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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