Josephus's Discourse To The Greeks Concerning Hades - Authorship

Authorship

William Whiston in "Dissertation 6", part of the appendix to his Josephus translation, printed the text of this "Discourse" in Greek and maintained that the piece was by Josephus, "preached or written when he was bishop of Jerusalem".

However, although generally still reprinted in editions of Whiston's Josephus, later scholars have realized that this attribution is incorrect. This brief discourse, at least in its original form, is now attributed to the church father Hippolytus. The attribution to Josephus, recorded by Photius in his Bibliotheca, did not stand unchallenged even in antiquity, and the "Discourse" was also ascribed to Caius, Presbyter of Rome, Justin Martyr, and Irenaeus.

We now know that a work by Hippolytus published in Vol. 5 of the Ante-Nicene Fathers under the title "Against Plato, on the Cause of the Universe" is essentially the same work as the "Discourse" attributed to Josephus. This Hippolytus work is in fact a fragment from a longer treatise entitled "Against the Greeks." There are, however, some slight differences between the Hippolytus version and the one that has passed under Josephus' name, notably in the final "Josephus" paragraph. This includes the "In whatsoever ways I shall find you" quote mentioned above, which is not in Hippolytus' fragment as given in the Ante-Nicene Fathers but does appear in Justin Martyr's Dialogue with Trypho (chapter 47), where it is also attributed to Jesus.