Flavius Josephus

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Flavius Josephus (born Yosef ben Matityahu, 37 – c. 100 CE) was a Romano-Jewish historian of priestly Jerusalem family whose surviving works are the single largest body of evidence for Jewish life and religion in the first century. He wrote in Greek, for a Greek and Roman readership, about a people and a war he had lived through — and the strangeness of that vantage runs through everything he left.

His life turned on a defeat. When revolt broke out against Rome in 66, Josephus was given command of Jewish forces in Galilee; besieged at Jotapata, he surrendered rather than die with his men, and — by his own account — told the general Vespasian that he would become emperor. When the prophecy came true, Josephus was freed, took the family name of his Flavian patrons, and watched the fall of Jerusalem and the burning of the Temple from the Roman side. He spent the rest of his life in Rome under imperial protection, writing. To his own people he was a turncoat; to himself, a man who had read the times correctly and tried to save what could be saved.

The works are four. The Jewish War narrates the revolt and the destruction of 70 CE. The Antiquities of the Jews, far longer, retells the whole of Jewish history from creation to the eve of the war, for outsiders. Against Apion defends the antiquity and dignity of Judaism against its Greek detractors, and a short Life answers charges against his own conduct. Together they preserve detail found nowhere else.

That uniqueness is also the difficulty. Josephus is the principal source for the three Jewish “philosophies” of his day — Pharisees, Sadducees, and the ascetic, communal Essenes, the last long compared (cautiously, by scholars) with the community behind the Dead Sea Scrolls. He is the one early non-Christian writer to mention John the Baptist as a historical figure, and James, called the brother of Jesus. And in the Antiquities stands the Testimonium Flavianum, a paragraph praising Jesus in terms no first-century Jew is likely to have written. Most scholars hold that a genuine notice was reworked by later Christian copyists; how much is original remains contested, and the passage is read both as evidence and as warning.

Because so much depends on him, Josephus has been mined for what he never set out to provide — corroboration of the Gospels, a window onto sects the canon barely names, raw material for later esoteric reconstructions of the Essenes and of John the Baptist. He should be read as what he was: a defeated commander, writing in a conqueror’s language, intent on showing that the religion of the vanquished was ancient, reasonable, and worth Rome’s respect. The record he left has outlived every reading imposed on it.

→ In the library: Mead — The Gnostic John the Baptizer (1924)

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