Jews and Christians in the Roman World: From Historical Method to Cases 9004543872, 9789004543874

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Steve Mason - 978-90-04-54596-0 Downloaded from Brill.com07/15/2023 01:47:20AM via Western University

Jews and Christians in the Roman World

Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity arbeiten zur geschichte des antiken judentums und des urchristentums

Founding Editor Martin Hengel† (Tübingen) Executive Editors Cilliers Breytenbach (Berlin) Martin Goodman (Oxford) Editorial Board Lutz Doering (Münster) – Tal Ilan (Berlin) – Judith Lieu (Cambridge) AnneMarie Luijendijk (Princeton) ‒ Tessa Rajak (Reading/Oxford) Daniel R. Schwartz ( Jerusalem) ‒ Sacha Stern (London) Amram Tropper ( Jerusalem) – Christiane Zimmermann (Kiel)

Volume 116

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/ajec

Jews and Christians in the Roman World From Historical Method to Cases By

Steve Mason

LEIDEN | BOSTON

The Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available online at https://catalog.loc.gov LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023012538

Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1871-6636 isbn 978-90-04-54387-4 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-54596-0 (e-book) Copyright 2023 by Steve Mason. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau, V&R unipress and Wageningen Academic. Koninklijke Brill NV reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

Contents Acknowledgements and Permissions vii Introduction 1

Part 1 Jewish Perspectives on the Roman World 1

Eretz-Israel and Diaspora in the First Century CE? Variations on the Category Blues 15

2

Stranger Danger! Judaean Non-Mixing (Amixia) in Graeco-Roman Context 29

3

Vespasian’s Rise from Civil War in Josephus’ Bellum Iudaicum 53

4 The Fides of Flavius Josephus 79 5

Josephus’ Account of the Flavian Triumph 101

Part 2 Judaean Historiography and Josephus 6

Judaean (Jewish) Historiography 145

7

Religious Violence? Two Massacres on a Sabbath 161

8

When Suffering Meets Passion: Pathos in Josephus’ Judaean War and Its Context 187

9

Speeches in Josephus’ Historiography: A Neglected Example (Ananus II) in War 4.162–193 210

10

Did Josephus Know the Bible When He Composed The Judaean War? The Elisha Episode 230

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Part 3 Judaean Realia 11

Herod’s Final Curtain: What to Do for an Encore? 253

12

The Historical Problem of the Essenes 266

13

Josephus’ Pharisees: Sketches by a Close Observer 311

14

A National Revolt? John, Simon, and Individual Motives in History 344

Part 4 Beyond ‘Judaism’ 15

John the Baptist: Judaean Example of a Good Man (Vir Bonus) 369

16

Paul without Judaism: Historical Method and ‘Perspectives’ Old and New 403

17

Did the Author of Luke-Acts Know the Works of Josephus? 445

Part 5 Interactions 18

With Tessa Rajak: Rajak’s Josephus 491

19

With Per Bilde: Bilde’s Place in Josephus Research 521

20 With Daniel Schwartz: Forty Years of Friendly Disagreement 543 21

With T. P. (Peter) Wiseman: Updates on an Emperor’s Death 586

22

With N. T. (Tom) Wright: Paul the Pharisee and Jews in Exile 602 Bibliography 625 Index of Ancient Texts 662 Index of Modern Scholars 685

Acknowledgements and Permissions Chapter 1. ‘Eretz-Israel and Diaspora: Variations on the Category Blues’, in Livia Capponi, ed., Tra Politica e Religione: I Guidei nel Mondo Greco-Romano. Studi in onore di Lucio Troiani. Milan: Jouvence/Antiquitas, 2019, 225–46. Used with permission. Chapter 2. ‘Stranger Danger! Amixia among Judaeans and Others’, in George van Kooten and Jacques van Ruiten, eds., Intolerance, Polemics, and Debate in Antiquity: Politico-Cultural, Philosophical, and Religious Forms of Critical Conversation. Leiden: Brill, 2019, 232–55. Used with permission. Chapter 3. ‘Vespasian’s Rise from Civil War in Josephus’ Bellum Judaicum’, in Darcy Krasne and Lauren Ginsberg, eds., After 69 CE—Writing Civil War in Flavian Rome, “Trends in Classics Supplementary Volumes” 69. Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 2018, 199–225. Used with permission. Chapter 4. ‘The Fides of Flavius Josephus’, in Antony Augoustakis, Emma Buckley, and Claire Stocks, eds., Fides in Flavian Literature, Phoenix Supplementary Series. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019, 45–67. Used with permission. Chapter 5. ‘Josephus’ Portrait of the Flavian Triumph in Historical and Literary Context’, in Fabian Goldbeck and Johannes Wienand, eds., Der römische Triumph in Prinzipat und Spätantike. Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 2017, 125–76. Used with permission. Chapter 6. ‘Jewish Historiography’, in Matthias Henze and Rod Werline, eds., Early Judaism and its Modern Interpreters. Atlanta: SBL Press, 2020, 379–404. Used with permission.

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Chapter 7. ‘Religious Violence? Two Massacres on a Sabbath: Jerusalem and Caesarea (Josephus, B.J. 2.450–57)’, in Jitse Dijkstra, and C. Ratschle, eds., Religious Violence in Antiquity: New Perspectives. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020, 106–32. Used with permission. Chapter 8. ‘Pathos and Passions in Josephus’ Judaean War: A Tragic Vision of History and Politics’, in Nicholas Allen, Pierre Jordaan, and József Zsengellér, eds., Passion, Persecution and Epiphany in Early Jewish Literature. London: Routledge, 2020, 150–73. Used with permission. Chapter 9. ‘A Neglected Speech in Josephus: Ananus II in War 4.162–93’, in P. Garuti, M. Leroy, and M. Staszak, eds., L’univers de Flavius Josèphe. Judaïsmes et christianismes au début de l’Empire romain.—Mélanges offerts à Étienne Nodet, O.P. à l’occasion de son 75e anniversaire. Cahiers de la Revue Biblique. Leuven: Peeters, 2021. Used with permission. Chapter 10. ‘Did Josephus Know his Bible when he Wrote the Jewish War? Elisha at Jericho in J.W. 4.459–65’, in Andrew Perrin, Kyung Baek, and Daniel Falk, eds., Reading the Bible in Ancient Traditions and Modern Editions: Studies in Textual and Reception History in Honour of Peter W. Flint. Early Judaism and its Literature. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2017, 603–28. Used with permission. Chapter 11. ‘Herod’s Final Curtain: What to do for an Encore?’ in David Mevorach and Sylvia Rozenberg, eds., Herod the Great: The King’s Final Journey, a volume of illustrated essays accompanying the exhibit of the same name in the Israel Museum (Feb. 2013–Jan. 2014). Jerusalem: The Israel Museum, 2013, 44–55. Used with permission.

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Chapter 12. ‘The Historical Problem of the Essenes’, in Peter Flint, Jean Duhaime, and Kyung Baek, eds., Celebrating the Dead Sea Scrolls: a Canadian Collection. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2011, 201–51. Used with permission. Chapter 13. ‘Josephus’s Pharisees’, in Joseph Sievers and Amy-Jill Levine, eds., Jesus and the Pharisees. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2021, 80–111. Revised and reprinted by permission of the publisher. Chapter 14. ‘John of Gischala and Simon bar Giora from Gerasa: A National Revolt against Rome?’, in Michal Bar-Asher Siegal and Jonathan Ben-Dov, eds., Social History of the Jews in Antiquity: Studies in Dialogue with Albert Baumgarten’s Work. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021, 87–108. Used with permission. Chapter 15. Previously unpublished, revision of presentation in the Enoch Seminar  / Nangeroni Conference on John the Baptist (by video conference), hosted by G. Boccaccini, 11–14 January 2021. Chapter 16. ‘Paul Without Judaism’, in Ronald Charles, ed., Paul and Matthew Among Jews and Gentiles: Essays in Honour of Terence L. Donaldson. London: T. & T. Clark / Bloomsbury, 2021, 9–39. Used with permission. Chapter 17. ‘Did the Author of Luke-Acts know the Works of Josephus?’ in Joseph Verheyden and John S. Kloppenborg, eds., On Using Sources: Samples from Greco-Roman, Second Temple Judaism and Early Christian Literature. Leuven: Peeters, 2023. Used with permission.

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Chapter 18. ‘Rajak’s Josephus: An Appreciation and Methodological Reflection’, in Sarah Pearce and Zuleika Rodgers, eds., Surviving Translation, Festschrift for Tessa Rajak. Leiden: Brill, 2022. Used with permission. Chapter 19. ‘Per Bilde’s Place in Research on Josephus’, in Per Bilde, Collected Studies in Philo and Josephus, ed. Eve-Marie Becker, Morten Hørning Jensen, and Jacob Mortensen. Studia Aarhusiana Noestestmentica 7. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016, 283–304. Used with permission. Chapter 20. Previously unpublished. Chapter 21. ‘Updates on an Emperor’s Death’, Review-Discussion of T. P. Wiseman, The Death of Caligula: Josephus, Ant. Jud. XIX 1–273. Translation and Commentary, revised edition. (Liverpool: University of Liverpool, 2013), Histos 10 (2016), cxxxix–cliv. Used with permission. Chapter 22. ‘N. T. Wright on Paul the Pharisee and Ancient Jews in Exile’, Scottish Journal of Theology 69 (2017), 232–52. Used with permission.

Introduction It is hard to stay current with research. It can be a challenge even to read the reviews in the Bryn Mawr Classical Review or the SBL’s Review of Biblical Literature. The more disciplines we try to keep in harness, the more it can feel like we are drowning. To compound the problem of missing things, much of what goes into Festschriften, conference papers, or other collected-essay volumes attracts little notice. Since I have reached the age at which many of my contributions go to neglected homes, colleagues who might find them useful—if only to provide targets for disagreement—will have missed them. So I was delighted when colleagues at Brill, the fount of so much basic research on the classical world, Roman Judaea, and Christian origins, with whom I have worked productively throughout my career, agreed that a selection of those pieces from the past decade would make a coherent book. But there was no point in throwing together essays with little in common other than authorship. A book needs coherence. The twenty-two essays chosen for this book have such a unity because they all spring from the same programme, driven by a deep conviction: that historical method, though it seems often neglected or confused with other methods, offers a path to clarity in my fields of research—even if it is greater clarity about what we do not know. Whether the issue is ancient historiography, the Jewish Diaspora, Essenes, John and Simon in the Jewish War, Flavian Rome, John the Baptist, Paul and Judaism, or Luke-Acts’ relationship to Josephus, each of the following essays moves from methodological foundations to the specific application. Moreover, all these studies appeared while I have been working on the Brill Josephus commentary (Flavius Josephus: Translation and Commentary), most during research for Judaean War Book 4 (Brill vol. 2a). Several chapters were inspired by that detailed work. This is not a dump of stray essays, then. I have not included studies that will have largely reached their intended readerships, as journal articles or entries in reference works. The reason to offer this book is to make available a coherent set of essays on questions that seem to me to merit closer attention because they are surely basic: What is historical method? Does it have a place in the study of Roman Judaea and Christian origins? If so, how might we apply it? What difference could it make to the way we go about research? Chapters 15 and 20 appear here for the first time. The others preserve the main content of the published versions, though I have taken the opportunity to clarify passages and rework introductions to fit this book more clearly. Reformatting these pieces for consistency has also required editing them to

© Steve Mason, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004545960_002

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remove repetitive material, add cross-references, and trim where possible. I am grateful to the publishers involved (see Acknowledgements and Permissions) for their permission to reuse items that appeared with them. 1

Reference Points: Historical Method

History is a subject that seems to have an obvious meaning, because we all studied it in school, but that meaning becomes elusive the closer we look. That is why so many monographs, journals, and sourcebooks try to clarify the nature and techniques of history. A further complication is that the fields of ancient Judaism and Christian origins have rarely found a place in history departments. Scholars working in these areas may be classicists, scholars of religion, theologians, experts in Jewish, rabbinic, post-biblical, or New Testament literature, social scientists, literary scholars, or archaeologists, among other things. Their methods are likely to range from those of the humanities (literary criticism, textual criticism, structural or strains of post-structural or postmodern analysis, philology, history, philosophy) to sociology, economics, anthropology, and even psychology. All of these I have seen in serving as a referee for journals and presses. Since the following chapters take up only particular aspects of historical method,1 this introduction is a good place for an overview of my approach to historical research. It is not proprietary or even special. The methodologists I value most include the French mediaeval historian Marc Bloch, in his posthumous Apologie pour l’histoire (ca. 1943; English: The Historian’s Craft, 1953), and the British Roman-archaeologist-historian-philosopher R. G. Collingwood in his posthumous The Idea of History (1940s).2 Collingwood and Bloch were very different scholars, but what they agreed on, in their unique formulations, seems to me a solid foundation for historical work. Older influences include Johann Gustav Droysen’s Outline of the Principles of History (Grundriss der Historik, from 1858) and before him Voltaire and even Tom Paine for some crucial points (in his inimitable Age of Reason). Among more recent influences are scholars as different as the ancient historian Arnaldo Momigliano and American historian Barbara Tuchman.3 They were all self-critical practitioners of history, not theorists, who nevertheless took time to explain their understanding of history and how to do it. In marked contrast to thinkers usually 1 Mason 2016b is an orientation to historical method aimed at students in these areas. 2 Bloch 1953; Collingwood 1994. Gilderhus 2007 is an insightful review of debates. 3 Momigliano 1974, 1990, 2016.

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labelled postmodern,4 they were concerned with recovering, however provisionally, aspects of the real human past. So am I. But they did not minimise the problems in doing this. For anyone interested in what happened 2,000 years ago in the eastern Roman empire, a basic problem must be: How can we know? Hardly anything of that world has survived. Even today, though we have a surfeit of evidence about the times we live in, we know little about who is making big decisions or what the neighbours are doing. What can we claim to know with confidence about the ancient world, and on what basis? Schoolchildren used to be told (this may be changing) that they could learn the past by studying history books. It was all recorded somewhere and needed only to be memorised. People even claim that the past is so cut and dried that it can teach us ‘lessons’ if we would only listen and learn. As we grow up, however, this picture joins the tooth fairy and Santa Claus. No master record of the past exists. None ever will. History can teach us no lessons because history does not stand outside us with a separate intelligence. It is something we do. We can learn about whatever we are investigating, of course, but history cannot teach us supposedly packaged lessons. When we look to the human past, we see a practically infinite chaos of claims and assertions, with a diminishing body of survivals the farther back we go. Then what? We can either wallow in disillusionment or roll our sleeves up and, if we are able and willing to undertake the necessary training, let a noble curiosity drive us to investigate. This is ‘history’ in its primary sense, and it is among the most rewarding activities available to humankind. Rather than trying to summarise the views of the beacons I have named, whom readers will want to savour without my filter, I shall sketch my outlook. It owes much to their influences, but they should not be blamed for it. 1. History (Greek historia) originally meant ‘investigation’. After Herodotus (1.1) applied the word to exploring the human past, this meaning remained even as secondary meanings—reports or narratives arising from investigation—accrued. In the research university, the project of inquiry into the human past is even now the generally accepted task of history. Outside of personal memory of the past we experience, or divine revelation, the past is accessible in two ways. Either someone tells us about it or we investigate it for ourselves. All of us hear much of the past




4 This against the bizarre impression some colleagues have (Bernett 2007: 20–21; Schwartz 2013: ix, 2; Davies and Magness 2017: 55 and Kokkinos 2018 on Mason 2016a) that my work has a postmodern ethos or motive. For actual postmodernism, see Jenkins 1991, 1995, 1997.

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2.

3.

from others: parents, teachers, and institutional representatives. Those accounts begin with personal memory, but memory is immediately selective and often plays us false. When memories are told to others, they undergo a further process of selection, but then are usually forgotten, unless they become part of the value-laden or emblematic past, which is passed from one generation to the next because it illustrates the (changing) values of groups we belong to: family, institution, or society. To be sure, a family tradition (story) about crazy Uncle George might be preserved for its humour or shock-value. In any case, what gets passed along to us is tradition. It comes to us whether we seek it or not, pre-chewed and even pre-digested. For example, stories about Jerusalem under Roman rule, the Jewish War, or Jesus’ resurrection reach us first as traditions. The other way we gain access to the past is by undertaking methodical investigations of particular questions that interest us. This is, ever since Herodotus, history. ‘The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there’, as a famous line says.5 To investigate remote times and places, therefore, requires training. Before opening an investigation into something ancient, we must familiarise ourselves with the languages, outlooks, and habits of the foreign world in which it happened. But this path, of history, is open to anyone with sufficient interest. The human past at any moment was, no less than the human present is, a chaos of unfathomable intentions, instincts, actions, and interactions. Events do not occur as discrete blobs or declare their meaning to us. And the vast majority of events in antiquity have been lost along the way, along with their human agents. We cannot know even a fraction of the names of those who lived or their actions. Even when trying to figure out how institutions worked in first-century CE Jerusalem or Tiberias, how ordinary families lived in Ephesus or Rome, or how conflicts began, we must be content with the small problems we can usefully investigate, which are tiny in relation to the reality that once was. Since the objects that interest us—people, their thoughts, and motives—do not exist now, we cannot study them. We can study only what some of them left behind, if it has by extraordinary good fortune survived to our time or been discovered. Such remains are of two main kinds: (i) artefacts, or objects created for ancient purposes—building structures, kitchenware, coins, implements and weapons, stone inscriptions, or legal or commercial documents—that

5 The saying was made famous by L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between (1953: front matter), though he apparently adapted it from a lecture by David Cecil (later Cecil 1957: 24).

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5.

5

have survived or been discovered, and (ii) deliberately written accounts, which were created to endure and shape contemporary and perhaps later understanding of those times. The very few literary accounts that have survived from the first century did so because they commanded sufficient interest to be repeatedly copied, while the vast majority of accounts disappeared. That is so with the works of Philo and Josephus, the texts that found a place in the New Testament, and assorted others. Their authors could not have anticipated the success of their writings because they had no idea of later centuries or what would survive. Nearly all literary accounts composed in the first century are lost. It is hugely exciting when texts that were not deliberately transmitted are discovered, found in dry climates. Such texts include the library found at or near the Qumran site, the Nag Hammadi Library, and the Oxyrhynchus papyri. Relative to what once existed, however, even with these we have very little.6 So we must make the most of it. But how? Investigating the past, or doing history, requires practitioners to move between two different mental modes: (a)  understanding or interpreting the evidence that we can study, if it is relevant to our investigation, and (b) hypothetically imagining the lost realities that produced it, the human experiences we are trying to reconstruct. These two mental processes are completely different insofar as in the first case we are studying something visible, whereas in the second we are thrown back on our critical imagination. Historical work has therefore often been compared with that of the detective, which in these respects is similar. The detective has to solve a problem of past events: Who killed John Doe? Gathering evidence requires examining both physical remains and listening to people who were close enough to the scene to have something possibly relevant to say. They will unavoidably do so in their words, from their perspectives, and with conscious and unconscious biases and limitations. Nothing they say could solve the problem on its own: the evidence does not speak for itself. The detective must, like a medical specialist trying to imagine the cause of visible symptoms, hypothesise and test possible explanations. We can only be grateful that famous accounts, by Thucydides, Josephus, or Tacitus, have reached us in substantial part. Interpreting them requires trying to figure out what they are, before we use them to solve our historical problems. Why did these authors write? In what circumstances? Who were their intended audiences, and what were they trying to

6 We know this in part because the few texts that have survived refer to many others that have not.

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communicate to them? We must pay attention not only to explicit propositions (‘I want you to understand …’ or ‘On the calends of February, X did Y’) but also the nature of ancient historical writing, what authors and audiences expected, and common rhetorical values and devices. What did ancient writers and their audience think they were doing? What techniques did they use to inspire trust? We shall never come close to a comprehensive understanding of all this. But we can make progress because we have the texts and so can keep refining our interpretations. Today, digital tools create new possibilities for exposing patterns and typical formulae, for example, that we could not have detected by reading alone. Where possible, we need to investigate an ancient authors’ sources of information. How did they come to think they knew what had happened, if they did not personally observe it? If we can see how they treated some of their known sources (as Josephus using the Bible and 1 Maccabees), that might help us understand their technique where we know they used sources, for events beyond their experience, but do not know what they were. Authors such as Diodorus Siculus and Plutarch preserve much from the sources they cite, which would otherwise be lost to us. It is often difficult or impossible, however, to know how much of what we read in a text is due to the source’s influence, not much altered by the author we are reading, and how much comes from this author’s interests and language. We can also make progress, however, by studying this author’s general habits of speech and diction, to think about what looks like his literary creation. The same principles of interpretation hold for material survivals, from walls of buildings to kitchen pots, inscriptions, and coins. Whereas we can see most texts with relative ease because they have been published,7 no investigator can be constantly on the road to visit ancient remains, in their original findspots or in museums or private collections around the world. Enterprising colleagues, thankfully, selflessly provide a service to everyone else by labouring to publish catalogues of coins, inscriptions, and papyri, as well as detailed excavation reports. These invaluable volumes include photographs, drawings, and transcriptions, often with translations and preliminary interpretations of why the artefact was created and how it functioned. When we investigate a problem in detail, we

7 It remains a problem that we usually lack the originals, which must be reconstructed from the ‘best’ Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and Aramaic (if not Ethiopic etc.) manuscripts that have survived, and these are often housed in inconvenient places. But they are increasingly being digitised to facilitate armchair study.

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may find ourselves doubting the provisional interpretations of evidence in such catalogues—or interpretations of texts in commentaries—but the preliminary interpretations of coins, inscriptions, archaeology, or texts are likely to lay out the main options, keeping us from hastily adopting one reading. 8. When we move from understanding the surviving evidence to solving our historical problem, we must imagine the lost reality. Why do this by trying to imagine every hypothetical scenario we can think of and then testing each one. Again, this is a different mental task from interpretation because we are no longer asking about the meaning of something we can see. Suppose that we are interested in Pontius Pilate, Cestius Gallus (legate of Syria at the outbreak of war in 66), the high priest Caiaphas, or John the Baptist, or some aspect of a group or institution or event: the Pharisees, the Jerusalem court, the ethnic strife in Caesarea, or the Flavian war in Galilee. Asking why Philo or Josephus or Luke mentions the thing that interests us, and how it functions in that narrative (and what the narrative is about: structure, themes, typical diction) is of course a different task from imagining the real person or event or institution. 9. When we shift from interpreting surviving evidence to reconstructing the past, we must switch out our filters: from the suspension of disbelief and willingness to be led by our author (necessary for interpretation) to doubt and scepticism about everything we are being told. To accept any text as an ‘authority’ would be an abdication of history. We must remember—it is too easily forgotten—that Josephus, say, could not mention a tiny fraction of what happened in his times, even had he wished to be as comprehensive as possible. He certainly did not write to answer our questions, of which he had no conception. So, after we have tried to understand his aims and the nature of his work, we must turn to imagining possibilities he did not or could not elucidate. 10. When we hypothesise the lost reality, however, we shall still need to test it against the surviving evidence, for its explanatory power. That is how we weigh hypothetical scenarios. Suppose we are investigating Pontius Pilate. We may want to get a full picture of his aims and outlook as a governor, but that will require answers to many subsidiary questions. What exactly was his job? Where was the Judaea of which he was prefect, and how was it related to the Province of Syria, which had a higher-level official and a legionary garrison? When was his term in office: 26 to 36 (as often stated) or 18 to 37, which is also possible? Either way, why was he left in place for such an unusually long time? Was he particularly competent, or did the emperor Tiberius not care? How should we reconcile

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the very different portraits in Philo, Josephus, and the gospels? What do the coins issued during his term imply, if anything, about his aims and outlook? Do the symbols, which lack human images, reflect a concern not to offend Judaeans? Or do the chosen symbols convey an aggressive approach of some kind? After specifying such questions, we gather our evidence, which in Pilate’s case is unusually rich. We must first try to understand each survival on its own. Only then will we know what needs to be explained by our hypothesis. Then we can proceed to test hypotheses. Suppose that Pilate was anti-Judaean from the start, or simply wanted to make money and leave. How would that explain the evidence? Suppose that he was a conscientious governor, who wished to work as productively as possible with local elites in Jerusalem and Samaria and Caesarea. How could we understand the evidence then? The hypothesis that explains the most, when we take account of our authors’ aims and situations, with the least strain and the fewest additional assumptions, should be favoured. 11. This view of history as investigation exposes the futility of the question most commonly asked about surviving evidence, namely: How accurate is Josephus (or Philo or Luke-Acts)? The question assumes that if we could declare a source ‘reliable’ or ‘accurate’, we could do history by following that source. But if we could know the real past by following such authorities, there would be no need for history. The past does not sit there, ready-made and ripe for plucking from reliable sources. We cannot even declare Josephus 30 or 50 or 80% ‘accurate’ and use that as a basis for understanding the past. His narratives are his literary creations for his purposes in his time long ago. He was largely concerned to describe the pollution of the temple, as he saw it, by people he called ‘bandits’ and ‘tyrants’, and the need for a divine purging of the holy sanctuary. Since those were his concerns, expressed in his unique language and from a first-century perspective, it would be meaningless for me to say that he is 47% or 81% accurate. History is not about finding accurate sources, or authorities, on which we can rest. It is the active, vigorous, and sceptical investigation of the past. 12. A predictable response might be: ‘But then we will never achieve confidence about what happened.’ To which I would respond: ‘Yes, exactly!’ History is not church. It is simply the reality that we cannot know much about the ancient past, in the proper sense of knowing for sure. Whether we like this reality or not, we cannot change it. The past owes us nothing. If we are curious enough to want to know about it, that is our problem and we must deal with the hazards and uncertainties involved. Insisting that

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we can know or that X is a known fact or almost certain does not make it so. Since our beliefs about the ancient past make no difference to what happened, there is little point in becoming exercised about our beliefs. Fortunately, history does not require us to produce firm solutions. On the contrary, it forbids any attachment to fixed conclusions. One cannot do history, which is to say one cannot open-mindedly investigate problems of the past, if one claims to know the solution in advance—any more than the detective can honestly investigate a murder if she is already sure that the butler did it. Curious, open-minded, and responsible investigation is the job. 2

Survey of Chapters

The following chapters apply this view of history to particular problems. The investigations fall naturally under five headings. Part 1 takes up aspects of the Roman world from Judaean perspectives. Chapter 1 explores the common but surprisingly vague and difficult distinction, commonly assumed in scholarship, between the Land of Israel and Diaspora. The simple question is whether Judaeans living in Caesarea, Scythopolis, and Tiberias, or in Alexandria or Rome, knew of any such distinction. Proposing a negative answer, I argue that the implications are significant for our understanding of events (such as the Great Revolt) and of Judaean life in general. Chapter 2 takes up the related question of how Judaeans were perceived to relate to the majority cultures of the Roman world. Chapters 3 to 5 explore Josephus’ Judaean and un-Flavian—contrary to common assumptions—portraits of Vespasian’s rise to power, the characters of Vespasian and Titus while they were in Judaea, and the Flavian triumph in the summer of 71 CE in Rome. I hope that these three chapters will help to dispel the still-common image of Josephus as a Flavian hack or flatterer and stimulate further efforts to understand his accounts in these respects. Part 2 likewise moves from broad to narrow, now in relation to historiography. Chapter 6 is a survey of what is often included as Judaean (Jewish) historiography. It asks about our criteria for inclusion or exclusion. Chapters 7 to 10 examine aspects of Josephus’ historiographical art in his War: his restrained depiction of violence, asking whether this violence can be usefully characterised as ‘religious’ (7), his thematisation of passion and/or suffering (8), and his way of crafting speeches to suit his characters, with attention to a generally overlooked example (10). Chapter 10 turns to Josephus’ sources and influences, especially whether he knew the Bible when he wrote the War—something

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often doubted—by looking at War’s episode involving the prophet Elisha at Jericho. Part 3 proposes a rethink of four important aspects of life in ancient Judaea: what King Herod did for the region and the consequences of his death (11), Judaea’s Essenes (12), understanding Josephus’ Pharisees as a first, interpretative step toward reconstructing this famous group (13), and the two men considered leaders of the Great Revolt against Rome: John of Gischala and Simon bar Giora (14). For each of these questions, Josephus’ works provide the fullest or the only surviving evidence. The need to understand his work separately from framing historical hypotheses becomes particularly clear. For example, asking how John and Simon function in his War should lead us to rethink our impressions of these historical figures, not because we believe or disbelieve Josephus’ accounts but because we must explain that evidence, with due provision for Josephus’ literary aims. Were John and Simon just two instances of a shared ideology of freedom, set over against Roman oppression? Or did they find themselves fighting each other in Jerusalem because their motives and situations were substantially different? Rethinking how these two outsiders to Jerusalem came to be the dominant players in the siege of the city might suggest a reconsideration of common views of a unified national revolt from 66 to 70 or 74. The title of Part 4, ‘Beyond Judaism’, has a double meaning. First, the chapters here move beyond what are traditional bounds of ‘Judaism’ to consider figures of chiefly ‘Christian’ interest: John the Baptist (15), Paul (16), and the two-volume work that occupies a quarter of the New Testament, Luke-Acts (17). More importantly, however, I propose investigating these figures and texts without resort to the category ‘Judaism’, on the ground that it was not available to them, to think with or to understand themselves in relation to it. It became popular much later, in the Christian reduction of Judaean life to a mere system of belief, an -ism.8 So then, what does John the Baptist look like if we try to understand first the portrait in Josephus’ narrative, and then imagine the real person behind that story and the more famous accounts in the gospels? What happens to our view of Paul if we put aside the hoary but impossibly elusive discussion of his relationship to ‘Judaism’ and try to understand him in terms available to him? The chapter on Luke-Acts revisits the relationship between this text, with its unique historical interest, and Josephus’ writings. Given what look to be distinctive compositional traits of Josephus in the Christian composition, I propose that the Christian author recognised 8 See Mason 2007.

Introduction

11

Josephus’ expertise for Judaica and so quietly borrowed names and events, reconfiguring them as desired, to help furnish his own story of the new faith’s iconic figures. Part 5, ‘Interactions’, is self-explanatory. I have had the privilege of knowing and collaborating with many scholars who have done fundamental work on Josephus, Judaea, first-century Rome, and Christian origins. I selected the essays comprising Chapters 18 to 22, dialogues with some work by Per Bilde, Tessa Rajak, Daniel Schwartz, Peter Wiseman, and N. T. Wright, because of the methodological issues they raise. Each chapter moves from a summary of that work to questions of historical method. I do not imagine that the essays in this collection are more than the scratchings of a few surfaces. But having worked on Roman Judaea and Christian origins for some decades, I have come to think that reflection on historical method—what we are trying to achieve when studying the ancient past, and how we go about it—is relatively neglected in these fields, often displaced by a new literary or social-scientific theory. Those may all be worthwhile, but the problem of doing history remains basic. If readers are willing to share this journey for a while and offer criticism, if they find something useful even in doubt or disagreement, which are the engines of scholarship, the book will have served its purpose. 3

Acknowledgements

I want to express my deep gratitude to colleagues who have facilitated the production of this book. When I first broached the redoubtable Loes Schouten, my long-time editor at Brill, she was immediately supportive. Marjolein van Zuylen stepped in to manage the publication, proposing that we ask the editors of the series Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity. I am grateful to Professor Martin Goodman for his willingness to support the book’s publication under the aegis not only of Pallas Athena, with Brill, but in that wellregarded series. This joins a long list of my debts to Professor Goodman. Pulling together essays formatted for a wide range of publications requires attention to detail if the resulting book is to look coherent. Some used British spelling and punctuation, others American. Some had in-text author-date citations, others full-reference footnotes. Quotation marks ranged from single to double and even the chevron type. Continental publications often put scholars’ names in small caps, though this is not standard in the Anglosphere. Reconciling all this was going to be a huge task, so I was beyond grateful when

12

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Dr. Eelco Glas, my colleague here in Groningen, agreed to help. He did much more than coordinate the style, suggesting clarifications and catching numerous errors arising from my revisions. I was truly fortunate to have his help. Of course, none of these colleagues can be blamed for shortcomings that remain. Finally, Peter Buschman at Brill shepherded the manuscript through production with exemplary efficiency.

Part 1 Jewish Perspectives on the Roman World

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Chapter 1

Eretz-Israel and Diaspora in the First Century CE? Variations on the Category Blues

Introduction: Context and Method

One direction in my research that overlaps with Professor Troiani’s distinguished studies on Jewish identity has involved unpacking the suitcases we use to classify groups in the Roman eastern Mediterranean. Some of the most familiar suitcases—religion, -isms, systems of belief—were manufactured from the Christian lexicon that emerged only in the third to fifth centuries. They distract us from thinking about how the residents of the earlier Empire constructed their world in pre-Christian times. When we pack everything into them, they lead us into discussions of how many ‘kinds of Judaism’ there were, or to compare Judaism and Christianity as ‘religions,’ though no one then living could have understood such talk. Instead of imagining a genus religion, of which Judaism and Christianity were two species, I have joined other scholars in arguing that the ancients viewed their world in terms of tribal-national groups, ethnē, each of which had its ancestral traditions, laws, gods, calendar, and so on.1 An ethnos might grow a polis or mother-polis (metropolis): an intensive settlement where the people’s laws, customs, calendar, and cult were distinctively realised, and which might spawn colonies elsewhere. This is not a social-scientific theory or hypothesis. It is an observation about the texts we seek to interpret. They routinely call Judaeans an ethnos (or gens) and juxtapose them with others: Egyptians, Romans, Syrians, Idumaeans. These pillars of ancient identity, ethnos and polis, were supplemented by an array of associations that one could choose to join or leave, with varying degrees of formality: guilds, cult affiliations, philosophical schools. The basic ethnos-polis-association script, however, remained stable from classical Hellas to the rise of Christianity in late antiquity.2 This was the langue in which Philo and Josephus communicated with their audiences. 1 Synthesis in Mason 2016b: 87–279; cf. Nongbri 2013; Barton and Boyarin 2016. 2 Stephanus of Byzantium could still write an Ethnica in the sixth century (Meineke 1849). A search of key authors in the TLG (via tlg.uci.edu) for cognates gives: Herodotus 611, PseudoScylax 369 (in 114 paragraphs), Diodorus Siculus 3,368, Strabo 1,913, Philo 911 (with little

© Steve Mason, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004545960_003

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If it seems only sweet reason to try to think in ancient terms, I am aware that not all scholars see the point of doing this, or they see the point but disagree with it. They seem to hold that if we recognise in ancient societies things that look familiar to us, we have the right or even the duty to call them by our names—blurring the line, it seems to me, between such physical realities such as gravity and malaria, which are always present no matter whether they are recognised or how they are called, and changing social constructions or ways of categorising knowledge of the world, which change from one era and place to another and are worth studying for themselves in their distinctive cultures, if only to understand texts produced in those contexts.3 I understand history to be, simply, the investigation of the human past. We may investigate whatever interests us, including ancient ways of thinking and speaking that are different from ours. We do this to understand the manifold possibilities of human existence, not conforming everything to our terms. So I persevere. This brief study opens a suitcase of modern build that is all but universally used to pack up the ancient past, though perhaps at the cost of some historical understanding: Eretz-Israel versus the Diaspora. That even scholars renowned for terminological scrupulosity assume this dichotomy confirms its appeal. In a survey of ‘the last century of Diaspora scholarship’ for his Jews in the Mediterranean Diaspora (1996), for example, John Barclay comments on the increasing rigour found in Diaspora studies, but finds no debate about the category itself.4 The scope of his book seems obvious: ‘As the title indicates, my object of study is the Mediterranean Diaspora, that is, Jews outside their homeland in the territories bordering the Mediterranean Sea.’5 But where is that homeland exactly? Egypt-Alexandria, Cyrenaica, (northern) Syria, Asia Minor, and Rome turn out to be the principal Diaspora loci in the study. Similarly, Isaiah Gafni opens his Land, Center and Diaspora (1997) by comparing the Land of Israel in Roman times with modern Israel, each being the counterweight to the Diaspora. Whereas Jews living in late-Roman, mediaeval, and early modern times knew only Diaspora life, Gafni suggests, ‘This duality of Jewish existence would reappear only in modem times, with the gradual realisation of the Zionist enterprise.’6 Erich Gruen’s 2002 Diaspora, even while it debunks any notion that the ancients had a theory or theology of Diaspora, assumes that the title will be clear. Obviously,

3 4 5 6

interest in human geography), Josephus 2,416, Plutarch 3,774, Dio of Prusa 878, Pausanias 851, Julian’s fragments 366. Schwartz 2011; Klostergaard Petersen 2017. Barclay 1996: 4–10, quoted phrases on pp. 5 and 10. Barclay 1996: 10. Gafni 1997: 19.

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the book will deal with Jews outside the homeland, Palestine, or the Holy Land.7 But again, where exactly is that? One of the few well known studies to avoid the homeland/Diaspora split was Heinrich Graetz’s magisterial Die Geschichte der Juden, published from the 1850s. Graetz understood Judaea to be the hinterland of Jerusalem, ‘surrounded on all sides by a Greek-speaking population.’8 Judaean settlements beyond this upland home, in Syria-Palestine or in Alexandria, Rome, and Asia Minor, were equally colonies. Graetz reflected ancient usage, which left no room for a diaspora because the foreign populations were always nearby in the coastal cities and Decapolis. The volume on the Roman period mentions the Golah / Galut rarely, only when anticipating rabbinic and later language. Incidentally, Graetz also used ‘Judaean’ ( Judäer, judäisch) rather than ‘Jewish’ ( Juden, jüdisch) for Judaeans living in Rome or Alexandria. The present essay takes a Graetz-like perspective to probe a bit farther into Judaean life in southern Syria, to help us think of the world as those who were alive then perceived it. Does the familiar ‘Diaspora || Land of Israel’ dichotomy help us to understand them, or does it distract us and thus foreclose important lines of historical inquiry? 1

Meaning and Significance of ‘Diaspora’

As far as I know, the most vigorous challenge to the Israel-Diaspora scheme came from Jonathan Price in 1994.9 Preparing to review six recent studies of the Diaspora, he first launched an assault on the whole construct. His most devastating points were these: 1. Scholars who study Diaspora do not define ‘the land from which Israel was dispersed,’ or what is not Diaspora. 2. The phrase ‘Land of Israel’ first appears in the Mishnah and is not direct evidence of Second-Temple conceptions.10

7 8

9 10

Gruen 2002: vii, 1, 7–8, 11. Graetz 1862: 2.2.207, 215, 231–32; 3.24–27; 1888: 1.294–95 (quotation p. 295), 361–62, 382; 2.112. Graetz 1956 (English) likewise: Judaeans both at home and abroad, colonies outside the Judaean hills. Graetz refers to Juden / Jews chiefly from the Mishnaic period onward and when touching themes (as ‘Jewish history’) that unite his work. Price 1994: 169–86. Rabbinic halakhah required a definition of the land for tithing, sabbatical year, divorce, inter alia, but this language had no relation to political realities, and even the Mishnah’s definitions are fluid: Shev. 6.1; Hal. 4.8; Git. 1.2; B. Qam. 7:7.

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3.

Ancient Greek-Jewish authors do not use the word διασπορά, much less offer a theory of Diaspora as exile.11 4. The Jewish homeland in Roman times was not comparable to the modern State of Israel. 5. Nearly all Jews who migrated during the Roman period did so voluntarily, to improve their life-chances. 6. The situations of Jews outside Judaea were highly diverse and not reducible to a Diaspora outlook. 7. Jewish dispersion and loss of homeland were potent Christian motifs, asserted as proof of divine punishment. Historians should be wary of adopting Christian polemic. Having cleared the ground, Price concluded: ‘All generalities about “Diaspora Judaism” should be banned until each Jewish community is understood in its immediate context.’12 Although his rejection of the ‘lachrymose’ view of Jewish life abroad resonated with some other studies,13 his call for a moratorium on diaspora language went nowhere. Subsequent research seems rather to have reified the taxonomy and built ever grander structures upon it (below). I certainly used to take Diaspora as a self-evident category, until three converging lines led me to question it (I only discovered Price’s article later), namely: researching a book on the war of 66 to 74; supervising Reuben Lee’s 2013 dissertation, which raised the problem in the course of his investigation of Jerusalem’s relations with Jews from elsewhere;14 and assessing new studies of Josephus, some of which placed considerable weight on the Land of Israel || Diaspora distinction. The boldest of the last group was Michael Tuval’s 2013 revised dissertation, From Jerusalem Priest to Roman Jew, which places Josephus between EretzIsrael and the Diaspora. Tuval built on other important studies: Jack Lightstone’s The Commerce of the Sacred, which posited that Jews of the Diaspora needed a different ‘“socio-systemic” sacred order’ from the one available to those in the homeland;15 Seth Schwartz’s case that Josephus learned the Bible mainly in Rome, for his Antiquities;16 and Daniel Schwartz’s argument for a shift in the meaning of Ioudaios from ‘Judaean’ to ‘Jew’ in connection with the loss

11 12 13 14 15 16

Price 1994: 170. Philo has διασπορά twice. Praem. 115 is unrelated, but Conf. 196–98 cites Deut 30.4, threatening covenant violators with ‘scattering.’ Philo nowhere suggests, however, that his situation in Alexandria is a function of such diaspora. Price 1994: 179. Feldman 1993; Gruen 2002. Mason 2016b; Lee 2013. Lightstone 1984: 5. Schwartz 1990: 25.

Eretz-Israel and Diaspora in the First Century CE?

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of Jerusalem.17 I have engaged Tuval’s rich and original analysis elsewhere.18 Here I ask about the value of Diaspora as a category by focusing on the nature of the Judaean homeland, some conception of which is needed to conceive of a Diaspora. 2

Mother-Polis and Chōra

The maps we use tend to assimilate ancient Judaea to the State of Israel and Palestinian territories. But thinking in ancient terms produces a different picture. Ancient writers, both Judaeans and outside observers of southern (Coele-) Syria, shared the common script of ethnos and polis-belonging. For Strabo and Pliny, this region was a mish-mash of ethnē and proudly independent poleis of diverse laws and customs, some dating back to mythological times and each anchoring a hinterland (chōra).19 The coastal centres included Rafia, Gaza, Ascalon, Azotus, Jamnia, Joppa, Apollonia, Dora, Ptolemais, Tyre, and Sidon. The agricultural hinterlands (chōrai) of the last two were enormous. Tyre’s chōra gave its name to all Syria (Tsurayya), extending north of Upper Galilee to the Jordan. Inland were the ‘ten poleis.’ Scythopolis was the lone member west of the river, and its large chōra dominated the eastern Jordan-Jezreel Valley. These poleis were well known, some having produced famed sons. Josephus assumes the general understanding that Judaea was Jerusalem’s chōra when he explains why ancient Greek writers did not mention Judaeans (Ap. 1.60): Well, we do not reside in a maritime land. Nor do we take joy in commercial trading (ἐμπορίαι) or in the mingling with others that comes with that. Rather, our poleis were settled far from the sea, and we devote ourselves to working this excellent land that we have been granted. In BJ 3.51–55, he describes Judaea separately from Galilee and Peraea, though including Idumaea. His remark that Judaea is not ‘deprived of maritime delights’ because it ‘inclines toward the coastal areas as far as Ptolemais’ appears to mean that one can see the coast from its heights, thus agreeing with Strabo that the Judaean mother-polis is visible from Joppa—which was seized by the Judaeans.20 17 18 19 20

Schwartz 1990: 48–61, 83–90. Mason 2014a. Strabo, Geogr. 16.2.2, 21–32, esp. 34–41. Cf. Strabo, Geogr. 16.2.28.

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In the central highlands abutting Judaea were the homelands of two ethnē that retained elements of agricultural-village and nomadic life, although by the first century CE their larger centres could be called poleis: respectively Sebaste to the north and Adora and Hebron to the south. Josephus regarded Samarians and Idumaeans as distinct from Judaeans, despite their interwoven pasts. Samarian-Judaean antagonism, which he frequently mentions, was virulent enough to leave marks also in Tacitus and the gospels.21 Besides Jerusalem, Judaea encompassed Jericho, Lydda, Thamna, and Emmaus, each with its chōra. Jerusalem was the stand-out polis, however, both as world-renowned mētropolis of the Judaean ethnos and as the long-standing regional hegemon, first under the Hasmoneans and then under Herod and Archelaus.22 Strabo (Geogr. 16.2.34) reflects a common view that Idumaeans were a derivative Syrian, Phoenician, or Nabataean ethnos, unlike Judaeans, who had originally been Egyptians, though they were also Judaeans in a sense because they had come to share Judaean customs. Yet they remain distinct in Strabo. Idumaean communities worshipping Qos have been found in Egypt and Herod’s own brother-in-law, Costobar, attempted to restore the cult in Idumaea. Tellingly, Idumaeans saw no reason to participate in Jerusalem’s lethal conflicts of 66–67, finding themselves at times among Jerusalem’s enemies, until a faction in Jerusalem desperately appealed for their help. Even when their fighters entered Jerusalem, they fought under their own commanders and eventually sought a separate peace with Titus.23 It is easy to forget that the frontiers of hostile Samaria and Idumaea lay only a long day’s walk from Jerusalem. Sebaste, Adora, and Hebron were but 40 km from Jerusalem. As unrest among the neighbours grew in the 50s and 60s CE, it was relatively easy for militant Judaeans to harass these frontier zones, as well as long-hostile Ascalon on the coast.24 This brings us to the size and nature of Jerusalem’s chōra. First, we should dispel any notion that Jerusalem was the capital of a Roman province. If such a province had existed, non-Judaean Caesarea would have been its capital. But there was apparently no such province. Judaea was Jerusalem’s hinterland, where Judaean law and custom held sway. Pompey incorporated it into the large province of Syria.25 Second, chōra was not a scientific category. It could be used at different levels: for Jerusalem’s immediate territory, or including 21 22 23 24 25

Tacitus, Ann. 12.54.2; Matt 10.5; Luke 9.52–54; 10.29–37; John 4.4–22. Pliny, Nat. 5.70. Mason 2016b: 144, 233–38, 461–63. Josephus, BJ 2.652–54 (with 2.235 and AJ 20.121); 4.503–37 (with AJ 20.5). Eck 2007: 1–54; Mason 2016b: 239–45.

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Emmaus to Jericho, or all regions under Jerusalem. We need not enter the historical weeds to see that Jerusalem’s power and reach varied greatly in relation to its neighbours in the centuries preceding 66 CE, and that these changes fuelled regional animosities. The post-Exilic community centred in Jerusalem remained small and overshadowed by Samaria, which became the home of Persian, Ptolemaic, and Seleucid garrisons in succession. Jerusalem’s vulnerability placed its culture in grave peril under Antiochus IV (175–164 BCE). The Hasmonean-led reaction followed a realist playbook, taking advantage of Seleucid decline to gradually increase Jerusalem’s territory and wealth. Forcing their conquered neighbours to accept Judaean law or flee, the Hasmoneans colonised neighbouring poleis or destroyed the recalcitrant, annexing the region as part of Jerusalem’s chōra. This was not Blitzkrieg; it required decades. But by the time of Alexander Jannaeus’ death (76 BCE), sixty-five years after Jerusalem achieved virtual independence from the Seleucids (140 BCE), Jerusalem controlled the coastal plain, the highlands, the Decapolis, and transjordanian Peraea.26 Josephus’ account of Idumaea’s conquest describes this expansion in the categories of his day (AJ 13.257–58): Hyrcanus also captures the poleis of Adora and Marisa, and when he had taken all the Idumaeans in hand, he let them stay in the chōra on condition that they circumcised their genitals, if they were willing to live with the Judaeans’ laws. In their yearning for their ancestral land (τῆς πατρίου γῆς), they patiently submitted to circumcision and to practising the very same regimen of life as the Judaeans in other respects. That is when they began to be, as in the sequel, Judaeans.27 Hasmonean control lasted long enough to create lasting resentments, however, especially in Samaria, where Hyrcanus I destroyed the temple on Mt. Gerizim. When Pompey arrived and dislodged the Hasmoneans (63 BCE), he removed their territorial gains. The proud Hasmonean scion Josephus ruefully reflects (AJ 14.77): ‘We tossed away our freedom and fell under subjection to Rome, and the territory (chōra) we had acquired by force of arms, by taking it away from the Syrians, we were compelled to give back to the Syrians.’ War’s parallel account suggests his understanding of the very different outlook of the

26 27

See AJ 13.395–96 for a cumulative list of Hasmonean conquests to Jannaeus. With emendations in Ralph Marcus’ Loeb text, 1957: 356.

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conquered peoples, who (we now know) often reset their calendars to make Pompey’s liberation their Year 1.28 After depriving the [Judaean] ethnos of the poleis in Coele-Syria they had taken, he placed these under a Roman commander … and confined them [the Judaeans] entirely within their proper borders (τοῖς ἰδίοις ὅροις). As a favour to one of his own freedmen, Demetrius, he also rebuilds Gadara. … So he liberated the inland poleis from them…. All these he gave back to their legitimate citizens (τοῖς γνησίοις … πολίταις) and made them subject to the Syrian province. The haircut that Pompey gave Jerusalem did not last. In the early 50s BCE, Aulus Gabinius let much of the hair grow back, apparently recognising that it was not worth trying to reverse Judaean settlement in some cities. Within another decade, Julius Caesar would return Joppa, the Mediterranean port captured by the Hasmoneans to the Judaeans, as a reward for their loyalty.29 These developments under Roman governors, facilitated by the skilled moves of the Idumaean Antipater, paved the way for Jerusalem’s second period of regional hegemony, now to be blessed by Rome. When Herod took power in 37 BCE he controlled the highlands of Judaea, Idumaea, Samaria, and Galilee. To these Augustus would add several coastal poleis, transjordanian Hippos, Gadara, and Esebonitis, and large tracts east of the Kinneret (AJ 15.217, 343), giving by imperial fiat a territory larger than what the Hasmoneans had seized. When we consider Herod’s long rule (40/37–4 BCE), the still longer tenures of his sons Philip and Antipas, the rapid expansion of Agrippa I’s territory by Gaius and Claudius (38–44 CE), and young Agrippa II’s favour in Rome, we might speculate that the arrangements between 6 and 41 and following Agrippa I’s death in 44 were temporary: that the Romans preferred to see the region ruled from Jerusalem, as long as a suitable Judaean royal was available.30 Like most great-power leaders, the Julio-Claudians preferred to deal with a single address than with the messiness of diverse populations presenting their endless claims and appeals.31 In southern Syria, they plainly preferred that address to be Jerusalem. They apparently never imagined elevating another polis or the leader of another ethnos. If no one in Jerusalem was suitable, they dispatched an equestrian or imperial freedman to Caesarea—a recent 28 29 30 31

BJ 1.155–57; cf. Strabo, Geogr. 16.2.46. Josephus, BJ 1.170; AJ 14.205–206. See Mason 2016b: 269–71. Cf. Luttwak 1976: 7–50.

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foundation, notionally free of ancient hostilities—to maintain the status quo. The longest-serving Prefect in Caesarea, Pontius Pilate (18 or 26–37 CE), was called Praefectus Iudaeae—apparently meaning ‘Prefect for Judaean Affairs,’ given that Caesarea was emphatically not in Judaea. Pilate issued coins that were more or less Judaean in their avoidance of human imagery.32 Of his successors, Tiberius Julius Alexander (46–48) was the scion of Alexandria’s most prominent Judaean family, and Felix (52–58/60) married the Judaean princess Drusilla.33 Herod’s ascendancy thus initiated a century of Judaean success and prominence in Coele-Syria. This came unavoidably at the expense of the neighbours’ ambitions and pride. Although Strabo admired Herod’s enlightened governance (Geogr. 16.2.46) and the king’s undoubted efforts to integrate Samaria and the non-Judaean poleis, Herod still managed to antagonise the cities that bristled at Jerusalem’s primacy. At Herod’s death (4 BCE) and again when Agrippa I died (44 CE), those populations broke out in wild celebration or even riot.34 The two most important consequences of all this for our investigation are: first, by the mid-first century CE, substantial Judaean minority populations were found throughout southern Syria’s non-Judaean poleis; second, although Judaean minorities must have found their adopted homes congenial, low-grade resentment and suspicion could flare up at any time to their peril. 3

‘Colonies’ of Jerusalem, Near and Far

When scholars hint at a rationale for the homeland (or Eretz-Israel)  || Diaspora distinction, it seems be that Judaeans of the homeland were near the mother-city and temple, whereas those of the Diaspora were not. But this vague criterion deserves to probed. Let us ponder the concrete realities of life for those living inside what the Diaspora model calls Eretz-Israel or the Jewish homeland. According to Stanford’s ORBIS map of the Roman world,35 which we may use for comparative purposes without taking its figures as infallible, if we select summer travel in favourable conditions, the trip from Alexandria to Jerusalem required about 5.5 days, from Antioch 6.5 days—if one travelled by ship as far as possible. But the Judaeans of Joppa and Azotus were 2 to 3 days 32 33 34 35

Frova 1961; Meshorer 2001: 167–76. Josephus, AJ 20.141–44, 162. Josephus, BJ 1.396; AJ 15.217, 351, 354; 16.14; 19.356–58; Mason 2016b: 262–80. http://orbis.stanford.edu/#.

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from Jerusalem, those in Caesarea and Scythopolis (100–120 km) more than 3 days away. Gerasa, Pella, and Gadara required 5 days or more. Even though these poleis were relatively close, they were as different from Jerusalem in custom and cult as Alexandria or Antioch and, given the practicalities of travel, they were nearly as far. Judaeans in all the poleis outside Jerusalem’s hinterland, Galilee, and Peraea lived amid foreign gods, calendars, and entertainments. None lived, for practical purposes, in the shadow of Jerusalem’s temple. Neither farmers nor merchants could simply have left their work for a week or more to visit Jerusalem. Such trips would have been as rare for them as for compatriots in Alexandria or Antioch: possible but needing careful planning. We all realise that crow-fly distance has no relationship to psychological distance. The distances of Ramallah (13 km / 8 mi) or even Amman (72 km / 45 mi) would be normal daily commutes in New York, Los Angeles, or Toronto, but they represent vast distances in our conceptual worlds. Even the two hours’ travel between Groningen and Amsterdam represent something far different from equivalent commutes in North America. For farmers and merchants, a trip requiring four days in each direction plus a stay in Jerusalem (even from Scythopolis or Caesarea) would have taken the better part of two weeks round trip. They were not living in the temple’s shadow. Some were minorities in alien poleis relatively near Jerusalem, others part of the Judaean-majority poleis in Galilee (Sepphoris, Tarichea, Tiberias) but a week’s travel away. Josephus observes that Galileans who needed to reach Jerusalem urgently might risk the serious danger of a three-day journey through hostile Samaria, though they would do this normally with a bodyguard (V 269). Otherwise, they took the circuitous route via the Jordan Valley, which required a week each way. Jericho, just the last stop on that route, was 24 km from Jerusalem, but a full day’s walk because of the 1060-meter ascent and the endemic banditry, which must have increased the psychological distance even between Jerusalem and Jericho.36 Where, then, are meaningful criteria for defining a Diaspora? Only in the chōrai of Jerusalem, Galilee, and Peraea did Judaean law and culture—calendar of festivals, sabbath observance, the prohibition of images and pork—hold sway. In this Judaeans were no different from other peoples. As Louise Revell writes of the western empire, beyond its own polis and chōra (urbs/civitas and territorium) any population was a vulnerable minority: A person’s allegiance was defined by the place in which they were born (their origo), and if they moved they became an incola [foreign resident]: 36

http://blog.bibleplaces.com/2006/11/jericho-to-jerusalem.html. Cf. BJ 2.125; Luke 9.51–56; 10.30; 17:11; 18.35.

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subject to the laws of, and with certain responsibilities toward, their adopted town, but with few privileges and only limited political rights.37 Judaeans in Alexandria knew this reality. Claudius’ letter of 41 CE insists that, although they were long settled there and should not be harassed by the citizen population, Judaeans lived there in a polis belonging to others (ἐν ἀλλοτρίᾳ πόλει).38 It was hardly different for Judaeans in Caesarea or Scythopolis— though by modern transport in Israel they may be only a couple of hours away. This is not to suggest that Judaeans living in Jamnia/Yavneh, coastal Caesarea, Scythopolis, or Galilee forgot about Jerusalem—any more than Judaeans in Alexandria or Rome did. We have plentiful evidence that they made pilgrimages to Jerusalem when possible, contributed annually to the temple’s maintenance, benefited from Jerusalem leaders’ and royals’ intercessions, and remained keenly interested in Jerusalem’s affairs. But if life away from the temple and amid foreign cultures are the criteria for defining a Diaspora, then the Judaeans of Caesarea, Scythopolis, or Gadara qualified. In this respect they were in much the same position, in day-to-day life, as their more distant compatriots. Let us glance at four examples of near-but-far sites. Jamnia. Although Yavneh is famous for early rabbinic activity, the pre-70 polis had an often hostile relationship with Jerusalem. The Hellenistic period finds it a home of ‘idols,’ an eager part of the Seleucid-led challenge to Judah Maccabee, scene of the disastrous rout of non-Hasmonean Judaeans, and home of ferocious conflict with Judaea, although a Judaean minority seems to have been present (2 Macc 12.8).39 The Hasmoneans largely destroyed it, but Pompey liberated it and Gabinius repopulated it with Syrians (BJ 1.156, 166). It became a prized revenue source for Herod, then his sister Salome, then Augustus’ wife Livia (BJ 1.98, 167). Josephus implies and Philo states that by Livia’s death in 29 CE, Jamnia’s population had become predominantly Judaean (BJ 3.56; Philo, Legat. 200), Philo even suggesting (‘in a manner of speaking’) that Judaeans were indigenous and the others foreigners, ‘snuck in’ to cause trouble. What he calls the mixed (μιγάδες) populace is necessary for understanding his story about Gaius Caligula’s statue. According to Philo, the emperor’s notorious plan to install the statue in Jerusalem’s temple came about because these ‘foreign residents’ in Jamnia seized an opportunity to aggravate their Judaean neighbours. Hearing of Gaius’ contempt for Judaeans, they build an altar to him where they know that 37 38 39

Revell 2009: 85. P. Lond. 1912 = Tcherikover and Fuks 1957–1963: 2. no. 153. 1 Macc 4.10–15; 5.57–61; 10.69; 15.40; 2 Macc 12.8–10, 40.

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Judaeans will take offence and knock it down, so they can report the contrived insult to an imperial agent there. In Rome, an Egyptian and an Ascalonite counsellor stoke the emperor’s fury, prompting his vengeful decision to put a larger statue in Jerusalem itself, the Judaeans’ own polis (Legat. 201–206). Plainly, Jamnia was not considered an obvious part of the Judaean homeland. Judaeans living there, according to their neighbours and the emperor, were in a foreign environment where they should have respected other customs. Coastal Caesarea is a fascinating case. Josephus leaves no doubt, and archaeology confirms, that Herod founded Caesarea as a non-Judaean polis. He dedicated it to the province of Syria, sailors plying the eastern Mediterranean, and Augustus. An early centre of imperial cult, it housed colossal statues, entertainment facilities, and games (BJ 1.408–15). By the 50s CE, however, the Judaean minority had grown sufficiently strong to take the unparalleled step of trying to have the polis recognised (perhaps re-chartered) as theirs, a place in which Judaean law and custom would prevail.40 This may have resulted from their growing feeling of vulnerability in the 40s and 50s, given that Caesarea was home to the chiefly Samarian auxiliary, which had celebrated the demise of King Agrippa I in 44 CE with vulgar street parties, and generally thrown its weight around with impunity, notably under Ventidius Cumanus (48–52 CE).41 Judaeans in Caesarea may have felt that, if the auxiliary was not to be based in Jerusalem under the discipline of a Judaean monarch, Caesarea—given its prominent Judaean minority and the imperial tradition of protecting Judaeans—must be recognised as a Judaean city. Any number of other economic, social, and political factors may have fuelled tensions in Caesarea, but the only shared premise of Josephus’ two, otherwise conflicting, narratives is that Judaeans took the initiative in trying to have Caesarea recognised as Judaean (see further Chapter 7).42 Launching this initiative under the procurator Felix, who was now married to the Herodian Drusilla, while the teenaged emperor Nero was still continuing Claudius’ favourable policies toward Judaeans, they must have imagined success to be plausible. But their request was delayed in Rome for several years. By the time the increasingly Hellenophile emperor answered it, he had discarded his Claudian tutors and murdered his mother, Claudius’ widow, to pursue his own course. He vetoed the request. According to Josephus, Nero’s insistence that Caesarea retain its Greek character became a foundation of the coming war (BJ 2.284). 40 41 42

BJ 2.267–68; AJ 20.175–76. AJ 19.356–66; 20.105–36. BJ 2.266–70, 284–96; AJ 20.173–78, 182–84.

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But how? The very boldness of the Judaeans’ request, accompanied by their attempt to buy up land, inflamed tensions on both sides as the purchase offers were refused. This led to property disputes, insults, and increasingly aggressive behaviour. The studied indifference of Nero’s new procurator in the mid-60s, Gessius Florus, put the Judaean minority in a precarious position. They suddenly lacked the accustomed support of the central government, while they faced a population in Caesarea that had the locally recruited auxiliary on its side. This led to the mass murder of Judaeans, which in turn provoked Judaean reprisals against other Syrian poleis and was connected with the massacre of the auxiliary garrison in Jerusalem. This turmoil, in its turn, added lethality to the legate Cestius Gallus’ legionary expedition to Jerusalem, the failure of which would bring Vespasian to Syria the following spring (BJ 2.450–555). Caesarea’s Judaeans could not have imagined that they were living in a Judaean homeland. Scythopolis. Josephus uses the Judaeans’ retaliatory raids for Caesarea to spotlight the plight of Judaeans in Scythopolis. Because they felt an unshakeable bond with their townsfolk, they joined them in vigorously repulsing the assaults of the Judaean avengers from the south. Indeed, a Judaean named Simon was one of Scythopolis’ most effective fighters. But that did not help him when the threat had passed. In a scenario that would repeat itself until modern times, the citizen population feared that its Judaean minority would conspire with compatriots from Jerusalem. They gathered a reported 13,000 Judaeans in a grove to massacre them. Josephus portrays Simon in tragic terms. Under a primordial curse, he claims, for having shed the blood of fellow-Judaeans—it is unclear how he could have acted otherwise; hence the tragic tone—Simon gives a recognition speech before he runs through his family and then himself (BJ 2.466–76). In some respects, the story foreshadows Masada in War 7. Irrespective of its historical veracity, it vividly conveys the tensions that must have existed in such situations, between ethnos (Judaean) and polis (Scythopolitan) allegiance, for Judaean minorities. Josephus claims that similar scenes played out through the region, as poleis turned against their Judaean minorities.43 In the Syrian capital of Antioch, he describes the efforts of the citizen body to expel their Judaeans, even those who had achieved citizenship, and Titus’ telling response that ‘their homeland (ἥ γε πατρὶς αὐτῶν), into which one might have expelled them, since they are Judaeans, has been destroyed’ (BJ 7.109). As minorities without secure rights in foreign poleis, Judaeans in Jamnia, Caesarea, and Scythopolis were in much the same situation as those in Alexandria or Antioch. They could not 43

Cf. BJ 2.477–483; 7.364–67.

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have imagined that they lived in a Judaean homeland, outside of which was a ‘Diaspora.’ Sepphoris. Unlike the sites above, Sepphoris was a Judaean polis from late Hasmonean times, and recognised as such by Roman officials. I include it to underscore the local diversity, in this case detachment from Jerusalem’s troubles. At the outset of the revolt, when Cestius Gallus marched southward, whereas Jerusalem would soon rebuff him and its militants would ambush his soldiers, Sepphoris welcomed him and requested a legionary garrison (BJ 2.510–13). Coins and structural remains confirm Sepphoris’ loyalty to Rome.44 Josephus also claims that Sepphoris’ leaders prevented their citizens from involving themselves in Jerusalem’s conflicts (V 346). The same appears to have held for Judaean Peraea and Idumaea; at least we have no evidence of their rushing to Jerusalem’s aid in the face of Florus’ humiliations. When Vespasian reached Ptolemais with two legions and Agrippa II early in 67, Sepphoris’ officials joined those from Tiberias, the Decapolis, and other northern poleis in welcoming him, effectively precluding any sustained war in Galilee.45 Whereas the examples above show Judaean minorities living fairly close to Jerusalem but in a world as alien and dangerous as Alexandria or Antioch, Sepphoris shows a majority-Judaean population within the ‘homeland’ but distant enough to have an independent outlook, precluding any idea of a shared mentality. The same might be said of Tiberias, Tarichea, or Judaean Peraea. 4

Conclusion

Judaeans facing mortal peril in Caesarea or Scythopolis did not know they were living in their own homeland and could not share our simple classifications. Imposing a modern Israel  || Diaspora dichotomy on the ancient Mediterranean obscures the radical diversity of the polis-centred landscape. Imagining a unified Jewish homeland that corresponds to modern Israel and a Diaspora outside it requires us to pack up the colourful ancient ethnos-polis bits and pieces into the suitcases of modern nation-states. Such simplicity comes at the cost of, and precludes investigation into, historical understanding of regional diversity. Jonathan Price’s 1994 call for a moratorium on Diaspora language has a point still. 44 45

Meshorer 1982: 2.16–69; Meyers 2002: 110–20. See Mason 2016a: 335–401.

Chapter 2

Stranger Danger! Judaean Non-Mixing (Amixia) in Graeco-Roman Context Philo and Josephus were fluent in the cultural discourse of their world. They explained Judaean laws and customs in ways that resonated with the highest Graeco-Roman values. For both, the laws of Moses embody the very laws of nature (φύσις) and so provide the finest human constitution (πολιτεῖα). The Judaean νόμοι breathe justice and humanity and virtue; they inculcate simplicity of life and contempt for death. Louis Feldman showed in many studies that Josephus paraphrased the Bible (Antiquities 1–11) in such a way as to find common ground with Graeco-Roman values, while dropping or marginalising elements that might offend or cause confusion.1 Judaeans also faced criticism from Graeco-Roman intellectuals, particularly on account of their perceived aloofness or non-mixing with other peoples.2 Yet on this question, far from trying to conceal or explain away the perception, Josephus (like Philo) celebrates it as a virtue. How should we explain that, given their sensitivity to contemporary values and outsider impressions? This chapter is an initial probe. To keep it manageable, I shall focus on Josephus and eventually one word, which encapsulates the problem: ἀμιξία (non-mingling, aloofness). It suggests the negation or absence of something normally expected: ἐπιμιξία (mingling) or similar. We shall use Josephus’ lone ἀμιξία passage, which includes two occurrences of the noun, and two passages with the cognate adjective ἄμικτος (unmingled, unable to mingle) as reference points for constructing a literary context outside his works, with special attention to Tacitus and Philo. This should enable us to return to Josephus with clearer criteria for identifying a thematic strain in his work. My proposal is that Josephus presents what could be seen as offensive ἀμιξία in a way that accords with the most elevated Greek thinking about legal systems. Needless to say, the question here is not about the actual lives of Judaeans and their varied real-life interactions in Alexandria, Antioch, or Rome. That would require an entirely different kind of study. We are here trying to understand a 1 Cf. Feldman 199a for a synthesis, Feldman 1998b for examples. Josephus’ neglect of Septuagintal διαθήκη as ‘covenant’ (using it only for wills) is an obvious case. Spilsbury 1998 argues that Josephus reinterprets the covenantal idea in patron-client terms. 2 Cf. Stern 1974–1984; e.g., Diodorus, Strabo, and Tacitus.

© Steve Mason, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004545960_004

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significant set of ideas in the late first century—friendly exchange, perceived aloofness, possible justifications—from different perspectives. 1

Preliminaries

In the ethnographical mindset that prevailed throughout pre-Christian antiquity, from Hecataeus of Miletus and Herodotus through the Neo-Platonist Julian—in the time ‘before religion’3—loyalty to one’s ancestral nomoi was an axiomatic virtue. While criticising the Persian Cambyses for his impious behaviour in Egypt, Herodotus wrote (3.38): If someone could somehow design an experiment, directing all humans to choose the finest nomoi from all nomoi, even after making a careful examination each would choose their very own. To such a degree do they consider their own nomoi to be the finest. […] It seems to me that Pindar formulated it properly when he said that that ‘nomos is king of all’ (νόμον πάντων βασιλέα). Half a millennium later, Josephus assumes this virtue as he taunts the late Egyptian-become-Alexandrian Apion (Ap. 2.144), though nomos has by now hardened to ‘law’: It is the duty of thoughtful people to devote themselves to the scrupulous maintenance of their own nomoi in relation to piety, and not to malign those of others (τοῖς μὲν οἰκείοις νόμοις περὶ τὴν εὐσέβειαν ἀκριβῶς ἐμμένειν, τοὺς δὲ τῶν ἄλλων μὴ λοιδορεῖν). This fellow not only abandoned his; he traduced ours! Similarly, Josephus castigates the Judaeans’ critics for contrasting them with other ethnē on the ground that each people’s traditions are sacrosanct and should be respected, no matter how strange they seem. Since his enemies have begun making odious comparisons, however, he will reluctantly play the game, and contrast Judaean laws advantageously with those of others (Ap. 2.237): ‘I certainly would have preferred not to scrutinise others’ legal precepts; for it is our tradition to guard our own and not to bring accusations against others’ (ἐγὼ δ᾿ οὐκ ἂν ἐβουλόμην περὶ τῶν παρ᾿ ἑτέροις νομίμων ἐξετάζειν· τὰ γὰρ αὑτῶν ἡμῖν φυλάττειν πάτριόν ἐστιν, οὐ τῶν ἀλλοτρίων κατηγορεῖν). In our world, which 3 Nongbri 2013; Barton and Boyarin 2016.

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runs on the same calendar and enjoys instant global communication, it is impossible for us to imagine the radical diversity, even in a small geographical area, that characterised ancient life. No doubt most people had little time for reflecting on the big picture of peoples and nations. But those who did—Greek thinkers from Herodotus to Stephanus of Byzantium were fascinated by the variety of ethnē—used the same sort of ‘world-affirming’ language. Members of each ethnos were expected to cherish their ancestral nomoi and equally to respect the very different ways of others. The second-century philosopher Celsus invoked the same view, held by all decent people, to attack the Christians. Recalling Pindar’s pithy phrase, he made a distinction between Judaeans and Christians on this issue. Whatever one thinks of Judaean nomoi (he does not care for them), they are ancient. They inspire appropriate loyalty among Judaeans and demand respect from foreigners. Christians, though they were born into various ethnē with ancient laws and customs, have rejected such loyalty and turned their backs on their societies’ ordering principles (Origen, Cels. 5.34–35, 40–41). 2

Josephus’ Amixia Passage in Its Literary Context

The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (TLG) shows only about ten occurrences of ἀμιξία up to Josephus’ time, and another five by the end of the third century. The most relevant—leaving aside the mere mixing or non-mixing of substances in Aristotle and Theophrastus—are as follows. Thucydides (1.3.4) says that the Trojan War first united the Hellenes; before that, they had lived in isolation (ἀμειξία). Isocrates, in the voice of the Spartan Archidamos, commiserates with the Achaeans, who face fearful isolation (Archid. 67). Polybius uses ἀμιξία twice in his criticism of the Carthaginians for using mercenary troops, for in a crisis their lack of understanding leaves them in a state of ἀμιξία vis-à-vis the citizens, unreachable (1.67.3, 11). Plutarch uses ἀμιξία with χαλεπός (‘harsh,’ ‘ferocious’) to describe the savagery of Dolopians on the island of Scyros (Thes. 36.2), the horde of Teutons heading towards Italy under Marius, who were mysterious because they would not interact with others (Mar. 11.4), and the uncultured ruler who lives in isolation from his people (Princ. iner. 780a). In all cases, the negative resonance is clear. Lucian, assuming that negative connotation, explains how it came to apply to the notorious Athenian misanthrope Timon. Paradoxically, Timon’s love of people caused his withdrawal, after trusted friends swindled him out of a fortune. When sympathetic gods allowed Timon to discover gold in compensation for that loss, he understandably adopted a life of ἀμιξία (Tim. 42). This is a

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case study of misanthropy, as described by Socrates in the Phaedo (89b–91c): people who have been harmed by trusting others naturally protect themselves by becoming aloof. Tacitus (Hist. 5.3–4) uses a similar logic to explain Judaean aloofness. Their suffering at Egyptian hands made them hostile to humanity. In a section of Philostratus’ marvellous Life of Apollonius of Tyana, the Greek sage and Thespesion of Egypt engage in a good-natured debate about the merits of their cultures (Vit. Apoll. 6.20). Thespesion mentions the Spartan practice of flogging young men at the altar of Artemis Orthia. How can other Greeks—and Apollonius himself—admire such brutal behaviour? Or the famed Spartan removal of foreigners: ξενηλασία (cf. Thucydides 1.144)? Why are these not offensive to Greeks, as they would be to Egyptians? Would it not be better for Spartans, the Egyptian sarcastically asks, to sacrifice one or two foreigners rather than ban them all? Apollonius argues that ξενηλασία is actually admirable (6.20): Let’s not pick on [the Spartan lawgiver] Lycurgus, Thespesion, for we need to understand the man, and that when he excluded strangers from settling in, he did not have ἀμιξία in mind, but wanted to keep the habits of Sparta healthy and free from external debasement (οὐκ ἀμιξίας αὐτῷ νοῦν εἶχεν, ἀλλὰ τοῦ ὑγιαίνειν τὰς ἐπιτηδεύσεις μὴ ἐνομιλούντων τῇ Σπάρτῃ τῶν ἔξωθεν). Thespesion is not impressed. First, he says, real virtue would consist in mingling with others and still preserving one’s virtue, not in taking the easy path of isolation. Second, despite their vaunted isolation, the Spartans have in fact borrowed much from others. Their fuss about keeping themselves unsullied is nonsense. We soon discover, however, that Thespesion does not mean any of this. His ultimate aim is to expose the folly of trying to rationalise customs, as Apollonius has done. Customs simply vary according to each people’s situation. Thinking about Spartan foreigner-expulsion (ξενηλασία), which is on the ‘non-mixing’ (ἀμιξία) spectrum, brings us to two passages in Plato. In the Protagoras, Socrates anticipates Apollonius by insisting that Spartan ξενηλασία is necessary, for the protection of its special wisdom, and especially from Laconisers. Laconisers here are Sparta fanboys, who gravitate to the polis because they admire the fitness regime. They fail to understand that Spartan strength comes from its wisdom about governance and discipline (Prot. 342c). Such hangers-on cannot live the life, and so must be disinvited so they do not cheapen and dilute Sparta’s unique potency. Even more important is Plato’s last work, The Laws. Here, three elders from various poleis are planning an ideal new polis: Magnesia on Crete. The Athenian

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member is appalled to learn that its location will be a mere 80 stadia (16 km) from a harbour, because this means constant interaction with foreigners; it will need ‘a mighty saviour and divine lawgivers’ if it is to avoid ‘luxurious and depraved habits’ (4.704–5). In the final part of the work, the sages ponder the extent to which this polis should isolate itself from foreigners in Spartan fashion. They agree that a uniquely well-governed polis must protect itself from contamination (12.950a): Foreigners interacting with foreigners means novelties being grafted in (καινοτομίας ἀλλήλοις ἐμποιούντων ξένων ξένοις). For those who are well governed by proper laws, this would inflict enormous damage all round—though with most poleis, which are hardly well regulated, it doesn’t matter. Since their new polis will indeed be well-governed, they must limit the scope for contamination, while avoiding a reputation for misanthropy. To do this, the committee proposes strict limits on foreign travel. Only those older than forty may leave, only in pairs or groups, and only in a public capacity. The polis may send men abroad to seek out the wise elsewhere, but such investigators must be in their fifties, if they are to be incorruptible by foreign customs (12.951a–c). As for inbound risks, the planners contemplate receiving summer tourists, festival-goers, or officials from other poleis on public business. They will be hospitably received, but allowed to meet only the necessary citizens and forbidden from introducing novelties. Anyone who visited the Soviet Union might see parallels. Plato’s Laws put ἀμιξία on a noble footing. It is necessary when common mixing would pose a danger to unusually excellent laws. Porphyry’s On Abstinence makes a similar point in relation to what is sacred. Shortly after his glowing description of the Judaeans and their Essene masters of discipline, Porphyry reflects on purity (De ab. 4.20): ‘Holy men postulated that purity means the separation [ἀμιξία] of opposites, whereas mingling means defiling’ (ἁγνείαν γὰρ ἐτίθεντο οἱ ἱεροὶ ⟨τὴν⟩ πρὸς τοὐναντίον ἀμιξίαν, μολυσμὸν δὲ τὴν μῖξιν). Since every polis included sacred or consecrated areas, and concepts of purity and pollution were ubiquitous, Josephus can expect his audience’s admiration when he says of the Judaean priests—a hereditary caste, unlike those of Mediterranean poleis (Ap. 1.30): [Our ancestors] from the beginning not only put in charge of these matters the best men and those devoted to the service of God; they also made provision so that the ancestral line of the priests should remain unmixed

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and pure’ (ἀλλ᾿ ὅπως τὸ γένος τῶν ἱερέων ἄμικτον καὶ καθαρὸν διαμενεῖ προυνόησαν). The logic is unassailable: to keep something pure, you must separate it from sources of contamination. The only question was whether a group claiming to require such aloofness deserved it. A gated community may be merely antisocial. 2 Maccabees is germane for the ἀμιξία question because it thematises this language in relation to the crisis of forced mixing under the Seleucid king Antiochus IV. Although the royal power threatens Judaeans’ allegiance to their ancestral nomoi, the king’s measures result from energetic ‘mixing’ initiatives by Jerusalem’s disgraceful priestly elite—the very men who should have been at the forefront of championing ancestral laws. Their designs, summarised by the author with the neologisms ‘hellenising’ and ‘foreignising’ (Ἑλληνισμός, ἀλλοφυλισμός), are vividly explained. They would abandon their customary service in the sacred temple to pursue foreign, Greek values, institutions, customs, and even dress (2 Macc 4.13). Although this is a Judaean text, the disgrace would have been clear to any Greek reader. In 2 Maccabees 14, the author refers twice to ‘the times of ἀμιξία’ (ἐν τοῖς τῆς ἀμειξίας χρόνοις). This is a strange construction, both because the ‘times’ refer to one brief period of testing, not times in general, and because the meaning and function of ἀμιξία are not immediately clear. On the basis of parallels in documents concerning Ptolemaic Egypt, Daniel Schwartz argues that ‘times of strife’ is the best translation.4 That may be so, as ‘apartness’ could signify conflict, but it is not the most obvious meaning, and one wonders how the audiences of 2 Maccabees could have discerned it from context. In the context, where cultural mixing and dilution (foreignising, Hellenising) is the problem, and behaving as a true Judaean (Ἰουδαϊσμός) to maintain the ancestral laws is the proper solution (exampled by Razis), the formulaic ‘times of ἀμιξία’ might simply suggest the times when separation was needed.5 This chapter, at any rate, contrasts the behaviour of two prominent Judaeans during that time of crisis. The high priest Alcimus destroyed his credentials, at the altar and among the people, by deliberately contaminating himself when the times called for separation (ἑκουσίως δὲ μεμολυσμένος ἐν τοῖς τῆς ἀμειξίας χρόνοις; 14.3). His only remaining gambit was to become a puppet high priest of 4 Schwartz 2008: 469. 5 So the NETS translation at 2 Macc. 14.3: ‘in the times of separation’, elaborated at 14.38 (ἐν τοῖς ἔμπροσθεν χρόνοις τῆς ἀμειξίας) as ‘in former times, when there was no mingling with the nations’.

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the Seleucid regime, which did not work out well. In sharp contrast, the wise elder Razis emerges as a lover of his polis-people (ἀνὴρ φιλοπολίτης), called affectionately the ‘father of the Judaeans’ (14.37). He threw himself wholeheartedly into the defence of Judaean law and culture, which the author characterises as Judaising (Ἰουδαϊσμός; 14.38), over against foreign dilution. Any ancient reader should have found these traits admirable. But in the upside-down world of the crisis, they become capital charges against Razis. The premise that the Israelite ‘am or Judaean ethnos must not mingle its laws with those of foreigners taps a deep biblical vein. Before Moses receives the Law at Sinai, God declares: ‘The whole earth is mine, but you shall be for me a priestly kingdom and a holy nation’ (Exodus 19.5–6). In Numbers 25, God commands the death of those Israelites who have mixed with women of the neighbouring peoples (cf. Deut 7.3–4). The great scribe Ezra requires Jerusalemites to divorce their foreign wives (Ezra 9.1–10.11). Separation (havdalah) is a bedrock theme of biblical and post-biblical literature. From an ancient ethnographic perspective, all of this was normal enough. Each ethnos had its charter myths and laws; they were nevertheless expected to get along with everyone else. How were these concerns playing out for Judaeans in the first century CE? And so we reach the two occurrences of ἀμιξία in Josephus. The setting is 134 BCE, shortly after John Hyrcanus assumes direction of the budding Hasmonean state. The Seleucid king Antiochus VII Sidetes, having fallen out with Hyrcanus’ father, Simon, in the preceding years, is fed up and decides to besiege Jerusalem. When the Feast of Booths arrives, the Jerusalemites request a ceasefire. Antiochus not only allows it but contributes magnificent sacrifices. This pious gesture encourages Hyrcanus to ask for more. How about self-rule for Jerusalem? Remarkably, Antiochus agrees—on the conditions that Jerusalem hand over all weapons, pay tribute for the territories already taken from Seleucid rule by Simon, and accept a Seleucid garrison to replace the one Simon expelled (13.215–217). Hyrcanus agrees to the first two proposals. In place of the third—so intolerable is the prospect of a foreign garrison—he offers hundreds of hostages and massive compensation. Still more remarkably, Antiochus agrees. This deal becomes crucial for the Hasmonean expansion to follow. Ἀμιξία appears in this episode twice in rapid succession. First, in showing his reverence for the Jerusalem temple, Josephus’ Antiochus ignores the advice of his commanders, who ‘urged him to eradicate the [Judaean] ethnos on account of the ἀμιξία of their way of life towards others’ (AJ 13.245). Then in the next sentence, the narrator confirms that Jerusalemites could not accept a Seleucid garrison because ‘they did not intermingle with others on account of their ἀμιξία’ (13.247).

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Josephus has anticipated the anti-Judaean counsellors’ advice two volumes earlier, in the Persian official Haman’s advice to King Artaxerxes. Annoyed that the Judaean Mordechai will not prostrate himself before Persian majesty, Haman wants him killed for starters. He then quickly expands this to a plea to destroy Mordechai’s whole ethnos, on the same charge of ἀμιξία (AJ 11.212): So he [Haman] comes to the king and accuses them, saying that there was a certain contemptible ethnos, and it is dispersed through the inhabited earth under his rule: ‘Separated [ἄμικτος], unassimilable, neither having the same worship as others nor following similar laws, hostile to your people and all humanity in customs and practices (ἄμικτον ἀσύμφυλον οὔτε θρησκείαν τὴν αὐτὴν τοῖς ἄλλοις ἔχον οὔτε νόμοις χρώμενον ὁμοίοις, ἐχθρὸν δὲ καὶ τοῖς ἔθεσι καὶ τοῖς ἐπιτηδεύμασιν τῷ σῷ λαῷ καὶ ἅπασιν ἀνθρώποις). This ethnos—if you want to leave some benefaction for your subjects—you should order destroyed down to its roots, with no remainder of it left behind whatsoever, not even under guard in slavery or captivity.’ As a motive for Haman’s rapid escalation from indignation on the king’s behalf concerning Mordechai to genocide, Josephus elaborates what the Bible only hints at: that Haman was an Amalekite, a descendant of the people the Israelites had been told to eradicate, down to the last infant and animal (AJ 3.60; 6.132–33). It is time for revenge. Although Haman’s plot is overridden by the wise king, and Josephus delights in his miserable end, he makes the man’s antipathy humanly understandable. The same campaign of Antiochus VII appears in other surviving texts, sometimes with the more expected conclusion of a final assault on Jerusalem. So it is in Eusebius, Chron. 1.255 (Latin from Armenian): ‘In the third year of the 162nd Olympiad [=  130 BCE—apparently a mistake] he conquered the Judaeans, pulled down the walls [of Jerusalem] after a siege, and put their leaders to death.’ Diodorus of Sicily (34/35.1.1–5), however, knew an account that ends up where Josephus does, though not before giving the king’s advisors a much fuller airing:6 Now most of his friends advised the king to take the polis by storm and to destroy completely the genos of the Judaeans. For of all ethnē they alone reject fellowship in the way of mixing in with another ethnos (τῆς πρὸς ἄλλο ἔθνος ἐπιμιξίας) and see everyone as enemies. They pointed out, further, that these people’s ancestors had been forced to flee all of Egypt, as 6 See Stern 1974–1984: 1.181–83.

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impious and hated by the gods. […] Those who had been banished occupied the spots around Hierosolyma and, after establishing the ethnos of the Judaeans, made the hatred of humanity hereditary. For this reason, they laid down utterly bizarre legal precepts: neither to share a table with another ethnos or even to show any good will of any kind. His friends also reminded him of the longstanding hatred among his ancestors for this ethnos. […] Going through all this, his friends implored Antiochus to destroy the ethnos completely or, if not, to abolish their laws and force them to change their ways. The king, being magnanimous and gentle in character, took hostages but dismissed the charges against the Judaeans—after seeing to the tribute owed and dismantling Jerusalem’s walls. It is hardly surprising that a king facing the rigours of a siege waves off the advisors’ historical erudition as bizarrely abstract and irrelevant to the military situation or his priorities in government. Josephus shows, nevertheless, that he is well aware of such perceptions of the Judaeans and even gives them an airing. Diodorus agrees that in the interest of productive governing, wise political leaders have disregarded such attempts to rationalise or assess cultures, or to punish Judaeans for being different. 3

Tacitus and the Allure of the Exclusive

Tacitus’ famous excursus on Judaeans in Histories book 5 implies a similar distinction between intellectual assessment and the imperatives of effective governing. He knows that Jerusalem was once a famous and successful city (urbs famosa, 5.2) under Rome’s imperium, despite his distaste for its customs. Notice his use of Latin equivalents for ethnos, polis, and cultic activity. The Iudaei are a gens (11 times in this brief description) among other gentes; he refers 15 times to the urbs Jerusalem, which he calls the head of the gens (5.8: genti caput). He is pausing his narrative of Flavian rule, after all, to describe the urbs and gens (= the polis and ethnos) that Titus attacked in the spring of 70 (5.2, 13), though his account of Jerusalem’s destruction is lost.7 Space does not permit interaction with the divergent readings of this passage—bitter anti-Semitic slander, a warning against proselytism, a passing

7 This point and its importance for understanding the passage are laid out in the exemplary study by Bloch 2002.

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contextualisation of the Flavian achievement, or a bit of rhetorical mischief.8 Our interest is in Hist. 5.4–5, where Judaean laws and customs are reviewed with an emphasis on their difference, separateness, and aloofness. René Bloch has shown that the movement in this passage is towards the (missing) destruction of Jerusalem.9 He rightly rejects proposals that the passage was written to warn Jews or Romans about proselytism, but I wonder whether Tacitus’ remarks about the Judaean attraction of foreigners have received enough attention (Hist. 5.5): For the worst element [of other gentes], scorning their ancestral devotions, gathered up for them their contributions and presents. This grew the wealth of the Judaeans, as did the fact that among themselves they are steadfastly loyal and ready with compassion, though they regard the rest of humanity with all the hatred of enemies (Nam pessimus quisque spretis religionibus patriis tributa et stipes illuc congerebant, unde auctae Iudaeorum res, et quia apud ipsos fides obstinata, misericordia in promptu, sed adversus omnis alios hostile odium). Tacitus is evidently peeved at the support that Romans and others have given this foreign people and their world-famous temple, now destroyed and the Judaeans humiliated. It might seem contradictory to make both accusations— the Judaeans isolate themselves from others, and many people want to join them!—but this is what he does. Perhaps they are two sides of the same coin, and that coin (in Tacitus’ imagination) is what built Jerusalem. One way into this question is to consider Tacitus’ Germania, which speaks glowingly, for the most part, of an imagined large, formidable, and virtuous population beyond the reach of Roman ambition. For example, at 2.1 he writes: ‘The Germani […] have in no way been mixed by the arrivals and alliances of other peoples’ (minimeque aliarum gentium adventibus et hospitiis mixtos).10 Again at 4.1: ‘I agree with the views of those who think that the inhabitants of Germania have not been tainted by any intermarriage with other tribes, but have existed as a distinct and pure people, resembling only themselves’ (qui Germaniae populos nullis aliis aliarum nationum connubiis infectos propriam et sinceram et tantum sui similem gentem exstitisse arbitrantur). At 9.2, he lauds their way of worship, which eschews temples and images of the deity: ‘They 8 9 10

For the first three, see Bloch 2002, 16–26, and his main argument; for the fourth, see Gruen 2011b: 179–96. See Bloch 2002. This translation is by Rives 1999.

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judge it not in accord with the greatness of the gods to confine them with walls or to liken them in appearance to any human countenance.’11 In 19–20, he commends their natural approach to marriage and child-raising: one man and one woman mate for life and raise the children they produce. Whatever specific aims scholars attribute to the Germania, the isolation of this people and their consequent purity are central to Tacitus’ portrayal.12 The strange thing is that each of these points finds a parallel in his description of the Judaeans, where however such traits are disparaged (Hist. 5.5). The Judaeans are reliably loyal and compassionate to one another, though they regard outsiders as hostile. Among the Germani, the contrast between harmonious home life and the men’s readiness to fight all foreigners is even more sharply put (Germ. 6–10, 14–16). Whereas the Germani are admired for keeping their ancestral stock pure, untainted by foreign marriage (4.1), Tacitus complains that Judaeans do not sleep with foreigners, even practising male circumcision to maintain sexual exclusivity. Like the Germani, Judaeans produce many children and raise them all, rather than exposing unwanted offspring in the Graeco-Roman tradition. And Judaeans are, Tacitus acknowledges, contemptuous of death, especially in battle, because of their belief that brave souls are rewarded after death. Given that contempt for death was a principal aim of philosophical training (e.g., Seneca, Ep. 24), which Josephus will celebrate as a uniquely Judaean virtue,13 it seems that Tacitus has trouble finding anything inherently deplorable to support his harsh adjectives for Judaean custom. Indeed, he seems to give up. The rest of Hist. 5.5 is a contrast between Judaean and Egyptian views of subterranean and heavenly matters, in which Judaeans plainly have the advantage. Egyptians worship all kinds of animals and contrived images, whereas Judaeans insist that one can grasp the one true deity only through the mind (Iudaei mente sola unumque numen intellegunt). The gloss that Judaeans understand the Supreme Being to be eternal and subject to neither representation nor decay makes this an undeniably laudatory statement. It distances

11

12 13

Tacitus was in good philosophical company in applauding natural aniconic worship; cf. Diogenes Laertius 1.6; 9.19. According to Plutarch, the Roman king Numa (Num. 87–8), and according to Augustine, the philosopher Varro (Civ. 4.31) rejected images. Cicero presents a Stoic as scorning divine anthropomorphism (Nat. d. 2.28) and relates that Xerxes destroyed the temples of the Athenians ‘because he considered it impious for the gods, whose home is this entire world, to be held shut up within walls’ (Rep. 3.14; cf. Leg. 2.26). See Rives 1999: 51–56. Josephus, BJ 2.128, 151, 377; 3.356, 475; 5.458; 6.33, 42; 7.406; Ap. 2.294; cf. Epictetus (Arrian, Diatr. 1.130–32, 2.21–22) and Plutarch (Brut. 12.2; Spartan Sayings 210f, 216c, 219e).

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Judaeans from the Egyptians on a point that attracted Roman ridicule of the latter: animal worship.14 Where does Tacitus’ animus toward Judaeans come from, then? He appears to divide his material on them into three parts. First, they have customs emerging from their Egyptian origins (5.4): sabbath, pork-abstention, fasting days, and the choice of sacrificial victims. These are strange, perhaps, but they enjoy the irrefragable defence of being very old (antiquitate defenduntur; 5.5). A seemingly intended third group, beginning halfway through 5.5 (Corpora condere […] caelestium contra), creates an inclusio with 5.4, returning to ancient beliefs and practices that distinguish Judaeans from Egyptians to the Judaeans’ credit. In between is a section marked off by the caption (5.5.1): ‘The rest of their enterprises [or undertakings] receive their vigour from being perverse, disgusting, and depraved’ (cetera instituta, sinistra foeda, pravitate valuere). Circumcision, mentioned only in this part, Tacitus must know to be as ancient as the respectable old customs. Why put it here? Although one could propose various reasons, in the text the Judaeans’ obvious difference from the Germani lies in their attraction of foreign supporters. Those who go over to the Judaeans, Tacitus complains, immediately regard Jerusalem as their homeland and send money to support its temple, turning their backs on their proper allegiances to family and their ancestral laws. As soon as he has spat out the trio of derisive adjectives above, Tacitus justifies his accusation about their disgusting ways by citing (‘for,’ nam) the defection of foreigners to support them (5.5.1). He continues with another juxtaposition of exclusiveness and attraction: Holding banquets separate from others, and exclusive in their marriage beds—though as a gens they are singularly prone to lust—they refrain from cohabitation with foreigners; among themselves, nothing is unlawful (Separati epulis, discreti cubilibus, proiectissima ad libidinem gens, alienarum concubitu abstinent; inter se nihil inlicitum). Cutting of the genitals they introduced in order to be recognisable by the difference (Circumcidere genitalia instituerunt ut diversitate noscantur). Those who go over to their way of life quickly grasp the principle, with which they are indeed thoroughly infected, of despising the gods, disowning their patria, and holding in contempt their own parents, children, and brothers 14

Lina Girdvainytė (2015: 92) shows how complex Tacitus’s picture of Egypt was—it was not merely anti-Egyptian. Still, Tacitus shared the common view of animal worship as ‘the most despicable practice of Egyptian religion in the eyes of the Romans.’

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(Transgressi in morem eorum idem usurpant, nec quicquam prius imbuuntur quam contemnere deos, exuere patriam, parentes liberos fratres vilia habere). This most pregnant of authors takes the trouble to spell out the consequences of adopting Judaean laws: those who do so instantly become as exclusive as other Judaeans. Now we can see what he may be doing by including circumcision among the depraved customs. He mischievously makes it a function and badge of sexual exclusiveness. Stressing that Judaeans are resolutely opposed to sleeping with foreigners, but up for anything with each other, he says that they instituted circumcision to be identifiable by the difference (ut diversitate noscantur)—when naked, obviously. Their men will mate only with other Judaeans, including the women who have joined them. Tacitus’ entire section on the Judaean ways he finds offensive thus consists only of these two symbiotic conditions: their exclusiveness and their attraction of foreigners. The force of his claim comes in the governing verb valuere: they enjoy their vigour or strength because of their disreputable stealing of foreigners from their proper loyalties. Judaean exclusiveness is not like that of the remote, harmless, and admirable Germani, therefore, because Judaeans are found throughout the Mediterranean. They are well known, admired, and a significant presence in the cities of the empire. Tacitus mentions nothing here about proselytism, it is true: no seeking of converts. Quite the opposite: Judaeans keep to themselves. But that very aloofness exercises a profound attraction. They are the only gens that lives among others but keeps itself so fully apart. Exclusiveness has its appeal. Why mention all this in a narrative that ended with Jerusalem’s destruction? In trying to describe the people (gens) and the urbs about to be destroyed, it makes sense that Tacitus would highlight distinctive traits. He does that throughout the section on laws and customs (5.4–5), where most of the differences from the Egyptians (from whom they allegedly sprang) speak well of Judaeans. What offends him, as far as he discloses his thinking, is the frequent defection of others to support Judaea in times past. This is directly relevant to Jerusalem’s post-Herodian glory, because the wealth and fame of Jerusalem’s temple came about in large part from foreign support. Tacitus may here be expressing the indignation that caused the Flavians to impose a tax for the fiscus iudaicus on all those who considered themselves Judaeans throughout the empire, after Jerusalem’s fall (BJ 7.218). His language recalls that of Josephus, scripting Titus’ outrage while addressing Simon and John immediately after the temple has burned (BJ 6.335–36):

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Most of all, we entrusted you with collecting tribute for God and sacred donations, and neither clamped down on these transfers nor prohibited them. The result was that you became richer [than we], and began making preparations against us with our money. And then, while enjoying such good things, you turned your abundance and privilege on those who provided them, and as untameable snakes you spat out venom on those showing such tender care [for you]! Greeks and Romans were familiar with admiring emulation (ζῆλος) of foreign constitutions or poleis, which was forgivable and even admirable if the object were worthy—Sparta rather than Crete, Cilicia, or Egypt—and as long as the attraction was not fanatical, leading to the abandonment of one’s own people and customs. Philo and Josephus, though they abhor disloyalty among Judaeans,15 are proud of the magnetic effects of Judaean laws on foreigners. 4

Philo (with Celsus and Julian)

Philo has a passage that anticipates Tacitus from the other side. After explicating the kindness and humanity that Moses’ laws enjoin for the treatment of compatriots, his essay On the Virtues continues (102): Having legislated for fellow-members of the ethnos, he [Moses] holds that newcomers must be deemed worthy of every privilege, because they have left behind blood-affiliation, homeland, customs, sacred rites and temples of the gods, the gifts and honours too, having undertaken a noble migration [or transfer] from story-like fabrications to the clarity of truth (καὶ τοὺς ἐπηλύτας οἴεται δεῖν προνομίας τῆς πάσης ἀξιοῦσθαι, γενεὰν μὲν τὴν ἀφ᾿ αἵματος καὶ πατρίδα καὶ ἔθη καὶ ἱερὰ καὶ ἀφιδρύματα θεῶν γέρα τε καὶ τιμὰς ἀπολελοιπότας καλὴν δ᾿ ἀποικίαν στειλαμένους τὴν ἀπὸ τῶν μυθικῶν πλασμάτων πρὸς τὴν ἀληθείας ἐνάργειαν). … He directs those of the ethnos to love the newcomers, not merely as friends and relatives but as their very selves in body and soul: making common cause in the body while in the mind sharing the same sorrows as well as joys, as reckoning the divided parts to be a single living being. 15

E.g., BJ 7.47–53 (Antiochus of Antioch); AJ 5.98 (Joshua warns army not to follow the ways of other ethnē); 20.100 (Tiberius Alexander of Alexandria), 143 (Drusilla, sister of Agrippa II), 146 (Polemon, who briefly married Berenice—though she is blamed for the contrivance and dirty motives).

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Just as in Tacitus, we picture foreigners abandoning ethnos loyalties to join a tightly knit Judaean ethnos. Philo sublimates any hint of scandal at the ethnosbetrayal, however, on the grounds that Judaeans are not merely another ethnos but have unique access to the truth. In his Rewards and Punishments (152), he speaks likewise of the newcomer’s having ‘deserted’ (αὐτομολέω) his original ethnos for God. Desertion is bad, but in this case it deserves praise. On the other hand, Judaeans cannot join others. Commenting on God’s concern in the Bible for strangers, orphans, and widows, Philo says (Spec. 4.179): Indeed the whole Judaean ethnos can be spoken of as an orphan when compared with all others everywhere else. The others, whenever misfortunes swoop down on them from above, have no shortage of help because of their mixing with the other ethnē (διὰ τὰς ἐν τοῖς ἔθνεσιν ἐπιμιξίας) who live the same kind of lives as they do. But no one at all comes together to help the other [i.e., the Judaean ethnos], as it follows the most select laws. These laws are necessarily serious because they ‘anoint’ [athletes for] the highest virtue/prowess. But serious means austere, and this the great mass of humanity recoils from, on account of its partiality to pleasure. Philo’s viewpoint mirrors that of Tacitus from a Judaean perspective. Like every ethnos of the oikoumenē, Judaeans expect loyalty to their laws and customs. But since theirs alone are true and not merely customary, reflecting the very laws of nature, Judaeans welcome foreigners who come over to Jerusalem’s laws, as long as they do not plan on mixing in foreign ways. A generation after Tacitus, Celsus sees the same phenomenon and puts the matter sharply. He respects Judaean laws, for being ancient and grounded in a famous place (above; Origen, Cels. 5.25). He feels Tacitean indignation, however, when others continue to leave their customs to adopt Judaean laws, now long after the temple’s destruction (5.41): Certainly if the Judaeans protect their own law, in accord with these principles, they have no blame. It lies rather with those who have abandoned their own ways, professing those of the Judaeans. … Nor is it the least bit probable that they [Judaeans] are in favour with God or are loved more than these other [ethnē], or that messengers are sent to them alone, or that they had received some chōra [i.e., Judaea] of the blessed. For we can see very well who they are, and what sort of chōra they were thought worthy of [post-135]. Let this chorus [of Judaisers] vanish, then, after paying the penalty for their boasting. For they do not know the great God,

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but have been lured and cheated by Moses’ deceptiveness, and become its student for no good end. That Judaeans have a respected place among the ethnē no one doubts. But when they welcome migrants from other ethnē they are not playing cricket. That is not part of the playbook of mutual tolerance, which would continue to characterise classical thought through the emperor Julian’s Against the Galileans, which scolds Judaeans for thinking that they alone have the truth, though it is much harsher on Christians for believing that everyone had to follow theirs. 5

Back to Josephus

We may now draw these threads together in relation to Josephus’ portraits of Judaean exclusiveness. Like Philo, he was immersed in Greek paideia, literature, rhetoric, and historiography. He closes the Antiquities by reflecting on his strenuous efforts to master Greek literature, and in Ap. 1.51 says that only those with Greek sophia could make sense of his Judaean War. Nevertheless, he rarely misses a chance to make snide remarks about the loquacious, lightweight Greeks of his day. He postures from first to last as the spokesman of the Judaean ethnos, the oldest and the best. Josephus takes a fairly sophisticated approach to the place of Judaeans in the oikoumenē. On one level he accepts the ethnographic relativism of ‘live and let live.’ He also understands why Judaeans are criticised for not mingling: because in crucial ways they do not mingle, though they deal with foreigners every day. But this is ground for accusation only if one assumes that all peoples are governed equally badly, as Plato remarked. Since Judaeans possess a uniquely sublime and disciplined constitution—like that of the Spartan mirage, but superior and actually implemented—it must be protected. Judaeans cannot join in the worship or undisciplined customs and diets of others, because it would mean diluting their more excellent laws. This does not mean, however, that they are hostile to other peoples. Judaean benevolence is clear: first in welcoming all foreigners to the public areas of Jerusalem, a trip that many eminent figures have made, even sponsoring sacrifices; second, in the decidedly un-Spartan welcome they extend to foreigners who truly wish to share their life under Judaean law. Third, what is best in Graeco-Roman culture actually stems from its imitation, pale though it be, of Moses (Ap. 2.168, 220–31, 255–61). Josephus himself claims to write his

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Antiquities in the spirit of not jealously hoarding the Judaeans’ good things, but magnanimously sharing them with curious outsiders (AJ 1.8–13). A well-known passage from Judaean War has been neglected in this connection. The passage is famous as the supposed Judaean ‘declaration of war’ against Rome.16 I quote a generous amount to support a different reading (BJ 2.409–17): Meanwhile in the temple, Eleazar, son of the high priest Ananias, a very bold young man serving as commandant at the time, induced those performing the services of worship to accept no gift or sacrifice from any outsider (ἀναπείθει μηδενὸς ἀλλοτρίου δῶρον ἢ θυσίαν προσδέχεσθαι). This was also a foundation of war against the Romans,17 for they cast aside the sacrifice on behalf of these [the Romans] and Caesar (τοῦτο δ᾿ ἦν τοῦ πρὸς Ῥωμαίους πολέμου καταβολή· τὴν γὰρ ὑπὲρ τούτων θυσίαν Καίσαρος ἀπέρριψαν). Although both the chief priests and the notables kept appealing to them not to jettison this custom on behalf of the rulers, they would not give in … for the most vigorous element of the revolutionaries were working with them, and they were looking intently to Eleazar as their commandant. At any rate, when the powerful [men] had come together … they began deliberating about the whole situation. … First they gave full vent to their anger at the audacity of the rebellion and at their inciting such a great war in the ancestral homeland (τὸ τηλικοῦτον ἐπισείειν τῇ πατρίδι πόλεμον). Then they turned to refuting utterly the irrationality of the justification, stating that their ancestors had furnished the shrine mostly from the foreigners, always welcoming the gifts from outside ethnē (φάμενοι τοὺς μὲν προγόνους αὐτῶν κεκοσμηκέναι τὸν ναὸν ἐκ τῶν ἀλλοφύλων τὸ πλέον ἀεὶ προσδεχομένους τὰς ἀπὸ τῶν ἔξωθεν ἐθνῶν δωρεάς). And not only had they not prohibited the sacrifices of some, which is the height of impiety; they actually set up the votive offerings [of foreigners] around the 16

17

E.g., Goodman 1987: 170, 178; Recently, Rogers (2021: 2, 144–45) nuances the action as a declaration of independence, not war, though in the Roman context it is hard to see the difference. Where the Judaea is that is supposed to be independent remains unclear in such interpretations; see Chapter 1. Josephus marks a number of incidents as foundations or beginnings of the coming war: 2.260 (prophetic disturbers, in Felix’s view), 284 (the conflict in Caesarea); 4.318 (the death of Ananus and Jesus). At 2.417 he reiterates that this withdrawal from interaction would lay a foundation for war. But foundations may go back decades, or never be acted on; they are visible only in hindsight and say little about intentions at the time.

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temple that can be seen and have remained there such a long time (καὶ οὐ μόνον οὐ διακεκωλυκέναι θυσίας τινῶν, τοῦτο μὲν γὰρ ἀσεβέστατον, ἀλλὰ καὶ τὰ βλεπόμενα καὶ τὰ παραμένοντα τοσοῦτον χρόνον ἀναθήματα περὶ τῷ ἱερῷ καθιδρυκέναι). But now they were goading the weapons of the Romans and, while courting war from them, were also grafting in [N.B.: the Platonic term] an alien way of worship. Along with the danger, they had voted to condemn the polis for impiety—if [people knew that] among the Judaeans alone an outsider could neither sacrifice nor make obeisance (καινοτομεῖν θρησκείαν ξένην καὶ μετὰ τοῦ κινδύνου καταψηφίσασθαι τῆς πόλεως ἀσέβειαν, εἰ παρὰ μόνοις Ἰουδαίοις οὔτε θύσει τις ἀλλότριος οὔτε προσκυνήσει). While they were saying these things, they brought forward the priests who were experts in the ancestral traditions, who explained that all their ancestors used to accept the sacrifices from strangers (Ἅμα ταῦτα λέγοντες παρῆγον τοὺς ἐμπείρους τῶν πατρίων ἱερεῖς ἀφηγουμένους, ὅτι πάντες οἱ πρόγονοι τὰς παρὰ τῶν ἀλλογενῶν θυσίας ἀπεδέχοντο). No one among the revolutionaries was paying attention. It seems to me that reading this as a declaration of war or independence is untenable historically—another subject—and as an interpretation.18 The episode arises from the Jerusalemites’ growing frustration with the violent behaviour of Nero’s prefect and his auxiliary garrison (locally recruited from among the Judaeans’ enemies). The people of Jerusalem look to King Agrippa II to help them, because of his high-level imperial connections, which have always worked. They ask to send an embassy to Nero to proclaim their fidelity to Rome and accuse Florus alone (BJ 2.342–44). Agrippa declines to risk such a political gamble, speaking out against Nero’s appointee, and tries to fob them off with a speech against war. They remind him that that they had no intention of revolt against Rome, but his emotional appeal nearly persuades them to cease their resistance—until he overplays his hand and counsels them to wait submissively for Florus’ replacement. This leads the exasperated populace to drive him out. The worried leaders reluctantly appeal to both Florus and the expelled Agrippa to send soldiers to restore calm (2.418–21). One group of the populace think they have no option but to seize the desert outpost of Masada and arm themselves from its stores against the auxiliary (2.408, 433), while a priestly group led by the youngish Eleazar declares that will cut off the temple from dealing with foreigners or accepting their gifts or sacrifices. 18

See Mason 2016a: 276.

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Josephus, writing with a full view of the consequences, observes that banning foreign sacrifices meant also halting those for the emperor, a crucial symbol of Judaean loyalty. Although his narrative betrays hindsight at every turn, here he is careful to formulate the decision in terms that made sense at the time: ‘to accept no gift or sacrifice from any outsider’. Likewise, the longer part of the response from the elders assumes that the decision was an on-the-spot reaction to rapidly changing conditions. The decision as reported by Josephus was not like the American Declaration of Independence, from a largely unified population; it was a decision by those able to control temple traffic and sacrifices, opposed by senior leaders, in a moment of crisis.19 Its import depended on what followed from it, which no one could have predicted in the moment: the lethal conflict between Eleazar’s and Menachem’s followers; the massacre of the auxiliary garrison; the exclusion and ambush of Cestius Gallus’ force; the murders of Ananus II and Jesus. The move by Eleazar’s group had no necessary consequences. The elders reportedly worried about implications for the sacrifices for the emperor, true, but their greater concern was for Jerusalem’s position among the nations and the danger of breaking these customary ties. This move would fundamentally change the temple’s relationship with foreigners. Indeed, it reportedly went hand in hand with explosions of violence in Caesarea and elsewhere, all events that had their own causes and did not result from a decision about sacrifices for the emperor (2.437–499). For our question about non-mixing, the relevant point is that welcoming foreigners to worship in Jerusalem was the only way in which Jerusalem could show itself open to the world, for Judaeans could not worship in others’ temples. King Herod had vastly expanded the Court of Nations on the temenos to demonstrate his Jerusalem’s openness. Many eminent foreigners had made obeisance to the Judaean God there, sponsoring large sacrifices—as the tribune Neapolitanus has just done in the story.20 Cutting Jerusalem off from all 19 20

Perhaps it was more akin to the decision of Muslim authorities to exclude non-Muslims from the Islamic Museum, the Aqsa mosque, and the Dome of the Rock, since the outbreak of hostilities in 2000. BJ 2.341. On foreign rulers’ gifts to the temple see 1 Kgs 7:13–45; 9:11–14; 2 Kgs 10:1–10. Josephus’ Solomon, in dedicating the temple, emphasises that supplicants from the ends of the earth are welcome (AJ 8.116–17; cf. 1 Kgs 8:41–43). Ps-Aristeas (42, 51–82) describes lavish gifts given by Ptolemy II Philadelphus. Various prominent Romans contributed generously (Philo, Legat. 297; Josephus, BJ 1.357; 2.50; 4.181; AJ 14.488; 16.14). Josephus accuses John of melting down costly temple vessels presented by Augustus, his family, and his successors: “Indeed, the kings of the Romans always honoured and added furnishings to the temple” (BJ 5.562–63). Suetonius relates (Aug. 93) that Augustus commended his grandson Gaius for not stopping in Jerusalem to worship, as he hurried from Egypt to Syria, implying that it would otherwise be normal.

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foreign gifts and sacrifices would end these relations of good will, such as that just expressed by Neapolitanus. Josephus notes the irony: in moving to exclude foreigners (xenoi), the disaffected priests are grafting in a way of worship that is in fact foreign (xenē) to Jerusalem’s tradition. Another set of passages on non-mixing comes in Josephus’ presentations of Judaean law. Surprisingly, we find there that he delights in the unparalleled severity of Moses’ law. Unlike other lawmakers, Moses made no accommodation for persistent human wilfulness. In this respect Josephus charges confidently in the opposite direction from the Pharisaic-rabbinic tradition, which tended to soften the potential harshness of biblical law. For example, in AJ 4.260–64 Josephus elaborates on the biblical law concerning the rebellious son. Deut 21.18–21 permits a persistently rebellious son to be hauled by his father before the city elders and stoned to death, with little indication of the mechanisms involved. As Louis Feldman points out in his commentary, the rabbis would qualify the biblical prescription in so many ways that they rendered it practically unenforceable (cf. m. Sanh. 8.1–4). They exegeted the text to reveal that it concerned only boys in a brief period of pubescence, who had managed to show themselves gluttons and drunkards, something that required boldly consuming others’ food in a public place before witnesses. Both mother and father had to desire such a boy’s death, and both of them had to be perfectly healthy for such a decision to stand. Even then, it was not a simple matter of stoning. The parents had first to beat the boy before three judges, and only if he repeated the same offence, while still in that brief age-bracket of several months, could they even bring him before the court of twenty-three, for capital cases—with the original three judges also present. The law was honoured, then, but no one was likely to be executed in this way.21 We do not know about common practice before 70, but Josephus—no Pharisee—insists that the Pharisees’ legal system held sway at the insistence of the common people, apparently in part because it mitigated potentially harsh biblical punishments (AJ 13.294, 298; 18.17). Whatever status the law had in real-life Jerusalem before 70, Josephus not only fails to limit or soften it; he seizes and rides it as a shining example of the Judaean law’s unique, unapologetic, and inexorable severity, which no other nation could tolerate. In summarising the law, he already adds much to the Bible by way of a morality play, as the parents making clear what a violation of the moral order has been committed and invoke God as a fellow-parent. 21

See m. Sanh. 8.1–4; Feldman 2000: 431; Avioz 2021 (103): ‘The rabbinic Sages took great pains to render this law inapplicable and absurd so that it could never be applied in practice.’

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The child—for Josephus includes both daughters and sons with no age restriction—is given a proper chance to repent, but if persistent, faces execution. The decision rests entirely with the father, with no legal processes, courts, or defence lawyers involved. This is no aberration. In the Apion, where he can choose only a few items to illustrate the unique severity of Judaean law, he returns to the same example (Ap. 2.206): ‘The one who does not fully reciprocate the favours received from them [parents] but falls short in any way (ἀλλ᾿ εἰς ὁτιοῦν ἐλλείποντα), it [the law] delivers up to be stoned.’ This whole essay is conditioned by Josephus’ early explanation that Judaeans are not mentioned in works by Greek authors, though they are ancient, because they do not seek the usual mixing with others (Ap. 1.60–61): We don’t inhabit a coastal land; nor do we take joy in trade or in the interactions (ταῖς πρὸς ἄλλους διὰ τούτων ἐπιμιξίαις) with others that go with these. … If one adds what has been said already about the peculiarity of our way of life (τῆς περὶ τὸν βίον ἡμῶν ἰδιότητος), then plainly there was nothing in olden times to make us interact with the Greeks (ποιοῦν ἡμῖν πρὸς τοὺς Ἕλληνας ἐπιμιξίαν). Proud inaccessibility and lack of contamination are consistent features of this work. Josephus’ reuse of the rebellious-son provision is part of his rousing celebration of the exclusive toughness of Judaean law. The section ends with a summary (Ap. 2.214): In this way he [Moses] took great care to incline us towards reasonable conduct in every respect, by prescribing such laws to be our teachers—and having ordered that those who transgress them be punished without any room for excuse (τοὺς δ᾿ αὖ κατὰ τῶν παραβαινόντων τιμωρητικοὺς τάξας ἄνευ προφάσεως). (215) The penalty facing most transgressors is indeed death (Ζημία γὰρ ἐπὶ τοῖς πλείστοις τῶν παραβαινόντων ὁ θάνατος), whether a man commits adultery or rapes a girl […] The law is inexorable (ὁ νόμος ἀπαραίτητος). As he moves toward Apion’s rousing peroration on the glory and worldwide impact of Moses’ laws, Josephus drives home that unflinching severity makes his people uniquely estimable. At Ap. 2.228: ‘our laws impose on us challenges and labours requiring levels of endurance far greater than those attached to the Spartans by popular imagination.’ At 2.234 he allows that even the easy

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things Judaeans do would be intolerable for others: their personal discipline, restricted diet, rejection of indulgence in food or drink or sexual relations, not to mention the rigid calendar of work and rest days. No other ethnos could take this. The theme continues through the work’s rhetorical climax (Ap. 2.276–77): I’ll leave aside for now discussion of the punishments that most lawgivers gave from the start as resolutions for the offenders—legislating money as a penalty for adultery, or marriage for rape. And, if anyone should bother to open an inquiry, they create a wall of excuses to deny anything connected with impiety. Look, today the transgression of laws has with most people become an art form. This is not the case with us! … There is no Judaean, no matter how far removed from his homeland, and no matter how terrified of a harsh despot, who is not more afraid of the law than he is of that fellow. Josephus cannot contrast ‘Judaism’ with other religions, language unknown to him. His contrast is between Moses’ laws for Judaeans, based in Jerusalem, with the laws of other ethnē and poleis. He cites Plato’s ideals of legal observance but, recognising that people disregard Plato as a fantasist, turns to Lycurgus on the ground that the Spartans are still universally admired. But, he insists, Judaeans have displayed their devotion to extremely severe laws for far longer (two millennia) and more convincingly than Spartans, who frequently gave up (Ap. 2.220–31). Judaeans alone have realised in life the ideal of a political community’s commitment to a high legal standard (2.221–22). This contrast of Judaean and Greek polities includes Josephus’ most definitive statements about Judaeans’ welcome of foreigners. Right in the middle of his discussion of the law’s inexorable standard, he comments (Ap. 2.210): ‘All those who want to come over and live under our laws he [Moses] welcomes heartily, reckoning that the kinship bond exists not only through ancestry, but also by virtue of the deliberate choice of life, though he did not want those who came by in a casual way to be integrated in [ἀναμίγνυσθαι] our intimate society.’ After another extended critique of Greek views of the gods (2.236–56), Josephus claims that Plato imitated Moses in two respects—in requiring that all citizens learn and obey their laws, and in that ‘he took precautions so that it would not be necessary for outsiders to mix randomly with them, but the politeuma would be pure for those steadfastly following the laws’ (καὶ μὴν καὶ περὶ τοῦ μὴ δεῖν ὡς ἔτυχεν ἐπιμίγνυσθαί τινας ἔξωθεν, ἀλλ᾿ εἶναι καθαρὸν τὸ πολίτευμα τῶν ἐμμενόντων τοῖς νόμοις προυνόησεν, Ap. 2.258). Josephus readily concedes the charge by Apollonius Molon that Judaeans refuse to admit those with different doxai about God; they do not seek fellowship with those who follow a different mode of life (2.258). But he is proud

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of this on solid Greek principle, for Plato and the Spartans understood the same need. He even appeals to Spartan foreigner-expulsion (ξενηλασία) and forbidding of citizen travel as practices admired by others (2.259). This allows him to favourably contrast Judaeans, who travel widely, are found everywhere, and, ‘[a]lthough we have no interest at all in emulating the ways of others, we certainly and gladly welcome those who want to share ours. This should be a decisive proof, I reckon, of our humanity along with our magnanimity’ (καὶ τοῦτο ἂν εἴη τεκμήριον, οἶμαι, φιλανθρωπίας ἅμα καὶ μεγαλοψυχίας). Magnanimity (μεγαλοψυχία) unites the endpoint of the corpus with Antiquities’ prologue, which says that he penned the twenty-volume account as a magnanimous gesture, because so many Greek-speakers, especially the circle of Epaphroditus in Rome, kept urging him to compose a clear account of Judaean law and custom (AJ 1.10–12). If the Spartans of old deserve the admiration they still attract, and receive a pass for holding themselves apart, then real-life Judaeans are infinitely more deserving of recognition. A large part of the closing volume of Josephus’ Antiquities (20.17–96) concerns the royal house of Adiabene’s embrace of Judaean law. I mention it because Josephus may have intended to illustrate what he meant in the Apion about ‘those who come to live under our laws’ with full commitment. For that is what this story is about: foreigners who so admire Judaean law and custom that they abandon their ancestral ways for those of Judaea. This is also the scenario that Philo and Tacitus describe from different perspectives. In this case, the royal family of a Parthian principality learn Judaean law through personal contacts. Queen Helena goes to stay in Jerusalem, where she spends vast amounts to relieve a famine in the 40s CE. She establishes a palace there, as do other members of her family, and a family mausoleum. Her two sons adopt Judaean law and send their sons to be educated in Jerusalem. Those young men play significant roles in the war against Rome. This is, in other words, a full realignment of life to foreign ways. Perceived as betrayal by compatriots, it incurs the threat of assassination. The story ends with a reminder that the leading family members would be buried in Jerusalem (20.95–96): that was their true homeland now, though the laws and customs of their upbringing could not have been more different. They did not attempt a merger or mixing, however. They simply came to ‘live under our laws,’ with all the ruptures and hazards that entailed. 6

Conclusions

We began with a question: How is it that Josephus and Philo, deeply immersed in Graeco-Roman cultural norms and ready to make Judaean law intelligible

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in that context, show so little concern with trying to challenge perceptions of Judaean standoffishness? Rather than denying or marginalising it, they fully own it. Philo and Josephus looked out on an oikoumenē populated by diverse ethnē. They accepted the prevailing pluralism, with the assumption that everyone must be loyal to his or her ancestral ways. But the quest for the best governance inevitably gave this pluralism a comparative, even competitive, dimension. Learning from other polities was part of the picture, and admiration for the laws of an admirable polis was understandable. Spartans, Athenians, Persians, Egyptians, Germani, and Indians all had their admirers. It seems to have been widely agreed that a superior society needed to take measures to prevent contamination. A clear boundary between those committed to the discipline of its laws and outsiders who wanted only to cherry-pick attractive elements had to be maintained. In the same way that Spartan foreigner-expulsion (ξενηλασία) could seem antisocial, Judaeans could seem standoffish—because in some respects they were. In Josephus’ telling, they accepted the fact of apartness or aloofness (ἀμιξία) but rejected any suggestion that this implied misanthropy. Judaean love of humanity was, on the contrary, proven by their willingness (in sharp contrast to Spartan practice) to welcome foreigners who truly resolved to live under their laws. This would not mean a grafting in of foreign contamination (καινοτομία), but a wholesome grafting in of new branches on the solid trunk of Moses’ laws. Yet another passage that might not be noticed in this regard is BJ 2.487–88. Josephus is writing about the Judaeans of Alexandria in Egypt: Now in Alexandria there was ongoing civil strife among the natives towards the Judaean element—ever since Alexander, after he had used very eager Judaeans against the Egyptians, gave as a reward for their alliance the [privilege of] settling in the city on an equal footing with the Greeks. This honour for them endured with the Successors, who also marked off for them a place of their own, so that they might maintain their regimen more purely with less of the foreigners’ intermingling (διέμεινεν δ᾿ αὐτοῖς ἡ τιμὴ καὶ παρὰ τῶν διαδόχων, οἳ καὶ τόπον ἴδιον αὐτοῖς ἀφώρισαν, ὅπως καθαρωτέραν ἔχοιεν τὴν δίαιταν ἧττον ἐπιμισγομένων τῶν ἀλλοφύλων). Rather than apologising for Judaean separateness, Josephus already celebrates it. Here, as in the passages above, he implies that every wise ruler has understood Judaean difference and the need to protect its nomoi. The historical plausibility of the claim is not our concern here, but rather the consistency of his appeal in his historical situation in Flavian Rome.

Chapter 3

Vespasian’s Rise from Civil War in Josephus’  Bellum Iudaicum With Josephus’ Bellum Judaicum we are probably getting as close as we ever can to the ‘official version’ (or one of the ‘official versions’) of the Flavian accession. Mary Beard, ‘The Triumph of Flavius Josephus’ (2003), 556

…

Writers of the times, who put together records of this war while the Flavian house was running things, have passed along the motives—perverted by reason of obsequiousness—of ‘concern for peace’ and ‘love of the republic’. Scriptores temporum, qui potiente rerum Flavia domo monimenta belli huiusce composuerunt, curam pacis et amorem rei publicae, corruptas in adulationem causas, tradidere. Tacitus, Hist. 2.101

∵ Flavian Rome must have birthed several histories, at least, that covered Vespasian’s rise to power. Only one has survived, however: Josephus’ Judaean War, which he completed in time to present it to that emperor before his death on 23 June 79 CE.1 In modern scholarship, Josephus’ work acquired the reputation of serving regime interests. This occurred to no ancient Christian readers,

1 V 361; Ap. 1.50–53. Despite these clear statements, scholars have often proposed that at least War 7 came under Titus or Domitian, but the recent trend is to accept Josephus’ plain statements. See Jones 2002; Brighton 2009: 33–41; Siggelkow-Berner 2011: 25–33. A neglected point: Josephus’ references to the rulers (generals in the war, now leaders: BJ 1.8, 16) appear to assume that Vespasian and Titus rule the empire now.

© Steve Mason, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004545960_005

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who found it obviously Jewish.2 Since it includes an account of Vespasian’s rise (BJ 4.491–663), however, circumstantial evidence alone suggested to modern critical thinkers that it had to be a somewhat coddling account, perhaps among those meriting Tacitus’ censure for obsequiousness (above). Yet Josephus’ declared reason for writing was to challenge those histories doing the rounds in Vespasian’s Rome, which he also accused of thoughtlessly flattering the men who had commanded Roman forces in Judaea while denigrating his people, the Judaeans. As a proud priest from Jerusalem and self-appointed spokesman for his people, he wrote to defend the national character (BJ 1.1–8). Josephus’ declared aim invites us to scrutinise his account of Vespasian’s rise to power, to ask how well it matches Tacitus’ characterisation. Was it another predictable voice in the sycophantic chorus or, as Josephus’ opening language would suggest, a solo voice with a different score? Tacitus claimed that Flavian histories justified Vespasian’s coup d’état against Vitellius as motivated by a wholesome love of country and peace. The jaded senatorial historian imagined, by contrast, a tragic psychological drama: a struggle in Vespasian’s soul between desire for power and fear of its dangers. I shall argue that Josephus’ outlook is surprisingly close to Tacitus’. His War is not principally about Roman affairs or Vespasian’s rise, but it gives these matters enough space that we can identify a coherent viewpoint that sits askew of the Flavian drama. As the opening quotation from Mary Beard suggests, historians in cognate fields often still regard the Judaean War as the work of a dutiful Gefolgsmann, lifted from Judaea’s destruction because of his readiness to dissemble and concoct eastern omens for the new dynasty.3 To be sure, Beard turns Josephus’ alleged fealty to the historian’s advantage: ‘If we want to understand how any political regime wants itself to be seen, where better to go than to the writings of one of its lackeys?’4 That would make sense, if his work fit the bill. I shall propose instead that his willingness to depart from the Flavian narrative on crucial points, while living in Flavian Rome, makes his work particularly useful for our understanding the Flavians from different perspectives.

2 Theophilus, Autol. 3.23; Tertullian, Apol. 19.6 [‘champion/vindicator of the Judaeans’ antiquities’]; Minucius Felix, Oct. 33; Clement of Alexandria, Strom. 1.21; Origen, Comm. Matt. 10.17; C. Cels. 1.47; 2.13; Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 3.9.2; Ps-Hegesippus, De excid., praef. 3 Cf. Künzl 1988: 9 (he stood ‘auf der Seite der Römer und nicht mehr auf der seines Volkes’); Beard 2003: 558 (‘besotted with the Flavians’); Itgenshorst 2005: 28–29 (a member of the Kaiserhaus); Curran 2007: 77 (‘His depiction of Vespasian is adulatory and that of Titus little short of sycophantic’). 4 Beard 2003: 543.

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If the Flavian-propaganda reading has little traction with Josephus specialists of recent years, that is because it has lost its explanatory power for detailed study of his works.5 Josephus’ works used to be mined for their data and putative sources, rather than being read as intelligently crafted narratives. In that atmosphere, Josephus’ undeniable status as a Flavian client, his few mildly flattering notices about Titus, especially, his fleeting reference to an elusive Aramaic precursor of the Greek work (BJ 1.3, 6), which was too quickly imagined as commissioned propaganda from Rome to Parthia, and the decontextualised reading of War’s digression on legionary invincibility (BJ 3.70–109) sufficed to support a vague picture of banner-waving for the regime.6 Ever more attentive compositional readings of his account have exposed the weakness of that view. First, by way of scholarly context, a more careful reading of texts from Polybius to Plutarch and Dio Chrysostom has broadened our sense of the possibilities open to Greek writers under Roman rule, leaving robotic pro- or anti-Roman ideology for more human ambiguity, ‘safe criticism’, and irony.7 Once it became clear that Rome and Parthia were not at serious loggerheads after the Corbulo-Nero settlement of 63–66, the stimulus for urgent propaganda to Parthia was lost.8 In any case, the seven-volume War is an original Greek work, with only the vaguest connection to whatever Josephus meant about earlier efforts in Aramaic, which he may have written before he reached Rome. Our Greek War, which devotes its first, double-length volume to the Hasmoneans (170–63 BCE) and especially King Herod (40/37–4 BCE), is manifestly unsuited to the clear and lapidary messaging required by propaganda. The content, structure, and profoundly Judaean themes of the work make it impossible to read as a Flavian product. That Josephus turned immediately, upon completing War, to writing his Judaean Antiquities and Against Apion, which extol the antiquity, laws, and constitution of his people, should make us cautious about seeing War as something radically different. Research has shown that the ‘nationalist’ themes of the later works are present from War’s prologue onward (BJ 1.1–12).9 More particularly in relation to our question, research has begun to expose gaps between Josephus’ War and the official Flavian story of their rise to 5 Lindner 1972; Rajak 1983, 1998; Bilde 1988; Mason 1991, 1994, 2003, 2005a; McLaren 2005; Eberhardt 2005: 274–75, 277; Goodman 2007: 445, 452. 6 Laqueur 1920: 245–78; Weber 1921: 246 (‘prophet of the new Caesar’), 283–84; Thackeray 1929: 3, 15–16, 37–39, 42, 52–53. Original publication dates given; all three were reprinted a half-century later. 7 Cf. among many fine studies, Ahl 1984; Eckstein 1995; Swain 1996. 8 Rajak 1983: 174–84. 9 Rajak 1998a; Mason 2003a: 55–146.

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power. Scholars trying to understand Josephus’ approach have invoked Ahl’s ‘safe criticism’, irony, and even post-colonial dynamics to see him as a proud Judaean spokesman who must communicate productively with FlavianRoman audiences.10 To draw out the interpretative stakes, I shall preface a re-examination of Josephus’ account of Vespasian’s rise with an overview of his portrayal of the Roman ruler. It is not the paean one would have expected from the traditional billing.11 1

Josephus’ Portrait of Vespasian

Vespasian does not appear in the narrative until Book 3, and by the end of Book 4 he has left for Rome. And much of Book 4 is about the growth of civil strife in Jerusalem. Whatever we make of Vespasian’s character in this work, then, it hardly dominates. What sort of character is it? Book 3 relates that, after Nero dispatches Vespasian from Greece to settle the disturbances in Judaea after the legate Cestius’ failure, upon Vespasian’s arrival at the coastal Roman colony of Ptolemais just west of Galilee, polis leaders rush to welcome him and the Judaean King Agrippa II. This pre-emptive embrace occurs even before Titus arrives with the Fifteenth Legion from Egypt, and before Vespasian sets foot in Galilee (BJ 3.1–8, 65). The northern Judaean capital Sepphoris, prominent in the welcoming committee, requests a Roman garrison to supplement the unit left by Vespasian’s predecessor Cestius Gallus (BJ 3.29–30). They want no trouble or misunderstanding of their motives. Even before the Flavians advance into Galilee, this northern area of Judaean settlement has demonstrated its tranquil posture. And as soon as the Flavians move their menacing 60,000-strong army in, the 60,000-strong army that an absurdly boastful General Josephus claims to have trained instantly vanishes.12 Vespasian immediately enjoys theatre dominance. Josephus, who says that he always knew that conflict with Rome was hopeless, but did his duty, unashamedly makes a beeline for King Agrippa’s lakeside resort of Tiberias, which is not on Vespasian’s itinerary, targeted at Jerusalem in the south (BJ 3.29–34, 59–69, 127–34).

10 11 12

Barclay 2005, 2006; Spilsbury 2003; Mason 2005a, 2005b. For the other Flavians, see Mason 2016a: 121–30. Josephus’ later autobiography undermines this effort to buff his credentials as captured enemy general. In the later story he goes north with two colleagues to report back to Jerusalem on regional sentiments, after the ambush of Cestius and the rise of anti-Judaean violence throughout the region, to persuade anyone who might be resorting to arms to wait and see what the Romans would do (V 24–29).

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Josephus is able to make himself the star of War 3 because of Vespasian’s overwhelming prestige as Roman emperor while he is writing, and in the narrative because of the massive and obviously unbeatable army that Vespasian has brought to Galilee’s frontier.13 Waiting safely in Tiberias, he hears that the small town of Iotapata in central Galilee, where he has friends, is in the sights of Vespasian’s marauding soldiers. Vespasian has allowed them to devastate nearby Gabara in retaliation for the ambush of Cestius’ legion the previous autumn. It is not clear why Iotapata, a small town of families, should be in danger. The strongest clue is that Vespasian’s tribune Placidus had tried to impress his master by rolling over central Galilee from Sepphoris, and been embarrassed when the residents of Iotapata had been prepared and fought back (BJ 3.110–114). At any rate, now that Vespasian is using nearby Gabara as a revenge target, and Iotapata stands between his army and the Sepphoris garrison, it is in obvious peril. Josephus rushes to the endangered town, apparently in the hope of mediating safe terms (3.132–34, 141–43). After all, he was a Jerusalem aristocrat, and he had recently undertaken a successful diplomatic mission to Nero’s court in Rome (V 13–16). If anyone could save Iotapata, it would be him, and he happens to be in the area. But when he arrives and sees that hopes of a safe outcome are futile, and when his admitted intention to flee is thwarted by the locals (BJ 3.193–202), he resigns himself to leading the best defence he can, perhaps again in the hope of buying time to reach terms. Book 3 now becomes the story of a contest between these two great generals. The reluctant warrior Josephus, with no visible means of support but only his resourcefulness, must face Vespasian, the most confident commander in the world at the head of the world’s finest army. That seems to be the point of Josephus’ digression on legionary training and field practice (3.70–109): Look at what I had to deal with! Vespasian needs no aggrandisement. Every sentient being in Flavian Rome knows of his power and military reputation. Josephus’ narrative serves to enhance Josephus’ image in this impossible situation. The massive disparity in resources makes Josephus’ generalship, courage, and unflagging ingenuity shine all the more brightly. Although he cannot defeat the legionary force, of course, he can and does manage an extraordinary fight. He repeatedly wrong-foots Vespasian, allegedly causing him despair and at one point an injury that nearly turns the tide. His intervention does not save Iotapata, but it does postpone it by nearly seven weeks—to Vespasian’s great annoyance.14 Vespasian’s fame and overwhelming superiority provide the dark horizon against which Josephus’ brilliance can shine. 13 14

On Josephus’ literary self-fashioning in War, see Glas 2020. BJ 3.175: his construction of a wall terrifies (καταπλήσσω) the Romans. 3.188: a deception with dripping clothes to suggest ample water supplies causes ‘faint-heartedness and terror

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The elaborate story of Josephus’ surrender to Vespasian, which takes about one third as much space as the siege narrative, continues the battle of wits. In the ways that matter most to his story, Josephus wins—under divine protection. It goes like this. When the legions overrun Iotapata, Vespasian sends two tribunes to pledge safety to Josephus if he will leave his cave (3.344). Certain that Vespasian’s assurances are lies aimed only at flushing him out to make him easier to kill, Josephus refuses (3.345). Vespasian, frustrated that he will not take the bait, tries again by sending the tribune Nicanor, who somehow knows Josephus. Nicanor expatiates on the Romans’ innate kindness, insisting that Vespasian is a huge fan of Josephus and can hardly wait to meet such a brave commander. While he is lying through his teeth at Vespasian’s direction, it is all Nicanor can do to restrain his soldiers from burning the cave with Josephus in it (3.346–51). Josephus is obviously right not to trust Vespasian’s ploys, the literary audience should know. He refuses to budge (3.350). When he finally does surrender, it is not because he begins to trust Vespasian, but rather because he decides to trust God—who, he claims, gave him insight into world affairs at this moment and a message for Vespasian (3.351–54). When he arrives in the Roman camp, his assumptions about Vespasian’s intentions are immediately validated. The Roman commander shows no interest in meeting him, while the enraged legionaries want to lynch the man who has delayed them for over a month. Only when young Titus, two years younger than Josephus, sees the humiliated Judaean does he have a sudden change of heart and inspire others to take pity on the man. ‘Indeed’, Josephus calmly reflects, ‘he [Titus] became the greatest factor with his father in saving him’ (τότε συνδιέθηκεν μὲν πλείστους ἑαυτῷ καὶ πρὸς οἶκτον τοῦ Ἰωσήπου, πλείστη δ᾿ αὐτῷ καὶ παρὰ τῷ πατρὶ μοῖρα σωτηρίας ἐγένετο. 3.397). The story confirms War’s picture of Vespasian as a wily and tough commander—and a congenital dissembler. The last point was no automatic censure, to be sure, for a general’s success was thought to depend on tricks (‘stratagems’).15 Throughout his autobiography, Josephus happily recounts his own tricks, lies, and deceptions, some of them deeply immoral by our standards.16 But even if they are understandable, portraying Vespasian as a

15 16

(ἀθυμία  … καὶ κατάπληξις) among the Romans’, emotions intensified by his deadening of the impact of their battering rams with sacks of chaff (3.222–25). 3.169, 177, 205–206, 227–35: his men’s intrepid sorties and burning of siege-works terrorise the Romans. 3.237: a Judaean archer’s injury to Vespasian cause mass panic (ἔκπληξις). Cf. The Flavian work on Stratagems (Stratēgēmata) by Sex. Iulius Frontinus. E.g., Josephus, V 22, 39, 71, 128–30, 141, 148, 163, 168–69, 175–76, 263, 273–74, 282, 287–91, 377–80.

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ready liar does not constitute flattery, especially when it comes to casually violating a pledge of safety for the author himself, Josephus. Later in War 3, not long after Josephus’ surrender, Vespasian promises antiAgrippa rebels in Tarichea that he will spare their lives if they leave that town unarmed. They believe him and put down their weapons. They are then directed through a cordon of soldiers along the road south, an hour away to the stadium of Tiberias. There, Vespasian orders many of them killed and the others sent to Nero for hard labour, in clear violation of his pledge (3.532–42). Josephus is plainly aware of the moral problem here, for he explains that Vespasian yielded to friends’ advice against his own instinct in this case. There can be no impiety against Judaeans, they urge, and (a nod to Thucydides) he must prefer advantage to mere propriety (3.536: μηδὲν κατὰ Ἰουδαίων ἀσεβὲς εἶναι λέγοντες καὶ χρῆναι τὸ συμφέρον αἱρεῖσθαι πρὸ τοῦ πρέποντος). But given that Vespasian elsewhere has no trouble overruling his advisors with his commanding wisdom (e.g. 4.366–77), as a great general should, the apparent mitigation here—his subordinates made him do it—does not redeem his image. It reveals a hard man of infirm character, who readily takes the easier path. The episodes involving Vespasian in Book 4 do nothing to dispel these clouds. First, he leads his soldiers to ‘unprecedented disaster’ in a rash assault on nature’s fortress-town, Gamala, in King Agrippa’s territory. His rare impatience, in the unusual situation of that remote spot requiring constant foraging to maintain the army, leads him storm the walled city and lose many legionaries in the steep alleyways. Titus, who was absent as Vespasian made this decision, must salvage the situation by guile and stealth—also not his typical traits (4.20–53, 39, 70). Still in Book 4, after he has moved south to Judaea and takes a trip to the celebrated Dead Sea (Lake Asphaltites), Vespasian orders men who cannot swim to be dropped into its deepest part, with their hands cuffed, to test the lake’s famed buoyancy (4.476–77). They float, happily, although it seems that Vespasian would have enjoyed himself just as much if he had proven the rumours false. The story of his bid for imperial power, below, concludes this volume of War and marks his departure from the Judaean theatre. Vespasian will appear again later volumes, but as emperor. Still, Josephus has him display recognisable character traits. He will decline the separate triumph offered him by the Senate in order to take first position in Titus’ event, for the successful siege and destruction of Jerusalem, in which he was not directly involved. This is a more spectacular achievement than anything Vespasian accomplished in 67–69. Their joint parade (as later the Arch of Titus) features the temple furnishings as its main foreign spoils. These too Vespasian covets, as he collected nothing remotely similar. After the triumph, he will divide them between his palace

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and, after 75 CE, his new Forum of Vespasian and its Temple to Pax (BJ 7.121, 148, 152, 158, 161–62). Josephus thus presents Vespasian as a tough, shrewd, and usually effective general. His odder behaviour passes without overt criticism, any potential for censure left between the lines. It is nevertheless difficult to find anything approaching adulation here. Vespasian looks realistically human and unique: a great man favoured by fortune, but hardly the object of panegyric. Having dispensed with the notion that Josephus extols Vespasian, I hope that this background will help prepare us to see how his description of Vespasian’s rise to power overlaps more with Tacitus’ cool analysis than with the regime-coddling historiography that both authors decry. Although never overtly hostile, of course, Josephus’ account of the accession exists to support the Judaean author’s interests, which depart significantly from the selfrepresentation of the regime’s founding myth. Why the Flavians found Josephus’ War valuable is a question worth pondering. It could not have been that he was a ready vehicle for their court history. Those who believe Josephus to be a Römling overlook the fact, mentioned above, that he opens his War with a frontal attack on the histories, circulating in Rome as he writes, that shamelessly flatter the rulers (1.1–8, 13–16). Such people, he charges, sacrifice the truth about the Judaean conflict for the simple messaging of the Flavian triumph, coins, and monuments. They claim that Rome’s just warrior-leaders have easily conquered a hostile and despicable nation:17 They dare to entitle those books ‘histories’, in which there is nothing sound. … Although they want to portray the Romans as great, they are always putting down and humiliating the Judaean side (καταβάλλουσιν δὲ ἀεὶ τὰ Ἰουδαίων καὶ ταπεινοῦσιν, 1.7). The scene he describes is plausible enough. In part, it reflects human experience across the ages (cf. Allied portraits of a contemptible Japanese army in World War II, more recently western ridicule of Iraqi or Iranian forces). But we also have a parallel in the Syrian Lucian’s attack on the ill-informed, regime-flattering nonsense that was making the rounds in connection with Lucius Verus’ eastern war of the 160s (Hist. conscr. 2, 7, 13, 24). Josephus punctures anti-Judaean misinformation in part by emphasising episodes of Judaean courage and contempt for death, often at the expense of the storied legionaries, 17

Hart 1952; Mason 2016a: 3–59.

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who have a tendency to flee in terror if detached from their columns.18 What, then, does this Judaean author have to say about Vespasian’s accession? 2

Vespasian as Victor in Bellum Civile

The crucial material is toward the end of Book 4, just past the half-way point in the seven-book structure that Josephus created (4.491–663). I have argued elsewhere that War’s dramatic plot, which reaches its climax with Jerusalem’s destruction in Book 6, is interwoven with this other structural logic, which we might call periodic, concentric, or ring-compositional.19 Books 1 and 7 parallel each other as prolegomenon and aftermath. From Book 2 onward, the tragic narrative begins to coil with increasing tension as events tragically align in Jerusalem. This coiling tension reaches explosive critical mass in the central panel of Book 4 (4.314–44). Jerusalem’s revered aristocratic leaders, the hereditary chief priests Ananus II and Jesus, who have been so successfully managing the tensions in the city that they are on the verge of neutralising the militant Zealots (or Disciples), are murdered by interlopers in the city, who have come from the north and south to support the Zealots, namely: John of Gischala’s Galileans and the Idumaeans. With the loss of the holy city’s native, public-spirited aristocratic leaders, things quickly unravel into the stasis and tyranny anticipated in War’s preface (1.10), which alone will bring Jerusalem’s destruction. The Roman civil war that brings Vespasian to power appears as part of this unravelling section after the murder of the high priests. Even as it provides an exit ramp for Vespasian from Judaea, the section allows Josephus to juxtapose Rome’s tyrants—Otho and Vitellius (Galba was by contrast a respected patrician)—with Judaea’s power-obsessed strong men: John of Gischala and Simon bar Giora. Josephus’ picture of Vespasian’s rise betrays its independence from the Flavian programme in at least four respects: its implication that Vespasian’s victory in civil war—one initiated by him—was his crucial military achievement, not the victory over Judaea that was being celebrated endlessly in Rome; Josephus’ assimilation of Vespasian’s story to the Judaean civil strife engineered by tyrants; his redating of crucial events in the Flavian calendar; and, coming full circle, his analysis of Vespasian’s motives for initiating the war with Vitellius. 18 19

Mason 2016a: 101–106. Mason 2016a: 99–101.

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The mere fact that Josephus includes the pre-Flavian civil war, while downplaying any threat to Rome from Judaea, is an index of his independence. Classical literature everywhere laments the blight of civil discord.20 This is the principle adduced by Dionysius to justify his preference for Herodotus over the lauded Thucydides: Thucydides, he grumbles, chose shameful inner-Greek warfare as his subject (Pomp. 3). In research on Republican Rome it has usually been held that, even when civil strife was obviously a greater threat than anything foreign, in post-war triumph and memorialisation that fraternal conflict would be swept under the rug to leave public attention focused on a foreign threat that has been overcome.21 Carsten Lange has effectively challenged this picture as too simple, pointing to abundant evidence that in the late Republic everyone knew the importance of the civil dimensions of conflicts, and these did find a place in memorialisation.22 Still, Lange does not doubt the odium that attached to initiating civil war—even if there was no shame in ending one—or the desirability of harnessing civil strife to a larger and nobler foreign conflict in such celebrations.23 The political benefits of using a foreign conflict to distract from suffering at home are obvious, and so remain basic to modern political calculations. Concerning Octavian’s behaviour after defeating Antony and Cleopatra returning to Rome, for example, Cassius Dio writes that with all the money he splashed around, ‘the Romans forgot all their conflicts and viewed his triumph with pleasure—as though the defeated were foreigners all’ (τῶν τε δυσχερῶν πάντων οἱ Ῥωμαῖοι ἐπελάθοντο, καὶ τὰ ἐπινίκια αὐτοῦ ἡδέως ὡς καὶ ἀλλοφύλων ἁπάντων τῶν ἡττηθέντων ὄντων εἶδον· 51.21.4). Claudius used his glorious invasion of Britain and ensuing triumph (44 CE) to expunge memories of the crisis that 20

21 22 23

On στάσις οἰκεία see Plato, Resp. 5.470c–d; similar phrases are in Appian, Hist. rom. 12.83.4; Bell. civ. 4.3.14; Dio 53.8.2. The classic narrative is Thucydides 3.82–84 (at Corcyra), but the theme is also prominent in Herodotus (1.59.3, 60.2, 150.1; 3.82.3; 5.28.1; 6.109.5); Isocrates Paneg. 79, 114, 174; Plato, Leg. 1.628c, 629c–d; Aristotle, Ath. Pol. 5.2–3; 13.1; Pol. 1265b; Diodorus Siculus 9.11.1; 11.72.2, 76.6, 86.3, 87.5; Plutarch, Statecraft 813a, 823f–825b; Dio Chrysostom, 1 Regn. 1.82; Pausanias, 3.2.7; 4.18.3. Salient literature includes Lintott 1982; Keitel 1984; Gehrke 1985; Henderson 1998; Price 2001, and on Josephus’ usage Rajak 1983: 91–94; Feldman 1998: 140–48; Mader 2000: 55–103; Mason 2012. Gurval 1995: 25, 28. Lange 2009: 73, 79, 93. Lange 2009: 68. Note the careful formulation (my emphasis) concerning Octavian’s war on p. 49: ‘There can be no doubt that the war, when it finally came, was represented as a foreign war; Octavian successfully avoided starting a civil war. But looking at the chronology and the context of events from 36–32 BC, even if there was an official stress on Cleopatra as the formal enemy, this did not conceal that Actium was at the same time a civil war.’

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had led to Gaius Caligula’s recent murder, with its potentially ominous implications for Claudius’ continuation of one-man rule. The Senate’s leaders and the remaining consul in 41, Cn. Sentius Saturninus, had reportedly demanded a change in the form of government (Suetonius, Claud. 11; Josephus, AJ 19). According to Eutropius, Claudius’ foreign campaign created opportunities for reconciliation, which the emperor seized by offering Sentius honours in the easy conquest of a Britain that already had long-established connections with Rome (Brev. 7.13.2). The Flavian situation seems crystal clear in this respect. The really devastating war(s) for Romans had begun with the revolts, early in 68, of the ex-consuls Julius Vindex and Sulpicius Galba, with the citizen legions under their command. The former was violently blocked by the legions under Verginius Rufus, legate to Germania Superior. Galba succeeded nevertheless, but his victory attracted the ire of two other senators with Roman armies: Vitellius and Otho. The toll of those internal conflicts was so devastating that ancient writers attributed Otho’s suicide, following the Battle of Bedriacum, not to an irretrievable defeat but to his refusal to be responsible for the deaths of more Romans—more than the alleged 80,000 already sacrificed.24 The struggle that followed between the legions of Vitellius and those aligned with Vespasian claimed many thousands more. This internecine war reached the streets of Rome itself, setting ablaze Rome’s ancient temple to Jupiter Optimus Maximus. The civil wars brought Vespasian to power. They obviously mattered more to Romans than whatever was reported to be happening—and this was nothing really—at the empire’s eastern extremity. Nevertheless, the Flavians managed to take their suppression of unrest in a southern zone of the 130-year-old Province of Syria, focused in the upland polis Jerusalem—with doubtful claims to meriting a triumph in other circumstances25—and present it as one of the greatest ever conquests of a foreign people, an unprecedented defeat that crushed the Eastern Menace. The 24 25

Suetonius, Otho 9.3; Cassius Dio 64.10.2–3. Judaea had been conquered by Pompey in 64/63 BCE and remained under continuous Roman administration since. King Herod (40/37–4 BCE) was able to assume his throne only with the aid of a Roman legion under C. Sosius, as a Roman appointee who served at the pleasure of Augustus, as did his son Archelaus. Even if one made a notional exception for a supposedly ‘independent state’ during the revolt (66–70), that would hold only for the 2 km2 of walled Jerusalem, which the Flavians had encircled by the spring of 68 (and Vespasian was able to ride up to its walls, even after Simon’s forces had entered in spring 69: 4.550–55). Titus did not besiege the city until after a nearly two-year suspension of the campaign. The rest of the region, including the main Judaean centres in Galilee and Peraea, welcomed Vespasian and sought peace from the start. Exceptions were sites endangered by Vespasian’s marauders that showed resistance (Iotapata and Iapha) or

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triumphal event itself, the ambitious building programme it inaugurated, and the empire-wide production of celebratory coins in all denominations for at least a decade grounded the Flavians’ ruling legitimacy in this alleged conquest of a foreign gens. If the implicit messages of the triumph, pomerium-extension, and coinage did not make the point, the inscription on the lost Arch of Titus in the Circus Maximus about a city first conquered by Titus, the surviving arch’s portrait of his signal accomplishment, and gushing statements in the Flavian poets made it unmistakable.26 What was our Judaean author up to, then, in pulling these skeletons of civil war out from the closet as Vespasian’s real concern (while he postponed the siege of Jerusalem unconcerned), during the high season of Flavian selfcongratulation? The question is compelling for two reasons. First, Josephus structures his work such that Book 1 gives ample attention to the real Roman conquest of Judaea, by Pompey in 64–63 BCE. That great general deliberately refrained from seizing temple furnishings, which he did not need to display the riches of actually conquered territory. Pompey’s conquest laid the foundation for 130 years of successful Roman administration, which Josephus’ War also describes in detail. If Josephus in Rome cannot take seriously the claim that Vespasian and Titus conquered Judaea,27 we must be all the more curious about his handling of Vespasian’s rise to power. Second, Josephus portrays Vespasian as initiating a civil war against Vitellius. We tend to speak for convenience of the civil war after Nero, beginning with the revolt of Vindex in spring 68 and ending with Vespasian. But this is a hindsight (and perhaps teleological) compression. It could not have looked that way as events were unfolding. To be sure, it is hard to say when a civil war is over. A foreign war is finished when a Carthage, Corinth, or Jerusalem is reduced to rubble and ash, the foreign fighters are dead or enslaved, and the leaders are killed or securely captured. Although the place may come back to life and fight again after a generation or two, that war is finished. But such definitive endings are not possible with internal conflicts, for antagonists will not destroy their own homeland. Killing internal opponents may only create further enemies among those who supported them, who bide their time before acting again. The insidious nature of civil war explains why it has always been considered a curse.

26 27

towns that opposed King Agrippa (Tiberias, Tarichea, Gamala) and faced Vespasian’s medicine, since he was nearby and eager to help. See Mason 2016a: 292–93. See Mason 2016a: 4–43. See Mason 2017 (= Chapter 5 in this volume).

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That said, even if Galba had reasons to feel vulnerable, Vitellius must have thought that civil war was truly over when Otho died in April 69, and he accepted the Senate’s recognition. When Galba was murdered in January, Otho was Vitellius’ only enemy. Once Vitellius prevailed over him, he had every reason to think the contest to succeed Nero was won. He began the task of uniting the empire’s legions and their commanders. That is the message his coins proclaim: ‘the concord of the Roman People’, ‘the consensus of all the armies’, and even—taking presumptive ownership of Vespasian’s campaign—‘victory’ in the east.28 Tales of his lewd conduct after Otho’s demise perhaps confirm that he no longer thought he was on a war footing. Who would challenge him? He was wrong. Soon after he arrived in Rome, in the summer of 69, he heard of Vespasian’s challenge with the support of the eastern legions. But this means that Vespasian was thought to be plotting a new civil war. Tacitus portrays Vespasian weighing up the prospects of initiating a bellum against Vitellius (2.74). Suetonius remarks with surprising insouciance that Vespasian was ‘initiating a civil war’ (Suscepto igitur civili bello) when he sent commanders and armies to Italy, as he seized control of Alexandria (Vesp. 7.1). It is hard to read Josephus’ account any differently. He does not pretend that Vespasian thought there was an existing civil war (who was fighting?), which he should intervene to end. Only the news that Vitellius has prevailed over Otho and become emperor leads him to ponder whether he could accept being governed by such a man or instead make a bid for supreme power himself (BJ 4.589–90). It is not civil war in Rome that drives Vespasian to action, but a decision that he cannot tolerate the man who ended the civil war, and then the pressure of his own army. No matter how we slice it, also for Josephus, Vespasian launches a civil war against an emperor duly recognised by the Senate. This has a couple of consequences in Josephus’ account. First, having started this war himself, Vespasian too knows that civil wars are never over. As he moves to replace Vitellius, who is to say that another Vespasian will not find him irksome and mount yet a further challenge? Second, therefore, only the celebration of an external victory—the bigger, the better—offers the prospect of channelling the conflicts and wounds of civil war in a productive way forward. The triumphal spectacle invites all Roman citizens to vent their anxieties on the image of the distant foreigner, reaffirming their deeper unity. If matched with the diplomatic skill to reward the best people who have served previous emperors, without retribution, and especially if followed by a massive building programme and glittering coinage production reinforcing the message of 28

Respectively, from British Museum examples: BM R.6585 (aureus), BM 2011,4133.1 (silver), and BM 1872,0709.466, 1950,1006.972, 1964,0401.1, R.10275 (bronzes).

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national unity, such a triumph for a foreign victory affords unmatched possibilities for a firm political foundation. It is no great leap to suggest that Vespasian and Titus maintained such a disciplined focus on the proclaimed victory over Jerusalem, for a decade and more after their arrival in power, because it was so obvious that Vespasian had in fact come to power by initiating a bellum civile against Vitellius. Blackening the character of Vitellius, as our sources unanimously do in reflection of the Flavian portrait (in this Josephus fully joins), could only go so far. The more compelling way to overcome the stigma of civil war was to change the conversation, keeping the focus on Vespasian’s other role as commander of that proper war against foreigners, in which he and Titus had personally faced hazards and injury on Rome’s behalf. Josephus, as it happens, has an unshakeable if awkward interest in Rome’s internal power struggles. As a matter of governing principle, he pointedly favours hereditary aristocracy. He views monarchy as at least latent tyranny, even if a particular ruler behaves benevolently, because of the inevitable struggle for succession that autocracy generates.29 War’s opening sentence highlights the disease of Roman domestic strife that followed Nero’s demise. It refers explicitly to civil war, when opportunity induced ‘many’ to contend for sovereignty (πολλοὺς μὲν βασιλειᾶν ὁ καιρὸς ἀνέπειθεν), while the contending armies were looking to maximise their profits (1.4–5). If βασιλειάω here (‘contend for sovereignty’) seems an impolitic verb for a sensitive author to use in the Flavian Principate, notice that its only occurrence outside this passage is in BJ 4.546, where it describes Vitellius’ moves against Otho. So we have a clear opening reference to civil war after Nero as the matrix for power-seeking among strong men in both Rome and Judaea. It can be no accident that War’s long first volume pictures the powerful men of the late Republic—Pompey, Crassus, Caesar, Cassius, Marc Antony, Octavian—as they cross the Judaean stage in turn, each enjoying his moment in the sun before the next man topples him. Judaea’s leaders, notably the wily Antipater and his son King Herod, must constantly adapt to this unstable Roman background, just as the Hasmoneans had shown a fleetness of foot in managing the rivals to decaying Seleucid power. War 2 devotes a surprising amount of space, for a work on Judaean history, to affairs in Rome following Gaius’ assassination (2.204–14). The standoff between the Praetorian Guard, supporting their chosen monarch, and the Senate, who demand a return to aristocratic rule, anticipates the whole volume Josephus will devote to this crisis in Antiquities (19). But War’s language already shows 29

Mason 2012.

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that he includes this material with purpose, as part of the Rome-Jerusalem dialectic. For he remarks that after Gaius’ murder the Senate, led by the consuls, intended either to re-establish their aristocratic government or to choose a worthy princeps. Either way, they ‘voted to make war on Claudius’, even though the force at their disposal was negligible (2.204). Josephus has Claudius reply from the secure Praetorian camp (2.210): An area must be pre-arranged outside the polis for the polemos, for it would not be holy for the sacred precincts of our native land to be polluted by compatriot murder—on account of their bad decision (οὐ γὰρ ὅσιον διὰ τὴν αὐτῶν κακοβουλίαν ὁμοφύλῳ φόνῳ μιαίνεσθαι τὰ τεμένη τῆς πατρίδος). Given that compatriot slaughter and the pollution of sacred precincts are central themes of Josephus’ Judaean story,30 this material cannot be mere filler. It is part of his crafted narrative, most obviously about Judaea but regularly invoking Roman parallels to interweave the two worlds for his audiences in Rome. An upshot is Josephus’ aim of puncturing the post-war image of the Judaeans, from the triumph and beyond, as war-mongering savages.31 The Romans themselves have just emerged from the same sort of internal conflict and violence that confronted Jerusalem’s leaders and led to that city’s destruction. His audience should understand the scene in Jerusalem, with aristocrats such as Josephus trying to manage dangerous impulses. Near the end of War he concludes this thread with a remark on the triumph, an event pre-emptively focused on victory in foreign war. Josephus calmly upends that assumption, however, with the reflection (7.157): ‘For on this day the city of Rome held a festival for the victory of its army over [foreign] enemies, the cessation of its internal ills (πέρας δὲ τῶν ἐμφυλίων κακῶν), and the beginning of hopes for happiness’. Despite the triumph’s effort at redirection, Josephus and his audiences know well that internal Roman strife was the main problem from Nero’s final years. In sum, Josephus’ War develops a dialectic between Roman and Judaean (especially Jerusalemite) internal conflict. In both cities one can find publicspirited leaders, fickle masses, and self-serving instigators. In place of the Flavian portrait of a rebellious or even previously unconquered gens in the East receiving its just deserts from commanders acting for a monolithic Rome, 30 31

Mason 2016a: 101–21. E.g., Silius Italicus, Pun. 3.605–66, ‘This man, in the bloom of youth, will put an end to war with the fierce nation of Palestine’.

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Josephus presents a more human and complex account of long-standing productive amity between these two great nations, tried and tested since the days of Pompey, Augustus, and his close friend Herod. In ways appreciated by anyone familiar with the sweep of Greek literature, our statesman-author charts the tragic internal conflicts that arose during Nero’s last days, as established government collapsed and fateful collisions put tyrants at the helm—in both Rome and Jerusalem. 3

Judaean and Roman Civil War—and Their Respective Tyrants

The particular stretch of narrative that interests us here, on the civil war that brought Vespasian to power (BJ 4.492–603), is part of the same dialectic. Josephus moves back and forth between Rome and Jerusalem. This cannot be merely for a change of scene, because the explicit connectors and transitional passages bring the two cities into conversation. In the large block 4.502–44, for example, Josephus connects Roman and Judaean events chronologically and thematically. At the beginning, he says of Vespasian and Titus (4.502–503): Being in suspense about the larger events, as Rome’s imperium was shaken to the core, they looked away from the campaign against Judaeans. Given their fear for their homeland, they considered it the wrong moment for an assault on foreign peoples. But another war loomed over Jerusalem. There was a certain Simon son of Giora, a Gerasene by origin: a young man unequal to John (who already controlled the city) in craftiness but surpassing him in strength of body and audacity. After then elaborating this conflict in Jerusalem between ‘the tyrants’ John and Simon, he builds a bridge back to the sedition and tyranny in Rome. Whether or not his audience was alert enough to detect parallels between the older, wily Galba and more vigorous Otho in Rome and the older-but-cunning John and younger Simon in Judaea, Josephus connects the two conflicts with language such as this (4.545–46): Stasis and civil war were not only in Judaea but had also come upon Italy. For Galba had been done away with in the middle of the Roman Forum, and as Otho was designated imperator he was at war with Vitellius, who was contending for royal power, for the legions in Germany had elevated him.

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Josephus does not spell out the chronology that supports these narrative moves, but the Roman side must have been fresh in his audience’s mind. The Flavian civil war had occurred just a few years earlier. After describing the contest between Otho and Vitellius (January–April 69), he gives the lunar month of Xanthicus (March–April) of what seems to be our 69 CE as the time when Simon bar Giora entered Jerusalem and the extreme violence began there. Roman audiences might have noticed from context, even if not familiar with Macedonian months, that this coincided with the victory of Vitellius (April 69) and his violent, nervous-making march to Rome.32 In each capital, according to Josephus, the arrival of the usurper with his unruly fighters brings turmoil, pollution, and destruction to the sacred polis. This is not to say that Josephus matches the two sides in either a mathematical or an allegorical way. It is a matter of atmosphere and evocation: tyrants all share certain traits and behaviours. Most striking are their indulgence, lack of proper masculine self-control, and even effeminacy.33 Vitellius attracts the only two occurrences of the noun λαγνεία in Josephus, a graphic word (lit. ‘semen’) used metonymically for power-lust (4.596, 652). Josephus remarks (4.652): ‘If he had survived to a full life-span, I reckon that the empire itself would have failed to satisfy his λαγνεία.’ Consider these passages: 4.586–87: Vitellius was now present from Germany, dragging along with his army a different sort of vast rabble. Being unable to accommodate them in the area marked off for soldiers, he made the whole of Rome into a military camp and filled every house with armed fighters. Seeing the wealth of the Romans with such impressionable eyes—silver and gold glittering everywhere they looked—these fellows could hardly restrain their desires (τὰς ἐπιθυμίας μόλις κατεῖχον). The result was that they could not be turned from plunder, while they did away with all those who obstructed them. 4.592–93 [Vespasian’s men in Judaea talk amongst themselves]: Those soldiers in Rome, who are indulging themselves and unable to bear even hearing a rumour of war (τρυφῶντες καὶ μηδ᾿ ἀκούειν πολέμου φήμην ὑπομένοντες), are voting in those whom they want in power and appointing emperors in the hope of profits, whereas we, who have come through so many hardships and are ageing under these helmets, yield this authority 32 33

Morgan 2006: 139, 152–53. Cf. Tacitus, Hist. 2.73: ‘Both he himself [Vitellius] and the army, as if they had no rival to fear, with savagery, lust, and rapine indulged fully in foreign behaviours’ (saevitia libidine raptu in externos mores proruperant).

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to those fellows. And we do this even though we have someone here among us who is much more worthy of ruling! 4.651 [At the end]: Then Vitellius comes out of the palace, drunk and stuffed, having gorged himself from a table for the doomed, as happens in extreme circumstances. Compare these remarks about Vitellius and his Rhineland thugs with Josephus’ picture of John of Gischala and his band of Galilean rustics, newly arrived in Jerusalem: 4.560–63: Their longing for plunder was indefatigable, as was their searching of rich people’s homes; murder of men and violation of women was their sport. They washed down what they had robbed with blood, and when full they insolently behaved like women: styling their hair and putting on women’s clothes, soaking themselves in perfumes and, for a fetching look, applying eyeliner. It was not only the makeup they imitated, however, but also women’s passions. With extraordinary wantonness they dreamed up illicit sexual modes. They wallowed about the polis as though in a brothel and polluted everything with their impure actions. But while feminising their faces, they murdered with their right hands. Adopting an unmanly gait, they fell upon men suddenly and became warriors. Bringing out swords from their fancy dyed gowns, they ran through the fellow they happened to meet. What united the civil wars most conspicuously, of course, was that the Flavians had ended both at the same time: Vespasian defeating Vitellius by the proxies of Mucianus and Antonius Primus, John and Simon at the hands of Titus with Tiberius Alexander. Gwyn Morgan highlights a chronological problem in BJ 4.586–87, quoted above. Josephus, he points out, makes the reported actions of Vitellius and his soldiers in Rome the trigger for Vespasian’s decision bid for power. But since Vitellius could not have reached Rome before Vespasian’s acclamation on 1 July 69, the eastern commander and his supporters could not have been motivated by reports about Vitellius’ behaviour in Rome.34 Evidently, Josephus has fused Vespasian’s disgust for Vitellius with the man’s alleged later behaviour in the capital itself. But it is still plausible that Vespasian made his bid out of hatred for Vitellius, soon after learning of his victory in mid-April. The role that the behaviour of Vitellius and his armies played, as distinct from his own political ambitions and calculations, is impossible to gauge. 34

Morgan 2006: 182.

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The anti-Vitellian historiographical tradition was undoubtedly shaped by the long-ruling Flavians. However that may be, Vitellius had been recognised by the Senate as soon as news of Otho’s death in mid-April reached Rome (Tacitus, Hist. 2.50–55). And Tacitus claims that Vitellius’ forces, once relieved of the war for survival against Otho, began behaving atrociously toward local populations throughout Italy: ‘robbing and plundering and polluting with violence and lust’, they ‘plunged with foreign manners into cruelty, sexual crime, and plunder’ (Hist. 2.56, 73). In Tacitus, this reported behaviour frames Vespasian’s consideration of his options (2.74–79) long before Vitellius arrives in Rome (2.89), though Tacitus’ Vespasian is not as personally hateful of Vitellius as Josephus’ character is. Although Josephus is thus mistaken, or using hindsight compression common to the best historians, in making Vitellius’ behaviour in Rome the cause of Vespasian’s anxiety, his larger point that Vespasian ‘hears about the troubles in Rome and that Vitellius was emperor’ (BJ 4.588) would have made sense to his audiences in Flavian Rome. Not only does Josephus portray Judaea, inconveniently for the Flavian picture, as a long-held ally of Rome, and draw attention to Vespasian’s decision to initiate a new civil war against Vitellius. The sequence of events he gives for Vespasian’s acclamation diverges in fundamental ways from the authorised version. As is well known, the Flavians and the pliant Senate antedated Vespasian’s dies imperii to 1 July 69—because that was the day on which Egypt’s Prefect Tiberius Julius Alexander led two legions in an oath of allegiance to Vespasian, months before the issue with Vitellius was settled in Rome (Suetonius, Vesp. 6.3). As Tacitus puts it (Hist. 2.79): The first step in transferring the imperium to Vespasian occurred in Alexandria, where Tiberius Alexander moved quickly and administered the oath of allegiance to his legions on the calends of July (initium ferendi ad Vespasianum imperii Alexandriae coeptum, festinante Tiberio Alexandro, qui kalendis Iuliis sacramento eius legiones adegit). The official story cherished the Egyptian Prefect’s independence of mind and political assessment. Suetonius claims that Alexander was influenced by a straw poll taken among Moesia’s legionaries. Seeking a strong leader of consular rank after Otho’s death, they chose Vespasian over Vitellius. Alexander saw which way the winds were blowing and made the first open declaration for Vespasian, now confident of broad eastern support. However he came to his decision, it was important to the Flavian narrative that he be seen to act independently, for this experienced true-blue governor supposedly initiated the chain reaction that enabled Vespasian to confront

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Vitellius with all justice on his side. The convergence of the Egyptian Prefect’s decision with the support of Syria’s legate Mucianus, the Danubian provinces, and finally Vespasian’s three legions in Judaea (on 3 July) distinguished his bid for power from any cheap, personally motivated coup d’état. The need for action against Vitellius was recognised by many political leaders and senators with armies, and Vespasian humbly accepted the demand of duty thrust upon him. That story would be seriously dented if people thought that Vespasian’s plan sprang from his personal ambitions and/or conspiracy originating from his group in Judaea. Enter Josephus. For his own reasons as a Judaean author, his account claims that Vespasian is first acclaimed by his own commanders and troops in Caesarea (BJ 4.588).35 They act from various motives, among which their competitive indignation and hopes for status and profit figure decisively (4.602–604, 616–21). This greatly complicates the Flavian story, though it anticipates the Judaean author’s assertions about his nation’s mysterious ancient oracles, which had predicted that a world ruler would rise from Judaea.36 In those later passages, he connects Vespasian’s rise with alleged ancient scriptures, which no modern scholar has been able to find, predicting that ‘one from their [Judaean] territory would come to rule the inhabited earth’ (BJ 6.312–13; cf. 3.352–53). Fulfilment of the alleged prediction requires that Vespasian be proclaimed imperator in Judaea (ἀποδειχθέντος ἐπὶ Ἰουδαίας αὐτοκράτορος). Although such mysterious oracles, recalled in Book 6, play no role in the accession story of Book 4, and it is not clear that Josephus had even thought of (or invented) them when he was composing Book 4, he may have been laying the ground for the later claim by having Vespasian first 35

36

Morgan (2006: 178, 182) places Vespasian on Mt. Carmel in May–June of 69, for Mucianus’ speech and the fateful decision, apparently assuming Tacitus’ support. Tacitus mentions Carmel, however, only in the paragraph following Mucianus’ speech, where Vespasian is recalling earlier omens in his favour, including one on Mt. Carmel. Tacitus has them disperse from this unnamed meeting place, Mucianus to Antioch and Vespasian to Caesarea (Hist. 2.79). But since he does not say where they were, the colony of Berytus (cf. 2.81) seems a more likely meeting place for Vespasian and Mucianus. That is where Josephus has them meet shortly after Vespasian’s acclamation in Caesarea (BJ 4.620–21). Nicols (1978: 72–73), with most others who have taken Josephus for a Flavian mouthpiece, does not explain this. Weber (1921: 168–69 n. 1) consigns it to a lengthy footnote, suggesting that there is no real problem if one considers the complexity of events in both Caesarea and Alexandria, which must have overlapped. His interest is more in the underlying realities and sources than the text as it is, though he concedes that foregrounding the Caesarean acclamation suits Josephus’ narrative. Lindner (1972: 65) may have been the first to notice here an important index of Josephus’ independence from the Flavian story.

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acclaimed in territory close to historic Judaea. Or he may have been telling the story he thought he knew: that in fact Vespasian had first been acclaimed by soldiers and officers jealous of Vitellius’ army, and this triggered an effort to gain further eastern support. Whatever Josephus’ motives were, he shatters the official scheme when he says that, once Vespasian had reluctantly accepted his soldiers’ demand that he seek power, he understood the strategic importance of Egypt and therefore wrote to Tiberius Alexander to solicit his support, explaining that his army’s zeal had forced him to assume the burden of power (4.616–19). When Alexander duly administered the oath of allegiance to Vespasian, in Josephus’ account, he did so as the obliging prefect of a province neighbouring that of a senator in command of a large and supportive army. He is not the independent instigator of Flavian tradition. Vespasian made him an offer he could not easily refuse. 4

Vespasian’s Motives

The particular motives that Josephus attributes to Vespasian, finally, are thoroughly human and unheroic. They suit Josephus’ interest in human psychology and ‘realistic’ portrait of the Roman. They seem more compelling to modern readers, perhaps, than the reported Flavian story of virtue in rescuing the Republic from civil war. After Nero’s death, Josephus and Tacitus agree, Vespasian and Titus had no reservations about serving the septuagenarian blueblood Galba (Hist. 1.10).37 When Galba was murdered in mid-January of 69, however, Vitellius (who was one cause of his demise) and the brash young Otho (the other) seemed to the Flavians equally repugnant successors.38 Both historians describe Titus’ termination of his journey to Galba, somewhere around Corinth, on learning of Galba’s lynching (15 January 69). Only Tacitus mentions a rumour that Titus had been going to Rome in hopes of being adopted by Galba. So only he claims to disclose Titus’ internal dialogue on hearing that Galba was dead (Hist. 2.1). The younger Flavian 37

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Morgan (2006: 177–79) plausibly suggests that Vespasian became unsettled by the lack of communication from Galba, given that he had been sent as Nero’s man, and further that Vespasian’s dispatch of Titus to Galba in late 68 was aimed at confirming good relations. Then again, since Galba reached Rome only in October 69, and Vespasian had to hear that he had arrived before sending Titus, the timing of Titus’ trip (NB: with King Agrippa II) can be explained without deeper speculation about such worries. Hist. 1.50: All classes united in thinking that ‘prayers for either would be ungodly, vows for either of these two abominable; in their war you knew only that the winner would be the worse one.’

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weighs the pros and cons of continuing to greet the new man, who would not thank him for honours intended for Galba and so might turn hostile, or going back to his father and risking offence to the new man, though he would be secure for the time being. Tacitus mentions that Vespasian dutifully administered oaths of loyalty in Judaea to Otho and Vitellius in turn (Hist. 1.76; 2.6, 73), but in his account Vespasian begins weighing his prospects as soon as he hears that Galba is dead. Titus’ decision to return home, which opens Book 2 of the Histories, is a turning point in these calculations as it creates its own momentum (2.1–7). Josephus agrees on that basic story. By having Titus accompanied by the key Flavian ally (Herod’s great-grandson) King Agrippa II, however, he strengthens the impression that they had both intended to honour old Galba and receive his mandate for Judaea (BJ 4.498). The Judaean king’s presence, unmentioned by Tacitus, removes any suspicion about Titus’ hidden purpose (Hist. 2.1). When the pair hear the news of Galba’s death, according to Josephus, Agrippa realises that he must continue to Rome in any case, for he can be nothing other than a loyal allied king to whoever should take power, whereas Titus abruptly turns back to confer with his father (BJ 4.501–502). Josephus attributes Titus’ decision to some ‘spiritual impulse’, anticipating the fateful developments to come. The different choices of Agrippa and Titus, and Josephus’ notice that the Flavian father and son were ‘in suspense’, given the empire’s current instability, show that Titus and Vespasian are in a position to influence events, whereas Agrippa is not. The Flavians are players in high Roman politics, in Josephus as in Tacitus, long before Vespasian hears of Vitellius’ accession and his offensive behaviour the following spring–summer. Once Vitellius emerges victorious from the struggle with Otho, likewise, both historians portray Vespasian as deeply conflicted. According to Tacitus, Vespasian was ‘at one moment buoyed by hope, at the next pondering the consequences of failure’—namely, death for himself and his two sons if a bid for power should fail (Hist. 2.74). Josephus explores a similar psychological drama, all the more vividly because it is now driven by potent personal animosity. He uses a variety of terms to make Vespasian’s outrage palpable: indignation (ἀγανάκτησις), overwhelming distress, unbearable torment (περιαλγήσας δὲ τῷ πάθει καρτερεῖν τὴν βάσανον), anger (θυμός), and rage (ὀργή). Although Josephus’ Vespasian would like nothing more than to cross the sea and deal with the impudent wretch Vitellius, however, he is paralysed by three considerations: the distance involved, the supposed winter weather, and the unpredictability of fortune (BJ 4.591). These are enough to immobilise him, boiling though his rage may be.

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Of all the models of the great commander, from Achilles to Augustus, Hadrian, or Marcus Aurelius, it would be difficult to find a place for what we today might label this passive-aggressive, tortured soul who rages so impotently but cannot act, constrained by manifold fears and even practical inconvenience. It is hard to detect in Josephus’ account of Vespasian’s personal motives any hint of transcendent justice, virtue, or self-sacrificing courage for the good of the Republic. The winter-travel problem is especially puzzling, because Vespasian could not have heard of Vitellius’ April accession much before May, after which it was not an issue. He would have sailed and his army would have marched in the most favourable season for travel. As for fortune, Josephus’ model Polybius had made it a central theme of his work that Rome succeeded because its great leaders were never cowed by fortune’s reversals. Virtue and discipline, embodied in the Roman constitution and army, had always enabled Rome to overcome fortune’s reversals.39 Why, then, does Josephus portray Vespasian as such a worry-wart? He draws the audience’s attention to Vespasian’s officers and soldiers. They have plans of their own, which serve their interests. They push Vespasian to bid for power because of their superiority to Vitellius’ Rhine legions, granted their commander’s advantages over Vitellius. They do contrast Vespasian’s virtue with Vitellius’ debauchery, but then quickly turn to more practical matters and political calculations, arguably thinking more strategically than their commander. Whereas Vitellius is childless, they reckon, Vespasian has both an heir and a spare. He even has a brother already well positioned in Rome (Flavius Sabinus), and his teenage son, Domitian, is also on the scene there. Most importantly, if Vespasian does not delay, he will certainly swing all the eastern legions, including those under Tiberius Alexander (not yet on board in this account), behind him. With such considerations, Vespasian’s officers convince themselves that they are objectively the best ones to secure imperial rule, under this commander, and that the Senate and people will agree (4.592–600). Without worrying about Vespasian’s views, right there in Caesarea they proclaim him imperator and demand that he rescue the endangered empire (4.601: καὶ σώζειν τὴν κινδυνεύουσαν ἡγεμονίαν παρεκάλουν). There are echoes here of the Praetorian Guard’s earlier choice of the terrified Claudius to serve their interests, in Josephus’ telling, irrespective of his wishes (BJ 2.204; AJ 19.216–20). 39

Polybius 1.1.2, 35.2, 63.9, 64.2; 2.7.1–2, 20.7–8; 3.2.6; 6.2.5–8; 16.28.1; 18.28.4–5; 38.2.1–2.

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Tacitus pictures Vespasian calculating his chances and expressing doubts, but the sharp edge of personal animosity toward Vitellius is missing.40 There Vespasian himself is more calculating. He reckons that he has the support of Mucianus in Syria, the Danubian legions, and Tiberius Alexander has already declared, though still he vacillates between hope and fear because he realises that failure would be terminal (Hist. 2.74). In Tacitus’ characteristic account, Mucianus speaks for the officers in persuading Vespasian that his prominence and eastern support have already made him a target for Vitellius, and so his only option is to try for supreme power (2.76): Remaining sluggish to the end and abandoning the Republic to violation and ruin seems like laziness and timidity, even if slavery [i.e., submission to Vitellius] could protect you—at the cost of disgrace. The time has already passed when you could still be seen as lacking ambition: imperium is your only refuge now (torpere ultra et polluendam perdendamque rem publicam relinquere sopor et ignavia videretur, etiam si tibi quam inhonesta, tam tuta servitus esset. abiit iam et transvectum est tempus quo posses videri non cupisse: confugiendum est ad imperium). This is not a million miles from Josephus’ treatment of the same events, but the Judaean historian brings Vespasian’s interests into much sharper conflict with those of his soldiers. Josephus has Mucianus speak only later, after the decisive event (BJ 4.605, 621), which goes as follows (4.602–604): His [Vespasian’s] mind had certainly been on general affairs for a long time, though definitely without intending that he himself should rule. Although he certainly considered himself worthy by virtue of his accomplishments, he preferred the security that comes with private life to the dangers that attend eminence (προκρίνων δὲ τῶν ἐν λαμπρότητι κινδύνων τὴν ἐν ἰδιώταις ἀσφάλειαν). But when he refused, the commanders became all the more insistent and the soldiers, sword in hand, threatened to do away with him if he should not be willing to live in a worthy manner (ἀναιρεῖν αὐτὸν ἠπείλουν, εἰ μὴ βούλοιτο ζῆν ἀξίως). After expounding to them the many reasons why he was resisting the rule, finally, as he could not persuade them he yields to the titles.

40

Morgan 2006: 182: ‘There is not one word about the excesses of Vitellius’. That is literally true, but surely polluendam perdendamque in 2.76 glosses Vitellius’ regime, while 2.74 has Vespasian counting on the eastern army’s revulsion at Vitellius’ insolent troops.

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Josephus’ Vespasian is confident that he deserves supreme power: he is in every way a better man than Vitellius, whom he despises. His reasons for eschewing power have little to do with modesty, therefore, and everything to do with fear. Given the fate of recent holders of supreme power, he unashamedly prefers personal safety. In the end, only his more immediate fear of the blades at his throat makes him abandon his preferred inertia. Josephus’ Vespasian is thus a reluctant commander, drafted by others to supreme rule, certainly no tyrant or demagogue, but ‘forced to shoulder the burden of empire’ (4.616). Although he might seem a Cincinnatus-like Roman drafted into service, the detail supplied by Josephus of a deeply frustrated and enraged man, steaming against Vitellius yet crippled by fear, do not read as flattery of a hero. Josephus’ audience could not but recall, from near the end of the preceding volume, a strikingly similar scene, when Josephus was confronting Vespasian in Galilee. Trapped in Iotapata, after heroically exhausting all avenues of defence, Josephus resolves to surrender, citing divine authorisation for such an unheroic finale (BJ 3.350–54). His officers, however, draw their swords and demand that he do what is right, which by their lights means collective suicide. He can join them voluntarily or their blades will take the decision out of his hands: ‘they brandished their swords at him and threatened to do away with him if he should give himself up to the Romans’ (3.360). Josephus’ resolve, however, unlike Vespasian’s, never wavers. Supremely confident of his purpose, he remains master of the situation and prevails: first by bamboozling them with a philosophical disquisition against suicide (3.361–82), then by using the sheer force of his personality to unman his assailants (3.383–86), and in the last extremity by his most famous trick—‘ἐπίνοια [scheming] did not abandon him’ (3.387): casting lots to determine the order of death, the puzzle that inspired the Josephus Problem in mathematics.41 This is not to suggest that Josephus makes an overt contrast between himself and Vespasian to the latter’s detriment. That would have been imprudent, and he draws no such lines. They are left for the audience to notice, or not. One might conceivably justify both men by supposing that in Josephus’ case the soldiers wanted something bad (even if they saw it as virtue), which he rightly refused, whereas Vespasian’s men wanted something virtuous, which 41

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/JosephusProblem.html, accessed 2 August 2022. Given a circle of 41 persons (BJ 3.342) and the rule that every nth must die, where should one stand to be among the last two? Josephus’ description of the ordeal has no such predictable order, however. One must reckon with sleight of hand with the lots (if not divine protection) to explain his survival.

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he nobly accepted. Still, Josephus’ account of Vespasian’s decision to bid for power is not a tale of courage and virtue. Vespasian’s hatred of Vitellius is the furnace of his rage, but he overcomes a debilitating fear of taking action only when forced by the more proximate fear of his men’s blades. Not only that, but when Vespasian does act it is to send Mucianus to Italy with an army—no longer concerned about winter travel or fortune’s reversals—while he heads to the safety of Alexandria for nearly a year (BJ 4.631–32). The regime image of Vespasian as a supremely tough and fortune-blessed conqueror, motivated by a heroic love of country and of peace, is at least greatly nuanced by the realistic human portraits of the Judaean client Josephus. 5

Conclusion

In order to move beyond subjective impressions of Josephus’ portrait of Vespasian’s rise to power, I have asked how well it matches Tacitus’ brief characterisation of the Flavian historians who had treated the subject. Our investigation shows that Josephus’ account of this crucial episode in the Flavian story resembles that of the worldly-wise senatorial historian to a surprising degree—surprising, if we consider their very different backgrounds and circumstances, and given that Josephus wrote while Vespasian still lived, whereas Tacitus’ criticisms come a safe generation later. Neither of these canny political historians explains Vespasian’s bid as motivated by simple love of peace and country. Both write as experienced statesmen, familiar with the grubbier hopes and fears that always attend claims to power. Both accounts are sceptical, deeply human, psychologically oriented, and plausible-seeming. Both are at odds with the simple images disseminated in the Flavian triumph, coins, and monuments, and the flood of pseudo-historical literature they both decry.

Chapter 4

The Fides of Flavius Josephus Everyone knows two things about Flavius Josephus (37–ca. 100 CE). First, ‘the Jewish historian’—a post he occupies by acclamation—is our principal source for southern Syria under early Roman rule. He wrote his Judaean War in seven volumes during Vespasian’s reign, then the twenty-volume Judaean Antiquities (Ἀρχαιολογία), running from Creation to the eve of the war and supplemented by an autobiographical appendix, as Domitian’s reign neared its end (93–94 CE). A two-volume polemical essay on the Judaeans’ antiquity and enviable laws, known as Against Apion, completes the surviving oeuvre. The second thing everyone knows is that Josephus was a client of the Flavians, brought to Rome as a human trophy from their virtus-defining victory in Judaea. Near the end of his life, he boasts of having accompanied a respectful Titus on the journey from Alexandria to Rome (V 422), of his privileged access to the Flavians’ field notes when composing his War (V 342), and of benefactions from each successive Flavian ruler (V 413–29). He buttresses his credentials with the claim that he presented copies of the War to Vespasian and Titus (V 361; Ap. 1.50), and that Titus declared them the only reliable guide to the conflict (V 363). He settles a dispute with a literary rival by citing the judgement of Vespasian, who protected him and condemned the other fellow (V 336–67). In Antiquities he recalls witnessing a display of Solomonic demon-therapy by a Judaean in Rome before all three Flavians with their top military commanders (AJ 8.46)—incidental evidence of an ongoing relationship. Suetonius (Vesp. 5.6) and the Epitome of Cassius Dio (66.1.4) mention Josephus by name. Tacitus may have borrowed from the War (in Hist. 5.12–13) and/or mentioned him in his own lost account of Jerusalem’s fall. Within decades, at any rate, Josephus’ writings had become the sole authority on matters Judaean.1 Such a career outline makes this extraordinary easterner an intriguing case study of Flavian fides: loyalty or faithfulness. Since Josephus wrote in Greek, the term itself cannot be our issue. He uses the parallel word-group πίστις / πιστὀς / πιστεύω too often and too mundanely for that to be worth pursuing in itself.2 In the scale of possible contexts for Roman fides, however, from Augustus’ boast that many peoples (gentes, ἔθνη) experienced the good faith 1 The TLG shows the eminent grammarian citing Josephus frequently for Judaean names. 2 See Lindsay 1993 for a survey.

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( fides, πίστις) of the Roman people under his leadership (RG 32.6) to the various dimensions of ‘mutual loyalty’ in the Flavian circle, we have ample room in Josephus’ thirty volumes for exploration. Several studies have examined Josephus’ view of the Roman empire in a conceptual way,3 and my recent History of the Jewish War looks in detail at the fides established between Rome and Jerusalem, as Josephus presents it and in reality.4 This brief investigation takes up the more personal dimensions of fides in Josephus’ literary portraits of the Flavians. Our underlying questions are: ‘How does he present Vespasian and Titus?’ ‘What was there about his writing that merited their support or at least tolerance?’ And ‘What might Josephus’ portraiture say about the governing style and expectations of Vespasian and Titus, and their attitude to such writers on the margins of their circle?’ Four preliminary considerations help to sharpen these questions. First, in War’s programmatic opening sentence Josephus denounces contemporaries who have been writing about the war by flattering the current rulers (BJ 1.1–8). Right off the mark, he seeks to establish a niche as the only credible guide to the Flavians’ founding achievement. With the unique knowledge of a Judaean leader who personally faced Vespasian in battle, it is not his role to aggrandise the victors, no matter how powerful they may be. His task is that of the dignified statesman-historian: to set the record straight with a balanced account (1.9). Confronting regime flatterers is a bold and exciting gambit: What will this foreigner say? What can he say, given his relationship of fides with Vespasian and Titus? Second, ‘the Jewish historian’ Josephus has understandably been read mainly for information on Judaea, seldom as a Roman author. Everyone has known as a circumstantial datum that he wrote in Flavian Rome, in Greek, but he has rarely been included in surveys or syntheses of Greek, Roman, or Flavian literature.5 John Marincola’s Authority and Tradition in Ancient Historiography (1997) was the first substantial work to tear down that fence 3 E.g., Cohen 1982; Stern 1987; Spilsbury 2003. 4 Mason 2016a: 199–280. 5 Josephus is missing from such standard treatments of Roman literary culture as Ogilvie (1980), Salles (1992), and Fantham (1996), though the last has two chapters on the Flavian period. The much expanded revision (Fantham (2013)) still leaves him out (cf. also Augoustakis (2016)). Revealing is Bowie (1970) 15, in an essay that hunts down even fragmentary and neglected local Greek authors. Bowie mentions Josephus only as evidence for the lost histories of the post-Nero civil war, but otherwise excludes the works of ‘a Jewish writer outside the main Greek tradition.’ Still, the attached n. 41 concedes that ‘his approach and arguments fall squarely within the Greek tradition that goes back to Thucydides, and … in this sense he does fall in the main Greek tradition.’

