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. He stands inside the world of Second Temple Judaism and at the same time describes it from outside, in the conqueror’s tongue, for an audience that had just burned its center. No other witness occupies that double position, and almost everything later readers think they know about the sects, the politics, and the texture of Judean life in the age of the Temple’s last generation passes through his hands.

A life that turned on a defeat

He was born the year Caligula came to the purple, into a household that joined two kinds of standing. On his father’s side the family belonged to the first of the twenty-four priestly courses, the order of Jehoiarib; on his mother’s, by his own report, it carried Hasmonean royal blood. Priesthood and dynasty were the two highest things a Judean could inherit, and he inherited both. He describes a precocious youth — consulted by the learned while still a boy, sampling the disciplines of the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes in turn before attaching himself, he says, to the Pharisaic way. As a young man he sailed to Rome to plead for some priests sent there in chains, and saw at first hand the scale of the power his nation was beginning to defy.

The defiance broke into open war in 66, and his life turned on it. Given command of Jewish forces in Galilee against Rome, he fortified towns and drilled levies, and was besieged in the hill fortress of Jotapata. When the place fell after a long investment, he took refuge in a cave with a band of survivors who had sworn to die rather than be taken. By his own telling he talked them into killing one another by lot rather than each his own hand, and — by chance, or by a providence he was careful to credit — stood last or nearly last alive, and surrendered. Brought before Vespasian, he announced that the general would become emperor: a prophecy, he claimed, drawn from his priestly skill in reading the sacred books and his own gift for dreams. When Vespasian was indeed acclaimed in 69, the prisoner was freed. He took the family name of his Flavian patrons — Josephus, son of Matthias, became Flavius Josephus — and attached himself to Vespasian’s son Titus for the final campaign.

So he watched the fall of Jerusalem and the burning of the Temple, in the summer of 70, from the Roman side of the wall. He records shouting appeals to the defenders in their own language, urging surrender, and being answered with contempt. When it was over he went to Rome, was housed in the former imperial residence, granted citizenship and a pension, and spent the rest of his days under the protection of the very dynasty whose triumph he had foretold. To his own people he was a deserter who had changed sides at Jotapata and never changed back. To himself he was a man who had read the times correctly — who saw that God had, for the present, gone over to the Romans, and that the only way to save the faith was to outlive the war and explain it.

The four works

What he made of that survival was a body of writing in four parts, each pitched at the gulf between his people and his readers.

The Jewish War, in seven books, came first, in the mid-seventies. It runs from the Maccabean background down through the revolt to the destruction of 70 and its aftermath, and it is shaped throughout by a thesis: that the war was the work of a faction of zealots and bandits who dragged a reluctant nation into ruin, that Rome’s victory was the verdict of God on that folly, and that the wise course was submission. He wrote it, he says, first in his native language for the Jews of the eastern empire and then in Greek for the wider world; only the Greek survives. It is the fullest narrative of the war that exists, by a man who had commanded on one side and stood in the entourage of the general on the other.

The Antiquities of the Jews, finished around 93 or 94, is far longer — twenty books — and far more ambitious. It retells the whole of Jewish history from the creation of the world to the eve of the revolt, a paraphrase of the Torah and the later scriptures expanded with legend, chronology, and apologetic argument, then carried through the Hellenistic and Roman centuries to his own day. Here Josephus the priest works as Josephus the historian, rendering the sacred story of the Old Testament into the idiom of Greek historiography for outsiders who knew nothing of it. The register is sometimes startling: among the antediluvian patriarchs he reports that the descendants of Seth, Adam’s third son, foreseeing a destruction of the world by fire and by flood, inscribed their astronomical discoveries on two pillars, one of brick and one of stone, so that the knowledge should survive whichever catastrophe came — and that the stone pillar still stood, in his telling, in the land of Siriad. The notice has no warrant in the biblical text; it is the kind of learned embellishment, drawn from the cross-currents of Hellenistic-Jewish lore, that makes the Antiquities a quarry for far more than scripture.

Against Apion, in two books, is the most polished of the four — a sustained defense of the antiquity and dignity of Judaism against its Greek and Egyptian detractors. The Alexandrian grammarian Apion had recycled old slanders: that the Jews descended from a band of leprous Egyptian outcasts, that they worshipped an ass’s head in their sanctuary, that their law was misanthropy dressed as piety. Josephus answers by marshaling the testimony of ancient writers, arguing that the Jewish nation and its law were older and more coherent than anything Greece could show, and that Moses was a lawgiver of a rank the Greeks had no name for. It is the clearest statement anywhere in his corpus of why the religion of the vanquished deserved the respect of the world that had crushed it.

The short Life, appended to the Antiquities, is less an autobiography than a defense brief. A rival historian, Justus of Tiberias, had accused Josephus of fomenting the Galilean revolt he later abandoned; the Life answers by recounting his conduct in Galilee in a light favorable to himself, and stands as one of the earliest surviving autobiographical apologias from the ancient world. Together the four works preserve detail found nowhere else, and they preserve it because a single man with a priest’s training and a survivor’s stake chose to write it down.

The chief witness

That uniqueness is also the difficulty. Because so much of the first century is dark without him, Josephus has been asked to bear weight no single source can carry — and the most consequential of his testimonies are precisely the ones hardest to read clean.

