Historical Fictions and Hellenistic Jewish Identity: Third Maccabees in Its Cultural Context

Preface

Preface The Greek East in the Roman period abounded in fictions. In Fiction as History : Nero to Julian (1994), G. Bowersock has written memorably of what he characterizes as an explosion in the production of ancient fictions in the Roman empire, beginning in the reign of Nero (54–68 c.e.), and of the paradoxical character of some of these fictions. Lucian wrote a series of fantastic tales that he impudently titled True Histories ( j Alhqh' Dihghvmata). His tales are fabulous, yet they mirror the world around him: “The people of the moon are at war with the people of the sun, but eventually they conclude a peace treaty that mirrors in its terms and language, as well in the oath that concludes it, the traditional peace treaties of the Greeks.”1 Another writer, named, curiously enough, Ptolemy the Quail (Ptolemy Chennus ), composed (as we learn from Photius) an outrageous work known as the Paradoxical History or New History (Paravdoxˇ JIstoriva, Kainh; JIstoriva ), in which he systematically rewrote the myths of the past, “with a completely straight face and in a pose of scholarly precision,” right down to the citation of a host of wholly fictitious scholarly authorities.2 Yet another author, Celsus, whose attack on the false doctrines of the Christians is preserved by Origen, complained bitterly about the attempt of the Christians to pass off a series of obviously fictitious stories as true history—but his attack on the Christians is framed in the form of a fictitious dialogue.3 All this, argues Bowersock, took place beginning in the reign of Nero, when pagan readers first began to encounter the apparently fantastic stories of resurrection and ritual cannibalism contained in the oral and later xi 1. Bowersock 1994: 6. 2. Ibid. 24–25. 3. Ibid. 2–4. written accounts of the life and death of Christ.4 When one studies, however , the writings of a wide variety of Hellenistic Jewish authors, most of whose literary production is generally dated to the second or first centuries b.c.e., one encounters a group of texts whose paradoxical character is strongly reminiscent of the fictions of the Roman period. In fact, the proliferation of ancient fictions in the ancient Mediterranean began quite a bit earlier than Bowersock suggests. Far from being the source and explanation of the phenomenon, the ambiguous historical character of the Gospels, like that of the classical fictions produced in the Roman period, reflects a more widespread Hellenistic paradox that has yet to be thoroughly explored. In one Hellenistic Jewish text, the Jews of Alexandria are sentenced to die at the feet of a pack of drunken elephants only to be snatched from the jaws of death at the eleventh hour by the appearance of angels. A charming fantasy—but the author of 3 Maccabees goes to some considerable trouble to locate his tale in the reign of a historical king, in the wake of a wellknown historical battle, and soberly cites verbatim documents to prove his case. In another, an eyewitness, a high-ranking pagan courtier in the court of Ptolemy II Philadelphus, gives a careful and well-documented account of the translation of the Septuagint in a letter to his brother. It has long since been established, however, that this author, Aristeas, is a wholly fictitious persona; the Letter of Aristeas was written by an anonymous Jew over a century later. A fictional city in Palestine, Bethulia, is threatened by a campaign of invasion, described in elaborate historical detail, until the courageous Judith seduces the enemy commander and beheads him—thus eliminating the general sent by one Nebuchadnezzar the Assyrian, who has recently restored the Jews from exile following the Babylonian Captivity(!).5 In an apocalypse attributed to the prophet Daniel, we learn of challenges repeatedly overcome by the prophet and his friends under a series of historical kings, one of whom, however, is a wholly fictitious character, apparently based on Darius the Great of Persia, named Darius the Mede.6 These examples could be multiplied at length.Such texts persistently combine hisxii / Preface 4. Ibid. 99–143. 5. Nebuchadnezzar was, of course, king of Babylon, not Assyria, and he was responsible for carrying the Jews into exile in the first place; it was Cyrus of Persia who ended the Exile. 6. Not only is Darius described incorrectly as a Mede, but he is said to have conquered Babylon and placed it under the control of the empire of the Medes (the Medes never...