Finally he adduces passages from various Greek writers, to show that the Jews were not entirely unknown to the Hellenes before Alexander's conquests. Josephus had no doubt predecessors among the Hellenistic Jewish litterateurs in the search for testimony, as well as successors among the Christian apologists; but his collection has alone survived, and has become invaluable to modern scholars, who have ploughed the same field for a different purpose. Authority is brought forward to show that Pythagoras had connection with the Hebrews, and Herodotus, it is argued, referred to the Jews as circumcised Syrians.[1] More apposite is a passage quoted from Clearchus, a pupil of Aristotle, about a discussion which his master had with a Jew of Soli, "who was Greek not only in language but in thought." The genuineness of this excerpt has been questioned, but without good reason. Aristotle's school had a scientific interest in the Jews as in other peoples that had come under Greek sway through Alexander's conquests.
[Footnote 1: Comp. Ant. VIII. x. 3.]
Josephus then sets out some very eulogistic passages about his people, purporting to be from Hecataeus of Abdera, which are very much to his taste and his purpose. Unfortunately, however, they are too good to be true, and modern criticism has established that, while the genuine Hecataeus, an historian who wrote at the end of the fourth century B.C.E., did insert in his work an account of Jerusalem and the Jews, the glowing testimonials which Josephus adduces are from forged books devised by Jews to their own glory. A passage of a less favorable tone, and of which the genuineness is therefore not open to suspicion, is quoted from Agatharchides, a Seleucid historian. Finally, with an incidental mention of a half-dozen Hellenistic writers that have made distinct reference to the Jewish people, and of three Jewish writers, Demetrius, the elder Philo, and Eupolemus, "who have not greatly missed the truth about our affairs," Josephus closes his evidence as to the antiquity of his nation.[1] Possibly he did not realize that his last three witnesses were of his own race, and it is not improbable that this string of names was to him also a string of names culled from Alexander Polyhistor or a similar authority.
[Footnote 1: C. Ap. 23.]
The latter part of the first book is devoted to the refutation of the anti-Jewish diatribes of several Greeks, and starts off with a few commonplaces upon the topic, to the effect that every great nation incurs the jealousy and ill-will of others. "The Egyptians," says Josephus, "were the first to cast reproaches upon us, and in order to please them, some others undertook to pervert the truth. The causes of their enmity are their chagrin at the events of the Exodus and the difference of their religious ideas."[1] Josephus deals with Manetho's description of the going-out from Egypt, and undertakes to demonstrate that "he trifles and tells arrant lies." He dissects the charge that the Hebrews were a pack of lepers exiled from the country, and insists upon its absurdity and the lack of consistency in the details. He offers ingenuously as a proof of the falsity of the allegation that Moses was a leper the Mosaic legislation about lepers. "How could it be supposed," he asks, "that Moses should ordain such laws against himself, to his own reproach and damage?" Chaeremon is unworthy of reply, because his account, though equally scurrilous, is inconsistent with that of Manetho. But the story of Lysimachus, a writer of the same genus, is more critically examined and found wanting, because it gives no explanation of the origin of the Hebrews. Lysimachus derived the name Jerusalem from the Greek Hierosylen—to commit sacrilege—the Hebrews, according to his story, owing their settlement to the plunder of temples; and Josephus points out triumphantly that that idea is not expressed by the same word and name among the Jews and Greeks. But, to vary a saying of Doctor Johnson, this section of Josephus must be read for the quotations, for if one reads it for the argument of either assailant or apologist, one would shoot oneself.
[Footnote 1: C. Ap. 24.]
The second book of the apology, which is a continuation of the first, opens with an elaborate refutation of Apion. Josephus questions whether he should take the trouble to confute the scurrilous stories of the Alexandrian grammarian, "which are all abuse and vulgarity"; but because many are pleased to pick up mendacious fictions, he thinks it better not to leave the charges without an answer. He disposes first of Apion's tales about Moses and the Exodus, which are of the same character as those of Manetho and Chaeremon. Loaded abuse and unmeasured invective color the refutation, but Apion apparently deserved it. We may take, as a fair specimen of his veracity, the statement that the Hebrews reached Palestine six days after they left Egypt and rested on the seventh day, which they called Sabbath, because of some disease from which they suffered, and of which the Egyptian name was Sabbaton. Apion had in particular attacked the Alexandrian Jews, and Josephus takes the opportunity of enlarging on the privileged position of his people, not only in the Egyptian capital, but in the other Hellenistic cities where they had been settled.[1] He elaborates and amplifies what he had stated on this subject in the Antiquities, and adds a short account of the miraculous delivery of the Egyptian Jews during the short-lived persecution of Ptolemy Physcon, which is recorded more fully and with some variation of detail in the so-called Third Book of the Maccabees. In reply to Apion's charge, that the Jews show a lack of civic spirit because they do not worship the same gods as the Alexandrians, Josephus launches out into an explanation of their conception of God, describes their abhorrence of idolatry, and deals also with their refusal to set up in their temples the image of the Emperor. "But at the same time they are willing," he says, "to pay honors to great men and to offer sacrifices in their name." He deals also, in a digression, with calumnies derived from Posidonius and Melon about the worship of an ass in the sanctuary at Jerusalem.
[Footnote 1: This part of the book, it may be noted, has only been preserved in the Latin version; the Greek original has been lost.]
Apion had invented a detailed story of ritual murder to justify Antiochus Epiphanes for his spoliation of the Temple. The origin of this charge is instructive of the methods of a classical anti-Semite. There was, in the innermost sanctuary, a stone[1] on which the blood of the burnt offering was sprinkled by the high priest on the Day of Atonement. It was known as the [Hebrew: Even Shtiah] and tradition said that the ark of the covenant had rested on it. Mystery centered around it, and the Greek scribes imagined that it was the object of worship. Now, the Greek word for a stone was Onos, which likewise meant an ass, and it was probably on the strength of this blunder that prejudice for centuries accused Jews and Christians of worshiping an ass' head. Josephus brings proof of the emptiness of the charge, and retorts that Apion had himself the heart of an ass; and then, describing the ritual of the Temple, insists that there was no secret mystery about it. It gives a touch of pathos that he speaks as if the Temple services were still being carried out, whether because he was copying a source written before the destruction, or because he deliberately disregarded that event. Apion, like Cicero, had taunted the Jews on account of their political subjection, which proved, he argued, that their laws were not just nor their religion true. Josephus meets the charge—which in the materialistic thinking of the Roman world was hard to answer—by the not very happy plea that the Egyptians and Greeks had suffered a like fortune. So, too, he meets the gibe that the Jews do not eat pork, by saying that the Egyptian priests abstain likewise. He omits in both cases the true religious answer, which would probably not have appealed to his public.
[Footnote 1: Yer. Yoma, v. 2.]