In Our Time - Josephus

Episode Date: May 21, 2015

It is said that, in Britain from the 18th Century, copies of Josephus' works were as widespread and as well read as The Bible. Christians valued "The Antiquities of the Jews" in particular, for the retelling of parts of the Old Testament and apparently corroborating the historical existence of Jesus. Born Joseph son of Matthias, in Jerusalem, in 37AD, he fought the Romans in Galilee in the First Jewish-Roman War. He was captured by Vespasian's troops and became a Roman citizen, later describing the siege and fall of Jerusalem. His actions and writings made him a controversial figure, from his lifetime to the present day.WithTessa Rajak Professor Emeritus of Ancient History, University of ReadingPhilip Alexander Professor Emeritus of Jewish Studies, University of ManchesterAndMartin Goodman Professor of Jewish Studies, University of Oxford and President of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish StudiesProducer: Simon Tillotson.

Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for more details about In Our Time, and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk slash Radio 4. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in 67 AD, during the first Jewish Roman war, Josephus was in charge of Jewish rebels in Galilee, facing the full, besieging might of the Roman army under Vespasian and his son Titus. Captured, Imprisoned, Josephus declared to them that he'd had a vision, that one day Vespasian will be emperor.

Two years later, that prophecy came true and freed from slavery, Josephus enjoyed a privileged position in the imperial household in Rome. There he wrote his great history, the Jewish War, his account of Roman triumph over a divided people. A later work, the antiquities of the Jews was treasured by Christians for almost 2,000 years, with its apparent corroboration of gospel accounts of Jesus' Messiah. He's become a controversial figure, though, called by many a traitor for changing sides during the Jewish War with Rome. We'd be discussed Josephus are Martin Goodman, Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Oxford and President of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies. Tessa Rajak, Professor Emeritus of Ancient History at the University of Reading

and Senior Research Fellow at Summermill College, Oxford, and Philip Alexander, Professor Emeritus of Jewish Studies at the University of Manchester. Philip Alexander, can you give us the background of the First Jewish Roman War? Yes, I would begin the story really where Josephus begins at himself, in the Jewish war with the Maccabian rebellion, which takes place in 167 BCE. The Jews revolt against their Greek overlords, the Seleucids, and finally establish a little independent Jewish state.

Now, that injects into Jewish society in Judea, Palestine, a nationalism that really wants. wasn't there before, a militant nationalism. And that rumbles through the period. The Hasmanian state, which the Maccabees founded, they belonged to a priestly house called the House of Hashmanai. The little independent state they founded lost its independence when Pompey came along, the Roman general Pompey. And in 63, he incorporated that little state into the Roman Empire. The Romans still continued to govern the Jews in the region through the Hasmanian priesthood, so there wasn't really direct rule from Rome at that point.

Then they governed it through Herod, the Great, who was a sort of local warlord, who took over from the Hasmanians, and he ruled over the region and over the Jews and other peoples as a client king within the Roman Empire. Then he died and his children carved up his little empire, his little state. But they didn't have the state craft skills that he had and gradually the Romans were forced to take over direct rule. And this proved quite disastrous because they didn't do it terribly well. How peaceful from a Roman point of view was what we could call Judea at the time of,

Well, say after Agrippa, the son of Herod. Yeah. It was peaceful enough in that I don't think they saw the trouble coming. It wasn't a militarised garrison, heavily militarised like others now. No, as I understand it, my colleagues are better qualified to speak in this. I understand that there wasn't a big military Roman presence at the time. But my feeling is that there was an awful lot of discontent simmering below the surface. For what reasons?

