Conclusion

Jewish historiography in the Hellenistic and early Roman worlds was complex. Jewish authors were recipients of a tradition of historiography that could not be ignored. The presence of a common group of texts that had to serve as a basis for any retelling of the early history of the Jewish people was fundamental. Some attempted to continue it, but in different ways. Others drew from these texts but creatively altered the story. Regardless of the specific historiographical stance that these different historians took, they all shared a couple of common perspectives. First, they wrote the story of a people. Some wrote about ancient history while others wrote about more recent history. The common element was that the Jewish people were the basic subject matter of their stories. As such, they wrote to establish the identity of the Jewish people, whether they understood this in terms of the larger world or solely of Judaism. Second, they believed that God controlled the history of the Jewish people.

Their understanding of the divine and how the divine worked in history varied, yet they all recognized that it was their connection to their ancestral traditions and God that gave them identity as the Jewish people.

There is a strange twist to the subsequent history of these historians. The heirs of these historians were not the rabbis who developed Rabbinic Judaism after the destruction of Jerusalem, but rather the early Christians who preserved these works and developed a new and different identity that lacked the specific ethnic focus of these earlier historians. They used these Jewish historians and the identity that they offered of Judaism to create a new identity for the religious adherents of Christianity. Just as these historians recreated their ancestral past to forge a new identity in the Hellenistic and Roman worlds, so early Christians used these reconstructions of Hellenistic Judaism to create Christian Hellenism.

FURTHER READING

The texts of the historians appear in different sources. The best collection of the Hellenistic Jewish historians is Holladay 1983. 1 and 2 Maccabees and 1 Esdras are available in editions of the Septuagint (Rahlfs 1935; the editio maior is the Gcittingen edition with critical editions of 1-4 Maccabees [1967] and 1 Esdras [1974]). The editio maior for Josephus is still Niese 1885-1895, the basis for the Loeb edition. Under the leadership of F. Siegert, the Institutum Judaicum Delitzschianum at the University of Miinster is producing a new edition of the works of Josephus with German translations and notes: the volume on the Life has appeared (Siegert et al. 2001). E. Nodet and a team of French scholars are producing an edition of the Jewish Antiquities with a French translation and notes: vols. 1-4 covering AJ 1-9 have appeared (Nodet 1992-2005). The Latin translation of Pseudo-Philo is available in Sources Chrdtiennes (Harrington et al. 1976) and in Jacobson 1996. All of the works except those in the Septuagint and Josephus are available in English translations in Charlesworth 1983-1985. The Jiidische Schriften aus hellenistisch-romischer Zeit volumes have German translations of and notes to these works (vols. 1 and 3) with extensive introductions and bibliographies (vol. 6).

There are several helpful surveys of Hellenistic Jewish historians. These typically treat each author individually. Some of the most important recent surveys include: Attridge 1984a and 1986, with helpful bibliography; Doran 1987, which should be read in tandem with Walter 1987; Denis 2000: II.1107-1189; Mittmann-Richert 2000, the most extensive recent treatment; and Lehnardt 1999, who offers an excellent bibliographic beginning point.

There are some important monographs that treat different aspects of the tradition. Sterling 1992/2006 attempts to establish a historiographical tradition to which a number of the fragmentary Jewish Hellenistic historians and Josephus’ Antiquities belong. Wills 1995 has argued for the genre of the Jewish novel and collected and translated these as Wills 2002. Gruen 1998 emphasizes the creativity and playfulness of many of these works. Inowlocki 2006 argues that Eusebius did more than collect Jewish sources, a point that is of great importance to the study of the fragmentary historians.

Finally, there are important treatments of individual historians. Wacholder 1974 provides not only a thorough treatment of Eupolemus, but analyzes similar concerns in other authors. Bar-Kochva 1996 demonstrates how Pseudo-Hecataeus argued for the legitimacy of his

Diaspora community. The bibliography on 1 & 2 Maccabees and Josephus is staggering. Goldstein 1976 and 1983 are a good beginning point. The single most important recent contribution to Josephus is the Brill commentary series that S. Mason is editing. Each volume contains a fresh English translation and commentary. Five of a projected ten volumes have appeared covering the Life, AJ1-10, and Against Apion. Louis Feldman has devoted a lifetime of research to Josephus; he has made a special contribution to the way that Josephus presents characters in AJ, e. g., Feldman 1998b, 1998c. Rajak 2002 is one of the most important interpretations of BJ. Feldman and Levison 1996 contains the most important recent work on Josephus’ apology. Schreckenberg 1968 and 1979, Feldman 1984b (with the update in Feldman 1989) provide extensive bibliographies of past research.