as a law of conduct, inculcating morality by good habit; it lacks,
indeed, any deep spiritual note or mystical exaltation, but it was
likely for that reason to appeal to the practical, material-minded
Roman. Josephus corroborates what Seneca had grudgingly remarked, that
the Jews understood their laws; and it is this, he says, which made such
a wonderful accord among us, to which no other nation can show a
parallel. The eloquent insistence on the harmony uniting the Jewish
people is another proof that Josephus is here reproducing the ideas of
others, for it is in complete and glaring contrast with what he had
repeatedly written in his _Antiquities_ and his _Wars_ about the strife
of different sects. His books would have supplied the best argument to
any pagan criticising his apology. Josephus further ascribes to the
singleness of the tradition the absence of original genius among the
people. The excellence of the Law produces a conservative outlook,
whereas the Greeks, lacking a fixed law, love a new thing. S.D.
Luzzatto, the Hebraist of the middle of the nineteenth century,
emphasized the same contrast between Hellenism and Hebraism.
Turning in detail to the precepts of the Law, Josephus gives eloquent
expression in the Hellenistic fashion to the idea of the divine unity.
"God," he says, "contains all: He is a being altogether perfect, happy,
and self-sufficient, the beginning, the middle, and the end of all
things; God's aim is reflected in human institutions. Rightly He has but
one Temple, which should be common to all men, even as He is the common
God of all men." He develops, too, the humanitarian aspect of Judaism in
the manner of the Hellenistic school. "And for our duty at the
sacrifices, we ought in the first place to pray for the common welfare
of all and after that for ourselves, for we were made for fellowship,
one with another, and he who prefers the common good before his own is
above all dear to God." He points to the excellence of the Jewish
conception of marriage, another commonplace of the Hellenistic
apologist, as we know from the Sibylline oracles; to the respect for
parents and to the friendliness for the stranger. He insists with
Philo[1] that kinship is to be measured not by blood, but by the conduct
of life. He dwells, likewise in company with the Hellenists, on a law
that lacks Bible authority: that the Israelites should give, to all who
needed it, fire and water, food and guidance.[2] The impulse to this
interpretation of the Torah is found in the charge made by the Jews'
enemies, that they were to assist only members of their own race.[3]
Josephus appears to be original, and, as is quite pardonable, he may be
writing with a view to Roman proclivities, when he praises the law for
the number of offenses to which it attaches the capital penalty. Like
many a later Jewish apologist living amid an alien and dominant culture,
Josephus accepts foreign standards, and he is silent about the Pharisaic
teaching which softened the literal prescripts of the Bible.[4]
[Footnote 1: Comp. De Nobilitate.]
[Footnote 2: Comp. Philo, II. 639.]
[Footnote 3: Comp. Juvenal, Sat. xiv. 102.]
[Footnote 4: It has been noticed above (note, p. 153) that Josephus
appears to misunderstand or deliberately misinterpret the Hebrew
[Hebrew: aror] (cursed be!), which precedes many prohibitions of the
Mosaic law, to mean "he shall be put to death."]
In a peroration Josephus returns to a general eulogy of the Jewish Law,
on account of the faithful allegiance which it commands, and denounces
the pagan idolatry in the manner of the Greek rationalists, who had made
play with the Olympian hierarchy. While the inherent excellence of the
Jewish Law is dependent on the sublime conception of God, the inherent
defect of the Greek religion is that the Greek legislators entertained a
low conception of God, and did not make the religious creed a part of
the state law, but left it to the poets to invent what they chose. The
greatest of the Greek philosophers, indeed, agreed with the Jews as to
the true notions about God: "Plato especially imitated our legislation
in enjoining on all citizens that they should know the laws accurately."
A later generation made bold to declare that Plato had listened to
Jeremiah in Egypt and learnt his wisdom from the Jewish prophet.
