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ABSTRACT

“Much More Ours Than Yours”: The Figure of Joseph the Patriarch in the New

Testament and the Early Church

by John Lee Fortner

This paper investigates the figure of Joseph the patriarch in early Christian

interpretation, demonstrating the importance of such figures in articulating a Christian

reading of the history of Israel, and the importance of this reading in the identity

formation of early Christianity. The paper also illumines the debt of this Christian

reading of Israel’s history to the work of Hellenistic Judaism. The figure of Joseph the

patriarch is traced through early Christian interpretation, primarily from the Eastern

Church tradition up to the 4

century C.E. The key methodological approach is an

analysis of how the early church employed typological, allegorical, and moral exegesis in

its construction of Joseph as a “Christian saint of the Old Testament.” A figure who, to

borrow Justin Martyr’s phrase, became in the Christian identity “much more ours than

yours.”

“Much More Ours Than Yours”: The Figure of Joseph the Patriarch in the New

Testament and the Early Church

A Thesis

Submitted to the

Faculty of Miami University

in partial fulfillment of

the requirements for the degree of

Master of Arts

Department of History

John Lee Fortner

Miami University

Oxford, Ohio

2004

Advisor ________________________

Dr. Edwin Yamauchi

Reader ________________________

Dr. Charlotte Goldy

Reader _________________________

Dr. Wietse de Boer

Table of Contents

Introduction 1

Early Christian Hermeneutics 1

The Aura of Antiquity 6

Apologetics of Hellenistic Judaism 8

Scope and Purpose of Study 12

1. Joseph in the New Testament 13

Acts 7 14

Heb 11 15

2. Joseph in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs 17

Joseph as an ethical example 18

The Chastity of Joseph 20

3. Joseph in the Apostolic Fathers and Early Apologists 23

Clement 23

Epistle of Barnabus 24

Justin Martyr and Tertullian 26

4. Joseph in Origen 27

Homilies on Genesis 28

Origen’s Exegetical Method 31

5. Joseph in the Syriac Church 34

Aphrahat 35

Ephrem 41

6. Joseph in the Homilies of John Chrysostom 58

Typology of Joseph 60

Moral Exegesis of Joseph 62

Conclusion: Joseph in Eusebius and the Construction of Christian History 74

Bibliography 80

Introduction

One of the enduring questions that the early church struggled with was how to make

the Jewish scriptures a part of the story of the church. “This task was such a top priority

throughout this period that the history of exegesis can very largely be written in terms of

it alone.”

Justin Martyr argued with Trypho the Jew, in his Dialogue with Trypho, that

“the Scriptures are much more ours than yours. For we let ourselves be persuaded by

them, while you read them without grasping their true import.”

This was an audacious

claim to make by Justin, for “the Scripture” he spoke of was the very text of the Old

Testament- the history of the Jewish people. How then could the text that recorded

Jewish history no longer be the sole provenance of the Jewish people? How did the early

Christians come to see themselves as the true inheritors of the traditions of Israel? And,

why was the relationship of the early church to these Scriptures such an important part of

their identity? In short, how did the early church go about the task of trying to make the

Jewish Scriptures, “much more ours than yours”? This paper will try to partly answer

these questions by analyzing the way the figure of Joseph the Patriarch was interpreted in

the early church. If the early church was to claim the history of Israel as its own, then it

must claim the key figures in Israel’s past. The figure of Joseph had inspired a wealth of

interpretations in Hellenistic Jewish and later rabbinic exegesis.

Likewise, the early

church fathers found Joseph to be a worthy subject for study, and he became a key figure

in the allegorical, typological, and moral exegesis of early Christian texts.

Early Christian Hermeneutics

Before looking at the patristic interpretation of the figure of Joseph, it is first

necessary to gain a general understanding of the hermeneutics of the early church.

Adding nuance to the question of how to claim the Jewish scriptures was the early

Gerald Bray, Biblical Interpretation Past & Present (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1996), 95.

Justin Martyr Dialogue with Trypho 29, as quoted in J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines (San

Francisco: Harper Collins Publishers, 1978), 66.

See Philo, On Joseph, the Hellenistic romance Joseph and Aseneth, and the lengthy expansions of the

Joseph narrative in Josephus Jewish Antiquities II, and Genesis Rabbah. For a collation of many legends

and interpretations of Joseph see Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, vol. 2 (Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1998), 1-184.

The inspiration for this particular angle in looking at early Christian interpretation came from the

intriguing work of Louis Feldman on Josephus’ interpretation of Biblical characters (including Joseph).

See his book Josephus’s Interpretation of the Bible (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998).

church’s realization that they must find a mediating position between two perceived

extremes in approaching the Old Testament. Joseph Trigg noted that on the one hand,

“Jews condemned Christians for retaining the Old Testament as Scripture, but not

observing the ordinances of the Law.”

On the other hand, however, the “Gnostics who

contended that the God of the old Testament was not the same deity as the God and

Father of Jesus Christ, condemned them for retaining the Old Testament at all.”

For the

Jews, the Christians’ new way of approaching the scriptures was not in concert with their

ancient traditions, and for the Gnostics, adherence to the Old Testament was an old,

outdated belief in an evil, capricious God. Thus for biblical interpreters in the early

church, the task was according to Robert Wilken, “to show what was old and what was

new about the Christian revelation and interpretation of the Bible.”

One way in which the church responded to this challenge was by interpreting the Old

Testament through a Christocentric perspective. Gerald Bray noted that within the early

patristic authors, “Many writings of this period reveal that the church generally regarded

the Jewish scriptures as prophetic of Christ, who appeared in them under the guise of

various types.”

The patristic writers thus scoured the text of the Old Testament looking

for persons, names, places, objects, etc., that would point to Christ. This method of

interpretation did not just begin in the patristic authors, but was rooted in the way that the

New Testament writers approached their exegesis of the Old Testament. Richard

Longenecker noted that in the preaching of the early church, as recorded in the New

Testament, there was no “clear consciousness of employing various methods of

interpretation in quoting the Old Testament.”

However, Longenecker went on to qualify

this noting, “What they were conscious of…was interpreting the Scriptures from a

Christocentric perspective, in conformity with the exegetical teaching and example of

Jesus, and along Christological lines.”

Joseph W. Trigg, Biblical Interpretation (Wilmington: Michael Glazier, 1988), 19.

Ibid.

Robert Wilken, Judaism and the Early Christian Mind (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), 16.

Bray, 78. Note J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 71, where he insists that typology does not

overlook the history of the type, but takes it very seriously (contra allegorical interpretation).

Richard Longenecker, Biblical Exegesis in the Apostolic Period (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans

Publishing Company, 1975), 103. Quoted in Gerald Bray, Biblical Interpretation, 65.

Ibid.

The most obvious example of this Christocentric hermeneutic employed by Jesus can

be found in Luke 24. Here the writer recorded that the risen Jesus appeared to two

disciples walking along the road to the small village of Emmaus. The two travelers,

troubled by the recent events in Jerusalem, were discussing the death and burial of Jesus,

and the reports that his tomb had been found empty. Jesus, who was not recognized by

the two travelers, rebuked them for their slowness to believe the testimony of the

prophets. “Did not the Christ have to suffer these things and then enter his glory?”

The

writer then noted that Jesus gave the travelers a survey of the Old Testament, “And

beginning with Moses and all the Prophets, he explained to them what was said in the

Scriptures concerning himself.”

Jesus was thus, in Luke’s rendering of the tale,

interpreting the Old Testament scriptures, “Moses and all the prophets,” as having

specific references to his life and ministry. Jesus saw the Old Testament texts as pointing

to and being fulfilled in him. In short, he was interpreting them Christocentrically. The

early church then continued this tradition of searching the Old Testament for signs of

Christ- a process that began with Jesus and the apostolic teaching. J. N. D. Kelly has

noted that Luke 24 is an important indicator of the early church’s understanding that,

all the events of Christ’s earthly career, together with their profound redemptive

implications, are to be understood as the fulfillment of what was written about

Him ‘in the law of Moses, and in the prophets, and in the psalms’, and that the

ultimate warrant for this conviction was His own express authorization.

Rowan Greer noted that by the time of Irenaeus (d. c. 200), this approach to scripture

became an effective way of mediating between the Jewish and Gnostic critiques. The

Old Testament was a “sacred history presided over by God’s providence,” and the

Scriptures were a “providential dispensation of God, pointing beyond themselves to their

consummation in Christian revelation.”

Thus against the Gnostics the early church

argued that the Old Testament was important as the salvation history which pointed

ultimately to Christ. And, against the Jews they argued that this salvation history, charted

Luke 24.26. All Scripture quotations from the New International Version, unless otherwise noted.

Luke 24.27. Note also Luke 24.45 where Jesus appeared to the disciples and “opened their minds so that

they could understand the Scriptures.”

J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 65.

James Kugel and Rowan A. Greer, Early Biblical Interpretation (Philadelphia: The Westminster Press,

1986), 123.

through the Old Testament, was realized in the coming of Christ, superceding the Mosaic

law and covenant now consummated in Christ. Irenaeus confirmed this view in his

treatise Against Heresies, where he noted,

If any one, therefore, reads the Scriptures with attention, he will find in them an

account of Christ, and a foreshadowing of the new calling. For Christ is the

treasure which was hid in the field, that is, in this world (for the “field is the

world”); but the treasure hid in the Scriptures is Christ, since he was pointed out

by means of types and parables.

The early church therefore saw Christ as the key to linking themselves to the history

of Israel.

This was especially true in the Hebrew prophecies of the coming Messiah.

Thus in Matthew’s gospel, there was repeated mention of events in the life of Christ as

fulfilling “what was said through the prophets.”

However, the Jews argued that the

Christians’ methodology of seeing Christ as the consummation of messianic prophecies

was faulty, because he had not fulfilled all of them. For example, Robert Wilken noted

that “the Jews contended that the wolf had not lain down with the lamb because Messiah

had not come.”

The writers of the early church responded to this, according to Wilken,

by emphasizing that the Old Testament Scriptures should be interpreted spiritually, not

literally.

The patristic writers drew upon Paul’s warning that Christian ministers were

“ministers of a new covenant- not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the

Spirit gives life.”

Origen was one example of this. He noted in On the First Things that

“Now the reason why all those we have mentioned hold false opinions and make impious

or ignorant assertions about God appears to be nothing else but this, that scripture is not

understood in its spiritual sense, but is interpreted according to the bare letter.”

Gerald

Bray noted that the use of this text,

Irenaeus, Against Heresies 4.26.1, The Ante-Nicene Fathers, edited by Alexander Roberts and James

Donaldson (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1987).

See Peter Richardson, Israel in the Apostolic Church (London: Cambridge U.P., 1969), 204-06.

Richardson argued that the early church’s claim to be the “true Israel” was based in part upon “a developed

Christology,” which identified Christ as fulfilling the promises to Israel and initiating a new covenant

(206).

See as an example the first two chapters of Matthew, where the phrase is used four times (1.22, 2.15, 17,

23). Note also a later example of this in Eusebius Preparation for the Gospel 8d.

Robert Wilken, Judaism and the Early Christian Mind, 16.

Ibid.

2 Cor 3.6.

Origen, On the First Principles, quoted in Wilken, Judaism and the Early Christian Mind, 16.

became axiomatic for the fathers of the early church. To them, what Paul meant

was that the literalistic exegesis of Scripture, as practiced by the rabbis was

deadly. Only the spiritual understanding which they understood as radically

Christological, was true.

Bray concluded that all patristic interpreters “agreed that a spiritual interpretation was

essential, and that to interpret Scripture in a merely literal way was to fall back into

Judaism and spiritual bondage.”

Another method used by the early church to lay claim on the Jewish Scriptures was an

apologetic focused on the denigration of some elements in the history of Israel. The early

church viewed the Old Testament as supplying a negative critique of the Jews. The Old

Testament was “the history of a people with an ineradicable capacity for apostasy, despite

the continual warnings of the prophets.”

The Mosaic laws were “a special discipline

temporarily imposed” because of the Jewish proclivity toward syncretism with the

surrounding nations, “but not intended to be taken as God’s first or last word.”

Eusebius (c.260-c.340 C.E.), the bishop of Caesarea and famous church historian

provided an example of this tendency. In his Preparation for the Gospel, Eusebius noted

that Moses,

promulgates a law that was suited to the moral condition of those who heard it.

For they were unable through moral weakness to emulate the virtue of their

fathers, inasmuch they were enslaved by passions and sick in soul; so He gave

them the polity that corresponded to their condition.

What then did this attack on Israel’s history mean for the Jewish people? There was

only one conclusion for the early church, since they claimed that the Law was a

temporary measure, and as Irenaeus argued, the Old Testament Scriptures truly pointed

toward Christ. Trypho, the Jewish interlocutor with Justin Martyr in his Dialogue with

Trypho, anticipated this conclusion, asking Justin “What then…are you Israel?”

The

Bray, Biblical Interpretation Past & Present, 98.

Ibid.

Henry Chadwick, The Early Church (London: Penguin Books, 1993), 22.

Ibid., 66-67.

Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel 312 d, translated by Edwin Hamilton Gifford (Grand Rapids: Baker

Book House, 1981), 337.

Justin Martyr Dialogue with Trypho 123.9, The Ante-Nicene Fathers.

answer from the early church was “yes.”

The Epistle of Barnabas, speaking of the Jews,

exhorted its readers,

do not be like certain people; that is, do not continue to pile up your sins while

claiming that your covenant is irrevocably yours, because in fact those people lost

it completely…their covenant was broken in pieces, in order that the covenant of

the beloved Jesus might be sealed in our heart.

The early church viewed itself as the true Israel, given a new and lasting covenant with

God through Christ Jesus.

As Eusebius noted, the Jews,

find fault with us, that being strangers and aliens we misuse their books, which

do not belong to us at all, and because in an impudent and shameless way, as they

would say, we thrust ourselves in, and try violently to thrust out the true family

and kindred from their own ancestral rights.

The Aura of Antiquity

Why was the issue of the early church clarifying its relationship to the Hebrew

Scriptures of such importance to early Christian writers? Why the continued emphasis on

the continuity between the history of Israel and the early church? Louis Feldman has

argued that the reason for this on-going emphasis is not immediately clear, particularly

when one looks at the differences between the two traditions. Feldman noted that

Christianity and Judaism differ:

in creed, i.e., in believing that Jesus was the Messiah, that he was divine, that he

died for man’s sins, that salvation can come through accepting Jesus, and in deed,

i.e., in not accepting the Halakhic (legal) basis, whether in the written or oral

Torah, so central to classical Judaism.

Feldman also argues that even more important than the above differences, was the fact

that Christianity and Judaism differ in their fundamental “essence:” Christianity was the

See Richardson, Israel in the Apostolic Church, 31. Richardson argued that from the time of the New

Testament onward, there is an emphasis in early Christianity on the church inheriting the promises to Israel.

As such, in references to the relationship between Israel and the church there was “a growing, though not

uniform, tendency to emphasize discontinuity and to forgo continuity.” This came to full fruition in the

writings of Justin Martyr who, according to Richardson, was the first to identify the church as the “true

Israel”(31).

Epistle of Barnabas 4.6, in, 2

edition J. B. Lightfoot and J. R. Harmer, translators, The Apostolic

Fathers (Grand Rapids: Baker Book House, 1989), 165.

See the early development of this idea in Mk 14.24; Lk 22.20; 1Cor 11.25; 2Cor 3.6; Heb 8:6, 8, 9:15,

12.24.

Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel 5d, 6.

Louis H. Feldman, Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World : Attitudes and Interactions from Alexander to

Justinian (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 196.

“first ‘pure’ religion” without a basis in a national identity.

Jews, however,

“historically have defined themselves as a people, a nation, a family…religion is an

accoutrement of the nation.”

Feldman concludes that the reason for this emphasis on

continuity by the early church, in spite of the obvious differences between the two

traditions, was the relatively new status of Christianity in comparison to other religions in

the Greco-Roman world.

Christianity emphasized continuity with the history of Israel

and its Scriptures, in order to create for itself “the aura of antiquity.”

That the issue of antiquity was an important one to religions in the Greco-Roman

world has often been acknowledged. E. R. Dodds noted that interest in ancient traditions

was fundamental to the Greco-Roman worldview: “Men stood with their backs to the

future; all wisdom was in the past, that is to say in books, and their only task was one of

interpretation.”

Antiquity stood as a test for the veracity of any religious tradition,

because “error disappears easily with the passage of time, whereas the core of truth

remains.”

This respect was also extended to the key figures of ancient religions,

because “the men and women of earlier times, especially those who lived very long ago,

were thought to have been closer to the gods.”

Indeed, one of the most important arguments leveled against Christianity by its pagan

critics was that it lacked antiquity. Eusebius acknowledged in his Preparation for the

Gospel that one of the first objections raised by both Greek and Jews to Christianity was:

“What then may the strangeness in us be, and what the new-fangled manner of life? And

how can men fail to be in every way impious and atheistical, who have apostatized from

those ancestral gods by whom every nation and state is sustained?”

Celsus, the 2

century apologist for Greek culture, argued that the Jews, because they followed their

Ibid., 197.

Ibid., 196.

Ibid.

David Rokeah, Jews, Pagans, and Christians in Conflict (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1982), 90.

E. R. Dodds, The Ancient Concept of Progress and Other Essays on Greek Literature and Belief

(Oxford,: Clarendon Press, 1973), 23-24.

Rokeah, Jews, Pagans, and Christians in Conflict, 90.

Robert Louis Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them (New Haven: Yale University Press,

1984), 122. One example of this respect for ancient figures can be seen in the emphasis in early

Christianity on connection with pre-Mosaic patriarchs such as Joseph. See the discussion below on Heb

11.

Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel, trans. E. H. Gifford (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Book House,

1981), 1.2, 4d.

“traditional customs” were “In this respect…like the rest of mankind.”

The Christians,

however, were criticized by Celsus because they had rejected both Greek and Jewish

traditions. And, according to Celsus, “it is impious to abandon the customs which have

existed in each locality from the beginning.”

Likewise, the 4

century emperor Julian,

labeled the “Apostate” for his rejection of Christianity, maligned the Christians as a sect

(which he called the Galileans), because they followed none of the ancient traditions of

the Hellenes or Hebrews. Instead, the Christians have “abandoned them and followed a

way of their own.”

As Arthur Droge noted, these attacks against Christianity carried

with them the assumption that, “the assertion of modern origin was equivalent to the

assertion of historical insignificance.”

The Apologetics of Hellenistic Judaism

What is interesting about the criticism leveled at Christianity concerning its lack of

antiquity is that this was often contrasted with the Greco-Roman acceptance of the

antiquity and traditions of the Jews. Thus, even a virulent anti-Semite as the 4

century

church father John Chrysostom had to begrudgingly acknowledge that, “Many, I know,

respect the Jews and think that their present way of life is a venerable one.”

This respect accorded to Judaism, however, was not gained without struggle, and the

nature of this struggle had important implications for the history of early Christianity.

The increasing contact of Jews with the Hellenistic culture of the Greco-Roman world

had aroused against Judaism its own set of criticisms maligning the history and traditions

of its people. The famous Roman orator and senator, Cicero (106-43 B.C.E.), related in

his speech De Provinciis Consularibus that the Jews and Syrians were “people born to be

Origen, Contra Celsum, trans. Henry Chadwick (Cambridge [Eng.]: University Press, 1965), 5.25.

Ibid.

Julian, Against the Galileans, trans. Wilmer Cave France Wright, The Works of the Emperor Julian (New

York: Macmillan, 1913), 43 A. Note also Suetonius’s criticism of the Christians in his Lives of the Caesars

as “a class of men given to a new and mischievous superstition.” As quoted in Wilken, The Christians as

the Romans Saw Them, 50.

Arthur J. Droge, Homer or Moses? : Early Christian Interpretations of the History of Culture (Tübingen:

J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1989), 9.

John Chrysostom, Discourses against Judaizing Christians, trans. Paul W. Harkins (Washington:

Catholic University of America Press, 1979), 1.3.1.

slaves.”

In another speech, Cicero referred to the conquest of the Jews by the Roman

general Pompey, and then mockingly added concerning the Jewish state, “how dear it

was to the immortal gods is shown by the fact that it has been conquered, let out for

taxes, made a slave.”

The Roman historian Tacitus (c. 54 -c.117 C.E.) even impugned

the brief period of Jewish self-rule under the Maccabees before the conquest of Rome.

He argued that these Jewish kings set up a “reign of terror which embraced, among other

typical acts of despotism, the banishment of fellow-citizens, the destruction of cities, and

the murder of brothers, wives and parents.”

According to Tacitus, the Jews were an

ethnic group that “regards as permissible what seems to us immoral,” and were thus a

“lascivious people.”

For these writers the Jews were a powerless people, incapable of leadership, and little

more than pawns in the struggle of history. Josephus recorded the Egyptian writer,

Apion, as charging that the Jews “have not produced any geniuses, for example, inventors

in arts and crafts or eminent sages.”

All of these charges have as a background the

commonly held myth of the origin of the Jews, articulated by various writers such as

Manetho, Chaeremon, Lysimachus, and also Tacitus. This foundation myth has minor

differences in each of these writers, but typically involves the expulsion of unwanted

people from the land of Egypt. This expulsion comes as a result of an Egyptian god

informing the pharaoh that the difficulties Egypt is experiencing can be resolved by

expelling the impure, sickly, and leprous inhabitants of the land. These people after

being expelled from the land eventually develop into the Jewish nation.

The response to these attacks on the history and traditions of Judaism was largely

crafted by representatives of Hellenistic Judaism. These writers emphasized a “common

Cicero De Provinciis Consularibus 5.10. In Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism, vol. 1 edited

by Menahem Stern (Jerusalem: The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1976).

Cicero Pro Flaccum 28.69.

Tacitus The Histories, transl. by Kenneth Wesley in the Penguin Classics edition (New York: Viking

Penguin, Inc., 1988), 5.10.

Tacitus The Histories 5.4, 5.

Flavius Josephus, Against Apion, ed. H. St J. Thackeray, vol. 1, Works of Josephus (Cambridge, Mass.:

Harvard University Press, 1961), II.135.

Josephus Against Apion I.227-250 (Manetho); I.288-292 (Chaeremon); I.304-311 (Lysimachus); Tacitus

The Histories 5.3.

ethic” shared with their Hellenistic neighbors in the cities of the Greco-Roman world.

This emphasis on shared values allowed Hellenistic Jewish writers to, “present their

religion in a way that invited the respect of such Greeks, and that expressed their own

Hellenistic identity, without repudiating their own fundamental beliefs and values.”

Hellenistic Jewish writers focused on the ethical heritage of Judaism, and used key

figures in the history of Israel as examples of these commonly shared values. For

example, Philo praised the pre-Mosaic patriarchs of Israel’s history as men who derived

their ethics from the dictates of nature: “they gladly accepted conformity with nature,

holding that nature itself was, as indeed it is, the most venerable of statutes.”

Particular

figures were allegorized as idealized versions of common virtues. Thus, the patriarchs

Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob were “symbols of virtue acquired respectively by teaching,

nature and practice.”

