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Spin-off
Only twelve years ago, interest in the Hebrew-Roman historian Josephus was slight. Work on his writings was done by only a few scholars. In the short time since then, study of Josephus has attracted an ever-growing number of people.

As far as I can tell the change is sudden and unheralded. Even now the only translation into English freely available is one made in 1737 by William Whiston. Translations into German and French are still incomplete.

Why the new attention? If I were to speculate, I would say that it is a much-needed spin-off from the current so-called "Third Search" for the historical Jesus. Previous searches have almost always been largely predicated on an assumption that the New Testament contains enough good historical data to provide us with, if not a biography, then at least a reasonable sketch of the person of Jesus of Nazareth.

This assumption is, I suspect, increasingly in doubt. And if the gospels are packed more with theology and doctrine than history, where are scientifically-minded Christians to turn? It is admittedly a minority who are concerned to test the limits of an historical Jesus, to work out what we can and do know about what he actually said and did. But they seem determined enough in their search to explore beyond the traditional limits of the gospel truth.

As Mason explains, our only source of extra information about the meaning of Jesus lies in the background to the gospels. Most of what we know about first-century Palestine (as we now call it) is derived from a single source - the writings of Flavius Josephus, who lived from about 37 to about 100. Our other information comes from histories of the Roman Empire, which provide the wider context for the life and times of Josephus and Jesus alike. It comes also from ongoing archeology, which is by nature a painfully slow business being carried out at present in an unstable, dangerous environment.

The pity is that this book, well-written from an obviously large knowledge of the subject, is likely to be read by so few ordinary Christians. It illustrates finely the great gap which exists, and has existed for many decades, between scholars and the person in the pew. The gap can be bridged. It must - if a viable faith is to emerge from the slough which is traditional Christianity at present. Mason's book is accessible to the ordinary person, though perhaps not without some effort on the reader's part.

Use and abuse
Mason pulls no punches about Christian abuse of Josephus in the past. That John's Gospel contains what we today perceive as anti-Semitic elements is nothing new. What was new to me is the degree to which the writings of Josephus have been used for this purpose. Mason writes: 

... he has been widely used but seldom appreciated as an intelligent author. And this exploitation has come at the hands of both religious and scholarly communities.

Ironically, its usefulness for dubious purposes is what saved the work from oblivion. It contains some critical information about the New Testament background. Many of the characters and places in the gospels are mentioned. Josephus discusses John the Baptist, James and (very briefly) Jesus himself. The crusaders of the 11th and 12th centuries took copies of Josephus with them "... as a kind of tour guide". Yet

... for many of these Josephus-reading crusaders it created no dissonance for them to stop en route and butcher Josephus' coreligionists ... for being "Christ-killers".

Josephus came in handy in helping the young Church demonstrate that it had decent antecedents in the Hebrew religion. The Church was, they claimed, the "true Israel".

But it was his account of the destruction of Jerusalem by Roman forces in the year 70 which was the primary Christian focus. It helped prove that God had punished the Jews for their treatment of Jesus. This terrible theme, we must today understand, is terrible only in our eyes - particularly in retrospect following the Nazi Holocaust. At the time it was normal, much as we might dislike the idea.

Ancient postmodernism
The book succeeds in presenting its readers with an excellent verbal portrait of Josephus. As with anything deriving from so far away in time, the data is incomplete and often uncertain. But I got the sense that Mason knows his subject extremely well and is particularly concerned with excluding any bias on his part as far as possible.

It should be kept in mind while reading Mason's book that Josephus was writing at almost the same time as the gospels were (as far as we can tell) being committed to paper. The qualifications which apply to Josephus' work may serve as useful insights when evaluating the gospels.

•  Understanding Josephus requires us to attempt, as far as we are able, to absorb the main literary conventions which guided and ruled his work.

• Only false comfort will derive from cutting Josephus and the New Testament off from the wider social background of which they were an integral part.

Both cautions are necessary because of the way most Christians even today approach the gospels. 

1. At some level the gospels are granted a degree of credibility not accorded to any other writings. A strong whiff of inspiration lingers despite the gale-force intellectual winds of the past three centuries.

