Josephus Part 10

The story of Agrippa is interrupted by a chapter about the Jews of Babylon, which has the air of a moral tale on the evils of intermarriage, and may have formed part of the popular Jewish literature of the day. Another long digression marks the beginning of the nineteenth book of the _Antiquities_, where Josephus leaves Jewish scenes and inserts an account of Caligula's murder and the election of Claudius as Emperor. This narrative, while of great interest for students of the Roman const.i.tution, is out of all proportion to its place in the Jewish chronicle. Josephus, it has been surmised, based it on the work of one Cluvius (referred to in the book as an intimate friend of Claudius), who wrote a history about 70 C.E.; he may besides have received hitherto unpublished information from Agrippa II, whose father had been an important actor in the drama, or from his friend Aliturius, the actor at Rome, who had mixed in affairs of state. Anyhow, he took advantage of this chance of making a literary sensation.

Doubtless also, the recital, which threw not a little discredit on the house of the earlier Caesars, was for that reason not unwelcome to the upstart Flavians, and may have been inserted at the Imperial wish.

Agrippa I is the most attractive figure in the second part of the _Antiquities_. He is contrasted with Herod,

"who was cruel and severe in his punishments, and had no mercy on those he hated, and everyone perceived that he had more love for the Greeks than for the Jews.... But Agrippa's temper was mild and equally liberal to all men. He was kind to foreigners and was of agreeable and compa.s.sionate feeling. He loved to reside at Jerusalem, and was scrupulously careful in his observance of the Law of his people. On his death he expressed his submission to Providence; for that he had by no means lived ill, but in a splendid and happy manner."

His peaceful reign, however, was only the lull before the storm, and the last book of the _Antiquities_ is mainly taken up with the succession of wicked procurators, who, by their extortions and cruelties and flagrant disregard of the Jewish Law and Jewish feeling, goaded the Jews into the final rebellion. It contains, however, a digression on the conversion of the royal house of Adiabene to Judaism, which is tricked out with examples of G.o.d's Providence. Yet another digression records the villainies of Nero (which no doubt was pleasing to his patrons) and the amours of Drusilia, the daughter of Agrippa I. But of the rising discontent of the Jewish people in Palestine we have no clear picture.

Josephus fails as in the _Wars_ to bring out the inner incompatibility of the Roman and the Jewish outlook, and represents, in an unimaginative, matter-of-fact, Romanizing way, that it was simply particular excesses--the rapacity of a Felix, the knavery of a Florus--which were the cause of the Rebellion. This is just what a Roman would have said, and when the Jewish writer deals at all with the Jewish position, it is usually to drag in his political feud. He especially singles out the sacrilege of the Zealots in a.s.sa.s.sinating their opponents within the Temple precincts as the reason of G.o.d's rejecting the city; "and as for the Temple, He no longer deemed it sufficiently pure to be His habitation, but brought the Romans upon us and threw a fire on the city to purge it, and brought slavery on us, our wives, and our children, to make us wiser by our calamities." Thus the priestly apologist, accepting Roman canons, finds in the ritual offense of a section of the people the ground for the destruction of the national center. He is torn, indeed, between two conflicting views about the origin of the rebellion: whether he shall lay the whole blame on the Jewish irreconcilables, or whether he shall divide it between them and the wicked Roman governors; and in the end he exaggerates both these motives, and leaves out the deeper causes.

The penultimate chapter contains a list of the high priests, about whom the historian had throughout made great pretensions of accuracy. He enumerates but eighty-three from the time of Aaron to the end of the line, of whom no less than twenty-eight were appointed after Herod's accession to his kingdom; whereas the Talmud records that three hundred held office during the existence of the second Temple alone.[1] That number is probably hyperbolical, but the statement in other parts of the Rabbinical literature, that there were eighty high priests in that period,[2] throws doubt on this list, which besides is manifestly patched in several places.

[Footnote 1: Yoma, 9a.]

[Footnote 2: Yer. Yoma, ix., and Lev. R. xx.]

