Josephus

“We have not among us innumerable books discordant and contrary to each other, but only two-and-twenty, containing the history of all time, which are justly believed to be divine.”

Josephus, Against Apion 1.8¹

Overview

Josephus (c. 37 to c. 100 AD), also known as Flavius Josephus, was a first-century Jewish priest, military commander, and historian whose surviving works narrate the political and religious world of first-century Judaism, the Jewish revolt against Rome, and the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in AD 70.²³ Reformed writers on the doctrine of Scripture have drawn on his statement of the Hebrew Old Testament canon, and historians of the New Testament era have used his narratives to help date events in Acts.⁴⁵

Life and Career

Josephus was born in Jerusalem in the first year of the reign of Gaius Caligula (AD 37), into a priestly family that also claimed descent, on his mother’s side, from the Hasmonean royal line.² By his own account he was recognized as a promising student by age fourteen, and at sixteen set out to test the teaching of the three principal Jewish schools of thought, the Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes, before spending three years in the wilderness with an ascetic teacher named Bannus and then adopting the practice of the Pharisees at nineteen.⁶ At twenty-six he sailed to Rome to secure the release of some Jewish priests held there, arriving after his ship was wrecked in the Adriatic; he obtained an introduction to Nero’s wife Poppaea and won the priests’ freedom.⁷

When the revolt against Rome broke out in AD 66, the Jerusalem leadership sent Josephus, with two other priests, to Galilee, and he was subsequently given command there.⁸ The Roman general Vespasian’s forces besieged and took the Galilean town of Jotapata in AD 67. Josephus survived the fall of the city by hiding with forty other men in a cave; when their hiding place was discovered, he talked the others out of a suicide pact, was among the last two left alive after they drew lots to kill one another, and surrendered to the Romans.³ Brought before Vespasian, he predicted that Vespasian would become emperor, a prediction that Vespasian later credited when it came true.³ Freed once Vespasian took the throne in AD 69, Josephus took the imperial family name Flavius, settled in Rome under the patronage of the Flavian emperors, and turned to writing history: The Jewish War (c. AD 75 to 79), the Jewish Antiquities (AD 93/94), an autobiographical Life, and Against Apion, a defense of Judaism against its Greco-Roman critics.³ He is generally reckoned to have died in Rome around AD 100.

Theological Contribution

Witness to the Hebrew canon

In Against Apion, Josephus set out to explain and defend Judaism to a Greco-Roman audience, and in doing so gave the earliest surviving outside description of the shape of the Hebrew Scriptures. He wrote that the Jewish people held “only two-and-twenty” books “which are justly believed to be divine,” five of Moses, thirteen historical and prophetic books “from the death of Moses to the reign of Artaxerxes,” and four more of “hymns to God and precepts for human life,” adding that later Jewish writings “have not been esteemed worthy of credence like that given to the books before them, because the exact succession of the prophets has been wanting.”¹ Reformed writers on the doctrine of Scripture have repeatedly drawn on this passage. Bavinck cites Josephus’s count of “twenty-two books divided into three parts” alongside Philo’s practice of citing only the canonical books, noting that “in the opinion of most scholars, the Old Testament canon of Philo and Josephus was identical with ours.”⁴ Mastricht likewise appeals to Josephus’s testimony in Against Apion as evidence that the Jewish church never received the Apocrypha as canonical Scripture.⁹ Barrows draws the same passage on to explain why none of the Apocryphal books were ever admitted into the Hebrew canon: Josephus placed the close of the prophetic succession at the reign of Artaxerxes Longimanus, after which “the exact succession of the prophets” was wanting, and Barrows adds that “Josephus, as we have seen, clearly recognized their true character.”¹⁰

An independent historical source

Josephus lived through the events he narrates, and his works survive complete and outside the New Testament documents, so historians of the apostolic era use him alongside other Roman writers to date events in Acts. F. F. Bruce’s study of the chronology of Acts turns to Josephus repeatedly: on the expulsion of Jews from Rome that Luke mentions in Acts 18:2, Bruce notes that “Josephus juxtaposes” an earlier expulsion, under Tiberius in AD 19, “with severe action taken about the same time against Isis-worshippers in Rome,” and weighs Josephus’s account against the Roman historians Dio Cassius and Suetonius in working out when Aquila and Priscilla actually left the city.⁵ Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities also contains a disputed passage about Jesus, known as the Testimonium Flavianum, whose original wording and authenticity scholars still debate;¹¹ that debate belongs to the historicity of Jesus rather than to Josephus’s own biography.

Historical Significance

Josephus surrendered to Vespasian’s forces at Jotapata rather than die with the last defenders, and he spent the rest of his life writing under the patronage of the Roman emperors whose armies had destroyed Jerusalem.³ His surviving narrative of first-century Judaism, the Jewish revolt, and the temple’s destruction comes from a Jewish priest and commander who ended his life as a client historian of Rome.³

Related Doctrines

References

Elijah Porter Barrows, Companion to the Bible (New York: American Tract Society, 1867), 196-97. ↩ ↩²
Flavius Josephus, The Life, trans. William Whiston, sec. 1. Not held in the Theopedia Library; consulted in the public-domain Whiston translation at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, https://www.ccel.org/j/josephus/works/autobiog.htm. ↩ ↩²
Flavius Josephus, The Wars of the Jews, trans. William Whiston, bk. 3, chap. 8. Not held in the Theopedia Library; consulted in the public-domain Whiston translation at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, https://www.ccel.org/j/josephus/works/war-3.htm. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶
Herman Bavinck, Reformed Dogmatics: Abridged in One Volume, ed. John Bolt (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011), chap. 5, “Holy Scripture”: “Josephus counts twenty-two books divided into three parts. In the opinion of most scholars, the Old Testament canon of Philo and Josephus was identical with ours.” ↩ ↩²
F. F. Bruce, “Chronological Questions in the Acts of the Apostles,” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 68, no. 2 (1986): 280. ↩ ↩²
Josephus, The Life, sec. 2. ↩
Josephus, The Life, sec. 3. ↩
Josephus, The Life, sec. 7. ↩
Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, vol. 1, Prolegomena, trans. Todd M. Rester, ed. Joel R. Beeke (Grand Rapids: Reformation Heritage Books, 2018), chap. 2, “Holy Scripture,” 220-312. ↩
Barrows, Companion to the Bible, 350-51. ↩
Flavius Josephus, Jewish Antiquities, trans. William Whiston, bk. 18, chap. 3, sec. 3. Not held in the Theopedia Library; consulted in the public-domain Whiston translation at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, https://www.ccel.org/j/josephus/works/ant-18.htm. ↩