Sefer Yosippon

John the Baptist shocked his audience by his appearance: a camel-hair garment and a leather belt. Why? Because as the Hebrew version of Josephus's Wars says he was called 'Rabbi John the Baptist High Priest'. High priests wear linen girdles. Some Hebrew manuscripts of the Gospel of Matthew add that the belt he had was black. What is the significance? Roman leather was usually brown.
These indications show that John had been residing in the country of Rome's hereditary enemy, Parthia. He had come to confront the guilty men of Israel. His dress was a reminder of their crimes.

This study explores the previously unstudied anti-Jewish Persian polemic Anbāʾ al-anbiyāʾ by the Jewish convert to Twelver Šīʿī Islam, Ismāʿīl Qazvīnī, the father of Ḥāǧǧī Bābā Qazvīnī Yazdī. It examines Ismāʿīl Qazvīnī’s discussion of a medieval Jewish controversy concerning the four-kingdom schema in the book of Daniel and Ibn Ezra’s interpretation of the dream-vision in favor of Islam as the fourth kingdom. The study shows that Ismāʿīl Qazvīnī, besides his reference to Muslim works in Persian, relied on different (partly printed) Jewish textual sources in the original Hebrew and Aramaic (Miqraʾot Gedolot, Neḇuʾat ha-yeled, Sefer haš-šorašim, Sefer Josippon), from which he quoted in his own Persian translation/adaptation. He thus made internal Jewish debates accessible to native Muslim scholars, such as Mullā ʿAlī Nūrī, who borrowed from Anbāʾ al-anbiyāʾ. Ismāʿīl Qazvīnī was a cross-cultural intermediary and go-between who expanded the traditional range of Šīʿī polemical arguments against Judaism in pre-modern Iran.

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.

Josephus' Temple ekphrasis in his Jewish War (5.136-247) is a significant literary monument. The description of this quintessential Jewish holy place has a great deal to do with Jewish identity. In the late fourth century, the Latin Christian author Pseudo-Hegesippus, in his work On the Destruction of Jerusalem, rewrote the Temple description to emphasize Christian identity as central to the Temple's construction, not Jewish identity. In the tenth century, the Jewish author of the Hebrew Sefer Yosippon rewrote the Temple description again to emphasize Jewish identity. By reading these Greek, Latin, and Hebrew Temple descriptions comparatively, one may identify an ongoing identity discourse about Jewish and/or Christian identity vis-à-vis the Jerusalem Temple. These three accounts, with each subsequent account based on the one that came before, illustrate a back-and-forth discussion between Jewish and Christian authors across a millennium about what the Temple means and is/was for Jews and Christians.

This lecture presents the argument that Josephus' Jewish War, a first-century Greek narrative about the Roman Jewish War of 66-73 CE, its fourth-century Christian adaptation into Latin (Pseudo-Hegesippus), and the Hebrew adaptation of Pseudo-Hegesippus into Hebrew in the tenth century (Sefer Yosippon) constitutes a 'fight for Jewish identity' - via the historiography of a critical period in Jewish history - between Jews and Christians over the first millennium CE.

The present work deals with an aspect in the reception of the stories
about ancient history -secular as well as sacred history-, in the Iberian
Peninsula in the XVth Century. For this purpose, it have been taken
into account the relationships stablished among the works that narrate
the history of the Jewish people and the destruction of Jerusalem, represented by the Castilian Yosippon and the legends about the emperor
Vespasian, and those other works about the origin of the Holy Grail,
specifically the Iberian versions of the Estoire del Saint Graal. It is concluded that all these works agree with a noble and chivalric way of reading. For this reason they were interpreted as texts from which some
knowledge of the Antiquity could be learned, just as they were understood to be historiographical works. In addition, this interpretation conditioned the treatment these texts received, in such a way as to incorporate
intertextual references that reinforced their belonging to this common
narrative background.