With the procuratorship of Florus, Josephus brings his chronicle to an end, the later events having been treated in detail in the _Wars;_ and in conclusion he commends himself for his accuracy in giving the succession of priests and kings and political administrators:

"And I make bold to say, now I have so completely perfected the work which I set out to do, that no other person, be he Jew or foreigner, and had he ever so great an inclination to it, could so accurately deliver these accounts to the Greeks as is done in these books. For members of my own people acknowledge that I far exceed them in Jewish learning, and I have taken great pains to obtain the learning of the Greeks and understand stand the elements of the Greek language, though I have so long accustomed myself to speak our own tongue that I cannot speak Greek with exactness."

He makes explicit his standpoint with this _envoi_, which shows that he was writing for a Greek-speaking public and in compet.i.tion with Greeks, and this helps to explain why he sets special store on the record of priests and kings and political changes, and why he so often disguises the genuine Jewish outlook. As an account of the Jewish people for the prejudiced society of Rome, the _Antiquities_ undoubtedly possessed merit. History, indeed, at the time, was far from being an exact science, nor was accuracy esteemed necessary to it. Cicero had said a hundred years earlier, that it was legitimate to lie in narratives; and this was the characteristic outlook of the Greco-Roman writers. The most brilliant literary doc.u.ments of the age, the _Annals_ and _Histories_ of Tacitus, are rather pieces of sparkling journalism than sober and philosophical records of facts; and therefore we must not judge Josephus by too high a standard.

Weighed in his own balance, he had done a great service to his people by setting out the main heads of their history over three thousand years, so that it should be intelligible to the cultured Roman society; and had he been reproached with misrepresenting and distorting many of their religious ideas, he would have replied, with some justice, that it was necessary to do so in, order to make the Romans understand. On the same ground he would have justified the omission of much that was characteristic and the exaggeration of much that was normal. He shows throughout some measure of national pride. To-day, however, we cannot but regret that he weakly adopted much of the spiritual outlook of his Gentile contemporaries, and that he did not seek to convey to his readers the fundamental spiritual conceptions of the Jews, which might have endowed his history with an unique distinction. His record of two thousand years of Israel's history gives but the shadow of the glory of his people.

VIII

THE APOLOGY FOR JUDAISM

In every age since the dispersion began, the Jews have appeared to their neighbors as a curious anomaly. Their abstract idea of G.o.d, their peculiar religious observances, their refusal to intermarry with their neighbors, their serious habits of life--all have served to mark them out and attract the wonder of the philosophical, the vituperation of the vulgar, and the dislike of the ignorant. Their enemies in every epoch have repeated with slight variation the charge which Haman brought in his pet.i.tion to King Ahasuerus, "There is a people scattered abroad and dispersed among the peoples in all the provinces of thy kingdom; and their laws are diverse from those of every people, neither keep they the king's laws" (Esther 3:8). In the cosmopolitan society that arose in the h.e.l.lenistic kingdoms, it was their especial offense that they retained a national cohesion, and refused to indulge in the free trade in religious ideas and social habits adopted by civilized peoples. The popular feeling was fanned by a party that had a more particular grievance against them. Though certain philosophical sects, notably the schools of Pythagoras and Aristotle, were struck with admiration for the lofty spiritual ideas and the strict discipline of Judaism, another school, and that the most powerful of the time, was smitten with envy and hatred.

The Stoics, who aspired to establish a religious philosophy for all mankind, and pursued a vigorous missionary propaganda, particularly in the East, saw in the Jews not only obstinate opponents but dangerous rivals, who carried on a competing mission with provoking success. The children of Israel were spread over the whole of the civilized world, and everywhere they vigorously propagated their teaching. Of all enmities, the enmity of contending creeds is the bitterest. The Stoics became the first professional Jew-haters, and set themselves at the head of those who resented Jewish particularism, either from jealousy or from that unreasoning dislike which is universally felt against minorities that live differently from the ma.s.s about them.

The ill-will and sectarian hatred were most prevalent at Alexandria, where the powerful Jewish community excited the attacks of the half-h.e.l.lenized natives. The campaign was fought mainly as a battle of books. The Hebrew Scriptures represented the early Egyptians in no favorable light. The Greco-Egyptian historians retaliated by a malevolent account of the origin and history of the Hebrew people, of which Manetho's story is the prototype. In this work of the third century B.C.E. the children of Israel were represented as sprung from a pack of lepers, who were expelled from Egypt because of their foul disease. A still more virulent attack on the Jewish teaching is found in two Stoic writers of the first century B.C.E., Posidonius of Apamea, a town of Phrygia, and Molon,[1] who taught at Rhodes. The former raised the charge that the Jews alone of all peoples refused to have any communication with other nations, but regarded them as their enemies.

