[Footnote 1: Orig. C. Cels. i. 14.]
[Footnote 2: De Viris Illustr. 13.]
[Footnote 3: H.E. III. viii. 2.]
The first point that Josephus seeks to make good in his apology is the antiquity of the Hebrew people and the historical character of their Scriptures. In the Greco-Roman world, which had lost confidence in itself, and looked for inspiration to the past, age was a title to respectability, and it was the aim of the Jewish apologist to explain away the silence of the Greeks. For the certificate of the Hellenic historians was in the Hellenistic world the most convincing mark of genuineness.
"By my works on the Antiquity of the Jews—thus Josephus begins—I have proved that our Jewish nation is of very great antiquity and had a distinct existence. Those Antiquities contain the history of five thousand years, and are derived from our sacred books, but are translated by me into the Greek tongue."
Josephus loosely represents that the whole of the Antiquities is based on the Bible, and reckons the period of history at nearly a thousand years more than it covered.
"But since I observe that many people give ear to the reproaches that are laid against us by those who bear us ill-will, and will not believe what I have written concerning the antiquity of our nation, while they take it for a plain sign that our nation is of late date because it is not so much as vouchsafed a bare mention by the most famous historians among the Greeks, I therefore have thought myself under an obligation to write somewhat briefly about these subjects, in order to convict those who reproach us of spite and deliberate falsehood and to correct the ignorance of others, and withal to instruct all those who are desirous of knowing the truth of what great antiquity we really are. As for the witnesses whom I shall produce for the proof of what I say, they shall be such as are esteemed by the Greeks themselves to be of the greatest reputation for truth and the most skilful in the knowledge of all antiquity. I will also show that those who have written so reproachfully and falsely about us are to be convicted by what they have themselves written to the contrary, and I shall endeavor to give an account of the reasons why it has happened that a great number of Greeks have not made mention of our nation in their histories."
Acting on the principle that the best defense is attack, Josephus starts by turning on the Greeks themselves and discrediting their antiquity. They were a mushroom people, or at least their records were modern, and not to be compared in age with the records of the Phoenicians, the Hebrews, or the Babylonians. Comparative sciences had flourished in the cosmopolitan city of Alexandria, and in the light of them the Greek claim to exclusive wisdom had been shattered. Josephus had made himself master of the current knowledge of the subject. The Greeks learnt their letters from the Phoenicians, they have no record more ancient than the Homeric poems, and even Homer did not leave his poems in writing,[1] while their earliest historians lived but shortly before the Persian expedition into Greece, and their earliest philosophers, Pythagoras and Thales, learnt what they knew from Egyptians and Chaldeans. Having shown the lateness and Oriental origin of Greek culture, Josephus accuses Greek writers of unreliability, as is manifest by their mutual disagreement. He makes a great show of learning on the subject and uses his material effectively. Doubtless he found the topic ready to hand in some predecessor, and it is somewhat ironical that a Josephus should throw stones at a Thucydides on the score of inaccuracy.
[Footnote 1: It is interesting that this casual statement of Josephus was one of the starting points of modern Homeric criticism.]
The reason for the want of authority in the Greek historians—continues Josephus—is to be found in the fact that the Greeks in early times took no care to preserve public records of their transactions, which afforded those who afterwards would write about them scope for making mistakes and displaying invention: conditions which favored literary art, but marred historical accuracy. Those who were the most zealous to write history were more anxious to demonstrate that they could write well than to discover the truth.