Against Apion

Against Apion is Flavius Josephus's ancient apologetic work defending Judaism against the anti-Jewish polemics of the Alexandrian writer Apion and other Greek and Egyptian authors of his era. As a primary text from a Jewish historian writing in direct response to specific ancient accusations, it is a valuable firsthand source for both the accusations themselves and one contemporary Jewish intellectual's rebuttal of them. Its limit is that it is explicitly an apologetic work written to persuade rather than a disinterested history, so its characterizations of the specific accusations it rebuts and of Judaism's own antiquity are best read as one side of an ancient argument rather than as a neutral historical account.