Josephus and His Writings

Flavius Josephus was a Jewish priest, a Pharisee, and a general in the revolt against Rome who ultimately surrendered, ended up in Roman custody, and spent the rest of his long life writing history in Latin-speaking circles. He was born in Jerusalem around AD 37, a few years after the Crucifixion, and he died around AD 100. He is not a Christian source. He is something arguably more useful for certain questions: an outsider, working from Jewish records and personal memory, writing in the generation immediately after the events the New Testament describes. His works are the single most detailed non-biblical account of Second Temple Judaism, Roman Judea, and the world in which Jesus lived and the apostles preached.

His major works

All four works survive complete and are available free online in William Whiston's 1737 English translation, which is public domain and remains the standard English rendering.

• Antiquities of the Jews (20 books). The most important for our purposes. A history of the Jewish people from creation through AD 66, drawing on the Hebrew scriptures, earlier historians, and his own knowledge. Books 18 through 20 cover the Roman governors of Judea, including Pilate, Herod Antipas, and the deaths of John the Baptist, James, and the figure called Jesus.
• The Jewish War (7 books). An account of the revolt against Rome (AD 66-73), the siege of Jerusalem, and the destruction of the Temple in AD 70. Josephus was present for much of this as a prisoner and observer. The most vivid first-hand account of the catastrophe that ended the world of the New Testament.
• Against Apion (2 books). A defense of the antiquity and credibility of Jewish scripture against Greek critics who dismissed Moses as too recent to be trusted. Useful background for anyone thinking about how ancient people evaluated the reliability of old texts.
• The Life. His autobiography, written as an appendix to the Antiquities. Covers his conduct as a general in Galilee and defends his surrender to Rome.

The complete works, read here in full

All of Josephus survives complete, and here it is gathered to read in full, not merely linked. The text is William Whiston's 1737 English translation, public domain and still the standard English rendering. Pick a work below; it loads into the reader. Use find to search within a work (for example, type Pilate or Machaerus), the arrows to step between matches, and A−/A+ to size the text.

Reference form for citing a passage is work, book, chapter, section, e.g. Ant. 18.3.3. The Discourse Concerning Hades is traditionally printed with Josephus, but its authorship is disputed and many scholars assign it instead to Hippolytus; it is included here for completeness, flagged honestly.

The three passages that matter most

Josephus mentions figures from the New Testament in several places, but three passages have drawn the most sustained attention from historians and believers alike.

John the Baptist (Ant. 18.5.2)

This is the cleanest of the three, largely undisputed. Josephus describes Herod Antipas executing John, who is called "a good man" who "commanded the Jews to exercise virtue, both as to righteousness towards one another, and piety towards God, and so to come to baptism." He ties John's death to the defeat of Herod's army, which some Jews read as divine punishment for killing the prophet. The account is independent of the Gospels, fits the timeline, and adds detail not found in the New Testament, including the name of the prison (Machaerus) and the political context. Scholars across the spectrum treat it as authentic.

James, brother of Jesus (Ant. 20.9.1)

Josephus records the high priest Ananus bringing "James the brother of Jesus who was called Christ" before the Sanhedrin and having him stoned. This passage is short, incidental, and carries no theological argument. It is precisely because it is unremarkable from a Jewish-historian standpoint that most scholars, including skeptical ones, consider it authentic: there is no obvious motive for a Christian interpolator to insert it when the passage adds nothing to the faith case. It corroborates both that Jesus existed and that James was known as his brother, consistent with Galatians 1:19.

The Testimonium Flavianum (Ant. 18.3.3)

This is the famous passage, and the one that requires the most honest handling. In the standard text as it has come down, Josephus describes Jesus as "a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man," says "he was the Christ," describes the Crucifixion, and reports that "he appeared to them alive again the third day." The difficulty is plain: a non-Christian Jewish historian writing around AD 93 would almost certainly not have written those words in that form. They read as the work of a Christian copyist.

The question is not whether Josephus wrote about Jesus, but which parts of the passage are his. The key evidence is a 10th-century Arabic version preserved by the bishop Agapius, which appears to give an earlier, less embellished form. In that version Josephus says Jesus "was thought to be the Christ," the resurrection claim is qualified as "perhaps the Messiah concerning whom the prophets said wonderful things," and the divine-man language is absent. The broader scholarly view is that Josephus did write about Jesus, that the passage has been expanded by Christian scribes, and that the Agapian version is closer to what he actually said. Even the qualifying "was thought to be the Christ" is significant, coming from a non-Christian source whose text Origen read in the early 3rd century and noted did not assert Jesus was the Christ at all.

What he adds to reading the New Testament

Josephus is not primarily a source for arguing about Jesus. He is more broadly useful for anyone who wants to read the New Testament in its own world rather than in a vacuum. The Pharisees and Sadducees, whom the Gospels mention constantly, come alive in his descriptions of their actual beliefs and disputes. The Temple, its layout, its politics, and its destruction, is described by someone who saw it and mourned it. Herod the Great's building projects, which are the backdrop to the Nativity accounts, are documented in detail. Pontius Pilate's character, including episodes that match the Gospels' portrait of a man who was brutal and politically calculating, appears in both the Antiquities and The Jewish War. The world the apostles walked into is the world Josephus grew up in.

And the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, which Jesus prophesied in Matthew 24:2 and which Josephus witnessed and described in harrowing detail in The Jewish War, is one of those moments where sacred history and secular history converge at a single datable point. Reading Josephus's account of the siege and the burning of the Temple alongside Luke 21 and Matthew 24 is one of the more striking reading experiences available.

Study the passages

Links go to BibleHub for the Scripture side; for Josephus, use the complete Whiston text gathered above (search a passage with the reader's find box).

• Galatians 1:19: James called "the Lord's brother"
• Matthew 14:3-12: John the Baptist and Herod in the Gospels
• Matthew 24:2: the prophecy of the Temple's destruction
• Luke 21:20-24: Jerusalem surrounded and the days of vengeance

Primary source: Flavius Josephus, translated by William Whiston (1737), public domain. Available free at Project Gutenberg and sacred-texts.com. The Agapius Arabic version of the Testimonium is discussed in: Shlomo Pines, An Arabic Version of the Testimonium Flavianum and Its Implications (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1971). Standard reference: Louis Feldman, Josephus and Modern Scholarship (1984), and John Meier, A Marginal Jew, Vol. 1 (1991), which gives a thorough reconstruction of the authentic Testimonium core. This page presents Josephus as a historical source; the question of faith rests on the Scriptures, not on him.