A Companion to Josephus by Chapman and Rodgers

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This one-volume mini-encyclopedia will tell you everything you need to know about Flavius Josephus (37-100 AD), the aristocratic Jewish priest and general who surrendered to the Roman commanders Vespasian and Titus in 67 AD and became an author of 30 volumes of works (The Jewish Wars, Jewish Antiquities and others), all written in Greek, the lingua franca of the Roman Empire’s intelligentsia. References in this review to the text will be made by page number, and not by author and title of article, since the style and overall assessment of Josephus are quite consistent.

 

In A Companion to Josephus, 29 scholars distill everything they know about Josephus into 30 dense articles, all of which are well fortified with background information and suggestions for further reading; two of them present 98 and 108 references! All of them support the consensus that his reputation has risen, and portray him as a skilled editor of sources; while he allows occasional obvious but not fatal discrepancies between accounts in different works, these are attributed to Josephus’s purposes, needs and biases. For instance, he “inserts God’s providence” into Jewish Antiquities where he does not mention it in parallel passages in Jewish Wars (p 51), and changes Saul’s demand for Philistine foreskins (I Samuel 18.25) into a demand for heads (p 53), to avoid offending his Gentile readers.

 

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