Josephus on Jesus and James

[historia]

All of the extant manuscripts of Josephus' Antiquity of the Jews contain the following references to Jesus of Nazareth. Did Josephus write this text, or are these reference entirely Christian interpolations?

Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man; for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. He was [the] Christ. And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him; for he appeared to them alive again the third day; as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him. And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day.

And now Caesar, upon hearing the death of Festus, sent Albinus into Judea, as procurator. But the king deprived Joseph of the high priesthood, and bestowed the succession to that dignity on the son of Ananus, who was also himself called Ananus . . . he assembled the sanhedrim of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James, and some others, [or, some of his companions]; and when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned . . .

[historia]

How can it partially be right when it is completely absent and never mentioned by prominent Christians who cite Josephus in early Christianity? This was written by the leading authority on Josephus, Louis H. Feldman.

I'll circle back to this question in more detail after I finish laying out my arguments. At this point, let me simply point out that Feldman is, indeed, one of the most prominent scholars on Josephus today, and is himself Jewish.

He also agrees with me. He writes, " . . . the great majority of modern scholars have regarded it [the Testimonium] as partly interpolated, and this is my conclusion as well." See "Flavius Josephus Revisited: The Man, His Writings, and His Significance," in Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt (1984). My quote here is via Meier's article cited above.

[scourge99]

The sixth argument I would offer is that there is no clear motivation here for a Christian scribe to invent and insert into to Josephus a text like this. What would he have hoped to have gained? Who was he trying to fool?

I find arguments like this extremely unconvincing.

In my opinion, speculating on motivations can only serve to weaken the authenticity of a text, not strengthen it*. Its a one-way road.

* There are exceptions to everything.

[historia]

Let me conclude my arguments in favor of hypothesis #3 -- the text is only partly interpolated -- by setting out the text again, clearly distinguishing the Christian interpolations (in red) from the original text written by Josephus (in black).

Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man; for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. He was [the] Christ. And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him; for he appeared to them alive again the third day; as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him. And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day.

The points I've argued throughout the thread (now re-ordered and restated a bit more clearly) include:

1. Removing the obvious Christian interpolations leaves a text that reads smoothly.
2. The original text contains words and phrases that are typical of Josephus, the interpolations do not.

Several features of the text make it unlikely to have been written by a Christian:

3. The claim that Jesus had many non-Jewish followers contradicts the New Testament.
4. The author's apparent surprise that Jesus' followers continue to persist after his death has a dismissive tone.
5. The fact that Jesus is mentioned before John the Baptist, the reverse order of the Gospels.
6. There is no clear motivation for a Christian scribe to invent a fabrication like this.

The final point I would make is that this position is held by most scholars, including many Jewish scholars and experts on Josephus. Not only do they find many of the above points convincing, but, having studied numerous manuscripts in the course of their research, conclude that this simply doesn't look like a forgery. Rather, it has the hallmarks of a gloss, as our hypothesis states.

From Carleton Paget (2001), "Some Observations on Josephus and Christianity," Journal of Theological Studies vol. 52 part 2, pg. 576:

Would a forger, intent upon aping Josephan style and at the same time avoiding biblical-sounding language, have produced such a Christian-sounding sentence? Does it not have more of the quality of a gloss of an already existing passage, an observation which is perhaps encouraged by the asyndetic character of the phrase?

From Bart Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist? (2012), pg 64-65:

[ I]f a scribe (or Eusebius or anyone else) wanted to insert a strong testimony about the virtues of Jesus into the writings of Josephus (so the Testimonium is a later interpolation), he surely would have done so in a much more glowing and obvious way. Those who wrote apocryphal stories about Jesus are flamboyant both in what they relate (recounting lots of Jesus' miracles, for example) and in how they say it (stressing his divine nature, not simply that he was the messiah). The Testimonium is so restrained, with only a couple of fairly reserved sentences here and there, that it does not read like a Christian apocryphal account of Jesus written for the occasion. It reads much more like what you get elsewhere throughout the manuscript tradition of ancient writings: a touch-up job that ascribe could easily do.

