A Jew Among Romans: The Life and Legacy of Flavius Josephus
by Frederick Raphael
Mr. Raphael,
I am in awe. I just finished your book “Josephus ..”
There is so much there that I was overwhelmed.
I bought it (on a Kindle) to learn more about Josephus and found instead a fascinating and unique trip through Jewish intellectual history. The pieces on Halevi….Maimonides ..Spinoza were worth a much longer book on their own. Any chance you will write one?
You also piqued my interest in Wittgenstein and drove me to try again to read Popper. As a scientist KI had only read him to nderstand type II error and Bayes. He writes densely and I have largely left him for others to summarize.
The footnotes are amazing … several could be expanded into books of their own. My only gripe is the clumsiness of traditional footnotes as oppose dot hyperlinked text. This sort of book belongs in web format!
But, to top it all off I read your Josephus as a screen play before connecting the text I was reading with your name and career. Is there some chance that the text is a step toward a screenplay?
A Josephus movie? The potential is so huge. Imagine thee ffect a movie like that might have .. even by indirection .. on the Christian world … seeing the Roman-Judean conflict in the context where the Paulines were uninvolved, the image of of Zealotry and the Hasmoneans would be an awesome change in how Jews as well see that era. As I read the book I began to imagine the scene with Johanan ben Zakai as the fore founder of rabbinic Judaism!
So, today I am going to the local (paper) book store to buy a copy of this book. As I use the Kindle for most of my non scientific reading (I am a biologist) I have culled my paper library to the volumes I want to keep going back to … especially seminal books I consider as my equivalent of bibles. (Feinman’s QED, Virchow’s Cellular Pathology. Siddarth’s sutras, Gandhi’s autobiography, Spence’s history of China, ….) I will greatly enjoy adding your book and leafing through it many times.
There is so much here!
Thank you!