It appears that Flavius Josephus borrows this from the Biblical Joseph to describe himself in just the same way the Gospels borrow material from the same story to illustrate aspects of Jesus’s life. Both “Josephs,” the Biblical figure and the Flavian historian, were Hebrews who gained a foreign ruler’s favor through miraculous predictions and the interpretation of prophetic dreams.
Josephus relates his prophetic dream to Vespasian
Like Joseph, Flavius Josephus claims to have had prophetic dreams and a talent for interpreting them. (21) He boasts about his ability “to give shrewd conjectures about the interpretations of such dreams as have been ambiguously given by God.” (22) According to Josephus’s own report:
[Josephus] called to mind the dreams which he had dreamed in the night time, whereby God had signified to him beforehand both the future calamities of the Jews, and the events that concerned the Roman emperors. Now Josephus was able to give shrewd conjectures about the interpretation of such dreams as have been ambiguously delivered by God. Moreover, he was not unacquainted with the prophecies contained in the sacred books, as being a priest himself, and of the posterity of priests: and just then was he in an ecstasy; and setting before him the tremendous images of the dreams he had lately had, he put up a secret prayer to God, and said, "Since it pleaseth thee, who hast created the Jewish nation, to depress the same, and since all their good fortune is gone over to the Romans, and since thou hast made choice of this soul of mine to foretell what is to come to pass hereafter, I willingly give them my hands, and am content to live. And I protest openly that I do not go over to the Romans as a deserter of the Jews, but as a minister from thee." (Emphasis added.) (23)
Of the Old Testament Joseph, according to Genesis, it was reported to Pharaoh that:
A young Hebrew was there with us, a servant of the captain of the guard. When we told him, he interpreted our dreams to us, giving an interpretation to each man according to his dream. (24)
The same methodology, therefore, that Josephus apparently used to write his own autobiography is used in the New Testament, as well, to construct the biography of Jesus. The story of “Joseph” in the Book of Matthew recalls that of Joseph in ancient Hebrew scripture in the same way that the life of Josephus does.
So, almost imponderably, we have at least some reason to doubt whether “Josephus” himself is even real. Is he too convenient for the Flavians or Christians to have actually existed? With such obvious sourcing in religious texts for his biography we must wonder whether he was a composited construction or whether we are merely looking at the same work and style of other authors who wrote both the Gospels and the works of Josephus. The resources necessary to engage such a deliberate deception were all too readily available to a Roman imperial administration well-versed in the initiation of cults and the sophisticated propaganda of war.
Whatever the case, Josephus argues strenuously for the credibility of his dreams to underscore how seriously he believes his own proclamation that Vespasian is the Messiah. To be sure, Josephus may have been a fraud even if he existed, but he certainly lobbies his audience very hard to believe him. Simply recalling his own prophetic dreams, Josephus assures us, sent him into a religious “ecstasy” resembling the ecstatic visions related by St. Paul in the New Testament:
I must go on boasting. Although there is nothing to be gained, I will go on to visions and revelations from the Lord. I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven. Whether it was in the body or out of the body I do not know—God knows. And I know that this man—whether in the body or apart from the body I do not know, but God knows—was caught up to paradise and heard inexpressible things, things that no one is permitted to tell. (25)
Josephus describes exactly the same kind of experiences, therefore, as Paul. Despite being a Hellenistic and Stoic philosopher and an “objective” historian, Josephus is nonetheless, a bona fide mystic it seems. He accepts the miracles of Moses and by his own assertion believes in the messianic prophecies of the Jews, along with his own prophetic visions and dreams.
Josephus reports with all seriousness that a Jew exorcized demons in the presence of Vespasian, his sons, and himself. (26) Such exorcisms, of course, are analogous to many of Jesus’s own “healing” miracles in the Gospels. And though he was a thoroughly Hellenized, Platonic and Stoic Jew, Josephus nevertheless believes in the Resurrection of the Dead and a Final Judgment, as well.
In the works of Josephus, we are surely at the confluence of the same ideological rivers that produced the Gospels. And, while it may never be possible to determine the authorship of the Gospels with certainty, in the circle of semi-observant “Jews” surrounding the Flavian court we have certainly found a number of leading candidates. They were at the same place at the same time and shared the same background, education, agenda, and even the same iconography with the earliest Christians. And they had the resources necessary to launch an empire-wide mission.
Professor Robert Eisenman has argued that this group around the Flavians, especially the figure of Epaphroditus, is likely to have produced the material comprising the Gospels. However, he does not think that Josephus himself could have written it, suspecting that his orientation was still too Jewish to have authored the sustained anti-Jewish drumbeat that is found throughout the Gospels. (27)
In response, we can only observe that Josephus had obviously abandoned any strict adherence to Mosaic Law. And more: he could actually take part in the Romans’ torture of many of his own people—by his own account—and could watch thousands upon thousands of his countrymen crucified in the aftermath of the great war between the Romans and the Jews. And finally, we know that Josephus wrote pages and pages of justification for the Roman generals who were responsible for the mass carnage and enslavement of his own people.
Josephus’s works reveal an author who possessed not only the education in history, philosophy, languages and Judaism that was necessary to have written the Gospels, but also the same outlook as the Gospel writers, politically and theologically. He used the same methodology to craft his autobiography that was used to construct Christ’s biography. He even admired and was close friends with figures who appear in the New Testament itself, such as Agrippa II, Epaphroditus, Bernice, and possibly Paul if they shared a berth on that ill-fated sea voyage across the Mediterranean. Perhaps most importantly, he bore the same contempt for that generation of Jews that we find expressed in the Gospels.
And, of course, he worked for masters (as their loyal freedman, he took their name) who were friends of so many figures favorably depicted in the New Testament, some of whom stood with Titus during the Siege of Jerusalem as he fulfilled the prophecy of Jesus Christ.
It is now time to reexamine the widespread unwillingness to accept at face value the evidence from so many fields suggesting Christianity’s imperial Roman origins.
Conventional wisdom tells us that if Jesus says his glorious return will come within the lives of his contemporaries, at the moment when Jerusalem is sacked and its Temple is destroyed, we cannot take this at face value—even if it happened with exactly the same vivid portents of “armies in the clouds” predicted by Jesus himself.