As time permits, I'll turn now to the some of the points raised apart from my arguments.

[historia]

Origen for one seems to have been quite interested in what Josephus had to say about Jesus; he quoted the reference to Jesus' brother James on no less than three occasions. Yet neither he, nor any other writer prior to Eusebius, mentions any other comments by Josephus regarding Jesus. It would be quite strange if an unaltered original version of the TF passed by with so little notice, particularly when at least one Christian author is known to have been pretty keen on the other reference to Jesus.

How can it partially be right when it is completely absent and never mentioned by prominent Christians who cite Josephus in early Christianity?

This is certainly a strong point, and one that any hypothesis of partial interpolation needs to address.

But arguments from silence are tricky. In this case, I would suggest it is only compelling if two things are true: (1) early Christian authors knew of this particular passage in Josephus, and (b) they felt that citing it would be useful in their polemics.

The first point is well covered by Alice Whealey in Josephus on Jesus (2003), in which she examines every ancient and Medieval Christian who cited Josephus. Allow me to quote at length from her work (pgs. 11-12). We'll deal with Origen himself separately.

In conclusion, before Origen Christian writers typiclly cited Josephus as an authority on things Jewish in works that were ostensibly addressed to pagans or to heretics whose views were considered by church fathers to be too close to paganism or Hellenistic philosophy. Josephus is not cited as an authority on any specifically Christian figure. There is no evidence that Josephus was at this time used in works directed at Jews or Jewish Christians. Apparently, Josephus was also rarely cited in works exclusively addressed to Christians such as sermons or Biblical commentaries. The only possible example of this sort of use of Josephus is the fragment dubiously attributed to Irenaeus. In this period, Christians cite mainly Jewish War and Against Apion. There is only one indisputably direct use of Antiquities: again in the fragment dubiously attributed to Irenaeus. However, we have shown that Irenaeus was clearly not familiar with Antiquities 18.

Why was Christian use of Josephus' works in this early period so limited? We must remember that Josephus wrote for a pagan audience. Thus Josephus' reputation in this early period was surely much greater among pagan readers than among even Christians, let alone Jews. Indeed, Josephus probably had a bad reputation among Jews even in this early period because of his questionable role in the Roman-Jewish war. This would explain why contemporary Christian works directed at Jews do not cite Josephus. In this period, Josephus' reputation seems to have rested more on Jewish War and Against Apion than on Antiquities. The only pagan author, Porphyry, known to have quoted Josephus quotes from Jewish War. Much more than Antiquities, both Jewish War and Against Apion are in some sense apologies directed at the pagan Roman world: both are written with the intent of refuting contemporary Greek and Roman misconceptions about Jews and the war (War 1.1-16; Apion 1.1-5). This suggests that Josephus intended both works to circulate outside libraries, as apologies evidently did in the ancient world.

In contrast, Antiquities was written to encourage "love·of learning" and respect for God (Ant. 1.19-23). It is less probable that this voluminous, antiquarian work circulated so widely. Given the size and nature of Antiquities, it is not implausible that no Christian, pagan or Jew had gotten all the way through the entire work even by the end of the second century. Certainly the sparse citation of Antiquities by the extant early sources suggests as much. It is furthermore suggestive that the probable citations of Antiquities in this early period, that attributed to Irenaeus and that by Clement, are from Josephus' treatment of the Old Testament found in the first part of the work. Not only was this part of Antiquities likely to have been read first simply because it came first, but it was more congenial to early patristic commentary than the later historical books because it most resembled what early church fathers themselves did: comment on something that was already clearly considered scripture. From Against Apion 1.1, we learn that the earliest pagans who read Antiquities also focused on its first books rather than its later books because they dealt with a popular apologetic theme, namely the relative antiquity of [text in Greek].

