Pseudo-Hegesippus

This article provides the first close comparative analysis of the Greek, Latin, and Hebrew versions of the 'Maria Story' or teknophagia, the account of the mother who ate her child within a besieged Jerusalem first recorded in Flavius Josephus' Jewish War 6.201-213. Josephus wrote his original account in Greek in the first century. Within the following half millennium, three Latin editions of the story emerged: those of 1) the Latin translation of the War, 2) Rufinus of Aquileia's translation of Eusebius' Church History, which contains Josephus' Greek version of the story, and 3) the Latin adaptation of PseudoHegesippus or On the Destruction of Jerusalem (De Excidio Hierosolymitano). This latter text comprises a late fourthcentury Christian rewrite of the Greek War and served as the most important source for a Jewish text that would emerge five hundred years later: the so-called Sefer Yosippon, an early tenthcentury Hebrew text which is arguably the first and most important installment of medieval Jewish historiography. Each of these texts has received scholarly attention, and sometimes several have been discussed together. Nor has the Maria Story itself escaped scholarly treatment. Yet the exact relationship between these texts and their renditions of the Maria Story has never been closely examined and clearly explained. This article fills this gap in the research and uses the Maria Story to explore source critical, literary, philological, and rhetorical questions pertaining to these five versions of the Maria Story, with an emphasis upon De Excidio and Sefer Yosippon, the most understudied iterations of this ancient and medieval tradition.

A translation of a story from the Yosiphun (Josippon). There are other versions in Josephus and Pseudo-Hegesippus, but this one is somewhat unique, bearing parallels to the Toldot Yeshu literature, the Gospel of Luke, and the Alexander Romances.

The fourth century of the Common Era was a period significant for witnessing the effective birth of Christian historiography and the (putatively) definitive separation of 'Jew' and 'Christian' as distinctive identities. A text emerged, known as Pseudo-Hegesippus or De Excidio Hierosolymitano (On the Destruction of Jerusalem). This text illustrates how Christian historiography and Christian anti-Jewish ideology at that time could engage with the traditions of classical antiquity. In particular, this article argues that Pseudo-Hegesippus deploys figures from the Hebrew Bible in the mode of classical exempla and that it does so within the largely classical conceptual framework of national decline. For Pseudo-Hegesippus, biblical figures presented as classical exempla serve to illustrate the historical decline of the Jews until their effective end in 70 CE (when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem and the Temple). One passage, De Excidio 5.2.1, and its enlistment of five Hebrew heroes illustrates this point particularly well. The use of exemplarity and the theme of national decline employed there help us appreciate De Excidio as a distinctive contribution to early Christian historiography and anti-Jewish literature in late antiquity; this expands our ability to imagine the ways in which fourth-century Christian authors could conceive of and articulate Jewish history in classical terms.

Exemplarity, ethnography, and exegesis are three forms of cultural practice well known to the ancient Mediterranean world. The use of role models, the 'writing' of peoples, and the interpretation of authoritative writings (i.e. "Scriptures") were ways in which many authors of Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian antiquity situated themselves and others within history. Here I argue that the biblical patriarch Abraham, as received within the late antique Christian text called Pseudo-Hegesippus (On the Destruction of Jerusalem), provides a quintessential example of these scribal-rhetorical habits in action. The upshot of this study is that key figures like Abraham were integral tools for doing the things that certain interested ancient writers were trying to do, and as such these figures constitute appropriate, even necessary, objects of research for those seeking to understanding ancient Mediterranean texts, authors, and readers.

In brief: the "Latin Josephus tradition" is a variegated tradition of diverse texts, and readers in the Middle Ages (and even before) encountered this tradition in one or more of its various iterations, making the tradition's reception trajectory more dispersed than streamlined.