IV. THE WORKS OF JOSEPHUS AND HIS RELATION TO HIS PREDECESSORS

The Jews, though they are the most historical of peoples, and though they have always regarded history as the surest revelation of God’s work, have produced remarkably few historians. It is true that a large part of their sacred literature consists of the national annals, from the earliest time to the restoration of the nation after its first destruction, i.e. a period of more than two thousand years. The Book of Chronicles, as its name suggests, is a systematic summary of the whole of that period and proves the existence of the historical spirit. But their very engrossment with the story of their ancestors checked in later generations the impulse to write about their own times. They saw contemporary affairs always in the light of the past, and they were more concerned with revealing the hand of God in events than in depicting the events themselves. Thus, during the whole Persian period, which extended over two hundred years, we have but one historical document, the Book of Esther, to acquaint us with the conditions of the main body of the Jewish people. The fortunate find, a few years back, of a hoard of Aramaic papyri at Elephantine has given us an unexpected acquaintance with the conditions of the Jewish colony in Upper Egypt during the fifth and fourth centuries, and furnished a new chapter in the history of the Diaspora. But this is an archeological substitute for literary history.

The conquest of the East by Alexander the Great and the consequent interchange of Hellenic and Oriental culture gave a great impulse to historical writing among all peoples. Moved by a cosmopolitan enthusiasm, each nation was anxious to make its past known to the others, to assert its antiquity, and to prove that, if its present was not very glorious, it had at one time played a brilliant part in civilization. The Greek people, too, with their intense love of knowledge, were eager to learn the ideas and experiences of the various nations and races who had now come into their ken.

Hence, on the one hand, there appeared works on universal history by Greek polymaths, such as Hecataeus of Abdera, Theophrastus, the pupil of Aristotle, and Ptolemy, the comrade of Alexander; and, on the other hand, a number of national histories were written, also in Greek, but by Hellenized natives, such as the Chaldaica of Berosus, the Aegyptiaca of Manetho, and the Phoenician chronicles of Dius and Menander. The people of Israel figured incidentally in several of these works, and Manetho went out of his way to include in the history of his country a lying account of the Exodus, which was designed to hold up the ancestors of the Jews to opprobrium. From the Hellenic and philosophical writers they received more justice. Their remarkable loyalty to their religion and their exalted conception of the Deity moved partly the admiration, partly the amazement of these early encyclopedists, who regarded them as a philosophical people devoted to a higher life. The Hellenistic Jews were led later by the sympathetic attitude of Hecataeus to add to his history spurious chapters, in which he was made to deal more eulogistically with their beliefs and history, and they circulated oracles and poems in the names of fabled seers of prehistoric times — Orpheus and the Sibyl — which conveyed some of the religious and moral teachings of Judaism. Nor were they slow to adapt their own chronicles for the Greek world or to take their part in the literary movement of the time. In Palestine, indeed, the Jews remained devoted to religious thought, and never made history a serious interest. But in Alexandria, after translating the Scriptures into Greek in the middle of the third century, they began, in imitation of their neighbors, to embellish their antiquities in the Greek style, and present them more thoroughly according to Greek standards of history.

A collection of extracts from the works of the Hellenistic Jews was made by a Gentile compiler of the first century B.C.E., Alexander, surnamed Polyhistor. Though his book has perished, portions of it with fragments of these extracts have been preserved in the chronicles of the ecclesiastical historian Eusebius, who wrote in the fourth century C.E. They prove the existence of a very considerable array of historical writers, who would seem to have been poor scholars of Greek, but ingenious chronologists and apologists. The earliest of the adapters, of whose work fragments have been thus preserved to us, is one Demetrius, who, in the reign of Ptolemy II, at the end of the third century B.C.E., wrote a book on the Jewish kings. It was rather a chronology than a connected narrative, and Demetrius amended the dates given in the Bible according to a system of his own. This does not appear to have been very exact, but such as it was it appealed to Josephus, who in places follows it without question. Chronology was a matter of deep import in that epoch, because it was one of the most galling and frequent charges against the Jews that their boasted antiquity was fictitious. To rebut this attack, the Jewish chroniclers elaborated the chronological indications of their long history, and brought them into relation with the annals of their neighbors.