Molon, besides a general travesty of their early history, wrote a special diatribe against them--the first doc.u.ment of the kind which history records--accusing them of atheism and misanthropy, cowardice and stupidity. These remained the stock charges for centuries, and they a.s.sumed an added bitterness after the Roman conquest, when to the peculiarity of Jewish customs was added the stigma of being a subject people. The hatred of Greek and Jew, despite all the ostentatious friendliness of a Herod for Greek things, became deeper, and it showed itself as well without as within Palestine. At Alexandria, in the beginning of the first century, the antagonism developed into open riots, and the leaders of the anti-Jewish party were again two Stoics, Apion and Chaeremon, the one orator and grammarian, the other priest and astrologer. There is nothing very original in their libels, which are modeled upon those of Posidonius and Molon; but some fresh detail is added. It was said that the deity worshiped at Jerusalem was the head of an a.s.s, to which human sacrifices were offered, and that the Jews took an oath to do no service for any Gentile. Apion, a man of some repute, was the head of the Alexandrian Stoic school, and called "the toiler,"

because of his industry. He was, however, also known as "the quarrelsome"[2] ([Greek: ho pleistonikeas]). Another critic of ancient times says he was notorious for advertising his ideas (_in doctrinis suis praedicandis venditator_)[3], and the Emperor Augustus declares that he was the drum of his own fame (i.e. the blower of his own trumpet). He was in fact a mixture of scholar and charlatan, as many of his successors have been, the Houston Chamberlain of the first century.

[Footnote 1: Schurer (iii. 503_ff_) has brought cogent reasons to show that Molon is not the same as Apollonius, another Jew-baiter, with whom he has often been identified.]

[Footnote 2: Clemens, Strom. i. 21, 101.]

[Footnote 3: Gallus, Noctes Atticae, v. 2.]

Apion wrote a history of Egypt in which his attack upon the Jews appears to have been an episode,[1] but his prominence as an anti-Semite is shown by the fact that he went as the spokesman of the Greek emba.s.sy to Caligula on the memorable occasion when Philo was the champion of the Jewish cause. In that capacity Philo prepared an elaborate apology for his people, which he had not the opportunity to deliver; but it contained in part an account of the religious sects, designed to show their philosophical excellence, and it was known to the Church fathers of the early centuries of the Christian era. Only small fragments of it are preserved by Eusebius, and the rest of the apologetic writing of Alexandria, which was in all probability very extensive, has disappeared. Yet the h.e.l.lenistic-Jewish literature is colored throughout by an apologetic purpose. Whether the work is a professedly historical or ethical or philosophical treatise, the idea is always present of representing Judaism as a sublime and a humanitarian doctrine, and of refuting the calumnies of the Greek scribes. Thus, besides his elaborate apology prepared for the Roman Emperor, Philo had written a popular presentation of Judaism in the form of a Life of Moses, with appended treatises on Humanity and n.o.bility, which was but a thinly-veiled work of apologetics. Another part of the defensive literature took the form of missionary propaganda under a heathen mask. The oracles of the Sibyl and Orpheus, a forged history of Hecataeus, and monotheistic verses foisted on the Greek poets, were but attempts to carry the war into the enemy's territory. Further, there must have been a more direct presentation of the Jewish cause by way of public lectures and popular addresses in the synagogues. Nevertheless, the specific answers to the charges advanced by the anti-Jewish scribblers are now to be found most fully stated in Josephus. In his day the literary campaign against the Jewish name was as remorseless as the military campaign that had destroyed their political independence. The Romans, tolerant themselves in religion, had long been intolerant of Jewish separatism and national exclusiveness, and Cicero,[2] shortly after the capture of Jerusalem by Pompey, had denounced their "barbarian superst.i.tion" in language that is typical of the outlook of the Roman aristocracy. "Even when Jerusalem was untouched, and the Jews were at peace with us, their religious ceremonies ill accorded with the splendor of our Empire; still less tolerable are they to-day, when the nation has shown, by taking up arms, its att.i.tude towards us, while the fact that it has been conquered and reduced to servitude proves how much the G.o.ds care for it."

