10.8. Conclusion
Case Studies: Biographies of Recent Characters
Use Prior Information
Those of us who teach the Synoptic Gospels often ask even beginning students to chart differences and especially patterns of differences. Because it is such a basic exercise, I will not reproduce examples from a Gospel synopsis here; I take for granted that most readers have made some such comparisons and contrasts themselves, or are at least aware of them, and can therefore grasp the relevance of this chapter’s analogies, without me adding superfluous pages to this book.
One unsurprising conclusion in the study of ancient biography is that the sort of differences evident in the Gospels are not unusual in ancient biography. My interest here is to show that the textual phenomena with which we are already familiar in the Gospels (parallels and variation) fall within the range of textual phenomena expected in analogous works of the era, hence should not be deemed idiosyncratic or (for those with theological concerns) problematic so long as we do not read the Gospels with anachronistic expectations.
In this chapter I focus at some length on one set of analogies, namely, how authors half a century after one figure, here the briefly reigning emperor Otho, overlapped in their reports about him. Like the Gospels, several accounts of Otho stem from the early empire and from within living memory of their subject. The comparison will display significant dependence on prior information. I then turn more briefly to some other potential analogies (with special attention to the first-century Jewish examples of Philo and Josephus) that suggest that this pattern of biographies depending on prior information obtains more widely.
While in many cases we cannot prove or disprove a biographer’s or historian’s claims,1 only a minimalist methodological skepticism deems all claims plainly false until proven true. Naturally, all history—indeed, any narration of memory—involves interpretation and selection based on perspectives. This question is not at issue here, so my focus will not be on what is omitted in one or another source, relevant as that is to the question of interpretation. (See below section 10.5b, “Omitting Omissions.”) My interest here is the question: How much of the information that is included does the author have reason to believe is accurate?
Minimalism is heuristically useful if asking the question: What is the minimum of information about which we can be certain? Maximalism offers the analogously useful function of asking about the maximum information that could be possible.2 Yet in most historical reconstruction our greater interest is what is probable.
To evaluate the historical probability of reports by minimalist standards even when their information that we can test proves generally reliable is to adopt an approach that we would often not imagine for analogous situations today. Though other memoirs might provide better examples, I take an example I can evaluate firsthand. My wife and I cowrote her refugee experience and our romance based especially on our journals and correspondence.3 Eyewitnesses can also confirm many details, and interviews about the book have circulated. But if only the book survived, a minimalist critic several centuries from now might accept only some basic events, such as the fact that nearly everyone from her city that survived did so at least temporarily as a fugitive. By disregarding any of our testimony not identical with what they already knew, they would be dismissing firsthand evidence.4
Identifying the genre of our work as autobiographic would not resolve all problems. We could, for example, be mistaken in some details, and we certainly were selective and have biases (not least in the romance material). We write in light of the outcome; that some of my initial assumptions within the narrative prove wrong nuances my reliability as a narrator earlier in the book. It certainly is not an academic textbook. But given the book’s genre as popular, inspirational autobiography, one expects that we reported only events that happened, even if a few memories are conflated and speakers’ words are not verbatim. A twenty-fifth-century critic who misidentified the book’s genre as a novel would get the book wrong and the motives of the authors wrong. If I composed a novel, it certainly would not look like this!
With some genres, such as ancient novels, we do not look for genuine historical information, although they inform us about ideas and customs. With some other genres, we expect some or much genuine historical information. What about ancient biography? Ancient “biography” in the most general sense offers only limited help in framing our historiographic expectations for these works as historical sources, especially for those who lump lives of poets and novels about historical figures with mainstream biographies of public figures. How do we evaluate which sorts of biographies (as a sort of subgenre within a genre) tend to be more reliable as historical sources? Some observations should already be obvious from previous chapters.
First, the brief “lives” of poets differ substantially from full “lives” of public figures, and we can expect much more historical substance from the latter. Second, the level of concern with historical facticity was greater in the early empire than either in the Hellenistic period or in late antique hagiography. Third, lives of figures from within living memory typically had available the most reliable oral sources. Such observations suggest that, as far as ancient biographies go, we should expect the Gospels to be among the more historically valuable sources, not among the less historically valuable ones.
10.2. How to Evaluate Particular Biographies
Nevertheless, even biographers of recent public figures from circa 100 BCE to circa 200 CE wrote differently from their modern successors, with a range of flexibility among themselves concerning details. To speak of biographic genre, or even of biography of recent figures in the early empire, does not resolve the degree of flexibility in any given work. Virtually all writers made decisions what to include, omit, and emphasize, and most also approached their subjects with a degree of appreciation or disdain that was subjective. All had to interpret their data in reconstructing events, and most also exercised some flexibility in how they presented the details.
How can we evaluate where on the spectrum of reliability, or at least the author’s intention of reliability, a particular biography lies? To do so, we need to give further attention to how particular writers engaged their sources. Often we lack sources that allow us to test them. (For a New Testament example, consider, on the usual view of Synoptic relations, Mark.)5 In other cases, though, we find sufficient material in other sources to help us answer the question.
Of course, the original source(s) on which other works depend could be deeply flawed or even fictitious; but we can offer at least two observations based on such comparisons. First, we can evaluate what the other works did with the original source, and second, we may conclude that, as source-based historical works, the authors of these works also believed that the original source did supply legitimate information on the points followed. If they write within living memory of the source or even the events, their belief about the soundness of their source is probably usually sounder than our guesses centuries or millennia later.
If, where we can test them, particular biographers use sources and handle them carefully, the probability in any given case should be that they also do so where we cannot test them, at least in the same document. That is, we expect that in this document they usually communicate what they believe to be true, and that the incidents that they report usually derive from their sources. For a New Testament example, if Matthew and Luke extensively use Mark and other shared material, they are clearly not simply composing freely from whole cloth.
Scholars often compare documents to ascertain the writer’s methods and emphases. In Gospels research, we call this redaction criticism,6 but its usefulness is not limited to the Gospels alone.7 Scholars often evaluate historical traditions by comparing other works, as I do below with works about Otho. Mark Beck tests Lucian’s depiction of Demonax with independent snippets about Demonax preserved elsewhere.8 Christopher Pelling uses the historian Thucydides and the orator Andocides as independent sources against which to study their respective tendencies,9 and then examines Apollodorus’s redaction of Thucydides to evaluate his oratorical departures from his source.10
Variations are common in parallel acccounts. For example, in Xenophon’s encomium on Agesilaus, the state selects Agesilaus as a better king than his rival; in Nepos, Lysander makes him king; in Plutarch, Agesilaus and Lysander together make Agesilaus king, and the people are unhappy about the result.11 Plutarch apparently supplies a speech for Agesilaus unavailable in prior sources and depicts him as more “quick-witted” than in other surviving sources.12 Still, Plutarch appears to have some very early sources about Agesilaus no longer available to us today.13 Later, in the fifth century CE, Orosius can be seen “condensing, expanding and changing verbal expressions” in his source, Justin’s epitome of Pompeius Trogus.14 We may speculate on the reasons for the differences, but the differences are plainly there.
Then again, similarities are also common. Robert Derrenbacker charts similarities and differences among Diodorus Siculus, Strabo, and Arrian, examining how they adapt their shared sources. He observes how they often follow even the same sequence in treating particular topics.15 Likewise, where comparison is possible, Diodorus abridges Ephorus by omitting episodes but follows fairly closely what he includes.16 (One example of adaptation there is changing an adjective to prepare for a later portrayal.)17 Similar differences and similarities obtain in parallel materials both in the OT18 and in its ancient Near Eastern setting, so the OT itself provides models for understanding Synoptic parallels and variation.19
10.4. The Most Useful Analogies?
As emphasized in chapter 9, ancients themselves often recognized that legendary and speculative elements increased with chronological distance from eyewitness material, especially after the living memory of eyewitnesses had passed.20 Most scholars date Mark to within roughly forty years (about a generation) after Jesus’s crucifixion; among the fairly small number of extant biographies from the early empire written within living memory of their subjects are Nicolaus’s fragmentary Augustus, Josephus’s autobiography (his Life), Tacitus’s Agricola, and Lucian’s Demonax. Each of these works preserves a substantial quantity of reliable information, though all these writers idolized their subjects, and Nicolaus in particular proved unduly encomiastic.
The Gospels derive from the period of ancient biographies’ strongest historical content, and they are written within living memory of their subjects. We may still learn much from some analogies that do not fit these constraints, but our closest and most useful analogies will fit these criteria, which also narrow the biographies to be explored to more workable proportions.21 Just as the Evangelists looked back to the central event of Jesus roughly half a century earlier,22 so early second-century historians often recalled the traumatic time the Roman aristocracy suffered under Nero roughly half a century before them, followed by a civil war of imperial succession that involved some of their own relatives.
Here I focus first and most extensively on the treatment of Otho in biographers and historians (Suetonius, Plutarch, and Tacitus) roughly half a century after his death;23 more briefly, noting treatment of some other figures such as Galba24 or works by some other biographers such as Nepos; and finally some Jewish works, examining especially how Josephus (less strictly) treats the same events in his Jewish War and his Life.25
Accounts about Otho in Suetonius, Plutarch, and the historian Tacitus correspond with one another in ways analogous to correspondences among the Synoptics.26 This observation is significant because Suetonius and Plutarch are the key extant examples of biographers from the early empire.27 This brief comparison of elements in Suetonius’s biography of a recent figure with his contemporaries’ treatment of the same figure illustrates that biographers drew on and, like historians, adapted a repository of historical information available to them.
As already noted, experts regarding ancient biography often classify it as related to or even as a subtype of history.28 If this observation is true for ancient full biographies in general, it is even more relevant for full biographies of then-recent figures in the early empire.
