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“A Myth for the World”: Early Christian Reception of Infanticide and Cannibalism in Josephus, Bellum Judaicum 6.199-219 Honora H. Chapman, Santa Clara University October, 2000

The Christian Fathers adapt, comment upon, and quote Josephus’s detailed and

dramatic description of the destruction of Jerusalem for a variety of literary and theological purposes.1 They cite the scene of Mary’s cannibalism at B.J. 6.199-219 more often than any other from the War because it provides them with vivid evidence to corroborate passages in the scriptures concerning the two destructions of Jerusalem and God’s punishment of his people for sin.2 Josephus’s Christian readers also appreciate his use of tragic themes and diction in the scene of cannibalism.3 They choose, however, to ignore that his rhetorical purpose in this tragic passage is to encourage his readers to have compassion for the majority of Jews who suffered during the war with the Romans because of the actions of the Jewish rebels. In this paper I shall offer an analysis of the scene of Mary’s cannibalism within the context of the B.J. Then I shall examine how Melito, Origen, Eusebius, Basil, John Chrysostom, Jerome, and pseudo-Hegesippus read and employ the Josephan passage.

Josephus, B.J. 6.199-219 The story of Mary’s cannibalism occurs in Book 6, right at the climax of his account

of the Roman siege of Jerusalem in 70 C.E., and it serves dramatically as the catalyst for the destruction of the Jewish Temple. By setting this abomination of cannibalism directly

1 H. Schreckenberg has extensively probed the reception of Josephus by later Christians; see, for instance, his Die Flavius-Josephus-Tradition in Antike und Mittelalter, Leiden: Brill, 1972; Rezeptionsgeschichtliche und textkritische Untersuchungen zu Flavius Josephus, Leiden, 1977; “Josephus und die christliche Wirkungsgeschichte seines ‘Bellum Judaicum,’”ANRW 2, pt. 21, sec. 2, ed. W. Haase, Berlin, New York, 1984, pp. 1106-1217; “The Works of Josephus and the Early Christian Church,” in L. Feldman and G. Hata, edd., Josephus, Judaism, and Christianity, Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1987, pp. 315-324. 2 See Schreckenberg (1972), pp. 186-191, for a list of passages in B.J. and the later authors who used them; he does not mention Melito of Sardis in connection with 6.199-219. On the use of the story of the cannibalism of Mary, see most recently S. Mason, Josephus and the New Testament, Hendrickson, 1992, pp. 11, 15, 32. In his chapter “The Use and Abuse of Josephus,” p. 11, Mason remarks, “Of all the Christian references to Josephus that have survived from the ancient world and the Middle Ages, the passage most commonly cited from his works, next to his reference to Jesus [Ant. 18.63-64], is one that describes a horrible act of cannibalism during the Roman siege.” 3 Schreckenberg has detected the historian’s use of tragedy and comments generally on its effect upon Christian readers of the Bellum: “On the whole, Josephus awakened, especially with his Jewish War, the emotions of his Christian readers; indeed, his depiction of the destruction of Jerusalem was in individual scenes composed almost like a tragedy and, especially at certain climaxes of the story, was perceived in just this way by Christian readers. They felt horror and fright in the face of the Jewish catastrophe; they felt, at the same time, on account of the frequently moralizing historical view of Josephus, a certain edification and satisfaction in stationing themselves on the side favored by God,” in “The Works of Josephus and the Early Christian Church,” trans. by H. Regensteiner, in Josephus, Judaism, and Christianity, ed. by Louis H. Feldman and Gohei Hata, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987, p. 320.

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before the destruction of the Temple, Josephus plainly is creating a disaster of biblical proportions, especially for his Jewish audience, who would know of the first destruction and other dire cases of cannibalism from the scriptures. At the same time, he tempers his description with topoi and pathos gleaned from Greek tragedy and historiography.4 Josephus sets the scene for Mary in Bellum 6 by painting a picture of the social breakdown within Jerusalem as the siege persists and of the “indescribable sufferings”5 of those perishing from famine. Throughout the B.J. the victims are the majority of the Jewish people, and the villains are the Jewish rebels, whom he excoriates for turning the Temple into a polluted brigand-stronghold.

Josephus introduces the story of Mary’s cannibalism with a rather lengthy prologue: But why should I tell about their shamelessness in eating inanimate food because of the famine? For I am about to reveal a deed of such a kind that has never been recorded by Greeks or barbarians, awful to tell and unbelievable to hear. For my part, so that I might not seem to my future audience to be telling tales, I would gladly have left out this misfortune, if I had not had countless witnesses among my own contemporaries. Above all, I would be paying cold respect to my country if I lied in my account of the things it has suffered.6

There are several issues to address in this introduction to the Mary episode: its supposed uniqueness in both the Greek and Jewish worlds, its emotional impact, its credibility with respect to his future audience, his insistence upon the use of eye-witnesses, and, finally, his desire not to be considered a traitor to his country but to present accurately through an account (“logos”) the sufferings of his own people. I shall analyze each of these elements in this prologue in relation to Josephus’s overall historiographic agenda before turning to his narrative of the scene itself.

In this prologue to Mary’s cannibalism, Josephus first tantalizes his audience by claiming that he will reveal a deed unparalleled in Greek or Jewish history. The few modern scholars who have examined this passage assume that Josephus has made a slip, is ignorant, or is lying, but none provides satisfactory explanation for his motives in doing any of the above. Thackeray notes, “Josephus strangely ignores the parallel incident at the siege of Samaria, recorded in 2 Kings vi.28f.”7 Thackeray assumes that

4 Most recently, L. Feldman has mentioned “the intense drama in Josephus’ description of the final debacle of the Jews and of the destruction of the Temple in Book 6 of the War, notably the account (War 6.201-213) of Maria, the Jewess who was led by the famine to devour her own child,” in “The Influence of the Greek Tragedians on Josephus,” in A. Ovadiah ed., Hellenic and Jewish Arts, Tel Aviv, 1998, p. 60. 5 B.J. 6.193. 6 B.J. 6.199-200: “kai\ ti\ dei= th\n e0p’ a)yu/xoij a)nai/deian tou= limou= le/gein; ei0=mi ga\r au0tou= dhlw/swn e0/rgon oi9=on mh/te par´ 9/Ellhsin mh/te para\ barba/roij i9sto/rhtai, frikto\n me\n ei0pei=n, a0/piston d’ a0kou=sai. kai\ e0/gwge mh\ do/caimi terateu/esqai toi=j au]qij a0nqrw/poij, ka0\n pare/leipon th\n sumfora\n h9de/wj, ei0 mh\ tw~n kat’ e0mauto\n ei0=xon a)pei/rouj ma/rturaj. a!llwj te kai\ yuxra\n a@n kataqei/mhn th|= patri/di xa/rin kaqufe/menoj to\n lo/gon w{ pe/ponqen ta\ e0/rga.” 7 Thackeray (1928), vol. 3, p. 434, n. a. At 2 Kings 6:26-31, a Samaritan woman in direct speech informs the besieging king of Aram that she and another woman had made a pact to eat each of their sons; she has

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Josephus knew the Hebrew story and chose not to include it.8 Thackeray in his note also relates this incident in the Bellum to the warnings of God’s retribution for Israel’s violation of the commandments in Deuteronomy 28.57 and Baruch 2.2f. Price augments these Biblical citations with others, including rabbinic parallels.9

I, however, do not think that Josephus’s omission is “strange” but actually essential to his historiographic goals. We should draw a comparison between Josephus’s claim here of the incomparable nature of Mary’s cannibalism and the historian’s larger claim in the preface of the Bellum that this war between the Romans and the Jews was the greatest of all ever waged.10 In this, he is hearkening back to Thucydides’ claim of the Peloponnesian War surpassing all previous wars.11 Great wars require great climaxes. In his story of Mary Josephus is laying out an extraordinary explanation for why the cataclysmic destruction occurs in Jerusalem. It, therefore, would only have deflated the grandeur and supposed uniqueness of his material at this point to refer to the Samaritan cannibalism in 2Kings.

An understanding of the scriptural background is essential for reading the passage of Mary’s cannibalism. Besides the account in 2Kings of the Samaritan mothers’ cannibalism, the Hebrew literature set dramatically during the Babylonian exile repeatedly foretells/reports cannibalism during the siege of Jerusalem which led to the destruction of its first Temple and the captivity of its people. What is key to these previous exilic texts, especially Jeremiah, Lamentations, and Ezekiel, is that Israel interpret its sufferings, including engaging in cannibalism,12 as punishments from Yahweh for not keeping the Jewish Law, and specifically for profaning the Temple. Parents, both fathers and mothers, will eat their own children. Ezekiel emphasizes that this act is unprecedented.13 Perhaps Josephus is also building upon this idea when he claims that the Mary story is unparalleled.

given up her own child, which they cooked and ate, but now the other is hiding her son. Upon hearing this “the king tore his garments.” 8 S. Schwartz, Josephus and Judaean Politics, Leiden: Brill, 1990, p. 43, n. 79, proposes that Josephus did not even know this story in 2Kings when he was composing the B.J. 9 J. Price Jerusalem Under Siege: The Collapse of the Jewish State, 66-70 C.E., Leiden: Brill, 1992, p. 156, nn. 122 and 123. 10 B.J. 1.1 and 1.4. 11 Thucydides 1.1. 12 Jeremiah 19:9: “I shall make them [Septuagint: “They will”] eat the flesh of their own sons and daughters”; Lamentations 2:20: “Should women eat their offspring, the children they have cared for? [LXX: “Shall women eat the fruit of their womb? The butcher has made a gleaning; will the infants suckling at the breasts be slain?] Should the priest and prophet be killed in the sanctuary of the Lord?”, 4:10: “The hands of compassionate women have boiled their own children, who became their food in the destruction of the daughter of my people”; Ezekiel 5:9-10: “And I shall do to you what I have never done before and will never do again because of your abominations. Therefore fathers will eat their children in your midst, and children will eat their fathers; and I shall make judgements against you and I shall scatter all your survivors to every wind”; also see Baruch 2:3, which was not part of the Hebrew Bible. 13 Baruch 2:2 also makes this claim.

