The Historiographical Position of John Malalas

IOI

Jewish traditions in particular used historical apologetics to prove the antiquity of
their civilizations and thereby to combat Greek cultural chauvinism. The earliest and
most famous historical apologists include Hecataeus and Manetho, writing on the
Egyptians, and Berossus, a Babylonian priest of Marduk, whose Babyloniaca ran from
the Creation to the reign of Alexander and likewise showed the antiquity of his own
culture by contrast to that of the Greeks. More influential on Eusebius were the his-
torical apologetics of Hellenistic Jews, who slipped comfortably into the Greek mode
of discoursing on the antiquity of their civilization. Jewish writers like Aristobulus
and Eupolemus could claim that Moses and the Pentateuch had provided wisdom to
a long list of Greek luminaries, and that a proper reckoning of chronology showed that
Moses had invented an alphabet for the Jews, who gave it to the Phoenicians, who
gave it to the Greeks. The coming of Rome had little impact on these Jewish apologet-
ics, so that Philo of Alexandria and Josephus can retail identical apologetic arguments
against the Romans as we find three hundred years earlier against the Greeks.19
Christian chronographic apologetics are the direct continuation of the Jewish
strand of the venerable Hellenistic apologetic tradition. The second- and third-cen-
tury works of Justin Martyr, Tatian, Theophilus, Clement, and Tertullian all use the
same arguments that Jewish apologists had been deploying for centuries, though now
in defence of Christian antiquity. Chronography mattered to Christians for another
reason as well: the need to date the coming of the end of the world, the consummatio
mundi. When the world had failed to end within the generation of Jesus, Christians
needed to calculate more distant dates for the end of time. By the early third cen-
tury, the Incarnation of Christ had been placed in the year 5500 of the world, which
would leave five hundred years between the birth of Christ and the Parousia. This
fixed chronological point was taken up by Julius Africanus, whose work popularized
it and led to its reception, often with minor modifications, by a wide variety of Greek
and Latin writers. In 221, the five books of Africanus’ Chronographiae synchronized the
chronologies of ancient empires to one another and to the narratives of the Old and
New Testaments, using regnal lists punctuated with extended discussions of regnal
years and chronography, all tending towards the coming consummatio mundi.20
Now, it is important to stress that none of these apologetic and chronographic
works belonged to the genre of the chronicle. Not one. Rather, they were historio-
graphical strands, each with a profound and purposeful interest in the reckoning of
past time, that were taken up by Eusebius of Caesarea and then merged in his Chronici
Canones with the even more ancient genre of the Greek Olympiad chronicle. Euse-
bius was well aware of his debt to his apologetic predecessors, but he realized that
the brevity and chronological legibility of the Hellenistic Olympiad chronicle would
make it much simpler to apprehend the complex arguments of historical apologetics.
Important parallels between the text of the Chronici Canones and the extant fragments
of Hellenistic chronicles (including the Parian Marble) make clear that Eusebius drew
19 Burgess/Kulikowski, Mosaics of Time, 98-110.
20 Burgess/Kulikowski, Mosaics of Time, pp. 110-19.