‘Great Expectation Among the Learned’: Edward Bernard’s Josephus in Restoration Oxford

The project of Oxford’s Professor of Astronomy and expert on Oriental languages, Edward Bernard (1638–1697), to edit Josephus for Oxford University Press had become legendary in England and on the continent even in Bernard’s own lifetime.¹ The scientist, philologist, member of the Academy Française, cleric and doyen of the Republic of Letters, Pierre Daniel Huet (1630–1721), wrote to Bernard in 1684 to let him know that, ‘expectation is great among all the learned of your Josephus, and no-one’s is greater than mine.’² And in the 1690s in England, Robert Burscough (1650/1651–1709), one of the many defenders of high church episcopacy connected to Bernard’s circle, was writing to Bernard’s closest friend, literary executor and biographer, Thomas Smith (1638–1710), to express his pleasure that ‘your admirably Learned friend Dr Bernard hath taken fresh spirits and reassum’d the Work of Josephus.’³ But, in the end, far less came of Bernard’s edition than everybody had hoped. The only part to be published during Bernard’s lifetime was a 1687 Oxford University Press volume, containing the first book of the Jewish War and some of the second. Bernard’s involvement in this volume seems to have been marginal. The work which Bernard had completed – an edition of the first four books of the Antiquities, and some of the fifth – was seen through the press in 1700, 3 years after Bernard’s death.⁴ Nevertheless, the story of Bernard’s edition, and the sections of the work that were published, has a great deal to tell us today about the history of Josephus’s reception in the later seventeenth century. How did Bernard go about mobilizing the scholarly resources of early modern Europe to produce his edition?⁵ And why was a new edition of Josephus seen to be such an urgent scholarly desideratum in Oxford, and in Europe more broadly?⁶

The Origins of the Oxford University Press Josephus

Publishing an edition of Josephus’s complete works was a long-held ambition of Oxford University Press’s leading figure in the late seventeenth century, the Bishop of Oxford, John Fell (1625–1686). In 1672, Fell sketched out a prospectus of books that ‘[w]e purpose to Print, if we may be encouraged’, at the newly founded University Press. ‘Josephus Gr[eek] and L[atin]’ was to have taken its place alongside an ambitious programme of biblical, Hebraic, and patristic scholarship, which included a new edition of the Septuagint based on Codex Alexandrinus, the Aramaic Targums, the gospels in Coptic, the Greek and Latin fathers ‘[e]specially those of the first Ages Clement, Ignatius, Polycarp etc.’, ‘eastern fathers in Syriack’, and Maimonides’s Mishneh Torah. For Fell, this is Josephus’s context.⁷ He is not primarily one of the historians of the Roman world writing in Greek, who might comfortably be put on the shelves next to Dionysius of Halicarnassus. He is a product of the Judaic culture of the first century AD, and a source that might help illuminate that culture and, in turn, the origins and development of the early Christian church. The press became a celebrated centre of patristic publishing, but a complete Josephus would not appear until 1720.⁸

By 1670, word of Fell’s plan to publish Josephus had already reached Europe’s greatest Josephus scholar, the Professor of History at Jena, Johann Andreas Bosius (1626–1674). Bosius had spent 10 years collecting variant readings of Josephus manuscripts from all over Europe, and it seems he planned to publish these in a new edition. In a letter a copy of which was passed onto Bernard in 1670 (by Bosius’s correspondent, Barthlomew Bredel), Bosius conveyed his scorn for Fell’s project: ‘I do not fear the edition of this man will be harmful to mine: for there are scarcely so many helpful manuscripts available to him as I have used.’⁹ Bosius’s particular scorn was reserved for the most substantive steps that the Delegates of the Press had so far taken to produce the Josephus edition: commissioning a transcription, in two enormous, magnificent volumes, of the four books Animadversiones on Josephus, which had been written in the 1630s by Samuel Petit (d.1643), professor of theology at the University of Nîmes. Running to 2600 pages, Petit’s Animadversiones constitute a series of elaborate essays on all things relating to Josephus’s Antiquities, ranging from the etymology of Josephus’s names to the geography of Palestine, with a focus on matters Rabbinic. Bosius dismissed their usefulness to an editor of Josephus.¹⁰

Petit’s Animadversiones certainly had their supporters and their detractors, both in Oxford and the wider republic of letters. André Rivet, writing to Gerard Vossius when Petit was close to death in late 1642, worried that ‘it would be deplorable if what he collected on Josephus with great expense and labour remained unfinished.’¹¹ Thomas Smith, on the other hand, Bernard’s great friend and himself an expert in Hebrew scholarship told Bernard that he had ‘no opinion of the judgement of Petitus, w^ch was not great and steddy in any point of learning or history: hee being a man of phansy and I confess very ingenious’.¹² And it is certainly true that Petit’s notes are not really the prolegomena to an edition of Josephus (although they do contain sporadic emendations of the text and some work with original manuscripts given to him by the antiquary and intelligencer, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc [1580–1637]). Their aim is to contextualize Josephus’s Antiquities by showing correspondences between Josephus’s account of Jewish custom and those found in later Talmudic sources. Their structure is highly miscellaneous. His commentary on book three, for instance, mixes emendations of Josephus’s text, antiquarian and historical information about quails (one of the foods given by God to the Israelites to eat in the desert), a long discussion of the language in which the Scriptures were permitted to be read aloud in the synagogues, and the puzzling out of chronological difficulties. Drawing upon Maimonides and the Talmud in order to illuminate these topics, Petit then embarks on a biography of Rabbi Jehudah, the compiler of the Mishnah. It is clear that Bernard spent a good deal of time studying these essays closely, drawing attention in the margins to overlaps of topics between this Josephus commentary and the 1642 edition of Petit’s Observationes on Scripture.¹³ And as we shall see, these notes, reviled in some quarters, did provide a scholarly model and inspiration for much of Bernard’s own work when annotating Josephus.

