NOTES ON NOTE-WORTHIES, OF DIVERS ORDERS, EITHER SEX, AND EVERY AGE. BY SIR NATHANIEL. And make them men of note (do you note, men?)-Love's Labour's Lost, Act III. Sc. 1. D. Pedro. Or, if thou wilt hold longer argument, There's not a note of mine that's worth the noting. D. Pedro. Why these are very crotchets that he speaks, Notes, notes, forsooth, and noting! Much Ado About Nothing, Act II. Sc. 3. And these to Notes are frittered quite away.—Dunciad, Book I. Notes of exception, notes of admiration, Notes of assent, notes of interrogation.-Amen Corner, c. iii. XXI.-FLAVIUS JOSEPHUS. THE credit enjoyed, first and last, by Josephus, as the "great Jewish historian," has been fluctuating enough. Denounced by his own countrymen, he was valued at the highest rate by early Christian writers, who accepted him without demur as a witness in favour of much wherein they were polemically interested. Then again he was scrutinised in no friendly fashion by more searching investigators of a later day. Bayle* mentions, in his article on Abimelech, that his indignation against Josèphe was a thing of very long standing, as well as of firm standing too. Le Père Hardouin is so hot against Josèphe, that he can't bear to hear him called Joseph, the name of a Christian saint: le bon Père has nought but scorn for the renegade Jew, and insists on calling him Josèphe, nothing (not a letter, not one poor vowel) less†-no one, that we are aware of, disputing the excited Father's liberty to take that liberty (if it be one) with the name in question. Basnage is another pronounced opponent. Baronius in his Ecclesiastical Annals does Flavius Josephus some damage. Salien and Salméron withhold not the scourge from his shoulders. Bochart, Le Clerc, Gillet, Calmet, and others, show up his habit of tampering with the sacred text, and wresting a plain record to suit his crooked purpose. Voltaire is shrewd and caustic-is himself, in fact-in his strictures on the denationalised Hebrew. Later again there has been a reaction. The authority of Josephus has been defended by *Dict. hist. et littér. "Je ne veux plus l'appeler Joseph, ce serait le confondre avec saint Joseph. Je n'ai que du mépris pour ce Josèphe; car je le nommerai toujours ainsi." Father Hardouin is something piquant in a pet. More telling and more dignified is the remark of Manasseh Ben Israel, in allusion to the historian's Romanising ways-that his histories should have borne the name of Flavius, not of Josephus. various apologists-some of them perhaps interested ones, such as Jost,* the German author of a History of the Israelites since the age of the Maccabees, who maintains the excellence of this suspected witness, and lauds his veracity at the expense of that of Eusebius, the pseudo-Philo, the pseudo-Hegesippus, and many obscure Roman and Greekish-Roman writers, and scribblers of legendary lore. In our own country a turn in the tide, in Josephus's favour, has occurred since Dr. Traill's translation,† which gave occasion to a cautious reviewer to observe at the time, that the credibility of the historian, after having been admitted without question, or strongly maintained rather for the sake of ulterior considerations than on the ground of its own merits-and next unduly depreciated for no better reasons-was now rising again in general estimation, as inquiry and research disclosed fresh evidence in its favour: the historical character of Josephus in this respect being compared to that of Herodotus-" both have been subject to unreasonable suspicion, and both are now vindicated by the results of recent investigation in a manner at once satisfactory and surprising." But sturdy objectors there are, and will be, on whom the surprise will act as a very mild shock, and to whom the satisfaction will be found utterly wanting. Both at home and abroad there are scholarly thinkers who can't be brought to terms with Josephus, and who leave to others of more penetrable stuff the joys of being thus satisfied and surprised. As examples of this recalcitrant and, if you will, ultra-protestant class, may be named, among English scholars, Thomas de Quincey; and among French, Philarète Chasles. Both are antiJosephite to the back-bone, each in his peculiar way. The latter, M. Chasles, has written a rather elaborate essay on the subject, which occupies the first seventy pages of his Etudes on Early Christianity and the Middle Ages. The former, Mr. de Quincey, has taken Josephus to pieces, leaving whoso will to sweep up the bits, in more than one of his multifarious tractates-in the ingenious paper (more ingenious, may we say it? than convincing) on the Essenes, and in the grave and gay disquisition on Secret Societies. Given Josephus as an enshrined ekov in the Temple of Fame-then are both gentlemen, the Briton and the Gaul, stalwart iconoclasts, neither of whom is in the mood to forget his own particular swashing blow. And to Josephus a niche of the kind has been appropriated, with all the honours. Witness Chaucer in the House of Fame: Alderfirste loo ther I sighe, • Interested, inasmuch as Herr Jost had nobody but Josephus to consult on the entire period of his Geschichte which deals with Herod and Vespasian (as M. Chasles remarks)-so that if Josephus be objected to, as untrustworthy, there is thus far an end put to Herr Jost's History: naturally therefore, as human nature goes, or poor historians' human nature at least, the learned and really painstaking