Josephus and the New Testament (review)

138 SHOFAR Winter 1994 Vol. 12, No.2 beginnings of an intellectual disease in Europe which would run its course in twentieth-century Nazism. The Broken Staff represents an invaluable contribution to the history of Christian-Jewish relations. With thoroughness and solid documentation it fills in the periods that have been little studied up till now. Manuel has definitely written a classic work which will remain a standard resource for future students and scholars. In so doing he has clearly shown that talk of a "Judaeo-Christian" tradition is terribly misleading and that any assumption that Jews are necessarily safer in societies less explicitly religious is quite unfounded. John T. Pawlikowski, O.S.M. Catholic Theological Union Chicago Josephus and the New Testament, by Steve Mason. Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 1992. 248 pp. $9.95 (P). Many good books are being written nowadays about Josephus, but most ofthem presume that the reader is already a scholar, acquainted with the world in which the historian lived. Mason's book provides a "roadmap " to Josephus for those who are not Josephus scholars, introducing them toJosephus and to the vast literature about him. The students Mason has in mind are educated "lay folk," acquainted with the New Testament and its world. He offers a useful study that makes clear the points of intersection between Josephus's works and the New Testament, while never losing sight of the fact that Josephus'S "outlook was fundamentally at odds with that of Paul and most other NT writers" (p. 233). The first chapter, on "The Use and Abuse of Josephus," offers a compact summary of the views of early Christian writers who mostly misused Josephus. That is, they mined Josephus's works for all that they could find to discredit the very people he wrote to defend. A dominant theme of these early Christian writers is exemplified in the third-century Origen's comment in Contra Celsus: "the entire Jewish nation was destroyed less than one whole generation later on account of these sufferings which they inflicted on Jesus." Josephus told of the destruction ofJerusalem, not of the destruction of" the entire Jewish nation." AJewish historian's report of this Jewish calamity added fuel to the fire of some early Christian anti-Jewish sentiment. Book Reviews 139 But the misuse ofJosephus was not limited to ancient Christian antiJewish polemic. Mason writes of Schiirer's citation from Josephus's works as' though he provided a compendium of unquestioned "facts" to be used along with unquestioned "facts" from other sources in a "scissors and paste" kind of history writing. Another misuse he challenges is the preoccupation among many scholars, until recent decades, with speculating on the sources Josephus may have used rather than studyingJosephus as an intelligent writer. Mason provides a thoughtful summary of Josephus's career and writings in the next two chapters. Such summaries have been written many times before, but Mason adds details seldom brought together elsewhere. For example, he deduces from the Life eight specific charges made against Josephus by his rival historian, Justus ofTiberius (p. 76). Among the useful details Mason provides are phonetic explanations of how to pronounce Greek words and names of importance in Josephus'S narratives (e.g., eudaimonia =yoo-die-mo-NEE-uh, p. 66; Berenice =Be-re-NI-kay, pp. 95; haireseis = hi-RE-sase, p. 215; parrhessia = par-rhay-SEE-uh, p. 219). He proposes that Josephus was not the Pharisee he claimed to be in the Life, but was rather a member "of the aristocratic elite" who looked down on the Pharisees as "mere pretenders" (p. 144). Chapter four, "Who's Who in the New Testament World," begins to explore the special pertinence ofJosephus to New Testament studies. The information found in the New Testament about Herod the Great and his progeny, Pontius Pilate and the rest of the Romans who governed Palestine, the Jewish sects, and the Jewish religious leadership is sketchy. Mason systematically traces the information on these matters found in Josephus'S works and the New Testament, taking note how these sources complement or contradict one another. Of particular interest to me was Mason's correlation of Paul's remarks to Felix, with...