How Josephus Made the Greek Philosophers Testify for the Jews

Most people picture Flavius Josephus, the first-century Jewish historian writing in Rome, defending his people by quoting the Torah. Against Apion, the late apologetic treatise he wrote in the 90s CE, does something quieter and more devastating.

It calls the Greeks as witnesses.

Josephus knew that a Roman audience, raised on Greek philosophy, would not trust a Jewish historian quoting Jewish scripture. So he sent the case to a different court. He produced the Greek thinkers themselves, including the Greek-speaking Egyptian priest who had become Judaism's most quoted enemy, and let them testify to Jewish antiquity, Jewish wisdom, and Jewish presence in the historical record. Three passages show the move.

Why Josephus Was Writing in the First Place

Against Apion 2:1 opens the second volume with a businesslike summary. Josephus reminds his patron, Epaphroditus, that the first book has already demonstrated Jewish antiquity from Phoenician, Chaldean, Egyptian, and Greek records. The second book will turn to the men who slandered the Jews directly, including Apion the grammarian.

What the opening reveals is the structure of the entire treatise. Josephus is running a trial. The witnesses are not Israelites. The witnesses are everyone else. He has already finished interviewing the Phoenicians and Chaldeans. He is, in effect, telling the reader that the Jewish case is closed before Apion has even taken the stand.

The rhetoric is patient and almost weary. He confesses he has hesitated about whether Apion is worth confuting at all. The hesitation itself is part of the case. A man whose insults barely deserve a reply is not a man whose claims threaten the truth.

Pythagoras Borrowed What He Did Not Cite

Then Josephus produces his first witness, and the choice is audacious. Against Apion 22 calls Pythagoras of Samos, the sixth-century BCE philosopher whose name was synonymous with wisdom in the Greek world. Josephus's claim is blunt. Pythagoras knew the teachings of the Jewish people, and he followed them.

There is no extant writing under Pythagoras's own name that proves it. Josephus admits this. He cites instead the biographers and the historians who described Pythagoras's habits, the dietary restrictions, the strict regard for the dead, the prohibitions that match nothing in the surrounding Hellenic world and align almost exactly with Jewish practice. The greatest of the Greek philosophers, in Josephus's telling, was an admirer and a borrower.

The argument is not that Pythagoras stole. It is that Pythagoras testifies. Wherever a Pythagorean rule lines up with a Jewish one, the line of influence runs in one direction. The older tradition is the source. And the older tradition, Josephus notes calmly, is the one Apion claims is too young to be respected.

The Poet Who Named the Jews in Greek Verse

The same chapter calls a second witness. Choerilus of Samos, a Greek poet of the fifth century BCE, composed verse describing the armies of Xerxes. Among the troops he names a people who live in the Solymean hills near a large lake, who carry their hair shorn in a peculiar manner, and whose tongue is unlike any other. Josephus reads the description as a portrait of the Jews of Judea in their distinctive haircut and their distinct Hebrew speech.

The reading was contested in antiquity, and modern scholars debate it still. What matters for Josephus's argument is that a Greek poet, writing for a Greek audience three centuries before the Common Era and four centuries before Josephus, already had the Jews on the map. The Jewish people had been visible to Greek literature for so long that Apion's claim of recency was a transparent lie.

The poet, like the philosopher, becomes a hostile witness without intending to. Choerilus had no interest in defending Judaism. He was writing about a Persian army. And exactly because he had no apologetic motive, his single stanza carried more evidentiary weight in a Roman courtroom than ten Jewish chroniclers could.

Manetho's Best Sentence Was the One He Forgot to Take Back

The final witness is, improbably, Manetho the Egyptian priest, the same Manetho whose anti-Jewish narrative Josephus spent earlier chapters demolishing. Against Apion 26 isolates a single sentence from Manetho's history and refuses to let it go.

Manetho had written, while pretending to summarize sacred Egyptian records, that our people had come into Egypt, many ten thousands in number, and subdued its inhabitants. He had also conceded that, on leaving, the same people settled in that country which is now called Judea, and there built Jerusalem and its temple. Two sentences, buried inside what was meant to be a polemic.

Josephus pounces. The same writer who later invents the leper-expulsion narrative, the same writer Apion will cite as an authoritative Egyptian source, has already conceded the only points the Jewish case requires. The Jewish people were in Egypt as a distinct nation. They left as a distinct nation. They built Jerusalem and its Temple. Everything Manetho adds after that, Josephus argues, can be discarded, because the foundational facts were given by the prosecution itself.

Why the Witnesses Came From the Enemy Camp

Stack the three passages and the strategy of Against Apion sharpens into focus. Josephus understood something most defenders of slandered communities still struggle to learn. The most credible witness for your existence is not the one who already believes in you.

So he goes hunting. He finds Pythagoras the philosopher quietly following Jewish practice. He finds Choerilus the poet quietly putting Jews in his battle catalogues. He finds Manetho the Egyptian priest quietly conceding Jewish antiquity in the very same scroll that slanders Jewish character. None of these witnesses meant to help. All of them, in Josephus's hands, do.

The Torah, in Josephus's hands, never has to argue for itself. The Greeks and the Egyptians, asked the right way, have already done it.