Upon assuming the position as first rector of the Geneva Academy in 1559, Theodore Beza proclaimed in the inaugural address that he not only considered Josephus to be a profane author, but a ridiculous and inept one as well.Footnote 1 Calvin, for his part, is not innocent of pronouncements similar to those of Beza: within days of the inaugural address—and perhaps with Beza's words still ringing in his ear—in his first lecture on Daniel at the newly established Academy, Calvin proclaimed that it was “a dreadful judgment of God to have made so stupid a man as Josephus a priest,” and referred to him further as an unlearned man (homo indoctus and homo brutus) with little scriptural training.Footnote 2 June of 1559 was not a good month for Josephus in Geneva. Considering that the Academy was founded by John Calvin and that Beza was appointed by him as rector, taken together with his comments on Daniel, one could be forgiven for assuming that Calvin had little use for the Roman-Jewish historian.Footnote 3
On the whole, however, such denunciations are in fact rare in Calvin's assessment of Josephus's works, and a comprehensive study reveals that Calvin's reception of Josephus is overwhelmingly positive and remarkably extensive: he cited Josephus explicitly no fewer than seventy-five times in his biblical commentaries alone, making use at one time or another of all four of Josephus's works.Footnote 4 There were good reasons for this: Flavius Josephus was (and is) unparalleled in his usefulness as an ancient historiographical authority for anyone attempting to uncover the social, cultural, and religious history of the biblical text, with respect to both the Old and New Testaments. His larger works, the Jewish Antiquities (hereafter referred to as Antiquities) and the Jewish War (hereafter referred to as War), together span almost the full range of biblical history, from Adam and Eve to the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem by the Romans in the year 70 c.e., the latter to which he was a privileged eyewitness as an advisor and translator for Titus himself. Calvin's critical engagement with, and occasional dismissing of, Josephus's authority (and his even stronger criticisms of other ancient historiographical accounts) conforms broadly to what Frank Borchardt long ago called the “topos of critical rejection in the Renaissance,” and it establishes Calvin firmly in a tradition of Christian humanism that respected ancient authorities and engaged them with a critical eye.Footnote 5 It also allows us to see the ways in which historical reasoning for Calvin interacted with theological reasoning, and furthermore how this relationship distinguishes Calvin from some of his contemporaries.
Analysis of the reception of Josephus in the early modern period specifically is inchoate, but promising, and this paper serves as another chapter in ongoing work in that subfield.Footnote 6 The dearth of direct scholarship on the reception of Josephus does not reflect his long-standing appreciation in the Christian tradition. Josephus's works had long enjoyed what Pauline Smith refers to as a “climate of approbation” among Christian biblical commentators and historians because of his unique position as a writer who provided substantial historical background for both the Old and New Testaments.Footnote 7 His works were translated from Greek into Latin as early as the fourth century, and most successfully under the advisement of Cassiodorus at Vivarium in the sixth century, the fruit of which went on to become what has been described as “the single most often copied historical work of the Middle Ages.”Footnote 8 At least 230 Latin manuscripts of Josephus's works survive today.Footnote 9 Because of Josephus's unique position as a Jewish historian fully participating in the Greco-Roman historiographical tradition, while also serving as an eyewitness to events important for establishing the historical background of the composition of the New Testament—including, according to a large swath of the Christian tradition, rare non-Christian references to Jesus, Jesus's brother James, and John the Baptist—he was long appreciated. As Daniel Stein Kokin has pointed out, referring to the historian's continued prominence in the medieval period, Josephus did not have a renaissance because he did not need one.Footnote 10
An analysis of Calvin's varied use of Josephus reveals several things of importance both for Calvin studies and for scholarship on Renaissance historical and biblical criticism. First, it shows that Calvin was interested in establishing the historical veracity and coherence of the biblical witness by appealing to extrabiblical sources, as Randall Zachman has already demonstrated.Footnote 11 It reveals further that Josephus's historiographical authority was a very important factor in Calvin's endeavors to do so. Second, the fact that a non-Christian historian could feature so heavily in Calvin's corpus is a testament to Calvin's persistent humanist tendencies and appreciation for works of Greco-Roman antiquity. Contrary to what we might expect, when Calvin challenged Josephus, he never reverted to the argument that the biblical authority simply trumps the non-biblical one in the case of Josephus. Calvin always gave a further historical or textual reason for opting to follow the biblical text over Josephus's account. This places Calvin in something like a middle space in the context of mid-sixteenth-century historical criticism, and between two of his exact contemporaries: Heinrich Bullinger on the one hand, who appealed to the Spirit as an infallible guarantor in cases where the biblical text and Josephus diverged, and Sebastian Castellio on the other, who interpolated passages from Josephus into the biblical text itself.Footnote 12 Third, even though Calvin was critical of Josephus at times, in a few instances it is clear that Josephus's works caused Calvin some trouble in his attempts to establish the historical veracity of the biblical account, which complicates Randall Zachman's judgment that “when secular history appears to contradict a historical narrative in Scripture, Calvin always rejects the secular account as being inspired by Satan and unquestioningly accepts the truth of the biblical account.”Footnote 13 In the case of Josephus, Calvin often used him in more complex ways, but it must also be admitted that he might have imagined him as something more than a secular historian.