Here I compare a biography of Suetonius with a historical writing of Tacitus and biographies of Plutarch, concerning a figure who lived roughly forty to fifty years before they wrote.29 Otho lived circa 32–69, with most of the relevant events taking place in his final decade. Writing about him a generation later, Suetonius (ca. 70–130 CE) composed his imperial biographies before 121. Tacitus (ca. 56–at least 118 CE) may have composed his Histories circa 109–10.30 Plutarch (before 50 CE–after 120) seems to have become most prolific in the last two decades of his life.31
For the sake of simplicity, I start here with Suetonius rather than Plutarch. Plutarch’s information that is parallel regarding Otho appears in two biographies, his Galba and his Otho. Suetonius treats Otho in twelve chapters of about twenty-eight paragraphs altogether. That Suetonius, Tacitus, and Plutarch, though contemporaries and all members of the elite, do not share all the same perspectives on every historical figure also strengthens the value of their independent attestation of some elements of historical information.
Unlike pure novelists, biographers constructed the events they narrate largely from the raw materials of available tradition. Nevertheless, they had some freedom in how they constructed their portraits from this raw material, so I will also offer a few comparisons on the extent to which they employed that freedom. Here my observations must be more limited because of the limited nature of the evidence; my focus therefore remains on establishing that they mostly edited and adapted historical information rather than inventing new stories.
In comparing data, I will focus on points of overlap rather than on points included by only one source. When a biography of a recent figure by Suetonius or Plutarch offers information that is not corroborated elsewhere, we should not for that reason alone simply dismiss its claims (although we may question them if we have specific reason to do so). Negative arguments from omissions in a different source constitute arguments from silence, arguments that are particularly precarious, given the severely limited nature of extant evidence.32 As mentioned, Suetonius’s biography of Otho is very brief, for which reason it could not have accommodated all the details found in Plutarch or (especially) Tacitus. This work in particular lacks much information about Otho’s conflict with Vitellius (whether for textual reasons or for reasons of Suetonius’s interest).
Omissions discard data but technically do not falsify the information that remains;33 even if we view them as distorting the overall picture, they are not errors of fact per se. Such omissions are common in individual memory,34 in ancient biographies,35 and in ancient historiography.36 Information-based writers must select from their information the elements most relevant to their genre, story, and agenda.37 When Dionysius of Halicarnassus notes that, unlike historians satisfied merely to report facts, he wants to investigate the causes of events as well,38 he is not discounting all the facts they report.
Again, the principle of relevant selectivity should make sense to us. Even in a court, when one promises to tell “the whole truth,” an attorney would not likely allow a witness to take two hours on the stand, attempting to provide every conceivable detail about an incident that one might recall, whether directly related to the immediate questions or not.39
For recent figures for whom information abounded, different writers naturally select different information, to some extent even where one was copying much information from another or both copied the same common source. Nevertheless, if the writer draws on genuine preexisting information where we can check him, it is reasonable to infer that, writing for an era where readers could have checked him on many other issues, the writer would have drawn on preexisting information in many more cases than where the information happens to remain extant today. Extant correspondences with other surviving sources, therefore, are undoubtedly merely a sample of correspondences that many works had with their real sources. Often reports of different historians may be complementary, allowing us to see what the other writer omitted because of bias or interest.40 Both for the Gospels and for other ancient biographies, multiple attestation is helpful, but we need not approach even unique accounts (such as, e.g., distinctly Lukan parables)41 with dismissive skepticism.42
10.5c. Listing Parallels and Some Differences
The parallels among authors addressed below exhibit the same sorts of variations one finds in the gospel tradition (although the elite authors naturally include less verbatim reproduction than appears in the Synoptics).43 To discuss each of the following parallels and differences in the way commentators discuss variations in the Gospels would prove prohibitively long; that length would also prove superfluous at many points in view of my primary objective. The most concise and visually effective way to note areas of overlap among Suetonius, Tacitus, and Plutarch here is to simply list them.44
The abundance of shared information should lay to rest any suggestion that a biographer such as Suetonius was engaging primarily in free composition without regard for the reliability of his information.
UETONIUS
THO
ACITUS
ISTORIES
LUTARCH
ALBA
AND
THO
Otho’s parentage and ancestry (1.1–3).
Otho’s parentage and ancestry (2.50).
Galba
Otho’s birth (2.1).
—
—
Otho’s wasteful, dissolute youth (2.1).
Otho’s wasteful, dissolute youth (1.13).
Galba
Otho used an affair with an imperial freedwoman to gain access to Nero’s court (2.2).
—
—
Otho gained friendship with Nero through their shared vices (2.2).
Annals
Galba
45
Annals
Annals
46
Galba
Annals
Galba
Otho governed Lusitania well for ten years (3.2).
Histories
Annals
Galba
Once Galba revolted, Otho supported him (4.1).
Otho was Galba’s chief supporter (1.13).
Galba
An astrologer named Seleucus predicted that Otho would survive Nero and become emperor (4.1; cf. 6.1).
An astrologer named Ptolemy predicted that Otho would survive Nero and become emperor (1.22).
Galba
Galba thus pursued his ambition by flattering nobles and obligating his soldiers (4.2), and later bribing soldiers to share his plot (5.2).
Most of the soldiers favored Otho (1.13); he had long curried their favor (1.23), including with bribes (1.24–25).
Galba
Galba
Galba
Otho eagerly hoped to be adopted by Galba (1.13); Galba adopted Piso instead (1.14–15), incurring Otho’s anger toward Galba and envy toward Piso (1.21).
Galba
Galba
Galba
Thus Otho realized that only by seizing the empire could he hope to pay his debts (5.1); he extorted a million sesterces from an imperial slave to finance his goal (5.2).
Once he realized that war might turn against Galba, Otho considered switching sides (1.14); one consideration for betraying Galba was Otho’s massive debts (1.21).
Galba
Galba
47
Galba’s adoption speech (1.15–16).
Galba
A delay of several days (6.1)
Five days (1.29) before the assassination: January 10 (1.18) to the fifteenth (1.27).
Galba
48
Otho was with Galba at a sacrifice in the temple of Apollo when the seer Umbricius declared unfavorable omens (1.27).
Galba
His freedman Onomastus announcing that his architect and contractors awaited him served as Otho’s prearranged excuse to leave Galba, to go examine properties he was buying (1.27).
Galba
49
aede Saturni
aedem Saturni
Galba
50
Otho walked through the palace to leave (1.27).
Galba
Soldiers took Otho on their shoulders, hailing him as emperor, and others who met them joined in (6.3).
Otho feared because initially just 23 members of the bodyguard hailed him as emperor; they drew other support and acquiescence more slowly and often reluctantly (1.27–28).
Galba
—
51
Galba
—
Piso’s speech (1.29–30).
—
Otho dispatched agents to kill Galba and Piso (6.3).
52
Galba
—
Atilius Vergilio, the standard-bearer for the cohort with Galba, cast Galba’s portrait on the ground (1.41).
Galba
—
Galba had assigned the centurion Sempronius Densus to guard Piso, and Densus defended him bravely (1.43).
Galba
53
—
Galba
Otho promised the soldiers that he would have only whatever they left for him (6.3).
Otho’s speech to the soldiers (1.37–38), including promises of money (1.37); out of traditional control, the soldiers ruled themselves (1.46).
Galba
Otho told the Senate that the people had forced this role on him (7.1).
Once Otho prevailed, the Senate switched allegiance to him (1.45) and honored him (1.47).
Galba
Otho honored Nero’s memory, again setting up his statues, and did not refuse acclaim as his successor (7.1).
Otho honored Nero’s memory, allowing people to set up statues of Nero, and did not refuse acclaim as his successor ( 1.78).
Otho
Galba
Nero
Vitellius
Titus Vinius ran (corruptly) Galba’s affairs (1.6), and Otho’s agents killed him (1.42; cf. 1.48); Otho had Marcianus Icelus executed (1.46).
Galba
Galba
—
Tacitus allows that Vinius’s protest that his execution was against Otho’s orders may have simply been trying to prolong his life but suspects that he was part of the conspiracy (1.42).
Galba
Galba
Galba had relied on Laco as well as Vinius (1.6, 14); he was Galba’s praetorian prefect (1.26), loyal but proud, corrupt, and incompetent (1.6, 26); after being banished to an island, he was assassinated (1.46).
Galba
Galba
Galba
54
—
Otho spared consul-elect Marius Celsus, despite his fidelity to Galba (1.45, 71), and Celsus became one of his generals (1.71, 87).
Otho
Otho
—
To the people’s pleasure, Otho ordered Tigellinus’s death; at Sinuessa (the famous baths there), Tigellinus cut his own throat with a razor (1.72).
Otho
55
Otho
Galba
Otho banished Dolabella to Aquinum, without harm (1.88).
Otho
A dream of Galba’s avenging shade tormented Otho (7.2).
Galba’s death disturbed the imagination of Otho’s mind (44.1; “gloomy visions,” LCL).
—
Vitellius planned to revolt (1.50–70).
Galba
Galba
Otho
Otho offered Vitellius a share in the empire and a marriage union between the families (8.1).
Otho offered Vitellius money and favor if he would accept peace, and Vitellius made the same offers to Otho (1.74).
Otho
—
After offers failed, Otho and Vitellius each reproached the other—both speaking truth (1.74).
Otho
—
Otho treated Vitellius’s brother Lucius Vitellius graciously as a friend (1.88).
Otho
56
When the 17th Cohort was being brought from Ostia to Rome, Crispinus was moving some weapons in the camp near dusk, to equip this cohort. The soldiers, however, suspected the senators’ slaves of opposing Otho (1.80), and Otho tried to disperse them to protect the senate (1.81).
Otho
Otho
57
The soldiers burst into Otho’s banquet hall (wounding some who tried to stop them), demanding to see Otho, who had to stand on the couch to quiet them (1.82).
Otho
—
Otho’s speech to the army, demanding that a few be punished for the army’s actions (1.83–84).
Otho
Vitellius
Vespasian
Domitian
58
59
Otho
Otho
Otho
Rather than going to the front himself, Otho retired to Brixellum (2.33; cf. 2.39); this decision disheartened the soldiers (2.33).
