- Person
- Flavius Josephus
- Lived
- 37–c. 100 CE
- Field
- History
- From
- Judean (Roman citizen)
The story
Flavius Josephus was a Jewish priest's son from Jerusalem who, after the failed Jewish revolt against Rome, lived out his life in Rome as a historian. By the 90s he had written two major histories of his people, The Jewish War and Antiquities of the Jews. His last work took a different form: a reasoned defence of a people against prejudice.
In the Greek-speaking world of his day, writers had spread hostile stories about the Jews. One of the best known was Apion, an Egyptian grammarian and sophist, who repeated and embroidered earlier material, some of it linked to the Egyptian historian Manetho. Josephus's two-book reply, originally titled something like Concerning the Antiquity of the Jews, Against the Greeks, is now known as Against Apion. It was written after the Antiquities, around the year 97.
Rather than answering insults with insults, Josephus set out to test the charges. He argued that Jewish tradition was ancient and consistent, comparing it with the more recent Greek myths, and he examined the sources his opponents relied on, including Manetho's history of Egypt and the work of Menander of Ephesus. He defended the ethics and morals of Jewish law against claims that Jews were immoral, and in the second book he refuted the blood libel, the false story that Jews committed ritual murder, an accusation that would cause terrible suffering for many centuries afterwards.
Modern scholars describe Against Apion as a wide-ranging defence of Judaism against the charges laid against it in Josephus's time, and as an important example of ancient Jewish apologetics, following the earlier work of Philo of Alexandria. In the first book Josephus also listed the books he regarded as Hebrew Scripture, which makes the work valuable to historians of the Bible as well.
Against Apion shows a minority writer answering defamation with careful argument and an appeal to evidence. Its method, checking the sources behind a slander and setting out the facts, is one that people still use when confronting prejudice against any group.
Why it matters
Against Apion remains a key source for how ancient prejudice was spread and answered, and an early model of meeting ethnic slander with evidence rather than hostility.
About Flavius Josephus
Jerusalem priest and rebel commander turned Roman historian, whose Jewish War and Antiquities are our main record of Second Temple Judea and the fall of Jerusalem.
More about Flavius Josephus
Sources
- Against Apion Wikipedia
- Josephus World History Encyclopedia
- Josephus Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.