Since 1998 I have been managing a website on Flavius Josephus at Josephus.org. This new Flavius Josephus Blog has been created to allow for quick addition of articles to the site. The original site, which is now looking old-fashioned, will be upgraded to newer technology.

I am trained as a physicist but have studied history and religion for decades. This blog aims at cross-disciplinary commentary on matters ancient and modern.

Josephus interests me in a number of ways:

• Josephus endeavors to bridge the gap between Jewish religious belief and the science-oriented Greco-Roman culture in which he was writing (the Roman Empire in the first century CE). In this I think he is surprisingly still relevant today.

• He is the last writer of ancient Temple-centered Judean religion and the first writer of the non-sacrificial Jewish religion that exists today. He writes only a few hundred years after the last books of the Hebrew Bible were written, and testifies to their versions and interpretations in his era.

• He lived during the time of the development of the New Testament. Almost all of our knowledge about the society and prominent persons in which Jesus of Nazareth worked comes from Josephus.

• Josephus writes with emotional intensity about ethnic struggles, superpower colonialism, violence in the name of religion, and political corruption that feel strikingly modern, particularly with regard to the current Middle East.

I strive to cite references for every significant assertion I make. It does not provide a complete literature search on every topic.

So this blog is intended for the general public and for anyone who wants to get away from the latest cultural fight or fad and gain some very long perspective on the here and now.