Central to the apologetic response of Hellenistic Jewish writers was an emphasis on

the antiquity of the history and traditions of Judaism. As before noted this was of central

importance in the Greco-Roman world, and all religious creeds were judged by this

criterion: “The primary test of truth in religious matters was custom and tradition, the

practices of the ancients.”

Josephus, highlighted his focus on this key idea entitling his

study of the history of Judaism as Jewish Antiquities, because “it will embrace our entire

ancient history and political constitution.”

In Josephus’ Contra Apion he made

reference to his earlier work, noting that in this work he “made sufficiently clear to any

who may peruse that work the extreme antiquity of our Jewish race, the purity of the

John Joseph Collins, Between Athens and Jerusalem : Jewish Identity in the Hellenistic Diaspora, 2nd

ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Pub., 2000), 160.

Ibid., 157.

Philo, On Abraham 1.6. All quotations from Philo taken from Philo, Works of Philo, trans. F. H. Colson,

G. H. Whitaker, and Ralph Marcus, Loeb Classical Library. (Heinemann, 1929). I have purposefully

avoided specific references to the figure of Joseph in these examples. The use of Philo and Josephus (as

well as other Hellenistic traditions) concerning Joseph in the writings of early Christianity will be

demonstrated below.

Ibid., 11.52. Marcel Simon argued that, “Philo’s use of allegory sprang from a desire to make acceptable

to cultivated gentiles the details of scriptural institutions and commandments, as well as the biblical

‘mythology.’” See Marcel Simon, Verus Israel : A Study of the Relations between Christians and Jews in

the Roman Empire, 135-425 (New York: Published for the Littman Library by Oxford University Press,

1986), 150. For a fuller description of this method and its importance to early Christian exegesis see the

section below on Origen.

Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, 62.

Flavius Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, trans. H. St J. Thackeray, 9 vols., Works of Josephus (Cambridge,

Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1961), I.5.

original stock, and the manner in which it established itself in the country which we

occupy today.”

The purpose of his current work, according to Josephus, was to

“convict our detractors of malignity and deliberate falsehood, to correct the ignorance of

others, and to instruct all who desire to know the truth concerning the antiquity of our

race.”

David Rokeah has argued that the early church saw in the apologetic writings of

Hellenistic Judaism an effective means of answering criticism of their own lack of

antiquity. He noted that, “The connection of Christianity with the Jewish religion and its

sacred writings, whose antiquity no one could question, enabled the Christians to defend

themselves against the accusations of novelty and sedition made against them by the

pagans.”

For example, Eusebius acknowledged in his Preparation for the Gospel that

Christianity “preferred” the philosophy and religion of the Hebrews, “above all our

ancestral traditions.”

Eusebius demonstrated the reasonableness of this choice, by

building a case for the great virtues of the Hebrews and their great antiquity. In doing so,

Eusebius excerpted portions from the works of Hellenistic Jewish writers such as Philo,

Josephus, Eupolemus, Demetrius, Artapanus, etc.

In view of these arguments,

borrowed by Eusebius from Hellenistic Judaism, he concluded: “Do you not think then

that we have with reason preferred these to the Greeks, and accepted the histories of

godly men among the Hebrews rather than the gods of Phoenicia and Egypt, and the

blasphemous absurdities of those gods?”

In fact, Eusebius’ emphasis on the attachment

of Christianity to the religion of the Hebrews, and its consequent benefit of antiquity was

applied specifically to the church in his Ecclesiastical History. Eusebius began his

account of church history with the history of Israel, arguing that “In this way…will both

the genuine antiquity and the divine majesty of the Christian religion be shown to those

who assume that it is recent and foreign, having put in its appearance no earlier than

yesterday.”

Josephus, Against Apion, I.1.

Ibid., I.3.

Rokeah, Jews, Pagans, and Christians in Conflict, 92.

Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel, 8.1, 298d.

See Eusebius’ arguments in Books 7-9 of Preparation for the Gospel.

Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel, 7.4, 303c.

Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, Books 1-10, trans. Roy J. Deferrari, 2nd ed. (Washington, D. C.: The

Catholic University of America Press, 1965), 1.2, p. 38.

In fact, it was the use of writers such as Philo and Josephus by the church which

ultimately resulted in their preservation.

As David Runia argued, Philo’s works became

so highly respected in the early church that “by the end of the Patristic period he had

virtually achieved the status of a Church Father.”

Runia also noted that “It is by no

means rare that extracts from his works in the Byzantine Catenae are headed with the

lemma FivlwnoV ejpiskovpou, Philo the Bishop.”

Likewise, Steve Mason has argued

that the “decisive factor” in the survival of Josephus’ works “was the Christian church’s

appropriation of the Jewish historian’s writings.”

Scope and Purpose of Study

Judith Lieu has argued that the claims to ownership of these Scriptures- the “much

more ours than yours” of Justin Martyr and other early Christian writers-“meant the

exclusive right to interpret them, and to find in them anticipation both of present

convictions and of the opposing unbelief and disobedience.”

Central to these claims

was the argument that the church constituted a new Israel, and as such was the true

inheritor of the history and traditions of Judaism. However, this drive to claim ownership

of the history of Israel was largely driven by the early church’s apologetic need for an

“aura of antiquity.”

As such, early Christianity faced two competing claims,

emphasizing both newness and antiquity for the Christian revelation. These contrasting

goals created a fundamental tension that was at the heart of identity formation in early

Christianity. And, as John Dawson has argued, “The interpretation of sacred texts is

often the principal site of the tension between past and future, the preservation and the

refashioning of religious identity.”

Additionally, it is important to note that these claims to ownership extended beyond

just the texts and traditions, to specific figures within the history of Israel. As Pierre

Rokeah, Jews, Pagans, and Christians in Conflict, 172.

David T. Runia, Philo in Early Christian Literature : A Survey (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993), 3.

Ibid.

Steve Mason, Josephus and the New Testament, 2nd ed. (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers,

2003), 8.

Judith Lieu, Image and Reality : The Jews in the World of the Christians in the Second Century

(Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1996), 280.

Rokeah, Jews, Pagans, and Christians in Conflict, 90.

John David Dawson, Christian Figural Reading and the Fashioning of Identity (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 2002), 207.

Maraval has argued, Christian writers viewed specific figures from the history of Israel as

constituting a “sacred history which belonged to them since it extends into the church.”

And, since the Church viewed itself as the true Israel, these figures were claimed by

Christian writers as “heroes of its own history….constituting an uninterrupted chain of

testimony to the truth.”

These claims to ownership, however, were impossible without

the “pioneering work of Hellenistic Judaism,” and the writers of early Christianity

borrowed heavily from this work in order to establish legitimacy in a Greco-Roman

world which valued antiquity.

This thesis will thus investigate the figure of Joseph the patriarch in early Christian

interpretation, demonstrating the importance of such figures in articulating a Christian

reading of the history of Israel, and the importance of this reading in the identity

formation of early Christianity. This thesis will also illumine the debt of this Christian

reading of Israel’s history to the work of Hellenistic Judaism. How specifically this

Christian history was constructed is the subject of the following pages as the figure of

Joseph the patriarch is traced through early Christian interpretation, primarily from the

Eastern Church tradition up to the 4

century C.E. The key methodological approach

will be an analysis of how the early church employed typological, allegorical, and moral

exegesis in its construction of Joseph as a “Christian saint of the Old Testament.”

figure who, to borrow Justin Martyr’s phrase, became in the Christian identity “much

more ours than yours.”

Chapter One:

Joseph in the New Testament

The authors of the New Testament were the first to take up this issue of understanding

the church’s relationship to the Old Testament Scriptures. References to the figure of

Pierre Maraval, ed., Figures de l’Ancien Testament chez les Pères (Strasbourg: Centre d'analyse et de

documentation patristiques, 1989), I. Translation is mine.

Ibid.

Rokeah, Jews, Pagans, and Christians in Conflict, 90.

Pierre Maraval, ed., Figures de l’Ancien Testament chez les Pères, I.

This study will focus on writers who offer extended reflections on Joseph. Many of the references to

Joseph in this study were located by use of the excellent database Thesaurus Linguae Graecae. See

Thesaurus Linguae Graecae Cd Rom, University of California, Irvine.

Joseph can be found in Acts 7 and in Hebrews 11.

The interpretive strategies employed

by these writers heavily influence the patristic portrayals of Joseph. Acts 7 recorded a

speech by Stephen, traditionally the first Christian martyr, before the Jewish Sanhedrin.

Stephen had been arrested on charges of blasphemy, and responded to the high priest’s

questioning by giving an overview of Israel’s history. The speech seems to have had two

apologetic emphases aimed at criticizing the Jewish people, who had rejected Jesus “the

Righteous One.”

First, Stephen emphasized that God had worked in the past outside of

the land of Israel.

Oscar Cullman saw this as the major point of this speech, which

comprised a “salvation history” challenging Israel’s restriction of the presence and work

of God in history.

The second apologetic aim was “the insistence that the Jewish

people’s refusal to acknowledge Jesus as Messiah was all of a piece with their attitude to

God’s messengers throughout the OT period.”

Both of these objectives made Joseph an obvious choice as an exemplar in Stephen’s

speech. First, Joseph had been sold into slavery in Egypt by his brothers, and is thus

outside of the land of Israel. However, even though alienated from his people and land,

“God was with him and rescued him from all of his troubles.”

Secondly, the brothers

sold Joseph into slavery because of their “jealousy.” Stephen assumed that the reader

would be familiar with the reasons behind this jealousy, as recorded in Gen 37. Jacob

loved Joseph more than Joseph’s brothers, and made a special coat for him to wear,

which enraged the brothers. More importantly, Joseph had two dreams, which he told to

his brothers. Both of these dreams indicated that one day his brothers would bow down

to him as a ruler, and this aroused intense jealousy on the part of the brothers.

The

jealousy of Joseph’s brothers became a standard topos in patristic literature.

Stephen’s

speech contrasted the jealousy of his brothers to Joseph’s magnanimity in inviting his

There is an additional text in Revelation 7.8, but it only mentions the “tribe of Joseph” in place of his son

Ephraim’s name. This was also commonly done in the Old Testament. See Ps 80.1, 81.5, 78.67.

Acts 7.52.

Earl Richard, “The Polemical Character of the Joseph Episode in Acts 7,” Journal of Biblical Literature

98/2 (1979), 259.

Oscar Cullman, Salvation History (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1967), 131.

F. F. Bruce, The Book of the Acts, New International Commentary on the New Testament (Grand

Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1955), 142.

Acts 7.9-10.

Gen 37.1-11.

See 1 Clement 4.9 (discussed later) and Cyprian Jealousy and Envy 5.

father “and his whole family” to come to Egypt during a famine.

In addition, this

negative image of the brothers was further emphasized by the fact that Joseph was

rescued from his “troubles” by God,

but the brothers’ “great suffering”

could only be

alleviated by a visit to Joseph. “The Jewish audience is left to conclude: God did not

save them from tribulation because he was not with them. The author…has presented a

very unique and indeed severely polemical picture of the patriarchs.”

This indictment

of the “fathers” was later applied, at the end of Stephen’s speech, to his accusers in the

Sanhedrin:

You stiff-necked people, with uncircumcised hearts and ears! You are just like

your fathers: You always resist the Holy Spirit! Was there ever a prophet your

fathers did not persecute? They even killed those who predicted the coming of

the Righteous One. And now you have betrayed and murdered him.

Joseph was thus counted as one of the prophets persecuted by the jealous fathers. And,

though not explicitly stated by Stephen, Joseph and the other persecuted prophets

functioned as types of Christ, who also was persecuted and ultimately killed by his

brothers. In addition, Stephen’s polemical retelling of the story of Joseph served to

denigrate the history of Israel, and along with the remainder of the speech was “a farewell

speech to Judaism.”

This approach to the history of Israel, as mentioned before, was a

means of clearing the way for the identification of the early church as the “new Israel.”

Joseph is also mentioned in the catalogue of great heroes of the faith in Hebrews 11.

In Hebrews 11.21 the blessing of Joseph’s two sons by Jacob is mentioned, and then in

11.22 Joseph himself: “By faith Joseph, when his end was near, spoke about the exodus

of the Israelites from Egypt and gave instructions about his bones.” The issue of Joseph’s

bones and his instructions concerning their care was a common theme in Hellenistic

Jewish literature. For instance, in the apocrypha book of Sirach Joseph was praised

because his bones received special care: “Nor was anyone ever born like Joseph; even his

Acts 7.14.

Acts 7.10. Here Stephen addresses the brothers as “our fathers.”

Acts 7.11.

Richard, 262.

Acts 7.51-52.

Richard, 265.

bones were cared for.”

The prominence of this theme was likely linked to Joseph’s

anticipation (by faith according to the writer of Hebrews) of the future event of Israel’s

exodus from Egypt. Joseph foresaw this and desired that his bones might be returned to

the land of his fathers.

Pamela Eisenbaum labeled Hebrews 11 a “Christian reading of Biblical history.”

There are several reasons for this idea. First, there is a marked emphasis on heroes of

faith who preceded the giving of the Mosaic Law. The only event mentioned in detail

after the exodus was the falling of the walls of Jericho, and the only person mentioned in

detail was Rahab the harlot.

B. F. Westcott in his classic commentary on Hebrews has

identified this focus on the pre-history of the Jews as a theme of the letter. He noted that

because of the “significant emphasis which the writer lays upon the prae-Judaic form of

Revelation….the work of Judaism is made to appear as a stage in the advance towards a

wider work which could not be achieved without a preparatory discipline.”

Henry Chadwick noted that the belief in the early church that the Law had been a

temporary necessity, initiated a desire to “look back to the patriarchs before Moses who

had no Law to keep other than the moral imperative of the inward conscience.”

The

writer of the letter was then connecting the reader, not to the nation of Israel that arose

from these heroes, but to the patriarchs themselves as the source of their history. This

approach, in part, anticipated criticisms of Christianity as an “apostasy from Judaism.”

Both Jewish and pagan critics of early Christianity questioned Christianity’s non-

observance of the law, particularly since Christianity claimed continuity with Judaism as

the new Israel. The pagan critic Celsus, questioned Christians on this point by asking

Sirach 49.15. Translation taken from “The Apocryphal and Pseudepigraphal Books,” NRSV Reference

Paul Ellingworth, The Epistle to the Hebrews : A Commentary on the Greek Text (Grand Rapids: W.B.

Eerdmans, 1993), 607. See also William L. Lane, Hebrews 9-13 (Dallas, Tex.: Word Books, 1991), 365-

66.

Pamela Michelle Eisenbaum, The Jewish Heroes of Christian History Hebrews 11 in Literary Context

(Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1997), 218.

Heb 11.30-31. Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David, and Samuel are also listed, but no details are

provided, and as Eisenbaum noted some of these characters (Barak, Samson, Jephthah) are dubious

selections for a list concerning faith (174-175). Also note they are out of chronological order (Eisenbaum,

174).

B. F. Westcott, The Epistle to the Hebrews (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company,

1950), lvi.

Chadwick, The Early Church, 67.

Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, 184.

them, through the voice of an imaginary Jew, “why do you take your origin from our

religion, and then, as if you are progressing in knowledge, despise these things, although

you cannot name any other origin for your doctrine than our law?”

The approach of the

writer of Hebrew, in emphasizing connections to the patriarchal history, could be used as

an answer to this criticism by later Christian writers.

Secondly, the lines of identity were also drawn to these heroes by the author noting

that, though these people were praised for their faith, “yet none of them received what

had been promised.” Their lives ended with a sense of incompleteness, which could only

be fulfilled in concert with the readers of Hebrews: “God had planned something better

for us so that only together with us would they be made perfect.”

100

Thus, this “Christian

reading of Scripture gave what was most likely an ill defined group of people an ancestral

heritage and the undeniable identity that comes with that.”

101

It is important to note that in both Acts 7 and Heb 11, lists of heroes are employed to

demonstrate a Christian reading of Israel’s history. In Acts, Jesus’ rejection by the Jews

falls into a line of prophets who had also been persecuted by their own people. Heb 11

emphasized the pre-Mosaic patriarchs, and connected Christians to this group of heroes

by the lines of faith. This use of hero lists to exemplify specific points or virtues was a

common literary form in Hellenistic Jewish literature.

102

Chapter Two:

Joseph in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs

The Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs is a document with a mixture of Jewish and

early Christian elements forming a collection of final testaments from the twelve sons of

Jacob. The format of the document is that the patriarch is near death, and calls his family

around him to share his reflections on his life with them. H. C. Kee has argued that this

document was written by a Hellenistic Jew, and that it was composed around 250

Origen, Contra Celsum, II.4.

See the discussion on Chrysostom and Eusebius below.

100

Heb 11.40.

101

Eisenbaum, 226.

102

See Sirach 44-50; 1 Macc 2.51-60; 4 Macc 16.16-23; 4 Macc 18.11-19; 4 Ezra 7.105-111. These

references were noted in Eisenbaum, The Jewish Heroes of Christian History, 230-231.

B.C.E.

103

However, more recent studies have seen it as a “Christian writing

incorporating a variety of pre-Christian, Jewish material.”

104

And, Collins has argued

that “There is no longer room to doubt that the final text of the Testaments is a Christian

document.”

105

As such, the final version of the text is usually dated to around the 2

century C.E. The main issue in determining dating for this text is the presence of

Christian interpolations, with specific messianic prophecies applied to Jesus. For

instance, in Testament of Benjamin there is a prophecy concerning a “unique prophet”

who:

shall enter the first temple, and there the Lord will be abused and will be raised up

on wood, and the spirit of God will move on to all the nations as a fire is poured

out. And he shall ascend from Hades and shall pass from earth to heaven. I

understand how humble he will be on the earth, and how splendid in heaven.

106

The presence of these Christian interpolations makes this document particularly

relevant for this study. The document shows evidence that a Christian redactor was

adding to and incorporating Jewish legends in a Christian recension, attempting to give a

Christian reading to these pre-Mosaic patriarchs.

Joseph as an Ethical Example

There is much material in this document concerning the figure of Joseph. Throughout

the text of the Testaments Joseph is depicted as the ultimate ethical example to be

followed by the reader.

107

In the Testament of Simeon Joseph was remembered as “a

good man, one who had within him the spirit of God.”

108

Likewise, in the Testament of

Benjamin, Joseph was described by his younger brother Benjamin as a moral exemplar

103

H. C. Kee, “Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs” Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, ed. by James H.

Charlesworth (Garden City: Doubleday & Company, 1983), 777-778. All quotations from the Testaments

are taken from this translation.

104

M. De Jonge, “Test. Benjamin 3:8 and the Picture of Joseph as a ‘Good and Holy Man,’” Die

Entstehung der jüdischen Martyrologie (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1989), 205. See also Harm W. Hollander,

“Joseph in Hellenistic Jewish and Early Christian Literature,” Biblical Figures Outside the Bible, ed. by

Michael E. Stone and Theodore A. Bergren (Harrisburg: Trinity Press International, 1998), 254.

105

Collins, Between Athens and Jerusalem : Jewish Identity in the Hellenistic Diaspora, 175.

106

Testament of Benjamin 9.3.

107

Harm W. Hollander, Joseph as an Ethical Model in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs Leiden: E.

J. Brill, 1981), 62-63.

108

Testament of Simeon 4.6, Old Testament Pseudepigrapha.

for his children: “Now, my children, love the Lord God of heaven and earth; keep his

commandments; pattern your life after the good and pious man Joseph.”

109

Joseph was a “good man” in many of the testaments because of the forgiveness he

offered his brothers, but more often his goodness is attributed to his ability to withstand

the temptation of Potiphar’s wife. This is particularly true in the Testament of Joseph.

Joseph is depicted as undergoing severe trials on the part of Potiphar’s wife. Joseph

reported that she threatened him with death, sent him to be tortured, and promised him

increased power if he would sleep with her.

110

Because of Joseph’s youth, she initially

acted as if she desired to be his surrogate mother, but Joseph soon realized that her

motherly hugs were meant only “to lure me into a sexual relationship.”

111

Later, she

acted as if she desired to be converted to Joseph’s religion with the provision that, “If you

want me to abandon the idols, have intercourse with me, and I shall persuade my husband

to put away the idols, and we shall live in the presence of your Lord.”

112

Joseph was not

convinced of her sincerity, and thus she resorted to threatening to kill her husband, sent

Joseph “enchanted food”, and resolved to commit suicide if Joseph did not capitulate.

113

Joseph however remained strong throughout this period of temptation, and ultimately fled

from the woman, leaving his cloak behind when she resorted to force to bring him to bed

with her.

The Testament of Reuben concurred with this ethical ideal of Joseph. Here, Joseph is

contrasted with his brother Reuben, who slept with his father’s handmaiden, Bilhah.

Reuben confessed his own lack of control, but reminded his sons who were gathered at

his death-bead that “You heard how Joseph protected himself from a woman and purified

his mind from all promiscuity: he found favor before God and men.”

114

Reuben went on

to describe the extreme measures that Potiphar’s wife took to influence Joseph into

sexual intimacy, as she “summoned magicians, and brought potions for him, but his

soul’s deliberation rejected evil desire.”

115

109

Testament of Benjamin 3.1.

110

Testament of Joseph 3.1-3.

111

Ibid., 3.8.

112

Ibid., 4.5.

113

Ibid., 5.1-7.8.

114

Testament of Reuben 4.8.

115

Ibid., 4.9.

The Chastity of Joseph

One aspect of this ethical portrait of Joseph specifically highlighted in the Testaments

of the Twelve Patriachs was his virtue of self-control or chastity. In the Testament of

Joseph the writer attributed Joseph’s endurance under temptation to the self-control he

derived from a life of ascetic practice. During Joseph’s seven years in the house of

Potiphar, he would often fast, and “If my master was absent, I drank no wine; for three

day periods I would take no food but give it to the poor and ill. I would awaken early and

pray to the Lord, weeping over the Egyptian woman of Memphis because she annoyed

me exceedingly and relentlessly.”

116

As shown earlier in the Testament of Joseph, the

annoyance that Joseph spoke of was no understatement; the woman tried various means

to entice him into her bed. One night as the woman relented and left Joseph, again

disappointed by his resistance, Joseph noted, “I tell you, my children, it was about the

sixth hour when she left me. Bending my knees before the Lord, I prayed for a whole

day and night. Toward dawn I arose, crying and begging deliverance from her.”

117

was through this fasting and prayer that Joseph was able to gain the self-control to resist

the woman. Later, as Joseph is surrounded by his children at his deathbed, he exhorted

them:

So you see, my children, how great are the things that patience and prayer with

fasting accomplish. You also, if your pursue self-control and purity with patience

and prayer with fasting in humility of heart, the Lord will dwell among you,

because he loves self-control. And where the Most High dwells, even if envy

befall someone, or slavery, or false accusation, the Lord who dwells with him on

account of his self-control not only will rescue him from these evils, but will exalt

him and glorify him as he did for me.

