Most scholars agree that the Jesus testimony in Josephus’s History of the Jews is not completely original, in other words not completely by Josephus. Whoever wishes to respond, what I am asking, is what do most scholars based on the latest finds and research believe the original Testimonium looked like in the first century after Josephus wrote it? Pre-meddling in other words.
John P. Meier – Marginal Jew Volume 1
At this time there appeared Jesus, a wise man. For he was a doer of startling deeds, a teacher of people who receive the truth with pleasure. And he gained a following both among many Jews and among many of Greek origin. And when Pilate, because of an accusation made by the leading men among us, condemned him to the cross, those who had loved him previously did not cease to do so. And up to the very day the tribe of Christians (named after him) has not died out.
What do you think he meant by a “doer of startling deeds”? I read that in 1995 a new document was discovered written around the time of the Testimonium and that it supported some of the claims in the Testimonium. Josephus.org stated that the conclusion was made that it as well as the Testimonium must have drawn from an unknown Gospel. Do you know anything about this?
No i dont know anything about Testimonium based on unknown Gospel, I just happened to be recently reading Meier’s book and recalled he had specified what he believed to be Josephus’ original writings which i copied above. Meier further questioned where Josepus got this data, did he read Luke’s account or did he meet some Christians in Rome (or Palestine)? but did not come to any definitive conclusion.
I think “startling deeds” would probably be reports of healings plus .
Mlamb88 said
Most scholars agree that the Jesus testimony in Josephus’s History of the Jews is not completely original, in other words not completely by Josephus. Whoever wishes to respond, what I am asking, is what do most scholars based on the latest finds and research believe the original Testimonium looked like in the first century after Josephus wrote it? Pre-meddling in other words.
I think one can safely conclude that the extant version is a result of at least two hands, which means that it wasn’t forged by one person alone.
The reason for this is that it contains elements that clearly are intended to overrule other parts that does not comply with later Christian theology. On the one hand there is the expression “there lived Jesus, a wise man”, which is not in harmony with “if indeed one ought to call him a man” and “He was the Christ”. A clever forger would have made a much smoother narrative.
The period “He appeared to them spending a third day restored to life, for the prophets of God had foretold these things and a thousand other marvels about him”, is also very suspect. But it is very difficult to say if the suspected elements are re-writings or insertions.
Provided the first hand wrote the minimal version without any Christian dogma inserted, nobody would have taken interest in forging such a historical proof of the existence of “the man” Jesus. That is a rather modern problem, looking for proof outside the Christian literature. The Christian communities already had that proof contained in the Gospels and Paul’s writings. So it is most likely that Josephus himself wrote it.
One can spend endless hours debating whether “He was the Christ” was inserted or was modified from “He was thought to be the Christ” or similar. Same thing with the resurrection description part.
gavriel said
I think one can safely conclude that the extant version is a result of at least two hands, which means that it wasn’t forged by one person alone.
The reason for this is that it contains elements that clearly are intended to overrule other parts that does not comply with later Christian theology. On the one hand there is the expression “there lived Jesus, a wise man”, which is not in harmony with “if indeed one ought to call him a man” and “He was the Christ”. A clever forger would have made a much smoother narrative.
The period “He appeared to them spending a third day restored to life, for the prophets of God had foretold these things and a thousand other marvels about him”, is also very suspect. But it is very difficult to say if the suspected elements are re-writings or insertions.
Provided the first hand wrote the minimal version without any Christian dogma inserted, nobody would have taken interest in forging such a historical proof of the existence of “the man” Jesus. That is a rather modern problem, looking for proof outside the Christian literature. The Christian communities already had that proof contained in the Gospels and Paul’s writings. So it is most likely that Josephus himself wrote it.
One can spend endless hours debating whether “He was the Christ” was inserted or was modified from “He was thought to be the Christ” or similar. Same thing with the resurrection description part.
Although Josephus was Romanised, he was a jew and no Jew would believe that it was foretold by earlier prophets about Jesus, I am sure that part was a christian interpolation and i agree with you it may have been more than one hand that forged it.
some say it was Eusebius, any idea about that?
jamal12 said
Although Josephus was Romanised, he was a jew and no Jew would believe that it was foretold by earlier prophets about Jesus, I am sure that part was a christian interpolation and i agree with you it may have been more than one hand that forged it.
some say it was Eusebius, any idea about that?