These observations are relevant to early modern and modern arguments about the authenticity of the Testimonium Flavianum. Patristic silence about the Testimonium before Origen if not Eusebius has been cited both in the early modern and modern period as evidence that the text is entirely an interpolation. Yet before Origen no Christian writer apparently found it worthwhile to cite Josephus as a relevant authority on anything in the New Testament; not only did they not cite Josephus on Jesus, they did not cite Josephus on James the brother of Jesus, John the Baptist, the several parallels shared by Luke-Acts and Josephus' works, and perhaps most surprisingly, they did not even name Josephus as an authority on King Herod, a figure who dominates three and a half books of Antiquities. Probably the reason for this is Christians' relative inattention to their own history during the second and third centuries. As far as we know, there were no real histories of the church in the period after Acts (circa 85 AD) and before Eusebius' Historia Ecclesiastica (circa 320 AD).

In other words, it appears that early Christian writers were not as well acquainted with Antiquities as some have presumed. They cited Josephus as an authority on issues relating to Jewish history and the Old Testament, not the period covering Christian history.

Origen, though, certainly knew Antiquities, even citing book 18 in his works. Why does he not quote from the Testimonium then? Here our reconstruction of the original text is useful. If the reconstructed text is accurate, then the original text was short and rather neutral (even somewhat negative) toward Jesus.

Most pagan and Jewish attacks on Jesus tended to be slanderous: he was the illegitimate child of an adulterous woman, he deceived people, his miracles were the result of magic, etc. The original, un-interpolated text of the Testimonium provides little material that could be cited against such attacks: at best, it says that Jesus was "wise" and a doer of "paradoxical" (Greek: paradoxos) works. Christians would have had little reason, then, to cite Josephus on this point.

[historia]

The Josephus passage is very short however (especially once we've removed the bits we want to remove), so I'd be interested in knowing a bit more about why the claim "The language and style is Josephan" has any merit

As usual, a very perceptive observation, Mithrae. Let me first acknowledge the limits of these studies by way of a quote from Carleton Paget, whose article is cited above (from page 576):

In the end, a decision in favour of or against the genuineness of the passage on the basis of its style and language is always going to be tenuous, not least because, as we noted above, the passage is so short, and may possibly reflect the use of a source.

That being said, what Meier has done is basically look at the terms and phrases used in the Testimonium and compared them to the frequency of those terms in the New Testament.

Here we face a basic methodological problem. Since we do not know who the Christian interpolator(s) were, or whether indeed the interpolations are anything more than random marginal notes that entered the text at different times, it is impossible to compare Josephus* vocabulary and style with any one Christian author. The NT is chosen for the sake of providing some fixed point of contrast; it is one corpus of first-century Christian works, most of which were written within the span of five decades, just as Josephus supplies us with a corpus of first-century Jewish works, all written within the span of three decades. The choice of the NT is not totally arbitrary, since presumably a Christian theologian or scribe of the first few centuries would be steeped in NT thought and vocabulary and would naturally narrate the story of Jesus out of his NT background.

I included an example of that analysis above in response to Goat: the Testamonium uses a term here for Gentiles that is used regularly throughout Josephus' writings, but it only used once in the NT.

Meier looks at more than just the frequency of terms. The Testamonium uses some words in a difference sense from how they are used in the NT. It also includes some (rather) unique phrases that Josephus uses elsewhere in Antiquities, as in this example from 8.1.1:

Yet was there one Judas, a Gaulonite, of a city whose name was Gamala, who, taking with him Sadduc, a Pharisee, became zealous to draw them to a revolt, who both said that this taxation was no better than an introduction to slavery, and exhorted the nation to assert their liberty . . . so men received what they said with pleasure, and this bold attempt proceeded to a great height.

Here is Meier's summary:

The upshot of all this is that, apart from Christianon, not one word of what I identify as the original text of the Testimonium fails to occur elsewhere in Josephus, usually with the same meaning and/or construction. As indicated in the first part of this note, the same cannot be said of the NT. One final caution: Word statistics are used here simply to indicate whether a word occurs fairly frequently either in Josephus or in the NT. The statistics should not be used simplistically to contrast the two bodies of material taken as a whole. Josephus represents a larger corpus of works than does the NT, and he is one well-known author as opposed to numerous NT authors, many of whom are anonymous.

