he much admired, and was also a devoted and loyal lover of Judaism.  Unfortunately, circumstances thrust him into a political position from which he could extricate himself only by treachery and duplicity.  As a young man he had visited Rome, and there acquired enthusiastic admiration for the Romans.  When he returned to Palestine, he found his countrymen filled with fiery patriotism and about to hurl themselves against the legions of the Caesars.  To his dismay Josephus saw himself drawn into the patriotic vortex.  By a strange mishap an important command was entrusted to him.  He betrayed his country, and saved himself by eager submission to the Romans.  He became a personal friend of Vespasian and the constant companion of his son Titus.

Traitor though he was to the national cause, Josephus was a steadfast champion of the Jewish religion.  All his works are animated with a desire to present Judaism and the Jews in the best light.  He was indignant that heathen historians wrote with scorn of the vanquished Jews, and resolved to describe the noble stand made by the Jewish armies against Rome.  He was moved to wrath by the Egyptian Manetho’s distortion of the ancient history of Israel, and he could not rest silent under the insults of Apion.  The works of Josephus are therefore works written with a tendency to glorify his people and his religion.  But they are in the main trustworthy, and are, indeed, one of the chief sources of information for the history of the Jews in post-Biblical times.  His style is clear and attractive, and his power of grasping the events of long periods is comparable with that of Polybius.  He was no mere chronicler; he possessed some faculty for explaining as well as recording facts and some real insight into the meaning of events passing under his own eyes.

He wrote for the most part in Greek, both because that language was familiar to many cultured Jews of his day, and because his histories thereby became accessible to the world of non-Jewish readers.  Sometimes he used both Aramaic and Greek.  For instance, he produced his “Jewish War” first in the one, subsequently in the other of these languages.  The Aramaic version has been lost, but the Greek has survived.  His style is often eloquent, especially in his book “Against Apion.”  This was an historical and philosophical justification of Judaism.  At the close of this work Josephus says:  “And so I make bold to say that we are become the teachers of other men in the greatest number of things, and those the most excellent.”  Josephus, like the Jewish Hellenists of an earlier date, saw in Judaism a universal religion, which ought to be shared by all the peoples of the earth.  Judaism was to Josephus, as to Philo, not a contrast or antithesis to Greek culture, but the perfection and culmination of culture.