Well, I think that the nationalism which I mentioned, which had been injected, the militant nationalism, which had been injected into Jewish political life by the Maccabees, was rumbling there all the time. I wouldn't say that everybody was subscribing to it, but there were enough hotheads, if you like, and this is Josephus's kind of angle on this. There were enough hot heads, enough militants, zealots to be, subscribing to it to really cause

an awful lot of trouble which the Romans I think didn't really see the Romans gave the Jews there a lot of rope didn't they had three great festivals here which wasn't common anywhere else,

three great gatherings Romans were worried about great gatherings because they might turn into great oppositional gatherings and so they thought they were very content with the relationship

they had there well it's very interesting that the Jews often are exceptional within Roman treatment of peoples. And, you know, they were given certain status under Roman law, which was unusual. But I think there was a mixture of things.

Doubtless will speak about the causes of the war later, but there was a mixture of things that were there beneath the surface that finally, you know, resulted in the outbreak of this big explosion. Let's go for this now then. Tessaraj, what events would you say triggered what was being called the Great Revolta or the first Jewish Roman War? Well,

the thing about this uprising or revolt or war is that it's three things at once. It's one of those composite happenings. It's indeed arising against Rome, but it's also

an internal social revolution and at the same time it's a collision which becomes quite widespread between the Jewish and the non-Jewish population of the cities around Judea and then further afield in the Jewish diaspora. And all that happens comes to a head in around 66-67. So how are these things linked? Well, by one simple thing which you have already mentioned, Melvin, and that is disorder.

Keeping order was the Romans' top number one commitment as an imperial power, not uncommon, as a priority. And here they, in the end, totally failed and in their attempts to do things, do so, made things worse. So really Rome bore considerable responsibility for the lead-up to the war. They had had, and here I'm following Joseph's narrative, and I don't apologize for it.

We'll be talking no doubt about his own slant on things. But it's a very compelling narrative. A succession of poor administrators, the prefects and procurators that Rome put in place. They underestimated this little province. and religious clumsiness and insensitivity so that... Doing things in the temple. Doing things in the temple.

Paltius pilot did some of them. And in the 60s, we have the guy who Josephus thinks is the ultimate in incompetence and indeed just appalling conduct. Jesseus Flores, who totally lost control. And this is, simultaneous with a judgment being delivered from the centre

over a dispute in Caesarea, the Roman Administrative Centre in the area, in a dispute between Jews and Greeks there. So a lot's going on. You mentioned a social conflict. There was an inequality of a very striking inequality, very, very, very rich, very, very poor. That was a figure, that figured in the unrest as well, as I understand it. Very much so. Can I come, though, to Josephus himself? What do we know about his early life?

He's in the middle of all this. He's born in 37 AD. So he's growing up inside a system which has a king that the Romans let rule, as it were, and then he enters into a different situation. What was his early life? Can he give us a brisk view of his early life? Yes, indeed. And here it's also relevant that Jewish memory is centered on the Hasmanian rulership,

that period of a semi or total independence that they had had because Josephus was of that royal line, he tells us through his mother. That's terribly important to him. He was also priestly and, of course, the wealth and the accumulation of power and of religious and social prestige was around the temple in Jerusalem. He was one of them. He had a very good education, both in Hebrew and in Greek. He had an excellent education.

He was teaching others in the temple. like somebody else that we might think of, rather similar to the story of Jesus. He had a good education, and then he looked for more education. He joined all three of the sects that he says with the major divisions in Judaism, Pharisees, Sadducees and Esid,

and then followed a guru called Banus in the desert for a while. He did all that, and then he became a young diplomat, really, you might call it. I went to Rome to try to release... Went to Rome's 64. And that's what people did in the Roman Empire. Yeah, you know, if you're an elite, talented young man, you joined that sort of world. So, in Toronto, Martin Goodman, it didn't seem to met nearer that we know.