If so, he just added to it, he did not invent all of it, for the reason I gave. He was a smart fellow, and would have written a coherent, perhaps neutral statement, as if written by a disinterested Jew. His purpose would then have been to prove that at least some Jews recognized the greatness of Jesus. If he on the other hand modified something already present, to purpose would have been to get rid of a possible critical attitude (“He was (incorrectly) thought to be the Christ”) in a work that became increasingly important to Christians.
gavriel you make a good point. If it is a complete interpolation it clearly is not the work of a single person because of the qualifying statements. But if you remove the qualifying statements the original is so half-assed it’s hard to see it coming from a committed Christian. I suspect it’s a partial interpolation for that reason. Not proof of course but compelling.
In many ways however the reference in Book 20 ch 9 is the more interesting passage.
Stephen said
gavriel you make a good point. If it is a complete interpolation it clearly is not the work of a single person because of the qualifying statements. But if you remove the qualifying statements the original is so half-assed it’s hard to see it coming from a committed Christian. I suspect it’s a partial interpolation for that reason. Not proof of course but compelling.In many ways however the reference in Book 20 ch 9 is the more interesting passage.
I think both are quite interesting! The one in Book 20 makes better sense if it refers to someone who has already been introduced , and therefore that Book 18 contained something like “He was called Christ” or similar. It is also reasonable to think that Josephus the historian would have reproduced the basic Christian message about the executed and resurrected Christ.
The argument of the Rabbis about the Historical references of the christ.
All Historian wrote in average more than 30 paragraphs over a theme. Events, political figures, conflicts, etc. In the issue of the most important person/god , “Christ” they went very short.
Josephus is the longest, about 3.5 paragraphs.
These Historians used to travel to get information. We must remember that Jesus left behind living miracles :2 kids that he resurrected and Lazarus. The Rabbis have not found any reference of Historians traveling to meet those persons.
Lazarus and the 2 kids surely would had started a cult by the people around them. Hundreds / Thousands of people going to ask questions, seek advise, touch them . That even Paul would have heard about.
gavriel said
Mlamb88 said
Most scholars agree that the Jesus testimony in Josephus’s History of the Jews is not completely original, in other words not completely by Josephus. Whoever wishes to respond, what I am asking, is what do most scholars based on the latest finds and research believe the original Testimonium looked like in the first century after Josephus wrote it? Pre-meddling in other words.
I think one can safely conclude that the extant version is a result of at least two hands, which means that it wasn’t forged by one person alone.
The reason for this is that it contains elements that clearly are intended to overrule other parts that does not comply with later Christian theology. On the one hand there is the expression “there lived Jesus, a wise man”, which is not in harmony with “if indeed one ought to call him a man” and “He was the Christ”. A clever forger would have made a much smoother narrative.
The period “He appeared to them spending a third day restored to life, for the prophets of God had foretold these things and a thousand other marvels about him”, is also very suspect. But it is very difficult to say if the suspected elements are re-writings or insertions.
Provided the first hand wrote the minimal version without any Christian dogma inserted, nobody would have taken interest in forging such a historical proof of the existence of “the man” Jesus. That is a rather modern problem, looking for proof outside the Christian literature. The Christian communities already had that proof contained in the Gospels and Paul’s writings. So it is most likely that Josephus himself wrote it.
One can spend endless hours debating whether “He was the Christ” was inserted or was modified from “He was thought to be the Christ” or similar. Same thing with the resurrection description part.
Steve Campbell, Author and Publisher of Historical Accuracy
Posted by G.J.G.
Robert Eisler’s book The Messiah Jesus is a classic of Josephus scholarship. Unfortunately it is long out of print and difficult to find.
What follows is an extract from Chapter 3 of this work. In this chapter, Eisler reviews the history of the controversy over Josephus’ description of Jesus (the “Testimonium Flavianum”), giving a number of interesting details that are not well known today.
Eisler follows this review with his own speculation as to the original form of the description, of which a brief synopsis is given below, with some additional comments. The major benefit of Eisler’s treatment is to remind modern scholars that something could have been deleted from the Testimonium as well as altered or added.
The extract includes Eisler’s original footnotes, some of which deserve an award for their wonderful obscurity.
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Robert Eisler
…a testimony rendered by an outsider to the truth of the historical foundations, not only of its faith, but even of its dogma, its creed.
Origen (died c. 254), ‘the greatest and most conscientious scholar of the ancient Church,; makes it quite clear, in two different passages [5], that in his text of the Antiquities Josephus did not represent Jesus as the Christ. From these passages Eduard Norden [6], among others, has inferred that, in his version of Josephus, Origen had found nothing whatever concerning Christ. [However the expression “called the Messiah/Christ” is insufficient basis for saying Josephus did not believe in Christ.
What the two passages of Origen do show is that whatever Origen read in his Josephus edition cannot have been the extant text of that famous passage with its orthodox Christian wording, but quite a different text, hostile to Jesus and the Christians and really in the Emperor Vespasian that the expectations of the Jews found their fulfillment.
