The Jewish Historian Flavius Josephus: A Biographical Investigation

we owe an excellent treatment of the speech (Rheinisches Museum 55, 1905, 388 ff.). 84 Xenophon
und Demosthenes may be sufficient in order to clarify that phenomenon in its literary
peculiarity, which we encountered in relationship to the administrative report and the Life: the
old manuscript is taken out, used word for word as the basis and furnished with only a few
additions; however it is these additions which actually matter to the authors.
If one is entitled to speak of a type of new edition of a text already in such cases, then
this expression is definitely appropriate when we cast a glance at the third methodologically
important phenomenon, namely the additions to the Antiquities and to the War. To a certain
extent, these represent the methodological intermediate stage between the phenomenon
considered up to now and the circumstances we encountered in the War: After the year 100 the
Antiquities was stripped of its old conclusion and, in place of this, [it] acquired a transition
segment, which had the function of leading over to the Life, which at that time was generated
as a whole in order to form the conclusion to the Antiquities. The difference with respect to the
new editions considered up to now is therefore first [of all] only a quantitative one in that the
newly appearing [substance] almost disappears in comparison to the mass of retained material;
as a result, however, the essence of the matter is also shifted: Xenophon created the Agesilaus
out of the Hellenica, from his Chersonese speech Demosthenes created the 4 Philippic, which was
quite different, and Josephus [created] the Life out of his administrative report – but the
Antiquities still remains the Antiquities even now. In those works a new [writing] arose from the
use of old manuscripts, here the old is developed further through additions; the former could
be designated as a verbatim use of earlier preliminary work, and the latter as a new edition of a
[239] work that had already been completed earlier. Josephus, however, reformulated his
Antiquities not only by means of the subsequent incorporation of the Life, as demonstrated in
chapter I, after it had already been published years previously; demonstrably later additions
based on new sources have been included (page 45 ff.) as well in a few passages in the midst of
the narrative, while for other sections such as the documents, for example, we were compelled
to leave [the question] open whether they originated at the same time as their surrounding
84
Both the Agesilaus and Demosthenes’ 4th Philippic have been declared inauthentic. I mention
this only briefly since no one will likely wish to embrace such an opinion any longer today. The
athetesis, however, does indeed prove how alien this phenomenon of ancient literature
discussed above strikes us [to be], although L. M. Hartmann recently did something similar in
his Roman history.
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