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Contagion of the Jews: Metaphorical and Rhetorical Uses of Sickness, Plague, and Disease in Pseudo-Hegesippus
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 June 2022
Abstract
Drawing upon discourses developed in earlier Graeco-Roman and Judaeo-Christian antiquity, the little-known text De excidio Hierosolymitano, also dubbed ‘Pseudo-Hegesippus’, develops a discourse of Jewish disease within a history of Jerusalem's destruction by the Romans in 70 CE. Based upon Flavius Josephus's Greek Jewish War, this Latin Christian text of Late Antiquity thus deploys a rhetoric of Jewish contagion within its historiographical solution to the Christian theological exigency of explaining the Jews out of history. Far from being an incidental or merely aesthetic component of this work, this article shows that a discourse of Jewish sickness constitutes a central component of Pseudo-Hegesippus's conceptualization and presentation of the end of Jerusalem and the historical demise of the Jews.
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- Research Article
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- Studies in Church History , Volume 58: THE CHURCH IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH , June 2022 , pp. 8 - 27
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- Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Ecclesiastical History Society
References
1 The Latin text of De excidio is taken from Vincenzo Ussani's standard critical edition, Hegesippi qui dicitur Historiae libri v, 1: Textum criticum continens (CSEL 66.1). All translations are my own. Texts and translation of Josephus's Greek works are from the LCL editions.
2 The name ‘Hegesippus’ constitutes a historical conflation between the author of De excidio and the second-century, Greek-writing Hegesippus who penned a five-book Hypomnēmata (Memoirs) and was a major source for Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History, a conflation which first appears in manuscripts during the ninth and tenth century, which coincides with a subtle orthographical move from the Latin phrase ex iosippi (‘of Josephus’) to the similar egesippi ('of Hegesippus’), as in Milan Codex Ambrosianus C105 inf., fol. 67v. In any case, it is best practice to refer to De excidio's author as Pseudo-Hegesippus to avoid confusion and to signal that the author of De excidio was almost certainly not named ‘Hegesippus’ (something that many, including the Thesaurus Latinae Linguae at Munich, continue not to do).
3 The only monograph on the work to date, an excellent but brief overview of its primary features, is in Italian: Somenzi, Chiara, Egesippo – Ambrogio. Formazione scolastica e Cristiana a Roma alla metà del IV secolo, Studia Patristica Mediolanensia 27 (Milan, 2009)Google Scholar.
4 See Bell, Albert A. Jr, ‘Classical and Christian Traditions in the Work of Pseudo-Hegesippus’, Indiana Social Studies Quarterly 33 (1980), 60–4Google Scholar.
5 More or less beginning with Albert A. Bell Jr, ‘An Historiographical Analysis of the De Excidio Hierosolymitano of Pseudo-Hegesippus’ (Ph.D. dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1977); idem, ‘Josephus and Pseudo-Hegesippus’, in Louis H. Feldman and Gohei Hata, eds, Josephus, Judaism, and Christianity (Detroit, MI, 1987), 349–61. See now, for example, Carson Bay, ‘The Bible, the Classics, and the Jews in Pseudo-Hegesippus: A Literary Analysis of De Excidio Hierosolymitano 5.2’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Florida State University, 2018).
6 On the text's provenance and (briefly) its date and authorship, see Carson Bay, ‘Pseudo-Hegesippus at Antioch? Testing a Hypothesis for the Provenance of De Excidio Hierosolymitano’, Bulletin de l'Académie Belge pour l’Étude des Langues Anciennes et Orientales 8 (2019), 97–128.
7 I draw loosely on the notion of ‘cultural biography’ as discussed in Andrew S. Jacobs, Epiphanius of Cyprus: A Cultural Biography of Late Antiquity (Berkeley, CA, 2016).
8 ‘Die literarische Tradition, an die Ps.-Hegesipp anknüpft, ist die eines Sallust. Er schreibt, wie Sallust, eine Monographie’: Markus Sehlmeyer, Geschichtsbilder für Pagane und Christen. Res Romanae in den spätantiken Breviarien (Berlin, 2009), 222.