Josephus compares with the Jewish separateness the national
exclusiveness of the Lacedemonians, and claims that the Jews show a
greater humanity in that they admit converts from other peoples. They
have, moreover, shown their bravery not in wars for the purpose of
amassing wealth, but in observing their laws in spite of every attempt
to wean them away. The Mosaic law is being spread over the civilized
world:
"For there is not any city of the Greeks, nor any of the barbarians, nor
any nation whatsoever whither our custom of resting on the seventh day
has not come, and by which our fasts and lighting up of lamps and divers
regulations as to food are not observed. They also endeavor to imitate
our mutual accord with one another, and the charitable distribution of
our goods, and our diligence in our trades, and our fortitude in bearing
the distresses that befall us; and what is here matter of the greatest
admiration, our Law hath no bait of pleasure to allure men to it, but it
prevails by its own force; and as God Himself pervades all the world, so
hath our Law passed through all the world also."
The task of the apologist is completed; "for whereas our accusers have
pretended that our nation are a people of late origin, I have
demonstrated that they are exceedingly ancient, and whereas they have
reproached our lawgiver as a vile man, God of old bare witness to his
virtues, and time itself hath been proved to bear witness to the same
thing."[1] In a final appreciation he concludes:
"As to the laws themselves, more words are unnecessary, for they are
visible in their own nature, and are seen to teach not impiety, but the
truest piety in the world. They do not make men hate one another, but
encourage people to communicate what they have to one another freely.
They are enemies to injustice, they foster righteousness, they banish
idleness and expensive living, and instruct men to be content with what
they have and to be diligent in their callings. They forbid men to make
war from a desire of gain, but make them courageous in defending the
laws. They are inexorable in punishing malefactors. They admit no
sophistry of words, but are always established by actions, which we ever
propose as surer demonstrations than what is contained in writing only;
on which account I am so bold as to say that we are become the teachers
of other men in the greatest number of things, and those of the most
excellent nature only. For what is more excellent than inviolable piety?
What is more just than submission to laws? And what is more advantageous
than mutual love and concord? And this prevails so far that we are to be
neither divided by calamities nor to become oppressive and factious in
prosperity, but to contemn death when we are in war, and in peace to
apply ourselves to our handicrafts or to the tilling of the ground;
while in all things and in all ways we are satisfied that God is the
Judge and Governor of our actions."
[Footnote 1: C. Ap. ii. 41.]
As we read this final outburst of the Jewish apologist and think of what
he had himself written to gainsay it, and what he was yet to write in
his autobiography, we are fain to exclaim, _o si sic omnia_! One would
like to believe that in the defense of the Jewish Law we have the true
Josephus, driven in his old age by the goading of enemies to throw off
the mask of Greco-Roman culture, and standing out boldly as a lover of
his people and his people's law. Such latter-day repentance has been
known among the Flavii of other generations. And the two books _Against
Apion_ show that when Josephus had not to qualify his own weakness nor
to flatter his patrons, he could rise to an appreciation and even to an
eloquent exposition of Jewish ideals. Yet it was not the Greek-writing
historian, but the Palestinian Rabbis, that were to prove to the world
the undying vigor, the unquenchable power of resistance of the Jewish
Law. The Vineyard of Jabneh founded by Johanan ben Zakkai was the
sufficient refutation of Roman scoffers, while the apology of Josephus
became the guide of the early Church fathers in their replies to heathen
calumniators who repeated against them the charges that had been
invented against the Jews. It is significant that Tacitus, who wrote his
history some few years after the defense of Josephus was published,
repeated with added virulence the fables which the Jewish writer had
refuted. The charges of anti-Semites have in every age borne a charmed
life: they are hydra-headed, and can be refuted, not by literature, but
by life.
Nevertheless literary libels, if unanswered in literature, tend to
become fixed popular beliefs, and in the Dark and Middle Ages the Jewish
people were to suffer bitterly from the lack of apologists who could
obtain a hearing before the peoples of Europe. In the early centuries of
the Christian era, before the Christian Church was allied with the Roman
Empire, tolerance ruled in the Greco-Roman world, and the narrow Roman
hatred of Judaism was in large part broken down. Celsus, Numenius, and
Dion Cassius, three of the most notable authors of the second century,
speak of the Jewish people and Jewish Scriptures in a very different
tone from that of a Tacitus and an Apion. And as it has been said, "Who
shall know how many cultured pagans were led by the books of Josephus to
read the Bible and to look on Judaism with other eyes?"[1] If the
apologies of Philo and Josephus could not pierce the armor of prejudice
and hatred which enwrapped a Tacitus or a Christian ecclesiastic, they
at least found their way through the lighter coating of ignorance and
misunderstanding which had been fabricated by Hellenistic Egyptians, but
which had not fatally warped the minds of the general Greco-Roman
society.
