The works of Josephus early passed into the category of standard literature. It is recorded that they were placed by order of the Flavian Emperors in the public library of Rome; and though Suetonius, the biographer of the Caesars, who wrote in the second century, and Diogenes, the biographer of the philosophers, who wrote a century later, do not apparently hold them of any account, it is certain that they were carefully preserved till the triumph of the Christian Church gave them a new importance. For centuries henceforth they were the prime authority for Jewish history of post-Biblical times, and were treasured as a kind of introduction to the Gospels, illuminating the period in which Christianity had its birth. The traitor-historian was soon forgotten by his own people, if they ever had regard for him, and with the rest of the Hellenistic writers he dropped out of the Rabbinical tradition. Possibly the Aramaic version of the Wars survived for a time in the Eastern schools, but while the Jews were struggling to preserve their religious existence, they had little thought for such a history of their past.

The Christians, on the other hand, had a special interest in the works of Josephus, since they found in them not only the model of their defense against pagan calumnies, but the earliest external testimony to support the Gospels. Josephus was venerated as the Jew who had recorded the fate of Jesus of Nazareth. The Antiquities contain two references to John the Baptist and an account of the execution of James, the brother of Jesus; but the most celebrated of the "evidential" passages occurs in book xviii of the Antiquities, where in our text, following on the account of Pilate's persecution, occurs this paragraph:

"Now, there lived about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. He was the Christ; and when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him, for he appeared alive to them again the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him. And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day (ch. 3)."

An enormous literature has been provoked by these lines, and the weight of modern opinion is that they are altogether spurious. The passage is first quoted by Eusebius,[1] the historian of Caesarea, who wrote about the beginning of the fourth century C.E.;[2] but Origen, his predecessor by a hundred years, significantly enough does not know of it. Josephus, he says simply, did not acknowledge the Christ.[3] At the same time Origen quotes a passage from the same book of the Antiquities,[4] to show that the Jews ascribed the defeat of the Tetrarch Herod to his murder of John the Baptist. The earliest of the Patristic writers, Clement of Alexandria, quotes Josephus as to chronology, but it is fairly certain that he did not know the works at first hand, since the era he refers to runs from Moses to the tenth year of Antoninus,[5] i.e. till the better part of a century after the death of Josephus. Origen likewise probably knew Josephus only at second hand, and the inference is that both the Alexandrian ecclesiastics derived their citations and their interpolation in the text of Josephus from a pious Christian abstract and improvement. The uncompromisingly Christian character of the text, the discrepancy between Origen and Eusebius, and the notorious aptitude of early Christian scribes for interpolating manuscripts, and especially the manuscripts of Hellenistic Jewish writers, with Christological passages make it well nigh certain that the paragraph was foisted in between the second and third century. That was a period when, as has been said, "faith was more vivid than good-faith." The will to believe its genuineness, however, persisted to our own day, and some have made a compromise between their sentiment and their critical faculty, by arguing that the passage, though partly corrupt, is founded on something Josephus wrote.[6]

[Footnote 1: Comp. Schlatter, op. cit. 403.]

[Footnote 2: H.E. i. 41; Comp. Freimann, Wie verhielt sich das Judenthum zu Jesus? (Monatsschrift fur die Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judenthums, 1911, p. 296).]

[Footnote 3: Comm. in Matth. ch. xvii.]

[Footnote 4: Ant. XVIII. v. 5.]

[Footnote 5: Strom. I. xxi. 409.]

[Footnote 6: Among those who uphold this view is the Franco-Jewish savant ThÉodore Reinach, whose opinion is that the Christian scribe changed a testimonium de Christo into a testimonium pro Christo (R.E.J. xxxv. 6). Both Renan and Ewald hold that our passage is a corrupted fragment of a much fuller account of Jesus in the Antiquities. See Joel. op. cit. p. 52.]

