He was moved to wrath by the Egyptian Manetho's distortion of the ancient history of Israel, and he could not rest silent under the insults of Apion.

The works of Josephus are therefore works written with a _tendency_ to glorify his people and his religion.

But they are in the main trustworthy, and are, indeed, one of the chief sources of information for the history of the Jews in post-Biblical times.

His style is clear and attractive, and his power of grasping the events of long periods is comparable with that of Polybius.

He was no mere chronicler; he possessed some faculty for explaining as well as recording facts and some real insight into the meaning of events passing under his own eyes.
He wrote for the most part in Greek, both because that language was familiar to many cultured Jews of his day, and because his histories thereby became accessible to the world of non-Jewish readers.