Episode Details

Josephus is our single most important source for the final decades of the Second Temple period. He was a former Jewish commander who surrendered to the Romans and later became a writer in the court of the Flavian emperors. Josephus wrote important books about the Jewish revolt, Jewish history, and Judaism that we still have today.
But can his account be trusted? Was Josephus a careful historian preserving the past, a political propagandist serving Rome, or something far more complicated?