Asinius Pollio, the friend of Herod, and Titus Livius, who, under the
name of Livy, has become the standard Latin historian for schoolboys.
Josephus refers to both of them as well as to Timagenes, Posidonius, and
Polybius; but as there is no reason to think that he ever tried to
master the earlier authorities, it is probable that he knew them only so
far as they were reproduced in his immediate sources and his immediate
predecessors. The two writers whom he quotes repeatedly and must have
studied are Strabo of Amasea (in Pontus) and Nicholas of Damascus.
Strabo was an author of remarkable versatility and industry. Besides his
geography, the standard work of ancient times on the subject, he wrote
in forty-seven books a large historical work on the period between 150
(where Polybius ended) and 30 B.C.E. Nearly the whole of it has
disappeared, but we can tell from Josephus' excerpts that he appreciated
the Jews and their religion as did few other pagans of the time. He
dealt, too, at considerable length with the wars of the Hasmonean kings
against the Seleucids, and he is one of the authorities cited by
Josephus for the period between the accession of John Hyrcanus and the
overthrow of Antigonus II by Herod. The Jewish historian follows still
more closely, and in many places probably reproduces, Nicholas, who was
the court historian of Herod. Nicholas was a man of remarkable
versatility. He played many parts at Herod's court, as diplomatist,
advocate, and minister. He was a poet and philosopher of some repute,
and he wrote a general history in forty-four books. In the first eight
books he dealt with the early annals of the Assyrians, the Greeks, the
Medes, and the Persians. Josephus, who took him for his chief guide
after the Bible, often reproduces from him comparative passages to the
Scripture story which he is paraphrasing. And for the later period of
the _Antiquities_, from the time of Antiochus the Great (ab. 200
B.C.E.), he depends on him largely for the comparative Hellenistic
history, which he brings into relation with the story of the Hasmoneans.
When he comes to the epoch of Herod, the disproportionate fulness, the
vivacity, and the dramatic power of the narrative in books XIV-XVI of
the _Antiquities_ are due in a large measure to the historical virtues
of the court chronicler. We can tell how far this is the case by the
immediate and marked deterioration of the narrative when Josephus
proceeds to the reigns of Archelaus and Agrippa--where Nicholas failed
him.
Among Roman writers of his own day whom Josephus used was the Emperor
Vespasian himself, who, to record his exploits, wrote _Commentaries on
the Jewish War_, which were placed at his client's disposal.[1] In the
competition of flattery that greeted the new Flavian dynasty, various
Roman writers described and celebrated the Jewish campaigns.[2] Among
them were Antonius Julianus, who was on the staff of Vespasian and Titus
throughout the war, and at the end of it was appointed procurator of
Judea; Valerius Flaccus, who burst into ecstatic hexameters over the
burning of the Temple; and Tacitus, the most brilliant of all Latin
historians. Besides these writers' works, which have come down to us
more or less complete, a number of memoirs and histories of the war
appeared, some by those who wrote on hearsay, others by men who had
taken some part in the campaigns. It was an age of literary
dilettantism, when nearly everybody wrote books who knew how to write;
and in the drab monotony of Roman supremacy, the triumph over the Jews,
which had placed the Flavian house on the throne, was a happy
opportunity for ambitious authors.
[Footnote 1: Vita, 68.]
[Footnote 2: C. Ap. 9-10.]
It has been suggested that the Roman point of view that pervades the
_Wars_ of Josephus, the frequent absence of sympathy with the Jewish
cause, and the incongruous pagan ideas, which surprise us, can be
explained by the fact that the Jewish writer founded his account on that
of Antonius Julianus, which is referred to by the Christian apologist
Minucius[1] as a standard authority on the destruction of Jerusalem.
Antonius is mentioned by Josephus as one of the Roman staff who gave his
opinion in favor of the burning of the Temple, and he has also been
ingeniously identified with the Roman general (called [Hebrew: Otaninus]
or [Hebrew: Ananitus]) who engaged in controversy with Rabbi Johanan ben
Zakkai.[2] The evidence in favor of the theory is examined more fully
later; but whether or not the history of Antonius was the main source of
the _Wars_, it is certain that Josephus had before him Gentile accounts
of the struggle, and he often slavishly adopted not only their record of
facts but their expressions of opinion. In point of time Tacitus might
have derived from Josephus his summary of the Jewish Wars, part of which
has come down to us, and on some points the Jewish and the Roman authors
agree; but the correspondence is to be explained more readily by the use
of a common source by both writers. It is unlikely that the haughty
patrician, who hated and despised the Jews, and who had no love of
research, turned to a Jewish chronicle for his information, when he had
a number of Roman and Greek authors to provide him with food for his
epigrams.