118

Here Joseph commended the virtue of self-control, attained through the practice of

fasting and prayer, as the ultimate source of his blessing, and consequently as the future

source of blessing for his descendants. The word used here is the Greek word

swfrosuvnh, and is translated variously as “self-control,” “temperance,” and “chastity.”

Harm W. Hollander has noted the recurring use of this word in connection with the figure

116

Testament of Joseph 3.4-6.

117

Testament of Joseph 8.1.

118

Ibid., 10.1-3.

of Joseph in Hellenistic Jewish Literature.

119

Philo emphasized this quality of

swfrosuvnh, in his depiction of Joseph. When Joseph was later thrown in prison by

Potiphar, because of the accusations by Potiphar’s wife, Joseph rose to a position of great

respect among his fellow prisoners. The reason for this respect, according to Philo, was

that, “by setting before them his life of temperance (swfrosuvnh) and every virtue, like an

original picture of skilled workmanship, he converted even those who seemed to be quite

incurable.”

120

Josephus also mentioned this quality of self-control within the context of Joseph’s stay

in prison. After interpreting the dream of the “butler,” that is, cupbearer, Joseph

entreated him to “remember him who predicted thy felicity, and, once at liberty, do not

neglect me in the state wherein thou wilt leave me….”

121

Joseph then related the reason

for his stay in prison, noting that “it was no crime that brought me into these bonds: nay,

it was for virtue’s sake and for sobriety (swfrosuvnh) that I was condemned to undergo a

malefactor’s fate.”

122

Josephus also highlighted the role that reason played in Joseph’s

resistance to temptation. Throughout the temptation episode in Josephus’ Jewish

Antiquities, Joseph is depicted as the stoical voice of reason in contrast to the woman’s

desire for pleasure. When Potiphar’s wife first approached Joseph, soliciting him to lie

with her, Joseph rebuked her and instead of obeying her commands:

he besought her to govern her passions, representing the hopelessness of

satisfying her lust, which would shrink and die when she saw no prospect of

gratifying it, while for his part, he would endure anything rather than be obedient

to this bequest.

123

This rebuke served only to heighten the woman’s passion, and she decided to wait for

an opportune moment to approach him again. Josephus then recorded that on the

occasion of a public festival Potiphar’s wife, pretending to be ill, stayed at home plotting

119

Harm W. Hollander, “The Ethical Character of the Patriarch Joseph: A Study in the Ethics of the XII

Patriarchs,” in Studies on the Testament of Joseph, edited by George W.E. Nickelsburg (Missoula: Scholars

Press, 1975), 64-65. See also, Daniel J. Harrington, “Joseph in the Testament of Joseph, Pseudo-Philo, and

Philo,” Studies on the Testament of Joseph, 127-128.

120

Philo, On Joseph 87.

121

Josephus, Jewish Antiquities II.68.

122

Ibid., II.69.

123

Ibid., II.43.

to catch Joseph unawares in an empty house.

124

When Joseph entered the house to attend

to his duties, the woman cornered him, threatening him and pleading with him to

acquiesce to her desires. Instead, Joseph “recalled to her mind her marriage and wedded

life with her husband and besought her to pay more regard to this than the transient

pleasure of lust.”

125

Joseph argued that giving into her lust would only bring remorse,

“whereas union with her husband afforded enjoyment without danger, and moreover that

perfect confidence before God and man arising from a good conscience.”

126

Throughout

Josephus’ account, Joseph argued with the woman, attempting to “curb the woman’s

impulse and to turn her passion into the path of reason.”

127

Joseph’s adherence to that

“path of reason” protected him from falling prey to the woman’s desire.

This theme of adherence to reason was also emphasized in the Testaments of the

Twelve Patriarchs. The Testament of Reuben was earlier referred to as depicting the

extreme measures that Potiphar’s wife engaged in to force Joseph into submission to her

desires. In this testament, Reuben retold to his sons the story of Joseph’s trials as a

lesson in how to endure sexual temptation. Joseph’s example was held in contrast to

Reuben’s sin of sleeping with his father’s handmaid. The reason for this sin was that

Reuben did not obey reason. As a result of seeing his father’s handmaid bathing, Reuben

confessed, “For so absorbed were my senses by her naked feminity that I was not able to

sleep until I had performed this revolting act.”

128

Reuben ended his account by

reminding his sons that it was Joseph’s adherence to reason that protected him: “For if

promiscuity does not triumph over your reason, then neither can Beliar conquer you.”

129

Thus to the reader of this testament Reuben was a man given over to his senses leading

ultimately to sin, whereas the steadfast Joseph was ruled by the dictates of reason.

This theme can also be traced in the 1

century C.E. book, Fourth Maccabees. This

Hellenistic Jewish history is a reflection on the primacy of reason over the emotions, and

takes as its main examples the apocryphal account of Jewish martyrs under the reign of

124

See Louis Feldman, Josephus’ Interpretation of the Bible (Berkeley: University of California Press,

1998), 310, note 69, who sees this added element of a public festival as heightening the erotic element of

the story. This detail is also mentioned in later rabbinic writings (Genesis Rabbah 1.1.1).

125

Josephus, Jewish Antiquities II.57.

126

Ibid.

127

Ibid., II.54.

128

Testament of Reuben 3.12.

129

Ibid. 4.11.

the Syrian king Antiochus Epiphanes (c.167-164 B.C.E.).

130

The writer of the book also

used figures from Israel’s ancient past to highlight the role of reason. Joseph was

depicted in Fourth Maccabees as “the temperate Joseph”, who was praised because

“through his own rational faculty he gained mastery over his sensuality.”

131

This was no

easy task, for Joseph was “a young man at the prime of his sexual desire,” and yet,

through his obedience to reason, “he quenched the burning ardor of his passions.”

132

In summary, Joseph was portrayed in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs as a

moral exemplar, whose virtues of forgiveness, chastity, and reason gave him an honored

position among his brothers.

133

The Testaments incorporated specific elements of the

stories and legends concerning Joseph found in Hellenistic Jewish literature.

Chapter Three:

Joseph in the Apostolic Fathers and Early Apologists: Clement, the Epistle of

Barnabas, Justin Martyr, and Tertullian

Clement

The book of First Clement was written around the end of the 1

century C.E. The

author is not named in this letter addressed to the Corinthian church, but tradition has

ascribed it to the bishop or presbyter of Rome, Clement (fl. c. 96 C.E.).

134

He wrote to

the Corinthian church because of a recent change in their church leadership. Because of

strife in the church, some presbyters had been deposed. Clement warned the Corinthians

that “It is disgraceful, dear friends…that it should be reported that the well-established

and ancient church of the Corinthians, because of one or two persons, is rebelling against

its presbyters.”

135

Clement urged the church to reinstate the genuine presbyters. At the

130

See the introduction to Fourth Maccabees in Daniel J. Harrington, Invitation to the Apocrypha (Grand

Rapids: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1999), 207-218.

131

Fourth Maccabees 2.2. Translation by H. Aderson in The Old Testament Pseudepigrapha, vol. 2, edited

by James H. Charlesworth (Garden City: Doubleday and Co., Inc, 1983). Note the use again of the word

temperance (swfrosuvnh) in describing Joseph.

132

Fourth Maccabees 2.4.

133

Harm W. Hollander noted a medieval Hebrew Testament of Naphtali, which is similar in content though

more elaborate then the Testament of Naphtali found in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. In this

medieval testament there are some negative traditions preserved about Joseph. See Harm W. Hollander,

“Joseph in Hellenistic Jewish and Early Christian Literature,” 257-259.

134

See the Introduction to First Clement in The Apostolic Fathers, 24. See also F.L. Cross, editor, The

Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 299-300.

135

First Clement 47.6. All quotations for First Clement come from The Apostolic Fathers.

beginning of the letter, Clement offered reasons for the strife in Corinth, and he pointed

especially to rampant jealousy and envy. In so doing, Clement provided examples from

Scripture that illustrated the danger of jealousy and envy. These exempla lists are similar

to those seen in Acts 7 and Heb 11. Rowan Greer has suggested that such lists have their

roots in the Jewish synagogue, where “the homiletical use of biblical figures can treat

them as models to be followed or cautionary tales to be avoided.

136

Clement used Joseph

in one example noting, “Jealousy caused Joseph to be persecuted nearly to death, and to

be sold into slavery.”

137

Here Clement followed a straightforward interpretation of the

Old Testament text, employing the figure of Joseph as nothing more than an illustration.

The theme of the brothers’ jealousy of Joseph had been emphasized in Stephen’s speech

in Acts 7, and was also emphasized in the writings of Philo and Josephus. Philo noted

that “envy, which is ever the enemy of high success, in this case too set to work and

created division in a household where every part had been happily flourishing, and stirred

up the many brethren against the one.”

138

In summary, Clement highlighted a key theme in the story of Joseph concerning his

relationship with his brothers. Clement, as in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs,

interpreted this event within an ethical context. Harm W. Hollander has argued that this

emphasis on the ethical context of the Joseph story in early Christian literature was

influence by Hellenistic Judaism, and “In various situations where moral exhortation is

required, including religious services, the example of Joseph is frequently adduced.”

139

Clement does use typology elsewhere in his letter to interpret Old Testament texts, but he

never employs it as his only approach.

140

The Epistle of Barnabus

The Epistle of Barnabas was written in the 2

century C.E., possibly in Alexandria,

Egypt.

141

It has been described as the “earliest [Christian] writing outside of the New

136

James L. Kugel and Rowan A. Greer, Early Biblical Interpretation, 1st ed. (Philadelphia: Westminster

Press, 1986), 137.

137

First Clement 4.9.

138

Philo, On Joseph II.5. See also Josephus, Jewish Antiquities II.1.2.

139

Harm W. Hollander, Joseph in Hellenistic Jewish and Early Christian Literature, 259.

140

See 16.1-14 and 36.5, noted by Willis A. Shotwell, The Biblical Exegesis of Justin Martyr (London:

S.P.C.K., 1965), 64.

141

See the introduction to the Epistle of Barnabas in The Apostolic Fathers, 160.

Testament which deals at length with ‘Jewish questions’.”

142

There is one mention of

Joseph in this epistle, where he is noted in connection with the blessing of his two sons

by Jacob. The writer of the epistle begins the account with the comment, “Now let us see

whether this people or the former people is the heir, and whether the covenant is for us or

for them.”

143

The writer was speaking concerning Judaism, and throughout the text he “attempts to

show that the covenant of ancient Israel has now become the covenant of the Church.”

144

The writer began by recalling the story of Rebecca who was told by the Lord that the two

children in her womb, Esau and Jacob, were “two nations…and the greater will serve the

lesser (Gen 25:21-23).” The writer then elaborated on this theme by describing the

blessing of Joseph’s sons. Jacob asked Joseph to bring his two sons Manasseh and

Ephraim to him for the blessing. Joseph brought his oldest son Manasseh to Jacob’s right

hand- the hand of blessing- because he was the firstborn. “But Jacob saw in the Spirit a

symbol of the people to come. And what does he say? ‘And Jacob crossed his hands and

placed his right hand on the head of Ephraim, the second and younger, and blessed

him’”

145

Joseph tried to get Jacob to change his hand to Manasseh, but Jacob replied, “I

know my child, I know; but the greater will serve the lesser. Yet this one too shall be

blessed.”

146

The conclusion of the writer of the epistle was that, “Observe how by these

means he has ordained that this people should be first, and heir of the covenant.”

147

Willis Shotwell has noted that the writer of the Epistle of Barnabas was in no way

discerning in his use of the Old Testament. “He quotes texts apart from their context, and

completely destroys any historical understanding of the Old Testament. All of the Old

Testament has a hidden meaning which can be found in Christ and his followers.”

148

This theme of the younger child receiving the blessing was a popular interpretive tool

in the early church to demonstrate that Christians were the true heirs of the covenant.

Irenaeus employed this theme in his Against Heresies in dealing with the story of Esau

and Jacob. He noted that Esau “looks on the blessing of the firstborn with contempt so

142

Wilken, Judaism and the Early Christian Mind, 12.

143

Epistle of Barnabas 13.1. All quotes from the Epistle of Barnabas are from The Apostolic Fathers.

144

Wilken, 13.

145

Epistle of Barnabas 13.5.

146

Ibid. The writer is largely quoting from Gen 48: 14, 18, 19.

147

Ibid., 13.6.

148

Shotwell, 65.

Jacob receives the blessing, just as younger nation received the blessing when the older

said ‘We have no king but Caesar.’”

149

Thus Irenaeus concluded, “the latter people have

snatched the blessing of the former from the Father just as Jacob took away the blessing

from Esau.”

150

For both of these writers, a common theme of the Old Testament has been

interpreted to find its true significance in the replacement of the Jews with the church in

the covenant with God.

Justin Martyr and Tertullian

Justin Martyr (c.100-c.165 C.E.) was an early Christian apologist who had been

converted from Greco-Roman paganism. Justin’s conversion was facilitated by his

acceptance of a Christological interpretation of history, which focused on Christ’s

fulfillment of the prophecies of the Old Testament.

151

As a result, Justin’s writings

demonstrate a marked concern in his writings for a hermeneutic of typology and

fulfillment.

152

Justin mentioned Joseph in passing at various points in his works, but did

not elaborate much on the figure of Joseph. However, in one section of his Dialogue with

Trypho Justin gives a typological interpretation of the figure of Joseph in relationship to

Moses’ prophecy about him in Deut 33.17. The text from the Septuagint read, “Let him

(Joseph) be like the firstling of a bullock; his horns the horns of an unicorn: with these

shall he push the nations from one end of the earth to another.”

153

Justin interpreted this

passage typologically, noting that

the horns of a unicorn represent…the type which portrays the cross. For the one

beam is placed upright, from which the highest extremity is raised up into a horn,

when the other beam is fitted on to it, and the ends appear on both sides as horns

joined to the one horn. And the part which is fixed in the center, on which are

suspended those who are crucified, also stands out like a horn; and it also looks

like a horn conjoined and fixed with the other horns.

154

Justin works out this elaborate system to emphasize that this strange statement about

Joseph is actually pointing toward the cross. In addition, Justin interprets the prophecy of

149

Irenaeus Against Heresies 4.21.3. Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol 1.

150

Ibid.

151

See Henry Wace and William C. Piercy, editors, A Dictionary of Early Christian Biography (Peabody:

Hendrickson Publishers, 1999), 617.

152

Shotwell, 29.

153

Justin Dialogue with Trypho XCL, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol 1.

154

Ibid.

the horns pushing the nations, as “indicative of what is now the fact among all the

nations. For some out of all the nations, through the power of this mystery, having been

so pushed, that is, pricked in their hearts, have turned from vain idols and demons to

serve God.”

155

Tertullian (fl. c.196-c.212 C.E.), the anti-Gnostic writer from North Africa, also

mentioned this passage from Deut 33.17, and likewise interpreted it as referring to the

cross in his An Answer to the Jews, and again in his work Against Marcion.

156

Tertullian

also made reference to Joseph’s being sold by his brothers into Egypt, in An Answer to

the Jews. He noted, “Joseph, again, himself was made a figure of Christ in this point

alone…that he suffered persecution at the hands of his brethren, and was sold into Egypt

on account of the favor of God.”

157

Tertullian then applied this type to Christ noting that

likewise, “Christ was sold by Israel- and therefore, ‘according to the flesh,’ by his

‘brethren’- when he is betrayed by Judas.”

158

For both of these writers, Joseph is seen as a type that pointed toward a fuller reality in

the person of Christ. Both fall within the tradition of approaching the Old Testament

Scriptures with a Christological hermeneutic. The ties for the church to the history of

Israel are through the lines of Christ, who fulfills all that is written in the Old Testament.

Key to this theme, however, is still the issue of making connections between the history

of Israel and the church. Both Justin and Tertullian knew that connecting Christianity to

the ancient traditions was a necessary element in defining its content within the Greco-

Roman world.

Chapter Four:

Joseph in Origen

Origen (c.185-c.254 C.E.) was, as noted by Gerald Bray, “By any standard of

measurement…the greatest biblical scholar of antiquity.”

159

He produced numerous

commentaries, collections of sermons, the first piece of textual criticism (the Hexapla),

155

Ibid.

156

An Answer to the Jews 10; Against Marcion 3.18.

157

Tertullian An Answer to the Jews 10, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 3.

158

Ibid. Note the discussion of these texts in A.W. Argyle, “Joseph the Patriarch in Patristic Teaching,”

The Expository Times 67 (1956): 199.

159

Gerald Bray, Biblical Interpretation Past & Present, 83.

and many philosophical treatises, including the well-known systematic theology On the

First Things. Many of Origen’s works have been lost, due to his condemnation for

heresy, first at the Council of Alexandria in 400, and then at the Council of

Constantinople in 543.

160

Even still, “Origen’s extant works comprise by far the largest

body of work by a single author to survive from the first three centuries of the Christian

church.”

161

Origen was the leading proponent of the allegorical method of interpretation of

Scripture. Origen viewed the Scriptures, “as a vast ocean, or (using a different image)

forest, of mysteries; it was impossible to fathom, or even perceive, them all, but one

could be sure that every line, even every word, the sacred authors wrote was replete with

meaning.”

162

This meaning was primarily to be understood as pointing to Christ. Origen

distinguished a three part approach to interpreting Scripture:

The first sense is the literal one, designed for the non-intellectual mind, but

necessary as the basis from which the other senses were to be discerned. The

second is the moral one, corresponding to the life of the soul. The third is the

spiritual sense, the highest and most important of all…only grasped by

revelation.

163

Origen’s Homilies on Genesis

Origen’s sermons provide a wealth of allusions to the figure of Joseph, particularly his

sermons dealing with the text of Genesis. Origen interpreted Joseph both as a moral

example and also as an allegorical type of Christ.

The only surviving texts of these sermons are the Latin translations by Rufinus. His

translations provoked a storm of controversy in antiquity as to their fidelity to Origen’s

Greek texts. And, there has been some question of how much the sermons are Rufinus

speaking through the character of Origen. However, Ronald Heine has concluded that

though Rufinus has made alterations, and the original text can not be reconstructed, still

“one may say that, on the whole, the substance can be regarded as representing Origen’s

160

“Origenism,” Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 1010.

161

Joseph W. Trigg, Biblical Interpretation, 23.

162

J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 73.

163

Bray, 101-102.

thought.”

164

Heine agreed with Henry Chadwick’s observation on Rufinus’ translation of

Origen’s Commentary on Romans: “The voice is the voice of Origen, even though the

hands are the hands of Rufinus.”

165

In Genesis Homily II, Origen preached a message on Noah and the Ark from Gen 6.

He developed an allegorical theme for the dimensions of the ark (300 cubits long, 50

wide, 30 high).

166

In interpreting the dimensions of width and height, Origen noted that

“you will discover many great events to be comprised under the number 30 or

50….Joseph was 30 years old when he was led out of prison and received the rule of all

of Egypt.”

167

Joseph was led out in order, “that he might divert the calamity of an

imminent famine.”

168

This was the first mention of Joseph in this grouping of homilies,

and provides a glimpse into Origen’s allegorical method. Since all details of Scripture

were inspired, then even the mundane dimensions of the ark must have been placed there

for spiritual benefit. In this case, Joseph is used as an example of the importance of this

number. Origen interprets the number 30’s significance, because 30 is 10 multiplied by

three. “But the sum is reduced to one, the number of the total construction, because

‘there is one God the Father from whom are all things, and one Lord…and all things

hasten to the one goal of the perfection of God.”

169

In Genesis Homily XV, Origen exposited Gn 45:25-28. He was intrigued by the

contrast in this passage of the phrases “go up” and “go down.” The brothers of Joseph

“go up” to bring news of Joseph to Jacob, who then “goes down” to visit Joseph. To

Origen going up is a good symbol, while the going down is not, “For if we were to give

diligent consideration, we would discover that almost never is anyone related to have

gone down to a holy place nor is anyone related to have gone up to a blameworthy

place.”

170

Origen was alluding to Jacob and his family’s descent into Egypt, but for

Origen Egypt symbolized a place of evil desire. Origen noted that the patriarchs tell

164

Origen Homilies on Genesis and Exodus, translated by Ronald Heine, The Fathers of the Church

(Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1982), 38. All quotes from Origen’s

commentary will come from this translation.

165

Ibid., 39.

166

Ibid.

167

Ibid., 83.

168

Ibid.

169

Ibid.

170

Genesis Homily XV.1, 203.

Jacob, “Joseph your son is living” (Gen 45.26). But, “these words are not said in the

usual sense.”

171

This would not have been said of Joseph if he had sinned with Potiphar’s

wife, “the soul that sins, the same shall die”(Ezek 18.4).

172

Joseph, though living in

Egypt away from his people and land, was able to remain pure. Thus Joseph is said to

have in Gen 45.26 “dominion over all Egypt.” Why was this an important point to

Origen? Origen viewed “dominion over Egypt” as an allegorical symbol meaning “to

tread on lust, to flee luxury, and to suppress and curb all the pleasures of the body.”

173

Origen identified Egypt in other homilies as a symbol of the pleasures and lusts of the

body. For example, he noted in Genesis Homily XVI, that when the Egyptians had sold

their land to the Pharaoh, they were allowed to cultivate it, but had to offer a fifth of the

produce to Pharaoh.

174

Origen contrasted this tithe to that of the people of Israel, who

offer a tenth (a tithe) to their priests. Why is there this difference in the numbers?

Origen argued, “See the Egyptian people weighing out contributions with the number

five; for the five senses in the body are designated, which carnal people serve; for the

Egyptians always submit to things visible and corporal.”

175

Origen’s allegory of Egypt as the place of bodily desires and pleasure was drawing on

a similar allegory in the writings of Philo of Alexandria. Philo noted in The Migration of

Abraham that God contemplated in the exodus “taking out all of the population of the

soul right away from Egypt, the body, and away from its inhabitants; deeming it a most

sore and heavy burden that an understanding endowed with vision should be under the

pressure of the pleasures of the flesh.”

176

Josephus also portrayed Egypt as a place

characterized by evil desire. He labeled the Egyptians as “a voluptuous people and slack

to labour, slaves to pleasure in general and to a love of lucre in particular.”

177

Interestingly, Philo does shift this view of Egypt as the symbol of bodily pleasure on to

Joseph himself. In The Migration of Abraham, Philo, as Origen had earlier done with

171

Ibid., 204.

172

Ibid., XV.2, 205. The translations of the biblical text are from the ones supplied in Origen’s homily.

173

Ibid. XV.3, 206-207.

174

See Gen 47.24.

175

Ibid. XVI.6, 223.

176

Philo The Migration of Abraham III.14, translated by F. H. Colson and Rev. G. H. Whitaker, The Loeb

Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1958). See also On Change of Names

XXXI.171, 174; Allegorical Interpretation IIV.242. All quotations from Philo are from the Loeb edition.

177

Josephus, Jewish Antiquities II.201.

Egypt, associated the number five with Joseph. Joseph is compared to the number five

because, “belonging to the five senses with him who hails as friends the body and the

things outside the body, him who is usually called Joseph.”

178

Also, Philo calls Joseph in

On the Change of Names the “controller of bodily necessaries.”

179

This may, however,

have come about because of Joseph’s close association with Egypt.

