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2.7 Reconstructing the Narrative Situation
In
his landmark study of the Pharisees in Josephus,[1] Steve Mason insists on
distinguishing contextualized interpretation from historiographical
reconstruction, prioritizing the former as preparation for the later.[2] While acknowledging that
other sources occasionally confirm particular facts in Josephus’s material,
Mason considers it naïve to extract “raw data” from narratives for historical
reconstruction without first understanding literary meanings “in their original
frameworks.”[3]
Adjudicating historicity during interpretation is pointless because “how
accurately an author perceived events is not a question that exegesis can
answer,” but historical context remains essential for interpreters who wish to
discern “how the original readership would plausibly have understood the
document.”[4] Thus, historical research
should begin with “a purely exegetical phase” of receiving authorial
representations as such before formulating one’s own questions and
attempting to answer them.[5] “Only when the evidence is
thus understood in situ can we reasonably formulate historical hypotheses to
explain it.”[6]
Eschewing source–critical theories that had
previously denied Josephus “authorial responsibility” for his configuration of
material, and paying careful attention to the language use in each relevant
passage, Mason primarily aims to understand the ancient Jewish writer’s own
deliberate (re)presentation and observable biases.[7] To that end, he details
his method:
Our
procedure will always be to look first within Josephus’s writings for clues…
His general usage and the immediate context will, so far as possible, be the
arbiters of meaning. . . . [If this were] a historical investigation, which
seeks to circumvent the witness’s intention, incidental notices [would be] the
most valuable because they are more likely to yield unintentional evidence.
Since our purpose, however, is to grasp Josephus’s intention, we must
try to be sensitive to his own emphases; this will require that primary
attention be given to his deliberate discussions of the Pharisees. It is in
those discussions, if anywhere, that he spells out what he wants the reader to
know about the group.[8]
To
summarize, in a manner of speaking, Mason will read against the grain
(as a historian) only after reading with the grain (as an interpreter)
carefully enough to scrutinize all the ways in which that grain actually
(arguably) runs. Repeatedly emphasizing that he is reconstructing “the story”
and not “the real past,”[9] Mason’s hermeneutic also emphasizes the need for “sensitivity” to “clues” because Josephus’s
ideas are not always “spelled out.” The contextual “whole” is therefore
something each reader must reconstruct for themselves by filling gaps and
drawing inferences.[10] To wit, Mason’s efforts
“to construct an adequate synthesis of the Pharisess in Josephus’s
narratives” proceed as follows.[11]
Surveying War and Antiquities
broadly, Mason establishes Josephus’s perspective as a Jewish and Flavian
elite: fronting his priestly aristocratic lineage, admiring the Hasmonean
family dynasts, advocating senatorial rule, disdaining the masses who empower
tyrants (and thus wary of monarchial succession), but nevertheless deferential
to established authority.[12] In contrast to these
“principal concerns” (which occupy the bulk of Josephus’s attention), the
Pharisees were “more or less irrelevant.”[13] But Josephus also “passes
up many opportunities to mention Pharisees, especially in contexts that might
have elicited his praise.”[14] Instead, their occasional
appearances consistently elicit disdain from Josephus, who repeatedly and
explicitly aligns their party with the common folk of Judea, and depicts them
in negative ways (as many have noted).[15] Mason summarizes:
In
this narrative world, Pharisees appear as an occasional aggravation to the
elite. They are a nonaristocratic group with enormous popular support and a
perverse willingness to use that support demagogically, even on a whim, to stir
up the masses against duly constituted authority.[16]
In sum, Josephus’s Pharisees are “power–hungry opportunists, whose
actions undermine their reputation for piety.”[17] The ancient writer has
made his views clear through both commentary and depiction. The “what” of story
has indeed illustrated the “how” and the “why” of authorial composition. And
yet, there is more.
In the process of assembling these
narratological inferences, Mason observes an important distinction between the
narrated text and the reconstructed story world. In revising War’s episode
about Queen Alexandria’s alliance with the Pharisees (Ant. 13), Josephus
introduces “a backstory, the preceding interval from Hyrcanus I to Alexandra,
as a failed experiment in governance without the popular Pharisaic
jurisprudence.”[18]
Mason explains: “We must connect some dots if we wish to understand.”[19]
When
interpreting a narrative we are entitled to accept conditions of Judean life
painstakingly established by the author at one place (Ant. 13) and
assumed again later (Ant. 18) as holding in the intervening narrative as
well. He need not pause every few pages… to remind us that Pharisees are still
influential.[20]
Thus,
“Josephus portrays the reestablishment of Pharisaic jurisprudence under
Alexandria as a necessary condition of governance, which has persevered until
his own time.”[21]
The Pharisees therefore “hold complete sway over the
masses and therefore over political life” in Josephus’s story world.[22]
Through narrative depiction and logical implication, the author has represented
an ongoing situation in which higher authority figures respected Pharisees
primarily because “their influence” had to be “reckoned with.”[23]
Collectively, all this exegetical inference provides Mason with grounds for
explaining the odd remark (Ant. 13.297–8, 18.17) that “one who
accepts office must listen to ‘what the Pharisees says.’”[24] Lacking
power, they exerted influence.
