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Writing the Jews out of History: Pseudo-Hegesippus, Classical Historiography, and the Codification of Christian Anti-Judaism in Late Antiquity

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 August 2021

Carson Bay
Carson Bay*
Affiliation:
Institute for Jewish Studies, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: carson.bay@theol.unibe.ch
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Abstract

Scholarly narratives of the development of Christian anti-Jewish thinking in antiquity routinely cite a number of standard, well-known authors: from Irenaeus, Tertullian, and Justin Martyr in earlier centuries to Eusebius, John Chrysostom, Ambrose, Jerome, and Augustine in the fourth and early fifth centuries. The anonymous author known as Pseudo-Hegesippus, to whom is attributed a late fourth-century Latin work called On the Destruction of Jerusalem (De Excidio Hierosolymitano), rarely appears in such discussions. This has largely to do with the fact that this text and its author are effectively unknown entities within contemporary scholarship in this area (scholars familiar with Pseudo-Hegesippus tend to be specialists in medieval Latin texts and manuscripts). But “Pseudo-Hegesippus” represents a critical contribution to the mosaic of Christian anti-Jewish discourse in late antiquity. De Excidio's generic identity as a Christian piece of classical historiography makes it a unique form of ancient anti-Jewish propaganda. This genre, tied to De Excidio's probable context of writing—the wake of the emperor Julian's abortive attempt to rebuild the Jerusalem Temple, resurrect a robust Judaism, and remove Christians from public engagement with classical culture—renders De Excidio an important Christian artifact of both anti-Judaism and pro-classicism at the same time. This article situates Pseudo-Hegesippus in a lineage of Christian anti-Jewish historical thinking, argues that De Excidio codifies that discourse in a significant and singular way, frames this contribution in terms of its apparent socio-historical context, and cites De Excidio's later influence and reception as testaments to its rightful place in the history of Christian anti-Judaism, a place that modern scholarship has yet to afford it. As a piece of classical historiography that mirrors not Christian historians—like Eusebius and others—but the historians of the broader “pagan” Greco-Roman world—like Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus—De Excidio leverages a cultural communicative medium particularly well equipped to undergird and fuel the Christian historiographical imagination and its anti-Jewish projections.

Keywords

Pseudo-HegesippusDestruction of JerusalemAnti-JudaismJosephusAncient Christian Historiography
Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 90 , Issue 2 , June 2021 , pp. 265 - 285
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of American Society of Church History

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References

1 Rutgers, Leonard V., Making Myths: Jews in Early Christian Identity Formation (Leuven: Peeters, 2009)Google Scholar; and Fredriksen, Paula and Irshai, Oded, “Christian Anti-Judaism: Polemics and Policies,” in The Cambridge History of Judaism, vol. 4, ed. Katz, S. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 977–1034CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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4 Mitchell, Margaret M., The Heavenly Trumpet: John Chrysostom and the Art of Pauline Interpretation (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002 [2000]), 223Google Scholar. See also Harkins, Paul W., Saint John Chrysostom: Discourses Against Judaizing Christians, Fathers of the Church 68 (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1979)Google Scholar; Shepardson, Christine, “Controlling Contested Places: John Chrysostom's Adversus Iudaeos Homilies and the Spatial Politics of Religious Controversy,” JECS 15, no. 4 (Winter 2007): 483–516Google Scholar; and Shepardson, Christine, Controlling Contested Places: Late Antique Antioch and the Spatial Politics of Religious Controversy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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6 Christine Shepardson, Anti-Judaism and Christian Orthodoxy: Ephrem's Hymns in Fourth-Century Syria (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2008).

7 David Brakke, “Jewish Flesh and Christian Spirit in Athanasius of Alexandria,” JECS 9, no. 4 (Winter 2001): 453–81, which demonstrates the utility of Jews as symbols in constructing a “catholic” church in the fourth century.

