Short answers, pulled from the story.
The Jewish War was written by Flavius Josephus, a first-century Roman-Jewish historian, around 75 AD. He originally composed it in his native tongue, either Aramaic or Hebrew, before overseeing a Greek translation that became the standard edition.
The Jewish War spans seven books. The first two cover Jewish history from the capture of Jerusalem by Antiochus IV Epiphanes in 168 BC through the opening stages of the First Jewish-Roman War. The remaining five books follow the war under Roman generals Vespasian and Titus to the death of the last Sicarii.
Mary of Bethezuba was a woman from the village of Bethezuba in the district of Perea, east of the Jordan River, whose story Josephus recounts in The Jewish War. After her food and property were plundered by Jerusalem's defenders during the siege, she killed and ate her infant son, an act Josephus uses to illustrate the extremity of the famine.
Christian readers valued The Jewish War as an independent historical account of events before, during, and after the life of Jesus of Nazareth. They interpreted Josephus's description of Jerusalem's fall and the destruction of the Second Temple as divine punishment for Jewish responsibility in Jesus's death.
The Yosippon is a work authored by an Italian Jewish writer in the 10th century that paraphrases Pseudo-Hegesippus's Latin version of The Jewish War and incorporates additional historical material. It circulated among Jewish communities and indirectly reintroduced Josephus's account to Jewish readers who distrusted Christian translations.
Thomas Lodge produced the first major English translation of The Jewish War in 1602 under the title The Tragic History of the Jews. William Whiston's later translation from the 1760s, titled The Wars of the Jews, became the more widely read English version.