9 See Carson Bay, ‘Pseudo-Hegesippus and the Beginnings of Christian Historiography in Late Antiquity’, Studia Patristica 126 (2021), 255–66.
10 Dominique Estève, ‘L'Oeuvre historique du Pseudo-Hegésippe: “De Bello iudaico”, livre I à IV’ (Ph.D. thesis, Université Paris Nanterre, 1987).
11 See Carson Bay, ‘On the Multivocality of the Latin Josephus Tradition: A Comparison between the Latin War, Latin Antiquities, Pseudo-Hegesippus, and Rufinus based on the Egyptian Pseudo-Prophet Episode (War 2.261–263, Antiquities 20.169–172a)’, Medaevalia et Humanistica 46 (2020), 1–36.
12 ‘ἀπόνοια καθάπερ νόσος’: Josephus, Jewish War 7.437 (LCL 210, 428); cf. Herodotus 3.76.2, 3.127.1, 5.28. It is worth noting that Josephus's comment here appears nearly at the end of his seven-book Jewish War, suggesting that the correlation of sedition and disease may have formed a core part of how he understood the Judaean uprising that led to the Roman-Jewish War, or at least the eventual Jewish ‘death’ it effected.
13 Josephus, Jewish War 2.11, 2.264, 3.443, 4.376, 6.337; see Steve Mason, Flavius Josephus: Translation and Commentary, Volume 1B – Judean War 2 (Leiden, 2008), 214 n. 1660.
14 Steve Mason, A History of the Jewish War: AD 66–74 (Cambridge, 2016), 14.
15 ‘Velut contagione morbi’: Livy 39.9.1 (LCL 313, 230). Benjamin Isaac notes that such Roman ‘attacks on Greek culture and Asiatic customs’ were extended to the Jews as well: The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton, NJ, 2004), 385, cf. 479; see also Livy 28.34.4.
16 Thucydides’ description ‘has been immensely influential to subsequent plague narratives in Western literature’, not least in its literary function of using plague to discuss religious and moral decay: Peter Hunt, ‘Thucydides on the First Ten Years of War (Archidamian War)’, in Ryan K. Balot, Sara Forsdyke and Edith Foster, eds, The Oxford Handbook of Thucydides (Oxford, 2017), 125–45, at 139.
17 ‘Individuals probably noticed contagion well before recorded history and Thucydides makes it clear that some people were afraid to approach plague victims for fear of catching the disease (Thucy. 2.51.5). Nevertheless, the historian himself deserves the credit of being the first writer clearly to operate within a model of contagion, something that was not formally proposed again until the sixteenth century and not fully accepted until the nineteenth century’: Hunt, ‘First Ten Years’, 139.
18 For example, Sallust Bellum catilinae 10.6; Lucan Bellum civile 3.322; cf. Livy 28.27.11, 29.6.3.
19 See Dennis Pausch, ed., Stimmen der Geschichte. Funktionen von Reden in der antiken Historiographie (Berlin, 2010).
20 John Marincola, ‘Speeches in Classical Historiography’, in idem, ed., A Companion to Greek and Roman Historiography, 2 vols (Malden, MA, 2007), 1: 118–32.
21 The best known presentation of this argument is A. J. Woodman, Rhetoric in Classical Historiography: Four Essays (Portland, OR, 1988), which deals at length with speeches in Thucydides surrounding the plague at Athens (ibid. 32–9); see also M. J. Wheeldon, ‘“True Stories”: The Reception of Historiography in Antiquity’, in Averil Cameron, ed., History as Text: The Writing of Ancient History (London, 1989), 33–63.
22 See briefly Estève, ‘L'Oeuvre historique’, xxii.
23 ‘Hos bellandi successus domestica seditio interpolauit, et orta conuiuiis usque ad bellum contentio processit familiari peste huiusmodi Iudaeorum uiris, ut de epulari ludo sese in arma excitant’ (‘A domestic rebellion interrupted these successes in war, and the dispute, having arisen in social gatherings, advanced to war by a plague of the sort familiar to the men of the Jews, that they stir themselves to arms from festive play’): De excidio 1.9.3. This is a creative and subtle expansion of Josephus, Jewish War 1.88. The dative plural uiris here (‘[to] the men’) may also be playing on the Latin term uirus, which can mean ‘virus’. On ideology as a disease (pestis) or contagion (contagio) which may spread, see also De excidio 1.39.1, cf. 1.37.6–7.
