Josephus: The Priest Who Wrote From Rome's Side

My Weird Prompts · Sep 28, 2026 · 25m

Yosef ben Mattityahu — Josephus — was a Jerusalem aristocrat, a general in the Galilee revolt, and a man who survived a cave at Yodfat to become a client of the Flavian emperors. He wrote the Jewish War, the Antiquities, the Life, and Against Apion, and he remains the only surviving first-century Jewish author writing at length about first-century Jewish life. This episode traces his biography, his four surviving works, and the central tension: the man who gives us the most detail about ancient Judaism is also the man we have to fact-check hardest about himself. Episode 5630 —…