The work in two books preserved in Greek (in part only in Latin) in the manuscripts of Josephus’ writings and commonly known by the title Against Apion contains much explicit apologetic, and the author’s numerous references to his own aims and techniques make this ‘skilfully planned, well-written and clever’ treatise a fine test case of the techniques which could be used in defence of a religious tradition.
The original title of the work is unknown: the text deals only in the first half of book 2 with the eponymous Apion, and the present title is first attested by Jerome (On Famous Men, 13) only in the fourth century. Before Jerome, the pagan philosopher Porphyry (On Abstinence, 4. II) described the work as ‘Against the Greeks’, and Origen referred to it as ‘On the Antiquity of the Jews’ (Against Celsus, I. 16; 4. II), which accurately reflects Josephus’ claims about its contents (cf. Against Apion, I. 3, 160, 217; 2. i) and may have been the original title. The apologetic genre of the work thus has to be derived from internal comments. So Josephus states that he is required to prove the antiquity of the Jews because others have produced lies to the contrary (I. 2—5), that he is tackling particular issues because of the absurd calumnies of other writers (i. 59), or that he would prefer to avoid polemic against other nations, but is forced to indulge in it in order to answer accusations (2. 237—8). At one point (2. 4) he makes explicit reference to the lawcourt style of such accusations when they come from the pen of the last opponent whose views he contradicts, Apion; and elsewhere he is at pains to stress that his brief account (2. 143) of the constitution of the Jews is not encomium (2. 147), indulged in for its own sake, but simply what is required to answer the assertions of others. Any doubts about the careful structure of the treatise should be dispelled by Josephus’ claim at the end of book 2 (2. 288) to have ‘fulfilled the promise’ of the work made at the outset: it is clear that the author intended the two books to be read as a whole.
Modern studies which have treated Josephus’ work on its own terms have been surprisingly rare, although there has been a marked increase in interest in recent years. Against Apion has generally been viewed in the past as a type of a wider genre of Jewish apologetic, of which it is sometimes seen as the sole full survivor. Thus the section on Jewish apologetic in Schurer’s History of the Jewish People describes the genre essentially by paraphrasing Against Apion; Against Apion itself, by implication, simply followed fixed conventions. Such arguments are difficult to avoid, despite their unfortunate circularity, because most other extant Jewish texts from antiquity which may have had apologetic intent survive only in very fragmentary form. Commentaries on the work have concentrated less on the literary technique of the author than on the sources quoted by him and on the political struggle between Jews and Greeks in Alexandria, taken (correctly) to lie behind the anti-Jewish polemic of Apion, but less obviously responsible for the shape, tone, and structure of Josephus’ response. My intention in this study is to analyse the work in its own terms and to try to understand the reasons for its composition not only as regards the sources available to the author but, more significantly perhaps, in terms of the pressures on Josephus as a fringe member of imperial court circles in late-first-century Rome.
The treatise has a clear structure: any convolutions (and there are some, as will be seen) seem to have had a specific purpose.
The introduction (I. I—3) lays out the general theme of the two books: the defence of Judaism against unwarranted attacks. The first section (I. 6—8) deals in some detail with a single issue, the lack of reference to Jews in Greek literature; within this section, a passage in praise of non-Greek histories (I. 28—46) leads by way of defence of Josephus as a historian to a defence of his career (I. 47—36), and then to a second introduction (I. 37—9) to return the treatise to its major subject, the reasons for Greek unfamiliarity with Jews (I. 60—8). The second main section (I. 69—160) quotes oriental testimonies about Jews, while the third quotes ancient Greek testimonies (1. 161—218). Then commences a series of refutations of attacks made on Jews by specific authors (I. 219—2. 144), each author being quoted and refuted at length and in turn. At 2. 143—219, Josephus takes a new tack (clearly signalled by the author), and describes the Mosaic code and the constitution of the Jews, which leads to a quite systematic contrast between Judaism and Greek culture (2. 220—86) and the triumphant conclusion (2. 287—96) that all attacks on Judaism have now been successfully refuted. Despite some uncertain readings, and the fact that part of book 2 is known only from the translation by Cassiodorus in the sixth century, there is no reason to doubt that the surviving work represents fairly closely what Josephus wrote.