Origen used this image of Egypt as the place of bodily pleasure to highlight Joseph as

a moral example. The strength of Egypt as a place of desire and temptation was implied

in Jacob’s excitement over the knowledge that his son has “dominion over Egypt”.

180

was a wonder to Jacob that Joseph was able to thrive in such a place. Origen thought that

it was also important to note that Joseph’s dominion was over all of Egypt, because “If

someone who should subject at least some vices of the body, but yield to others and be

subject to them, it is not said correctly of him that he holds ‘dominion over the whole

land of Egypt.’” This is not the case with Joseph, “whom no bodily lust ruled, was prince

and Lord ‘of all Egypt’”

181

Origen’s point again highlighted the emphasis on Joseph as a

virtuous example in both Hellenistic Jewish and early Christian exegesis. Joseph was

able to gain control over Egypt, the symbol of bodily desire and temptation, by his

chastity and self-control.

Origen’s Exegetical Method

In Origen’s Exodus Homily I, he noted from Ex 1.6-7 that when Joseph and his

brothers died that the Israelites “increased in number.” “While Joseph was living it is not

reported that the sons of Israel were multiplied nor is anything at all mentioned about

increases and multitudes in these times.”

182

Origen focused in on this small point in the

text, because “I, believing in the words of my Lord Jesus Christ, do not think that an ‘iota

or point’ in the Law and prophets is void of mysteries, nor do I think ‘any of these things

can pass away until all things come about”(Mt 5.18).

183

This was a clear statement of

Origen’s sense that everything in Scripture has been placed there for a reason, and

178

Philo The Migration of Abraham XXXVII.203.

179

Philo, On the Change of Names XIV.89.

180

Origen Genesis Homily XV.3, 206.

181

Ibid., 207.

182

Origen Exodus Homily I.4, 231.

183

Ibid.

requires the attention of the interpreter. Origen explained this increase in the number of

the Israelites by shifting into an interpretation which mixes elements of allegory and

typology. He noted that “The sons of Israel were very few before our Joseph died, who

was sold for thirty pieces of silver by Juda one of his brothers.”

184

Origen has shifted the

focus from solely the Genesis narrative, describing the increase of the people at Joseph’s

death, to a focus on another “Joseph”. “But when he tasted death for all, by which ‘he

destroyed him who had the rule of death, that is the devil,’ the people of faith were

multiplied.”

185

Origen then added the testimony of this other “Joseph”, meaning Christ:

“For unless, as he said, ‘a grain of wheat had fallen into the earth and died,’ the Church

would certainly not have produced this huge harvest of the whole earth.”

186

Origen goes on to apply this allegory within a moral context. He noted, “If, therefore,

Joseph die in you also, that is, if you assume the dying of Christ in your body and you

make your members dead to sin, then ‘the sons of Israel are multiplied in you.”

187

The

“sons of Israel” are then given an allegorical meaning: “The ‘sons of Israel’ are

interpreted as good and spiritual senses. If therefore, the senses of the flesh are put to

death, the senses of the spirit increase, and while the vices are dying in you daily, the

number of virtues is being increased.”

188

Origen constructed this elaborate moral allegory from Ex 1.6-7 because of the belief

that nothing was placed in Scripture by chance. In addition, he was able to do this,

because the historical dimension of the text was only of secondary importance to him. As

he noted later in the same homily, “These words are not written to instruct us in history,

nor must we think that the divine books narrate the acts of the Egyptians. What has been

written ‘has been written for our instruction and admonition.’”

189

Origen was using as a

base for his allegorization of this text about Joseph and his brothers’ deaths, the argument

of Paul in 1 Cor 10. Here Paul gives a brief synopsis of Israel’s history during the exodus

and the years of wandering in the desert. Similarly to Origen, Paul’s reflection on these

events was that “These things happened to them as examples and were written down as

184

Ibid., 232.

185

Ibid.

186

Ibid.

187

Ibid.

188

Ibid.

189

Origen Exodus Homily I.5, 234.

warnings for us, on whom the fulfillment of the ages has come.”

190

For Paul, there was

still a historical element in the event “these things happened to them.” Yet their ultimate

meaning is that they are instructive as moral examples to the Christian reader of Paul’s

letter. And, the reason that Paul was able to connect these historical events in Israel’s

past to his readers was that in the church, “the fulfillment of the ages has come.”

Origen builds further on this argument of Paul, in his interpretation of Romans 4.

Origen noted in reference to Romans 4.3 “Abraham believed God, and it was credited to

him as righteousness,” that “the Apostle says that these things were written, not for

Abraham’s sake alone but also for ours…Indeed is not everything which is said about

him said not for his sake alone but also for us?”

191

Origen further applied this principle

noting, “It is similar for what is written about Jacob and the other patriarchs. For what

reason could there seem to be that what was indeed written about Abraham could be said

to pertain to us, but, although similar in form, not what was said about Isaac and Jacob

and Judah and Joseph and the others?”

192

Origen was arguing that the chain of

interpretation was linked from Abraham to Joseph, and thus “it will be logical that,

concerning everything that has been written, not only for the sake of those who were

living at the time but also for our sake, they have been written.”

193

Thus, for Origen

“what had happened was important because of its bearing upon the present. The meaning

of history and not history as such found pride of place.”

194

In one sense, this method of interpretation was drawn from Paul’s own conclusions

concerning the history of Israel. However, for Origen the more direct influence was

likely Philo’s interpretive method. Philo noted in The Confusion of Tongues that a

straightforward reading of a text focusing on the letters was insufficient to ascertain the

true meaning. Philo argued that, “the letter is to the oracle but as the shadow to the

substance.”

195

To press on to the “higher values,” the reader must employ an allegorical

interpretation to the text. Philo’s allegorical method, according to Marcel Simon,

“consisted in a search beneath the letter of scripture for an expression of transcendent

190

1 Cor 10.11.

191

Origen, Commentary on the Epistle to Romans, translated by Thomas P. Scheck, The Fathers of the

Church (Washington, D.C.: 2001), 277.

192

Ibid.

193

Ibid.

194

Kugel and Greer, Early Biblical Interpretation, 201.

195

Philo, The Confusion of Tongues 190.

truths.”

196

Origen argued in his apologetic work Contra Celsum that Christian and

Jewish interpretation were fundamentally different: “we both confess that the books were

written by divine inspiration, but concerning the interpretation of the contents of the

books we no longer speak alike.”

197

Origen added that differences in interpretation

centered around the fact, “that we think the literal interpretation of the laws does not

contain the meaning of the legislation.”

198

This argument, however, overlooked the fact

that Origen’s allegorical method was modeled on the exegesis of Philo. Origen was,

similarly to Philo, concerned with pushing the readers beyond the letter of the text into

the experience of its transcendent truths, thus Origin’s interpretation “moves from the

letter of the narrative meaning to the spirit of the allegorical meaning mysteriously

embodied in the text.”

199

Of course, for Origen this allegorization was meant to elicit a

distinctively Christian reading of the Scriptures. Still, Origen was concerned with

emphasizing the connection of the Scriptures to the present context of the reader, and as

such the allegorical method in early Christian interpretation continued the distinctive

concerns of Hellenistic Judaism. And, as Simon argued “With respect both to the

principles and to some of the results a clear line of development is traceable from one to

the other.”

200

Chapter Five:

Joseph in the Syriac Sources up to the 4

Century C.E.

The Syriac Church reflected a tradition of interpretation centered on the use of the

Semitic language of Syriac as its primary language of discourse. Syrian Christianity had

a very long tradition of close association with Judaism in both its founding myth and in

its on-going dialogue with the strong Jewish communities of Syria.

201

As such, the two

196

Simon, Verus Israel : A Study of the Relations between Christians and Jews in the Roman Empire, 135-

425, 151.

197

Origen, Contra Celsum, V.60.

198

Ibid.

199

Kugel and Greer, Early Biblical Interpretation, 179.

200

Simon, Verus Israel : A Study of the Relations between Christians and Jews in the Roman Empire, 135-

425, 150.

201

See Labubna bar Sennak, The Teaching of Addai, trans. George Howard (Chico, Calif.: Scholars Press,

1981), 74.

writers examined in this study, Aphrahat and Ephrem, offer good insight into Early

Christian interpretation of the Hebrew Scriptures.

Joseph in Aphrahat the Persian Sage

There are few biographical details available for Aphrahat (fl. 337-345). Other than

knowing that he wrote in Syriac and was identified in later Syriac traditions as the

“Persian Sage,” the only available information is what can be deduced from his one

extant work, Demonstrations. The Demonstrations is a series of twenty- three letters

arranged by topics that summarize the Christian faith. These letters were written around

345 C.E.

202

Aphrahat addressed these to the “children of the Church of God.”

203

Aphrahat stated that he wrote the Demonstrations to these children of the Church in order

that,

when these come into their hands in various places, and when they read in them,

they may also remember my insignificance in their prayers, and may know that I

am a sinner also, and fail short; but that this is my faith, that I have set forth from

the beginning and written, in these chapters written (by me).

204

From the few autobiographical remarks in the text of the Demonstrations it can be said

that, “He was an ascetic, evidently holding some important ecclesiastical office, and lived

through the persecution of the Sasanid king, Shapur II.”

205

Though Demonstrations is a short text, Aphrahat provided many examples of how he

interpreted the Old Testament scriptures. Aphrahat used characters from the Hebrew

scriptures as examples for his summary of the faith, and, of particular interest to this

study, he mentioned Joseph the patriarch in several sections of his letters. In

Demonstration I, Aphrahat addressed the topic of faith. He drew on several examples

from Israel’s history to demonstrate the necessity of faith, and the blessings for those who

possess it. He used Abel, Enoch, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. He then listed

202

Robert Murray, Symbols of Church and Kingdom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 29.

203

Aphrahat, Demonstrations XXII.25 in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol XIII, edited by

John Gwynn (Grand Rapids: William B Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1987). All quotations from

Demonstrations come from this edition.

204

Ibid.

205

F. L. Cross, editor, The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (New York: Oxford University

Press, 1974), 68.

Joseph as an example, noting “Joseph, because of his faith, was tried in the waters of

contention, and was delivered from his trial, and his Lord established a witness in him, as

David said:-Witness hath he established in Joseph.”

206

Aphrahat did not point out a

specific event here, but sees rather Joseph’s whole life as an example of one who,

because of faith, is able to endure trials. Aphrahat’s list included examples from Israel’s

history culminating in the life of Christ. Aphrahat’s stated purpose in using these

examples, including Joseph, was:

when thou hast read and learned the works of faith, thou mayest be made like

unto that tilled land upon which the good seed fell, and produced fruit a hundred-

fold and sixty-fold and thirty-fold. And when thou comest to thy Lord, He may

call thee a good servant and prudent and faithful, who on account of His faith, that

abounded, is to enter into the Kingdom of his Lord.

207

Joseph then, as well as the other characters used by Aphrahat, is a witness, or exemplar to

be followed in the reader’s own pursuit of faith.

208

Aphrahat repeatedly engaged in this type of moral exposition using Joseph and others

as exemplars for his readers. In Demonstration V, Aphrahat discussed a common theme

observed in scripture: characters who exalt themselves are eventually humbled. Aphrahat

gave the example of Cain and Abel, the Sodomites and Lot, Esau and Jacob, but also the

sons of Jacob in their dealings with Joseph. Aphrahat noted “And the children of Jacob

gloried over Joseph, and (afterwards) fell down and worshipped him in Egypt.”

209

Likewise, in Demonstration VI, addressed to monks, Joseph’s temptation by Potiphar’s

wife was used as an example to warn monks that Satan often entices to sin through the

medium of a woman. Aphrahat first noted that Adam was tempted through Eve, and then

added “And again he came in against Joseph through his master's wife, but Joseph was

acquainted with his craftiness and would not afford him a hearing.”

210

Aphrahat also used Joseph as an example to pastors in Demonstration X. Aphrahat

described the vocation of a pastor, noting “Pastors are set over the flock, and give the

sheep the food of life. Whosoever is watchful, and toils in behalf of his sheep, is careful

206

Aphrahat, Demonstrations I.14. The reference attributed to David is from Ps 81.5.

207

Ibid., I.20.

208

Note the similarities of this list of pre-Mosaic heroes of faith to that of Hebrews 11, although the list in

Hebrews curiously emphasized the instructions given by Joseph for the care of his bones as evidence of his

faith. See the discussion below concerning the importance of the theme of the care of Joseph’s bones.

209

Ibid., V.3.

210

Ibid., VI.3.

for his flock, and is the disciple of our Good Shepherd, who gave Himself in behalf of

His sheep.”

211

Aphrahat drew on the imagery of the shepherd to illustrate what a pastor

is called to do within the church. He recalls how many of the characters from Israel’s

history were shepherds, including Jacob, Joseph and his brothers, Moses, David, and

Amos. Aphrahat then proposed the question, “Now, why, my beloved, did these pastors

first feed the sheep, and were then chosen to be pastors of men?”

212

The answer for

Aphrahat was that being a shepherd prepares one to become a pastor: “Clearly that they

might learn how a pastor cares for his sheep, and is watchful and toils in behalf of his

sheep. And when they had learned the manners of pastors, they were chosen for the

pastoral office.”

213

Aphrahat used Joseph as one example of the vocation of shepherding

as preparation for pastoring. He observed, “Joseph used to tend the sheep along with his

brethren; and in Egypt he became guide to a numerous people, and led them back, as a

good pastor does his flock.”

214

Aphrahat similarly observed later in his address, “Thus

Joseph was chosen from the sheep, to guide the Egyptians in the time of affliction.”

215

A similar observation concerning Joseph was made by Philo in his treatise On Joseph.

Philo noted Joseph was trained for his position as a statesman in Egypt from the time of

his youth. “This training was first given to him at about the age of seventeen by the lore

of the shepherd’s craft, which corresponds closely to the lore of statesmanship.”

216

Philo

argued success in shepherding will prepare one for future success as a king,

since through the charge of flocks which deserve less thought and care he has

been taught the charge of the noblest flock of living creatures-mankind…so to

those who hope to superintend a state nothing is so suitable as shepherding, which

gives practice in the exercise of authority and generalship.

217

One of Aphrahat’s longest reference to Joseph is found in his account of Joseph’s

death and the burial of his bones. The reference comes from Demonstration VIII in

which Aphrahat dealt with the topic of the resurrection. Aphrahat began the discussion

by noting the hope that the patriarchs had in a future resurrection. In particular, he

211

Ibid., X.1.

212

Ibid., X.2.

213

Ibid.

214

Ibid.

215

Ibid., X.5.

216

Philo, On Joseph I.2. Translated by F. H. Colson, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: 1966).

217

Ibid., I.2-3.

mentioned Jacob who made Joseph swear an oath that he would not bury him in Egypt,

but return him to the land of his fathers. Aphrahat then posed the question, “And why,

my beloved, did Jacob not wish to be buried in Egypt, but with his fathers?”

218

The

answer given by Aphrahat is that Jacob was looking ahead to the day of the resurrection

when, “he might rise up near to his fathers, and might not at the time of the Resurrection

be mingled with the wicked who shall return to Sheol and to punishment.”

219

This

explanatory note offered by Aphrahat, closely resembles a similar discussion in the

Midrashic literature. The rabbis dealt in a similar way with the request of Jacob to

Joseph that he be buried in the land of his ancestors. The questions was posed, “Why

were all the Patriarchs so anxious and so desirous for burial in Eretz Israel?”

220

One of

the answers offered was “Because the dead of Eretz Israel will be the first to be

resurrected in the days of the Messiah and to enjoy the years of the Messiah.”

221

Both

Aphrahat and the rabbis of Genesis Rabbah place this issue within the context of the

resurrection.

Aphrahat then went on to discuss the oath that Joseph had his brothers make, that

when the sons and daughters of Israel left the land of Egypt they should take his bones

with them to be buried in the land of Joseph’s fathers. Aphrahat noted that when the time

came for Israel to leave Egypt, Moses remembered to obtain the bones of Joseph and take

them with the Israelites in their exodus.

222

The reason for this, according to Aphrahat

was that to Moses, “the bones of the righteous man were more precious and better in his

estimation than the gold and the silver that the children of Israel took from Egypt when

they spoiled them.”

223

Aphrahat was here contrasting the reference in Ex 12.35-37,

where the Israelites plundered the gold and silver of the Egyptians to Moses’

remembrance of the bones of Joseph. Aphrahat recognized some special worth for

218

Ibid., VIII.7.

219

Ibid.

220

Genesis Rabbbah XCVI.5. Translation form Midrash Rabbah, edited by H. Freedman and Maurice

Simon (London: Soncino Press, !961). All further quotes from Genesis Rabbah come from this edition of

the text.

221

Ibid. It is interesting to note that a concern is then raised for the righteous who were not able to be

buried in Eretz Israel. This problem is resolved by the observation that God “makes cavities like channels

for them in the earth, and they roll along in them until they reach Eretz Israel, when the Holy One, blessed

be He, will infuse into them a spirit of life and they will arise.”

222

Ex 13.19

223

Aphrahat, Demonstrations VIII.8.

Joseph’s bones, and this worth was also recognized by Ephrem in his Commentary on

Exodus. Ephrem noted that “The people took the spoils from the Egyptians, and Moses

took the bones of Joseph.”

224

In addition, their worth was recognized in the Midrashic

and Talmudic literature, where an extensive corpus of legends and traditions arose

concerning the care of Joseph’s bones.

225

James Kugel has argued that these legends

proliferated because of the repeated references to the care of Joseph’s bones in the

Biblical text: Joseph himself gave instructions concerning his bones in Gen 50.24-26;

Moses was reported as remembering to collect Joseph’s bones before leaving Egypt in Ex

13.19; and the book of Joshua recorded the burial of Joseph’s bones in the promised land

at Shechem (Josh 24.32).

226

This theme of the importance of Joseph’s bones was also reflected in Hellenistic

Jewish literature. The apocryphal book of Sirach closed its reflection on wisdom with a

hymn which listed “praises of famous men, our ancestors in their generations.”

227

Included in this list of famous men was Joseph, of whom the writer noted “Nor was

anyone ever born like Joseph; even his bones were cared for.”

228

Though the focus in

both Sirach and in Heb 11 on Joseph’s bones being a source of his renown is curious,

even more peculiar is the reference in the Testament of Simeon of the magical qualities

attached to Joseph’s bones. Here the children of Simeon are reported as having carried

his bones to be buried at the traditional burial site of Hebron in Palestine. However, the

writer noted: “The bones of Joseph the Egyptians kept in the tombs of the kings, since

their wizards told them that at the departure of Joseph’s bones there would be darkness

224

Ephrem, Commentary on Exodus XIII.1. Translation by Edward G. Mathews and Joseph P. Amar in St.

Ephrem the Syrian Selected Prose Works,The Fathers of the Church (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic

University of America Press, 1994). See also the account in Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews,

vol.2 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), 182. Ginzberg listed some later Jewish

sources that also record the contrasts of Israel’s desire for gold and silver and Moses’ care of Joseph’s

bones.

225

See James L. Kugel, In Potiphar’s House (San Francisco: Harper Collins Publishers, 1990), 125-155;

Shalom Goldman, The Wiles of Women/The Wiles of Men (Albany: State University of New York Press,

1995), 119-143; Ginzburg, 181-184.

226

Kugel, 128-129.

227

Sirach 44.1. Translation taken from “The Apocryphal and Pseudepigraphal Books,” NRSV Reference

Bible with the Apocrypha. Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1993.

228

Sirach 49.15.

and gloom in the whole land and a great plague on the Egyptians, so that even with a

lamp no one could recognize his brother.”

229

Aphrahat’s account next moved to the transfer of the bones from Moses, to Joshua,

and then to burial in the land of promise. Aphrahat noted that Joseph’s bones

accompanied Moses and the people during the forty years of wandering in the wilderness.

When Moses died he passed the bones on to Joshua as his inheritance. Joshua treasured

this gift, because “The bones of Joseph his father were better in his estimation than all the

spoil of that land which he subdued.”

230

Aphrahat then asked why Joshua received the

bones of Joseph. The answer was, “Clearly, because he was of the tribe of Ephraim the

son of Joseph.”

231

Joshua took the bones, and “buried them in the land of promise, that

there might be in that land a treasure, (even) that of the bones of Joseph (that were)

buried therein.”

232

Again, Aphrahat placed here a special value on these old bones of

Joseph that reflecting similar traditions in Jewish interpretations. Ephrem described in

more detail this honored burial of Joseph’s bones in Hymn 19 of his Hymns on Virginity:

Joshua Bar Nun gathered a congregation,

and came carrying Joseph with great pomp;

he placed him in you. From his bones

wafted the smell of his victory.

A desirable blossom and a triumphant flower

struggled with fire and extinguished it.

Who has even seen a blossom that surrounded itself with its glory?

233

Aphrahat also interpreted Joseph as a type prefiguring Christ. In Demonstration

XXI, Aphrahat addressed the issue of persecution. Here he noted, “Joseph who was

persecuted was a type of the persecuted Jesus.”

234

Aphrahat then detailed events in the

life of Joseph, observing there hints and foreshadowings of similar events in the life of

Christ. Aphrahat compared Joseph being clothed by his father in a coat of many colors to

Jesus being clothed by God in human flesh. Joseph’s brothers threw him into a pit, as

Jesus’ brothers (the Jews) threw him into the grave. Joseph rose from the pit, and

229

Testament of Simeon 8.3.

230

Aphrahat, Demonstrations VIII.8.

231

Ibid.

232

Ibid.

233

Ephrem, Hymns on Virginity Hymn 19.7. Translation by Kathleen E. McVey, Ephrem the Syrian

Hymns (New York: Paulist Press, 1989).

234

Aphrahat, Demonstrations XXI.9.

likewise Jesus rose from the dead. When Joseph revealed himself to his brothers, they

were afraid of him, and when Jesus returns his brothers will be afraid because they

crucified him. Joseph was sold into Egypt on the counsel of Judah, and Jesus was sold by

Judas Iscariot to the Jews. Joseph left behind two garments, one to his brothers (the coat

of many colors) and one in the hands of Potiphar’s wife, likewise Jesus left behind his

clothes, which were divided by the soldiers. Joseph gave bread to the whole world

during his administration in Egypt, and Jesus supplied to the whole world the bread of

life. Joseph married the daughter of an unclean priest in Egypt, and Jesus took for his

bride the church, composed of the unclean Gentiles.

235

There is a similar list of

typologies of Joseph and Christ in the later sermon attributed to Ephrem, Sermon on

Joseph the Most Virtuous.

In summary, Aphrahat interpreted Joseph as a moral exemplar and as a type whose life

prefigured that of Christ. Aphrahat also showed familiarity with and use of Rabbinic and

Hellenistic Jewish traditions and legends in his interpretation of the figure of Joseph.

Joseph in Ephrem the Syrian

As for Aphrahat, so also for Ephrem (c.306-373), the biographical details provided are

very few. There are a number of late sources which give more details, however many of

these incorporate legendary materials and are questionable as primary sources.

