by Elizabeth Prais

A captivating lecture about Josephus, the Jewish Historian, was given by Oxford Professor Martin Goodman at Maidenhead Synagogue and chaired by Rabbi Jonathan Romain under the under the auspices of the Berkshire Council of Christians and Jews, entitled: Was Josephus a Hero or Villain?

The audience - 108 people strong - was treated to a whistle-stop tour of Josephus’s life, from his birth in Jerusalem to his final days in Rome.

Josephus’s adventures sounded like the plot of a blockbuster movie: fighting against the Roman Empire as a General of the Jewish forces in the First Jewish-Roman war, a breathtakingly-impossible sequence of events leading to his surrender to the Romans in AD 67, claiming a messianic prophecy indicated Vespasian would be Emperor (thus sparing Josephus’s life), and watching the Second Temple burn from the Roman side. And throughout it all, Josephus was frantically writing things down.

Josephus was a prolific writer whose chronicles of ancient history are the primary sources of knowledge about first-century Judaism and Early Christianity. His most important works are the 20-volume Antiquities of the Jews, a history of the world from a Jewish perspective, and The Jewish War, the story of the Jewish revolt against Roman occupation.

Is Josephus a hero or a villain? That has been a reoccurring debate in Yeshivas for centuries, and the answer, we learned, depends on when and who you ask.

Professor Goodman succinctly ended his prepared portion of the evening with, “[Josephus} was a very complicated man who had a very complicated life, but he was certainly very Jewish.”