It is alleged that many of the words are such as Josephus might have used, but, apart from the fact that this is contested by other authorities, it is unreasonable to suppose that the interpolator would go out of his way to stamp the insertion as a forgery by using extraordinary words. It is urged again that the passages about John and James in the Antiquities support the likelihood of Josephus' having mentioned Jesus. But these passages are themselves open to very grave suspicions. There is no reference to them in the epitome of the chapters furnished at the head of each book, which according to Niese dates from the age of the Antonines, or the end of the second century. Nor does the Slavonic version of Josephus contain the passage about James, and while Origen refers to that passage, he had a different version of it from that which appears in our manuscripts. It seems that he has incorporated the gloss of a Christian believer. And again, while our text imputes the blame of the stoning of James to the Sadducees, and gives credit to the Pharisees for endeavoring to prevent it, Hegesippus, the Christian writer of the second century, uses the alleged account of the incident by Josephus to gird at the Pharisees. The probability is then that different Christological insertions were made in the manuscripts of Josephus according to the leaning of the scribe, but that none of the supposed evidences are genuine, or based on a genuine narrative. The absence of any reference to Jesus and the apostles in Josephus would have seemed damaging to the truth of the Christian testament, and therefore the passages were supplied.

Nevertheless we may be grateful to the interpolators, because, on the strength of these passages, Josephus was especially treasured through the Dark and Middle Ages, and he alone survived of the Hellenistic apologists. When Christianity established its center at Rome, Josephus was soon translated into Latin, and in the Vulgate version (if we may so call it) he was best known for centuries. The seven books of the Wars were rendered into Latin by one Tyrannus Rufinus of Aquilea, who was a contemporary of Jerome (Hieronymus, 345-410 C.E.), and a very industrious translator of the works of the Greek Patristic writers. The translation of the Antiquities, though ascribed to the same author, was made later. Jerome apparently was invited to undertake the task, for in one of his letters he writes:[1] "The rumor that the works of Josephus and Papian and Polycarp have been translated by me is false. I have neither the leisure nor the strength to render his writings into another tongue with the same elegance" [as those already done]. It is uncertain who the translator was, but the work was carried out at the instigation of Cassiodorus (480-575), who lived in the time of Justinian, and was a versatile historian. He wrote himself a chronicle of events from Adam to his own day as well as a history of the Goths. In his book on the Institutions of Holy Literature he says:

"As to Josephus, who is almost a second Livy, and is widely known by his books on the Antiquities of the Jews, Jerome declared that he was unable to translate his works because of their great volume. But one of my friends has translated the twenty-two books [i.e. the Antiquities and the two books of the Apology], in spite of their difficulty and complexity, into the Latin tongue. He also wrote seven books of extreme brilliancy on the Conquest of the Jews, the translation of which some ascribe to Jerome, others to Ambrose, and others to Rufinus."

[Footnote 1: Epist. ad Lucrinum, 5.]

The autobiography of Josephus, alone of his writings, does not appear to have been done into the language of the Western Church. Perhaps its worthlessness was apparent even in the dark days. More ancient, however, and even more popular than the complete Latin version of Josephus, was an abridgment of his works which passed under the name of Hegesippus. The name is not found till the ninth century, but it is likely that the work was written in the time of Ambrosius, the famous bishop of Milan (C.E. 350). In this form the seven books of the Wars are compressed into five, and the words and phrases of the original are modified throughout. The writer in his preface explicitly declares that it is a kind of revised version, and he improves the original by Christological insertions, explaining, for example, the destruction of Jerusalem as a judgment upon the Jews for the murder of Christ. Josephus, he says, aims at the careful unraveling of events and at sobriety of speech, but he lacks faith (religio) and truth; "and so we have been at pains, relying not on intellectual force but on the promptings of faith, to probe for the inner meaning of Jewish history and to extract from it more of value to our posterity." Josephus is often mentioned by name as authority for the statements, but at the same time considerable additions are made from other Roman sources. Some have thought that there was a compiler named Hegesippus, others that the word is but a corruption of the Latinized form of the Jewish historian's name: Josippus, formed from [Greek: Io saepos], would become Egesippus, and finally Hegesippus.

A Greek epitome of Josephus also existed. We find it used by a Byzantine historian, John Zonaras, during the tenth and the eleventh century, in the composition of his chronicles. It omitted the speeches and historical evidences of the fuller work and pruned its excessive garrulousness. By the uncritical scholiasts and the prolix chroniclers of the Byzantine and Papal courts, Josephus was esteemed as a distinguished and godlike historian, and as a truthloving man ([Greek: philalaethaes anaer]). He was dubbed by Jerome "the Greek Livy," and to Tertullian and his followers he was an unfailing guide. Choice passages in his writings are frequently extracted, often with a little purposive modification, to emphasize some Christological design. Eustathius of Antioch in the sixth century, Syncellus in the eighth, and Cedrenus and Glycas some three or four hundred years later, are among those whose extant fragments prove a frequent use of Josephus. And the neo-Platonist philosopher Porphyry (ab. 300 C.E.), who was well acquainted with Jewish literature, reproduces in his treatise on Abstinence the various passages about the Essenes from the Wars and the Antiquities. The Emperor Constantine later ordered extracts from the Wars to be put together for his edification in a selection bearing the title About Virtue and Vice.

