Against Apion


Against Apion is a work written by Flavius Josephus as a defense of Judaism against criticism by the Egyptian author Apion. Josephus was a Roman–Jewish historian, defector, and courtier to the emperors of the Flavian dynasty; Apion was a Hellenized Egyptian grammarian and sophist. The work is dated to after 94 CE.

Purpose

In the centuries of imperial conquests in the Eastern Mediterranean, first by Alexander and his successors and then by the Romans, a phenomenon arose among the literate elites of the various civilizations that were incorporated into the newly formed imperial states. This took the form of historians from different cultures writing histories in the form of polemics, with each author claiming his own civilization as the world's oldest, a designation that—to the authors and audience of these works—would serve as proof of cultural supremacy.
Against Apion was Josephus's contribution to the polemical discourse, and also a work of Jewish apologetics, an earlier example of which are the works of Philo of Alexandria Against Apion is a wide-ranging defense of Judaism against charges laid against Judaism in Josephus's time.
Josephus stressed Judaism's antiquity as a classical religion and philosophy, and opposed it to what he perceived as the more recent—and so less venerable—traditions of the Greeks. Against Apion cites Josephus' earlier work Antiquities of the Jews, so can be dated after 94 CE.

Positions

In the first book of Against Apion Josephus delineated which books he believed to be part of Hebrew Scriptures.
In the second book, Josephus defends the historicity of the Hebrew Bible against accusations made by Apion, arguing that Apion in fact rehashes material of Manetho's, though there was apparently some confusion between Manetho's references to the Hyksos and the Hebrews.
Josephus also refutes Apion's blood libel in the second book.

Editions