The Jewish Historian Flavius Josephus: A Biographical Investigation

about the distant past, the War therefore features a trend that is friendly to Herod and the
Antiquities [features] one that is inimical to him, then this development goes hand in hand with
the shift in [Josephus’] judgment about the Herodian Agrippa: therefore no one other
than Josephus himself has fundamentally changed his opinion of the Herodians
and expressed this modified view in the Antiquities. Psychological
understanding of the personality must take the place of the stratification of
sources [Quellenzergliederung] in the usual sense, which traces each sentence
back to an author and makes Josephus out to be a dim-witted copyist. Josephus,
too, is a human being who has passed through an infinity of experiences in his life and
therefore evolved only [133] gradually. To detect traces of this evolution is truly the
task of anyone who wishes to evaluate Josephus as a historian.
If we are to take up our task in this sense, however, then virtually all preparatory work
is lacking – despite the rich literature mentioned; because, since Josephus’ individuality had
been cast aside from the start, a larger stock of facts was manifest within the younger writing,
the Antiquities, in comparison to the older War; therefore [it was thought that] both works must
have originated independently from older sources. On the other hand one could not fail to
recognize, from the extremely far-ranging correspondence that can be observed between the
[two] works, that ultimately a common basis existed, which was traced back to Nicolaus of
Damascus. In this way arose the currently quite widespread assumption that Josephus
expanded upon Nicolaus[‘ work] in his War; [but that] in contrast, he based the Antiquities on an
anonymous author, who, for his part, also used Nicolaus as a source, but who gave his work an
anti-Herodian bias. Thus the War and the Antiquities came to be valued as two sources, which
were independent from each other and which could, for that reason, be invoked at will with
equal justification. Proceeding from an assumption of such a nature, in all the basic works 48
that address the presentation of the history of the Herodians and especially of Herod himself,
the historical narrative is constructed equally from the War and the Antiquities in such a way
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I [shall] indicate those known best: H. Ewald, Geschichte des Volkes Israel, vol. 4; Hausrath,
Neutestamentliche Zeitgeschichte, vol. 1; Renan, Histoire du peuple d'Israel, vol. 5; Wellhausen,
Israelitische und jüdische Geschichte; Schürer, Geschichte des jüdischen Volkes, vol. 1; Felten,
Neutestamentliche Zeitgeschichte; Otto, Herodes; Réville, Deutsche Revue 18, 1893, II, pages 83 ff.,
221 ff., 361 ff.; Bertholet, Das Ende des jüdischen Staatswesens, 1910; H. Holtzmann, Judentum and
Christentum.
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