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These exile reports of cannibalism, both the Biblical and Josephus’s, would have been conceived by a Jewish author, especially a priest,14 and read by a Jewish audience as fulfilment of the original warnings of God’s punishments for sacrilege recorded in Leviticus 2615 and Deuteronomy 28. Both passages contain cannibalism committed against children. The Levitical warnings proceed to the destruction of Israel’s cities and sanctuaries and the dispersion of its people into “the land of their enemies.”16 The warnings in Deuteronomy more explicitly contextualize the accursed cannibalism with the onslaught of the enemy. Deuteronomy also creates a character, “the tenderest and most fastidious of women.” Once a grand woman, “who has never ventured to set the sole of her foot upon the ground,” she now is a hateful wife and, worse still, a desperate mother reduced by starvation to eating both the afterbirth and her own baby.17

That Josephus was working from this biblical material seems evident; we should now consider how he could adapt it for his historiographic purpose. Philo provides keen insight into how a hellenized Jew would consider and shape a narrative of cannibalism based on these scriptural passages for a hellenized audience in the first century C.E. Philo’s treatise entitled On Rewards and Punishments traces how God rewards those who follow the Law handed down to Moses, and how transgressors are punished. After describing the earthly blessings for the just and pious, Philo graphically elaborates on the punishments found in Leviticus 26 and Deuteronomy 28. On the famine and drought that will ensue, causing people to turn to cannibalism, Philo comments: “The tales of Thyestes will be child’s play compared with the extreme misfortunes, which the times will produce in great abundance.”18 Thyestes is a natural choice when referring to 14 As a priest performing the daily whole-offering (or Tamid) at the Temple in Jerusalem before the war, Josephus would have recited a shorter version of Yahweh’s blessings and curses upon Israel from Deuteronomy 11. This idea of rewards and punishments was intrinsic to the relationship between Yahweh and Israel and was reiterated in daily Temple ritual. 15 On Josephus’s later interpretive use of Leviticus 19 in Contra Apionem 2.190-216, see Alan Kirk, “Some Compositional Conventions of Hellenistic Wisdom Texts and the Juxtaposition of 4:1-13; 6:20b-49; and 7:1-10 in Q,” Journal of Biblical Literature 116.2 (1997), pp. 235-257, especially p. 251 and n. 56, and Chart 2 on pp. 252-253. Kirk shows that Leviticus 19 provides the structure for elements of Jewish religion and customs which Josephus chooses to include here in C.A. 2. I would emphasize that Josephus never quotes the Scriptures directly because this would not be easily recognizable nor necessarily appeal to his gentile audience, and yet his Jewish readers would understand the context/source for his comments. 16 Lev. 26: 30-41; 36, 38, 39, 41, 44. 17 Deuteronomy 28: 53, 56-57. Thackeray (1928) notes this passage. [Notice also, however, that Deuteronomy 28:54-55 describes first the “most tender and fastidious man,” who eats his own children, before mentioning the woman.] BT Gittin 56a adapts this Deuteronomy passage about the woman to tell the story of Martha b. Boethus, who dies from the famine during the siege of Jerusalem; two scholars have situated Josephus’s account of Mary within the context of the rabbinic exegeses: N. Cohen, “The Theological Stratum of the Martha b. Boethus Tradition: An Explanation of the Text in Gittin 56A,” HTR 69 (1976), pp. 187-195, and B. Visotzky, “Most Tender and Fairest of Women: A Study in the Transmission of Aggada,” HTR 76 (1983), pp. 403-418. 18 Philo, de Praemiis et Poenis, 134: “tosau/th de\ e0fe/cei spa/nij tw~n a0nagkai/wn, w(/ste a0llotriwqe/ntej tou/twn tre/yontai e0p´ a0llhlofagi/aj, ou0 mo/non o0qnei/wn kai\ mhde\n proshko/ntwn, a0lla\ kai\ tw~n oi0keiota/twn kai\ filta/twn: a(/yetai ga\r kai\ path\r ui9ou= sarkw~n kai\ mh/thr spla/gxnwn qugatro\j kai\ a0delfw~n a0delfoi\ kai\ gone/wn pai=dej: a)ei\ de\ oi9 a0sqene/steroi tw~n dunatwte/rwn kakai\ kai\ e0pa/ratoi trofai/: ta\ Que/steia paidia\ [kai\] sugkrino/mena tai=j u9perbolai=j tw~n sumforw~n, a(\j megalourgh/sousin oi9 kairo¤.”

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cannibalism, since in the myth he (albeit unwittingly) ate his own children. Philo then dwells on the horrible consequences of not obeying God: “But ills that last and waste away both body and soul produce new sufferings more profound than the ones described in tragedies, which seem to be told because of their excesses.”19 Philo, therefore, makes it very plain that tragedy is the natural point of association for his hellenized audience when discussing extreme human suffering, whether real or hypothetical and regardless of religion.

In this introduction to the Mary episode Josephus is also insisting upon his own personal integrity as a historian who tells the truth, based on eye-witness account, and who records it for posterity. Here he is aspiring to Thucydidean reliability, trustworthiness, and permanence.20 All of these qualities are part of Josephus’s mission statement in the main introduction to his history.21 As Josephus explains, there were witnesses to Mary’s deed, and consequently his insistence upon accuracy in his main introduction would be a sham were he not to include the event. Moreover, his personal attachment to the suffering of his people is a posture which he has already assumed in his main introduction to his history of the war.22

Finally, by using the word “logos” to describe his account about Mary, Josephus is asserting its truthfulness. He insists that he is telling a logos (and, therefore, not a mythos) about an event which ushers in the climax of the war. Yet we shall discover that he consciously uses the narrative tactics of mythos and chooses to have Mary’s cannibalism play out on the tragic stage in order to make his logos a more compelling and convincing apologia to his audience. Though it may seem ironic to us, Josephus lays claim to Thucydidean “accuracy” when presenting a story imbued with myth. This myth, the story of Mary, in turn, introduces his greatest mythos of all in the Bellum: his explanation for the burning of the Temple.

Josephus commences his main account of Mary in the following way: There was a woman among the people who live beyond the Jordan named Mary, daughter of Eleazar, of the village of Bethezuba (this means the “house of hyssop”), distinguished by birth and wealth, who escaped with the rest of the people to Jerusalem and became involved in the siege.23

The very first words in this passage, “gyne tis,” immediately alert his audience that he is going to be telling an engaging story involving an otherwise minor character. Throughout the Bellum Josephus uses “tis” in combination with a noun in order to introduce

19 Ibid., 136: : “kai\ ga\r ei0 xalepa\ r9I=goj, di/yoj, e0/ndeia trofh=j, a)ll´ eu0ktaio/tata ge/noit´ a)\n e0pi\ kairw~n, ei0 mo/non a)nupe/rqeton fqora\n e0rga/soito: xroni/zonta de\ kai\ th/konta yuxh/n te kai\ sw~ma tw~n tetragw|dhme/nwn, a(\ di´ u9perbola\j memuqeu=sqai dokei=, baru/tera pe/fuke kainourgei=n.” 20 Thucydides 1.20-22. 21 See especially 1.2: accuracy valued over the invective or praise in others’ accounts; 1.6: his efforts to educate all near and far accurately; 1.16: at great expense and effort he presents his memorial of great accomplishments; 1.18: a war he experienced personally; 1.30: his history is for lovers of truth. 22 B.J. 1.11-12. 23 B.J. 6.201: “Gunh\ tij....Mari/a tou0/noma…”

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provocative or exemplary material.24 This use of “tis” to introduce paradigmatic material is also a trait shared by a type of narrative that at first glance appears quite different from that of Josephus’s history: the fable. As the grammarian Theon formulates it, a fable is a “false logos giving the semblance of truth.”25 While the fabulist represents “truth” through “a false story,” the historian purports to be presenting a “true story” while using the tools of fiction.

Josephus commences his story by giving details of Mary’s father’s name and home in Peraea. He provides the details about her great wealth and high social position perhaps in order to increase his audience’s respect for her and to prepare for the tragedy of her great fall. She takes refuge in Jerusalem, only to lose all her belongings to rebel raids.26

The focus of this passage rests upon Mary’s emotional state. Josephus highlights the terrible vexation that drives her to reproach and curse the looters, who, in turn, are provoked to act against her.27 The historian now must explain how she arrives at the horrible point where she would decide to eat her own baby, who has remained unmentioned up to this point. He then suspends the narrative, in order to build up to the supposedly unparalleled deed, by crafting a comparatively long sentence and by delaying introduction of the baby until Mary’s dramatic direct address:

But when no one out of either anger or pity killed her, and she was tired of finding any food for others, and it was difficult now to find it from any source, and the famine was advancing through her innards and marrow while her anger was burning stronger than the famine, she, under the influence of her anger, along with necessity, went against nature and seizing her child, who was an infant at the breast, said, “Poor baby, in the midst of war and famine and civil strife, why should I preserve you? There will be slavery with the Romans, if we are alive under them, but the famine is beating out even slavery, and the rebels are harsher than both. Be food for me and for the rebels a fury and for the world a myth, the only one lacking for the calamities of the Jews.”28

24 For instance, in his account early in book 2 of the period shortly after the death of Herod, Josephus introduces three colorful pretenders to the throne with this “tis” formula. B.J. 2.57 (Simon of Peraea), parallel passage in Ant. 17.273 [Tacitus, Hist. 5.9 has “Simo quidam”]; B.J. 2.60 (a shepherd called Athrongaeus), parallel passage in Ant. 17.278; B.J. 2.101 (a young Jew from Sidon), parallel passage in Ant. 17.324. Also, at B.J. 2.118, Josephus introduces the founder of the rebellious Zealots in the same way, parallel passages in Ant. 18.4 and Ant. 18.23. None of the parallel passages in Ant. uses “tis.” 25 Theon, Progymnasmata 3: “lo/goj yeudh\j ei0koni/zwn a)lh/qeian.” 26 It is interesting to note that Josephus does not tell us here how much food cost at the inflated prices which siege induces, while the account in 2Kings and the rabbinic story of Mary do dwell on such details. 27 B.J. 6.203. 28 B.J. 6.204-207: “w(j d’ ou0/te parocuno/meno/j tij ou0/t’ e0lew~n au0th\n a0nh|/rei, kai\ to\ me\n eu9rei=n ti siti/on a0/lloij e0kopi/a, pantaxo/qen d’ a0/poron h0=n h0/dh kai\ to\ eu9rei=n, o9 limo\j de\ dia\ spa/gxnwn kai\ muelw~n e0xw/rei kai\ tou= limou= ma=llon e0ce/kaion oi9 qumoi/, su/mboulon labou=sa th\n o0rgh\n meta\ th=j a0na/gkhj e0pi\ th\n fu/sin e0xw/rei, kai\ to\ te/knon, h0=n d’ au0th|= pai=j u9poma/stioj, a9rpasame/nh ‘bre/foj,’ ei0=pen, ‘a0/qlion, e0n pole/mw| kai\ limw|~ kai\ sta/sei ti/ni se thrh/sw; ta\ me\n para\ 9Romai/oij doulei/a, ka0\n zh/swmen e0p’ au0tou/j, fqa/nei de\ kai\ doulei/an o9 limo/j, oi9 stasiastai\ d’ a0mfote/rwn xalepw/teroi. I0/qi, genou= moi trofh\ kai\ toi=j stasiastai=j e0rinu\j kai\ tw|~ Bi/w| mu=qoj o9 mo/noj e0llei/pwn tai=j 0Ioudai/wn sumforai=j.’”

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This passage is rich with tragic imagery and themes crucial to Josephus’s history as a whole.

The picture of a passionate female from Greek tragedy strongly emerges. Josephus explains Mary’s emotional state in terms very familiar from Greek tragedy: she is overwhelmed by the goads of “orge” and “anagke,”29 “anger” and “necessity,” to commit a deed “against nature.” The combination of anger, necessity, and an unnatural act committed by a mother are characteristics which Josephus and his audience would have readily identified with Euripides’ Medea. In Euripides’ play, Medea is driven by orge against her former husband, Jason.30 After killing Jason’s new bride (and his new father-in-law), Medea believes she must kill her own children, an unnatural act, so that they will not be killed by another: “Surely it is necessity for them to die; and since it is necessary, I, the very one who bore them, will kill them.”31

The audience of the Bellum also finally learns the crucial piece of information just before her speech: Mary has a child. Josephus heightens the suspense and tragic pathos by delaying this revelation until the beginning of Mary’s tragic monologue. When Mary seizes her baby, she mirrors the violence of the rebels’ guards who have snatched her property earlier. That the baby is a nursling makes it that much more vulnerable, thereby increasing the pathos and inviting the audience’s pity.

