Jewish Antiquities
Ioudaikē Archaiologia
The full sweep of Jewish history, from creation to the eve of the revolt against Rome, deserves to stand as a national history equal in dignity to Greek and Roman historiography, told for a Greco-Roman readership largely ignorant of it.
- a full national history retold for a Greco-Roman audience
- extensive paraphrase of the Hebrew Bible via the Septuagint
- sole surviving detailed source for much of the Hasmonean and Herodian periods
- the disputed "Testimonium Flavianum" passage on Jesus
A twenty-book history of the Jewish people from creation to the outbreak of the war with Rome in AD 66, composed in Greek for a Greco-Roman readership by the same Judean-turned-Roman-client historian who wrote The Jewish War. Its earlier books closely paraphrase and retell the biblical narrative, drawing heavily on the Septuagint, while later books cover the Hasmonean, Herodian, and Roman-procuratorial periods largely absent from scripture, incorporating sources unavailable elsewhere. Written partly to present Judaism as an ancient, philosophically respectable tradition to a skeptical Greco-Roman audience, it preserves the only substantial non-Christian ancient references presently known to figures including John the Baptist and, in a passage of long-disputed authenticity, Jesus of Nazareth.
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