[Footnote 1: The idea, which is derived from the Church fathers, that he wrote a separate [Greek: logos] against the Jews, appears to be based by them on a misunderstanding of Ant. XVIII. viii. 1. Comp. Schurer, _op.

cit._ iii. 541.]

[Footnote 2: Pro Flacco, 68.]

The later poets of the Augustan age, Horace, Tibullus, and Ovid, expressed a supercilious disdain for the Jewish customs of Sabbath-keeping, etc., which were spreading even in the politest circles. As the political conflict between the Romans and their stubborn subjects became more p.r.o.nounced, the Roman impatience of their obstinacy increased. Seneca, writing after Palestine had been placed under a Roman governor, speaks bitterly of "the accursed race whose practices have so far prevailed that they have been received all over the world." Hating the Jews as he did with the double hatred of a Roman aristocrat and a Stoic philosopher, he is yet fain to admit that their religion is diffused over the Empire, and anxious as he is to decry their superst.i.tion, he reveals part of the reason of their success. "They at least can give an explanation of their religious ceremonies, whereas the pagan ma.s.ses cannot say why they carry out their practices." The pagan cults were languishing because of the frigidity of their forms and their incapacity for providing men with an ideal or a discipline or a solace; and the people turned to a living religion. The day had come that was foretold by the prophet, when men shall catch hold of the skirts of a Jew, saying, "We will go with you, because we have heard that G.o.d is with you" (Zech. 8:23).

The bitterest and the most envenomed attacks on the Jews were written after the destruction of Jerusalem, when the failure of Rome to break the stubborn spirit of her conquered foe became apparent. The legions could destroy Jerusalem; they could not uproot Judaism or even stay its progress. The presence of thousands of Jewish captive slaves at Rome accelerated indeed the march of conversion. Vespasian and t.i.tus forebore to take the t.i.tle "Judaicus" after their triumph, lest it should be taken to mean that they had Judaized. The speedy defection of Roman citizens to the superst.i.tion of a conquered people was an insult, which, added to the injury of their obstinate resistance, roused to fury the remnants of the Roman conservatives. The entanglement of t.i.tus with the Jewish princess Berenice was the final outrage. The satiric poets Martial and Juvenal inserted frequent ribald references to Jewish customs; but the nature of their works precluded a serious criticism.

Martial was a master of flouts, jeers, and gibes, and Juvenal was a soured and disappointed provincial, who delighted to hurl wild reproaches. He declaimed against the pa.s.sing away of the old manners of Republican Rome, and for him the spread of Jewish habits was among the surest signs of degeneracy. The poets, however, did not so much endeavor to misrepresent as to ridicule the Jews and their converts. But the cla.s.sical exponent of Roman anti-Semitism is Tacitus, the historian who wrote in the time of Nerva and Trajan, i.e. just after Josephus, and who treated of the Jews both in his _Annals_, which were a history of the last century, and in his _Histories_, which dealt with his own times. He surpa.s.sed all his predecessors, Greek or Roman, in distortion and abuse, and he combined the charges invented by the jealousy and rancor of Greek sophists with the abuse of Jewish character induced by Imperial Roman pa.s.sion. His account cannot be mistaken for a sober judgment. By the transparent combination of earlier, discredited sources, by blatant inconsistencies, and by neglect of the authorities that would have provided him with reliable information, he shows himself the partisan pamphleteer. But the indictment is none the less illuminating. Mommsen speaks of the solemn enmity which Tacitus cherishes to the section of the human race "to whom everything pure is impure, and everything impure is pure." Doubtless his hatred was founded on intense national pride, but it was fed by his tendency to blacken and exaggerate. His audience was composed, as Renan says, of "aristocrats of the race of English Tories, who derived their strength from their very prejudices." Their ideas about the Jewish people were as vague as those of the ordinary man of to-day about the people of Thibet, and they were willing to believe anything of them.

