Secret Alias wrote:were both written [soon] after the death of Agrippa II.
There is no need for the 'soon' when we know that Clement possessed a second century edition of Josephus.
It's implied from the references to Domitian in
Life 76, at least.
And Domitian, who succeeded, still augmented his respects to me; for he punished those Jews that were my accusers, and gave command that a servant of mine, who was a eunuch, and my accuser, should be punished. He also made that country I had in Judea tax free, which is a mark of the greatest honor to him who hath it; nay, Domitia, the wife of Caesar, continued to do me kindnesses. And this is the account of the actions of my whole life; and let others judge of my character by them as they please. But to thee, O Epaphroditus, thou most excellent of men! do I dedicate all this treatise of our Antiquities; and so, for the present, I here conclude the whole.
It's also implied from the correction of Justin, who wrote 20 years after the fact, according to
Life 65.
But if thou art so hardy as to affirm, that thou hast written that history better than all the rest, why didst thou not publish thy history while the emperors Vespasian and Titus, the generals in that war, as well as king Agrippa and his family, who were men very well skilled in the learning of the Greeks, were all alive? for thou hast had it written these twenty years, and then mightest thou have had the testimony of thy accuracy. But now when these men are no longer with us, and thou thinkest thou canst not be contradicted, thou venturest to publish it.
It's also implied from the 20th book of the
Antiquities and its double reference to the year AD 93:
... what befell us therein to this very day, which is the thirteenth year of the reign of Caesar Domitian, and the fifty-sixth year of my own life.
The whole paragraph is interesting in that Josephus tells the reader basically why he doesn't include more of the Jewish wars in his Antiquities: he is planning to write more about the subject in other books, and to bring Jewish history down to the present day (93 AD) among other projects (some of which, including the
Life and the
Against Apion, are in our possession).
And now it will not be perhaps an invidious thing, if I treat briefly of my own family, and of the actions of my own life (28) while there are still living such as can either prove what I say to be false, or can attest that it is true; with which accounts I shall put an end to these Antiquities, which are contained in twenty books, and sixty thousand verses. And if God permit me, I will briefly run over this war, and to add what befell them further to that very day, the 13th of Domitian, [or A.D. 93,] is not, that I have observed, taken distinct notice of by any one; nor do we ever again, with what befell us therein to this very day, which is the thirteenth year of the reign of Caesar Domitian, and the fifty-sixth year of my own life. I have also an intention to write three books concerning our Jewish opinions about God and his essence, and about our laws; why, according to them, some things are permitted us to do, and others are prohibited.
The
Jewish Antiquities (Greek:
Ἰουδαϊκὴ ἀρχαιολογία, Latin:
Antiquitates Judaicae) in 20 books are an ambitious direct literary reference to the (much more famous)
Roman Antiquities, also in 20 books:
His great work, entitled Ῥωμαϊκὴ Ἀρχαιολογία (Rhōmaikē archaiologia, Roman Antiquities), embraced the history of Rome from the mythical period to the beginning of the First Punic War. It was divided into twenty books ...
Dionysius Halicarnassus also ended his history of the origin of a people with an epoch-making war, so the decision by Josephus to end his own
Antiquities with the Jewish war against the Romans is looking more and more credible, if we bother to read the text itself instead of just dreaming up ideas in the abstract.
There are some genuine puzzles created by the references from patristic writers Clement of Alexandria and Photius of Constantinople, but the existence of a puzzle is no proof of the correctness of your particular preferred solution, as it is far from being the only one and suffers from the absence of evidence and the contradiction of what evidence we do have. We should be a little more circumspect than that.
Clement has a chronicle of 'Flavius Josephus the Jew' dated to 147/48 CE.
And Photius "has" a text of Josesphus,
The Universe, in codex 48 of his
Bibliotheca, which thus came to be attributed to Josephus even though it was supposed to be attributed to Hippolytus.
The crossover of the names Hegesippus and Josephus also occurred, in the direction from Josephus to Hegesippus. Of course, Josephus didn't write Pseudo-Hegesippus either, although it's been attributed to him as early as the fifth century by a certain Eucherius.
This kind of essentialism and bluntness in your argumentation reveals fundamental weakness. Often when people can't make a good case, incorporating all the data in the best possible way, they'll settle for loudly trumpeting a particularly inept reading of a few favored factoids.