Antiquities of the Jews

Here is the book that tells you what the world looked like before Christianity began. Josephus, a Jewish general who defected to Rome and wrote for Greco-Roman audiences, gives us the only substantial independent history of the Jewish people from Creation to the First Jewish-Roman War. The first ten volumes retelling Genesis through the exile rival the Hebrew Bible itself in narrative power. But it's the later volumes that matter most: Josephus provides our earliest outside accounts of Jesus, John the Baptist, and James the brother of Jesus. Without him, we would know almost nothing about the Sadducees, the Pharisees, or the mysterious Essenes. This is the essential companion to the New Testament, the book that illuminates the political and religious world that produced Christianity. It is also a remarkable artifact of cultural translation, one Jewish writer's attempt to explain his people's ancient story to the empire that destroyed their temple.