I. Josephus the Reliable Historian
Calvin read Josephus broadly and uses him liberally in his commentaries on the Bible, from Genesis all the way to James, referring at one time or another to all of the historian's extant works.Footnote 14 He brought these works to bear on a wide range of issues, from the reckoning of the relative value of the sanctuary shekel in Genesis 23, to the gruesome death of Herod Agrippa, to sorting out the complexities of the order and hierarchy of Roman governorship in the first century c.e. He also used Josephus for exegetico-theological ends, as when he invoked the story of Maria eating her own child during the Jewish War, which for Calvin served as a sort of prophecy fulfillment of several passages in the Old Testament. He cites Josephus in the context of a contemporary religious and political polemic in a dedicatory letter to Frederick III, referring to the zealots whom Josephus identified as primary instigators of the Jewish War as a parallel to the sixteenth-century anti-Calvinist Lutherans who were critical of Frederick for ostensibly accepting a Reformed understanding of the Eucharist. Calvin even refers to Josephus's silence at times, seemingly troubled that, for example, the historian did not corroborate Matthew's Gospel account of the slaying of the children of Bethlehem by Herod. Because of the nature of Josephus's works and their relationship to biblical history, he was substantially more important as a historian for Calvin than other ancient historiographical sources, which could only be used on occasion to illuminate the scriptural account. Taking the broad scope of Calvin's use of Josephus into account, it may be that Calvin was in fact unprecedented at the time for the extent to and varied manner in which he used Josephus as a source.
The bulk of instances where Calvin uses Josephus positively come, unsurprisingly, in the context of his attempts to establish the underlying history of biblical texts. His esteem for the Greco-Roman historiographical tradition is revealed by his incorporation of Josephus's texts into his own account, as is his fundamental interest in establishing the true history that lies behind the biblical texts, an endeavor which obviously benefits from multiple sources agreeing on the same events.Footnote 15 A brief overview of several of these cases is illuminative of the varied manner in which Josephus served as a useful source for Calvin. In his commentaries on the Old Testament, Calvin invokes Josephus for a variety of reasons. In order to elaborate on Exodus 28:1, he cites Josephus as proof that the Aaronite priesthood was eventually bought and sold; and again, expositing Deuteronomy 18, that the priests eventually exacted tithes from the Levites by violence, demonstrating, presumably, that the priests had been elevated above the Levites.Footnote 16 On Psalm 83:5–6, Josephus's testimony that the Israelites had traveled through the lands of the Moabites and Ammonites peaceably, only then to be repaid with violence, serves a historical and theological point, as Calvin concludes his comment on the passage with a reference to the destiny of the church as one wherein she will suffer persecution from enemies external and internal. Other instances include Calvin's use of Josephus as evidence of the timeline of Nebuchadnezzar's conquering of Egypt, per the prophecy of Jeremiah (44:29–30); of Onias's construction of a temple at Heliopolis;Footnote 17 of the timing of the earthquake during Uzziah's reign mentioned at Amos 1:1; and of the differences between the new Temple and the old one in a lecture on Haggai.Footnote 18
But Josephus's name appears even more frequently in Calvin's New Testament commentaries. Over half of all explicit instances of Calvin's use of Josephus positively come in his attempts to elaborate on the historical events from first-century Rome that lie behind the Gospels and Acts. A good portion of these consist of Calvin attempting to chronicle the order, or identity, of the Roman rulers and Jewish priests during the time of Jesus and the Apostles, something he seemed particularly keen to work out. At times he went to great lengths to establish these chronologies, and one wonders whether he imagined his audience to be well versed enough in the intricacies of first-century Roman political history either to care or to put forth the effort to follow his often rather compact arguments. Commenting on Luke 3:1,Footnote 19 Calvin relies heavily on Josephus for laying out the historical background of the order and hierarchy of rulers when John the Baptist began to preach the Gospel. He cites the Antiquities and the War three times each in a single paragraph.Footnote 20 He further takes the opportunity to provide background information on Valerius Gratus and Pilate, then to identify the appropriate Herod, and finally to disabuse some readers of the idea that Luke's Lysanias was the same person as either the son or the grandson of Ptolemy Mennaeus (but he leaves open the possibility that he was his great-grandson). Calvin has more than just a pastoral concern here, and exhibits his interest in setting the historical record straight—cases like this exist at the expense of theological exposition, and the considerable effort Calvin spends on teasing out what he perceives to be the true history belies his historical curiosity. Another reference comes when he uses JosephusFootnote 21 to clarify Luke's insinuation at 3:2 that Annas and Caiaphas were high priests at the same time (they were not).Footnote 22 He twice cites Josephus on the amiable character of Philip, brother of Herod (Luke 3:19 and Matthew 14:3–4). He “willingly assents” to Josephus's identification of the queen of the south as the queen of Ethiopia.Footnote 23 Regarding the slaying of the children of Bethlehem by Herod (Matthew 2:16), Calvin actually goes out of his way to note that Josephus did not mention this event in his history, which must have troubled Calvin as much as it troubles modern New Testament scholars, although he ultimately claims that Matthew's authority ought to be deemed sufficient here. In this case, Calvin anticipates (and perhaps even influences) the great Renaissance chronographer and sometime Genevan Joseph Scaliger.Footnote 24
The commentary on Acts contains the most Josephus references of any of Calvin's works (at least a dozen in all). Here Calvin finds in Josephus support for an argument that the Temple was truly governed by the Roman army—and not a priest as an interpretation of Acts 4:1's “the priests and the governor of the temple” suggests—for otherwise, the Jews would be able to easily use the Temple as a place of refuge during a time of dissension.Footnote 25 On Acts 5:36–37, where the author has Gamaliel putting Theudas before Judas of Galilee in the order of men who had instigated unsuccessful uprisings, Calvin argues that this cannot refer to chronological order, for Josephus has it that Judas operated in the time of Quirinius's consulship, and Theudas not until Fadus's, under Claudius. That is, in this instance, Josephus's history has forced Calvin to interpret the author of Acts (whom Calvin refers to as “Luke”Footnote 26 ) in a way that did not conform to the most obvious and straightforward reading.Footnote 27 Calvin also encourages his readers to consult the thirteenth and fifteenth books of the Antiquities to learn more about Hyrcanus's destruction of Samaria and the subsequent rebuilding of it by Herod,Footnote 28 and he mentions book fifteen explicitly again in a reference to Judea's agricultural infertility under Claudius.Footnote 29
