Bibliography
| Title: Josephus and the authorship of IV Maccabees. A critical investigation Type: Generic Year: 1988 Abstract: "Authorship of IV Maccabees was attributed to Josephus by both Eusebius and Jerome, and Medieval Christian tradition followed them. Modern scholars have rejected this ascription, although the problem has not been investigated critically. Indeed, scrutiny reveals fallacies attending scholarly objections. Accordingly, it is appropriate to investigate evidence supportive of Josephan authorship of IV Maccabees. To that end, I have discovered that significant commonality can be isolated between IV Maccabees and Josephus in their emphasis on reason controlling emotion, their relation of martyrdom and the Law, and their idea of the effective death of the martyr. While such consonance is intriguing, it is insufficient for determining whether Josephus actually wrote the book. It is helpful, then, to examine certain linguistic issues, through techniques of stylometry, in order to assess the likelihood of Josephan authorship. The most reliable stylistic features for analysis are function words (prepositions, conjunctions, particles, etc.), repeatedly shown to be powerful discriminants between various authors because their tally and distribution reflect how one writes rather than what one is writing. Of particles which can be examined by standard statistical procedures in a carefully selected set of Josephan texts and in IV Maccabees, the useful rates for fully half display statistically significant differences. I have confirmed these results by means of various other statistical tests and studies, such as the chi-squared test and the distinctiveness ratio. These tests demonstrate that the chance of random variation accounting for my findings is infinitesimal. The uniformity of the test results strongly implies that there is no reason to assume that Josephus had any connection with the composition of IV Maccabees. Thus my conclusion coheres with scholarly suspicions heretofore, but it provides a solid basis for them which has been lacking. A major implication of my research is that the commonalities which I have isolated between the still unknown writer of IV Maccabees and Josephus reveal how unexpectedly extensive a linguistic analysis is necessitated to differentiate between the two authors. This result challenges presumptions that IV Maccabees' philosophical sophistication was beyond the reach of Josephus the historian." Keywords: ewish and Christian Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, Apocalyptic |