This component of a mother and child suffering during siege is one shared in the Hebrew and Greek traditions, surely because the literary topos is a reflection of the realities of war through which both cultures suffered. Homer’s Andromache serves as the archetype in Greek literature of the pathetic woman left alone with a babe in arms after the father has died in war. The tragedians turned to Homer’s poetry on the Trojan War as a source of inspiration for describing the pain of war, as did Thucydides and later historians. Likewise, Josephus turns to Greek tragedy and historiography as inspiration for shaping this moment in his narrative. Josephus, however, is also recalling the Hebrew prophetic literature of lamentation, which decries the plight of women in war.32 The

29 See Colin Macleod, Collected Essays, Oxford, 1983, “Thucydides and Tragedy,” pp. 140-158, for a stimulating analysis of themes, such as necessity (p. 154, in Euripides’ Hecuba), in the tragedians and Thucydides, especially his speeches. As Macleod points out at the end, the two main sources for the material of these fifth-century composers were life experience and Homer. 30 Euripides, Medea, on Medea’s anger: lines 121 (Nurse), 176 (Chorus), 447 (Jason), 520 (Chorus), 870 (Medea), 909 (Jason). 31 Ibid., 1062-3: “pa/ntwj sf´ a)na/gkh katqanei=n: e0pei\ de\ xrh/, / h9mei=j ktenou=men oi9/per e0cefu/samen.” (These lines are reiterated at 1240-1241, and could be deleted, as editors have, at either location.) Another tragedy which stresses the role of “necessity” in forcing a parent to kill children is Euripides’ Heracles, which Thackeray claims was a favorite of Josephus. Before the hero appears, his wife, Megara, prepares her children for death at the hands of the tyrant, Lycus. She tells the chorus of Theban elders that their anger against Lycus is just (275-6), but that she cannot struggle against necessity (282) though she loves her children. Much later in the play, after Heracles is driven mad by Lu/ssa and kills his family, he tells Theseus that he performed such a heinous crime out of necessity (1281). The compulsions of tyranny and madness likewise play out at the climax of the Bellum. 32 For instance, Lamentations 2:10-12: children, still nursing, begging for food and taking consolation at their mothers’ breasts; also 2:20: “Will the infants at the breast be slain?” In response to this type of imagery the apocalyptic poem of consolation in Isaiah 66 converts this horrible reality of war into an image of joy, where a revived Jerusalem can suckle her people and offer comfort like a mother (66:11).

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Christian gospels, which were composed in response to the Hebrew tradition as well as current realities at the end of the first century C.E., also attest, through the prophecies of Jesus, to the theme that women and their babes will suffer because of war and the destruction of Jerusalem.33 Josephus is shaping his narrative within both the Greek and Hebrew lines of thought, including the Hebrew prophetic literature of lamentation.

After seizing her infant at the breast, Mary delivers a short tragic monologue. As with other speeches in the Bellum, it reflects Josephus’s own apologetic Tendenz.34 What makes this speech remarkable, however, is that it is uttered by a woman, Mary.35 Mary’s speech is unusual for the Bellum because it comes directly from the mouth of a woman;36 it is more unusual still in that it is addressed to a baby. (Let us remember that Josephus could have had Mary simply direct her words to the rebels, who were the source of her agony.) Babies are hardly the typical addressees of set speeches in Graeco-Roman historiography, especially at the climax of an historical account. Instead, this rings of the

33 In these gospel narratives, Jesus’ predictions about the destruction of Jerusalem (in the tradition of the Hebrew Scriptures, including Lamentations and Daniel) and the coming of the Son of Man are in response to his disciples drawing his attention to the Temple; in all three synoptic accounts, the Temple (its stones, buildings, and decorations) is a spectacle which Jesus is invited to view. He then views it, and he finally pronounces judgment on it. For the specific predictions on women and their children, see Mk . 13.17: “ou0ai\ de\ tai=j e0n gastri\ e0xou/saij kai\ tai=j qhlazou/saij e0n e0kei/naij tai=j h9me/raij,” “Alas for women who are pregnant and for the ones nursing in those days.” This prediction is found verbatim at Mt. 24.19 and Lk. 21.23. The gospel of Luke, however, changes the spectacle which triggers Jesus’ dire prediction: instead of Jesus warning about seeing in the Temple “the abomination of desolation” from Daniel 9:27, Luke’s Jesus warns about seeing Jerusalem encircled by an army, 21:20. Both Josephus and Luke, though working within the parameters of Greek historiography, clearly reveal understanding of the Hebrew background in their writings. Luke, unlike the other gospels, returns to this theme of woe for women and children in the description of Jesus walking to Calvary: at 23:28-29, Jesus responds to the people, including women, who are lamenting his fate by saying, “Daughters of Jerusalem, do not weep for me; weep rather for yourselves and for your children. For the days will surely come when people will say, ‘Happy are those who are barren, the wombs that have never borne, the breasts that have never suckled!’” (This is a direct contrast to the blessing pronounced by Jesus’ mother, Mary, in the Magnificat, 1:48, and to the blessing of the woman in the crowd upon Jesus’ mother at 11:47.) Luke is reflecting and soon quoting from Hosea 9-10 in this section, but one cannot help wondering if the plight of women in Jerusalem during the war (including the story of Josephus’s infamous Mary) had not somehow come to his attention. On Luke’s possible awareness of Josephus’s writings, see Mason (1992), pp. 185-225. 34 David Aune, The New Testament in Its Literary Environment, Philadelphia: Westminister, 1987, pp. 107-108, gives a good short assessment of Josephus’s use of speeches. He states: “Josephus included 109 speeches in Wars (excluding very short statements and conversations). All are uniformly cast in the author’s language and style, all are deliberative or advisory, and all are vehicles for his personal viewpoint...[Aune here provides examples of several important speeches.]...The high percentage of speeches in indirect discourse (55 percent) is significant, for they are used to convey content rather than to display the author’s rhetorical skills.” 35 Previous historians had, of course, resorted to speeches by women to heighten the drama of a scene: witness the self-sacrificial Lucretia, whose suicide serves as the catalyst for the end of monarchy at Rome, in Livy Book 1, and Oenanthe in Polybius Book 15.29.8-14. Oenanthe screams a pithy speech at women in a temple, concluding: “if it is the will of the gods, I trust that you will one day taste the flesh of your own children.” Polybius then describes the mutilation of Oenanthe and others by the mob at 15.33.8-10. 36 Elsewhere in the Bellum, only in Book 1 does the historian give direct speeches to women. These speeches occur during the highly dramatized saga of the destruction of the oikos of Herod and his tragic downfall, when women are being tortured in order to gather information about the poisoning of the king’s brother, Pheroras.

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role of children in Greek tragedy, as in Euripides’ Medea and even more in his Trojan Women,37 which had as its archetype the role of Astyanax as a focus of pathos in Homer’s Iliad.38

Women, children, and the gods are also considered among the main conventional objects of concern before battle in Greek historiography.39 Josephus, however, raises this typical element to a much more dramatic level by allowing a woman to speak to her child in order to explain just what is at stake in the war he is describing. We cannot possibly determine whether this is a new adaptation of the conventional mention of women and children at the climax of a history of a war, since so many histories that we know of from antiquity are now lost. We can assume, however, that Josephus presents the scene with Mary very deliberately in order to further his apologetic aims and to appeal to his audience’s taste.

There is more here, however. The fact that Mary is addressing her own son and commanding him to serve a higher purpose through his death belongs to the tradition of the Jewish stories in 2 and 4 Maccabees describing the courageous mother who urges her seven sons to resist the attempts of Antiochus Epiphanes to hellenize the Jews and to endure his punishments.40 Josephus, too, is telling a story of resistance to political power, but not so much against the foreign Romans, who potentially would enslave the

37 Andromache addresses her child Astyanax for the last time at 740-779. 38 This is not, however, to say that children do not figure as dramatic foci of attention in Classical and Hellenistic historiography; see Mark Golden, “Change or Continuity? Children and Childhood in Hellenistic Historiography,” in edd. M. Golden and P. Toohey, Inventing Ancient Culture, Historicism, Periodization, and the Ancient World, London: Routledge, 1997. Golden has recently argued rather convincingly that one cannot assume that “more interest in and different sentiments toward children are defining characteristics of the Hellenistic age” (p. 191). He provides a table showing the frequency of words for “child” (teknon, pais, and paidion) appearing in Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon’s Hellenica, and Polybius 1-5. Herodotus clearly outstrips the others in referring to children–four times as often as Thucydides. After examining these authors along with fragmentary Hellenistic historians and Plutarch, Golden concludes, p. 190: “Perhaps, to put the case at its strongest, Polybius was as unwilling to admit children into his work as Thucydides and Xenophon but more prone to use them to arouse pathos (for both of which propositions we have found evidence) and more apt to present them in a variety of ways (for which we haven’t).” 39 Though Herodotus does not use children as a focus of pity when the Persians are attacking Athens, he does show that children are an object of concern by mentioning at 8.41.1 that the Athenians issued a proclamation that anyone there should save both children and household members by evacuating to Troezen, Aegina, and Salamis. Thucydides, the least likely to tug on the heartstrings of his readers by referring to children, does have Gylippus and the generals at the height of the conflict at Syracuse remind their men that had the Athenians taken their city, they “would have applied the most indecent treatment to their children and women” (7.68.2). Thucydides then turns back to Nicias to report his actions as a general in response to the crisis the Athenians are facing. The historian editorializes upon the nature of Nicias’s exhortation of his men and the fact that the general resorts to the stock appeals to soldiers in such a crisis situation at the climax of a war, including concern for “women, children, and the gods of their fathers” (7.69.2). Before these conventional items, however, Thucydides has Nicias echo Pericles’ Funeral Oration by reminding the men of their own reputations, their famo us forefathers, and the unmatched freedom of the Athenian way of life. Thucydides presents these elements as particular to Athens and not just the standard talk of desperate generals. 40 Josephus may not have used 2 or even 4 Maccabees, but this does not rule out the possibility that he had heard the tales of martyrdom they contain.

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mother and child, but against the rebels, whom the historian has been so careful to blame for the famine and the forthcoming destruction of Jerusalem.

Mary offers an interpretation of what her baby’s death signifies: food, fury, and myth all rolled into one. On the practical level within the story, the baby will serve as “food” to alleviate the mother’s hunger. On the thematic level, the baby will play the tragic role of a “fury” after its death (like those in Aeschylus’s Oresteia), hounding the rebels for the crimes they have committed.41 The echo of the Oresteia resounds, especially since Josephus is condemning the rebels yet again for their murderous oikeia stasis and homophylos phonos.42 Finally, the label of “myth”43 elevates the baby to a role in a tragedy, which is a further clue to the nature of this particular narrative.44

The baby embodies all the suffering of the Jews in this war by suffering murder, dismemberment, and consumption at the hands of his own mother. Josephus states:

And with these words she slew her son, and then having roasted the body, she devoured half of it, while the rest she covered and was safeguarding.45

The baby is roasted, and only half is consumed while the rest is held in reserve as leftovers. Scheiber46 has suggested that Josephus has derived his idea of a mother with a half-eaten baby from the very end of Petronius’s Satyricon as we have it. Here Eumolpus justifies his requirement that his inheritors eat him up after he dies by pointing to the historical precedents of cannibalism during the sieges at Saguntum, Petelia, and Numantia, where in the final case “mothers were found who were holding half-eaten bodies of their children at the breast.”47 One also, however, might conjecture that Josephus could have known of the story from Polybius’s monograph of Scipio’s siege of

41 Josephus, however, does not create a happy counterpart to Aeschylus’s neat incorporation of the Furies into the city of Athens at the end of the Eumenides; this makes sense s ince there is no happy ending for the Jews with the fall of Jerusalem. 42 D. Ladouceur, “Josephus and Masada,” in L. Feldman and G. Hata, edd., Josephus, Judaism, and Christianity, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987, p. 110, comments on these in relation to the episode of Masada in book 7. 43 Josephus uses the word mythos only once elsewhere in the B.J. at 3.420, where he describes the traces of Andromeda’s chains at Joppa. It also clearly foreshadows Josephus’s own interpretation of Apion’s canard about Jews sacrificing and eating a Greek every year: this is “full of everything to do with tragedy.” 44 In keeping with Philo’s association of mankind’s sufferings with tragedy and this account in Book 6, later in C.A. 2.97 Josephus interprets Apion’s canard about Jews sacrificing and eating a Greek every year: “A tale of this kind is full of everything to do with tragedy,” “huiusmodo ergo fabula non tantum omni tragoedia plenissima est.” 45 B.J. 6.208: “kai\ tau=q’ a(/ma le/gousa ktei/nei to\n ui9o/n, e0/peit’ o0pth/sasa to\ me\n h9/misu katesqi/ei, to\ de\ loipo\n katakalu/yasa e0fu/latten.” 46 A. Scheiber, “Zu den Antiken Zusammenhangen der Aggada,” Acta Antiqua Academia Scientiarum Hungaricae 13 (1965), pp. 267-272. 47 Petr., Sat. 141: “Cum esset Numantia a Scipione capta, inventae sunt matres, quae liberorum suorum tenerent semesa in sinu corpora.”

