Page:Selections. Translated by H. St. J. Thackeray (1919).djvu/15



INTRODUCTION

Josephus, son of Matthias the priest, and on his mother's side claiming descent from the royal Hasmonæan house—or Flavius Josephus, to give him the name which he adopted out of gratitude to his Imperial patrons—was born in the first year of the Emperor Caligula, 37-38. St. Paul's conversion had probably taken place a few years earlier. His life of upwards of sixty years falls into two nearly equal parts, spent respectively in Palestine and in Rome. The Palestinian portion, again, is sharply divided into the pre-war period (to 65), of which we know comparatively little, and the great four years' war ( 66-70), of which we know a great deal.

Of his precocious youth, when, if we may believe him, Rabbis flocked to hear the wisdom of the boy of fourteen; how he himself two years later "did eagerly frequent Doctor and Saint," making trial successively of the three sects of his nation, and ending his education by three years passed as an ascetic with a hermit in the wilderness; how on his return to Jerusalem at the age of nineteen he joined the popular and influential party of the Pharisees; of the one outstanding incident