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A review by kahawa
The Antiquities of the Jews by Flavius Josephus
4.0
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.
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.