Chapter 309 of 404

Some Palestinian Jewish Literature

The methodology of many Hebrew and Aramaic Palestinian Jewish texts concerning historical figures diverges at significant points from that of Greco-Roman historical writing. Since the Palestinian Jewish roots of the Jesus movement affected Diaspora Christianity, a brief consideration of Jewish biographical conventions may be useful in discussing the traditions behind the Gospels. More importantly for our purposes, they may be useful in understanding literary techniques particularly adapted by Matthew and John. Because the differences in genre are more significant, however, I am treating them only in this appendix.

Although many individuals feature prominently in the Hebrew Bible and in early Jewish literature, there are rarely volumes devoted to a person that would be called biography in the sense in which we have discussed the term in ch. 5; usually they are part of larger narratives. Job, Ruth, Judith, Jonah, Esther, Daniel and Tobit each have books about them in the Greek Bible, but the events rather than the lives of the characters dominate the accounts.⁴ Of course, the Gospels could draw on biblical narratives focused on persons as well as on the Greco-Roman genre;⁵ but we should not overlook the broader availability of the more general biographic category in this period.⁶

The various reports of events in the lives of pious rabbis are too piecemeal to supply parallels to biographies like the Gospels.⁷ It remains possible that some of these stories were collected and told together like some of the brief philosophical lives in Diogenes Laertius. Since no such early collections are extant, however,⁸ rabbinic sources can add little to our discussion of Jewish “biography.” In contrast to Josephus or Tacitus, rabbinic texts are primarily legal, and incidental biographical information tends to serve more purely homiletical than historical purposes.⁹

Nevertheless, some Jewish works, drawing on the Bible and postbiblical Jewish tradition, bear some resemblance to Greek lives; most of these again, however, are in Greek. I shall note Philo’s analogies later. One collection called the Lives of the Prophets, with genre parallels in the Greek lives of poets, resembles the briefer lives.¹⁰ Josephus’ accounts about Moses in his Antiquities often follow patterns in hellenistic philosophical biography¹¹ (though sometimes also novelistic literary conventions);¹² so also his treatment of Abraham,¹³ Jacob, ¹⁴ Joseph,¹⁵ Samson,¹⁶ Saul,¹⁷ Zedekiah,¹⁸ and the Aqedah narrative,¹⁹ among others.²⁰ Thus Cohen lists among Jewish works of history owing “more to Herodotus, Thucydides, and Hellenistic historiography than to Kings and Chronicles” both 2 Maccabees and Josephus.²¹

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