Will the Real Josephus Please Stand Up?

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What went through the mind of Flavius Josephus as he stepped through his doorway into the brilliant sunshine of the Roman summer in 75 C.E.? Now 38 years old, he was beginning to write The Jewish War—a history of the First Jewish Revolt against Rome (66–74 C.E.). A year earlier, the last rebels had been vanquished at Masada. In 70 C.E., Roman legions had burned Josephus’s home city, Jerusalem, along with the magnificent Temple where he had occasionally served as priest. It was only six years since his namesake, Titus Flavius Vespasianus (Vespasian), had seized ultimate control of the […]

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Footnotes

It is possible that the seventh volume came later.

Endnotes

Reprisals in other areas play a large role in Josephus’s chronicle of the revolt (The Jewish War 2.399, 457–498; 7:41–62, 361–369).

Laqueur’s interpretation received widespread publicity and support, especially through the qualified endorsement of Henry St. John Thackeray, Josephus’s first translator for the Loeb Classical Library. Thackeray’s 1928 lectures on Josephus became the standard introductory textbook, Josephus: The Man and the Historian (New York: Ktav, 1967 [1929]).

This reading of Antiquities of the Jews was developed by the late Morton Smith of Columbia University; see “Palestinian Judaism in the First Century,” in Israel: Its Role in Civilization, ed. Moshe Davis (New York: JTSA/Harper & Brothers, 1956), pp. 67–81, esp. 74–75.

See Molly Whittaker, Jews and Christians: Graeco-Roman Views (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1984), pp. 14–130.

Tacitus, Histories 5.1–13; Philostratus, Life of Apollonius 5.33.

Origen, Against Celsus 5.41; Minucius Felix, Octavian 10, 33.

Josephus, Jewish War 1.9–12.

See, for example, Josephus, Jewish War 2.315–329, 340–342, 352.

Josephus, Jewish War 3.205–206, 229–233, 268; 4.17–30; 5.109–119; 6.169–185.

10.

See, for example, Josephus, Jewish War 1.354–355, 387, 422–430.

11.

Josephus, Jewish War 2.124.

12.

Josephus, Jewish War 2.139.

13.

Josephus, Jewish War 2.345–401.

14.

Josephus, Jewish War 5.27–30, 572; 6.102, 126–128.

15.

Josephus, Jewish War 4.388.

16.

Josephus, Jewish War 5.424–459; 6.193–213.

17.

Josephus, Jewish War 7.259–274.

18.

Cf. Harry J. Leon, The Jews of Ancient Rome, rev. ed. (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1995), pp. 119–120.

19.

Josephus, Antiquities 1.1–4.

20.

Josephus, Antiquities 1.6–7.

21.

Josephus, Contra Apion 1.53–56.

22.

See Whittaker, Jews and Christians, pp. 85–91.

23.

Louis H. Feldman has studied each of the main Biblical characters in Josephus’s story. See the list of the resulting articles in his Jew and Gentile in Antiquity: Attitudes and Interactions from Alexander to Justinian (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 595–596.

24.

The groundbreaking study was Harold W. Attridge’s The Interpretation of Biblical History in the “Antiquitates Judaicae” of Flavius Josephus (Missoula, MT: Scholars, 1976). See also Feldman, “Use, Authority and Exegesis of Mikra in the Writings of Josephus,” in Mikra: Text, Translation, Reading and Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible in Ancient Judaism and Early Christianity, ed. Martin J. Mulder and Harry Sysling (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1988), pp. 455–518.

25.

Cf. Josephus, Contra Apion 1.223–2.144; Tacitus, Histories 5.2–4.

26.

Josephus, Antiquities 3.224–294; 4.176–301.

27.

Josephus, Antiquities 10.206–210; cf. 4.114–117. Today we realize that Daniel and Second/Third Isaiah (Isaiah 40–66) were probably written after the events they claim to predict. But scholars who see Josephus as an opportunist may forget that Josephus lived long before such critical insights. (Daniel’s Hasmonean date was first proposed by the third-century C.E. philosopher Porphyry.) Josephus believed that Daniel and Second Isaiah were written centuries before the events they predicted (Josephus, Antiquities 10.276–281; 12.319–322). He had also read or heard that great world leaders such as Cyrus and Alexander had happily acknowledged the merit of Judean Scripture.

28.

Josephus, Antiquities 15.49–67, 165–182, 243–246, 267–279, 375–376.

29.

Josephus, Antiquities 16.1–5, 150–159, 179–188, 311–312, 362–365, 395–404; 17.150–151, 168–171, 180–181, 191.

30.

Cf. Tacitus, Histories 5.5; Juvenal, Satires 5.14.96–106; Celsus in Origen, Against Celsus 5.41; and Cassio Dio, Roman History 67.14.12.

31.

Josephus, Contra Apion 2.143.

32.

This is summarized in Contra Apion 2.228–90.

33.

Josephus, Jewish War 6.411.