The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic

by Daniel S. Richter

  The narrative of Joseph and Aseneth can receive only the briefest summary here. It has but a small basis in Scripture. Genesis reports that the patriarch Joseph took as wife a certain Aseneth, daughter of an Egyptian priest by whom she bore two children (Gen. 41:45, 41:50–52, 46:20). The novel employs that short notice as launching pad for a full-scale fantasy. It divides into two quite different parts. The first takes the form of an erotic tale in which Joseph meets and rejects the beautiful teenager Aseneth until she abandons her idolatrous ways through a mystical revelation, thus paving the way for a marriage between them sanctioned by the Pharaoh himself (Jos. As. 1–21). The second consists of an adventure story in which the embittered son of Pharaoh endeavors to murder Joseph and carry off Aseneth, sparking a split among Joseph’s brothers and a fierce battle in which Aseneth emerges victorious with the assistance of some of Joseph’s brothers while magnanimously sparing the others. The narrative concludes with Pharaoh’s appointment of Joseph to rule the land of Egypt (22–29).

  Affinities exist with certain Greek or Roman novels. A plot set in the distant past, the virginal status of the lovers, their separation and then uniting, and the attempted kidnapping of the heroine by a rival lover all strike familiar chords. So also does Aseneth’s dramatic conversion to the faith of Joseph and his fathers through a mysterious vision, which bears comparison to mystical tales and sacred epiphanies, as in Apuleius’s Metamorphoses (Jos. As. 14–18; Kee 1983, 394–413). The author was surely familiar with the motifs and devices that occur in pagan romances (Chesnutt 1995, 85–93; Humphrey 2000, 38–46; Pervo 1991, 145–160; Standhartinger 1995, 20–26; West 1974, 70–81; Wills 1995, 16–28, 170–184).

  But parallels do not provide the full picture. Joseph and Aseneth has its own characteristics and peculiarities that set it apart from the mainstream. The erotic features central to most of the novels play a subordinate role in this one. Separation of the lovers was a voluntary rather than an involuntary one, a dramatic tension between the priggish Joseph and the haughty Aseneth (Jos. As. 2–9). And the fantasy, imaginative and inventive though it be, did employ a known setting, that of the biblical narrative of the patriarch in Egypt. The Jewish author, moreover, had other novelistic texts as forerunners, Jewish texts quite independent of the Greco-Roman tradition, the tales of Judith, Esther, and Tobit, which also combined marriage narratives with adventure stories (Pervo 1976, 171–181). Both Hebraic and Hellenic strands intertwined in this remarkable text. It would be misleading to isolate them—or indeed to imagine that the author consciously combined them. The work reflects a mixed milieu.

  As with the other authors and writings discussed here, a subtle tension swirls below the surface in Joseph and Aseneth. Joseph’s insistence upon the purity of the faith and the pollution of idolatry, Aseneth’s abject debasement and violent break with her past to achieve absolution, and the favor of God supporting the faithful against their idolatrous opponents all seem to suggest a stark dichotomy between the forces of good and evil, and a sharp distancing of Jew from gentile (Barclay 1996, 204–216; Collins 2000, 231–232). The relationship, however, is more nuanced and complex. The fact that the wedding of Joseph and Aseneth takes place under the auspices of Pharaoh, who had not himself become a convert, holds central symbolic significance. The enemies of the faithful were forgiven, harmony and reconciliation followed, and the gentile ruler of Egypt placed his kingdom in the power of the immigrant from Israel. Indeed, it is noteworthy that no mention of “Jew” or “gentile” occurs anywhere in the text. Aseneth’s transformation amounted essentially to abandonment of idolatry. This is no simple tale of cultural clash. Distinctions between the people hold at one level in the novel, but they are overcome at another. Joseph and Aseneth exemplifies the duality stressed throughout this chapter. The Jewish author perpetuated a literary tradition that stemmed from his forefathers, while at the same time he bought into (or perhaps helped to shape) a Hellenic literary tradition that reached its apogee in the empire of the Romans.

  FURTHER READING

  This subject has not been treated as such in previous publications. General surveys of Jewish literature in Greek in the Hellenistic and Roman periods do place some of the works discussed here in a broader context. One might mention in particular the valuable studies of Barclay (1996), Collins (2000, and Schürer (1987). The individual authors or works addressed in this chapter have received fuller attention on their own terms. For the interested reader, one can recommend the classic work of Wolfson (1948) on Philo, together with the quite instructive collection of essays by Kamesar (2009). The edition of 4 Maccabees by Hadas (1953) remains a most serviceable introduction to that text. Van der Horst’s edition of Pseudo-Phocylides (1978) is the essential starting point for the study of that author. And, amidst the numerous treatments of Joseph and Aseneth, the brief book by Humphrey (2000) supplies a sober and intelligent guide to the main issues and controversies in that fascinating text.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Alexandre, M. 1967. De Congressu Eruditionis Gratia. Paris.

