It teaches us temperance, so that we master our pleasures and desires,
and it exercises us in fortitude, so that we willingly undergo every
toil. And it instructs us in justice, so that in all our behavior we
give what is due, and it teaches us to be pious, so that we worship the
only living God in the manner becoming His greatness.
Freudenthal has conclusively disposed of the theory that Josephus was
the author of this work.[1] Neither in language, nor in style, nor in
thought, has it a resemblance to his authentic works. Nor was he the man
to write anonymously. It reveals, indeed, a mastery of the arts of Greek
rhetoric, such as the Palestinian soldier who learnt Greek only late in
life, and who required the help of friends to correct his syntax, could
never have acquired. It reveals, too, a knowledge of the technical terms
of the Stoic philosophy and a general grasp of Greek philosophy quite
beyond the writer of the _Antiquities_ and the _Wars_. Lastly, it
breathes a wholehearted love for Judaism and a national ardor to which
the double-dealing defender of Galilee and the client of the Roman court
could hardly have aspired.
[Footnote 1: Freudenthal, Die Flavius Josephus beigelegte Schrift ueber
die Herrschaft der Vernunft, 1879.]
The genuine works of Josephus reveal him not as a philosopher or sturdy
preacher of Judaism, but as an apologetic historian and apologist,
distinguished in either field rather for his industry and his ingenuity
in using others' works than by any original excellence. He learnt from
the Greeks and Romans the external manner of systematic history, and in
this he stood above his Jewish predecessors. He learnt from them also
the arts of mixing false with true, of invention, of exaggeration, of
the suggestion of the bad and the suppression of the good motive. He was
a sophist rather than a sage, and circumstances compelled him to be a
court chronicler rather than a national historian. And while he acquired
something of the art of historical writing from his models, he lost the
intuitive synthesis of the Jewish attitude, which saw the working of
God's moral law in all human affairs. On the other hand, certain defects
of his history may be ascribed to lack of training and to the spirit of
the age. He had scant notion of accuracy, he made no independent
research into past events, and he was unconscionable in chronology. In
his larger works he is for the most part a translator and compiler of
the work of others, but he has some claim to originality of design and
independence of mind in the books against Apion. The times were out of
joint for a writer of his caliber. For the greater part of his literary
life, perhaps for the whole, he was not free to write what he thought
and felt, and he wrote for an alien public, which could not rise to an
understanding of the deeper ideas of his people's history. But this much
at least may be put down to his credit, that he lived to atone for the
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