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in principle,6 but in the intervening years Josephus has still usually been left on the bench for big games. Flavian specialists increasingly acknowledge that he should not be neglected—and hope someone is attending to that.7 But his thirty extant volumes present a great deal of material, the eleven-volume biblical paraphrase most obviously, in which classical historians are not naturally at home. Reading his works as, first of all, products of Flavian Rome has not been the norm in either Josephus research or the study of classical literature. But this frame forces us to consider their implications for his fides-relationship with the rulers. Third, to the extent that ancient historians have commented on Josephus’ relationship to the ruling family, they have usually characterised it as the sort of mindless adulation one would a priori expect of someone in his position, living in a Flavian property and receiving a stipend—rather dull, unless one has a taste for sycophancy.8 The most common schema, often taken to be self-evident, imagines Josephus as a determined rebel fighter in Judaea who, after an ignoble surrender, became eager to honour his saviours. He therefore wrote the Judaean War in the service of Vespasian and Titus, possibly using an official Flavian chronicle as the main source.9 As he matured, however, and/or became alienated from Domitian, he recovered his self-respect and abandoned agitprop for devotion to nationalist subjects: the Judaeans’ antiquity and noble character. Nowadays, those who still assume this trajectory do not generally show the easy contempt of his critics a century ago, for a 6 The entry for Josephus in Marincola’s index (1997: 349), exceeding those for Cato the Elder, Caesar, or Cassius Dio and rivalling that for Herodotus, reflects his value for studying themes and tendencies in Greco-Roman historiography. 7 Given that Josephus’ corpus is the largest extant from Flavian Rome, the twenty-seven chapters in Zissos 2016 are notably reticent. Josephus is named in several (e.g., sources, Titus, Judaea, foreigners, literary culture, spectacle); his works are briefly summarised as evidence for the period (Hurlet 2016: 21–22) and cited for various historical conditions (e.g., Brighton 2016), but they are not explored as other literature is. 8 E.g., Hurlet 2016: 21–22: ‘The proximity of Josephus to the new regime makes him a valuable witness, capable of understanding the Flavian political program, and of transmitting elements of its “official” version.’ Similarly, Beard 2003: 543. 9 The creators of the scheme were (original publication dates) Laqueur 1920: 245–78; Weber 1921: 246 (Josephus, ‘prophet of the new Caesar,’ borrowed a Flavian source for much of books 3 to 7), 283–84; Thackeray 1929: 3, 15–16, 37–39, 42, 52–53. NB: Josephus claimed to have consulted the generals’ field notes (BJ 5.342, 358; Ap. 1.56; cf. AJ 15.174), but this appears as primary research used for his purposes, a very different thing from copying out an official chronicle. More recent echoes of the classical scheme are, e.g., in Künzl 1988: 9 (Josephus stood auf der Seite der Römer und nicht mehr auf der seines Volkes); Beard 2003: 558 (‘besotted with the Flavians’); Curran 2007: 77 (‘His depiction of Vespasian is adulatory and that of Titus little short of sycophantic’).

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renegade or turn-coat,10 but they still convey bemusement at Josephus’ allegedly abrupt shifts.11 Fourth, although this image of Josephus as Flavian apparatchik remains alive and well among non-specialists,12 specialist research of the past generation or two has gone in a different direction. It increasingly stresses the independent Judaean interests of all his writings, beginning with War, their unity as a corpus, and their significant departures from Flavian myth.13 This essay is a contribution in the same spirit. It is not wholly original, but the literary portraits of the Titi Flavii in Josephus’ War have not yet been isolated for study.14 Our task is simply to interpret the threads pertaining to Vespasian and Titus in Josephus’ Judaean War. Since I wrote the preceding chapter of this volume at the same time as the present one, for different audiences, and the originals overlapped in discussing Vespasian, this chapter omits the original section on Vespasian’s rise to power as already covered. 1

Preliminaries

Before we proceed, it will be helpful to mention some facts about Josephus’ War that may not be widely known, to clear the ground and avoid mistaken assumptions from the start. 10

11

12 13 14

Cf. Bentwich 1914: 54: surrender story ‘a sad compound of cant and cowardice’; ‘pusillanimity and subservience to his Roman patrons … He is at once vain and obsequious, servile and spiteful, professing candor and practising adulation. … As a general he proved himself a traitor.’ (255–56). E.g., Hurlet 2016: 21: ‘Josephus, who fought against Rome prior to joining the Flavians … a close associate of the new dynasty’; Murison 2016: 91: ‘Josephus, the one-time insurrectionistgeneral turned Flavian propagandist’; Parker 2016: 283: ‘in the course of the war, changed allegiance and joined the Romans’; Kemezis 2016: 464: ‘The references [to Vespasian and Titus] are uniformly positive, which is  … awkward given that Josephus had begun his career fighting against them as a rebel in Judaea only to end it in Rome as their favored dependent.’ Rajak 1983 was decisive in laying out a more complex picture of Josephus’ social-political position. See the preceding chapter of this volume; cf. Lindner 1972: 65 (Vespasian’s rise to power), Eberhardt 2005: 274–75, 277 (the triumph), McLaren 2005 (Titus), Mason 2005 (Titus and Domitian). Den Hollander 2014 comes closest, in treating Josephus’ relations with each of the Flavian rulers in Rome. Material from Josephus’ portraits of these men is obviously relevant, but he does not try to interpret the narratives as such. In a study of the historical war, Mason 2016a: 121–30 offers a brief survey of Josephus’ War on Vespasian and Titus, as part of the interpretation of the work.

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First, the Judaean War is not about the Flavians.15 They take their places in the train of Roman strong men that provides background scenery throughout the work’s 250-year journey (ca. 170 BCE–75 CE). But the story does not revolve around the Flavians any more than it does around Pompey, Antony, or Augustus in the earlier parts. The work’s opening prospectus (1.19–29) anticipates the parade of great Romans without giving special attention to the Flavians. The two first and longest volumes use Pompey, Crassus, Caesar, Antony, Augustus, Tiberius, Gaius, Claudius (whose accession depends on Herod’s grandson), and Nero, along with their legates and officials, as principal background figures for the main narrative of Jerusalem under Hasmoneans, King Herod, and their descendants. The work is nearly half over, therefore, before Vespasian and Titus appear.16 Nero sends Vespasian to take over from his failed legate in Syria, C. Cestius Gallus, who was the main Roman official in the final quarter of book 2. Cestius was planning to march on Jerusalem in the spring of 67. Vespasian, his replacement in subduing Jerusalem, then becomes a key player in book 3. But this is because he is the adversary of the War’s producer, director, script-writer, and leading man: Josephus. No one in Flavian Rome doubts the emperor’s magnificence, or the legions’ abilities. Josephus exploits their reputations to highlight his achievements and character. As a thirty-year-old priest from Jerusalem with no military experience and no obvious means of support, he manages to frustrate and demoralise Vespasian, Titus, and their 60,000-strong professional, experienced, and well-equipped army. Nor is the finale written from a Flavian perspective. It concerns Josephus’ divine mission and justification, which turn on his proximity to the Deity (3.351–54). Vespasian returns in the latter half of book 4, to consolidate the Judaean countryside and be acclaimed imperator in Caesarea, before leaving Josephus’ narrative world for Rome. Titus takes up the baton of Roman commander in books 5 and 6, but The Judaean War is not about him either. Its driving tragic score concerns besieged Jerusalem, its holy temple, polluting tyrants, and terrors. Titus’ presence adds valuable texture and pathos, but Josephus says much more about the people in Jerusalem, their actions and their mindsets. In book 7 Domitian makes a diverting appearance, in the west (7.85–88), and Titus figures in a few eastern episodes before he leaves the region for Rome (7.121–62). 15 16

Hurlet 2016: 21: ‘The Flavian dynasty is at the heart of this account, and it is not surprising that it is presented(?) in a positive light.’ Kemezis 2016: 464: ‘Vespasian and Titus are major characters in the Jewish War … The references are uniformly positive.’ According to the TLG, the War contains 125,274 words; according to the desktop programme Accordance, about 320 more. Either way, the first two volumes account for 42%: book 1 nearly 30,000 words and book 2 more than 22,500.

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That leaves the senatorial legates of the new imperial province—Cerialis, Bassus, and Silva (70–74 CE)—to conclude the train of Roman commanders (to 7.455). As the preface already makes clear (1.11–12), this is a story of Judaea and its beating heart Jerusalem, their long prosperity under Rome, and their sudden catastrophe. Roman leaders provide context, but it is not a Roman, much less a Flavian, story. Second, Josephus’ account of Jerusalem’s relations with Rome clashes with Flavian media presentations at several points. To take only the most glaring discrepancy: the Flavian founding myth declared that they had conquered a foreign people (Chapter 3). Hence the triumph, the senate’s permission to extend Rome’s pomerium, the revived Augustan themes of eastern conquest, the abundant Iudaea Capta coins (recalling Aegypto Capta and Armenia Capta), the inscription on the arch in the Circus Maximus extolling Titus for an unprecedented conquest, and Silius Italicus’ ex eventu prediction that Titus would tame the fierce tribes of Palestine.17 Scholars have long recognised that the Flavian claims were political piffle, but they have rarely if ever noticed that Josephus’ War exposes the sham. It begins with Hasmonean-Roman treaties of friendship, a century before even Pompey (1.38, 48), then dwells on Pompey’s real capture of Jerusalem (64/63 BCE) and the repeat event by Antony’s general Sosius after a brief spell of Parthian control (1.127–58, 327–57). The rest of War is an unbroken story of Judaeo-Roman cooperation, elaborating Josephus’ programmatic statement that Jerusalem attained heights of prosperity under Rome before its last reversal (1.11). So, any notion that Titus was the first to conquer Jerusalem is rendered absurd. When Vespasian arrives, it is only to clean up the mess that Nero’s legate in Syria had failed to deal with (3.1–5). This all sits awkwardly with the crucial Flavian theme of an eastern conquest meriting a triumph. I leave aside here the larger question whether Josephus’ description of the Flavians’ ‘war’ supports the representation depicted in the triumph as he describes it (7.122–57; cf. Chapter 5).18 What might his programmatic departure from central Flavian themes imply for his relationship of fides with the rulers? Third, Josephus’ War says almost nothing about his own dealings with the family after the conflict (7.448). He describes these relations more fully in writings composed near or after Domitian’s death in 96 (V 359–63, 414–29; cf. Ap. 1.50). It is inconvenient for the ‘sycophantic War’ scheme that Josephus becomes unambiguously complimentary toward Vespasian and Titus only when they are dead (AJ 12.119–30). He says that he contemplated writing 17 18

Cody 2003; Millar 2005; den Hollander 2014: 196–97; Mason 2016: 3–45. Mason 2016a: 3–45.

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another work, which would cover aspects of Titus’ reign (AJ 20.144), and we have no reason to think that it would have been less laudatory than all his later remarks. But if Josephus turned so openly complimentary in his later writings, which are rightly recognised as deeply nationalist in sentiment, there is no reason to doubt that the earlier War, which portrays the two men in more ambiguous terms, was already written from similar motives, which Josephus forcefully declares in the work’s preface (1.1–8). I hope to have disturbed common assumptions about Josephus’ War sufficiently that we may now look afresh at its portraits of the Flavians. 2

Vespasian

War’s characterisations of Vespasian fall in four blocks: his campaign in Galilee and the Golan in 67, where he was first Josephus’ enemy and then his captor; his domination of Judaea and Peraea in 68–69; his bid for power and release of Josephus in 69; and the triumph of 71. Although his Vespasian material is broken up in sections, the portrait is coherent. Common impressions of Vespasian have left enough traces in Pliny the Elder, Tacitus, Suetonius, Xiphilinus’ Epitome of Cassius Dio, and Flavian coinage and monuments for a patchy sketch of what everyone in Flavian Rome would have known, or assumed, about the world leader. In marked contrast to his predecessors in power, he was known to be a tough, experienced, and dominating commander who faced his enemies eye to eye. His non-patrician outlook is suggested by anecdotes in Suetonius about acquiring the nickname ‘muleteer’, seeking hefty bribes for favours, and always being on the lookout for revenue, no matter how down-market the source (Vesp. 4.3; 22.2–3).19 In politics he was shrewd, worldly-wise, and cunning. Even the avowedly non-partisan Tacitus can say, long after Vespasian’s death: ‘Vespasian was a keen soldier who would march at the front, select the camp site, and whether it was night or day throw his skill against the enemy, or indeed, if the situation called for it, his own arm’ (Vespasianus acer militiae anteire agmen, locum castris capere, noctu diuque consilio ac, si res posceret, manu hostibus obniti; Tac. Hist. 2.5; cf. 2.82; Agr. 13, 17; Suet. Vesp. 4). He was a soldier’s soldier, candid and free of affectation, with no patience for humbug. He reportedly satirised his own triumph and joked about the deification awaiting him at death.20 Suetonius relates that at the time of 19 20

Bosworth 2002 argues plausibly that the label ‘muleteer’ reflected his involvement in slave traffic. ‘Dammit, I guess I’m becoming a god’ (Suet. Vesp. 23.4; cf. 12).

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his dispatch to Syria from Nero’s Greek entourage, he had repeatedly fallen asleep or walked out while the young ruler was performing (Vesp. 4.4). The same author dwells on Vespasian’s earthy wit, which he deployed in part to deflect criticism of his unseemly taste for money (Vesp. 16–23). Josephus’ Vespasian comes to life against this background. His unique military experience—War ignores doomed Corbulo—justifies Nero’s choice of him for the Judaean portfolio (BJ 3.3–5). Josephus paints an imposing picture of the redoubtable commander at the head of 60,000 soldiers. He intensifies these colours with a digression on legionary training, which insists that Rome’s army simply cannot be beaten, whether by foes or by natural adversity (3.64–109, 115–26). Since these claims are not quite true, and every Roman knew of terrible reverses in Parthia and Germany among other sites, the point seems to be to picture his hopeless position as the ‘general’ allegedly assigned to protect Galilee (3.69).21 The audience should feel his terror. Although he absurdly claims to have trained 100,000 men in column manoeuvres, of whom 60,000 completed his tough course (2.576–83), it turns out not to matter. His fighters vanish when the region’s capital Sepphoris—‘sentinel of the whole ethnos’—sends delegates to welcome Vespasian and admits a 7,000-strong garrison, which quickly dominates the Galilean countryside (3.34, 59–63, 129–31). It is understandable that Josephus, writing in Rome, should milk his personal conflict with Vespasian for any credit he can gain as a surviving enemy commander. Disarmingly, however, he first admits to having immediately fled for his life—to King Agrippa’s lakeside city Tiberias, not on Vespasian’s Jerusalem-oriented itinerary (3.131). But a sense of duty to Iotapata, suddenly imperilled (3.310–14), leads him to rush to the aid of friends there (3.141–43). And when his initial ploys to buy time are exhausted, he admits to having tried to flee rather than die pointlessly with the locals (3.193–206, 343). When they prevent his departure, Josephus has no choice but to embrace the role of Iotapata’s general. He instantly becomes—in his memory—a Caesar-like tactician and creates the biggest problems Vespasian will face in the region (3.155–61). His defensive genius thwarts the Roman at every turn, dragging out the siege for well over a month. Josephus is particularly adept at psychological operations: drenching cloths in water to feign abundance of provisions or hanging bags of chaff to absorb the blows of Roman rams (3.276–81). Indeed, War dwells on the psychological dimensions of each conflict it narrates. At Iotapata, despite the Romans’ overwhelming numbers and material 21

‘Allegedly assigned’ because only War (2.562–68) presents Josephus as a general given a command. The later Life (28–30) has him sent with two other priests to see how Galilee is faring and persuade its people to remain peaceful.

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advantages, he balances the terror they create by generating anxiety, despair, and even panic on their side.22 At one point he nearly puts the whole Roman force in disarray, when an archer from Iotapata hits Vespasian’s foot:23 This caused a huge commotion among the Romans. When those nearby became disturbed at the blood, rumour immediately spread through the whole army. Most abandoned the siege and came running, in panic and alarm for their general. μέγιστον δὲ θόρυβον ἐνεποίησεν τοῖς Ῥωμαίοις· πρὸς γὰρ τὸ αἷμα ταραχθέντων τῶν πλησίον φήμη διὰ παντὸς ἐπῄει τοῦ στρατοῦ, καὶ τῆς πολιορκίας οἱ πλείους ἀφέμενοι μετ᾿ ἐκπλήξεως καὶ δέους ἐπὶ τὸν στρατηγὸν συνέθεον (BJ 3.236–37). Titus’ alarm and distress for his father (δείσας, ἀγωνίᾳ) compound the general consternation. The tough old soldier shrugs off the injury and restores order, in keeping with his character, but this receives only casual mention from Josephus, no adulation. The brighter beacon is his own generalship, which compels Vespasian to endure a dispiriting siege outside a town he had expected to roll over. Josephus’ account of his eventual surrender at Iotapata (3.340–408) has many fascinating dimensions, but again these serve to illuminate his command brilliance, oratorical skills, cool resourcefulness, and proximity to God. Vespasian is not his focus. In connection with the surrender episode, I would point out something generally missed: that Josephus portrays the current princeps as a serial liar, or at least dissembler (Chapter 3). Frontinus’ Stratagems assume that deception is required for military success, and Josephus’ autobiography is a stew of his own tricks (V 21–22, 126–28, 141–44, 226). Even pledges of security or safe conduct are a grey area. Josephus expresses outrage when militants in Jerusalem pledge safety to the auxiliary garrison, only to cut the men down after they relinquish their weapons (BJ 2.450–54). But he is too canny to accept a domestic enemy’s pledge of security, assuming that is a ruse to kill him (V 216–27). And he cheerfully describes how he invited local enemies into his house, assuring their safety, then flayed them to the bone, or sent one back with a bloody severed hand dangling from his neck (BJ 2.611–13; V 147–49). If one can find a consistent ethic here, it seems to be that the end justifies the means. Bad men revel in deceit for its own sake, whereas good men may be forced to use it for noble ends. But when Vespasian is the deceiver and 22 23

E.g., BJ 3.169, 175, 177, 188, 222–25, 227–35, 282–83. Suetonius had heard (Vesp. 4.6) that Vespasian took several arrows to the shield, but was wounded in the knee by a stone.

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Josephus the victim, it is hard to see the portrait of Vespasian’s false pledges and lies as adulatory. We wonder, again, about the nature of Josephus’ literary fides and the limits of Vespasian’s tolerance, now as emperor in Rome. Vespasian’s particular blend of toughness and trickery continues in the story after Iotapata. Having quickly pacified Galilee by the beginning of summer 67, he goes to relax with King Agrippa II in the cool of the royal capital at Panias, below Mt. Hermon. There Agrippa requests his help in dealing with the restiveness that has recently been reported in the lakeside cities given to him by Nero a decade earlier. There is no reason to assume anti-Roman motives behind these disturbances, which seem clearly targeted at the king. Nevertheless, as an eager commander and a faithful friend with a huge army resting, Vespasian agrees and recalls his force from winter quarters, to put the fear of God into Tiberias and Tarichea (3.443–61). The former is predictably easy. The leaders of the Greek-style polis want no trouble, and the anti-Agrippa faction flees an hour’s walk up the lake to Tarichea (3.457). There Vespasian isolates the militants, killing anyone still willing to fight on land or trying to escape by the lake (BJ 3.462–531). Josephus adds that many innocent residents were killed by Titus. Although they expected his pledge of security (κατὰ … ἐλπίδα δεξιᾶς), Titus ordered his men to kill indiscriminately, to ensure that all militants were destroyed (3.500–2). When the fighting is over, Vespasian holds a consilium with his generals about the remaining strangers in Tarichea, including many who are old and unfit. Seemingly by inference, he decides that they too must have been instigators (κατάρξαι γὰρ οὗτος ἐδόκει πολέμου) and so deserve death (3.532). Vespasian’s quandary is how to get rid of them (3.534: ὸν δὲ τρόπον αὐτῶν τῆς ἀναιρέσεως διενοεῖτο). If he kills them in cold blood, as they beg for their lives, he will create needless opposition from the townsfolk for an unjust act, whereas he himself could not stomach offering them a pledge of safety and then killing them at some other spot (3.535: μετὰ πίστεις ἐπιθέσθαι προελθοῦσιν οὐχ ὑπέμενεν). Josephus thus makes it clear that what is about to happen is wrong. But he blames it on Vespasian’s friends, who prevail over their commander (3.536: ξενίκων δ᾿ οἱ φίλοι). The prisoners are Judaeans, they insist, and they helpfully remind him that his mandate is to suppress Judaean trouble. If he cannot have both, he must ‘prefer what is advantageous over what is proper’ (χρῆναι τὸ συμφέρον αἱρεῖσθαι πρὸ τοῦ πρέποντος). So it happens that Vespasian follows a course he claimed not to tolerate. He permits the supplicants ‘a doubtful safe-conduct’ (αὐτοῖς ἄδειαν ἀμφίβολον ἐπέτρεψεν). They must walk inside a four-mile security cordon leading back to Tiberias. There, after gathering (an impossible) 37,000 in the stadium, he kills more than a thousand of the elderly and weak, preserving the rest for slave labour (3.532–42). Whatever we make of

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the story, given that Vespasian readily overrules his advisors on other occasions (4.366–76), it fits Josephus’ realistic view of this unique individual, rather than any model of a hero. Vespasian’s later activities in southern Syria (68 CE), as he consolidates his grip on Judaea and Peraea across the Jordan (from 4.410), enhance Josephus’ portrait of an effective commander with a large army, methodically and cautiously going about his work. Still is hard to find flattery. His general Placidus, the one apparently responsible for Iotapata’s earlier plight, continues his glory-hunting by cutting down terrified and innocent villagers of all ages and both sexes, until the Jordan River is choked with their corpses (4.430–39). Vespasian’s actions west of the Jordan are hardly different, if not as crass: he kills more than 10,000 helpless countryfolk (4.445–48). Josephus’ account of Vespasian’s tourist-like visit to the Dead Sea (Asphaltitis) seems likewise more of an entertaining story illustrating the character than something that Vespasian’s enablers might have desired. Whereas most travellers confirm the famous lake’s buoyancy by wading in, Vespasian concocts an experiment more suited to his nature. He ‘ordered some who did not know how to swim to be tossed in the deep part, with their hands tied behind them’ (Οὐεσπασιανὸς ἐκέλευσέ τινας τῶν νεῖν οὐκ ἐπισταμένων δεθέντας ὀπίσω τὰς χεῖρας ῥιφῆναι κατὰ τοῦ βυθοῦ; 4.477). Luckily they float, but the test reflects a peculiar mindset. Still in keeping with it, Vespasian’s last engagement before departing the field is in unnamed villages, where ‘the strong fled, the weak perished, and everything left went up in flames’ (4.489)—not exactly epic warfare suited to a hero. Josephus’ account of Vespasian’s bid for imperial power is also more nuanced than one might imagine from his billing as a sycophant. Although he does not openly denigrate the ruler, his lighting choices are not especially flattering (Chapter 3). His account deviates from the cherished Flavian chronology. He grounds Vespasian’s motives in a combination of personal hatred of Vitellius and a paralysing, countervailing fear of action. When his soldiers force him at blade-point to accept his responsibilities (ζῆν ἀξίως, 4.602–604), Vespasian sends Mucianus to link up with Antonius Primus and fight his war in Italy, while he repairs to the safety of Alexandria—hardly the imperator that his soldiers expected to lead them in glorious battle. Finally, although Josephus’ triumph story in book 7 is all but universally read as the epitome of fealty to the regime, sizeable cracks tell against that interpretation. The following chapter takes up that story. Undoubtedly there are tokens of respect for Vespasian throughout Josephus’ account: for the man’s prudence, as when he counsels against a rapid assault on Jerusalem (4.366–76), for his lack of vindictiveness in reconciling with the Commagenian royals (7.219–43),

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and above all for the Roman commander’s growing respect for Judaean fighters, which supports one of War’s root themes. Contemplating what lies ahead in the Judaean mother-polis, for example, Vespasian articulates Josephus’ theme: He reckoned that even without walls, the high spirit of these [Judaean] men and their daring actions would be difficult to deal with (τὰ δὲ φρονήματα τῶν ἀνδρῶν καὶ τὰς τόλμας δυσμεταχειρίστους καὶ δίχα τειχῶν ὑπελάμβανεν). So he trained his soldiers just like athletes for contests. (BJ 4.89–90). In general, however, Josephus plays against the mythic dimensions of Flavian imaging to describe a fully human commander, with feet of the lowliest clay. His Vespasian is not a heroic type. He is a man with a peculiar persona who faces tests and responds in keeping with his character. His greatness is not in question—he is emperor—but Josephus’ War assumes this rather than adding exaltation. The most protracted image of Vespasian in the work is of the world’s most powerful man, leading the most fearsome army, held at bay week after week outside a small town in Galilee—by the young Judaean priest Josephus. Vespasian’s greatness valorises the Judaean people and their self-appointed spokesman. 3

Titus

The same realistic mode of characterisation continues with Titus, but the character in question is entirely different. I do not mean that we know the real Titus and that Josephus faithfully portrays him. I mean only that here again his portrayal does not deal in abstractions, as one might expect from Josephus’ reputation, but depicts a personality. Titus’ qualities and potential shortcomings differ notably from those of his father. Those who claim to find adulation of Titus in Josephus have trouble clearly illustrating it.24 After noting that indications of Titus’ brutality are sometimes moderated by clemency, one scholar finds panegyric when Vespasian’s officers, demanding that he challenge Vitellius, appeal to both his qualities and those of his son (BJ 4.597). But this is rather mild and indirect. Another scholar presents Josephus’ description of the perils faced by the Tenth Legion—NB: a 24

Yavetz 1975: 423, 431. Yavetz argues generally that that Josephus admired Titus’ clemency and chose to emphasise it just when Titus needed an image enhancement, before his accession (426–32).

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result of Judaean daring—which only Titus’ intervention could neutralise, as sycophancy (BJ 5.81–97).25 I would rather include that among the subtle ways in which G. M. Paul finds that Josephus ‘favours Titus’. For example, Josephus uses past unreal conditions to describe battlefield situations in which Titus saved the day (‘all would have been lost, had not Titus arrived’). Again, in a speech given by the character Josephus outside Jerusalem’s walls (BJ 5.409–11), he observes that Jerusalem’s spring has begun to flow copiously with Titus’ presence (παρουσία). Paul suggests that this Greek word suggests a heroic or divine figure. In Josephus, however, παρουσία appears often, for nobody special.26 And of course the flowing spring is a piece of persuasive rhetoric, as Josephus also bends scripture to claim that the Judaeans never succeeded if they took to arms (forgetting about Joshua and the Hasmoneans).27 These are at best ambiguous indications of favour, which need to be balanced both by expressions of unstinting praise in other authors and by Josephus’ more restrained cues. For unstinting praise in other texts, we might look to the Elder Pliny, Josephus’ contemporary in Vespasian’s Rome. He celebrates Titus’ character, political, military, and literary achievements in just the period when Josephus’ War appeared (77 CE), well before Vespasian’s death and Pliny’s own, two years later (Nat. praef. 1–6): ‘Most pleasant imperator—an address that suits you in consummate truth, while the title of “greatest” ages gracefully along with your father … a triumph, a censorship, the consulship six times, and tribunician power …, all this for the republic. … O great fecundity of spirit!’ Long after Titus was gone, Suetonius introduced his praise of the man’s impressive physical and mental qualities (Tit. 2–3) with the famous caption: ‘the love and darling of the human race’ (amor ac deliciae generis humani; Tit. 1). Even the jaded Tacitus found in Titus a happy combination of character, fortune, beauty, and majesty of countenance (Hist. 2.1). This is not even to mention Flavian poetry, with its more expected extravagances: ‘Godlike excellence shall come from Cures [Vespasian’s birthplace] and soar to heaven. A warrior family, reared on the berry that grows in the Sabine land, shall increase the fame of the deified Julii’ (Silius Italicus, Pun. 3.594–96). Josephus has nothing remotely like this, though he is the only one of these authors who acquired a reputation 25 26 27

Curran 2007: 77 n. 11. Paul 1993: 65. Mundane parousia: BJ 2.617, 4.345; AJ 1.287, 2.20, 5.109, 12.86, 160, and 352, 13.266. Just as anyone with a vague knowledge of Israel’s or Hasmonean history would doubt Josephus’ claims about historic pacifism, it was obvious that a gushing spring could be interpreted variously: by those besieged in Jerusalem as a sign of divine support. Only Josephus as orator links it to Titus’ presence.

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for Titophilia.28 Brian Jones better captures Josephus’ Titus inadvertently, while ostensibly describing the historical figure: ‘at best he was competent and brave, at worst foolhardy and naïve.’29 In Josephus’ War, Titus’ activities fall in three periods: under his father as an unusually young (quaestorian) legate of the Legio XV Apollinaris (67–69 CE);30 following Vespasian’s departure, directing the Jerusalem siege (April–September 70); and his final actions in the east before returning to Rome for the triumph. We shall focus on the first, because it is the least explored31 and because it lays the foundation in Josephus’ account for the rest. As long as Vespasian is in Syria, Titus is a supporting player. Since he is Vespasian’s son, and virtual co-regent at Josephus’ time of writing in Rome, it is not surprising that he receives more attention than the other legionary legates, aside from considerations of friendship and gratitude from Josephus. In discussing Vespasian above (and Chapter 3) we noted relevant episodes from the first period. Titus makes his narrative debut when he leads the panic outside Iotapata caused by his father’s foot injury (BJ 3.238). This already anticipates enduring themes: Titus’ distress is motivated by commendable concern (εὔνοια) for his father. But what does this portend for military bearing and the needs of war-making? We also noted that it was Titus’ compassion that persuaded his callous father to spare Josephus’ life. Three other episodes from this first period suggest a nuanced picture of the man who would be renowned in Rome for his military prowess, high spirit, and literary talent. First, when the little town of Iapha turns defiant, in solidarity with its neighbour Iotapata, it is easily subdued by Trajan senior (father of the 28

29 30

31

There was also a ‘bad Titus’ (pre-accession) tradition, which asserted Titus’ brutality and hedonistic lifestyle while Praetorian Prefect in the 70s (Suet. Tit. 6). But this image seems tied to his position in the Guard and may have been created by misunderstood motives and actions there. Murison 2016: 81–86 summarises the evidence and argues (86) that the conspiracy of two Flavian stalwarts, Caecina and Marcellus, is clearer evidence than any narrative assertions of high-level unease about Titus’ accession. Although elements of Josephus’ presentation (especially the stress on his clemency) might support Yavetz’s 1975 suggestion that he wrote to help facilitate Titus’ transition from Guard to imperial palace, other aspects of Josephus’ account do not show Titus particularly fit for world rule. Jones 1989: 128; cf. 134: ‘always brave, never original … a commander in the traditional mould’; cf. Jones 1992 and 1984: 34–76; also McLaren 2005. Service as praetor was the normal (not invariable) prerequisite for legionary command, but one usually had to be 29 to qualify for the praetorship. Vespasian gave Titus command of the Fifteenth (presumably with Nero’s agreement) when he was just 27. This was roughly the career path of Corbulo’s son-in-law Annius Vinicianus, who was given command of V Macedonica at 27. For Josephus’ Titus in Jerusalem and later see Jones 1989 and 1992; McLaren 2005; Mason 2005 and 2016a: 402–65; den Hollander 2014: 139–99.

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future emperor), who is legate of the Tenth Legion Fretensis. Sent by Vespasian with 3,000 soldiers to deal with the small town, Trajan quickly has his hand around its throat. But then he magnanimously sends word to Vespasian, offering the coup de grâce and its minor glory to young Titus. The latter arrives with a supplementary force half the size of Trajan’s. He assumes tactical direction, arranging the Romans’ overwhelming numbers against the hapless countryfolk, now bereft even of their young men. Titus and Trajan get more than they bargain for, however. For not only the old and very young males but especially the town’s women throw everything they have at the soldiers, and in this way prolong the fight for hours. The humiliated Romans cut the throats of all the males they find, leaving only infants and women for enslavement (3.298–306). Is this a glorious victory for young Titus? Josephus’ story is, again, about the indomitable Judaean character. Second, Titus is given the lead in pacifying King Agrippa’s lakeside town of Tarichea. When Vespasian agrees to help Agrippa, he sends Titus to fetch the Fifth and Tenth legions from coastal Caesarea while Vespasian gathers the Fifteenth from nearby Scythopolis (3.446). The father and his other generals quickly chase the troublemakers to Tarichea. Titus returns in time for a key role in what comes next. Like Iapha, this looks like Vespasian’s effort to provide supervised training and confidence-building for the young man, with Vespasian’s camp nearby for support. Hearing that militants are gathered in the plain near Tarichea, Titus takes 600 cavalrymen with the intention of surprising and destroying them. On arrival, however, he decides that his force is not large enough for the tough Judaeans. While awaiting reinforcements, he must give a rousing speech to encourage his elite but dispirited horsemen—again in support of Josephus’ picture of Boer-like Judaean irregulars. Titus’ oration does its job and, once Trajan is alongside with an additional 400 cavalry, the force attacks. Contrary to their plan, however, they only drive the militants into Agrippa’s peaceful town. Titus orders a hot pursuit inside the walls. As we have seen, this leads to indiscriminate slaughter (3.500). His father, nonetheless ‘overjoyed at his son’s prowess and success’ (ὑπερησθεὶς τῇ τε τοῦ παιδὸς ἀρετῇ καὶ τῷ κατορθώματι, 3.504), moves in to consolidate. Their first order of business, before the fake offer of safe passage described above, is to chase down those who have fled to the lake on boats. Vespasian orders rafts built, pursues them, and fills the lake with stinking corpses (3.305, 22–331). At Gamala an exasperated Titus, returning from a mission to talk with Mucianus, must fix the situation after his father’s rash assault on the town (BJ 4.4–83). This entails a curious if brief role-reversal in Josephus’ account. The main story has the all-wise and super-cautious Vespasian gradually initiating his son in the ways of command, with training wheels (as it were) steadying

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each of his increasingly responsible challenges. Even for his final test, the siege of Jerusalem, Vespasian will remain nearby in Alexandria. But here at Gamala, with young Titus away in the north, it is the father who strikes impulsively against a natural fortress, nearly getting himself killed and courting disaster for his soldiers while he loses valued officers (4.17–38). Gamala is eventually taken only when Titus returns and, shocked at the earlier repulse (Josephus does not connect the obvious dots, questioning Vespasian’s planning), has just three of his men undermine the tower by night, after which he personally leads a much smaller band into the city to create havoc and unnerve the defenders (4.70–71). This signal success, perhaps, encourages Vespasian to entrust Titus with ensuring the pacification of Gischala and other negligible sites in the north while he leads the army back to winter quarters (4.87). That Suetonius (Tit. 4.3) should single out Tarichea and Gamala as Titus’ key victories while serving at his father’s side suggests his knowledge of an account like that of Josephus—though he includes the detail not in Josephus that Titus, when his horse was shot by an arrow beneath him at Tarichea, seized that of a fallen comrade.32 At least, it is telling that he mentions neither the near-debacle at Iapha nor the next episode involving Titus: Gischala. This was arguably the young Roman’s greatest blunder of the war, given its grave consequences for Jerusalem. Josephus makes no effort to cover Titus in glory. On the contrary. If the events occurred in anything like the way Josephus relates, which seems a reasonable assumption in a work known to Titus (V 361; Ap. 1.50), it is remarkable that Josephus portrays them as he does, for he suggests that Titus lacked even common sense, let alone tactical acumen. By the time that Vespasian has wrapped up his assistance to King Agrippa II with the taking of Gamala (late September 67), nearly all the region’s population centres have sent envoys to confirm their submission, but two still require visits. Towering 450 m above Galilee’s Jezreel Valley, Mt Tabor attracts refugees who perhaps assumed they would be safer there than risking surrender. Vespasian sends Placidus with 600 cavalry and he manages to subdue it by a ruse—the lure of a fake withdrawal (BJ 4.54–61). The other site is Gischala, a small agricultural settlement in remote Upper Galilee (BJ 4.84), near the modern border with Lebanon. For this Vespasian sends Titus with 1,000 cavalrymen, while he heads south with the army to begin preparations for the main objective, Jerusalem (4.87–90). Evidently Vespasian expects no problems. The task, with father deliberately moving away 32

Jones 1989: 130 says: ‘Suetonius is wrong. It was not Titus who redegit Gamalam in potestatem. … the credit belongs to Vespasian’ (132–33). Actually, Suetonius’ remark would make sense as a summary of Josephus’ account, in which Titus is the crucial player.

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at speed, fits well in the progression-of-responsibility scheme for Titus’ education in military command. The wealthy and well-connected principal man in Gischala, John, was Josephus’ earlier rival and a potentially lethal enemy. It is conceivable that Josephus, now in Roman custody, alerted Vespasian to Gischala as a place worth visiting in force before the Flavians left the region. Again, if Agrippa had not requested Vespasian’s help back in July, when he had already sent the legions to winter quarters, it seems that the Gischala would never have been on the Roman itinerary. Upon his arrival, Titus sees that his 1,000 cavalry could easily storm Gischala in a direct assault. According to Josephus, however, he is tired of killing. Pitying the town’s regular inhabitants, he prefers that they submit voluntarily and accept a small Roman garrison (4.92–96). Although neither Josephus nor we can read Titus’ mind, the general scenario is entirely plausible. Titus was not expecting trouble, and many larger towns had accepted garrisons. Why would the Gischalans not do so? Wily John, however, while professing his eagerness to receive a garrison, points out that it is the sabbath,33 on which Judaeans may not conclude treaties. Titus would surely not want a reputation for impiety! The only reason not to delay by a day would be fear of their flight, but Titus could easily prevent that, John helpfully observes, ‘by camping around the perimeter to guard them’ (ἐξὸν περιστρατοπεδεύσαντα παραφυλάξαι; 4.101). John would be delighted to welcome them and sign all the documents after the sabbath. In case audiences should miss the point that this is a ruse, Josephus plainly states that John ‘outwitted Titus’ (ἐσοφίζετο τὸν Τίτον, 4.103). So oblivious is Titus that he does not even take the precautions John supposed would be necessary. Perhaps we are to assume that John knew he would not do so, because his men had already had to camp and forage outside Gamala? At any rate, instead of digging in nearby, Titus leads his elite company of horsemen to the nearest non-Judaean town, which is a good hour’s ride away, for a more comfortable overnight at Kedasa (Kedesh), a village belonging to Tyre. John cannot believe his luck (4.106). When he discovers that Titus has simply left, he wastes no time fleeing southward, to Jerusalem’s strong walls, with his militant crew and their families. They already have many hours on Titus, 33

Sabbath goes from sundown to sundown. Titus’ return early the next morning expecting to do business (4.112) implies that he considers the sabbath over. But if this is Sunday morning, it ended the previous evening and he had no need to go away. John’s initial indication that it would not be over until the following day suggests that Titus arrives on a Friday as it is beginning. If so, Titus assumes Roman time-keeping (a day begins at midnight or dawn), or John misleads the naïve fellow on this point, or Josephus has fabricated parts of the story in ways that Roman audiences might not notice.

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therefore, when the latter returns in the morning to find them gone. He sends a party in pursuit, though it catches only stragglers (4.112–16). For those who remain in Gischala, Josephus expatiates on Titus’ distaste for the death penalty, because of its finality, and reluctance to accept tattle-tale charges from informants. In a less than glorious finale, he completes his mission of placing a garrison in the town, but only after losing the dangerous element that will decide Jerusalem’s fate (4.118–20). When Josephus allows that the young Roman ‘was gutted that he had not been able to punish John right then for his trick’ (ὁ δὲ Τίτος ἤχθετο μὲν ἐπὶ τῷ μὴ παραχρῆμα τιμωρήσασθαι τὸν Ἰωάννην τῆς ἀπάτης, 4.116), the sympathy the audience may feel only enhances the image of Titus as a well-meaning and brave but naïve commander. Nor does Josephus ameliorate the monumental blunder when he observes that it was really God who preserved John, to cause the Romans to destroy Jerusalem (4.104). Josephus immediately follows up the episode of John’s escape by describing the hero’s welcome in Jerusalem (4.121–34), which is the lying foundation of John’s rapid rise in popular esteem there. His outrages will eventually lead the townsfolk to invite the exceedingly brutal Simon bar Giora, whom they had managed to keep out of Jerusalem, as the only effective antidote to John’s deadly tyranny. The two men perpetuate the blood-soaked stasis that ensures the city’s doom (1.10–11; 4.389–97, 503–44, 556–84). When we consider that Josephus’ Roman audience would know the names of John and Simon, since they were the two leaders featured in the Flavian triumph (6.433–34; 7.118, 154), Josephus’ picture of John’s wrapping Titus around his finger is impactful. It is no wonder that Suetonius omits Gischala from Titus’ dossier and credits Gamala to him. This period as Vespasian’s protégé in the field lays the foundation for everything that follows in Josephus’ portrait of Titus, until his most famous role as Jerusalem’s destroyer. In accord with Vespasian’s usual tactics and Titus’ own approach at Gischala, he first hopes to intimidate the capital into submission (BJ 5.52–53, 130–35). When that fails, after his army digs in and he witnesses the besieged Judaeans’ contempt for death, he gradually escalates the vigour of his assaults along with continuing psychological operations, at each stage hoping that the Judaeans will see their hopeless position and capitulate. Like his father (3.145–48, 453–61), though personally brave Titus is averse to risking Roman soldiers in futile assaults or entangling them inside Jerusalem’s walls. His own bravery is needed surprisingly often because he must repeatedly rescue what Josephus presents as an ill-disciplined, easily disconcerted legionary force. Although Titus gradually hardens and can even show brutality at moments (5.446–551), he never quite sheds the image of a ‘simplicity’ that is hard to distinguish from gullibility (e.g., 5.319)—a man very different from his father.

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We cannot close without commenting on War’s climactic event, the destruction of the temple. Josephus’ account of this episode, again, reflects Titus’ character. Josephus always acknowledges that Titus destroyed the holy site, while claiming with equal consistency that he did not wish to do so (BJ 1.10, 27–28; 6.266; AJ 20.250). Historians have curiously abstracted the question to present us with a choice: believe Josephus about Titus’ ‘innocence’ or treat his account as a blatant effort to ‘exculpate’ Titus.34 But this is a false dilemma, and it makes little sense. First, there is no hint in any surviving evidence that Titus was embarrassed about the event for which he was most famous in Rome, engraved forever on the panel of the arch dedicated by his brother and celebrated in the lines on the lost arch: he did what no one else had done in destroying the city and liberating its holy vessels. Second, the number of ways in which the temple came to burn is much larger than such a binary choice allows. Third, the only point on which I elaborate slightly here, Josephus’ account of the temple’s burning could not easily be read as flattery of Titus. In the story, Titus is constantly changing tactics in his effort to secure Jerusalem’s surrender. After he hears about an episode of cannibalism inside the walls, in his fury he resolves to reduce the city to ashes. He thus orders the temple compound destroyed and its gates burned (BJ 6.214–19, 228). During a further consultation with his commanders, however, his anger now cooled, he realises that his fight is not with the world-famous buildings and it will enhance Rome’s image—and perhaps reduce problems with Judaeans worldwide—if he can preserve them (6.236–43). So he orders the fires extinguished, to prepare for an assault on the remaining Judaean fighters inside the compound. The next day he watches from the safety of a tower to the north until, satisfied that the enemy are confined to the inner temple and the fires are being extinguished, he heads for a siesta, intending to make a full attack at dawn (6.248–49). While he sleeps, however, an anonymous auxiliary soldier in the clean-up crew, having come under attack from those within—and ‘moved by some other-worldly impulse’—shoots a firebrand through a window. This, the soldier could not have anticipated, sets the dry goods in the temple store-rooms ablaze (6.250–53). When Titus is roused by aides appalled at this development, he is apoplectic with rage but there is nothing he can do. He screams and waves his arms while his legionaries, whom he has held back in preparation for the big assault, charge past him in a stampede to get their share from the famous landmark. Although the inner sanctuary could still have been saved, Josephus remarks, if the soldiers could have been restrained, ‘passion became the general for all. … Once 34

Leoni 2007; Mason 2016a: 466–513.

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near the shrine, the [legionaries] pretended that they could not hear Caesar’s instructions but urged those in front of them to take the fire inside’ (ἀλλ᾿ ὁ θυμὸς ἁπάντων ἐστρατήγει … πλησίον δὲ τοῦ ναοῦ γινόμενοι τῶν μὲν τοῦ Καίσαρος παραγγελμάτων προσεποιοῦντο μηδὲ κατακούειν, τοῖς πρὸ αὐτῶν δὲ τὸ πῦρ ἐνιέναι παρεκελεύοντο; 6.257–58). Again, ‘their passions, their hatred toward the Judaeans, and a violent warrior instinct prevailed over their respect for Caesar or indeed their fear of the one trying to hold them back …’ (τῶν δὲ καὶ τὴν πρὸς τὸν Καίσαρα αἰδῶ καὶ τὸν ἀπὸ τοῦ κωλύοντος φόβον ἐνίκων οἱ θυμοὶ καὶ τὸ πρὸς Ἰουδαίους μῖσος, καὶ πολεμική τις ὁρμὴ λαβροτέρα; 6.263). It is truly out of Titus’ hands, and not in a way that could possibly redound to Titus’ credit in Rome. This is how the temple burns ‘against Caesar’s will’ (6.266). It would be a most peculiar way to ‘exculpate’ Titus. The story is not intended as criticism of Titus, of course. It shows rather that Titus’ designs and ‘resolve’ mean nothing. He must yield to the tragic role assigned him by the Judaeans’ God. This God remains in control of history, and the Flavians—like all other world rulers—could only ever be pawns in the cosmic drama. 4

Conclusions

This investigation has shown that Josephus’ Judaean War is a profoundly Judaean story, in which the Flavians play supporting roles as other Roman leaders do. It is a history of Jerusalem’s remarkable success under Roman rule, before the catastrophic recent fall. The whole structure of the account quietly undermines Flavian claims about their alleged conquest. Josephus’ debts to Thucydides and Polybius, in this pragmatic-political history, are welded to a biblical-Judaean frame, according to which nations rise and fall under divine supervision. Rome is currently ascendant, and it is only wise to accept this as Judaeans have done to their advantage since Pompey. Josephus casts all this in the universal language in which he seems also to have thought: τύχη and her reversals, polis leadership and its hazards, tyranny, sacred spaces, pollution, and purification. Given his aims and distinctive viewpoint, he should not be assimilated to the role of regime lackey. He can afford to portray the Flavians as recognisable human beings of distinct personality, not bathing them in the topoi of hero worship. Gruff old Vespasian is careless of Judaean life and does whatever he must to subdue the enemy. He earns the deep loyalty of his soldiers as he minimises their risks, leads from the front, and constantly attends to their rest and training. Indeed, they eventually force him to seize imperial power. Vespasian is careful to give Titus a graduated series of combat experiences to build

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confidence and reputation. His character flaws, never analysed by Josephus, are those that fit this temperament: callousness toward others, readiness to lie and violate pledges of safety, and to steal others’ achievements. He meets unexpected resourcefulness and national pride among Judaeans in a couple of Galilean sites, especially in his allegedly brilliant adversary Josephus. His young son is a different sort of man altogether, the sort of difference that everyone knows in human experience. Although they share the trait of personal bravery, Josephus’ Titus (as Pliny’s and Suetonius’ Titus) is a more sympathetic figure. He shows astonishing sensitivity and empathy toward even his enemies, and so saves Josephus’ life. The potential weaknesses of his personality, which are also left between the lines and never explored, are an utter lack of the guile normally associated with military commanders, a striking simplicity of heart, and so a tendency toward gullibility. Titus’ relationship with his soldiers is correspondingly very different. He must often deal with degrees of insubordination bordering on contempt, even at critical moments, that are hard to punish because they are rampant. Once the temple burned, even if this resulted from insubordination, the smart political move (on father’s advice) was to turn it into the most daring of masculine enterprises and a foundation of the new regime’s glory. Plainly Josephus did not write in the service of Flavian myth-making. But then how should we think about his relationship of good faith ( fides or πίστις) in relation to the ruling family? He could not have invented his claims of Flavian support, even if he exaggerated (V 363; Ap. 1.50). What could the Flavians have found creditable and useful in his works, if they read them? The Greek and Latin terms refer to some combination of trustworthiness, fair dealing, loyalty, faithfulness to the historian’s task, and fidelity to the real-life characters. Suetonius’ biography of Vespasian, written a generation after his death, glows with omens and virtues. It is more overtly laudatory than Josephus’ War. But Suetonius likewise describes a distinct character, with a weakness for personal avarice and a crude sense of humour (Vesp. 16, 19, 22–23). He also remarks that Vespasian did not take offence easily or remember slights, and so even reconciled with Vitellius’ family (14). Not only did he ‘tolerate with great patience the frankness of friends, the ironic allusions of pleaders, and the obstinacy of philosophers’ (Amicorum libertatem, causidicorum figuras ac philosophorum contumaciam lenissime tulit; 13), but when some flatterers cooked up a divine ancestry for him, he laughed at the silliness of it (12). Might we not imagine that such a ruler actually preferred somewhat realistic portraiture, such as Josephus offers, to the cheap flattery of the Flavian hacks disparaged by Josephus and Tacitus (BJ 1.1–8; Hist. 2.101). Perhaps Vespasian did not mind seeing himself throwing non-swimmers in the Dead

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Sea or breaking promises to terrorists—as long as the historian was reliably loyal and encouraged cooperation with his rule. Perhaps Vespasian and Titus understood that a judicious account by an intelligent Judaean, obviously an independent voice and proud of his own heritage and people, was a more credible basis for political relations than off-the-rack obsequiousness, which they could buy anywhere. Perhaps the accusations of maiestas that Josephus occasionally faced (V 428–29) gained plausibility from the independence of his writing and the possibility of reading it as slant criticism.35 But the genuineness of Josephus’ loyalty is shown by his consistent gratitude, long after Vespasian and Titus are dead. In Antiquities, completed in 93/94 CE, he expresses awe at their forbearance and generosity (ἐπιείκεια καὶ μεγαλοφροσύνη) in refusing the petitions of Alexandria and Antioch for a curtailment of Judaean rights (AJ 12.120–29). Josephus’ autobiographical appendix to the Antiquities concludes with a list of Flavian benefactions ‘continued’ by Domitian’s wife Domitilla, which might suggest that his assassination was recent.36 These are clearer statements of admiration, without ambiguity, than anything he wrote while Vespasian and Titus lived. Just as the Flavian rulers maintained their fides toward Judaeans throughout the empire and toward Josephus, continuing a tradition of warm relations with Jerusalem and its expatriate communities, Josephus apparently remained loyal to them. But he wrote to tell his own, Judaean stories, and used great Roman figures to serve those interests. 35 36

See S. Schwartz (1990) 18 n. 80; Mason (2001) 171 n. 1771. For discussion see Mason (2001) 171–72 nn. 1774–76.

Chapter 5

Josephus’ Account of the Flavian Triumph What are we to do with Josephus’ description of the Flavian triumph in the summer of 71 CE (BJ 7.121–57), an event that extolled Vespasian and Titus for their victories in his Judaean homeland? His is our fullest surviving account of a triumph, and the only one by an implied eyewitness. If it omits much that might interest us, it is nonetheless formally complete. It tracks the procession from the previous night’s purifications through early morning sacrifices, the parade with its awe-inspiring displays, and at the end of the day a cathartic execution, sacrifice, and feasting. Imagining that such an account had been newly discovered, Mary Beard aptly calls it ‘the kind of text that ancient historians and literary critics would die for’.1 Or is it too good to be true? Many historians continue to find in Josephus’ portrayal another piece of Flavian propaganda, the literary counterpart of the scenes depicted on the Arch of Titus. Some even doubt that our reporter was an eyewitness. In this brief foray I propose to rethink the meaning of his description as part of his Judaean War, something that has not been attempted before to my knowledge. 1

State of the Question

Wilhelm Weber (1921) doubted that Josephus could even have read his own account attentively, let alone composed it. As ‘prophet of the new Caesar’,2 he must have copied the triumph story from the same Flavian source that Weber posited as the spine of the Judaean War (books 3–7). A Jewish author, he reasoned, could never have penned such a matter-of-fact description of that celebration of his nation’s bloody defeat, which ends with Jerusalem’s spoils being deposited in Vespasian’s pagan Temple of Pax (BJ 7.156–58). Weber also felt that the repeated mention of ‘the Jews’ was odd for a Jewish historian, even as he found the account too vague to be the work of an eyewitness. He even thought he detected a smoking gun, where the true Roman author of the passage betrayed his hand.3 I shall return to that at the end of this chapter. 1 Beard 2003: 543. 2 Weber 1921: 246, 283 (‘er hat auch diesen Bericht von einem andern abgeschrieben und ihn nicht einmal sorgfältig durchgesehen’). 3 Weber 1921: 282–83, on BJ 7.148–49. © Steve Mason, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004545960_007

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Source-critical explanations no longer beguile as they once did, when they promised our forebears a scientific rigour that would keep the humanities respectable. Nevertheless, both Weber’s perception that Josephus transmitted a quasi-official version and his doubts about the Judaean author’s presence have survived many shifts in scholarship to continue making their appearance. Otto Michel and Otto Bauernfeind, who made an influential translation of the War in the late 1950s, likewise doubted that Josephus was on hand, because of the distasteful role he would have had to play as either Judaean Gefolgsmann or as captured general of Iotapata, high atop a scenic float in the humiliating parade.4 Ernst Künzl’s Der römische Triumph (1988) concurred. Künzl devoted his first two chapters to the Flavian example, beginning with a quotation of Josephus’ whole passage.5 This marked a break with earlier triumph research, which had paid scant regard to the Jewish historian.6 Künzl shared a general assumption of the time: that Josephus stood ‘bereits auf der Seite der Römer und nicht mehr auf der seines Volkes’.7 The Jewish author’s Lobeshymnen for the Flavians, he argued, helped to enable their bold conversion of a minor provincial success into the epochal defeat of a foreign enemy. Although the campaigns for Jerusalem and Masada [sic: the latter had not happened yet] were ‘bemerkenswerte militärische Operationen’, they did not obviously merit a triumph. Josephus’ assistance must have been valuable in making the case.8 Künzl again doubted that Josephus was an eyewitness,9 given his account’s dispassionate tone and unclear vantage point. Finally, Künzl was concerned that Josephus omitted key elements from a proper three-stage triumph: prisoners and booty at the front, triumphators with Roman dignitaries next, and then the army. Josephus mentions only the first stage and a half. Even if he borrowed most of it, however, Künzl took Josephus’ account as a straightforward (einfach) and uniquely valuable portrayal, by someone at least temporally close to the events.10

4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Michel-Bauernfeind 1969 (De Bello Iudaico) 2.2: 242. They suppose therefore that he uses some (unknown) source material, retreating into a highly conventional descriptive mode out of extreme caution over against both Roman and Judaean readers. Künzl 1988: 9–29. Laqueur 1909; Ehlers 1939; Versnel 1970. Künzl 1988: 9. Künzl 1988: 9. The fall of Masada occurred in the spring of either 73 or 74. Even Künzl’s impossible date of 72 would have put it a year after the triumph. Künzl 1988: 14–15. Künzl 1988: 9.

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Since Künzl, Josephus’ stock has continued to rise in matters triumphal, so high that Tanja Itgenshorst (2005) gives him a role in her study of the Republican ritual. She includes Josephus alongside imperial historians who describe the Republican triumph (Plutarch, Appian, Dio/Zonaras) on the premise that they all portray a (Max-) Weberian ideal type, rather than events they actually knew about. She too doubts that Josephus was present, now on the ground that he furnishes a series of ‘superlative commonplaces’. He speaks vaguely of the scenes portraying cities, fortresses, and walls being overrun, of rivers, captured generals, even ships (BJ 7.147), while obscuring the one critical scene of action: Jerusalem.11 His admitted dashes of particular colour, Jerusalem’s temple spoils and the execution of Simon bar Giora, seem to Itgenshorst minor. Such information he could have gathered in Rome long after the triumph for inclusion in his borrowed account. For her, the account is thoroughly Roman evidence, ‘ein literarisches Monument, das—wie die Friese im Titusbogen—die Angehörigen des Kaiserhauses preisen sollte’.12 Before proceeding I would note some emerging problems already at this point. First, as we shall see, Josephus’ description is distinctive in more ways than these readings have recognised. Second, if he borrowed a generic account, who had an interest in composing and circulating it? Third, if we consider his account defective (Künzl), how would the hypothesis of an official source explain that? If he borrowed an official Flavian statement (Weber), either he transmitted it as it was or he tailored it to suit his interests. If the former, why would the official account include such lacunae and lack of proportion (Künzl)? If he included only what he needed for his purpose, why do we need to posit another source, rather than suppose that he worked with what he experienced, shaped to suit his interests in War? Finally, why does the (correctly observed) vagueness of his description, with all those rivers and ships, suggest that Josephus was not there instead of the more obvious possibility that the triumph itself portrayed things in this vague way, because of the fraud inherent in the event? Mary Beard has insisted on Josephus’ importance for research on the triumph.13 Although she remarks on the ‘disconcertingly deadpan fashion’ in which he describes Jerusalem’s fate,14 this does not suggest to her that he borrowed the account. Rather, Josephus’ dispassion exposes his role, she thinks, as a turncoat and regime apparatchik. Still, historians can find value where 11 12 13 14

Itgenshorst 2005:26–27. Itgenshorst 2005: 28–29. Beard 2003. Beard 2007: 152.

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moralists cannot: ‘If we want to understand how any political regime wants itself to be seen, where better to go than to the writings of one of its lackeys?’15 It would be pointless to deny that Josephus’ triumph episode presents puzzles. We do not know what really happened, and it is conceivable that he missed the event—perhaps he had a migraine, to say nothing of possible political reasons for sending him to Ostia that day. Perhaps he borrowed what students call ‘the notes’. But why would we think so? What, in the evidence, makes better sense on those suppositions? What are the possible explanations of the oddities in his portrayal, and which ones work best in view of his narrative context? The contributions surveyed above share a crucial methodological move. They all detach Josephus’ portrayal of the triumph from the War narrative, for comparison with triumph-segments in other authors. Our impulse to liberate passages from ancient texts for separate study is understandable. Life is short, and we must share the endless labour of ancient history. Military historians, scouring Josephus for data concerning legionary practice, excise his account of the Roman army on manoeuvres (BJ 3.70–107) for comparison with material in Arrian. Historians of Julio-Claudian Rome surgically remove his account of Gaius Caligula’s assassination (AJ 19.1–273) from its context, with little concern for the wound left behind.16 There is little wrong with this, to a point. Whatever Josephus might have meant, he said what he said, and surely no one will be harmed if we compare his words about the number of cavalry or ballistae accompanying a legion with other evidence on the same subject. But in general, our inquiries into historical problems depend on our understanding of the evidence, and this requires attention to what it is: its perspective and intended meaning. It matters whether Plutarch or Josephus was trying to give a proportionately balanced picture of some event, why he featured what he did, what kind of access to contemporary information he had, whether he was trying to be sarcastic or ironic, and in general what his stake was. Detaching a segment of Josephus’ narrative for comparative study is, from this perspective, like amputating someone’s left foot and calling it a prosthetic—making a vital part of someone’s living body an autonomous device reusable elsewhere. 15

16

Beard 2003: 543. Cf. 556: ‘With Josephus’ Bellum Judaicum we are probably getting as close as we ever can to the “official version” (or one of the “official versions”) of the Flavian accession’ (556). And 558: Josephus was ‘besotted with the Flavians’, a ‘Flavian apparatchik’. Cf. Goldsworthy 1996: 105–11; Keppie 1998: 197–98, where Josephus’ ‘idealised account’ in War 3 forms much of the conclusion; Gilliver 1999: 9 et passim. Wiseman 1991 is devoted to Josephus’ portrait of Gaius, but never asks about the place or themes of this section in relation to the larger narrative of Antiquities. See Chapter 21.

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Josephus composed literary accounts with beginnings, middles, and ends, with a shape that real events do not provide as they happen. His portrait of the Flavian triumph is one element of such a complex narrative. Unlike Pliny’s encyclopaedia of Natural History, with its index to discrete bits of information for emperors on the go, Josephus’ War is not a catalogue. He did not expect people to begin reading or listening at some random spot in the final volume, Book 7. Nor, if our goal is to understand what he wished to communicate and the interpretative cues he provided, should we begin there. While research on the Roman triumph has continued to treat Josephus as a spokesman for the Flavian regime, scholarship on Josephus’ corpus has been putting ever more blue water between his outlook and the interests of his imperial patrons (see Chapters 3 and 4 above).17 War’s biblical, Jewish, and priestly roots, especially his debts to Jeremiah and Daniel, have become ever clearer.18 Some scholars have found value in the post-colonial categories of hybridity and mimicry, to elucidate Josephus’ position vis-à-vis Roman power.19 I would rather propose that his debts to Polybius and his well-earned place among ‘Greek writers under Rome’, given the typical ambivalence of such writers toward Roman power, should deter us from making simple assumptions about Josephus’ identity or allegiances.20 Studies of the triumph story from the perspective of Josephus scholarship are rare. Barbara Eberhardt’s 2005 essay appears to stand alone thus far. Given her awareness of the rest of Josephus’ work, Eberhardt cannot accept that he wrote a literary counterpart to the friezes on the Arch of Titus, and offers a study of both. The arch has the Gods serving the Flavians, she argues, whereas Josephus portrays the Roman commanders serving God. When Josephus describes Vespasian moving the Torah and temple curtains to his Palatine residence (BJ 7.162), he honours the emperor but also shows him (in her terms) honouring Judaism. Vespasian in Josephus asserts his control but also implies his own submission to God.21 I am not sure that an ancient audience could

17

18 19 20 21

See already Lindner 1972; Rajak 1983; Bilde 1988; Mason 1991 (reading War, Antiquities, and Life as coherent narratives?); Mason 2003b, 2005a. McLaren 2005 finds Josephus critical of Titus as general. on the common Denkmuster across Josephus’ corpus, Schreckenberg 1977: 173; Rajak 1998a. Cohen 1982; Gray 1993: 70–79; Mason 1994; Spilsbury 2003. On the centrality of Passover to War’s narrative, Colautti 2002; Siggelkow-Berner 2011. The most thorough exposition is Barclay 2007; cf. Barclay 2005 for orientation. On Josephus and Polybius, Cohen 1982; Eckstein 1990. On Polybius and Rome, Eckstein 1995. On Greek writers under Rome, e.g., Swain 1996. Eberhardt 2005: 274–75, 277.

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have detected all this in Josephus’ account. But I agree with Eberhardt that, like all evidence, it needs to be interpreted contextually. Martin Goodman’s study of Jewish-Roman relations in connection with the war (2007) includes a discussion of the triumph, which may be taken as crystallising our problem. A renowned Josephus Kenner, Goodman finds a mismatch between the trunk of the War and the triumph story. Of this ‘vivid eyewitness account’ he remarks: ‘In the light of his [Josephus’] heartfelt comments elsewhere about the disaster which had befallen the Jews, the description of the ceremony is remarkable for its consistently Roman viewpoint’.22 War as a whole Goodman reads as a Judaean work, that is, but the account of the triumph seems to him to have a different, Roman feel. Let us take this expert’s perception of dissonance as our invitation to rethink the triumph passage in light of the preceding volumes. Does it fit so awkwardly and, if so, in what sense(s)? Let us reconsider not only the puzzles identified above—dispassionate tone, vague locations, lack of proportion, failure to divulge the author’s vantage point—but also one that seems to have escaped notice. Namely, Josephus’ description of the Flavian triumph combines a certain fogginess as to location in Judaea with lurid images of unrestrained Roman violence. Since these images appear to be out of keeping with the more formal and ritualistic representations on monuments related to early imperial triumphs, we might ask why his account has both traits.23 2

Crucial Context: Josephus’ Judaean War

Josephus composed the War following his arrival in Rome, accompanying Titus (below), in the summer of 71 (V 422; cf. BJ 7.117–21). As he prepared the work, he seems to have followed the normal ‘publication’ practice of give and take in the author’s local environment, presenting sections to audiences via recitation and draft, and taking criticism.24 Though he hoped that the whole world would read his book, he wrote first for that lively context in Flavian Rome. By the time of Vespasian’s death in June of 79 he had it substantially finished (V 361–63; Ap. 1.50–51). So he was writing through the decade in which the actual Judaean War and Jerusalem’s destruction were prominent in Roman public awareness, not as remote events but as the defining achievements of Vespasian and Titus, justifying their victory over Vitellius and their right to rebuild Rome in a 22 23 24

Goodman 2007: 452; cf. 445. Hölscher 2006: 43; Lusnia 2006: 294–95. Mason 2005b. Cf. BJ 1.1–8, 22 for the social context, 1.13–16 for criticism.

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quasi-Augustan way on a new foundation. The last datable event in Josephus’ work is Vespasian’s dedication of the Pax temple in his forum in the summer of 75 (BJ 7.158–62). This is not the place to investigate Flavian Rome.25 Three points are, however, germane for Josephus’ context. (a) If the joint triumph of Vespasian and Titus was confined to a single day because of a dearth of plausible plunder (below), the diffuse afterglow of the event faced no such constraint. They promulgated their Judaean victory at least as fully as any predecessor had exploited a real foreign conquest. (b) The open secret was that their success in Judaea was no real foreign conquest.26 (c) The real war that Vespasian had fought to achieve power was the bloody civil war fought on the battlefield between Bedriacum and Cremona against other Romans, which took many more legionaries’ lives than the careful sieges in Judaea.27 Then, as now, political leaders trying to heal the nation after civil conflict funnelled public anxieties toward foreign enemies, real or imagined.28 Mommsen long ago remarked on the unseemly gap between what the Flavians achieved in Judaea and their celebration of it:29 Dass Kaiser Vespasianus, ein tüchtiger Soldat, es nicht verschmäht hat wegen eines solchen unvermeidlichen Erfolgs über ein kleines längst unterthäniges Volk als Sieger auf das Capitol zu ziehen und dass der aus dem Allerheiligsten des Tempels heimgebrachte siebenarmige Kan­ delaber auf dem Ehrenbogen, den der Reichssenat dem Titus auf dem Markte der Kampfstadt errichtete, noch heute zu schauen ist, giebt keine hohe Vorstellung von dem kriegerischen Sinn dieser Zeit. The Flavians knew what they were doing. So did Josephus. But political need and power supervened. Political theorists posit a difference between force, which is limited and must be applied sparingly where the risks are containable, and the projection 25 26 27

28

29

Inter alia Boyle and Dominik 2003. E.g., Mattern 1999: 191–94; Millar 2005: 102; Goodman 2007: 438–44. In general, see Wellesley 2000; Morgan 2006. Although the figure of 40,000 casualties on each side in the first Battle of Cremona, between the forces of Otho and Vitellius (Epit. Dio 63/64.10.3) is grossly exaggerated, any estimate of losses in 68–69 will greatly exceed those of Vespasian’s three or Titus’ four legions, besieging towns in Judaea. For Augustus’ triumphs see Gurval 1995: 25, 28. Only at the end of his life could that emperor acknowledge that his accession ended civil war as well, albeit still without mentioning Antony (RG 1–4). After his death, Velleius gave the civil restoration its full weight (2.89.3–4). Cf. Beard 2007: 123–24: ‘a triumph in civil war … was a contradiction in terms.’ Mommsen 1894: 5.538–39.

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of power, which is leveraged on force but knows no such limits. Tonio Hölscher has deftly explored this issue in the Graeco-Roman world. Military victory on some distant battlefield was a real but fleeting event, he observes, whereas political power was ‘a long-term structural concept’ in the Roman capital.30 There was no necessary correlation between the two. An emperor’s decision to convert some field success into a landmark achievement required forethought, energy, and expense. A narrative had to be constructed and disseminated: the event’s meaning had to be created. For the field victory had been achieved ‘by a marginal group of socially inferior people’ far away, but now the Roman populace had to be induced to own it in union with their princeps.31 Hölscher’s description of the usual means for transforming a field victory into political power—initial festivities and defining rituals such as the triumph, memorial monuments, new public buildings (temples, theatres, baths) as alleged benefits from the spoils of conquest, and ‘the creation of an ideological atmosphere’ in which military success was essential to the public good32—dovetails with Henry St. John Hart’s exploration (1952) of what the Flavians actually did to transform their provincial success into political power: their joint triumph, conspicuous monuments and public buildings in Rome, and a flood of coinage in all denominations, unprecedented in duration and scope—including many more than the obvious Iudaea capta / devicta types.33 The Flavians knew how to create propaganda, then. But Josephus’ War does not answer that need. He opens with a complaint about the rampant hostility toward Judaeans in literary accounts arising from, precisely, the prevailing impulse to flatter the Flavians for their Judaean achievement (1.1–2, 7–8): 1.1–2: Those who did not happen to be at the events, but are collecting random and incoherent tales through hearsay, are writing them up sophist-like, 2 while others who were there are misrepresenting the events, either through flattery toward the Romans or through hatred toward the Judaeans—their compositions comprise denunciation in some cases and encomium in others, but nowhere the precision of history. … Moreover, they dare to entitle those [books] ‘histories’, in which they present nothing sound and seem, to me at least, to miss their target. For, whereas they want to portray the Romans as great, they always vilify and denigrate the 30 31 32 33

Hölscher 2006: 27. Hölscher 2006: 35. Hölscher 2006: 36–37. Mattingly & Sydenham 1926: 1–153; Hart 1952; Meshorer 2001: 185–93. For arguments that Domitian and even Nerva continued the numismatic celebration see Hendin 2010: 403–59.

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Judaean side (καταβάλλουσιν δὲ ἀεὶ τὰ Ἰουδαίων καὶ ταπεινοῦσιν). I just do not see how those who have conquered insignificant people should seem to be great. And they [these writers] respect neither the length of the war nor the mass of the army that exhausted itself on the Roman side, nor the greatness of the generals, who sweated so much in the vicinity of Hierosolyma. I suppose that, by denigrating their [the generals’] achievement, they regard them too as unworthy! In part because of the relief they could offer from the bloody civil war that had recently filled the streets of Rome, easterners with rebarbative superstitions were an easy target.34 Against such reflexive anti-Judaean rhetoric, Josephus opens a space for a Judaean view of this conflict. He is a Jerusalem aristocrat addressing an intellectual elite in Rome that is willing to go beyond the clichés of the imperial chisellers. In what follows, I propose that the misrepresentations Josephus complains about in the prologue of his masterwork are of a piece with what he describes seeing in the Flavian triumph. He does not need to spell out the connection, for an audience in Rome. His entire narrative confronts and undermines the story of the triumph, but by the time he reaches that point he need only describe it and leave his audience to see the distortions involved. To see how this works, we need to survey the structures and thematic repertoire of Josephus’ War. The greatest obstacle to the notion that Josephus wrote War as a Flavian history—this a product of early twentieth-century criticism and not self-evident—is the disposition of its content (see Figure 1). In a work of about 125,600 words, the weight is decidedly at the beginning, long before the Flavians enter the scene in Book 3. Book 1 is the longest by far; Books 1 and 2 occupy 42% of the work by word weight. Since Josephus created War’s book divisions himself,35 we must conclude that instead of allowing his content to flow naturally from one standard book-roll to the next,36 he stuffed some to overflowing (1 and 2) while leaving others (6–7) much less busy. Evidently, then, he wanted to begin the Flavian campaign, and more importantly his own military activity, in Galilee in Book 3, to conclude the destruction of Jerusalem at the end of Book 6, and to leave Book 7 for the aftermath. He could have included Book 7 (local fallout, Roman triumph, desert fortresses) with 6 in a single volume, which would still have been shorter than Book 1. But plainly he preferred to keep them separate, at almost exactly the same 34 35 36

On the humiliations of the triumph for Judaeans see Esler 1995. AJ 13.298; Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 2.21.3; 3.6.1, 20; 9.3. Contrast Ap. 1.320. In the 20-volume Antiquities (ca. 306,488 words total), each volume comes close to the mean of 15,324 words, the Life appendix being typical at 15,835 words.

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War 1

29756

War 2

22520

War 3

14247

War 4

17624

War 5

16675

War 6

12462

War 7

12310

Figure 1

Relative volume size by word count in Josephus’ Judaean War

length. That choice gave the fall of Jerusalem its full impact, allowing a certain relief of mood in Book 7 after the relentless tension before the climax. Perhaps he was influenced by the seven-volume structure of Caesar’s original Gallic War. From this overview two conclusions emerge. First, Book 1 is important. Many readers or hearers would not have gone beyond that double-strength roll. Since Books 1 and 2 are crucial and yet Flavian-free, no matter what Josephus writes about the imperial family when they appear (see Chapters 3 and 4), the work as a whole could not have served as propaganda for them. Second, Josephus’ effort to reserve each volume (of whatever size) for a particular story-arc shows that he did not merely divide up the mass of his material in even chunks but paid careful attention to its structure. Chronological proportion was not among his concerns, however. The periods covered in a volume vary from 167 years in Book 1 to a few months in others (Books 3, 6). He is evidently more interested in pursuing ongoing themes than in providing an account proportionate to the events. A brief tour of the contents will give readers unfamiliar with Josephus’ War a sense of where the triumph fits. 1. From the primal Judaean civil strife (stasis) that created Onias’ dissident temple in Egypt and the Hasmonean Revolt to the funeral of Herod the Great, with a preview of the Herodian succession problem (ca. 170–4 BCE). War’s compact Hasmonean story (1.31–122) foregrounds alliances with Rome (1.38, 48), then the family’s acquisition of territory and their political agility in rapidly changing political contexts. These traits are found abundantly in King Herod, whose long rule emerges out of chaos in Rome and its protracted civil wars. Herod’s story is tragic: his brilliant success in ruling from Jerusalem,

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strengthening bonds with Judaea’s neighbours and the subject poleis, is undone by his passions, women, and domestic intrigues. 2. From the Herodian succession struggle to Josephus’ control over the northern defences in anticipation of the legions, with a Jerusalem preview (4 BCE–66/67 CE). During succession hearings before Augustus in Rome (4 BCE), revolts erupt in Judaea. The subsequent narrative intertwines regional tensions, especially Judaean-Samarian issues, with Roman attempts at direct or indirect (native-Judaean) governance. In War (BJ 2.117–18; contrast AJ 17.354; 18.2) Judaea appears as a province, and the varying natures of the equestrian agents based in Caesarea are prominent. Nevertheless, Judaea’s leaders habitually turn to the emperor or his legate in Antioch for redress—and find it, until Nero’s final years. A failed effort to Judaise Caesarea generates violence throughout the region, then intervention by the legate from Antioch, resulting in the loss of a legion. The final section describes the Jerusalem leaders’ reluctant preparation for Roman retaliation. They send Josephus to Galilee to raise and train an army while fortifying towns, in anticipation of a Roman retaliation (led by Cestius) that will come from the north. 3. From Vespasian’s appointment to the fall of Josephus’ northern command and most of Galilee (spring to late autumn, 67 CE). The narrative clock slows dramatically. After a survey of the terrifying Roman forces and a digression on the invincibility of the legions, it treats in slow-motion the few weeks of Josephus’ brilliant generalship until his surrender. Otherwise, the war in Galilee seems negligible, after the main city’s pre-emptive capitulation (Sepphoris). The Galilean war is over after Josephus’ surrender. As a favour to their host Agrippa II (Herod’s great-grandson), Vespasian and Titus confront a restive Tiberias and the militants who flee from there to Tarichea and Gamala. 4. From these eastern Galilean remnants (of rebellion against Agrippa) to the summer of 69 in Judaea; civil war in Rome to Vespasian’s remote victory; Titus’ return to Caesarea in preparation for Book 5 (late 67–December 69). Vespasian and Titus deal with the fortress Gamala as well as remnants at Tabor and Gischala. Gischala falls quickly and bloodlessly, but its leader John fatefully escapes to Jerusalem. He dominates the first half of Book 4 as the chief ‘tyrant’, who faithlessly arranges for Idumaeans to enter the city and murder the native chief-priestly notables. The latter half belongs to Simon bar Giora, whom the surviving notables welcome as the only antidote to John’s poison, inadvertently creating a stalemate between two tyrants. The final section shifts to Rome for the civil war after Nero, with the despicable Vitellius, comparable to John in Jerusalem, chief villain. 5. From the growing factionalism in Jerusalem to the siege of Titus and the horrors of murder and famine (December 69–June 70). Titus’ campaign is

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described in five parts: narrative, digression on the impregnable stronghold Jerusalem (emphasising walls and surrounding depths), narrative, Josephus’ grand speech, narrative. Each narrative moves back and forth between Roman and Judaean conditions and changes lenses from wide-angle to zoom, as individuals on each side come into focus for a moment. We also watch gentle Titus gradually hardening, as his efforts to secure a surrender are continually rebuffed. 6. From Titus’ renewed siege to the fall of Jerusalem (ca. late June–early September 70). The dramatic climax draws many threads together. The book opens with dispirited Romans redoubling their efforts by returning to basics (discipline, columns, ramps) against the seemingly unconquerable, death-defying, and endlessly resourceful Judaean foe. Jerusalem’s internal miseries reach their nadir in the famine and aristocratic Maria’s cannibalism (6.193–219). News of this atrocity fires Titus with a determination to bury the city, though he is trapped in the divinely orchestrated play and cannot do what he wants. When he finally resolves to spare the temple, it burns and the city falls. 7. From the fall of Jerusalem to the end of Onias’ temple in Egypt, with a glance at the author’s post-war life (September 70–ca. 75 CE). The overall shape of Book 7 contrasts the dire consequences for Judaeans in Syria and Egypt and in the Roman triumph with compelling stories of Judaean heroism (Machaerus) and thoughtless disaster (Masada). The book ends with the closing of Onias’ dissident temple and reminders of the author’s towering virtue. This overview suggests a few observations. First, the War has a carefully crafted plot and structure. It is not a haphazard collection of incidents. Second, Josephus knows the rhetorical mandates of variation (in scene, angle, style, tone), vivid portrayal or enargeia, and symmetry. After building tensions to a point, he punctuates his narrative by shifting to a different scene, introducing a set speech (below), a geographical description, or a philosophical diversion. The most famous of the last kind is his long description of Judaea’s three schools (2.119–66), in which the utopian Essene ‘legion’ (tagma) illustrates Judaean male virtue with a Spartan-like community of shared property, contempt for death, and smiling at torture. But the work abounds in interest-sustaining digressions and reflections. Third, several volumes share a similar structure. Josephus frames the extended central narrative in opening and closing panels on quite different subjects. Thus Book 2 opens in Rome with the succession hearings, then provides the main story of regional conflict in Judaea until the Cestius ambush, then closes with Josephus’ preparations for war in Galilee. Book 3’s opening frame concerns the Roman army, its closing panel the recovery of Agrippa’s cities, while the central narrative portrays Josephus as defender of Iotapata.

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Book 4 opens with Vespasian’s settlement of the remnants of Galilee and the Golan, then focuses on John and Simon as tyrants in Jerusalem, before shifting to Rome at the end for Vespasian’s rise to power (Chapter 3). Moreover, several volumes coil the narrative, so to speak, around a central spindle. They advance toward a critical scene in the centre before unravelling the coil. In Book 1, the middle falls at the beginning of Herod’s capture of Jerusalem (1.340–57). In Book 2 the end of the fateful Caesarea conflict (2.292), which Josephus makes a foundation of the war (2.284) falls at the halfway point (at 10.269 words of 22.520). The fallout from Caesarea indeed colours the rest of the narrative of growing violence, and conditions Cestius’ fateful expedition to Jerusalem. The midpoint of Book 6 coincides with the dramatic conclusion to Maria’s cannibalism in Titus’ resolve to bury the city (2.219: 6.202 words of 12.462). It is hard to see this pattern as mere coincidence, for even the passage on the philosophical schools in Book 2 displays a concentric structure,37 showing that Josephus favoured this design. Given his tendency to use concentric structures also on a grand scale, as in Antiquities and Life,38 we should examine War for such an overall plan. This would lead us to expect something pivotal in the middle of Book 4. That is what we find—not because we wish to find it. Of Book 4’s 17,624 words, the midpoint falls after word 8,812. Just one sentence before that is the clearly marked turning point of both Book 4 and of War as a whole. This is the end of the encomium on the chief priests Ananus and Jesus (4.325), who have been managing Judaea’s defensive effort since the defeat of Cestius. Their murder ushers in the tyranny that will lead to final disaster. Josephus’ encomium—‘the capture of the city began with the death of Ananus, and from that very day came the overthrow of the walls and the ruin of the Judaean commonwealth, on which they saw the leader of their own rescue slaughtered in the middle of the polis’ (4.318)—makes the centrality of this episode clear. Near War’s end he will restate the point: the murder of those men removed the last traces of piety and all remnants of the nation’s political integrity (7.267). This much alerts us to watch for other signposts of symmetry. There are many, though such patterning is not a matter of mathematical precision, much less of a mysterious hidden code. Arranging episodes near the beginning to be reprised near the end (not necessarily in exact order) is the art of ring 37

38

The twelve initiates’ oaths provide the fulcrum (BJ 2.139–142), signposted by the rare verbs ἐγκρίνω and ἐκκρίνω on either side (2.138, 143). Moving outward from there are corresponding stops—reverence for the sun as a deity (2.128, 148), ‘make it a point of honour’ (2.123, 146), the rare agent-noun ‘despiser’ (of wealth bzw. death, 2.122, 151), women, children, and sex (2.119–21, 160–61), and finally Pharisees and Sadducees (2.119, 162–66). Mason 2001: xxi–xxvii.

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composition on a large scale. It helps to create the impression of shape and brings a satisfying sense of closure to the themes gradually opened in the first half.39 These correspondences give added force to Josephus’ remarks at the beginning of the Antiquities. He explains that he had contemplated including the ancient past—the main subject of Antiquities—at the beginning of War. Because the size would have been excessive, however, ‘I separated that [work] by itself and measured off a balanced composition, with the beginnings and the ending proper to it’ (ταῖς ἰδίαις ἀρχαῖς αὐτοῦ καὶ τῷ τέλει τὴν γραφὴν συνεμέτρησα; 1.6–7). The verb συμμετρέω is architectural, used for the matching of columns to create balance (BJ 1.411; 5.192; AJ 8.74). Josephus was conscious of constructing War by means of corresponding volumes. His interest in symmetry suggests that there might be implied links between the triumph in Book 7 and War’s foundations in Book 1. For example, might the long pre-history of the Judaean-Roman war, extending back two centuries, have implications for the event that the Flavians continue to celebrate so relentlessly? In broad strokes, the answer seems clear. First, the Judaean-Roman relationship began as an alliance of friendship (BJ 1.38, 48), which has remained in place ever since. The alliance took definitive shape via Augustus’ intimate friendship with Herod, the main subject of Book 1. Herod’s most prominent living heir, his great-grandson Agrippa II, and this king’s sister Berenice remain close friends and allies of the current Flavian regime—Berenice being Titus’ lover in the late 70s, as Josephus need not mention. Second, in managing the various ethnic groups of southern Syria, as Books 1 and 2 show, the Romans have always favoured their Judaean friends, establishing native rule from Jerusalem whenever possible, but with no other polis in the region. No Samarian, Ascalonite, or Scythopolitan has had such a status. The emperor Claudius, whose protégé Vespasian had been—and whose temple on the Caelian hill Vespasian was now rebuilding after Nero had shown contempt for it (Suet. Vesp. 9.1)—had been particularly close to Herod’s grandson Agrippa I, who played a role in his accession. Claudius showed a deep interest 39

Matching pairs include: Antiochus Epiphanes (BJ 1.31–40; 7.219–44; cf. 5.460); anachronistic references to Medes (1.50, 62; 7.244–46); Masada, fortified and destroyed (1.175–82; 7.252–406, 455); Pascha (a rare Aramaic term in an Atticising work) with its ‘many sacrifices’ (only at 2.10; 6.423); heaping of corpses from civil strife, worse than in a foreign war (2.30; 6.259, 421); souls of the good enter the ‘most refined ether’ (2.152; 6.47); a ‘pseudoprophet’ costs many lives (2.261; 6.285); burning of temple porticoes, with victims dying five ways (2.229–30, 405; 6.233); Agrippa’s and Titus’ orations (‘Don’t foolishly rely on …’; 2.362; 6.328–32); Josephus imprisoned, makes prediction; prediction fulfilled and Josephus released (3.387–408; 4.622–29); Galilee and the north subdued; the south except Jerusalem subdued (4.120, 4.490).

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in Judaea’s well-being, intervening dramatically to protect Judaeans’ interests. This was partly because of his dependence on advice from Agrippa II, who had grown up around the imperial household and stayed in Rome whenever possible.40 Consequently, third, the ‘Judaean War’ cannot be understood either as the conquest of a foreign nation or as the suppression of a national revolt of the usual (German, British, Batavian) kind—led by local elites and auxiliary forces. It arose rather from a tragically perfect storm of ongoing regional tensions, the collapse of trust in Roman protection during Nero’s final years, and resulting Judaean vigilantism (Josephus’ banditry and ‘tyranny’). Even as things came apart, however, the ethnos remained deeply divided about the best course of action, while the elite did its best to protect the people and their mother-city. It was a pair of interlopers, John and Simon, whose vanity pushed them beyond surrender and who led Jerusalem to the final catastrophe. Finally, this survey conflicts with Flavian propaganda. Their abundant coinage speaks eloquently, as do the friezes of the restored Arch of Titus and the triumphal themes on the monuments of the Haterii tomb relief.41 Clearest of all is the inscription copied by a medieval traveller from an Arch of Titus that once stood in the Circus Maximus: Because on the advice and counsel of his father, And under his auspices, he subdued the nation of the Judaeans. The city of Hierosolyma, either attacked in futility or left entirely untried by all the leaders, kings, or nations before him, he destroyed.42 The exaggerations are well known: the claim ignores the renowned Pompey the Great and Antony’s general Sosius, who had both celebrated triumphs for actually conquering a foreign Judaea;43 never mind the Babylonian, Persian, and Macedonian rulers who had taken the city. Exaggeration and omission are normal in politics,44 but this was quite a reach. 40 41 42 43 44

BJ 2.204–17, 232–46 (Claudius recalls and banishes his own procurator for siding with the Samarians, sending a tribune back to Jerusalem to face mob justice and beheading); cf. AJ 19.356–65. On the arch, see Pfanner 1993; on the Haterii relief, Jensen 1978; Leach 2006. Quod praeceptis patri[s] consiliisq[ue] et auspiciis gentem Iudaeorum domuit et urbem Hierusolymam omnibus ante se ducibus regibus gentibus aut frustra petitam aut omnino intem[p]tatam delevit (CIL 6.944). Cf. Ciancio Rossetto 2000: 1.108–9; Leoni 2018 in depth. For Pompey’s and Sosius’ triumphs see the fasti in Degrassi 1954: 108, 110. Cf. Pomponius Mela on Claudius’ alleged opening of long-closed Britain (4.49), neglecting Caesar and the intervening decades of contact.

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Josephus’ lengthy back-story explodes all this. It features Pompey’s dignified capture of Jerusalem: though violent, it restored the temple service and did not disturb the sacred furnishings of the sanctuary. That was clearly the moment, for Josephus, when Judaea came under Roman control (BJ 1.127–58). He mentions Pompey’s eager return to Rome, for what his audience knew to have been a memorable triumph (1.157–58). As we have seen, Josephus makes Sosius’ recapture of the city for Herod from the Parthians (with a nod to Pompey, 1.343) the centre-point of Book 1 (1.327–57). Lacking Pompey’s innate virtue, Sosius would reportedly have looted the city and its temple, had not Herod offered to pay off his army and the general himself (1.354–56). The capture of Jerusalem by Pompey and recapture by Sosius are also anticipated in the prologue (BJ 1.19) and recalled at later points. Josephus’ audience could not be in doubt that Judaea had been under peaceful Roman rule for well over a century.45 The rest of his detailed narrative could make no sense without that assumption. Flavian claims about a great new foreign conquest are exposed as deeply untrue. Josephus also makes it clear that Vespasian did not go to Judaea to conquer a foreign enemy. Nero dispatched him from Achaea to quash disturbances that the legate of Syria had already tried unsuccessfully to handle (BJ 3.1–7). Vespasian was entrusted with ‘command of the armies in Syria’ (3.7). If Cestius had been successful, Josephus’ narrative gives no reason to imagine that he (or the emperor Nero) could have contemplated a triumph. The Roman audience knows that Nero held no triumph even for Corbulo’s historic settlement with the Parthians, a true foreign enemy, a few years earlier. In Josephus’ narrative, further, disturbances have occurred with some frequency, some as potentially serious as the one in 66. He has Titus address the rebels as ‘You, who from the time when Pompey first took you by storm, have never ceased your revolts (οἳ πρῶτον μὲν ἀφ᾿ οὗ Πομπήιος εἷλεν ὑμᾶς κατὰ κράτος οὐκ ἐπαύσασθε νεωτεροποιίας)’ (BJ 6.329)—something Titus could not say if he were the first Roman to capture Jerusalem. When Herod’s death (4 BCE) sparked massive unrest, the legate Varus had to come south with three legions—the same as Vespasian’s core force (BJ 2.39–79; AJ 17.250–97). When Quirinius, legate of 6 CE, conducted a census to bring Judaea under his direct control, there was another flare-up (BJ 2.117–18; AJ 17.354–18.10). Three decades later (39–41 CE), Gaius instructed the legate Petronius to take three legions plus auxiliaries to steamroll the expected resistance to the installation of his statue(s) in Jerusalem (BJ 2.185–87). The legates L. Vitellius (under Tiberius) and Ummidius Quadratus (under Claudius) removed equestrian governors for exacerbating the ethnic strife in the south (BJ 2.239–44; AJ 18.88–89). 45

BJ 2.356, 392; 5.396–98, 408–409, 506; 6.436.

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When the ageing Cestius came south, with the equivalent of two legions plus auxiliaries and allies (BJ 2.499–502), he was doing his duty as legatus Augusti in his provincia, not conquering a foreign people for Rome. Vespasian’s assumption of the legate’s task did not change the nature of the conflict. So the prospect of a triumph for success would be bizarre from the perspective of Josephus’ narrative. This literary mismatch fits the historical situation: the Flavian triumph for Judaea was odd, as Mommsen (above) and others have observed. It was fraudulent. 3

Background Questions

I have devoted much of this chapter to context because it is indispensable for interpretation. Now I hope to show that Josephus included the triumph in this artistic creation—no one forced him to mention it—because it was the fons et origo of the outlook against which he has oriented his Judaean War. This does not mean that Josephus considered falsehood in politics reprehensible. The Flavians had their reasons for deceiving the Roman πλῆθος, which our urbane commentator could understand. Nevertheless, the triumph of 71 was a historic event with a huge fallout. It was the Big Bang of the universe of untruth that enveloped Rome in the following decade. Before we turn to the procession itself, three background elements need attention: the Flavians’ preference for a shared triumph, Josephus’ presence at the event, and the triumphators’ overnight stay at the Temple of Isis. 3.1 The Shared Triumph Josephus claims that when Titus arrived home in late spring of 71, the Senate offered separate triumphs to him and Vespasian, but they opted instead for a joint event (BJ 7.121). Especially given Josephus’ portrait of Vespasian as a man quick to dissemble, this notice is not without humorous potential. Even in their joint triumph they seem hard pressed to find enough stuff, from Judaea, to satisfy the normal expectation of abundant riches from the (allegedly) conquered place. Suppose that Vespasian had held a separate triumph. What could he have displayed? Some trees or rocks from Galilee or the Judaean highlands? Some figs and balsam?46 Perhaps, but that was hardly the stuff of a triumph, rather than a garden show. There was no possibility of displaying the wealth 46

We owe to Pliny the notice (Nat. 12.111) that indeed Vespasian and Titus included balsam shrubs in their triumphal procession. Pliny expresses surprise that triumphs should include trees, though he traces the practice back to Pompey’s conquest of the same region.

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of captured kings, as there were no kings to capture. Agrippa II and Berenice were fast friends of Vespasian and Titus, because of the real conquest of Judaea much earlier. Well they might have preferred a joint triumph, for even with both of them parading together, the only real spoils were those from the temple after Titus happened to destroy it, treasures that Pompey had piously left alone. Vespasian needed Titus more than son needed father. 3.2 Was Josephus an Eyewitness? We have seen that Josephus does not declare his vantage-point in the procession. If he was present, there are three main possibilities: he was among the triumphing Romans in some capacity, among the captured enemies, or among the massed spectators. Anything is possible, but the first two seem highly implausible. His narrative suggests the perspective of an observer. As a (low-level) client of the imperial family, would he have needed to fight for a spot among the masses? Perhaps he was offered a seat with foreign notables, in the Circus Maximus for example. We do not know, and he does not help our ignorance. I would point out, however, that this problem of locating Josephus is not peculiar to the triumph story. By itself, our uncertainty tells us nothing about his presence, and any solution for this case must work for others. It is part of Josephus’ literary posture in War that, aside from his personally oriented prologue (BJ 1.1–30) and corresponding reflections at the end (7.443–53), he keeps his character largely out of view.47 We rarely know where he is. This may have something to do, on the one hand, with his ostentatious conformity with—and serial violation of—the supposed demand of history that an author’s personal feelings not intrude (BJ 1.9–12). The same logic leads him to describe his character in the third person, as Caesar had in the Gallic War. On the other hand, his posture of detachment allows him to highlight his own character more vividly, reserving it for star turns where he can occupy the spotlight without competition.48 He is no mere extra hanging around the set, invisible in the 47

48

The first-person singular pronoun occurs 100 times in War. Of these, 5 are in the personally oriented prologue. Most of the rest come in quoted speech by various characters. Half a dozen times Josephus uses the peculiar Platonic formula (Meno 81a) ἔμοιγε δοκεῖν (‘it seems to me at least’), in his narrator’s voice. A striking example is BJ 3.202, where he says of the people who wanted to prevent him fleeing Iotapata, ‘not because they begrudged him his security, it seems to me at any rate, but from the hope for their own, because they could not imagine that they would suffer anything awful as long as Josephus remained with them.’ Josephus mentions the character Josephus about as often, chiefly from the end of Book 2 through Book 3. See Glas 2020 on Josephus’ techniques of self-praise.

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horde. When the actor Josephus first appears, he bursts on the scene fully formed, as the general sent to Galilee (2.562–84; Book 3 passim). We have no idea where he has been until then, how he acquired the credentials for such a post, or what relations with Jerusalem’s leaders prompted such a choice. Only his later autobiography (V 413–29) suggests his connections. Where was he at the fateful moment when Cestius Gallus arrived outside Jerusalem to find the city gates barred? Josephus describes members of the elite trying to open the city gates to Cestius and being prevented by armed rebels (BJ 2.533–34). Since he was normally resident in Jerusalem, we might suppose that he saw this from the inside, but he does not say so. Or where was he when Gessius Florus was abusing the population, when Queen Berenice was publicly humiliated in Jerusalem, or indeed during the events leading to the burning of the temple (e.g., 6.250–54)?49 We would love to know, but he chose not to say. After his exploits as commander and the drawn-out surrender in Book 3, the actor Josephus leaves the stage again, resurfacing only to deliver brilliant set-piece speeches, confirming the statesman’s talents he had shown earlier (5.361–420; 6.94–129). Outside of these high-visibility moments, with minor exceptions he hovers invisibly as narrator (also producer, screen-writer, and director): above the action or behind the camera as it were, able to pass through city walls and to enter the private or collective thoughts of Romans and Judaeans alike. The ethereal narrator’s voice in War is therefore not a problem that suddenly appears with the triumph narrative. We may not conclude that because he does not explain his whereabouts in most cases, he was not present. From his later writings we learn two relevant points. First, after his release from chains he was present in the Roman camp, forced to attend constantly on Vespasian and Titus and assist them with intelligence, while remaining an object of suspicion to the army (V 416; Ap. 1.48–49). Second, the list of benefactions he recites at the end of his autobiography includes the note that Titus chose him as personal travel companion on the weeks-long voyage from Alexandria to Rome (V 422–23). Although we have no idea how Titus treated him—did he invite him to ‘Captain’s Table’?—Josephus could not easily have made up this shared voyage. That notice in the autobiography is helpful because War 7 mentions both Titus’ pleasant crossing and the city of Rome’s eager welcoming of him, all while characteristically omitting Josephus’ presence from the scene (BJ 7.119–20): 49

See Chapman 1998: 103 n. 352.

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When he had completed a voyage as pleasant as he could have wished, Rome held a reception and welcome for him just like the one for his father, except that for Titus it was more brilliant in that the father himself was there to greet and receive him. And for the mass of the citizens, the sight of the three [with Domitian] now together in one place afforded an other-worldly joy. Certainly, the notice in the Life encourages us to think that Josephus was part of Titus’ entourage when he disembarked to this warm reception. That is why he could capture it so vividly. Since this passage leads immediately to the preparations for the triumph (BJ 7.121), we have no reason to think that he was not present then too, though he does not explain where or how. Similarly, Josephus’ dispassionate tone is not a special problem in the triumph story, but matches his narrative voice. Books 4 to 6 are somewhat different, admittedly, as he describes the murder of the chief priests and excoriates the rebels whom he holds responsible for the crimes that ensued—a historian’s transgression for which he also conspicuously apologises (BJ 1.9–12; 5.20). But in Books 1 to 3 he can be remarkably dispassionate and balanced as he narrates the gradual unravelling of Judaea’s regional position and conflicts with neighbours or with the equestrian governors. A good illustration is his description of the fateful conflict in Caesarea (BJ 2.266–70). Even the massacre of an alleged 20,000 Judaeans is described as briefly as language permits, the fact itself speaking more eloquently than any moralising commentary that he could add (2.457; see Chapter 7). In the same way, I would suggest, it is enough for him to narrate those elements he chooses from the triumph, against the background of the War as a whole, for his audience to receive an impression that requires no explicit commentary. 3.3 The Temple of Isis Josephus’ claim that the Flavians passed the night before the triumph (near the Pantheon) in the domed Temple of Isis on the Campus Martius, which they also featured on coins of the early 70s, has created problems for scholars. Josephus writes: While it was still night the entire soldiery had proceeded out in their companies and ranks and under their commanders, around the gates—not those of the palaces above but rather [the gates] near the Temple of Isis, because that is where the imperators were staying during that night (Τοῦ δὲ στρατιωτικοῦ παντὸς ἔτι νύκτωρ κατὰ λόχους καὶ τάξεις ὑπὸ τοῖς ἡγεμόσι διεξωδευκότος καὶ περὶ θύρας ὄντος οὐ τῶν ἄνω βασιλείων ἀλλὰ πλησίον τοῦ

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τῆς Ἴσιδος ἱεροῦ, ἐκεῖ γὰρ ἀνεπαύοντο τῆς νυκτὸς ἐκείνης οἱ αὐτοκράτορες; BJ 7.123). Although he shows no interest in explaining this choice of accommodation, which is incidental to his account of the soldiers’ forming-up ground, Josephus’ clarification (not the palace gates, but …) suggests a deviation from what might have been expected. In her systematic dismantling of scholarly constructions of the Roman triumph, Mary Beard takes this as an example. She cites a sizeable group of experts who have confidently moved the Flavians’ lodging from the Isis temple to the unmentioned villa publica, on the ground that its adjacent parkland could better accommodate the massed troops, and because that would have been more echt römisch for such an august event.50 The scholars in question understand Josephus to say that the soldiers formed up near the Temple of Isis because the Flavians were also staying near the Temple of Isis—in the villa publica. Although Beard charitably considers it an equally plausible reading, I cannot see it: ἐκεῖ surely means ‘there, in that place’. Why choose such words if not to say that the soldiers formed up near the Temple of Isis because that is where the generals were staying? Josephus should have mentioned the other place if that were where they were staying. He could not expect his audiences to follow the scholars’ exegesis. An overlooked problem, too, is that this presumably non-traditional feature of the story (which however may fit Josephus’ account, below) makes it more difficult to imagine that Josephus borrowed an official triumph account. Without committing herself on the sense of the sentence, Beard proposes that if the Temple of Isis did house the imperators, it was: a careful allusion to the fact that in the civil wars of just two years earlier, Titus’ younger brother Domitian was said to have escaped his opponents thanks to an ingenious disguise as an attendant of the Egyptian goddess. What better place … to sleep over than the temple of the goddess whose protection had saved the young hope of the dynasty? A careful allusion indeed, but again, who would have been able to extract this meaning from all the possibilities? Both Tacitus and Suetonius relate that Domitian escaped Vitellius’ forces and the burning Capitol in December of 69 by dressing as a priest of Isis.51 That is true, but as the temple at Pompeii shows 50 51

Beard 2007: 95–96. Suetonius, Dom. 1.2; cf. Tacitus, Hist. 3.73.

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most impressively, Isis was immensely popular in Rome, Italy, and throughout the empire.52 The cult had not always fared well under the late-Republican Senate, Augustus, and Tiberius, and Gaius’ alleged enthusiasm might not have helped the Goddess’s image.53 Nevertheless, by the mid-first century Rome hosted three significant Isea: the one under discussion here at the north end of the Campus Martius, in a compound with a matching Serapeum; one on the Via Labicana heading southeast out of the city; and a chapel on or near the Capitoline hill.54 Many other evocations of Egypt could be found throughout the city, in smaller temples, pyramids, altars, and exotic art.55 The short-lived emperor Otho was said to have been a devotee of Isis.56 Quite apart from Domitian’s escape tactic, moreover, Vespasian and Titus had their own investments in Egypt, Isis, and Serapis. We cannot discount the possibility of their genuine interest in these cults. Vespasian had made Alexandria his long-term base when he left the Judaean campaign, and stories circulated about omens he had received in Egyptian temples. He may have been initiated in the cult of Serapis, given the eerie experiences he is said to have had in connection with it.57 After Jerusalem’s fall, Titus also lingered in Egypt, reportedly wearing a traditional diadem while sacrificing to the Apis bull, reportedly staying long enough to make Vespasian nervous about his son’s growing power in the East.58 Egypt had also been important for the war in Judaea. Titus brought 2,000 legionaries from there. Vespasian had appointed as his executive officer the experienced Alexandrian-Judaean Tiberius Julius Alexander, who had just completed a term as Egyptian Prefect and decades earlier had served as Claudius’ Judaean Prefect (BJ 5.43–46). Alexander was chosen because of his firm early support of Vespasian, months before the outcome of the civil war was known (BJ 5.46): it was he who administered the Egyptian legions’ oath of loyalty to Vespasian on 1 July (BJ 4.617), 69. Since the date of this acclamation became Vespasian’s dies imperii, Tiberius Alexander and Egypt were of 52 53

54 55 56 57 58

See Bricault 2013; Bricault & Leclant 2001; Bricault, Versluys, & Meyboom 2007. Reasons for regarding Gaius as an Egyptophile and Isis enthusiast are in Köberlein 1962. Balsdon (1964: 91) offers sober qualifications, conceding that this emperor ‘was interested in things Egyptian, and sponsored the building of the first great temple of Isis in the Campus Martius’. Barrett (1989: 219–22) points out that even the ‘fact’ of Gaius’ building the Isaeum on the Campus Martius’ is insecure. Roullet 1972: 37. See also Richardson 1992: 211–13. Roullet 1972: 37–52. Suetonius, Otho 12.1. Suetonius, Vesp. 7. Suetonius, Tit. 5.

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fundamental importance to the Flavian story. Alexander might later have been appointed Prefect of the Praetorian Guard, possibly as Titus’ colleague.59 So we must wonder whether Domitian’s fortunate escape, before the arrival of Vespasian and Titus in Rome, was really a sufficiently obvious, singular referent for the stay in Isis’ temple. (Where Domitian stayed is unclear.) Material evidence suggests higher stakes. The Haterii tomb relief, which exudes triumphal motifs across all of the Flavian monuments it portrays, begins on the left with an ‘arch by … Isis’ (arcus ad Isis). The arch itself is both filled with Isis imagery—Anubis, cista, Isis, sistrum—and surmounted by captive-Judaea symbols.60 Moreover, just when the Flavians were most avidly disseminating their triumphal coins, in the early 70s, they included copper coins depicting the Temple of Isis, an innovation in imperial coinage and different in spirit from Augustus’ Aegypto capta. Although it is conceivable that all this relates to Domitian’s escape, the more obvious connections are with victory in Judaea. The popularity of Isis offered the Flavians a vehicle for transforming their success in an eastern province into something more majestic: the pacification of the recurring primal threat of the East, with Egypt, Alexandria, Isis, and Serapis integrated and supportive. In Flavian visual representations of bearded and trousered Judaeans, they seem indistinguishable from Parthians, the historic eastern enemy.61 In reading Josephus’ account, we should watch for other evidence of the Egypt/Isis theme and the conversion of a Judaean victory into something vaguely and more generally eastern. Concerning the space needed for the army outside the Flavians’ lodging (or incubation?), context is also important. What sort of Flavian army was available for this parade? Not long before his triumph account, Josephus explains that none of the legions involved returned to Rome with the generals. The redoubtable X Fretensis remained as the garrison of the new praetorian province (BJ 7.5). Legio XII Fulminata, which had failed spectacularly under Cestius and again in this rehabilitation assignment, was removed from Raphanaea to the Euphrates frontier (7.18). The other two (V Macedonica, XV Apollinaris) remained with Titus until he reached Egypt but were then released to their former bases in Moesia and Pannonia (7.19, 117). It is not clear which or how many soldiers were present for the acclamations and parade. It seems most 59 60 61

Turner 1954: 62–64. Jensen 1978: 89–92. Cf. Gergel 2001 and British Museum coins ref. R.10513, R1935,0404.7, and 1974,0518.1 (71, 77/78 80/81 CE, Judaean prisoners on reverse), 1913,0614.11 (70 CE, Titus spearing Judaean), R.10744 (79 CE, prisoner beneath trophy).

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likely that they were taken from units under Antonius Primus and Mucianus in the civil war (e.g., III Gallica from Syria) and/or perhaps those involved in the recent Batavian war. In any case, the army of the Judaean campaign is not in view, and the parading force may have comprised representative cohorts only. 4

Josephus’ Portrait of the Flavian Triumph: In the End Is the Beginning

To keep things moving I shall divide Josephus’ account of the procession into six parts. The main point emerging from this investigation is that each part is in significant tension with his narrative in the preceding volumes. The inescapable implication, for an audience that has been with Josephus from the start and trusts his expert knowledge, is that the Flavian story is bathed in deception. Knowing this does not prevent Josephus from being awed by the greatest show on earth. Visitors to the Berlin Olympics in 1936 were in awe, while being completely alienated from the sponsoring regime and its ideas. But the contradiction between the awe-inspiring ceremony and the truth about Judaea as told by Josephus is clear. 4.1 Preparations (7.122–30) Josephus begins with a notice that reflects familiar conditions (BJ 7.122): ‘When the day for the procession associated with the victories was announced beforehand, none of the countless rabble in the city was left at home. They all went out ahead of time, determined to find places to stand. These they secured, leaving only the narrowest possible thoroughfare for what they were going to watch’. Even those of us who would never camp out for concert tickets recognise this kind of crowd behaviour. Everyone loves a parade. Plutarch relates that security guards had to hold back the crowds to keep a path clear for Aemilius Paullus’ triumph (Aem. 32.3). Josephus’ comment, reflecting his usual tone of superiority to the rabble (τῆς ἀμέτρου πληθύος), also highlights the political purpose of the event: to shore up domestic support in Rome. The vulgus is predictable and biddable, however. The important actors come next. After emerging from Isis’ temple, the imperators do everything that Roman tradition expects. Clad in purple robes and laurel, without weapons, they are welcomed by the Senate, Rome’s magistrates, and equestrians of standing. They sit on ivory stools, receive the soldiers’ acclamations for their prowess (αὐτοῖς τῆς ἀρετῆς μαρτυρίας ἀποδιδόντες ἅπαντες), draw their cloaks over their heads and offer prayers to the Gods, give a short (i.e., Roman-style) speech,

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provide a breakfast for the soldiers while they themselves repair to the porta triumphalis for refreshment, and finally offer sacrifices before crossing the pomerium. Josephus emphasises by repetition the traditional nature of all this. The ritual was, with its elements of purification from bloodshed and reintegration, a celebration of the commanders’ virtue and the favour of Rome’s Gods. They play their expected, reassuring, politically necessary role. But what has this to do with the truth of events in Judaea? Not much. Josephus has made it a theme, increasingly stressed toward the climax, that the Judaean God ‘went over’ to render assistance to the Romans, without which they could have achieved nothing. God used them to purge his sacred house, which native tyrants had polluted.62 Just a few paragraphs before the triumph story, Titus himself has declared, upon seeing Herod’s constructions up close: ‘God was the one who brought the Judaeans down from such defences, for what could human hands or machines have achieved against these towers?’ (BJ 6.411). Nevertheless, to establish their power, he and his father must do what a Roman public expects—with the small twist that they signal the assistance of Isis. That was at least getting warm in acknowledging another deity. This is where the Roman Senate and army play critical supporting roles, for without them there was no imperial power. Künzl’s observation above that Josephus does not explain the three stages of the procession, and the placement of these groups within them, seems to be a category mistake. Josephus was not a journalist, preparing a complete introduction to the Roman triumph for foreign readers. As a resident of Rome (by now a citizen), writing in the first instance for local audiences familiar with triumph norms, he was writing his own Judaean story and focusing on the elements of the Flavian event he wished to highlight. 4.2 Flowing Rivers of Treasure (7.132–35) The display of marvellous treasures was part of the triumphal logic. When an imperator brought new peoples under Rome’s imperium, he did so in large measure to be seen as guaranteeing Rome’s prosperity and security with the flood of new income. An important part of the procession, typically leading the parade, was the display of such acquired bounty. Plutarch says that when Aemilius Paullus was awarded a three-day triumph for his victory over Perseus’ Macedonia (168 BCE), after intense debate about whether he merited a triumph, the first two days were needed just to display all the beautiful statues, paintings, and colossal figures, transported on 250 chariots, then the mountains 62

E.g., BJ 2.390; 3.293, 351; 4.366, 370; 5.19, 39, 278, 343, 368, 378, 396–98; 6.38, 101, 110, 371, 399; 7.319, 323, 333.

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of captured Macedonian weaponry and armour, all polished bronze and steel in massive piles, along with 3,000 men carrying 750 large bowls of coined silver, ornamented drinking horns, bowls, and cups (Aem. 32.4–8). Even the third day, which finally featured the prisoners and the triumphator, was wrapped in seemingly endless Macedonian gold and silver. For Pompey’s third triumph, likewise, he brought all kinds of stuff from the east: hundreds of whole ships, wagons overflowing with gold, 2,000 drinking cups made of onyx and gold, 75 million silver drachmae, and all manner of royal paraphernalia (Appian, Mithr. 115–16). And Cassius Dio remarks that Augustus brought enough treasure from Egypt to exhibit on all three days of his triumph (51.21). When we recall that Pompey’s two-day triumph in 61 BCE already included Judaea and paraded its Hasmonean king Aristobulus, along with spoils from more than a dozen other principalities, the single-day joint Flavian affair begins to look insipid, like the illusion of a treasure mountain sustained by a molehill. The Flavians and their enablers apparently tried for a Pompeian effect by having the Judaean tail wag the eastern dog. Triumphing generals were not supposed to raid Rome’s own storage vaults, private collections, and public buildings to put the city’s existing wealth on display. That would be cheating. Yet that is what Josephus’ narrative appears to say. Judaea was a mostly agrarian, village-based society. And Galilee’s main cities had either capitulated pre-emptively (Sepphoris) or been spared because they were not in rebellion against Rome (Tiberias, Tarichea). There was no treasure to be had from them. Beautiful Caesarea, which had many triumph-worthy goods, was a Roman base and not in conflict with Rome. Nor were the wealthy Greek-style poleis of the coastal plain or the Decapolis or Samaria. Only Jerusalem had significant wealth, chiefly because of its status as sole temple city for Judaeans world-wide. It was an enduring sore point with some Romans that Judaeans were allowed to send money there (Tacitus, Hist. 5.5, 8), though Josephus emphasises the Spartan simplicity of Judaean life. After repeated raids by Nero’s latest procurators, however, and the four-year conflict that must have drained much of the city’s money for necessities, Jerusalem in 70 CE could not have produced the usual sort of world-scale treasures that a triumph needed—granted Josephus’ note that deposits of (private?) wealth had been discovered in the tunnels beneath the city just before Titus’ departure (BJ 7.114–15). Judaea’s best-known resources were balsam, date-palms, olive oil, and bitumen (Tacitus, Hist. 5.6). Granted Pliny’s notice about the exhibit of balsam trees (Nat. 12.111–13), neither they nor wagonloads of bitumen could amaze onlookers in the way that the glittering spoils of Aemilius, Pompey, and Augustus had done.

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What should the Flavians do to create a ‘wow factor’ at the front of the procession? Josephus claims to have been wowed by what they put on display. Coming from Jerusalem, and knowing the temple intimately, he had never seen anything like this. He claims to have been nearly speechless (‘impossible to find adequate words to describe’, BJ 7.132), and takes to repeating himself: ‘amazing and expensive’ (7.133, 136, 137, 140), ‘rare’ (7.134, 135). A prosperous individual who managed to secure just one of these things, he reflects, would be counted rich, and here such treasures are so abundant as to seem almost trivial in value: ‘a flowing river, one might say’ (7.134). How could we ever have imagined such things to be rare, he asks, when they were so plentiful here (7.135)? The problem is that none of this eye candy had much to do with Judaea or Jerusalem. Although it is conceivable that the Flavians found it all in the temple vaults or the tunnels, Josephus does not say so, and it was all a surprise to him. He says rather that the display was calculated to show ‘the vastness of the Roman imperium’ (7.133: τῆς Ῥωμαίων ἡγεμονίας ἔδειξε τὸ μέγεθος)—not that it came from Jerusalem. His vague notes about the items on display, which amounted to everything one could imagine, confirm this. The show included the greatest conceivable items, ‘whether of works of craft or objects of wealth or natural rarities’ (7.132). Heading the parade were ‘silver, gold, and elephant [ivory], fashioned in every kind of way’ (7.135), ‘both woven carpets in the rarest purple being carried, and vividly accurate representations embroidered, in the Babylonian style’ (7.134: τὰ μὲν ἐκ πορφύρας ὑφάσματα τῆς σπανιωτάτης φερόμενα, τὰ δ᾿ εἰς ἀκριβῆ ζωγραφίαν πεποικιλμένα τῇ Βαβυλωνίων τέχνῃ). There were also precious translucent stones, some set in gold crowns (7.135). We need not doubt that the abundance amazed the Judaean observer. The woven carpets might be the ‘purple objects’ from the temple that Vespasian will later take to the Palatine (7.162), though Josephus does not make the connection. Otherwise, his language suggests broadly eastern themes: elephant/ivory (repeated at 7.141, 151), abundant purple and gold, Babylonian-style embroidery, precious stones, and gold crowns. ‘Accurate representation’ of human or animal life, at least, was not a Judaean strong point, as it risked violating the commandment against images.63 Josephus has, it is true, earlier mentioned a single large ‘Babylonian’ curtain hanging before the temple sanctuary in blue, natural linen, purple, and red (5.212–14). But that curtain appears as a singular wonder at Jerusalem’s holy site, whereas many curtains and hangings, vividly embroidered to depict life, are on display in the triumph. The other spectacular woven carpets about to be mentioned are of Roman manufacture (7.141). 63

BJ 1.649–59; 2.5–13, 170–71, 185–95.

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Josephus’ reference to diaphanous stones is intriguing (7.135). Various types of rock allow light through, but Josephus’ phrase (λίθοι διαφανεῖς) was used by ancient authors for pearls or topaz. They associated both with the Red Sea or points east, not with highland Judaea or Jerusalem.64 The gold crowns in which some of these stones were set evoke the luxury of eastern royalty or Roman largesse. War has mentioned gold crowns five times. The last Roman to triumph for Jerusalem, Sosius, ‘dedicated a gold crown to God’—presumably to the temple (BJ 1.357). Second, the deceased King Herod was laid out with his gold crown, diadem, sceptre, and much purple (1.671). Third, Josephus describes the complicated and unique headgear of the high priest, which included a sort of gold crown (5.235). Fourth, Titus distributed gold crowns to his soldiers along with spears, standards, and other ornaments after their victory (7.14). Finally, the Parthian king Vologaeses presented Titus with an excellent gold crown for his Judaean victory (7.105). Of these, we should presumably discount the high priest’s headgear because it was such a complicated affair, the gold coronal elements combining with many others (cf. AJ 3.172–78). And there was only one. The only Judaean royals who might own crowns, the Herodians, are intimate friends of emperors.65 Surely, their crowns were not on display. Or did they loan them for the show? It would be an exquisite irony if Josephus had in mind the sort of gold crown that Sosius (a real triumphator) had dedicated to the temple. But if Titus was able to produce gold crowns en masse for his soldiers, it is not clear that the crowns in question come from Judaea. Although a great deal of costly stuff was reportedly on display, then, Josephus leaves room for the impression that the organisers scavenged whatever they could to dazzle Rome’s populace with a sense of eastern conquest, suggesting the luxury of potentates, to reaffirm the scale of Rome’s imperium under such mighty conquerors. He gives no clear signal that this was even intended to be seen as Kriegsbeute rather than as a general celebration of empire, as he says. If the two Flavian imperators together, sharing a joint triumph, could scarcely produce enough booty for one day, finally, we might wonder about their claim to have built the Flavian Amphitheatre ‘from the spoils of war’. The Haterii relief portrays that iconic structure with a triumphal quadriga over the entrance. This would fit with Geza Alföldy’s reconstruction of the original lettering on an architrave, by tracking the plugholes behind a fifth-century inscription written over it, which carried the claim that the massive building

64 65

Theophr. Lap. 36; Agath. Mari eryth. 96; Strabo, Geogr. 16.4.6; Athen. Deipn. 3.45 [Kaibel]. BJ 2.181–82, 206–15; 3.29, 443–45; 4.498–500; cf. Dio 65/66.15.

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was funded by war spoils ([ex] manubis).66 Alföldy proposes that the reconstructed statement was one of at least four, each executed in highly visible 20-cm gold letters over the main exits, and that a much larger version of the same declaration would have stood conspicuously on the amphitheatre’s internal podium.67 While admiring the brilliant detective work involved, I would add the trite reflection that political leaders do not always tell the truth. The Flavians had reasons to make such an impressive claim, if they did, other than merely reporting that they actually funded the amphitheatre from Judaean spoils. Claiming to have funded a stupendous public structure from their eastern victory would drive home the impression of endless bounty flowing from Flavian virtue, whether it was true or not. 4.3 Gods, Animals, Prisoners (7.136–38) The sense of imperial detachment, deceit, and desperation continues in the next part. Josephus mentions ‘statues of their Gods, amazing in size and of formidable craft, not one of them lacking an expensive covering of some kind’ (7.136), ‘animals of many kinds’ all decked out and accompanied by attendants in rich costume, and then the Judaean prisoners—presumably the 700 that Titus had earlier selected (7.118). The reference to their Gods (literally ‘among them’) seems again to be our Judaean’s restrained emphasis on the triumphators’ omission of any reference to the Deity who actually won Jerusalem for them. It is not too much, in view of Josephus’ work as a whole,68 to detect his bemusement at the ways in which the Romans had fashioned and accessorised these images of what counted for ‘Gods’ among them (7.136: οὐ παρέργως πεποιημένα … ῆς ὕλης τῆς πολυτελοῦς). By the time of the Flavian triumph, Rome was accustomed to seeing exotic animals from Africa and the East:69 elephants, leopards, lions, panthers, bears, camels, giraffes, hippos, crocodiles, and so on. But what sort of animals from Judaea could stand behind Josephus’ terse reference to the ‘animals of many kinds’ (ζῴων τε πολλαὶ φύσεις)? It would have been a challenge to impress a Roman audience. Josephus diverts attention to the rich costumes adorning beasts and handlers alike. His failure to indicate what animals were on view, while expressing amazement at all the accompanying hand-made treasures, stones, and costumes, 66 67 68 69

Alföldy 1995; Feldman 2001. Alföldy 1995: 223–26. AJ 1.22; 4.138–39; 8.271, 317; 18.344; Ap. 1.225, 254; 2.239, 244, 247. Josephus is diplomatically restrained on the subject of foreign Gods (cf. Ap. 2.237) in comparison to the Wisdom of Solomon (e.g., chapters 12–15). Livy 39.22; 44.18; Pliny, Nat. 8.96.

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might be explained in various ways. The most obvious possibility, in light of Roman triumphal tradition (e.g., Plutarch, Aem. 33.2) and given the dressing up of the animals and their attendants, is that these were sacrificial victims: oxen, perhaps with pigs and rams, which would soon meet their ends (BJ 7.155). But Josephus is not squeamish about sacrifice, and his brief emphasis on the variety of species does not help us to think of sacrifice. The other logical alternative with traditional support would be exotic animals from the supposedly conquered land. In this case, perhaps he cut the explanation short from embarrassment. If the animals had been impressive (elephants, bears, and giraffes), mentioning them would have exposed the fraudulent character of the parade, since they were not native to Judaea. Before the modern draining of the marshes in Galilee (not the focus of Flavian fighting), there were exotic amphibians in the region. But frogs and turtles were not triumph-worthy. Perhaps the Romans had brought hyenas or mountain lions from the Judaean desert? If they had to corral some horses, donkeys, and lizards for their show, that would have been embarrassing in a different way. In describing the recurring ivory, it is striking that Josephus opts for the ambiguous word ἐλέφας (BJ 7.136, 141, 151), which means ‘elephant’ unless the context requires ivory, rather than the clearer derivative ἐλεφάντινος (as at BJ 7.126). Whatever these varied animals were, Josephus passes over them abruptly to focus on the great care taken to dress everyone up: both the unnamed animals (παρήγοντο κόσμον οἰκεῖον) and their attendants, the latter decked out (κεκοσμημένον) in deep purple laced with gold. Speaking of costumes, Josephus’ description of the prisoners, who come next, makes the air of deception explicit. ‘Next one could see that even the crowd of captives was not undecorated, but the colourfulness [or embroidery, variety] of their clothes and their own beauty concealed from sight the ugliness of the injuries on their bodies’ (7.138: οὐδὲ τὸν αἰχμάλωτον ἦν ἰδεῖν ὄχλον ἀκόσμητον, ἀλλ᾿ ἡ τῶν ἐσθήτων ποικιλία καὶ τὸ κάλλος αὐτοῖς τὴν ἀπὸ τῆς κακώσεως τῶν σωμάτων ἀηδίαν ἔκλεπτε τῆς ὄψεως). The parade is all about cosmetics. Reading the story in context, again, we may detect Josephus’ fellow-feeling and a hint of sarcasm. This was, after all, a war he had fought on the losing side, and he had seen plenty of injury and death. As for these prisoners, he has related that the finally jaded Titus allowed his soldiers to kill and pillage in Jerusalem, in the usual way. (We get the feeling that they would have done so with or without his permission.) Only when the men became ‘weary of slaughtering’, and a large number of Judaeans remained alive, did he order the remainder to be penned up in the temple’s Court of Women. From now on, the soldiers were to kill only those who offered resistance, though in typical

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disregard of Titus they took the opportunity to dispatch the weak and elderly. They preserved only the young and fit, because these might be useful (BJ 6.414). All these captives Titus left to the tender mercies of his friend Fronto, who became their judge, jury, and executioner. Fronto promptly dispatched anyone whom another prisoner identified as a troublemaker, evidently seeking to lighten his load indiscriminately, while taking care to preserve only ‘the tallest and most attractive for the triumph’ (6.417). During this horrifying genetic lottery many perished from starvation: some because their hateful guards allowed them no food, others because they bravely refused to eat (6.419). Josephus remarks in a different context (V 419) that he was personally able to free nearly two hundred people, especially women and children of families he had known—and this without even exacting a fee for his kindness!—as a favour granted by Titus. It was from Fronto’s select group that Titus made his final selections for the trip to Rome (BJ 7.118–20). We may assume that those who survived all this, and then the voyage to Rome, had been maltreated along the way, adding to whatever scars combat may have left. This was the one area in which the Flavians must have realised the need to display a credible enemy. Yet even here Josephus remarks on the pretence. This was not the occasion to let people see what these men had suffered. For present purposes—the Flavians’ greater glory—they needed to look big and strong. The irony is that Josephus has always presented Judaean fighters as genuinely courageous, far superior to the legionaries, man for man. The Flavians, having imprisoned and mistreated them, must now rehydrate and polish them up for the big display. 4.4 Floats and Gigantic Battle Tapestries (7.139–47) The most spectacular artifice comes next, in an extravagant visual recreation of what the Flavians claim to have accomplished in Judaea—still without material that comes from there. We have seen plenty of cosmetic decoration already, but this section is filled with the language of manufacture, art, and construction (ποιέω, κατασκευή, μίμημα): What produced the greatest amazement was the construction that held up the scaffolds, because on account of their size there was alarm over the unconvincing stability of the foundation. For many of them had been built to three or even four storeys in height, and the luxuriousness of the construction was intended to generate pleasure—albeit mixed with terror. On many of them were woven carpets laced with gold, and all were framed in carefully wrought gold and elephant [ivory].

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Through several representations [perhaps: ‘artistic liberties’], the war, now all chopped up into segments, produced a vivid spectacle of itself, running from one [scene] to the next (διὰ πολλῶν δὲ μιμημάτων ὁ πόλεμος ἄλλος εἰς ἄλλα μεμερισμένος ἐναργεστάτην ὄψιν αὑτοῦ παρεῖχεν). On display were: a prosperous countryside being ravaged; entire phalanxes of the enemy being killed, also some running away and some being taken captive; walls of great height and thickness being wrecked by machines; the strongest of fortresses being stormed; the most populous city compounds on the tops of hills being seized; an army pouring inside walls; every place filled with slaughter; the hands of the impotent raised in supplication; fire engulfing holy places [or temples]; the destruction of houses on top of their owners; and after much wasteland and gloom, rivers flowing not over cultivated land, or as drink for man or beast, but through a land aflame on every side—for the Judaeans committed themselves to the war and so had these sufferings coming (ταῦτα γὰρ Ἰουδαῖοι πεισομένους αὑτοὺς τῷ πολέμῳ παρέδοσαν). The final clause may reflect either Josephus’ mournful perspective or the Roman logic underlying the production: all this was on display because (γάρ) this is what the Judaeans brought on themselves in choosing war with Rome. The terror (ἔκπληξις, 7.140) that the exhibit was meant to arouse in Rome’s viewers was justified by putative Judaean belligerence. The tenor of the description matches the boastful and brutal surviving material evidence: Roman legions dominated the enemy at every turn, causing rampant destruction with no regret. Here Josephus’ description breaks through the oft-remarked vagueness with vivid and abundant fire, blood, and destruction. Such sentiments are not surprising in a military context. Enlightened western powers today do not shrink from threatening declared enemies with a reduction to rubble or the Stone Age (after due ‘shock and awe’). Late Victorian Britain was consciously committed to fair play throughout its empire, but still unabashedly celebrated what it deemed righteous vengeance, which it thought unavoidably severe (as corporal and capital punishment were common at home), against violent challengers. In the context of war, no special thought is given to holy places if they are part of an enemy’s defences, or to women, children, and the aged. Not only does the overall theme of the Flavian production, as Josephus presents it, differ sharply from his foregoing narrative of the real war, but none of the scenes depicted on the tapestries matches any events he has portrayed. The closest parallel to the army’s ‘pouring over the walls’ of a hilltop city comes in the siege of Gamala, though it was not populous. But there (BJ 4.19–38),

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after the legionaries pour over the walls at the misguided urging of Vespasian, they meet catastrophe. It is Vespasian’s Roman soldiers and not the Judaean enemy who find themselves caught on collapsing rooftops and dying in the rubble. Josephus presents Vespasian’s Inszenierung of the triumph elements as a fantasy. Another index of imposture is Josephus’ reference to ‘entire phalanxes of the enemy’ being killed. Judaeans could not and did not face the legions on the battlefield, as Macedonian phalanxes had done. In the preceding volumes of War, they fight (after the ambush of Cestius) by launching sorties from besieged cities, and then only at Iotapata and Jerusalem. The plurals, ‘well-populated compounds of poleis on hilltops’ and ‘fire engulfing temples’ (or even ‘holy places’), imply scenes manifestly unsuited to Judaean geography or culture, as do the mysterious rivers passing through formerly productive country, now ablaze. The only significant river was the Jordan marking Judaea’s eastern perimeter. This whole pictorial presentation, Josephus’ audience must conclude, was a deception offered to Rome’s masses. It aimed to aggrandise the Flavians by depicting a supposedly large, exotic, and wealthy land of fierce warriors now conquered. This was an artistic production, somewhat like that of a film loosely ‘based on real events’ but actually a make-believe landscape designed for purposes other than methodical investigation. If the scenes on the luxurious tapestries were fake, who were the ‘generals’? Perched precariously above each high scaffold, Josephus continues (7.147 with 140), ‘was stationed the general of the captured city—what manner he was taken.’70 It would be interesting to know who these men were, given that there were few cities at all, those in the north had capitulated, and those of Galilee were mostly not conquered (Sepphoris, Tiberias, Tarichea). Josephus presents himself in War 3 as the only real general there, with John of Gischala about to escape to Jerusalem. Nor, it seems, were the men held responsible for Jerusalem’s resistance, John and Simon (soon to be executed), perched atop a float. The toughest site for the Romans in War’s narrative, before Jerusalem and aside from his own Iotapata, was Agrippa’s Gamala. But he claims that the town leaders died in the fight, leaving only two female survivors from the whole 70

BJ 7.147: τέτακτο δ᾿ ἐφ᾿ ἑκάστῳ τῶν πηγμάτων ὁ τῆς ἁλισκομένης πόλεως στρατηγὸς ὃν τρόπον ἐλήφθη. Elsewhere Josephus uses ὃν τρόπον as the direct object of a transitive verb, which would have been clearer. Here the sentence is grammatically complete before ὃν τρόπον ἐλήφθη. The closest parallel is at V 412, where Josephus says that his War already explained many things, including ‘[in] what manner I was taken alive and bound. …’ That passage does not refer to a particular pose, but a series of events. It seems easiest to imagine a pose in the triumph account, though some kind of mime of a series of events is possible.

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population (BJ 4.65–69, 81–83). Incidentally, one might wonder what became of the ‘law’ Josephus mentions at the moment of his surrender, according to which Judaean generals were to die in combat (BJ 3.400). Who were the ‘generals’ of all those large enemy cities on hilltops? Or, were a few ordinary prisoners from Jerusalem promoted and forced to play these roles in the Flavian drama? Whoever they were, Josephus’ language appears to suggest that each man was required to hold the physical posture in which he had supposedly been captured, as Thackeray translates in the Loeb edition: ‘in the attitude in which he was taken’.71 Such stress positions do not bear contemplating, but they recall Pompey’s reported insistence on portraying the deceased Mithridates and Tigranes first in fighting pose, then as beaten, and finally as running away (Appian, Mithr. 117). It seems to have been important to let the population relive the personal danger faced by the imperator. But the air of detachment from Judaean reality, as described in Josephus’ preceding volumes, continues. Yet another unrealistic element of the production, which Josephus mentions as tersely as the variety of animals (perhaps likewise from embarrassment), was a large number of ships: πολλαὶ δὲ καὶ νῆες εἵποντο (BJ 7.147). Pompey, the scourge of eastern pirates, reportedly brought 700 intact ships into Rome’s harbours and exhibited ramming prows in his triumphal procession (Appian, Mithr. 116). Augustus’ naval battle at Actium was also famous, and this may have been why Vespasian was eager to claim a great naval victory. Throughout his reign he issued coins depicting Victoria on the prow of a ship, with the legend Victoria Navalis.72 On what basis? Harold Mattingly and Edward Sydenham thought that the coins ‘undoubtedly’ recalled Vespasian’s use of sea power to cut off Vitellius’ supplies in the civil war. They speculated that Vespasian needed to emphasise this against Antonius Primus’ unauthorised (but decisive) land battle at Cremona/Bedriacum.73 That may be so, but it seems a stretch. The notion that Vespasian truly sought to kneecap Vitellius by blocking grain traffic from Alexandria rests on doubtful evidence.74 Anyway, 71 72 73 74

So too Barton 2001: 88–89; Beard 2003: 553; 2007: 152 (‘the Jewish generals were stationed, acting out the moment of their capture’). E.g., British Museum coins ref. 1913,0614.105, 1929,0716.5, 1929,0716.8, 1930,0407.8, 1931,1006.10, R.10549, R.10550, R.10559, R.10560, R.10668, R.10709. Mattingly and Sydenham 1926: 7. The main evidence is Josephus, BJ 4.605–606: Vespasian’s soldiers were urging him as imperator to lead them against Vitellius, but he preferred to go to Alexandria, claiming that he could bring Vitellius to his knees by halting the grain supply and causing the Roman populace to rise against him. To take this as Vespasian’s actual (and highly implausible) strategy, while he sends Mucianus with the army instead of going himself, would be to ignore the nature of Josephus’ narrative as well as the realities of Rome’s grain supply. See the discussion in Mason 2022 ad loc.

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the ‘many ships’ in the triumph for Judaea could not easily be explained in terms of the civil war. We should prefer an explanation that works for the ships in the triumph and on the coins.75 The only waterborne victory mentioned by Josephus was a small engagement on the Kinneret Lake (Sea of Galilee), as Vespasian and Titus assisted their friend King Agrippa II in dealing with his opponents there (BJ 3.445). Since local industry was lake-based, the rebels had boats at hand, outside of Roman bowshot (3.497–502). The shipless but determined Vespasian ordered his men to build rafts and pursue the sailors, whom they then trapped and killed en masse (3.505, 522–31). We may doubt that Vespasian transported either these hastily-built rafts or the rebels’ little skiffs as memorials. We can only wonder, therefore, whether he ordered ships built or commandeered more impressive barques for the triumph. The conflict in landlocked Judaea was not naval, but claiming a naval victory was no more of a stretch than the whole façade of the triumph. Scholars are understandably reluctant to trace Vespasian’s boasted admiralship to rafts on the Kinneret, but that reluctance comes from an assumption of proportionality between the event and its celebration.76 As we have seen, however, there was nothing about the Flavian triumph that smacked of proportionality in relation to the events. The whole project of a triumph for finishing the Syrian legate’s task in Judaea required creative flair and fabrication. 4.5 The Temple Spoils (7.148–52) The only spoils that Josephus unambiguously identifies as from his homeland and beloved city are those now mentioned, last of all. And these, he says, were ‘abundantly’ (χύδην) present. The three most striking relics, he says, were those that had been trapped in Jerusalem’s burning temple (διέπρεπε δὲ πάντων τὰ ἐγκαταληφθέντα τῷ ἐν Ἱεροσολύμοις ἱερῷ, 7.148): the golden table and golden lampstand from the inner sanctuary and ‘the Law of the Judaeans’. Josephus will soon remark, reflecting his general view of the man’s character, that Vespasian (not Titus) prided himself on these golden objects (σεμνυνόμενος ἐπ᾿ αὐτοῖς) and therefore chose to display them in his own Pax Forum (7.161). The master-copy of the Law, however, Vespasian would keep in his palace (7.162). The wishes of Titus, who secured them for Rome in his siege of Jerusalem, do not enter into it. Vespasian, also known in Rome for his crude and low-brow avarice, shows why he insisted on a joint triumph. 75 76

I agree thus far with Kokkinos 2010: 9–11. Smallwood (1981: 309 n. 65) finds the naval coinage too abundant to be traceable to ‘the minor Roman navalaction on the Sea of Galilee’.

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Spoils relief in the Flavian triumph (71 CE) from the Arch of Titus, replica at the Beit Hatfutsot Museum (Tel Aviv) Photo by TijsB under Creative Commons licence via Wikimedia

Josephus’ perception that the golden table and candelabrum were the most impressive components of the triumphal parade is independently confirmed by the southern panel frieze on the Arch of Titus (see Figure 2), which highlights precisely those pieces of furniture, along with the Law. They were the undoubted emblems of Judaea and the anchor of the triumphal parade among all the gee-gaws of uncertain provenance and boastful images. The ‘abundance’ of temple treasures here might be related to Josephus’ description at BJ 6.387–90 of a priest and a temple treasurer who bargained with Titus by offering him treasures from the temple storehouses in return for their safety. Titus received golden lampstands, tables, large and small bowls, priestly garments, purple and red cloth (to repair the main veil), and costly spices. In the structure of the War, this Flavian exhibition of the temple’s large lampstand and table creates an inclusio with the scene of Pompey’s arrival at the beginning (BJ 1.152–53). There Josephus relates that the city was on edge as the Roman general walked where only the high priest was permitted to go, and saw what no other human was supposed to see: the lampstand and table inside the Holy Place. Although they were of solid gold, and there were also piles of sacred money amounting to 2,000 talents nearby, Josephus insists that Pompey touched none of it. The Antiquities parallel adds that he refrained ‘because of piety but behaved in a way that was worthy of his virtue’ (AJ 14.72). He directed the temple officials to cleanse their sanctuary and reinstate the sacrifices. Pompey triumphed for his eastern victories in unprecedented style, but he did not need the temple’s sacred furniture.

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How pathetic was it, then, that Vespasian not only took these sacred objects but made them the focus of his joint triumph with Titus, and further that he ‘prided himself’ on these temple furnishings so much that he displayed them to the public in his forum? The closest analogue for Vespasian’s behaviour in Josephus’ works appears to be the infamous Seleucid Antiochus IV: for he had seen much gold in the temple along with other dedicated ornamentation of great value … so he stripped the temple bare and carried off the very vessels of God: the golden lampstand, the golden altar [of incense], the table … and did not hold back even from the curtains, which were made of fine linen and scarlet (AJ 12.149–50). All this Judah Maccabee had to replace before rededicating the temple at the first Hanukkah (AJ 12.318–19). Titus had destroyed the temple, unlike any representative of a great power except Nebuchadnezzar. But he had the option of leaving the sacred furniture for a rebuilt sanctuary. In War Josephus mentioned the lampstand and table again while describing the temple as context for the siege (5.216–18). There he explained the cosmic significance of the seven lamps (representing the planets) of the candelabrum and of the twelve loaves on the golden table (representing the zodiac; cf. AJ 3.182).77 When he now says, in describing the triumph, that the number seven (of the lamps) has a special significance for Judaeans, this appears to be what he means. Antiquities will mention these two principal objects of temple furniture (along with the altar of incense and censers) several times.78 The language he uses in the triumph passage to describe the design of the temple’s lampstand also matches his diction elsewhere (BJ 7.149): There was a golden table, many talents in weight, and a lampstand: although it was likewise of gold, the structure was different from that [of lampstands] in our normal use. There was a central stem fixed to the foundation (ὁ μὲν γὰρ μέσος ἦν κίων ἐκ τῆς βάσεως πεπηγώς), but smaller branches had been drawn out of this, having an arrangement resembling that of a trident, though each of them had been fashioned as a lamp at the top. There were seven of them, however, showing clearly the prestige of the number 7 among the Judaeans (τριαίνης σχήματι παραπλησίαν τὴν θέσιν ἔχοντες, λύχνον ἕκαστος αὐτῶν ἐπ᾿ ἄκρον κεχαλκευμένος· ἑπτὰ δ᾿ ἦσαν οὗτοι τῆς παρὰ τοῖς Ἰουδαίοις ἑβδομάδος τὴν τιμὴν ἐμφανίζοντες). 77 78

See Pena 2020. AJ 3.144, 182, 193, 199; 8.90, 104; 10.145; 12.250.

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This wording anticipates Josephus’ first account in the Antiquities, where he describes the ten decorated segments of each branch, ‘out of which it [the lampstand] was constructed from a single base up to the top (ἐξ ὣν ἀπὸ μιᾶς βάσεως συνετέθη πρὸς ὕψος)’, mentions its weight (there just one talent), and highlights the planetary connection of the number 7 (AJ 3.141). At the end of War itself, Josephus describes the dissident temple of Onias in Egypt, which Vespasian ordered shut or destroyed (cf. BJ 1.33). There he explains that, although most of the furniture was modelled on that in Jerusalem’s temple, the Egyptian lamp was very different from the one he has described in Jerusalem. Instead of a menorah, Onias had a single lamp fashioned in gold and hung from a chain (οὐ γὰρ ἐποίησε λυχνίαν αὐτὸν δὲ χαλκευσάμενος λύχνον χρυσοῦν, BJ 7.428–29). I stress this unity of diction and conception because for Weber—to return to our starting point—this was the smoking gun that betrayed Josephus’ use of a Roman account. Weber could not fathom how the text could say that the menorah resembled a trident or that it looked different from lamps in ‘our common use’, unless a Roman was writing. But given Josephus’ immediate stress on the seven lamps and their significance, it seems that he mentioned the well-known trident structure (e.g., Poseidon’s) to convey the basic idea of a central stem with protruding arms, because that was not what λυχνία would suggest without such explanation. His sentence structure implies this: a gold table, which needs no comment (a table is a table), and a lampstand, also of gold but not what that word would suggest. Think of a trident as the basic form, but with three branches on each side of the stem. This was not the familiar chamber-and-wick, pottery volute found across the Mediterranean basin. Where did the Flavians get their display copy of the temple’s Law? Josephus does not include it among the treasures handed over by priests (above). He claims elsewhere, however, that immediately after the fall of the temple he himself rescued ‘sacred volumes, with Titus’ permission’ (V 418). We must wonder whether he donated these treasured scrolls from the temple, for the triumph and for safekeeping—he would have had little choice—in Vespasian’s palace. Vespasian was in no position to read the Hebrew text, but he might have seen it as a numinous object or talisman. Thus far I think we may agree with Eberhardt, that Josephus’ comment about Vespasian’s taking the Law to his palace implies respect and/or wonder. Even in his brief section on Judaea’s distinctive treasures, Josephus returns to the theme of Flavian manufacture. For immediately following the temple spoils, he says, ‘many people were carrying statues of Victory; everything was constructed of elephant-ivory and of gold.’ Finally came the triumphing father and son. ‘Domitian rode alongside, himself magnificently decorated’ (Δομετιανὸς

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δὲ παρίππευεν αὐτός τε διαπρεπῶς κεκοσμημένος, 7.152). Again we see unsparing decoration, sheen, and appearance, but little substance from Judaea—except what was raided from the accidentally destroyed temple. 4.6 Execution of Simon bar Giora, and Rampant Celebration (7.153–57) At his Republican triumph, Aemilius Paullus forced King Perseus to shuffle along behind his children and their attendants in pathetic humiliation (Plutarch, Aem. 33.6–34.2). Pompey exhibited an enormous statue of the deceased Mithridates along with 324 generals and royals whom he had fought (Appian, Mithr. 116). Augustus portrayed the defiantly dead Cleopatra (Cassius Dio 51.21.8). The Flavians had no great generals or monarchs to put on display, since they had ‘conquered’ a city in their Province of Syria. They decided to use Simon bar Giora, who was not from Jerusalem and entered the city just a year before the siege, as a symbol of the enemy nation, as though he were the champion of a foreign war against Rome. In Josephus’ narrative, by contrast, the conflict began because of regional tensions exacerbated by the truculence of Nero’s equestrian officials. Although Simon participated in the initial harassment of Cestius Gallus’ force (BJ 2.521), his main energies were directed against Judaea’s aristocratic leaders, local enemies to the north and south of Judaea, and the Zealot faction when they seized control in Jerusalem (BJ 2.652–53; 4.504, 511, 551). He was kept out of Jerusalem’s governance altogether, even when the conflict was well underway and throughout Josephus’ time in Galilee, until a Faustian bargain brought him into Jerusalem as a desperately needed antidote to John (BJ 4.573–76). The notion that Simon was responsible for a foreign war against Rome does not match Josephus’ account of the war’s origins (see further Chapter 14). Josephus closes his account of the triumph (skipping four years) with Vespasian’s dedication of his Forum and Temple of Peace, where memorabilia and the treasures from Jerusalem would be on permanent display (7.158–62). Honora Chapman has reasonably proposed that the site became a place of pilgrimage for Judaeans visiting or residing in Rome, because of the sacred furniture.79 5

Conclusions

In sum, the Flavian triumph as Josephus presents it was a manufactured, artificial affair. Impressive, no doubt, but almost everything in it that inspired 79

Chapman 2009.

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awe was created or sourced by the organisers: the abundant gold and ivory, the gigantic tapestries depicting battle scenes, the costumes of the prisoners, the statues of Roman Gods, mysterious animals, attendants, and everyone’s expensive clothing and jewellery. Even the piles of treasure at the front of the procession seem to have come chiefly from other collections. Josephus’ language emphasises manufacture, making, fashioning, adornment, decoration, and (Roman) expense. This was a far cry from the triumphs that had required two days or more simply to show off the booty that flowed in from the new territory. Even sharing a single triumph, Vespasian and Titus could manage only a day. This defect in the material content was the consequence and betrayal of a fraudulent foundation. It was a tour de force, converting a revolt suppressed within a longstanding province into the conquest of a foreign enemy. It was a sham. To amplify the spectacle, the Flavians multiplied the Judaean poleis, temples, and rivers, and conjured up military phalanxes. To evoke the resonant theme of the Eastern Menace now subdued they brought in the Isis temple, ubiquitous ivory, lavishly decorated crowns, and embroidered Babylonian-style fabrics. All this could only be by way of evocation, however, if they were to avoid ridicule. The central message of the triumph was unmistakable, however. Rome had been challenged. The Flavians answered the call as no one else could have done, righteously destroying the enemy’s cities and laying waste to their country. Lapidary Flavian commentary, still visible in the friezes of the surviving Arch of Titus, the inscription from the lost arch, and the Flavian coinage, confirms the message. Josephus’ presentation, the ironic distance of which is clear in the context of his work, offers a Judaean perspective on the same phenomena. This is what the Flavians made of their struggles in Judaea. He does not need to comment, for his entire narrative has exposed the emptiness beneath. I have tried to make a methodological point as well. Let us say that we have set for ourselves the historical problem of reconstructing the Flavian triumph, including the reasons for it, its structure and nature, and its effects. Not knowing what happened, we must try to understand the surviving evidence and then hypothesise the lost reality that would best explain it. Josephus’ portrayal, our principal evidence for the event itself, comes near the end of a much fuller narrative, of which it is an integral part. We need to read it as part of that story. Josephus also purports to describe what the Flavians actually did. This point tends to get lost if we criticise his account. There was a triumph in 71 CE, and he was not free to compose his ideal picture or what should have been. Writing in Rome within a few years of the event, he was constrained by what had happened. He made his (conscious and unconscious) choices about selection,

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emphasis, and diction, but nevertheless described what he saw. Once he chose to include the triumph episode, his room for manoeuvre was limited. Above all, Josephus was in no position to criticise the regime. And there is no reason to suppose that he considered the Flavian exercise in political deception strange, given the circumstances in Rome or the wily character of Vespasian. Against the background of his detailed narrative of what really happened in the earlier war, he could afford to describe what he saw and let the audience join the dots. His account contains many elements that could prompt raised eyebrows among a sympathetic, clued-in audience: the stress on construction, manufacture, and cosmetics, the Roman or vague provenance, the unseemly focus on plundered sacred furnishings, Vespasian’s priding himself on Titus’ spoils, and indeed the joint triumph itself. From the scenes of rivers and hilltop cities being overwhelmed to the dressed-up prisoners and ‘many ships’, from the gratitude to Rome’s Gods to the images of unstoppable legionary domination, this was an exercise in make-believe. So it goes.

Part 2 Judaean Historiography and Josephus

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Chapter 6

Judaean (Jewish) Historiography [Everything] explicated by Jason of Cyrene in five volumes we shall try to digest in a single composition. Considering the flood of numbers and the difficulty facing those who want to immerse themselves in the stories of the ἱστορία …, we undertook to provide satisfaction for those who wish to read  …, leaving the scrutiny of each detail to the composer (τῷ συγγραφεῖ) while devoting our attention to the continuity of the sketches in this digest (τῆς ἐπιτομῆς). … Close inquiry, personally investigating subjects, and busying oneself with each separate part—they are proper for the author of the ἱστορία, whereas the person making the paraphrase (τὴν μετάφρασιν) must be allowed to aim for compression of language. 2 Maccabees 2.23–32

…

The opportune moment now calls us to the demonstration from history (ἐπὶ τὴν ἀπόδειξιν τῆς ἱστορίας) of the temperate reasoning faculty. 4 Maccabees 3.19–20

…

If it were possible for us to paint the ἱστορία of your piety on some surface, would those who saw it not shudder at seeing a mother of seven children endure diverse tortures, even death, for the sake of piety? 4 Maccabees 17.7

∵ 1

Changing Frameworks

Those who write about human affairs have three tenses to choose from. Given the perils of treating the future and the impossibility of describing the instant

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present, we naturally turn to the past. But if all writing about the human past counted as historiography, the term would be an empty signifier. Scholars have confronted the potential chaos by offering us two rivers in which to paddle. The broader stream holds that every culture must reckon with its past and therefore each has its own way of doing history—whatever language they may use. For Johan Huizinga, ‘History is always the imposition of form upon the past,’ or ‘the intellectual form in which a civilization renders account to itself of its past’.1 This river is wide enough to carry along myths, epics, king lists, priestly annals, dynastic chronicles, and bardic tales: every ingredient of a national tradition.2 Biblical scholar John van Seters’ agreement that ‘History writing is a literate form of tradition’ leads him to include biblical narrative.3 Indeed, it is common to label the Deuteronomistic narrative history, perhaps the first one4 and thus the foundation of a Jewish historiography.5 If the Bible inaugurates Jewish historiography, we might ask with Amram Tropper what became of it. Observing the ahistorical character of rabbinic tradition and doubting the Jewish bona fides of Greek-language corpora, Tropper sees Jewish historiography dissolving into the idealised chain of tradition that we find in Mishnah Avot, a shift he connects with the Second Sophistic movement.6 Robert Hall’s Revealed Histories, by contrast, examines Jewish (and Christian) works written by inspiration.7 He explores ‘the historical consciousness’ of ancient Jews under five heads: prophetic history, whether interpretative (Josephus’ War) or inspired ( Jubilees); inspired historical sermons (Ezekiel, Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum, Judith); apocalyptic world histories (in 1 Enoch, 2 Baruch, Apocalypse of Abraham); limited apocalyptic history (Daniel); and the classification-resistant 4 Ezra and Sibylline Oracles.8 The shoe-horning required to unify Jewish historiography becomes clear when Hall describes Josephus’ War as ‘part of his prophetic mission’ and ‘based on inspiration’,9 for Josephus alone among these authors dons the historian’s mantle (below) and distinguishes history from prophecy.10

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Huizinga 1936: 5, 9. Hall 1991; Kraus 1999. Van Seters 1983: 3. Halpern 1988; Halpern and Lemaire 2010. Van Seters 1983: 1–7. Tropper 2004. Hall 1991: 11. Hall 1991: 13. Hall 1991: 29–30. Feldman 1990.

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The other conceptual stream is much narrower. It takes ἱστορία to be quintessentially Greek, framed by rhetorical education, and inconceivable without the vast supporting vocabulary in Greek for truth, accuracy, causation, psychological motives, testing, and proof.11 Although Herodotus depended on local traditions,12 ἱστορίη was for him a critical investigation of the past animated by his character and political wisdom.13 Munn finds the conditions for history’s birth in the need to eradicate false Athenian traditions at the time of the Peloponnesian War. Herodotus’ concern to understand the Persian side would expose him to criticism for ‘love of barbarians’ (Ps-Plutarch, Malice of Herodotus). Thucydides, considered ‘the greatest of all history-writers’ (Dionysius, De Thuc. 2; cf. Josephus, Ap. 1.18) because he raised the standards for ‘composing’ a tight narrative of the past (συγγράφω, Thucydides 1.1), likewise faced later criticism for a lack of patriotism.14 Though very different writers, Herodotus and Thucydides established the historian’s task as the analysis of human events: identifying relations and true causes while fearlessly challenging tradition, narrow interest, and cherished belief. Thucydides composed a still-unmatched analysis of power and justice in inter-polis relations, Polybius an account of constitutions and their health. These statesmen-writers considered history the best education for ‘political affairs’ (τὰς πολιτικὰς πράξεις; Polybius 1.1.2). Given that history expressed the author’s unique character, he began with a proem to identify himself, his occasion for writing, and the basis of his authority.15 History’s driving idea, the rigorous investigation of the human past without regard for received tradition, would eventually be realised in the autonomous history departments of modern research universities.16 History’s aura of astringent inquiry comes through in 2 Maccabees (opening quotation above), Josephus (Ap. 2.46), Tacitus (Ann. 1.1; Hist. 1.4), and later authors.17 Josephus assumes it when he castigates writers who ‘dare to call histories’ works that lack rigour or balance (BJ 1.2, 7). But 4 Maccabees reflects another use, which is implied by Josephus’ response to critics (BJ 1.13–16) and explicit in Lucian’s How History Ought to be Written (160s CE). Namely, as histories proliferated and few consumers were in a position to assess the quality of research, history came to be evaluated only by literary-rhetorical criteria, such 11 12 13 14 15 16 17

Bolin 1999; de Breucker 2012: 65–115, 683. Luraghi 2001. Myres 1953: 9–10; Thomas 2000: 168–212. Munn 2017. Marincola 1997: 128–74. Bloch 1953: 20–23; Collingwood 1994: 9–21; Lowenthal 1996: 105–47; Beiser 2011: 1–25. Marincola, 1997: 158–74.

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as choice of subject-matter, lucidity, proportion, style register, tone, artistry of speeches, and moral or patriotic concerns (e.g., Dionysius, Thuc. 1–3, 21, 50–51; cf. 4 Macc. 17.7 above). Ancient historiography was not so much a genre, in the sense of prescribed forms and norms, then, as an undertaking broadly inspired by Herodotus and Thucydides, of any size or scope, in prose or verse, with abundant room for creativity.18 To be sure, history accumulated a range of commonplaces concerning truth, toil, and accuracy, which are summarised and satirised in Lucian’s essay (cf. Sextus Empiricus, Adv. gramm. 248, 269). But writers of history were elite men who composed in all ‘genres’. Even when they chose ἱστορία, as a serious meal for statesmen, they seasoned the dish with geography, botany, philosophy, and rhetoric to make it more memorable and display their wide knowledge of the world.19 Scholars who swim in the small channel and view ancient historiography as a distinctive product of the Greek polis (city-state), as the impartial analysis of causes by an individual asserting his personal standing and political-moral acumen, do not include biblical narrative under this heading, even if they date it late enough to be influenced by Greek models.20 Convention, in any case, permits a survey of Jewish historiography to leave biblical studies aside as a specialist field and focus on post-biblical literature. Here the possible candidates all survive in Greek, and so offer at least the prospect of sharing the distinctively Greco-Roman conception of writing historia. Harold Attridge’s chapter on Jewish historiography in Early Judaism and its Modern Interpreters (1986) assumed this narrower definition. After identifying the works usually grouped as Jewish historiography, Attridge described the editions, translations, and other tools available for their study. When it came to their content, he was primarily interested in religious, theological, and apologetic tendencies. Since the Pharisees were then central in research, he regularly discussed whether a given text was Pharisaic. He also touched on dating disputes, the identity of Alexander’s Eupolemus, calendar problems in 1 Maccabees, Josephus’ paragraph on Jesus (AJ 18.63–64), and the historical value of Josephus’ autobiography.21 The present chapter builds on Attridge’s foundation. The editions and tools he surveyed represented the mature work of the post-World War II generation. Together with new investigations in rabbinic literature by Jacob Neusner 18 19 20 21

Farrell 2003; Conte and Most 1996; Marincola 1999; 2012: 1–13. Clarke 1999; Shahar 2004. E.g., Lemche 2000; Thompson 2000; Wesselius 2002. Attridge 1986.

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and his students, the gathering Qumran Scrolls juggernaut, the fervent interest in apocalyptic and pseudepigraphical works, and E. P. Sanders’ call for a wholesale reappraisal of Jewish-Christian relations,22 these tools were defining the field of early (not ‘late’) Judaism—or ‘Judaisms’—now freed from tradition and placed on a publicly accessible, historical-philological foundation. Attridge’s essay will not soon be supplanted. The same conditions that recommend a new Early Judaism and its Modern Interpreters, however, suggest a new approach to historiography. These include changes in scholarly constituency, in academic interests, and in the material conditions of research. As for material conditions, the digital revolution has changed much. Whereas in the 1980s we were thrilled to pore over the new Concordance to Flavius Josephus, we now have online and desktop tools that instantly find all occurrences of roots and verbal collocations—in thousands of texts at once. The indispensable Thesaurus Linguae Graecae (stephanus.tlg.uci.edu), Packard Humanities Institute (latin.packhum.org), and desktop databases show how things have changed. Manuscripts that once required expensive travel to view are often examinable in high definition on portable devices. The desk piled with binding-stretched books has been replaced by a screen with tabbed PDF s. These riches can generate investigative problems that were unthinkable in the 1980s. Scholarly constituencies have evolved in ways that may affect historiography more than other areas. The post-World War II research surveyed in EJMI I focused on doing justice to ancient Judaism(s) as a subject of its own. The most notable shift in the past three decades has been the steady integration of ancient Jewish history into the Mediterranean scene. We see this, for example, in the work of scholars who won renown for contributions to Hellenistic-Roman history and then applied that background to the study of Judaea and Judaeans.23 Historians interested in Roman provincial administration, military practice, religion, minority rights, or Hellenistic-Roman intellectual and literary culture generally, find Judaea and its Diaspora to be rich nodes. One index of this development is that Josephus’ corpus, which until the mid-1990s had been largely ignored in studies of either Roman or Greek literature, is among the most frequently cited exemplars in John Marincola’s famed Authority and Tradition in Ancient Historiography.24 The growing integration of all ancient historiography—understood as the conscious writing of historia—has provided new vantage points from which 22 23 24

Udoh 2008. Gruen 2002; Millar 2002–2006; Eck 2007. Marincola 1997.

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to question traditional categories, even such cornerstones as religion and the subset Juda-ism, as distinct from Judaean life in all its variety.25 One could easily fill the space for this chapter with bibliography from the expanding universe generated by this Big Bang. The problem provides its own solution, however, because online searching has replaced obsolete printed lists. We turn instead to consider notable shifts in scholarly interest since 1986, beginning with problems of definition, category, and genre. 2

Jewish Historiography: Definitions and Parameters

To discuss ancient Jewish historiography, we must have some clarity about the terms Jewish and historiography. To begin with the latter: Did the authors in question think they were doing the same kind of thing? The three quotations at the head of this chapter highlight the problem. Few would call 4 Maccabees a history because the author presents it as an argumentative essay (1.1–2, 7, 13). Yet his programmatic sentence—promising a demonstration of, or monument to, history (τὴν ἀπόδειξιν τῆς ἱστορίας)—recalls Herodotus’ opening line (1.1: ἱστορίης ἀπόδεξις ἥδε). The ἱστορία to be used by 4 Maccabees is not, however, Herodotus-like inquiry. To prove the supremacy of reasoning over suffering, this author exploits episodes from 2 Maccabees concerning famous Judaeans who had endured lethal terrors rather than violate the laws of Moses. In antiquity, the connection between rhetoric and past events was close. Rhetoricians expected orators to use the past (Suetonius, Rhet. 1).26 After the speech’s introduction (exordium), the narratio invited audiences to rethink often familiar events from the perspective being argued (Cicero, De or. 2.18.80; Quintilian, Inst. 2.4.2–3; 4.2.1, 52–53; Josephus, BJ 5.375–420). Quintilian urged writers not to get bogged down in details. They should take the accepted version of a story, or one that rested on credible authority, and focus their efforts on refashioning it for their purposes (Inst. Or. 1.8.18). This approximates what 4 Maccabees does with 2 Maccabees. The author knows about ἱστορία and does not claim to be doing it. Did he consider 2 Maccabees ἱστορία? Apparently so,27 although the author of 2 Maccabees did not. In this chapter’s opening quotation (above), he insists that only Jason of Cyrene bore the historian’s burden and refuses to let his 25 26 27

Boyarin 2004; Mason 2007; Nongbri 2013; Barton and Boyarin 2017. Villalba i Verneda 1986: 250–51; Woodman 1988. DeSilva 2006: 111.

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digest, which draws out simpler lines from the historian’s complex work, be judged by the same standard. When Daniel Schwartz describes 2 Maccabees as a ‘history of the trials and tribulations of Jerusalem’,28 he must be using history in the popular sense, for he sees the purpose of the surviving epitome as persuasive: to observe both Nicanor’s Day and Hanukkah (7–10). Jonathan Goldstein’s tag, ‘the abridged history’, is apt.29 Nor is it clear that the author of 1 Maccabees, another staple of ancient Jewish history-writing, intended Greek-style historiography. Most scholars think that our Greek text renders a lost Hebrew original, in which case one might not expect to find ἱστορία. But the evidence for a Hebrew source is meagre and otherwise explainable,30 while the official documents of chapters 8 to 13 give the work a decidedly Greek cast. The author shows enough awareness of Greek literary culture that he could have donned the historian’s mantle if it had suited him. Instead, he assumes a quasi-biblical authority, with a style reminiscent of Judges and Samuel, beginning in medias res with ‘And it came to pass that.’31,32 He punctuates the story with Bible-like verse (1.23–28, 35–40; 2.6–13; 3.2–9) and diction that would be at home in apocalyptic literature. Successors of Alexander the Great multiply evils until the ‘sinful root’ King Antiochus IV attracts ‘transgressors of the law’ from the sons of Israel, and divinely chosen Hasmoneans (5.62) must deal righteous retribution (1.1–11). Robert Doran, rightly rejecting the old notion of a ‘tragic history’ genre, paradoxically calls the work ‘a history of recent events filled with the theme of the epiphanic help of God’,33 a description that exposes the distance from Greek ἱστορία. The same is true of Nils Martola’s finding that the story is about correcting an imbalance—Jerusalem’s intrusive Seleucid citadel—and David S. Williams’ observations concerning the work’s highly literary character.34 If we did count 1 Maccabees as undeclared historiography, would not Virgil’s Aeneid, Greco-Roman tragedy, much of the Bible, wisdom and apocalyptic literature, the Genesis Apocryphon, and Jublilees also qualify? The question is not whether such texts have historical value. They do—as do pottery fragments. Doron Mendels explored 1 Enoch, Daniel, Eupolemus, 1 Maccabees, Judith, Jubilees, and the Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs to lay bare phases

28 29 30 31 32 33 34

Schwartz 2008: 14. Goldstein 2003: passim. Yarrow 2006, 87. Bartlett 1998: 33. Bartlett 1998: 16. Doran 1979: 113. Martola 1984; Williams 2001.

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in the Hasmonean conception of the land.35 Daniel Harrington exposed the ‘anatomy’ of the Hasmonean revolt using Daniel and 1 and 2 Maccabees.36 But the ancient texts reveal no effort to write historia, even or especially when they allow the term’s implications. Greco-Roman writers distinguished at least three related forms from ἱστορία, and these might help to explain some Jewish texts. First, military and political leaders would draft notes or memoirs (ὑπομνήματα, commentarii) about events they experienced (Cicero, Att. 1.19; 2.1; Fam. 5.12). Even if they wrote these with literary skill, they considered them only material for later history (Plutarch, Sul. 23.2; Luc. 1.3; Josephus, V 342, 348). Josephus may have intended his autobiography as ὑπομνήματα (note the cognate verb in AJ 20.267), for he refers readers to his War for detailed history (V 336, 362, 367). Second, the boundary between history and biography was fluid, since histories were largely biographical and the same men wrote both (e.g., Sallust, Tacitus, Josephus). Plutarch could distinguish his Lives from history (Alex. 1.2), but often he remarked on their historical character (Thes. 1.1–3; Aem. 1.1–5; Dem. 2.1; cf. Sallust, Cat. 4–5; Jug. 4). Finally, we have noticed the use of historia in speeches and argumentative essays. This model might explain not only the relationship of 2 and 4 Maccabees to Jason’s history, but also that of Josephus’ highly rhetorical essay Against Apion to the elaborate history, Antiquities, that it seeks to vindicate (Ap. 1.1, 54–55).37 Philo of Alexandria (ca. 20 BCE–50 CE) is known for his allegorical exegesis, but we commonly peel off two of his works as histories: Embassy to Gaius and Against Flaccus.38 Recounting Philo’s experiences in 38 to 41 CE, these apparently once anchored a five-part series On the Virtues (Eusebius, Hist. eccl. 2.5.1).39 Did Philo consider these compositions histories? He knows the category ἱστορία but reserves it for authoritative ancient accounts by poets and historians, including Moses (Cher. 105; Sacr. 78; Congr. 15, 44; Somn. 1.52, 205; Mos. 2.46). By contrast, Philo’s description of the Embassy as ‘what we saw and heard’ (Legat. 349) suggests memoirs (ὑπομνήματα) rather than historia, and a standard commentary on the work opens by saying: ‘The Legatio is an invective against Gaius, illustrated by various examples of that Emperor’s outrageous behaviour’.40 Likewise, a recent commentary on the Flaccus describes it as a 35 36 37 38 39 40

Mendels 1987. Harrington 1988. Feldman and Levison 2006; Gerber 1997; Gruen 2005. Royse 2009: 34, 53–55. Smallwood 1961: 38–43. Smallwood 1961: 3.

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story of divine revenge against a persecutor, the latter half being Philo’s pure invention, and as a combination of theodicy, consolation, novel, and history.41 If ‘historiography’ requires definition, so does the ‘Jewish’ in Jewish historiography. One option would be to include everything written On the Judaeans, as did L. Cornelius Alexander of Miletus, nicknamed Polyhistor (‘diversely learned/curious’) by the ancients, in the first century BCE.42 But this definition would encompass treatises by such hostile commentators as Nicolaus of Damascus, Manetho and the other writers targeted in Josephus’ Against Apion, Philo of Byblos,43 and Antonius Julianus (Minucius Felix, Oct. 33.4), not to mention later Christian authors. They all wrote about Jews for their own reasons, but not what most consider Jewish history. Alexander Polyhistor demands special attention because his On the Judaeans preserves paragraphs from the more shadowy inhabitants of the domain ‘Jewish historiography’: Demetrius, Eupolemus, Pseudo-Eupolemus, Artapanus, Cleodemus Malchus, Aristeas, Pseudo-Hecataeus, Theophilus, and Thallus.44 Alexander himself was a Greek grammarian and bibliophile (Suetonius, Gramm. 5), captured early in the Mithridatic Wars and sent to Rome as a slavetutor. In 81–80 BCE he received his freedom under L. Cornelius Sulla.45 His On the Judaeans was one of perhaps two dozen ethnographic studies (On the Libyans, Egyptians, Babylonians, etc.) that he penned for contemporaries. He was better known for his strange tales pertaining to Greece and Rome than for the sketches of eastern peoples (Pliny, Nat. 1.3c, 4c, 5c, 6c).46 But after Eusebius (early 300s CE) decided to use his pastiche of otherwise lost Jewish authors, chiefly in the ninth book of Praeparatio Evangelica, these twice-mediated fragments survived to tantalise modern students. Eusebius often stresses that he quotes Alexander verbatim, and scholars tend to suppose that he and Alexander were both ‘relatively accurate’ in what they quoted.47 Eusebius’ contextualisations, by contrast, are recognised as deceptive to the point of being sinister.48 He crafted his work to serve ‘a wellstructured apologetic strategy,’ as ‘a formidable weapon and tool of control’ for disseminating the gospel.49 There is no reason to think that the ‘bungler’ 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49

Van der Horst 2003: 1–4, 11–15. Adler 2011. Baumgarten 1981: 35–36. Holladay 1983. Freudenthal 1874: 17–19; de Breucker 2012: 154–55. Cf. Adler 2011: 238–40. Holladay 1983, 8; cf. Freudenthal 1874: 3–16, 32–33. Inowlocki 2006. Inowlocki 2011: 209, 216.

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Alexander had treated his Jewish sources any more transparently.50 The twicerefracted fragments, even if accurate in themselves, cannot reveal the aims, structures, and themes of the originals. Nor do they indicate that the Judaean authors intended to write history. Demetrius looks more like an exegete.51 Holladay labels Eupolemus’ fragments ‘history’, as early Christian authors had, but observes that his work repackages tradition to exude ‘a strongly patriotic, even nationalistic character’,52 while Artapanus’ fragments resemble ‘popular romance’.53 We do not find conscious historiography in the texts that Alexander plundered for his ethnography of Judaeans. A second option, restricting Jewish historiography to histories written by Jews, would face other difficulties: the uncertain ethnicity of some authors; the question whether narratives that describe Roman legions, military campaigns, or internal Roman politics count as Jewish historiography because they are written by a Jewish author; and the paradox of a Jewish historian dependent on non-Jewish sources, as Josephus on Nicolaus. On the first question, Alexander’s fragments of Eupolemus are now confidently (though speculatively) divided between a Judaean Eupolemus and the Samarian Pseudo-Eupolemus— because of a reference to Mt. Gerizim, though Alexander or Eusebius assumed them to be the work of one man. Likewise, the prophet Cleodemus Malchus, whom Josephus knew from Alexander (AJ 1.240), we guess to be Samarian.54 Josephus, adding a wrinkle, thought that writers we consider Judaean were Gentiles (BJ 1.17; Ap. 1.216–218).55 A third option would admit as Jewish historiography only texts about the past that revealed a Jewish perspective, however defined. But as we have seen, Josephus’ War is so devoid of obvious biblical-Jewish colouring that it was long considered Flavian propaganda.56 Someone following that approach and this criterion might have to accept only the Antiquities as Jewish historiography, though Josephus postures in War as a Judaean spokesman (BJ 1.1–3). Having glanced at Josephus from various angles, we must now consider his work as such.

50 51 52 53 54 55 56

Freudenthal 1874: 22–31; cf. Adler 2011: 225–26; Long 2013. Freudenthal 1874: 35; but Holladay 1983: 54. Holladay 1983: 96–99. Holladay 1983: 190. Holladay 1983: 58–59; Adler 2011: 234–35. Gruen 2005. Laqueur (original 1920) and Weber (1921) to Curran 2007: 71.

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The Jewish Historian: Flavius Josephus

A sentence beginning ‘The ancient Jewish historian’ is nearly certain to continue with ‘Flavius Josephus.’ Josephus (37–ca. 100 CE) was a priest-aristocrat who surrendered during the Roman invasion of Galilee in 67 and, after Jerusalem’s fall in 70, spent the balance of his life in Rome, where he composed four works in thirty volumes. These works are saturated with cognates of ἱστορία (128 times) and Thucydidean συγγράφω (BJ 1.2, 13, 18; 7.448; AJ 1.1, 6, 29; 20.268), supported by the resonant language of truth (ἀλήθεια 271), accuracy (ἀκρίβεια 135), and causation (αἰτία 334, πρόφασις 59, ἀφορμή 61). He feels confident enough in his role as statesman-historian to flout the ‘laws of history’ that bind less commanding authors (BJ 1.11; 5.20; cf. Polybius 38.4). He sees ἱστορία as a Greek activity but claims that present-day Greeks have lost the plot: Judaeans have better ancient source material and a more robust commitment to truth-seeking (Ap. 1.7–27; cf. BJ 1.13–16; V 40). Josephus’ later reflections on his seven-volume War and twenty-volume Antiquities show him asking to be judged by history’s highest standards (V 336–67; Ap. 1.1–5, 50–55). The surge in Josephus research since Attridge makes even a partial summary impossible.57 For the manuscripts, history of reception, and many other matters, happily, readers can consult the expert essays in Chapman and Rodgers 2016. Several compact introductions to his life and works are available.58 Of the fundamental new resources, it must suffice to mention the (English) synopsis of the Greek and Slavonic War and a range of translation and commentary projects in French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, and English.59 We shall keep our focus here on Josephus’ way of writing history. In the year that EJMI I appeared, Pere Villalba i Varneda’s The Historical Method of Flavius Josephus provided an unprecedented exploration of Josephus’ approach to historical narration, first by subject (e.g., historical personalities, speeches, chronology, geography, wars) and then by literary device (e.g., ecphrasis, narrative anticipation), before taking up such ‘personal elements’ as reasoning and paradox, ethical-philosophical reflection, eulogy and censure,

57 58 59

Attridge 1986. Rajak 2002, Bilde 1988 (13–122), Hadas-Lebel 1993, and Mason 2003a: 1–211. English synopsis of the Greek and Slavonic War: Leeming and Leeming 2003. Translation and commentary projects in French are Nodet et al. 1990–2010; Munnich 2017; Goldberg 2018. In German: Labow 2005; Siegert 2008; Siegert and Vogel 2001. In Hebrew: Kasher 1996; Schwartz 2007c; Ullmann 2009. In Italian: Calabi 2007. In Japanese: Hata 1977–1998, 1999–2002; English: Mason et al. 2000–; Hammond and Goodman 2017.

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proem and epilogue. His conclusion planted Josephus firmly within the GrecoRoman historiographical tradition.60 How much remained to be explored, despite that work’s apparent comprehensiveness, became clear in the many conference-based and other collectedessay volumes that followed,61 not to mention the profusion of dissertations and monographs (below). The Josephus Seminar, inaugurated by the Society of Biblical Literature in 1999, remains vital today. I devote the remaining space to historiographical dimensions of this newly animated research. One conspicuous absence is interest in the ‘lost Aramaic’ precursor of Josephus’ War. Josephus claims in the proem of the extent work that he decided to ‘recast in the Greek language, for the Roman empire, what [plural] I previously composed in the native [language] for the upper barbarians’ (1.3)— meaning inhabitants of the Parthian empire (1.6). Fusing this remark with a decontextualised comment from the middle of the work (BJ 3.108), scholars used to infer that the Flavians commissioned Josephus to write an Aramaic account that would deter the Parthians from belligerent thoughts.62 The lost Aramaic not only seemed to explain the existence of the Greek War, as translated propaganda; it undergirded Thackeray’s belief that Josephus, whom he imagined as a Pharisee from a backwater province, required slave-assistants to render his Aramaic in the sophisticated Greek we now read. Rajak demolished most of these assumptions. She argued that the lost Aramaic, which Josephus ignores in later reflections on War’s composition, could have had little relationship to our Greek, that the Greek War does not answer to the needs of propaganda, that Josephus must have had the skill to write decent Greek without help, and that the Parthians of the 70s needed no Judaean to dissuade them from belligerence.63 Rajak’s brush-clearing exercise combined with a growing interest in Josephus as author to create the space for the studies of ‘Josephus and x’ that constitute the new subdiscipline of Josephus research. Instead of using Josephus as a cipher for facts about Roman Judaea or more interesting sources, scholars now try first to understand his complex corpus. Neither the lost Aramaic nor the hypothesised sources that once preoccupied researchers figure much in compositionally oriented studies of Josephus.64 60 61 62 63 64

Villalba i Varneda 1986. E.g., Feldman and Hata 1987, 1989; Parente and Sievers 2005; Siegert and Kalms 1998–1999, 2002–2003; Kalms 2000–2001; Mason 1998, 2009; Sievers and Lembi 2005; Edmondson, Mason, and Rives 2005; Rodgers 2007; Pastor, Stern, and Mor 2010. Laqueur (original) 1920: 125–28; Thackeray (orig.) 1929: 127–29. Rajak 2002: 174–84, 233–36. Examples are: the war (Bilde 1979; Rajak 2002; Goodman 1987, 2007; Price 1992; McLaren 1998; Mason 2016); women (Halpern-Amaru 1988; Mayer-Schärtel; Grüenfelder 2003;

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The concern to understand Josephus’ histories as intelligent compositions does not mark a turn toward solipsistic literary study. It is only the late-arriving realisation of a principle long since applied to Livy, Tacitus, or Cassius Dio, as to biblical and New Testament texts: that we cannot responsibly use literary (or material) sources for historical purposes until we interpret them.65 Application to Josephus was delayed by the tenacity with which he was viewed as a mere transmitter. Just as Jacob Neusner and Bruce Chilton insisted that exploration of the historical Pharisees await interpretation of each text that describes them,66 so Josephus researchers ask that the study of Herod, the Essenes, or Masada await contextual understanding of Josephus’ descriptions in his context. As the Flavian-propaganda interpretation of War dissolved, a new consensus formed around the idea that Josephus wrote to absolve his nation, especially himself and his priestly class, from war guilt. He deflected blame for all hostilities on a small band of rebels, who first provoked Roman harshness and then ignored priestly advice by violently responding.67 One might doubt, however, that Josephus’ elaborate descriptions of priestly activity in the build-up to war, especially his own achievements as a ‘general,’ somehow run counter to his literary aims. A different approach would allow these passages their full weight and understand War’s aims in a less thesis-like way.68 One might rather see Josephus as trying to create an ethos, as a Judaean statesman speaking to peers in other cultures. Such pervasive themes as the character of Judaeans in warfare, polis-management in perilous times, reversals of fortune, and pollution and purity, would constitute the threads of his effort to communicate with kindred spirits in the established historiographical framework.69 How does Josephus engage that framework? Already in the 1920s, Thackeray noticed Josephus’ many allusions to classical historians, from Thucydides to Sallust, though his assumptions forced him to attribute these to literary assistants. More holistic recent interpretations have credited Josephus with drawing inspiration for core concepts from Polybius, Thucydides, and Strabo.70

65 66 67 68 69 70

Ilan 2006); priesthood (Gussmann 2008); Pharisees (Mason 1991); Essenes (Finkbeiner 2010), sicarii (Brighton 2009), Samaritans (Egger 1986; Pummer 2009), King Herod (Toher 2003; Landau 2006), Jewish festivals/Passover (Colautti 2002; Siggelkow-Berner 2011), the emperors (den Hollander 2014), or use of embedded letters (Olson 2010), speeches (below), spectacle and drama (Chapman 1998; Price and Ullmann 2002). Bloch 1953: 138–44; Collingwood 1994: 274–78. Neusner and Chilton 2007. Rajak 2002: 78–83; Goodman 1987: 20–21; Bilde 1988: 77–78; S. Schwartz 1990: 15; Price, 1992: 32–33; McLaren 1998: 55–56; Mader 2000: 10–17. Bilde 1979. Mason 2016: 60–137. On Polybius: Eckstein 1990; Thucydides: Mader 2000; and Strabo: Shahar 2004.

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After Thucydides (1.22.1) allowed that speeches could never be reported as they were given, they came to be seen as fields of rhetorical invention (Polybius 12.25–25a.4f, 25i–26b; 12.25i.9; Dionysius, Thuc. 16–18). Polybius eschewed them for that reason (36.1.1–7), but most historians took advantage of the opportunity for rhetorical display. Josephus’ War includes seven major set-piece orations plus many shorter ones.71 How exactly they function is a matter of debate, depending on scholars’ views of Josephus’ philosophical-political models, his ideological-persuasive aims, and his view of Greek rhetoric.72 Two fundamental problems in Josephus research concern his use of sources and the relationship between his two histories, War and Antiquities. The problems are related, for in the half-century before 1920, scholars usually attributed the differences between War 1–3 and Antiquities 13–20, when they narrate the same events, to supposed new sources for the later work. Laqueur undermined that general explanation (not denying some new sources) by showing that Josephus’ Life reworked episodes from his own past in ways that could not be attributed to sources. Laqueur ascribed the new framework and themes of Antiquities to Josephus’ changed circumstances and allegiances: moving from Roman propaganda in War to rapprochement with Judaism in Antiquities.73 The idea that Josephus underwent some kind of volte-face between his two histories proved irresistible throughout the twentieth century.74 Attridge argued that the two histories followed distinct historiographical schools: one Polybian and presentist, the other rhetorical and interested in antiquity.75 But the notion that distinct schools existed has crumbled along with modern scepticism about fixed genre boundaries.76 Krieger fused Laqueur’s biographical approach with a new-style compositional reading of each work. Insisting that each episode be read in light of its narrative’s context, he argued that War was written for the western Jewish Diaspora, as a post-war plea for cooperation with Rome, whereas Antiquities was mainly for gentiles interested in Judaism. This view, however, requires downplaying evidence for War’s assumption of a local Gentile audience (1.1–9, 22, 110, 146, 152, 650; 2.42, 119– 66, 170, etc.).77 Meanwhile, Daniel Schwartz revived source-critical solutions 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

Villalba i Varneda 1986, 89–117; Runnalls 1997. On Josephus’ philosophical-political models, see Luz 1983; Ladouceur 1987. On his ideological-persuasive aims, see Saulnier 1991; Rajak 1991; Price 2008. On his view of Greek rhetoric, see Mason 2011a. Laqueur 1970 (orig. 1920). Cohen 1979; S. Schwartz 1990. Attridge 1986: 326–27. Feldman 1998a: 9–12; cf. Mason 1991: 376–83. Krieger 1994.

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for many differences in the two works.78 More recently, he has taken a Laqueurian approach, positing a profound change in Josephus’ outlook. The Jerusalemite priest who wrote the Judaean War came to express a diasporic outlook—more religious than national-territorial—in the Jewish Antiquities.79 Other scholars have found no great difficulty in reading the two histories as compatible in overarching theme and purpose.80 After all, Josephus claims that he had considered including the ancient past as a prologue to the War, before deciding that this would ruin the symmetry of the war monograph (BJ 1.18; AJ 1.6–7). The later work claims to build directly on War (AJ 1.1–8) and cites it several times, and Josephus’ later reflection on both histories (Ap. 1.53–56) reveals no qualms about his turn to the ancient past—since the Judaeans’ ancient records, composed by prophets, are uniquely reliable. Mason challenged a crucial premise of the volte-face view: that Josephus’ Antiquities and Life promote the Pharisees (or Yavnean rabbis).81 The excavation of biblical substrata already in War has further militated against the notion of abrupt change,82 as has the realisation that even Antiquities, though more obviously biblical in subject matter, translates core biblical themes into the Greco-Roman language of natural law, political constitutions, philosophy, virtue and vice, providence, and patronage.83 Researchers who find War and Antiquities compatible acknowledge their myriad differences, but attribute these to the creative spirit encouraged in ancient rhetorical handbooks (progymnasmata). Much as Plutarch and the gospel writers rewrote source material as needed, Josephus evinces no anxiety about reconfiguring War’s episodes to suit the new subject, structure, and themes of Antiquities. What are these? Thackeray’s argument that Josephus modelled his twenty-volume Archaeology on the twenty-volume Roman Archaeology by Dionysius of Halicarnassus has retained its appeal.84 Gregory Sterling accepts it while proposing an older and more basic model. Like the Babylonian and Egyptian priests Berossus and Manetho, more than three centuries earlier, Josephus was engaging in ‘apologetic historiography,’ which is to say explaining an ancient oriental people’s ways to the rest of the world in Greek language and categories.85 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85

Schwartz 1990, 2013. Cf. Ilan 1995; 2006; Bergmeier 1993; Collins 2009. Schwartz 2007a: 18–22. Tuval 2013 makes an elaborate case for this approach. Bilde 1988, 121–22; Rajak 1998a. Mason 1991. Gray 1993; Mason 1994; Spilsbury 2003. Attridge 1976; Halpern-Amaru 1981; Spilsbury 1998. Feldman 1998a: 7–8. Sterling 1992: 289–90.

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Josephus’ biblical paraphrase (AJ 1–11) has continued to attract the lion’s share of interest in the Antiquities, though it cuts across Josephus’ clear structuring of the work in two ten-volume halves.86 Antiquities’ moralising approach, treating history as serial biography and passing judgment on each actor in turn—an approach familiar from Hellenistic and especially Roman historiography87—facilitated Feldman’s deep explorations of Josephus’ use of biblical characters.88 Christopher Begg’s analyses of the same material take a less personal approach, examining Josephus’ presentation of the early and later monarchies and comparing it with other textual traditions.89 Scholars usually study Antiquities’ post-biblical material, not flagged as such by Josephus, piecemeal and according to their interests in the Letter of Aristeas (AJ 12), the Hasmonean history or 1 Maccabees (12–13), King Herod (14–17), Mesopotamian Jewry (18),90 or Roman affairs (18–19).91 Efforts to read Antiquities 12–20 as an integrated part of Antiquities remain rare.92 4

Conclusion

Josephus’ Antiquities returns us to our starting point because it sits on both sides of the question, ‘What constitutes Jewish historiography?’ On the one hand, Josephus views historiography as a Greek undertaking. This confident Judaean priest takes up the challenge of beating the Greeks at their game. On the other hand, the work’s dependence on the prophet-written Bible, Aristeas, and 1 Maccabees suggest that he considered history not the only or perhaps the best way of knowing the distant past. 86 87 88 89 90 91 92

Bilde 1988: 91–92. Otis 1967. Feldman 1998a; 1998b. Begg 1993, 2000. Rajak 1998b. Wiseman 2013. Semenchenko 2002; Mason 2012.

Chapter 7

Religious Violence? Two Massacres on a Sabbath Josephus’ Judaean War (2.450–57) tells of two massacres, with aggressors and victims reversed, that by some ‘other-worldly provision’ happened on the same day and even in the same moment. One occurred in Jerusalem, where Judaean militants cut down the military garrison, the other in Caesarea, where the Graeco-Syrian majority killed or expelled all Judaeans resident there. The passage is brief enough to quote: 450 Although the populace [of Jerusalem] urged repeatedly that the siege be raised, in consideration of the soldiers … they [Eleazar’s faction] applied themselves yet more harshly, until Metilius’ group—he was the prefect of the Romans—could hold out no longer. They sent word to Eleazar’s group, asking only for their lives under a truce, saying that they would surrender their weapons with the rest of their property. 451 The others seized on this plea and … gave them the pledge as well as oaths … and Metilius led his soldiers down [sc. from the Herodian palace towers]. 452 As long as they had weapons around, none of the insurgents made a move on them. … But when, in keeping with the agreements, they all put down their shields and swords and began to withdraw, suspecting nothing more, 453 Eleazar’s group rushed at them, surrounded them, and made away with them—men neither defending themselves nor even pleading, but only crying out: ‘The agreements!’ and ‘The oaths!’ 454 In this way they were all savagely butchered, then, except Metilius. Him alone they preserved, because he had pleaded and promised to Judaise, going as far as circumcision. On the Roman side the suffering was light, in that from a boundless force a few were expended, but still among Judaeans it seemed a prologue to capture (προοίμιον ἁλώσεως). 455 Perceiving that the justifications for the [coming] war were already beyond healing, and that the city had been defiled with such pollution that it was reasonable to expect some other-worldly wrath (τηλικούτῳ μιάσματι πεφυρμένην, ἐξ οὗ δαιμόνιόν τι μήνιμα προσδοκᾶν εἰκὸς ἦν), even if not retaliation from the Romans, the Judaeans began a public mourning. … 456 For it happened that the slaughter was committed on a sabbath, on which for the sake of worship they observe a moratorium even on pious activities.

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457 On the very same day and at the same time, just as from an other-worldly provision (ἐκ δαιμονίου προνοίας), Caesareans began doing away with the Judaeans among them. Thus more than 20,000 were butchered within a single hour. All Caesarea was emptied of Judaeans, for [the procurator Gessius] Florus arrested those who were trying to escape and took them down into the dockyards as prisoners. Given Josephus’ capacity for vivid portrayal, his restraint here adds to the ominous atmosphere. Such atrocities need no elaboration—and they cannot be the end. Nor will they be. A few paragraphs on, C. Cestius Gallus, the legate of Syria, is hurrying a large expeditionary force from Antioch to Jerusalem (BJ 2.499). The recent expulsion of his friend King Agrippa II from Jerusalem (2.406) and the slaughter of the garrison have forced him to action. Meanwhile, fierce Judaean strikes against Syrian poleis in retaliation for the massacre in Caesarea, and the actions of those cities against their Judaean minorities, in turn, raise the stakes ever higher (2.458–80). Cestius’ effort to pacify the region, paradoxically, will generate the crucial spark for war.1 For Judaeans will devastate his Twelfth Legion on its departure from Jerusalem, in an ambush at Beit-Horon. The aged Cestius’ failure to manage his province will prompt Nero to assign the task to Vespasian, who seems a capable general but no threat as an imperial rival (3.1–5). The ‘Judaean War’ is now in motion. The brief passage above is thus a lynch-pin of Josephus’ War and, as far as we know, of events in 66 CE. But how did such violent conditions come about? To what extent do the massacres reflect a deep Judaean antipathy toward imperial Rome? And are they examples of religious violence? If so, what makes them religious, and what is the added value of that classification for historical understanding? These questions we shall now explore, after first broaching the thorny problem of the relationship between narratives, including those of Josephus, and lived reality. 1

Narrative and Real Life—Generally and in This Case

Real life and narrative are different things. This is not a post-modern claim. It has been obvious at least since Homer invoked the Muse to help him sing of Odysseus (Od. 1.1). It is why Cicero pleaded with the orator L. Lucceius to write the history of his consulship, from Cicero’s rough ‘notes’, and why Josephus 1 See Goodman 2007: 9–14, 392–99; Mason (2016): 281–334.

