Theophilus ben Ananus

Theophilus (Hebrew: תפלוס בר חנן)[1] was the High Priest in the Second Temple in Jerusalem from 37 to 41 CE.[2]

Theophilus was a member of one of the wealthiest and most influential Jewish families in Iudaea Province during the 1st century: he was the son of Ananus (Hebrew: חנן) and the brother of Eleazar, Jonathan, Matthias and Ananus, all of whom served as High Priests. He was also the brother-in-law of Joseph Caiaphas, the High Priest before whom Jesus of Nazareth appeared. In addition, his son Matthias served as the next to the last High Priest before the destruction of the Temple by the Romans.

Possible identification with Luke's Theophilus

It has been suggested that he was the Theophilus to whom the Gospel of Luke is addressed, [3] though Theophilus is a common enough name that there are many other possibilities for the addressee of Luke's Gospel and the Acts of the Apostles.[4]

Proponents of this identification argue that the fact that in Luke Theophilus is called by the title Most Excellent (kratiste) indicates that he held a political office like high priest. If anything can be concluded from the absence of that honorific from Acts 1:1, this would suggest that the Gospel of Luke was written during his high priesthood (37-41 CE) while Acts was written after him leaving the office.

The Johanna Ossuary

An ossuary has been discovered bearing the inscription, "Yehoḥanah (Johanna) daughter of Yehoḥanan (John) son of Thefilus (Theophilus)[a] the High Priest".[5] The details of this ossuary have been published in the Israel Exploration Journal. Therefore, Theophilus had at least one other son, named John, who fathered Johanna.

A woman called Joanna, wife of Chuza, appears twice in the Gospel of Luke. First as a woman accompanying Jesus, after he had healed her (Luke 8:3), and later as one of the women visiting the empty tomb (Luke 24:10). It is unlikely, however, that the Johanna in the Gospel of Luke is the same Johanna as the one mentioned on the ossuary. According to Richard Bauckham, Johanna was "the fifth most popular woman's name in Jewish Palestine", and the Johanna of the Gospel of Luke was likely from Galilee, not from Jerusalem.[6] Furthermore, the High-Priest Theophilus probably turned 30 only after 18 CE, when his brother-in-law was appointed High Priest. It would have been unlikely for a son-in-law to take precedence over a son that had already reached minimum age for that office. If Theophilus was in his thirties at that time, a granddaughter of his could not have been married in the period of the Gospels around 30 CE.

Notes

  1. ^ Thefilus (Imperial Aramaic: תפלוס) is a transliterated form of Ancient Greek: θεοφιλη or Ancient Greek: θεοφιλα. It is a translation of a Hebrew name ידידיה (Yadidiyah), which means friend of Yah.

References

  1. ^ Spelling based on an ossuary inscription discovered in Israel in 1984. See: Flusser, David (1986). "The Ossuary of Yehoḥanah Granddaughter of the High Priest Theophilus". Israel Exploration Journal. 36 (1/2): 39–44. JSTOR 27926007.
  2. ^ Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews xix.vi.§ 2
  3. ^ The earliest known person to suggest that most excellent Theophilus was none other than the High Priest was probably Theodore Hase who contributed a short article to Bibliotheca Bremensissome time prior to 1802 when this contribution is mentioned in the Introduction to the New Testament, tr. and augmented with notes by Johann David Michaelis and Herbert Marsh. David L. Allen, Lukan Authorship of Hebrews (2010); David Heilbron Price, Jesus, James, Joseph, and the Temple, 2006-19, Richard H. Anderson, Who are Theophilus and Johanna? The Irony of the Intended Audience (2010); "Theophilus: A Proposal", Evangelical Quarterly 69:3 (1997) 195-215; "The Cross and Atonement from Luke to Hebrews", Evangelical Quarterly 71:2 (1999), 127-149; "Luke and the Parable of the Wicked Tenants", The Journal of Biblical Studies, January–March 2001, Vol. 1, No. 1; "A la recherche de Theophile", Dossiers d'Archeolgie, December 2 – January 3; Josep Rius-Camps, Jenny Read-Heimerdinger, The message of Acts in Codex Bezae: a comparison with the Alexandrian tradition, Volume 4, (2009) 3-4 and prior volumes
  4. ^ Robert F. O'Toole, "Theophilus", Anchor Bible Dictionary 6:511-512
  5. ^ D. Barag and D. Flusser, "The Ossuary of Yehohanah Granddaughter of the High Priest Theophilus", Israel Exploration Journal, 36 (1986), 39-44.
  6. ^ Richard Bauckham, Gospel Women: Studies of the Named Women in the Gospels (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2002), 143-144.
  • This article is a summary of an article appearing in Dossiers d'Archeologie as "A la recherche de Theophile", December 2 – January 3.
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