Demetrius is followed by Eupolemus and Artapanus, who treated the Bible in a different fashion. They freely handled the Scripture narrative, and methodically embellished it with fictitious additions, for the greater glory, as they intended, of their people. They imitated the ways of their opponents, and as these sought to decry their ancestors by malicious invention, so they contrived to invest them with fictitious greatness. Eupolemus represents Abraham as the discoverer of Chaldean astrology, and identifies Enoch with the Greek hero Atlas, to whom the angel of God revealed the celestial lore. Elsewhere he inserts into the paraphrase of the Book of Kings a correspondence between Solomon and Hiram (king of Tyre), in order to show the Jewish hegemony over the Phoenicians. Artapanus, professing to be a pagan writer, shows how the Egyptians were indebted to the founders of Israel for their scientific knowledge and their most prized institutions: Abraham instructed King Pharethothis in astrology; Joseph taught the Egyptian priests hieroglyphics, and built the Pyramids; Moses (who is identified with the Greek seer Musaeus) not only conquered the Ethiopians, and invented ship-building and philosophy, but taught the Egyptian priests their deeper wisdom, and was called by them Hermes, because of his skill in interpreting ([Greek: Hermaeneia]) the holy documents. Fiction fostered fiction, and the inventions of pagan foes stimulated the exaggerations of Jewish apologists. The fictitious was mixed with the true, and the legendary material which Artapanus added to his history passed into the common stock of Jewish apologetics.

The great national revival that followed on the Maccabean victories induced both within and without Palestine the composition of works of contemporary national history. For a period the Jews were as proud of their present as of their past. It was not only that their princes, like the kings of other countries, desired to have their great deeds celebrated, but the whole people was conscious of another God-sent deliverance and of a clear manifestation of the Divine Power in their affairs, which must be recorded for the benefit of posterity. The First Book of the Maccabees, which was originally written in Hebrew, and the Chronicles of King John Hyrcanus[1] bear witness to this outburst of patriotic self-consciousness in Palestine; and the Talmud[2] contains a few fragments of history about the reign of Alexander Jannaeus, which may have formed part of a larger chronicle. The story of the Maccabean wars was recorded also at great length by a Hellenistic Jew, Jason of Cyrene, and it is generally assumed that an abridgment of it has come down to us in the Second Book of the Maccabees.

[Footnote 1: They are referred to at the end of the book. Comp. I Macc. xvi. 23f.]

[Footnote 2: Kiddushin, 66a.]

In Palestine, however, the historical spirit did not flourish for long. The interest in the universal lesson prevailed over that in the particular fact, and the tradition that was treasured was not of political events but of ethical and legal teachings. Moral rather than objective truth was the study of the schools, and when contemporary events are described, it is in a poetical, rhapsodical form, such as we find in the Psalms of Solomon, which recount Pompey’s invasion of Jerusalem.[1] The only historical records that appear to have been regularly kept are the lists of the priests and their genealogy, and a calendar of fasts and of days on which fasting was prohibited because of some happy event to be commemorated.

[Footnote 1: See above, .]

In the Diaspora, on the other hand, and especially at Alexandria, which was the center of Hellenistic Jewry, history was made to serve a practical purpose. It was a weapon in the struggle the Jews were continually waging against their detractors, as well as in their missionary efforts to spread their religion. It became consciously and essentially apologetic, the end being persuasion rather than truth. Fact and fiction were inextricably combined, and the difference between them neglected.

The story of the translation of the Septuagint by the Jewish sages sent to Alexandria at the invitation of King Ptolemy, which is recounted in the Letter of Aristeas, is an excellent example of this kind of history. It is decked out with digressions about the topography of Jerusalem and the architecture of the Temple, and an imaginative display of Jewish wit and wisdom at a royal symposium. The Third Book of the Maccabees, which professes to describe a persecution of the Jews in Egypt under one of the Ptolemies, is another early example of didactic fiction that has been preserved to us. The one sober historical work produced by a Jewish writer between the composition of the two Books of the Maccabees and of the Wars of Josephus was the account given by Philo of Alexandria of the Jewish persecutions that took place in the reigns of Tiberius and Gaius. It was originally contained in five books, of which only the second and third have been preserved. They deal respectively with the riots at Alexandria that took place when Flaccus was governor, and with the Jewish embassy to Gaius when that Emperor issued his order that his image should be set up in the Temple at Jerusalem and in the great synagogue of Alexandria. Philo wrote a full account of the events in which he himself had been called upon to play a part. He is always at pains to point the moral and enforce the lesson, but his work has a definite historical value, and contains many valuable details about Jewish life in the Diaspora.