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declined to include the ancient past in War—to leave that work symmetrically balanced with corresponding parts.2 Effective communication requires countless choices, we all know. Narratives are artistic creations with structures (beginnings, middles, ends), thematic palettes, characterisation of selected dramatis personae, and the other features of ‘a good story’. Our lives, by contrast, do not unfold as elements of a story falling into place, with plot and characters disclosing themselves. We do construct narratives for our lives at various points, but these are constantly changing. ‘The story’ of our childhood, university days, or a close relationship will look different, as our choices about what to include and exclude and how to frame it change with each retelling. The inability of events to declare their meaning is the reason for history—and for criminal investigation, which is a quotidian application of historical thinking. Because the past does not generate a story for us, if we want to know what happened in some particular context we must investigate. Consider the ‘quest of the historical Jesus’. For more than two centuries, eager scholars have been ingeniously reconstructing the lost figure of Jesus, imagining the sort of person who could have given rise to the varied traditions about him. That person cannot be inferred from Paul or Matthew or John, but must be hypothetically imagined. The same principles hold for reconstructing Socrates, Confucius, or Gautama Buddha. Historians cannot make life so easy as finding some narrative tree branch to sit on. This is not because Josephus or Tacitus are liars or incompetents, but simply because real life and stories about life are different kinds of things.3 We are ultimately interested here in what happened in ancient Jerusalem and Caesarea, to produce the dual massacres described by Josephus—if some such things occurred. We can see immediately that the passage above is an artistic construction and not a simple window on events. Most obvious is the repetition of δαιμόνιος (‘other-worldly’), which is Josephus’ non-explanation of the Jerusalemites’ fear of retaliation and of the timing of the Caesarean massacre (2.455, 457). War has this adjective thirty times in its seven volumes, using it for eerie or providential events, which are beyond human accounting but crucial to the story’s progression.4 No one could have planned them: wow. In War, distinctively, the neuter substantive τὸ δαιμόνιον refers nearly always to God or Providence, rather than to a demon or mid-level spirit as in most other 2 Cicero, Fam. 5.12; Josephus, AJ 1.6–7. 3 Collingwood 1994: 378; cf. the extensive section on criticism of sources in Bloch 1953: 66–113. 4 BJ 1.69, 82, 84, 331, 347, 370, 373, 376, 613; our two occurrences here; 3.341, 485; 4.34, 76, 217, 501, 622, 649; 5.377, 502; 6.59. 252, 296, 303, 429; 7.82, 120, 159, 185, 318. The italicised references are significant turning points in the story.

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texts.5 Josephus’ later works do not share this usage, and the events did not require it.6 It is part of War’s artful narrative. Other tell-tale signs of Josephus’ artistry include: his characteristic psychologising, which has the Judaeans discern a ‘prologue to capture’;7 Metilius’ ‘Judaising’, a rare verb that anticipates an observation on the same phenomenon in Syria a few paragraphs later (BJ 2.463); his typically expository remark on the sabbath; the appearance of one of Josephus’ favourite and characteristic words, θρησκεία (‘worship’);8 and his language for butchery and savagery, which is War’s metier. On the subject of characteristic diction, I might mention ‘strength of bodies’ from an earlier passage on Caesarea (below), another distinctive trait in Josephus’ language and War in particular.9 War’s account of the two massacres and the events that produced and followed them is thus his configuration and a one-off literary production. Whatever the events were that lay behind them, those events did not require this narration, and they cannot simply be inferred from it. That is why historians should not waste time trying to answer the perennial question, whether Josephus or some other narrative is ‘reliable’. It is a meaningless and unanswerable question. A story may have many virtues. It may be carefully researched and structured, brilliantly written in evocative language, and suited to the ancient author’s (chiefly moral) purposes. But it is not on the same cognitive 5 Only at BJ 7.185 does the substantive (plural) refer to demons. 6 Antiquities (2.5 times the length of War) has δαιμόνιος only 12 times, normally following the LXX in referring to malign spirits or demons (e.g., 6.166–68; 8.45–48). The unthematised providential sense comes in the part that parallels War (AJ 13.314; 16.76–77; 19.60). 7 ‘Capture’ (ἅλωσις) occurs 45 times from BJ 1.10 to 7.407. This usage is so characteristic that the work was known among Church Fathers as Περὶ ἁλώσεως Origen, Fragments on Lamentations 105, 109; Theodoret, Questions and Responses 111; Procopius, Commentary on Isaiah 1837; cf. the title of Pseudo-Hegesippus’ fourth-century Latin reworking, De excidio hierosolymitano. 8 Josephus has the noun 101 times (114 times all cognates), though in all extant Greek literature before him it appears only 22 times. On Josephus’ concern to explain sabbath, see BJ 1.146 (narrative antecedent here); 2.517; AJ 1.33; 3.143; 11.346; 12.4, 259, 276–77; 13.352; 14.264; V 159, 275; Ap. 2.20–27. 9 BJ 2.268. Cf. 2.376, 476, 580; 4.503; 6.55, 81, 331; 7.232; note also 2.60; AJ 6.21; 17.278. The phrase ἀλκὴ σώματος is rarely attested before Josephus; this counts as characteristic. The plural here (σωμάτων ἀλκή) could be construed as either collective manpower (numerical superiority) or as physical strength, as at nearby 2.376: the Germans are renowned for the strength and size of their bodies. Likewise at 2.580, strength of body and exaltation of soul have allowed the Romans to master the inhabited earth. The parallel account mentions only the Judaeans’ wealth (AJ 20.175). Although Levine (1994: 382–83) and Feldman (1993: 119–20) take the phrase to indicate numerical growth, the German parallel illustrates ancient assumptions about varying degrees of physical vigour among the ethnē. The Judaeans’ advantage in ‘strength of bodies’ better matches the story: they are a minority, but their youth prevail in fights and can by restrained only by military forces (2.286).

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plane as the events behind the story, and it cannot take the place of a historical investigation. Nor can we justify throwing up our hands and saying: ‘Well, this account is all we have, and so we must follow it’. That would be like saying, if we found ourselves adrift in a lifeboat, the only water we have is sea water and so we must drink it, though we know that it is not fit for drinking. If we do not have what we require, we cannot proceed. That is why so many criminal investigations fail: one may not accuse someone, simply to have a culprit. If we do not know, we do not know. Deuteronomy 19.15 already put the principle clearly: A single witness shall not suffice to implicate a person in any crime …; only on the word of two witnesses, or better on the word of three, shall a claim be substantiated. Where we have only one literary source and cannot control all the variables that may have gone into the creation of the story, we must adopt a provisional ‘nescience’—to revive a useful word from Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary for not knowing that lacks the baggage of agnosticism. We await the completion of a methodical investigation that produces compelling results. The life-narrative distinction is forced upon us, whether we like it or not, by the fact that Josephus composed two very different accounts of pre-70 Judaea. His later Antiquities–Life has a different structure and theme-set, with a correspondingly new style and diction. As it happens, the pre-war events in Caesarea are among those that he relates in a new way. The most important difference is that War’s horrifying massacre makes no appearance in the later version, which does not exactly exclude it as a possibility but seems to pre-empt it. This observation forces us to realise that structures, characterisations, and dramatic ‘climaxes’ are properties of stories, not of events as we experience them. Events can be retold in countless ways. 2

Causes of Conflict in Caesarea: War vs. Antiquities

War makes clear, in its account of Caesarea’s founding by King Herod, what sort of city the king envisaged. It was to be a grand Graeco-Roman polis: a boon to sailors working the Levantine coast, a centre of imperial cult for Augustus and Rome, and a gift to the province of Syria (1.414). Its world-class harbours, temples, and entertainment facilities would make it a regional centre, also hosting quinquennial games that would draw in visitors from around the East (1.408–15). Although little more than hour’s drive from Jerusalem today, in the

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first century the 120 km distance required three or four days by foot. No less than Gaza, Ascalon, Dora, Ptolemais or Scythopolis, Caesarea was a different cultural universe from Judaea’s highlands (Chapter 1). Archaeology confirms that it was a flourishing trading hub10—the sort of place from which Josephus distances Judaeans, in one rhetorical context, because of the cultural mixing that maritime trade implies (Ap. 1.60; see Chapter 2). H. K. Beebe proposed that Herod built Caesarea as a counterweight to the Judaean mother-polis, which since Hasmonean times had controlled the much smaller port of Joppa.11 Given this background, which comes through clearly in War even without archaeological support, it is a surprise to read that in the late fifties (2.166–68): A different kind of disturbance involving Caesarea compounded matters, when the Judaeans who were mixed in there formed a faction against the Syrians (τῶν ἀναμεμιγμένων Ἰουδαίων πρὸς τοὺς ἐν αὐτῇ Σύρους στασιασάντων). They insisted the polis was really theirs, saying that its founder had been a Judaean (οἱ μὲν γὰρ ἠξίουν σφετέραν εἶναι τὴν πόλιν Ἰουδαῖον γεγονέναι τὸν κτίστην αὐτῆς λέγοντες)—this was Herod the king. The others [Graeco-Syrians], though they readily conceded that the coloniser was a Judaean (τὸν οἰκιστὴν … Ἰουδαῖον), nevertheless insisted that the polis was in fact one of Greeks. For if he [Herod] had dedicated it to Judaeans, he would not have set up statues and shrines. Because of these issues the two sides were in dispute. Their rivalry progressed to weapons, as every day the more spirited ones from both sides kept plunging into battle. The senior Judaeans were not able to restrain their agitators, and to the Greeks it seemed a disgrace to be in a weaker position than the Judaeans. The latter had the advantage in wealth and in strength of bodies (προεῖχον δ᾿ οἱ μὲν πλούτῳ καὶ σωμάτων ἀλκῇ), the Greek side in protection by the soldiers—for the bulk of the military force there had been enlisted by the Romans from Syria. Just as relatives are, they [the auxiliary soldiers] were ready for acts of assistance. As Lee Levine aptly puts it, ‘we find a Jewish community daring to seek control of a Greco-Roman city, an attempt without parallel in antiquity.’12 Josephus does not explain why Judaeans made such a bold effort or thought it could succeed, other than his remark that they enjoyed superior wealth and ‘strength 10 11 12

Vann 1992; Alföldy 1999; Raban and Holum 1996; K.G. Holum et al. 1999; Porath 1995: 15–27. Beebe 1983. Levine 1974: 387.

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of bodies’. Nor does he explain what it would mean to recognise Caesarea as Judaean. Presumably, given the response of the non-Judaeans, it would entail dismantling the colossal statues, temples, and other institutions of the present polis, changing its character so that it followed Judaean law, perhaps in the way that the Hasmoneans required of the cities they conquered (AJ 13.257–58). I have proposed elsewhere that the move could be understood as what the realist school of politics calls ‘balancing’. The region’s auxiliary forces had originated in the royal armies of King Herod and Archelaus. Now having lost their Judaean and Idumaean elements, and above all their subservience to a Judaean monarch based in Jerusalem, they were increasingly nurtured and recruited in the foreign and potentially hostile environs of Caesarea. Having Caesarea, the headquarters of the Prefect assigned to the Judaean portfolio, declared a Judaean polis might go a long way toward offsetting Jerusalem’s loss of regional status.13 However that may be, this passage reveals two points that lie beneath the surface in the rest of the narrative. First, although War usually calls the auxiliary force in Jerusalem ‘Roman’,14 perhaps in hindsight to anticipate the consequences of acting against this part of Rome’s military system, our passage acknowledges that the soldiers were locally recruited—as auxiliary cohorts were—in this case from populations long hostile to Jerusalem. Antiquities is revealing on this issue. There, the premature death of the Judaean King Agrippa I (44 CE) prompts unseemly celebrations in Caesarea and Sebaste. Their exuberance is a direct result of the large number of their family members serving in the military, which had been returned to Jerusalem under the monarch’s command (AJ 19.356–66). Since Agrippa might have ruled for decades, his unexpected death sparks riotous joy from the soldiers and their relatives in Samaria and the headquarters city of Caesarea. The emperor Claudius, indignant on behalf of his late friend, threatens to remove these units to the Black Sea. Most tellingly, AJ 19.366 reflects that because Claudius was persuaded not to go ahead with this plan, the auxiliary soldiers hostile to Jerusalem ‘sowed the seeds of war and became the source of the greatest calamities for Judaeans under Florus’. War does not make these dynamics explicit, and so the critical reader must pay attention to smaller clues—as in the reference to military support for the Caesarean majority’s position against the Judaean minority. Second, although BJ 2.117 plainly states that Judaea was marked off as a Roman province in 6 CE, the incidental remark at 2.268 that the auxiliary were 13 14

Mason 2014b: 199–201; 2016a: 262–80. E.g., BJ 2.296, 308, 320, 321, 326, 329.

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recruited ‘from Syria’ agrees with other indicators that Judaea was actually now part of the Province of Syria. That is why the legates based in Antioch—Varus, Quirinius, Vitellius, Quadratus, and Cestius Gallus—felt responsible for the south and visited often. Antiquities, departing from War’s formulations also in this respect, will state unambiguously that Judaea was annexed to Syria in 6 CE (AJ 17.354; 18.1–2). In that narrative, this clarifies Quirinius’ presence in Judaea to conduct the property census throughout his province. The next part of War’s account elaborates points made in the opening paragraph quoted above. The prefect Felix intervenes in a brawl that the Judaeans are winning, and demands that they withdraw. When they refuse, he orders their fighters killed and wealthy Judaean homes plundered (2.270). Still, he has the fairness to dispatch representatives of both sides to Nero, to settle the issue of the city’s character. Will Nero accede to the Judaeans’ claim that the polis is theirs? It seems unlikely. Josephus often heightens drama by suspending a story just before its climax to explore other matters. So it is here. When we next hear of Caesarea, two more procurators and perhaps seven years have come and gone. Nero’s unsurprising verdict is that Caesarea will remain Greek. Judaeans must not treat the polis as though it were theirs. Josephus carefully dates this rescript, which he reckons a foundation of the coming war, to May/June 66 CE (2.284). Now he must explain how such an oblique-seeming decision led to war anchored in Jerusalem. The explanation is that it was not Nero’s announcement as such, which only confirmed the status quo, but the charged political circumstances around it, all linked to the procurator and the auxiliary force based in Caesarea, that sparked bloody regional conflict and prompted Cestius Gallus’ reluctant expedition to Jerusalem later in the year. Namely, Josephus explains, in the long interval while Judaeans awaited Nero’s decision, their wealthier representatives were trying to buy up contiguous plots of land. Whether from a misplaced bet on the imperial decision going their way or, more plausibly, as a hedge against the expected rejection of their initiative, their relative wealth (noted by Josephus) allows them to offer sums above market value. So confident are they of making the polis theirs, by imperial decree or by changing the facts on the ground, that they erect a meeting place (συναγωγή) right at the edge of one property. Apparently, they are expecting to buy the adjacent field, after which the communal meeting place would be centrally located between the two. But they encounter an extremely stubborn neighbour who refuses to sell at any price. Not only that, but to increase the aggravation he develops workshops along the edge of his property. This leaves the Judaeans a narrow passageway to their building. That situation gives the antagonist what he needs to provoke his Judaean neighbours

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beyond tolerance. Knowing that they must pass right by his workshop, on one of their meeting days he creates a makeshift altar and begins offering bird sacrifices on it as they pass by, with his young friends waiting to step in if things turn physical. A deadly riot ensues, and this time the Judaeans get the worst of it. Seeing Florus’ fecklessness, and aware of their vulnerability after Nero’s rescript, they remove their laws from Caesarea for safe-keeping and prepare for the worst. Florus has the gall to arrest leading Judaeans also for this (BJ 2.291–92). He too keeps provoking the Judaeans. Realising that they are getting no protection by legal avenues, they offer him a huge personal bribe, eight talents, to secure his support. He takes their money and absconds, however, leaving the parties to sort things out. This turn of events explains how the Caesarean situation comes to concern Jerusalem. For Judaeans in the mother-city must deal with the same Florus, their supposed guardian, and they are appalled by his treatment of their compatriots in Caesarea. In Jerusalem, at the very same time, he is provoking everyone. He has boldly taken another seventeen talents from the temple treasury, along with the eight from Caesarea. He cites Nero’s order, which was historically likely but unimpressive to Jerusalem’s residents (2.293).15 To them he seemed only a vicious ogre, against whom legal defence looked impossible. The next we hear of Caesarea is Josephus’ notice at BJ 2.457, in the passage quoted at the head of this chapter. Seemingly out of the blue, the Syrian majority massacre an alleged 20,000 Judaeans in a single hour. This creates outrage in Jerusalem, causing Judaeans to fan out in parties and attack the poleis of southern Syria. In Josephus’ narrative compression, this appears to be a trigger for Cestius’ expedition, though attention to the calendar suggests that he was already en route from the north in September 66, when this violence exploded. It might well have added urgency and ferocity to his soldiers’ behaviour on the expedition, perhaps explaining their zealous hunting down of fighters outside Jerusalem and their destruction of Joppa. Whatever we may begin to hypothesise about the realities behind War’s account, Josephus’ later version AJ 20.173–84 lacks not only the concluding massacre and the retaliatory strikes. Also missing, and seemingly excluded, is War’s explanation of how Nero’s decision generated the conflict in Caesarea. The whole business about land purchase and offending sacrifices is missing, and a different story has taken its place.

15

See Eck 2011.

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The few points of agreement with War come in the opening frame. Here, as in War, the Judaean minority of Caesarea initiate civic strife by attempting to change the status quo (AJ 20.173–76): Whereas the Judaeans were asserting their primacy, on the ground that the founder of Caesarea had been their king …, the Syrians conceded the point about Herod but insisted that Caesarea had formerly been called Strato’s Tower, and at that time there had been not a single Judaean inhabitant.  … The Judaeans who were in the polis, made confident by their wealth and on that account holding the Syrians in contempt, kept slandering them, expecting to provoke them to anger. The latter, though inferior in resources, were in high spirits because most of those doing military service there under the Romans were either Caesareans or Sebastenes, and so took to abusing the Judaeans with words for a while. Then they began throwing stones at each other, until many were injured on both sides—though the Judaeans would surely win. On that shared foundation, however, Antiquities builds a different story. To begin with, the prefect Felix is no longer War’s even-handed referee, sending both sides to Nero for a verdict. Antiquities portrays Judaeans prevailing in fights with their neighbours. Here, therefore, Felix’s concern is to force them to desist. When they do not, he executes some Judaeans and takes others prisoner, while allowing his eager auxiliaries, even more clearly identified here as hailing from the area, to ransack Judaean houses in Caesarea. In this account, when the Judaean leaders beg him to stop and promise to rein in their youth, Felix accepts their pledge and the matter is settled. No appeal to Nero is needed (20.177–78). In this later version the next procurator, Festus (59–62 CE?), plays a decisive role. He allows Judaean dignitaries to send an embassy to Nero, but this is only to accuse Felix, for the violence against them and their property that he authorised. Notice, incidentally, their continued assumption that the emperor, even Nero, is their best hope of redress against local ills and rogue officials. Felix escapes punishment from Nero, Josephus claims, only because his famous brother Pallas still has influence with the emperor (20.182).16 16

This is difficult on prosopographical grounds, a problem not diminished by Nikos Kokkinos’ redating of Festus’ tenure to 59–60: Kokkinos 1998: 385. According to Tacitus, Pallas’ influence was at its height around 52–54 CE under Claudius (Ann. 12.53.1–2). Nero’s accession cost him (Ann. 13.2.2) and in 55 he was dismissed from court (13.14.2, 13.23.1–2). At the story time here, Pallas was reportedly near execution (62 CE; Ann. 14.65.1).

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After that mission to prosecute Felix fails, Antiquities departs further from War by claiming that the Syrian Caesareans make a separate overture to Nero, via his highly corruptible secretary Beryllus. They offer this man an irresistible bribe to induce Nero to cancel the Judaeans’ ‘equality [or reciprocity] of citizenship with them’ (ἀκυροῦσαν τὴν Ἰουδαίων πρὸς αὐτοὺς ἰσοπολιτείαν, 20.183). Josephus’ use of the rare word ἰσοπολιτεία,17 which he has only in Antiquities’ Caesarea story (20.173, 183), has understandably occasioned much scholarly discussion in relation to the question of Judaean rights in the Roman world.18 The word looks like it means ‘equal citizenship’, and Josephus elsewhere argues that Judaeans settled in Antioch and Alexandria indeed were full and equal citizens from the start.19 That is hard to square with other evidence, however. In the case of Caesarea, it would be impossible to understand the effort of the Judaean minority to assert primacy in a city not Judaean if they had equal status all along. Kasher seems to me right in supposing that ἰσοπολιτεία in Caesarea must mean the mutual recognition of two political communities, even though only one (the Graeco-Syrian) is identified with polis citizenship and the other is legally inferior.20 We should not press the prefix ἴσος to mean ‘equal’, because the semantic range includes ‘fair, reciprocal, balanced, the same sort’. At AJ 12.119 Josephus uses the rare word ἰσότιμος (‘the same in honour’) for Judaean rights in Antioch, evidently as a rough synonym for the ἰσοπολιτεία word group. Since Philo accounts for 35 of 46 instances of this adjective before Josephus, and 4 of the 9 instances of the cognate noun ἰσοτιμία, it is worth noting his usage. At Mos. 1.34–36 he describes the Judaean patriarchs who fled to Egypt as refugees from their native country, by reason of famine, who now seek asylum and good faith from the host countries. As obviously alien sojourners in Egypt (μέτοικοι) they nevertheless request ἰσοτιμία with citizens. But the Pharaoh-king seizes them as though they were slaves and not free persons, abusing them at will. This offends God, Philo says, as the guardian of free refugees, suppliants, and sojourners. In this passage, ἰσοτιμία cannot mean equal citizenship or the like, but something more in the way of ‘fair respect, regard’. The point seems to be that Judaeans, as free citizens of a known homeland, and no slaves, deserve 17

18 19 20

In surviving literature, the word makes only 18 appearances before Josephus, 15 of these in Polybius (1), Diodorus (1), Dionysius’s Roman Antiquities (11), and Strabo (2). At AJ 19.281 Josephus has the synonymous phrase ἴση πολιτεία. Similar phrases in documents, however, discussed by the scholars mentioned in the next note. Kasher 1977; Ben Zeev 299–300; Sly 2000; and Ritter 2015: passim, esp. 5, 32–34, 148, 248–52 cover the main bases and interpretations. BJ 2.487; AJ 12.8; 14.188; 19.281; Ap. 2.32–42. Kasher 1977: 20–21.

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respect when they sojourn, just as the citizens of other places would expect not to be treated as slaves in Judaea. This means enjoying the protections of free persons, but not sudden citizenship of their host cities. It seems that this understanding would fit with the notion of reciprocal citizenship in the Greek documents, and that it would have made sense to Josephus’ audiences in his account of Alexandria. The logic of the Caesarea story in Antiquities is that the Judaean minority enjoys substantial political rights in a non-Judaean polis—a situation roughly comparable to that in Antioch, Alexandria, and various Asian poleis.21 Their bold effort to improve their lot by making the polis Judaean predictably draws violent opposition (20.173). In Antiquities’ version (only) the Syrian population, perhaps encouraged by the Judaeans’ failure to prosecute Felix before, press home their advantage. They make a bold request, greased by a bribe, in reply: that the emperor annul even the Judaeans’ rights established by long residence in Caesarea. Josephus does not spell this out, but it seems the easiest way to understand his language. They wanted too much and, as a result, lost even the protections they had.22 In Alexandria, the emperor Claudius cautioned the Judaeans not to bother themselves pursuing more than they formerly had (μηδὲν πλήωι ὧν πρότερον ἔσχον περιεργάζεσθαι)—already an abundance of good things—in a city belonging to others.23 What would happen if they disobeyed? He makes it clear that this would create suspicions of sinister intent and he would treat them as a plague on the inhabited earth. Given such warnings, one can imagine that an emperor sufficiently annoyed by a minority community’s effort to gain more would annul its existing rights, withdrawing protections and exemptions for the practice of its customs. Is that what happened in Caesarea? In Antiquities, the profound insult of removing even these basic rights of untrammelled residence, which had allowed Judaeans to prosper in Caesarea, fuels ever increasing violence and leads to the coming war (AJ 20.184): This [imperial letter] furnished the causes of the bad things that followed for our ethnos: for when the Judaeans of Caesarea learned what had been written, they engaged all the more in civil strife against the Syrians until indeed they ignited the war (μέχρι δὴ τὸν πόλεμον ἐξῆψαν).

21 22 23

In BJ 7.110 the citizens of Antioch unsuccessfully beg Titus to annul Judaean rights there. Agreeing with Kasher (1977: 27): ‘Their political ambitions and efforts were designed to shatter the basis of the existing isopoliteia, according to which they were inferior in status. … But the result of their efforts was, ironically, the opposite of what they had intended.’ CPJ (Tcherikover and Fuks) 2 no. 153.V.89.

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In this account, finally, Nero’s decision arrives while Festus is prefect (by 60 or 62: AJ 20.185, 197, 215), in marked contrast to War’s date of 66. Similar observations apply mutatis mutandis to War’s account of what led to the massacre in Jerusalem, the ‘climax’ entirely missing from Antiquities, where it would seem unwelcome and would lack a purpose. 3

Conflict in Jerusalem—and Massacres

The Judaean mother-polis Jerusalem is War’s ultimate interest. The work’s preface highlights the tragic reversal involved in its final catastrophe (BJ 1.11): ‘For it happened that our polis, of all those under the Romans, certainly reached the pinnacle of prosperity, only to fall again in the worst of calamities at the last.’ The most obvious reason that Josephus includes such a long Book 1—double the standard (15,000-word) volumen length—is to chart the long period of success from the beginning of Roman-Judaean relations (see Chapter 5). That volume ends with the death of Augustus’ friend Herod. As Book 2 opens, the air crackles with tension. What will become of Jerusalem, which has flourished so brilliantly under Rome? Josephus devotes considerable space to the succession hearings in Rome (2.1–111). Augustus does his best to honour the king’s wishes by installing his three sons over parts of the kingdom. Archelaus gets the heartland plus Samaria and the title of ethnarch—with the carrot of kingship if he governs well—while Antipas and Philip receive tetrarchies (2.93). Alas, the other two are successful and rule longer than their father, whereas Archelaus alienates both Jerusalem and Samaria, forcing Augustus to remove him within a decade (2.111). In War’s formulation, as we have seen, Augustus makes Judaea a province under an equestrian administrator (2.117: εἰς ἐπαρχίαν περιγραφείσης ἐπίτροπος τῆς ἱππικῆς … τάξεως), whereas Antiquities more plausibly reports that Judaea joined Syria. The latter is more plausible because War itself assumes the northern legate’s responsibility for Judaea: the legate Quirinius’ census of 6 CE (2.433; 7.253); the legate Publius Petronius’ mandate to install Caligula’s statues in the temple (2.185–203); Ummidius Quadratus’ intervention against a rogue procurator and his auxiliary (2.239–44); and the concern of Cestius Gallus for Jerusalem (from 2.280). Indeed, War exploits the contrast between the distinguished ex-consuls in Antioch and the mixed bag of equestrian careerists in Caesarea to help sustain its kinetic atmosphere. Whatever virtues a legate might have had, he was weeks away and likely to be seen in Jerusalem with a small bodyguard only during occasional Passover visits. The character of the equestrian official based in Caesarea, commanding the auxiliary force deeply hostile to Jerusalem, is crucial to War’s account.

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A clear example of what could go wrong is furnished by the procurator Ventidius Cumanus. On his watch, an auxiliary soldier patrolling the temple’s colonnade roof during Passover reportedly made rude gestures toward the Judaean crowds gathered below him (BJ 2.224). A fatal riot ensued as the celebrants tried to get up the colonnades to assault the soldier, while his comrades joined him in responding with weapons. Then, after Judaean bandits robbed an imperial slave at Beit-Horon, an over-zealous soldier exceeded Cumanus’ order to find the culprits and gratuitously burned a copy of the Torah he found in a village. Cumanus had to mollify the Judaeans by executing his own soldier (2.228). However, when a Galilean pilgrim en route to Jerusalem was murdered by Samarians, and Judaeans launched retaliatory raids against Samarian villages (2.232–35), Cumanus loosed a fast-moving cavalry wing against them (2.236). The parallel in AJ 20.122 says that he took nearly his entire force—four infantry cohorts plus one cavalry wing—and even that he ‘armed the Samarians’ (τούς τε Σαμαρεῖς καθοπλίσας). This appears to mean that he armed civilians for protection from Judaean raids. Even in War’s version, this appears as an eruption of long-standing hatred between Judaeans and Samarians. In a revealing line, the elders of Jerusalem in War plead with the populace ‘to not, for the sake of revenge against the Samarians, provoke the Romans [i.e., the legate and his legionary forces] against Jerusalem’ (μὴ διὰ τὴν εἰς Σαμαρεῖς ἄμυναν ἐπὶ Ἱεροσόλυμα Ῥωμαίους παροξύνειν, 2.237). Both sides appeal to the legate Quadratus, who investigates, executes Judaean vigilante leaders, and sends the key players from both sides to Claudius in Rome. That emperor, characteristically, decides in favour of the Judaeans. Advised by Agrippa II, who is then resident in Rome and pleading the Judaean case (2.245), Claudius not only exiles Cumanus; he even executes Samarian delegates—as he reportedly executed anti-Judaean accusers elsewhere.24 Most remarkably, he reportedly orders the commander most responsible, one Celer, back to Jerusalem for torture and beheading at Judaean hands (BJ 2.239–46). Although War does not clarify the inter-ethnic rivalry underlying Jerusalem’s fall from happiness, then, a curious reader could join the dots. In this work it seems that Josephus prefers to focus on the character of the equestrian officials. With Rome itself the Judaeans never have a problem, before Nero’s final years. To judge from Tacitus, this emphasis on the variable character of the men in Caesarea would have resonated with Josephus’ audiences. Though no admirer of Judaeans, Tacitus remarks that the imperial freedman Felix behaved ‘with every mark of barbarity and lust, governed with the privilege of a king and the 24

According to the Acts of the Alexandrians, though the men in question may have been executed (if they were) for other activities; cf. Harker 23–24.

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mindset of a slave. Nevertheless, the patience of the Judaeans held out until Gessius Florus was procurator’ (Hist. 5.10). Even such distant observers could see that Judaea had been lately saddled with reprehensible specimens of this motley class. Felix and Festus, whose tenures as procurator covered the decade from 52 to 62, we have met in connection with Caesarea. Tacitus makes peevish remarks about Felix, but Josephus’ War does not complain about him. His reported actions culminate in his dispatch of Judaean and Syrian disputants to Nero for a decision about their claims in Caesarea (2.270). In the Judaean heartland he has been on the side of the angels, doing his best to rid the country of the troublemakers that Josephus also abhors: Judaean bandits terrorising Samarian borderlands (2.253)25 and pseudo-prophets promising restored Judaean greatness. These types focus their ire on the auxiliary garrison in Jerusalem, perhaps hoping for another king such as Herod, Archelaus, and Agrippa I to put them in their place (2.260, 263). Antiquities’ moralising lessons, noting the fate of those who observe or violate Judaean law (cf. AJ 1.14, 20), leads Josephus there to explore Felix’s lust— mentioned also by Tacitus (Hist. 5.9) and suggested in the New Testament Acts (24.24–25)—in snatching Agrippa’s sister Drusilla from a virtuous husband (20.142–44). Antiquities also explains why War dates the rise of urban knife-crime to Felix’s time and notes that its first victim was the high priest Jonathan (BJ 2.254–57). In Antiquities, knife-crime became popular in Jeru­ salem because that high priest had begun to criticise Felix, feeling responsible because it was he who had asked Claudius to send this man. Once the self-indulgent Felix is in post, however, Jonathan begins to protest that he does not care about Judaea (AJ 20.162). Felix contrives to get rid of his nagging sponsor by ordering his assassination at the hands of concealed-knife assassins. Their success leads to copycat stabbings, and this accounts for the rash of knife crime under Felix in Antiquities. It seems that Josephus knew all this when he composed War, but chose not to disturb his account of a late-breaking catastrophe in Nero’s later years. In the earlier work Felix does what a competent prefect should do, as the knife-crime is merely dated to his tenure and not blamed on him. War’s appreciative tone toward Felix is strengthened by its notice about his successor [Porcius] Festus (59/60–62 or 58–60), who behaves in much the same way—‘he arrested the majority of the bandits and actually did away with quite a few’ (2.271)—and by 25

If Eleazar, the bandit ring-leader here who has been active for two decades, should be understood as the Eleazar son of Deinaeus recently mentioned at 2.235, as AJ 20.161 clarifies.

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the radical change he attributes to Albinus and Florus: ‘Albinus did not govern affairs in the same manner, and there was no conceivable form of sordid behaviour that he neglected’ (2.272). A Roman audience might have assumed this to be the Lucceius Albinus, whom Nero would later dispatch to Mauretania, where he reportedly claimed royal prerogatives and died in the civil war after Nero’s death (Tacitus, Hist. 2.58–59). In any case, they would have understood that the story time here is after Nero’s transition of 59–60 CE, marked by his murder of his mother, sidelining of advisors, and increasingly urgent demands for revenue.26 Albinus devotes himself single-mindedly to raising money: he plunders the wealth of individuals and allegedly raises tax levies on the whole ethnos, striking bargains to release bandit-leaders and empty holding cells on payment of sufficient ransom (2.273). This creates a lawless atmosphere in which rival malcontents cause mayhem while virtuous leading citizens, ripe for plunder by both governor and gangs, are forced into silence. Josephus remarks that Albinus left the region with ‘the seeds of the coming capture’ (τὰ σπέρματα τῆς μελλούσης ἁλώσεως) already sown (2.276). War’s audience realises by now that the auxiliary force is the procurator’s muscle. The degree of harm they can cause depends on the nature of their commander, which is why Judaeans long for, and their enemies detest, a Judaean monarch in Jerusalem. With Gessius Florus (64–66 CE), War dramatically slows the narrative speed to elaborate on dynamics unexplored until now. War’s programmatic contrast between the beneficence of the legate in Antioch, now Cestius Gallus (from 63/64 CE), and the questionable equestrians in the south reaches its high point in the brazenly rapacious Florus. War’s audience may somehow know what Antiquities will explain: that Nero appointed Florus because the two men’s wives were friends (AJ 20.252). Romans would have understood the fear with which senators such as Cestius lived in Nero’s final two years, amidst the senatorial conspiracies in Rome, as well as the confidence of Nero’s equestrian emissaries in raiding provincial wealth—and informing on senators who stood in their way.27 Josephus does not develop these background conditions, likely known to his audiences, but he leaves no doubt about the character of Nero’s new procurator Florus (2.277–78): He neglected no form of either plunder or torture. With those who deserved pity he was most savage, while among the shameful he was most 26 27

Eck 2011: 61–65; Mason 2016a: 315–18. See previous note and Mason 2016a: 318–24.

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shameless. … To him it seemed pointless to make his gains one man at a time; he was instead stripping whole cities and despoiling populations en masse. Up and down the countryside, he all but declared that everyone had leave to practice banditry—as long as he himself got a share of the war-spoils. Although it seems most likely that Florus’ preoccupation with revenue reflected Nero’s orders (BJ 2.293), Josephus portrays it as a matter of personal greed (2.295, 311). The legate Cestius, by contrast, shows respect for Jerusalem and its leaders, with whom he needed to work productively. He made the long trek at least for Passover in the spring of 66 CE, which may have been his first or second in post. As the procurator stands next to him at the festival, a massive crowd implores Cestius to deal with the egregious fellow. He promises that he will (War 2.280–83), but there is practically little he can do. Only a month later,28 King Agrippa II’s sister Berenice, in Jerusalem to fulfil a vow, witnesses such atrocities and experiences such personal humiliation that she must request urgent help from Cestius against Florus (2.301). He hears a similar plea from Jerusalem’s leaders, though Florus is clever enough to launch a counter-suit, as it were, making his own self-exonerating appeal to help suppress an alleged Judaean rebellion. It is clear in the story that Cestius knows where the problem lies, but he is powerless to remove Nero’s agent. Against the advice of his military commanders, therefore, who expect him to honour Florus’ request and send an army against the Judaeans, he dispatches a trusted tribune to meet up with Agrippa II and find out how things have developed since his Passover visit (2.333–34). The tribune’s report confirms that Judaeans want peace with Rome and with Cestius; they simply cannot tolerate Florus’ brutality (2.336, 339–41). Agrippa II’s famous speech in Jerusalem, immediately after the tribune’s departure, is occasioned by the people’s demand that they be allowed to send a delegation to Nero—to obviate any appearance of revolt and to accuse Florus (2.342). Cestius will finally have no choice but to march to Jerusalem with a legion, with Agrippa alongside, after the king has been expelled from Jerusalem because he proves as impotent as Cestius in protecting his people (2.499). He and Cestius are the sole remaining pickets of the formerly secure fence protecting Judaea, a fence 28

Cestius is in Jerusalem for Passover in mid-Nisan (ca. 1 April 66). Josephus dates the queen’s appeal to 16 Artemisius, apparently  = 16 Iyyar (the month after Passover). Given that Cestius would have needed a good couple of weeks to return to Antioch, a mounted courier bringing Berenice’s letter may have reached him only a week or two after his return.

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that Nero’s revenue-collector has broken through with impunity. As the young emperor urges on his incendiary agent, they can do little. This is the context of the Jerusalem massacre. Even as he stresses Florus’ responsibility, Josephus lifts the veil on a military seething with rage against Judaeans, ready not merely to follow Florus’ harsh orders but to exceed them. This new phase begins after Cestius’ Passover visit, when Florus—relieved of the senator’s presence—dispatches soldiers to raid the temple treasury. This prompts protest rallies in the sacred precinct by outraged Judaeans, under the gaze of auxiliary troops on the porticoes. In one raucous meeting, angry Judaean youths mockingly pass a hat for the poor governor (2.294–95). When Florus heard of it in Caesarea, ‘he rushed against Jerusalem with an army of both cavalry and infantry’, perhaps two cohorts to supplement the one already there (2.296). Later he will summon another two cohorts (2.318). He is willing to use nearly all of his six-cohort auxiliary to silence Jerusalem. Setting up his tribunal in the Herodian palace, Florus demands that Jerusalem’s elders hand over those who mocked him. When they try to deflect his anger, he commands his now huge force to plunder the adjacent Upper Market, in the wealthy part of town. Josephus observes: In their lust for gain, they took advantage of such an authorisation and not only plundered the area against which they had been sent but, bursting into the nearby residences, they began slaughtering the occupants. … They arrested many of the respectable folk and brought them up to Florus. After torturing them with lashes, he crucified them. (2.305–306) The shocking death toll, allegedly 630, includes women, infants, and even Judaean men who have attained Roman equestrian rank—the same as Florus (2.308). The soldiers’ fury is hard to explain by greed alone, just as their behaviour toward Queen Berenice suggests deeper motives. She sends soldiers from her tiny bodyguard to Florus to appeal for mercy (2.310)—and risks her life in doing so (2.312): [T]he soldiers’ charge was rabid even against the queen. … They would have done away with her too, had she not managed to take refuge in the royal palace [i.e., where Florus was]. There she passed the night, albeit with a guard unit because she was alarmed by the soldiers’ aggression. The episode ends with Berenice before Florus’ tribunal, surrounded by these lethally hostile auxiliary soldiers, a humiliated and barefoot suppliant (2.314).

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Even as the wise leaders of Jerusalem try to persuade the people that violent reaction will only make things worse, Florus ups the ante by demanding that they prove their good will. Having summoned those additional cohorts from Caesarea, he will believe their protestations if they welcome that force in the customary way, out on the road. He has, however, sent orders to the cohorts to ignore any salute from the people and to act harshly against anyone who utters a syllable in complaint (2.318–19). The ploy produces its intended result: ‘Soldiers fell upon those they caught up with, beating them without restraint’ (2.328). Meanwhile Florus takes soldiers from the Herodian palace through the crowded streets northeast to the Antonia fortress. Fearing that he has assembled such a large force for a raid on the holy precinct from the Antonia, the citizens destroy a section of the colonnade connecting the fortress with the temple (2.328–30). Their determination persuades Florus that he cannot succeed for the moment. In a conciliatory gesture he promises to leave Jerusalem with his cohorts, with only a garrison of their choice remaining to keep order. In response, Jerusalem’s leaders (2.332, emphasis added): promised everything … if he would leave just one cohort for them, and not the one that had fought, for the common folk harboured animosity toward this one because of what they had suffered. So he exchanged the cohort, according to their preference and, with the balance of the force, returned to Caesarea. This is puzzling because Josephus does not attribute the ravages of the Upper City to one cohort alone. Several seem to have a hand in the death and destruction. It does not matter because Florus’ withdrawal is merely tactical. Once back in Caesarea, he writes immediately to Cestius requesting legionary intervention to crush the city (2.333). When Cestius instead sends the tribune and Agrippa II (above), they are greeted by the widows of Florus’ victims and given a tour of the ransacked market and plundered houses (2.339). They remain convinced that there is no desire for rebellion against Rome. Whichever cohort remained as a garrison, the striking thing is that Josephus mentions no further malfeasance on its part before Jerusalem’s militants besiege and massacre it (2.434–50). It seems, then, to be the very garrison that the leaders have chosen that the armed factions destroy. It seems unlikely that Josephus imagines that they chose the unit they hated most so that they could kill its men, because they could not have known that they were going to have an opportunity to do so.

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The siege and massacre come about in the following way. Agrippa II has been forced out of Jerusalem. Seeing the population beginning to arm itself, and younger priests closing the temple to foreign connections, at the request of the city leaders and presumably in consultation with Cestius, he immediately dispatches 2,000 of his Judaean cavalry, partly to help protect the hated auxiliary garrison (2.409–21). These elite troops manage to secure the Upper City for a while, but soon are forced to yield to the faction of Eleazar, son of the high priest Ananias, and they retreat to the security of the Herodian palace. They cannot protect the part of garrison stationed in the Antonia. After a brief siege, those soldiers are attacked and killed by Eleazar’s faction (2.430). Tensions are heightened when a second armed faction emerges, led by one Menachem and equipped with professional-grade (if old) weapons liberated from Masada (2.433). They seize control of the struggle and begin a methodical siege of the Herodian palace, which now houses Agrippa’s royal troops, some members of the Jerusalem elite, and the remainder of the auxiliary garrison. Menachem catches and kills the former high priest Ananias, Eleazar’s father, along with his associates fleeing the palace. He permits the Judaean troops sent by Agrippa, however, to depart from the palace compound with their lives. This leaves only the remaining auxiliary garrison—before Menachem himself is captured and killed by Eleazar’s men (2.337–48). Now Eleazar assumes command of the siege. He finally yields to the cohorts’ plea for a truce that would let them leave unarmed (2.437). This must have seemed to the soldiers as trustworthy as the safe passage that had recently freed Agrippa’s cavalry. But only Metilius, the Roman commander of the unit who desperately promises to Judaise, survives the cold-blooded massacre that ensues, after the soldiers have laid down their arms in reliance on the pledge of safety (2.450–56). Although Josephus’ War thus gives a fairly clear causal chain for this massacre, many puzzles remain, which highlight the difference between real events and stories about them (Section 1). One of the biggest puzzles is that Antiquities, which gives a much more vivid picture of the ethnic dimensions of this conflict, does not even hint at the climactic massacre in War, and seems to tell a different story. 4

Conclusions

Having now attempted to interpret War’s double-massacre episode, we may return to our three original questions.

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4.1 Real Events and Narratives Even if the distinction between life and narrative is obvious, some of its consequences might not be. A recent monograph on Judaean minorities in the East will illustrate. The author writes (emphasis mine): Josephus tells us that it was ‘at the same day and hour’ [as the Jerusalem massacre] that the Caesareans turned on their neighboring Judeans. Josephus seems to be curiously unwilling to draw a causal connection between the murder of the soldiers and the Judeans in Caesarea. But neither was Josephus an eyewitness in Caesarea. News must have travelled to Caesarea first. And a messenger traveling by horseback could have made the nearly 90 kilometer trip from Jerusalem to Caesarea within a short day’s travel and reported the news there that same day of the Sabbath, and this is certainly what must have happened.29 When watching a play or film, we expect the story to play out in its own world, not to enter ours. If an actor pierces the bubble of ancient Rome, Victorian England, or the wild West and addresses the modern audience in terms of our values and language, they are ‘breaking the fourth wall’. Although no character in Josephus’ War can break out of that story world, we regularly do it on their behalf, by shattering Josephus’ set and reworking chosen bits of his story in terms of our rationalisation. This seems to me a good example, though I do not mean to blame this author in particular. It is all too easy for any of us. As we have seen, Josephus’ War fuses the two massacre scenes as part of its milieu of tragic pollution and purification. Inside that world, the two massacres can occur at precisely the same moment because of an ‘other-worldly provision’. That is his explanation for their simultaneity. Josephus has elsewhere given the travel distance between Jerusalem and Caesarea as 600 stadia, or 120 kilometres (BJ 1.79), which approximates the distance by road. Requiring three or four days’ travel, that distance removes any possibility of one event’s being caused by the other. That is the point, and why he brings the two episodes together. Only by divine arrangement could these events have occurred simultaneously. Because we do not live in his story world, of course we suspect or even assume a causal relationship. Josephus is quite capable of describing such mundane reactions, however, as he does next with the reactions to the Caesarea 29

Ritter 2015: 256.

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massacre—and the reactions to those reactions. At this crucial moment, however, he excludes that possibility. Correlation of events far removed from each other is a known feature of eerie stories. Cures that occur far from the healer are part of Jesus’ repertoire (Luke 7.1–10; John 4.46–54), the distance heightening the sense of awe. We do not try to come up with rational explanations for those cures. Efforts to save Josephus’ account (from Josephus) by offering a rational explanation—note: ‘must’ and ‘certainly’ in the above quotation—which the narrator ‘curiously’ does not recognise, are breaking the fourth wall, trying to bring him into our way of thinking and making him tell us what we want to know. But it is arbitrary to select only convenient elements (‘the same day’) as hard data while we ignore the conditions that motivate his story (‘the same hour’, ‘other-worldly’ causes). We may well imagine that a massacre of auxiliary soldiers in Jerusalem led to retaliation against Judaeans in Caesarea or vice versa. But that is not his account, which is of a truly spooky coincidence, which should make the audience shiver. If we cannot believe his story, then we should put it aside and not suppose that the two events occurred (if they occurred) on the same day or the one after. Further, as we have seen, Antiquities’ failure to mention the Caesarea massacre raises the unsettling question whether it occurred. The honest answer must be that we cannot be sure. Josephus’ death toll of 20,000 (BJ 2.457) looks impossible, given that the entire population inside the walls could not have much exceeded 18,000, with the surrounding region perhaps 26,000.30 The story assumes that Judaeans were a clear minority. And some reportedly escaped the massacre to be imprisoned by Florus. We might well ask whether Josephus could have narrated such things if they did not happen at all? The answer is that he certainly did describe, and at length, some things that could not plausibly have happened, such as the speeches he gives Agrippa II, Ananus and Jesus, his character outside Jerusalem, or Eleazar at Masada. In other cases, his own account in the Vita nullifies a number of the claims he makes much of in War 2.31 So, yes he can. But there are other possibilities. Short of outright invention, he typically gives numbers that must be divided by 10 or by 100 to be half-way plausible. Perhaps there were not such comprehensive massacres in either Jerusalem or Caesarea, but murders of smaller groups. If the number of victims in Caesarea were closer to 200—still a horrendous massacre—that might explain how Antiquities could fail to mention it. War’s account of fierce 30 31

Kloppenborg 2000: 31–37. The city’s theatre sat perhaps 4,000, the multi-function stadium ca. 12,000. See Mason 2001: 213–22 (Appendix C).

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regional reprisals, if something like those events occurred (he could not make all that up, with so many cities and Cestius Gallus’ commanders involved), assume a substantial death toll in Caesarea. 4.2 Anti-Roman Sentiment? It has been all but universally assumed that the war with Rome must have been caused by the kind of Rome-hatred satirised in Monty Python’s Life of Brian (1979).32 Not only do the massacre stories fail to indicate such anti-Roman feeling, however. They preclude it. Josephus could not easily have concealed widespread anti-Roman feeling, for that would have rendered much of his narrative—the people’s constant appeals to the emperor and his legate for relief from local hostility, and the reciprocal concern of legates to hear and respond to Judaeans’ (including Agrippa’s and Berenice’s) concerns—nonsensical. Josephus’ War assumes, though its hindsight, temple-oriented view only partly explains, that Nero’s last procurator at the head of a fiercely anti-Judaean auxiliary force created the problems that drove some Jerusalemites to self-help and ignited the war. 4.3 The Role of Religion Finally, to what extent were the massacres in Caesarea and Jerusalem examples of religious violence? Two of the more appreciative reviews of my A History of the Jewish War (2016)33 express puzzlement at its lack of interest in ‘religion’ as a factor in the war. One cites the Caesarea scene as a clear example (emphasis mine): One final and cautious concern should be raised: the almost total exclusion of religion as a force of any kind within the progression of the war. … [T]he conflict at Caesarea, which exploded when Greek citizens performed a mock sacrifice outside a synagogue, began explicitly through religious conflict, even though there were certainly political questions underlying the choices made. Josephus pays great attention to what he sees as conflicts rooted in religious difference.34

32 33 34

See Taylor 2015. Mason 2016a. Westwood 2017: 192–93; cf. Novenson 2017: ‘I would argue that for the Jews, as for ancient peoples generally (though not for us moderns), nothing was more realist or more human than religion. For just this reason, they often expressed other, ostensibly more realist ideas in the language of religion’ (my emphasis).

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Given the centrality of religion as a category in scholarship in our fields, this criticism deserves as clear a response as I can give in a short space. First, as a matter of interpretation I would suggest that the bird sacrifice, mentioned only in War’s version (above), did not ignite the conflict in Caesarea. The tension over the Judaean or Greek character of the city reaches a boil under Felix (BJ 2.266–70), but explodes only when Nero’s negative rescript arrives, two procurators later (2.284). Granted that Josephus then makes the trivial incident of the bird sacrifice a ‘pretext’ for the war—not for the conflict in Caesarea—that belongs to his literary art. The event is a symptom of the long-running land dispute, which is what puts the man’s workshop right by the narrow passage that Judaeans had to use, because he had refused to sell (2.285). Now he took advantage of his proximity to rub salt in the wound and sacrifice birds on their holy day as they walked close by. Does that make either his action or the larger dispute distinctly religious? Although religion has been a distinct sphere of our lives in the West at least since the Enlightenment, and we understand the concept of university courses in religion or the religion section of a newspaper, religious studies research has itself led the way in recognising problems with the category, especially in the non-Christian world. Fung Yu-Lan began making this point in the 1920s: the search for Chinese religion was a Christian imposition on a culture that knew no such category.35 Many studies in the intervening century have made similar points for other eastern traditions, and for the pre-modern West, at least before the ascent of Christianity.36 This has led some scholars to prefer native categories, whether these are seen as ‘emic’ kinds of social science or as old-fashioned philological responsibility in the humanities tradition. After all, scholars have long recognised that many Latin key words (imperium, dignitas, provincia) do not have modern equivalents, and therefore have sought to understand their world. Opponents of this preference for Roman Judaea see it is a strangely zealous kind of scruple. They have insisted (a) that whether or not the ancients knew a category of religion, we have one and so are entitled to ask about it, historians not being limited by categories conceivable to their subjects, or (b) that avoiding ‘religion’ language amounts to pedantic nominalism. Many phenomena actually existed in antiquity—from base-metal mining to endogamous 35

36

Fung 1948: 1–6. Fung allows that Chinese society came to host coherent systems with ‘superstitions, dogmas, rituals, and institutions’, his perception of what constituted religions (3). But Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism were first ways of philosophy (systematic and reflective thinking about life), free of religion’s attributes. He had made the same point implicitly in his two-volume History of Chinese Philosophy (from 1922). Notably Nongbri 2013; Barton and Boyarin 2016; Josephson 2012; Masuzawa 2005.

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marriage—that the ancients did not recognise or have Greek, Latin, or Hebrew labels for.37 One review of a recent ‘no-religion’ study offers male chauvinism as an example of something that existed in antiquity without the name.38 Participants in the debate often seem to be talking past each other, however, by failing to clarify what exactly the question is. Take this example of male chauvinism. Did it exist in antiquity, without the name? The solar system, bacteria, photosynthesis, oxygen, and the earth’s turning on its axis were all happening without being named, to be sure. But they were not social constructions. The processes were occurring—as many processes go into running a large office building, of which the inhabitants know nothing. They are not human actions or kinds of social networks or shared categories for ordering knowledge. Is male chauvinism comparable to photosynthesis? Or is it part of a socially constructed discourse, meaningful in our world but unknown at other times? The claim seems to be that ancient males exhibited attitudes and behaviour that we would call chauvinist, in relation to our value system. But unless the ancients shared these values, I do not see how the thing could exist without those criteria. The ancients knew about boasting, arrogance, and excessive devotion, and had terms for them (ἀλαζονεία, αὔχη, ἀγερωχία, γαυρίαμα, πλεονεξία, τῦφος, ὑπερβίη, φρόνημα, ὑπερφροσύνη). But they had no language for ‘class condescension’ because it was not ‘a thing’ for them. It became visible only when it violated later ethical norms. Likewise, male ‘chauvinism’, along with the original patriotic chauvinism, became discernible only when mutual respect among nations, or genders, was expected. To find religion in antiquity, it would seem necessary either (a) to claim that it existed whether or not anyone knew of it, as an enduring natural process like the earth’s rotation on its axis or bacteria, or (b) to define it as a category of social-scientific investigation. In the latter case the investigator might declare: ‘For the purposes of my inquiry, religion is marked by x, y, and z together. And since I see x, y, and z together here, I see what I am calling religion.’ The former option does not work. Obviously, religion is a socially constructed category and not an operation of nature in all times and places. The latter course would present no problems if investigators were clear that this is what they were doing. Of course, one can find anything in antiquity by defining it into existence. If I define a police force, or a health or education or banking system by certain criteria, or various types economic or family structure, I can discover them in the eastern Mediterranean under Rome even though the inhabitants knew nothing of them. If our question is about how they thought and communicated 37 38

Cf. [specifically on ‘Judaism’] Schwartz 2011. Klostergaard Petersen 2017, reviewing Barton and Boyarin, Imagine No Religion.

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about their world, however, imagining a category of ancient life that would correspond to ‘religion’ is a distraction. Obviously, living long before the rise of ‘Christianism’, let alone the modern extrusion of religion as a distinct sphere of life, they could not have had such a category. Asking about their way of seeing is not the only legitimate question, but it is the one that interests me here. Is anything really at stake in such discussions, or are we merely playing with words? My benevolent reviewer perceives that I excluded religion (i.e., omitted something that was there) from my inquiry into the war. In her view, ‘the conflict at Caesarea … began explicitly through religious conflict’ and further, ‘Josephus pays great attention to what he sees as conflicts rooted in religious difference’. But how can one say that Josephus sees the conflicts in Caesarea or Jerusalem as rooted in ‘religious difference’ if he says no such thing? If I prefer to stay with the language of his contemporaries—of ethnos, polis, ancestral laws, and traditions (which to be sure include traditions of worship and sacrifice)—it is only because my interest is in understanding the world of Josephus’ narrative. Others might declare the violence in Caesarea and Jerusalem ‘religious’, and I have no quarrel, if they find it helpful. But what does that label add to our understanding of the incidents, or of Josephus’ account? Might it not distract us from the issues that he and his contemporaries could see? In a trenchant article on the Caesarea crisis two decades ago, John Kloppenborg made this pertinent observation, which may fittingly close our inquiry: The lines of conflict fell between the Judean population of the city and the Greek and Syrian residents and it manifested itself in various ways, some of which might be termed ‘religious’. But evidence from Josephus and later rabbinic sources indicate just how narrow and misleading the category of ‘religious rivalry’ is.39 39

Kloppenborg 2000: 227.

Chapter 8

When Suffering Meets Passion: Pathos in Josephus’ Judaean War and Its Context Although I certainly cover the actions of both sides with precision, I add language beyond the events in relation to the arrangement [of the work] and to my own πάθη [sufferings, emotions?]—permitting myself to lament the calamities of my homeland. Then I go through  … the πάθη [the sufferings?] of those taken captive in each polis, with precision, as I saw or suffered [ἔπαθον] them—for I shall not conceal any of my personal calamities, being about to speak to those who know them (μέλλων γε πρὸς εἰδότας ἐρεῖν). Josephus, BJ 1.9, 22

∵ What exactly are passions? We do not trouble much over the question because it appears that passions have always been with us, and we all recognise them when we see them. So we reflexively translate Latin passiones and Greek πάθη as ‘passions’ or ‘emotions’. When we do so, such texts as 4 Maccabees and Josephus’ Judaean War appear to be about passion-management. Unlike the many ancient categories that are hard to bring over to modern times, with passions at least we feel as though we understand. Presenting the results of a brief investigation into Josephus’ use of πάθος in his War, this essay suggests caution. As the examples from its preface above suggest, War’s πάθη seem not to be simple feelings or emotions but are at least bound up with—and may rather indicate—suffering and calamity. That would fit with the tragic ethos of this work and its Thucydidean outlook in relation to both internal and external politics. 1

Tragic Realism

Tragedy lives in the shortfall between human suffering and justice, as between inevitable suffering and some imagined knowledge the sufferer hopes will © Steve Mason, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004545960_010

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relieve it. Squarely facing the contingencies and conceits of life, classical tragedy negated every solution. The formal genre, according to Aristotle (Poet. 1552a–b), worked itself out by way of a mythos or plot including three elements: discovery or recognition of a truth unknown (ἀναγνώρισις  = ἀναγνωρισμός), the reversal of direction and upheaval that follow this recognition (περιπέτεια μὲν ἡ εἰς τὸ ἐναντίον τῶν πραττομένων μεταβολὴ), and the eventual calamitous suffering or πάθος marked by misfortune (τὸ ἀτυχεῖν). Aristotle reflects that ‘by arousing pity and fear it [tragedy] achieves the release of such sufferings’ (Poet. 1449b: δι᾽ ἐλέου καὶ φόβου περαίνουσα τὴν τῶν τοιούτων παθημάτων κάθαρσιν). Staged tragedy makes its impact by way of an ‘all-encompassing spectacle’ (ὁ τῆς ὄψεως κόσμος). We also recognise tragedy’s influence, however, far beyond the staged plays, not least in the narratives of the statesman-historians. Thucydides offers a penetrating analysis of the Peloponnesian War as, implicitly, a tragic conflict. Throughout his work and most famously in the Melian Dialogue, Thucydides remarks incisively on the relationship between power and justice.1 It is a law of nature, his Athenians crow, that the strong do what they wish, while the weak do what they must; ‘justice’ becomes a consideration only when one party cannot dominate and so the two must treat on equal terms (5.105). Because he so clearly expressed these ideas, which have rung true to countless nations ever since, Thucydides became the Bible of political realists of every epoch and type. To be sure, experts have cautioned that Thucydides is not advocating ‘might makes right’—after all, the boastful Athenians lost that war—and they offer various ways of teasing out his true ethical-philosophical perspective.2 But Thucydides gave the tension between justice and power such crystalline formulation that both vigorous advocates of power politics and the many more who resign themselves to the grim reality of power have looked to him as a uniquely clear-eyed analyst. Among the ancient historians influenced by Thucydides, Josephus yields to none.3 Polybius, another primary inspiration for Josephus’ War,4 provided his own vision of tragic realism with his ‘fortune’ (τύχη) motif. Despite what may seem reassuring remarks concerning fortune’s purpose in bringing Rome to supreme power, the preponderance of Polybius’ 200 or so references to fortune assume 1 Thucydides 5.89–113 (Melian dialogue); cf. 1.42.1–2, 76.2–3; 3.44.2–4, 56.3, 6; 6.87.2–4. 2 E.g., Ahrensdorf 1997; Lebow 2003: 65–178; Monten 2006; Shanske 2007. 3 Cassius Dio was a self-conscious and Thucydideanist; see 38.36.1–3 for external and 52.14–41 for internal politics. As for Josephus, aside from the Thucydidean flourishes of War’s prologue, note his treatment of yielding to power as a law of nature in BJ 2.355–57, 385; 5.364–67, and see Mader 2000, 4, 10, 52. 4 See Eckstein 1990.

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its inscrutable character and penchant for unexpected reversals, which statesmen must learn to bear. Rome’s arrival in the East confronted politicians with a long-lasting dilemma: how to reconcile national pride and justice with the fact, created by fortune, of Roman power?5 The same theme underlies Josephus’ War, which uses cognates of τύχη some ninety times.6 Polybius anticipates Josephus in describing the fall of Corinth (146 BCE) as the greatest calamity (συμφορά) in Greek history.7 Diodorus of Sicily comes even closer to Josephus’ remark above when he writes that the Greeks ‘exchanged the greatest good things for the most extreme calamities’ (μεγίστων ἀγαθῶν ἠλλάξαντο τὰς ἐσχάτας συμφοράς; 32.26.2), and describes the pity and shared πάθη (ἔλεος, συμπάθεια) that the ruins of Corinth evoked (32.27.1–2). Plato was another influence on Josephus, most obviously in the Against Apion but also in War’s speeches and philosophical reflections.8 Plato famously excluded the poets from his ideal polis (Resp. 10.595a), regarding tragedy as a mere reflection of life and distraction from truth-seeking, but his Gorgias makes extensive use of Euripides’ Antiope.9 Of the various explanations offered for this surprising fact, I find persuasive Franco Trivigno’s argument that Plato recognised the tragic role of the philosopher: devoted to pursuing truth and justice in a world governed by power and its ever-adaptable tool, rhetoric. This tragic outlook frames Socrates’ death in Plato, and in Trivigno’s view accounts for the Gorgias’ unusually dark passions. Still today, realists in international relations look to Thucydides.10 In doing so, they are not necessarily enthusiasts for conflict or the assertion of power. Many are well aware of the tragic nature of Thucydides’ vision of the ways in which peoples relate.11 Richard Lebow says of his teacher Hans Morgenthau:12 He shared Thucydides’ tragic understanding of politics, reflected in their belief that order was fragile, that human efforts to control, or even, reshape, their physical and social environments were far more uncertain in their consequences than most leaders and intellectuals recognised, 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

See Eckstein 1995. Note especially the Daniel-like distancing in Josephus’ speech at BJ 5.367: ‘Fortune has passed to them from all sides, and God, who transfers the ruling power from one ethnos to the next, is now over Italy.’ Polybius 38.1.9. E.g., Morel 1926. Dodds 1959; Nightingale 1992; Trivigno 2009. E.g., Woodruff 1993; Cawkwell 1997; Plattias and Koilopoulos 2009. See Welch 2003. Lebow 2003: x.

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and that hubris—in the form of an exaggerated sense of authority and competence—only made matters worse. Such realists observe that nations often go to war even when they have no wish to do so or rational benefit from it, and this is tragic.13 They observe that strenuous efforts to avoid war, for example by amassing an intimidating arsenal, establishing alliances and balances of power, or trying to construct effective institutions of international law, can unintentionally precipitate war through the fear they generate.14 They see a major power seeking no conflict at all, but with an assumed duty to check rogue states, unwittingly creating serious enemies from its failure to understand the perceptions of others. They see in Thucydides a keen insight into the ways that nations behave with each other, mostly out of fear and self-protection, when there is no higher power to arrange their affairs. Whenever leaders feel that they must act in a way that risks irrational war or other costs, it is a tragic situation. Political futility amid a growing sense of doom will be familiar to the reader of Josephus’ War. In this narrative, the wise leaders of Jerusalem do what they think proper and virtuous in responding to the increasingly violent power of the procurators and the violent responses from segments of their population. But an inexorable fate looms—the audience already knows the outcome—as Jerusalem’s and Caesarea’s young men react to provocations in the ways young men predictably do, and ‘tyrants’ rise up to do what tyrants do. Their exercise of power, driven ultimately by fear of its loss, defies rationality and marginalises any concern with justice, inevitably creating hatred, strife, and destruction. These broad contextual perspectives can add weight and texture to our question about Josephus’ use of τὰ πάθη in his Judaean War. He composed this work of political analysis in Flavian Rome, during the 70s of the first century CE, and he was heir to Greek historiography, philosophy, and tragedy alike. The driving questions of our study include the following. 1. Given the varied senses of πάθος, how does Josephus’ War use the word group? How do its various senses relate to each other? 2. What might his use of the πάθη suggest about the relationship between ancient historiography and tragedy in his environment? 3. What does a tragic ethos add to Josephus’ account? Is it mere ornament, a display of learning by this cultural outsider, an effort to bond more effectively with his audiences, or something deeper? My preliminary proposals are: that Josephus artfully uses πάθος language to fuse suffering and emotion in a unified field; that his War is much more about 13 14

E.g., Taylor 1969, 1979. Niebuhr 1932; Morgenthau 1946.

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the sufferings of Judaeans in Jerusalem’s recent collapse than about passions or emotions as we think of them; and that, although he contrasts wiser and less wise responses to Judaean suffering, it is not clear that events could have rolled out differently—people being what they are. In his narrative, this war results from a perfect storm of causes, motives, and typical reactions. The story is about the tragedy of politics and human conflict. To work through these questions, we need first to consider the semantic range of pathos-language and then explore Josephus’ use of it before pondering the implications. 2

Semantic Range and Contexts of the Pathē

The πάθη were of enormous interest to ancient writers.15 Quite a few composed works entitled Περὶ Παθῶν, though most (by Zeno, the much-excerpted Chrysippus, Sphaerus, Herillus, Theophrastus, Poseidonius, Tryphon the Grammarian, Aelius Herodian) are lost. Some essays on the subject survive but are of doubtful provenance, such as that by Pseudo-Andronicus of Rhodes16 or the essays of the Hippocratic corpus entitled Περὶ Παθῶν and Περὶ τῶν ἐντὸς Παθῶν.17 Aristotle (with 764 occurrences) and Plutarch (827) are the heaviest attested users of πάθος; their extensive corpora allow them to exploit varied senses. The geographer Ptolemy included a section on the πάθη in his astrological Tetrabiblos, where he clarified that he was speaking of ‘emotions’ by adding the qualification ‘psychic’ (Περὶ παθῶν ψυχικῶν), as others added ‘internal’ (3.4.2). By contrast, the most eminent historians—Herodotus (26 occurrences), Thucydides (13), Xenophon (18), Polybius (8)—cited πάθη sparingly. This may have been in part because the vivid depiction of suffering and emotion could compromise the historian’s impartial posture; see further below. Then again, even the tragedians Aeschylus (39 occurrences), Sophocles (22), and Euripides (43)—granted relatively small surviving corpora—do not invoke πάθη as often as one might think. The Stoic heavyweights, however, are well represented among writers on πάθη mentioned above, with Chrysippus’ fragments alone 15

16 17

Some word counts: Aesop 13, Aeschylus 39; Thucydides 13; Euripides 43; Sophocles 22; Herodotus 26; Xenophon 18; Plato 171; Hippocratic corpus 76; Aristotle 764; Theophrastus 95, Chrysippus (fragments) 231; Polybius 8; 4 Maccabees 59; LXX Job 30.31 (ἀπέβη δὲ εἰς πάθος μου ἡ κιθάρα, ὁ δὲ ψαλμός μου εἰς κλαυθμὸν ἐμοί: my lyre has turned into pathos, my hymn into weeping—emotion by synonymous parallelism and given Hebrew original, mourning (‫) ֵא ֶבל‬, but perhaps also his suffering?), Poseidonius (fragments) 172; Diodorus 73; Dionysius of Halicarnassus—90 in Ant. Rom., 86 in his rhetorical writings (+10 in spurious texts); Strabo 52; Philo of Alexandria 536; Plutarch 827. Cf. Gilbert-Thirry 1977. For a critical overview of the sixty-work corpus see Craik 2015.

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hosting some 230 occurrences. Stoics were much concerned with such disturbances of the life in harmony with nature. So it was natural that they sought paths to ἀπάθεια or ἀταραξία: tranquillity through the management of suffering or other sense-impressions.18 The LSJ lexicon (s.v. πάθος) shows that across the sweep of ancient Greek literature πάθος had two main senses that modern English regards as distinct: (a)  that which happens to or afflicts a person; an accident, something people ‘suffer (from)’ or endure—usually in the negative sense of misfortune or calamity—and (b) something that happens within a person’s mind or soul (ψυχή): a sensation, feeling, emotion, or passion. Aristotle uses the word in both senses. In the Poetics he explains (1452b; cf. 1453b–1454a):19 ‘A πάθος is a destructive or painful action, such as someone’s death in clear view, or the pains and wounds [seen in tragedy] and all such things’ (πάθος δέ ἐστι πρᾶξις φθαρτικὴ ἢ ὀδυνηρά, οἷον οἵ τε ἐν τῷ φανερῷ θάνατοι καὶ αἱ περιωδυνίαι καὶ τρώσεις καὶ ὅσα τοιαῦτα). His Rhetoric, on the other hand, opens by listing animosity, compassion, and anger—emotions, we would say—as examples of πάθη (Rhet. 1354a: διαβολὴ γὰρ καὶ ἔλεος καὶ ὀργὴ καὶ τὰ τοιαῦτα πάθη τῆς ψυχῆς). That work is famous for making πάθος one of the three kinds of proof, which attach to the three parties in communication: the speaker’s character (τὸ ἦθος), the medium of words (ὁ λόγος), and the audience’s feeling of sorry or joy, love or hatred (1356a: λυπούμενοι καὶ χαίροντες, ἢ φιλοῦντες καὶ μισοῦντες). But Aristotle anticipates Ptolemy (above) in finding it necessary to clarify that the latter kind of πάθη are sufferings or ructions of the mind (πάθη τῆς ψυχῆς). This implies that πάθος without qualification suggested suffering, and that emotion is a derivative sense. The cognate verb πάσχω occupies the same dual track: ‘to suffer something’, but this could come from an external agent (suffering) or from disturbances of the mind (emotion). Latin passio (suffering, change, undergoing) and its cognate verb patior (suffer, undergo, meet with, endure, go through) and adjective passivus (capable of feeling or suffering, being passive or the recipient of an action) more or less overlap with the possibilities for πάθος and cognates. Two common English words, affection and disease, used to have both meanings, though today each word occupies just one track. In the past, and perhaps still in medical terminology, affection was used for a physical ailment, though popular discourse reserves it for a healthy emotion. Disease, likewise, has narrowed in meaning from any sense of being ‘ill at ease’ to a physical malady

18 19

E.g., Epictetus (Arrian), Diatr. 4.6.34. But Poet. 1460b: καὶ πολλὰ πάθη τῆς λέξεώς (‘many changes of diction’).

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only.20 Perhaps this bifurcation has to do with the western tendency to separate spirit from matter, to find ‘a ghost in the machine’ in Gilbert Ryle’s phrase. If a person feels bad and the doctor can find no ailment in the body, we say: ‘There’s nothing wrong with her; it’s all in her mind.’ Or: ‘It’s merely psycho-somatic’ (with the emphasis on ‘psycho’). This perspective is gradually changing, at long last, partly under the influence of eastern thought and with developments in physics and biochemistry. However that may be, the ancients used just one word, πάθος, for both physical and psychological conditions, apparently assuming that one kind of ‘suffering’ was implicated in the other. Medical writers could explain emotions in light of the body’s four juices, or humours (yellow and black bile, phlegm, and blood), or conversely observe with Galen that the pulse was affected by being in love.21 Josephus, as we shall see, has his own ways of fusing what happens to one and one’s emotional reactions, in the single concept and category: πάθος. This is not the place to survey the use of πάθος in ancient literature. It is hazardous to generalise, especially with authors who use the word hundreds of times. In place of a survey, I shall dip into three texts that help to contextualise the inter-cultural Josephus: the Hippocratic Airs, Waters, and Places; an early Jewish text in Greek, 4 Maccabees; and Apuleius’ God of Socrates—a second-century Latin work but one that, like Josephus’ corpus, uses Greek conceptions to communicate with Roman audiences. 2.1 Airs, Waters, and Places This late-fifth-century-BCE work uses πάθος interchangeably with νόσος for an affliction or ailment. It enjoins physicians, when they arrive in a new polis, to consider the unique environmental conditions there, for these create a baseline for understanding the physiological and moral character of the ethnos. They must not assume that humans are everywhere the same (Airs 1–2). The author explains how the different manifestations of wind and water, as well as topography, produce different kinds of people (Airs 3–11). He makes a general distinction between Europeans and Asians, the latter including North Africans. Moral overtones become clear when he says that Asiatic abundance conduces to pleasure, effeminacy, and feebleness; it cannot generate the ‘courage, endurance of hardship, industry, or boldness’ found among other peoples (τὸ δὲ ἀνδρεῖον καὶ τὸ ταλαίπωρον καὶ τὸ ἔμπονον καὶ τὸ θυμοειδές; Airs 11, 16). The physical environment shapes character and emotional make-up. 20 21

See the Oxford English Dictionary online (www.oed.com), s.v. ‘affection (n. 1)’ and ‘disease (n.)’. Cf. Lloyd 2009: 119–20.

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In Europe, the author continues, the Scythian ethnos differs from all others in lacking both intellectual creativity and procreative potency. This is because, living in the perpetual cold of the north, their men and women come to resemble each other; fat and lazy, they are uninterested in sexual relations (Airs 18–21). The author even claims that many Scythian men, having become impotent, resign themselves to living and dressing as women (Airs 22): In addition to these [prevailing conditions] there are many eunuchs among the Scythians, who act female and speak like women. Such people are called non-men (ἀνανδριεῖς). The locals attribute the cause to God, and so revere and make obeisance to these [non-male] people—each one fearing [the same fate] for himself. But it seems to me personally that these afflictions (ταῦτα τὰ πάθεα) and all others are divine: that none is qualitatively different from another in being more divine or more human. … As for this affliction (Καὶ τοῦτο τὸ πάθος): how it seems to me to come about I shall now explain. In seeking a physical explanation, the author unexpectedly blames the fact that their men virtually live on horseback. Too much riding causes the hips to seize up. When they try to relieve this condition by cutting veins behind the ears (!), they unwittingly cut off semen production. In this text, πάθος is a physical affliction, with consequences for character. 4 Maccabees (On the Sovereignty of Pious Reasoning over the Pathē) The question posed by the essay we call 4 Maccabees is whether pious reasoning (ὁ εὐσεβὴς λογισμός) is master of the πάθη. The author assures readers, almost ad nauseam, that the answer is Yes! (1.7, 29–30; 2.15–18; 3.17–18; 6.31–33; 7.1, 23; 8.28; 13.1–7; 15.1, 23; 16.1–2; 18.2). It is not surprising, then, that πάθος appears 62 times in the work’s 18 chapters, though the word is nearly absent from the Greek Bible.22 This text is all but universally understood as meaning that reason should master the emotions. If that is the meaning, there is nothing earth-shattering here: Stoicism with Judaean examples. Marcus Aurelius declares that ‘The mind free of πάθη is a citadel (άκρόπολις ἐστιν ἡ έλευθέρα 2.2

22

Prov 25.20 changes the sense of the Hebrew completely to introduce πάθος as suffering. Whereas the Hebrew compares the singer of songs to vinegar on a wound (both as healing agents), the LXX assumes that vinegar makes a wound more painful and so compares: ‘an injury that befalls the body makes the heart sorrowful (οὕτως προσπεσὸν πάθος ἐν σώματι καρδίαν λυπεῖ)’. The only other biblical occurrence is LXX Job 30.31, which likewise appears to indicate suffering.

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παθῶν διάνοια)’ (Med. 8.25), and his first examples of such πάθη are anger and lust (Med. 1.9, 17.6–7). When the opening sentences of 4 Maccabees identify gluttony, lust, malice, anger, fear, and fatigue as πάθη ruled by pious reasoning, we might yawn at what sounds like a boilerplate morality lecture. Following those opening cues, the NRSV and NETS consistently translate πάθη as ‘emotions’ or ‘passions’ throughout the work. But context suggests that the meaning of πάθος in 4 Maccabees is more complicated. Already at 4 Macc 1.7–8, the author says that he can most effectively prove the mastery of pious reasoning over πάθη by relating the stories—taken from 2 Maccabees (apparently known to the audience)—of aged Eleazar and the woman who lost seven sons during the persecution under Antiochus IV. These Judaeans all demonstrated the triumph of λογισμός as they faced death by torture. But what exactly is reason triumphing over here: mere emotions, or the horrible physical suffering, or both? In academic fashion, the author recognises that his argument cannot proceed without definitions of both λογισμὸς and πάθη. In the latter case, he says, one must decide (1.14): ‘how many forms of the πάθη there are—and whether reasoning has mastery over all of them’ (διακρίνομεν τί ποτέ ἐστιν λογισμὸς καὶ τί πάθος, καὶ πόσαι παθῶν ἰδέαι, καὶ εἰ πάντων ἐπικρατεῖ τούτων ὁ λογισμός). Using the rhetorical tactic of immediately anticipating objections and conceding the obvious, his answer is ‘No, I am not speaking of all πάθη.’ He makes a crucial distinction by twice responding to the question: If reason masters all πάθη, why can it evidently not control forgetfulness or ignorance, λήθη and ἄγνοια (1.5–6; 2.24–3.1)? It is noteworthy that he raises the question twice in rapid succession, because both times he dismisses it as laughable. His revealing answer is that, although forgetfulness and ignorance are indeed πάθη, they are πάθη of the mind or reasoning faculty (λογισμός), and so obviously the λογισμός cannot control them—any more, we might say, than a failed computer drive can reboot itself. The second time he raises the same question (2.24), he elaborates (3.1) that the πάθη that can be mastered by the reasoning faculty are body-related (τῶν σωματικῶν). This distinction between πάθη of the body and those of the mind corresponds roughly to Aristotle’s and Ptolemy’s descriptions of emotions as πάθη τῆς ψυχῆς. His concern, therefore, will be mainly not with emotions, despite the opening (above), but with πάθη of the body: physical suffering. After a forceful statement in 3.17–18 to the effect that the reasoning mind can conquer the most visceral ‘flames of frenzied desire’ along with extreme physical agonies, the word πάθος appears mainly in the stories about Eleazar (Chapter 7) and the mother of the seven sons (Chapters 13–16)—actually not in the stories or events themselves (Chapters 5–6 and 8–12), but in the author’s

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moral analysis. Obviously, the stories are not significantly about passions, emotions, or desires. They are about suffering caused by torture, which is described in hair-raising detail: whipping, burning, and the application of wheels, hooks, joint-breakers, cauldrons, thumbscrews, and claws (8.13). Of Eleazar, for example, the text says repeatedly that the old man’s reasoning triumphed over his pains and tortures (6.9, 24), and at 6.30–31 identifies these as his πάθη: ‘he stood firm even to the point of death from tortures, by his reasoning faculty according to the law; confessedly, therefore, the pious reasoning faculty is master of the πάθη’ (μέχρι τῶν τοῦ θανάτου βασάνων ἀντέστη τῷ λογισμῷ διὰ τὸν νόμον. Ὁμολογουμένως οὖν δεσπότης τῶν παθῶν ἐστιν ὁ εὐσεβὴς λογισμός). Similarly, in the case of the pious woman’s sons (8.28): ‘But the young men, though about to be tortured, neither said nor considered any of these things, for they were disdainful of the πάθη and absolute rulers over agonies’ (αὐτοκράτορες τῶν ἀλγηδόνων). If we put these cues together, the author’s point seems to be that the reasoning faculty can manage all the afflictions (πάθη) of the body, which may include anger, lust, and gluttony, but the important victory is over pain, even that of such an extreme kind that most people could not imagine bearing it. This work is not primarily about reason’s mastery of the emotions or desires, after all, but about the unspeakable sufferings a person can face if equipped with a pious reasoning faculty. If they can do even that, then the lesser πάθη of physical appetites or psychic disturbances can certainly be conquered. 2.3 Apuleius, On the God of Socrates (De Deo Socratis, on Daimones) 13 Apuleius’ essay On the God of Socrates explores the close connection between external influence and resulting emotion, in the Latin noun passio. The subject is the famed δαίμων of Socrates, which this author explains as one of a class of beings that exist halfway between gods and mortals: ‘For they are situated between us and the Gods both in the place of abode and in quality of mind, having immortalitas in common with those above and passio in common with those below.’ The fact that Apuleius should contrast the gods’ imperishable nature with mortal passio suggests that here too the word does not mean emotion, which the gods exhibit (e.g., jealousy and anger), but rather suffering or change— which for humans portends ultimate death, but from which the gods are exempt. He elaborates on the meaning of passio as it pertains to the daemones: For just like us they are able to suffer (pati) everything that either calms or incites minds, namely: they are incited by anger, moved by pity, attracted by gifts, softened by prayers, hardened by insults, delighted by honours, and they change (varient) in all other respects in the same way that we do.

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Indeed, to put it succinctly: daemones are by class animate beings, in mind rational, in soul able to suffer change (animo passiva), in body aerial, in duration eternal. … It follows that my calling them passiva is not absurd, because they are subject to the same perturbations as we are. In conveying Greek pathos language to a Roman audience, Apuleius fuses what modern English distinguishes as emotions or passions from suffering and change. In both Greek and Latin, these constituted a unified semantic field, more than in modern English. In our world, every barista or bricklayer is expected to have a ‘passion’ for what they do, a conception seemingly without parallel in antiquity. 3

Pathos in Josephus’ Judaean War: Inventory and Interpretation

Figure 3 shows the distribution of πάθος across Josephus’ works. It is obviously a useful word for him. Antiquities, with about 306,500 words, has the noun 114 times along with 226 occurrences of the verb πάσχω. Antiquities uses these words in a wide variety of ways: for punishments or catastrophes such as the Flood, for damages in Moses’ legal system, for the passions in the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, and variously in the tragic story of Herod. But the word-group is a leitmotif only in Josephus’ War. Its roughly 125,600 words include 96 occurrences of πάθος and 76 of πάσχω. I have called πάθος a leitmotif in War, first, because it features so prominently in the proem (1.1–30): five times. Interesting here is both the frequency and the fusion of the two senses we have discussed, as we can see in the quotations that open this chapter. In Figure 4 I try to separate out the senses in two columns for analytical convenience. This is not easy because πάθος often reoccurs within a couple of sentences and shifts to the other side of the table. The close connection is clear when Josephus uses πάθος alongside συμφορά (calamity, disaster), as he does sixteen times in War—marked by asterisk* in Figure 4. In some cases, πάθος appears to be a synonym for συμφορά, mere variation of language for suffering or disaster, whereas in others it indicates the emotion that issues from συμφορά. The second reason I call πάθος a leitmotif is the remarkably coherent profile of its distribution in War (cf. especially Figure 4). Given the near impossibility that Josephus calculated this, we must be impressed that he sprinkled the word around with almost geometrical precision. After salting it into key statements of the proem, he grounds the Hasmonean Revolt in πάθη and then explores πάθη involved in the tragic story of King Herod, before turning to the

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Figure 3

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Distribution and frequency of ΠΑΘΟΣ in Josephus by volume 1 occurrence = 0.5 pt line

Pathos in Josephus ’  Judaean War and Its Context Suffering, affliction (*+

µ

, **+

)

1.6 Judaean suffering in war 1.22* **suffering under war, 27* tyrants 1.121 Hyrc./Arist. avoid incurable suffering 1.328 *: pathos => lament 1.377 earthquake: * =nature 1.656

199

Emotion / passion 1.9, 11 Josephus passions (generated by 1.34 35 King suffering)** just familial affections 1.77 Aristobulus kills: envy destroys good emotions 1.195 foolish emotion of Antigonus 1.277 Herod just anger at Arabians (mastered) 1.443-44 passion (jealousy, rage) re: Mariamme 1.509 reflection on familial affections 1.544, 580, 644 emotion, compassion, temper 2.31 in right mind = free of passion

2.136 Essenes study nature to cure path 2.233 Cumanus: elite prevent incurable suffering 2.234 a murder (drove Judaeans to anger) 2.269 punishments of Judaeans in Caesarea 2.320 Florus: elite try to stop incurable suffering 2.454 suffering of Romans (in massacre) 2.469 suffering of Simon of Scythopolis ) 2.499 suffering of Judaeans in Alexandria 3.63 Galilee exempted from no suffering* 3.293 God used Romans for punishment 3.306 the suffering of Galilean Iapha 3.432 suffering of Iotapata in Galilee* 3.438 Josephus of) 3.530 Judaean suffering at Tiberias => mourning 4,31 suffering seen by Vespasian: Gamala 4.54 sufferings of Gamala 4.165 sufferings of Jerusalemites from rebels* 4.590 suffering under Vitellius tortures Vespasian 5.256 Judaeans suffered most from each other** 5.288 Titus intimidates by killing lead fighters 5.324 fake suffering of Judaeans fools Titus 5.450 pitiable capture of Jerusalemites: Titus** 5.452 rebel leaders feel nothing at the same sight 5.494 suffering is worse than dying by sword 5.513 the besieged collapse from their suffering 5.522 rebels unmoved, but Titus pities suffering 5.526 rebels like dogs, impervious to suffering 5.561 suffering (cut open) drove deserters back 6.1 the sufferings and calamities of Jerusalem* 6.12 Judaean sufferings did not weaken them* 6.39 Titus: 6.123 Romans see incurable suffering of temple 6.190 and of Lucius => Romans discouraged 6.193 unspeakable suffering in famine (=> Maria) suffering affects Judaeans 6.214 pathos reported to Romans => pity or hatred 6.218 Titus: their suffering because of unjust war 6.226 sufferings of Romans killed by Judaeans 6.253 burning of temple: supreme pathos 6.273 trapped Judaeans groan at sad predicament 6.275 pathos of temple fire greater than tumult 6.297 chariots in sky portended coming path 7.200 Machaerus I: capture/torture of Eleazar 7.202 Machaerus II: crucifixion threat unbearable

Figure 4

2.120 Essene virtue = mastery of passions feelings at

3.385 Josephus prompts various emotions in soldiers ) of Judaeans 3.479 = boldness/rashness (

4.175 most honourable passion, desire for liberty 4.200 passions of Zealots and enemies in Jerusalem 4.384 pity the noblest emotion destroyed by Zealots* 4.562 Zealots adopted passions of women 5.20 admits to showing cf. µ 5.32 emotions of besieged, many synonyms* 5.371 passions/emotions driving the civil war (stasis) 5.429 famine overcomes all emotions, esp. shame 5.445 Romans show more emotion as temple burns 5.515 famine checked all (expression of) emotions* 5.558 no emotion more potent than greed 5.566 Josephus t stifle what emotion directs**

7.390 Masada I: natural affections overcome

Inventory of Pathos in Josephus’ War

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sufferings of the Judaeans in Books 2 to 3. Book 4 matches up sufferings and passions in Galilee and Jerusalem with those in Rome during their civil war. In the climactic Books 5 and 6, use of πάθος changes as the focus tightens to the suffering of Jerusalem’s population during the siege. Josephus’ rationing of the word is clearest in Book 7, where it appears only four times. Book 7 is a wide-ranging miscellany, including Titus’ victory tour in the East, the Flavian triumph in Rome, anti-Judaean initiatives in Antioch, the provincialisation of Commagene, affairs in Egypt and Cyrene, as well as the capture of the places of refuge at Herodium, Machaerus, the Jordan Thicket, and Masada. In these diverse episodes, Josephus reserves πάθος for the taking of Machaerus and Masada, with two occurrences each amid the thematically charged language of wailing, lament, and calamity—even (cf. 4 Maccabees) positing a perverted λογισμός that overcomes natural affections at Masada (7.200, 202, 390, 401). These episodes complete the story of Judaean suffering in the war, as Josephus himself points out (BJ 7.303). His use of πάθη looks like the result of careful artistry. With the help of Figure 4, let us look more closely at concentrations of πάθος-language in War. The word first appears in the narrative as a tangle of suffering and resulting emotion kicks off the Hasmonean revolt. According to Josephus’ misleading compression of Antiochus IV’s conflicts, the Seleucid king is the first to take Jerusalem from the Ptolemies—from Ptolemy VI Philometor. The suffering that Antiochus experiences, during the long siege to capture Jerusalem, generates unrestrained passion in him, and that passion leads him to outlaw Judaea’s ancestral customs. In turn, his extreme persecution provokes those who suffer it to mount a daringly passionate defence, and so begins the Hasmonean revolt. Suffering and emotion work in symbiosis, fully exploiting the word-group’s potential (BJ 1.34–35): For Antiochus neither the conquest of the polis—beyond his hopes—nor the looting and so much slaughter sufficed. Unable to govern his passions, and in memory of what he had suffered during the siege (ὑπὸ δὲ ἀκρασίας παθῶν καὶ κατὰ μνήμην ὧν παρὰ τὴν πολιορκίαν ἔπαθεν), he compelled the Judaeans to abandon their ancestral ways and leave their infants uncircumcised, also to sacrifice pigs on the altar. Everyone disobeyed these [orders], and the most respected were slaughtered. Bacchides … tortured the notables man by man, and each day furnished the polis with a public spectacle of its conquest, until he provoked, by the excess of his injustices, those who had suffered them to boldness of defence (μέχρι ταῖς ὑπερβολαῖς τῶν ἀδικημάτων τοὺς πάσχοντας εἰς ἀμύνης τόλμαν ἠρέθισε).

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In the remainder of Book 1, pathos occurrences fall most clearly in the ‘emotion’ column. The four contrary cases range from political (1.121) or natural disaster (1.377) to the brutal death and beheading of Herod’s brother (1.328) and then the king’s own final illnesses (1.656–57). These plainly have to do with physical suffering. In the fuller emotions column, a surprise is that more than half of the πάθη are good or virtuous. This work’s generally admiring portrait of Herod has him display both naturally virtuous emotions and, even after the dark turn toward his domestic misfortunes from BJ 1.431, understandable emotions in reaction to events such as intrigue and perceived betrayal. Book 2 reverses the columns. Here we find only incidental references to πάθη as emotions, for example in notices that Essenes consider mastery of πάθη (apparently meaning passions involved in sex or anger) as the summit of virtue, and that Arabs hated both Herod and his Judaeans. Even there, however, the Essenes are said to study cures for πάθη, which presumably refers more to disease or suffering than emotion. But as War 2 charts the long build-up to war, the story is mainly one of Judaean suffering: under the governors Cumanus and Florus and among the neighbouring poleis of Scythopolis and Alexandria. Book 3 gives a similar picture, now in Galilee: the main πάθη are the sufferings of Galilean towns when Roman legions arrive. The pivotal Book 4 is noteworthy for two kinds of balance: first, between Judaeans and Romans. A theme running throughout War (from BJ 1.4) is that the Judaean civil strife was paralleled in Rome, and at the same time. Just as Judaeans suffer from their tyrants, in Gamala and Jerusalem, the Romans suffer from theirs after Nero’s death, especially Vitellius. The other kind of balance is that between πάθη as suffering and emotion. In Book 4, Judaeans’ emotions relate to the new Zealot—or ‘Disciples’ (οἱ ζηλωταί)—faction. The people’s proper passions, for liberty and pity, are squashed by the ζηλωταί and their ilk, who exhibit the most disgraceful πάθη. Books 5 and 6 form a single continuous narrative, which draws the reader irresistibly deeper into the horrors of the Jerusalem siege. There is no respite, and only changes of perspective slightly relieve the horror. Book 5 maintains the balance of Book 4, however, between suffering and emotion. Judaean suffering is now deep and ubiquitous. Aside from Titus’ rare display of force to encourage surrender, the traumas are mostly caused by Judaean tyrants, who have become beast-like in their imperviousness to suffering around them (BJ 5.452, 526), whereas Titus (with Josephus’ literary audience) is full of pity: 5.324, 450, 522. Again, emotions follow from suffering. In Book 6, by contrast, πάθη are nearly always cases of physical agony and affliction, occasionally on the Roman side (BJ 6.186, 190) but overwhelmingly

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among Judaeans. This development culminates in the greatest πάθος of all: the temple’s destruction (6.253, 273, 275, 297). Four occurrences of πάθος cluster around a single event in War 6, which represents the nadir of Judaean suffering before the temple’s destruction and a turning point in Titus’ outlook. This is the story of the noblewoman Maria’s eating of her infant son (teknophagia), the tragic associations of which Honora Chapman has expertly elucidated.23 This wealthy and dignified woman, who fled to Jerusalem just in time for the siege, finally succumbed to crippling hunger, exacerbated by incessant rebel raids on her food stores. In her impossible situation, she resorted to roasting and eating half of her child. Josephus elaborately introduces this πάθος by describing the famine conditions, then reporting the effects of her πάθος—which must here be an exemplum of catastrophic suffering—on Judaeans, on Romans, and on Titus, respectively (BJ 6.193, 212, 214, 218). The thematic working of πάθος in War is confirmed not only by the absence of such thematic coherence in the much longer Antiquities (above), but also by the absence of the word from Josephus’ autobiography and its negligible presence—four non-thematic appearances—in the Against Apion (more than 20,000 words combined). Obviously, events themselves did not require this language; it comes from Josephus’ literary art in composing the Judaean War. 4

Analysis and Implications

By way of analysis and conclusion, I offer seven summary reflections. 1. Our investigation confirms what research has been discovering on many fronts. Although long considered a work of Flavian orientation, cobbled haphazardly for the sake of regime propaganda from a range of lost sources (see Chapters 3 and 4), and/or translating an Aramaic original with superficial hellenisation by literary assistants, Josephus’ War is emerging ever more clearly as a carefully crafted and coherent Greek narrative. Its use of πάθος-language is further evidence of the tone and colour that Josephus weaves through the whole production, and of the depth of his reflection. An example will further illustrate War’s distinctive lexicon. A recurring phrase involving πάθος is ἀνήκεστον πάθος, which I render ‘incurable suffering’ in Figure 4. In all four occurrences of the phrase in this form, Josephus puts the preposition πρὶν or πρό before it, with the sense of solving a problem before the suffering should become incurable (BJ 1.121; 2.233, 320; 6.123). At BJ 1.121, Hyrcanus II reaches an accommodation with his brother Aristobulus 23

Chapman 2000.

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about the kingship, sparing the nation the ‘incurable suffering’ of a civil war between them, whereas at BJ 2.233, 320, under the prefects Cumanus and Florus, Jerusalem’s elders bend every effort (in vain) to stop the officials’ abuses and emotional reactions to them before the suffering should become incurable. Note also BJ 2.316, where leaders advise the people not to provoke Florus into something incurable beyond what they have already suffered (πάσχω). We could add three similar passages from other key moments in the same work. At BJ 2.411 Jerusalem’s leaders recognise that they are heading rapidly into incurable calamities (ὡς ἐπ᾿ ἀνηκέστοις ἤδη συμφοραῖς) when younger priests close the temple to foreign contact. At 2.455, after militants have slaughtered the garrison in Jerusalem, everyone can see that the causes of war have become incurable (καὶ κατιδόντες ἀνηκέστους μὲν ἤδη τὰς αἰτίας τοῦ πολέμου). At 2.532, when Cestius Gallus fails to subdue Jerusalem during his expedition of autumn 66, Josephus as narrator remarks that the Judaeans would be consumed by incurable calamities. In spite of all this foreboding, before the end Josephus’ character can plead with his compatriots in a speech to surrender before their calamities become incurable (πρὸ ἀνηκέστου συμφορᾶς). Even at BJ 6.123, Roman soldiers hope for a change of course, for the sake of the temple, before the πάθη are truly incurable (ηὔχετο πρὶν ἀνηκέστου πάθους μετανοῆσαι). All such phrases about incurable πάθη and συμφοραί are thematic only in War. Nothing like them appears in Josephus’ other works, even though they appear in diverse situations—Titus uses ἀνηκέστον πάθος in an ironic way (BJ 3.481)—and could have found a place elsewhere if they had been thematically fitting.24 Leaving aside the Titus passage, however, there is a clear progression in their use in War. Whereas in Book 2 wise leaders are trying to prevent Judaean reactions to abuse before disaster becomes inevitable, in Books 4 to 6 Jerusalem’s suffering is becoming incurable indeed. The futile appeals expressed by Josephus and the Roman legionaries in Books 5 and 6 only add to the tragic sense that there is no longer a way out. If we look for a possible inspiration for Josephus’ use of this potent phrase, there are not many possibilities.25 The standout candidate, it seems, is Aeschylus’ 24

25

The ‘overall lesson’ Josephus offers readers of Antiquities (1.14) is the tragic proposition that if people do not follow God’s laws, even the good things they resolve upon doing are turned into incurable calamities (τρέπεται δὲ εἰς συμφορὰς ἀνηκέστους ὅ τι ποτ᾿ ἂν ὡς ἀγαθὸν δρᾶν σπουδάσωσιν). But this is a different conception from War’s efforts to prevent political disaster, and the later work lacks War’s pervasive dramatic-tragic tension. Herodotus 1.137.4: ‘It is a praiseworthy law also that does not allow the [Persian] king himself to kill any one for a single offence, or indeed any other Persian to inflict incurable suffering on his own domestic slaves for just one cause’ (μήτε τινὰ τῶν ἄλλων Περσέων μηδένα τῶν ἑωυτοῦ οἰκετέων ἐπὶ μιῇ αἰτίῃ ἀνήκεστον πάθος ἔρδειν); Polybius 4.53.3: ‘A little

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Libation-Bearers. This is a good candidate because the Agamemnon myth in general and this play in particular were well known. More importantly, the story of the tragedy turns on an act of bloodshed—the murder of Agamemnon by his wife Clytaemnestra and her lover Aigisthos. No matter how justified it might be, as retaliation for Agamemnon’s crimes, the act will bring incurable suffering. Orestes gives voice to outrage over the murder of his father when he discovers that his sister Electra has been sent by Clytaemnestra to pour libations at Agamemnon’s grave. He remarks to the Chorus (Choe. 514–22): But it is not impertinent to enquire how she [Clytaemnestra] came to send the libations, for what reason she would try—too late!—to compensate for an incurable [act of] suffering (ἐκ τίνος λόγου μεθύστερον τιμῶσ’ ἀνήκεστον πάθος). They are a pointless gift to send to the dead, who can’t think: It is beyond me what this means. The gifts are too meagre for the fault. For if someone pours out everything possible, for just one blood-offence, it is pointless effort (τὰ πάντα γάρ τις ἐκχέας ἀνθ’ αἵματος ἑνός, μάτην ὁ μόχθος). Since the phrase ἀνήκεστον πάθος is rare in surviving literature, and Josephus makes many other allusions to the famous tragedies, and he uses this phrase precisely in the context of bloodshed and pollution generating incurable suffering for Jerusalem, it seems most likely that he is alluding to Aeschylus’ play, in a way that his cultured audience should appreciate.26 The allusion sharpens his meaning: there were many points at which the πάθος could have been avoided, had wise leaders been heeded. Once the strong men have entered Jerusalem and shed so much blood, there is nothing left to do but drink the full measure of calamity. As Orestes insists, it is too late (μεθύστερον). 2. Second, Josephus programmatically intertwines the two senses of πάθος, though possibly in a unique way. It is striking how he piles up language related to calamity, misfortune, or injury, on the one side, and emotion, lament,

26

while before these times the Lyttians had met with incurable calamity’ (περιέπεσον δὲ καὶ Λύττιοι βραχὺ πρὸ τούτων τῶν καιρῶν ἀνηκέστῳ συμφορᾷ); Isocrates, Big. 45: ‘I ask you not to abandon me to my enemies nor entangle me in the net of irremediable misfortunes’ (ὑμᾶς δ’ ἀξιῶ μὴ προέσθαι με τοῖς ἐχθροῖς μηδ’ ἀνηκέστοις συμφοραῖς περιβαλεῖν); Aeschines, Ctes. 226: ‘But, Demosthenes, you fail to ask yourself in turn what kind of a statesman he would be who, … after fleeing the dangers himself and enveloping the polis in incurable calamities, should then demand to be given laurels for his virtue!’ (ἀποδρὰς δ’ ἐκ τῶν κινδύνων καὶ τὴν πόλιν ἀνηκέστοις συμφοραῖς περιβαλὼν ἀξιοίη στεφανοῦσθαι ἐπ’ ἀρετῇ). For Josephus’ tragic allusions see Chapman 1998; Ullmann and Price 2002; Landau 2006; Mason 2014.

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mourning, or wailing on the other, no matter where πάθος falls on the spectrum between the two. We have seen this in the prologue (BJ 1.11–12), where some sentences are saturated with pathetic language. There are also non-Judaean examples, as when Josephus describes Vespasian’s torment on learning that Vitellius is emperor (BJ 4.590–91): ‘Consumed with anguish at this πάθος [apparently the suffering of Rome], he could not endure the torture, nor when his own homeland was being ruined, devote his attention to other wars …; his anger propelled him to vengeance  … (περιαλγήσας δὲ τῷ πάθει καρτερεῖν τὴν βάσανον οὐχ οἷός τε ἦν καὶ τῆς πατρίδος πορθουμένης ἑτέροις προσευσχολεῖν πολέμοις. … ὁ θυμὸς ἤπειγεν ἐπὶ τὴν ἄμυναν …).’ With such πάθη it is hard to disentangle the injury from the resulting emotion. Another Judaean example is in BJ 5.31–32. Soon after seeming to chastise himself for indulging his πάθη (emotions, or suffering?) as a historian (5.20), Josephus unrestrainedly describes the πάθη of those caught in Jerusalem, filling out his description with words relating to both their suffering and their emotional responses. 3. Although War maintains a tight connection between suffering and emotion, its use of πάθος-language leans noticeably toward the suffering pole. This is surprising because scholars have tended to view War as Josephus’ indictment of a few rebel leaders, driven by irrational passions, as the cause of the conflict.27 Our investigation has shown that Josephus uses the word-group chiefly in relation to Judaean suffering. A confluence of events in Jerusalem during Nero’s final years brought the polis crashing down, from the zenith of prosperity to the nadir of misery, in an astonishingly abrupt reversal of fortune (BJ 1.11). The clearest sign of this national πάθος is Josephus’ repeated references to his own suffering, as a Jerusalemite who suffered grievously through the events and suffers now in the telling, as the only author capable of conveying those πάθη now, with writerly πάθος. Shaye Cohen argued in a famous 1979 book that Josephus’ War and AntiquitiesLife offer different theories of the origins of, and responsibility for, the war against Rome. Cohen stresses Josephus’ observation at AJ 1.6 that Judaeans as a people undertook the war against Rome unwillingly (ἄκοντες), and at V 27 that the war was ‘not a choice but much more a necessity’ for Judaeans (οὐ προαίρεσις ἐγένετο τοῦ πολέμου πρὸς Ῥωμαίους Ἰουδαίοις, ἀλλὰ τὸ πλέον ἀνάγκη). Reading War, by contrast, as Josephus’ effort to dissociate the people as a whole from the conflict, putting the blame on a small group of revolutionaries bent on war, Cohen sees a new and more nationalistic theory of the war’s origins, consonant with other changes in Josephus’ outlook, in the later works.28 I would point out, 27 28

Most forcefully, Mader 2000: 23, 27–28, 42–43, 55–103. Cohen 1979: 154–56.

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however, that in both of the later passages noted by Cohen, Josephus directs the audience to his War. In the Life he cites the regional hostilities described in War 2 as aggravations that drove Judaeans into conflict, and remarks that he is reminding readers of what he described in detail in War. I have elsewhere argued that it is a mistake to read War as attributing the origins of the war to revolutionaries; their tyrannical and stasis-causing role— chiefly that of John and Simon—is connected with the temple’s destruction. War provides a gripping account of the humiliations of all Judaeans under Nero, which make the militant actions of some—the origins of the general unrest—understandable or even inevitable, given human nature.29 Here I would add that although War does not use ἀνάγκη cognates in this context, they would have been apt for the tragic descent into ἀνηκέστον πάθος (above) that War describes. The efforts of Jerusalem’s native leaders to prevent confrontations with the authorities were motivated by the realisation that violence would set in motion a larger and unstoppable, necessary train of suffering. 4. Returning to Josephus’ apologies for introducing πάθη in the prologue and again at 5.20: these appear to suggest that he knew clear, generic rules for writing history, and he was embarrassed about transgressing them. But it turns out to be difficult to find any such expectations in ancient literature. Polybius’ ridicule of Phylarchus’ history for its tragic features, an approach to historiography he labels ‘sordid and feminine’, perhaps comes closest (Polybius 2.56.7–10): Being keen to elicit pity in his readers and call forth sympathy (εἰς ἔλεον ἐκκαλεῖσθαι τοὺς ἀναγινώσκοντας καὶ συμπαθεῖς ποιεῖν) by his words, he weaves tapestries of women and disheveled hair and the slipping out of breasts. To these he adds the tears and lamentations of both men and women being led off—all together with children and aged parents. He does this throughout his whole history, always trying to place the horrors in each situation before our eyes (πειρώμενος ἐν ἑκάστοις ἀεὶ πρὸ ὀφθαλμῶν τιθέναι τὰ δεινά). Forget about the fact that his method is sordid and feminine (ἀγεννὲς καὶ γυναικῶδες); let us examine whether it is proper or useful for history. It is certainly not the business of a narrator to use history to shock those who encounter his work with such wondrous tales (οὐκ ἐπιπλήττειν τὸν συγγραφέα τερατευόμενον διὰ τῆς ἱστορίας τοὺς ἐντυγχάνοντας); nor should he, just like the tragic playwrights (καθάπερ οἱ τραγῳδιογράφοι), seek words [merely] assumed to have been spoken. … For the aim of history is not the same as that of tragedy; quite the opposite. 29

Mason 2016a: 60–137.

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But Polybius’ apparent exclusion of tragic and other dramatic devices is qualified when he explains that Phylarchus’ problem is that he fails to explain causes and motives. These are necessary if the reader is to share in judging where pity or anger are appropriate, equipped with criteria for fair-minded praise and blame (2.56.13–14). Polybius’ own project has strong tragic elements, with its programmatic emphasis on fortune’s incessant reversals, undoing all human ambition. Certainly, he understands the need to tell a compelling story. In any case, it seems that his most important gripe about Phylarchus was his pro-Spartan (hence anti-Achaean) sympathies. Phylarchus’ lack of even-handedness disqualifies him as a reliable historian (2.56.1–5, 61.1–12). So Polybius’ esteemed history is no anti-tragic manifesto. The old idea that there was a recognised sub-genre of history-writing of the tragic kind has disappeared from scholarship.30 Other ancient writers who mention a supposed ‘law of history-writing’ do so either to violate it, as a deliberate set-up, or to reflect on its transgression by others31—a law more honoured in the breach than in the observance. Velleius Paterculus indulges all kinds of self-reference and emotion in his Roman history, without hinting that he should apologise. Rather, he assumes that his experience of combat alongside Tiberius lends credibility to his praise of that emperor.32 In Josephus’ case, even more, his deep understanding of events in Judaea and his eyewitness participation as an acknowledged representative of his humiliated people—his outstanding credential as a historian—makes possible his depth of feeling. This is not contrived emotion for the sake of enthralling audiences, but a programmatic claim of the work. Every time he mentions his personal suffering or emotion, which his audience already knows in some measure (1.22), he is reinforcing his unique qualifications: Jerusalem was his polis. When compared to this Judaean statesman, fully engaged with world affairs and the highest levels of political analysis, the wannabe historians in Rome, all cheap flatterers of the Flavian rulers, look absurd (BJ 1.1–3). It is no coincidence that his history alone survived. Josephus was thus free to weave tragic themes into his War, and it is all the more effective for that. The benefit for him becomes clear at BJ 5.566. Despite his declared hesitation about indulging his emotions at 5.20, he fully gives in to πάθος and becomes its oracle. He speaks with quasi-divine authority, summoning heaven’s verdicts on past law-breakers to declare that if the Romans 30 31 32

Marincola 2003; MacMullen 2003. For the former compare Cicero, De orat. 1.62; Leg. 1.5; Brut. 85 with his Fam. 5.12 and De orat. 2; for the latter, Lucian, Hist. conscr. 7–9, 39–51. Woodman 1977.

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had not destroyed Jerusalem, a divine hand would have consumed it. Far from being embarrassed about πάθος, Josephus is fulfilling the promise of the proem (1.9–11, 22), to declare his own suffering with that of his homeland. 5. War regularly evokes both pity and fear, the hallmarks of tragic performance (Aristotle), both within the story and in its impact on audiences ancient and modern. Josephus declares that the sufferings of young Simon of Scythopolis, no matter how deserved they were, as he was living ‘under the curse’ of compatriot blood-letting, were certainly worthy of pity (ἄξιος μὲν ἐλέους, BJ 2.476). Throughout the later volumes, the rebel leaders’ lack of capacity for ἔλεος in the face of Judaean suffering (4.384), which gradually affects the Judaean populace as it becomes numb (5.515), provides a foil for the pity of Roman soldiers and their commander (3.530; 5.324, 450, 522). We are led to the thought that Josephus’ tragic retelling of Jerusalem’s fall, which leaves no misery unmentioned (except the unspeakable realities of rape and similar crimes), is partly for the sake of κάθαρσις, what we might call closure—in order to go on. 6. Josephus is not a moral philosopher of the kind that would treat all passions as deviations from tranquillity or problems to be overcome. He writes about good, natural, proper, and admirable emotions (e.g., BJ 1.77, 312, 509; 4.175, 384–85; 5.429; 7.390). Nevertheless, he realises that baser emotions, such as greed, often prevail (BJ 1.77; 5.558); he admires the Essenes for a way of life that excludes the pathē (2.130), and he thinks that the rebel leaders who factionalised Jerusalem and brought its downfall were driven by a kind of madness in letting their passions prevail over reason (4.200, 562; 5.371). They did not follow the path charted by the Romans in Polybius’ history, of counteracting the reversals and assaults of fortune with rational assessment, foresight, and discipline. They allowed themselves to react impulsively and be tossed about by the reversals they met. That is all true, but nevertheless Josephus gives wide scope and a crucial role to legitimate πάθη. He writes as a pragmatic historian of political affairs. 7. Josephus’ War is a pragmatic history in the Polybian vein: a history for statesmen or a cultural elite who like to think about statesmen’s issues. It is a work of political realism in its recognition that the powerful will and must rule; that justice does not enter into it; and that fortune changes things constantly. How does tragedy fit with this aim? The realist vision of the world, as we might now call it, is a tragic one. No matter what human beings intend, no matter how sincere their desire for simple justice, the survival imperative will drive them to actions they would rather not pursue—if justice could prevail in the world. That wise elders and Josephus himself could see where things were headed,

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Teiresias- or Cassandra-like, only heightens the sense of inevitability when strong men from elsewhere—John of Gischala and Simon bar Giora—bolt their hubris to Jerusalem’s fate. Josephus’ War is a deeply tragic work, with no lessons to teach about avoiding suffering in the future. It narrates Jerusalem’s unwanted suffering (πάθος), in the language of Josephus’ forceful emotion (πάθος), because it is a story of how things actually were. And are.

Chapter 9

Speeches in Josephus’ Historiography: A Neglected Example (Ananus II) in War 4.162–193 Josephus’ Judaean War includes a number of set-piece speeches, which, like his famous digressions in BJ 2.119–66 (the philosophical schools) and 3.70–109 (legionary training), pause the narrative flow and provide diversions. Antiquities has impressive orations too but, distributed over twenty volumes, they do not have the same prominence as Agrippa II’s case against revolt (BJ 2.346–401), Josephus’ against suicide (3.362–82), his sermon on Israel’s alleged pacifism (5.376–419), or the grand finale in which Eleazar at Masada calls on Greek, Indian, and Judaean philosophy to make collective self-destruction sound like sweet reason (7.341–88). Our interest in this chapter is in the function of one substantial but relatively neglected piece of oratory: the speech of Ananus II in the fateful spring of 68 CE, to stir the populace to action while the rebel ‘Disciples’1 are consolidating their power. 1

State of the Question

Why Josephus punctuates War with speeches, and where he found his material, became interesting questions as Josephus research was congealing as a subdiscipline in the 1980s and 1990s.2 Three fundamental treatments were 1 I translate ζηλωταί thus, rather than follow the standard transliteration ‘Zealots’, because the translation retains the positive sense of the Greek word familiar to Josephus’ audiences, whereas ‘Zealot(s)’ embeds the negative connotation in modern languages, which came into existence only as a result of his criticism of the group and observations about their ironic use of a noble word (e.g., BJ 4.160–61). 2 Although many factors gradually shaped the new field (inter alia the Concordance [Rengstorf et al. 1973–1983] and at least a dozen significant monographs and other reference works from 1972 to 1992), the international colloquium held in San Miniato, Italy, from 2 to 5 November 1992, was the decisive birth event. Until then, scholarly efforts were mostly individual. The colloquium brought together most of those known to be working on Josephus around the world, a bare twenty or so including our honouree, Etienne Nodet. That this encounter gave form to the field is indicated by the series of international meetings that immediately followed, the creation of a Josephus Seminar in the Society of Biblical Literature, new translation and commentary projects in several languages, and the proliferation of graduate seminars, dissertations, and collected-essay volumes on Josephus. The papers from San Miniato were revised for publication in Parente and Sievers 1994. © Steve Mason, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004545960_011

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doctoral dissertations, which had the feel of exploring uncharted territory. The most technically sophisticated, Donna Runnalls’ 1971 analysis of eight speeches in a Toronto thesis, was never published.3 Helgo Lindner’s Tübingen dissertation on Josephus’ outlook on history became an important book. It focused only on War’s three longest speeches: by Agrippa II (BJ 2.345–401), Josephus (5.362–419), and Eleazar at Masada (7.323–88).4 A decade later, Pere Villalba i Varneda sent an English translation of his 1981 Barcelona dissertation to Brill. Attempting comprehensiveness in all respects, it devoted nearly thirty pages to the thousand-plus speeches he found in Josephus’ corpus.5 Interacting with scholarship from the 1920s, before a virtual half-century hiatus in Josephus research, these investigators picked up where the pioneers had left matters. Wilhelm Weber (1921) had seen War’s speeches as part of Josephus’ miserable (‘empty and bombastic’) oriental contribution to a work he had otherwise mainly borrowed from superior, western (Roman) sources.6 Henry St.-John Thackeray (1929) had put War’s speeches in three bins: short utterances that could have been remembered fairly accurately; pre- and postcombat speeches, which probably convey the gist if not the wording of the original; and the lengthy set-piece monologues, which are the author’s ‘oratorical displays, subserving the general propagandist purpose, as he imagined it, of the work. ‘“Bow to the invincible world empire,” … that is their theme, and it is put into the mouths of the Jewish leaders.’7 Viewing War as a piece of willing imperial propaganda, Thackeray regarded the speeches as Josephus’ best opportunities to drive this message home. In contrast to those early impressions, Runnalls and Lindner independently agree that Josephus, though following Greek rhetorical conventions, crafted his orations to express his biblical-Jewish world-view. After all, he had far more control of the great speeches, which were zones of free creativity, than of his largely source-driven narrative—as was still thought. Runnalls and Lindner argue that Josephus’ world-view was profoundly influenced by the biblical prophets, especially Jeremiah. In their speeches, his characters drive home prophetic themes of submission to divine governance, via the rise and fall of great powers, and expose the folly of rebel-Zealot groups for missing this foundation of proper piety.8 3 4 5 6 7 8

Runnalls 1971. Lindner 1972. Villalba i Varneda 1986: 89–117—sent to press in 1982 (xii, xvi). Weber 1973: 15. Thackeray 1967: 43. Runnalls 1971: ii (they convey ‘his own moderate Pharisaic theological and ideological evaluation of the conflict … against the radical rebels—that is, the Zealots—whom he believed had destroyed the Temple and the state’), 346–55; Lindner 1972: 18–20, 142–50.

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Villalba i Varneda agrees about the Graeco-Roman forms and structural devices, but takes a different approach. He first divides the 1,000+ speeches in Josephus’ corpus according to whether they are in direct or indirect speech, or a mixture, before considering each major work. For War, he focuses on the same three speeches as Lindner, but with cursory attention to some shorter disquisitions.9 On the one hand, he stresses the unity of message and structure: ‘the invariable elements which form the mainstay of the three speeches’, in relation to which the rest is mere ‘complement.’10 On the other hand, he is attentive to Josephus’ care in making each speech suit the occasion and character of the speaker.11 This is not a matter of Josephus’ craft, necessarily, for Villalba i Varneda surprisingly returns to Thackeray’s question about correspondence with actual speeches given. Differing from Thackeray, Runnalls, and Lindner on this point, he tends to think that their situational appropriateness comes from the fact they largely reflect what was actually said at the time.12 All of these studies relate in some way to the programmatic, if exquisitely ambiguous, statement by Thucydides (1.22.1) concerning the speeches in his account of the Peloponnesian War. Although he did not call this work a history, its keen analytical edge and cut-glass language soon made it the gold standard for writing about the past. Thucydides explains, or at least reflects: As for the speech that each man uttered, whether when they were about to make war or when they were already in it, it is hard to recollect with precision what was said—whether what I myself heard or things that others report to me from another source. So, each man has been given to say what it seemed to me he should have said in the prevailing circumstances, though staying as close as possible to the overall gist of what was truly uttered.

9 10 11 12

Villalba i Varneda 1986: 92–105. Villalba i Varneda 1986: 99. Villalba i Varneda 1986: 94, 97, 98. Villalba i Varneda 1986: 94 (the real Agrippa was ‘on the side of the colonizers’ in giving his speech); 97 (a ‘very real’ possibility that Josephus actually spoke the words he later wrote for himself outside Jerusalem’s walls; the oration ‘may be, in certain sentences, a faithful reproduction of the words spoken at the real historical moment’, 98 (his uncertainty about whether Eleazar delivered his speech is mainly because the rebel leader lacked the culture to deliver ‘a speech of this calibre’, not because of an assumption that Josephus created speeches with little constraint from the facts).

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So truthful reporting, situational suitability, and authorial craft all come into play. Whatever Thucydides’ intention may have been, ancient writers understood him to be both authorising and illustrating the historian’s freedom in speech-writing, and most of them eagerly expanded this creative domain.13 The Josephus research I have summarised pressed different aspects of Thucydides’ declaration. Other article-length studies of War’s larger speeches have usually followed the lead of Thackeray, Runnalls, and Lindner in assuming that oratorical set pieces were zones of more or less free composition, and that Josephus exploited this valuable tool of history-writing to drive home War’s ideological purposes. Some researchers have focused on one or two speeches, seeking out their inspirations, sources, and/or programmatic messages.14 Jonathan Price makes one of the most recent efforts to consider them as a whole, finding a previously unnoticed pattern by reading them against the background of Thucydides’ picture of stasis—the political strife that is also War’s leitmotif (BJ 1.10, 25–27, 31)—as irrational. In this world of convoluted values, Josephus presents rational appeals in the speeches as unsuccessful; only the irrational arguments of Eleazar at Masada find their mark.15 These studies have in common an understandable tendency to find a coherent outlook instantiated throughout War. Villalba i Varneda agreed, even while also proposing that the speeches track what was actually said. Tessa Rajak’s analysis of Agrippa’s great speech (BJ 2.345–401) cuts a different path, and is closer to my approach here. She sees this imposing oration as tailor-made for the ruler in question, reflecting Josephus’ own socio-political tensions but with a grandeur and intensity that suit only the beleaguered king. The real Agrippa was at risk of looking like a serious failure to both Roman rulers, for failing to keep his people quiescent, and to his people, for failing to protect them from obnoxious Roman officials.16 The speech that Josephus writes for his royal friend conveys a profound realism that suits only a person in his position. He does not celebrate Roman rule, and accepts that it amounts 13

14 15 16

Polybius 12.25–25a.4f, 25i–26b, especially 12.25i.9 (Loeb numbering)—against the prevailing indulgence; Dionysius, Thuc. 16, 18; Lucian, Hist. conscr. 58. For the interpretation of Thucydides, Jebb 1907: 359–445. Among many later studies see Stadter 1973; Garrity 1998; Pelling 2000: 112–22. Sources and inspirations: Ladouceur 1983; Luz 1983. Ideology: Saulnier 1991; Stern 1987: 78 (Agrippa’s speech reflects a combination of Thucydidean realism and traditional Jewish views). Price 2007. Rajak 1991.

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to slavery of a kind, but stresses the survival need to accept great-power dominance—for now. These analyses all offer insight. My main contribution argues, nevertheless, that preoccupation with Josephus’ ideology or viewpoint is not a promising path. Ancient rhetoric did not evolve for the expression of sincere views.17 Even if a statesman’s ultimate aim was to move the audience in the direction he sincerely thought best, prophet-like frankness and self-disclosure would be ineffective at moving others, if not unintelligible to them. Persuasion required attention to one’s audience, their outlook, and their capacity to receive. Aristotle and Plutarch agreed that the great leader must be frank and truthful in principle, as a trait of good character, but only with fellow elites.18 Speech to the masses require dissimulation. This need (still understood by politicians) puts a gap between what we think and what we say, which in turn creates the conditions of irony and ‘playfulness’ of language. A historian’s use of speeches created further gaps: between the script he wrote for the character and the narrative context, and between the story line (including possibly off-kilter speeches)19 and the author’s own audience. When Josephus crafted speeches for his characters, the space between his personal views and those expressed by a character might be unbridgeable. He uses consistent themes and phrases, but—as with Simon the Idumaean, Eleazar ben Yair, or Korah expatiating on freedom20—manipulates them according to speaker and situation. He does not merely keep saying the same thing, using his speakers as robots. Each one speaks as he would, should, or might have done, and we have no means of testing whether that resembles anything actually said. At any rate, a speaker’s limited perspective within the story world cannot be simply equated with that of the hindsight-enabled author, Josephus. An example of this last point in our speech is at BJ 4.180. Weighing the possibility of capture by the Romans, Ananus expresses confidence that whatever horrors that might bring, should it ever happen—‘may the proof of these words remain unrealised!’—could not be worse than the Disciples’ brutality. Josephus and his Roman audience knew, however, that Rome’s capture of Jerusalem had occurred, and that it had involved considerable brutality, during and after the 17 18 19

20

Mason 2011a and 2012a. Aristotle, Eth. nic. 1124b; Plutarch, Statecraft 799b–801e. Cf. Mason 2005a. E.g., the great speech of Agrippa in BJ 2.345–409. The context is that Jerusalem’s populace do not desire war with Rome, and are begging the king to authorise an embassy to Nero to confirm their loyalty while seeking relief from Florus (2.342–43, 402). The speech, however, assumes an audience contemplating war against the empire. The politician answers the question for which he has an answer, not the one asked. BJ 4.271–83; 7.340–88; AJ 4.14–20.

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battles. They could not have mistaken any character’s speeches for Josephus’ ideology, but expected an ironic sensibility from any decent historian.21 Against this background, I propose another look at the relatively neglected speech of Ananus II in BJ 4.163–92: to review the content of this compact gem and consider its external as well as internal connections and impact, in the story and with Josephus’ audiences in Rome. 2

The Speech of Ananus: Overview and Content

In Josephus’ account, Ananus son of Ananus, who found himself elected to prepare Jerusalem for the expected retaliation by Cestius Gallus after the ambush of his legion (BJ 2.540–55, 562–63), has emerged as leader of the opposition to the priest-led Disciples group, which is consolidating a base in the temple compound (BJ 4.151, 159–60). Greatly strengthened by the influx of radicalised refugees from Judaea’s villages (BJ 4.133–37) and by John of Gischala’s arrival from Galilee (4.121–129), for he pretends to be an ally of Ananus while leaking crucial information to them, the initially small band of Disciples are arresting, robbing, and even killing men of status on the charge that they plan betray the mother-city to Vespasian. Vespasian himself has moved from Galilee to coastal Caesarea, from where he immediately asserts control over the coastal plain and Judaean hill country (4.138–46). He faces no detectable opposition, but the legions’ arrival has forced Judaean townsfolk to remain in place and risk being overrun to no purpose, to find some safe means of collective surrender, or to flee to the provisional safety of Jerusalem’s walls in the highlands. Some of these migrants are understandably angry at the upheaval in their lives and ready for violence. Ananus II has appeared in War as a respected former high priest (2.563, 648–54), though his brief tenure in 62 CE will be described only in AJ 20.197– 203. Within Jerusalem, as some of the refugees join the Disciples and swell their numbers, the final straw for Ananus is their ousting of the serving high priest, elected from one of the traditional families, and replacement by a man Josephus characterises as a bumpkin priest from a no-account village.22 Worried about where things are heading with this growing mass of Disciples and their associates, and still hoping that he can safely resolve the conflict with Rome (2.650–51), Ananus tries to rouse Jerusalem’s lethargic native populace to 21 22

See Plass 1988; O’Gorman 2000; S. Mason 2005a. See Rajak 2002 (orig. 1983): 132–33, with a historical corrective to Josephus concerning this Phanni (Pinchas).

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retake control of their own city from the newcomers and their friends among the dissident priests. Donna Runnalls has identified the classical parts of his deliberative speech: the emotionally charged, deeply personal introduction (exordium), 4.163–71; a statement of the logical case (narratio) with a direct challenge to the audience, if they are to preserve their liberty, 172–75; a proof (probatio), which invokes the virtue of the ancestors and the urgent need to act for the city’s advantage, 176–84; and an epilogue (peroratio), which reprises the argument and transforms it into a call for action, even at the risk of personal death, 4.185–92.23 I follow Runnalls’ analysis with one small exception. BJ 4.175 does not wholly belong to the narratio, but makes the transition to probatio, and so I would break it in the middle. Niese’s numbering was not, of course, known to Josephus. Of particular interest is Runnalls’ demonstration that the speech meets the criteria of the grand or elevated style of oratory described by pseudo-Demetrius (second century CE), in distinction from the simple or plain and intermediate styles. Grand speeches are marked by contrasts between elaborate and short, sharp periods and questions, by the predominance of long syllables, frequent superlatives, such figures of speech as asyndeton (omission of conjunctions) and aposiopesis (concision by the omission of understood words), and diction that is ‘rarefied, strange, and distinctly unfamiliar’ (Demetrius, Eloc. 77).24 Work on the Brill commentary to Josephus has furnished additional support for Runnalls’ observations in examples of rare diction—the most obvious feature of that style: 4.163 provides the first attestation of σεβάσμιος in Greek literature, though Josephus will use the word again (BJ 5.17; AJ 3.88; 18.277, 349). Although it is synonymous with σεβαστός, he reserves the latter term (used twenty-three times) for Roman emperors. 4.165: Josephus uses the compound verb ἐπιστένω (‘utter a groan’) only here and in War’s prologue (1.11), both times enhancing the work’s tragic ethos. Of just 9 attestations before Josephus, 2 are in Euripides (Med. 929) and Sophocles (Trach. 947; cf. Hesiod, Theog. 679), all the others in Philo (Leg. 3.211; Sobr. 6; Conf. 164; Ios. 217; Spec. 1.443; Flac. 168)—an example of the conspicuously shared vocabulary between these two Judaean authors. 23 24

Runnalls 1971: 97–108. Runnalls 1971: 108–111. She illustrates asyndeton with ἀκαταιτιάτοις ἀκρίτοις (4.169) and aposiopesis by Ananus’ avoidance of important issues, leaving them for the audience to fill in, at 4.169, 177.

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4.165: The adverb ἀναφανδά (‘in the open’) is attested only 36 times before Josephus, usually once or twice in scattered texts but 4 times in Homer and 7 in Dionysius of Halicarnassus᾽ Roman Antiquities, possible inspirations. Josephus has it 6 times, 3 of these in War (also BJ 4.224, 292). 4.166: ἀνεξικακία (‘putting up with wrongdoing’) is a cleverly concise noun. Although Josephus has used it in BJ 1.501, 624, it is attested only 3 or 4 times before War. The Judaean text Wisdom of Solomon 2.19 is a possible inspiration. 4.168: The adjective ἀλιτήριος has only 50 attestations before Josephus: once each in Thucydides and Polybius, 2 or 3 times in some orators, 4 in 2 Maccabees, against his 12 uses (4 in Antiquities 1–11). Seven of these are in War 4–7, 4 in this volume (also 4.245, 264, 384). 4.169: Josephus is the first attested user of the cumbersome privative compound ἀκαταιτίατος (‘uncharged’). He has it 6 times, however, all in War (1.494; 2.304; 4.169, 259, 266, 280) and mainly in the speeches of Book 4, building on this instance. 4.172: The artful compound προσθάλπω (‘find warm comfort’) appears only here in all extant Greek literature before the fifth century CE. 4.175b: The compound adjectives φιλόδουλος and φιλοδέσποτος (‘slaveryand mastery-lover’) appear only here in Josephus and are rare elsewhere. Philo provides the only other case of the former (Leg. 3.194) as well as 10 of the 13 non-fragmentary examples of the latter, the others appearing in Theognis (Eleg. 1.849), Herodotus (4.142), and Diodorus (17.66.5). Note again the striking relationship between Philo’s and Josephus’ diction. 4.183: The double compound ἐμπεριπατέω appears only here in Josephus. Of just 24 earlier attestations, 8 are in the LXX (including Wisdom of Solomon) and 14 in Philo, again illustrating their close connection, and one is in a New Testament citation (1 Cor 6.16) of the Bible. This may be considered Judaean-Greek language, therefore, stemming from the LXX rendering of the hitpael stem of ‫הלך‬. 4.184: The noun βεβαιωτής is attested only 23 times before Josephus’ 4 uses (also BJ 1.669; 2.35; AJ 1.304). His main predecessors are Polybius (twice), Dionysius (seven times), and Philo (three times). 4.189: With its interior psychological interest, the noun συνείδησις is not found in such classical literature as Homer, Hesiod, the tragedians, the early historians, Plato, or Aristotle. It makes one-off appearances in less visible places: the Seven Sages, Aesop’s Fabulae, Isocrates, the Hippocratic corpus, Democritus, Menander (4 times), Diodorus, Dionysius (5 times), and fragments of Chrysippus. Of the other 37 attestations before Josephus, most are in the New Testament (30). The word will become a

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staple of Christian writing. Its singular appearances in LXX Ecclesiastes, Wisdom of Solomon, Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, and 4 in Philo may justify our seeing it as largely Judaean and Christian. Josephus has it 4 times (cf. AJ 16.103, 212). The 2 occurrences in War fall within a short space: in Ananus’ voice here, as he hopes that rebel consciences can still be moved, and immediately afterward (4.193) in Josephus’ narrator voice, which describes Ananus’ inner reflections in the opposite vein: perhaps rebel consciences can no longer be moved. These examples illustrate Josephus’ effort to give Ananus an elevated style, as well as the at-homeness of Ananus’ speech in Josephus’ literary palette, especially that of War and Josephus’ influences from Hellenistic, and particularly ‘Philonic’, diction. We shall notice other connections with classical models below. For the moment I would supplement Runnalls by noting that Josephus weaves another kind of structure in with the formal and logical one she describes. This is a concentric or ring-compositional structure, which Josephus uses through the work, embedding symmetry at macro-, micro-, and intermediate levels.25 He draws attention to this in a later reflection on War’s composition (AJ 1.7), remarking that he arranged the material in a matching and balanced way (χωρίσας ταῖς ἰδίαις ἀρχαῖς αὐτοῦ καὶ τῷ τέλει τὴν γραφὴν συνεμέτρησα). Observe that War’s narrative fulcrum—the murder of Ananus II and Jesus (cf. BJ 7.267), not long after the speech we are studying—falls in the very centre of the middle volume (BJ 4.314–425). Just as his famous passage on the Essenes, BJ 2.119–161, has matching opening and closing sections on marriage and children (2.119–121 || 160–161), and its central panel comprises the twelve oaths of initiates (2.139–142), so here the speech opens and closes with Ananus’ personal determination to die for the laws and the city (BJ 4.163–165a || 191–192) and an exhortation for the citizens to join him (4.165b–71 || 185–90), whereas the intervening panels (statement and proof) have a more analytical character. As it happens, the centre of Ananus’ oration (among 832 words) comes at 4.177: ‘Why should one speak of the ancestors?’ This is the transition point in the central panel of the speech (4.175b–179), which concentrates potent themes of the entire work: voluntary slavery (φιλόδουλοι δὲ καὶ φιλοδέσποτοι) over against claims to freedom, the Judaean masculine character as proved by its ancestral vigour (πολλοὺς καὶ μεγάλους ὑπὲρ τῆς αὐτονομίας πολέμους διήνεγκαν), Thucydidean questions of benefit or advantage for the polis (λυσιτελὴς … καὶ σύμφορος), freedom vs. domestic tyranny (ἐλευθερίαν … φέροντες τῶν 25

Cf. Mason 2016a: 99–101.

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ὁμοφύλων τυράννων), fortune’s present backing of Rome (εἰς τὴν ἅπαξ ἡττήσασαν τύχην), and the need to excise internal threats (τοῖς οἰκείοις εἴκειν πονηροῖς) from the body politic. The following translation of the speech is interrupted by remarks on its embedded themes and the twists that Josephus’ Ananus gives to them, in his unique situation. Introduction 163 It would truly be well for me to have died before watching the house of God being filled with such accursed things: the impassable and holy spaces crammed with the feet of murder-polluted men. 164 But, wearing the high-priestly robe and being called by the most honoured of the august names, I [so far] live and love my soul, not subjecting myself to a glorious death befitting my age. If it is necessary, then, I shall go alone and, just as though in a desert, I shall give up my soul alone for the sake of God. 165 For why should one live among a populace that cannot feel the calamities, and among whom the remedy for their sufferings, though it is in their hands, has been lost? Look: When you are being robbed, you put up with it! When being struck, you are silent! And no one utters a groan, in the open, for those who are being murdered. 166 What a bitter tyranny! But why am I blaming the tyrants? Were they not nurtured by you and your putting up with wrongdoing? 167 You looked on as the first of them were forming up, when they were still few, and created more of them by your silence. By being idle while they armed themselves, you turned those arms against yourselves. 168 You should have cut off their very first forays, when they were imposing on the family members with insults. But since you showed no concern about their robberies, you provoked these deviants, and when households were utterly ravaged there was no word at all. That is why they seized the owners, and when these were dragged through the middle of the city no one rose to their defence. 169 So then, they mistreated with bonds those whom you had betrayed. I refrain from describing their number and different situations, but no one helped those who were confined—uncharged and untried. 170 The result was [our] watching those same people being murdered. Even this we have watched—just as from a herd of dumb animals the choicest one is always pulled out for sacrifice. No one emitted a sound, and certainly none moved his right hand. 171 Well, be tolerant then! Be tolerant as you see the holy places being trampled! Since you have supported all the footholds for the brazen acts of these profane [men], by all means do not cave in [when they are] at

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the top! By now they certainly would have advanced to something even greater—if they had anything greater than the holy places to dismantle. This opening salvo is saturated with thematically charged language, much of it concentrated in the most famous lines of War’s prologue (1.9–11): the historic sanctity and recent pollution of Jerusalem’s holy places, the Judaeans’ innately masculine character and contempt for death, Jerusalem’s tragic calamities (συμφοραί), sufferings (πάθη), and groaning (ἐπιστένω) or lamentation, and the deviant, profane, or obnoxious men (οἱ ἀλιτήριοι), synonymous with the contemptibles (οἱ πονηροί) at 4.187, or tyrants (τύραννοι) who have caused these evils by preying upon the cowed mass of the people. No one could doubt that this oration is woven from the dominant threads of Josephus’ War. But it is no flat ideological statement, transplantable anywhere else in War. Ananus applies these themes to his unique situation and putative outlook as a former high priest. The opening personal remarks could suit Ananus or his colleague Jesus, but few others: his wearing of the high priest’s mantle and awesome responsibility are the spur to his embrace of a noble death. He pretends to have been oblivious to his duty to stand against the Disciples until this moment. By affecting to undergo an epiphany, he can bring the audience with him in supposedly awaking to his responsibility—a tactic that Plutarch recommends to statesmen.26 Ananus’ observation about the Disciples’ tyrannical incrementalism recalls, among ancient texts, Demosthenes in 3 Phil. 21–25 (further below). In modern times, the scheme is often seen in connection with the rise of Nazi power in the 1930s: in Winston Churchill’s warnings, in poetic versions of Pastor Niemöller’s retrospective mea culpa sermons (‘First they came for the socialists …’), and in later research on German attitudes of the period.27 The common idea is that there is a chance to stop evil when it is in the bud. If we allow ourselves to become insensitive as it gradually encroaches, we find that it can no longer be stopped. Statement (narratio) 172 And so the strongest point of the city has been mastered—yes, let the temple now be spoken of as some citadel or fortress. Facing such an ensconced tyranny, and seeing your adversaries over the summit, what 26 27

The statesman should pretend to be neutral or opposed to a policy, then have others present the case so that he can seem to be persuaded, bringing the audience along with him (Statecraft 813a–c). Marcuse 2016; Mayer 2017 (orig. 1955): 166–73 (‘But then it was too late’).

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do you advise? And where do you find warm comfort for your intentions? 173 Are you going to wait around for the Romans, that they might bring aid to our holy places? Is this how public affairs stand in the city? Have we come to such a state of calamities that our enemies should take pity on us? 174 Will you not rise up, you who are so extremely care-worn, and turn to face the blows—which even wild animals are seen to do—and repel those who are striking you? Will you not remember, each of you, your private calamities and, bringing the things you have suffered before your eyes, hone your souls against them for defence? 175a We have lost that most honoured and most natural of feelings: a longing for freedom. Here Ananus tacks to one side of the dual-track policy that Josephus attributes to him (BJ 2.650–51; 4.320–21): either reach an honourable peace with Rome or fight with honour and vigour—honour being the necessary quality either way. Using various images and from different angles, Ananus provokes his male audience to live up to their proper role and nature, Judaean valour being a central theme.28 But this virtue need not be directed against the Romans, whom fortune and God have allowed to rule, if Jerusalemites can remove the malignity among themselves. It is their responsibility to take care of their own polis, not to leave this to foreigners: to show themselves men and at least superior to irrational beasts in self-respect, to exact just vengeance for their own sufferings from this violent gang, and to prove their love of freedom by ejecting those who would squash it through tyranny and ultimately cause its destruction. The striking image of honing, whetting, or sharpening souls to face mortal hazard against an enemy (τὰς ψυχὰς ἐπ̓ αὐτοὺς θήξετε πρὸς τὴν ἄμυναν) may be inspired by the widely read Xenophon (Mem. 3.3.7; Cyr. 1.2.10, 6.41; 2.1.11, 20), whereas the appealing phrase ‘longing for freedom’ (ἐλευθερίας ἐπιθυμία) appears to be Josephus’ coinage. Proof (probatio) 175b We have become both slavery-lovers and master-lovers, as if we had received the legacy of submissiveness from our ancestors. 176 But they bore the burden of wars, many and great, for the sake of self-government—for the sake of not doing what they were directed to do—and they were not defeated by the supreme power of Egyptians or of Medes. 177 But why should one speak of the ancestors? There is now a war against Romans. I shall not debate whether it is in your interest and 28

Mason 2016a: 101–106.

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advantageous, or the opposite, but what does it have for a pretext? 178 Is it not freedom—for which cause, though not tolerating the masters of the world, we are putting up with compatriot tyrants? 179 Yet one has had to obey those from outside, because Fortune has comprehensively defeated us, whereas yielding to these home-grown worthless types is ignoble and yet something we are consciously choosing! 180 Since I have once mentioned Romans, I shall not hold back from telling you what occurred to me in the middle of my words and diverted my thinking: that even if we were captured by those [people]—may the proof of these words remain unrealised!—we would have nothing more painful to suffer than what these [fellows] have arranged for us. 181 How is it not worthy of tears to see the votive offerings of those [Roman men] in the temple, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, compatriots who have stripped the spoils and done away with the nobility of our mother-city, and men left murdered—things those others [Romans] would have refrained from, if they had taken control? 182 And [to see] that the Romans have never overstepped the boundary for commoners or transgressed any of the sacred customs—watching the precincts of the holy places from afar in shuddering awe—183 whereas some born in this very land, nurtured by our own customs, and calling themselves Judaeans, amble about the holy places with their hands still hot from compatriot murders? 184 Can anyone still be anxious about the external war, then, against those who by comparison with the home-grown [men] are far more reasonable with us? If it is necessary to apply true labels to public affairs, one would quickly find that Romans are guarantors of the laws for us, and [their] enemies are those inside. The proof elaborates, as one would expect, the statement of the case. The opening nod to the ancestors’ courage in fighting against great powers for the sake of αὐτονομία (4.175–76) is doubly paradoxical: because Ananus’ opponents were presumably making the same appeal, against Roman rule, and because Josephus’ character will later insist that Judaeans never succeeded by taking up arms (5.375–419). The tension is partly resolved at 4.179, however, where Ananus remarks that fortune has blocked any such action against external powers. This leaves valour to be exercised only against internal opponents. The later speech by Josephus’ character likewise begins with an effort to blend realism, or submission to the state of things (5.362–74), with claims that fortune has given power to Rome—and anyway, Rome’s external domination is preferable to in-your-face domestic tyranny (see further Part 3).

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Conclusion (peroratio) 185 That these plotters against freedom are pernicious, however, and that one could not conceive of a fitting judgement against them for what they have done, I suppose you were already convinced when you left your houses. Before my words, you were already provoked against them by their actions, which you have suffered. 186 Perhaps most of you feel overwhelmed by their throng and their brazenness, and again by the advantage of their position. 187 But just as these things came about because of your neglect, so they will be made all the worse by dithering. Their throng, for example, is growing every day, as every worthless type deserts to those like him, 188 and inflames their brazenness until now there is no impediment. As for their occupying the superior position, yes, and they would certainly exploit it—with added preparation if we were to give them time. 189 But trust me now: if we go up against them, they will become humbler in their conscience, and reasoning will nullify the advantage of their elevation. 190 Maybe the Deity, having been so insulted, will even turn back their projectiles on them, and the irreverent [men] will be wrecked by their own arrows! Let us only make our appearance to them, and they are done for! 191 And it is well, if there is a certain risk, to die at the sacred gates and relinquish the soul, if not also for children and wives, then for the sake of God and the holy places. 192 I myself shall support you with my intention as well as my hand. From our side, no possible scheme for your security will be lacking; nor will you see any sparing of the body. The peroration recalls the emotional exordium, rousing the populace to remember their personal grievances as motives for a decisive push, finally putting an end to the tyrants’ power-grab. Ananus pledges to put his own life in the balance and to lead the fight. The speech succeeds impressively in the short term, though he will indeed pay the personal price (4.315–16). 3

Connections External and Internal

In his post-Domitianic Precepts of Statecraft,29 Plutarch advises Menemachus (802d–3b):

29

For the date see Jones 1966.

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They say that one cannot control a wolf by the ears, but a populace and a polis one must lead chiefly by the ears. … [Those who try to rule by means of bread and circuses make the people ‘wild animals’ (ἀλόγων ζῷων), 802e.] Leading a populace means leading those who are persuaded by speech / reason [διὰ λόγου]. … Just as musicians require that the touch of the strings show sensitivity, not hammering, so also with the speech of the politician, counsellor, and ruler: let it make its presence felt neither by force nor by manipulation, and let his praise come not for his fluency, artistry, or arrangement, but rather let the speech be full of uncontrived character, a truthful mindset, fatherly frankness, foresight, and a concern for understanding, possessing in addition to nobility a gracefulness and guidance that comes alike from exalted diction and fitting and persuasive thoughts. Political speech, more than judicial, allows maxims, histories, tales, and metaphors, by which those who use them can especially move their audiences—in a calibrated way and at the right moment … On the whole, dignity and grandeur are more suited to political speech, for example the Philippics and, among the orations in Thucydides, that of Sthenelaïdas the ephor, of Archidamus … and of Pericles after the plague. Though he could not yet have known Plutarch’s essay, Josephus gives Ananus a speech that matches these prescriptions, even down to the image of a populace bereft of a statesman as ‘wild animals’ (BJ 4.170; Plutarch, Statecraft 802e). Ananus’ oration is one that no ordinary person could have produced, but is worthy of his superior position and demonstrates his right to lead. Within the story Ananus’ audience responds appropriately, enthusiastically roused from their inertia and positively begging him to lead them into action against Disciples and interlopers (BJ 4.195). Plutarch’s mention of Demosthenes’ Philippics as paradigms of statesmanoratory is noteworthy because Ananus’ effort so closely parallels those canonical calls to action. Josephus’ Flavian contemporaries considered Demosthenes the consummate Greek orator,30 and investigation of the TLG shows him among the usual suspects when we search for precursors of striking diction in Josephus.31 Given that War’s other speeches also suggest influence from 30

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Cf. after Cicero’s abundant citation of Demosthenes and admission that the Philippics have been his model of statesman-like discourse (Att. 2.1.3), Pliny, Nat. 33.25; Quintilian, Inst. 2.5.16; 3.8.65; 6.5.6–8; Valerius Maximus 8.7 (ext.).1 and Dio Chrysostom, Or. 2.19. Cf. Marrou 1956: 168; Cribiore 2001: 38, 144. That is, tlg.www.uci.edu. Cf. Mason 2008, for dozens of examples (index locorum). E.g., at BJ 2.347 Agrippa’s phrase εἰπεῖν ἃ νομίζω συμφέρειν recalls Demosthenes’ Σχεδὸν εἴρηχ’ ἃ

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Demosthenes,32 it is natural to ask whether the Philippics provided particular inspiration for Josephus’ Ananus. Their setting and content indicate that they did. In the decade from 351 to 341 BCE, Philip II of Macedon was the tyrant from Athens’ point of view, steadily absorbing Hellas with few setbacks—memorably Sparta. He would soon subdue the prize poleis of Athens and Thebes (338 BCE). In the preceding years, Demosthenes repeatedly warned his fellow-citizens that they were oblivious to the impending loss of liberty. The tyrant was gaining confidence from their supine posture, and so would soon be unstoppable. Like Winston Churchill in the 1930s, Demosthenes urged his compatriots to act, whatever the risks and no matter how unwelcome the prospect of violent conflict, while they had a chance. He appealed alike to their self-respect and to the city’s history of courageous exploits from virtuous forebears. The dominant themes of the four Philippics are those of Ananus’ speech, and this already makes us wonder whether Josephus was inspired by the great orator. Details confirm the suspicion. In the First Philippic, as Philip has begun seizing Athenian assets, Demosthenes accuses the citizens of having allowed the threat to develop by their lethargy and insouciance (1 Phil. 8), by failing ‘to do what must be done’ (1 Phil. 2, 10). He tries to motivate them by recalling the city’s past victories against tough opponents (1 Phil. 3–4; cf. BJ 4.175–76). Philip has not acquired his possessions by strength alone, he declares, but by his hearers’ neglect (παρὰ τὴν ἡμετέραν ἀμέλειαν, 1 Phil. 11, 17), this anticipating Ananus almost verbatim (διὰ τὴν ὑμετέραν ἀμέλειαν, BJ 4.187). Like Ananus, Demosthenes acknowledges that the tyrant may seem unbeatable, but he advocates confrontation nevertheless as the only hope. Both speakers rhetorically withhold blame from the tyrant, who has only naturally taken advantage of weakness and lack of defence (1 Phil. 5–6; BJ 4.166). Both concede that fortune ultimately decides conflicts, but then one must be ready to exploit good fortune (1 Phil. 12; BJ 4.179). Both seize on the freedom of the polis as the ultimate motivator (1 Phil. 10; BJ 4. 175, 178, 185). Whereas Demosthenes includes a plan for successful confrontation (1 Phil. 4, 13–27), Josephus describes Ananus’ (effective) tactics in the following narrative (BJ 4.172, 186, 189, 205–7). Demosthenes realises that everything they plan in assembly will be reported to the tyrant (1 Phil. 18: εἰσὶν οἱ πάντ᾿ ἐξαγγέλλοντες ἐκείνῳ παρ᾿ ἡμῶν …), whereas Josephus mentions the inevitable spies reporting

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νομίζω συμφέρειν (3 Olynth. 3.36); and from 4 Phil. 1 [πειράσομαι περὶ αὐτῶν] εἰπεῖν ἃ νομίζω συμφέρειν (cf. close matches at Meg. 32; Exord. 4.1; 52.1). Josephus’ construction ‘If’ [‘If X were so, I would not have … but as it is …’] at BJ 2.345 and 4.240 (cf. 4.252, 255) recalls Demosthenes, 1 Phil. 1–5.

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to the Disciples just after the speech (4.196, παρῆσαν γὰρ οἱ ἀγγέλλοντες αὐτοῖς πάντα τὰ παρὰ τοῦ δήμου; cf. 208–23). By the time of the Third Philippic, Demosthenes can cite thirteen years of Philip’s incremental acquisitions, which the Athenians have tolerated (3 Phil. 21–25). This anticipates Ananus’ core argument about the Jerusalemites’ failure to react to increasing insults, albeit in a much shorter and more intense period. If action is not forthcoming, Demosthenes foresees, it will be too late for Athens (3 Phil. 19). A key verb for both Demosthenes (3 Phil. 6, 33) and Josephus’ Ananus (BJ 4.165, 178; cf. ἀνεξικακία at BJ 4.166) is ἀνέχω in the middle voice, which has the dual sense of tolerating and in that way supporting or enabling the tyrants’ moves toward domination. Further evidence of inspiration is Ananus’ language at BJ 4.172. The Disciples have achieved an ‘ensconced  / fortified tyranny’ (ἔχοντες δ̓ ἐπιτετειχισμένην τυραννίδα) in the nearly impregnable inner temple, over against the polis of Jerusalem.33 This phrase appears to be uniquely paralleled in the Fourth Philippic (8), where Philip has ensconced  / fortified a tyranny over against Attica in neighbouring Boeotia (τυραννίδ’ ἀπαντικρὺ τῆς Ἀττικῆς ἐπετείχισεν). Although the Fourth Philippic has been considered a forgery by critics ancient and modern, many or most experts today either accept it or find its authenticity plausible.34 Even if it was forged, it was early enough and so redolent of Demosthenic diction that Josephus would not likely have known to reject it, or he might have used it anyway. Altogether, then, it seems likely that Josephus looked to Demosthenes’ Philippics as a model. But slavish imitation was for schoolboys. Mature writers drew their allusions from varied sources. Runnalls pointed out biblical echoes in the speech. Ananus’ high-priestly status and lament over the temple’s pollution, important strains, find no parallel in Athenian oratory. Nor does the substantial section on Jerusalem’s position vis-à-vis Rome (BJ 4.180–84). War’s programmatic contrast between Rome’s relative benevolence and domestic tyranny matches a vein in Greek writers under the Empire, as Plutarch remarks in relation to Titus Quinctius Flamininus, the liberator of Greece:35

33

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Mader (2000: 86–87) notices the parallel. I cannot follow his argument that Ananus had to work extremely hard to rouse the populace (in historical reality), and this suggests widespread sympathy with the Zealots. In Josephus’ literary construction, the speech is an example of instantly transformative rhetoric, like that of Eleazar at Masada, which turns indifferent or opposed hearers into willing accomplices. Cf. Mason 2011a and 2012a. Worthington 1991; Trevett 1996; Hajdú 2002. Plutarch, Flam. 11.6–7; cf. 12.10 and Comp. Phil. Flam. 1.2; Statecraft 824c–e; Dio Chrysostom, 1 Regn. 82–84; Aelius Aristides, Rom. 68–69, 90–91. For a realistic assessment of early Greek responses to Roman rule as it began, see Gruen 1984: 1.316–56.

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[With few exceptions] Hellas has fought all her battles to bring slavery on herself, and her every trophy has stood for calamity and shame, her overthrow resulting mostly from her leaders’ villainy and contentiousness. Foreign men, by contrast, who appear to have only the tiniest glimmers or scarcely any commonalities of ancient ancestry, from whom it was amazing that Hellas should gain anything useful in word or thought, these men [i.e., Romans] have through the greatest dangers and labours rescued Hellas, freeing her from harsh despots and tyrants. The theme of liberation by outsiders would remain potent and malleable through modern times, not least in appraisals of the British Empire and Pax Americana. It remains to supplement such external parallels with a brief consideration of what precedes and follows Ananus’ speech in War 4, to see further how contextually embedded it is. First, despite obvious differences of speaker and situation, Ananus’ effort bears a striking resemblance to the earlier speech by Vespasian at Gamala near the book’s opening (BJ 4.40–48). In both cases, the speaker is a commander confronting a loss of heart among his audience in the face of a fearsome enemy. The speaker combines overall encouragement of his auditors with criticism and a challenge to spur them on. Both speeches begin with a reference, explicit or oblique, to the speaker’s own courage. Both proceed with an analysis of the enemy and the possible reasons for his audience’s understandable fear. Both nevertheless evoke the spirit of righteous vengeance for injuries caused by that enemy and conclude with the speaker’s rousing pledge to put himself physically in the forefront of the fight. Looking ahead, not long after Ananus’ oration come the duelling speeches of his chief-priestly associate Jesus (BJ 4.239–69) and Simon the Idumaean commander (4.272–82). Ananus is so effective in stirring the populace with his oration that they quickly confine the Disciples to the temple compound, as a prison, from where they can no longer move to injure the city. They are all but finished. Their only hope lies in external help, and the most plausible source of that is Idumaea—if they can find a suitable pretext to draw in their martially adept but usually indifferent neighbours. This they do, and soon an Idumaean force is massed outside Jerusalem’s western gate. Taking up a position in a tower over that gate, Jesus delivers a speech of the same length and quality as that of his colleague Ananus. The situation is now entirely different, however. His task is to deflate rather than arouse the audience’s ardour. He elaborates two main concerns: the pretext that brought the Idumaeans in arms and what they should do now. For each of these issues, this former high priest expertly dissects the logic with a series of ‘if’ conditions. If the charge is that he and Ananus were

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betraying the city, why trust the claim of worthless men against Jerusalem’s esteemed and proven leaders? Further, what motive would the leaders have for such a move at this point? If the leaders were doing this, where is the evidence of such contact? If it was rather the populace reaching out to Vespasian, how did they accomplish that? No, the whole charge is a fabrication to deflect attention from rebel crimes. As for what the Idumaeans should do now that they are here in any case: they can enter the city in arms but under the command of Ananus and Jesus, to help them remove the Disciples. Or they can go in unarmed as impartial observers, to see for themselves who is in the right. Or they can remain outside to monitor any attempted communication with Vespasian. If they reject all of these reasonable and decent options, they must sit where they are, excluded and unwelcome. Although the content is completely different from Ananus’ effort, Jesus’ monologue shares the same ‘grand’ register befitting the speaker’s dignity. It is replete with clever turns of phrase and rare compound words.36 Josephus draws attention to its brilliance in his conclusion: ‘Even though Jesus said such things as these, the mass of the Idumaeans paid no attention, but were only infuriated that their entry into the city was not forthcoming’ (BJ 4.270). This reinforces his picture of Idumaeans as an undisciplined, bellicose ethnos (4.224, 231), ‘savage and murderous by nature’ (4.310), who have no interest in reasoned debate or fancy talk. Jesus’ compelling appeal, so carefully constructed by Josephus, is wasted on the Idumaeans, though not on Josephus’ audience in Rome. This point is driven home by the response of their commander, Simon, which is of a different hue altogether, since it is written to suit a rough military commander. His speech, just one third the length of Jesus’, also has two main points but they are handled much more briefly: first, he throws Jesus’ fancy words back at him in mockery, dismissing his logic as typical elite ‘dissimulation’ (4.279);37 second, he promises that the Idumaeans will bring a boldness to eviscerating the city’s traitorous elite that the Disciples have lacked. Their allies inside the temple have been far too soft and forgiving. Simon needs few 36

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E.g., the rare ἐξώλης (‘abominable’) at BJ 4.239; κατασωτεύομαι (‘squander’), first attested here, παρεισρέω (‘trickle’), attested three times earlier, and the rare λεληθότως (‘imperceptibly’) all in 4.241; ἀβέβηλος (‘inviolable’) and ἐμμεθύσκομαι (‘act like a drunk’), either first or exclusively attested in Greek literature at 4.242; the rare αὔτανδρος (‘to the last man’), συνασπίζω (‘share shield cover’), and λογάς (‘picked, select’) piled up in 4.243; ἐξαγριόω (‘turn savage’) at 4.246; ἐπίπλαστος (‘fabricated story’) at 4.247; προσπωλέω (‘sell in addition’) at 4.248, this last the only occurrence in Greek literature. It does not take away from the simplicity of Simon’s speech that it includes the clever προαποκόπτω (‘cut off in advance’), attested only here before the seventh century, at 4.280. Its meaning is clear, and we should perhaps take it as his ostentatious mockery of Jesus’ fancy talk, which prefers rare terms and compounds to Simon’s robust and masculine language.

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words to make these points, which are free of recherché language or clever compounds, except where he quotes Jesus. Josephus gives each character the language that suits him. 4

Conclusion

These last examples confirm the impressions we gained from pondering Ananus’ oration itself. First, Josephus has taken considerable trouble to craft a speech suited to each character in a specific, unrepeatable situation. We have no way of knowing whether anything remotely similar was said on the occasion, though it seems unlikely. That is because of the common view that historiographical speeches were the author’s free creations, and because of the evidence of Josephus’ recurring themes and characteristic phrases in these constructions. His efforts to script something appropriate for Ananus, taking inspiration from Demosthenes, shows him fulfilling Thucydides’ prescription (1.22.1) as it was often understood in his time: Since you do not know what was actually said, write what such a speaker should have said. Second, given that Josephus constructed the speeches for particular situations, we should not expect or seek ideological conformity in them, especially not a coherent theology. Nor do they reveal, not even the speeches he gives characters he admires, Josephus’ own views of history and politics. They all express thoughts he could think, obviously, but that does not mean that they develop a single view or ideology. If Josephus had one of those, there is no reason to suppose that he wished to express it through the speeches of his characters. In general, it seems that he was more interested in conveying larger (‘meta-’) messages to his audiences about his own gravitas and competence as moral arbiter. Finally, for these reasons we should expect elements of playfulness and irony, even in the interplay between the speech-giving character and his in-text audience, to be further savoured by Josephus’ literary audience in Rome. Such devices as Ananus’ (pretend?) admission of his own indolence, as a technique for bringing his audience with him, or his confidence that a Roman conquest could not be worse than the Disciples’ treatment of compatriots, throw up more obstacles to any notion that Josephus uses the speeches to elaborate an ideology.

Chapter 10

Did Josephus Know the Bible When He Composed The Judaean War? The Elisha Episode In research on Josephus the question has arisen whether this indispensable Judaean historian knew much scripture when he wrote his first and most famous work, the Judaean War in the 70s CE. Although earlier scholars had assumed that Judaica was all he knew well, and that he required both extensive sources and the aid of literary assistants to write his works in Greek, Seth Schwartz’s 1990 monograph made a provocative case for his ignorance of scripture, in this period—before the Jerusalemite priest turned to composing the Antiquities (finished in 93/94 CE), which includes a sophisticated paraphrase of the Bible (AJ 1–11). Recently that case has been rejuvenated and developed by Michael Tuval, who builds on Schwartz and other research, as diverse as Jack Lightstone’s social-scientific study of the numinous and Daniel Schwartz’s intensive studies of Josephus, to posit fundamental differences between life in Jerusalem and that in the Diaspora, such that Josephus himself changed to become a Diaspora Jew in his later works.1 1

Stakes

As these very different studies show, the question is not one of Josephan arcana. Seth Schwartz used Josephus’ changing interests, and late curiosity about the Bible, as a platform for reconstructing elusive post-70 politics in Judaea. He argues that Josephus’ allegiances shifted after War toward the new rabbinic movement, and this encouraged his taste for scripture. Tuval paints War’s biblical innocence on a larger canvas, contrasting temple-centred piety in Eretz-Yisrael, visible in Josephus 1.0 (War), with temple-deprived and scripture-based piety in the Diaspora, found in Josephus 2.0 (Antiquities). If the proposition that Jerusalem’s most highly educated priests were not often biblically informed is plausible, one could imagine other consequences: for the nature of priestly education, general legal literacy, or the status of Torah as effective law in Judaea and jurisprudence before 70. Partly because of such 1 S. Schwartz 1990: esp. 24–44; Tuval 2011, 2013.

© Steve Mason, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004545960_012

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wide-ranging implications, but also for the non-trivial project of understanding Josephus, it is worthwhile to kick the tyres of the intriguing hypothesis that Josephus was biblically illiterate when he landed in Rome. Elsewhere I have engaged this argument from various angles.2 Here I propose to take up just one manageable test case that is easily overlooked, namely: War’s account of the prophet Elisha at the spring of Jericho (BJ 4.459–65; cf. 2 Kings 2.19–22). This is part of a geographical digression that provides background colour to Vespasian’s Judaean campaign in the spring of 68 CE. Our goal is to understand the passage contextually, as part of the work in which it stands (interpretation). As a by-product of that, we may hope to make progress with the question of the author’s biblical knowledge (historical explanation). Schwartz’s analysis of our passage is brief enough to be quoted whole as a point of reference. He writes:3 In BJ 4.460–4—the story of Elisha’s purification of the spring of Jericho in Josephus’ description of the Dead Sea region—Josephus gives an accurate account of the essential action in the miracle story of 2 Kings, but has turned the story into a display of arete (‘virtue’—i.e., magical power) by a hellenistic goes (magician). First Josephus writes up the damage formerly caused by the spring—it blighted the whole countryside—then he introduces the hero, ‘a certain Elisha, a prophet,’ and gives him an appropriate motive: the men of Jericho (not, as in 2 Kgs 2.15, the ‘sons of the prophets,’ i.e., the prophetic guild, there) received him as a guest and treated him kindly, so he rewarded their kindness by a lasting favor. Then comes the one element closely paralleled: he threw salt in the spring. But 2 Kgs’ simple prophetic command (‘So says the Lord, “I have healed”’) is replaced by gesticulations, libations, prayers to the earth (!) to sweeten the waters, and to heaven (!) to give fertility. As a result of these operations the water gains supernatural powers (in 2 Kgs it simply becomes drinkable) and was used for irrigation. All this is probably not Josephan: where else in BJ, or even in AJ, does he so hellenise his biblical material? Perhaps it is the beginning of what follows in BJ—an excerpt from a travel book on the curiosities of the lower Jordan valley and Dead Sea region. Confident that Josephus used a ‘guidebook’ for the rest of this digression, Schwartz proposes that our passage may have been part of that Greek production. 2 Mason 2011a, 2012a, 2014a. 3 S. Schwartz 1990: 33.

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A footnote adds curiously that its author (not Josephus) must have known the Bible, for he glosses the Bible’s note that the water’s quality has endured ‘until this day’ with the remark that that the beneficial water would not fail Jericho’s residents as long as they remained just/righteous. Schwartz takes this to refer to ‘the destruction of the city during the War,’ apparently concluding that the putative travel guide appeared between the war’s conclusion (70) and Josephus’ time of composition (mid-70s to 80 CE). Schwartz’s impressions may be grouped under three general propositions: (a) that the passage has little in common with the biblical story—the sole significant element in common being Elisha’s tossing salt into the spring; (b) that Josephus’ account is replete with extraordinary (note exclamation marks) hellenisations; and (c) that, since these are too extreme to posit of the priestly historian himself, the passage is ‘probably not Josephan.’ Not only did Josephus not know the Bible, in other words. His ignorance was so profound that he could use travel-guide material that was quite at odds with scripture and not notice. Prefacing each of these propositions with ‘Is it the case that …?’ provides an outline for our investigation. Does the episode show little awareness of the biblical story, and hellenise it in extraordinary ways? Has Josephus ‘probably’ borrowed it from an unknown writer? Before we take up these three questions, some basic context is needed. 2

Context

No one doubts that War contains few references to the Bible or Judaea’s ancient past—the material that will dominate Antiquities (1–13) and Against Apion. But according to Josephus himself, that is by design. That fact alone says nothing about his biblical knowledge. It is not that he needed to write something, anything, and being yet unaware of the Bible decided that perhaps the war would be a good topic. War’s proem (1.1–16) explains that he felt compelled to write about the war as a matter of urgency. Disparaging accounts of the Judaeans, amplifying the humiliation trumpeted by the Flavian triumph (Chapter 5) and ubiquitous propaganda, all designed to flatter the conquerors, were circulating and winning trust. Since those hostile accounts were full of ignorance and animus against Judaeans, he had to enter the fray as a proud Judaean nobleman who was uniquely knowledgeable about the subject from both sides. There was no reason for him to expound the Bible, whether he could have done so or not, while writing War. Having set out to write the definitive monograph on the conflict, however, Josephus faced the problem familiar to all writers: finding the optimal starting

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point.4 Classical historiography furnished precedents for including aspects of the distant past, which provided the opportunity to explore deeper causes that would not be clear from recent events alone (cf. Herodotus). In BJ 1.17 Josephus claims that he contemplated included a discussion of the nation’s character through such formative experiences as the Exodus (ἀρχαιολογεῖν μὲν δὴ τὰ Ἰουδαίων, τίνες τε ὄντες καὶ ὅπως ἀπανέστησαν Αἰγυπτίων) and their subsequent military conquests and losses—topics he will take up later in Antiquities (1.6: δηλῶσαι τίνες ὄντες ἐξ ἀρχῆς Ἰουδαῖοι). Deciding, however, that a war monograph was not the place for such explorations (νῦν τε ἄκαιρον ᾠήθην εἶναι), and anyway that others had covered that material tolerably well (οὐ πολὺ τῆς ἀληθείας διήμαρτον), he opted to begin where existing coverage ended, with only what was important for understanding the recent war. We should doubt that this amounts to a full disclosure of Josephus’ motives, or that he meant his work as a direct continuation of existing narratives in the way that Xenophon was a continuator of Thucydides.5 But he was under no obligation to make a full confession. He needed only a plausible rationale for a beginning point, so that he could get on with it. His choice was a good one. It coincides with the first encounters between Judaea and Rome in the early second century BCE. His highlighting of these contacts even from the first Hasmoneans (e.g., 1.19, 38, 48) lends the monograph a sense of shape. Though focused on the war’s immediate causes (Book 2) and course (3–6), this will turn out to be a full account of Judaean-Roman interactions (Book 2 ff.), which were largely happy and productive, before the catastrophe of 66 CE and following. Moreover, the material on the aftermath of Jerusalem’s fall (Book 7) structurally matches the long prelude of the Hasmoneans and Herod in Book 1. The structural device of large-scale ring composition, with matching panels at each step moving toward and away from the centre, in the middle of Book 4 (see Chapter 5),6 give substance to Josephus’ later observation (AJ 1.7) that he arranged War so as to create balanced opening and closing sections. Josephus’ assumption in War’s prologue that he was capable of treating Judaea’s ancient past becomes explicit at BJ 5.237. In a digression on the Jerusalem temple and priestly service, in the context of Titus’ siege (70 CE), he points out that much remains to be said about the relevant ‘customs and 4 On contested starting points see Thucydides 1.23.3–6, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Thuc. 10, and especially Polybius, 1.5.1–3; 3.1.1–3; 4.2.1–2. 5 Xenophon, Hell. 1.1: ‘After these things [related by Thucydides to 411 BCE], not many days later.’ 6 To take only the most obvious outer ring: 1.33 (three sentences into the narrative) ends with a promise to discuss more fully the temple of Onias in Egypt, a promise fulfilled near the very end of War (7.421–31).

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laws’ of the Judaeans, which he cannot include here. He will return to that as a separate subject at a later time. Again, this agrees with his reflection in AJ 1.6–7 (above) that he had considered including the ancient material in War but preferred to make the work a balanced treatment of its main subject. Writing War offered no opportunity to explore the peerless Judaean constitution and the nation’s ancient history (Ap. 1.40). Clearly, Josephus’ claim in War that he could have included the biblical history does not compel us to believe that he had such an ability. But this is his posture, and it requires a plausible explanation. Why would he say such things, which are incidental to War’s purpose and need not have come up at all, if he had never given any thought to the Bible, the ancient history of the Judaeans, or the laws of Moses in detail? Josephus’ earliest work, we should nevertheless agree, is not about scripture. This point may seem trite, but it is worth stressing if we are to avoid the sort of thinking that would treat all ancient survivals as equally, mechanically, corresponding to underlying realities. Thus, if a work makes little use of scripture, the author could not have known it.7 Evidence is not self-interpreting. It only becomes evidence in relation to an investigation of some question, such as the one we are now pursuing, and interpreting evidence requires careful attention to its context (see Introduction to this volume). War also presents Josephus to his Roman audience as a Judaean priest and national spokesman, expert in his people’s ancient texts and folklore (1.3, 26; 3.352 with 2.417; 5.419). His contemporary subject, he says, requires him to be content with echoes and allusions to the older material: to his people’s exotic ancient oracles (often invented, to be sure, or at least generously massaged), to himself as a Jeremiah-like figure, to Jeremianic images of murderous rebels and temple polluters and having to eat one’s children as a divine punishment, even to Danielic chronological schemes and hopes, beneath the surface of the work.8 How should we explain all of that? War’s few explicit biblical references occur mostly in just one of its halfdozen display speeches (Chapter 9). This is the one delivered by his character, Josephus, by order of Titus, to the besieged inhabitants of Jerusalem, reportedly in their own language. During the siege, Titus alternates between carrots and sticks in his effort to effect a rapid, low-risk surrender of the city. Here, Josephus is ordered to produce another carrot (5.360–61). His own parents, first wife, and family remain in the besieged city, he says, and this adds to the emotional force of his appeal (5.419, 533). 7 Tuval 2011: 407: ‘However, if anyone checks how much Bible he really knew in War, and compare [sic] it to Antiquities …’ (my emphasis). 8 E.g., Mason 1994; Spilsbury 2003; Ferda 2013.

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He actually makes two speeches. Only when his preferred—brief, masculine, straightforward—appeal to realism fails to move his audience does he resort to high-flown rhetoric. He has no choice but to change registers in this way, and to summon ancient historical examples, in an argumentative tour de force (δ᾿ ὡς ταῖς φανεραῖς οὐκ ἔπειθε συμβουλίαις, ἐπὶ τὰς ὁμοφύλους μετέβαινεν ἱστορίας, 5.375). A similar problem will confront Eleazar of Masada. When his brief and simple masculine appeal to reason fails, he must argue the absurd position, via abstruse Indian philosophy, that life is futile and should be ended forthwith, for freedom comes only with death (7.320–89). In both cases, the speaker must propound unpromising theses out of desperation, knowing that high-flown rhetoric is likely to work (5.420–22). And it largely does. Josephus’ introductory language implies that his oration is a desperate exercise in persuading by all available means, not a leisurely exegesis of scripture in shul. Sincere thoughts are irrelevant. He seizes the amazingly bold thesis—at odds with his earlier glowing treatment of the Hasmoneans—that Judaeans have never achieved anything by arms, and indeed consistently fail when they use weapons (5.376, 386, 390). Such contrived oratory would not seem suitable material for assessing Josephus’ knowledge of the biblical stories he invokes. The exercise assumes rather his expert ability to manipulate familiar stories in ways that no one had imagined before, because the situation and Titus require it. Yet scholars who argue that Josephus could not have known the Bible take his glaring departures from scripture at face value. He really knew little of the Bible!9 Our passage in Book 4 has the advantage of not being part of such oratorical fireworks, composed (notionally) in an emergency and displaying his resourcefulness. This does not mean that it lacks rhetorical constraints, for they governed all ancient communication. But it appears in a context very different from the speechifying of Book 5. In this part of Book 4 we hear the ostensibly authoritative voice of a narrator attempting to put his literary audience in 9 S. Schwartz 1990: 28–32. Schwartz’s explanation of Josephus’ use of traditional material (‘Josephus is probably responding to charges that he was unconcerned with Jewish tradition,’ 28) is puzzling, given that no such charges are known, that War is a proudly and vehemently Judaean account of the war, over against foreign slander (1.1–8), and that the use of biblical and other canonical examples by Josephus’ character makes rhetorical sense—in a literary context Schwartz does not discuss. Having failed with his preferred straight talk, Josephus must address compatriots who cling to Jerusalem’s walls from some notion of piety and hope for divine protection. His ad hoc reworking of the tradition seeks to undermine that view and hope. It says nothing about the author’s knowledge. It might rather imply that author and character had such a complete command of Judaean cultural material that they could turn it to any purpose.

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the picture, by sharing privileged information that only he, their trustworthy Judaean guide, could supply about the environment of his exotic homeland. The narrative setting is the late spring of 68 CE by our calendar. Tightening the noose around the fortified Judaean capital, Vespasian camps his Fifth Legion Macedonica in Emmaus to the west of Jerusalem before proceeding northward via Samaria to Jericho in the east (4.443–50). Josephus interrupts his account of the encirclement (4.486) to show off his local knowledge—this being the foundation of his claim to authority (1.1–8)—with a digression on the favourable situation of the Jordan Valley (4.451–58), the oasis of Jericho (4.459–75), and the remarkable properties of Lake Asphaltitis (or Dead Sea; 4.476–85). His audience might well have heard about both the Dead Sea’s amazing properties and the nearby exotic plants.10 He, the priest from the region, can now offer them exclusive knowledge. War has mentioned this region a number of times. An early passage connected with Pompey in 63 BCE (1.138) identifies the Jordan valley as Judaea’s most fertile region with abundant palm and balsam trees. Also there, Josephus implies his first-hand knowledge. Our expert even describes the technique for extracting the prized juice from the exotic balsams, which had been exhibited in the Flavian triumph (Pliny, Nat. 12.111–13). In the same narrative, BJ 1.361 laments Marc Antony’s transfer of Jericho’s prized palms and balsams to Cleopatra. Likewise, Antiquities’ first mention of Jericho will express admiration for its fertility, palms, and balsams (AJ 4.100; cf. 325; 5.77). Given Josephus’ fascination with the region, its fame with his audience, and these earlier references in War, it is hardly surprising that he would seize the opportunity now, as he narrates Vespasian’s advance into the same region, for a fuller digression. His incidental indications of his first-hand knowledge of the place, throughout his works, cast doubt on the proposition that he needed some other source for this. 3

Josephus against the Bible?

Our interest is in the Jericho section of the Jordan-Valley digression, because Josephus enlivens it with the biblical story of a feat accomplished by Elisha, which changed the nature of the region. To reach a fair assessment, we should begin with the Bible itself. That typically spare story is set centuries after the conquest of Canaan (late ninth century BCE). The hairy, belt-wearing prophet Elijah the Tishbite 10

E.g., Strabo, Geogr. 16.2.41–44.

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dominates the narrative from 1 Kings 17 to 2 Kings 2. Already in 1 Kings 19, Elijah follows the divine directive to name Elisha son of Shaphat his prophetic successor (19.16: ‫ ; ַתּ ְח ֶתּיָך ְלנָ ִביא‬OG: εἰς προφήτην ἀντὶ σοῦ), symbolically throws his cloak over him, and takes him on as an aide-apprentice (1 Kgs 19.21). Although the reader assumes Elisha’s presence with Elijah from then on, he does not become visible again until the older prophet’s final hours, when they cross the Jordan River together. This day-trip is possible because Elijah’s mantle has special powers: when he touches the fast-flowing current with his clothing, a dry path opens for them to cross (2 Kgs 2.8). Before Elijah is caught up into heaven, from a spot in Transjordan, Elisha manages to secure his grant of a double share (‫י־שׁנַ יִ ם‬ ְ ‫ ִפּ‬, διπλᾶ) of his potent spirit (2.9), on the proviso that Elisha observes his ascension to heaven. He makes sure that he fulfils this condition, never dropping his gaze. Equipped thereafter with Elijah’s discarded mantle, Elisha is likewise able to tap the water at will for a dry crossing. This puts him back on the west side in Jericho. Elisha’s new potency fairly radiates from him. It is visible at a distance to the ‘sons of the prophets’ resident in Jericho, though they assume at first that Elijah remains alive (2 Kgs 2.15). His new power is also the rationale for our episode, which is his first opportunity to display it (2.19–22): The people of the city said to Elisha, ‘Please look: though the setting of the city is good, as my lord sees, the water is bad and the land causes bereavement [from lost children].’ So he said, ‘Bring me a new bowl and put salt there [in it].’ They brought it to him. He went out to the source of the water and threw the salt there, and he said ‘So says the Lord, “I have healed this water; no longer will death and bereavement come from it.”’ And the water has been healed until this day, in keeping with the word that Elisha spoke.11 This compact story is ripe for creative interpretation. Why were the water and land so baleful? Why specify a new bowl and salts? Does Elisha have a motive for assisting the people of Jericho? Is there any doubt that he could have done so if he wished? If so, what would be the point of receiving the double portion of Elijah’s spirit? Does his power operate automatically, at his discretion ‫אָרץ‬ ֶ ‫מֹושׁב ָה ִעיר טֹוב ַכּ ֲא ֶשׁר ֲאד ֹנִ י ר ֶֹאה וְ ַה ַמּיִ ם ָר ִעים וְ ָה‬ ַ ‫ישׁע ִהנֵּ ה־נָ א‬ ָ ‫ל־א ִל‬ ֱ ‫אמרוּ אַנְ ֵשׁי ָה ִעיר ֶא‬ ְ ֹ ‫וַ יּ‬ ‫ְמ ַשׁ ָכּ ֶלת‬ ‫ֹלחית ֲח ָד ָשׁה וְ ִשׂימוּ ָשׁם ֶמ ַלח וַ יִּ ְקחוּ ֵא ָליו‬ ִ ‫חוּ־לי ְצ‬ ִ ‫אמר ְק‬ ֶ ֹ ‫וַ יּ‬ ‫אתי ַל ַמּיִ ם ָה ֵא ֶלּה לֹא־יִ ְהיֶ ה ִמ ָשּׁם‬ ִ ‫ֹה־אָמר יְ הוָ ה ִר ִפּ‬ ַ ‫אמר כּ‬ ֶ ֹ ‫ְך־שׁם ֶמ ַלח וַ יּ‬ ָ ‫ל־מֹוצא ַה ַמּיִ ם וַ יַּ ְשׁ ֶל‬ ָ ‫וַ יֵּ ֵצא ֶא‬ ‫וּמ ַשׁ ָכּ ֶלת‬ ְ ‫עֹוד ָמוֶ ת‬ ‫ישׁע ֲא ֶשׁר ִדּ ֵבּר‬ ָ ‫וַ יֵּ ָרפוּ ַה ַמּיִ ם ַעד ַהיֹּום ַהזֶּ ה ִכּ ְד ַבר ֱא ִל‬

11



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and command—as the mantle apparently does? However one answers these questions, the people of Jericho put their requests to him, in 2 Kings, because they assume that he is in a unique position to help them with his evident Elijah-power. The Greek translation of 2 Kings usually renders Hebrew idioms with a wooden, phrase-for-phrase literalism: The men of the polis said to Elisha, ‘Look, the living situation of the polis is fine, as the Lord (?) sees, but the water is rotten and the land makes people childless.’ Elisha said, ‘Bring me a new water container and put salt there.’ They brought it to him, and Elisha went out to the spring of the waters and there threw the salt down and said, ‘So says the Lord: I have healed these waters; death and childlessness will no longer come from them.’ And the waters were healed—until this very day—according to Elisha’s utterance, which he spoke.12 The larger vocabulary of Greek required choices, however, which suggested nuances despite the translators’ conservatism. So, in the Greek version the water is not merely ‘bad’ (some Greek terms might have suggested moral failure or lack of beauty); it is miserable, pernicious, or rotten. The possibly more generic Hebrew ‫( ִעיר‬city, town, settlement) becomes a Greek πόλις—the expected rendering, but unavoidably shaping the picture. Hebrew ‘bowl’ becomes more specifically a ‘water vessel’ (ὑδρίσκη). On the other hand, the translators use the same Greek κύριος for two distinct Hebrew terms, thus creating possible ambiguity about who should observe Jericho’s favourable situation: Elisha the human dignitary (adoni) or the Lord God. In later tradition the story was mined, like the rest of the biblical narrative, for its moralising potential. Haggadists emphasised the closeness of Elisha and Elijah, so much so that when the angel first descended to take Elijah he had to delay because he found the pair deeply engrossed in conversation. Some interpreters understood the double portion quantitatively, inferring that Elisha performed sixteen wonders over against Elijah’s eight. The water miracle of Jericho—number two on this list after Elisha’s first mantle deployment to return from Transjordan—provided grist for sermonic mills. Some rabbis 12

Καὶ εἶπον οἱ ἄνδρες τῆς πόλεως πρὸς Ελισαιε Ἰδοὺ ἡ κατοίκησις τῆς πόλεως ἀγαθή, καθὼς ὁ κύριος βλέπει, καὶ τὰ ὕδατα πονηρὰ καὶ ἡ γῆ ἀτεκνουμένη. 20 καὶ εἶπεν Ελισαιε Λάβετέ μοι ὑδρίσκην καινὴν καὶ θέτε ἐκεῖ ἅλα· καὶ ἔλαβον πρὸς αὐτόν. 21 καὶ ἐξῆλθεν Ελισαιε εἰς τὴν διέξοδον τῶν ὑδάτων καὶ ἔρριψεν ἐκεῖ ἅλα καὶ εἶπεν Τάδε λέγει κύριος Ἴαμαι τὰ ὕδατα ταῦτα, οὐκ ἔσται ἔτι ἐκεῖθεν θάνατος καὶ ἀτεκνουμένη. 22 καὶ ἰάθησαν τὰ ὕδατα ἕως τῆς ἡμέρας ταύτης κατὰ τὸ ῥῆμα Ελισαιε, ὃ ἐλάλησεν.

Did Josephus Know the Bible When He Composed The Judaean War? 239

figured that Elisha’s provision of free potable water would have angered those who had made a business of selling the ancient equivalent of bottled water. When those men harassed Elisha, he cursed them and caused a thick forest to appear all around the city, filled with bears. These hungry animals devoured the businessmen. Although there was a kind of justice in this, Elisha had to pay for the impulsive misuse of his power—following the Bible’s implication that this was indeed discretionary and automatic, rather than requiring petitionary prayer for each instance.13 Some rabbis and Christian authors were uneasy with the magical possibilities of the biblical story and assumed, though 2 Kings does not suggest this, that Elisha must have prayed to God before the stunning transformation of the spring water. Elisha’s presumed petition even became a model of prayers impressively answered by God with conspicuous healing effects, though such a prayer is conspicuously not there.14 This brings us to Josephus. Before proceeding with War, I would make a general point about his freedom as an author in relation to the Bible. We see this clearly in the Antiquities, where his declared purpose is to present biblical law and narrative in accessible Greek, and where no one doubts his access to and knowledge of the text (AJ 1.5–26). Antiquities follows the biblical story of Elijah and Elisha closely in many respects. It describes Elisha’s early designation as Elijah’s successor (προφήτην Ἐλισσαῖον ὑπ᾿ αὐτοῦ γενήσεσθαι, 8.352), Elijah’s covering him with the cloak (8.353), and his leaving home to become Elijah’s ‘student and attendant’ (8.354). Even though Josephus makes a point of saying that he will relate Elisha’s feats, however, because they are ‘illustrious and worthy of historical treatment’ (9.46), Antiquities omits the episode concerning Elisha at Jericho. One could imagine many reasons, including the obvious one that this is one of the few biblical episodes he has already retold in War. But he makes countless omissions of a similar kind. We see everywhere in Antiquities that he controls his narrative, which he wrote for particular purposes in a unique situation. He plainly feels no responsibility to mediate his sources just for the sake of it, without regard for the need of intelligible communication.15 Even more conspicuous than Antiquities’ omissions are his constant alterations of biblical language and generous additions, to suit those themes and structures. We need only think of Abraham’s philosophical 13 14 15

See Ginzberg 1913: 4.239–40 with documentation and notes in 6.343–44 (= Ginzberg 1956: 602–603). b. Ber. 55b; Apostolic Constitutions 7.37. Louis Feldman published both of the most comprehensive studies to date, one mishnaic and the other midrashic so to speak, in 1998a and 1998b.

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enlightenment, Joseph’s virtuous encounter with Potiphar’s wife, Moses’ enhanced birth, youth, exploits as a general in Egypt, and Romulus-like death, or Solomon’s Aristotelian researches, authorship of thousands of books, and cures for demons, to remind ourselves of the scale of Josephus’ inventiveness16— even if much of it reworked oral traditions known to him. ‘Hellenisation’ is a problematic term for this reworking, if we take it in the sense of pure, non-hellenic source material consciously rendered in a Greek form, but however we call it, Josephus obviously makes a serious effort at inter-cultural communication in reworking the Bible for his audiences.17 How, then, does War’s earlier account of Elisha at Jericho relate to the biblical story, to Josephus’ ways of elaborating the Bible in Antiquities, and to other creative reworkings such as we have canvassed? What does it suggest about Josephus’ level of biblical literacy? It is time to quote his passage in full: 4.459 Beside Jericho, however, is a spring that is both abundant and luxuriant for irrigation, in the area of the ancient city that grew up there, which Joshua [Jesus] the son of Nun, a general of the Hebrews, took by the spear—the first in the land of the Cananaeans. 460 Word has it that originally this spring hampered not only the fruits of the earth and trees, but also the offspring of women, as it was thoroughly sickening and destructive to all, but it was reclaimed for human use and made the opposite of what it had been—now wholesome and most productive—by Elisha the Prophet. This man was a close acquaintance and also successor to Elijah. 461 Having been welcomed as a stranger by those in Jericho, and because the people treated him with exceptional kindness, he repaid both them and their country with an everlasting favour. 462 He went out to the spring and threw down into the current a clay jar full of salts. Then he extended his just right hand to heaven and, pouring out soothing libations on the earth, enjoined her to soften the stream, and to open up sweeter veins; him [heaven] to mix into the stream more productive airs 463 and to give the locals abundance of produce together with a succession of children—that the water productive of these goods might never fail them, as long as they should remain just. 464 Adding to these prayers all kinds of expert manual effort, he changed the spring and made the water that had formerly brought them orphanhood and famine become the chorus-producer of large families and plenty. 465 Consequently, it has such a power in irrigation that, if it once touches the 16 17

Cf. AJ 1.154–57; 2.39–59, 205–53; 4.323–31; 8.42–49. See Feldman in n. 15.

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241

countryside it gives a higher yield than those [floodwaters] that produce plenty by remaining long [in the soil].18 Let us begin by noting what seem indisputable signs of the author’s biblical knowledge, whoever the author is. 1. He knows that bountiful Jericho was the first city conquered by Joshua. This is a decisive event for Israel’s history in the Bible (cf. Joshua 1–6) as also in Antiquities’ paraphrase (5.1–34). 2. He knows that Jericho had been a city of the Cananaeans, a term that Josephus uses (72 times in Antiquities 1–9) for the Canaanite inhabitants of the land west of the Jordan. War uses this word only three times: here and in a passage (6.438–39) describing two previous masters of Jerusalem—Melchizedek, the Canaanite king and high priest, and King David, who took the city from Canaanites. The Hebrew Bible’s 63 occurrences (‫ ) ְכּנַ ֲענִ י‬mainly occur from Genesis to Judges (57) and all refer to the land’s original inhabitants. War’s Elisha passage agrees with the rest of Josephus’ corpus in reflecting, indeed requiring, biblical knowledge of the kind displayed in Antiquities. 3. He uses the term ‘Hebrew(s)’ in a knowing, biblical way. The Bible’s 35 (Hebrew) or 27 (Greek) occurrences, from Genesis to Jeremiah, refer to the ancient Israelites. Josephus’ usage elsewhere agrees, much more conspicuously because he uses the term ten times as often. This is the first of 303 occurrences in his corpus, and almost all of them occur in the biblical paraphrase of Antiquities 1–11. Outside of that major section the same usage occurs, of the Judaeans’ ancient forebears: in his character’s speech 18

4.459 Παρὰ μέντοι τὴν Ἱεριχοῦν ἐστι πηγὴ δαψιλής τε καὶ πρὸς ἀρδείας λιπαρωτάτη παρὰ τὴν παλαιὰν ἀναβλύζουσα πόλιν, ἣν Ἰησοῦς ὁ Ναυῆ παῖς στρατηγὸς Ἑβραίων πρώτην εἷλε γῆς Χαναναίων δορίκτητον. 460 ταύτην τὴν πηγὴν λόγος ἔχει κατ᾿ ἀρχὰς οὐ μόνον γῆς καὶ δένδρων καρποὺς ἀπαμβλύνειν, ἀλλὰ καὶ γυναικῶν γονάς, καθόλου τε πᾶσιν εἶναι νοσώδη τε καὶ φθαρτικήν, ἐξημερωθῆναι δὲ καὶ γενέσθαι τοὐναντίον ὑγιεινοτάτην τε καὶ γονιμωτάτην ὑπὸ Ἐλισσαίου τοῦ προφήτου· γνώριμος δ᾿ ἦν οὗτος Ἠλία καὶ διάδοχος· 461 ὃς ἐπιξενωθεὶς τοῖς κατὰ τὴν Ἱεριχοῦν, περισσὸν δή τι φιλοφρονησαμένων αὐτὸν τῶν ἀνθρώπων αὐτούς τε ἀμείβεται καὶ τὴν χώραν αἰωνίῳ χάριτι. 462 προελθὼν γὰρ ἐπὶ τὴν πηγὴν καὶ καταβαλὼν εἰς τὸ ῥεῦμα πλῆρες ἁλῶν ἀγγεῖον κεράμου, ἔπειτα εἰς οὐρανὸν δεξιὰν ἀνατείνας δικαίαν κἀπὶ γῆς σπονδὰς μειλικτηρίους χεόμενος, τὴν μὲν ᾐτεῖτο μαλάξαι τὸ ῥεῦμα καὶ γλυκυτέρας φλέβας ἀνοῖξαι, 463 τὸν δὲ ἐγκεράσασθαι τῷ ῥεύματι γονιμωτέρους [τε] ἀέρας δοῦναί τε ἅμα καὶ καρπῶν εὐθηνίαν τοῖς ἐπιχωρίοις καὶ τέκνων διαδοχήν, μηδ᾿ ἐπιλιπεῖν αὐτοῖς τὸ τούτων γεννητικὸν ὕδωρ, ἕως μένουσι δίκαιοι. 464 ταύταις ταῖς εὐχαῖς πολλὰ προσχειρουργήσας ἐξ ἐπιστήμης ἔτρεψε τὴν πηγήν, καὶ τὸ πρὶν ὀρφανίας αὐτοῖς καὶ λιμοῦ παραίτιον ὕδωρ ἔκτοτε εὐτεκνίας καὶ κόρου χορηγὸν κατέστη. 465 τοσαύτην γοῦν ἐν ταῖς ἀρδείαις ἔχει δύναμιν ὡς, εἰ καὶ μόνον ἐφάψαιτο τῆς χώρας, νοστιμώτερον εἶναι τῶν μέχρι κόρου χρονιζόντων.

