This anthology of Steve Mason’s essays ranges over twenty papers published between 2011 and 2024, with a concentration from the years 2019–2021. The five essays of part 1: Jewish Perspectives on the Roman World, consider such themes as the definition of “diaspora” vis-à-vis the land of Israel (ch. 1), accusations and affirmations of Jewish amixia (ch. 2), and aspects of Josephus’s presentation in Bellum Judaicum (ch. 3–5). Part 2: Judaean Historiography and Josephus, asks questions of Josephus’s Antiquitates as well as of the Bellum (ch. 6), of the relative weight of religious vs. political/ethnic incentives in the run-up to the first revolt (ch. 7), and of the implications of Josephus’s word choices (ch. 8), speech compositions (ch. 9) and biblical knowledge as displayed in the Bellum (ch. 10). In part 3: Judaean Realia, Mason considers the place of Herod the Great in events that led up to the war (ch. 11), the makeup of the Essenes (ch. 12) and of the Pharisees (ch. 13), and the motivations behind the actions of two foreground figures of the revolt, John of Gischala and Simon ben Giora (ch. 14). Part 4: Beyond ‘Judaism,’ ventures into New Testament texts, with considerations of John the Baptist (ch. 15, published here for the first time), Paul (ch. 16), and Luke-Acts (ch. 17). Part 5, Interactions, conveys the scholarly conversations that Mason has conducted between himself and Tessa Rajak (ch. 18), Per Bilde (ch. 19), Daniel Schwartz (ch. 20, published here for the first time), Peter Wiseman (ch. 21) and N. T. Wright (ch. 20). A generous bibliography of secondary sources (625–661), and two indices, one of ancient texts (662–684) and the last of modern authors (685–691) rounds out the whole.
“This is not a dump of stray essays,” Mason tells his reader in the introduction (1). It is, rather, a gathering of articles published in hard-to-access places—conference volumes, Festschriften, and various volumes of collected essays—that cohere around certain themes central to Mason’s work. A premier theme is historiography, modern no less than ancient. “What is historical method?” (1). On this question, Mason invokes the greats: Collingwood, Bloch, Momigliano. He constantly admonishes the reader not to confuse a narrative of past events (whether Josephus’s or our own) with the past events themselves: no narrative, as Frank Kermode once pointed out, can be transparent upon historical fact. “Real life and narrative are different things” (162).
How then can we know the past? How do we know what we (think we) know? How do we conduct historical investigation? What questions shape our inquiry? “The past is a foreign country,” Mason cautions at several points throughout the book. To sojourn there requires both understanding and imagination (5), a transition from surveying the evidence to reconstructing the past, hypothesizing why things happened the way that they did, adjudicating between hypotheses on the basis of their explanatory power. Mason champions skepticism (8). The past is elusive, in many ways unknowable. “The past owes us nothing” (8). It needs to be investigated both with open-mindedness and with the realistic acknowledgement that we can never know everything we would wish to know. (See his meditations on “nescience,” knowing and acknowledging when one does not know, 165.)
Our word choices matter. Mason insists on parsimonious clarity. Impatient with imprecision, he explicates “the land of Israel” and “diaspora,” questioning “diaspora” as a category as he analyzes the Roman province of Judaea in terms of poleis cultures. The immediate landscape of what we now think of as “Israel” was a patchwork of different ethnicities and cultures, of different chorae gathered around ethnically variegated poleis, their uneasy relations with each other going far toward explaining why the revolt of 66–74 CE broke out the way it did.
How do we translate Ioudaios? In a now-classic article from 2007,[1] Mason argued passionately for retiring the translation “Jew” because of the way it disguised the locatedness of the term. People who hailed from Judaea were Judaeans. “Jew” as a modern term measures religious orientation; “Judaean” foregrounds the connection of all ancient ethnē to ancestral homeland (and to the ethnos-polis-nomos cluster defining identity, 444). It thus better suits. Mason is not doctrinaire about this translation (I point in evidence to the book’s title), though it flows into another argument he makes, against using the terms “Judaism” and, accordingly, “religion” as descriptive of the first century. “Using -ism language for belief-systems was thus a gradual Christian innovation, which can only have occurred long after Paul” (414). We can speak of ancestral customs, but we should avoid anachronistically reifying them as systems of belief (“religion”; cf. 185).
The care with which Josephus crafts his narratives, and his definite (if oblique) criticisms of Flavians and of Flavian power, is another theme of Mason’s writing: Josephus was no mere propagandist for the new dynasty. While he is capable of sympathetic portraiture (e.g., 100), Josephus also subtly undermines Flavian claims to imperial greatness because of their conquest and destruction of Jerusalem. Mason patiently unpacks all the ways that Josephus reframes, and so diminishes, Vespasian’s and Titus’s victory. Far from being the conquest of a threatening foreign power, the war was the unfortunate result of an outbreak of local grudges in what had long been a provincial territory well integrated with Roman interests. Comparing Vespasian (who paraded the temple’s treasures) with Pompey (who, in 63 BCE, left them untouched), Josephus presents to the knowing reader his description of Vespasian’s triumph, as “an exercise in make-believe” (141).
