Josephus's Pharisees

When I speak of a lacuna in studying Josephus’s portraits of the Pharisees, I mean only the absence of this kind of compositional study circa 1980. Josephus had always been the prime data source for ancient Judea, and since the Pharisees loomed large in scholars’ thinking about the period, they often cited his remarks. In the many handbooks on the New Testament world, Josephus appeared to be a kind of neutral record—“Josephus reports that …” was a common phrase. Scholars who sought to apply a more critical method to his works followed one or more of three courses. First, from the late nineteenth century many specialists were assigning most of Josephus’s corpus to sources that he more or less copied. The rationale was that, as an Aramaic- and Hebrew-speaking Pharisee from backwater Palestine, Josephus could not have conducted the primary research that bears his name or composed the sophisticated Greek accounts. So careless was he in transcribing his sources, it was thought, that he often copied material at odds with his views. His passages on the Pharisees were Exhibit A. Although a Pharisee himself, he blithely borrowed Nicolaus of Damascus’s excoriations of his group