Josephus Part 9

[Footnote 1: Ant. XIII. xii. 6.]

Josephus marks the new era on which he was entering by a fresh preface to book xiv. His aim, he says, is "to omit no facts either through ignorance or laziness, because we are dealing with a history of events with which most people are unacquainted on account of their distance from our times; and we purpose to do it with appropriate beauty of style, so that our readers may entertain the knowledge of what we write with some agreeable satisfaction and pleasure. But the princ.i.p.al thing to aim at is to speak truly."[1] It is not impossible that the prelude is based on something in Nicholas; but it is turned against him; for in the same chapter Josephus controverts his predecessor for the statement that "the Idumean Antipater [the father of Herod] was sprung from the princ.i.p.al Jews who returned to Judea from Babylon." The a.s.sertion, he says, was made to gratify Herod, who by the revolution of fortune came to be king of the Jews. He shows here some national feeling, but in general he accepts Nicholas, and borrows doubtless from him the details of Pompey's invasion of Judea and of the siege of Jerusalem. He appeals as well to Strabo and the Latin historian t.i.tus Livius.[2] But though it is likely that he had made an independent study of parts of Strabo, since he drags in several extracts from his history that are not quite in place,[3] there is no reason to think he read Livy or any other Latin author. He would have found reference to the work in the diligent Nicholas. We may discern the hand of Nicholas, too, in the praise of Pompey for his piety in not spoiling the Temple of the holy vessels.[4]

Josephus writes altogether in the tone of an admirer of Rome's occupation, attributing the misery which came upon Jerusalem to Hyrca.n.u.s and Aristobulus.

[Footnote 1: Ant. XIV. i. 1.]

[Footnote 2: Ant. XIV. iv. 3; vi. 4.]

[Footnote 3: Comp. Ant. XIV. vii. 2; viii. 3.]

[Footnote 4: Ant. XIV. iv. 5.]

Thanks to his copious sources, he is able to give a detailed account of the relation of the Jews to Julius Caesar and of the decrees which were made in their favor at his instance. It has been conjectured with much probability that Josephus obtained his series of doc.u.ments from Nicholas, who had collected them for the purpose of defending the Jews of Asia Minor in the inquiry which Marcus Agrippa conducted during the reign of Herod.[1] He says that he will set down the decrees that are treasured in the public places of the cities, and those which are still extant in the Capitol of Rome, "so that all the rest of mankind may know what regard the kings of Asia and Europe have had for the Jewish people." In a subsequent book, when he is recounting the events of Herod's reign,[2] Josephus sets forth a further series of decrees in favor of the Jews, issued by Caesar Augustus and his lieutenant Marcus Agrippa. These likewise he probably derived from Nicholas, who was the court advocate and court chronicler at the time they were promulgated.

But he enlarges on his motive for giving them at length, pointing to them with pride as a proof of the high respect in which the Jews were held by the heads of the Roman Empire before the disaster of the war.

Though in his own day they were fallen to a low estate, at one time they had enjoyed special favor:

"And I frequently mention these decrees in order to reconcile other peoples to us and to take away the causes of that hatred which unreasonable men bear us. As for our customs, he continues, each nation has its own, and in almost every city we meet with differences; but natural justice is most agreeable to the advantage of all men equally, and to this our laws have the greatest regard, and thereby render us benevolent and friendly to all men, so that we may expect the like return from others, and we may remind them that they should not esteem difference of inst.i.tutions a sufficient cause of alienation, but join with us in the pursuit of virtue and righteousness, for this belongs to all men in common."[3]

[Footnote 1: Comp. Bloch, Die Quellen des Flavius Josephus.]

[Footnote 2: Ant. XVI. ii.]

[Footnote 3: Comp. below, p, 234.]

The Jewish rising and defeat had increased the odium of the Greco-Roman world towards the peculiar people, and the captive in the gilded prison was fain to dwell on their past glory in order to cover the wretchedness of their present.

Josephus claims to have copied some of the decrees from the archives in the Roman Capitol.[1] The library was destroyed with the Capitol itself during the civil war in 69.[2] It was restored, it is true, during the reign of Vespasian, and it is not impossible that the old decrees were saved. But Josephus might have collected from the Jewish communities those doc.u.ments which he did not find ready to hand in Nicholas, if they formed part of an apology for the Jews of Antioch in 70 C.E. At least there is no good reason to doubt their authenticity, and they are in quite a different cla.s.s from the letters and decrees attributed to the h.e.l.lenistic sovereigns, which lack all authority.

[Footnote 1: Ant. XIV. x. 20.]

[Footnote 2: Comp. Tac. Hist. iii. 71.]