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Numantia.48 Polybius in his Histories glorifies his friend Scipio,49 and it would be no surprise if a laudatory account of the Roman general’s capture of Numantia inspired Josephus to draw a literary and historical parallel between Scipio and Titus both facing cannibal mothers.50

The rebels now appear, and Mary invites them to eat part of her “sacrifice”: This child is my own, and the deed is mine.51 Eat, for I, too, have eaten. Don’t be weaker than a woman52 or more compassionate than a mother. If you are pious and turn away from my sacrifice, then I have eaten for you, and let the left-overs remain for me. 53

48 This piece is mentioned by Cicero in Ad Fam. 5.12.2. Also, in de Rep. 6.11 (Somnium Scipionis), Cicero has Scipio Africanus the Elder predict to Scipio the Yo unger: “bellum maximum conficies, Numantiam excindes.” 49 See, for instance, Polybius Hist. 31.25, on the close relationship between Polybius and Scipio, and Scipio’s fine character. Scipio appears once in the B.J. at 2.380 in Agrippa’s list of historical exempla of nations that defied Rome and fell. 50 S. Cohen, “Josephus, Jeremiah, and Polybius,” History and Theory 21 (1982), p. 367, compares the careers of these two historians. A. Eckstein, “Josephus and Polybius: A Reconsideration,” Classical Antiquity 9 (1990), pp. 175-208, draws many apt parallels, both thematic and linguistic, between the two authors, but he does not mention this scene. 51 The use of “this” with the first person possessive adjective and her invitation to the rebels to eat this child partly resembles the words attributed to Jesus at the Last Supper, a meal timed in the Christian texts with Passover. (Mary, however, never invites the rebels to drink blood or enter into any covenant.) In Paul’s formula in 1Corinthians, Jesus breaks bread and says: “Take, eat. This is my body which is for your sake, do this as a memorial of me” (1Cor 11:23-27), “tou~to mou& e0stin to_ sw~ma to_ u(pe\r u(mw~n: tou~to poiei=te ei0j th\n e0mh\n a)na&mnhsin”; the synoptic gospels contain variants: Mt. 26:26-9, “la/bete fa/gete, tou=to e0stin to\ sw~ma/ mou,” “Take, eat; this is my body”; Mk . 14:22-25, “la/bete, tou=to e0stin to\ sw~ma/ mou,” “Take; this is my body”; Lk . 22:14-20, “tou=to e0stin to\ sw~ma/ mou to\ u9pe\r u9mw~n dido/menon,” “This is my body which has been given for your sake.” Jn. 6:51-8, on the bread of life, is a discourse in response to the Jews arguing and asking: “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” (No “touto” here.) G. Feeley-Harnik, in The Lord’s Table: Eucharist and Passover in Early Christianity, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1981, p. 130, states that the Christian eucharist is a reversal of the Jewish Passover. There is possibly a suggestion, then, that Mary has performed a perverted Passover-type meal, where instead of a lamb, an Israelite baby has been slaughtered. Josephus, however, does not place the time of her cannibalism at Passover; he does later at 6.421 explain that so many Jews were caught up in the siege of Jerusalem because they had gathered for Passover in early spring. It may be that Melito a century later understood a connection between Josephus’s account of Mary and Passover when he employed it in his Peri Pascha—see below. In Book 7 Josephus will use the reversal of Passover and the ‘Aqedah (see especially 7.385 and 401) in his rendition of the mass suicide at Masada. 52 The only other place in Josephus where we find this phrase “weaker than a woman” is in the Slavonic addition to B.J. 1.650, which draws a direct comparison to the martyrdom of Eleazar, the seven brothers, and their mother. 53 B.J. 6.211: “h9 d’ ‘e0mo/n,’ e0/fh, ‘tou=to to\ te/knon gnh/sion kai\ to\ e0/rgon e0mo/n. fa/gete, kai\ ga\r e0gw\ be/brwka. mh\ ge/nhsqe mh/te malakw/teroi gunaiko\j mh/te sumpaqe/steroi mhtro/j. ei0 d’ u9mei=j eu0sebei=j kai\ th\n e0mh\n a0postre/fesqe qusi/an, e0gw\ me\n u9mi=n be/brwka, kai\ to\ loipo\n d’ e0moi\ meina/tw.’”

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Josephus clearly has made Mary a woman from Greek tragedy, both in proclaiming this murder-cannibalism her “deed”54 and by referring explicitly to her status as a woman and a mother as a challenge to the rebels. She is, in fact, a latter-day Medea/Agave/Andromache hybrid.55 Medea, before she murders her children in Euripides’ play, calls their deaths her “sacrificial offerings,”56 and agonizes over their fate at the hands of enemies should she not dispatch them. Euripides’ Agave does not call her son Pentheus’s brutal death and dismemberment a “sacrifice” in the extant portions of the play, but she does invite the chorus to “share the banquet.”57 Mary does not dwell upon her baby’s bloody, severed limbs or try to put her baby’s body back together again as Agave may have at the end of the Bacchae,58 but both women and their people suffer the same fate of dispersion.59 In similar fashion, Andromache in Euripides’ Trojan Women challenges the conquering Greeks, who are seizing her child Astyanax, to “feast on his flesh.”60 With Astyanax’s death Troy can fall, just as Jerusalem falls after the death of Mary’s baby in the B.J.

Josephus then reports, in the tradition of political invective, that the rebels depart having almost eaten the human flesh.61 The historian has used this image of the rebels as

54 Titus has already disavowed a tragic “deed” when viewing “oozing bodies” of dead Jews at B.J. 5.519; this episode echoes Sophocles’ Antigone 410-412, 427-8. 55 See Feldman (1998), pp. 60-62, on “Josephus’ Indebtedness to Euripides,” and also his “Josephus as a Biblical Interpreter: The ‘Aqedah,” JQR 75 (1985), 212-252. 56 Euripides, Medea 1054, “toi=j e0moi=si qu/masin.” 57 Euripides, Bacchae 1184, “me/texe/ nun qoi/naj.” 58 E.R. Dodds ed., Euripides Bacchae, 2nd ed., Oxford, 1960, pp. 57-59, provides several ancient and medieval adaptations of and citations to the Bacchae in an attempt to help fill the lacuna perceived after line 1329, which is the second line of Agave’s speech in response to Kadmus. Dodds reports on p. 57 that a third-century rhetorician, Apsines wrote in his Rhetoric [ed. Walz ix. p. 587 and 590] with regard to Eurpides’ Bacchae that “the mother grasped in her hands each of his limbs and lamented over each of them, “e3kaston ga_r au0tou= tw~n melw~n h9 mh/thr e0n tai=j xersi\ kratou=sa kaq’ e9/kaston au0tw~n oi0kti/zetai.” The twelfth-century Christus Patiens also may be used (as Dodds remarks in his introduction, “with great caution”, p. lvi) to help reconstruct this lost portion of the Bacchae; lines 1471-2 read: “the bloodstained limbs cut into furrows,” “ta\ d’ ai9mo/furta kai\ kathlokisme/na / me/lh…” 59 Josephus may have seen a thematic connection between the fate of the Jews after the war and possible lines from Dionysus’s speech at his epiphany at the end of the Bacchae where the god may have pronounced his sentence upon the Thebans as punishment for their blasphemy against him: “a(\ d’ au0= paqei=n dei= lao\n ou0 kru/yw kaka/./ li/ph| po/lisma, barba/roij ei0/kwn, (a0)/kwn)/ po/leij de\ polla\j ei0safi/kwntai, zugo\n / dou/leion (a0ne/lkontej) oi9 dusdai/monej,” “I shall not hide the evils which the people must now suffer. They must leave the city, making way for barbarians, and unwillingly go to many cities, the unlucky ones dragging the yoke of slavery,” (reconstructed from Christus Patiens, lines 1668-9 and 1678-9, in Dodds’ edition). 60 Euripides, Trojan Women 775, “dai/nusqe tou=de sa/rkaj.” [In the Iliad Achilles in book 22 and Hecuba in 24 declare in their rage that they are capable of cannibalism; Andromache never speaks of it, even in reference to her son.] 61 B.J. 6.212. See A. McGowan, “Eating People: Accusations of Cannibalism Against Christians in the Second Century,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 2 (1994), 413-442, for the use of charges of cannibalism against political enemies; the Catilinarian conspirators are the most famous political examples: Sallust, B.C. 22 and Plutarch, Cicero 10. McGowan’s analysis is excellent, but he does miss the

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virtual cannibals twice before, and returns to it again when he claims that they would have eaten corpses had the Romans not captured them first.62 The rebels are the true villains here, not Mary, as Titus will soon make clear in his reply to this deed.

We now receive the mixed audience response of Jews in the city and of the Roman soldiers just outside of it. Josephus engages in wordplay when the “mythos” of the mother’s deed gets out and is interpreted by the residents of Jerusalem as “mysos,” an atrocity.63 Josephus reports the Roman army’s response to hearing the news of the “pathos”: a mixture of incredulity, pity, but mostly deeper “hatred” (“misos”) towards the Jews.64 The triple wordplay creates a causal link and explanation for the events to follow: the mythos of the mysos inflames Roman misos. This helps to explain the Romans’ ferocity later in the assault upon Jerusalem.