Otho
Otho
Otho won the first three battles (in the Alps, near Placentia, and at Castor’s place), though these were not decisive (9.2).
The war started well for Otho (2.11–12, 14, 25–28, and mostly 2.15), which included battles at Placentia (2.17–23) and Castor’s place (2.24).
Otho
Otho
—
60
Otho
Otho
61
—
Annals
Otho
—
Marius Celsus was one of Otho’s generals (1.71, 87; 2.60).
Otho
—
Fabius Valens was one of Vitellius’s generals against Otho (e.g., 1.74; 2.24, 27–31, 55).
Galba
Otho
—
Otho
Most advised Otho to prolong the war, but he insisted on deciding it quickly (9.1).
62
Otho
Otho
Otho
—
The Vitellians began building a bridge at the Po, which the Othonians were trying to set ablaze (2.34); Otho’s gladiators, trying to reach an island in the river, were beaten by Vitellius’s Germans (2.35).
Otho
63
Otho
Otho
Vitellius
The Vitellians prevailed especially because they attacked when Otho’s soldiers were expecting terms of peace (9.2).
Otho’s army wrongly thought that the Vitellians had deserted; it was unprepared for the Vitellian onslaught (2.42); Vitellius granted terms to the vanquished, though delay caused confusion (2.45).
Otho
Otho’s soldiers were not ready to give up the war (9.3) and initially refused to believe the report that they had experienced a defeat (10.1).
Otho’s soldiers were not ready to give up the war (2.46).
Otho
Otho wanted to spare his followers further suffering on his behalf (9.3; 10.1; cf. 10.2–11.1).
Otho wanted to spare his followers further suffering on his behalf (2.47).
Otho
Otho’s final instructions, summarized (10.2).
Otho’s final speeches and instructions (2.47–48).
Otho
Otho gave final instructions for the safety of several people whom he addressed, including his nephew (10.2).
Otho consoled his nephew Salvius Cocceianus, noting that Otho had spared Vitellius’s family, hence mercy should be expected, and warning him to remember neither too much nor too little that Otho had been his uncle (2.48).
Otho
Otho destroyed any letters that could incriminate his friends to Vitellius (2.48).
—
Otho distributed money to his servants (11.1).
Otho distributed money, though frugally (2.48).
Otho
Those beginning to leave the camp were being detained as deserters, but Otho prohibited harming them and met with friends until late (11.1).
Otho urged his friends to depart and provided means (2.48); the soldiers tried to prevent those departing, requiring his harsh intervention, and he met with those departing until late (2.49).
Otho
gelidae aquae
gelidae aquae
Otho
Otho chose the sharper of two daggers to place under his pillow (11.2).
Otho chose the sharper of two daggers to place under his head (2.49).
Otho
Otho then slept soundly one more night (11.2).
Otho then spent a quiet night, reportedly even sleeping some (2.49).
Otho
At dawn Otho stabbed himself to death (11.2).
At dawn Otho fell on his weapon (2.49).
Otho
People rushed in when he groaned, as Otho was dying from a single wound (2.49).
Otho
Otho was quickly buried at his request (11.2).
Otho was quickly buried at his request, to prevent disfigurement by his enemies (2.49).
Otho
Many soldiers killed themselves in mourning by Otho’s bier (12.2).
Some soldiers killed themselves in mourning by Otho’s bier (2.49).
Otho
64
Otho died in his 37th year (2.49).
Otho
One could add some other comparisons, but this list should be sufficient for our purposes. Before summarizing positive comparisons, I shall note some sample areas of difference and some possible reasons for them. These differences are important in helping to establish a potential range of accepted variation among contemporary biographies, which can help readers not to evaluate variations in the Gospels anachronistically.65
For example, the sequence of information in our sources sometimes differs, sometimes in a manner that affects how we understand the events. Thus, did Otho urge quick engagement before66 or after67 his initial victories? In the former case, events seemed to initially vindicate his choice; in the latter, his victories spurred on false hopes that his rashness quickly dashed. Since both writers consider his choice rash in retrospect,68 one might argue that Tacitus rearranged the events to reinforce this point; but given Tacitus’s enormous detail and sequencing of the material, and the fact that Suetonius merely summarizes various points here, Tacitus surely preserves the original sequence.69
Some differences in sequence probably reflect lack of knowledge or concern for sequence rather than deliberate changes.70 Sometimes, however, similar events may have happened more than once, so that different sources may occasionally involve different occasions. Thus Plutarch recounts that Otho was not only in Brixillum earlier,71 but that he returned to it72 after visiting the camp at Bedricum.73 Sometimes details appear garbled through Suetonius condensing the story.74 Suetonius sometimes may condense in this way because his elite readers already knew the basic stories to which he was alluding.75
Our sources contradict each other in designating the name of the astrologer who spurred on Otho’s ambitions. Suetonius designates him as Seleucus,76 whereas Tacitus and Plutarch designate him Ptolemy.77 In this case one might conjecture that Suetonius, working from memory, simply remembered the name as the same as that of one of Alexander’s successors (which included both a Seleucus and a Ptolemy). Much more likely (or perhaps partly for the same reason), he apparently confused Ptolemy with Vespasian’s court astrologer.78 In any case, even elite biographers sometimes confused some details; this seems a case of simple confusion, rather than following some ideological agenda.
Likewise, Plutarch contradicts Tacitus in having the centurion Sempronius Densus bravely defend Galba himself,79 whereas Tacitus has him defending Galba’s adoptive son Piso.80 This difference likely reflects an oversight of Plutarch’s, the sort of detail that writers could easily confuse even in the first generation unless they had substantial feedback from audiences familiar with their stories.81 We should note, however, the significant overlap in facts and the essential story in both of these accounts, despite the confusion of some secondary details.
In some cases differences may be somewhat semantic, such as who was left in charge of Rome. Tacitus claims that Otho left his brother Titianus in charge of Rome;82 but while Titianus undoubtedly wielded great influence, it is clear even from Tacitus that Titianus did not remain in Rome,83 whereas other sources seem clear that Flavius Sabinus did.84 One might therefore incline to favor Plutarch’s view that Otho left Flavius Sabinus in charge in Rome,85 whatever Titianus’s official designation may have been. Tacitus himself observes that Flavius Sabinus was Rome’s prefect.86
Only Suetonius reports the dream in Otho 7.2, though the wording included in Tacitus’s Histories 1.44.1 could possibly imply that Tacitus knows of it. Dreams are an interest of Suetonius, who also recounts a terrifying and ominous dream to Galba shortly before his own death.87 Yet Tacitus also could include predictive dreams among his lists of omens88 and divine signs.89 Like other omens, they are common in historical works,90 though we cannot be certain at what point they entered the traditions or texts that report them.91 Generals often depended on dreams before battles and in other situations, probably both in reality and in their postbattle propaganda, as well as in later embellishments about them.92 None of this is surprising, since people do often dream, and ancient readers usually believed that dreams portended the future.93
Even where the accounts clearly depict the same events, they vary on matters of detail, for example, the soldiers who came close to killing senators after some weapons were moved. In this case, comparing all three of our sources allows us to better reconstruct the larger context that makes sense of some details, though minor conflicts remain. As noted in chapter 7, in the absence of sufficient information ancient historians sometimes did elaborate details or speeches to flesh out scenes for the sake of a cohesive narrative, and ancient readers apparently expected this practice.
As noted below, Josephus does not mind anyone noticing his rhetorical adaptations of biblical narratives in much of his Jewish Antiquities. Tacitus develops dramatic scenes and dialogues94 and infuses scenes with pathos where the events narrated invite this approach.95 Various writers report private conversations in direct discourse.96
Nevertheless, differences need not all be explained in these terms. For example, multiple sources may have diverged on some such details by this point, or (very likely) some writers or their sources misconstrued some of their information. Sometimes more genuine information remains in accounts than we might suspect, simply because we lack the additional information that would reconcile more of the details.97
In these works, we find both variation in detail and continuity of the substance most relevant to the larger story. The variations among the Gospel accounts appear well within the range of acceptable variation in ancient biographies from roughly the same period; they need not discourage readers from finding substantial historical information about Jesus there.
10.5e. Differences because of Genre
As noted in chapter 6, ancient histories contained many biographic elements,98 but biographies more specifically tended to focus more on a single person and to emphasize characterization more.99 Difference in genre sometimes explains why one source includes elements missing in another.
Elite historiography normally expected, not merely brief summaries of speech points or statements about the historian’s inferences, but speeches like those the speaker might have given. Thus, not surprisingly, Tacitus includes set speeches that Suetonius, writing a short biography, lacks.100 Even when Suetonius is aware of Otho offering instructions, he is far less interested in fleshing them out for his readers.101 Tacitus and Plutarch offer different versions of Otho’s final speech (despite agreements in narrative).102 Even on occasions when speeches were surely offered, providing speeches for readers remains Tacitus’s interest, not that of Suetonius.103
Sometimes Tacitus’s speeches here probably adapt his sources.104 Nevertheless, Tacitus’s works include many speeches for which we cannot expect exact words to have been preserved,105 including private conversations.106 Indirect speech also appears at events where we cannot be certain that scribes would have kept records.107
Speeches do not represent the only area of difference based on genre. Tacitus specifies more names of collaborators in the plot against Galba,108 perhaps again reflecting the difference in genre expectations. Tacitus (and Plutarch) name generals; Suetonius summarizes the war and simplifies by omitting the names of generals, even where he includes their role.109 Writing a simpler, one-volume biography of Otho rather than (like Tacitus’s work) a more technical multivolume history, Plutarch also condenses, omitting some names, though less than does Suetonius.110
By contrast, Tacitus, being less biographically focused, recounts some of Otho’s background only at the end of his life. By contrast, Tacitus the historian elaborates in far greater detail aspects both of Otho’s plot111 and of the military operations.112
Sometimes Suetonius may forgo details about other figures in the Otho because he says more about these figures elsewhere in his other imperial biographies, which would be read as a series.113
While there are a few points at which the writers conflict and many points on which one is silent (not all of the latter are included in my list), the points of contact listed above are too numerous to entertain the possibility of random coincidence. The line between novelistic composition based on imagination and biographic or historical composition that constructs narratives with heavy reliance on preexisting information is not nearly so thin as some scholars have suggested. Even if the line appears thin in some kinds of sources, it is not at all thin in early imperial biographies concerning then-recent figures.
