:19–20 5:20 7

201 201 200, 201, 200, 207 196 193, 207 202, 197 201 200 206 201 207 200 196, 203, 201 206 201 194, 199, 200, 200, 204 196, 206 199, 326 200 203

201, 206 202 201 197, 199, 203, 204

200, 202, 204

196, 197, 201 202, 203 202, 203, 200, 204, 200, 207

2 John 7

193, 202, 203

3 John 9–10

193

Jude 1 1–2 3 3–4 4 5 5–7 5–10 5–16 7 8 9

217, 213 218, 213, 213, 219, 218, 214, 214 213 222 214, 214

218, 222 222 217 217, 218, 222 222 215, 218

218, 219

3/5/2008 8:56:51 PM

index 10 11 12 12–13 12b–13 13 14 14–15 16 17 17–19 17–23 18 19 20 20–23 21 22–23 23 24 24–25 25

214, 215, 218, 215 220 222 218 215, 215, 222 217 215 213, 217, 218, 220 215 217, 220, 218, 222 215, 217,

Revelation 1:4–18 1:5–6 1:8 1:16 1:19 2:7 2:8

406 406 590 406 339 406 406 406

218, 222 218, 219 219, 222

220 218, 219,

223 219, 220 222 220, 222 222 219 571, 590 218

627 2:10 2:11 2:26–27 2:27 2:28 3:4–5 3:5 3:9 3:11 3:21 4:3 4:4 4:10 5:13 6:11 7:9 7:12 7:13–14 7:14 8:13 9:12 10:1 11:15 12:5 19:5 19:19 19:20 20:10 20:14 20:15 21:8

343 406 449 435 406 341 406 410 343 406 344 342, 343 590 342 342 590 342 342 449 449 339, 449 449 435 449 411 411 406, 417 406,

343

343

411 411

Apocrypha or Septuagint Baruch 3:24 4:8–10

560 257

Bel et Draco 5 7 19 22

167 167 167 167

Epistle of Jeremiah 3 7–15 8–72 39 45 50

167 167 167 167 167 167

HOUTMAN_index_617-646.indd 627

54–58 70–71

167 167

1 Maccabees 2:29–41 2:41

24 187

2 Maccabees 1:1–10a 1:9 1:10b–2:18 1:13–16 1:18 1:24–29 1:27 2:7 2:16

388, 390 389 388, 390 390 371, 389 258 258 258 389

3/5/2008 8:56:51 PM

628 2:18 2:19 ff. 2:19–21 2:19–23 2:19–32 2:23 3:1–7:42 3:4 3–5 3:5–6 3:7 3:8–9 3:10 3:15 3:16–17 3:18 3:19 3:23–24 3:24 3:25 3:26 3:27 3:30 3:31 3:33–4 3:36 4:17 5:2 5:2–4 5:17–20 5:18 5:24 5:25–26 6 6:12–16 6:12–17 6:18–7:42 7 7:6 7:9 7:14 7:28 7:29 7:37 7:38 8 8:1 8:1–15:36 8:2 8:5 8:15 8:18–20

HOUTMAN_index_617-646.indd 628

index 258 385 391 375 385, 393, 388, 390 370 388 370 370 370 370 371 371 371 371 371 371, 371 373 373 373 374 374 374 388, 372 391 388, 373 392 389 402 389 388, 395 388, 389, 389 410 410 389 390 391, 390 389 391 390 391 390 389 389

388, 391, 394 392

391

393, 394 389, 393

393, 394, 389, 390 402

392

8:26–28 9 9:28 10:1–8 10:8 10:29 11:8 11:39–46 12:22 12:31 12:38 12:41 ff. 14:15 14–15 14:35 14:37–46 15:1–5 15:27 15:34 15:37 15:37–39 15:37b–39

389 389 390 389 389 372 372 402 392 389 389 410 392 386 389 388, 389, 390 389 392 391 387 388, 393 394

Sirach 3:30 7:10 26:16 29:11–12 36:1–16 36:11 51:12 51:12a–q

490 490 338 490 258 258 258 258

Tobit 1:3 1:5–8 1:17 2:1 2:2 2:2–6 2:7–8 2:14 4:14–19 11:14 11:14–15 12:7 12:7–10 12:8 12:8–11 12:11–13 12:13 13:5 13:5–6 13:13