8 Maria Doerfler, “Ambrose's Jews: The Creation of Judaism and Heterodox Christianity in Ambrose of Milan's Expositio evangelii secundum Lucam,” Church History 80, no. 4 (December 2011): 749–772.

9 Hillel I. Newman, “Jerome's Judaizers,” JECS 9, no. 4 (Winter 2001): 421–452; and now William L. Krewson, Jerome and the Jews: Innovative Supersessionism (Eugene, Oreg.: Wipf and Stock, 2017).

10 To this list we could add Epiphanius of Cyprus: Young Richard Kim, Epiphanius of Cyprus: Imagining an Orthodox World (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2015), 44–82, esp. 77; and Andrew S. Jacobs, Epiphanius of Cyprus: A Cultural Biography of Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016), 132–175.

11 See by way of introduction Carson Bay, “The Bible, the Classics, and the Jews in Pseudo-Hegesippus: A Literary Analysis of the Fourth-Century De Excidio Hierosolymitano 5.2” (PhD diss., Florida State University, 2018), 1–59; Richard Matthew Pollard, “The De Excidio of ‘Hegesippus’ and the Reception of Josephus in the Early Middle Ages,” Viator 46 (2015): 65–100; Albert A. Bell, Jr., “Josephus and Pseudo-Hegesippus,” in Josephus, Judaism, and Christianity, ed. Louis H. Feldman and Gohei Hata (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987), 349–361; and Albert A. Bell, Jr., “An Historiographical Analysis of the De Excidio Hierosolymitano of Pseudo-Hegesippus” (PhD diss., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1977).

12 Albert A. Bell, Jr., “Classical and Christian Traditions in the Work of Pseudo-Hegesippus,” Indiana Social Studies Quarterly 33 (1980): 60–64, at 60, explains why De Excidio “is all but unheard of except among a handful of late nineteenth and early twentieth-century scholars.”

13 Ruth B. Nisse, Jacob's Shipwreck: Diaspora, Translation, and Jewish-Christian Relations in Medieval England (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2017), 22.

14 Marcel Simon, Verus Israel: A Study of the Relations Between Christians and Jews in the Roman Empire, A.D. 135–425, trans. H. McKeating (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996 [1948]), 67.

15 A view popularized by Rosemary Radford Ruether, “The Adversus Judaeos Tradition in the Church Fathers: The Exegesis of Christian Anti-Judaism,” in Essential Papers on Judaism and Christianity in Conflict, ed. Jeremy Cohen (New York: New York University Press, 1991 [1979]), 174–189.

16 A survey exists in Stephen G. Wilson, Anti-Judaism in Early Christianity, vol. 2, Separation and Polemic (Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1986), with dated but still relevant chapters on the Epistle to the Hebrews, the Epistle of Barnabas, Ignatius of Antioch (and others), Marcion, Justin Martyr, Melito of Sardis, and more. On later texts, see Jeremy Cohen, ed., Essential Papers on Judaism and Christianity in Conflict: From Late Antiquity to the Reformation (New York: New York University Press, 1991), which includes discussion of New Testament texts and earlier evidence.

17 Todd Berzon, “Ethnicity and Early Christianity: New Approaches to Religious Kinship and Community,” CBR 16 (2018): 191–227; Denise Kimber Buell, Why This New Race? Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); and Aaron P. Johnson, Ethnicity and Argument in Eusebius’ Praeparatio Evanglica (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).

18 On “replacement theology,” see Edward Kessler, An Introduction to Jewish-Christian Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 171–172.

