The Jewish Historian Flavius Josephus: A Biographical Investigation

obbers that ultimately tipped the political scale. They simply could not risk dismissing
Josephus since as a result they would lose their only means of keeping the
dangerous robbers under control. So the government in Jerusalem was finally compelled
to [250] accept the situation that Josephus had brought about by force: they endorsed him
henceforth as strategos of Galilee. Yet the opposition certainly had no intention of falling silent,
written charges against Josephus were released from Galilee, however he responded to the
grievances in his administrative report, which we reconstructed in chapter IV and the main
substance of which we have rendered here: Its purpose was to elaborate the particular merits
of Josephus in the pacification of Galilee and to explain his rise [to power] in such phrases as
were inevitably inoffensive. Josephus was a rebel who had been successful; and it is probably
their bad conscience, which disposed such characters repeatedly throughout history to
portray their rise [to power], whereby the historically crucial points are mostly concealed or
intimated only in a veiled form. One [should] remember, if the small may be compared to the
great, the Monumentum Ancyranum or Caesar’s Bellum civile. Josephus wishes to prove that he
protected Galilee from the robbers and he even tells us in the form of suggestions how he
managed to do this. That he himself, however, in this way turned himself into the tyrant of
Galilee in opposition to his government, we learn only through the grievances of the
opponents to whom Josephus has responded. He could truly be satisfied with his achievement;
he was not yet thirty years old but he had seized the strategia of Galilee for himself.
When Josephus was composing the War a few years later, he projected a very different
picture of his first activities in Galilee; now he knew what he could not yet suspect during the
composition of his administrative report, [namely] that directly from the turmoil in Galilee,
which he had portrayed in his administrative report, arose the war, which was to lead to the
destruction of Jerusalem, and that the first blow of the Romans was to strike him as strategos of
Galilee. From this new knowledge of things Josephus now decided in the War not to deny his
entire activity in Galilee, but indeed to present it in such a way as if he had been sent to Galilee
from the outset as strategos for the Roman War (2.568). He accordingly shifts the beginning of
the Jewish-Roman War to an earlier time [251] in such a manner that those events, which
according to the administrative report had no connection whatsoever to the war, which was
indeed still unknown then, henceforth fell within the framework of this war. Thus the War
acquires the semblance that the opposition in Galilee was directed against the legal
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