I think this is about Josippon See Christianity in Jewish Tradition We know some forms of Josippon were contaminated by the Toledoth Yeshu..................................
2). Suppose a Christian scribe was copying the Antiquities and had two manuscripts: one which had the Testimonium in it and another which did not. Which would he accept? I suspect it would be the one which had the Testimonium.
We do in fact know of one case from the Middle Ages in which someone claimed to have discovered Hebrew manuscripts of Josephus which did not contain the Testimonium:The great malice and obstinate faithlessness of the Jews is made quite clear by the fact that they keep the book of their own great historian in Hebrew among themselves and deem it to be authentic, with the sole exception of the testimony about Christ which they do not accept. So when this testimony by their own author is pointed out to them, they say, lying, that in their own Hebrew books it has never been found or written. But the prior of St. Frideswide, Master Robert, an old and authoritative man whom we have met … since he was erudite, well-read in the Scriptures, and not ignorant of the Hebrew language, sent to various English villages in which Jews were resident who had many Hebrew manuscripts of Josephus. Upon request they furnished him with them as he was a familiar figure since he knew the Hebrew language better than they, and he collected them together. In two of these manuscripts he found this testimony to Christ intact and written in the logical place, but it appeared as though it had been recently erased. In all other manuscripts however, it had been missing for a long time: it appeared as though it had never been [Gerald of Wales, De Principis Instructione, Distinction I, trans. from Whealey, Josephus on Jesus, 61]
We do not know if this really happened, or how accurately the story is if it did. What is this Hebrew translation of Josephus? Is this the Josippon? If so, then the part about it preserving Josephus work except for the Testimonium is wrong. The Josippon is vastly different from the Antiquities. The part about that Josephus being 'their own great historian' probably comes from Eusebius. Jews did not regard Josephus that way, or not until modern times.
But I think the story is interesting in what it tells us about how Christians might react to the discovery of a manuscript of Josephus that did not contain the Testimonium. They might well have thought it was suppressed by the Jews. (William Adler has published on Christian accusations of Jewish forgery in antiquity - I could dig up the reference on request).
Andrew Criddle
Statistics: Posted by andrewcriddle — Mon Aug 26, 2024 8:20 am