The death of Herod Agrippa, recounted in Acts 12:21, offered Calvin the opportunity to recount Josephus's longer version of the same event from book nineteen of Antiquities.Footnote 30 “There is astonishing agreement between Luke and Josephus in the thing itself and in all circumstances,” Calvin writes.Footnote 31 He then paraphrases Josephus's version of events: that Herod was dressed extravagantly (to the point that his courtiers called him a god), that an owl sitting above him served as an omen of his impending death, that he addressed those present before he died. Calvin modifies a few things, presumably quoting from memory, or perhaps embellishing for effect: that his garment was embroidered in gold (in both the Greek and Latin editions of Josephus's Antiquities, as well as in Eusebius, the garment is silver, but Calvin may have been influenced by Erasmus's Paraphrase on Acts, where Herod is dressed in both silver and goldFootnote 32 ); that Herod concluded his speech by saying, “I am forced to end my life miserably,” whereas in Josephus's account, Herod actually says that he had lived a happy life (although certainly he does not in fact die happily).Footnote 33 Calvin's lengthy explanation that the horrific death experienced by Herod was the result of his overweening pride before God is much more elaborate than Josephus's version, although the reasons are the same: Herod himself in the Antiquities recognizes the negative valence of the owl-omen and the reason for his violent death, saying to his flatterers that Providence had reproved their reckoning him a god.Footnote 34 Moreover, while Luke has an angel of the Lord exacting the punishment, Calvin points out that the owl sitting on a cord in Josephus “represents a devil more than a heavenly angel.”Footnote 35
Two especially interesting cases arise where Josephus's credibility seemed nearly to outweigh Luke's recording of events for Calvin. The most striking case comes in Calvin's comments on Acts 4:6, for he appears here to prefer Josephus's account to Luke's on the dating of Annas's and Caiaphas's respective tenures as high priest. It is worth quoting Calvin at length:
It is strange that Luke here makes Annas the high priest, since it is clear from Josephus that this office was not taken from Caiaphas until Vitellius entered Jerusalem to take command after Pilate had been ordered to Rome. All agree that the Lord was crucified in the eighteenth year of Tiberius. And the reign of Tiberius continued for four more years. Not less than three years must have passed after the death of Christ before Pilate was removed from the office of proconsul. For Tiberius was dead when he came to Rome. So Caiaphas was still high priest for three years after the death of Christ. It is likely therefore that the events narrated here by Luke did not happen immediately after the resurrection of Christ; although not even in this way will the whole difficulty be solved. For Josephus reports that Jonathan was appointed in place of Caiaphas; yet because this Jonathan was the son of Annas it is not unlikely that the son was called by the father's name; Caiaphas also had two names, being also known as Joseph.Footnote 36
Calvin does make two tentative suggestions regarding the difficulty for Annas to have occupied the office of high priest at a time when Josephus's testimony does not allow it, but, strictly speaking, he leaves the question open-ended. And while it is not the most significant passage in the New Testament, his Mirum est—“It is extraordinary”—reveals his discomfort with Luke's account on the basis of what he seems clearly to think is the correct account in Josephus. It may in fact be that Calvin was the first to interrogate this discrepancy.Footnote 37 Furthermore, in this case, Randall Zachman's judgment that “Calvin will use secular history only to confirm, and not to falsify, the meaning of a given passage of Scripture” must be qualified.Footnote 38
Calvin handled the perceived inconsistency delicately, but it is clear that he was capable of using “secular” history to do something other than to confirm the meaning of the biblical account, even if he did not go as far as his colleague-turned-enemy Castellio in imagining the biblical text (to quote Irena Backus) as “a document which could be altered by new evidence and which could be supplemented by data from pagan sources.”Footnote 39 He invokes pagan history here, in fact, in order precisely to point out Luke's “strange” recounting of events, and his analysis consists of attempts to reconcile Luke to Josephus, and not the other way around. While Calvin was rarely, if ever, so blatant in his questioning of the veracity of the biblical account relative to extra-biblical sources, it is an important example of Calvin's relatively liberal approach to biblical historiography when considering what we might call exegetical adiaphora.Footnote 40
There is a considerable and long-running scholarly debate over whether Calvin ought to be considered a forerunner to modern historical criticism. Twenty years ago, Muller and Thompson argued convincingly that whiggish approaches to the history of biblical interpretation are misguided and overly constraining, and that “precritical” does not entail “uncritical.”Footnote 41 Irena Backus has argued that convictions of scriptural infallibility are not necessarily inconsistent with sixteenth-century Protestant interests in history, especially insofar as these interests are grounded in the notion that “the Bible as a book determined the course of all subsequent history.”Footnote 42 This must still be kept in mind, and while it would for several reasons be anachronistic to paint Calvin as a modern historical critic simpliciter, we still may consider the gradations that make up the space between the false dichotomy of precritical and critical, or premodern and modern, biblical exegesis. The fact that the tendency represented in the above example is possible in Calvin's analysis does not fit with the mold of precritical exegetes as always understanding the “story” as “identified with the literal or grammatical sense” as opposed to the underlying historical account.Footnote 43 That case and the one that follows seem not to fit perfectly into these models, and they reveal Calvin's position in a rapidly changing world in terms of historiographical methods and presuppositions.