[Footnote 1: Comp. Joel, Blicke in die Religionsgeschichte, ii. 118.]
IX
CONCLUSION
The works of Josephus early passed into the category of standard
literature. It is recorded that they were placed by order of the Flavian
Emperors in the public library of Rome; and though Suetonius, the
biographer of the Caesars, who wrote in the second century, and
Diogenes, the biographer of the philosophers, who wrote a century later,
do not apparently hold them of any account, it is certain that they were
carefully preserved till the triumph of the Christian Church gave them a
new importance. For centuries henceforth they were the prime authority
for Jewish history of post-Biblical times, and were treasured as a kind
of introduction to the Gospels, illuminating the period in which
Christianity had its birth. The traitor-historian was soon forgotten by
his own people, if they ever had regard for him, and with the rest of
the Hellenistic writers he dropped out of the Rabbinical tradition.
Possibly the Aramaic version of the _Wars_ survived for a time in the
Eastern schools, but while the Jews were struggling to preserve their
religious existence, they had little thought for such a history of their
past.
The Christians, on the other hand, had a special interest in the works
of Josephus, since they found in them not only the model of their
defense against pagan calumnies, but the earliest external testimony to
support the Gospels. Josephus was venerated as the Jew who had recorded
the fate of Jesus of Nazareth. The _Antiquities_ contain two references
to John the Baptist and an account of the execution of James, the
brother of Jesus; but the most celebrated of the "evidential" passages
occurs in book xviii of the _Antiquities_, where in our text, following
on the account of Pilate's persecution, occurs this paragraph:
"Now, there lived about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to
call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such
men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of
the Jews and many of the Gentiles. He was the Christ; and when Pilate,
at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to
the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him, for he
appeared alive to them again the third day, as the divine prophets had
foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him.
And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this
day (ch. 3)."
An enormous literature has been provoked by these lines, and the weight
of modern opinion is that they are altogether spurious. The passage is
first quoted by Eusebius,[1] the historian of Caesarea, who wrote about
the beginning of the fourth century C.E.;[2] but Origen, his predecessor
by a hundred years, significantly enough does not know of it. Josephus,
he says simply, did not acknowledge the Christ.[3] At the same time
Origen quotes a passage from the same book of the _Antiquities_,[4] to
show that the Jews ascribed the defeat of the Tetrarch Herod to his
murder of John the Baptist. The earliest of the Patristic writers,
Clement of Alexandria, quotes Josephus as to chronology, but it is
fairly certain that he did not know the works at first hand, since the
era he refers to runs from Moses to the tenth year of Antoninus,[5] i.e.
till the better part of a century after the death of Josephus. Origen
likewise probably knew Josephus only at second hand, and the inference
is that both the Alexandrian ecclesiastics derived their citations and
their interpolation in the text of Josephus from a pious Christian
abstract and improvement. The uncompromisingly Christian character of
the text, the discrepancy between Origen and Eusebius, and the notorious
aptitude of early Christian scribes for interpolating manuscripts, and
especially the manuscripts of Hellenistic Jewish writers, with
Christological passages make it well nigh certain that the paragraph was
foisted in between the second and third century. That was a period when,
as has been said, "faith was more vivid than good-faith." The will to
believe its genuineness, however, persisted to our own day, and some
have made a compromise between their sentiment and their critical
faculty, by arguing that the passage, though partly corrupt, is founded
on something Josephus wrote.[6]
[Footnote 1: Comp. Schlatter, _op. cit._ 403.]
[Footnote 2: H.E. i. 41; Comp. Freimann, Wie verhielt sich das Judenthum
zu Jesus? (Monatsschrift fur die Geschichte und Wissenschaft des
Judenthums, 1911, p. 296).]
[Footnote 3: Comm. in Matth. ch. xvii.]
[Footnote 4: Ant. XVIII. v. 5.]
