Selections From Titus Flavius Josephus
Titus Flavius Josephus
9781465656209
201 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
Josephus, son of Matthias the priest, and on his mother’s side claiming descent from the royal Hasmonæan house—or Flavius Josephus, to give him the name which he adopted out of gratitude to his Imperial patrons—was born in the first year of the Emperor Caligula, A.D. 37-38. St. Paul’s conversion had probably taken place a few years earlier. His life of upwards of sixty years falls into two nearly equal parts, spent respectively in Palestine and in Rome. The Palestinian portion, again, is sharply divided into the pre-war period (to A.D. 65), of which we know comparatively little, and the great four years’ war (A.D. 66-70), of which we know a great deal. Of his precocious youth, when, if we may believe him, Rabbis flocked to hear the wisdom of the boy of fourteen; how he himself two years later “did eagerly frequent Doctor and Saint,” making trial successively of the three sects of his nation, and ending his education by three years passed as an ascetic with a hermit in the wilderness; how on his return to Jerusalem at the age of nineteen he joined the popular and influential party of the Pharisees; of the one outstanding incident of his early manhood, his visit to Rome at the age of twenty-six—of all these things we may read in his own words. Although he finally threw in his lot with the Pharisees, we may judge from the three years’ stay with Ban(n)us, the specially full account which he gives of the Essenes, and other indications, that the tenets and communistic life of that order left a lasting impression. If we may again attempt a synchronism with events in the life of St. Paul, we may say that the Rabbis were listening to the boy about the time of the first Council of the Church at Jerusalem, he was receiving his schooling during the third missionary journey, and his return to Jerusalem nearly coincided with the arrest of the Apostle in that city. The journey to Rome (A.D. 63-4), like St. Paul’s a few years earlier, began with a shipwreck. Its nominal purpose was to plead the cause of certain priests who had been sent by Felix to Italy for trial. Chronology will hardly permit us to accept the suggestion of Edersheim to connect St. Paul’s liberation with the mission of Josephus; but he cannot have failed, during his stay in the city on the eve of the Neronian persecution, to become acquainted, if not with the work of the Apostle, at least with the existence of the Christian community. Through the influence of Poppæa, the mistress and afterwards wife of Nero, who coquetted with Judaism (Josephus’s words imply that she was a proselyte), he was successful in obtaining the release of the priests and returned to Judæa laden with presents. Besides the expressed object, was there any ulterior motive in this visit to the capital? Edersheim suggests that, foreseeing the trend of events, Josephus was already fired with the ambition of becoming the intermediary between Rome and his nation. At any rate, his visit had impressed him with a sense of Rome’s invincible power; and on his return to Judæa, where he found the Jews drifting towards revolt and everything pointing to the immediate outbreak of war, he at first tried to pacify the war-party, but in vain. The turbulent state of the country at length induced Cestius Gallus, the governor of Syria, to advance against Jerusalem. With the disastrous rout of his army in the defiles of Beth-Horon towards the end of A.D. 66, following upon his unexpected withdrawal from the gates of the metropolis, it was realized that the irrevocable step had been taken, and all preparations were made for the impending war.
