Antioch is the first place where Christians congregated. This chapter will explore the establishment of Antioch’s Christian community, as well as its leadership and connections with other churches.

Chapter 1 does the work of conventional introduction to De Excidio by surveying everything we know about the text, from date, authorship, and provenance to manuscript witnesses, sources, and reception history, including a critical discussion that clarifies the relationship between De Excidio and its main source, Flavius Josephus’ Jewish War (written in Greek around 75 CE). Chapter 1 also lays out a framework for the rest of the study by explaining Roman exemplarity as a rhetorical discourse especially familiar within scripted character speeches by historians in the Greco-Roman world.

Chapter 9 surveys the biblical exempla that appear in the most example-packed section of the work, the speeches made by the narrative character Josephus before the walls of Jerusalem to his Jewish comrades (De Excidio 5.15–16). This chapter most clearly illustrates Pseudo-Hegesippus’ hermeneutical ingenuity and intensive use of biblical exempla, while also showing how he infused the examples he drew from the Jewish Scriptures (the Christian Old Testament) with not only Roman but also overtly Christian ideology.

The Introduction frames the study as an argument about the use of biblical figures within the narrative of On the Destruction of Jerusalem (De Excidio Hierosolymitano). Bay maintains that a survey of the scriptural characters that appear in this text suggest that these remembered heroes were an important tool for how Pseudo-Hegesippus conceived of and communicated late Second Temple period Jewish history from a late antique Christian perspective. This chapter also recommends the Old Testament exempla of On the Destruction of Jerusalem as a good place to start literarily for approaching and understanding the background, aims, and inner logic of this text. Bay further explains how the biblical exempla of Pseudo-Hegesippus often appear within speeches placed into the mouths of historical characters in the narrative, a typical literary feature of ancient historiography. Finally, the Introduction helps situate this study within the history of scholarship – not only within the little work done on Pseudo-Hegesippus, but also in the context of various scholarly discussions in Classics, biblical studies, early Christianity, Jewish-Christian relations, and late antique literature.

Chapter 4 shows how Pseudo-Hegesippus participates in the common ancient Mediterranean historiographical discourse of national decline. In De Excidio 5.2, the author juxtaposes five biblical figures (Moses, Aaron, David, Joshua, Elisha) of the Hebrew past to the first-century Jews of his narrative in a way that exposes the relative lack of virtue, faith, and strength among the “latter-day Jews.”

Chapter 3 explores how Pseudo-Hegesippus uses the figure of the patriarch Abraham, along with several other biblical heroes, to drive a variegated discourse of Jewish ethnography throughout De Excidio. By zeroing in on two passages where Abraham and other Bible figures are used to talk about “what the Jews are like” (i.e., ethnic stereotyping), Pseudo-Hegesippus shows himself familiar with ancient ethnographic conventions and uses ethnography to present various pictures of the Jewish national character in the mouths of both Roman and Jewish narrative characters.

The Conclusion brings the works chapters into a synthetic discussion of what this book is designed to do: introduce On the Destruction of Jerusalem to contemporary scholarship and point to the ways in which it can enhance our knowledge of historiography, speech-writing, exemplarity, anti-Judaism, Classicism, biblical reception, and Greek-to-Latin literary adaptation in Christian late antiquity.

Chapter 5 explores Pseudo-Hegesippus’ brief yet striking engagement with the ancient Judeo-Christian discourse of martyrdom. It assesses the biblical figures cited in a speech made by the Jewish leader Matthias in De Excidio 5.22, and compares this to the story of the martyr deaths of the Christian apostles Peter and Paul in De Excidio 3.2, to show how De Excidio delegitimates the notion of Jewish martyrdom, implicitly leaving Christians as the only legitimate martyrs of the first century CE.

Chapter 7 analyzes the relatively few passages in De Excidio in which the figure of the Old Testament prophet Elisha shows up, passages that tend to tell much longer stories in which this biblical hero is involved than is true of other Bible figures in De Excidio. The chapter argues that this phenomenon, which I call “extended exemplarity,” also has parallels in ancient Roman literature, and suggests particular interests of the author, as well as exposing specific potentialities of exempla within historical literature generally.

Chapter 8 assesses De Excidio 3.16–17, a set of speeches made after the Battle of Jotapata (66 CE) by Josephus’ Jewish comrades and then by Flavius Josephus, the Jewish general, himself. The chapter shows how Pseudo-Hegesippus articulates and plays with very Roman ideas of death, war, and virtue by inserting biblical exempla into these two speeches, which are radically changed and rewritten from the Greek versions found in Josephus’ Jewish War.

Chapter 2 exposes a subtle yet thoroughgoing aspect of De Excidio’s anti-Jewish rhetoric at the crossroads of language and identity. It shows how Pseudo-Hegesippus creates a conceptual distinction between the Jews (Iudaei), who are ignoble, and their ancient ancestors, the Hebrews (Hebraei), who are noble, as a way of couching the work’s historical narrative within a framework of Christian supersessionism.