Josephus the Historian
Yosef ben Matityahu was born in Jerusalem in the first year of Caligula, of priestly stock on his father's side and Hasmonean royalty on his mother's. He boasts in his autobiography that the rabbis of Jerusalem…
Biblical Narrative
Yosef ben Matityahu was born in Jerusalem in the first year of Caligula, of priestly stock on his father's side and Hasmonean royalty on his mother's. He boasts in his autobiography that the rabbis of Jerusalem consulted him on points of Torah at the age of fourteen — a self-praise that has not endeared him to his readers in any century — and that at sixteen he tried each of the great schools of Judaism in turn, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes, and spent three years besides in the desert with a hermit named Bannus, before settling on the Pharisaic way.
He was twenty-six when he was sent to Rome on an embassy to free certain priests Felix the procurator had imprisoned, and the journey marked him: the wreck of his ship, the swim through a night to a Cyrenian rescue vessel, the audience at Nero's court arranged by the empress Poppaea — who had a soft spot for Jews. He returned in 65 to a province on the brink of revolt, and when the war broke out the next year against his counsel, the Sanhedrin appointed him commander of the Galilee, the first front the Romans would attack.
He fortified the towns; he raised an army of unwilling peasants; and he was besieged at Jotapata for forty-seven days, until the city fell and forty soldiers escaped with him to a cistern beneath. There they made a pact to die rather than surrender, and drew lots in a circle for who should kill whom. Yosef and one other were the last two — by chance, he says; by manipulation, his readers have always suspected — and Yosef talked the other man into surrendering with him. Brought before Vespasian in chains, he prophesied that the general would be Caesar; eighteen months later Vespasian was, and Yosef was freed and given citizenship and a Roman name: Titus Flavius Josephus.
He went up with Titus to the siege of Jerusalem in 70, watching from the Roman lines as the city of his birth was burned, the Temple destroyed, and the survivors crucified by the thousands or driven into slavery. He pleaded with the defenders — in Hebrew and Aramaic, from outside the wall — to surrender. They threw stones at him. After the war he settled in Rome on Vespasian's bounty, in a house that had been the emperor's private residence, and turned to the work that would consume the rest of his life: writing, in Greek, the history of his vanished people for the Greco-Roman world that had destroyed them.
I have told the story of the war as a faithful and not as an inflammatory narrator. To me, my country is dearer than any commander or any reader.Josephus, The Jewish War, preface (paraphrased)
Archaeology · History · Genetics
Titus Flavius Josephus (37-c.100 CE) is the chief historical source for the entire Second Temple period and for first-century Judea, and his importance to scholarship can hardly be overstated. Nearly everything we know about the Hasmonean kingdom, the reign of Herod the Great, the prefects and procurators (including Pontius Pilate), the Jewish parties (Pharisees, Sadducees, Essenes, Zealots, Sicarii), the events of the Jewish War (66-73 CE), and the fall of Masada comes from Josephus, often as the only surviving source. Steve Mason's multi-volume Brill commentary on Josephus (2000-) and the work of Tessa Rajak, Per Bilde, and Louis Feldman have built a sophisticated modern critical apparatus around the texts.
Josephus is also crucial for the history of early Christianity, primarily through two passages in Antiquities Book XVIII: the Testimonium Flavianum (XVIII.63-64), a brief notice of Jesus that survives in a clearly Christian-interpolated form but whose authentic core most scholars now accept; and the notice of James the brother of Jesus called Christ, executed by the high priest Ananus in 62 CE (XVIII.197-203). The James passage is generally accepted as authentic and provides one of the earliest non-Christian attestations of Jesus's existence. The Testimonium has been the subject of more scholarly literature than perhaps any other paragraph in classical antiquity.
His reliability has been intensely debated since antiquity. Josephus is plainly an apologist — for himself in the Vita, for his people in Against Apion, for his Flavian patrons in The Jewish War. He inflates his own role, downplays unflattering events, and writes Roman triumphalism into Jewish defeat. But he is also a meticulous reporter who consulted official documents (he had access to Vespasian's personal commentaries on the war), and where his statements can be checked archaeologically — the design of Herodion, the Masada siege ramp, the layout of the Antonia fortress — they have repeatedly been confirmed by excavation, most spectacularly by Yigael Yadin's work at Masada (1963-65).
The transmission of his works is itself an extraordinary story. The Jewish War survives because Origen and Eusebius cited it; the Antiquities because medieval Christian scribes valued it as background for the New Testament. The Jewish tradition rejected him as a traitor — there is no Hebrew Josephus until the medieval Sefer Yosippon, a paraphrase several stages removed from the original — and his Greek text was preserved entirely by Christian copyists. Only with the Renaissance and the rise of critical philology was Josephus restored to Jewish historical consciousness, and he remains, two thousand years on, the indispensable witness to the world that the Romans burned.
Without Josephus, the dark ages of Jewish history begin not in 70 CE but four centuries earlier, with the closing of the Hebrew Bible. He is the bridge across the silence.Tessa Rajak, Josephus: The Historian and His Society (1983), paraphrased