There's no evidence that he met nearer, but he got in the court, he got in the swing of things, obviously a clever man indeed in every way. But he came back in time for the start of the war. And without any expertise that we know about, but we don't know, we only know what he tells us, really. that period about himself. He was made a general or leader of some sort

and he was sent to a difficult part as the Romans decided that this was completely out of hand they were going to take it seriously and move in. Can you tell us about his experiences there? Yes, he didn't have any experience as a military man nor did any of the

other Jews who began the rebellion. And our real problem in trying to work out exactly what he did is that our narrative of the war and of his own part in it comes entirely from him. And he was writing after the event,

so with the knowledge that the war that he embarked in in 66 AD was going to end up four years later with a terrible disaster for the Jews and the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem, which was the main place that Jews thought that they should be worshipping their God. And also, the most magnificent place famed in the whole area,

not just in that area. Indeed, one of the greatest buildings of the Eastern Roman Empire, for good reasons that Jews all over the empire, sent their contributions in order to make it really, really impressive. And so when the war broke out, it wasn't at all clear who was going to lead the Jewish rebels, and Josephus tells us that six months after the war broke out, in October of 66. He was appointed as general in Galilee and went up to command the

Jewish forces against the Romans in Galilee, which he did with conspicuous lack of success. It doesn't seem to have had much of a clue as to quite how he was going to fight a war against extremely disciplined Roman forces, and indeed he didn't hold on to Galilee for very, very long. And they overwhelmed him and his forces, and there was this incident, well, it's incident, yes, it's incident, where there were 40 of him, 40 of them

left, after weeks of a siege, and they decided on a mutual suicide pact, as we read. Then what happened? Yes, this is the most notorious episode in Josephus' career, which has affected

the way in which he's been seen by later generations down to now. And he tells it with a good deal of verve in the account in the Jewish war, that he'd lost control of his final siege in Jotaparta in Galilee. He thought of surrendering. He was persuaded by his colleagues not to surrender. He persuaded them that, he tried to persuade them, that committing suicide was against Jewish law.

and he gives us a whole speech in which he tried to say this. They didn't agree with him. So they agreed that instead they would draw lots as to who would kill whom. And eventually through divine providence, he says there ended up just two of them left, and he persuaded his colleague that the two of them would surrender. And the reason why he does this, he did this, according to him, was because God told him to. And so it's rather striking. this narrative is known only from Josephus' own writings.

So we would know nothing at all about these events if Josephus didn't tell us. And the reason he tells us this is because he thinks he was clearly right. So he had had knightly dreams, he said, in which God came to him and told him that He, God, was moving to the side of the Romans. And of course, all this has been written after the war and it was clear that these divine prophecies were correct. So he was in prison, as we understand it, and enslaved in that sense.

But then he was brought in front of Vespasian, I'm being elliptical. And he told him that against all the odds, you could imagine at that time, he one day would be emperor quite soon, and so would his son Titus. And Spasian seems to have taken the dream on board and brought Josephus onto his side. Yes, so we are told by Josephus. Now, the only part of the whole story that is corroborated by any other ancient source is that Josephus was known as the Jewish prophet who had prophesied that Vespasian would become emperor. Now, in the year 67, when Josephus has said to have made this prophecy,

this was, as you say, deeply implausible. There had been 100 years of the descendants of Julius Caesar had been emperors in Rome. the idea that somebody like Vespasian, who came from an outstandingly undistinguished background, should become emperor, would not have occurred to anybody, including Vespasian. But it did happen two years later

after a civil war in Rome and a series of pretenders to Remem at the centre of Rome, and in due course the prophecy came true. And so it's clear that it was in the interest of both Vespasian and Josephus to say the prophecy had been said, whether it was said in 67, of course we can't now be certain. So he's in Rome, Philip Alexander, and he's housed by Vespasian.

It is after the war's over. He's being given land in Judeo to sustain him. And he starts writing the Jewish War, this enormously important book, seven volumes. But it's worth mention now, we may come back to it, we may not, just in case we don't. that one of the reasons he was called a traitor is not only he went over to Rome, but he worked with Titus and Vespasian, i.e., having been a former general, however, incompetent, he must have known what was what, and said, they're strong over there, they're not over there, they must have helped them out in a practical way, which is very serious act of being serious business. Okay, right, now let's get back to this book.

