“Men who receive the truth with pleasure.” “The truth” (τἀληθῆ). The crasis is in the style of Jos., but the phrase is again unexampled, at least in this portion. On the other hand, “to receive with pleasure” (ἡδονῇ δέχεσθαι) recurs in XVIII. 6, 59, 70, 236, 333; XIX. 127, 185 and similar phrases (ἡδονῇ φέρειν, χαρᾷ φέρειν or δέχεσθαι) elsewhere in this portion of the work. I account for this, with Norden, by supposing that “the interpolator knew his author.” He knew him just well enough to employ the crasis in τἀληθῇ and a phrase which he found twice in the immediate context (59, 70).
“The Greeks” (τοῦ Ἑλληνικοῦ). The neut. may be paralleled by B.J. II. 268, but is not uncommon outside Josephus.
“Our principal men.” Norden notes that, whereas “the first” or “principal men” (οἱ πρῶτοι) is frequent in Ant. XX. (2, 6, 53, 119, 123, 135, etc.), it never has the personal note (“our”) attached to it.
“Those who first loved (him).” Ἀγαπᾶν in Jos., never, according to Norden, has the Christian meaning of “love,” but only its classical sense of “be content”; an instance occurs in the previous paragraph (60, cp. 242).
“On the third day.” The phrase (τρίτην ἡμέραν ἔχων) is again unexampled in Jos.; the N.T. yields the nearest parallel (Lk. xxiv. 21, τρίτην ταύτην ἡμέραν ἄγει).
“Alive again” (πάλιν ζῶν). Jos. writes elsewhere of a future life ἀναβιοῦν (Ant. XVIII. 14) and γενέσθαι τε πάλιν καὶ βίον ἀμείνω λαβεῖν (Ap. II. 218); he does not use ζῆν or ζωή in this connexion.
“And to this very day” (εἰς ἔτι τε νῦν). The phrase is foreign to Jos., who commonly writes ἔτι καὶ νῦν, occasionally καὶ μεχρὶ τοῦ νῦν and the like, never εἰς ἔτι (Norden).
Jos. is scrupulous in avoiding a harsh hiatus—the juxtaposition of unelided vowels at the end of one word and the beginning of the next. The interpolator writes τἀληθῆ correctly, but, as Norden notes, he has in these few lines introduced three glaring examples of hiatus: Ἑλληνικοῦ ἐπηγάγετο, σταυρῷ ἐπιτετιμηκότος, Πιλάτου οὐκ.
(3) Contents.—Our decision must rest primarily upon the arguments already adduced from context and style. But the whole tone of the passage suggests a Christian hand. It is the eulogy of a devotee masquerading under the mantle of the Jewish historian, rather than what we should expect, the bare chronicle, if not the bitter invective, of the priestly historian himself. “If one should call him a man”; “this was the Christ.” Could Josephus have so written? Even Jerome found this last phrase incomprehensible on such lips and altered it in his translation to “credebatur esse Christus” (De vir. ill. 13). Prof. Burkitt ventures to uphold the authenticity even of these words. The passage, he argues, was penned at a time when Christianity had not yet become a formidable foe to Judaism, and was intended as an answer to Jewish expostulations on the subject of the coming of Messiah. This is how he paraphrases it: “Yes, the Christ was to come and indeed did come. That very estimable person who met with his death some time ago was the Christ. As in the case of so many other personages in our divinely chosen nation, there were some wonders and prodigies told about him. Even now there are some who revere him. They are good harmless folk like their master. But they are quite unimportant and no danger to the State; when you hear of ‘Christ’ it is no future Hannibal or Spartacus, but a good man who is dead and gone” (loc. cit. p. 140 f.). The reader must be left to estimate the value of this interpretation of the historian’s character and language in the light of the other evidence.
The theory of partial interpolation, held by those who reject the obviously Christian phrases but believe that Josephus made some statement about Christ, is unsatisfactory. In so far as it is supported by any solid arguments, it is based partly on the few phrases for which parallels can be found in his writings, partly on the assumption that the other mention of “Jesus who was called Christ” (Ant. XX. 200) implies a fuller statement elsewhere. But the elimination of all that is suggestive of Christian origin leaves practically nothing behind. We may well follow Norden in declining to discuss what he calls the “transcendental” question whether the interpolation may have ousted a genuine statement of the historian about Christ, now lost beyond recovery; merely adding that the argument that the paragraph interrupts the sequence of the narrative is an argument for its spuriousness as a whole.