Naturally, a party possessing the power to destroy obnoxious books will ipso facto be in a position to enforce minor omissions and alterations [8] in works in which only individual passages were felt to be objectionable. It is equally clear that owners of valuable manuscripts, whether private individuals, book-vendors, or officials in libraries and synagogues, should have preferred the excision of a few lines or certain alterations to the alternative of seeing their treasures devoured by the flames. Add to this the loss involved in the destruction of a whole Josephus in manuscript, and the laws imposing capital punishment on the concealed possession of writings hostile to Christianity [9], and the natural consequence will be obvious to every one. As a matter of fact, not a single Greek, Latin, Slavonic, or other Josephus text has come down to us which has not passed through the hands of Christian scribes and Christian owners. The numerous glosses and marginal notes, abounding in every single manuscript [10], fully bear out this statement.
Of course, with these mutual accusations that the one party, the Christians, had interpolated the passage, and that the other, the Jews, had erased it, the argument could not advance very much. With the revival of learning the cultivated Jews were indeed not slow in putting up another and far more sweeping argument. The learned Isaac Abravanel [12] (1437-1508) in his commentary on Daniel drily and curtly observes: ‘If Josephus wrote this, we accept it not from him, for he has written much, but not all is true.’ Thus he doubts the genuineness of the Testimonium, but considers the whole matter of secondary importance in view of the well-known character of the writer, a commonsense view which can be warmly recommended to such blind believers among the Christians as may still think that anything can be gained for their cause by a statement made by so characterless an individual as was Flavius Josephus, who, Jew though he was, did not feel ashamed to proclaim Vespasian the Messiah of his people [13].
[T]he clever sycophant had introduced it at a moment when it appeared to him that Christians such as Flavius Clemens and his wife Domitilla might after all gain some power at court — enough, at all events, to be useful to him or to hinder his career [14]. That would take away from the passage all independent value which otherwise it might possess. For it stands to reason that Josephus would then have been wily enough to draw on the right sources, i.e. the oldest Gospel narratives [15]. Nor would the conversion of such a person as Josephus unquestionably was redound to the particular glory of any religion. At any rate, this much is clear: if the ‘testimony’ were proved to be authentic it could only be the work of a Christian, and it would matter very little, for our argument, whether that Christian were Josephus or Eusebius, and as a consequence if would have only the smallest value for the historicity of Jesus.
It is natural enough that the critics of the passage were chiefly philologists, and its defenders theologians. In these discussions practically all of the possible arguments pro and con used by modern scholars are anticipated in one form or another.
The same rabbi, according to Pastor Johannes Muller, states: ‘…Josephus telleth first / how Pilate hath given cause for rebellion / whereupon the text should continue to say / how about the same time still another tumult happened unto the Jews: but because in between them is told the history of Jesus / the text doeth not hang together / the other tumult pointeth to the first.’
Steve Campbell, Author and Publisher of Historical Accuracy
If there is no full interpolation, the outrage/sad calamity is Christian dogma and creed.
If there is full interpolation, the outrage/sad calamity is the riot brought about by Pilate.
Furthermore, not only Passage I is an interpolation, why would Paulina being being exploited for sex and Fulvia being exploited for money be an outrage/sad calamity for Jews?
Answer: because Jews did not want their reputation tarnished by exploitative evangelism
It was bad enough Rome was already annoyed by so may Romans converting to Judaism.
Robert Eisler
It is difficult, at a first perusal, to deny the force of these remarks. Yet on second thought they carry far less weight than one might at first be inclined to suppose. It is perfectly true, of course, that the section in its extant form does not fit into the enumerations of ‘tumults.’ But in a narrative observing a purely chronological order of sequence and written in the ordinary style of annalists it should be possible to insert here and there some miscellaneous notes among the ‘disturbances’ which form the nucleus of the story. Whether, as Prof. Norden believes, Josephus is here dependent upon an annalist such as Cluvius Rufus, or, as I hope to show later on, whether he had access to the official notes of the imperial chancellery (commentarii), his source no doubt, and very naturally, contained all sorts of facts out of which he chose what ** you do not have permission to see this link **].
G.J.G.
The absence of the term such as ‘tumult’ Eisler more strongly attributes to its deletion by a Christian censor. The speculation is that originally the Testimonium did describe a ‘tumult’, and it was hostile to Jesus; therefore it was censored. The rest of the chapter and of much of Eisler’s book is devoted to the idea that a quantity of Josephus’ original text is missing from extant manuscripts.
