The relationship between the Christian tradition and Hellenistic Judaism is deeply ambivalent: The earliest Jesus followers were Hellenistic Jews, yet Jews came to be identified as a contaminating force in Christian intellectual history. Late antique and medieval Christians drew deeply on the writings of Hellenistic Jews, like Philo and Josephus, but they identified them as members of a foreign and inferior religious group. The relationship between rabbinic Judaism and Hellenistic Judaism is equally complicated, because Hellenistic Jewish texts were transmitted exclusively by Christians and hence deeply embedded in anti-Jewish discourses. Hellenistic Judaism was thus an inheritance which, at a rhetorical level, was left unclaimed by both Jews and Christians during the Middle Ages. Through a series of case studies, this volume shows how Hellenistic Jews and the literature they produced came to be woven into the fabric of medieval Christian and Jewish traditions.

Carson Bay holds his PhD from Florida State University and was part of the University of Bern’s “Lege Josephum!” research team from 2019 to 2023. His research has dealt with many aspects of Hellenistic Judaism, with a focus on its reception in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages. He currently works at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Anthony Ellis has a PhD in Classics from the University of Edinburgh, which studied religion and theology in Herodotus. His research interests include the history of the emotions, the Latin reception of Josephus, and pre-modern notions of forgery. He recently began a new research project on the concept of heresy across Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as part of the Bernese SNF project “Co-Produced Religions”. Judith Mania is a PhD candidate at the University of Bern as part of the interdisciplinary project “Lege Iosephum!”. She studied History, German, and medieval Latin at the University of Heidelberg. Her dissertation focuses on the Latin manuscripts of Flavius Josephus, showing how his works were perceived and used by Christian readers of the early and high Middle Ages. Sara Moscone obtained her PhD at the University of Bern as part of the “Lege Iosephum!” project. She is now working on the biblical figure of Samuel in Judeo-Hellenistic sources in the SNF-project: The Jewish and Christian Samuel. Her dissertation thesis “Pro veritate historiae: Flavio Giuseppe e le fonti ebraiche nell’Historia Scholastica di Pietro Comestore” was published with Schwabe Verlag in 2024. Lena Tröger is a PhD candidate at the University of Bern. She studied Classical Philology and French in Bamberg. After a period of study in Paris, she spent two years teaching Latin and Greek at schools in Bavaria, before joining the SNF project “Lege Iosephum!” in 2019. Her dissertation is a study of the influence of Josephus on the crusader chronicles of Fulcher of Chartres und William of Tyre.

The reception of Judaeo-Greek literature in the Middle Ages