Biblical Hebrew Forum

[peter_kirk AT sil.org]

Well, Josephus may have claimed to be translating Hebrew originals. 
His claim looks a little thin when he is at that point (AJ 10,10,6) 
making a very abbreviated precis of an Aramaic original (Daniel 4) - 
or perhaps he didn't know the difference between Hebrew and Aramaic? 
;-) Josephus would not be the last person who claimed to be 
translating the Bible from the original but was actually rephrasing an 
existing translation, and he was clearly a man capable of such 
"economy with the truth".

So to continue the important digression (not a "red herring") we have 
got into, and to extend the comparison to the Hebrew Scriptures (as 
appropriate to this list) as well as to the New Testament, see my 
comments interspersed below.

Peter Kirk


______________________________ Reply Separator 
_________________________________
Subject: Re[7]: Josephus & 1Esdras (Peter)
Author:  mc2499 AT mclink.it at internet 
Date:    16/07/1999 19:30


Dear Peter,

You wrote:

>1) Josephus was brought up with and knew fairly well the 22 books 
>(according to his reckoning) in Hebrew corresponding to the whole of 
>the existing MT, including Ezra.

He may have known many books well.

>2) Josephus when composing his writings used the best available Greek 
>translations of these books,

He says in his Antiquities that he set out to translate the Hebrew books 
(AJ 10,10,6).

PK: See my point above.

>namely the Septuagint (or something similar).

We have very little knowledge of what the state of Greek translation of the 
TaNaCh was. You are making too many assumptions again.

PK: We have some Greek texts from Qumran etc, I believe, and we have 
complete texts from the 4th century. I only suggested something 
similar to the Septuagint. It is you who are insisting that he had 1 
Esdras, a Septuagint book, in something close to its surviving form.

>Either he did not have the Hebrew text available in the 
>Gentile setting in which he was working,

He says he did.

PK: Well, not quite. His text is quite compatible with a claim that he 
is translating from memory. Of course he was not, but he may have 
pretended to himself that he was using existing Greek translations to 
jog his memory. Anyway, he says lots of other things which are 
demonstrably false.

>or he chose to work from the
>Greek text because he was writing in Greek. (If you, Ian, were writing 
>a paper on the Bible in Italian, would you have open in front of you 
>an Italian Bible or an English one?) Obviously he followed the Greek 
>text in front of him when spelling names.

Besides 1 Esdras, what texts can you show evidence for? None, of course. So 
the assumption you are firing on is unsupported. I'll therefore cut the 
following stuff based on it.

PK: I do have some evidence from AJ 11.6.7, Josephus' account of the 
Esther story, which includes the words of Mordecai's lament: "a nation 
that had been injurious to no man was to be destroyed." These words are 
not in the Hebrew text, but they are in the Greek text of Esther 4:1 in 
the form "An innocent nation is being destroyed!" (NRSV) The letter of 
Artaxerxes in AJ 11.6.12 (as well as the name Artaxerxes) seems to have 
come from the Greek text of Esther (8:12 in LXX, chapter 16 or addition 
E in English translations), although the nationality of Haman has been 
corrected to "Amalekite" according to Josephus' understanding of the 
Hebrew "Agagite". This sort of correction could not come from a written 
Hebrew text and so suggests that Josephus was relying on his memory of 
the Hebrew.

<snip re Nehemiah>

>By the way, what is the date of the earliest manuscripts of Josephus or 
>other definite evidence of his existence? How can you use him as a 
>source for anything earlier than that? Surely, by your exacting 
>standards, the dating of his writings to any date before those earliest 
>manuscripts and his very existence are pure speculation and should be 
>ruled out of court in any discussion of anything.

Josephus can very often find support in the archaeological and epigraphic 
heritage. We know who he was, where he wrote, under what circumstances, 
what his purposes were.

PK: Only from the internal evidence in his own writings. Is there any 
contemporary external evidence for the existence of Josephus?