The Search for Manuscripts

Undeterred by Bosius’s scorn for the Press’s aspiration to publish Josephus, Fell and his colleagues decided that their next move would be to try to encourage Bosius to allow the Oxford Press to publish his Josephan researches. In 1674, Sir Leoline Jenkins (1625–1685), one of the press’s managers and a diplomat based in Cologne, wrote an elaborate persuasive letter to Bosius, and enlisted the support of one of Europe’s most celebrated scholars, the numismatist, and diplomat, Ezechiel Spanheim (1629–1710).¹⁴ The attempt does not seem to have been successful. It was not, however, the first attempt the Press had made. Edward Bernard seems to have tried writing to Bosius himself in October 1673 to persuade him that Oxford’s printing house was the best home for his work. ‘Whatever I promise, I shall perform in full’, he claimed, saying that ‘learned labour, the diligence of the correctors, and everything else remains at your service.’¹⁵ Bosius was kept informed about Bernard’s interest in him and in Josephus when, in 1674, one of Bosius’s colleagues, Christoph Gunther Schelhammer (1649–1716), reported from London that there was a man in Oxford, one Edward Bernard, the Professor of Astronomy, who knew a great deal about their University, and especially about Bosius’s editorial work on Josephus.¹⁶

This 1673 letter suggests that Bernard was on the fringes of the Josephus project by this point. What drew him into its heart? For one thing, he was a man who combined a remarkably wide range of different kinds of erudition. As an undergraduate at St John’s College, ‘his mind could not be confined within the narrow limits of Greece and Rome’, but was accustomed ‘to wander while in his study through Palestine, Syria, Arabia and Egypt.’¹⁷ The philological study of ancient Greek mathematical texts, as well as lost Greek texts preserved in Arabic translation, emerged as perhaps Bernard’s primary interest. He studied with John Wallis (1616–1703), Oxford’s foremost scholar of ancient mathematics, and spent time in the Bodleian and in Leiden transcribing mathematical manuscripts.¹⁸ The early 1670s, when he first seems to have become involved in the Josephus project, were in some ways the most promising moment of Bernard’s career. He formally took over the post of Savilian Professor of Astronomy in 1673. This post was designed to encourage philological research into ancient mathematical texts, and it was around this time that John Fell asked Bernard to produce for the University Press an enormous edition of ancient mathematicians, which would run to many volumes; the enormity of the project led it to run aground.¹⁹ In 1677, Bernard set out on a journey to Paris as a tutor to the illegitimate sons of the Duke of Cleveland, where he was introduced to the leading lights of French erudition, many of who would become his correspondents and supporters in his search for Josephus manuscripts. When he returned to Oxford in 1677, he was well poised to take editorial control of Fell’s Josephus edition: he was known to Fell as an expert in Greek manuscripts; in Oriental scholarship; and someone who was well connected in the republic of letters. In that year, he began work on Josephus in earnest.

Bosius had died in 1674. Bernard set about trying to get hold of his Josephus collations. Vital assistance was provided to Bernard by a scholar who lived and worked relatively near to Jena, the Altenburg professor, Hiob Ludolf (1624–1704). Ludolf was a founding figure of Ethiopic scholarship, and, after the initial help he gave Bernard in acquiring Bosius’s papers, he went on to write to him for the next 20 years on Ethiopic and Eastern Christianity. Bernard had initially made overtures to Ludolf’s nephew, Heinrich Wilhelm Ludolf (1655–1712), the diplomat, who passed his letters onto his uncle.²⁰ Hiob Ludolf recounted that Bosius’s widow had driven a hard bargain for the emendations: he and Leoline Jenkins offered 150 Thalers (about £30), but she wanted 200 Thalers.²¹ Nevertheless, by 1678 or so, copies of Bosius’s readings of Josephus seem to have reached Oxford. They instantly gave Bernard access to a huge array of continental Josephus manuscripts and the variant readings they contained.

