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M. J. Edwards, Un falso letterario sotto il nome di Flavio Giuseppe: Ricerche sulla tradizione del “ΠΕΡΙ ΤΟΥ ΠΑΝΤΟΣ” e sulla produzione letteraria cristiana a Roma nei primi decenni del III secolo. By Emanuele Castelli., The Journal of Theological Studies, Volume 63, Issue 2, October 2012, Pages 712–715, https://doi.org/10.1093/jts/fls081
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Among the many notices of otherwise lost works that we owe to Photius is a long excerpt from a treatise On the All or On the Being of the All, which he believes, although it was attributed by many to the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, to be the work of a Christian whom he styles simply the author of the Labyrinth (Bibliotheca 48). When excerpts from the same or a cognate work appear in the writings of Philoponus, John Damascene, and Constantine Porphyrogenitus, Josephus is named as the author, and he is also the putative author of the fragmentary text preserved in the manuscript labelled Coislin 305 (Castelli, appendix, pp. 86–99). No such work, however, has been transmitted in the surviving corpus of Josephus’ writings; the presence in Eusebius and Porphyry of citations from Josephus which cannot now be identified could be taken as evidence either that some genuine works of his have not survived or that some writing like the treatise On the All was falsely credited to him even in the third century. One reason for doubting the truth of the attribution to Josephus was the emergence in 1848 of a Christian pretender. The writer whom we commonly know as Hippolytus, in the lucubration commonly entitled the Elenchus, or Refutation of all Heresies, appears to describe his text (or at least the matter of it) as a labyrinth of heresies, and alludes in his tenth and final book to a treatise On the All as his own composition. If this is the book to which Photius alludes, and if the name of the writer was indeed Hippolytus, the provenance of the work On the All is known at last, and only the spurious attribution remains to be explained.
