Justus of Tiberias

Origins and early life

Justus was born around the year 35 in Tiberias, the Greek-speaking capital of Galilee founded by Herod Antipas, into a Jewish family of the city's leading class; his father Pistus was a notable, and Justus received a full Greek education while remaining a Jew of Galilee.

Work and career

During the revolt against Rome in 66 he was a leading figure in the divided politics of Tiberias, and he later served as private secretary to King Agrippa II, the last of the Herodians, until the king dismissed him for a time over an intercepted correspondence. After the war he wrote two works in Greek: a history of the Jewish war against Rome, and a chronicle of the Jewish kings from Moses to the death of Agrippa II.

Neither survives, and this fiche states plainly that almost everything known about him comes from the pen of his rival Flavius Josephus, who devoted a furious section of his autobiography to accusing Justus of having pushed Tiberias into revolt and of having written a self-serving and belated history. The patriarch Photius, who still had the chronicle in his library in the ninth century, judged its style concise but noted that it passed over the coming of Jesus in silence, which tells us it was a Jewish national history and not a Christian one.

Modern historians, and Tessa Rajak in particular, treat Josephus's charges with caution and see in Justus a rival witness whose loss deprived us of the only other contemporary Jewish account of the destruction of the Temple. His chronicle was still being used by Christian chronographers centuries after his death.