This has been a most enjoyable book to write not least because so many people have helped me to write it. Many of the ideas were tried out first on final-year students in Birmingham and then on members of Geza Vermes' seminar at Oxford. An invitation to a conference in Israel by the Universities of Haifa and Tel Aviv and by the Yad ben Zvi opened my eyes to a variety of evidence and theories of which I had previously been culpably ignorant. Dr I. Ben-Shalom kindly sent me a copy of his thesis, which is soon to be published. Fergus Millar, Simon Price, Tessa Rajak and Chris Wickham all made detailed comments of the first draft of the book, Benjamin Isaac on the second. Between them they have radically altered the book's structure and caused me to re-examine more ill-founded assumptions than I care to recall; I know that some of them remain sceptical about my rasher arguments and they should not be held responsible for the misjudgements that remain. My greatest academic debt is to Tessa Rajak, who with great generosity allowed me to see her Josephus before publication, criticised my typescript with care and acumen, and encouraged me to press ahead with my own views even when they diverged from hers.