The Rev. S. Baring-Gould, in his “Lost and Hostile Gospels,” says:
“This passage is first quoted by Eusebius (fl. A. D. 315) in two places (Hist. Eccl., lib. i, c. xi; Demonst. Evang., lib. iii); but it was unknown to Justin Martyr (fl. A. D. 140), Clement of Alexandria (fl. A. D. 192), Tertullian (fl. A. D. 193), and Origen (fl. A. D. 230). Such a testimony would certainly have been produced by Justin in his apology or in his controversy with Trypho the Jew, had it existed in the copies of Josephus at his time. The silence of Origen is still more significant. Celsus, in his book against Christianity, introduces a Jew. Origen attacks the argument of Celsus and his Jew. He could not have failed to quote the words of Josephus, whose writings he knew, had the passage existed in the genuine text. He, indeed, distinctly affirms that Josephus did not believe in Christ (Contr. Cels. i).”
Dr. Chalmers ignores it, and admits that Josephus is silent regarding Christ. He says: “The entire silence of Josephus upon the subject of Christianity, though he wrote after the destruction of Jerusalem, and gives us the history of that period in which Christ and his Apostles lived, is certainly a very striking circumstance” (Kneeland’s Review, p. 169).
Referring to this passage, Dean Milman, in his “Gibbon’s Rome” (Vol. II, p. 285, note) says: “It is interpolated with many additional clauses.”
Canon Farrar, who has written the ablest Christian life of Christ yet penned, repudiates it. He says: “The single passage in which he [Josephus] alludes to him is interpolated, if not wholly spurious” (Life of Christ, Vol. I, p. 46).
The following, from Dr. Farrar’s pen, is to be found in the “Encyclopedia Britannica”: “That Josephus wrote the whole passage as it now stands no sane critic can believe.”
“There are, however, two reasons which are alone sufficient to prove that the whole passage is spurious—one that it was unknown to Origen and the earlier fathers, and the other that its place in the text is uncertain” (Ibid).
Theodor Keim, a German-Christian writer on Jesus, says: “The passage cannot be maintained; it has first appeared in this form in the Catholic church of the Jews and Gentiles, and under the dominion of the Fourth Gospel, and hardly before the third century, probably before Eusebius, and after Origen, whose bitter criticisms of Josephus may have given cause for it” (Jesus of Nazara, p. 25).
Concerning this passage, Hausrath, another German writer, says it “must have been penned at a peculiarly shameless hour.”
The Rev. Dr. Hooykaas, of Holland, says: “Flavius Josephus, the well known historian of the Jewish people, was born in A. D. 37, only two years after the death of Jesus; but though his work is of inestimable value as our chief authority for the circumstances of the times in which Jesus and his Apostles came forward, yet he does not seem to have mentioned Jesus himself. At any rate, the passage in his ‘Jewish Antiquities’ that refers to him is certainly spurious, and was inserted by a later and a Christian hand” (Bible for Learners, Vol. III, p. 27). This conclusion of Dr. Hooykaas is endorsed by the eminent Dutch critic, Dr. Kuenen.