“Josephus, in...his Antiquities, has described [the Tabernacle] in careful narrative, and we have had it painted and placed at the beginning of our larger Pandect.” [1] Cassiodorus, writing in the later sixth century, here explicitly confirms the usefulness of Flavius Josephus for producing Christian art. Yet his legacy in art remains relatively unexplored, even if Josephus’s textual reception in the Middle Ages is starting to be taken more seriously. In a new book, Steven Wander explores not only Cassiodorus’s explicit use of Josephus, but his implicit connexion to at least eleven other works, drawn from Western Europe and Byzantium, and ranging from the Jewish historian’s own lifetime to the late eleventh century. Not all these parallels and links are conclusive, as Wander himself admits several times. In fact, these warnings allowed me to enjoy this lavishly illustrated book much more. The “preponderance of the evidence” (22-23, 76, 98, 142, 229) confirms that, overall, Cassiodorus was neither the first, nor the last, to find artistic inspiration in Josephus’s Antiquities and Jewish War, despite uncertainty on various particulars.
Wander’s book forms part of the recent “Josephus industry” that seeks to highlight the manifold ways the historian’s works were continuously used and abused throughout the Middle Ages. Almost contemporaneously were published books like A Companion to Josephus in the Medieval West and From Josephus to Yosippon and Beyond: Text–Re-interpretations–Afterlives. [2] Of course, all of us who study Josephus’s reception are indebted to Heinz Schreckenberg, whose oeuvre not only included extensive analysis of textual impact, but also in art. His “Josephus in Medieval Christian Art,” for example, carefully surveyed visual depictions of Josephus, as well as art inspired by his works, while concluding that “there remains a rich yield to be harvested.” [3] Wander takes this statement as his cue. He also relies on work by Guy Deutsch and Ulrike Liebl, amongst others. [4] As such, the book’s novelty (and the author’s track record) could have been underlined a bit more graciously.
In terms of the items selected, the influence of the Antiquities seems to win out over the Jewish War. The first substantive (and strongest) chapter discusses the Arch of Titus in the Via Sacra, in Rome, completed after 81 CE. The well-known frieze of the triumph of June 71 CE found there depicts Jewish treasures like the menorah and the shewbread table being paraded through the streets of Rome. It has previously been argued that this sculptural scene was inspired by the Jewish War, but Wander identifies elements, like the trumpets or two cups with the shewbread table, that seem to come from Ant. 3.291-292 and 3.143. Because the Antiquities were not completed until 93/94 CE, Wander ingeniously suggests that Josephus himself was involved in designing the reliefs. This direct involvement, presumably at the behest of the emperor(s), would also help to explain why the Jewish law is not pictured on the frieze, nor was it displayed in the Templum pacis with the other spoils: for Josephus, it was a holy object, not to be seen.
The Jewish War is only central to the second chapter, which delves into the origins of a mysterious portrait of Flavius Josephus found in a mid-ninth-century copy of the Latin Josephus, probably from Micy (Bern, BB cod. 50, f. 2r). There it is clumsily labelled ὐωσυππος ὑσθωρυωγραφος (“Josephus the Historian”). Previous interpretations of this image have often been fanciful. Perhaps in keeping with this tradition, Wander argues that the portrait is based on a then-extant statue of Josephus in Rome, mentioned by Eusebius’s Historia ecclesiastica (3.9.2). Such a statue would explain some of the “sculptural” (93, 95) elements of the portrait. It would also serve as a common source to account for the supposed resemblance between the Bern portrait, figures in the sack of Jerusalem depicted on the c.700 Franks Casket, and a possible image of Josephus in the lost twelfth-century Lateran portico mosaics. To me, the parallels were not terribly convincing. Furthermore, upon consultation with Robert Coates-Stephens, an expert on ancient statuary in early medieval Rome, [5] it seems the Bern portrait would be highly unusual in this period as a correct identification of a statue, and unique as a rendering of one.
