Particularly in his early work, the Jewish War, Josephus seems clearly motivated to exonerate the Pharisees (and almost everyone else except the lowest orders) from blame for the war. It has often been supposed that this is a pro-Pharisaic bias, reinforced from a different angle by his longer account in the Antiquities which, despite letting the mask slip a little as regards the Pharisees’ involvement with revolution, stresses how influential the Pharisees always were.