What did he cover in the Jewish War, the book, The Jewish War? He covered basically the story from the Maccabees down to the fall of the temple, down to the end of the Jewish revolt. And it's worth noting that in fact he tells us in the preface to the book that he first wrote an account of the war in Aramaic. It's almost certainly he's referring to Aramaic, and he sent it to the Jews in the Eastern Diaspora, which would have been Jews in modern-day Iraq, modern-day Persia, and possibly Syria and North Arabia.

But then he decided to translate this into Greek, and he gives several reasons why he decided to do that. First of all, the Jewish war was actually a big event. It was talked about at great length in the Roman world of the time. It was a big news item, if you were. you like. And he hints that there were other people had been writing accounts and they were not

accurate. So he decided to actually tell the story and he was able to do it because he had a ringside seat. It was also flexing his muscles, wasn't it? Because Eucydides has written about the war between Athens and Sparta as the greatest war ever fought. And Josephus thought, well, this is the greatest

war ever thought and I'm going to follow in the footsteps of Eucydides, write in Greek, invent speeches, do it the way he did it. Cricides was a sort of the historian whom you wanted to emulate. Yes, yes. No, he clearly thought that he was emulating the great Greek historians, and he does say that this was the greatest war that had been fought. Martin, you raise your hand.

I just thought that the seven books as we have them in Greek have very clearly got a Roman audience in mind. And that's simply from the title of the work, which he calls in his later works, the Jewish war. So from the point of view of the Romans, it was the Jewish war. Of course, from the point of view of the Jews, it would have been the Roman War. So if he wrote an earlier account for Jews, he must have had a different title. Yes. Tessarajag, why do you think you wrote the Jewish War? Yes, well, I'd like to throw something else here into the picture.

and if I may just query slightly my esteemed colleagues last remark we're not sure that ancient works had titles at all and I think the Romans put that one on Josephus. I think there is a big Jewish internal component to the work and I do think that in the end who would have actually bought it, picked it up and read it, but people who were really, really interested, not those Romans, but Jews from all over the world, world. People wanted to know why Jerusalem

fell and I think he felt he owed them an account and not just of what he had done but of what happened and he says something very interesting. He has a long preface where he sets up the work and he says I hope you'll allow me also to lament for the fall of my country and of

Jerusalem and although my facts are better than anybody else is, I was an eyewitness this is an entirely true history not like my competitors there is also room for me as what we would call an engaged historian, to express my feelings.

And I think this is a post-war, post-catastrophe world. And I think also it's why did it happen, how did it happen, and whose fault was it? And a lot of the work, we'll see more of this when we talk about, the Christian take on it, is blaming those Jews who went to war. It's a huge, huge attack on the extremists among those nationalists, extremists in religion and in politics, who forced the war on a moderate group of which Josephus was one of the leaders.

Martin Goodman, do you want to take that on in any way, amplify it, and the idea of him blaming the extremists, Sikari, this extremist there, and how that ties in with your view of his factual reliability? It's his instant history. So he was writing it within... It's not bad instant history. I mean... That's great.

One thing I've got, can I pick up on a tiny thing? Please ignore it, but he just niggles away. You say he's writing with hindsight. Don't all you historians write with hindsight. I mean, what's history about it? It's about the past. You've got hindsight. What's the problem?

Indeed. And it's always... The answer is it's always the problem. It's always a problem because you know the disaster is going to come. But what's the question would be the particular problem with your secret. Right. I forget it. Okay.

It's a particular problem. with Josephus because of the extent of the disaster. And this is something that perhaps we've lost sight of over the last 2,000 years, that the temple in Jerusalem was the main place where God required his people to worship him. And there hasn't been one for the last 2,000 years, so we sort of got used to the idea.

