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Flavius
Josephus
From
the Cambridge History of Judaism
I. Life
II. Works
A. The Jewish War (Bellum Judaicum)
B. The Jewish Antiquities (Antiquitates Judaicae)
C. Life (Vita)
E. Proposed and Spurious Works
III. The Versions Of Josephus
IV. The Influence Of Josephus
Few scholars have
been neutral in their judgement of the life of Josephus. In the nineteenth century there was an almost
unanimous condemnation of him by
Jews and Christians alike, a major exception being the Jewish scholar
Hamburger, who regarded Josephus’ own steadfast adherence to Judaism and his
able literary defence of its tenets as providing sufficient ground for pardoning his supposed wrongs to the
Jewish people.
Aside from Josephus’ own autobiography and the references to his career in the Jewish
War, the sources for his life are slight. Among pagan writers Suetonius (Vespasian 5.6), Appian
(fragment 17) and Dio Cassius (lxvi.i) mention
Josephus’ prediction that Vespasian would become emperor; and Porphyry (De abstinentia et esu
animalium iv.n) cites Josephus’ discussion
of the three philosophical schools. Perhaps the silence of the Talmud about him is due to the fact that he was
an ‘outsider’, though Brull has
attempted to find a hidden reference to him in a minor Tal-mudic tractate (per.
Er. Rab. 5, Pirke BenAai 3) which mentions a visit of several
sages to a nameless (to be sure, pagan) philosopher in Rome seeking his intercession with the Emperor
Domitian.
We know nothing of Josephus’ life until the age of fourteen, when, according to
Josephus (Vita 8), the chief priests and leaders of the city of Jerusalem constantly resorted to him for
information concerning the laws. This is, however, a traditional motif in
biographies, as we see, for
example, in Luke 2:46-7. At about the age of sixteen (Vita 10-12) Josephus decided to gain experience in the
three sects (Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes)
in order to select the best; but this procedure is, again, a common
motif in this period, as we see in the cases of Nicolaus of Damascus, Apollonius of Tyana, Justin and Galen, and may
therefore not correspond to reality. There is some confusion in the text,
because Josephus (Vita 12) proceeds to say that he became a
devoted disciple of a certain hermit (not necessarily an Essene) named Bannus
for three years. He was now, he says, in
his nineteenth year; but since he spent three years ‘with Bannus, this
would leave no time for the three sects.
In 64 Josephus (Vita
13) says that he went to Rome (there is no statement who sent him) to help deliver some priestly friends from
bondage. Thanks to the aid of a Jewish actor at court named Aliturus
and of Nero’s mistress Poppaea Sabina,
who was a ‘sympathizer’ with Judaism (Ant. xx. 19 5), he succeeded. In
addition to the release of the captives Josephus also received some gifts;
and one wonders whether there was not
some connection between the extraordinary achievement of the young man and a promise, explicit or implicit, to
defuse the incipient revolution once he would return to Jerusalem. Two
years later, according to Bell-(11.562
- 8), the revolutionaries, after their rout of the Roman governor of Syria,
Cestius Gallus, brought over to their side, whether by persuasion or force, such pro-Romans as still remained and
appointed additional generals,
including Josephus, who was put in charge of the Galilean sector. In the Vita, however, which tells the story
at greater length, Josephus asserts that
he, together with the chief priests and leading Pharisees, pretended to agree with the views of the revolutionaries,
while actually hoping that Cestius
would in the meantime quell the revolution and that the leaders in Jerusalem, who favored pacification,
dispatched him with two other priests to Galilee to induce the terrorists, to
fight only in self-defence. Inasmuch
as Josephus was so young, being not yet thirty, and had had no previous
military experience, it seems remarkable that he was chosen as commander in the area where the Romans were most
likely to attack first; and it
seems likely that he was selected more because of his prominent genealogy than because of his capacity for
military leadership. The two versions
may, of course, represent two stages in Josephus’ activities.
One wonders why
Josephus, once appointed, did not undertake guerrilla warfare, as his ancestors, the Maccabees, had done so
successfully more than two centuries earlier, or why he did not
retreat with his army to Jerusalem, which
he knew was by far the best fortified of all the Jewish strongholds, rather than shut himself up in the
tactically hopeless trap of Jotapata.
The suspicion is strong that Josephus was playing a double role; and indeed he says, in an extraordinarily candid
passage (Vita 72), that when John of Gischala had asked for the
imperial corn in Galilee, so that he might use the income with which
to construct defences for Gischala, Josephus
refused, saying that he intended to reserve the corn ‘either for the
Romans or for my own use’. Again, the fact that in the suicide pact with his
men at Jotapata Josephus somehow managed to be among the last two has led to suspicions that he arranged
the lots. Indeed, the Slavonic
version (Bell. 111.391), which hardly seeks to discredit Josephus, states
quite explicitly that ‘he counted the numbers with cunning and thereby misled them all’. Perhaps Josephus,
guided by an inner voice, was so deeply imbued with a sense of mission
to record these events for posterity that
he felt that he had to survive in order to fulfil this task. Moreover,
in view of the tremendous success of the Jews during this period in winning
converts, he may have looked upon the revolt as ruining the prospect of winning the Roman Empire to Judaism. In addition, we may note that while some of the
people in Jerusalem condemned him as a traitor, he was apparendy
never censured by the government. It has
often been pointed out that the great Pharisaic leader Johanan ben Zakkai similarly sought peace with the
Romans and likewise prophesied (b.
