betrayal and cowardice;his writing in Greek and in isolation from the
growing rabbinic literature based in postwar Judea, Galilee, and Mesopota-
mia; and his enthusiastic use by Christian apologists, albeit without his ap-
proval, against the Jews. The wide-ranging tenth-century chronicle known
asYosippondoes nothing to alter this picture, for the name is a corruption
based on a mistake; even if it does use material from Josephus along with
many other sources, its readers were interested in the legends and not in
Josephus. His legacy has remained one of suspicion in the Jewish world un-
til the present, although this has begun to change in the past three decades
under the combined force of dazzling archaeological finds, for which
Josephus’s narratives provide explanations, and a new effort to read his nar-
ratives on their own terms, free of assumptions about his life and morals.
The modern critical study of Josephus, from the mid-nineteenth cen-
tury, was curiously parallel to Pseudo-Hegesippus in its concern to rescue
Josephus’s “factual material” from its narrative framework, though for dif-
ferent reasons. This time he was simply not considered a writer worth ex-
ploring. What mattered — as in most ancient texts for these early critics —
were the sources he used, which should take us as close as we can get to
what actually happened. Isolating and excising Josephus’s sources ap-
peared to be a straightforward exercise. First, the critic should remove the
obvious overlay of self-aggrandizement and moral evaluation, the very
things that Josephus wrote to provide. In any case, Josephus’s moral uni-
verse was thought to consist of little more than the rhetoric of an oppor-
tunist and coward: the mouthpiece of Roman masters inWa r,who later
gave up writing propaganda to dwell on his native traditions, but still did
little more than stitch together the work of others and call it his own. Since
a Judean priest could not have had a very deep knowledge of Greek litera-
ture and rhetoric, according to older assumptions, he could not have per-
sonally investigated, understood, or written most of what goes under his
name. By assiduous alertness to repetitions, changes of vocabulary for the
same object, doublets, apparent changes of outlook, andhapax legomena,
one could hope to identify the “seams” of his editing work and reconstruct
his sources for reuse on a more scientific basis.New Approaches
The past quarter-century has witnessed a sea change in the scholarly use of
Josephus. The most important catalyst for this change was the completion of315JosephusEERDMANS -- Early Judaism (Collins and Harlow) final text
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