The magnum opus of the Greek-writing, Rome-living, Jewish historian Flavius Josephus (ca. 37–100), his Jewish Antiquities, is a monumentally important work (its size also is monumental). One can measure its significance by its later influence and popularity (hundreds of manuscripts exist in Latin translation alone, and the work is referenced by innumerable writers); its historical value (along with Josephus’ Jewish War, the Antiquities’ latter books tell us most of what we know about Judea and Judeans in the first century CE); or its cultural situatedness at the axis of Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian antiquity (the first half of the 20-book work renders the Jewish Scriptures in Greek, and the entire work wielded an outsized influence on developing Christianity). However gauged, this history of the late-Flavian period is one of the truly consequential writings of the early Roman Empire.
Schwartz’s translation is the tenth of what will eventually be eighteen volumes within Brill’s “Flavius Josephus: Translation and Commentary” (FJTC) series, edited by Steve Mason (the first was published in 1999).[1] Thus it contributes to the first comprehensive translation-and-commentary on Josephus’s oeuvre. Even aside from the valuable commentary, the translation itself is a boon to readers: Josephus’s War and Antiquities were translated and published together by William Whiston in London in 1737, and both have high-quality text-and-translation editions in the Loeb Classical Library (published between 1926 and 1965).[2] However, only the War has received modern translations accessible to a wide readership, appearing among both the Penguin Classics (trans. G. A. Williamson; 1984) and the Oxford World Classics (trans. Martin Hammond; 2017). Thus, the only other “recent” translation of the Antiquities is more than sixty years old, and the translation most often cited (Whiston) is, for all its literary quality, closer to three hundred years old. A new English translation of Josephus’s Antiquities is a good thing.
But this work is far, far more than a translation. On many pages, a few lines of text sit above what is effectively a full page of detailed footnotes. For both English translation and interpretation, then, this work is now the standard resource for Books 18–20 of Josephus’ Antiquities, replacing Louis Feldman’s 1965 Loeb volumes.
The work’s introduction does a commendable job laying the groundwork. Schwartz begins by framing books 18–20 in terms of 1) Readerly Expectation: dedicated to 6–66 CE, which witnessed the stabilization of the Roman Empire and the outbreak of the Roman-Jewish War, developments to which Josephus was largely an eye witness, the reader “may justifiably expect them to be the culmination and most important part of Josephus’s magnum opus” and “the high point of the work” (p. 1); 2) Disappointment: these books appear “half-baked” as literature, often conjuring adjectives like “pedestrian,” “boring,” “unclear,” “confusing,” or “sloppy” (p. 3), which Schwartz explains with a number of helpful textual examples; 3) Nevertheless: despite Josephus’s constant failure to intervene in the sources he uses in these books (which is “actually an advantage” for the historian, p. 12), they still demonstrate Josephus’s authorial hand and contain valuable historical content. Other subsections of the introduction deal with 4) Intended Readership, 5) Josephus and His Sources, 6) Translation (where, notably, Schwartz criticizes allowing historical knowledge to drive translation, as he shows Feldman to have done at AJ 19.332 – p. 29). The introduction, like the translation and notes, constitute exemplary scholarship written in the confident hand of a long-time leader in the field (by my count, Schwartz himself claims forty-six entries in the bibliography).
The translation is, in this reviewer’s opinion, markedly good; one struggles to find substantive or stylistic problems with it. The truly determined critic might claim, however pedantically, the occasional infelicity: a) Greek Vocabulary – “appendix” to translate προσθήκη at 18.2 (p. 46) sounds odd as a geographic descriptor of Judea vis-à-vis Syria and suggests a secondariness of Judea that Josephus may not have intended. Some words, like ἔθνος, are translated variously (“nation” at 18.4, “people” at 18.378), not an error but worth noting; b) Phraseology/Syntax – rendering Ἰουδαίοις φιλοσοφίαι τρεῖς ἦσαν (18.11, p. 51) as “The Jews have had … three philosophies” rather than, e.g., “There were three philosophies among the Jews” imputes to the imperfect ἦσαν the sense of the English present perfect; such a generalization may be right (cf. e.g. 18.25b with the present-tense φιλοσοφεῖται), but did Josephus still understand the Sadducees to exist in the late-first century?[3] AJ 18.196 begins καὶ μαθὼν μὲν Ἀγρίππαν ὄνομα αὐτῷ, Ἰουδαῖον δὲ τὸ γένος (of a German coprisoner inquiring about Agrippa), which Schwartz renders “Learning that his name was Agrippa and that he was a Judean by birth” (p. 112). Granted that γένος is a tricky term to translate, but by rendering it thus, rather than something like “…and his race Judean…” the translation may obscure the question about “type” (of person) that is actually being asked; c) Textual Choices – at AJ 20.119 Cumanus responds to a complaint of the Galileans and the Samaritans: ὠλιγώρησεν. Schwartz—Cumanus “pooh-poohed [the complaint]” (p. 285)—improves upon the translation of Whiston (“he was induced … to do nothing in the matter”) and makes a different textual choice than does Feldman (he “neglected to avenge them” – p. 453),[4] whose translation reflects the retention in his Greek text of a direct object for the verb (τὴν ἐκδίκησιν) recorded as a variant in Niese’s critical edition.