489 489 489 263 489 489 489 490 490 236 571 490 490 490 490 491 490 258 491 491

3/5/2008 8:56:51 PM

index 14:7 14:11

560 490

629 13:1 13:2–3 13:5 13:6 13:7 13:9 13:10–14:11

Wisdom of Solomon 1:15–16 410 7:21 241 7:29 338

53 53 53 54 54 54 55

Old Testament Pseudepigrapha Ascension of Isaiah 8:26 9 9:7–8 9:9 9:11–12 11.2

339 343 341 341 341 599

2 Baruch 3:1–3 10:7 14:12 51:3 51:10 77–78

257 499 338 338 258

3 Baruch 11:8–9 13:4 14:2 15:1–3

501 501 500 501

1 Enoch 6 14:9 14:19–20 17:1–3 38:4 51:5 57:1 62:13 62:15–16 90:34 104:2 106:2 106:10 108:13–15

233, 410 342 340 335 338 338 258 340 340 258 338 342, 343 342 338

4 Ezra 7:34–35 7:72–73 7:76–77 7:97 10:7

499 500 499 338 257

HOUTMAN_index_617-646.indd 629

13:32 13:35 13:37 13:39

434 434 434 258

Joseph and Aseneth 3.3 15 15:11–12x 29:1–3 29:3

571 236 237 479 479

Jubilees 2:16–18 5:2 11:16 12:16–20 35:9 50:10 50:12

181 348 233 53 348 263 263

Letter of Aristeas 16 18 127 128 128–171 171 187–294 205 210 225 226 231 248 272

493 492 493 493 493 493 493 493 493 493 493 493 493 493

Ps.-Philo 15:6

236

Ps.-Phocylides 1–2 3–7 4

483 501 479

3/5/2008 8:56:51 PM

630 9–54 9–131 22–54 27 29 30 31 32 32–4 33 41 42–7 42–54 44 55–96 57–58 63–64 69a 77–78 80–81 91–94 97–8 97–115 97–121 99 100–2 100–8 100b 101 102 103 103–4 103–8 103–15 103–104 104 105 105–7 105–8 106 106–108 107–8 108 108b 109–15 111 111–5 111b 112–13 114–15 115 118 118–20 121

HOUTMAN_index_617-646.indd 630

index 477 477 477 477, 478 478 478 479 478 478 477 479 477 479 479 479 480 481 480 481 481 474 476 470, 474 475 474 475 475 471, 476 472 471 473, 472 471 472 470, 472 473 472 476 476 473 474 473, 471 473 476 476 472 474 474, 474,

478

477

475

482

472

476

476 477

132–136 132–227 134 138 153 153–74 157 159 162–63 175 175–76 175–94 175–227 184–185 190–91 195–97 220–22 229–30 230

480 480 480 481 481 481 481 481 481 481 481 480 481 480 480 481 482 482 482

Psalms of Solomon 8:27–28 8:28 9:9 11:2–6 17:26 17:28 17:30–31 17:31 17:34–36 17:43–44

258 258 499 258 258 258 258 258 258 258

Sibylline Oracles 1.33 2.23 2.156 3 3.27–38 3.97–349 3.218–220 3.235 3.332 3.363 3.364 3.586–90 3.601–7 4.91 8.166 8.175 8.352 11.46 11.240 13.106 14.213

118 118 118 231 167 494 494 495 118 119 119 167 167 119 119 118 118 118 118 118 118

3/5/2008 8:56:51 PM

index Testament of Asher 1:3 1:3–9 1:8–9 3:2 4:1–5

503 347 503 504 504

Testament of Benjamin 5:3 504 6:7 504 10:3 504 10:5 504 Testament of Joseph 1:1–7 504 3:5–6 504

