The Origins of Islam for them. Time and again ere now the sight has been witnessed of pris-
oners enduring tortures and death in every form in the theatres, rather
than utter a single word against the laws and the allied documents.
What Greek would endure as much for the same cause? Even to save
the entire collection of his nation’s writings from destruction he would
not face the smallest personal injury. For to the Greeks they are mere
stories improvised according to the fancy of their authors.^1What Josephus says about the available records of the history of the Jews is
also, viewed from a different angle, a statement about the material which he
had been able to use for the twenty books of hisJewish Antiquities,written
in Greek in Rome; beginning with the Creation, this great work carried its
narrative continuously to the outbreak of the great revolt in... Josephus
did his best—both in the passage cited and elsewhere—to distance himself
from the conventions and criteria of Greek literature.^2 But he was none the
less, inevitably, reshaping his material to make it acceptable and intelligible
to a Greek readership. This paper is devoted to the way in which one char-
acteristic Greek way of relating the past to the present was taken over by
Josephus, and applied to the retelling and exposition of the biblical narra-
tive. If the consequences of his doing so were indeed as will be suggested
below, the particular step which he took was to be of very great importance
for future religious history.
The mode of thought, or means of categorising information, which Jose-
phus took over from Greek historical writing was that which was expounded
by Elias Bickerman in a now famous article of , ‘‘Origines Gentium.’’^3
That is to say that one very significant way in which Greeks tended to charac-
terise the various other Greek, semi-Greek, and non-Greek peoples whom
they encountered was to identify them in terms of legendary or divine
founders who themselves had a place within Greek mythology or mythical
history. More important still, these identifications were often taken over and
adopted by semi-Greek and non-Greek peoples, with real consequences for
both their self-identification and their activities and attachments in the con-
temporary world. The legend of the descent of the Macedonian kings from
Heracles via emigrants from Argos is merely one example, and one which was
to have important consequences for the ambitions of Philip and Alexander
. Josephus,C. Apion. , –, Loeb trans.
. See alsoBJ,pr. –;Ant. , –.
. E. Bickerman, ‘‘Origines Gentium,’’Class. Philol. (): Religions and Politics
in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods(), .