Bosius’s work seems to have concentrated in Central Europe, in particular in the Bibliotheca Caesarea, Vienna’s most important library.²² Particularly important were two manuscripts, one which had been owned in the sixteenth century by Johannes Sambucus (1534–1584), which contains the first ten books of the Antiquities: it was these manuscript readings that Bernard had recourse to perhaps more than any other.²³ Bosius had also gathered material at Schleusingen, from a manuscript referred to simply as Hennebergensis, and containing the first ten books of the Epitome Antiquitatum and most of the second half of the Antiquities proper.²⁴ Manuscripts of the Bellum Judaicum came from Leipzig and Wroclaw.²⁵ In addition, Bosius himself seems to have acquired (with the help of Nicholas Heinsius) the readings of another leading Josephus scholar, the Rouen-based bibliophile, Emery Bigot (1626–1689).²⁶ Bigot’s work, encouraged by Isaac Vossius, had focussed on two libraries: the Medicean Library in Florence, where he seems to have copied several manuscripts, and the Royal Library in Paris, where he copied a manuscript of the first ten books of the Antiquities.²⁷ Some of Bigot’s work must have come to Bernard via Bosius’s collections, and Bernard kept up a correspondence with Bigot via the Anglo-French ecclesiastical scholar, Moses Cartier, in which he tried to identify the specific manuscripts which Bigot had consulted.²⁸

Bernard was not attempting to produce a new manuscript recension of Josephus; his aim was to amass as many textual variants as possible to insert into the edition’s footnotes. At most, he would use these variants to ‘correct obvious errors as he went along.’²⁹ The portions of Josephus that appeared came accompanied with an enormous array of variant readings at the foot of each page. Some of Bernard’s correspondents saw these variants as integral to the edition as a whole. ‘For, as to that part of the Annotations, which are the Various readings’, argued the Irish scholar and student of chronology, John Baynard, in a letter to Bernard which articulated his vision of the ideal scholarly edition of Josephus, ‘I look upon them as necessary in a manner as the text; no man can p^rsume he has the Author if he has no more but one copy.’³⁰ These variants were clearly conceived as a Josephus edition’s selling point for the nascent University Press (which was still struggling to find a way to make its books turn a profit). In 1678, Bernard sent a printed specimen of the edition (of which no copy survives) to the newly installed Archbishop of Canterbury, William Sancroft (1617–1693), with a letter that drew attention to the ‘syllabus of our present helps towards a correct Edition of that necessary historian’ to be found there.³¹ A specimen of the edition produced in 1694, which does survive, proudly listed all the manuscripts which were to be used to provide the ‘variantes lectiones.’³² This process of amassing manuscript variants was a cumulative scholarly enterprise in late seventeenth-century Europe that had been begun by Bosius and Bigot, and which Bernard attempted to continue.

Some of these variants were available locally to Bernard. Among the Barocci manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, for instance, he found a fourteenth-century manuscript of the Jewish War.³³ But it was libraries in continental Europe that primarily interested Bernard. From around the time of his return from Paris, Bernard began to correspond with the erudite across Europe in his search for manuscripts of Josephus and their variant readings. The Josephus edition provided Bernard’s real entrée into the Republic of Letters, and it made his participation in that network necessary. Paris provided some of the richest pickings for Bernard. One of his guides to Parisian libraries was the founder of the modern approach to the study of original monastic documents and charters, the Benedictine scholar, Jean Mabillon (1632–1707). In 1679, Mabillon sent materials designed to shed light on problems of chronology in the first book of Josephus (‘the sum of years’) from two Parisian manuscripts of the antiquities.³⁴ Further assistance came from the young Danish scholar, Poul Vinding (1658–1712), who was on a tour through England, France and the Netherlands in the late 1670s. In Paris, Vinding copied some important materials from the ending of the second book of the Antiquities that Bernard had requested, and sent them to him in a letter.³⁵ Bernard incorporated these readings into his edition.³⁶ Bernard looked further afield than Paris, too, to Copenhagen, from where Johann Wandalin (fl.1680–1695) in 1680 sent him a collection of variant readings, probably of the Contra Apionem from Hafniensis MS 1570, which he hoped might provide ‘medicine for your Josephus.’³⁷ Some of Bernard’s most important assistance came from Isaac Vossius, who supplied collations of the Latin translation of Josephus, and a manuscript of pseudo-Eustathius’s Commentary on the Hexameron, a late antique work which had drawn upon Josephus’s Antiquities, and which Bernard and Vossius believed might help furnish better readings than those found in modern Josephus manuscripts.³⁸

But much of Bernard’s search for continental manuscripts ended in frustration and failure. Doors in Paris remained closed to him, which left Bernard complaining to Vossius in June 1681 that ‘I lack the help of the French manuscripts, which pertain greatly to Josephus.’³⁹ He struggled in particular to gain access to the manuscripts which had belonged to the French statesman and bibliophile, Pierre Séguier, which he believed would help solve some of the chronological problems presented by the first book of the Antiquities.⁴⁰ Mabillon had to explain to Bernard that all access to the Séguier collection was forbidden because of ‘the morosity of this woman’, Séguier’s widow.⁴¹ Bernard faced even greater difficulties in his attempt to mine Italian libraries, despite the enthusiastic assistance provided him by the fellow of University College, Oxford, John Ledgard (c. 1652–1684). Ledgard brought what he describes as Bernard’s ‘Quaeres’ to libraries in Rome, Venice, Milan, and Florence, and wrote from Paris to Bernard in 1679 describing his tribulations gaining access to each library he visited. Work in the Vatican will take a long time because it is ‘open onely a little in the forenoon, and five daies a week at most, often not 4′, and the Barberini is usually closed because the library keeper is ‘living at the other side of the Town.’ The Greek librarian of the Marciana, ‘least they should discover his weakness in the ancient language of his country, would never let me come to the sight of the MSS.’ A visit to the Ambrosiana was a little more successful, where he saw a manuscript of ‘17, 18, 19, 20 books, of the Antiq. Jud. in Latine in Lombardick characters writ on the barke of trees’, which he believed ‘was the proper MS of Ruffinus Aquileiensis’; so was a visit to the Laurenziana, where ‘I remember there was an MS of Josephus, I think entire, in Greek, but not of considerable antiquity apparently.’⁴² But none of this resulted in material that Bernard could actually use. It was left to the next English editor of Josephus, John Hudson (1662–1719), Bodley’s Librarian, to make significant progress beyond Bigot’s work in the Italian libraries.

