[Footnote 1: J.Q.R. xvi. 393.]
[Footnote 2: Der arabische Josippus; see J.E., s.v. Joseph ben Gorion.]
[Footnote 3: De Emend. Temp. Proleg. 17.]
[Footnote 4: Readers of Rudyard Kipling may recall that in Captains Courageous one of the seamen on board the "We're Here" Schooner reads aloud on Sunday from a book called Josephus: "It was an old leather-bound volume very solid and very like a Bible, but enlivened with accounts of battles and sieges."]
In modern times his reputation as a trustworthy authority has depreciated considerably, and it is still depreciating. More accurate study and wider knowledge have exposed his grave defects as an historian, and the critical standpoint has dissipated the halo with which his supposed Christian sympathies had invested him, and laid bare his weakness and his essential unreliability. Yet with all his glaring faults and unlovable qualities he has certain solid merits. The greatest certainly is that his works so appealed to later generations as to have been preserved, and thereby posterity has been enabled to get some knowledge, however inadequate, of the history of the Jewish polity during its last two hundred years—between the time of the Maccabees and the fall of the nation—which would otherwise have been buried in almost unrelieved darkness. And at the same time he has preserved a record of some interesting pieces of Egyptian, Syrian, and Roman history. Just because he was so little original, he has a special usefulness; for he reproduces the statements of more capable writers than himself, who have disappeared, and he has embodied an aspect of the Hellenistic-Jewish literature which had otherwise been lost. We can estimate his value to us as an historian from our ignorance of what was happening in Judea during the fifty years after his account comes to an end.
It is true that he brings before us, for the most part, but the external facts and the court scandals in place of the vital movements and the underlying principles; and in dealing with contemporary events he has a perverted view, borrowed largely from Roman foes and feebly corrected. But it is something to have preserved even these facts, and in the account of the Wars he often draws a vivid picture. The siege of Jerusalem has passed into the roll of the world's heroic events, and it owes its place there largely to the narrative of Josephus. Moreover, in spite of his pusillanimity and his subservience to his Roman patrons, Josephus did possess a distinct pride of race and a love of his people. It led him at times to glorify them in a gross way, but notably in the books Against Apion it could inspire a certain eloquence; and many hostile outsiders must have learnt from his pages to appreciate some of the great qualities of the Jewish people.
To appraise him fairly is difficult. He has few of the qualities, either personal or literary, that attract sympathy and many of the defects that repel. He is at once vain and obsequious, servile and spiteful, professing candor and practising adulation, prolix and prosaic. As a general he proved himself a traitor; as apologist of the Jews, a function which he asserted for himself, he marred by a lack of independence the service which he sought to render his people. In his account of their past he was often false to their fundamental ideas of God and history. Whether he was really under the influence of the debased Greco-Roman culture of the day, which consigned mankind to the dominion of fatality, or whether he deliberately masked his own standpoint to please his audience, he presented the history of the Hebrew nationality in the light of ideas of fate strange to it. He has perpetuated a false picture of the Zealots, whose avowed enemy he was, and he reveals an inadequate understanding of the deeper ideas and deeper principles of the Pharisees, whose champion he professed to be. Generally, in dealing with the struggle against Rome, his dominating desire to justify his own submission and please the Romans led him to distort the facts, and rendered him blind to the real heroism of his countrymen. The client in him prevails over the historian: we can never be sure whether he is expressing his own opinion or only what he conceives will be pleasing to his patrons and masters. This dependence affects his presentation of Judaism as well as of the Jewish people. He dissembled his theological opinions in his larger historical works, and it is only in his last apologetic composition that he asserts confidently a Jewish point of view.
Yet it is but fair to Josephus to consider the times and circumstances in which he wrote. It was an age when the love of truth was almost dead, extinguished partly by the crushing tyranny of omnipotent Emperors, partly by the intellectual and moral degeneration of pagan society. The Flavian house soon showed the same characteristics of a vainglorious despotism as the line of Caesars which it had supplanted. Under Domitian "the only course possible for a writer without the risk of outlawry or the sacrifice of personal honor was that followed by Juvenal and Tacitus during his reign, viz., silence." It was an age when, in the words of Mazzini, "a hollow sound as of dissolution was heard in the world. Man seemed in a hideous case: placed between two infinities, he knew neither. He knew not past nor future. All belief was dead; dead the belief in the gods, dead the belief in the Republic." The material power of Rome, while it dazzled by its splendor, seemed invincible, and it crushed, in all save the strongest, independence of thought and independence of national life. Unfortunately it fell to Josephus to write amid these surroundings his account of the Jewish wars and the history of the Jews, and he may have been driven to distortion to keep his perilous position at court. The moral environment, too, was such as to contaminate those who had not a deep faith and a strong Hebrew consciousness. At Alexandria it was possible to achieve a harmony between Judaism and the spiritual teaching of Greek philosophy; but the basic conceptions of Roman Imperialism were not to be brought into accord with Jewish ideas.
