Against Apion

Against Apion is a forceful, learned defence of Judaism composed in the late first century CE. Written as a reply to hostile Greek and Egyptian writers, the work argues for the antiquity, moral seriousness and historical credibility of the Jewish tradition. Josephus deploys historical narrative, literary critique and appeals to evidence to rebut slanders, to show that the Jewish law is as venerable as any classical tradition, and to place Jewish history on equal footing with the histories prized by Greco-Roman readers. Far from a narrow partisan tract, the book is an important piece of ancient apologetics and cultural argumentation: it surveys competing claims about origins, confronts myths drawn from authors such as Manetho, and insists on careful use of sources and eyewitness testimony. Readers today approach it as essential reading for Jewish apologetics, ancient Jewish history, classical polemics, and the study of how minority traditions argued for their place within the Greco-Roman world. This is an 18th-century translation by William Whiston.