This volume offers a state-of-the-art collection of papers by leading scholars on Josephus' "Contra Apionem," together with a concordance to the Latin section, 2.52-113.

I SUPPOSE that by my books of the Antiquity of the Jews, most excellent Epaphroditus, have made it evident to those who peruse them, that our Jewish nation is of very great antiquity, and had a distinct subsistence of its own originally; as also, I have therein declared how we came to inhabit this country wherein we now live. Those Antiquities contain the history of five thousand years, and are taken out of our sacred books, but are translated by me into the Greek tongue. However, since I observe a considerable number of people giving ear to the reproaches that are laid against us by those who bear ill-will to us, and will not believe what I have written concerning the antiquity of our nation, while they take it for a plain sign that our nation is of a late date, because they are not so much as vouchsafed a bare mention by the most famous historiographers among the Grecians. Aeterna Press

This volume offers a state-of-the-art collection of papers on one of the most significant works of Flavius Josephus, by many of the leading scholars in current Josephus research. The collection, which includes a concordance by H. Schreckenberg of the Latin section Contra Apionem 2.52-113, forms a standard, indispensable resource for the study of Josephus' writings, of apologetic literature in general, and particularly for the study of Contra Apionem, one of the most significant apologetic treatises in Antiquity.

In The Origins of the Canon of the Hebrew Bible: An Analysis of Josephus and 4 Ezra, Juan Carlos Ossandón Widow examines the thorny question of when, how, and why the collection of twenty-four books that today is known as the Hebrew Bible was formed. He carefully studies the two earliest testimonies in this regard—Josephus’ Against Apion and 4 Ezra—and proposes that, along with the tendency to idealize the past, which leads to consider that divine revelation to Israel has ceased, an important reason to specify a collection of Scriptures at the end of the first century CE consisted in the need to defend the received tradition to counter those that accepted more books.

This volume focuses on the interplay between Josephus' Judean identity and his Roman context. After treating historiographical and literary issues, it addresses Josephus' presentation of Judaism and of historical "facts." A final section deals with the transmission of his works.

'Against Apion' is a polemical work, written by the renowned Jewish historian Flavius Josephus. He sought to make a defense of Judaism as a classical religion and philosophy against criticism by the Greek grammarian Apion, stressing its antiquity against what he perceived as more recent traditions of the Greeks. One of his main sources was Menander of Ephesus. It cites Josephus' earlier work Antiquities of the Jews, so can be dated after C.E. 94. It was most likely written in the early second century.

This book collects twenty two previously published essays and one new one by Erich S. Gruen who has written extensively on the literature and history of early Judaism and the experience of the Jews in the Greco-Roman world. His many articles on this subject have, however, appeared mostly in conference volumes and Festschriften, and have therefore not had wide circulation. By putting them together in a single work, this will bring the essays to the attention of a much broader scholarly readership and make them more readily available to students in the fields of ancient history and early Judaism. The pieces are quite varied, but develop a number of connected and related themes: Jewish identity in the pagan world, the literary representations by Jews and pagans of one another, the interconnections of Hellenism and Judaism, and the Jewish experience under Hellenistic monarchies and the Roman empire.

In Synagogues in the Works of Flavius Josephus, Andrew Krause examines the historiographical tendenz and spatial rhetoric of Flavius Josephus, in order to clarify how his writings may be used responsibly in the reconstruction of first-century synagogues.

The encounter between interpretation and history in the writings of Josephus provides the conceptual framework for this collection of essays. The contributions in this volume, which were presented at an international colloquium entitled “Josephus: Interpretation and History” held in Dublin in 2004, are united, not by a single view of Josephus, but by the question of historical method, both ancient and modern. These essays take up aspects of a problem basic to all researchers who would use Josephus for historical purposes, namely: What is the relationship between narratives and history? Organized thematically, the volume reflects a critical engagement with the texts of Josephus, other literary texts, case studies of particular events, and material remains.

This is the first English commentary on Josephus’ Against Apion, his apologetic treatise which rebuts Egyptian and Hellenistic slurs on the Judean people. Accompanied by a new translation, the commentary provides full analysis of the historical, literary, and rhetorical features of the treatise, and analyses its engagement with the cultural politics of the ancient world.