But it wasn't at all obvious in antiquity when worshipping in temples was the standard way to worship. And in Rome, where he was writing the account of the Jewish War, the propaganda of the new regime of Vespasian and Titus was based entirely around the defeat of the Jews. So you think of the Arch of Titus, you can still see when you go to Rome. You think of the Colosseum that was built with the money that came from slaves

who were sold at the end of the Jewish rebellion. Jewish slaves, yeah. The centre of Rome, where he was writing, had been reconstructed to, so to speak, describe, Judaism as no longer an acceptable religion. And so he had a lot to explain. Philip, have you wanted to come in? Yes. For me, one of the key points about the message that he's trying to get across in the war

is it's looking both ways. On the one hand, it's saying to the Romans, don't blame all the Jews for this disaster. It was a lot of hotheads. But that same message also in the Jewish context is, saying to Jews, don't follow these hotheads. So there's a kind of double, a genus-like aspect to the message of the war,

and much of Josephus's writing. Can I come back to pick up something implied in what you said, Martin, that the much that was made of it in Rome, was that because Vespasian and his son Titus wanted to prove their imperial credentials, which didn't come from birth, but came from war? So they made it a massive thing with their arches and their colosseum, which was very important, and this was a great war that everybody ought to understand,

with the candelabra from the temple being paraded through the room and so on and so forth. Wasn't it partly to do with the propaganda push on the part of those two, Father and Son? I think probably entirely to do with that. So if you go back to the lack of legitimacy for Spasian and Titus becoming emperor, they needed to say what a great victory they'd won. and in Roman society you got political power through military competence. And so what had been an internal rebellion within the Roman Empire was portrayed as a defeat of foreigners.

And so Josephus has a lot to try to explain. And I entirely agree with Philip that ultimately what Josephus would have liked would have been a return of a temple and ordinary, proper, sensible Jews like him, back with the temple and with the priests doing what they'd always done before, which is what you might have expected to have happened in 66 when the revolt broke out. And the beginning of the revolt was marked by the priests in the temple, refusing to make offerings to the Jewish God on behalf of the Roman Emperor.

You would expect the war to have ended with the temple still standing and the Jews being encouraged to make such offerings. It didn't end that way. It ended up with no temple at all. Can we move on, unless there's something crucial more to say about that, to this 20-volume work, the antiquities of the Jews. Right, okay? Any bids, no bays.

Right, Philip, let's talk about the antiquities of the Jews, 20 volumes after his first great book. Yes. It's written about 20 years after the Jewish war, and about 94, probably, under the mission. And I find it personally a much more engaging book because what he tries to do in that is cover the whole history of the Jews, their culture, their religion. And it's very much aimed at a Gentile audience to argue that the Jews are an ancient people with great traditions and a great culture. It shows his learning in a way, his traditional Jewish learning in a way that the war doesn't. because a large part of the book is retelling the story of the Bible,

what we now call the Bible. And he tells it with all sorts of additions and interpretations, which shows how he was trained in school in Jerusalem, taught this method of reading Bible. So I find it a very warm and very interesting book, and it shows it right to the end of his life. He was deeply engaged with his native, culture and trying to explain it.

But the problem which will arise is that he is doing it from Rome, in Rome, as he's now officially called Flavius, if he wants to call himself Flavius, which he does in the later book, and he's in that camp instead of that camp. And that never goes away, does it? Yes, but can I just gloss that a little, in that he belongs in that sense to a great diaspora world of Jewish culture? You've got to think of the two pole. of Jewish world.

There's the centre in Palestine in Jerusalem and then there's the diaspora. And he's really part at that point of what's called Hellenistic Greek Jewish culture. And that's really quite different in quality and tone

from what was being produced in the old homeland. Tessa Rajak, as you mentioned that, I think, the antiquities was sort of to be very valuable to early Christians. for nearly to a thousand years. Can you explain why?

Yes. If I could just add one tale piece to what Philip said, by the time he wrote the antiquities, he had a different patron. It was no longer the Flavians. He may or may not still have been living in Vespasian's old house, but he had a guy called Epaphroditus,

a Greek freedman. So he belongs also to that world of Greeks living in Rome, who have their own cultural identity, all sorts of Asian and Syrian Greek writers and from other parts of the Roman Empire. So the antiquities, and he wrote another work defending Judaism, the against Apio.

