Flavius Josephus

Palestinian historian

• Born: c. 37
• Birthplace: Jerusalem, Palestine (now in Israel)
• Died: c. 100
• Place of death: Probably Rome (now in Italy)

Josephus’s history of the Jewish revolt against Rome in 66 c.e., the fall of Jerusalem in 70, and the capture of Masada in 73 remains, despite patent exaggerations and questionable reporting, the primary source of information for this segment of world history.

Early Life

Flavius Josephus (joh-SEE-fuhs) was born in Jerusalem into an influential priestly family. His Jewish name, Joseph ben Matthias, indicates that he was the son of Matthias, whom he asserts to have been of noble Hasmonaean (that is, Maccabean) lineage. He claims that he was consulted at the age of fourteen by high priests and leading citizens on the fine points of law and that, at the age of sixteen, he conducted inquiries into the relative merits of the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes. Becoming a disciple of a Pharisee named Banus, he entered on an ascetic existence, living with Banus in the desert for three years and then returning, as a Pharisee, to Jerusalem at the age of nineteen.

Seven years later, by his account, he went to Rome as an emissary to plead for the release of some Jewish priests who were being held on what Josephus considered to be trivial charges. The sea voyage to Rome ended in shipwreck in the Adriatic Sea, with Josephus being one of eighty survivors out of the six hundred on board.

He reached Puteoli (modern Pozzuoli) and was befriended by a Jewish actor named Aliturius who enjoyed Nero’s favor. Aliturius secured for Josephus an audience with Poppaea Sabina, Nero’s wife, and with her assistance Josephus gained the release of the priests. He returned to Palestine a year or two later.

His homeland at this time (66 c.e.) was in a state of incipient rebellion against Roman occupation. Josephus was opposed to insurrection and sided with the moderate faction against the extremists. The insurgent nationalists, however, prevailed. The Roman garrison at Masada was captured, and the Roman contingent was expelled from Jerusalem. The Roman Twelfth Legion, sent to put down the revolt and restore order, was decisively defeated by Jewish patriots. By the end of 66, the war between the Jews and the Romans was a military reality. Josephus was pressed into service as the commander of the region of Galilee.

Although his talents were for the priesthood and research, Josephus, like many learned men in classical antiquity, proved to be capable in military affairs. He conceived defenses and trained fighting forces but refrained from taking the initiative in attack. In the spring of 67 c.e. the Romans moved into Galilee. Josephus’s main fighting unit was routed, and he retreated to Jotapata, the most strongly fortified town in Galilee. Three Roman legions under Vespasian laid siege to Jotapata, captured it on the first of July in 67 c.e., and took Josephus prisoner.

Life’s Work

The relationship of Josephus with Vespasian and the Roman Imperial entourage marks the major stage in his life. Vespasian’s prisoner of war became his adviser and, in time, favored client. It is this sustained association with the dominant enemy of the Jews that clouds the attitudes toward Josephus taken by his compatriots and their descendants. In his early opposition to the Jewish revolt he had been suspected of complicity with the Romans, and in view of the perquisites accorded him by the Roman leaders after Jotapata, no apologist can effectively defend him against the charge of fraternization with the enemy.

He appears to have ingratiated himself with Vespasian by accurately predicting Vespasian’s installation as emperor. He assumed the name of Vespasian’s family, Flavius, when he Romanized his own. His account, published between 75 and 79 c.e., of the Jewish revolt against Rome carries the Greek title Peri tou Ioudaikou polemou, which in Latin is Bellum Judaicum (75-79 c.e.; History of the Jewish War, 1773). The significance of the title is that it denotes the Roman, not the Jewish, perspective, just as Julius Caesar’s Comentarii de bello Gallico (45 b.c.e.; The Gallic Wars, 1609, translated in Commentaries) denotes the Roman, not the Gallic, perspective. Josephus had clearly cast his lot with the victorious Romans.

A telling incident prior to the fall of Jotapata makes it difficult for anyone to admire Josephus as a patriotic Jew. The besieged had agreed on a mass suicide pact as a means of avoiding capture by the Romans. Josephus relates his attempt to dissuade them, his failure to do so, and his alternate and subsequently accepted plan to draw lots whereby number two would kill number one, number three would kill number two, and so on until, presumably, the last person left would be the only one actually to commit suicide. Josephus concludes this story with a nod to divine providence or pure chance: He and one other were the last two alive and, making a pact of their own, remained alive.

By contrast, Josephus’s account of the mass suicide in the year 73 c.e. of the 960 Jews at Masada, the last citadel of resistance to the Romans, who had conclusively ended the revolt three years earlier, includes reference to no survivors, save two women and five children who had hidden in subterranean aqueducts. Comparison of the respective survivors of Jotapata and Masada lends no honor to the historian of both defeats.