[Footnote 1: Epist. ad Octav. 33.]
[Footnote 2: Yer. Sanhedrin, i. 4. Comp. Schlatter, Zur Topographie und
Geschichte Palästinas, pp. 97_ff_.]
One other writer on contemporary Jewish history to whom Josephus refers
as an author, not indeed in the _Wars_, but in his _Life_, was Justus of
Tiberias, Unfortunately we have to depend almost entirely on a hostile
rival's spitefulness and malice for our knowledge of Justus. He did not
produce his work on the wars till after Josephus had established his
reputation, and part of his object, it is alleged, was to blacken the
character and destroy the repute of his rival. The conduct of Justus in
the Galilean campaign had been little more creditable than that of
Josephus--that is, if the latter's account may be believed at all. He
had been a leader of the Zealot party in Tiberias, and had roused the
people of that city against the double-dealing commander; but on the
breakdown of the revolt he entered the service of Agrippa II. He fell
into disgrace, but was pardoned. Some twenty-four years after the war
was over he wrote a History of the Jewish Kings and a History of the
War. It is difficult to form any judgment of the work, because, apart
from the abuse of Josephus, the criticism we have comes merely from
ecclesiastical historians, who imbibed Josephus' personal enmity as
though it were the pure milk of truth. Eusebius and Jerome[1] accuse him
of having distorted Jewish affairs to suit his personal ends and of
having been convicted by Josephus of falsehood. His chief crime in their
eyes and the reason for the disappearance of his work are that he did
not mention any of the events connected with the foundation of the
Christian Church, and had not the good fortune to be interpolated, as
Josephus was, with a passage about Jesus.[2] Hence Photius says that he
passed over many of the most important occurrences.[3] We know of him
now only by the charges of Josephus and a few disconnected fragments.
[Footnote 1: Hist. Eccl. III. x. 8; De Viris Illustr, 14.]
[Footnote 2: See below, pp. 241 ff.]
[Footnote 3: Bibl. Cod. 33.]
Coming now to the works of Josephus, his prefaces give a full account of
his historical motives. He originally wrote seven books on the Wars with
Rome in Aramaic for the benefit of his own countrymen. He was induced to
translate them into Greek because his predecessors had given false
accounts, either out of a desire to flatter the Romans or out of hatred
to the Jews. He claims that his own work is a true and careful narrative
of the events that he had witnessed with his own eyes and had special
opportunities of studying accurately. "The writings of my predecessors
contain sometimes slanders, sometimes eulogies, but nowhere the accurate
truth of the facts." He goes on to complain of the way in which they
belittle the action of the Jews in order to aggrandize the Romans, which
defeats its own purpose; and he contrasts the merit of one who composes
by his own industry a history of events not hitherto faithfully
recorded, with the more popular and the easier fashion of writing a
fresh history of a period already fully treated, by changing the order
and disposition of other men's works. He iterates his determination to
record only historical facts, and says, "It is superfluous for me to
write about the Antiquities [i.e. the early history] of the Jews,
because many before me, both among my own people and the Greeks, have
composed the histories of our ancestors very exactly."[1] By the
Antiquities he means the Bible narrative. He proposes therefore to begin
where the Bible ends and, after a brief survey of the events before his
own age, to give a full account of the great Rebellion. Josephus falls
short of his promise. Many of the shortcomings he pointed to in his
predecessors are glaringly present in his work. Nor is it probable that
his profession of having taken notes on the spot is true. At the time of
the siege of Jerusalem he had no literary pretensions, and it is
unlikely that he contemplated the writing of a history. It has been
pointed out that his account is much more accurate in regard to events
in which he did not take part than in regard to those in which he
assisted.
[Footnote 1: B.J., Preface. The Greek name _Archaeologia_ is regularly
rendered by _Antiquities_, but it means simply the early history.]
