The Jewish Historian Flavius Josephus: A Biographical Investigation

narratives contained in the War and in the administrative report; for if our path is the correct
one, then the administrative report must offer the more original version of the narratives
[when] compared to the War. This problem is to occupy us in the next chapter.
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Chapter III. Josephus’ Life and War
The preceding investigation has brought us to the important realization that even
before the War Josephus composed an administrative report about his activity during the
Jewish revolt, and that he published this report after the year 100 as an appendix to the
Antiquities — after expanding it with his combat against Justus and with biographical details.
The War is therefore younger than this old recovered nucleus of the later Life. We [can] verify
this finding by an exhaustive comparison of the parallel reports to be found in the Life and the
War. It is a fact — and a downright outrageous one at that — that no research at all has been
dedicated to this task before now. But this fact is explained by the circumstance that one could
not possibly have arrived at [such] a result with the previously accepted means of source
criticism. Since this [writing], in fact, concerns the personal experiences of the author himself,
about which only he has kept records, it was of course impossible to ascribe, for example, the
one report to this source and the other [report] to that [source]. And since it is thought that an
author’s contradictions can be explained only by [the fact] that he has used diverse sources,
and this possibility is excluded here, thus an insoluble puzzle was encountered in this case —
with silence. In so far as things were being retold, at times this version was used, at times that
one, and consequently a picture was painted that had only a rather vague relationship to the
actual course of events.
As opposed to source criticism which has run into such a quagmire, we shall compare
the two reports with each other in great detail, and through this comparison two findings will
emerge which are methodically invaluable; for we shall not only find confirmation that the
nucleus of the Life is older than the War, but we shall also see that the different reports that
Josephus has produced about the events do depend upon each other in such a way that he
pursued different political purposes at the different periods of time and therefore he changed
certain details of his formulation. In the place of source criticism — and as a
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