He is the principal source for the three Jewish schools he calls the philosophies of his nation: the Pharisees, exact in the law and influential with the people; the Sadducees, drawn from the priestly aristocracy, holding to the written law alone and denying the immortality of the soul; and the ascetic, communal Essenes, whom he describes at unusual length — their shared property, their oaths and probation, their white garments, their doctrine of the soul’s immortality and the body’s bondage. His account of the Essenes is the longest ancient description of them in existence, and since 1947 it has been read against the library recovered near Qumran, the Dead Sea Scrolls, in a comparison scholars still pursue with care: the correspondences are striking, the identification probable to many and certain to few. (Where Josephus and the contemporary Alexandrian Philo both describe the Essenes, the two Jewish writers of the Greek diaspora can be set side by side — the historian and the philosopher, each rendering an ascetic Judaism for Greek readers.)

He is also the one early non-Christian writer to fix two figures of the Gospels in the frame of secular history. In the eighteenth book of the Antiquities he reports the execution of John the Baptist by Herod Antipas — describing John as a preacher of righteousness and a baptizer, and attributing his death to the tetrarch’s fear of his influence over the crowds, with no reference at all to the Gospels’ account. The passage is almost universally accepted as Josephus’s own. In the twentieth book he records, almost in passing, the unlawful execution under the high priest Ananus of a man named James, identified as the brother of Jesus who was called Christ — a notice whose offhand manner argues for its authenticity, even as that identifying phrase has drawn its own debate.

The disputed paragraph

And in the eighteenth book stands the most argued-over passage in all of ancient literature about Jesus: the Testimonium Flavianum, a short paragraph that calls Jesus a wise man, a doer of wonders, a teacher who drew Greeks and Jews, condemned by Pilate at the urging of the leading men, and — in the text as it has come down — declares that he was the Christ, that he appeared alive on the third day as the prophets had foretold, and hints that he was perhaps more than a man. No first-century Judean priest, loyal to Rome and writing for a pagan court, is likely to have professed the messiahship and resurrection of an executed Galilean. The paragraph is first quoted, in its received form, by the church historian Eusebius in the fourth century; an Arabic version preserved in the tenth century by Agapius of Hierapolis, and a Syriac one, carry the notice in a more guarded shape that omits the most overtly Christian claims.

From this evidence three readings descend. A minority holds the whole paragraph a later Christian insertion. Another minority defends it nearly entire. The broad center takes it for a genuine notice — a neutral or even faintly skeptical sentence or two by Josephus about Jesus and the movement named for him — into which Christian copyists later worked the confessional phrases. The arbitration of exactly which words are his and which were added is a question the textual critics keep open, and this account leaves it where they leave it: the passage is read at once as evidence and as warning, a reminder that the chief witness was copied, for fifteen centuries, by hands with their own stake in what he said.

Text, edition, and the long afterlife

Josephus survived because Christians preserved him. The rabbinic tradition let the renegade priest fall silent; the church kept him, copied him, and read him as an unwitting corroborator of its own story — which is why the Greek manuscripts that carry his works are medieval Christian books, and why the Testimonium sits in them at all. The Greek text was set on a critical footing by Benedikt Niese’s seven-volume edition (Berlin, 1885–95), still the standard reference for the numbering scholars cite. In English the old workhorse remains the complete translation by William Whiston (1737), a clergyman’s rendering that ran through countless reprintings and carried Josephus into Protestant households for two centuries; it is freely available, with Whiston’s whole Josephus hosted at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library and the Greek-and-English Antiquities in the Perseus Digital Library. The scholarly standard is the Loeb Classical Library Josephus in nine volumes (1926–65), begun by H. St. J. Thackeray and completed by Ralph Marcus, Allen Wikgren, and Louis H. Feldman, and now in part out of copyright; Against Apion circulates in the public domain through editions such as the one at Project Gutenberg. The most thorough modern apparatus is the Brill Flavius Josephus: Translation and Commentary (2000– ), edited by Steve Mason, a multi-volume scholarly translation of the whole corpus.

The modern reading of Josephus has moved decisively. The nineteenth century saw him as a competent but contemptible turncoat, valuable for his facts and worthless for his judgment. Twentieth-century scholarship — gathered in such collections as Louis Feldman and Gohei Hata’s Josephus, Judaism, and Christianity (1987) and the Companion to Josephus edited by Honora Howell Chapman and Zuleika Rodgers (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016) — learned instead to read him as an author with designs of his own: a Judean writing under Flavian eyes, shaping his narrative to a thesis, and to be understood as a deliberate witness rather than mined as a transparent one. The shift matters most precisely where he is most quoted, because every notice he gives — of the sects, of the Baptist, of the Christ — was written to do work within his own argument.

That argument never changed. From the War to Against Apion he set out to show a watching empire that the people it had broken possessed a law older than Greece, a wisdom worthy of respect, and a God whose verdict in the late war was to be read not as abandonment but as discipline. He had foretold the rise of one emperor; the longer prophecy embedded in his books is that the nation Rome thought it had ended would prove the more ancient and the more reasonable of the two, and would be standing — in its scriptures, its law, its memory of the Temple — when the question of who had really won the war came at last to be asked.

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

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