Flavius Josephus between Jerusalem and Rome: His Life, His Works, and Their Importance

Per Bilde's Flavius Josephus Between Jerusalem and Rome, His Life, His Works, and Their Importance, published by JSOT Press in 1988, is a scholarly study of the first century Jewish historian Josephus, examining his biography, the composition and reliability of his major works, and his significance as a source for Second Temple Judaism and the Jewish War against Rome. Bilde is a specialist in ancient Jewish and Christian history. Its strength is that it addresses Josephus's own reliability and biases directly, rather than treating his histories as a neutral record, an important caution given how heavily later scholarship on this period depends on Josephus. Its limit is that it is a single scholar's synthesis from the late 1980s, so a claim resting on a specific disputed passage in Josephus should be checked against the more recent Josephus scholarship that has continued to debate his sources and motives.