theComplete Concordancein 1983, followed quickly by the development of
electronic databases that include Josephus along with countless other an-
cient texts. These fundamental new resources disabled at a stroke all the
guesswork and speculation about Josephus’s tendencies and interests as an
author, and about his use of sources; one now has to prove one’s claims. At
the same time, scholars influenced by what has been called “the linguistic
turn” in all areas of the humanities — the insight that language is always
constructed, never neutral, and that it is a significant problem to get beyond
language to objective truth — now have the tools to explore Josephus’s lan-
guage. For the first time they can undertake sustained analysis of his diction,
phrasing, and even incidental traits (particles, Atticizing forms, neologisms),
also in comparison with his literary context. This close analysis has opened
the door to considering long-neglected compositional features known from
contemporary writing: rhetorical devices, paradox, polyphony, and irony.
This kind of study, which has energized the burgeoning field of
“Josephus studies,” has already demonstrated a general unity of language
and thought across the Josephan corpus, and the surprising sophistication
of those parts that have received intensive study. A negative consequence is
that the old criteria for source criticism have been disqualified as rules of
thumb: Josephus himself, it turns out, tends to vary language for the same
object; to use A-B-A patterns, repetitions, and doublets; to change narra-
tive voice or outlook for effect; and to use new word forms that happen to
come into vogue from Plutarch onward — and so cannot be attributed to
older sources. Since these traits are evident also in Josephus’s autobiogra-
phy, they must be deliberate and not a clumsy effort to sew together poorly
understood sources. There is no doubt that Josephus used sources for most
of what he wrote about, since he could not have known the events person-
ally. Extracting sources from his finished work, however, may be as diffi-
cult as reconstituting the eggs from a baked cake. What we have now is his
artful creation. It always remains possible that any particular oddity might
be explicable as the vestige of a source, but our first obligation is to under-
stand it as part of the composition; only if it does not seem to fit should we
turn to sources (along with clumsiness, literary assistants, manuscript
transcription errors, or later doctoring) as a possible explanation. Study of
Josephus’s language also undercuts assumptions about any radical differ-
ences of purpose from his earliest work to his latest: they show a substan-
tial continuity of concern to articulate, defend, and even promote Judean
law, custom, and character as contributions to human existence.
This new approach has direct implications in two other areas: the use316steve mason, james s. mclaren, and john m. g. barclayEERDMANS -- Early Judaism (Collins and Harlow) final text
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