Eupolemus

Who is Eupolemus?

Eupolemus is the earliest Hellenistic Jewish historian whose work survives only in five fragments in the Eusebius of Caesarea's Praeparatio Evangelica embedded in quotations from the historian Alexander Polyhistor and in the Stromata of Clement of Alexandria.

A sixth passage which Polyhistor attributes to Eupolemus in Eusebius' quotations of Polyhistor is usually considered spurious as being dissimilar to the other passages quoted and has come to be called Pseudo-Eupolemus.

Style and vocabulary indicate the writing as also originally in Greek and the date of composition of the seemingly genuine passages is about 158/7 BC. That the author dates his work by the Seleucids rather than the Ptolemies suggests Palestinian rather than Egyptian origin. It has been speculated that the author might be the Eupolemus who was ambassador of Judas Maccabeus to Rome as found in 1 Maccabees 8.17f and 2 Maccabees 4.11.