HistoricalChristian.Faith

Agapius of Hierapolis on the Rabbinic Corruption of Scripture

Dates: c. 942 (the Kitāb al-ʿUnwān runs to AD 941/942) · Wikipedia
Summary: The fullest narrative. Agapius of Hierapolis (Maḥbūb ibn Qusṭanṭīn, "Agapius son of Constantine"), the Melkite bishop of Manbij — the old Mabbug, Syriac see of Philoxenus — wrote the earliest Christian world history in Arabic, the Kitāb al-ʿUnwān (Book of the Title, "Universal History"), c. 942. There the corruption charge reaches its most fully dramatized form: after the Resurrection the high priests Annas and Caiaphas, frightened that elders of their own people had owned the Messiah, hid the Septuagint of the seventy translators, changed and mutilated the messianic prophecies in the Books of the Prophets, and cut 1,389 years out of the chronology from Adam to Abraham — so that the time appointed for the Messiah might seem not yet to have come. The pre-Christian Greek, finished "approximately 300 years before the Advent of Christ," he holds clean of the tampering. Both strands of the charge — the messianic proof-texts and the Genesis chronology — are here fused into a single conspiracy, with named agents, a motive, and a method. The same chronicle first tells the origin of that Greek in one of its fullest Arabic forms — Ptolemy's seventy-two elders divided into thirty-six cells, the finished copies sent to Rome, Ephesus, and Byzantium — the inspired-Septuagint premise his corruption charge then turns against the Hebrew; for that testimony he is a witness on the companion Septuagint-origin timeline.

Claims & evidence

After the Resurrection, Annas and Caiaphas hid the Septuagint and altered the prophecies of the Messiah

"At that time two high priests of the Jews, Annas and Caiphas, wished to falsify the mission of Christ and to refute the time of his advent, because they were frightened because a great number of their respected and older chiefs recognized the mission of Christ for them and the authenticity of the miracles among them, when they had seen the resurrection of Christ…"

"…they hid the translation of the Torah, translated by the Seventy commentators, with their companions, with the books of the Prophets, which were translated under King Ptolemy Philadelphus in the town of Alexandria; they changed and mutilated in the Books of the Prophets all that they could, of what referred to the prophecies on the Messiah. The acts of the Messiah Our Lord which are in the books of the Seventy, are, on the contrary, faithful and clear. They made this falsification after the Resurrection of Christ, while the translation of the Seventy was completed approximately 300 years before the Advent of Christ."

— Agapius of Hierapolis, Universal History (Kitāb al-ʿUnwān), Part 1 (PO ed. Vasiliev, pp. 81–82), source.¹ This is the corruption charge in its richest form. Where Justin alleged scattered excisions and Epiphanius indicted one named reviser (Aquila), Agapius supplies a complete narrative: named conspirators (the Gospel high priests), a precise occasion (after the Resurrection, once the message could no longer be ignored), a method (hiding the inspired Greek, then doctoring the prophets), and a verification test — what the rabbis bent in their copies "are, on the contrary, faithful and clear" in the Seventy. The dating filter is the same one reported of Philoxenus and pressed by Chrysostom: only a version made after Christ could have been knowingly turned against him, so the pre-Christian LXX is innocent by construction.

They cut 1,389 years from the chronology — Adam to the flood is 2,256 years in the Septuagint, 1,656 in the mutilated Hebrew

"…having the libraries in their possession, [they] set out to cut off these years from Adam and the beginning from the world until the time of Tarih and from the birth of Abraham; and because of the distance of time and ignorance of the majority of the men, as we already said, they cut off from the history from the world, from Adam to the time of Abraham, 1389 years…"

"The total number of years of the history of the world from Adam and the beginning of creation until the year of the flood is 2,256 years, according to the Septuagint. As for what is in the Torah mutilated and reduced by the Jews and in the Syriac Torah, the total of years there is 1,656 years."

— Universal History, Part 1 (PO pp. 39, 82), source.² Agapius inherits the chronology strand from Eusebius and Julian of Toledo but recasts it as deliberate, motivated fraud: the shorter Hebrew totals are not a different reckoning but a deletion, made so the conspirators could "affirm… that the Messiah whom the prophets had prophesied, would come only in the last days; but, they said, we are still in the middle of the days of the world." (His Septuagint total, 2,256, runs slightly higher than the 2,242 of Eusebius's Armenian Chronicon, a measure of the figures' own instability across the tradition.) He even narrates the textual mechanics — the conspirators struck out the "second Kainan" (Cainan son of Arphaxad), preserved in the Septuagint and in Luke 3:36, and were caught when the disciples demanded, of his erased years, "where did you put them?"³

The origin of that Septuagint: Ptolemy's seventy-two, the thirty-six cells, and the copies sent abroad

"At that time Ptolemy Philadelphus reigned, for whom, as we have already told, the sacred Books were translated; he reigned over Egypt 38 years. He freed from the captivity the people who were in his kingdom, 130,000, including 30,000 Jews."

