Titus Flavius Josephus (37-100)
A fragment from De bello Judaico in Latin, decorated manuscript on vellum [England, 12th century].
A portion of ‘perhaps the most influential non-biblical text of Western history’.

c. 183 × 145mm. A partial leaf preserving the upper 23–24 lines of two columns of text, preserving fore-edge prickings, the text comprising parts of Book 3 chapters 9 and 10, with a large coloured decorative initial at ‘Itaque Valeri[a]nus ubi muris appropinquavit’ and a blue initial at ‘Audito autem Vespasianus magnam eorum multitudinem’ (probably recovered from use as flyleaves, with significant staining, wear, darkening, etc., and lacking about 18 lines at the bottom to judge by the amount of missing text). In a card binding.

Provenance:
(1) Doubtless from a monastic library; more than 25 copies are recorded in medieval English library catalogues (see R. Sharpe, general ed., Corpus of British Medieval Library Catalogues (1990– )
(2) Colker MS 306; acquired in 1983 from Maggs.

Composed in the first century A.D., the text was written with a few generations of Jesus’s life, and provides one of the most detailed accounts of his time, second only to the Bible itself. In A Companion to Josephus, ed. by H.H. Chapman and Z. Rodgers (2016), p. 13, S. Mason describes it as ‘perhaps the most influential non-biblical text of Western history’.

Titus Flavius Josephus, born Yosef ben Matityahu, was a first-century Romano-Jewish historian born in Jerusalem (then part of Roman Judea) to a father of priestly descent and a mother who claimed royal ancestry. The works of Josephus, The Jewish War chief among them, provide crucial information about the First Jewish-Roman War and revolt against Roman occupation, and also represent important literary source material for understanding the context of the Dead Sea Scrolls and late Temple Judaism. For many years, Josephus was largely known in Europe only in an imperfect Latin translation from the original Greek. Only in 1544 did a version of the standard Greek text become available in French, edited by the Dutch humanist Arnoldus Arlenius. The first English translation, by Thomas Lodge, appeared in 1602, with subsequent editions appearing throughout the 17th century. The 1544 Greek edition formed the basis of the 1732 English translation by William Whiston, which achieved enormous popularity in the English-speaking world. It was often the book— after the Bible — that Christians most frequently owned.

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