URL: http://jesus.com.au/html/page/josephus, Accessed: Fri, 22 Aug 2008 12:45:48 +1000, Copyright: ©2000-07, Nigel Chapman
Flavius Josephus (b.37/38 CE, Jerusalem; d.101 CE, Rome) became a Galilean military commander at the outset of the Jewish-Roman war in 66 CE. Defeated and captured he became an advisor to the generals (soon to be the Emperors) Vespasian and Titus. He wrote about the history of the period in The Jewish War (73 CE), Antiquities of the Jews (93 CE), his own biography, and several other works. He mentions Herod, Pilate, Agrippa, John the Baptist, the high priests Annas and Caiaphas, and many other figures who appear in the New Testament. He mentions Jesus in two places, once as the subject of a paragraph, and once in passing.
The primary reference to Jesus in Antiquities of the Jews (18.63-64.) has suffered interpolations, probably around 300 CE, and its reconstruction is somewhat debatable. In Niese's 1892 edition of the Greek text (here taken from the Perseus Archive), the whole passage is bracketed as suspect, although that is a rarer view today:
(3) [63] Γίνεται δὲ κατὰ τοῦτον τὸν χρόνον Ἰησοῦς σοφὸς ἀνήρ, εἴγε ἄνδρα αὐτὸν λέγειν χρή: ἦν γὰρ παραδόξων ἔργων ποιητής, διδάσκαλος ἀνθρώπων τῶν ἡδονῇ τἀληθῆ δεχομένων, καὶ πολλοὺς μὲν Ἰουδαίους, πολλοὺς δὲ καὶ τοῦ Ἑλληνικοῦ ἐπηγάγετο: ὁ χριστὸς οὗτος ἦν. [64] καὶ αὐτὸν ἐνδείξει τῶν πρώτων ἀνδρῶν παρ' ἡμῖν σταυρῷ ἐπιτετιμηκότος Πιλάτου οὐκ ἐπαύσαντο οἱ τὸ πρῶτον ἀγαπήσαντες: ἐφάνη γὰρ αὐτοῖς τρίτην ἔχων ἡμέραν πάλιν ζῶν τῶν θείων προφητῶν ταῦτά τε καὶ ἄλλα μυρία περὶ αὐτοῦ θαυμάσια εἰρηκότων. εἰς ἔτι τε νῦν τῶν Χριστιανῶν ἀπὸ τοῦδε ὠνομασμένον οὐκ ἐπέλιπε τὸ φῦλον.
The English version below is shown in what F. F. Bruce, in compiling a modern consensus, judges to be the original form. Probable later deletions and insertions have been indicated:
“About this time there arose a source of further troubles in one Jesus, a wise man if indeed we should call him a man and a wonder-worker, a teacher of those who gladly welcome strange things the truth. He led away many Jews and also many of the gentiles. This man was the so-called Christ. When Pilate, acting on information supplied by the chief men among us, condemned him to the cross, those who had attached themselves to him at the first did not abandon their alleigance for he appeared to them on the third day alive again, the divinely inspired prophets having spoken these and thousands of other wonderful things about him, and the tribe of Christians, which has taken its name from him, is not extinct to this day.”
We may make some comments on these changes (cf. Bruce, again):
he was believed to be the Christ, raising the question of an earlier version of the text. It is more probable that someone writing from a Christian perspective would omit a qualifying phrase like 'so-called' or 'believed to be', than add it, whether accidentally or intentionally.
N.T. Wright offers the following perspective on this last phrase:
The crucial sentence ho christos houtos en does not mean, as is usually supposed, 'this man was the Messiah', but, because of the position of the article, '"The Messiah" was this man'. The implication is that Josephus expects his readers to have heard of someone who bore, almost as a nickname, the title 'ho christos' (cf. Suet[onius]. Claudius 25, impulsore Chresto), and is simply identifying this person with the one he is now describing.
and was believed to be Christ. Jerome lived c.340-420 CE.
arguments which are nothing short of fatal to the currently complacent view that the Josephan passages, even in a core fashion, are essentially reliable and can be used to support the contention that Jesus existed.