Nevertheless, all this manuscript collecting was yielding results that manifested themselves in increasingly large volumes of variant readings. More troubling still, Bernard was adding enormous notes to his edition, which compared Josephus’s Antiquities to an array of Oriental texts, especially rabbinic ones. These notes risked overwhelming Josephus’s text as well as the variant readings. And their vast extent caused massive delays. Bernard was increasingly under pressure in Oxford and beyond to curtail the extent of the apparatus that he was piling onto the edition. In his biography of Bernard, Thomas Smith recorded that he had encouraged his friend to adopt the example of Henry Valesius, a scholar they both admired, by putting notes in a separate volume.⁴³ Isaac Vossius himself advised Bernard (via a conversation with the leading figure of the Royal Society, Robert Boyle), that ‘it twere best to proceed as you have begun to take notice of the various Readings that are important: but for fear of distracting the Reader, to be very sparing of Annotations or Discourses at least till the end of the Book, by which time they may be more maturely made and better understood.’⁴⁴ It is no surprise to see Isaac Vossius advocating this minimalist approach: as Anthony Grafton has recently shown, the iconoclastic impact of his works was partly down to their own incisively spare style, which cut through the mountains of more orthodox erudition.⁴⁵ Taken together, this debate shows that there were starkly differing views about what the ideal late seventeenth-century edition of Josephus might look like: Bernard’s vision, of a massive display of erudition; or that of Smith and Vossius, of clean texts with erudition available elsewhere.

Fell, too, was becoming frustrated with Bernard, and around 1684 he decided to take action. Writing to Vossius, Fell conveyed his irritation with Bernard’s delays over Josephus. But, Fell explained, now that Bernard has gone into Holland (to attend the auction of Nicholas Heinsius’s library), the Press had been freed to start work again and planned now to take the project in a new direction by publishing a book of the Jewish War under the supervision of Henry Aldrich (1647–1710), the Dean of Christ Church, the man who succeeded John Fell as a curator of the Sheldonian Theatre in 1687.⁴⁶ That year, the Press published an edition of the first book, and some of the second, of the Jewish War.⁴⁷ This edition makes full use of the variant readings of the Greek manuscripts, which Bernard was amassing, but it gives a less comprehensive account of Latin variants, and contains none of the enormous notes and Oriental erudition which had brought the project to a standstill.⁴⁸ This was something much closer to the kind of volume that Vossius and Smith were encouraging Bernard to produce, aimed at readers who wanted Josephus with a full textual apparatus, but without too many further annotations. It was a pragmatic betrayal of Bernard’s vision. What then was the rationale behind Bernard’s vision for his edition of Josephus? To answer this question, it is necessary to think more broadly about the kinds of issues in which an edition of Josephus, especially an edition of the Antiquities (Bernard’s particular focus), would have been caught up.

Josephus: Greek or Hebrew?

Perhaps the central question within late seventeenth-century Josephus scholarship was over the culture within which his works needed to be contextualized and understood. Was his culture primarily a Greek-reading one, for whom their Bible was the Septuagint? Or was he an essentially Hebraic author, who needed to be understood in relation to the Hebrew sources which might illuminate Second Temple Judaism? This question was part of an urgent debate within ecclesiastical and biblical scholarship: should scholars prefer the Greek Bible of the Septuagint, or the Masoretic text of the Hebrew Bible?

The central figure on the side of the Greek Bible in the late seventeenth century was Isaac Vossius. His works of the 1660s and 1670s, as Scott Mandelbrote has shown, constituted not only defences of the Greek Septuagint against the Hebrew text of the Bible, which Vossius condemned as essentially corrupted by later Masoretic editors, but also an impassioned defence of Josephus himself.⁴⁹ Vossius’s De Septuaginta Interpretibus of 1661 included his Chronologia Sacra, a work of which Josephus was the heroic centre. Vossius begins by putting his position in a nutshell: ‘Those who have struggled in this argument [about the chronology of the Old Testament], have strayed further from the truth, because they put more trust in today’s manuscripts of the Jews, than in these the LXX translators and the Apostles used, and give more support to the authority and interpretations of the Rabbis of the following age, than the consensus of all those who flourished before the fall of Jerusalem. Therefore in discussing the ancient chronology of the Jews, we will speak first not about those rabbis of today and their followers, but those Jews who flourished when Jerusalem still stood. Such are the LXX translators, Eupolemus, both Philos, the Apostles and Josephus.’⁵⁰ ‘And in particular’, Vossius concludes, ‘we shall follow Josephus, who alone gathered the measure of all time’, who ‘made use of the manuscripts of the Temple’ (i.e., the pre-Masoretic biblical manuscripts) and so became ‘the most learned man of all the Jews from the Apostolic times up to our age.’⁵¹ Here we have a Josephus closely situated within the Graeco-Jewish world of the Septuagint, whose chronologies, Vossius argues, Josephus essentially supports.