Herr is anxious to uphold against all assailants, and certainly against considerable odds, the validity of the only evidence extant for his use. † Posthumous-edited by Mr. Isaac Taylor. Chaucer makes Josephus of the sect of Saturn because, according to the commentators, Saturn it was that presided over the frightful famine, pestilences, and slaughters which the Jews endured during the siege of Jerusalem, as related by this historian. The Ebrayke Josephus the olde, And he bare on hys shoulderes hye Dan Chaucer was a Christian poet, and only followed in the wake of Christian doctors when he thus exalted one whom the Hebrew race repudiated. In the feud between Christian apologists and Jewish unbelievers, Josephus was hailed as an ally, and treated as one worthy of highest consideration, by the former. It was enough that good Israelites rejected his evidence, to make good Christians accept it without qualification. These latter, as M. Chasles observes, shut their eyes to his contradiction or falsification, in numerous passages, of the words of the Old Testament; they forgave him his Pharisaic doctrines, and his wholesale omissions: they simply discerned, in his writings, one prodigious testimony in favour of the sanctity of their faith, Jerusalem destroyed and the Messiah avenged. Accordingly, this spectator of the catastrophe which fulfilled the prophecy, this pathetic narrator of disasters foretold in Christian records, became, virtually, and on the strength of this one fact, a Father of the Church. "St. Jerome, Eusebius, St. Gregory, all the Christians of the first six centuries, accepted him without a question. They were fain to make a Christian of him even, or a semi-Christian at the least. They pretended that Saint John the Baptist had poured the water of baptism on his head. Not content with admitting him as one of the most veracious historians of all antiquity, they devoted whole volumes to the elucidation of the one little paragraph found in his works, be that paragraph genuine or not, which refers to the advent of our Lord. "These insignificant lines," says M. Chasles, "which have been discussed with indefatigable acharnement, may belong either to Josephus, or a scholiast, a Christian, or a Jew, without either convulsing or weakening the foundations of the Christian religion."§ In truth, the importance attached to the controverted passage by the conflicting parties does seem to have been unreasonably exaggerated. Some eight lines it consists of. Count up the letters these eight lines contain, and then the volumes which have been written for and against them, and the volumes, we are assured, will outnumber the letters. Yet to what do the eight lines amount? What is the quale of their little quantum? They tell that about the time of Pilate's administration, "there lived a wise man named Jesus, who wrought miracles and was crucified." Wherein does such a statement, be it interpolated|| or S M. Chasles refers, in illustration of the infatigable acharnement characteristic of the disputants, to Chr. Arnoldi's Letters on the Testimony of Josephus, to Huet's "Demonstr. Evang." and the article "de l'Autorité de Josèphe" in the Huetiana, &c.-especially, however, to Père Gillet's "Trad. des Antiqu. jud.," where may be found an accurate as well as copious collection of the opposing arguments in this much-vexed question. "True it is," writes Mr. de Quincey, "that an interpolated passage, found in all the printed editions of Josephus, makes him take a special and a respectful notice of our Saviour. But this passage has long been given up as a forgery by all scholars. And in another essay on the Epichristian era, which we shall have occasion to write, some facts will be laid before the reader exposing a deeper folly in this forgery than is apparent at first sight.”—On the Essenes. Part I. genuine, affect either way, for boon or bane, the Christian religion? The vassal of the Romans, and willing to have it so, Josephus could hardly venture to glorify, in a book written for the Flavian house, the cause which Tacitus stigmatises with contempt: in short, the passage contains, as our French critie remarks, nothing of the nature of an éloge, but only the briefest possible résumé of certain facts. "What after all do these eight lines prove? Josephus may have written them; they are marked by his ordinary caution and his habitual reserve; or he may not have written them, true to the custom he never forgets, to hold his tongue whensoever the not holding it may do him a mischief."* Assuming Josephus to have actually omitted all allusion to the Messiah, it is not, as a writer in the Quarterly Review has suggested, altogether irrelevant to reflect that for the whole thirty years which Thucydides comprises in his work, Socrates was not only living, but acting a more public part, and, for all the future history of Greece, an incomparably more important part than any other Athenian citizen;, and yet that so able and so thoughtful an observer as Thucydides has never once noticed him directly or indirectly. "There is no stronger proof of the weakness of the argument from omission, especially in the case of ancient history which, unlike our own, contained within its range of vision no more than was immediately before it for the moment."