The story of Herod's life, which is set out in great detail in these books, has more dramatic unity than any other part of the _Antiquities_.

It bears to the whole work the relation which the story of the siege of Jerusalem bears to the rest of the _Wars_. Josephus seems to manifest suddenly a power of vivid narrative and psychological a.n.a.lysis, to which he is elsewhere a stranger. But at the same time, where the story is most vivid and dramatic, its framework is most pagan. The Greco-Roman ideas of fate and nemesis, which dominate the shorter account of the king's life in the _Wars_, are still the underlying motives. The reason for the dramatic power and the pagan frame are one and the same: Josephus uses here a full source, and that source is a pagan writer.

It is apparent at the same time that Josephus had a better acquaintance with the historical literature about Herod than when he wrote the _Wars_, and that he compared his various authorities and exercised some judgment in composing his picture. For example, in relating the murder of the Hasmonean Hyrca.n.u.s, he first gives the account which he found in Herod's memoirs, designed of course to exculpate the king, and then sets out the version of other historians, who allege that Herod laid a snare for the last of the Maccabean princes. Josephus proudly contrasts his own critical att.i.tude towards Herod with the studied partisanship of Nicholas,[1] who wrote in Herod's lifetime, and in order to please him and his courtiers,

"touching on nothing but what tended to his glory, and openly excusing many of his notorious crimes and diligently concealing them. We may, indeed, say much by way of excuse for Nicholas, because he was not so much writing a history for others as doing a service for the king. But we, who come of a family closely connected with the Hasmonean kings, and have an honorable rank, think it unbecoming to say anything that is false about them, and have described their actions in an upright and unvarnished manner. And though we reverence many of Herod's descendants, who still bear rule, yet we pay greater regard to truth, though we may incur their displeasure by so doing."

[Footnote 1: Ant. XIV. xvi. 7.]

It was not so difficult for the historian to write impartially of Herod as to write impartially of Vespasian and t.i.tus. At the same time Josephus, though in these books more critical, seldom escapes the yoke of facts, and says little of the inner conditions of the people. Of Hillel we do not hear the name, and Shammai is only mentioned, if indeed he, and not Shemaya, is disguised under the name of Sameas, as the member of the Sanhedrin who denounced Herod.[1]

[Footnote 1: Ant. XV. i. 1. Schlatter ingeniously conjectures that Pollio, who is mentioned as predicting to the Sanhedrin, that this Herod would be their enemy if they acquitted him, is identical with Abtalion, of whom the Talmud tells a similar story. [Greek: pollion] may be an error for [Greek: Eudalion] as the Hebrew name would be transcribed in Greek.]

The speeches, which are put into the mouth of the king on various occasions, are rhetorical declamations in the Greek style, which must be derived either from Nicholas or from Herod's Memoirs, to which the historian had access through his intimacy with the royal family. Yet, prosaic as the treatment is, it has provided the picture of the "magnificent barbarian" which has inspired many writers and artists of later ages. It is from the Jewish point of view that it is most wanting.

He does indeed say that Herod transgressed the laws of his country, and violated the ancient tradition by the introduction of foreign practices, which fostered great sins, through the neglect of the observances that used to lead the mult.i.tude to piety. By the games, the theater, and the amphitheater, which he inst.i.tuted at Jerusalem, he offended Jewish sentiment; "for while foreigners were amazed and delighted at the vastness of his displays, to the native Jews all this amounted to a dissolution of the traditions for which they had so great a veneration."[1] And he points out that the Jewish conspiracy against him in the middle of his reign arose because "in the eyes of the Jewish leaders, he merely pretended to be their king, but was in fact the manifest enemy of their nation." It has been suggested that Justus of Tiberias supplied him with this Jewish view of Herod, which is unparalleled in the _Wars_. But in another pa.s.sage, where he must be following an Herodian and anti-Pharisaic source, he makes some remarks in quite an opposite spirit, as if the Pharisees were in the wrong, and provoked the king. He says of them: "They were p.r.o.ne to offend princes;[2] they claimed to foresee things, and were suddenly elated to break out into open war." He calls them also Sophists,[3] the scornful name which the Greeks gave to their popular lecturers of morality.

[Footnote 1: Ant. XV. viii. 1.]

[Footnote 2: Ant. XVII. ii. 8.]

[Footnote 3: Ant. XVII. vi. 2.]