19 The argument that Jewish and Christian identities were fluid and ambiguous over the first few centuries and not substantively distinguishable before the fourth is presented in Adam H. Becker and Annettee Yoshiko Reed, eds., The Ways that Never Parted: Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003). See also Daniel Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). Scholars are not agreed on the premise of this view. Rutgers, for one, has objected to this movement's reliance upon “a linguistic theory of which it is unclear whether it is a relevant heuristic tool to explain human behavior.” Rutgers, Making Myths, 12–13, also 118. Cf. James D. G. Dunn, The Parting of the Ways Between Christianity and Judaism and their Significance for the Character of Christianity (London: SCM Press, 1991); James D. G. Dunn, ed., Jews and Christians: The Parting of the Ways, AD 70–135 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1992); and Judith M. Lieu, Neither Jew Nor Greek? Constructing Early Christianity (London: T. and T. Clark, 2002), 11–29.

20 Simon, Verus Israel; and Marcus Hirshman, A Rivalry of Genius: Jewish and Christian Biblical Interpretation in Late Antiquity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996), 13–22.

21 Paula Fredriksen, “The Birth of Christianity and the Origins of Christian Anti-Judaism,” in Jesus, Judaism, and Christian Anti-Judaism: Reading the New Testament After the Holocaust, ed. Paula Fredriksen and Adele Reinhartz (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2002), 8–30, at 27.

22 Fredriksen, Augustine and the Jews, 82, argues that “the longest-lived and (eventually) the most toxic of [the Christians’] various accusations was the charge that ‘the Jews’ killed Christ.”

23 On which see now Lieve Van Hoof and Peter Van Nuffelen, The Fragmentary Latin Histories of Late Antiquity (AD 300–620): Edition, Translation and Commentary (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 78–80.

24 De Excidio Prol. 1. All Latin texts of De Excidio herein are taken from the critical edition of Vincenzo Ussani, ed., Hegesippi qui dicitur Historiae libri V–Pt. 1: Textum criticum continens (Leipzig: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1932). All translations are my own.

25 John Marincola, Authority and Tradition in Ancient Historiography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

26 On Josephus's Christian reception, begin with the old but still useful Michael E. Hardwick, Josephus as an Historical Source in Patristic Literature Through Eusebius (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989); the more thorough Heinz Schreckenberg and Kurt Schubert, Jewish Historiography and Iconography in Early and Medieval Christianity (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1992); and now Sabrina Inowlocki, “Josephus and Patristic Literature,” in A Companion to Josephus, ed. Honora Howell Chapman and Zuleika Rodgers (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2016), 356–367; and Karen M. Kletter, “The Christian Reception of Josephus in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages,” in A Companion to Josephus, Chapman and Rodgers, 368–381.

27 On this event, see now Jodi Magness, Masada: From Jewish Revolt to Modern Myth (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2019).

28 See Josephus, War 7.406 and 7.407–455, respectively.

29 See Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 18.63–64; with Alice Whealey, Josephus on Jesus: The Testimonium Flavianum Controversy from Late Antiquity to Modern Times (New York: Peter Lang, 2003).

30 De Excidio 2.12.1.

31 Bay, “The Bible, the Classics, and the Jews.”

32 See Bay, “The Bible, the Classics, and the Jews,” 148–199.

33 Bell, “Historiographical Analysis,” 3.

34 See, along with Bell, Chiara Somenzi, Egesippo—Ambrogio: Formazione scolastica e Cristiana a Roma alla metà del IV secolo (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 2009), 151–182 (“La polemica antigiudaica,” one of that work's best theoretical chapters); and Dominique Estève, “L'Oeuvre historique du Pseudo-Hegésippe: ‘De Bello Iudaico,’ livre I à IV,” 2 vols. (PhD diss., Université Paris Nanterre, 1987), 2:441–458 (“Image du Juif”). See also Steve Mason, “Josephus's Judaean War,” in A Companion to Josephus, Chapman and Rodgers, 13–35, at 13; and Heinz Schreckenberg, Die christliche Adversus-Judaeos-Texte und ihr literarisches und historisches Umfeld (1.—11. Jh.) (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1982), 310–311.

35 See the discussion of the “stickiness factor” in Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (New York: Little, Brown, and Co., 2000).

