A priest of Jerusalem
Yosef ben Mattityahu, Joseph son of Matthias, was born in Jerusalem in 37 or 38 CE, in the first year of the emperor Caligula. Judea was then under Roman rule, and the Temple, rebuilt on a grand scale by Herod, stood at the centre of Jewish life. His family belonged to the city’s priestly aristocracy: his father Matthias was a priest of the first of the twenty-four priestly courses, and through his mother he claimed descent from the Hasmoneans, the dynasty of the Maccabees who had ruled an independent Jewish kingdom a century before.
Josephus tells us in his autobiography that he was a precocious student of the Jewish law, so learned by the age of fourteen that priests and leading men consulted him. At about sixteen he set out to experience the main schools of Jewish thought, the Pharisees, Sadducees and Essenes, and then spent three years in the wilderness with an ascetic teacher named Bannus, who lived on wild plants and bathed often in cold water for purity. At nineteen he returned to the city and, by his account, began to conduct his public life following the Pharisees.
Mission to Rome
In about 64 CE, when he was twenty-six, Josephus travelled to Rome to secure the release of some Jewish priests whom the Roman governor had sent in chains to be tried before Nero. He survived a shipwreck on the way, made friends with a Jewish actor popular at Nero’s court, and through him was introduced to the empress Poppaea, who helped win the priests’ freedom.
The journey left a deep impression. He had seen at first hand the size, wealth and military power of Rome. When he returned home he found Judea moving toward open revolt, and he later wrote that he tried, without success, to persuade the revolutionaries that war against Rome was hopeless.
Commander in Galilee
The great revolt broke out in 66 CE. After an early Jewish victory over the Roman governor of Syria, the leadership in Jerusalem divided the country into military districts, and Josephus, not yet thirty, was sent to command Galilee in the north, the region the Romans would attack first. He fortified towns, raised and trained troops, and struggled with rival leaders, especially John of Gischala, and with cities such as Sepphoris and Tiberias whose loyalties were divided.
In 67 CE the Roman general Vespasian invaded Galilee with a large army. Josephus held the fortified town of Jotapata, Yodfat, against a siege that by his account lasted forty-seven days. When it fell, he hid in a cave with forty other men who resolved to die rather than surrender. Josephus persuaded them to draw lots so that each would be killed by another. By his own account he and one other man were the last left alive, and they surrendered to the Romans. The episode has raised suspicion ever since. His two accounts of his Galilean command, in The Jewish War and in his later autobiography, do not always agree, and historians still argue about how committed to the revolt he really was.
From prisoner to Roman
Brought before Vespasian, Josephus declared that he came as a messenger from God and predicted that Vespasian and his son Titus would become emperors. Vespasian kept him in chains but spared his life. In 69 CE, after the turmoil following Nero’s death, Vespasian was proclaimed emperor, and he freed Josephus, who took the family name Flavius in honour of his patron.
Josephus then accompanied Titus during the siege of Jerusalem in 70 CE. He served as interpreter and negotiator, circling the walls to urge the defenders to surrender, and was wounded by a stone thrown from the city. His own parents were held inside. He watched the city fall and the Temple burn in the summer of 70, a catastrophe that ended the Second Temple period and reshaped Judaism forever. He later wrote that he used his influence with Titus to save relatives, friends and sacred books from the ruins.
After the war he went to Rome, where he received Roman citizenship, a pension and lodging in the house Vespasian had lived in before becoming emperor, as well as estates in Judea. His private life followed the upheavals of his career. Vespasian had arranged for him to marry a captive Jewish woman from Caesarea, who later left him. In Alexandria he married again, and from that marriage only one son, Hyrcanus, survived childhood. Later he divorced and married a Jewish woman of a distinguished family from Crete, with whom he had two sons, Justus and Simonides Agrippa.