While it should go
without saying that Josephus’s depiction may not be historically accurate, even
if Mason has read him correctly, what bears mentioning is that Mason is
inferentially reconstructing Josephus’s Pharisees, rather than history.
Basically, the hermeneutic strategy is that Josephus’s remarks should remain
grounded within the context of Josephus’s depictions. We should also observe
that, although writing to a Roman audience quite unfamiliar with Pharisees gave
Josephus no opportunity to evoke knowledge not explicitly provided by the text,
Mason has elsewhere demonstrated that Josephus does exactly this when the
narrative regards other topics.[25] The task of literary
criticism inevitably requires all sorts of inferences.
The major interpretative payoff from Mason’s
representational groundwork regards the Jewish–Flavian’s autobiographical claim
at Life 12b about his youth: ἠρξάμην τε πολιτεύεσθαι τῇ Φαρισαίων αἱρέσει κατακολουθῶν.[26] Influential renderings by
Thackeray (“I began to govern my life by the rules of the Pharisees”) and
Whiston (“…to conduct myself according to the rules…”) suggest a personal
commitment to discipline.[27] Perceiving this as a claim (whether sincere or deceptive) to hold membership in the
Pharisee party,[28]
centuries of interpreters problematized most of Josephus’s material on the
Pharisees.[29]
Mason reverses this trend by privileging that bulk of material before arguing
exegetically about the single remark.[30]
Thus, because Josephus’s “overall portrayal” of the Pharisees makes the former
reading impossible, Mason argues for a different understanding,[31]
translating 12b as, “I began to engage in public life following the school of
the Pharisees.”[32]
That is, based on Mason’s constructive literary reading (detailed above), we
find Life 12b makes the author’s young self politically savvy, prudently
“even if unwillingly” recognizing the need to “side with” popular Pharisaic
views.[33] By itself, this alternative exegesis might have seemed
contentious, but the weight of contextual grounding makes the revisionist
reading compelling, and arguably determinative. In Ankersmit’s terms, Mason’s
representation of Josephus has preceded his interpretation of Josephus.
Grounding hermeneutics with this kind of
narratological inference is both necessary and unavoidable, whether or not such
literary reconstructions can ever be verified. Even if Mason has read Josephus
incorrectly, he has shown us the proper procedure. Our ancient Jewish writer
did not say, “Here’s what I think of the Pharisees.” Rather, he portrayed them
episodically, intermittently, with many details offered only in passing, and
even the plainest descriptions are framed and lit by his own narrativized
configurations. As such, interpreters seeking to determine authorial bias and
narrative meaning must engage the full measure of Josephus’s situational
grounding. The authorial “hows” and “whys” can become more accessible if we
prioritize a careful and deliberate reconstruction of “what” the author was
trying to represent. Moreover, we must reconstruct the authorial vision before
we can leverage that representation while investigating the actual past.
Although we might ultimately disbelieve our reconstructed view of Josephus’s
world, the process of interpreting material on its own terms is a necessary
first step. Such imaginative exegesis must conclude before historical judgment
can effectively begin.
A final observation is required. Mason’s
work on the Pharisees contextualized his readings so robustly that some critics
mistook his constructive interpretations for historiographical verdicts.[34] This confusion was no doubt exacerbated because
Mason’s interpretation logically ruled out several prior interpretations which
had wrongly been equated with historical fact.[35]
To such critical confusion, Mason replied that historical debates
“played no role in my efforts to understand Josephus,” and clarified, “I did
not attempt a historical investigation there.”[36] At the other extreme,
Mason’s colleagues who correctly grasped his distinction between literary
interpretation and historical reconstruction had begun to doubt whether his
careful preparatory work would ever give way to the next stage (although
eventually it did).[37] To avoid such confusion
and doubts about this project, therefore, I will follow
my narratological reconstruction (in chapter four) by sketching out three
divergent hypotheses (in chapter five) about what might have really happened in
the actual past. Because these rough examples of historical reconstruction
merely need to illustrate what the process could look like (in order to
establish a categorical distinction), the only theoretical and methodological
explanation they require at this point is to re-iterate how the previous
discussion applies to the question of this dissertation.
[1] Mason, Pharisees;
Mason,
“Josephus’s Pharisees: The Narratives,” in Jacob Neusner
and Bruce Chilton, eds., In Quest of the Historical Pharisees (Waco,
Tex: Baylor University Press, 2007), 3–40; Mason, “Josephus’s Pharisees: The
Philosophy,” in Jacob Neusner
and Bruce Chilton, eds., In Quest of the Historical Pharisees (Waco,
Tex: Baylor University Press, 2007), 41–66; Mason and
Helfield, Origins, 103–37.