Did that answer your question? I'm far from an expert on this as well, so I'm not sure I've done it justice here.

[historia]

Yes a christian scribe WOULD have written something like that, so as to determine some "link" between the tribal nuances of the OT...or better, Hebrew Bible.

Odd how no other off-shoot"sect" he referred to in his comparitavely mass writings on other religous groups of the time, mentions the word TRIBE and moreso IF a Jewish writer wanted to show that YES this was the assumed "christ" of prophecy, would he not have mentioned that this off shoot "sect" known as christianity was from, perhaps... the TRIBE of Judah?

To me at least, it shows a latter christian scribe trying to squeeze the NT christianity into OT/Hebrew Bible understanding.. and failing.

A couple of thoughts:

First, you are reading a lot into a single word here. Would someone reading the text really get all this simply from the word "tribe"? I have more than a dozen scholarly articles and two book-length works on the Testimonium in front of me, several of which discuss this term at some length. None mention this idea.

Second, early Christians often spoke of themselves as being the true spiritual Israel. They didn't see themselves as merely one tribe within Israel, as your analysis suggests.

Consider Justin Martyr here from Dialogue 9: "For the true spiritual Israel, and the descendants of Judah, Jacob, Isaac, and Abraham (who in uncircumcision was approved of and blessed by God on account of his faith, and called the father of many nations), are we who have been led to God through this crucified Christ."

Finally, your own assessment that the author has "failed" in getting this point across is perhaps more an indictment of your (mis-) interpretation of his intention than any failing on his part.

If nothing else, Josephus tended to like reiteration and cross referencing of his points, hence so many things being mentioned across the board in ALL of his writings and at least if somewhat mentioned in Ant, if it fit the time and relevance was also mentioned in WARS and also Life.

IF this "tribe" was of any interest or actually existed during HIS lifetime, it would have been mentioned in at least two of his well known works.

Although these generalizations are not completely without merit, I think they have little bearing on the issues of this thread.

Josephus mentions a number of people and events in Antiquities that he doesn't mention in Wars or his other works. Honi the Circle Drawer, who I've mentioned above, is one such example, as is John the Baptist.

Christians (and Honi and John) played no part in the Jewish-Roman conflict, so their absence from Wars is not at all surprising.

[historia]

In my opinion, speculating on motivations can only serve to weaken the authenticity of a text, not strengthen it.

That is -- to some extent anyway -- my point. I think those who wish to maintain that the Testamonium is a forgery need to provide at least some kind of explanation for why its author did this. To borrow a legal metaphor: The prosecution needs to establish a motive if they truly wish to convince us that a crime has been committed here.

[scourge99]

In my opinion, speculating on motivations can only serve to weaken the authenticity of a text, not strengthen it.

That is -- to some extent anyway -- my point. I think those who wish to maintain that the Testamonium is a forgery need to provide at least some kind of explanation for why its author did this. To borrow a legal metaphor: The prosecution needs to establish a motive if they truly wish to convince us that a crime has been committed here.

I would agree with you ....if it wasn't established that the document has been tampered with. Since its been established that it has been tampered with then our position on the document must be changed and the burden has shifted. We must now view those aspects of the document as unreliable instead of neutrally. It must now be demonstrated that the document has NOT been tampered with if we are to accept its claims.

This is much like in a court case. If it is revealed that a witness has perjured himself then his entire testimony on that matter is thrown out as untrustworthy. Now, i don't think we need to go that far and throw out all of the text. but we should certainly be extremely skeptical of any parts of the text related to the known tampered section and presume they are also unreliable until proven otherwise.

[historia]

In my opinion, speculating on motivations can only serve to weaken the authenticity of a text, not strengthen it.