"[The Jews] agreed to send six people from each of their tribes, their number being of 72 men, who went to him. When they arrived, he received them in a very hospitable way and divided them into thirty-six groups… he appointed for each group a man who prevented them from meeting, dealt with their business and, once the translation of the books was completed, passed them from one group to another, until the Torah and all the books of the Prophets were entirely finished."

"He obtained thirty-six copies in Greek, distributed them to all the countries in his empire and sent a certain number of them to Rome, Ephesus and Byzantium."

— Universal History, Part 1 (PO pp. 85–88), source.⁴ Before he brings the corruption charge, Agapius tells the origin legend in one of its fullest Arabic forms — and it is the premise on which that charge depends: the very "translation of the Torah… translated by the Seventy commentators… under King Ptolemy Philadelphus" that Annas and Caiaphas are then said to have hidden. He keeps the separate-cells miracle in Epiphanius's paired form — thirty-six groups of two, an attendant set over each pair to bar them from conferring — but, like his fellow Melkite Eutychius, he stops at the demonstrated agreement of the copies and never names the Holy Spirit. His distinctive flourish is the distribution of the finished Greek "to Rome, Ephesus and Byzantium" — a detail no other teller of the legend carries, turning the single library-deposit of the older tellings into an imperial publication. This origin testimony is slotted on the companion Septuagint-origin timeline (c. 942), Philastrius-style; he also appends there the offshoot Simeon-the-Just legend, one of the Seventy kept alive to see the Christ he had rendered in prophecy.

Notes

• Why it matters here. Agapius is the witness in whom the two strands of the corruption charge — the messianic proof-texts (Justin, Epiphanius) and the Genesis chronology (Eusebius, Julian) — are welded into one story with one cast. Earlier writers charged either a doctored proof-text or a shortened year-count; Agapius makes both the work of the same two men on the same occasion, and so gives the charge its most novelistic shape. It is also its least guarded: the Letter of Aristeas / b. Megillah legend located the changes in the Greek and credited them to God; Agapius relocates all alteration to a post-Resurrection rabbinic plot against the Hebrew and the prophets.
• The chronology, on the evidence. The mechanism Agapius describes — that the Jews subtracted a hundred years from each antediluvian begetting-age — is exactly the Eusebian observation, and the modern text-critical reading runs the other way or sideways: the three witnesses (Masoretic, Septuagint, Samaritan) diverge by systematic, schematic adjustments whose direction is debated, and the Dead Sea Scrolls show the LXX often rendering a genuinely different Hebrew Vorlage rather than a corrupted one. The deliberate-shortening thesis is weighed on the Genesis 5/11 chronology argument; the master malice thesis on the corruption argument. Agapius states as settled history what those pages adjudicate.
• The "second Kainan," and an overstatement to flag. Agapius's most concrete example — that the Jews cut the extra Kainan (Cainan son of Arphaxad) out of the Hebrew — is the weakest of his proofs, and is weighed in full on the dedicated "second Cainan" argument. Two things tell against it. First, even modern defenders of Kainan's originality (Henry B. Smith Jr.; Jonathan Sarfati) reconstruct his loss as an accidental scribal slip centuries before the rabbis, not a deletion — and the pro-Septuagint Fathers Agapius follows (Africanus, Eusebius, Jerome) rejected the name as a spurious interpolation, so the "deletion" was disowned by the charge's own side. Second, Agapius clinches the point by appealing to the name's survival "in the Torah which is in the hands of the Samaritans" — but the second Kainan is not in the Samaritan Pentateuch's Genesis 11 any more than in the Masoretic; that half of his proof is a factual error, leaving only the (disputed) Greek-tradition Luke 3:36.
• The man and his see. Agapius (d. after 942) was a Melkite (Chalcedonian) bishop and the earliest Christian historian to write in Arabic, a contemporary of Eutychius of Alexandria (d. 940), whose parallel Annals carries the kindred Simeon-the-Just Isaiah-7:14 legend. His seat, Manbij, was the Greek Hierapolis and the Syriac Mabbug — the very see of Philoxenus, from whose tradition the dating argument Agapius deploys ultimately descends, so the charge reaches him along a line that runs through his own cathedral city. For the early history he used apocryphal and legendary material freely; the Septuagint narrative is a case in point.
• Sourcing. The page is cited from the published English translation of Part 1 of the Kitāb al-ʿUnwān (rendered from Alexander Vasiliev's edition and French translation in the Patrologia Orientalis), hosted at tertullian.org; PO page numbers are marked in that text. The same narrative is discussed as the fullest form of the corruption charge in Abraham & David J. Wasserstein, The Legend of the Septuagint: From Classical Antiquity to Today (Cambridge, 2006), pp. 22–23, which prints Agapius's closing reflection that the whole was "the command of God because of his foreknowledge" of what the priests would do.

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