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Jan Willem van Henten

Flavius Josephus, born as Joseph ben Matityahu in 37 CE, was a Jewish priest who acted as commander of Galilee during the Jewish rebellion against Rome (66–73/74 CE) until his arrest at Iotapata (Iotape, Hebrew Yodfat) in 67. After his prediction that the Roman commander Vespasian would become emperor materialized, he was rewarded by the new emperor and spent the rest of his life in Rome as a historian (Rajak 2002; Chapman & Rodgers 2016). He wrote four works: a history of the armed conflict between the Jews and Rome (The Jewish War (BJ)), a history of the Jewish people starting from the creation of the world up to Josephus’s own time (The Jewish Antiquities (AJ)), an autobiographical work that demonstrates his credentials (The Life (Vita)) and, finally, an apologetic work called Against Apion (Bilde 1988: 61–122). Without Josephus we would know hardly anything about Jewish history from the mid-Hasmonean period until the destruction of Jerusalem (c. 125 BCE–70 CE) – the period that saw both the rise and fall of Jewish statehood and the emergence of Christianity. There is no unambiguous evidence of a Jewish reception of Josephus’s writings in antiquity. Passages in Greco-Roman writings imply that several pagan authors were familiar with Josephus’s writings (see esp. Suetonius, Vesp. 5.6; Cassius Dio 66.4; Tacitus, Hist. 5.13; and the Epitome of Aelius Herodian’s work), but Josephus was especially popular among the Christians, who have preserved and transmitted his works.