Ben Hur, the novel, part 17

So Book V of Ben Hur.

Chapter 7 has a list of 3 people as Judah’s servants. Wallace means slaves but he’s wrong. Esther could only have been bound to him if Ithamar had written up for her to be Judah’s wife, and that bond ended when she reached the age of 12 years and 1 day.

In chapter 8, the texts that Simonides reads to Judah are all the favorite choices of Christians – and his list could only have been made after Christianity adopted the Jewish Bible ostensibly as its own. It’s not clear why the Bible was adopted except for one thing. In the Roman Empire the recognized faiths were the Roman cult, the Greek cult, the Jewish and the Egyptian. The druids of Gallia were persecuted; those outside this magic circle were ignored. (Mithraism, a Mesopotamian faith, became popular with merchants and soldiers later.) To become respectable, Christianity had to associate to itself one of the recognized faiths.

And all of them were pagan except Judaism. Two of the oldest church fathers, Clement of Alexandria and Justin Martyr, show that Greek had been rejected. Justin (d. 165 CE) connected Christianity to Neo-Platonism as the pure root which the Greek philosophers corrupted. Clement (d. 215 CE) tried to attract Greek pagans to Christianity as a better moral guide, purified from the examples in Greek mythology. They did not cite to the Septuagint, nor would they have reason to because they were not talking to people familiar with the Septuagint. The Septuagint wouldn’t convince Greek pagans of anything. Neither one of them spoke of Judaism because neither one knew anything about it.

But in the 200s CE, Origen the Greek geek compiled all the Greek translations of the Jewish Bible that he could get, into the Hexapla, including the Septuagint and Aquila’s translation from about 100 CE. Supposedly Origen’s father taught him the Bible, as well as Greek literature, but this is not certain and the father has been labeled a pagan by some writers.

At any rate, Christians developed the habit or policy of separating themselves from pagans and also from criticism, by claiming Judaism as a basis. After that, church fathers went to work proving the relationship by interpreting Jewish scripture as references to Christianity, much as Clement related pagan myth to Christianity.

This is a strawman argument, a fallacy claiming that the words don’t mean what they say. It’s also cherry-picking, using bits that are convenient and ignoring the inconvenient truths. It could happen once Christianity decided it wasn’t going to follow Jewish law, even if its earliest members were Jews. This happened by the time of Mark’s book of Christian scripture. He was a second generation Christian and he already knows nothing about Judaism. Satan has become a crucial element in the Jesus story; so has the working of miracles as events contrary to nature.

In Judaism satan is a servant of Gd, not an equal and opposing power. The things in the Tannakh that seem to be miracles, are not important for being exceptions to the laws of nature; they were part of creation, according to Pirkey Avot. They were important for their influence on Jewish culture, not on individuals.

It is a sad truth that ancient literature may not be as ancient as people want to believe. I can well believe that The Embassy to Gaius was a true production of Philo of Alexandria. I can’t say the same for the twelve books ostensibly about Judaism, but containing outright errors that make them useful only as an exercise in reading Greek. The Fulvia and Paulina stories in Josephus’ Antiquities are known to be forgeries because of their language; so is a supposed reference to Jesus, which was copied from Jewish Wars where it is known to be a forgery.

The “eschatological” material in Mark’s work may seem to some like a reflection of a battle in his own lifetime that lead to destruction of the Second Temple, but it could also reflect the Hadrianic persecution, which included Christians as well as Jews. That provides about a century for the contents of Mark to develop from the original events before his birth. The Antonine persecution came later but included only Christians.

There was a Mark in Rome whose name was attached to the Christian book, but that’s no proof that he wrote it, only that Christians of a given time knew about him and thought the world of work attributed to him.