Josephus

He was a Jewish general who should have died with his men at Masada. Instead, Flavius Josephus became Rome's most controversial chronicler, translating for the general who destroyed the Temple and writing the only substantial first-century account of the Jewish revolt against Rome. Norman Bentwich's 1914 intellectual biography remains a penetrating examination of this profoundly divided man: a priest's son who surrendered to Vespasian, who claimed Jewish prophecies foretold Rome's emperor, who watched Jerusalem burn from the Roman camp yet preserved its history for posterity. The book traces Josephus's extraordinary journey from Galilean commander to Roman citizen, scrutinizing the compromises and contradictions that made his name synonymous with betrayal in Jewish memory, while recognizing the immeasurable value of works that give us, outside the Bible, our only contemporary witness to figures like Herod the Great, Pontius Pilate, John the Baptist, and Jesus of Nazareth. Bentwich asks what it means to survive when your people are being annihilated, and whether history is better served by heroism or by the messy, compromised act of bearing witness.