In a series of lectures given in 1928, H. St. John Thackeray wrote: “The study of Josephus has latterly entered on a new phase. There was a time in my own country when almost every house possessed two books, a Bible and a Josephus, in the old eighteenth century version of William Whiston. That period of general and undiscriminating popularity has passed . . . .”1
Times have changed further and now even the clergy, who could learn much from Josephus’ Jewish Antiquities or The Jewish War are clueless as to his value for both the Old and New Testament studies. Like Philo, Josephus gives us a glimpse to how people read the Bible from a non-rabbinic Jewish perspective close to the time of Christ and the early church. Stories of Old Testament heroes like Abraham, Moses, David and the prophets come to life in a contextualized Greco-Roman frame-of-reference. It was Josephus that was used in the past to fill in the blanks when reading the New Testament. His works can tell you everything you wanted and even didn’t want to know about the Pharisees, the Sadducees, the Essenes, the Zealots, etc. Although it is probably in vain that a Christian would look for Jesus in the Jewish Antiquities, still, John the Baptist and James the brother of Jesus make cameo appearances along with people like Pontius Pilot and Herod.
It is true that we no longer swallow “hook, line and sinker” Josephus’s material without filtering it through an understanding that his works were jaded by an apologetic motivation. To non-Jews, he beautified and defended the faith and nation of Israel. To the Jews in diaspora, he defended his personal honor, while challenging them to continue in their Jewish faith. For the modern Christian Josephus can still give us the smell of Israel of old and the days when Jesus and his disciples traversed the land of Palestine.
Josephus’s three major works: The Jewish War; Jewish Antiquities; Against Apion are well worth reading while one pastors and feeds the congregation that God has entrusted to him or her. I have not been able to find where I read it, but I believe it was Charles H. Spurgeon, “the prince of preachers” that instructed his students of homiletics that Josephus was one of the most important reads for their ministry.
Recent studies into things Josephus have been multiplying exponentially. Concordances, commentaries, special monographs abound. Besides reading Josephus directly, Steven Mason’s book, Flavius Josephus and the New Testament, is a good place to start.
An important online source for studying Josephus’s writings is PACE (Project on Ancient Cultural Engagement) maintained by a great Josephus scholar Steven Mason. It contains several older scholarly works on Josephus and the Greek text of his works. The site uses Perseus’ database which allows for parsing and declining of the Greek words, along with the old translation by Whiston and a newer one by Feldman, et. al., from the Brill commentary series.
By David Hymes
1 H. St. John Thackeray, Josephus: The Man and the Historian (New York: KTAV Publishing House, 1967), 3.