[Footnote 5: Strom. I. xxi. 409.]
[Footnote 6: Among those who uphold this view is the Franco-Jewish
savant Théodore Reinach, whose opinion is that the Christian scribe
changed a _testimonium de Christo_ into a _testimonium pro Christo_
(R.E.J. xxxv. 6). Both Renan and Ewald hold that our passage is a
corrupted fragment of a much fuller account of Jesus in the
_Antiquities_. See Joel. _op. cit_. p. 52.]
It is alleged that many of the words are such as Josephus might have
used, but, apart from the fact that this is contested by other
authorities, it is unreasonable to suppose that the interpolator would
go out of his way to stamp the insertion as a forgery by using
extraordinary words. It is urged again that the passages about John and
James in the _Antiquities_ support the likelihood of Josephus' having
mentioned Jesus. But these passages are themselves open to very grave
suspicions. There is no reference to them in the epitome of the chapters
furnished at the head of each book, which according to Niese dates from
the age of the Antonines, or the end of the second century. Nor does the
Slavonic version of Josephus contain the passage about James, and while
Origen refers to that passage, he had a different version of it from
that which appears in our manuscripts. It seems that he has incorporated
the gloss of a Christian believer. And again, while our text imputes the
blame of the stoning of James to the Sadducees, and gives credit to the
Pharisees for endeavoring to prevent it, Hegesippus, the Christian
writer of the second century, uses the alleged account of the incident
by Josephus to gird at the Pharisees. The probability is then that
different Christological insertions were made in the manuscripts of
Josephus according to the leaning of the scribe, but that none of the
supposed evidences are genuine, or based on a genuine narrative. The
absence of any reference to Jesus and the apostles in Josephus would
have seemed damaging to the truth of the Christian testament, and
therefore the passages were supplied.
Nevertheless we may be grateful to the interpolators, because, on the
strength of these passages, Josephus was especially treasured through
the Dark and Middle Ages, and he alone survived of the Hellenistic
apologists. When Christianity established its center at Rome, Josephus
was soon translated into Latin, and in the Vulgate version (if we may so
call it) he was best known for centuries. The seven books of the _Wars_
were rendered into Latin by one Tyrannus Rufinus of Aquilea, who was a
contemporary of Jerome (Hieronymus, 345-410 C.E.), and a very
industrious translator of the works of the Greek Patristic writers. The
translation of the _Antiquities_, though ascribed to the same author,
was made later. Jerome apparently was invited to undertake the task, for
in one of his letters he writes:[1] "The rumor that the works of
Josephus and Papian and Polycarp have been translated by me is false. I
have neither the leisure nor the strength to render his writings into
another tongue with the same elegance" [as those already done]. It is
uncertain who the translator was, but the work was carried out at the
instigation of Cassiodorus (480-575), who lived in the time of
Justinian, and was a versatile historian. He wrote himself a chronicle
of events from Adam to his own day as well as a history of the Goths. In
his book on the Institutions of Holy Literature he says:
"As to Josephus, who is almost a second Livy, and is widely known by his
books on the _Antiquities of the Jews_, Jerome declared that he was
unable to translate his works because of their great volume. But one of
my friends has translated the twenty-two books [i.e. the _Antiquities_
and the two books of the _Apology_], in spite of their difficulty and
complexity, into the Latin tongue. He also wrote seven books of extreme
brilliancy on the Conquest of the Jews, the translation of which some
ascribe to Jerome, others to Ambrose, and others to Rufinus."
[Footnote 1: Epist. ad Lucrinum, 5.]
The autobiography of Josephus, alone of his writings, does not appear to
have been done into the language of the Western Church. Perhaps its
worthlessness was apparent even in the dark days. More ancient, however,
and even more popular than the complete Latin version of Josephus, was
an abridgment of his works which passed under the name of Hegesippus.
