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  • Josephus, Judea, and Christian Origins: Methods and Categories
  • Ryan S. Schellenberg
Steve Mason . Josephus, Judea, and Christian Origins: Methods and Categories. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 2009. Pp. xx + 443. Paper, US$34.95. ISBN 978-1-59856-245-5.

It is perhaps ironic that Steve Mason, who, more lucidly than anyone else, has advocated reading Josephus for his own sake and on his own terms, has devoted much of his best scholarship to the questions asked by those of us—biblical scholars, historians of Second Temple Judea, etc.—who seek to use Josephus for our own ends. It is also our good fortune. Indeed, Mason's latest collection is not only an invaluable contribution to our understanding of Josephus's narratives; it also constitutes a clear and programmatic methodological statement on the use of Josephus in historical reconstruction and "New Testament background." Quite simply, it is now impossible responsibly to use Josephus, or any history of the period that is dependant on him—that is, any at all—without coming to terms with Mason's fundamental methodological challenge.

Part 1 is titled "Josephus: Interpretation and History." In the initial chapter ("Josephus as Authority for First-Century Judea")—one of two previously unpublished essays—Mason throws down the gauntlet: "Where Josephus provides our only account(s) of episodes in Judean history, we still know nothing about them, but only that he said what he said" (42). As Mason demonstrates with insightful analysis of two examples from the [End Page 293] War—Pilate's prefecture and Caesarea's role in the outbreak of the revolt—prevailing methods of gleaning historical data from Josephus, even if skeptical and attuned to his biases, fail to reckon with the basic status of Josephus's works as artful narratives. Where Josephus is our only source, we simply have no way to isolate facts from his intricately woven narrative fabric. Moreover, as Mason emphasizes in chapter 4 ("Contradiction or Counterpoint? Josephus and Historical Method"), if we believe that we can parse apparent contradictions in Josephus's accounts to get at the facts behind his story, then we underestimate his capacity for complexity. Mason's Josephus is in complete control of his narrative, whose aims are not so simplistic that apparent deviation from his prominent themes can be attributed to incomplete editing of sources or the constraints of inconvenient facts.

Moreover, Mason argues that Josephus is not primarily evidence for first-century Judea at all; rather, his narratives provide a window into the milieu in which they were written: Flavian Rome. The significance of this interpretative move, analogous to the new focus on gospel audiences that arose with redaction criticism and displaced—at least to some extent—preoccupation with their historicity, is the focus of chapter 2 ("Of Audience and Meaning: Reading Josephus's Judean War in the Context of a Flavian Audience"). Against the interpretation of the War as Roman propaganda designed to discourage further rebellion, Mason argues that Josephus's audience was in fact his peers in Rome—the educated elite—whom he sought to provide with an account that neither flattered the Romans nor unduly denigrated the Judeans (see War, 1.1-2). Chapter 3 ("Figured Speech and Irony in T. Flavius Josephus") brings us further into the literary world of Flavian Rome, where, given the dire consequences of political dissent, doublespeak and dissimulation were the norm. In this context, Mason notes, we must always be attentive to the possibility that apparent flattery was in fact biting irony.

Part 2, "Josephus and Judea," demonstrates the fruitfulness of Mason's singularly sensitive reading of the dynamics of Josephus's narratives. "Jews, Judeans, Judaizing, Judaism: Problems of Categorization in Ancient History" is to my knowledge the most lucid explanation available of why Ioudaios should be translated as "Judean," not "Jew." Combining careful philology with penetrating insight into the ancient politics of identity, Mason convincingly argues that the ancients saw Ioudaioi not as practitioners of a certain religion but rather as one ethnos among many, each of which was characterized by its own geography and its own traditional practices—some of which we would categorize as religious.

The two chapters on Josephus's Pharisees ("Pharisees in the...

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