Gittin 56a - b) that the general Vespasian would become emperor. Undoubtedly, as we may gather from the
appearance of the revolutionary leader Menahem in royal robes in the Temple (Bell.
11.444), there was a Messianic
basis to the revolt against Rome, as there was to be in the revolt of Lucias Andreas against Trajan in
115-17 and in that of Bar Kokhba
against Hadrian in 132-5; but instead of applying the Messianic prophecy
to the Jews, Josephus and Johanan apparendy applied it to Vespasian, just as Cyrus in Isa. 45:1 is called
Messiah. On the other hand, Johanan
did not seek any personal rewards, whereas Josephus received from Titus a tract of land outside Jerusalem,
some sacred books, Roman citizenship, lodging in the former palace of
Vespasian, and a pension.
Josephus’ first work, his Jewish War, was originally composed
in Aramaic (Bell. 1.3). With the help of assistants (Against Apion 1.50)
he rewrote (rather than translated) the work in Greek. The view that the
Slavonic version was made directly from the lost Aramaic version has now been
disproved by Mescerskij, who, through a
careful linguistic analysis, has concluded
that the translation was made directiy from Greek.
The usual date for
the Bellum, 75-9, has now been challenged by Cohen, who notes that the
black picture of Caecina (Bell, iv.634-40) shows that the work was published after 79, when Caecina was executed
for an alleged plot against the Emperor Titus, since Caecina stood too high in favour with Vespasian and since
Josephus was too much a servile flatterer
to adopt an independent position. Cohen also notes that Book vii gives much more prominence and
favour to Domitian, and he concludes that
it is a Domitianic addition; Morton and Michaelson, in their statistical study, confirm that Book vn differs
markedly from the other books of the Bellum in style.
For the first part
of the war, when Josephus himself was a participant, it seems likely that he
relied chiefly upon his own observations; for the latter part he apparently relied primarily upon the memoirs of
Vespasian and Titus (Vita 342,
3 5 8; Against Apion 1.50). Despite his statement, traditional in prooemia, that previous accounts had
been inaccurate or prejudiced or
rhetorical, his own work has been rightly suspected on precisely these grounds, especially since his expressed
purpose (Bell. 111.108) in writing
was to deter others from revolting. Indeed, the very title, Concerning the Jewish War, shows that Josephus is writing from the
standpoint of the Romans. Tacitus,
we may note, although manifestly anti-Jewish, gives an entirely
different picture of the war, portraying it as a national rebellion rather
than as the work of a few thugs. Josephus ignores mention of the facts that many Jews, not only of the Roman
Empire but also beyond the Euphrates, aided the revolutionaries (Dio
66.4.3) and that some Roman
soldiers even deserted to the Jews (Dio 66.5.4). There is good reason to prefer the statement of the fourth-century
Christian historian Sulpicius Severus, supported by the implicit
statement in the proem of Valerius Flaccus and by the Talmud (b. Gittin 56b),
that Titus demanded the destruction of the Temple, rather than Josephus’
statement (Bell, vi.241) that Titus
urged that the Temple be spared.
Moreover, the messianic goal of the rebellion
indicated by Tacitus (Histories v.13) and Suetonius (Vespasian 4)
and by Simon bar Giora’s coins is almost
completely suppressed by Josephus, except for Bell, vi.312-15,
presumably because he wished to represent the war as an action of a fanatical element in order to conceal the
general Jewish hostility to the Romans and to exculpate the Jews as a whole
in the eyes of the Roman administration.
In addition, as Thackeray7 has noted, Josephus’ blackened portraits
of the revolutionaries Simon bar Giora and John of Gischala are suspiciously
modelled, to some extent, on that of Catiline by Cicero. On the other hand, Farmer’s theory8
that Josephus has deliberately ignored a connection between the
revolutionaries and the Maccabees has not won general acceptance, since the Maccabees rebelled because of the
suppression of the Jewish
religion, whereas the Jews in the time of the revolt against Rome had
religious liberty but sought to obtain political liberty. The most spectacular case where archaeology has
enabled us to check Josephus’ accuracy is the episode at Masada. Before the
discoveries of Yadin in 1963-5, scholars had tended to be sceptical about
Josephus’ account, since he
himself was not present and presumably derived it from the Romans, who
in turn had learned of the mass suicide from a woman who had survived in an underground conduit. The speeches by Eleazar ben
Jair, with passages almost taken verbatim from Plato about the relation of the body and the soul, seem to be
the work of Josephus’ scriptorium in the style of ancient historians.
It did not seem likely that brave
fighters would commit suicide rather than fight to the last man, especially since suicide is so severely frowned
upon by Jewish law. Yadin,” however,
concluded that the discoveries confirmed Josephus’ reliability as a
historian. In particular, the discovery of twenty-five skeletons of the defenders, of eleven ostraca (one of which
contained the name of Ben Jair, the
commander of the Sicarii at Masada) with names which may well be the lots used to determine who would kill
the others, of sherds which may have been used by the defenders in
rationing food, of sherds connected with
the tithes, and of two ritual baths and a synagogue appeared to confirm Josephus’ credibility. The
discoveries have also, however, raised
a number of questions. Thus Josephus says that Herod’s palace was on the
western slope, whereas it is actually on the northern slope, that the
pillars of Herod’s palace were cut from a single block, whereas those found by Yadin had been made up of several
sections fitted together and then covered with stucco so that the
joints would not be seen, and that the food of the defenders was preserved to
prove to the Romans that the defenders
had not been driven to suicide by hunger, whereas Yadin found that some of it
had been preserved but that part of it had been burnt. In particular, the discovery of a sectarian scroll of
liturgies based on the peculiar
calendar used by the Dead Sea sect at Qumran would suggest some connection between the sect and die Sicarii not mentioned
by Josephus. It is perhaps this sectarianism which will at once explain the
Talmud’s silence about the defenders, the fact that they engaged in a raid (Bell. iv.402) on En
Gedi on Passover (which was apparently not Passover according to their
sectarian calendar), and their differing
view on suicide. We may conclude that, in view of Josephus’ bitter denunciation of the Sicarii elsewhere,
the incredulousness at their amazing boldness expressed by the Romans
according to Josephus (Bell. vn.4.05)
puts a stamp of credibility upon the narrative as a whole.
