Herod the Procurator - Richard Carrier

Analysis of this question is key to revealing the sorry state of the texts of
Josephus, proving the need is great for new critical work wholly independent of Niese. In
his apparatus, Niese says that the reading of auton in all the other mss. is “hardly right; it
seems a gap ought to be here” ( vix recte; lacuna statuenda vid.). He does not say why he
doesn’t think auton can be correct, but the only reason imaginable is that it seems to state
the impossible: a foreign client king being made governor of a Roman province. This
must be Niese’s reasoning, since there is nothing grammatically wrong with the reading
of auton (obviously referring to Herod), in fact it is exactly what we should expect given
what the BJ says, though it is strange that Niese of fers no remarks or emendations for
that passage, even though it says essentially the same thing. But supposing this was his
reasoning, why did Niese think autên was a better reading? Perhaps because the feminine
would not make Herod the object of the sentence, but the territory he was being given (in
the preceding passage). The sentence would then read “[Augustus] adjoined this
[territory] to those who were procurating Syria, giving orders to do everything with
[Herod’s] judgement.” This would make a nice solution: instead of giving Herod power
over Syria, Augustus is merely loaning his personal agents in Syria to Herod, ordering
them to also work for him in administering financial matters in his newly-acquired lands.
This would be legally uncontroversial: the same men serving as employees of Augustus
in Syria simply serve as employees of Herod in an adjacent section of Herod’ s kingdom.
But this all falls apart when we compare this passage with the BJ, which definitely
excludes this interpretation (even if we tried to emend the text in some plausible way),
and the agreement of meaning between the reading of auton in the AJ and what is stated
in the BJ, coupled with the noted unreliability of the Palatinus ms., and the universal
agreement of all other mss. (and even Latin translations, which have eum), certainly
excludes autên as an acceptable reading. However , it is not certain that this is even what
Niese had in mind, since he apparently thought some additional text was required, which
he then proposed had fallen out in copying, and therefore he believed the received text
was in some sense illegible, but this removes any plausible support he could have had for
accepting autên as the correct reading.
Through their distortion of Niese’s original note later editors show that they never
actually looked at the mss. themselves. As we saw, Niese’s actual words were “ vix recte;
lacuna statuenda vid.” But Naber rewords Niese’ s comment to say “ lacunam notavit
Ns.,” in other words, “Niese noted a gap,” an ambiguous paraphrase that seems to assert
rather than conjecture. Ralph Marcus reworded this yet again in the apparatus to the Loeb
edition as “post hoc verbum lacunam stat. Niese,” in other words, “after this word lies a
gap [according to] Niese.” 14 Thus, what began as a merely conjectured missing word or
two became a mythical ‘observed lacuna’ in the text. This gives us little confidence that
14 Both taken from the apparati to the relevant passage in Naber and in Marcus, op. cit.
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