מגסתנס על ה'פיסיקה' של היוונים, הברהמינים והיהודים

Megasthenes' account of the Jews, preserved from his ethnography on India by Clement of Alexandria (Stromateis I. 15 [72. 5]), summarizes the question of the relation between the 'physics' (including theology) of the 'ancient' Greeks (the Presocratics in modern terminology), the Jews, and the Brahmans. The fragment has attracted a number of far-fetched interpretations. The article attempts to clarify the authenticity, accuracy and extent of the text in the light of Clement's working methods and aims, and understand it through an examination of the life and works of Megasthenes himself, the original context of the fragment, and especially the sources of inspiration for the comparison. The main conclusions arising from the discussion are the following. 1. Megasthenes is usually described in the scholarly literature as someone who served for years as an envoy for Seleucus I at the Indian court. While this view is plausible to a great degree, the sources and the events of the time suggest certain other possibilities with regard to his status, length of stay in India and his activity there, and even with regard to the question who it was he represented in the Far East. At any rate, it is clear that he visited or stayed in India, served for some time at the Seleucid court, and had opportunities now and then to receive direct information about Jews and Judaism, although there is no indication that he availed himself of the opportunities. 2. Megasthenes' Indian ethnography contained four books composed of four parts in the following order: geography, origo, customs (nomima), and a history of the leaders. These four components were causally interconnected, and the items of information included in them were, in a typically Greek spirit, causally explained. The material as a whole was selected and sorted according to the aims of the author, and intended, among other things, to transmit social, political and religious messages, in addition to impressing the reader with wonder stories. 3. Megasthenes was familiar with the Egyptian ethnography of Hecataeus of Abdera (preserved by Photius from Diodorus [XL. 1. 1-6]), which included a detailed Jewish excursus, and he was influenced by the 'scientific' structure and principles established by Hecataeus for the ethnographic genre. This is not to say that the Jewish ethnography of Megasthenes is to be seen as the Seleucid answer to the Egyptian ethnography of Hecataeus, as it has been presented by some scholars. While it does have ideological purposes, it has nothing to do with the propaganda war waged by the Hellenistic powers for Greco-Macedonian public opinion. The reference to the Jews is in no way connected, therefore, with contemporary political struggles and trends. 4. Megasthenes' composition reached its final form, and was published, about the end of the first decade of the third century B.C.E., as some have already suggested. 5. The part quoted by Clement is authentic and accurate. There is no reason to suspect that Clement, a native Athenian who moved to Alexandria and converted to Christianity, introduced significant changes, or that he copied from a text which had been forged by a Jew or a Christian. The only addition by Clement is the pertinent identification of the Brachmans (Brahmans) as Indians. The quotation contains everything Megasthenes reported about the Jews. 6. The fragment appeared in Megasthenes' work as a sentence concluding the detailed comparison he had made between the opinions of the Brahmans and the Greeks concerning 'physics'. The comparison is preserved in a slightly revised and Stoicized form by Strabo, in his Geographica XV 1.59. In Megasthenes, some similarities were drawn between principles of Brahmanic 'physics' and views of Presocratics, or views attributed to them, in order to show that even the conceptions of the 'ancient' Greeks were current among the Brahmans. Megasthenes drew his information for these views from the doxography by Theophrastus concerning 'physics' (or rather from its epitome), and from a few popular Platonic dialogues known to him. 7. The comparison between the Greeks and the Brahmans was originally an appendix to the nomima section of the Indian ethnography, at the end of the third book, and dealt with a description of the castes. 8. Prior to the concluding sentence ( άπαντα μέντοι...) came mention of a claim widely held among Greeks, according to which the important philosophical opinions about 'physics' originated with the 'ancient' Greeks (=the Presocratics), and that they were current only among Greeks. Megas- thenes reacts only to the second part of the claim, and states that important opinions concerning 'physics' expressed in the past by the 'ancient' Greeks are expressed now partly by Brahmans and partly by Jews. He does not react to the question of primacy. 9. Clement misinterpreted - knowingly or unknowingly - Megasthenes' intent, and adduced the sentence as evidence for the central message of chapter xv of the first book of his Stromateis, to the effect that the written philosophy of the Jews preceded that of the Greeks. He may have been misled by the first part of Megasthenes' claim alluding to Greeks. At any rate, Clement's interpretation accords with the central message of that chapter of his book. 10. It is quite clear from the phrasing of the sentence that the opinions of the Brahmans are to be distinguished from those of the Jews, and are not identical or even similar to them. 11. The presentation by Megasthenes of the Jews as a caste of philosophers rests on a widespread rumour reflected in previous Greek literature as well. He took the concepts concerning Jewish 'physics' from the account on Jewish faith and cosmology which he found in the Jewish excursus of Hecataeus. 12. The description given by Hecataeus is partly incorrect, although it rests fundamentally on information he received from Jewish informers. One mistake results from the tendency of Hecataeus to provide causal reasons for the information which he supplies; another mistake arises from a misunderstanding, easily made. The information in general, both the incorrect and the accurate, was transmitted, due to its nature, in the conceptual vocabulary of 'ancient' Greek philosophers, and is in accord with positions of Presocratic rather than contemporary philosophers. 13. Megasthenes stated according to his understanding of Hecataeus' version, that the 'physics' of the Jews is in some points similar to opinions of 'ancient' Greek philosophers. Because of it, he also concluded that there is no similarity between Jewish 'physics' and that of the Brahmans. 14. It was only natural that Megasthenes did not feel the need to 'interrogate' Jews about their religion and their cosmological conceptions just for one incidental sentence in an ethnography on India and its peoples. Even later authors, who wrote relatively detailed accounts of the Jews, and who had many opportunities to receive up-to-date information from Jews, drew on the work of their predecessors, particularly Hecataeus, whose excursus on the Jews became a sort of 'vulgate' during the Hellenistic period, just as the Indian ethnography of Megasthenes became the main source of information on India for centuries.