24 See also ibid. 3.22.1, 4.11.1.
25 ‘Fugiens ut supra diximus, de Galilaeae partibus Iohannes ad Hierosolymitanam urbem se contulit et quasi quaedam pestis infecit animos conplurium, qui ex diuersis regionibus principes flagitiorum eo quasi in sentinam confluxerant’ (‘Fleeing the regions of Galilee, as we explained above, John betook himself to the city of Jerusalem and, as if some kind of disease, he infected the minds of many, who, leaders of the scoundrels from diverse regions, had come together there even as in a cesspool’): ibid. 4.6.1 (paralleled in Josephus, Jewish War 4.122).
26 De excidio 4.4.5.
27 ‘Hoc enim illi urbi maioris causa excidii fuit’: ibid. 4.6.1.
28 Nicolas Wiater, ‘Reading the Jewish War: Narrative Technique and Historical Interpretation in Josephus's Bellum Judaicum’, Materiali e discussioni per l'analisi dei testi classici 64 (2010), 145–85.
29 Like Jesus in the gospels of Matthew and Luke: see William den Hollander, ‘Jesus, Josephus, and the Fall of Jerusalem: On doing History with Scripture’, HTS Theological Studies 71 (2015), 1–9.
30 As argued in Bay, ‘The Bible, the Classics, and the Jews’.
31 See on this passage Carson Bay, ‘Jewish National Decline and Biblical Figures as Classical Exempla in Pseudo-Hegesippus: Moses, Aaron, Joshua, David, and Elisha at De Excidio 5.2.1’, JBR 7 (2020), 167–204.
32 ‘Exsurge, Aaron, qui aliquando, cum propter offensam dei omnipotentis mors plurimos populi depasceretur, stetisti inter uiuentes ac mortuos, et mors stetit atque obiectu corporis tui haesit lues nec transire potuit ad contagionem uiuentium’: De excidio 5.2.1.
33 Ibid. 3.16–17, 5.2.1. Aaron is also mentioned in 2.12 (twice), 2.13 (twice), 5.9, 5.16. Even beyond this, the rebellions of Numbers 16 seem to have loomed large in Pseudo-Hegesippus's memory, as they emerge again in a mention of Dathan and Abiram (Numbers 16: 1–27) as models of divine judgment in Antipater's speech: De excidio 1.44.8. At 3.16.1, Josephus's Jewish comrades cite Aaron as an example of willingness to die as a good leadership trait, as part of an attempt to dissuade Josephus from capitulating to the Romans, recently victorious at Jotapata: ‘Vbi est Aaron, qui inter uiuos ac mortuos medius stetit, ne mors uiuentem populum saeuo contagio depasceretur’ (‘Where is Aaron, who stood in the middle between the living and the dead, lest death consume the living populace with a savage infection?’). In 3.17.1, Josephus responds that Aaron's action was an instance of uirtus, not temeritas.
34 ‘Iacuerunt in te Ananus et Iesus insepulti sacerdotum principes, et illi dudum sacerdotalibus amicti stolis, qui uenerationi etiam exteris fuerant, deformi iacuerunt cadauere, escae uolatilium et deuoratio canum, membra laceri et tota dispersi urbe, ut deplorare ueteris sanctitatis species uideretur tantam sacri nominis contumeliam et speciosi quondam muneris deformitatem. … Ante et uirga sacerdotalis floruit recisa de siluestri radice, nunc et fides aret et sepulta est pietas et abiit omnis uirtutis aemulatio. Nec mirum si populus, qui a deo recessit et improbum contradictionis spiritum sequitur, in se ipsum diuisus est. Quomodo enim pacem suam tenere poterat qui pacem dei repudiauit? Pax dei Christus est qui fecit utraque unum. Merito ergo ex uno populo plures aduersum se facti sunt, quia noluerunt sequi diuisa consociantem Iesum, sed secuti sunt coniuncta diuidentem furoris spiritum. Soluebas igitur, Hierusalem, mercedem perfidiae tuae, cum ipsa tuis manibus destrueres munimina tua, cum tuis mucronibus foderes uiscera tua, ita ut hostis misereretur, ut ille parceret tu saeuires’: ibid. 5.2.1.
