Suresh Shenoy

The Flavian Jewish War: A Senecan Tragedy (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

For the last two thousand years, the Jewish nation, true and loyal to its ancient heritage, has condemned Flavius Josephus as a traitor to the Jews and a lackey of the Flavian Romans. My research into the Jewish War by Josephus shows that the longheld perception as a traitor is quite mistaken.

Josephus used 'genres disjunction' in his War narrative to convey a hidden perception opposed by the public perception. The public perception is of the foreground text of the Jewish War, in which the Flavian Romans are praised as the heroes and the Jews as the villains. The hidden perception is in the background text of the Jewish War which is a five-Act tragedy modelled on Seneca's tragedies. In the background text we find that the Flavian Romans are the villains and the Jewish nation are trasformed into the hero-victims of a classical tragedy.

The 'genres disjunction' of multiple texts in a single work is not unique to Josephus. It served him well to hide his attitudional disjunction towards the Flavians from whom he benefitted. Unfortuntely, it also hid his love for the Jewish nation. My study is the first attempt to prove Josephus was a loyal Jew but an inveterate secret enemy of the Flavian Romans.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Suresh Shenoy
• Erscheinungstermin: 19. Juni 2015
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781310573729
• Artikelnr.: 48756277

Autorenporträt

I had been a secondary school teacher until my retirement in 2000. While planning for life after the gruelling work, I undertook a Masters course in Theology at the Australian Catholic University, Melbourne, Australia. Graduation in M.Theol. coincided with the beginning of retirement. A course research paper on the Herod Narrative in the Jewish War by Josephus dramatically turned my life around. I'll explain how.

While close reading the Herod Narrative, with my previous acquaintance with Roman literature, I discovered that Josephus had carefully incorporated all the literary conventions of a five-Act tragedy in Seneca's Hercules Furens. That gained for me a high distinction and an invitation to research into the whole of the Jewish War for a Ph.D. That was the year 2000.

I began carefully reading the Jewish War as a history and where it fitted in the spectrum of classical histories. I found that Josephus fell closer to Herodotus than to Thucydides. I also noticed that the Senecan tragedy conventions were also present in the Jewish War side by side with the history. That indeed was an extension of the paper on the Herod Narrative.

The evidence of two texts in one work by Josephus was my discovery. I named it 'Genres Disjunction'. The term explained that it was an example of Quintilian's structual irony. It also clarified that Josephus hid his deep hatred of the Flavian Romans, his benefactors, and secretly asserted his loyalty to the Jewish nation. He made the Flavians the heroes of the history and villains of the tragedy as he changed the Jewish nation from villains of the history into hero-victims of the tragedy.

This is where my life began to change. I was baptized a Roman Catholic and lived a devout life of a Catholic until my reserch began. My curiosity took me from Josephus to the four Evangelists. I found to my utter disbelief that they too had 'Genres Disjunction' in their Gospels. All the Evangelists had the Gospel as the foreground text, but added other texts in the background. Mark had the classical history modeled on Livy's History of Rome. Matthew took Dionysius of Halicarnassus for his. Luke chose the Jewish War of Josephus for his background text and John had Herodotus for his second text.

The more I studied the Gospels the more shocks were in store for me. I found that Mark had a second background text of monomyths in the public life and the passion of Christ. Matthew had the same includ...