The longest, central chapter moves us beyond statuary to the Antiquities as a source for early medieval Christian illuminations, particularly of the tabernacle. Here Wander tackles the Christian Topography of Kosmas Indikopleustes (c. 543), the lost Codex grandior of Cassiodorus (s. VImed), and the Codex Amiatinus (c. 700). Some of Wander’s arguments for a relationship between the Topography and the Antiquities are convincing, notably that the floral tabernacle curtains in the Sinai manuscript (St. Catherine of Sinai,cod. gr. 1186, 79r) align with Josephus’s description (AJ 3.126). Others, like an attempt to match Kosmas and Josephus on thedivision of the tabernacle, are less persuasive, given that Josephus insists on a threefold partition (AJ 3.181) and Kosmas has it as bipartite (CT 2.35). Wander spends more time elucidating the images once contained in Cassiodorus’s Codex grandior of the Bible, via the book it inspired, the Northumbrian Codex Amiatinus. Following Chazelleand Revel-Neher, [6] he succeeds in showing that “the details of the Mosaic tabernacle in the Amiatinus deviate from the account in the Bible while agreeing with the text of Josephus” (159); it is less probable that these details prove Cassiodorus had access to the Christian Topography. His discussion of the Ezra portrait in the Amiatinus likewise goes from highly probable—that the image was heavily inspired by Josephus’s description of the attire of the high priest (AJ 3.151-187)—to less, with the suggestion that the same portrait was inspired by the questionably identified “Augustine” fresco in the Lateran. [7]
The next chapter reads as if Wander hoped to find a clear connexion between three manuscripts, namely the Sacra Parallela (Paris BnF Gr. 923), a Byzantine florilegium of the later ninth century, and two copies of the Latin Josephus, Chartres BM ms. 29 (c. 1000) and Paris BnF Lat. 5058 (s. XIex). To his credit, he does not force any such connexion, beyond a few musings. Still valuable are his analyses of the images associated with the Josephan texts, particularly his notice of the figures grasping initials in Chartres BM ms. 29. The art-historical comment here is timely, as the manuscript was badly damaged in 1944 (and even thought lost by some) but has been recently reconstituted by Laura Pani. [8]
Wander rounds out the book with an analysis of eight scenes of the life of David in the Paris Psalter (Paris BnF gr. 139), a tenth-century Byzantine manuscript, making a case for their inspiration by Josephus’s Antiquities. The case is compelling. For example, in the image of the Battle of David and Goliath, the personified words δύναμιςand ἀλαζονείαmirror terms found in the Antiquities (6.187, 6.179). Josephus’s influence, however, is not quite direct. Wander deduces it is more probable that the illuminator drew on the Palaea historica, a contemporary collection that includes many quotations of Josephus.
Although Wander is appropriately forthright about the speculative nature of his conclusions, it is still worth underlining a few problems that suffuse the book. The first would be a tendency towards “parallelomania”; that is, Wander tries a bit too hard to connect surviving pieces of evidence, when they are only the very rare fragments of what was a much larger world. [9] It is more probable, for example, that a complex set of interrelations hides behind the resemblance between Kosmas and Josephus rather than the direct one suggested here. Second, there are many sections which feel superfluous, either because they add nothing or are far too undeveloped to be included. Here I would include (inter alia) the section on the Tomb of the Haterii in chapter 3 (78-80), or the discussion of the effaced Latin note next to the Josephus portrait in Bern BB cod. 50 (109-110). Florian Mittenhuber of the Burgerbibliothek kindly checked this under UV light, and it seems more likely to read peregrinus (?) iste est superbus. (Such a statement merits further investigation!) There are various small slips, like “stead” for steed on 52, or “Dutch” for German on 203 n.4, and a number of places where the prose could have been smoothed out.
Anyone interested in Josephus’s life and his legacy will find this book valuable, notably for the 56 splendid illustrations that must be a factor in its considerable price. Not all will be convinced of the individual arguments, but taken as a whole, Wander’s book shows once more the enduring, and multifarious impact that the Jewish historian had in the Latin and Greek worlds.
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Notes:
1. Cassiodorus, Explanation of the Psalms, vol. 1, trans. P. G. Walsh, Ancient Christian Writers (Paulist Press, 1990), 157 (14.1).
2. Karen Kletter and Paul Hilliard, eds., A Companion to Josephus in the Medieval West, Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition 106 (Brill, 2024), https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004684270; Carson Bay et al., eds., From Josephus to Yosippon and Beyond: Text - Re-Interpretations - Afterlives, Supplements to the Journal for the Study of Judaism 215 (Brill, 2024).
3. Heinz Schreckenberg and Kurt Schubert, Jewish Historiography and Iconography in Early and Medieval Christianity (Van Gorcum & Fortress Press, 1992), 138.
4. Guy N. Deutsch, Iconographie de l’illustration de Flavius Josèphe au temps de Jean Fouquet, Arbeiten zur Literatur und Geschichte des hellenistischen Judentums 12 (Brill, 1986); Guy N. Deutsch, “The Illustration of Josephus’ Manuscripts, ” in Josephus, Judaism and Christianity, ed. Louis H. Feldman and Gōhei Hata (Brill, 1987), https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004671799_025; Ulrike Liebl, Die illustrierten Flavius-Josephus-Handschriften des Hochmittelalters (P. Lang, 1997). For an overview of Josephus and art history up to 1980, see Louis H. Feldman, Josephus and Modern Scholarship, 1937-1980 (W. de Gruyter, 1984), 869-871.
5. Robert Coates-Stephens, Statues After the End of Sculpture (De Luca editori d’arte, 2025).
6. Celia M. Chazelle, ‘Painting the Voice of God: Wearmouth-Jarrow, Rome and the Tabernacle Miniature in the Codex Amiatinus’, Quintana 8 (2009): 15-59; Elisabeth Revel-Neher, “Du codex Amiatinus et ses rapports avec les plans du tabernacle dans l’art juif et l’art byzantin,” Journal of Jewish Art 9 (1982): 6-17.
7. See John Osborne, Rome in the Eighth Century: A History in Art (Cambridge University Press, 2020), 144-145.
8. See Laura Pani, “Giuseppe Flavio a pezzi: per una ricostruzione di Chartres, Bibliothèque Municipale, 29 (70), ” Scrineum 17 (2020): 211-270, https://doi.org/10.13128/SCRINEUM-12149.
9. Samuel Sandmel, “Parallelomania,” Journal of Biblical Literature 81, no. 1 (1962): 1-13, https://doi.org/10.2307/3264821.