From where did Josephus derive the literary form of his apologia? It has been common for scholars to assume that his source lay in the writings of earlier Jewish apologists—a surprising assumption in some ways, because the non-Jewish genres used by Josephus for his other works are widely recognized. The origins of the assumption seem to lie in the view that any literature composed by Jews in Greek must have had a non-Jewish audience at least partly in mind. Thus the great histories of Jewish apologetics by Friedlander and Dalbert included consideration of the works of Demetrius the Chronographer, Philo the Elder, Eupolemus, Artapanus, Ezekiel the Tragedian, Pseudo-Hecataeus, Pseudo-Aristeas, Aristobulus, and even the Sibylline Oracles and the Wisdom of Solomon. Since a justly celebrated article published by Tcherikover in 1956, few scholars would argue that many of these writings were primarily aimed at a Gentile readership, although the themes taken up by these authors were sometimes provoked by the hostile views expressed by outsiders: it is hard otherwise to explain the curious assertions of an author like the Egyptian Jew Artapanus, who claimed, probably at some date in the second century bce, that the Egyptians owed all their knowledge and institutions to the Jews, and especially to Moses, the hero whom the Greeks called Musaeus (Eusebius, Preparation for the Gospel, 9. 27). A similar claim is found in the writings of Aristobulus, an Alexandrian Jew of the mid-second century bce, who tried to show that the ideas found in the Greek poets and in the philosophy of Pythagoras, Socrates, and Plato were anticipated by Moses in the Torah (ibid. 7. 32; 8. 10; 13. 12); the argument relied on allegorical interpretation of biblical anthropomorphisms and on the quotation of alleged verses (actually forged) from Greek poets, and according to one fragment (ibid. 8. 10. 1—2) was directly addressed to the king of Egypt, Ptolemy VI Philometor.
Some of the themes from these earlier Jewish writers certainly resurface in Josephus’ Against Apion. Thus, for instance, Josephus too asserted that Moses was the father of Greek philosophy and culture (Against Apion, 2. 168), even though this claim rested uneasily with his attack on the inadequacies of Greek culture in 2. 220—86. But the adoption of motifs is to be distinguished from the adoption of form, and none of the earlier Jewish writings mentioned so far took a form as close to that of a formal apologetic work as did Against Apion.
Hence the argument proposed for much of this century has been that similarities between Against Apion and various works by Philo were the result of their common use of an established genre of specifically Alexandrian Jewish apologetic. A work entitled ‘Apologia for the Jews’ by Philo is known only through a fragment about the Essenes quoted in the early fourth century by Eusebius (Preparation, 8. II; the title is given by Eusebius at 8. 10. 19 fin.); it is impossible to tell from the excerpt what accusation was being countered in the work. The existence of Philo’s treatise On the Jews is known only from a reference to the title in Eusebius’ Ecclesiastical History, 2. 18. 6; again, it is unknown whether this was an apologetic work in the same sense as Against Apion. The best claim to similarity can thus be made only for Philo’sHypothetica, which is known only from fragments preserved in Eusebius (Preparation, 8. 6—7). The meaning of the title of the book is uncertain, but Eusebius (ibid. 8. 3. II fin.) described the Hypothetica as a work in which Philo ‘made the argument on behalf of Jews, as if against their accusers’. However, the extant fragments make no reference to any specific accusers, and it is perfectly possible that the description of the work as apologetic was invented by Eusebius as a description which would make sense to his Christian readers in the fourth century; apologetic elements are certainly visible in the passages which contrast lax Gentile laws to the excellence, humanity, and moral strictness of the Jewish law (7. I—9), and Philo does make claims for the value of specific Jewish customs, such as the sabbath and the sabbatical year (7.10—20); but, although nothing can be said for certain about Philo’s intended audience, such material may have been meant to strengthen Jewish readers in their faith rather than as apologetic for Gentiles. The almost verbal identity between some passages in the Hypothetica and passages in Against Apion make almost certain the hypothesis that the two authors used a common source; but nothing requires that common source to have been apologetic in genre or form.