Close reading of texts can yield insight and information. Mason reads very closely, tracing out the frequency with which certain themes, particular vocabulary and volume of words appear in Josephus’s works. (See, e.g., the charts on the relative volume size by word count in the Bellum, 110; on πάθος and related words, 198–199; and on the places where Josephus names the Pharisees, 311.) Words are the weave and thematic composition the weft of Josephus’s narratives: by attending to this level, we reach a clearer understanding of the rhetorical skills and historiographical and biblical influences that shape his work. By reading in this way, Mason establishes past doubting—and contra received opinion—that Josephus indeed knew his Bible when he landed in Rome (230–250).
Mason appreciates that Josephus appreciated Herod. Despite his horrendous personal life, Herod shone as a military and a political figure, carefully integrating his own best interests and those of his kingdom with those of Rome. Centuries of foreign rule had left the region, in Mason’s nice phrasing, an “ethnic kaleidoscope in its pockets and plains. Each people and polis had its own customs, calendars, cults, and (sometimes) coins” (255). Into the void created by the displacement of Hasmonean rule strode Herod, the man with “the requisite brains, toughness, and vision” to govern this intrinsically unstable aggregate. No matter what the particular immediate causes of the first revolt—and Mason parses these out in several essays—one major one was the mess made by Herod’s successors. Executing the sons who were (probably) most like himself, Herod was left with a “B” team (Archelaus, Agrippa, and Philip). The power vacuum that yawned after Herod’s death contributed immediately to the “conditions for war and Jerusalem’s eventual destruction” (265).
Turning to the Essenes, Mason analyzes the three outsider sources that we have for this elusive community: Philo, Pliny, and Josephus. How can these sources be used for historical inquiry? Mason carefully compares and contrasts, circling around two current scholarly contestations: whether the settlement at Qumran was Essene, and whether the Essenes had a marrying branch as well as a celibate one (266–310). Philo, he observes, was “an intelligent writer who painted word pictures for his audiences” (273). He presented the Essenes, in Greek terms (καλοκαγαθία), as the epitome of Judaean virtue (272), living scattered in villages as communities of male celibates. Pliny, too, remarks especially on Essene celibacy (277), though an admiring tone is lacking (280). By naming west of the Dead Sea as the region where Essenes collect, Pliny’s description supports the Essene = Qumran hypothesis. Josephus, finally, has the most to say, providing more community details. He too presents these men as the epitome of virtue, living a philosophical life, though some, he says—complicating his emphasis on Essene celibacy—marry for the sake of procreation. (Chapter 20, pages 560–565, treats this question of “breeder” Essenes in more detail. Mason queries the historical reliability of Josephus’s report.) Mason concludes his fine-grained analysis by questioning the Qumran-Essene connection (“Nothing I have said excludes the Qumran-Essene hypothesis. I simply do not see what evidence requires it,” 309). This long essay (266–310), because it shows how Mason handles these three sources comparatively and critically, especially showcases his historiographical commitments.
I have covered only half of this book’s offerings in the past 1500 words. I can scarcely summarize what remains in the five hundred words that remain to me. In brief, then: Mason’s essay on the Pharisees treats of all four of Josephus’s writings, concentrating mainly on his two major works, and usefully compares these to various New Testament texts. Pharisees, he concludes, are a marginal presence in Josephus’s oeuvre. Chapter 14, on John of Gischala and Simon ben Giora, underscores how much the Bellum is narratively shaped by Josephus’s sense of tragic irony. John and Simon emerge not as bold revolutionary leaders, but as contingent actors, fleeing to Jerusalem for security for particular reasons having to do with their own particular circumstances. They were not spearheading a national war of liberation. Chapter 15 concludes that Josephus presents John the Baptist as a stalwart example of a virtuous man committed to justice. Chapter 16, “Paul without Judaism”—a riff off of the current “Paul within Judaism” Schule—meditates especially on the ways that the habitual use of certain terms and concepts makes reconstruction vulnerable to anachronism. Did the author of Luke-Acts know Paul? Mason thinks yes (chapter 17). The last five chapters feature deft intellectual footwork as Mason spars with colleagues over points of interpretation and method. They valuably place Mason’s own work within his historiographical context.
Mason’s commitment to his view of historical method gives the whole a coherence that its bulk might belie. And throughout, the book is peppered with astringent observations and adroit phrasing. “Detaching a segment of Josephus’s narrative for comparative study,” he remarks, “is like amputating someone’s foot and calling it a prosthetic—making a vital part of someone’s living body an autonomous device reusable elsewhere” (104). Josephus, in his account of Jerusalem’s destruction, “hovers invisibly as narrator (also producer, screenwriter, and director), (119). Quoting Huizinga: “‘History is always the imposition of form upon the past’” (146). Narratives have “thematic palettes” (163). “Tragedy lives in the shortfall between human suffering and justice” (187). “Evidence is not self-interpreting” (234). Historian colleagues “fraternize” with social sciences (344). Throughout, Mason is dead serious but that does not mean that he isn’t having fun.
In sum: this volume of collected essays offers much to think about and to think with. And as much as it shines light on ancient historiography, particularly that of Josephus, it also offers—via especially Collingwood and Bloch—much for the modern to ponder. If the past, as he notes at several points, is indeed a foreign country, then Mason offers a guided tour.
Notes
[1] “Jews, Judaeans, Judaizing, Judaism: Problems of Categorization in Ancient History,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 38 (2007): 457-512.