The name is not found till the ninth century, but it is likely that the
work was written in the time of Ambrosius, the famous bishop of Milan
(C.E. 350). In this form the seven books of the _Wars_ are compressed
into five, and the words and phrases of the original are modified
throughout. The writer in his preface explicitly declares that it is a
kind of revised version, and he improves the original by Christological
insertions, explaining, for example, the destruction of Jerusalem as a
judgment upon the Jews for the murder of Christ. Josephus, he says, aims
at the careful unraveling of events and at sobriety of speech, but he
lacks faith (_religio_) and truth; "and so we have been at pains,
relying not on intellectual force but on the promptings of faith, to
probe for the inner meaning of Jewish history and to extract from it
more of value to our posterity." Josephus is often mentioned by name as
authority for the statements, but at the same time considerable
additions are made from other Roman sources. Some have thought that
there was a compiler named Hegesippus, others that the word is but a
corruption of the Latinized form of the Jewish historian's name:
Josippus, formed from [Greek: Io saepos], would become Egesippus, and
finally Hegesippus.
A Greek epitome of Josephus also existed. We find it used by a Byzantine
historian, John Zonaras, during the tenth and the eleventh century, in
the composition of his chronicles. It omitted the speeches and
historical evidences of the fuller work and pruned its excessive
garrulousness. By the uncritical scholiasts and the prolix chroniclers
of the Byzantine and Papal courts, Josephus was esteemed as a
distinguished and godlike historian, and as a truthloving man ([Greek:
philalaethaes anaer]). He was dubbed by Jerome "the Greek Livy," and to
Tertullian and his followers he was an unfailing guide. Choice passages
in his writings are frequently extracted, often with a little purposive
modification, to emphasize some Christological design. Eustathius of
Antioch in the sixth century, Syncellus in the eighth, and Cedrenus and
Glycas some three or four hundred years later, are among those whose
extant fragments prove a frequent use of Josephus. And the neo-Platonist
philosopher Porphyry (ab. 300 C.E.), who was well acquainted with Jewish
literature, reproduces in his treatise on Abstinence the various
passages about the Essenes from the _Wars_ and the _Antiquities_. The
Emperor Constantine later ordered extracts from the _Wars_ to be put
together for his edification in a selection bearing the title _About
Virtue and Vice_.
Owing to this popularity, we have abundant manuscripts of Josephus. The
oldest of the Latin is as early as the sixth century; the Greek date
from the tenth century and later. Niese, the most authoritative editor
of Josephus in modern times, thinks that our manuscript families go back
to one archetype of the second century in the epoch of the Antonines.
The earliest printed copy like the earliest manuscript of his work
contains the Latin version, being a part of the _Antiquities_, which was
issued in 1470 at Augsburg. The whole corpus was printed in 1499, and,
after a number of Latin editions, the first Greek edition was published
at Basel by Arten, in 1544, together with the Fourth Book of the
Maccabees, which was ascribed to the historian.
In the days of vast but undiscriminating scholarship that followed the
Renaissance, Josephus still enjoyed a great repute, and Scaliger, prince
of polymaths, regarded him as superior to any pagan historian. The great
Dutch scholar Havercamp made a special study of the manuscripts, and
produced, in 1726, a repertory of everything discovered about his
author. A little later Whiston, professor of mathematics at Cambridge,
published an English translation of all the works, which is still
serviceable, but not critical, together with some dissertations, which
are neither serviceable nor critical. Later translations into English
and almost every other language were made, but the greatest work of
modern times on Josephus is the edition of Niese. Lastly, it may be
mentioned that we have a Slavonic version, which goes back to the eighth
or the ninth century, and a Syriac version of the sixth book of the
_Wars_, which is included, immediately after the Fourth Book of the
Maccabees, in a manuscript of the Syriac version of the Bible dating
from the sixth century, and is entitled the Fifth Book of the Maccabees.
It has been suggested that the Syriac was based on the work which
Josephus published in Aramaic before he wrote the Greek; but Professor
Nöldeke has shown that the theory is not probable, since the translator
clearly used the Greek text.[1] Somewhat late in the day a Hebrew
translation of the books _Against Apion_, which were regarded as the
most Jewish part of his work, was made in the Middle Ages, and printed,
together with Abraham Zacuto's Yuhasin, at Constantinople, in 1506, by
Samuel Shullam. The Hebrew translation is very free, and is marred by
several large omissions. It was very probably made with the help of the
Latin version.
[Footnote 1: Literarisches Centralblatt, 1880, no. 20, p. 881.]