36 Carson Bay, “Pseudo-Hegesippus and the Beginnings of Christian Historiography in Late Antiquity,” Studia Patristica (forthcoming); see also Somenzi, Egesippo—Ambrogio; Estève, “L'Oeuvre historique du Pseudo-Hegésippe”; and Bell, “Historiographical Analysis.” See also Markus Sehlmeyer, Geschichtsbilder für Pagane und Christen: Res Romanae in den spätantiken Breviarien (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2009), 196, 219–222.

37 John Marincola, “Introduction,” in A Companion to Greek and Roman Historiography, ed. John Marincola, 2 vols. (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007), 1:1–9, at 1.

38 Eusebius, even if he did inevitably source classical inspirations and models, wrote not only about, but to and for, Christians: Hist. Eccl. 7.18.1; 8.2.3 (e.g.); see now Michael J. Hollerich, Making Christian History: Eusebius of Caesarea and His Readers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021); and James Corke-Webster, Eusebius and Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 63–65.

39 On “truth,” “reality,” and realism in historiography, see J. Woodman, Rhetoric in Classical Historiography: Four Studies (Portland, Oreg.: Areopagitica, 1988) and T. P. Wiseman, Historiography and Imagination: Eight Essays on Roman Culture (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1994).

40 M. J. Wheeldon, “‘True Stories’: the reception of historiography in antiquity,” in History as Text: The Writing of Ancient History, ed. Averil Cameron (London: Duckworth, 1989), 33–63.

41 On the persuasive nature of ancient historiography, see T. P. Wiseman, Clio's Cosmetics: Three Studies in Greco-Roman Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2004 [1979]).

42 Averil Cameron, Christianity and the Rhetoric of Empire: The Development of Christian Discourse (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 92; and later, at 93: “The better these stories were constructed, the better they functioned as structure-maintaining narratives and the more their audiences were disposed to accept them as true.”

43 That De Excidio was understood as historiography may be discerned from its piecemeal inclusion in a manuscript, Paris BnF Lat. 6256, that also contains excerpts from Sallust and Josephus's Jewish Antiquities and is apparently a kind of historiographical sourcebook. My thanks to Richard Pollard for sharing his transcription of this text along with information and bibliography.

44 Marshall McLuhan, “The Medium is the Message,” in Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (New York: Signet, 1964).

45 Fixation upon radio and tv as “new media” can make McLuhan's work seem outdated and irrelevant. But the enduring significance of these ideas may be surmised from the fact that they inform the Pulitzer Prize finalist book by Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2010).

46 Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin, 1985); see also Neil Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture To Technology (New York: Vintage, 1993).

47 See Marincola, Authority and Tradition, 1.

48 Andrew Laird, “Fictions of Authority: Discourse and Epistemology in Historical Narrative,” in Powers of Expression, Expressions of Power: Speech Presentation and Latin Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 116–152, at 118.

49 John Frow, Genre, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2015), 109–133.

50 Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer, 3 vols. (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984–1988); Paul Ricoeur, From Text to Action, trans. Kathleen Blamey and John Thompson (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1991); Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: Multidisciplinary Studies in the Creation of Meaning in Language (London: Routledge, 1978); and Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth, trans. Charles A. Kelbley (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1965).

51 On the tendency to assume the reality of groups as “things-in-the-world,” i.e., “groupism,” see Rogers Brubaker, Ethnicity Without Groups (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 7–8.

52 On how neuroscience exposes the basic biological substrates of categorization, see Daniel J. Levitin, The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload (New York: Penguin, 2014), 37–76.

53 On correlations between culture and human physiology, neuro-biochemistry, etc., see Joseph Heinrich, The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017).

54 See D. S. Levene, Livy on the Hannibalic War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 216–217.

55 See Rosaria Vignolo Munson, ed., Herodotus: Volume 2—Herodotus and the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

56 See Carson Bay, “Judaism,” in The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Tacitus, ed. Victoria Emma Pagán (Malden, Mass.: Wiley-Blackwell, forthcoming).