Tacitus gives several alternative accounts of the origin of the Jews.[1]

According to some they were fugitives from the Isle of Crete (deriving their name from Mount Ida), who settled on the coast of Libya. According to others they sprang from Egypt, and were driven out under their captains Hierosolymus and Judas; while others stated that they were Ethiopians whom fear and hatred obliged to change their habitation. He supplies himself a fanciful account of the Exodus, tricked out with a variety of misrepresentations of their observances, which are ludicrously inconsistent with each other:

"They bless the image of that animal [the a.s.s], by whose indication they had escaped from their vagrant condition in the wilderness and quenched their thirst. They abstain from swine's flesh as a memorial of the miserable destruction which the mange brought on them. That they stole the fruits of the earth, we have a proof in their unleavened bread. They rest on the seventh day, because that day gave them rest from their labors, and, affecting a lazy life, they are idle during every seventh year. These rites, whatever their origin, are at least supported by their antiquity.[2] Their other inst.i.tutions are depraved and impure, and prevailed by reason of their viciousness; for every vile fellow despising the rites of his ancestors brought to them his contribution, so that the Jewish commonwealth was augmented. The first lesson taught to converts is to despise their G.o.ds, to renounce their country, and to hold their parents, children, and brethren in utmost contempt: but still they are at pains to increase and multiply, and esteem it unlawful to kill any of their children. They regard as immortal the souls of those who die in battle, or are put to death for their crimes.[3] Hence their love of posterity and their contempt of death. They have no notion of more than one Divine Being, who is only grasped by the mind. They deem it profane to fashion images of G.o.ds out of perishable matter, and teach that their Being is supreme and eternal, immutable and imperishable.

Accordingly, they erect no images in their cities, much less in their temples, and they refuse to grant this kind of honor to kings or emperors."

[Footnote 1: Hist. v. 2_ff_.]

[Footnote 2: Ch. lvii.]

[Footnote 3: This statement agrees remarkably with what Josephus puts into the mouth of several of his speakers. See above, p. 114.]

The sage Pliny, who himself laughed at the crude paganism of his time, could also point the finger of scorn at the Jews as "a people notorious by their contempt of divine images." To the genuine Roman, the state religion might not be true, but it was part of the civic life, and therefore its rejection was unsocial and disloyal. Yet the account of Tacitus contains several remarks which, in their author's despite, reveal the moral superiority of the conquered over the conquerors. He notes their national tenacity, their ready charity, their freedom from infanticide, their conviction of the immortality of the soul, their purely spiritual and monotheistic cult. Tacitus certainly wrote after the works of Josephus had been published, so that the apology is not an answer to him; but his methods of misstatement were antic.i.p.ated at Rome by a host of anti-Semitic writers. Though Josephus never mentions a single Roman detractor of his people, and confines his reply to Greeks who were long buried, it was doubtless against this cla.s.s that he was anxious to defend himself and his faith.

He declared at the end of the _Antiquities_ his intention to write three books about "G.o.d and His essence, and about our laws," proposing, perhaps, to imitate Philo's apology for Judaism, which was in three parts. But the virulence of the calumny against Judaism induced him to modify his plan and write a specific reply to the charges made against the Jews. It was necessary to refute more concisely and more definitely than he had done in his long historical works the false tales about the Jewish past and the Jewish law that were circulated and believed in the hostile Greco-Roman world. He directed himself more particularly to uphold the antiquity of the Jews against those who denied their historical claims and to disprove the charges leveled against the Jewish religious ideas and legislation. These two subjects form the content of the two books commonly known to us as _Against Apion_. Only the second, however, deals with Apion's diatribe, and the current t.i.tle is certainly unauthentic. Origen,[1] Eusebius, and Hieronymus[2] refer to the first book as _About the Antiquity of the Jews_, and Hieronymus adds the description [Greek: antirraetikos logos], _A Refutation_. Eusebius similarly[3] speaks of the second book as the Refutation of Apion the grammarian. Porphyry calls it simply [Greek: pros tous h.e.l.laenas], _The Address to the Greeks_, and it is possible that Josephus so ent.i.tled his work. It is noteworthy that he directed his pleading to the Greek-speaking and not to the Latin public; the Greeks, he recognized, were the source of the misrepresentations of his people, and, as Greek was read by all cultured people in his day, in refuting them he would incur less obloquy and attain his end equally well.

[Footnote 1: Orig. C. Cels. i. 14.]

[Footnote 2: De Viris Ill.u.s.tr. 13.]

[Footnote 3: H.E. III. viii. 2.]