>To quote your other
>E-mail in the similar context of the NT, "1) you don't know when the 
>texts were written;

We know when AJ was written. The historical situation is relatively precise.

PK: On the same argument from internal evidence we know when Gore 
Vidal's "Julian" was written, in the late fourth century.

2) you don't know who wrote them;

We know who wrote it. Many of the fathers quoted him.

PK: And we "know" that Julian wrote his own autobiography. What are 
the accepted dates of the "fathers" you refer to? And what are the 
dates of the earliest surviving manuscripts of their works or 
epigraphic evidence of their existence?

3) you don't know the connection between the writers and Palestine."

And you are being desperate.

PK: Well, I accept that the author had some knowledge of Palestine.

Except that at least
>we can date much of the NT before the end of the 2nd century

Very little actually. But exaggeration is for effect.

PK: Not "very little" if we include such papyri as P46 and P66 dated 
"about 200" (see Nestle-Aland 27th edition) and containing large parts 
of the NT.

>as we have
>dateable manuscripts, whereas I guess the deadline for Josephus is much 
>later. So why do you treat the (alleged) works of Josephus as a good 
>source but reject my parallel use of the NT?

This red herring is merely taking us away from the discourse that you 
wanted to argue against but had no evidence for.

1) Each of Josephus's works contextualise themselves, giving a historical 
situation in which they were *written*. This is not true for any of the NT.

PK: This is true of most of the epistles in the NT. It is also true of 
much of the Tanakh. But in the past you have rejected such evidence 
for the dating of Hebrew books as valueless because based on internal 
evidence only (you made the comparison with "Julian", remember?)

2) Many of the events in Josephus's works has a lot of archaeological and 
epigraphic support. Would you like to provide substantial examples for the NT?

PK: There are events in the NT as well as in Josephus' works which 
have "a lot of archaeological and epigraphic support," as well as 
others which do not. For the NT, how about the death of Herod in Acts 
12 and the proconsulship of Gallio in Acts 18? Several others 
mentioned in Acts are historical characters known from epigraphic 
evidence. Of course most of the NT does not claim to be a work of 
history and so "archaeological and epigraphic support" would not be 
expected.

3) Josephus claims to be an eye witness to a lot of his data. Which of the 
NT works offers a writer who claims to have been an eye witness?

PK: The authors of John (see 21:24), 1 John (1:1) and 2 Peter (1:16), 
explicitly. (These claims can be doubted, but so can those of 
Josephus). Much of Acts, by implication from the "we" passages.

4) Josephus shows very little in the way of anachronisms in his comments on 
contemporary history. There are some interesting anachronisms in the NT.

PK: There are some clear historical errors in Josephus. Which 
anachronisms in the NT do you have in mind?

5) Josephus claims to be writing history and gives the impression that that 
is what he is trying to do.

PK: So does Luke, explicitly in Luke 1:1-4. So (in a slightly 
different way) did the authors of the historical books in the Hebrew 
Bible.

This is off the top of my head, but it should be enough. Literary tradition 
is clearly not enough.

PK: What you have written is clearly nothing like enough to establish 
any good reasons for treating Josephus as more reliable than the NT or 
the Hebrew Bible.

At least you seem to come round to my conclusion that Josephus was probably 
using the Greek 1 Esdras as his main source for the Ezra story. He states 
that he was using Hebrew books -- that's why I found the use of 1 Esdras 
interesting -- and he was happy to "deliver these accounts to the Greeks" 
(AJ 20,11,2).

PK: I don't think I ever claimed anything else, only that he would be 
expected to use a Greek translation when writing in Greek.

Cheers,


Ian


PS: I will not deign to answer your E-mail about levels of education, 
which shows appalling ignorance, except to say that I was never 
talking about university level education. It is generally recognised 
that Jewish boys received compulsory education in their synagogues (as 
instituted by Simon ben-Shetah about 75BC) - formal education 20 
centuries before this one. If you want to learn more about these 
things, take a course in sociolinguistics at an SIL school (as I did) 
or any university.