Danny Schwartz on Agrippa

copyright 2008 Stephan Huller

For most people the Acts of the Apostles is just about the only place that they might run into Marcus Julius Agrippa. Nevertheless there exists a small percentage of Christians and history students who will end up turning to the portrait of Agrippa in the writings of Josephus. There is a great body of literature which has essentially proven that a relationship exists between the canonical Acts of the Apostles and Josephus. It is usually used to demonstrate that Acts can’t have been developed much earlier than the middle second century CE given that Josephus only completed his work c. 95 CE.

Holtzmann for instance notes that the all the principle sections of Josephus’ text where mention is made of the contemporary ‘false messiahs’ of the Jews – Theudas and Judas (Ant xx 5, 1, 2) emerge somewhere in Acts in the exact order established by the Jewish author. He also adds that in the short passage in Acts dealing with these figures there are five expressions which appear identical or near identical in Josephus. He also adduces certain Greek words which he demonstrates the author ‘Luke’ appropriated material from Josephus.

Max Krenel’s develops additional arguments including the fact that the author of Luke-Acts doesn’t just ‘use’ Josephus, he ‘adapts’ the material to say things which were never in the original text. There have been countless variations and innovations to these original observations over the last century. Those who defend the Book of Acts answer by saying that the case that ‘Luke’ used Acts isn’t yet ‘proved.’ This is utterly ridiculous. If we have to deny that there was borrowing from Josephus in our New Testament canon then we must refrain from ever arguing that any ancient author used any source without his explicit confirmation to that effect. The underlying case is that strong.

Many have made the case that the editor of our canon misused or used Josephus badly. Yet there is something which never gets said in any study of Josephus that I have ever read. The account of Josephus even beyond the famous Testamonium Flavium is hopelessly corrupt. This can’t be the original text that Josephus published around 95 CE. There are inconsistencies in almost every chapter. I will put forward that many of these are deliberate especially those which can be connected somehow to Marcus Julius Agrippa.

So when we put forward our startling claim that the Christian editor of Josephus manufactured the figure of ‘Agrippa I’ the father of Marcus Julius Agrippa we are fortunate that much of the work has already been done for us. For while Daniel Schwartz in his Agrippa I in no way supports our contention as to the complete falseness of this figure he has already begun the task of examining the sources behind Josephus’ account of Agrippa. It is noteworthy that he concludes that many of the details had to be entirely fictitious leaving open the possibility that ‘Agrippa I’ himself was an entirely fictitious creation.

To this end let us begin with Schwartz’s attribution of sources. Schwartz assumes of course that there was indeed a ‘real historical’ Agrippa I. One of the sources that Josephus must have had, he concludes was a ‘Life of Agrippa’ which provided him with basic details of his life and accomplishments. Outside of this he acknowledges that the author of these sections drew heavily from existing source materials ‘which dealt with individuals and episodes Agrippa encountered’ in his career. Of note is the fact that Philo of Alexandria is seen as one of the main sources of this section of work and Schwartz argues that the author of Josephus often misquotes the original material.

Of course we have to emphasize that Schwartz sees Josephus’ role as ‘mainly that of extractor, compiler and seamster.’ He imagines that there was a real life of Agrippa I that Josephus ‘filled’ from extracts from other sources. However I think that when we get through all the inventions and borrowings that even Schwartz identifies the reader can really see that there is very little authentic history left for us to seize upon.

According to Schwartz “in the latter part of the first chapter and all of the next two i.e. which focuses successively upon Antipas, upon the Temple-statue affair, and upon Gaius’ death and Claudius’ enthronement, Josephus successively followed the respective specialized sources and used the Life of Agrippa only as a supplement.” So at once we see that Schwartz thinks that whoever ‘Josephus’ was he derived these stories from a patchwork of existing historical sources. This necessarily means that the same stories could have applied to ‘Agrippa II’ (to use the existing term without acknowledging it). They prove no independent knowledge of a particular ‘Agrippa’ having performed them.

One of the main sources that Schwartz attributes to this later section in Josephus’ treatment of Agrippa was Philo of Alexandria. If Philo’s material were read without reference to Josephus not only would we find no evidence to support the existence of two Agrippas, as we shall examine shortly the material actually seems better suited to the assumption that Agrippa was a little boy. Yet once we establish that even by Schwartz’s standards almost nothing at the end of Josephus’ account came from a ‘Life of Agrippa I’ tradition and thus proves nothing for the existence of such a figure, the same can interestingly be noted for the remaining material in the first half of Josephus section.