631

Testament of Levi 5:5–6

236

Testament of Naphtali 4:5 8:4 8:5

502 502 502

Testament of Zevulon 5:1–5 6:4–5 7:1 8:1–3

503 503 503 503

Dead Sea Scrolls and Related Texts 1Pes.Hab 7:11 8:1 12:4

488 488 488

1Q18 1–2 3

348 348

1Q20

523

1QHa 35 22 25 23 12

348 351 348

1QM 13:7 13:11–13 14:8

231 356 233 356

1QS 1–7 1:20 1:24–2:1 1:25–26 2:4–5 3:13–4:24 3:13–14 3:18–19 3:26 4:6–8 5:5–6 8:3 8:9 9:3–8

488 488 355 356 487 353 347, 503 353 503 406 560 348 560 560

HOUTMAN_index_617-646.indd 631

4Q158

523

4Q223–224 2:1.49

348

4Q259 2:1.1

348

4Q266 11:11

356

4Q270 1:1.1

348

4Q286 7:2.7–8

349

4Q287 67

349

4Q299 86 87

348 348

4Q364 23a–b i

523

4Q364–367

523

4Q365 14 23

523 523

4Q365a

523

4Q366 4:1

523

3/5/2008 8:56:51 PM

632

index

4Q370 1:1.3

349 349, 356

4Q438 4:2

351

4Q377 2:2.5

356

4Q468i 1–6

354, 355, 356

4Q381 46a 46b 4 76–77 2

356 356 349

4Q392 6–9 3

4Q504 1–2:2.8 1–2:4.12–13 1–2:6.6 4:7

356 351 356 357

356

4Q393 36

356

4Q506 131–132:12 131–132:13

356 357

4Q400 2

238

4Q525 7:4

349

4Q400–407

178

4QDamDoc 3:1

179

4Q416 1:16

348

4QRP 57:1–59:21

522 524

4Q417 1:1.17 1:2.12

348 349, 350

11Q5 19:15–16

350

4Q418 2a–c 8 43–45 I 13 81:1–15

348 348 236

11Q6 4–5

350

11Q12 7:4

349

4Q422 1:12

349

11Q17

178

4Q428 13:8 14:3

348 348

11QPsalms 27

179

4Q434–438

351

11QTa 51–66

522

4Q435 2:1.5

352

4Q436 1:1.1 1:1–2 1:1.10

352 351, 352 351, 352

4Q437 2:1.12 4

352 351

HOUTMAN_index_617-646.indd 632

CD 1 2:16 10:14–11:23 11:14–15 20:29

355 348, 349, 351, 353 179 179 356

3/5/2008 8:56:52 PM

index

633

Classical Works and Authors Aeschylus Agamemnon 1624 Choephori 1061 Prometheus Vinctus 323 Alexandra of Miletus I. Didyma 496 Ammianus Marcellinus 15.8 15.13.2 16.12.64 17.12.2 18.4.1 21.2.4 21.16.1–7 21.16.8–21 22.5.1 22.5.2 22.10.7 22.12.6 22.14.3 25.3 25.4 25.4.1–15 25.4.16–21 25.4.17 25.4.20 29.1.31 31.2.11 31.5.9

381 372 381

384 73 77 79 79 77 66 77 77 66 69 73 74 74 73 73 73 73 73, 77, 78, 79 73 77 78 79

Apollonius of Rhodes 4.855 4.1312

372 378

Apuleius Metamorphoses 11.13

374

Aristides Apology 2–3 4.2 5 7.4 16

58 58 58 58 448

HOUTMAN_index_617-646.indd 633

Artemidorus 2.44

375

Asclepius Inscriptiones Graecae 4.1.121–24 4.951–2

375 377

Athenagoras 16.1 16.4 16.5

58 58 58

Augustine De Civitate Dei 6.11 De Haeresibus 46.1 Enarrationes in Psalmos 56.9 Sermo 5.5 Callimachus Bath of Pallas 73–4 Hymn to Apollo 9 Cicero De Divinatione 1.7 1.47 De Inventione 2.165 De Legibus 2.19 De Natura Deorum 2.6 2.64 2.70 2.72 3.5 3.79–93 3.82 3.82–83 3.91 Epistulae ad Atticum 10.1a

177 106 36 36

378 372

78 118 76 45 371 113 78 74, 75 68 114, 115 108, 117 117 115, 116 78

3/5/2008 8:56:52 PM

634 Clement Protrepticus 63.1 67–70 Stromata 3.3.12.1–2 3.3.14.1 3.3.14.1–21.1 6.110.3 6.111.1 Cyprianus Ad Fortunatum 12 Ad Quirinum 1.13 1.15 2.8.29 3.20.56.112 3.119 Epistle 69.12

index

59 59 324 324 324 59 59

408 429 438 429 429 438 78

Cyril of Alexandria Acta Conciliorum Oecumenicorum I 1.1.40–2 202 Dio Cassius 49.20.5 59.24.1

