be actual occurrences or was merely seeking to emphasize for his audience the gravity of the occasion with rhetorical exaggeration is, of course, beyond the realm of solution.
6. A final characteristic of Josephus’s account of Israelite and Judean history is his lack of any sense of development in the people’s institutions and religion. The orthodox practices, beliefs, and institutions of his day were assumed to have existed from the time of Moses (see the book of Jubilees where the patriarchs are depicted as exemplary practitioners of the Mosaic law). That the whole of Jewish law and the institutional structure of Judaism had been given on Mount Sinai was a firmly anchored concept in later rabbinic Judaism. Josephus certainly operated with a very similar assumption.
After Josephus, ancient Judaism produced no historian in any way comparable. Very few Jewish writings from the rabbinic and Talmudic periods can be called historical works. Three perhaps should be noted. The Megillat Taanit (“The Scroll of Fasts”) is an Aramaic document probably written near the beginning of the second century CE. Containing a list of thirty-six days on which Jews were not to fast because of the joyous events that occurred on those days, the work provides some narrative material on events during the period of the second temple. However, in no way can it really be designated a real history. The Seder Olam Rabbah (“The Order of the World”), probably from the second century CE, is a chronological work generally ascribed to Rabbi Yose ben Halafta.27 The work established a chronology based on the calculation of dates from the creation of the world (libriath ha‘olam or anno mundi). While it is primarily concerned with the dating of biblical events, a final chapter surveys the period from Alexander the Great to the revolt of Bar Kokhba in 132–135 CE. Meyer has summarized the value of this work in the following terms: The author’s
endeavour to establish a single consistent chronology, reconciling apparent variations in the biblical text, would place his work very much in the rabbinic tradition of seeking to resolve scriptural contradictions which might otherwise create some doubt about the accuracy of the text. Though he confined himself almost entirely to biblical history, mixed chronicle with midrash, and sometimes departed from chronological sequence, the author of Seder Olam did evince a desire to establish a sequential framework for Jewish history. His concern was unusual for that time.28
Pseudo-Philo’s Liber antiquitatum biblicarum was apparently produced in the first century CE as a Jewish handbook on biblical history.29 The work is primarily a midrashic chronicle of biblical history from Adam to David characterized by extensive omissions, modifications, and additions to the biblical texts. Its exact purpose is unknown. Many of its additions have parallels in other Jewish haggadah. The work was translated into Greek and subsequently into Latin, perhaps in the process being turned into a Christian handbook.
The sudden cessation of the writing of historical works by the Jews has been explained in various ways. The causes of this phenomenon were probably multiple; among them were the Jewish loss of a national and cultic center, the sense of a demise of sacred history with the destruction of the temple, the further scattering of the Jews in the diaspora that intensified the dissipation of any concept of continuing political history, the canonization of Scripture that presented the Jews with a closed sacred past, the general disillusionment with historical processes attendant upon the failure of two major Jewish revolts against Rome, and the rabbinical orientation towards the law and its application and the rabbinical demands for total purity of life and separation from the world. Jewish historians in the Hellenistic and Greco-Roman world had borrowed the forms and interests of Hellenistic historiography and ethnography and utilized these for apologetic, propaganda, and polemical purposes. Josephus was a primary example. After the Bar Kokhba Revolt, these purposes seem to have lost their appeal. Jewish apocalyptic, with its special historical concerns, was reduced to only a glowing ember in the Hadrianic fires.
The early Christian church inherited from Judaism a collection of Scriptures strongly oriented to history. This combined with the belief that God had finally and fully revealed himself in the historical person, Jesus of Nazareth, meant that Christians could not ignore past history; in fact it had to claim the history of the old covenant as its own. The apologetic desire to present Christianity as the true heir of Old Testament faith and the evangelistic-confessional proclamation of the church as the special object of God’s providence led to the attempt to view “theocratic” history in systematic form. This systematization of history took both chronological and philosophical forms, although even the chronological perspectives were undergirded with major theological claims. The earliest specimens of Christian interpretation and systematic treatments of history were more chronological than historiographic in form.
The Christian chronographers had to summarize the history that the converts were now supposed to consider their own; they had also to show the antiquity of the Jewish–Christian doctrine, and they had to present a model of providential history. The result was that, unlike pagan chronology, Christian chronology was also a philosophy of history. Unlike pagan elementary teaching, Christian elementary teaching of history could not avoid touching upon the essentials of the destiny of man.30
Little is known of the Christian chronographers and their works prior to the establishment of Christianity as the state religion in the fourth century CE. Among the most important of these pre-Constantinian Christian ‘historians’ were Clement of Alexandria, Julius Africanus, and Hippolytus of Rome. Their concerns were primarily apologetic—to counter the contempt of Christianity as a novelty; and their methods were primarily those of their precursors, the Greco-Jewish historians and Hellenistic chronographers.
The work of Julius Africanus (about 170–245 CE), of which only fragments have survived, will illustrate the approach of these Christian chronographers.31 Africanus’s work, which was still available to Jerome (De viris illustribus, 63), consisted of five volumes. He treated the history of the world from creation until his own day and like practically all patristic writers saw chronology in eschatological perspectives. He allotted 6,000 years for the world’s duration and dated the birth of Jesus to 5500 anno mundi. Such time schemes or world ages were common in Jewish apocalyptic writings and are even found in rabbinic sources.32 Africanus did not share the view of his North African contemporary Tertullian, who claimed that “to be ignorant of everything outside the rule of faith is to possess all knowledge.” He worked out an elaborate synopsis of sacred and profane history, using as a fixed point the accession of Cyrus, and sought to collaborate his synchronisms with quotations from secular sources. He dated the flood to 2,262 after creation and apparently placed the exodus in the year 3,707. The first of these reckonings differs from the LXX, which places the flood 2,242 years after creation, and the date of the exodus was correlated with a Greek version of the flood assigned to the time of Ogygos, the legendary first king of Thebes. The date of Cyrus’s accession was derived from Diodorus of Sicily, who had stated that Cyrus became king of the Persians in the opening year of the fifty-fifth Olympiad. The Olympiad system was based on the quadrennial celebration of the Olympic games, with the first of these supposedly held in what would be our 776/775 BCE.33
In Africanus, one sees a flicker of textual criticism, so essential to scientific historiography. In a letter to Origen, he outlined seven reasons for considering the story of Susanna as late and fictitious and thus as no original part of the book of Daniel. He also noted and discussed the differences in the Matthean and Lukan genealogies of Jesus. Africanus’s textual criticism and skepticism of sources, however, nowhere approached that of the non-Christians Celsus and Porphyry. In their attacks on Christianity, the former criticized the miraculous and absurd in the Bible and the latter denied the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch, pointed out inconsistencies in Genesis, understood the book of Daniel against the times of Antiochus Epiphanes, and called attention to major disagreements in the Gospels.
Eusebius of Caesarea, who died about 340 CE, utilized the works of his Christian and pagan predecessors in the study of chronography and produced an extensive chronology of world history. Although especially indebted to the work of Africanus, Eusebius frequently deviated from him and developed a new system for synchronistic tabulation. Unfortunately, Eusebius’s chronographic work has survived only in Jerome’s Latin translation