236

It is

known that Ephrem was born in Nisibis, a city in northeastern Mesopotamia probably to

Christian parents. He lived most of his life in Nisibis, but in 363 upon the death of Julian

the Apostate, Nisibis was given by Jovinian to the Sassanid empire. This event brought

about a mass exodus of Christians from the city, some of which, like Ephrem, ended up

in Edessa to the west. He stayed in Edessa for the remaining ten years of his life, where

he was ordained into the diaconate and assisted in the relief of a famine in the city.

237

For Ephrem the commentaries he wrote were a secondary means for his exegesis of

the scriptures. His primary means for the teaching of scripture was through his poetical

235

Ibid., 21.9. This is only a selection of some of the types that Aphrahat finds in the story of Joseph.

236

See Sebastian Brock, The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of Saint Ephrem (Kalamazoo, MI:

Cistercian Publications, 1992), 16.

237

See, McVey, 28.

expositions.

238

Ephrem noted at the beginning of his Commentary on Genesis that “I had

not wanted to write a commentary on the first book of Creation, lest we should now

repeat, what we had set down in the metrical homilies and hymns.”

239

However, in spite

of this hesitancy to write commentaries, there was in the Syriac and Greek churches the

tradition that Ephrem produced commentaries on all the books of the Bible. “Many of

these commentaries survive in Armenian translation; there are also partial versions that

survive in Syriac in fragments preserved in later Syriac commentaries and catenae.”

240

The immensity of this literary output was likely due to his position as “Interpreter” of

the School of Nisibis.

241

He was appointed to this position under the leadership of Jacob

of Nisibis (bishop of Nisibis in the early 4

century) and continued to serve under the

bishoprics of Babu, Vologeses, and Abraham. His duties would have involved

instruction in the church as its “chief biblical exegete” and service as “master of the city’s

school of religious education.”

242

Thus, for Ephrem, many of his duties in service to the

church in Nisibis and later in Edessa revolved around the exegesis and instruction of the

biblical text.

One legend concerning Ephrem recorded by the Syriac translator of Palladius’ Lausiac

History mirrors this life-long vocation of interpreting scripture. The translator records a

dream of one of the “holy fathers” who sees a band of angels in which one of the angels

is carrying a scroll. The angels were asking one another who could be entrusted with the

scroll. After some discussion the angels agreed:

‘No one can be entrusted with this apart from Ephrem.’ Whereupon they gave it

to him. When the father arose in the morning he heard people saying, ‘Ephrem

teaches as if a fountain was flowing from his mouth.’ Then the elder who had

seen the dream recognized that what issued from his lips was from the Holy

Spirit.

243

238

Sidney H. Griffith, ‘Faith Adoring the Mystery’: Reading the Bible with St. Ephraem the Syrian

(Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1997), 13.

239239

Ephrem, Commentary on Genesis, Prologue.1, translated by Edward G. Mathews and Joseph P. Amar

in St. Ephrem the Syrian Selected Prose Works,The Fathers of the Church (Washington, D.C.: The

Catholic University of America Press, 1994), 67. All quotations from Ephrem’s Commentary on Genesis

come from this edition and will use its numbering system for the citations.

240

Ibid., 42.

241

Kathleen E. McVey, Ephrem the Syrian Hymns (New York: Paulist Press, 1989), 10.

242

Sidney H. Griffith, ‘Faith Adoring the Mystery’, 7.

243

As recorded in Sebastian Brock, The Luminous Eye: The Spiritual World Vision of Saint Ephrem , 173.

It is perhaps with this sense of duty that Ephrem, though recording his hesitations

about the commentary, went on to note in the introduction to his commentary on Genesis

that “Nevertheless, compelled by the love of friends, we have written briefly of those

things of which we wrote at length in the metrical homilies and in the hymns.”

244

Sidney

H. Griffith has highlighted the idea expressed here by Ephrem of the briefness of his

commentary literature in comparison to the homilies and hymns, noting that Ephrem

“seems to be in a hurry, as if the commentaries are meant to serve only some immediate,

academic purpose.”

245

Edward G. Mathews agreed with Griffith noting that in the

commentaries, Ephrem “does not deal with the texts in such depth, or in the same ways,

as he did in his hymns….Most of the Commentary is a close literal reading of the text.”

246

However, in spite of its brevity, Ephrem’s Commentary on Genesis has an extended

reflection on the figure of Joseph the patriarch which offers more than just a “literal

reading” of the biblical text. Ephrem expounded directly from the text in Genesis, but

adds material in his commentary that often can only be found in Jewish extra-canonical

traditions. Though in addition to his commentary there is a sermon on Joseph attributed

to Ephrem, this is from the corpus of Greek works attributed to him and may be a later

work that emerged from his disciples.

247

Joseph also appears sporadically in some of

Ephrem’s hymns,

248

but the Commentary on Genesis offers the most detailed look at his

interpretive approach to the Joseph narrative. This portion of the thesis will study

Ephrem’s interpretation of Joseph up to his exaltation by pharaoh to a position of power

in Egypt.

Ephrem began his exposition on Joseph by noting the incident recorded in the Genesis

narrative of Joseph shepherding with his brothers, and returning to his father with a bad

244

Ephrem Commentary on Genesis, Prologue.1

245

Sidney H. Griffith, ‘Faith Adoring the Mystery’, 33.

246

Edward G. Matthews, “Introduction to Ephrem’s Commentary on Genesis” in St. Ephrem Selected

Prose Works, 60.

247

This sermon will be used in several points as a means of showing the continuity of some of Ephrem’s

interpretive strategies. All quotes from this sermon will be taken from Sermon on Joseph the Most

Virtuous, translated by Archimandrite Ephrem; available from http://www.anastasis.org.uk/on_joseph.htm

;

Internet. This is the home page of the Monastery of St. Andrew, the First Called in Manchester, England.

It is a fine internet site with several hard to find texts. Archimandrite Ephrem lives and works at the

monastery.

248

See especially Ephrem Hymns on Virginity, Hymn 18, 19, 21.

report of his brothers.

249

Ephrem clarified in his text that the brothers Joseph was

shepherding with were “the sons of his father’s concubines.”

250

The text of Genesis calls

them the “the sons of Bilhah and Zilpah, his father’s wives.”

251

Ephrem added to this a

reflective comment that is not in the book of Genesis, noting “Because Joseph had

exposed them in their deed they hated him.”

252

These changes are minor, but possibly

show even from the outset of Ephrem’s handling of the Joseph narrative reliance on more

than just the canonical text.

Ephrem seems to be drawing on a tradition in Jewish interpretation of a special enmity

existing between the sons of Jacob’s concubines and Joseph. In the Testament of Gad,

one of the sections of the Testament of the Twelve Patriarchs, the character of Gad, one

of the sons of Zilpah, reported to his sons that Joseph had been shepherding with him for

thirty days. When Joseph returned to his father he gave a negative report to him that “the

sons of Zilpah and Bilhah are killing the best animals and eating them against the advice

of Judah and Reuben.”

253

Gad explained to his children that Joseph had lied or

misunderstood the situation, because “He saw that I had set free a lamb from the mouth

of the bear, which I then killed, but that I had killed the lamb when I was saddened to see

that it was too weak to live; and we had eaten it.”

254

As a result of Joseph’s negative

report, Gad confesses “On this matter I bore a grudge against Joseph until the day he was

sold into Egypt; the spirit of hatred was in me, and I wanted to see or hear nothing of

Joseph…I now confess my sin, children, that frequently I wanted to kill him.”

255

A similar tradition is recorded in the Hellenistic Jewish romance Joseph and Aseneth.

Joseph inspired jealousy in Pharaoh’s son by his marriage to Aseneth. He had long

desired her for his own, and hatched a plot to kill Joseph and take Aseneth to be his bride.

Pharaoh’s son proposed his plan to Joseph’s brothers, Simeon and Levi, but they refused

to have a part in it. He then approached the sons of the concubines telling them Joseph

had planned to kill them off after Jacob died. The sons of Bilhah and Zilpah joined

249

Gen 37.2. Though Gen 29.24 recognized Zilpah as the maidservant of Leah, and Gen 29.29 labeled

Bilhah as the maidservant of Rachel.

250

Ephrem Commentary on Genesis XXXIII.1.

251

Gen 37.2.

252

Ephrem Commentary on Genesis XXXIII.1.

253

Testament of Gad 1.6.

254

Ibid. 1.7.

255

Ibid. 1.8-2.1.

Pharaoh’s son in this plot against Joseph- a plot that ultimately led to the death of

Pharaoh’s son and the defeat of the sons of the concubines.

256

Though Ephrem’s

reference to this enmity between Joseph and the sons of the concubines was much briefer,

it does illustrate his familiarity with expansions on the Joseph story also found in

Hellenistic Jewish literature.

Ephrem next gave a summarized account of Joseph’s dreams, the first concerning the

sheaves and the second concerning the sun, moon, and eleven stars. Ephrem focused in

on the second dream where Joseph envisions the sun, moon, and the eleven stars bowing

down to him.

257

This was to be symbolic of his father, mother, and eleven brothers

bowing to him. Joseph’s brothers, in Ephrem’s account, mock this dream because

Joseph’s mother, Rachel, is already dead so she would not be able to bow down to him.

258

Ephrem provided an answer to this dilemma, noting that “Because it is said, ‘A man and

his wife are one flesh,’ Jacob, symbolized by the sun, bowed down on the head of his

staff, and with him Rachel, symbolized by the moon, bowed down, although she did not

[in fact] bow down.”

259

Ephrem’s explanatory note on the dream is very similar to the exegetical notes

provided by the rabbis in the midrashic literature, which often engages in resolving

dilemmas created by the biblical text. This same exegetical problem of Joseph’s dream is

addressed in Genesis Rabbah. The rabbis address the problem of Jacob’s questioning of

the dream, assuming that Jacob’s issue is similar to the issue recorded by Ephrem,

concerning the problem of the death of Rachel. The rabbis of the Genesis Rabbah

resolve the problem in two ways. First, “R. Levi said in the name of R. Hama b. R.

Hanina: Jacob thought that resurrection would take place in his days.”

260

Here the rabbis

interpret Jacob’s response as an affirmation of the dream rather than a rebuke to Joseph.

He can affirm the dream of Joseph because he believed that Rachel would be resurrected

and thus could bow down with Jacob and the eleven brothers. Another resolution of this

issue offered by the rabbis was that Jacob misunderstood the application of the dream.

256

See the summary of the account in Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, trans. Henrietta Szold and

Paul Radin, Johns Hopkins paperbacks ed., 7 vols. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), vol.

2, 176-78.

257

Gen 37.9.

258

In the Genesis account it is actually Jacob who questioned the reality of Joseph’ dream (Gen 37.10).

259

Ephrem Commentary on Genesis XXXIII.1.2.

260

Genesis Rabbah LXXXIV.11.

Genesis Rabbah recorded “But our ancestor did not know that it applied to Bilhah,

Rachel’s handmaid, who had brought him [Joseph] up like a mother.”

261

Ephrem’s

resolution of the conflict is similar in form to the rabbis in its careful attention to the

difficulties presented by the text.

Ephrem gave a brief summary of the capture and sale of Joseph by his brothers,

adding little additional material. However, he did highlight the duplicity of the brothers

in their treatment of Joseph and their actions before their father. The Genesis account

recorded only that when Jacob was mourning “All his sons and daughters came forth to

comfort him, but he refused to be comforted.”

262

Ephrem made explicit this deception

noting:

With no mercy they cast him into a pit in the desert but they wept over him with

tears in the house. They sold him naked to the Arabs but wept over him and

wailed in the presence of the Canaanites. They put irons on his hands and feet

and sent him on his way but composed lamentations over him in the village.

263

Ginzberg recorded a similar tradition in the Jewish legends of the sons mourning with

Jacob in Yashar Wa Yesheb, but their mourning is connected to their sorrow over the

grief they had caused their father.

264

The account of Joseph’s sale into Egypt and his temptation by Potiphar’s wife in

Ephrem’s commentary stayed very close to the text of Genesis.

265

Though this episode

and in particular Joseph’s dealings with Potiphar’s wife received much comment and

expansion in Jewish exegesis, Ephrem only gave cursory remarks on the topic.

266

Ephrem’s silence on this episode may ironically be due to his close reading of the

expansions by Jewish commentators, particularly in the Midrashic literature. The

commentary of the rabbis on Joseph’s behavior with Potiphar’s wife, at times depicts

261

Ibid.

262

Gen 37.35.

263

Ephrem Commentary on Genesis XXXIII.2.

264

Ginzberg, 27. The reference is provided in vol. 5, page 331, note 64. Note additionally the mourning of

the sons of Jacob in The Ethiopic History of Joseph, translated by E. Isaac in Journal for the Study of the

Pseudepigrapha 6 (1990): 3-125. Here after twenty years of mourning Jacob becomes very ill. The sons

saw this and cried out, “Woe unto us when the Lord, the Most High, shames us on account of what we have

done to our father, and he [Jacob?] curses! Woe unto us from his curse and the tears of his eyes!”

265

Gen 39.

266

However, in the Sermon on Joseph the Most Virtuous there is a lengthy temptation scene. It includes

Potiphar’s wife dressing lavishly to entice the young Joseph, and a threat by her to poison her husband in

order to make way for Joseph. The entire account is very similar to the temptation scene in the Testament

of Joseph 3-9.5.

Joseph in a negative, even scatological fashion. Joseph was accused of being partially

responsible for the lust of Potiphar’s wife, because of the excessive attention to his

appearance. Thus, he was compared to a man who, “sat in the street, penciling his eyes,

curling his hair and lifting his heel, while he exclaimed, ‘I am indeed a man.’”

267

The

temptation of Joseph was also attributed to his self-satisfaction with the life of ease he

attained in Potiphar’s house. The rabbis noted that as a result of this, “Said the Holy One,

blessed be He, to him: ‘Empty words! By thy life, I will incite the she-bear against

thee.’”

268

Also, the temptation came because Joseph complained about not being tested

by God as his fathers had: “My father was tried, and my grandfather was tried, but I am

not put to the test, [Joseph thought to himself]. Said God to him: ‘By thy life! I will try

thee even more than them.’”

269

The rabbis depicted Joseph as escaping from the temptation of Potiphar’s wife, but

they suggested that Joseph struggled before making the virtuous decision to flee. Joseph

was accused of entering the empty house of Potiphar with the intention of having sex

with Potiphar’s wife. Joseph was kept from fornication, according to R. Samuel b.

Nahman, because of impotence: “on examination he did not find himself a man.”

270

Isaac, however, argued that fornication was avoided by Joseph’s premature ejaculation,

thus “His seed was scattered and issued through his finger-nails.”

271

R. Huna disagreed

with both of these accounts, arguing instead that Joseph’s arousal was averted by a vision

of his father’s face, “at which his blood cooled.”

272

These comments reflect a need on the

part of the rabbis of the Midrashim to make sense out of Joseph’s later being thrown into

prison. For the rabbis “nothing happens without divine providence. Therefore, when

Joseph is later punished by Potiphar, it would not make theological sense if Joseph were

innocent.”

273

Though Ephrem avoided the more suggestive elements of this story, he did add one

interesting detail concerning Joseph’s fleeing from Potiphar’s wife. In a tradition that

267

Genesis Rabbah LXXXXVII.3.

268

Ibid., LXXXVII.4.

269

Ibid.

270

Ibid., LXXXVII.7.

271

Ibid.

272

Ibid. Each of the above reasons for Joseph avoiding fornication, are derived by the rabbis from the text

of Jacob’s blessing of Joseph in Gen 49.22-26.

273

Edwin C. Goldberg, Midrash for Beginners, 39.

does not seem to be attested elsewhere, Ephrem noted “But Joseph, who could have fled

and, by doing so, have gone to his father’s house, detested this flight which would have

spared him from shame. He rather persevered until he saw how the dreams that he had

seen would turn out.”

274

Ephrem here depicted Joseph as having more control and insight

into his destiny than the Genesis text gave him.

275

Ephrem also summarized Joseph’s time spent in prison, giving only passing mention

to his rise to leadership and his interpretation of the dreams of the butler and baker.

276

Ephrem did note concerning Joseph’s request that the butler remember him when he was

restored to his position, “that ‘remember me’ that Joseph had told him made him forget

for two years.”

277

This reflection by Ephrem carried a sense of negativity. Joseph’s

request worked the opposite result, causing him to remain in prison for an additional

period of two years. The Sermon on Joseph attributed to Ephrem also recorded this

negative view of Joseph’s request of the butler. The writer questions Joseph for seeking

the help of the butler:

Abandoning God, you appeal to a human! And yet you experienced God’s help in

the greatest need, when you preserved the tunic of your chastity untouched! Why

are you faint-hearted, blessed one? God foresees kingship and glory for you

whenever he wills. When you nobly endure the test, you make the garlands of

victory brighter!

278

The writer went on to note that the butler forgot about Joseph, “in accordance with

God’s providence.”

279

The rabbis of the Genesis Rabbah likewise found in this act of forgetfulness a purpose

larger than just the butler’s poor memory. One interpretation proposed that God sent an

angel to force the butler into forgetfulness, until God was ready to bring Joseph out of

prison. The Genesis Rabbah recorded of the butler that “He kept on making resolutions

the whole of that day, but an angel would come and upset him; he kept on making knots,

274

Ephrem Commentary on Genesis XXXV.2.

275

Note that this concern does arise in other Jewish traditions in the sense that there were questions of why

Joseph did not return to his father, or why he did not send for him at an earlier stage. See for instance the

reference in Demetrius Fragment Two 13. Here Joseph’s success in Egypt is reported, but it is noted that

he did not send for his father, because he was a shepherd and Egyptians abhorred shepherds.

276

Gen 40.

277

Ibid. XXXV.3.

278

Sermon on Joseph the Most Virtuous lines 595-600.

279

Ibid., line 606.

but an angel would come and untie them.”

280

In another interpretation of the butler’s

forgetfulness, God rebuked Joseph and said to him “The chief butler forgot thee, but I

will not forget thee.’ Who would have expected that a child should be born to Abraham

and Sarah in their old age? Who would have expected that Jacob, who crossed the Jordan

with but his staff, should increase and become wealthy?”

281

This particular interpretation

continued with a list of interventions by God in hopeless circumstances, compiling by the

examples an argument that Joseph should have trusted in God rather than in the memory

of the butler.

This interpretation of Joseph forsaking God and relying on man by asking the butler to

remember him was also recorded in Targum Pseudo-Jonathan . It is noted in the targum

concerning this event that “Joseph, leaving his higher trust and retaining confidence in a

man, said to the chief butler, But be thou mindful of me when it shall be well with thee,

and act kindly by me, and remember me before Pharaoh and obtain my deliverance from

this prison house.”

282

The writer of the targum then went on to make the point of Joseph

rejecting God more explicit:

But because, Joseph had withdrawn from the mercy that is above, and had put his

confidence in the chief butler, he waited on the flesh. Therefore the chief butler

did not remember Joseph, but forgat him, until from the Lord came the time of the

end that he should be released.

283

Again, Ephrem’s comments seem to show a close attentiveness to the difficulties in the

text, and a familiarity in some form with Jewish exegetical traditions.

284

One interesting facet of Ephrem’s Commentary on Genesis is his lack of emphasis on

the dreams and interpretation of dreams which is so much a part of the Joseph narrative in

the text of Genesis.

285

This was particularly true in Ephrem’s comments on Joseph’s

280

Genesis Rabbah LXXXVIII.7.

281

Ibid.

282

Targum Pseudo-Jonathan Gen 40. In J.W. Etheridge, Targums on the Pentateuch (London, 1862).

283

Ibid.

284

Archimandite Ephrem in his translation of Sermon on Joseph the Most Virtuous has noted some of the

above similarities, and observed in addition the similarities with Philo On Joseph XIX.99 “the chief butler

forgot him…perhaps because the ungrateful are always forgetful of their benefactors, perhaps also in the

providence of God Who willed that the happy events which befell the youth should be due to God rather

than to man”[Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: 1966).] He noted also the reference in Josephus

Antiquities of the Jews II.74: “Joseph, however, for two full years endured the miseries of bondage, without

receiving any aid from the butler in memory of his predictions, until God released him from prison”[Loeb

Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961).]

285

This is also true of the sermon in Greek attributed to him, Sermon on Joseph, the Most Virtuous.

interpretation of Pharaoh’s dreams and consequent rise to a position of authority in

Egypt. Unlike the Genesis account, Ephrem did not go into detail in describing the two

dreams of Pharaoh, instead he summarized it by noting “Pharaoh then saw twin dreams,

one of ears of grain and one of cows.”

286

He went on to note concerning these dreams

that “Although they are easily interpreted by every one, for the sake of Joseph they were

hidden even from the wise men of Pharaoh.”

287

Ephrem engages here in a purposeful

denigration of Joseph’s interpretation. The dreams could easily have been interpreted by

Pharaoh’s wise men, but God prevented this from happening so that Joseph would benefit

from the interpretation. However, even here Ephrem noted it was not so much the

interpretation of the dream that impressed Pharaoh as the wise counsel he offered:

“Joseph became great in the eyes of Pharaoh through his interpretation of Pharaoh’s

dreams but even more through the beneficial counsel that his mind had devised.”

288

It is

important also to note that in the earlier account of Joseph’s dreams concerning his

family, the dreams are also summarized as “Joseph dreamed dreams: the first of sheaves;

and the second of the sun, moon, and eleven stars, bowing down to him.”

289

Likewise the

incident in prison with the butler and baker is also shortened into “He also interpreted

there two dreams for two of Pharaoh’s servants; one was hung as Joseph told him and the

other ‘placed the cup in Pharaoh’s hand’ as Joseph had interpreted for him.”

290

It is difficult to determine Ephrem’s exact reasons for deemphasizing the

interpretation of dreams in the Joseph pericope. One possible factor though may be that

Ephrem was deliberately trying to counter the popular connection of Joseph with magic

and the art of interpreting dreams. One of the few pagan references to Joseph can be

found in Justinus’ Epitome of the Philippic History of Pompeius Trogus. The Epitome

noted that Joseph had been sold into Egypt “where he mastered the art of magic by his

quick intelligence and soon became a great favorite of the king.”

291

Joseph’s popularity

286

Ephrem Commentary on Genesis XXXV.4.

287

Ibid.

288

Ibid.

289

Ibid., XXXIII.1.2.

290

Ibid., XXXV.3.2.

291

Marcus Junianus Justinus, Epitome of the Philippic History of Pompeius Trogus, trans. John Yardley,

Clarendon Ancient History Series. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 36.7.

with the king is attributed to his being “shrewd with omens” and as the originator of the

interpretation of dreams.

292

The Epitome then noted of Josepht:

It seemed that no aspect of divine or human order was beyond his knowledge,

so that he foretold barrenness in the fields many years before the event, and all

Egypt would have perished in the resulting famine had not the king issued an

edict on Joseph’s advice and ordered crops to be stored up over a number of

years. So successful was he when put to the test that his predictions seemed to be

made by a god rather than a man.