125 123

Diodorus Siculus 13.24.5

160

Diogenes Laertius 7.10–11 7.23 7.29 8.6 8.39–40 8.47–8

108 115 108 121 119 120

Empedocles fr. B 17.7 D–K fr. B 17.35 D–K fr. B 20.1–3 D–K fr. B 20.2 D–K fr. B 21 D–K fr. B 26.4–5 D–K fr. B 35.3–6 D–K fr. B 35.5 D–K fr. B 36 D–K fr. B 38.2 D–K fr. B 108 D–K

320 321 320 321 324 320 321 321 320, 321 326 324

HOUTMAN_index_617-646.indd 634

fr. fr. fr. fr. fr. fr.

B B B B B B

109.1 D–K 115 D–K 115.13 D–K 117 D–K 120 D–K 124 D–K

Epictetus 2.7.12 Epiphanius Against Heresies 72.3 Panarion 18–20 Euripides Bacchae 45 325 443–8 567 ff. 596–99 605 795 1078–83 1255 Eusebius Explanatio psalmi II 24.79–82 24.84 24.89 Historia Ecclesiae 3.11.1 3.18.3 5.30.3 6.38 Praeparatio Evangelica 9.34.1 XIII.12.7

326 320, 324 326 320 326 324 383

603 85

381 381 381 381 381 380 380 381 381

435 438 451 608 422 422 85 570 234

Firmicus Maternus De Errore Profanarum Religionum 17.1 78 Galen De Placitis Hippocratis et Platonis 5.6.43 121 Gregory of Nazianzus Oratio 4.76 18.178

66 66

3/5/2008 8:56:52 PM

index Heraclitus Quaestiones homericae 24.5 325 Herodotus 7.171 8.37

118 163

Hesiod Opera et dies 243

118

Hippolytus Apostolic Tradition 21 Refutation 9.13–17 9.14.1 10.29.2 Homer Iliad 2.167 ff. 2.182 10.512 11.196 ff. 15.243 ff. 20.330 ff. 20.375 ff. 20.380 22.214 ff. 24.169 ff. Odyssey 4.400 9.19 11.252 11.268 16.159 ff. Horace Epode 16.2

262, 603 85 100 100

372 372 372 372 372 372 372 372 372 372 378 383 383 383 372

119

Iamblichus De Mysteriis 5.15 39 De Vita Pythagorae 56 121 Irenaeus Adversus Haereses 1.28 597 3.11.7–8 597

HOUTMAN_index_617-646.indd 635

635 5.30.3 31:1

422 220

Istrus FGrH 334 F 50–52 334 F 53 532 D

375 375 375

Jerome Life of Malchus 10

606

Josephus Antiquitates Judaicae 3.280–285 22 4.196 19 5.90 168, 5.101 168, 9.95 168, 9.137 168 11.302–347 386 11.304 153 11.339 168 12.22 234 12.120 26 12.255 168 12.271 168 12.277 24 12.280 168 13.251 160 13.297 23 13.397 168 14.63 24 14.194 168 14.202 25 14.210 154 14.213 168 14.223 168 15–16 171 15.109 151 15.121 151 15.161–162 151 15.184–201 151 15.254 168 15.255 168 15.266 168 15.267 168 15.267–268 162 15.268 151, 162, 15.268–269 164 15.268–276 151,

169 169 169

156, 159, 169 165

3/5/2008 8:56:52 PM

636

index 15.268–290 15.269 15.269–270 15.270 15.271 15.272 15.273 15.273–275 15.274 15.274–275 15.274–276 15.275 15.276 15.276–277 15.276–278 15.277 15.277–279 15.277–290 15.278 15.279 15.280 15.280–290 15.281 15.284 15.285 15.288 15.291 15.328 15.329 15.339 15.341 15.375–376 16.1 16.1–5 16.35 16.43 16.137–138 16.137–141 16.138 16.140 16.140–141 16.184–185 16.225 17.148–164 17.149–152 17.159 17.161 17.180–181

