Before addressing this problem, let me introduce the text: written in Rome near the end of its author's life, sometime between 96 and 100 C.E., Josephus's Life is a short book, eighty-eight small-sized pages in the standard Loeb Classical Library edition. It begins with the author's genealogy, childhood, youth, and education, continues with a long narrative about his first trip to Rome at the age of twenty-six, and gives a description of the revolutionary situation in Jerusalem upon his return there. Then, in the main and by far the largest section of the book, we follow our hero to Galilee, where his mission was to convince the rebellious Jews to lay down their arms against Rome, but where he soon became one of the generals who led the moderate forces in the rebellion and—equally importantly—outfoxed the Jewish zealots and brigands who were mistreating their compatriots, until he was captured by the Romans and forced to accompany them as they attacked and laid waste to Jerusalem and destroyed the Temple. The Life then ends with a short summary of Josephus's departure from Judea, first to Alexandria and then with the imperial forces to Rome, where he was treated with much dignity by the emperors, housed in one of their palaces, and granted Roman citizenship and a pension, as well as lands back home that provided him with a fixed income for the rest of his life. Roughly two-thirds of the way through the main action, we encounter a short but very strongly worded attack on another Galilean exgeneral turned Greek-Jewish historian, one Justus of Tiberias, who, Josephus insists, was not only a traitor to the Jews but a terrible and deceitful historian, unlike our author, who is pledged to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

The problem, as already noted, is that in countless places this “truth” contradicts the “truth” of Josephus's other account of the same events in his much longer Wars of the Jews, written some twenty years earlier. Most famously, in the Vita Josephus maintains that he was first sent to Galilee by the elders of Jerusalem to put down the rebellion and only later became a military leader, whereas in the Wars he is elected a general by those very same leaders before he departs for the north. Though many ancient, medieval, and modern readers were not troubled by these and other contradictions between these two texts, from the rise of German classical scholarship in the late eighteenth century to today, scores of scholars and experts have pondered the problem and have attempted to sort out which version is true; in the words of one recent scholarly article by an Israeli expert, “Where was Josephus Lying—in his Life or in the War?”³ This expert, like many others, chose the Life over the War, on very learned grounds, though an almost equal number of Josephus scholars have argued the opposite, on equally erudite grounds. In the process there have been advanced many highly inventive and in turn controversial hypotheses about the origin and sources of the Vita, most famously a speculation that it was based on an earlier document—either a so-called Rechenschaftsbericht (a brief biography submitted to one's military or civilian authorities), or a hypomnena (an outline of a historical work submitted by ancient writers to the authorities before a final draft was penned). The latter hypothesis was made most forcefully by the ancient Jewish historian Shaye Cohen in his Josephus in Galilee and in Rome, published in 1979. Here, Cohen subjected the Vita to a minute analysis, comparing its historiographical method with that of the Antiquities and the Jewish Wars, and not incidentally for our purposes, demonstrated that from the start of the Life to its close, Josephus misrepresented the facts of his life, as discernible in retrospect. Thus, the very opening of the autobiography is hugely problematic:

Cohen comments:

As a result, Cohen concludes that Josephus's detractors “apparently had some basis for their charges.” Similarly, after discussing his lineage, Josephus continues:

Cohen responds, “The impossible chronology in this section may be a sign not of textual corruption but of mendacity: Josephus had three years to study with Bannous because his tour of the academies was imaginary. His claim of adherence to Pharisaism, part of V[ita]'s religious apologetic, is probably false too.”⁷

This line of inquiry was continued by many other scholars, who have subjected virtually every line and verse of the Vita to detailed forensic dissection, and the consensus that has emerged is hardly sympathetic to Josephus or to his scrupulousness either as a historian or as an autobiographer: “the story [of the Vita] is narrated with little concern for cohesiveness or logical development, and, as a result, the reader often becomes confused…he was not a meticulous and articulate craftsman”; the Vita is “literarily wretched,” its author “more gifted as flatterer than classicist”; as a whole Josephus demonstrated “unusual sloppiness in historical detail,” and the Life is “careless” as well as “tendentious.”⁸ In sum, as Seth Schwartz recently put it, “[t]here are those of us who have made a cottage industry of detecting Josephus’ biases,”⁹ and one scholar—Gohei Hata—has recently even tried to reconstruct what Josephus was hiding in the Life and the War, in a paper entitled “Imagining Some Dark Periods in Josephus’ Life.”¹⁰