B. The
Jewish Antiquities (Antiquitates Judaicae)
In die first half
of the Antiquities, where Josephus parallels the Bible, it is clear that his solemn declaration (Ant. 1.17)
that he will set forth the ‘precise
details’ of what is written in the Scripture, neither adding nor omitting anything, is either a commonplace or an
indication that Josephus included in
‘Scriptures’ not only the written Bible but Jewish tradition generally. For the Hexateuch the evidence that
Josephus used the Septuagint, in
any of the forms known to us, is slight. Either Josephus is dependent upon a Greek tradition or upon a Hebrew text
somewhat different from ours, or
upon an Aramaic Targumic paraphrase, or, most likely, was an eclectic using all of them. For his
paraphrase of Samuel through 1 Maccabees,
however, Josephus employed a proto-Lucianic (or, according to Barthelemy, an
old Septuagint) Palestinian text akin to that found in Qumran and in his presumed Palestinian
contemporary Pseudo-Philo’s Biblical
Antiquities. Holscher’s theory
that Josephus used neither the Hebrew nor the Greek Bible but rather a Hellenistic Greek midrash has not
been widely accepted, since it seems
hard to believe diat Josephus, who was certainly well educated and probably, in accordance with the usage of
the time, knew much of the Bible by
heart, did not also resort to direct use of the Bible; and, moreover, several of Josephus’ major modifications
are paralleled in rabbinic
midrashim. Thus his omission of the story of the golden calf (Exod. 32) is in accord with the
minority view of die Talmud (b.
Meg. 25 a) that this passage
should not be read in the synagogue out of respect for Israel. In addition, Josephus often shares with Philo an allegorical interpretation of the Bible,
particularly in the symbolic explanation
of the Tabernacle in cosmic terms, though it is hard to assert categorically that Philo was Josephus’ source
since similar traditions may sometimes
be found in rabbinic midrashim. In at least thirty instances, moreover, tiiere are parallels in extra-biblical
details between Pseudo-Philo’s Biblical
Antiquities and Josephus, which are to be found in no other extant source, though in general Pseudo-Philo is
closer to the rabbinic midrashim
than is Josephus.
But the Antiquities is also the work of Josephus himself, who,
under the influence of the antiquarian approach of Dionysius of Halicarnassus
(whose Roman Antiquities, also in twenty books, clearly influenced
Josephus), adopted the conventions
of a very different style of historiograpny in the Antiquities
from that which he used in the War. Many of these are
historiographical commonplaces derived
from Isocratean rhetoric and paralleled in other Hellenistic writers. In rearranging the biblical
material Josephus follows the
‘thematic’ school, in accordance with the Hellenistic historical tradition, i.e. he brings into juxtaposition the
items which belong together on subject
matter, regardless of chronology or source. In his modifications Josephus is
often concerned with answering anti-Jewish charges, such as that the Jews had
invented nothing useful in sciences, that the Jews were illiberal toward non-Jews, that the Jews were
cowards, etc. Sometimes, as in the
paraphrase of the stories of Joseph and of Esther, Josephus highlights
erotic elements, perhaps under the influence of the Greek novel-istic tradition. In particular, Josephus paints
portraits of Abraham and Moses as
typical national God-like heroes, such as were popular in Hellenistic times, with emphasis on them as
statesmen, philosophers, logicians, rhetoricians, scientists and romantic
heroes. Thus Abraham’s teleological
proof for the existence of God (Ant. 1.156) from die irregularities of the heavenly bodies, though it is in the form
of the proof promulgated by the
Greek philosophical schools, is found only in Josephus; and it is clear from
the context that Josephus is here combating the Stoics.
In general,
moreover, Josephus tends to downgrade miracles, as we see especially when we compare, for example, his
view of Abraham and Moses as
talented generals with the rabbinic portraits of these leaders as prevailing
because of God’s miraculous assistance. On several occasions, moreover, when
mentioning miracles, Josephus uses the formula familiar from Dionysius of Halicarnassus, that ‘everyone
is welcome to his own opinion’ as an
expression of courtesy and tolerance intended for his pagan readers.
Similarly directed to his Hellenistic readers is Josephus’ emphasis on fate
as the distinguishing feature of the three Jewish sects, as well as his comparisons of the Pharisees with the
Stoics (Vita 12) and of the
Essenes with the Pythagoreans (Ant. xv.371).