Like the translation, the notes in the volume are quite satisfactory. Long notes into the minutiae of Josephan literature stand alongside short textual/historical/philological discussions as well as commentary on issues of general interest to students of Greco-Roman literature, i.e., passages tapping into the trope of civil discord as disease/infection (e.g., p. 48 n. 35 on AJ 18.6) or the trope of the cross-dressing of the Emperor Gaius Caligula (p. 175 n. 103 on AJ 19.30, citing Seneca Const. 18.3; Pliny NH 37.17; Suetonius Cal. 52; Cassius Dio 59.26.6–8).
The passage of greatest historical interest in the portions of the Antiquities represented in this volume is the so-called “Testimonium Flavianum” (= TF; AJ 18.63–64), in which Josephus provides the only extant reference to Jesus of Nazareth that is both contemporaneous and external to the corpus of New Testament writings. This passage, along with short mentions of John the Baptist (18.116–19) and James, “the brother of the Jesus called ‘Christ’” (20.200–1), made these books of the Antiquities extremely popular among ancient Christians, the major purveyors of Josephus’s writings, and effectively guaranteed their preservation and use. Regarding the TF, modern scholarship has tended to see it either partially or completely as a later Christian interpolation given the text’s inclusion of the apparently-straightforward line ὁ χριστὸς οὗτος ἦν, “He was the Christ” (18.63).[5] While Schwartz articulates all three interpretive options—total authenticity, total inauthenticity, partial (in)authenticity—he opines, along with scholarly consensus, that “[t]otal authenticity seems to be ruled out” (p. 75–76, n. 310). This due to “the plain expression of Christian belief about Jesus”—which, “if authentic, would mean that Josephus had become a Christian”—and the beginning of 18.65 (“Around those same times another terrible thing caused a tumult for the Jews …”), which does not fit with 18.63–64 and thus is read to hint at its being interpolated.
In Schwartz’s treatment of the TF we have, apparently, a case of unfortunate timing. For the standard reading of the TF receives robust challenge in a book of the same publication year as Schwartz’s, namely T. C. Schmidt, Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ (Oxford University Press, 2025). One wonders whether Schwartz and the editor (Mason) and the publisher (Brill) were all totally unaware of this impending study: If so, why? If not, why isn’t it represented in the discussion and bibliography? In any case, Schmidt’s argument in a nutshell is that the TF, if read as fully authentic, does not suggest an affirmation of faith in or positive evaluation of “Jesus called Christ.”[6] This basically annuls arguments for reading the passage as interpolatory and would presumably have prompted a fuller and somewhat different discussion in Schwartz’s commentary, which would suit those who, like the present reviewer, have always been suspect of the interpolation argument due to its complete lack of codicological support. As it stands, it will be up to the next commentator upon the TF to integrate Schmidt’s arguments into this perennial debate.
Finally, the volume generally ignores the Syriac and Latin AJ texts/fragments, preferring to deal with the Greek text as a first-century historiographical source. This tack is generally right. However, in certain places for the Syriac (e.g., the TF) and in many places for the Latin (including the Jesus, John the Baptist, and James passages), these translational traditions do more than illustrate reception: they can help clarify the translation of tricky Greek and sometimes help determine the original text (it should be noted that Latin manuscripts of AJ outnumber Greek ones by an order of magnitude). Yet these traditions, and the highly salient recent scholarship on them by David Levenson and Thomas Martin, are ignored.[7] Their inclusion would have been salutary, if not downright important.