In dealing with Herod's character, Josephus is more discriminating than in the _Wars_. He sums him up as "cruel towards all men equally, a slave to his pa.s.sions, and claiming to be above the righteous law: yet was he favored by fortune more than any man, for from a private station he was raised to be a king."[1] One piece of characterization may he quoted,[2]

which is not the less interesting because we may suspect that it is stolen:

"But this magnificent temper and that submissive behavior and liberality which he exercised towards Caesar and the most powerful men at Rome, obliged him to transgress the customs of his nation and to set aside many of their laws, by building cities after an extravagant manner, and erecting Temples, not in Judea indeed, for that would not have been borne, since it is forbidden to pay any honors to images or representations of animals after the manner of the Greeks, but in the country beyond our boundaries and in the cities thereof. The apology which he made to the Jews was this, that all was done not of his own inclination, but at the bidding of others, in order to please Caesar and the Romans, as though he set more store on the honor of the Romans than the Jewish customs; while in fact he was considering his own glory, and was very ambitious to leave great monuments of his government to posterity: whence he was so zealous in building such splendid cities, and spent vast sums of money in them."

[Footnote 1: Ant. XVII. viii. 1.]

[Footnote 2: Ant. XV. ix. 5.]

He bursts out, too, with unusual pa.s.sion against Herod for his law condemning thieves to exile, because it was a violation of the Biblical law, "and involved the dissolution of our ancestral traditions."

If the account of the Jewish spiritual movement at a time of great spiritual awakening is meager, the picture of Herod's great buildings, despite occasional confusion and vagueness, is full and valuable. He gives us an excellent description of Caesarea and Sebaste, the two cities which the king established as a compliment to the Roman Emperor, and an account of the Temple and the fortress of Antonia, which he himself knew so well. Of the Temple we have another description, in the Mishnah, which in the main agrees with Josephus. Where the two differ, however, the preference cannot be given to the writer who had grown up in the shadow of the building, and might have been expected to know its every corner.[1] As we have seen in the _Wars_, he was in topography as in other things under the influence of Greco-Roman models.

[Footnote 1: Comp. George A. Smith, Jerusalem, ii. 495 _ff_.]

Josephus did not enjoy the advantage of a full chronicle to guide him much beyond the death of Herod. Nicholas died, or ceased to write, in the reign of Antipater, who succeeded his father. Apparently he had no successor who devoted himself to recording the affairs of the Jewish court. Hence, though the events of the troubled beginning of Antipater's reign are dealt with at the same length as those of Herod, and we have a vivid story of the Jewish emba.s.sy that went to Rome to pet.i.tion for the deposition of the king, the history afterwards becomes fragmentary. Such as it is, it manifests a Roman flavor. The nationalists are termed robbers, and the pseudo-Messiahs are branded as self-seeking impostors.[1] After an enumeration of various pretenders that sought to make themselves independent rulers, there is a sudden jump from the first to the tenth year of Archelaus, who was accused of barbarous and tyrannical practices and banished by the Roman Emperor to Gaul. His kingdom was then added to the province of Syria. Josephus dwells on the story of two dreams which occurred to the king and his wife Glaphyra, and justifies himself because his discourse is concerning kings, and also because of the advantage to be drawn from it for the a.s.surance both of the immortality of the soul and the Providence of G.o.d in human affairs. "And if anybody does not believe such stories, let him keep his own opinion, but let him not stand in the way of another who finds in them an encouragement to virtue."

[Footnote 1: Ant. XVII. xiii. 2.]

The last three books of the _Antiquities_ reveal the weaknesses of Josephus as an historian: his disregard of accuracy, his tendency to exaggeration, his lack of proportion, and his mental subservience. He had no longer either the Scriptures or a Greek chronicler to guide him.

He depended in large part for his material on oral sources and scattered memoirs, and he is not very successful in eking it out so as to produce the semblance of a connected narrative. His chapters are in part a miscellany of notes, and the construction is clumsy. The writer confesses that he was weary of his task, but felt impelled to wind it up. Yet, just because we are so ignorant of the events of Jewish history at the period, and because the period itself is so critical and momentous, these books (xviii-xx) are among the most important which he has left, and on the whole they deal rather more closely than their predecessors with the affairs of the Jewish people. The palace intrigues do not fill the stage so exclusively, and some of the digressions carry us into byways of Jewish history.

At the very outset[1] Josephus devotes a chapter to a fuller delineation than he has given in any other place of the various sects that flourished at the time. The account, ampler though it is than the others, does not reveal the true inwardness of the different religious positions. He repeats here what he says elsewhere about the Pharisaic doctrine of predestination tempered by freewill, but he enlarges especially on the difference between the parties in their ideas about the future life.[2] The Pharisees believe that souls have an immortal vigor, and that they will be rewarded or punished in the next world accordingly as they have lived virtuously or wickedly in this life; the wicked being bound in everlasting prisons, while the good have power to live again. The Sadducees, on the other hand, a.s.sert that the souls die with the bodies, and the Essenes teach the immortality of souls and set great store on the rewards of righteousness. Their various ideas are wrapped up in Greco-Roman dress, to suit his readers, and the doctrine of resurrection ascribed to the Pharisees is almost identical with that held by the neo-Pythagoreans of Rome.[3] But Josephus' account is more reliable when he refers to the divergent att.i.tudes of the sects to the tradition.