Yeah, but we come to that. Can we talk about antiquities, right? Yes, indeed. So, I mean, Josephus was absolutely God's gift to early Christianity as it separated from Judaism. And that was happened at about the time of the destruction of the temple. So we're talking about a very, very radical thing happening in that first thing, a lot of radical things, but perhaps in one particular area, rather large area of life, doesn't seem to diminish at all one way in another, a massive area of life.

The temple crushed, the Christians seem to come, grow in important, cheese the chance, whatever you can use better phrases than I am. Something happened, there was a step change there. So can you tell us why the Christians thought it was so about? The Christians had to do two things, of course. course, they had to graft their own new sect, which became a religion, onto Jewish history, to see themselves as the new Israel, to appropriate, as it were, Judaism. And so for them, an account of the fall of the temple and apparently the end of Judaism

in Jerusalem was tremendously important. And so they had that already in the Jewish war. And then they had this fantastic critique of Judaism. So Josephus came to them as really persona grata. He really was all things to all men in his lifetime and therefore subsequently. But what about the Christians? And for the Christians too. He told them how wicked the Jews had been and that was perfect. And then ironically, the antiquities come into play as you say. And so ironically, because his fame rests on a passage that's probably a forgery. It's the so-called Testimonium Flavianum, as it was known, through the Middle Ages and on, a paragraph about Jesus, an external witness.

Yeah, about the time they let Jesus, a wise man, if you need no order to call him a man, he has not performed surprising deeds, and the tribe of the Christian so called after him is still, to this day, has not disappeared. So that paragraph, which is disputed as to whether he did it or it was done, 100, 200 more later, that paragraph was seized on when the thing came through as evident, independent evidence of the Gospels, that this was happening, and therefore his work was taken into their literature. And he was esteemed as a historian because a witness and a prophet. Ironically, from the bit that you read, one can already see that he couldn't have written the whole of it. If indeed he was a man is one thing, the resurrection is mentioned.

and he was the Christ comes in halfway through. So it's either holy or partly tampered with, and we know that happened between one of the church father's origin who says Josephus doesn't mention Jesus and another Eusebius, who has this whole passage. Eusebius at the time of Constantine. Exactly. And from then on, now it's true to say that during the Renaissance,

there were dissenting voices critical. and skeptical scholars queried the testimony, but on the whole, it marched on through the centuries and made Josephus probably the most red Greek historian right through the Christian Europe, through many centuries. Philip, you wanted to come in. I was just wanting to emphasize the importance of Eusebius, who's been mentioned, as you say, the French.

end of Constantine. He wrote the definitive history of the early church, the ecclesiastical history, and he relies a lot on Josephus. And what he really relies on him mostly for is this account of the destruction of the temple, because he

wants to argue this shows God rejecting Judaism. So it's really Eusebius, who I think brings him into the Christian tradition in a big way, and from Eusebius on, then he is almost a Christian sinned. And he's with Constantine and brings him into the Roman tradition.

Yes. In fact, Romanises the entire thing. Can you be brief? Please, please. Very brief indeed. I just wanted to say that the antiquities of course also provided Eusebius and everybody subsequently with lots and lots of material that actually backed up the gospel accounts.

It told everyone who the herods were and it told them about the geography of the place. without it, I mean, very little would have been known about the world of Jesus. So it was just an indispensable Vardémycom apart from the, you know, the reference to Jesus. Martin Goodman, there were many translations of Josephus. He goes in like a lot of these, right,

he goes in and out of fashion. Let's go to the 18th century with William Whiston's translation. Why was that important? It's been an astonishing publishing phenomenon. There were lots of translations as you say, originally into Latin in late antiquity by Christian authors

and then within the Christian world into the different vernaculars, so French and Spanish and English during the 16th and 17th centuries. So the success of Weston's translation, which was not at all the first English translation, is rather remarkable. By the 19th century,

