I have italicized such clauses as have a chance to be authentic, and as may have led Origen to say of Josephus that he did not believe Jesus to be the Christ. For the clause “This was the Christ” must have run, “This was the so-called Christ.” We have the same expression in [ Matt. i, 16], and in the passage, undoubtedly genuine, in which Josephus refers to James, Ant., xx, 9, 1. Here Josephus relates that the Sadducee High-priest Ananus (son of Annas of the New Testament), in the interval of anarchy between the departure of one Roman Governor, Festus, and the arrival of another, Albinus, set up a court of his own, “and bringing before it the brother of Jesus who was called Christ—James was his name—and some others, he accused them of being breakers of the Law, and had them stoned.”
In the History of the Jewish War, iv, 5, 2, Josephus records his belief that the Destruction of Jerusalem was a divine nemesis for the murder of this Ananus by the Idumeans.
There is not now, nor ever was, any passage in Josephus where the fall of Jerusalem was explained as an act of divine nemesis for the murder of James by Ananus. Origen, as Professor Burkitt has remarked, “had mixed up in his commonplace book the account of Ananus’s murder of James and the remarks of Josephus on Ananus’s own murder.” [↑]
[3] So in [ Acts xviii, 12], we read of faction fights in Corinth between the Jews and the followers of Jesus the Messiah; Gallio, the proconsul of Achaia, who cared for none of the matters at issue between them, is a well-known personage, and an inscription has lately been discovered dating his tenure of Achaia in A.D. 52. [↑]
[4] Tacitus very likely wrote Chrestiani. He says the mob called them such, but adds that the author of the name was Christ, so implying that Christianus was the true form, and Chrestianus a popular malformation thereof. The Roman mob would be likely to deform a name they did not understand, just as a jack-tar turns Bellerophon into Billy Ruffian. Chrestos was a common name among oriental slaves, and a Roman mob would naturally assume that Christos, which they could not understand, was a form of it. [↑]
Chapter VI
THE ART OF CRITICISM
Repudiation by the partisans of non-historicity of Jesus of regular historical method Let us pause here and try to frame some ideas of the methods of this new school which denies that Jesus ever lived:—
Firstly, they are all agreed that the method they would apply to all other figures in ancient history—for example, to Apollonius—shall not be used in connection with Jesus. They carelessly deride “the attempt of historical theologians to reach the historical nucleus of the Gospels by purely philological means” (The Witnesses, p. 129). “The process,” writes Mr. Robertson, “of testing the Synoptic Gospels down to an apparent nucleus of primitive narrative” … “this new position is one of retreat, and is not permanently tenable” (Christianity and Mythology, p. 284).