Theology
Daniel R. Schwartz
Reading the First Century
On Reading Josephus and Studying Jewish History of the First Century
[Das erste Jahrhundert lesen. Ein Vorschlag zur Lektüre des Josephus und zur Deutung des ersten Jahrhunderts.]
2013; unchanged student edition; 2014. XVIII, 204 pages.
Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament 300
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ISBN 978-3-16-153331-0
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Published in English.
The writings of Flavius Josephus provide much of what we know about the first century CE – which witnessed the birth of Christianity, the destruction of the Second Temple of Jerusalem, and the concomitant rise of rabbinic Judaism. However, Josephus was an author, not a video camera, and what he wrote often reflects much apart from what actually happened in the first century: Josephus' works were affected both by his literary models and by current events, and they functioned in various ways for Josephus as an individual and also as a Jew and a Roman, writing in a time of tumult and radical change. Daniel R. Schwartz argues that by building from the bottom up – first establishing the text and its meaning, then moving on to issues of Josephus' models, sources, and purposes – we may nevertheless reconstruct, with some confidence, the events and processes of this crucial era.