Josephus on the Sacred Books

“We do not, then, have countless books that disagree with and contradict one another, but only twenty-two books, which contain the record of all time and are justly believed to be divine. [a] Five of them are the books of Moses, which contain the laws and the tradition of mankind’s origin down to his own death; this period falls a little short of three thousand years. From the death of Moses to Artaxerxes, who reigned over the Persians after Xerxes, the prophets who came after Moses wrote down what was done in their own times in thirteen books. The remaining four contain hymns to God and precepts for human life. [b] From Artaxerxes to our own time everything has been written down, but it has not been thought worthy of the same trust as the earlier books, because there has not been an exact succession of the prophets. How we treat our own writings is plain in practice. For although so long an age has now passed, no one has dared to add to them, or to take anything from them, or to change anything; it is inborn in all Jews from their very birth to regard them as the decrees of God, to abide by them, and, if need be, gladly to die for them.” Let these words of the historian be usefully set down here. [c]

The same man has also produced another work of no mean quality, On the Sovereignty of Reason, which some have entitled Maccabaicum, because it contains the struggles of those Hebrews who acted bravely for piety toward God, as told in the books called Maccabees. [d] And near the end of the twentieth book of the Antiquities the same writer indicates that he had planned to write, in four books, according to the ancestral beliefs of the Jews, about God and his being, and about the laws: why, according to them, some things are permitted and others forbidden. The same man also mentions, in his own writings, other works he labored on. [e]

In addition, it is reasonable to set down the words he included at the very end of the Antiquities, to confirm the testimony we have drawn from him. Attacking Justus of Tiberias, who like himself had tried to write the history of the same period, for not having written the truth, and bringing many other charges against the man, he adds in these very words: [f] “I was not afraid for my own writing in the way you were. I presented the books to the emperors themselves, when the deeds were all but still before people’s eyes; for I knew that I had preserved the truth in what I handed down, and I expected to obtain testimony to it, and I was not disappointed. I also presented the history to many others, some of whom had been present at the war, such as King Agrippa and some of his relatives. [g] The emperor Titus wanted people to learn of these events from these books alone, so much so that he signed them with his own hand and ordered them to be published; and King Agrippa wrote sixty-two letters bearing witness to the truth of my account.” Of these letters he gives two. But let this much be shown concerning him.