After the Jewish revolt of 66-70 c.e., Josephus was granted living quarters and a regular income in Rome. Thus ensconced, he produced his history of the revolt. His claim that he wrote the work initially in Aramaic and then translated it into Greek need not be disputed, although no Aramaic text whatsoever remains in either small part or citation. The Hellenistic Greek in which this work and the other works of Josephus appear is faultlessly in character with the lingua franca of the time. The idiomatic perfection of Josephus’s Greek may owe, in large part, to his employment of Greek-speaking assistants, but his own linguistic abilities were patently considerable.

History of the Jewish War was published between 75 and 79 c.e., the year in which Vespasian died and was succeeded as emperor by his son Titus. It covers not merely the years 66 to 73 c.e. but also much of the history of the Jews, from the desecration of the Temple at Jerusalem by Antiochus IV Epiphanes in 167 b.c.e. through the events culminating in the capture of Jerusalem by Titus in 70 c.e. The work is composed of seven books, the first two of which outline the Hasmonaean, or Maccabean, revolt, the reign of Herod the Great, and the Roman occupation of Palestine up to the military governorship of Galilee by Josephus.

The five books dedicated to the details of the revolt are both exciting and graphic. Josephus mars his credibility with hyperbole and distortion of fact—for example, he describes Mount Tabor, which has an altitude of 1,300 feet (400 meters), as being 20,000 feet (6,100 meters) high, and his crowd counts are almost invariably exaggerated, one such noting thirty thousand Jews crushed to death in a panic rush—but, if his particulars are questionable and his narrative self-serving, his general survey of times and events has not lost its value.

Although it may tend to disqualify him as a scientific historian, his creative imagination undeniably enhances the grand movement of his history. In one respect, History of the Jewish War resembles the history by the more scientific Thucydides. Both works are informed by a major theme: In Thucydides’ Historia tou Peloponnesiacou polemou (431-404 b.c.e.; History of the Peloponnesian War, 1550) that theme is Athenian hubris; in History of the Jewish War it is Jewish self-destructiveness. Josephus sees the factionalism of the Jews and their impractical unwillingness to yield to the overwhelming power of Rome as suicidal tendencies that make the Jews their own worst enemies. He underscores this theme with many images of suicidal conflict and with depictions of individual and mass suicides.

Josephus’s pride in his heritage is evident in his work and transcends both his contempt for his Jewish rivals and enemies (especially Josephus of Gischala) and his deference to his Roman benefactors. His second work is a massive history of Judaism and the Jews titled Antiquitates Judaicae (93 c.e.; The Antiquities of the Jews, 1773). This work, in twenty hooks, or about three times the length of History of the Jewish War, begins with the Creation as recounted in Genesis and ends with the Palestinian war clouds of 66 c.e. The first eleven and one-half books cover Jewish history up to the tyranny of Antiochus IV Epiphanes. The latter eight and one-half books cover the same material as the first book and a half of History of the Jewish War but in greater detail and with many additions. The work is addressed to Epaphroditus, an otherwise unknown figure who seems to have succeeded the emperor Titus, dead in 81 c.e., as one of Josephus’s patrons.

At the conclusion of The Antiquities of the Jews, Josephus claims, characteristically, that his work is accurate and that no other person, Jew or non-Jew, could have enlightened the Greeks on two millennia of Jewish history and practices as well as he. In quality, however, and in importance and readability, The Antiquities of the Jews is discernibly inferior to its predecessor.

It must be noted, however, that The Antiquities of the Jews offers passages that are of notable importance to Christians. For example:

Jesus comes along at about this time, a wise man, if indeed one must call him a man: for he was a performer of unaccountable works, a teacher of such people as took delight in truth, and one who attracted to himself many Jews and many Greeks as well. This man was the Christ. And when Pilate sentenced him to crucifixion, after he had been indicted by our leading citizens, those who had been devoted to him from the start remained firm in their devotion, for he appeared to them alive again three days afterward, as it had been prophesied about him, along with countless other wonders, by holy men. And to our own time the host of those named, after him, Christians has not dwindled.

There is a passage on the aftermath of the execution of John the Baptist and another on the stoning of Jesus’ brother James. Jesus is not mentioned in the Greek version of History of the Jewish War. There is, however, an Old Slavonic (that is, Russian) version with an independent late medieval manuscript tradition that contains references to the lives of John the Baptist and Jesus, one of them being a variation of the passage quoted above.

