The works of Josephus early passed into the category of standard literature. It is recorded that they were placed by order of the Flavian Emperors in the public library of Rome; and though Suetonius, the biographer of the Caesars, who wrote in the second century, and Diogenes, the biographer of the philosophers, who wrote a century later, do not apparently hold them of any account, it is certain that they were carefully preserved till the triumph of the Christian Church gave them a new importance. For centuries henceforth they were the prime authority for Jewish history of post-Biblical times, and were treasured as a kind of introduction to the Gospels, illuminating the period in which Christianity had its birth. The traitor-historian was soon forgotten by his own people, if they ever had regard for him, and with the rest of the Hellenistic writers he dropped out of the Rabbinical tradition. Possibly the Aramaic version of the Wars survived for a time in the Eastern schools, but while the Jews were struggling to preserve their religious existence, they had little thought for such a history of their past.
The Christians, on the other hand, had a special interest in the works of Josephus, since they found in them not only the model of their defense against pagan calumnies, but the earliest external testimony to support the Gospels. Josephus was venerated as the Jew who had recorded the fate of Jesus of Nazareth. The Antiquities contain two references to John the Baptist and an account of the execution of James, the brother of Jesus; but the most celebrated of the "evidential" passages occurs in book xviii of the Antiquities, where in our text, following on the account of Pilate's persecution, occurs this paragraph:
"Now, there lived about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. He was the Christ; and when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him, for he appeared alive to them again the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him. And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day (ch. 3)."
An enormous literature has been provoked by these lines, and the weight of modern opinion is that they are altogether spurious. The passage is first quoted by Eusebius,[1] the historian of Caesarea, who wrote about the beginning of the fourth century C.E.;[2] but Origen, his predecessor by a hundred years, significantly enough does not know of it. Josephus, he says simply, did not acknowledge the Christ.[3] At the same time Origen quotes a passage from the same book of the Antiquities,[4] to show that the Jews ascribed the defeat of the Tetrarch Herod to his murder of John the Baptist. The earliest of the Patristic writers, Clement of Alexandria, quotes Josephus as to chronology, but it is fairly certain that he did not know the works at first hand, since the era he refers to runs from Moses to the tenth year of Antoninus,[5] i.e. till the better part of a century after the death of Josephus. Origen likewise probably knew Josephus only at second hand, and the inference is that both the Alexandrian ecclesiastics derived their citations and their interpolation in the text of Josephus from a pious Christian abstract and improvement. The uncompromisingly Christian character of the text, the discrepancy between Origen and Eusebius, and the notorious aptitude of early Christian scribes for interpolating manuscripts, and especially the manuscripts of Hellenistic Jewish writers, with Christological passages make it well nigh certain that the paragraph was foisted in between the second and third century. That was a period when, as has been said, "faith was more vivid than good-faith." The will to believe its genuineness, however, persisted to our own day, and some have made a compromise between their sentiment and their critical faculty, by arguing that the passage, though partly corrupt, is founded on something Josephus wrote.[6]
[Footnote 1: Comp. Schlatter, op. cit. 403.]
[Footnote 2: H.E. i. 41; Comp. Freimann, Wie verhielt sich das Judenthum zu Jesus? (Monatsschrift fur die Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judenthums, 1911, p. 296).]
[Footnote 3: Comm. in Matth. ch. xvii.]
[Footnote 4: Ant. XVIII. v. 5.]
[Footnote 5: Strom. I. xxi. 409.]
[Footnote 6: Among those who uphold this view is the Franco-Jewish savant Théodore Reinach, whose opinion is that the Christian scribe changed a testimonium de Christo into a testimonium pro Christo (R.E.J. xxxv. 6). Both Renan and Ewald hold that our passage is a corrupted fragment of a much fuller account of Jesus in the Antiquities. See Joel. op. cit. p. 52.]