The Jewish Historian Flavius Josephus: A Biographical Investigation

portrayal [of Josephus’ development]; one may discount the War as one-sided or invoke it only
with certain reservations – a standpoint with which I agree entirely – but it is fundamentally
incorrect when, instead of this, the reinterpretations of his source that Josephus undertook in
the Antiquities are invoked as something better. In our entire part, the Antiquities does
not contribute even a single useful segment, to the contrary, what could be
useful from the War is reinterpreted [181] into a mixture that no longer has
anything whatsoever to do with history. By this discovery, however, all newer
presentations are deprived of any foundation based on source [analysis]; for as far as I
examined them, they generally take the Antiquities as their starting point (Ewald 531,
Boltzmann 217, Wellhausen, Pharisäer und Sadducäer, page 103 ff., Israelitische und jüdische
Geschichte, page 319 f., Réville 94, Renan 198 f., Felten 97, Schürer 348, Bertholet 49, Otto,
Herodes 17 f.), and accordingly, maintain that the Jewish aristocracy forced Hyrcanus, half
against his will, to drag Herod before the Sanhedrin, who failed in a cowardly and shameful
way. In truth these “principal men of the people”, behind whom one has sought the Sadducees,
are nothing other than a replacement in the Antiquities for the “gossips at Herod’s court” and
the discussion before the Sanhedrin is a replacement for [the discussion] before Hyrcanus.
Josephus did not use some tradition or other in this; for he transfers quite superficially the
traits that fit with the view of the War into the picture that he has designed afresh [in the
Antiquities] and he does not use the colours that would inherently suit the new picture. Thus he
writes in exclusive dependence upon the War, the view[point] of which he simply reinterprets.
Together with this comes the oldest, indeed fundamental, evidence for the assertion
that at that time the Sanhedrin alone was entitled by right to impose the death penalty. It is
extremely important that Nicolaus was not aware of any of these things at all; on the contrary,
he assumes that the king can order the death penalty (War 1.209).
Granted, Juster, who has correctly drawn the same conclusion from the internal
contradiction of Ant. 167 (cf. page 174), 61 thought (in the place cited [above]) that Nicolaus, who
61
Unfortunately he did not pay the corresponding attention to the War; the same internal
contradictions exist in it. Only their origination is to be explained differently. The
contradiction arose within the Antiquities by virtue of Josephus’ reinterpretation of the
narrative of the War, [while] the War was corrupted only later as a result of the new theory of
the Antiquities, which was retroactively incorporated into the War. For this reason the two
layers can be easily separated from each other in the War, whereas in the Antiquities they have
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