35 See Rebecca Langlands, Exemplary Ethics in Ancient Rome (Cambridge, 2018); Matthew B. Roller, Models from the Past in Roman Culture: A World of Exempla (Cambridge, 2018).
36 Significantly, De excidio 5.2.1 is written in the style of a funeral oration, and it resembles in more ways than one the funeral oration Thucydides puts in Pericles's mouth immediately preceding the account of the plague of 430 BCE.
37 When, a few lines later, Pseudo-Hegesippus speaks of a ‘fury that was transferred from the dead to those who were still living’ (a mortuis in eos qui adhuc uiuerent furor transferebatur), he may well have in mind the avenging plague said to have killed so many Israelites in Numbers 16, as discussed above. Pseudo-Hegesippus also describes the diseases spread among the Jews holed up in Jerusalem: ibid. 5.18.2.
38 See Bay, ‘The Bible, the Classics, and the Jews’, 148–99.
39 See Tacitus, Histories 1.14.1, 1.20.3, 1.29.1, 1.37.4, 1.63.1, 1.83.1, 2.68.3, 3.54.1, 4.9.1, 4.46.4, 4.81.2; cf. Bay, ‘The Bible, the Classics, and the Jews’, 280–4; Rebecca Edwards, ‘Deuotio, Disease, and Remedia in the Histories’, in Victoria Emma Pagán, ed., A Companion to Tacitus (Malden, MA, 2012), 237–59.
40 ‘Et ideo spectatores malebant esse Romani quam percussores, ne furentibus tuis inter se uisceribus manum admouere contagionis magis quam fortitudinis aestimaretur’: De excidio 5.2.1.
41 See Martin Dinter, Anatomizing Civil War: Studies in Lucan's Epic Technique (Ann Arbor, MI, 2013).
42 The connection between physical plague and self-mutilation was immortalized in the discussion of the Athenian plague in Lucretius, De rerum natura, e.g. 6.1199–1214, as discussed by Catharine Edwards, Death in Ancient Rome (New Haven, CT, 2007), 82–3, who notes that ‘these references to self-mutilation have no precedent in Thucydides. For Lucretius, plague is a physical disaster but also – much more than for Thucydides – a moral calamity. … Social structures are undermined, moral values and ritual practices abandoned’. Edwards could be describing De excidio's portrayal of Jerusalem at 5.2.1.
43 See Carson Bay, ‘The “Maria Story” in Greek, Latin, & Hebrew: The Teknophagia Episode (BJ 6.201–13) in Josephus, Latin Josephus, Rufinus, Pseudo-Hegesippus, and Sefer Yosippon with Introduction, Texts, Translations, Notes, & Commentary’, Judaica 3 (2022), 1–105; Honora Howell Chapman, ‘Josephus and the Cannibalism of Mary (BJ 6.199–219)’, in Marincola, ed., Companion to Greek and Roman Historiography, 2: 419–26; eadem, ‘“A Myth for the World”: Early Christian Reception of Infanticide and Cannibalism in Josephus, Bellum Judaicum 6.199–219’, Society of Biblical Literature Seminar Papers 39 (2000), 359–78; eadem, ‘Spectacle and Theater in Josephus's Bellum Judaicum’ (Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1998), 58–121.
44 ‘Quo conperto Caesar exsecratus infelicis terrae contagium, manus ad caelum eleuans, talia protestabatur: … Mundus ego ab hoc contagio tibi me absoluo, quaecumque in caelo potestas es. … Operiant eam ruinae suae atque abscondant, mundi ipsius contagionem ne sol uideat, ne stellarum globus spectet; ne maculentur aurarum spiramina, purgatorius quoque ille exsurgat ignis’: De excidio 5.41.2.