Which elements one counts makes the exact count subjective, but speaking roughly, in Suetonius’s brief biography, I found thirty-one points with close correspondence to Tacitus and eighteen additional points of significant correspondence. I found thirty points of close contact between Suetonius and Plutarch, with eighteen further points of significant correspondence; besides these, I found twenty-eight further points of close correspondence between Plutarch and Tacitus.
Keep in mind again that Suetonius’s biography of Otho is brief, the equivalent of roughly only twenty-eight paragraphs, with a total of less than two thousand words. This biography is less than one-fifth the length of Mark’s Gospel, so if we extrapolated to suggest a comparable amount of information in Mark, we would be thinking of perhaps 250 points of significant correspondence with external reality, averaging some 15 to 16 points of significant correspondence per chapter. Moreover, this projection rests only on the points in Suetonius’s Otho that may be confirmed externally. In Suetonius’s own day, when much more information remained extant and some eyewitnesses could be consulted, the figure was undoubtedly much higher. (Regarding the frequent presence of sources even when they are not named—as they are not in the Gospels and usually are not even in Suetonius’s Otho, though see below—see our earlier discussion at 7.9 above.)
One would not expect anything like this level of correspondence in a novel of comparable length, even in the most historical of novels (esp. Philostratus’s Apollonius), where some correspondences are possible. The genre difference between such biographies and novels should, then, be plainly evident. At least two of our three sources, and probably all three of them, are closely bound to their own sources. Such an observation need not surprise us; ancient historians and biographers do sometimes name their sources.114 They were particularly apt to identify their sources when alternate stories came to circulate over time.115 What our comparison of some sample sources indicates is just how closely bound to their sources they could be. This appears particularly evident for Otho’s final hours; as in the Gospel passion narratives, the chief character’s end was a matter of interest inviting detailed comment.
Suetonius, then, follows sources, even though he does not usually name them. Some of the material regarding Otho’s conspiracy and death corresponds so closely as to require the supposition of some common source or sources. If Suetonius drew on Tacitus, so that their works were not independent,116 this dependence would still illustrate our primary point about Suetonius the biographer: he developed sources rather than engaging in purely free composition. (Chronology makes it less likely that Tacitus drew on Suetonius. Had he done so, however, the historian would have been accepting Suetonius’s biographies as a legitimate historical source.)117 Such dependence would also not oblige us to suppose that this was the only source available to him. Nevertheless, these authors agree so closely, even in sequence, only at particular points, which might suggest that Suetonius drew not on Tacitus here but on a source or sources that Tacitus used.118
One source that they sometimes shared might be the no-longer-extant work of Fabius Rusticus.119 Many other scholars prefer a lost work by Pliny the Elder.120 Whatever their source or sources, their dependence on them indicates that even some of those writing within a generation of events (such as Mark) could conceivably depend on even earlier sources written by those who lived during the events in question and knew some of the participants.121
Tacitus elsewhere cites “historians of that era”122 as sources for events a century before his time.123 Tacitus knows of various earlier historians, sometimes naming them only when they themselves become subjects of history124 and often mentioning both the verdict of “the majority” of historians from the earlier era noted and dissenters from that consensus.125 Tacitus normally follows annals and earlier histories, but he also consulted personal memoirs from perhaps half a century earlier.126
The biographers likewise reveal some of their sources. Plutarch consulted witnesses, including an officer who described to him what he saw while Plutarch was touring the site with him.127 Suetonius apparently made some local inquiries for his work as well128 and sometimes could establish his point by naming various earlier sources supporting it.129 Suetonius’s sources more generally include notes that he took from official archives and libraries and archives (see ch. 6).
One of Suetonius’s sources in this biography about recent history is clear: his own father, Suetonius Laetus, was a tribune serving under Otho and shared with him information about Otho’s character and actions.130 In terms of major public events, a generation is, after all, not a very long time, for it remains within living memory of eyewitnesses and participants who would naturally be consulted.
That writers used sources does not prove that the sources are always correct. Even eyewitnesses have biases, and gossip and speculation were surely rife in the setting that Suetonius depicts.131 Nevertheless, it appears that biographers writing within the first generation or two often had considerable historical information on which to depend.
On the most common reconstruction of the Gospels’ relationship, Matthew and Luke depended heavily on their sources, and they treat Mark as a valid biographic source for reliable information rather than as a work of fiction. Matthew and Luke wrote at a time when the identity and qualifications of Mark were likely known. Whatever the exact actual sequence of the Gospels’ publication, the Evangelists write like source-based biographers, hence expecting their audiences to assume that they depend on information.
Some NT scholars nitpick at the Gospels in a way that no one would have thought to do with other ancient biographies, for example, complaining that one Gospel reports the heavenly voice saying, “You are my son,” and another, “This is my son.”132 Such minor differences pervade not only the Gospels, but ancient biography and historiography generally; dismissing the essential accuracy of ancient sources that exercise at least this much flexibility would probably leave us without credible historical sources from antiquity. As will be evident in our chapter on memory, such stringent standards judge ancient works by standards that were not possible or expected before modern recordings, and that are rarely expected in ordinary conversation even today.
10.5h. Conclusions regarding Otho Material
While the degree of adaptation in Suetonius is debatable, his heavy dependence on source material is not. In a work of perhaps twenty-eight paragraphs, we found nearly fifty correspondences with each of the other two works (a history and another biography) with which we compared it. Suetonius’s understanding of biography involved not free composition but dependence on prior information; where we can test him, this biographer mostly edited and adapted historical information rather than inventing new stories. Given its chronological proximity to eyewitness sources, a large amount of Suetonius’s information about events (if not always the participants’ motives) is likely correct.
These features of Suetonian biography also support our expectations based on the Gospels: Matthew and Luke plainly depend on prior information. On this or any other configuration of Synoptic sources, the Synoptics do employ prior reports. On the majority view, Matthew and Luke presumably made use of Mark for their biographic projects because they believed that Mark likewise conveyed accurate information, whether from earlier published sources (cf. possibly Luke 1:1) or oral information from eyewitnesses (as Papias suggests; cf. Luke 1:2). Fictional accounts were not typically interested in prior information, nor were they written about recent historical figures.
Because Mark wrote his biography within a generation of Jesus (closer to his time, in fact, than Suetonius is in relation to Otho), we may expect that he also depends on substantial preexisting information, whatever his (or Suetonius’s) literary adaptations for their respective sorts of audiences. If his approach is anything like that of Suetonius, he probably narrates prior information in every pericope of his work. In any case, Matthew and Luke, who probably wrote biographies within two decades of Mark, considered him a reliable source and were in a much better position to know circumstances surrounding his work than are we.
10.6. Comparing Other Greek and Roman Biographies
Although I reproduce in this chapter at length only some parallel treatments of Otho, the results would be relatively the same for biographies of Galba, another emperor from the same period.133 Comparing Suetonius’s approximately thirty-five paragraphs (about 3,000 words) with Plutarch’s approximately thirty-nine longer paragraphs (about 6,500 words), Benson Goh found variation on some details that do not significantly affect the story or suggest the biographers’ deliberate fabrication.134
At the same time, he also found “about 98 points of contact, 63 of which bear very close resemblance to each other by using nearly identical wording.”135 Likewise, he found roughly “76 points of contact between Suetonius and Tacitus, with 53 of them (approximately 70%) being very similar; and 131 between Plutarch and Tacitus, with 80 of them (approximately 61%) being significant.”136 Clearly, Suetonius reports events existing in his sources and neither fabricates them nor sees fabrication as his appropriate role as a biographer.137 Most scholars view Tacitus as a fairly reliable historian for the period; we should therefore view the biographic work of Suetonius and Plutarch similarly.138 Similarly, although their sources may differ, Suetonius and Josephus overlap in depicting some portents before Caligula’s death; the obvious and significant differences between the accounts invite investigation rather than the wholesale dismissal of either writer’s work.139
Many other potential test cases are obvious. We may learn about the acceptable range of variation in biographies also by comparing how different biographers treated the same figure, for example, how Nepos and Plutarch diverge from the earlier, eyewitness writer Xenophon in their portraits of Agesilaus.140 Although both later writers often omit what Xenophon includes,141 the people142 and places143 named overlap considerably, especially between Xenophon and Plutarch. Discrepancies appear, though most are fairly easily explained; they may stem from “different sources or minor creative variations by one of the later writers.”144
Similarly, one of Nepos’s biographies closely follows the corresponding material in Herodotus and Thucydides, omitting many details but making minimal changes to the elements that Nepos includes (I draw here from a thirty-two-page chart of comparisons).145 Apart from style and detail, he conflicts significantly with these sources just three times each, in some cases because of long-range perspective or memory,146 whereas he follows them repeatedly.147
10.7. Comparing Diaspora Jewish Works
Another case is Philo’s first-century, biographic adaptation of the OT. Although he sometimes allegorizes wildly, his Life of Moses stays closer to expectations for Greco-Roman biography. Philo conforms Moses to fit philosophical ideals for sages, at points ignoring the biblical portrait to do so.148 Nevertheless, he normally follows the biblical story closely,149 though he offers explanatory elaboration and rhetorically rearranges material.150 All his episodes depend on the Pentateuch.151 We should therefore not expect him to imaginatively invent entire events that he finds neither in Scripture nor in tradition. By contrast, he does expand and invent some speeches,152 as readers would expect in ancient historiography.