Mary’s tragic act of cannibalism also provides the ultimate justification for the destruction of the Temple. Josephus gives Titus a defense speech in indirect discourse in which he claims that God knows that he has shown clemency by offering peace, autonomy, and amnesty, and yet the Jews have chosen the opposite. He then blames the Jews for “first setting fire with their own hands to the Temple which is being preserved

opportunity to incorporate this example of infant cannibalism from Josephus into his larger discussion of the “symbolism of infanticide” at pp. 435-6. 62 B.J. 4.541 (on Simon), 5.4 (on Jewish factionalism), 6.373 (on rebels in the underground tunnels). Josephus may have been inspired by Sallust’s B.C., as with his portrayal of John of Gischala in the B.J. 63 B.J. 6.212: “...a)neplh/sqh d’ eu0qe/wj o9/lh tou= mu/souj h9 po/lij.” Perhaps Josephus was again drawing from Euripides’ Bacchae in choosing to use the word “mysos.” According to Dodds p. 57, the Schol. Ar. Plut. 907 quotes a fragment from Euripides’ Bacchae: “ei0 mh\ ga\r i0/dion e0/labon e0j xe/raj mu/soj.” Josephus has previously used this word mostly to describe the crimes committed in Herod’s household in 1.445, 503, 525, 530, 630, 638. At 1.530, Josephus highlights the framework of Greek tragedy he is using in the story of Herod by labelling Eurycles “ the destroyer of this house and the dramaturge of the whole atrocity,” “to\n de\ lumew~na th=j oi0ki/aj kai\ dramatourgo\n o3lou tou= mu&souj Eu0rukle/a,” while Herod calls him “savior and benefactor.” Between the Herod drama in Book 1 and the Mary scene, Josephus only used this word mysos when he editorializes on the pollution of the Temple, asking at 5.19: “What misery to equal that, most wretched city, hast thou suffered at the hands of the Romans, who entered to purge with fire thy internal pollutions (“ta_ e0mfu/lia mu&sh”)?” I use Thackeray’s translation because it captures the histrionic nature of Josephus’s question.

Josephus’s account of Mary’s cannibalism shares many elements found in the tales of (pseudo-)cannibalism later found in the novels of Achilles Tatius and Lollianos. For instance, Achilles Tatius also engages in wordplay in Kleitophon’s tragic monologue over the supposedly dead and cannibalized Leukippe. He bemoans many aspects of her death, listing them off: its foreign location, its violence, the fact that she is a “purifying sacrifice for [the] impure bodies” of the brigands, that she had to see her own evisceration, and worst of all, that her “insides are inside the outlaws, victuals in the vitals of bandits,” 3.16 (“nu=n de\ h9 tw~n spla&gxnwn sou tafh\ lh|stw~n ge/gone trofh&”). Here J. Winkler’s clever translation [found in B. Reardon, Collected Ancient Greek Novels, Univ. of California, 1989] is a reflection of the Greek wordplay of taphe, burial, and trophe, food. In essence, Kleitophon does not dwell upon his own loss, but instead encapsulates the meaning of Leukippe’s death in his short speech, just as Mary has in her short speech to her baby. For a treatment of the narrative of cannibalism in this novel and in the fragments of Lollianos’s Phoenikika, see J. Winkler, “Lollianos and the Desperadoes,” JHS 100 (1980), pp. 155-181. 64 B.J. 6.214: “tou\j de\ pollou\j ei0j mi=soj tou= e0/qnouj sfodro/teron.” I think that Josephus deliberately reuses elements of this particular paronomasia of mythos/mysos/misos at Ant. 8.128-9 where he reshapes the destruction of the Temple in the dream of Solomon at 1Kings 9:7-9. In Ant. Josephus says the destruction will be worthy of “mu/qwn” and that people will ask why “the Hebrews were so hated (“e0mish/qhsan”) by God.” (These are not the terms used in LXX.)

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by us for you.”65 The use of the first person plural stands out in the middle of indirect discourse, which only emphasizes Josephus’s argument that the Romans and their leader have great concern for the Temple. Titus then declares that such people, who would set their own Temple on fire, “are worthy of such food” as Mary’s cannibal feast.66 The Roman general pronounces his verdict: he will “bury this atrocity of infant-cannibalism (“to tes teknophagias mysos”) in the very destruction of the country” and vows “not to leave in his oikoumene a city standing for the sun to look upon where mothers are fed thus.”67 Titus finally condemns the men specifically for creating the situation by not submitting to the Romans.

Josephus clearly presents Mary’s cannibalism as an event closely connected with the destruction of the Temple at Jerusalem. Josephus first fashions a remarkable tragic mythos about a mother desperately killing her baby for food. Mythos becomes mysos when she eats part of it and offers the rebels the rest. When they find out, the Romans now have adequate reason for feeling misos towards the Jews because of such a crime. Hence, Titus, who is presented as ultra-clement, can now blame the Jews for the destruction of their city and Temple before it even happens in the narrative. In Josephus’s telling of the story, and in Titus’s response to it, Mary is a tragic victim driven to an insane act by the rebels, who are ultimately to blame. Thus ends the tale of Mary in the B.J.; she has served her narrative purpose and is never mentioned again.

Melito of Sardis, Peri Pascha 52 The first Christian attestation to the account of Mary’s cannibalism occurs in Peri

Pascha,68 a homily attributed to Melito, a prolific second-century writer, bishop, and “eunuch” at Sardis according to Eusebius.69 This homily’s inflammatory rhetoric against 65 B.J. 6.216. 66 B.J. 6.216: “…ei0=nai kai\ toiau/thj trofh=j a0ci/ouj.” 67 B.J. 6.217: “kalu/yein me/ntoi to\ th=j teknofagi/aj mu/soj au0tw|~ tw|~ th=j patri/doj ptw/mati kai\ ou0 katalei/yein e0pi\ th=j oi0koume/nhj h9li/w| kaqora~n po/lin, e0n h|0= mhte/rej ou9/tw tre/fontai. ” 68 This text is reconstructed from a melange of Greek and Coptic papyri and codices, as well as texts in Georgian and an epitome in Latin. I shall be referring to the text found in S. G. Hall, Melito of Sardis, On Pascha and Fragments, Texts and Translations, Oxford, 1979; also see O. Perler, Méliton de Sardes, Sources Chrétiennes 123, Paris, 1966. Previous MS editions include: C. Bonner, The Homily on the Passion by Melito of Sardis and Some Fragments of the Apocryphal Ezekiel, Studies and Documents 12, London and Philadelphia, 1941[A]; M. Testuz, Papyrus Bodmer XIII, Méliton de Sardes, Geneva, 1960 [B]; J. E. Goerhing, The Crosby-Schøyen Codex MS 193, Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum Orientalium, vol. 521, Louvain: E. Peeters, 1990 [Coptic text with English translation]. 69 Eusebius H.E. 4.13, 21, 26 (where he lists Melito’s works including “The Easter Festival,” Books 1 and 2, which most scholars do not believe is the same as this homily; this section also contains quotes from Melito’s petition to Antoninus and a quote from his Extracts, which lists his canon of the Old Testament), 5.24 (Eusebius quoting from Polycrates of Ephesus’s letter to Victor at Rome concerning all the Asian bishops who observed “the fourteenth day of the lunar month as the beginning of the Paschal feast,” including “Melito the eunuch who lived entirely in the Holy Spirit, and who lies in Sardis waiting for the visitation from heaven when he shall rise from the dead”), 28 (“For who does not know the books of Irenaeus, Melito, and the rest, which proclaim Christ as God and man…?), and 6.13.

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Jews as unrepentant sinners and killers of Christ/God70 provokes scholars to explain what kind of Christian71 would compose such a text and to evaluate the status of and relations between the Christian and Jewish communities at late antique Sardis. The Peri Pascha does not stand alone as potential evidence for these social and religious aspects of Jewish life in Sardis. Scholars generally rely upon two other major pieces of evidence: the notices quoted in Josephus’s Antiquities concerning the privileges granted to Jews at Sardis in the first century B.C.E.72 and the fourth-century archaeological remains of a grand synagogue, which was built in basilica form into the corner of a bath-gymnasium complex and which was flanked by a colonnade of shops that were owned by and served both Jews and Christians.73 The decrees in Josephus, however, date about two hundred years before and the remains of the synagogue over one hundred years after the homily’s assumed date of composition in the mid-second century.74

In a recent article Lynn Cohick sensibly warns the reader of this homily against leaping to conclusions about religious conflicts at Sardis (especially by using the fourth-century synagogue as a sign of second-century Jewish power) and instead asks us to “consider seriously broader social concerns and developing Christian thought, which may affect greatly the interpretation of the homily.”75 Cohick comments approvingly on the observations of Miriam Taylor:

70 See E. Werner, “Melito of Sardes, The First Poet of Deicide,” HUCA 37 (1966), pp. 191-210. He investigates the possibility that Melito was the source for the seventh-century Improperia, a set of 15 reproaches supposed to have been uttered by a dying Jesus against the Jews, most of whose motifs “sound like an anti-Jewishly twisted version of Dayenu,” p. 193. [At the time Werner wrote, the Catholic, Byzantine, and Georgian rituals still used them in the Good Friday liturgy.] 71 No one seems to dispute that the author of this homily was a Christian at the time of its composition, but there is controversy regarding the author’s identity and sectarian sympathies. A. Stewart Sykes suggests in “Melito’s Anti-Judaism,” Journal of Early Christian Studies 5 (1997), pp. 271-283, that Melito himself was “a Jew teaching a form of Jewish Christianity surrounded by a strong Jewish community,” p. 280. Furthermore, the same author in The Lamb’s High Feast: Melito, Peri Pascha and the Quartodeciman Paschal Liturgy at Sardis, Leiden: Brill, 1998, argues, as have previous scholars, that “Melito was a member of one of those groups of Christians who became known as Quartodecimans, those who kept Pascha in the fourteenth of Nisan, in accordance with the custom that had been handed down from Judaism,” p. 2. On the other hand, Lynn Cohick, “Melito’s Peri Pascha, in edd. H. C. Kee and L. H. Cohick, Evolution of the Synagogue: Problems and Progress, Harrisburg: Trinity, 1999, p. 124, remarks (based on H.E. 4.26.3-11, 13-14 and 5.24.2-6) that Eusebius’s “description of the author as a Quartodeciman is not obviously reflected in our homily, and his quotation allegedly from the Peri Pascha is not found in our homily. Moreover, nothing in the homily hints of its provenance. With that in mind, and to prevent confusion, I will not refer to the homily’s author as Melito.” 72 Josephus, Ant. 14.231-2, 14.235, 14.259-261 (on these last two, see P. Bilde, “Was hat Josephus über die Synagoge zu sagen?” in edd. J. U. Kalms and F. Siegert, Internationales Josephus-Kolloquium Brüssel 1998, Münster, 1999, pp. 15-35), and 16.171. 73 See ed. G. M. A. Hanfmann, Sardis from Prehistoric to Roman Times, Harvard, 1983. Five essays on the Sardis synagogue by A. T. Kraabel appear conveniently together in Diaspora Jews and Judaism: Essays in Honor of, and in Dialogue with, A. Thomas Kraabel, Univ. of South Florida, 1992. On the shops: J. S. Crawford, The Byzantine Shops at Sardis, Harvard, 1990. 74 For a reevaluation of the inscriptional evidence see M. Bonz, “The Jewish Community of Ancient Sardis: Deconstruction and Reconstruction,” in Kee and Cohick, 1999. 75 Cohick (1999), p. 123.

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She argues convincingly that the homily’s descriptions and details about Jews/Judaism are biblical images, with little or no reference to second-century Sardis. In examining the characteristics of “Israel” in the homily’s anti-Jewish section, one is struck with the overwhelming number of biblical comparisons and the absence of examples of second- or third-century C.E. Jewish practices. “Israel’s” crime seems to be that it did not recognize the miracles of Jesus or the person of Jesus as the Messiah (PP 84-90). Whereas Chrysostom’s sermons against the Judaizers include ample examples of specific interactions between Christians and Jewish [sic] in fourth-century Antioch, our homily offers only characteristics or incidents from biblical accounts.”76

Taylor and Cohick, therefore, emphasize the essentially scriptural basis of Melito’s description of Jews and Judaism. Cohick does not mention Melito’s use of the Bellum Judaicum, but this only encourages one to examine closely how Melito might have adapted Josephus’s text for his literary purposes.

