Priest, Commander, Prisoner, Historian

Josephus was born around 37 CE in Jerusalem to a priestly family with claimed royal Hasmonean descent on his mother's side, giving him standing in both the religious and political elite of Judea before the revolt against Rome even began. When the First Jewish Roman War broke out in 66 CE he was given command of Jewish forces in Galilee, where he organized the region's defenses against the Roman legions under Vespasian.

The Galilean campaign ended in defeat, and Josephus surrendered at the fortress of Jotapata in 67 CE rather than dying with the last defenders, as several of his companions reportedly urged. By his own account he predicted to Vespasian, while a prisoner, that Vespasian would become emperor, a prophecy that came true in 69 CE and won Josephus his freedom, Roman citizenship and the patronage of the new Flavian dynasty, whose family name he adopted. He spent the rest of his life in Rome under that protection, an arrangement his fellow Jews, both then and afterward, have often read as opportunism or outright betrayal, a judgment his own writing spends considerable energy trying to answer. His account of the prophecy scene, delivered to Vespasian while he stood as a prisoner facing likely execution, is preserved only in his own later writing, and its neat fulfillment two years later has led many historians to treat it with some caution as self-serving retrospective shaping rather than as a report that can be independently confirmed.