that Joseph Scaliger pointed up its Jewish origin. The content is not so dis-
tinctively Jewish as to allow the reader to identify its author as a Jew. This
interesting example should warn us that a Greek text attributed to a Greek
philosopher or historian may be a Jewish text. Not all Jewish literature is
“obviously Jewish.”
Due to a lack of information, we must exclude from the corpus texts
written by Jews who either had no commitment to their cultural heritage
and religious tradition, or who chose to express themselves on topics that
had little or nothing to do with the characteristic features of Judaism. Con-
versely, we will mention in passing authors who are not Jewish but who ex-
cerpted Jewish writings (e.g., Alexander Polyhistor) or who mentioned
Jews and Judaism in a way that invited a response from early Jewish au-
thors (Manetho, Apion).
One more reason to be cautious is that nearly all the Jewish texts writ-
ten in Greek have been transmitted to us through Christian channels.
Moreover, some of the church fathers — Clement of Alexandria and
Eusebius, in particular — depended on Alexander Polyhistor, a Greek his-
torian active during the first centuryb.c.e.The evidence we have is thus
indirect, and it should not been taken for granted that we have the
ipsissima verbaof the Jewish authors whose works are now lost. What is
more, the church fathers who quoted early Jewish writers such as
Aristobulus, Eupolemus, and Artapanus did not attempt to preserve Jew-
ish literature as such. They were looking for proofs of the antiquity of bib-
lical revelation, in order to respond to pagan critics such as Celsus and
Porphyry. What they ultimately wanted to show was that Christianity was
not a new cult but a respectable religion with very ancient roots, even older
than Greek civilization itself. Since Jewish authors had taken pains to dem-
onstrate the antiquity of the Jewish people and the influence Moses exer-
cised on Homer, Pythagoras, Plato, and others, their writings represented a
providential pool of arguments for the church fathers. In Josephus, they
also valued references to events contemporary with Jesus’ life and the view
that the Jewish defeat in the First Revolt was a punishment for the sins of
the Jewish people, the Christian interpretation of what Josephus wrote be-
ing that the Jews had sinned in rejecting Jesus. The case of Philo is differ-
ent, since many church fathers sincerely admired his work and took inspi-
ration from his allegorical exegesis. Nevertheless, they used Jewish
literature written in Greek with their own agenda in mind, an agenda that
was clearly apologetic. They frequently manipulated the works they were
quoting, either by omitting the context or by modifying the text. In short,230katell berthelotEERDMANS -- Early Judaism (Collins and Harlow) final text
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