+ De Quincey gives full credit to the renegade Jew's well-wishers, for their natural and amiable desire to think the best they can of the one solitary witness, the one exclusive authority, concerning the last conflict of Jerusalem. He does not wonder, he says, at the pious fraud which interpolated these eight lines. He does not blame, far from it-he admires those who find it necessary (even at the cost of a little self-delusion) to place themselves in a state of charity with an author treating a subject like this, "the most affecting section of ancient history." Gladly, he professes, would he suppose, as a possibility about Josephus, what many adopt as a certainty. But he has scrutinised Josephus too closely for that; and the result is, that he pronounces Josephus to be an unprincipled man, and an ignoble man; one whose adhesion to Christianity would have done no honour to our faith-one who most assuredly was not. a Christian-one who was not even in any tolerable sense a Jew-one who was an enemy to our faith, a traitor to his own: as an enemy, vicious and ignorant; as a traitor, steeped to the lips in superfluous baseness. Josephus had only too much interest, says M. de Sacy, to represent his compatriots as frenzied madmen; for he had been a traitor to their cause. "The pen of the deserter is traceable in every word of his history. He * Chasles sur Flavius-Josèphe, § II. † See the admirably-written essay on Socrates, in the form of a review of Mr. Grote's seventh and eighth volumes, Quarterly Rev., vol. lxxxviii. It is observable, by the way, that Josephus has no word to say, good or bad, about the "false Christs," as such. He calls them, as Mr. Merivale remarks, λησται, αρχιλησταί, γοητες, απατεωνες, and “ false prophets,” but never ψευ δοχριστοι. "He makes no more allusion to the false Christs than to the true Christ. The subject of the Messiah was one he shrank from contemplating in any shape. This may account for his silence about the persecution of the 'Christians' by Nero at Rome, even supposing these to have included the turbulent Christ-seeking Jews."-Merivale's Romans under the Empire, vol. vi. p. 536. wrote it at Rome, in the enjoyment of leisure, which his favour in the eyes of Titus had procured for him, a rich and influential man, while the defenders of Jerusalem were wandering to and fro, without a place of refuge, or else had come to a cruel end." Elsewhere, however, the same kindly censor has this passage: "He [Josephus] had been witness of the events he relates; he had heard with his own ears the cries of those women and children who were crushed beneath the ruins, consumed in the flames, of the Temple. . . And we are conscious, in reading Josephus, that at Rome, in his palace, his remorse perhaps contributing to this result, he still heard those cries, and was again en eye-witness of that day of desolation everlasting!" Mr. Merivale justly calls attention to the variations in the Jewish historian's own account of his conduct, when placed in command of Galilee, in the "History" and in the "Life." The former work, we are reminded, had been written soon after the events themselves, in which he bore so eminent a part, when he had fallen into the hands of the Romans, and had consented to purchase their favour by a tribute of unlimited admiration. In this work, the History of the Jewish War, "it was his object to excuse to his countrymen his own recent defection; to represent the fidelity with which he had served their true interests, as agent of the party who sought to preserve their nation, though with the sacrifice of its independence; to charge on the rashness of the Zealots the ruin which had actually befallen them, from which he had himself escaped by timely but justifiable submission." Not so in the "Life." That was composed twenty years later; and in the Autobiographer's reply to the "insinuations of a personal enemy, that he had deserved ill both of Jews and Romans by the aimless obstinacy of his defence," we discern one who seeks no longer to keep up appearances with his countrymen-all sympathy between him and them being virtually extinct-but who "devotes all his ingenuity to showing that he was throughout a covert friend of Rome, seeking, under the disguise of prudent patriotism, to smooth the progress of the invaders, and deliver Palestine into their hands. If a cloud of suspicion hangs to this day over the head of the historian, he owes it to this shameless representation of his own conduct. The ardent upholders of a Jewish nationality, which has survived in some sense the fall of Jerusalem nearly eighteen centuries, still denounce him, from his own words, as a renegade to their cause."+ Yet, while admitting that his equivocation is patent, and allows of no defence, it is Mr. Merivale's belief that of the two representations Josephus gives us of his policy, the former is the nearer to the truth;-that he was more faithful to his professions, in fact, than he wished, at a later period, to be supposed; that he has falsely accused himself, to preserve the favour of his masters, of crimes which should only have gained him their contempt. "He seeks in vain to repudiate the glory which must ever attach, in his own despite, to his skill and prowess. Allowing for many exaggerations and misstatements in both, according to their respective bias, I still regard the Wars, rather than the Life, as the genuine record of the campaign in Galilee."+ * De Sacy: Variétés historiques, 192, 201. † See Salvador's History, ii. 15, 49. Merivale's Romans under the Empire, vol. vi. pp. 549 sq. 1 |