ANTIQUITATES JUDAICAE

(This is the beginning of the History subsection of my Tikkun Olam section.)

In the course of the following selective glimpses of Jewish history, I am foregoing any kind of systematic exposition, touching upon only such bits and pieces that are of a particular interest to me. My “Jewish history” starts in post-Biblical times, as Biblical history, to me, has more to do with religion than with actual historiography.

This entry’s title Antiquitates Judaicae is the title of a major work in twenty volumes by Josephus Flavius, considered his greatest, recounting Jewish history from Creation to the events preceding the great revolt of 66-70 AD, which resulted in the final destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. The revolt itself is covered by Josephus in his preceding seven-volume opus Bellum Judaicum. I have a good reason to use this particular title Jewish Antiquities, which stands for the historical earliness of the times when Flavius lived, wrote, and prospered. All earlier history of the Jews, as I said, has been dominated by Biblical history and thus poses a serious historiographic problem, which, as a matter of principle, I have no desire to tackle. Thus for me ab ovo starts here.

Josephus Flavius is one of the most controversial somebodies of all time. On the one hand, he is depicted in all encyclopedias and dictionaries as a preeminent Jewish historian, while the Christian world treasures him as the supreme extra-Biblical authority on the historicity of Jesus. But, on the other hand, most Jews want to have nothing to do with him, and even less so to take collective credit for his accomplishments in behalf of our Western Civilization, considering him a traitor, a turncoat, and, in short, an utterly despicable fellow. As for Josephus’ special services to Christianity, they are even more deplorable, although in this latter case his name has been shamefully misused, while he himself apparently had nothing to do with it.

Whatever one may think of him, Josephus Flavius was certainly an enterprising man with a great knack for embellishing history and his personal biography to his maximum commercial advantage. Priest, prodigious scholar, military commander, prophet, and of course the preeminent Jewish historian of his era, he spun his tales artfully, albeit not quite on the level of Homer and Herodotus. What he wrote about himself is typical, and apparently he got away with it all. A scion of an aristocratic Jerusalem family, he was born Joseph ben Mathias around 37 AD, and, according to his own account, was such an incredible child prodigy that by the age of fourteen he was already in such great demand as an eminent legal scholar that the high priests sought his opinion on a regular basis.

The rest of his autobiographical story proceeds pretty much along the same highly elevated lines. But there is a snag somewhere along the way. The circumstances of his personal surrender to the Romans in 67 AD are highly suspicious, leading Jewish historians to condemn him and accuse him of treason. Alone coming out of the caves where he had been trapped together with his comrades, he claimed that everybody else had committed suicide... Brought in chains to the commander of the Roman anti-rebellion force, General Titus Flavius Vespasian, Josephus, who was, by his own account, no less than the military commander of Galilee, had allegedly most reluctantly participated in the Jewish revolt, and now exhibited a brilliant flash of quick thinking, declaring himself to be a prophet and prophesying to Vespasian that the good General was soon to become the Emperor of Rome, which naturally saved his life, and assured him of Vespasian’s good graces from then on. Receiving the Roman name Flavius and a fairly high social status in Rome, he was billed as the official historian of the Jewish people and lived happily ever after, until his death in 100 AD.

…Well, as for my personal opinion of him, I am not too eager to take sides. With regard to the questionable quality of his historiography, I have no objection to mythology passed off as history. Moreover, I confess that Josephus Flavius is fun to read, and he is even genuinely instructive, as long as we are prepared to take him skeptically, that is, with a large grain of salt. But when we are facing an explicit outrage, a scandalous perversion of the truth, sliding into sheer blasphemy and mockery of religion, this is already a different and totally unacceptable matter.

There are no extant manuscripts of his works, but anybody even without special training and deep research can easily distinguish between what he could have written and what he could not possibly have written. His presumably authentic writings are in themselves already an indictment of sorts of the whole historiographic phenomenon which he represents, but not only is his own historical account of almost everything extremely untrustworthy, even worse is what has been done to him by certain zealous Christian “editors,” Eusebius et al., whose surreptitious insertions and corrections of the text have left us, in the absence of extant originals, with a compounded fraud.

So, look what happens when this man’s liberties are multiplied by the even greater liberties of others with a vested interest in using him as an authoritative promoter of their own much tainted agenda.

The following passage “from Josephus” has been widely quoted by many Christian scholars, who choose to point to it as providing “irrefutable proof” to the historicity of Jesus:

“There was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man (obviously, only a Christian can say this about Jesus, and Josephus was naturally nothing of the kind), for he was a doer of wonderful works. He was the Christ. (That is, the Messiah! It is nonsensical to ascribe this blasphemy, and that is what it is to a Jew who was also very much subservient to the Romans, who were already persecuting Christians at this time, and would never have allowed such outright Christian doxology to be written, and, even worse, made public!) Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men among us, condemned him to the cross... He appeared to his followers alive again on the third day.” (What shameless fraud!!! There is no chance that Flavius could ever have written this! What an indignity and outright mockery for a Christian to be reading this, and, even worse, to be invited by fellow Christians to believe its authenticity! No, the Christians do not need this kind of forgery, to make their case for Christianity, except to provide some masochistic fodder for their gloating critics.)

Perhaps Flavius and his later Christian redactors deserve each other. The question whether we deserve them is an open question: the way all history has always been written, and living history is being written today, is a good indication that we do.

The image of a turncoat and sycophant would become the historical legacy of Josephus Flavius among the Jews, but, to be fair to him, it was only partially true. Josephus was a typical Pharisee of his time, a religious Jew, but very skeptical toward the Jewish nationalistically-minded Zealots, who were constantly stirring trouble with the Romans, instead of placating them, to leave the Jews alone. Having visited Rome just before the revolt got underway, he was impressed by what he saw, and was hardly inclined to resist the Roman occupation, yet, probably, he had little choice but to participate in the rebellion, against his “better” judgment.

Now, here was probably an early case of the “Haskala versus the shtetl” mentality. Not that I would be too eager to take sides in this complicated conflict, but this essential leitmotif, running throughout the Jewish history of the Dispersion, sometimes for better, sometimes for worse, ought to be explicitly identified, and by no means ever taken out of the historical equation.

It is also in this light that the last two major uprisings against the Roman rule, leading to the destruction of the Temple in 70 AD and ending in utter defeat in 135 AD, ought to be seen. Was this disaster a vindication of sorts of Josephus’s animus against the Jewish troublemakers? Could the Jews have kept the Temple and a limited statehood within the Roman Empire without these ill-fated rebellions? At any rate, even not taking into account Rome’s overwhelming military superiority, the Zealots’ cause had been doomed by the inbuilt ambiguity and perpetual equivocation of the collective Jewish mind.