Josephus is a rotten witness of his time.arnoldo wrote:I think footnote #4 is germane in context of other threads.arnoldo wrote:There was probably other reasons why Josephus wanted to minimize David if the gospel stories were written contemporaneously.Abstract
In the portrayal of David in his paraphrase of the Bible in the Antiquities, Josephus was confronted with a dilemma. On the one hand, as the beneficiary of so many gifts from the Romans, he could hardly praise David, who was the ancestor of the Messiah, and who ipso facto would lead a revolt against Rome and establish an independent state. On the other hand, David was a great folk hero, and his qualities of character could be used in answering the calumniators of the Jews. Josephus' solution was to adopt a compromise: thus he gives David a distinguished ancestry without stressing it unduly. He uses the figure of David to answer the denigrators of the Jews; he notes David's wealth to refute the canard that the Jews are beggars; he ascribes to him the cardinal virtues of wisdom, courage, temperance, justice, and piety to counteract the charges that the Jews were not original, that they were cowards, that they were immoderate, that they lacked humanity (a corollary of justice), and that they were impious. When David is elevated, it is not so much for his own sake as it is to increase the drama of the situation.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/23507841?se ... b_contents. . . Messiah concept is insignificant in most early rabbinic works; yet this may be due to the general eagerness of the rabbis not to provoke the Romans into abrogating the special privileges of the Jews. If so, Josephus would be in accord with this rabbinic trend: and this would be explained by his desires not to offend his Roman beneficiaries, since a Messiah, ispo facto, implies revolt against Rome. . .
I would add that any writings/discussion of a Messiah of the lineage of David would essentially be seen as sedition against the Hasmonean/Herodian archon(s) ruling Israel. Talk about being caught between a rock and a hard place.
Arnaldo Momigliano writes :
“It is our task to elucidate more precisely the meaning of Josephus’s twofold blindness about the synagogue and the widespread Jewish and Christian apocalyptic trends of his time...!
Arnaldo Momigliano
On Pagans, Jews and Christians
Chapter 7. What Josephus did not see
Wesleyan University Press
Middletown, Connecticut, 1987
ISBN 0819562181
http://www.nytimes.com/1987/09/03/obitu ... -dies.html