But there was perceived to be another side to the debate: a tendency specifically to Hebraize Josephus, to situate him in relation to the later culture of Talmudic and medieval Judaism. This side of the story emerges in a crucial letter to Bernard from Hiob Ludolf, written in 1690. Ludolf has been writing about the Sambation river, which Josephus discusses in the last book of the Jewish War. Josephus writes that the Sambation flows on a Saturday and then runs dry for the rest of the week. Ludolf believes the story to be untrue, ‘fabulous’, and that the river ‘never existed anywhere in the world’, but his comment on the attitude of other scholars to the passage is revealing: ‘You know too that Casaubon and Fuller emend Josephus, and have tried to force him to consent with the fables of the Rabbis. Truly, as it seems to me, they do not emend, but alter him, and I think that he should be left intact.’⁵² He is thinking here about the comments Isaac Casaubon (1559–1614) makes in the fifteenth of his Exercitationes against Baronius, in which he discusses the Sambation. Josephus, Casaubon points out, is at odds with other Jewish commentators here, specifically Elia Levita, who says that the river does not flow on a Saturday and stop for the rest of the week, but rather the other way round: it flows all week and then stops on a Saturday. Casaubon introduces ingenious emendations to Josephus’s text in order to bring him into line with Levita’s account, and the English theologian Nicholas Fuller adds some further emendations.⁵³ According to Ludolf, both Casaubon and Fuller feel the need to bring Josephus in line with the later Hebraic tradition: if Josephus disagrees with Elia Levita, he must need emending. To Ludolf, this is a worrying Hebraizing trend. It was in stark contrast to Vossius’s reading of Josephus, which opposes him radically to later Rabbinic traditions.

Bernard’s Josephus and the Septuagint

When Bernard was getting to work on his Josephus around 1680, the debate about Vossius’s works in Oxford was at its height. The Dutch critic had just published his De Sibyllinis Oraculis at the University Press. This work took aim at the Masoretic text and Rabbinic scholarship more broadly, with its last chapter focusing on ‘The Grammatica of the Jews.’⁵⁴ Bernard’s own attitude to Vossius is complex. Clearly, he is a touchstone in Bernard’s eyes for great scholarship: in 1669, when he met Vossius on his visit to Leiden, he described him excitedly to Joseph Williamson as ‘the very scholar of the Age’.⁵⁵ Around 1680, Bernard was writing to Vossius offering to let him see the sheets of his Josephus as they are printed to check they were to his liking, and John Fell wrote to Vossius around the same time to thank him for all his assistance in the edition.⁵⁶ But Bernard was troubled by Vossius’s work too, particularly by his attacks on Hebrew learning in the postscript to the Sibylls book, in which Vossius responded to the assault on his work levelled by the Oratorian biblical critic, Richard Simon (1638–1712). In a letter of February 1680 to the Huguenot scholar, Henri Justel (1620–1693), Bernard wrote that ‘Judaic literature is lost, the studies of Buxtorf, Lightfoot, and the like are lost, unless someone answers Vossius, and wipes clean the infamy of Rabbinism.’⁵⁷ Others in Bernard’s circle agreed that Vossius had gone too far. A few days before he wrote this letter to Justel, Bernard had received a letter from Thomas Broughton, thanking him for sending Vossius’s De Sibyllinis, but admitting he was ‘sorry he censures that worthy man Dr Lightfoot, whose memory is ever precious with me’.⁵⁸ This complex and at times divided attitude to Vossius, and to the wider issues his works entailed, shaped Bernard’s Josephus. The edition seems to be asking: can Josephus be at once the Greek Josephus, the reader of the Septuagint, and the Hebrew Josephus, a product of the language and culture of second temple Judaism? This is the synthesis that Bernard’s edition tries to achieve.

