The Jewish Historian Flavius Josephus: A Biographical Investigation

changing the content he copied it partly literally and partly such that a slight paraphrase was
produced. This stylistic reworking did not remain consistent throughout, Josephus reworked
the beginning of the book in a more intense manner stylistically speaking; later on he became
noticeably depleted and copied more literally. And something similar happens to the contents.
Josephus retains the old framework from beginning to end but he incorporates a new
trend into it. He presents the various pictures anew for this purpose, and in so doing he makes
an honest effort to think these new pictures through consistently in the details; but the author
is burdened by the model so that he cannot extricate himself from its pressure. So all these
new formulations then still clearly betray their origin from a writing [based on] an opposite
bias and as a result also form a counterpart to our War. Moreover, Josephus did not make the
attempt to refurbish the entire old text from a uniform point of view; rather he was content to
reformulate the individual pictures as such and to remove from each one that trait, which no
longer seemed appropriate to him. The result is that the Antiquities is lacking all uniformity of
execution, and that it is absolutely impossible [219] to characterize a personality on the basis
of this work; the only thing that we can deduce from these reworkings is the political bias that
Josephus wished to express in detail by the reworking, and it is indeed this, which interests us
above all. But also with these factual reworkings the same thing happened to Josephus as did
with the stylistic [reworkings]. His power began to weaken progressively; in the first part of
the book Josephus is tirelessly at work impressing the new trend upon almost every sentence;
later on he follows his model much more closely. Therefore, when our investigations, which
were to identify the reworkings, gradually lose somewhat in extent, they still as a result
provide an exact portrayal of what Josephus has accomplished. Evidently he fully sensed the
formidable difficulties occasioned by the incorporation of a new trend into the old framework
– he did, after all, constantly stumble in the process; therefore he contented himself at the end
with showing his new view to its best advantage in a few outstanding points while he calmly
transferred other [material straight] from his source. Thus his work was to be deprived of all
balance.
This impression of imbalance is heightened by the fact that Josephus included even
more insertions into his work during its composition; at present I am thinking less of the
additional sources [Nebenquellen] (documents, Strabo, etc.), which should be dealt with
collectively, than in fact of such segments in which Josephus once more brings his political
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