For his account of
the capture of Jerusalem by Nebuchadnezzar Josephus also employs the Babylonian historian Berossus (third century bce). An important recently published chronicle15
strikingly confirms Berossus’ account, as reported in Josephus (Against
Apion 1.135), of the Battle of Carchemish, though it does show
a number of differences with the
account (Ant. x.96-102) of the events leading up to the fall of
Jerusalem and the capture of King Jehoiachin;
Josephus’ account of Ezra and Nehemiah is full of inaccuracies, particularly in the
chronology of the Persian kings, and deviates widely from both the Hebrew and Greek texts. It is clear
that Josephus had an additional
source for this period. In his account of Samaritan affairs during this time, Josephus has apparently
projected the hostilities against the Samaritans of his own day. Papyri now
confirm that Josephus has confused the first and third Sanballats, who
were governors of Samaria.
The fact that, in a treatise ori Jewish law which entailed and indeed attempts a kind of
codification of halakhah, Josephus omits certain laws (e.g. Exod. 21:7 - 11,
20, 26-7; Lev. 1:4, 3:2) is an indication that his work is often motivated by apologetic concerns. Josephus’ statement (Ant. iv.207 and Against Apion 11.237) citing as a law the prohibition
against blaspheming the gods of other peoples is clearly not based on the Hebrew
Bible, which in fact (e.g. Lev. 18:3) reviles the laws of pagans and commands the destruction of pagan altars
(Deut. 12:2-3); it clearly derives
from the Septuagint version of Exod. 22:27-, ‘Thou shalt not revile God’, where the plural form of the word
for God is rendered theous, ‘gods’,
from which Philo (De vita Mosis 11.205, De spedalibus legibus 1.
3) had drawn the same conclusion
and indeed had given (De vita Mosis 11.205) the same reason for the prohibition, namely the holiness
attached to the very name of God. In
some instances Josephus may have been influenced by his use of Philo’s Hypothetica, namely in the
death penalty for abortion (Against Apion 11.202), the prohibition of
revealing secrets (Against Apion
11.207), the necessity of
kindness toward suppliant animals (Against
Apion 11.213), and public
reading of the Torah on the Sabbath (Against Apion 11.175). In view,
however, of the fact that Josephus was under constant attack from his fellow Jews, it seems unlikely that he would have dared to ‘deviate’ thus from Jewish
law unless such interpretations were to be found among pious Jews in
his homeland; and indeed the first three of
these deviations have their parallels in rabbinic sources, if not to
quite the same degree as in Philo, whose language Josephus parallels,
sometimes strikingly. Again, Josephus (Against Apion n.199) says that
sexual intercourse is permitted only if designed for procreation of children;
but in the Mishnah (Yebam. 6.6-7) that companionship is also a purpose
of marriage. Riskin18 conjectures that Josephus was influenced by the Essenes; but we may suggest
that perhaps he was influenced by
Philo’s” statement (De vita Mosis 1.28) that Moses participated in
sexual relations solely to beget children. Moreover, in a number of cases, Josephus appears to adopt a legal
position for apologetic reasons.
Thus he declares (Against Apion 11.207) that a judge who
accepts a bribe suffers capital
punishment, whereas there is no such penalty in the Bible or in the
Talmud. Inasmuch as, according to the rabbinic understanding of the seven Noachian commandments which are incumbent upon Gentiles, if a Gentile judge accepts a bribe
he is indeed put to death, perhaps Josephus did not want to have it
appear that the law is more stringent for
Gentile than for Jewish judges, and thus he applied the same penalty
to both. We may also note that Josephus (Against Apion 11.202) equates abortion with infanticide,
whereas the Mishnah does not regard
the unborn foetus as a human being and justifies killing it to save the mother if the majority of it has
not emerged. Here, too, apparently Josephus did not want to let it appear
that Jewish law was more lenient
than the law as applied to non-Jews, since the Talmud (b. Sank. 57b) quotes Rabbi Ishmael as stating that Noachian law forbids killing a foetus in its mother’s womb on the
basis of an interpretation of Gen. 9:6; or perhaps Josephus was motivated by
a desire not to be more lenient
than Plato, who says (according to Plutarch, De placitis philosophorum 5.15) that
a foetus is a living being.
Apologetic purposes may similarly be
behind Josephus’ declarations (Against
Apion 11.214), which have no
basis in the Bible or in the Talmud, that the law bids the Jew even in
an enemy’s country to spare and not to kill
beasts employed in labour, and that castration of an animal is a capital crime.
Again, perhaps to remain consistent with the literal interpretation of the
Bible, Josephus, in his attitude toward images, seems more strict than the
rabbinic tradition. Indeed (Ant. vm.195), he goes out of his way to condemn King Solomon for breaking the Second
Commandment in putting the images of
bulls and lions in the Temple, where the Bible itself (1 Kgs 7:25, 10:20) and
the Talmud (b. Zebah 62b) do not censure him. For the post-biblical period Josephus has been
justly criticized for giving such scant attention to those
developments in Judaism on the eve of
Antiochus Ill’s conquest of Palestine which must have been of some importance
to produce the religious and cultural outburst that followed. Starting with the Maccabaean period Josephus has
parallel accounts in the Bellum and in the Antiquities. The
former is more carefully composed and more polished stylistically; the
latter has considerably greater length, is generally
more critical of Herod, and stresses the power and influence of the Pharisees. For the Maccabees, Josephus
apparently used both the Hebrew original and a Greek translation of 1
Maccabees, which was more correct and
fuller than ours. For the Hasmonaean kings and Herod Josephus’ chief source was most likely Nicolaus
of Damascus, Herod’s non-Jewish adviser,
who was probably anti-Hasmonaean. Indeed his heavy dependence on Nicolaus seems clear from the fact
that once he reaches the period no longer covered by Nicolaus’ work Josephus’
own account becomes meagre indeed,
except for occasional long digressions, where Josephus presumably had special sources. Still, Josephus consciously
tried to free himself from the
panegyrical approach of Nicolaus toward Herod, and we must therefore conclude that he used Nicolaus more critically
in the Antiquities than in the Bellum. His other major
sources for the Hellenistic period were
Polybius, Posidonius, Strabo and Diodorus.
