The personal character of Josephus and his credibility as a historian have been often impugned, more especially by his own compatriots. Edersheim’s article in the Dictionary of Christian Biography (where our author finds himself in strange company), while not lacking in appreciation of his merits, displays some of this rancour, though not in its more virulent form. He has been denounced as traitor and renegade, as a flatterer of the Romans and one whose statements must always be regarded with suspicion.
His character is somewhat of an enigma. We may grant that it is not one to arouse any feeling of keen admiration. He was no ardent patriot, like Judas Maccabæus, no missionary in a great cause to which he was ready to devote his whole heart and soul and to sacrifice his life. His three years’ sojourn in the wilderness was not, like the visit to Arabia of an older contemporary, the prelude to a life-work of strenuous and unremitting toil ending in imprisonment and martyrdom. His faults are patent; and among them we should rank first an inordinate egotism and a concern, above all other considerations, for his personal interests. His life was constantly in danger; like St. Paul, he encountered perils in the sea, perils from his own countrymen, perils from the Gentiles; but his instinct for self-preservation, aided by ready tact and resourcefulness, carried him safely through the most desperate situations. In his account of the shipwreck[[23]] we read that “I and certain others, about eighty in all [out of a crew of six hundred], outstripped the others and were taken on board.” There is no thought of the unfortunate swimmers who were left behind; nothing corresponding to the Apostle’s words of encouragement in similar circumstances, and to his biographer’s joy in recording that “all escaped safe to the land.” In Galilee, before the siege of Jotapata, he narrates with evident self-satisfaction the various stratagems by which he outwitted his enemies who plotted against his life. During the siege he meditated flight; “Josephus, dissembling his anxiety for his own safety, said that it was for their sakes that he proposed to retire”—such is his own naïve statement of his reply to the remonstrances of the besieged citizens (B.J. III. 7. 15 f. (197)). Then there is the final scene in the cave; we cannot but admire the dexterity with which he eluded death at the hands of his fellow-prisoners and the vividness of his description; but by what ruse (“should one say by fortune or by the providence of God?” are his own words) he managed to be, with one companion, the last survivor in the drawing of the lots, remains a mystery.[[24]] Later, as Roman prisoner and Roman citizen, he always steered a safe course and retained the favour of a succession of imperial patrons. He was, it seems, a man of the world with a thoroughly secular disposition.
What was his real attitude to Judaism? Though he devoted the latter part of his life to writing the history of his nation and a very able defence of their religion, we may doubt whether he was profoundly affected by their beliefs. Traill finds something “unnational” in the first act of his life, when he “looked around him upon the sects and factions of his times ... with a philosophic, supercilious independence.”[[25]] Though we need not, perhaps, go so far as this, nor blame him for what appears to have been a genuine quest of truth, we may allow that he was a cosmopolitan, alienated in many ways from his own nation, and that there was a lack of depth and sincerity in his adherence to Jewish dogmas.
