ans. He became a personal
friend of Vespasian and the constant companion of his son Titus.

Traitor though he was to the national cause, Josephus was a steadfast
champion of the Jewish religion. All his works are animated with a
desire to present Judaism and the Jews in the best light. He was
indignant that heathen historians wrote with scorn of the vanquished
Jews, and resolved to describe the noble stand made by the Jewish armies
against Rome. He was moved to wrath by the Egyptian Manetho's distortion
of the ancient history of Israel, and he could not rest silent under the
insults of Apion. The works of Josephus are therefore works written with
a _tendency_ to glorify his people and his religion. But they are in the
main trustworthy, and are, indeed, one of the chief sources of
information for the history of the Jews in post-Biblical times. His
style is clear and attractive, and his power of grasping the events of
long periods is comparable with that of Polybius. He was no mere
chronicler; he possessed some faculty for explaining as well as
recording facts and some real insight into the meaning of events passing
under his own eyes.

He wrote for the most part in Greek, both because that language was
familiar to many cultured Jews of his day, and because his histories
thereby became accessible to the world of non-Jewish readers. Sometimes
he used both Aramaic and Greek. For instance, he produced his "Jewish
War" first in the one, subsequently in the other of these languages. The
Aramaic version has been lost, but the Greek has survived. His style is
often eloquent, especially in his book "Against Apion." This was an
historical and philosophical justification of Judaism. At the close of
this work Josephus says: "And so I make bold to say that we are become
the teachers of other men in the greatest number of things, and those
the most excellent." Josephus, like the Jewish Hellenists of an earlier
date, saw in Judaism a universal religion, which ought to be shared by
all the peoples of the earth. Judaism was to Josephus, as to Philo, not
a contrast or antithesis to Greek culture, but the perfection and
culmination of culture.

The most curious efforts to propagate Judaism were, however, those which
were clothed in a Sibylline disguise. In heathen antiquity, the Sibyl
was an inspired prophetess whose mysterious oracles concerned the
destinies of cities and nations. These oracles enjoyed high esteem among
the cultivated