I would simply stress here that we need to view Melito’s incorporation of the story of Mary’s cannibalism into his scripturally-based interpretation of the Pascha primarily as a rhetorical strategy. The fact that Melito would turn to the B.J., the product of a Jewish author, is in itself an interesting comment upon the availability of the text (or excerpts from it) in second-century Asia Minor and upon the desire of a Christian to use it. Furthermore, it is possible that Melito drew upon Josephus as an extra-biblical source elsewhere in his lost works listed by Eusebius at H.E. 4.26.

But can we be so sure that Melito is actually using Josephus’s account from B.J. 6 at Peri Pascha 52? After all, Melito never refers to Josephus, whereas other Christian authors we shall examine do mention the historian by name as their source. Schreckenberg presents a scholarly consensus that this paragraph of the homily exhibits an allusion to Josephus’s story.77 Hardwick weighs the evidence: “Although one cannot say with certainty that Josephus’ account of the Roman siege of Jerusalem was in Melito’s mind, elements in Melito’s text reflect the situation in the B.J. rather than what we find in Scripture.” Hardwick observes that the sufferings in P.P. are “not of foreign origin,” just as Josephus depicts the source of Jewish trouble as internal party politics, and the “cannibalism described by Josephus is the ultimate tragedy as it is for Melito.”78

76 Ibid., pp. 136-7, on M. Taylor, Anti-Judaism and Early Christian Identity, Leiden: Brill, 1995. Also see L. Cohick, “Melito of Sardis’s PERI PASCHA and Its ‘Israel’,” Harvard Theological Review 4 (1998), pp. 351-372, which presents what might be considered an extreme position, while upholding previous, though not universal, scholarly opinion that the homily may “address Marcionite charges,” p. 372: “I have suggested that this homily reveals little regarding Jews or Judaism in the author’s time. Indeed, it centers on defining Christianity over against a hypothetical ‘Israel’ that the unknown author has created largely for rhetorical purposes. This approach in no way discredits the evidence that Judaism in the early centuries was active and vibrant in some cities. It simply suggests that this homily’s anti-Jewish rhetoric is no the place to find evidence for Jews or Judaism of its time.” 77 H. Schreckenberg, Rezeptionsgeschichtliche und textkritische Untersuchungen zu Flavius Josephus, Leiden: Brill, 1977, pp. 13-14, where he cites Perler, who originally suggested this in 1966 (see pp. 164-5 ad P.P. 52, l. 382), and von Campenhausen in assent. 78 M. E. Hardwick, Josephus an an Historical Source in Patristic Literature Through Eusebius, Scholars Press, 1989, pp. 17-18.

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I believe that Hardwick and the others are correct in seeing a textual relationship between P.P. 52 and the B.J., and I shall now expand upon their observations.79

The immediate context for the Josephan borrowing is the homily’s description of the “destruction” (“apoleia”) of mankind by sin (P.P. 48-56), a destruction which the author labels “kaine de kai phobera,” “strange and terrible” at P.P. 50. In no respect is this destruction limited to “Israel,” the Jewish people, whom he excoriates later, nor is it linked directly to the destruction of Jerusalem. This general destruction includes self-destruction, as mankind becomes “parricides, infanticides, and fratricides” (P.P. 51). Hall aptly notes here: “This passage is inspired both by biblical ideas (Gen. 4:8; Judg. 9:5; John 13:8; Lev. 18:21; Wisd. 12:5) and by Greek mythological figures such as Orestes, Agamemnon, and Medea.”80

Mankind’s self-destruction culminates in P.P. 52, a mother’s cannibalism. Halls’ text reads:

to\ de\ kaino/teron kai\ foberw/teron e0pi\ [th=j gh=j] hu9ri/sketo: mh/thr tij h9/pteto sarkw~n w(~n e0ge/nnhsen, <kai\> prosh/pteto w(~n e0ce/qreyen masqoi=j, kai\ to\n karpo\n th=j koili/aj ei0j koili/an katw/russen, kai\ fobero\j ta/foj e0gi/neto h9 dustuxh\j mh/thr,

o9\ e0ku/hsen katapi/nousa te/knon +ouketi proslaloun+.81

Melito introduces the deed as “to de kainoteron kai phoberoteron,” emphasizing its extraordinary nature in comparison to all the other heinous sins. Melito has used this exact phrase as the beginning of P.P. 23, thereby linking this tale of cannibalism back to the death of the Egyptians’ firstborn at the “old” Passover. Josephus in similar fashion claims that Mary’s deed was unparalleled. And just as Josephus starts his story with “gyne tis,” Melito introduces his account with “meter tis,”82 thus cutting away all the background on Mary which Josephus provides; he instead concentrates on the key necessary detail: she is “a mother.”

The baby, whom Josephus finally introduces as “to teknon” and “pais hypomastios” and whom Mary addresses as “brephos” in her speech, is transformed in Melito immediately into his fated end: flesh (to be eaten), “sarkon.” In the next line the mother is tasting the child who once nursed at her breasts,83 echoing Josephus’s “pais

79 I am perplexed by Stewart-Sykes (1998) choosing to compare the P.P. to Josephus’s Antiquities in section 3.1.5 on “Peri Pascha as Rhetorical History,” pp. 77-83 and then deciding not to discuss the one passage, P.P. 52, which seems to indicate that Melito had at least seen or heard of Josephus’s B.J. 80 Hall, p. 29, n. 16, on PP. 51. 81 Hall’s translation, p. 29: “But the strangest and most terrible thing occurred on the earth: / a mother touched the flesh she had brought forth,/ and tasted what she had suckled at the breasts;/ and she buried in her belly the fruit of her belly,/ and the wretched mother became a terrible grave,/ gulping, not kissing [see my n. 85s below], the child she had produced.” 82 On reading “mh&thr,” Hall is following O. Perler, Méliton de Sardes, Sources Chrétiennes 123, Paris, 1966, p. 88, who was relying on B here (against Bonner who restored “pa]thr” in A. The Coptic MS confirms B. 83 At P.P. 18, Egypt is personified as a woman whose “breasts of delicacy” are torn.

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hypomastios” and swiftly making the consumer the consumed. How Melito has poetically condensed and focussed this material is truly startling; not a word is wasted. In the following line Melito indulges in heavy alliteration with “kai ton karpon tes koilias eis koilian katorussen,” “and the bounty of her belly she buried in her belly.” Basil, whom I shall discuss below, also engages in this anaphora with “belly” when describing the cannibalism but uses a different word.

What follows? “And the wretched mother became a dreadful (“phoberos”— again) tomb, gulping down (“katapinousa”)84 the child whom she conceived, no longer talking.” “ouketi proslaloun” at the end is obelized in Hall’s text: Papyrus Bodmer XIII (B) has the participle, but Perler changes it to “proslalw~,” and Hall in his notes suggests that it would be better to consider that just an epsilon has slipped out of the verb (“prosela/loun”).85 We should, however, consider the overall parallelism with the original Egyptian Passover described earlier in the homily. At P.P. 22, Melito has already used the participle “katapinon” to describe “Hades swallowing their firstborn.”86 Then, in an incredibly macabre scene, an Egyptian child pitifully asks who is holding him (father?, mother?, etc.), only to be silenced by “the silence of death.”87 This scene replays again with another Egyptian child denying his firstborn status on the technicality of having been begotten on the third conception (!), but “he fell face-down being silent.”88 It makes sense then for the mother’s child in P.P. 52 to be the one no longer speaking, and in this way B’s reading (and the Coptic text’s) would stand.89

84 In P.P. 21, the dead children at the Egyptian Passover are also eaten: “the death of the firstborn was insatiable” and the dead become “the food of Death.” (There is quadruple wordplay here with tropaion, rhope, trophe, and trope, which Hall, p. 11, calls “crude.”) 85 Hall’s suggestion of “kataphilousa”, “kissing,” (which he uses in his translation to replace “proslaloun”) does play off “katapinousa” cleverly, but since there is no kissing in the biblical or Josephan scenes of cannibalism, it is probably best not to ignore the text in B and introduce it here. The Chester Beatty and Michigan papyrus (A), breaks off after ouketi; for the text, see C. Bonner (1941), pp. 120-121. Furthermore, the Coptic text has: “the wretched mother became a fearful tomb, having swallowed the child who was silent, whom she had borne.” (The Coptic, however, has the mother consume children at the beginning of this scene, but ends with a singular one.) This text is found in J. E. Goerhing (1990), pp. 28-29 (Coptic with English translation). Goehring states in his introduction, p. 5: “A careful comparison with the Greek witnesses suggests that no direct relationship exists between the Crosby-Schoyen text (C-S) and any of the surviving Greek versions….The splendid rhetorical style and phrasing of the Greek text is often lacking in the Coptic version either because it was not of major interest to the scribe or because it lay beyond his competence to translate it.” 86 P.P. 22: “kai\ a|(/dhj katapi/nwn tou\j prwtoto/kouj au0tw~n.” T. Halton observes this in “Stylistic Device in Melito, PERI PASXA,” in P. Granfield and J. Jungman, edd., Kyriakon: Festschrift Johannes Quasten, Münster, 1970, pp. 249-255, here p. 252. 87 P.P. 25: “h9 tou= qana/tou siwph/.” 88 P.P. 26: “prhnh\j de\ e0/pipten sigw~n.” Also note that Melito uses the same verb “prosh/pteto” here in P.P. 26 just before the silencing of the child and again in P.P. 52. 89 This “silence of death” does not appear in the original Exodus 12 account on which this homily is based. We might also wonder whether the author of Peri Pascha has been inspired by B.J. 5.512-519, the account of the effects of the famine upon the residents of Jerusalem. Here Josephus employs Thucydides’ description of the plague (2.47-55) and Sophocles’ Antigone to heighten the pathos over the corpses. [ Halton, p. 252, also comments on P.P. 26 where “all Egypt stank with the unburied bodies”: “a reminiscence of Soph. O.T. 17, Antig. 412,?” (Hall, p. 15, n. e, notes Wisdom 18:12.)] One phrase from this

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Of course, what is missing in Melito are the details of how Josephus’s Mary cooks, eats half of, and then conceals the rest of her baby’s body, and most importantly, how she offers it to the rebels who can barely resist eating it. Melito, however, in P.P. 55-6, picks up the word “sarks” again, which he has used in the plural to describe the flesh of the devoured child, and dwells upon the separation and division of “the beautiful body” of mankind. He might even be alluding further to the B.J. when he speaks of the “kaine…symphora kai halosis” (P.P. 56) which encloses mankind and makes him captive, the very fate which Mary was trying to prevent her baby from suffering. In the texts of Josephus and Melito, the victim’s body becomes a symbol for the sins committed and the consequences suffered by a larger group.

After the paragraph on the mother’s cannibalism, Melito turns next in P.P. 53 to incest and adultery as further general scriptural examples of “strange, dreadful, and outrageous” behavior. Hall notes on P.P. 52 that “Melito is perhaps conscious of repeated allegations that Christians were child-eaters, cf. Theophilus, Ad Autolycum iii.3-5;” furthermore, he observes on P.P. 53 that “the theme of sexual malpractice is a favorite in Christian apologetic (Tatian, Oratio ad Graecos 33-4; Athenagoras, Supplicatio 34; Tertullian, Ad nationes 1.16).”90 In fact, Athenagoras even uses the same verb as Melito, “katapino,” to describe his own accusers’ unseemly and predatory sexual and eating practices. While Athenagoras is specifically turning the accusations of cannibalism and sexual depravity back upon his accusers, Melito juxtaposes the two sins in his general condemnation of all mankind. Josephus, however, does not use the incest motif alongside his account of Mary’s cannibalism.