  Anderson, G. 1984. Ancient Fiction: The Novel in the Graeco-Roman World. London.

  Anderson, H. 1985. “4 Maccabees.’ In The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, edited by J. H. Charlesworth, 2:531–573. Garden City, NY.

  Barclay, J. 1996. Jews in the Mediterranean Diaspora: From Alexander to Trajan (323BCE–117CE). Edinburgh.

  Breitenstein, U. 1978. Beobachtungen zu Sprache, Stil und Gedankengut des vierten Makkabäerbuches. 2nd ed. Basel.

  Chesnutt, R. 1995. From Death to Life: Conversion in Joseph and Aseneth. Sheffield.

  Collins, J. J. 2000. Between Athens and Jerusalem: Jewish Identity in the Hellenistic Diaspora. 2nd ed. Grand Rapids, MI.

  Derron, P. 1986. Pseudo-Phocylide: Sentences. Paris.

  deSilva, D. 1998. 4 Maccabees. Sheffield.

  Dillon, J. 1977. The Middle Platonists: 80B.C.toA.D.220. Ithaca, NY, and London.

  Dupont-Sommer, A. 1939. Le Quatrième Livre des Machabées. Paris.

  Goldhill, S. 2008. “Genre.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Greek and Roman Novel, edited by T. Whitmarsh, 185–200. Cambridge.

  Gruen, E. S. 1998. Heritage and Hellenism: The Reinvention of Jewish Tradition. Berkeley, CA.

  Gruen, E. S. 2002. Diaspora: Jews amidst Greeks and Romans. Cambridge, MA.

  Hadas, M. 1953. The Third and Fourth Books of Maccabees. New York.

  Hägg, T. 1983. The Novel in Antiquity. Berkeley, CA.

  Humphrey, E. M. 2000. Joseph and Aseneth. Sheffield.

  Kamesar, A., ed. 2009. The Cambridge Companion to Philo. Cambridge.

  Kee, H. C. 1983.”The Socio-Cultural Setting of Joseph and Aseneth.” New Testament Studies 229: 394–413.

  Klauck, H.-J. 1989. “4. Makkabäerbuch.” Jüdische Schriften aus hellenistisch-römischer Zeit 3: 645–763.

  Kraemer, R. S. 1998. When Aseneth Met Joseph. New York.

  Lebram, J. C. H. 1974. “Die literarische Form des vierten Makkabäerbuches.” Vig. Chr. 28: 81–96.

  Mendelson, A. 1982. Secular Education in Philo of Alexandria. Cincinnati, OH.

  Morris, J. 1987. “The Jewish Philosopher Philo.” In The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ, edited by E. Schürer, revised edition by G. Vermes, F. Millar, and M. Goodman, 3.2:809–889. Edinburgh.

  Niehoff, M. R. 2001. Philo on Jewish Identity and Culture. Tübingen.

  Norden, E. 1898. Die antike Kunstprosa vom VI. Jahrhundert v. Christus bis in die Zeit der Renaissance. 2 vols. Leipzig.

  Pearce, S. 2007. The Land and the Body. Tübingen.

  Pervo, R. 1976. “Joseph and Asenath and the Greek Novel.” SBL Seminar Papers: 171–181.

  Pervo, R. 1991. “Aseneth and her Sisters: Women in Jewish Narrative and in the Greek Novels.” In Women Like This: New Perspectives on Jewish Women in the Greco-Roman World, edited by A. J. Levine, 145–160. Atlanta, GA.

  Reardon, B. P. 1991. The Form of Greek Romance. Princeton, NJ.

  Renehan, R. 1972. �
��The Greek Philosophic Background of Fourth Maccabees.” Rh. Mus. 115: 223–238.

  Royse, J. 2009. “The Works of Philo.” In The Cambridge Companion to Philo, edited by A. Kamesar, 32–64. Cambridge.

  Schürer, E., ed. 1987. The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ. Revised edition by G. Vermes, F. Millar, and M. Goodman. Edinburgh.

  Schwartz, D. 2009. “Philo, His Family, and His Times.” In The Cambridge Companion to Philo, edited by A. Kamesar, 9–31. Cambridge.

  Standhartinger, A. 1995. Das Frauenbild im Judentum der hellenistischen Zeit: Ein Beitrag anhand von “Joseph und Aseneth”. Leiden.

  Thomas, J. 1992. Der jüdische Phokylides. Göttingen.

  van der Horst, P. W. 1978. The Sentences of Pseudo-Phocylides. Leiden.