293

Marcel Simon has noted the connections that the ancient world made between the

Jews and magic. “In the opinion of the ancients, magic was, as it were, congenital to

Israel.”

294

Louis Feldman argued that this element of Judaism was an attraction for

converts from other religions, including Christians.

295

Feldman listed canon 49 of the

Council of Elvira, forbidding the blessing of fields by rabbis, and canon 36 of the Council

of Laodicea, forbidding Christians to make phylacteries to be used possibly as amulets, as

evidence of the attraction of Jewish magic to Christians.

296

Hans Drijvers has also

commented on this phenomenon, noting in particular the influence of Jewish rabbis as

“well-known soothsayers, magicians, and healers, who were held in high esteem by the

Christians also, who often used their services or consulted them.”

297

Simon saw this

influence of Jewish magic as having an enduring affect on Christians: “Even when the

flowering period of proselytism was over, although the competition weakened, Judaism

thus continued to manifest its presence, in indirect and very humble ways, and to exercise

a dangerous influence on the Church from inside.”

298

Ephrem, as numerous studies have shown, could be quite virulent in his rhetorical

attacks upon the Jews.

299

One should particularly note here his Hymns Against Julian

292

Ibid., 36.8

293

Ibid., 36.8-10.

294

Simon, Verus Israel : A Study of the Relations between Christians and Jews in the Roman Empire, 135-

425, 340.

295

Feldman, Jew and Gentile in the Ancient World : Attitudes and Interactions from Alexander to Justinian,

379-80.

296

Ibid., 380-381.

297

Hans J. W. Drijvers, “Jews and Christians at Edessa,” Journal of Jewish Studies vol. XXXVI, no. 1

(1985): 99.

298

Simon, 341.

299

See especially A.P. Hayman, “The Image of the Jew in the Syriac Anti-Jewish Polemical Literature,” in

To See Ourselves As Others See Us, edited by Jacob Neusner and Ernest S. Frerichs (Chico, CA: Scholars

Press, 1985), 423-441. Hans J. W. Drijvers, “Jews and Christians at Edessa”(see note 48 above). And,

and Nisibene Hymn 67, where he refers to the notorious anti-Semitic barb of the “stink of

the Jews”, and Hymn on the Unleavened Bread 17, 18, and 19.

300

But, in the case of his

rewriting the figure of Joseph without focusing on the interpretation of dreams, there is a

more subtle polemic at work based on changes of emphasis, whereby Ephrem moved

Joseph away from popular associations with magic.

Ephrem went on to describe Joseph’s exaltation by Pharaoh to a position of authority

in Egypt. Ephrem stayed close to the text here, only adding the detail that the ring

Pharaoh placed on his finger “had never been placed on the hand of a non-Egyptian.”

301

Ephrem also noted that when Pharaoh said to Joseph “I am Pharaoh, but without your

word no one will lift hand or foot in all Egypt,”

302

that in this command, “Included

among those who were to be subservient to him were all the army commanders and the

princes of the king.”

303

This comment, though not stated directly by Ephrem, is

connected to Genesis 39.1 where Potiphar, Joseph’s master at the time, was described as

being “one of Pharaoh’s officials, the captain of the guard.” Thus, for Ephrem, Potiphar

would have been present in the court of Pharaoh as one of his officials. This then became

the basis for an intriguing extra-canonical story arising from this possibility. Ephrem

noted, “Joseph’s [former] master was there when the dreams of Pharaoh were being

interpreted.”

304

The questions that arise from this possibility are many. What would Potiphar think of

this exaltation of his former slave? Would he be afraid of Joseph? Would he begin to

doubt the story of his wife? What would be the response of Potiphar’s wife to this

reversal of fortune? Would she now come forward with the truth? Ephrem addressed

some of these questions in a haggadic story of Potiphar returning to his wife with the

news of Joseph’s new position of authority in Egypt. Ephrem noted that Potiphar

returned quickly to his house, and with a twist of irony to the story he commented “In his

haste to go to tell his wife of [Joseph’s] greatness, he closely resembled his wife when

Hans J. W. Drijvers, “Syrian Christianity and Judaism,” in History and Religion in Late Antique Syria

(Brookfield: Ashgate Publishing Company, 1994), 124-146.

300

See the discussion in Hayman, 427-432.

301

Ephrem, Commentary on Genesis XXXV.6.1.

302

Gen 41.44.

303

Ephrem Commentary on Genesis XXXV.6.2.

304

Ibid., XXXV.7.

she had come out to meet him to accuse Joseph.”

305

Potiphar then told his wife of

Joseph, relating the news in a series of contrasts to the way they had treated him and the

way Pharaoh had now exalted him:

He whom we sent to prison without clothing, Pharaoh has now clothed with a

garment of fine white linen. He whom we cast prostrate into prison now sits upon

the chariot of Pharaoh. He whom we had bound in irons now has a gold necklace

set on his neck…How then can I look upon him whom my eyes are unable to look

upon?

306

Potiphar’s wife does not react with the panic apparent in her husband. In her response

she was characterized by Ephrem in a positive light as the comforter of her husband. She

addressed Potiphar stoically: “Do not fear Joseph to whom you did no evil, for he knows

that the disgrace that came upon him in our domicile, whether justly or not, came upon

him from my own hands.”

307

Potiphar’s wife then encourages her husband to accompany

the other officials and captains as they follow Joseph. She then confessed to her husband

the truth behind the events that had sent Joseph to prison: “I was enamored of Joseph

when I falsely accused him. I made assault on his clothing because I was overcome by

his beauty. If he is just, it is I whom he will bring to grief and not you.”

308

Potiphar’s

wife argued, however, that Joseph should not bring grief to her,

because if he had not been wronged he would not have been imprisoned, If he

had not been imprisoned he would not have interpreted the dreams of Pharaoh and

he would not have come to this royal dignity of which you just informed me.

Although, we did not actually exalt him, it is as if we did exalt him, for it was due

to our afflicting him that he has been accorded such honor and has become second

to the king.

309

Buttressed by his wife’s encouragement, Potiphar returned to his position and

followed behind Joseph’s chariot with the other officials and captains of Pharaoh.

Ephrem reported that Joseph did not bring grief to Potiphar over the incident with his

305

Ibid.

306

Ibid. This is an interesting twist on the very common lists of reversals of fortune for Joseph in Jewish

literature. See Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, vol. 2, 73. “The mouth that refused the kiss of

unlawful passion and sin received the kiss of homage from the people; the neck that did not bow itself unto

sin was adorned with the gold chain that Pharaoh put upon it; the hands that did not come in contact with

sin was arrayed in vestures of byssus; the feet that made no steps in the dierection of sin reposed in the

royal chariot, and the thoughts that kept themselves undefiled by sin were proclaimed as wisdom.” See

note 183 in vol. 5 for references to these lists.

307

Ibid., XXXV.8.

308

Ibid.

309

Ibid.

wife, but for a different reason than she had surmised. Instead of crediting Potiphar’s

wife and her temptation of Joseph as the ultimate cause of the chain of events that led to

his exaltation, Joseph gave credit to God:

He knew that it was God who had permitted his brothers to throw him into the pit

in the desert, and [who had delivered him] from the pit, in order to send him in

irons to Egypt, and who had permitted his master to send him to prison so that

from that humble seat He might set him upon the chariot of Pharaoh.

310

This extra-canonical story of Potiphar and his wife is not attested in the extant Jewish

literature. It is, however, repeated in the Sermon on Joseph the Most Virtuous. Potiphar

(here Petephres) ran to his wife, who comforted him by confession of her sin against

Joseph. “I will tell you my sin. I did this. I was in love with Joseph the all-virtuous, that

chaste youth, and hour by hour with many enticements I lay in ambush for him, so that I

might sleep with him and enjoy his beauty.”

311

She then revealed to Petephres that she

had seized his garment, but Joseph had fled from her. She again claims responsibility for

his rise to power, saying “I am the cause of his kingship and his surpassing glory. For if I

had not been passionate for Joseph, he would not have been thrown into prison, but he

owes me thanks, who have become the cause of his glory.”

312

She counsels her husband

to return to Joseph, for “Joseph is just and holy, because when falsely accused, he did not

reveal it to anyone. Get up then, and go with joy, and bow down before him with the

nobles.”

313

This story with some alteration was also recorded in The Ethiopic History of Joseph.

Here Potiphar (Qatifan in this work) hides from Joseph, and comes to his wife in anger,

suspecting that she was deceptive in her accusations against Joseph. “As for myself, I

now know that it was not Joseph who transgressed against you. But, surely you yourself,

in your own [desire for] adultery and evil [design], lusted [after him because of] his

beauty and majesty.”

314

Qatifan seems to do a bit of detective work, noting that “For, had

it been he who had desired you, as you say, it would have been you who would have

310

Ibid., XXXV.9.

311

Sermon on Joseph the Most Virtuous lines 636-639.

312

Ibid., lines 640-643.

313

Ibid., lines 643-645.

314

The Ethiopic History of Joseph fol. 141a.

abandoned your garment [in his hand] and fled from him.”

315

Qatifan’s wife then

responded to her husband, “Yes! It was I who transgressed against Joseph! I spoke a lie

against him! I did evil against him!”

316

As in the other accounts, she counsels him not to

worry because it was her wrongdoing, but in addition she promises to him “I shall make

him [Joseph] love you exceedingly more than [he loves] your colleagues, and make you

chief over Pharaoh’s magistrates.”

317

At this point the narrative of The Ethiopic History

of Joseph deviates from Ephrem’s commentary and the Sermon on Joseph the Most

Virtuous. The history recorded a bizarre exchange of letters between Qatifan’s wife and

Joseph. She sends him a letter asking that he forgive her husband, and Joseph replies

with thankfulness that her deed has caused his rise to power. He exalts Qatifan to “chief

of all Pharaoh’s judges,” sends a gift of garments to her, and requests that she and her

husband come to see him soon.

318

When Qatifan and his wife do make the visit, Joseph

receives them graciously and praises Qatifan’s wife “before the elders of the people of

Egypt, and revealed to them her kindness.”

319

He then sent them home with more gifts,

and officially made Qatifan chief over Pharaoh’s officers.

The Ethiopic History of Joseph has been dated to the 14

or early 15

century, which

is far removed from the time in which Ephrem is writing (4

century). E. Isaac, however,

has proposed that the contents of the history seem to point to the document being a copy

of a much earlier work. He has suggested “Overall the preponderant characteristics of

this work, whatever the Ethiopic Vorlage is, point to a Jewish work of the late Second

Temple period from which a large number of our apocryphal and pseudepigraphic works

come.”

320

In light of this observation, Ephrem’s commentary has preserved a haggadic

tradition concerning the story of Joseph that is otherwise not attested in the extant

literature. Ephrem was writing his commentary during a period when much of the

Talmudic and Midrashic literature was still in the process of formation.

321

Ephrem was

315

Ibid.

316

Ibid.

317

Ibid., folio 141b

318

Ibid., fol. 141b-142b. Strangely, Joseph addressed Qatifan’s wife in his letter as “my lady/mistress

forever!”

319

Ibid., fol.142b-143a.

320

Introduction to The Ethiopic History of Joseph, 44.

321

The earliest redactions of these materials falling around 5

century, thus placing Ephrem and his

writings well within their formative period.

conversant with these traditions, and yet demonstrated a freedom to choose and adapt the

available legends and traditions to the interests of his commentary.

Ephrem’s final comment on Joseph’s rise to leadership in Egypt, before the narrative

turns to the appearance of his brothers, was that his plan unveiled to Pharaoh in the

interpretation of his dreams was a success. He gathered grain from the cities of Egypt

during the years of plenty in order to have grain during the years of famine.

322

Ephrem

here again added information that is not found in the account in Genesis. He noted that

during the years of famine, “Joseph took special care of the orphans, widows, and every

needy person in Egypt so that there was no anxiety in Egypt.”

323

Ephrem’s comment

here is very close to that found in the New Testament book of James, where the nature of

true religion is described. The writer here describes, “Religion that God our Father

accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and

to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.”

324

It is possible that Ephrem was

alluding to this verse as a background text for the life of Joseph. He was an example, in

the episode of Potiphar’s wife, of one keeping away from pollution by the world, and

here in the episode of the famine he also cares for orphans and widows. Joseph then was

an exemplar of pure and faultless religion. This is an intriguing possibility since the book

of James is from a Jewish-Christian context- a context that is often claimed as the

foundation for Syrian Christianity.

325

It must also be noted that Ephrem may have in

mind here the common command in the Torah to not neglect or abuse the “fatherless and

the widows.”

326

Interestingly, there was also often attached to this command an

additional exhortation to care for the “alien.” In this case, Ephrem has the alien, Joseph,

fulfilling the command to care for the orphans and widows.

In summary, the portrait of Joseph sketched by Ephrem in his Commentary on Genesis

stayed very close to the lines drawn in the text of Genesis. What is conspicuously

missing in his commentary is the allegorical exegesis found in Origen’s homilies on

Genesis. Ephrem paid close attention to the text of the Genesis narrative, and did not see

322

Ephrem Commentary on Genesis XXXVI.1.

323

Ibid.

324

James 1.27.

325

See Arthur Vööbus, History of Asceticism in the Syrian Orient in Corpus Scriptorum Christianorum

Orientalum, vol 184 (Louvain, 1958), 3-10. Also, L. W. Barnard, “The Origins and Emergence of the

Church in Edessa During the First Two Centuries A.D.,” Vigiliae Christianae 22 (1968): 161-175.

326

See Ex 22.22; Dt. 10.18, 14.29, 24.17, 24.19, 26.12. Note also Ps 68.5, 146.9.

the characters as symbols of deeper truths. In addition, Ephrem’s commentary lacks the

typological exegesis that was common in Aphrahat and the exegetes of the Antiochene

school of exegesis; although he commonly used typology in his hymns and sermons.

One example of this applied to the character of Joseph can be found in “Hymn 8” in

Ephrem’s Hymns on Virginity. He began the hymn with the observation that “In Eden

and in the inhabited earth are parables of our Lord.”

327

He then goes on to find types that

prefigure Christ in the Jewish Scriptures, particularly of the patriarchs. Concerning the

sons of Jacob he observed:

On the tribes of Jacob your twelve are imprinted:

on Judah your robe, and on Levi your censer,

and your dispensation on Joseph.

328

Here Ephrem attributed to Jesus the position of king, priest, and prophet as

symbolized through the three sons of Jacob, Judah, Levi, and Joseph. Ephrem in this

hymn read Joseph not as an allegory of Christ, but as a type constituting one part of the

identity of Christ.

329

Ephrem does show a familiarity with extra-canonical, haggadic stories and traditions,

which he freely chooses and adapts in his commentary. Ephrem seems to use these

stories and traditions to address questions and lacunae in the Genesis narrative in a

manner that resembles the Midrashic and Talmudic literature. Ephrem’s familiarity and

use of Jewish traditions was due in part to his vocation as the Interpreter at the Christian

school in Nisibis. Part of his responsibility within this position would have been, as

Kathleen McVey has pointed out, “the elaboration of a Christian interpretation of the Old

Testament--one that could compete with the growing sophistication of the rabbinic

schools and attract to Christianity the uncertain, whether of Aramean pagan or Jewish

background.”

330

His task, however, was made more difficult by the uniqueness of his

location in comparison to his contemporaries among the church fathers. Nisibis, where

Ephrem spent the majority of his life, was according to Robert Murray “almost the first

327

Ephrem Hymns on Virginity, Hymn 8.

328

Ibid.

329

Here again, Ephrem distances Joseph’s interpretation of dreams from the connotation of magic, viewing

them instead as a prophetic dispensation from God.

330

McVey, 14.

place in the east to have a Jewish school.”

331

Thus for Ephrem, “The uniqueness of his

endeavor lay in the fact that he taught in a city where the rabbinic traditions were well-

established and sophisticated and where the Jewish community may have been more

prosperous and numerous than its Christian counterpart.”

332

Both Aphrahat and Ephrem lived, worshiped, and wrote in a region with a strong

Jewish community possessing an established history of interpretation of the scriptures.

In light of this, the writings of Aphrahat and Ephrem show engagement not only with the

traditions of Hellenistic Judaism (as in other early Christian literature) but also with the

growing literature of Rabbinic Judaism. Thus as Drijvers noted, “Ephrem Syrus’ works

like those of Aphrahat and Origen in the third century reflect Jewish learning and actual

discussions on theological matters with Jewish rabbis and scribes.”

333

However,

particularly in Aphrahat and Ephrem’s case, there was adaptation of this Jewish material

to produce a Christian reading of the Joseph narrative.

Chapter Six:

Joseph in the Homilies of John Chrysostom

John Chrysostom was born in the city of Antioch in Syria around 349 C.E. As a

youth, he received rhetorical training under the famous pagan orator, Libanius.

334

The

rhetorical skills he gained under Libanius served him well throughout his career, gaining

him renown as a skilled preacher in the churches of Antioch and later at Constantinople.

His ability eventually gained him after his death the epitaph of the name Chrysostom, or

golden-mouth. Chrysostom also received spiritual training in an ascetical school presided

over by Diodore, one of the leaders in the Orthodox Church at Antioch.

335

Here

Chrysostom would study with his fellow pupil Theodore of Mopsuestia (d. 428), and both

of them would become prime examples of Diodore’s exegetical method known

eventually as the Antiochene school of exegesis. Diodore disdained the allegorical

method of interpretation represented by the Alexandrian school of such writers as

331

Robert Murray, Symbols of Church and Kingdom (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 18.

332

McVey, 15.

333

Drijvers, “Jews and Christians at Edessa,” 100.

334

For a sampling of Libanius’ works see Libanius, Selected Works, trans. A. F. Norman (Cambridge,:

Harvard University Press, 1969).

335

J. N. D. Kelly, Golden Mouth : The Story of John Chrysostom--Ascetic, Preacher, Bishop (Grand

Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1998), 18.

Clement and Origen, and instead, “championed straightforward, historical exegesis, while

allowing that the historical events could foreshadow spiritual realities later to be

revealed.”

336

Chrysostom was ordained as a priest in 386 by Flavian, the bishop of Antioch, and

served him, more or less, as a personal assistant taking over most of the bishop’s

speaking responsibilities in the churches of the see of Antioch. It was during this period

of his life that many of the extant collections of his homilies were composed, and it is

here that he “established forever his title as the greatest of Christian pulpit orators.”

337

398 John was appointed, against his will, the bishop of Constantinople, the capital of the

Eastern Roman Empire. Here John experienced strained relations with the imperial court

and with the priests whom he oversaw in his duties as bishop, but he was beloved by the

common people who came to hear him deliver sermons on a weekly basis. John’s

strained relations eventually led to his condemnation at the Synod of the Oak in 403,

which was presided over by John’s archenemy Theophilus the bishop of Alexandria.

338

John was eventually deposed as bishop and died in exile in 407. In the face of “popular

pressure” the abuses of the Synod of the Oak were later recognized and John’s reputation

was rehabilited.

339

In 438 John’s remains were brought back from exile, and formally

interred at the Church of the Holy Apostles in Constantinople.

340

As Johannes Quasten has noted, “Among the Greek Fathers none has left so extensive

a literary legacy as Chrysostom.”

341

This collection of texts is particularly rich in the area

336

Ibid., 19. Recent scholarship has found the distinction between the two schools to be less clear than

Diodore and his students may have imagined. Both schools approached the text with theological

convictions and interpreted the text in light of those convictions. Both schools drew extensively from

commonly agreed stocks of typologies (i.e the sacrifice of Isaac, the crossing of the Red Sea). And, though

the Antiochene school valued the historical narrative meaning of the text, all representatives of its thought

made room for a higher spiritual meaning. See the discussion in Joseph Trigg, Biblical Interpretation, 34

and J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines, 72-73.

337

Johannes Quasten, Patrology, vol. 3 (Westminster, MD: Newman Press, 1950), 425.

338

Theophilus opposed John’s appointment as bishop of Constantinople, and only capitulated after he was

blackmailed by Eutropius the imperial eunuch of the Eastern court. See Wendy Mayer and Pauline Allen,

John Chrysostom, The Early Church Fathers. (New York: Routledge, 2000), 8.

339

Kelly, Golden Mouth, 289.

340

Ibid., 289-290. For further biographical details see the two volume work of Chrysostomus Baur, John

Chrysostom and His Time, 2d ed. (London: Sands, 1959). A more readable account can be found in J. N.

D. Kelly’s Golden Mouth, but also note the excellent study of John’s time in Antioch by Robert Louis

Wilken, John Chrysostom and the Jews : Rhetoric and Reality in the Late 4th Century (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1983).

341

Quasten, 429.

of exegetical homilies, comprising sermons by Chrysostom on Genesis, Psalms, Isaiah

and most of the books of the New Testament.

342

Throughout these exegetical homilies,

Chrysostom draws on key figures in Jewish history to illustrate the points of his exegesis.

These figures include such notables as Job, Daniel, David, Moses, Abraham, Jacob, and

most importantly for this study, the figure of Joseph. Chrysostom focused on two key

events in the life of Joseph: Joseph’s relationship with his brothers and the attempted

seduction of Joseph by Potiphar’s wife. These events in the life of Joseph were used to

portray him as a moral exemplar, particularly focusing on his patience and endurance

through suffering and his temperance or chastity in the face of his confrontation with

Potiphar’s wife.

Typology

Before looking at Chrysostom’s use of Joseph as a moral exemplar, it is important to

note that he does associate the visit of Joseph to his brothers and his betrayal by them as a

typology that points to events in the life of Jesus.

343

This typology was alluded to in

Chrysostom’s homily on the speech of Stephen in Acts 7. In Acts 7.9 Stephen narrated

the sale of Joseph by his brethren, and Chrysostom concluded that this event was, “the

type of Christ. Though they had no fault to find with him, and though he came on

purpose to bring them their food, they thus ill-treated him.”

344

This typology was further

developed in Chrysostom’s Homilies on Genesis. In Homily 61 Chrysostom noted that

Joseph was sent by his father to visit his brothers “so that Joseph’s regard for his brothers

might be demonstrated and their murderous intent might come to light.”

345

Chrysostom

added, however, “it happened also as a type of things to come, the outlines of truth being

sketched out ahead of time in shadows.”

346

The correlation of the shadow with the truth

342

Ibid., 434-450.

343

Note also that Chrysostom viewed Joseph’s silence in the face of the false accusations of Potiphar’s wife

as a type of Christ’s silence in the face of his persecutors. “What then did Joseph? He held his peace, and

thus is condemned, even as Christ is also. For all those things are types of these.” See John Chrysostom,

The Homilies of S. John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople, on the Gospel of St. Matthew, 3 vols.

(Oxford: J.H. Parker, 1843), Vol 3, Hom 84.4.

344

John Chrysostom, The Homilies of S. John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople, on the Acts of

the Apostles (Oxford: J. Parker, 1851), Homily XVI, p.222.

345

John Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis 46-67, trans. Robert C. Hill (Washington, D.C.: Catholic

University of America Press, 1992), 61.10.