HOUTMAN_index_617-646.indd 636

151–173 154, 155, 165 155 155, 156 151, 155, 158, 164 152, 156, 164 156 154, 156 156, 165, 170 165 20, 169 152, 159, 169 159 165 152, 156, 165 151 165 165 159, 162, 165 153 153, 165, 170 156, 165, 156 165, 170 170 164, 169 161, 162 161, 162 158 169 168 168 168 168 164 151, 159 162 165 164 168 168 169 168 168 158 168

156,

156, 159,

169

162,

162,

165 169, 170

17.255 18.9 18.53–64 18.55–59 18.57 18.59 18.60–62 18.63–64 18.65–84 18.79 18.85–87 18.88–95 18.109–119 18.109–126 18.113 18.116 18.116–119 18.119 18.136 18.261–309 18.319–323 19.14–118 19.92 19.93 19.95 19.290 19.335–336 20.17 20.38 20.100 20.139 20.146 20.169–172 20.216–218 Bellum Judaicum 1.84 1.400–415 1.401 1.401–402 1.401–428 1.403 1.415 1.417–421 1.643 1.648–655 1.666 2.5–7 2.44 2.142 2.147 2.148–149 2.169–174 2.169–177 2.172

158 20 144 144, 152 152 152 144 144 144, 145 162 144 144 128 139 142 128 135, 144 128 141 151 25 153 153 165 153 168 158 168 168 168 168 168 396 20 171 171 170 156 172 170 151, 158 170 498 169 158 169 158 239 178 22 152 144 158

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index 2.184–203 2.261–263 2.279 2.457 2.460–465 2.490 2.492 2.500 3.68 4.102 4.182 5.184–247 5.460–465 6.288–315 6.289–290 7.39–40 7.50 7.96 7.100 7.109 7.136 7.219–243 7.236 7.238–243 7.424 Contra Apionem 1.163 1.317 2.10 2.145–220 2.175 2.192 2.220–286 2.230 Vita 74–76 198 Julian Epistle 8.415a 26.415c 46.404c 54.380d 61c 61c423a 83 84.430b 89a.454b 89b 89b.305b 111 111.435a

HOUTMAN_index_617-646.indd 637

151 396 168 162 128 158 158 125 125 168, 169 168 156 125 391 391 129 168 129 129 129 162 122 126 124 168 121 168 168 497 178 497 497 498 26 168

71 69 66 66 67 68 67 70 66 70 66 65 66

637 Against the Galileans fr. 72 39 fr. 84 72 Hymn to the Mother of the Gods 180b–c 65 Praise of King Helios 131a 66

Justin Apology 1.40 1.65–66 Dialogue with Trypho 55.1–2

429, 435 262 59

Justinian Novella 146

36

Lactantius Divinae Institutiones 1.6.8–12 4.28 4.28.7 4.28.11 5.13.3 7.25.7

231 75 76 76 78 119

Letter of Mara bar Sarapion Cureton (ed.) 43:6 110 43:9–14 112 43:19 111 44:6–21 123 44:7.22 113 44:9 133 44:20 112 45:6–10 124 45:7 125 45:12–17 116 45:21 113 46:11 131 46:12 112 46:12–20 108, 116 46:15–16 128 46:15.19–20 130 46:19 119 47:8–15 126 47:9–11 126 47:20 112 47:22 113 48:3 113 48:3–5 124

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638 48:5–6 48:6.14.26 48:7–16 48:8–10 48:13–15 48:14 70:10–12 Schulthess (ed.) 5 5–9 9–10 9–29 10–11 14 17–20 23 23–31 24–34 28–29 47–71 49 71 74–5 75 91–98 93 100–07 104–5 105 105–6 110–12 112 114 116 128 139–43 139–152 140 143–55 144 145 146 148 150 150–1 153 153–4 153–5 154–55 155 163–64 165 168–69

HOUTMAN_index_617-646.indd 638

index 124 113 123 124 124 131 111 111 110, 110 131 111 112 111 111, 112 111 110 123 113 112 114 112, 124 125 116 112 120 112 114 112, 111 112 112 132 115 131 116 112 118 112 130 112, 118 112 112 112 130 119 112 112 115