2. Jesus and his Hebrew culture are thought of as cut off in all essentials from the prevailing Greco-Roman culture of the period. "The NT stood by itself as a serene island of divine revelation, while 'history' swirled around it", says Mason. Perhaps the isolationist outlook derives from a desire to preserve an uncontaminated continuity between the Israel of old and the Church. Or perhaps it stems from an unconscious fear of too much influence on Church doctrine from non-Hebrew or even non-Christian sources.

I doubt if Christians ever hear from any pulpit of the all-pervading art of rhetoric in the Roman world, and how it probably tailored in part the way the gospels were written. Mason spells out its impact on Josephus' writing. For example, at first sight Josephus has written an autobiography. It turns out that Josephus has given us at least three differing versions of his life. They are all heavily stylised according to the rhetorical conventions of the time. A substantial quotation is justified here:

Manuals of rhetoric abounded, and the aristocrat Josephus would have become familiar with the techniques - if not in his Jewish education, then at least in his study of Greek literature (Antiquities 20.263). Even those lacking such educational opportunities (Paul?) were bound to have absorbed rhetorical conventions from their environment, much as we absorb a lot of popular psychology even if we lack formal psychological training.

Those of us who look to the gospels for a historical Jesus, will perhaps do well to keep this in mind. Do not expect the gospels to conform with what we think is good history. That was not their purpose. Even if it had been, they would have been written more like Josephus' works than a modern history.

When in Rome
Mason's book is a mine of information and insights into the world of Jesus and the first Hebrew-Christians. I was left with a conviction that Bible scholars may be guilty, even today, of underestimating the degree to which the Hebrew culture was penetrated and dominated by Rome.

Case after case comes to light in which Greek and Roman norms and customs clearly filter right down to the Palestinian peasant in the field - the very people among whom Jesus worked. Many of these instances revealed to me my own prejudices and preconceptions, especially about Roman culture. Traditional Christian teaching has tended to portray Romans as brutally legalistic, more interested in bread and circuses than in salvation. Mason shows that this was far from the truth.

For example, Christian scholars and others are fond of portraying Romans as pagan, cynically worshiping the gods as a matter of form rather than conviction. This attitude betrays an unflattering degree of bigotry, for history reveals a deep religious foundation to the Roman Empire. Like all religious people, Rome's leaders had to be realists to survive. But, as Mason points out,

The Romans tried carefully to interpret signs of divine favour or disfavour ... they blamed losses [in politics and battle] on failure to read the omens properly ... It would be hard to overstate the centrality of religion to the Roman state ... It was a common assumption that the state could be held responsible for the failures of one person or group, especially for such enormities as temple pollution.

There was no distinction, then, between church and state. Romans saw themselves and their culture as champions of piety and morality. That their position differs from ours is our problem, not theirs.

Many lessons can be learned from Josephus and his culture when we fall to considering the historicity of the gospels. One relatively minor example must suffice here.

There were fifteen seats in each of the four main priestly colleges of Rome. These could be held only by top aristocrats. Julius Caesar held the office of High Priest in the college responsible for interpreting and upholding Roman religious traditions. Turning to the gospels, a number of modern Bible commentators assume that it was somehow reprehensible for the Hebrew high priests and their colleagues to be in cahoots with the Roman governors of Palestine. Others tend to look badly on the high social position and wealth of the priestly caste in Jerusalem.

This stance seems far from the truth. Not only were alliances between ruler and priest common worldwide at the time, but there was no distinction between what we now call religious and secular. They were one and the same. Any contrast between them would have been greeted with incomprehension by Jesus and everyone else of his day.

We can be reasonably sure as a matter of good history that when Luke's Gospel reports, for instance, that "They arrested him and marched him away to the house of the high priest" and then "Arose and took him before Pilate, the Roman governor" we are getting good history. In the light of what we know about Roman government, a close link between the two should be no surprise.

Let Mason have the last word from his final chapter entitled The Significance of Josephus for New Testament Study. History is

... a kind of detective work requiring the interpreter to try to recreate the past ... [this] can be only hypothetical ... there are no historical facts ... only hypotheses which range from highly probable to scarcely conceivable ... Once we read Josephus historically, we are compelled to read the NT, written by his contemporaries, in the same way.

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