Be that as it may, this volume’s quality is, as a rule, spectacular. It represents a new starting-point for scholarship on books 18–20 of Josephus’s Jewish Antiquities, a new node on the map of Josephus studies, and an important contribution to the study of ancient Judaism and of the early Roman Empire.
Notes
[1] Current extant volumes, from oldest to youngest, are: Louis H. Feldman, Volume 3: Judean Antiquities, Books 1–4 (1999); Steve Mason, Volume 9: Life of Josephus (2001); Christopher T. Begg, Volume 4: Judean Antiquities, Books 5-7 (2004); Christopher T. Begg and Paul Spilsbury, Volume 5: Judean Antiquities, Books 8–10 (2005); John M. G. Barclay, Volume 10: Against Apion (2006); Steve Mason, Volume 1b: Judean War 2 (2008); Jan Willem van Henten, Volume 7b: Judean Antiquities 15 (2013); Paul Spilsbury and Chris Seeman, Volume 6a: Judean Antiquities 11 (2016); Steve Mason, Volume 2a: Judean War 4 (2022). See the series website here.
[2] The LCL volumes are printed alternately as nine-, ten-, and thirteen-volume sets, confusing bibliographers everywhere. The thirteen-volume installments are: Volume I: H. St. J. Thackeray, Josephus: The Life of Flavius Josephus – Against Apion (1926 – LCL 186); Volume II: H. St. J. Thackeray, Josephus: The Jewish War, Books 1–2 (1927 – LCL 203); Volume III: St. J. Thackeray, Josephus: The Jewish War, Books 3–4 (1928 – LCL 487); Volume IV: H. St. J. Thackeray, Josephus: The Jewish War, Books 5–7 (1927 – LCL 210); Volume V: H. St. J. Thackeray, Josephus: Jewish Antiquities, Books 1–3 (1930 – LCL 242); Volume VI: H. St. J. Thackeray, Josephus: Jewish Antiquities, Books 4–6 (1934 – LCL 490); Volume VII: Ralph Marcus, Josephus: Jewish Antiquities, Books 7–8 (1937 – LCL 281); Volume VIII: Ralph Marcus, Josephus: Jewish Antiquities, Books 9–11 (1943 – LCL 326); Volume IX: Ralph Marcus, Josephus: Jewish Antiquities, Books 12–13 (1945 – LCL 365); Volume X: Ralph Marcus, Josephus: Jewish Antiquities, Books 14–15 (1960 – LCL 489); Volume XI: Ralph Marcus, Josephus: Jewish Antiquities, Books 16–17 (1963 – LCL 410); Volume XII: Louis H. Feldman, Josephus: Jewish Antiquities, Books 18–19 (1965 – LCL 433); Volume XIII: Louis H. Feldman, Josephus: Jewish Antiquities, Book 20 (1965 – LCL 456).
[3] N.b. Schwartz translates Ἰουδαίοι sometimes as “Jews,” sometimes as “Judeans.” See, e.g., p. 46, n. 12.
[4] Schwartz (p. 258 n. 225) notes this and explains: “I have completed the thought ad sensum.” Also, we should note with LSJ that ὀλιγωρέω had by Josephus’s time come to mean “neglect” something (with an accusative object) or “neglect” to do something.
[5] On this statement Schwartz (p. 76 n. 314) states: “The plain unqualified nature of this declaration, in contrast to ‘Jesus called Christ’ in the reference to him in connection with his brother James at 20.200, is among the reasons to assume the present text has undergone Christian editing.” While scholarship on the TF abounds, the standard monographic treatment has been Alice Whealey, Josephus on Jesus: The Testimonium Flavianum Controversy from Late Antiquity to Modern Times, Studies in Biblical Literature 36 (New York: Peter Lang, 2003).
[6] See the present reviewer’s forthcoming review of Schmidt in The Heythrop Journal.
[7] Starting with David B. Levenson and Thomas R. Martin, “The Latin Translations of Josephus on Jesus, John the Baptist, and James: Critical Texts of the Latin Translation of the Antiquities and Rufinus’ Translation of Eusehius’ Ecclesiastical History Based on Manuscripts and Early Printed Editions,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 45 (2014) 1–79, which inter alia provides new Greek texts and apparatuses for AJ 18.63–64, 116–19 and 20.200–1; as these improve upon Niese’s critical text, such articles would seem requisite for inclusion.