Eisler proposes a reconstruction of the Testimonium that follows not unnaturally from the hypothesis that some text was deleted by Christian censors. There were many such deletions made in Jewish works, Eisler notes. Given that something was erased, it must be that the deleted text was hostile to Christianity (else no one would have bothered to censor it). Therefore, Josephus’ original description of Jesus must have been antagonistic. Eisler then proposes a certain small amount of hostile text that could have been deleted from the original to leave the existing version.
Eisler’s proposal for the original form of the Testimonium is as follows. (The dots […] are Eisler’s and indicate what Eisler he believes are irrecoverable deletions.)
Steve Campbell, author and publisher of Historical Accuracy
And this is found on page 48 of the Loeb Classical Library version of Antiquities Book 18.
Robert Eisler
“Now about this time arose an occasion for new disturbances, a certain Jesus, a wizard of a man, if indeed he may be called a man who was the most monstrous of all men, whom his disciples call a son of God, as having done wonders such as no man hath ever yet done…He was in fact a teacher of astonishing tricks to such men as accept the abnormal with delight….
And he seduced many also of the Greek nation and was regarded by them as the Messiah…And when, on the indictment of the principal men among us, Pilate had sentenced him to the cross, still those who before had admired him did not cease to rave. For it seemed to them that having been dead for three days, he had appeared to them alive again, as the divinely-inspired prophets had foretold — these and ten thousand other wonderful things — concerning him. And even now the race of those who are called “Messianists” after him is not extinct.”
G.J.G.
[You cannot really guess at what was deleted.]
The advantage of Eisler’s “hostility hypothesis” is that it offers a motivation for altering the text and explains Origen’s statement. But a neutral or somewhat skeptical text can do the same. The latter is an intrinsically more likely hypothesis for two reasons. First, generating a favorable text from a neutral one is a smaller step than working from a starting text that was hostile, and in the latter case, the simple deletions Eisler takes as his model would have turned a neutral text into a hostile one, not a favorable one. Second, an originally neutral text is more in keeping with Josephus’ presentation of himself in the Antiquities as an objective historian.
Eisler’s reconstruction is biased by his oft-repeated opinions of Josephus as an immoral, self-serving traitor. I believe any objective comparison of Josephus’ writing in the Antiquities with Eisler’s reconstruction reveals the innate implausibility of the latter’s extremely hostile tone.
Origen, Against Celsus, ** you do not have permission to see this link **
CHAP. XLVII.
I would like to say to Celsus, who represents the Jew as accepting somehow John as a Baptist, who baptized Jesus, that the existence of John the Baptist, baptizing for the remission of sins, is related by one who lived no great length of time after John and Jesus. For in the 18th book of his Antiquities of the Jews, Josephus bears witness to John as having been a Baptist, and as promising purification to those who underwent the rite. Now this writer, although not believing in Jesus as the Christ, in seeking after the cause of the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple, whereas he ought to have said that the conspiracy against Jesus was the cause of these calamities befalling the people, since they put to death Christ, who was a prophet, says nevertheless–being, although against his will, not far from the truth–that these disasters happened to the Jews as a punishment for the death of James the Just, who was a brother of Jesus (called Christ),–the Jews having put him to death, although he was a man most distinguished for his justice. Paul, a genuine disciple of Jesus, says that he regarded this James as a brother of the Lord, not so much on account of their relationship by blood, or of their being brought up together, as because of his virtue and doctrine. If, then, he says that it was on account of James that the desolation of Jerusalem was made to overtake the Jews, how should it not be more in accordance with reason to say that it happened on account (of the death) of Jesus Christ, of whose divinity so many Churches are witnesses, composed of those who have been convened from a flood of sins, and who have joined themselves to the Creator, and who refer all their actions to His good pleasure.
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Origen, Commentary on Matthew, ** you do not have permission to see this link **
And James is he whom Paul says in the Epistle to the Galatians that he saw, But other of the Apostles saw I none, save James the Lord’s brother. Galatians 1:19 And to so great a reputation among the people for righteousness did this James rise, that Flavius Josephus, who wrote the Antiquities of the Jews in twenty books, when wishing to exhibit the cause why the people suffered so great misfortunes that even the temple was razed to the ground, said, that these things happened to them in accordance with the wrath of God in consequence of the things which they had dared to do against James the brother of Jesus who is called Christ. And the wonderful thing is, that, though he did not accept Jesus as Christ, he yet gave testimony that the righteousness of James was so great; and he says that the people thought that they had suffered these things because of James.
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Antiquities
He was the Messiah
Loeb Classical Library Footnote
Variant (Richards and Shutt)
“the so-called Christ”
= = =
Antiquities
On the third day, he appeared to them restored to life.
Richards and Shutt
“[A]ccording to their report” has been removed by a Christian censor.
= = =
BDEhrman
FreedomBen
evgendob
Robert