The Jewish War
In Rome Josephus became a historian. His first work, The Jewish War, written first in Aramaic for Jews in the East and then in seven books of Greek, was completed in the later 70s CE. It tells the story from the Maccabean revolt to the fall of Jerusalem and the last stand at Masada in 73 or 74 CE. It is a gripping and often harrowing narrative, full of speeches, battles, famine and political intrigue.
Josephus wrote as a Jew under Roman patronage, and the book serves several purposes at once. It honours the Flavian emperors, blames the war on a minority of extremists and a series of corrupt Roman governors rather than on the Jewish people as a whole, and laments the destruction of the Temple. Historians read it critically, aware of his biases and his need to justify himself, but for many events it is the only detailed source that exists. Archaeologists at Masada, Gamla, Yodfat and in Jerusalem itself continue to test his descriptions against what they find in the ground. In 2007 the archaeologist Ehud Netzer announced that he had found Herod’s tomb at Herodium, guided in part by Josephus’s account of the king’s funeral, though other scholars have since disputed the identification. The Christian historian Eusebius later reported that Josephus was honoured with a statue in Rome, and that his books were placed in the public library there.
Defender of his people
Josephus’s later work was devoted to explaining Judaism to the Greek and Roman world. His Jewish Antiquities, twenty books completed around 93 or 94 CE, retells Jewish history from the Creation to the eve of the revolt, drawing on the Bible, Jewish traditions and many lost sources. It is our main source for much of the Second Temple period, including the Hasmonean dynasty and the reign of Herod. His autobiography, the Life, was attached to it, largely to answer a rival historian, Justus of Tiberias, who had challenged his conduct in Galilee.
His last work, Against Apion, written around the end of the first century, is a powerful defence of the Jewish people against the slanders of Greek writers. Josephus argued that the Jews were an ancient nation with a noble law, and that their constitution, in which God was sovereign and the whole people knew the law, deserved respect. He coined a word for it, “theocracy.” Whatever his compromises, Josephus never ceased to see himself as a Jew and a priest, and he spent his last decades presenting his people’s history and faith to a world that often despised them.
Traitor or survivor?
Few Jewish figures have been judged so harshly. His surrender at Jotapata, his life of comfort in Rome and his flattering portraits of the Flavians led many readers, ancient and modern, to regard him as a turncoat. The rabbinic literature never mentions him by name. Some modern historians have called him self-serving and duplicitous, and his accounts of his own conduct contain contradictions.
Others see a more complicated figure: an aristocrat who believed from the start that the revolt was doomed, who survived a catastrophe that killed huge numbers of his people, and who used his position to preserve their memory. Josephus himself presented his history as a record written by an eyewitness, so that the truth of what happened would not be lost. The tension between these views is part of why he remains so absorbing to read.
A legacy preserved by others
Josephus died around 100 CE, probably in Rome; neither the date nor the place is known. His works survived not because Jews preserved them but because Christians did. Early Christian writers such as Origen and Eusebius valued him as a witness to the world of the New Testament: he mentions John the Baptist and James, the brother of Jesus, and his Antiquities contains a passage about Jesus, the Testimonium Flavianum, which most scholars believe was later expanded by Christian copyists, though many think a shorter original lies beneath it. Medieval Europe read him widely, and William Whiston’s eighteenth-century English translation stood in many English-speaking households beside the Bible.
Jews rediscovered him through a tenth-century Hebrew adaptation, Sefer Yosippon, written in southern Italy, which became very popular, and in modern times through Hebrew translations of the original Greek. For historians and archaeologists of ancient Israel, he remains indispensable: the main guide to Herod’s Jerusalem, to the Jewish sects of the time, to the revolt and to the destruction of the Second Temple. Almost everything we know in detail about the world in which Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity were born passes, at some point, through the pen of Joseph son of Matthias.
Sources & further reading
Josephus, Wikipedia · Flavius Josephus, Encyclopedia.com · The Jewish War, Book 1 (Thackeray translation), Attalus · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life 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.