The documents
bearing on Roman-Jewish relations cited by Josephus in Antiquities, Books
14 and 16, have occasioned much dispute about authenticity. Most scholars have regarded the majority of them as genuine;
but Moehring imputes significance to Josephus’ silence about the fire of 69 in which three thousand documents in
the Roman archives were destroyed,
cites instances where decrees of the senate were forged, asserts that in antiquity historians probably
did not bother to check the original
texts of decrees and were content with second-hand opinions abotit them, notes a number of instances where
the texts of the document are
unusually corrupt and where Josephus’ versions of decrees do not correspond
to the standard known to us from epigraphical evidence, and concludes that
Josephus’ invitation to check the accuracy of his statements by consulting the original documents
is merely a literary device.
On the basis of a close study of Josephus’ vocabulary and style, Thackera}? has
theorized that in Books 15 and 16 Josephus utilized an assistant who had a particular love of Greek
poetry, especially Sophocles, and in Books 17 - 19 an assistant who was notably
fond of Thucydides. Actually, we may
comment, Josephus (Against Apion 1.50) says that he used fellow-workers for the Greek of the Bellum,
where ironically Thackeray is
forced to admit that he cannot pinpoint the nature and extent of their help. Moreover, the presence of many Sophoclean
and Thucydidean phrases in the other
Greek works of the period, notably in Dionysius of Halicarnassus,
shows that they are characteristics of first-century Greek rather than that they are the work of a special
assistant. Furthermore, there are Sophoclean and Thucydidean traces
throughout the Bellum and the Antiquities.
Where Josephus parallels Tacitus in their accounts of Parthian affairs,
Josephus
is generally to be preferred, as the numismatic avidence appears to indicate, presumably because Josephus, with
his knowledge of Aramaic, the language of the populous Jewish
communities in Babylonia, had a more direct knowledge of the events there.
Schalit21 has ingeniously discerned
an Aramaic word in Ant. xvm.343 in Josephus’ account of the Jewish
robber-barons Anilaeus and Asinaeus who defied the Parthians, and has
suggested that Josephus’ source was a Greek translation which goes back to an Aramaic original. He similarly,
though less convincingly, finds an
Aramaic source for Josephus’ account of Izates, the king of Adiabene who was
converted to Judaism.
Occasionally
inscriptions will shed light on Josephus’ terminology. Thus an inscription discovered in 1961 in
Caesarea has established Pilate’s official tide as prefect rather than
as procurator, the title given him by
Tacitus (Annals xv.44.3) and Josephus (Bell. 11.169). But
Josephus elsewhere, like the New
Testament, calls him by the more ambiguous term hegemon, ‘governor’; and Josephus’ fluidity in terminology
generally indicates either that
Pilate’s title changed in the course of his administration of Judaea or that the tides were not as
rigid as most modern scholars believe.
We may remark here on the passage in Josephus which has occasioned by far more
comment than any other, die so-called Testimonium Flavianum (Ant. xviii.63-4) concerning Jesus. The passage appears in all our manuscripts; but a considerable number of Christian
writers - Pseudo-Justin and
Theophilus in die second century, Minucius Felix, Irenaeus, Clement of
Alexandria, Julius Africanus, Tertullian, Hippolytus and Origen in the third century, and Methodius and
Pseudo-Eustathius in the early fourth century - who knew Josephus and cited
from his works do not refer to this
passage, though one would imagine that it would be the first passage that a Christian apologist would cite. In
pardcular, Origen (Contra Celsum 1.47 and Commentary on Matthew 10.17), who certainly knew Book
18 of the Antiquities and cites five passages from it, explicidy states
that Josephus did not believe in Jesus as Christ. The first to cite the Testimonium
is Eusebius (c. 324);
and even after him, we may note, there are eleven Christian writers
who cite Josephus but not the Testimonium. In fact, it is not until
Jerome in the early fifth century that we have another reference to it.
The principal
internal argument against the genuineness of the Testing- nium-is that it says that
Jesus was the Christ, whereas Josephus, as a loyal Pharisaic Jew, could hardly have written this. To be sure, there were several claimants to the status of Messiah in
this era, and those who followed
them were not read out of the Jewish fold; but ‘in view of the fact that Josephus nowhere else uses the word Christos
(except in referring to James,
the brother of Jesus, Ant. xx.200) and that he repeatedly sup presses the Messianic aspects of the revolt
against Rome because of the association
of the Messiah with political revolt and independence, it would seem
hard to believe that he would openly call Jesus a Messiah and speak of’him
with such awe. The fact that Jerome (De viris illustribus 13) reads that ‘he was believed to be the Christ’ (credebatur
esse Cbristus) would suggest
that his text differed from ours.Another objection to the authen ticity of
the passage is that it breaks the continuity of the narrative, which tells of a series of riots. Those, such as
Eisler, who regard the passage as
interpolated, suggest that the original spoke of the Christian move ment as a riot.