111

112

113

113

120

178–184 178–189 181–183 185–189 190–95 193–4 194 197 200 214–216 216–218 218 222 222–226 227–36 231–234 233 234–6 237 238 244 252

126 126 126 126 111 112 111 112 113 124 124 112, 113 112 124 132 124 112, 113 131 111 112 112 112, 113

Libanius Oratio 1.119 12.80 12.82 18.121 18.126 18.128

71 78 74 69 69, 71 78

Longus Daphnis and Chloe 2.4 2.26

378 376

Lucan Civil War 1.186 1.191–2

371 371

Marcian Institutiones III, fr. 74

45

Marinus Life of Proclus 32

373

Nicolaus of Damascus FGrHist 90.52

153

3/5/2008 8:56:52 PM

index Origen Commentary on John 1:1 2.24–27 Contra Celsum 4.56 5.6 5.10 5.11 6.27 Selecta in Psalmos 12.1099–1118 12.1101 12.1103–05 12.1107–11

60 60 60 59 60 60 305 435 436 437 437

Ovid Metamorphoses 3.144–5

378

Pausanias 3.19.12 5.27.7

368 161

Petronius 117.5

78

Philo Apologia 7.12–14 De Abrahamo 69 159 De Aeternitate Mundi 10 20 108 De Agricultura 20–22 79–82 De Cherubim 36 De Confusione 59 146 173 De Congressu 50 103 De Decalogo 52 53–57 58

HOUTMAN_index_617-646.indd 639

178 56 57 57 57 57 219 464 242 496 242 56 56 57 54 54 55

639 66 55 96–101 461 De Exsecrationibus 165 258 De Gigantibus 62–64 56 De Migratione Abrahami 177–181 56 179 56 De Opificio Mundi 27 57 55 57 144 57 De Plantatione 12 55 De Posteritate Caini 81 496 181 496 De Praemiis et Poenis 117 258 De Providentia 2.84 57 De Sacrificiis Abelis et Caini 53 495 De Somniis 2.34 496 2.242–245 242 De Specialibus Legibus 2.61–63 461 2.175 255 4.149 20 13–20 55 16 55 19 55 20 55 De Virtutibus 212 56 De Vita Contemplativa 2 56 24–27 465 26 460 29 461 34 463 40–63 461 78 462 85 464 89 56 De Vita Mosis 1.180 464 1.313–14 478 2.37 23 2.209–216 461 2.214–16 178 2.256 464

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640 In Flaccum 41 46 Hypothetica 7.10–14 Legatio ad Gaium 93–113 162–177 203 203–337 225 278 281 288 294 299 299–305 305 334 346 Legum Alleg. 1.65 2.86 Quaestiones in Genesim 1.70–6 2.62 3.1 4.152 4.157 Quis Rerum Divinarum 97 191 Quod Deterius Potiori 35 Pindar Second Pythian Ode 88 94–6 Plato Cratylus 400b–c Epinomis 984d5–7 985d–e Laws 740c1 821b–c 967a–c Phaedrus 252cc Republica 517a

HOUTMAN_index_617-646.indd 640

index 61 257 461 61 61 257 151 257 257 257 257 257 257 152 257 257 257 242 242 324 242 56 325 57 56 242 496

381 381

324 50 50 49 50 50 49

Timaeus 27d–29b 29e–30a 34b8 37c6 38d5 40d4 47a–d 52d–53b 92c7

272 272 50 50 51 50 54 272 50

Pliny the Elder Naturalis Historiae 3.136

160

Pliny the Younger Epistle 10.96.8

75

Plotinus Enneads 2.9.4–5 2.9.8

51 51

Plutarch De Alexandri Fortitudine 328a 121 De Genio Socratis 583A 119 De Iside et Osiride 370B 113, 118 De Stoicorum Repugnantiis 1051B–D 114, 117 1051C 119 1051C–D 108 Sulla 19 163 Porphyry De Abstinentia 2.26–27 De Vita Pythagorae 56–7 57 Pseudo-Linus Martyrium Petri 17

39 119 121

373

Sallustius On the Gods and the World 16.2 72

117

3/5/2008 8:56:53 PM

index Seneca De Beneficiis 7.7.3–4 De Providentia 5 6 Epistulae Morales 78.17 95.50 96.5 110.2 Solon 13.62