In the first book and the greater part of the second, where he is taken
up with the preliminary introduction, he had ample sources before him,
and his functions were only to abstract and compile; but when he comes
to the final struggle with Rome, he would have us believe that he
depended mainly on his independent knowledge. Recent investigation has
thrown grave doubts on his claim, and has suggested that with Josephus
it is true that "once a compiler, always a compiler." The habit of
direct copying from the works of predecessors was fixed in the literary
ethics of the day. In company with most of the historians of antiquity
he introduces his general ideas upon the march of events in the form of
addresses, which he puts into the mouth of the chief characters at
critical moments. Here he is free to invent and intrude his own
opinions, and here he almost unfailingly adopts a Roman attitude. The
work, in fact, bears the character of official history, and has all the
partiality of that form of literature. Titus, as the author proudly
recalls, subscribed his own hand to it, and ordered that it should be
published, and King Agrippa wrote a glowing testimonial to it in the
most approved style.[1] It was accepted in Rome as the standard work
upon the Jewish struggle. Patronage may have saved literature at certain
epochs, but it always undermines the feeling of truth. It is not
improbable that a juster appreciation of events was contained in the
original writings of Josephus, but was corrected at the order of the
royal traitor or the Imperial master, to whom he perforce submitted
them.
[Footnote 1: C. Ap. 8. See below, p. 221.]
If in the _Wars_ Josephus assumes the air of a scientific historian, in
the _Antiquities_ he is more openly the apologist. Despite his
professions in the preface of the earlier work, he seems to have found
it necessary or expedient to give to Greco-Roman society a fresh account
of the ancestry and the early history of his people and of the
constitution of their government. The Roman _Archaeologia_ of Dionysius
of Halicarnassus, who fifty years earlier had written in twenty books
the early events of Rome, probably suggested the division and the name
of the work. He issued it after the death of his protector, in the
thirteenth year of the reign of Domitian and in the fifty-sixth year of
his own life.[1] In the preface, inconsistently with the statement in
the earlier work, he declares that he intended from the beginning to
write this apology of his people, but was deterred for a time by the
magnitude of the labor of translating the history into an unaccustomed
tongue. He ascribes the impulse to carry out the task to the
encouragement of his patron Epaphroditus and of his other friends at
Rome. It probably came also from his circumstances at Rome and the
necessity of refuting calumnies made against him on account of his race
and religion. And with all his weaknesses and failings he was not
lacking in a feeling of national pride, which must have moved him to
defend his people.
[Footnote 1: Ant. XX. xi. 3.]
Following on the destruction of Jerusalem, a passion of mixed hatred and
contempt against the Jews moved the Roman nobility and the Roman masses.
The Flavian court, representing the middle classes, by no means shared
the feeling, and indeed the infatuation of Titus for the Jewish princess
Berenice, the sister of Agrippa, was one of the scandals that most
stirred the anger of the Romans. But the nobles hated those who had
obstinately fought against the Roman armies for four years, and scorned
those whose God had not saved them from ruin. At the same time Jewish
persistence after defeat and the continuance of Jewish missionary
activity offended the majesty of Rome, which, though tolerant of foreign
religious ideas, was accustomed not merely to the physical submission of
her enemies, but to their cultural and intellectual abasement. The
hatred and scorn were fanned by a tribe of scribblers, who heaped
distortion on the history and practices of the Jewish people. On the
other hand, the proselytes to Judaism, "the fearers of God," who
accepted part of its teaching--and in the utter collapse of pagan
religion and morality they were many--desired to know something of the
past grandeur of the nation, and doubtless were anxious to justify
themselves to those who regarded their adoption of Jewish customs as an
utter degradation. For those who mocked at him as a renegade member of a
wretched people, which consisted of the scum of the earth, which
harbored all kinds of low superstition, and which fostered inhumanity
and misanthropy, and for those who looked to him as the accredited
exponent of Judaism and the writer most able to set it in a favorable
light, Josephus wrote the twenty books of his _Antiquities_.
