The Jewish Historian Flavius Josephus: A Biographical Investigation
The Jewish Historian Flavius Josephus: A Biographical Investigation
The Jewish Historian Flavius Josephus: A Biographical Investigation
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narratives contained in the War and in the administrative report; for if our path is the correct<br />
one, then the administrative report must offer the more original version of the narratives<br />
[when] compared to the War. This problem is to occupy us in the next chapter.<br />
[56]<br />
Chapter III. <strong>Josephus</strong>’ Life and War<br />
<strong>The</strong> preceding investigation has brought us to the important realization that even<br />
before the War <strong>Josephus</strong> composed an administrative report about his activity during the<br />
<strong>Jewish</strong> revolt, and that he published this report after the year 100 as an appendix to the<br />
Antiquities — after expanding it with his combat against Justus and with biographical details.<br />
<strong>The</strong> War is therefore younger than this old recovered nucleus of the later Life. We [can] verify<br />
this finding by an exhaustive comparison of the parallel reports to be found in the Life and the<br />
War. It is a fact — and a downright outrageous one at that — that no research at all has been<br />
dedicated to this task before now. But this fact is explained by the circumstance that one could<br />
not possibly have arrived at [such] a result with the previously accepted means of source<br />
criticism. Since this [writing], in fact, concerns the personal experiences of the author himself,<br />
about which only he has kept records, it was of course impossible to ascribe, for example, the<br />
one report to this source and the other [report] to that [source]. And since it is thought that an<br />
author’s contradictions can be explained only by [the fact] that he has used diverse sources,<br />
and this possibility is excluded here, thus an insoluble puzzle was encountered in this case —<br />
with silence. In so far as things were being retold, at times this version was used, at times that<br />
one, and consequently a picture was painted that had only a rather vague relationship to the<br />
actual course of events.<br />
As opposed to source criticism which has run into such a quagmire, we shall compare<br />
the two reports with each other in great detail, and through this comparison two findings will<br />
emerge which are methodically invaluable; for we shall not only find confirmation that the<br />
nucleus of the Life is older than the War, but we shall also see that the different reports that<br />
<strong>Josephus</strong> has produced about the events do depend upon each other in such a way that he<br />
pursued different political purposes at the different periods of time and therefore he changed<br />
certain details of his formulation. In the place of source criticism — and as a<br />
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