Justus, Josephus, Agrippa II and his Coins

Abstract

An appendix to my book on the Herods dealt with the complex subject of the date of Agrippa II’s death. A double critique of my view by Christopher Jones and Alla Kushnir-Stein has appeared in this journal. Jones claims to be making a contribution by means of ‘Greek philology and Roman imperial prosopography’, tools presumably ‘insufficiently exploited’, and declares that while the revised edition of Schürer is out of date, my discussion is ‘questionable on many points’. So it is necessary to restate my case here. Had the numismatic model proposed by Kushnir-Stein been right, it would simply have made one aspect of my previous discussion, like that of Schürer (and of all numismatists involved), out of date — nothing more. But the model is not right as it stands, and in any case it does not affect my chronology.