115 114, 115 114, 115 114 115 114 115 377

Sophocles Oedipus Coloneus 1460–71 1464–6 1606 1606–7 1623 1624–5

382 382 382 382 382 382

Stobaeus Eclogae I 3.54

115

Strabo 16.2.3

125

Suetonius Nero 16.2 Tacitus Annales 2.18 2.42.5 13.7 14.26 15.44.3 56.4 Historiae 2.81 4.81.3 5.1.2

75

160 125 125 125 75 125 125 374 125

641

Tertullian Adversus Marcionem 4.22 4.42 5.22 De Idololatria 10

429 435 438 67

Theocritus 1.15

378

Theodoret of Cyprus In Psalm 2.3 876c–877a

439

Theodosian Codex 13.3.5 16.5.10 16.5.34 16.10.2

67 76 76 39, 77

Thucydides 2.47–55 2.54

117 118

Virgil Aeneid 8.187 Georgica 1.269

78 76

Zeno of Citium Stoicorum Veterum Fragmenta 2.331 113 2.1086 113 2.1091 113 2.1107 115 2.1178 114 2.1179 115 2.1180 115 2.1197 115 3.74–7 112 3.491–9 112 3.674 112

Rabbinic Works Babylonian Talmud Abodah Zarah 3a–b 3b

HOUTMAN_index_617-646.indd 641

443 443

Baba Batra 16a Baba MeÉia 59b

353 24

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642 Berakhot 8a 10a 17a 32b 33b 61b Æagigah 11b 15a Megillah 3b 13a 29a Pesahim 117a Sanhedrin 2–3 21a 91a 92a 92b 98b Shabbat 118b Sukkah 52a Mishnah Abodah Zarah 2.6

index 40, 429 429 40 41 533 447 282 373

Abot 3:11 4:11 4:17 6:19 Æagigah 2:1 Ma{aser Sheni Rosh ha-Shanah Sanhedrin 10:1 Shabbat 7:2 Shebiit 10.3–4 Sotah 9.9 Yadayim 4.3 4.4 4.7

489 521 258 258 446 420 444 414 442 442

Talmud Yerushalmi Æagigah 2:1/33 f.

177 441

Tosefta Berakhot 6:12 Æagigah 2:7

26

487 487 487 487 270, 282, 283 26 26 416 178 27 24 23 25 23

282

487 282

Apostolic Fathers Barnabas 2–3 18–20

446 250, 503

1 Clement 5 20.12 32.4 39.4 43.6 45.7 50.7 58.2 61.3 64 65.2

398 590 590 590 590 590 590 590 590 590 590

2 Clement 20.5

590

HOUTMAN_index_617-646.indd 642

Didache 1:1 1:1–3a 1:3a 1:3a–2:1 1:3b–2:1 1–6 1–10 2:2 2:2–6:1 2:2–7 5:1 6:1 6:2–3 7:1b 7:4

248 249, 249, 250, 249, 247, 251, 247 249 249, 252 501 248, 248, 250, 252 251 261

251 252 251 251 250, 503 251 249 249, 251,

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index 7–10 7–16 8:1–2

11:12 11–15 14:1 16

247 250 248, 261, 589, 254 590 253 590 248, 590 262 248 254, 255, 253 571 590 248, 590 220 247 262 247

Diognetus 12.9

590

8:2 9 9:2 9:2–4 9:3 9:4 9:5 9–10 10 10:2 10:2–5 10.2–6 10.4 10:5

259, 260, 264 590

256, 263,

255, 257 590

256, 263,

643

Epistle to Diognetus 6:7 Ignatius Eph. 7–9 18–19 Magn. 8–11 9:1–2 Phld. 5–9 Smyrn. 1–9 2:1 4:2 5:2 6:2 Trall. 9–10 10:1 Martyrdom of Polycarp 14.3 20.2 21 22.3

448

207 207 207 262 207 207 208 207, 208 207 207 207 208 590 590 590 590

Targumic Texts Fragment Targum Deuteronomy 33:6 Targum Jonathan Isaiah 4:3 22:14 33:17 53:9 65:5b 65:6 65:15 66:24 Jeremiah 51:39: 51:57 Targum Onqelos Deuteronomy 33:6