With this must be considered his attitude to Christianity. If we set aside the one brief “testimony” to Jesus Christ, which must be rejected as an interpolation,[[26]] we are left with the story of the death of James, “the brother of Jesus who was called Christ,”[[27]] and the reference to the murder of John the Baptist,[[28]] as the sole allusions to the Founder of Christianity and the movement which prepared the way for it. This glaring omission cannot be other than deliberate. Josephus had every opportunity of acquainting himself with the events of the life of Christ and of his followers; certainly he did not lack the curiosity to investigate the facts, and he must surely have watched with interest the fortunes and rapid spread of the rising sect which, even in St. Paul’s lifetime, had gained a footing in “Cæsar’s household.”[[29]] The Apostle’s words with reference to an intimate friend of Josephus might have been said of the historian himself: “I am persuaded that none of these things is hidden from him; for this hath not been done in a corner.”[[30]] Yet there is this silence. He does not attack Christianity; he simply ignores it. And, with our knowledge of the character of Josephus, the reason is not far to seek. He studiously avoids a topic to which, in the circumstances of the time, it would have been dangerous to allude. “Not only was he informed on these subjects; he was far too well informed of what the Christians had already and recently suffered ... not to be on his guard against the imprudence of giving any testimony in their favour which might implicate himself in their misfortunes.”[[31]]
To the same motive must be attributed the historian’s reticence on the subject of a Messiah. The words addressed to the serpent: “It shall bruise thy head and thou shalt bruise his heel,”[[32]] occasion no allusion to a future deliverer, nor yet the prophecies of Balaam; Jacob’s blessing is omitted; the oracle which foretold the coming of a world-ruler out of Judæa is interpreted of Vespasian.[[33]] On the other hand, there are a few passages which suggest that Josephus did not regard the fulfilment of prophecy as closed with the destruction of Jerusalem, and that he may have entertained a belief in a Messianic era involving the downfall of Rome, of which he dared not speak openly. On Balaam he writes (Ant. IV. 6. 5 [125]): “From the accomplishment of all these things in accordance with his prediction one may conjecture what will happen in the future”; and again, in the interpretation of Nebuchadnezzar’s dream (Ant. X. 10. 4 [210]): “Daniel also showed the king the meaning of the stone, but I have not thought proper to relate this, my duty being to describe past, not future, events,” while curious enquirers are referred to the prophetical book.
In his public life as statesman and general Josephus scarcely deserves the hard names of traitor and renegade. Involved in early manhood in the rush of events arising out of a popular movement which had long been gathering force, with which he did not sympathize, which he could not stem and vainly tried to direct, realizing from the first the hopelessness of combating the Roman legions, and anxious to find some means of compromise by which to save his country from ruin, he nevertheless accepted the post with which he was entrusted, and threw himself into the task of organizing, to the best of his ability, the defences of Galilee, so long as resistance was possible; while he devoted the energies of his later life, when his position might have tempted him to disown his nation, to writing its history and defending his countrymen against the slanders of a malignant world.
On the position of Josephus as a historian, widely different opinions have been held, from that of Jerome who extolled him as a “Greek Livy,” to the criticisms of some modern writers who have accused him of bias and gross misrepresentation.
The apologetic nature of the Antiquities is self-evident. The author’s purpose was to represent his maligned nation in the best light to Greek readers, “to break down, if possible, the wall of partition that had hitherto secluded the Hebrew race from the communion and cut them off from the sympathies of mankind,” to “plead the cause of the injured Jew at the bar of the world” (Traill). This object has occasioned the suppression of some (though not all) of the less creditable incidents in the Biblical narrative. With a view to attractiveness the narrative is diversified by legendary additions culled from various sources, while occasionally, it must be admitted, the author seems to have added minor details of his own invention (see below on the imitation of Thucydides). Granted some blemishes of this kind, there remains no very serious charge against the writer of Ant. That work is, on the whole, a skilful compilation, its value varying with that of the authorities consulted, while the criticisms passed on some of them show that these were not always used without discrimination.[[34]] He professes in several passages to have a high ideal of a historian’s duty, and, speaking generally, one may allow that he so far comes up to it as to deserve a fairly high, if not a foremost, place among the historians of antiquity.
As the historian of the Jewish War, Josephus comes before us with the highest credentials. Holding command in Galilee in its opening stages and behind the Roman lines throughout the siege of Jerusalem, he was exceptionally well qualified for this task, and must have relied mainly on his own recollections and the notes which he made at the time (c. Ap. I. 49). Deserters kept him informed of events within the city (ib.). He seems also to have had access to the emperor’s memoirs (Life 358). He submitted the books as they were finished to Herod Agrippa and the completed work to Vespasian and Titus, and from them and others received testimonials to his accuracy (c. Ap. I. 50 ff., Life 361 ff.).[[35]] We may therefore unhesitatingly accept the general trustworthiness of his account. Exception should, perhaps, be made for a tendency to exaggeration, e. g. in the matter of numbers, and for some, though not a marked, bias for extolling the achievements and clemency of the Roman generals. His statement that Titus desired to spare the Temple[[36]] runs counter to that of another historian (Sulpicius Severus), who asserts that the destruction received his sanction; the Jewish historian was, at any rate, in a better position to know the facts.