Intertestamental, Apocrypha, NT Use

Intertestamental, Apocrypha, NT Use Christopher T. Begg 1591. [Josephus Antiquities] étienne Nodet, Texte et Sommaires des Antiquités de Josèphe: Éditions multiples (Cahiers de la Revue Biblique; Leuven/Paris/Bristol, CT: Peeters, 2017). Pp. 189. Paper €56. ISBN 978-90-429-3488-7. This work has a double purpose: First, it seeks to provide a way of using the apparatus criticus of B. Niese's excellent edition (1885–1892) of Josephus's Jewish Antiquities, which on one level can hardly be improved upon. Niese's way of sorting the data presented by him is not, however, satisfactory, understandably so since he worked before the emergence of modern text-critical theories, which focus on "conjunctive errors" and take into account the ubiquitous problem of contamination due to the fact that in ancient times copyists often used more than one source text, though not in a systematic way. On the basis of a careful study of Niese's apparatus, we propose stemmas for each of the 20 books of the Antiquities, and for the Life as well, which originated as an independent book. The second object of our work is to restore the "Tables of Contents" that are appended to each of the 20 books as preliminary sketches written by Josephus himself prior to the composition of the whole. These preliminary notes are obviously not designed as tables of contents. They include lengthy passages on Herod the Great and can hardly have been compiled by a Christian copyist, given that they entirely lack any reference to matters of NT interest such as the Prophets, the Pharisees, the Sanhedrin, Jesus, John the Baptist, etc. Moreover, there are expressions, e.g., "Abraham our forefather" or "our nation" in this material that evidences Josephus's own hand—rather than a later Jewish hand—for he did not have any known Jewish posterity, notwithstanding his overarching goal of presenting himself as a leader of his people, albeit from Rome. The above two points are not unconnected. We can, moreover, discover bridges between them when we recognize that Josephus did rework his own books. His doing so manifests itself in various ways: First he enlarged his preliminary sketches by adding chronologies and certain additional items in order to bring those sketches into closer conformity with what would be expected of a proper table of contents. Second, it can be proved that Josephus issued at least two editions of his work. The most obvious indication of this fact comes at the end of Book 20. Its early form included a short account of his life, in line with the preliminary sketch of the book. Later, for apologetic reasons, Josephus detached this account from what precedes and turned it into a full-scale book. Eventually, a new conclusion was appended to the thus truncated Book 20, with a date and mention of additional literary projects envisaged by Josephus—which, as far as we know, were never completed by him. Finally, one manuscript, which has a good position in the stemmas, has large additions to the whole work that reflect a significant reworking of the whole by Josephus, though this cannot be the very first edition of the work. Indeed, the very notion of "the original work" becomes blurred in light of our analysis, which, for its part, opens up the possibility that a careful study of the branches of the archetypes might unearth a mixture of various reworkings by Josephus. Our work provides a tentative sample of what might emerge from such a large-scale endeavor. [Adapted from English abstract—C.T.B.] [End Page 543] 1592. [Letter of Aristeas] Benjamin G. Wright iii, The Letter of Aristeas: 'Aristeas to Philocrates' or 'On the Translation of the Laws of the Jews' (Commentaries on Early Jewish Literature; Berlin/New York: de Gruyter, 2015). Pp. xi + 501. €112.10. ISBN 978-3-11-043904-5. W.'s monograph on the famous Letter of Aristeas opens with an introduction articulated under ten headings: (1) the present commentary; (2) historical value; (3) title of the book; (4) the author of Aristeas and his provenance; (5) date; (6) textual criticism (the manuscripts, Josephus, and Eusebius); (7) integrity of Aristeas; (8...