The Jewish Historian Flavius Josephus: A Biographical Investigation

we are not in such a favourable position with Josephus who always amended only the details,
as [we are] with Polybius, for example, where we can identify the preliminary stages in a
completely different manner, thanks to the clarity and uniformity of his thinking.
With the death of Herod this source ran dry and Josephus thereupon resorted once
again to his War, which he remodelled in a manner similar to the one we have demonstrated
for book 14. We shall not address these matters in detail [221]; because numerous researchers
have pointed out these shifts, although they wrongly assigned them to Josephus’ source. This
mistake has been eliminated by us probably for good; it is no one other than Josephus who has
introduced a new bias into the report of the War.
Chapter VI. The documents in Josephus’ writings
There are essentially two opinions about the provenance of the tremendously
important documents in Josephus’ [writings]. Niese (Hermes 11, 1876, page 466 ff.) assumes that
in the speech that Nicolaus of Damascus delivered before Agrippa, when [the king] stayed in
Asia Minor, in favour of the Jews [living] there, prompted by their dispute with the various city
communities (Josephus, Ant. 16.31 - 57), reference was also made to older Roman documents
that were located in the Capitol (section 48); he [Niese] surmises from this that the documents
disclosed by Josephus, which were likewise stored in the Capitol (14.266), had already been
collected by Nicolaus and had been extracted from the latter’s work by Josephus. By contrast,
Willrich (Judaica, 1900, page 40 ff.) would have the collection brought together by King Agrippa
I when he spoke before Caligula in support of the Alexandrian Jews. Both opinions implicitly
make the correct assumption that the documents were to serve apologetic purposes. No one
stressed this more exactly and clearly than Josephus himself, especially [in] 16.174 - 178: his
historical work will preferably fall into the hands of the Greeks; therefore he wishes to show by
means of the documents how the Jews have been able to carry on their worship unmolested
under the protection of the authorities. He mentions these matters more frequently in order to
free foreign peoples of their preconceptions about the Jews etc. For this reason the very
quoting of documents in Josephus’ [writings] is placed in the [same] category [as] the
quotations from pagan authors. We have seen that Josephus supplemented the tradition of the
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