. I Suppose that by my books of the Antiquity of the Jews, most excellent Epaphroditus, 2 have made it evident to those who peruse them, that our Jewish nation is of very great antiquity, and had a distinct subsistence of its own originally; as also, I have therein declared how we came to inhabit this country wherein we now live. Those Antiquities contain the history of five thousand years, and are taken out of our sacred books, but are translated by me into the Greek tongue.

When Jonathan, who was Judas's brother, succeeded him, he behaved himself with great circumspection in other respects, with relation to his own people; and he corroborated his authority by preserving his friendship with the Romans. He also made a league with Antiochus the son. Yet was not all this sufficient for his security; for the tyrant Trypho, who was guardian to Antiochus's son, laid a plot against him; and besides that, endeavored to take off his friends, and caught Jonathan by a wile, as he was going to Ptolemais to Antiochus, with a few persons in his company, and put him in bonds,...

The first book in this two book collection presenting the Antiquities of the Jews in which Flavius Josephus gives a rendering of the history of the Jewish people from the time of Adam until the fall of Jerusalem at the hands of the Romans.

A selection of writing by Flavius Josephus that describe his life, the war that destroyed Jerusalem, a rebuttal against another man and a piece about the reality of hell. Josephus continues to be a relevant source of history for our modern world.