346

Ibid.

was, according to Chrysostom, to be found in that Joseph willingly went to his brothers,

who betrayed him in their desire to kill him and in their eventual sale of their brother to

desert traders. Likewise, “our Lord in fidelity to his characteristic love came to visit the

human race; taking flesh of the same source as ours and deigning to become our brother,

he thus arrived amongst us.”

347

Chrysostom found the precedence for this typology in Heb 2.16-17, noting the

relationship of Christ taking on flesh to be like his “brothers”: “It is not the condition of

angels he takes to himself but descent from Abraham-hence the need for him to become

like his brothers in everything.”

348

These brothers were the “unresponsive Jews,” who,

however, went further than Joseph’s brothers, carrying out their desire to kill by

“crucifying the one who deigned to take on the form of a slave for our salvation.”

349

Chrysostom highlighted the importance of the difference between the two noting, “The

type had to convey less than the reality- otherwise it would not have been a type of what

was to come later. Hence, in that case, things were prefigured as in shadow.”

350

This example of Chrysostom’s use of typology is illustrative of the parameters

observed by him when progressing beyond his usual literal or moral exegesis into a

spiritual meaning for the text. Chrysostom sought in this typology a clear textual

precedence for looking beyond its literal meaning. In this case, the similarities of Joseph

being betrayed by his brothers to Jesus’ own life were highlighted by the text of Acts 7.

Stephen’s speech in Acts 7 recorded several events in the history of Israel, connected in

part by a theme of rejection and persecution of key prophetic figures such as Joseph and

Moses.

351

Stephen ends the speech by associating this theme with the rejection of Jesus

by the people of his own time: “Which of the prophets did your ancestors not persecute?

They killed those who foretold the coming of the Righteous One, and now you have

become his betrayers and murderers.”

352

In addition, Chrysostom cited support for his

typology in the passage from Heb 2.16-17, which connected Jesus’ incarnation into flesh

as a coming in order to be like his “brothers.”

347

Ibid.

348

Ibid.

349

Ibid., 61.11.

350

Ibid.

351

For more detail see the discussion above on this passage.

352

Acts 7.52.

These scriptural precedents thus allowed Chrysostom the latitude to view the betrayal

of Joseph as prefiguring Christ’s betrayal “in shadow.”

353

The idea of these events as

shadows is in part similar to the idea of shadows from Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave.”

354

Chrysostom viewed the Holy Spirit as casting a light which illumined the events of Jesus’

earthly life, and in that light events from the history of Israel were cast as shadows. The

shadows mirror events in the life of Jesus, but only in the form of outlines. In order to

understand these types and their fulfillment in the life of Jesus, the interpreter must be

illumined by the Spirit. In this sense, Chrysostom’s use of typology bares similarities to

the allegorical interpretation seen earlier in Origen’s homilies. At issue for both

approaches was the relevance of the Old Testament to the New, and the connections that

could be forged between them for the reader of these texts.

355

Chrysostom, however, as a

member of the Antiochene School was more reticent in his use of a spiritual

interpretation than Origen.

356

Moral Exegesis

Chrysostom demonstrated in his homilies a marked preference for moral or

exhortatory exegesis. Manlio Simonetti noted that “the primary objective of his

rhetorical output was to draw out of the sacred text a lesson to educate, warn, or edify his

listeners, rather than to illustrate the text for its own sake.”

357

This preference for

exhortatory homilies is certainly noticeable in Chrysostom’s use of the figure of Joseph

353

Chrysostom, Homilies On Genesis 61.11. Note that Tertullian in An Answer to the Jews 10 also viewed

the betrayal of Joseph by his brothers as a type of Christ.

354

See Plato, The Republic VII.514 A-521 B.

355

See chapters 4-6 of Dawson, Christian Figural Reading and the Fashioning of Identity. Dawson

argued for a closer association between allegorical and figural/typological readings of scripture. Note that

the issue of relevance was also key to Philo’s allegorical exegesis of the Pentateuch, but in his case Philo

was specifically concerned with making the message relevant to the philosophical ideas of a Hellenistic

world.

356

Chrysostom’s reticence may also be credited to his preference (see following discussion) for

moral/exhortatory exposition and, as such, he viewed the use of typology as divergences from the central

point of his message. In the example above, Chrysostom followed this typology of Joseph’s betrayal with a

transitional notice, “Let us now return, however; to the theme of our sermon” (Homilies On Genesis 61.12).

Note also that Chrysostom may have observed more typologies than he included in his sermons. In the

example of Joseph’s silence in the face of accusations, Chrysostom noted that “For all those things are

types of these,” pointing perhaps toward events of Joseph’s life in general instead of a few select events

(Homilies on Matt 84.4).

357

Manlio Simonetti, Biblical Interpretation in the Early Church : An Historical Introduction to Patristic

Exegesis (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1994), 74.

as a moral exemplar. Joseph was an important example for Chrysostom, because he

preceded the giving of the Mosaic Law. In a discussion concerning being patient while

undergoing suffering, Chrysostom noted that he could use Moses as an example but he

desired to go back even further. Chrysostom argued that, “The greater the antiquity of

the examples cited, the more we are convinced by them.”

358

The reason for placing

greater weight on pre-Mosaic figures was that in their time, “virtue was harder to

practice. For those who then were living did not have commandments written down, or

the example of men’s lives.”

359

Chrysostom then used Noah and Joseph as exemplars of

patient endurance of suffering. As noted earlier, Henry Chadwick argued that this was a

common practice of the patristic writers who desired to “look back to the patriarchs

before Moses who had no Law to keep other than the moral imperative of the inward

conscience.”

360

Focusing on these pre-Mosaic figures, was one weapon used in the

apologetic distinction of patristic writers between Christian and Jewish claims on the

history of Israel. Thus, as Eusebius noted, Christians tied themselves to the pre-Mosaic

patriarchs because the later Israelites “were unable through moral weakness to emulate

the virtue of their fathers, inasmuch as they were enslaved by passions and sick in

soul.”

361

Chrysostom’s moral allusions to Joseph focused on two key events in his life: his

relationship with his brothers and his confrontation with Potiphar’s wife. The

prominence of the theme of Joseph’s relationship with his brothers in patristic literature

has been noted by M. Dulaey.

362

Chrysostom focused particularly on Joseph’s patient

endurance of the suffering caused by his brothers, and his willingness to forgive them for

their intrigues against him. Chrysostom noted that Joseph’s visit to his brothers as they

were shepherding in the fields was made in good faith, without any suspicion or malice

toward them: “he set off to them carrying provisions; he used no caution; he committed

358

John Chrysostom, Commentary on Saint John the Apostle and Evangelist; Homilies 48-88, trans.

Thomas Aquinas Goggin (New York: Fathers of the Church, Inc., 1960), Hom 71, p. 265.

359

Ibid.

360

Chadwick, The Early Church, 67. Note the discussion earlier, where Heb 11 was shown to be the first

example of this preference for pre-Mosaic figures.

361

Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel, 7.8, 312d. See below for a fuller discussion of this idea in

Eusebius.

362

M. Dulaey, « Joseph le patriarche, figure du Christ, » in Pierre Maraval, ed., Figures de l’Ancien

Testament chez les Pères, 84.

all to God: nay, the more they held him in the light of an enemy, the more did he treat

them as brothers.”

363

This was to serve as an example to Chrysostom’s listeners, that

relationships with outsiders should be characterized by “simplicity” in order to imitate the

early Christians from the book of Acts who had “favour with all people.”

364

The brothers, however, were envious of Joseph and this was the source of their

betrayal of him.

365

Chrysostom argued that envy was capable of destroying charity and

disrupting the lives of his parishioners, because “the despotism of envy has upset whole

churches and laid waste the whole world.”

366

This was exemplified in that, “because of it

his brothers [plotted to kill] Joseph; because of it the Devil [seeks to] destroy all men.”

367

Chrysostom heavy-handedly censured the conduct of the brothers, and as a result his

depiction of their relationship with Joseph was cast in clear black and white, good versus

evil categories.

368

Chrysostom lamented the cruelty of the brothers, noting “even though

they had been provided by him with nourishment they tried to deprive him of his life and

freedom.”

369

This cruelty was even more starkly portrayed in that the brothers sat down

and ate the food Joseph brought them, while he was lying naked in an adjacent cistern.

Chrysostom concluded: “What could be worse than this savagery? Were they not worse

than murderers?”

370

Chrysostom also accused the brothers of “unlawful frenzy” and

“dreadful malice.”

371

This heavy censure of the brothers was likely influenced by the

typology, discussed earlier, where the brothers’ betrayal of Joseph was linked by

Chrysostom to Jesus’ betrayal and crucifixion by the “unresponsive Jews.”

372

Chrysostom is infamous for his anti-Semitic barbs, particularly in the series of sermons

Discourses Against Judaizing Christians, which criticized parishioners who participated

363

Chrysostom, The Homilies of S. John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople, on the Acts of the

Apostles, Vol 1, Hom VII, p. 104. See also his Homilies on I Corinthians 25.4, where Joseph goes

willingly to his brothers, because he “prefers the care of his brethren above all.”

364

Ibid., p. 103.

365

Chrysostom’s focus on envy as the cause of Joseph’s suffering mirrors I Clement 4.9: “Jealousy caused

Joseph to be persecuted nearly to death and to be sold into slavery.” Note the earlier discussion of this

passage and its parallels in Philo and Josephus.

366

John Chrysostom, Commentary on Saint John the Apostle and Evangelist; Homilies 1-47, trans. Thomas

Aquinas Goggin (New York: Fathers of the Church, Inc., 1957), Hom 37, p. 366.

367

Ibid.

368

The Biblical narrative is far more nuanced, and depicts Joseph’s dreams and the exalted position granted

to him by his father Jacob, as contributing factors in the brothers’ hatred for Joseph.

369

Chrysostom, Commentary on Saint John the Apostle and Evangelist; Homilies 48-88, Hom 71, p. 267.

370

Ibid.

371

Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis 46-67, 61.16.

372

Ibid., 61.11.

in Jewish festivals.

373

As noted before, the speech by Stephen in Acts 7 had earlier made

the connection between Joseph’s brothers and the Jewish community that had rejected

Jesus, and Chrysostom also consistently made this connection in his polemic against the

brothers.

The envy of Joseph’s brothers and their sale of him to desert traders, became,

according to Chrysostom, the immediate cause of Joseph’s years of suffering in Egypt.

374

Chrysostom argued that his brothers, “betrayed him to ten-thousand deaths by selling him

to savage and uncouth men, who were about to go away to foreign peoples.”

375

Joseph,

however, did not hold this grievance against his brothers, but was willing to do good to

his enemies. Chrysostom noted that while in prison Joseph interpreted the cupbearer or

butler’s dream, and asked him to remember him when he was restored to favor by

Pharaoh. Joseph then explained to the cupbearer why he was in prison, but Chrysostom

noted that in Joseph’s explanation, “though he had been sold, and made a slave, and had

tenanted a prison, uttered not even then a bitter word against the authors of his

sorrows.”

376

Instead, Joseph simply noted that, “Indeed I was stolen away out of the land

of the Hebrews,” but as Chrysostom noted he “addeth not by whom.”

377

Joseph did this

because, “he feels more ashamed for the wickednesses of his brethren, than they who

wrought them.”

378

Chrysostom exhorted his listeners to imitate Joseph’s attitude, arguing

that “Such too ought to be our disposition, to grieve for them who wrong us, more than

they themselves do. For the hurt passeth on to them.”

379

In another homily, Chrysostom

argued similarly that Joseph’s forgiveness and acceptance of his brothers should be an

example to his parishioners in their treatment of enemies. Chrysostom exhorted them to

action, arguing “Since we know all of this, let us forgive the trespasses of our neighbors

373

See Chrysostom, Discourses against Judaizing Christians. Chrysostom referred repeatedly in these

discourses to the Jewish community in Antioch as “pitiful and miserable” (Disc 1.1.4, 1.2.1, 4.1.1). For a

learned discussion of these texts and on Jewish and Christian relationships in Chrysostom’s Antioch see

Wilken, John Chrysostom and the Jews : Rhetoric and Reality in the Late 4th Century.

374

Note, however, the discussion below concerning the role of Providence in the direction of Joseph’s life.

375

Chrysostom, Commentary on Saint John the Apostle and Evangelist; Homilies 48-88, Hom 71, p. 267.

376

John Chrysostom, The Homilies of S. John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople, on the Second

Epistle of St. Paul the Apostle to the Corinthians (Oxford: J.H. Parker, 1848), Hom 5.5.

377

Ibid.

378

Ibid.

379

Ibid. Chrysostom placed this exhortation within a Eucharistic context, arguing that no one should come

to the table harboring anger toward an enemy. The reason for this was that the participant in the Eucharist

must remember “the Subject of the Sacrifice, that he was sacrificed for enemies” (Hom 5.5). As such,

Chrysostom may be alluding to another typological interpretation of an event in the life of Joseph.

and repay them with the opposite that we may obtain the mercy of God.”

380

Joseph was a

particularly powerful example to follow, according to Chrysostom, because he was a pre-

Mosaic figure from the history of Israel: “For what excuse shall we have, after being

given the Law and grace and such true wisdom, if we do not even emulate him who came

before the giving of grace and the Law?”

381

Joseph patiently endured under the suffering that began with his brothers, and

Chrysostom pictured his steadfastness as characteristic of an athlete under the pressure of

competition. Chrysostom noted that, even though Joseph would “suffer trial upon trial,”

he endured as a “noble athlete.”

382

This was particularly true of Joseph’s time in prison,

and for Chrysostom, this period of Joseph’s life was depicted as one of the great

challenges to Joseph’s faith in the promises of God. Chrysostom described Joseph during

his stay in prison as an “athlete under pressure,” who was “competing in some

gymnasium or wrestling ring, giving a demonstration of his characteristic virtue by not

showing signs of alarm, panic, or disappointment.”

383

Even when the cupbearer, whose

dream Joseph had interpreted, forgot his promise to remember Joseph when restored to

his position, Joseph still did not lose hope. Instead, as a virtuous athlete, “he realized that

the race was longer for him, so that by striving consistently he might win a glorious

crown.”

384

Part of the difficulty of this experience for Joseph was attributed to the conditions of

the prison he was resident in. Chrysostom described the fellow prisoners he was housed

with as “squalid and filthy people,” who were condemned as “murderers, grave robbers,

thieves, and perpetrators of countless crimes.”

385

Chrysostom also noted the harshness

380

Chrysostom, Commentary on Saint John the Apostle and Evangelist; Homilies 48-88, 267-68.

381

Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis 46-67, 267. See the discussion above concerning the importance of

pre-Mosaic figures in the patristic writings. Ambrose argued along similar lines that Joseph’s forgiveness

of his brothers was remarkable: “Therefore, one deserves to be noticed who did this before the Gospel, who

showed compassion when harmed and forgiveness when attacked, who did not repay injury when put up

for sale but paid out grace for insult- the conduct we have all learned after the Gospel yet cannot observe.”

See his De Ioseph in Ambrose, Seven Exegetical Works, trans. Michael P. McHugh (Washington: Catholic

University of America Press, 1972), 1.3.

382

Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis 46-67, 62.12.

383

Ibid., 63.9, 11.

384

Ibid., 63.11. Note the discussion of Chrysostom’s use of metaphor (including athletic imagery) in

Wilken, John Chrysostom and the Jews : Rhetoric and Reality in the Late 4th Century, 106-12. See also

Kelly, Golden Mouth : The Story of John Chrysostom--Ascetic, Preacher, Bishop, 62-66. And, Mayer and

Allen, John Chrysostom, 27-28.

385

Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis 46-67, 63.7, 11.

that was typical of most custodians of prisons, labeling them as “wild beasts.”

386

Prison

keepers were “practiced in cruelty….They profit by the misfortune of others, and harass

those whom others support in their afflictions, making a gain of them that is truly

deplorable, with a more than brutal cruelty.”

387

Chrysostom’s criticism of the prison

keeper was possibly drawn from a similar description by Philo. He noted in his treatise

On Joseph that “Everyone knows how full of inhumanity and cruelty gaolers are: pitiless

by nature and casehardened by practice, they are brutalized day by day towards

savagery.”

388

The reason for their inhumanity was that:

they spend their days with footpads, thieves, burglars, men of violence and

outrage, who commit rape, murder, adultery and sacrilege, and from each of these

they imbibe and accumulate something of their villainy, out of which

miscellaneous amalgam they produce a single body of evil, a fusion of every sort

of pollution.

389

The similarities between the two accounts continued in Chrysostom’s recognition that

Joseph was treated kindly by the prison keeper, because “the virtue of the soul can

mollify even wild beasts.”

390

Likewise, Philo noted that the prison keeper was “tamed by

the nobility of the youth.”

391

Since the prison keeper had been mollified or tamed, he

allowed Joseph to become a ruler or governor of the prison, and Chrysostom related this

to his governance of the house of Potiphar: “Thus, Joseph was again a ruler, he ruled in

prison as he had ruled in the house.”

392

Chrysostom argued that this was good

preparation for Joseph’s eventual position as governor of Egypt, for “it was fit that he

who was to be a governor, should first be an excellent ruler of the house.”

393

Philo also

386

John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Epistles of St. Paul the Apostle to Timothy, Titus, and Philemon,

trans. Philip Schaff, vol. XIII, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (Grand Rapids: Wm. B. Eerdmans

Publishing Company, 1956), 534. Chrysostom’s depiction of the baseness of life in the prison was likely

due to his desire that his parishioners visit the needy in prison. Chrysostom argued that Joseph was an

example of “estimable men” who can be found in prisons. See Chrysostom, Commentary on Saint John the

Apostle and Evangelist; Homilies 48-88, 147. Based on this example, parishioners should visit the prisons

because, “The service you do to such as these gives you a return for your solicitude on behalf of all the rest.

But, even if there be no one of this kind, even in this case you will have generous repayment (Ibid). For

more on the theme of social action in Chrysostom’s sermons see Kelly, Golden Mouth : The Story of John

Chrysostom--Ascetic, Preacher, Bishop, 97-100.

387

Chrysostom, Homilies on the Epistles of St. Paul the Apostle to Timothy, Titus, and Philemon.

388

Philo, On Joseph 81.

389

Ibid., 84.

390

Chrysostom, Homilies on the Epistles of St. Paul the Apostle to Timothy, Titus, and Philemon, 534.

391

Philo, On Joseph 84.

392

Chrysostom, Homilies on the Epistles of St. Paul the Apostle to Timothy, Titus, and Philemon, 534.

393

Ibid., 535.

recognized this relationship, noting that when Potiphar appointed Joseph as steward of

his house, “in fact and reality it was nature’s doing, who was taking steps to procure for

him the command of whole cities and a nation and a great country.”

394

The reason for

this, according to Philo, was that “the future statesman needed first to be trained and

practiced in house management; for a house is a city compressed into small dimensions,

and household management may be called a kind of state management.”

395

The other key facet of Chrysostom’s moral exegesis was his extensive retelling of the

incident of Joseph’s confrontation with Potiphar’s wife. Chrysostom labeled the woman

a “wild beast,” and described her “lewdness and her machinations for his destruction.”

396

Chrysostom, however, also noted her strong qualities of beauty and charm, which made

her particularly alluring to Joseph: “For what was there not then to charm him? A

beautiful person, the pride of rank, the costliness of garments, the fragrance of perfumes,

(for all these things know how to soften the soul,) words more soft than all the rest!”

397

Potiphar’s wife was not content to rest on the strength of these qualities, but rather

pursued Joseph, “taking upon her the attitude of a supplicant.”

398

Potiphar’s wife went to

great lengths in order to entrap Joseph: “she threw herself at the knees perhaps of the

captive boy, and perhaps even intreated him weeping and clasping his knees, and had

recourse to this not once, and a second time, but oftentimes.”

399

Chrysostom also

suggested that Potiphar’s wife dressed provocatively in order to secure Joseph’s attention,

so that “not simply but with excessive nicety would set off her beauty; as wishing by

many nets to catch the lamb of Christ. Add here I pray also many magic charms.”

400

Chrysostom’s retelling of this scene drew from a stock of legends surrounding the

story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife. This event filled with sexual suggestiveness and

valiant moral stands proved ripe ground for imaginative expansions by various writers. In

much of the post-Biblical literature, this part of the narrative became the most important

394

Philo, On Joseph 38.

395

Ibid.

396

Chrysostom, The Homilies of S. John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople, on the Acts of the

Apostles, Hom 49.3.

397

John Chrysostom, Homilies on the Epistles of St. Paul the Apostle to the Philippians, Colossians, and

Thessalonians, trans. John A. Broadus, vol. XIII, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (Grand Rapids: Wm. B.

Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1956), Hom 4, p. 343.

398

Ibid.

399

Ibid.

400

Ibid.

element of Joseph’s life to be remembered.

401

Louis Ginzburg recorded the midrashic

legend of Potiphar’s wife dressing provocatively. The midrashic writers noted that she

“arrayed herself in princely garments. She placed precious stones upon her head, onyx

stones set in silver and gold, she beautified her face and her body with all sorts of things

for the purifying of women.”

402

Also, The Ethiopic History of Joseph noted that

Potiphar’s wife longed for Joseph every day, and to entrap him, “She [painted her eyes]

with antimony, she scented herself with perfume, and she changed into varieties of

beautiful dresses in Joseph’s presence.”

403

The later work, Sermon On Joseph the Most

Virtuous attributed to Ephrem the Syrian, noted similarly that, “by changing her clothes,

making up her face and decking herself in gold, the wretched woman tried to entrap with

satanic nods and shameless smiles the holy eyes of the just young man.”

404

The Testament of Joseph recorded, much like Chrysostom, that Potiphar’s wife

employed magical charms to entice Joseph. He noted that the woman, “sent me food

mixed with enchantments,” but Joseph refused to eat because of a vision given to him by

God of a “frightening man who offered me a sword along with a bowl.”

405

Likewise, the

Testament of Reuben recorded that Potiphar’s wife, “did many things to him, summoned

magicians, and brought potions for him, but his soul’s deliberation rejected evil

desire.”

406

A key theme throughout Chrysostom’s account of Joseph’s temptation was his

extraordinary virtue of self-control or chastity.

407

When Potiphar’s wife finally despaired

of all other measures to seduce Joseph, she resorted to forceful measures grabbing his

cloak and pulling him to bed with her. Joseph, however, left his cloak behind and fled

naked from the woman. Chrysostom delighted in recounting this scene, drawing out the

irony of the naked Joseph leaving all but his chastity behind him. Thus, in his Homilies

on Genesis, Chrysostom noted that “Then one could see this remarkable man emerging,

401

Isaac Kalimi, “Joseph Between Potiphar and His Wife,” Biblische Notizen (2001): 58.

402

Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, vol. 2, 53.

403

The Ethiopic History of Joseph fol. 133a, p. 61. See the introduction to this translation, referenced

above, which argued that the origins of this text point to a work of Jewish origin from the late Second

Temple Period (43-44).

404

Sermon On Joseph the Most Virtuous lines 481-484.

405

Testament of Joseph 6.1-2.

406

Testament of Reuben 4.9.