Perhaps an even clearer instance comes at Acts 23:2 where Luke identifies Ananias as holding the office of high priest. In his analysis of this passage, Calvin consults both the Antiquities and the War and concludes that Luke's account runs contrary to Josephus's (what Calvin calls the recepta historia). “If we have faith in Josephus,” Calvin writes, “the Ananias mentioned by Luke could not have been high priest at this time.” But do we have faith in Josephus? Calvin then writes that “another possibility comes to mind” (alia mihi coniectura in mentem venit), and he attempts to save Luke from running afoul of the recepta historia: he suggests there might have been a second Ananias who held office after the one Calvin thinks had already ended his tenure as high priest, but who was not mentioned by Josephus; or that when Luke refers to Ananias as high priest, he simply means that he was very important, but not necessarily that he held the office formally. In the end, Calvin is content to “let the readers decide” (expendant lectores) what might be the most suitable resolution. (In fact, Calvin seems to have gone to all the trouble for naught, for Luke was actually right and Josephus concurs.Footnote 44 ) Most important for our purposes is the stock Calvin often put in Josephus's works and their relative weight next to the biblical account: he had enough faith in Josephus to allow his testimony to complicate the plainest reading of Luke's narrative.
It is useful to compare Calvin here with Heinrich Bullinger, who, in recognizing that Luke and Josephus differ over the issue of the Roman census in Luke 2, writes forcefully that “it is most certain and indubitable that Luke has erred in nothing.” In that case, Calvin also follows Luke, but the most forceful statement he makes is that “it is highly probable that Josephus's memory had failed him.” Indeed, Josephus's faulty memory is on more than one occasion the apparent reason for a discrepancy, according to Calvin. He gives a similar explanation regarding Josephus's assertion that Herodias was married to Herod, and not to Philip, in his commentary on Luke (Luke 3:19). On the parallel passage in Matthew (14:3–4), Calvin also disputes Josephus's account on the issue of Herodias's having been carried away and incestuously married to Herod (Philip),Footnote 45 but in this case Calvin argues that the events in question had only just happened when the Evangelists wrote, insinuating that their proximity to the events implies more reliability. This is the only time Calvin explicitly argues for the Evangelists' overt reliability over Josephus, but note that his argument is not that the Evangelists have more authority in virtue of their having been inspired by the Spirit (an argument Bullinger makes in another reference to Josephus), but that they were in a better position chronologically to get the facts right.Footnote 46 Again, this is tantamount to a shift, however slight, in the development of historical reasoning when considering biblical texts. The Gospel accounts are compared to other ancient historical witnesses, at least rhetorically, as historical witnesses. The fact that the Evangelists always (or nearly always) get the story straight according to Calvin says something, certainly, about where his allegiances lie, but it is worth pointing out that his critical posture differs from Bullinger's in the way that he attempts to adjudicate these types of discrepancies.
Another complex case arises in his commentary on Luke. Calvin spends a fair amount of energy attempting to disentangle Luke's account of the census (Luke 2:1) from the contradictory accounts available to him, and this section of his commentary requires some heavy lifting. Calvin is not the first commentator to use Josephus here: Eusebius uses Josephus heavily in his reconstruction of these events, although he does not disagree with his account.Footnote 47 In the sixteenth century, I have found that at least Faber Stapulensis and Bullinger precede Calvin in pointing out the discrepancies between Luke's account and Josephus's.Footnote 48 Calvin could easily have read both, but he deals with the matter in more detail than either, and concludes differently as well, proving that he consulted Josephus directly in order to try to resolve what he thought to be a significant biblical-historical matter. Regarding the alleged summons by Caesar for all in the empire to register (in Luke 2:1–2), Calvin points out that Luke's assertion that Quirinius was proconsul at the time runs counter to Josephus's assertion that Quirinius became proconsul while Herod Archelaus was exiled in VienneFootnote 49 —for the problem is that “historians are agreed” (inter scriptores convenit) that Archelaus “reigned nine years after the death of his father Herod” which would put the census several years (thirteen by Calvin's reckoningFootnote 50 ) after the birth of Christ (given that “everyone subscribes to Epiphanius' account” that Christ was born a few years before the death of Herod the Great). Calvin has pinpointed the two major irreconcilable events: that Christ was born under the rule of Herod the Great (per Luke), and that the census was carried out after Herod was dead (per Josephus). Calvin leaves the question open, and neither affirms nor rejects Josephus's account—it is, simply, a “much greater difficulty” (longe maior difficultas) than sorting out the spelling of Quirinius's name.Footnote 51 It is difficult not to perceive a kind of nascent historicism in Calvin's attempts to get at the historical events underlying the biblical accounts, but he always stops just short of explicitly concluding that the biblical witness has erred. The matter is brought into further relief when considered alongside Calvin's predecessors. Bullinger, like Stapulensis, suggests that there were in fact two censuses, and further that both Josephus and Eusebius had erred in their reconstruction of the order of events; he also says, much more forcefully than anything Calvin puts forth, that it is “most certain and indubitable that Luke has erred in nothing.”Footnote 52
II. Josephus, Homo Indoctus
Calvin did not always accept Josephus's account, and in a few cases criticized the historian vociferously (even unfairly), as Calvin was occasionally wont to do with those he did not agree with. And even though most of the cases of negative reception are benign, and hinge on Calvin's privileging of the biblical authors' authority over Josephus's in cases where the two disagree, what seems at times like an about-face in terms of Calvin's appreciation of his source can be surprising. In any case, the fact that he registers explicit disagreement with Josephus at all, especially given the number of instances where he appeals to him as an authority, can be understood as proof of the respect he has for his source. His disagreements also serve another rhetorical function: Calvin can establish his own historical bona fides not only by referring to extra-biblical texts, but by explaining (or attempting to explain) the way in which some historians have erred. By citing and disagreeing with a well-respected authority like Josephus, Calvin legitimizes his own participation in the field of ancient history.
