The Jewish Historian Flavius Josephus: A Biographical Investigation

life, the author refers to the [7] narrative of the War (Life 412). Despite this, the fact of the
matter is not that Josephus would have refrained from a renewed presentation of all the
events that he had recounted in the War, which would have been totally understandable. One
should bear in mind that, for example, Life 85 - 103 reports the same facts, partly in literal
correspondence, as does War 2.614 - 623, and that Life 126 to 148 stands in similarly close
correspondence to War 2.595 - 613. So anyone who reads the Life and the War will learn
numerous facts twice; anyone who reads only the Life will simply not learn about the most
important facts from Josephus’ life. Actually one would expect either a Life that included
everything worth knowing about Josephus, or a Life that presumed the reader had possession
of the War, and that consequently dismissed everything already reported there with a short
reference. If, on the other hand, the author provides us with a mixture of two possible
presentations whose blending cannot be accounted for either on the basis of content or of
external form, then without further ado we are forced to the thought that when composing
the Life, Josephus provided some elements in a renewed presentation and left other elements
aside for factual reasons, and that certain differences in content, which exist between the Life
and the War with respect to facts reported in both sources, motivated Josephus’ procedure: the
self-portrayal was to improve the presentation of the War; however where there was nothing
to improve, Josephus could content himself with a simple reference to the older writing.
In fact, it appeared that the motive underlying the need for these modifications could
also be demonstrated; because just before the publication of the Life, Justus of Tiberias had
published a work projecting an image of Josephus’ activity in the rebel movement that did not
meet with Josephus’ approval. For example, Justus had actually claimed that Josephus
instigated the rebellion against Rome in Tiberias while Josephus for his part raised this same
accusation against Justus (Life 340 ff.). Picking up on this, the researchers, who have recently
been concerned with finding an answer to our question, 4 have repeatedly portrayed the
following [8] essentially unchanging picture: in his presentation of the Jewish War Josephus
had sought to cover up his participation in the conflict against Rome since he had won the
emperor’s favour and therefore wished to suppress his anti-Roman past as much as possible.
This attempt at denial prompted Justus of Tiberias to denounce Josephus’ lack of truthfulness
4 Besides the usual reference works, I emphasize in particular B. Niese (Historische Zeitschrift N.
F. 76. 1896) and H. Luther (Josephus und Justus von Tiberias, Dissertation. Halle 1910).
11