The first point that Josephus seeks to make good in his apology is the antiquity of the Hebrew people and the historical character of their Scriptures. In the Greco-Roman world, which had lost confidence in itself, and looked for inspiration to the past, age was a t.i.tle to respectability, and it was the aim of the Jewish apologist to explain away the silence of the Greeks. For the certificate of the h.e.l.lenic historians was in the h.e.l.lenistic world the most convincing mark of genuineness.

"By my works on the Antiquity of the Jews--thus Josephus begins--I have proved that our Jewish nation is of very great antiquity and had a distinct existence. Those Antiquities contain the history of five thousand years, and are derived from our sacred books, but are translated by me into the Greek tongue."

Josephus loosely represents that the whole of the _Antiquities_ is based on the Bible, and reckons the period of history at nearly a thousand years more than it covered.

"But since I observe that many people give ear to the reproaches that are laid against us by those who bear us ill-will, and will not believe what I have written concerning the antiquity of our nation, while they take it for a plain sign that our nation is of late date because it is not so much as vouchsafed a bare mention by the most famous historians among the Greeks, I therefore have thought myself under an obligation to write somewhat briefly about these subjects, in order to convict those who reproach us of spite and deliberate falsehood and to correct the ignorance of others, and withal to instruct all those who are desirous of knowing the truth of what great antiquity we really are. As for the witnesses whom I shall produce for the proof of what I say, they shall be such as are esteemed by the Greeks themselves to be of the greatest reputation for truth and the most skilful in the knowledge of all antiquity. I will also show that those who have written so reproachfully and falsely about us are to be convicted by what they have themselves written to the contrary, and I shall endeavor to give an account of the reasons why it has happened that a great number of Greeks have not made mention of our nation in their histories."

Acting on the principle that the best defense is attack, Josephus starts by turning on the Greeks themselves and discrediting their antiquity.

They were a mushroom people, or at least their records were modern, and not to be compared in age with the records of the Phoenicians, the Hebrews, or the Babylonians. Comparative sciences had flourished in the cosmopolitan city of Alexandria, and in the light of them the Greek claim to exclusive wisdom had been shattered. Josephus had made himself master of the current knowledge of the subject. The Greeks learnt their letters from the Phoenicians, they have no record more ancient than the Homeric poems, and even Homer did not leave his poems in writing,[1]

while their earliest historians lived but shortly before the Persian expedition into Greece, and their earliest philosophers, Pythagoras and Thales, learnt what they knew from Egyptians and Chaldeans. Having shown the lateness and Oriental origin of Greek culture, Josephus accuses Greek writers of unreliability, as is manifest by their mutual disagreement. He makes a great show of learning on the subject and uses his material effectively. Doubtless he found the topic ready to hand in some predecessor, and it is somewhat ironical that a Josephus should throw stones at a Thucydides on the score of inaccuracy.

[Footnote 1: It is interesting that this casual statement of Josephus was one of the starting points of modern Homeric criticism.]

The reason for the want of authority in the Greek historians--continues Josephus--is to be found in the fact that the Greeks in early times took no care to preserve public records of their transactions, which afforded those who afterwards would write about them scope for making mistakes and displaying invention: conditions which favored literary art, but marred historical accuracy. Those who were the most zealous to write history were more anxious to demonstrate that they could write well than to discover the truth.

The contrast between the individual creative impulse of the h.e.l.lene and the respect for tradition of the Hebrew, which antic.i.p.ates in a way Matthew Arnold's contrast between h.e.l.lenic "spontaneity of consciousness" and Hebraic "strictness of conscience," is pointedly made by the apologist:[1]

"We Jews must yield to the Greek writers as to style and eloquence of composition, but we concede them no such superiority in regard to the verity of ancient history, and least of all as to that part which concerns the affairs of our country. The reliability of the Hebrew records is vouched for by the unbroken succession of official annals handed down by priests and prophets. The purity of the priestly caste was strictly maintained by the law of marriage, which impelled every priest to make a scrutiny into the genealogy of his wife and forward a register of it to Jerusalem, where it was duly recorded in the archives.

And we possess the names of our high priests from father to son for a period of two thousand years. Nor is there individual liberty of writing among us: only the prophets (i.e. inspired persons) have written the earliest accounts of things as they learned them of G.o.d Himself by inspiration, and others have written about what happened in their own times, and that too in a very distinct manner. We have no ma.s.s of books disagreeing with each other, but only twenty-two books containing the records of all our past, which are rightly believed to be inspired."