Aristobulus (philosopher)

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Aristobulus († around 160 BC) was a Hellenistic Jewish philosopher, one of the earliest Jewish philosophers of the Alexandrian school . Like Philo of Alexandria later , he tried to combine the Jewish tradition with Greek thought.

Life

There are only a few, sometimes contradicting and controversial, information in ancient sources about the life of Aristobulus. Presumably he was from Alexandria . The name "Aristobulus of Paneas" used in the past is wrong, it is based on a misunderstanding. With regard to dating, very different approaches have long been represented; the dates of his work fluctuated between the 2nd century BC. BC and the 2nd century AD, whereby dating to the time after the birth of Christ meant that the work was believed to be false and the author's name to be fictitious. Today the view has prevailed that Aristobulus under King Ptolemy VI. Philometor (180-145 BC) was active, probably as early as the 1970s. According to a letter from the Jews of Jerusalem and Judea to Aristobulus and the Egyptian Jews cited in 2 Maccabees 1.10, the authenticity and dating of which is disputed, Aristobulus was of priestly descent and "teacher of King Ptolemy", which means that Ptolemy VI. is meant. He may have been the king's advisor on Jewish affairs. Clement of Alexandria describes him as a peripatetic philosopher, but this is not to be understood in the sense of belonging to a peripatetic school; the utterances of Aristobulus that have survived show little peripatetic influence. The Bishop Anatolios of Laodikeia counted him among the translators of the Septuagint , which would lead to a completely different dating, but is not the case.

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Aristobulus' work is lost, the original title unknown. It was dedicated to King Ptolemy. Only five extracts have been preserved. They appear in the works of Christian writers ( Clement of Alexandria , Eusebius of Caesarea and Anatolius of Laodikeia). Apparently it was a fictional, literary dialogue between Aristobulus and Ptolemy, in which Aristobulus answered questions from the king. The subject was the exegesis of the books of Genesis , Exodus , Deuteronomy and possibly other parts of the Torah.

In addition to peripatetic (probably overemphasized by Klemens), there are Platonic and Pythagorean influences and linguistic and conceptual proximity to contemporary Jewish texts such as the Book of Proverbs , Book of Wisdom , Jesus Sirach , Pseudo- Phocylides and 4th Maccabees .

Following the example of Stoic hermeneutics, which philosophically reinterpreted Greek mythology, Aristobulus interpreted the Torah texts allegorically . Apparently he was the first Jewish thinker to venture this. In particular, he did not want to take anthropomorphic formulations literally. In reformulating Jewish traditions, he used Greek philosophical terminology; so he called the laws of the Torah aretaí (virtues). Aristobulus taught a preexistence of wisdom, which he identified as "light", and a decisive role of the number seven in cosmic processes, in human, animal and vegetable life (fragment 5).

With this project, Aristobulus sought, on the one hand, to connect Jewish intellectuals to Greek philosophy, and, on the other hand, to rationalize Judaism against the Greek way of thinking. To this end, he represented a (later recurring) historical fiction, according to which Greek poets and philosophers such as Pythagoras, Socrates, Plato, Homer and Hesiod owed their wisdom to Moses. Accordingly, they would have used an alleged Greek text version of the Pentateuch that was older than the Septuagint. Passages by Linus , Orpheus , Aratos or Musaeus in particular are close to the Mosaic tradition. The texts mentioned as evidence for this are largely late forgeries , some of which can be traced back to pseudo-Hecataeus . When quoting the cited text passages, Aristobulus proceeded very freely in order to make his thesis appear credible and even intervened in the traditional Homer text; this was very bold towards King Ptolemy, who, like all educated Greeks, must have had a good knowledge of Homeland. This fact was therefore an essential argument of those researchers who considered the work of Aristobulus to be a late forgery.

The relation to philosophical parts in Jesus Sirach is controversial. There are clear similarities with the letter to Aristeas ; they can be explained with the dependence of one work on the other, but also with the dependence of both on a common source. In the case of direct dependence, Aristobulus' work is probably to be regarded as the older.

output

  • Carl R. Holladay (Ed.): Fragments from Hellenistic Jewish Authors , Vol. 3: Aristobulus , Atlanta (Georgia) 1995 [critical edition of the Greek text of the fragments with English translation and commentary]

translation

  • Paul Rießler: Old Jewish literature outside the Bible , Augsburg 1928 [No. 12, pp. 179-185; German translation of the fragments]

literature

Overview representations in manuals

Investigations

  • Nikolaus Walter: The Torah interpreter Aristobulus. Investigations into its fragments and pseudepigraphic remains of Jewish-Hellenistic literature (= texts and investigations on the history of early Christian literature , volume 86). Berlin 1964
  • Martin Hengel : Judaism and Hellenism. Studies of their encounter with special attention to Palestine up to the middle of the 2nd century BC Chr. , Tübingen 1969 (esp. Pp. 295–307)
  • Martin Hengel : Jews, Greeks and Barbarians. Aspects of the Hellenization of Judaism in Pre-Christian Times , Stuttgart 1976
  • Max Küchler : Early Jewish Wisdom Traditions. On the progress of wisdom in the area of ​​early Jewish belief in the Jahweh , Freiburg (Switzerland) 1979
  • Markus Mülke: Aristobulus in Alexandria: Jewish Bible Exegesis between Greeks and Egyptians under Ptolemy VI. Philometor (= studies on ancient literature and history , 126). De Gruyter, Berlin / Boston 2018.

Web links

Wikisource: Aristobulus in a translation by Paul Rießler  - sources and full texts

Remarks

  1. ↑ Holladay pp. 74f.
  2. ↑ Holladay p. 71.
  3. ↑ Holladay pp. 44, 47f., 72f.
  4. ↑ James Charlesworth: The Pseudepigrapha and Modern Research , Missoula 1976, pp. 81f.
  5. ↑ Among others with Philo, Clement, Justin, Eusebius, the early Augustine, the honest brothers of Basra, Judah ha-Levi; see, for example, HA Wolfson: Philo , Vol. 1 (4th edition), Cambridge (Mass.) 1968, pp. 160-163.
  6. ↑ Adolf Schlatter had claimed a dependency on Aristobulus in 1897: Schlatter, Das Neugefundene Hebräische Stück des Sirach , Gütersloh 1897, pp. 103ff .; to contradict u. a. Gottheil / Wendland.
  7. ↑ On this question, see Holladay pp. 64f.
personal data
SURNAME Aristobulus
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Aristobulus of Paneas (incorrectly assigned name); Aristobulus of Alexandria
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Jewish philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH 3rd century BC BC or 2nd century BC Chr.
DATE OF DEATH uncertain: around 160 BC Chr.