Bay, Biblical Heroes and Classical Culture in Christian Late Antiquity (CUP)

NEW BOOK FROM CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS:

Biblical Heroes and Classical Culture in Christian Late Antiquity
The Historiography, Exemplarity, and Anti-Judaism of Pseudo-Hegesippus

AUTHOR: Carson Bay, Universität Bern, Switzerland DATE PUBLISHED: November 2022
AVAILABILITY: Available
FORMAT: Hardback
ISBN: 9781009268561

£ 90.00 Hardback

Description

In this volume, Carson Bay focuses on an important but neglected work of Late Antiquity: Pseudo-Hegesippus' On the Destruction of Jerusalem (De Excidio Hierosolymitano), a Latin history of later Second Temple Judaism written during the fourth century CE. Bay explores the presence of so many Old Testament figures in a work that recounts the Roman-Jewish War (66–73 CE) and the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE. By applying the lens of Roman exemplarity to Pseudo-Hegesippus, he elucidates new facets of Biblical reception, history-writing, and anti-Judaism in a text from the formative first century of Christian Empire. The author also offers new insights into the Christian historiographical imagination and how Biblical heroes and Classical culture helped Christians to write anti-Jewish history. Revealing novel aspects of the influence of the Classical literary tradition on early Christian texts, this book also newly questions the age-old distinction between the Christian and the Classical (or 'pagan') in the ancient Mediterranean world.

• Offers extensive English translations of key portions of Pseudo-Hegesippus (De Excidio Hierosolymitano) with extended analysis and comparison with source texts and comparanda from Biblical, Classical, early Christian, and Jewish literature (all for the first time)
• Provides a comprehensive analysis and exhaustive overview of the Old Testament figures in a rarely-studied Latin history from late antiquity
• Shows how the Christian appropriation of biblical figures could and did fuel anti-Jewish history-writing in the first century of Christian empire

For Pseudo-Hegesippus' De excidio Hierosolymita see here, as well as here and here.

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