Josephus had no conception of the moral weakness, he felt only the invincible power, of the conqueror. He was a Jew, isolated in Rome, estranged from his own people, and not at home in his environment, a favored captive in a splendid court, a member of a subject people living in the halls of the mighty. Did ever situation more strongly conduce to moral servility and mental dependence! It was well nigh impossible for him, even had he possessed the ability, to write an honest and independent history of the Jews. It required some courage and steadfastness to write of the Jews at all. In such circumstances he might well have become an apostate, as his contemporary Tiberius Alexander had done, and it is a tribute to his Jewish feeling that he remained in profession and in heart true to his people, that he was not among those who with the fall of the second Temple exclaimed, "Our hope is perished: we are cut off." He had indeed chosen the easier and less noble way on the destruction of the national life of his people; he preferred the palace of the Palatine with its pomp to the Vineyard at Jabneh with its wise men. While Johanan ben Zakkai was saving Judaism, Josephus was apologizing for it. Yet he too has done some service: he preserved some knowledge of his people and their religion for the Gentiles, and became one of the permanent authorities for that heretical body of Jewish proselytes who in his own day were beginning to mark themselves off as a separate sect, and who carried on to some extent the work of Hellenistic Judaism. Perhaps the true judgment about him is that he was neither noble nor villainous, neither champion nor coward, but one of those mediocre men of talent but of weak character and conflicting impulses struggling against adversity who succumb to the difficulties of the time in which their life is passed, and sacrifice their individuality to comfort. But he wrote something that has lived; and for what he wrote, if not for what he was, he has a niche in the literary treasure house of the Jewish people as well as in the annals of general history. As a man, if he cannot inspire, he may at least stand as a warning against that facile subservience to external powers and that fatal assimilation of foreign thought which at once destroy the individuality of the Jew and deprive him of his full humanity.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The best Greek text of Josephus is that edited by Niese (Berlin, 1887-1894), but the editions of Bekker (Leipzig, 1855) and Dindorf (Paris, 1845) are still serviceable.
The standard English translation of the complete works is that made by
William Whiston, of Cambridge, a century ago. It has been revised in
modern times—not very thoroughly—by Shilleto (London, 1890) and by
Margoliouth (London, 1909).
A French translation, which contains excellent notes to the text, is in the course of publication under the general editorship of M. Théodore Reinach; and there are German translations of the whole works, by Demme, and of the Antiquities, by Martin (Köln, 1852) and Clementz (Halle, 1900). The Life and the books Against Apion were translated by M. Jost (Leipzig, 1867) and books xi-xiii of the Antiquities by Horschitzky. And there is another elaborately annotated edition of the books Against Apion by J. G. Müller.
The best modern works on the Roman history of the period are Mommsen's Roman Provinces, and Merivale's History of the Roman Empire; and of the literature of the contemporaries of Josephus, the Annals and Histories of Tacitus and the Lives of the Caesars by Suetonius are the most valuable historical sources.
For Jewish history, the fullest account is provided by Schürer's Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes im Zeitalter Jesu (fourth edition), which contains a thorough criticism of Josephus and the best general investigation into his sources. The work has been translated into English. Joel's Blicke in die Religionsgeschichte is suggestive upon certain aspects of the period.
Graetz, of course, deals with the events, and in the Stories of the
Nations Series (Putnam) there is a volume on The Jews under the
Romans by Hosmer, which is readable.
The opening chapters of Berliner's Die Juden in Rom, and of Vogelstein and Rieger's Geschichte der Juden in Rom (Berlin, 1895) are concerned with the relations of Jews and Romans in the first century; and a series of articles on the same subject by Hils, in the Revue des études juives (vols. viii and xi), is noteworthy. Anatole France has written two very vivid sketches of the Roman attitude to the Jews, which give a better impression of the inner conflict between the two peoples than any strictly historical work, "Gallion" in Sur la pierre blanche, and "Le Procurateur de Judée" in L'étui de nacre.
Among critical studies of Josephus as an historian the most striking works are:
Schlatter, Zur Topographie und Geschichte Palästinas (Stuttgart, 1893).
Bloch, Die Quellen des Flavius Josephus (Leipzig, 1879).
Nussbaum, Observationen in Flavius Josephus (Göttingen, 1875).
Destinon, Die Chronologie des Josephus (Kiel, 1880) and Die Quellen des Josephus (1882).
Büchler, A., Les Sources de Josèphe, R.E.J. xxii. and xxiv., and The
Sources of Josephus for the History of Syria, J.Q.R. ix.
Holscher, G., Die Quellen des Josephus, etc. (Leipzig, 1904).
For the relation of Josephus to the Bible and Jewish tradition, the following monographs may be consulted:
Duschak, Josephus und die Tradition (Vienna, 1864).
Olitzki, Flavius Josephus und die Halacha (Berlin, 1885).
Schlatter, Die hebräischen Namen bei Josephus (Gütersloh, 1913).
Grünbaum, Die Priester-Gesetze bei Fl. Josephus (1887).
Poznanski, Ueber die religionsphilosophischen Anschauungen des Fl.
Josephus (Berlin, 1887).
The apologetic works of Josephus are especially dealt with by:
Friedlaender, M., Die Geschichte der jüdischen Apologetik (Vienna, 1906).
Müller, J.G., Des Fl. Josephus Schrift gegen den Apion (Basel, 1877).
Gutschmid, Kleine Schriften, iv. (Leipzig, 1893).
The work of M. Théodore Reinach, Textes des auteurs grecs et romains rélatifs au judaisme, is a very useful collection of the pagan accounts of Jewish life which Josephus was seeking to refute.
Among general appreciations of Josephus, there may be mentioned those of:
Edersheim, in Smith and Wace's Dictionary of Christian Biography.
Foakes-Jackson, in the Jewish Review, iv.
Margoliouth, in his edition of Whiston's translation.
Niese, in the Historische Zeitschrift, lxxvi.
ABBREVIATIONS USED IN REFERRING TO THE WORKS OF JOSEPHUS
Ant.: The Antiquities of the Jews.
B.J.: The Wars (Bellum Judaicum)
C. Ap.: Against Apion (Contra Apionem)