Jannes and Jambres

James1920 fragment dossier, printedpage 32

32 THE LOST APOCRYPHA OF them. But when the might of Moses in his works proved greater, they were humbled, and confessed, with the pain of their wounds (of. Philostorgius, below), that it was God that wrought in Moses." These are the old allusions that imply the existence of a book of Jannes and Mambres. There is a good deal of scattered legend about them, chiefly Jewish. They are the two sons of Balaam (Num. xxi. 22) : they edu- cated Moses (Abulpharaj) : they were drowned in the Red Sea, 'or slain with their father by Phinehas. St. Macarius visited their tomb, which was full of demons, from whom he obtained leave to enter and look round. He found a brazen vessel hanging by an iron chain in a well and much consumed by time, and also a number of dried-up pomegranates (Palladius, Hist. Lausiaca). Another set of allusions is in heathen writers. Nu- menius, quoted by Eusebius, names them, and so does Artapanus. Pliny speaks confusedly (N. H., xxx. 11) of the magicians Moses, Jannes, Jotapa; and Apuleius {Apology, 90), enumerating famous wizards, names Jesus perhaps, and certainly Moses and Jannes, Apol- lonius, Dardanus, Zoroaster, Hostanes. The allusions to the two wizards which occur in Oriental chronicles have been collected by Iselin in Zeitschrift f. Wissenschafil. TkeoL, 1894, 321. We now come to consider possible fragments of the book. Photius's excerpts from Philostorgius' s Eccle- siastical History has one (ix. 2, p. 166, ed. Bidez) : " Moses chastised Jannes and Jambres with sores and sent the mother of one of them to death." This must have been introduced by Philostorgius as an illustration : the ninth book of the History is concerned with the reign of Valens. In the eleventh-century MS. Cotton Tiberius B. V., appended to a tract On the Marvels of the East, is the following fragment in Latin and Anglo-Saxon, illus- trated by a beautiful picture of Mambres doing an incantation, and hell open with souls in it. " Mambres opened the magical books of his brother Jannes, and did necromancy and brought up from hell