But what of the Vita as an autobiography? The one scholar to address this question most frontally is Per Bilde, who, in his 1988 book Flavius Josephus between Jerusalem and Rome: His Life, His Works and Their Importance, wrote the following about the genre of what he terms “this curious little book”:

I should like to agree with Bilde's main thrust but to refine it by rejecting the rather bewildering, if rather Platonic, notion that the first specimen of a literary genre can be said to diverge from a preexistent norm. On the contrary, I see the Vita not as an “autobiography of a very special kind” but precisely the opposite: as an exemplar of a genre (or series of connected genres) in which an author's life-story is crafted by a highly partial, both conscious and unconscious, selection of which episodes of his or her life to retell, refracted through an ever-changing sense of selfhood. Thus, to the extent that we can understand it, Josephus's selfhood was suspended between Rome and Jerusalem, Hellenism and Hebraism, sedition and collaboration, and, most importantly for our purposes, between his interior need for self-fashioning and his desire to tell the historical truth, at least from the vantage point of a Judean general turned Roman loyalist. I would submit, therefore, that many if not most of the differences and contradictions between Josephus's various writings are caused, first and foremost, by this tension between the hugely contrasting, if not inevitably contradictory, narrative imperatives of historicism and self-fashioning, both compounded by the biologically based reality that memories are ever changing because they are reconstituted in different ways each time one remembers, that memories are unstable and transient, effected or transformed by beliefs and emotions, and hence by the contexts and cues that evoke these memories even before they are articulated in words and then in writing. Seth Schwartz has reasonably speculated that when Josephus came to Rome he had brought no files with him from Judea or Galilee, and thus depended in large measure upon his memory, and only his memory, for much of what he later reported.¹² To my mind, then, it is not cynical but utterly realistic to propose that the question “Where was Josephus lying, in his Life or in his Wars?” is, as the French say, une question mal posée (a wrongly posed question), answerable equally plausibly by “both” and “neither”!

The far more relevant question is, how did Josephus attempt to fashion himself in his Vita? What image of himself, which memories of his life—true, partially true, or false but nonetheless remembered or claimed—did he pass on to us in his autobiography?

In an important recent article entitled “An Essay in Character: The Aim and Audience of Josephus's Life,” the historian Steve Mason ingeniously explains the Vita as an exercise in Roman rhetoric whose basic aim is the demonstration of an author's character, beginning with genealogy and education and following with politics and war, and necessarily rebutting a counter-case—thus Josephus's seeming obsession with Justus's attack.¹³ While I find this argument compelling, I would extend it beyond a structural analysis to claim that the time has come simply to cease using the Vita as a source for the facts of Josephus's life-story—an enterprise which even the most skeptical readers of the autobiography have engaged in, if often faute de mieux. Rather, we should approach this text simply as the literary record of Josephus's last, retroactive self-fashioning. Moreover, I would argue, at the core of this last self-fashioning was Josephus's attempt to present himself as both a loyal Jew and as a man imbued with and defined by the Roman conception of virtus—as what we might call a Jewish vir virtutis.

In Tusculan Disputations, Cicero famously defined the Roman conception of virtue as follows:

Thus, what is most remarkable to me about the Vita, given its juxtaposition to contemporary rabbinical writings in which a life devoted entirely to study is exalted as the ultimate summum bonum, is the extent to which Josephus, while in exile in Rome, seeking to justify himself both to himself and to posterity, remembered himself as a man whose life was marked by spectacular acts of physical courage, military brilliance, and utter devotion to the service of his God and His people. This seamless synthesis, he insisted, had already in his lifetime been misunderstood and misrepresented, and therefore must be corrected. Thus, throughout the autobiography he recounts episodes in which he escaped from life-threatening dangers through a combination of physical strength, nimbleness of mind, and probity of spirit, all of which were marked and defined by dedication to the God of Israel.

A few examples will suffice: