Josephus

The only early Jewish author to have written a surviving description of what his contemporaries believed about the afterlife was Josephus, yet his testimonies about the afterlife are complex historical, literary, and apologetic descriptions. They cannot be immediately corroborated by contemporary writings; nor should they be exclusively categorized as a purely Hellenizing literary construction that had no relationship to actual Jewish eschatological beliefs. To understand his testimonies to the afterlife, it is ultimately necessary to address how Josephus wrote about the afterlife. This chapter argues that his treatment of the afterlife can be reasonably explained as an apologetic cultural translation that made use of established doxographic and ethnographic techniques. His descriptions of the afterlife are, thus, an important window into his own compositional methods. In translating Jewish eschatological hopes into the categories of Hellenistic philosophy, Josephus also anticipates the strategies of later Christian apologists.