ABSTRACT
In a recent study of Josephus, James McLaren, writing about the Jewish Revolt, makes the following statement: “Scholars have constructed their accounts entirely within the boundaries set by Josephus in War 2 and Ant. 18-20. As such they reinforce the extent to which scholarship, allegedly critical of Josephus and conceptually independent, parallels the description of affairs provided by him” (McLaren 1998: 207). In this chapter I would like to respond to the implicit challenge that McLaren poses, namely, to examine the events that occurred in Judea in the first century C.E. within a framework different to that provided by Josephus, thereby hopefully also providing a different perspective. The horizon I wish to explore, namely that of regionalism, asks whether it might be possible to understand the events of 66-70 and the disturbances leading up to them as being regional in character, having more to do with local factors than as part of a single plot, dating back to Antiochus Epiphanes, the point where Josephus, in the War, begins his narrative.