I have already noted Calvin's mention of Josephus's omission of Herod's command to slay the children of Bethlehem (in Matthew 2), as well as other instances from the New Testament where Josephus's recollection had simply failed him, according to Calvin. Otherwise, in three separate instances, Calvin pointed out that Josephus's neat division of the tables of the Ten Commandments into two sets of five was misguided, and these register a theological disagreement. It “confounds the distinction between piety and charity” in the Institutes;Footnote 53 Josephus enumerates them correctly, but divides them improperly, according to Calvin in his comments on Deuteronomy 5:16 (it might be worth pointing out that Josephus is received in a more positive light here than Augustine, whose attempts to discover the Trinity in the first table Calvin deems “frivolous”) and again on Matthew 19:18, where Josephus improperly includes the proscription against murder in the first table. One other amicable disagreement arose over the matter of the midwives who spoke with the King of Egypt in Exodus 1:15, for Josephus errs, in Calvin's opinion, in suggesting that they were not Hebrew women, but Egyptian spies.Footnote 54 In this case, Calvin seems flatly to prefer Moses's authority over Josephus's, pointing out that Moses expressly said that the midwives were associated with the Hebrew women, but he also gives a further argument (from the context of the scene [et ex toto contextu]) that the midwives demonstrated a fear of God (timore Dei), which further proves, apparently, their identity as Hebrews and not Egyptians.Footnote 55
These examples are benign, especially given that, even in the refined context of his reception of Josephus, Calvin judged Augustine frivolous and Jerome devoid of scriptural knowledge. Calvin's ad hoc approach to the Fathers and ancient authorities was constitutive of a fairly consistent independence and a critical willingness to criticize those whom in other circumstances he showed respect for. But he was not altogether beyond vitriol in his assessment of Josephus. The historian's etymological connection between Gilgal and “liberty” Calvin found dubious when interpreting Joshua 5:9 (he calls it “idle and ridiculous”), and he argues that it serves as proof that Josephus was “ignorant both of Hebrew and of jurisprudence.”Footnote 56 Josephus received the harshest criticism in Calvin's lectures on Daniel, which were gathered together and published in 1561 and dedicated to all the Christians in Calvin's native France. In attempting to sort out the significance of the prophecy regarding the hebdomad in Daniel 9:24, which Calvin spends several pages unpacking, he writes that Isaac Abravanel relishes an easy victory in rejecting Josephus's reading, insinuating that besting Josephus is not all that difficult (his words for Abravanel himself—nebulo et impostor—and the rabbinic tradition in general, are much more critical here, however).Footnote 57 Calvin writes, moreover, that his own faith in Josephus is not without exception. And in his first lecture on Daniel, he refers to Josephus's interpretation of the eunuchs in verse 1:3 as literally having been castrated, as inscite, or ignorant, explaining that in many other places the Hebrew term here (sarasim) does not entail a castrated eunuch.Footnote 58
The most abuse that Josephus receives, however, occurs just earlier in the same lecture. In his commentary on Daniel 1:1–2, criticizing Josephus's assertion that Nebuchadnezzar's entry into Jerusalem mentioned in the text occurred in the eighth year of Jehoiakim's reignFootnote 59 —no trivial matter apparently—Calvin includes Josephus among the many interpreters who “hallucinate” (hallucinantur) when interpreting this passage, and alleges that Josephus himself had never read the Book of Daniel.Footnote 60 He goes on to call Josephus an unlearned man (homo indoctus) who had little training interpreting scripture (minime exercitatus in scriptura).Footnote 61 And the final blow: Horribile fuit illud Dei iudicium, quod sacerdos fuerit tam brutus homo, ut est Iosephus—“It was a dreadful judgment of God to have made so stupid a man as Josephus a priest!”Footnote 62 The horribile iudicium here, the terrible divine judgment, is the same phrase Calvin uses to describe Maria eating her own child. It turns out that at least a portion of Calvin's denunciation was not entirely warranted, for Josephus had in fact read Daniel, as is clear from books ten and eleven of the Antiquities.Footnote 63 To the reader's surprise, not an entire sentence goes by before Calvin refers to Josephus positively again, approving of Josephus's account of the destruction of the monarchy.Footnote 64 It is difficult to know what to make of the outburst, which could partly be explained, perhaps, by the extemporaneous nature of the lecture in comparison with the commentary proper. Perhaps Beza's denunciation from the inaugural address to the Academy was still ringing in Calvin's ears, for it could not have happened more than a week or two prior. It may have resulted from Calvin's eagerness to, as Randall Zachman puts it, establish the “historical context of prophecy” as “essential to the interpretation of the prophets and to Scripture as a whole.”Footnote 65 As Zachman further points out, Calvin was keen to properly establish the details of the five ages of Daniel 2, for the prophetic account presages the coming of Christ the Messiah and “the Jews can only avoid this necessary conclusion by contradicting the truth of history known from these sources.”Footnote 66 Despite appearing to be a fairly mundane chronological issue, it in fact bears substantial theological import regarding the unfolding of the history of the church. Probably each of these factored in.
One may be further tempted to read this as part and parcel of Calvin's occasional anti-Jewish remarks, often directed at medieval Jewish exegetes. It is the only instance where Josephus's Jewishness is mentioned at all by Calvin. But it must also be noted that the target of the attack is not Josephus's Jewishness (which is only actually hinted at with a reference to Josephus's being of priestly descent), but his alleged doltishness. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine that Calvin has Josephus in mind in his generalized excoriations of the “very ignorant and very stupid” Jews who “neglect all history.”Footnote 67 As we saw above, in the only case where Josephus and later Jewish commentators are considered together, Calvin was harsher in his assessment of the latter. The fact is, Josephus, as a Roman Jew who wrote in Greek and defected to the Roman side during the Jewish War, presents a peculiar case by which to consider Calvin's disposition toward Jews and Judaism.Footnote 68 Scholarly treatments of Calvin's relationship to Judaism often distinguish between Calvin's disposition toward Jews in the Bible and Jews in his own time. Josephus, of course, falls into neither of these categories, and it is perhaps for that reason that he is not typically considered in the literature on Calvin and Judaism. In this case, we can safely say that, to whatever extent Calvin bore anti-Jewish sentiment, we have no evidence that it extended to this ancient Jewish historiographer. Nor did Calvin use the fact of Josephus's Jewishness as a rhetorical foil against which early modern Jews could be criticized, as some Renaissance Italian thinkers did.Footnote 69 Calvin's assessments of Josephus's merits as a historical authority had nothing to do with his Judaism, and Calvin approached Josephus as he did most other sources from Greco-Roman antiquity: with a fair amount of respect, but not as an infallible authority. This seems to have been the same way Luther considered Josephus vis-à-vis the question of his Jewishness, and thus Calvin's approach in this way was not unique in the sixteenth century.Footnote 70 As further studies of the reception of Josephus in this period appear, it will be interesting to see how Calvin's conception of Josephus as a Jew relates to those of his contemporaries and predecessors.