As Schwartz again notes ‘the use of multiple sources brings with it profit and loss; it allows for a richer picture, but also for confusion.’ Schwartz acknowledges the existence of ‘several difficulties such as doublets and chronological problems’ caused by ‘improper arrangements of narrative segments based upon different sources.’ Yet he is convinced that the one authentic trait of this supposed ‘Life of Agrippa I’ on which Josephus account is based is that it ‘views its hero as living proof of the vicissitudes of fortune.’

Of course the Josephan narrative is written exactly this way – ‘Agrippa I’ is thrown into prison only to emerge and miraculous go ‘from rags to riches.’ However it would be misleading to claim that only Agrippa I could make these claims. As we shall show in the next chapter the coins associated with ‘Agrippa II” never stop referencing Tyche the goddess of Fortune than those coins identified as belonging to ‘Agrippa I.’ Schwartz seems to contradict himself in one sentence when he argues that ‘the assumption that Agrippa’s peripreteia which governed by Divine Providence … [is] typically Josephan” on the one hand but acknowledges that the idea appears also in Philo and other Jewish sources for Agrippa.

Indeed it is curious that Schwartz should emphasize over and over again how the narrative dealing with the imprisonment of Agrippa I should be so authentic while in the same breath should go on to prove that its details were stolen from the Biblical account of the patriarch Joseph. As Schwartz notes the story of Joseph ‘recounts the career of a talented young man who was dashed down due to his brothers’ jealousy from fair haired boy to slave and prisoner in a distant land.’ Just as Joseph eventually was raised to the same status as Pharoah himself, Schwartz reminds us that it recalls the details of Agrippa’s life almost two perfectly.

The point is now that whoever wrote the account of ‘Agrippa I’ imprisoned in Rome did so by borrowing heavily from the Biblical account of Joseph. Schwartz rightly points out that the narrative with Agrippa introduces an ominous bird and a German slave who asks the future king to remember him when he is freed. These ideas are stolen from the account of Joseph where a bird appears over the baker’s head (Genesis 40:17 – 19) and the butler makes much the same request as Agrippa’s German (ibid 12 – 15).

Schwartz again reminds us that the narrative in Ant 18:237 which has Gaius release Agrippa from prison says that ‘he sent for Agrippa to come to his house, and he attended to cutting his hair and changing his clothes.’ As Schwartz notes ‘the only reason these petty details are mentioned, it seems obvious, is that Genesis 41:14 reports the exact same regarding Pharaoh’s liberation of Joseph.” Indeed the parallels don’t stop there.

Schwartz notes that later in the narrative Agrippa gets angry at a certain Silas his chief of command and imprisons him. Silas eventually gets pardoned on the king’s birthday. This exactly corresponds to what occurs to the baker in the Joseph story in Genesis. Similarly the narrative claims that Agrippa was well treated in prison and got along quite well with the prison’s director. While this is flatly denied by another account in Josephus it again conforms with the details of Joseph’s story.

The point of course is now that the imprisonment narrative is the one piece of evidence which Schwartz points to proving the existence of an independent ‘Agrippa I.’ Most of the other famous stories about ‘Agrippa I’ are acknowledged to have come from other sources who might well have originally identified only one Agrippa. The prison narrative makes it appear absolutely certain at first glance that it was a forty something year old Agrippa being thrown into the slammer in 37 CE. With Schwartz’s critical examination of the material we can’t be so sure.

As even he acknowledges the life of Agrippa I which appears in Josephus was undeniably ‘borrowed’ from the Book of Genesis. Indeed as he notes it was written within a stock Biblical tradition of how Jews survived in Imperial courts where ‘the heroes of these books are typical Diasporan heroes, who must depend on their luck and their wiles.’ This might leave us thinking that Schwartz concludes that the author might well have only exaggerated something with actual historical truth underneath it. However Schwartz goes one step further.

He ends by noting that the story which appears in Josephus is very much like the Biblical narrative of Josephus in so far as it is only a novel. Schwartz pauses and finally declares that such works abounded in the period and that “these too are only fascinating novels, but the historical worth of even the latter which claims to be historiography is open to serious doubt.”