Epistle of Aristeas. For the history of the Macca- bees he keeps close to 1 Mac. For the succeeding period he cites numerous documents, which, unlike the speeches, he did not invent but probably quoted verbatim (as found in a collection formed by AgTippa I. ?). For the facts of universal history he was indebted first to Polybius (till 143 B.C.) and then to Strabo. For the reign of Herod the Great he manifestly utilizes the voluminous work of Nicolaus of Damascus, who, as the counsellor of Herod, had exalted his patron to the skies. It is true that Josephus controverts Nicolaus, but, wliile he sets many matters of detail in a ditterent light, he borrows from him the actual facts ; hence, too, the profusion of material in bks. XV.-XVII. as con- trasted Avith the meagre data of the following period. But even for the latter he is not entirely dependent upon his own personal recollections, but falls back upon documents ; and, in fact, while pre- paring this part of his Antiqiiities, he seems to have re-examined, and here and there to have more fully utilized, the same authorities from which he had already quoted more briefly in BJ I. and II. He has thus to some extent furnished us with the means of controlling his work as a historian.
5. Credibility. — Our estimate of the historic re- liability of Josephus, despite the personal attesta- tion of Titus and the sixty-two commendatory letters of Agrippa II. (c. Apion. i. 9[51f.], Vit. 65 [363 f.]), will scarcely be a favourable one if we compare the Vita with the relative sections of the BJ, inasmuch as each differs greatly from the other in the impression it conveys of his conduct during the Galiltean campaign. We must re- member, however, that the former is really a book of personal reminiscences, and, like most works of its kind, exhibits the writer's tendency to excul- pate himself ; and it would therefore be far from right to found our judgment of Josephus as a historian upon the Vita. As regards the BJ, we may certainly affirm that it is a carefully executed work, and that in the Antiquities the author has in general reproduced — though with a veneer of Hellenism — what his sources supplied. But he exaggerates in his numerical data, and he over- praises the generosity of the Romans. As another misleading tendency we need only mention his having done his best to suppress the Messianic expectations of his people, or at least to purge them of all political imi)ort. He set the seal on this attitude by assui-ing Vespasian — the oppressor of his nation — in God's name that the coming sovereignty of the whole world should one day be hi?, [B J III. viii. 9[401f.]).
Nevertheless, the manner in which he has woven his materials into the texture of his narrative fre- quently arouses misgiving. A number of his refer- ences to other passages of his writings (cf. Ant. XI. viii. 1 [305], XVIII. ii. 5 [54]) cannot be verified in his extant works, and must therefore have been inadvertently taken over from the source he hap- pened to be using. In chronology especially he shows himself to be a very unsafe guide. He has no regular method of dating— neither consulates nor reigns — and it is only occasionally that we find such chronological references as ' the third year of the 177th Olympiad, when Quintus Hor- tensius and Quintus Metellus were consuls' (Ant. XIV. i. 2 [4]), i.e. 67 B.C. Moreover, events from different sources and of different dates are thrown promiscuously together. A characteristic instance is found in the history of Pilate. While in BJ (II. ix. 2-4 [169-177]) Josephus refers to Pilate only in connexion with the two tumults which he caused by introducing into Jerusalem standards bearing the figure of the Emperor and by using the Temple funds for the construction of an aqueduct, he
652
JOSEPHUS
JOSEPHUS
apparently gives a much fuller record in A71L (XVIII. ii. 2-iv. 2 [35-89]). Here, after referring to Valerius Gratus as the first procurator of Judaja under Tiberius (14-37) — the four successive changes in the high-priesthood being all that he thinks worthy of mention in the eleven years of that pro- curatorship — Josephus records (in XVIII. ii. 2 [35]) Pilate's accession to the office, an event that can- not be dated earlier than A.D. 26. But before dealing (in XVIII. iii. 1-2 [55-62]) with the tumults which he had already described in BJ, he describes from another source the founding of Tiberias by Herod Antipas (XVIII. ii. 3 [36-38]), the embroil- ments among the Parthians consequent upon the death of Phraates (A.D. 16 ; Tac. Ann. ii. 1 f.), the extinction of the royal house of Commagene in the death of Antiochus (A.D. 17 ; Tac. ii. 42), and the murder of Germanicus (10 Oct. A.D. 19; Tac. ii. 69 tf.). Next, after recounting the two Jewish tumults referred to, he relates two events which evidently had already been conjoined in the Roman tradition (Cluvius Kufus?), for only the second be- longs to his subject (as giving an example of the ill-fortune that beset the Jews) : the first deals with the outrage in the Temple of Isis in Rome, whei'e the priests lent themselves to a trick by which a Roman lady of repute was beguiled sub prcetexta relicfionis to yield herself to a lover (XVIII. iii, 4 [65-80]) ; the second with the fraud practised by four Jews upon another Roman matron — an incident which led to the expulsion of the Jews from Rome by the decree of Tiberius, and to the drafting of 4,000 recruits from amongst them to Sardinia (A.D. 19) (XVIII. iii. 5 [81-84] ; cf. Tac. Ann. ii. 85). Then at length the narrative returns to Pilate, for the purpose of showing that he was deposed by Vitellius in consequence of a revolt of the Samaritans (xvill. iv. 1 [85 ff.]), and that, after his ten years of office, he was sent to Rome to defend his actions before Tiberius, arriv- ing there, however, only after the Emperor's death (16 March, A.D. 37). This outline will serve to show how little the narrative takes account of strict chronological sequence, as also — to take but one instance — how unwarranted it is of Schiirer, on the supposed evidence of Josephus, to assign the foundation of Tiberias to a date after A.D. 25, while numismatists, with a considerable show of reason, had hxed it in A.D. 17. Similarly, from the statement of Josephus that the defeat of Herod Antipas in the war against his father-in-law Aretas of Arabia (an event which should probably be assigned to A.D. 36) was regarded as a punishment for his murder of John the Baptist, we have no right to draw conclusions as to the date of that event or to that of the entrance of Jesus upon His public ministry, as has been done by Keim and others, who have on the same grounds fixed upon A.D. 35 as the date of the Crucihxion.