57 See Todd S. Berzon, Classifying Christians: Ethnography, Heresiology, and the Limits of Knowledge in Late Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016).

58 See Carson Bay, “Exemplarity, Exegesis, and Ethnography: Abraham in Pseudo-Hegesippus as a Test Case for Biblical Reception in Christian Late Antiquity,” Journal of the Bible and Its Reception 8 (forthcoming).

59 Terry Eagleton, Literary Theory: An Introduction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 72.

60 Frances Young, “Classical genres in Christian guise; Christian genres in classical guise,” in The Cambridge History of Early Christian Literature, ed. Frances Young, Lewis Ayres, and Andrew Louth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 251–258, at 251.

61 Julian's program was itself fundamentally reactionary, as were the Christian reactions it instigated; see Charles Norris Cochrane, Christianity and Classical Culture: A Study of Thought and Action from Augustus to Augustine (Oxford: Clarendon, 1940), part 7: “Apostasy and Reaction.”

62 David B. Levenson, “The Ancient and Medieval Sources for the Emperor Julian's Attempt to Rebuild the Jerusalem Temple,” JSJ 35 (2004): 409–460; David B. Levenson, “A Source and Tradition Critical Analysis of the Stories of the Emperor Julian's Attempt to Rebuild the Jerusalem Temple” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1980); but see also Glen W. Bowersock, Julian the Apostate (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1978); and Averil Cameron, The Later Roman Empire: AD 284–430 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).

63 Young, “Classical genres,” 251. One contribution of this article is to illustrate one specific, distinctive way in which the larger vision cast by Young, who focuses on more well-known authors, materialized.

64 Bell, “Historiographical Analysis,” 3, 207; later, Bell, “Josephus and Pseudo-Hegesippus”; but see also Bay, “The Bible, the Classics, and the Jews,” 43–44; Somenzi, Egesippo—Ambrogio, 153–157; and Oded Irsahi, “Dating the Eschaton: Jewish and Christian Apocalyptic Calculations in Late Antiquity,” in Apocalyptic Time, ed. Albert I. Baumgarten (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 113–154, at 145n94, citing Bell.

65 Ari Finkelstein, The Specter of the Jews: Emperor Julian and the Rhetoric of Ethnicity in Syrian Antioch (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018), 2. Even more recently, see Scott Bradbury, “Julian and the Jews,” in A Companion to Julian the Apostate, ed. Stefan Rebenich and Hans-Ulrich Wiemer (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 267–292, at 282–289. See also Peter Van Nuffelen, “The Christian Reception of Julian,” in A Companion to Julian the Apostate, Rebenich and Wiemar, 360–397.

66 Finkelstein, Specter of the Jews, 2, continuing: “many of whom had already experienced Jews in Antioch in this way.” Significantly, De Excidio may hail from Antioch: Carson Bay, “Pseudo-Hegesippus at Antioch? Testing a Hypothesis for the Provenance of the De Excidio Hierosolymitano,” BABELAO 8 (2019): 97–128.

67 On this understanding of God and state in the fourth century, see Harold A. Drake, A Century of Miracles: Christians, Pagans, Jews, and the Supernatural (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

68 Young, “Classical genres,” 251.

69 Andrew S. Jacobs, Remains of the Jews: The Holy Land and Christian Empire in Late Antiquity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 193–195.

70 Jacobs, Remains of the Jews, 196.

71 Todd S. Berzon, “The Double Bind of Christianity's Judaism: Language, Law, and the Incoherence of Late Antique Discourse,” JECS 23 (2015): 445–480, at 445; and cf. James Carleton Paget, “Anti-Judaism and Early Christian Identity,” ZAC 1 (1997): 195–225.

72 My thanks to the anonymous Church History reviewer for pushing me to make this argument more clearly, whose turn of phrase “out-Romaning a Roman emperor” I have shamelessly stolen here.