What most clearly signalled his support for a Vossian, Greek Josephus, was Bernard’s work on the problems of chronology in the first book of the Antiquities. Josephus’s account of the crucial period between the Flood and the birth of Abraham presented some of the most acute problems for early modern chronologists. In the key passage (Book One, chapter six, section five), most editions of Josephus said that there were 292 years between the Flood and the birth of Abraham. Clearly, scholars recognized that there is a problem here, because this number is too small to correspond with the others that follow it in the same chapter. Vossius had argued strongly that this number needed to be emended to 1192.⁵⁹ Writing to Vossius, Bernard identified this period as the crucial era in biblical chronology which was most in need of clarification, and praised his work on the subject: ‘I think there is nothing more difficult or more necessary to know in sacred chronology than how distant the time is between the birth of Abraham and the Flood.’ ‘And we owe much to your insight’, Bernard went on, ‘about this time. Josephus plainly is yours, restored by you, and given by you again to our age after so many barbarous centuries’.⁶⁰ This was indeed clearly a central passage: his correspondence shows that this was one of the passages of which he printed a specimen to circulate to scholars and solicit their thoughts.⁶¹

To a large extent, Bernard’s edition of this passage is strongly in support of Vossius’s arguments. His notes offer an elaborate discussion of the problem, in which he sets Vossius’s figures for the ages of Abraham’s ancestors besides those found in the Hebrew Bible, the Septuagint and the Samaritan Pentateuch. And Bernard is certainly supportive of the longer Josephan/LXX chronologies which Vossius propounded. However, Bernard does want slightly to modify Vossius too, in a way that could be seen to throw even more emphasis on the importance of Josephus in solving the larger problems of world history at stake here. To get the years between the flood and Abraham to add up to the high figure of 1192, Vossius had followed the Septuagint in inserting a son of Arphaxades, Cainan, into the genealogy of Abraham. In the Hebrew Bible, Arphaxades’s son is Shelah, whereas in the Septuagint, Shelah is Cainan’s son (Arphaxades’s grandson), whom Cainan fathered at the age of 130, thus adding another 130 years between the Flood and the birth of Abraham.⁶² This ‘second Cainan’, as Bernard calls him (a repeat of Kenan, the great grandson of Adam), does appear in the Septuagint, but he does not appear in Josephus, or in many other ancient chronicles. ‘But truly as I confess’, Bernard writes in a key passage in his discussion, ‘I do not like this other Cainan, who shoves the great man Abraham out from being tenth in descent from Noah [as Josephus comments], against the will of Berosus, Eupolemus, Molonis, Josephus, Zonaras, Glyca, and a hundred others.’⁶³ The agreement of ancient historians that there is no second Cainan seems to be one reason why Bernard ‘does not like him’, as well as the fact he is keen to make sure the whole of Old Testament history can take place within 5000 years. So the edition comes out broadly in support of Vossius, but also setting a little distance between his work and Bernard’s. ‘If you do not like this second Cainan’, Vossius jokingly responded to Bernard upon receiving the specimen of this passage, ‘do not however think on that account I will like you less.’⁶⁴

Bernard’s initial printing of the specimen of this passage whipped up a great deal of debate, especially among English and Irish scholars. The immensely learned patristic scholar John Pearson (1613–1686), Bishop of Chester, who acted as mentor and patron to Bernard’s circle, came out strongly in support of Vossius’s conclusions, and tried to persuade Bernard that he was wrong not to like the second Cainan, an argument for which he made particular reference to the reconstruction of the first book of Eusebius’s Chronicle.⁶⁵ Two other English scholars, however, came out cautiously in support of Bernard’s rejection of the second Cainan. In response to a letter from Thomas Barlow (1608/9–1691), the Bishop of Lincoln, a significant scholar and book collector, Bernard wrote that ‘I am delighted to hear that you are kind enough to agree about Cainan’, and Robert Cary (bap. 1615–d. 1688), a chronologist from Exeter, who had recently published a complete Chronological Account of Ancient Times (1677), said that ‘I doe highly applaud your acumen: and upon a Lawful rejection of the second Kainan shall be ready to join hands with you.’ Cary did acknowledge, however, that ‘excluding [Cainan] and his years will farr more perplex Josephus’s accounts, then (perhaps) you are aware of’.⁶⁶ Bernard’s specimen had certainly sparked a debate over Josephus’s chronology, but what is striking is that this debate, especially in England, was largely within the framework of support for longer Septuagint chronologies, and for Vossius’s thought in particular. The urgency of this debate provoked by the initial pages of Josephus shows why the search for variant readings was so particularly exciting in this early stage of Bernard’s Josephus work: he was keen to find manuscripts that could provide important variant numbers, or even variant genealogies, to support his or Vossius’s theories about this passage. The collection of variae lectiones of Josephus was of urgent value for the study of world history.

Bernard’s Josephus and the Mishnah

If the edition’s account of chronology offers implicit (but qualified) support for Vossius and the Septuagint’s longer chronologies, it is in the enormous notes on Jewish law and ritual in the third and fourth books of Antiquities that Bernard situates Josephus in his Hebraic context. After his initial flurry of work on the chronological materials of book one, Bernard seems to have turned to work on his annotations on the third and fourth books of Antiquities in the early 1680s. In 1680, Bernard reported to the Leiden philologist, Jacob Gronovius (1645–1716), that ‘Josephus has led me to the holy mount Sinai, where I remain still stuck with Moses.’⁶⁷ Then, in 1682, he announced to Vossius, ‘Flavius has led me at last to the Hebraic Judges. After the laws of Moses, I see nothing so arduous in the Antiquities.’⁶⁸ The main thrust of Bernard’s work during this time was to investigate connections between Josephus and Rabbinic sources, especially what was increasingly coming to be seen as the archaic core of the Talmud, dating from before ‘Rabbinism’ proper set in: the Mishnah. Bernard explained what he was doing most clearly in a letter to the Leiden theologian Jacobus Triglandius (1652–1705) in 1683: ‘My Josephus needs you as a critic and examiner, especially in the fourth book of the Antiquities, where the rites of the Jews are derived from the most ancient writings of that afflicted people, and when Josephus might be joined equally with the Doctors of the Mishnah.’⁶⁹