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to the besieged of Jerusalem in BJ 5.160, 381, 388, 443. Much the same may be said of ‘Elisha the prophet,’ as we shall see in the final section. 4. He knows that Jericho’s conqueror, whom he styles the ‘general of the Hebrews,’ was Joshua son of Nun (the patronym is spelled variously in Greek, even in Antiquities). This detail is not necessary for his Elisha story. This author intelligently links the two very different biblical stories concerning Jericho. This accurate conjunction requires a basic level of biblical knowledge. 5. That Josephus is not merely recounting a stray story that he or a guidebook author had heard about a wonder-worker named Elisha (Schwartz: ‘he introduces the hero, “a certain Elisha, a prophet”’) is clear because he knows and stresses Elisha’s unique association with Elijah, though his audience might have had no clue of Elijah’s significance. The connection is crucial to biblical Elisha’s identity, and so it is noteworthy that Josephus thinks it important to mention (with γνώριμος), even in such a brief episode about Elisha alone. He is showing off his local expert knowledge. 6. The Bible emphasises, as we have also seen, that Elisha’s status arose from his early identification as Elijah’s successor. This is another detail extraneous to the Jericho story but knowingly captured by the author, with διάδοχος. This is the mot juste, because it efficiently reflects the biblical phrases as well as his own programmatic interest in the royal, high-priestly, and prophetic successions, from Judaea’s ancient past.19 7. Nor can we neglect War’s telling remark, noticed by Schwartz but assigned to the imagined guidebook author, about the durability into perpetuity of the spring’s transformation. The biblical author notes that it has endured to his day (i.e., the spring still does its work), whereas Josephus injects a typical moralising tone in saying, anticipating AJ 1.14, 20, that it would endure as long as the people remained just. There is no suggestion in War (pace Schwartz) that this condition has failed or the spring no longer functions because of the war. It is a simple moral condition, which anticipates the moral lessons of Antiquities. These seven points, when joined with what Schwartz concedes is Josephus’ basic agreement with the Bible on the main event of the spring’s transformation by the prophet’s application of salt, preclude the possibility that the author of this passage did not know the Bible. He plainly knew at least the main post-Mosaic story of the nation’s life in Canaan, the time of the Hebrew ancestors and prophets. Such knowledge enabled him to include details not needed for the Elisha story in War. These details, which would presumably 19

Kings: AJ 8.197; 10.25, 274; 20.261; high-priests: 20.224, 261; prophets: Ap. 1.41.

Did Josephus Know the Bible When He Composed The Judaean War? 243

have been eroded by constant oral retelling of a freestanding pericope about Elisha alone, were supplied by an intelligent and literate author attempting to convey biblical narrative in keeping with his literary interests. 4

Elisha: Hellenistic Hero Rather Than Biblical Prophet?

We turn now to Schwartz’s proposal that Josephus’ source has recast a biblical miracle story as the feat of a Hellenistic-style magician (goes) displaying his raw power (arete), also praying and sacrificing to the earth and sky in a most unprophetic manner. Schwartz connects other perceived variations from the biblical account with these motives. 1. Readers might assume from Schwartz’s summary that his Greek descriptive terms (goes, hero, arete, prayers to the earth) are in Josephus. So we must begin by clarifying that this is not so. No cognate of γόης appears anywhere near the Elisha story. This is a word group that War uses for political disturbers,20 and so it would be out of place as a description of an actual seer. Nor does ἀρετή appear here, though Josephus likes the word and uses it nearly 300 times—nearly always with the sense of moral excellence, not magical power. Again, it would be most unsuited to Elisha, even if Josephus had wished to portray him as a magician. He does not and the word is not there. Nor is there any mention of heroes. The language that Schwartz finds so alien to biblical conceptions is language he supplies. It is not in Josephus. 2. The ‘gesticulations, libations, prayers to the earth (!) to sweeten the waters, and to heaven (!) to give fertility’ that Schwartz considers redolent of hellenised magicians, not biblical prophets, likewise do not appear in this way. Is Elisha’s ‘extending his righteous/just right hand to heaven’ comparable to a magician’s gesticulation? In fact, it is a standard gesture of pious petition in the Bible as in Josephus.21 Elisha’s extension of a righteous or just hand to heaven signals the prophet’s moral qualification for making his appeal—assuming the same piety-and-justice criterion for divine favour that Josephus will thematise in Antiquities.22 As for the libation (‫נֶ ֶסְך‬, σπονδή), this is a biblical form of sacrifice, by its nature ‘poured out’ below the offerer, usually but not always on an altar (Gen 35.14). 20 21 22

BJ 1.224; 2.261, 264, 565; 4.85; 5.317. 1 Kgs 8.22, 54; 2 Chr 6.13; Neh 9.27–28; Lam 3.41; cf. 2 Macc 14.34; 15.21; 3 Macc 5.25; 4 Macc 4.11; Josephus, AJ 11.143. E.g., AJ 1.14, 20, 183; 2.28; 3.190; 4.180; 8.49; 13.299–300. For piety and justice/righteousness as the virtues required for divine favour: AJ 1.21; 6.160, 265; 7.338, 341, 356, 374, 384; 8.121, 208, 300, 314, 394; 9.16, 236, 260; 10.50; 12.43 etc.

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Nor does Josephus quite say that Elisha prayed to the earth and sky. He describes Elisha’s address to the earth and sky with the middle voice of αἰτέω. Is there any prospect in this story that Elisha, after ordering up the clay vessel and salt, is merely asking heaven and earth for a favour—unsure whether his instructions will be honoured? Since he gives his detailed orders with the confidence of a prophet, the verb seems to have the sense of enjoining, or conveying his demands. Josephus retrospectively refers to the prophet’s directions/demands with a word (εὐχή) that we normally translate as ‘prayers,’ but that is in Jewish and Christian contexts, where wishes addressed to the omnipotent deity are in effect prayers. The word itself does not require the sense of petition. In other contexts it means only wishes or aspirations: things hoped for (see LSJ s.v.). That sense is recommended here because Josephus uses this word after the instructions to earth and sky, explaining that Elisha went on to make these wishes/demands a reality with all manner of expert manual operations (πολλὰ προσχειρουργήσας ἐξ ἐπιστήμης) not further clarified. Such instructions to earth and sky are not traditionally Judaean, admittedly, though there are parallels in Jesus’ ‘rebuke’ of the wind and address to the sea (Mark 4.39). Rabbinic tradition reflects unease about a character such as Honi the circle-drawer (ha-ma’agel), who seemed to be able to direct nature with divine acquiescence—in the way of Elijah and Elisha.23 They were authorised prophets; Honi was not. In Josephus’ account, at any rate, there is no indication of Elisha’s praying to heaven and earth as gods and making petitionary requests. We seem to see rather literary licence and narrative balance. The problems were a toxic stream emerging from deadly land that produced bad crops and killed children. While soothing the malevolent heaven and earth, the prophet enjoins them—chiastically—to resolve these matters: earth to change the nature of its water, heaven to mix in the vital airs needed to produce both crops and human issue. It does sound rather Greek and Stoic, but that is not unusual in Josephus. The same may be said of his presentations of Pharisaic and Essene views of the afterlife in BJ 2.151–66. On ‘air and land’ see the final section. In any case, how different are such prophetic directions to nature from the original biblical stories about the power emanating from Elijah’s mantle to part the Jordan on contact (no prayers needed at all), or about Aaron’s rod and Moses’ staff? The biblical version of the Elisha stories comes closer to suggesting magical effects (cf. the mantle), with salt from a specified new vessel being applied the spring. Elisha’s technical expertise, unmentioned by Schwartz, is 23

See b. Ber. 19a; Taan. 19a, 23a.

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also typical of Josephus’ naturalising of the biblical story, as we shall see in the final section. 3. Whereas 2 Kings mentions the problem of bad water and child-killing earth retrospectively, in the appeal of the residents to Elisha, Josephus asserts the narrator’s privilege of setting the scene. Schwartz appears to consider this a departure from the Bible. But Josephus is only making inferences from what later happened, with little creative expansion. He even signals this modest elaboration: ‘Word has it that originally this spring thwarted not only the fruits of the earth and trees, but also the offspring of women, as it was thoroughly sickening and destructive to all.’ 4. One of Josephus’ undoubted amplifications is his claim that Elisha healed Jericho’s land and spring because he had been treated well by the locals. Schwartz again focuses on Josephus’ departure from the Bible here, suggesting that the author (and compiler Josephus) must have been ignorant of 2 Kings 2.15, which has the city’s prophetic guild and not the townsfolk entertaining Elisha. But the ‘sons of the prophets’ in the biblical passage do not extend hospitality. They bow and perform obeisance to Elisha, in recognition of the power they see emanating from him. There is no contrast here with the hospitality described by Josephus. He is doing something else, and it is characteristic of his narratives. Josephus has an abiding interest in the quintessentially Greek virtues of hospitality (ξενία and related) and reciprocity for such generous treatment of strangers.24 For example, the biblical story of Melchizedek mentions that he greeted Abraham with bread and wine but it focuses on Melchizedek’s blessing of the patriarch, before ending with an unclear remark about one of them giving a tithe (of something) to the other (Gen 14.18–20). Josephus’ reworking (AJ 1.181) stresses Melchizedek’s extraordinary hospitality toward Abraham’s army with feasts and provisions, and spells out that Abraham gives Melchizedek a tenth of his military spoils in recognition of this kindness. Both accounts develop typically Greek categories not featured in scripture. But they are not strange departures that prove Josephus’ ignorance of the Bible. They are what we expect of this author, in Antiquities as in War 4. 5. In Schwartz’s hellenistic-magician reading, ‘the water gains supernatural powers’ and is also used (against the Bible) for irrigation, whereas ‘in 2 Kgs it simply becomes drinkable.’ Although it is true that Josephus adds claims about the Jericho spring’s irrigational properties, he evidently does this because of contextual considerations in his own work, which were not anticipated in the Bible. Recall that he includes this episode not for the sake of telling old tales, 24

E.g., AJ 1.164, 194–96, 200–201, 259, 136; 4.105; 6.342; V 142.

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but as part of his explanation of the region’s world-famous fertility, known to Roman audiences in his time. How is that fertility possible, given the harsh conditions of the burning desert sun and the lethal lake Asphaltitis nearby, conditions that he stresses? Explaining that the Jericho spring, having been transformed by Elisha, provides the valley’s only water apart from the Jordan River, he can celebrate its luxuriant effects: ‘this spring irrigates an area larger than all others and covers a plain 70 stadia long and 20 wide, nourishing in that space the finest and most abundant parks.’ There grow the world’s best date-palms, balsam, cypress, and myrobolanus. It is Josephus’ context in War 4, not his biblical source, that leads him to elaborate on the spring’s extraordinary effectiveness for irrigation. There is nothing supernatural about this. Josephus concludes by marvelling that in contrast to a river’s flood plain (the Nile valley is the most obvious referent), which is made fertile by long periods of saturation, the spring of Jericho achieves its results by mere contact with the surrounding soil. I am no botanist and neither was Josephus, but the scientific truth of his claim is beside the point. He seems impressed, or he gives the impression of being impressed, that the fertility of Jericho’s environment is very different from a flood plain such as that watered by the Nile’s world-famous inundations. Josephus describes other such natural wonders, much in the spirit of Pliny the Elder. Compare the wondrous glass-making sand near Ptolemais (BJ 2.189–91) or the lethal-to-touch but curative rue plant of Machaerus (7.178–85). These are not supernatural, but amazing natural wonders. He is justifiably amazed by the irrigational success of the spring at Jericho, and drives home this boast about his homeland by tracing all it to the transformation achieved by one of his nation’s great prophets long ago, recalling and embellishing a biblical story. The biblical episode becomes an aetiological story. But it is not an example of hellenistic magic, and it does not show Josephus’ ignorance of the Bible. 5

Did Josephus Write the Elisha Story?

We have observed some lines of connection between War’s account of Elisha at Jericho with Josephus’ world of discourse and literary project. This little story is another example of his pride in Judaea’s peerless ancient narratives. It remains to consider other indications that the reworking of the Eisha story is his own. The following examples are selective, but selectiveness does not tell against the argument in this case. Half a dozen examples of conspicuous intersection between this pericope and the distinctive themes and vocabulary in Josephus’ work speak for his ownership of the passage. Phrases that are not

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conspicuously thematic or distinctive, or hapax legomena, do not strengthen the case but neither do they count against it, since every writer includes terms common to others along with more characteristic language. 1. The adjective δορίκτητος (‘taken by the spear’) is attested in the TLG corpus25 only 36 times before Josephus, most of those in the earlier Hellenistic historians with whom he has much in common, Diodorus Siculus (14) and Dionysius of Halicarnassus (7). Josephus has the word twice. His other occurrence is in AJ 4.166, where it refers, as in our passage, to the Israelite conquest (there of Transjordan, before the expeditions in Canaan). This suggests that War 4 anticipates Antiquities, tapping the same language pool in Josephus’ thought. 2. Josephus uses προφητ-language more than 400 times, with extraordinary consistency. Virtually the only candidates for this family of terms are Judaean or Israelite figures of the distant past.26 The time of prophecy (though not accurate prediction or inspired insight) is long past. He will not call any gifted seer a prophet: none of his contemporaries, not his beloved Essenes, and not even himself, though he claims unique gifts from the Deity.27 The last person to exercise prophecy was John Hyrcanus, nearly two centuries before his time (BJ 1.68; AJ 13.300). Josephus’ phrase ‘Elisha the prophet’ in our passage (not ‘a certain Elisha, a prophet,’ pace Schwartz) is entirely characteristic. He will use precisely the same phrase of Elisha in AJ 9.88, 178, and 183. 3. Josephus’ reference to Joshua ben Nun as the Hebrews’ strategos is not an obvious or necessary word choice. But it too anticipates his fuller account in Antiquities (cf. AJ 5.13 with 117 in summary and programmatically 1.13). 4. The compound verb ἀπαμβλύνω (‘thwart, hinder, blunt’) is rarely attested before Josephus (13 times, partly in fragments), though it will later become more popular. Josephus has it twice, the other occurrence at BJ 3.327, where he is describing, from his Judaean perspective, the Romans overrunning his base at Iotapata. It is not plausible that Josephus used this unusual verb in Book 3 and then happened to find it in a guidebook, and borrowed it in Book 4. 5. The adjective γόνιμος (‘fruitful, productive’) is not rare. It is used often by medical and scientific authors. Philo, whose vocabulary often anticipates 25 26 27

www.tlg.uci.edu: a practically exhaustive and flexibly searchable database of known ancient and mediaeval Greek texts, including fragments. The reference to ‘Cleodomus the Prophet’ at AJ 1.240 comes in a quotation from Alexander Polyhistor. See Feldman 1990.

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that of Josephus, has it 36 times. It is noteworthy, however, that all 5 occurrences in Josephus fall in War 3–5, all around our passage, and 4 in comparative or superlative forms as here. The first 4 instances are likewise in geographical digressions, on Galilee and Judaea; the fifth is a sarcastic comment on the rebel leaders’ productiveness of misery. Although Josephus finds no use for the word in his much longer Antiquities-Life or Apion, it looks like his compositional choice in War 3–5 generally and in our passage. 6. The verb φιλοφρονέομαι (‘treat with kindness’) is also not strange, but Josephus uses it significantly more often than any writer attested before him (19 times; cf. 3 in Philo). Its appearance in our passage, the last of the 7 occurrences in War, supports Josephus’ authorship. 7. Of the first 200 hits for αἰώνιος (‘everlasting’) in the TLG corpus, 177 belong to the Septuagint. Of the next 200, the vast majority come from pseudepigrapha, Philo, the New Testament, and Josephus. The word is not uniquely Judaean and Christian, but it is predominantly so, and Josephus has this adjective 16 times. Its appearance in our passage again recommends his authorship over that of a source. 8. In all surviving Greek literature, Josephus is only the second writer (after Aeschylus, Pers. 610) to use the artful adjective μειλικτήριος (‘soothing’), and it does not turn up again for another half-millennium after him. What are we to conclude, then, when we find this very rare word both in our passage and in the speech of Josephus’ character outside Jerusalem in War’s next volume (5.385)? It strains credulity to suppose that another author also happened upon this fancy word and Josephus, who uses it in his own speech elsewhere, borrowed it.28 9. The unusual metaphorical use of χορηγός (‘chorus-director, producer’) in this passage may be compared with BJ 2.131 and AJ 6.342, where God is said to be the χορηγός of life. 10. Seemingly overlooked in the hellenistic-magical interpretation of Josephus’ account is that he gives a characteristic natural-scientific twist to a biblical story that, as we have seen, itself suggests a magician’s display of power. This quasi-scientific interest pervades Josephus’ corpus, as he seeks to bring the otherworldly into the world of human beings. Thus he opens the Antiquities with the surprising proposition, for readers of the Bible, that ‘pretty much everything hinges for us on the wisdom 28

Not as extreme is the case of the rare compound verb ἐγκεράννυμι (‘mix into’ in my translation). Of its first 20 occurrences in the TLG database, about half are in fragments of authors. Hits number 21 and 22 are both from Josephus’ War: our passage and 1.324.

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11.

29

of the lawgiver Moses’ (1.18). Really? Not the peerless divine revelation? He does not back away from this premise, but rather insists that the following treatment of laws and deeds boils down ultimately to the principles of Nature (φυσιολογία, 1.18). That is why Moses, in contrast to Greek fabulists, predicated his laws on the rational observation and deduction, and began with Creation (1.19–21). Josephus never doubts the divine origin of the laws, of course, but his explication in both Antiquities and Against Apion focuses on their unmatched quality as a political constitution, which is proven not by resort to their divine origin but by the fact that they have stood the test of time and continue to inspire emulation (Ap 2.156–81, 279–86). This perspective is deepened in Josephus’ portrait of Abraham and Solomon as pre-eminent philosopher-scientists (above), and it explains his interest in the admired Essenes’ research into the therapeutic properties of stones and roots (BJ 2.136, 159). It suits this outlook that Josephus portrays Elisha in War 4 as not merely commanding the spring and earth to become more productive, in a feat of uncanny power, but as applying expert know-how to the reconfiguration of the spring for productive irrigation. God helps those who help themselves. If we focus on Josephus’ ‘prayers’ to heaven and earth, finally, we miss the more obvious point that the passage’s assumptions about the elements, though they are by no means unique in Greek literature, fit with Josephus’ narrative. With a certain technical precision, Elisha directs earth to make the water less harsh and open sweeter subterranean veins into it, heaven to mix into the stream more productive airs (4.462). Josephus does not mean by ‘air’ just what we think of by this word. First, he accepted the ancient notion of the elements—earth, air, fire, and water—which he found represented in the four colours of the temple veil, along with the reality and efficacy of the zodiac (BJ 5.312–14). Second, he assumed that the heavenly realm above comprised two levels: the pure upper ether (αἰθήρ), where souls dwell, and air (ἀήρ) as the environment of mortals below.29 Most striking is Solomon’s speech and prayer dedicating the first temple in Antiquities 8. Solomon observes that God pervades heaven, air, earth, and sea, and these in no way exhaust his presence (8.107). But still he wants to be able to pray from this one place on the earth into the air above this location (8.108), in the consolation that God is also here. Although he realises that God is in all, the king stands and ‘extends his right hand toward heaven,’ precisely as Elisha in our story, to address God (8.111). On the former, BJ 2.154; 6.47; on the importance of airs for various products of nature, BJ 3.516–19; 4.471; 7.298.

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Conclusion

Our task in this chapter has been to examine BJ 4.459–65, one of the work’s few explicit uses of the Bible. We have asked what the passage assumes by way of the author’s biblical knowledge, in what ways the author has ‘hellenised’ the story, and whether Josephus himself is that author. Our starting point was a set of scholarly proposals to the effect that the passage shows no direct knowledge of the Bible, that it turns a biblical miracle into the feat of a hellenistic magician, and that Josephus—who did not know enough about the Bible at this point to care—must have borrowed the account from some other author. These proposals could have significant implications for larger issues in our understanding of Josephus and his audiences, and of Graeco-Roman culture in Judaea or Judaean culture in Rome. This investigation has produced several conclusions. First, it would be difficult to explain the existing text on the hypothesis that Josephus did not compose it. Not only does it use terms such as ‘prophet,’ ‘Hebrews,’ ‘Cananaeans,’ and ‘general’ in ways that anticipate his characteristic language in Antiquities, and could not be expected of non-Jewish Greek authors, but other rare vocabulary that turns up rarely in ancient literature is found here and occasionally elsewhere in War. More fundamentally, the whole tenor of the passage—its claim to expert local knowledge of things only rumoured among others, and Josephus’ eagerness to convey his special knowledge of Judaean culture and geography—fits with his purpose in War and with many other passages. This is an aetiology story for the famous bounty of the Jericho region. Second, his alterations to the biblical account fall in two categories: those necessitated by his particular context in War (especially the emphasis on the spring’s extraordinary value for irrigation) and the kind of ‘hellenisation’—i.e., conversion of ancient Hebrew stories into common values and categories of his time—that we find throughout his writings, especially in Antiquities’ biblical paraphrase. His introduction of a hospitality-reciprocity motive, chiastic instructions to the elements, and incorporation of technical science all make sense in these contexts. At bottom, finally, the passage could only have been written by someone who knew the basic biblical narrative. Only such an author could have had the intelligence to juxtapose Joshua ben Nun as first conqueror of Canaanite Jericho with this story from centuries later. That author can hardly be anyone other than Josephus. He wrote this episode as a small but deliberate contribution to his uniquely expert, Judaean narrative of the war.

Part 3 Judaean Realia

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Herod’s Final Curtain: What to Do for an Encore? When we think about King Herod we tend to focus on his status as a Jew. Was he truly Jewish, only half-Jewish, or Idumaean and perhaps pagan? Did he observe Jewish law and treat his Jewish subjects well? We gravitate toward such questions partly because we see Herod from within Jewish or Christian tradition, partly because the physical remains of his palaces and other structures invite these reflections, and partly because the only biographical material that survives intact, by Flavius Josephus, predisposes us to think this way. Josephus’ fullest account of Herod’s life occupies nearly four volumes of his Judaean Antiquities (93 CE). Josephus had particular fish to fry in that work. One theme unifying its twenty volumes concerns the Judaean ‘constitution,’ as he calls the law code delivered by Moses, considering it the finest known to humanity. Herod is the most famous ruler whom Josephus measures against the constitution and finds wanting. That work presents Herod as a ruthless tyrant and violator of the nation’s laws, who duly paid the price in an agonising death. Herod’s horrible end matches those of other rulers, Judaean and Roman, who abandoned the laws of God, which reflect the laws of Nature, and therefore came to grief, in illustration of the work’s moral lessons (AJ 1.14, 20). But that was only one way to tell of Herod’s life. Josephus himself had written quite differently about the king in his Judaean War (70s CE), because his purposes were different. There he was describing the origins of the recent Judaean-Roman conflict. In order to explain the regional situation leading to the war, which was one of harmonious and productive relations between Rome and Jerusalem, he began with the Hasmoneans, who were quick to make alliances with Rome (BJ 1.19, 38, 48). But he devoted most of the work’s first and longest volume to Herod. This book describes the king as a larger-than-life character of remarkable strength and courage, and a close ally of the Roman emperor Augustus, who was generous to cities inside and beyond his kingdom. In describing Herod’s final years, War adopts the tragic tone of reversal that will colour the rest of that work, all the way to Jerusalem’s fall in 70 CE. That is, despite the king’s achievements as a statesman and public figure, he was undone by forces beyond his control on the domestic front. Mischievous fortune brought him down by means of the women in his household (BJ 1.431, 665). Criticisms of Herod in War come from his detractors, which Josephus as narrator refrains from endorsing or contradicting.

© Steve Mason, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004545960_013

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These different portraits of Judaea’s most famous king, by the same author, combine with the extraordinary material remains from Herod’s buildings, artwork, and coins to prompt new questions about his reign in recent scholarship. My focus in this chapter is on the crisis precipitated by his death. Herod’s demise created a crisis indeed for Judaea, for the region, and for Rome. Josephus’ War implies, without spelling out the reasons or the connecting links but dwelling on the succession problem (BJ 2.1–110), that the failure to find a successor contributed to the regional conditions that eventually generated war with Rome. Political scientists of a ‘realist’ persuasion point out that in international relations all leaders of states act in strikingly similar ways, no matter what religious or moral values they profess, or in modern times what party they belong to. This is sometimes called the ‘tragedy’ of interstate politics: no matter what a government’s professed values, it must act in a narrow range of ways to secure the state’s vital interests.1 Because no authority greater than the state can be expected to protect those interests, ‘self-help’ is the ultimate recourse. As Hillel famously asked (m. Avot 1.14), ‘If not I, who is for me?’ I invite the reader to join me in rethinking King Herod’s place in the region of Coele-Syria (southern Syria)2 and the crisis created by his death from this perspective of realist politics. 1

Herod’s Achievement in Regional Perspective

To say that Herod was a tool of Roman imperium (‘controlling power’), which he undoubtedly was, is not to say that he was only that. Like the rulers chosen by modern imperial powers to be their agents in faraway places, he was a real human being whose personal ambitions coincided to an acceptable degree with the needs of the ruling power. Herod saw himself as a powerful king in the Hellenistic tradition, a self-animated player with a large circle of his own hard-won friends and clients, a great man of endless resources who influenced affairs far beyond his royal turf.3 Of course he did not see or present himself as a puppet whose strings were pulled in Rome. His palaces and public buildings 1 Mearsheimer 2001 and Lebow 2003; more generally, Morgenthau 1954 and Waltz 1979. 2 In Roman political geography, Judaea, Samaria, and Idumaea, along with the coastal and Decapolis Greek cities and the territories of petty kings allied with Rome, were part of the massive province that stretched from the Euphrates to Egypt. The southern region, including these areas, was often labelled Coele- (‘Hollow’) Syria. 3 See Jacobson and Kokkinos 2009.

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proclaimed his greatness always, Rome’s only secondarily at best and where that was politically expedient. To appreciate what Herod achieved for Judaea, we must glance back at the Hasmoneans before him and then at the Roman conquest. Before the revolt against the Seleucid king Antiochus IV (in 167 BCE), for more than three centuries Judaea was the small area of landlocked countryside surrounding Jerusalem. The Judaeans were one ethnos (nation or people) among many in the area. The coastal cities from Gaza to Ptolemais (Akko), Tyre, and Sidon hosted very different cultures, fusions of ancient Philistine and Greek elements. Idumaea sat nearby to the south, Samaria to the north, the Greek cities of the Decapolis to the northeast, and Arabia to the south and east. The remarkable diversity of topography and climate in southern Syria had, after centuries of foreign rule, left an ethnic kaleidoscope in its pockets and plains. Each people and polis had its own customs, calendars, cults, and (sometimes) coins. As far as we can tell from meagre evidence, this environment posed no serious problems for Judaea before the mid-second century BCE. Then, for reasons that remain partly obscure, in the 160s BCE Judaea became suddenly isolated and vulnerable, even threatened with extinction. In response to Antiochus IV’s moves against distinctive Jewish practices, the priestly Hasmonean family exacted a high enough cost that he soon left Jerusalem to them. As they gradually increased their strength through a variety of shrewd political manoeuvres, this family proceeded to do what realist politics would prescribe. Having faced near extinction, they took advantage of rapidly diminishing Seleucid strength in southern Syria to launch a countervailing Judaising programme there. For nearly a century, especially the four decades from 120 to 80 BCE, they absorbed, colonised, or removed the surrounding populations. By the mid-70s BCE, much of southern Syria was under Jerusalem’s control. This domination was not merely a matter of revenge for what had happened under Antiochus. It was a question of survival. By opportunistically annexing territory, gaining wealth, and building a large standing army (albeit one increasingly dependent on mercenaries), Hasmonean Judaea became the regional power (hegemon) of the south, whose assistance even the fading Seleucids requested. The Hasmonean expansion left a complicated legacy for both Judaeans and their neighbours. Its undeniable success would remain for posterity a shining example of patriotic courage and its possibilities. Yet even or especially during the decades of greatest success, Judaean groups opposed the dynasty’s resort to violence. They were so appalled by the blood-stained hands of the high priests Hyrcanus I and Alexander Jannaeus that their opposition ignited civil wars. Some dissenting groups dissociated themselves from the government. As for

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Judaea’s neighbours, of course, they were not at all pleased about falling under Jerusalem’s rule. The Greek cities of the region were proud centres of culture, and the Hasmoneans would be remembered by them as bullies.4 When the Roman general Pompey arrived in the area (64/63 BCE), therefore, he was seen as a liberator of the territories acquired by the Hasmoneans. Their regional dominance ended abruptly. It was not in Rome’s political interest to tolerate nationalist expansion by others, and Pompey removed most of the Hasmoneans’ acquisitions. The Romans were perfecting the principle, later borrowed by the British and other imperial powers, of pacifying subject populations by encouraging antagonism among them.5 It served those interests to restore the independent Greek cities and regions such as Samaria. This was not done out of love for any of the subject peoples, or admiration of their culture. It was a necessary political move. At one stroke, Pompey created allies who were extremely grateful for liberation from Hasmonean dominance and created a dynamic equilibrium of rivalry and competition for Rome’s favour. This recovery of the pre-Hasmonean status quo was soon qualified, however, by Rome’s recognition that Idumaea, Galilee, and coastal Joppa, though they had been non-Judaean before the Hasmonean expansion, were now thoroughly Judaean, and further that Judaean minorities were now established in many Greek cities. This forced the question: What was the optimal way to govern such a complicated region? So-called ‘Coele-Syria,’ now unravelled from Hasmonean control, was part of Rome’s enormous province of Syria, which extended from modern Turkey in the north to Egypt in the south. Syria’s administration, led by a senatorial proconsul at first (later an imperial legate), had to be based in the north toward the Euphrates, because that was where the most serious threats to Rome lay, on the frontier with Parthia. That is also where the province’s four precious legions had to be arranged. How, then, to maintain peace and revenues in the south of the province, among such diverse and rivalrous communities? Not long after Pompey’s settlement, during the Roman civil wars of the 40s BCE that saw his death in Egypt, whichever strong man was temporarily on top faced the same dilemma. The Parthian empire to the east, which had recently demolished a Roman force trying to penetrate its frontier (under Crassus, 53 BCE), flexed its muscles by invading Syria (41/40 BCE). The Parthians seized Jerusalem and shrewdly sponsored a Hasmonean, Antigonus, on its throne as their ally. This raised the prospect of a renewed Hasmonean 4 E.g., Strabo, Geogr. 16.2.37, 40; Tacitus, Hist. 5.8; Pompeius Trogus in Justin, Epit. 36.1.9. 5 This principle would eventually be captured by the Latin-educated and Rome-fascinated British in the expression divide et impera (‘divide and rule’).

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kingdom in the region. It also displaced the Romans’ favourite Hasmonean, Hyrcanus II, and drove out his highly capable backers: Herod and his brother Phasael. Rome had to do something to secure that southern region. Although we remember them largely for military might and brutality (they were mighty and could be brutal), the Romans’ striking innovations were in diplomacy, flexibility, and adaptability.6 Their approach to governing foreign subjects relied, where possible, on the cultivation of local elites. If they managed to take back southern Syria militarily and then left it to its own devices, their senatorial legate in Antioch would have had a difficult time providing security or maintaining his personal relationships with the city elites in the south, up to three weeks’ march away. To position a second senatorial legate in the south as governor with one or more legions, thus creating a new province, was a possibility, but it would have been an expensive and risky investment in those early days of Rome’s presence, when legions were desperately needed elsewhere. (This would be the solution after the war of 66 to 70 CE.) For now, Rome thought it best to find a reliable commander, a trustworthy native strongman with the requisite brains, toughness, and vision, to install in in the south. Choosing a native of Gaza, Ascalon, Gerasa, or Hippos was a possibility, and we do not know whether they pondered such an option. Perhaps that person’s limited constituency and the inevitability of opposition from other regional players made such an option unpalatable. Jerusalem’s regional dominance throughout the preceding century, and the Herodian family’s demonstrated loyalty and wide regional connections, recommended the installation of that Judaean dynasty on the throne. Herod was furious over having been dislodged by the Parthians and, a proven fighter and commander, he could be relied upon to serve Rome’s interests even as he advanced his own power. Herod’s father and grandfather had raised him with the requisite qualities for governing. Grandpa had been a strongman of the Idumaean nobility Judaised by the Hasmoneans, reportedly used by Alexander Jannaeus to cement connections with Gazans, Ascalonites, and Arabs (AJ 14.10). Herod’s father Antipater had married a Nabatean-Arab princess, in the union that produced Herod, and Antipater too forged strong regional connections in support of Hyrcanus II. He prepared Herod and his other sons by deftly managing relations with a series of Roman commanders during the Roman civil war, while gradually increasing the young men’s political-military responsibilities. So, when the Parthians installed Antigonus in Jerusalem, Mark Antony—then in command of the East by the terms of the second triumvirate—decided it 6 See Eckstein 2006.

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was time to replace him with a solid friend of Rome. Herod would thus become a type of ruler on which the Romans relied heavily in the first century of their empire, the friendly native king. We call these men ‘clients,’ but the Romans were not so crass. Under the fiction of an admittedly lopsided ‘alliance,’ they looked to these kings as the only realistic means of ensuring the far reach of their imperium. It was a simple calculation. Rather than having to occupy each far-flung region around the periphery of the empire with their valuable citizen armies, and deal with unfamiliar laws and customs and potential enemies, friendly ‘allied’ kings could be welcomed into the ruling consensus, usually with a grant of Roman citizenship and a stake in the Roman project. Once in place, they could act as local powers under their own banners, raising their own armies, collecting taxes, and keeping the peace. But they could be relied upon to deal with internal dissent and external menaces alike, while gradually influencing their neighbours in Rome’s favour and quietly broadening its effective imperium. Any king who should decide to go rogue and join with their neighbours in defecting from Rome’s family could expect harsh retribution, if the Romans had the reach to effect it.7 But the Romans needed only the king’s address. He was the only one the Romans needed to worry about. As long as he was loyal, they could leave everything else to him. Herod’s long rule (37–4 BCE) attests to both his personal competence and the unwavering support of successive Romans for his friendship, especially the first emperor Augustus (ruled alone 31 BCE–14 CE). Although Herod was reportedly ridiculed by his Hasmonean rival for being only quasi-Jewish (AJ 14.403), in political reality that was his chief qualification: he had a share in several regional ethnic groups and was not about to attempt the Judaisation of the region. Herod worked especially hard to win over Samaria, Judaea’s nearest and largest potential adversary, which had been ravaged by the Hasmoneans, even as he tried to impress the Judaeans with his Hasmonean connections. Already under his father, Herod had been given special responsibility for Samaria (BJ 1.213). When the Senate recognised him as king (40 BCE), he quickly built a personal and military support base in that region north of Judaea, from which he conducted the campaign for Jerusalem (37 BCE). After dismissing his first (Jewish-Idumaean) wife Doris, he ostentatiously visited Samaria during the battle for Jerusalem in order to marry the Hasmonean Mariamme there (BJ 1.241, 344). After her death (by his jealous order), and while recovering from an illness in Samaria, he married the Samarian noblewoman Malthace. As soon as Octavian was given the reverent 7 See the fundamental study of David Braund (1984), with astute observations in Luttwak 1984: 20–40.

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title Augustus, Herod began rebuilding the Samarian capital in splendid fashion and renaming it ‘Sebaste’, or Augustus-city. This honoured the emperor and, with its conspicuous temple to Augustus, gave Samaria’s elite a great opportunity to attract imperial favour.8 Limited space prevents even the listing of cities in the region mentioned by Josephus as beneficiaries of Herod’s largesse. Many Greek coastal cities received from his hand the accoutrements of a proud polis (fountains, baths, gymnasia, temples, marketplaces). His generosity extended all the way to the storied cultural capitals of Athens and Sparta on the Greek mainland (BJ 1.422–28). Most fatefully for regional politics, he dedicated to Rome, the emperor, and the province of Syria a stunning coastal city filled with Greco-Roman cultural accoutrements, which he called Caesarea (again: ‘Emperor-city’, now built on the Latin family name). With even this limited context, we can get a fairly clear idea of Herod’s enormous value for Rome, for Judaea, and for the region. To the Romans he was a godsend: a strong ruler who was energetic in building the prosperity of all the peoples under his control, creating the conditions for enhanced revenue and its collection, and a general climate of calm acquiescence under Roman rule—without the need for direct Roman involvement or investment. For the region, by and large, Herod’s reign meant increased prosperity and opportunity, not least through his facilitation of connections with Rome and its emperor, enhanced pathways to status and prosperity. Local elites had at least an indirect way of fulfilling their political aspirations, without the Hasmonean overlay of enforced Judaean law and custom. But it was especially for Judaea that Herod was good news, at least from a realist political perspective. He had once again secured Jerusalem, which he magnificently rebuilt on a world-class scale to be renowned for its shining temple, its place as the political centre of the southern part of the province of Syria. Herod did not Judaise the region, but all the neighbours had to look to Jerusalem for the fulfilment of their aspirations. In marked contrast to the days before and after the Hasmoneans, Jerusalem was more than merely secure. Herod’s benefactions far and wide immeasurably increased its wealth and image. Much of the recognition accorded Judaean communities in the cities of the eastern Mediterranean was in some way traceable to Herodian political achievements (AJ 14.186–265, 16.160–73).9 8 Compare perhaps the British royal family’s assiduous cultivation of Scottish connections, traditions (especially military), and loyalties. 9 AJ 14.186–265, partly reflecting Julius Caesar’s gratitude for the work of Herod’s (unnamed) father; 16.160–73, expressing Augustus’ favour in view of Jewish friendliness at the time of Herod. Although she writes with quite different larger interests (related to the imperial cult), Bernett 2007 offers much useful material for reflection on Herod’s ‘balance program.’

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Herod’s evident success, still visible today in the grand ancient buildings that mark the region, did not mean of course that all his subjects loved him. That never happens. From Josephus alone we hear of three major sources of opposition: from various groups in Jerusalem (including aristocrats, Pharisees, and Essenes), from unreconciled supporters of Idumaea’s ancestral traditions, who resented Idumaea’s Judaisation even though one of their own was in power, and from the proud Greek cities, especially Gadara in the Decapolis. Having been destroyed by the Hasmonean Alexander Jannaeus, Gadara was given to Herod in 30 BCE. But it chafed under even his looser version of rule from Jerusalem. The city’s leaders complained bitterly and repeatedly to Rome’s representatives (AJ 15.253, 267–91, 351–54). We know from common experience that dissatisfaction with any ruling power is inevitable. But given the limited number of possibilities for ruling southern Syria, Herod managed his responsibilities successfully. 2

Herod’s Last Days and the Succession Problem

Every educated person in the ancient world knew the centuries-old debates about the best form of government: monarchy, aristocracy, democracy, or some combination. The famous problems with monarchy were its tendency to tyranny and, even if a model ruler could be found, the problem of an encore. How to find a worthy successor? Even a good king’s own sons, centuries of experience had shown, were unlikely to measure up and might even prove disasters, since they had not undergone the character-forming experiences that made the father a capable ruler. In southern Syria, succession to Herod was a particularly knotty problem. All the conundrums facing the Romans thirty-seven years earlier came back with a vengeance, but now with no Herod as a solution. Having married at least ten times and with at least ten sons from those marriages (fifteen or more children in total), there might seem to have been many candidates for the royal mantle. But the top job required extraordinary abilities—as assessed by the emperor Augustus. Josephus portrays Herod as constantly changing his will to name a successor, partly because he killed his three oldest sons, in an atmosphere of endless conspiracy, and he had reason not to trust the next three. Josephus puts all this down to actual intrigues, which were more than matched by the king’s increasing paranoia toward the end of his life. We need not doubt that some such plots occurred, though Josephus has written them up in the literary style of heart-wrenching tragedy. Herod must have been genuinely concerned to find a successor who could both function capably in the region and maintain the

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emperor’s favour. His execution of his three oldest sons in the last years of his life (BJ 1.550–51, 620–21, 663–64) put the spotlight on the next three—Archelaus, Philip, and Antipas. They were, however, all still in their early twenties. Josephus devotes virtually all of his account of Archelaus’ decade-long reign as ethnarch in Judaea (4 BCE to 6 CE; BJ 2.1–116) to the succession crisis that gave him that role (‘ruler of a nation’), leaving barely one sentence for his actions as ruler (2.111). This emphasis shows how important the succession was, and how much trouble the emperor Augustus took over it. In Rome, the emperor received various delegations from southern Syria and pondered the matter fully. But all that thinking did not help much. All options were on the table. One delegation of leading Jews pleaded with him not to be placed under another native autocrat, denouncing both Herod and his heir-apparent Archelaus as tyrants in relation to the population of Jerusalem. This group represented the interests of priestly and lay leaders, whose own ambitions and sense of status were much curtailed when an all-powerful monarch was on the throne. In a serious political gamble, they were willing to sacrifice Jerusalem’s regional power and control of an army if they could be left under the legate in distant Antioch, with Jerusalem’s priestly-aristocratic council managing the city’s affairs (BJ 2.91; cf. 2.22, 80). From entirely different motives, some Greek cities heartily supported the same solution, as we learn from Nicolaus of Damascus, who was a participant in the hearings. He reports that the Greek cities under Herod’s rule pleaded with Augustus to be freed from Jerusalem’s domination. Nicolaus claims indeed that on Herod’s death there was a revolt among Judaeans, as Josephus claims, and also a violent conflict between Judaeans and the neighbouring Greek cities, who asserted their wish to be free.10 That this strife in 4 BCE, in the south of the Province of Syria, had to be suppressed by the legate based in Antioch far to the north, P. Quinctilius Varus, who went to the great bother of mobilising three legions whose primary role was to guard against Parthian invasion, shows how impractical it was for the south to continue without a strong ruler based there. But what to do? Augustus could not risk placing the region under one of the king’s young sons. They lacked their father’s experience or competence. Nor could he select a non-Judaean ruler, who would inherit command of Herod’s non-Jewish army, to manage the longstanding ethnic tensions. Given that the Judaeans were by far the most populous and widely distributed people in the south, accustomed to dominance for many decades now, that would have been a hazardous course. It was likewise implausible, however, to imagine an alternative to one of the Herodians, since 10

See the latter half of fragment 5 in FHG, vol. 3, p. 354.

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the Hasmoneans were now long gone and anyway their nationalist legacy was even more potentially troublesome. Herodian royals—men and women—had enjoyed Rome’s favour for decades, and Herod’s own sons had grown up in Rome. A crucial consideration from the Roman side was that they were well connected in both the world capital and southern Syria. They had been brought up with a worldly outlook. And as Herod’s offspring they certainly expected to have a share in the rule. Quite apart from the sentimental wish to honour his friend Herod’s will, therefore, it was not politically feasible for Augustus to create an entirely new administrative system in southern Syria. The emperor’s final decision seems to have been the best compromise he could imagine. He would honour Herod’s last version of the will to an extent, by placing young Archelaus on Jerusalem’s throne, though with the diminished title of ethnarch: literally, ‘ruler of a people,’ and connotations of limited power (BJ 2.93–100). Archelaus lost control of most Greek cities on the coastal plain (except the crucial Caesarea and inland Sebaste). For Augustus this would be an experiment in preserving the Herodian balance: a Judaean royal governing Idumaea, Samaria, and the Joppa-Caesarea corridor, with the allied army remaining under his command from Jerusalem. At the same time, not only did Augustus keep many of the coastal cities from Archelaus, leaving at least their revenue under Herod’s sister Salome; he also removed large sectors of Herod’s kingdom in the north and east, granting Philip the thinly populated and less conflicted areas east of the Sea of Galilee, and Antipas the disjointed territories of Galilee north of Samaria and Peraea across the Jordan. Although Archelaus received the southern heartland on a kind of probation, with the prospect of a larger kingship awaiting if he proved capable (BJ 2.93), a decade in power was enough to show that he had fatally alienated both of his main constituencies: Judaeans and Samarians (BJ 2.111). For Augustus, his removal and exile in 6 CE brought renewed urgency to the problem of governing southern Syria after the loss of Herod’s irreplaceable political genius. 3

Consequences of Herod’s Death

At this point we must leave our topic with a glance ahead at the serious consequences of Herod’s loss for Judaea, southern Syria, and Rome. Roman rulers would try other things, but their obvious preference was—note the lack of evidence for any hostility on their part toward the Judaeans—to have a Judaean royal in charge of a Samarian-Caesarean army, thereby striking the appropriate balance of regional interests among the most important players. Augustus tried to make this work immediately after Herod’s death, in the best-of-evils

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scenario of dividing Herod’s kingdom. Two out of three successes was not the worst imaginable result, and Augustus’ successor Tiberius happily left Antipas and Philip in place for a further two decades. But the southern heartland of Judaea, Samaria, and Idumaea, surrounded by the coastal and Decapolis poleis, was potentially volatile. So Augustus replaced Archelaus in 6 CE with an experimental Roman-equestrian governor, responsible to the senatorial legate in Antioch. He was expected to balance things in a new way by basing himself in Herod’s non-Jewish showcase city of coastal Caesarea. Although this may have been the only feasible solution after Archelaus’ debacle in ruling from Jerusalem, the new arrangement unavoidably tilted power relations in favour of the Samarians and Caesareans. For the new representative of Roman administration, whose principal task was to develop trusting relations with the elites of all peoples in the region, would be living among the auxiliary army recruited from the Jews’ old adversaries, in an ostentatiously Graeco-Roman city filled with statues, entertainment facilities, and even a temple to Rome and Augustus. He would use Samarian and Caesarean forces to monitor Jerusalem and Judaeans, keep a rotating garrison in the Judaean mother-city, and police its large festivals, when tens of thousands of celebrating pilgrims flooded the ancient capital. This was a recipe for disaster, even under a prefect with the best of intentions. Though we cannot know his mind, surviving evidence gives reason to think that the long-governing Pontius Pilate (26 or possibly 18/19 to 37 CE) tried hard to respect and protect Judaeans, and largely succeeded, but he ran afoul of the structural conditions and was unable to manage his auxiliary.11 However that may be, after Philip died and Antipas was finally ousted from his Galilean rule, the emperor Claudius tried (41 CE) to return to the plan that had worked best. He placed the whole region once again under a proven Judaean royal in Jerusalem: his personal friend and Herod’s grandson, Agrippa I. That arrangement looked like it might work as well as the Herodian precursor, for Agrippa was a fairly experienced ruler in his fifties. But then he suddenly died, just three years into his reign. The Samarians and Caesareans broke into

11

See Bond 1998 for an overview of relevant sources, Schwartz 1992: 182–217 on Pilate’s dates. That Pilate lasted so long in office (even if 10 years), presumably the kind of vigorous complaint that would end his term (AJ 18.88: from Samarians), that he instructed the new auxiliary cohort stationed in Jerusalem to bring in their figured standards at night and under covers (BJ 2.169), that he allowed them only sticks and not swords for crowd control (2.176), and that his coins lack human figures might all suggest efforts to manage relations with Jerusalem in a productive way. Josephus allows, however, that his auxiliary troops exceeded their orders in beating Judaeans (AJ 18.61–62).

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exuberant celebration at this unexpected liberation (AJ 19.354–59). Another shift was inevitable. Since Agrippa’s son was just sixteen, in 44 CE the regional government returned to Caesarea, now under a Roman equestrian with vastly expanded territory because Antipas and Philip were gone. The temptation for him to side with the Samarian-Caesarean auxiliaries must again have been nearly overwhelming, as the governor Cumanus (48–52 CE) learned to his regret. That he was removed after allowing Samarians too much leeway in their violent confrontations with Judaeans, and after the intervention of the legate in Antioch and a decision of Claudius against him (reportedly under the counsel of Herod’s great-grandson Agrippa II in Rome), shows again how sensitive the senior Roman administration was to preserving a regional balance that respected Judaea’s place. Not least they were concerned to preclude any Judaean moves toward ‘self-help.’ Things changed again when the sixteen-year-old artiste Nero assumed supreme power in Rome (54–68 CE), especially when he broke free of his controlling mother and advisors from about age twenty-one. The governors Nero sent to Judaea were ordered to collect funds from Jerusalem’s famous temple, a move certain to worsen the Jews’ regional position: they felt that they were being harassed while Samaria and the Caesareans grew bolder. Seeing few ways out of this predicament, the Jews made an extraordinary bid to have Herod’s Caesarea, if it was going to be the seat of Roman power, reconfigured as a Jewish city, and to have its ingrained Greco-Roman character removed or neutralised in some way (BJ 2.266; AJ 20.173). Not surprisingly, their attempt failed to win Nero’s support. Josephus dates the beginning of the war precisely to that failure and its consequences for all of southern Syria (BJ 2.284; AJ 20.184; cf. Chapter 7). Any dream of recovering Herod’s achievement of regional rule from Jerusalem, which had remained Rome’s preferred option because it was the most stable solution, would soon be destroyed along with the awe-inspiring structures of Herod’s Jerusalem. Such possibilities might well have been reasonably clear to Herod, without being a prophet, as he approached his final days. He had undertaken an energetic programme of balancing regional tensions and aspirations. As he looked for a worthy successor, he kept changing his mind and altering his will in response to events. He knew what was at stake and needed someone capable of building on his achievements. He must have been worried indeed as each son proved to be of doubtful loyalty and/or ability—whether the charges against them were real or conspiratorial. Only a worthy successor would retain the kind of Judaean regional primacy, outward-looking and generous, that would keep serious conflicts at bay.

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Whereas he could afford to create Caesarea within his domains as a GraecoRoman counterweight to his Judaean capital, and his grandson Agrippa I would briefly re-establish that regional balance in ruling from Jerusalem, the shift under Roman prefects or procurators concentrated all the power in Caesarea, to the marked disadvantage of Jerusalem and Judaeans. This left Judaeans, in the mother-city and as minority populations in other cities, feeling (and being) vulnerable to the only recognised Roman authorities: the auxiliary cohorts recruited from Judaea’s historic enemies and under the command of the official in Caesarea. Especially when that official was Nero’s man Gessius Florus, who was ordered to raid the temple treasury and crush any resistance, and the usual avenues of redress—the senatorial legate in Syria, the Herodian Agrippa II, and the emperor—were blocked, some Judaeans felt they had no option but armed self-defence. All this Herod’s long rule had forestalled. The failure of a sound plan for succession created the conditions for war and Jerusalem’s eventual destruction.

Chapter 12

The Historical Problem of the Essenes This essay is an effort to sketch how a historical inquiry into the ancient Essenes might begin. It takes as evidence the only contemporary descriptions that have survived: by Philo, Pliny, and Josephus. A prestigious hypothesis, still held in some form by many, affiliates the residential site of Qumran and the scrolls found in nearby caves with the Essenes of these accounts. This is not an attempt to undermine that hypothesis or any other proposed Essene affiliation. The Essenes have fascinated readers since at least the Enlightenment. Nineteenth-century writers proposed connections with Pharisees, Pythagoreans, Baptists of John’s type, Jewish Christians, Zoroastrians, Buddhists, and others.1 Then from the early 1950s to the late 1990s there was first a rapid hardening and then a loosening or reconfiguration of the view that the site and scrolls discovered near Qumran were Essene. I have no reason to rule out any such speculation. It is entirely possible, but a historian’s connection of an ‘A’ with a ‘B’ that do not declare their affiliation requires an understanding of A and B separately. Only with that in hand is there any point in testing hypotheses of affiliation—for their ability to explain that evidence. My aim here is not to test hypotheses of affiliation, however. The more fundamental task, though it is bypassed with surprising frequency, is to interpret each text so that we know what needs explaining when we imagine the real Essenes. All the surviving evidence is in prose, whether narrative (Josephus, Pliny) or essay form (Philo). We customarily treat a text as an effort by its author to communicate with certain audiences, whether or not we know much about author or audience. Communication does not always, or most often, mean propounding concepts or claims. Much composition, including historical narrative or epic poetry, uses a story with a beginning, middle, and end, along with a plot, selected characters, and a thematic palette, to convey an atmosphere. An author might be more concerned about making an impression, to establish a role as a trustworthy political-moral analyst, than with convincing audiences about an event. Josephus changes War’s story with such abandon (in Antiquities-Life) that he cannot have been too worried about particular claims. 1 Two valuable surveys are by Christian Ginsburg (1864: 59–82), covering scholarship from the mid-1500s to 1863, and the revised Leipzig dissertation by Siegfried Wagner a century later (Wagner 1960), covering trends from the Enlightenment to 1947; Wagner’s bibliography lists nearly 2,000 studies. Cf. Lillie 1887: 73–85, 144–56.

© Steve Mason, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004545960_014

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Happily, with Philo, Pliny, and Josephus (contrast many biblical texts or the gospels) we have relatively abundant information about their situations, purposes, and audiences. Interpretation begins with asking ‘What was this author trying to convey?’ ‘What cues can we find in the text?’ ‘What do we know about the first audiences, their values, background knowledge?’ These questions can never be answered comprehensively. But asking how first audiences could have understood the text is one basic way of trying to understand the communication. I stress these principles because they are a source of perpetual misunderstanding. Colleagues with different interests and disciplinary backgrounds may view calls to interpret Philo, Josephus, or Pliny as though these were motivated by opposition to the Qumran-Essene hypothesis.2 When I have emphasised that all hypotheses are possible, while asking only that advocates show how theirs would explain the Essene descriptions, I have seemed an ‘opponent’ of the Qumran-Essene hypothesis, whom colleagues imagine to be insisting ‘that the scrolls could not have been written by Essenes’.3 2 When Albert Baumgarten pointed out that Josephus’ War and the Temple Scroll from Cave 11 prescribe two incompatible toilet practices—initiates given a hatchet to dig a new hole for each bowel movement (Josephus, BJ 2.147–49), or a community constructing latrine facilities at a specified distance from the city (11QT 46.13–16)—concluding that the Qumran text was evidently not Essene, colleagues aligned this with ‘the doubts of a few revisionist scholars who have sought to cast doubt on the connection between the Scrolls and the site of Qumran or the identity of the sect as the Essenes’: Baumgarten 1996; Zias, Tabor, and Harter-Lailheugue 2006: 638 (my emphasis). Colleagues reinterpret Josephus, however, to fit 11QT and/or the toilet facility found in L51 at Qumran: ‘Josephus describes how the sectarians relieved themselves when they had no access to built toilet facilities’ or, the opposite, the community all went off to dig holes at a spot away from the residence, the latrine facility being for ‘fecal emergencies’ (Magness 2002: 109; Atkinson and Magness 2010: 335) or Josephus was describing Essene toilet practices that he ‘may well have observed firsthand in the Qumran area’ (Zias, Tabor, and Harter-Lailheugue 2006: 638). 3 Atkinson and Magness 2010: 318 (‘Mason and other opponents of the Qumran-Essene hypothesis’); 325. Their article partly responds to my work. They seem to agree about the need to interpret Josephus (318–19) but proceed to rehash familiar parallels without regard for Josephus’ meaning. They feature spitting (326–29). My missed point was that instead of saying ‘Josephus’ Essenes and 1QS both prohibit spitting!’ we should pay attention to the meaning of each text. In praising the Essenes, Josephus mentions that they avoid spitting into their middles (torsos) and to the right side in the same sentence, with the same verb (BJ 1.147), as their scrupulous observance of the sabbath. Especially given the right-side qualification, that sounds more like avoidance of a common superstitious practice than 1QS’s (7.9–25) list of punishable offences during yaḥad meetings: lying down, walking out, laughing uproariously, exposing one’s penis, gesturing rudely, or spitting in the group. In other words, if we hypothesised that Josephus had in mind such a list of penalised offences, it would not explain his language and his audiences could never have guessed that. It is not what he communicates.

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Given the pervasive confusion, let me say again that I have no stake in whether Scroll authors or John the Baptist or Jesus were Essenes. What we believe about the past makes no difference to what actually happened, however, so we should be cautious. My profession is history. Historical method requires that surviving evidence (literary or material) be understood for itself, in its own contexts, before we ponder linking it with something else. We may not assume the conclusions of such a hypothesis and bake them into our reading of the evidence, of course. A hypothesis of affiliation should be tested later, by its capacity to explain the evidence. Historians have not only the right but the duty to scrutinise such hypotheses, pointing out where they do not explain evidence. That is the job. Without these principles history has no value. What follows, then, is an effort to interpret each first-century source that describes Essenes. It makes no pretence of comprehensiveness, and disagreement about each interpretation is welcome. Criticism and doubt are the engines of scholarship. The conclusion includes thoughts about the Essenes behind the surviving descriptions. 1

Philo of Alexandria (ca. 20 BCE–50 CE)

(Ti. Iulius?) Philo knew a good deal about contemporary affairs in Judaea (e.g., Legat. 188–348). He had visited Jerusalem at least once, possibly more often.4 His brother’s line of the family were Roman citizens, and he may have been too. Members of the family were leaders of the expatriate Judaean community in Alexandria and very well connected, both to Judaea’s Herodian dynasty and to the Julio-Claudian ruling family.5 His brother Alexander was a high tax official. One nephew married briefly into Herodian royalty and another (Ti. Iulius Alexander) would pursue a distinguished equestrian career that included governorships of both Judaea and Egypt, possibly culminating in the prefecture of the Praetorian Guard in Rome.6 Philo displays a thorough Greek education. His devotion to the laws of Moses did not prevent him from finding a modus vivendi with his cultural environment. He attended the theatre and games.7 Much engaged with Greek politics and culture, he advocated for his compatriots in

4 5 6 7

If he had said that they avoid showing their penises or lying down to sleep, instead of spitting, he would have sounded absurd. So De providentia, cited by Eusebius, Praep. ev. 8.14.398b. E.g., Philo, Flac. 25–29; Josephus, BJ 2.309; AJ 18.159–60; 19.354. For Tiberius Alexander see Turner 1954; Kraft 2010; Appelbaum 2018. Ebr. 177 refers to Philo’s many (pollakis) experiences in the theatre. Other knowing references to games and shows: Opif. 78; Agr. 35, 113; Flac. 19; Legat. 79. NB: Claudius thought it necessary

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Rome before Gaius Caligula. He interpreted scripture as a Platonist but, in the eclectic fashion of his day, also as a Stoic with a fondness for Pythagoreanism, fully exploiting the allegorical method that contemporaries were applying to Greek classics.8 Philo’s accounts of the Essenes are the earliest that have survived. He celebrated the group at length, in at least three compositions. Only after attending to his portraits can we try to understand what sort of group might have inspired them. His first relevant essay, That Every Good Person is Free, was partner to the lost antithesis, That Every Bad Person is a Slave. Both developed the proposition, basic to first-century moral philosophy and particularly Stoic versions, that freedom and slavery are matters of internal disposition and not of external circumstances, which are beyond one’s control. Because voluntary death always offers an exit, one can choose freedom, well-being, and internal calm (Prob. 117). Thus, ‘Those in whom anger or desire or some other passion or even some lurking menace has control are truly slaves, whereas those who live with regulation [of their impulses] are free’ (45). None of this has to do with wealth or external pressures. Again, ‘Being unenslavable means being unconcerned not only with dying but also with poverty, bad reputation, pain, and whatever other things the masses assume to be bad’ (23). Philo gives the analogy of a lion purchased by an ostensibly free man. The lion need only look his ‘owner’ in the eye to show which of them is truly free, self-governing, and in charge (40). The man’s ownership of the lion is a merely external appearance. He further explains that the few good and free persons in all societies avoid the masses and cities, where vice rules, to lead solitary lives in virtuous communities that reinforce their values (63–65). Philo offers examples of such groups from Persia (Magi) and India (gymnosophists) before stopping to consider his ancestral home of Palestine-Syria, then continuing with other Greek examples: Zeno the Eleatic, Stoics, and Cynics. In Palestine–Syria, he says, Essenes best exhibit the umbrella virtue of ‘moral excellence’ (καλοκαγαθία). Found in considerable number (4,000) throughout the land (75–91), Essenes are ‘attendants of God,’ not in the usual sense of punctiliousness in animal sacrifice, but rather in making temples of their minds (75).9 Philo continues: ‘The first thing about these people is that they to forbid Alexandria’s Judaeans from ‘intruding themselves into the games presided over by gymnasiarchs and kosmētikoi’ (P. Lond. 1912, col. V, line 93; CPJ II no. 153). 8 Of a burgeoning literature on Philo, important studies include Sandmel 1979; Mendelson 1982; Kamesar 2009; Taylor 2009; Schwartz 2009 (on his life and context); Termini 2009: 96 (on his Greek culture); Bilde 2009; and for a detailed case study, Runia 2001. 9 See the apt remarks in Taylor 2009: 11–15.

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live the village life, avoiding the cities on account of the lawlessness normally practised by city-dwellers’—illustrating his earlier principle (76). Given that he speaks here of Palestine-Syria, not Judaea, he might mean that Essenes were not found in the most famous poleis of the region, the coast and Decapolis cities. Perhaps he considered holy Jerusalem an exception to city norms. We cannot know. In their scattered village communities, at any rate, Philo’s Essenes attend to agriculture and crafts. They do not buy fields or accumulate money. They are voluntarily poor, a trait rarely found but much admired (76–78).10 They live in fraternities (θίασοι), sharing their houses and opening their doors to visitors from elsewhere who are devoted to the same practice (85). They place the wages they get from their labours in a communal fund (86), which allows them to care for their sick and the elderly (87). Clothing and food are shared, the latter in Spartan-style messes (συσσίτια). Taking their motto of freedom seriously, they condemn the practice of slavery (79). They also abstain from oaths, as feeble and contemptible proofs of honesty. Unaffected by love of money or pleasure, they are free to pursue virtue (84). Although they should be called philosophers, they are concerned only with the practical and ethical kinds, leaving the logical and physical (i.e., metaphysical) branches to others. To practise the philosophical life, they gather in sacred spaces on the sabbath for instruction in the moral life. There they sit in ranks according to seniority, and hear a reading from ‘the books’ (or scriptures), expounded allegorically to assist them in making moral judgments according to the criteria: love of God, of humanity, and of virtue (80–83). Their outstanding qualities are self-mastery (τὸ ἐγκρατές), simplicity (άφέλεια), fellowship (κοινωνία), and fortitude or endurance (τὸ κατερικόν). Philo concludes this glowing account with an extended discussion of rulers’ attitudes toward Essenes. Even the most vicious tyrants in that part of the world (the Seleucid rulers? King Herod?), who did not hesitate to use torture against enemies real or imagined, could find no charge to bring against these men. Even such rulers have been unable to resist the moral excellence (καλοκαγαθία) that renders Essenes ‘self-governing and free.’11 Such rulers have 10 11

Seneca, Ep. 17.3: ‘Riches have shut off many a man from the attainment of wisdom; poverty is unburdened and free from care’; cf. Ep. 108.9–12: ‘We talk much about despising money’ (108.11); Plutarch, On Love of Wealth; Epictetus in Arrian, Diatr. 3.22. I cannot follow Taylor’s view (2009: 17–19) that Philo’s αὐτόνομος ‘does not quite fit’ the ethos of Graeco-Roman philosophy, but highlights a distinctively Jewish concern with the laws, even a special Essene claim to ‘judicial autonomy’ (18). Throughout ancient literature, whether the issue was national or personal-philosophical constitutions, ἐλευθερία καὶ αὐτονομία were standard correlatives. For Philo as for the Stoics, it seems to me, the

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praised these ‘athletes of virtue,’ extolling especially their common meals (συσσίτια)—a remarkable custom, when differentiated diets were a primary marker of social status (88–91). It seems clear that this passage comes from Philo’s pen and his thought world, whether his knowledge came mainly from direct observation alone or reflected common knowledge in Judaea and what he had picked up from his contacts (likely, given his connections), or whether he also found written sources. At any rate, has infused his description with his typical thematic language, for example the contrast between freedom and slavery. His favourite moral category, καλοκαγαθία (77 times in Philo, against 3 in Josephus), which is the trait of free persons (Prob. 71), creates an inclusio around this Essene account (75//91). His claim that Essenes use allegory reflects his well known practice. The rare Herodotean term ‘Palestine Syria’ (or its reverse) appears elsewhere in Philo (Abr. 133; Virt. 221),12 as does the collocation ‘attending on’ or ‘serving’ God (with a cognate of θεραπεύω) in connection with sacrifice.13 The term θίασος (‘fraternity’) is distinctively Philonic.14 Of the six occurrences of Spartan-tinged συσσίτια in Philo,15 three are in his accounts of the Essenes and three in his descriptions of Judaean common meals.16 Twice in this essay the Essenes (and twice others) are credited with practising true fellowship (κοινωνία). This is also a key term his works, occurring more than 100 times. He says elsewhere that Moses disciplined all his followers for this excellent ideal (Virt. 51, 81–181). The notion of training in virtue (ἀρετή), as a contest (ἄθλος) with rewards (ἆθλα) for those who persevere (ἀθληταί), is also typical

12

13 14

15 16

self-governing soul, whose actions are not determined by outside pressures, is the free soul (Prob. 19, 21, 47; cf. Ebr. 58; Somn. 2.293; Ios. 66). Though characteristic of Herodotus (1.105; 2.106; 3.91; 4.39; cf. 2.104; 3.5; 7.89), the term disappears until the 2nd-cent. BCE Polemon (fragment in Eusebius, Praep. ev. 10), then Philo and Josephus (AJ 8.260–62; Ap. 1.169, citing Herodotus), later in Arrian (Alex. 2.25.4; Ind. 43—after Hadrian’s renaming; cf. Galen, Simpl. med. temp. 11.690). Looser Latin parallels are Tibullus, El. 1.7; Ovid, Ars amat. 1.416; Pliny, Nat. 12.80. See also Prob. 43; Cher. 94; Sacr. 12, 13, 37, 87, 127; Det. 55–56, 160; Ebr. 126, 144; Her. 7; Fug. 40, 67; Somn. 2.99; Mos. 2.5, 67, 135; Decal. 108; Spec. 2.147; 4.191; Virt. 40, 54, 185; Praem. 81, 108, 142; Leg. 278. Attested only 41 times in the 8 centuries of literature before Philo, largely in tragedy, it occurs only twice each in Dionysius, Strabo, and Josephus, perhaps because of its association with Bacchic orgies: Josephus’ 2 references are in the same passage, referring to Caesar’s prohibition of such groups (AJ 14.215–16). Philo, however, uses the word 33 times. See David 1978. Philo, Spec. 2.148 (New Moon festival), 193 (no feast, unusually, at Yom Kippur), and 3.96 (precise referent unclear). Although extensively used by Plato, Aristotle, and other earlier writers in describing ideal constitutions and Spartan (also Cretan) practice, the word appears only twice in Diodorus, not at all in Josephus.

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of Philo.17 His audiences must have concluded that for Philo, the Essenes of Palestine-Syria carried the banner of the Judaean qualities inculcated by Moses. They were an epitome of Judaean virtue. To help us understand what was in the air in Alexandria and Rome, where Philo also spent time, and so what might have resonated with his audiences,18 we should note that his description of Essene life as based in regular instruction and admonition to virtue aligns with what his younger contemporary Seneca, a Stoic, described as ‘practical’ or ‘active’ philosophy. It stands in contrast to ‘contemplative’ philosophy, which promotes individual insight into the real and true, and which should produce moral action without the need of rules or admonitions (Seneca, Epp. 94–95). Seneca’s language closely matches that of Philo, who begins his surviving tractate On the Contemplative Life, developing the idea that virtue springs from ‘sight’ rather than admonition (Cont. 11–12), by saying that he has just finished writing about the Essenes, who pursue the other kind of philosophical life: the active one, with regular meetings and admonitions. They excel in most areas, he reflects, though the contemplative life is a notch superior to theirs (Cont. 1, 12). Still, Philo was clearly fascinated by the Essenes, perhaps because they had reached the zenith of virtue in the sphere of ordinary life, without withdrawing into contemplation. So, although we know about it and have an idea of its general content, Philo’s second account of the Essenes is lost to us. His third description of Essenes is also lost in the form that he wrote it, as part of an essay In Defence of the Judaeans, also known as the Hypothetica or simply On the Judaeans. Fortunately for us, much of it, including most or all of its Essene description, was interesting enough to Eusebius that he included it in his fourth-century anthology, The Preparation of the Gospel (8.11). From Eusebius’ context it is clear that Philo, like Josephus in the Against Apion, was not merely defending Judaean law and custom; he was advocating its ethical superiority. For that purpose, he again turned quickly to the Essenes, whom he now introduces extravagantly as ‘myriads of those who are well known [or notable],’ whom ‘our lawgiver anointed [i.e., prepared, trained] for a life of fellowship’ (κοινωνία as above; Praep. ev. 8.11.1). This excerpted account in Eusebius overlaps considerably with that in Philo’s extant essay on freedom. Essenes again appear in his typical language 17 18

So: ἄθλοι toward virtue: Ebr. 82; Congr. 24, 180; Ios. 230; Mos. 1.48; 2.57; Somn. 1.131; Virt. 210; Prob. 135. Virtue’s ἆθλα: Deus 96; Agr. 121; Migr. 27, 163, 167; Fug. 187. Its ἀθληταί: Leg. 3.14; Agr. 91; Plant. 145; Sobr. 65; Praem. 5. See Niehoff 2018, which dates Philo’s more accessible philosophical works during and after his stay in Rome, 38–41 CE.

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as athletes or ‘contenders’ because of their unflagging labour and training of body and soul (Praep. ev. 8.11.7). Again, Philo dwells on the honours accorded them by rulers (8.11.18). Speaking of Judaea now, he says that they are found plentifully in its cities and villages (8.11.2), in which again they live in fraternities (θίασοι) and share common meals (συσσίτια, 8.11.5). He expands on their community of goods, simplicity, and measures for taking care of the sick and aged (8.11.4–5, 10–13). Some distinctive literary themes of the freedom essay are gone, however. In place of the freedom motif, which is still present but now marginal (8.11.4, 17), we have new details. The use of ‘anoint’ (ἀλείφω) for spiritual preparation, along with the cognate ἀλείπτης for ‘teacher’—part of the image of philosophical study as athletic training—is characteristic of Philo.19 Essene labour is here further explained. It includes sowing and planting of seeds, grazing herds, keeping bees, and trades—anything, actually, that is both profitable and morally blameless (8.11.8). Again, wages from this employment go into the common fund. Philo clearly pictures Essenes as regular workers who earn money, but instead of amassing personal wealth from it they pool it for common use. Whereas he had casually mentioned that Essenes were male (Prob. 74, 91), he now makes clear that they are celibate and explains why ‘none of the Essenes takes a wife’ (8.11.14)—because women are demanding and mess with a fellow’s ‘sovereign mind’ (8.11.15), a problem that grows where children are involved. To avoid that ‘slavery’ (8.11.17), Essenes recruit mature men, some approaching old age, as new members (8.11.2–3). Despite Philo’s various uses of the Essenes, then, each account adjusted to his literary purpose and audience, he is plainly describing the same phenomenon in each case. Looking for examples of moral excellence in Judaea or Palestine, he quickly and repeatedly turns to Essenes as the obvious luminaries. When he wrote a general work defending and advocating Judaean values, he again thought it natural to put the spotlight on them. After a quick effort to interpret his passages contextually, then, our next historical question is: ‘How can we best imagine the real-life group behind his portraits? How can we best explain both the content of his descriptions and the simple fact that such a person as Philo thought of the Essenes so readily?’ Philo did not record disembodied data, whose atoms we can pluck out to compare with atoms from other evidence. He was an intelligent writer who painted word pictures for his audiences. What sort of group enchanted a writer of Philo’s elite background 19

These two appear 48 times, mostly in athletic, rather than sacral, contexts. E.g., Conf. 91; Her. 123; Congr. 131; Prob. 111; Flac. 5; Legat. 39, 161, 178. For the explicit analogy see Leg. all. 1.98.

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and cosmopolitan temperament? Before turning to Josephus’ accounts, which breathe much of the same air and raise the same questions, we pause to consider a very different kind of writer. 2

The Elder Pliny (23–79 CE)

C. Plinius Secundus was a member of the equestrian lower elite, from Comum (Como) in Italy, and an older contemporary of Josephus when both lived in Rome. He pursued a career path open to the most talented men of his class, rising through ever more responsible military commands and politicaladministrative posts. Such work was not a profession. Like many men of his class, Pliny had catholic interests, abundant curiosity, and literary talent. He was a busy legal advocate and eventually an advisor to the emperor Vespasian, and yet he somehow managed a prodigious literary output, 102 volumes on history, biography, ethnography, military matters, rhetoric, and language.20 Like Philo, he was well connected, a friend to both Vespasian (who had similarly risen from equestrian roots) and emperor-designate Titus, having served with the latter in Germany. He capped this career as Prefect of the Western Fleet at Misenum and died while investigating the eruption of nearby Vesuvius in 79 CE. Pliny’s other works are lost, but his 37-volume Natural History survived as a mine of information for later generations. The effort to interpret this encyclopaedic work as a coherent composition is recent.21 In place of the usual prologue to Graeco-Roman texts, we have a letter of dedication to Titus, whom Philo praises as an arbiter of literature and rhetoric, written in 77 CE while Titus was virtual co-regent with Vespasian.22 The introductory volume, following this letter, elaborately replaces the other standard part of a prologue: a prospectus. In this case, Pliny offers a comprehensive list of contents and sources, intended to help the busy Titus find what he might need. This detailed description illustrates the letter’s claim that Pliny drew from 2,000 volumes by 100 authors, to produce 20,000 facts in the remaining 36 volumes (pr. 17). Pliny indicates that for Book 5, for example, which includes his main account of Judaea, he consulted 15 Roman and 45 foreign sources. Later, in a captatio 20 21 22

His nephew Pliny the Younger gives a charming account (Ep. 3.5). Marchetti 1991 seeks the author’s coherent moral voice; Beagon 1992 finds the unity of his thought in a Stoic conception of natura as divine; and Murphy 2004 looks for structural and symbolic (more than linguistic and conceptual) coherence. Pliny, Nat. pr. 5; cf. Suetonius, Tit. 3.

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benevolentiae introducing the ethnographical survey of books 3 to 6, he emphasises that he must rely on authorities for much of what follows (3.1). As Trevor Murphy points out, the reference-work nature of the Natural History means that we should not expect the degree of literary control that we typically find in histories of events, where the statesman-historian imbues the whole narrative with his thematic language.23 Nevertheless, as Nicholas Purcell observes, Pliny’s material was ‘slanted where possible towards his own experience.’ His style and imagery remain, despite his declared use of countless sources, ‘highly individual.’24 The structural oddities of the Natural History, with its opening letter, introductory index, and source-attributions prompt two observations that are important for understanding his remarks on Essenes. First, while stressing the unavoidable dullness of such encyclopaedic subject matter, Pliny presents its difficulty as befitting Roman virtue, in contrast to Greek frivolity (pr. 24–28). Anyway, he promises, he will relieve the tedium by regularly pausing his geographical survey to note anything ‘marvellous’ or ‘astonishing’. No one will remember all the strange names of places and peoples, but they will enjoy Pliny’s tales of the weird. And his narrative follows through on this promise. He uses cognates of the adjective mirus (‘amazing’; cf. mirabilis, miraculum) more than 760 times.25 Clearly, he remains sensitive to his audience, even in a deliberate work of reference. For example, opens the ethnographical survey that includes Judaea and the Essenes by apologising for the bare names (nuda nomina) that he is compelled to list (3.2), but even the first volume listing contents is laced with enough anticipations of the wondrous to inspire confidence in the author’s attentiveness. He also promises there that as soon as he has finished the tedious ethnographical part, he will turn to amazing bodily disfigurations, astonishing pregnancies, and monstrous births (1.7). Although it falls within the ethnographic survey part of the History, Pliny’s passage on Judaea’s Essenes is one of the work’s many diversionary marvels. Second, given that Pliny presents his work to Titus, we should be alert to his handling of that prince’s most famous achievement: the destruction of Jerusalem.26 In general, Pliny updates old source information where possible, noting for example that a recent Neronian expedition has proved that many sites along the Nile reported in his Augustan-era sources no longer exist (hoc 23 24 25 26

Murphy 2004: 5–6. In OCD3 1197. Murphy (2004: 18–22) argues that the marvels are an important ordering device throughout the work, for defining by antithesis the sphere of the normal. The point is well made by Murphy (2004: 114–17), though he goes well beyond the text in reading the Essenes as a symbol of the misanthropic Judaean people.

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tempore: 6.181, 184). In Judaea’s case, his awareness of recent events is more important, given that Titus is his dedicatee. From 70/71 CE, Judaea had become an imperial province under a praetorian legate who commanded the resident Tenth Legion (Fretensis).27 Pliny does not discuss the war itself, but whenever he mentions Jerusalem he comments that it used to be great, though it is now a heap of ashes (5.70, 72, 73). He also uses the past tense for places in this area: ‘Palaestina, which is what the part touching on Arabia used to be called (vocabatur), and Judaea’ (5.66). Note especially 5.69, concerning ‘Caesarea founded by King Herod, now the colony Prima Flavia established by the Imperator Vespasian.’ At 12.109 he includes Ascalon in Judaea, which is a post-70 development of the new province. Elaborating his claim that in their Roman triumph Vespasian and Titus exhibited the unique Judaean balsam tree, now captive along with its people (12.111–12), Pliny continues mockingly: ‘The Judaeans vented their fury on it—just as also on their own lives—but the Romans protected it against them’ (12.113). His language and plant-person parallel suggest that he alludes to a Judaean effort to destroy what was of most value to the Romans, and associated with En Gedi.28 Despite his keen awareness of post-70 realities in Rome, Pliny mostly describes the region as it was before the Flavian war, when Idumaea, Samaria, Palestine, and Judaea were ethnic regions in the Province of Syria (1.5a; 5.66–67). When Pliny reaches southern Syria, approaching from the southern coast of the Mediterranean, he begins by surveying its constituent areas, rather than its peoples (5.66–67; contrast Strabo, Geogr. 16.2.2). He then returns to the start, approaching from Egypt, to move northward through the coastal cities (5.68–69) and then haphazardly inland across the ethnic zones of southern Syria: Idumaea, Palestine, Samaria, Galilee, Peraea, and Judaea (5.69–70). Having introduced Judaea with its administrative toparchies and famed (but destroyed) Jerusalem, he turns to Judaea’s water bodies. Here he tracks the Jordan River from salubrious origins in the north to its foul and repulsive terminus at Lake Asphaltites (5.71–72). Pliny anthropomorphises the tightly meandering river, imagining it as reluctantly delaying its course, offering its life-giving properties to the peoples of the north before its much-praised (laudatas) life-giving stream is swallowed up by the stagnant, bituminous lake. Both lakes host pleasant springs (at Tiberias and Callirhoe), which contrast with the gloomy southern mass of Lake Asphaltites (5.71–72). A century later Galen, after visiting Asphaltites, would stress the same contrast between the life-nurturing

27 28

Smallwood 1981: 331–55. So, plausibly, Guichon 2000: 2.542 and n. 11.

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river and the lethality of ‘the sea that is called “dead”’29—perhaps the earliest attestation of a label that would become standard from Late Antiquity.30 In listing sites around the two lakes, Pliny follows the same pattern: he works clockwise from east to south to west. In both cases he makes basic errors, although his information about political centres (e.g., coastal cities, Decapolis, toparchies) is good. Thus, he misleadingly locates Bethsaida on the east with Hippos and Tarichea on the south of the Kinneret—the latter error persisting in maps until the twentieth century because of this. He likewise places Machaerus and Callirhoe to the south of Asphaltites. He also imagines a Dead Sea about fourteen times its actual size: 100 × 75 Roman miles (5.71–72). After briefly mentioning ‘Arabia of the Nomads’ east of this vast and deadly lake, and the cities allegedly to its south, he concludes his description of the west side, because that is where Judaea lies (Nat. 5.73): To the west, [the] Essenes completely shun the shores, which cause harm (ab occidente litora Esseni fugiunt usque qua nocent): a solitary tribe (gens sola) and amazing beyond all others in the world (in toto orbe praeter ceteras mira), without any women and having renounced all sexual interest, without money, with the company of palm branches only! Their assembly is born again daily from the crowds, tired of life and the vicissitudes of fortune, that crowd there for their manner of living. So, for thousands of ages—remarkable to say (incredibile dictu)—a tribe is eternal (gens aeterna est) into which no one is born! So fruitful for them is the reconsideration of life by others (aliorum vitae paenitentia). This is one of Pliny’s departures from ‘naked names’ to report something astonishing (mira). What is unbelievable (incredibile dictu) is clear: a bizarre gens (‘tribe, people, nation’) that maintains its number without procreation or the presence of women, through a constant influx of initiates tired of civic life, copulation with palm trees being unproductive, he almost jokes. That is the main point he wants to make about the Essenes, his evident reason for mentioning them, though he also notes their lack of money. Pliny specialists differ in nuance on the function of this passage in the Natural History, but their impressions are similar. Mary Beagon, arguing that 29 30

Galen, Simpl. med. temp. 11.690–91 (without qualification ‘called’); 12.203, 373–75; Atra bile 5.112; Sympt. caus. 7.245 (with Asphaltites). Whereas Strabo had mistakenly spoken of Sirbonis as the asphaltic lake in Judaea (16.2.42–43), the table of contents later supplied for his work (1.16) matter-of-factly rendered this ‘Dead Sea.’

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our energetic, public-spirited, and nature-praising Roman found asceticism and withdrawal from society repugnant, holds that ‘his attitude is one of baffled fascination rather than approval. He notes as mira the rejection of normal human reproduction in the community of the Essenes on the Dead Sea. They are a paradox of Nature …’31 Trevor Murphy finds a still harsher tone: The portrait is hostile: Pliny emphasises their selfishness, their sterility, their refusal of life and the duties, careers, and civic engagement that come with it. The Essenes are to all intents already dead, having refused all interactions with the world.32 Like Beagon, Murphy insists that Pliny’s language be read in light of his own Roman values. To find outright hostility, which Beagon does not, he must make other connections. First, he sees Essenes as a cipher for the defeated Judaeans, in other words as ‘the emblem of the subject nation that in 64–70 CE [sic] did a real injury to Roman authority. … Their self-chosen death is a fitting punishment for the crime of withholding their productivity.’33 Second, he finds Essenes = Judaeans mirrored in the region’s geography: they have both wasted their potential benefit (the Jordan’s northern pleasantness) through a rebellion ending in death (Asphaltites). Third, Murphy contrasts this with Pliny’s account of the utopian Hyperboreans (4.89–91), who thrive on nature’s bounty. Essenes do the opposite: they deplorably recruit men tired of life to a desolate, rather nihilistic existence.34 Murphy’s case is difficult to follow all the way, given that the utopian Hyperboreans35 are not near enough to this passage to provide a clear contrast for Pliny’s readers, and Pliny emphatically separates Essenes, who survive and even flourish, from the foul lake. The palm groves with which they are connected are emblems of fertility, found near deserts but not in them.36 The bemused or sarcastic tone that Beagon finds is easier to see. We may agree with both Beagon and Murphy, at any rate, that this ‘wonder’ does not entail Pliny’s moral admiration as a good Roman. Greek writers often admired the utopian ascetic life away from society’s ills, it is true, and in Judaean prophetic tradition cities were normally places of sin and 31 32 33 34 35 36

Beagon 1992: 79. Murphy 2004: 118. Murphy 2004: 127. Murphy 2004: 113–21. See Ferguson 1975: 17–18, 21–22, 122–23. See e.g., Horace, Ep. 2.2; Josephus, BJ 3.517. Note Pliny’s reference to the fertility of En Gedi and Jerusalem at 5.73 and the elaborate description at 13.26–49.

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oppression, the desert being the place for encountering God. Roman bucolic literature idealises the agricultural life. But Cincinnatus and Cato were crucially public-spirited men, who accepted high civic responsibility when called upon. Roman elite writers tend toward suspicion of the kind of devotion to philosophy that implies retirement from social–political life, just as they criticise the indulgence of luxury. They associate both with Greeks.37 The more inward and secretive that bands of philosophers became, the more suspect were their motives.38 Pliny’s description is, like those of Philo and Josephus, shaped by his values and language. We have noted his concern with narrative-stopping wonders (mira), of which Essenes furnish the Judaean example. The phrase in toto urbe—incidentally invoking his knowledge of the entire world’s affairs—occurs 19 times in his work and rarely elsewhere.39 He favours the adjective incredibilis, though that is not uncommon; more characteristic is his sentence-breaking phrase incredibile dictu.40 I stress his ownership of the passage because some scholars have declared it ‘likely’ that he took it over bodily, verb tenses and all, from some source.41 That is unlikely given the evidence, though he must have had an underlying oral or written source. Because Pliny’s description is of an entirely different tone and character from Philo’s, their agreements are all the more telling and important for historical reconstruction. Independent evidence is precious when it overlaps, because it frees us from entrapment in one author’s story world. In this case, 37 38 39 40

41

For philosophical retreat, see Lucian’s Wisdom of Nigrinus. For the complaint against philosophers, see Quintilian (tutor of the Flavians), Inst. 11.1.35; 12.2.7; Seneca, Ep. 5.2; 108.22; Tacitus, Agric. 4.3. On Roman perspectives in general see MacMullen 1992: 46–94. Vespasian expelled philosophers in 71 and Domitian executed several Romans in 93 on charges of philosophising—and thus failing to fulfill their civic duties (Dio 65.13; 67.13.2–3). Cicero, Verr. 2.4.99; Font. 13; Phil. 11.34; Petronius, Sat. 140.2; Pliny, Nat. 3.39, 54, 67; 7.130; 10.3; 14.87; 18.65, 283; 19.20; 21.57; 22.12; 27.3; 31.37, 41; 36.20, 40, 123; Seneca, Dial. 11.14.2. Others have the phrase occasionally, but not in this construction: Cicero (more habitually difficule dictu), Verr. 2.3.129; 2.4.124; Clu. 195; Phil. 2.106; Curtius Rufus, Hist. Alex. 8.2.36; 10.5.3. Of Pliny’s 4 examples (also 32.41, 34.149, and 35.88), 3 are in this sentence-breaking form, which Florus will later use (1.18.22, 24). This also resembles Pliny’s more distinctive mirum dictu (9 times, always as a sentence-breaking phrase, which is rare elsewhere). Virgil preferred the more enduring mirabile dictu. VanderKam 2010: 74: ‘His source-oriented procedure entails the likelihood that Pliny cited from another writer in his section on the Essenes. … If he quoted from an older source, the author of that source could have been the one who used the present tense [see below] in speaking of the Essenes and actually observed the Qumran group.’ Goranson (1994: 297) proposes Agrippa as Pliny’s source. That is possible, though Agrippa could not have written Pliny’s Flavian-era account as we have it.

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both authors describe an ancient, exclusively male and celibate group in Judaea that perpetuates its existence through recruitment, which has opted out of city life and allows no private money. That Pliny gives little other information is unsurprising. Unlike Philo, he is not celebrating Essene life, but enlivening his ‘bare names’ of geographical features by mentioning sexless wonders from Judaea, for a bit of amusement. As far as it goes, however, his jaundiced portrait would be easy for Roman readers of the Flavian era to understand, if the group behind his sketch were much as Philo portrays it, much more lovingly. He does not contradict Philo’s content but he takes an altogether different tone. If we had only this part of Pliny’s account, his location of the Essenes would not have become controversial. We would imagine Essenes inhabiting places other than cities, wherever palm trees break up the deserts, on the Judaean side of the massive lake, a good distance from the shores. At least as much as Phoenicia (‘palm-land’), Judaea was famous for its palm trees,42 and Pliny will devote a separate and more appreciative later discussion to those (13.26–49). To joke that that Essene men had only such palm trees for companions is enough here for the sarcastic effect. It is noteworthy that this work, devoted compendiously or even tediously to naming places, as he himself points out, gives no name for any particular Essene habitation west of the lake. The simplest explanation is that he does know of such a single settlement. Rather, to judge from context, the gens of Essenes on the west corresponds roughly and symmetrically to the Arabian nomads on the east, or in an earlier passage to the Sabines above Latium (3.109). If Pliny had any particular site in mind, the absence of a name would be odd and possibly unique in his work. Contrast his naming of even minor sites in the vicinity: Machaerus, prominent among Judaea’s fortresses; Callirhoe with its renowned springs (5.72); the once fertile grove of En Gedi; and the fortress Masada (5.73). The Dead Sea was for Pliny the defining body of water in Judaea—‘Judaea’s lake’ he will call it (7.65: in lacu Iudaeae). At nearly 150 km from north to south, in his imagination, it was bigger than Judaea itself. It so dominated the area that it was natural for him to use it for reference. Strabo, citing Poseidonius before him, had been fascinated by the bitumen from this lake (mistakenly called ‘Sirbonis’), and made it along with Jericho’s date palms and balsam trees the focus of his description of Judaea.43 Even Josephus pauses his biblical paraphrase to mention ‘En Gedi, the city that sits right beside Lake Asphaltites …; in it are produced the finest date palm and balsam juice’ (AJ 9.7), perhaps 42 43

Strabo, Geogr. 16.2.41; 17.1.15; Horace, Ep. 2.2; Josephus, BJ 3.517; AJ 4.100; Pausanias 9.19. Strabo, Geogr. 16.2.41–44.

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assuming that his Roman audience knew of this. Decades later, Galen would reserve the label ‘finest’ for the bitumen from Asphaltites (valuable for healing wounds)44 and the balsam juice from En Gedi. He calls these products, respectively, Judaean asphalt and opobalsam.45 He agrees with Josephus that the ‘Engadine’ balsam trees are the finest (Antid. 1.4). That Galen would make the arduous journey to the Dead Sea while en route to Rome (161–162 CE), and that he would poke fund at rich Romans who import the lake’s mineral-laden water, confirm the wide reputation of Asphaltites.46 Pliny’s use of Judaea’s famous lake as the anchor for his description of Judaea to its west is not surprising. We must ask, then, whether Pliny intended to communicate anything more than that the amazing Essenes lived in Judaea, west of the lake, when he concluded his description with these words: Below them [or possibly ‘next on my list’] used to be the town of En Gedi (infra hos Engada oppidum fuit), second only to Jerusalem in fertility and groves of palm trees, but now likewise a ruin (nunc alterum bustum). After that (inde) is Masada, a fortress on a crag—for its part not at all far from Asphaltites (et ipsum haut procul Asphaltite). This is Judaea. Because a particular reading of these words—locating En Gedi south of an Essene settlement at Qumran—is a mainstay of the hypothetical QumranEssene affiliation, we need to remind ourselves of other and better possibilities of contextual interpretation. We also need to be precise about the methodological issue here, since there appears to be much confusion about this. Our question is not whether Pliny’s notice contradicts the Qumran-Essene hypothesis or whether, if the connection were shown on other grounds, Pliny’s notice could be understood to fit with it. Just as it would be perfectly legitimate to look for Semitic roots of the Essenes’ name in the Scrolls if we knew the Scrolls to be Essene products, but such speculations do not show the Scrolls to be Essene, likewise Pliny’s notice could be reinterpreted to include Qumran if that site were otherwise known to be Essene. But that recognition is different from saying that Pliny locates Essenes in the Qumran area. He does not. Our interest is again in understanding what his description communicated to Roman audiences in the first instance: what his word pictures, rightly or wrongly, suggest. 44 45 46

Simpl. med. temp. 12.171, 375 (GLAJJ 382, 386). Sympt. caus. 7.245; Comp. med. 13.536, 560; Pis. ther. 14.260; Antid. 14.60–62 (GLAJJ 380, 388, 389, 392, 393). Simpl. med. temp. 11.690 (GLAJJ 381).

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The meaning of the passage has become an issue not because of any great problem in understanding Pliny, but because of the Qumran-Essene hypothesis. Scholars whose main interest is not the interpretation of Pliny, but rather Qumran or the Scrolls, often assert that his passage locates Essenes at Qumran with sufficient clarity (and assumed accuracy) that it may serve as one of the two pillars of the hypothesis, the other pillar being supposed agreements between Josephus’ account of the Essenes and such passages in the community rules as 1QS 6–7. Of these two pillars, Pliny’s alleged location is generally considered the more objective. In a justly popular introduction to the Scrolls, James VanderKam describes this pillar as follows:47 Pliny locates the tribe (gens) of the Essenes on the west side of the Dead Sea, between its northern end and En-Gedi, which he seems to place to the south of (‘lying below’) their residence. … Some have argued that Pliny’s words ‘lying below’ imply that the Essene settlement should be sought on the hills above En-Gedi, but his words appear to mean ‘to the south of.’48 Pliny is imagined to place the Essenes between the north end of the lake and En Gedi, around Qumran. Those who doubt what VanderKam thinks Pliny’s words ‘appear to mean’ are being difficult: ‘Pliny’s seemingly clear testimony has not, however, gone unchallenged.’49 VanderKam is by no means alone. Many Qumran experts have insisted that, granted the many differences between the Scrolls and the Greek sources and the scope for subjectivity in finding parallels, in the words of one, ‘l’argument géographique est toujours le meilleur support.’50 Although our aim is simply to interpret Pliny in context, not to debate higher-level hypotheses, this is the most important case in which interpretation of a surviving text must be preliminary to its historical use. We must spend a bit more time exploring Pliny’s contextual cues about his meaning. 3

Excursus: Pliny’s Location of Essenes

Pliny’s brief list of Judaea’s remaining sites, after the Essene notice, continues to highlight Flavian achievements. He has mentioned the formerly strong 47 48 49 50

VanderKam 1994: 71–75 (‘pillars’: 72). VanderKam 1994: 72 (emphasis added). VanderKam 1994: 73. Burchard 1963: 533–69 (here 534). Cf. Grabbe 1992: 492, 494; Magness 2002: 41.

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Judaean fortress of Machaerus—before Masada, which was the last site to fall in connection with the recent war—in conjunction with the famed springs of Callirhoe (5.72). These places and the world-renowned En Gedi were all formerly impressive, but are now devoid of glory thanks to righteous Flavian punishment. Now, Masada’s proximity and connection to the rotten lake creates a contrasting inclusio with the opening statement about Essenes, who flee the shores as far as possible ( fugiunt usque), while Masada is itself ‘not at all far away’ from the baleful lake (ipsum haut procul).51 But it is on a high crag. The phrase haut procul is, incidentally, another Plinyism.52 Notice too that Pliny’s ‘eternal tribe’ of Essenes consistently appears in the present tense,53 in contrast to these wasted sites. Their ongoing vitality is central to his point: it is amazing how they keep on keeping on. Finally, Pliny’s inde before Masada returns us to his workman-like ‘bare-name’ style, after the splash of colour with the Essenes. Exchangeable with dein (appearing 233 times), deinde (202), and similar terms, inde (269 occurrences) is characteristic of his itinerary-like lists. Given the high frequency and vague usage of these terms, we should not seek any kind of precision in them. To understand their general force in Pliny, we must remember that Romans did not have accurate, proportional maps of areas larger than cities, even though they desired them and tried to equip their provincial governors with as much geographical knowledge as possible.54 They built excellent roads, with miles precisely marked off with stones, but this reflected a conception of space 51

52 53 54

Today Masada is about 4.5 km from the water; Qumran is about 3 km away. We do not know where the shoreline was in the first century, and the currently rapid drop in water level affects the western shore in particular. Still, the relative distances of Qumran and Masada present another obstacle for placing Pliny’s Essenes at Qumran. It occurs 10 times in Pliny, against only 1 or 2 occurrences in Columella, Ovid, and Naso, and it is not otherwise attested (not, e.g., in Cicero or Caesar). Pliny, Nat. 5.73: fugiunt, renascitur, agitat, nascitur, tam fecunda … est. This consistency, which supports Pliny’s reason for mentioning the group (their ongoing vitality without sex), makes it hard to explain as a mistake. See Kraft 2001: 255–61. Tozer, 1971: 235–37. There is an ongoing debate about Roman map-thinking, tied up with larger differences concerning Roman frontiers, strategic thinking, amateurism vs. professionalism, and the relationship between elite values and planned systems as motivators. See Isaac 1992: 401–408; Mattern 1999: 41–87; and Whittaker 2004: 63–87. Pliny apparently knew the mural ‘map’ in Rome based on Agrippa’s measurements (3.17), but see the reconstruction of this ‘map’ in Whittaker 2004: 50. Greatrex 2007 argues for Roman cartographic knowledge. He is no doubt correct that the Romans were interested in maps and that they developed a frontier strategy (especially in Late Antiquity). This does not mean that they possessed proportionately accurate maps of larger areas. As far as we know, they lacked the ability to produce these, which was not available until the 19th century.

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anchored in linear distance. We can take three-dimensional maps for granted because of our extremely advanced technology, now including high-resolution satellite photography. Anyone who doubts the difficulty of producing proportional maps before these tools existed, however, need only look at maps from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. They show a Mediterranean coast bearing sharply north-east, a bizarre-looking Dead Sea, and a misshapen Kinneret Lake far south of its real location.55 Until the U.S. Naval expedition down the Jordan River in 1847/48, with its then state-of-the-art instruments and painstaking survey discipline, the shape, size, and topography of the Dead Sea were simply not understood, even by intrepid visitors.56 Although we instinctively read Pliny with an accurate map alongside, this was not available to his ancient readers or to him. We have no good idea of the image that was in his mind, and can only piece things together by taking a minimalist approach to reading him. What does his language require, if we do not import our views or assumptions? What did he mean? When Pliny follows a coastline, road, or river, the adverbs mentioned above have the clear enough sense of ‘next’, vague though that is. When he departs from such lines to describe zones or regions, however, he becomes extremely hazy. In such contexts, the meaning of ‘from there’ or ‘after that’ appears to amount to: ‘the next place I shall mention  …’ We can see the difference in Nat. 5.69–70, which begins as an itinerary following the Mediterranean coast, and thus accords with known sites, but then shifts inland to describe regions in ways that are impossible to map. No ancient audience could have deduced the locations of Judaea, Samaria, and the Kinneret Lake (Sea of Galilee) from such a description. Pliny has often been impeached for his: complete ignorance of scientific geography; and in describing the leading features of countries, such as mountains and rivers … he contents himself with lists of names, and in like manner the cities of any particular region he simply catalogues without remarking on their relative position.57 A good example of his name-barrage technique is Nat. 6.177–82, which lists places on each side of the Nile. A recent study of that passage has shown the impossibility of identifying his places, challenging what scholars used to think 55 56 57

Cf. Bartlett 2009: 187–204 (with examples). See in general Ben-Arieh 1979: 124: ‘Scientifically, the region of the Jordan valley was completely unknown until the beginning of the nineteenth century’: specifically, Jampoler 2005: 154–84 (esp. 164), 199–204, 220. Tozer 1971: 264 (emphasis added).

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they knew on the basis of his description.58 Nevertheless, it is hard to see how Pliny could have written differently, when only itinerary-based knowledge from road or coastal travel was available. We should not, then, expect inde or dein to indicate precision or even linear intention in the description of Judaea. They cannot have such senses, given that he places Machaerus and Callirhoe on the south, when in fact they are in the lake’s north-eastern quadrant (Callirhoe more northerly and Machaerus well inland). Taking any of this as though it followed a path will not work.59 Given that we are trying to imagine what Pliny’s words could have communicated with the cues he provides, not what was in his inaccessible brain, we have some assistance in (i)  parallel passages and (ii)  pre-Qumran readings of Pliny. The closest parallel seems to be at Nat. 3.109, noted above, where he writes: ‘Below the Sabines is Latium (infra Sabinos Latium est).’ And this is helpful because Pliny and his audiences would have known the landscape in question. There is no implication in this language that the Sabines live at a particular site north of Latium (Lazio). Like his Essenes, they are a gens and they are distributed through the foothills of the Apennines. He says only that Latium, which is lower and extends to the coast, is below them, as famed En Gedi on the coast of Asphaltites is below the Essenes. Similarly, at Nat. 4.26: ‘On the coast below Thebes (in ora autem infra Thebas) are Ocale, Heleon, Scolos, Schoenos, Peteon,  … Tanagra,  … and Aulis renowned for its large harbour.’ This is the reverse of the Latium and En Gedi passages, for here the upper site is one city, and the lower term multiple. Thebes lay in the hills of central Boeotia, and the sites ‘below’ it were from the north to east of it in no discernible line. They were lower because they were by the coast. Tanagra is due east of Thebes and still 10 km from the coast, whereas Aulis is to the northeast and has a harbour. At Nat. 6.21, again, we see a series of upward and downward movements by the Sea of Azov (Maeotis). Pliny first names sites on the coast, then higher (supra) places inland, then the peoples who occupy the mountain tops; then in reverse, following the river downward from the mountain tops, he names various peoples in succession, each group below (infra) the preceding ones. Readings of Pliny before the discovery of the Scrolls are helpful because they show what people thought he meant without the magnetic pull of 58 59

Desanges 2008. Such a circuit would run: Arabia on the east, then two sites on the south (mistakenly and in the wrong order), then on the west: Essenes, En Gedi below them (which would mean north of the Essenes if we were following a coastal line), and finally … Masada—the southernmost of all!

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Qumran. Pliny’s first extant interpreter was C. Iulius Solinus, who compiled his Polyhistor or Collectanea rerum memorabilium (Gallery of Remarkable Things) early in the third century. This became an important resource for mediaeval and Renaissance scholars. We have seen Pliny’s own interest in tales of the weird. Solinus extracted mainly these from Pliny, combining them with similar anecdotes from elsewhere to produce a whole library of oddities—only the fun parts of Pliny.60 Given this aim, Solinus passes over Pliny’s lists of boring names. Describing southern Syria, after a few comments on coastal cities (Coll. 34), he moves directly to the bodies of water (35.1). Here he elaborates Pliny’s distinction between the Jordan’s pleasant sources and its horrible end, for dramatic effect, before digressing on the special quality of Judaean palm trees—the subject that Pliny reserved for later (Nat. 13.26). Then he turns to those remarkable Essenes: The interior parts of Judaea (interiora Iudaeae) toward the west [of the lake] are held by the Essenes. … The town of En Gedi used to be beneath the Essenes (Engada oppidum infra Essenos fuit), but it is now completely destroyed. … The boundary of Judaea is the fortress of Masada (Iudaeae terminus Massada castellum). (35.9, 12) Solinus’ minor clarifications confirm the main lines of our interpretation of Pliny. Essenes live west of the lake, now in regions described as interior in the plural. That is all. Because they are in the uplands, it is even clearer that infra signifies elevation: En Gedi, famously on the lake, was beneath Essenes in the higher inland region. Finally, Solinus clarifies that Masada is the boundary of Judaea, not the end of a line from Essenes via En Gedi. Solinus’ tone is notably different from Pliny’s, however. He seems to have some admiration for this odd group, for he adds a comment on their virtues. He may also have a more particular place in mind, when he remarks that ‘their very location is devoted to modesty’ (locus ipse addictus pudicitiae est, 35.10), though locus here could mean a region or the sort of place that Essenes live in. If he imagines a specific place, it is in Judaea’s interior parts. For our purpose, which is again to understand Pliny as his first readers might have read him, the most important points are clear. First, before the Qumran discoveries, Pliny was understood to locate Essenes west of the Dead Sea, with a wide range of possible sites mooted when scholars linked his account with Philo and Josephus. Second, taking Pliny to mean that En Gedi lay south of an 60

Tozer 1971: 364–65; cf. the critical edition of Mommsen 1864, with marginal notes indicating Solinus’ sources and the summary tables on pp. 249–54.

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Essene settlement can only come from an effort to connect his account with some other source. He neither says nor suggests anything of the kind. Third, subsequent efforts to explain how this new reading of Pliny is natural, even necessary, cannot withstand scrutiny. I shall elaborate on each point. 1. When pre-Qumran scholars isolated Pliny’s text from the other Essene accounts, they thought that he placed the group west of the Dead Sea, which means above En Gedi on the shore. Often, however, since they also knew Philo and Josephus, they fused the three of them—without apparent strain—and assumed that Essenes were distributed from around En Gedi northwest to Jerusalem. The seventeenth-century Cambridge divine, John Lightfoot, was a notable exception. So convinced was he that Essenes were heirs of the biblical Kenites and Rechabites (anticipating a view that gained some traction in the nineteenth century), whom he placed at Arad, he boldly relocated En Gedi to near the south end of the Dead Sea, close to En Boqeq. Arad is southwest of Masada and about 18 km west of the lake. Placing En Gedi roughly on that parallel would put Essenes in Arad and Pliny’s En Gedi ‘below them.’61 He thought it so obvious that infra meant ‘below’ that he thought En Gedi needed moving to make sense of Pliny. More in the critical mainstream, the officer who led the U.S. Naval expedition down the Jordan, Lt. W. F. Lynch, wondered whether the caves above En Gedi with ‘no perceptible access’ that his team noticed were ‘once, perhaps, the abodes of the Essenes.’62 The French Semiticist Louis-Félicien de Saulcy, distracting himself from a recent bereavement (as Lynch had struggled with domestic problems), headed to the region on an adventure with his son in 1850. His understanding was that ‘Pliny … informs us that the Essenians inhabited the western coast of the Asphaltic Lake.’63 He noticed the surface remains at Qumran (Ghoumran) but assumed that they were from biblical Gomorrah. He had no reason to think that Pliny had located Essenes there (further below).64 In the Jewish Encyclopaedia entry on Essenes (1905), Reform scholar Kaufmann Kohler discussed ‘the Essenes at En Gedi’.65 Walter Bauer, in the state-of-the-art reference work, the Pauly-Wissowa encyclopaedia (1924), remarked that Pliny located Essenes ‘on the west side of the Dead Sea, in and around the city of

61 62 63 64 65

Pitman 1823: 10.16. Lynch 1849: 294, 323. De Saulcy 1854: 1.130. De Saulcy 1854: 2.30–48. De Saulcy was vigorously defended concerning Gomorrah, by contemporary literati (Bentley’s Miscellany 36 [1854]: 177–87). Kohler 1905: 5.231–32.

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En Gedi.’66 British explorer Canton Tristram, in a four-volume reference work edited by Charles Wilson (1881), seems to have had Pliny in mind when he described the area near the ‘leafy thicket’ of En Gedi: The inhospitable shores of the lake were at one time inhabited … by the indigenous inhabitants, later on by the Israelites, and after them came a succession of hermits—the mystical Jewish sect of the Essenes and the anchorites.67 Cunningham Geikie (1886) likewise wrote what everyone assumed about ‘The upper valley of Engedi, where Pliny tells us most of the Essenes had settled. … In the upper parts of the wady, and in others running parallel with it, the Essenes found exactly the localities that suited them.’68 Describing the area around Masada during his 1932 survey, likewise, Adolf Schulten recalled that it had always been a place for political fugitives, and that the Judaean sect of Essenes (‘the refuge of all hermetically inclined men’) had settled that area in particular.69 Because Pliny’s notice was understood to be vague, combining it with Philo’s and Josephus’ indications of Essenes throughout Judaea did not create problems. Harriet Martineau said of the Essenes she so admired (1848), ‘Their chief establishment was on the western shore of the Dead Sea [this from Pliny]:—that is, in the neighbourhood of the Baptist’s home—“in the hill country of Judaea” [Luke 1.39].’70 An 1855 translation of Pliny integrates Josephus’ evidence into its explanatory note.71 In narrating his hazardous trek eastward from the Mar Saba monastery, through the Wadi Kidron with its high caves with man-made walls, de Saulcy came to think that the ‘primitive Essenians’ must have been ancient inhabitants of this area72—citing Josephus for their customs and Pliny for this location.73 Christian Ginsburg likewise conflated all the sources when he imagined Essenes first living everywhere and prominent in Jerusalem, then settling mostly northwest of the Dead Sea, with some 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73

That is: ‘auf der Westseite des Toten Meeres in der und um die Stadt Engada (Engeddi)’; Bauer 1924: 390. Wilson 1881: 3.206 (emphasis added). Geikie 1886: 1.362 (emphasis added). Schulten 1933: 8–9. Martineau 1848: 399–400 (emphasis added). Bostock and Riley 1855: 1.430–31 n. 5: ‘they generally lived at a distance from large towns’; their ‘principal society’ was the one mentioned by Pliny, though they were found throughout Palestine, Syria, and Egypt. De Saulcy 1855: 1.128. De Saulcy 1855: 1.128–30.

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of their communities remaining throughout Palestine and Syria—before, he was sure, they embraced Christianity in the first century.74 According to W. H. Dixon, president of the Palestine Exploration Fund (1869), obviously integrating Philo with his understanding of Pliny, ‘many of these men retired to the desert wadies, to till the soil, to rear bees and birds, to tend sheep and goats, to train vines, grow pulse and corn.’75 He agreed with Martineau, de Saulcy, and Ginsburg: ‘The chief seats of this sect were pitched on the western shores of the Dead Sea, about the present Ras el Feshka, and along the slopes of the wilderness by Mar Saba and Ain Jidy [En Gedi]. Some of them dwelt in the villages below Bethlehem.’76 In his great handbook on the environment of the New Testament, and under the heading ‘The Facts’, Emil Schürer pointed out that because Philo and Josephus described Essenes throughout Judaea, ‘we should be much mistaken if we were, according to Pliny’s description, to seek them only in the desert of Engedi on the Dead Sea.’77 Walter Bauer also found no problem in blending the sources: Essenes lived at En Gedi (Pliny), Thamna, and especially Jerusalem (Josephus).78 Likewise Shailer Matthews: ‘Many of their monastic communities lived in solitudes like Engedi, while others lived in monasteries in the midst of cities, where all who wore the white robe of the fraternity were always welcome.’79 And Morton Scott Enslin: ‘According to Pliny they lived apart in communities on the west shore of the Dead Sea; Josephus, however, remarks “They have no certain city”.’80 Each writer thus emphasised different points, as we would expect of independent scholars, but there was no noticeable controversy about the Essenes’ location. Pliny’s impression that Essenes lived above coastal En Gedi in the hills was elastic enough to accommodate Philo’s and Josephus’ indications of their ubiquity throughout Judaea. My purpose in citing these pre-Qumran readings is not to suggest that any of them is ‘correct.’ Our question is about what Pliny meant and how, from the cues he provides and the normal meanings of Latin words, he was understood. We have seen that he vaguely locates Essenes west of the Dead Sea, and so modern scholars understood him in light of whatever else they thought they knew, from Philo and Josephus. Some made a conscious effort to distinguish his information from other accounts, preferring the more knowledgeable Philo 74 75 76 77 78 79 80

Ginsburg 1864: 26–27. Dixon 1869: 258–60. Dixon 1869: 279. Schürer 1910: 2.2.193–94 (emphasis added). Bauer 1924: 418. Matthews 1933: 97. Enslin 1938: 122.

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and Josephus (it would be a mistake to locate them only in the hills above En Gedi, as a narrow reading of Pliny might suggest), while most fused everything into a sensible picture accommodating all the evidence. Unusually and perhaps uniquely, an 1853 German translation of Pliny, by C. F. L. and M. E. D. L. Strack, translates the infra hos line: ‘South of them (südlich von ihnen) lay also the city of Engadda.’81 This has occasionally been cited as evidence that Pliny was normally read as placing Essenes up the coast north of En Gedi (around Qumran).82 But given all that we have just seen, that cannot be so. It seems rather that the Stracks allowed their knowledge of Philo and Josephus to influence their translation. That is, if they accepted the common idea (influenced by Philo and Josephus) that Essenes lived mainly in the lake’s northwestern sector, from En Gedi to Jerusalem via the desert wadis, it would not be surprising if their interpretative translation reflected this—interpretative translations being common at the time, as when the Loeb translation of Pliny gives modern names from the late British Empire. But as a translation of the Latin it is not possible. In the preceding paragraph, Pliny uses the clear phrase for ‘south of’ (a meridie, 5.72). Rendering infra as ‘south of’ is commentary. Epilogue: this translation was harshly criticised for just such inaccuracies. A leading classicist of the time was prepared to applaud the translators’ ambition, ‘if only it were more reliable.’ After listing a dense four pages of errors from a small sample, he concluded that the elder Strack’s manuscript, which his son had found and piously reworked for publication, should have remained unpublished.83 2. With the Qumran discoveries, changes in ‘the understanding of Pliny’ came quickly and with rapidly increasing confidence. His notice was furnished with a completely new meaning, those who first proposed it realising its novelty and being cautious. But it quickly took centre stage as the remarks in Philo and Josephus about the dispersal of Essenes in Judaea were marginalised to make way for fascination with the Qumran site. The new interpretation rose to such prominence and so quickly that people soon forgot that it depended on the Qumran hypothesis. There is no point in denying that this Qumran-driven reading of Pliny was original in the 1950s, because the scholars who proposed it knew that to be the case.

81 82 83

Strack and Strack 1853–1855. Bardtke 1958: 39 n. 2; de Vaux 1973: 134 n. 3. Urlichs 1856: 298–302 (critical comments on first and last pages). Others were more generous.

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Eleazar Sukenik, studying three scrolls from Cave 1, reasoned almost immediately (1948) that they might have come from the Essenes, because those men were known from Josephus to have had strict rules, which seemed to match the prescriptions of 1QS in some respects. Notice: he added that ‘several ancient literary sources’ mention ‘their seat on the western side of the Dead Sea, in the neighbourhood of ʿEin Gedi.’84 Sukenik knew the standard interpretation of Pliny and saw no reason to change it. He proposed that those first scrolls came from desert genizot (scroll repositories), which did not need to be located in the dispersed Essene communities around En Gedi and in the Judaean hills. His speculation that the Community Rule was an Essene text was neither surprising nor troublesome, as some other scholars connected the new discoveries with Zealots, Pharisees, or Sadducees.85 Sukenik did not need to reinterpret Pliny. He was content with the usual location of Essenes west of En Gedi. Nor did he see Pliny’s passage as proof of an Essene-Qumran connection. He simply thought that if Essenes lived west of the Dead Sea, as all the sources indicated, it would make sense for them to have deposited used scrolls in the caves around Qumran. The new interpretation of Pliny came soon afterwards, however, in a bold proposal by André Dupont-Sommer. He too knew the standard reading of Pliny. But in a fateful footnote he proposed that a new and different reading would cement the connection of Qumran with Essenes, if it were plausible (emphasis added): It is generally admitted that the Essene colony described by Pliny was situated near the spring of Engedi, towards the centre of the western shore of the Dead Sea; in fact the text of Pliny continues thus: ‘Below them (infra hos) was the town of Engada.’  … But I believe this means not that the Essenes lived in the mountains just above the famous spring, but that this was a little distance from their settlement, towards the south.  … If Pliny’s text is to be understood in this way, the Essene ‘city’ would be found towards the north of the western shore; that is to say, precisely in the region of ‘Ain-Feshka [near Qumran] itself. Should this explanation not be acceptable, it could be supposed that the Essenes possessed monasteries other than that mentioned by Pliny and Dio in the same Wilderness of Judea.’86 84 85 86

Sukenik 1948: 16 [Hebrew]. An English version was published posthumously with the assistance of N. Avigad, see Sukenik 1955: 29. Burrows 1956: 279 reported hearing the Essene identification earlier. I owe the reference to Cansdale 1997: 20, who elaborates the point. Dupont-Sommer 1952: 86 n. 1 (French original = 1950: 106 n. 3).

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Dupont-Sommer was appropriately cautious, as we can see, unsure whether this new reading (to account for the Scrolls, despite Pliny’s apparent meaning) would convince experts. And he had an alternative ready if not. But his proposal did catch on. Yigael Yadin, Sukenik’s son, threw his support behind what ‘Dupont-Sommer suggests with justice.’87 A decade after he had first published the footnote, Dupont-Sommer could look back with pride: ‘I first suggested this new explanation of the words infra hos in Pliny’s account in 1950 … and it is now accepted by most authors.’88 His new reading was embraced with such enthusiasm that it is often now considered self-evident. Dupont-Sommer himself did not think that. He could not logically have said both: (a) With the Scrolls now in hand and hypothetically identified as Essene, because of the parallels between Josephus and 1QS, I propose that Pliny had in mind Essenes at Qumran (what he did say) and (b)  I know that the Scrolls are Essene because Pliny locates Essenes in the Qumran area. If he had known the latter, he would not have been so hesitant. When scholars now use the new reading of Pliny as though it were independent support for the hypothesis, though the hypothesis itself produced the new reading, this is logical tail-chasing, a fully circular argument.89 3. Such caution disappeared, indeed, as scholars found the need for a more certain, more objective proof of the Qumran-Essene identification. Historical method was the loser in this. Scholars began to elevate Dupont-Sommer’s hesitant, possible explanation of Pliny to pre-emptive status, driving it like a tank that blew away other readings, which were now dismissed as the absurd efforts of nay-sayers. I know this in part from experience, for in my training through doctoral work I received the very clear impression that Pliny’s notice obviously located Essenes at Qumran, and those who doubted the hypothesis were the usual marginal types who did not take evidence seriously. And this attitude pervaded published research. Roland de Vaux, who supervised the early excavation of the Qumran site, was a transitional figure. He still vacillated between hesitancy and certitude about the new interpretation. In his 1959 Schweich Lectures at the British Academy, he expressed the contemporary caution. Even the revised version of his lectures in 1973 left the ‘affiliation’ question to the last dozen of its 138 pages, indicating that Essene identification was not essential for understanding the Scrolls. Seeing the Qumran-Essene rapprochement as mainly dependent on the interpretation of texts and not in Pliny’s notice, he allowed 87 88 89

Yadin 1957: 185. Dupont-Sommer 1961: 38 n. 1 (French original = 1959: 49). Emphases added. On the circularity issue see also Ullmann-Margalit 2006: 39–55.

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that archaeological support for the Essene connection, or evidence against it, was simply ‘inconclusive.’90 Like other founding figures of Qumran research, he knew that the Pliny passage ‘generally has been taken’ to place Essenes in the inland heights above En Gedi. With increasing confidence as he continued, however, de Vaux cast doubt on that reading on the ground that archaeology had found no suitable site on the hill above the En Gedi oasis (Tell el-Jurn). I pause to observe that this is irrelevant to the understanding of Pliny. We cannot say that Pliny did not locate Callirhoe south of the Dead Sea because we know that it was not there. De Vaux then leapt from the absence of archaeological confirmation to ‘the only course open to us’—without considering other possibilities raised by previous writers (Essenes further inland, further south, in the wadis further north). By the end, he was sure that Pliny’s infra hos must mean that En Gedi was south of the Essenes. This is an abandonment of historical method: fitting the interpretation of Pliny to an assumed conclusion, rather than reading the text for what it says and leaving conclusions open, as he had first seemed to do. In support of the logical shortcut de Vaux offered two reasons: infra can allegedly mean ‘south of’91 and anyway, ‘if this usage is contested,’ it can mean ‘down stream of’. On the latter proposal, Pliny allegedly follows a stream of some kind, from the Jordan River to En Gedi and Masada via the Essenes.92 Given these manoeuvres, it is noteworthy that at the end de Vaux reverts to caution, after all: ‘this particular passage in Pliny is not in itself decisive.’ As for Sukenik and Dupont-Sommer, for de Vaux it was the parallels between 1QS and Josephus’ Essene descriptions that seemed decisive. He suggested and wanted a ‘convergence’ with Pliny’s information. But he vacillated again, content to say that the areas of convergence produced ‘that kind of certitude with which the historian of ancient times often has to content himself.’93 Contenting ourselves with certitude is a paradoxical concept, however, like ‘settling for perfection’ or ‘getting by on fabulous wealth.’ As a historian, I would suggest that we must usually content ourselves with not knowing and only possible or plausible scenarios. Certitude is rarely available to ‘content ourselves with’. If de Vaux appeared conflicted in his reading of Pliny and its role in the Qumran-Essene ‘convergence’, later scholars evidently felt emboldened by the 90 91 92 93

De Vaux 1973: 128, 133. Lewis and Short have a substantial entry on infra, whether used adverbially (‘on the underside, below, underneath’) or prepositionally with accusative (‘below, under’), and noting many applications in particular cases. ‘South of’ is not among the word’s meanings. De Vaux 1973: 135. De Vaux 1973: 137.

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growing consensus within the echo chamber of the convinced. Some, including revisers of Schürer’s handbook, dropped the German scholar’s original impression and now imagined that Pliny draws a line from Jericho and/or the Jordan River through the Essenes to En Gedi. They write categorically, ‘There is no site other than Qumran to correspond to Pliny’s settlement between Jericho and Engedi.’94 Again, ‘Hence the Essene settlement lies south of Jericho and north of En-gedi and the only location fitting this description is Qumran.’95 Likewise, in the words of a more recent survey: ‘This [Qumran-Essene] identification tallies with Pliny the Elder’s placement of a celibate community of Essenes between Jericho and En Gedi south of them.’96 We have here moved from possible if doubtful explanations of Pliny to certain and exclusive readings, which are however demonstrably incorrect. The problem for this oft-repeated claim is that Pliny says nothing of the kind, as we have seen. Jericho does not appear in his description, not even in his earlier Jordan-Asphaltites part (5.71), not in his survey of the lake (5.72), and not in the passage on the western zone where Essenes are (5.73). Pliny approaches the lake by looking first east and south and then west. The convenient ‘line’ from Jericho to En Gedi and Masada via Essenes is a figment of scholarly imagination, and a curious one it is. I was also told this as a student, so it came as a great surprise when I actually studied Pliny. Other scholars dispense with Jericho as the northernmost point of this imaginary line, but still insist that a line is there. In an extraordinarily useful two-volume handbook on Judaean history (1992), Lester Grabbe writes: ‘The approximate location of the Essenes’ habitation is made clear by Pliny’s geographical description. Although the term “below” may be ambiguous, the sequence of listing is from north to south.’ That second sentence avoids being a non sequitur only if there is evidence apart from the infra phrase. Grabbe is insistent, however: ‘The statement of Pliny regarding the location of the Essene community seems incompatible with any interpretation other than Qumran and perhaps one or two other sites on the northwest shore.’97 His later work becomes even blunter: ‘The statement of Pliny the Elder … indicates only one settlement: on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea,’ and he chastises another scholar for not taking seriously Pliny’s perfectly plain location of the Essenes.98 But as a matter

94 95 96 97 98

Vermes 1995: 21 (emphasis mine). Schürer 1979–1987: 2.563 n. 6. Harding 2002: 153 (emphasis added). Grabbe 1992: 492, 494. Grabbe 2000: 202 (cf. 200), p. 70 criticising N. Golb.

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of demonstrable fact, Pliny has no settlement, no northwest shore, and indeed no shore. Pliny’s Essenes flee the toxic shores. A final argument develops de Vaux’s notion that by infra hos Pliny locates En Gedi downstream from and therefore south of Essenes at Qumran. We teach undergraduates in ancient history, who may assume from modern usage that ‘up’ means ‘north,’ that Latin supra and infra, like Greek ana and kata or Hebrew le-maʿelah, le-matah, refer to elevation—as pre-Qumran scholars understood Pliny, above. At 5.70, Pliny says that Judaea pours out ‘above’ (supra) Idumaea and Samaria, which cannot mean ‘north of.’ He knew the words for north, south, east, and west, and used them when he wanted to.99 Nevertheless, many scholars have followed de Vaux in imagining that Pliny locates En Gedi downstream from (infra) Essenes on the Dead Sea’s western shoreline.100 Jodi Magness’ fine textbook on Qumran archaeology couples this notion with that of the imagined line: Pliny’s description of the Dead Sea appears to progress from north to south, beginning with the Jordan River to the settlement of the Essenes to Ein Gedi and then to Masada. This means that Ein Gedi lay downstream from or south of the settlement of the Essenes.101 It is undeniable that, since water runs downhill (cf. Pliny at 2.165), infra can mean ‘downstream of’ when Pliny is following the downward course of a river, and we have seen examples. But how should this meaning apply to either the massive 147 × 111 km lake he describes or the real 80 × 17 km Dead Sea? Leaving aside the basic problem that Pliny does not describe a line from the Jordan River, but moves clockwise around the lake, nothing is clearer than his earlier contrast between the vibrant stream to the north and its demise as it meets Asphaltites (5.71; see above). This terminal lake consumes and kills the stream on contact. And if there were a stream, why would it run only along the western shore and not the eastern or through the middle? Where does the stream go? These extraordinary efforts to explain how Pliny obviously locates Essenes around Qumran, and therefore supports the Qumran-Essene convergence, cannot be sustained by historical method. They are driven by the needs of the hypothesis, at the expense of interpreting Pliny contextually. 99

North (a septentrione and cognates) 126 times; east (ab oriente) 58; south (a meridie) 124; west (ab occidente) 113. Pliny has 52 occurrences of infra: below the sun or moon (2.36, 72, 99, 102), or the Capitol (34.77), degrees below (2.67). The general sense is clear from 2.166. 100 Audet 1961 raised the objection concerning the normal meanings of infra. Laperrousaz 1962 and Burchard 1962 responded with the ‘downstream’ proposal. 101 Magness 2002: 41 (emphasis added).

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I want to emphasise again that my purpose is not to figure out the one ‘correct’ reading of Pliny. Nor is to oppose any hypothesis about Essene or Qumran connections. Pliny mentioned Essenes not in order to locate, name, or describe a ‘settlement’, but to enliven his name-barrage narrative with local colour. His description of the group adds nothing substantial to Philo’s, though his independence is important by way of corroboration. Beyond locating Essenes west of his massive Dead Sea, thus in Judaea, if he had much else in mind he did not communicate it. Modern readers naturally want him to be more specific. But his meaning has become controversial only since the Qumran discoveries, because scholars have tried to pressure the old Roman into coughing up evidence for a certain identification of the new discoveries. Pliny’s vague account does not exclude the possibility of Essenes at Qumran, but nor does he locate them there. This is not an opinion, but observable fact: in the text itself and in the history of its interpretation. Scholars are free to think that Qumran was Essene, but it is not credible to claim that Pliny puts them there. 4

Flavius Josephus (37–ca. 100 CE)

Of our three authors who describe Essenes, Josephus deserves the most space because he had the most to say, and because he was the only one of the three who lived half his life in Judaea. He even claims to have studied with the Essenes (V 10–11), and he implies his own attachment to their ways and ideas (e.g., BJ 2.158). Since I have discussed Josephus’ portraits elsewhere in detail,102 however, I must be relatively brief here. Josephus had a significant education in Greek literature, statesmanship (he often sounds like Plutarch or Dio), rhetoric, and historiography.103 He was as well connected as a defeated provincial commander could be, with close ties to both the Herods of Judaea and the ruling family’s circle of influence in Rome.104 He describes the Essenes repeatedly, in both of his major works, War and Antiquities-Life. Uniquely, he also describes a few individual Essenes. His main account, by his own designation,105 comes in the second book of the War. War’s prologue frames this work’s context, themes, and contents 102 E.g., Mason 2000b; 2008: 84–131; 2009. 103 See Richards 1939; Shutt 1961: 59–75; Rajak 2002 [1983]: 8, 21, 42, 47–63, 233–36; Mader 2000; Eckstein 1990; Shahar 2004. 104 E.g., V 361–67, 414–30; Ap. 1.50–52. See Goodman 1994; also essays in Edmondson, Mason, Rives 2005, and in Sievers and Lembi 2005. Cf. Den Hollander 2014 on Josephus’ Roman connections. 105 AJ 13.173, 298; 18.11; V 10.

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(1.1–30). Living in Rome during the years following Jerusalem’s destruction, Josephus finds much nonsense being written by men who either had no part in the conflict or were present but are now so consumed with praising the Flavians that their accounts are hopelessly compromised, truth-wise. As a Judaean nobleman who proudly fought against Rome, survived, and observed the sequel as a captive, he claims the unique position of being able to write with the balance and fairness required of a historian (1.1–8). Such a complex history in seven volumes has no simple thesis, but a certain ethos and a number of robust themes lend it coherence. These include the temple and its cult, the familiar problems of managing a polis, and the temple’s end as a tragedy. An unstoppable fate brings down the empire’s happiest city, Josephus writes, as hubristic men ostensibly pursue its ‘liberation’, actually for their own power, while wise leaders struggle helplessly to avoid the looming catastrophe. The most basic recurring themes concern the character of the Judaean people. Josephus emphasises their masculine prowess, fortitude, courage, resourcefulness, fearless devotion to their laws, and ultimately their contempt for suffering and death—the most admired traits of good men (cf. Philo’s essay on freedom), which are visible even among politically misguided specimens of Judaean manhood. Implicit in all this is the author’s own standing as a trustworthy arbiter of political morality. The Greek virtue of balance extends to War’s structure, which has, as Josephus later observes (AJ 1.7), a certain symmetry. It moves toward a fulcrum in the middle of Book 4, with the murder of Ananus and Jesus, the wise statesmen who were managing affairs to that point, after which things unravel and an unchecked tyranny consumes the city (BJ 4.300–333). Our author presents himself as the credentialed spokesman of his people, a hereditary priest descended from the non-Zadokite Hasmoneans, whose brilliant exploits open his narrative (1.31–122).106 Josephus’ main passage on the Essenes comes after his lengthy account of Herod’s rule and succession woes (1.218–673). That story has established important themes: King Herod, who magnificently rebuilds the temple that will become the scene of ultimate catastrophe, is a tragic figure. Josephus has an abiding interest in constitutions and the problem of monarchical succession, which features in the case of Herod (see Chapter 11). After the king’s death the emperor Augustus, who had his own famous succession problems, appoints Archelaus as Judaean ethnarch. Unfortunately for Judaea (and Samaria), this young son of Herod is a disaster. After a decade of indulging his passions, pursuing revenge, and unbridled lust, the tyrant is removed (2.111–16). 106 Cf. V 1–6.

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Josephus uses Archelaus’ exile (6 CE), the incorporation of Judaea under a Roman equestrian governor, and the resulting popular indignation fanned by a ‘sophist’ named Judas (2.117–18) to open a digression on Judaea’s philosophical schools: Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes (2.119–66). He thus portrays Judaean society as rich and diverse, comparable to Greek and Roman cultures. But as for Philo, the Essenes completely dominate this account (2.119–61), leaving Pharisees and Sadducees for perfunctory comparison at the end. The glow emanating from the Essenes vanishes when he comes to those groups. The first things Josephus says about Essenes provide a sharp contrast with the political characters who have been creating disaster in the immediately preceding narrative. Having a reputation for gravitas, Essenes control their passions entirely. Contrast the just-described Archelaus and Judas the Galilean. Far from pursuing fickle women, as Archelaus in particular did (2.115–16), they exclude women from their communities. Though alive to the need for succession, they do not crave personal heirs and certainly not feminine distraction. Rather, they adopt children while they are young enough to be formed in the Essene character (2.119–21). Here Josephus differs from both Philo and Pliny, who both think that new entrants are mature, though Josephus will make that assumption later when he speaks of initiates in the order (2.137). The raising of others’ children is a puzzle. And he tosses in a characteristic attack on women’s ‘wanton ways,’ which echoes the language he has just used of Archelaus’ last wife, Glaphyra (2.115–116). In structure, the Essene passage is a microcosm of War. It too is concentric, moving toward a centre and then away from it. Only at the beginning and end do Pharisees and Sadducees make brief appearances, the verb ἀσκέω (‘train, discipline’) strengthening the inclusio (2.119, 166). At one step in come the opening and closing references to women, children, and succession. Even while excluding women, Josephus mentions the need for succession; at the end, a mysterious ‘other order’ values succession enough to allow members to marry (see Chapter 20 in this volume). But they take no pleasure in the sex, which is exclusively to produce children (2.160–61). At 2.122 and 151, moving towards the centre from each end, we find the agent-noun ‘despiser’ (καταφρονητής) twice, which Josephus uses elsewhere only in his eulogy for King Saul—paradigmatic male and ‘despiser of terrors’ (AJ 6.347). Essenes are ‘despisers’ of wealth at the first occurrence, of terrors and death—like Saul—at the second. In each case, Josephus elaborates, respectively on their community of goods and their fortitude under torture (1.122–27, 151–58). Next come his two descriptions of Essene leadership: they are elected by vote (2.123) and ranked by seniority (2.150). At another step moving toward the middle, we meet parallel references to Essene reverence for the sun and its divine rays (2.128, 148).

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Yet another step brings corresponding accounts of their pious routines, strict rules, and customs (2.128–36, 143–49). These occupy each side of the central panel, which concerns (a) their initiation regimen, (b) the twelve oaths taken by initiates, and (c) the expulsion process for Essenes who violate their oaths (2.137–44). The centrality of this fulcrum is flagged by the rare but matching verbs ‘reckon in’ (ἐγκρίνω), at the entrance (2.138), and ‘reckon out’ (έκκρίνω), at the exit (2.143). A number of points emerge in Josephus’ description that are not in Philo or Pliny. Thus, Essenes reject cosmetic oil, preferring dry hard skin (2.123). They have no single polis or home base but are found throughout Judaea, with no exclusion of poleis such as Jerusalem (124). They travel regularly between chapters and so maintain standing provisions for travelling members (124–5). They take daily frigid baths (cf. V 11 on Bannus) and eat very simple meals (129–33). They investigate the curative properties of roots and stones (136). They specially revere Moses and honour his name (145). They refrain from spitting ‘into middles or to the right side’—not from spitting in general and apparently not in a group setting. This most likely refers, if we consider how Josephus’ audience would understand his verbal cues, to the avoidance of common superstitious practices involving spitting into the torso or the right side or sandal (147).107 Their ad hoc toilet practices require digging before and covering up after each bowel movement (hence the initiate’s hatchet)—except on sabbaths (148). They hold Greek-like views of the soul and afterlife (154–58). And they enjoy the ability to predict the future, a skill also illustrated in Josephus’ descriptions of individual Essenes (159). This long digression contributes many things to War’s narrative. Most obviously, it is a diversion from grubby politics to sublimity, filled with utopian ideals and exotic suggestions of Judaean occult skill (cf. AJ 8.44–49). It incidentally reaffirms divine control over human affairs, a central theme in Josephus (2.140). But its pervasive emphasis is on Essene, and hence Judaean, character. Josephus’ Essenes are men’s men who live simple, tough, and virtuous lives, 107 The right side and the avoidance of sabbath work (governed by the same verb) indicate that this is not a general ban on spitting, for example in a group—where spitting to the left could not be acceptable either. Spitting into one’s torso (εἰς κόλπον πτύσαι; in sinum spuendo) or to the right side or right shoe were considered apotropaic: Theophrastus, Char. 16.14; Theocritus, Idyll. 20.11; Tibullus 1.2.96; Pliny, Nat. 24.172; 28.38; cf. Petronius, 74.13; cf. Pliny, Nat. 38.35–39. Comparing this with the prohibition of spitting into a meeting (and of laughing uproariously or otherwise disturbing decorum) as a good example of the scholarly habit of grab-and-go use of Josephus (‘ripping out chunks’ from Josephus to match up with other things, without regard for his contextual meaning); see further Chapter 20.

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neither seduced by life’s attractions nor fearful of its perils. They say little and speak mainly through virtuous actions. In the Graeco-Roman world such admired ‘philosophical’ living was viewed as preparation for life’s hardest test, facing death as a man.108 Josephus therefore places particular emphasis on the way in which Essenes have met torture and death, with peaceful equanimity, as during the recent war (2.151–58). Unlike other Essene portraits, even the others in Josephus, this one is filled with War’s military language. Six times the passage describes a Judaean philosophical school as a τάγμα, which is his normal word for ‘legion.’109 Two of War’s 3 occurrences of ‘in order’ (ἐν τάξει), 5 of its 10 occurrences of ‘regimen’ (δίαιτα), 3 of its 10 occurrences of ‘hard training’ (ἄσκησις or ἀσκέω), and 2 of its 3 examples of ‘self-control’ (ἐγκράτεια) are concentrated in this description of Essenes.110 Their very long initiation process aims to instil endurance (καρτερία, 2.138), he says—famously the purpose of Spartan training.111 Essenes are thus a display case of Judaean values: their willingness to die for the laws anticipates the same behaviour by Judaeans in the later narrative (BJ 2.170–74, 195–97). Judaean courage and contempt for death pervade Josephus’ works, notably in the final quarter of the Against Apion where he speaks of the people as a whole (2.151–296). His language about Judaean simplicity, community, devotion to the laws, and contempt for death there is strikingly similar to what he says of the Essenes in War 2.112 Much like Philo the Alexandrian in Rome (sometimes), then, our Jerusalem aristocrat in Rome enthuses about the Essenes because he sees them as the embodiment of the nation’s character—more even than Josephus’ beloved priesthood, which tarnishes its image by political strife.113 This admiration is explicit at 2.158, where he remarks that Essene views of the afterlife ‘set an irresistible bait (ἄφυκτον δέλεαρ) for those who have once tasted of their wisdom’, implying that he aligns himself with them in some way. The paradoxical use of ‘bait’—normally of sensual pleasures to be avoided—anticipates Ap. 2.284, where he reflects that the Judaean laws attract many foreigners, 108 Valerius Maximus 9.13.pr.; cf. (of countless examples) Diodorus Siculus 5.29.2; 15.86.3; 17.43.6, 107.6; Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Ant. rom. 5.46.4; Philo, Prob. 30; Abr. 183; Musonius Rufus, Diss. 10; Epictetus in Arrian, Diatr. 3.26.11–14, 21–39; 4.1.70, 71; Plutarch, Brut. 12.2; Lucian, Peregr. 13, 23, 33; Marcus Aurelius, Med. 4.50.1; 9.3.1; 12.34.1. Cf. Warren 2004. 109 BJ 2.122, 125, 143, 160, 161, 164 the last of Sadducees. 110 In sequence, BJ 2.130, 133; 137, 138, 151, 155, 160; 119, 150, 166 (of Pharisees); 120, 138. 111 Xenophon, Ages. 5.3; 10.1; 11.9; Plutarch, Mor. [Apoph. lac.] 208c, 210a, 237a; Lyc. 2.2; 16.5–6; 18.1; 29.5; Ages. 11.7; 30.3. 112 See Mason 2009: 258–60. 113 E.g., BJ 1.31–33; 2.409–11; AJ 4.14–56; 20.199–203, 205, 208–10, 213.

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even though their ‘bait’ is not that of pleasure (χωρὶς τοῦ τῆς ἡδονῆς ἐπαγωγοῦ δελέατος). The third-century philosopher Porphyry must have picked up this connection between War’s Essenes and Apion’s Judaeans because, in order to illustrate Judaean virtues, he quotes most of War’s Essene passage (shortly after describing Spartans) and fuses it with the final part of Against Apion (Abst. 4.11.3–13.10). Josephus’ Antiquities, completed in 93/94 CE, furthers many of War’s themes, though the emphasis is different. More than half of this twenty-volume work is devoted to the ancient past, from Creation onward. The tragedy of Jerusalem’s recent fall is foreshadowed, but the story ends on the eve of revolt in 66 CE. An elaborate prologue (AJ 1.1–26) highlights Antiquities’ interest in political constitutions and the notion that Moses’ laws reflect the laws of Nature (1.5, 21–26). Related is the broad theme of political-ethical philosophy, the ancient context in which constitutions were discussed (1.25). The temple and its priests form another consistent interest, providing the core of the ‘aristocratic’ government that Moses mandated,114 which has served the nation for most of its history under a succession of high priests. Other recurring themes have to do with divine oversight of human affairs and the inescapability of rewards and punishments for following or violating natural-divine law. These motifs run through the work and are reprised in Book 20.115 Antiquities and its autobiographical appendix, the Life, include several accounts of the Essenes, though in them Josephus often refers to War 2 as his basic account.116 Essenes first appear in a brief comparison with Pharisees and Sadducees on the question of fate and free will (AJ 13.171–73). In Book 15 Josephus discusses them more particularly, when explaining why Herod exempted them from an oath of allegiance, even though the tyrant was usually harsh toward his subjects. The Essenes he held in honour because one of them had seen him walking to lessons as a child, addressed him as king, and predicted his rise and fall—with a smack on the backside to drive home the message. When Herod became king, he remembered this and privileged the Essenes. Josephus takes the opportunity to celebrate their moral excellence (καλοκαγαθία, as in Philo), which explains why God allows them foreknowledge (15.379, as in War 2). In the same passage, he compares their way of life to that of the Pythagoreans (15.371). The tyrannical Herod’s tolerance of the Essenes independently agrees with Philo’s remarks about their survival under tyrants, and this may well be what Philo had in mind. 114 AJ 4.223; 6.36, 84, 268; 11.111; 20.229, 251. 115 For themes in the biblical paraphrase see Attridge 1976; generally, Mason 2000a: ix–xxxvi. 116 AJ 13.173, 298; 18.11; V 10.

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Antiquities’ main description of the Essenes comes at the place corresponding to War’s, after an expanded account of the rebellion that occurred when Judaea was brought under direct Roman rule following Archelaus’ removal in 6 CE (NB: that political situation is described differently). Again referring the reader to War 2 for a basic presentation (AJ 18.11), Josephus takes another stab at describing all three schools. It is not an altogether happy effort, because in these volumes he is experimenting with Thucydidean style, which is challenging enough at times even where Thucydides himself produced it.117 This passage is one in which Josephus goes over the top, playing with awkward constructions that baffled both mediaeval copyists—who tried to correct the ‘errors’ in surviving manuscripts—and modern interpreters. The Essenes continue to receive a bit more space than the other schools (18.18–22), and Josephus elevates them above any Greek or barbarian group (18.20), though this description is much more proportionate than the War counterpart. While repeating points about their community of goods, not taking wives (now an absolute rejection of women, without War’s breeding kind; see Chapter 20 below), election of leaders, belief in the soul’s immortality, and concern for justice, Josephus offers a few new points. Essenes have survived since ancient times, he now remarks. They devote themselves to agriculture (contrast ‘trades’ of BJ 2.129). They number about 4,000. They do not own slaves because that would be unjust, but rather humbly take care of each other’s needs.118 It is often observed that the new material, as also the reference to some sort of attenuated sacrifice (below), matches elements in Philo’s essay on freedom. Having exhausted his talents in War 2 and wanting to avoid repetition in keeping with rhetorical norms, it seems that Josephus looked to Philo, whom he will soon mention (AJ 18.259–60).119 If so, however, this is not a matter of simple copying. He has made the material his own and written it up to serve the context and style of Antiquities 18. This passage begins and ends with statements that have vexed interpreters because of their awkward style, strange vocabulary, and the manuscript 117 See Thackeray 1967 [1929]: 108–115; he traced the strange style to a ‘Thucydidean hack’ allegedly employed by Josephus as assistant. 118 Cf. Philo’s Therapeutae (Cont. 70–74). 119 See Rajak 1994: 148, and more recently Collins 2009: 58–60, with the literature cited there. Although it is always possible that Josephus used Philo’s putative sources (Collins’ preference), or indeed an intermediate revision of Philo by someone else, such hypotheses only complicate matters. They seem unnecessary, since wherever we can test him (e.g., when using Nicolaus or the Bible), Josephus departs significantly from his sources anyway. So his borrowing of a few elements from Philo, and reworking them fully into the style and context of Antiquities 18 would not require other hypothetical sources.

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variants. In the first (18.19), Josephus says something about Essenes dispatching or bringing ‘offerings’ (ἀναθήματα) to the temple precincts and performing or not performing (depending on the variant) sacrifices in connection with their ‘distinctive way with purifications.’ ‘For the same reason,’ he continues, they are either barred from or keep themselves from the ‘common sacred enclosure’ (inner court?) and perform sacrifices by/for themselves—in a different part of the temple area, or in their communities? At the end of the passage (18.22), Josephus makes equally puzzling remarks on their living ‘in no way strangely or differently’ (from whom?) and (or ‘but’: it is unclear whether the phrase is adversative or emphatic) ‘especially bringing in (something) with—or being close to—those said to be [or called] the majority of the Dacians’ (ζῶσι δὲ οὐδὲν παρηλλαγμένως ἀλλ’ ὅτι μάλιστα ἐμφέροντες Δακῶν τοῖς πλείστοις λεγομένοις).120 This apparent nonsense has inspired brilliant attempts at emendation, the cleverest perhaps comparing Essenes to the so-called ‘Founders’ (Ctistae) among the Thracians—a group described by Strabo (Geogr. 7.3.3) that has similarities with Essenes.121 Given the background role of the Spartan mirage throughout Josephus’ accounts and his use of Spartans as a benchmark of virtue in the Apion, I would suggest a simpler emendation, affecting only one word. Given the similarity between Delta and Lambda (Δ, Λ), he might have compared the Essenes to ‘what are said [i.e., alleged] to be the majority of the Spartans (i.e., Λακώνων τοῖς πλείστοις λεγομένοις).’ In that case, the second ΩΝ will have dropped out and initial Λ will have been misread as Δ, so that Josephus’ ΛΑΚΩΝΩΝ122 became ΔΑΚΩΝ—changes easy to imagine in textual transmission. In an intriguing notice without a finite verb (18.22), Josephus appears to claim that Essenes elect their priests: ‘As receivers of the proceeds and whatever the earth might produce they hand-elect good men, and priests for the preparation of both grain-based food and meat [or other food].’ It is unclear whether this means that some men are elected to be priests, in Greek fashion (the more natural sense), or that members of the Judaean priestly caste (kohanim) among the Essenes are elected only for the priestly task of food preparation. Likewise in War 2, the only role given to priests involves food—there, blessings at meals (2.131). Josephus’ brief reference in his autobiography to his youthful study with all three schools from age 16 (V 10–12) adds nothing substantive, though it implies his internal knowledge of the group. (Did they have a school for outsiders?) 120 See Finkbeiner 2010 for a thorough examination of Josephus’ Essenes. 121 This reading is discussed and adopted by L. H. Feldman in the Loeb edition ad loc. 122 Singular and plural are in BJ 1.513; 2.381.

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This commonplace passage on the youthful philosophical quest has famous arithmetical problems, however, and it is impossible to know what such study amounted to in reality.123 Like Philo’s and Pliny’s descriptions, then, Josephus’ accounts of Essenes fit their narrative environments, just as we would expect. Consideration of his literary interests might help us understand his description of Essene priests and sun-reverence. He has a consistent interest in the role of priests: his own priestly heritage is the basis of his social status, expert knowledge of sacred texts, and ability to predict the future (from knowledge of those texts).124 He also shows a sustained concern with high-priestly succession, makes the priestly college the stable core of Judaean governance, entrusts the accurate transmission of the nation’s holy books to them, and takes many opportunities to emphasise the role of priests.125 It is not surprising, therefore, that Josephus is the only writer of the three to find a role for priests among the Essenes. Even still, the most he can say is that elected priests had some limited responsibilities in connection with food. The priestly caste has no leadership role (contrast the Qumran Scrolls). Intimations of Essene sun-worship, which impressed many pre-Qumran scholars, also fit his general outlook, for he often mentions the sun in place of God.126 Josephus’ individual Essenes all appear in the vicinity of Jerusalem. This matches his claim that they are found in all cities, not one alone, his polis being a vague term that includes towns and possibly even villages.127 I have mentioned one such Essene, who addressed the child Herod as he walked to lessons—presumably in Jerusalem and not in the desert. Another, who used to teach in Jerusalem, predicts King Aristobulus’ murder of his brother (BJ 1.78). Still another is summoned by Archelaus in Jerusalem, alongside other seers and Chaldaeans, to interpret his bad dreams (1.112–13). This Simon must have been near enough to be on call. So we are not surprised that Josephus mentions a ‘Gate of the Essenes’ in Jerusalem’s oldest wall (5.145). One commander in the revolt, a counterpart to Josephus, is called John the Essaios (2.567), though many scholars think that the contexts in which this label is given (e.g., 3.11) indicate his origin in Essa rather than membership of the Essenes. The historian’s ultimate task, as always, is to imagine the sort of group that would best explain Josephus’ accounts, and then all the accounts together. 123 124 125 126 127

See my commentary to this passage in Mason 2001. BJ 1.2–3; 3.350–53; V 1–6, 197–98; Ap. 1.54–55. E.g., AJ 20.224–51; Ap. 1.30–36, 184–89; cf. Rappaport 1930; Gussmann 2008: 198–433. See Mason 2008: 105–6 n. 804. See V 235 and compare the status of Gabara at 123 and 229.

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As with Philo, we have in Josephus a statesman whose career and writings are all about cultural interaction, a world citizen who has drunk deeply of Graeco-Roman political-moral ideas and applied them to his nation in copious writings. Like Philo, though independently for the most part, he turns easily and consistently to Essenes as the most obvious shining examples of the nation’s moral excellence. His political narratives are not about the Essenes, and they do not figure largely; nor do Pharisees or Sadducees, or Josephus’ beloved teacher Bannus. But of all the philosophers and groups in Judaea, they are the ones, and the only ones, to whom he consistently resorts as examples of sublimity in the tragic history that is his main theme. 5

Summary and Assessment

My aim has been to sketch the rudiments of a historical inquiry into the Essenes, along the lines we pursue when investigating any other problem of the ancient past. We gather contemporary evidence bearing on the subject and try to understand it contextually, recognising all the possibilities we can, and then turn to imagining the lost reality that produced this evidence. Our conclusions begin with what is independently corroborated by these authors. Essenes were a long-established association of celibate males living in the villages and towns of Judaea (west of the Dead Sea). To maintain their numbers, they relied on adult recruits, everyone agrees. Income from their hard work in agriculture and other occupations went into a common fund for mutual support. They rejected the swearing of oaths. Their lack of slaves and status-erasing common meals were noteworthy in a world more attuned to status-differentiation than ours. They lived apart from the norms of society, with simple food and dress, and a humble demeanour. To regulate their lives, they studied their ancestral laws, revered Moses, and strictly kept the sabbath. They apparently had a distinctive outlook on animal sacrifice and the temple, though whatever it was it was not strange enough to deter the legal expert Philo or the priest Josephus from unstinting praise. Essenes were admired by the general population and honoured by even harsh rulers. Their way of life was suffused with the universal ancient virtues of holiness and purity. The reality of their human relations must have fallen short of sublimity,128 but they enjoyed such a reputation that Philo and Josephus readily extolled them. 128 We need only consider the rules for all human organisations: a club in Lanuvium (CIL 14.2112), 1QS 7 for Qumraners in Judaea, and many Christian and Buddhist monastic rules; cf. Crosby 2006.

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Positing such traits would explain how all three authors came to their views, including Pliny’s distant effort at sarcasm. It would also explain why such men as Philo and Josephus were so quick to feature this group. They embodied in nuce the virtues that Philo and Josephus claimed for all Judaeans. If such a group existed in Judaea’s towns and villages, we would expect independent writers to portray them in distinctive language, to fit the themes of each work that incorporates Essenes. Ancient accounts of Augustus, the Senate, Pilate, Agrippa I, the Pharisees, or other phenomena differ in the same way. Philo’s use of the Essenes to exemplify moral freedom made sense in his essay on freedom, as did his use of Essenes to illustrate more general virtues in works on those virtues. We can see him applying his characteristic metaphors, images, and terminology to the Essenes (athletes, anointing for contests), and we would not expect Pliny or Josephus to do the same. Likewise, Pliny’s barbed bemusement at this Judaean curiosity after the war reflects his style and interests, which we do not find in the others. Josephus’ emphasis on Essene discipline and toughness in War 2, yielding in Antiquities 18 to temple-related and philosophical issues, is also what one would expect. His ‘wanton ways of women’ avoided by Essenes (but a trap for Herodians), his emphasis on Essene self-control and discipline, and his characteristic language on the afterlife are all par for the course. In other words, once we have some contextual understanding of each surviving description of the Essenes, it is not difficult to imagine the kind of reality that gave rise to them. The accounts agree on a great deal, from very different and independent perspectives. Their differences are mostly what we would expect of independent authors describing the same basic phenomenon. More difficult to assess are elements asserted by one author alone. Josephus has most of these because he has the fullest descriptions: adoption of others’ children, reverence for the sun, marrying Essenes, priests’ role in food preparation, not ‘spitting into middles or to the right,’ a long and tough initiation, etc. Philo alone mentions sacred ‘synagogues’ and occupations such as herding, grazing, and bee-keeping. Most of these, however, pose no great problem insofar as they cohere with the corroborated points. That is, we would not expect independent authors to mention only the same items. Philo, who died before the war, could not have described Essene courage under torture in that conflict, which Josephus emphasises. Interest in curative substances and a frigid-bath regimen suited the ethos of ancient philosophy,129 and their attestation among 129 On cures, see Philo, Cont. 2 with respect to the similar Therapeutae; Seneca, Epp. 93–94; Plutarch, Keeping Well; also the notes ad loc. in Mason 2008. On frigid baths for trainees in philosophy see Lucian, Nigr. 27.

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Judaea’s Essenes presents no surprises.130 Elaborate initiations with special commitments to the group and professions of secrecy also go with the territory of rigorist associations. With this class of information, the lack of corroboration leaves us less confident, as we do not know what might come from a single author’s poor information or creative liberties, but there is nothing contradictory in it and is plausible. The marrying order, by contrast, mentioned only by Josephus and by him in only one of his accounts, presents a special problem because it creates a contradiction, not only between Josephus and the other two sources, but more importantly within Josephus’ own accounts: between his BJ 2.160–61 and Antiquities 18.21 (οὔτε γαμετὰς εἰσάγονται) and within the War 2 passage. I explore these problems in Chapter 20, below. Given the strangeness of the afterthought, though also integration into the structure of the passage,131 we must reckon with the possibility that Josephus has freelanced. His inventiveness is an evidential fact, not an opinion.132 If we consider the possibility that he invented marrying Essenes for passing reasons in War 2, it is easy to imagine why he might have done so133 and that hypothesis would explain all the evidence without remainder, whereas the hypothesis that Essenes were actually known to include an order that married (because they saw procreation as crucial) would leave the preponderance of evidence unexplained: not only Pliny and Philo but also the other parts of Josephus. I am not suggesting that we know the former hypothesis to be correct. I am simply following historical method, testing hypotheses for their explanatory power.134 Whatever one thinks of this last proposal, all the contemporary Essene descriptions that have survived portray a group embodying values widely 130 Cures: AJ 8.41–44. Evidence for Judaean magic, amulets, exorcisms, and cures, and the use of Judaean lingo by others, is abundant. Daily (or twice-daily) cold baths: V 11. See examples in Kee 1986; Bohak 2008. 131 E.g., τάγμα, Essenes as γένος, διαδοχή through child-production (all anticipated in 2.120–22, creating an inclusio), ἔθη καὶ νόμιμα (characteristic of Josephus), three-year testing/proving, περίζωμα (the distinctive loincloth described at 2.129, 137). 132 Cf. Feldman 1998a: 37–73 et passim, War’s lengthy speeches (with, e.g., Lindner 1972), and Mason 2001: 213–22 (= Appendix C). 133 Spartan women were famously reared for child-production (τεκνοποιία): Xenophon, Lac. 1.4–10. Roman elite perspectives: Tacitus, Ann. 3.25; Cassius Dio 54.16.1–2. Soranus (Gyn. 3.24.1) insists that marriage is not for ‘the enjoyment of pleasurable sensations’ but for ‘the sake of children and succession.’ For Judaean parallels (perhaps grounded in the command to multiply, Gen 1.26) see next note. 134 Supposing the notice to be an undigested artefact from a source (Bergmeier 1993: 68) would not explain its literary integration, while supposing that many Essenes married would not explain most of the evidence.

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admired in the ancient world. Such values connected with perennial Greek discussion about optimal constitutions and ideal societies,135 a debate into which Josephus confidently enters the Judaean polity (AJ 1.14, 20, etc.). Two important models were the Spartans,136 at the polis level, and among philosophical schools, the Pythagoreans.137 The Essenes of Josephus’ and Philo’s accounts would have been intelligible as examples of this type, which had other shadows too: the men of the Alexandrian Mouseion (males only, practicing community of goods, and sharing common meals [syssitia]),138 Philo’s Therapeutae, the Roman legions (trained to be fearless, living without wives under strict discipline), exotic ethnic groups such as the Thracian ‘Founders’ (living without women and held in great honour),139 and some early Christians (sharing property and sacred meals, avoiding oaths).140 6

Conclusion

Since the Enlightenment and before, scholars have speculated about connecting the Essenes described by Philo, Pliny, and Josephus with other groups. Such hypothetical connections always face the challenges of economy and adequacy. It may be (in principle) that secret Essene teaching would have shown them to be followers of Jesus or the home of John’s Baptists, as some 135 E.g., Ferguson 1975: 23–28. 136 In general: Ollier 1933; Tigerstedt 1974; Hodkinson and Powell 1994. 137 On Pythagoras’ influence, see Plato (who mostly assumes knowledge of Pythagoreanism), Resp. 7.530d; 10.600b; Porphyry, Vit. Pyth. 53. According to Diogenes Laertius (8.15), Plato paid a great sum to purchase three volumes by the Pythagorean Philolaus. Aristotle discusses Pythagorean ideas at length, mentioning them more than 50 times. See inter alios Johansen 1998: 36–44. In addition to Cumont’s 1930 study (n. 31) see now Taylor 2004, arguing the Pythagorean origin of non-biblical ideas among the Essenes (with whom he includes the people of the Scrolls). Both Philo and Josephus regard Pythagoras with respect, as a student of Moses: Opif. 100; Leg. all. 1.15; Josephus, Ap. 1.162; cf. 1.14; 2.168. 138 Strabo, Geogr. 17.1.8. 139 Strabo, Geogr. 7.3.3. 140 Acts 2.44–45: ‘All who believed were in the same places and held everything as common. They were selling their possessions and property and distributing them to all, according to anyone’s need.’ Acts 4.32–35: ‘Now the group of those who had believed were one in heart and soul, and none of them said that any of his/her possessions was private, but everything was common for all. … There was no needy person among them, because all those who were owners of fields or houses sold them and brought the proceeds of what had been sold, and placed it before the apostles’ feet. And so it was distributed to each person, according to anyone’s need’ (NRSV).

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pre-Qumran scholars imagined. No one can prove that this was not so. But why should we think that it was? What evidence for Essenes or Christians (or baptists) would be more satisfactorily explained by such a hypothesis? None that I know of. Such hypotheses, though possible, are unnecessary and, because they create more problems than they solve, best left aside unless they are needed. The same problem attends the Qumran-Essene hypothesis. Advocates read the descriptions of Philo, Pliny, and Josephus in ways already processed by this hypothesis: Pliny clearly located Essenes at Qumran, and Josephus described avoidance of oil for purity’s sake, indicated celibates at Qumran and married Essenes elsewhere, prayers at dawn, and a 1QS-like prohibition against spitting into the assembled group.141 When he featured Essene toilet practices, he was describing ‘only practices which deviated from the [Qumran] norm’142—irrespective of his own contextual indications. Historical method requires, however, that the evidence be understood in its own context first, without such question-begging. Hypotheses of affiliation must come later, as an explanatory vehicle: If X had been the reality, how would that explain why these authors wrote what they did? Nothing I have said excludes the Qumran-Essene hypothesis. I simply do not understand what evidence requires it as an explanation. It seems unnecessary for understanding the surviving descriptions of the Essenes. Where it is embraced, it tends to obfuscate our understanding of those accounts. I have no problem with it as a hypothesis, any more than a hypothesis that Jesus or the Baptist were Essenes, or Qumraners—or Buddhists or Pythagoreans. Almost anything is possible. But what problem is solved by any such hypothesis? It is a solution in search of a problem. A fundamental question is why, if the Essenes were the people of 1QS, the War Scroll, CD, and the pesharim, such establishment men as Philo and Josephus admired them so much. I have never suggested that it is not possible that they did. But nor have I seen any effort at an argument that would explain this. It is an inversion of historical method to assert a hypothesis and then demand that others disprove it or show why it could not have been. History is not a matter of belief. It is not church. The Essenes either were or were not connected with the Qumran Scrolls. I do not know whether they were, and do not see how others can know. But our opinions have no effect on the past, so there is little point in insisting on them. A methodical inquiry disallows 141 See in general Beall 1988: 34–129, esp. 41, 45–46, 52–53, 96–97. For Josephus’ description of celibate Essenes at Qumran see also Gray 1993: 92. 142 Magness 2002: 108–109.

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antecedent commitments. It should be clear, therefore, that I am not attacking the Qumran-Essene hypothesis or any other. I have interacted with it here only to show its gravitational effect on the reading of Philo, Pliny, and Josephus. Historians have no business attacking hypotheses. But it is up to those who advance them to show what problems they solve and how they explain the evidence better than alternatives—in short, why they are necessary.

Chapter 13

Josephus’ Pharisees: Sketches by a Close Observer In Josephus’ thirty-volume corpus Pharisees rarely appear. That observation already says something important for any study of Josephus’ Pharisees. Despite older impressions that Josephus was a Pharisee or that he wrote his later works to promote the group, they are a marginal presence in his corpus (see Figure 5). One could analyse in some depth the structures, themes, and contents of Josephus’ works without paying much attention to Pharisees—or Sadducees, or even Essenes, though Essenes play a larger role (see previous chapter). In his seven-volume Judaean War, which sets out to explain how Jerusalem came to be destroyed in 70 CE (BJ 1.1–12), Pharisees act only in the double-length opening volume, which offers two centuries of pre-history, then fleetingly in Book 2. In his Antiquities, the subject of which is Judaea’s origins and ancient constitution (AJ 1.5–26), Pharisees appear only in scattered passages among the later volumes (13, 15, 17, 18), which have most often been considered a miscellaneous hodge-podge, not in the trunk of the work.1 One might suppose that Pharisees do not appear earlier because they did not exist before the Hellenistic period. But Antiquities 1–12 includes mention of the Romans in general, Claudius, Vespasian and Titus, Epicureans, and authors such as Nicolaus of Damascus and Alexander Polyhistor, all of whom belong to

Figure 5

Pharisee sightings in Josephus

1 E.g., Thackeray 1967: 60: ‘a patch-work, compiled from such miscellaneous materials as were at the author’s disposal …. accounts for much disproportion in the narrative.’ Contrast Mason 2012b, which finds more structural and thematic unity throughout the whole work.

© Steve Mason, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004545960_015

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later periods.2 Were the Pharisees important for Josephus’ understanding of Judaean life and law, he would presumably have said so, for example when explicating Moses’ laws (AJ 3–4). But they do not appear in the main narratives of his two great histories. That he did not consider any of the schools crucial for his project is confirmed by their complete absence from the Against Apion, his last composition. There he stresses the complete sufficiency of the written laws given by Moses, which all Judaeans understand (Ap. 1.37–43; 2.145–96). The Pharisees’ presence looks even slighter when we realise that the passages in which they do appear fall in two categories. Josephus describes them most fully when contrasting them as a group with Sadducees and Essenes. In only about ten places does he mention Pharisees as historical actors, but then the reference may be a single phrase or sentence.3 They appear in more episodes than Essenes (and both are more visible than Sadducees), but only in three contexts: the late Hasmonean period (AJ 13), under King Herod (AJ 15, 17), and in connection with Josephus’ half-year in Galilee (Life). To anticipate my conclusions: the scattered frequency seems best explained by Josephus’ coolness toward the Pharisees. Outside of the comparative ‘school’ passages, he mentions them only when it is necessary to make his narrative intelligible. At those points he says the minimum needed to move the story along. That is why he adds information in Antiquities, his later and fuller account. Given that he never attempts a sympathetic explanation of their motives, viewpoint, or place in society, one might conclude that he speaks of the Pharisees’ actions grudgingly, only when he considers it helpful for the story line. We begin with what scholars have done with Josephus’ descriptions of the Pharisees and then review the passages. 1

Scholarship on the Pharisees

From the nineteenth-century beginnings of critical research on ancient Judaism until the 1960s, scholars’ views of the Pharisees were shaped by the confessional contexts in which they encountered them. Older research was divided between Jewish and Christian scholarship, each side with its own subdivisions. Everyone considered Pharisees the most prominent group in pre-70 Judaea, but this meant different things to different researchers. For most Jewish scholars, Hillel, Gamaliel, and Yohanan ben Zakkai were among the admired founders of rabbinic tradition, which would unify and preserve the Jewish community 2 E.g., AJ 1.4, 6, 13, 94, 108, 159, 240; 3.320; 7.101; 8.46, 157; 10.277; 12.121–22. 3 BJ 1.110–14, 571; 2.411; AJ 13.288–96; 13.401–35; 15.3, 370; 17.41–46; V 21, 191–97.

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through perilous times to come. The Oral Torah (‫ )תורה ׁשבעל פה‬of the Pharisees/ Rabbis was deeply humane, merciful, and progressive, taking full account of human weakness by showing how the Torah was not in heaven but made for humans and enabling a rich life. Abraham Geiger (Reform), Heinrich Graetz (Orthodox), and Kaufmann Kohler (Reform) were among the voices protesting ancient Christian caricatures. They found in the Pharisees the deeply moral and religious heart of the Jewish nation, the compassionate party of the people against cold, rich aristocrats, ‘the noblest guardians and representatives of Judaism and strict morality.’4 Geiger counted Jesus among the Pharisees, and Kohler saw little difference between Jesus’ teachings and theirs. In sharp contrast, for most Christian scholars before the Second World War, who grounded their views in New Testament polemic and sought confirmation through their impressions of rabbinic literature, Pharisees were part of the dark background against which Jesus and Paul stood out in bright relief. The founders of Christianity claimed revelations that, those scholars thought, broke with the Pharisees’ (and rabbis’) imagined legalism. Traditional Christian perceptions of Judaism would claim a scientific basis in Julius Wellhausen’s history of Israel,5 which posited a long decline from early prophetic vitality through the post-exilic codification of laws to a finally pointless and barren legalism—in Pharisees and rabbis—which supposedly preserved a mere husk of the prophetic deposit.6 Given that ancient Judaism was mainly studied in Europe’s rabbinical colleges and faculties of theology, or in North America’s seminaries, yeshivas, or rare departments of Semitics (for biblical studies), common ground among Jewish and Christian researchers was elusive, despite the efforts of notable Anglophone Christian scholars to disavow traditional views.7 That basic difference of perspective—about whether Pharisees were humane and progressive or the withered endpoint of ‘late Judaism’—was tied up with many other decisions, for example about whether texts that do not mention Pharisees (Psalms of Solomon, Jubilees, Ben Sira, or the Damascus Covenant found in the Cairo Geniza) might nevertheless be Pharisaic, or anti-Pharisaic. Different choices about which sources were Pharisaic expanded the number of variables in disputes about the nature of the Pharisees: their aims and what 4 Graetz 1888: 3.88; cf. Geiger 1857: 101–50; 1864: 87–102. Cf. Kohler 1906a: 9.661–66; Lauterbach 1929: 69–139 [lectures presented to Christian scholars]; Finkelstein 1938. For deep context see Heschel 1998, which often discusses Pharisees. 5 Wellhausen 1883. Cf. his famous article ‘Israel’ in the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1880) 13.428– 29: Pharisees and rabbis widened the ‘domain of law’ to snuff out individual conscience under an ‘iron system’ of law. 6 Wellhausen 1874: 12, 19, 20–21. Cf. Weber 1880: 1–5 on Nomokratie. 7 Herford 1924: 11–12; Moore 1927–30: 1.13–15; Parkes 1960: 134–35.

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they most valued, how they began, what their name signified, their connection with apocalyptic views, their political affiliations especially in relation to Roman rule, and the degree of their popular influence.8 Until about the late 1960s, assessments of the Pharisees were becoming steadily more varied. There seemed little hope of finding agreement on basic questions. Nearly everyone still agreed that they were the most prominent, popular, and influential group in pre-70 Judaean society, and were forerunners of the rabbis. But who were they? As the post-World War II generation was calling for peace and understanding, universities and religious institutions began to reckon seriously with the roles that traditional Christian views of Jews and Judaism had played in the Holocaust. From the side of organised religion, new avenues of exchange were embodied in the dialogue between Augustin Cardinal Bea, S.J., and Rabbi Prof. Abraham Joshua Heschel, which helped to bring about the declaration Nostra Aetate from the Second Vatican Council (1965). Meanwhile in higher education, a 1963 US Supreme Court decision opened a way forward by distinguishing between the teaching of religion, which the Constitution had been understood to forbid in public institutions, and teaching about religion(s), which seemed increasingly necessary in a democratic society. US involvement in the Pacific War, the Korean conflict, and now Vietnam also brought many Americans into direct contact with eastern thought and traditions. University-level studies that would balance a confession-free study of Christian origins, history, and thought with greater understanding of Jewish, East Asian, and eventually Muslim traditions became a desideratum for a liberal-arts education. Soon after the Supreme Court’s decision, therefore, the American Academy of Religion formed itself (from the National Association of Biblical Instructors), and many public universities decided that the time had come to create departments of religious studies.9 I began my university studies in Canada’s first experiment along this line, McMaster University’s Department of Religious Studies, established in 1964. These changes had lasting consequences for research on the Pharisees, as Jewish and Christian scholars, observant or lapsed, came into regular conversation. In the 1970s, two watershed books catalysed the new atmosphere by applying standard historical-critical approaches to ancient Judaism and Christian origins. In his 1973 textbook From Politics to Piety: The Emergence of Pharisaic Judaism, Jacob Neusner sketched a program for historical study of

8 Mason 1993: 103–140. 9 Cf. Hughes 2016: 56–59.

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the group.10 Applying lessons from his detailed work on Yohanan ben Zakkai11 and his three-volume study of traditions about the Pharisees in rabbinic literature,12 Neusner perceived that most previous research on the group had rather sloppily combined statements from scattered and unverified sources, without attention to context. The only source groups with plausible claims to knowledge of the Pharisees, he insisted, were early rabbinic literature, the New Testament texts, and Josephus. These must therefore serve as a control group, before any sources that do not explicitly describe Pharisees are used. The historian’s first task was to assess the nature of each of these texts. Rather than looking for superficial intersections among disparate corpora, we should first understand each corpus for what it is and figure out how the Pharisees function in it: why they are present and what they contribute to that work. In his 1973 textbook, Neusner ventured to interpret all three corpora himself. Three decades later, he and Bruce Chilton would invite scholars with expertise in each corpus to contribute chapters.13 The other watershed study of the 1970s was Ellis Rivkin’s A Hidden Revolution.14 Also a specialist in rabbinic literature, Rivkin reached superficially similar insights to Neusner’s: one could responsibly speak of the historical Pharisees only after surveying the evidence in its own context. And the only three corpora reflecting contemporary knowledge of the Pharisees were the early rabbinic texts, Josephus, and the New Testament. Like Neusner, then, Rivkin attempted to work through each source before offering historical conclusions. Although their methods were outwardly similar, the two men could not have reached more opposite conclusions, because their deeper historical sensibilities ran in opposite directions. Neusner methodically, given his sensitivity to the distinctive literary programme of each text, doubted its correspondence to historical reality. He concluded from his highly sceptical analysis of all three corpora that the real Pharisees must have abandoned political activities during Herod’s reign to become a small group of limited influence (to account from their absence in much of Josephus), chiefly concerned with maintaining priest-like purity (rabbinic indications). Only after the Temple’s destruction in 70 CE did they return to prominence as the anchor of the rabbinic movement (hence the largely post-70 gospels interest in them). All of our sources 10 11 12 13 14

Neusner 1973. Hughes 2016: 62–65. Neusner 1971. Neusner and Chilton 2007. Rivkin 1978.

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except Josephus’ War, he suspected, projected post-70 conditions on pre-70 times. Rivkin took the sources much more at face value. Seeking correspondences among them, he found them largely in agreement on the essentials. He concluded that the variously labelled Pharisees / scribes / soferim / hakamim / rabbis were scarcely distinguishable (though ḥaverim, often identified with Pharisees, were different). By the first century BCE they, the Pharisees, had usurped the priests in scriptural exegesis (the ‘hidden revolution’), to become the leading exponents and interpreters of Torah in pre-70 Judaea. A decade after Rivkin’s book, Anthony Saldarini again reviewed each source group separately, now applying sociological questions, methods, and models. This approach led him to generate new proposals about the place of the Pharisees in Judaean society as a ‘retainer’ group—serving rulers but from the masses, according to Gerhard Lenski’s typology of agrarian societies—and of limited direct influence on that society.15 Although these researchers reached different conclusions, they agreed that any attempt to reconstruct the historical Pharisees must begin from understanding the three primary source bodies, each in its own right, before moving to historical hypothesising. This largely brought an end to the old way of cherry-picking promising fruit from each corpus. Scholars remained interested in the Pharisees, but the new foundation redirected them to study the Pharisees in Mark, Matthew, John, and Luke-Acts, to supplement those of rabbinic literature by Neusner and Rivkin.16 When I reached dissertation time in the early 1980s, the obvious lacuna was a study of Josephus’ Pharisees, and so I devoted my dissertation to a ‘composition-critical’ interpretation of the Pharisees in Josephus.17 2

Scholarship on Josephus’ Pharisees

When I speak of a lacuna in studying Josephus’ accounts of the Pharisees, I mean the absence of a compositional study, circa 1980. Josephus had always been considered the prime data source for ancient Judaea, and since the Pharisees loomed large in studies of the period, his remarks on Pharisees were frequently cited. In the many handbooks on the New Testament world, Josephus appeared 15 16 17

Saldarini 1988. Cook 1979; Sanders 1987; Brawley 1987; Watson 1995. For a new effort to understand the Pharisees in each of the gospels and Acts, see Marshall 2015. ‘Flavius Josephus on the Pharisees: A Composition-Critical Study,’ University of St. Michael’s College (Toronto), 1986. A revised version was published under the same title in 1991 (Leiden: Brill).

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as a kind of neutral record. ‘Josephus reports that’ was a common phrase, more or less equivalent to ‘We know that’. Scholars who sought to apply a more critical method to his works took one or more of three roads. First, from the late nineteenth century onward, many specialists were assigning most of Josephus’ corpus to sources that he was thought to have copied. The rationale was that, as an Aramaic- and Hebrew-speaking Pharisee from backwater Palestine, Josephus could not have conducted the primary research or composed the sophisticated Greek accounts that bear his name.18 This was long before Martin Hengel argued that Judaean society was fully part of the Hellenistic world, or Tessa Rajak’s case for Josephus’ familiarity with Greek culture.19 So careless was he in transcribing sources, it was thought, that he often copied material that must have been at odds with his views. His passages on the Pharisees were Exhibit A of this imagined phenomenon. Because of a line in his autobiography (V 12), he was thought to have been a Pharisee. Yet he includes a number of passages that are either hostile or cool toward the group. So he must have blithely borrowed Nicolaus of Damascus’ excoriations of the Pharisees without noticing or bothering. As I was beginning my dissertation research, my later friend and mentor Daniel Schwartz was reviving a source-critical approach to Josephus, without assuming his incompetence in Greek literature, as the older scholarship had, but focusing on perceived changes of perspective and language in Josephus’ works.20 This approach had many impressive adherents. When I moved to Tübingen in 1984 and first presented my compositional proposals to the eminent specialist Martin Hengel, his initial response was that Gustav Hölscher’s source-critical analysis for the Pauly-Wissowa Realencyclopädie (1916)21 had sufficiently explained Josephus’ Pharisees—despite Hengel’s having undermined Hölscher’s assumptions. A different approach, which was much more in fashion when I embarked on the dissertation, attributed the tendencies of Josephus’ narratives to his changing political allegiances. His War was all but universally viewed as proFlavian propaganda, written while he was supposedly in thrall to his powerful Roman saviours. In his alleged promotion of Roman rule, Josephus was widely condemned as a traitor to his people.22 This view could join hands with the source-critical approach, as in Wilhelm Weber’s 1921 argument that the ‘prophet of the new Caesar’ naturally used official Roman sources for the spine 18 19 20 21 22

The classic comprehensive study is Hölscher 1916. Hengel 1969; Rajak 1983. Schwartz 1983. See n. 18 above and n. 29 below. So even the cautious Thackeray 1967: 27–28, 42–43, 46–47, 52. He was much influenced by Laqueur (orig.) 1920: 245–78 (summary).

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of his War.23 Whether because he lost his Flavian patronage in Domitian’s last years, or his interests matured, or he repented of his betrayal, or he was merely a callous opportunist, Josephus was imagined as reversing course in his later works, to abandon shilling for the Roman regime and instead revel in Judaean history, law, and life. Pharisees played a central role in these putative changes. Hans Rasp (1924) first developed Laqueur’s biographical explanation of Josephus’ works in general (1920), to propose that his political shifts changed his view of the ‘religious parties’ as he became more interested in the Pharisees (rabbis).24 In Anglophone scholarship, the same idea appeared independently in an obscure essay by Morton Smith, in a 1956 collection that was mainly on Israel’s place in the modern world.25 It might have remained unnoticed by many specialists had Neusner, Smith’s former student, not promoted it in his 1973 textbook (above), in the chapter on Pharisees in Josephus. After Neusner’s forceful support of the idea that Josephus first ignored the Pharisees but then decided to promote their interests, the scheme was refined by Shaye Cohen (1979), Harold Attridge (1984), Lee Levine (1988), and Seth Schwartz (1990) among other leading scholars.26 In its English formulations the idea was that Josephus said little about Pharisees in War—written in the 70s and reflecting pre-70 conditions Josephus knew—because there was little to say. They were then a marginal pietist group. His Antiquities and Life gave them ample space because of their new prominence in the rabbinic movement that was taking shape in Yavneh in the 90s—a context Josephus never mentions. Since the later works’ fuller material repeatedly stressed the Pharisees’ great influence with the masses, and Josephus’ autobiography appeared to proclaim his own life-long allegiance to the group, scholars inferred that he was also trying to align himself with Judaea’s new leaders. A third approach to Josephus, and hence to his Pharisees, took him at what seemed face value. He was assumed to be a competent thinker and Greek writer, who was both a priest and a Pharisee, but neither a congenital dissembler nor a plagiariser on subjects he knew.27 Benedikt Niese, Adolf Schlatter, Martin Braun, Horst Moehring, Tessa Rajak, and Per Bilde were among those who found Josephus’ corpus basically coherent in its language, themes, and outlook, with no radical break between War and Antiquities. They saw no reason 23 24 25 26 27

Weber (orig.) 1921. Rasp 1924. Smith 1956. Cohen 1979; Attridge 1984; Levine 1978. Niese 1914: 7.569–79; Schlatter 1932; Braun 1934; Moehring 1957; Rajak 1983: 11–45; Bilde 1988: 189.

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to doubt that he was a Pharisee—as they also understood V 12. Scholars in the other streams found this approach insufficiently critical, while these scholars were sceptical about the others’ hypercriticism and confidence in claiming to be able to recover what is not in Josephus’ texts, his sources or changing political commitments. They attributed the contradictions in his portraits of Pharisees, priests, and other matters to normal human complexity or simply the challenge of writing so much—failures of memory and ordinary sloppiness. If he harshly criticised fellow-priests and Pharisees for bad political decisions, this was likely the result of his own thoughtful assessment. There was no need to invoke a hostile source or a change of allegiance. 3

Methodological Foundations

Before moving to an analysis of Josephus’ Pharisee passages, I must lay out three methodological points that are not much discussed in the research just surveyed. The first concerns the difference between any account of the past and lived human experience. This needs stressing because scholars have most often treated Josephus’ narratives as though they were a video camera on Roman Judaea, which recorded everything worth mentioning. So, if he mentions Pharisees’ activities only under the Hasmoneans and King Herod, that must have been the period of their political activity. Had they been active at other times, he surely would have said so.28 This inference ignores Josephus’ literary choices. Any narrative is—and could only ever be—highly selective. That is why I have shelves full of books on particular aspects of the Second World War, such as Churchill’s premiership, the Italian campaign, even the battles over Monte Cassino. Each one has significant new information not included by others. No account should be called defective because of what it lacks, because of course it can only include slivers of what once was. Therefore, we cannot conclude anything about the historical Pharisees’ place in society from the few passages in which Josephus mentions them. They are there (at all) only because they serve his narrative interests, not because he held up some kind of mirror on all aspects of life.

28

Put succinctly by Grabbe 2010: 55: Josephus’ claim (AJ 18.17) that Sadducees and other office-holders followed Pharisaic practice, or they would not have been tolerated by the people, is ‘not borne out by his data except during Alexandra’s reign.’ Note the use of data and assumption that Josephus recorded whatever was happening.

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Second, I should justify my division of his Pharisee passages into those that compare two or three schools and those that describe Pharisees in action, as a group or individually. It used to be a staple of scholarship that Josephus had mixed views about the Pharisees, partly because of his use of irreconcilable sources.29 I have argued that his descriptions of Pharisees in action are uniformly sceptical or critical, but that his comparison of them with Sadducees and Essenes lacks any such criticism because the purpose of those passages is different. A number of colleagues have questioned the distinction, suggesting that it skews the evidence by overlooking ‘neutral’ or even implicitly laudatory statements about the Pharisees, in the comparative passages, to focus on Josephus’ negative portraits.30 While everything that Josephus wrote belongs to a holistic narrative (I agree completely), compositional reading still requires attention to changing contexts. I do not understand interpretation as a matter of counting up passages according to whether they are ‘positive’ or ‘negative.’ My interest is not quantitative but qualitative: to understand Josephus’ meaning. Here is an example. As a British citizen and child of the Commonwealth (having grown up in Canada and Australia), I admire Britain’s parliamentary tradition, which is shared by the two former colonies. If I were to describe it to a foreigner, I might explain how parliament works (e.g., the Government and Loyal Opposition) and that the main national parties are Conservative, Labour, and Liberal Democrat, along with the smaller parties of regional interest. None of this reveals my political inclinations. Only if I speak of events in which one party or another was involved—Brexit, or the miners’ strikes under Margaret Thatcher—would I be likely to express my political sympathies or aversions. Suppose that every time I mentioned the Conservatives, I added, ‘Of course, they’re in bed with big business,’ or remarked of Labour that ‘Of course, their ties to the unions and the welfare state are bad for the economy’. My listeners could then see my political inclinations in a way that they could not in my descriptions of the parliamentary system. No one could reasonably conclude that my views of Labour or the Conservatives were ‘mixed’ or partly neutral because I had not expressed them in the more structural descriptions. The contexts are different. When Josephus describes the Judaeans’ three (or two) parties, he is giving something like a structural account of a Judaean culture rich enough to host philosophical schools, comparable to those of the Greeks, also to isolate a group 29 30

Cf. Hölscher 1916: 1936, where he classifies the passages as recht unfreundlich (BJ 1.110–112), teils unfreundlich (AJ 17.41), teils ziemlich neutral (school passages), and anerkennend (only AJ 18). E.g., Grabbe 1998: 35–47.

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that he considers outside the spectrum of Judaean tradition (BJ 2.118)—as though one were to mention the Rhinoceros Party; they have followers, but they are not part of the traditional scene. The traditional philosophies differ, Josephus explains, in their philosophy of life, jurisprudence, and legislation (BJ 2.119–66; AJ 13.171–73, 288–98; 18.12–20). He roundly criticises both Pharisees and Sadducees, however, when speaking of their representatives’ actions. Only Essenes win his consistent admiration, for their views and their behaviour alike. But they are also a closed group with tough initiation procedures and exclusive membership. This leads to a third methodological point. I use the analogy of the British government advisedly because the statesman-historian Josephus is concerned largely with political affairs and the philosophy of government. Scholars have invented other categories, which we impose on this period but are not present in his world. We imagine a religion called Judaism, which one entered or left. We call Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes ‘religious groups’ or ‘religious sects.’ Josephus knows nothing of such language.31 It has been well said that the past is a foreign country.32 To understand it—as we more easily recognise when we study ancient India, Japan, or China—we need to imagine different ways of ordering knowledge, alien categories, and concepts unlike ours. This process can be uncomfortable when we study the ancient west because we find our own roots there and we want it to be familiar. But alienation and admission of ignorance are foundations of historical investigations. 4

Josephus’ Pharisees: The Texts

With these foundations in place, we may attempt a brief survey of Josephus’ Pharisees. 4.1 The Judaean War The proem to Josephus’ War evokes a lively literary atmosphere of in the early years of the Flavian dynasty. Josephus relocated to Rome in time for their monumental triumph in June 71 CE. As the decade rolls on (by our calendar), the emperor Vespasian and son Titus are basking in celebration of Jerusalem’s 31

32

Moore 1929. The central philosophical question of Fate, in Josephus’ Pharisee passages, was ‘alien to all Jewish thinking that we know anything about’ (383), and rather came from Nicolaus of Damascus, who also transformed what were actually religious sects into philosophical schools (375, 384). Cecil 1957: 24.

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destruction, which is billed by their enablers as the just termination of a foreign threat. This atmosphere creates a golden opportunity for scribblers in the capital, who are churning out accounts of the Flavians’ signature war, outdoing each other in flattering the rulers while heaping scorn on the reviled enemy. The proud Judaean Josephus is visiting recitations of what he calls these ‘sophist-like’ accounts—note his present tenses (BJ 1.1–2). He charges that their authors either have not set foot in Judaea and have no idea of what happened there, or they were in the country but lie in order to fawn over the Flavians. As a priest-aristocrat from Jerusalem, who knows both sides of the conflict intimately—after facing Vespasian in the field and spending the bulk of the war as a Roman captive—Josephus is in a unique position to give the balanced, truthful account that historia requires (1.3–9). He establishes at least three themes of his narrative, which all challenge the Roman jingoists, already in the preface. First, he says, when these Flavian historians humiliate the Judaeans, they unwittingly minimise the Flavian achievement (1.7–8). As a matter of fact, Judaeans proved themselves extraordinarily tough and brave, holding death in contempt.33 Man for man, the storied legionaries were no match and frequently, if they became detached from their marching columns, ran away from Judaeans in fear.34 Second, the Flavians did not conquer Jerusalem for Rome. Pompey the Great had done that 130 years earlier, a story that Josephus will relate in detail (and anticipate in the prologue, BJ 1.19–20). Moreover, Jerusalem flourished under subsequent Roman rule, reaching the height of prosperity and happiness, before the recent debacle (1.11). That success began with the heroic Hasmoneans, who made alliances with distant Rome right away (1.34). Their famous King Herod was a close friend of Augustus, who brought Jerusalem to the peak of its glory, which it retained in the following decades. Third, Jerusalem’s story is tragic in the classical sense: its abrupt reversal of fortune deserves lament and pity (1.9–12). In the same way as Polybius’ Corinth made tragic mistakes in an effort to protect its interests against Sparta and Rome (Polybius 38.1–6, 9–18), Jerusalem fell into a perfect storm as a result of provocation by Nero’s last procurator, Gessius Florus. His violent and abusive raids on the temple spawned Judaean factionalism. This is all Polybian in cast.35 33 34 35

θανάτου καταφρόνησις: BJ 2.60, 151, 377; 3.356, 475; 5.458; 6.33, 42; 7.406; AJ 6.343; 11.130; Ap. 2.294. BJ 3.471; 5.55–58, 76–79, 86–87, 109–27, 285–88, 291–95, 322–30, 336–41, 466–72, 480–85, 490, 548–61; 4.89–90; 5.315–16; 6.9–18, 31–38, 42–44, 88–89, 169–71, 179, 190, 252, 257, 260. For Polybius’ influence on Josephus’ War see Eckstein 1990; Gruen 2011a.

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Jerusalem’s native leaders and people behaved like those of any other polis facing such threats, disputing the best way forward. As usual, younger hot-heads preferred a physical response while wiser elders counselled restraint. This turmoil opened the way for ‘tyrants’ (τύραννοι, 1.10–11, 24, 27), interlopers from elsewhere whose pursuit of self-interest sealed the city’s doom. This propelled the city to destruction, even as wise men could see what was happening but were powerless to stop it. How do Pharisees function in this compelling story? Again, they are absent from most of it. They turn up only in four preliminary moments: three times as actors (1.110–12, 571; 2.411) and once in Josephus’ description of Pharisees alongside Sadducees and Essenes (2.119, 162–66). First, Pharisees play a role in the briefly recounted downfall of the Hasmonean dynasty, which creates the scene for Pompey’s arrival in 63 BCE. Josephus presents this as one of several fortune-reversal moments. His honoured Hasmonean ancestors had gained in power and virtue until John Hyrcanus, whose long rule (135–104 BCE) proved his excellence. Hyrcanus was so close to the Deity, however, that he was permitted to foresee the rapid decline ahead under two of his sons (1.67–68). The first, Aristobulus, died in physical and psychic torment after killing his brother. The second, Alexander Jannaeus, ruled long but as a brutal tyrant, killing thousands of Judaeans at the hands of mercenary soldiers. He even had 800 enemies crucified, while murdering their wives and children in front of them (1.97). The Pharisees’ first appearance comes when the dying Alexander hands on his kingdom to his wife Alexandra. He is sure that her famous piety, devotion to ancestral custom, and opposition to his crimes will endear her to the people, securing her reign (BJ 1.107–109). This will not actually happen, however. That is because, Josephus claims, her naïve piety led her to give too much power to the Pharisees. War’s first description of the group contains much that he will later elaborate (1.110–12):36 Symbiotically with her, the Pharisees now grow into power—a certain body of Judaeans reputed to be more pious than the others and to interpret the laws more precisely / carefully (σύνταγμά τι Ἰουδαίων δοκοῦν εὐσεβέστερον εἶναι τῶν ἄλλων καὶ τοὺς νόμους ἀκριβέστερον ἀφηγεῖσθαι). Being actually pious toward the Deity herself, she deferred to them rather too much (τούτοις περισσὸν δή τι προσεῖχεν ἡ Ἀλεξάνδρα σεσοβημένη περὶ τὸ θεῖον). They, by gradually exploiting the woman’s simplicity, became the true managers of state affairs, able to drive out or bring down whomever 36

Translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.