Owing to this popularity, we have abundant manuscripts of Josephus. The oldest of the Latin is as early as the sixth century; the Greek date from the tenth century and later. Niese, the most authoritative editor of Josephus in modern times, thinks that our manuscript families go back to one archetype of the second century in the epoch of the Antonines. The earliest printed copy like the earliest manuscript of his work contains the Latin version, being a part of the Antiquities, which was issued in 1470 at Augsburg. The whole corpus was printed in 1499, and, after a number of Latin editions, the first Greek edition was published at Basel by Arten, in 1544, together with the Fourth Book of the Maccabees, which was ascribed to the historian.

In the days of vast but undiscriminating scholarship that followed the Renaissance, Josephus still enjoyed a great repute, and Scaliger, prince of polymaths, regarded him as superior to any pagan historian. The great Dutch scholar Havercamp made a special study of the manuscripts, and produced, in 1726, a repertory of everything discovered about his author. A little later Whiston, professor of mathematics at Cambridge, published an English translation of all the works, which is still serviceable, but not critical, together with some dissertations, which are neither serviceable nor critical. Later translations into English and almost every other language were made, but the greatest work of modern times on Josephus is the edition of Niese. Lastly, it may be mentioned that we have a Slavonic version, which goes back to the eighth or the ninth century, and a Syriac version of the sixth book of the Wars, which is included, immediately after the Fourth Book of the Maccabees, in a manuscript of the Syriac version of the Bible dating from the sixth century, and is entitled the Fifth Book of the Maccabees. It has been suggested that the Syriac was based on the work which Josephus published in Aramaic before he wrote the Greek; but Professor NÖldeke has shown that the theory is not probable, since the translator clearly used the Greek text.[1] Somewhat late in the day a Hebrew translation of the books Against Apion, which were regarded as the most Jewish part of his work, was made in the Middle Ages, and printed, together with Abraham Zacuto's Yuhasin, at Constantinople, in 1506, by Samuel Shullam. The Hebrew translation is very free, and is marred by several large omissions. It was very probably made with the help of the Latin version.

[Footnote 1: Literarisches Centralblatt, 1880, no. 20, p. 881.]

While Josephus enjoyed great honor among Christian scholars, for centuries he passed out of the knowledge of his own people. The Talmud has no reference to him, for the surmise that he is the "philosopher" visited by the four sages who journeyed from Palestine to Rome[1] is no more than a vague possibility. Nor has the supposed identification with the Joseph Hakohen that is mentioned in the Midrash anything more solid to uphold it.[2] In the Middle Ages, however, when Spain, Italy, and North Africa witnessed a remarkable revival of Jewish literature, both secular and religious, and when scientific studies again interested the people, the historical literature of other peoples became known to their scholars, and several Jewish writers mention the chronicles of one Yosippon, or "little Joseph." The text of the chronicle itself is widely known from the eleventh century onwards. The first author to mention it is David ben Tammum (ab. 950), and an extract from the book is found about a century later. Four manuscripts of it have come down to us: two in the Vatican, one in Paris, and one in Turin, and it was among the earliest Hebrew books printed. Professing to be the work of Joseph ben Gorion, one of the Jewish commanders in the war with Rome and a prefect of Jerusalem, it is written in a Rabbinical Hebrew that is nearer the classical language than most medieval compositions. It was indeed argued on the ground of its pure classical idiom that it dated from the fourth century, but Zunz[3] showed that this was impossible. It bears all the traces of the pseudepigraphic tendency of a period that produced the first works of the Cabala, the Seder Olam Zutta of Rabbi Joshua, and the neo-Hebraic apocalypses. The attempt to write an archaic Hebrew is marred by the presence of Rabbinical and novel terms. Reference to events or things only known to later times is combined with the pretension of an ancient chronicle. The country and the date of the author are uncertain, but probabilities point to Italy, where in the ninth and tenth centuries Jewish culture flourished, and where both Arabic and Latin works were well known in the Ghettos. The transcription of foreign names, the frequent introduction of the names of places in Italy, the acquaintance with Roman history, and the fact that Italian Jews are among the first to recognize Yosippon favor this theory. It is fitting that the country where Josephus wrote his history should also have produced a Jewish imitation of his work. Yosippon indeed was soon translated into Arabic, and its narratives and legends passed into the current stock of Ghetto history. The book was swollen by later additions, which Zunz has proved to belong to the twelfth century. One Yerahmeel ben Shelomoh who flourished in that epoch is mentioned in an early manuscript as a compiler of Yosippon and other histories; and it is possible that he was himself responsible for parts of the work in its present form.

