sions only a rewriting of the sacred texts, that possibility seems excluded by
Apion1.54. There, writing after the completion ofAntiquities,Josephus
continues to describe the work as nothing more than his Greek version of
the Judean sacred writings. Evidently, that is what mattered most to him:
the later material must have continued or illustrated themes from the
trunk of the work.Scholarship
As recently as 1988 a comprehensive survey of Josephus scholarship re-
ported the near absence of studies on either the aims or structure ofAntiq-
uitiesas a whole. Indeed,Antiquitieshas provided the clearest case of the
general scholarly neglect of Josephus’s compositional interests, in favor of
a preoccupation with his sources. Most early critics did not even ask about
his authorial aims but dissectedAntiquitiesinto large composite sources
(e.g., books 1–13en bloc), which anonymous authors had allegedly pre-
pared for other uses — probably in Alexandria — and they did the heavy
lifting of which our author was thought incapable. Josephus, these schol-
ars imagined in keeping with the assumptions of the day, found such ma-
terial ready-made and stitched it into the work we now possess.
With the studies of Richard Laqueur and Henry St.-John Thackeray in
the early twentieth century, this radical source criticism was replaced with
a biographical proposal: that having writtenWa rin the service of Flavian
propaganda, Josephus later repented of this betrayaland turned to expli-
cating his nation’s laws and culture in a defensive-apologetic vein. For this
he needed new patrons to replace the imperial family: hence the appear-
ance of Epaphroditus (though there is no reason why the Greek patron
should not have been among Josephus’s audience forWa r). More or less
loosely connected with this influential theory of a reconversion to nation-
alism was a subsidiary proposal — dominant through the 1970s to early
1990s and still occasionally found — that Josephus wroteAntiquitiesto in-
gratiate himself with the budding rabbinic movement at Yavneh and re-
configured his political allegiances to do so, in particular promoting the
Pharisees as rabbinic progenitors.
Every piece of evidence for this construction has been seriously chal-
lenged in recent years. Careful reading ofWa rdoes not commend it as Ro-
man propaganda; Josephus claims to be writing against such partisan
works. Josephus himself stresses the unity of purpose between his two ma-304steve mason, james s. mclaren, and john m. g. barclayEERDMANS -- Early Judaism (Collins and Harlow) final text
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