In complete contrast, both in subject and mood, to Debbie Lerman’s book, which I reviewed in my last post, my other recent reading has been a new monograph by T. C. Schmidt on the passage in Josephus’s Antiquities about Jesus Christ. Published by Oxford University, in an incredibly enlightened gesture Josephus and Jesus – New Evidence for the One Called Christ is available for free download here. Presumably it is thought to be of interest only to nerdy academics. Maybe that’s me.
Josephus ought to be an impeccable source for any information on Jesus and the early church. He wrote towards the end of the first century, but was born and brought up in Jerusalem in the very decade of Jesus’s crucifixion, of royal and high-priestly stock. He was therefore well-placed to witness the early history of the Jerusalem church at first-hand. But his work shows that he was also intimately acquainted with several high-priestly families including that of Annas in the New Testament; high-ranking Pharisee families including that of Gamaliel, also mentioned in the New Testament (Josephus himself, having flirted with the Essenes in his youth, was himself a Pharisee of the school of Hillel, the party most closely aligned with Jesus’s teaching); and he even rubbed shoulders with the royal family of Herod, such as Herod Agrippa and his sister Bernice, who of course presided over one of Paul’s trials.
Not only would these families probably preserve inside knowledge of Jesus’s trial, but it is highly likely (Schmidt documents) that some of Josephus’s personal contacts were actually involved in the trial. In addition, Josephus served as a general in Galilee in the Jewish War (under a commander who, when a former high priest, had illegally executed James the brother of the Lord, as he recounts in another passage), which was of course the epicentre of Christ’s ministry just a few decades before.
We now know that, for historians of that period, the ideal methodology was either first-hand experience of events, or personal testimony by reliable witnesses, or at worst transmission from reliable witnesses at one remove, which was Josephus’s situation regarding the key players in the judgement of Jesus. They regarded documents as poor evidence. Josephus had the lot with respect to Jesus.
The problem is that modern scholars have seen this short passage about Jesus as so implausibly sympathetic to Christianity that it must be a later interpolation by Christian editors. This standard translation from the Greek, cited by Schmidt, demonstrates the point:
And in this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man, for he was a doer of miraculous deeds, a teacher of men who receive truth with pleasure. And he led many from among the Jews and many from among the Greeks. He was the Christ. And, when Pilate had condemned him to the cross at the accusation of the first men among us, those who at first loved him did not cease to do so, for he appeared to them alive again on the third day given that the divine prophets had spoken such things and thousands of other wonderful things about him. And up till now the tribe of the Christians, who were named from him, has not disappeared.
The majority Evangelical academic position has been that, although the textual tradition, and quotations by early authors, are pretty unanimous, Josephus probably did mention Jesus, but much less fulsomely. Some support for this lies in just one tenth century Arabic text, which reads:
There was in this time a wise man who was called Jesus and his conduct was good and it was known that he was righteous and that many from among the people—from both Jews and the surrounding nations—became his followers. And Pilate sentenced him to crucifixion and to death. And those who followed him did not forsake following him, but they reported that he appeared to them three days after his crucifixion and that he was alive. Perhaps he was the Christ of whom the prophets spoke marvels.
However, Schmidt, after very detailed analysis not only of the textual tradition of the passage, but of the unique style and vocabulary throughout Josephus’s voluminous works and the contrast with how later Christian writers address the same subject, concludes that with one possible exception, there is little doubt that the longer passage comes from the hand of Josephus himself. He is, of course, greatly helped in this work by the computerised tools available for such detailed stylistic and linguistic analysis.
Furthermore, he explores the highly interesting fact that none of the more competent early commentators treat the passage as sympathetic to Christianity at all. They make use of its historical support, but comment that despite this Josephus himself remained an unbelieving Jew. With this in mind, Schmidt re-examines the original Greek, and finds it to be far more ambiguous, or even mildly hostile, than modern translations admit. It seems likely that Josephus was, in a highly nuanced way, either seeking to be historically dispassionate, or mildly ironic against the Christians, or conceivably somewhat sympathetic to the movement, but unwilling to admit it openly for fear of cancellation by his peers!
After much discussion, Schmidt suggests that a fairer representation of the ambiguities in the text would give an English translation something like this:
And in this time, there was a certain Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man, for he was a doer of incredible deeds, a teacher of men who receive truisms with pleasure. And he brought over many from among the Jews and many from among the Greeks. He was [thought to be] the Christ. And, when Pilate had condemned him to the cross at the accusation of the first men among us, those who at first were devoted to him did not cease to be so, for on the third day it seemed to them that he was alive again given that the divine prophets had spoken such things and thousands of other wonderful things about him. And up till now the tribe of the Christians, who were named from him, has not disappeared.