III. Josephus the Theologian
Calvin also used Josephus in ways beyond referring to his texts for numismatic, geographical, or chronological data. These cases more approximately reflect Calvin's theological interests, while also involving, perhaps, some of Josephus's most literary embellishments. One instance comes in a heavily politicized context: in the dedicatory letter to Elector Frederick III which prefaces Calvin's commentary on Jeremiah (published in 1563). In it Calvin ushers in the example of the zealots who caused the Jewish War as a parallel to anti-Calvinist Lutherans “who can find no worse insult than ‘Calvinist’ by which to insult Your Highness, Most Illustrious Prince.”Footnote 71 Their “violent clamors” are directed at the Prince for his ostensibly accepting a Calvinist understanding of the Eucharist, and specifically for commissioning the Heidelberg Catechism in the Palatinate. They also slandered Calvin himself in German publications, apparently, but not in Latin (which Calvin equates with cursing the deaf—hoc quidem surdo maledicere est). This prefatory letter is a veritable treatise on Calvin's understanding of Christ's (spiritual) presence in the Eucharist, and a history of the conflict it begot among Protestants in the sixteenth century. Keeping in mind that the Schmalkaldic War had ended only fifteen years prior provides some context for Calvin's hyperbolic insinuation that the Prince's German detractors are the equivalent of those who brought the entirety of Jerusalem to ruin.
In an entirely different context, Josephus's Contra Apionem comes to bear on defending the historical validity of certain miracles. Glossing Exodus 12:29, for example, Calvin invokes the treatise in the context of defending the historicity of God's smiting of the first-born of all the Egyptians (cattle included). Calvin does not point to a place where Josephus mentions God's smiting of the Egyptians; rather the treatise against Apion, which is not a work of history, is brought in to refute the “calumnies” of such writers who doubt the veracity of God's miraculous involvement in history.Footnote 72 Josephus here serves Calvin's purposes not for corroborating specific biblical events, or for providing additional data, but for demonstrating that God works in history, and often in ways that run contrary to the ordinary course of things. Randall Zachman has described Calvin's preference for Greek and Roman historiographers to the medieval Jewish chroniclers, pointing out Calvin's acerbic language toward Jews in general in the context of his specific criticisms of Abravanel's inaccuracies as a historian.Footnote 73 From this perspective, Josephus clearly fits more comfortably alongside the Greco-Roman historiographers than later Jewish chroniclers to Calvin's way of thinking. Moreover, he is a preferred source over other non-Christian historians and is compared favorably in this case to Tacitus and Strabo. Strabo's account of Jewish circumcision is brought in and judged a “foolish fable” (stulte fabulatus), and, according to Calvin, Tacitus too ought to be ashamed of his errors, even if neither could have known any better—for they had been obstructed by Satan.Footnote 74 That Josephus is not only a “secular” historical source for Calvin, but also a corroborator of the workings of God in history, which includes a shared belief in the theological truths of the Hebrew Bible, also sets Josephus apart from other historians for Calvin.
In quite an involved digression on the ins and outs of ancient leprosy (with the conclusion that the ancient malady differed from anything known in Calvin's day) in a comment on Leviticus 13:2–3, Calvin defends the antiquity of the disease through explicit references to book nine of Josephus's Antiquities and the Contra Apionem, which he points out are corroborated by both Tacitus and Justin.Footnote 75 Continuing on the same passage, in an argument against the notion that Moses and the Israelites were exiled from Egypt on account of their having been infected by the disease, Calvin writes that “Josephus, with a clear and solid argument, refutes the absurdity” of this idea: for Moses would never have imposed strict laws regarding leprosy had the entire community been afflicted with it.Footnote 76 Here again, Calvin is not appealing to historical data presented by Josephus per se, but to his abilities as an interpreter of history to deduce something that is not explicit in the text. While admittedly it serves Calvin's rhetorical purpose, Calvin judged Josephus's abilities as a religious historian and Jewish apologist favorably. Another example comes in his comment on Psalm 77:15 where, ostensibly in the context of demonstrating God's favor toward God's people (both in David's and in Calvin's time), Calvin refers again to the Contra Apionem for evidence of the Gentiles' accusations against Moses as a magician, accusations which served the purpose of covering up God's power. References to the Contra Apionem were not confined to the commentaries, either. One of two references to Josephus in Calvin's Institutes comes at 1.8.4, where Calvin refers to the treatise in order to argue for the antiquity of the teachings of the law, and of its agreement among all nations.Footnote 77
Calvin refers multiple times to the terrible story of Maria, daughter of Eleazar, who during the Roman siege of Jerusalem, being one of many victims of famine, decided to roast her infant child and eat it.Footnote 78 According to Josephus, the tale spread through the city quickly, and everyone who had already starved to death was counted as lucky to have died before hearing of such a thing. Calvin's references to the story came in the context of validating various Old Testament prophecies. Jeremiah 19:9 begins, And I will cause them to eat the flesh of their sons and the flesh of their daughters, and Calvin does not hesitate in his analysis of the passage to invoke the story of Maria as one casualty of God's vengeance, and argues furthermore that it represents by metonymy God's vengeance upon the Jewish people in toto:
We know that this was also done in the last siege of that city; for Josephus shows at large that mothers in a brutal manner slew their children, and that they so lay in wait for one another that they snatched at anything to eat. This was also an evidence of God's dreadful vengeance. But it was no wonder that God visited in such an awful manner the sins of those who had in such various ways, and for so long a time provoked him; for if we compare the Jews with other nations, we shall find that their impiety, ingratitude, perverseness, exceeded the crimes of all nations. Then justly did God inflict such a punishment, which even at this day cannot be referred to without horror. The whole indeed is to be ascribed to his judgment.Footnote 79
