E. Norden in Neue Jahrbücher für das klassische Altertum, vol. xxxi, 1913, pp. 637 ff., Josephus u. Tacitus über Jesus Christus und eine messianische Prophetie.
E. Schürer, Hist. of Jewish People in the time of Jesus Christ, 1898, I. 2, pp. 143 ff. (where the older literature is quoted).
(d) For the passages in the Slavonic version of the B.J.
A. Berendts in Texte und Untersuchungen, N. F., Bd. XIV, 1906.
In this much debated passage Josephus appears to speak of Jesus Christ as one of more than mortal nature, as a wonder-worker and a teacher of men who receive “the truth” with pleasure, and as gaining many adherents among Jews and Greeks. Then comes the explicit statement, “This was the Christ.” The writer proceeds to mention His crucifixion by Pilate “on the indictment of our principal men,” His resurrection and appearance to His followers on the third day, and the survival at the time of writing of “the tribe” of Christians who took their name from Him.
The passage largely accounts for the high esteem in which Josephus was held by Patristic writers. Since the revival of learning the question of its authenticity has been the subject of keen controversy. Until recently few scholars of weight have ventured to maintain that the paragraph as it stands can have been penned by the Jewish historian; the point on which opinions have diverged has been whether the whole is an interpolation or whether a genuine brief statement of Josephus about Christ has been expanded and emended by a Christian hand. In recent years the question has been reopened in two ways, by the conversion of two authorities of the first rank to the rejected view and by the discovery of new materials. Professor Burkitt in this country and (following him with a little hesitation) Harnack in Germany have pronounced in favour of the genuineness of the passage. The existence has also been brought to light of other passages in the Slavonic version of the Jewish War relating to John the Baptist, Christ and the early Christians. The Slavonic matter may be treated independently; it has no attestation in the Greek MSS, and, whatever its origin, lacks the authority with which the present passage comes before us. Harnack has been answered in a masterly article by one of his own countrymen (Norden), and, notwithstanding the weight attaching to the names of its recent supporters, the arguments against the authenticity of the passage (at least in its present form) appear overwhelming. The really decisive factors in the problem must be sought rather in the relevance of the passage to its context and in the style than in any subjective considerations as to what Josephus could or could not have written.
External evidence
The passage, it is true, stands in all our MSS, but this tells us little, since the oldest of them (Niese’s P) is not earlier than the ninth or tenth century. Eusebius quotes it (H.E. i. 11, cf. Dem. Ev. iii. 3. 105 f.), thus attesting its existence in the fourth century. On the other hand, it is practically certain that Origen in the preceding century did not find it in his text. He knows the allusions to John the Baptist in the same book of the Antiquities (§ [29]) and to James the Lord’s brother in the twentieth book (§ [37]), but of any mention of Christ he has no word. Nor are we confined to this argumentum e silentio; his language makes it impossible to suppose that he found the statement “This was the Christ.” “The wonder is,” he writes, “that, though he (Josephus) did not admit our Jesus to be Christ, he none the less gave his witness to so much righteousness in James” (Comm. in Matt. x. 17); and again (writing on John the Baptist) “although he (Josephus) disbelieved in Jesus as Christ” (c. Cels. i. 47). The passage about James as cited by Origen differs, indeed, from the normal text; according to Origen, Josephus regarded the destruction of the Temple as a punishment for the murder. Prof. Burkitt thinks that Origen may have “mixed up in his commonplace book the account of Ananus’ murder of James and the remarks of Josephus on Ananus’ own murder” (§ [45]); but it is difficult to believe, as the Professor appears to suggest, that his familiarity with the Antiquities was so slight that he could have missed the statement in XVIII. 63 f. and written as he did if it stood in his text. The real importance of Origen’s evidence is that it seems to supply the date when our passage was interpolated by a Christian reader, viz. towards the end of the third century, between the age of Origen and that of Eusebius.
Internal evidence
(1) Context.—The latest advocates of the authenticity of the statement have judged it on its merits, apart from its context, from which it cannot be isolated. As Norden has convincingly shown, it breaks the thread of the narrative, the framework of which at this point consists of a series of “tumults” or “disturbances” (θόρυβοι). This framework seems to have been taken over from an older authority, and so mechanically that disturbances which occurred at different dates are treated as contemporaneous. We have:—