"The Pharisees strive to observe reason's dictates in their conduct, and at the same time they pay great respect to their ancestors; and they have such influence over the people because of their virtuous lives and their discourses that they are their friends in divine worship, prayers, and sacrifice. The Sadducees do not regard the observance of anything beyond what the law enjoins them, but since their doctrine is held by the few, when they hold the judicial office, they are compelled to addict themselves to the notions of the Pharisees, because the ma.s.s would not otherwise tolerate them. The Essenes live apart from the people in communistic groups, and exceed all other men in virtue and righteousness. They send gifts to the Temple, but do not sacrifice, on which account they are excluded from the common court of the Temple."

[Footnote 1: Ant. XVIII. i. 1.]

[Footnote 2: Comp. B.J. II. viii.]

[Footnote 3: Comp. Vergil, Aeneid, vi.]

Lastly, Josephus turns to the fourth sect, the Zealots, whose founder was Judas the Galilean:

"These men agree in all other things with the Pharisees, but they have an inviolable attachment to liberty, and they say that G.o.d is to be their only Ruler and Lord. Moreover they do not fear any kind of death, nor do they heed the death of their kinsmen and friends, nor can any fear of the kind make them acknowledge anybody as sovereign."

Josephus, however, cannot refrain from imputing low motives to those who belonged to the party opposed to himself and hated of the Romans. "They planned robberies and murders of our princ.i.p.al men," he says, "in pretense for the public welfare, but in reality in hopes of gain for themselves." And he saddles them with the responsibility for all the calamities that were to come. About the Messianic hope, which appears to have inspired them, he is compulsorily silent.

The historical record that follows is very sketchy. We have a bare list of procurators and high priests down to the time of Pontius Pilate, a notice of the foundation of Tiberias by the tetrarch Herod, and an irrelevant account of the death of Phraates, the king of the Parthians, and of Antiochus of Commagene, who was connected by marriage with the Herodian house. Still there is rather more detail than in the corresponding summary in the second book of the _Wars_, and Josephus must in the interval have lighted on a fuller source than he had possessed in his first historical essay. It is not impossible that the new authority was again Justus of Tiberias. Of the unrest in the governorship of Pontius Pilate he has more to say, but the genuineness of the pa.s.sage referring to the trial and death of Jesus, which is dealt with elsewhere,[1] has been doubted by modern critics. It is followed in the text by a long account of a scandal connected with the Isis worship at Rome, which led to the expulsion of Jews from the capital. In this way the chronicler wanders on between bare chronology and digression, until he reaches the reign of Agrippa, when he again finds written sources to help him. The romance of Agrippa's rise from a bankrupt courtier to the ruler of a kingdom is treated with something of the same full detail as the events of Herod's career, and probably the historian enjoyed here the use of royal memoirs. He may have obtained material also from the historical works of Philo of Alexandria, which were partly concerned with the same epoch. He refers explicitly to the emba.s.sy which the Alexandrian Jews sent to the Roman Emperor to appeal for the rescission of the order to set up in the synagogue the Imperial image, at the head of which went Philo, "a man eminent on all accounts, brother to Alexander the Alabarch, and not unskilled in philosophy." Bloch[2]

indeed is of the opinion that the later historian did not use his Alexandrian predecessor, either in this or any other part of his writings, and points out certain differences of fact between the two accounts; but in view of the references to Philo and the fact that Josephus subsequently wrote two books of apology, one of which was expressly directed in answer to Philo's bitter opponent Apion, it is at least probable that he was acquainted with Philo's narrative. He may, however, have used it only to supplement the memoirs of the Herodian house, which served him as a chief source. Josephus devotes less attention to the Alexandrian emba.s.sy than to the efforts of the Palestinian Jews to obtain a rescission of the similar decree which Petronius, the governor of Syria, was sent to enforce in Jerusalem. His account is devised to glorify the part which Agrippa played. The prince appears as a kind of male Esther, endangering his own life to save his people; and indeed higher critics have been found to suggest that the Biblical book of Esther was written around the events of the reign of Gaius.

[Footnote 1: Ant. XVIII. iii. Comp. below, p. 241.]

[Footnote 2: Die Quellen des Flavius Josephus.]