73 Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success (New York: Little, Brown, and Co., 2008).

74 “Books cost money,” after all; see Peter Brown, Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350–550 AD (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2013), 170.

75 Harry Y. Gamble, Books and Readers in the Early Church: A History of Early Christian Texts (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995), 121–122.

76 On the ancient church, Roman Empire, and Latin language, see Mark E. Amsler, Etymology and Grammatical Discourse in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages (Philadelphia: John Benjmains, 1989), 57–59. Concerning the impact of Latin's grammatical structure and classical corpus on late ancient Christian literature, see C. M. Chin, Grammar and Christianity in the Late Roman World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008).

77 Bay, “Pseudo-Hegesippus at Antioch?”

78 Pollard, “The De Excidio,” 89.

79 It is not impossible that De Excidio influenced Sozomen, who also begins his Church History with a mention of Gen 49:10 as a prediction that “the rulers of the Hebrews of the tribe of Judah, the tribal leader, shall fail.” Theresa Urbainczyk, “Observations on the Differences between the Church Histories of Socrates and Sozomen,” Historia: Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte 46 (1997): 355–373, at 364. See Eusebius, Church History 1.6.1; Eusebius, Demonstration of the Gospel 8.1; and Ronald E. Heine, Reading the Old Testament with the Ancient Church: Exploring the Formation of Early Christian Thought (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Academic, 2007), 113–114.

80 Günter Stemberger, Juden und Christen im Heiligen Land: Palästina unter Konstantin und Theodosius (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1987), 260; and see the sections on “Julian und das Judentum,” 160–163, and “Der Wiederaufbau des Tempels,” 163–174.

81 See Julian, Against the Galileans fr. 62. See Somenzi, Egesippo—Ambrogio, 153–157; and Finkelstein, Specter of the Jews, 55.

82 Céline Urlacher-Becht and Rémi Gounelle, “Un développement littéraire medieval: la ‘légende’ de la Vindicta Saluatoris (Vengeance du Sauveur),” in Les récits de la destruction de Jérusalem (70 ap. J.-C.): Contextes, representations et enjeux, entre Antiquité et Moyen Âge, ed. Frédéric Chapot (Turnhout: Brepols, 2020), 293–341.

83 Pollard, “The De Excidio,” 93.

84 “ad delendam sevam gentem [Iudeam] convenerunt principes.” See Pollard, “The De Excidio,” 94.

85 Pollard, “The De Excidio,” 95.

86 Paul of Cordoba, Epistula 16. Pollard, “The De Excidio,” 80; Ludwig Traube, “Zum lateinischen Iosephus,” Rheinisches Museum für Philologie 39 (1884): 477–478; Vincenzo Ussani, “Su le fortune medievali dell'Egesippo,” Rendiconti della Pontificia Academia romana di Archeologia 9 (1933): 107–118, at 114; and Heinz Schreckenberg, Die Flavius-Josephus-Tradition in Antike und Mittelalter (Leiden: Brill, 1972), 118.

87 Actually, the Historiae de Excidio Hierosolymitanae urbis Anacephalaeosis: Pollard, “The De Excidio,” 96–98; see also Amnon Linder, “Ps. Ambrose's Anacephalaeosis: a Carolingian Treatise on the Destruction of Jerusalem,” Revue d'histoire des textes 22 (1992): 145–158.

88 Inaccurate and confused is the description in Irena Dorota Backus, Historical Method and Confessional Identity in the Era of the Reformation (1378–1615) (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 322n188.

89 A critical edition and translation are in preparation by Greti Dinkova-Bruun of the Pontifical Institute for Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto.

90 See E. Göransson et al., eds., The Arts of Editing Medieval Greek and Latin: A Casebook (Turnhout: Brepols, 2016), 100.