Bernard’s interest in the Mishnah was long standing. When he was only twenty, Bernard owned the rabbinic dictionary produced by Johannes Buxtorf (1564–1629).⁷⁰ In 1669, he was hoping to see an edition of ‘the Misna in Hebr. and Lat. with Notes.’⁷¹ In the early 1670s, he seems to have encouraged the traveller and Orientalist, Robert Huntington (1638–1701), to look for Mishnah manuscripts in the Levant and, although initially Huntington reported to Bernard that ‘[t]he whole Mishnas Talmud I have not met with in MSS’, he promised ‘you shall have them piecemeal’.⁷² At the same time, the Jewish scholar Isaac Abendana (d.1699) was keeping Bernard informed about the progress he was making in Cambridge in translating the Mishna into Latin.⁷³ And by the time of his death in 1697, Bernard owned the important works of English Mishnaic studies, which had commenced with the Orientalist Robert Sheringham’s edition of Joma, published in 1648, and that continued with Edward Pococke’s Porta Mosis of 1655.⁷⁴ He also owned more recent continental works in this field: Constantin L’Empereur’s important edition of the Middoth, the tractate that deals with the measurements of the Temple and which Bernard drew upon, and Johann Christoph Wagenseil’s work on the tractate Sota.⁷⁵ He was equipped, too, with both Bomberg’s Babylonian and Jerusalem Talmud. Two years before his death, he was writing to Thomas Smith to ask whether he might acquire ‘the Amsterdam Talmud’, an uncensored edition produced in Amsterdam in the 1640s, which had recently been put up for sale.⁷⁶

Perhaps, Bernard’s clearest methodological statements about the value of Mishnaic study can be found in the preface he wrote to the brilliant Orientalist William Guise’s (1653–1683) posthumously published edition of the first seven tractates of the Order of Zeraim, which Bernard helped to see through the press after Guise died tragically young at the age of thirty.⁷⁷ ‘But the man that is wise and most diligent in the study of Divine matters’, announced in his preface, ‘had known to compare closely the corpus of Pharasaic law (which is called the Mishna or Deuterosis) with the New and the Old Testament, so that their sayings, rites, and precepts may rightly be understood.’ Lightfoot, he goes on to say, had shown the same thing; implicitly, here, Bernard is defending the great Cambridge Hebraist from Vossius’s attacks.⁷⁸ He goes on to draw a firm distinction between the Mishnah itself and the later commentaries by Maimonides, Bartenorius, and what he calls ‘the twin heap of the Gemara.’ Bernard explains that ‘out of their great ignorance of Hellenism’, the period to which Josephus was roughly contemporary, these later commentators have gone on to distort the archaic core of the Talmud.⁷⁹ Implicit here is the idea that the Mishnah is the product of the Hellenistic era, which ended around the same time as Josephus was writing his Antiquities. This kind of thinking leaves the possibility open of close comparison between Josephus and the tracts of the Mishnah.

And that is exactly what Bernard did in his Josephus edition. A fairly straightforward example of Bernard’s practice here can be seen in his notes on Book III, chapter x, section four of the Antiquities, the description of the Feast of Tabernacles.⁸⁰ This chapter’s commentary is vast, running for six folio columns. Its main focus is on the Mishnaic tractate Sukkah, although Bernard sometimes dips into Shabbat too. In this instance, he is primarily translating the original chapters of the Mishnah, taking the reader through the various prescriptions found in Josephus (e.g. that families should fix their tents to ward off the coming cold) and using the Mishnah to elaborate on them. He does also occasionally make reference to the commentaries on the original Mishnaic texts. In book three, as would be expected, many of the references are to tractates that fall within the order of Moed (Appointed times), but there is a far broader range of reference, to tractates in the orders of Zeraim (Seeds), Kodashim (Holy things), and Tohorot (Purities). He draws extensively on the commentaries of Maimonides on these tractates. The aim of his notes, then, is often to point to parallels between topics discussed by Josephus and rabbinic writings. Bernard is at times careful to distance himself from his own displays of Rabbinic learning: at the end of one particularly extravagant exploration, the longest note in book three, Bernard’s account of Urim and Thummim prophecies, he concludes, ‘It is a hard and rare thing, as you see, not to be driven mad in the reading of the Rabbis.’⁸¹ However, these displays of Oriental erudition unmistakably embed Josephus within an Oriental, and specifically rabbinic, context. Their exuberant displays of rabbinic learning clearly signal a debt to the method of the Animadversiones of Samuel Petit, the acquisition of whose enormous tomes was the starting point of the Press’s plan to publish a new Josephus. If book one of the Antiquities came out in support of Vossius’s vision of an essentially Greek Josephus, the editions of books three and four showed that Josephus was inextricably linked to the Rabbinic learning from which Vossius had tried to separate him.

