Tuesday, August 6, 2024

Erwin R. Goodenough: We would not know of the Hellenization of Judaism from the Sources of the Time

  

All these considerations force me to conclude that, generally speaking, Jews throughout the Roman world borrowed from these emblems with deliberate symbolic intent. We have no literature telling us of a Judaism which could do this, but the conclusion seems ineluctable that such a Judaism did exist for centuries. And it is a likely hypothesis that on the completion and dissemination of the Talmud, and with the beginning of Christian persecution of the Jews, a great reaction set in which abolished this Judaism and destroyed its writings. This possibility is heightened by our knowledge of the efficacy of Jewish censorship. If we were dependent upon Jewish tradition and Jewish preservation of records, we should never have heard of Philo and the Jewish Hellenism of his day. Philo and Josephus were both preserved by Christian copyists and in Christian circles, and we should not have known even Philo’s name if Christians had not adopted him. The same is true, so far as I know, of the Wisdom of Solomon and the works of Josephus. That is, Jews have not only failed to preserve accounts of the literature of hellenized Judaism; their records do not even mention it. On the basis of what Jews themselves have transmitted, it would be ridiculous to suggest that Philo and hellenized Judaism ever existed. (Erwin R. Goodenough, Jewish Symbols in the Greco-Roman Period, ed. Jacob Neusner [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953], 58, emphasis added)

 

 One was reminded of this old article from then-LDS (now agnostic?) Kevin Graham in response to J. P. Holding concerning the evidence from Josephus and Tacitus concerning the nature of God.

 

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