No way. I don't know if I've ever exactly thought of Josephus as a "turncoat," but I've always been aware that he is commonly viewed that way. But what makes his version of Judaism any less authentic than the Fourth Philosophy he abandoned? I think he had a better grasp of geopolitical reality than those fighting against Rome for their "true" form of Judaism. I wish the position of people like Josephus and ben Zakkai had prevailed and peace was made with Rome and Jerusalem wasn't destroyed. Then Jews could have continued to live in the Land of Israel with some measure of autonomy for a Messiah that will never come.
Anyway, curious to see what's out there, I stumbled upon this article by Peskowitz ("Meeting Josephus Head On and Humanly, a Historian's Transgression"), who concludes:
Yeah! Where the hell would we be without him? Josephus was no more a "turncoat" than ben Zakkai and other moderate Jews. The Fourth Philosophy was like the Taliban. If I had lived in Jerusalem when they took over, it would have sucked.
And how cool would it be if Jerusalem had not been destroyed and the Temple was still standing? Fourth Philosophic Jews should have toned it down like ben Zakkai and Josephus and enjoyed living in the Roman Empire in peace. And there is no "Messiah," it's all just crazy talk, so it doesn't matter who anyone thinks it was or could be.
Anyway, curious to see what's out there, I stumbled upon this article by Peskowitz ("Meeting Josephus Head On and Humanly, a Historian's Transgression"), who concludes:
Josephus's Jerusalem and Judea were destroyed, Jewish people were spread out everywhere, sometimes free, sometimes enslaved. He alone, it turns out, had the capacity to reach into the past and commit the Jewish stories to the written word. He believed in the Judean and Jewish past, in accomplishments and ordinariness, in the specialness of the Jewish Torah and in the unremarkable, just-like-everyone-else, quality of the Maccabean and Herodian royal families. It didn't matter that the Jews hadn't produced philosophers as Greece had or military legions like Rome. They were his people, they'd been destroyed, and it was going to be by his hand that they'd be saved, finally and for all time.
http://perspectives.ajsnet.org/transgre ... sgression/
Yeah! Where the hell would we be without him? Josephus was no more a "turncoat" than ben Zakkai and other moderate Jews. The Fourth Philosophy was like the Taliban. If I had lived in Jerusalem when they took over, it would have sucked.
And how cool would it be if Jerusalem had not been destroyed and the Temple was still standing? Fourth Philosophic Jews should have toned it down like ben Zakkai and Josephus and enjoyed living in the Roman Empire in peace. And there is no "Messiah," it's all just crazy talk, so it doesn't matter who anyone thinks it was or could be.
Statistics: Posted by John2 — Sat Mar 09, 2024 5:06 pm