HOUTMAN_index_617-646.indd 643

414

417 415 419 413 416 416 417 419 418 418

413, 418

Isaiah 22:14 65:6 65:15 Jeremiah 51:39 51:57

413 413 413 413 413

Targum Psalms Psalms 49:11 49:12 49:13

419 420 420

Targum Pseudo-Jonathan Genesis 46:30

413

Targum Rishon Esther

521

Targum Sheni Ester 2:20

521

3/5/2008 8:56:53 PM

644

index Midrash and Other Rabbinic Works

Aggadat Bereshit 2 Bereshit Rabba 1:1 1:2 1:3 1:4 1:5 1:6 1:7 1:8 1:9 1:10 1:11 1:12 1:12–14 1:13 1:14 1:15

444 268, 283, 276, 288 268, 286, 278, 287, 267, 279, 287, 272, 275, 286, 280, 287, 267, 287, 268, 287, 284, 284, 288 284, 285, 286,

272, 280, 287, 288 280, 287, 277, 287, 280, 288 268, 280, 288 283, 277, 287, 281, 288 280, 288 281, 288 287, 286, 287 287 287

279, 288 283, 269, 283, 287 279, 288 283, 286, 283, 288 287

Genesis Rabbah 14:7 32:3 44:17 46:3 75:4

449 535 529 534 535

Leviticus Rabbah 13:5 27:11

535 446

Mekhilta Yithro 1

487

Mekhilta de Rabbi Ishmael Shirata 7 440 Midrash Psalms 2:2 2:8 2:9 2:11 Midrash Tannaim 3:23–29 5:14 11:12 23:22 Deuteronomy 32:39

440 447 449 449 487 487 487 487 420

Canticles Rabbah 7:3

448

Pirqe de Rabbi Eliezer 18 442

Esther Rabbah 7:23

440, 446

Sifra 18:3

168

Exodus Rabbah 29:5 51:5

534 447

Sifré Deuteronomy 29 30 347

487 487 413

New Testament Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha Acts of John 87

376

Acts of Thomas 1 108:12–14 110:45–46 112:76–87

376 309 309 309

HOUTMAN_index_617-646.indd 644

Arabic Infancy Gospel 25 603 30 603 42 603 Gospel of Nicodemus 9 605

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index Gospel of Pseudo-Matthew 1.2 599, 607 41.1 608 42 607 42.1 606, 607, 608 Gospel of Thomas P.Oxy. 11.1382

375

History of Joseph 2.3 2–4

606 608

Infancy Gospel of Thomas 5.2 604 Leabhar Breac Infancy Narrative 94.6 606 Nativity of Mary 1 1.1 6 9 10

607 599 604 603 603

Protevangelium of Jacob 1.1 607 1.2 607 2.1 607 6 604 10.1 599 Revelation of Peter (Akhm.) 1 329, 330 1:2 337 1:3 337 1:6 337 1:8 337 1:10 337 1:19 337 1:21 337

645 1:24 1:50 1:59 1:60 2 2:1 2:1–3 2:2 2:3 2:4 2:5 2:5–13 2:6 2:7 2:8 2:8–9 2:10 2:10–11 2:12–13 2:13 2:14 2:14–20 2:15 2:16 2:17 2:20 2:21–34 2:22 2:23 2:27 2:28 2:30

337 337 335 337 329, 332 331, 332 332 332 332, 333, 333, 338, 341, 336, 341, 343, 342 333, 335 333, 333 336, 333 339 335 333 335 335 335 335 339

330 334, 342

334, 345 336, 339, 344 342, 342 344

344 344 340, 344

344 335, 344 343

Vision of Dorotheus 4 378 131 373 145 373 Vision of Paul 2

373

Other Books and Manuscripts Enuma Elish V 15–22

183

Kephalaia 9.24–14.4 36.1–11 36.3–6

97 97 97

HOUTMAN_index_617-646.indd 645

T.Kell.Copt. 2.A5

98

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646

index Early Christian Literature

Pseudo Clementine Homilies 7.1 ff. 7.3.3 ff.

HOUTMAN_index_617-646.indd 646

249 249

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