In sum, the argument that Josephus made use in Against Apion of a whole literature of Alexandrian Jewish apologetic is possible but unproved. But it is rendered less likely by the following observations. The order in which Gentile authors are refuted in Against Apion shows no particular bias towards Alexandrian (as opposed to Egyptian) opponents of the Jews: despite his Greek culture, Manetho (I. 219—87) was an Egyptian priest, who as such would have been looked at askance by Alexandrian Greeks, who saw themselves, socially and politically, as superior to Egyptians. Chaeremon, refuted along with Lysimachus in Against Apion, 1. 288—319, is also said to have been an Egyptian priest; the attack on Apion, from first-centuryce Alexandria, takes up the section 2. 2—144. More significantly, Against Apion has very little on the main issues which divided Jews and Greeks in Alexandria in the mid-first century ce, such as citizenship, isopoliteia, and the poll tax; the exception isAgainst Apion, 2. 33—78, which deals explicitly with the attacks by Apion. In any case, by the time of Apion, who was a contemporary of Philo and one of the delegates sent to Rome by the Alexandrian Greeks to present their case against the Jews (Josephus, Antiquities, 18. 237—60), relations between the two communities seem to have deteriorated beyond the point at which literary responses would serve any purpose in deflecting hostility. Certainly, if Josephus did use such earlier apologetic as his source, he reworked it considerably, since the present form of his text is homogeneous in diction and shows no sign of having been sewn together from earlier works, in contrast to the variegated style of his Antiquities.
Many aspects of Against Apion can be understood without recourse to Alexandria at all, simply in the context of Rome in the Nineties ce, when the work was written (see below). Josephus had been in Rome from the early Seventies (Life, 422—3), and, so far as is known, wrote all his books there. Against Apion, his final book, was composed after the publication of the Antiquities in 93 ce (cf. I. I f.; I. 127; 2. 287). There is no clear indication of the latest date for its publication, which would be as plausible in 96—7 ce under Nerva, or even later under Trajan, as in the last years of Domitian. The contrast at 2. 158—9 between the wisdom of Moses and the actions of lawless despots might fit best with the rhetoric about Domitian’s reign after his death, and the description of the Jerusalem Temple as the central element in Judaism (2. 193) might have been thought more appropriate at a time when the rebuilding of the Temple was a real possibility after the demise of the Flavian dynasty; but certainty about the date is impossible.
More definite is the audience at which the work was aimed. Josephus’ other works may have in part expected a Jewish as well as a Gentile readership; at any rate, some Jews evidently read his account of the revolt against Rome, since at least one, Justus of Tiberias, complained about his alleged inaccuracies (Life, 336—56). Against Apion, by contrast, must surely have been written with a Gentile audience in mind, since the summary of Judaism at Against Apion, 2. 180—219 was far too crude for Jews. It is notorious that the praise of the extraordinary unanimity of Jews in theology and religious practice at 2. 179—81 appears directly to contradict the more complex picture of the varieties of Judaism given by Josephus in the War, 2. 119—61, and Antiquities, 18. 11—21.
The rhetorical techniques used by Josephus are sufficiently varied to be worth enumerating individually. They may in theory have been learned from predecessors or from handbooks, but all are sufficiently practical for Josephus simply to have invented them for his own purposes.
The structure of the treatise was clearly deliberate, with occasional signposts for the reader—for instance, he specifically designated one passage as a digression (I. 57), and he frequently summarized the argument (e.g. I. 217—19). The division into two books occurs in the middle of the refutation of Gentile authors, and seems to have been forced on Josephus by the size of the scrolls— hence his statement at I. 320 that ‘this book has already reached a suitable size, so I shall start a second’—but here too Josephus guided the reader at the beginning of book 2 with a short resume of book i and a programmatic description of the second book. The impression of a carefully planned work is confirmed by the summary of the whole work given at the end (2. 288—90). The literary case to which Josephus was opposed is paraphrased and cited at some length, to the extent that much anti-Semitic literature is known only through Josephus’ quotations, even though the citations are sometimes rather convoluted (e.g. Manetho, cited at I. 237—50). It is tempting to speculate that the impression of having taken the other side’s point of view properly into consideration is deliberately misleading, since readers may not in fact always have ploughed through all the turgid extracts which Josephus included. This technique made it easier to appear to be responding to the quoted extracts point by point while actually picking on one weak point in the argument of the opposition, often with a rhetorical question (e.g. I. 313: ‘When Lysimachus speaks
of lepers, does he suggest that only Jews were lepers?’), or abuse (e.g. 2. 83: Apion has ‘the mind of an ass and the impudence of a dog’), or an attempt to expose contradictions (e.g. i. 303: ‘It will be foolish to spend time refuting authors who refute each other’).
Josephus made only a minimal attempt to respond to most of the issues which had in fact been raised by anti-Jewish pagan authors at and before his time, such as the sabbath, circumcision, food laws, alleged drunkenness, and lechery: he made a few remarks at the end of the section devoted to refuting Apion (2. 137), and he stressed the emphasis of Jews on marriage (2. 199) and the sobriety of their sacrifices (2. 193); but his only real answer is that Jewish laws are respected by Jews for good reason (for example, ‘not from sloth’, cf. 2. 228, 291) and that Jewish habits are ‘not peculiar to us’.
The loss of much anti-Jewish literature from antiquity prevents certainty about a suspicion that some of the accusations to which Josephus did respond were in fact artificial, straw arguments set up by him simply to be knocked down. Most important, if this is really Josephus’ technique, it will have been the whole topic which dominates the first half of book i: namely, the accusation that Jews were not mentioned by Greek authors because they lacked antiquity. This charge is anonymous in Against Apion (I. 2). It was hardly an obvious one to bring against the Jews, and it is not actually included in the libels cited by Josephus in the works of the various authors whom he takes to task, since the latter were more concerned about the alleged Egyptian origin of the Jews; the closest slur is Apion’s dating of the Exodus to the seventh Olympiad (732—749 bce). Josephus’ own younger contemporary, Tacitus, who had imbibed much anti-Jewish rhetoric, none the less transmitted a number of traditions (not all of them complimentary) which presupposed the antiquity of the Jews (Histories, 5. 2—3; cf. 3. 3. I: ‘these rites are defended by their antiquity’). The accusation that Jewish antiquity was spurious apparently did form part of the polemic of Celsus in the later second century (Origen, Against Celsus, 4. 33—6), so it is possible that the claim had been made before; but it is odd, to say the least, that Josephus does not state in his own apologetic precisely against whom he is
arguing in this case. What he says is much more vague (Against Apion, I. 2—3): ‘Since, however, I observe that a considerable number of persons, influenced by the malicious calumnies of certain individuals, discredit the statements in my history concerning our antiquity ... I consider it my duty to devote a brief treatise to all these points, in order at once to convict our detractors of malignity and deliberate falsehood.’ It is of course possible that all these individuals made their comments orally rather than in writing, but that would not in itself explain Josephus’ reluctance to name them.
The suspicion that readers are being manipulated grows stronger when Josephus is found claiming two Jewish Greek authors, the elder Philo and Eupolemus, as Gentile witnesses to the truth of the Jewish tradition (I. 218): it seems almost impossible that this was a genuine error on his part. Thus his claim (2. 237) to have been forced into unwilling polemic against Greeks and Greek polytheism (2. 238—34) may be taken as another attempt to manipulate: the polemic against specifically Greek culture is indeed rare in extant Jewish literature, which tended to assert more positively that Greeks derived their culture from Jews (thus also Josephus himself at 2. 168, 279—86); but it is hard to see what compelled Josephus as author to take his more aggressive stance rather than confine himself to countering the criticisms of those who compared Judaism unfavourably with Greek culture (cf. 2. 130, 238)—although I shall suggest an explanation at the end of this essay for Josephus’ decision to tackle the issue in this fashion.
The spurious claim to be under compulsion to write in a certain way is an element in the lawcourt style which permeates the whole work. Josephus calls witnesses both from literature (e.g. Manetho (I. 74)) and from everyday life: at 2. 124, 282 ff., he claims that the slander that Jews are unsociable can be refuted by the testimony of ordinary people. He pretends not to have time to bring out all the arguments he can use, urging his readers that they can ‘read Hecataeus’ own books’ if they want to do so (I. 203), and asserting, when he wishes to, that he needs to be brief (I. 231); quite why the work must be short he does not state, and his assertion sits uneasily with his extensive quotation of irrelevant material from other authors.
Similarly legal in origin are his personal defence of his own integrity as a historian and his vehement attack on the personality of Apion. It was characteristic of ancient trials that the parties attempted to discredit the personality of their opponents. Thus Josephus made barbed comments about Apion’s deceit regarding his own status as a Greek (2. 29), and revelled in his painful death (2. 143—4), while he deliberately mingled the defence of himself as veracious historian with the defence of the antiquity of the Jews: at i. 57, his argument in i. 44—7—that Greek histories are inaccurate, including those about the Jewish War, unlike Josephus’ own history of the war which was scrupulous—is admitted to have been a digression. In other ways, his self-defence is more sly: according to i. 29, in Jewish society, priests are the best historians, and at I. 54 Josephus emphasized that he himself was a priest; but for some reason he made no attempt to bring the two facts together. The defence of his historiographical technique is based essentially on his personal experience of the events described in the War and his use of documents (I. 53—6) for earlier history, rather than an appeal to his character and career, such as is to be found in his earlier self-defence in the Life.
I have left almost to the end Josephus’ encomium of Judaism in book 2—identifiable as an encomium precisely by the author’s claim that it was not such (2. 147). Most striking here is the unashamed exaggeration. According to the magnificently idealized account, priests control everything in Jewish society (2. 188), Jews are ‘admirably harmonious’ in both theology and religious practice (2. 179—81), and ‘the mere intention of doing wrong to one’s parents is followed by instant death’ (2. 217).
It would be wrong to give the impression that this whole exercise was fraudulent. Occasionally Josephus made what appears to be an authentic response to an accusation which he genuinely found in his opponents’ writings. Thus he replied directly to the charge that Jews do not worship the emperor by stating that they pray on his behalf (2. 76—7), and to the claim that Jews isolate themselves from others by alleging that others go further in their self-segregation (2. 255—75). The widespread stories about Jewish ass worship seem to have caused him genuine puzzlement, and his counter-argument was simply that they were ludicrous (2. 79—120): it has been suggested that he failed to grasp the significance that the ass, as a symbol of Typhon, held for the Egyptians among whom the calumny first arose.
What was Josephus’ purpose in writing Against Apion? If, as seems likely (see above), he had a Gentile audience in mind, this was by definition not a tract intended to confirm Jews in their faith, unlike much Jewish Greek literature. Some scholars have suggested that it might have been a missionary tract designed to win converts to Judaism; but despite Josephus’ apparent openness about Jewish acceptance of converts (cf. 2. 123, 209—10, 261, 282—6), the argument is too indirect for such a missionary purpose: Josephus simply fails to state, let alone urge, what, on this hypothesis, should be his main message, that non-Jews should become Jews. Josephus’ purpose in these passages seems to be only to deny stories of Jewish hostility to Gentiles: acceptance of proselytes demonstrates the philanthropy and magnanimity of the Jews (2. 261).
I suggest that Josephus’ reason for composing Against Apion was the need to counter the great weight of anti-Jewish propaganda produced by and for the Flavian dynasty after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 ce. Roman soldiers had destroyed the Temple at the end of an intensive siege. The destruction was a mistake, according to Josephus (War, 6. 236— 66); but, if so, it was fatal. Vespasian and Titus used their victory over the Jews as the main element in the claim of their new dynasty to legitimacy as rulers of the Empire, advertising widely their achievement, on coins, arches, and inscriptions. Since they had undeniably destroyed the Temple, they either had to apologize for the fact, since annoying a powerful divinity was not a good omen for the new emperor, or revel in it as a good deed. They chose the latter course: the destruction was celebrated in Titus’ triumph, in which the utensils looted from the sanctuary were paraded (Josephus, War, 7. 148—9), and the quasi-illegitimacy of Judaism in the Empire was symbolized by the imposition of a new tax on Jews, the fiscus Judaicus.
The propaganda against the Jews did not come to an end in 70 ce. On the contrary, the whole centre of the city of Rome was altered during the reigns of Vespasian, Titus, and Domitian, to emphasize the importance of the victory: one triumphal arch, now only recorded on an inscription set up in 80 ce, dominated the great public space of the Circus Maximus, while the extant Arch of Titus, erected in the time of Domitian, still crowns the route of the sacred way as it heads down from the Palatine hill to the forum. The severity with which Domitian exacted the Jewish tax (Suetonius, Domitian, 12. 2), and the public reaction to it reflected in the claim advertised on the coins of Nerva in 96 ce to have alleviated complaints, demonstrate the continuing political significance in Rome of the Judaean campaign of 70 ce in the thirty years after the Jews had been defeated. It is plausible to argue that the hostile tone of the comments about Jews in such Latin writers as Tacitus and Suetonius, both of whom came to maturity in the Flavian period, owes much to the insidious effects of such propaganda.
