Did Josephus write 4 Maccabees? Reconstructing the authorship debate through editions of the text.
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.36950/jndf.2025.20Keywords:
4 Maccabees, authorship studies, Flavius Josephus, Erasmus, Hugo Grotius, William Whiston, Jacob Freudenthal, Lion FeuchtwangerAbstract
In today’s scholarship, no one would question the fact that the author of 4 Maccabees is unknown. However, for many centuries the work was believed to have been written by Flavius Josephus. This article investigates when exactly in the long reception history of this text, and for what reasons, it was first suggested that the Jewish historian could not be its author. Furthermore, it explores how long it took for this view to become the consensus among scholars and other readers of Josephus. By analysing paratexts of editions of 4 Maccabees and other sources from the 16th to the 20th century, this article establishes that Hugo Grotius was most likely the first to argue in print against the text’s authenticity, which makes it probable that 4 Maccabees was first considered spurious in the milieu of Protestant late humanism. Moreover, this article also shows that despite this relatively early scepticism, it took until the beginning of the 20th century for the idea of unknown authorship to be generally accepted by all editors and translators of Josephus.
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