MrMacSon wrote: ↑Fri Oct 25, 2019 5:32 pm
Ben C. Smith wrote: ↑Fri Oct 25, 2019 4:21 pm
To my way of thinking, it is kind of a wider story, but the accounts are not supposed to be allegorical (highly symbolic, yes, but not allegorical).
Yes, symbolic is a better description (than allegory or allegorical).
Ben C. Smith wrote: ↑Fri Oct 25, 2019 4:21 pm
Rather, it is part of that wider pattern of emulation and fulfillment which I
posted about recently. It is part of the mindset of certain kinds of people of the time, who would deliberately set out to emulate the ancient heroes or fulfill the promises made in scripture. This is why we find so very many biblical passages, even some rather unpromising ones, applied to Jesus; he was supposed to be their fulfillment. Well, I think it is clear that Jesus was not the only game in town at the time. John the Baptist was supposed to be fulfilling various aspects, and so was Simon Magus, and so were the "enchanters" of whom Josephus writes. Joshua was not the only template, either; the Samaritan "enchanter," for example, seems to have been trying either to emulate or to fulfill the role of the "prophet like Moses" promised in Deuteronomy 5.28-29 + Deuteronomy 18.18-19 = Samaritan Exodus 20.18a-g. Jesus ben Ananus seems to have been acting like a new Jeremiah.* And so on.
.
* it would be interesting to know if Weeden is right about Josephus basing his account of Jesus ben Annus on Jeremiah.
Part of the purpose of
my thread on emulation and fulfillment is to contextualize the texts which suggest, implicitly or explicitly, that such emulation and fulfillment was actually something which some people did during the relevant era. The bare fact of the matter is that most of the people about whom such claims were made in antiquity did not leave anything for us in writing. Jesus, for example, is said to have emulated and fulfilled numerous scriptures, but he (if he even existed) left us nothing in writing to let us know his own thoughts on the matter directly; his sayings in the gospels may or may not reflect his own viewpoint. We get brief accounts about Theudas, the Egyptian, the Samaritan, Jesus ben Ananias, and others in Josephus, but the historian does not even tell us that they were deliberately emulating or fulfilling scriptural templates; we have to infer that for ourselves. Same goes for the Zealots, described by Josephus as such but not tied directly in the text itself to the precedents set by Phinehas and Mattathias (and Elijah, too, for that matter). Some of the Qumran scrolls tell us that the Teacher of Righteousness was fulfilling certain obscure scriptures, but it is unclear whether the Teacher himself wrote anything preserved in the scrolls. The rabbinic texts rightly compare Honi and Hanina to Elijah, but neither of those two alleged wonder workers speak for themselves. The rabbinic texts also tell us that Simon bar Kokhba thought he was the Messiah, but the few letters of his which we possess are far more mundane, dealing with the logistics of fighting a war and such.
Josephus does seem to view himself and his situation in the light of Joseph and Daniel, both of whom found themselves making their way in foreign courts, but his self reflection on this score is very subtle, and only emulation seems to be on the table in this case, not fulfillment.
It is easy, therefore, in any single case to suspect that the author of the text has used the scriptures in order to
invent characters (or motivations
for characters) who are taking it upon themselves either to emulate or to fulfill ancient prophecies and the like; after all, we have only the text making the claim, not the written ruminations of the person about whom the claim is being made. At this point, though, we run into a fork in the road: it is not likely that
all of the cases were invented by authors
independently of one another, for why would this sort of thing be such a common theme if literally nobody was going around emulating or fulfilling scripture? The only way such a mass invention would work is if one author (or at most a very limited group of authors) invented the very idea of it happening and all the other authors got that idea from him/her, whether directly or indirectly.
Authors of fiction write about jealous lovers, prolonged wars, and sibling rivalries because all of those things happen in real life. But authors of fiction also write about time travel, and that is because a pair of authors writing late in century XIX (Mark Twain and H. G. Wells) wrote several stories about traveling through time and the theme stuck around as a stock science fiction motif. So is the sort of emulation and fulfillment written about in our texts an example from real life, or is it more like time travel, a purely literary device? Several considerations make me lean toward the former option:
- We have examples of ancient writers actively encouraging their readers to emulate scriptural and cultural heroes.
- We have examples from more recent (modern and medieval) and thus more verifiable history of people in the Judeo-Christian tradition trying to fulfill ancient prophecies (pseudo-Messiahs and the like). Did this notion occur only to medieval and modern people and never to the ancients?
- We have examples of ancient people from cultures and religions other than Jewish or Christian who seem to have done the same thing with their own traditions (think of Virgil, Caesar Augustus, and the Golden Age of Saturn), suggesting a trend more widespread than mere literary imitation.
- We have examples of ancient scriptures which genuinely seem to predict that certain things are going to happen, and in such an environment it is difficult to imagine that no people or groups of people ever thought to take it upon themselves to fulfill those predictions.
I am confident, therefore, that people were attempting both to emulate and to fulfill ancient scriptural prophecies. This logical result does not in any way mean, however, that all the examples on the list are genuine; we are stuck in our usual position of having to sort good information from bad; we cannot just sweep it all away in one direction with a single flourish. When it comes specifically to Josephus, I admit that there is plenty of subjectivity involved, but my own sense is that he is not inventing the whole trend of people from among the common folk performing those symbolic scriptural actions; he wants to find examples of unruly members of the lower classes in order to blame them for the war with Rome, to be sure, but I am not certain what benefit he derives from secretly injecting scriptural precedents into those examples; he never highlights them or uses them to some advantage. Making the commoners look silly would be easy enough without simultaneously making them into interpreters of scripture without even telling his gentile readers what is going on. Furthermore, the existence of Joshua/Jesus imitators during the very time period in which a nascent Christianity concocted its own Joshua/Jesus figure just makes a lot of sense to me. Subjective, like I said, but those are my current thoughts on the topic. YMMV.