  Van Henten, J. W. 1997. The Maccabean Martyrs as Saviours of the Jewish People: A Study of 2 and 4 Maccabees. Leiden.

  West, S. 1974. “Joseph and Asenath: A Neglected Greek Romance.” CQ 24: 70–81.

  Whitmarsh, T. 2008. “Introduction.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Greek and Roman Novel, edited by T. Whitmarsh, 1–14. Cambridge.

  Wills, L. M. 1995. The Jewish Novel in the Ancient World. Ithaca, NY.

  Wilson, W. 1994. The Mysteries of Righteousness. Tübingen.

  Wilson, W. 2005. The Sentences of Pseudo-Phocylides. Berlin.

  Wolfson, H. A. 1948. Philo: Foundations of Religious Philosophy in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA.

  CHAPTER 42

  THE CREATION OF CHRISTIAN ELITE CULTURE IN ROMAN SYRIA AND THE NEAR EAST

  WILLIAM ADLER

  AS it did elsewhere, Christianity in Syria produced its own brand of disaffected culture warriors, most notably the anti-Greek polemicist and rhetor Tatian (ca. 120–173). Anyone who assumes, however, that Syrian Christians of the late second and third centuries were tout court self-marginalizing outsiders would be at a loss to explain the existence of Bar Daysan (154–222) and his contemporary Julius Africanus (ca. 160–240), two Christian aristocrats serving in the court of Abgar VIII the Great (died 212). Traditional Christian categories (apologist, theologian, biblical commentator) do scant justice to authors of such wide-ranging interests. Because they moved with evident ease in non-Christian society, “Christian” was not always the first or the most distinctive thing observers and associates saw in them.

  Bar Daysan, Africanus, and even Tatian, after a fashion, are as much creations of elite Hellenistic culture as they are representatives of the Church. The ensuing discussion explores these exemplars of eastern Christianity in the context of four themes familiar to students of the Second Sophistic: (1) attitudes toward Greek paideia; (2) relics and the creation of civic identities; (3) Hellenistic court culture; and (4) the encounter of Greek-speaking eastern elites with Rome.

  SYRIAN CHRISTIANS AND GREEK PAIDEIA

  While Hellenism elsewhere in the Near East produced no explosions comparable to the Maccabean uprising, by the second century of the common era Syrian writers began to express anxiety either about assimilation and loss of native identity or estrangement from the culture in which they were educated.1 For the rhetor and satirist Lucian of Samosata, the encounter with Greek culture made a fruitful topic for social commentary on the liminal existence of outsiders straddling two worlds. Tatian’s own reaction was more virulent. The author of a searing indictment of the “Greeks,” Tatian represents himself as a seeker after truth, whose intellectual restlessness finally brought him to Rome. It was there that he finally soured on Greek learning altogether (35.1). In his view, the whole concept of “Greekness,” an agglomeration of gleanings from other peoples, is devoid of content: “I am at a loss,” he writes, “as to whom to call a Greek” (1.3). Tatian’s rejection of Greek culture is, at least rhetorically, categorical and decidedly nativist. Born “in the land of the Assyrians” (42), he renounces Greek culture in favor of what he calls the “barbarian philosophy.” And if the Greeks are serious in their search for a universal polity able to integrate the various peoples of the world into a single oikoumenê, they might consider doing the same. Given the irreconcilable differences in prevailing national customs, the cosmopolitan ideals of Hellenism can come to fruition only in a philosophy that is for Tatian the most ancient and most pure (28.1).

  Tatian’s abandonment of the culture in which he says he was first instructed may not have been entirely high-minded. Beneath his scorn for the “arrogance of the Romans and the cold cleverness of the Athenians” (35.1), the “mumbling” of Atticizing Greek, and the sophists “who sell their freedom for pay” (1.3) lie the bitterness and disappointments of an aspiring but unsuccessful rhetor in Rome.2 The Oratio is itself drenched in the very system of education that Tatian now claims to disown. Although Tatian might praise the sources of his barbarian philosophy for simplicity and lack of artifice, his own language, style of argumentation, the well-worn topoi, and the gratuitous displays of erudition (much of it available from handbooks) betray the marks of the trained rhetor.3 We should thus not see in the Oratio an example of Christian participation in the revival of a distinctively “Syrian” paideia.4 But even if “barbarism” is here only a rhetorical construction, Tatian’s framing of the categories is revealing. “Greeks” are not the Greek nation, but rather “you learned people [pepaideumenoi]” (25.3). Similarly, barbarism, at least as it applies to Christianity, is an alternative paideia, more original than its Greek counterpart and defined by its negation of everything distinctive of it.5

