Josephus, however, cannot refrain from imputing low motives to those who
belonged to the party opposed to himself and hated of the Romans. "They
planned robberies and murders of our principal men," he says, "in
pretense for the public welfare, but in reality in hopes of gain for
themselves." And he saddles them with the responsibility for all the
calamities that were to come. About the Messianic hope, which appears to
have inspired them, he is compulsorily silent.
The historical record that follows is very sketchy. We have a bare list
of procurators and high priests down to the time of Pontius Pilate, a
notice of the foundation of Tiberias by the tetrarch Herod, and an
irrelevant account of the death of Phraates, the king of the Parthians,
and of Antiochus of Commagene, who was connected by marriage with the
Herodian house. Still there is rather more detail than in the
corresponding summary in the second book of the _Wars_, and Josephus
must in the interval have lighted on a fuller source than he had
possessed in his first historical essay. It is not impossible that the
new authority was again Justus of Tiberias. Of the unrest in the
governorship of Pontius Pilate he has more to say, but the genuineness
of the passage referring to the trial and death of Jesus, which is dealt
with elsewhere,[1] has been doubted by modern critics. It is followed in
the text by a long account of a scandal connected with the Isis worship
at Rome, which led to the expulsion of Jews from the capital. In this
way the chronicler wanders on between bare chronology and digression,
until he reaches the reign of Agrippa, when he again finds written
sources to help him. The romance of Agrippa's rise from a bankrupt
courtier to the ruler of a kingdom is treated with something of the same
full detail as the events of Herod's career, and probably the historian
enjoyed here the use of royal memoirs. He may have obtained material
also from the historical works of Philo of Alexandria, which were partly
concerned with the same epoch. He refers explicitly to the embassy which
the Alexandrian Jews sent to the Roman Emperor to appeal for the
rescission of the order to set up in the synagogue the Imperial image,
at the head of which went Philo, "a man eminent on all accounts, brother
to Alexander the Alabarch, and not unskilled in philosophy." Bloch[2]
indeed is of the opinion that the later historian did not use his
Alexandrian predecessor, either in this or any other part of his
writings, and points out certain differences of fact between the two
accounts; but in view of the references to Philo and the fact that
Josephus subsequently wrote two books of apology, one of which was
expressly directed in answer to Philo's bitter opponent Apion, it is at
least probable that he was acquainted with Philo's narrative. He may,
however, have used it only to supplement the memoirs of the Herodian
house, which served him as a chief source. Josephus devotes less
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