pp.4-5:
In his War, Josephus begins his history of the tragic Jewish Revolt of 66-70 C.E. with Mattathias to show that his family had created a state that had long been an ally of the Roman Republic (War 1.38). He later expands this earlier narrative of the Hasmonean family in his Antiquities to include Roman decrees that honored the Jews, doing so to show that the Roman Empire had conquered Judea in the First Jewish Revolt of 66-70 C.E. not on account of its military might, but its poor Jewish leadership. The later Hasmonean rulers and Jewish tyrants of the first century C.E., Josephus emphasizes, had severed the longstanding alliance between the Jews and the Romans. This, Josephus was convinced, provoked divine punishment that ended the Jewish state in the first century B.C.E. and again in the first century C.E. His method of recounting these two disasters can partly be traced back to the causal emphasis found in Polybius.
Josephus’s reading of Polybius led him to view individual moral virtue and vice as a driving force of history. Like Polybius and other ancient historians, including the biographer Plutarch, Josephus focuses on personalities and their impact on the historical process. Josephus’s accounts of the Hasmoneans are largely character studies that combine the Greco-Roman tradition of biography with scriptural interpretations. The Hasmoneans, particularly Mattathias, stand out in his books as an example of moral qualities worthy of emulation. Like Polybius, Josephus in his Antiquities presents past events—particularly the history of the Hasmonean state—to understand the present. Both writers believed their accounts could serve as models to guide present and future political activity.
Although Josephus is primarily influenced by Jewish writings, his unique background as a Roman citizen in the heart of the Roman Empire strongly influences both his understanding and presentation of the Hasmonean family. Greco-Roman traditions shape his narrative and his retelling of his sources. As a creative historian, he combined Jewish and Greco-Roman traditions to shape his narratives of the past. Josephus, moreover, did not follow his sources uncritically. The vocabulary in the passages that likely came from 1 Maccabees and other works he consulted, including Scripture, display Josephus’s distinctive vocabulary, showing how he reshaped his materials, by his own interpretive lights, to produce a seamless narrative. His uniqueness as a writer lies in his dual grounding in his Jewish faith as well as in the world of the Greco-Roman culture. This perspective strongly influences his recounting of the lives and history of Mattathias and his sons.