407

See the earlier discussion of this key theme in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs.

divested of his clothes, but garbed in the vesture of chastity.”

408

Similarly, in his

Homilies on Matthew Chrysostom argued that Joseph, “when he stripped himself, did

then more than ever shine forth. For to be thus naked is no evil, but to be so clad, as we

now are, with costly garments, this is both disgraceful and ridiculous.”

409

Chrysostom favored this scenario when criticizing the elaborate clothing of some of

his parishioners. In Homilies on Colossians, Chrysostom pleaded with these parishioners

to “Put Christ about thee, and not gold; where Mammon is, there Christ is not, where

Christ is there Mammon is not.”

410

Chrysostom contrasted the clothes of Potiphar’s wife

with the nakedness of Joseph as support for his exhortation: “He was naked, but clothed

in the garments of chastity; she was clothed, but more unseemly than if she had been

naked; for she had not modesty.”

411

This was also a key theme in other early Christian

writers. Clement of Alexandria observed that when Potiphar’s wife took hold of Joseph’s

coat, “he divested himself of it, becoming bare of sin, but clothed with seemliness of

character.”

412

Likewise, Ambrose proposed that Joseph, “left behind the clothing by

which he was held, and fled away, stripped to be sure, but not naked, because he was

covered better by the covering of modesty.”

413

The importance of this theme of chastity (swfrosuvnh) in Hellenistic Jewish literature

was discussed earlier.

414

A few additional examples from the literature demonstrate the

consistency of the use of this appellation to describe Joseph. In Josephus, Joseph was

warned by Potiphar’s wife that he should acquiesce to her advances or taste her wrath,

“should he reject her suit and set more store on a reputation for chastity (swfrosuvnhV)

than on gratifying his mistress.”

415

The woman’s pleading and threats were ultimately to

408

Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis 46-67, Hom 62.19.

409

Chrysostom, The Homilies of S. John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople, on the Gospel of St.

Matthew, Vol. 1, Hom 18.2. Curiously, this reference to Joseph falls in a list of characters from the history

of Israel who were “naked and not ashamed.” Chrysostom’s list supports his argument that one should

scrupulously obey Jesus’ commandment that “if any man will sue thee at the law, and take way thy coat, let

him have thy cloke also.”

410

Chrysostom, Homilies on the Epistles of St. Paul the Apostle to the Philippians, Colossians, and

Thessalonians, Hom 10, p. 308.

411

Ibid. This was a favorite target of Chrysostom’s invective against the affluent members of his

congregation. See Kelly, Golden Mouth : The Story of John Chrysostom--Ascetic, Preacher, Bishop, 97-

98, 135-36.

412

Clement, Stromata 7.11.

413

Ambrose, Seven Exegetical Works, 206.

414

See the discussion above of this virtue in the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs.

415

Josephus, Jewish Antiquities II.48.

no avail, and Josephus depicted her as weeping with the knowledge that, “neither pity

could induce him to unchastity (mhv swfronei:n) nor fear compel.”

416

Likewise, Philo

noted that Joseph rejected the advances of the woman, because “so strong was the sense

of decency and temperance (swfrosuvnhn) which nature and the exercise of control had

implanted in him.”

417

Later, Philo stated that Joseph’s behavior toward the woman would

serve him usefully in his political career, because “if the results of licentiousness are civil

strife and war, and ill upon ill without number, clearly the results of continence

(swfrosuvnhV) are stability and peace and the acquisition and enjoyment of perfect

blessings.”

418

Patristic writers, such as Chrysostom, freely borrowed this appellation

accorded to Joseph as the chaste or moderate patriarch in their own re-narrations of the

story.

419

Chrysostom used the idea of God’s providential ordering of the events of Joseph’s life

as a unifying theme in his homilies. In his Homilies on Acts, Chrysostom addressed the

way that “God ordered events,” and specifically the irony in the lives of figures such as

Joseph, where “the very things by which we are hurt, by these same are we benefited.”

420

In support of this, Chrysostom noted that the plans of Potiphar’s wife seemed to ruin

Joseph, but ultimately saved him because, “by her contriving she placed him in a place of

safety: for the house where that wild beast (of a woman) was kept was a den in

comparison with which the prison was gentle.”

421

Thus, God’s Providence oversaw a

complete reversal in Joseph’s circumstances, “So that the fact was not that he got into

prison, but that he got out of prison.”

422

Likewise, though Joseph’s brothers sold him into

slavery, “they freed him from having enemies dwelling in the same house with

him…they placed him far aloof from them that hated him.”

423

This was also true of

Pharaoh’s cupbearer, who forgot Joseph’s plea to remember him when he regained

416

Ibid., II.50.

417

Philo, On Joseph 9.40.

418

Ibid., 11.57.

419

Note also, the argument by James Kugel that the appellation of “Joseph the Righteous” or “Joseph the

Virtuous” became common in rabbinic exegesis, and that this title was largely tied to Joseph’s

confrontation with Potiphar’s wife. See James L. Kugel, In Potiphar's House : The Interpretive Life of

Biblical Texts, 1st ed. (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1990), 25.

420

Chrysostom, The Homilies of S. John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople, on the Acts of the

Apostles, Hom 49. p. 653.

421

Ibid.

422

Ibid., Hom 49, p. 654.

423

Ibid.

Pharaoh’s favor. Chrysostom argued that this forgetfulness was ordained by God, so that

Joseph’s subsequent exaltation “might be more glorious: that the whole might be

ascribed, not to man’s favour, but to God’s Providence.”

424

Again, Chrysostom

highlighted the irony in this event, noting “Therefore, it is that the eunuch forgets him,

that Egypt might not forget him, that the king might not be ignorant of him.”

425

All of

these events acted as constraints to keep Joseph in Egypt, so that he could ultimately save

his family: “first by subjection to a master, secondly by being in prison, thirdly by being

over the kingdom, to the end that all of this might be brought about by the Providence of

God.”

426

This was also a central theme in Chrysostom’s reflection on Joseph in his

Homilies on Genesis. At the conclusion of his reflections on Joseph’s sufferings and his

final exaltation as ruler of Egypt, Chrysostom noted “So, being in distress and trial is a

mark of the loving God’s great care and providence in our regard.”

427

That this was a key topic in Josephus’ writings has been demonstrated by Harold

Attridge, who argued that the theme of God’s Providence formed “a consistent pattern of

interpretation of the events of biblical history in the Antiquities.”

428

Louis Feldman has

argued that this was also a theme specific to Josephus’ paraphrase of the life of Joseph.

429

For instance, after refusing the advances of Potiphar’s wife and being thrown into prison,

Joseph did not attempt any defense against his unfair imprisonment, but rather “silently

underwent his bonds and confinement, confident that God, who knew the cause of his

calamity and the truth, would prove stronger than those who had bound him; and of His

providence he had proof forthwith.”

430

In a similar manner, when Joseph finally revealed

himself to his brothers he attributed their earlier cruelty to him as a function of God’s

424

Ibid.

425

Ibid.

426

Ibid., Hom 49, p. 655.

427

Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis 46-67, 64.33. In this series of homilies Chrysostom often

interchanges the theme of God’s Providence with the idea of receiving “grace from on high.” For example

in Homily 63.14, Chrysostom concluded “Do you see how wonderful a thing it is to be helped by grace

from on high? See how many things divine providence had arranged so that the events affecting Joseph

should come to pass.” The ubiquity of this phrase in Chrysostom’s commentary, possibly makes it the key

moral theme of Chrysostom’s paraenesis. Additional references to this theme can be found in Homilies on

Genesis 61.17; 62.23, 24; 63.2,10, 19; 65.12, 18.

428

Harold W. Attridge, The Interpretation of Biblical History in the Antiquitates Judaicae of Flavius

Josephus, Harvard Dissertations in Religion ; No. 7. (Missoula, Mont.: Published by Scholars Press for

Harvard Theological Review, 1976), 106-07.

429

Louis H. Feldman, Josephus's Interpretation of the Bible, Hellenistic Culture and Society ; 27.

(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 359-60.

430

Josephus, Jewish Antiquities II.60.

Providence. Josephus recorded Joseph exhortation to his brothers that it was not,

“through your own nature that ye did me ill, but by the will of God, working out that

happiness that we now enjoy and that shall be ours hereafter, if He continue to be

gracious to us.”

431

One reason for the prominence of this theme in Joseph, was the

importance of the idea of providentia in Roman religion. As Robert Wilken has argued,

the providential ordering of world events was a key theme in the Roman cult, and the

term appears repeatedly on Roman coins.

432

The active intervention of the gods was

foundational to Rome’s survival thus, “Through the providence of the gods the earth

came to life each spring, the wheat bloomed, the trees bore fruit, and the heavens opened

to provide rain.”

433

Josephus emphasized this quality in Israel’s God, as a central

platform in his cultural apologetic for the values of Hellenistic Judaism.

Chrysostom certainly knew and valued the writings of Josephus, and cited them as

direct support in several of his homilies. In his Homilies on Matthew, Chrysostom argued

that Jesus’ prophetic warning in Matt 24 of coming calamities was addressed specifically

to the Jews. As proof that this prophecy was fulfilled in the Jewish war against the

Romans, Chrysostom urged his listeners to read the “writings of Josephus, and learn the

truth of the sayings.”

434

Josephus was, according to Chrysostom, a valuable witness,

“For neither can any one say, that the man being a believer, in order to establish Christ’s

words, hath exaggerated the tragical history.”

435

Chrysostom also cited Josephus as a

source in his Discourses against Judaizing Christians. As confirmation of his

interpretation of certain prophecies from the book of Daniel, Chrysostom offered the

work of Josephus, in order that his listeners, “may know that my words are not based on

mere conjecture.”

436

Josephus was, according to Chrysostom, “a witness whom the Jews

regard with the highest trust…who has made their disasters a subject of tragic history and

who has paraphrased the entire Old Testament.”

437

In light of this, Chrysostom’s use of

431

Ibid., II.161.

432

Wilken, The Christians as the Romans Saw Them, 59.

433

Ibid.

434

Chrysostom, The Homilies of S. John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople, on the Gospel of St.

Matthew, Vol 3, Hom 76.1.

435

Ibid.

436

Chrysostom, Discourses against Judaizing Christians, 5.5.

437

Ibid. For other references to Josephus in Chrysostom’s homilies see Homilies on John, Hom 65;

Homilies on Acts, Hom 5; and Homilies on I Thessalonians, Hom 8.

this theme of God’s Providence points toward a direct reading of and borrowing from

Josephus’ own paraphrase of the life of Joseph.

Chrysostom, similarly to the other early Christian literature surveyed by this paper,

manifested a consistent concern for elucidating the connections between the history of

Israel and his own community. Chrysostom attempted to do this through some use of

typology, but mainly through moral exposition which drew upon figures, such as Joseph,

because of the rhetorical power of their great antiquity. Christianity and its virtues were

not something new and thus illegitimate. Chrysostom could trace its origins to the

venerated history of Judaism, forming what Rowan Greer labeled a “sacred history

presided over by God’s providence.”

438

Chrysostom’s source and model for many of

the key themes in his moral exegesis of Joseph can be traced directly to the literature of

Hellenistic Judaism. Drawing upon this literature, Chrysostom proposed that this ancient

figure from Israel’s past was an apt exemplar for timeless virtues. As Chrysostom

argued, concerning Joseph, toward the end of his Homilies on Genesis: “Who could

adequately admire the virtue of this good man who fulfilled in generous measure the

moral values of the New Testament?”

439

Conclusion:

Joseph in Eusebius and the Construction of Christian History

The early Christian sources surveyed in this paper all demonstrated a concern for

articulating connections between the history of Israel and the church. This was, in part, a

response to the charges by pagan apologists such as Celsus and Julian that Christianity

was a “new” sect lacking the venerated antiquity of other religious traditions. As such,

this emphasis on connections with the history of Israel was foundational to the

construction of identity within early Christianity. Raoul Mortley has argued for the

importance of this theme of connections, noting “Historical research is the first step in

self-identification.”

440

Writers such as Origen, in his apologetic work Contra Celsum,

438

Kugel and Greer, Early Biblical Interpretation, 123.

439

Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis 46-67, 64.32.

440

Raoul Mortley, "The Past in Clement of Alexandria," in Jewish and Christian Self-Definition, ed. E. P.

Sanders (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1980), 186.

argued for the “deeper wisdom” of the Jews over against the traditions of other nations.

441

Eusebius (c. 260-340 C.E.), the bishop of Caesarea and famous historian of the church,

began his Ecclesiastical History with an introduction to the history of Israel, emphasizing

the connection between this history and that of the church. Indeed, by beginning with the

history of Israel Eusebius argued, “In this way…will both the genuine antiquity and the

divine majesty of the Christian religion be shown to those who assume that it is recent

and foreign, having put in an appearance no earlier than yesterday.”

442

Eusebius also argued for the great wisdom found in the history of Israel, and

contended that even the revered philosophy of the Greeks had largely been borrowed

from the Hebrews.

443

As a result, Eusebius acknowledged in his Preparation for the

Gospel that Christianity “preferred” the philosophy and religion of the Hebrews.

444

demonstrated the reasonableness of this choice, by building a case for the important

virtues of the Hebrews and their great antiquity. In view of this, Eusebius concluded:

“Do you not think then that we have with reason preferred these to the Greeks, and

accepted the histories of godly men among the Hebrews rather than the gods of Phoenicia

and Egypt, and the blasphemous absurdities of those gods?”

445

Indeed, Eusebius

acknowledged Christianity’s debt to the history of Israel, contending “that nothing at all

has yet been found among any of the nations like the boon which has been provided for

us among the Hebrews.”

446

This focus on the connections between the church and the history of Israel was,

however, not without its risks for early Christian writers. Though figures such as Joseph

figured prominently in the sacred history of Christianity, there were distinct differences

in how the church and Israel remained connected to that history. And, pagan apologists

were attuned to these differences, exploiting them in their criticisms of Christianity.

Celsus in his attack on Christianity, questioned Christians on this point by asking them,

through the voice of an imaginary Jew, “why do you take your origin from our religion,

and then, as if you are progressing in knowledge, despise these things, although you

441

Origen, Contra Celsum, V.43.

442

Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History, Books 1-10, 1.2, p. 38.

443

See Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel, Books 10-12.

444

Ibid., 8.1, 298d.

445

Ibid., 7.4, 303c.

446

Ibid., 7.1, 298d.

cannot name any other origin for your doctrine than our law?”

447

Julian also maligned

the Christians for preferring “the belief of the Jews to ours;” but noted that “they do not

even adhere to the Jewish beliefs but have abandoned them also and followed a way of

their own.”

448

The pagan apologists saw duplicity in the Christian claim of antiquity by

relation to the history of Israel, when in fact they rejected certain elements of that history

such as circumcision and the observance of the Mosaic laws. Eusebius acknowledged

this problem, noting that critics of Christianity charged them with impiety in this

selective approach to Israel’s history. The pagan apologists argued that Christians “put

aside the customs of their own kindred….not even to adhere to the God who is honored

among the Jews according to their customary rites.”

449

The Christians have instead, “cut

out for themselves a new kind of track in a pathless desert.”

450

These criticisms highlighted the fundamental tension that lay at the heart of the

Christian reading of history. Early Christian writers were forced to face these criticisms

by navigating between the contrasting identities of early Christianity as being both new

(as the new Israel) and old (as the true inheritors of the history and traditions of Israel).

As Eusebius argued, the Christian revelation was “very, very old; and on the other hand,

it is new through having been as it were hidden away from men through a long period

between, and now come to life again by the Saviour’s teaching.”

451

Eusebius dealt with this issue in a radical way by creating a distinction between

characters in the Old Testament Scriptures who were Hebrews and those who were Jews.

Eusebius noted:

the latter assumed their name from Judah, from whose tribe the kingdom of Judah

was long ages afterwards established, but the former from Eber, who was

forefather of Abraham. And that the Hebrews were earlier than the Jews, we are

taught by the sacred writings.

452

The Jews were the people of the Mosaic Law, which had been given to them because,

“they were unable through moral weakness to emulate the virtue of their fathers,

447

Origen, Contra Celsum, II.4.

448

Julian, Against the Galileans, 43 A.

449

Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel, 1.2, 5c.

450

Ibid.

451

Eusebius, The Proof of the Gospel, trans. William John Ferrar (New York,: The Macmillan company,

1920), I.6, 16d.

452

Eusebius The Preparation for the Gospel 7.6, 304b.

inasmuch as they were enslaved by passions and sick in soul.”

453

The Hebrews, on the

other hand,

having never heard of all the Mosaic legislation, enjoyed a free and unfettered

mode of religion, being regulated by the manner of life which is in accordance

with nature, so that they had no need of laws to rule them, because of the extreme

freedom of their soul from passions, but had received true knowledge of the

doctrines concerning God.

454

Thus, for Eusebius Joseph was a “Hebrew of the Hebrews, and not a Jew (because the

Jewish nation did not yet exist).”

455

Indeed, if one could be transported back to the land

of ancient Egypt, “you would find Joseph in pre-Mosaic times in the palaces of the

Egyptians living in freedom not burdened by Judaism.”

456

Eusebius argued that distinguishing Joseph and the other pre-Mosaic figures as

Hebrews and not Jews was important because:

From all of this it is abundantly proved that the Word of God announced to all

nations the ancient form of their ancestors’ religion, as the new covenant does not

differ from the form of holiness, which was very ancient even in the time of

Moses, so that it is at the same time both old and new.

457

This approach to navigating the tension between old and new was employed in a less

radical way by the writer of Hebrews 11, who emphasized the connection of the Christian

community through lines of faith to the pre-Mosaic patriarchs. And, the importance of

these pre-Mosaic patriarchs was emphasized by both Aphrahat and Chrysostom.

Eusebius also acknowledged the use of “symbols and shadows,” which pointed toward

their fulfillment in Christ as another means of mediating the tension of the old and the

new.

458

Thus people and events in the history of Israel, when viewed through the light of

fuller revelation mirrored events in the life of Jesus. Connections were thus drawn

between the ancient history of Israel and the more recent history of the church, thus

emphasizing their continuity. As this thesis has demonstrated this method was alluded to

in Stephen’s speech in Acts 7, but was more fully employed in the Epistle of Barnabas,

453

Ibid., 7.8, 312d.

454

Ibid., 7.6, 304d. Note here the emphasis on universal ethics perceived in accord with nature- again, a

key theme in the apologetic of Hellenistic Judaism.

455

Ibid., 7.8, 312b.

456

Eusebius, The Proof of the Gospel, I.6, 14b.

457

Ibid., I.6, 16d.

458

Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel, 7.8, 312d.

early apologists such as Justin Martyr and Tertullian, Aphrahat, and to a limited extent in

Ephrem and Chrysostom. The allegorical method of Origen was shown to have a similar

concern for emphasizing the on-going importance of the events of Israel’s history to the

Christian community.

Eusebius also identified Joseph as a moral example, who should be emulated by the

Christian community.

459

As demonstrated in this study this was a key theme in early

Christian writing on Joseph. He was interpreted as a moral exemplar in the Testaments of

the Twelve Patriarchs, Clement, Aphrahat, Ephrem, and especially in the writings of

John Chrysostom. Eusebius retold the story of Joseph, focusing, as other Christian and

Hellenistic Jewish writers, on the confrontation of Joseph with Potiphar’s wife. She was

a “terrible and raging beast,” who tried to entrap Joseph into “licentious and amorous

intercourse.”

460

Joseph, however, “recalling the memory of the piety of his

forefathers…shakes off the base and licentious woman, putting her aside with a stronger

hand.”

461

Because of Joseph’s piety and virtuous resistance to the woman he was

“received among the thrice blessed and most highly favoured friends of God.”

462

This

form of holiness demonstrated in figures such as Joseph, “which was ancient even in the

time of Moses” was also new because it had “now come to life again by the Saviour’s

teaching.”

463

Arnaldo Momigliano argued that Eusebius was creating a new kind of history by

deemphasizing the political narrative in his writings.

464

Christian historical writing as a

whole focused on biographies of saints, rather than key political figures.

465

The result of

this emphasis was that “all other types of men became inferior to that of the saint.

466

Early Christian writers were thus crafting a new form of history- a holy history written

through the lives of pious men forming moral exemplars for the reader. This emphasis

extended to the figures from the history of Israel, who were claimed by early Christian

459

Ibid., 7.8, 311b.

460

Ibid., 7.8, 311d.

461

Ibid.

462

Ibid., 7.8, 312b.

463

Eusebius, The Proof of the Gospel, 1.6, 16d.

464

Arnaldo Momigliano, "Pagan and Christian Historiography in the Fourth Century A.D.," in The Conflict

between Paganism and Christianity in the Fourth Century; Essays, ed. Arnaldo Momigliano (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1963), 92.

465

Ibid., 93.

466

Ibid.

writers as actors “not of a profane history” but rather of a “sacred history which belonged

to them since it extends into the church.”

467

These figures mediated the foundational

tension between old and new, becoming “the Christian saints of the Old Testament,

constituting an uninterrupted chain of testimony to the truth.”

468

Indeed, it was because

of this sacred history that Chrysostom could praise Joseph as an ancient figure from the

history of Israel who, paradoxically, “fulfilled in generous measure the moral values of

the New Testament?”

469

In so doing, the Christian construction of history borrowed from the “pioneering work

of Hellenistic Judaism.”

470

They had been preceded in this construction of an apologetic

history by the writers of Hellenistic Judaism, who successfully defended the great virtues

and antiquity of their traditions through allegorical and moral exegesis. This thesis has

demonstrated that early Christian writers borrowed these methods, preserving in the

process many of the writings and traditions of Hellenistic Judaism. As a result, scholars

such as John Collins have argued, “The legacy of the Hellenistic Diaspora was inherited

not by Judaism but by the emerging Christian church.”

471

The process, however, was

much more complex than this. Christian writers only borrowed the methods of

Hellenistic Judaism in so much as they served to emphasize the connections between the

history of Israel and their own communities. Use of writers, such as Philo and Josephus,

and their interpretations of Joseph served to further what Mortley termed “historical

research,” and as such became “the first step in self-identification.”

472

Early Christian

writers were constructing their own version of history- a sacred history, and these

methods of the interpretation of texts and figures such as Joseph became “the principal

site of tension between past and future, the preservation and refashioning of religious

identity.”

473

Thus figures such as Joseph were claimed by early Christianity to be “much

more ours than yours,” because the possessive pronoun “ours” was indefinable without

these figures and texts from the history of Israel.

467

Pierre Maraval, Figures de l’Ancien Testament chez les Pères, I.

468

Ibid.

469

Chrysostom, Homilies on Genesis 46-67, 64.32.

470

Rokeah, Jews, Pagans, and Christians in Conflict, 90. The writers examined in this paper from the

Syriac sources (Aphrahat and Ephrem) also borrowed from the developing genre of Midrashic literature.

471

Collins, Between Athens and Jerusalem : Jewish Identity in the Hellenistic Diaspora, 275.

472472

Mortley, "The Past in Clement of Alexandria," 186.

473

Dawson, Christian Figural Reading and the Fashioning of Identity, 207.

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