When one of my sisters was a sophomore in high school. She and her friend concocted a plan to pass the biology test without actually studying. One of them had read where if you just recorded the study data on a tape and then played it as you fell asleep, your unconscious brain would absorb all the information and voila! you'd pass the test. They tried it! And both of them failed the test.

I tell that story because I just finished listening through all 37 hours of Josephus' Antiquities. Josephus has a lot of interesting perspectives on Jewish history so the information contained in this book is good and worthwhile. It is not, however, riveting reading. I quickly learned that this book was VERY worthwhile for putting one to sleep while listening to it.

Now, would I pass a test on Josephus? Well, you be the judge based on my sister's failed experiment. But I can confidently say that I listened through all 37 painful and boring, indeed insomnia curing hours of Josephus. He really is useful to fall asleep to.

One of my goals for 2022 was to read (listen to) Josephus’ 1300 page (51 hour) long ‘Antiquities of the Jews’. One of my reasons for reading it was that it’s a classic, and not much else has been preserved from the first century AD. But another reason was that I wanted to get my own sense for whether or not Josephus’ references to Jesus the Christ were authentically Josephan. And now, having trudged through page after page of minutia, quoted letters, retold conversations and (oftentimes spurious) speculations, I don’t think that Josephus had ever heard of Jesus of Nazareth, may have never heard of Christianity (if he did, it was insignificant), and had no inclination of an early first century son of god-led revolution of Judaism in the holy land.

Josephus begins the book by retelling the Old Testament stories. I got the impression that Josephus had no other source for this material than the OT itself. It sounded like he had a Tanakh in front of him, and he was paraphrasing and commenting on it for his readers.

Eventually he moves on to historical events for which he must have had other source material, but it was almost always impossible to know what sources he was using. He simply describes what happened as though it’s 100% fact. He often interpolates his own ideas and things that people ‘would have’ said or even 'thought'. This makes him a somewhat untrustworthy historian, by today’s standards. As a side note, I’ve detected this style in many ‘modern’ historians. They write as though “Caesar did this” or “Pompei did that”, rather than “Letters discovered in Egypt, attributed to Festus, claim that prior to entering the battle, Caesar had a dream.” Josephus, and many modern scholars, would just write, “Then Caesar had a dream.”

The amount of data that Josephus relates in this book is enough to launch 10,000 PhDs. There are so many people and events related that it was impossible to keep track, and instead I found myself just going along for the ride while not expecting to retain a whole lot. You could pick just about any page and do a major research project. Now that I think about it, since there are 1300 pages, you could pick any page and do 7.69 research projects.

It's basically like rereading the bible; it's about 3/4th the way in before you get to the interesting stuff, but by then you're so desperate to be done you don't really pay attention...