In the first book and the greater part of the second, where he is taken up with the preliminary introduction, he had ample sources before him, and his functions were only to abstract and compile; but when he comes to the final struggle with Rome, he would have us believe that he depended mainly on his independent knowledge. Recent investigation has thrown grave doubts on his claim, and has suggested that with Josephus it is true that "once a compiler, always a compiler." The habit of direct copying from the works of predecessors was fixed in the literary ethics of the day. In company with most of the historians of antiquity he introduces his general ideas upon the march of events in the form of addresses, which he puts into the mouth of the chief characters at critical moments. Here he is free to invent and intrude his own opinions, and here he almost unfailingly adopts a Roman attitude. The work, in fact, bears the character of official history, and has all the partiality of that form of literature. Titus, as the author proudly recalls, subscribed his own hand to it, and ordered that it should be published, and King Agrippa wrote a glowing testimonial to it in the most approved style.[1] It was accepted in Rome as the standard work upon the Jewish struggle. Patronage may have saved literature at certain epochs, but it always undermines the feeling of truth. It is not improbable that a juster appreciation of events was contained in the original writings of Josephus, but was corrected at the order of the royal traitor or the Imperial master, to whom he perforce submitted them.
[Footnote 1: C. Ap. 8. See below, p. 221.]
If in the Wars Josephus assumes the air of a scientific historian, in the Antiquities he is more openly the apologist. Despite his professions in the preface of the earlier work, he seems to have found it necessary or expedient to give to Greco-Roman society a fresh account of the ancestry and the early history of his people and of the constitution of their government. The Roman Archaeologia of Dionysius of Halicarnassus, who fifty years earlier had written in twenty books the early events of Rome, probably suggested the division and the name of the work. He issued it after the death of his protector, in the thirteenth year of the reign of Domitian and in the fifty-sixth year of his own life.[1] In the preface, inconsistently with the statement in the earlier work, he declares that he intended from the beginning to write this apology of his people, but was deterred for a time by the magnitude of the labor of translating the history into an unaccustomed tongue. He ascribes the impulse to carry out the task to the encouragement of his patron Epaphroditus and of his other friends at Rome. It probably came also from his circumstances at Rome and the necessity of refuting calumnies made against him on account of his race and religion. And with all his weaknesses and failings he was not lacking in a feeling of national pride, which must have moved him to defend his people.
[Footnote 1: Ant. XX. xi. 3.]
Following on the destruction of Jerusalem, a passion of mixed hatred and contempt against the Jews moved the Roman nobility and the Roman masses. The Flavian court, representing the middle classes, by no means shared the feeling, and indeed the infatuation of Titus for the Jewish princess Berenice, the sister of Agrippa, was one of the scandals that most stirred the anger of the Romans. But the nobles hated those who had obstinately fought against the Roman armies for four years, and scorned those whose God had not saved them from ruin. At the same time Jewish persistence after defeat and the continuance of Jewish missionary activity offended the majesty of Rome, which, though tolerant of foreign religious ideas, was accustomed not merely to the physical submission of her enemies, but to their cultural and intellectual abasement. The hatred and scorn were fanned by a tribe of scribblers, who heaped distortion on the history and practices of the Jewish people. On the other hand, the proselytes to Judaism, "the fearers of God," who accepted part of its teaching—and in the utter collapse of pagan religion and morality they were many—desired to know something of the past grandeur of the nation, and doubtless were anxious to justify themselves to those who regarded their adoption of Jewish customs as an utter degradation. For those who mocked at him as a renegade member of a wretched people, which consisted of the scum of the earth, which harbored all kinds of low superstition, and which fostered inhumanity and misanthropy, and for those who looked to him as the accredited exponent of Judaism and the writer most able to set it in a favorable light, Josephus wrote the twenty books of his Antiquities.
