information for the history of the Jews in post-Biblical times. His
style is clear and attractive, and his power of grasping the events of
long periods is comparable with that of Polybius. He was no mere
chronicler; he possessed some faculty for explaining as well as
recording facts and some real insight into the meaning of events passing
under his own eyes.

He wrote for the most part in Greek, both because that language was
familiar to many cultured Jews of his day, and because his histories
thereby became accessible to the world of non-Jewish readers. Sometimes
he used both Aramaic and Greek. For instance, he produced his "Jewish
War" first in the one, subsequently in the other of these languages. The
Aramaic version has been lost, but the Greek has survived. His style is
often eloquent, especially in his book "Against Apion." This was an
historical and philosophical justification of Judaism. At the close of
this work Josephus says: "And so I make bold to say that we are become
the teachers of other men in the greatest number of things, and those
the most excellent." Josephus, like the Jewish Hellenists of an earlier
date, saw in Judaism a universal religion, which ought to be shared by
all the peoples of the earth. Judaism was to Josephus, as to Philo, not
a contrast or antithesis to Greek culture, but the perfection and
culmination of culture.

The most curious efforts to propagate Judaism were, however, those which
were clothed in a Sibylline disguise. In heathen antiquity, the Sibyl
was an inspired prophetess whose mysterious oracles concerned the
destinies of cities and nations. These oracles enjoyed high esteem among
the cultivated Greeks, and, in the second century B.C.E., some
Alexandrian Jews made use of them to recommend Judaism to the heathen
world. In the Jewish Sibylline books the religion of Israel is presented