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.

I’ve been thinking about the topic of “unfulfilled expectations”. How easy it is for me to expect more of others than they can give or do. Then when our friends or colleagues do not meet our expectations, we are disappointed which can be displayed in our attitudes towards them. Sometimes our expectations are unrealistic. Sometimes people are just incapable or unwilling or just don’t care about the issues we care about. When expectations go unfulfilled our behavior and/or our attitude towards that person can be affected. Even as Believers, we often fail to meet the expectations of non-believers who look at Christians and expect more than they observe.

The other side of it is that we should expect a lot of ourselves and we have a right to expect righteous conduct and good examples of those who make certain claims about their lives and beliefs. The danger zone for believers is the fine line between judging others harder than we judge ourselves and rightful expectations of ourselves to live up to the standards we say we hold as well as expecting the same of others. The Biblical statement that comes to mind here is found in 2 Corinthians 4:7:

“If you only look at us, you might well miss the brightness. We carry this precious message around in the unadorned clay pots of our ordinary lives. That’s to prevent anyone from confusion God’s incomparable power with us. As it is, there’s not much chance of that. You know for yourselves that we’re not much to look at.” The Message