The Jewish Historian Flavius Josephus: A Biographical Investigation

and are not erected in public places, but were preserved only among Jews and some
barbarians. This discrepancy, however, is impossible for the documents of the Romans; for
they are erected in the public places of the towns and are even engraved still now upon bronze
tablets in the Capitol; when Julius Caesar granted Alexandrian citizenship to the Alexandrian
Jews he even imparted this to them upon a bronze tablet. I shall construct my proof from this
evidence (Ant. 14.186 - 188). After Josephus then reproduced the documents, he concludes the
collection – completing the above line of thought [228] — by indicating that he has
reproduced only a selection from the wealth of documentary material of the Capitol and the
bronze inscriptions, since he is of the conviction that this suffices for a basic appreciation of
Rome’s attitude towards the Jews (ibid. 265 ff.). According to Josephus’ explicit testimony the
documents [in] 14.144 ff. were likewise to be found in the Capitol. Josephus lived in Rome
during the years when he was composing the Antiquities; is there then anything more natural
than that he obtained the documents there, which he believed he could exploit for his
purposes? No one can doubt that the material was indeed available in the Capitol, not only
because Josephus tells us this explicitly, but also because everyone could have easily found him
guilty, should he have lied. And are we to assume here that he, who had for example
scrutinized closely what Strabo recounted about the Jews, should have foregone [the
opportunity] in Rome of examining this invaluable material in the Capitol? And if Josephus has
handed down to us many documents in a mutilated condition [and] if he did not disclose
others at all, then we may consider this to be the consequences of his difficulty in reading such
documents.
Josephus probably sent for other material directly from the Jewish communities in the
east; close connections did exist in the diaspora, and surely it was easy for Josephus to obtain
these documents. In this point I therefore agree totally with Schürer, who (page 86, note)
likewise considers Josephus [to be] the one who collected the documents. Perhaps some
document or other may have become known to him from a literary source, but this changes
nothing in the overall view: Josephus has obtained the documents themselves from the
archives and inserted them into his work, in which it so happened that he stumbled almost
constantly. Nevertheless, he was proud of his accomplishment, as is suggested by his repeated
reference to this.
81 As an example I offer Inscription 5, Priene no. 37.
200