That is -- to some extent anyway -- my point. I think those who wish to maintain that the Testamonium is a forgery need to provide at least some kind of explanation for why its author did this. To borrow a legal metaphor: The prosecution needs to establish a motive if they truly wish to convince us that a crime has been committed here.

I would agree with you ....if it wasn't established that the document has been tampered with. Since its been established that it has been tampered with then our position on the document must be changed and the burden has shifted. We must now view those aspects of the document as unreliable instead of neutrally. It must now be demonstrated that the document has NOT been tampered with if we are to accept its claims.

This is much like in a court case. If it is revealed that a witness has perjured himself then his entire testimony on that matter is thrown out as untrustworthy. Now, i don't think we need to go that far and throw out all of the text. but we should certainly be extremely skeptical of any parts of the text related to the known tampered section and presume they are also unreliable until proven otherwise.

I hate to argue over a metaphor, but since I introduced it, I suppose I should at least clarify my thinking here.

I would say that in this legal metaphor, the text is not a witness, but rather the crime scene itself. Unfortunately, we have no witnesses to the crime, although the first person to come across it (Eusebius) has occasionally been considered the chief culprit.

At any rate, no one doubts that a crime has been committed, and so no one here is arguing that the text has not been tampered with. Rather, the question centers on the extent of the crime: is it murder or merely manslaughter?

To establish murder (= forgery), you must establish premeditation: in the case of a forgery, an intention to deceive and something to be gained in doing so. Yet, there seems to be no obvious context for a Christian scribe to create a forgery as such.

On the other hand, manslaughter (= a gloss) is easy to establish, and several aspects of the text appear to point in this direction, as I've argued at length above.

[scourge99]

In my opinion, speculating on motivations can only serve to weaken the authenticity of a text, not strengthen it.

That is -- to some extent anyway -- my point. I think those who wish to maintain that the Testamonium is a forgery need to provide at least some kind of explanation for why its author did this. To borrow a legal metaphor: The prosecution needs to establish a motive if they truly wish to convince us that a crime has been committed here.

I would agree with you ....if it wasn't established that the document has been tampered with. Since its been established that it has been tampered with then our position on the document must be changed and the burden has shifted. We must now view those aspects of the document as unreliable instead of neutrally. It must now be demonstrated that the document has NOT been tampered with if we are to accept its claims.

This is much like in a court case. If it is revealed that a witness has perjured himself then his entire testimony on that matter is thrown out as untrustworthy. Now, i don't think we need to go that far and throw out all of the text. but we should certainly be extremely skeptical of any parts of the text related to the known tampered section and presume they are also unreliable until proven otherwise.

I hate to argue over a metaphor, but since I introduced it, I suppose I should at least clarify my thinking here.

I would say that in this legal metaphor, the text is not a witness, but rather the crime scene itself. Unfortunately, we have no witnesses to the crime, although the first person to come across it (Eusebius) has occasionally been considered the chief culprit.

At any rate, no one doubts that a crime has been committed, and so no one here is arguing that the text has not been tampered with. Rather, the question centers on the extent of the crime: is it murder or merely manslaughter?

To establish murder (= forgery), you must establish premeditation: in the case of a forgery, an intention to deceive and something to be gained in doing so. Yet, there seems to be no obvious context for a Christian scribe to create a forgery as such.

On the other hand, manslaughter (= a gloss) is easy to establish, and several aspects of the text appear to point in this direction, as I've argued at length above.

This doesn't seem to address my point. My point is that once its been established that a part of the text has been tampered with then our attitude toward the rest of the text must change. We can no longer look neutrally upon the text. Instead we must now assume other parts may also have been tampered with unless we can demonstrate otherwise.

This is quite different from your perspective. You seem to believe that if part of a text is tampered with then we should assume its an isolated event that is irrelevant to other parts of the text. That we shouldn't change our attitude toward the rest of the text in light of such a discovery unless we can prove other parts were tampered with.