Flavius Josephus

[poptart]

Anyone here ever read his works?  Went through a four-volume set late spring/early summer (briefly, 2000+ pages is a lot......)  Curious if anyone else here has.  

Edited July 30, 2024 by poptart

[Pyreaux]

41 minutes ago, poptart said:

Anyone here ever read his works?  Went through a four-volume set late spring/early summer (briefly, 2000+ pages is a lot......)  Curious if anyone else here has.  

Yes, a skim and a subject specific reading of a 1 volume of "The Works of Josephus - Complete and Unabridged (1988)", so primarily Antiquities of the Jews and Discourse to the Greeks Concerning Hades which is hiding on the last page. Both interesting when reading about King Saul's blood Atonement and Hades temporary prison. I've used it in conjunction with Biblical Antiquities of Philo (Pseudo-Philo) to write up historical profiles on mystery Biblical figures like Manoah, Sedecla the Witch of Endor, Job the Second King of Edom, etc.

Edited July 30, 2024 by Pyreaux

[blackstrap]

Been there , done that ... no t-shirt

[Calm]

1 hour ago, poptart said:

Anyone here ever read his works?  Went through a four-volume set late spring/early summer (briefly, 2000+ pages is a lot......)  Curious if anyone else here has.  

I have a one volume, though quite, quite thick and small print version bought decades ago, I never read it completely through.  Read a lot of it though.

Edited July 30, 2024 by Calm

[poptart]

17 hours ago, Pyreaux said:

Yes, a skim and a subject specific reading of a 1 volume of "The Works of Josephus - Complete and Unabridged (1988)", so primarily Antiquities of the Jews and Discourse to the Greeks Concerning Hades which is hiding on the last page. Both interesting when reading about King Saul's blood Atonement and Hades temporary prison. I've used it in conjunction with Biblical Antiquities of Philo (Pseudo-Philo) to write up historical profiles on mystery Biblical figures like Manoah, Sedecla the Witch of Endor, Job the Second King of Edom, etc.

My skim was a brief one as well, there's a lot.  The Siege of Jerusalem and the Seal of Solomon were my favs so far.  

17 hours ago, blackstrap said:

Been there , done that ... no t-shirt

Nothing sticks out?

16 hours ago, Calm said:

I have a one volume, though quite, quite thick and small print version bought decades ago, I never read it completely through.  Read a lot of it though.

There were times reading it felt like I was mentally chewing cardboard.  You really  had to stick with it to get anything, worth it though, I think anyway.

[InCognitus]

The "Writings of Josephus" (containing Antiquities of the Jews, Wars of the Jews, Life of Flavius Josephus, and Against Apion, using the William Whiston translation) are among the eBooks available on BYU's WordCruncher software, and it's extremely useful to be able to search these works, or just read through them on your computer.  The writings of the early Christians (the Ante-Nicene and Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers) are also available on WordCruncher.  There's also a mobile app for this stuff too.  It's awesome to be able to have these writings at our fingertips.  (I'm adding Steve Jobs and a host of other unnamed innovators to my list of pioneer ancestors that I'm grateful for).

[poptart]

On 8/1/2024 at 1:35 PM, InCognitus said:

The "Writings of Josephus" (containing Antiquities of the Jews, Wars of the Jews, Life of Flavius Josephus, and Against Apion, using the William Whiston translation) are among the eBooks available on BYU's WordCruncher software, and it's extremely useful to be able to search these works, or just read through them on your computer.  The writings of the early Christians (the Ante-Nicene and Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers) are also available on WordCruncher.  There's also a mobile app for this stuff too.  It's awesome to be able to have these writings at our fingertips.  (I'm adding Steve Jobs and a host of other unnamed innovators to my list of pioneer ancestors that I'm grateful for).

Now that is interesting, thanks for sharing.  I will be looking at that when I get time.  The history of the early church is well, interesting.  Haven't had the time to look at the Gnostic Gospels, the more I look at how petty they were over things like Filioque, the more I scratch my head.  Curious, do you know if they have anything on the Nestorian/Church of the East?  For me out of all the variants of the Christian religion, that one is not only my favorite, it did a very good job of addressing the non Christian systems of it's day.  Especially for someone who isn't Christian and is from a world/culture apart, it was very appealing.

[InCognitus]

5 hours ago, poptart said:

Now that is interesting, thanks for sharing.  I will be looking at that when I get time.  The history of the early church is well, interesting.  Haven't had the time to look at the Gnostic Gospels, the more I look at how petty they were over things like Filioque, the more I scratch my head.  Curious, do you know if they have anything on the Nestorian/Church of the East?  For me out of all the variants of the Christian religion, that one is not only my favorite, it did a very good job of addressing the non Christian systems of it's day.  Especially for someone who isn't Christian and is from a world/culture apart, it was very appealing.

I just looked at the books available for download on WordCruncher, and I didn't see anything specifically on Nestorianism.  But there's certainly plenty written about and against Nestorius in the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series 2 (which is available for download to WordCruncher).  The name of Nestorius appears 393 times in Series 2 (so he is a hot topic), with the word "anathema" (or "anathemas") along side of the name Nestorius showing up 48 times (which tells you something ).

But in looking for anything related to Nestorius in WordCruncher, I see a few more historical and religious texts of interest to me that I'm downloading (like, I didn't notice previously that they had The Mishnah as translated by Herbert Danby, for example.  Cool stuff).  So thank you for asking! 

By the way, a lot of what is available for download on WordCruncher is free (such as the texts I mentioned above), although they do have some pay items for research purposes (such as the Dead Sea Scrolls Electronic Library).