Synopses of the Synoptic Gospels suggest, at least where we can test Matthew’s and Luke’s adaptations of Mark (including occasional use of verbatim material), that they normally treat their sources more conservatively than Philo treats the biblical life of Moses (i.e., more like Suetonius than like Philo). This conservatism may reflect the less rhetorical expectations of their less elite audiences. Nevertheless, both the Evangelists and Philo reflect similar constraints and freedoms: they retain the substance of the story while flexibly reframing it in contextually relevant forms. Granted, Matthew’s and Luke’s rearrangement of sayings and shorter discourses into speeches seems modest by comparison. Philo’s occasional addition of full speeches,153 as in Josephus’s Hellenistic Jewish historiography,154 exceeds what we can clearly demonstrate in the Synoptic tradition, but some might find it comparable to Johannine discourses.155
Although 2 Maccabees is not a biography, its adaptations of earlier material reveal Diaspora Jewish use of Hellenistic historiographic conventions long before Philo’s time. This book condenses a five-volume work by Jason of Cyrene, but comparison with 1 Maccabees, from which it appears literarily independent, shows numerous correspondences where the scope of the two stories overlaps.156 Besides normal compositional devices and variation in minor details,157 some contradictions appear, for example, in troop estimates.158 Nevertheless, such variation does not undermine the key features of the events that both documents address.159
10.7a. Josephus versus the Septuagint
Sometimes we lack means to test Josephus’s sources,160 but at other points we have access to them. We can test Josephus most clearly where his Jewish Antiquities uses the Septuagint. Comparing Josephus’s Antiquities with his source in the Septuagint reveals the degree of his rhetorical adaptation. While usually maintaining the biblical story line, he occasionally augments it with subsequent traditions and often reshapes it for apologetic purposes. See also discussion in chapter 3.
Josephus’s claim not to have added anything may be simply conventional:161 he does add some features, even if he personally deems them minimal. He also interprets his sources for his Hellenistic audience in various ways.162 After promising to add nothing to Moses’s laws,163 he manages somehow to find among them a specific prohibition against theft from pagan temples, the requirement of seven judges per city, and a prohibition against receiving women’s testimony.164 Josephus seems to have viewed his “translation” task as including interpretation and adaptation for his audience; Plato, Cicero, and others understood the “translation” task similarly.165
Josephus follows but apparently modifies some literary sources;166 he is not always correct, but neither does he normally appear to deliberately misrepresent his sources.167 Like some other Jewish writers,168 Josephus dramatizes, adds speeches,169 omits what appears counterproductive, and inserts his own apologetic slant.170 Sometimes Josephus apparently “corrects” or adjusts biblical accounts based on other biblical passages.171 The pictures of Moses in Josephus and Artapanus also include imaginative features to conform to Hellenistic conventions.172
This practice may not represent his method everywhere; he may strive for greater rhetorical sophistication in his magnum opus, the Jewish Antiquities (where he overlaps most with Scripture), than in his earlier, more historiographically sophisticated Jewish War.173 Even in the Antiquities, Josephus may exercise more freedom and stylize more in his first five books than afterward (in bks. 6–20).174 More relevant for the present discussion, even in the Antiquities, Josephus tends to adapt events in his sources, rather than to create them.175 While adding details and perspectives, he retains even the stories of David’s sin with Bathsheba176 and Uriah’s murder,177 although—perhaps with an eye toward anti-Judaic polemic such as Apion’s sources—he omits the episode of Moses and the golden calf.178
Even when Josephus adds extrabiblical events to biblical accounts (such as Moses’s exploits as an Egyptian prince),179 our sources sometimes confirm that he is following earlier extrabiblical traditions, rather than composing from his imagination.180 Thus, for example, Josephus’s Moses wins Ethiopia (Nubia) peacefully as in Artapanus,181 although Josephus may well adjust his material for apologetic purposes.182 Josephus calls Pharaoh’s daughter Thermuthis, which differs from Artapanus’s name for her.183 It corresponds, however, to a second-century-BCE Judean source that calls her Tharmuth.184
Josephus also clearly depends on sources for postbiblical as well as biblical events,185 such as the work of Nicolaus of Damascus,186 although he critiques what he sees as Nicolaus’s bias.187 Josephus may have used Roman military commentaries for some of his accurate information about the Judean-Roman War.188
Numerous studies have traced Josephus’s adaptation of biblical accounts, but whereas the degree of adaptation varies from one narrative to another, it remains balanced by his general fidelity to the basic biblical account.189 As a rule, except for speeches, Josephus “does not create events or incidents, either out of his head or by midrashic exposition,”190 with little if any room for free invention of incidents.191 He freely chooses which material to include, rearranges it, and adapts the wording, but he does not invent material.192 As others have noted, Matthew and Luke paraphrase Jesus’s sacred words in their sources more conservatively than Josephus paraphrases Scripture.193
10.7b. Josephus versus Josephus
Comparing Josephus with the Septuagint is fruitful in exploring the range of liberties that Josephus felt free to take with his sources, even those he considered sacred. In Josephus’s case, however, we may also compare Josephus with himself—comparing his autobiographic Life with parallel events in the War and part of the Antiquities. Josephus seems to have followed his own War at points in his later magnum opus, the Antiquities.194 Yet, whether because of conflicting sources,195 careless composition, or neglecting to explain information that would resolve some of the tensions, Josephus sometimes contradicts himself, even in some of his most rhetorically refined material and closest to his own lifetime.196 Josephus sometimes forgets to include promised information.197
Given how often Josephus contradicts himself on various points concerning events of his own time, one suspects that Josephus and some of his audience are more familiar with, or more concerned with the fixity of, the regularly retold biblical story than with his own. That Josephus did not expect his audence to mind such variation suggests a considerable degree of potential literary flexibility in at least some (and perhaps more) first-century autobiographic or historical writing. As Henderson notes, Josephus’s discrepancies offer a “possible outer range of variation that might have been acceptable” in his milieu.198
Information in Josephus’s autobiography differs from that in his history of his people regarding chronology, Josephus’s mission to Galilee, and his relation to John of Gischala.199 New circumstances dictate Josephus’s most striking difference: whereas he omitted mention of Justus before, he now adds him as a rival, harmful to his people.200 After Josephus had written about the war, Justus published his own account, which apparently depicted Josephus in an unflattering manner,201 inviting Josephus’s apologetic response. Josephus had greater personal apologetic incentive than the average biographer would have. Even so, his different accounts of the same events suggests, not that the events never happened, but that he presents them from different perspectives.202
I have focused on biographers’ treatment of Otho and secondarily on their treatment of Galba and on Josephus’s adaptation of his sources. Other comparisons could also be marshaled to support those noted here. Comparisons of some ancient biographies with more contemporary accounts of figures (e.g., their letters) further suggest a general range of variation on details.203 Such examples establish an approximate range for what first-century hearers might expect in the Gospels, probably with Matthew or Luke, for example, on the more conservative side of the genre (at least in how they handle Mark) and John on the more flexible side.
The evidence examined above suggests that biographers in the early empire built on information for their events and often for details. While Suetonius or even Tacitus might gladly report any widely known, hostile rumor that had circulated about Caligula, Nero, or Domitian, they did not likely invent these rumors. If their events are fictitious, therefore, it is likely because of fabricated material in their sources.
In the case of the Gospels, I believe that the authoritative status of the witnesses in the Jesus movement’s formative period and the distance of the Diaspora movement from early Galilean populist rumors would probably suggest fewer, rather than more, errors in transmission. Transmission through disciples was one of ancient memory’s most careful forms of transmission, especially regarding a teacher’s message. I must, however, reserve further questions regarding pre-Gospel transmission for the closing chapters of the book, which address memories before memoirs. The point to note here is that, to the extent that they resembled normal biographies of their time, the Gospels would employ literary flexibility in shaping the stories they inherited, yet would not invent new stories, that is, incidents not in their sources.
1. E.g., Humble and Sidwell, “Dreams,” 222; König, “Lives,” 248.
2. Since quite a range exists between “certain” and “possible,” in a court of law minimalists and maximalists could debate what we should mean by “beyond reasonable doubt” in a criminal case. Civil cases require only a preponderance of evidence, closer to probable reconstructions.
3. Keener and Keener, Impossible Love.
4. I use this analogy as a sort of reductio ad absurdum to illustrate the vulnerability of extreme minimalism, not to suggest a direct analogy with the Gospels per se; no one claims that the Gospels rest on anyone’s daily journal accounts.
5. Except where we can identify overlap with other early tradition, using the criterion of coherence (e.g., showing that Jesus preached about God’s kingdom or told parables).
6. Surveying, accepting, and challenging aspects of redaction criticism, see, e.g., Perrin, Redaction Criticism; Duling and Perrin, New Testament, 20–23; Spivey, Smith, and Black, Anatomy, 57–58; Güttgemanns, Questions, 399–400; Carson, Moo, and Morris, Introduction, 38–45; Osborne, “Redaction Criticism”; Goodacre, “Redaction Criticism.” Ancient historians did not believe that editing for style or ideological emphasis ipso facto undermined the accuracy of their information (Dio Cassius, Roman History 1.1.1–2).
7. For comparing multiple ancient historians, see, e.g., Laistner, Historians, 131.
8. Beck, “Demonax,” 82, although Beck is seeking simply to establish the historical existence of the sage Demonax.
9. Pelling, Texts, 21.
10. Pelling, Texts, 62–67.
11. Ytterbrink, Gospel, 93, noting Xenophon, Agesilaus 1.5; Plutarch, Agesilaus 3.3–4.1 and 30.1.
12. Ytterbrink, Gospel, 93, also contrasting Xenophon, Agesilaus 1.4, 17, and Plutarch, Agesilaus 9.2, with Nepos, On Great Generals 17 (Agesilaus), 3.1, 5.
