Our Young Folks' Josephus: Including an Updated Paraphrase of New Material from Adam to Abraham, and 164 New Illustrations

FOR most of the history of the Christian church, two books sat side by side on the family shelf: the Bible, and Josephus.
That is not an exaggeration. Flavius Josephus, a Jewish priest and general who lived through the destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, wrote down the whole story of his people, from the creation of the world to his own day, for readers who had never heard it. The early church fathers quoted him constantly. Jerome called him "the Greek Livy." Through the Middle Ages his Antiquities of the Jews was copied in the monasteries alongside the Scriptures, and it was among the first books ever put through a printing press. When William Whiston's English translation appeared in 1737, it became the one book, after the Bible itself, that an ordinary Christian household was likely to own. For two hundred years after that, a farmer in Ohio or a shopkeeper in Lancashire who owned three books owned the Bible, Pilgrim's Progress, and Josephus. Children learned the story of Abraham, of Moses, of David, of the Maccabees, and of the fall of the Temple from his pages as much as from the Scriptures themselves.

We have lost that. Josephus has not gone anywhere; he is still in print. But Whiston's English is now almost three hundred years old, and his sentences run on for half a page. A modern reader opens the book, reads two paragraphs, and quietly puts it back. A book that was once the common property of every Christian family has become the property of specialists.
In 1884, William Shepard saw the same problem coming and did something about it. His Our Young Folks' Josephus retold the whole of the Antiquities and the Jewish War in plain language that a child could read and an adult could enjoy. It is a wonderful book, and it deserves to be read again. But Shepard made one decision that I have never been able to understand. He began with Abraham. The whole opening of Josephus—the creation of the world, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, the long lives of the patriarchs, the Flood, the Tower of Babel, and the spreading of the nations over the earth—he simply left out. Six chapters of the original, gone, and the reader dropped into the story at chapter seven with no explanation.

Those six chapters are some of the most interesting Josephus ever wrote. They are where he tells us that the children of Seth were the first astronomers and carved their discoveries on two pillars so they would survive the Flood. They are where he quotes the Chaldean and Greek historians who remembered the ark, and where he explains why God allowed the first men to live nine hundred years. They are where he traces every nation of the ancient world, the Medes and the Scythians, the Egyptians and the Ethiopians, the Greeks and the Thracians, back to a grandson of Noah. A young reader who gets this part of the story understands something that a reader who starts with Abraham never quite does: that Josephus is telling the history of the whole human race, and that the Jews are the thread that runs through the middle of it.

This edition puts those chapters back. This edition includes a paraphrase of Book I, chapters 1 through 6, of the Antiquities, together with Josephus's own preface, in the same simple style Shepard used for everything else. Where Josephus differs from the Bible, I have said so in a note, as Shepard did, and let Josephus speak for himself.