The work differed from all previous apologies for Judaism in its
completeness and its historical character. Philo had sought to recommend
Judaism as a philosophical religion, and had interpreted the Torah as
the law of Nature. Josephus was concerned not so much with Judaism as
with the Jews. He seeks to show, by his abstract of historical records,
that his people had a long and honorable past, and that they had had
intercourse with ancient empires, and had been esteemed even by the
Romans. The _Antiquities_ comprised a summary of the whole of Jewish
history, as well that which was set out in the books of the Bible as
that which had taken place in the post-Biblical period down to his own
day. Some of his predecessors had elaborated only the former part of the
story, and that, it is probable, not nearly so fully as Josephus. He
claims not to have added to or diminished from the record of Scripture.
Though neither part of the claim can be upheld, he does undoubtedly give
a tolerable account of the Bible so far as it is an historical
narrative. The finer spirit of the Bible, even in its narrative parts,
its deep spiritual teaching, its simple grandeur, its arresting
sincerity, he was utterly unable to impart. In style, too, his Greek
falls immeasurably below the original. We feel as we read his abstract
with its omissions and additions:
The little more and how much it is;
The little less and what miles away.
His is a mediocre transcription, which replaces the naïveté, the
rapidity, the unaffected beauty of the Hebrew, with the rhetoric, the
sophistication, and the exaggerated overstatement of the Greek writing
of his own time. Impressiveness for him is regularly enhanced by
inaccuracy. His own or his assumed materialistic fatalism lowers the God
of the Bible to a Power which materially rewards the righteous and
punishes the wicked. In this immediate retribution he finds the surest
sign of Divine Providence, and it is this lesson which he is most
anxious to assert throughout his work. But he is at pains to dispel the
idea of a special Providence for Israel. The material power of Rome made
him desert in life the Jewish cause; the material thought of Rome made
him dissimulate in literature the full creed of Judaism.
The second part of the _Antiquities_ is a more ambitious piece of work.
The compiler brings together all that he could find, in Jewish and
Gentile sources, about Jewish history from the time of the Babylonian
captivity to the outbreak of the war against Rome. And he was apparently
the first of his people to utilize the Greek historians systematically
in this fashion. There are long periods as to the incidents of which he
was at a loss. Without possessing the ability or desire for research, he
is not above confounding the chronology and perverting the succession of
events to cover up a gap. But he does contrive to produce a connected
narrative and to provide some kind of continuous chronicle. And for this
service he is not lightly to be esteemed. Without him we should know
scarcely anything of the external history of the Jewish people for three
centuries. In style the last ten books vary remarkably. It depends
almost entirely on his source whether the narrative is dull and
monotonous or lively and dramatic. Where, for example, he is
transcribing Nicholas and another historian of the period, he succeeds
in presenting a picture of Herod that has a certain psychological value.
Where, on the other hand, he has had to trust largely to scattered
notes, as in the record of Herod's successors, his history is little
better than a miscellany of disjointed passages. He lacks throughout a
true sense of proportion, and for the deeper aspects of history he has
no perception. He does not show in spite of his Jewish training the
slightest appreciation of the spiritual power of Judaism or of the
divine purpose illustrating itself in the rise and fall of nations. His
conception of history is a biography of might, tempered by occasional
manifestations of divine retribution. The concrete event is the
important thing, and of culture and literature he says scarcely a word.
His occasional moral reflections are on a mediocre plane and not true to
the finer spirit of Judaism. He is consciously or unconsciously obsessed
by the power of Rome, and makes little attempt to inculcate the higher
moral outlook of his people. In soul, too, he is Romanized. He admires
above all material power; he exhibits material conceptions of
Providence; he looks always for material causes. Altogether the
_Antiquities_ is a work invaluable for its material, but a somewhat
soulless book.
Josephus conveys more of the spirit of Judaism in his two books commonly
entitled _Against Apion_, which are professedly apologetic. They were
written after the _Antiquities_, and further emphasize two points on
which he had dwelt in that work: the great age of the Jewish people and
the excellence of the Jewish law. He was anxious to refute those
detractors who, despite the publication of his history, still continued
to spread grotesquely false accounts of Israel's origin and Israel's
religious teachings; and he wrote here with more spirit and with more
conviction than in his earlier elaborate works. He has no longer to
accommodate himself to the vanity of a Roman Emperor, or to distort
events so as to glorify his nation or to excuse his own conduct. He is
able for once to set out his idea wholeheartedly, and he shows that, if
he had few of the qualities required for a great historian, he had
several of the talents of an apologist. His own calculated
misrepresentation of his people in their last struggle would have
afforded an opponent the best reply to his apology. In itself that
apology was an effective summary of Judaism for his own times, and parts
of it have a permanent value. For seventeen centuries it remained the
sole direct answer from the Jewish side to the calumnies of the enemies
of the Jews.
