Against Apion

Written in the first century CE, Against Apion is one of the earliest and most deliberate works of communal defense in Jewish literary history.

The historian Flavius Josephus - soldier, statesman, Pharisee, and eyewitness to the siege of Jerusalem - constructs a point-by-point rebuttal of hostile Greek and Egyptian claims about Jewish origins, customs, and character.

The treatise argues systematically for the antiquity and coherence of Jewish life, meeting slander not with silence but with ...