The Jewish Historian Flavius Josephus: A Biographical Investigation

correctness of my analysis of Polybius by means of [my investigations of]
Josephus on the basis of two parallel texts. That is to say, by this fact the foregoing
investigation becomes a decisive reinforcement to everything that I have presented in my
Polybius.
As a start, the comparison between the War and the Life permitted the realization that
even the things experienced by Josephus himself had been presented by him in a varying
manner and in such a way, in fact, that the basis of the experiences was left, however, this
basis was trimmed and embellished in various different ways. It was possible to demonstrate
precisely and in complete detail that Josephus was not in the slightest provided with new
factual knowledge, rather he merely shed a new light upon the existing material, which he
retained linguistically as well [235], however, as a result he still caused the events as such to
appear differently. This objective fact described here can simply not be explained by the
previous methods of source criticism: both texts are dependent upon each other – and yet they
are not; there has been no influx of new sources – and yet the illumination is different. The
solution to this problem is provided only in that Josephus himself did indeed retain the
narrative, however he wished to endow it with a different colouring, i.e. Josephus’
objective has changed over the years. One would almost be inclined to shrink from
introducing this insight as a methodological innovation to historical scholarship, which has
after all recognized and described the intellectual and political development of leading
personalities in numerous cases – and yet precisely what one has been accustomed to consider
as something almost natural otherwise, has been eliminated among historians from the outset.
How significant it is, indeed, that Eduard Meyer accused me of making Polybius out to be a
falsifier because I expected of him that in later years he would have provided a new
presentation of events that he had previously reported differently. The reason for this
immense misunderstanding is given in [the fact] that the so-called objectivity of history has
been valued far too greatly and this in turn lies [in the fact] that history has been confused
with antiquarian details [Antiquaria], whereas in truth the latter simply provides the material
for the former. A historical researcher is not someone who establishes facts, but someone who
brings past life into his [own] living awareness, and for this reason we cannot at all be too
exhaustively acquainted with a historian upon whom we come to depend as a source.
But I believe that yet another reason – half unconscious – deters researchers from
206