if you went into many ordinary homes in this country or in the United States, you would find a copy of a Wisdom Josephus sitting next to the Bible, possibly not read, but certainly there with the sense of authority. And if you go on to the Internet, now it's the Winston translation that you hit most easily. Wisdom was a remarkable person. He was the successor of Newton as the Lucidian Professor of Mathematics in Cambridge. Cambridge and then got thrown out for his dubious ideas in Christian theology and just wrote and wrote and wrote for the rest of his life during the first half of the 18th century. And the success of this particular translation, one of many translations he did, is a bit of a mystery, why it trumped all the other ones, but it did.

and it helped to spread the authority of Josephus in the English speaking world, clearly with immense success. One of the dramatic things in this is his description, Joseph's description of the fall of Masada, the 960 people who committed suicide there. It's taken as a correct description, it's an extremely vivid description. If you go to Massada, it's as it were,

on the walls there and there's very little questioning of whether this is or is not accurate now where do you stand on that Tessa? Well of course it has been questioned by sort of post and anti-Zionists in very active debate

recently and it's interesting that they go back and say well how can this be such a highlighted and much-price story for you know for the for Israel and in Jewish consciousness,

when it's probably not true. Josephus was a liar, wasn't he? That's where the debate has come down to. So again, Josephus sent a stage. I stand on it that, of course, well, we all knew that the speeches are made up, as you mentioned, his good Greek historians make up speeches. The story of the collective suicide, which is a sort of counterpoise to what Josephus didn't do

at Yotaparta, and here suicide is advocated and carried out by these 960 survivors of the Roman mopping up operation in 73 or 4C.E. It's a very dramatic story as told by Josephus, and again, it is a counterpose also to his telling of the Roman triumph of Suspacian and Titus, which he has to do, I suppose, as a good Flavian writer. And here he actually highlights Jewish, it is the one glorious moment of the extremists. I know there are some ambivalences in his account of the suicide, but nonetheless we come away thinking, wow. And my belief is that something very like it must have happened,

though of course he embellished it and made it a great set piece, which has been tremendously important since really the late 19th century in forming modern Jewish identity as a fighting people rather than a passive people. Is there a general agreement on that opinion? Certainly of the importance of the Masada story in the Jewish self-consciousness.

Of course, it's slightly bizarre that self-consciousness should be the heroism of total failure because they will end up dying at Masada. but it's part of the complexity of the Jewish reception of Josephus down to the 21st century, because everything we've been talking about has been the Christian reception, among whom Josephus was seen as immensely authoritative and important.

And then among Jews who didn't read the Greek books of Josephus until the Renaissance, because they just didn't read the Greek. and it was entirely preserved Joseph's work by Christians. When they came to know about it, they were much more ambivalent about it. And so you have contrasting views from the early 19th century among Jews as to whether the works of Josephus are, as Christians thought, a great authority for the nature of Jewish history, or whether they are indeed the work of a traitor who shouldn't be believed about anything.

Can we concentrate on that for a while, maybe for the rest of the program, Philip? Bill of Alexander. One of the points I would stress again with my colleagues is the way that Josephus' account of the fall of Massada creates this big symbol for the modern state of Israel. And that is very interestingly encapsulated in a famous poem by a modern Hebrew author called Isaac Lamdan. And he called it Masada.

And it's very interesting, although he wrote in Hebrew, he calls it by Josephus' Greek name Masada, not the Hebrew name. And the most famous line in that poem is Masada shall not fall again. And that's a good line. It's a very good line. But what this means is, you know, Masada becomes a symbol for the beleaguered state of Israel, and it expresses the determination that Masada shall not fall again. I just want to say a little more about this business of him being considered to have been a traitor.

