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1 / Josephus’s Life I am by training and inclination a historian of modern Jewry, but I should like to begin my investigation in a time, place, and culture in which I have no first-hand experience, ancient Rome, and with a text not usually dealt with by the few other scholars of Jewish autobiography, Josephus’s Life. I approach this work with much trepidation, primarily because I cannot read this text, as opposed to the others I shall be treating in these pages, in its original language, first-century Greek, and must rely on the many translations of the Vita into Latin, English, Hebrew, and German that I have consulted. Secondly, there is a vast and erudite scholarship on Josephus and his writings that I make no claims to controlling: the classicist Louis Feldman has recently noted that since the beginning of 1992, twenty-one books devoted to Josephus have been published in English alone!1 But how can a Jewish historian interested in the intersection between design and truth in Jewish autobiography not begin with Josephus’s Life, which is by all accounts not only the first Jewish autobiography ever written but very possibly the first extant complete pre-Christian autobiography tout court?2 Moreover, Josephus was of course the first, and certainly the most influential, historian of the Jews before the nineteenth century, and scholars have long realized that a huge amount of what we know, or think we know, about ancient Jewish history is dependent upon Josephus’s accounts of that history, but that these accounts—most importantly , his Antiquities of the Jews and Wars of the Jews—are shot through with both overt and covert autobiographical details and agendas. The specific problem that the huge literature on Josephus’s Vita has focused on is the complex relationship between that work and Wars of the 18 Jews, since these two accounts contradict one another in crucial and fundamental ways. Before addressing this problem, let me introduce the text: written in Rome near the end of its author’s life, sometime between 96 and 100 c.e., Josephus’s Life is a short book, eighty-eight small-sized pages in the standard Loeb Classical Library edition. It begins with the author’s genealogy, childhood, youth, and education, continues with a long narrative about his first trip to Rome at the age of twenty-six, and gives a description of the revolutionary situation in Jerusalem upon his return there. Then, in the main and by far the largest section of the book, we follow our hero to Galilee, where his mission was to convince the rebellious Jews to lay down their arms against Rome, but where he soon became one of the generals who led the moderate forces in the rebellion and—equally importantly— outfoxed the Jewish zealots and brigands who were mistreating their compatriots, until he was captured by the Romans and forced to accompany them as they attacked and laid waste to Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple. The Life then ends with a short summary of Josephus’s departure from Judea, first to Alexandria and then with the imperial forces to Rome, where he was treated with much dignity by the emperors, housed in one of their palaces, and granted Roman citizenship and a pension, as well as lands back home that provided him with a fixed income for the rest of his life. Roughly two-thirds of the way through the main action, we encounter a short but very strongly worded attack on another Galilean exgeneral turned Greek-Jewish historian, one Justus of Tiberias, who, Josephus insists, was not only a traitor to the Jews but a terrible and deceitful historian, unlike our author, who is pledged to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. The problem, as already noted, is that in countless places this “truth” contradicts the “truth” of Josephus’s other account of the same events in his much longer Wars of the Jews, written some twenty years earlier. Most famously, in the Vita Josephus maintains that he was first sent to Galilee by the elders of Jerusalem to put down the rebellion and only later became a military leader, whereas in the Wars he is elected a general by those very same leaders before he departs for the north. Though many ancient, medieval , and modern readers were not troubled by these and other contra19 josephus’s life [18.221.174.248] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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