13. Wright, “Reliability,” ch. 2, on Xenophon’s Agesilaus.
14. Develin, “Introduction,” 6, noting esp. Steele, “Trogus,” 27.
15. Derrenbacker, Practices, 78–89.
16. Derrenbacker, Practices, 90–92.
17. Derrenbacker, Practices, 92.
18. Knoppers, “Problem,” 12, notes, e.g., Samuel-Kings and Chronicles; 2Kgs 18–20//Isa 37–38; 2 Kgs 25//Jer 51–52; Ps 18:1–51//2 Sam 22:1–51; Ezra 1:1–4//5:13–15//6:3–5//2 Chr 36:22–23; and 1 Chr 16:8–36 with Ps 105:1–15; 96:1b–13; 106:1, 47–48.
19. See Knoppers, “Problem,” helpfully drawing on Greek and Roman discussions of mimēsis, or imitatio.
20. See, e.g., Thucydides, History 1.21.1; Livy, History 6.1.2–3; 7.6.6; 25.11.20; Diodorus Siculus, Library of History 1.6.2; 1.9.2; 4.1.1; 4.8.3–5; Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities 1.12.3; Thucydides 5; Pausanias, Description of Greece 9.31.7; Josephus, Against Apion 1.15, 24–25, 58; further Kennedy, “Source Criticism,” 139.
21. Of course even these works differ among themselves. The Gospels (esp. Mark) address more popular audiences (where popular storytelling techniques may matter more than elite rhetoric) and a more distinctively Jewish subculture. The lack of extant “popular” biographies for recent characters, however, leaves these biographies of recent public figures as particularly close analogies.
22. Votaw, “Biographies,” 246, compares Plato’s and Xenophon’s accounts of Socrates after a comparable span of time. As noted, however, biography had not yet achieved the form identifiable during the empire.
23. I adapt my discussion of Otho from Keener, “Otho 1” and “Otho 2”; with permission from BBR.
24. Drawing on the work of Goh, “Galba.”
25. Drawing esp. on Henderson, “Life and War”; Henderson, “Comparison.”
26. For my own argument concerning the Gospels’ relation to their sources, see Historical Jesus, 126–61.
27. Kennedy, “Source Criticism,” 139. Others also offer comparisons with them, e.g., Theissen and Merz, Historical Jesus, 114.
28. Kennedy, “Source Criticism,” 136; Aune, “Biography,” 125; Burridge, Comparison, 63–67; Stadter, “Biography,” 528; Hose, “Historiography: Rome,” 6:422–26; Bravo, “Antiquarianism,” 516; Pitts, “Citation,” 377–78.
29. As Pliny, a contemporary of Suetonius and Tacitus, wrote, the days of Nero seemed near history, even though none of the consuls from that period, normally older men, remained alive (Letters 3.7.11). Some younger people from that period probably did remain alive.
30. Bradley, “Suetonius,” 1451; Martin, “Tacitus,” 1469.
31. Russell, “Plutarch,” 1200; for Plutarch’s firsthand knowledge about Galba and Otho, see Alfred, “Valuation,” 92–93. Chronologically, it is possible that Plutarch could have written before Tacitus and Suetonius, but he is not likely their (esp. Tacitus’s) direct source; many other writers no longer extant flourished in antiquity (as noted further in the book introduction).
32. Cf. Brown, Death, 7–8: “The evangelists certainly knew more of the Christian tradition about Jesus than they chose to convey in their Gospels; John 21:25 affirms that. Therefore we should maintain a certain distrust of negative arguments from silence, as if the failure to write meant the failure to know.” Also McGrew, “Argument,” 598: assumptions that a writer’s failure to mention something means that he was ignorant of it or rejected it, frequent as they are in NT scholarship, cannot stand up in proper historiography.
33. Vansina, Oral Tradition, 172; cf. 188.
34. McIver, Memory, 48.
35. Ytterbrink, Gospel, 94; McGing, “Adaptation,” 120, 131–33; Licona, Differences, 2, 20, 51, 56, 72, 75, 77, 95, 109; see further chs. 5, 11.
36. See Polybius, Histories 6.11.7–8; Bosworth, Arrian, 91, 211; Derrenbacker, Practices, 91, 93; Pelling, Texts, 100–101, 119; Keener, Acts, 194–96 (including Josephus, Life 339; Against Apion 1.60–66; Dio Cassius, Roman History 1.1.1–2); cf. Stanley, Language, 323.
37. See, e.g., Polybius, Histories 15.36.10; Tacitus, Annals 3.65; Plutarch, Aemilius Paulus 1.2; Alexander 1.2; Justin, Epitome pref.4; cf. Votaw, “Biographies,” 231; De Pourcq and Roskam, “Virtues,” 166–67, 176.
38. Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities 5.56.1.
39. I owe this illustration to Terence Paige, November 9, 2017.
40. Laistner, Historians, 131.
41. Despite their distinctive Lukan forms and emphases; cf., more skeptically on this point, Meier, Marginal Jew, 5:210.
42. For this logic, see Allison, Constructing Jesus, 454: a writer may add information to one of his major sources if he has other sources available.
43. See Aune, Environment, 125; Downing, “Redaction Criticism 2,” 33. Deliberately rewording an account does, however, increase the danger of inadvertently changing its meaning (see observations on differences in our sources below).
44. Illustrating the range in ancient biography, Plutarch is far more moralistic than Suetonius in these accounts yet, like Suetonius, preserves substantial information. For Plutarch’s emphasis on ethics in his parallel lives, see, e.g., Hägg, Biography, 239–81.
45. Suetonius, Otho 3.1, initially presents the marriage as a sham, but this reflects Suetonius’s moral perspective rather than a legal one, as becomes clear in 3.2 (as well as in Tacitus, Annals 13.45).
46. Given Tacitus’s cynical style, the instance in Histories 1.13 might imply only that she was going to be Nero’s mistress and that his power aided Otho’s objective of securing her; or the perspective may simply differ from that of the source followed in Histories, Suetonius, and Plutarch.
47. Naturally, there certainly was a speech on this occasion, whether or not Tacitus composed his version from scratch.
48. Suetonius (Galba 19.1) has already indicated that a diviner’s predictions involved assassins seeking Galba’s life.
49. Even before this scene, Plutarch (Galba 24.1) agrees that Otho’s freedman was named Onomastus and that he was involved in Otho’s conspiracy.
50. If they were at the Temple of Apollo rather than in the palace for a sacrifice (Tacitus, Histories 1.27), Suetonius has condensed something or depends on a source that has done so.
51. Martialis was later wounded in Otho’s service (Tacitus, Histories 1.82).
52. Tacitus, Histories 1.41, offers varying versions of Galba’s last words (Plutarch, Galba 27.1, choosing only the most positive of these), but Tacitus rightly observes that the assassins, who alone could have lived to report his words, would not have cared to report them.
53. Here Plutarch clearly diverges from Tacitus. If Plutarch is working from memory, the confusion is understandable, though one might have hoped that Plutarch would have been more careful about one he so valorizes.
54. Apparently quickly, but Plutarch is summarizing (Galba 27.5).
55. According to Plutarch, Galba 17.4–5, Vinius had previously prevented this popular decision.
56. Details among the accounts vary, as noted in Rolfe’s LCL note in Suetonius (LCL 2:238–39 n.d.): “The same story is told by Tacitus (Hist. 1.80) and Plutarch (Otho, 3), but the three accounts seem to vary. According to Suetonius the arms were sent from the praetorian camp to Ostia, to fit out the (seventeenth) cohort, and the riot started in the praetorian camp; the account of Tacitus seems to imply that it was the soldiers from Ostia (joined by the praetorians) that burst into Otho’s dining room. . . . The arms in question would seem to be a part of those belonging to the cohort.” Suetonius might suppose that the arms were being sent to the cohort in Ostia before bringing them to Rome. Laistner, Historians, 129, notes that Suetonius’s information makes Tacitus’s account intelligible. (Earlier Gospels studies emphasized such interlocking, “undesigned coincidences” in the Gospels, an approach recently revived esp. in McGrew, Hidden.)
57. Some think that Suetonius’s brevity here is because something is missing in the text.
58. Titianus had earlier been consul (Annals 12.52) but was now connected to Otho’s reign (Histories 1.75) and was consul with Otho (1.77). Like Proculus, Titianus was less than competent (2.39–40).
59. Flavius Sabinus appears also in this prominent role in Tacitus, Histories 2.99; 3.59, 65, 69–70, 73–75. He should not be confused with T. Flavius Sabinus, consul suffect for two months in 69 CE (1.77; 2.36, 51).
60. Otho’s dependence on the advice of his praetorian prefect Proculus spells his doom according to Tacitus, Histories 2.33.
61. Proculus appears as a general also in Plutarch, Otho 13.1.
62. Unlike the biographers, Tacitus provides Paulinus with a full speech (Histories 2.32).
63. Both spellings (Bedriacum and Betriacum) appear in Salmon and Potter, “Bedriacum.”
64. Differences between Suetonius and the others here could reflect differences between inclusive and exclusive means of reckoning years. On inclusive reckoning, see Koester, Introduction, 2:102.
65. Differences in ancient historical reports are not uncommon; see, e.g., divergent approaches to crossing the Rubicon in sources in Beneker, “Crossing”; cf. Rondholz, “Rubicon.” Still, even in recounting Nero’s death, where Suetonius may take a particularly free hand, the parallels in Dio Cassius, Roman History 63.27.3–63.29.2, might suggest a common source, perhaps even Nero’s secretary (Hägg, Biography, 226–27).
66. Suetonius, Otho 9.1–2.
67. Tacitus, Histories 2.11–33.
68. Cf. Suetonius, Otho 8.3–9.1.
69. As noted in ch. 5, biography was typically less concerned with chronology than history was (e.g., Görgemanns, “Biography: Greek”; Stanton, Preaching, 119–21); for history as sequential, see, e.g., Pliny, Letters 1.1.1.
