This page summarizes the literary sources for the history of Roman Palestine. For the archaeological and epigraphical evidence and for the documents from the Judaean desert see the bibliography.
The wealth of literary evidence for Palestine in the first three or four centuries makes it one of the better known provinces of the Roman empire. The works of Josephus and Eusebius bracket the period, the one for the first century, the other for the tetrarchic period (late third-early fourth century).
Josephus (first century)--Jewish aristocrat and priest, failed commander in Galilee in the First Jewish Revolt, then protégé of the Flavians--contributes his Jewish War, a sketch of the history of Israel in the Hellenistic period and a detailed history of the first revolt, the Antiquities of the Jews, a survey of the history of Israel from the creation to the outbreak of the revolt, and the apologetic Autobiography and Against Apion. The Jewish War depends largely on Josephus's own experience and reports of other participants. The Antiquities depends on the Hebrew and Greek Bibles and contemporary interpretation of scripture for the early periods and on a variety of Hellenistic and first-century sources for the post-Biblical period. Josephus depended heavily on the histories of Nicolaus of Damascus, friend of Herod the Great; indeed, Josephus's writings preserve a great part of those histories. Modern editions and translations of Josephus's works abound. See, eg, text and translation by H St J Thackeray, R Marcus, A Wikgren, and L H Feldman in the Loeb Classical Library, 9 vols (London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam; Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Univ Press, 1926-65).
The Legatio and In Flaccum of the Alexandrian Jewish scholar Philo (first century CE) offer a snapshot into imperial-Jewish relations in the time of the emperor Gaius (37-41). Text and translation by F H Colson and G H Whitaker in the Loeb Classical Library, 10 vols (London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam; Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Univ Press, 1929-62).
The New Testament, which emerges from the same Galilean and Judaean world familiar to Josephus, offers additional incidental historical information but raises special interpretive problems. For an exhaustive study of the sources for the history of Palestine (as well as of the Diaspora) in the first century see Schürer. The Patristic sources also offer some information, especially beginning in the fourth century with the tremendous growth of interest in the Holy Land. Eusebius of Caesarea (ca 260-339) offers a great deal of evidence for Palestine even to the point of misleading the reader into thinking that Palestine constituted a major center of Christianity. His works include The Ecclesiastical History, The Martyrs of Palestine, and--a gazetteer of Palestine--the Onomasticon. Kirsopp Lake edits and translates The Ecclesiastical History for the Loeb Classical Library, 2 vols (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Univ Press, 1980); the principle critical edition of Eusebius's works is in the series Die Griechischen christlichen Schriftsteller der ersten drei Jahrhunderte (Leipzig: J C Hinrichs, 1902-). For historical commentary and context, see Barnes, Constantine and Eusebius.
Rabbinic sources, while they do not offer any sort of continuous narrative, present a remarkably vivid glimpse into various isolated aspects of life in Palestine especially in the second through fourth centuries. Avi-Yonah, in the Preface to his The Jews under Roman and Byzantine Rule, gives a useful survey of this literature and the standard editions; see also Martin Goodman's discussion of the same sources; for a more comprehensive survey see H L Strack and G Stemberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash, trans Markus Bockmuehl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992). For a thorough review of the Jewish and Aramaic literature (including the Dead Sea Scrolls) from the Hellenistic period and the first century CE see Emil Schürer's The History of the Jewish People in the Age of Jesus Christ (175 BC-AD 135), trans and rev by Geza Vermes, Fergus Millar, Matthew Black, and Martin Goodman, 3 vols (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, LTD, 1973-87), 3.1.
The classical Greek and Roman historians make occasional reference to Palestine. Strabo (ca 64 BCE-20s CE) treats Palestine at the beginning of book 16 of his Geography, 8 vols, trans Horace Leonard Jones (London: W Heinemann; New York: G P Putnam's sons, 1917-33). Cassias Dio (second-third century) has some information on the Bar Cochba revolt and other incidents: Roman History, 9 vols, trans Earnest Cary (London: W Heinemann; New York: The Macmillan Co, 1914-27). Some of the biographies in the Historia Augusta also furnish information on Palestine, albeit problematic. For text and translation see Scriptores Historiae Augustae, ed D Magie, 3 vols (London: Heinemann; Cambridge, Ma: Harvard Univ Press, 1967-68) and for interpretation T D Barnes, The Sources of the Historia Augusta (Brussels: Latomus, 1978). Ammianus Marcelinus (ca 330-395) places Palestine in the context of the great political and military events of the third quarter of the fourth century: John C Rolfe edits and translates his history in the Loeb Classical Library, 3 vols (Cambridge: Harvard Univ Press; London: Heinemann, 1935-40, partly rev 1950). Menahem Stern collects a range of classical texts in Greek and Latin Authors on Jews and Judaism, 3 vols (Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1974-84).
Important late antique sources include Procopius of Caesarea and Choricius of Gaza (both sixth century) the former because he comments on developments in his homeland in the course of his more general histories, the latter because his orations furnish brilliant snapshots of life in the middle of the sixth century. Procopius, History of the War of Justinian and History of the Buildings of Justinian, ed and trans H B Dewing in the Loeb Classical Library, 7 vols (London: Heinemann; New York: Putnam; Cambridge, Mass: Harvard Univ Press, 1914-40). Choricius's works: Choricii Gazaei Opera, ed Richard Foerster, Eberhard Richtsteig (Stuttgart: Teubner, 1929). Scattered notices occur in the works of such authors as Sozomen (fifth century), Libanius, Zosimus (fifth-sixth centuries) and Malalas (ca 480-ca 570). For information on these authors and their works see their respective entries in The Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium (New York: Oxford Univ Press, 1991). The accounts of pilgrims to the Holy Land furnish information about religious buildings and practices; see, eg, the fourth-century accounts by the Bordeaux Pilgrim, Itinerary from Bordeaux to Jerusalem (333 AD), trans Aubrey Stewart (London: Committee of the Palestine Exploration Fund, 1887); and by Egeria, Egeria's travels to the Holy Land, trans John Wilkinson (Jerusalem: Ariel; Warminster, England: Aris & Phillips, 1981). The new genre of hagiography, lives of the holy men flocking to Palestine, likewise provides occasionally useful information for the history of Palestine; see, eg, Jerome's life of St Hilarion in Early Christian Lives, trans Carolinne White (London, New York: Penguin Books, 1998).
The legal codes constitute another important source for the history of late antique Palestine. See Theodosiani libri XVI, ed T Mommsen and P Meyer, 3d ed, 2 vols in 3 (Berlin: Weidmann, 1962), trans as The Theodosian Code and Novels by Clyde Pharr (Princeton: Princeton Univ Press, 1952); and Justinian's code: Corpus iuris civilis, 3 vols (Hildesheim: Weidmann, 1989-1993), partly trans as Justinian's Institutes by Peter Birks and Grant McLeod, with the Latin text (Ithaca: Cornell Univ Press, 1987), and The Digest of Justinian by Alan Watson, rev ed (Philadelphia: Univ of Pennsylvania Press, 1998).
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