Julius Africanus

Sextus Julius Africanus was a man of affairs before he was a scholar. He served in the Roman army, traveled in Egypt and the East, and knew the imperial court well enough to be used by it. He was probably from Aelia Capitolina, the Roman colony built over the ruins of Jerusalem.

His town of Emmaus had been wrecked, and around 221 he led the embassy to the emperor Elagabalus that got it rebuilt and renamed Nicopolis. Later the emperor Severus Alexander commissioned him to organize a library at the Pantheon in Rome.

His great work was the Chronographiai, five books setting out the history of the world from the creation to about AD 221. It was the first attempt anyone had made to lay Hebrew, Greek, Egyptian, Persian, and Roman chronologies side by side against the biblical record and make them agree. He reckoned about 5,500 years from Adam to the incarnation and roughly 5,723 to his own day, a framework that later chronologists, Eusebius among them, built on and argued with for over a thousand years. The Byzantine world reckoned its dates from creation because of the road he opened.

He also wrote a Letter to Aristides on a problem readers still ask about: Matthew and Luke give different fathers for Joseph. Africanus argued from levirate marriage, the law of Deuteronomy 25 requiring a man to raise up children for a dead brother, that Joseph had a legal father and a biological father, and that the two lists record the two lines. Eusebius quotes the letter at length, and adds Africanus's claim that the account came from relatives of Jesus who had preserved the family record.

A second letter, to Origen, shows a different side. Origen had cited the story of Susanna as scripture in a debate. Africanus wrote to say it did not belong: the Greek contains a pun that only works in Greek, so the passage was not translated from Hebrew, and the story is absent from the Jewish text. He was doing textual criticism in the third century, and doing it well. Origen wrote back disagreeing, and the exchange survives.

His strangest book is the Kestoi, the Embroideries, a sprawling encyclopedia of medicine, agriculture, military tactics, weights and measures, and folk remedies, dedicated to an emperor, and with very little Christianity in it at all.

He died around 240. Everything he wrote is lost as a whole; all of it survives in pieces, quoted by people who found him indispensable.

Sources: Eusebius, Church History I.6–7, VI.31; the extant writings of Julius Africanus (Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 6); Jerome, On Illustrious Men 63; Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, vol. 2.