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they wished, to release or to place in chains. … She ruled the others, but Pharisees ruled her. The Pharisees exploit the queen’s trust to conduct a purge of her late husband’s accomplices. Josephus’ audience will have inferred, then, though he does not spell it out, that Pharisees were conspicuous among Alexander’s opponents (1.113). They kill and bring down many who were implicated in his reign. In the meantime, the queen’s younger son, Aristobulus II, becomes his late father’s champion. This sets the seen for a contest between Aristobulus and his more placid and pliant older brother, Hyrcanus II, for the high priesthood and successor to Alexandra. That squabble in turn creates the conditions for Rome’s conquest, which was bloodless at first. This episode provides a backdrop for Judaean life in later times, as the two brief follow-up references to Pharisees confirm. The group’s prominence in Judaean society remains from Alexandra’s fateful elevation of them. Their role as popular agitators against rulers (as overtly against Alexander and undermining Alexandra) is now assumed. Thus, when Josephus describes King Herod’s reversals of fortune toward the end of his life, seventy years after Alexandra’s rise to power, he can simply allude to the Pharisees’ influence. Describing a cabal of women who allegedly cause the king’s problems (1.431–32), he mentions a conspiracy led by the wife of Herod’s brother Pheroras (1.568). This woman, he says without explanation, ‘paid the Pharisees compensation when they opposed him [Herod]’ (1.571). War presents both the early Hasmoneans and Herod as virtuous and pious rulers who achieve great things for Jerusalem. The Pharisees are vaguely imagined trouble-makers, who can turn the masses against them. We must remember that Josephus himself is no admirer of ‘the rabble’. He is a highly educated priest of middling noble ancestry (V 1–6). His remarks on the Pharisees’ ability to rile up the mob are not the sentiments of Che Guevara. The Pharisees’ final appearance as actors in War comes after another seventy years, in real time. Here we barely glimpse them, apparently matured as a popular party. The episode concerns the fateful decision of some younger priests, led by the temple commandant Eleazar son of Ananias, to close off Jerusalem’s temple to foreigners (2.409). Josephus remarks that ‘both the chief priests and the notables’ (τῶν τε ἀρχιερέων καὶ τῶν γνωρίμων παρακαλούντων)— presumably, non-priestly lay leaders—opposed the activist priests and the popular insurgents, urging them not to cut the temple off from foreigners or, certainly, to halt the daily sacrifices for the emperor (2.410). When the younger priests ignore their advice, Josephus now identifies three constituent groups of wise counsel: the most powerful men, the chief priests, and the notables

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among the Pharisees (οἱ δυνατοὶ τοῖς ἀρχιερεῦσιν … καὶ τοῖς τῶν Φαρισαίων γνωρίμοις). Together, they caution that cutting off relations with other nations would mark a serious rupture with tradition (2.411–16). It appears that mention of the Pharisees here merely elaborates the group he had just called ‘chief priests and notables’ at 2.410, though perhaps he means that the leaders now reached out to include leading Pharisees, to create a broad front. Either way, the Pharisees clearly have representatives in high political affairs, a situation that accords with the picture in Acts 5, set a generation earlier, where the leading Pharisee Gamaliel opposes the views of the chief-priestly leaders of the council. These very few actions by Pharisees in War’s opening volumes provide little insight into the group’s aims or nature. Josephus does note their reputation for piety and legal interpretation by way of explaining their popular support and influence in public affairs—though they are on the wrong side of his values. In any case, they play no role in the main story of the descent into conflict, especially in Jerusalem. The most famous Pharisee passage in War is one of those (above) that includes them among the three Judaean schools of philosophy. In describing the transition from Herodian rule, upon the removal of Herod’s son Archelaus (6 CE), Josephus briefly mentions unrest led by one Judas the Galilean. Calling him a sophist, who led a school or faction (hairesis) with no relation to ‘the others’ (2.118), Josephus diverts from grubby politics to sublime philosophy and describes the others, especially the amazing Essenes (see previous chapter). Although he names Pharisees first among the schools (2.119), his glowingly detailed description of Essene life consumes almost all of the digression (2.120–61). The actions of individual Essenes have already drawn his admiration in the earlier narrative (1.78; 2.113). Here he can dwell on their remarkably disciplined, elevated way of life, and divinely granted powers. Ancient readers would have assumed that, if Josephus favoured any of the three schools, it was the Essenes. In fact, he remarks that their views of the soul and afterlife are ‘an irresistible bait for those who have once tasted of their wisdom’ (2.158). Why, then, does his opening sentence (2.119) put Pharisees first? The answer may come when he returns to Pharisees and Sadducees perfunctorily at the end (2.162). Finally recalling ‘the first two’ schools, he speaks of the Pharisees as τὴν πρώτην ἀπάγοντες αἵρεσιν. Greek πρώτη here could mean the oldest, the most prominent, or simply the first-mentioned above. The third option would not explain why he named Pharisees first, and the audience would have had no reason in his remarks to take ‘first’ as ‘oldest.’ The verb ἀπάγω is also curious, because it usually has the negative sense of ‘leading away’ or ‘astray.’ Scholars have conjectured that he actually wrote the more neutral ἐπάγω,

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which could mean ‘constitute’—partly on their old assumption that Josephus was himself a Pharisee. Josephus would be saying that the Pharisees constitute the leading school.37 That is possible, whether he was affiliated with them or not, but we should avoid conjectural emendations if the attested text of the manuscripts makes tolerable sense. Although we cannot be certain of his Greek text, his connection between the Pharisees’ reputation for scriptural interpretation and claims that they ‘lead off’ the first school might suggest that, despite his own admiration of the Essenes—who also fascinated Philo, Pliny, and other writers38—Pharisees have managed to persuade the largest body of ordinary people in Judaean society. After the sublime Essene account, Josephus’ remarks on Pharisees and Sadducees appear merely formal. Reminding his audience of his earlier statement (BJ 1.110) that Pharisees have the reputation of interpreting the legal ordinances with precision (οἱ μετὰ ἀκριβείας δοκοῦντες ἐξηγεῖσθαι τὰ νόμιμα, 2.162), he gives both groups equally short shrift, reducing their views to a formulaic affirmation vs. denial.39 Pharisees ascribe everything to Fate in some sense; they consider the soul imperishable, with rewards and punishments awaiting after death; and they have a community in which members care for each other. Sadducees deny the soul and Fate, and treat even their fellow-Sadducees harshly. In light of Antiquities 13 and 18 (below), this last contrast may be an obscure reference to the Pharisees’ respect for their elders’ teaching, which Sadducees do not share. 4.2 The Judaean Antiquities Available space does not allow us to work through the passages involving Pharisees in Antiquities in the same level of detail. Nor is that necessary. Although Josephus’ magnum opus has more Pharisee-related episodes than War 1–2, on this question Antiquities expands the earlier account: filling in back-stories, clarifying causes, and thus elaborating Josephus’ view of the group. He repeatedly refers readers to War for a ‘more precise’ account (AJ 13.173, 298; 18.11; cf. V 10), confirming that he said what was most essential there— and precluding scholarly hypotheses that his view of the Pharisees underwent a major change between his two main compositions. Antiquities has a different subject and scope from War, which dealt with the subject most urgently needed in Rome. The later work deals in a much 37 38 39

See discussion in Mason 1991: 129–32. Philo, Prob. 75–91; Contempl. 1; Hypothetica in Eusebius, Praep. ev. 8.11; Pliny, Nat. 5.73; Porphyry, Abst. 4.11–13. Compare schematisations in Cicero (Fat. 39) and Tacitus (Ann. 6.22).

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more leisurely way, reportedly responding to the requests of a circle in Rome (AJ 1.8–10), with the ancient Judaean constitution. It seeks to show, by means of a long history of examples, that those who follow Moses’ laws prosper, whereas those who violate them come to grief (1.14, 20). To make these points, or perhaps only to be interesting at times, Josephus often changes the colouring of many key figures he had already discussed in War. Most striking is his different use of King Herod and family, whom he now considers congenital violators of the laws, who met spectacularly bad ends as a result.40 But the three schools remain a stable reference point for him, and Antiquities elaborates the same views of each philosophy he had suggested in War. As in War, only Essenes glow with untarnished virtue and divine favour in Antiquities. The considerable added material includes a number of new episodes featuring Pharisees and Sadducees, but both of them are more obviously damaged pieces of Judaea’s political furniture.41 To maintain a sense of perspective on the place of Pharisees in Antiquities, we should remember that Antiquities 13–20 and the appended Life recast the story of War 1 and 2 in nine volumes. Thus, Josephus now has more than three times as much space to narrate the same period. Much of this material he knew when he wrote War, but there he kept a tighter control of his pen, to hold the spotlight on the beginnings and course of the war. The fact that he includes new episodes on the Pharisees does not mean, therefore, they have become a new interest. He adds more information on many subjects, from Herod’s family and reign (Books 14–17) to Mesopotamian and Roman affairs (18–19), while also saying much more about aspects of Judaean politics, the high priests, the governors, and the Sadducees and Essenes (20). His new material on the Pharisees is valuable but nothing in it could have suggested to his audiences that Josephus suddenly wished to flatter Pharisees, to promote them, or especially to be seen as a Pharisee himself. Book 13 has the largest number of Pharisee additions—concerning all three schools. It adds a brief Ciceronian notice (cf. Cicero, Fat. 39) about each school’s supposed views of fate and free will (13.173), as a brief digression from the narrative of Jonathan the Hasmonean’s career (150s BCE). This has no counterpart in War 1, and it is more formulaic than helpful. Although referring to War 2, Josephus quietly changes the scheme of BJ 2.162–66, which had Pharisees and Sadducees on opposite poles: Pharisees ascribe everything 40 41

AJ 17.168–92, 342–44; 18.109–15, 127–29, 245–55; 19.343–50. Concerning Sadducees, Josephus mainly adds material on their harshness or even ‘savagery’ in implementing the laws (AJ 13.293–96; 20.199), a point on which he may not differ in principle (below), but he portrays harshly in practice.

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to Fate and God (εἱμαρμένῃ τε καὶ θεῷ προσάπτουσι πάντα) while Sadducees do away with Fate entirely (τὴν μὲν εἱμαρμένην παντάπασιν ἀναιροῦσιν). In the new scheme, which must accommodate Essenes, as BJ 2.162–66 did not, Essenes take up the all-Fate wing (πάντων τὴν εἱμαρμένην κυρίαν ἀποφαίνεται) over against the Sadducees on the opposite pole. This leaves Pharisees to bring up the middle, with the unhelpful remark that they attribute some things to Fate but not all (τινὰ καὶ οὐ πάντα τῆς εἱμαρμένης ἔργον εἶναι λέγουσιν).42 Whereas War first mentioned the Pharisees in describing Alexandra’s embrace of them, Antiquities next provides an illuminating back-story to that decision. We now learn that John Hyrcanus, the most prominent Hasmonean (leader, 134–104 BCE) before Alexander Jannaeus, had been a disciple of the Pharisees. But he fell out with them and, as a result, dissolved their system of jurisprudence. Alexander continued that standoff, and now we understand why he faced such popular antagonism: it was indeed led by Pharisees. Now we also understand better why Alexandra embraced and promoted the Pharisees, after her husband’s violent and unpopular reign. This decision marks, not a new idea as War suggested, but a return to Pharisaic legal interpretation. As Josephus puts it: ‘the ordinances [or legal precepts] that her father-in-law Hyrcanus dissolved, which the Pharisees had introduced in accord with the ancestral tradition, she put back in place.’43 Why did Hyrcanus fall out with the Pharisees? Josephus gives two explanations in the same story. First, after recounting his hero’s divinely favoured exploits, he remarks ominously (AJ 13.288): As for Hyrcanus, his own success and that of his sons aroused jealousy among the Judaeans. The Pharisees, who are one of the Judaean schools as we have explained above, were especially hostile toward him. Their power with the populace is such that, even when they speak against a king and against a high priest, they are immediately credited! The attached episode does not, however, match this anti-Pharisee headline, but tells a more human, less categorical, story. Namely, Hyrcanus throws a banquet 42

43

Klawans 2012: 44–91, makes this passage the centre-piece of his analysis of Josephus’ theological assessment of each school—sidelining questions of historiography, literary structure, and rhetoric. His approach finds no material difference between this passage and BJ 2.162–63, since both give Pharisees a ‘compatibilist’ position. My focus, in contrast, is on Josephus’ rhetorical flexibility—his language, rhetorical structures, and historiographical context—as ancient audiences might have understood them. AJ 13.408: τῶν νομίμων Ὑρκανὸς ὁ πενθερὸς αὐτῆς κατέλυσεν ὧν εἰσήνεγκαν οἱ Φαρισαῖοι κατὰ τὴν πατρῴαν παράδοσιν, τοῦτο πάλιν ἀποκατέστησεν.

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and invites leading Pharisees, Sadducees, and, apparently, other eminent figures. During the banquet, he asserts his commitment to Pharisaic rigour and asks members of the group to be sure to tell him if he goes astray. According to Josephus, all the Pharisees praise his piety, as Hyrcanus presumably expected them to, in humbly making himself vulnerable. He surely did not expect harsh criticism from his guests at such a pleasant affair. But another guest, a known rabble-rouser and apparently independent of any school, brazenly demands that Hyrcanus relinquish the high priesthood, on the ground that he is likely illegitimate because his mother was once a prisoner of Seleucid forces (and therefore was presumably raped)—a rumour Josephus loyally declares to be untrue (13.290–92). He continues: all the Pharisees are indignant with this man. But a Sadducee who is present sees an opportunity. He cleverly advises Hyrcanus that the Pharisees secretly agree with the impudent fellow—a point not at all obvious from their stated reaction. The way to prove it, he advises, is to ask the Pharisees what punishment the man deserves. This is a trap, Josephus’ audience knows, because as he explains to them, Pharisees would never call for capital punishment, even if they disagreed vehemently with the fellow, because of the nature of their jurisprudence. Thus (AJ 13.294–96): When Hyrcanus asked the Pharisees what they considered a worthy punishment (for he would be persuaded that the slanders had not been made with their approval, he said, if they advocated punishing Eleazar with a commensurate penalty), they proposed lashes and chains, for it did not seem right to punish someone with death on account of verbal abuse and anyway the Pharisees by nature take a lenient approach toward punishments (ἄλλως τε καὶ φύσει πρὸς τὰς κολάσεις ἐπιεικῶς ἔχουσιν οἱ Φαρισαῖοι). At this response, Hyrcanus became extremely angry and assumed that the man had slandered him with their approval. Jonathan [the opportunistic Sadducee] exacerbated his anger greatly and achieved the following result. He induced Hyrcanus to join the party of the Sadducees, to abandon the Pharisees, to dissolve the ordinances that they had established among the people (τά τε ὑπ᾿ αὐτῶν κατασταθέντα νόμιμα τῷ δήμῳ καταλῦσαι), and to punish those who kept them. This is the reason, then, that hatred developed among the populace toward him and his sons. The story, then, is not itself hostile toward Pharisees. They are diplomatic, careful, and mild. They obviously value the ruler’s adherence to their way of governing and do everything to reassure and support him. But Josephus frames this apparently traditional story in a way that makes the Pharisees look bad.

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His headline, not supported by the incident he relates, is that the Pharisees roused the populace against Hyrcanus and his sons because they were jealous of Hyrcanus’ power and were congenitally hostile to rulers. His reminder that Pharisees have the ability to turn the masses is his consistent line, and he can even bend a more favourable, traditional story about them to this end. As he completes his account of the historic rupture, Josephus evidently realises that his audiences in Rome might need a fuller explanation of the Pharisee-Sadducee difference, and so for the first time adds minimal but precious information (AJ 13.297–98): I want to explain here that the Pharisees passed on to the people certain ordinances from a succession of fathers, which are not written down in the laws of Moses. For this reason [sc. because they are not in Moses’ laws], the party of the Sadducees dismisses them (νόμιμά τινα παρέδοσαν τῷ δήμῳ οἱ Φαρισαῖοι ἐκ πατέρων διαδοχῆς, ἅπερ οὐκ ἀναγέγραπται ἐν τοῖς Μωυσέως νόμοις, καὶ διὰ τοῦτο ταῦτα τὸ Σαδδουκαίων γένος ἐκβάλλει), averring that one need recognise only the written ordinances [in the laws of Moses], whereas those from the tradition of the fathers need not be observed. Conflicts and major differences developed between the two groups over these matters. The Sadducees find their followers only among the well-heeled, however, and have no popular following, whereas the Pharisees have the alliance of the rabble (τῶν μὲν Σαδδουκαίων τοὺς εὐπόρους μόνον πειθόντων τὸ δὲ δημοτικὸν οὐχ ἑπόμενον αὐτοῖς ἐχόντων, τῶν δὲ Φαρισαίων τὸ πλῆθος σύμμαχον ἐχόντων). But these two groups and also the Essenes have been described with detailed accuracy in the second book of my Judaica [= War 2]. Alert audience members might infer a connection between the Pharisees’ para-biblical tradition, described here, and their tendency to lighten punishments, especially where the death penalty is a prospect, in the story. Josephus does not spell out the link. But it would make sense if the Pharisees’ explicit recognition of case law had the effect of mitigating the potentially severe consequences of some prescriptions in the Torah, and if this was a major part of the reason for their public support. Lest it should seem that Josephus is praising the Pharisees in saying this, four considerations make that doubtful. First, he frames the story by blaming the Pharisees for their ‘jealousy’ at John’s success and desire to harm him. There is no indication here that he favours the group. Second, as we have seen, Josephus is no democrat, but a proud aristocrat who pities or scorns the gullibility of the masses or ‘rabble,’ their need of competent leaders, and their vulnerability to

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demagogues.44 Third, he elsewhere speaks often and enthusiastically of the laws of Moses as a complete, sufficient, and perfect constitution, which cannot be supplemented or altered (e.g., Ap. 2.184–85). In his extensive representations of Moses’ laws (Antiquities 1–11; Apion), he never mentions the need for, or indeed leaves any obvious room for, an interpretative tradition or case law. Fourth, far from trying to ameliorate the laws’ potential harshness, Josephus boasts about their uncompromising severity. In the last quarter of the Apion, a rhetorical crescendo in praise of the laws, that severity becomes part of what he most admires. Other legislators, he mockingly observes, find all sorts of ways to mitigate the harshness of laws, often by accepting fines in place of the statutory penalty (Ap. 2.276–77). Judaeans, by contrast, demand the death penalty for a wide range of crimes, including adultery and fraudulent business dealings, without any possibility of amelioration (Ap. 2.215–17). A conspicuous example is Josephus’ use of Deut 21.18–21, which prescribes that a persistently rebellious son should be hauled by his father and mother before the city elders and stoned to death (see Chapter 2 above). As Louis Feldman and Michael Avioz show, the rabbis would qualify this law in so many ways that they rendered the death penalty effectively unenforceable (cf. m. Sanh. 8.1–4). They interpreted the statute in such a way that it concerned only boys in a three-month period of pubescence, who had shown themselves gluttons and drunkards during that time, by consuming food belonging to others, in a public place and before witnesses. Moreover, mother and father must both desire the boy’s death, while themselves in perfect health. And if all those conditions are met, it is only the beginning of a process. The parents must first beat the boy in the presence of three judges. Only if he repeats the offence, while still in that narrow age-bracket, may they initiate a trial before the capital court of twenty-three judges, which is likely to acquit after all. The rabbis’, as apparently the Pharisees’, careful exegesis and attention to case law ensured that the law remained honoured in principle even as courts following their legal system mitigated its harsh consequences.45 However this law was actually enforced in first-century Jerusalem, Josephus fails to suggest any such mitigations. On the contrary, he seizes it as a shining example of the Judaean constitution’s unique severity, of a kind that no other society would pursue (AJ 4.260–64). Rather than restricting its application, he expands its coverage to include daughters, removes any age restriction for a 44 45

Cf. AJ 3.24–27, 68–69, 295–315; V 40. His default term for the common people, as in AJ 13.298, is τὸ πλῆθος (918 times in corpus): the lumpen rabble, which largely overlaps with Latin vulgus. Feldman 2000: 431; Avioz 2021: 102–104.

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culprit, and does away with court procedures. The father alone decides when he has had enough, even if in consultation with the wife for whom he speaks. It is he who sees to his child’s execution. In the Apion, where Josephus chooses just a few summary items to illustrate the admirable severity of Judaean law, he selects the same law and formulates it in blunt language (Ap. 2.206): ‘Honour of parents the law puts in second place only after honouring God. The one who does not fully reciprocate the favours received from them, but falls short in any way (ἀλλ᾿ εἰς ὁτιοῦν ἐλλείποντα), it [the law] delivers up to be stoned.’ Back in Antiquities 13, then, Josephus’ notices about the Pharisees’ leniency in punishment and resulting popularity are not likely signs of his esteem. He makes the Pharisees chief culprits in turning the people against his favourite ruler, John Hyrcanus. The Pharisee-led opposition begins when John dissolves the Pharisees’ legal system, and it will dog his sons Aristobulus and Alexander Jannaeus. Antiquities thus gives a much fuller context to Queen Alexandra’s rapprochement with the Pharisees, so briefly narrated in War 1. In this much fuller version, however, Alexandra can no longer be naïvely duped by the Pharisees because of her simple piety. She knows far too much for that. Since they have been on the scene as agitators for generations, her embrace of the Pharisees now appears as a Machiavellian move, dreamt up by her crafty dying husband to stabilise her power. He advises her to reinstate the Pharisees and their legal system, to end the popular antagonism: ‘he himself … had come into conflict with the nation because these men had been badly treated by him’ (13.401–2). She eagerly agrees as his co-conspirator. Only now do we receive confirmation that Alexander’s main opponents and victims had been Pharisees. This is one of many indications that Josephus knew the fuller story when he wrote War. In BJ 1.109 he relates that Alexandra made her older son Hyrcanus high priest mainly because of his lack of interest in public affairs. In that context, one might infer only that she wanted a free hand as queen without his interference. Antiquities explains more, in keeping with the new information about her agreement with Alexander. She now has to choose between the younger, daring and energetic Aristobulus, who was championing his late father’s causes and friends, and the older brother, whose lack of energy for public affairs would keep him from interfering with her cynical agreement with the Pharisees (διὰ τὴν ἡλικίαν, πολὺ μέντοι πλέον διὰ τὸ ἄπραγμον αὐτοῦ, καὶ πάντα τοῖς Φαρισαίοις ἐπέτρεπεν ποιεῖν [13.408]). This complex of events also explains why, in Josephus’ narrative, the Pharisees have had the decisive influence in Judaean society since Alexandra, just before Rome’s acquisition of the territory—though their legal system is quite unnecessary for those who have always lived under Moses’ excellent laws as they are.

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In case the audience has any doubt about Josephus’ sympathies, he not only describes the terror that the Pharisees allegedly instituted under the queen—they urge her to kill Alexander’s accomplices and murder some themselves (13.410). He also gives a fulsome obituary for the Hasmonean dynasty, to conclude Book 13. Alexandra’s reign is the decisive moment of collapse. At 13.417, while commiserating with the Pharisees’ victims, Josephus has Aristobulus declare: ‘Still they [the victims] themselves were to blame for their misfortunes, in allowing a woman to reign who madly desired it in her unreasonable love of power, and when her sons [especially him] were in the prime of life.’ The narrator’s voice agrees with Aristobulus, and Josephus himself concludes:46 She valued the present more than the future, and making everything else secondary to absolute rule, she had … no consideration for either decency or justice. At least matters turned out so unfortunately for her house that the sovereign power, which it had acquired in the face of the greatest dangers and difficulties, was not long afterwards taken from it because of her desire for things unbecoming a woman, and because she expressed the same opinions as did those [i.e., Pharisees] who were hostile to her family, and also because she left the kingdom without anyone who had their interests at heart. And even after her death she caused the palace to be filled with misfortunes and disturbances, which arose from the public measures taken during her lifetime. Nothing in the rest of the Antiquities or Life undoes this impression of the Pharisees’ massive popular influence, which is now for Josephus a regrettable but unchangeable part of Judaean life. A complex of events during King Herod’s reign, for example, confirms the picture. This begins in Antiquities 14. Explaining how Herod’s father Antipater took advantage of Hyrcanus II’s weakness to put his sons in power, and how Herod’s extra-judicial killings in Galilee, before he was king (40s BCE), provoked little protest because Hyrcanus and his council were intimidated (14.158–71), Josephus relates that only a certain Samaias, a just man and superior to fear, criticised his colleagues for cowardice. He predicted that Herod would eventually gain power and do away with them (14.172–74). This is what happens, although (Josephus looks ahead to say) Herod will spare Samaias himself—because he also counselled the people to admit Herod when the 46

AJ 13.431–32 (Marcus, LCL).

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king besieged Jerusalem in 37 BCE (14.176). When Josephus comes to that story (15.3–4), he finally explains that Samaias was a student of one Pollion, a Pharisee (15.369). Herod spared them because, although they were openly critical of him, they also understood the inevitability of his rule and that is why they counselled submission. The first part of this cycle is completed at 15.370. Herod, now in power for some years and concerned about plots against him, requires everyone to take a loyalty oath (15.366–68). Those who refuse are killed. The Pharisees are an exception, however, again excused because of Pollion and Samaias’ role in his rise to power. Incidentally, the Essenes are also exempted from the oath. In their case, however, Josephus adds a story about their super-human reputation, illustrated by their ability to predict the future, which had allowed them to predict a long reign for Herod and so earned his gratitude (15.371–79). In case his incidental notices about Pollion and Samaias leave readers in doubt about Josephus’ view of the Pharisees, he restates these in AJ 17.41–45, near the end of Herod’s reign. Here he is elaborating on the intrigues by the sons and women of the court mentioned in War 1.571. Whereas War obliquely remarks that Pheroras’ wife rewarded the Pharisees for opposing him, Antiquities explains that Herod had demanded another loyalty oath, which Pharisees again refused to take.47 This time Herod fines them, rather than exempting them as earlier, and Pheroras’ wife daringly uses royal resources to pay their fine—what War cryptically referred to as financial compensation. Josephus’ view of the Pharisees remains unambiguous (17.41–45): There was also a certain bloc of Judaean people that prided itself greatly on its great precision in relation to the ancestral heritage and laws, pretending that the Deity was pleased with them (καὶ ἦν γὰρ μόριόν τι Ἰουδαϊκὸν ἀνθρώπων ἐπ᾿ ἐξακριβώσει μέγα φρονοῦν τοῦ πατρίου καὶ νόμων οἷς χαίρει τὸ θεῖον προσποιουμένων); the women’s faction had submitted to them. Called Pharisees, these men were especially capable of acting conspiratorially toward the king and of openly rising up to make war and harm him (βασιλεῖ δυνάμενοι μάλιστα πράσσειν προμηθεῖς κἀκ τοῦ προὔπτου 47

It is conceivable that this is a doublet of the same initial oath, and Josephus failed to mention the fine, stressing only that they were not executed as other dissidents. But it is easier to posit two oaths. A few decades have passed in the narrative. Herod now kills a number of Pharisees rather than showing leniency (AJ 17.44–46). His youngest brother, Pheroras, has reportedly become more inclined to conspiracy because of his commitment to his wife, even after he divorces her under pressure from Herod (AJ 16.194–200; 17.46–51, 58–60).

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εἰς τὸ πολεμεῖν τε καὶ βλάπτειν ἐπηρμένοι).48 When the whole Judaean [people] confirmed with oaths that they would honour Caesar and the king’s governance, these men—numbering more than 6,000—did not swear the oath. And when the king imposed a fine on them, the wife of Pheroras paid the fine on their behalf. As a reward for her kindness they predicted—for they had been credited with foreknowledge by guidance from God (πρόγνωσιν δὲ ἐπεπίστευντο ἐπιφοιτήσει τοῦ θεοῦ)—that a cessation of Herod’s rule, his and his family’s after him, had been decreed by God and that the kingdom would devolve on her and Pheroras and any children they might have. … And the king [when he heard] did away with the main culprits of the Pharisees, as well as Bagoas the eunuch and a certain Karos, who was better looking than anyone else at the time and was the king’s ‘boy’. As for Bagoas, he had been taken in by them [the Pharisees], being led to believe that he would be named father and benefactor of the one who should be on high with the title of king. Everything would be in his hands, and God would grant Bagoas potency for marriage and the production of his own children. Despite the awkward Greek reflected in my translation, Josephus’ point is clear. As elsewhere, the Pharisees are involved in conspiracy. His tone is disdainful, even though Antiquities is harsher than War toward Herod. The Pharisees’ reputed gift of foresight allows them to make cynical empty promises to political allies. As elsewhere, they are reputed, and ‘pretend’ (see AJ 17.41 above), in Josephus’ disparaging view, to interpret the laws more carefully than others. Antiquities’ final reference to the Pharisees is a counterpart to the threeschools passage in War 2. Although Josephus again refers to War for details, he makes a few changes here, perhaps only from the need not to repeat himself. This new passage shares the crabbed, convoluted, quasi-poetic Greek of Antiquities 17–19, and leaves his meaning obscure in places. But Josephus also 48

These volumes are replete with textual difficulties, which widen the range of translation possibilities. I follow the Greek text by Ralph Marcus (1900–1956), edited by Allen Wikgren (1963, LCL), but differ from their translation: ‘These men were able to help the king greatly because of their foresight, and yet they were obviously intent upon combating and injuring him.’ The key phrase is μάλιστα πράσσειν προμηθεῖς, which they take positively and in contrast to the coming harm. But the adjective προμηθής appears 5 of its 9 times in Antiquities 17–19, generally with the sense of cunning (as 17.33), and there is no reversal in the sentence. It was a sign of the times that these scholars thought Josephus to have confused Pharisees with Essenes, in dependence on Nicolaus who was hostile to the Pharisees (17.41 n. b. The LCL Preface attributes English notes such as this one to Wikgren).

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now summarises the newer information that has emerged in the fuller narrative of Antiquities 13–17. He stresses, for example, that Pharisees have the overwhelming support of the masses (as 13.297–98), and even declares that the Sadducees who assume public office must ‘defer to what the Pharisee says’ if they are to keep their positions. War 2 referred to the Pharisees’ respect for one another, but the language he now uses for their respect for case law suggests that this might have been what he had in mind (AJ 18.12–17): The Pharisees restrain their regimen of life, yielding nothing to the softer side. They follow the authority of those things that their teaching deemed good and handed down; they regard as indispensable the observance of those things that it saw fit to dictate. Out of honour they yield to those who go before them in age; nor are they inclined boldly to contradict the things that were introduced. They reckon that everything is effected by Fate; yet they do not thereby separate the intending of the human element from the initiative that rests with them [humans], it having seemed right to God that there be a fusion [or judgment or weighing against], and in the council-chamber of that one [Fate?] and [in] the one having willed of the humans, a siding with—with virtue and vice. That souls have a deathless power is a conviction of theirs, and that subterranean punishments and also rewards are for those whose conduct in life has been either of virtue or of vice: for some, eternal imprisonment is prepared, but for others, an easy route to living again. On account of these (views) they happen to be most persuasive to the people; of prayers and sacred rites, whatever is considered divine happens to be conducted according to their interpretation. This much of their influence the cities have demonstrated, in both manner of life and discourse, by their pursuit of [or ‘adherence to’] the way that prevails over all. As for Sadducees: their teaching has souls disappearing along with bodies. They recognise no obligation whatsoever to observe anything other than the laws. They count it a virtue to dispute with the teachers of wisdom, which they pursue. This teaching involves only very few men, albeit those of the highest status. Virtually nothing of what they say is actually implemented, however, for whenever they come into official positions, although they do so unwillingly and by necessity they must defer to what the Pharisee says, for the simple reason that otherwise they would not be tolerated by the mobs.

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Notice two contextual factors connected with this passage. First, although the Essene section is far shorter than War’s description, they still receive the fullest coverage (18.18–22), and Josephus remarks that their way of life is superior to anyone other, as they surpass everyone in virtue. Second, in discussing Judas Galilean (or Gaulanite), Josephus now says that he had an accomplice in fomenting rebellion, a Pharisee named Zadok (18.4). This comes as no surprise, since the Pharisees’ capacity and inclination to excite unrest against priestly leaders is by now familiar. Those who cause trouble in 6 CE seem to be resisting an initiative led by the high priest Joazar, who ousted Archelaus and wished to see Judaea incorporated into Syria.49 4.3 Life of Josephus (Vita) The last wok by Josephus that mentions Pharisees is his autobiography. This appendix to the Antiquities adds no new information about what they believe or their internal group practice. Josephus refers audiences to his earlier accounts for that (V 10). But the relatively many episodes involving Pharisees confirm their popularity and may help to explain his disdain for the group. There are three passages to consider. In the first, Josephus describes his youth and education. He writes (V 10–12): When I was about sixteen years old, I chose to gain experience in the philosophical schools among us. There are three of these, as we have often said: the first, Pharisees; the second, Sadducees; and the third, Essenes. In this way I intended to choose the best, if I might examine them all. So I toughened myself and, after considerable effort, passed through the three of them. Yet I did not consider the experience thus gained sufficient for me (καὶ μηδὲ τὴν ἐντεῦθεν ἐμπειρίαν ἱκανὴν ἐμαυτῷ νομίσας εἶναι). When I discovered that a certain man by the name of Bannus made his life in the wilderness, I became his disciple (ζηλωτὴς ἐγενόμην αὐτοῦ): wearing clothes made from trees, scavenging food that grew by itself, and washing frequently for purification—with frigid water, day and night! When I had lived with him three years and satisfied my longing, I returned to the polis. Being now in my nineteenth year I began to engage in polis life, deferring to the philosophical school of the Pharisees, which is like the one called Stoic among the Greeks (καὶ διατρίψας παρ᾿ αὐτῷ ἐνιαυτοὺς τρεῖς καὶ τὴν ἐπιθυμίαν τελειώσας εἰς τὴν πόλιν ὑπέστρεφον. ἐννεακαιδέκατον δ᾿ ἔτος ἔχων ἠρξάμην τε πολιτεύεσθαι, τῇ Φαρισαίων αἱρέσει κατακολουθῶν, ἣ παραπλήσιός ἐστι τῇ παρ᾿ Ἕλλησιν Στωϊκῇ λεγομένῃ). 49

See Mason 2016a: 249–52.

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This is the passage that older scholarship took as clear proof of Josephus’ claim to be a Pharisee. The final sentence was translated to say that, after duly experimenting with others, he chose to govern his life by the teachings of the Pharisees. Moehring’s 1957 summary is telling because it is incidental to his study. He simply took it as common knowledge that, as he writes: ‘He [Josephus] further tells us that at the age of sixteen he studied the three main sects of contemporary Judaism, the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes, and that three years later he joined the Pharisees.’50 In my dissertation, by contrast, I argued (as I still think) that this makes no sense of the passage or of Josephus’ works. Nothing else hints at Josephus’ Pharisee connections, and this passage puts all three schools on the same level. He thought at first that he would choose one, and so threw himself into each one in turn (beginning with the Pharisees, who obviously did not bowl him over). In the end, none of the schools could fulfil his philosophical yearnings. That happened only with the extraordinary philosopher Bannus, with whom Josephus lived three years (the bulk of this period), as his true disciple. That is why he describes something of those happy and tough days close to nature. It would be mighty strange if he concluded all this by saying, ‘And so of course I became a Pharisee.’ Wait, what? But that is not what he says. V 12b has four distinct clauses, two of which are dependent on the main finite clause ἠρξάμην πολιτεύεσθαι, which means in context: ‘I began to engage in polis life.’ That is the main point. After his footloose youthful experimentation, around the time when elite young Romans likewise typically experimented with philosophy or advanced rhetorical training, Josephus was seeking out the toughest and most satisfying experience, the ‘special forces’ of philosophical training. But it had to end sometime, as the young man accepted his adult civic responsibilities and returned to the polis, to become active in civic life: ἠρξάμην πολιτεύεσθαι. The first dependent clause lashed to this statement is governed by the participle ἔχων, giving his age at this turn to public life: ‘having my nineteenth year’. The second subordinate clause is governed by the participle κατακολουθῶν. This indicates that his decision to embark on public life involved ‘complying with [obeying, following the dictates of] the school of the Pharisees.’ This obviously does not mean that he became a Pharisee, any more than he makes Sadducees into Pharisees when they take public office. As he has recently explained (AJ 18.17), entering public life requires deference to the Pharisees. Shortly after this passage Josephus gives a compressed account of his most important roles in political life: rescuing fellow-priests being held by Nero in Rome (V 13–16) 50

Moehring 1957: 2 (my emphasis).

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and then managing the unrest he encountered in Jerusalem on his return (17). These confirm the sense of V 12 as marking his entry into political affairs. A final dependent clause (ἣ παραπλήσιός ἐστι) compares Judaea’s Pharisees to Greek Stoics. What exactly that should mean is not clear. Perhaps it relates to their variously described view of fate and free will, and/or their comparable prominence among the schools. Since he has compared Essenes with Pythagoreans (AJ 15.371) and implied a comparison between Sadducees and Epicureans (AJ 10.277), this added piece of intended illumination is not surprising, if also not very helpful. The second reference to Pharisees is extremely brief, grouping the leading Pharisees with the chief priests, as War 2 had (above), as the leadership echelon that tried to restrain the people from anything that could appear as rebel action against Rome (V 21). This group, with which Josephus allied himself, realised that they could not openly oppose the newly armed militants, but had to seem to agree with their sentiments even as they gradually steered them to a safer course (V 22). The remaining Pharisee passage confirms the group’s influence in public life and Josephus’ view of their troublesome potential. The episode arises because his main antagonist in Galilee, where he has been sent by the Jerusalem leaders to ensure calm, is John of Gischala. John turns out to be—this is new information over against War 2—a friend of the eminent Pharisee, Simon ben Gamaliel of Jerusalem. John sends emissaries to Simon, pleading to have Josephus recalled and his own leadership in Galilee recognised (V 189–90). After all, he is a native Galilean and already has many followers. Unable to persuade the chief priests Ananus and Jesus, according to Josephus, for they are stand-up figures who understand justice, and so still support Josephus, the Pharisee allegedly resorts to bribing them (V 191–95). Finally corrupted, the chief priests agree against their better judgment to authorise a four-man delegation to bring Josephus home dead or alive (202). This unwelcome delegation to remove Josephus from his post is led by a Pharisee, and two of the other three members are likewise Pharisees. The idea is, supposedly, that if the priest Josephus is respected in Galilee for his legal expertise, they can put their credentials as Pharisees and more popular legal experts against that claim (196–98). As Josephus describes it, their behaviour once they arrive in Galilee is both despicable and impious. Shameless liars all, they violate divine law and misuse holy days and customs to achieve their ends.51 Josephus’ autobiography thus confirms the sentiments he expresses whenever he mentions Pharisees elsewhere. Their reputation for piety and 51

E.g., V 216–19, 249–55, 273–75, 285–302.

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legal expertise gives them great influence, but they regularly abuse that public trust to undermine properly constituted leaders, especially high priests and their affiliates, including Josephus. Along with his insistence that Moses gave priests the exclusive authority to preserve and interpret the laws, this personal experience with Pharisees might well help us to understand his jaundiced view of the group. 5

Conclusion: Josephus’ and Others’ Pharisees

The wrong conclusion to take from this investigation is that Pharisees are bad, because Josephus says so—and agrees with some of the gospels. My aim here has been to understand Josephus’ Pharisees as they function in his particular stories about the past. This involves treating Josephus’ narratives as artfully designed and meaningful wholes, with plots, characters, and entertaining digressions, crafted for audiences in Rome. This differs from older approaches that viewed his works as disembodied records or data-sets, composites of source material with only slight contributions from Josephus, and/or stories shaped by unspoken changes of political allegiance. Just as those methods lack explanatory power, so too their implications for understanding Josephus’ Pharisees—he supposedly borrowed much of his Pharisee material whole, whereas he was or wished to be seen as a Pharisee—wither under scrutiny. Josephus’ identity as a priest, aristocrat, statesman, and historian is unmistakable and frequently asserted in his works. There is no reason to link him with Pharisees, and many reasons not to. My more constructive conclusions are as follows. 1. Pharisees are a marginal presence in Josephus’ works. That is true of all three schools. Outside of the schools passages, Pharisees appear in more episodes (10), than Sadducees (2) or Essenes (7 or 8). But they mainly obstruct characters whom Josephus likes: Alexandra and Herod in War, John Hyrcanus, Herod (partly honoured), and Josephus himself in Antiquities-Life. Sadducees are a small group of little influence, whereas Essenes have no antagonist role. By word count, Essenes receive more space than the others and their press is uniformly positive.52 If Josephus’ audiences remembered any of these groups, it would be the otherwise famous Essenes. 2. Josephus’ accounts of the Pharisees are consistent in outlook, from the group’s first appearance in War to his Life. He says only what is necessary to move his story along, most obviously about their baleful influence, 52

BJ 1.78; 2.213; perhaps 2.567 and 3.11; 5.145; AJ 13.311; 15.371–78; 17.346.

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5.

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which is based on their reputation for careful legal interpretation. The extra space available in Antiquities 13–20 allows Josephus to explain much more. Without joining the dots, he brings four points about the Pharisees into such close contact as to suggest a connection: the extrabiblical tradition guiding their interpretation of Moses’ laws, their reputation for precise (distinction-making) interpretation, their leniency in punishments, and their popularity with the masses. Notable Pharisees take their place, because of their great popular support, alongside the chief priests, with whom Josephus finds his ancestry. Still he withholds most of the information that is of interest to modern historians of ancient Judaism, on the Pharisees’ motives, structure, internal activities, or values as they saw them. Josephus agrees with all three schools on various points. His commitment to the all-sufficient and severe laws of Moses accords with the view he attributes to Sadducees, with whom he also seems to commiserate for having to follow ‘what the Pharisee says’ (AJ 18.17). On the perplexing questions of fate vs. free will, the soul, afterlife, and morally conditioned rebirth, his presentations of all the schools’ views are suitably vague.53 But he agrees with Pharisees, Essenes, and all right-thinking people in affirming these postulates against Sadducean denial,54 though only when describing Essenes does he explicitly endorse a group tenet (BJ 2.158). The image of the Pharisees as legal experts might suggest superficial comparison with the Pharisees of the gospels. But there are crucial differences. In contrast to the gospels’ and traditional Christian perceptions of humourless legalists who are out to catch offenders, Josephus’ Pharisees look like opposites. Like that of a good defence lawyer today, their extreme precision in interpreting the laws, illustrated perhaps by the rabbis’ handling of the rebellious-son provision, works to mitigate the laws’ potential severity. Because they know the exact wording and are intimately familiar with their own case law, they can argue against the severest application of the laws for the most vulnerable in society. It was understood that the wealthy were not likely to be faced with common criminal prosecution because arguments from ‘character’ (as in modern societies until recently) would not likely place them in legal jeopardy.55 The aristocrat Josephus appears (rhetorically) out of sympathy with both the leniency and the popular appeal. Cf. Elledge 2006. See Sievers 1998: 20–34. Men of high rank were, however, the most likely to face prosecution for political crimes, under suspicion of treason or intrigue.

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6.

Josephus’ disdain for Pharisees has clear motives, which do not apply to the gospels. First, he prides himself on being an expert interpreter of the laws, as a priest. Although a priest by birth could also be a Pharisee by choice (V 197), his many priestly self-references make this highly unlikely in his case.56 Second, his initially ambiguous comments about the Pharisees’ reputation for precise legal interpretation are typically followed by a story that savages their reputation, as they leverage their influence to exert power with no concern for justice. The crowning example, and simplest explanation for his distaste, is the effort of leading Pharisees to have him, a priest appointed by chief priests, ousted from Galilee. Because of the temptation to conflate Josephus with the gospels, I close with a few other points of comparison and contrast. The gospels broadly agree with Josephus about the Pharisees’ influence among the people, their distinctive exegetical tradition and legal expertise, and the Pharisees’ acceptance (against the Sadducees) of the afterlife, which the gospels style as ‘resurrection’ (ἀνάστασις) instead of Josephus’ emphasis on the soul’s continuation.57 In their attitudes, however, the gospels differ significantly among themselves. Mark, Matthew, and John all portray Pharisees as lethally opposed to Jesus from an early point.58 The group’s legal expertise appears in those texts as oppressive, and they demand Jesus’ compliance. They are always trying to catch him out. He and they reject each other’s authority. Luke-Acts, which is generally more historically sensitive and bills itself as a superior effort to put things in their proper place (Luke 1.1–4), gives a strikingly different picture. Far from seeking to harm Jesus, Luke’s Pharisees repeatedly invite him to dinner, three times, even though he takes the opportunity to scold them for their preoccupations and alleged lack of concern for outcasts.59 They nevertheless respect him as a ‘teacher’, warn him to leave Galilee when they hear that Herod Antipas is out to kill him as he had killed John, and accompany Jesus, still addressing him as teacher, as he enters Jerusalem.60 Luke considers the Pharisees righteous or just and eager to learn from him. It faults them chiefly for being scandalised by Jesus’ bad company.61 After travelling with him as far as his entry into Jerusalem, however, the Pharisees fade from the scene (Luke 19.39), as the temple authorities detain and then execute Jesus. In this 56 57 58 59 60 61

Especially BJ 1.3, 26, 150; 2.417; 3.352; 5.18, 226–27; AJ 3.258–62, 276–78; 4.304; 20.216; V 1, 13, 16, 29, 80, 198; Ap. 1.28–35, 54; 2.185–93. Mark 2.18–3.5; 7.1–2; 12.18–26; Matt 23.1–28; Acts 23.6–9. Mark 3.6; 12.13; Matt 27.62; John 7.32, 45; 11.57; 18.3. Luke 7.36; 11.37; 14.1. Luke 13.31; 17.20; 19.39. Luke 5.30–32; 7.39; 15.2; 18.9–14.

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work, unlike the other gospels, the (Sadducean) chief priests represent raw and unforgiving power, whereas the Pharisees work at a much more human level among the common people. Pharisees reappear in Acts as advocates of tolerance and patience toward the Christians, in the person of Gamaliel, over against the Sadducean establishment and chief priests (Acts 4.1; 5.17). Many early followers of Christ are then said to be Pharisees, and Paul makes much of his own Pharisee background.62 The paradoxical upshot of all this, given the tradition of Jewish respect for the Pharisees and Christian hostility toward them, is that the two-volume Christian work we call Luke-Acts is more favourable toward them than the Judaean priest-aristocrat Josephus. In Luke-Acts, Jesus and the Pharisees work among and for the common people and distinguish themselves sharply from the temple-based priestly authorities. The explanation for this surprising fact seems to be that Josephus looks down on the popular Pharisees from a temple-establishment perch, displeased at their usurpation of the priests’ prerogatives. The author of Luke-Acts lacks Josephus’ background, status, or assumptions, and relies on information that has reached him about Jesus’ life.63 This leads him to put Jesus and the Pharisees in the same orbit among the common people, providing a rhetorical approximation of the ‘view from below,’ albeit in the service of exclusive Christian claims (Acts 28.23–28). 62 63

Acts 5.34; 15.5; 23.6–9. See Mason 2011a and 2012a.

Chapter 14

A National Revolt? John, Simon, and Individual Motives in History Even as Albert Baumgarten’s research has expanded to cover everything from Philo of Byblos to millenarianism across the ages and Elias Bickerman, he has maintained an interest in Jewish groups of the Hellenistic-Roman period. This, a subject I studied with him in McMaster days, is where I shall try to intersect with his work, by investigating the roles of John of Gischala and Simon son of Giora(s) in the First Revolt. Josephus held these two ‘tyrants’ chiefly responsible for Jerusalem’s destruction.1 A generation later, Tacitus had the same impression, even conflating their names: ‘John who is called bargiora’ (Hist. 5.12). Perhaps confused about who was who, Cassius Dio in epitome names only Bargiora (66.7.1). Lacking the competence to follow Professor Baumgarten’s later fraternisation with social sciences, I hope that the historicist methods in which he helped train me prove worthwhile for the ‘idiographic’ question of what motivated these two crucial figures in the war with Rome.2 ‘No man is an island entire of itself,’ John Donne observed. We can fruitfully study ancient figures only with attention to their literary and historical contexts as well as our methods. There is no space for all that here, but in a recent book I attempt a systematic investigation of such questions.3 In the present essay, Part 1 summarises relevant points from that book as a foundation for a closer investigation of John and Simon (Parts 2 and 3). Before that, I can offer the briefest indication of the relevant scholarly context. Namely, Martin Goodman and James McLaren seem to me right in saying that the traditional view of a long-gathering storm of animosity between Rome and Judaea (from 63 BCE or 6 CE), which exploded in 66, lacks explanatory power.4 I part company with them on two smaller matters: the perception that Josephus created that gathering-storm picture, whereas I understand his War to describe something close to the unexpected ‘perfect storm’ in the 60s that they find more historically likely, and the proposition that opposition to 1 2 3 4

BJ 1.10; 4.208, 337; 5.5, 11, 444, 564, 566, 569, 573; 7.259–74. For the nomothetic-idiographic distinction, see Windelband 1980. Mason 2016a. McLaren 1998, 46, 289–95; Goodman 2007: 3–7.

© Steve Mason, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004545960_016

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Rome congealed among Jerusalem’s leaders to create an independent ‘Jewish state’ during the war. The second position matters here because viewing the war as ultimately a national project, however it originated, tends to assimilate John and Simon to the collective category of ‘Jewish rebels,’ and to diminish curiosity about their unique situations or aims.5 If the standard picture of the war is a tapestry of interwoven threads, I want to ask whether pulling on the John and Simon threads will reveal it to be a solid construction or rather begin to unravel it. 1

The Origin and Nature of the Conflict with Rome

Vespasian, Titus, and their senatorial enablers had good reason to consider the Judaean conflict ‘the greatest war’ ever, no matter what had really happened over there.6 Writing amidst their endless celebrations, Josephus understood their programme and used it as a hook for his uniquely expert account (BJ 1.1–8). While ridiculing the flacks who sought only to aggrandise the new regime, he agreed that it was the greatest conflict ever, but for quite different reasons. A polis that had enjoyed the greatest felicity under Rome’s imperium now lay in smouldering ash (BJ 1.11). How had this catastrophic reversal happened? Josephus’ account is filled with tragic irony, as ordinary Judaeans pushed by violent neighbours and demagogues among themselves react to changing conditions in predictable ways—without realising that they are creating a perfect storm over Jerusalem (e.g., BJ 2.285). I did not write A History of the Jewish War (2016) because I had a new thesis that I was burning to share. Rather, years of thinking and teaching about the conflict had generated many questions. When Cambridge University Press invited me to write for their ‘Key Conflicts of Classical Antiquity’ series, explaining that the aim of the series was not to furnish authoritative narratives but to expose the evidence for our pictures of ancient conflicts, I seized the opportunity—without having much of an idea where things would end up. The investigations lay ahead. The structure of the book reflects that approach. Its contribution was meant to be methodological. If we investigate crucial problems, what do we find and how confident can we be in our answers? 5 Goodman 2007: 4, 27–28, 540, 561 (independent ‘Jewish state’ based in Jerusalem); McLaren 2011: 129–54. 6 Implicit in Silius Italicus 3.605–6, explicit in the inscription on the lost Arch of Titus from the Circus Maximus; cf. Leoni 2018.

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The book’s approach rests on a view of history, which I have outlined in the introduction to this volume. Namely, we can gain only partial and provisional knowledge of the ancient past by means of investigating problems. Investigation requires first interpreting the surviving evidence and then imagining and explaining how it came to be, in relation to the problem we are investigating. The heart of my History (Chapters 4 to 9) therefore comprises five investigations, with the siege of Jerusalem occupying two chapters. Each inquiry explores a problem: the reasons for violent outbreaks in 66 CE, the aim of the failed expedition of Cestius Gallus, what the Flavians and Judaeans were attempting in Galilee, the reasons for the siege of Jerusalem on both sides, and the respective aims in relation to the desert fortresses. Interested readers may consult the book for documentation of the following précis of the book’s concluding summary, which is only an effort to link up each investigation’s results in an economical way, without added assumptions.7 Although every government creates discontent, Jerusalem basically prospered under Rome. Pompey’s termination of Hasmonean rule in 63 BCE and Titus’ destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE were traumas, but they do not represent the intervening 133 years. The four legions based in Syria did not normally affect Jerusalem. Rome preferred to put southern Syria under Jerusalem’s hegemony, with King Herod or a successor. When a Herodian was unavailable, instead of elevating some other polis to a leading role, the emperor dispatched a prefect/procurator to Caesarea with responsibility for Judaea, as the famous Pilate inscription confirms. Jerusalem’s enduring conflicts were not with Rome, but with neighbours in all directions who chafed at Jerusalem’s primacy under first Hasmoneans and then Rome-sponsored Herodians. Samaria had enjoyed regional paramountcy from Persian through Seleucid times, and Jerusalem’s rise had come at its expense, most obviously when John Hyrcanus destroyed Samaria’s temple on Mt. Gerizim. That bitter antagonism, amply and independently attested, never ceased, but it was only Jerusalem’s most persistent irritant. The coastal poleis from Ascalon to Ptolemais, along with inland Scythopolis, Hippos, and Gadara, were disenchanted by Rome’s Vorliebe for Jerusalem. In normal circumstances, regional antagonisms were contained by sturdy checks and balances. Emperors protected Jerusalem and ordered their legates and commanders to do likewise. The Samarians’ long tradition of military service was a threat in principle, but Herod neutralised it by giving Samaria a large role in his kingdom and Samarians a prominent place in his army. After 7 Mason 2016a: 576–89.

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Archelaus’ removal (6 CE), however, the Samarian component of his army became the auxiliary force of the region, based in Caesarea. Notwithstanding brief eruptions, even still, especially those of the early 50s under Cumanus, Jerusalem reached the pinnacle of success under Julio-Claudian emperors (Josephus, BJ 1.11). Predictable regional tensions could not, by themselves, have generated a war with Rome in 66. Rome was Jerusalem’s reliable protector. The last years of Nero’s reign changed everything for Judaea, as for much of the empire. The young ruler’s need for revenue, particularly after the great fire of 64, his growing conflict with the senatorial class, and his corresponding reliance on freedmen and equestrians poisoned the cocktail of political relations also in southern Syria. In ordering his procurator, Gessius Florus, to raid Jerusalem’s famous temple for funds contributed from the Roman and Parthian empires, Nero destroyed the network that kept Jerusalem safe. Florus had a Samarian auxiliary aching to be unleashed on Judaeans. The senatorial legate Cestius Gallus, who had worked assiduously to conciliate Jerusalem’s leaders, was muzzled as Nero’s procurator went about his business, killing even eminent Judaeans who resisted. This reversal of longstanding practice left residents of Jerusalem with hard choices. Some formed armed factions, a move that would soon lead to the siege and massacre of a hated auxiliary garrison. This added the fuel of vengeance to the legionary expedition that Cestius reluctantly brought south in the autumn of 66. When Cestius finally intervened, his force of some 30,000 burned villages and killed Judaeans on its way south, to show strength and exact vengeance for the auxiliary garrison. This in turn generated a loathing previously unknown among Judaeans, who had rarely seen legionaries. It provoked brave young Judaeans to harass the column as it entered the Judaean highlands. When Cestius was then stunned to find himself excluded from Jerusalem, he left to plan a proper assault in the spring, only to face further humiliation on the way home. His Twelfth Legion, still recovering from a Parthian mauling, was ambushed in the descent at Beit-Horon and suffered heavy losses. Judaeans now had to expect that Cestius would lead a retaliatory expedition in the spring of 67. At the end of 66 CE they were bracing for this, while Jerusalem’s leaders looked for ways to mitigate the serious threat to the mother-city. When Vespasian arrived unexpectedly in Ptolemais in early 67, to pacify Jerusalem in place of the aged Cestius (who may have died by now), the leaders of significant towns in the north, including Agrippa’s poleis of Tiberias and Tarichea, welcomed him and made clear that they wanted no trouble. Sepphoris instructed its people not to involve themselves in Jerusalem’s troubles as it welcomed a large Roman garrison (V 346). So too, when Vespasian

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moved to Caesarea after a quick settlement of Galilee, rulers of the southern towns—including Judaea, Peraea, and many of the wealthier class from Jerusalem—rushed to welcome him there and offer support. The legions’ arrival in Caesarea, anchoring an army of about 60,000, also produced a counter-flow of groups and individuals toward the mother-polis. Of the motives one can imagine for this, fear is the most obvious. Whereas Jerusalem’s elite had lines of communication with Roman officials, farmers and tradespeople in the villages would have felt vulnerable, having no idea whether their homes would be burned and overrun. Individual women with children would not readily present themselves to foreign soldiers, while men of fighting age might worry that they would be perceived as hostile regardless of intentions. The desert redoubts of Herodium, Machaerus, and Masada were possible places of refuge, but not practical options. To buy time, Jerusalem’s thick walls and sacred spaces up in the highlands were the only provisional hope. All those within could hope for at least temporary protection, while the leaders figured something out. And what were Vespasian’s aims? If he had not been delayed by Iotapata (Yodfat) in the north, he might have reached Caesarea by May of 67 and moved to deal with Jerusalem, intimidating it into surrender, already then. Neither John nor Simon would have been present in Jerusalem, nor the large number of Idumaean fighters who later entered. The city was still led by Ananus II and colleagues, who were reportedly seeking a way to reach terms with the Romans. It seems nearly certain that if Vespasian had arrived with his army in 67, Ananus would have found a way to surrender, and there would have been no reason to destroy the city or its temple. World history might have been very different. Was it Josephus’ fault that Vespasian was delayed at Iotapata, long enough for him to receive the invitation from Agrippa and delay his move south, thereby driving John to Jerusalem, which led to the entry of Idumaeans and Simon? We cannot know. He was delayed, however, and so did not emerge in Judaea until the spring, where he spent April and May 68 hemming Jerusalem in with garrisons, meeting no resistance. Even then, if Nero’s death in June had not forced him to stop, Vespasian would likely have taken Jerusalem by the end of that summer. We cannot know this either, but it is likely because Simon, who lacked any of the Roman army’s advantages, was reportedly able to intimidate the city and gain entry months later (BJ 4.538–84), also because Titus would take the city even with the Idumaeans and Simon’s tough fighters two summers later. If Vespasian’s actions in the north are any guide, he would have preferred and likely achieved a largely bloodless capitulation in 68. A sensible course would have been for him to make an example of those he deemed guilty, install a

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legionary garrison, and reinstate the traditional elite, which had so long maintained productive relations with Rome. At any rate, in June of 68 neither Vespasian nor John nor Simon could have had a clue as to how things would unfold in 69 and 70. 2

John of Gischala

The fascination of John’s character is largely attributable to Josephus’ having written so differently about him in War and Life. As we have seen, scholars have usually treated John as just one instance of an imagined ‘rebel’ mentality: he was a leader of the long-standing opposition to Roman rule. Uriel Rappaport is a notable exception, having turned his article-length probes of John’s career into a 2006 monograph.8 Because our starting points and methods differ, I am pleased to see that our analyses overlap in large measure.9 Rappaport argues effectively for points that are easily missed by those who assume a shared general motive for ‘the revolt’. He argues that John was initially a well-connected nobleman opposed to any conflict with Rome, and also that we must allow for ordinary human change on his part, as his circumstances changed.10 I agree and also welcome Rappaport’s willingness to say ‘we do not know’ when evidence fails or is explainable by too many variables. My reconstruction differs from his in relatively small ways, most significantly in doubting that John underwent a sort of conversion in Jerusalem as he proposes. This difference turns on the interpretation of a passage in Josephus, which we shall consider below.11 I agree, however, that John was a most unlikely candidate for the role of Rome’s enemy in Jerusalem. John only found himself in the Judaean capital by a remarkable twist of fortune, which he could not have foreseen. Once he was inside Jerusalem’s walls, I would suggest, the predicament itself was enough to necessitate the kinds of actions that Josephus attributes to him. The turn to nationalist zeal posited by Rappaport cannot be excluded, but it seems an unnecessary extra. John has a substantial role in both War and Life. Both are stories, however, not mere windows on real life, and John’s character serves each narrative. To the frustration of scholars, but understandably in his context, Josephus weaves his 8 9 10 11

Rappaport 2006, English translation by Rebecca Toueg with Jack Pastor and George Silberman (privately circulated, 2013). I give page numbers from the English typescript. On the importance of regional conflicts, cf. Rappaport 1981. Rappaport 2013: 67–78. Rappaport 2013: 101–2.

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stories from many short threads, which he abruptly drops when he loses interest. For example, War fails to explain how, given the severe tensions between Gischala and Tyre (BJ 2.459; 4.105), John acquired hundreds of ‘Tyrian’ or ‘Syrian’ followers (2.588, 625; cf. V 372) who quietly become ‘Galileans’ (4.558). Life does not explain, inter alia, the sudden appearance and disappearance of John’s interesting brother Simon (V 189–96). These are common kinds of gaps in Josephus’ works. War nevertheless presents a clear and coherent impression of John’s character, after introducing him as follows (BJ 2.585–87): a certain schemer of a fellow from Gischala, a son of Leius, John by name: the slipperiest and craftiest of all those who distinguished themselves in wretched behaviours during these times. Still, because he was poor at the beginning, for a long period a lack of means functioned as an impediment to his evil. Though ready to lie, he was formidable at conveying trustworthiness for the things he had lied about and regarded his trickery as a virtue—even its use against those dearest to him. A pretender to kindness, while extremely bloodthirsty when there was hope of gain, even though he had always yearned for great things he nourished his hopes by pathetic wrongdoings. He was basically a solitary bandit, but later found a crew of brazenness—small at first, but cutting an ever-larger swath. John’s innate rottenness, once established by Josephus, is the only explanation needed for his wilful opposition to our author, who in this narrative is sent by Jerusalem’s authorities to be the ‘general’ in charge of Galilee’s defences (BJ 2.568). Perhaps nudged by Justus of Tiberias’ alternative account of these events after his War appeared,12 Life presents a more rounded and plausible John. Rather than appointing Josephus as general and instructing him to train an army, the autobiography portrays Josephus as one of a three-man team sent to ensure that no one in Galilee is taking up arms (V 29). In this new context, Josephus introduces John as a man much like these aristocrats: a local eminence trying to tamp down hatred toward Rome after Cestius’ violent expedition (V 43): ‘John son of Levi, seeing some of the citizens with big ideas about secession from the Romans, tried to restrain them and kept urging them to maintain loyalty’. His difficulties arise because of encroachments on 12

See V 88. Even if Josephus fabricated a link between John and Justus (see Mason 2001: 69), Justus may have portrayed John in a way that Josephus had to concede.

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Gischala’s territory by neighbours—Tyrians, Gadarenes, and Aganaeans—who feel emboldened by Rome’s turn against Jerusalem. They join forces to burn Gischala itself (44). John admirably defends his town against these assaults, while distinguishing the hostile neighbours from Rome. A comparable situation obtains in Tiberias, where the polis leaders are engaged in lethal conflict over farmland with the now adventurous Decapolis centres of Gadara, Hippos, and Scythopolis (42), the last of which massacres its Judaean minority upon hearing of Cestius’ ambush (26). Even Josephus, who presents himself as resolutely against conflict with Rome (V 17–19), admits to having joined in reprisals against local enemies when he was in Galilee (81). After Vespasian arrives with his army, with Judaeans his declared targets, the other poleis quickly isolate their Judaean minorities as hated aliens (cf. BJ 7.46). In this atmosphere, the actions that Judaean centres take to protect themselves might easily be construed as anti-Roman, even if that was not their motive. Thus, Vespasian reportedly sentences the city councillor Justus of Tiberias to death because of complaints by Decapolis leaders about his actions against them (V 342–43). The issues were immediate and strictly local, but the imperial power could be convinced by persuasive figures that one town or another was disturbing the Roman pax. Within Tiberias and Tarichea themselves, Nero’s recent transfer of the cities to Agrippa generated grievances, perhaps related to the population’s economic life-chances and status, not because of Roman rule as such.13 Here too, protests against the absentee landlord-king, Agrippa II (cf. 67), could and did appear as an affront to the Roman order of which the king was a part, especially when a powerful representative of Roman order, Vespasian, was nearby with a large army. It is in these realistically threatening circumstances, rather than in opposition to ‘the idea of Rome’ or from motives of ‘anti-imperialism,’ that Josephus’ portrait of John in the Life makes historical sense. He was the wealthy, wellconnected, and effective patron-protector of Gischala, defending his people against ferocious assaults from Decapolis neighbours. He fortified his town and led retaliatory raids (V 45), never intending to act against Rome or imagining that Gischala would face a Roman force. To understand how complicated local hostilities could be under the umbrella of an imperial power, it may be instructive to think about the numerous varied, relatively well documented local contexts of the British Empire in the nineteenth century. Tensions often existed among tribes or principalities vying for status, or between local tribes 13

See AJ 20.159 and V 37–40 with Mason 2001: 43–44.

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and lower imperial officials, without the implication that those angling for change wished to leave the empire itself.14 In both of Josephus’ accounts, though they otherwise differ, the antipathy between him and John is clear. This might have had to do with different political or ‘religious’ outlooks, but we need not go there for an explanation. Ordinary life turns up daily experience of jealousy over status and role. John and Justus of Tiberias, who risked their skins as champions of their own communities, would naturally view an interloper such as Josephus, who expected obedience as official leader, with hostility. The appeal of John’s claim to be Galilee’s protector is evident in Josephus’ admission that most Galilean towns favoured the Gischalan (V 73, 76, 124). So indeed did some of those in Jerusalem who had sent Josephus, who also knew John and his family, once John appealed to them against their priestly emissary. When the rivalry opened, the Jerusalem leaders tried to recall Josephus (189–96). Therefore, when Josephus ascribes to his adversary John a sudden ‘powerful desire to rule’ (70), or alleges his ‘envy’ of Josephus (85, 123), or criticises his nefarious gift of being able to persuade people to ‘defect from their loyalty’ to Josephus (87), it requires no unusual scepticism to imagine that the native Galilean simply thought he was the rightful leader. Josephus himself allows at one point: ‘he claimed that he would be a better general for them than I was’ (83). And why not? An inspiring and proven defender against nearby poleis, who enjoyed strong support in Jerusalem, might well have thought he was Galilee’s natural champion—though this did not imply any intention of leading a war against Rome. Whereas Life completes its narrative arc with John cowering in Gischala, outmanoeuvred by Josephus (V 372), War makes John’s withdrawal the springboard for him to invite the delegation from Jerusalem to help him (BJ 2.625, 632). Disconcertingly for historians, in Life that delegation has already come and gone (V 189–332). We can only speculate about the roles of Josephus’ faulty memory, sources, and literary freedom in accounting for this huge difference. Whatever the explanation, War then describes a much longer extension of John’s story, which concludes only with the siege and destruction of Jerusalem. Rappaport astutely observes that Vespasian’s concern about Gischala, and therefore John, must have been negligible, given that he did not approach the town during his Galilean operations. When he finally did think of it, he left it to Titus, while he took the army south.15 I would add an important consequence of this observation. As we have seen, Flavian operations in Galilee and Samaria 14 15

Morris 1973 vividly conveys these complexities, from Tasmania to Bengal and from Jamaica to British Columbia. Rappaport 2013: 95–97.

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were over by early in the summer of 67, when Vespasian offered sacrifices for a campaign quickly accomplished (BJ 3.443–44). He left Agrippa’s idyll in Caesarea Philippi only as a favour to his host (ὡς εἰς ξενίας ἀμοιβὴν σωφρονίσων, 3.445), concluding this aid to the king with an assault on Agrippa’s town of Gamala (4.11–83). So Gischala was not even the last item on Agrippa’s Galilean agenda. It was entirely an afterthought on Vespasian’s part, when he had completely finished his operations. Why had he shown no interest? And what might Vespasian’s late interest suggest about John? It seems that John had no intention either to move to Jerusalem or to fight against Romans. In the only account we have, John fled to Jerusalem because he, staying clear of the Flavians in Upper Galilee, was unexpectedly disturbed by Titus in late 67. His situation is very different from that of Justus of Tiberias, who was denounced to Vespasian by Decapolis leaders as soon as the Roman commander arrived at Ptolemais in early 67 (V 342–43, 355). John apparently faced no such charges, for Vespasian did not seek him out. Perhaps John’s conflict with his neighbours had been less intense, or Vespasian had more sympathy with Gischala’s self-defence, his rivalry with Josephus was of no concern to the Romans, or his town was just too remote to bother with. Something happened in late 67 to make Vespasian think that, even as he left with the army, a visit from Titus would be prudent. Josephus says in a vague nod at explanation that Gischala ‘remained untaken’ (BJ 4.84). But why did it need to be ‘taken’? Upper Galilee was not otherwise on Vespasian’s itinerary. His objective, taken over from Cestius Gallus, was Jerusalem. Josephus remarks that Gischala’s population was devoted to agriculture. He goes on to say, however, that the peaceful population had recently been imposed upon by ‘a sizeable bandit contingent’ loyal to John, which was pursuing rebellion (ἀπόστασις). Josephus does not miss the opportunity to remind the audience of his view of John: ‘an enchanter of a fellow with an extremely slippery character, always primed for grandiose hopes, who obviously loved war as a foundation for gaining power’ (4.85). This looks like boilerplate slander from an ardent enemy. In historical terms, it seems odd. What grandiose hopes could John have had, sitting in tiny Gischala, and how could Josephus have known his mind? One possible reason for Vespasian’s interest is Josephus’ passing notice that Gischala had not sent emissaries to greet him to offer submission; Josephus claims that the residents had wished to do so, but were prevented by John’s militants (BJ 4.86). But it is not clear that Vespasian would have considered Gischala important enough to miss an embassy from them. Other factors may have come into play. First, Gischala had been involved in regional conflicts, and Vespasian may have been unsure of where these might lead. A visit from

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Titus might reassure him that they would keep the peace. Second, the captive Josephus might have suggested a visit to his old nemesis. When authorities are executing people under emergency measures, it is a god-sent opportunity for their enemies to inform on them. The younger Pliny noticed such invidious accusations while he was executing Christians in Pontus-Bithynia (Ep. 10.96), and the phenomenon was well known in Rome itself.16 Even if Vespasian did not trust Josephus, he might have thought it worthwhile to check on John. Finally, Vespasian might simply have been giving Titus another safe, confidencebuilding task on his path to increasing capability. Speculations aside, two points look to be well grounded. First, if Josephus’ broad storyline has merit, John had no intention of fighting Romans. He hoped to remain out of sight in Gischala. His hope to be ignored is as easy to understand as the flight of other Judaeans to Machaerus, Masada, or Jerusalem, when Roman legions arrived in southern Syria. Also today, when foreign armies invade a country, whether that army is Russian or American (or Nazi German in France), many locals who can do so will flee or try to become invisible. The reason is simply that they do not know what will happen when they are surrounded by heavily armed men who see them as a potential enemy, and they would rather not find out. Those refugees who fled to desert locations in the south also hoped—and succeeded far longer than John—that the Romans would ignore them, and they could live quasi-normal lives.17 John had acted only in defence of Gischala against rival poleis. Once the Romans arrived, he retreated to his remote hometown for a quiet life with his family. When Titus came knocking with 1,000 cavalrymen, however, he was forced to make quick and fateful decisions, just as the residents of Machaerus and Masada would be years later. The other well-grounded point is that more or less everything that happened to John after Titus’ visit seems explainable as a fear-driven response in rapidly changing circumstances. Titus’ arrival left him with few options. (a) Surrender and hope that Titus has no damaging intelligence or other reason to harm him. But how could he be sure of that? Why had Titus come? What has he heard, and from whom? Although Josephus repeatedly called on compatriots to surrender to Rome, as he had done and survived, he admits that he himself rejected Vespasian’s repeated pledges of safety because he did not trust them. He expected to be killed, as he would have been without divine protection and Titus’ change of heart, prevailing on his father (BJ 3.345–50, 397). So too, John might have survived if he had welcomed Titus, but he could not have 16 17

Rutledge 2001. See Mason 2016a: 514–75.

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known that. Titus had made a special trip to Gischala. Why? (b) If he feared surrender, John’s second unpalatable option was a daring charge against Titus’ cavalry and impossible odds. But if he were unsure why Titus had come, this would put his belligerence beyond all doubt and make a violent death highly likely. Why risk that, especially if he never had an issue with the Romans? (c) A third possibility was suicide. Josephus’ cave companions at Iotapata, as later Eleazar on Masada, reportedly preferred suicide once Romans were at the door and their fate was looking grim. No matter what their internal thoughts and intentions might have been, they saw torture, crucifixion, and/or the molestation of family members as probable outcomes. A quick death by one’s own hand could seem preferable. Perhaps John thought of this, but suicide would also have meant dispatching his family. If these options were too awful to contemplate, one course remained: try to evade capture and flee. This is the course that John took, and it naturally took him to Jerusalem’s walls, his only hope for provisional safety once Vespasian’s army was in Judaea—other than a retreat to the desert fortresses or caves. Fast-forward to the end of War’s story, and we find John pleading for precisely that option: safe passage with his family to the desert. Like Josephus, John was apparently not of the martyr mould. He had reportedly vowed never to trust a Roman pledge of safety, like the earlier Josephus (BJ 6.351). When Titus refused that final request during the siege of Jerusalem, to be allowed to leave unscathed with his family, John dropped into Jerusalem’s underground tunnels until, starving, he had no choice but to accept the pledge of safety he had refused (6.433). As it happened, he was not killed or tortured, but would be held in perpetual incarceration (δεσμοῖς αἰωνίοις) without execution (6.434). Members of the Adiabenian royal family in Jerusalem, though they had taken leading roles in Jerusalem’s earliest resistance and held out during the siege, eventually surrendered and received safe passage to Rome as hostages (2.520; 6.357). Perhaps John could have done so too. If so, he did not know it, and his choice to hold out as long as possible was rational. Thus far, my picture of John’s early direction does not contradict Rappaport’s.18 If we take a different approach to what happened next, that is because we interpret BJ 4.121–27 differently. There, Josephus describes John treating his adoring welcoming committee in Jerusalem to a rousing speech, which insists that the city’s walls are absolutely unconquerable, ‘even if the Romans could take wings’ (4.127). Observing that ‘This phrase expressed a belief that Jerusalem was unconquerable because it was under God’s protection,’ 18

Rappaport 2013: 90: ‘nothing can be found to show that he took any important action against the Romans’.

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that ‘Josephus ascribes to John a national-religious, or better a metaphysical, outlook,’ and that Josephus had no reason to credit his enemy John with such noble thoughts, Rappaport infers that there must be a kernel of historical truth in Josephus’ description. If so, the passage is evidence of John’s new nationalistic outlook once in Jerusalem. This would explain why the Galilean first joins Jerusalem’s ‘moderates’ (Ananus and Jesus) but, upon discovering that they wish to surrender, decides to betray the chief priests and join the Zealots. His new vision requires him to ‘stand firm’ against Rome and not associate with those seeking surrender.19 This is where we part company in understanding Josephus’ evidence. We have no idea, historically speaking, how John effected his move from Gischala to Jerusalem. But Josephus’ account is coherent, from departure to arrival, and it drives home John’s essential deviousness at every point. We do not know whether or where aspects of the real John poke through, but there is no reason to think that Josephus forgot his craft and simply reported John’s real thoughts at some point—or that the thoughts he reports are noble. His story goes like this. Titus and his cavalry arrive outside Gischala to find the walls crowded with John’s bandits, with the good-hearted native populace out of sight. Titus knows that he could easily overrun the town, but he has no taste for massacring the innocent majority. Slippery John, seeing his dire situation and apparently suspecting young Titus’ gullibility, speaks up to offer submission without resistance. But he points out that it is the sabbath. If Titus would respect Judaean tradition and return the next morning, John promises unconditional surrender (BJ 4.92–102). In the meantime, Titus can camp his force just outside the town to prevent his flight. Nothing to worry about! ‘Simple-minded’ Titus, Josephus goes on to say, detects no hint of guile. Ignoring even John’s proposed precautions, Titus takes his men to a Tyrian village that is miles away. They return next morning to find that John and his henchmen have fled with their families and townsfolk. Josephus’ wily enemy has, he plainly states, outwitted Titus (ἐσοφίζετο τὸν Τίτον; 4.103). Although this entertaining episode should be comprehensively doubted, Josephus’ remark that John was suddenly ‘spurred on by fears of captivity, and for his very life’ (BJ 4.107) when Titus arrived is plausible enough. Gischala’s farmers, women, and children, who have done nothing to offend Rome and have no reason to expect the visit of Titus’ cavalry force, fall in with the southbound caravan for similar reasons (4.108–11). They are terrified. They behave as any sensible population does when an enemy force invades. Why would John not fear for his life, after having come to Titus’ attention? 19

Rappaport 2013:, 101–5.

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Whereas Rappaport detects a change in the historical John when he reached Jerusalem, I propose that this next part of the story is of a piece with what precedes. It only intensifies Josephus’ emphasis on John’s egoistic slipperiness, which Josephus continues to flag. For example, John has barely survived the flight from Gischala. But when the chameleon-figure arrives in the mother-city, his posse, ‘though the shortness and heat of their breath made their distress obvious,’ as Josephus relates, ‘kept bragging—despite the bad indications—insisting that they had not fled the Romans but had come only to fight them on secure ground’ (BJ 4.121–22; emphasis added). The story drips with sarcasm. When John then declares that the Romans are weak and incompetent, and that even if equipped with ‘wings’ they could never take Jerusalem’s walls, this barefaced lie, contradicting facts known to Josephus’ literary audience in Rome, finds an appreciative reception within the story, among young men of Jerusalem who are desperate to believe. They are tragically primed for fighting in seeming defence of their home city. But for Josephus’ later audiences, in Rome after Jerusalem’s fall, the episode is deeply ironic. Even within the story time, our narrator remarks that all the older men in Jerusalem saw through John’s bluster and began mourning the city’s fate (4.123–28). Since all of this clearly serves Josephus’ portrait of John—Catiline to his Cicero—I cannot agree that the real John pokes through here to reveal a turn toward nationalism. The whole episode seems to me a product of Josephus’ craftsmanship, in illustration of John’s deviousness and ability to charm the unwary. Historically speaking, John must have moved from Gischala to Jerusalem, since he ended up there, and had attracted an armed following in the process. How that happened we cannot know. In imagining scenarios, if we gave Titus a bit more credit and John less than Josephus does, we might imagine something like the following. Titus took a cavalry troop on a quick final tour of northern sites, including Gischala and Tyrian Kedesa, for some of the reasons proposed above. If this was a planned circuit, his stay in Kedesa would not have been caused by John’s tricks, but been a planned overnight stop in a comfortable place. John, however, made seriously uncomfortable by Titus’ unexpected proximity, and perhaps worried that complaints from the neighbouring poleis might catch up with him after all, thought it prudent to flee to Jerusalem, where he had some prominent friends. Together they could at least buy time, confer, and possibly work something out with Vespasian. Whatever happened, it would be much safer for him there than exposed by himself in the north. Josephus’ lament that John could have been neutralised in the north is typical of his hindsight view. Compare BJ 2.531–34, 540, where he regrets that Cestius could have saved Jerusalem from its fate if he had persevered with a siege—though Cestius at the time had no reason to do so. In the case of

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John, he seems to have crafted a tragic incident to juxtapose Titus’ inveterate simplicity with John’s wily scheming, which put John fatefully in Jerusalem. A simple historical scenario could explain all the evidence without needing to posit either Titus’ remarkable gullibility or John’s conversion to militant nationalism. Irrespective of John’s real intentions, if Nero had not died in June, Vespasian would likely have taken the submission of Jerusalem by the autumn of 68 (above). When Nero’s death put his campaign on hold, John could not have known— as Vespasian did not—how long the confrontation with Jerusalem, which he began to plan in early 68 (BJ 4.412), would be delayed. When S. Sulpicius Galba was acclaimed emperor that June, Vespasian might have resumed operations. As it happened, Galba’s delay in reaching Rome delayed Vespasian’s dispatch of Titus, to secure a new mandate, to the end of 68 (BJ 4.497–98), possibly with the thought that Galba might even adopt Titus (Tacitus, Hist. 2.1). All parties might reasonably have expected Vespasian to reactivate his army by the spring of 69 at latest. When John arrived in Jerusalem around Hanukkah of 67 CE, therefore, he will have known that he would face life decisions again soon. That he would find security behind Jerusalem’s walls until mid-70, as Vespasian kept adjusting course and finally left for Rome, he could not have imagined. Josephus’ description of John’s later actions in Jerusalem are well enough known that I need not go through them. The main point of this approach to the subject is that their twists and turns are more or less explainable by John’s general predicament. No particular religious or political outlook is needed for us to understand his actions. Holding out as long as possible would have seemed his best option. His predicament would explain: his initial relief at finding common cause with Jerusalem’s trusted leaders, Ananus and Jesus, who could offer protection and under whose wings he might hope to see the conflict through in safety; his growing suspicion, provoked by the Zealot (or ‘Disciple’) faction, that Ananus and Jesus were secretly planning capitulation to Rome—as they may well have been doing—with the peril that might entail for John after his flight from Titus (BJ 4.228; cf. 4.218, 244–45, 146); his gradual alignment with the small group of Zealots, who had led the reaction against Florus and also believed that they could not safely surrender; their collectively desperate invitation to the Idumaeans, a body of sympathetic neighbours with a martial tradition, to come to Jerusalem and remove Ananus and Jesus (winter of 67/68), ensuring John’s ascent and buying him more time; the Idumaeans’ growing disenchantment with John, as these personal motives became clear; the admission of Simon bar Giora more than a year later, with Idumaean support, as a check on John; and the intense rivalry that followed between Simon and John, as neither could either surrender or trust the other man with his life.

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Simon Son of Gioras from Gerasa

If John had reason to fear surrender to the Flavians, Simon perhaps had still more. The Flavians would eventually single him out for execution, as notional enemy general in their triumph. At the end of the historic celebration he was ceremonially strangled (Cassius Dio 66.7.1; Josephus; BJ 7.25–36, 153–55; cf. Tacitus, Hist. 5.12). Unlike John, Simon had been in perpetual conflict with Jerusalem’s native leaders. That is why he could enter the city only in the spring of 69 (BJ 4.577). His case presents another problem for the common image of a Jerusalem-led national revolt against Rome, springing from a shared anti-Roman motive. Unlike John, who figures prominently in Josephus’ Life as we have seen, Simon appears only in War. At the end of this narrative’s fulcrum section in Book 4 (BJ 4.503–504), Josephus reintroduces Simon in preparation for the climactic events ahead. He explains that, though a younger man who lacked John’s ‘cunning,’ Simon had the better of John in physical strength and courage. This contrast prompts Josephus to recall Simon’s earlier appearances. Because of his bold actions on the frontier with Samaria in Acrabatene, the high priest Ananus II had ejected Simon from that sensitive zone (BJ 2.652), forcing him to flee with his family to Masada (cf. 4.399). Later, the priest-led faction of Zealots kidnapped Simon’s wife as a hostage for his good behaviour toward Jerusalem (4.538–44). In sharp contrast to Josephus’ amusing depiction of John and his men as effeminate wantons who liked to dress in women’s clothes and make-up (4.561–62), Josephus portrays Simon as a raging beast: torturing his victims, chopping off their hands, and all but gnawing their corpses in Achilleslike rage. He remarks that Simon was ‘the more murderous’ of the two men (φονικώτερος, 4.564). John was likely to trick you; Simon would kill you with his bare hands. Simon’s first appearance in War had given no hint of all that, though he is a tough character and Josephus’ audience would have known from the outset of his starring role in the triumph of 71 CE. Simon first appears as an opportunistic raider of Cestius Gallus’ baggage train. He is not part of the group from Jerusalem that first confronted the legate and legionaries on their approach (2.517–19) or the one that later pursued them from Jerusalem into the fateful ambush (2.541–55). Rather, he attacked the column from behind as it first ascended the Beit-Horon pass into the Jerusalem hill country (2.521). This suggests, if it was merely an opportunistic assault, that Simon was then based in the foothills, not in Jerusalem. The next time we meet him is in the closing lines of War 2, where Josephus ominously anticipates his later prominence. Destroying houses and people around Acrabatene, where Judaean militants

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had often positioned themselves for strikes against Samaria (cf. 2.235), Simon attracts the ire of Ananus, who sends a force to chase him to Masada. Once there, Simon cannot remain still and promptly begins attacking nearby Idumaea. That ethnos, though it shares Judaean laws and worship, has to establish a defensive force against him (2.652–54). This anticipatory passage is fleshed out in War 4, which explains that Simon stayed at Masada until Ananus’ murder freed him to roam again. By our calendar, it appears that he fled to Masada in late 66 or early 67, and stayed a year or more, until Ananus’ death in the winter of 67–68. After a probationary period of gradual acceptance and joining in the Masada residents’ local raids for food, however, he becomes disgusted by their lack of spirit. Their ambition was limited to grabbing what they needed from nearby Judaean settlements and fleeing back to their secure rock to avoid risk (BJ 4.507–9). Champing at the bit for more action, after Ananus’ death, Simon returns briefly to his old havoc in Acrabatene (4.511), but his new obsession is Idumaea (4.535). In the face of Simon’s devastating attacks there, which are supported by unnamed wealthy Judaeans, a quick-thinking Idumaean commander offers to yield up his country in exchange for a senior position in Simon’s rapidly growing private army. Simon accepts the man’s offer and lets his force overrun Idumaea, leaving it a true desert (4.521–37). It seems to be this display, along with his antics following the kidnapping of his wife, that prompts those who are disillusioned with John in Jerusalem, including the powerless current high priest Matthias, to admit Simon and his band to the upper city as a counterweight to John (4.566–77). Simon has enlarged his ranks with people fleeing from John’s Jerusalem, including wealthy Jerusalemites whom John had incarcerated to seize their funds (4.353). Residents of Jerusalem unaffiliated with any militants agree to admit Simon because they need someone, anyone, who is able to protect them from John (4.560, 574). Because of Simon’s evident centrality in the coming siege of Jerusalem, older scholarship tried to find a noble programme for him, whether theological, social, or political. We can see the wish fathering the thought in Cecil Roth’s remark (emphasis mine): ‘That Simon bar Giora considered himself as being to some extent a religious teacher is nowhere indicated in our sources, but is by no means improbable.’20 Surely he had more going for him than Josephus relates. Otto Michel tried to be more precise. He reasoned from the high priest Matthias’ inclusion among those who reached out to Simon that the man must have been a pious soul. If so, Josephus’ narrative (our only source for Matthias’ welcome) must be a comprehensive distortion. Michel speculated 20

Roth 1960: 52–58, here 53.

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that Simon’s final bid to scare people as he emerged from Jerusalem’s tunnels dressed in white and purple, near the end of Josephus’ account, reflected his inner consciousness that he was the (non-Davidic) gibbor-Messiah described in Isaiah 9.5–6.21 Gideon Fuks has ably refuted this parade example of multiplying entities, beyond what is needed to explain the evidence.22 The clearest hint of a visionary programme is Josephus’ remark that, in order to recruit an instant following, Simon offered liberty to other people’s slaves and financial bonuses to free persons who would join him, ‘and so collected the scoundrels from everywhere’ (BJ 4.508). Even Peter Brunt, however, when scouring Josephus for hints of socioeconomic causes of the revolt, wisely left this passage alone, for he realised that accusing someone of such behaviour was a common tactic ‘for discrediting political opponents.’23 Polybius, one of Josephus’ main inspirations, attributed just such rhetoric to the Achaean Diaeus, when he needed to assemble a loyal force in a hurry (Polybius 38.11.9–10, 15.2–4, 7). The principle of raising an army with financial inducements has created mercenary and private forces from ancient times to the present. Given Josephus’ presentation of other such appeals to the poor as demagogic bluffs,24 his characterisation of Simon’s force reflects a literary trope rather than sober reporting. It cannot readily be converted into evidence of Simon’s real socialist values. Coins might offer different kinds of clues. Specialists have increasingly explained the differences between the fine silver shekels of Years 1 to 5 and the crude bronzes of Years 2 to 4 by hypothesising different mints. Rappaport’s argument that all the bronzes come from Simon—Years 2 and 3 from a mobile mint in the countryside, Year 4 from a stable mint in Jerusalem25—has not won the day, but Simon’s responsibility for the Year 4 coins is widely agreed.26 We cannot here engage the countless debates. The main question for us is whether the legend ‘for the redemption of Zion’ on Year-4 bronzes reveals an anti-Roman or messianic outlook on Simon’s part. This is possible, but the evidence neither declares it nor requires it. In general, it is hazardous to infer a personal viewpoint or sentiment, such as Simon’s, from slogans on coins meant to reach a wide range of users. There 21 22 23 24 25 26

Michel 1968: 402–8, here 402–3. Fuks 1985/88. Brunt 1977: 153 n. 12. BJ 2.422, 427–28 present the temple captain Eleazar using a promise of debt relief as a cynical recruiting tool against the [other] wealthy and powerful. V 38–40 has Justus of Tiberias use the same ruse. Rappaport 2007. E.g., Roth 1962: 43–45; Goldstein and Fontanille 2006; Hendlin 2010: 343–45; Ariel 2011.

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are so many steps between any individual’s aspirations and what he might wish inscribed on coins that no inferences can safely be drawn. In any case, if Simon did believe that Zion/Jerusalem needed redemption, it is not clear why the people he wanted to redeem it from were Romans. Romans had never occupied Jerusalem, except in the brief capture of the city by Pompey and Sosius (63 and 37 BCE). The provincial legate and his legions were weeks away. Jerusalem had been run in peacetime by the local priestly and Pharisaic council, with an auxiliary garrison recruited among Samarians and Caesareans as its police force. After mid-66 and the slaughter of the garrison, the groups running Jerusalem—first Ananus and his circle, then the priest-led Zealots under two Eleazars, then John of Gischala with Galileans and Idumaeans—were Simon’s fiercest enemies, who tried to have him killed or banished. After he entered the city in the spring of 69, his conflict with John and the Zealots intensified to close-up violence. So, if the coin legend was not merely expressing a hope for better times and a way out of the mess following the ambush of Cestius, the Year 4 coins might envisage the city’s redemption from Simon’s Judaean enemies. We cannot know, of course, but we should not assume that Simon’s chief concern, when fleeing for his life from Judaean authorities, was with the Romans. We lack the space to work through the details of War 5 and 6 concerning the horrors of the siege and their exacerbation by the conflict between Simon and John, after Eleazar son of Simon, the original leader of the Zealots, is absorbed by John’s group (BJ 5.99–105, 250–251; cf. Tacitus, Hist. 5.12). My general proposal is that Simon, although an entirely different character from John, was in much the same predicament, and this could explain his actions. Once trapped within Jerusalem’s walls, that is, he faced a looming life-and-death struggle with Rome’s army in which he had to manoeuvre himself into the best position possible to manage things. Josephus’ two appendages to Simon’s name, ‘a certain Gerasene’ and ‘son of Gioras’ (4.503), are tantalising, although neither has a certain meaning. Since giora is Aramaic for Hebrew ger, used in biblical times for a foreign resident who lives under Israelite-Judaean laws (a προσήλυτος or ‘one who has come over here’ in the LXX), it is generally agreed that Simon belonged to a new Judaean family.27 His situation then invites comparison with the Adiabenian royals. When leaders of that family, whose kingdom was in territory now in the Erbil region of Iraqi Kurdistan, embraced Judaean law in the 30s CE, they quickly identified with Jerusalem and its problems. They provided famine relief for the mother-city, built palaces and mausolea there, and sent their sons 27

Roth 1960: 53; Michel 1968: 403.

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to Jerusalem to be educated in Judaean laws and customs (AJ 20.17–96). The second generation were nativised enough to assume prominent roles on the Judaean side (BJ 2.520; 4.567; 5.474; 6.356–57). Simon, likewise from a ‘convert’ family, illustrated the same dynamics of eager association with his new identity, ultimately paying with his life. Josephus’ tag ‘Gerasene’ is full of possibilities. His other uses of the adjective refer to people from the famous Gerasa of the Decapolis (BJ 2.480; AJ 13.398), as do three of War’s four uses of the place name (BJ 1.104; 2.458; 3.47). The city is magnificently preserved, if mostly from later centuries, as Jordan’s Jarash. It is an intriguing thought that Simon’s father met Judaeans in Decapolis Gerasa and decided there to commit his family to Judaean law, and that he or his son Simon left the great Graeco-Syrian centre at some point, crossing the river to live nearer Jerusalem. We would probably feel confident that Simon hailed from Decapolis Gerasa if Josephus, shortly before calling him a Gerasene, had not mentioned a different Gerasa, one near Jerusalem (4.488–90). This nuisance evidence forces us to admit that any Jarash or similar place name could have been Simon’s place of origin, rather than the famous Gerasa.28 Wherever his family originated, it is not strange that as a new Judaean he should take unusually zealous measures to secure his bond of identity with the nation.29 Josephus makes such motives explicit in the case of a Judaean who, reversing the move, adopted Greek ways. When anti-Judaean hatred was at its peak in 67, a son of the Judaean community-president in Antioch boldly renounced his ancestral customs. So eager was he to establish a GreekAntiochian identity that he falsely accused his former compatriots of plotting to burn down the polis. He not only offered Greek-style sacrifices but, recalling his namesake Antiochus IV of the same city (1.34), proposed to Antioch’s leaders that they compel all Judaeans to prove their loyalty in the same way (7.46–53). Like John’s, Simon’s early belligerent actions had targeted neighbouring populations, in his case Samarians and Idumaeans. Like John, he showed no interest in attacking Romans, with the exception of the Twelfth Legion’s baggage train, a one-off incident likely provoked by Cestius’ reported massacre of 8,400 innocent men, women, and children in Joppa immediately before this (BJ 2.504, 508). Harassment of the column would be understandable from outrage at the atrocity. It did not require long-standing hostility to Rome as a 28 29

See Mason 2016a: 458. Cf. the Briton-turned-Irish republican (and executed as such) Erskine Childers; https:// rationalwiki.org/wiki/Zeal_of_the_convert; https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-con verts-zeal-why-are-so-many-jihadists-converts-to-islam.

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motive. Simon’s involvement in that episode and connection with the plunder he brought to Jerusalem (2.521) may have sealed his doom, however, as far as he knew. His assumption that he was now a marked man would understandably have caused his effort to stay away from Roman forces, even as he raided Judaean and Idumaean centres for supplies. His fear of surrender and the likelihood of a violent death in Roman hands would certainly explain his recalcitrance in holding out behind Jerusalem’s walls, and final effort to flee again. Simon reportedly entered Jerusalem in early April 69 (BJ 4.573–77; cf. 585), halfway through the hiatus between Vespasian’s withdrawal to Caesarea and the beginning of Titus’ siege. Although he could not have known what Vespasian would do next, the struggle between Otho and Vitellius was now nearing its climax. Since Vespasian had made no recent moves against Jerusalem— in contrast to his rapidly energetic activity a year earlier (4.413 with 4.443)— Simon might have supposed that the general was distracted by Roman affairs and would leave Jerusalem alone indefinitely. But a reckoning would come at some point, and the city was now isolated by Vespasian’s garrisons throughout Judaea. Once inside Jerusalem Simon had to avoid submission to John. The Galilean’s fighters were well protected in the Temple and on the eastern hill, while Simon’s men overtook the rich western district and Herodian palace (cf. Tacitus, Hist. 5.12). When Titus arrived the next spring (70 CE) with perhaps 50,000 soldiers, Simon and John faced the same options: surrender at their peril, a desperate dash and almost certain death, or suicide. Since these remained undesirable, both men held out until they were forced to plead for safe passage, when that was refused diving into the tunnels, and finally surrendering ignominiously. It has always been curious to me that Josephus, who had earlier left the security of Tiberias, exposing himself to considerable danger in order to save Judaean lives at Iotapata (BJ 3.130–42), has long borne a reputation for cowardice and betrayal, whereas John and Simon, who fled the Roman advance for the provisional the safety of Jerusalem, and surrendered only after thousands of compatriots had died and the Temple lay in ruins, have been regarded as heroes. 4

Conclusion

The Romans considered John of Gischala and Simon of Gerasa the driving forces behind Jerusalem’s resistance to Titus, which was the major conflict in their celebrated Judaean War—the half-year siege in 70 CE. Partly for that reason, scholars have tended to view John and Simon as leading examples of a

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single, shared desire for a national revolt against Rome, led by Jerusalem and anchored there. This investigation has highlighted problems with that view. First, neither man was from Jerusalem and neither had been involved in the struggles that generated the conflict, with Nero’s last procurators or the Samarian auxiliary. Second, neither man entered Jerusalem in order to fight Romans. On the contrary, John fled there to escape a small Roman force in Galilee. His fear of surrender required him to prevent Jerusalem’s capitulation as long as possible, even if it meant killing the city’s esteemed native leaders as they tried to arrange terms. Simon and his group entered much later. Having attacked Cestius’ baggage train, as far as Simon knew he was also not in a position to surrender. He entered Jerusalem for provisional safety. Third, although we cannot know either man’s worldview, neither was in a position to know what Vespasian would do about Jerusalem or when. The Roman commander’s constraints were conditioned by his calculations about Roman politics. John and Simon therefore had no basis for long-term planning, of a Judaean state or anything of the kind, as they awaited his moves. They were trapped in limbo until Vespasian acted. They had no idea that Titus would eventually take over, with Vespasian entrusting the situation to his young son as he pursued imperial power and his forces fought a more crucial war in Italy. They could not have known how Titus would approach the gradually tightening siege, how they would respond to each stage, or what fate would await them. The two square kilometres of crowded, anxiety-filled Jerusalem within the walls were undoubtedly ‘independent’ in some sense from the autumn of 66 to late summer in 70—as were the little hilltops of Machaerus and Masada. In the language of the time, such pockets were considered by the Romans bandit zones, or centres of latrocinium (λῃστεία).30 They had no real freedom of external action or hope of dynastic succession or durable governance, and so were not ‘independent states’ in a sense we would recognise today. They were walled compounds racked by internal horrors as they awaited the final reckoning. It is difficult to find in John and Simon evidence of a revolt against Rome, therefore, leading Jerusalem in a shared national vision of independence. And since they are the best examples available of such aspirations for freedom, we have reason to question the familiar image of a national revolt against Rome’s imperium. 30

See Shaw 1984, 1993, 1995, 2014.

Part 4 Beyond ‘Judaism’

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John the Baptist: Judaean Example of a Good Man (Vir Bonus) This investigation aims to throw light on a simple question: What does Josephus mean to say about John the Baptist in his famous description, AJ 18.116–19? The question is simple, but to my knowledge it has never been asked in such a way. The passage has often been discussed and analysed from various angles, of course.1 Any study of the Baptist mentions it, and scholars often prize it as the only surviving first-century portrait of John that is free of Christian influence—though this assumption has recently been questioned. At least, Josephus’ description is markedly different from the gospel portraits, which push the Baptist to ever greater degrees of self-abnegation before Jesus. Josephus does not connect John with Jesus but portrays him as an important teacher with a large following. Although scholars have understandably valued this perspective, they have nevertheless approached Josephus’ account with two preoccupations: (a) the historical John’s relationship with Jesus and (b) the nature of John’s baptism. Judaean ritual immersion, proselyte baptism, interpretation of the Qumran site with its many pools and of the Scrolls found nearby, the Sibylline Oracles, and the pseud0-Clementines are all brought to bear, along with early Christian baptism. Even the recent study arguing that Josephus’ passage is a Christian interpolation shares these preoccupations.2 They came to the fore in a recent international conference on the Baptist, although the papers were otherwise highly diverse.3 Missing in all of this is any simple attempt to understand Josephus’ passage contextually. ‘Simple attempt’ may sound naïve, as though the text had a single meaning, which we merely uncover. I do not mean that. I mean that a preliminary task for historians investigating any problem is to understand the 1 Dibelius 1911, Kraeling 1951, Scobie 1964, and Wink 1968 are among the older basic studies. Webb 1991 attempted to reconcile the sources while placing John in a plausible social milieu. Taylor 1997 and Marcus 2018 present new critical probes, both making fuller use of the Qumran Scrolls, though in quite different ways: John was (Marcus) or was not (Taylor) originally a Qumran-Essene. 2 Nir 2012a, 2019. 3 Nangeroni conference of the Enoch Seminar on John the Baptist, host G. Boccaccini: http://enochseminar.org/online-2021. Accessed 25 February 2021.

© Steve Mason, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004545960_017

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evidence, literary or material, first in its own right: What is it and what does it mean? Authors such as Josephus wrote to be understood by audiences. When we try to communicate, we use all the verbal and contextual cues at our disposal, taking into account our expected audience and what we assume they know and value. We might expect the names of Presidents Trump or Obama to resonate with our audiences, unlike the names of 1940 presidential candidate Wendell Willkie or 1950s aspirant Estes Kefauver. To be safe, we would explain the last two. We want our audiences to trust us and feel that we respect them enough to tailor our communication to their values and existing knowledge: neither telling them what they already know, which sounds patronising, nor speaking of unfamiliar things and appearing to show off. We hope that audiences will pay attention to the cues we provide about our meaning, but we also rely on our estimate of their knowledge to secure the communication. Ancient writers did much the same.4 Figuring out how to connect with audiences was the driving concern of rhetoric, the norms and values of which pervaded Graeco-Roman literary culture, not least the writing of history.5 Josephus composed his Judaean Antiquities for audiences in Flavian Rome who had expressed a strong interest in learning about Judaean law, custom, and culture (AJ 1.8–10).6 That they wished to know more of Judaean matters from an expert did not mean that they were ignorant of everything. To be so interested in a foreign code, they must have been cultured people who also had the leisure for such explorations. Their days were not consumed by hard labour to put bread on the family table. To meet their interest, Josephus composed a twenty-volume work. His Antiquities has a clear overall structure, less obvious devices, and a thematic palette that he uses from beginning to end, to lend the work a coherent plot and a consistent approach. Most obviously, the work has two ten-volume halves, the former ending with the first destruction of Jerusalem, the latter on the eve of the second destruction. Antiquities is thus a ‘prequel’ to Josephus’ already famous Judaean War, likely the stimulus for his audience to want more. His brief account of John the Baptist falls near the end, well into Book 18. It comes in the middle of his portrait of a major character, King Herod’s son Antipas, the long-ruling tetrarch of Galilee and Peraea.

4 For example, Pseudo-Demetrius, Eloc. 287–97. 5 Wiseman 1979, 1994; Woodman 1988; Marincola 1997; Potter 1999; Pelling 2000. 6 Attridge 1976; Bilde 1988; Feldman 1998a, 1998b; Spilsbury 1998; Mason 2012b; cf. Mason 2005b on audience and communication.

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For anyone interested in the historical figure of John the Baptist, then, a basic task is to figure out why Josephus included John in this account. What impression did he want to make? How does the passage contribute to his narrative? These questions drive the following inquiry. Investigation suggests that John’s ‘baptism’, the issue that has preoccupied scholars, is incidental to Josephus’ main interest. That is, he presents John as a vir bonus, a man unshakably committed to justice and for that reason a highly effective orator. John suffers death from an unjust ruler, who faces divine vengeance for that impious action. The episode thus provides another illustration of the moral lesson of Josephus’ Antiquities, announced in the prologue, while offering some variations on the theme. Our main task is to understand Josephus’ portrait of John, but the Conclusion will highlight some consequences for the historical use of this passage. I shall first give the passage in Greek with an English translation and notice Josephus’ ‘fingerprints’ in it, then look for contextual clues about Josephus’ reasons for mentioning the Immerser. Finally, I shall consider discussions current in Josephus’ Flavian environment that might have added spice or even punch to his portrait of John. Plutarch, Epictetus, and Quintilian spent time in Flavian Rome. Since they all discuss washings for purity, justice, and oratory, roughly matching Josephus’ constellation of these themes in the Baptist passage, they call out for consideration. 1

Josephus’ Description of John

Here is the passage in Greek with an English translation. An asterisk (*) indicates a present-tense Greek verb, such as Josephus frequently uses, rendered with an English past tense. 18.116 Τισὶ δὲ τῶν Ἰουδαίων ἐδόκει ὀλωλέναι τὸν Ἡρώδου στρατὸν ὑπὸ τοῦ θεοῦ καὶ μάλα δικαίως τινυμένου κατὰ ποινὴν Ἰωάννου τοῦ ἐπικαλουμένου βαπτιστοῦ. 117 κτείνει γὰρ δὴ τοῦτον Ἡρώδης ἀγαθὸν ἄνδρα καὶ τοῖς Ἰουδαίοις κελεύοντα ἀρετὴν ἐπασκοῦσιν καὶ τὰ πρὸς ἀλλήλους δικαιοσύνῃ καὶ πρὸς τὸν θεὸν εὐσεβείᾳ χρωμένοις βαπτισμῷ συνιέναι· οὕτω γὰρ δὴ

18.116 But to some of the Judaeans it seemed that Herod’s army’s being destroyed was a matter of being repaid by God—and altogether justly—for his punishment of John, who was nicknamed ‘the Immerser’. 117 For Herod actually killed* this good man, who directed the Judaeans to discipline themselves for virtue, and to come together for immersing while

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καὶ τὴν βάπτισιν ἀποδεκτὴν αὐτῷ φανεῖσθαι μὴ ἐπί τινων ἁμαρτάδων παραιτήσει χρωμένων, ἀλλ̓ ἐφ̓ ἁγνείᾳ τοῦ σώματος, ἅτε δὴ καὶ τῆς ψυχῆς δικαιοσύνῃ προεκκεκαθαρμένης. 118 καὶ τῶν ἄλλων συστρεφομένων, καὶ γὰρ ἥρθησαν ἐπὶ πλεῖστον τῇ ἀκροάσει τῶν λόγων, δείσας Ἡρώδης τὸ ἐπὶ τοσόνδε πιθανὸν αὐτοῦ τοῖς ἀνθρώποις μὴ ἐπὶ στάσει τινὶ φέροι, πάντα γὰρ ἐῴκεσαν συμβουλῇ τῇ ἐκείνου πράξοντες, πολὺ κρεῖττον ἡγεῖται πρίν τι νεώτερον ἐξ αὐτοῦ γενέσθαι προλαβὼν ἀνελεῖν τοῦ μεταβολῆς γενομένης [μὴ] εἰς πράγματα ἐμπεσὼν μετανοεῖν. 119 καὶ ὁ μὲν ὑποψίᾳ τῇ Ἡρώδου δέσμιος εἰς τὸν Μαχαιροῦντα πεμφθεὶς τὸ προειρημένον φρούριον ταύτῃ κτίννυται. τοῖς δὲ Ἰουδαίοις δόξαν ἐπὶ τιμωρίᾳ τῇ ἐκείνου τὸν ὄλεθρον ἐπὶ τῷ στρατεύματι γενέσθαι τοῦ θεοῦ κακῶσαι Ἡρώδην θέλοντος.

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exercising justice toward one another and piety toward God. For only in this way does the immersing really show itself acceptable to him: if they are using it not for the pardon of some faults [sins], but for cleanness of the body, on the condition that the inner self has already been thoroughly purified by justice. 118 When others flocked together to him, because they were greatly excited at the hearing of these words, Herod became alarmed in case his [John’s] capacity to persuade people to such a degree might lead to some kind of civil strife, for it looked like they would do anything according to that fellow’s advice. He [Herod] considered* it far better, before some kind of revolutionary activity came about because of him, to take pre-emptive action and get rid of him—rather than fall victim to circumstances and then have regrets. 119 So it was because of Herod’s suspicion that the detainee was sent to Machaerus, the fortress mentioned above [AJ 18.111–12], and he was killed* there. But an opinion among the Judaeans held that the ruin that befell Herod’s army was by way of vengeance for that man [John], with God wanting to cause Herod harm.

Josephus’ Fingerprints

Before proceeding to analysis and context, we immediately notice tell-tale Josephan traits in language and theme. The following list includes the more striking examples.

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Word/Phrase

Remarks

τίνυμαι

An unusual, poetic variant of the middle form of τίνω, rare before Josephus (Homer, Il. 3.279; 19.260; Od. 13.214; 24.326; Hesiod, Op. 711; Euripides, Or. 323; Herodotus 5.77). But he has used it recently, at 17.60. It is thus part of the unusual diction of Antiquities 17–19. Plutarch’s occasional use (twice) may suggest that it was becoming fashionable. This fixed expression (cf. ‘and jolly right too’) is found before Josephus only in fragments of the comic writers Nicolaus and Menander, then in one of his inspirations, Polybius (21.23.9). Josephus has it again at Ap. 2.51. It fits in his work. Common in ancient literature, but usually with intervening modifiers. Josephus often uses this simple phrase in a quasi-formulaic way, in both War (8 times) and Antiquities (18 including the Baptist passage),7 usually to speak of of a true, proper, valiant man (BJ 5.340). See the discussion of vir bonus below on the significance in Flavian Rome. The precise phrase, which Josephus has only here, is attested earlier only in Herodotus 3.82.3 in the Persian discussion of government, not a likely inspiration. More common is ἀρετὴν ἀσκέω (with the un-prefixed verb), which Josephus has several times (AJ 3.309; 4.294; Ap. 2.192). It also appears in Xenophon (Mem. 2.6.20; Symp. 9.27; Cyr. 1.5.9; 7.2.24, 5.77, 85; 8.2.26; Lac. 10.4, 7.2) and Plato (Resp. 3.407a; Gorg. 527d-e; Euthyd. 283a; cf. Isocrates, Pac. 119). It is not common in other historians (once each in Diodorus and Dionysius), tragedy, Philo, or Plutarch.

καὶ μάλα δικαίως

ἀγαθός ἀνήρ

ἀρετὴν ἐπασκοῦσιν

7 AJ 1.247 (Isaac); 4.134; 5.36; 7.44, 390; 9.100, 132; 10.246; 12.49, 53, 224, 358; 13.264; 14.146; 18.22; 19.17, 171.

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ἅτε δή

δικαιοσύνη

ἀποδεκτός

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The word is rare in ancient literature. Before Josephus, it appears only 1–3 times in a few authors, even in the LXX. Nor is it early Christian: the NT has it just twice (both in 1 Timothy). Diodorus has it 8 times, Philo 12—among common precursors of Josephus. Josephus has it a striking 21 times. It is characteristic of his prose. The phrase appears 13 times in Josephus, notably more than in any author before him. Some of these occurrences are in programmatic passages at the beginning and end of Antiquities (AJ 1.8, 13 [prologue]; 20.200). The 98 cases in Plutarch suggest that it was becoming fashionable, but it fits well in Antiquities. A key term in Josephus, with 3 cognates in the Baptist passage alone. Given the Platonic theme of justice, for example, it was hardly rare in ancient writing, but it was not common among historians (Herodotus 8; Thucydides 1; Polybius 1; Diodorus 33; Dionysius 21). Of Josephus’ 39 cases, 34 are in Antiquities. The word is characteristic of Antiquities (only 1 case each in War and Life). It is programmatic as the main condition of divine favour in this work (AJ 1.53, 75, 99; 4.223; 6.18, 265; 8.120, 314; 9.16, 182; 11.139, 169), as it is for Josephus’ John. Moreover, Josephus characteristically pairs justice (δικαιοσύνη) with piety (εὐσέβεια), as he does here; see comments below. This adjective is only here in Josephus and hardly attested before him (Aeschines, Ctes. 25; Disocorides Pedanius, Simpl. 1.pr. and fragments of a few others). It appears later in Ps-Clementine, Hom. 15.10.1, though in a completely different context (concerning poverty), which does not suggest Christian interpolation here. Josephus often uses rare vocabulary, especially in War and Antiquities 17–19.

John the Baptist: Judaean Example of a Good Man ( Vir Bonus )

προεκκαθαίρω

ἐπί τινων ἁμαρτάδων παραιτήσει

παραίτησις

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Similarly, this clever double compound is attested once before Josephus (Lysis, Ep. Hipparchum, 4th–2nd cent. BCE) and scarcely afterward (14 refs. in all Greek literature to the 15th cent., 2 of those in quoting Josephus). It is rare but readily intelligible. Rare words are a feature of the elevated or dignified style (Demetrius, De elocutione), and lend dignity to Josephus’ presentation of John. Given that they are not found much in other authors, they do not suggest interpolation or source use. Both key words, ἁμαρτάς and παραίτησις (next item), are distinctive of Josephus. The former is found mainly in Aeschylus (4), Herodotus (9), Dionysius (3), and Strabo (2). The NT, though it speaks frequently of ‘sin’, nearly always (173 times) uses ἁμαρτία, occasionally ἁμάρτημα (4), never ἁμαρτάς. Surviving Christian texts do not have it before the 4th century. The word is fairly common in Antiquities (9 occurrences), however, in synonymous variation with ἁμαρτία (31) and ἁμάρτημα (32), when describing Moses’ laws (3.204, 230, 238–39, 240, 249) and again after the Baptist passage (18.350). It is quite at home in Antiquities. This is again rare in classical Greek (1–2 each in Aeschylus, Euripides, Thucydides, Plato, Demosthenes). Following a common profile among Josephus’ precursors, it appears more often in Diodorus (8), Dionysius (6), and Philo (4) before Josephus’ 14 instances. All 14 are in Antiquities and Apion, none in War. Moreover, half are in a phrase, as here, with ἁμαρτάς (3.238), ἁμάρτημα (3.221, 241, 247; 6.144), or ἁμαρτία (3.246; 8.278). Since the collocation appears 8 times in Josephus’ Antiquities, with partial parallels only in Philo (Spec. 1.67; 2.196) before him, this counts as characteristic language in Antiquities.

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Reading the passive aorist 3rd-person plural of αἴρω, preferred by Feldman (with all the mss and the Epitome of Josephus), though the text is uncertain. The context suggests ‘stirred up, roused, excited’, though the simple verb is not used with quite that sense elsewhere in or before Josephus (in Philo, Mos. 1.218, it refers to a miracle of suspension). The compound ἐπήρθησαν would have such a sense, however, as in ἐπήρθησαν γὰρ ἐπὶ τούτῳ μᾶλλον at Josephus, V 24. So it would not be completely strange with the simple verb here. Niese preferred ἥσθησαν (from ἥδομαι: ‘they found pleasure’), found in Eusebius’ rendering of Josephus. It is better attested before Josephus (e.g., Herodotus 1.69.3; Xenophon, Hell. 7.1.32 and 7 other times in relation to hearing welcome news) and it occurs in Josephus (BJ 7.406). Indeed, he has a distinctive phrase, ‘receive X with pleasure’, which appears 8 times in Antiquities 17–19 (ἡδονῇ δέξασθαι: 17.239; 18.6, 59, 63, 70, 236, 333; 19.127), and that might offer support for Niese’s text. A few authors before Josephus have ἐπὶ πλεῖστον, 1 to 4 times each, and some of his models use it conspicuously: Thucydides 19, Dionysius 16, Philo 8, but Josephus has 20 instances, as does Plutarch. Though this phrase is not exclusive to Josephus, it is at home in his work. Anticipated by Philo (Ebr. 213; Mut. 210). In Josephus, it occurs two more times in Antiquities 17–19: 18.227 (ἡδονῇ τοῦ ἐπ̓ αὐτῷ λόγου φέροντος τὴν ἀκρόασιν: the hearing about him [Tiberius’ dying] reached the Romans with pleasure) and 19.247 (ἀκροάσει λόγων: senators hearing the words of Claudius).

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στάσις

νεώτερον

μετανοέω

κτίννυμι and κτιννύω

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There is no more thematically charged term in Josephus than στάσις (so mss MWE, though ms A has ἀπόστασις [‘departure, defection, secession, revolt’, also extremely common: 62 in Josephus]). The simple form appears 71 times in War, 68 in Antiquities, and is programmatic in both: BJ 1.10, 25–27, 31; 4.371, 388; 5.257; AJ 1.117; 4.12, 32, 36, 66; V 66, 87, 100. The word and its highly negative resonances would have been well familiar to Josephus’ audiences: Thucydides (3.82–84), Herodotus (1.59.3, 60.2, 150.1; 3.82.3; 5.28.1; 6.109.5), Isocrates (Paneg. 79, 114, 174), Plato (Leg. 1.628c, 629c–d), and Aristotle (Ath. Pol. 5.2–3; 13.1; Pol. 1265b); cf. Diodorus Siculus 9.11.1; 11.72.2, 76.6, 86.3, 87.5; Plutarch, Statecraft 813a, 823f–825b; Dio Chrysostom, 1 Regn. 1.82; Pausanias, 3.2.7; 4.18.3. Both the substantive comparative adjective νεώτερον and the interchangeable use of it with μεταβολή (‘upheaval’), as here, are characteristic of Josephus (cf. V 36, 87; cf. BJ 2.259; AJ 15.30). The verb is not rare before Josephus, but no one before him uses it nearly as often (he has it 47 times). Plutarch is close with 43. It is characteristic language in Josephus. These are rare alternatives to κτείνω (205 times in Josephus). In classical literature, these two verbs nearly always come with the prefix ἀπο(as at AJ 15.92). The simple form κτιννύω here is however characteristic of Antiquities 17–19: cf. 17.182; 18.99, 271, while κτίννυμι occurs at 15.118 and here. Josephus uses κτείνω often in these volumes, and in this passage (18.117); the alternatives evidently provide variation. The passage fits not only Antiquities, but also the unusual diction of Antiquities 17–19.

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Larger Literary Context: The Antiquities

Josephus’ twenty-volume Antiquities is not an argumentative essay with a thesis. It is a meandering narrative filled with vivid scenes, legal expositions, speeches, and innumerable digressions on everything from botany to philosophical, military, and moral questions. Nevertheless, somewhat like Livy’s Ab urbe condita (1.9–13) or Dionysius’ Roman Antiquities (1.1–5), it does offer the reader a general lesson, of which the main episodes function as exempla. Josephus introduces this lesson unmistakably in the prologue and repeats it often. His wide-ranging history from Creation until almost the present will show ‘that God, the father and master of all, who also observes all things, grants a prosperous life (εὐδαίμονα βίον) to those who follow him, but those who stray beyond virtue he surrounds with major calamities (μεγάλαις περιβάλλει συμφοραῖς)’ (1.14, 20). Whereas other legislators moved straight to their prescriptions for just dealings (τῶν πρὸς ἀλλήλους δικαίων) and penalties for failure, he stresses, Moses first elevated his readers’ gaze to the cosmic order, in order to ground his laws in divine law and in the piety that nature imposes (πρὸς τὴν εὐσέβειαν ἔσχεν ὑπακούοντας, 1.21). Shortly before these remarks, at AJ 1.6 Josephus has explained that he initially planned to include much of Antiquities’ content as background to his War (Book 20 ends on the eve of war), but he decided against it because the material was far too copious for inclusion in a balanced war monograph. This makes sense, if we consider that even what he did include of the distant past, on the Hasmoneans and King Herod, stretches War’s first volume to double the normal length. This passage in Antiquities mentions that he then omitted but will now explore ‘by what lawgiver [Moses] they [the Judaeans] had been instructed in matters conducive to piety and to the other exercise of virtue’ (οἵῳ τε παιδευθέντες νομοθέτῃ τὰ πρὸς εὐσέβειαν καὶ τὴν ἄλλην ἄσκησιν ἀρετῆς). Key terms here—εὐσέβεια, ἄσκησις (disciplined exercise), and ἀρετή—anticipate the programme of the twenty-volume history. Josephus will soon reduce all virtue language to a convenient formulaic pair: εὐσέβεια (πρὸς τὸν θεόν), reverent piety toward God, and toward fellow human beings δικαιοσύνη (πρὸς ἀνθρώπους / πρὸς ἀλλήλους), or just behavior. Josephus was not the first writer to make this neat reduction. The Athenian orators Antiphon (Tetr. 2.2.11; Chor. 7, 51), Isocrates (Nic. 2; Pac. 33, 34, 63; Panath. 124, 163, 183, 204, 217), Demosthenes (3 Phil. 16; Cor. 1, 7, 126; Arist. 97; Boeot. 1.41; Exord. 54.1; Tim. 35), and Dinarchus (Dem. 84) favoured it. So did the Hellenistic historians Diodorus (1.2.2, 49.3, 92.5; 3.60.2, 64.7; 5.7.7, 8.3, 79.2; 6.6.1, 8.1; 12.20.3; 33.5.6) and Dionysius (Ant. rom. 1.4.2; 4.32.1; 8.2.2, 8.1, 28.3, 62.3; 13.5.3; Isoc. 7). Nevertheless, Josephus’ Antiquities uses it more programmatically, citing piety

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and justice as a two-edged criterion of moral evaluation some 28 times. He invokes them especially when assessing rulers, from the first kings of Israel to the family of Herod: AJ 7.338, 341 (David), 356, 374, 384 (David admonishes Solomon); 8.280 (Abijah to Jeroboam); 9.16 (Josaphat); 9.236 (Jotham); 12.43 (Simon the Just); 12.56 (modifying Aristeas to add the pair). Other passages make the same points in different language, as when he says that the descendants of Seth overthrew the ancestral customs for the worse, ‘neither offering God the established honours [= piety] nor giving voice to justice toward human beings (μήτε τὰς νενομισμένας τιμὰς ἔτι τῷ θεῷ παρέχοντες μήτε τοῦ πρὸς ἀνθρώπους δικαίου ποιούμενοι λόγον)’—the double-headed inversion of virtue or epitome of vice, as he points out (διπλασίονα τῆς κακίας, AJ 1.72). In his Republic (2.13–14), Cicero had contended that Rome was unique in grounding its laws in piety. Josephus makes the same case for Judaea, more convincingly he hopes. He returns to this Grundkonzept of his corpus in the essay we know as Against Apion (2.145–46, 170–71). When, therefore, Josephus has John the Baptist demand that those coming to him for immersion practice justice toward one another and piety toward God (τὰ πρὸς ἀλλήλους δικαιοσύνῃ καὶ πρὸς τὸν θεὸν εὐσεβείᾳ χρωμένοις), he is taking a last opportunity in Antiquities to assert the work’s persistent themes.8 The Baptist bravely reminds the Judaeans of Galilee about these national virtues (according to Josephus), which the Herodian ruler so manifestly and consistently ignores. Josephus will return to the same pair in the rousing final paragraphs of his corpus, in an encomium on Judaean law and philosophy (Ap. 2.125, 146, 170, 291, 293). Even more obviously than in War, the mode of history-writing that Josephus adopts in Antiquities is that of serial biography.9 Instead of proceeding by years, eras, or Olympiads, as many other historians did, Josephus uses individual lives to illustrate his moral lessons. His version of Samuel’s discovery and anointing of King David illustrates this well. The prophet first sees Jesse’s oldest boy, who is tall and handsome, and assumes that he must be God’s chosen one. God quickly corrects him: ‘I am making the kingdom a prize not for the attractiveness of bodies, but for virtue of inner selves (ψυχῶν ἀρετῆς). The one I seek is perfectly fitting in this respect: adorned with piety, justice, courage, and persuasiveness, from which things beauty of the inner self is constituted’ (6.160). Notice here the inclusion of oratorical facility or persuasiveness among David’s 8 The pair’s only explicit occurrence in War is in Josephus’ formulation of the first two oaths taken by Essene initiates (2.139), though 7.264 uses similar language to negate John of Gischala’s virtue (see below). 9 See Feldman 1998a: 3–7.

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qualifications, a neglected point central in his description of the Baptist. Below we shall ask why virtue and rhetoric should appear together. Meanwhile, in that Samuel-David story, God’s rejection of bodily appearance in favour of virtue of the inner self is encapsulated as ‘piety, justice, and courage’, of which persuasive oratory is a consequence. This constellation of virtues anticipates Josephus’ terse but compelling portrait of John. 4

Immediate Literary Context: Herod Antipas in Antiquities

Whereas Josephus’ War uses King Herod and his family to mark the zenith of Rome’s good relations with Judaea, and therefore has much good and little bad to say about them (in Josephus’ narrator’s voice), Antiquities both gives the dynasty much more space and includes considerably more direct criticism. Without ignoring their virtues, the emphasis is now, in keeping with Antiquities’ themes and lesson, on their wayward government, tyranny (14.165; 15.354; 16.4; 17.304), and consequent divine punishment.10 King Herod, the long-serving ruler and friend of Augustus, was by far the most famous king of Judaea, and his descendants maintained close ties in Rome until around Josephus’ time of writing. His audiences in Rome knew quite a bit about King Agrippa II and his sister, Titus’ long-time lover, Berenice. The Herodian family’s high visibility makes them perfect examples for Josephus to use, to illustrate his lesson about the effectiveness of Moses’ (and divine, natural) law. Consider an example immediately relevant for his picture of John. In describing King Herod’s alleged demand for sycophancy and glory, and punishment of those who failed to offer it, Josephus makes a pointed rebuff in the authoritative voice of the narrator (AJ 16.158): The Judaean ethnos has become alienated from all such things [flattery, bowing to human authority] by law, and has been accustomed to love justice rather than glory [or appearance]. That is why it [the ethnos] did not humour him: because it was unable to coddle the king’s ambition with images, shrines, or such typical practices. In the unfolding story, Herod’s son Antipas appears equally consumed with power, glory, and appetite. It is here that John, known as the Immerser, carries the banner of death-defying justice in his brave criticism of the ruler. 10

Already Laqueur 1920 (original); more recently Mason 2012b.

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We first meet young Antipas when he is a rival of his brother Archelaus, hoping to become sole heir to Herod’s kingdom (AJ 17.224–39). Although Herod had recently named Antipas his heir (17.188), in a hotly disputed will, Augustus decides to cut up the pie and give the young fellow only northern and eastern sectors of the great man’s kingdom: Galilee and Peraea (17.318). The grasping tetrarch comes across in Josephus as a real piece of work. His first prominent act is to build the new lakeside city of Tiberias, in obsequious flattery of the emperor and hoping for reflected glory—in blatant contravention of Judaean law, for the site had previously housed tombs. Not finding enough willing inhabitants to settle in such a tainted city, Antipas does not scruple to populate it by forced resettlement (18.36–39). Next, the petty ruler pathetically imposes himself on the peace agreement between Rome and Parthia, upstaging the consular provincial legate by informing Tiberius of the settlement before an infuriated L. Vitellius can dispatch his official report (18.102–105). At some point along the way (Josephus’ chronology is not clear), Antipas then brings a world of hurt on himself by falling for Herodias, the wife of a living brother. This is a matter of consequence because marrying her requires him to divorce his current wife, who happens to be the daughter of the Nabataean ally of Rome, Aretas IV, whose territory borders Antipas’ Peraea (map below). When the rejected wife flees to her father, via the fortress Machaerus, which is on the frontier and so nearby sheikhs loyal to Aretas can ferry her home from there (AJ 18.112), the insult to Aretas ignites a political storm. Over the next years, border disputes and skirmishes exacerbate the tension, until the two rulers dispatch armies to square off. Then, after being soundly thrashed by the Arab king, Antipas has the gall to complain to the emperor about being attacked. Siding with the tetrarch—NB: the Julio-Claudian rulers typically support Judaea’s Herodians—and indignant that an allied king would go to war with another Roman client (even though Antipas caused the rift), Tiberius orders his legate Vitellius to teach Aretas the kind of lesson that the legions were designed for (18.115). Now, after explaining Rome’s assessment of the situation—Tiberius’ indignation at Aretas’ affront and the need for punishment—Josephus contrasts the view of ‘some Judaeans’. They, in keeping with the lessons of Antiquities, saw Antipas’ defeat rather as fitting divine punishment for his violation of Moses’ law, in his marital escapades and especially in his unjust treatment of John, whom they admired. He killed this just man, only because he seemed a potential threat to his power. John had done nothing wrong, but only good. No one escapes divine observation and punishment if needed, the story reminds Josephus’ audience.

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Immediately after the brief account of John (above) and of Vitellius’ planned operations ordered by Tiberius, Josephus pauses to restate Antiquities’ themes (18.127–29). With King Herod having died in Book 17, he dwells on Herod’s offspring in order to show, he says, that the number of one’s descendants or any other sign of human achievement means nothing unless it is accompanied by pious acts toward the deity. His proof is that within a century of Herod’s demise (in 4 BCE; Josephus writes a century later) nearly all of Herod’s descendants have vanished, often meeting bad ends. Josephus explains that it will serve the moral instruction of humanity if he shows how accursed they were (18.128). In this recapitulation of the whole Herodian fiasco, Josephus puts a spotlight on the waywardness of Antipas’ marriage to Herodias, the wife of a living brother (18.136). The outcome of their sad story he reveals a few paragraphs later. After Herodias prevails on Antipas to help their struggling and suicidal nephew Agrippa I (18.148–50), the ungrateful Agrippa unexpectedly receives a small ‘kingdom’ from the new emperor Gaius Caligula (18.237–39). His star is rising rapidly: he will soon become king of all his grandfather’s territory. This reversal of his fortunes prompts the indignant Herodias to urge her husband, who is still a mere tetrarch after four decades, and surely more deserving of a diadem than the upstart nephew, to request kingship himself (18.240–47). The wily Agrippa outmanoeuvres his uncle, however, accusing him of conspiracy with the Parthians. The new emperor Gaius Caligula, who is fond of Agrippa, banishes Antipas to Gaul at the opposite end of the empire—and gives his property to Agrippa! Josephus again spells out here that this was divine punishment for Antipas’ illicit marriage and, adding a stinger typical of his disdain for women, for listening to his wife’s bad counsel (18.250–57). In these larger and smaller contexts, Josephus’ passage on the Baptist is an important waystation, embedded in Antiquities as deeply as any episode. It vividly illustrates the miscreant Antipas’ weak and fearful response to John, who taught justice in powerfully effective, simple speeches. Considering how these themes in Antiquities would have resonated with Josephus’ Roman audiences will add texture to our interpretation of the passage. 5

Extratextual Resources Known to Josephus and His Audiences

In an essay claiming to be by Plutarch—if it was, it appeared within a decade or two of Josephus’ Antiquities (93/94 CE)—the author scorns irrational fear of the gods (δεισιδαιμονία). People who fret over their dreams as though they conveyed divine messages illustrate this type (Superst. 166a):

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When such persons then get up, they do not treat these things with the contempt or ridicule [they deserve]. … Instead, … they put themselves into the hands of vagabonds and sorcerers who say to them: ‘If a phantom during sleep causes you to fear for all you’re worth And you are faced with Hecate’s band from underneath the earth,11 then call the old crab who does magic purifications, immerse yourself in the sea (βάπτισον σεαυτὸν εἰς θάλατταν), and spend the day sitting on the ground’—in fear of the gods (τῇ δεισιδαιμονίᾳ) … [they are] smearing themselves with mud, wallowing in filth (πηλώσεις, καταβορβορώσεις [the sole attestations of these words]), getting immersed (βαπτισμούς), throwing themselves face-down, shamefully posturing, in weird prostrations. Plutarch rejects such barbarian—likely meant to include Judaean (below)— rituals as beneath the dignity of Greeks, who take a moral view of piety and consider such rites entirely secondary to justice. For a moral person, washing or other ritual acts by themselves are meaningless: ‘To sing in praise with the just mouth’ (δικαίῳ τῷ στόματι τοὺς κιθαρῳδοὺς ἐκέλευον ᾄδειν)—that was what the harp-players directed, those who thought to preserve the traditional forms of music (οἱ τὴν νόμιμον μουσικὴν σῴζειν δοκοῦντες). We too reckon it fitting to pray to the deities with the mouth straight and just (ἡμεῖς δὲ τοῖς θεοῖς ἀξιοῦμεν ὀρθῷ τῷ στόματι καὶ δικαίῳ προσεύχεσθαι), and not to inspect the tongue that goes with the animal entrails [in sacrifice], to see whether it is pure and straight while at the same time, by distorting and defiling one’s own [tongue] with bizarre names and barbarian terms, to disgrace and contravene the divine and ancestral dignity of piety (καταισχύνειν καὶ παρανομεῖν τὸ θεῖον καὶ πάτριον ἀξίωμα τῆς εὐσεβείας). Justice, Plutarch insists, is more important than the drenchings and smearings into which barbarians entice thoughtless Greeks. He echoes Theophrastus’ mockery (Char. 16.1–3, 13–14) of people who live in terror of the gods, constantly sacrificing or washing in the sea. The likelihood that Plutarch included Judaeans among the barbarian purifiers is enhanced by a textual peculiarity. The βαπτισμούς (above) in the Teubner (G. N. Bernardakis) and Loeb (F. C. Babbitt) editions comes from a 11

The author quotes a tragic fragment, now conjecturally attributed to a chorus, among the so-called Tragica Adespota, collected in Kannicht and Snell 1981, vol. 2 fr. 375.

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conjecture by the enthusiastic amender Richard Bentley. The mss read, however, ‘sabbath-keeping’ (σαββατισμούς), furnishing a Judaean context.12 Theophrastus and Plutarch both recall, in turn, Plato’s Republic, the classic inquiry into justice. There, Glaucon and his brother Adeimantus challenge the philosopher’s platitude that a just life is best. Adeimantus observes that people are rewarded not for their just behaviour, but only for the appearance of being just. Therefore, the smart move is to pursue lucrative and pleasant opportunities, which may not meet the standard of justice, while making a big show of probity when necessary. That way, one may scoop up the lesser reward of approbation for virtue along with truly important profit (Resp. 2.362d–367a). Adeimantus mentions Homer and the poets, who portray ritual actions as though they directed the gods’ behaviour, to prove that a posture of justice or righteousness can easily be faked when needed (2.363a–365e). If you perform certain rituals, the gods must respond in predictable ways. Thus ‘vagabonds and seers’ assure rich men that: they have the power to cure any unjust deed, done by the person or his ancestors, with pleasant activities and festivals; indeed, even if he should wish to bring down some adversary, for small fees he could harm the just or the unjust, because with spells and enchantments they can make the gods serve them (Resp. 2.364e–365a). Robert Parker aptly observes: ‘Greek religion had always been a religion of lustrations [since Homer]. … [I]t was, as Plato knew, always possible to interpret even orthodox Greek religion as if the gods were swayed by ritual more than righteousness [= justice].’13 In the ancient Mediterranean basin, ritual washing was ubiquitous; water channels, bowls, and other receptacles were abundant.14 So the tension between purification by ritual and inner moral disposition was inevitably going to bother philosophers, as it did biblical prophets (e.g., Isa 1.12–20)15 and their counterparts in China and India.16 Another contemporary of Josephus in Rome was the freedman-philosopher Epictetus, who was expelled by Domitian in the very year that Antiquities’ portrait of the Baptist appeared (93 CE). Epictetus’ student Arrian would 12 13 14 15 16

Stern 1974–1984: 1.549 (no. 255), is unusual in preferring the mss reading. Parker 1983: 305–306. Parker 1983: 19–22, 226. Cf. Taylor 1996. Sarkissian 2014. In Vedic ritual, including ablution and sacrifice, samkalpa (desire, conception, intention) was crucial. Thanks to Dr. Elena Mucciarelli, my Groningen colleague, for the latter insight.

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commit his lectures to writing, and these Discourses provide further context for Plutarch’s elliptical remarks. Epictetus refers to Judaeans a few times, using them with Egyptians and Syrians to illustrate cultural practices that arise from habit rather than from reason attuned to nature (Diatr. 1.11.12–13, 22.4). In one passage he remarks that no representative of those ethnē would doubt that justice is finest and most fitting, or that holiness should always take priority (1.22.1, 4). They disagree only about cultural prejudices, such as those involving food and ritual. In a surprising later passage, Epictetus derides his students’ lack of commitment to the life of a philosopher by comparing them with one who hesitates about becoming a Judaean (Diatr. 2.9.19–21):17 Why, then, do you say you are a Stoic? Why deceive most people? Why play-act at being a Judaean when you are a Greek? Do you not see how each person is said to be ‘Judaean’, how a Syrian, how an Egyptian [i.e., what each status requires]? Whenever we see someone wavering between two [courses], we are accustomed to say, ‘He’s not really a Judaean, just play-acting.’ But whenever he adopts the condition [or experience: τὸ πάθος] of one who has undergone the immersion and so made a decisive choice (ὅταν δ’ ἀναλάβῃ τὸ πάθος τὸ τοῦ βεβαμμένου καὶ ᾑρημένου), then he is a Judaean in his real being and is called one too. In the same way, we ourselves are only fake immersers (οὕτως καὶ ἡμεῖς παραβαπτισταί):18 Judaeans in word, but in action something different, with no experience to match the word, and far from applying to our actions what we say, though we praise ourselves for knowing it so well (λόγῳ μὲν Ἰουδαῖοι, ἔργῳ δ’ ἄλλο τι, ἀσυμπαθεῖς πρὸς τὸν λόγον, μακρὰν ἀπὸ τοῦ χρῆσθαι τούτοις ἃ λέγομεν, ἐφ’ οἷς ὡς εἰδότες αὐτὰ ἐπαιρόμεθα). These parallels all suggest that when Josephus has the Baptist emphasise justice and piety over immersion, he is on a resonant chord in the late first century, while perhaps trying to free Judaeans from this common image of cheap superstition or ritual obsession.

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Because of the references to ‘baptism’ here, and the scholarly assumption that Christians attracted converts to this ritual, scholars (with W. A. Oldfather in the Loeb edition) have often assumed that Epictetus confused Judaeans with Christians. Nothing but scholarly presupposition commends this notion. Epictetus’ programmatic comparison of Judaeans with Egyptians and Syrians would not work with Christians, and there is no reason why he would not associate Judaeans with immersion—for proselytes and/or in life generally. Or ‘unauthorised drenchers’, outside the sphere of effective immersion.

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Interpretation

Josephus’ apparently banal characterisation of John as a ‘good man’ (ἀγαθὸς ἀνήρ) deserves closer inspection, in part because he so clearly connects this goodness with brave and successful oratory. In the story, Antipas does not care about John’s call for immersion. He puts John to death because of that good man’s appeal to the masses, which the unjust ruler fears and cannot abide, through a combination of sterling character and effective oratory (18.118). Josephus introduces John as the one called ‘the Immerser’, but he too shows no interest in the nature of the immersion. It is merely John’s distinctive moniker. Eleven men named John appear in Josephus’ corpus, and Yohanan is the fifth-most commonly attested male name in surviving evidence from the period.19 Identifying him as the one called the Immerser perhaps introduces a bit of exotic colour and intrigue. Does he perform some magical rituals? Joan Taylor presses the good question of whether the label signified that John took an active physical role in holding onto or even dunking the immersees, in a Protestant-Baptist style that was alien to Judaean immersion practices, which the immersee usually handled without support. Or did he merely call for immersion and supervise the practice?20 Josephus does not say. He shows no interest in what has preoccupied nearly all scholarship: the nature of John’s baptism itself. He briefly mentions that John acquired this name because he called people for immersion, then speeds on to what interests him: This John was a good man, according to the criteria spelled out in Antiquities and familiar to Josephus’ audience. He called for piety and justice. This is what made his pure, simple oratory compelling. His goodness did not save him from the embarrassed Herod Antipas, however, who habitually flouted justice and could not tolerate good men who won popular admiration for wholesome reasons. But Antipas would suffer devastating defeat, then banishment and the loss of all he had coveted, because of his illegal marriage and his mistreatment of John. John is not a major figure in Antiquities, then, but he is a significant one. Unlike morally ambiguous rivals in Antipas’ miserable career, such as his conniving uncle Agrippa I, John is an unqualified ‘good man’, whose moral radiance fully exposes the tetrarch’s degradation. Two other features of Josephus’ rhetoric that appear in the Baptist passage should be mentioned because historical hypotheses may turn on their interpretation (below). They are Josephus’ fondness for A-B-A patterns and his 19 20

Ilan 2002: 56. Taylor 1997: 51–58.

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tendency to deny an antithesis when asserting a point: ‘not X, but Y’. In the final section we shall see that arguments for Christian authorship of the passage seem to miss both. Rivka Nir, for example, notes that the Baptist passage ‘interrupts the sequence of events [in Antiquities 18]  … and could therefore easily be removed’ (as an interpolation), and further that: John’s call for baptism is remarkably odd. … Rather than issuing a straightforward call for a baptism acceptable to God, … John (or the author) opts to introduce his appeal by refuting baptism conceived in terms of obtaining pardon for sins. Such phrasing suggests the possibility of an author engaged in polemic.21 But neither of these perceived oddities appears odd if we consider Josephus’ writerly habits. The latter technique is so common in rhetoric that I have unconsciously used it above in this chapter (Part 3 beginning). Instead of merely stating that Antiquities is a complex narrative, I sharpened the point by first saying that it is not an essay with a thesis. I said this not because anyone had claimed that it was an essay, but from an instinct to clarify by contrast. I doubt that anyone would propose that it is an essay, but we may veer unconsciously toward that assumption if we look for each and every component of the work to fit into a tight scheme, as we might expect of an argument. I pushed the point to its extreme by stating the obvious: it is not an essay with a thesis. That clears the ground for the positive point that it is a complex narrative history. When we ask our audience to join us in rejecting some obviously false path, we often use this technique.22 Josephus habitually used the same technique, with οὐ … ἀλλὰ … and μὴ … ἀλλὰ … constructions.23 It was such a second-nature move that he used it to open the Antiquities. Historians write not for one reason, he says there, but from several motives (AJ 1.1). Had some fool really claimed that historians write for 21 22

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Pace Nir 2012a: 35 and 60, respectively. Politicians reflexively posit a straw man to knock down when presenting their own platforms: ‘We do not want the nanny state peering into every aspect of our lives (watching our every move, taking away our guns)’, or ‘We do not want to live in a Hobbesian state of nature, in a society of each person for themselves, where the vulnerable are cast out to perish’. Winning the audience’s cheers for the disavowal smooths the way for agreement with the proposed alternative, as though it were the only one. Rarely has anyone ever advocated the position being dismissed. E.g., AJ 1.21, 60, 110, 113, 129, 163, 201, 233, 318; 2.50, 316; 3.298, 310; 8.116, 121, 280; 11.334; 14.355; 18.77; 19.42.

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one reason only? Not as far as we know. Josephus was laying the table for the big meal he had prepared, coming up with four reasons for writing history in order to place his War. Even these four do not seem canonical, but rather ad hoc. If he had tried the same thing again, he might have come up with seven reasons for writing history. Why not? Thus, when he says that John called for people to immerse themselves not because entering the water could make one just or correct moral faults, but actually demanding an inner change of life, there is no reason to see this as polemic against a position advocated by someone else. It could be merely the citation of an absurd alternative, to highlight John’s admirable message. But given the remarks in Plato, Plutarch, and Epictetus about barbarians (including Judaeans) placing a premium on washing rituals, it would have suited his purposes to use John to dispel any such impression. Yes, he was known as the Immerser, but he is not important because he went around calling for immersion. He was a philosopher in the lineage of Moses, concerned with piety and justice. As for Josephus’ taste for A-B-A patterns, notice first the sandwich structure of the Baptist passage itself. It opens with the Judaeans’ view that Herod’s defeat was divine vengeance for John, and it closes by reiterating the point, whereas the nutritious filling comprises John’s influential call to piety and justice.24 Josephus reflexively uses such structures. Although the search for chiasms and the like in ancient texts can easily be overdone, they were widely used in oral cultures, partly to create memorable passages and partly for the sake of an aesthetically satisfying symmetry and sense of completion.25 At the macro-level, too, Josephus designs each of his four surviving works in such way that they progress from a starting-point toward a central panel, after which they unspool toward an ending that reprises the beginning in many obvious ways, with parallel stops along the way.26 24

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Compare AJ 18.116 (Τισὶ δὲ τῶν Ἰουδαίων ἐδόκει ὀλωλέναι τὸν Ἡρώδου στρατὸν ὑπὸ τοῦ θεοῦ … τινυμένου κατὰ ποινὴν Ἰωάννου) with 18.119 (τοῖς δὲ Ἰουδαίοις δόξαν ἐπὶ τιμωρίᾳ τῇ ἐκείνου τὸν ὄλεθρον ἐπὶ τῷ στρατεύματι γενέσθαι τοῦ θεοῦ κακῶσαι Ἡρώδην θέλοντος). Note the similar construction from Josephus’ pen at BJ 5.85: Ἰουδαίοις δὲ τοῦτ̓ ἐδόκει φυγή. E.g., Welch 2020. Cf. Mason 2016a: 96–101. In Antiquities, the fall of the first temple at the end of Book 10 and rebuilding in Book 11 is the clear mod-point (with the eve of the second temple’s destruction, with causes asserted, in Book 20). In the two-volume Apion, the middle section of combat with a series of detractors anchors the matching opening and closing panels, which extol the Judaean constitution in various ways. In the Life, the middle section (around 215) is the dream-revelation that persuaded Josephus to remain in Galilee. In AJ 1.6–7, Josephus remarks that he constructed War in a careful way, such that its opening and closing would match. If we go by word count, the middle (given 125,600 words in

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On the small scale, Josephus’ famous passage on the Essenes (BJ 2.119–61) opens and closes with their views of marriage and children (2.119–21 || 160–61). The fulcrum, in the dead centre, comprises their twelve initiatory oaths, bounded by matching verbs about being admitted or expelled (2.129–42). Parallel panels, en route to and from that core, deal with Essene leadership, sun-reverence, and contempt for pleasures and death among other issues. In War 4, the speeches of Vespasian (BJ 4.40–48) and Ananus (4.163–92) open and close with deeply personal references, around a filling of more abstract logical propositions (see Chapter 9). These are among Josephus’ literary habits. As I write this chapter, I am preparing a commentary to War 4. That volume often connects episodes in an A-B-A pattern. That is, he begins with subject or location A, moves away to B, and then returns to A.27 Changing scenes is evidently a conscious device: to maintain audience interest, build suspense about a main story momentarily left to stew, and provide a rough chronological coordination among disparate events. Wherever we find such patterns, especially in cases of linked episodes, we could remove the central ‘B’ without apparent loss—because we would not know about the lost material. A coherent story would remain. But to turn that reality into an argument that any such diversion is an interpolation one would need to show much more: that the pattern was out of character for Josephus, or that a particular diversion was otherwise problematic or incoherent or perhaps not found in some manuscripts. None of these conditions holds for the Baptist passage. Although we would not know to miss the paragraph if it were not there, of course, it certainly adds to the story, and it does this in ways characteristic of Josephus. It is explicitly there to balance the Roman perspective on the AntipasAretas war with a Judaean one. Emperor Tiberius thought that Aretas IV was too big for his breeches and so ordered Vitellius to teach him a lesson. Josephus adds that, understandable though Tiberius’ anger with Aretas was, many Judaeans on the contrary regarded Antipas’ loss to the Arab as divine

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the work) comes with his fateful surrender at 3.392. If we take his deliberate division of the work in seven volumes as a guide, however, the middle falls is the middle of Book 4 (4.318–25), which is the encomium on the murdered high priests Ananus and Jesus, elaborately flagged as War’s pivotal moment, after which civil war led inexorably to Jerusalem’s fall. Word studies show that, in all Josephus’ known works, certain striking phrases and subjects appear only or mainly at matching points in the two halves (see e.g., Mason 2001: xxi–xxvii). E.g., BJ 4.54–61 (to Tabor during siege of Gamala), 366–77 (diversion from Jerusalem to Caesarea), 398–409 (diversion to Masada and raids in the countryside), 413–39 (diversion to Peraea), 452–58 (digression on Jericho), 459–74 (digression on Elisha and the fecundity of the region), 475–85 (digression on the Dead Sea region), 491–96 (digression on Roman civil war after Nero’s death), 545–49 (further on Roman civil war).

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justice, because of what Antipas had done to John. The paragraph enriches the story. Josephus’ audience in Rome might immediately sympathise with Tiberius’ view, but the Judaean specialist adds a native perspective, exemplifying Antiquities’ programmatic interest in showing the divine punishment awaiting wrongdoers (1.14, 20). He is also doing his work as a historian to balance perspectives, a requirement of history ever since Herodotus originated the enterprise.28 The passage also builds on the preceding narrative by having Antipas dispatch John—in a clearly un-Christian note (below)—to the frontier desert fortress Machaerus, just explained in the story (18.112). If the passage were a Christian interpolation, the interpolator would have needed to be someone with interests, diction, and style indistinguishable from those of Josephus. This will suffice concerning the compositional cues Josephus provides about his meaning. Now if we return to the extratextual resources that he shared with his audiences, his apparently banal characterisation of John as a good man (ἀγαθὸς ἀνήρ) takes on new dimensions in connection with the Baptist’s successful oratory. Antipas does not care about John’s washing activities—the issue on which scholars concentrate. The tetrarch puts John to death because of the man’s ability, which this chip off the Herodian block cannot tolerate, to attract large crowds (18.118). Josephus thus configures John as the type of good man (vir bonus) idealised by yet another contemporary in Flavian Rome, the rhetorician Quintilian. While frequently adapting Platonic ideas and often citing Socrates as a model,29 Quintilian insists that true rhetoric is not merely the skill of being able to persuade others, but rather speaking well, which is to say speaking as a good man (verum, id quod et ille posuit prius et ipsa natura potius ac maius est, utique vir bonus, Inst. 12.1.1). On the Platonic premise that a bad person must be ignorant, for if he knew better he would not be bad, Quintilian asserts that one cannot be a true orator if he is not a good man (Inst. 12.1.3, 2.3), for no bad person would choose the path of virtue and prudence required by rhetorical training. Quintilian believes that he is innovating in spelling this out. Even 28

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See Marincola 1997: 158–74. Marincola surveys countless remarks on the historian’s concern for impartiality or lack of bias, as a function of the historian’s character. It is impossible to see Josephus as impartial. He writes confidently as a Judaean presenting Judaean cases, whether to debunk common impressions of the war (War) or to claim that Moses’ constitution is the finest ever (Antiquities, Apion). Nevertheless, he is everywhere conscious of the historian’s need to show balance and to look at events from different angles. Much of Marincola’s material is relevant on this point. Cf. Brinton 1983. Socrates: Inst. 1.10.13; 2.15.18 (Gorgias allowed to talk about justice, not to teach it); esp. 27, 30, 21.4; 4.4.5; 5.11.3.

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Cicero, though he often spoke about the ‘good man’, dealt chiefly with the technique of effective speaking (quo sit usurus perfectus orator, satis habet dicere), not so much with the character of the speaker (Inst. 12.pr.4).30 Josephus’ image of John as a good man and an effective orator should have resonated particularly with anyone familiar with Quintilian, the celebrated teacher of rhetoric in Flavian Rome. Integrating all these themes from Plato, Plutarch, Theophrastus, Epictetus, and Quintilian, which were in the air in Flavian Rome, with Josephus’ verbal cues helps us to link up what Josephus says with what a cultured audience might have understood him to mean. Whether from direct study or via mediators, Josephus also knew Platonic themes. Like other Judaeans writing in Greek, he claims to have thought that Plato derived many of his ideas, albeit with some mistakes, from Moses (Ap. 2.168–72, 192, 221–25, 255–57). Josephus’ own dismissal of the poets’/mythologists’ unworthy ideas of the gods (AJ 1.15–16, 22; cf. AJ 2.239, 251, 256) recalls Plato (Resp. 2.377e–378e). His insistence on the need to protect good laws from dilution, like his views of the soul and afterlife, have clear Platonic precedents.31 For our question, Josephus’ most important connections with Plato are his programmatic distinction between seeming and being32 and his emphasis on the centrality of good laws and justice. In the closing speech of Plato’s Gorgias—a passage that Quintilian also cites as a beacon (Inst. 2.15.27)—having fended off the sophists’ alternatives, Socrates reflects (Gorg. 527b–e):

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Quintilian’s view does not lead to him to think that the just man must say everything he knows to be true. In the interest of a higher truth, he must often conceal things (Inst. 12.33–45), as Josephus also thought (V 22 et passim). It is not clear that he would have admired John, in this regard, or indeed that Josephus would have recommended that others behave as John. He did not. But this does not prevent him from reporting admiration of the great figure. For the Platonic features of War’s speeches see Morel 1926; Ladouceur 1980; Luz 1983; Kelley 2004. On the soul and afterlife: Mason 1991; Sievers 1998; Elledge 2017: 109–29. On protection of the laws from dilution, see Chapter 2 in this volume. To be sure, this was by now common philosophical property at the moral level, without Plato’s ideas or forms; Cf. the Stoic Epictetus above; the third-century BCE Cynic Teles of Megara, in O’Neil 1977: 2–5; and the second-century CE Pythagorean Sextus, Sent. 64: ‘Work at being, rather than seeming to be, just’. For seeming (δόξα, δοκέω) vs. being in Josephus, a theme related to titles vs. power and words vs. actions, see BJ 1.85, 108–112, 209, 561; 2.2, 208; AJ 17.41; 19; 332; Ap. 1.18, 67. Words vs. deeds: BJ 1.288; 5.361, 457; 6.200; AJ 2.253, 272; 3.306; 5.289; 10.39; 15.281; 17.47, 220, 230; 18.177, 260; 19.63, 101, 156; Ap. 2.12, 169–72, 182, 241.

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A man needs to apply himself above all not to seem but rather to be good, in private and in public alike. … and all flattery in relation to oneself or in relation to others … is to be avoided (καὶ παντὸς μᾶλλον ἀνδρὶ μελετητέον οὐ τὸ δοκεῖν εἶναι ἀγαθὸν ἀλλὰ τὸ εἶναι, καὶ ἰδίᾳ καὶ δημοσίᾳ … καὶ πᾶσαν κολακείαν καὶ τὴν περὶ ἑαυτὸν καὶ τὴν περὶ τοὺς ἄλλους … φευκτέον) … Let someone look down on you as an ignoramus, and tramp all over you if he wants, yes by God, and strike you—resolute in bearing it—with a shock of dishonour. For you will suffer nothing terrible if you are really a fine and just man, working at virtue (καλὸς κἀγαθός, ἀσκῶν ἀρετήν). … Let us then take as our leader the teaching now disclosed, which shows us that this is the best manner of life—to live and die working at justice (ἀρετὴν ἀσκοῦντας) and all the rest of virtue. Josephus’ portrait of John as a good man who calls for working at virtue, and whose oratory is therefore pure, truthful, and effective, resembles the concentrated phrases in Quintilian’s description of the good man (vir bonus) and his recollection of Plato’s passage more than any other texts that have survived. For a Flavian audience familiar with Plato’s dialogues and especially with Quintilian, Josephus’ John would sound like a Judaean Socrates, who dies for his unalterable commitment to justice. Embedding the character of John in Antiquities’ overriding themes of piety and justice, Josephus reasserts the primacy of justice among Judaean values, notwithstanding his people’s reputation for immersions and purifications. The famous Immerser, justice warrior, and effective orator John makes the point. Finally, a contrastive parallel. At BJ 7.264, Josephus unites internal and external purity (ἁγνεία) in order to castigate a very different John, from Gischala (see previous chapter), for failing miserably on both counts: Illicit [food] was set on his table, and he adopted a different regimen of life from the established and ancestral cleanness/purity (τὴν νενομισμένην καὶ πάτριον ἐξεδιῄτησεν ἁγνείαν), so that it was no longer surprising that one who treated piety toward God so madly also failed to maintain gentleness and fellowship toward human beings (ἵν᾽ ᾖ μηκέτι θαυμαστόν, εἰ τὴν πρὸς ἀνθρώπους ἡμερότητα καὶ κοινωνίαν οὐκ ἐτήρησεν ὁ τῆς πρὸς θεὸν εὐσεβείας οὕτω καταμανείς). Josephus could not have expected Antiquities’ audience to recall this passage from War, but the hostile portrait there anticipates by inversion Josephus’ bi-directional summary of Judaean virtue in Antiquities: piety toward God and fair dealing with humanity (justice). John of Gischala allegedly abandoned

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both sides, as well as both the appearance and the moral substance of purity. This is a full house of defects in the Platonic and common moral scale. Often in Josephus, characters cloak their self-serving and power-seeking under a show of concern for justice, a charge that he lays on the Disciples-Zealots, the paradigmatic rebel Korah, and Justus of Tiberias.33 His John of Gischala cannot be bothered even with the pretence. Antiquities’ John the Immerser forcefully rejects any impression, which Greeks have long attributed to barbarians, that washing rituals have anything to do with justice or piety. Showing no interest in external washing for itself, he demands internal virtue in both the divine and the human directions: piety and justice. Josephus’ concern is not to expatiate on John the Immerser, however, but to use him as one of many examples of justice, along with various Essenes, Samaias, and Pollion, who appear occasionally to throw the Herodian family’s inveterate lawlessness into sharper relief. 7

Historical Implications

This chapter has focused on the historian’s preliminary task of interpreting relevant evidence, for any investigation into the John ‘called the Immerser’. I have tried to show that Josephus’ crucially important passage fits well in both its literary home (Antiquities, and books 17 to 19) and ambient concerns in Flavian Rome. For the historian interested in John, and/or Jesus, I hope that this analysis helps with the interpretation of this valuable evidence, which is so different from Christian portraits of the Baptist. This does not mean that Josephus’ passage tells us what John was really like, of course. This is a preliminary exercise, before we move to imagining the figure who would explain all of the evidence. Josephus exploited John for his purposes, just as every other author did. Josephus’ versatility in portraying other characters (e.g., King Herod, Ananus II, John of Gischala, even himself), quite differently in War and Antiquities–Life, suggests that if he had mentioned John in a subsequent work, he might have given him a very different colour. No single account can tell us much about the underlying reality because of the unknown number of uncontrollable variables it may represent. To reconstruct the real figure, even in outline, we need controls of some kind from comparative material. That said, our interpretation of evidence can already render some hypotheses implausible. 33

BJ 2.146, 228–29, 334–44; AJ 4.412–56; V 37–42.

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First, although we cannot know from Josephus what John was like, Josephus must have found something in the man or his reputation (he died before Josephus’ birth in 37 CE) to recommend him as a carrier of Antiquities’ themes. Josephus was under no obligation to mention John. He does not mention most of the people who populated first-century Judaea, and most of those he does mention receive the briefest of treatments, perhaps only a name drop. He must have found John famous and sympathetic enough to play the role of the just opponent of corrupt Herodians. Any writer making such a quick sketch must ignore and possibly suppress much of the chosen figure’s real character, if that were known. Still, if John were wholly repugnant to a person of Josephus’ background and outlook, if he did little more than pronounce imminent doom or if he violently opposed the Jerusalem establishment, it would be hard to see why Josephus would bother using him in this role. The observation that Josephus adapted John to his purposes only goes so far. One must still ask ‘Why John?’ Second, critical scholarship has long recognised that the earliest Christian texts that mention John struggle to assimilate him to Jesus’ towering status. Jesus’ coming to John for immersion suggests, after all, a teacher-student relationship. It also raises the possibility that Jesus felt a need to repent. Neither assumption accorded well with developing Christian theology (cf. Matt 3.13–17; John 1.29–36; 3.25–30). Scholars have usually agreed, for this reason, that the gospel writers’ inability to omit John from Jesus’ story and efforts to subordinate him make Jesus’ immersion by John a secure reference point in the historical Jesus’ career—one of very few secure pegs.34 The main value of Josephus’ portrait is not that it finally offers the bare truth, concealed by Christian bias in other sources, but simply that it is independent of Christian tendencies and offers another portrait. Josephus used whatever he knew about John from growing up in Jerusalem for his literary needs in Antiquities. Fortunately, his picture connects with incidental notices in the Christian texts, for example: John’s beginning to wonder whether Jesus might be someone special (Matt 11.2–4), which is hard to reconcile with the gospels’ baptismal accounts or Luke’s infancy story; scattered hints that the two teachers and their respective students competed (John 3.23–27) and led notably different lifestyles (Mark 2.18; Matt 9.14; 11.18–19); John’s independent moral teaching, unrelated to the person of Jesus, focusing on just behaviour (Matt 3.7–10; Luke 3.10–14); and, not least, the continued devotion of John’s students to his legacy even after his death, in ignorance of any notion that John 34

Sanders 1985: 10–11, 91–95, 226; 1993: 93–94.

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came to point to Jesus (Acts 19.1–7).35 Josephus’ picture of this highly successful orator, executed by the tetrarch, would help to explain the gospels’ anxieties about any suggestion that Jesus followed him. The historical John remains, however, to be coloured in. Now to some negative implications of this effort to interpret Josephus. Since the nineteenth century, Josephus’ passage has struck some readers as a Christian interpolation. This impression merits respectful if unavoidably brief consideration. The great historian of Judaism, Heinrich Graetz, thought it clear as day (sonnenklar) that the historical John was actually an Essene (almost a century before the first Qumran Scrolls came to light), that his moniker βαπτιστής was indeed nothing more than a synonym for ‘Essene’, and that in calling for people to be immersed, John was trying to recruit Essenes—that is, the group known in Philo, Josephus, and the Elder Pliny.36 Graetz, whose image of Essenes came from these Greek and Latin sources, seized on what struck him as historical mismatches within Josephus’ account of the Baptist: the chronological problem that Aretas’ war with Antipas comes shortly before Tiberius’ death in March 37 CE, whereas John was apparently active before Jesus’ ministry and death around 30 CE (so Luke 3.2), and Josephus’ apparent implication at 18.112 that Machaerus belonged to Aretas, whereas in the John passage it belongs to Antipas (18.119). Graetz thought the simple (leicht zu erledigen) solution to these problems was that the passage was a brazen Christian interpolation in Josephus’ narrative.37 His puzzlement that Josephus would mention John’s nickname βαπτιστής without explanation, as far as he could see, supported the hypothesis that the writer was Christian and assumed knowledge of Jesus’ forerunner. It is not clear, however, how the Christian-interpolation hypothesis would resolve the problems noted by Graetz.38 The nickname question can be quickly 35 36 37 38

See Backhaus 2011; and now Marcus 2018: passim. Graetz 1862: 277–80. Graetz 1862: 3.277–78 n. 3. Re: the ownership of Machaerus, Graetz read εἰς τὸν Μαχαιροῦντα τότε πατρὶ αὐτῆς ὑποτελεῖ with the editio princeps (later followed also by the Loeb edition): Aretas (her father) controlled Machaerus at that time. Niese, however, follows the mss in reading εἰς τὸν Μαχαιροῦντα τῷ τε πατρὶ αὐτῆς ὑποτελεῖ, which would mean that Aretas’ daughter fled ‘to Machaerus [under Antipas’ control] and to the one [the Nabataean governor, who met her just south of the fortress] subject to her father’. That would remove the problem, granted that Josephus might have been clearer in his formulation. Re: chronology, the following reconstruction presents no great difficulties. Antipas abandons Aretas’ daughter in 29–30. This marks the beginning of a rift, as Josephus remarks (AJ 18.113: ἀρχὴν

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disposed of. When Josephus (as other ancient writers) identifies some character’s cognomen or agnomen—‘humpback’, ‘shorty’, or ‘stammerer’ (AJ 7.393; 12.223, 235; 13.62, 103; V 3–4; cf. 1 Macc 2.1–5)—there is no need to say more. Indicating that it was a nickname is enough. Moreover, in John’s case Josephus does briefly explain ὁ βαπτιστής, as we have seen: he was called this because he called people to come for immersion, yes, although …. Rivka Nir has revived Graetz’s conclusion but for different reasons. Discarding the historical John’s membership of the Essenes, she contends that his baptism as described by Josephus is not ‘mainstream’ Jewish—Qumran Scrolls and other marginalia aside—and that the primacy of moral rectitude emphasised by Josephus, along with the pre-emptive negation (not for X but for Y), looks like inner-Christian polemic. Our questions, assumptions, and categories are so different that I cannot adequately engage Nir’s book-length study here. Having tried to show how well Josephus’ description of John fits its literary and historical contexts, however, I cannot ignore the proposal. One opening for concrete dialogue may be her impression that the passage betrays Christian authorship with what seems tell-tale vocabulary in relation to ‘baptism’. In this respect, however, the argument seems to be circular.39 That is, to say that Josephus’ passage sounds Christian because it associates John with immersion, as the Christian evidence does, is to fuse the premise and conclusion of the argument: (a) Christian writers call John ‘the immerser’; (b) so does Josephus; therefore, (c) Josephus’ passage is Christian; and (d), all passages that call John ‘the immerser’ are Christian (d = a). But how would other, non-Christian authors distinguish this John from other Johns? If we had other

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ἔχθρας), between the formerly friendly rulers. At about the same time, John’s popularity arouses Antipas’ ire and he executes John, around 30 (when Jesus is beginning his itinerant career). Conflicts between Aretas and Antipas, who realise that they must try to get along and not attract Roman anger, continue to grow over the next 5 years in a series of border disputes (18.113). Vitellius arrives as imperial legate to Syria in the late summer of 35 and visits Jerusalem for Passover 36. Aretas and Antipas, when their patience runs out, send their armies against each other in the spring of 36, and the tetrarch loses. The humiliated Antipas boldly complains to Tiberius, who orders Vitellius to punish the Arab king. Vitellius sets out to do this in the spring of 37, visiting Jerusalem en route at Passover (18–25 April 37—around the time of Josephus’ birth). But news of Tiberius’ death (16 March, 37) reaches him while he is there. He lingers to announce and celebrate Gaius’ accession with a delighted populace (AJ 18.120–26; cf. Mason 2016a: 266–69). But Gaius, perhaps less well disposed to Antipas already, no longer sees the need to punish Aretas and that expedition is recalled. In relating all this, Josephus mentions Tiberius’ anger at Aretas, but notes that Judaeans viewed Antipas’ defeat as divine punishment for his execution of the much admired John a few years earlier, a story Josephus grew up hearing. As noted also by James McGrath at http://enochseminar.org/review/16946.

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descriptions of this John from Graeco-Roman, Judaean, and Christian perspectives, and if the Christian texts called him βαπτιστής and used βαπτισμός for his activity, whereas others used other language, and then if Josephus reflected the Christian choices, we might have grounds for wondering about a Christian interpolation. But none of these conditions obtains. Aside from that circularity, the case is flawed by its assumptions. It is not an opinion but a demonstrable fact that the description of John in AJ 18.116–19 (a) matches the themes and language of Antiquities and Books 17–19, and (b) does not show distinctive Christian traits. Having already dealt with (a), we can turn briefly to (b). Josephus uses βάπτω (transitive: ‘dip, dye, submerge’; intransitive: ‘sink’) 3 times and βαπτίζω (trans. ‘drench, soak, dye, flood, sink, drown, overwhelm’— typically of a sunken ship)40 13 times, but neither in connection with washing, whether routine or ritual. He does not use either verb in his description of John. For ordinary washing or bathing (BJ 1.340; AJ 7.130; 8.356, 417; 14.463), but also for immersion in preparation to enter the temple (AJ 7.156), he uses λούω. When he describes his own frequent washings in frigid water—as in John’s case, ‘for cleanness/purity’ (ψυχρῷ δὲ ὕδατι τὴν ἡμέραν καὶ τὴν νύκτα πολλάκις λουόμενον πρὸς ἁγνείαν, V 11)—he uses λούω. That verb too is missing from the John passage. But is any of this language Christian? Having introduced John as ‘the one called the Immerser (ὁ βαπτιστής), Josephus hastens to explain this unusual name, as a common moniker. People called John this, he elaborates, because he called for Judaeans to undergo dipping (βαπτισμός), whether once only or repeatedly he does not clarify. Indeed, Josephus explains nothing of the mechanics of this dipping. Did the head go under water? It does not matter because this popular label is merely a gateway to what he wants to say about John: his fusion of justice and oratory. Nevertheless, as far as it goes, his opening description is clear. The actionnoun βαπτισμός had an obvious meaning to Greek readers. This and the cognate agent-noun βαπτιστής both derive from the verb βαπτίζω. That is, βαπτίζω | βαπτισμός | βαπτιστής have the same relationship as ὑβρίζω | ὑβρισμός | ὑβριστής, as verb, action-noun, and agent-noun. Graetz was mistaken in saying that Josephus does not explain John’s nickname ὁ βαπτιστής. He explains more than he does of most characters’ nicknames. If Josephus had said that John was nicknamed ‘the Insolent’ (ὁ ὑβριστής) because he used to engage frequently in abusing (ὑβρισμός) people, that would not explain why or how he insulted people, but it would be more than enough to account for the name. Josephus 40

BJ 1.437; 2.476, 556; 3.368, 423, 525, 527; 4.137; AJ 4.81; 9.212; 10.169; 15.55; V 15.

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likewise explains the minimum necessary about John, who was known as βαπτιστής because he called for βαπτισμός. By contrast, when Christian authors referred to either John’s or their own initiatory immersion, they preferred to call it τὸ βάπτισμα, the neuter result noun of βαπτίζω rather than the masculine, action-in-progress noun βαπτισμός (immersing). The Christian choice of βάπτισμα may have been thought fitting to stress (as Josephus’ John does not) the one-time nature of the ritual. However that may be, NT texts use βάπτισμα (19 times) as their default. The apostolic fathers (6), Greek apologists (19 times), and Eusebius (42 times) also use it exclusively—Eusebius except where he quotes Josephus’ passage on John (Dem. ev. 9.5.15; Hist. eccl. 1.11.5), and therefore includes Josephus’ βαπτισμός. This is a revealing switch, accommodating Josephus’ vocabulary. Where βαπτισμός does appear in the NT, moreover, it is never in connection with John’s activity. This already makes it unlikely that Josephus’ passage was composed by Christians. Three NT authors use βαπτισμός in somewhat derogatory contexts, and referring to an ongoing practice rather than the Christian initiation ritual. Thus in Mark (7.4) βαπτισμός refers to Judaeans’ washing of cups and pots, which Mark’s Jesus criticises. Hebrews 9.10 uses βαπτισμός in a similar way, for Judaean laws about sacrifice, food, and ongoing immersions, with which Christ-followers should not concern themselves. Heb 6.2 then uses it of Christian or perhaps Judaean-Christian practice (βαπτισμῶν διδαχῆς; note plural), in reference to basic teachings that must be transcended. Only Col 2.12 uses βαπτισμός with clear approval, but there it refers to the fundamental spiritual experience of Christian initiatory immersion and has nothing to do with John. Christian authors did not use βαπτισμός of their own initiation ritual or for John’s activity. Nor did they consistently call John ὁ βαπτιστής, the nickname Josephus mentions. Luke called him ‘John son of Zacharias’ (Luke 3.2) and others John ‘the one immersing’ (ὁ βαπτίζων; Mark 1.4; 6.14; cf. John 1.28; 3.23). Josephus either did not know these alternatives, which seems most likely, or he preferred not to use them. It is striking that even when he wants to vary his diction after speaking of John’s βαπτισμός activity, he does not turn to Christian βάπτισμα but conjures up a feminine equivalent, βάπτισις. This may be be his coinage, but its meaning as equivalent to βαπτισμός is clear. The grammarian Dionysius Thrax explains, using forms built from ποιέω as examples (Ars gramm. 1.61), that there is the agent or doer, the doing, and the thing done (ὁ ποιητής, ἡ ποίησις, τὸ ποίημα). Nouns ending in -ισις were thus action-nouns, just like those ending in -ισμός (e.g., ἀνάγνωσις [reading], χρῆσις [being used], ἐξήγησις [narrating], εὕρεσις [finding], ἀπόδοσις [handing over]), but built from different forms. Since the line between βάπτω and βαπτίζω was not rigid, it made sense for Josephus to alternate βαπτισμός with βάπτισις. Neither is Christian.

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A final relevant consideration, too often glossed over, is that the gospel accounts all assume that John lost his head while being detained in Galilee.41 In the Marcan story of his death, which is the source for Matthew, Antipas invites Galilee’s great and good to a birthday party (Mark 6.21). While that party is in full swing, Herodias’ daughter asks for John’s head on a platter, and the head is quickly brought to her, while the party continues. This makes sense because the gospels know Antipas as ruler of Galilee alone; Mark even describes him as a King Herod of the region. Luke’s explicit statement that Antipas was ruler of Galilee (3.1) implies that John’s arrest, which he reports a few sentences later (3.19–20), leads to execution in Galilee. The gospels’ audiences would have no way of knowing Josephus’ information, that Augustus, in keeping with Herod’s revised will, granted Antipas Galilee as well as Peraea, a Judaean region across the Jordan River (AJ 17.188, 318; 18.240). They could not have imagined that John died, as Josephus claims, in the remote Peraean desert fortress of Machaerus. That would not fit the gospels’ version of his execution at a party. Machaerus, where Josephus has John sent for execution, was very far from Galilee. It occupied an isolated hilltop on Antipas’ frontier with hostile Nabataea, as Josephus has just explained (18.111–12, 119). Although it is true that the gospels do not explicitly rule out the tetrarch’s control of Peraea (why would they?), the two stories cannot be reconciled. No ruler in Galilee with a beautiful lakeside resort nearby, would subject his party guests to the gruelling expedition to Machaerus. That desolate outpost lay in rugged desert about 165 km (102 mi) from the charms of Tiberias. The journey would have required about seven days’ continuous travel each way, at 15 miles per day, including a hard slog from the coastal highway at Callirhoe up into the barren highlands of what is now Jordan. See figures 5 to 8. Travel there and back alone would require half a month, plus the stay on the forlorn hilltop. Moreover, such a travelling party would have had to pass through the Decapolis territories of Scythopolis, Hippos, Gadara, and Gerasa, all of which were foreign, often hostile to Judaeans, and anyway not under Antipas’ control. That scenario is both unimaginable on its merits and incompatible with the gospel scene of partygoers waiting for John’s head to appear on the platter. The gospels’ assumption of a Galilean imprisonment is also clear from the passage in which John’s disciples visit him in detention and pass messages back and forth with Jesus in Galilee (Matt 11:2–6). That could not work in Josephus’ account, in which Antipas has removed the popular orator to the remotest edge of the king’s territory, in an inaccessible desert fortress, as far as possible from public contact. 41

But see now Rotman 2020.

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Figure 6 From Tiberias to Machaerus

Figure 7

Tiberias, theatre to Kinneret Lake

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Figure 8

Machaerus from the east

Figure 9

Machaerus from summit north-west to Dead Sea

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Conclusion

Historians must explain evidence, and we can only explain what we have first tried to understand. When it comes to Josephus’ valuable passage concerning John the Baptist, scholarly preoccupations have ignored the basic interpretative question, of what Josephus meant to convey in his description of John the Baptist, as an episode that belongs to his Antiquities. What he meant can certainly be debated, but his contextual and verbal cues combine with related themes in the air in Flavian Rome to provide a reasonable starting point. John had died a few years before Josephus’ birth (37 CE). The little that Josephus says could have come from a story he had heard while growing up, in connection with the banishment of Antipas—a major political event, given that Antipas had governed Galilee and Peraea for nearly four decades. Josephus may have heard that many Judaeans blamed Antipas’ fate, beginning with his defeat by Aretas, on his unjust execution of the popular moralist and speaker John a few years earlier. Or Josephus knew only the story about John and supplied the moral lesson to suit Antiquities’ themes. For Josephus, the activity that earned John his nickname, his immersing activity, has two functions. First, it simply helps to identify him in distinction from other Johns. Second, it opens the door for him to praise the man’s exemplary character and resulting power of simple oratory. Ultimately, he uses John’s fearless commitment to justice, which cost him his life, to illustrate Antiquities’ themes: those who transgress divine law meet failure, while those who follow them find happiness—for death in the service of justice is no terror (BJ 2.154–58; 3.372–75; Ap. 2.217–18). Death-defying commitment to justice, arising from a contempt for death itself, are hallmarks of Josephus’ Judaeans. These themes had added salience in Flavian Rome, where John’s virtue and oratory answered criticisms of superstitious barbarian-Judaean washing rituals. Josephus’ John is rather the sort of ‘good man’ (vir bonus) described by Quintilian, who scorns any such notion.

Chapter 16

Paul without Judaism: Historical Method and ‘Perspectives’ Old and New Looking back on Pauline research in the last decades there is one trend which is generally accepted in international scholarship, namely that Paul is a Jew, and that he must be understood on the background of Judaism and the O.T. Johannes Munck 19651

…

A nomenclature which is thrust upon the past will always end by distorting it, whether by design or simply as a consequence of equating its categories with our own, raised, for the moment, to the level of the eternal. There is no reasonable attitude toward such labels except to eliminate them. Marc Bloch 19432

∵ Delighted to share in honouring Terry Donaldson, whom I have considered a model of scholarly probity since our shared graduate-student days, I offer this investigation in a constructive spirit.3 In a recent volume representing the ‘Paul within Judaism’ (hereafter PWJ) approach, the editors invited Donaldson to respond. He did so in a typically circumspect way, noting the valuable contributions along with several problems. One of his positive reflections on the volume can serve as our departure point:

1 Munck 1965: 174. 2 Bloch 1953. 3 This essay adapts my 2016 T. W. Manson Memorial Lecture in the University of Manchester. I am grateful to my host, Prof. emer. George Brooke, and to the lively if sceptical audience.

© Steve Mason, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004545960_018

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I also appreciate the attention that is given to terminological matters. Many of the terms and categories used in critical reconstructions of the past are laden with meanings and connotations that have accumulated through centuries of subsequent use, which readily leads to anachronisms, distortions, and false assumptions.4 Donaldson stresses a basic principle of historical research, in keeping with Marc Bloch’s prescription above: avoid anachronism. Alas, we all find it easier to strain out the gnats in others’ work while we swallow whole camels that we find congenial.5 In this investigation I shall push farther in the same direction, hoping to be ‘radical’ enough to recall some roots that are easily ignored. The question driving the investigation is a simple one, if rarely asked as such. Namely: How did Paul present himself in relation to Judaean law and custom, in his letters to his converts? Note the difference between this and more common questions: ‘What did Paul think, and why? What were his influences? How did his thought relate to (other) Judaism?’ My reasons for avoiding ‘Judaism’ will soon become clear. I do not seek to defend a particular Paul, but rather invite readers to reflect with me on what it means to study Paul historically.6 How would he look if we put aside modern categories to think in terms that were available to him and his contemporaries in the eastern Mediterranean under Rome (Parts 2 and 3)? Part 4 offers a sketch of what seem to me the beginnings 4 Donaldson 2015: 283 (emphasis added). 5 As much of my research has been devoted to ‘the rectification of names’, I am sympathetic; cf. Mason and Robinson 2004: 7–10. PWJ scholars place weight on framing categories, however—Diaspora, gospel, Judaism—that had no currency, while their concern for shades of meaning in pistis is difficult to follow. Cf. Runesson 2015: 59–68: ‘Christians’ is not emic language in Paul; etic definitions would be hazardous; and even if Acts 11.26 were trusted concerning early use, Christianoi might be better rendered ‘messianics’ than ‘Christians’. But we normally transliterate (rather than translate) place and group names. Although Christ-followers preferred in-house terms—brothers and sisters, slaves of Christ, in Christ—outside observers thought that Christiani had been around for decades before 100 CE (Josephus, AJ 18.64 in the most likely authentic part, 93 CE referring to the 30s; Pliny, Ep. 10.96, on former Christians who left 25 years earlier; Tacitus, Ann. 15.44.2 and Suetonius, Ner. 16.2 on Christians in Nero’s Rome). Cf. Barclay 2013; Van der Lans and Bremmer 2017. Although the apparently Latin -ianus might suggest an origin with Roman authorities (but cf. ‘Herodians’), 1 Pet 4.16 and Acts 11.26; 26.18 assume that the name did not trouble Christ-followers. Ignatius’ delight in christianismos (below) also assumes long familiarity with ‘Christian’. We do not know whether Paul knew the term, however, as we have only some of his letters to fellow-believers. 6 Cf. Dunn (1983: 100): ‘to see Paul properly within his own context, to hear Paul in terms of his own time’; Nanos (2015a: 9): ‘committed to proposing  … pre-Christian  … questions about Paul’s concerns and those of his audiences and contemporaries … a historical portrait of Paul.’

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of a plausible direction. I return to the ‘problem’ posed by the so-called New Perspective after considering the framework of a ‘solution’, in Part 5. 1

Orientation

When I left a chair in ancient history to take up a New Testament post (2011), my world changed in many ways. What struck me most about the graduate-student cadre in the new setting was their fascination with ‘the new perspective on Paul’ (hereafter NP). This impressed me, first, because the new perspective was older than most of them. Second, it seemed a tiny boat, lashed to the already small ship of Paul’s corpus, for so many researchers. Third, most seemed at least as concerned about alignment with a Paul-guru or theological tradition as with the open-ended project of understanding the historical Paul. This last impression was strengthened during research for an SBL panel on part of N. T. Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God (2013; see Chapter 22 in this volume). I found the internet heaving with debates about whether Wright’s Paul fit the NP and, more earnestly, whether Wright was sound in relation to some theological standard. Any distinction between Wright’s theology and that of Wright’s Paul was hard to detect. The NP was inaugurated by James Dunn’s 1982 T. W. Manson Memorial Lecture in Manchester.7 Respectfully challenging E. P. Sanders’ then-recent but already impactful Paul and Palestinian Judaism (1977), Dunn argued that Paul’s turn to Christ had to be more intelligible from Jewish-biblical sources than Sanders had proposed, with his notion that the encounter with Christ alone drove Paul’s change; otherwise, Sanders had argued, Paul was perfectly content within ‘Judaism’ (Part 4 below). The NP has endured because this reaction to Sanders, this view of Paul as an earnest scriptural exegete ‘within Judaism’, catalysed the larger, widespread, and multi-faceted evolution of scholarship captured in the quotation from Munck above, a couple of decades earlier and connected with post-Holocaust reflection.8 Once Paul is housed securely within Judaism, the classical assumption that he laid the foundation for a distinctive ‘Christian’ theology crumbles, and a new question opens for bids: about when Christianity and Judaism ‘parted ways’.9 Studying Paul as a Jewish exegete has been the prevailing direction of 7 Dunn 1983. 8 E.g., Hays 1993; Donaldson 1997; Wright 2013. 9 E.g., Gaston 1987; Segal 1990; Boccaccini 1991; Dunn 1992; Boyarin 1994, 2004; Eisenbaum 2009.

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scholarship for well over a generation now. The most vigorous opposition has come from scholars who think that the NP does not go far enough. It is still too encrusted with vestigial church language, in their view, in speaking as though there were such things as pre-70 ‘Christianity’, ‘Christians’, ‘churches’, ‘missionaries’, ‘faith/belief’, and the like. These colleagues call for a more radical new perspective, which begins from the assumption—and conveniently ends with the conclusion—that Paul lived wholly ‘within Judaism’. They call for a vocabulary that does not traffic in distinctively Christian language, which they see as anachronistic.10 In what follows I do not mean to suggest that, while everyone has been searching for Paul, I have found him: ‘Relax everyone: He is over here!’ On the contrary, my methodological argument is that what we normally mean by studying a figure historically is almost impossible with Paul, because the theological stakes are so deeply internalised. E. P. Sanders, my first Paul teacher, was genuinely concerned to understand the historical figure and let the theological chips fall where they might. But Jacob Neusner challenged his portrait of Palestinian Judaism for being irredeemably theological.11 Then Dunn, who thought Sanders’ Judaism about right, found his Paul unhistorical. Now the ‘Paul within Judaism’ (hereafter PWJ) group finds the NP too theological and imagines its own picture of Paul to be, at last, historical: they will restore Paul to his true = historical, first-century Jewish setting.12 In such formulations, ‘historical’ appears to mean accurate in relation to someone’s understanding of how things were. Let us stipulate that honest students of all persuasions are interested in the real Paul, so the historical figure. The many conferences and volumes on Paul testify to a relentless and, we should assume, sincere search for the first-century person. Still, historians with a mandate of public accessibility do not approach other figures of the past—Augustus, Vespasian, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Winston Churchill—in this way, positing one framework and expecting to work out a coherent system of thought within it. Since Herodotus ‘fathered’ 10

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Zetterholm 2015: 34: ‘proponents of  … Paul within Judaism perspectives  … share the assumption that the traditional perspectives … need to be replaced by a historically more accurate view. … I am quite confident that Christianity will survive a completely Jewish Paul.’ Neusner 1978. Nanos 2015a: 8–9: ‘the prevailing constructions of the apostle have not begun from the most probable historical hypotheses; they have not been approached from the most historiographically grounded sensibilities; they have not been developed around the most historically likely choices. …’ The scholars in this volume share a ‘commitment to the quest to understand the historical Paul …, letting the theological chips fall where they may.’ But see the works in nn. 3–4 among dozens of others.

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a past-oriented historiē in the fifth century BCE, it has meant the open-ended, methodical investigation of problems of the human past.13 Herodotus made his inquiries largely transparent, and often admitted that he could not answer his questions with the evidence available to him. Responsible inquiry is history’s only requirement—not accuracy in relation to pre-conceived images, or asking ‘Who is right?’ If we knew the real Paul in advance, or the solution to any other historical problem (the real Pontius Pilate, Essenes, Pharisees, Masada), we would not need to investigate. Historical studies of the figures mentioned above seek out complexities and contradictions, while allowing that much remains unknown where evidence is lacking. Whatever prestige history has as an academic discipline in the modern research university comes from its relentlessly questioning, truth-seeking nature. Such investigations can only ever produce provisional and—given the parlous evidence—dodgy results. Scholarship that descends into camps, believing they have the real Paul, are forsaking History’s outstretched arms and returning to the sure embrace of Theology. The point is crucial. We can investigate responsibly only if we are not already committed to certain conclusions. In any open investigation, conclusions may change with new information, new angles of insight, and the testing of hypotheses. As the physician Galen stressed (in De sectis), researchers committed to propositions in advance belong to a dogmatic school or hairesis; they can no longer seek the truth. Galen was speaking of medical knowledge, but also in studying the human past, a programme that exists to prove and elaborate what investigators already believe is not historical. No one living today can know much about Paul (or anyone else) in the first century. So the criteria for a ‘historical Paul’ must be modest. They cannot include correspondence with some known reality or standard. The historical Paul can only be the assemblage of low-resolution, tentative images in the minds of historians who are willing to keep trying to interpret what he has left behind, and imagining and testing explanations.14 Since Paul was a human being, he is likely to have defied any simple schematisation of his ‘thought’, as much as any of us lesser lights would. The long and painful conflict between historical and theological research in the nineteenth century arose not because churchmen were concerned with some particular portrait of the apostle but precisely because of this chasm between belief in a Catholic or Lutheran (etc.) Paul and who-knows-what an

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E.g., Collingwood 1994: 7–10, 19–20; Bloch 1953: 20, 71, 87; Beiser 2011: 1–25. Donaldson 2010, is a model of careful method.

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open-ended investigation might produce.15 These issues were real and almost violently divisive in the latter half of the nineteenth century. If the sanguinary nature of those fights is hard to imagine today, except in vestigial rhetoric, that is an index of how much our societies have changed: how far the churches’ influence has retreated, and how deeply new intellectual and moral assumptions have taken hold. Those broadly described as ‘postmodern’— the decentring of knowledge and emphases on perspective with the loss of claims to authoritative truth—are now basic to the way we think. Rejecting ‘essentialism’ and highlighting instead perceptions shaped by a priori conditioning (Kant) minimises conflict because it relativises all interpretations. A paradoxical result of these changes is that the long tradition of understanding Paul as insisting on the end of Moses’ law and ‘Judaism’, now dismissed as blind Christian prejudice (with horrendous consequences in World War II), has given way to a new orthodoxy, according to which he was ‘within Judaism’. Here is the difference between a theological and a historical approach. A Lutheran, Catholic, or Jewish Paul must be sound. Whatever he said must be intelligible within the posited framework. That is the price of being an icon. History, by contrast, which is to say open-ended investigation, is messy. It has no criteria or reference points for soundness. There is only understanding of whatever oddities this particular phenomenon may produce: the Paul of the letters. The evidence of the letters themselves (e.g., Phil 3; 2 Cor 10–13; Galatians) and his early legacy (e.g., James 2.14; Acts 21.20–28; 2 Pet 3.15–16; Marcion, Ebionites, pseudo-Clementines) shows that many of Paul’s peers did not understand him or, to the extent they did, find him simpatico.16 He reciprocated their disdain, consigning some of them to hell in virulent tones. Where did such ferocious conflicts come from? If Paul was devoted to Judaean ancestral customs, as Peter and James appear to have been, why were similar accusations not made of Peter or James? If he was truly devoted to Moses’ law, but many people thought that he was not and was in fact bad-mouthing Jerusalem and its people, where did that powerful impression come from? The harmony-seeking author of Acts seems unlikely to have fabricated a picture of Paul as hated by both Christ-following and other Judaeans for his activities (Acts 21). And did Irenaeus have a reason to invent the Ebionites, who:

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Of countless examples, the relatively tame British standoff between Benjamin Jowett’s circle and their opponents around 1860 gets at the central issues. Cf. Jowett 1861 with Jelf et al. 1862. See Lüdemann 1989; Gray 2016; Meeks 1972: 176–84, 288–301, excerpts ancient and modern detractors.