91 Greti Dinkova-Bruun, “Latin Versifications of Josephus's Latin Bellum,” Medaevalia et Humanistica 46 (2021): 37–54.

92 “Quid, Iudea, tibi credebas esse futurum, / Dum crucifigis eum quem patet esse Deum.”

93 Ussani, De Excidio, 296: “Quid putabas futurum, cum tuis manibus salutare tuum crucifigeres?” Compare the following line 1404—“Since you pressed with thorns him who was a pure rose” (Dum premis hunc spinis qui rosa pura fuit)—to De Excidio's Prologue 2, where Ps-Hegesippus characterizes his attempt to make sense of post-biblical Jewish history as something done “as though seeking a rose among thorns” (tumquam in spinis rosam quarentes). Cf. Matt 27:29; Mark 15:17; John 19:2, whose Latin Vulgate renderings likewise speak in terms of spinae (thorns).

94 See Wolfram Drews, The Unknown Neighbor: The Jew in the Thought of Isidore of Seville (Leiden: Brill, 2006); Wolfram Drews, Juden und Judentum bei Isidor von Sevilla: Studien zum Traktat De fide catholica contra Iudaeos (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 2001); and Bat-Sheva Albert, “Isidore of Seville: His Attitude Towards Judaism and His Impact on Early Medieval Canon Law,” JQR 80 (1990): 207–220.

95 Bede, Exposition on the Acts of the Apostles 26.27, where De Excidio 2.9.1 helps Bede show that Agrippa, before whom the Apostle Paul defended Christianity in Acts 26:27, knew something of Christianity's divinely ordained legitimacy but failed to believe nonetheless.

96 Richard Matthew Pollard, “Flavius Josephus: The Most Influential Classical Historian of the Early Middle Ages,” in Writing the Early Medieval West: Studies in Honour of Rosamond McKitterick, ed. Elina Screen and Charles West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 15–32, and at 29: “by every single quantifiable measure then, Josephus towered above Livy and Sallust during the early Middle Ages.” See further Pollard, “The De Excidio,”; and, soon, Richard Matthew Pollard, “Flavius Josephus: A Carolingian Church Father?” in A Companion to the Latin Josephus in the Western Middle Ages, ed. Karen M. Kletter and Paul Hillard (Leiden: Brill, forthcoming). See also Heinz Schreckenberg, “Josephus und die christliche Wirkungsgeschichte seines Bellum Judaicum,” in Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt, vol. 2:21.1, ed. Wolfgang Haase (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1984), 1106–1217.

97 Pollard, “The De Excidio,” 85.

98 Nor is this the only kind of literature that De Excidio influenced. One of the most pronounced and important literary afterlives of De Excidio comes in the Jewish work called Sefer Yosippon, written in early tenth-century southern Italy. This Hebrew text uses De Excidio (along with the Latin translation of Josephus's Jewish Antiquities) as one of its main sources, following De Excidio's narrative for over half of its length yet omitting De Excidio's anti-Jewish rhetoric at every turn. In this, Sefer Yosippon constitutes a robust challenge and response to De Excidio. See Saskia Dönitz, “Historiography among Byzantine Jews: The Case of Sefer Yosippon,” in Jews in Byzantium: Dialectics of Minority and Majority Cultures, ed. Robert Bonfil et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 951–968. Thus, the Jews do “write back” at De Excidio eventually.

99 Schreckenberg, Die christliche Adversus-Judaeos-Texte, 310–311.

100 David Nirenberg, Anti-Judaism: The Western Tradition (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 2013), 87–134.

101 Again, see Bell, “Classical and Christian Traditions.”

102 Carroll, James, Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews: A History (New York: Mariner, 2002)Google Scholar.

103 Chazan, Robert, From Anti-Judaism to Anti-Semitism: Ancient and Medieval Christian Constructions of Jewish History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Cohen, Jeremy, Christ Killers: The Jews and the Passion from the Bible to the Big Screen (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.

104 This does not mean that the data with which they do reckon is not the most important, but I happen to believe that it is not.