Was Josephus a Sloppy Historian?

Josephus wrote histories of the Jewish people, but history writing in antiquity was very different from the way we write history today. Ancient historians were well-off men of affairs, educated in rhetoric —the art of persuasion—who wrote with an agenda. Josephus was no different. As a priestly Jerusalemite, an aristocrat with a literate Greek education, and a Roman citizen addressing a Roman audience, he wrote with an apologetic purpose: portraying the Jews and himself in the most favorable light possible in the difficult years after the Jews’ war with Rome. Josephus is often criticized as a sloppy, incompetent historian. This lecture, “Was Josephus a Sloppy Historian?” will argue that modern perceptions of Josephus’ sloppiness reflect a lack of familiarity with rhetoric, not problems with Josephus. Josephus is often inconsistent, presents arguments that do not support his claims, states that he will demonstrate one thing, but really proves something else, and tendentiously misrepresents the positions of his opponents. Close reading of Josephus suggests that these were deliberate argumentative strategies which Josephus probably learned from a training in ancient rhetoric, and which he consciously employs in the service of his apologetic goals: demonstrating to Romans that the Jews are an ancient, noble people. This lecture aims to understand Josephus and his writings in the context of both his Jewishness and his Greek rhetorical education, which few scholarly works have explored in detail. The paper will identify the ancient argumentative strategies underlying Josephus’ supposed “sloppiness” and demonstrate that Josephus made skilled use of rhetorical techniques to portray the Jews as favourably as possible in a hostile environment.