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reject the apostle Paul, maintaining that he was an apostate from the law …, [and who] practise circumcision, persevere in the observance of those customs that are enjoined by the law, and are so Judaean in their style of life that they even adore Jerusalem as though it were the house of God (Adv. Haer. 1.26.2; cf. Origen, C. Cels. 2.1; 5.61, 65)? Paul’s fans and detractors alike, from Marcion via the Popes, Luther, and NT scholar B. F. Westcott through many of their twentieth-century heirs, thought that Paul had declared the end of Moses’ law.17 It was not only Christians. Jewish academics with serious knowledge of early Christian texts tended to follow Voltaire and Thomas Paine in distinguishing Jesus, a recognisably Jewish teacher, from Paul, who was totally alien to Judaism and twisted basic Judaean principles and teachings. Thus Kaufmann Kohler’s entry in the Jewish Encyclopedia (1906) spoke of Paul’s pathology and ‘unparalleled animosity and hostility to Judaism’.18 Although the Third Reich did not emerge simply from Christian anti-Judaism, the long Christian tradition of divorcing Pauline Christianity from Judaism spawned the radical ‘German Christian’ movement and played a role in the Nazis’ broader co-optation of European churches. Decades of soul-searching after the war produced the final version of nostra aetate from Vatican II (1965) and Rosemary Radford Ruether’s Faith and Fratricide (1974). The swing to a profoundly Jewish Paul, with the implicit claim that a colossal misreading underlies the history of interpretation, undoubtedly comes with all sincerity and moral justification. History, however, has a stubborn interest in particulars, contexts, and change, which upsets every holistic scheme. That is, again, why open-ended investigation and tradition so often came to blows in the nineteenth century, as the former pursuit became increasingly confident. Asking historical questions does not mean claiming a chimerical objectivity, it should be stressed. Objectivity is a distraction. Facts do not speak for themselves but require interpretation. A fortiori, hypothetical reconstructions of events long lost never acquire the status of fact, in the literal sense of a factum, something given and clear. Our hypothetical reconstructions live in our imagination as provisional scenarios, on a different cognitive plane from the survivals of the past, which we can see and touch. If we begin to feel certain about the lost realities behind the scant survivals from antiquity, we should smack our heads to remind ourselves how much we do not know. 17 18

E.g., Stow 2007; B. F. Westcott (as Dunelm) in Knight 1896: 9–11. Kohler 1906b at https://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/articles/13232-saul-of-tarsus. Cf. Klausner 1926; Maccoby 1987; Vermes 2003: 40–52.

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Rather than debating the lost background of Paul’s real life, I propose to focus on interpreting the survivals, which are facts and contain facts—for example, the frequency with which certain words and phrases appear. This is not because Paul’s letters can reconstitute the person in all his complexity. It is because it seems to me that prevailing currents in research overlook some evidential facts, which ought to complicate the scheme: ‘Paul within Judaism’. 2

Paul Did Not Know about ‘Judaism’

In case my title should suggest that I place Paul outside (in Scottish usage ‘outwith’) Judaism, I hasten to clarify that I mean something more basic. Namely, Paul, Peter, Philo, Josephus, and their contemporaries were all without Judaism, because they were unaware of the category. This is not a matter of semantics. Everyone trained in Roman Judaea and/or Christian origins learned to think of ‘Judaism’ as a given. I use the term still for the field of study and in public communication. But if we leave our comfort zones for the foreign territory of ancient languages, as we would if we were studying ancient India, China, or other aspects of the Roman Empire, and ask about the terms they used, we can find neither Judaism nor the genus of which it is a species: religion. Just as there was no Romism, Syrism, or Egyptism in the Roman world, Judaism was not a term that was in use. On the threshold of Christianity’s transformation, in the early 300s CE, from persecuted nuisance19 to most-favoured status, the man who would soon write a panegyric for the Christian or Christian-curious emperor Constantine was still preoccupied with justifying the not-yet approved Christian faith. In his Preparation of the Gospel, Eusebius addressed the central criticism of his faith. Whereas Pindar’s motto ‘Nomos is king’ had echoed through centuries as the axiomatic foundation of social order (Herodotus 3.38.4; Origen, C. Cels. 5.40), mainstream Christians were following Paul’s lead in declaring themselves not to be under law (ὑπὸ νόμον).20 For Paul, who was born and raised a Judaean, the

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Pace Moss 2013: 43–53, who does not discuss Paul (Philippians), Hebrews, or Acts 2–4, and dispenses with Pliny (Ep. 10.96) and Tacitus (Ann. 15.44) in brief and vague dismissals, it seems clear enough that the regular harassment and mistreatment of Christ-followers for their worship of this man, leading to possible execution if they refused to abandon the commitment, meets the usual definition of persecution—even if it was not empire-wide and even if it was justified by officials as legal prosecution. Few have imagined that to qualify as persecution, action against Christians had to be irrational or outside the law. E.g., 1 Cor 9.20; Gal 3.23; 4.4, 32; 5.18; Rom 6.14–15.

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most salient nomos had been that instituted by Moses.21 The nomoi known to his non-Judaean converts were the laws and customs of their respective poleis. Outside observers cared little about what Christ-followers believed, as long as they were loyal to their nomoi. It was a scandalous prospect that people would not take pride in their ancestral and polis traditions, following the local calendar of festivals, participating in the public sacrifices, and serving in the relevant offices. Neglect of these basic features of polis life would produce chaos. Christ-followers had to return, their neighbours insisted, to customary life and embrace all of this, not pretend to float above it with the bizarre hope that they would soon be evacuated into the clouds.22 By Eusebius’ time, Christ-followers had struggled for nearly three centuries to explain themselves. That is a very long time, and skilled Christian teachers and apologists such as Clement, Tertullian, and Origen had made sophisticated cases. But only now, from a position of rapidly growing confidence, did Eusebius feel able to turn the tables on Christians’ accusers. To do this, he debuts a game-changing Christian lexical palette. He asks what ‘Christianismos should properly be called, since it is neither Hellenic nor Judaean, but a new and true kind of divine philosophy’ (τίς ἂν κυρίως λεχθείη ὁ Χριστιανισμός, οὔτε Ἑλληνισμὸς ὢν οὔτε Ἰουδαϊσμός, ἀλλά τις καινὴ καὶ ἀληθὴς θεοσοφία; Praep. ev. 1.5.12; cf. Dem. ev. 1.2.1, 2.9–10, 6.62, 7.18). This is an innovation, as we see when Eusebius elaborates: ‘One might fittingly use the label ἰουδαϊσμός for the constitution arranged according to the law of Moses, connected with the one God over all, and ἑλληνισμός to express in nuce the superstitious belief in many gods, as in the ancestral customs of all the ethnē.’23 His use of the optative mood shows his creativity here: ‘one might fittingly …’, would make no sense if everyone already knew ἰουδαϊσμός as a system of practice and belief based in Moses’ laws, or Judaism, and ἑλληνισμός as polytheism. They did not. Outside of Christian circles, as far as we can tell from a wide range of surviving texts, this vocabulary was not current. Only the triumph of Christianity in the fourth century would establish it in the western lexicon. Outsiders such as Celsus, the pagan interlocutor in Minucius Felix’s Octavius, and later the emperor Julian saw Christ-followers as occupying a strange halfway house (Julian, C. Gal. 43a, 141, 238, 253 and below). Claiming allegiance to a 21 22 23

Cf. Philo passim; Josephus, Antiquities 1–11 and Against Apion; Diodorus Siculus 34/35.1.1–4; Strabo, Geogr. 16.2.34–37; Tacitus, Hist. 5.3–5. Celsus in Origen, C. Cels. 5.25–26, 33; Porphyry (or similar) in Macarius Magnes, Apocr. 3.30, in Hoffmann 1994: 59; Julian, C. Gal. [Loeb] 39a–43a, 141c–141b, 238d, 314c, 343c–356e. Dem. ev. 1.2.2: Τὸν μὲν ἰουδαϊσμὸν εὐλόγως ἄν τις ὀνομάσειε τὴν κατὰ τὸν Μωσέως νόμον διατεταγμένην πολιτείαν, ἑνὸς ἐξημμένην τοῦ ἐπὶ πάντων θεοῦ, τὸν δὲ ἑλληνισμόν, ὡς ἐν κεφαλαίῳ φάναι, τὴν κατὰ τὰ πάτρια τῶν ἐθνῶν ἁπάντων εἰς πλείονας θεοὺς δεισιδαιμονίαν;

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Judaean Lord, they did not continue in Greek polis customs, holidays, and sacrifices, but they also did not follow Judaean law and custom. Eusebius agreed that they occupied an in-between position but rejected the inference that ‘Christianism’ was derivative, taking the worst from each side. It may only have ‘recently been made the nomos for all humanity of the inhabited earth’ (νεωστὶ πᾶσιν ἀνθρώποις τοῖς καθ’ ὅλης τῆς οἰκουμένης νενομοθετημένη), with Christ’s arrival and the growth of the faith. But Christ-followers constituted, he insisted, ‘the oldest community of piety and most ancient philosophy’ (τὸ μεταξὺ τούτων παλαιότατον εὐσεβείας πολίτευμα, καὶ ἀρχαιοτάτη μέν τις φιλοσοφία), antedating both Moses and polytheism—or ‘Judaism’ and ‘Hellenism’ (Dem. ev. 1.2.9). Recalling Paul in Gal 3.6–29, Eusebius used the new terms to claim that Moses’ system, encapsulated in his curse of Israelites who failed to fulfil every bit of the law (sharing Paul’s odd reading of Deut 27.26), was a change to the simple faith of the biblical patriarchs, which had been Christianism before Christ. Had Paul known anything of what Eusebius calls Judaism? He had parried the same accusation about defection from civic loyalty, but Eusebius’ lexicon was not available for him to express this. Paul had to communicate in the prevailing categories of the first century, including political and cultic terminology that he spiritualised or sublimated. Thus, in rejecting demands for this-worldly affiliation he declared: ‘our political community (ἡμῶν … τὸ πολίτευμα) exists in heaven, from where we also await a saviour-lord, Jesus Christ’ (Phil 3.21). But Paul was writing this from judicial confinement, being detained as a troublemaker in the poleis he visited, for leading others into defection from polis loyalty (1 Thess 2.13). By about 200 CE, increasingly learned Christian writers were feeling somewhat freer. Tertullian of Carthage, where Christianity had gained a significant foothold, felt strong enough to confront the ‘champions and avengers of laws and ancestral institutions’, who considered the very name of Christian culpable (Tertullian, Apol. 5–6). Elsewhere he wrote (Ad nat. 2.1.7): This is what our project is against: it is against the arrangements made by the ancestors, authoritative opinions [or models] passively received, the laws of those in power, and the reasonings of the wise; it is against antiquity, custom, coercion; it is against precedents, marvels, and wonders—all of which conspired to create your corrupt view of the Deity. Claiming a pristine truth revealed in Christ alone, surviving Christian texts of the period tend to view ancestral traditions as mouldy and corrupting, not the beautifully varied gardens of the oikoumenē that Pindar, Herodotus, and Strabo (later Celsus, Porphyry, and Julian) cherished. Tertullian has the customs of

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all gentes and nationes in view, but for him as for Paul the Judaeans are the most germane example, because obviously Christ came from Judaea and so the question is why Christ-followers do not follow Judaean nomoi. Tertullian’s answer is that God had once chosen that gens, but God abandoned them and transferred his favour to more faithful followers from all nations (ex omni iam gente et populo et loco cultores sibi adlegeret deus multo fideliores in quos gratiam transferret, Apol. 21.4–6): to a community no longer defined by local tradition. Ethnos- or gens-identity, identified with ancestral customs and laws, has therefore lost its meaning among Christ-followers. Clement’s Exhortation to the Greeks weaponises the same points when it contrasts mere customs, ‘handed down from fathers’, with revealed truth: ‘Let us then steer clear of custom! Let us steer clear of it like a dangerous headland. … Custom is a snare, a trap, a pit, an evil treat’ (Protr. 10, 12.1). We get a glimpse of the Roman criticism of this position, if only fictively, from the character Caecilius in Minucius Felix’s Octavius. He mocks the claim of Christ-followers to stand above nations and tribes (gentes nationesque), in the arrogant expectation that the universe will burn while those naïfs alone are saved (11.1). The philosopher Celsus assails the same view (in Origen, C. Cels. 5.14–16). Impervious to such criticism, Tertullian confidently awaits the ridiculed coming conflagration, when the world with its ancient ways and origin-claims (cum tanta saeculi vetustas et tot eius nativitates uno igni haurientur), magistrates, philosophers, poets, and other scoffers, will be consumed (Spect. 30). Although each of these authors has a distinctive viewpoint and context, they all see themselves as cleaving to positions established especially by Paul. These authors were the incubators of the characteristically Christian -ism terminology. Tertullian pairs every use of Christianismus with Iudaismus, as a way of contrasting Gospel with Law or ‘legal servitude’ (Marc. 4.6, 33; 5.4, 6). He also uses Iudaismus on its own—some 20 times—as shorthand for alleged law-slavery. Origen anticipates Eusebius most directly, using ἰουδαϊσμός some 33 times to mean the belief system that is based in Moses’ law. Most telling is his eight-volume refutation of Celsus, which has ἰουδαϊσμός nine times. Although he does not quote Celsus using the word, he supplies it when the philosopher speaks of the Judaeans’ laws and customs. For Origen, but not for Celsus, that means ‘Judaism’ (1.2.2). This also matches what survives from Porphyry and Julian. They both knew a great deal about Christians and Judaeans, but their extensive preserved sections do not include ἰουδαϊσμός.24 This Christian lexicon of reductive -isms reached its full flowering with Epiphanius, decades after 24

Cyril has it at Proph. min. 1.659; Comm. Joann. 2.108; Comm. Luc. 72.864, not when citing Julian.

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Eusebius. He created a flow-chart of falsehood by calling out five ‘mothers’, or wombs, of deviance, which he labelled Barbar-ism, Scyth-ism, Hellen-ism, Juda-ism, and Samarit-ism (Anc. 12.8; Pan. 1.2 [Holl] 1.157–97). Using -ism language for belief-systems was thus a gradual Christian innovation, which could only have occurred long after Paul. As we can still see in their English descendants—baptism, ostracism, Laconism, Medism, Atticism— Greek -ισμός nouns indicated actions: baptising, ostracising, Medising, and so on. Χριστιανισμός began its life the same way. It meant Christianising over against ἰουδαϊσμός, or Judaising (below). As both terms lost this dynamic sense, apparently by being freeze-dried in Latin, they gradually came to form a Christian luggage-set for contending belief systems, or ‘religions’ (religones). No non-Christian would have thought, on seeing such -ισμός words, that they referred systems of thought or belief comparable to English Marxism, Catholicism, or Protestantism today. A barbarism (βαρβαρισμός) was an action, a turn of speech (cf. Strabo, Geogr. 14.2.28), akin to a solecism (σολοικισμός) at sentence level. These were contrastable with Hellenism (ἑλληνισμός), which at first meant adopting or affecting pure Greek (Aristotle, Poet. 1458a). Compare our use of Americanism (‘Can I get fries with that, going forward?’) and Britishism (‘I’ve come over all peckish’). This explains why Ἰουδαϊσμός is found almost always in Christian texts, not coincidentally in relation to Χριστιανισμός, and not in any Graeco-Roman text or Judaean text referring to a system of belief or practice. Menachem Stern’s indispensable three-volume compendium, Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism, is comprehensive in the text it cites. But despite the title, which is conditioned by scholarly usage, it contains not a single instance of ἰουδαϊσμός or Iudaismus. Anyone with access to the relevant databases can confirm the following facts. First, of the 393 occurrences of ἰουδαϊσμός in the database, all but 5 (388) are Christian. The other 5 come from a single Judaean text (2 Maccabees: 4 instances) and one that borrows from that text (4 Maccabees). Second, all known instances of Latin Iudaismus are Christian. Third, in the extensive corpora of the Hebrew Bible/LXX, Philo, Josephus, 1 Maccabees, the pseudepigrapha, Qumran Scrolls, and the New Testament outside Gal 1.13–14 (below), no ἰουδαϊσμός or Hebrew equivalent such as yahadut appears. Given that scholars rely on ‘Judaism’ when discussing these texts—try to imagine an academic discussion of Galatians, Romans, or Matthew that did not refer to ‘Judaism’—is it not worth asking why ancient authors felt no need for such a word? Have our familiar categories led us to miss conditions of life that were obvious to them? Have we unwittingly pulled them into our way of thinking, our categories?

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In case I should seem to push aside ἰουδαϊσμός in 2 Maccabees and Gal 1.13–14, I must briefly explain why it does not appear to resemble the Christian reduction ‘Judaism’ here or attest such a reduction before the rise of Christianity.25 The author of 2 Maccabees or possibly Jason of Cyrene, whose five-volume work he abridges, was creative and unusually partial to fabricating action-nouns with -ισμός endings. His innovations include ‘arming with a breastplate’ (θωρακισμός) and ‘eating entrails’ (σπλαγχνισμός; 6.7, 21; 7.42). Both words more or less vanish from later literature after he experiments with them.26 He also experiments with three previously unattested cultural -ισμός words: ἀλλοφυλισμός, the action of ‘foreignising’ (4.13; 6.24), ἑλληνισμός, ‘hellenising’ (4.13), and ἰουδαϊσμός, ‘judaising’ (2.21; 8.1; 14.38 [twice]). It is not possible, on either morphological or contextual grounds, that ἀλλοφυλισμός means a belief system called ‘foreignism’, or that ἑλληνισμός means a belief system called Hellenism. What would that system be? Since his programmatic statement at 4.13 describes the crisis under Antiochus IV as a ‘peak of ἑλληνισμός’ and an ‘advance in ἀλλοφυλισμός’, he is speaking of movements or actions, akin to the familiar Medising or Spartanising (Μηδισμός, Λακωνισμός) in earlier Greek history: adopting foreign ways. These terms refer to the actions of hellenising and foreignising. Given this context, the same author’s neologism ἰουδαϊσμός should be read as an activity: the proper counter-movement of Judaeans to the rampant foreignising/hellenising in Jerusalem. The city needs, ironically, to assert its proper Judaean identity, or judaise, to maintain its ancestral dignity. So the text relates that ἰουδαϊσμός was what armed Judaean groups were doing, at the risk of their lives (8.1; 14.38). This was an activity for which they could be punished—not for being Judaeans, which was ineradicable, or for believing in a system of some kind, but for persisting in Judaean actions now deemed unlawful by the king. Another way the author describes this cultural devotion and persistence is with the noun ἀναστροφή, which means a constant striving, turning and returning, a commitment (to Judaean ways) instead of easily ‘capitulating to foreignising’ or yielding to threats and pressure. The author praises the aged Eleazar for having just this determination (6.23–24). Now Ἰουδαϊσμός might have disappeared along with ἀλλοφυλισμός and the work’s other neologisms, if Paul had not found an occasion to recall 25 26

Mason 2007, 2016b: 175–220. Other words of this class have extremely slender attestation prior to his eager use of them: ἐμφανισμός (3.9), ὑπομνηματισμός (2.13; 4.23), and καθαρισμός (1.18, 36; 2.16, 19; 10.5).

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2 Maccabees, adding his own ironic twist. Some of his gentile recruits in Asia Minor, under the influence of other influential Christ-following teachers, become convinced that they ought to judaise, to adopt Judaean law and custom. Those other teachers had persuaded them that Paul was watering down the true teaching about Christ by ignoring its fundamental Judaean content (Gal 1.6; 2.14; 3.1–3; 4.21; 5.2–12). In response to this challenge—and only in response to it—Paul reanimates the creativity of 2 Maccabees. Whether or not his audience understood the allusion, they would have deduced the meaning of the word from its form (as above). That is, he uses ἰουδαϊσμός to encapsulate the energy he himself had devoted, in former times, to asserting Judaean law and custom. He is not ignoring or downplaying anything. He knows all about Judaean law, and he used to be more devoted to it than anyone of his age group. For this purpose, he seizes both barrels from 2 Maccabees to speak of τὴν ἐμὴν ἀναστροφήν ποτε ἐν τῷ ἰουδαϊσμῷ, ‘my own former doggedness in that Judaising activity’. Even without reference to 2 Maccabees his meaning would be clear because he elaborates: ‘that is, I was going after the assembly of God [Christ-followers] with a vengeance, trying to wipe it out’ (Gal 1.13). Having invoked ἰουδαϊσμός, he repeats it immediately for effect: ‘This is what you want? Look, I was far ahead of my peer group in that Judaising’. This time he glosses it: ‘so completely was I a devotee of the traditions of my ancestors’. His point seems clear: no one is now keener on Judaean ancestral law than he once was—before Christ called him (Gal 1.15). That he uses ἰουδαϊσμός for these former activities, asserting Judaean values, is clear from the context. That he does not use the word for a system of belief and practice as later Christians would, for an -ism called Judaism, is clear because he never uses the word when he is discussing precisely that: Judaean law and its requirements. He does not use the word in Romans, especially, or in Galatians 3–4, 2 Corinthians, or Philippians 3. 4 Maccabees, possibly contemporary with Paul, is the only other Judaean text that uses ἰουδαϊσμός, and this text borrows its source material from 2 Maccabees. It valorises the word in the same way that 2 Maccabees does (4 Macc 4.23). Writing decades after Galatians,27 but intimately familiar with Paul, Ignatius of Antioch seems to have taken the decisive step in making ἰουδαϊσμός a fixed and durable Christian category,28 though he could not have known that he was doing so. Hearing of Judaising among the Philadelphians of Asia Minor 27 28

How many decades after Paul is not of paramount concern here. Barnes 2008 argues for a date in the 140s rather than the traditional date a generation earlier, on the basis of striking literary agreements between Ignatius and the gnostic Ptolemaeus (via Irenaeus). Cf., with a different direction of argument but largely in agreement, Boyarin 2018.

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(cf. Rev 3.9), he takes a leaf from Paul to object, in still further examples of creative diction: ‘If someone explains Judaising to you (Εὰν δέ τις ἰουδαϊσμὸν ἑρμηνεύῃ ὑμῖν), don’t listen! It is better to hear Christianising from a man having circumcision (παρὰ ἀνδρὸς περιτομὴν ἔχοντος χριστιανισμὸν ἀκούειν) than Judaising from a foreskin-type (ἢ παρὰ ἀκροβύστου ἰουδαϊσμόν)’ (Phila. 6.1). That is, if someone promotes Judaising to you, block your ears. The proper direction is Christianising, which everyone should be doing. Circumcised or not, everyone should now ‘talk of Jesus Christ’. Anticipating the writers we noted above, Ignatius also insists that to bring up laws and customs now is to live among ‘the tombs of the dead’, ensnared by ‘the ruler of this age’—a Pauline phrase (1 Cor 2.6–8; cf. 2 Cor 4.4). Writing to the Magnesians, he compares Judaising (ἰουδαϊσμός), after Christ’s coming, to hearing ‘ancient and worthless fables’ (8.1). Here he replaces the tomb metaphor with that of stinking food that is past its useful time (Mag. 10.1–3), before driving home the point: ‘It is absurd to talk Jesus Christ and to Judaise (ἄτοπόν ἐστιν Ἰησοῦν Χριστὸν λαλεῖν καὶ ἰουδαϊζειν)! For Christianising did not lead to trust in Judaising, but Judaising into Christianising (ὁ γὰρ χριστιανισμὸς οὐκ εἰς ἰουδαϊσμὸν ἐπίστευσεν, ἀλλ᾿ ἰουδαϊσμός εἰς χριστιανισμόν)’. That ἰουδαϊσμός retains a verbal sense in Ignatius is clear because he uses ἰουδαϊζειν and ἰουδαϊσμός as synonyms. He is building further on Paul’s creative re-use of 2 Maccabees. His exaltation of χριστιανισμός as the end goal of history nevertheless paved the way for its use as an abstract noun in both Greek (Origen, Eusebius, Epiphanius) and Latin (Tertullian). To summarise thus far: Paul and his contemporaries did not know a category of Judaism. They communicated using the long-established lexical bank of the Graeco-Roman world, in which Judaeans had an ancient and respected place. Judaeans were an ethnos with a mother-polis, Jerusalem, their lawgiver Moses, a distinctive calendar, festivals, laws, and customs, including circumcision and dietary restrictions. In other words, they were normal. They belonged in the ancient world. They needed no -ism because, like Romans, Egyptians, and Syrians, they had a civilisation, which was not the same as a belief system. Strangely, given everyone’s sincere efforts to adjust our academic categories to the ancient scene, scholarly use of ‘ancient Judaism’ shades toward the Christian creation of Judaism as a system of belief and practice, a ‘religion’. Christians created capsule-words for such systems because they needed negative alternatives to their own Christianism, as it morphed from an activity to a belief system.29 This matching luggage set was not yet available in the first century. That is what I mean in arguing that Paul and his contemporaries were all ‘without Judaism’. 29

See the different approach but similar conclusions in Boyarin 2004.

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What Difference Does a Category Make?

When I have discussed such things with colleagues or published in this vein, the most consistent response has been, in essence: ‘You’re being pedantic. We need some covering term for everything Jewish, Judaism is the established term, and you don’t have a better one.’30 This response misses the point that historians do not otherwise feel the need to miniaturise complex cultures with such capsule-words. At least, I have never heard a historian either speak of Romism, Athenism, Egyptism, or Syrism or lament the lack of such terms. Those who feel this need for Judaeans alone might ask why. Is it because the academic study of Judaea, its people, and literature grew in theological soil? To be sure, we all take short-cuts for convenience, as when we use ‘emperor’ for the Roman princeps, who, in the first century and a half, could never have used a term corresponding English emperor. In many or most contexts, where convenience or ease of initial communication takes priority, I have no problem calling my research area ‘ancient Judaism’. It is not a question of pedantry. Communication depends on one’s interlocutors and purposes. Speaking of ‘ancient Judaism’ among the general public presents no problems, as we all understand each other. We know what Judaism is now, and my field is the ancient roots of that. But to assume in our research that this category was already present the first century has consequences. Once we stipulate that the ancients thought about Judaism, we inevitably ask what class of phenomena Judaism belonged to (usual answer: a species of religion), and from there set about characterising this particular expression of the genus. Scholars have spent huge amounts of time asking variations of the question, ‘What kind of religion was ancient Judaism?’ Was it legal, legalistic, progressive, missionary? Paradoxically, the scholar who did the most to establish the critical-historical study of Judaism in American universities, Jacob Neusner, stressed more than anyone the notion of Judaism as a system. His mathematical, philosophical, and comparative inclinations—this last influenced by Jonathan Z. Smith—led him to read each ancient Jewish corpus as a discrete ‘intellectual system’.31 His resulting vision of many ‘Judaisms’ provoked Sanders’ contrary case for a ‘common Judaism’: not many systems but one system, a single Judaism.32 Both scholars would have recoiled at the suggestion that they were actually using ancient Christian language, but they ended up enshrining it nonetheless. 30 31 32

E.g., Schwartz 2011. See Hughes 2016: 48, 106–108, 137, 145–47. Sanders 1992.

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Well before his conflict with Neusner, Sanders had challenged age-old Christian readings of Judaism by exploring how its ‘members’ understood their place in this ‘religion’.33 Against long-held Protestant impressions, he argued, Jews were not worried about earning God’s favour, or about their membership in Judaism. As he famously put it: ‘A pattern of religion … is the description of how a religion is perceived by its adherents to function … of how getting in and staying in are understood: the way in which a religion is understood to admit and retain members is considered to be the way it “functions”’. Jews were ‘in’ by divine election, he stressed, not by laborious efforts to gain entry. They kept the laws (covenant obligations) as a function of membership within the religious system, any failure being remedied by the same religion’s provisions for repentance and atonement. It was only a matter of time before others would take up the corresponding phenomenon of leaving Judaism.34 These questions would not arise, however, if one did not posit ‘Judaism’ in the first place as the root category. Let us try a thought experiment. What would happen if we took a leaf from Martin Goodman’s magisterial Rome and Jerusalem, which methodically compares these two ‘ancient civilizations’,35 and applied our linguistic habit in speaking of Judaism in Judaea to Rome? Would it make sense to ask: ‘How did one get in and stay in Romism?’ Or, ‘How did one leave Romism?’ Such questions would be absurd, I suspect, and I have never heard anyone ask them. Why, then, should we not study Judaeans, their mother-polis, lawgiver, laws, customs, and individual characters such as Paul in the—historical—way we study other contemporary cultures, using the categories familiar to them? This is the root of my concern that placing Paul ‘within Judaism’ is thought somehow to be historical. The lexical categories known to Paul and his contemporaries, which had been around for centuries, permitted practically infinite individual variation. One belonged to a birth group (genos, ethnos), which had peculiar laws and customs, but humanity was gloriously diverse, a point that writers from Herodotus to Julian celebrated. How individual Persians, Romans, or Spartans behaved in relation to their ancestral traditions was another matter, and all to be played for. A Roman or Judaean male who felt perturbed by the degrees of fidelity to tradition, or the slovenly attitudes of the vulgus (hoi polloi, ‘ammei ha-aretz) toward ancestral norms, could always join a group with tough admission requirements and standards: a philosophical school (Stoics, Pharisees, 33 34 35

Sanders 1977: 17. Wilson 2004. Goodman 2007.

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Essenes), priestly college, purity club, particular synagogue, or literary coterie. Formal or informal initiation into such groups was real, and sometimes an ordeal. Certainly, one spoke of getting in and staying in such groups, such as the Essenes or the Alexandrian Museum fellowship. Once admitted among fellow-purists, members could safely share their peeves about the degradation of others. The larger society, the ethnos or the polis, had no such admission or exit requirements for the native born. Procreation has no membership standards. Before glancing over Paul’s letters to see how he related to his ancestral traditions, it is worth trying to get a sense of the diversity that is attested in this way. Loyalty to one’s ethnos and polis were axiomatic values, as we have seen (cf. Herodotus 3.38). But every literate person knew that new affiliations and changing identities were possible, whether individual or collective, whether voluntarily or under compulsion. This kind of thing was not framed as moving in or out of a religion or of Judaism, however. How was it framed? I have mentioned Laconism, or Spartanising, which is a famous example of cultural admiration and borrowing. The term referred in the first instance to those who allied with Sparta in the Peloponnesian War. But Sparta’s fiercely disciplined way of life also remained attractive (from a distance) throughout antiquity, and still among modern societies from imperial Britain to Soviet Russia. Ancient admirers included philosophers, who liked its constitution, and the young men who visited Laconia to see it in action—and faced periodic expulsion for the sake of maintaining cultural purity. In the opposite direction, Thucydides and the Spartans accused the Spartan king Pausanias of holding his own ancestral laws in contempt and favouring those of the Persians (1.132.1–2), a charge he turned back on them.36 There were no objective measures of such things, of course. It was then, as patriotism is today, a matter of perception. Individuals acted as they saw fit, and sometimes incurred the wrath of critics for appearing to be disloyal to ancestral traditions. Herodotus charged the Persian king Cambyses with forsaking his laws and everyone else’s (3.36–38). The Scythians were a fund of fascination on this score. The reported curiosity of some of their leaders about foreign wisdom led other Scythians to violence. Anacharsis, Toxaris, and Scyles did not cease to be Scythians, or even royals (much less leave a ‘Scythism’), when they returned home as Athenian citizens or devotees of the Great Mother Cybele. Rather, they were deemed sufficiently defective Scythians to be killed for abandoning their ancestral traditions, or

36

Lang 1967.

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foreignising as 2 Maccabees might have put it.37 There are surely parallels in modern societies. The general assumption was that the world’s ethnē had become distinct by evolving their customs as they gradually branched out from just a few root ethnē—Dorians and Ionians, Egyptians and Arabs among them. Judaeans, like Colchians and others, were thought to derive from Egyptian stock, while Arab Idumaeans had adopted Judaean laws under compulsion (Strabo 16.2.34), after which they became Judaeans in some sense (Josephus, AJ 13.258)—but were also still the distinct ethnos of Idumaeans (cf. BJ 4.233–82). Members of the Adiabenian royal family risked their lives when they embraced Judaean laws and customs in the 30s CE (AJ 20.17–96) and later fought Romans alongside fellow-Judaeans, though they did not cease to be Adiabenians.38 The countless others we hear about who associated with Judaean customs did so in different ways and degrees. Whatever passing Judaean contacts they had lacked any ‘curial’ authority to declare them ‘inside or outside Judaism’. Such language was simply not available. This is, incidentally, one reason why I prefer to render Ἰουδαῖος as ‘Judaean’ when I am interpreting ancient texts. I have never seen anyone render Ἰουδαία as anything other than Judaea, a simple transliteration, following the principle we normally use for foreign places and peoples. Since Ioudaioi frequently 37 38

Herodotus 4.76–80 with Josephus, Ap. 2.269; Lucian, Anacharsis, Toxaris, and The Scythian; Diogenes Laertius 1.101–105. With most scholars, Nanos 2015b theologises the Adiabene story. Nanos frames it for conversation with Paul (my emphasis): ‘The portrayal of King Izates sketched by Josephus is related in a story he purports to have taken place within Diaspora Judaism’ (110). And ‘Josephus characterizes the change that the non-Jew Izates makes to living like a Jew or practicing Judaism’; ‘Josephus makes no mention of Jewish communities  … very individualistic’; ‘Josephus places the story within a Diaspora setting’ (111) ‘Eleazar is … likely a Pharisee’; ‘the reader is made aware of two conflicting Jewish interpretations of what is faithful’ (116). The highlighted language is not in Josephus, who knows no ‘diaspora’, Judaism, Pharisee Eleazar, or ‘two interpretations of what is faithful’. This is PWJ terminology, already primed to assimilate Paul to it. Josephus’ language draws from the common lexical bank of his time: ‘About this time, Helena, queen of the Adiabenians, and her son Izates exchanged their way of life for the customs of the Judaeans (εἰς τὰ Ἰουδαίων ἔθη τὸν βίον μετέβαλον)’ (AJ 20.17–96). In AJ 20.48 (the only one of 10 πίστις-cognates in the story Nanos notices), Josephus is restating the lesson of Antiquities: that God watches human affairs and rewards those who follow him (AJ 1.14, 20; 10.277–78). As for the alleged individualism: Helena soon visits Jerusalem, sends famine relief for city, constructs a palace, and plans her burial there (20.49–53, 95). Her sons also send their boys for education there, where they participate fully in Judaean life and eventually, as committed Judaeans, in the coming conflict with Rome (20.71). Their Judaean identity has clear corporate entanglements and is not merely a matter of private belief or religion. Cf. Mason 2007: 506–508, and 2016b: 209–10.

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appear in texts juxtaposed with other people and place names, and the prevailing assumption was that a group’s place of origin said much about its character, rendering Ἰουδαῖος as ‘Judaean’ conveys those ancient connections—if that is my primary interest, and not modern concerns. This pairing also helps us to see that foreigners who emulated or embraced Judaean laws and customs did not join a ‘religion called Judaism’ but allied themselves with this ancient ethnos and its patrioi nomoi. Their original ethnos identity could not disappear, despite such changes in affiliation, which seems to have been an individually scaleable matter. That is why Josephus could delight in saying (in effect), of a dead literary opponent who had reinvented himself more than once: ‘You can take Apion out of Egypt, but you can’t take the Egyptian out of Apion!’ (Ap. 2.138–44). Identity was complicated then, as it probably is now. Such cultural comings and goings are particularly well known in relation to Judaean culture because of the relative wealth of evidence. Tacitus, Celsus, and Cassius Dio all complain about ‘those who have abandoned their own ways, professing those of the Judaeans’ (Celsus in Origen, C. Cels. 5.41; cf. Tacitus, Hist. 5.5). Dio adds that ‘Judaean’ is used for both native Judaeans and ‘all those who emulate their legal precepts, though being of another ethnos’ (Dio 37.17.1). From the Judaean side, Philo and Josephus talk of the welcome afforded to those who seriously wish to join their ethnos and live under their laws. They fully respect the hardships and ruptured family bonds that this can involve (Philo, Virt. 102–103; Josephus, BJ 2.463, 560; 7.45; Ap. 2.280–86). Since Moses’ laws reflect the very laws of nature, in Josephus’ view (AJ 1.18–23), Abraham the Chaldaean could embrace them proleptically long before Moses lived (1.154–68); the Adiabenians complete that work’s literary inclusio by embracing these laws in the last volume (20.17–96). In the Roman world particularly, the adoption of layered identities was not strange. Rome had extended its citizenship and identity to privileged foreigners, who added it to their existing identities with varying degrees of devotion.39 Josephus also recognised the opposite direction of traffic, though he was not pleased about it—Judaeans who failed to follow the laws of Moses or actually renounced them. Since the moral lesson of his Antiquities is that those who follow the laws find success, whereas those who violate them meet disaster (AJ 1.14, 20), the work furnishes examples of both kinds. Among the defaulters are various tyrants, rebels, kings including Saul and Herod, and high priests.40 The most famous alleged renouncer of Josephus’ time was Tiberius Julius 39 40

Eckstein 2006: 244–316; Revell 2009. E.g., Nimrod (1.114); Korah (4.15–19); Abimelech (5.234); Hophni and Phineas (5.338–39); Saul (6.262–68); common people (11.40); Alexander Jannaeus (13.377–405); Herod

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Alexander, nephew of Philo of Alexandria and the son of a pillar of the large Judaean community there. Josephus praises Tiberius Alexander’s actions as governor of Judaea and later of Egypt, but notes matter-of-factly that he ‘did not persevere in the ancestral customs’ (AJ 20.100). No terrible consequence follows in his case. Josephus is much more severe toward Antiochus of Antioch, son of the most eminent Judaean in that polis, because his defection brought disaster for his compatriots. Unnerved by anti-Judaean sentiment in the capital of Syria as the war was taking shape in the south of the province (67 CE), Antiochus tried to prove his Greek credentials by showing revulsion toward his native Judaean customs (τοῦ μεμισηκέναι τὰ τῶν Ἰουδαίων ἔθη). He not only offered Greek-style sacrifices, but urged the civic authorities of Antioch to compel other Judaeans to do the same, as a test of loyalty to their polis of residence. He also falsely accused his compatriots of plotting to burn Antioch down (BJ 7.47–53). A different kind of loyalty issue is pondered by Josephus in BJ 2.466–76. There, Judaeans from the heartland have launched indiscriminate reprisals against Syrian poleis in retaliation for the massacre of Judaeans in Caesarea (see Chapter 7). The Judaean minority in Scythopolis join their townsfolk in defending against these raids. But as soon as the external threat has passed, they become suspect as potential spies and traitors, and face a most unjust massacre. Josephus has described the Judaean raids across the region as the actions of an ethnos made ‘animal-like’ in vengeful brutality (2.458–60). But curiously, he also blames the Judaeans of Scythopolis for having killed those compatriots and sided with foreigners, actions that placed them ‘under a curse’ and polluted them (2.472–73). Using a regular dramatic technique, he singles out the best Judaean fighter, Simon, and crafts a mini-tragedy around him. He had been instrumental in saving Scythopolis. But now, under this fatalistic curse for having fought Judaeans, Simon resolved to kill his family and himself before the Scythopolitans could touch them. To cast Simon’s activity as ‘leaving Judaism’ by having fought against Judaeans would be absurd, as no such language existed. It would also obscure the tragic tone of Josephus’ account, which sympathetically highlights a reallife struggle of conflicting loyalties. Tiberius Alexander, Antiochus, and Simon were not following different ‘Judaic systems’ or Judaisms. They were all Judaeans, who made the unique choices that seemed best in their particular situations. And of course, we see them only through the literary construction of Josephus, not from an omniscient or even balanced perspective, let alone (17.304–308); Drusilla 20.143–44; Ananus II (20.197–203); Ananias and other chief priests (20.204–207).

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from their own point of view. We cannot ask them how they interpreted and applied Judaean ancestral tradition in connection with other aspects of their lives. No one today would take a conservative writer’s description of people deemed unpatriotic or un-American as any kind of proof of the person’s own views. Of the many ways in which one could (seem to) let observance of the ancestral laws slide, two others merit attention. The first appears in Philo’s famous remark that knowing the spiritual truth of scripture does not permit one ‘to dissolve the customs that more exalted and greater men than any of our time devised’ (Migr. 90). We do not know the real-life situation behind this passage. It raises the possibility that Philo knew of some Judaeans who took a purely philosophical approach toward the laws and so did not care about their practical observance. But it is not clear that such a group existed, for Philo may have been conjuring an extreme position for rhetorical purposes, as Paul seems to do in Romans at times. Second, the second chapter of Wisdom of Solomon, perhaps from Alexandria, seems to describe a conflict between Judaeans who were (perceived as) determined to enjoy life in the present, on one side, and the ‘righteous’, who accept the ancestral law and its constraints on pleasure in anticipation of a life to come (2.12).41 In any real human society, there must have been a wide range of thought and practice, and perceived thought and practice, in relation to observance of ancestral custom, as there was of Rome’s mos maiorum. Even civic officials who had to represent Rome’s national customs at public events may not have sincerely believed in them,42 and a Greek’s or Roman’s fascination with Egyptian or Judaean ways could go so far as to weaken native allegiances. I see no prospect of usefully categorising the kaleidoscope of individual possibilities, given the scope for contradiction even within individuals. In sum, just as there was no Judaism in Paul’s day, no authority could decide who was ‘in’ or ‘out’ of it. Just as a choice to join the Judaeans did not obliterate one’s Idumaean or Adiabenian birth identity, so becoming lax in relation to Judaean customs or following Greek or Roman ways did not stop one being Judaean—even if it caused rupture and scandal with family and friends. 41

42

The standard reading is challenged by Zurawski 2017. Even if he is right that this passage does not reflect an internal divide between more and less righteous Judaeans (I am not yet convinced), I stand by my general observations about human difference, ancient and modern. Cicero (Div. 2.33 [70]) and Pliny (Ep. 4.8) were both members of Rome’s prestigious College of Augurs, with no belief at all in the divination behind it. Cf. Polybius 6.56.7–12; Diodorus 1.2.2; 34/35.2.47 on the importance of traditions connected with superstitious belief for public order.

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Paul was indisputably a Judaean, for that was his ethnos by birth, and he faced the criticism of compatriots if he seemed so disloyal as to badmouth Judaea’s ancestral traditions (Acts 21.21–36). The path he chose, including his posture toward the laws of Moses and ancestral custom, needs to be understood in its particularity, as far as possible, not as a test of whether he was in or out of a system constructed by modern scholarship, borrowing from late-antique Christians. The next section sketches the beginnings of an approach to the historical Paul in his unique situation. 4

Paul’s Euangelion—In Relation to Judaean and Other nomoi

In asking how Paul presented himself to his groups, I follow four standard principles of historical research, which I lack the space to defend, namely: begin at the beginning, distinguish rhetoric from true beliefs, do not multiply entities unnecessarily, and work from the known to the unknown.43 Standard principles of interpretation require that we begin with 1 Thessalonians, which Paul could not have expected his audience to understand in light of Romans, try to understand it (not Paul’s psychology or formative influences) as his first audiences might have done, and work from what is clearest to what is less clear in his later letters. The unmissable theme of 1 Thessalonians, the earliest known text by a Christ-follower and valuable for that reason alone, is what Paul calls The Announcement (τὸ εὐαγγέλιον). The word is normally blandified as ‘the gospel’, but this is another case of anachronism. That translation, or rather that slogan-making (a step beyond ‘good news’), blurs the distinctions among cognates. The plural εὐαγγέλια and the cognate verb εὐαγγελίζομαι are fairly common in the LXX (23 occurrences) and across the NT library (53), found occasionally in classical literature and a dozen times each in Philo and Josephus. Treating all cognates together, however, conceals the distinctive profile of τὸ εὐαγγέλιον. This neuter singular with article does not appear at all in pre-Christian authors, not even the Septuagint. Also without the article, 43

Since the original version of this appeared, some correspondents have asked where I found these principles. I did not find them listed somewhere. They are my distillation, after a career as a historian, of the most relevant principles of method for this investigation into Paul. The last two belong to all scientific (wissenschaftlich) and critical thinking, the first two particularly to history. Foundations will be found (among much else in these studies and among many other studies) in Droysen 1893; Bloch 1953; Fischer 1970; Goldstein 1976; Tuchman 1982; Ranke 1983; and Collingwood 1994; see the Introduction to this volume.

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the singular noun is extremely rare, referring to some specific message.44 But then, the small NT explodes with 76 occurrences of εὐαγγέλιον, of which the vast majority (60) appear in Pauline and Paul-ish texts, fully 57 of these with the definite article, often without qualification as ‘The Announcement’. Paul obviously expected his audiences to know what he was talking about in using this term. By contrast, Luke, John and the Johannines, Hebrews, and reconstructed Q (also Coptic Thomas) lack τὸ εὐαγγέλιον altogether, though Luke-Acts is a heavy user of εὐαγγελίζομαι. Whatever we make of the outlier 1 Pet 4.17, therefore, εὐαγγέλιον language was not shared vocabulary among early Christ-followers. In case the distinction between a general plural and definite singular sounds pedantic, consider English usage. When someone refers to ‘messages’ we think nothing of it. Text and other messages are part of our daily reality. We live in a world of trivial messages. If, however, a colleague says ‘This weekend I’m attending a retreat to learn The Message’ (cue eerie music), the resonance is completely different. The singular noun and definite article make it so. We immediately want to know: What do you mean? What is The Message? The 1976 film by Moustapha Akkad used this title for a biography of Muhammad, precisely because it was so intriguing. Paul uses this loaded expression six times in the short letter we call 1 Thessalonians, glossing it variously as God’s, ours, or Christ’s. What was The Announcement? Before proceeding, we should register the evidential fact, generally missed, that the term looks to be distinctively Pauline. This becomes clear from a synoptic comparison of Mark with Matthew and Luke. Mark has a deep investment in Paul’s εὐαγγέλιον language. That work titles itself The Origin of The Announcement (Ἀρχὴ τοῦ εὐαγγελίου Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ: 1.1) and portrays Jesus himself proclaiming τὸ εὐαγγέλιον in his keynote (1.14, twice), before repeatedly identifying his mission with τὸ εὐαγγέλιον throughout the story (8.35; 10.29; 13.10; 14.9). Mark appears to be providing an origin or back-story for what people know as The Announcement, describing how it all began in Jesus’ life as he configures it. While salvaging what they can from Mark, in stunning contrast, Matthew and Luke methodically (and independently, according to the regnant hypothesis) remove this language from Jesus’ horizon. It belongs

44

The word was intelligible enough, but usually in the plural (‘news’). Even without the article, the singular is rare (Homer, Od. 14.152, 166; Josephus, BJ 4.240; Plutarch, Ages. 33.4; Demetr. 17.6; Mor. [Glor. Ath.] 347d twice). With the article, it is overwhelmingly Pauline and later Christian; Plutarch has it once with the article, but the article is demonstrative, referring to a report just given, not absolute as in Paul.

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with much that they find gauche in Mark, which in part motivated them to write their own stories of Jesus. To be sure, Matthew retains four occurrences of εὐαγγέλιον, but no longer in Mark’s absolute formulation, ‘The Announcement’. Matthew reworks the few instances it keeps as ‘the announcement of the Reign [of God]’ (Matt 4.23; 9.35; 24.14)—this text’s leitmotif. In one case Matthew uses the word mundanely for the report of a specific incident (26.13). Luke, for its part, makes no attempt to save the terminology at all, presumably because the author knows it to belong to the next generation and so expurgates it from Jesus’ world, in keeping with his programme of putting things in their proper sequence, unlike his predecessors (Luke 1.1–4). The simplest deduction from this evidence is that τὸ εὐαγγέλιον was known in the first century to be distinctively Pauline language. This would explain why Paul referred to his first visits to Philippi and Thessalonica as ‘the beginning of The Announcement’ (ἐν ἀρχῇ τοῦ εὐαγγελίου; Phil 4.15), anticipating Mark’s title, which however takes the audience much farther back, in a bold way Paul might not have recognised. In the second generation, only Mark, the first attempt to relate Jesus’ life, had sufficient sympathy with Paul’s mission to present an interpretation of Jesus’ mission in its terms.45 Many readers will doubt my framing of this linguistic issue, and that is proper. It is the way of criticism. But I would like to stress that I am mainly talking about facts here: the absence of τὸ εὐαγγέλιον before Paul, his heavy and distinctive use of it, Mark’s programmatic adoption of the theme, and the other gospels’ avoidance of it (Luke and John do not have it; Matthew reworks it). Others are welcome to frame these facts in ways more agreeable to their outlooks, but the facts must be explained somehow, not blurred away as though all early Christians were happy with τὸ εὐαγγέλιον. 45

It cannot be mere coincidence that the later authors remove Mark’s other distinctively Pauline emphases (along with τὸ εὐαγγέλιον): the untrustworthiness of Jesus’ family, including his generally esteemed brother James, the head of the Jerusalem Christ-group (Mark 3.21–35; 6.1–6); the obtuseness of Jesus’ first students and especially Peter, though he was James’ leading associate in Jerusalem; Jesus’ alleged preference for a spiritual family, not connected by natural bonds (3.35; 9.38–41); his alleged rupture with Judaean law (Mark 7.19); the lethal hostility of Judaean leaders toward Jesus ab initio (2.1–3.6); and Mark’s pervasive sense of apocalyptic imminence, which the author uses Pauline language to create (9.1; 13.30–37). By supplying birth narratives, endorsing Jesus’ students (adding redeeming endings to Mark’s episodes), situating Jesus in a world of Judaean observance, and delaying or qualifying his Judaean opposition, Matthew and Luke independently reconfigure such unwelcome Pauline themes to yield completely different impressions of a Jesus deeply embedded in Judaean culture and continuous with it—until later ruptures, in Galilee (Matthew) or chiefly in Jerusalem (Luke).

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Back to the earliest Christian text, then. Paul’s opening thanksgiving declares his confidence that the new Christ-group in this bustling port city has been selected for salvation or rescue, because of their trusting response to The Announcement, which Paul brought to them. They remain loyal despite much harassment from their neighbours (1.5). Fortunately for us, Paul elaborates on the content of The Announcement that he brought to them. Others in Hellas have heard, he exults, of how they (a) ‘turned to God—from mere images to a living and true God’ (1.9), (b) ‘to await his son from the heavens, whom he raised from the dead—(c) Jesus, who is rescuing us from the impending wrath’ (1.10). Of course, we do not know everything that Paul said during his visit. But we have reason to believe that this was the core of his Announcement or Message, because the remainder of the letter elaborates these points, while reiterating that they indeed constitute the heart of The Announcement (2.2, 4, 8, 9; 3.2). Paul even insists, apparently in response to their questions, that he has little to add now, in the interval before Christ’s return, to the Message he already gave them. Keep on keeping on! That the need to be prepared for Jesus’ imminent return dominates The Announcement we see even in incidental remarks (e.g., 2.12). Paul concludes the first part by saying that he writes in the hope of strengthening them so that they will be ‘blameless before our God and father at the arrival of our lord Jesus with all his holy ones’ (3.13), the event awaited in 1.10. He then responds to three concerns that have come up after his departure, apparently conveyed via Timothy, whom he had sent to check on their welfare. For the first and third of their concerns, Paul can only restate what he told them when he was present. ‘What should we do while waiting for Christ’s return?’ Do what I told you, only more (4.1–2): pursue holiness and abstain from sexual sin, each preserving his ‘vessel’ and avoiding lust, while loving each other and minding your own business (4.3–12). You ask me, ‘But when will it happen?’ As I told you, we don’t know (5.1–2). Just watch, wait, and be ready, because we aim to be rescued and not face the divine wrath that is coming (5.9; cf. 1.10). The only substantial insight that Paul adds responds to their middle question: about believers who die before the consummate event. Here he provides new information that he claims to have received from the risen Christ (4.15), namely: anyone who dies before the day will follow Christ’s own path of death first and then resurrection, rather than being caught up into the heavens with the living. In fact, the ‘dead in Christ’ will precede us, who remain alive, and we shall follow to meet them in the clouds. This news should console his audience (4.16–18). It is not clear whether someone has died, or is on the brink, or whether they have simply begun to wonder about the logical problem. In any case, Paul closes the letter by reaffirming the central point (5.23–24): that

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their spirit, mind, and body must be preserved ‘blamelessly intact at the arrival of our lord Jesus Christ. The one who calls you is trustworthy. He will do this!’ The entire letter, brief as it is, aims to consolidate Paul’s bond with those in Thessalonica who have trusted The Announcement. Before responding to their concerns, he expresses his joy at Timothy’s basically good report (3.1–12), because he had worried that their trust might have faltered in the face of abuse from their townsfolk (2.17–3.5). What does this first letter say about Paul’s own ethnos, its laws and customs? His Announcement has said nothing whatsoever about Torah, circumcision, covenant, scripture citations, Judaean tradition, calendar, or diet. Although we do not know everything he told them, it is inconceivable, in view of his own summaries and his responses to their central questions, that any of this was material during his visit. Scholars today know that Christos originates from Hebrew Mashiach–Messiah, but no such knowledge was necessary to understand his use of Christos.46 It was simply Christ’s name. Nothing that Paul says requires biblical knowledge. He does not even speak in Septuagintal tones about ‘idols’ as a self-evident evil in 1 Thess 1.9–10, or mention the second commandment. He frames his followers’ move from mere ‘representations’ (εἴδωλα) to the ‘living and true’ God, in language that would have been perfectly intelligible to Greeks. Greek philosophers had long thought that one true, ineffable God stood supreme over all representations.47 Greeks also knew about children of gods being restored after death or removal to the underworld (Dionysus-Osiris, Attis, Persephone). Paul had only to convince his non-Judaean audiences that God had raised the crucified Jesus Christ and made him their lord, who would soon return to rescue them—a belief that Lucian and Celsus would ridicule as appealing only to the gullible.48 This Paul succeeded in doing, with at least a few, and that claim formed the heart of The Announcement. Although this letter to non-Judaean Christ-followers makes no call on biblical knowledge, its incidental reference to Judaeans is revealing. Speaking about the abuse that Christ-followers in Thessalonica must endure from their neighbours in the short interval before Christ’s return (1.6; 2.1; 3.3–4), Paul tries to console them with the thought that this is not new or peculiar to them. They are only suffering from their compatriots what earlier Christ-followers, 46 47 48

This is demonstrable. Cf. Pliny, Ep. 10.96; Tacitus, Ann. 15.44; Suetonius, Claud. 25.4 (Chrestus); Josephus, AJ 20.200. Plato, Phaed. 78d; Tim. 27d–29a; Aristotle, Met. 1071a–b; Cicero, Nat. d. 2.28; Epictetus in Arrian, Diatr. 1.3 etc.; Tacitus, Hist. 5.4–5; Celsus in Origen, C. Cels. 1.24; 5.41; Diogenes Laertius 1.6; cf. Jaeger 1947: 38–54 on Xenophanes and the criticism of Homer’s polytheism. Lucian, Passing of Peregrinus; Celsus in Origen, C. Cels. 5.14–16 (and Origen seeks to defend a basically Pauline view, with slight adjustments).

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including Paul, faced from his compatriots: ‘the Judaeans, who killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove us out, and displease God and oppose all humanity, hindering us from speaking to the nations that they might be saved’ (2.14–16). This outburst vividly depicts a rupture between Christ-followers and contemporaries who reject the asserted revelation, whether they are Judaean or Greek. Scholars of a previous generation, in the hindsight certainty that condign punishment of Jews for rejecting Christ (2.16) was too close to post-70 Christian claims to be anything else, declared at least this part of the passage a postPauline interpolation. That option has now fallen out of favour, and rightly so.49 There is no reason to deny that Paul wrote the passage. It makes good sense where it is, and any number of incidents in the 30s or 40s might have been considered divine punishment. It is somewhat amusing to observe that the prevailing PWJ momentum in scholarship has turned a passage that once looked so obviously hostile to Judaeans into a perfectly normal internal Judaean conflict nowadays.50 But there is nothing in Paul’s language to suggest internal debate. If we read his words and his rhetoric, without resorting to Romans or other material unavailable to his audience in Thessalonica, the point seems clear: all heaven-bound Christ-followers will face ‘persecution’ from the champions of ethnos-custom, from outsiders to this faith, whether those outsiders are Judaean, as in his case, or Greek, for the Thessalonians. The spectrum of ways in which other Judaean Christ-followers reacted to pressure from their compatriots is another matter, irrelevant to Paul’s points to the Thessalonians. He will later charge that some of these Judaean Christfollowers, based in Jerusalem, caved in to persecution from their compatriots, and that this explains their hostility to his mission among non-Judaeans (Gal 6.12), the point mentioned in 1 Thessalonians. He was driven out and vigorously opposed by ‘the Judaeans’, a situation independently supported by the author of Acts 21. Paul himself will regularly resort to the language of ‘new 49 50

Pearson 1971. Rollens 2016 offers an insightful précis of research. Her own proposal, however, has a certain circularity (pre-70 Christians could not have opposed Jews because they were both ‘varieties of Judaism’, 118) and the multiplication of entities: the passage is ‘an effort to form the identity of the nascent Thessalonian group, incorporating it into a wider mythic narrative—in this case, the narrative of Deuteronomistic theology … widespread among other Jewish texts’ (129, emphasis added). Van Houwelingen 2018, arguing that Paul’s ‘sharp criticism of the Jews … is moderated by the fact that he himself was Jewish’ (118, emphasis added) and that Paul does not speak against ‘Judaism as such’ (129), further illustrates the circularity. He does not speak against Judaism or paganism (or Arian theology), indeed, but he had also never heard of them. Hurd 1986 brought a rare historical sensitivity to the question.

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creation’ to stress the radical disjunction between Christ-following and maintaining any such former commitments: the old has passed away (2 Cor 5.17; Gal 6.15). As far as the rest of his surviving letters permit us to judge, Paul remained devoted to The Announcement for the rest of his life, continuing to use this language as his key term. The last letter of his undisputed corpus, indeed, he frames as a defence of The Announcement (Rom 1.15–16), for which God has uniquely chosen him (1.1), addressing himself to a group of Christ-followers that he did not establish, who seem to be sceptical of his Announcement. Paul tells them that he has by now fully proclaimed The Announcement in the eastern Roman Empire, and so wants to proceed to ‘the remainder’ of the nations in the west (Rom 15.17–28; cf. 1.13). In passing, he will bring his Announcement, with which he has been uniquely entrusted by God, also to these Christ-followers, because he is not in fact ashamed of it (Rom 1.15–16; cf. 1.1). If Paul had been free to continue touring The Announcement throughout the Roman world without interference or challenge, it seems likely that subsequent letters would have resembled 1 Thessalonians. That is, he would gather a following of believers, leave town, and send an emissary for a follow-up visit. Those who remained faithful would send questions back with the emissary, which Paul would answer in an effort to consolidate their trust. But then, perhaps most of Paul’s letters would not have been preserved. Things were not to be so simple, at any rate. This was mainly because other impressive Christ-teachers vehemently disagreed with Paul, and they made their influence felt among his groups of converts. If his later letters are more complex and problematic than 1 Thessalonians, that is largely because these people were influencing his groups—intentionally or not—with very different interpretations of Jesus. He had to respond in ways that would both sustain his views and parry their criticisms, while also addressing the question of their relative status as Christ’s emissaries. That letters reflect at best only one side of a conversation or debate explains why so many of them seem to hedge and waffle. This is especially clear with Romans, his longest letter, written with a half-apology for stepping on someone else’s turf (Rom 15.14–24). When faced with those challenges, Paul had to make adjustments and finesse the straightforward propositions of 1 Thessalonians. As Sanders observed, and this point is germane to our subject, it was only when facing these challenges that Paul discussed issues of Judaean law and custom—because the others had raised them and criticised him from that perspective.51 To what extent his deeper views may have changed as he penned his letters remains unclear to us, as it 51

Sanders 1977: 434–42.

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may have been to him, in part because of the impossibility of penetrating his rhetoric in most cases. But if we begin with the proposition that we have an idea of Paul’s Announcement as he presented unfiltered, in 1 Thessalonians, and that he was more or less trying to defend it in his later letters, while adjusting it rhetorically as needed, his letters look broadly coherent—if contradictory in the usual human way on particular points. 1 Corinthians, apparently his next extant letter, assumes that much has happened since his founding visit there, following the trip south after Thessalonica. He has come and gone, returning to Ephesus in Asia. Other teachers have passed through Corinth in the meantime. In Paul’s words: ‘I laid a foundation, and another is building over it; let each take care how he builds over it!’ (1 Cor 3.10). The over-builders he names are Apollos, described in Acts (18.24–28) as a Judaean teacher and orator from Alexandria, and the man most prominent among Jesus’ direct students, Cephas (his Aramaic name in Greek) or Peter (translated), a Galilean fisherman according to the gospels, who has surprisingly travelled abroad with his wife. Most remarkably, Jesus’ brothers and their spouses are apparently known, directly or by reputation, to the Corinthians (9.5–6). Whatever the intentions of those visitors may have been, some of Paul’s converts have come to find their ideas more appealing, and even describe themselves as followers of Apollos or Cephas (1.11–12; 3.22). Paul has already written to the group at least once after his departure (5.9). We know nothing much about that lost letter, or much else that was happening. It would be very interesting to know what was appealing, perhaps even from Jesus’ family members. Paul gives only hints, the most remarkable being that some in Corinth, though Christ-followers, ‘say there is no resurrection’ (15.12). It seems that Apollos is Paul’s most immediate concern, for Paul singles him out as the main builder on his foundation (3.4–11). In the same passage, Paul disparages wisdom and rhetoric (4.6), while apparently punning on Apollos’ name (1.19: ἀπολῶ τὴν σοφίαν τῶν σοφῶν). Tellingly, the Corinthians ask Paul via Timothy when Apollos will return (16.12). It is not clear that they were as eager for Paul, given that he urgently dispatches Timothy again, calling him ‘my beloved child and trustworthy in the lord, who will remind you of my ways in Christ Jesus’. In the same defensive posture he threatens his own follow-up visit, bringing a stick to enforce discipline (4.17–21). When he does eventually return, it is indeed a ‘painful’ visit, as he later reflects, which caused a serious rift between Paul and this group of Christ-followers that he established (2 Cor 1.23–2.7).

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In this febrile atmosphere, the clearest issues of debate (aside from the non-trivial question of loyalty) seem to arise from those who have come to see Christ-following as more about finding a kind of fulness, knowledge, and peace in this life, than suffering misery until Christ’s heavenly return (4.8–13). Other concerns, which Paul has heard by various means (7.1), are easy to link up with this picture, though we cannot join the dots with confidence: whether one should stop engaging with the world while awaiting Christ’s return, especially in relation to marriage (chapter 7: he advises against it in light of the imminent end); what is wrong with eating good meat, even if it comes to market from temple sacrifices (chapters 8–10; he prefers not); manifestations of ‘spiritual gifts’ such as ecstatic utterances and prophecy (chapters 12–14); and the central question of what resurrection means, for Christ and his followers—the very heart of Paul’s Announcement, which some now doubt (15.12). For our question, the main point is that Judaean law and tradition are still not explicit concerns, in this second-longest of Paul’s letters and among its many subjects. Paul does, however, cite a few carefully chosen scriptural proof-texts.52 These scattered passages, like his quotations of Jesus’ sayings and other texts (2.9; 15.32–33), serve his arguments about being ‘in Christ’. They do not resemble midrash, or an attempt to find deeper meaning in the context of scripture, and do not suggest a concern to live by the Torah. Nevertheless, he does cite scripture a few times, and we need to ask why, and what it could have meant for his audiences, which seem to be non-Judaean (12.2). One explanation might be that his Judaean rivals had made much of Torah in their teaching, and so he felt the need to show that he could use it also, in support of his Announcement. But there may be more to it, that would take us to the complexity of his life and of all human life. For Paul also mentions Judaean holidays that he is observing (16.8). His reference to Passover (5.7) suggests that he shares this major Judaean holiday with his followers. Then again, this might reflect Christian practice in commemorating Christ’s death and resurrection at Passover-time. We do not know. One thing that is clear, but easily forgotten today, is that the ancient world had no default calendar, as we have. In our world, many people mainly follow traditional Jewish, Muslim, or Chinese calendars in their daily lives, and those (largely lunar) calendars are known by name to the rest of the world. But the world runs, for the sake of international communication and commerce, on the western (Roman-Christian) solar calendar. Books are published around the 52

E.g., 1 Cor 1.19, 31 (omitting the reference to knowledge from Jer 9.23); 9.9; 10.1–8, 26; 14.2; 15.54–55.

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world with this ‘common era’ date for the sake of cataloguing, even if a traditional date also appears. The ancient world had no such defaults. Each polis had its own calendar, festivals, and holidays, its own new year’s day(s), usually in spring or autumn, its own number and structuring of months, and its own month names.53 Even seven-day weeks and weekends were not normative. The Judaean calendar, connected with Jerusalem, was the one in which Paul had been raised. But it was not followed even elsewhere in southern Syria (Ascalon, Caesarea, Scythopolis, etc.). To reject it, he would have had to adopt the calendar of some other polis, with the sacred festivals and sacrifices of Ephesus, Corinth, or Rome. Why would he do that, especially if he considered all local customs defunct as he awaited Christ? It is not difficult to imagine Paul continuing to pattern his life by the calendar with which he was raised, even though he thought that Christ’s resurrection and imminent return put all laws and traditions in the shade. After all, most people who have parted from any Christian belief still recognise or even celebrate Christmas and Easter. Real life is not an academic seminar or an exercise in rigorous logic. That Paul gave some thought to Passover, even if he and his converts interpreted it in light of Christ’s death, then, and that he took time off for Shavuot (Pentecost) a few weeks later, is not surprising. These are fascinating glimpses into his calendar, which again he may have mentioned to reinforce his knowledge of Judaean realia in the face of challengers. But nothing suggests that he was teaching his gentile converts to adopt Judaean law. All indications are against that. In Paul’s remaining letters to groups he established, Moses’ laws become an ever more prominent issue, forced onto centre stage by his conflicts with others. From Phil 3.2–21 it appears that someone is telling his gentiles that in order to be true Christ-followers they must observe Judaean nomoi. In response, Paul makes it clear that he considers his own Judaean past less than worthless now, ‘on account of the better possession of the knowledge of Christ Jesus my lord’. He excoriates the ‘dogs’ who call for his people to be circumcised. What he includes as ‘loss’, or even—a word unfit for church reading—excrement (σκύβαλα), which he formerly valued (3.8), include his Judaean ancestry, circumcision, association with the Pharisees, and zeal for Torah. None of that matters now, he declares (3.9), not because he has begun following a different ‘Judaism’ but because Christ’s revelation and imminent return render his ethnos-nomos heritage irrelevant. All humanity is to be rescued now on the same basis, by trust in Christ. Confident that ‘our politeuma is in heaven’, he rails against the teachers who demand affiliation with an earthly community. He does not see 53

See Bickerman 1968; Samuel 1972; Hannah 2005.

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them as fellow-teachers, though they are Christ-followers: their ‘end is destruction’ (3.17–21). 2 Corinthians shows Paul even more distracted by teachers who apparently stress their authentic Hebrew descent and apostleship, who offer a ‘different Jesus’ (2 Cor 10.12–11.23). They too will meet a horrible end (11.15). This letter or its sequel if 2 Corinthians is composite (2 Cor 1–9), steps boldly on the Judaisers’ turf with a radical re-reading of the Sinai story. Paul claims that Moses himself knew that Torah’s glory was temporary and fading—a fact that Moses had to conceal by placing a covering over his head. Five times in a short space (3.7, 11, 13, 14, 17) Paul repeats that Moses’ law has been ‘nullified’ by the greater glory of Christ (ὅτι ἐν Χριστῷ καταργεῖται). Galatians develops the same position, as it seeks to prove from the law, for those now enthralled by its observance, that it is obsolete. Moses’ law lasted only until Christ’s arrival (Gal 3.1–4.7). ‘The present Jerusalem … is in slavery with her children’ (4.25). In sum, Paul’s letters to his own assemblies present a coherent picture of the relationship between his Announcement and his ancestral, Judaean traditions, a subject forced on him by teachers who call for Judaising. Granted, the surviving letters are hardly uniform in details. For decades, scholars have been developing three main lines of explanation for their differences: an evolution in his thinking;54 a stable matrix or core adapted to contingencies;55 or human inconsistency or carelessness.56 From a historical perspective, however, one might ask why these occasional letters should have to shoulder any burden of ‘consistency’,57 a standard we would not dream of applying to Plato, Cicero, or Pliny, let alone any modern correspondent. Here again we can see unusual, not quite historical, methods applied to the study of Paul. At any rate, Paul’s posture toward his Judaean past is one of the more consistent features of his letters, before Romans. The Announcement is about a radically ‘new creation: the old has gone away’ (2 Cor 5.17; Gal 6.15). He continues to prepare himself and the chosen (= those who trust The Announcement) for evacuation from the impending wrath of God, to be with Christ in heaven—a scenario that would attract Porphyry’s criticism that human bodies do not belong in heavenly spheres.58 Partly anticipating this objection, it seems, Paul insists that preparation for heavenly ascent requires both a freedom from

54 55 56 57 58

E.g., Buck and Taylor 1969. E.g., Beker 1990. E.g., Räisänen 1987. Räisänen 1987: xi–xvi. Porphyry (vel sim.) in Macarius Magnes, Apocr. 4.2; in Hoffmann 1994: 68–69.

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carnal attachment and a final transformation to spirit, following Christ’s example, before the upward journey (1 Cor 15.50–53). Since Paul attached The Announcement to a historical figure whom he had not personally known, but others had known intimately, his Announcement was likely to put their noses out of joint. After a brief meeting with Peter and Jesus’ brother in Jerusalem, he steered clear of the Judaean mother-polis. When he returned there after fourteen years, he says, he did so only because of ‘a revelation’ and not because he respected any summons—though he worried that these influential Christ-followers could sink his project (Gal 2.2). It is unclear that they ever did accept his Announcement. Even when trying to put the best face on the encounter, Paul can cite only his promise that he would speak to non-Judaeans exclusively, and ‘remember the poor’ in Jerusalem. With this, they politely shook hands and sent him off (Gal 2.2–10). The ‘pillars’ also did some travelling, however, as we have seen, and became known to Paul’s groups. Whether or not they intended to interfere, their assumption that Christ-followers should follow Judaean laws became known, and they were undoubtedly an impressive group. Either they or people claiming to represent them propagated such views. In dismissing their claims, Paul used his own formidable knowledge of scripture, from his past life, to claim the law’s temporary nature and displacement by Christ. Paul’s restriction of Moses’ law to a bygone period helps to explain the repeated floggings by Judaean compatriots that he mentions (2 Cor 11.24). Moses’ law was, after all, the foundation of Judaean life throughout the empire: the law that minority communities in many places had a hard-won permission to observe, exempting them from the prevailing laws in many poleis.59 Outsiders occasionally enjoyed ridiculing Moses as a supposed outcast from Egypt: a magician, leper, or deeply anti-social.60 Judaeans did not need one of their own feeding such deprecations, just as they did not need Antiochus of Antioch undermining their legitimacy and threatening the community standing there (Josephus, BJ 7, above). That the Judaean Paul was basing his claims on post-mortem appearances of a man crucified as a criminal in Jerusalem made his work all the more odious. 59

60

Virtually every page of Josephus’ Antiquities and Against Apion, composed for Roman audiences in the first instance, is about the excellence of Moses’ laws as those governing Judaean life. Outside observers never doubted that Moses was the lawgiver under whose ordinances Judaeans everywhere lived, e.g.: Hecataeus of Abdera in Diodorus 40.3.38; Apollonius Molon in Josephus, Ap. 1.145; Diodorus 34/35.1.1–5; Strabo, Geogr. 16.2.34–46; Tacitus, Hist. 5.2–4. See Molon and Tacitus in the previous note.

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Even Acts, though it is generally a calming and homogenising narrative, claims that when Judaeans from Asia spotted Paul near Jerusalem’s temple, they were outraged because he was ‘teaching everyone everywhere against the people, the law, and this place’ (Acts 21.28). The same text claims that Christfollowing Judaeans, who still insisted on maintaining Judaean law, were likewise under the impression that Paul was teaching ‘all Judaeans living among the nations defection from Moses: advising them not to circumcise their children or continue in the customs’ (21.21). These impressions are difficult to explain as the invention of such an author. Left with only tiny fragments from Paul’s life, we do not know what he said to Judaeans he encountered in his travels, unless Romans fits that bill. But in writing to the Corinthians he appears to say that, despite his agreement in Jerusalem, he did talk with Judaeans when the opportunity arose, and his goal was always to win them over to The Announcement (1 Cor 9.19–23): While being free from all, I have enslaved myself to all, so that I might win more. To the Judaeans I became as a Judaean, that I might win Judaeans; to those under law as one under law, though I am certainly not under law myself, that I might win those under law; to the law-less as law-less—though I certainly am not law-less with God, but in the ‘law of Christ’—that I might win the law-less. To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I became all things to all people so that by all means I might save some. And I do all that because of The Announcement, so that I might be a partaker in it with others. It is hard to see how Paul could have put more starkly the primacy of The Announcement in his thinking. Feeling an imperative to ‘rescue’ as many as possible, he persuades Judaeans and foreigners in whatever language will work, though he claims no attachment except to The Announcement—and is certainly not ‘under law’. I can almost hear any colleagues who may still be reading objecting, ‘Yes, but what about Romans?’ The question I proposed at the outset concerned Paul’s letters to the groups he founded. Even there, my interest is not in his internal thoughts or formative influences, which can only be conjectured, but in how his letters present his relationship to Judaean ancestral law. When Paul comes to write Romans, his proclamation of The Announcement is over in the east (Rom 15.18–28). Rome had apparently not been on his itinerary, in part because the group there was founded by others. But now, since he has decided to go as far as Spain to reach ‘the remainder’ of the gentiles, he can

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hope to visit Rome without causing offence, en passant. His groups in Philippi, Thessalonica, Corinth, or Galatia did not know his letter to the Romans, however, and that is why I have ignored it while trying to understand his correspondence with them. That said, the Romans reflex is so forceful in scholarship that I should make a brief effort to reconcile it with the rest. Following our principle of stressing what is clearest, we can see immediately that Romans continues to present The Announcement as proprietary. He is called as ‘apostle set apart for The Announcement of God’ (κλητὸς ἀπόστολος ἀφωρισμένος εἰς εὐαγγέλιον θεοῦ; 1.1, 9). He explains to this audience that ‘according to my Announcement’ Christ will return to judge the world (2.16), ties The Announcement exclusively to his work among the nations (10.16; 11.28; 15.16, 19), and concludes with a greeting based on ‘my Announcement’ (16.25). What his audience believes about Christ, tellingly, he calls not The Announcement, but rather ‘your kind of teaching’ or ‘the teaching that you learned’ (6.17; τὴν διδαχὴν ἣν ὑμεῖς ἐμάθετε; 16.17). As we have seen, he plans to bring his Announcement to them because he is not ashamed of it (1.15–16). He writes partly in preparation for that visit, but also for more urgent reasons. Heading now to Jerusalem, to convey the financial gift he has raised from his assemblies, he appeals to the Romans for support in ensuring that the gift will be accepted, and that he will be protected from ‘unbelievers’ or the unpersuaded in Judaea (15.25–32). Why seek the support of Roman Christ-followers before heading to Jerusalem? Romans, in marked contrast to Paul’s other letters, assumes the audience’s Judaean perspectives, knowledge of the Bible, and even technical terms (3.25). It uniquely calls Abraham ‘our physical ancestor’ (4.1), addresses the audience as Judaeans who know the law, and adopts ‘we’ language with them (2.17, 23, 27; 3.9; 7.1), while consistently speaking of gentiles in the third person (even at 11.13, telling his audience ‘Now I am speaking to the nations/ gentiles’). Since the letter hardly says anything without a scriptural proof-text, it seems to me most likely that these Christ-followers are Judaeans. I do not expect many NT readers to agree. But this is to explain how I reconcile this letter with Paul’s main corpus. For example, uncharacteristically falling over himself to be polite, addressing a group he did not establish (1.11–12), Paul bobs and weaves to defend The Announcement from specifically Judaean criticisms. Circumcision and Judaean identity have enormous value, he stresses (3.1–2)—although not with respect to salvation in Christ (3.30). Is the law finished with, or is it sin? Perish the thought! (3.31; 7.12)—although the law is there to point to Christ and is otherwise irrelevant (3.21; 4.14; 10.4). Has God abandoned Israel? Of course not! How could anyone imagine such a thing? (9.2–6a). Then again, not all ‘Israel’ are really Israel, are they? (9.6b). God’s

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choice of Israel is irrevocable, and so all Israel will be saved—at least those who accept The Announcement (11.25–32). The two-covenant (Sonderweg) reading of Rom 11.26—all Judaeans will be saved without following Christ—could seem to make sense if the line were taken by itself. If so, however, an editor might have advised Paul to express himself more clearly, without all the distracting build-up of chapters 1 through 8, or such remarks as at 11.14 shortly before: ‘might save some of them’. It is hard to imagine another historical figure (cf. Churchill, Roosevelt, Tony Blair) from whom we would pull out one remark, from a single letter or speech prepared for an unusual audience, and insist that this line was the foundation of his thinking. The overwhelming evidence of both Paul’s other letters and of Romans itself, as well as the reaction against Paul evident in his letters (Galatians; Philippians 3) and Acts 21, suggest that Paul considered it supremely important to follow Christ as he, though a Judaean by birth, has done. Although this arguably last letter is preoccupied with Judaean issues, most scholars understand it to have been written primarily for gentiles.61 I find it easier to understand as an example of the principles Paul boasts of in 1 Cor 9.19–23 (above): speaking to Judaeans as a Judaean for the sake of The Announcement. For our question, however, it does not matter greatly whether Romans’ audience comprised Judaeans or devotees of Jupiter Optimus Maximus. Either way, ‘Judaism’ does not appear in it and is not an issue. As for Paul’s relationship with his ancestral traditions, while he says every reassuring thing he can about Israel and the law of Moses, he still clings relentlessly to The Announcement, which posits rescue (salvation) only for those who trust Christ, whether they are gentiles or Judaeans. 61

Kümmel 1975: 309: ‘essentially a debate between the Pauline gospel and Judaism, so that the conclusion seems obvious that the readers were Jewish Christians’, except that ‘the letter contains statements which indicate specifically that the community was Gentile Christian’, and ‘Any attempt to gain a picture of the readers of Rom[ans] must be made from this established point of view.’ Cf. Das 2007 and Elliott 2007, both of which highlight the Jewish content but insist on a gentile audience. Alleged proof of a gentile audience is found in Rom 1.5–6, 13; some translations embed this assumption (NRSV, NIV, ESV). But in the first passage, Paul mentions his own work among the nations (ἐν πᾶσιν τοῖς ἔθνεσιν; cf. Gal 1.16; 2.2; Acts 15.12; 21.19) and before ingratiatingly comparing his audience, ‘among whom you also are called of/for Christ’ (ἐν οἷς ἐστε καὶ ὑμεῖς κλητοὶ Ἰησοῦ Χριστοῦ; cf. 1 Pet 2.12). He says only that he and they are likewise among (ἐν) the nations (cf. Acts 21.21 on Judaeans: τοὺς κατὰ τὰ ἔθνη πάντας Ἰουδαίους). In 1.13 Paul writes προεθέμην ἐλθεῖν πρὸς ὑμᾶς … ἵνα τινὰ καρπὸν σχῶ καὶ ἐν ὑμῖν καθὼς καὶ ἐν τοῖς λοιποῖς ἔθνεσιν. Although scholars usually read τοῖς λοιποῖς ἔθνεσιν as ‘[to] the other gentiles’ (in addition to you), the ordinary sense of τοῖς λοιποῖς is ‘[to] those remaining, the rest’. Given Paul’s plan to stop in Rome en route to the west, it is easier to see here as a distinction between the Romans and the remainder of the gentiles he plans to reach; cf. Mason 2009: 303–28.

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From Solution to Problem

Although I obviously depart from Sanders’ approach in avoiding ‘Judaism’ or ‘patterns of religion’, and in not assuming that Paul had to be a coherent thinker,62 Sanders’ picture of Paul’s relationship to his ancestral tradition seems to me about right in important ways. It explains what Paul says to his ‘assemblies’ better than the NP can. He says that his encounter(s) with the risen Christ transformed his life. Without that transformative experience, Paul would have remained devoted to his ancestral tradition, and persecuting Christ-followers for their departures from Judaean law and custom. Following the encounter, however, all that matters is union with Christ and preparing for his return, in the meantime fulfilling Paul’s mission to bring The Announcement to the nations. To be ‘in Christ’ is to be a ‘new creation’, which renders all existing structures and allegiances, laws and customs, with no point or purpose. Whereas I cannot follow Sanders’ view that Paul followed a ‘pattern of religion’ very different from Judaism’s ‘covenantal nomism’, I do share his impression from the letters that Paul’s encounter with Christ led him to jettison everything that came before, including all earth-bound law and custom. He had not had a problem with it before, but the encounter with Christ—a solution—led him to see it as a problem. There seems to be strong confirmation in this understanding of Paul from what came later. Precisely that claim by Christ-followers to be free from nomoi would be central in outsider criticism, as we see in Celsus, Tertullian, Minucius Felix, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen among others (Part 1 above). Dunn’s 1982 lecture launched ‘The New Perspective on Paul’, but in a roundabout way. In the published version he first allows that, among the many contributions to Pauline studies of past decades, only Sanders’ Paul and Palestinian Judaism deserves the accolade of a ‘new perspective on Paul’.63 Thus far it seems that Sanders’ view is the new perspective. So it comes as a surprise to read that Dunn applauds everything in Sanders’ book except its view of Paul. This Dunn considers actually retrograde, inferior even to the old Lutheran Paul.64 An even bigger surprise is Dunn’s reasoning: ‘The Lutheran Paul has been replaced by an idiosyncratic Paul who in arbitrary and irrational manner turns his face against the glory and greatness of Judaism’s covenant theology and abandons Judaism simply because it is not Christianity.’65 Dunn imagines 62 63 64 65

Sanders 1977: 433. Dunn 1983. Dunn 1983: 102–103. Dunn 1983: 109.

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Paul as one of a class of Jews who became Christ-followers, whose members must therefore have had similar reasons.66 This assumption leads him to reject Sanders’ ‘arbitrary and abrupt discontinuity between Paul’s gospel and Jewish past’. Dunn prefers to see Paul, and others like him, reasoning himself into following Christ—from scripture, as a Jew who was concerned only about the too-narrow ‘nationalist and racial’ character of contemporary Judaism. Being committed to ancestral tradition, Dunn proposes, Paul saw in adherence to Christ a means of dropping the ‘badges’ of Jewish exclusivity, and that is why Paul and his group followed Christ. ‘Logic’, ‘argument’, and ‘corollaries’ appear more than half a dozen times each in the latter part of this famous lecture. But the ancient recipients of Paul’s letters were perhaps more willing than modern professors to believe that God spoke to people, as Paul himself repeatedly claims. So they might not have found Sanders’ understanding of Paul’s abrupt reversal so ‘arbitrary’ or ‘irrational’. Is it arbitrary or irrational to do what God tells you? The author of Acts thematises necessary obedience to divine instruction revealed in sudden encounters with heavenly visions and voices, irrespective of human preference, to explain Christian origins. He uses Paul as Exhibit A (9.3–19; 26.19). Should Paul have remonstrated with the divine presence: ‘Well this is all very flattering, but could you offer a seminar for me and my Jewish friends? If you can convince us that this is all grounded in scripture, and if we can all be apostles (I wouldn’t wish to be idiosyncratic), I’ll consider your offer’? Dunn’s assumption that Paul was one of a class, the members of which must have followed Christ from similar reasoning, is the root of the problem. It is hard to square with anything Paul says between Phil 3.2 and Galatians 6, with Romans in the bargain. Paul’s bold claims of personal selection, revelation, and unique authority leap out: ‘When the one who had set me apart from my mother’s womb and called me … was pleased to reveal his son to me, that I might proclaim him among the nations, I did not consult with flesh and blood’ (Gal 1.15–16). ‘Am I not an apostle? Have I not seen Jesus …? Are you not my work in the lord? … You are the seal of my apostleship!’ (1 Cor 9.1). ‘Last of all … he appeared to me. … I am what I am … I struggled far more than all of them [apostles] put together’ (15.8, 10). ‘I reckon myself in no way behind the oh-so-grand apostles’ (2 Cor 11.5). No less, Paul speaks pervasively of his abrupt change, novelty, and disjunction: ‘If one is in Christ, it’s a new creation. The old things went away. Look: new things have come to be!’ (Gal 6.15). He 66

Dunn 1983: 101 (my emphasis): ‘Paul was by no means the only Jew who became a Christian and it is difficult to see such an arbitrary jump from one “system” to another commending itself quite as much as it … did to so many of his fellow Jews.’

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formerly pursued the ancestral traditions with zeal, but now regards those who read scripture without Christ as veiled and blinded by ‘the god of this age’ (2 Cor 3.17–4.4). If Paul’s Announcement had been more in the vein of ‘I’m OK, you’re OK’, or ‘I’ve discovered a new reading of Isaiah that you might consider’, it would surely not have generated such urgency, or intense controversy. Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), founder of a modern philosophy of history, warned against five prejudices that ensnare historians. He explained the third, ‘the conceit of the scholars’, as ‘delight in fancying an inaccessible esoteric wisdom among the ancients, coinciding miraculously with the opinions professed by each one of themselves [the modern scholars], which they dress in the garb of antiquity in order to enforce their acceptance.’67 That is to say, we imagine that the ancients must have thought as we do, ignoring their unavoidable weirdness as figures from an alien past. Classicists and biblical exegetes— I say this as a fully complicit commentator—are especially prone to this fallacy because of the great distance between us and the world we study and yet the very hominess of ‘Judaeo-Christian’ tradition, which we feel that we know and own. We suppose that we understand it intuitively. Dunn’s call for a rational, moderate, scholarly Paul seems to me to embody this pull, which we all feel in some way. But it is not the way of history, which begins with not knowing and the assumption of alienness. 6

Conclusion

Most historical questions are worth pursuing even if we cannot definitively answer them. When we investigate why an actor in the past did something, or why an event occurred, we are immersing ourselves in their world to rethink their thoughts and situations. Since history is first of all the act of investigating, nothing is lost and much is gained by any effort to live imaginatively in the foreign world of the past. Whether Paul was inside or outside ‘Judaism’ is, by contrast, a pointless historical question, in my view. This is not because it cannot be answered, but because the mere framing of it takes us away from Paul’s world. To discuss such a question would require us to find out from each other what we mean by ‘Judaism’, since it was not a term known to Paul or his contemporaries. This would generate a common-room discussion requiring several further levels of abstraction, as each scholar’s view of Paul’s relation to 67

This is Benedetto Croce’s summary (in 1913: 157) of passages from Vico’s Scienza Nuova (1744), accessible in English in Bergin and Fisch 1948, such as l.vii (59); II.iv (127–28), and III (330).

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this figment were analysed, each with different criteria for what would signal proximity to or distance from ‘Judaism’. In this essay I have invited readers to imagine with me a different and simpler question, which is susceptible of at least partial (dis)confirmation. Namely: ‘How did Paul present himself to the groups of Christ-followers he established, in relation to Judaean law, custom, and culture?’ Paul did not know a category called Judaism. He was a Judaean by ethnos, and that he could not change. He was indelibly circumcised, and continued to follow at least some traditions, including holidays in the Judaean calendar. But there was no other calendar that he could have adopted as his own. The degree to which he ‘remained in the ancestral customs’ of the Judaeans, as Josephus might have put it, is a different matter. The gradations were practically infinite. Since most of what we all do comes from custom or habit, not rational analysis, even if we could watch Paul we might not know what he was thinking or how he reconciled thought with his actions. Where we can make progress, again, is with Paul’s self-representation to his ‘in Christ’ groups in his letters. From this it emerges that he was sure of having been singled out by God, and son Christ, to prepare the chosen among the nations for rescue to heaven. Second, ‘The Announcement’ he propounded lacked any Judaean requirements and required no biblical knowledge. Third, when challenged by Christfollowers who insisted that he should have included Judaean content and required Christ-followers to accept Judaean law, he responded with a firm ‘No’. This was not because he had a different Judaism or only because his groups were gentiles. He says that it was because, according to The Announcement with he was entrusted (not shared by all Christ-followers), being in Christ rendered every nomos, Greek or Judaean, a dead letter. Moses’ law too had served only until Christ’s advent. Paul insisted that he was a new creation and no longer ‘under law’. Fourth, Paul declared as vividly as one could imagine his abandonment of the zeal he formerly had for his ancestral traditions. Fifth, he was happy to eat with non-Judaeans in a way that other Judaean Christ-followers—Peter, Paul’s associate Barnabas, and a group from Jesus’ brother James—could not. Sixth, as word about these points got around, from Rome to Jerusalem, Paul’s Announcement caused deep offence to many Judaeans, whether Christ-followers or not, as it continued to do (adapted by church authorities) until modern times. Seventh, Paul himself faced a rough reception from Judaeans everywhere, which included repeated whippings, because of The Announcement. These indications present a fairly unified picture, though beginning and partial, of a Judaean who consciously abandoned his ancestral custom. He did this not for the more common reasons of laxity, intermarriage, political ambition,

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or attraction to the ways of another ethnos, however. Paul claimed an encounter with the resurrected figure of Jesus Christ, which in his view pre-empted and displaced the ethnos-polis-nomos foundations of ancient identity. This radical departure from long-established, essential-seeming categories of life made a certain sense in view of his claim that Christ was about to return to evacuate his followers. Christ-followers of succeeding generations who pursued Paul’s trajectory—by no means the only trajectory—had a more difficult time explaining themselves. They became a laughingstock when Christ did not evacuate them. Their predicament remained awkward until at least Tertullian and Origen in anticipation, then Eusebius and his successors, who managed to turn the tables on Graeco-Roman society, with the ascendancy of Christianity. They transformed the social-political lexicon so that faith-based identity and adherence to -isms displaced ethnos- and polis-affiliation.

Chapter 17

Did the Author of Luke-Acts Know the Works of Josephus? As soon as Christian influencers became aware of Josephus’ writings in the second century, they valued them for their overlaps with the gospels and Acts.1 In the pre-critical phase of Christian use of Josephus, which lasted from about the second to the nineteenth centuries (though critical impulses began obliquely in the Reformation), Christians apparently thought, ‘Isn’t it wonderful, providential even, that we have this large corpus by a contemporary Jewish writer, which confirms the Christian story on so many points?’2 In this way of thinking, Luke and Acts were not studied as a two-volume work. They were a large part of sacred scripture. Josephus was viewed as an omnibus data resource: for King Herod and his descendants, the Roman governors, Jewish institutions and groups, Pontius Pilate, John the Baptist, and especially the harrowing siege and destruction of Jerusalem. With the arrival of thoroughgoing historical-critical thinking in the nineteenth century, scholars began to say something different about the LukeJosephus relationship: ‘Wonderful, yes, but is it not puzzling that there are so many overlaps between das lukanische Doppelwerk and Josephus?’ To critical minds alive to—sometimes obsessed with—sources, it seemed odd that, given the choice of all events and personalities one could write about, the same selections turned up in both corpora: Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene, a census under Qurinius, a rebellion led by Judas, Pontius Pilate, Felix, and Festus (among the dozen or so governors, others unnamed), the sicarii, the Egyptian prophet, descriptions of the philosophical schools, and much more. Commonalities come through even in Luke’s distinctive presentation of the ethical side of John the Baptist’s teaching (Luke 3.10–14; cf. AJ 18.116–19), in Luke’s unique distinction between powerful, temple-based Sadducees and popular Pharisees, and in their similar portraits of Agrippa I’s death. Is it possible that the author of Luke-Acts knew Josephus’ works?

1 Hardwick 1989; Whealey 2003; Goodman 2019. 2 Inowlocki 2006. For the end of the epoch, see the introduction by B. F. Westcott (writing as B. F. Dunelm, Bishop of Durham) in Knight 1896: 9–12: ‘The prophecies of the Lord and the narrative of Josephus combine to form one picture’ (p. 12).

© Steve Mason, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004545960_019

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That is our simple question here. After some methodological and contextual considerations, I shall take up five case studies that bear on the relationship between Josephus and Luke-Acts. The hypothesis that the Christian author reworked episodes from Josephus’ War and Antiquities appears to explain the evidence better than any other. This investigation thus revisits a question I took up in my first popular book thirty years ago3 and confirms its results from new angles. 1

Method

Whenever we have reason to suspect a literary relationship between two texts, A and B, we have three basic explanations to test: either A used B, or B used A, or A and B independently drew from a C, a mediating source or sources not directly known to us. There are many possible complications of course: a ‘C’ comprising several parts, C comprising oral traditions of unexpected verbal precision, or intermediate links between A and B or between C and the others. But these three options define the broad range of possibilities. We use them instinctively and axiomatically—and justifiably—when we grade two essays that show extended verbal agreement. Because such agreement is virtually impossible between independent texts, we reckon that if the students did not collaborate (another A-B possibility: texts composed collaboratively), then either one borrowed from the other or they both reflect the language of some C, such as a Wikipedia article. In the late nineteenth century, the most famous study of our question, by Max Krenkel, argued for Luke-Acts’ dependence on Josephus. With no awareness of the compositional issues to be considered here, Krenkel argued (unconvincingly) from aggregate statistics of verbal agreement, albeit with faulty word counts.4 The next year, J. E. Belser explained the agreements the other way around, positing Josephus’ knowledge of the Christian author,5 a proposal that creates many more problems than it solves, given Josephus’ much fuller and more sophisticated accounts. As the twentieth century dawned, a few historically minded scholars were convinced that Krenkel was right. Among them were Zurich scholar P. W. Schmiedel (1902) and the Cambridge palaeographer and theologian F. C. Burkitt (1906). They stressed a point that would often be ignored later, which I shall take up, and which may seem counter-intuitive: that 3 Mason 1992. 4 Krenkel 1894; H. Haessel, with apt critique by Cadbury 1920: 6–7, and Clarke 1922: 2.81–82. 5 Belser 1895.

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the very differences between Josephus and Luke-Acts might best be explained by borrowing.6 But their view did not carry the day. The contributors to Foakes Jackson and Lake’s monumental Beginnings of Christianity (1922), who did much to relocate Luke-Acts from purely theological study to that of hard-nosed historical analysis, did not miss the parallels with Josephus. Hans Windisch thought that some confusions in Acts are ‘best explained as a rather inaccurate reminiscence of Josephus’—though he allowed that he could not prove this.7 H. J. Cadbury, while acknowledging the explanatory power of the hypothesis, held back from endorsing it. His reasons would prevail until recent times: The case will always rest on three passages [viz., Gamaliel and the Egyptian in Acts, Lysanias in Luke 3], and it is safe to say that they can never be completely explained away, yet will never convince every one. … These three examples of Lucan errors explained by Josephus are certainly very persuasive. But they fall just short of demonstration. The case of Theudas is the strongest, but even here there is always the possibility that Luke and Josephus were using a common source, in which the events were arranged in the order given by Josephus.8 Most scholars since have followed this line, which rests on the question: Why would Luke have taken such material from Josephus and then changed his source so much? Once they had discounted an A-B model for Luke-Acts and Josephus, most scholars naturally resorted to C: the two authors must have had access to the same kinds of sources. Heinz Schreckenberg put the logic succinctly in 1992, adding the twist that the sources must have been, if very similar, also different: 6 Schmiedel 1902 and 1903; Burkitt 1911: 105–10, 119. 7 So Windisch 1922: 2.312. His careful reasoning is worth quoting (my emphasis): ‘There are beyond all doubt several passages in the writings of Josephus which are much clarified by passages in Luke’s writings, in respect both to subject-matter and to expression. … It is more difficult to decide definitely the question whether or not Luke had access to Josephus’ writings. One is most tempted to give an assenting answer in the case of the speech of Gamaliel. … Further confirmation is to be had in certain coincidences in expression. … If literary contact is assumed here, there will be many other parallel passages … about which we shall have to hold that the influence has been in the same direction, and the inevitable result of such a decision will be a new terminus a quo for the genesis of Luke’s writings, namely the year 93 AD. We should have won thereby a sure date on which to base our opposition to the traditional point of view. But since I cannot persuade myself that Luke’s dependence on Josephus is a proved fact, I prefer to make no use of this hypothesis.’ 8 Cadbury et al. 1922: 2.355–58. My emphasis.

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It seems probable that Luke and Josephus wrote independently of one another; for each would certainly have had access to sources and information, which he then employed according to his own perspectives. A characteristic conglomerate of details, which in part agree, in part reflect great similarity, but also in part, appear dissimilar and to stem from different provenances, accords with this analysis. Presumably the two authors use neither the same sources nor each other.9 The seeming advantage of this view, its convenience, comes however at the high cost of supreme vagueness and consequent lack of falsifiability. C in this case amounts to what American football calls a ‘hail-Mary pass’: We don’t know what might be at the end, but let’s fire the ball down the field and hope it works. Advocates feel no need to describe those similar but different sources or how they would account for the evidence.10 Contrast scholarship on the Q hypothesis, for example, which (despite persistent niggles and debates) seeks tirelessly to construct the kind of source that would adequately explain Matthew’s and Luke’s independent agreements.11 The contrast is glaring. No one has ever tried to describe the imagined common source(s) that would explain the overlapping material in Josephus and Luke-Acts. What kind of texts were they? What sorts of things were in them? Who would have composed them, for whom, and where, and when? It seems best not to ask. In the same year that Schreckenberg articulated the prevailing hypothesis, I was publishing the results of early investigations into Josephus and LukeActs, with the proposal that the disagreements between Luke and Josephus are best explained by the Christian author’s dependence on the Judaean. Although this conclusion was not new, the argument was, for it rested on distinctive compositional traits of Josephus present in Luke-Acts. Such questions had not been considered in the old debates.12 My argument was welcomed by some colleagues, especially those who were happy with a second-century date for Acts on other grounds.13 But my perception is that the case is more 9 10

11 12 13

In Schreckenberg and Schubert 1922: 51–52 (my emphasis). So Cronin 1917: 150–51 (my emphasis): ‘resemblances in diction point rather to the existence of a sort of literary κοινή of the eastern provinces … than to a direct dependence. Where St Luke and Josephus narrate the same event, more often than not they either differ in their details or they disagree. … The Josephus theory … credits the author of the Gospel and the Acts with a slovenliness of method and a lack of earnestness of purpose, which do occur in journalism but require proof in his case. It implies a late date for the Gospel and Acts.’ See inter alia Kloppenborg 1987; Robinson 2001; Fleddermann 2005. Mason 1992: 185–229; in the second edition (2003), 251–95. Notably Pervo 2006: 149–200; cf. Tyson 2006: 14–15, who cites only Pervo, though Pervo had generously acknowledged my arguments as a foundation.

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generally doubted in NT circles. In addition to the observation that proof is not conclusive—true, but a standard inappropriate for most ancient history—a common concern appears to be accepting a date after 100 CE for Luke-Acts, especially if this means that the sacred text is derivative and confused in its historical claims.14 The present essay revisits just a few test cases in the relationship between Josephus and Luke-Acts. Further research on Josephus in the intervening decades, including that for the present contribution, leads me to put the matter somewhat more forcefully than I did in 1992.15 It now seems fairly clear that Luke’s knowledge of Josephus’ works best explains both their agreements and their disagreements. As with many problems in ancient history, our solutions depend on our methods and the framing of our questions at least as much on the evidence as such. It does not speak for itself (see Introduction). I begin by spelling out the three most important methodological assumptions for this investigation. 1. Even when they used the same source material (e.g., Homer or tragic plays), ancient writers usually tried to create new products with distinctive moral lessons of their own construction.16 It was a function of writing to express and extend their own authority, in keeping with the values and norms of rhetoric. Exercises in reworking and even challenging canonical texts while using them were basic to rhetorical training.17 It was all about flexibility, change, and adaptation. Examples include Timaeus, who was known for both his dependence on sources (Polybius 12.4–6) and his relentless fault-finding with those sources (12.2–4, 12–13).18 Polybius vehemently criticises his own sources for bygone periods, but still uses them (cf. 12.7.5).19 Likewise, Diodorus pointedly distances himself from his sources, while using and ostensibly improving them.20 Plutarch joins Polybius’ criticism of Phylarchus (Arat. 38.8), but uses the 14 15

16 17 18 19 20

Cf. Bock 2007: 25–27 (27 n. 27: the case for Luke-Acts’ knowledge of Josephus ‘has not won wide consent’). NB: the commentary mentions Josephus nearly 200 times for factual background to Luke-Acts. Even then, proper academic caution was energised by the publisher’s concern not to risk discomfiting Hendrickson’s main (somewhat conservative) market, with the prospects that Luke misunderstood and erroneously reported events or the resulting date of Luke-Acts, a generation or two later than readers had supposed. Woodman 1988; Pelling 1980, 2000; Marincola 1997: 12–19, 63–86, 217–57. Several essays in Kraus 1999 are relevant. Kennedy 1994: 202–208; 2003: e.g., 72, 101–103, 144–46. Baron 2013: 58–88. See for context Eckstein 2013. Marincola 1997: 114, 121, 233–34.

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discredited historian extensively in his Lives (Agis 9.2; Cleom. 5.3; 28.1; 30.2; Pyrr. 27.4). Luke’s criticism of his predecessors (Luke 1.1–4) does not prevent him from incorporating large chunks of Mark, even as he changes it by reframing to suit his project, for example by radically revising the portraits of Jesus’ family and the apostles.21 Matthew too disagrees with much of Mark and yet digests it almost bodily. Josephus’ Apion happily plays both sides of the table (e.g., 1.58–59; cf. AJ 8.262; 14.118): excoriating non-Judaean writers while using them in spite of themselves, to prove his points about Judaean antiquity. Most impressively, Josephus’ own Antiquities-Life reworks many episodes from his War 1–2, including those he knows only from his life-experience (not from different sources). But he obviously feels free to restructure the material while changing his characterisations, speeches, and moral evaluations.22 He shows that one can radically revise even one’s own work when the new context requires it. No one scoffed at this because it was what rhetoric was for. If anything, one should be praised for showing an ability to reuse material in new ways. There was no assumed obligation to represent a source as it was in its original form. In the case of Josephus and Luke-Acts, scholars have tended to see differences between two texts as the disproof of a literary relationship. If B borrowed from A, why would B not mirror A? But this assumption does not hold up against demonstrable ancient practice. If we had only differences between texts (as between Mark and John, for the most part), differences would not show dependence. But where there are striking agreements even in compositional traits, differences do not nullify such agreements. 2. Once his Judaean War appeared, Josephus quickly became the authority for pre-70 Judaea in the Roman empire. Many others in the Flavian period tried their hands at narrating the great ‘foreign’ victory that the Flavians claimed to have won. Tacitus wrote scoldingly of the fawning historians who described the Flavians’ rise to power (Hist. 2.101), Josephus complained about the proliferation of these works in real time. He heard them in preparation (BJ 1.2–8). They were quickly thrown into the shade, however, by his truly expert history. His War was endorsed and promoted by Titus, then deposited in the imperial library where it could be consulted and copied (V 362–64). And it was. Eusebius made extensive use of Josephus, two centuries later, because of his reputation as the preeminent authority on Judaea and the war, a status evidenced by a statue in Rome (Hist. eccl. 1.5.3; 3.9.1–2). 21 22

Ex hypothesi, but I favour the prevailing view. NB: I use the traditional gospel names only to avoid repeating ‘the author of.’ Mason 2001, with frequent comparative notes in the commentary and the summary in Appendix C: 213–22.

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From the Judaean side, we know that the well-educated and connected Justus of Tiberias became a late rival to Josephus, challenging his War on various points while attacking his character (V 336). But this assault did not fare any better than those of Josephus’ other accusers (BJ 7.447–50; V 428–29). Not only Christian authors, but such a careful scholar as Aelius Herodian, writing in the reign of Marcus Aurelius, turned to Josephus as the authority on Judaean life and ways.23 It appears that Josephus’ works began to acquire this status already in the late 70s (above). Any writer wishing to include Judaean realia in his work, therefore (e.g., Tacitus [below], Suetonius, Luke, Herodian), would presumably have turned to Josephus. 3. To repeat a point made in various ways in this volume (see Introduction), there is a qualitative difference between our lived reality and any representation of that life in narrative. They are not merely incommensurate, in the sense that no literary description could capture everything that happened. They are two different kinds of things. We seem to feel instinctively that the most important events of the past (but important for whom?) must be recorded somewhere. There must be a general fund of facts, distinct from anyone’s opinion or bias, from which all ancient authors could draw. That appears to be the assumption underlying Schreckenberg’s assessment, above. Or consider the following entry on Theudas from Oxford Biblical Studies Online:24 Theudas. A Messianic pretender who promised to lead his followers in revolt against Rome; he was killed according to Josephus in 44 CE. In Acts 5.36–7 Theudas is regarded as preceding another revolutionary, Judas, who died in 6 CE, so it would seem that either Josephus or the Acts has made a mistake. The time when Gamaliel was speaking (Acts 5.34) was about 30 CE, so that Theudas’ rebellion had not then taken place. However, since there were numerous other disorders, it is just possible that there was another leader called Theudas who lived at an earlier date. Notice, first, the lack of distinction between facts and literary sources. Josephus is mentioned for the date of Theudas, as though that were his only contribution, though Josephus does not date his execution so precisely. The reader could not know that Josephus is the only other evidence for Theudas’ existence. And who says that Judas died in 6 CE? Although only some items are singled out for debate, all of this comes from Josephus’ literary account and 23 24

Even the surviving epitomes of Herodian cite Josephus about 30 times for Syrian names; cf. www.tlg.uci.edu. http://www.oxfordbiblicalstudies.com/article/opr/t94/e1902, accessed 10 November 2019. My emphasis.

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not from a database of facts. Second, a thick overlay of assumption is stated as fact: Theudas was ‘messianic’; there was a decades-long atmosphere of ‘revolt against Rome’, which Theudas also represented in the 40s; and either Luke or Josephus must have been mistaken about Theudas’ dates, the only alternative being two different Theudases. The possibility that an author willingly changed his source information to suit his present needs does not arise. A messianic and anti-Roman Theudas appears as an independent datum, a fact known from somewhere. Readers are invited to ponder only which author got his dates wrong. But again, events and narratives are two different kinds of things. Leonardo da Vinci was reportedly the first to reckon with the full magnitude of this problem in artistic representation. He came to the non-intuitive realisation that points and lines, which we naturally use in representation, are not really there in nature, that representation therefore cannot be mere imitation of things as they are, but an interpretation of reality requires considerable artifice, and that we cannot avoid perspective and just see things as they are. We must position ourselves somewhere (not being divine) to see, and we must also adopt a perspective—consciously or unconsciously, executing it well or badly, to create a coherent representation.25 Authors of narratives, including narrative historians, likewise create order from the chaos of real events, which have no self-evident boundaries or shape, and no objective meaning. A narrative requires a beginning and end, for example, which do not inhere in events themselves. Authors must create a notional starting point, which they will not find given by events, and draw a plotline from there through other selected moments to form a narrative arc of suspense, growth, and resolution. There is a practically infinite range of possibilities for doing this, even for commonly accepted chunkings of the past. That is why I have shelves full (my collection is a tiny fraction of what exists) of studies of the Second World War, or Churchill’s premiership, or even the Monte Cassino campaigns of January–May 1944. Each study is original and insightful, and often comes with endorsement as the definitive work. But none could possibly reflect what happened. Each effort is an artistic creation. Not only new data, but new questions, contexts, and connections continue to generate new investigations of this momentous past, and that shows no signs of abating. Ancient writers of history occasionally expressed awareness of the unmanageable chaos of the past, the impossibility of knowing what happened, and 25

See Isaacson 2017: 260–78. Some scholars argue that ancient Chinese language reflected similar assumptions about the lack of fixed points or lines, clear and distinct objects: Ames and Rosemount 1998: 19–44.

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the possibility of constructing many stories from the same evidence. On the second point Cassius Dio, a serious and capable historian, spoke with disarming candour (53.19.4–6): Much that does not actually happen gets endlessly repeated, while much that really does happen remains unknown, and in more or less every case there is a difference between what happens and what gets reported. Certainly, too, the size of the empire and the number of things going on make accuracy in these respects a very slippery prospect. In Rome a great deal is happening, and much in the subject territory [provinces] too, and with the enemy it is always something or other—every single day, you might say. When it comes to these things, no one beyond the circle of those immediately involved can easily get a clear picture, while most people do not even hear the first thing of what happened. With this in mind, I shall explain everything in sequence, as much as needs to be said at any rate, as it has been made public here and there, whether it really happened like that or in some other way. Dio understood the instability of historical knowledge and resolved to do his best. Sallust had dealt with the impossible vastness of Roman history by tackling only manageable slices, in the form of biographies of Catiline or Jugurtha (Bell. cat. 4.2–5). Without explicitly reflecting on these problems, Josephus does much the same thing. This is clearest in Antiquities, which describes not historical periods but a succession of morally assessable characters (Moses, Joshua, Saul, David, Herod, etc.). War begins this way, with a focus on Hasmonean and then Herodian characters (Bk. 1), though its later subject matter includes also systemic treatment and stock characters—a polis in stasis, with tyrannoi and bandits against the traditional leaders, energised by hot-headed youth—more in the vein of Thucydides and Polybius. The figures he selects are not obvious or given by the data.26 The scholar who tries to identify them might abandon the task in frustration.27 Why does Josephus include these characters, then, and why does he characterise them as he does, when his audience is most unlikely to remember many of them? For the sake of vividness (ἐνάργεια), in part. But vividness would lose 26

27

E.g., BJ 2.451 (Gorion, Ananias Sadouki, and Judas offer terms to the garrison); 4.18 (Chares and Joseph at Gamala); 4.140–41 (Antipas, Levias, and Syphas among bandits’ first victims in Jerusalem); 5.317–30 (the crafty Judaean Castor); 6.169–76 (Jonathan, Pudens, and Priscus in combat outside Jerusalem). Cf. Ilan and Price 1993–1994.

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its value if listeners thought it merely invented. Josephus’ ability to draw out one example from a countless number supports his claim to uniquely expert knowledge (BJ 1.1–8). Crafting a narrative required playing fast and loose with the people he mentions and their actual motives. Without omniscience and omnipotence it is not possible to bring real people back to life as they were. When he describes bandits, tyrants, sicarii, pseud0prophets, and would-be kings, it is antecedently likely that the subjects would have rejected his depictions. But we do not know how they would have described themselves. He might even have gotten away with creating a character from whole cloth, here or there. I dwell on the difference between life and narrative because it has important consequences for our question. If Josephus shows off his expertise by selecting episodes and characters from a wide range of possibilities, and characterises them in a particular way to suit his themes and plots, we would expect independent authors to have made very different choices and, if they happened to agree on selection, to have characterised the chosen figure with different language, not in Josephus’ themes. The principle that events are not self-interpreting, and that shaping belongs to each author, is fundamental. When, therefore, we find distinctive elements from one author’s creation turning up in another’s, literary dependence becomes the most economical explanation. Although the Christian narrative of Luke-Acts has little to do with Josephus’ War or Antiquities in its main purposes, audience, scope, or themes, the striking agreements between the corpora in choice and thematic diction suggest dependence. Distinctively thematic Josephan traits appear in Luke-Acts, that is, where they are not thematic. Such agreements are difficult to explain without a hypothesis of influence from Josephus. One set of parallels has to do with general language and framing techniques of the two authors’ accounts, such as their inclusion of prologues concerned with truth and accuracy, and their similar hesitancy toward Greek rhetoric.28 These agreements are fascinating, but also too generic to be part of a case for dependence. Other intriguing cases involve Luke’s handling of figures connected with the Herodian dynasty—Agrippa I, Agrippa II and sisters Berenice and Drusilla, the former accompanying her brother as though his wife, the latter marrying the Prefect Felix in the early 50s. In these cases, knowledge of Josephus would add a great deal of texture to the Christian story, and one must wonder whether Luke himself knew Josephus and enjoyed private humour but did not share that background with his audiences. But as tantalising as 28

See Mason 2011a and 2012a; idem 2019a.

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such connections are, the story of Acts makes good sense without them, and a case for dependence on that basis would rest on too many uncontrollable variables. I shall not take these up either, therefore, except in a brief suggestion at the end. My focus is rather on five specific references to individuals, groups, and events that go largely unexplained in the narrative of Luke-Acts and seem to be there mainly to support the Christian author’s claim to superior knowledge (Luke 1.1–4), but which seem to bear the hallmarks of Josephus’ account. It is therefore easiest to understand these items as loose borrowings or mangled artefacts from Josephus’ detailed and joined-up narratives. They appear as vestiges of Josephus because, far from being free-floating, independent facts available for anyone’s use, they bear the distinctive markings of their origin in Josephus-world. 2

Excursus: A Methodological Analogue

The question of Luke-Acts’ use of Josephus is not a theological one, it is worth stressing. From the perspective of historical method, the question is the same one that we might pose of Tacitus’ Histories (ca. 100–109 CE) or Sulpicius Severus’ Chronicle (401 CE) where those works overlap with Josephus. In those cases, too, the prevailing view in scholarship has been that neither author knew Josephus, and that view has large implications, especially for understanding Titus’ destruction of Jerusalem’s temple in 70 CE. Josephus relates that Titus held a consilium with his generals, at which Titus reversed his own prior order to burn the temple, now deciding that it is in Rome’s governing interest to preserve such a famous and exquisite structure (BJ 6.236–43). Tacitus’ account of the temple’s destruction has fallen out of his Histories. The surviving parts of Book 5 (1–13) anticipate that climax. Most scholars have concluded from Tacitus’ differences from Josephus on Judaean origins and customs (5.2–5) that he could not have known the Judaean’s work. Therefore, he must have used other sources for Jerusalem’s fall.29 Most scholars likewise hold that the Christian author Severus, writing in 401 CE, knew Tacitus but not Josephus. The consequence is that Severus’ very different account of the consilium, according to which Titus determined that the temple had to go (Chron. 2.30.6–8), is hypothesised to originate with the lost account in Tacitus, who in turn took it from a shadowy Roman prefect in Judaea. And so 29

A recent and convenient review of scholarship on Tacitus, Hist. 5.3–5, is Roux: 2018.

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this alternative account, though known only from the Christian priest writing in the fifth century, supposedly provides a cold-eyed picture of Flavian bloodymindedness, which Josephus whitewashed to exculpate the ruling family.30 The number of assumptions about Josephus, Tacitus, and Severus involved in this common picture boggles the mind. There are far too many to raise them here. Elsewhere I have followed the simpler course of showing that Severus’ echoes of distinctive Josephan language prove (more or less) that the Christian author tendentiously reused Josephus’ War.31 This does not mean that Josephus’ account of the consilium should be accepted. Even minutes of a meeting should not simply be trusted, and there were no minutes of that meeting. Knowing that Severus reworked Josephus means only that one cannot take the Christian fifth-century account as a window on what happened in 70 CE.32 Not only did Severus know Josephus’ War, but it seems that Tacitus did too. Incidentally, that might best explain the loss of his account. If it resembled Josephus’ much fuller original version, copyists might well have thought there was no sense in preserving Tacitus for that. However that may be, his apparent ignorance of Antiquities on Judaean origins is not dispositive. In Tacitus’ section on Judaean origins, he claims to know many accounts, which he summarises with extreme economy (5.2.1). Although the frame of his remarks about Judaean aloofness is hostile (5.5), the content he provides is not; it happens to agree with Josephus’ presentation of the same issue in the Apion.33 Most relevant for us are the striking agreements between Hist. 5.12–13 and Josephus’ War 5–7, for Hist. 5.12 closely tracks the content of War 5–6. Tacitus reflects Josephus’ thematic (not necessarily unique) interest in the temple’s impregnable walls, for example, including the one begun by Agrippa I (BJ 5.136–247); reflects Josephus’ emphasis on the influx of outsiders into Jerusalem after the Flavians’ arrival (BJ 4.130–50); and names the same three duces (John, Simon, Eleazar), noting with Josephus that they were eventually reduced to two and mentioning their burning of each other’s grain supplies (BJ 5.1–38, 248–57), though Tacitus mashes up Josephus’ names, calling John bar-Giora—somewhat like Luke’s re-combinations, I would suggest.

30 31 32

33

Mason 2016a: 487–508. See previous note. Concerning both dependencies I agree with the brief remarks by Rajak 2002: 193–94, 207–209. I disagree with Rajak’s inclination to conclude that Josephus is therefore reliable, however—not because he is unreliable, but because ‘reliable narrative’ seems to me a category mistake. A review of scholarship is in Leoni 2007. See Mason 2019a (= Chapter 2 in this volume).

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In 5.13, Tacitus not only lists four of the six or seven prodigies that Josephus presents in BJ 6.288–300 (309), which were surely not real, observable events but Josephus’ construction and collection. Tacitus also gives precisely the same interpretation of an ‘ambiguous’ ancient oracle, after citing omens that occupy the same place in War (6.312–15), concerning a world ruler arising from the east. Tacitus agrees almost verbatim, in Latin translation, with Josephus’ disparaging remark about the common people’s inclination to interpret such things in their favour.34 If these items are thematically charged creations of Josephus’ narrative, then Tacitus was dependent on Josephus, directly or indirectly. Why would he not have turned to Josephus’ War if it were known in Rome as the place to go for information about the Judaean conflict? It is true that Tacitus’ figure of 600,000 besieged persons nearly halves Josephus’ 1.1 million dead and 97,000 prisoners (BJ 6.420–21). But Josephus’ figures are unbelievable, and Josephus himself revises his numbers, between War and Antiquities-Life, with apparent abandon. Moreover, this is the kind of statistical-factual information that Tacitus could have found independently, from Flavian accounts. It is also the only item to which he attaches a source note ( fuisse accepimus), perhaps flagging a departure from his main source. The cases of Tacitus and Severus help to put in perspective the issue of Josephus and Luke-Acts. They raise the problem of what ancient historians actually did with sources, which have little to do with our intuition or abstract reasoning. Must we cling to the notion that disagreements between texts disprove borrowing? Or, given many examples of authors departing from source material, should we not focus on the problem of how two independent authors made improbably similar choices? I favour the second approach. In the five cases that follow, hypothesising Luke’s use of Josephus is the simplest explanation of not only the similarities but also the main differences between the two texts. 34

BJ 6.312–15: τὸ δ᾿ ἐπᾶραν αὐτοὺς μάλιστα πρὸς τὸν πόλεμον ἦν χρησμὸς ἀμφίβολος ὁμοίως ἐν τοῖς ἱεροῖς εὑρημένος γράμμασιν, ὡς κατὰ τὸν καιρὸν ἐκεῖνον ἀπὸ τῆς χώρας αὐτῶν τις ἄρξει τῆς οἰκουμένης. τοῦθ᾿ οἱ μὲν ὡς οἰκεῖον ἐξέλαβον καὶ πολλοὶ τῶν σοφῶν ἐπλανήθησαν περὶ τὴν κρίσιν. … οἱ δὲ καὶ τῶν σημείων ἃ μὲν ἔκριναν πρὸς ἡδονὴν ἃ δὲ ἐξουθένησαν, μέχρις οὗ τῇ τε ἁλώσει τῆς πατρίδος καὶ τῷ σφῶν αὐτῶν ὀλέθρῳ διηλέγχθησαν τὴν ἄνοιαν. Hist. 5.13: Quae pauci in metum trahebant: pluribus persuasio inerat antiquis sacerdotum litteris contineri eo ipso tempore fore ut valesceret Oriens profectique Iudaea rerum potirentur. Quae ambages Vespasianum ac Titum praedixerat, sed vulgus more humanae cupidinis sibi tantam fatorum magnitudinem interpretati ne adversis quidem ad vera mutabantur. Suetonius (Vesp. 4.5) has something similar, making this Judaean opinio about a native conqueror the cause of their revolt, agreeing with Josephus’ words but ignoring the late appearance of this claim in his War, which provides a much more complex account of the war’s origin.

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The Census Complex: Quirinius, the Registration, Rebellion, Judas

One could tell the story of Roman Judaea without mentioning P. Sulpicius Quirinius (cos. 12 BCE), who was legatus augusti pro praetore to Syria in 6–12 CE, or the census he conducted throughout his large province on arrival. We know that one could do so because Josephus, describing 6 CE in BJ 2.117–18, just before his famous digression on the Essenes (2.119–66), makes no mention of the census or Quirinius. He merely relates that after the removal of Archelaus (5 or 6 CE), Judaea was made a province and placed under an equestrian governor. A certain Judas the Galilean led a rejectionist campaign, castigating his compatriots for tolerating an earthly master. Judas appears as a crank with no rational motive, however, and after this brief remark, which seems only a segue to his glorious description of the Essenes, he moves on. Josephus knew about Quirinius and the census when writing of 6 CE, for he mentions them later in passing (BJ 2.433; 7.253). But he could tell the story of 6 CE without them—even giving a somewhat different impression, as though Judaea then became an independent province. If he could omit the census and Quirinius, then so could another writer. Independent writers could have described the governing situation differently, and they might have neglected Judas, just as Josephus ignores Sadok, whom he will mention in Antiquities 18. This all illustrates the methodological point, above, that events do not determine their meaning or significance. That is up to the authors who write them up. Josephus’ depiction of Judas as a ‘sophist’ leading his private ‘school’ (ἦν δ᾿ οὗτος σοφιστὴς ἰδίας αἱρέσεως) is again not a fact that would have been evident to all. It is Josephus’ literary creation, to help him bridge to what he considers the three legitimate philosophical schools (2.119), which are also his construction. It turns out that War is interested in Judas partly to make him the putative patriarch of a troublemaking family behind later conflicts with Rome, although the family connections are sketchy at best. Josephus names Menachem, leader of an armed faction in 66 CE, as a ‘son’ of the Galilean sophist Judas at the time of Quirinius (2.433)—the first incidental mention of the legate. The arithmetic, however, for Menachem’s emergence sixty years after Judas’ activity, raises questions. Near the end of War, he further claims that the Eleazar who led some sicarii to Masada was ‘a descendant of the Judas who persuaded more than a few Judaeans, as we explained before, not to join in the property registration when Quirinius was sent as registrar into Judaea’ (7.253), though he explained nothing about such a property registration in the narrative corresponding to this period. Again, Josephus knew much more than he

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wrote. His choices about what to write were not determined by what he knew had happened. War compresses a great deal that Josephus knew but could not write in a relatively tight and balanced war monograph. Antiquities expands considerably on many issues, including Judas’ significance, but it also gives him a completely different frame. Now identified as a Gaulanite from Gamala (rather than War’s Galilean, though Josephus will again call him a Galilean:  18.23; 20.102), and newly paired with the Pharisee Sadok, Judas here appears as the founder of a fourth school of philosophy, having no relation to the other three. It supposedly rejected all earthly masters and recognised God alone, though apart from this it agreed with the Pharisees. Although the ‘rogue school’ was hinted at in War 2, Josephus elaborates considerably (AJ 18.9–10, 23–25). But this account forces the modern historian to suspect that the other-worldly slogan with which he now taxes Judas—no ruler but God!—is at best a half-truth. Judaeans had been under foreign kings, emperors, and princes since the sixth century BCE or earlier, under Rome since 63 BCE. Judas’ emergence in 6 CE, just when Judaea was losing its autocratic ruler (Archelaus) and shifting to collegial priestly governance at the local level (theocracy) suggests that he was not in fact devoted to an other-worldly vision of theocratic paradise but was responding to the political crisis of 6 CE. This needs a bit of unpacking. When Herod dies in 4 BCE, according to both War and Antiquities, an embassy of fifty eminent Jerusalemites travels to Rome to plead with Augustus not to be placed under another monarch, a son of Herod. They ask to be returned to the province of Syria, to be accountable only to the legate in Antioch (BJ 2.21, 80, 91; AJ 17.300–314). Augustus decides against their appeal in that moment, preferring to give young Archelaus a chance to prove himself in deference to Herod’s will. As the youth’s tyrannical tendencies become insufferable over the following years, however, the elite group renews its appeal to Augustus. This time—apparently because they are joined by Samarian counterparts—Augustus grants their request and banishes Archelaus to the far west. Antiquities now, departing from War’s claim that Judaea became a province, explains that Jerusalem and its territory were annexed to Syria, just as the emissaries had requested, under the imperial legate Quirinius (AJ 17.304–14, 317–20, 342–44, 354; 18.2). This makes much better sense historically. It emerges only now that the high priest Joazar and his circle had engineered the removal of Archelaus and annexation to Syria, in coordination with Samaria’s elite, and so Joazar also leads the campaign to enlist support for the annoying property registration that re-incorporation in Syria required (AJ 18.3). This is the context in which Judas and his Pharisee colleague appear,

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in protest. Despite the derisive slogan Josephus ascribes to them, about rejecting all earthly rule, something in the changes of 6 CE must have motivated them. The obvious cause is that Jerusalem will lose the status it has had since Hasmonean times, with a brief interruption after Pompey, as the regional hegemon. It is about to become just one of many poleis in Roman Syria. That loss of status might well come with unpleasant consequences, given its long domination of the other poleis and the nearby Samarians.35 In this regard, it may be telling that Antiquities relates that two sons of Judas who do not appear in War were crucified for disturbances in the mid-40s, soon after Jerusalem’s renewed loss of status following the death of Agrippa I in 44 (AJ 20.102)—a notice, incidentally, that makes War’s Menachem in the 60s even less likely to be another ‘son’ of Judas. This might suggest that Judas’ sons renewed their father’s agitation when Jerusalem again lost its primacy. For our purposes, the main point is that Josephus had distinctive literary reasons in each of his histories to feature Judas as a pivotal figure. In both cases, he ignored whatever real-life motives the man had, preferring to cast him as an arch-rebel, a generic bad guy with no worthy motives. Another author, such as Justus of Tiberias, if he mentioned Judas, might well have given him a very different press, certainly in different language. Although Justus’ history is lost to us, we know that it provided a picture of early-war Galilee that was very different from Josephus’ version (V 336). Josephus later decided to make Justus a principal cause of the nation’s ills, though he had not mentioned him in War (V 40–41). It was not a historical fact that Judas was a generic, transplantable rebel, and it would be interesting to see how Justus would have described him. All of this means that the four main elements of the census complex in Antiquities—viz., Quirinius as governor, annexation to Syria, the accompanying property registration, and the rebellion led by Judas—were not a pre-existing bundle that came as a factual, self-revealing package. They did not call out to every author, not even to Josephus when writing War, to be treated as a complex. Another historian might have referred to the annexation but not the legate, or the property registration but not Judas, or Sadok (and/or someone else) and not Judas, or the legate and property registration without the brief resistance. Only Josephus’ Antiquities links these as a major and consequential complex, for reasons that make unique sense in this work’s eighteenth volume. Given the differences between Josephus’ War and Antiquities-Life in retelling the same events, we should suppose that if Josephus had written another history, even he would have told the story differently again, perhaps ignoring Judas or adding two or three other accomplices. 35

Cf. Mason 2016a: 247–55.

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How, then, should we explain the following features of Luke-Acts? First, this author chooses the registration of property (calling it an ἀπογραφή as Josephus does: Luke 2.2; Acts 5.37 || BJ 7.253; AJ 18.3) under Quirinius, who is named but unexplained in Luke, as a watershed event in his narrative. The census is his vehicle for explaining how Jesus came to be born in Bethlehem, although he grew up in Nazareth and would always be identified by that origin. It is clear that the Quirinius-census complex was not required to explain Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem, because Matthew has a completely different explanation, namely: Jesus’ family was from Bethlehem but later migrated to Galilee (2.7–23). Luke, however, mirrors the complex in Josephus’ Antiquities, with some absurd embellishments to suit his narrative needs: it has become a world-wide census mandated by Emperor Augustus, requiring all provincials to return to the towns of some selected ancestors many centuries earlier (Luke 2.1–3)—for no reason, by unstated criteria, and in contravention of the rationale for a property census. Luke will do much the same with the famine of the 40s, which Josephus locates in Judaea, making relief from Egypt and other neighbouring regions possible (AJ 20.51–53, 101). The famine in Luke-Acts, predicted by Christian prophets, must also be centred Jerusalem (or relief would not be feasible), but the author inflates it to become world-wide (ἐφ᾿ ὅλην τὴν οἰκουμένην, Acts 11.28; cf. ἀπογράφεσθαι πᾶσαν τὴν οἰκουμένην in Luke 2.1). Posturing as one familiar with events across the whole οἰκουμένη, this author writes on a cosmic scale. Second, in the speech he crafts for Gamaliel in the second volume, Luke remarks that Judas the Galilean once ‘drew the people off after him’ (ἀπέστησεν λαὸν ὀπίσω αὐτοῦ; Acts 5.37). Compare Josephus’ account in Antiquities. After the initially spontaneous resistance of Judaeans toward the property registration is overcome by the arguments of the respected high priest Joazar and the registration is proceeding smoothly, Judas and Sadok begin rousing the rabble (ἠπείγετο ἐπὶ ἀποστάσει; AJ 18.4–6). This author seems confused about dating Jesus’ birth, which he mainly connects with the census in 6 CE, though elsewhere implying that it happened during or shortly after Herod’s reign (d. 4 BCE; Luke 1.5). Ingenious efforts to posit two Syrian legateships for Quirinius and hence an earlier census (while Herod or Archelaus ruled) do not work in my view.36 If the author had a vague grasp of events in the period, it is hard to imagine that he independently knew of the moment at which Judas urged rebellion, but the phrase makes sense as a reflection of Josephus’ description. If Luke chooses to make the census-registration (ἀπογραφή) under Quirinius, accompanied by a popular rebellion (ἀπόστασις) led by Judas the Galilean, a 36

Schürer 1973: 1.420–27.

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crucial reference point in both of his narratives, and this was neither a narrative necessity nor something that everyone knew (as Matthew and War 2 show), how did he come to configure this potent complex of events? Since Josephus was the most famous Judaean author from the 70s onward, and he is the only author (as far as we know) who combined these events in this way, and only in his Antiquities, that story—however used or remembered—seems the most likely foundation of Luke’s decision to use the same complex as a foundation of his work. 4

Abila, Tetrarchy of Lysanias

That one of Luke’s motives in mentioning so many names and events outside the Christian sphere (contrast Mark, Matthew, and John) was to enhance his impression of unique knowledge (Luke 1.1–4) is suggested by Luke 3.1–2, where he opens the main narrative, after the quasi-poetic birth stories for Jesus and the Baptist. Many critics have noticed that the list of political figures used to date the appearance of John the Baptist—Tiberius as emperor, Pilate ruling Judaea, three men ‘tetrarching’, and ‘Annas and Caiaphas’ as high priest (cf. Acts 4.16)—looks like overkill. Emperor, governor, and high priest would have been plenty. If one pleads the author’s later interest in the Herodians Antipas (always ‘Herod’ here, perhaps under Mark’s influence), Agrippa I, and Agrippa II as reason to include them, the oddity remains Lysanias’ tetrarching in Abilene (Λυσανίου τῆς Ἀβιληνῆς τετρααρχοῦντος). This notice is odd because neither Lysanias nor Abilene appears again in Luke-Acts. Even the conservative scholar H. S. Cronin, writing a century ago, found it strange:37 The selection of Lysanias … has for a long time puzzled me, as … many others. It is difficult to understand why one minor potentate of Syria should be chosen, when others, Aretas, for instance, of Nabataea, or the dynast of Chalcis, have, at all events at first sight, as good or better claims. Cronin was right. The simplest explanation is the one we assume today: that Luke drops names for reasons other than narrative need. His most obvious motive is to enhance the impression of expertise: ‘I can even tell you who was ruling in … Abilene. Never heard of it? Well, that’s why you need me!’ Asking where Luke acquired this titbit leads us again to Josephus’ likely influence.38

37 38

Cronin 1917: 47. So already Schmiedel 1902.

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As with many of the issues we are discussing, including the census, research has focused all but exclusively on the question of Luke’s referential accuracy: locating the tetrarchy in question, which sits (now Souk Wadi Barada) on the route from Damascus to Heliopolis/Baalbek,39 in relation to Ituraea and Josephus’ unlocated ‘Chalcis under Lebanon’, while distinguishing it from both coastal Leucas and Decapolis Abila east of Gadara.40 Scholars have thus debated whether Luke’s Lysanias was a current ruler in 30 CE, otherwise unknown, or rather the well-attested tetrarch Lysanias from the mid-first century BCE, clumsily transplanted to Luke’s story time.41 It is now sufficiently clear, historically speaking, that the ‘tetrarchy’ in question was one of three or four in and around the two Lebanese mountain ranges.42 In addition to Josephus’ rough indication of this situation (below), two versions of a Greek inscription concerning the hilltop temple of Kronos in this northern Abila confirm a tetrarchy under one Lysanias there.43 And among the Latin inscriptions commemorating a new road section cut through the mountain, after a later flood in the time of Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus, one confirms that the local ‘Abilenes’ paid the costs.44 Coins, furthermore, put it beyond doubt that the first-century BCE Lysanias, his swashbuckling father Ptolemy, and son Zenodorus all bore the title tetrarch as well as high priest.45 39 40

41 42 43

44 45

Hogg 1850. De Saulcy 1874: 308–9, citing much earlier studies already distinguishing the two. It is not certain that Josephus was always clear about it, however. At BJ 2.252, he says that Nero, soon after his accession, gave Agrippa II four poleis with their toparchies: Abila and Julias in Peraea, Tiberias and Tarichea in Galilee. On the strength of that notice, Spijkerman 1978: 48–49, understands Decapolis Abila as Nero’s gift to Agrippa II. AJ 20.159 changes (corrects?) this grant, however, to the two Galilean poleis plus Julius in Peraea with fourteen attached villages—no Abila. If we ask why, the answer may be that AJ 20.138 (with no parallel in War) had seen Claudius, shortly before Nero’s accession, add Abila—there defined as Lysanias’ tetrarchy—to Philip’s former territories as his grant to Agrippa II. Schmiedel 1902; Cadbury et al. 1922: 357: ‘It is clear that an inaccurate knowledge of Josephus would adequately account for the error in Luke.’ Kokkinos 1998: 280–81; Wright 2013; Butcher 2004: 435; Cohen 2006: 210, 239–42. The first, more lacunose copy, was in Boeckh and Franzius 1844: no. 4521. NB: CIG 4523 is a fragmentary inscription in memory of Zenodorus’ daughter, and Zenodorus’ name is followed by one beginning ΛΥΣ. Savignac 1912 published a full version of CIG 4521 discovered decades later. It reads (my trans.): ‘For the preservation of the lords augusti (ὑπὲρ τῆς τῶν κυρίων σεβαστῶν σωτηρ[ί]ας) along with their whole house. Nymphaeus Abimmenos, freedman of Lysanias the tetrarch, after founding the road, made and constructed the temple and planted all the orchards around it from his own resources. For the Lord Kronos and in a spirit of piety for the homeland.’ Hogg 1850 with photos and commentary at https://syriaphotoguide.com/souq-wadi ‫ق‬ -barada-‫�برد �ى‬-�� ‫وا د‬-�‫��سو‬/. Accessed 25 November 2019. ‫ي‬ Described in Mionnet 1811: 145; Madden 1881: 124 n. 2; Wright 2013; Burnett 1992: 662–63, with images on Plates 172–73, nos. 4768–80.

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It cannot be ruled out that the name Lysanias reoccurred in a later generation, such that a Lysanias was again ‘tetrarching’ over Abilene around 30 CE.46 If so, Luke’s accuracy on the point would be honoured, but that would not answer our more basic, compositional questions: Why would Luke include Lysanias’ distant Abila in this passage, even if it was a real place under a Lysianias in 30 CE, other than to shore up his authority? And where did he find his information? Our problem prompts us to ask whether Josephus, the main surviving author of the period, had narrative reasons to highlight Lysanias, tetrarch of Abila, as Antiquities featured the census under Quirinius and Judas’ rebellion. The answer is: Yes, he did. Josephus first describes Ptolemy son of Mennaeus as a king of Chalcis and lord of the Bekaa Valley, who became father-in-law and later husband of the Hasmonean Alexandra (BJ 1.103, 185–86; AJ 13.392, 418; 14.39, 126, 297). Josephus’ detailed Hasmonean history in Antiquities provides a motive for putting a spotlight on this minor royal family, which remains in the picture. Around 40 BCE, he relates (cf. Strabo, Geogr. 16.2.10), Ptolemy’s son Lysanias inherits his father’s territory (14.330). Lysanias tries to forge an anti-Herodian and anti-Roman alliance, in favour of the Hasmonean Antigonus and his Parthian backers (BJ 1.248; AJ 14.330). In doing so, he becomes a significant regional power-broker. Vying to preserve the Seleucid mantle against Rome’s incursion, this Greeknamed dynasty of Ptolemy and Lysanias tries to shape the politics of southern Syria. Marc Antony removes and executes Lysanias, however, reportedly at Cleopatra VII’s urging, in about 36 BCE (BJ 1.440; AJ 15.92). Lysanias’ son, Zenodorus or Zenon, leases back his father’s territory from Rome and continues to attack the old dynastic enemy Damascus, until Augustus finally places the troublesome tetrarchy under Herod’s trusted control (BJ 1.398–40; AJ 15.344–64). This creates a bitter rivalry, with Zenodorus son of Lysanias always ready to bring complaints against Herod. But Zenodorus too exhausts the emperor’s patience, and on his death his territory reverts to Herod. Upon Herod’s death in 4 BCE, ‘the house of Zenodorus’ passes to the tetrarch Philip, Herod’s son (BJ 2.95; AJ 17.319). War continues to call this region the ‘house’ or 46

Savignac (1912: 538–39), with a full version of CIG 4521, followed E. Renan’s and E. Schürer’s arguments (a) that the scenario of two augusti could only fit between 14 and 29 CE, the time between Livia’s designation as Augusta on Augustus’ death and her own passing, and (b) that a freedman of the Lysanias who died in 36 BCE could not have been building roads and temples fifty years later. So, there must have been a Lysanias around the 20s CE. Schmiedel (1902: 2843) countered that if Nymphaeus had been granted his freedom as a boy, he would have been active and wealthy fifty years later. Cadbury et al. (1922: 356–57) dismissed the argument as motivated by apologetics.

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‘kingdom’ of Zenodorus, or of Lysanias (1.398; 2.215, 247). Antiquities prefers to call it the ‘tetrarchy of Lysanias’ as a fixed name, no matter who is governing, long after the tetrarch’s death (below). Josephus thus has obvious and as far as we know unique reasons for tracking this region and continuing to call it after an early tetrarch: for his audience’s sake. Herodians dominate the last seven volumes of his Antiquities, and that valuable northern territory, though it changes shape (shrinking from much of the Bekaa Valley to Abila proper) and its rulers also change, remains an important piece of territory as ‘the tetrarchy of Lysanias’, even under Herodian rule. When Josephus relates that Gaius Caligula made over ‘the tetrarchy of Lysanias’ to Agrippa I as part of his starter kingdom, in the late 30s CE (AJ 18.237), and then that Claudius confirmed this grant of ‘Abila of Lysanias and everything of his that lay in Mt. Lebanon’ (19.275), he does not mean that Lysanias is the current ruler. He continues to remind his audience of the place that has played an important background role in Herod’s reign. Likewise, when Claudius gives the area to Agrippa II, Josephus describes it with these words: ‘Abila—this had been the tetrarchy of Lysanias’ (σὺν Ἀβέλλᾳ· Λυσανία δ᾿ αὕτη γεγόνει τετραρχία, AJ 20.138). If there were a new tetrarch in the 20s CE who happened to be named Lysanias, that would be irrelevant to Josephus’ usage, and he does not seem to know or care about that. It is Lysanias’ territory. Because of the uncontrollable variables, I cannot prove from this that Luke knew Josephus. This example is like the others we are considering. Their common trait is that they have no sustained narrative place or logic in Luke-Acts, while they reflect Josephus’ programmatic interests and his language. Josephus has a motive to keep mentioning Lysanias’ tetrarchy (Antiquities) in support of his account of Judaean history, politics, and culture. Luke has no such motive. Luke uses Herodians as fleeting scenic elements in support of a story concerning Jesus, the resurrection, and the apostles. The simplest explanation of Luke’s passing mention of a ‘tetrarching’ Lysanias in Abilene is a vague, whether direct or mediated, recollection of Josephus, AJ 19.275; 20.138. It would be understandable if he had heard or read passages from Antiquities’ later volumes (above) and thought he had heard Abila passed from Lysanias to Agrippa, supposing that Lysanias was governing around 30 CE. 5

Another Generic Rebel: Theudas

Luke’s Gamaliel mentions, before Judas but in the same breath, a certain Theudas. He serves Gamaliel’s purpose as another generic rabble-rouser. Some

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of the problems that his name creates have been discussed intensively since the nineteenth century. Scholars have usually approached the issue, however, in relation to historical events and possible sources, without asking about the compositional interests of each author. When we ask this question, things become still more complicated—and interesting. Josephus’ War mentions no events under Cuspius Fadus’ governorship (44–46 CE) and therefore War has no reason to mention Theudas. In Antiquities 20, completed by 93 CE, he makes Fadus’ campaign against Theudas the capstone event of the procurator’s tenure. It is an important turning point in the later history, given its interest in Agrippa I, who reigned as king of Judaea until 44 CE. Fadus is the first post-Agrippa procurator, sent by Claudius in part to calm the turmoil that followed the king’s unexpected death, when the shift of power from Jerusalem back to coastal Caesarea made Judaeans vulnerable, and the king’s death was being indecently celebrated by non-Judaeans (AJ 19.356–59). The political change was a repeat of Judas’ concern a generation earlier, when Archelaus’ removal brought Jerusalem’s loss of power and the shift to Caesarea. Judas’ sons would soon face crucifixion for violent activities after Agrippa’s death, likely in retaliation against the anti-Judaean violence of the period (AJ 20.102). Having been sent by Emperor Claudius to pick up the pieces, Fadus was tasked with suppressing conflicts on the frontiers between Judaea and its neighbours (AJ 20.1–9). Josephus interrupts that dismal narrative to quote a decree issued by Claudius for the protection of Judaeans (20.10–16) and then for the sublime account of the Adiabenian royal family’s embrace of Judaean law and custom (20.17–96), before he turns to the Theudas episode (AJ 20.97–99). Theudas, he remarks, attracted a following by claiming to be a prophet and promising to part the Jordan River—presumably, since he was in Judaea, to lead the people out, thus reversing Joshua’s entry into the land, but possibly going out somehow and then coming back in. This description suits Josephus’ usual but historically hazy types (below): prophets promising wonders in the desert, matching bandits terrorising villages, would-be tyrants in Jerusalem, and sicarii wreaking havoc in urban crowds. Given that he frames Fadus’ term by mentioning the ethnic strife that followed the death of Agrippa (AJ 20.2–6, 97–99), after the unseemly celebrations involving the auxiliary army that that so disgusted Claudius (19.356–66), there is reason to doubt that Theudas’ motive was anti-Roman. His activity is connected with conflicts among Judaea’s neighbours and the locally raised auxiliary army. Josephus had no interest in explaining such connections, however. Our aristocratic historian, writing for like-minded men in Rome, saw only base motives in individuals who broke from the senior priesthood’s pleas to remain calm

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and not risk attracting Roman legionary medicine—a stance paralleled in Dio Chrysostom and Plutarch around the same time.47 For Josephus, such men, irrespective of their true motives, were disturbers of the peace. Nothing good could come from their misguided ambitions, whether expressed in violent attacks or ‘prophetic’ grand gestures. That is all the audience needed or perhaps wanted to know. Fadus, when he learned of Theudas’ following, reportedly sent an auxiliary cavalry troop to shut them down. The ever-eager auxiliary soldiers captured the Judaean leader, cut off his head, and stuck it on a post in Jerusalem. It is a compelling story, further developing Antiquities’ narrative of ructions throughout the region after the death of Agrippa I. Needless to say, the historical Theudas could not have been, any more than Judas was, an intrinsic rebel who woke up each morning wondering what havoc he could wreak. Theudas’ concerns in the 40s must have been different from those of Judas in 6 CE and connected with his context somehow. For Josephus he was a deluded crank. Perhaps he was, but we are entitled to suspect other motives—if only we could interview him. Theudas appears generic only because that image suited Josephus’ handling of unreconciled or trouble-making men. An independent author of different temper and sensibility, and Luke if he had had independent knowledge,48 would have written a somewhat different story. If Josephus singles out Judas in 6 and Theudas in the mid-40s as exemplary individuals, among many more who lived at the time, and Luke chooses the same two figures and gives them the same, aristocratically slanted, generic roles as bad guys, where did he get this impression of them? These are not autonomous facts about Theudas or Judas, which any observer would have seen. They betray an author’s compositional perspective. That author is Josephus. The chronological disparity between Josephus and Luke-Acts in locating Theudas before (Acts) or after (Josephus) Judas is glaring, and one of the discrepancies that has led scholars to see Luke as independent of Josephus. But what does this difference really mean? As we have seen, scholars reason that if Luke had borrowed from Josephus, he would have followed his ordering of events. But this way of thinking is too reflexive. Suppose as a working hypothesis that Luke had no other source for these events, but relied on Josephus. 47 48

E.g., Plutarch’s Precepts of Statecraft and Dio’s Alexandrian oration (Or. 32) among others. I say this because Luke assumes but also inverts Josephus’ value system with respect to Pharisees and Sadducees. This Christian author finds in the popular Pharisees, whom Josephus consistently disparages because of their mass appeal, a home for his characterisation of Jesus and Jesus’ followers. Cf. Mason 1995.

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He could not have given Theudas his correct date (if he remembered it) in Gamaliel’s speech, which occurred before Agrippa I’s reign or Theudas’ activity. If Luke wished to sound informed about Judaean affairs, however, and wanted to include Theudas because this was one of the few names he knew (from Josephus), he had little choice but to shift his date forward by decades. To when, then? He could have placed him after Judas, but If he was redating him anyway, why not place him before Judas? He might have preferred to keep Judas at the time of the watershed census of Luke 2 as the featured villain. This may look like I am assuming my conclusion: Luke knew Josephus, and contrary evidence (the chronological discrepancy) can be explained away. It is not that, but rather the illustration of historical method. Once we have interpreted our evidence, we go on to test explanatory hypotheses. Scholars have generally abandoned that second step, after noting the chronological discrepancy, prematurely concluding that Luke did not use Josephus and turning to the vague hypothesis of similar sources—without showing how that hypothesis would work or what those sources were. I am merely pointing out that the chronological discrepancy is not a fatal problem for the hypothesis of dependence. Once we posit it, as a hypothesis, it works. If Luke depended on Josephus for Judaean scenic elements, that is, he was free to mash these up to suit his needs. Whatever his sources were, he demonstrably did this in the case of the census (above), the Egyptian, and the sicarii (below)—as he did with Paul’s career.49 A neglected point enhances the likelihood that Luke found Theudas in a memory of Antiquities 20: the rarity of the name. Like σικάριοι (below), Θευδᾶς does not appear in Greek literature before Josephus and Acts. Contrast Judas (Hebrew Yehuda), one of the commonest names in first-century Judaea thanks to the heroic Judah Maccabee.50 In the latter half of the second century, the Greek name Theudas first appears in the physician Galen and the contemporary grammarian Aelius Herodian (Pros. cath. 3.1, 54; Peri Pathōn 3.2, 206, Peri Parōnymōn 3.2, 859). Then again, Herodian knew and extensively used Josephus’ works. He explains Theudas as a diminutive of the common and ancient Theodoros (gift of God), just as Zenas reduces Zenodoros (gift of Zeus), Metras Metrodoros (mother’s gift), and Pythas Pythodoros (gift of Apollo). In all these cases, the fuller name is well attested in classical literature, but the diminutives become common only in the second century CE—except perhaps Zenas in the undatable Aesop’s Fables.

49 50

See Knox 1950. Ilan 2002: 7, 56 (Table 7). The diminutive Θευδίων had earlier currency (BJ 1.592; AJ 20.14).

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It stretches credulity, then, to suppose that two independent authors, Josephus and Luke, chose the same series of axe handles to line up and shoot through (cf. Homer, Od. 21.68–434).: this one man from among many reportedly troublesome figures of the time, with the uniquely attested name Theudas, both characterising him as a nuisance rebel (in keeping with Josephus’ compositional themes: for him, of the pseudoprophet subset), and both writers using him along with Quirinius, the census, Judas, his rebellion, and Lysanias’ tetrarchy. We saw in the first part that some scholars a century ago wondered whether Luke took his information from a confused recollection of Josephus. Some alertly noted a detail of Josephus’ account that could explain the confusion, assuming that he did not consciously reshuffle the men’s dates.51 Immediately after describing Theudas, namely, Antiquities mentions the procuratorship of Tiberius Alexander (46–48 CE). His main achievement, according to Josephus, was executing two sons of Judas the Galilean (20.102). Since they die, in the narrative, almost immediately after Theudas’ death under Fadus, scholars proposed that Luke could innocently have remembered the order: Theudas, then Judas. We need not put much weight on this scenario, ingenious (and possible) though it is, because Luke is manifestly willing to rework his sources without great concern for historical accuracy. However that may be, it seems to me easier to imagine Luke either misremembering Josephus or deliberately shifting Theudas’ floruit than to conjure up a different, pre-6 CE generic rebel who happened to bear the name Theudas and went unmentioned by Josephus, or to imagine mysterious independent ‘sources’ describing such a Theudas. 6

Walk Like The Egyptian?

Still more curious is the decision of both Josephus and Luke to include a rebel figure they both call the Egyptian, as though he had no name. Again, this label makes sense only in Josephus. Luke makes him a leader of sicarii, a group that plays no role in Luke-Acts but is prominent in Josephus—alone of ancient writers. Luke puts all this together in a famous scene in Acts (21.38). When Paul addresses a friendly Roman tribune of the Jerusalem auxiliary cohort, the tribune is surprised to hear him speaking Greek. The officer then offers an artificially expository history-lesson, evidently for Luke’s literary audience rather than for Paul. Turning to camera, as it were, the tribune disgorges the author’s historical knowledge: ‘So, then, you are not the Egyptian who, before 51

Elaborately Schmiedel 1903: 5054–56.

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these days, led a rebellion and led out 4,000 men of the sicarii into the desert?’ (οὐκ ἄρα σὺ εἶ ὁ Αἰγύπτιος ὁ πρὸ τούτων τῶν ἡμερῶν ἀναστατώσας καὶ ἐξαγαγὼν εἰς τὴν ἔρημον τοὺς τετρακισχιλίους ἄνδρας τῶν σικαρίων;). If we read this against Josephus’ narrative, it is a rich stew of confused connections. Let us first recall Josephus’ contexts for mentioning ‘the Egyptian.’ War’s description of Felix’s governorship in the 50s CE (2.253–65) makes a number of observations. He uses formulaic categories, presumably to help his Roman audience avoid getting bogged down in details. Here is an overview: – Procurator Felix ends the twenty-year-long rampages (not described earlier in the story) throughout the countryside of a man named Eleazar (b. Deinaeus) and his gangs of bandits. – In contrast to that blight in the villages, in the urban space of Jerusalem a new breed of bandit appears. These people are sicarii. Using knives concealed in their clothing, they murder socially prominent targets in urban crowds, and with impunity—a quick stab, concealment of the knife, and an innocent walk away. – This rash of urban knife crime creates pervasive fear. According to Josephus, aged about 20 at the story time and likely to have a decent memory, people worried that even an old friend, having turned antagonistic over some slight, might be packing a knife (2.257). – After surveying these two violent types, bandits in the country and knifers in the urban space, Josephus turns to an equally dangerous if seemingly harmless group. These are the visionaries. They have ‘cleaner hands’ (they do not kill), but their ideas are even more dangerous. Pretending divine inspiration, they attract mobs of zealous followers, ‘leading them out into the desert, where God would show them signs of freedom’ (τὸ πλῆθος ἔπειθον καὶ προῆγον εἰς τὴν ἐρημίαν; 2.259). All such groups Felix met with (Samarian) auxiliary forces that were more than happy to beat or kill Judaeans. – All three groups appear first appear in the aggregate like this, with no named representatives. Before leaving the prophets, however, Josephus singles out one specimen as more dangerous than others, because he combined violence and visionary pretension. ‘The Egyptian false prophet’ (ὁ Αἰγύπτιος ψευδοπροφήτης) promised miraculous signs not in the desert, like other visionaries, but actually in Jerusalem, a much more volatile place. Playing the tyrant, he gathered 30,000 spear-carriers on the Mount of Olives, promised that God would cause the walls of Jerusalem to collapse, and boasted that he would expel the auxiliary garrison to establish himself as tyrant in the city (anticipating John of Gischala and Simon bar Giora in War 4). All of this should be doubted on historical grounds, given the impossible numbers (larger than Jerusalem’s likely population), the schematisation in

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Josephus’ charged language and types, and the unlikelihood that the man confessed to being a tyrant. But the context explains Josephus’ possibly unique characterisation of this man, without naming him. He can get by with introducing him as ‘the Egyptian pseudoprophet’, that is, because he needs only to distinguish him from all the other false prophets. The label pseudoprophet is another way of referring to those who ‘made a show of divine inspiration’ and filled the masses with enthusiasm (BJ 2.259). Indeed, ψευδοπροφήτης is one of his go-to terms of abuse (16 occurrences, far more than in any other author; the LXX has 10, 9 of these in Jeremiah). That this Judaean hailed from Egypt is enough to distinguish him. Josephus may, further, have chosen to label him this way, to exploit anti-Egyptian prejudices among his Roman audience.52 It is unusual for Josephus to mention a male without naming him.53 Josephus had every reason to say ‘the Egyptian pseudoprophet’ to achieve his aim of ridicule. When Josephus reworks the episode in Antiquities 20, he varies the context and language as usual, though he retains the basic story. He first describes a large number of unnamed ‘enchanters and tricksters’, who advised the masses to follow them into the desert (AJ 20.167–68), promising that they would show them signs and wonders54 by divine provision (οἱ δὲ γόητες καὶ ἀπατεῶνες ἄνθρωποι τὸν ὄχλον ἔπειθον αὐτοῖς εἰς τὴν ἐρημίαν ἕπεσθαι· δείξειν γὰρ ἔφασαν ἐναργῆ τέρατα καὶ σημεῖα κατὰ τὴν τοῦ θεοῦ πρόνοιαν γινόμενα). He continues: ‘At about this time, a certain fellow arrives in Jerusalem from Egypt, saying that he was a prophet (ἀφικνεῖται δέ τις ἐξ Αἰγύπτου κατὰ τοῦτον τὸν καιρὸν εἰς Ἱεροσόλυμα προφήτης εἶναι λέγων) and calling for the throng to accompany him to the 52

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Notwithstanding the popularity of the Isis cult in Rome and Italy, Romans often voiced disdain for Egypt and Egyptian character and piety. Both ridicule of Egyptians and political constraints on Egypt (devalued currency, lack of a council for Alexandria, governance by an equestrian prefect) had been fuelled by the civil war with Antony. See Tacitus, Hist. 5.4; Balsdon 1979: 3, 14–16; Barclay 2007: 205 n. 232. Although the Egyptian pseudoprophet was apparently a Judaean Egyptian, perhaps—if a real figure—motivated by the turmoil in Alexandria (possibly his real place of origin) in 38–39 CE, Josephus can tar him as an ‘Egyptian’. Josephus’ own remarks on Egyptian vices and shortcomings include BJ 2.362; AJ 1.162, 166; 2.201–204, 239–41; 19.81–82; Ap. 1.223–53, 270, 279; 2.28–42, esp. 128–34, 138–44. Women often go unnamed, even his own mother (V 1–6), though royal and noble women are more likely to be named. It is curious that this is one of only two occurrences in Josephus of τέρατα καὶ σημεῖα or the reverse (also BJ 1.28). He charges the false prophets with making outlandishly false promises. In Acts, the same Septuagintal phrase is thematic (2.22, 43; 4.30; 5.12; 6.8; 7.36; 14.3; 15.12), serving as crucial proof the apostles’ ability to prove their claims about the risen Christ by the visible action of the Holy Spirit. If Luke knew Josephus, he had reason not to borrow this phrase and risk contaminating his account with the prospect that many people claimed signs and wonders.

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mountain called “of Olives”’ (20.169). After this clear introduction specifying the man’s distinctive origin (distinctive among the fake prophets), Josephus can refer to ‘the Egyptian’ again when describing the fate of his followers (600 instead of War’s 30,000)—and his personal escape, as in War. Again, calling him the Egyptian makes good sense in Josephus’ narrative, which posits a plethora of would-be prophets and needs only that origin to distinguish this man. Needless to say, the man’s parents did not call him ‘the Egyptian’, much less a ‘pseudoprophet.’ His name must have been known to his followers. An independent writer with different sources and interests, writing a different sort of narrative without Josephus’ language and categorisations, would presumably have named him. In Alexandria, Philo names various local figures in his Against Flaccus and Embassy to Gaius. Pseudoprophet and the Egyptian are Josephus’ literary constructions, intelligible in his contexts but otherwise meaningless. There was a constant stream of Judaeans from Egypt who visited Jerusalem as pilgrims, including Philo (Prov. 2.64). Calling the man ‘the Egyptian’, without the need to distinguish him from other pseudoprophets, would be like calling one American in London ‘the American’ and expecting people to understand. Josephus does not do that, but calls him ‘the Egyptian pseudoprophet’ (of all the pseudoprophets) in War, or in Antiquities explains that this would-be prophet had arrived from Egypt. For another writer to call him ‘the Egyptian’ as though this were his name would be futile. Audiences take whatever they are given, of course. If Luke has the tribune recall ‘the Egyptian who led sicarii into the desert’ (ὁ Αἰγύπτιος ὁ … ἀναστατώσας κτλ.), Luke’s audience would presumably take this as a nice touch of local colour. Fair enough. But if we ask about his sources, and how an unnamed Egyptian ends up with sicarii and the desert, it is difficult or impossible to imagine a source other than Josephus. Why does Luke’s tribune think of the Egyptian at all? He is unnecessary for the officer’s interaction with Paul, whom he should simply protect. Given the abundant evidence for Greek-speakers in Jerusalem and the necessity that this was the normal language of communication between Judaeans and prefects, it is incredible that the tribune should hear someone address him in Greek and respond, ‘So you are not the Egyptian.’ And did ‘the Egyptian’ not know Greek? Was he from the depths of Egyptian village country and not from Alexandria or the other Greek cities? What language did he use in Jerusalem? Had he spoken Hebrew or Aramaic in Egypt? At bottom, our question is about the plausibility of an independent author’s both choosing the same figure and describing him in the same nameless way. Notice that the tribune uses the same phrase to date the Egyptian’s activity that

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Gamaliel had used of Theudas: ‘before these days’ (πρὸ τούτων τῶν ἡμερῶν), a vague formula that might betray the author’s knowledge of an authoritative source. Other evidence of vestigial Josephus is of course Luke’s claim that this Egyptian led the sicarii ‘out into the desert.’ If we compare that with Josephus’ War, above, it looks like the tribune mashes up three distinct elements, which sit next to each other in Josephus: sicarii, who require urban crowds for their murders by concealed weapon; prophet types, who lead followers into the desert; and the hybrid Egyptian. Despite having described the urban context of sicarii activity, oddly, Josephus himself goes on to describe one Eleazar leading sicarii to the desert fortress Masada (BJ 4.400, 516; 7.253). So Luke fuses the three, creating a super-hybrid Egyptian who takes sicarii into the desert. If Luke has an interest in displaying his knowledge of political events and figures, a trait to which few of us are immune, it is understandable that he would ball up such information from an authoritative source with no concern for details. The specificity of his terms (Egyptian, desert, sicarii) would suffice for the desired impact: He really knows his stuff! Whether or not I have correctly guessed his motives, it is difficult to explain this combination of these figures without reference to Josephus. It is not enough to dismiss the prospect of borrowing because of obvious differences, without troubling to explain what other source Luke could have used. The problem looks different once we are alert to compositional uniqueness. What other author had reason to write about the anonymous Egyptian, and sicarii, and visionaries heading into the desert, in close proximity? Luke’s familiarity with Josephus’ War is the most economical explanation of the tribune’s knowledge. The name sicarii is more distinctive of Josephus than is usually recognised. Scholars tend to see the sicarii as a known faction in Judaea with a somewhat defined membership, like the mediaeval order of trained Ismaili killers we know as Assassins or the nineteenth-century Indian Thuggi. There are problems with such a picture, however. To begin with, though the Greek transliteration of Latin sicarii is frequent in Josephus, it is also unique to him (and Acts). Second, why would a nationalist Judaean group take such an abhorrent Latin name for themselves? The usual explanation is that ‘Roman authorities’ applied the name to them, and the group may have adopted the word as a badge of honour.55 But these possibilities need clarification. Which Roman authorities were using Latin for communication in Judaea, and how many were they? Judaea was not occupied by legionaries. The army in charge of policing was the locally recruited auxiliary force, which communicated in Greek. The 55

E.g., Hengel 1989: 49, 396–97.

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Prefect-Procurator in Caesarea, responsible to the provincial legatus augusti in Antioch (with four legions), had a tiny support staff, which necessarily used Greek for administrative purposes and communication with the populace. A fortiori, the prefects or tribunes of auxiliary cohorts communicated in Greek with their soldiers. The biggest problem, however, is that Josephus himself uses σικάριοι in unstable ways.56 War first uses the word generically, as we have seen above, of ordinary folk committing knife crimes under Felix in the 50s, to the extent that people feared friends with such concealed weapons. Although War introduces the term in that vague way and not for a definable group, let alone a political-military faction (2.254, 425), most occurrences in this work attach to the group that Eleazar ben Yair led out of Jerusalem’s conflicts at the earliest stage (66 CE) to Masada. Josephus uses the word later in War 7 for certain violent Judaeans in Egypt and Cyrenaica—generic troublemakers all (4.400, 516; 7.253, 262, 275, 297, 311, 410, 415, 437, 444). Aside from Luke, it needs to be stressed, Josephus is the only known author who transliterates Latin sicarii in Greek, though he does so eagerly (19 times).57 If we ask why he likes the word, when it does not refer to a particular group in Judaea, the simplest explanation is his writing context in Rome. In Rome the word sicarii had a terrifying force. In 81 BCE, Sulla had established courts (quaestiones) for trying sicarii and poisoners under the lex cornelia de sicariis et veneficiis, elaborating an earlier law. Poisoning and stabbing with a concealed blade were the two most likely techniques for disposing of political-social enemies without risking prosecution, especially if the deed were done by a paid subordinate.58 Cicero’s first public defence, aged just 27 (80 BCE), was of a prominent figure accused under this law.59 Defining a sicarius in that defence case as ‘a brazen man often involved in murder’ (Pro Rosc. 39), Cicero would later deploy the word more broadly as an effective term for smearing his political enemies (Cat. 2.4 [7]; Verr. 2.1.9; Pis. 16 [37]). In this political usage, the word goes with latro (bandit)—another fear word, and favourite of Josephus in the Greek equivalent (λῃστής).60 Although it is hard to make sense of sicarii as a group in Judaea’s hills, it is easy to understand the term as the literary creation of a 56 57 58 59 60

See Brighton 2009. Not counting Origen, Eusebius, and other Christian authors borrowing from Josephus. Justinian, Dig. 48.1; Inst. 4.18.5. cf. Lintott 1978. Pro Roscio Amerino; later Pro Cluentio and Pro Sestio. Habinek 1998: 69–87.

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foreign statesman living and writing in Rome, who is trying to impress his audiences there with resonant vocabulary from their political past. Here is another curiosity. The law concerning poisoners and concealed-knife assassins used the plural only because it pertained to all such people. When we speak of liars or cheats, we do not mean that they act in chorus. Their dastardly deeds are individual, and perhaps must be so to be effective. So too, the acts that defined a sicarius or a veneficius were by definition solitary, as they exploited intimate access to their target. They were not marauders or highway robbers. One had to get near someone to poison them or to stab with a concealed blade and walk away undetected. Those accused were tried as individuals. The notion of teams of poisoners or sicarii would make little sense. The deed was terrifying because of its personal character and breach of trust. In Cicero’s defence of Roscius and attack on the real culprits, he allows that there was a multitude of sicarii in Rome (erat tum multitude sicariorum), but this refers to the large number of individual assassins, personally motivated or available for hire to murder an individual. Cicero makes the point that Roscius may have been seen with sicarii, but that did make him a sicarius (Rosc. 93–94). Because it is an individual crime, the singular sicarius is common in Latin texts (Rosc. 39, 76, 94, 103, 152; Cat. 2.7; Dom. 49; Sest. 39; Pis. 38; Horace, Serm. 1.4). Yet Josephus, though he first describes individual urban murders as actions of sicarii, only ever uses the plural. As his narrative develops, he neglects to mention any individual crime that should justify this group label. Having once described the knife crime, he expects his audience to trust him when he says, improbably, that all those who went to Masada or turned up later in Egypt were sicarii. This is distinctive language, but one can see what Josephus is doing, in writing for his Roman audience. Luke appears to piggy-back on that peculiar usage, as though ‘men of the sicarii’ were a visible group acting as a team, and for some reason going to the desert—to Masada?. In short, since it is difficult to understand a Judaean rebel group acquiring the label sicarii, much less cherishing it; since no other text of the period refers to such a group; since the word does not have a non-Latin equivalent; and since Josephus’ usage of sicarii is extremely vague, the simplest explanation of such groups in Josephus is that this is his distinctive choice. Writing for local audiences in Rome, he transliterated a resonant Latin term to evoke activity for which only Latin had the mot juste. Then he grew to like it and used it more vaguely. If that is so, then Luke seems to have borrowed the tribune’s learning from Josephus. War’s sicarii began, however, only about the same time as Paul’s encounter with the tribune, late in Felix’s tenure (mid-50s CE). Antiquities first

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uses the term sicarii under Festus (59–62 CE?), so in neither case ‘before these days’, before Paul’s arrest in the late 50s. To sum up: the puzzles of Acts 21.38—(1) that Luke chose Latin sicarii as a one-off term for Judaean militants, (2) that he sent them out in the desert (like Eleazar’s taking sicarii to Masada in War), when they should be urban assassins, and (3) that he should place ‘the Egyptian’ at their head—are not easy to explain if we imagine a source other than Josephus. These features are most economically explained by Luke’s blending of elements from a dense passage in Josephus, War 2. Looking for another source would create more problems. What other author had the compositional interest in (a) highlighting the desert as the destination of false prophets, (b) positing sicarii in Judaea in the first place, (c) portraying them as a group, and (d) isolating an unnamed Egyptian, and all in close proximity? Differences here speak for Josephus’ influence. 7

The Christian Path as a αἵρεσις—Like Pharisees and Sadducees

In Acts 22.3 Paul says that was educated at the feet of the Pharisee Gamaliel, ‘with accuracy/precision in the ancestral law’ (πεπαιδευμένος κατὰ ἀκρίβειαν τοῦ πατρῴου νόμου). He later tells Agrippa II that he had lived as a Pharisee, ‘the most precise/accurate school of our way of worship’ (τὴν ἀκριβεστάτην αἵρεσιν τῆς ἡμετέρας θρησκείας, 26.5). The superlative adjective ἀκριβεστάτη suggests at least three such ‘schools’ or parties, though perhaps we should not press the grammar. In any case, the author defaults to αἵρεσις as his category for both Pharisees and Sadducees (Acts 5.17; 15.5; 26.5). He then uses the same term for Christ-followers or Nazarenes, as though yet another school—though of course their teaching is unique and superior by virtue of the recent revelation of Christ’s resurrection (24.5, 14; 28.22). Luke is the only NT author to use αἵρεσις with this positive connotation (all 6 times in Acts). The letters of Paul and ‘Peter’ use it only for destructive factionalism (1 Cor 11.19; Gal 5.20; 2 Pet 2.1). Our question is again whether this cluster of terms and concepts—αἵρεσις, ἀκρίβεια, θρησκεία—was self-evident, a choice that any observer of the scene would have used, or whether they are artefacts of Josephus’ literary programme. If the latter, their presence in Luke-Acts is further evidence of Josephus’ influence. We begin with the categorisation of Pharisees and Sadducees as αἱρέσεις. Because Josephus repeatedly claims that Judaea had three schools or philosophies, formerly rendered ‘sects’ in most translations (BJ 2.119–66; AJ 13.171–73; 298; 18.11–22; V 10–12), scholars have all but unanimously assumed that this was the reality. Everyone in Judaea must have known of this triad. I recently had a lively email discussion with a respected colleague about the extent of

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Josephus’ literary creativity, and this was the example of things that Josephus could not have made up that occurred to him: there were three schools. He was right that this is the virtual consensus. Handbooks on ancient Judaism or New Testament backgrounds, dissertations, and monographs refer to the three schools of ancient Judaism as a given.61 The scheme seemed so obvious when the Qumran Scrolls began to appear that their identification with Essenes could be made in part by disqualifying Pharisees or Sadducees (also pondered), along with Pliny’s reference to their location (Nat. 5.74) and some correspondences between 1QS 6–7 and War 2. Scholars have long doubted that some of the categories Josephus uses to describe the schools’ views (e.g., ‘fate’, ‘philosophies’, ‘schools’) reflect Judaean reality very well. They have sometimes assumed that he borrowed hellenising sources and/or lingo.62 But few have doubted that any observer would have noticed that Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes comprised three religious groups or ‘schools’ before 70 CE. Surprisingly, given the general take-up of this picture, it is easily disprovable.63 Even the extant NT writers differ markedly in how they label and order Judaea’s groups. Mark and John feature (or know) Pharisees alone and see them as broadly representative of Judaeans outside Jerusalem, sometimes in cahoots with chief priests in the city—together constituting Jesus’ cosmic enemies who are out to destroy him (Mark 3.6; 7.3–5; John 1.24; 3.1; 7.32, 45–48; 11.47, 57). Both texts ignore Sadducees and Essenes—John completely, Mark allowing Sadducees a single pericope to wave their no-resurrection banner (12.18). Mark pairs Pharisees with elusive ‘Herodians’ (3.6; 8.15; 12.13; cf. Matt 22.16), or less often ‘scribes’ (7.1, 5) or students of John the Baptist (2.18),

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E.g., de Vaux 1973: 126–28, 138: ‘It [the Qumran sect] must belong to one of the movements which were important and well known within Judaism’. Maier 1982, matching the philosophy of each school to another Judaean text group; Stemberger 1991; cf. idem 1995; Sanders 1992: 317: ‘we know of three named parties: Sadducees, Pharisees and Essenes. … We shall now examine first the history and then the characteristics of each party in some detail’ (i.e., 317–490); Grabbe 2010: 51–63 (NB: ‘the four main “philosophies” described by Josephus’, 59 [my emphasis]); Klawans 2012, basically redoing Maier. Bergmeier, 1993: 56, proposed that the n form of the Essenes’ name in Josephus (as distinct from Essaios) betrayed a 3-school source, but this free speculation does not match the literary evidence (Josephus uses the ai-form for the singular, n-form for plural). A rare and ignored exception is Schürer-Vermes, which treats Pharisees and Sadducees together (2.388) but removes Essenes to a completely different part of the volume as ‘a phenomenon of an entirely different kind’ (2.558). Moore 1929; Schwartz 1983; systematic discussion, arguing that Josephus crafted these accounts, in Mason 1991. See already Smith 1956: 67–81.

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as somewhat comparable groups.64 Apparently having no better idea than we do who Herodians were, Matthew pushes them aside to give much more visibility to Sadducees, who now appear alongside Pharisees in both Galilee and Jerusalem, even joining them in chorus (3.7; 16.1, 6, 11–12; 23.34). In Matthew, as in Mark and John, Pharisees are close to the chief priests (Matt 27.62). The effect is that the Pharisees’ lethal conflict with Jesus issues in his trial and execution led by chief priests, in a seamless thread. Luke, exploiting the added space of two volumes to avoid what he considers conflations of Jesus’ life with the time of the apostles (Luke 1.1–4), offers a very different picture. In Luke, Pharisees figure prominently alongside scribes and law-teachers and certainly do not plot Jesus’ death. They address him respectfully and repeatedly invite him to dinner, although he uses these occasions to scold them (7.36; 11.37; 14.1). After warning him to flee Galilee to avoid Antipas’ death warrant (13.31), they even accompany him as far as his entry to Jerusalem, still addressing him as teacher (19.39). Then they abruptly fade from the scene, to reappear in volume 2 as defenders of the new Christ movement. A prominent Pharisee has the courage to stand against the demand of the high priest and Sadducees that Jesus’ apostles be executed (5.34). Thereafter, Pharisees supply many Judaean converts to Christ, their acceptance of resurrection (and their identification as Paul’s former group) helping to smooth the way (15.5; 23.4–9). Luke’s Pharisees are not in league with the chief priests and temple authorities, who present an altogether different and sinister power. Between the appearances of Pharisees alongside Jesus and those who become his followers in Acts, Sadducees appear in sharp relief and much higher resolution than in other gospels. Luke mentions them only where Mark does (Luke 20.27). But the departure of Jesus’ Pharisaic entourage as he approaches Jerusalem takes on potent meaning in retrospect, in Acts. There, when Peter and John speak freely to the common people, they are arrested by the ‘(chief) priests, the temple commandant, and the Sadducees’ (4.1). The assembly of rulers, elders, and scribes who then interrogate the apostles is led by the high priest and three members of his family (4.5). These are the very people, the audience realises, who crucified Jesus (ὃν ὑμεῖς ἐσταυρώσατε, 4.10). In case one should miss the point that this temple-based group is made up 64

Taylor 2012 devotes a chapter to arguing that the Herodians of Mark were Essenes. But her argument, which begins with the oddity of the NT’s failure to mention Essenes, rests on the assumption (along with a complex series of interpretations and connections) that the three-school model was a reality (109: ‘Why would the Gospel-writers have avoided mentioning the Essenes if they were powerful players …? If the Pharisees and Sadducees were concerned about Jesus’ interpretations of the law and actions, surely the Essenes—if they played a public role—would also have been concerned?’).

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of resurrection-denying Sadducees, Luke states it clearly. After releasing Peter and John under caution (5.17), ‘the high priest and all those who were with him, being the hairesis of the Sadducees’ (ὁ ἀρχιερεὺς καὶ πάντες οἱ σὺν αὐτῷ, ἡ οὖσα αἵρεσις τῶν Σαδδουκαίων), arrest them again at the hands of the temple commandant and his agents (5.26). When the apostles face a trial by this high-priest led court, the brave Pharisee Gamaliel intercedes and the apostles are released after a flogging (5.40). This fundamental difference between the two groups persists until the end of Acts. Whereas Pharisees have always associated themselves with Jesus and they join the Christian movement, Sadducees reappear in the trial conducted by the high priest, who orders Paul struck in the face for insolence. There, Paul resourcefully turns the Pharisee-Sadducee split into a diversion, on the creative claim that the trial is only about resurrection, which he and the Pharisees accept but the powerful Sadducees reject. This is what is known in Australian and British politics as deadcatting, or throwing a dead cat on the table as a diversion. A brawl ensues (23.1–10). Such differences as we find among the gospels and Acts are what we would expect from at least partly independent texts with different programmes. What they agree on, the relative prominence of Pharisees and Sadducees, is confirmed by rabbinic literature, which several times places perushim and tsadukim in opposition.65 None of these authors, however, imagined a three-school scheme, putting Essenes in the same frame as Pharisees and Sadducees. Reciprocally, the several texts aside from Josephus that feature Essenes (viz., Philo, Pliny, and Porphyry, De Abstinentia), make no mention of Pharisees or Sadducees. They make clear that Essenes are a unique group. Josephus himself takes that view in most cases, describing Essenes’ actions without any reference to Pharisees or Sadducees (BJ 1.78; 2.113, 119–61 [3.11]; 5.145; AJ 13.311; 15.371–78; 17.346), though he usually portrays Pharisees either acting alone or in opposition to Sadducees (BJ 2.162–66; AJ 13.288, 292–93, 297–98; 18.17). Philo compares Palestinian-Syria’s Essenes with Alexandria’s Therapeutae (Contempl. 1). Philo, although he discusses Essenes often and adoringly, never thinks to call them a αἵρεσις, reserving that label for other philosophical schools (Plant. 151; Contempl. 29).66 That may be because he did not face Josephus’ challenge of trying to explain Judaean culture in a comprehensive way, and therefore 65 66

Rivkin 1969. Since he labelled the Therapeutae both a γένος (Contempl. 21) and a αἵρεσις (29), and given that this essay departs from a lost mention of the Essenes (1), we cannot rule out the possibility that somewhere else he called the Essenes a αἵρεσις. But this does not appear in his several elaborate descriptions of them, and their dispersion throughout Palestine-Syria’s villages in active life (Prob. 75–91) might not have recommended the category to him. My

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needed no covering category for Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes. Paul and the authors of Mark, Matthew, and John refer to Pharisees and/or Sadducees, but never have reason to call them αἱρέσεις either. It is not what they were, which everyone could see. It is a literary choice. These disparate pictures show that Pharisees and Sadducees were a visible and contrastable pair, even if they too differed somewhat in their group type, their reasons for being, and their constituencies. When prominent Pharisees came into contact with Sadducees in Jerusalem’s council, their legal perspectives collided. That made their grouping and differences relatively well known. The main legal principle on which they disagreed, whether jurists should in principle hew to Moses’ law alone or give explicit authority to case law, has reappeared in many forms in other cultures: Karaites vs. rabbis; Hanafi fiqh vs. other schools of Sunni-Islamic jurisprudence; Catholics vs. Protestants; Conservatives vs. Progressives; in American legal conflicts, originalism vs. binding precedent (stare decisis), or strict constructionism vs. judicial activism. Josephus’ explanation of this crucial difference makes sense, and the gospels offer support with notices about the Pharisees’ tradition of the fathers. Essenes were, the evidence agrees, a different kind of group. Only Josephus— and he only sometimes, when he is at his most abstract—groups them with Pharisees and Sadducees in a triad, shifting about their views of fate and free will as needed to make a happy threesome (AJ 13.171–73 in contrast to BJ 2.162–66). This is slightly awkward, and he does not try to explain how Essenes relate to the main Pharisee-Sadducee difference, concerning statute vs. case law. But once he has the neat three-school scheme in place, he uses it as a springboard for the still more elusive ‘fourth philosophy’ in another one-time creative move in Antiquities 18.23. In presenting Judaean culture to his Roman audiences, Josephus needed to make at least three decisions together: (a) how to describe the internal landscape of this alien culture for his Roman readers, at each social level, from the noble to the squalid (e.g. finding labels for militant and prophet-ish groups or individuals, above, or for groups that pursue more sublime activities); (b) which Greek term(s) to use for groups dealing with higher-level pursuits; and (c) which of these groups to include. There were no obvious facts available. He had to craft the picture. Other authors would presumably have chosen different groups, given the diverse landscape.67 Josephus, however, chose to make a triad of Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes. His first effort, in War 2.119–66,

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larger point is that he does not mention Pharisees and Sadducees, and I see no reason to think that, if he had, he would have put them in the same category as his Therapeutae. See Smith 1956.

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suggests that he was feeling his way along. It is completely one-sided, with Essenes nearly toppling the cart and appearing sui generis, despite the balanced introduction at 2.119. He also uses categories that are extremely vague: τάγμα, indicating a clearly demarcated organisation or a Roman legion, his main use otherwise, which suits his disciplined Essenes (2.122, 125, 143, 160, 164),68 and γένος, meaning some kind of ‘class, kind’ (2.113, 160; cf. 1.78 of Essenes), a term he normally uses for one’s ancestry or ethnic origin (as even at BJ 2.119). He could not have found more non-descriptive categories. His most durable and distinctive category for all three groups, however, tested also in this first passage, is αἵρεσις (BJ 2.118, 122, 137, 142, 162; cf. AJ 13.171, 288, 293; 20.199; V 10, 12, 191, 197). This is a more vivid word than the others. It could refer to any sort of group commitment or faction—political, philosophical, or other. Right from the start, however, Josephus begins to shade it toward the philosophical, as when he contrasts Judas the Galilean as a σοφιστής leading an aberrant αἵρεσις (2.118) with the three groups that engage in actual philosophy (Τρία γὰρ παρὰ Ἰουδαίοις εἴδη φιλοσοφεῖται, 2.119)—not in mere sophistry (cf. BJ 1.2). His last description of the ‘schools’ will cement this by simply labelling the three groups ‘philosophies’ (φιλοσοφίαι, AJ 18.9–11, 23). Along the way, he contrasts them on a perennial philosophical question—Essenes ascribe everything to fate, Sadducees do away with it, Pharisees hold a middle position (13.171–73)—and compares Essenes with Pythagoreans (AJ 15.371), as he will compare Pharisees with Stoics (V 12). So, his final labelling of the three as philosophies, even conjuring a ‘fourth philosophy’ ad hoc, is no big surprise. This formulation also lays the groundwork for Josephus to present his advanced education, implausibly in historical terms, as a tour through his nation’s three philosophical schools (V 10–12), reworking the trope of the youthful quest for truth among Graec0-Roman philosophies.69 Why did Josephus choose three schools? There might be a deep Jungian explanation of our general taste for the rhetorical ‘rule of three’.70 In relation to philosophical matters, further, Cicero (De fat. 39) and Tacitus (Ann. 6.22) portray Graeco-Roman views of fate, much as Josephus describes the Judaean 68 69 70

At 1.110, he has first introduced the Pharisees (alone) as a σύνταγμα, a word with a negative slant when used of people, in his lexicon. Cicero, Fam. 13.1.2; Fin. 1.16; Brut. 89.306–91.316; Plutarch, Lib. ed. 10.8a–b; Lucian, Men. 45; Justin, Dial. 2; Galen, De Anim. pecc. dign. cur. 5.102 (and Lucian’s satire, Philosophies for Sale). Just two examples: his programmatic triad of war, civil strife, and famine (1.27; 4.137; 361; 5.522; 6.13, 205, 216; related: 6.40, 367–69, 399, 405, 421, 430) and a more general tendency to group especially psychological possibilities as X, Y, and Z (e.g., BJ 2.4; 3.436; 4.391; 5.539; 6.170, 214, 392, 397–98; 7.373), if not in the more common men … de opposites.

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spectrum (AJ 13.171–73), as a trio of options: foregrounding fate, dispensing with it, or taking some kind of middle way. So much for Josephus. How, then, should we explain Luke’s labelling of Pharisees and Sadducees as αἱρέσεις and the implication of his superlative adjective that he thought there were at least three of these, not counting Christ-followers? When, alone among NT authors, he uses this language; pictures Pharisees and Sadducees as having different social constituencies and regional spheres, opposing each other when they come into contact; portrays Pharisees as popular with the masses and therefore close to Jesus and tolerant of his followers; puts prominent Pharisees in Jerusalem’s council, where the high priest is in charge and the chief priests hold sway (Gamaliel is a wise and brave exception); portrays Sadducees as a small temple-based group of powerful men led by the high priest, which favours harsh discipline—when the author of Luke-Acts includes these unique features, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that he is influenced by the detailed narrative of Judaea-expert Josephus. This brings us to Luke’s investment in ἀκρίβεια language. Eight of the 13 occurrences of ἀκρίβεια cognates in the NT fall in Luke-Acts, and they are used programmatically: for something like accurate history-writing (though the author does not claim to write history), in the prologue (1.3); for the related process of careful legal inquiry (23.15, 20); for precision in understanding the Christian Path (18.25–26; 24.22); and in relation to Paul’s education among the Pharisees, which he calls a αἵρεσις. Although it is a standard feature of ancient historical prologues, and common enough elsewhere, ἀκρίβεια cognates have a rare thematic coherence in Josephus—as they do in Dionysius and Philo.71 The word group appears 6 times in War’s prologue alone, and once in War’s very brief conclusion (7.454). Likewise it shows up twice in the prologue to Antiquities (at 1.14, 17) and 4 times in that work’s longer conclusion (AJ 20.258 referring to War’s accuracy; 20.260, 262, the accuracy of Antiquities; at 20.263 admitting his lack of precision in Greek expression). One reason Josephus uses these words so often is that he connects this desirable attribute of historical precision with (his) scrupulous care in interpreting the ancestral laws. The main point for our purposes is that, among his varied uses of ἀκρίβεια, Josephus is the only known author to make a sub-theme of the αἵρεσις of the Pharisees’ reputation—from which he demurs—for ἀκρίβεια in relation to the ancestral laws (see Chapter 13). In BJ 1.110; 2.162; AJ 13.298; 17.41; and V 191 71

E.g., ἀκρίβεια: Thucydides 4, extant Polybius 12, Diodorus 9, Dionysius 34, Philo 23, Josephus 34; ἀκριβής: Thucydides 12, Xenophon 4, Polybius 10, Diodorus 39, Dionysius 71, Philo 78, Josephus 59; ἀκριβόω, Xenophon 8, Polybius 1, Dionysius 10, Philo 65, Josephus 6.

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he formulaically repeats that Pharisees are the αἵρεσις who are reputed (δοκέω) to interpret τοὺς νόμους, τὰ νόμιμα, τοῦ πατρίου καὶ νόμων, or τὰ πάτρια νόμιμα—largely interchangeable terms in Josephus—more precisely than anyone else. His debunking of this reputation, which usually follows, matches his disparagement of Thucydides and Ephorus as historians. Though reputed to be the most accurate of historians, he points out, even they stand accused of falsehood (Ap. 1.8, ὡς ψευδόμενος ὑπό τινων κατηγορεῖται καίτοι δοκῶν ἀκριβεστάτην τὴν καθ᾿ αὑτὸν ἱστορίαν συγγράφειν; 1.67, οἱ δοκοῦντες ἀκριβέστατοι συγγραφεῖς, ὧν ἐστιν Ἔφορος … οἴεται …). Josephus’ use of the δοκέω + ἀκριβής pair, though not unknown in earlier authors, is distinctive and particularly consistent when he speaks of ancestral laws and Pharisees.72 Thus, when the author of Luke-Acts not only distinguishes Pharisees and Sadducees in the ways that Josephus does, and labels them αἱρέσεις, but also makes the Pharisees the ‘most exact school’, it is hard not to hear Josephus. In this regard, I am not quite sure that Luke’s τὴν ἀκριβεστάτην αἵρεσιν τῆς ἡμετέρας θρησκείας, though it is broadly intelligible, makes perfect sense. What would an accurate or exact school or other group look like? If the sense were ‘accurate in relation to the laws / regarding our θρησκεία’, or any other unstated object, that would make sense, but it is unstated. The phrase looks like shorthand for something like ‘the school that is (regarded as) most accurate in interpreting the law’, which is what Josephus says formulaically, and what Luke’s Paul says, roughly at 23.3: he was a student of the Pharisee Gamaliel, hence ‘educated to a precise standard in the ancestral law’ (πεπαιδευμένος κατὰ ἀκρίβειαν τοῦ πατρῴου νόμου). Finally, then, to θρησκεία. This word appears just once in Luke-Acts, in Paul’s follow-up comment to Agrippa II (26.5) that he had been educated according to ‘the most precise/exacting school of our worship’ (τὴν ἀκριβεστάτην αἵρεσιν τῆς ἡμετέρας θρησκείας). This word θρησκεία has recently attracted scholarly attention because of its distinctive presence and significance in Josephus.73 It is attested only 23 times in all Greek literature before him, and not much of that is classical: 4 in 4 Maccabees and Wisdom of Solomon, 5 in Philo, and 3 in the NT outside the Acts passages. But Josephus has it a remarkable 91 times. Likewise, of the first 34 attestations of the cognate verb (θρησκεύω), a

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Cf. AJ 20.43 on Eleazar, the advisor of Izates (who advocated circumcision): περὶ τὰ πάτρια δοκῶν ἀκριβὴς εἶναι; AJ 2.132 (re: the search that revealed the cup in Benjamin’s sack): ἀλλ᾿ ἀκριβῆ τὴν ζήτησιν βουλόμενοι ποιεῖσθαι δοκεῖν. Schwartz 2007b: 97–98 and with contrasting emphasis re: the overlap between and religion, 2014: 91–100; Barton and Boyarin 2016: 131–212.