Josephus completed The Antiquities of the Jews in 93 c.e., at the age of fifty-six. His plans, announced at the end of the work, to produce an epitome of History of the Jewish War, a continuation of the same work, and a tetrad of books on the Jewish religion and laws appear not to have been realized. His brief autobiography is attached to the end of The Antiquities of the Jews and contradicts some of the statements made in History of the Jewish War, in the interest, it seems, of mitigating his early military opposition to the Romans and perhaps as a means of offsetting his rivals for the favor of the emperor Domitian.

The treatise that marks the end of Josephus’s literary career is one that could warrant no complaint from his fellow Jews. It is called Contra Apionem (Against Apion, 1821). The work is an effective and stirring defense of the Jewish people and their religion and laws against scurrilous anti-Jewish writings of the past (by Manetho and Cheremon, for example) and by Josephus’s older contemporary, Apion of Alexandria.

Having been favored by the emperors Vespasian and Titus and having enjoyed the patronage of Emperor Domitian and his wife, Josephus seems to have survived Domitian, who died in 96 c.e., by no more than a few years. Nothing is known of his reception by the emperors Nerva (ruled 96-98 c.e.) and Trajan (98-117 c.e.). It is significant that the last remaining works of Josephus are defenses—the autobiography a defense of his part in the Jewish revolt and Against Apion a defense of his Jewish heritage. It is not known whether these apologiae, also addressed to Epaphroditus, qualified him for a return to Judaea or, for that matter, for continued subsistence in Rome. His status with either Jews or Romans during his last years of life, as well as the actual place of his death, can only be conjectured.

Significance

The latter part of Josephus’s autobiography includes a digressive apostrophe to Justus of Tiberias, who had also written an Antiquities, which covered Jewish history from Moses through the first century of this era and which related the insurrection and revolt of 66 to 70 in such a way as to challenge Josephus and attempt to discredit him. Justus, for example, accused Josephus of actively fomenting the revolt against the Romans. This charge, made during the reign of Domitian, would have eroded Josephus’s credibility at court were it to have gone without answer and may have done so in any case. The work of Justus stood in rivalry to that of Josephus as least until the ninth century, after which its readership, along with all traces of its actual text, disappeared. Josephus prevailed; the fact that he did attests his value, not as a benign and likable person or as an objective and fully credible historian but as a writer of great erudition and talent, whose narrative scope and magnitude and whose personal association with many of the figures and events in his narrative make him perennially readable and provide a veritable drama in complement to scientific history.

Of special value to general readers and to students of first century history are the detailed appraisals by Josephus of the zealotry, factions, and religious turmoil in Palestine, the political thrusts of the Roman aristocracy, and the complex relations between Rome and the Judaean principate.

Bibliography

Bentwich, Norman. Josephus. 1914. Reprint. Folcroft, Pa.: Folcroft Library Editions, 1976. A consideration of Josephus from the Jewish point of view. The writer is harsh on Josephus, not only as a general whom he calls traitorous but also as a scholar, claiming that Josephus was not so learned and erudite as he claims to have been and is credited as having been. According to Bentwich, Josephus misuses words such as “Gamala,” an error that may have been understandable for a Roman but not for someone Jewish.

Cohen, Shaye J. D. Josephus in Galilee and Rome: His Vita and Development as a Historian. Boston: Brill, 2002. This work is a scholarly study of Josephus and his sources, the literary relationship of the autobiography to The Jewish War, the aims and methods of the autobiography, and the historicity of Josephus’s activities in Galilee and Rome.

Feldman, Louis H. Josephus and Modern Scholarship, 1937-1980. New York: Garland, 1986. A massive achievement in its comparative summaries of Josephan scholarship and in bibliographical research. This work is chiefly of interest, and is indispensable, to the Josephan scholar.

Josephus, Flavius. The Jewish War. Translated by G. A. Williamson. New York: Dorset Press, 1985. This, in its estimable revision by E. Mary Smallwood, is the definitive English translation. Its introduction, notes, maps, and appendices are edifying to both the student and the general reader.

Smallwood, E. Mary. The Jews Under Roman Rule: From Pompey to Diocletian. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1981. The first twelve chapters of this study, particularly chapters 11 and 12, provide an informative reprise of the world in which Josephus was elevated to greatness and offer an appreciable survey of his place in history.

Tcherikover, Victor A. Hellenistic Civilization and the Jews. Translated by S. Applebaum. Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1999. Comprehensive exposition of the confluence of the Judaic and Hellenistic traditions; essential to an understanding of the cultural crucible in which the political identity of Josephus was formed.

Whiston, William. The Life and Works of Flavius Josephus. Reprint. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977. This translation of the complete works of Josephus, for all its faults and verbosity, remains an important part of the Josephan tradition in the English-speaking world. Both G. A. Williamson and M. I. Finley mention its being kept alongside the family Bible in Victorian homes.