A QUESTION OF AUTHENTICITY: THE JEWISH PRIVILEGES

In the two fi rst Books of the Maccabees and the Antiquities of Flavius Josephus, we fi nd the texts of roughly sixty public documents, Greek and Roman, concerning the Jews. The historical importance of this series, which begins in the reign of Antiochus III (223–187 B.C.E.) and concludes with a rescript issued by the Emperor Claudius in 45 C.E., is obvious.1 However, the authenticity of these documents, or at least of a large number of them, has often been called into question.2 My dear teacher and friend, to whom this volume is dedicated, is one of those who refuse to admit the authenticity of the privileges granted to the Jews by the Seleucid sovereigns. I know of no better means of expressing my gratitude to Mr Isidore Lévy than to attempt to convince him that this time, his negative opinion is unjustifi ed.

I

It was not the historians who fi rst questioned the authenticity of the Jewish privileges. The great scholars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – a Drusius, a Grotius, a Gronovius – accepted them without any hesitation. It was the Protestant theologians who shook the cred- ibility of the “apocryphal” Books of the Maccabees. This was a good chance to annoy the “papists,” by discovering historical errors in these so-called “infallible” books. The dossier of the controversy can be inspected in the celebrated work by Cardinal Bellarmine (1542–1621), Disputationes de controversiis christianae fi dei, and in the Protestant replies; the only one of these I have consulted is the voluminous treatise by

1 For a chronological list of the Roman documents, cf. J. Juster, Les Juifs dans l’empire romain I, 1914, pp. 158–159. For the documents in 1 and 2 Maccabees, cf. Abel, pp. xxvii and xlii; J. Goldstein, I Maccabees, 1976; C. Habicht, 2. Makkabäerbuch ( Jüdische Schriften aus hellenistisch-römischer Zeit I, 3), 1976, pp. 179–183. 2 Cf. e.g. H. Willrich, Urkundenfälschungen in der hellenistisch-jüdischen Literatur, 1924; R.H. Pfeiffer, History of New Testament Times, 1949, pp. 489–491. Cf. also the bibliographies by R. Marcus in his edition of Josephus, Ant. Jud. VII (Loeb Classical Library, 1942), and in PAAJR 16 (1947); L. Feldman, Scholarship on Philo and Josephus, 1937–1962, 1963; H. Schreckenburg, Bibliographie zu Flavius Josephus, 1968.

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John Rainolds (1549–1607), Censura librorum apocryphorum. This Oxford theologian seems to have been the fi rst to deny the authenticity of a document concerning the Jews. When he attacked the letter of the king of Sparta to the high priest Onias I (1 Mac 12) as a forgery, he compared it to the apocryphal letter of King Abgar of Edessa to Jesus.3 The controversy broke out anew in the eighteenth century. Making good use of the treasures of erudition which had piled up since the time of Bellarmine, and relying primarily on the testimony of the Seleucid coinage, the Jesuit Erasmus Froehlich, in his Annales compendiarii regum et rerum Syriae (1734), attempted to demonstrate the perfect agreement between the inspired Books of Maccabees and the secular evidence from the past. The Protestant reply came quickly: in his Commentatio historico-critica de fi de librorum Maccabaicorum (1747), Gottlieb Wernsdorf did not hide the confessional reason which had prompted his work: multum interest ut ne libri illi canonici putentur. This book has remained the arsenal from which even today weapons are supplied to the critics of the Books of Maccabees. Wernsdorf examines the offi cial documents which are reproduced in these books and remarks, not without malice: doleo apocryphorum tot ineptis epistulis fuisse deceptum; doleo non saniore judicio fuisse praeditum ad eas repudiandas.4 Wernsdorf believes that he can show the existence of crude mistakes in these “inept letters.” But the main reason for his critical suspicion lies elsewhere. As he writes, the literary tricks of the Jews are familiar to everyone – just think of the apocryphal literature! Accordingly, we cannot trust in any way these public documents which are presented

3 Cf. e.g. the notes by Drusius and Grotius in Critici Sacri (I quote the folio edition of 1660). These scholars hold that the Roman document at 1 Mac. 8:23 displays some strange forms because the Jewish author has adapted it to the usage of his Hebrew readers. On the polemic about the authority of the Books of Maccabees, cf. R. Bellarminus, Disputationes I, ch. 15 (I quote the edition of 1581), J. Rainaldus, Censura, pp. 1226, 1303, 1328 (I quote the edition of 1611); H. Hoody, De bibliorum textibus originalibus, 1705, Pars I, ch. 9, §4. There is a striking contrast between the boldness of the Protestant polemicists such as Rainolds and the timidity of the Protestant com- mentators (cf. e.g. the commentary by Claude Baduel, published in 1557). The classical scholars were not yet sure about how to employ the critical methodology. Albericus Gentilis (1551–1611) warned his coreligionists that the attack on the historical veracity of the “apocrypha” could become a threat to the authority of the Bible itself (Critici Sacri V, col. 8089). In this context, we should note that even the celebrated modern debate on the infl uence of Calvinism on economic history began as a confessional controversy: cf. A.-E. Saxous, Annal. d’hist. écon. et soc., 1935, p. 225. Like so many of our popular ideas, it too goes back to the “siècle des lumières.” Cf. e.g. F. Venturi, Settecento reformatore II, 1976, p. 267. 4 G. Wernsdorf, Commentatio, 1747, pp. 178–179.

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