But the lengthiest digression on the matter, with special attention to the question of whether God himself is responsible for such atrocities, comes in his commentary on Ezekiel (which was also a set of lectures originally).Footnote 80 Verse 5:10 reads, Therefore the fathers shall eat the sons in the midst of thee, and the sons shall eat their fathers, and so on. Calvin mentions Titus's siege and the ensuing infanticide twice in his explanation of the text. A preliminary difficulty arises from verse nine, where God says that he will do what he had not previously done, and what he will never do again: for since Jeremiah recounts an instance of parental cannibalism (in Lamentations 4:10),Footnote 81 and since Josephus has provided a second occurrence in the Maria story, Calvin must account for God's reneging on his promise to only cause this to happen once. This he does by collapsing both instances into the same divine threat, on the grounds that they were both punishments for the Jews' outstanding and unique impiety. Calvin argues that God can thus repeat the punishment on the Jews alone (ergo fuit illud singulare in Iudaeis). Calvin, then, takes Josephus at his word and accepts the story of Maria as perfectly historically valid, to the point where he feels the need to explain the problem that arises from the text of Ezekiel. On the question of theodicy, Calvin refers to Jerome's attempts to dismiss the divine provenance of these cases as futile, and goes on to enumerate equally heinous acts (coram hominibus, no doubt) where God takes direct responsibility. Jerome, he concludes, was not familiar with the scriptures.Footnote 82
The last example of this kind occurs in Calvin's reception of the story of Alexander the Great's visit to Jerusalem, as told by Josephus in book eleven of the Antiquities. Calvin followed a long tradition of interpreting Daniel 11:3 (And a mighty king shall stand up . . .) as referring to Alexander and in a lecture on the passage referred to Josephus's story of Alexander bowing before the High Priest in Jerusalem after a vision from God.Footnote 83 Josephus's version was also recounted in its entirety by Calvin in a lecture on Zechariah,Footnote 84 with the express purpose of demonstrating that God has stayed the hand of the church's enemies throughout history, glossing Zechariah 9:16: And the Lord thy God shall save them in that day as the flock of his people. Previous interpreters, according to Calvin, had allegorized superfluously when they interpreted the passage to mean that the Apostles and others had spread the Gospel far and wide. The “simpler” reading, according to Calvin, is that God has in fact literally protected his people from destruction, and here he gives Alexander's mercy upon the Jews as an example of divine protection. The only possible explanation for Alexander's restraint in Judea, after all the bloodshed he had rendered, is that God had stayed his hand. Indeed, in the comment on Daniel 11:3, Calvin further interprets Alexander's dream-vision as involving an angel sent from God, which, when recollected, kept Alexander from his original intention: to completely destroy the nation.Footnote 85 Josephus, then, has provided Calvin with historical fodder which enables him to interpret “literally” a traditionally allegorized passage—in this case, Josephus's example serves both Calvin's historical-exegetical and his hermeneutical interests.
All told, Calvin's positive use of Josephus was quite multifaceted, and it repeatedly shows the immense respect he must have held for the historian. He consulted his texts again and again for a variety of types of historical evidence, and often appealed to his works in making larger theological points.
IV. Conclusion
Calvin's reception of Josephus is quite extraordinary in its breadth, and complex in its employment and function. References to the historian are peppered throughout the commentaries in a wide array of contexts, from the special authority of Moses to the length of the Sea of Galilee. Calvin did not only use Josephus as a source for raw historical data, but employed him for philosophical, theological, and political ends as well. And while he was not unequivocally positive in his judgment of the historian as a reliable source, an overwhelming majority of instances where Josephus's texts were cited were used by Calvin positively to augment his exegetical works. On balance, his criticisms of Josephus were typically even-keeled, and the historian rarely receives any stronger criticism than most of Calvin's sources, and receives far less than many. Furthermore, it seems that, in attempting to discern the motivations for Calvin's disagreements with Josephus (to say nothing of the ad hominem attacks), it is not useful to generalize and instead each case must be treated ad hoc: at times Calvin simply sided with the biblical account without justification, at other times he gave more explicit theological reasons for doing so, and in others still he devised a more complicated exegetical strategy for explaining his reasoning, often not giving a definitive pronouncement one way or the other. He never dismissed Josephus in favor of the biblical account with a simple appeal to the latter's infallibility. In many cases, Josephus corroborated the biblical witness for Calvin, but in others he provided proof of its prophecies or examples of political subversion which ran parallel to those in Calvin's own day. Calvin did not merely read Josephus for historical information, in other words, but put him to use whenever an opportunity arose. It is clear that he imagined Josephus as a substantial historical authority, not only from the extensive manner in which he used him (which dwarfs his use of all other ancient historians), but also because of the instances where reading Josephus results in Calvin questioning the precision of the author of Luke-Acts. Calvin's engagement with Josephus in his commentaries reveals that he was an able and discerning critic who would at times go to great lengths in order to sort out perceived discrepancies or to fill in historiographical lacunae pertinent to the biblical story.