Conclusions

After about 1684, Bernard’s attention to the Josephus edition dwindled. Bernard’s interests from across the spectrum of Greek and Oriental philology, that Josephus had brought together, started to fragment into individual projects. His work on chronology resulted in a very large chronological manuscript, which places next to one another the chronologies of the Bible in various eastern tongues and those of Christian world historians.⁸² In 1692, he considered passing the manuscript to a continental publisher who was visiting England.⁸³ But this came to nothing. Bernard’s interests in Oriental erudition found focus in another project, a book on Oriental weights and measures, which featured material that also appeared in the posthumous 1700 edition of Josephus.⁸⁴ This book started off as (another) enormous footnote to Pococke’s Commentary on the Prophecy of Hosea (1685), before being republished as an individual monograph in 1688.

Bernard’s own interest in Josephus seems to have revived in the early 1690s, when he could be found complaining to Smith that his ‘few hours and little health’ were spent in part upon Josephus.⁸⁵ He solicited Smith to transcribe Isaac Casaubon’s marginalia on his copy of the 1544 Basel edition of Josephus, preserved in the Royal Library, and to arrange for him to borrow Codex Alexandrinus, so that he might study the text of four Macabees.⁸⁶ For his part, Smith was pleased to hear that in this new phase of work, Bernard intended to ‘enter upon a new method, I mean, of giving us a correct Greek text, without troubling yourself about the various readings of the translation of Epiphanius Scholasticus, or writing large commentaries in the body of your notes, but reserving them as an appendix to bee printed themselves.’⁸⁷ Smith had always discouraged Bernard from devoting time to gathering variants of the sixth-century Latin translation of Josephus (which they attributed to Epiphanius Scholasticus). Contemporaries, he says, dismissed it as ‘unlearned, in very many places scarcely responding to the Greek text.’⁸⁸ But to Bernard it was an important part of an edition, which, at every turn, sought to read Josephus in the context of his later reception in the Christian and Jewish worlds. The early Christian Latin translation, commissioned by Cassiodorus as part of a wave of translations of Greek texts, had its place in Bernard’s edition alongside his myriad references to the later epitomizers of Josephus, or those antique and Byzantine chronological works (like Eustathius’s Hexameron or Zonaras’s Epitome Historiarum), which drew upon the Antiquities. Bernard situated his Josephus within the multiple and competing historical traditions that followed him. Trimming the variants of the Latin translation seems to have signalled to Smith a welcome move away from this approach.

Nevertheless, the new specimen printed in 1694 (which survives in a copy Bernard gave to Anthony Wood) suggests that plans remained almost as grand as ever. Variant readings of the Latin translation were now omitted. But the specimen promises an edition based on a vast array of manuscript evidence (of both the Greek and Latin texts), to which would be added ‘the notes of Bosius, of Thomas Reinesius [Bosius’s close colleague in all things Josephan], Samuel Petit, and of others’.⁸⁹ Very little of Bernard’s work on Josephus from this period seems to have survived. Given the strong correlation between the sections of the Antiquities that were published in 1700 and Bernard’s descriptions of his work on Josephus in the late 1670s and early 1680s, and the lack of correlation between the 1700 edition and the work he describes in the early 1690s, it is probable that most of the work we have in print dates from that first serious phase of activity.

Bernard’s Josephus ultimately ended in failure. We might ask why it failed. Part of the answer was simply Bernard’s temperament. He liked the beginnings of vast projects and then tended to lose interest in them. He was also kept busy with his duties as the university’s astronomy professor and was plagued by ill health throughout his life. But there were more fundamental problems with the project, too. Fell’s initial prospectus of Press publications placed Josephus alongside new editions of early Christian and Jewish texts; the resulting edition would have been a product of a distinctively English ecclesiastical erudition, which sought to contextualize the early Church within the contemporary Jewish cultures from which it had emerged. Bernard seemed just the man to do this: a scholar with his roots firmly in this English seventeenth-century tradition of Oriental, ecclesiastical erudition, and one of the rare people in his era who was working seriously across Greek manuscripts and Oriental languages. In the end, this desire to create a Josephus who straddled so many areas of erudition was the project’s undoing. Bernard was working at a time when the quantity of Oriental manuscripts available to him in the Bodleian Library meant that the kind of heaping of mountainous erudition he practised had become unsustainable. To be completed, the edition had to be taken out of the hands of Orientalists, and into the hands of someone who might more readily be identified today as a ‘classical scholar’, Bodley’s Librarian, John Hudson. He was more strictly an editor of Greek texts, and had edited other Greek historians like Thucydides and Dionysius of Halicarnassus.⁹⁰ Not insignificantly, he scrapped the sixth-century Latin translation. Yet, Josephus was still a labour of love for him that presented huge challenges, and was only eventually published 2 years after his death.⁹¹ As Benedikt Niese wrote, ‘what others attempted, the English completed’, but the process of completing Josephus necessitated a decisive, and far from inconsequential, move away from the kind of English scholarship which Bernard’s Josephus had embodied.⁹²