The work differed from all previous apologies for Judaism in its completeness and its historical character. Philo had sought to recommend Judaism as a philosophical religion, and had interpreted the Torah as the law of Nature. Josephus was concerned not so much with Judaism as with the Jews. He seeks to show, by his abstract of historical records, that his people had a long and honorable past, and that they had had intercourse with ancient empires, and had been esteemed even by the Romans. The Antiquities comprised a summary of the whole of Jewish history, as well that which was set out in the books of the Bible as that which had taken place in the post-Biblical period down to his own day. Some of his predecessors had elaborated only the former part of the story, and that, it is probable, not nearly so fully as Josephus. He claims not to have added to or diminished from the record of Scripture. Though neither part of the claim can be upheld, he does undoubtedly give a tolerable account of the Bible so far as it is an historical narrative. The finer spirit of the Bible, even in its narrative parts, its deep spiritual teaching, its simple grandeur, its arresting sincerity, he was utterly unable to impart. In style, too, his Greek falls immeasurably below the original. We feel as we read his abstract with its omissions and additions:
The little more and how much it is;
The little less and what miles away.
His is a mediocre transcription, which replaces the naïveté, the rapidity, the unaffected beauty of the Hebrew, with the rhetoric, the sophistication, and the exaggerated overstatement of the Greek writing of his own time. Impressiveness for him is regularly enhanced by inaccuracy. His own or his assumed materialistic fatalism lowers the God of the Bible to a Power which materially rewards the righteous and punishes the wicked. In this immediate retribution he finds the surest sign of Divine Providence, and it is this lesson which he is most anxious to assert throughout his work. But he is at pains to dispel the idea of a special Providence for Israel. The material power of Rome made him desert in life the Jewish cause; the material thought of Rome made him dissimulate in literature the full creed of Judaism.
The second part of the Antiquities is a more ambitious piece of work. The compiler brings together all that he could find, in Jewish and Gentile sources, about Jewish history from the time of the Babylonian captivity to the outbreak of the war against Rome. And he was apparently the first of his people to utilize the Greek historians systematically in this fashion. There are long periods as to the incidents of which he was at a loss. Without possessing the ability or desire for research, he is not above confounding the chronology and perverting the succession of events to cover up a gap. But he does contrive to produce a connected narrative and to provide some kind of continuous chronicle. And for this service he is not lightly to be esteemed. Without him we should know scarcely anything of the external history of the Jewish people for three centuries. In style the last ten books vary remarkably. It depends almost entirely on his source whether the narrative is dull and monotonous or lively and dramatic. Where, for example, he is transcribing Nicholas and another historian of the period, he succeeds in presenting a picture of Herod that has a certain psychological value. Where, on the other hand, he has had to trust largely to scattered notes, as in the record of Herod's successors, his history is little better than a miscellany of disjointed passages. He lacks throughout a true sense of proportion, and for the deeper aspects of history he has no perception. He does not show in spite of his Jewish training the slightest appreciation of the spiritual power of Judaism or of the divine purpose illustrating itself in the rise and fall of nations. His conception of history is a biography of might, tempered by occasional manifestations of divine retribution. The concrete event is the important thing, and of culture and literature he says scarcely a word. His occasional moral reflections are on a mediocre plane and not true to the finer spirit of Judaism. He is consciously or unconsciously obsessed by the power of Rome, and makes little attempt to inculcate the higher moral outlook of his people. In soul, too, he is Romanized. He admires above all material power; he exhibits material conceptions of Providence; he looks always for material causes. Altogether the Antiquities is a work invaluable for its material, but a somewhat soulless book.
Josephus conveys more of the spirit of Judaism in his two books commonly entitled Against Apion, which are professedly apologetic. They were written after the Antiquities, and further emphasize two points on which he had dwelt in that work: the great age of the Jewish people and the excellence of the Jewish law. He was anxious to refute those detractors who, despite the publication of his history, still continued to spread grotesquely false accounts of Israel's origin and Israel's religious teachings; and he wrote here with more spirit and with more conviction than in his earlier elaborate works. He has no longer to accommodate himself to the vanity of a Roman Emperor, or to distort events so as to glorify his nation or to excuse his own conduct. He is able for once to set out his idea wholeheartedly, and he shows that, if he had few of the qualities required for a great historian, he had several of the talents of an apologist. His own calculated misrepresentation of his people in their last struggle would have afforded an opponent the best reply to his apology. In itself that apology was an effective summary of Judaism for his own times, and parts of it have a permanent value. For seventeen centuries it remained the sole direct answer from the Jewish side to the calumnies of the enemies of the Jews.