The phrase in brackets is the only part that may have been deleted in our manuscripts by a later hand, based on the fact that most early translators, like Eusebius, follow the sense given here. Taken with several ambiguities in the text, this phrasing alters one’s whole approach to the meaning. Hence “a certain Jesus” is the kind of wording Josephus often uses elsewhere for insignificant trouble-makers, and “wise man,” in that context, may be as ironic as our term “wiseacre.” I’m reminded of Tom Lehrer’s sarcastic line about his army colleague’s reading habits:
He loves the great philosophers
Like Norman Vincent Peale.
“If indeed one ought to call him a man” would serve equally well to disparage an utter scoundrel or to decline to reject outright what can only have been an extant, contemporary, claim of Jesus’s divinity.
Similarly, the Greek word for “incredible deeds” is ambiguous enough to cover not only miracles, but magic trickery – an accusation current amongst the Jews against Jesus. “Receiving truisms with pleasure” may refer to the simplicity, or even triviality, of Jesus’s public teaching, compared to the subtlety of the scribes, and to the naivety of his followers, such “pleasure” sometimes having the sense, in Josephus, of “crowd pleasing.” “Brought over” is also ambiguous, in the Greek meaning as much “led astray” as simply “convinced.” As for the resurrection, the Greek used is, on balance, more likely to mean “he appeared to them to be alive” than “he appeared to them, alive,” that is, he is probably reporting a belief, not a fact.
And so we see that, if Schmidt is right that the passage is genuinely Josephus’s, it presents no implausible commitment to Christianity at all on the historian’s, but is exactly the sort of thing that an uncommitted, even cynical, Romanised Jew would write. But once that is granted, the probably unbelieving Josephus becomes, once more, an immensely valuable support for historical Christianity.
For, against the mythicists, Jesus was indeed a popular and charismatic teacher and wonder-worker at the very time that the New Testament places him. Against the bulk of liberal scholarship, his miracles and teaching were not gradual “accretions” generated by “Jesus communities,” but were generally acknowledged even during his lifetime. This has huge implications for the likely dating, and reliability, of the gospels. Why make up Jesus’s teaching rather than simply recording it? Why manufacture signs and wonders when even Jesus’s enemies remembered those he actually performed? Why not write down such important good news at the earliest opportunity to win over “the People of the Book”?
As the New Testament claims, Jesus was indeed crucified, on unclear grounds, by a consortium of the “first men amongst us” and the Roman governor Pilate. And as modern scholars like Gary Habermas and Richard Bauckham have argued, Josephus confirms that his disciples’ belief in his physical resurrection “on the third day” began not as the simple teacher gradually became shrouded in legend, but immediately, and that his followers were also quick to link that belief to the Scriptural prophecies in exactly the way the New Testament does.
Furthermore, whilst the “many from among the Greeks” may be an anachronism based on Josephus’s own later experience (which would confirm the account in Acts of the successful Gentile mission – Josephus would have been a teenager at the time of the Council of Jerusalem), the account confirms the biblical claim that the Jesus movement was no hole-in-corner sect, as some scholars claim, but a popular movement of “many thousands” (Acts 21:20). If that had not been so, Josephus would scarcely have mentioned it at all – unless indeed he was a secret believer putting in a plug for his esoteric cult, for which there is no evidence whatsoever.
Schmidt also points out one other point. From the viewpoint of the 90s AD, two generations after Jesus, Josephus viewed the Church as a single “tribe,” and not (as Dan Brown and a few more serious academics would have it) a hotch-potch of scattered Jesus followers with a wide range of views. The New Testament itself refers to heresies and perversions of the faith, but both it, and Josephus, anticipating Vincent of Lerins in the fifth century, agree that Christians “hold that faith which has been believed everywhere, always, by all.”
In short, in this brief passage (quite apart from his mentions of the murder of James the brother of Jesus called the Christ, and of John the Baptist), a contemporary historian confirms all the principal claims of the New Testament about who Jesus was, what he did, and what the first Christians believed about him. That seems to leave each of us in the same position as Josephus was in – to accept the testimony like the disciples, to reject it like the “first men” who crucified Jesus… or to attempt to sit on the fence whilst staring down the historical facts.