Josephus himself enjoyed the patronage of all three Flavian emperors and of Domitia, the wife of Domitian (Life, 428—9), and he referred with pride to the fact that they had received his books (Against Apion, i. 30). He must be envisaged as one of many such literary figures from the provinces on the edge of the imperial court. So it is all the more remarkable to consider his response to this blaze of propaganda. In many ways he showed extraordinary bravery. His twenty books of Jewish Antiquities—a huge literary task which took many years—were designed precisely to stress to Gentiles the impressive origins of the Jews: Josephus could quite easily have forgotten his Jewishness altogether, like his elder contemporary Tiberius Julius Alexander, or he could have opted for a quiet life, either living off the proceeds of his lands in Judaea (Life, 423), or, if he was intent on a literary career, composing in a less controversial genre, but, despite the unpleasantly competitive atmosphere, described by Martial and Statius, of the literary circles around the emperor, Josephus chose to champion the cause of the Jews against a pervasive attitude of hostility. The genre of the Jewish Antiquities is not strictly apologetic, but in the circumstances of composition their apologetic aim was undeniable.
Against Apion thus continued Josephus’ efforts of the previous fifteen years or so, only more explicitly. Josephus wished to counter Flavian claims that Judaism was somehow incompatible with Roman society. The impetus for the work may have been the demise of the Flavian dynasty—after the death of Domitian in 96 ce, the new emperors Nerva and Trajan had no propaganda stake in hostility to Judaism, and Jews might reasonably hope for permission to rebuild the Temple in Jerusalem (cf. 2. 193—8)—but, as we have seen, the date of composition of the treatise is uncertain.
In any case, the apologetic in Against Apion was well designed to appeal to popular opinion among the literate classes in the city of Rome. The qualities in Judaism stressed by Josephus were the same qualities as Latin authors claimed for ancient Roman morality, and it seems likely that this coincidence will have struck the ancient as well as the modern reader. Jews, like Romans, claimed to oppose innovation (2. 182—3), to value sobriety (2. 204), to value the community above the individual (2. 196), to oppose homosexuality (2. 206), to control their women (2. 201), to honour their priests (2. 206), to stand by their friends (2. 207), to love justice, hard work, and courage (2. 291—2), to avoid extravagance (2. 291—2), to value practical above theoretical wisdom (2. 173—7), and to be prepared to die for their laws (2. 271— 2). It is true that Josephus never made explicit the compatibility of Jewish and Roman attitudes, but it is striking that his contrast of the Jewish constitution to others made unflattering comparisons with many other nations (different Greek cities, Carthage, and so on), but not Rome, and that the attack he made on Greek culture will have been familiar to his Roman audience from similar polemic against fickle, drunken, selfish, homosexual, corrupt, idle, cowardly, extravagant, unserious Greeks by contemporary Latin authors such as Juvenal.
All this is to suggest that Against Apion was not a literary conceit or an antiquarian study of political issues which had erupted some fifty years before in Alexandria, but rather an impassioned rhetorical plea: for Josephus, a Roman citizen and a defender of the right of Rome to domination (a theme which permeates the War), but also a committed, enthusiastic Jew, the success of his apologetic would have immense consequences. It is therefore sad to report that his implicit appeal for the rebuilding of the Temple in Jerusalem, which he describes as the only place where Jews could properly worship (2. 193—8), fell on deaf ears.
If Against Apion was a response by one author to particular pressures at a specific time, as I have suggested, it will not do to treat it simply as a specimen of a whole genre of pre-existing, but now lost, Jewish literature. The only pagan author known to have cited the work was Porphyry (On Abstinence, 4. 14); but the impact on Christians may have been much greater. The first person known almost certainly to have used Against Apion was Theophilus of Antioch, in the second half of the second century ce: there are many parallels to Against Apion in the third book of his apologetic work To Autolycus. No Christian author is attested as citing this writing by Josephus directly until Origen (c.180—233 ce) (cf. Origen, Against Celsus, I. 16), and Origen did not refer to it as a work of apologetic; but it is reasonable to speculate about how much the methods and techniques used by Josephus in this work were used by Christian apologists as they developed their own genre on the basis of the apologetic writings in the New Testament in the century after Josephus wrote.