What, then, are we to make of Melito’s adaptation of Josephus, and how does it fit into the homily as a whole? In the larger picture, Melito’s cannibal mother and her child serve as a counterpart to the Egyptians who lost their firstborn sons during Passover, a scene he has so dramatically recounted in the first section of this homily. Melito has employed many of Josephus’s details from the B.J. for his depiction of mankind’s sinful self-destruction through cannibalism, but the homilist has masterfully condensed these details and has transformed them for a new exegetical context. He does so without ever commenting directly upon the historicity, truth-value, or literary qualities of the Josephan text he has employed. The only true “logos” that Melito really cares about is Christ (P.P. 3, 4, 7, etc.), and Jerusalem as a real place91 only matters in the homily when it serves as

famine description in the B.J. definitely evokes the mood and language which Melito later employs for the Passover in Egypt: “ The city wrapped in profound silence and night laden with death, was in the grip of a yet fiercer foe–the brigands” (trans. Thackeray), “baqei=a de\ periei=xen th\n po/lin sigh\ kai\ nu\c qana&tou ge&mousa kai\ tou&twn oi9 lh|stai\ xalepw&teroi.” (Melito, however, does not care about the brigands.) 90 Hall, p. 29, nn. 17 and 18. See A. McGowan (1994). In Minucius Felix, Octavius 9.5, the pagan Caecilius presents the notorious accusation against Christians that initiates were asked to beat a lump of dough and in the process unintentionally (“quasi ad innoxios ictus provocato”) kill a baby wrapped in the dough, whereupon the rest would lap up the infant’s blood and tear its limbs to pieces; in chapter 30 the Christian Octavius refutes the charge and counters: “nemo hoc potest credere nisi qui possit audere,” “No one can believe this except a person who could dare to do it.” For an examination of the background behind this charge, also see J. Rives, “Human Sacrifice Among Pagans and Christians,” JRS 85 (1995), pp. 65-85. 91 Melito had been a pilgrim to Jerusalem: Eusebius H.E. 4.26, quoting Melito to a certain Onesimus: “…you also wished to learn the accurate information about the ancient books….So when I visited the east and arrived at the place where it was proclaimed and where it happened, I learned accurately about the Old

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the place “in the middle of which” “God” was “murdered” (P.P. 94, 96). The Romans (and rebels) from the B.J. are never specifically mentioned as instruments of God’s punishment and destroyers of Jerusalem;92 in fact, the only “general” and triumphator is Christ.93 We shall not encounter such a condensed and strange reworking of Josephus’s account of cannibalism in Origen, Eusebius, Basil, John Chrysostom, or Jerome; only pseudo-Hegesippus matches Melito by going to the opposite extreme in his expansion upon the tale of Mary.

Origen, Fragmenta in Lamentationes 105 Origen employs Josephus’s account of cannibalism to explain the text of

Lamentations 4:10 in his commentary which is now fragmentary and known as Fragmenta in Lamentationes.94 The specific Fragment 105 on Lam. 4:10 and Fragments 109 and 115 which also mention and quote from Josephus on the destruction of Jerusalem have received careful discussion by Mizugaki.95 He remarks that “in proportion to the remaining fragments, this chapter [4] contains the highest frequency of references to Josephus among all of the extant works of Origen.”96 After examining the fragments in some detail, he concludes, “The fact that there are substantial allusions to Josephus in Fragmenta in Lamentationes proves that such historical incidents as the destruction of the Temple and the fall of Jerusalem were significant to Origen’s theology.”97

In Fragment 105, Origen attempts to explain the curious lines at Lamentations 4:10: “The hands of compassionate women boiled their own children; they became food for them [the women] in the ruin of the daughter of my people.” Compassion is hardly the first thought that comes to mind when describing cannibalism, so Origen starts off his commentary: “So that the women may not seem on account of savagery to have eaten

Testament books.” K. Armstrong, Jerusalem: One City, Three Faiths, Knopf, 1996, pp. 170-171, reports: “Eusebius says that ‘crowds’ came ‘from all over the world’ to visit Jerusalem [Eus., The Proof of the Gospel 6:18-23], but even he could only name four pilgrims, one of whom was Melito, who had absolutely no interest in the city of Aelia. It was ‘worthless now because of the Jerusalem above.’ Melito had come to Palestine for scholarly, not devotional, reasons: he hoped to further his biblical studies by researching the country’s topology….There is no evidence that Jerusalem was a major pilgrim center for Christians during the second and third centuries.” My thanks to Tom Hawkins for pointing this passage out to me and for reading an early version of this paper. 92 At P.P. 99, the Latin text adds “impugnatus ab hostibus contremuisti,” whereas the Greek, Coptic, and Georgian do not have this. In any case, the line is not historically specific. 93 Christ as “strategos,” P.P. 105; Christ in triumph over the enemy, P.P. 102. 94 The text appears in Origenes Werke, Dritter Band, GCS, ed. E. Klosterman, Berlin, 1983; Fragment 105 at p. 273. 95 W. Mizugaki, “Origen and Josephus,” in edd. L. Feldman and G. Hata, Josephus, Judaism, and Christianity, Detroit: Wayne State, 1987, pp. 325-337, on the Fragments, pp. 331-333. Also see L. Feldman, “Pagan and Early Christian Anti-Semitism,” in his Studies in Hellenistic Judaism, Leiden: Brill, 1996, p. 302. Also, N. de Lange, Origen and the Jews, Cambridge, 1976, pp. 17-18, generally comments upon Josephus and Melito among other sources for Origen’s writings on the Jews. 96 Ibid., p. 331. 97 Ibid., p. 333.

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their children, it says they are compassionate; it attributes the suffering to the necessity [on account] of their lack [of food].”98 “Necessity” (along with “fury”) also drives Mary at B.J. 6.205, but Origen does not refer to the context of this passage until he has to explain the boiling/roasting of the children, which he says “happened during the siege of the Romans.”

Mizugaki has analyzed Origen’s use of Josephus’s cooking/roasting vocabulary, but he does not notice that Origen is not troubled by the plural cannibal mothers in Lamentations only being one mother in Josephus. He does comment upon Origen’s approval of and reliance upon Josephus’s “accuracy” in the final line of this fragment99 and elsewhere in his writings. For Origen, Josephus is an essential piece of extra-biblical evidence for the truth of the scriptures, but Origen does not acknowledge that Josephus built his description of Mary and the destruction of Jerusalem on the foundation of these same scriptures. Furthermore, though Origin himself justifies the women’s cannibalism by using the word “necessity” in Fragment 105, he does not pay attention to the literary and tragic nature of Josephus’s account of Mary’s cannibalism whereas Basil and John Chrysostom will; he instead values Josephus’s text for certain details from the destruction of Jerusalem which help him illuminate the diction and content of Lamentations.

Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History 3.6.20-8 Origen quotes a bit of Josephus B.J. 6 almost verbatim in Fragment 109, but Eusebius

takes this reliance upon Josephus’s exact testimony to a new level. He chooses to quote verbatim long portions of Josephus’s account of the famine in Jerusalem in B.J. 5 and 6, especially the cannibalism of Mary, “in order that those who happen upon this work may have some partial knowledge of how the punishment of God pursued them soon after for their crime against the Christ of God” (H.E.. 3.5.7). Eusebius then introduces these famine passages by inviting his reader to pick up book 5 of the B.J. and “to go through the tragedy of what was then done.”100 Eusebius does at least recognize the tragic nature of Josephus’s account, as will Basil and John Chrysostom. Eusebius then quotes from book 5, followed up by 6.193-213. Cutting off just before Josephus describes the Roman reaction to Mary’s cannibalism, Eusebius interjects his own interpretation that this is, again, their punishment for their impiety and “their crime against the Christ of God” (3.7.1). For Eusebius, however, the cannibalism of Mary is not only a sign of God’s

98 Origen, Frag. 105: “ 9/Ina mh\ do/cwsin ai9 gunai=kej di’ w)mo/thta bebrwke/nai ta\ te/kna, oi0kti/rmonaj me\n ei0=nai/ fhsin: th|= de\ th=j e0ndei/aj a0na/gkh| prosa/ptei to\ pa/qoj” 99 Frag. 105: “kai\ tou=to de\ kai\ ta0/lla pa/qh met’ a0kribei/aj 0Iw/shppoj e0n toi=j peri\ a(lw/sewj pare/dwken,” “And this and the other sufferings Josephus has presented with accuracy in his [writings] on the capture.” 100 Eusebius H.E. 3.6.1: “fe/re dh\ ou0=n, tw~n 9Istoriw~n th\n pe/mpthn tou= 0Iwsh/pou meta\ xei=raj au0=qij a0nalabw/n, tw~n to/te praxqe/ntwn di/elqe th\n tragw|di/an.”

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punishment, but it also fulfills the prophecy of Christ at Matthew 24:19-21 (3.7.1).101 John Chrysostom will also see the connection between the cannibalism of Mary and Matthew 24. Eusebius returns to this thought at 3.7.6, marveling that if one compares the rest of Josephus’s account of the war to Christ’s sayings, one can apprehend “the truly divine and supernaturally wonderful character both of the foreknowledge and of the foretelling of our Savior.” Whether Eusebius’s readers had access to a full text of the B.J. or interest in investigating such comparisons is hard to determine.102 In any case, Eusebius’s use of extended quotation from the B.J. is not unique within the context of the E.H. as a whole; consider, for instance, his long quotation from the written account of the martyrs in Gaul at the beginning of E.H. 5, which is some of the most gripping reading in his entire history. Clearly Eusebius has an eye for graphic stories, and Josephus provided several, including the cannibalism of Mary, which Eusebius could incorporate selectively into his overall theological argument for the triumph of the church over its enemies.

Basil, Homilia Dicta Tempore Famis et Siccitatis, John Chrysostom, Homilia 76, In Matthaeum,

Both Basil and John Chrysostom understood the scene of Mary’s cannibalism in B.J.