[2] E.g., Mason,
Pharisees, 10–7, 43–4, 53
[3] Mason, Pharisees,
10–16; Mason, “Narratives,” 3–4; both citing Neusner.
[4] Mason, Pharisees,
13.
[5] Mason, Pharisees,
12–16. Steve Mason, Orientation
to the History of Roman Judaea (Eugene, Oregon: Cascade Books, 2016), 73–83, prescribes the opposite
sequence (forming questions before embarking upon exegesis) but keeps
historical reconstruction separate from and subsequent to interpretation.
[6] Mason,
“Narratives,” 3. See also Mason and
Helfield, Josephus, 7–67.
[7] Mason, Pharisees,
43, 53; 18–53; e.g. 113, 118, 176–7, 207–11, 274–80, 306–7, 327; defending this
position against source criticism is a major component of Mason’s original 1986
[1991] monograph, which spends over 25% of its argument on vocabulary and
source analysis (e.g., 84–110, 133–52, 231–40). By contrast, authorial autonomy
is entirely presumed by Mason, “Narratives,” [2007], with source critics
briefly refuted by Mason, “Philosophy,” 41, 60–1 [2007].
[8] Mason, Pharisees,
43–4.
[9] E.g., Mason,
“Narratives,” 4, 35, 38; Mason, “Philsophy,” 63.
[10] Mason,
“Narratives,” [2007] is more articulate about exercising inference than Mason, Pharisees,
[1991 publication; 1986 dissertation].
[11] Mason,
“Narratives,” 38.
[12] Mason,
“Narratives,” 6–8, 14–6, 20–1; Mason, Pharisees, 50, 59–60, 228, 238,
240, 243–5. See also Tessa Rajak, Josephus:
The Historian and His Society, 2. ed. (London: Duckworth, 2004), 8, 21, 42.
[13] Mason,
“Narratives,” 4–5, 17, 30–1, 37; Mason, Pharisees, 181–7, 322, 373;
Mason, “Philosophy,” 54–5, 64.
[14] Mason,
“Narratives,” 11–13, 38.
[15] Mason,
“Narratives,”8–11, 17–28; Mason, Pharisees, 18–39, 82–4, 110–23, 173–6,
195, 213–63, cf. 272–308. The most relevant passages include War
1:107–14; 2:162–6; Ant. 13:288–98, 13:400–32; 17:41–5; 18:12–15.
[16] Mason,
“Narratives,” 37–8.
[17] Mason, Pharisees,
345.
[18] Mason, Pharisees,
38ff.
[19] Mason, Pharisees,
38.
[20] Mason,
“Narratives,” 433n.59; cf. 10–11, 22–3.
[21] Mason,
“Narratives,” 39.
[22] Mason,
“Narratives,” 32–3.
[23] Mason,
“Narratives,” 14.
[24] Mason,
“Narratives,” 29–30, 38; Mason, Pharisees, 353–4, cf. 279, 304, 308, 373.
[25] Steve Mason,
“Figured Speech and Irony in T. Flavius Josephus,” in J. C. Edmondson, Steve
Mason, and J. B. Rives, eds., Flavius Josephus and Flavian Rome (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2005), 244–88.
[26] Mason, Pharisees,
374.
[27] Mason, Pharisees,
347; cf. German renderings (348, 54) and discussion there.
[28] Mason, Pharisees,
325–46; cf. 18–39, 55–6, 194; Mason, “Narratives,” 31–2, 38–9.
[29] Mason, Pharisees, 18–39, 46–51, 325–41, 356,
discusses source–critical theories; e.g., that
Josephus included unflattering material reluctantly, or had sections drafted by
compositional assistants.
[30] Mason, Pharisees,
342–56, ; Mason, “Narratives,” 31–3.38–9.
[31] Mason, Pharisees,
342–56.; Mason, “Narratives,” 32–3.
[32] Mason, Pharisees,
351 [347–53].
[33] Mason,
Pharisees, 353–6; Mason, “Narratives,” 33. NB: Josephus’s overlapping content
allows Mason to build one narratological context from three separate works.
Also, Josephus’s self–inclusion as a character allows Mason to combine
historical inferences about the author with narrative inferences about the
story world. However, despite the advantages of these specialized
opportunities, Mason’s inferential hermeneutic remains exemplary.
[34] Mason and
Helfield, Josephus, 133–4;
Steve Mason, “What is History?” in Mladen
Popović, ed., The Jewish Revolt against Rome: Interdisciplinary Perspectives
(Leiden ; Boston: Brill, 2011), 198–200.
[35] Mason,
Pharisees, 373–5; Mason, “Narratives,” 38–9.
[36] Mason and
Helfield, Josephus, 133n.137;
Mason, “What is History?” 198.
[37] Neusner and
Chilton, In Quest of the Historical Pharisees, 423; Mason, Orientation,
66—70; Mason, Pharisees, 375. Cf. Steve Mason, A
History of the Jewish War, A.D. 66–74 (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2016).
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