Pines has created a considerable stir by bringing to the scholarly world’s attention
two hitherto almost completely neglected works containing the Testimonium, one a tenth-century history of the
world in Arabic by a Christian named Agapius and the other a
twelfth-century chronicle in Syriac’by Michael the Syrian. There are a number
of differences between Agapius and our Testimonium;
notably in the omission of the statement ‘if one ought to call him a man’ and of Jesus’ miracles and of
the role of the Jewish leaders in
accusing Jesus, and, above all, in the assertion that Jesus was perhaps the Messiah. Since Agapius declares that
‘This is what is said by Josephus and his companions’ and indeed includes a
number of other details not found in Josephus,
we may conjecture that he used other sources as well. Inasmuch as
there are changes in the order of the statements of the Testimonium in Agapius and Michael, we are apparently dealing not with a
translation but with a paraphrase.
For the lengthy
account in Book 19 of the Antiquities of the assassination of Caligula and the accession of Claudius,
Mommsen’s view that Josephus’ source
was the lost Roman historian Cluvius Rufus has won general acceptance,
but several’alternative written and oral sources have been suggested. In particular, we may note the fact that Agrippa I’s
role in the accession of Claudius is built up to a high degree. This
can hardly be due to Cluvius, but most
likely was derived from Josephus’ friend Agrippa II, son of Agrippa I, who elsewhere (Vita 366) declares
himself ready to inform him of
details that are not generally known.
Near the end of the Antiquities (xx.266),
he dates the work in the thirteenth year of the reign of Domitian (93-4),
Josephus indicates that he will append his
Vita to his Antiquities. Inasmuch as the Vita (359)
definitely indicates that Agrippa is already dead, and Photius says that Agrippa died in the third year of the
reign of Trajan (i.e. 100), Laqueur has argued that the Antiquities appeared
in two editions, the first in 93-4,
and the second some years later. Our manuscript tradition, however, provides no proof for a
second edition, and the alleged two endings to the. Antiquities (xx.259
and xx.267) may simply be due to the ract
that after twenty long books it took Josephus some time to bid :he reader farewell. Still, we may remark that
ancient book production afforded ample opportunity for change and
correction..
Josephus’ Vita is
the oldest autobiography that we possess from antiquity in its original form, though most of it is
devoted to a single episode in the author’s
life, his command in Galilee. That it is an appendix to the Antiquities
is clear from both the end of the Antiquities (xx. 266) and the end of the Vita (430). Laqueur27
has’hypothesized that the nucleus of the
Vita was an administrative report, the use of which makes it more original,
more truthful, and less tendentious than the Bellum. But all attempts .it tiigher criticism’ of the Vita have
failed to disclose strata within’ it or differences between it and
Book 20 of the Antiquities in style. On the contrary, there are numerous links of style between them, including
the alleged early portions of the Vita.
In fact, the Vita shows the internal unity of a single work
written for a particular purpose, namely that of refuting the charges
of Justus of Tiberias, whose work, written
twenty years after the war, is completely lost. Laqueur postulates that Justus had attacked Josephus’ style
and that the competition from Justus meant financial ruin for Josephus; but
inasmuch as the Emperor Titus favoured the..
Bellum, the competition with Justus would have had no direct financial
impact upon Josephus; and, in any case, the style of the Vita is inferior to that of the Bellum.
The invective exchanged by Josephus and Justus
is typological. Actually, both of them were realists, who clashed because each was playing his own double
game. In the end, Justus fled for
protection to the collaborationist Agrippa II, whereas Josephus joined Vespasian. Cohen has conjectured that
the reason for Justus’ delay in
publishing his work was that after the war Tiberias had had to suffer the ignominy of seeing many cities
become the autonomous rulers of extensive
territories, while it was still subservient to Agrippa II and was not even the capital of his kingdom. Hence
Justus, as a native son, came to the
defence of his city, whereas the Vita is an anti-Tiberian polemic.
Moreover, Justus had apparently attacked Josephus’ religiosity, and
hence the Vita seeks to portray Josephus as a religious man.
The discrepancies
between the Vita and the Bellum may, in large part, be explained by the licence traditionally
granted in biographies to engage in
panegyric. Thus Polybius (x.21), whose work Josephus knew, states that
when he wrote a biographical memoir of Philopoemen he exaggerated as panegyric required, whereas in his
history he was more objective. Autobiography was still less reliable as a
source of fact, as we may infer from Josephus’ contemporary, Tacitus (Agricola
1). The same distinction between
history and biography is to be found in the licence permitted in a monograph
in contrast to the truthfulness demanded in a more general history, as seen in Cicero’s request (Ad
familiares v.12) to the historian Lucceius to treat the events of the annus
mirabilis of his consulship in a monograph. A comparison with the Agricola
shows substantially the same division
of subject matter and the same addiction to digression. Indeed, Cohen has
with good reason concluded that the Vita is Josephus’ least careful
work - confused, tendentious, inconsistent, with incorrect cross-references,
with doublets, and with important segments of information presented in
a casual and even a startling manner. The
treatise Against Apion was written after the Antiquities, to
which it refers
(1.1,1.54,11.28). It is a defence of the Jews against charges of theiropponents, though Apion himself is not mentioned until the second book. In
particular, Josephus answers the contention that the Jews are of recent origin. He counter-charges that the
Greeks themselves are of much more recent origin and that their
historians are untrustworthy. He shows considerable acquaintance with
antiquarian problems; and his remark (Against
Apion 1.12) that Homer himself
did not commit his poems to writing
was the basis of Wolf’s Prolegomena on the origin of the Homeric corpus.
He replies to the distortions in the accounts of the Exodus by Manetho, Chaeremon and Lysimachus, and rebuts
such calumnies in Apion as that the
Jews worshipped the head of an ass in the Temple, that they practised ritual murder, and that they
were more concerned with their own affairs than with those of the
community in which they lived. The work
closes with a summary and defence of the Mosaic constitution as
compared with those of the Greeks. In this he follows the standard rhetorical pattern for such encomia,
particularly as seen in Dionysius of Halicarnassus’
encomium of Rome in Roman Antiquities (1.9-11.29). Josephus was clearly indebted to Philo’s Hypothetka, notably
in his interpretations of law, as indicated above.
Josephus also mentions a number of works which he intended to write, notably on God and
his Substance and the laws. Petersen29 has, however, concluded that we have all of Josephus’ proposed
works, and that most of the
references to contemplated works are to Against Apion, which, however, when finally written, contained certain
changes from the original plan.
Several works are
ascribed to Josephus but are clearly not by him. In particular, the Christian
tradition, ever since Eusebius, has ascribed 4 Maccabees to Josephus. Modern scholars have rejected this authorship on
the ground that this work uses 2 Maccabees, which Josephus did not know. In addition, Skknina30 has
shown that 4 Maccabees differs considerably from the other works of
Josephus in its prose rhythms at the ends of
sentences. It smacks of having been composed by an Alexandrian Jew deeply
imbued with Greek philosophy, notably Stoicism. Another work ascribed to Josephus, De universo, is a
philosophical refutation of Plato by a Christian, presumably
Hippolytus.
The standard editions of Josephus remain those that were issued almost
simultaneously
by Niese31 and Naber. The former has a much fuller apparatus
criticus in his editio maior; and indeed both Naber and the Loeb edition of Thackeray and others depend upon it.
It is close to the manuscript
tradition and is generally, and with good reason, more widely accepted than Naber. It should be noted,
nevertheless, that Niese’s editio minor changes the text
of the editio maior in several hundred passages, though often it is unnecessarily bold; it rates,
however, as Niese’s final edition. But Niese, in line with the
prevailing principle in text-criticism of his
time, overestimated the value of one group of manuscripts and frequently failed to consider the quality of
individual readings case by case. Consequently, all too often, as
Schreckenberg remarks, the best textual tradition
appears in Niese’s apparatus. Naber’s text may be smoother generally than that of Niese, especially when
compared with”the latter’s editio maior; but the task of the editor is
to reconstruct wliat Josephus wrote
rather than to improve his Greek. Naber’s edition,’and especially his apparatus criticus, are, moreover, full of
errors.
Schreckenberg has listed a number of manuscripts missed by Niese, but he admits that
an extensive collation of these manuscripts would increase the massive apparatus of Niese’s editio maior insignificantly,
with only a slight chance here and
there of localizing the genuine tradition. A possible clue to the
unreliability of the text that we possess may be found in the fact that
Origen (Contra Celsum 1.47, 11.13 end; Commentary on Matfheip 10.17),
Eusebius (Historia Ecclesiastica ii.23.0q),’and Jerome (De viris illustribus 13) declare that Josephus said that Jerusalem was
destroyed because of the murder of James the Just, a statement nowhere
to be found in our text of Josephus.
Similarly, as Pinesj6 has noted, there are statements in the tenth-century Arabic
historian Agapius allegedly drawn
from Josephus which are not in our texts. These may, of course, be due
to interpolations or to loose paraphrasing, or they may refer to a different
text.
The text of Josephus’ Bellum is relatively sound; but Schalit,”
the foremost
Josephus scholar of the past generation, has remarked that the text of the Antiquities is more corrupt
than any other Greek text.
Inasmuch as Josephus is writing in a language which is still foreign to
him,
and inasmuch as he appears not to have had assistants for most of the Antiquities (if he had them at all),
as he did for the Bellum, we are often reduced to finding what
a writer not thoroughly familiar with the language would have written. The corruption in the text of the first half
of the Antiquities, where he
paraphrases the Bible, has been aggravated by the tendency of copyists to assimilate Josephus’ text to that of the
Septuagint, particularly in the
spelling of proper names.
Schreckenberg has
presented us a complete, annotated list of the manuscripts of Josephus (including many missed by Niese), as well as
of those who cite or quote excerpts from him. The textual tradition
was apparendy polarized into two families as early as the diird century.
The oldest manuscripts of complete treatises of Josephus
date from the tenth or eleventh century. The tradition for
the second half of the Antiquities differs
from that of the first half. For the treatise Against Apion we
are dependent upon a single manuscript dating from
the eleventh century, for which 11.52-113, which is missing,
must be supplied from the Latin version
of Cassiodorus’ school. The one papyrus fragment (Bell, ii.576-9)
that has been found dates from the third century,
apparendy before this polarisation took place.
Especially in view
of the corrupt state of the text, the versions, often much older than our oldest Greek manuscripts, are of considerable importance. In Latin there is a free reworking of
the Bellum of the fourth century
attributed to a certain Hegesippus (sometimes, probably wrongly, identified with Ambrose or pseudo-Ambrose), who
claims to be writing an original
work in accordance with the spirit of Christianity.
There is also in
Latin a closer translation of the Bellum usually attributed to
Rufinus (d. 410) and a translation of the Antiquities and Against Apion made under the direction of Cassiodorus in the sixth century. The fact that there are 171 manuscripts of
Cassiodorus’ version is an indication of its popularity. Blatt’s
edition of Books 1-5 of the Antiquities is unfortunately based on only a few of these; a truly
critical text remains a desideratum.
The linguistic and
ethnographic evidence that the Hebrew paraphrase of the Bellum by Josippon (Josephon), identified in the
manuscripts as Joseph ben Gorion (cf. Bell. 11.563), dates from
the middle of the tenth century seems overwhelming. The textual tradition of
this version is extraordinarily
complicated by the fact that there are three substantially different recensions. A critical edition has
finally been produced by David Flusser (2 vols., Jerusalem, 1978-80).
Josippon’s major source was Hegesippus,
but he also used a Latin Bible and a Latin version of sixteen of the twenty books of the Antiquities. Until
the nineteenth century, with the major exception of Azariah dei Rossi in the
sixteenth century, Jews identified Josippon with Josephus, and the work was
extremely popular.
In the tenth
century Josippon was translated into Arabic, and this in turn was translated
into Ethiopic some time between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries.
The Slavonic version of the War, apparently made in the eleventh
century, contains a number of additions not found in the
Greek, notably passages on John
the Baptist and Jesus, which Josephus could hardly have written, since they speak with such antipathy of the role of the
Jews. Recent scholarship
indicates that the work was used by Christians in the ideological
struggle against the Khazars, who had been converted to Judaism in the eighth century.
The Influence Of Josephus
The only extant pagan writer who definitely knew the works of Josephus
is
the third-century Porphyry, who in his De abstinentia ab esu animalium 1v.11, states that the Essenes are referred to
in the second book of his Jewish
History (that is the Bellum),
in the eighteenth book of his Archaeology, and in the second book of his To the Greeks (that
is Against Apion).
Josephus
influenced the Church Fathers, particularly the Greek Fathers: Origen, Eusebius, Pseudo-Eustathius, John
Chrysostom, Theodoret, Theodore of Mopsuestia and Isidore of Pelusium.
Among the Latin Fathers he particularly
influenced Tertullian, Lactantius, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine and Cassiodorus. Jerome (Epistula
ad Eustochium 22. 5, pl xxii,
col. 421) praises Josephus as a
second Livy. Indeed, so marked was Jerome’s
favour for Josephus that during his lifetime it was thought, without
basis, that he had translated Josephus’ Bellum into Latin. We may also note that the Syriac version of the sixth
book of the Bellum was actually included in the sacred canon of the
Syrian Church.
During the Middle Ages and into modern times Josephus was associated with either
pagan or Christian authorities, as the occasion demanded. Indeed, he was regarded as a veritable polymath
- an authority in such diverse fields as biblical exegesis, allegory,
chronology, arithmetic (the Josephus-spiel
was one of the popular
arithmetical problems of the Middle Ages),
astronomy, natural history, geography of the Holy Land, grammar,
etymology and Jewish theology. There was a legend that Josephus had cured the Emperor Titus of a swollen leg, gout
or palsy. When the Christians were largely cut off from the direct
Jewish tradition, it was Josephus who supplied
the pilgrims with knowledge of the Holy Land, their teachers with
knowledge of Jewish history and the Jewish religion and lore, and their military leaders with military tactics and
formulae. The Jewish War was particularly popular since it
contained such a graphic account of the destruction of the Temple, a debacle
which was explained as divine punishment
meted out to the Jews for their rejection of Jesus. Because of the Testimonium
Flavianum Josephus’ was regarded as having borne witness to the miracles, Messiahship and resurrection of Jesus;
and it is not surprising that in the catalogues of mediaeval libraries
his works commonly appear with those of
the Church Fathers. In the late Middle Ages Josephus was widely known
through the Historia Scholastica of the twelfth-century Peter Comestor, a summary of biblical history which
soon became the most popular book
in Western Europe. In the Byzantine Empire he was particularly used by
George Syncellus, Photius, George Hamartolos,
the anonymous De obsidione toleranda, Constantine Por-phyrogenitus,
Joannes Zonaras, Nicetas Choniates and Nikephoros Kallistos Xanthopoulos. His influence is also to be seen
in painting, particularly in Christian
miniatures of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries.
In modern times, until
the twentieth century, both in England and on the continent, it is no
exaggeration to say that Josephus was the most widely read of all ancient historians. Until our own days a very common
sight in houses was a copy of
Josephus (in England and in the United States most often in Whiston’s much reprinted translation - there have
been at least 217 reprintings) next
to the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament, since the Jewish historian
was regarded as the bridge between them. In fact, among strict English
Protestants, only Josephus and the Bible were permitted to be read on Sunday.
In the seventeenth century the growing
sanctity of the Hebrew Scriptures in England led playwrights to turn
to the Apocrypha and the works of Josephus, which provided scriptural settings and associations without the
awkwardness of divine authority.
The first book of Jewish authorship printed in the American colonies was L’Estrange’s translation of Josephus
in 1719; the second was Morwyne’s
translation of Josippon in 1722.
Among famous
Italian writers Petrarch, among the French Voltaire, and among the Spanish Lope de Vega were particularly influenced by Josephus.
The Hebrew
paraphrase, Josippon, was well known to the mediaeval commentators on the Bible and the Talmud. The Arabic version of Josippon was widely used by Muslim historians,
notably by the great fourteenth-century Ibn Khaldun. The Ethiopic
version became a semi-canonical work of the Monophysite Church.
The Slavonic version of the War influenced mediaeval Russian
literature and especially Russian chronicles and the Tale
of Igor’s Expedition.
In modern times Josephus has had notable influence on Hebbel’s tragedy Herodes
und Mariamne and on Feuchtwanger’s trilogy of novels.
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