6 as a piece of drama/tragedy.103 In his only extant allusion to Josephus,104 Basil, in a homily on hunger and thirst, speaks of how:

...a mother, who had given birth to a child from her belly received it back into her belly in evil fashion. And the Jewish history, which the diligent Josephus composed for us, enacts this tragedy, when terrible sufferings took hold of the people of Jerusalem who were paying the just penalty for their impiety against the Lord.105

101 Hardwick, p. 124, sees further application of Mary’s cannibalism in Eusebius: “The Preparation for the Gospel 7.2 and the Prophetic Excerpts 3.46 connect the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple by the Romans with the destruction of the city and the Temple in Daniel 9:26. For Eusebius, the gruesome details of destruction, suffering, cannibalism and the statistics of the dead and the enslaved in the aftermath in H.E. 3 (all drawn from the Jewish War) fit the apocalyptic vision of Daniel. Eusebius juxtaposes Daniel’s promise of deliverance with the prophecy of a world ruler (whom Josephus identified with Vespasian [B.J. 6.312-313]) and identifies the figure as Christ.” 102 Origen also invites his readers to pick up Josephus at Contra Celsum 1.16: “For anyone interested can read what has been written by Flavius Josephus in two books on the antiquity of the Jews, where he produces a considerable collection of writers who testify to the antiquity of the Jews.” 103 Schreckenberg (1987), p. 324, n. 25, notes that both Basil and John Chrysostom perceived that the episode of a mother’s act of cannibalism was written as “drama” or “tragedy.” He also includes that “Isidore of Pelusium says (PG 78, 968) that the sorrowful fate of the Jews should serve the world as a tragic spectacle.” 104 Schreckenberg (1972), p. 88, notes this as Basil’s sole allusion. 105 Basil, Homilia Dicta Tempore Famis et Siccitatis, PG 31,324: “...mhte/ra de\ pai=da, o9\n e0k th=j gastro\j proh/gage, pa/lin th|= gastri\ kakw~n u9pode/casqai. kai\ tou~to to\ dra~ma 0Ioudaikh\ e0tragw|/dhsen i9stori/a, h9\n 0Iw/shpoj h9mi=n o9 spoudai=oj sunegra/yato, o9/te ta\ d

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Basil is not speaking here of the destruction of Jerusalem or Christ’s prophesies. Instead, he is simply using the example from Josephus to provide corroboration for his section on famine as the worst of human calamities. He labels Josephus as “diligent,” an opinion which agrees with our other Christian authors who comment on his accuracy. Basil also appraises the literary nature of Josephus’s B.J. as tragedy.106

John Chrysostom uses the scene of Mary when commenting in a homily on Matthew 24 concerning Christ’s prophesy of coming destruction. Like Eusebius, he tells his reader to turn to Josephus’s text to get “the truth” of Christ’s prophesies.107 He mentions Josephus as his extra-biblical source, says that the horrors of the war “surpass all tragedy,” and specifically mentions the “paidophagian.”108 He links this account of Jewish suffering to the crucifixion of Christ, as Eusebius does.

Basil and John both read the scene of Mary’s cannibalism as “tragedy,” since as astute ancient readers they understand the literary nature of the presentation. At the same time, however, they insist upon its “truth” as support for their arguments, just as Josephus does.

Jerome, In Hiezechielem II, 5, 10 If we examine Schreckenberg’s list of Josephan passages employed by Jerome, we

see that only In Danielem surpasses In Hiezechielem for the number of citations from the B.J., Antiquities, and Contra Apionem.109 When Jerome comments upon the siege of Jerusalem as foretold in Ezekiel chapter 5, he indicates that he is using “the history of the Maccabees” and Josephus to provide the historical details fulfilling the prophecies.110 As Jerome reaches verse 10 he faces a bit of a dilemma: the verse reads that “patres comedent filios,” but he cannot find historical references to such a deed. He slips conveniently into accounts of maternal cannibalism by mentioning the mothers’ cannibalism from 2Kings111 and then adds: “Iosephus quoque in obsidione Hierusalem multa huiuscemodi facta commemorat.”112 He does not expand upon Josephus’s story

eina\ pa/qh tou\j 0Ierosolumi/taj kate/labe, th=j ei0j to\n Ku/rion dussebei/aj e0ndi/kouj timwri/aj tinnu/ntaj.” 106 At the end of this homily, Basil juxtaposes the terms “mythos” and logos” when discussing the options of heaven or hell at the Last Judgement: “These are not a myth, but a logos which is proclaimed with an true voice” (P.G. 31.327). I wonder whether he was inspired by his reading of Josephus’s story of Mary to do so. 107 John Chrysostom Homilia 76, In Matthaeum, PG 58, 695, comments on Mt. 24:21: “kai\ mh/ tij nomi/sh| tou=to u9perbolikw~j ei0rh=sqai: a0ll´ e0ntuxw\n toi=j 0Iwsh/pou gra/mmasi, manqane/tw tw~n ei0rhme/nwnn th\n a0lh/qeian.” Schreckenberg (1972), p. 90, comments that PG 58, 694-5, “verbindet irrtümlich den Fall von Kannibalismus Ant. Jud. 9, 65-66 mit dem Jüdischen Krieg.” 108 Ibid., “pa~san e0ni/khse tragw|di/an e0kei=na ta\ deina\...th\n paidofagi/an.” 109 Schreckenberg (1972), pp. 93-94 110 Jerome, In Hiezechielem II, 5, 1-4, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 75 (1964), p. 55, l. 44: “Machabaeorum narrat historia,” and l. 47: “in Iosephi voluminibus.” 111 Ibid., II, 5, 10, p. 58, ll. 154-155. 112 Ibid., ll. 155-157.

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because it is not quite appropriate for the line in Ezekiel since a father is not involved in the B.J., but it is clear that the Mary passage is on his mind. Jerome admits that he cannot find anything from the Bible or from Josephus to support paternal cannibalism in Jerusalem (“quando autem patres filios suos comederint vel filii patres, nulla narrat historia”113), but he cannot resist adding an argument from probability: “nisi forte in multis necessitatibus malis etiam haec facta esse credendum sit.”114 Jerome clearly views Josephus as a reliable historical source for his exegetical purposes and feels compelled to cite him here, despite the fact that the story of Mary’s cannibalism does not entirely explain the Ezekiel passage.

Pseudo-Hegesippus, De Excidio 5.40-41 Pseudo-Hegesippus’s history,115 which extends from the Maccabees to the fall of

Masada, is clearly based primarily on Josephus’s B.J. but stands as an independent text and not a translation.116 In his preface to Ussani’s edition of pseudo-Hegesippus, K. Mras says of the speeches in this text: “In orationibus autem quibus Iosephus opus exornavit suum, Iosippus suo indulgebat ingenio.”117 This is an understatement when one looks at the author’s adaptation of Josephus’s account of Mary, which is found in the last book of the history.

The adaptation of this scene of cannibalism and Titus’s reaction to it runs much longer than Josephus’s original, and I, therefore, shall not describe it in great detail, Instead, I would like to focus on pseudo-Hegesippus’s understanding of Josephus’s debt to Greek tragedy in constructing this scene, especially the speeches. In 5.40, Mary’s first speech is a substantially longer tragic monologue in which she weighs the pros and cons of her decision, much like Euripides’ Medea. She dwells far more pathetically upon the child than Josephus’s Mary does, but she does retain the stated purpose for the murder: “esto ergo cibus mihi, furor latronibus et vitae fabula, quae sola deest nostris

113 Ibid., ll. 157-158. 114 Ibid., ll. 158-159. Jerome then stretches his exegetical boundaries further by offering the funny possibility that one instead should turn “ad nostram Hierusalem, quando magistri contra discipulos, id est patres contra filios, et discipuli contra magistros, id est filii adversum patres, seditione mutua concitantur, et impletur illud quod per apostolum dicitur: Si autem invicem mordetis et accusatis, videte ne ab invicem consumamini”! A nice idea for all academics. 115 Schreckenberg (1972), pp. 56-58, provides background and bibliography. He observes of this text’s main thrust: “Der Untergang Jerusalems und die Zerstörung des Tempels durch Titus ist, von daher gesehen, die verdiente Strafe für die Perfidie Juden und die Tötung Jesu Christu.” 116 See A. Bell, “Josephus and Pseudo-Hegesippus,” in L. Feldman and G. Hata, edd., Josephus, Judaism, and Christianity, 1987, pp. 349-361. Bell cannot identify the author, but he does offer several clues which point to a date of composition circa 370, including the following interesting observation on p. 350: “To the best of my knowledge, no one has suggested a possible relationship between the emperor Julian’s abortive attempt to rebuild the Temple at Jerusalem in 363 and the composition of pseudo-Hegesippus’s work, the theme of which is that the destruction by Titus was the supremum excidium (5.2).” I have been investigating Julian’s plan to rebuild the Temple in light of Josephus, but I cannot elaborate on it here. 117 K. Mras, preface, p. xlv, to V. Ussani, Hegesipi Qui Dicitur Historiae Libri V, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum 66, Vienna: Hoelder-Pichler-Tempsky, 1960.

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calamitatibus.”118 After this first very extended speech, pseudo-Hegesippus’s description of the slaughter concentrates on her movements and an added prop of a sword!119 More noticeably different, however, is pseudo-Hegesippus’s expansion of Mary’s second short speech to the rebels into two much longer parts. In the first of the two parts, she invites them to eat the part of the baby that she has saved for them, but also then almost comically invites them to take a seat quickly so that she can serve the meal for them like a good hostess!120 Between the two speeches she dramatically uncovers the “ambusta membra” of her baby and then resumes speaking:

hoc est prandium meum, haec vestra portio, videte diligentius ne vos frauderim. Ecce pueri manus una, ecce pes eius, ecce dimidium reliqui corporis eius, et ne alienum putetis, filius est meus, ne alterius opus arbitremini, ego feci, ego diligenter divisi, mihi quod manducarem, vobis quod reservarem.121

We notice the “hoc” and “haec” are probably derived from Josephus’s “touto” in B.J. 6.210, and her insistence upon it really being her child comes from Josephus’s “genesion,”122 but her emphasis upon the baby’s body parts is definite embellishment. One might wonder whether the author of this text knew that Josephus’s text was based in part upon Euripides’ depiction of Agave in the Bacchae or was simply reminded of it and went to the source for more inspiration for this detailed presentation of the dismembered baby.123 Of course, pseudo-Hegesippus may have been influenced by other dramatic representations, either in text or on stage; we cannot know for certain. When Mary finally stops speaking in pseudo-Hegesippus, the text switches the order of initial reactions to her deed first by having the city react with horror and then by commenting that the rebels began to be more careful about the kind of food they stole so that they would not mistakenly eat food like that in the future;124 this surely changes the tenor of Josephus’s remark about the rebels! The direct speech by Titus that follows greatly expands upon the indirect speech reported in the B.J. and includes many references to scriptures. Again, I resist recounting all the details of the speech, but we should note that Titus here refers directly to the tragic roots of the story of Mary: “Thyesteas dapes fabulam putabamus, flagitium videmus, veritatem cernimus atrociorem

118 Pseudo-Hegesippus 5.40.1. 119 Ibid. 5.40.1: “haec dicens auerso uultu gladium demersit et in frustra filium secans igni imposuit, partem comedit, partem operuit ne quis superuenerit.” 120 Ibid. 5.40.2: “considite ocius, mensam adponam, mirari habetis ministerium meum…” 121 Ibid. 122 At 5.40.2, pseudo-Hegesippus also retains the challenge to the men not to be softer and weaker, but turns the simple “thusian” into “hostiam meam…holocaustum meum…sacrificium meum.” 123 See my note 58 above concerning the reconstruction of the lines lost towards the end of the Bacchae. Notice that in Christus Patiens l. 1470, as reported in Dodds p. 58, “i0dou/” is used to draw attention to his head (which is covered here), and then the lines, which I have quoted above, concerning his limbs follow; in the same way, Mary in ps.-H. uses “ecce.” 124 Pseudo-Hegesippus 5.41.1.

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tragoediis.”125 Thus, we return full-circle to Philo’s interpretation of stories of cannibalism. Pseudo-Hegesippus revels in creating speeches that go well beyond the bounds of Josephus’s text in order to heighten the drama and in doing so drive home his point that the Jews deserved to lose their Temple.

Conclusion Each of the Christian writers examined here draws upon Josephus’s depiction of

Mary’s cannibalism in the B.J. to justify his own interpretation of the scriptures, especially those which touch upon the destruction of Jerusalem. Some of them identify it as “tragedy” while insisting upon its truth; they, therefore, are responding positively to Josephus’s own rhetorical cues. The tragic irony, however, of these Christian readings of Mary’s cannibalism in the B.J. is that Josephus presents his account with its “myth for the world” in order to exonerate the majority of his people, yet the Christians generally use it to support their approval of the destruction of Jerusalem and condemnation of the Jews.

125 Ibid. 5.41.2.