Blood wrote: ↑Fri Mar 02, 2018 4:53 amThere is a lot of disingenuousness about Josephus, like how he pretends to have just learned how to write Greek, but in
Contra Apion is thoroughly familiar with a broad range of Greek-language texts which betrays decades of immersion in Greek. Either the author is lying, or somebody else wrote the book, and I don't know the motivation in either case.
Perhaps he was an L. Ron Hubbard type: always grossly exaggerating or inventing details about his life in a self-aggrandizing manner.
As is generally known here, in
War Josephus apologizes for having to make use of professional scribes trained in Attic Greek, by way of saying that he was not used to the Greek language. War is actually written in good classical style Greek, I think I have read somewhere.
I think that the professional scribes that were made available to Josephus by Vespasian were there to spin things to conform to Roman propaganda goals. Josephus was told to sign off on the finished product, maybe allowing him to make corrections of fact (but not in matters of propaganda), but he dared not say "no" to the emperor who saved his life.
I've recently begun to wonder whether part of the agenda of the professional Greek scribes who did the final editing of War was to make special effort to emphasize that Judeans of that region, including an aristocrat like Josephus, were unsophisticated barbarians (which they were, from a Roman perspective). J's
Antiquities and
Life and
Against Apion were his writings alone, which are not close to the quality of the War but not too bad Koine Greek (so I understand).
That may suggest a working familiarity with Koine Greek, but we also have to acknowledge that (as Stephen Goranson has already noted) they were written at least 20 years after the end of the Judean rebellion. Most all of that time would have been spent in Rome. As for what he may have read in Koine Greek while resident at Jerusalem, there were several Greek works written by Judeans of the diaspora available, even the Lxx translation of the Law and various Greek translations of the Prophets and Writings like Daniel. Then there was the matter of communicating with the Roman Prefect and his staff, with the common language being Greek.
That being said, I don't recall having read about Josephus making many, if any, quotations or clear allusions to classical Greek literature. He might have read the city newsletter with its gossip about things going on (Mundus & Paulina, forced group expulsions, etc.) but I can't imagine he was reading Aristophanes'
Clouds.
DCH