The last extant work of Josephus was the _Life_, of which we have
already treated, and it were better to say little more. It was provoked
by the publication of the History of Justus, which had accused Josephus
and the Galileans of having been the authors of the sedition against the
Romans.[1] Josephus retorts that, before he was appointed governor,
Justus and the people of Tiberias had attacked the Greek cities of the
Decapolis and the dominions of Agrippa, as was witnessed in the
Commentaries of Vespasian. Not content with this crime, Justus had
failed to surrender to the Romans till they appeared before Tiberias.
Having charged his rival with being a better patriot than himself,[2]
Josephus proceeds to argue that he was a worse historian: Justus could
not describe the Galilean campaign, because during the war he was at
Berytus; he took no part in the siege of Jerusalem, and, less privileged
than his rival, he had not read the Commentaries of Caesar, and in fact
often contradicted them. Conscious of this weakness, he had not ventured
to publish his account till the chief actors in the story, Vespasian,
Titus, and Agrippa, had died, though his books had been written some
twenty years before they were issued. But in his pains to gainsay Justus
and his own patriotism, such as it was, Josephus, as has been noticed,
gives an account of his doings in Galilee that is often at complete
variance with his statements in the _Wars_. The _Life_, in fact, is
untrustworthy history and unsuccessful apology.
[Footnote 1: Vita, 65.]
[Footnote 2: Justus, no doubt, had done the converse, representing
himself as a thorough Romanizer and Josephus as an ardent rebel.]
At the end of the _Antiquities_ Josephus declares his intention to write
three books concerning the Jewish doctrines "about God and His essence,
and concerning the laws, why some things are permitted, and others are
prohibited." In the preface to the same work, as well as in various
passages in its course, he refers to his intention to write on the
philosophical meaning of the Mosaic legislation. The books entitled
_Against Apion_ correspond neither in number nor in content to this
plan, and we must therefore assume that he never carried it out. He may
have intended to abstract the commentary of Philo upon the Law, which he
had doubtless come to know. Certainly he shows no traces of deeper
allegorical lore in the extant works, and his mind was hardly given to
such speculations. But a humanitarian and universalistic explanation of
the Mosaic code, such as his predecessor had composed, notably in his
Life of Moses, would have been quite in his way, and would have rounded
off his presentation of the past and present history of the Jews. The
need of replying to his personal enemies and the detractors of his
nation deterred him perhaps from achieving this part of his scheme. Or,
if it was written, the Christian scribes, who preserved his other works,
may have suppressed it because it did not harmonize with their ideas.
Photius ascribes to Josephus a work on _The Universe_, or _The Cause of
the Universe_ ([Greek: peri taes tou pantos aitias]), which is extant,
but which is demonstrably of Christian origin, and was probably written
by Hippolytus, an ecclesiastical writer of the third century and the
author of _Philosophumena_. Another work attributed to Josephus in the
Dark and Middle Ages, and often attached to manuscripts of the
_Antiquities_, is the sermon on _The Sovereignty of Reason_, which is
commonly known as the Fourth Book of the Maccabees. The book is a
remarkable example of the use of Greek philosophical ideas to confirm
the Jewish religion. That the Mosaic law is the rule of written reason
is the main theme, and it is illustrated by the story of the martyrs
during the persecution of Antiochus Epiphanes, whence the book takes its
title. In particular, the author points to the ethical significance
underlying the dietary laws, of which he says in a remarkable passage:
When we long for fishes and fowls and fourfooted animals and every kind
of food that is forbidden to us by the Law, it is through the mastery of
pious reason that we abstain from them. For the affections and appetites
are restrained and turned into another direction by the sobriety of the
mind, and all the movements of the body are kept in check by pious
reason.
Again, of the Law as a whole he says:
It teaches us temperance, so that we master our pleasures and desires,
and it exercises us in fortitude, so that we willingly undergo every
toil. And it instructs us in justice, so that in all our behavior we
give what is due, and it teaches us to be pious, so that we worship the
only living God in the manner becoming His greatness.