But if the Jews were somewhat careless of the exact record of their history, many of the Greek and Roman historians paid attention to it, some specifically for the purpose of attacking them, others incidentally in the course of their comprehensive works. The fashion of universal history continued for some centuries, and works of fifty volumes and over were more the rule than the exception. These “elephantine books” were rendered possible because it was the fashion for each succeeding historian to compile the results of his predecessor’s labors, and adopt it as part of his own monumental work. Distinguished among this school of writers were Apollodorus of Athens, who in 150 B.C.E. wrote Chronicles containing the most important events of general history down to his own time, and Polybius, who was brought as a prisoner from Greece to Rome in 145 B.C.E., and in his exile wrote a history of the rise of the Roman Republic, in the course of which he dealt with the early Jewish relations with Rome. Then, in the first century, there flourished Posidonius of Apamea (90-50 B.C.E.), a Stoic and a bitter enemy of the Jews, who continued the work of Polybius down to the year 90, and, besides, wrote a separate diatribe against Judaism, which he regarded as a misanthropic atheism. The succession was carried on by Timagenes of Alexandria, who wrote a very full history of the second and the first part of the first century.

Among Roman writers of the period that dealt with general affairs were 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. A-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, pff.]

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, p 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. A. See below, .]

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.

Freudenthal has conclusively disposed of the theory that Josephus was the author of this work.[1] Neither in language, nor in style, nor in thought, has it a resemblance to his authentic works. Nor was he the man to write anonymously. It reveals, indeed, a mastery of the arts of Greek rhetoric, such as the Palestinian soldier who learnt Greek only late in life, and who required the help of friends to correct his syntax, could never have acquired. It reveals, too, a knowledge of the technical terms of the Stoic philosophy and a general grasp of Greek philosophy quite beyond the writer of the Antiquities and the Wars. Lastly, it breathes a wholehearted love for Judaism and a national ardor to which the double-dealing defender of Galilee and the client of the Roman court could hardly have aspired.

[Footnote 1: Freudenthal, Die Flavius Josephus beigelegte Schrift über die Herrschaft der Vernunft, 1879.]

The genuine works of Josephus reveal him not as a philosopher or sturdy preacher of Judaism, but as an apologetic historian and apologist, distinguished in either field rather for his industry and his ingenuity in using others’ works than by any original excellence. He learnt from the Greeks and Romans the external manner of systematic history, and in this he stood above his Jewish predecessors. He learnt from them also the arts of mixing false with true, of invention, of exaggeration, of the suggestion of the bad and the suppression of the good motive. He was a sophist rather than a sage, and circumstances compelled him to be a court chronicler rather than a national historian. And while he acquired something of the art of historical writing from his models, he lost the intuitive synthesis of the Jewish attitude, which saw the working of God’s moral law in all human affairs. On the other hand, certain defects of his history may be ascribed to lack of training and to the spirit of the age. He had scant notion of accuracy, he made no independent research into past events, and he was unconscionable in chronology. In his larger works he is for the most part a translator and compiler of the work of others, but he has some claim to originality of design and independence of mind in the books against Apion. The times were out of joint for a writer of his caliber. For the greater part of his literary life, perhaps for the whole, he was not free to write what he thought and felt, and he wrote for an alien public, which could not rise to an understanding of the deeper ideas of his people’s history. But this much at least may be put down to his credit, that he lived to atone for the misrepresentation of the heroic struggle of the Jews with the Romans by preserving some record of many dark pages in their history and by refuting the calumnies of the Hellenistic vituperators about their origin and their religious teachings.