70. For chronological displacement, see chs. 6, 11.
71. Plutarch, Otho 5.3.
72. Plutarch, Otho 10.1.
73. Plutarch, Otho 8.1.
74. Suetonius, Otho 6.2; 8.2–3.
75. Cf., e.g., Tacitus, Annals 15.63.
76. Suetonius, Otho 4.1.
77. Tacitus, Histories 1.22; Plutarch, Galba 23.4.
78. Tacitus, Histories 2.78.
79. Plutarch, Galba 26.5.
80. Tacitus, Histories 1.43.
81. Feedback did occur in various genres during oral recitation; see, e.g., Suetonius, Vergil 33; see also Winterbottom, “Recitatio,” 1296 (citing Pliny, Letters 5.12.1–2).
82. Tacitus, Histories 1.90.
83. Tacitus, Histories 2.33.
84. Suetonius, Vitellius 15.2–3; Vespasian 1.3; Domitian 1.2. Among the Gospels, cf. Matthew’s special interest in dreams (1:20; 2:12–13, 19, 22; 27:19).
85. Plutarch, Otho 5.2.
86. Tacitus, Histories 1.46.
87. Suetonius, Galba 18.2. Elsewhere in Suetonius, Augustus took dreams seriously (Augustus 91), and Vespasian dreamed positively before becoming emperor (Vespasian 5.5).
88. Note the favorable one in Tacitus, Annals 2.14.
89. Tacitus, Histories 4.83.
90. See, e.g., Meister, “Herodotus,” 269.
91. Josephus adds a false dream claim to the biblical narrative in Jewish Antiquities 5.193. Imperial historians regularly included portents presaging an emperor’s death; see the massive work of Vigourt, Présages.
92. E.g., Alexander (Quintus Curtius, History 4.2.17; Plutarch, Alexander 24.3; 41.3–4; 49.3; Arrian, Alexander 2.18.1; Ps.-Callisthenes, Alexander Romance 1.35; cf. Hermogenes, Issues 33), P. Scipio (Polybius, Histories 10.4.5–10.5.5), Hannibal (Valerius Maximus, Memorable Doings and Sayings 1.7.ext.1; Silius Italicus, Punica 3.168–71), Sulla (Plutarch, Sulla 9.4; 28.6), Pompey (Plutarch, Caesar 42.1), Caesar (Valerius Maximus, Memorable Doings and Sayings 1.7.1), and others (Valerius Maximus, Memorable Doings and Sayings 1.7.3).
93. E.g., Valerius Maximus, Memorable Doings and Sayings 1.7.1–8; 1.7.ext.1–10; Velleius Paterculus, History 2.70.1; Plutarch, Caesar 42.1; 69.5; Cicero 44.2; Sulla 37.2. Note, e.g., Calpurnia’s dream for her husband, Julius Caesar (Valerius Maximus, Memorable Doings and Sayings 1.7.2; Velleius Paterculus, History 2.57.2; Suetonius, Julius 81; Plutarch, Caesar 63.5; 64.3; cf. 68.2). Cf. brief discussion in Keener, Miracles, 2:870–84; Keener, Acts, 1:911–16; 3:2347–49.
94. See Hadas, “Introduction,” xx–xxi.
95. E.g., Tacitus, Annals 3.1; 4.62–63; 5.9; 16.30–32.
96. Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 19.78–83; cf. Acts 25:14–22; Tacitus, Annals 12.65. For scenes behind closed doors: De Temmerman, “Formalities,” 16, thinks that even Suetonius in his Caesars sometimes makes claims of sources to compensate for actual lack of sources. Such an approach renders verification or falsification difficult; given Suetonius’s sometimes cited weakness in critical acumen, how do we know that the inaccessible details were not simply in his source?
97. See also, e.g., Eddy and Boyd, Legend, 424. My journal for events of April 23, 2001, seemed to contradict my wife’s journal for the same time; information in her journal of April 19, 2001, however, reconciled the contradiction. We discovered that a French translation variant explained the differences between my wife’s journal and (three years later) her oral account regarding a detail of June 14, 1997. Different accounts also included additional details that others omitted without expressly contradicting each other (e.g., phone interview with Emmanuel Moussounga, February 20, 2010; my wife’s journal from March 13, 1999; note Keener and Keener, Impossible Love, 236). Only a minority of the divergences remained after careful examination.
98. Fornara, Nature, 34–36, 116.
99. See Fornara, Nature, 185. Still, fleshing out character traits appears widely, e.g., in drama (e.g., tragedians expanding on Homeric characters), practice orations (e.g., Dio Chrysostom, Orations 61, on Chryseïs), and histories (Pitcher, “Characterization”; Ash, Mossman, and Titchener, Fame).
100. See, e.g., Tacitus, Histories 1.15–16, 29–30. Still, Plutarch (Galba 22.4–5; Otho 15.3–6) also provides a few speeches here.
101. Cf., respectively, Suetonius, Otho 6.3 and 10.2, vs. Tacitus, Histories 1.37–38 and 2.47–48.
102. Talbert, Mediterranean Milieu, 211, cites Plutarch, Otho 15, and Tacitus, Histories 2.47.
103. See Tacitus, Histories 1.83–84. Still, biographers could create conversations; see Hägg, Biography, 3.
104. Tacitus elaborates speeches where Suetonius and Plutarch omit them (Histories 1.29–30) or merely mention them (1.15–16 with Suetonius, Galba 18.3; Plutarch, Galba 23.2), but sometimes he includes material that also appears in their summary (Histories 1.83–84 with Plutarch, Otho 3.8; Tacitus, Histories 2.47–48, with Suetonius, Otho 10.2; Plutarch, Otho 15.3–17.2; cf. Tacitus, Histories 1.37–38, with Suetonius, Otho 6.3).
105. E.g., Tacitus, Annals 2.71–72, 76–77; 6.48; 11.7; 12.48; 13.21; 16.22.
106. Tacitus, Annals 4.7, 52, 54, 68–69; 12.65.
107. E.g., Tacitus, Annals 12.2; 14.53–56; 15.51.
108. Tacitus, Histories 1.24–25.
109. E.g., those advising Otho, Suetonius, Otho 9.1.
110. E.g., Plutarch, Galba 27.4; Tacitus, Histories 1.43.
111. E.g., Tacitus, Histories 1.24–26.
112. Tacitus, Histories 2.11–45.
113. Thus Tacitus elaborates Galba’s demise in far more detail than Suetonius does in his Otho, but Suetonius had a separate biography for Galba (though he treats the matter briefly there as well; Galba 19–20). Tacitus elaborates Vitellius’s revolt, which Suetonius treats in Vitellius, and Vespasian (Histories 2.1–7), which Suetonius reserves for that biography. Because Plutarch wished to avoid duplication, much of his information about Otho appears only in his Galba.
114. For historians: e.g., Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities 1.1.1; 1.6.1; Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 1.94, 159; 1 Kgs 14:19, 29; 15:7, 23, 31; for biographers: Arrian, Alexander 6.2.4; Plutarch, Alexander 30.7; 31.2–3; 38.4.
115. For historians: Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Roman Antiquities 1.87.4; 3.35.1–4; 8.79.1; Livy, History 9.44.6; 23.19.17; 25.17.1–6; Valerius Maximus, Memorable Doings and Sayings 5.7.ext.1; 6.8.3; Herodian, History 7.9.4, 9; Appian, Roman History 11.9.56; 12.1.1; for biographers: Cornelius Nepos, On Great Generals 7 (Alcibiades), 11.1; 9 (Conon), 5.4; Arrian, Alexander 1.pref.1–2; 4.9.2–3; 4.14.1–4; 5.3.1; 5.14.4; 7.14.2; 7.27.1–3; Plutarch, Alexander 31.3; 38.4; 46.1–2; Demosthenes 5.5; 29.4–30.4; Themistocles 25.1–2; 27.1; 32.3–4; Philostratus, Lives of the Sophists 2.4.570; 2.5.576.
116. Plausible (cf. Wallace-Hadrill, Suetonius, 2, 9), but they may have simply drawn on common sources (Power, “Suetonius’ Tacitus,” 205). Dependence is more easily demonstrated in some cases than in others. Some argue, for example, that Arrian drew on Plutarch (Buszard, “Parallel”); others demur. Hägg, Biography, 240–41, suggests (I believe implausibly, given biographies of leaders in Nepos) that Suetonius and Plutarch, who organize their works quite differently, may have even invented imperial biographies independently.
117. Because Tacitus would have known contemporary expectations for ancient biographies far better than we could, his verdict would likewise reinforce our point about the historical texture of ancient biography (cf. Keener, Historical Jesus, 96–105). Similarly, Matthew and Luke, who knew much more about Mark than we do, regarded Mark as a reliable source for their biographies.
118. In his recent dissertation, Youngju Kwon cites in support of a common source Syme, Tacitus, 674–76; Fuhrmann, “Vierkaiserjahr,” 264–69; Sage, “Works,” 893–94; Damon, Tacitus: Histories, 291–302; Williams, “Embassies,” 213. Many Gospels scholars analogously infer the existence of Q based on differences between Matthew and Luke that suggest neither’s knowledge of the other’s full work (esp. the infancy narratives and Judas’s death).
119. Cf. Tacitus, Annals 13.20.2; 14.2; 15.61; cf. Martin, “Tacitus,” 1470.
120. Kwon cites Georgiadou, “Lives,” 254–55.
121. Observe, e.g., the many contemporary histories of Nero noted already in Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 20.154, though Josephus did not like the ones with whose perspectives he disagreed. Josephus published the Antiquities perhaps twenty-seven years after Nero’s death.
122. Tacitus, Annals 5.9.
123. Historians could also refer readers more generally to “other historians” (Velleius Paterculus, History 2.48.5); cf. Luke 1:1. Earlier, Polybius readily critiqued historians who failed to consult earlier historians (Histories 12.25d.1); later, Dio Cassius had to defend his omission of some material by explaining that he had in fact read almost everything but did not judge it all suitable for inclusion (Roman History 1.1.1–2).
124. E.g., Tacitus, Annals 4.34; his books survived, 4.35.
125. E.g., Tacitus, Annals 4.57. Tacitus recounts the views of the majority and most reliable historians, but then he mentions another view (4.10), which he goes on to refute logically (4.11) despite its utility for his perspective.