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whopping 23 are in Josephus. He is far and away the most self-conscious user of the word group. It is part of his characteristic diction. Against those other uses of θρησκεία, there seems (to me) something slightly off in Acts’ lone occurrence. First, in its rare appearances elsewhere in the NT (Col 2.18; James 1.26–27), θρησκεία refers to a generic piety, perhaps initiating the trajectory toward its meaning ‘religion’ in modern Greek.74 This is different from the prevailing sense in Josephus, which is roughly the Judaean way of worship. In Josephus, this ‘worship’ normally has the ancient sense of ritual, cult, and sacrifice or ‘devotion’, at any rate activities associated with the temple.75 His use fits with the few non-Judaean occurrences of the term, in connection with the worship of the gods, typically involving sacrifices and related rituals.76 Even though Josephus uses θρησκεία often, he does not make his three Judaean philosophical schools part of a national θρησκεία. That would not quite work in his lexicon. It would be like speaking of Stoics or Platonists as two ways of sacrificing (to Athena or Isis). I render the word ‘worship’ (not an anachronistic and vague ‘religion’) to highlight the slight oddity. Given the unique prominence of θρησκεία/θρησκεύω in Josephus and its lone occurrence in Luke-Acts, in relation to the Josephan-sounding Pharisees as ἀκριβεστάτη αἵρεσις, as a capsule-term for Judaean life (differing from other NT uses), this looks like another case in which Luke’s choice of language is most easily explained by his recollection of Josephus: a mash-up comparable to the Egyptian’s leading sicarii into the wilderness or the Theudas-Judas reversal. Again, although this author’s use of θρησκεία does not align exactly with that of Josephus, his frequent use of the word for Judaean worship is the simplest explanation of Luke’s employment of the term for Judaean piety. Whatever one makes of that word, when we find Luke matter-of-factly portraying the Pharisees as τὴν ἀκριβεστάτην αἵρεσιν τῆς ἡμετέρας θρησκείας, and speaking of Paul’s Pharisaic education as κατὰ ἀκρίβειαν τοῦ πατρῴου νόμου, we must realise that these charged terms do not reflect mere facts or common knowledge. They belong to a particular, constructed narrative world. Since Josephus created such a world, on a much larger and more integrated canvas than Luke’s—conceiving of the Pharisees as one of three national αἱρέσεις, ascribing to them a reputation for being most ἀκριβής in the ancestral

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Cf. religio and Smith 1963: 28; Nongbri 2013. BJ 1.148–50; 2.10, 42, 391, 414, 425, 456, 517; 4.218; 7.434 etc.; AJ 1.222–24, 234; 4.74, 306 (the Judaean-Samarian debate about where to worship God, Gerizim or Jerusalem, meant where to perform ritual sacrifice); 5.98–101, 112, 339; 6.19; 7.78 etc.; Ap. 1.261; 2.254. Herodotus 2.18, 37; Dionysius, Ant. rom. 2.63.2; Strabo, Geogr. 3.23.19.

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law, and speaking distinctively of the unique Judaean way of worship (θρησκεία)—Luke’s language appears to be vestigial of Josephus. Available space does not permit discussion of other fascinating correspondences I mentioned at the outset. I can give only a quick impression of them to round out the picture. The episode of Agrippa I’s death in Acts 12.20–23 is remarkably similar to Josephus’ account (AJ 19.343–352), according to which the king is in the royal complex at Caesarea and dies because he fails to reject praise as a god. The details differ, as always, but Acts casually mentions that the king first put on his royal robes, while in Josephus alone this point is explained: it was the sun’s gleam on the threads of his robe that elicited the cry that he was a god. That king’s son Agrippa II’s later interview of Paul makes the best sense in light of information not provided in Acts but only clear from Josephus. In Acts 25.23, the king arrives in great pomp, having been brought in by the procurator Festus because he is supposedly expert in Judaean law, a point that the defendant Paul gushingly elaborates (25.22–23, 26–27). But Berenice’s presence at Agrippa’s side, which Acts highlights as though the couple were husband and wife, becomes almost farcical if author and audience know Josephus’ information that Berenice was Agrippa’s sister, with whom he was widely assumed to be having an illicit relationship.77 Similarly, Acts’ portrait of the procurator Felix and his royal Judaean wife Drusilla seems almost to require the kind of information provided by Josephus (not in Acts) to be appreciated. Only Josephus’ Antiquities explains that the teenaged Berenice had married Azizus, king of Emesa (Homs), who had been forced to undergo circumcision for the privilege. But when the imperial freedman Felix arrives in Judaea and meets her, his lust requires him to have her, and she ditches her unfortunate husband for Felix, who has no intention of being circumcised (AJ 20.139, 141–44). Josephus leaves no doubt that their marriage was unlawful and scandalous, with the result that they lost their son in the eruption of Vesuvius. Acts calmly says that Felix came with his wife Drusilla to interview Paul in prison. When Paul begins discussing justice and self-control and coming judgement, however, Felix becomes afraid (διαλεγομένου δὲ αὐτοῦ περὶ δικαιοσύνης καὶ ἐγκρατείας καὶ τοῦ κρίματος τοῦ μέλλοντος, ἔμφοβος γενόμενος, 24.25). These are not typical themes in Acts, the crucial noun ἐγκράτεια appearing only here. The story makes the fullest sense, again, if we imagine it against Josephus’ backdrop, which would then be known to the author Luke, 77

This rumour was widespread, also in Rome (Juvenal, Sat. 6.158), but is particularly clear in Josephus, AJ 19.145—along with the king’s other violations of Judaean law and custom (20.191).

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at least, although admittedly one can read Acts without such knowledge (as it has nearly always been read). 8

Conclusions

This investigation has examined five clusters of thematically resonant terms from Josephus that appear more casually in Luke-Acts, without thematic integration. They are most easily explained, I have argued, by the hypothesis that Josephus’ authoritative histories of Roman Judaea influenced Luke, furnishing some of the scenic elements he needed to give his narrative depth. It is difficult, in other words, to imagine another hypothesis that could explain how Josephus’ distinctive compositional traits turned up in Luke-Acts. I do not possess video of the author of Luke-Acts reading Josephus’ works. Nor can I logically exclude the possibility that some unknown author before Luke highlighted the same figures as Josephus with the same classifications and lexical choices. If that is what it would take to make a case for Josephus’ influence on Luke, we can agree that the case is now and will forever be unprovable. We are in a position, however, to deny that Luke’s descriptions come from the events themselves. That is because events do not supply their own descriptive lexicon or meaning. Those are supplied by creative authors, who weld them into narratives and supply them with thematic language. Either Luke’s literary choices happened to coincide in an uncanny way with the elaborate constructions by Josephus, which alone make full sense of them, or Luke borrowed from an author very much like Josephus. Since we should not multiply entities without reason, and there is no good reason to do so here, it is most likely that Luke was influenced by Josephus. With all respect to Luke (Acts 1.3), even history-writing at his time—which he does not claim to be doing—did not traffic in certain proofs (τεκμήρια).78 It rarely does so today, other than for establishing skeletal data. Rather, we investigate problems by identifying, interpreting, and explaining the relevant evidence, imagining and weighing hypotheses. Our problem here has been to explain how two authors came to agree on so much, though the material we have examined is a small part of each corpus: making the Quirinius-census-rebellion-Judas 78

As it happens, Josephus is a relatively heavy user of τεκμήριον, accounting for 61 of the first 800 occurrences in all extant Greek literature (www.tlg.uci.edu). But he mainly uses the word in moral and intellectual connections, for tokens or signs of attitudes, emotions, virtues, and the like, not for proof of particular events. This is true even of the 12 occurrences in Apion, where he opens (1.2) by rejecting the proposition that absence from Greek historians is a τεκμήριον of the Judaeans’ youth as an ethnos.

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complex a watershed; selecting Judas, Theudas, the Egyptian, and sicarii heading into the desert; describing Pharisees and Sadducees as αἱρέσεις, with Pharisees (reputedly) ἀκριβεστάτη in interpreting the ancestral law, or of the national θρησκεία; and in distinguishing Pharisees as a popular school—hence close to Jesus and his early followers—from a powerful and harsh Sadducean clique based in Jerusalem’s temple. These elements are part of Josephus’ narratives. His categories and thematic colouring endure across many volumes and take their meaning from his rich context. This does not mean that Josephus always knew what he was talking about. He made his own mash-ups for his purposes: to make an impact in Rome. But he drew from his expert knowledge of the land and its past. The author of Luke-Acts had a similar need, but his knowledge base was at several removes from Roman Judaea. For Judaean affairs, as for the other scenes of his colourful narrative, he borrowed bits and pieces from an authority. There are no such things as free-floating facts, with neutral language. Josephus created his narratives of the war, whereas Luke need far fewer elements. Many of those that he chose for Judaea betray Josephus’ distinctive markings. That Luke made a bit of a hash of them would only be a problem if we expected something different. As we do with Josephus, we may assume that he knew what he was about and did what he needed to do. What are the implications of the study, if its main lines are valid? The most frequently discussed implications concern the date and reliability of Luke-Acts. Since we are fairly sure of the date of Antiquities (93/94 CE),79 if Luke knew that work as an authority he must have been writing some years later. I hold no stake in the question of Luke-Acts’ date, and ‘reliable narrative’ seems to me a chimera. Although my ultimate interest is in what happened and what people made of it, a preliminary concern is to understand the approaches that ancient authors took in writing about the past. For it is only when we understand our evidence that we can use it in historical reconstruction.80 Luke postures as an author capable of pursuing historia, who nevertheless prescinded from it. Neither he nor his Paul nor his apostles believed in Christ’s resurrection—his central concern—because of historical investigation or analysis. Just as Josephus describes the Judaeans’ knowledge of the ancient past and the laws not as the result of anyone’s inquiry, but as revealed knowledge through prophecy,81 Luke sees his world-changing events as incontrovertible 79 80 81

Josephus carefully dates the work’s completion, in two different ways (AJ 20.267; cf. V 5). The brightest beacons informing my understanding of historical method are Bloch 1953 and Collingwood 1994. Mason 2019b.

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facts created by God. They are proven by abundant witnesses, to be sure, but also by ongoing prophecy, signs, and wonders. They are not discoverable by history. Josephus too was hesitant about the Greek project of history, as he was about Greek values in general, but he undertook it, and boasted that he beat the Greeks at their own game (BJ 1.13–16). His subjects—the recent war, its context, and the longer Judaean past—lent themselves to historical inquiry, and so he applied himself to it. The author of Luke-Acts, though he quibbles with other Christian authors in his preamble, was in a basically different situation. Supremely confident of a recent revelation in Christ’s resurrection, he avoided historia and its entanglements—omitting not only the label but even his own name, unlike a historian, who normally made his identity and stature clear as warrants for his trustworthiness. Luke’s claims about the resurrection of Christ do not require clever investigation. His truth imposes itself on people who have no choice but to obey the divine disclosure, even if they would otherwise mock the idea (Acts 4.19–20; 5.38–39; 9.1–22; 10.10–14, 28; 26.19). He dresses his message in history-like accoutrements, borrowing names and events from authorities and citing his superior ordering of things, but this is to enrich his announcement of Christ’s resurrection, much as Eusebius and Sulpicius Severus would do in coming centuries.

Part 5 Interactions

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With Tessa Rajak: Rajak’s Josephus To say that Tessa Rajak began her academic career as a Josephus scholar would be true but misleading. Nearly two decades after her dissertation, a bequest from Morton Smith allowed Joseph Sievers and Fausto Parente to scour the planet for Josephus scholars, for a 1992 conference in San Miniato. The planet produced eighteen specimens, including Tessa and our gracious hosts.1 I was there as a novice without a network and was overawed to meet all the Josephus experts I’d been assiduously reading, including the delightful Professor Rajak, whose easy humour buoyed me when I felt in over my head. Tessa’s still-recent bombshell book (1983), in tandem with Per Bilde’s of 1988 (see next chapter),2 was beginning to create a subdiscipline of ‘Josephus studies’, devoted to the study of this author, rather than merely using him in the familiar ways. After its appearance, Tessa taught a broad Classics curriculum at Reading, where her research grew to encompass many areas of ancient Jewish, Diaspora, and Septuagint studies. Here I revisit her debut son et lumière, Josephus: The Historian and his Society.3 I shall attempt to situate the study in a context, provide a critical review of the contents, and isolate two methodological questions of enduring salience for the possible benefit of the book’s future readers. 1

Rajak’s Josephus in Context

Like most first monographs, Tessa’s was the revision of a dissertation, hers supervised by Fergus Millar with supply turns from Geza Vermes and Arnaldo Momigliano (1974). I advise doctoral students to plan their dissertations by first identifying a big topic that fascinates them and then narrowing that interest to a specific problem, text, or situation, in order to combine motivation with manageability. As her dissertation title suggests, however—‘Flavius Josephus: Jewish History and the Greek World’—Tessa’s exercise for the D.Phil. aimed high: ‘a wide-ranging survey of Josephus’ historical works’. The justification was fair enough. Half a century had passed since the last efforts, and it was time 1 The conference papers became Parente and Sievers 1994. 2 Bilde 1988. 3 Rajak 1983, reprinted with a new introductory essay by Rajak in 2002.

© Steve Mason, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004545960_020

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for a new approach.4 But the result occupied two volumes. Fortunately, no one talked sense into her. The dissertation has three main parts plus appendages. Part 1 explores Josephus’ formation in Jerusalem in two chapters, the second establishing the presence of Greek language and culture alongside the obvious Jewish heritage. This Greek-Jewish dialectic is the matrix for the rest of the study. Part 2 examines the First Revolt in three chapters: its origins, Josephus’ time in Galilee, and his composition of the War in Flavian Rome. Part 3 takes on the Antiquities, with a chapter each on the work’s origins and overall shape, the textual relationship between Josephus’ biblical paraphrase and the Septuagint, Josephus’ tendencies in rewriting the Bible, and the extensive post-biblical narrative of Books 12 to 20. The seven technical appendices of the dissertation relate to the Antiquities part. This comprehensive re-evaluation of Josephus’ works has not been rivalled since. Bilde’s 1988 study (next chapter), written with an appreciative nod to Rajak, is an invaluable introduction to Josephus research. It offers brilliantly innovative sketches of the primary texts, but they are brief.5 Rajak’s dissertation was an unprecedented effort to explore Josephus’ social contexts, motives, and coherent literary aims. While she was in the middle of her research, I suppose, W. C. van Unnik gave a lecture (published later) entitled ‘Josephus, the Neglected’. He called for the sustained interpretation and excavation of Josephus’ works, beyond their use as data.6 The same decade saw beginning probes toward reading Josephus as an intelligent composer.7 Rajak answered van Unnik’s call more comprehensively. She proposed that, if we could get beyond old preconceptions and dodgy methods, Josephus’ works were a treasure trove for understanding not only his outlook but also his world. So we read in the dissertation preface:8 I have found that real attention to what Josephus actually says often reveals more than is expected. What is lacking in information about the man himself can be supplemented with an understanding of the world in which he moved, and of the influences which acted upon him. … 4 Rajak 1974. Quotation and justification are from the Preface. The earlier efforts were Laqueur 1920 and Thackeray 1929 (original publication dates). 5 Chapman and Rodgers 2016, a fundamental resource, goes farther in these areas but lacks the coherent standpoint of a monograph. 6 Later published in Van Unnik 1987: 18. My translation and emphasis. 7 E.g., Moehring 1957; numerous articles by L. H. Feldman on Josephus’ biblical paraphrase, later gathered in Feldman 1998b; Lindner 1972; Rengstorf et al. 1973–1983. Between Rajak’s dissertation and book: Attridge 1976; Schreckenberg 1977; Cohen 1979. 8 Rajak 1974: Preface.

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[H]e can tell us much about his period—about Palestine, about Judaism, about the Greek culture of his time, and about politics, society and attitudes in the Roman Empire. Rajak found in Josephus’ bi- or tricultural identity—Jewish, Greek, and Roman—a most productive and largely untouched field. Abandoning the older, artificial quest to distinguish the Greek from the Jewish in his work, she argued that it was the very complexity of such a life that made his work interesting, and which explained much that had been misunderstood, from his precarious position as an opponent of the revolt, who nevertheless had to take part in it, to his way of paraphrasing the Bible. Rajak’s eventual revision of the dissertation for publication was not the usual cosmetic ἑρμηνεία from the language of angels to a human tongue, but a true μεταβολή (cf. BJ 1.3). For starters, she ruthlessly cut the entire Antiquities section: Part 3 of the dissertation along with six appendices. I do not know whether the publisher required this radical edit, or whether the cutting-room floor became a resource, as it seems, for her later explorations. Not only did she remove an arm and a leg, but in the material she kept, the intervening years apparently led her to modify some positions. Two examples will suffice. First, the dissertation largely accepted the importance that scholars since Laqueur and Thackeray had placed on the ‘lost Aramaic’ precursor to our War (cf. BJ 1.3, 6). Benedikt Niese had minimised the connection and a renegade mid-century scholar even doubted that Josephus had ever penned an Aramaic version.9 But the consensus after Laqueur-Thackeray inferred from Josephus’ presumed circumstances (writing a supposedly commissioned Aramaic work from Rome) that the precursor Josephus mentions must have been Flavian propaganda, in Aramaic because it was aimed at Parthia’s rulers. The Greek translation reworked that content for the eastern Mediterranean. Thackeray confirmed the propagandistic purpose of the Greek version too, by tearing a throwaway line from its context and loading it with independent meaning. Josephus likes rhetorical triads, and says that he included a digression on the unbeatable Roman legions to console those who have yielded to them, to dissuade those who are rebelling, and to inform the curious (BJ 3.108–109). In the free-for-all spirit of the day, Thackeray seized on the second of these justifications, discarded the rest, and presented it as proof that Josephus wrote War to deter Parthian aggression on Rome’s eastern frontier.10

9 10

Niese 1914: 7.571 (the Greek ‘was probably a complete recast’); the renegade was N. A. Meščerskij, according to Finkelstein 2003: xviii. Thackeray 1967: 28–29, 46.

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Rajak the doctorand already rejected the propaganda explanation of the Aramaic version, thinking it more likely to have been Josephus’ effort from Rome to inform eastern Jews about the war, in which case the Greek War would have done the same for the Mediterranean Diaspora.11 Nevertheless, she accepted that: ‘What we do know, … and it is an important fact, is that Josephus’ Greek work had a predecessor, written in his native language, … which he had translated or adapted … to create the existing book.’12 She even counted Josephus’ Life as his fourth composition, after the Aramaic and Greek Wars plus Antiquities.13 Partly under the influence of Gohei Hata’s 1975 article,14 perhaps, Rajak’s book diminishes the size and relevance of that ‘lost Aramaic’ version. A new chapter on the issue in the book holds that it was a precursor only ‘in some sense’, and that ‘there is no reason to think that the first work bore much similarity to the second in scope or literary form’. By comparison with the Greek, it must have been ‘a slight production’.15 Rajak notes that the Greek work, filled with classical tropes, could not be a mere translation. Her focus on the Greek version further supports her programme of reading the whole corpus as a unity.16 This bold challenge to a poorly grounded assumption shook researchers out of their sleep. What had been considered crucial to understanding Josephus’ War scarcely appears in the post-1990 flood of research, and this is mainly due to Rajak’s relegation of it to the cheap seats. Bilde made only cursory reference to it (next chapter), and in my first book I followed Rajak (and Niese, anticipating) in proposing that we read our War as an original Greek work.17 John Barclay sees no need to mention it in his detailed discussion of the passage in Apion on Josephus’ preparation of the War.18 More recently, continuing to feel Rajak’s initial spur, I have proposed that War’s prologue might refer to Aramaic letters he had penned concerning the war for his eastern priestly contacts, in the nine months or more after Jerusalem’s fall when he 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

Rajak 1974: 152–59. That Josephus wrote for Jewish-Diaspora audiences would remain a theme of Rajak’s work. Cf. Rajak 2005. Rajak 1974: 127. My emphasis. Rajak 1974: 3. Hata 1975. Rajak 1983: 176—although she preserves the dissertation’s count of Life as ‘fourth work’ (p. 12). Cf. the epilogue to the 1983 book and Rajak 1998a. Mason 1991: 57–62. Barclay 2007: 36–37—on Ap. 1.50–51, which envisages a single Greek work prepared in Rome. V 365–67 describes a gradual process of writing, Josephus being aided by information from Agrippa II.

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was still in Judaea. He had rhetorical reasons, once in Rome, to inflate their importance while presenting his War as the work of an eastern expert.19 The book’s other big change over against the dissertation moves in the other direction: toward a consensus from which the dissertation had boldly departed. The dissertation had opened with the daringly revisionist argument that Josephus was not in fact a priest. Rajak’s case rested on her astute reading of textual clues and her assumption of coherence.20 For example, Josephus’ genealogical boast in V 1–5 appears to make his claim to priestly status depend on his Hasmonean descent (V 2), but also to explain this descent via his great-great-grandfather’s marriage to the Hasmonean Jonathan’s daughter (V 4), whom Josephus either calls his ‘mother’, confusingly, or adds another mysterious connection to the Hasmoneans via a female ancestor. Rajak further noted AJ 16.187, where Josephus remarks: ‘we are close to the ancestral line of kings from Asamonaeus and for this reason share the honour of the priesthood’ as apparent confirmation that he based his claim to priesthood itself on his Hasmonean descent. But since of course priesthood passed through the paternal line, if Josephus’ claim resulted from an ancestor’s marriage to a Hasmonean woman, the males of Josephus’ family, though they may have been in the higher social circles connected with priests, ‘did not actually minister as priests, or receive heave-offering or tithes’.21 Taking these incidental remarks as the obscure foundation of his claim, Rajak the doctorand doubted Josephus’ repeated and confident claims to be a priest. The one in War’s opening sentence (ἐξ Ἱεροσολύμων ἱερεύς, 1.3) must mean only ‘of a priest-ish family’, and Ap. 1.54 (γεγονὼς ἱερεύς) must mean not a priest by descent, as it seems to say, but of priest-ish descent. Even the line in BJ 3.352 (ὢν ἱερεὺς καὶ ἱερέων ἔγγονος), which prefaces his famous prediction with a statement of ‘being a priest’, connects his priesthood with prophetic ability. The early Rajak saw this as a connection with no basis in Judaism, but rather an ‘eastern pagan’ bluff.22 By using such greasy formulations, Rajak concluded, Josephus ‘succeeds in misleading all but the most careful reader’.23 She was a most careful reader.

19 20 21 22 23

Mason 2016a: 92–95. Of V 1–5: ‘If all this be taken seriously—and it must, after all, make some sense’ (Rajak 1974: 6). Rajak 1974: 9. Rajak 1974: 11 (quotation), 5–12 for the full discussion. If Josephus’ precise language is important, however, note that he nowhere calls himself a prophet or claims prophecy for himself. Rajak 1974: 11–12.

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By the time of the book, Rajak had reconsidered this argument. After all, Josephus’ delight in being a priest appears not only in his forthright claims but also incidentally, for example in V 80, where he declines the tithes due him in Galilee as a priest, in contrast to his priestly colleagues who enrich themselves from these dues (V 63), and in V 198, where the delegation sent to oust him includes priests, on the premise that the people might say they love Josephus on account of his priesthood (διὰ τὴν ἱερωσύνην λέγοιεν ἀγαπᾶν με). Besides those incidental remarks, Josephus’ pervasive interests in the temple, sacrifice, pollution, and priestly administration and succession make the best sense in light of his consistent claim: ‘I am one of them.’ Intriguingly, however, the book retains some of the dissertation’s doubts while adding blocking statements that save the consensus: ‘Yet we must accept that the menfolk of Josephus’ family did actually minister as priests …. For all their limitations, the passages in which he discusses it provide valuable and even unique testimony to a priest’s own attitude to his role in the days when the Temple still stood. … Josephus’ emphasis on his being a priest can be taken as seriously meant.’24 I raise this issue because it illustrates the virtue, not always evident in scholarship, of changing one’s mind in the face of new evidence and rethinking. The dissertation’s radical questioning of accepted truths reflects the sceptical mindset proper to a historian. Rajak’s change on the crucial question of Josephus’ priesthood is also worth emphasising because of the impression some have gained, from remarks we shall consider below, that she naively trusts whatever

24

Rajak 1983: 17–19 (my emphasis). It is, however, not so clear that Life connects his priesthood with a Hasmonean female ancestor he calls mother. He says, in effect: ‘I have an incredible pedigree. With us priests are best, and I am no mere priest but of the first course. In addition, I have royal blood and connections with high priests’ (1–2). V 2 puts Josephus’ own mother near the top of this pyramid of prestige, connecting her with royal descent rather than simple priesthood: ‘Not only is my ancestry from priests, but it is of the first. … And I am also of royal ancestry via the mother’ (καὶ τοῦ βασιλικοῦ γένους ἀπὸ τῆς μητρός). His remark that his mother was a descendant of the Hasmoneans, who were both high priests and kings (ἠρχιεράτευσαν καὶ ἐβασίλευσαν, V 2) seems to confirm this. If his mother is a descendant of the Hasmoneans, then his paternal ancestor’s marriage to a Hasmonean woman was a separate matter. This finds support in BJ 5.419: ‘I have a mother and a wife and a very distinguished ancestry’ (cf. 5.544–47). Life declares Josephus’ father Matthias a man of distinguished birth (εὐγένεια, V 7) in his own right, and an intimate of high priests (V 204). Ancestor Simon’s marriage with a Hasmonean might suggest that Simon was already a priest—to contract such an elite marriage. AJ 16.187 might mean not that Josephus’ priesthood depends on that Hasmonean marriage, but that the special honour he claims (διὰ τοῦτο σὺν τιμῇ τὴν ἱερωσύνην ἔχοντες) comes from his family’s ‘proximity to the line of kings from Asamonaeus’.

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Josephus says25—a misguided charge on the whole. The priesthood question demonstrates both her questioning of doctrine and her admission that we cannot always know what lies behind Josephus’ narratives. 2

Rajak’s Josephus: The Historian and his Society (1983), an Overview

We turn now to the book itself and its aims. The Preface gives an immediate idea: ‘This book is a re-interpretation of Josephus’ history and of the war which he described.’26 The body of the text opens thus: ‘Josephus was a Jewish priest of royal descent and Pharisaic persuasion.’ As in the dissertation, this identity triad, priest / Pharisee / Hasmonean descent, underscores the complexity that Rajak finds so fascinating in Josephus. She continues:27 his career embodies in a distinct way the principal themes and conflicts of the Roman middle east during this period: the tension between local patriotism and the claims of the imperial order, between native culture and the allure of Greco-Roman civilisation, between Semitic languages and Greek, between pragmatic flexibility and committed sectarianism, between class loyalty and group loyalty. Identity construction sounds hackneyed in the twenty-first century, but in the 1980s it was a gust of fresh air in the study of Josephus. Just after the book’s appearance, in 1984, Louis Feldman’s 1,000-page annotated bibliography on Josephus included twenty-nine major headings and hundreds of subheadings to arrange Josephus research, but one looked in vain for such introductory matters as the aims, structures, publication settings, or themes of Josephus’ major works. This was not Feldman’s fault; his task was to represent scholarship. Faithfully mapping the long-span trends in research, he distinguished Josephus’ accounts of periods and topics (and use of sources) from Josephus’ views, but only those views that could be subsumed under ‘the Jewish religion’. These do not include the war or its outbreak, except for the evergreen question of its alleged ‘messianic background’.28 A year after Feldman’s tome appeared, Per Bilde submitted his study for publication. He 25 26 27 28

McLaren 2003: 150–51, divides research on Josephus between scholars who trust Josephus (Rajak, Bilde, and me) and those who are sceptical. Rajak 1983: vi. Rajak 1983: 1. Feldman 1984: 489.

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took scholarship to task for obsessing over Josephus’ character while paying little attention to what he wrote as compositions (next chapter).29 Rajak’s refreshing resolve to understand Josephus in his world earned her Bilde’s accolade as ‘the most important advocate of the modern conception of Josephus’.30 It is doubtful that Rajak knew that she was part of Bilde’s ‘modern conception’, given the revolutionary nature of her study. Like Josephus’ Fourth Philosophy (AJ 18.9, 23), the modern conception was one author’s ad hoc construction.31 Just as there had been no single ‘classical conception’ of Josephus—Niese’s holistic approach (1890s) and Brüne’s concern with Josephus’ language (1913) had little to do with thoroughgoing source-criticism (e.g., Hölscher 1916), the biographical explanations of Laqueur (1920), or the literary assistants imagined by Thackeray (1926)32—so there could have been no single ‘modern conception’, certainly not before Rajak. But we should not fault Bilde. He rightly recognised a mood of breaking with established assumptions, and acutely saw Rajak’s book as the most important synthesis, based as it was on deep familiarity with primary texts along with robust historical and interpretative principles. It might not be clear from the publication dates, indeed, that Rajak’s (1983), Bilde’s (1988), and my (1991) contributions to Josephus research, though sometimes linked together, had independent origins and different programmes. Rajak’s book, largely taken from the dissertation a decade earlier, was grounded in a rich variety of influences from social-historical and textual perspectives. Appearing in December 1983, in pre-internet days, her book did not become well known until 1984–85. Bilde immediately recognised Rajak’s kindred spirit, but since his own book went to press in June 1985 he could have discovered hers only late in his research.33 It was tangential to his own programme of situating Josephus compositions in the history of academic criticism. These were not Rajak’s questions.34 Again, one might infer from publication dates that my 1991 book must have been inspired by both Rajak 1983 and Bilde 1988. In fact 29 30 31

32 33 34

Bilde 1988: 126–28. Bilde 1988: 159. Here I amicably part with the general view, possibly shared in part by Rajak (1988: 112, 115, but 59: ‘this [what?] looks suspiciously like Josephus’ own schematisation, made for the benefit of his Greek readers.’), that the Fourth Philosophy was Josephus’ name for a real ‘movement’ or ‘rebel tendency’, rather than a momentary construction in the passing rhetoric of Antiquities 18. There may have been such a movement, but that hypothesis is not necessary to explain Josephus’ language. He habitually speaks of three philosophical schools (this too is his construction: see Chapter 13). Cf. BJ 4.398 on the ‘fourth ill’ facing Judaean society after the neat triad often repeated. Niese 1896; Brüne 1969 [1913]; Hölscher 1916. Bilde 1988: 8. Bilde 1988: 70, 89, 92, 102, 118.

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it was the truncation of a dissertation submitted in summer of 1986. So I had no knowledge of Bilde, still not when I submitted the revised book manuscript in 1988. Returning from two years of travel for research, I learned of Rajak’s new book in the autumn of 1985, just as I was beginning final revisions of the dissertation. Like Bilde, I was encouraged and integrated Rajak’s work where I could. But our projects originated from different interests, problems, and methods—and from somewhat different approaches to history.35 A brief account of this last difference is necessary to explain my assessment of Rajak’s book. As I understand it, the professionalisation of academic history, which spread like wildfire from Berlin’s new Humboldt University (1810), forced historians to explain their work as a contribution to scientific knowledge, to justify their position among colleagues in the hugely prestigious natural sciences.36 Retelling old stories or constructing grand narratives, the kinds of history pursued in the early modern period and the Enlightenment, would no longer do. This need to justify the humanities’ place in the university, which has by no means gone away, cut through the cadre of historians like a ship’s prow through swimmers, driving them toward opposite shores for safety. Many swam toward the natural sciences. They accepted that knowledge claiming to be scientific must generate laws useful for prediction, and that these can only derive from aggregate observation and mathematical analysis. Science requires us to dispense with sentimental illusions about the human species, or the specialness of individuals. Just as we cannot usefully study the outlooks of flowers, foxes, or rock formations, but only their external relations, to study the human herd scientifically it was necessary to take a coldly analytical view of its behaviour in the aggregate. Statistical analysis would show that humans acted in predictable ways, in response to social and economic forces. Free will was sentimental nonsense. Historians working in this way could hope to extract lessons or even laws from history, helping to qualify for a residence permit in the research university. The historians who broke for the opposite shore had no taste for this aggregative history. They argued that the credibility of science really rested on the care it took with particulars. Precision was the foundation of any large-scale explanation: get the specifics wrong and the supposed aggregation fails. And to understand a particular phenomenon is to understand it in its unique, 35

36

My project had sprung from a historical interest in the Pharisees, from course work with Albert Baumgarten, and from the dawning realisation (inspired by J. Neusner and philosophers of history) that historical investigation required first understanding each source in situ. These four paragraphs distil Mason 2016b: 19–53. More expert analysis is in inter alia Iggers 1968; Beiser 2011.

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unrepeatable context of one-time only conditions converging. Finally, they argued that the study of humanity by humans makes it qualitatively different from the human study of flowers, foxes, and rock formations. Endowed with consciousness, humans can truly understand only the human mind and its products. Even if we concede that we have herd-like propensities en masse, it is nevertheless the human spirit and its possibilities that make the study of the human past interesting and valuable. It is not like studying flowers. Rather than positing trans-temporal patterns, lessons, or laws, therefore, historians on this shoreline wanted to understand the endlessly diverse possibilities of human existence, prizing the aberrant and anomalous. Will and Ariel Durant’s 1968 booklet The Lessons of History illustrates the difficulty of combining the two approaches.37 Over decades of painstaking research, they had produced The Story of Civilization, a masterpiece of idiographic history in (then) ten volumes averaging over 700 pages per book.38 Each tome immerses the reader in a particular time and place, from the Ancient Near East to Voltaire’s Paris. For recent times, the Durants exploited letters and diaries to bring their personalities to life, sometimes day by day. How could one produce lessons from such diverse riches? While admitting their hesitations about attempting it,39 the 100-page Lessons book offers a dozen chapters of five to seven pages each, dealing mainly with twentieth-century issues that have little connection with the ten massive volumes.40 After declaring the ‘laws of history’ to be basically those of biology (competition, natural selection),41 they offer such bromides as religion is not disappearing and free markets and fair wealth distribution are both necessary. When they attempt an actual lesson in the form of a prediction—‘by the year 2000, the Catholic Church will be the dominant force in national as well as in municipal or state [US] governments’42—this book loses all credibility, though their eventual eleven volumes of particularist history remain an unparalleled treasure. They had explored 37 38 39

40 41 42

Durant and Durant 1968. Durant and Durant 1935–1975. Durant and Durant 1968: ‘a multitude of doubts assail our enterprise. To begin with, do we really know what the past was, what actually happened …?’ (11); ‘Furthermore, an element of chance, perhaps of freedom, seems to enter into the conduct of metals and men’; ‘Obviously historiography cannot be a science. It can only be an industry, an art, and a philosophy’ (12). ‘[O]nly a fool would try to compress a hundred centuries into a hundred pages of hazardous conclusions. We proceed.’ Durant and Durant 1968: 9: ‘It repeats many ideas that we, or others before us, have already expressed.’ Durant and Durant 1968: 18. Durant and Durant 1968: 23.

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Voltaire’s world of friendships and tensions because it was worth understanding in itself, not to produce lessons. This background may help to explain what I find most intriguing about Rajak’s book: its effort to reconstruct a social world from what is basically a biographical study. How is it possible to use the same textual material for these different purposes? Rajak allows that the book ‘does not adopt one single style of historical investigation: it is not political, social, or literary history, but each of these in turn’, and again, ‘Literary technique has not in itself been my theme’.43 This methodological question undergirds my critical engagement. I would ask whether, when push comes to shove, Rajak’s interest in the social does not elbow aside her concern with the man and his works, taking nothing away from her justly celebrated contributions on the latter question. To give a preliminary sense of what I mean, consider the following passages, in which Rajak stresses her intention to use Josephus as one example of a class, in keeping with the signals we have already noted in her opening statements (emphasis mine): ‘His varied career can be seen as an expression of the ambivalences and conflicting forces to which prominent Jews of this kind were increasingly subject under Roman rule.’ (4); ‘to concentrate in this way on a single member of an elite … is an obvious way of getting closer to a world of which so much has sunk into oblivion’ (6); ‘In essence, my aim has been to cast light on the cultural and social history of the Roman empire. Josephus belonged to the Jewish elite of first-century Jerusalem, and that group, apart from its own intrinsic interest, can provide illuminating comparisons with similar groups elsewhere in the empire’ (7); ‘Through his early life, we can learn from the inside about the upper echelons of the Palestinian priesthood, an outward-looking, flexible group’ (8); ‘Yet we need to be sure that we are not dealing with one man’s highly personal, perhaps eccentric opinions’ (68); and ‘There is no question of ascribing the actual outbreak of revolt against Rome in a simple way to the activities of influential individuals’ (116). In most practitioners’ hands, social history tends to hoover up supposed data from texts.44 Given her social interest, a striking and admirable feature of Rajak’s book is that it is not cluttered with sociological jargon or models. On the contrary, remarking that received opinions ‘have made it very difficult for readers to notice what Josephus actually says’, she offers detailed observations 43 44

Rajak 1983: 6, 9. See Brinton 1965 [orig. 1938]: 14: ‘We shall, then, rely on the historians to supply us with the necessary facts.’ In the study of Roman Judaea, aggregative studies that tend to treat Josephus’ narratives as data sources include Kreissig 1970 and, though not as hard-core, Saldarini 1988.

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on his text, including manuscript variants, and on his unique life-situation— all of this suggesting particularist interests. That her tightrope-walk between the individual and the social works is clear from the book’s enormous impact. So, who am I to question it? Simply, as an admirer and friend of the court, I would like to ask whether the study does not tend to squeeze Josephus’ art and life, in some respects, in the service of the social historian’s need for data. For example, consider this remark on the ‘structure’ of the first revolt: ‘Economic resentment was not consistently perceived as such [by Josephus], but in religious or social terms.’45 If we grant, however, that Josephus presents a conflict in non-economic terms—whether he presented events as ‘religious’ is another question46—what basis do we have for grounding the conflict, which only he describes, in other terms—if our project is to read his society out of his work? The knowledge we claim as a basis for correcting him must come from somewhere other than his work. But where? Likewise, in the chapter on Galilee, Rajak reflects:47 The class dichotomy, so visible at Jerusalem, is obscured here [by Josephus], where there is at least as much division within classes. But elements of it can be perceived [in the Galileans’ attacks on King Agrippa’s interests]. … One might also add to this list of actions originating in class hatred some … of the attempts to murder the general, Josephus. So, we are to understand that there really was abundant class hatred in Galilee, but it is obscured by Josephus’ portrait of divisions within a ‘class’. If so, how do we know about the class conflict? Where is the other evidence, and what has become of trying to understand his account? Finally, is his version so implausible? Why should we privilege our class-based analysis over his, given that he was there and used categories that were then intelligible to communicate with his audiences? If there had been class warfare, what language could he have used for it? We shall meet these questions again as we proceed through the chapters. 3

Rajak’s Josephus: The Historian and His Society (1983), the Chapters

Chapter 1 (‘Family, Education and Formation’, 11–45) is Rajak’s gateway to Josephus’ complexity and intersecting identities. She examines the clues he 45 46 47

Rajak 1983: 121. My emphasis. Smith 1964; Nongbri 2013; Barton and Boyarin 2016. Rajak 1983: 149. My emphasis.

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provides about his formative years with the help of patterns and analogies derived largely from Talmudic tradition. That seems appropriate to her because she is sure that Josephus was a Pharisee and received a Pharisaic education,48 and the creators of rabbinic tradition were basically Pharisees (29). This chapter hosts the first of Rajak’s stronger statements in defence of Josephus’ general accuracy. Speaking of the problematic genealogy, she writes (16): ‘while there are some features which are improbable, there are none which are impossible; and, as long as what Josephus tells us is possible, we have no right to correct it.’ This raises a second methodological question, to which I shall return in the final section. Josephus’ diplomatic mission to Rome, from 63/64 to 65/66 CE (V 13–16), provides a fitting conclusion to the opening chapter because it brings forward the cultural complexity that Rajak underscores. Whatever one thinks of his shipwreck story, with its Olympian swimming feat, the journey confirms his membership of the Jerusalem elite. To have achieved such success in Rome, this Hebrew and Aramaic-speaking Pharisee (Rajak’s assumption) must have been able to exploit considerable resources in Greek language and culture and been adaptable to new experiences. Adaptability and versatility were the hallmarks of his class, however, which could not afford some sort of ideological purity. Chapter 2 (‘The Greek Language in Josephus’ Jerusalem, 46–64) argues that a measure of functional Greek learning was available in Jerusalem, even though the prevailing culture was not Greek, and someone in Josephus’ position would have taken advantage of that. Given that he later had years in Rome to build on this foundation, Rajak concludes against long-held scholarly assumptions that he was well positioned to write his Greek-language works, even if some friends helped refine his mode of expression. We have no need, she makes clear, of Thackeray’s imagined ‘ghost-writers’. Chapter 3 (‘Josephus’ Account of the Breakdown of Consensus, 65–77) explores the complex situation of the Judaean elite class before the war. Near the beginning, Rajak exposes problems with the tenacious view of scholars that Antiquities represents a volte-face from War, sporting a new nationalism and willingness to criticise the Roman governors. She finds no such reversal, but only new information and different foci in relation to War (66). This chapter quietly undermines another entrenched view: that a rupture between Rome and Jerusalem was inherent in governing structures, or inevitable because of Jewish-Roman hostility or Judaean oppression since Pompey’s

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Mason 1991 would later challenge these premises (see Chapter 13 above). The preface to Rajak’s 2002 reprint generously acknowledges my study.

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arrival or since 6 CE—the standard ‘gathering storm’ picture.49 Rajak presents Judaea’s elite as effective bridges between the ruling power and their people, in a role in which they succeeded for more than a century. She blames the final breakdown, first, on deteriorating Roman administration in the persons of the later procurators, especially Gessius Florus. His escalating violence, carried out by a willing auxiliary (recruited from ‘the Jews’ traditional enemies’, 71), made it impossible for Jerusalem’s elite to function effectively or to retain the people’s trust, and so generated stasis or civil war, which led to war with Rome (73–74). Two issues of method come up here. First, although this is ostensibly an exercise in reading Josephus’ narrative (singular), and War 2 provides the spine, at crucial points Rajak injects material from Antiquities (68–69, 72), justifying this with the claim that the later narrative complements the earlier one (66). That is true, but what does it mean if we are concerned with interpreting Josephus’ narrative, for War’s audiences did not yet have access to Antiquities? There is no great problem here, if one supposes that Josephus already had in mind some angles that he would bring forward only in Antiquities. Referring to the later work might then elucidate his thinking. Still, there remains the question of what Josephus meant to communicate in the first work. Even if we agree with her rejection of a volte-face in the later work, as we should, Antiquities is of course a different story with its own structures and themes—for example, making Judaea fully a part of Syria (AJ 17.354–18.2) rather than a province as War does (BJ 2.117). Does a fusion of the two narratives not over-simplify the task of historical reconstruction, by collapsing different stories into a prefabricated unity, making possible such a statement as (my emphasis): ‘our study will show it [as though there were a single narrative] to be true’ (66). Rajak insists that his narrative ‘cannot be faulted’ and ‘speaks clearly enough for itself’, and ‘we are impelled to accept his view’ (75–77). But which narrative, and which view? Again, we shall return to this in the final section. With regard to my main question, about the tension between individual and aggregative history, in this chapter and the next Rajak is ostensibly concerned with what Josephus reports, before testing it historically in Chapter 5. That sounds like a clear distinction between interpretation and reconstruction, which I applaud. In her summary of Josephus’ account, she rightly reflects his tendency to feature individuals and their followers—not classes or mass movements—as drivers of events. Such memorable individuals are usually people of the same class, whether the Roman procurators Albinus and Florus 49

Later studies in the same vein (though differently argued) include McLaren 1998; Goodman 2007; Mason 2016a.

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departing from their predecessors’ behaviour or the warring members among Jerusalem’s priestly class. But if Josephus’ account is ‘true’ or credible, as she insists, how can it also support the very different structural and class-based analysis of revolutions that is coming in Chapter 5? Chapter 4 (‘Josephus’ Interpretation of the Jewish Revolt’, 78–113) keeps the spotlight on his language. It uses War’s major speeches to tease out his picture of the revolt, given the scholarly consensus that he composed these orations and speaks through various characters (80–83; see Chapter 9).50 Consistent elements of Josephus’ outlook, she finds, include his view that the governing consensus could have continued to work if procuratorial malfeasance had not provoked the rise of Jewish factions, the leaders of which roused the masses against the impotent ruling class. Violent self-defence was a fatal mistake, however, because it was not Rome or the emperor, but certain procurators, that had caused the trouble. Provoking Rome because of these humiliations was counter-productive. Self-serving Judaean ‘tyrants’, Josephus believed, inflicted greater harm on their people than the Romans had done (82). This is all acute analysis of a rare kind, I think. Rajak also astutely shows that Josephus interprets both Roman rule and the misguided responses to it in light of prophetic and Deuteronomistic patterns of thought. That is, nations rise and fall under divine supervision and God intervenes to punish violations of the law, compatriot murder, and the pollution of holy spaces (96–103). His Greek account is therefore ‘essentially Jewish’ (78). Josephus ‘introduced a distinctive Jewish interpretation into a political history which is fully Greek in form, juxtaposing the two approaches’ (79) while preparing the way for Antiquities. Rajak’s theme of cultural integration in the person—and class—of Josephus comes into its own here. In this chapter Rajak also begins to put a clear, though often missed, gap between her views and those of Josephus, with her observation that because ‘the social and political implications of this [Josephus’] explanation have tended to be overlooked by Josephus’ readers’ (78, emphasis added), she will examine them. Although Josephus faithfully reported and interpreted what he understood, she explains, he ‘had no more sense of identification with the Jewish oppressed and dispossessed than the upper classes elsewhere seem to have had with theirs’. In writing contemptuously of Jewish ‘robbers’, for example, ‘Josephus scarcely recognises (which an impartial commentator would have to) … that most of the rebels had grievances of a different order from those of his own class’—in seeking a more just society (85). Rajak is now moving rapidly toward her own economic and class-oriented explanation of the revolt, 50

Cf. Lindner 1972. I suggest qualifications in Mason 2011a.

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giving her reasons for departing from Josephus while continuing to value his narrative. His account is reliable, she says, but it is blinkered and so requires an explanatory frame that eluded him. My questions are, again: How do we know about those other realities, and are they so readily compatible with Josephus’ explanations, if he is reliable? Can we claim that both are grounded in Josephus? It is also in these two chapters that we first meet Rajak’s description of leaders such as Ananus as ‘moderates’ (71, 82–83), a label that creates the crucial bridge from Josephus to social science types. This movement between a literary account and social or sociological criteria is the heart of the problem I am raising. Nevertheless, Rajak’s exploration of Josephus’ terminology for rebel groups is refreshingly revisionist. For example, she dismisses the notion that Josephus’ bandit/robber language is mere political slander. In her view, it describes actual bandit-like behaviour,51 the motives of which Josephus failed to understand, his account being in this respect ‘seriously deficient’ (85–86)—another correction of any perception that she naïvely trusts Josephus. Most of his recurring language for revolt, civil strife, and revolution, she continues, was his writerly accommodation to Greek-speaking audiences (86) and hardly illuminating of Judaean realities. His Zealots, sicarii, and Fourth Philosophy therefore create many puzzles (86–91). As a political enemy of all such tendencies, Josephus had no interest in explaining their views, even in labelling them with any clarity or consistency (91). His Zealots are a barely discernible group of lower priests, but ‘It is when we start enquiring why and whence “Zealots” [i.e., where the name comes from] that Josephus leaves us in the lurch’. This astute observation parts company with the general confidence, which is still around today, about the Zealots’ founding ideology in biblical Phineas and conjectured kannaim (87).52 Rajak also astutely observes that ‘the expression “Fourth Philosophy”, is, we may suspect, Josephus’ private coinage’. Further, ‘all this looks suspiciously like Josephus’ own schematisation. … Thus we are left in the dark as to how the enemies of Rome aligned themselves within the Jewish religion’ (88). Likewise with the famed sicarii, one can make only ‘tentative identifications’ (88). Curiously, for such a famous and fundamental study, many of these salutary cautions from the early 1980s have been ignored. Perhaps I may be allowed a grumble here. When I have stressed the opacity of realities behind Josephus’ narratives, much in the vein of Rajak if from 51 52

Independent confirmation comes from Shaw 1984, 1993, and 1995. Doubting Farmer 1973 [orig. 1956]; Hengel 1989 [orig. 1961].

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a different framework, my work has often been dismissed as ‘postmodern’.53 Rajak, esteemed as a fount of good sense, has (as far as I know) never felt that uncertainly wielded branding iron when expressing the same cautions. After this immersion in Josephus’ account and outlook, Rajak’s Chapter 5 (‘The Structure of the Jewish Revolt’, 104–43) brings her socio-economic interests, which she acknowledges are largely absent from Josephus, to the fore. The shift is indicated in the chapter heading’s implication that events—not narratives—have a structure. Whether they do is the heart of the debate between social-scientific and humanistic historians above. Here I cannot follow (see Introduction to this volume). Although class conflict drives the structure of events that Rajak sees, hers is not a simple picture of a widening class divide that finally explodes in war. Such a static if widening division would not explain why conflict broke out only in the 60s CE, not far earlier. Rajak argues in a sophisticated way that it was actually the growing prosperity of the lower classes, from Herod onward, that stirred ambitions for a fuller redistribution of wealth and land, and the repeated frustration of this hope, with ‘land hunger’ peaking around 66, prepared the ground for conflict.54 Granting that Josephus relates nothing at all about this, Rajak turns to Crane Brinton’s influential study, The Anatomy of Revolution (orig. 1938), to find traces in Josephus of the event structure of revolutions known from other (modern) times and places, which again Josephus did not know: Roman pressure opened up the rift, but could not have created it out of nothing. … [D]escription in terms of upper and lower classes is unavoidable [for us]. … Whatever the uncertainties, there can be no doubt that without some sort of tentative economic commentary we are at sea. We have interpreted change in Jewish society in terms of plurality of ideology, and transformations of status. Yet the economic character of Josephus’ dichotomy is often quite plain [i.e., not explicit, but obvious?].55

53

54 55

Egregiously, Eliav 2017. More circumspect misunderstandings include Bernett 2007: 20–21, and Schwartz 2013: vii. Schwartz (see Chapter 20) places Rajak and me together in a camp that cares only about the texts, not what underlies them (viii), invoking Richard Evans’ ‘defence of history’ against postmodernism (n. 4). On pp. 2–3 he remarks that, whether ‘doctrinaire epistemological’ postmodernists or not, we have supposedly abandoned the quest for historical truth. Rajak 1983: 123–24. Rajak 1983: 119–20.

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To understand what is at stake, in this assessment with shades of Marx, we need to go back to Brinton. In the terms of W. Windelband’s division between nomothetic (socialscientific, law-producing) and idiographic (humanities-based, particularist) research, Brinton locates his work unambiguously in the former stream, declaring it to be both scientific and aggregative. That explains the ‘anatomy’ and singular ‘revolution’ in his title. He is consciously exploring a trans-temporal model of human experience, in which he finds a repetitive structure, whether or not those involved recognised it.56 He uses the pathology of fever as a metaphor for the phases of this natural and diagnosable progression, in the English, American, French, and Russian revolutions. Like fever, he proposes, revolution moves from preliminary signs of trouble (namely, a government’s demand for payment from those who refuse) to the rise of revolutionary ‘moderates’ (a mediating group), then to the accession of revolutionary extremists who impose a reign of terror (‘virtue’ in their view) to purify the revolution, and finally to a calming reaction and partial restoration of the status quo ante after the revolution. The world is changed by the revolution, but not as completely as the original revolutionaries or certainly the extremists intended. Dismissing the objection that each revolution is historically unique as ‘an extreme view’, Brinton writes: History is essentially an account of the behavior of men, and if the behavior of men is not subject to any kind of systematizing, this world is even more absurd than the existentialists would have it. History at least gives us case histories, is at least material for the clinician.57 From his quasi-scientific perspective, history like medicine furnishes examples of endlessly repeatable phenomena, but on the social-political level. Individuals, with all their peculiarities, play no role in such an analysis. Brinton is interested in revolutionary leaders as types or ‘carriers’ of shared values, who ‘can be classified, labelled, described in economic and sociological terms’.58 It does not matter who they are, and their individual visions are irrelevant because they play roles they do not understand in the structure of events. Decades after his book first appeared, he conceived doubts about the Russian Revolution’s conformability to his model, but the study continued to exert enormous

56 57 58

Brinton 1965: 3–25. Brinton 1965: 19 (my emphasis). Brinton 1965: 92.

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influence, and it is not surprising that Rajak would use it in thinking about the Judaean revolt.59 Rajak does not, it should be stressed, don Brinton’s white coat, as a social scientist seeking verification of a model from Josephus’ evidence. Her approach is in some ways opposite. Writing at a time when Josephus was all but universally derided as a rotten liar, her concern was mainly to use Brinton’s model of revolutions to show the historical plausibility of Josephus’ account. With the minor swap of Rome’s imperial power over Judaea for Brinton’s category of the ‘old regime’ in modern revolutions, she offers: there is little that is not illuminated by this exemplar. The historical logic of Josephus’ story will go a good way towards establishing his credibility, at least with regard to the principal actions and events. For … if we find no internal grounds for impugning the historian’s story, then, in the absence of evidence from outside, it must have a prima facie claim on our belief. And although a comparison with the pattern of other revolutions [per Brinton] is not a proof of anything …, it does help us to assess the story put before us by Josephus.60 That said, to make the connection with Brinton, Rajak must still move from Josephus the unique writer, full of individual complexity and the author of a rich corpus, to Josephus as anonymous carrier of class values. This is the chapter in which the particularist-aggregative tension becomes most problematic. To lay my cards on the table: I am in no way averse to social and economic history, comparison, or heuristic modelling in studying the ancient past. Studies of demography, mortality, disease, food supply and diet, mining, trade patterns, land use, Roman military life, and much else involving longuedurée conditions, are crucial for our understanding of the ancient past, also of particular events and life-situations.61 Problems may lie, however, in (a) the exclusion by some historians of idiographic history as beneath the dignity of science (not an issue for Rajak, but for Brinton and many others in the socialscientific stream) and (b) in the very mixing of methods, categories, and criteria, such that a crafted literary episode must be expected to furnish data for trans-temporal models.

59 60 61

Brinton 1965: vi–vii (1956 preface). Rajak 1983: 127. My emphasis. For the distinction between the history of particular events and that of long-lasting conditions, see Braudel 1958.

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Consider Brinton’s category ‘moderates’. The clearest link to such language in Josephus is War 2’s occasional (2.275, 306, 455, 469) reference to (oἱ) μέτριοι in Jerusalem. Scholars have often been tempted to reify these as a party or distinct group of moderates. Some even paradoxically accuse Josephus of simplifying a complex reality—imagined by the scholars—when he allegedly pits a moderate party against rebels.62 Rajak defends Josephus, as we have seen, but also finds him recognising a group of ‘moderates’ that includes Ananus II and himself.63 The connection with Brinton’s moderate revolutionaries is tempting. The problem is that μέτριος is one of Josephus’ common, go-to adjectives for ‘decent, reasonable, measured, tolerable’ people, occurring 61 times in his corpus (24 in War). Only the four instances just mentioned relate to people with these qualities in wartime Jerusalem. They are not a moderate party, over against extremists. In the only passage where the word could conceivably signal a defined group (BJ 2.649)—I do not think it does even here—the category would have to exclude Ananus and Josephus. Josephus does not appear to know a party or group that would match ‘the moderates’ of Brinton’s revolutionary schema. A bigger problem is that Brinton’s model, derived from modern state revolutions, does not take account of the situation of Jerusalem in 66 to 70. From mid-68 to 70, when the shift to ‘extremism’ and ‘terror’ supposedly occurred, Jerusalem’s walled city of roughly two square kilometres was cut off from its hinterland. Much of the city elite had fled after Cestius’ ambush in October 66 (BJ 2.556). Thereafter it reportedly became a city of refuge, flooded by Judaean villagers clinging to their sometimes enraged leaders (4.130–42). This influx produced such violently opposed men as John, from Gischala, thousands of armed Idumaeans, and eventually Simon bar Giora with a scratch militia. Which ones are the ‘extremists’? What has become of their individual situations, interests, and motives? Take the Idumaeans, for example. In the story, they remain aloof from Jerusalem’s dire struggles through 65–67 CE, entering only when invited and that reportedly under false pretences (BJ 4.224–35, 335–53). As for John, he flees to Jerusalem only because Titus has come knocking at his home town of Gischala in northern Galilee. He would presumably have preferred to remain in peace at home (BJ 4.84–120; see Chapter 14 in this volume). Even for Vespasian, the unexpected death of Nero and the hiatus that required (June 68 to spring 70) shaped many of his decisions in ways he could not have planned when he arrived under Nero’s mandate. Do all these contingent, unpredicted situations 62 63

Cohen 1979: 183, 195; Price 1992: 37–40. Rajak 1983: 83–4, 106, 127–31.

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amount to a revolt against ‘Rome’ because of economic oppression, a revolt mappable according to Brinton’s model of revolutions in modern states? And how much can class explain, given that Josephus, John, and Eleazar son of Ananias are the fiercest of enemies but from more or less the same class? To put it another way, is it not likely that if Jerusalem’s established leaders (including Ananus, Jesus, and prominent Pharisees) had not been killed in the winter of 67–68, Jerusalem would have submitted intact to Vespasian by the summer of 68, as other Judaean centres had done, as Ananus’ group was reportedly planning to do (the reason for their deaths), and given that the walled city was boxed in by the late spring of 68? If John had not come from Gischala, the Idumaeans from the south, and Simon from the countryside, and if the Roman civil war had not frozen Vespasian’s campaign for nearly two years, does anyone imagine that the siege of Jerusalem would have occurred only in 70? Would there have been any reason for the city’s or temple’s destruction in 68, if Jerusalem had submitted? A relevant vignette is Josephus’ account of the burning of Jerusalem’s archives. Rajak sees the decision taken by some priests in Jerusalem to halt the twice-daily sacrifice for the emperor as ‘a declaration of war on Rome’, which ‘led straight away to the predictable confrontation between the two parties of Jews’, namely the propertied ‘moderates’ and non-propertied rebels. During this confrontation, she relates, ‘the house of Ananias, the palaces of Agrippa and Berenice, and the archives which contained the money-lenders’ bonds, were deliberately burned; as Josephus has it, the indigent were turning upon those who were more prosperous.’64 Put thus, Josephus’ account might seem to fit Brinton’s Anatomy, for it would explain the origin of a revolution in terms of the familiar structure. But that is not quite what Josephus says. At least two qualifications are needed, in addition to the already-mentioned substitution of imperial Rome for the old regime (127). First, the episode that Rajak calls a declaration of war, as many scholars have done, is fuzzier than that. Josephus relates that the decision of the group led by Eleazar b. Ananias—in their fury over the just related abuses of the procurator Florus and Agrippa’s failure to protect them (to 2.407)—was ‘to accept no gift or sacrifice from a foreigner’ (2.409). That is not a declaration of war against Rome. Josephus then explains editorially that this also meant that the sacrifices for the emperor would cease (2.410). In his hindsight view, therefore, this was ‘a foundation of war against Rome’—along with other foundations he mentions, such as Nero’s decision that Caesarea would remain Greek (2.260, 284). Even while noting this terrible consequence of the decision to 64

Rajak 1983: 117–19 (quotation 118). My emphasis.

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isolate Jerusalem, however, he does not collapse it into an anti-Roman move. The decision not to accept foreign gifts or sacrifices has a broad remit, which makes sense in its context. We see this when the senior leaders try to dissuade Eleazar’s group from following through (2.412–16). The heart of their objection is that Jerusalem’s holy site has always been open to foreigners and proudly displays their gifts in its courtyards. Preventing foreigners from entering the Court of Nations, which Herod built precisely for them, would attract the charge of misanthropy and exacerbate general conflict with neighbours (2.417). This example illustrates the problem with converting a nuanced and contextualised remark by Josephus into a datum for social-scientific modelling. Second, it is hard to see where Josephus describes the indigent turning on the rich in the burning of the archives. King Agrippa has been driven from the city, for proving useless in protecting the populace (2.406–407). Disaffected groups, including that of the high priest’s son and temple commandant Eleazar (2.409), proceed to arm themselves for defence against the auxiliary. The worried leaders appeal to Florus and Agrippa for military support against these armed men, and the king sends a rapid-response force of 2,000. His elite soldiers maintain order for a short while, but the armed men soon push out from their temple base to seize the Upper City, home of the wealthy. In their fury, they first burn Agrippa’s palace, as well as the home of Eleazar’s esteemed father (2.426). This is perhaps a display of intergenerational conflict, but is it class warfare? Their next target is, to be sure, the archive building with its debt notices (2.427). But why? According to Josephus, it is ‘so that they might attract to themselves [i.e., to an elite group] a mob of those who owed debts, and pit those who lacked means, now freed of fear, against the well-to-do’ (2.427). So this is not a spontaneous rising of the poor against the rich, but rather a cynical ploy by a well-heeled rebellious youths to create an instant mass of eager followers, liberated from fear of their social leaders because they owe nothing to them, and assured of support by this younger and more energetic elite group. Using financial incentives to generate a following was always a promising idea, and it might be found even in modern politics. Josephus will charge that Simon bar Giora, in need of an instant army to match his tyrannical ambitions, used the funds of wealthy backers and ‘proclaimed liberty for slaves and bounties for the free, and in this way assembled low-lifes from every quarter’ (4.508).65 In his autobiography, Josephus will even charge that Jerusalem’s high

65

Cf. Polybius (38.15), one of Josephus’ models, on the Achaean stratēgos Diaeus, who ordered the Greeks to liberate and arm 12,000 slaves and send them to Corinth, a move

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priests turned against him because of generous bribes they had received from a leading Pharisee (V 195–96). Chapter 5 thus lays bare the problems in coordinating a ‘nomothetic’ method with an ‘idiographic’ investigation. At bottom is the question of whether and why we should we assume that messy real-life events, including revolts, conform to repeatable structures. If they do, does a superior intelligence arrange them thus, no matter what the people involved think they are doing? And if we use models to explain them, what exactly are we explaining? It could not be the motives of the ancients, if they were unaware of the structure. Or are we rather comforting ourselves that we have arranged and ordered our knowledge in a reasonable way? I do not understand either the underlying conception of Brinton’s work or its application to the Judaean War, though I would stress again that Rajak did not use the war as Brinton had used revolutions. She rather wished to show the plausibility of Josephus’ account, by linking it with the Brinton schema of well-evidenced modern revolutions. Even as she finds correspondences in Josephus to Brinton’s Anatomy, Rajak exposes Josephus’ biases in this chapter, highlighting again the largely idiographic or particularist side of her study. For example, she contrasts rabbinic passages honouring the wartime High Priest Pinchas with Josephus’ deprecation of him as a bumpkin elected by rebel priests in flagrant disregard for decency and tradition (132–33). Here again we see that she does not simply trust Josephus. Rajak could integrate the Jewish War with Brinton’s model in part because against long tradition she finds little messianism, millenarianism, or ‘religion’ among the drivers of the conflict (10, 41, 140–41). The categories remain important to many colleagues in these fields (see Chapter 7 above). Rajak also rightly discounts Josephus’ afterthought about an ambiguous oracle as a cause of the war (BJ 6.312), which scholars continue to give a central role in the revolt (Chapter 22 in this volume).66 In Rajak’s Chapter 6 (‘Josephus on the Civil War in Galilee’, 144–73), she reverts almost wholly to particularist history, now stressing the complexity of Josephus’ position when he was sent to Galilee, and the consequent necessity for him to play a double game, which he freely admits (V 21–22). She also argues that oft-trumpeted discrepancies between War and Life are overblown in scholarly imagination. Beyond minor variations, in her view, the main

66

that caused chaos by making slaves insolent, upon suddenly being freed or in the expectation of manumission. E.g., Hengel 1989: 237–45; Grabbe 2010: 75, 78; Wright 2013: 116–17, 130, 170, 293, 346.

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differences may be explained by the difference of genre and occasion, along with the aforementioned complexities of Josephus’ class and situation. On this last point I must demur again. The differences between War and Life in portraying Josephus’ time in Galilee seem to me more fundamental. For one thing, they show a completely different order of episodes, which requires a different causal chain, as well as some remarkable changes in content within important episodes. For example, Josephus differently identifies the four men sent to capture or kill him, though this was presumably a major and memorable life-event.67 That big episode is also differently positioned within each work. I must wonder whether our difference in seeing this glass as half-full or half-empty has to do with different attitudes toward social-scientific or idiographic approaches. I mean, if one thinks that Josephus dramatically changes his story in each retelling, as I do, that would make it hard to connect ‘his narrative’, which is not one but two in my reckoning, with any social-scientific model. In the same vein, the Galileans’ attacks on Agrippa II, in which Rajak finds precious evidence of class conflict, I see as less amenable to that model. Josephus blames Tiberias’ factions on various members of the city’s elite (V 31–35), including the council president,68 and lets the councilman Justus express the city’s grievance about its loss of status (V 37–41). Is this a conflict between classes, then, or rather factionalism led by different elite interests? Moreover, Josephus’ references to defections from King Agrippa II69 in the king’s territories are not obviously connected with Jerusalem’s travails, much less part of a class-driven revolt against Roman rule. We should not forget that the most calculated and dangerous efforts to kill the priest-aristocrat Josephus did not come from class warriors. They were ordered by Jerusalem’s highest officials.70 Where is the evidence for class struggle? Another distinctive proposal in this chapter is that the deeper issues addressed in Josephus’ Life boil down to the problem of why the ‘moderates’ such as he were unable to keep control in Jerusalem. Rajak proposes that this question would have been most pressing for the Jewish Diaspora elite. On the cui bono principle, therefore, although she sees the difficulty that Life is an appendix to Antiquities, which explicitly addresses non-Judaeans (AJ 1.1–26), she argues that Josephus wrote his Life principally for a Diaspora audience (152). I have elsewhere stressed the unity of Antiquities and Life and argued that the frame he gives the latter (AJ 20.262–67; V 1–9, 430) serves to focus on his 67 68 69 70

Mason 2001: 213–22. V 66, 134, 278, 294, 300 with BJ 2.497–98, 599. V 187 with 43–61, 114; BJ 3.409–13, 443–46; 4.63, 83. V 202–204; BJ 5.541–47.

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personal character, which he considers awesome. The Life seems to me a hastily written appendage to the exhausting magnum opus: ‘Now, let’s talk about me, the man uniquely equipped to write all this.’ He highlights his exploits in Galilee before the Flavians’ arrival (his conflict with Vespasian already recounted in great detail in War) because they best illustrate such statesman-like character traits as effective generalship, forethought, self-restraint, and clemency. Chapter 7 (‘Josephus as an Aramaic Writer’, 174–84) takes up the lost Aramaic version—‘Josephus’ first known action after his move to Rome’ (175, my emphasis), which we have discussed above. This is new material over the dissertation, however. Rajak scrutinises the evidence, internal (exposing Thackeray’s misuse of BJ 3.108) and external (Parthian-Roman relations in the 70s), which scholars adduced for the propaganda hypothesis, and shows that the notion of an Aramaic original dispatched to the East withers in bright light. This chapter remains the definitive debunking of the old Aramaic obsession and it leads directly to the book’s climax. As I have said above, my only question here is whether Josephus had to have written anything in Aramaic after his arrival in Rome, to explain his passing remarks in War’s prologue. Chapter 8 (‘Flavian Patronage and Jewish Patriotism’, 185–222) complements Rajak’s eradication of the Aramaic as Flavian propaganda by asking about imperial influence on the extant Greek War. Did Josephus write to praise the Flavians? Answer: No. She begins with Josephus’ surrender and prediction, which were considered Exhibit A of his betrayal, convincingly arguing that the episode exalts the author—an incredible general who now has the ear of the divine—and not his captors. As to how Josephus managed to foresee Vespasian’s rise, Rajak suggests two possibilities: ‘his prediction will have been a performance rigged with his patron’s connivance; or else a trick of his own devising’ (187). She then explores the historical possibilities for Flavian patronage of history-writing, finding little evidence or plausibility in such a scenario for Josephus. Finally, she tours Josephus’ literary treatment of the two Flavian generals, showing that while Vespasian comes across as a respected commander, only Titus really shines.71 War is not a paean to the dynasty, therefore, but something more nuanced. It includes de rigueur flattery of the rulers, but this is marginal in a markedly Jewish history. This chapter includes the book’s most pointed statements about Josephus’ trustworthiness. The first comes in Rajak’s discussion of Jerusalem’s destruction, which according to Josephus occurred against Titus’ wishes, in an account 71

Supportive studies include, on the historical relationship between Josephus and the Flavians in Rome, Den Hollander 2014; on Josephus’ portraits of Vespasian and Titus, see further Chapters 3 to 5 in this volume.

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that most scholars have held to be a grovelling whitewash of the rulers.72 Remarkably enough, they prefer the Christian priest Sulpicius Severus’ version of 401 CE, in which Titus firmly decides on the temple’s destruction. This preference rests on the dodgy assumptions that Sulpicius’ very late account preserves lost material from Tacitus, which he in turn took from another eyewitness (see Chapter 20). Rajak writes: ‘as long as it cannot be convincingly impugned, Josephus’ story, the best we have, is the one that should stand’ (211). Likewise, concerning Josephus’ account of Masada, which scholars of the time often saw as his concealment of a Roman massacre: ‘The framework of the story can safely be accepted as true’ (220). If I differ on these points, it is not because I favour the option she rightly discounts, but because I do not see why historians should have to choose one story or another (see Introduction to this volume and final section below). Only in his description of the Flavian triumph (June 71) does Rajak find our deeply Jewish author losing his way, writing: ‘Here Josephus can for the first time be said to glorify his patrons at the expense of his people’ (219). She proposes, however, that he then over-compensates for this giddy lapse in his account of Masada’s end, where he forgets his posture as a moderate in the opposite direction: ‘his earlier abhorrence of such people’ (220) vanishes as he turns Masada’s self-immolators into heroes. Whereas other scholars had seen Josephus’ account of the Flavian triumph as the clearest expression of War’s Flavian sympathies, and the Masada story as a slip that exposes Josephus’ carefully concealed nationalism, Rajak reverses this, concluding that Josephus forgets his Jewishness, clear throughout the trunk of the work, in the compromised triumph episode, then forgets his characteristic denunciation of rebels from a sense of awe at the events of Masada. While agreeing that War is the creation of a proud Judaean statesman, I have argued that neither of these episodes in Book 7 is an aberration from the main story. If we read the whole work as Josephus’ response to Flavian hacks, who flatter the imperial family as though they had won a foreign victory deserving a triumph (BJ 1.2–8), then each part of it can be read as quietly shattering the Flavian claim: first detailing the long and strong Roman-Judaean connections since the Hasmoneans, Pompey, and Herod, concluding—with restraint for obvious reasons—with the sham Flavian triumph, which lacked goods to display from the supposedly conquered territory (see Chapter 5 above). As for Masada, given that the story is anticipated in volumes 2 and 4, rather than seeing in it a sudden change of perspective I prefer to read it as the 72

See Leoni 2007, which highlights Rajak’s voice in the wilderness (44–45).

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tragic, self-destructive end of the impossible construal of ‘freedom’ by Judaea’s ‘tyrants’, which Josephus programmatically rejects.73 Rajak’s brief epilogue (‘The Later Josephus’, 223–29) is the only vestige of the dissertation’s large section on the Antiquities. It drives home the continuity that Rajak finds throughout Josephus’ corpus. She writes that ‘the spirit was still the same’ (226), and that his later works show ‘evolution rather than transformation’ (229). This is a hallmark of Rajak’s approach to Josephus, and all the more worth noting because the opposite view, that Josephus’ basic outlook changed radically between War and Antiquities, has since returned with new energy.74 Three appendices complete the book. The first (‘The Native Language of Josephus’, 230–32) is the only appendix taken from the dissertation. It holds that Josephus was ‘totally at home in both’ Hebrew and Aramaic (232). ‘The Assistant Theory’ (233–36) preserves material from Part 1 of the dissertation. Thackeray’s idea about ghost-writers, doubted on various grounds before, is here buried for good. ‘The Dating of Josephus’ Antiquities and Life’ (237–38), finally, supports dating both works to 93/94. With this, Rajak’s powerful voice helped to establish the view that prevails today, rather than dating Life after 100 CE, as earlier scholars often did to accommodate the ninth-century Photius’ dating of Agrippa’s death to 100.75 4

Methodological Questions and Reflections

With this summary in hand, I would now pose a pair of questions to my longtime collegial friend and trench-mate in war that I have never had the chance to put in our varied and always pleasant meetings. Along with the many cases in which Rajak sidelines Josephus’ interpretation of events, contrary to her reputation, we have observed calls indeed to trust Josephus’ narrative on certain points, on the grounds that it is the best we have and there is no reason to doubt it. My first question has already come up in discussing her chapters. It concerns the tension between valuing Josephus’ narratives and breaking out items from them for use in social-scientific models. The other and related question concerns the declarations of trust, namely: Why must a historian choose one

73 74 75

See Mason 2016a: 3–59, 514–75, and Mason 2017 (= Chapter 5 in this volume). E.g., Smith 1956; Neusner 1973; Cohen 1979: 237–74; S. Schwartz 1990; D. Schwartz 2014; Tuval 2013. For critique see Mason 2014. Kokkinos 1998: 396–99, defends Photius.

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narrative or one conclusion, and not confess that we do not know what happened unless and until investigation can produce a compelling result? To explain this question, I bring forward one aspect of the method outlined in the Introduction to this volume. Already Herodotus, history’s famed founder, was sceptical of either single or conflicting accounts. He readily admitted uncertainty when his inquiry (historiē) turned up uncertain evidence.76 In modern (not postmodern!) times, here is Collingwood addressing Oxford undergraduates in 1926:77 when experienced historians assure us that all sources are tainted with ignorance and mendacity, we are apt to ascribe the opinion merely to cynicism. Yet this opinion is really the most precious possession of historical thought. It is a working hypothesis without which no historian can move a single step. Add in these thoughts from Bloch’s classic manual, hurriedly sketched in the early 1940s:78 But from the moment when we are no longer resigned to purely and simply recording the words of our witnesses, from the moment we decide to force them to speak, even against their will, cross-examination becomes more necessary than ever. Indeed, it is the prime necessity of wellconducted historical research. Every historical book worthy of the name ought to include a chapter …, which might almost be entitled: ‘How can I know what I am about to say?’ [Re: social-scientific categories]: A nomenclature which is thrust upon the past will always end by distorting it, whether by design or simply as a consequence of equating its categories with our own, raised, for the moment, to the level of the eternal. There is no reasonable attitude toward such labels except to eliminate them. These British and French giants shared a view that life as we live it is a chaos of colliding events, motives, intentions, and responses. Events do not come with explanations of their meaning. If we wish to know aspects of the past, therefore, we must limit ourselves to posing and investigating problems. In every generation people write up accounts of their times, but these can only 76 77 78

Herodotus 2.19.3, 29.1–3, 54.1, 113.1. Collingwood 1994: 378 (my emphasis). Bloch 1953: 64, 71, 174 (my emphasis).

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ever capture, and shape into a meaningful story, tiny slivers of life and only as shaped by the author’s conscious and unconscious limits, interests, values, and diction.79 Even where such accounts have survived, a rare situation for antiquity, our inquiry into a problem we have formulated can therefore never be a matter of accepting or rejecting one such account. We can only try to understand why it exists, its perspective and limitations, and what bearing it might have on our problem. Principled scepticism is thus required, not because we assume any author to be a liar, but because even the most competent ancient narrative could only reflect a glimmer of the past, shaped by its author’s interests and lexical bank. This is what underlies my question: Why do historians need to pronounce at all on Josephus’ trustworthiness, whether the issue is his ancestry or the burning of the temple? Given that his interests and questions could never be ours—we cannot meaningfully ask whether his opponents were really tyrants, who actually polluted the temple—‘trusting’ him is a meaningless gesture. When it comes to human actions and their motives, there will always be many more possibilities than the stories he chose to tell, in his efforts to communicate for his purposes with ancient audiences. When we investigate problems that we have formulated involving Roman Judaea, why not embrace not knowing—Samuel Johnson’s ‘nescience’—as a default position, and simply see how far inquiry can take us?80 5

Conclusions

It would be a mistake to read the foregoing essay as a very late review of Tessa’s 1983 book. In her preface to the 2002 reprint, she already qualified some of her positions and left others more open. I imagine that after another two decades, she would make further adjustments, as we all would. My aim has been neither to speak for Rajak’s views today nor to challenge her justly celebrated 1983 book. I have tried rather to situate this monumental study in scholarship and assess its contributions from a perch well into in the twenty-first century, in order to encourage new readers to read it more actively. In 1983, Rajak’s monograph swept away many untenable impressions of Josephus’ work and the half-baked methods based on them. Her outstanding 79 80

A further problem is the rhetoricised mentality and its implications for history-writing: Woodman 1988; Marincola 1997; Pelling 2000; Mason 2016b. Cf. the subtitle of Neusner 1993, and slogan elsewhere: ‘What we cannot show, we do not know.’

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preparation in both classical and Jewish literature gave her a confidence that shines through on every page. She was not above invoking common sense against bookish hypercriticism,81 and she made her points with a vigour that retains its appeal. Our earliest projects were basically different: hers exploring Josephus as the member of a class, mine trying to understand his works as compositions. But I was hugely impressed by the tailwinds she unleashed on the discipline for the rest of us to ride, and until this opportunity I have never had reason for disagreement worth mentioning. If I have taken the opportunity to quibble now, my admiration for this book’s achievement is undimmed. I have tried to formulate two methodological questions that still seem pertinent. First, to what extent is it possible to fuse aggregative-nomothetic with particular-idiographic questions in a single inquiry, granted that both kinds are entirely legitimate, without the one compromising the other? Second, what is the relationship between what really happened and the stories that Josephus wrote (or that anyone writes) about what happened? And what could it mean to trust Josephus? Other colleagues would ask different questions of Tessa’s landmark study. I would be pleased if this assessment helps future readers to interact with her fundamental contribution. 81

Rajak 1983: 147.

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With Per Bilde: Bilde’s Place in Josephus Research In 1978, when I was an undergraduate becoming acquainted with Josephus, the Dutch scholar W. C. van Unnik published an essay called ‘Josephus the Neglected’: Josephus is and will continue always to be used and cited. Who can calculate how often this has occurred?! Nevertheless, one might fairly ask whether the oft-cited historian is also genuinely known. Is he not [considered] much more a transmitter of data than a responsible author? Have we truly read his writings, exegeted them, and in a suitable way exploited them?1 Van Unnik’s answer to these last questions was a decisive No. Outside of research on the biblical paraphrase, scholars were all but universally using Josephus as a database—looking past his literary creations to his putative sources and the underlying events. They largely ignored the text as such, though it is the only form in which the ‘data’ have reached us. That peculiar if long-established situation was about to change dramatically, and Per Bilde of Aarhus played a pivotal role in generating the seismic shifts ahead. His 1988 book Flavius Josephus between Jerusalem and Rome, which developed lines from his 1983 dissertation on Josephus as historian with respect to the Caligula affair, quickly became the closest thing we had—and have—to an Einleiting in Josephus, a text that would survey the scholarly terrain and trajectories of Josephus interpretation.2 Its chapters methodically cover Josephus’ life, writings, thought, meaning, and use, in dialogue with international research in several languages. The book appeared in 1988, though—such were the timetables of academic presses in those days—Bilde had submitted it in June 1985.

1 My translation and emphasis: ‘Josephus ist und wird immer wieder benutzt und zitiert; wer kann zahlenmäßig ausdrücken, wie oft das geschehen ist?! Und doch läßt sich fragen, ob der vielzitierte Historiker auch wirklich gekannt wird. Ist er nicht viel mehr Lieferant von Daten als verantwortungsvoller Autor? Hat man seine Schriften wirklich gelesen, exegesiert und in richtiger Weise ausgeschöpft?’ Van Unnik 1978, reprinted in Breytenbach and Van der Horst 2014: vol. 4, pp. 69–128 (quotation p. 75). 2 Bilde 1988; cf. Bilde 1983.

© Steve Mason, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004545960_021

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Although Bilde could give just one chapter to Josephus’ works, and he largely devoted that to summarising scholarship, he was the first to lay out a comprehensive case for understanding Josephus’ works as literary wholes, agreeing with Rajak (see previous chapter) in viewing Josephus as an earnest, intelligent, and self-conscious author, though with less interest in his social context and focusing more on scholarly oversights in relation to reading the primary text. The products of Bilde’s research became foundation stones in the emerging subdiscipline of ‘Josephus studies’. To explain what I mean by this, and what his contribution has meant, I shall try to situate his work in relation to what came before, then review his methodological and substantive contributions, before a brief survey of what has happened since Bilde’s 1988 introduction. So: Before Bilde, Bilde, and Post-Bilde. 1

Before Bilde

Bilde himself divided the history of Josephus research into three periods. First came the long night of uncritical, traditional use of the corpus, mainly as the external guarantor of Christian theology. A vehement critical reaction eventually came along, in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Now Josephus was typically maligned as a mouthpiece of the Flavians, a contemptible Pharisee (from Christian theological perspectives), and a source-weaving pretender to the mantle of a true historian. At Bilde’s time of writing, finally, he perceived researchers laying a new foundation from various directions, which he sought to draw together and strengthen in the synthesis that was his book. The scholars in question were finding that Josephus was much more engaged with his literary-intellectual world than had been thought, that he must have had a serviceable command of Greek language and literature, that he was not dependent on sources or assistants, but controlled the content of his works, which were true literary compositions with visible structures, plots, characters, and themes, that the Flavians played a much smaller role in his writing than earlier scholars had claimed, and that archaeological finds were tending to prove Josephus ‘credible’ or ‘accurate’ (further below).3 A roll call of the scholars producing those green shoots in the 1970s and 80s might give the impression that they had already effected a fundamental shift. Among them were Horst Moehring, Heinz Schreckenberg, Louis Feldman, Helgo Lindner, Harold Attridge, Shaye Cohen, and especially Tessa 3 Bilde 1988: 17–18.

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Rajak.4 Bilde modestly presented his own investigation as merely continuing the trend. But he correctly observed that these other studies had had more particular interests than his: Moehring in parts of the Antiquities, Schreckenberg in the mediaeval transmission of Josephus’ text, Feldman and Attridge in the biblical paraphrase, Cohen and Rajak in Josephus’ life and social context at the outbreak of war. Though each study pointed toward, implied, and in different ways illustrated new ways of reading Josephus, nothing published had yet formulated the project of reading Josephus’ works as literary wholes.5 Bilde reveals this incidentally in his Chapter 3, as he works through each text and offers original interpretative proposals, but then finds himself unable to cite much scholarship for reference. His bibliographical summaries include such telling comments as: The contents of Bell. are not usually rendered in the literature on Josephus. (70) To the best of my knowledge, no contribution to a discussion on the arrangement and plan of Bell. is to be found. (70) On the question of Ant.’s contents and sources, one can only refer to Attridge (1984), pp. 211–16. (89) To my knowledge, the only available discussions of the disposition of Ant. are to be found in Attridge (1984), pp. 211, 213, and Schalit (1967), p. lvii. (92) In general, it is almost impossible to refer to any literature concerning Josephus’ aim in Ant. Feldman’s recent bibliographical works contain nothing on this subject. (102) To my knowledge, no attempts at determining the disposition and structure of Ap. exist. (118) A year before Bilde finished his work, Feldman’s 1,000-page annotated bibliography on Josephus research from 1937 to 1980 had appeared (1984).6 This undeniably comprehensive project confirms Bilde’s impressions. As we work through the twenty-nine major headings and hundreds of subheadings in Feldman’s extremely useful and detailed Table of Contents, we indeed find 4 Moehring 1957; cf. Moehring 1984; Feldman 1998b; Lindner 1972; Schreckenberg 1977; Attridge 1976; Attridge 1984; Cohen 1979; Rajak 1983. 5 As we saw in the previous chapter, Rajak’s dissertation was closer to this description than her 1983 book, which focused on the war and War. Even so, Rajak was not concerned to study War’s seven volumes as a literary composition. Her main interests were in Josephus’ social matrix and related outlook and motives. 6 Feldman 1984.

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nothing on such introductory questions as the aims, structures, publication settings, or themes of Josephus’ major works. Instead, the literature includes copious discussions of Josephus’ imagined character and his surrender to the Romans, reworking of the Bible, accuracy as a historian, sources, views of Jewish religion and halakhah, value for archaeology, influence on later Western literature, and the manuscript tradition. Even the thirty-five pages devoted to Josephus’ vocabulary and style mainly focus on speculative questions, such as his possible knowledge of Latin, use of assistants, Aramaisms in his work, and Hebrew sources. Strangely enough, researchers had been interested in everything about Josephus except the narratives and essays that he wrote, read as coherent texts. This was not, it should be understood, a unique situation with Josephus. The Bible and NT gospels, like many classical texts, had been valued chiefly for their sources or presumed data. With Livy, Diodorus Siculus, or Pausanias, among others, the data-mining approach lasted until quite recently, and has not entirely disappeared.7 A few classical historians had for some time been seen as literary craftsmen, especially Thucydides,8 and occasional studies had shown an interest in literary aspects of Josephus’ work too.9 But in general scholars did not suppose that this Judaean from the backwater East, a presumed Pharisee, could have had much competence in Greek paideia. As the baby-boomers’ ‘linguistic turn’ catalysed interest in literary questions across the humanities, however, even in such modest works as the Gospel of Mark, and as the older preoccupations of biblical studies with sources and form criticism yielded to redaction and composition criticism, it was perhaps inevitable that Josephus research would sooner or later pose new questions about whether this author’s works, after all, showed evidence of conscious literary effort. The single most important catalyst at the time was the Complete Concordance to Flavius Josephus, which gradually appeared between 1973 and 1983.10 That suitcase-filler, the result of monumental labours, has been partly (not completely) supplanted by weightless digital tools. But as it appeared it created the new possibility of settling debates about what was and was not 7 8 9

10

Correctives include Luce 1977; Sacks 1990; Habicht 1985. A general challenge to these approaches came with Woodman 1988. Cornford 1907. It was decades before a full (and not wholly successful) effort to lay bare Herodotus’ structures came with Immerwahr 1966. The great editor of Josephus’ Greek text, B. Niese 1896, though he gave much space to Josephus’ sources and external questions, and did not spell out his literary structures, did credit him with a degree of artistic skill. B. Brüne 1969 [1913] was far ahead of his time in studying Josephus’ language. Rengstorf et al. 1973–1983. The publisher packaged with it Schalit 1968.

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characteristic language of Josephus, as a matter of demonstrable fact rather than intuition about what such a writer could or should have said. This was a major step. As Bilde pointed out, however, even Feldman and Schreckenberg, in laboriously gathering and annotating bibliography in all languages for common benefit, made little effort to interpret or frame their results in relation to scholarly trends, methods, or perspectives. They categorised publications by year and subject, but mostly left interpretation to the user. This created an opportunity for Bilde, which he took up in the fourth chapter of his 1988 book. Here he assigned most preceding scholarship to what he called the ‘classical conception’ of Josephus, in contrast to the ‘modern conception’, the new phase that he was advocating. Though still today partly embraced by some colleagues, the classical conception seemed to him to be crumbling like an old scientific paradigm, as newer research ate at its foundations in arbitrary-seeming methods. Bilde never exactly defines the classical conception, however. His earliest statements associate it vaguely with a ‘negative’ view of Josephus, the person and historian alike, including the supposition that he was an inept copyist of sources.11 But as we read on, we discover so many approaches under the classical-conception umbrella that we might wonder whether there really was a singular ‘conception’ involved—from the Destinon/Hölscher source-based approach to Laqueur’s biographical-political rejection of source explanations to Thackeray’s more sympathetic reading of Josephus, which attributes much to assistants. What distinguishes the classical from the modern conception? Putting the pieces together in a way that Bilde did not, I would suggest that works he aligns with the classical conception have the following characteristics: 1. They approach Josephus first as a person with a career susceptible of moral appraisal, rather than looking first to his writings; 2. When they then look to the texts, their treatment is piecemeal and preoccupied with external questions (sources or events), often showing little or no interest in the narratives as compositions; 3. Applying modern standards and values, they find Josephus wanting and allege his incoherence, randomness, and sloppiness, compounding the root sin of cowardly betrayal in his behaviour; 4. The change in subject and genre from his war monograph (War) to ancient history (Antiquities) encouraged classical-conception scholars to postulate psychological motives, for example imagining Josephus as regretting his alleged pro-Romanism and penitently returning to a nationalistreligious outlook; 11

Bilde 1988: 127–28.

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5.

They tended to find Josephus minimally responsible for his corpus as a whole, and were ready to credit other hands or influences, from authoritative sources to literary assistants, for the more valuable parts of his work (those that do not concern his own life). Bilde’s ‘modern conception’ differs in all respects. It begins with the texts as we have them, taking them to be Josephus’ intelligent compositions, sidelining assumptions about his education along with judgements about his character. It seeks continuities in and through them. It looks to ancient social, historiographical, and rhetorical values to explain many features of Josephus’ writing. Bilde considered Tessa Rajak’s publications—her 1983 book appeared two years before he submitted his—the purest expression of his modern conception, even though their methods and questions were quite different (see previous chapter).12 2

Bilde (Method and Substance)

It is a trait of great ideas—gravity, bacteria, the heliocentric solar system—that once they have found general acceptance, no matter how hard their authors had to struggle for a hearing, they suddenly seem obvious and basic. How could anyone have thought otherwise? Reading Bilde’s decades-old book today, a student might imagine that he was merely stating the obvious. That this was not the case I can attest, from my dissertation research on Josephus’ Pharisees, which began before Bilde’s book appeared. He gave full credit to his forebears and inspirations, but he was developing a basically new paradigm, if that is not too grand a term for a subdiscipline, both for interpreting Josephus and in using Josephus’ works for the history of Roman Judaea. Bilde characterised his method as holistic, on the one hand, and economical on the other: holistic in reading Josephus’ works as compositions with distinctive structures, themes, and tones; economical in explaining what is in the texts and what produced them with the smallest number of hypothetical parts—that is, without resorting to untestable assumptions about his motives or layers of sources.13 Bilde put it this way: these principles lead us always to begin with trying to understand what Josephus himself has to say. … And only in the second place will we resort to hypotheses … to explain unsolved problems in the texts. In this way, 12 13

Bilde 1988: 159. Bilde 1988: 23–24.

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we will continually be in search of the simplest possible and, at the same time, the most trustworthy and convincing explanations … as well as the unity of and the driving forces in Josephus’ person, his life and his writings in their historical context.14 It was not that Bilde had found something new to do with Josephus: advocating literary study because it had been neglected and he had a taste for it. He had a historian’s interest in Josephus, and simply argued that anyone who wished to use this evidence had to deal with Josephus’ narratives and essays because these are what Josephus left us. They were not free-floating data for us to grab and use without getting our hands dirty. Historians ought not to take a paragraph here or there, on King Herod or Pilate or the Essenes, and run off with it undisturbed by contextual and interpretative issues, to compare it with something else. Since Josephus provided much of the evidence for our investigations, we have to reckon with the nature and meaning of that evidence before we can use it. Whether we all realised it or not, Bilde was interposing a new step in the historical investigation of ancient Judaea: the interpretation of crucial evidence. In arguing for closer attention to Josephus’ writings, it needs to be said, Bilde was in no sense advocating a naïve, uncritical acceptance of Josephus as reflective of reality. Perhaps because earlier scholarship had so often approached history as a matter of deciding whether Josephus’ account was reliable, colleagues often mistake interest in Josephus for acceptance of his accounts as transparent of reality, an assumption I have regularly encountered.15 In fact, Bilde’s programme—like Tessa Rajak’s and mine—tends to drive a wedge between the interpretation of a narrative and reconstructing historical reality, as different kinds of activity (see Introduction to this volume). That methodological distinction was anticipated by, among many other works, Cornford’s 1907 study of Thucydides, which both exposed the distortions of his account, in relation to what plausibly happened, and appreciatively explored the literary character of the work as we have it.16 One can admire a literary production and study it without imagining that it is somehow a trustworthy reflection of real life.

14 15

16

Bilde 1988: 24. For example, McLaren 2003: 150 divides scholars in two groups: those who consider Josephus basically ‘reliable’ on the war’s origins (including T. Rajak and S. Mason) and those who consider his alleged account of priestly non-involvement ‘a deliberate distortion’ (J. Price, M. Goodman, and McLaren). Bilde is not mentioned but given his praise for Rajak he would presumably belong in the former group. Cornford 1907.

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Bilde’s book applied this method to interpreting each of Josephus’ works. It was chiefly in his articles, some of which appeared long before the book, that he worked out the implications for particular problems. The rest of this section will survey some of these articles in relation to the book. Bilde’s first English article, in the Nordic journal Studia Theologica 1978, was preparatory to his dissertation on Gaius Caligula’s statue affair. It is a clinic in historical method, as he intended it to be.17 Very deliberately, he first identifies the available sources for this famous episode, then formulates six historical questions that are rarely explored in any depth, concerning Gaius’ motives, the roles of Petronius and Agrippa I, the nature and motives of the Jewish opposition, and the precise chronology of the events. He works through each problem seriatim, summarising what each source says that bears on the particular issue, analysing how that presentation fits with each source’s literary project—noting also historical shortcomings—and finally conjecturing a hypothetical scenario that would explain all the evidence. The historical hypothesis is unavoidably different from the picture offered by any one source. The historian must favour the hypothesis that best explains all or most of the evidence. This essay is a powerful antidote to any suspicion that Bilde naïvely trusts Josephus or Philo. It is a critical historical exercise. Bilde’s first English study of Josephus was his 1979 JSJ essay on ‘The Causes of the Jewish War according to Flavius Josephus’. This illustrates his method in other ways.18 It opens with a survey of the main scholarly explanations given for the war until the time of writing. Pointing out that our chief source for all these views is Josephus, Bilde makes the common-sense appeal that would underlie his later book: There should, therefore, be good reason to analyse more systematically the reasons for the war, given by the historian himself. Such an analysis seems to be a necessary precondition for further progress in the learned discussion about the historical background of the Jewish rebellion.19 His insight here was that scholars had not clearly separated the operations of interpreting Josephus’ narrative from reconstructing the past. Even those who acknowledged the need in principle did not go far with it. They settled for one or two broad strokes as a sufficient characterisation of Josephus’ interests—for example, he wanted to blame a few rebels or to vindicate the Romans or his 17 18 19

Bilde 1978: 92. Bilde 1979. Bilde 1979: 180 (emphasis mine).

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own class—in order to expose his ‘bias’ (which they had imputed to him) as inadequate, and then accused him of mendacity and concealment, by observing things he openly related that did not fit their encapsulations of his biases. Having imagined that they had sufficiently accounted for Josephus’ Tendenz, they proceeded to rearrange other bits of his story in a new whole, as though they offered free-floating data. They then imagined that they had produced something new and better than Josephus’ account.20 As Bilde put it: These interpretations reflect different conceptions of Josephus’ main interest, … But they seem to agree on the idea that Josephus emphasized mainly one interpretation and was … interested, for whatever reason, in covering up the historical truth about the responsibility for the war.21 Bilde, by contrast, tried to show how complex and multi-layered Josephus’ own narrative was: Josephus presents, scattered all over his works, a great number of different causes for the war, and it seems to be an important task to interpret the nature and purpose of these texts in a way corresponding to the author’s intentions.22 Echoing the ancient recognition of different kinds of causes (αἰτἰαι, προφἀσεις, άφορμαἰ), Bilde then distinguishes what Josephus presents as ‘trigger’ events or ‘immediately releasing’ causes (e.g., Florus’ raiding the treasury, cessation of sacrifice for the emperor, and the quarrel in Caesarea) from catalytic (‘accelerating’) events, and these from ‘more fundamental (structural or long-term) causes’, which were themselves numerous and disparate: Roman maladministration, a Jewish militant party, regional conflicts especially with the Samaritan auxiliary. Bilde further distinguishes all of these from abstract ‘theological’ causes (disunity and civil strife, transgression of the Law, pollution of the sanctuary)—still interpreting Josephus’ account, not yet proceeding to historical reconstruction.23 Ultimately, Bilde finds that Josephus struggled in a very human way to explain why the war had happened. He could not fully understand it and remained dissatisfied with his own varied and partial answers. Bilde imagines Josephus as a 20 21 22 23

Bilde 1979: 180–82. Bilde 1979: 183. Bilde 1979: 184. Bilde 1979: 184–94.

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latter-day Job, falling back on the inscrutability of God’s ways. The most that can be said about Josephus’ view of the war’s causes, for Bilde, is that they were an absorbing personal issue for him, and he never stopped pursuing the problem from different vantage points throughout his whole corpus.24 The brief section on War’s description of the war’s causes in Bilde’s 1988 book (above) reprises the main points of the article, though the tightly structured format there, perhaps, makes him seem to espouse a position he had rejected in the article: that War has an overriding ‘political-apologetic aim’, namely to exonerate the Jewish people of war guilt.25 This is a puzzle. Since we are back in the 1988 book, this is a good place to mention Bilde’s handling of Josephus’ Antiquities, Life, and Against Apion. In all three cases he swam against the tide and made durable contributions in doing so. He showed much interest, for example, in the macro-structure of Antiquities, significantly advancing that previously marginal discussion. He rejected the established view that the magnum opus was chiefly apologetic in intention, defending Jewish law and tradition against calumny. Bilde argued that it makes better sense as an active missionary work, encouraging gentile audiences already interested in Jewish law, as the proem implies (AJ 1.8–10).26 I have independently agreed with these general directions, on partly different foundations: arguing for a large-scale ring composition in the Antiquities and for its protreptic (if not exactly missionary) intentions.27 Taking Josephus’ works as wholes, Bilde rejected the nearly unanimous position of scholarship at the time (which I had shared in what became a 1991 book, written without knowledge of Bilde), that Josephus wrote his Life to defend himself against the charges made by Justus of Tiberias, to the effect that Josephus was responsible for stirring up rebellion in Galilee. Bilde concisely but brilliantly pushed aside this line of argument on the grounds that Josephus had made no effort to hide his involvement in the war, and anyway the brief Life did not answer to the alleged need. He proposed instead that the Life was Josephus’ effort, introduced in AJ 20.265–67, to declare his genetic and educational qualifications for writing the two large histories.28 Such a self-motivated account needed no external stimulus. Jerome Neyrey’s 1994 article on the Life as a self-encomium continued in the same direction. Both of those studies, along with other research, influenced my 2001 Brill commentary on the 24 25 26 27 28

Bilde 1979: 198–202. Bilde 1988: 74. Bilde 1988: 99–103. E.g., Mason 1996. Bilde 1988: 104–113.

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Life.29 It presented the Life as a celebration of Josephus’ character, attacking Justus and others only incidentally in the service of that aim. Bilde’s approach brought the Life in from the cold, as an integrated appendix to the Antiquities (as the manuscripts and references in the Church Fathers consider it), rather than as an independent work written from separate motives. With the Against Apion, likewise, Bilde’s method led him to interpret this remarkable essay as what it claims to be: a sequel to the Antiquities (Ap. 1.1–5). Although it is hard to believe now, scholars used to consider the work a light paraphrase, at best, of Alexandrian-Jewish sources and more or less unrelated to Josephus’ earlier work.30 We have noted Rajak’s insistence that Josephus’ later works preserved the spirit of his War. Bilde showed that the Apion was the crown of Josephus’ corpus, drawing into a compact and forceful whole many Grundthemen from the earlier works: the unparalleled antiquity and virtues of Moses’ Law; its administration by a uniquely worthy priestly aristocracy, of which Josephus is always the proud spokesman; the Law’s profound philosophical qualities, which compare favourably with those of other political constitutions; and its unique welcome of foreigners willing to live by its discipline. Addressing the same group that had pleaded with him to write Antiquities, Apion also continues the putative missionary work, actively encouraging ‘conversion to Judaism’ in Bilde’s view. It is the key to Josephus’ corpus because it lays out most systematically ‘the political and spiritual status of the Jewish people’, which is ‘the central theme in all of Josephus’ works’.31 A decade after Bilde’s book, Rajak cautiously reinforced his insights about these continuities, though rejecting his view of Josephus’ audience. She continued to argue that his main readership was across the Jewish Diaspora.32 With Bilde, however, she continued to find that Josephus did not experience any significant ‘change of heart’ in his final production.33 It appears that Bilde developed his basic insights about the Apion in a fuller 2007 Danish essay, which I have not been able to read.34 29 30

31 32 33 34

Neyrey 1994; Mason 2001. Cohen 1987: 425: ‘Apion’s perspective is that of ‘an Alexandrian Jew of the first half of the first century’; likewise S. Schwartz 1990: 23, 56 n. 127. This recalls older source-based explanations of the Apion, such as in Hölscher 1916, in which the author deduces from details that Josephus would not have discovered for himself (e.g., that Homer does not use the word nomos) that Josephus depended almost entirely on Jewish intellectuals, who did know such things. Bilde 1988: 118–21. Rajak 1998a. Rajak 1998a: 243. Bilde 2007.

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Another methodological paragon was the paper Bilde presented at the 1992 San Miniato conference, which is where we first met. We enjoyed a memorable walk in the stunning Tuscan countryside, in a (legitimate) break from conference meetings. His contribution, published in the 1994 volume of papers by conference hosts Fausto Parente and Joseph Sievers, concerned Josephus’ geographical excursuses.35 In keeping with his method, again, Bilde first states his question and situates it in relation to scholarship. Other research had offered the alternatives that Josephus either deliberately crafted geographical excursuses for his historical purposes or he borrowed them verbatim from sources. Bilde explains his method and terminology, reviews relevant passages, and offers a new analysis. Finding that examples drawn from all over Josephus’ corpus share similar features, language, and contexts, Bilde concludes that those in War, for example, could not have come from a posited Roman source. Bilde’s conclusion seems unassailable and even commonsensical, but it was a significant advance: ‘Josephus was deeply interested in geography’, he concluded, and even if he did use sources at times, he ‘gave them his own literary form and substantial character.’36 If Yuval Shahar’s 2004 monograph on Josephus’ geography could assume Josephus’ control of his material without needing to defend the proposition, that was in part because Bilde had paved the way toward understanding Josephus as a thoughtful author in control of his material.37 Until now I have commended and admired Bilde’s clear method and sound conclusions. If a couple of essays from the 1990s give me pause, that is because their method shifts from the standard above. I highlight my disagreement in these cases not to find fault with my late friend, but because the issues at stake anticipate some research that has emerged post-Bilde (below). It is only fair to consider everything together. The 1998 volume that includes Rajak’s Apion chapter also hosts one from Bilde on Jewish apocalypticism.38 In formal terms it seems to be another paradigm of careful method, moving from a statement of the problem (the connection between Josephus and Jewish apocalypticism) to a summary of research, definition of terms, and the exploration of seven issues from across Josephus’ corpus. Bilde shows Josephus’ unity of conception, and proposes influences from what he defines as apocalypticism. My respect for his analysis is barely dented by my disagreement with two elements of this argument: first, that Josephus considered himself to be a ‘prophet’ (and prophecy to be alive and 35 36 37 38

Bilde 1994. Bilde 1994: 262. Shahar 2004: 190–268. Bilde 1998.

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well in his day), and second, that Josephus’ descriptions of the Essenes dovetail sufficiently with indications in the Qumran Scrolls to identify the Scrolls as Essene. On both points Bilde was in close agreement with Rebecca Gray’s then-recent book.39 For Essenes, see Chapter 12 above. For the question of Josephus as prophet, it is best to go back a couple of years to Bilde’s 1996 contribution to the volume of essays edited by Feldman and Levison on the Against Apion.40 There, in a marked departure from his usual method, Bilde engages much more in deductive reasoning. After briefly stating his question concerning ‘Josephus’ view of his literary activity’ (in relation to the biblical canon), he asserts that Josephus regarded himself as a prophet, ‘identified himself with the prophet Jeremiah’, and ‘appears to have seen himself as a prophet like Jeremiah and Daniel’, that Josephus considered prophecy to be alive in his day—against the supposedly narrow-minded view of scholars who imagine that it had ceased; and most remarkably, that Josephus’ Antiquities ‘was the Jewish Bible’ (his emphasis), for ‘Josephus puts his Jewish Antiquities on the same footing as the Jewish canon’.41 Bilde’s thesis about Josephus’ prophetic consciousness leads him to argue that other first-century Jewish authors, including Philo, may also have viewed themselves as prophetic scripture-writers.42 He proposes that not only Antiquities but already War is ‘a direct continuation of the historiography of the Jewish “prophets”’, intended by Josephus to be on the same level with them, for its author possessed ‘the very same three qualifications of priestly status, prophetic gift and first-hand knowledge’ as the canonical authors.43 My concern here is not with Bilde’s conclusions, but with their justification. In support of Gray, he dismisses as ‘inaccurate’ an important 1990 essay by Louis Feldman on prophets and prophecy in Josephus, which had pointed out problems with her analysis.44 When weighed against what we can see and read, however, Feldman has the stronger argument. Gray and Bilde make claims that are difficult to support in Josephus’ text. His assertion of Josephus’ ‘identification’ with the prophets is the crux of the matter. The rest of the chapter pursues what he variously calls Josephus’ ‘line of thinking’, ‘logic’, and ‘line of thought’, which he discovers by making further deductions. The problem is that his approach here seems to abandon his principles of contextual or compositional interpretation. The logical-deductive 39 40 41 42 43 44

Gray 1993. Bilde 1996. Bilde 1996: 94, 97, 108. Bilde 1996: 108–110. Bilde 1996: 110. Feldman 1990.

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approach might work better with a tightly argued philosophical essay. In the Apion, for example, Josephus’ alignment of himself with Oriental-Jewish writers against the Greeks logically implies for Bilde that he presents his own works as Exhibit A of prophetic writing. But Josephus uses no such language and he seems to say something rather different (below). In Antiquities, Josephus’ priestly expertise in translating scripture must mean, for Bilde, that he assumes the authority of a scripture-writer.45 And of the Iotapata scene in War 3, where Josephus claims revelatory dreams and insight into scripture, Bilde writes revealingly: Although the word προφήτης does not appear, this text clearly presents Josephus as a prophet: ‘… but I come to you [Vespasian] as a messenger (ἄγγελος) of greater destinies. …’ Here, Josephus obviously claims to have functioned as a prophet.46 Notice the deductive reasoning: since Josephus called himself a divine messenger, even though his understanding came from reading scripture and in dreams, this makes him a prophet. Therefore, he wrote War with the consciousness of a prophet. In the way it joins up disparate dots, however, the argument follows the logic of the famously fallacious syllogism: ‘Dogs are domestic animals with fur and four legs; cats are domestic animals with fur and four legs; therefore, dogs are cats’. Or in this case: prophets are people who experience and convey divine revelations; Josephus experienced and conveyed divine revelations; therefore, Josephus was a prophet. But there is an excluded middle here. Not all furry quadrupeds are dogs, and not all those who received divine messages, in Josephus’ lexicon, are prophets. If we are concerned about Josephus’ meaning and use of language—as Bilde characteristically was—we cannot say that he obviously presents himself as a prophet if he does not so present himself. First, Josephus writes self-consciously as a historian, not as a prophet. In this, he is patently influenced by Herodotus, Thucydides, and Polybius as well as the great rhetoricians, tragedians, and philosophers. He speaks openly of his mundane motives for writing, having entered the fray among competing accounts of the war, stressing the labour and expense involved (BJ 1.13–16), and later yielding the pressure of friends who want to learn about Moses’ constitution in Antiquities and Apion, all the while contrasting his historical efforts with those of lesser lights (Ap. 1.50–51). To be sure, he insinuates parallels between himself and various prophets, especially Jeremiah and Daniel. But 45 46

Bilde 1996: 103–107. Bilde 1996: 106 (my emphasis).

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this does not mean that he considers himself their equal, any more than a politician who invokes Washington or Lincoln, Disraeli or Churchill, puts himself or herself on the same level. It highlights their authoritative, in contrast to his derivative, status. Feldman made specific discoveries about relevant facts, which cannot be replaced by deductions or opinions. Namely, Josephus uses prophet-words 402 times, all but exclusively for the biblical prophets. That is why only 14 occurrences are in War. Of the 14, even in War 8 refer to the biblical prophets, 2 to John Hyrcanus—the last person granted genuine prophetic gifts according to Josephus (BJ 1.68–69)—and the other 4 to fake prophets close to the time of the war, some of whom were suborned by tyrants to manipulate the masses, claiming to be prophets (6.285–86). There is no genuine prophecy in Josephus’ day, according to Josephus. This does not mean that he considers his age bereft or in decay, or in mourning over the loss of prophecy, as Christian writers have sometimes claimed. On the contrary, he delights in the fact that Judaea’s prophets laid down their sacred texts in a golden age long ago, as a venerable and permanent foundation for Judaea’s laws, which has required no change. Judaeans have a great advantage over Greeks, who are stuck with much more recent, competing, and error-ridden histories (Ap. 1.6–43). He admires and celebrates Judaea’s ancient prophets. But Josephus cannot apply prophet language even to the people he admires in his own day for their proximity to the Deity—the Essenes and his good self—and he does not do so. This cannot be an accident or oversight. He expresses only satisfaction that Judaean sacred books come from prophets in ages past. Greek and oriental seers, even the Oracle of Delphi, he calls by other names; they are not, for him, prophets.47 Josephus’ reservation of prophet-language for Judaea’s ancient ancestors is the more impressive for not being made explicit. Only the concordance or digital tools allow us to see the pattern, confirming that prophets are a special category for him. Bilde’s reading of Ap. 1.41 to say that post-biblical Judaean authors until Josephus’ time are also prophets seems to contradict Josephus’ enthusiastic point that only twenty-two ancient books are ‘trusted’ by Judaeans (1.38: τὰ δικαίως πεπιστευμένα), and that their authors were prophets (1.37), whereas more recent writings are not given the same trust (πίστεως δ᾿ οὐχ ὁμοίας ἠξίωται τοῖς πρὸ αὐτῶν)—because that accurate transmission by prophets is no more 47

The few exceptions to Josephus’ reservation of prophet-language for ancient forebears of the Judaeans (Hyrcanus as last outlier), where he is not speaking sarcastically of so-called prophets in his own time (16 references are to pseudoprophets), are in quotations of other writers (AJ 1.240; Ap. 1.249, 312).

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(1.41).48 The whole drift of Apion 1 contrasts the antiquity and fixity of Judaea’s sacred texts with fluidity, haphazardness, and uncertainty on the Greek side. History or the investigation of events amid competing claims, which he has pursued of necessity, is the opposite of prophecy. 3

Post-Bilde

In estimating Bilde’s influence on recent scholarship, we face the usual difficulties attending any efforts to trace ‘impact’. For example, raw scores of citation frequency—from the Humanities Index or ATLA database—would not reveal much about the degree to which Bilde’s ideas have shaped or sharpened research. It is common for scholars to refer to Bilde’s Josephus book as a rare introduction to Josephus without seeming to take his innovative arguments on board. Moreover, his work rapidly coalesced with that of other scholars, to form a group that may be cited together as one direction in Josephus research, even if that direction is misunderstood (e.g., as purely literary). I can best illustrate these problems by mapping three trajectories in Josephus research since Bilde’s 1979 article and 1988 book. 3.1 Josephus (along with Bilde) the Still Neglected Bilde’s ground-breaking contributions were largely missed. Most people who write about the war have neglected his work, especially the important 1979 essay. It would be futile to list the works that do not mention him, however. The most conscientious historians have registered his article with respect, but even in these cases its contribution has not come through with complete clarity, or shaped the discussion as Bilde might have hoped. Martin Goodman’s 1987 study of the war’s origins knew the 1979 essay and used it appropriately in observing that ‘Josephus blames the war on a wide variety of causes’.49 Yet within a page, Goodman ascribes to Josephus a simpler apologetic line: Jews of the richer class like himself were, despite the revolt, just like other aristocrats in the Greek East of the empire. Above all, he wanted to demonstrate that they should be entrusted again with the Jerusalem Temple and the flourishing Judaean society of which they had lost control.50 48 49 50

See further Mason 2019b. Goodman 1987: 5. Goodman 1987: 6.

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Suggesting that it is ‘all too likely that his instinct for apologetic overcame his conscience as a historian’, he cites Bilde in apparent support—though this would seem to run counter to Bilde’s point about the complexity of Josephus’ view. James McLaren’s 1998 study of the war’s causes gives a full and careful summary of the essay,51 noting that Bilde was unique in focusing on the interpretation of Josephus’ account by itself. He too recognises that Bilde found Josephus mentioning many causes on various levels. Puzzling here is that he discusses Bilde in the section of his book showing that modern scholars consider the revolt the inevitable end of a trajectory because they are in thrall to Josephus. Although McLaren describes Bilde’s view with care, those points might be obscured somewhat by the framing. Finally, when Jonathan Price (1992) reconsiders the causes of the war,52 he refers to Bilde’s 1979 essay, but only for a summary of ‘traditional views’, which Bilde indeed offers.53 Price’s attribution of a simple motive to Josephus54 and proposals about a very different historical reality seem to skirt Bilde’s challenge that Josephus’ account is itself complex and unsystematic. Price’s proposal that ‘any account or interpretation of the Jewish rebellion is necessarily an interpretation of Josephus’ Bellum Judaicum’ also seems to conflate what Bilde had separated: interpreting Josephus and explaining the past.55 These are all excellent scholars who have made crucial contributions to the study of the war. My point is not to play ‘gotcha’ by suggesting shortcomings. We all miss some studies and unavoidably compress those we do mention. I am not finding fault, but rather trying to trace Bilde’s influence on the field. His work has been read by experts and duly noted, but his arguments have not necessarily shaped discussions as they might have done. Research on the war and its origins has continued—here I am not referring to Goodman, McLaren, and Price—largely as though Bilde had not made his plea for distinguishing the interpretation of Josephus, as a demanding task on its own, from the reconstruction of past events, which is even more challenging, especially when we find that Josephus’ account has many layers and angles. The greatest paradox is that those who (rightly) reject monocausal, growing-storm explanations of the historical war blame Josephus for misleading scholars with such a picture, whereas Bilde’s argument that Josephus’ fascination with the war’s causes was never coherent seems to have been lost. 51 52 53 54 55

McLaren 1998: 152–53. Price 1992: 45–50. Price 1992: 45 n. 138. Price 1992: 32. Price 1992: xi, my emphasis.

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3.2 Josephus the Earnest From disregard of Bilde’s method and substantive arguments, we turn to developments that are broadly consonant with the methodological directions pursued by Bilde. The undergirding principle of this research is that Josephus was a reasonably talented Greek author who controlled the content of his work in the service of purposes we have every reason to consider sincere—rather than Roman propaganda or cheap politicking, for example. Among the most obvious expressions of this approach are ongoing commentary projects in German, French, Italian, English, and other languages. Commentaries became desiderata only when Josephus was deemed worthy of study as an author. That is why these projects are so recent, having gathered steam only since the 1990s.56 Bilde was part of the Brill Josephus Project (Flavius Josephus: Translation and Commentary) from its inception, working on Antiquities 18–20. When I invited the original team in 1997, he was an obvious choice for this important stretch of narrative, which includes many subjects he had worked on in detail. It may be hard to believe now, but the state of scholarship was such that several eminent scholars declined my invitation for other parts, some even expressing surprise that such a writer as Josephus (as they thought of him) should receive a commentary. Bilde was keen from the start. Even when his devastating illness immobilised him for more than a year, he wanted to remain involved, partly as a motivation for recovering strength. After his eventual withdrawal, I was much relieved when Daniel Schwartz of Jerusalem was willing to take over these crucial volumes of Antiquities. Other manifestations of the new interest in Josephus were the international scholarly conferences that began to proliferate. First came the 1992 San Miniato gathering already mentioned, which was funded by a bequest from Morton Smith. That was followed for a time by annual or even more frequent colloquia, which produced significant volumes of essays. Energy was gathering around the prospect that the 30-volume corpus of Josephus, though it was so well known by name, still awaited the sort of investigation long applied to other classical and biblical and post-biblical texts. The Josephus Seminar in the Society of Biblical Literature, begun in 1999, continues to hold at least two sessions in the Annual Meeting. Perhaps the most important index of the new perspective on Josephus was the flurry of dissertations and monographs, many resulting from dissertations, exploring aspects of Josephus’ literary corpus. This ever-growing stream confirms that Bilde’s interest in Josephus as an author, coupled with the impetus of 56

See Sievers 1999, online at http://www.biblico.it/doc-vari/sievers_josephus.html (accessed 10 October 2015), for a summary at the end of that decade.

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Rajak’s work, the other studies mentioned above, and the Concordance, gave us a massive new and rich vein for investigation. Questions that had been thought simply historical in the past—Herod, Pilate, Pharisees, Essenes, Samaritans, temple, priesthood, sicarii, women, calendar and feasts, sacrificial cult, the revolt—were reconceived first as questions of Josephus’ portrait of that X, as a separate issue from the historical reality. A slew of historiographical, literary, and rhetorical questions focused on the works of Josephus became possible. Contrary to widespread misunderstanding by a generation of scholars unfamiliar with the distinction, this did not mean that those conducting such investigations had no interest in the real events, much less that they reduced events to Josephus’ narratives. Like Bilde, rather, they thought it important to clarify the nature of Josephus’ evidence before and as a condition of fuller historical investigation.57 Perhaps I may be forgiven here for briefly explaining the connection of my work to Bilde’s. I do this partly for the entertainment of younger colleagues, who may not appreciate the degree to which technology has changed conditions. Partly because of the challenge of printing Greek or Hebrew from the wide array of proprietary fonts on different platforms at the time, it was common in the 1980s for a technical or academic book to take three or more years to produce. Contrast that with Brill’s current pace of some months for the volumes of the Josephus commentary. The older gap explains why, though Bilde submitted his manuscript in June 1985, it did not appear until September 1988. This also explains why, when I submitted my dissertation on Josephus’ portraits of the Pharisees in August 1986, I had no knowledge of Bilde’s 1988 work. I had found the same scholarly situation that he describes, and in much the same spirit argued that we could only undertake historical investigations of the historical Pharisees—a question then in vogue—if we first understood Josephus’ contexts for portraying the group. This meant an effort to interpret War, Antiquities, and Life as compositions and trying to understand the contribution of the Pharisees to each narrative. Hence my subtitle, ‘a compositioncritical study’, which puzzled some scholars. Bilde would eventually have another ally, once I discovered his book. Between 1986 and 1988, however, I reworked the dissertation for publication as a monograph and submitted it to Brill in 1988. Even then, therefore, I did not yet know of Bilde’s research, and 57

I mention some that come readily to mind since about the turn of the millennium: Chapman 1998; Galimberti 2001; Colautti 2002; Sementchenko 2002; Grünenfelder 2003; Shahar 2004 (n. 36 above); Nakman 2004; Elledge 2006; Landau 2006; Jonquière 2007; Gussmann 2008; Brighton 2009; Pummer 2009; Olson 2010; von Ehrenkrook 2011; Siggelkow-Berner 2011; Klawans 2012; Tuval 2013; Den Hollander 2014.

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could not read his book until the following year. Although my 1991 publication date might suggest that I was surely influenced by Bilde 1988, they were independent lines of research. When I finally read his book, needless to say I thought it wonderful, much as I responded to Rajak late in the dissertation process. If only I could have seen it earlier! Nearly every scholar involved with Josephus studies today would, I suspect, agree at least in principle that Josephus was an intelligent author with a coherent literary project, who controlled the content of his narratives. But this was ground hard won in the 1980s, against much doubt and occasional derision. When I first explained the approach of my dissertation to world-famous scholars in 1984–1985, travelling beyond North America for research, they (separately) recoiled in bafflement that I would accord Josephus such credit and not simply assume that he borrowed most of his Pharisee passages from sources. Through his 1988 book, in particular, Bilde did much to make it seem the merest common sense to ask about Josephus’ narratives and their constituent elements. 3.3 Josephus the Double-Talker—Not So Earnest after All? If the first post-Bilde trajectory ignores some of his contributions or finds them inconvenient in method or substance, and the second has comprehensively vindicated his original insights, the third trajectory builds on the foundation laid by Bilde but develops it in ways that Bilde himself might not have agreed with. What do I mean? Bilde’s signal achievement was to establish Josephus as an earnest and capable author. This was a major step forward, complementing Rajak’s. I have suggested that this interest could lead to an overly systematic, even essentialistseeming impression of Josephus, for example on the question of Josephus’ apocalyptic influences or self-perception as a prophet. Taking him to be a coherent author, one might be tempted to assemble bits from various places in his corpus and subject them to syllogistic reasoning: if Josephus says X and implies Y, then Z would logically follow. I have challenged Bilde on these points, holding that narrative is a different kind of beast from systematic argument. But the question is one of tone and judgement. A trajectory that begins from the Rajak-Bilde premise of Josephus’ control of his work, but moves in directions Bilde might not have favoured, could for example explore irony, double-talk, or multiple layers of meaning in the corpus. This would take nothing away from appreciating Josephus’ seriousness. On the contrary, it would ask about the degree to which he trafficked in standard rhetorical moves of his time and place. Rhetoric was about persuading others as the situation demanded, and sometimes the situation required deception.

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Tacitus, Quintilian, Plutarch, Pseudo-Demetrius, and others recognised the need not to explain everything to one’s audience but to rely on them to make inferences—partly for the sake of art, partly for the author’s safety. Studies of ancient historians have stressed the ironic content of their work.58 From a different direction, social-scientific analysis, especially in relation to ‘post-colonial’ literature, has explored the strategies used by ‘subaltern’ populations and their elites to manage their relations with the great power. This typically involves a balancing act, asserting the national identity while absorbing the language and value system of the hegemon.59 In Josephus’ case, his Life tells the audience that he had adopted double-talk as a conscious programme. Near the beginning, he relates that Jerusalem’s leading men opposed the popular move to arms, but nevertheless, ‘Given the clear and present danger to ourselves, we said that we concurred with their opinions’ (V 22). Throughout the work, indeed, we see both Josephus and his rivals unabashedly deceiving each other and the populace they hope to lead. Josephus’ awareness of the duplicitous potential of rhetoric makes it hazardous to apply any sort of deductive reasoning, of the kind that used to be common. For example: he says that he and Ananus II opposed the war, but there he was fortifying Galilee while Ananus prepared Jerusalem’s defences. Therefore, they cannot have opposed the war. Once we allow for the perspective of a Plutarch, in his Precepts of Statecraft, about the need for political leaders to keep their own preferences to themselves and appear to side with a disgruntled populace, this deductive reasoning loses its grip. Such considerations complicate our reading of ancient narratives, undoubtedly. But if we try to place ourselves in the position of Josephus’ first audiences, regarding his works as merely the products of a sincere thinker who lays everything on the line may be as misguided as using them as mere data sources. If we interpret him in his social and political contexts, we must allow him to dissemble in the ways the authors of his time did: for art, for impact, and for safety. Decisions about Josephus’ intention in writing such passages must affect our use of those passages, and Josephus’ work generally, in our historical constructions. 4

Conclusion

Bilde’s research laid a foundation, with the differently angled but complementary boost of Rajak’s 1983 monograph, for the new subdiscipline of ‘Josephus 58 59

Ahl 1984; Rudich 1993; Bartsch 1994; O’Gorman 2000. Syntheses are in Mason 2005a and Mason 2011a. Barclay 2005; Spilsbury 2005.

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studies’. Given its pivotal position, still, his work is not as well known as it deserves to be. Unfortunately, his 1988 book is long out of print. Preparation for this tribute has convinced me that his book and at least his JSJ article (1979) merit re-reading. As with everything we read, time has a way of condensing and reducing research to mnemonic signposts in our memory. Bilde’s research and ways of thinking were innovative and stood almost alone for a time, against entrenched views. I hope to have gone some way toward recalling his singular contribution.

Chapter 20

With Daniel Schwartz: Forty Years of Friendly Disagreement Danny Schwartz and I have been talking off and on for quite a while. Before I headed to the Hebrew University for a summer Ulpan and the academic year 1983–84, my Canadian supervisors gave me several big names to contact in Jerusalem. The owners of those names politely offered an hour or two, and I was grateful. But they were busy and my subject—Josephus’ Pharisees—did not seem entirely riveting. Dr. Daniel Schwartz, however, who had recently begun teaching at Hebrew University, had an article just out on the very subject (1983).1 What luck! As it happened, his approach could not have differed more completely from the one I was developing. Instead of trying to dissuade me, however, Danny proved a patient and wise conversation partner. So he has remained to this day. We still correspond and collaborate, now also for the Brill Josephus Project, which he joined to universal relief and applause. The intervening years have exposed some apparently basic differences between our approaches, and these have often appeared in print. I have some reason to believe from our conversations, however, that at the deepest level of historical method, we actually agree. Although disagreement is not to be feared, and is indeed the primary means of advancing knowledge, some of our publications appear to put us in silos between which communication looks impossible. That impression, to the extent it may exist, is unfortunate. If misperceptions can be corrected, that will help us to identify genuine differences. And that can only help colleagues or students who try to contextualise our work and sort out those issues. My perception is that with easy email correspondence nowadays, we understand each other better than we did twenty or thirty years ago. But what we have written is out there and still relatively recent, so it seems worth the effort to untangle some sources of difference. Let us consider the basic problem of historical method, then some particular cases in which our differences might seem to stem from different methods, though I suspect that they do not, and finally the two main debates we have had in print: over the relationship between interpreting Josephus and historical reconstruction and over the transliteration or translation of Ioudaios. Ideally, this should be a joint essay, with input from each of us. Unavoidably, it 1 Schwartz 1983; contrast Mason 1991.

© Steve Mason, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004545960_022

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is my perception only and therefore in part an apologia in relation to Danny’s published impressions of my work. Even still, I hope that this contributes to mutual understanding. In keeping with the conventions of critical dialogue, I must now call my collegial friend by his surname. 1

The Big Issue: Historical Method

A promising place to begin is Schwartz’s 2013 book, Reading the First Century: On Reading Josephus and Studying Jewish History of the First Century.2 This is promising for the task because it opens by juxtaposing a quotation from me with one from the great Arnaldo Momigliano (p. vii). Schwartz offers the two as representing opposite paths in (a) reading Josephus and (b) doing history. The book’s dedication to Momigliano and Schwartz’s translation of his 1975 essay on ‘The Rules of the Game in the Study of Ancient History’ in an appendix (pp. 182–90) leave no doubt about his preference. He says, indeed, that he came to see his book as ‘footnotes exemplifying Momigliano’s views’ (p. 181).3 Where does that leave Mason? The opening quotation from me reads thus: ‘The movement toward reading Josephus through, and not merely reading through Josephus to external realities, now provides the dominant agenda’. The quotation is accurate, but the context is missing. The ‘dominant agenda’ for what? The quotation is from an article on one aspect of historical method only (what to do with contradictions in Josephus’ narratives), and in the section quoted I was not speaking about how one does history. I was characterising the new subfield of Josephus research that was taking off in seminars, dissertations, commentary projects, and collected-essay volumes in the 1990s. The sentence preceding the one quoted thus reads: ‘Much has changed in Josephan studies, or perhaps “Josephan studies” has only existed, since the 1980s. The narrative-centred approaches that Bilde perceived as new [in 1988] have in the meantime assumed primacy’.4 The dominant agenda of this new approach involved paying attention to the nature of Josephus’ compositions, rather than immediately looking through them to sources and historical events (see Chapters 18 and 19 above). 2 The closest parallel by me, which occasionally interacts with Schwartz, is Mason 2016b: 1–86. 3 Without knowledge of Schwartz’s labour, alas, Kenneth W. Yu published an English translation in History and Theory 55 (2016)—confirming interest in the essay. Momigliano had dedicated it to Aldo Ferrabino, in a neat anticipation of Schwartz’s use, acknowledging their half-century of ‘methodological disagreement’. Cf. Piovan 2018. 4 Mason 2009: 103–104.

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I understand how Schwartz could have read this observation as though I were saying that interpreting Josephus was now the only game in town. Usually by invitation, I had published a number of studies that focused on interpreting Josephus. I meant that closer study of the narrative was the hallmark of this growing field. All sorts of dissertations and articles were distinguishing Josephus’ portrait of some X (women, Jewish festivals, temple and priesthood or high priesthood, Essenes, Pontius Pilate, Caiaphas, John the Baptist) from the historical X, whereas in the past there had been only the historical question, for which Josephus was appropriated as data. Understanding Josephus was obviously the main task of the new commentary projects, which also spawned the Josephus Seminar in the SBL (from 1999). That is what I was referring to in the quoted article. I intended neither to characterise my view of history5 nor the broader field of Judaean history, which was obviously carrying on regardless of the new kind of Josephus research, its most important input coming from archaeology. From Momigliano’s essay on the rules of the game, in ostensible disagreement, Schwartz quotes a more general remark about historical method, namely: ‘The historian is not an interpreter of sources, although interpret he does. Rather, he is an interpreter of the reality of which the sources are indicative signs, or fragments’ (p. vii, my emphasis). The juxtaposition implied a two-ways choice, which indeed frames the study. Schwartz wrote to defend those, whom he perceived as under attack amidst the new interest in Josephus’ narratives, who venture to pursue the real past. He wrote in ‘response to those who would hold that all we can do with texts is read them’ (p. vii). This is paradoxical because from my first monograph I had also cited Momigliano as a reference point on method,6 and find nothing to disagree with in the essay from which Schwartz quotes, on the ‘Rules of the Game’. In fact, one could read it as a foundation of my distinction between interpretation of sources and reconstruction of the real past. For the ‘reality of which the sources are indicative signs’, Momigliano explains, is not the reality of events but that created by the author (in our case, Josephus). He writes: ‘The historian encounters an author in a text. … The historian interprets his documents as traces of individuals who have vanished. He finds the meaning of a text or object in front of him because he understands how it belonged in that situation

5 I had sketched my view of history (first interpret evidence, then hypothesise what really happened to explain the evidence; cf. the Introduction to this volume) in Mason 1991: 1–17, and would do so at length in Mason 2011b, 2014b, 2016a, and 2016b. 6 Mason 1991: 12, 46, 68, 73–74, 398.

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of which it was a product and part.’7 In the same essay, he writes: ‘Every document is the product of a specific situation and tells us something about it. Even a single word holds a different meaning in different contexts when used by different speakers (even by the same speaker!) at different moments. The goal of the historian is to recognize the specific situation that will allow him to place the document in its precise temporal and spatial context.’8 I cannot imagine a better description of the effort to interpret Josephus, as in the Brill commentary: to contextualise and draw out as fully as possible the meanings of this text, as a preliminary step toward hypothesising the lost realities that the historian seeks to recover by inquiry. The first chapter of Schwartz’s book gives colour to that opening sketch of a bifurcation in research. Against scholars who ‘doubt that one can with reasonable confidence move from reconstructing stories to the reconstruction of history’ (original emphasis, p. 2), he insists that reconstruction of the past is both possible and necessary. He then makes a revealing connection about his concerns when he allows that the text-only view (that he associates with me) may spring not from ‘doctrinaire post-modernism’, but only from despair about historical knowledge. Either way, the effect is the same: ‘we are often told that it is impossible to move from stories to history’ and that attempts to do so are ‘contemplated only by the naïve’ (p. 2). This is the spectre he wishes to confront. On the apparent conflict between Momigliano and me, Schwartz offers further clues. He recommends reading Momigliano’s essay on the rules of the game as an implicit rebuttal of Hayden White, given that the Piedmontese historian would soon write against the American directly (p. 181). With this recommendation I agree, and would note that already in 1974 Momigliano 7 Momigliano 2016: 245. I find abundant good sense throughout the essay, in such statements as these (my emphasis): ‘The specific field of a historian’s activity is established by the existence of documents and information about the past that are to be interpreted and compared in order to know and understand what happened. The specific problems of the historian are defined by the relation between the nature of the sources and what he wants to know’ (40); ‘Since the historian’s craft consists in collecting and interpreting documents to reconstruct and understand events of the past, there can be no history where there are no documents. If the documents prove insufficient for what the historian desires to learn, then that history will be deficient’; ‘The competence of the historian is manifest from his not ascribing certainty to the dubious and from not making generalizations from isolated examples. In some cases the historian should say: I don’t know. At other times, he might advance a hypothesis but with caution’ (41); ‘The hypothesis put forward ought to be more plausible than any other hypothesis, and before offering a hypothesis, the historian should make a concerted effort to seek out and weigh alternatives’ (42). 8 Momigliano 2016: 42–43.

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had published an essay disagreeing with White’s Metahistory (1973) for its reduction of modern historians’ narratives to rhetorical tropes.9 But what has this to do with me? I had never championed Hayden White’s (structuralist) approach to history, which assumes that it takes the form of narrative, therefore requiring emplotment and characterisation, whereas I see history as open investigation. Here is the great paradox again: Schwartz and I look to some of the same historians as models of method. For example, Momigliano regularly expresses his admiration for Marc Bloch (d. 1944).10 He dedicated his 1961–62 Sather lectures to Bloch and other ‘historians and witnesses of truth’.11 But Bloch, along with Momigliano (not Hayden White), had been among my guiding stars from the outset.12 So I was puzzled. Schwartz’s contrast rests, I respectfully suggest, on a misperception. Again, this is understandable because of my (real and unabashed) call to pay attention to Josephus’ narratives. But that is not the end of history. From my first book I presented it as a first step—understanding the literary evidence as we must first understand material evidence—in historical investigation. I remain confident that interpreting Josephus’ works as such not only fits with sound historical practice, as Bloch, Momigliano, Collingwood, and many other sensible thinkers have said, but is necessary for the responsible use of Josephus. I hope that the following analysis clarifies how the standoff occurred and what is (and is not) at stake. 1.1 The Postmodern Peril and the Best Defence Further clues about Schwartz’s concern come in a footnote in the appendix to the 2013 book, which draws a connection between Hayden White’s work on narrative history and a perceived stream of the new Josephus research. Schwartz remarks: ‘On the sidelining of the quest for truth, cf. the passage from Rajak cited above, p. VIII.’ The reference is to his Preface and first chapter, to which we shall return. He also updates Momigliano’s bibliography for 9 10

11 12

Momigliano 1974. E.g., the closing sentence of Momigliano 2016 (45): ‘To see how the historian transforms sources into the life of the past, it is easier to learn from Herodotus, Guicciardini, Burckhardt, and Marc Bloch than from any manual of historical method.’ He has just said that what he means by bringing documents to life is understanding their authors and specific contexts, not as mere words or data, but as living creations. I had assumed that my efforts to understand Josephus’ works as compositions meant to communicate with real audiences in Flavian Rome followed in the path of Bloch and Momigliano. Momigliano 1990: viii (foreword by Riccardo di Dinato). E.g., Mason 1991: 13–16. In 2019, I would offer a lecture series in Paris (EHESS) on reading the Judaean War with Marc Bloch, applying his methodological principles to Josephus and other evidence for the war.

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the ‘Rules of the Game’ with Richard Evans’ In Defence of History (1997). Evans wrote that as a bulwark against the ‘intellectual barbarians’ in the humanities, which he called postmodern.13 So, we are beginning to discern the sort of history that Schwartz saw as making unwholesome inroads into the study of Roman Judaea—via Tessa Rajak and Steve Mason. It is postmodern, even if not ‘doctrinaire’. Paradoxically, again, I agree with Schwartz’s concern. I have never found what usually goes by the name of postmodern history appealing. Deciding which of the chiefly French theorists ought to be included in the postmodern parade is a fun game, but a distraction. Readers with experience in the humanities will recognise the postulates that Keith Jenkins, an avowed practitioner of postmodern history, explains to students: [P]ower relations produce ideological discourses such as “history as knowledge” which are necessary for all involved in terms of conflicting legitimation exercises …. history is composed of epistemology, methodology and ideology. … [T]he differences that we see are there because history is basically a contested discourse, an embattled terrain wherein people(s), classes and groups autobiographically construct interpretations of the past literally to please themselves. There is no definitive history outside these pressures …, consensus only being reached when dominant voices can silence others. … In the end history is theory and theory is ideological and ideology just is material interests.14 Momigliano, Evans, and Schwartz (and I) are understandably concerned about such an approach the human past. F. R. Ankersmit saw the work of future historians (after the 1990s) as moving away from concern with the past itself, which he considered a modernist pursuit, toward rather comparing interpretations of the past. He wrote: ‘Evidence does not send us back to the past, but gives rise to the question what an historian here and now can or cannot do with it.’15 I do not understand what the criteria for ‘doing with it’ could be, if not their ability to explain the real past. In his 1986 essay ‘The Burden of History’, Hayden White had seemed to signal the demise of history as a discipline on the ground of alleged conceptual impossibility:

13 14 15

Evans 1997: 8. Jenkins 1991 [2003]: 23–24 (my emphasis). In Jenkins 1997: 287.

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It may well be that the most difficult task which the current generation of historians will be called upon to perform is to expose the historically conditioned character of the historical discipline, to preside over the dissolution of history’s claim to autonomy among the disciplines, and to aid in the assimilation of history to a higher kind of intellectual inquiry which, because it is founded on an awareness of the similarities between art and science, rather than their differences, can be properly designated as neither.16 For any historian interested in recovering aspects of the ancient past, this is sober stuff. The assumption is that history is or must be narrative, but narratives are techniques of control and/or power (in some sense) and/or ideology, and so the main reason to study historical narratives is to identify and untangle these webs of control. Schwartz’s Preface also presents his book as ‘an instance and application’ of Evans (p. ix n. 4), decrying the Whitean virus in our pastures. He wants to show how a diligent historian can use good material, such as Josephus’ corpus, to get at what happened. Again, with much of this I have always been in full sympathy. I am a historian and I want to investigate the ancient past, to see how far we can get in recovering aspects of it. I can well understand Schwartz’s concern if it seemed to him that colleagues, including me, were advocating these views. None of the language or the assumptions of either Whitean structuralism or postmodernism appear in Rajak or Mason, however. So how did Schwartz come to see us as carriers of the virus? His Preface explains his paradoxical title, Reading the First Century, by anticipating the response: Surely one reads texts and not events? But he intended this provocative title, he explains, ‘to point up the belief that by reading texts we can discover what happened’ (p. vii). To establish a contrast with other views, again, he quotes from Rajak’s Introduction to the 2002 re-edition of her 1983 study, Josephus: The Historian and his Society. Because this was a reprint, Rajak added an introductory essay to explain the very different state of scholarship when she wrote her dissertation and published the book, then to survey what had developed in the two decades between the book’s appearance and the 2002 reprint. Rajak explains that in the early 1980s Josephus was still being judged largely ‘on the simple scale of truth or falsehood’: was he giving an accurate description of events or not? In her book she wanted to ‘push harder’ in the direction of trying to understand his works, ‘not just as evidence for reconstructing’ events but in themselves (pp. viii–ix). Obviously, she was also interested in 16

In White 1978: 29 (my emphasis).

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what happened (see Chapter 18 above). Then, in surveying publications that followed her contribution, Rajak generously mentioned my work with its emphasis on interpreting Josephus, though she also expressed admiration for many other developments, including important studies by Martin Goodman, Jonathan Price, James McLaren, Menahem Stern, Rebecca Gray, Seth Schwartz, and Gregory Sterling. She was not, as far as I can see, advising her readers to limit their interests to the interpretation of Josephus. Incidentally, Rajak’s point about moving beyond mere judgement as to accuracy recalls Bloch. Back in the 1940s he dismissed the (already) ‘old’ practice of judging narratives for their truthfulness, as though they could serve as clean windows into the past if they were deemed accurate. Bloch saw critical history as a new discipline in his time. Rather than sitting as a judge over existing material,17 he said, the new historian must be an independent investigator of the past and not rely on ready-made sources. R. G. Collingwood’s posthumous Idea of History pursues this point most elaborately. Just as Francis Bacon revolutionised science by seeing the need not merely to observe and report on nature, but to interrogate it, so history was revolutionised when historians abandoned their response-reflex to presumed authorities and began taking responsibility for their own investigations, which also meant accepting that much could not yet be known.18 Now, an admittedly puzzling phrase in Rajak’s reference to my work seems to have attracted Schwartz’s concern, and again I understand this. She wrote in 2002: ‘The “detective historians”, to borrow a phrase from Steve Mason, have had their day’.19 Schwartz reads from this that ‘she welcomes the relative sidelining of such interests [facts outside Josephus] and the fact that Josephus and his writings have themselves, along with their evidence for him and his times rather than for the events he describes, become … the focus of scholarly interest’ (p. ix, my emphasis). Rajak thus appears to join me and Horst Moehring in being ‘overly pessimistic’ about historical truth, even abandoning it for the comfort of Josephus’ text. I understand the concern, but would suggest that it is misdirected. As for Rajak, the 1974 dissertation of which her 1983 book is a reduction (Chapter 18) was co-supervised by Momigliano.20 She refers to him often and appreciatively, and shows his influence everywhere.21 Her book was a classic 17 18 19 20 21

See also Ginzburg 1991. Collingwood 1994: 231–49. Rajak 1983: xi (my emphasis). Rajak 1974, unnumbered ‘Acknowledgements’. E.g., Rajak 1994: esp. 144–45.

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expression of Momigliano’s principle VI in ‘Rules of the Game’: ‘The goal of the historian is to recognize the specific situation that will allow him to place the document in its precise temporal and spatial context.’22 She uses comparative material of every kind to reconstruct Josephus’ life and what happened in the war. As for me, I do not know what Rajak meant by saying that the ‘detective historians’ have had their day and attributing the idea to me. I have often used the detective analogy for historical work, it is true, but only ever to advocate that history is like detective-work in many ways. In much research on Roman Judaea I had seen little methodological clarity, and suggested that we could benefit from taking our work as seriously as detectives take theirs.23 The detective image I borrowed from Collingwood, as he—with Bloch and others—had borrowed the basic principle of cross-examination from Herodotus, Thucydides, and Polybius. They all saw the historian’s work as investigation, requiring critical examination and comparison of witnesses, rather than trust in authorities. Subsequent Hellenistic, Roman, mediaeval, and modern authors would gradually give up on investigative effort to take that easier path. So I am quite sure that Schwartz and I agree about the usefulness of the detective analogy. For me, the most helpful part of the comparison is that detectives do not seize on a single witness statement and close their investigation, saying ‘OK, we have the truth over here!’ They investigate a problem—Who killed John Doe? Who robbed the local jewellery store?—in two distinct phases: collecting and interpreting the material evidence and witness statements before trying to explain the evidence with a hypothesis or ‘theory of the case’ that prosecutors may advance if it is strong enough. Just as honest detectives must begin with an open mind about the solution to their problem, so too if their investigation is inconclusive (as often) they must admit that they cannot reach a compelling conclusion. They are not permitted to pursue prosecutions without such a strong case. I have pushed the detective analogue because of the impression that much research on Roman Judaea and Christian origins tended to over-confidence in shaky propositions and leaky arguments, which often relied on a doubtful interpretation of Josephus as authority.24 I 22 23 24

Momigliano 2016: 42–43. Mason 1992: 235 (‘So the historian is a detective’), elaborated in the second edition (2003a: 301–2); Mason 2003c (= Mason 2009: esp. 114); most elaborately in Mason 2011b: 185–92; again 2016b, 73–76; 2016a: 71. The analogue extends only as far as the common logic of investigation. In their day-to-day tasks, of course, detectives and historians do not overlap much. Judicial traditions, legislation, defence counsel, juries, and rules of court evidence do not apply to us. Nevertheless, I like the comparison because, despite the problems with historical knowing, especially

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have not advocated abandoning the notion of history as analogous in important respects to detective work. 1.2 Events and Narratives: Two Tasks or One? I cannot here work through the many examples that Schwartz offers in the six chapters in his book of ways to read ‘the first century’. His general argument is that criticism, animated by the search for difference and comparison, will allow us to exploit Josephus’ narratives to recover the past. Chapter titles reflect this theme: ‘Beneath the Text’ (on manuscript variants), ‘Within the Text’ (changing meanings in narrower or larger contexts), ‘Behind the Text’ (recovering Josephus’ sources as independent voices), and ‘Rubbing sources together’ (comparing Josephus with the NT, Philo, rabbinic literature, Tacitus, and even Josephus). Chapter 6 emphasises in summary that ‘conflict is the key’. With much of this, again, I agree in principle. Marc Bloch’s Apologie pour l’histoire stressed that comparison is the engine of criticism—though usually on the assumption that one had at least two things to compare.25 My 2016 book on the war,26 which was of course unavailable to Schwartz when he wrote this book, seeks to apply that principle. My friendly challenges arise from (a) Schwartz’s different impression of the scholarly scene and (b) a couple of his methodological postulates. Let us begin with what looks like a basic statement of method (p. 5, my emphasis): Any report of an event in Josephus’ writings can have, ultimately, one of four origins: either it happened and Josephus wrote it down him[s]elf; or it happened and someone else recorded it (in writing or orally) and Josephus took that over (with more or less editing) into his own work; or it didn’t happen, and the same two alternatives exist—either some predecessor made it up or Josephus did that himself. Striking here is a fusion of events and reports (about events), such that Schwartz can use one pronoun (‘it’) for both, or so it seems. At least the opening clause, ‘any report of an event’ is followed by six its, which seem to identify event and report as two sides of the same coin. The event (or not) and the recording are distinguished only by whether it happened or not. What is the it here: the event or the report? If a car bomb explodes in Moscow, as in yesterday’s news, and one

25 26

when it comes to antiquity, detective work reminds us that it is possible in principle, and always worth trying, to recover valid understanding of the past. Bloch 1953: 42–110–12. Mason 2016a.

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‘report’ describes it as a Ukrainian attack on the Russian elite, while another proposes that the Russian secret service did it, and another leaves the reasons unknown, which one is the ‘the report of it’? Could any report confine itself to the physical and chemical events of quotidian life without discussing their meaning? It would undoubtedly be possible to read events in narratives if they were the same kinds of things. The problem (for me) is that I cannot see how that is possible, since events look like practically infinitely complexes, lacking in structure, plot, or character, which can only be given by those who construct reports on events. Only the report, or narrative, defines the beginning, middle, and conclusion of an event. In order to find meaning in the event, it also omits everything extraneous to the story, something that events cannot do. We experience events as part of a never-ending flux (Heraclitus). They have no in-built structures or shapes, beginnings, or climaxes. They cannot disclose their meaning. One might object that a car accident, a flight, or a speech is a demarcated event, which begins and ends at a certain time. It is true that if a flight is defined merely as the operation of a machine from wheels up to landing or gate arrival, it has such traits, just as a speech may be timed from the speaker’s first to last words. But that is what Collingwood calls the outside of an event, like Caesar’s crossing the Rubicon River on a January day in 49 BCE. Historians are not, however, mechanical recorders.27 We are interested in the outside of events only as a portal to (in Collingwood’s language) their inside, which is their human meaning. Untold numbers of people crossed the Rubicon River, and no one cares about that. The human meaning of Caesar’s crossing is what matters, and that had no inherent shape or structure. It began for different participants long before his horses’ feet got wet and it endured long after for the Senate, Pompey, and Caesar’s party. Likewise in mundane life, a businesswoman may board a weekly flight just before it takes off, preoccupied by a telephone conversation, without giving it a second thought. That is her flight, but for the pilots, attendants, maintenance crew, or for a passenger terrified of flying who might have had nightmares for days, that same external event has a very different structure and meaning. The time from wheels-up to touchdown is only a starting point for investigating that meaning. In case this sounds like airy-fairy codswallop, I would challenge anyone to describe British Middle-Eastern policy during the First World War in terms of simple events that could be reported. The outside of events, sure: nine months of the McMahon-Hussein correspondence (1915–1916) with its dated letters; the roughly simultaneous meetings that produced the Sykes-Picot agreement; 27

Collingwood 1994: 213–16.

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and the Balfour Declaration dated 2 November 1917. But historians are not ultimately interested in dates. Anything that can be measured or described numerically (Lord Kitchener was 6 ft, 2 inches tall) is incidental to what matters: the human meaning of those events. Once we try to describe that, we see such ‘events’ as the McMahon-Hussein correspondence as almost infinitely complex in their entanglements, which of course were perceived differently by different participants. No one believes that Lord Balfour’s letter began the instant that he or his secretary began typing, or that it has a single meaning, which can simply be reported. Far from being airy-fairy, the recognition that events and reports are two different kinds of things, and therefore events need investigating and cannot be reported, is in my view a basic reality facing all historians, which disallows easy or comforting pictures of the past. The difficulty of defining a human event—duration, content, and meaning— is particularly clear with wars. In school we learn that the First World War ran from August 1914 to November 1918. That sounds straightforward, and it is not wrong, but for the historian it is only a starting point. Why do many monuments give 1919 for the war’s end? The question, of course, is whether a war ends with the cessation of fighting or only when a peace treaty is agreed. The Korean and Vietnam wars create intractable problems, but any image of a war as a neatly structured event faces insuperable problems. Although American forces would be decisive in ending the First World War, they joined only when Russia, a crucial party in ‘the war’s’ beginning, was leaving. Was there one war for Russia and the US? Events do not explain themselves or declare ‘This is Part 1 of Phase 4 in X War’. No one involved at the time could imagine such structures. Later authors would create them to bring order—and often moral instruction—to the chaos of events. Judaea’s first ‘war with Rome’ seems to me to present the same problems. Josephus’ Judaean War is a world treasure. That it deserves close attention is something on which Schwartz and I surely agree. But how do we get from the narrative to underlying events as they were experienced at the time? Even if we stipulate for argument’s sake that there was one recognisable single war, its duration would be uncertain. Josephus describes eruptions in a year that most scholars think was 66 CE, the arrival of Vespasian with legions in 67, the destruction of Jerusalem (70 CE), and mopping up until Masada’s fall in the year that used to be thought 73 (BJ 7.403)—unless he means to end the war in Cyrene (7.408, 443). But Werner Eck redated Silva’s arrival in Judaea to 73, pushing Masada’s fall to 74,28 and Nikos Kokkinos ploughed up the other end by insisting that many events we put in 66 occurred in 65. Although his revision 28

Eck 1969.

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has not found as much support as Eck’s,29 both revisions show that even basic events, on the most childlike view of a structured war, do not declare themselves. They require investigation and the admission of doubt. Whatever dates we choose for the boundaries, a cursory glance at Josephus’ War shows that his presentation of a unified conflict results largely from his literary concerns. Judaeans involved in Jerusalem’s conflicts with the Procurator and his auxiliary troops, in 66–67, or in the civic strife in Caesarea at the same time, could have had no idea they were in the first phase of a war that would end with Jerusalem’s destruction. Jerusalem’s fall would ultimately give the war its definitive shape and historic meaning (differently for different participants and later writers), but the shape could emerge only in retrospect. Moreover, the Flavians’ war was over in 70, leading to their triumph in 71. Seeing the recapture of Machaerus and Masada in 73 or 74 as part of the same war is not a simple fact, but part of a construction of the war. And these are only the beginnings of problems in creating a structure from impossibly messy and uncertain events. Vespasian did not arrive in Galilee until spring 67, and he ceased aggressive operations by mid-68. So his war lasted about fifteen months, including four or five in winter quarters. Josephus, even while inflating his exploits as the greatest general to face Vespasian, makes the Flavian operations in 67–68 look like slight affairs, except for Iotapata, Tarichea, and Gamala. Archaeology suggests that most of Galilee, Agrippa’s territories, Judaea, Samaria, and Peraea, as well as the coastal cities and the Decapolis of southern Syria, saw no serious fighting.30 Vespasian reportedly burned near-empty villages and killed those unable to flee.31 Since he could move more or less at will until Nero’s death (June 68) halted his campaign, it is a plausible guess that he would have taken Jerusalem by that autumn, had Nero remained alive.32 Had he won Jerusalem’s surrender, there would have been no reason to destroy the city or temple, before Simon and the Idumaean cohorts were inside. It is unlikely that Nero would have held a triumph, or felt the need for one, for the settlement of a provincial disturbance (he did not triumph for Corbulo’s massive Parthian settlement). If any of these contingencies had gone another way—and no one in 67–68 could have known that they would not—‘the war’ would never have taken the shape it did in light of Jerusalem’s fall, to Josephus or the Flavians. 29 30 31 32

Kokkinos 1998: 386. Aviam 2004; Leibner 2009. See Mason 2016a: 335–401. John had recently arrived; Simon was not yet in the city; desperate factionalism and famine lay far in the future. Every other Judaean site had found surrender terms, and the city’s traditional leadership had apparently sought such terms.

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To understand the motives, doubts, hopes, and decisions of various Judaeans during those years, we must imagine scenarios that Josephus never hints at. David H. Fischer’s Historians’ Fallacies (1970) stresses the need for historians to try to recover the dilemmas that people faced at the time, and not cling to trajectories that only became visible in hindsight. Ian Kershaw’s Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions that Changed the World, 1940–1941 (2007) illustrates the approach for modern history.33 Schwartz and I have never had a chance to discuss these issues as such, and I dare not attribute views to him. In trying to understand his criticism of my approaches, I can only probe those published statements. Because I see events and narratives as different kinds of things, I distinguish two mental operations in historical research: (a) the interpretation of what has survived (material or literary) and (b) the investigation of the events behind them, which can only be imagined, hypothesised, and tested for a proposed scenario’s explanatory power. These are not hermetically sealed operations, one following the other in splendid isolation. In real life, historical questioning prompts the investigation and our effort to interpret sources, interpretation raises new historical possibilities, and historical questions regularly challenge interpretations. But the two operations are conceptually distinct. They have different starting points—the text before our eyes vs. a question about what we cannot see—and different criteria for success: making sense of a text or other survival that we can see vs. explaining all relevant evidence by a hypothetical reconstruction. This is why I do not see how to ‘read the past’ through Josephus, and not because I share postmodern views of history. 1.3 Same Principles, Different Meanings Another source of misunderstanding is, it seems, that we can use the same words with different meanings. Schwartz, for example, dismisses my lament about scholars’ ‘ripping chunks’ from Josephus without regard for contextual meaning, countering that ‘good historians have always recognized’ that ‘an author’s interests impact upon the way he or she reports whatever is reported’ (p. 4). Only ‘a fool’, he adds, could not see this. Why do I go on about the need for understanding the composition first? Sensible historians have always recognised Josephus’ interests, and found ways to get behind them, whereas I seem to him to regard interpretation as the only thing worth doing (p. 5). Schwartz has more fish to fry than disagreement with me, and I should stress that his book is more constructive than polemical. But since he returns to this perception of my method a number of times, as a counter-foil to his approach, 33

Fischer 1970; Kershaw 2007.

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I must try to clarify the matter. A century ago, he allows, the pendulum did swing too far in the direction of ignoring Josephus as author. Everyone knows that, it seems to him. Mason and other quasi-postmodernists make the mistake of clinging to the pendulum as it swings to the opposite extreme, refusing to let go of the security of Josephus’ text and passing over history in the sensible centre-ground (pp. 11–13). We obviously mean different things, then, in talking of the need to recognise Josephus’ control of his compositions. If everyone always recognised it, why was W. C. van Unnik complaining in the 1970s that Josephus was everywhere used and cited but hardly explored as an author (see Chapters 18 and 19)?34 Why did Louis Feldman’s exhaustive, 1,000-page annotated bibliography of research until 1980, with its granular subtitles on every aspect of Josephus research to date, include no sections on the aims, structures, publication settings, or themes of Josephus’ works?35 When Per Bilde submitted his comprehensive account of Josephus research in 1985, why could he find little or no published research on the ‘disposition’ and themes of Josephus’ major works?36 This is what I was talking about in describing the neglect of Josephus as an author. No one was studying Josephus’ works as thoughtful compositions. Schwartz’s impression that scholars had always done this is not a disagreement, it seems, as much as a case of using the same words to mean different things. He is correct if he means that there has been no shortage of declarations about Josephus’ alleged ‘biases’. But the perceptions of those biases (Flavian propaganda, flattery of emperors, cowardly traitor, protector of his class) did not arise from sustained study of the structures, themes, and rhetoric of Josephus’ works. That standard books on ancient Judaism and the New Testament Umwelt, with Schürer’s oft-revised manual leading the fleet, borrowed (and still borrow) from Josephus with little concern for his narrative interests, even requisitioning Josephus’ dramatic language to describe the psychology and motives of ancient figures, is easy to show. Scholars who do this have usually been content to indemnify themselves with the caveat that of course one must be cautious in using Josephus. And then the plundering begins.37 Studies of the ‘Jewish sects’, provincial governance, Roman affairs, legionary training, or the Flavian triumph proceed with no discernible interest in his narrative. Ubiquitous claims about Josephus’ ‘obvious biases’ recall something that Mark Twain should have

34 35 36 37

Van Unnik 1978: 18. Feldman 1984. Bilde 1988: 70, 89, 92, 102, 118. I give numerous examples in Mason 2011b.

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said: ‘It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.’ 1.4 How Confident Can We Be, and on What Basis? This leads to what may be the crucial difference in how Schwartz and I describe our methods: the degrees of confidence one can or should place in results. Recall Momigliano’s cautions about the limits of our knowledge. If we are trying to reconstruct the past and we have either no relevant sources or one literary account or inscription without corroboration, we must admit our ignorance or be cautious about the hypotheses we propose. That does not mean we cannot inquire, inquiry being the historian’s main task. But we may not be able to know, through no fault of our own. Since most of the human past is lost to us, I find the justification for history not in reaching confidence about what happened, but in responsible investigation. Herodotus, Momigliano,38 Bloch, and Collingwood all stress that we may not be able to know. That is fine, however, because the inquiry is the thing. Bloch was eloquent on the point: [F]aced with the vast chaos of reality, the historian is necessarily led to carve out that particular area to which his tools apply. … The incomplete, if it is perpetually straining to realise itself, is quite as enticing as the most perfect success. … the good husbandman takes as much pleasure in plowing and sowing as in the harvest. … The sight of an investigation, with its successes and reverses, is seldom boring. It is the ready-made article which is cold and dull.39 As Rabbi Tarfon reportedly said in a different context (m. Avot 2.16), ‘It is not on you to finish the work, but nor are you free to give it up’. There is no shame in admitting provisional ignorance. Responsibility for the state of surviving evidence lies above our pay grade. Ignorance and curiosity are spurs to further inquiry. If we can get only as far as imagining scenarios, that is already a gain because it requires immersion in ancient evidence and ways of thinking, which is the fundamental part of history. Likewise, if my research has mainly involved shoring up the foundations of the historian’s pyramid, by interpreting our evidence, that is because interpretation was more urgently needed than adding to the mounds of doubtful claims about the past.40 38 39 40

Momigliano 1974: 68: ‘(especially if he is a historian of Antiquity or of the Middle Ages) he will find the evidence inadequate. Though every piece of evidence is a fact in itself, it is not necessarily the fact we need.’ A florilegium from Bloch 1953: 22, 38, 71. Bloch 1953: 45: ‘the natural progression of all research is from the best (or least badly) understood to the most obscure.’

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Against the timidity he finds in those who seem to cling to Josephus’ text, Schwartz insists that one can ‘with reasonable confidence move from reconstructing stories to the reconstruction of history’ (p. 2; first emphasis mine). To be sure, ‘confidence’ can mean different things. Confidence that my team will ‘go all the way’ this year and win the championship is harmless, but also meaningless. Such remarks, we all understand, express a pride that we cannot expect others to share. Such confidence does not involve any hard weighing of possibilities. Historians, however, must rise above this informal language. If we express confidence, we need to give reasons that scholars who do not share our tastes and assumptions can at least follow. When a historian says that something ‘probably happened’, the claim should be supported by more than hunches. The only way I could see to give substance to such confidence is if, detectivelike, we have a sufficient range of good independent evidence, if we then weigh all the scenarios we can imagine, and find one of them compelling for its ability to explain the evidence. Marc Bloch has a trenchant discussion of probability in history. He argues that when we imaginatively travel back to a time before the events took place, to try to understand how they looked at the time (without hindsight), we can meaningfully speak of ‘probability’ because they are still future outcomes. We can then see, in some measure, the alternatives and possibilities that faced those involved at the time. If we react against Gessius Florus’ provocation, what is the likelihood that X, Y, or Z will result? Although mental time travel will only ever be an intellectual abstraction, it helps us engage the real world faced by the ancients, resisting the powerful attraction of hindsight.41 Hindsight breeds reductionism. If we see the Judaean War (in hindsight) as a war from the start, we might ask (as most scholars do) why Cestius Gallus did not act more effectively, or why the Judaean side did not take far more aggressive measures in guerrilla warfare. Only if we try to think of how things looked at the time—when Cestius assumed he would be able to enter Jerusalem and no one knew how long the conflict would last or whether Jerusalem would capitulate—do we have a chance of understanding the hard choices and uncertainties they faced. This is the approach taken by Kershaw and Fischer, above. Bloch’s image of time travel and Collingwood’s ‘re-enactment’ both get at this need.42 It is what I attempted in A History of the Jewish War.

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Bloch 1953: 125. From the other side, criticising the tendency of historians not to place themselves in the situation before the events under examination unfolded, when all possibilities were still alive, see Fischer 1970—also in Momigliano’s bibliography. Collingwood 1994: 282–302.

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In the study of Roman Judaea and Christian origins, such attempts are rare. We readily default to later categories, unknown to actors at the time, from religion, Judaism, and Diaspora (Chapter 1) to the Jewish War or Great Revolt. It is not obsession with Josephus, but rather a method that acknowledges the nature and limitations of our evidence that keeps me from moving with confidence from Josephus (alone) to events. A single literary account leaves too many variables—Donald Rumsfeld’s ‘unknown unknowns’—to make that move. We know that War’s accounts of Pilate or John of Gischala or Ananus II are not mere windows on real events, because of their obvious compositional artistry and because Josephus dramatically rewrites the same events in Antiquities-Life. If he had written a third history, he would presumably have drawn them differently again. A single account leaves too many uncertain conditions to serve as a portal to the real past. That is why a detective seeks independent corroboration. The principle is as old as Deuteronomy (19.15): ‘a case can be valid only on the testimony of two witnesses or more’. Schwartz and I agree completely on the need for criticism and the possibilities of getting somewhere with comparison of independent sources. We may differ in deciding what counts as an independent source. 2

Abstract Agreement but Disagreement in Cases

Having scouted the methodological terrain on which we often agree at the deepest level of method, I now offer two illustrations of the consequences of thinking either (a) that the real past can be ‘read’ through Josephus or (b) that interpreting Josephus is a separate task from reconstructing the past. 2.1 Essenes: Celibates and Breeders One of Josephus’ three schools (see Chapter 17) furnishes a parade example of what I referred to as scholars’ ‘ripping out chunks’ from his work without concern for interpretation. The longstanding Essene-Qumran identification rests on three main arguments: that the Scrolls ought to be linked to one of Josephus’ three schools; that one-for-one matches between Josephus on the Essenes (especially in BJ 2.119–61) and the sectarian rules (especially 1QS 6–7 and CD) look impressive; and that (a bold new reading of) Pliny’s description of the Essenes (Nat. 5.73) locates the group at or near Qumran (but see Chapter 12). Once scholars accepted the Qumran-Essene identification, they could look to the Scrolls to understand Josephus’ meaning, on the assumption that the Scrolls were primary sources for the Essenes, whereas all the explicit descriptions of Essenes (in Philo, Pliny, and Josephus) were somewhat

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confused secondary sources.43 That Josephus’ Roman audiences had no Scrolls to guide their understanding of his narratives was not considered a problem. That is because the question of Josephus’ meaning in communicating with his audiences was not asked. He was not treated as an intelligent author trying to communicate. The circularity of this method—beginning with a hypothesis, rather than with the only sources that mention Essenes, and then displacing the Essene descriptions on the strength of the hypothesis—appeals only to those who share that faith. It leaves those who want to make sense of Josephus with nothing much to do. This is the kind of thing I meant in calling for attention to Josephus’ compositions first. One aspect of this problem comes up in Schwartz’s critique of my approach, as it happens. He finds in BJ 2.160–61, where Josephus briefly describes Essenes who marry for the sake of breeding, evidence of my lack of interest in the world beyond Josephus. We may confirm Josephus’ claim that some Essenes married, Schwartz contends, because the Damascus Covenant assumes that its community-members married. Since the community of CD were (ex hypothesi) Essenes, we can in fact escape the clutches of Josephus’ text and conclude with confidence that there were indeed both celibate and marrying Essenes (Schwartz, pp. 92–93). My hesitations about this, including my suspicion that Josephus added the note on marrying Essenes for his immediate literary reasons, looks like a simple failure to smell the flowers outside the narrow world of Josephus’ text. For Schwartz, the Damascus Covenant allows us to look through Josephus to the reality of Judaean society. Here we begin to see what is stake, concretely, in our different approaches. I am as interested as anyone in the real, historical Essenes. In calling for careful interpretation of Josephus’ Essene descriptions, and of those by Philo and Pliny, I am only trying to provide somewhat solid ground for hypotheses about the Essenes. That is why my commentary to War 2 (2008) includes an excursus summarising all the Essene sources and offering preliminary thoughts on

43

Beall 1988: 38–39; Sanders 1992: 344–45 (‘his information is both very good (some married and some did not) and inadequate (he does not mention the isolated community on the shores of the Dead Sea’); Gray 1993: 80 (‘Both the Scrolls and the classical sources suggest that there were two basic types of Essenes, a celibate group, whose members lived a separate existence, and another variety, whose representatives married and had children and settled in towns and villages …: a celibate group at Qumran and various noncelibate groups dispersed throughout the towns and villages of Jewish Palestine’); Vermes 2004: 47–48. Atkinson 2012 takes a different tack, stressing Josephus’ personal knowledge of the Essenes and proposing on that basis that he knew a version of 1QS.

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the underlying reality, before immersing the reader in the detail of 2.119–61.44 I later found time to address the problem of the historical Essenes directly.45 For the record, then, it is not the case that I lack interest in the real Essenes. The fly in the ointment is Schwartz’s assumption that CD is an Essene text. I have never seen a reason to make that identification. When CD fragments first came to light, in the Cairo Geniza finds (1897), most scholars—weighing them against Josephus’ three-school system—thought them likely Pharisaic in origin. For Louis Ginzberg: The sect whose history and doctrine are recorded in this document, emerged around 76–67 [BCE] within the Pharisaic colony of Judeans [his word] at Damascus, whither they had fled from Alexander Jannaeus’ persecutions. In the beginning, the Damascene refugees differed only on political grounds from their fellow Pharisees in Judea. Gradually there developed, however, also religious and particularly halakic distinctions which set them more and more apart, until a schism and a rift consolidated the sect of exiles. The Damascene sect branded both the Sadducees and the Pharisees as backsliding sinners and considered their own sect as the only true Israel.46 Identification of CD as an Essene primary source is a hypothesis, not a given fact. It rests on further hypotheses, assumptions, and interpretations that seem to me improbable (see Chapter 12). That problem aside, those who claim to find a match for Josephus’ twokinds-of-Essene picture in CD must turn both texts into pretzels, it seems to me. First, they present Josephus as though he had said ‘Now I want you to understand that there are two kinds of Essenes, one celibate and one marrying’. But Josephus does not say this or mention a celibate community at Qumran. When he says that Essenes live in sizeable groups in each polis, and have no one place (2.124), he is plainly talking about the celibate Essenes introduced at 2.120-21, who occupy nearly all of his account (2.120–59). The ‘other order’ of marrying Essenes47 come as a surprising afterthought (2.160–61). So far have 44 45 46

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Mason 2008: 90–95. Mason 2011c (= Chapter 12 in this volume). Ginzberg 1976: 407–408. In this re-edition of the 1992 German work, Ginzberg’s son ‘corrects’ his father, noting the view of ‘most contemporary scholars that “the land of Damascus” is the “prophetic name” applied to the desert of Qumran.’ Nothing in the text, however, links the community with either Qumran or Essenes. I use this crude term because Josephus emphasises that breeding is the sole purpose of their coupling.

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scholars allowed extraneous concerns (from Qumran) to colour their reading of Josephus that they ignore this clear structure, as Josephus’ audience would have understood it, and read his account as though he had said there were two kinds of Essenes, and the marrying kind were not at Qumran. This member of Jerusalem’s elite, born and raised in pre-70 Judaea, supposedly misunderstood the reality, as did Philo, who knows only celibate Essenes in ‘Palestine-Syria’. Scholars claim this on the basis of texts that do not mention Essenes or identify themselves as Essene. As for CD, it nowhere distinguishes celibate and married members of its Damascene community, but simply assumes that its members marry and have families, quite unlike the Essenes of Philo, Pliny, and Josephus (for the most part). What if, instead of fitting Josephus to the Qumran-Essene hypothesis ab initio, we did things the other way around, and first tried to understand his meaning before proceeding to historical hypotheses? Now, we can see (this is not a hypothesis) that three largely independent and contemporary firstcentury authors describe Essenes. This is a rare historical bonanza. We do not have such independent angles on most of what Josephus writes. Of these three, Pliny and Philo are sure that Essenes are celibate. That is the main reason why Pliny mentions them: to marvel at their endurance without women (Nat. 5.73: ‘a tribe is eternal into which no one is born!’). Their strict celibacy is a point of admiring emphasis in Philo (Prob. 75, 91; apud Eusebius, Praep. ev. 8.11.2–3, 14–15). Josephus is also sure of their celibacy most of the time, and he too marvels at it. He does not introduce them by saying, ‘Some Essenes marry and some do not.’48 His main account emphasises Essene celibacy, just as much as Philo and Pliny, and he provides a clear rationale: Essenes avoid pleasures, such as sex, and they do not trust women (BJ 2.120–21). The whole description of their shared goods, early prayers, hard work, silent meals, excavation for defecation, studies, and leadership assumes what he has just said: they live in closed male societies throughout the land. That ancient readers understood this to be Josephus’ meaning is confirmed by Porphyry, who quotes the War 2 passage almost verbatim. But he stops quoting at 2.159, before the note on marrying Essenes, without suggesting that he has omitted anything (Abst. 4.11–13). Celibacy is a crucial part of Essene abstinence for his work on abstinence. Josephus also mentions a number of Essene teachers and disciple-groups in his narratives, and these are always male. Most strikingly, his final description of the group makes no exceptions and declares that the 4000 or so Essene men (ἄνδρες) do not take wives (AJ 18.20–21: οὔτε 48

See previous note.

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γαμετὰς εἰσάγονται). What is going on with the added note in War 2 about marrying Essenes? What might his audiences have understood? To be sure, we must still make sense of that supposed ‘order’ of Essenes, which exists exclusively to produce children, its couples taking no pleasure in the sex acts required, and in every other respect living the Essene life (BJ 2.160– 61). It is an odd remark, however, a bit like a detailed account of NASA’s rigorous astronaut training programme that says at the end: ‘Oh, there is another group of astronauts, and they do everything in exactly the same way, except that they do not train for space’. How should we imagine this ‘order’ that does everything just like the celibates, except they are not celibate? Did those Essenes rouse their wives and small children before dawn for prayer, give up all their property to the order, sit in perfect silence with muzzled children at communal meals, and have a parallel set of married priests to say the blessings? Did parents use their own hatchets for the children’s defecation, in secluded spots, or did the little ones have kiddy-hatchets that were not as sharp? And what was the children’s initiation like: three years of gruelling training? What oaths did they swear? Finally, was there a breeding group next door to each celibate community in all the towns? The problem with understanding Josephus’ marrying order is not an invention and cannot be easily solved by resort to CD. The question I am asking is about how to understand that notice first in the context of War 2 and in light of what he has emphasised in 2.119–59, which glorifies the celibate Essenes as though they were the only kind, as he will say plainly in Antiquities 18. If we first focus on interpreting War 2 as a distinct issue from historical reconstruction, the anomalous endnote is not necessarily a big problem. It comes as a surprise, because 2.120 has described how Essenes adopt others’ children, clearly implying that this was their sole way of reproducing given their principled avoidance of women. If a sub-group married for that purpose (because otherwise ‘the line would quickly die out’: 2.160), adoption would be unnecessary and the boast about avoiding women would be meaningless. Incidentally, who certified that Essenes who cohabited as a duty took no pleasure in sex? Because these marrying Essenes do not make sense in the narrative, where their presence is contradictory, or in historical imagination, and because Josephus is so vague about how they live—in sharp contrast to the loving detail he devotes to the celibate order—we must ask whether the breeding kind are his ad hoc creative invention, something he thought to include in the moment and later forgot about. Why would he do that? There are good narrative reasons. For a reader with experience of Josephus’ literary freedom, whether in telling corkers or in

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dramatically rewriting War’s material in Antiquities-Life, the assumption that he could not have written about marrying Essenes if they did not exist has no validity. So, why might he have momentarily constructed an order of marrying Essenes? Having exalted the all-male Essenes at length, as the uniquely virtuous emblems of the Judaean national character (anticipating his description of Judaeans in Ap. 2.145–296), also implying his own affinity with them at BJ 2.158 (their teaching is irresistible), he might have thought it wise to include a saving loophole to broaden their influence. Adding a vaguely conceived group of Essenes-light, who supposedly saw the production of offspring as indispensable to life (2.160), would leave space for people such as himself to claim tough Essene credentials despite marrying (often) and raising children. We cannot be sure of any such motive, of course, and I am not claiming that this is what happened. I am saying that this is a hypothesis worth testing, and that historians need to imagine all explanations and test them against the evidence. The test is easy to run. If we hypothesise that some Essenes married and some did not, that this was the known historical reality, that hypothesis would partly explain Josephus’ note (except its vagueness and contradictory content). But that is all it would explain. It would leave unexplained (i) the rest of Josephus’ passage in War 2, (ii) his later declaration of Essene celibacy in Antiquities 18, (iii) Pliny’s emphatic statement that Essenes were celibate, and (iv) Philo’s well-informed agreement. That is a great deal of evidence unaccounted for. By contrast, hypothesising that Josephus added the endnote on marrying Essenes for momentary literary reasons would account for all the evidence without remainder. That imagined reality would explain Pliny and Philo and Porphyry. They independently admired Essene celibacy, in this scenario, because it was the known reality. This hypothesis would also explain all of Josephus’ references to Essenes, which either suggest or declare their celibacy, and his assumption of celibacy, and explanation of its rationale, in the War 2 passage. Finally, it would explain the odd vagueness, contradictory elements, and historical implausibility of the endnote on breeders. Of the two, then, the hypothesis that Essenes were in fact known to be celibate has by far the greater explanatory power. 2.2 Titus and the Temple No event in western history has been more consequential than the destruction of Jerusalem’s temple in 70 CE. It is of some importance for historians, therefore, to investigate how that happened. If every literate person in the West knows that Titus destroyed the Jerusalem temple, this is first because the

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Flavians endlessly celebrated the event, and then because Josephus’ detailed account, emerging from that celebratory scene to correct common impressions, was increasingly exploited by the ascendant Church and cited in proof of its claims. While blaming certain Judaean tyrants for the final catastrophe, and without contradicting that claim, War’s prologue remarks that even ‘Titus, the very man who destroyed it’ (αὐτὸς ὁ πορθήσας Καῖσαρ Τίτος), would support his account (1.10). Likewise at the end of the main narrative, Josephus speaks matter-of-factly of the temple’s destruction ‘by Titus’ (6.440). No one in Flavian Rome could have had the slightest doubt that Titus destroyed the temple. It was his, and by proxy his father the emperor’s, claim to fame. The temple furnishings that had just been paraded in the triumph, were on display in Vespasian’s new forum, and would soon be portrayed in relief provided the clearest proof of the Flavian victory. Titus’ burning of the temple was not in doubt. How he came to burn it was the interesting historical question. Schwartz uses Josephus’ account of part of the temple-burning story to illustrate his programme of reading real first-century events through a critical assessment of Josephus, in this case with the help of an external source for comparison. In doing so, he rightly notices clear marks of Josephus’ narrative shaping, which raise doubts about the correspondence between the narrative and real events. In this, he is talking my language! But instead of concluding that historical reconstruction cannot use such highly crafted narratives to recreate events (and we must conduct our own investigations), he finds what he considers a better narrative to follow. This is the famous Chronicle by the very Christian priest Sulpicius Severus, composed in 401 CE. To understand what is at stake and why Sulpicius should be allowed a say, we first need to recall the main features of Josephus’ account. Josephus held John of Gischala and Simon bar Giora, his principal ‘tyrants’, ultimately responsible for Jerusalem’s destruction (BJ 1.9–12). He could do this because, like other historians and philosophers, he recognised different levels of causation.49 At the most profound level, he attributes the temple’s destruction to the divine will: God resolved to purge the polluted sanctuary. It could not have happened without divine will. On the level of human causation, Gessius Florus’ grievous abuses of the Judaeans at the hands of the auxiliary force produced a range of responses, including calls for caution, pleas to Roman officials, and predictable violence from the young. But after short-lived efforts by a Menachem and two Eleazars, the two later ‘tyrants’ would channel Judaean rage, Josephus claims, for the sake of their personal aggrandisement, until they could no longer surrender. They would drive a destructive civil war 49

Villalba i Varneda 1986: 1–63.

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of devastating compatriot bloodshed and famine all the way to its catastrophic end. They stubbornly refused to surrender even when all hope was plainly lost and the city with its temple were in peril. Eventually, by impiously using the Holy Place as their fortress, they forced the Romans to overrun it, and it was destroyed in the process. Josephus never doubts that Titus’ soldiers threw the firebrands (BJ 6.249–66). The fire did not descend from heaven, and the Judaeans barricaded in the temple did not burn their own structure. Near the end of this tragic story, when Titus has Jerusalem firmly in his grip and every call to surrender has gone unheeded, he hears that the noblewoman Maria, starving because of the constant plunder by armed gangs inside the walls, resorts to eating her own infant. In disgust, Titus orders Jerusalem buried in rubble (6.216–18). Later, however, after trying to take the inner temple but finding that the rebels inside persist in exploiting its elevation and strong walls, he orders its gates burned to facilitate the legions’ access (6.228). He shows no hesitation about doing so, issuing commands for burning or demolition as the situation requires (6.220–35). After a couple of days of the gates’ burning, however, he orders the fires extinguished so that the legionaries can enter (6.235–36). With the temple precinct now burned around its edges, he ponders whether military necessity requires the destruction of this world-famous shrine at the centre of the temple compound, sacred to Judaeans throughout the Roman and Parthian empires. To decide the question, he characteristically convenes a consilium of his legionary commanders to hear their perspectives (6.236–43). Roman consilia were not vehicles for giving orders, but for airing views so that a commander or emperor could act wisely.50 They are a regular feature of Josephus’ narrative, suggesting that there were many more of them than he mentions.51 Josephus’ account of all this, compellingly written though it is, forces us to recognise the difference between events and dramatic narratives. In reality, Titus probably met regularly with his generals, or some of them, who were nearby in the northern half of Jerusalem. He may have had daily briefings. We have no idea. Josephus’ War, however, dramatises only one such exchange. It serves, among other functions, as part of his programmatic Judaean response to the Flavian boosters’ claim that Titus had crushed a miserable Judaean enemy at will (BJ 1.7–8, 27–28). Josephus counters that in fact Titus had thought it 50 51

Crook 1955. Augustus deciding the Herodian succession (BJ 2.25–38, 93–100); Cestius before sending Neapolitanus to Jerusalem (2.334); Vespasian at Tarichea (3.532–36) and in Caesarea about an assault on Jerusalem (4.366–77); Titus recently on surrounding Jerusalem with a wall (5.491–501). The consilium on the temple is thus characteristic of the narrative. Like the others that Josephus chooses, it serves a dramatic purpose.

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best not to destroy the temple, when the crucial moment arrived, and only the Judaean God could have permitted its destruction—against Titus’ plans. The boasts in Flavian Rome about how Titus controlled the war are, for Josephus, laughable (6.409–12). In historical terms, there is no reason to think that if we had been present outside Jerusalem in late summer of 70 CE, we could have seen this consilium as a singular or decisive event, if it were only one of several such meetings, as seems likely. Its dramatic function and shape belong to Josephus and his narrative, not to self-revealing events. In the meeting as Josephus portrays it, the commanders air their frank views as expected. Josephus constructs them in a neat scheme, as often favouring the rule of three (6.239–41): some took one pole position (destroy the temple), Titus took the other (don’t destroy in any case), and some came up the middle (try not to, but destroy it if they persist). Titus recognises the military logic of unsparing severity, given the enemy’s use of the shrine. If he spared the structure, however, it would help his father to rule (Ρωμαίων γὰρ ἔσεσθαι τὴν βλάβην, ὥσπερ καὶ κόσμον τῆς ἡγεμονίας αὐτοῦ μένοντος; 6.241). No sentimental factors appear among his criteria, no love of the Judaean temple or the stubborn enemy barricaded within. He makes a hard-nosed, and historically plausible, political-military calculation, comparable in some respects to U.S. General Mark Clark’s determination not to destroy Monte Cassino’s abbey in February 1944 (though he did anyway). As they should be, his loyal commanders are instantly convinced of his wisdom and go out to convey his orders to the soldiers. In a final narrative twist, however, just as Clark’s decision was overruled, Titus’ resolve becomes irrelevant because ‘some other-worldly impulse’ leads a soldier to hurl a firebrand inside, responding to outbound missiles. This catches fire in the temple stores and the conflagration begins (6.250–52). In a scene that would presumably have made Titus wince, Josephus portrays him, awakened from a siesta, flailing about ineffectually and screaming at his soldiers to put out the fire. They blithely ignore him. Titus looks a pathetic figure amid the din. In this way, Josephus emphasises, the temple burns against Titus’ wishes (6.254–59), at God’s direction. Now back to Sulpicius. Curiously enough (if his text were independent of Josephus), he describes the very same consilium. But he contradicts Josephus’ description of the views that were aired. He claims, 330 years after the event, that it was Titus who resolved to destroy the temple, and his remarkable motive was to stamp out Christianity, by the circuitous means of destroying its Judaean root (Chron. 2.30.7). In a passage I could have written, Schwartz acknowledges that the Christian text is heavily thematised: ‘With such a priori

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and hypothetical considerations and debate one could go on and on without hope of any certainty at all’ (p. 138). That is precisely my assessment too. Nevertheless, he goes on to argue that Sulpicius is preferable to Josephus, and so we should follow his account (p. 138, emphasis mine): in 1861 Jacob Bernays put the whole question onto a different footing when he showed that Sulpicius Severus’ report, despite some Christian input, goes back to the lost continuation of Tacitus’ Histories. His argument, which rests on linguistic and thematic comparisons of this and other parts of Severus’ Chronicles to extant parts of Tacitus’ Histories, has been accepted more or less across the board. That is, we must choose not between Josephus of … the first century … and Severus of … the fourth. … Rather, we must choose between two nearly contemporary historians who were both very close to the center of things in Rome. Two big problems keep me from celebrating Sulpicius in this way. First, Bernays’ case for asserting the priest’s dependence on lost Tacitus requires a number of assumptions and hypotheses that range from the extravagantly speculative to the demonstrably false: Sulpicius did not know the celebrated Josephus; this passage preserves distinctive Taciteanisms; Josephus had the more powerful motive of the two writers to rewrite the story, in his case allegedly to whitewash and flatter Titus—despite a deeply unflattering portrait; Tacitus (a generation after Josephus in Rome) did not know Josephus’ War either; and Tacitus took his information from another participant in the very same consilium. In addition to the antecedent probability, however, it seems to me provable that Sulpicius knew Josephus’ famous account, that he borrowed the isolated consilium from him, and that his bold reversal of the generals’ views serves his unmistakable root theme of Roman imperial persecution of Christians.52 I even think it most likely that Tacitus knew Josephus’ War. There is then no case here for a better, independent version of that meeting, which somehow reached Tacitus and then Sulpicius in pristine condition as a self-revealing event. When later authors such as Pseudo-Hegesippus and Sulpicius focus on the same meeting Josephus described, they reveal—in this as in countless other ways—their dependence on Josephus. Schwartz and I differ on this matter, again, not because he favours (putative) Tacitus whereas I cling to Josephus. The disagreement turns on a methodological assumption, in his formulation that we ‘must choose between two 52

Mason 2016a: 487–513.

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nearly contemporary historians’. I have argued (Introduction and Chapter 18) that historians ought not to follow any authority, because events and narratives are fundamentally different things. We should keep investigating our questions, acknowledge what we cannot know (where independent contemporary evidence is lacking), and never treat our knowledge as settled. The important question for me is therefore not, ‘Is Josephus or Sulpicius (Tacitus) right about this consilium?’ but rather, for example: ‘How did Titus come to destroy the temple?’ If one made that question the object of a historical investigation, it would generate many real-life possibilities not suggested by either Josephus or Sulpicius. In real life, there is no reason to focus on the one consilium of Josephus’ drama. Freed to think for ourselves, we may summon analogues from other times and places, including sieges and related conflicts, to help us imagine plausible scenarios. 3

Two Enduring Debates

Having considered these two examples of historical stakes in either reading events from Josephus or treating the reading of Josephus’ compositions as a preliminary and separate task, let us turn finally to two larger and more enduring debates. These began before Schwartz’s 2013 book. The methodological issues we have discussed in relation to that book may throw light on these more public debates. 3.1 Josephus and His Sources Our longest-running debate topic concerns Josephus’ use of sources. When Danny and I first met on Mount Scopus, we were going in different directions on this question. In view of what I am about to say, I want to stress again my agreement with him about the possibility that ancient historians, certainly Byzantine chroniclers but also Livy using Polybius in his fourth ‘decade’, directly copied or translated their sources. Even when they did not, source use might well account for seeming irregularities in their work, where the sources poke through in odd diction or other oddities. I have sometimes caught myself adopting a phrase from something I have been reading, which was not part of my usual idiom. And this may have happened far more often than I noticed. Certainly, one sees it in student papers: new writers discovering their voices and borrowing language from their sources. So, I have no problem with the general notion that ancient historians in particular could borrow without attribution or be influenced by their sources. When I speak of ancient authors as creators, I am not assuming creatio ex

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nihilo. Historians were more like demiurges, it seems to me, giving shape to the tohu va-bohu of human actions they had heard about and sometimes witnessed. How each author worked with sources remains to be discovered by investigation. Still, since events are not self-disclosing, and every meaning-making author must decide how to configure them, every written account will bear the stamp of its demiurge. Far from excluding source criticism, this assumption facilitates it. That is, if meaningful structures do not inhere in events but can come only from the art of representation, we expect to see coherence in the created story. When we read a text that looks disjointed in style, vocabulary, or syntax, this might reflect the collision of different narrative types: an author not fully digesting a previous author’s effort with different language and themes. We may be looking at the later author’s quiet use of another (see Chapter 17). But source-criticism of Josephus experienced a heyday, from roughly 1870 to 1920, in which its ambitions were not so restrained. Scholars of the time took great stretches of text, sometimes whole volumes (e.g., BJ 1 or 2.119–66; AJ 15–16, 17–19), and posited that he was only clumsily stitching together, with few additions of his own, other authors’ work. My first monograph (1991) was on the Pharisees. Older scholarship on the Pharisees well illustrated the issue, because prevailing opinion held that Josephus borrowed his descriptions of all three schools from Nicolaus of Damascus and/or other sources. In that work I summarised the approach that I still take: If striking inconsistencies should appear among Josephus’s Pharisee passages, they will call for an explanation. In that case, one possibility [i.e., along with carelessness, deliberate changes, self-revision, or literary artifice] would be difference of authorship, a theme that has three variations [viz.: sources, assistants, or changes made by later scribes]. Our first task, however, is to try to interpret Josephus’s statements about the Pharisees within the context of his own thought and writing, as his own testimony.53 In that book, I argued that one passage (AJ 13.288–96) relevant to the inquiry seemed to result from Josephus’ imperfect assimilation of a source (see Chapter 13 above). That is because his frame for the episode of John Hyrcanus’ rupture with the Pharisees, which denounces their habitual envy and popular influence in a way characteristic of his larger portrait, does not match the 53

Mason 1991: 53 (emphasis added).

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encased story offered to justify this judgement. Given that this passage also uses a couple of terms in ways more typical of the Bible and later Jewish tradition than of his writing elsewhere, we have reason to suspect that he used a traditional story describing the rupture, which lacked his animus toward the Pharisees.54 My challenge to source criticism of Josephus does not, therefore, come from principled opposition. My scepticism is only about resorting to sources immediately, as the sole explanation of perceived oddities, where there seems a lack of interest in pursuing alternative hypotheses, and about the confidence that scholars often claim in recovering sources bodily. As Schwartz notes, through about half a century (ca. 1870–1920) scholars with a low view of Josephus’ intelligence and character tended to attribute much of his work to sources. The bumpkin Josephus from backwater Judaea could only have touched these up, they thought, and affixed his name.55 Such was the parlous condition of Josephus research in the decades following that, when I began doctoral research in the early 1980s, scholars in Jerusalem and Germany were still directing me to Hölscher 1916 for the definitive study: Josephus obviously copied sources on the Pharisees! What more is there to say? In Schwartz’s 1983 article, ‘Josephus and Nicolaus on the Pharisees’, however, he felt it necessary to reassert the source-critical explanation of Josephus’ Pharisee passages, to challenge a different approach to the famous passages. This view had recently captured scholars’ imaginations, after being promoted by Jacob Neusner as part of his thorough reassessment of rabbinic literature and pre-70 conditions in Judaea that scholars had formerly derived from the rabbis. Reviving a largely neglected 1956 essay by his teacher Morton Smith, Neusner proposed that Josephus’ War barely mentioned the Pharisees because that work reflected the group’s negligible presence in pre-70 Judaea, whereas the post-90 Antiquities included much more Pharisee material because Josephus had by then decided to promote the Pharisaic-rabbinic movement at Yavneh.56 Schwartz and I found common ground in challenging this increasingly popular view, but from nearly opposite perspectives. Assuming with most scholars that Josephus was a Pharisee (cf. V 10–12), Schwartz rightly observed that much of the later Pharisee material (AJ 13.288–98, 401–13; 17.41–45) was hostile toward the group. He argued, reasonably, that this made nonsense of the 54 55 56

Mason 1991: 216–30. Classic statements were Hölscher 1916; Bauer 1924: e.g., p. 404 on: ‘die Gewohnheit des Josephos, auf Grund von Quellen zu schreiben’. Schwartz 1983: 157.