45 Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary (Oxford, 1879), s.vv. ‘contagio’, ‘contagium’.
46 This involves the example of Abraham and his infamous near-sacrifice of his son Isaac (the Aqedah from Genesis 22), as ancestors definitive of the national character: see Carson Bay, ‘Exemplarity, Exegesis, & Ethnography: Abraham in Pseudo-Hegesippus as a Test Case for Biblical Reception in Christian Late Antiquity’, JBR 8 (2021), 35–59.
47 De excidio 4.6.1.
48 De excidio 1.16.3, 5.2.1, 5.31.2, 5.32.1.
49 ‘Nec mirum est si recessit a Iudaeis diuina gratia, quos tanta flagitia circumuallarunt. An uero bonus uir plenum horroris refugit diuersorium et domum suam deserit, si quid in ea commissum sceleris agnouerit, declinat indignae habitationis consortia, execratur conuersantium iniquitates: et dubitamus de summo et immaculato deo, quod abhorreat tantorum contagia flagitiorum, et funestorum scelerum auersetur atrocitatem, nec demoretur in parricidarum conciliabulis, qui Dathan et Abiron, quia Moysen et Aaron praeripiendo sacerdotii munere lacessiuerant, separari ab innoxiis praecepit, ne pios aut macula contaminaret de consortio noxiorum aut poena inuolueret?’: ibid. 5.16.1. This part of this speech, based upon a shorter and rather different speech in Josephus, Jewish War 5.376–419, builds upon certain theological ideas presented there: see 5.392, 413, and specifically 5.413–15.
50 After Dathan and Abiram, along with Korah, rejected the authority of Moses and Aaron in Israel, the Lord prescribes their punishment. The first thing Moses says to the congregation is: ‘Depart now from the tents of these wicked men, and touch nothing that belongs to them, or you will be swept away in all their sin’ (Numbers 16: 26, NASB). Thereafter Dathan, Abiram and all their goods and relatives are swallowed alive by the earth.
51 In De excidio one finds the terms aeger / aegra / aegrum and aegritudo twelve times each, contagio / contagium fourteen times, febris four times, medicabilis once, medicamentum four times, medicinus / medicina three times, morbus eleven times, noxius / noxia / noxium eleven times, pestilens once, pestis seventeen times, pestilentia five times and plaga seven times. Sometimes these terms are used literally, sometimes figuratively. The brevity of this article prevents a full survey of this vocabulary of sickness within De excidio.
52 An interesting and accidental example is in Pseudo-Hegesippus's mistranslation of the Greek verb ξενοτροφεῖν (‘to hire foreign troops’) from Josephus, Jewish War 1.61 by the Latin xenodocheia, a reference to a system of institutional healthcare whereby the poor and indigent were cared for and which emerged, apparently, in the mid-fourth century CE: see Mark Anderson, ‘Mistranslations of Josephus and the Expansion of Public Charity in Late Antiquity’, EME 25 (2017), 139–61, discussed in Bay, ‘Pseudo-Hegesippus at Antioch?’, 116.
53 See Harper, Kyle, The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, & the End of an Empire (Princeton, NJ, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
54 See Contra Iudaeos 1.1.5, 1.4.4, 2.1.1, cf. 8.7.8–12; also St John Chrysostom: Discourses against Judaizing Christians, ed. Paul W. Harkins (FOTC 68), especially xxxix, 267.
55 Pliny the Younger, Epistula 10.96.9 refers to Christians as a contagium and as a superstitio; cf. Tacitus, Annals 44.4.
56 Pernick, Martin S., ‘Contagion and Culture’, American Literary History 14 (2002), 858–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 860.
57 Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark, Metaphors we live by (Chicago, IL, 1980)Google Scholar.
58 Pinker, Steven, How the Mind works (New York, 1997), 355–62Google Scholar.
59 See Pollard, Richard Matthew, ‘The De Excidio of “Hegesippus” and the Reception of Josephus in the Early Middle Ages’, Viator 46 (2015), 65–100CrossRefGoogle Scholar.