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Article: Flavius Josephus.(Brief Article)
- Article from:
- Commonweal
- Article date:
- November 4, 1994
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1994 Commonweal Foundation. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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As an apologia for his natal faith and culture, Josephus, in the final decade of his life, wrote The Antiquities of the Jews, tracing the history of the Jews from the creation narrative in Genesis to the beginnings of the Jewish wars. It is in that work where one finds the famous passage in book xvii (An interpolation? Much ink has been spilled about that issue) about Jesus.
Based on those works, as well as a somewhat prolix autobiography and a polemical work (Contra Apionem), Hadas-Lebel, a Parisian scholar, gives us both a biography of this fascinating figure and a critical study. Ably translated from the French, the book is an accessible, straightforward, and ...