[Footnote 1: Derek Erez, ed. Goldberg, iii. 10.]

[Footnote 2: MoËd Katon, 23a. See above, p. 177.]

[Footnote 3: Comp. Zunz, Gottesdienstliche VortrÄge, pp. 154_ff_.]

The chronicle of Yosippon is a summary of Jewish history, with considerable digressions—many of them later interpolations—about the history of the nations with whom the Hebrew people came into contact, Babylon, Greece, and Rome. Like the Book of Chronicles, it begins with Adam and genealogies, explains the roll of the nations in Genesis, and then springs suddenly from the legendary origin of Babel and Rome to the relation of the Jews with Babylon. The history proper contains the record of the Jews from the first to the second captivity, but is broken by a mass of legendary material about Alexander the Great—reproducing much of what is found in pseudo-Callisthenes—and by a short account of the Carthaginian general Hannibal and several incidents of Roman history. These include a description of a coronation of the Emperor, which, it is suggested, applies to the medieval and not the classical period of the Empire.

The book was known throughout the later part of the Middle Ages and down to the eighteenth century as the Hebrew Josephus, and contrasted with the [Hebrew: Yosifon la-Romim], or "Latin Josephus." When the genuine works of our worthy became known to the Jews, Yosippon was regarded as the true representative of the Jewish point of view against the paganizing traitor. Its author had not a first-hand acquaintance with our Josephus. He knew him only through the Latin versions, which were mixed with much later material. Possibly he meant to pass off his work as the Hebrew original of the Jewish history, and confused Joseph ben Gorion with Joseph ben Mattathias; for in the introduction to one manuscript we read, "I am Joseph, called Josephus the Jew, of whom it is written that he wrote the book of the wars of the Lord, and this is the sixth part." This, however, may be the gloss of a later scribe, who found an anonymous book, and thought fit to supply the omission. In places the Hebrew translator reproduces, though with some blunders, the Latin Hegesippus, but he sought to give charm to his work by legendary additions, which more often show Arabic and other foreign influences than traces of the Jewish Haggadah. Interpolations have served to increase the legendary element, and take away from the historical value. But it is this element, reflecting the ideas of the age, that gives the composition a peculiar literary interest.

Though only to a small extent representing Jewish tradition, the book remained very popular among the Jews both of the West and the East, and was long regarded as authoritative. The first printed edition was issued at Mantua, in 1476, and was followed by the edition of Constantinople, in 1520, arranged in chapters and enlarged, and an edition of Basel, in 1541, containing a Latin preface and a Latin translation of the greater part. In 1546 a printed Yiddish edition appeared in Zurich, and in the Ghetto it retains its popularity to the present day. Other editions and translations have followed. Steinschneider has noted that as late as 1873 an abstract of the Arabic translation together with the Arabic version of the Book of the Maccabees was published at Beirut.[1] The spuriousness of the work has now been established, and of modern scholars Wellhausen[2] is almost alone in ascribing to it any independent historical worth. In the Spanish period of Jewish culture the real as well as the spurious Josephus was read by many of his race, and some hard things were said of him. Thus Rabbi Isaac Abrabanel, the statesman and apologist (1457-1508), regarded him as a common sycophant and wrote, "In many things he perverted the truth, even where we have the Scriptures before us, in order to court favor with the Romans, as a slave submits himself to the will of his master." Azariah de Rossi (ab. 1850), anticipating the ideas of a later age, alone balanced his merits against his demerits. Among the great Christian scholars of the Renaissance, however, he enjoyed great fame. Joseph Scaliger, the most eminent of the seventeenth century critics, could write of him, "Josephus was the most diligent and the most truthloving of all writers, and one can better believe him, not only as to the affairs of the Jews, but also as to the Gentiles, than all the Greek and Latin writers, because his fidelity and his learning are everywhere conspicuous."[3] It is illustrative of his popularity that Rembrandt named one of his great Jewish pictures after him. Whiston's English translation of his works became a household book, found side by side with the Bible and The Pilgrim's Progress.[4]

[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.