And there's still a dispute among scholars and among Jewish scholars and other scholars. Is he to be relied on because he went to the other side? He probably informed for the other side against what would be seen as his own people helped them to win. And therefore helped a lot of killings of his fellow citizens back in Jerusalem and around the place. What's the status of that at the moment, Martin? Well, I think the dispute of it has not really resolved itself since began in the 1820s and 1830s, when the Wyssenchafter Studentom's movement,

which is the science of Judaism in Germany, began trying to find a sort of historical scientific base for Jewish history, so that Jews would look like other European nations and have a history of their own. And Josephus was wonderful for them, because instead of having to talk about one rabbi after another, they could talk about what looked like political history for the whole of the Hasmanian period

that Philip was talking about at the beginning, which otherwise they know almost nothing about without Josephus' writings. So they saw him as very important for writing this history, but at the same time, this is the same period as Jews were looking at their status within European societies, being given emancipation, within European societies,

so beginning to become good Germans as well as Jews or good Englishmen as well as Jews, and also worrying about the nature of Jewish nationalism. And what happened was that Jews began to see Josephus both as very important as their authority for a national history at the same time as they saw him as somebody who had swapped sides. So he still put on to... trial occasion. Yeah, and in

the 20th century it was standard among youth groups, Jewish youth groups, to put Josephus on trial, and people would talk on either side. Indeed, in the French resistance, Jewish youth group did this, you'd have thought they'd have other things to do, but they did put him on trial, and he was convicted. Well, unfortunately, I've turned to

an end, thanks to Martin Goodman, Tessa Rejak and Philip Alexander. Next week, we'll be talking about the science of glass. Thank you for listening, even. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Are you going to tell me what we missed out? Don't tell me what you're going to do.

It's too big a subject. We missed out Your Sepon. But you implied Your Syphiard. Because the Lambdan poem is from Yusipon. Yes, yes. So Yusipon is this Hebrew version from the Latin. that became very important among rabbinic Jews from the 9th century.

We missed out the whole rabbinic take, not taker, I was swinging to the rabbinic tradition after 74, didn't we really. Well, there are A-historicism, which was then remedied by the Enlightenment that became conscious of history. And we also missed out against Apion, which I didn't succeed in smuggling in, which is really how Josephus redeemed himself in the, eyes of

Jewish scholars and lay people that although as Heinrich Ress said he didn't earn the crown of a patriot but he they often say he did in the end justify his existence as a Jew by defending Judaism against

anti-Sivites and all sorts of other I was a bold move to write that in Rome at the time where they were still you know they were the Jews were too regarded is a, I think, completely political,

enemy. And for him to sit down and ride, and it must have taken a lot of nerve, I thought. And the antiquities as well, really. Yeah, and it didn't really have much effect as propaganda for the Jews, you know, trying to explain the Jews, I think, because they remained regarded

with huge suspicion. Of course, very shortly after there was a second revolt. Well, there was revolt at the pain. Again, he was probably preaching that to the converted, if there's a feel-good factor there, isn't there, how we defend ourselves and restore our own sort of sense of pride.

But it was very useful also to Christians. They took a lot of motifs in Christian apologetics come straight out of Josephus against Appian. Sorry to interrupt. Do you think the Christian reference is just later altogether? It's inserted later. You think that too? I think there's a core.

I think there was something there to hang it on. Because if you look at the two pastures either side, it looks like there was something there. Oh, do you think so? I think they're closed up neatly without anything. I agree with Martin on this. I think there was a peg. The bit that I didn't answer properly was the question of the reliability of Josephus.

Because the real question was, why go on writing about this stuff at all? So why write about Jews in a society which is deeply anti-Jewish? When if he had to write anything, he should have written poetry or did not have something which would have been safer. Harmless, yeah. And the against Apion is the most striking of these things, because why defend Judaism in a society where it's just a silly thing to do? And plenty of Jews to stop being Jewish.

So why do you think it is? Because he cares about it. And he actually believes that this prophecy that said God has spoken to him, which modern readers are extremely skeptical about, we know about because he told us. And so I think he believes it. We have Simon Tell us and the producer who's going to make an important announcement. Who'd like to eat?

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