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proposal that Josephus included the material to aggrandise the party he now allied himself with. Schwartz proposed, against the Smith-Neusner picture, that War was in fact the more tendentious of Josephus’ narratives on this point. It carefully expunged Pharisees from the main story so as to remove Josephus’ own party from war guilt. Antiquities was far less careful, because the issue had lost salience by its time of composition. There, a somewhat distracted Josephus included quite a bit of material from one of his main sources, Nicolaus, which accurately reflected the Pharisees’ prominent place in society, without really noticing that this borrowed material was often hostile. My dissertation (1986) and resulting 1991 book agreed with Schwartz about the hostile tone of Antiquities’ Pharisee passages, and about the implausibility that Josephus’ readers could have inferred any intention to support Yavnean rabbis from such material, not least because Pharisees only appear after the main content, from Book 13. But since we can see Josephus rewriting his sources with considerable care, especially in Antiquities 1–11 where we can compare him with the Bible,57 it seemed to me implausible, as an opening assumption, that he would copy Nicolaus of Damascus’ harsh appraisals of the Pharisees with such abandon. Trying first to make sense of the whole thing as Josephus’ work, therefore, I: (a) challenged the assumption that in V 10–12 Josephus means to identify himself as a Pharisee; (b) found no evidence for an identification with the Pharisees elsewhere in his work, and much reason to doubt it; and (c) argued that the Pharisee-hostile passages actually expressed Josephus’ characteristic diction, style, and outlook, as we also see in his autobiography, where sources are beside the point. Putting all this together, I concluded with Schwartz that Smith-Neusner’s Pharisee-promoting picture of Antiquities was mistaken, but I could not follow his argument that Josephus lifted his material from Nicolaus. Rather, I proposed that Josephus, as a priestly aristocrat who prided himself on the legal expertise of his caste, viewed the Pharisees, who were popular with the ‘rabble’ and had led the lethal opposition to his work in Galilee, as a menace. The project of recovering Josephus’ sources more or less bodily would remain a prominent part of Schwartz’s approach, and an ongoing area of difference in our analyses. Although his 2013 book scorns the notion that scholars would rip out chunks of Josephus for independent study (above), his 1990 book on King Agrippa I literally recommends ignoring Josephus to focus on his sources. While introducing the five sources he posits for Josephus’ Agrippa, Schwartz explains (my emphasis): 57

Attridge 1976; Feldman 1998a, 1998b.

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Basically, we want to know what Josephus had on his table when he composed his narrative. In our work on Josephus, we have become increasingly convinced that he composed his narrative, in the latter half of Ant., by juxtaposing extracts from his different sources. … A modern historian may, therefore, hope that proper methods will allow him to dissect the narrative, recreate Josephus’ tabletop, and then ignore Josephus and do the job of historical reconstruction himself. … The criteria we will use for distinguishing sources are the usual ones: contradictions (with respect to facts or attitudes); evidence of editorial “splicing”; doublets; existence of parallel versions; differential vocabulary, etc.58 Although my language was different, I am not sure how this agenda differs from ‘ripping out chunks’ from Josephus, to ignore his narrative (as Schwartz puts it) and use the material otherwise. Changes of vocabulary in Josephus furnish a particularly important criterion for the ‘proper method’ Schwartz follows. In the foreword, he illustrates this by recalling the moment when he noticed that Josephus’ two names for the same place, Greek Dicaearcheia and Latin Puteoli, matched a change of narrative perspective. Schwartz turned to distinct sources as the obvious explanation: Josephus used sources with different perspectives, which were flagged by their different vocabulary.59 It is undoubtedly an exciting prospect that we might be able to work with Josephus’ sources, independently of his narrative, but how plausible is it to imagine recovering those sources? I used to think that I had introduced the phrase ‘composition criticism’ in the study of Josephus, as I had not noticed it elsewhere, but I was mistaken. In this book on Agrippa (submitted in 1989), Schwartz already rejected Kompositionskritik as a movement that had displaced source-investigation, although ‘the pendulum of fashion might be swinging back’—the same image he would use in describing my work (2013 above). Although he admits that ‘mathematical certainty’ in the reconstruction of sources is not possible, he suggests that ‘The alternative is not to do history at all.’60 I do not understand this choice. Bloch, Collingwood, Momigliano and other historical methodologists do not suggest that historical research requires the reconstitution of sources within a single narrative. They focus on comparison with independent texts. This apparent conflation of historical research with recovering Josephus’ sources is thus a basic difference in our methods. 58 59 60

D. R. Schwartz 1990: 2. D. R. Schwartz 1990: xv. D. R. Schwartz 1990: xiv.

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On the specific issue: if I do not find the switch from Dicaearcheia to Puteoli in AJ 18.160–61 so remarkable or suggestive of different sources, that is because Josephus does the same thing in his autobiography, where sources are not in question. Recounting his first visit to Italy, he says that he ‘came through safely to Dicaearcheia, which the Italians call Puteoli’, where he met an important contact (V 16). The switch to ‘Puteoli’ here matches that in AJ 18.160–61, a passage he might still have in mind, since the Life is an appendix to Antiquities. In the earlier passage, having mentioned the Alexandrian-Judaean Alexander’s promise of money to young Agrippa I, if  he would come to him at Dicaearcheia, Josephus explains that the king’s wife, Cyprus, let her husband go to Italy while she took their children to Judaea. The next line, mentioning Agrippa’s arrival in Puteoli fits both Josephus’ penchant for name-variation in Antiquities 17–1961 and this interest in local colour. In general, he likes to vary his language, even that for place names. Note for example his alternation in Antiquities 18 between Πάρθος (AJ 18.41, 44, 47, 50, 96, 250, 317, 325, 340) and Παρθυαῖος (AJ 18.39, 313, 318, 334, 339, 348, 355, 362) for ‘Parthian’. I have not published a response to Schwartz’s book on Agrippa I, but my article-review of a book by T. P. Wiseman takes up similar issues (Chapter 21 below).62 Likewise assuming that ‘Josephus stuck pretty closely to his sources’, Wiseman thought it possible to extract ‘authentic contemporary Roman’ accounts of Caligula, namely by the Latin authors Cluvius Rufus and Fabius Rusticus, from Josephus’ often crabbed Greek in Antiquities 19.63 When he revised his 1991 study for 2013, he cited Schwartz’s Agrippa I in support of his method.64 In sum, we agree that source-critical hypotheses can certainly help us to make sense of Josephus. When we meet oddities, source-intrusion is one possible explanation. I do not see how they help us much with historical reconstruction, however. That is because hypothetically positing sources merely reclassifies material we already know. It does not generate new material for us. If we take Antiquities 19 as Josephus’ informed composition, assuming that he used good material but also his judgement and general knowledge to write what he considered sound, we have a known foundation for our historical guesswork. If, by contrast, we speculate that Josephus’ material copied several sources, uncredited by Josephus, the added guesswork does not add strength 61 62 63 64

Note the virtual alternation between Parthos (AJ 18.96, 317, 325, 340, 355) and Parthuaios in these volumes (8.98, 313, 318, 334, 339, 348) and cf. 13.384–85. Mason 2016c: cxxxix–xliv (= Chapter 23 in this volume). Wiseman 1991: xiv. Wiseman 2013: xvii, 91.

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to any historical arguments. The additional source hypotheses indeed enjoy nothing remotely close to ‘mathematical certainty’. Different experts would make different analyses. Reclassifying what had been thought of as a narrative by Josephus, a knowledgeable author in Flavian Rome, as the work of hypothetical unknown authors only introduces new and uncertain variables into the foundation of a historical argument. Any hypothesis built on such a proposal faces an extra probability tax from the outset, because if the guesses about sources are mistaken, any structure built on those guesses goes down with them. We are fairly sure, by contrast, that Josephus wrote the narrative as we have it, whatever his sources were. If we stay with that foundation alone, it is more secure for historical hypothesising. 3.2 Jew, Judaean, Judaism, Religion In 2007, Schwartz published a chapter entitled ‘“Judaean” Or “Jew”? How should we Translate Ioudaios in Josephus?’65 My research had unwittingly provided the stimulus: the Judean title on Brill commentary volumes, first appearing in 2000, and an invitation I had sent Schwartz in the same year, to present on ‘Judaeans in Rome’ at a Toronto conference in 2001. I used that language unconsciously, by recent habit and not intending controversy. But by sheer coincidence, in the same year that Schwartz published his criticism of this usage, I published an effort to justify it, especially in the commentary volume titles, which were attracting increasing notice and criticism.66 Neither of us was responding to the other’s 2007 essay, therefore. We were both addressing, from opposite sides, a scholarly scene in which the Jew-Judaean question was becoming an issue. Nor were we exactly in debate, for a debate requires different answers to the same question. Schwartz’s question was one that has since been all but universally adopted, namely: How should we (all) translate—or what is the best translation of—Ioudaios?67 He and others who have weighed in since imagine that this was my question: that I was telling colleagues how we should translate a key term in our field. But neither of Schwartz’s key terms, ‘should’ and ‘translate’, were among my concerns, and that was not my purpose. Let us take them up in order. Just as ‘There’s no crying in baseball’ (let the moviegoer understand), there is no should in translation. There is is plenty of ‘should not’: οἶκος should not 65 66 67

Schwartz 2007a. Mason 2007. Much of the debate is synthesised in Miller 2010, 2012, 2014; cf. Reinhartz 2014 with resulting Marginalia forum.

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be translated as ‘truth’ or ‘scallop’. But on the positive side, there can be no single correct rendering of other languages, especially ancient Greek, Latin, or Hebrew, because individual words can have many equivalents, and anyway translators prefer to render phrases and sentences, sense for sense, not wordfor-word. Compare the many translations of Homer’s Iliad or Tacitus’ Annals or indeed Josephus’ works. They differ considerably even in sentence structure, let alone in phrasing and diction. Does that make any of them wrong? Aside from occasional mistakes, no. That I do not consider translation a matter of should or ought I tried to explain in the Series Preface that accompanies each volume of the Brill Josephus commentary. This happens to use Ioudaios as Exhibit A of the original commentary team’s diversity of outlook. We agreed, in a discussion of principles from 1997 to 1999, that of the different guiding standards in translation projects, we would incline toward literalness. Because our translation was meant to anchor the commentary, it made sense to try to use consistent English word-groups for Greek counterparts where possible. We consciously departed, in this, from common practice, where English readability of standalone translations was the main concern. If we followed the Loeb translation’s lead in rendering the half-dozen instances of genos in V 1–6 differently each time, our commentary reader could not see that Josephus kept using the same Greek word. In preparing that volume, I tried to find a single word that would make sense in all six occurrences and settled on ‘ancestry’. The Series Preface explains this. Having made a case for such broad consistency, however, the Preface goes on to caution that absolute conformity was not our goal and was not desirable. First, Greek words (like those of any language) can have completely different senses in different contexts, and it would be foolish to stick to mechanical equivalents. Second, complicated Greek sentences require concessions for English readability. Finally, and most importantly: the team members respected each other’s independence. Although we agreed on the desirability of consistency within a volume, we would not relinquish our right to decide which terms we preferred as the default, though we would take other volumes’ usage into account. For these reasons, I alerted readers not to expect uniformity. The rendering of the ubiquitous Greek Ioudaios was a prime illustration: The simple Greek word Ioudaios affords an example of the diversity among us. Scholars in general differ as to whether the English “Judean” or “Jew” comes closest to what an ancient Greek or Roman heard in this word, and our team members reflect that difference. Some of us have

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opted for “Judean” as a standard; some use both terms, depending upon the immediate context; and others use “Jew” almost exclusively. For the modern translator, as for Josephus himself, any particular phrase is part of an integrated world of discourse; to coerce agreement on any such point would violate that world. We hope that our readers will benefit from the range of expertise and perspective represented in these volumes. I did not pull this example out of a hat. Our discussions had highlighted the difference of opinion even for the volume titles. They had to have titles, and three options emerged: Jewish for both War and Antiquities, Judaean for both, or Judaean War but Jewish Antiquities. One colleague, happy with either of the first two, offered that if the modern state had been called Judaea, which he said had been considered, ‘Judaean’ would have caused no concern. Another felt that War should be Judaean but Antiquities Jewish. There was a majority against changing from War to Antiquities, however, as too thesis-driven. That left us with a choice between the traditional rendering, Jewish, and what we knew would be a departure: Judean. I could see arguments for both, but proposed that Judaean would draw attention to the ancient-historical ethos of the commentary: we were highlighting the need to understand Josephus in his first-century context. The team members were all willing (if not universally delighted) to go with this for the series titles, on the proviso that each expert remained free to use whichever term(s) he or she preferred in their translations, and that is what the Series Preface reports. Both the case that I made for openness in the Preface and its rationale have escaped some colleagues in the meantime, who describe me as ‘the strongest critic’ of ‘the translation “Jews”’.68 My argument in the 2007 JSJ article, which tried to explain and defend the alternative Judaean,69 somehow came across 68

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Van der Toorn 2019: 15–18. The author’s uncertain grasp of my argument is suggested by, among other things, his apparent revelation that my case for the absence of religion was made long ago, by Wilfred Cantwell Smith, whereas I had explicitly built upon Smith and other standard works in religion, precisely to avoid any suggestion that I was making a new argument (2007a: 480–82). As its opening lines explain, I wrote the 2007 JSJ article because Judaean Antiquities was eliciting reactions from puzzled to hostile. I aimed to explain the rationale and carve out a space for difference. Thus, when I cited colleagues it was not to criticise them for not taking my approach. I showed that respected scholars (Shaye Cohen and Daniel Schwartz) also considered ‘Judaean’ the root meaning of Ioudaios, but they argued that it took on a ‘religious’ sense at some point, after which it is better rendered ‘Jew’. I saw no reason to make that change because: (a) these scholars differed by centuries in dating the appearance of this ‘religious’ meaning; (b) the ancients did not know the category religion; and (c) in pre-Christian discourse no texts indicate such a change of understanding. Outside

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as an aggressive claim that everyone should stop speaking of Jews in antiquity. This was bizarre to me, as it was only the responses to my proposal declared how things ‘should’ be done by everyone. Schwartz’s article mentions the Series Preface. But it quotes only the sentence beginning ‘The simple Greek word’ and half of the next one, thus ending before the line ‘and our team members reflect that difference’ (see the text above). Removing that context, which emphasises individual freedom, creates the impression that, as he put it without having seen my 2007 article, ‘Mason’s innovation in preferring “Judaean”’ was something I was pressing on others. Schwartz’s essay is framed in terms of should and ought. Having constructed my position as an antithesis, he battles it down, as though I had claimed an alternative should. But if someone stands up and shouts, ‘You are all individuals: follow your own judgement!’, as I thought I had, there is nothing to refute—unless the critic prefers uniformity (see Monty Python’s Life of Brian). We were asking different questions, therefore. Schwartz’s was about how we should translate Ioudaios, whereas I was reporting different views among the commentary team, though we had agreed on Judean for the Brill titles. A second important difference is that Schwartz views this as a question of translation, whereas I distinguish translation proper from transliteration and prefer to transliterate proper nouns in ancient texts. Of course, ‘translate’ has both a broad and a specific meaning. In the broad sense it covers whatever is needed to ‘bring over’ a text from source to target language. This normally requires finding equivalent meanings. But with the names of places, peoples, and persons, we do not attempt to find meaning equivalents. Nerds ancient and modern have been curious about the etymology of such names, but we normally transliterate them. That is why translations of ancient texts brim with Iceni, Moesi, Dardani, Sarmatians, Marcomanni, Quadi, and Scythians. What do those names mean? It does not matter. They are names. Transliterating names has been the practice since Herodotus, Strabo, Pliny the Elder, and Tacitus. Still today, we do not say that we are visiting Little Bear if we mean Berlin, or that we are flying to Muddy Waters or Trade, if we mean Winnipeg or Ottawa, or ‘the god that speaks’ if we mean Manitoba. We take names as they are, from the natives, and more or less transliterate them to the Christian world (Christian invention of religions was the decisive change), writers of the third and fourth centuries continue to see Ioudaioi as an ethnos. Weirdly, colleagues have claimed that I consider Jew a religious term, whereas they argue that it is far more inclusive (Schwartz 20007; Reinhartz 2014; Van der Toorn 2019: 16). No, my case was that, since what we call ‘religion’ was all bundled up in ethnos-belonging, there was no basis for changing our English translation (with Cohen and Schwartz) on the ground that a new ‘religious’ element had appeared in Ioudaios. They argued for the religion-Jew connection.

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something pronounceable in our language: Cologne and Munich are easier for English speakers than Köln und München.70 Some older translations of ancient texts have attempted modern equivalents, with unhappy results. The Loeb edition of Pliny the Elder, for example, renders Pliny’s remark, ‘Asphaltites produces nothing but bitumen, whence also its name’ (Asphaltites nihil praeter bitumen gignit, unde et nomen) as, ‘The only product of the Dead Sea is bitumen, the Greek word for which gives it its Greek name, Asphaltites’ (5.71). Having translated rather than transliterated the Greek name mentioned in Pliny’s Latin text, as our Dead Sea, the translator had to execute a back-flip to make sense of the rest of the text. The lake produced asphalt, after all, and not death. Later, however, the same translator renders Asphaltites as ‘Asphalt Pool’ (7.65). That seems a lot of bother. I tried to avoid these problems by following the usual practice of transliterating proper names, treating Ioudaios as we do Ioudaia. Our different preferences concerning Ioudaios appear to depend on our answers to the question: Is it better to seek the best translation of the ancient term in a modern context or to treat it as we do other ancient ethnic labels of similar form and transliterate it? Schwartz takes the former path. After a detour into Hebrew Yehudim, on the stated ‘assumption that the nature of Hebrew indicates something about how Jews understood themselves’ (my emphasis), he stresses the translator’s need to find modern equivalents. He observes: ‘There are Jews around today. But there are no Judaeans around today.’71 This is true, just as it is true that there are no Scythians or Iceni, but there were Judaeans in the first century. I prefer the latter course, transliterating names of places and peoples. Another reason for doing so is that ancient discourse maintained a tighter connection between a people and its place of origin than we usually do today (below). Having assumed that meaning-to-meaning translation is required, Schwartz takes the logical step of consulting English dictionaries. He finds that they either have no entry for ‘Judaean’ or restrict that word’s meaning to something like ‘native or inhabitant of Judaea’. Since many Ioudaioi who appear in our sources were not in or necessarily born in Judaea, English dictionaries prove 70

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Translators differ about nouns that are not names but nevertheless are difficult or impossible to translate: polis, ethnos, imperium, dignitas, Ephor. Units of measurement present a particular difficulty. Older translations tend to convert stadia to miles, cubits to feet and inches (cf. Pliny, Nat. 7.74–75; 8.84–85, Loeb), to exchange sesterces or talents for USD or Sterling, and to turn Mt. Casius, Rhinocolura, Sebaste, Neapolis, and Asphaltites into Mt. El-Kas, El-Arish, Sebustieh, Naplous, and The Dead Sea (Pliny, Nat. 5.68–71, Loeb). But such translations are rapidly outdated. Schwartz 2007a: 5.

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that Ioudaioi are not well rendered as Judaeans. That is, one cannot ‘bring over’ Judaeans from antiquity, because they do not exist today, whereas Jews do exist today. And since in English Jew is the more capacious of the two terms, bridging ancient and modern and not restricted to the ‘territorial’ sense of Judaean given in modern English dictionaries, Jew is for him the only plausible translation of Ioudaios. Finally, Schwartz anticipates Adele Reinhartz (2014) in worrying that using Judaean could have the effect of removing Jews from the ancient scene, a concern seemingly justified by the efforts of some Christian and/or New Testament scholars to erase Jews from episodes of conflict with Jesus, or with New Testament authors.72 He chides me: ‘Historians, or translators, should not presume to revise the English language, so, if that’s what “Judaean” means [in the dictionaries], it follows that when we use such a term to render Ioudaios we imply … that [it] refers to a person according to his or her residence or origin in a particular land, Judaea.’73 QED. It is worth noting, incidentally, that in this essay Schwartz had already arrived at a distinction he would later develop, speaking of Josephus’ Judaean War but Jewish Antiquities.74 So he was willing to use Judaean in some cases. In my view, given that Josephus emphasises the unity of his projects (e.g., AJ 1.1–7; Ap. 1.50–51), and often refers to his War (or Judaica: AJ 13.72, 173, 298) in Antiquities, Life, and Apion, if our question is about his communication with ancient audiences,75 it is difficult to justify changing our English terms. If Josephus’ audiences would not have noticed a change in meaning, then we are again asking different questions. Schwartz’s solutions would not help with my questions. Modern dictionaries are undoubtedly helpful for translating among Euro­ pean languages, because centuries of cultural cross-fertilisation have produced large-scale equivalences, notwithstanding the few words that retain a certain je ne sais quois and remain untranslatable: Angst, Kitsch, Realpolitik, Wanderlust, Dutch gezellig. Ancient historians have usually assumed, however, that pre-industrial and especially pre-Christian worlds were alien to ours. When we are trying to understand conditions in the ancient world, we do not usually turn to modern dictionaries. That is because the ancients ordered knowledge of the world differently. Just as they had no terms for ‘industrial’, ‘feminist’, or ‘high-tech’, so we have no equivalents for their ethnē or poleis, imperium or 72 73 74 75

Schwartz 2007a: 6–7. It would, however, be a fallacy (of the ‘You know who else was a vegetarian / teetotaller?’ kind) to avoid well-grounded historical choices because others make the same choice for disagreeable reasons. Schwartz 2007a: 7. Schwartz 2007a: 18. Mason 2007 and most fully 2016b: 97–220.

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praetorium. Who are modern equestrians? There are no Marcomanni, Quadi, Scythians, or Sarmatians today, but they appear in our English texts because we are describing a different world. The difference is, of course, that Judaeans became Juden, juifs, and Jews in the evolution of western languages. Schwartz argues that because there are no Judaeans today, we should speak of Jews in antiquity (unless we refer to those in Judaea). But if Judaea were a known ethnic home today, as it was then, it would generate Judaeans as surely as Italy, Egypt, and India produce Italians, Egyptians and Indians—no matter where they now live. Judaea (Ioudaia) was a well-known place in antiquity, and it produced well-known people known as Ioudaioi, Judaeans. As I have emphasised, members of the Brill Project (happily now including Schwartz) have always been free to follow their preferences, however, just as I may defend mine. In my view, Ioudaios belongs to a class of nouns and adjectives for which we do not seek meaning-for- meaning translations. If Syria, Egypt, Idumaea, Nabataea, Rome, and Judaea transliterate Συρία, Αἴγυπτος, Ἰδουμαία, Ναβατηνή / Ναβαταία, Ῥώμη, and Ἰουδαία, as everyone agrees, so Syrian transliterates Σύρος, Egyptian Αἰγύπτιος, Idumaean Ἰδουμαῖος, Roman Ῥωμαῖος, Nabataean Ναβατηνός / Ναβαταῖος, and Judaean Ἰουδαῖος. Along with this preference for transliterating names, the texts I work with present two conditions that recommend Judaean for Ἰουδαῖος in my work. First, Ἰουδαῖοι frequently appear alongside other groups named in the same way (Αἰγύπτιοι, Ἰδουμαῖοι, etc.). So it would seem odd to transliterate the others but translate Ἰουδαῖοι as Jews, as a matter of immediate contextual consistency. Second, the ancients assumed a much closer bond between place of origin and ethnos character than we do. We vaguely associate Chinese with China and Italians with Italy, but in our highly mobile world, people may hold two or three passports and reside in still a different country—as I do. We would be unwise to make any assumptions about degrees of loyalty to certain customs with people of any particular heritage living elsewhere. Ancient writers espoused—even while they often knew a more complex reality—a simpler model of ethnos-belonging. In this frequently expressed picture, first elaborated by Herodotus but suggested in earlier fragments, each ethnos has unique laws, customs, and habits of diet, dress, and cultic devotion. These were thought to have grown organically from the unique environment in which the ethnos took shape. Diodorus (following Poseidonius; 33/34.1), Strabo (Geogr. 16.2.34–37), Tacitus (Hist. 5.2–5), Philo, Josephus, Celsus (in Origen), Cassius Dio, and sundry philosophers and grammarians make the same assumptions about Ioudaioi. Philo devotes most of his writing to explicating the works of Moses as the foundation of first-century CE life in

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his community. Josephus’ histories are all about the Judaean character—past, present, and everywhere—a character inextricably bound up with the nation’s formative experiences and ancient laws (BJ 1.1–8, 17; AJ 1–12; Apion). These authors all write as much about Ioudaioi outside Ioudaia as in the homeland, but the connection remains crucial for understanding the unified people’s laws and customs. For example, in Ap. 1.179–82 Josephus delights in describing a Ioudaios whom Aristotle met in Asia, where the philosopher admired the man as a ‘Greek, not in speech alone but in mind’. After insisting that a person’s character comes from his genos, Aristotle continues without contradiction by tracing the man’s ‘Greek’ excellences to his origin: That fellow was by origin a Ioudaios, from Coele-Syria. These people are descended from the philosophers in India. … But among the Syroi (Syrians), the Ioudaioi have received their name from the place, for the place they inhabit is styled Ioudaia. Since this text explains the name Ioudaioi by the origin-place Ioudaia, which everyone transliterates as Judaea, the corresponding Judaeans best captures the author’s intended connection, in my view. It would not be wrong to translate as Jews, but it would obscure the point of the passage, and what ancient audiences heard in it. A passage from Cassius Dio (37.16.5–17.1) from the third century CE, albeit from a less admiring author, does much the same thing: So this is what happened in Palaestina—for that is what the whole ethnos that lies beside the Internal [Mediterranean] Sea … has been called from of old. They have also a different, acquired name: the territory is styled Ioudaia and they themselves Ioudaioi. Again, Judaea and Judaeans explain each other. Transliterating the first while translating the second does not make good sense to me, though I have no problem with other scholars’ preferences. In both passages, which span six centuries in their reference-points, an author explains the name of the people by reference to their place of origin. Even long after the destruction of Jerusalem, the second-century philosopher Celsus puts the issue vividly (in Origen, C. Cels. 5.25): The Ioudaioi, having become a unique ethnos [from the Egyptians], enacted laws in keeping with their local conditions, and they protect them

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until even now. In preserving their way of worship—which, whatever its actual form, is ancestral—they act just like other people: each [nation] deals with its ancestral ways … and it is not pious to dissolve what has become customary/legal in each place from the beginning. The emperor Julian’s fourth-century Against the Galileans, a vain effort to undo the Christian transformation of the social-political lexicon, continues to make the connections among people, place of origin, and customs. That none of this implies removing Jews from antiquity should be clear from the eleven-volume Jüdische Geschichte (1862 original) by Heinrich Graetz. With a historian’s sensitivity to the changing discourse of his sources, Graetz chose terminology appropriate for each period.76 When writing of the GraecoRoman period, he defaulted to ‘Judaean’ ( Judäer, judäisch), reserving Juden and jüdisch for the Mishnaic period and later, or when anticipating long-span themes in the earlier volumes. His preference for Judäer came into the English translation as Judaean(s).77 In the second volume, for example, dealing with our period, Judaean appears nearly 500 times in the English translation: ‘the Judaean nation’ (47, 61, 69, 139, 142), the ‘Judaean quarter’ of Rome, and ‘Roman Judaeans’ (68, 103), ‘the Judaean people’ (89), foreign and ‘Babylonian Judaeans’ (90), ‘Alexandrian Judaeans’ (102), ‘Judaeans outside of Palestine’ (107), and ‘the Judaeans throughout Italy’ (137). This usage is striking in Chapter 7, concerning the Judaeans of Alexandria and their embassy to Rome, and Chapter 8, on the distribution of Judaeans in the Roman and Parthian empires. Graetz also follows the sources in avoiding the chiefly Christian construct of Jewish Dispersion (Diaspora), to speak rather of Judaea’s ‘colonies’ and their relation to Jerusalem (see Chapter 1). If he had used Juden / Jews throughout all the volumes, that would have surprised no one, and it would not be wrong. His choice of Judaean for the Hellenistic-Roman period does not remove Jews from ancient history, however. It is a question of how best to capture something of ancient discourse. 4

Conclusions

In this essay I have tried to solve a puzzle: how Danny Schwartz and I could have so often taken opposed positions in print, although we have known each other a long time, we respect each other, and we now collaborate on a major 76 77

Graetz 1862. Graetz 1956 [orig. 1891].

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project. It seems that we also agree about fundamental principles in historical research, not least because of shared influence from Marc Bloch and Arnaldo Momigliano. We agree that the historian’s task is to investigate the human past, detective-like; that literary study for its own sake is not history; and, it seems, that individuals deserve careful attention as drivers of action. Neither of us has social-scientific propensities or an inclination to use models, theories, or covering laws of aggregate behaviour, or to seek scientific lessons in history. Above all, we agree that Josephus’ thirty volumes are a treasure, with no parallel for ancient Egypt, Syria, Gaul, Spain, Britain, post-classical Greece, or Asia. We even concur that most of what Josephus wrote derives ultimately from sources, whether written or oral, and from his diffuse cultural knowledge. In some sense, we could also both say, he is ultimately responsible for his works. Given the many ways in which historians might disagree, that is a lot to be going on with. For one of us to try to identify the roots of disagreement is hazardous. Our different upbringings, locations, and life-experiences I take to be too complex for analysis. Anyway, I persist in the un-postmodern belief that public inquiry can and should transcend conscious and unconscious predispositions, though these undeniably play a role. So, I have proceeded from Danny’s methodological statements, especially where he engages my published work to disagree. I have mainly tried to respond to his criticisms and to use those responses to highlight what seem areas of agreement in method, beneath the more obvious differences. It seems that he views events as more structured and self-explanatory than I do, with the result that the difference between an event and an account of it (‘recording, reporting’) is negligible. In that case, historical research could proceed in a single operation. Schwartz’s 2013 book makes it clear that he does not take the naïve view that Josephus narrates events just as they happened. Rather, he tries to show, we may chisel away at Josephus to remove his binding devices and expose the underlying facts, or sources, with the help of comparanda where available. If my summary seems crass in relation to the sophistication of his writing, the fault lies in my effort to uncover our genuine differences. We both value common sense. If there is a deep root of difference in method, it seems to be in our conceptions of the relationships among events, facts, and history, in my case under the particular influence of R. G. Collingwood (with Bloch). We both spend much time with Josephus but we tend to look for different things. This is surely all to the good for historical research, as it leads to challenge, criticism, and clarification.

Chapter 21

With T. P. (Peter) Wiseman: Updates on an Emperor’s Death Although he has been known from antiquity as ‘the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus’, the émigré priest from Jerusalem (37–ca. 100 CE) surprisingly devoted most of the penultimate volume of his Judaean Archaiologia to the murder of Gaius Caligula and its aftermath (AJ 19.1–273). Scholars have generally considered this a major digression, illustrative of the miscellany thought to characterise that work’s later volumes. Josephus needed twenty volumes, they have suspected, the number having been made respectable by Dionysius’ Roman Archaiologia. So he could not be too discriminating about what he used as fill, after his main biblical source ran out half-way through his project. The maestro of Josephus studies for much of the twentieth century, Henry St. John Thackeray, described Antiquities 12–20 as ‘a patch-work, compiled from such miscellaneous materials as were at the author’s disposal’.1 Given that Josephus could have had little to add to such disparate material, which he basically copied, the scholar’s main interest must be in the nature of the sources rather than in Josephus’ writing. In Thackeray’s view, Josephus lost the plot when he let his sources for King Herod and Herod’s grandson Agrippa I (ruled 41–44) lead him into ‘much interesting, but strictly irrelevant’ detail, about Rome, which was no more his subject than the Mesopotamian material found in volumes 18 to 20.2 The Gaius narrative in Antiquities 19 is only the most sustained and surprising example of this indulgence. As for its source, Thackeray was not sure about Cluvius Rufus, Mommsen’s choice, but in any case: Josephus has discovered a lively and circumstantial record, which, to eke out his scanty materials and make up the necessary tale of 20 books … he has not hesitated to incorporate entire, notwithstanding its irrelevancy to his proper subject.3

1 Thackeray 1967 [orig. 1929]: 60. Cf. 61: ‘the main point of interest is the determination of the various sources’. 2 Thackeray 1967: 68. 3 Thackeray 1967: 69 (emphasis added).

© Steve Mason, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004545960_023

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Those who worked routinely with Josephus’ War, Antiquities, and Against Apion, in departments of Jewish/religious studies or European-style ‘theology’, were not likely to do much with this alien debris in their familiar turf. So it was a boon for all involved when in 1991 the distinguished Exeter classicist Peter Wiseman, known for his studies of the late Roman Republic and historiography, published a commentary on AJ 19.1–273.4 Autobiographical remarks on Wiseman’s departmental web page5 include this book under the roof of ‘anything else that seems interesting’—beside his main research fields. I recall lamenting in the mid-1990s how little known this excellent contribution was in Josephus studies, perhaps because its preoccupation with Latin and Rome confirmed the remoteness of the material for scholars working mostly in Greek, Hebrew, and the Levant. The book did attract admiring attention from classicists—an index of the slow pace at which the walls among ancient-studies disciplines have been crumbling. Arthur Ferrill’s review for BMCR (1992) included this remark: ‘I cannot imagine why this book was not entitled The Death of Caligula.’6 Well, now it is. When I opened the 2013 version bearing Ferrill’s title, it looked so familiar that I wondered whether it was the old content in a new suit, typeface, and page flow. The nine pages (vii–xv) of the original Introduction matched pp. ix–xvii in the new one, and the paragraphs looked the same, though a chart was shifted by one paragraph. The same seven headings that gave helpful shape to the translation reappeared, with the translation itself in the same page range (1991: 3–39; 2013: 3–39). Following a reproduced ‘note on the text’ (1991: 41–42; 2013: 41–42), which lists Wiseman’s departures from Benedikt Niese’s editio maior of Josephus in 1890, the commentary sections (1991: 43–102; 2013: 43–99) looked virtually the same, though it was easy to spot seven new items in the three-page bibliography—six on Josephus research, half of those on the sources of Antiquities 19. Both books conclude with two appendices (on the Augustan Palatine and Cluvius Rufus) and a four-page Index of (Ancient) Names, ending respectively on p. 122 and p. 121. Whatever differences there might have been seemed negligible. Wiseman himself describes his new offering, on the Acknowledgements page, as a second edition with updated bibliography, ‘adjustments and additions’ throughout, and a rewritten Appendix I (p. vii). For the purposes of this review, given the similarity of the two books, it seems most sensible to reconsider the original, mainly, and then look for the changes that Wiseman 4 Wiseman 1991. 5 http://humanities.exeter.ac.uk/classics/staff/wiseman, accessed 17 August 2022. 6 http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/1992/03.02.23.html.

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considered important enough to include in an edition that conforms so closely to the original. Wiseman’s approach squares with Thackeray’s above, and with the general state of scholarship ca. 1990. Nearly half of the Introduction is a standard overview of Josephus’ life and writings: of illustrious ancestry, he allegedly joined the Pharisees as a youth, was fluent in Greek (a recent recognition),7 surrendered to Vespasian under questionable circumstances and predicted his accession, wrote an Aramaic mini-War from Rome for Jews of the Parthian world, was favoured by the Flavians in consideration of his predictive and propagandistic services, and was in general well-connected and culturally fluent. A good third of the remainder, understandably, treats Josephus’ sources on Gaius. Already here in the Introduction Wiseman sketches his case: that Josephus used two Roman historians (not the one generally assumed), and their distinctive viewpoints can still be detected. Although their work is lost and Josephus names no sources here, they were most likely historians known from Tacitus who had some connection with the events: the ex-consul Cluvius Rufus and Fabius Rusticus, a Spanish friend of Seneca. Wiseman does not deny that Josephus occasionally inserted his own comments (see table in 1991: xiii) and also added brief glosses to his sources. Josephus thus manages to connect the story vaguely with his own theme of divine providence. But aside from these interventions Josephus was happy to exploit their work, Wiseman argues: ‘Fortunately for us, Josephus stuck pretty closely to his sources (even traces of their Latin may sometimes be detected …)’. His willingness to leave his sources unmolested means that: ‘What Josephus has preserved for us is an authentic contemporary Roman view, a generation earlier than Tacitus, of the events that brought about the change’ from Rome as Senate and People (SPQR) to Senate, People, and Soldiers (1991: xiv). Moreover, these excellent sources support Wiseman’s picture of Gaius’ truly outrageous behaviour, which emerges in the commentary, against scholarly efforts to soften the image of the hated emperor. The degree of Josephus’ alleged dependence on his Latin sources, the cornerstone of Wiseman’s argument, becomes clear in the commentary. A rare line that Wiseman ascribes to Josephus himself (19.16) thus refers to ‘God’, whereas another (19.72) mentions ‘the gods’ and so ‘must come from J.’s source’. (But the later passage reflects the conspirators’ perspective, not the narrator’s voice.) In 19.17–21 Josephus introduces three antagonists with individual motives for wanting Gaius dead. Wiseman finds the reference to the first man’s 7 Thanks mainly to Rajak 1983, which Wiseman had wisely taken as one of his two guides to Josephus research, along with Bilde 1988.

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origin in Cordoba a clue that the Spaniard Fabius is the source here. (But why would Josephus himself not mention this man’s distinguishing foreign origin?) After the three-way plot is described, Josephus narrows his focus to Chaerea, and so Wiseman infers that ‘J. evidently changes his source’ (1991: p. 49). The obviousness of this may be missed by readers familiar with Josephus’ fondness for threes, for exploring psychological motives, and for focusing on one of the three.8 After relating that Chaerea’s sword did not kill Gaius on the first blow, Josephus appears to deploy his authoritative knowledge of combat psychology to dispute others, who claim (καίτοι γέ φασίν τινες) that Chaerea deliberately prolonged Gaius’ suffering. Josephus knows better from his experience in warfare: that fear of failure and death would have forced the killers to work quickly (19.106). In Wiseman’s view, however, this reflection is ‘arguably the most ill-timed digression in the history of narrative’. It must be Josephus’ interruption of his narrative source, and moreover, his dispute must be with that source (1991: 63–64). We should imagine him reading and copying his source, then abruptly stopping: ‘Hang on a minute! I don’t agree with that’ and inserting his own view. This reviewer finds nothing unusual in Josephus’ interruption of his own narrative, in the service of psychological-motivational exploration. Indeed, it seems to me odd that Josephus would use such vague plural language (φασίν τινες) to target a particular author.9 I do not see how we can get behind the more obvious impression that Josephus is telling his own story and, having related that Chaerea’s first blow did not kill Gaius, pauses to wield his own big sword of combat knowledge against sophistic pen-pushers who write about what they do not know. His posture of unique, hard-won expertise trumping the claims of all rivals defines his whole corpus (from BJ 1.1–12 via AJ 20.262–65 to Ap. 1.37–51). The language here resembles his adjudication of different views later in the passage (AJ 19.195–98) and his disparagement of writers on Nero in the following volume (20.154–55). At 19.167, Josephus has (the consul) Cn. Sentius Saturninus begin his great speech ‘Although it is incredible, O Romans’. Wiseman comments: ‘one would expect “senators”, but evidently J.’s source did not make Sentius say patres conscripti.’ Again, why should we look to Josephus’ source, when he himself has the habit of introducing speeches (more than 100 times) with the 8 E.g., BJ 2.119; 5.2, 21; 6.169–71; AJ 13.171–73. 9 Contrast AJ 14.9; 16.183–84; V 336–67; Ap. passim. This phrasing looks more like the ‘many’ of the War prologue (1.1–8), where Josephus takes on a group of writers about the recent war, or his mentioned remarks on Nero’s historians.

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Homeric-oratorical ‘O + vocative’? He does this most often with titles or individual names,10 it is true, but also has ‘O Taricheans’ (BJ 2.606), ‘O Hebrews’ (AJ 3.84), Galileans, citizens, and Tiberians (V 258, 278, 302). By contrast, when we see patres conscripti in surviving literature it is not normally preceded by Latin ‘O’.11 And why should Josephus not have Sentius address his audience as Romans, when the issue is Roman identity, governance, history, and freedom, and he calls upon the Senate to act in the interest of the δῆμος (19.189, 194)? The speech certainly looks to be at home in Josephus’ crafted production. At 19.242 Josephus mentions a senatorial notion that it might be possible to raise an army quickly by freeing and arming slaves. Wiseman immediately asks about the source’s inspiration for conjuring such a radical move, and suggests the Roman civil war of 69. But Josephus himself claimed that, in the recent Judaean War, Simon bar Giora instantly created an armed force by freeing slaves (BJ 4.508–509). If he was familiar with the idea, why could he not have given the Senate this thought? Finally, Wiseman sees in Josephus’ obituary for Gaius (19.202–11) only ‘J.’s source’, which goes easier on the emperor here than elsewhere. But obituaries are characteristic of the Antiquities, and they tend to be surprisingly balanced over against the preceding narrative, as this one is. Even when the deceased has flagrantly violated divine law or made a complete hash of things, Josephus looks for redeeming qualities in the final assessment.12 These examples return us to Wiseman’s main proposition, that ‘Josephus stuck pretty closely to his sources’. It seems surprising that the author of Clio’s Cosmetics, which took what some reviewers considered an extreme position on authorial creativity, should seem so uninterested in Josephus as an author. How does the long Gaius episode serve his narrative interests, and how did he rewrite it? Why did he bother including it? Was it simply on a to-do list, after which he would leave it to collect dust? Did the story have no meaning for him? If not, why would he include it in his greatest work, which he claims to have been pressed into writing (AJ 1.8–9)? Did he have no real audience in Rome? What were such hearers / readers supposed to make of a mainly irrelevant digression? In fairness to Wiseman, these questions were rarely asked in 1990, even among Josephus specialists. They were being asked, however, by the time of the second edition under review here. 10 11 12

Cf. Agrippa’s ὦ βουλή to the senate in 19.242, part of the Gaius story but unremarked by Wiseman, in a section he attributes to a source on ‘the Jewish King Agrippa’ (1991: xii). The phrase is most frequent in the speeches of Cicero to the Senate, where it often comes after a lengthy clause or two, and ‘O’ would be rather shocking. E.g., AJ 1.256, 346; 2.198–204; 4.327–31; 5.117–18, 253, 317; 6.292–94, 344–50 with 166, 378; 7.37–38, 390–91; 8.211; 13.318–19, 380–83, 430–32.

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We must leave aside, after flagging it, the intriguing question whether Josephus could have known Latin well enough to be studying Latin histories and using them as sources. Until a few decades ago his knowledge even of Greek, the lingua franca of the east, was sufficiently doubted that his work was credited to literary assistants.13 That he was fully conversant also with Latin literature, an ability he does not suggest (contrast AJ 20.262–65 for Greek), is possible but not common knowledge. Lacking the Latin sources for comparison, how could we know whether Josephus followed them closely? One tool we might use is comparison between this section and Josephus’ corpus as a whole, or its larger sections. If we find in the Gaius narrative elements of diction, style, and theme that are distinctive or characteristic of Antiquities, this section of it, or Josephus in general, then it would seem that Josephus was equally responsible for the whole work. The only place where I noticed Wiseman showing any interest in Josephus’ characteristic language was his comment at 19.108: that a line about everyone being free to make up their own mind—one of the rare comments that Wiseman credits to Josephus—is ‘a favourite formula’ of the Judaean author. That is true, but it is not clear that Wiseman has searched for similar branding marks elsewhere in Antiquities 19. Two ancillary questions arise. First, granted that Josephus must have used written sources and familiar traditions for matters outside his direct experience, and no one denies that, did he normally follow them in a manner that amounts to preserving the sources for us? The clearest comparison case is his eleven-volume biblical paraphrase (AJ 1–11). But there we find him thoroughly rearranging, rewriting, cutting, and supplementing his material in the interest of his artistic creation.14 Second, in a review of Wiseman’s first edition Anthony Barrett notes the ‘awkward Greek’ of Josephus in this part of his work and praises Wiseman’s free translation: ‘a good decision, since Josephus’ anacoloutha and corruptions made a literal rendering almost unreadable’.15 But then we might wonder (a) why close reproduction of Latin sources should have generated such a mess, and (b) whether Barrett’s description would not hold for Antiquities 17–19 altogether, which Thackeray credited to a ‘Thucydidean hack’. Although no one today supports Thackeray’s notion of a cadre of (sub-par) literary assistants with differing proclivities, he rightly observed that Antiquities 17–19 has a

13 14 15

Thackeray 1967: 100–124. See Feldman 1998a, 1998b. L. H. Feldman. Barrett 1992; 435.

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distinctively Thucydideanesque style, which mostly vanishes as Antiquities 20 relaxes into the plain constructions of the following autobiography. If we add to these considerations Wiseman’s alert observations on Thucy­ dideanisms in the Gaius passage, as well as the moving reference to the Melian dialogue at the conclusion of Wiseman’s Introduction (1991: xiv)—a passage of known interest to Josephus16—we must wonder whether the Gaius narrative of Antiquities 19 is not just as much Josephus’ creation (in its final form, notwithstanding his undoubted consultation of sources), as the rest of the Antiquities is. If it is, would that not complicate the project of recovering Roman sources with their diverse perspectives? We may be more specific. Let us begin with a simple case of diction. Although the aristocrat Josephus writes frequently of nobles, first, or leading men,17 he uses εὐπατρίδης only eight times in the corpus. Two of these are in the Claudian succession story of War (2.212–13), the other six all in Antiquities 17–19. Wiseman comments only on the occurrence at 19.132, where he renders the plural ‘aristocrats’ and explains (emphasis mine): J.’s word eupatridai normally means ‘patricians’, but here (and at 136 and Bell. II 212) it probably translates a more general word or phrase in his source. … The description of the pathology of tyranny in 132–7 [also from the source] is reminiscent of Tacitus. Wiseman’s commentary occasionally mentions the corresponding passage on Claudius’ accession in Josephus’ BJ 2.204–14, but mainly for the sake of contrast. He attributes it to a Jewish source focused on Agrippa (1991: 93, 95) and so finds it basically different from the Antiquities account, which follows Roman sources. I see many overlaps between the two in content, political interest, and also tone. For example, at 19.251 Josephus names senators who saw themselves worthy of bidding for supreme rule, and Wiseman comments: ‘Perhaps J.’s source, like Tacitus later, was conscious of the capax imperii theme’. But the War parallel already sounds ‘Tacitean’ in my view: first, when it portrays Claudius as determined to move forward because merely being called to imperium has put him in mortal hazard (BJ 2.207; cf. Tacitus, Hist. 2.76); second, when it has the Senate reject ‘voluntary slavery’ under a new princeps (BJ 2.209); and third, when King Agrippa admonishes Claudius to keep the Senate alive because only their existence will give meaning to his supremacy

16 17

BJ 2.346, 355–58, 365; 5.367. Cf. Mader 2000: 23–54. οἱ πρῶτοι, γνώριμοι, δυνατοί, etc.

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(i.e., he needs an elite to dominate)—for he would not want to be king of a desert (BJ 2.213; cf. Tacitus, Agr. 30). However that may be, we have enough information in the mere distribution of εὐπατρίδης to wonder about Wiseman’s source-based scheme. What a fluke it would be if the only occurrences of the word in War concerned the very same incident as in Antiquities 19 (if Josephus relied on independent sources), and if all six occurrences in Antiquities happened to fall in the linguistically distinctive section Antiquities 17–19. The first occurrence of εὐπατρίδης in this section (17.307) has nothing to do with Rome. It concerns King Herod (ruled 37–4 BCE), whom Antiquities characterises as a tyrant. Josephus says of him: ‘And as for the nobility, he would kill them for ridiculous reasons and confiscate their property for himself (τῶν τε εὐπατριδῶν ὁπότε κτείνειεν αὐτοὺς ἐπ᾿ ἀλόγοις αἰτίαις τὰς οὐσίας ἀποφερόμενον).’ Is there not a clear thematic link between this and the next occurrence of εὐπατρίδης, concerning Tiberius—but still not part of the Gaius story (18.226)? For this one man inflicted enormous terrors on the Roman nobles, as he was always quick to anger (πλεῖστα γὰρ ἀνὴρ εἷς οὗτος Ῥωμαίων τοὺς εὐπατρίδας εἰργάσατο δεινὰ δυσόργητος ἐπὶ πᾶσιν ὢν) and unstoppable once he had begun to act, even if his reason for conceiving a hatred of someone made no sense. When the narrative reaches Gaius and says of him (19.2), he regarded it [Rome] with no more honour than other cities but harassed the citizens, particularly the Senate and as many of them as were nobles or honoured for their distinguished parentage (μάλιστα τὴν σύγκλητον καὶ ὁπόσοι τούτων εὐπατρίδαι καὶ προγόνων ἐπιφανείαις τιμώμενοι), it feels like the same narrative, of tyrants abusing the well born. It is hard to see why we should attribute only the occurrences in AJ 19.1–273 to a Roman source and not to Josephus. His shift in nuance when using this word, from nobles or patricians to the Senate, matches his practice everywhere, as the commentary volumes would show. However we imagine his sources, we must reckon with the observable fact that he seizes on this word to help describe the behaviour of tyrants from quite different places and times, in Antiquities 17–19. The great speech of by Sentius (19.167–84) gives rise to similar questions. It seems all but certain that, whatever his source material may have been, Josephus became the consul’s retrospective speechwriter. Readers who do not work regularly with Josephus should understand that he uses speeches often.

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The half-dozen great specimens in his War, from that of Agrippa II surveying an empire allegedly at peace (War 2) to Eleazar’s philosophical monologue recommending self-immolation on the rock of Masada (War 7), have attracted much analysis. But Antiquities also thrives on set speeches. Many of these have to do with the grand themes of politics, as does this one by Sentius. Two examples from Antiquities 4, which lays out the Mosaic legislation that justifies and undergirds the work, suffice to make the point. In both cases, Josephus exploits the Thucydidean-Sallustian technique of duelling speeches to allow the audience room for critical engagement. So effective are the B-side orations that a modern western reader might prefer their reasoning, at least provisionally, to that proffered by Josephus and his Moses in argumenta ad (divine) auctoritatem or even ad baculum. In the first case (AJ 4.11–66), Josephus describes a stasis unprecedented in Greek or barbarian history, which arose because one Korah, who was ‘among the most distinguished by ancestry and wealth, an able speaker and very persuasive with the crowds’ (4.14), accused Moses of acting the tyrant by appointing his older brother Aaron high priest, rather than following the laws and making a case before the populace (4.15–16). In the second example (4.126–58), Moses is again accused of tyranny (4.146, 149), this time for demanding that Israelites divorce their foreign wives in fidelity to his new laws from God. The tribal chief Zimri gives a fine speech, before he and his wife are murdered by a Moses-zealot, to the effect that the tyrant Moses wants to enslave us and rob us of the self-determination that belongs to every free man (4.146). One ought to investigate the truth from many sources, he insists, and not live as though under tyranny (4.149). Who could disagree? Josephus thus demonstrates his fluency in the political themes of GraecoRoman culture, and with considerable skill. The powerful speeches of Korah and Zimri, which he also writes for them, are wrong, it turns out, because these men are demagogues. They seek to advance their interests by flattering the mob with plausible-sounding arguments. With most ancient authors, Josephus views the mob as thoroughly tractable, therefore in need of wise and vigilant, public-spirited leadership for its own welfare. Otherwise, it remains vulnerable to egoists’ empty promises in the service of their personal glory. Josephus regularly taps the Platonic vein that contrasts play in the world of appearances with a virtuous concern for hard truth. It was thus inevitable that Moses would seem tyrannical, being the sole figure to receive the divine law. But that law encapsulates the laws of nature and all human virtue (AJ 1.14–26). Josephus invites the audience to think through the speeches and realise that, despite the plausible challenges from the demagogues, Moses was of course no tyrant. On the contrary, he planned for aristokratia—the curation of

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his laws in perpetuity by the priestly collective descended from Aaron—as the only acceptable politeia (AJ 4.186–87, 223): The high priest Eleazar, Joshua, the Senate, and the heads of the tribes will propose to you the best counsels, by following which you will continue to find happiness (αἷς ἑπόμενοι τὴν εὐδαιμονίαν ἕξετε) … [if you] do not take ‘freedom’ to mean constant antagonism to what those governing you reckon it best to do (τήν τ᾿ ἐλευθερίαν ἡγεῖσθε μὴ τὸ προσαγανακτεῖν …). … Aristocracy, and the life associated with it, is simply the best. So do not let the longing for any other constitution snare you (Ἀριστοκρατία μὲν οὖν κράτιστον καὶ ὁ κατ᾿ αὐτὴν βίος, καὶ μὴ λάβῃ πόθος ὑμᾶς ἄλλης πολιτείας), but learn to love it, and having the laws for your master, so that you do each and every thing in accord with them, for God is enough of a governor. Josephus’ Moses is as opposed to human monarchy, which inevitably degrades to tyranny,18 as he is to the mob-rule disingenuously championed by demagogues (AJ 1.114; 5.338–39; 6.33–44, 83–85, 262–68). When we return to Antiquities 19 and Sentius’ great speech on Roman freedom and the virtues of aristocracy over tyranny, then, there is every reason to think that Josephus also composed these words for a Roman consul, which suit the occasion but are redolent of his larger themes (19.178): Since, then, we have gotten clear of such great evils and made ourselves [senators] accountable only to one another—which of all constitutions establishes most securely both present good will and future freedom from plots (αἵπερ πολιτειῶν ἐχεγγυώταται πρός τε τὸ παρὸν εὔνουν καὶ τὸ αὖθις ἀνεπιβούλευτον), and in addition to putting the polis straight will conduce to our fame—it is right for you individually to make provision for the public benefit as your own (? προνοῆσαι διὰ τὸ εἰς κοινὸν αὐτοῦ τὴν ὠφέλειαν ἀπαντᾶν), and freely dissent in your judgement. Recognising Josephus’ profound interest in the subject matter of the Gaius episode opens the possibility that it plays an important role in Antiquities, and books 17–19 in particular. It illustrates, as he elaborately states, the dire consequences of departure from divine law, using the case of Judaea’s most notorious enemy, Gaius Caligula, who obscenely demanded treatment as a god and nearly destroyed the ethnos (19.4–11, 15–16). The long account of the tyrant-king 18

Cf. Herodotus 3.80.2–5; Plato, Resp. 8.565–69; Aristotle, Pol. 3.5.4 [1279b]; 4.8 [1295a]; Polybius 6.4.8; Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Ant. Rom. 7.55.3.

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Herod (AJ 14–17) was, after all, motivated by a similar concern with God’s handling of tyrants (AJ 16.395–404; 17.148, 168–81, 191–92), though Herod never exalted himself as outrageously as Gaius. Josephus makes his authorial interest clear by introducing the Gaius episode twice, first proleptically, explaining that such detail is warranted by the need to show God’s power to punish a man who had caused the world such misery by exalting himself to divine status (AJ 18.306–307; 19.1–16). An abundance of verbal detail confirms Josephus’ authorship of the consular speech. Consider as a reference point one of Antiquities’ many editorial reflections, in the early volumes, on the consequences of abandoning Moses’ aristocratic constitution (5.179): ‘For, once they were redirected from the order of the constitution (τοῦ κόσμου τῆς πολιτείας), they moved toward living in accordance with pleasure and their own will’ (πρὸς τὸ καθ᾿ ἡδονὴν καὶ βούλησιν ἰδίαν βιοῦν). Back in Antiquities 19, Sentius bewails Rome’s loss of freedom, to tyrants, and the wisdom of the nation’s laws (19.173): From the moment when Julius Caesar set his mind on the dissolution of the democracy and put the constitution in turmoil by having violated the order of the laws (διαβιασάμενος τὸν κόσμον τῶν νόμων), placing himself above justice while descending to his own private pleasure (ἥσσων δὲ τοῦ κατ᾿ ἰδίαν ἡδονὴν αὐτῷ κομιοῦντος), there is no sort of misery that has not occupied the polis. Verbal resonances are clear. Indeed, the whole speech is dense with Antiquities’ programmatic constitutional language19 and characteristic diction,20 salted with the linguistic tics of Antiquities 17–19. Examples of the latter include the articular neuter substantive τὸ ἐλεύθερον, all 9 occurrences in Josephus falling in Antiquities 17–19—supporting the Thucydidean aesthetic. Josephus uses this construction as the theme of Sentius’ speech, where it occurs 4 times (19.167, 171, 172, 177), Wiseman crediting that speech to Cluvius. But the other appearances of this phrase are in passages concerning Judaean affairs (17.28; 18.23) and in a section attributed by Wiseman to the second Roman source (19.248). 19 20

πολιτεία occurs three times in the speech, 60 times in the work (programmatically [1.5], 10, 121; 3.84, 213, 322; 4.45, 184, 191–98, 223). E.g., εὐδαιμονία (with cognates 151 times in Antiquities, programmatically in 1.14, 20), ἐλευθερία (with cognates 218 times in Antiquities), ἀρετή (290 times in Antiquities). πρόνοια and cognates (human or divine provision, forethought) appear 192 times in Antiquities, creating a programmatic theme (e.g., 1.46, 53; 10.260, 278, 280), 6 of these in the Gaius episode (material ascribed by Wiseman to Josephus, Cluvius, and Fabius), and one at a crucial point in the speech of Sentius (19.178).

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It is much the same with τὸ μεγαλόφρον (liberality), which accompanies τὸ ἐλεύθερον in 19.172. This articular neuter form shows up 6 times in Antiquities, 4 in 17–19, but at 18.5, 255 in connection with Judaean affairs and not from a Roman source. It is clearly a function of Josephus’ style in these volumes. Similarly, two thirds (15) of the 23 occurrences of τυραννίς (tyranny) in Antiquities are in books 17–19. As Wiseman observes, most of these (12) are in the Gaius narrative (6 in Sentius’ speech, I would add). But the other 3 in Antiquities 17–19 (i.e., 17.237, 304, 342) concern Herod and his tyrannical son Archelaus. Those examples continue a thread from 14.165; 15.321, which established the Herodians as arch-tyrants, and link up with the larger theme of tyranny as inimical to the Mosaic (and divine, natural) constitution in the work (from AJ 1.114; 4.149; 5.234). Nearly half (19) of the 45 occurrences of ὁμιλέω (converse) in Josephus occur in Antiquities 17–19, but only 2 in the consular speech and 6 in the Gaius narrative. The articular infinitive τὸ ὁμιλεῖν appears only in Antiquities, twice in 17–19 (also 5.191). But the other occurrence (18.207) has no connection with Roman sources. Again, the rare Thucydidean τὸ ἀνεπιβούλευτον (‘free from plotting/attack’, Thuc. 2.37.2) occurs 3 times in Josephus, all in Antiquities 19: once in the speech (19.178), once in remarks from Chaerea (19.43), and once in the narrator’s voice (19.150). Although all three are in material that Wiseman ascribes to Cluvius, to be sure, it is easier to imagine the author of Antiquities 17–19 composing this, in keeping with the ethos of the whole section, than to suppose that a Latin source prompted the Thucydideanisms just here. The Thucydidean adjective ἐχέγγυος (‘furnishing security’, Thuc. 3.46.1) is attested only seven or eight times before Josephus, who has it 4 times, all in Antiquities 17–20. Two of these are in Josephus’ own undisputed narrative voice, describing Judaean affairs (17.249; 20.255), and one in the narrator’s voice of the Gaius episode (19.144). The remaining example we noted above, at the climactic moment of Sentius’ speech (19.178). It causes the least mental strain to imagine that Josephus composed the Gaius episode, including the speech for the consul, as an embedded part of Antiquities 17–19—using some kind of sources, no doubt, but reworking everything in his style to convey his themes. These are only some examples. The speech also includes the recherché verb ἀνταποφαίνω, which is found twice in Thucydides (3.38.2, 67.3) but not again before this occurrence in Josephus, suggesting again a Thucydidean motive throughout Antiquities 17–19 rather than the copying of Latin sources. We have moved from conception and theme to specific diction. Let us return to the larger issues with the observation that Sentius characterises all Roman rulers from Julius Caesar to Gaius as tyrants who overthrow the laws (19.173–77), and praises Chaerea for completing the work of Brutus and Cassius (19.184). This agrees not only with the narrator’s voice of this passage, at 19.187

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(‘before the polis had been subjected to tyrants’, a century ago, the consuls had commanded the military), but also in what should be unrelated on Wiseman’s analysis: AJ 18.169. There the narrator speaks of Tiberius as a procrastinator, ‘if ever another of the kings or tyrants had been’. Given that emphatic rejection of monarchy-cum-tyranny is fundamental to Josephus’ magnum opus (e.g., AJ 6.33–44, 83–85, 262–68), and that the tyranny theme had already been central to his Judaean War,21 it would be peculiar to deny him authorship of the whole thing, including these passages, which seem precisely on point. I have provided some detail to avoid the appearance of peremptory dismissal or mere methodological bias. Wiseman’s thesis—that we can still identify in Josephus, buried only in the Antigonean way with a bit of dust, two Roman sources close to the events of Gaius’ death—does not seem to explain the textual evidence. There is no reason to doubt, I stress, that Josephus used written sources and stories he had heard for both his briefer account in BJ 2.204–14 and for the grandly introduced AJ 19.1–273. But the prospect that he used those sources in such a respectful way that we can recover them bodily seems as promising as the hope of reconstituting eggs from a cake. Josephus has blended his material, stirring in generous dollops of his own political insight, literary aspirations, and language, before baking. The differences between War 2’s version of Claudius’ accession, which Wiseman does not consider in any detail, and the version in Antiquities are no greater than those affecting all the material from War 1–2 that is retold in the much longer Antiquities 12–20 plus Life. Josephus’ reworking of his own life story from War 2 to the Life is the most spectacular example, and there the changes cannot be traced to sources. Even within the same narrative, throughout the whole corpus Josephus proves himself capable of changing zoom, focus, and perspective, as well as style and diction, interrupting himself, leaving countless loose threads, and blatantly contradicting himself. How much ‘worse’ he is in these respects than other historians is not a matter for calibration. But in any case, his shortcomings and surprises cannot be explained, as classes, by his sources. If Josephus’ Roman sources for AJ 19.1–273 must rejoin the shades (though Cluvius Rufus is a good candidate along with Fabius Rusticus), perhaps we gain something more valuable in the long run. If Josephus combined oral tales 21

The proem of War blames τύραννοι, who turn out to be John of Gischala and Simon bar Giora especially, for fomenting the στάσις οἰκεία that resulted in Jerusalem’s fall (1.10–11, 24–28; 2.275–76, 442; 4.158, 166, 208, 401; 5.5, 11; 7.261). Both men pursued personal power at all costs, in opposition to Jerusalem’s aristocracy (whom they murder), misleading the populace with absurd promises of radical freedom.

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and written sources to craft this story, in the way he wrote his other material, we have a knowledgeable and capable author, with an outsider’s critical perspective, somewhat earlier than Tacitus. He was active in Rome throughout the Flavian period, had access to the ‘best’ people and sources, and wrote thirty volumes that have survived intact. Perhaps that would not be such a bad outcome? On that scenario, Wiseman’s study of Josephus’ Antiquities 19 would retain nearly all of its value, minus confidence about sources: in the substance of the translation and commentary. The former still offers a lively reading that draws the reader in, while the latter provides illuminating links to Josephus’ Roman environment. Perhaps it would not be so damaging, historically, to suppose that this rich and fascinating material is part and parcel of a Judaean author’s composition. That line of thought might invite further reflection on the level of socio-cultural integration of Judaean (and other foreign) elites in Rome, and on this prolific author’s Roman context in particular. Everything I have said until now applies to the 1991 edition of Wiseman’s study. That emphasis is justified because the current edition basically reproduces the first, but also because this foundation will help us isolate the changes in the 2013 book and ponder their significance. That is our remaining task. Adjustments to the Introduction are subtle. They begin with Wiseman’s opening words, where the end of the Republic ‘may be said to have ended’ in 49, qualifying his earlier language: ‘The Roman Republic ended …’ Since Wiseman has changed so little, the compelling reason for this alteration may be consistency with his 1991 commentary note at AJ 19.187, which suggests Caesar’s first consulship in 59 as a plausible end of the Republic (so Cicero), in explanation of Josephus’ remark that in 41 CE the Republic had been lost for a century. Otherwise, apart from cosmetic enhancements in the Introduction (notation style or accommodating the moved chart), Wiseman changes the date of Josephus’ War from ‘some time between 75 and 79’ (citing P. Bilde) to ‘completed about 81’ (replacing Bilde with C. P. Jones), and the date of Antiquities from ‘A.D. 94’ to ‘A.D. 93/94’. The latter adjustment better suits the evidence, but Wiseman would have been safer leaving the original date for War. Josephus is clear, after all, that he presented the finished work to Vespasian and Titus (V 359–62; Ap. 1.50), and War’s proem assumes that both men are alive (BJ 1.3, 7–8), though of course Vespasian died in 79. Reasons for dating the work to 81, because of the prominence of Titus for example, are rather more subjective. The absence of much change in the Introduction is the most surprising feature of the new edition, because the interval between 1991 and 2013 was a time in which ‘Josephus studies’ came to life as an active subdiscipline. The beginning of the compositional study of Josephus’ works cannot be precisely dated.

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There were green shoots at the beginning of the twentieth century and in the 1950s. But the gradual appearance of the Josephus Concordance (Brill) from 1973 to 1983 and a couple of far-sighted studies that used it in the 1970s began the reorientation to his text. New ways of appraising Josephus as an author were also made possible by studies of Hellenistic-Roman Judaea, culminating in Rajak’s 1983 monograph on Josephus and his society, which demolished old assumptions about his (and Judaea’s) cultural isolation. Per Bilde’s 1988 monograph, Flavius Josephus between Jerusalem and Rome, was a watershed. This was an original effort to identify the structures, purposes, audiences, and themes of each work. The new interest in Josephus as an author really took off with a 1992 conference in the Tuscan hills, funded by a bequest of Columbia University’s Professor Morton Smith. Virtually all scholars known to be working on Josephus at the time, at all ranks and from around the globe, were invited for what was nevertheless a small conference.22 Although not all of the attendees favoured compositional study of Josephus, the role of that event as a trigger is clear from what followed: unprecedented annual Josephus conferences, which resulted in numerous collected-essay volumes; the opening of the taps in Ph.D. research and a flood of dissertations on ‘Josephus and X’, which gradually became shelves of new monographs; the beginning of a commentary to all of Josephus’ works, from an international team (with Brill, 2000–). These studies, which were scarcely conceivable before the compositional turn represented by Bilde 1988, shared the concern to understand every topic raised by Josephus first as part of his narrative—not looking immediately to external referents as in the old days. One might have imagined that Wiseman would find this new direction in the study of Josephus congenial. Granted that he could not be expected to read much from the gushing stream (who can keep up?), he might have consulted volumes in the commentary series Flavius Josephus: Translation and Commentary (Brill, 2000–). Of those available before about 2010, the overview essay in the first Antiquities volume (2000) and the Life of Josephus (2001) might have provided useful context, while the commentary to the parallel story of Claudius’ accession in Judaean War 2 (2008) might have challenged Wiseman’s impressions of that episode. As for Wiseman’s translation in the new edition, it is still superb. He has managed to produce, from Josephus’ often awkward prose, a readable and flowing text, which nevertheless pays careful attention to word choice. Not much has changed here. Wiseman rewrites 19.103 and a few words following, which describe Gaius’ final movements, before being struck by Chaerea. A change at 19.117 is likewise topographical, describing Chaerea’s movements 22

The proceedings became Parente and Sievers 1994.

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after the deed, though without noticeably changing the sense. As in these passages, at 19.195 and 214 Wiseman replaces ‘palace’ for βασίλειον with (imperial) ‘residence’—to avoid creating the image of a purpose-built palace, as he explains in the notes. Curiously, he keeps ‘one of the palace guard’ at 19.217 for τῶν περὶ τὸ βασίλειόν τις στρατιωτῶν. This change raises a difficult and unexplored methodological question, concerning the roles of historical referents in translation. If Josephus uses βασίλειον 163 times, and otherwise it would be understood to mean ‘palace’ or ‘king’s property’, does it matter—for the meaning Josephus’ audiences could understand—what historical reality underlies the story? A change at 19.212 seems to be for the sake of precision: ‘a Caesar’s death’ rather than the emperor’s, for τῆς Καίσαρος τελευτῆς. The commentary is more obviously updated. Some notes are significantly expanded to include recent research, for example to ‘Pompedius’ at 19.32, on 19.64–9, and to ‘King Agrippa’ at 19.236. I noted above that Wiseman’s reading in Josephus-related research after 1991 seems largely confined to studies of the sources for Antiquities 19. That new research finds mention here. A rare entirely new note, on ‘to kill a tyrant’ at 19.63, illustrates my critique above. Wiseman stresses the importance of the tyrant theme in the Gaius passage, counting occurrences here (only) and tracing the interest to ‘J.’s main source’. He misses the point that the Antiquities thematises tyranny (52 occurrences of the word group), as the greatest constitutional calamity, and uses Gaius as crowning example. Two expanded notes at 19.75 clarify the topography of the Palatine imperial zone in anticipation of the revised appendix, also explaining the translation change from palace to residence. Similar changes related to Palatine topography occur in the notes at 19.90, 103–4, 117, 266. Some readers may find the modest price of the book justified alone by the wholly rewritten Appendix I, on the Augustan Palatine. In a concise and readable way, Wiseman walks through the early imperial development of the site in light of recent archaeology, locating the original houses of Augustus and Tiberius to recreate the scene at the time of Gaius. This may not be indispensable for the foregoing study, but it is a welcome bonus in the new edition. Wiseman’s Death of an Emperor in 1991 was a valuable contribution from a leading classicist willing to venture into a new area and bring to life a neglected, somewhat obscure passage in Josephus. I submit, with undiminished respect for the achievement, that Wiseman may have missed an opportunity to rethink the place of the Gaius narrative in relation to the structures, themes, rhetoric, and intended audiences of the larger script to which it belongs, in Josephus’ magnum opus. Nevertheless, Wiseman’s book remains as valuable as it always was. Students of ancient history in all subdisciplines should be pleased that it is available again, and with a particularly useful update.

Chapter 22

With N. T. (Tom) Wright: Paul the Pharisee and Jews in Exile My first encounter with Tom Wright came when I was getting settled in a tenure-track position at Toronto’s York University. One day a blue aeromail letter arrived in my university mailbox from an address in Oxford. Lacking much of a network as young scholar, I found this exciting, and potentially concerning. Why would N. T. Wright, already a big name, track me down and write out of the blue? Unfolding the thin sheet, I was relieved and gratified to discover that he had not only read with care my 1991 book on Josephus’ Pharisees. He had also read a much more famous 1992 monograph, which mentioned my study in seeming disagreement, in some footnotes. Tom was writing because he was pretty sure that this book had misunderstood or misrepresented my study, so he was seeking confirmation. That a prominent scholar at the world’s most famous university would write to a colonial boy about such a thing told me a lot about the man. Tom and I met a few times at conferences in the following years, and I came to admire him as a scholar of rare diligence and a person of character. These traits have not changed. Our most recent contact occurred when he was giving a distinguished lecture series in the U.K. He wrote, again most improbably and unexpectedly, to ask about one of my more obscure publications, which I thought no one was reading. He was going to mention a point in one of the next lectures, and he wanted to be sure that he had it right. Given that Tom has a vast circle of former students and friends from his many positions and roles in academia as in the church, that he owes me nothing, and that our fields are somewhat different, these efforts gave me a sense of awe at the reach of his scholarship and his humanity. Deep appreciation does not, of course, preclude academic disagreement. The following essay is a response to part of N. T. Wright’s Paul and the Faithfulness of God (2013). It should not be mistaken for a book review. Best practice in that genre requires an initial summary of a whole work, which I cannot attempt here. The book in question is long and enormously complex. I drafted this in preparation for the Society of Biblical Literature’s 2014 Annual Meeting, where the Pauline Soteriology Seminar was going to welcome the new book in a special session. It would be the usual academic welcome: rough handling by a panel, followed by a response from the author and discussion. The Seminar’s

© Steve Mason, 2023 | doi:10.1163/9789004545960_024

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Ephors invited me to probe Wright’s handling of ancient Judaism, which was a foundation for his interpretation of Paul. I first wrote out some thoughts in a barely structured list, responding to particular points, and sent them to Wright in advance. On the day of the panel, I selected a few to present. Iain Torrance then kindly invited me to publish a summary in SJT, which I was happy to do. But the nature and limited space of a journal article required more of a shaped argument than those original ad hoc observations. For this purpose, I pulled forward two topics that seemed important for the book and somewhat manageable: Paul the Shammaite-Zealot, as Wright presents him, and the ‘great narrative’ of an Israel in exile, waiting for something. My questions are those of a historian: Does Wright’s reconstruction approximate a plausible reality two thousand years ago? Answering that question turns on one’s interpretation of evidence and the adequacy of the explanation. We must travel light here. Some readers may well know Wright’s larger project, other parts of which my fellow-panelists addressed. I hope to have included enough from the book to make my responses both fair and clear. More, or fuller documentation, would have required an extra suitcase, which the airline prohibits. 1

Pharisees at the Departure Gate: Paul the Shammaite-Zealot?

Because Paul once refers to some sort of Pharisee connection in his past (Phil 3.5: κατὰ νόμον Φαρισαῖος), Wright not unreasonably begins his investigation of Paul with the Pharisees. He agrees with a common view that pre-70 Pharisees were much concerned with purity. For Wright, however, underlying the purity issues debated by the Pharisees’ heirs in later rabbinic literature was an obscured political question: ‘how to be a loyal Jew faced with pagan oppression from outside and disloyal Jews from within’ (83). The ostensible concern with purity was really ‘a sign and seal of that concern’ about foreign interference. Moreover, ‘In our period, it was the revolutionary wing of the Pharisees who were in the ascendancy … firmly in the driving seat until devastated by the fall of the city and the Temple’ (83), and Saul/Paul ‘was trained in this most strict of Jewish worldviews’ (84). This radical wing, which would be fully realised in the wartime Zealot faction wiped out in 70, was based in what rabbinic literature calls the ‘house of Shammai’. They opposed the accommodations of foreign rule reflexively favoured by the house of Hillel. ‘The deep division among the Pharisees themselves, between the houses of Hillel and Shammai, almost certainly focused on this issue’ of response to gentiles (85, emphasis mine).

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The Pharisees’ zeal was, according to Wright, inspired by the biblical story of Aaron’s grandson Phineas, who ran through Zimri and his Midianite wife after Moses ordered that Israelite chiefs found consorting with Baal-Peor be impaled (Num 25). The Hasmonean patriarch Mattathias, another priest, in whom the author of 1 Maccabees finds Phineatic inspiration for his holy murder (1 Macc 2.23–27), was a more recent model of divinely authorised zeal. The pedigree of pre-war zealotism will be familiar from the work of W. R. Farmer and M. Hengel. Wright finds it in Paul’s references to his own former ζῆλος (Phil 3.6; Gal 1.13). Wright observes, ‘This is what “zeal” was all about. … And “zeal” is precisely the word that Paul uses of his former self’ (85). That is why we must understand Pharisaic-Shammaite zeal if we are to understand Paul’s original mindset. Let us look more closely. Wright says of the purity concerns ubiquitous in rabbinic texts (eating food in priest-like purity, tithing, holy days, family relations): ‘the signs indicate that this is a re-reading of earlier debates which may have been about quite other things’ (85). He does not really explain these compelling signs, or explore the gospels’ evidence for related Pharisaic concerns, which do not seem to touch on foreign rule (Mark 7; Matt 23). Within a couple of sentences, nevertheless, the subjunctive may have has given way to near certainty (85, my emphasis): the principal debate between Hillel and Shammai … is almost certain to have been not about purity … but about how to be a loyal Jew under an alien regime, whether that of Rome … or compromised local regimes like Herod’s. Should one find a way to live and let live? Hillel thought so … Shammai almost certainly thought not. Wright seals the sure foundation with his claim that Paul ‘had almost certainly been on the Shammaite side’ (86, my emphasis), blithely punting Acts’ claim (22.3) that the apostle (-ish) ‘was educated in the ancestral law with precision at the feet of Gamaliel’—a famous Hillelite. Wright’s justification seems to rest on faith: ‘It is inconceivable, frankly, that someone from the more conciliatory wing  … would have taken the trouble to persecute the emerging Christian movement’ (86). Still, he considers his ground secure: ‘it is against that [Shammaite] background that we must imagine all his rethinking and reworking of prayer, thought and life to have taken place’ (86, my emphasis). The near certainty that Wright professes may be consoling to some readers, but it presses a historian’s buttons. Where is he getting this? Wright shores up his picture of Pharisaic principles from the rabbis with other texts that he takes

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to indicate the group, even though they do not appear by name (82–83, 127), as diverse as Philo of Alexandria and the Psalms of Solomon. His portrait of the Pharisees takes me back to possibly happier times, when historians of the Pharisees were certain of many things. Though not old enough to personally recall the controversies of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, I did immerse myself in these for my dissertation in the 1980s, and separately published a summary essay.1 Here is the essence. For long decades, different scholars’ confident knowledge about the Pharisees produced fierce debates with those who were equally sure of very different things. In that period, scholarship was still religiously framed, after the gradual ‘emancipation’ of Europe’s Jews enabled Jewish scholars to challenge long-secure Christian portrayals, which often amounted to slanders. Jewish scholars tended to see the Pharisees as estimable forebears, whereas most Christian scholars (not all) viewed the group through NT lenses, and therefore disparagingly. If they dealt with rabbinic literature, it was most often with gospel strictures ringing in the ears. These debates were suffused with values-questions popular at the time, for example about what was gesund (progressive law, red-blooded nationalism, indomitable courage against foreign predators) or krankhaft (other-worldly escapism, especially, but also any over-fondness for libraries, scrolls, or detached mental worlds) in religious groups. Beneath everything else was a disagreement about sources: the weight given to the gospels, the right disposition for understanding rabbinic literature, and the collision between the irresistible force with which some experts declared Psalms of Solomon, Jubilees, Testament of Moses, or a pre-Qumran Damascus Covenant Pharisaic and the immovable objections of others. Supreme confidence from all sides produced impressive fireworks but little enlightenment. In the less parochial times since the 1970s, with the growth of secular religious studies departments and university-housed Jewish/Judaic studies programmes, we are generally more willing to admit ignorance, with the upside of more widely shared historical principles among scholars of all background: secular or religiously committed, Jewish, Catholic, or Protestant. With the fundamental studies of J. Neusner, E. Rivkin, A. Saldarini, E. P. Sanders, and many others in the 1970s and 1980s, research moved in a much more disciplined, collaborative, and publicly accessible direction. Hallmarks of the new consensus on method were the limitation of admissible evidence for the Pharisees, in the first instance, to texts that mention the group and offer hope of contemporary access (viz., NT 1 Cf. Mason 1993.

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authors, Josephus, and early rabbinic literature), and the increasingly recognised need to understand each text or corpus first for what it is, even if that complicates historical reconstruction.2 We can easily explore the Pharisees of Matthew, Luke-Acts, Josephus, or early rabbinic literature, because they are present before our eyes. We cannot examine the Pharisees of Psalms of Solomon or the Qumran Scrolls because they do not exist (as such). As we progress from interpreting evidence to hypothesising scenarios about the real Pharisees, to be sure, we might well posit that Pharisees had a role in the origin of some Qumran scrolls or that a Pharisee wrote Psalms of Solomon or the Testament of Moses. But that belongs to the realm of historical imagination and not to the interpretation of surviving evidence. To find Pharisees behind such texts, that is, we would need to have control information available. We would need to know that certain traits that appear in our texts were unique to them or at least distinctively characteristic of them. Wright’s use of Philo (Spec. 2.253) for the Pharisees illustrates the problem here. He says: ‘We should be in no doubt that he [Philo] is referring to Pharisees, and moreover to “zealous” ones like Saul of Tarsus’ (83, my emphasis). We should pause here because the Philo passage is important for his view of the Pharisees’ impact: ‘Philo makes it quite clear that a strong part of the Pharisees’ aim was not just to try to influence other, non-Pharisaic, Jews but to put considerable pressure on them to shape up, to approximate to their own high levels of purity.’ Wright can even speak of ‘Philo’s fascinating window on zealous Pharisaic activity’. From his confidence, one might think that Philo had actually mentioned Pharisees, but he does not. Wright’s warrant for finding them in the Special Laws is not entirely clear, but it seems to involve words that Wright considers distinctive of Pharisaic traits. That is not a bad criterion in principle, but the argument then depends on whether the terms are distinctive. In the passage in question, Philo says: ‘Myriads of overseers (ephors), ζηλωταί of the laws, very scrupulous guardians of the ancestral ways, act mercilessly against any action that tends to [the laws’] dissolution’ (μυρίοι γὰρ ἔφοροι, ζηλωταὶ νόμων, φύλακες τῶν πατρίων ἀκριβέστατοι, ἐπὶ καταλύσει τι δρῶσιν ἀμειλίκτως ἔχοντες). To whom is Philo referring? Wright finds Pharisees here because of external parallels with a couple of these words, but he does not explore the cues that Philo himself offers about his meaning for his audiences. As we all know, ζηλ- words in common Greek discourse (outside the LXX) had to do with devotion to or emulation of someone or something admirable, not zeal in its broader English sense including a kind of fanaticism, as in ‘zealot’. Recall Josephus’ happy days as the disciple 2 The clearest example is Neusner and Chilton 2007. See further Chapter 13 above.

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(ζηλωτής) of Bannus (V 11; cf. AJ 20.47; Ap. 1.162). His ζηλωταί, whom he assails for their poor judgement in choosing objects of emulation, gave ‘zealots’ a bad name ever after and in modern languages. The Greek word connoted something admirable, however, as we see with all those philosophers who admired Sparta’s constitution (Plato, Prot. 342e–343b). Josephus and Philo substitute Judaean for Spartan law as the system most admired and emulated by others. NB: Philo’s use of ephor might be a nod to the Spartans, who distinctively entrusted their leadership to Ephors. Philo uses the word 25 times, usually for God or ‘Justice’ as the Overseer who watches human affairs and does not permit evil to go unpunished (Spec. 3.19, 129; 4.200). In our passage the Guardian-Overseers are myriad, but the idea is the same. Given Philo’s clear statement that those who blaspheme will meet the Ephors/guardians’ punishment ‘even if they should escape retribution from humans’ (κἂν διαφύγῃ τὰς ἀπ᾿ ἀνθρώπων τιμωρίας), and given his great latitude for intermediary beings between the ultimate God and humanity, why should we think that these guardian-overseers are human, let alone Pharisees? Philo also uses ζηλ- terminology often, as it happens, typically to contrast worthy (i.e., Mosaic) with unworthy (i.e., Egyptian or vice-ridden) objects of emulation. He has ζῆλος 44, ζηλόω 55, and ζηλωτής 27 times, all cognates of these at least 138 times. In the Special Laws alone he uses ζηλωτής 9 times, the word group 31 times. Moses, he says at the first occurrence, being concerned that ζηλωταί of his matchless laws might be swept away in the stronger current of baser devotions, took care to provide for his followers a lofty conception of God and piety for emulation (1.30, 133; 2.230). Moses’ disciples are not Pharisees. Most people remain, Philo laments, ζηλωταί of lust, dissipation, and evil (2.170, 240). In our passage above, Philo is warning about the iron severity of Moses’ laws. If people casually misuse the divine name in their oaths, he says, even if they escape human punishment there are tens of thousands of Overseers (ephors) and guardians, ζηλωταί of these laws, who will bring retribution. Imagining these ephors/guardians/devotees alone as Pharisees, without any warrants from the text or Philo’s context, seems quite unnecessary for understanding the passage and indeed unhelpful as an explanation of it. Philo’s audiences could have had no clue, as far as we can see, of such a meaning. We cannot pursue this level of detail for every passage Wright discusses. I am trying only to illustrate a methodological problem: the need first to attend to interpreting our evidence, before we build historical hypotheses on it (see Introduction to this volume). What explanatory power do Wright’s proposals have? We move on from Philo’s Pharisees to the pre-70 Pharisaic Houses. Neusner spent much of his astonishing career translating and interpreting the major rabbinic corpora. On a grand, systematic scale he has done what I have hinted

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needs doing with Philo: examining the structure and rhetoric of each text in its own time and circumstances. This procedure will complicate or exclude some old efforts to break loose elements of a text, as though they were free-standing data unburdened by the work that houses them. Already in 1971 Neusner was spelling out some implications of his interpretations of rabbinic literature for historical research on the Pharisees, also concerning the Houses of Hillel and Shammai. His conclusions are worth recalling because they go in the opposite direction from Wright’s (my emphasis):3 The focus of interest of the rabbinic traditions about the Pharisees is the internal affairs of the Pharisaic party itself. The primary partisan issues center upon Shammai’s and his House’s relationship to Hillel and his House. … Essenes and Christians make no appearance at all. … The country’s life and struggle with Rome as a whole are bypassed in silence. What we have, therefore, are the records of the party chiefly in regard to the life of the party itself. … This seems to me the most striking result of the survey. One might see no necessary conflict with Wright, who acknowledged parts of the rabbinic presentation, as apparently inwardly focused, but imagined a different underlying reality, especially before 70. The problem then would be that Neusner took it for granted that the twoHouses model, with its mnemonic formulae of contrast (House-of-Shammai says X, whereas House-of-Hillel says Y), must have been a rabbinic construction in the post-70 Yavnean period. It would not have made sense earlier. Before 70, each group must have had its own reason for existing and must have generated its own legal interpretations on its own bat; it did not exist merely to contradict another group. Legal interpretation in the wild does not produce two isolated houses that live to refute each other in a chorus. Neusner argued that those who favoured the Hillelite tradition, who became ascendant at Yavneh, reified and exploited the schematic two-Houses construction in order to provide a negative foil for their man.4 Shammai’s image of stubborn severity was one result of this: he can also appear as weak, as more stringent than his ‘house’, or even as a deceptive ‘crypto-Hillelite’.5 The artificiality of the rabbis’ Houses construction was clear to Neusner also because of the way Beit-Hillel and Beit-Shammai contend for control of the sacrificial cult, in rabbinic literature,

3 Neusner 1971: 3.240, 304; similarly 227, 234, 248. 4 Neusner 1971: 3.313–17. 5 Neusner 1971: 3.312–19.

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as though the priests who ran it were not even there6—much as high priests disappear from the rabbinic vision of the ‘Sanhedrin’. Neusner’s Bibliographical Reflections included scathing assessments of older scholars’ naïve use of this material, for example: ‘[I]n general, the historical question has been asked too quickly and answered uncritically.’7 Of Heinrich Graetz’s picture of the School of Shammai as historically real, uncompromising rigorists against yielding Hillelites he remarks: ‘This repertoire of lugubrious homilies masquerading as historical facts set the fashion from Graetz’s time onwards.’ He castigates Rabbi Samuel Mendelsohn’s ‘even more gullible approach’, which portrayed Hillelites as ‘peace-loving men, accommodating themselves to circumstances’ and Shammaites as ‘stern and unbending like the originator of their school’, as intensely patriotic, Zealot-like rejectionists of foreign rule.8 Neusner also argued that the concept of Oral Torah from Sinai, which Wright takes to be a central concern of pre-70 Pharisees (176), was thoroughly rabbinic and not likely an available concept among pre-70 Pharisees.9 This is what I mean by sensing déjà vu in reading Wright’s account. Neusner demolished the pre-70 houses of Hillel and Shammai, along with confident beliefs about their positions in relation to Roman rule. If Wright wishes to rebuild them, I respectfully suggest that he needs to explain that he is doing so, on what basis, and where one may secure a permit to join in the construction. To change my clumsy metaphors, Wright is asking us to climb a ladder of propositions: that the two Houses, though mentioned only in the third-century Mishnah and later, were a recognisable pair before 70; that their chief concerns, despite the hundreds of rabbinic comparisons on in-house legal disputes (or the gospels), actually had to do with foreign rule; that Shammaites were radical rejectionists, Hillelites reflexive accommodationists; that Paul, notwithstanding Acts, came up as a Shammaite; and, perhaps most important, that we can only truly understand Paul when we have ascended this ladder of insights. As I try to climb after our genial host, I find even the lowest rung insecure and so cannot go higher. It seems easier to understand rabbinic literature, Philo, Qumran Scrolls, Josephus, and Paul, who never hint at Wright’s apparatus, without it. As for the prospect that Pharisaic ‘zeal’ against foreigners led to war, I would observe that Josephus, who carries no water for Pharisees, gives a very different picture. His account of the war ignores Pharisees altogether—notwithstanding 6 7 8 9

Neusner 1971: 3.314. Neusner 1971: 3.322. Neusner 1971: 3.334, 338. Neusner 1971: 3.163–79.

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Antiquities’ passing mention (18.4) of a Pharisee connected with protests two generations earlier, in 6 CE—and he says nothing of the Houses. His Ζηλωταί, a name he toys with in Philo-like ways (as devotees of the wrong people and values), are a priest-based group anchored in the temple. They are associated initially with the high priest’s son Eleazar ben Ananias, later with one Eleazar b. Simon and John of Gischala (BJ 5.5–7, 12, 21, 99–105, 250–51). That first Eleazar, commandant of the temple, led the rejection of gifts from foreigners in the summer of 66, and his faction massacred the auxiliary garrison. The last we see Pharisees as a group in War, their leaders are vociferously opposing these fateful priest-led moves (BJ 2.409–426, 450–53; V 21–22). One prominent named Pharisee (Simeon b. Gamaliel) and the likely Pharisee Joseph son of Gorion (Josephus does not call him a Pharisee) appear alongside the chief priest Ananus II leading the early coalition (V 189–94; BJ 2.563), which aims to wind down the revolt.10 The apparently Pharisee Gorion family oppose the Zealots and soon die at their hands.11 From Josephus, then, one would gain the impression that the most energetic militants in at least the early phases were associated with priestly groups, perhaps inspired by their ancestors Phineas and Mattathias. None of the main players in the war and siege of Jerusalem—John of Gischala, Simon bar Giora, Idumaeans, Adiabenians—had any known connection with Pharisees. The Pharisee/zeal-against-foreigners/Shammaite school/Paul nexus therefore seems doubtful. 2

A Great Narrative of Exile?

Similar issues arise in relation to our second question: a proposal supported by a kind of proof-texting, without evident concern for the nature, context, coherence, themes, rhetoric, or meaning of texts in situ. Wright seems to justify this eclecticism with the notion of a single great narrative that virtually all ancient Jews inhabited, Pharisees in particular. This was implicit everywhere and occasionally pokes through the surface, geyser-like, even if no significant text lays it out. To borrow a metaphor Wright uses in relation to Paul, the varied Jewish texts are ‘bucketfuls of water drawn from a deep well,’ and he is looking for the well—the allegedly shared worldview—rather than the buckets (29–30).12 In his words, ‘there is every indication that the kind of Jew who 10 11 12

Ananus was reportedly the implacable enemy of the Zealots as well as Simon bar Giora (BJ 2.651–54), eventually falling victim to the former (4.314–25). BJ 2.4.159, 358. Wright uses ‘great narrative’ 19 times, ‘grand narrative’ 5 times (including contrasts with a contrasting grand Roman narrative of imperial salvation, which also seems to me very doubtful). ‘Single’ is implied throughout and occasionally explicit (as on 138–39).

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became a Pharisee was implicitly aware of living in a continuous story going back to Abraham, perhaps even to Adam, and on to the great coming day, and of being called to be an actor within that drama’ (his emphasis), and Paul should also find a place in this ‘great controlling narrative’.13 What is the controlling narrative? Wright conjures a biblical-Jewish story of Israel’s perpetual exile and hope of restoration. He finds this grounded in Deuteronomy 27–30, picked up in the covenantal language of Daniel 9, and embraced by Josephus among others. Thus (140, my emphasis at end): The point  … is the theological awareness of being at a particular stage within the overall continuing narrative, coupled with the exegetical awareness of a large-scale Deuteronomic prophecy being worked out. … The idea of continuing exile is, I believe, part of the “Sanders revolution” in Pauline studies (or second-Temple Jewish studies), but a part that neither Sanders himself, nor Dunn for that matter, ever worked out (though the texts were there to tell them they should). This final remark creates a certain tension, which we cannot explore, between Wright’s insistence that the great narrative is plainly there in our texts and other passages in which he explains that it is more of a metanarrative (114–16). Wherever the line between those should be drawn, we are to understand that the narrative was in a Pharisee’s ‘bloodstream’, and so in recovering it we are touching ‘some central components of the mindset of Saul of Tarsus’ (108). Like the supposedly radical Shammaites, this is a matter of ‘enormous importance’ (150, 175). Wright elaborates (140, his emphasis): Perhaps we can get at the heart of what I am saying like this: that within the continuing narrative which virtually all Jews believed themselves to be living in … a great many second-Temple Jews interpreted that part of the continuing narrative in which they were living in terms of the so-called Deuteronomic scheme of sin-exile-restoration, with themselves somewhere in the middle stage, that of “exile” (which, granted, could itself become quite complicated). Further (146, his emphasis): [Ancient Jews] knew that, despite the geographical “return” in the late sixth century and on to the time of Ezra and Nehemiah in the mid-fifth century 13

E.g., 97. Wright uses ‘controlling narrative/story/metaphor/categories’ dozens of times, arguing also that Paul’s controlling categories came from those of Judaism.

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BC, something they still regarded as “exile” was not yet over. And they were reading their own situation, again and again, within the single flow of national narrative which they found in Deuteronomy 27–30. This combination of Daniel’s revised prophecy  … and the Deuteronomic warning of the curse of exile followed by the blessing of covenant renewal is, I suggest, at the heart of the controlling story within the worldview not only of first-century Pharisees but of a great many other second-Temple Jews as well. Wright acknowledges that many scholars have doubted this, while naming some supporters (146). Not being party to those earlier debates, I can only offer my independent assessment. First, the notion of a controlling narrative seems curious. I first heard the term ‘controlling’, outside personal relationships, when studying with Ben Meyer, who favoured it. Because he understood history as the investigation of problems, which set the terms of inquiry, he often described the questions, assumptions, frameworks, ideas, and biases that shaped an investigation as ‘controlling’. He also spoke of controlling themes, meaning the redactional-compositional motifs that shaped an author’s material. All that I understand. But is control a function of stories, with their meandering plots and endless possibilities of interpretation and subtext? It is one thing to tell the story of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac or Jacob’s tricks against Esau, another to say that the narrative means X or controls Y. Greek authors would frequently cite a line from Homer or a tragedian. Those were canonical works, authoritative, intensively studied, the core deposit of the common cultural fund. But how were they used? Was there a controlling narrative governing their use? It seems not, for each new author was expected to use lines from Homer or the tragedians in ever new and more creative ways, surprising and delighting audiences. Rhetorical training put a premium on this flexibility and creativity. As far as I can see, Judaean writers took a similar approach. Abraham, Moses, Saul, David, and Solomon were not figures with stable or controlling meanings to be learned, as though one should not depart from the official talking points. Philo, Josephus, the pesharists, and the rabbis fashioned ever-new and exciting figures from the canonical repertoire: finding philosophers, exorcists, natural scientists, or examples of masculine virtue in texts that had never made such claims. Since Paul and the evangelists furnish so many examples of the same freedom, I do not quite see how a narrative could have issued propositions, requiring understanding and assent, about a single story of ‘continuing exile’. I cannot see this in or behind our main first-century texts.

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Wright complicates the issue when he accounts for diversity by writing (135, my emphasis): ‘The widely differing ways in which the story was told demonstrates that out of the hundreds of features that were in principle available every writer could pick and choose to present his own points.’ But if there were hundreds of features to choose from, who was in control: the narrative or the later writer? Since reuse of the biblical narratives was not a matter of merely picking and choosing from what is given, but of liberal supplementation and alteration, as we see in Josephus’ biblical paraphrase, where is the control? I sometimes worried that I was taking Wright’s language too literally. But he reasserts this claim in various ways. It is as though, he suggests in one place, ancient Jews pulled a book called ‘My Life’ from the library shelf, saw that they were looking at volume 99 of 100, and realised that they needed to read the earlier volumes to grasp their place in the narrative (p. 116)—not their uniquely individual place but everyone’s place in the story. The Bible ‘presented itself as a single, sprawling, complex but essentially coherent narrative, a narrative still in search of an ending’ (116). The story could even answer specific questions, if generically for all (150, emphasis mine): What then does “exile” mean, in this continuing sense? Answer: the time of the curse spoken of in Deuteronomy and Leviticus, a curse that lasts as long as Israel is “the tail and not the head”, still subject to the rule, and often the abusive treatment, of foreign nations with their blasphemous and wicked idolatry and immorality, not yet in possession of the promised (even if laughably ambitious) global sovereignty. As long, in other words, as the condition of Israel is much like that in Egypt, they will be waiting for the new exodus. It is in trying to nail down this ‘exile’ that problems arise, both general and particular. First the general. On the one hand, as the paradigmatic Phineas episode shows, Israel had been subject to foreign harassment, threat, and/or domination since before the conquest of Canaan, certainly since the Neo-Assyrian period. Even the Hasmonean state lived half of its life (160s to 120s or later) under fading Seleucid rule. If the nation was always in some kind of ‘exile’, even when not in Exile, what force does the term have? Was there a conceivable alternative? On the other hand, against the drift of much recent NT scholarship I would suggest that the first century of Roman hegemony represented Jerusalem’s salad days. Josephus remarks on the city’s unparalleled eudaimonia at this

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time (BJ 1.11). More populous and prosperous than it ever had been or would be again until the late Ottoman period, world-famous Jerusalem dominated Coele-Syria for more than a century and Judaeans punched well above their weight in Roman provincial relations. Their leaders were uniquely close to Rome’s rulers, from Julius Caesar and Marc Antony through Augustus to Claudius. It is true that we do not have comparable evidence for Samarians, Ascalonites, Idumaeans, Egyptians, or Gadarenes, but what we do have (Josephus, Philo, gospels, coins) suggests that the others had nothing like the access of an Agrippa I or II. Judaean minority communities likewise prospered, enjoying significant exemptions (from conscription; permission to send funds to Jerusalem; local protections for their foreign customs). People can always complain, but Judaeans were not in a situation remotely comparable to the Hebrews’ storied slavery in Egypt. And it is hard to find traces of exile-anxiety in first-century texts. Philo and Josephus register fear or outrage at moments of vulnerability, but they write as culturally confident members of an eastern elite. Josephus uses the return from Exile, full of promise and glory, as the pivot of his Antiquities (Books 10–11), giving no hint that exile has somehow continued in Judaean thought. In every society certain subcultures, genres, and periods lend themselves to expressing alienation or social criticism. We do not expect the U.S. Air Force choir to sing Leonard Cohen’s ‘Democracy is coming to the U.S.A.’, or ‘There’ll be the breaking of the ancient western code … phantoms … fires on the road’. Apocalyptic genres and styles, some in verse, continue to voice displacement, grievance, and even vengeance. Perhaps there is something in William James’ pitting ‘world-affirming’ outlooks—Philo, Josephus, and the rabbis—over against the ‘religion of the sick soul’ and the twice-born. However that may be, alienation and grievance were hardly unique to Jews, as the literature of disaffected Egyptians and Alexandrians shows (cf. the Acts of the Alexandrians). Ancient Jewish examples generally lament the success or the loss of Hasmonean power, generations before our period, or the fall of Jerusalem afterwards, not the nature of ordinary life in the intervening century and more.14 Paradoxically, in view of Wright’s case that a pervasive Jewish sense of exile was resolved for Paul in the experience of Messiah (Christ), one might conclude that alienation was programmatically Christian, not Jewish. Was Paul not one of the most dislocated figures of Western history? ‘We who are alive … will be caught up in the clouds … to meet the Lord in the air’, he wrote; ‘Let those who deal with the cosmos be as though they had no dealings with it, for the form of this cosmos is passing away.’ Christ will ‘deliver us from this present 14

From Psalms of Solomon and some Qumran texts to 4 Ezra and 2 Baruch.

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wretched aeon’. I pray ‘that you might remain utterly pure and blameless for the day of Christ’, for ‘our politeuma is in the heavens, from where we are awaiting a saviour.’ Exile seems more characteristic of the stream that issued from Paul, because of the sharper dualisms engraved in these Christian texts, than in Judaean texts. A discourse of dislocation runs from Paul, Hebrews, the synoptic apocalyptic discourses, and Revelation via Augustine’s City of God all the way to modern spirituals (‘Going home’; ‘This world is not my home’; ‘crossing the Jordan’). Christ-followers were unavoidably in suspense as they awaited Christ’s return (cf. Justin, Dial. 32), many of them fundamentally at odds with the polis life that made the rest of the world work. Granted that some Jews may have yearned at times for an anointed figure to install an other-worldly kingdom, many others (Philo, Josephus, rabbis) fully engaged high culture where they lived and celebrated the success of Torah among the world’s constitutions. I agree with Wright that not everything people believe is explicit in their texts. Authors rely on audience knowledge (hence irony and satire) and the shared values of a larger discourse (langue) to communicate. E. P. Sanders elucidated ‘covenantal nomism’ as a pattern of thought beneath the texts, not so much in them. But there are notable differences in Wright’s project of recovering the great narrative. Sanders devoted whole chapters to his main texts. This allowed him to explore many passages from a single work and make a plausible case for its atmosphere and assumptions. Second, he was asking about what the texts logically presupposed. They might not explicitly discuss the need to observe ‘covenant’ or offer sacrifice, but if they discuss how one ought to do these things, they are presupposing covenantal (including sacrificial) obligations.15 Third, what Sanders found by this method was not a controlling narrative but a shared core of tenets or commitments: a ‘pattern of religion’ in his terms. Wright’s great narrative does not seem to me derivable either from what the texts actually say or from what they presuppose. Here is an example of his method in connection with Josephus (181, emphasis mine): When Josephus describes the Pharisees as believing in “synergism”, over against the Sadducees who believed in “free will” and the Essenes who believed in “determinism”, the strong probability, I believe, is that this is Josephus’s translation of political reality into apparently harmless philosophical categories. The powerful, aristocratic Sadducees believed that they could do whatever they liked; the disempowered Essenes believed that they simply had to wait for God to act; the Pharisees believed that 15

Sanders 1977: e.g., 80–82, 149–50, 182, 223, 299, 330, 339, 421.

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they were required to work towards bringing God’s kingdom. … Those are the three-dimensional versions of the two-dimensional analysis Josephus presents for the benefit of his non-Jewish readers. Just as he finds political positions in the rabbis’ detailed statements about purity, here he finds them in what Josephus calls the schools’ philosophical distinctions. Although Wright seems confident (‘strong probability’), he does not even say which passage in Josephus, of three that describe the schools (plus V 10–12), he has in view. The ‘synergy’ he connects with Pharisees could apply to BJ 2.162–66 or AJ 18.12–22, but the former does not include Essenes and the latter describes only Pharisees on fate and free will. So perhaps he means the other passage, AJ 13.171–73, which is the only one that places all three schools on a single fate/free will spectrum. But that passage does not ascribe synergy to the Pharisees as the War 2 passage does. There, in a much simpler scheme, Essenes attribute everything, Sadducees nothing, and Pharisees some things but not all to fate. This distinction between what Pharisees ascribe to fate and what they leave to human will is the opposite of ‘synergy’—fate and free will working together in the same events. Neither the half-half nor the cooperation scheme is very revealing, in any case, though such a crude sketch resembles passages in Cicero (Fat. 39; Nat. d. 1.2) and Tacitus (Ann. 6.22) on philosophical debates of their time, which are indeed just philosophical debates. Further, Wright’s political explanation could not work for BJ 2.119–66, which Josephus presents as his definitive statement about the three schools (cf. AJ 13.173, 298; 18.11). That passage is almost entirely a glowing exploration of the Essenes. Hardly ‘disempowered’, they are his absolute stars, displaying the traits of self-mastery and contempt for death that characterise the whole nation later in War and Against Apion. Essene pre-eminence leaves only a little see-saw description of the other two schools at the end (2.162–64): the Pharisees leap up and shout ‘Oh yes it is!’ to fate and the soul; Sadducees rise in turn to yell ‘Oh no it isn’t!’ In the third passage, Josephus insists that Sadducees were not free to do as they wished, being hamstrung by overwhelming popular support for the Pharisees (AJ 18.15, 17; cf. 13.298). The problem is not only, then, that no ancient reader could have found what Wright considers ‘strongly probable’ in AJ 13.171–73, if that is the passage he has in mind. We have reason to doubt that Josephus imagined any such notions either. Where could these truths lie, if not in the minds of ancient author or audience? But Wright sees Josephus as an important post-70 witness to the (meta)narrative of exile (129, my emphasis):

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For our present purposes the main thing is that he [Josephus] is interpreting his own time in the light of the huge, sprawling narrative of Israel’s long and chequered career. That he sees the whole thing in terms of a long story reaching a paradoxical resolution (perhaps not yet a conclusion) there should be no doubt. I conclude by considering two passages in Josephus that Wright treats as geysers, or loci where the metanarrative breaks through the surface. My point is not that my interpretations are better than his. My impressions are provisional. They have changed and will change again. There is no reason that Wright should know, let alone agree with, my views. The question for this response is about how well his reading of the great (meta)narrative in Josephus, mutatis mutandis in other texts, explains what is actually there—what we can see and what ancient audiences might have understood Josephus to mean. If the perception of a general exile-feeling does not help to explain the surviving texts, what does it explain? My examples are from War 5 and 6, respectively. 1. The first is one of War’s seven or eight set speeches (depending on how one counts), and one of two or three delivered by Josephus’ character (5.360–423; cf. 3.362–82; 6.99–110). Although each oration uniquely suits its occasion and speaker, they all play with common themes and rhetorical devices.16 In this case the scene is Titus’ capture of Jerusalem’s second wall. As he ponders taking the temple stronghold, Titus pauses to have Josephus address those still besieged, urging them to surrender. As in some of the other cases, the speaker first tries a direct and brief appeal. This one comes in coldly realist, Thucydidean (not biblical) terms: the Romans are too strong and obviously have fortune/luck/chance (τύχη) on their side (5.367). Since it is a law of nature that the weaker must yield to the stronger, you need to surrender! Only ‘when he could not persuade them with plain counsel,’ Josephus remarks of his own character in the story, did he reluctantly turn to the statesman’s last resort: high-powered rhetoric (5.375: ὁ δ᾿ ὡς ταῖς φανεραῖς οὐκ ἔπειθε συμβουλίαις, ἐπὶ τὰς ὁμοφύλους μετέβαινεν ἱστορίας). His debating-school thesis now was that the national past actually reveals a tradition of pacifism (5.390, 399). Who knew? This is pure nonsense, of course. Josephus elsewhere takes much pride Israel’s military successes, even turning Moses and himself into great generals; for martial prowess was central to ancient concepts of virtus/ἀρετή. He usually celebrates this aspect of the national character, not least the Hasmonean 16

E.g., Runnalls 1997.

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conquests that made his greatest hero Hyrcanus I so memorable. In the present speech, however, even the Hasmoneans, whose exploits lay the foundation of the work, must appear as failures because they rose against Antiochus IV in arms (5.394). The speech is a tour de force. Wright discusses neither this context nor War’s speeches in general, observing only that Josephus ‘is well able to adapt Israel’s history for his own purposes’ (129). True, but for what purposes? Surprisingly, Wright expresses surprise (‘one might have expected’) that Josephus did not encourage the besieged to patiently await divine deliverance. But why would he have done that, when he was under Titus’ direct order to urge surrender, and when he portrays only tyrant demagogues as offering the people false assurances? Despite all contextual indicators, Wright finds here ‘still the great story of Israel coming at last to a long-delayed climax, albeit a terrible and tragic one’ (129). I would suggest that the speech represents very nearly the opposite of a shared, familiar narrative. Josephus presents it as his markable craftsmanship, which he produced ad hoc when his heartfelt arguments were disdained by the besieged. Moreover, his five examples of successful pacifism and four of failed militancy are discrete examples (τοῦτο μέν … τοῦτο δ᾿ … καὶ τί δεῖ τἆλλα λέγειν; … οὕτως) serving the probatio of his argument. His success as an orator depends on decontextualisation and misdirection. These distinct proofs have the same function as Agrippa’s earlier seriatim citation of Britain, Spain, Egypt, and Greece to prove that formerly great nations live happily under Roman rule (2.346–404)—also nonsense—and Eleazar’s proofs (τεκμήρια) from sleep and Indian self-immolation of the absurd proposition that soul and body are happiest apart (7.341–88). In the case of this speech, because the theme is national honour, Josephus conjures up proofs that will move his hearers, giving some carefully selected stories from Israel’s past a radical new twist. And he has some success in eliciting the surrender of the tractable (5.420–22). As for Wright’s perception of the ‘great story of Israel coming at last to a long-delayed climax’ in Josephus, our ancient priest considered the fall of Jerusalem a disaster (συμφορά) and not the climax to some long exile. As we have seen, Josephus thought that before the war Jerusalem had ‘attained a higher degree of prosperity/success/happiness (εὐδαιμονία) than any [polis] under the Romans’. The catastrophe of 70 was an abrupt reversal of τύχη—a Polybian, not biblical concept that pervades War17—caused by the despicable tyrants (a Greek category) who had occupied Jerusalem and dispossessed its proper leaders. A narrative of long exile is not merely absent; it would not fit with Josephus’ language or emphases. 17

Cognates appear about 90 times in War, programmatically in the proem (1.11–12, 28).

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2. While conceding that an exile narrative is hard to find in the rather sanguine and world-affirming Philo, Wright proposes (116–17, his emphasis): But read Josephus, and it becomes clear: here are the revolutionaries, he says, who are doing what they are doing because of an oracle in their scriptures according to which at that time deliverance would come to Israel. As I argued before, the only oracle which makes sense  … is the book of Daniel. And Daniel is precisely all about a story … [in which one like a son of man] will bring about the real return from exile. Wright is referring to Josephus’ remark at BJ 6.312–13 about an ancient oracle. He takes this to be Josephus’ explanation of the war’s motives (293, his emphasis): [I]t is through a single comment that he makes on the Jewish zeal for war … that we see how the prophetic narrative of the Book of Daniel was being read at the time. What drove them to war, he said, was a biblical oracle which said that at that time a world ruler would arise from Judaea. Contextual reading of Josephus, however, again throws up formidable obstacles. Josephus’ reference to this oracle is one small part of a lengthy digression (6.288–315). The narrative has reached its climax as the temple is ablaze. After describing a heinous example of the tyrants’ misuse of so-called prophets, he stops to reflect on this enormity. He lashes out at Simon, Eleazar, and John, his tyrants, for having caused the deaths of so many, especially women and children, by deceiving them with fraudulent promises of salvation. To stem desertion, he alleges, they cynically enlisted fake prophets. In the worst case, the one that prompts the digression, these charlatans called the people to the temple court, promising that on that day they would receive signs of deliverance (6.285–86). But the people all died in the crush. This leads Josephus to digress on the human capacity for self-delusion, as people interpret in their favour signs that in fact indicate their doom (BJ 6.287–88). He offers seven examples of such signs, from the years before the revolt: a cow giving birth to a lamb, heavenly armies clashing, massive gates in the temple opening by themselves. While listing the signs, Josephus reiterates that the deluded common folk saw only good omens in them, while the few learned (the λόγιοι) realised that they portended catastrophe (6.291, 295). After listing the seven prodigies, he says that God provides every possible indication of the future, for the people’s safety, and yet they stubbornly misread the divine signals (6.310).

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Josephus now illustrates this point by mentioning two allegedly misread ‘oracles’. The first was plainly written (ἀναγεγραμμένον ἐν τοῖς λογίοις), and stated that the polis and sanctuary would be taken whenever the temple compound became square. Judaeans unwittingly created precisely this geometry when they (he does not mention the Roman contribution!) destroyed the Antonia fortress earlier in the story (6.311). Whether any Judaeans had the foggiest notion of such an oracle Josephus does not actually say. Since no one has ever found it in scripture, we are free to doubt that anyone else knew of it. In its present form, this information for his literary audience in Rome confirms the author’s claim to expertise in Oriental arcana. What lay behind his claim is anyone’s guess. The second misunderstood oracle Josephus describes as ambiguous (χρησμὸς ἀμφίβολος), unlike the first one. The sacred writings indicate that ‘at that time someone from their territory would rule the inhabited earth’ (κατὰ τὸν καιρὸν ἐκεῖνον ἀπὸ τῆς χώρας αὐτῶν τις ἄρξει τῆς οἰκουμένης)—οἰκουμένη being a term he uses elsewhere for the sphere of Rome’s imperium.18 Whereas common Judaeans, and in this case even many ‘wise’ persons, took the saying to indicate that one of their own people would some day rise to world rule (6.313), a conviction that supposedly gave them confidence for war (τὸ δ᾿ ἐπᾶραν αὐτοὺς μάλιστα πρὸς τὸν πόλεμον), Josephus—nearly alone among his contemporaries, gifted as he was—understood the true referent to be Vespasian, whom Josephus (NB: not the Flavians) has presented as receiving his imperial acclamation in coastal Caesarea, the East.19 He concludes the whole digression with a recap: If the Judaeans did not ignore all these ominous indications and divine warnings, they misinterpreted them to suit themselves (6.314–15). This last oracle is the one that Wright seizes upon and traces to the ‘great narrative’ via Daniel. Five considerations make it difficult to see this putative oracle as evidence of a widely understood narrative, especially one that actually led the Jews to war with Rome. (i) It is an oracle: a definitive, one-time, usually ecstatic utterance by a prophet or seer (BJ 4.386). This is a term normally used by Josephus of phenomena among non-Jews (AJ 2.241; 9.289; Ap. 1.307–12). Oracular utterances may motivate action, but they do not sit easily with Wright’s notion of a great and clear guiding narrative. Decisive events in the Greek past had occurred because 18 19

BJ 1.355, 633; 2.360, 362–64, 372, 378, 382, 398, 580; 3.29, 473, 480 etc. Vespasian backdated his accession to 1 July, 69, when the legions of Egypt acclaimed him (Suetonius, Vesp. 6.3; Tacitus, Hist. 2.79). Josephus insists that he was first acclaimed in Caesarea, and that Vespasian strategically arranged Egyptian support (BJ 4.602–21), rather ruining the Flavian story.

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of oracular utterances by the inspired seers of Delphi, Thebes, and other sites. Many such oracles were straightforward, but ambiguity was more typical and a standard feature of oracles. Most famously, Croesus of Lydia failed to ponder whose empire would be destroyed, as the Pythia had foretold, if he attacked Persia (Herodotus 1.53–54). A figure of some interest to Josephus, Croesus had become the paradigm of hubristic men who assumed that oracles were in their favour, which is Josephus’ point here and something his audience in Rome would well understand.20 The Croesus model works here: Judaeans assumed that an ambiguous oracle was all about them, and proceeded to war on that basis, but (surprise!) it was really about Vespasian. Where is the great biblical narrative here? Granted the mysterious Urim and Thummim, the medium of Endor, and rare prophetic responsa at moments in the distant past, oracles of this kind were not a feature of the biblical covenant. (ii) The appeal of such a remark to Josephus’ Greek and Roman audiences is proven by other writers’ apparent borrowing of this item, and little else, from Josephus. It suited a Roman perspective to see the Judaeans as crazed, superstitious Middle-Easterners who foolishly rose up against Rome because of some nutty religious impulse, when they misunderstood an oracle that could only have signified Vespasian. They joined the ranks of excitable losers in the Croesus tradition. The Flavian triumph, we see from multiple survivals, pictured the entire nation (gens) in revolt and justly defeated (Chapter 5 above). Suetonius mentions a widespread eastern belief that a new ruler would come from Judaea at that time (eo tempore Iudaea profecti rerum potirentur), a foolish belief that prompted Judaeans to kill their governor and begin the war (Vesp. 4.5). Tacitus takes much the same line, though he borrows more of Josephus’ omens and includes enough of the actual events to make the scheme problematic (Hist. 5.10). Still, he closely mirrors Josephus’ language about ambiguous oracles (ambages), which were misunderstood by a superstitionriddled gens hostile to true cultic remedies (5.13: gens superstitioni obnoxia, religionibus adversa). Incidentally, these passages in Suetonius and Tacitus prove that it was possible for an author to mention oracles and be believed with neither author nor audience knowing or caring about what lay behind it. This should remind us that Josephus, too, was quite free to mention such an oracle without having anything clearly in mind. (iii) Josephus writes his War to undermine such Roman misunderstanding and denigration of the Judaeans as a foolish nation (1.1–8). His vivid portraits of ethnic strife, procuratorial provocations, and responses to violence, presented with nuance and subtlety in rapidly changing conditions, show that 20

Compare BJ 5.461 with Herodotus 1.32.7.

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Judaean statesmen such as himself are as good as any in the empire, but were faced with a kind of tyrant-led civil strife (stasis) that Romans know all too well from recent years. They are not so different. This moralising tidbit on misunderstood signs and oracles, which turns up near the end of his narrative in a rant against the tyrants, does not displace his detailed account, in Books 2 through 5, of how the war actually began and unfolded. That story does not agree with Suetonius’ claim that the Judaeans revolted because of a misunderstood oracle. Josephus could hardly have recounted the long-simmering strife that blew up in Caesarea, or the mounting desperation in the face of the auxiliary cohorts’ violence, and added: ‘Oh, and the people were prompted by the great narrative of Deuteronomy and a passage in Daniel.’ There is no room for such theological abstractions as motives in the events that caused Cestius’ and then Vespasian’s interventions. And are we to imagine that when Judaeans reacted with indignation to the abuse of the auxiliary or the insults of neighbours in Caesarea or Scythopolis, they were motivated by a notion that one of their own would soon rule over the oikoumenē, on the basis of some ambiguous text that has never been found? If one objects, ‘But he says that this oracle raised up the people for war’, I would reply: ‘Yes, he does’—and then caution against mechanical readings that take no account of context, narrative rhythms, or rhetorical devices. Josephus offers many foundations for the war and many causes of ruin, which cannot be systematically reconciled.21 Consider V 41, where he calls Justus of Tiberias with his brother ‘the cause of almost complete ruin (καταστροφή)’. Justus does not even appear in War, and Josephus never even names his brother or explains how the men should have effected near ‘ruin’. He makes the remark, undoubtedly, but so what? It is part of his animus against Justus, and it goes nowhere. No scholar has ever said ‘Aha! Justus of Tiberias was the real cause of the Judaean War.’ His remark about the misconstrued oracle is another late, passing reflection, in a passage of anti-tyrant venom. It has no function or explanatory traction in his detailed account of the war’s origins. (iv) This is not the only oracle or sign Josephus mentions, as we have seen, and the others are so vague or imaginary (no one supposes that a cow really gave birth to a lamb) as to be untraceable. Why choose this one alone, and insist that it points to the great narrative and Daniel, when Josephus mentions nothing of the kind? We have noted the paired oracle about squaring the temenos. War uses χρησμός (‘oracle’) in two other places, both times to accuse the tyrants of blindness. In 4.386–88 he describes those who murder Ananus II and Jesus as trampling human laws, laughing at divine law, and 21

E.g., BJ 2.284, 409, 413; 4.318–25; AJ 18.9–10; 20.166, 181, 210, 214, 218.

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ridiculing prophetic oracles as mere beggars’ babblings. Josephus appears to have a wide range of well-known biblical promises in view (attending on virtue or vice)—not a narrative—for his general point. But then he mentions a particular ancient saying (παλαιὸς λόγος), that ‘the city would be captured and the holiest place would be burned down by the law of war if one should embark on civil war (στάσις) and native hands should pollute the sacred precinct of God’ (4.388). He seems to have related thoughts (passages?) in mind at 6.109, in a brief speech to the tyrants: ‘Who did not know what was written up in the ancient prophets, and especially the oracle about to be realised now in this miserable city (τῇ τλήμονι πόλει): that they foretold its capture when someone would resort to compatriot murder?’ So, on the one hand, Josephus’ ‘oracles’ are clear biblical predictions of reward for virtue and punishment for vice, which everyone knows (e.g., AJ 4.313). On the other hand, he occasionally gilds the lily by mentioning supposedly precise predictions that no one has been able to find in the Bible and which tend to sound rather Greek: concerning political στάσις and tragic pollution marked by compatriot bloodshed—the tragic mood signalled by a word such as τλήμων.22 Again, why should we should take BJ 6.312, alone and out of context, described as a misconstrued oracle (not a clear biblical expectation), to indicate a scriptural story so clear and widely shared that it led people to war? Josephus’ contrast between his own esoteric knowledge and the folly of others who misunderstood signs does not make this a promising argument. (v) None of this is to deny Josephus’ interest in Daniel. He was clearly invested in scripture generally and—innocent of Porphyry’s proof that the author predicted ex eventu23—viewed Daniel’s predictions as clear evidence of scripture’s divine origin (AJ 10.266–67). He rejuvenated the fourth kingdom of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream as iron only, so that Rome could fit the role (AJ 10.205–10, 276), and he might well have come to see the tenth horn of the fourth beast in Daniel 7 as Vespasian—with Caesar as first horn—after Vespasian’s rise in 69. Why not? But since that fourth kingdom would be pulverised (he intensifies Daniel’s language) by a stone, and the horns of the fourth beast would be utterly destroyed by a human-like figure granted eternal dominion, no half-awake reader could have confused the fourth kingdom with the stone, or the tenth horn with the figure like a man. These passages are therefore unlikely sources of oracle confusion. It is much easier to suppose that Josephus makes up the oracles (as so much else) as he goes along. A more 22 23

Of only 752 occurrences in 10,000+ TLG texts, 187 are from Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles. In Jerome, Comm. Dan. praef. et passim.

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general observation is that the bilingual and multi-genre book of Daniel, if we consider the great variety of its later uses, seems a particularly unstable candidate for repository of the great narrative. 3

Conclusion

This fourth volume in N. T. Wright’s great synthesis of Christian Origins is another stunner. It shows again a prodigious intellect indefatigably processing oceans of primary text and scholarly literature, and it has found a large and appreciative audience. I was invited to probe its treatment of ancient Judaism. Focusing on aspects of Paul’s Pharisaic background and the controlling narrative of exile that Wright posits for ancient Jews generally, I hope to have shown why these parts of the foundation seem to me insecure. Historians imagine the scenarios that produced our surviving evidence. My critique lies precisely there: in finding it difficult to see how the ancient situations and outlooks described by Wright would explain Philo, Josephus, or rabbinic literature, if those are interpreted contextually.

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Index of Ancient Texts Some footnotes in this book include strings of references, for example on the usage of a word. Since it is hard to imagine the reader who would, after going to the trouble of seeking out a reference to Diodorus or Dionysius, be helped by such a list, this index registers only passages that receive discussion or belong to a short list of examples. Given that indices exist to help readers find things, it uses traditional categories (e.g., biblical, post-biblical, Christian, Greek, Latin), despite the historical problems that some of these create. Philo and Josephus, both because they share much that distinguishes them from other postbiblical literature and because they are the most frequently cited texts, have a section of their own. Since Josephus references outpace the number of pages by some distance, in his case the principle of indexing only discussed passages is all the more important. Finally, given that users are most likely to know English titles of ancient texts, where these are familiar, the index uses these, even though the book usually cites Latin abbreviations in the normal way, for concision. Thus, a reference such as ‘Lucian, Hist. conscr. nn’ in the book is listed under ‘Lucian, How History Should be Written.’ Once the reader has found the desired page or note, the reference should be easy to see. Where the ancient texts lack familiar English titles (e.g., for Aelius Herodian or Galen), or the texts are so widely used that varied English translations may obscure the original (e.g., Cicero), the Latin or Greek title is used.

Bible: Hebrew and Greek-Septuagint (‘Old Testament’ order) Genesis 1.26 307 14.18–20 245 35.14 243 Exodus 19.5–6 35 Numbers 25

35, 604

Deuteronomy 613, 622 7.3–4 35 19.15 165, 560 21.18–21 48, 331 27–30 611–12 27.26 412 30.4 18.11 Joshua 1–6 241 Judges

151, 241

1 and 2 Samuel

151

1 Kings 17 237 2 Kings 231, 238–39, 245 2 37 2.15 245 2.19–22 231 Ezra 611 9.1–10.11 35 Nehemiah 611 30.31 194n22 Proverbs 25.20 194n22 Isaiah 1.12–20 384 9.5–63 61 Jeremiah 205, 211, 234, 241, 471, 533–34 9.23 433n52

663

Index of Ancient Texts Lamentations 3.41 243n21 Daniel 105, 146, 151, 152, 533– 34, 619–20, 622–24 7 622 9 611

Judith

146, 151

Jubilees

146, 313, 605

Testament of Moses 605–606 Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs 151, 218

Qumran Scrolls

Psalms of Solomon

Damascus Covenant (CD) 309, 313, 561–62, 605

Wisdom of Solomon 217–18, 424, 483 2.19 217 12–15 129n68

Community Rule (1QS) 291–93, 305n128, 309, 561n43 6–7 267n3, 282, 477, 560

313, 605–606

4 Ezra

146

2 Baruch

146

Temple Scroll (11QT) 267n2

Sibylline Oracles

146

Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha

Apocalypse of Abraham 146

1 Enoch

146, 151

1 Maccabees 6, 148, 150–52, 160, 414 2.1–5 396 2.23–27 604 2 Maccabees 34–35, 147, 150–52, 217, 414–17, 421 2.23–32 145 4.13 34 12.8 25 14.3 34n5 14.38 34n5 4 Maccabees 147, 187, 194–96, 200, 414, 416, 483 1.1–2, 7, 13 150 1.7–8 195 3.19–20 145 4.23 416 17.7 145, 148 Ben Sira

313

Rabbinic Literature Mishnah Avot

17, 609

146 1.14 254 2.16 558

Sanhedrin 8.1–4

48, 331

Sheviit 6.1 17n10 Hallah 4.8 17n10 Gittin

1.2 17n10

Bava Qamma 7.7 17n10

664

Index of Ancient Texts

Babylonian Talmud Berakhot 19a 244n23 55b 239 Taanit

19a 244n23 23a 244n23

Philo of Alexandria and Flavius Josephus Philo 5, 7–8, 15, 18n11, 29, 51–52, 152, 217–18, 248, 266, 268–74, 287–90, 300, 302, 306–10, 373–78, 410, 414, 533, 560–63, 619,624 Against Flaccus (In Flaccum) 25–29 268n5 168 216 Allegorical Interpretation (Legum allegoriae) 3.194 217 3.211 216 Apology (= Defence of the Judaeans or Hypothetica) 272–274 Excerpted in Eusebius, Dem. ev. 8.11 above Embassy to Gaius (Legatio ad Gaium) 39 273n19 79 268n7 161 273n19 178 273n19 188–348 268 200 25 201–206 26 297 47n20 349 152 On Abraham (De Abrahamo) 30 300n108 133 271 On Dreams (De somniis) 1.52 152 1.205 152 On Drunkenness (De ebrietate) 82 272n17 177 268n7 213 376

On Flight and Finding (de fuga et inventione) 187 272n17 On Husbandry (De agricultura) 35 268n7 91 272n17 113 268n7 On Joining with the Preliminary Studies (De congressu eruditionis gratia) 15 152 24 272n17 44 152 131 273n19 180 272n17 On Joseph (De Iosepho) 217 216 230 272n17 On Noah’s Work as Planter (De plantatione) 145 272n17 151 479 On Providence (De providentia) 2.64 472 On Rewards and Punishments (De praemiis et poenis) 5 272n17 152 43 On Sobriety (De sobrietate) 6 216 65 272n17 On the Change of Names (De mutatione nomimum) 210 376 On the Cherubim (De cherubim) 105 152 On the Confusion of Languages (De confusione linguarum) 91 273n19 164 216 On the Contemplative Life (De vita contemplativa) 1 272, 479 2 306n129 11 272 12 272 21 479n66 29 479 On the Creation of the World (De opificio mundi) 78 268n7

Index of Ancient Texts On the Life of Moses (De vita Mosis) 1.34–36 171 1.48 272n17 1.218 376 2.46 152 2.57 272n17 On the Migration of Abraham (De migratione Abrahami) 27 272n17 90 424 163 272n17 167 272n17 On the Sacrifices of Abel and Cain (De sacrifiis Abelis et Caini) 78 152 On the Special Laws (De specialibus legibus) 1.30 607 1.67 375 1.133 607 1.443 216 2.148 271n16 2.170 607 2.196 375 2.230 607 2.240 607 2.253 606 3.19 607 3.96 271n16 3.129 607 4.179 43 4.200 607 On the Virtues (De virtutibus) 51 271 81–181 271 102 42–43 102–103 422 221 271 That Every Good Person is Free (Quod omnis probus liber sit) 23 269 30 300n108 40 269 45 269 63–65 269 75 269, 563 75–91 269–71, 326n38, 479n66 76 279

665 91 563 111 273n19 117 269 135 272n17 That God is Unchangeable (Quod Deus sit immutabilis) 96 272n17 Who is the Heir of Divine Things? (Quis rerum divinarum heres sit?) 123 273n19 Josephus (works in chronological order) Judaean War (Bellum Judaicum) 1.1–3 154, 207, 322 1.1–8 54, 80, 99, 345, 450, 454, 516, 563 1.1–12 55, 311, 569 1.1–30 118 1.2 147, 155, 481 1.3 55, 493, 599 1.4 201 1.6 55, 493 1.7–8 147, 322, 567, 599 1.9 187 1.9–12 96–97, 118, 120, 155, 173, 205, 213, 322–23, 345, 347, 566, 614 1.13 155, 493 1.13–16 147, 155, 488 1.17 154, 233, 563 1.18 155, 159, 321 1.19–20 253, 322 1.22 187 1.25–27 213 1.27–28 97, 567 1.31 213 1.33 138 1.34–35 200, 322 1.38 114, 253 1.48 114, 253 1.67–68 323 1.68–69 535 1.78 304 1.79 181 1.98 25 1.107–109 323, 332 1.110–13 304, 323–24, 326, 482–83

666 Judaean War (Bellum Judaicum) (cont.) 1.121 201, 202 1.127–58 116 1.138 236 1.152–53 136 1.155–57 22n28, 25 1.157–58 116 1.166 25 1.167 25 1.327–57 116 1.328 201 1.354–56 116 1.357 128 1.361 236 1.377 201 1.408–15 26 1.422–28 259 1.431 201, 253 1.656–57 201 1.665 253 1.671 128 2.1–110 254 2.111 262 2.19 116 2.93–100 262 2.117–18 111, 116, 167, 458, 504 2.119 481 2.119–61 296–300, 389, 560 2.119–66 210, 321, 476, 616 2.128 39n13 2.130 208 2.136 249 2.151 39n13 2.151–66 244 2.154–58 402 2.158 325, 341, 561 2.159 249 2.160–61 307, 561, 564 2.162–66 326–28, 480, 482–83, 616 2.170–74 300 2.185–87 116 2.189–91 246 2.195–97 300 2.204 75 2.204–14 592, 598 2.224–37 174 2.233 202

Index of Ancient Texts 2.239–44 116, 174 2.239–79 116 2.245 174 2.254–57 175 2.259 471 2.266–70 120, 184, 264 2.271 175 2.277–78 176–77 2.280–83 177 2.284 26, 184, 264 2.285 345 2.291–92 169 2.293 169, 177 2.320 202 2.342–44 46 2.345–401 210–11 2.406 162 2.408 46 2.409–17 45–46 2.411 203 2.418–21 46 2.433 46, 458 2.450–55 27, 87, 203 2.457 120, 169, 182 2.458–80 162 2.459 350 2.463 164 2.466–76 27, 423 2.476 208 2.487–88 52 2.491–663 54 2.499–502 117, 162 2.504–508 363 2.510–13 28 2.521 139 2.531–34 357 2.532 203 2.533–54 119 2.540 357 2.556 510 2.567 304 2.568 350 2.585–87 350 2.606 590 2.611–13 87 2.625 352 2.632 352 2.649 510

667

Index of Ancient Texts Judaean War (Bellum Judaicum) (cont.) 2.650–51 221 2.652–54 20n24, 139, 359 3.1–8 56, 116 3.3–5 86 3.7 116 3.29–30 56 3.51–55 19 3.56 25 3.59–69 56 3.65 56 3.70–109 55, 104 3.108–109 156, 493 3.127–34 56–57 3.130–42 364 3.141–43 57 3.193–202 57 3.236–37 87 3.238 92 3.310–14 57 3.345–50 354 3.352–53 72, 495 3.362–82 210–11 3.397 354 3.400 134 3.443–44 353 3.445 135 3.462–531 88 3.481 203 3.497–502 135 3.505 135 3.522–31 135 4.4–83 93 4.17–38 94, 132–33 4.40–48 227, 389 4.54–61 94 4.65–69 134 4.70–71 94 4.81–83 134 4.84 94, 353, 510 4.86 353 4.87–90 90, 94 4.92–102 356 4.103 356 4.104 96 4.105 350 4.107–11 356 4.112–16 96

4.118–34 96 4.121–27 355–58 4.123–28 357 4.130–50 456 4.133–37 215 4.138–46 215 4.162–93 210–29, 389 4.195 224 4.177 218 4.228 358 4.233–82 421 4.239–69 227 4.249 350 4.270 228 4.272–82 227 4.300–333 297 4.314–25 218 4.320–21 221 4.384 208 4.386 620 4.389–97 96 4.412 358 4.459–65 230–50 4.488–90 363 4.492–603 68 4.497–98 74, 358 4.501–503 68, 74 4.503–504 139, 359 4.507–509 360–61, 590 4.511 139 4.538–84 348 4.545–46 66, 68 4.573–76 139, 364 4.577 359 4.586–87 70 4.588 71 4.589–91 65, 74, 205 4.592–600 75 4.597 90 4.601 75 4.602–604 76 4.605–606 76, 134n74 4.617 122 4.621 76 4.631–32 78 4.651 70 5.1–38 456 5.20 120, 207

668 Judaean War (Bellum Judaicum) (cont.) 5.31–32 205 5.43–46 122 5.52–53 96 5.81–97 91 5.99–105 362 5.130–35 96 5.136–247 456 5.145 304 5.235 128 5.237 233 5.248–57 456 5.250–51 362 5.312–14 249 5.319 96 5.324 201 5.376–419 210 5.409–11 91 5.446–51 96 5.450 201 5.452 201 5.515 208 5.526 201 5.566 207 6.33 39n13 6.42 39n13 6.123 202, 203 6.186 201 6.190 201 6.193–218 202 6.214–19 97 6.228 97 6.236–43 455 6.236–53 97 6.249–66 567 6.250–54 119 6.253–97 202 6.266 97 6.285–86 619 6.287–88 619 6.288–300 457 6.288–315 619–20, 619 6.312–15 72, 457n34, 513, 619, 623 6.329 116 6.335–36 41–42 6.351 355 6.357 355

Index of Ancient Texts 6.387–90 136 6.433–34 355 6.414 131 6.417 131 6.419 131 6.420–21 457 6.433–34 96 7.5 123 7.18 123 7.25–36 359 7.46 351 7.47–53 423 7.105 128 7.119 123 7.109 27 7.117–21 106, 123 7.119–20 119–20, 131 7.121 60, 117, 120 7.121–57 101–143 7.122–30 124–25 7.123 120–21 7.132–35 125–29 7.136–38 129–31 7.139–47 131–35 7.147 103 7.148–52 60, 135–39 7.153–57 139, 359 7.156–58 101 7.158 60 7.158–62 107 7.161–62 60, 105 7.178–85 246 7.200 200 7.202 200 7.218 41 7.253 458 7.264 392 7.267 218 7.303 200 7.341–88 210–11 7.390 200 7.401 200 7.403 554 7.408 554 7.443–53 118, 554 7.447–50 451 7.448 155

Index of Ancient Texts Judaean Antiquities (Antiquitates Judaicae) 1–11 160, 230 1.1 155, 387 1.1–8 159, 581 1.1–26 301, 514 1.5–26 239, 311 1.6–7 114, 155, 159, 205, 218, 233–34, 297, 378 1.8–10 327, 370, 530, 590 1.8–13 45 1.10–12 51 1.13 247 1.14 175, 242, 253, 308, 327, 422 1.14–26 594 1.15–16 391 1.18–23 422 1.20 175, 242, 253, 308, 327, 422 1.22 391 1.29 155 1.72 379 1.114 595, 597 1.181 245 1.240 154 1.304 217 2.241 620 3.60 36 3.84 590 3.88 216 3.141 138 3.172–78 128 3.182 137 3.309 373 4.11–66 594 4.100 236 4.149 597 4.166 247, 331 4.186–87 595 4.260–64 48 4.294 373 4.313 623 4.325 236 5.13 247 5.77 236 5.117 247 5.234 597 5.338–39 595 6.33–44 595, 598

669 6.83–85 595, 598 6.132–33 36 6.262–68 595, 598 6.342 248 6.347 298 7.156 397 7.338 379 7.441 379 7.356 379 7.374 379 7.384 379 7.393 396 8.44–49 299 8.46 79 8.74 114 8.262 450 8.352–54 239 9.7 280 9.46 239 9.289 620 10.205–10 623 10.266–67 623 10.276–77 339, 623 11.212 36 12.119–30 84, 171 12.120–29 100 12.149–50 137 12.223 396 12.235 396 12.318–19 137 13.62 396 13.72 581 13.103 396 13.171–73 301, 321, 326, 476, 480–82, 581, 616 13.245 35 13.247 35 13.257–58 21, 167, 421 13.288–96 571 13.288–98 321, 328, 479–81, 572 13.292–93 479–81 13.294–96 48, 329 13.297–98 48, 326, 330, 476, 479, 482, 571 13.300 247 13.311 479 13.392 464 13.398 363 13.401–13 572

670 Judaean Antiquities (cont.) 13.408 328n43 13.410 333 13.417 333 13.418 464 13.431–32 333 14.10 257 14.39 464 14.72 136 14.77 21 14.118 450 14.126 464 14.158–71 333 14.172–74 333 14.186–265 259 14.297 464 14.330 464 14.403 258 15.3–4 334 15.92 464 15.217 22 15.253 260 15.267–91 260 15.343 22 15.344–64 464 15.351–54 260 15.366–70 334 15.371–79 301, 334, 339, 479, 481 16.158 380 16.160–73 259 16.187 495 16.395–404 596 17.28 596 17.41–45 334–35, 572 17.148 596 17.168–81 596 17.188 381, 399 17.191–92 596 17.224–39 381 17.237 597 17.250–97 116 17.300–314 459 17.317–20 459 17.318 381, 399 17.319 464 17.342–44 459, 597 17.346 479 17.354 111, 459

Index of Ancient Texts 17.354–18.10 116, 168, 504 18.1–2 111, 168, 459 18.3 459, 461 18.4–6 337, 461 18.9–10 459, 481, 498 18.11 302, 326, 616 18.11–22 476, 616 18.12–17 336–37 18.12–20 321 18.17 48, 319n28, 338, 341, 479 18.18–22 301–305 18.20–21 563 18.23–25 459, 481, 498, 596 18.36–39 381 18.63–64 148 18.88–89 116 18.102–105 381 18.111–12 372, 381 18.113 395n38 18.116–19 369–402, 445 18.160–61 575 18.169 598 18.237 465 18.240 399 18.259–60 302 18.277 216 18.306–307 596 18.349 216 19.1–16 596 19.1–273 63, 104, 586–601 19.4–11 595 19.15–16 595 19.167–72 596 19.173 596 19.178 595 19.187 599 19.195–98 589 19.216–20 75 19.248 596 19.275 465 19.281 171 19.343–52 485 19.354–59 264 19.356–66 167, 466 20.1–9 466 20.2–6 466 20.10–16 466

Index of Ancient Texts Judaean Antiquities (cont.) 20.17–96 51, 363, 421 20.47 607 20.51–53 461 20.97–99 466 20.100 423 20.101 461 20.102 460, 466 20.122 174 20.138 463n40, 465 20.139 485 20.141–44 85, 485 20.154–55 589 20.159 463n40 20.162 175 20.167–68 471 20.169 471–72 20.173–76 170, 264 20.173–84 169 20.177–78 170 20.182 170 20.184 172, 264 20.185 174 20.197–203 173, 215 20.199 481 20.200 429 20.215 173 20.250 97 20.252 176 20.258 482 20.262–67 514, 530, 589, 591 20.263 482 20.267 152 20.268 155 Life of Josephus (Vita) 1–5 495 1–6 304n124, 207n106, 471n53, 577 1–9 514 2 495, 496n24 3–4 396 4 495 7 496n24 10–12 296, 301n16, 303, 324, 326, 337, 476, 481, 572–73, 616 11 299, 307n130, 397, 607 12 317, 319, 338–39, 481

671 13–16 57, 338, 503 16 575 17–19 351 21–22 87, 339, 391n30, 513, 541, 610 24 376 24–29 56n12 27 205 29 350 31–35 514 37–40 351n13, 361n24, 514 40 155, 331n44, 460 41 622 43 350 45 351 63 496 70 352 73 352 76 352 80 496 81 351 83 352 85 352 87 352 88 350n12 123 352 124 352 126–28 87 141–44 87 147–49 87 189–90 339 189–96 350, 352, 610 189–332 352 191 482 191–95 339 195–96 513 197–98 304n124, 342, 496 204 496n24 216–17 87 226 87 258 590 269 24 278 590 302 590 336 451, 460 336–67 79, 152, 155 342–43 79, 152, 351, 353 346 28, 347

672 Life of Josephus (Vita) (cont.) 348 152 359–63 84, 599 361–63 53n1, 79, 94, 99, 106 361–67 296 362–64 450 365–67 494n18 372 350, 352 412 133n70 413–29 79, 84, 119, 296 416 119 418 138 419 131 422 79, 106 422–23 119 428–29 100, 451 430 514 Against Apion (Contra Apionem) 1.1 152 1.1–5 155, 531 1.6–43 535 1.7–27 155 1.8 483 1.18 147 1.30 33 1.37–43 312, 535 1.37–51 589 1.40 234 1.41 242n19 1.48–49 119 1.50 84, 94, 99, 599 1.50–55 53n1, 79, 106, 155, 296, 531, 581 1.51 44 1.53–56 159 1.54–55 152, 304n124, 495 1.60–61 19, 49, 166 1.162 607 1.169 271n12 1.179–82 583 1.216–18 154 1.307–12 620 1.320 109n36 2.46 147 2.51 373 2.125 379 2.138–44 422 2.144 30 2.145–96 312, 565

Index of Ancient Texts 2.146 379 2.156–81 249 2.168 44 2.168–72 391 2.170 379 2.184–85 331 2.192 373 2.206 49, 332 2.210 50 2.214 49 2.215–17 331 2.217–18 402 2.220–31 44, 50 2.221–25 391 2.228 49 2.234 49 2.237 30, 129n68 2.255–61 44, 391 2.258 50 2.259 51 2.269 421 2.276–77 50, 331 2.279–86 249, 422 2.284 300 2.291 379 2.294 39n13 New Testament Matthew 342, 462 2.7–23 461 3.7 478 3.7–10 394 3.13–17 394 4.23 427 9.14 394 9.35 427 11.2–6 394, 399 11.18–19 394 16.1 478 16.6 478 16.11–12 478 22.16 477 23 604 23.24 478 24.14 427 26.13 427 27.62 478

673

Index of Ancient Texts Mark 342, 426–427 and n45, 478n64, 524 1.1 426 1.4 398 1.14 426 2.18 394, 477 3.6 477 4.39 244 6.14 398 6.21 399 7 604 7.1–5 477 7.4 398 8.15 477 8.35 426 10.29 426 12.13 477 13.10 426 14.9 426 Luke–Acts Luke

316, 343, 445–490

342, 426–27 1.1–4 342, 427, 450, 455, 462, 478, 482 1.39 288 2.1–3 461 3.1–2 395, 398–99, 462 3.10–14 394, 445 3.19–20 399 7.1–10 182 7.36 478 9.51–54 20n21, 24n36 11.37 478 13.31 478 14.1 478 19.39 342

John 342 1.28 398 3.23 398 4.46–54 182 Acts

1.3 486 4.16 462 4.19–20 488 5.17 476 5.26 479

5.36–37 451, 461 5.38–39 488 5.40 479 9.1–22 488 9.3–19 441 10.1–14 488 11.28 461 12.20–23 485 15.5 476 18.24–28 432 18.25–26 482 19.1–7 395 21.21–36 425, 439 21.28 437 21.38 469–76 22.3 476, 604 23.1–10 479 23.15 482 23.20 482 24.5 476 24.14 476 24.22 482 24.25 485 25.22–27 485 26.5 476, 483 28.22 476 Paul’s letters

410, 420, 431, 435, 441

Romans 425, 431, 435, 441 1.1 431, 438 1.9 438 1.11–12 438 1.15–16 431, 438 2.16 438 3.1–2 438 3.25 438 3.30 438 4.1 438 6.14–15 410 9.2–6 438 10.4 438 10.16 438 11.13 438 11.14 439 11.25–32 439 11.26 439 11.28 438 15.14–24 431, 438

674 Romans (cont.) 15.18–28 437 15.35–32 438 16.25 438 1 Corinthians 432 1.19 433n52 1.31 433n52 2.6–8 417 3.10 432 6.16 217 9.1 441 9.5–6 432 9.19–23 410n20, 437, 439 11.19 476 15.8 441 15.10 441 15.50–53 436 2 Corinthians 435 1–9 435 1.23–2.7 432 3.1–4.7 435 3.7–17 435 3.17–4.4 417, 442 5.17 431, 435 10–13 408 10.12–11.23 435 11.5 435, 441 11.24 436 Galatians 408, 414, 439 1.13–14 414–16, 604 1.15–16 416, 441 2.2 436 2.2–10 436 2.14 416 3–4 416 3.1–3 416 3.1–4.7 435 3.6–29 412 421 416 4.25 435 5.2–12 416 5.20 476 6.12 430 6.15 431, 435, 441

Index of Ancient Texts Philippians 3 408, 416, 439 3.5 603 3.6 604 3.2–21 434, 441 3.21 412 4.15 427 Colossians 2.12 398 2.18 484 1 Thessalonians 425–32 1.9–10 429 2.13 412 2.14–16 430 2.17–3.5 429 Hebrews 426, 615 6.2 398 9.10 398 James 1.26–27 484 2.14 408 1 Peter 2.12 439n61 4.16 404n5 4.17 426 Revelation 3.9 417 Early Christian Literature Outside the New Testament (roughly chronological) Justin Martyr Dialogue with Trypho 2 481n69 32 615 Theophilus of Antioch 3.23 54n2 Irenaeus Adversus Haereses 1.26.2 409

675

Index of Ancient Texts Tertullian 411, 417, 440, 444 De spectaculis 30 413 Ad nationes 2.17 412 Adversus Marcionem 4.6 413 4.33 413 5.4–6 413 Apology 5–6 412 19.6 54n2 21.4–6 413 Clement of Alexandria Protrepticus 10 413 12.1 413 Stromata 1.21 54n2 Pseudo-Clementine Homilies 369, 408 15.10.1 374 Minucius Felix 411 11.1 413 33 54n2, 153 Origen Against Celsus 1.2.2 413 1.24 429n47 2.1 409 5.14–16 413, 429n47 5.25 43, 411n22, 583 5.33 411n22 5.34–35 31 5.40–41 31, 43, 410, 422, 429n47 5.61 209 5.65 209 Commentary on Matthew 10.17 54n2 Fragments on Lamentations 105 164n7 109 164n7 Eusebius

413, 417, 444, 488

Chronicle 1.255 36 Historia Ecclesiae (Church History) 1.5.3 450 1.11.5 398 2.21.3 109n35 2.5.1 152 3.6.1 109n35 3.6.20 109n35 3.9.1–2 54n2, 450 9.3 109n35 Praeparatio Evangelica 153, 410 1.5.12 411 8.11 272, 326n38 8.14.398b 268n4 9.5.15 398 10 271 Demonstratio Evangelica 1.2.2 411n23 1.2.9 412 Pseudo-Hegesippus (De excidio urbis Hierosolymitanae) Preface 54n2 Jerome Commentary on Daniel 623n23 Macarius Magnes 3.30 411n22 Sulpicius Severus (Chronicle) 455, 488, 516, 566, 568–70 2.30.6–8 455 2.30.7 568 Cyril of Alexandria Commentary on John 2.108 413n24 Commentary on Luke 72.864 413n24 Commentary on Minor Prophets 1.659 413n24 Theodoret Questions and Responses 111 164n7

676

Index of Ancient Texts

Procopius of Gaza Commentary on Isaiah 1837 164n7 Augustine City of God 4.31 39n11 Justinian Digest 48.1 474n58 Institutes 4.18.5 474n58 Greek-Language Texts (excluding categories above, alphabetical order) Aelius Aristides (rhetor, 2nd cent. CE) To Rome 68–69 226n35 90–91 226n35 Aelius Herodian (volume and page in A. Lentz, Grammatici Graeci) 191, 451 De prosodia catholica 3.1, 54 Peri Parōnymōn 3.2, 859 Peri Pathōn 3.2, 206 Aeschines Against Ctesiphon 25 374 226 204n25 Aeschylus 191, 203–204, 375, 623n22 Libation-Bearers 514–22 204 The Persians 610 248 Aesop’s Fables

217, 468

Antiphon On the Choreutes 7 378 51 378 Tetralogies 2.2.1 378 Appian 103 Civil Wars 4.3.14 62n20 Mithridatic War 115–16 126, 134, 139 117 134 Roman History 12.83.4 62n20 Aristotle 191, 217, 271n16, 308n137, 583 Athenian Constitution 5.2–3 62n20, 377 13.1 377 Nicomachean Ethics 1124b 214n18 Poetics 1449b 188 1552b 192 1458a 414 1552a–b 188 Politics 1265b 62n20, 377 Rhetoric 1354a 192 Arrian 104 Discourses of Epictetus 1.1.30–32 39n13 1.2.221–22 39n13 1.3 429 1.11.12–13 385 1.22.1–4 385 2.9.19–21 385 3.22 270n10 3.26.11–14 300n108 4.6.34 192n18 Berossus 159

677

Index of Ancient Texts Cassius Dio (History of Rome) 85, 582 37.16.5–17.1 422, 583 38.36.1–3 188n3 51.21 126 51.21.4 62 51.21.8 139 53.9.4–6 453 54.16.1–2 307n133 64.10.2–3 63n24 66.1.4 79 66.7.1 344, 359 Celsus (philosopher: see Origen [Christian authors], writing against) Chrysippus

191, 217

Demetrius of Phalerum (pseud0-: On Style, De elocutione) 216, 375, 541 77 216 287–97 370n4 Demosthenes 224–25, 375, 378 First Philippic 225 Third Philippic 220, 226 Fourth Philippic 226 Dinarchus 378 Dio Chrysostom, Orations (on Kingship) 55, 407 1.82–84 226n35, 377 2.19 224n30 Diodorus Siculus (Universal History) 6, 15n2, 29n2, 62n20, 171n17, 191n15, 217, 247, 300n108, 373–78, 524 1.2.2 424n42 17.66.5 217 32.27.1–2 189 34/35.1.1–5 36–37, 411n21, 436n59, 582 34/35.2.47 424n42 40.3.38 436n59

Diogenes Laertius (Lives and Views of Eminent Philosophers) 1.6 39n11, 429n47 1.101–105 421n37 8.15 308n137 9.19 39n11 Dionysius of Halicarnassus 62, 247, 271n14, 373–76 Letter to Pompeius Magnus 3 62 On Isocrates 7 378 On Thucydides 1–3 148 2 147 10 233n4 16–18 158, 213n13 21 148 50–51 148 Roman Antiquities 159, 171n17, 191n15, 217, 482, 586 1.1–5 378 1.4.2 378 2.63.2 484n76 4.32.1 378 5.46.4 300n108 7.55.3 595n18 Dionysius Thrax (Ars grammatica) 1.61 398 Epictetus (see Arrian) 371, 384, 388, 391 Euripides 191, 375, 623n22 Antiope 189 Medea 929 216 Orestes 323 373 Galen 193, 276–77, 281 De animi cuiuslibet peccatorum dignotione et curatione 5.102 481n69

678

Index of Ancient Texts

De antidotis 1.4 281 De sectis 407 De simplicium medicamentorum temperamentis ac facultatibus 11.690 271, 277n29, 281n46 12.171 281n44 12.375 281n44 Hecataeus (and pseud0-) of Abdera 153, 436n59 Hecataeus of Miletus 30 Heraclitus

553

Herodotus (Histories of the Persian-Greek Wars) 3–4, 15n2, 30–31, 62, 81n6, 147–48, 191, 233, 271n12, 374–77, 390, 406–407, 412, 419, 518, 534, 551, 558, 579, 582 1.1 150 1.53–54 621 1.69.3 376 1.137.4 203n25 2.18 484n76 2.37 484n76 3.36–38 30, 420 3.80.2–5 595 3.82.3 373 3.38.4 410, 420 4.76–80 421n37 4.142 217 5.77 373 Hesiod 217 Theogony 679 216 Works and Days 7.11 373 Hippocratic Corpus 191, 217 Airs, Waters, Places 193–94 Homer 217, 384, 429n47, 449, 531n30, 577, 589–90, 612

Iliad

3.279 373 19.260 373 Odyssey 1.1 162 13.214 373 14.152 426n44 14.166 426n44 24.326 373 Isocrates 217, 378 Archidamus 67 31 De bigis 45 204n25 De pace 119 373 Panegyricus 79 377 114 377 174 377 Julian (emperor) 30, 44, 411–13, 419, 584 Against the Galileans 43a 411 141 411 238 411 253 411 Lucian 421n37 How History Should be Written 147–48 2 60 7 60 7–9 207n31 13 60 24 60 39–51 207n31 58 213n13 Menippus 45 481n69 Passing of Peregrinus 429n48 13 300n108 23 300n108 33 300n108 Philosophies for Sale 481n69 Timon 42 31

Index of Ancient Texts

679

Wisdom of Nigrinus 279n37 27 306n129

7.530d 308n137 8.565–69 595n18 10.595a 189 10.600b 308n137 Timaeus 27d–29a 429n47 Plutarch (and pseudo-) 6, 55, 103–104, 159, 296, 371–77, 384–85, 388, 391, 467

Manetho

153, 159

Marcus Aurelius (Meditations) 300n108 1.9 194–95 8.25 194–95 17.6–7 194–95 Menander

217, 323

Musonius Rufus

300n108

Pausanias (Description of Hellas) 16n2, 524 3.2.7 377 4.18.3 377 9.19 280n42 Philostratus Life of Apollonius of Tyana 6.20 32 Plato 44, 50–51, 388, 435, 594 Euthydemus 283a 373 Gorgias 189 527b–e 391–92 527d–e 373 Laws 32–33 1.628c 377 1.629c–d 377 4.704–705 33 12.950a 33 12.951a–c 33 Meno 81a 118 Phaedo 78d 429n47 Protagoras 342c 32 342e–343b 607 Republic 2.362d–367a 384 2.364e–365a 384 2.377e–378e 391 3.407a 373 5.470c–d 62n20

Lives (alphabetical order because of fixed titles and internal numbering) Aemilius Paulus 1.1–5 152 32.3 124 32.4–8 125–26 33.2 130 33.6–34.2 139 Agesilaus 33.4 426n44 Agis 9.2 450 Alexander 1.2 152 Aratus 38.8 449 Brutus 12.2 39n13, 300n108 Cleomenes 5.3 450 28.1 450 30.2 450 Comparison of Philopoemen and Flamininus 1.2 226n35 Demetrius 17.6 426n44 Demosthenes 2.1 152 Flamininus 11.6–7 226n35 12.20 226n35 Lucullus 1.3 152 Marius 11.4 31 Numa 87–88 39n11

680 Pyrrhus 27.4 450 Sulla 23.2 152 Theseus 1.1–3 152 36.2 31 Moralia (by page number, as English titles vary and references are to pages) On the Education of Children 108a–b 481n69 Advice about Keeping Well 306n129 On Superstition 166a 382–84 Spartan Sayings 208c 300n111 210a 300n111 210f 39n13 216c 39n13 219e 39n13 237a 300n111 On the Glory of the Athenians 347d 426n44 On the Love of Wealth 270n10 To an Uneducated Ruler 780a 31 Precepts of Statecraft 467n47, 541 799b–801e 214n18 802d–3b 223–24 802e 224 813a 62n20, 377 823f–825b 62n20, 220n26, 377 824c–e 226n35 On the Malice of Herodotus 147 Polybius (Histories) 55, 75, 98, 105, 157, 171, 189, 191, 217, 374, 453, 561, 570 1.1.2 147 1.5.1–3 233n4 1.67.3 31 1.67.11 31 2.56.1–5 207 2.56.7–10 206–207 2.56.13–14 207 2.61.1–12 207 3.1.1–3 233n4

Index of Ancient Texts 4.2.1–2 233n4 4.53.3 203n25 6.56.7–12 424 12.2–4 449 12.4–6 449 12.7.5 449 12.25–26 158, 213n13 21.23.9 373 36.1.1–7 158 38.1–6 322 38.4 155 38.9–18 322 38.11.9–10 361 38.15 512n65 38.15.2–4 361 38.15.7 361 38.19 189n7 Porphyry 411–13, 425, 479, 623 On Abstinence 33 4.11.3–13.10 301, 326, 563, 565 4.20 33 Life of Pythagoras 53 308n137 Poseidonius

191, 280, 582

Ptolemy (Claudius Ptolemaeus, geographer) 192, 195 Tetrabiblos (Apotelesmatica) 3.4.2 191 Scylax (pseudo-)

15n2

Sextus (anon. Pythagorean [?], Sentences) 64 391n32 Sextus Empiricus Adversus grammaticos (mathematicos) 248 148 269 148 Sophocles 191, 623n22 Women of Trachis 947 216 Soranus (Gynecology) 3.24.1 307n133

681

Index of Ancient Texts Strabo (Geography) 157, 375, 412, 579 3.2.19 484n76 7.3.3 303, 308n139 14.2.28 414 16.2.2 276 16.2.10 464 16.2.21–32 19n19 16.2.28 19n20 16.2.34–37 20, 411, 421, 436n59, 582, 19n19 16.2.37 256n4 16.2.40 256n4 16.2.41–44 236n10, 277n30, 290n42, 290n43 16.2.46 22n28, 23 16.4.6 128n64 17.1.8 308n138 17.1.15 290n42

Cyropaedia 1.2.10 221 1.5.9 373 1.6.41 221 2.1.11 221 2.1.20 221 De republica Lacedaemoniorum 1.4–10 307n133 10.4 373 7.2 373 Hellenica 1.1 233n5 7.1.32 376 Memorabilia 2.6.2 373 3.3.7 221 Symposium 9.27 373

Theognis (Elegies) 1.849 217

Latin Texts (alphabetical)

Theophrastus 191, 384, 391 Characters 16.1–3 383 16.13–14 299n107, 383 Thucydides (Peloponnesian War) 5, 59, 62, 80n5, 98, 147–48, 157, 188–91, 213, 224, 233,302, 374–77, 453, 482n71, 524, 527, 534, 551 1.1 147 1.3.4 31 1.22.1 158, 212–13, 229 1.23.3–6 233n4 1.132.1–2 420 1.144 32 3.82–84 62n20 3.38.2 597 3.67.3 597 5.89–113 188 Xenophon 191 Agesilaus 5.3 300n11 10.1 300n11 11.19 300n11

Augustus (emperor), Res gestae 1–4 107n28 32.6 79–80 Caesar, Julius Gallic War 118 Cicero 435 Brutus 85 207n31 89–91 481n69 De divinatione 2.33 [70] 424 De fato 39 326n39, 327, 481, 616 De finibus 1.16 481n69 De legibus 2.26 39n11, 207n31 De natura deorum 1.2 616 2.28 39n11, 429n47 De oratore 1.62 207n31 2 207n31 2.18.80 150

682

Index of Ancient Texts

De re publica 2.13–14 379 3.14 39n11 Epistulae ad Atticum 1.19 152 2.1 152, 224n30 Epistulae ad Familiares 5.12 152, 163n2, 207n31 13.1.2 481n69 In Catilinam 1–4 2.4 474 2.7 474 In Pisonem 16 474 38 475 In Verrem 2.1.9 474 2.3.129 279n39 2.4.99 279n39 2.4.124 279n39 Philippica 2.106 279n39 11.34 279n39 Pro Cluentio 195 279n39 Pro Fonteio 13 279n39 Pro Roscio Amerino 39 474–75 76 475 94 475 103 475 152 475 Cluvius Rufus 575, 586–88, 596–98 Fabius Rusticus 575, 588–89, 598 Frontinus Stratagems 87 Horace Epistles 2.2

278, 280n42

Justin (Pompeius Trogus via) Epitome 36.1.9 256n4 Juvenal (Satires) 6.158 485n77 Livy (History of Rome) 157, 524, 570 1.9–13 378 39.22 129n69 44.18 129n69 Petronius (Satyricon) 140.2 279n39 Pliny the Elder (Natural History) 19, 85, 266, 274–96, 308–10, 395, 479, 560–63 praef. 1–6 91 praef. 5 274n22 praef. 17 274 praef. 24–28 275 1.3c 153 1.4c 153 1.5a 276 1.5c 153 1.6c 153 1.7 275 2.165 295 3.2 275 3.109 280, 285 4.26 285 5.66–67 276 5.68–69 276 5.68–71 580n70 5.69–70 20n22, 276, 284, 295 5.71–72 276–77, 280, 290, 294, 580 5.73 276–78, 280–84, 294, 326n38 6.21 285 6.177–182 284 6.181 276 6.184 276 7.65 280, 580 7.74–75 580n70 8.84–85 580n70

683

Index of Ancient Texts Pliny the Elder (Natural History) (cont.) 8.96 129n69 12.80 271n12 12.109 276 12.111–113 117n46, 236, 276 13.26–49 280, 286 24.172 299n107 28.38 299n107 33.25 224n30 Pliny the Younger (Epistles) 3.5 274n22 4.8 424n42 10.96 354, 404n5, 410n19, 429n46 Quintilian (Institutio Oratoria) 371, 390, 541 1.8.18 150 1.10.13 390n29 2.4.2–3 150 2.5.16 224n30 2.5.18 390n29 2.5.27 390n29 2.5.30 390n29 2.15.27 391 2.21.4 390n29 3.8.65 224n30 4.2.1 150 4.2.52–53 150 4.4.5 390n29 5.11.3 390n29 6.5.6–8 224n30 11.1.35 279n37 12.pr.4 391 12.1.1 390 12.1.3 390 12.2.3 390 12.2.7 279n37 12.33–45 391n30 Sallust 152, 157, 594 Conspiracy of Catiline (Bellum Catilinae) 4.2–5 453 Seneca the Younger 588 Dialogues 11.14.2 279n39

Epistles 5.2 279n37 17.3 270n10 24 39 93–94 306n129 94–95 272 108.9–12 270n10 108.22 279n37 Silius Italicus (Punica) 3.594–96 91 3.605–666 67n31, 84, 345n6 Solinus, Julius (Gallery of Remarkable Things) 34 286 35.1 286 35.10 286 Suetonius 85, 451 Lives of the Caesars (his order) Augustus 93 47n20 Claudius 11 63 25.4 429 Nero 16.2 404n5 Otho 9.3 63n24 12.1 122n56 Vespasian 99 4.3 85 4.4 86 4.5 457n34, 621 4.6 87n23 5.6 79 6.3 620n19, 71 7 122n57 7.1 65 12 99 14 99 16–23 86, 99 22.2–3 85 Titus 99 1 91 2–3 91 3 274n22 4.3 94 5 122n57

684 Domitian 1.2 121 Lives of Illustrious Men Grammarians 5 153 Rhetoricians 1 150 Tacitus 5, 20, 29, 51, 85, 152, 157, 163, 456, 516, 541, 552, 569–70, 588, 592 Agricola 4.3 279n37 13 85 17 85 30 593 Annals 1.1 147 3.25 307n133 6.22 326n39, 481, 616 12.53.1–2 170n16 12.54.2 20n21 13.2.2 170n16 13.14.2 170n16 13.23.1–2 170n16 14.65.1 170n16 15.44 404, 410n19, 429n46 Germania 2.1 38 4.1 38–39 6–10 39 9.2 38 14–16 39 19–20 39 Histories 1.4 147 1.10 73 1.50 73n38 1.76 74 2.1–7 73–74 2.1 91, 358

Index of Ancient Texts 2.5 85 2.6 74 2.50–55 71 2.56 71 2.58–59 176 2.73 69n33, 71, 74 2.74–79 65, 71, 72–76 2.76 592 2.79 620 2.81 72n35 2.82 85 2.89 71 2.101 53–54, 99, 450 3.73 121 5.1–13 455 5.2 37, 456 5.2–5 455, 582 5.2–4 436n59 5.3–4 32 5.4 471n52 5.3–5 411, 455n29 5.4–5 38–41, 126, 422, 429n47, 456 5.6 126 5.8 256n4, 37, 126, 256n4 5.9 175 5.10 174–75, 621 5.12–13 37, 79, 344, 359, 362, 364, 456–57 and n34, 621 Tibullus (Corpus Tibullianum) 1.2.96 299n107 Valerius Maximus (Memorable Deeds and Sayings) 8.7 (ext.).1 224n30 9.13.pr. 300 Virgil 279n40 Aeneid 151

Index of Modern Scholars Adler, W. 153n41, 153n45, 154n49, 154n53 Ahl, F. 55n7, 541n58 Ahrensdorf, O. J. 188n2 Alföldy, G. 129, 166n10 Ames, R. T. 452n25 Appelbaum, A. 268n6 Ariel, D. T. 361n26 Atkinson, K. 561n43, 267n2, 267n3 Attridge, H. W. 148–49, 155, 158, 159n82, 301n115, 318, 370n6, 492n7, 522–23, 573n57 Audet, J.-P. 295n100 Augoustakis, A. 80n5 Aviam, M. 555n30 Avioz, M. 48n21, 331 Backhaus, K. 395n35 Balsdon, J. P. V. D. 122n53, 471n52 Barclay, J. M. G. 16, 56n10, 105n19, 404n5, 471n52, 494, 541n59 Bardtke, H. 290n82 Barnes, T. D. 416n27 Baron, C. A. 449n18 Barrett, A. A. 122n53, 591 Bartlett, J. R. 151n30, 151n31, 284n55 Barton, C. A. 15n1, 30n3, 134n71, 150n25, 184n36, 185n38, 483n73, 502n46 Bartsch, S. 541n58 Bauer, W. 572n55, 287, 288n66, 289 Baumgarten, A. I. 153n42, 267n2, 344, 499n35 Beagon, M. 274n21, 277–78 Beall, T. S. 309n141, 561n43 Beard, M. 53–54, 81n8, 101, 103, 104n15, 107n28, 121, 134n71 Beebe, H. K. 166 Begg, C. T. 160 Beiser, F. C. 147n16, 407n13, 499n36 Beker, J. C. 435n55 Belser, J. E. 446 Ben-Arieh, Y. 284n56 Bentwich, N. D. M. 82n10 Ben Zeev, M. P. 171n18 Bergin, T. G. 442n67 Bergmeier, R. 307n134, 477n61

Bernett, M. 3n4 Bickerman, E. J. 344, 434n53 Bilde, P. 11, 55n5, 105n17, 155n57, 156n63, 157n66, 157n67, 159n79, 160n85, 269n8, 318, 370n6, 491n2, 494, 497–99, 521–42, 544, 557, 588, 599, 600 Bloch, M. 2, 147n16, 157n64, 163n3, 403–404, 407n13, 425n43, 518, 547, 550–52, 558–59, 574, 585 Bloch, R. S. 37n7, 38 Boccaccini, G. 369n3, 405n9 Boeckh, A. 463n43 Bohak, G. 307n130 Bolin, T. M. 147n11 Bond, H. K. 263n11 Bostock, J. 288n71 Bosworth, A. B. 85n19 Bowie, E. L. 80n5 Boyarin, D. 15n1, 30n3, 150n25, 184n36, 185n38, 405n9, 416n28, 417n29, 483n73, 502n46 Boyle, A. J. 107n25 Braudel, F. 509n61 Braun, M. 318 Braund, D. 258n7 Brawley, R. L. 316n16 Bremmer, J. 404n5 Bricault, L. 122n52 Brighton, M. 53n1, 81n7, 157n63, 474n56, 539n57 Brinton, A. 390n29 Brinton, C. 501n44, 508–509, 513 Brüne, B. 498n32, 524n9 Brunt, P. A. 361 Buck, C. H. 435n54 Burchard, C. 282n50, 295n100 Burkitt, F. C. 446, 447n6 Burnett, A. 463n45 Burrows, M. 291n85 Butcher, K. 463n42 Cadbury, H. J. 446n4, 447, 463n41, 464n46 Calabi, F. 155n58 Cansdale, L. 291n95 Cawkwell, G. 189n10

686 Cecil, D. 4n5, 321n32 Chapman, H. H. 119n49, 139, 155, 157n63, 202, 204n26, 492n5, 539n57 Chilton, B. 157, 315, 606n2 Ciancio Rossetto, P. 115n42 Clarke, K. 148n19 Clarke, W. L. K. 446n4 Cody, J. M. 84n17 Cohen, G. M. 463n42 Cohen, S. J. D. 80n3, 105n18, 158n73, 205, 318, 492n7, 510n62, 517n74, 522–23, 531n30, 578n69 Colautti, F. M. 105n18, 157n63, 539n57 Collingwood, R. G. 2, 147n16, 157n64, 163n3, 407n13, 425n43, 487n80, 518, 547, 550n18, 550–51, 553, 558–59, 574, 585 Collins, J. J. 159n77, 302n119 Conte, G. B. 148n18 Cook, M. J. 316n16 Cornford, F. M. 524n8, 527 Craik, E. M. 191n17 Cribiore, R. 224n30 Cronin, H. S. 448n10, 462 Crook, J. A. 567n50 Crosby, K. 305n128 Curran, J. R. 54n3, 81n9, 91n25, 154n55 Das, A. A. 439n61 Davies, G. 3n4 de Breucker, G, E. E. 147n11, 153n44 De Saulcy, L.-F. 287–89, 463n40 De Vaux, R. 290n82, 292–95, 477 Degrassi, A. 115n43 Den Hollander, W. 82n14, 84n17, 92n31, 157n63, 296n104, 515n71, 539n57 Desanges, J. 285n58 DeSilva, D. A. 150n27 Dibelius, M. 369n1 Dixon, W. C. 289 Dodds, E. R. 189n9 Dominik, W. J. 107n25 Donaldson, T. L. 403–405, 407n14 Doran, R. 151 Droysen, J. G. 2, 425n43 Dunn, J. D. G. 404n6, 405–406, 440, 440–41, 611 Dupont-Sommer, A. 291–93 Durant, A. 500 Durant, W. 500

Index of Modern Scholars Eberhardt, B. 55n5, 82n13, 105–106, 138 Eck, W. 20n25, 149n23, 169n15, 176n26, 554 Eckstein, A. M. 55n7, 105n20, 157n69, 188n4, 189n5, 257n6, 296n103, 322n35, 422n39, 449n19 Edmondson, J. 156n60, 296n104 Egger, R. 157n63 Ehlers, W. 102n6 Eisenbaum, P. 405n9 Eliav, Y. 507n53 Elledge, C. D. 341n53, 391n31, 539n57 Elliott, N. 439n61 Enslin, M. S. 289 Esler, P. F. 109n34 Evans, R. J. 507n53, 548–49 Fantham, E. 80n5 Farmer, W. R. 506n52, 604 Farrell, J. 148n18 Feldman, L. H. 18n13, 29, 152n36, 156n60, 158n75, 159n83, 160, 164n9, 239n15, 240n17, 247n27, 303n121, 307n132, 331, 370n6, 376, 379n9, 492n7, 497, 522–23, 525, 533–35, 557, 573n57, 591n14 Ferda, T. S. 234n8 Ferguson, J. 278n35, 308n135 Ferrill, A. 587 Finkbeiner, D. P. 157n63, 303n120 Finkelstein, L. 313n4, 493n9 Fisch, M. H. 442n67 Fischer, D. H. 425n43, 556, 559 Fleddermann, H. T. 448n11 Foakes Jackson, F. J. 447 Fontanille, J. P. 361n26 Franzius, I. 463n43 Freudenthal, J. 153n44, 153n46, 144n49, 144n50 Frova, A. 23n32 Fuks, A. 25n38, 172n23 Fuks, G. 361 Fung Y.-L. 184 Gafni, I. M. 16 Galimberti, A. 539n57 Garrity, T. F. 213n13 Gaston, L. 405n9 Gehrke, H.-J. 62n20 Geiger, A. 313 Geike, C. 288

687

Index of Modern Scholars Gerber, C. 152n36 Gergel, R. A. 123n61 Gilbert-Thirry, A. 191n16 Gilderhus, M. T. 2n2 Gilliver, C. M. 104n16 Ginsburg, C. D. 266n1, 288–89 Ginzberg, L. 239n13, 562 Ginzburg, C. 550n17 Girdvainytė L. 40n14 Glas, J. E. 12, 57n13, 118n48 Goldberg, S.-A. 155n58 Goldstein, I. 361n26 Goldstein, J. A. 151 Goldstein, L. J. 425n43 Goldsworthy, A. K. 104n16 Goodman, M. 11, 45n16, 55n5, 106, 107n26, 155n58, 156n63, 157n66, 162n1, 296n104, 344, 345n5, 419, 445n1, 504n49, 527n15, 536–37, 550 Goranson, S. 279n41 Grabbe, L. L. 282n50, 294, 319n28, 320n30, 477n61, 513n66 Graetz, H. 17, 313, 395–97, 584, 609 Gray, P. 408n16 Gray, R. 105n18, 159n81, 309n141, 533, 550, 561n43 Greatrex, G. 283n54 Gruen, E. S. 16, 17n7, 18n13, 149n23, 152n36, 154n54, 226n35, 38n8, 322n35 Grünenfelder, R. 156n63 Gurval, R. A. 62n21, 107n28 Gussmann, O. 157n63, 304n125, 539n57 Habicht, C. 524n7 Habinek, T. N. 474n60 Hadas-Lebel, M. 155n57 Hajdú, I. 226n34 Hall, R. G. 146 Halpern, B. 146n4 Halpern-Amaru, B. 156n63, 159n82 Hammond, M. 155n58 Hannah, R. 434n53 Harding, M. 294n96 Hardwick, M. E. 445n1 Harker, A. 174n24 Harrington, D. J. 152 Hart, H. St.-J. 60n17, 108n33 Harter-Lailheugue, S. 267n2 Hata, G. 155n58, 156n60, 494

Hays, R. B. 405n8 Henderson, J. 62n20 Hendin, D. 108n33 Hengel, M. 317, 473n55, 506n52, 513n66 Herford, R. T. 313n7 Heschel, S. 313n4 Hodkinson, S. 308n136 Hoffmann, J. R. 411n22, 435n58 Hogg, J. 463n39, 463n44 Holladay, C. R. 153n43, 153n46, 154 Hölscher, G. 106n23, 317, 320n29, 498, 535, 531n30, 572 Hölscher, T. 108 Holum, K. G. 166n10 Hughes, A. W. 314n9, 315n11, 418n31 Huizinga, J. H. 146 Hurd, J. C. 430n50 Hurlet, F. 81n7, 81n8, 82n11, 83n15 Iggers, G. G. 499n36 Ilan, T. 156n63, 159n77, 386n19, 453n27, 468n50 Immerwahr, H. R. 524n8 Inowlocki, S. 153n47, 153n48, 445n2 Isaac, B. H. 283n54 Isaacson, W. 452n25 Itgenshorst, T. 54n3, 103 Jacobson, D. N. 254n3 Jaeger, W. 429n47 Jampoler, A. C. 284n56 Jelf, W. E. 408n15 Jenkins, K. 3n4, 548 Jensen, W. M. 115n41, 123n60 Johansen, K. F. 308n137 Jones, B. W. 92, 94n32 Jones, C. P. 53n1, 223n29, 599 Jonquière, T. 539n57 Josephson, J. A. 184n36 Jowett, B. 408n15 Kalms, J. U. 156n60 Kamesar, A. 269n8 Kannicht, R. 383n11 Kasher, A. 155n58, 171, 172n22 Kee, H. C. 307n130 Keitel, E. 62n20 Kelley, N. 391n31 Kemezis, A. 82n11, 83n15

688 Kennedy, G. A. 449n17 Keppie, L. 104n16 Kershaw, I. 556, 559 Klausner, J. 409n18 Kloppenborg, J. S. 182n30, 186, 448n11 Klostergaard Petersen, A. 16n3, 185n38 Knight, W. 409n17, 445n2 Knox, J. 468n49 Köberlein, E. 122n53 Kohler, K. 287, 313, 409 Koilopoulos, C. 178n10 Kokkinos, N. 3n4, 135n75, 170n16, 254n3, 463n42, 517n75, 554 Kraeling, C. H. 369n1 Kraft, R. A. 268n6, 283n53 Kraus, C. S. 146n2, 449n16 Kreissig, H. 501n44 Krenkel, M. 446 Krieger, K.-S. 158 Kümmel, W. G. 439n61 Künzl, E. 54n3, 81n9, 102–103, 125 Labow, D. 155n58 Ladouceur, D. J. 158n71, 213n14, 391n31 Lake, K. 447 Landau, T. 157n63, 204n26, 539n57 Lang, M. L. 420n36 Lange, C. H. 62 Laperrousaz, E.-M. 295n100 Laqueur, R. 55n6, 81n9, 102n6, 154n55, 156n61, 158, 317n22, 380n10, 492n4, 493, 498 Lauterbach, J. Z. 313n4 Leach, E. W. 115n41 Lebow, R. N. 188n2, 189, 254n1 Lee, R. Y. T. 18 Leeming, H. 155n58 Leeming, K. 155n58 Leibner, U. 555n30 Lemaire, A. 146n4 Lembi, G. 156n60, 296n104 Lemche, N. P. 148n20 Leoni, T. 97n34, 115n42, 345n6, 456n32, 516n72 Levine, L. I. 164n9, 166, 318 Levison, J. R. 533 Lightstone, J. N. 18 Lillie, A. 266n1

Index of Modern Scholars Lindner, H. 55n5, 72n36, 82n13, 105n17, 211–13, 505n50, 522, 523n4 Lindsay, D. R. 79n2 Lintott, A. 62n20, 474n58 Lloyd, G. E. R. 193n21 Long, A. A. 154n49 Lowenthal, D. 147n16 Luce, T. J. 524n7 Lüdemann, G. 408n16 Luraghi, N. 147n12 Lusnia, S. 106n23 Luttwak, E. 22n31, 258n7 Luz, M. 158n71, 213n14, 391n31 Lynch, W. F. 287 Maccoby, H. 409n18 MacMullen, R. 207n30, 279n37 Madden, F. W. 463n45 Mader, G. 62n20, 157n66, 157n69, 205n27, 226n33, 296n103, 592n16 Magness, J. 3n4, 267n2, 267n3, 282n50, 295, 309n142 Maier, G. 477n61 Marchetti, S. C. 274n21 Marcus, J. 369n1, 395n35 Marcus, R. 21n27, 333n46, 335n48 Marcuse, H. 220n27 Marincola, J. 80–81, 147n15, 147n17, 148n18, 149, 207n30, 370n5, 390n28, 449n16, 449n20, 519n79 Marrou, H. I. 224n30 Marshall, M. 316n16 Martineau, H. 288–89 Martola, N. 151 Masuzawa, T. 184n36 Mattern, S. P. 107n26, 283n54 Matthews, S. 289 Mattingly, H. 108n33, 134 Mayer, M. 200n27 Mayer-Schärtel, B. 156n63 McLaren, J. S. 55n5, 82n13, 92n29, 92n31, 105n17, 156n63, 157n66, 344, 345n5, 497n25, 504n49, 527n15, 537, 550 Mearsheimer, J. J. 254n1 Meeks, W. 408n16 Meineke, A. 15n2 Mendels, D. 151 Mendelson, A. 269n8

689

Index of Modern Scholars Meshorer, Y. 23n32, 28n44, 108n33 Meyboom, P. G. P. 122n52 Meyers, E. 28n44 Michel, O. 102, 360–62 Millar, F. 84n17, 107n26, 149n23, 491 Miller, D. M. 576n67 Mionnet, T. E. 463n45 Moehring, H. R. 318, 338n50, 492n7, 522–23, 550 Momigliano, A. 2, 491, 544–48, 551, 558, 559n41, 574, 585 Mommsen, T. 107, 117, 586 Monten, J. 188n2 Moore, G. F. 313n7, 321n31, 477n62 Morel, W. 189n8, 391n31 Morgan, G. 69n32, 70, 72n35, 73n37, 76n40, 207n27 Morgenthau, H. 189, 254n1 Morris, J. 352n14 Moss, C. R. 410n19 Most, G. 148n18 Munck, J. 403, 405 Munn, M. 147 Munnich, O. 155n58 Murison, C. L. 82n11, 92n28 Murphy, T. M. 274n21, 275, 278 Myres, J. L. 147n13 Nakman, F. M. 539n57 Nanos, M. D. 404n6, 406n12, 421n38 Neusner, J. 148–49, 157, 314–18, 406, 418–19, 499n35, 517n74, 519n80, 572–73, 605, 606n2, 607–609 Neyrey, J. H. 530 Nicols, J. 72n36 Niebuhr, R. 190n14 Niehoff, M. R. 272n18 Niese, B. 216, 318, 376, 395n38, 493–94, 498, 524n9, 587 Nightingale, A. W. 189n9 Nir, R. 369n2, 387, 396 Nodet, E. 155n58, 210n2 Nongbri, B. 15n1, 30n3, 150n25, 184n36, 484n74, 502n46 Novenson, M. V. 183n34 O’Gorman, E. 215n21, 541n58 Ollier, F. 308n136

Olson, R. S. 157n63, 539n57 O’Neil, E. 391n32 Otis, B. 160n86 Parker, G. 82n11 Parker, R. 384 Parkes, J. F. 313n7 Paul, G. M. 91n26 Pearson, B. A. 430n49 Pelling, C B. R. 213n13, 370n5, 449n16, 519n79 Pena, J. X. 137n77 Pervo, R. 448n13 Pfanner, M. 115n41 Piovan, D. 544n3 Pitman, J. R. 287n61 Plass, P. 215n21 Plattias G. 189n10 Porath, Y. 166n10 Potter, D. S. 370n5 Powell, A. 308n136 Price, J. J. 17–18, 28, 62n20, 156n63, 157n63, 157n66, 158n71, 204n26, 213, 453n27, 510n62, 537, 550 Pummer, R. 157n63, 539n57 Raban, A. 166n10 Räisänen, H. 435n56, 435n57 Rajak, T. 456n32, 491–520, 522–23, 527, 531, 540, 547–51 Ranke, L. (von) 425n43 Rappaport, S. 304n125 Rappaport, U. 349, 352, 355–57, 361 Rasp, H. 318 Reinhartz, A. 576n67, 579n69 Rengstorf, K. H. 210n2, 492n7, 524n10 Revell, L. 24, 422n39 Richards, G. C. 296n103 Richardson, L. 122n54 Riley, H. T. 288n71 Ritter, B. 171n18, 181n29 Rives, J. 38n10, 39n12, 156n60, 296n104 Rivkin, E. 315–16, 479n65, 605 Robinson, J. M. 448n11 Robinson, T. A. 404n5 Rodgers, Z. 155, 156n60, 492n5 Rogers, G. M. 45n16 Rollens, S. E. 430n50

690 Rosemount, H. 452n25 Roth, C. 360, 361n26, 362n27 Rotman, M. 399n41 Roullet, A. 122n54, 122n55 Roux, M. 45n29 Royse, J. R. 152n37 Rudich, V. 541n58 Runesson, A. 404n5 Runia, D. T. 269n8 Runnalls, D. 158n70, 617n16, 211–18, 226 Rutledge, S. H. 354n16 Sacks, K. S. 524n7 Saldarini, A. J. 316, 501n44, 605 Salles, C. 80n5 Samuel, A. E. 434n53 Sanders, E. P. 149, 394n34, 405–406, 418–19, 431, 440–41, 477n61, 561n43, 611, 615 Sanders, J. T. 316n16 Sandmel, S. 269n8 Sarkissian, H. 384n16 Saulnier, C. 158n71, 213n14 Savignac, R. 463n43, 464n46 Schlatter, A. 318 Schmiedel, P. W. 446, 462n38, 463n41, 464n46, 469n51 Schreckenberg, H. 105n17, 447–48, 451, 492n7, 522–23, 525 Schulten, A. 288 Schürer, E. 289, 294, 461n36, 464n46, 557, 477n61 Schwartz, D. R. 3n4, 11, 18, 34, 151, 155n58, 158–59, 263n11, 269n8, 317, 477n62, 483n73, 507n53, 517n74, 538, 543–85 Schwartz, S. 16n3, 18–19, 100n35, 157n66, 185n37, 230–32, 235n9, 242–47, 318, 418, 517n74, 531n30 Scobie, C. H. H. 369n1 Segal, A. F. 405n9 Semenchenko, L. 160n91 Shahar, Y. 148n19, 157n69, 296n103, 532, 539n57 Shanske, D. 188n2 Shaw, B. 365n30, 506n51 Shutt, R. J. H. 296n103 Siegert, F. 155n58, 156n60 Sievers, J. 296n104, 341n54, 391n31, 491, 532, 538n56, 600n22

Index of Modern Scholars Siggelkow-Berner, B. 53n1, 105n18, 157n63, 539n57 Sly, D. 171n18 Smallwood, E. M. 135n76, 152n38, 152n39, 276n27 Smith, J. Z. 418 Smith, M. 318, 477n63, 480n67, 491, 517n74, 538, 572–73, 600 Smith, W. C. 484n74, 502n46, 578n68 Snell, B. 383n11 Spijkerman, A. 463n40 Spilsbury, P. 29n1, 56n10, 80n3, 105n18, 159n81, 159n82, 234n8, 370n6, 541n59 Stadter, P. A. 213n13 Stemberger, G. 477n61 Sterling, G. E. 159, 550 Stern, M. 29n2, 36n6, 80n3, 213n14, 384n12, 550 Stern, P. 156n60 Stow, K. 409n17 Strack, C. F. L. 290 Strack, M. E. D. L. 290 Sukenik, E. 291–93 Swain, S. 55n7, 105n20 Sydenham, E. A. 108n33, 134 Tabor, J. D. 267n2 Taylor, A. J. P. 190n13 Taylor, G. 435n54 Taylor, J. 308n137 Taylor, J. E. 183n32, 269n8, 269n9, 270n11, 369n1, 384n15, 386, 478n64 Tcherikover, V. 25n38 Termini, C. 269n8 Thackeray, H. St.-J. 55n6, 81n9, 134, 156–57, 159, 211–13, 302n117, 311n1, 317n22, 492n4, 493, 498, 503, 515, 517, 525, 586, 588, 591 Thomas, R. 147n13 Thompson, T. L. 148n20 Tigerstedt, E. N. 308n136 Toher, M. 157n63 Tozer, H. F. 283n54, 284n57, 286n60 Trevett, J. 226n34 Trivigno, F. V. 189 Tropper, A. 146 Tuchman, B. W. 2, 425n43 Turner, E. W. 123n59, 268n6

691

Index of Modern Scholars Tuval, M. 18–19, 159n78, 230, 234n7, 517n74, 539n57 Tyson, J. B. 448n13 Udoh, F. E. 149n22 Ullmann, L. 155n58, 157n63, 204n26 Ullmann-Margalit, E. 292n89 Urlichs, L. 290n83 Van der Horst, P. W. 153n40, 521n1 Van der Lans, B. 404n5 Van der Toorn, K. 578n69 Van Houwelingen, R. 430n50 Van Seters, J. 146 Van Unnik, W. C. 492, 521, 557 VanderKam, J. C. 279n41, 282 Vann, R. L. 166n10 Vermes, G. 294n94, 409n18, 477n61, 491, 561n43 Versluys, M. J. 122n52 Versnel, H. S. 102n6 Villalba i Varneda, P. 150n26, 155, 158n70, 211–13, 566n49 Vogel, M. 155n58 Von Ehrenkrook, J. 539n57 Wagner, S. 266n1 Waltz, K. N. 254n1 Warren, J. 300n108 Watson, A. 316n16 Webb, R. L. 369n1 Weber, F. W. 313n6 Weber, W. 55n6, 72n36, 81n9, 101–103, 138, 154n55, 211, 317

Welch, D. A. 189n11 Welch, J. W. 388n25 Wellesley, K. 107n27 Wellhausen, J. 313 Wesselius, J. W. 148n20 Westcott, B. F. 445n2 Westwood, U. 183n34 Whealey, A. 445n1 White, H. 546–49 Whittaker, C. R. 283n54 Wilson, C. 288 Wilson, S. G. 419n34 Windelband, W. 344n2, 508 Windisch, H. 447 Wink, W. 369n1 Wiseman, T. P. 11, 575, 104n16, 160n90, 370n5, 586–601 Woodman, A. J. 150n26, 207n32, 370n5, 449n16, 519n79, 524n7 Woodruff, P. 189n10 Worthington, I. 226n34 Wright, N. L. 463n42, 463n45 Wright, N. T. 11, 405, 513n66, 602–624 Yadin, Y. 292 Yarrow, L. M. 151 Yavetz, Z. 90n24, 92n28 Zetterholm, M. 406n10 Zias, J. E. 267n2 Zissos, A. 81n7 Zurawski, J. 424n41

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