  CHRISTIAN ELITES AND THE CREATION OF CIVIC IDENTITIES IN THE ROMAN NEAR EAST

  Among the many advantages that for Tatian gave his barbarian philosophy the edge over the Greeks was its superior antiquity (31.1). By Tatian’s time, this was an old and somewhat hackneyed theme. From the time of their first encounters, representatives of Egypt and the civilizations of the Near East often charged the Greeks, nouveaux arrivés, with borrowing from them everything they knew. The Jews had their own culture heroes, especially the lawgiver Moses, the source from which the most illustrious legislators of the Greeks purportedly derived their own legal code.6 Tatian found in the same argument a way to take down the Greeks a peg or two. He never calls himself a Christian, aligning himself instead with the school of Moses, the “author of all barbarian wisdom” (31.1) and the foundation of all the doctrines of Greek philosophers and sophists—even if, in adulterating his teachings, they were no longer mindful of their debt.

  Like Josephus before him, Tatian makes his case empirically, through a rather circuitous chronological excursus meant to demonstrate that Moses pre-dated Homer, the historians, and all the “ancient heroes, wars, and demons” of the Greeks (40.1). But in the world of the Second Sophistic, an age absorbed with relics and antiquities, visible symbols proved to be a more compelling way to forge links to the distant past.7 And local experts, so expertly caricatured in (Pseudo-)Lucian’s De Dea Syria, were more than happy to indulge the cultural appetites and preconceptions of Greek and Roman readers. How educated Christians from the Roman Near East contributed to this project of fashioning civic identities in an age in which Hellenism was the dominant idiom of communication is a story yet to be told.

  In Asia Minor and the Near East, the best attested examples of this exercise in cultural translation are the various cities claiming possession of monuments dating back to the reign of the semimythical Assyrian queen Semiramis.8 It is telling that the tradition about her accomplishments owes its origins to a Greek history, the Persica of Ctesias of Cnidus (fifth century BCE). Dissenting opinions notwithstanding, Ctesias’s claim that Assyria was the oldest kingdom of Asia, and Ninus and Semiramis its earliest rulers of record, was soon absorbed into the vulgate tradition of Hellenistic universal historiography.9 The cachet of the term “Assyrian” may thus explain why educated Syrians preferred to be called “Assyrian” instead of the arguably more disparaging term “Syrian.”10 And the willingness of cities of Asia and the Near East to oblige a fiction propounded by a historian charac
terized by Pierre Briant as a precursor to Western orientalism illustrates the extent to which the construction of civic identity through founding myths presupposed Hellenocentric perceptions of the East.11

  Biblical relics, especially those with crossover appeal, had their own contribution to make to this exercise in identity formation. Because the various tales about flood heroes that proliferated in the Near East were easy to assimilate to Greek counterparts, artifacts surviving from Noah’s ark were best suited for this kind of exploitation.12 The various locations competing for possession of its remains are a sure sign of its own international standing. Travelers to Armenia took home souvenirs from the ark for use as amulets.13 In Adiabene, relics were shown, Josephus writes, to “those curious to see them.”14 In Apamaea of Phrygia, a city founded not far from Celaenae, one of the alleged sites of the ark, coins minted in the city from the late second century bore the likeness of Noah and his wife, together with the word “Noah.”15 Probably the most sensational discovery of the early third century was in the northwestern Syrian kingdom of Edessa. This was the correspondence purportedly exchanged between Jesus and king Abgar V (9–46 CE), housed in Edessa’s public archive. Jesus’s letter, the only document asserting authorship from Jesus himself, helped put the city and its archive on the map. By the early fifth century, Edessa and her archive had become a mandatory destination for Christian pilgrims.16

  Like the self-identified “Assyrian” who escorts his readers through the temples, ruins, and wonders of Hierapolis in De Dea Syria, native Christian experts were prepared to act as informants and go-betweens. One of them was the well-traveled polymath Julius Africanus. In his universal chronicle, Africanus, a Palestinian by birth, referees a controversy about the location of the ark. While aware that Celaenae claimed possession of its remains, he rules in favor of Ararat in Parthia, adjudicating the matter in the expected way, through autopsy.17 At the Dead Sea, on the other hand, he plays the part of the faux-naïf, viewing, as if for the first time, the amazing things he witnessed there and adding in some local lore about the reasons for the sterility of its water and the barrenness of the surrounding region.18 One other location known by Africanus to possess biblical relics was the western Mesopotamian city state of Edessa. Jacob’s shepherd’s tent, he writes, was preserved there until it was destroyed by a thunderbolt during the reign of the emperor Antoninus.19 If, as seems likely, Africanus, a visitor to Edessa, had firsthand knowledge of its existence, his discovery would be one of the earliest Christian contributions to antiquarian research in Edessa.