126. Tacitus, Annals 4.53.
127. Plutarch, Otho 14.1–2. Plutarch (Otho 18.1) also visited Otho’s tomb at Brixillum.
128. Suetonius, Vespasian 1.4.
129. Suetonius, Julius 9.3.
130. Suetonius, Otho 10.1. Not to be confused with Suetonius Paulinus, a prominent general of the time.
131. Ancients themselves noted the speed and effectiveness of rumor (e.g., Nicolaus, Augustus 16, 20, 30, FGrH 130), e.g., rumors of conspiracy (Tacitus, Annals 14.58); of catastrophic losses in Germany (Tacitus, Histories 4.12); of mass exile (Tacitus, Annals 4.46); rumors exaggerating enemy numbers (4.23); a false rumor of a leader’s death (4.34) or survival (Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 19.134; Tacitus, Annals 2.82–83) or that the enemy had fled (Histories 2.42); or even deliberately false rumors (disinformation; Histories 4.38, 54; Annals 4.24). Conflicting reports also emerged this way (e.g., Histories 1.51). Of course, even rumor was not always wrong (Tacitus, Agricola 9).
132. Ehrman, Before Gospels, 212–13; Ehrman, Interrupted, 39–40.
133. Goh, “Galba,” esp. the chart in 175–89.
134. Goh, “Galba,” 197–99. Nathan Brasfield found only slightly fewer in a study with me in 2011.
135. Goh, “Galba,” 190, estimating two and a half to three points of contact per Suetonian paragraph.
136. Goh, “Galba,” 190.
137. Goh, “Galba,” 190–92.
138. Goh, “Galba,” 190.
139. Cf. Woods, “Robe,” brought to my attention by my doctoral student Kevin Burr.
140. See Woldemariam, “Comparison”; cf. also Ytterbrink, Gospel, 93.
141. Woldemariam, “Comparison,” 224. Plutarch also includes additional information, but his named sources include also some other contemporary (as well as somewhat later) sources; see 219.
142. See the chart in Woldemariam, “Comparison,” 222–23.
143. See the chart in Woldemariam, “Comparison,” 225–26.
144. Woldemariam, “Comparison,” 227–29 (quotation from 229); cf. 224.
145. Christian, “Themistocles,” esp. 139, and the chart on 106–38.
146. Christian, “Themistocles,” 139–40, on Nepos, On Great Generals 2 (Themistocles), 2.5; 3.2; 5.2; 7.2; 8.3, 4.
147. Again, note Christian’s chart (“Themistocles,” 106–38).
148. Petit, “Traversée exemplaire” (on Philo’s Hypothetica, and comparing similar practices in Artapanus, Josephus, and Ezekiel the Tragedian); Van Veldhuizen, “Moses” (emphasizing Stoic apatheia). Cf. also Philo’s portrait of Moses as commander-in-chief (Canevet, “Remarques”).
149. McGing, “Adaptation,” 121–23, 128; Hidalgo, “Study,” esp. 278–86, following esp. Feldman, Portrayal. Although Hidalgo acknowledges his use of Feldman’s detailed work, their agreement is significant, since Hidalgo first charted the material in Life of Moses 1 inductively.
150. McGing, “Adaptation,” 128.
151. Hidalgo, “Study,” 300.
152. Hidalgo, “Study,” 294–300.
153. Hidalgo, “Study,” 291–300, esp. the four added discourses on 297–300.
154. On Josephus and speeches, see sources in Keener, Acts, 1:301–4. Some Judean haggadic works also supplied interpretive speeches (cf. Endres, Interpretation, 198–99).
155. Cf. Bauckham, “Historiographical Characteristics.” For Johannine discourse, cf. also helpfully Parsenios, “Rhetoric.”
156. Reynolds, “Difference,” 304–8.
157. See Reynolds, “Difference,” 309–13.
158. Reynolds, “Difference,” 315, noting that 2 Maccabees has the lower and likelier figure here.
159. Reynolds, “Difference,” 315.
160. E.g., his account of Caligula’s killing apparently lacks a common source with Suetonius’s very different account (Scherberich, “Sueton und Josephus”). Note similarities and differences in the portents preceding that assassination in Woods, “Robe.”
161. Feldman, “Abraham,” 133, citing Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Thucydides 5, 8; Lucian, How to Write History 47.
162. Clearly not all changes stem from a desire to please Rome: it is unlikely that Josephus avoids Nineveh’s repentance because of Roman antiproselytism views (Feldman, “Jonah”), given his reports of many conversions elsewhere, and still less likely are some parallels drawn between the Jonah story and the Argonautica (Hamel, “Argo”).
163. Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 4.196; cf. 1.17.
164. Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 4.207, 214, 219.
165. Inowlocki, “Adding.”
166. See Pucci Ben Zeev, “Reliability.”
167. Pucci Ben Zeev, “Ambiguities.”
168. Sometimes LAB dramatically rewrites an account (e.g., Begg, “Ceremonies”), but it usually depends on the biblical text for events. Feldman, “Antiquities,” 76, argues that in narrative style LAB is closer to Luke-Acts than to Josephus.
169. E.g., Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 1.46; 4.25–34, 134–38; cf. Cohen, “What Happened?”; see Josephus’s adaptation of speeches in 1 Macc (Gafni, “Josephus and Maccabees,” esp. 126–27).
170. See, e.g., Penner, Praise, 113.
171. See Höffken, “Reichsteilung.”
172. Silver, “Moses and Birds” (on Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 2.243–53; Artapanus in Eusebius’s Preparation for the Gospel 9.27).
173. Cf., e.g., Attridge, Interpretation, 44–50; followed by Newell, “Forms,” 285. Even in the Jewish War Josephus may write for Rome’s elite, who might recognize Greek tragic allusions in bk. 1 (so Forte, “Echoes Revisited”).
174. Cohen, “Josephus and Scripture.”
175. See Downing, “Redaction Criticism 2,” 33. For sample analyses of many of his accounts, often resembling gentile biographers’ adaptations, see the many works by L. Feldman and C. Begg on this subject in the bibliography.
176. Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 7.130–31.
177. Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 7.131–46.
178. Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 3.95–99.
179. E.g., Petitfils, “Tale,” 160–62 (though noting the probably earlier plotline in 161n31).
180. Note Moses’s peaceful victory in Nubia; compare Artapanus, Concerning the Jews frag. 3 (Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel 9.27.10); Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 2.238–57. For Josephus’s historiographic conventions and apologetic adaptation here, see Rajak, “Moses in Ethiopia”; Runnalls, “Ethiopian Campaign.”
181. Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 2.238–57, esp. 252–53; Artapanus, Concerning the Jews frag. 3 (Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel 9.27.10). Similar stories are told of Alexander’s diplomacy (Ps.-Callisthenes, Alexander Romance 1.23). The narrative follows conventions for Hellenistic historiography; see Rajak, “Moses in Ethiopia” (thinking Josephus’s source and Artapanus shared a common source).
182. See Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 2.238–57; Runnalls, “Ethiopian Campaign” (thinking that Josephus subtly challenged Artapanus’s account).
183. Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 2.224–36; Artapanus, Concerning the Jews frag. 3.
184. Jub. 47:5. Much later, rabbis called her Bithiah (Pesiq. Rab Kah. 7:6/9; Pesiq. Rab. 17:5; Exod. Rab. 18:3).
185. Bellemore, “Josephus, Pompey, and the Jews,” suggests that Josephus depended on more Roman sources and fewer Jewish sources in the later Jewish Antiquities than in the Jewish War. He may employ genuinely Iranian material (whether originally accurate or not) in Antiquities 18.314–70 (cf. Herman, “Motifs”).
186. E.g., Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 12.127. Probably Josephus depends on Nicolaus as his main source from Antiochus IV through Herod I (Stern, Authors, 1:229).
187. Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 14.9; 16.183–84. Josephus also writes from a Jewish perspective that differs from Nicolaus’s Greco-Syrian one (Wacholder, “Nicolaus”). Josephus sounds less favorable to Herod in Antiquities than in War.
188. Broshi, “Credibility”; see esp. Josephus, Life 348, 352; Against Apion 56, on p. 381.
189. See esp. Cohen, Josephus. For specific examples of Josephus’s adaptations, see, e.g., Begg, “Jotham”; “Fall”; “Putsch”; “Jehoahaz” (improving the character); Feldman, “Elijah”; see other articles by Feldman in the bibliography; Gafni, “Josephus and Maccabees,” 126–27.
190. Downing, “Redaction Criticism 1,” 55–56, quoted in Derrenbacker, Practices, 93.
191. Downing, “Redaction Criticism 1,” 60, contends, “probably none.”
192. Derrenbacker, Practices, 94, following Downing, “Redaction Criticism 1,” 56.
193. Evans, “Foreword,” x.
194. Krieger, “Hauptquelle.”
195. But cf. Mason, “Contradiction.”
196. See Mason, Life, 213–22; Henderson, “Life and War”; Henderson, “Comparison.” Cf. different views on who inherited the right to replace high priests (Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 20.16; cf. 20.103, 179, 196, 203). Granted, some apparent mistakes might instead betray deliberate literary connections (see the argument in Sievers, “Name”).
197. Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 20.53 (though cf. 20.101).
198. Henderson, “Comparison,” 275.
199. Rodgers, “Justice,” 170; Henderson, “Comparison,” 269–74.
200. Cf. Rodgers, “Justice,” 170, 175, 182, noting Josephus, Life 40–41, 338; cf. 336, 340, 367; Henderson, “Comparison,” 269.
201. Rodgers, “Justice,” 182, citing esp. Josephus, Life 40, 338.
202. Wright, People, 378, also comparing Luke 24:51 and Acts 1:3. Cf. also the divergent details in Josephus and Philo on the same events (Theissen, Gospels, 149).
203. See Hillard, Nobbs, and Winter, “Corpus.”