While more in-depth studies of particular cases should be illuminating, in considering Calvin's reception of the Roman-Jewish historian broadly, we have not only a better sense of his use and judgment of Josephus in particular, but a testable model for the ways in which he employed classical historiographical sources in general in his endeavor to understand the historical and social background of the biblical texts. Calvin's use of Josephus is not too different from his use of Eusebius, per Irena Backus's study: it “combines cavalier judgments with some very sensitive historical insights,” and “the reliability or otherwise of his historical source is judged in those cases by how far that source conforms to or departs from Calvin's own theology.”Footnote 86 Furthermore, my analysis confirms, in many ways, Randall Zachman's contention that Calvin was operating in a kind of via media with respect to precritical and modern historical-critical biblical studies, and that he read scripture in light of both its biblical and extrabiblical context. As Francois Gilmont puts it in a related context, Calvin “was neither the father of historical criticism nor a dogmatician incapable of carrying out historical studies. In certain instances he could analyze historical evidence, but he could equally well ignore the issue for doctrinal reasons.”Footnote 87 And yet the cases from Luke and Acts described above also complicate Zachman's other contention that for Calvin, biblical narratives “are always seen to be true and [extrabiblical narratives] false” in cases where they contradict each other.Footnote 88 Calvin's use of Josephus serves as a demonstration of the agility of Calvin as a historically minded exegete, while also reminding us that he worked in a humanist milieu that was beginning to think differently about the authority of biblical texts in relation to other ancient sources.
Appendix: Calvin's Sources for Josephus's Texts
Because Calvin never explicitly quotes from Josephus directly, it is essentially impossible to establish what texts he might have used, or even whether he was reading Josephus in the original Greek or in a Latin translation in a particular case.Footnote 89 Scholarship on the Latin editions of Josephus's writings is scant—although David Levenson and Tom Martin have recently made significant inroads in the area—and there are no critical editions of any of his works in their totality in Latin yet.Footnote 90 The printed editio princeps of the Latin text came off the press in 1470, and a variety of Latin editions were on offer in the ensuing decades from presses across Europe. Multiple Venetian editions printed in the late fifteenth century set the stage for editions in Cologne (1524) and Basel (also 1524), which lead us to the most likely texts Calvin would have had access to. The Gelenius edition, printed by Froben in Basel in 1534 and several times after, became the most prominent base text for other editions through the seventeenth century. It attempted to correct older Latin versions on the basis of a few Greek manuscripts available in Basel at the time. The editio princeps of the Greek edition (edited by Arnoldus Arlenius) was also printed by Froben in Basel, but not until 1544 (this text, given the state of Greek manuscripts available at the time, was actually corrected by using the Latin edition of Gelenius).
Beyond this, there are a few hints at which editions Calvin may have used at times. In Ganoczy's account of the Geneva Academy library, we learn that there were two editions of Josephus noted in the catalogue of 1572, both of which were printed during Calvin's lifetime and which would have been obvious choices for acquisition by Swiss schools and libraries at the time: one was Froben's Greek editio princeps of 1544, mentioned above, and the other was the Gelenius Latin edition, this one printed in 1548 by Froben.Footnote 91 It seems reasonable that these would be the editions Calvin had at hand when at work in Geneva once they became available. But we know that they were not the only editions he used because of two early references to Josephus in his career: the first Romans commentary, which was published in 1540, four years before Froben's Greek edition saw the light of day, includes a single reference to Josephus's Jewish Antiquities; and in the 1539 Institutes, there is a single reference to how Josephus (incorrectly) divides the tables of the Ten Commandments.Footnote 92 Apart from the intriguing possibility that Calvin consulted one of the Greek manuscripts being prepared by Arnoldius and Froben while he was in Basel in 1538, it seems he would have had access to good Latin editions wherever he was for these early references. In the end, since neither of these is a direct quote, we can only speculate. In some cases Calvin may have taken references from non-Josephan sources, or, in consulting other works (for example, Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History, Jerome's commentaries, Erasmus's Annotationes, Steuco's Recognitio or Castellio's Moses Latinus for the Pentateuch, Sebastian Munster's Josippon translation and commentaries, or Bullinger's commentaries), he may have been led to consult Josephus's works directly.Footnote 93 Moreover, instances of Calvin's use of Josephus where he did not cite him explicitly have not been documented, although such instances do exist. At any rate, given the sheer number and variety of references in his works, it is all but certain that Calvin often consulted Josephus directly, or, having read him directly, referred to his works from memory.Footnote 94
We can say, with some certainty, that Calvin was reading Josephus in Latin in one instance.Footnote 95 For this, we turn to a case from his commentary on John, verse 6:17: Calvin cites Josephus as describing the Sea of Galilee as being forty stadia in breadth and one hundred in length (Ioseph. lib. 3 belli Iudaici centum illi stadia in longitudinem, quadraginta in latitudinem assignat). This accords with Latin versions from as early as the 1499 Aldine edition and as late as the 1691 Cologne printing of Gelenius's edition (both read some variation of: XL vero stadiis in latitudine patens, centumque in longitudine).Footnote 96 Josephus's Greek version, however, has the sea at one hundred and forty stadia long,Footnote 97 and there is no extant Greek variant that reads otherwise. Thus, unless Calvin had the same oversight in translating the Greek as an earlier translator, we can assume he had the Latin at hand when writing (and I have not found this reference in any other author writing before Calvin).Footnote 98 In one other case, in Calvin's commentary on Herod Agrippa's death in Acts 12 where he uses book nineteen of Josephus's Antiquities, Calvin's vocabulary almost certainly betrays his use of a Latin version.Footnote 99 Calvin's phrase “quae solis radiis percussa, suum fulgorem vicissim redderet” is quite similar to the 1534 Basel edition, which reads, “quae radiis ex orientis solis percussa et divinum quendam fulgorem emittens,” and not far from the 1524 Basel edition, which reads “et primis radiis sole oriente demissis argenti claritas repercussa fulgorem reddidit.”
