Oxley in his great work 011 Egypt says: “However, I have found in some papers that this discourse was not written by Josephus, but by one Caius, a presbyter.”
Here, according to their own showing, what had passed for centuries as the work of Josephus was a fraud perpetrated by a dignitary of the Church. This is in perfect keeping with ancient custom. In addition to all this, there is not an original manuscript of Josephus in existence, nor one (that I have heard of) that dates farther back than the tenth or eleventh century A. D.
Another forged reference to Christ is found in the Antiquities, book xx. chapter ix. section 1, where Josephus is made to speak of James, “the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ.” Some theologians who reject the longer reference to Jesus accept this as genuine. But they do it without reconciling the discrepancies between the stories regarding the end of this same James. According to this passage, James was put to death under the order of the high priest. But according to Hegesippus, a converted Jew who wrote a history of the Christian Church about A. d. 170, James was killed in a tumult, not by sentence of a court. Clement of Alexandria confirms this, and is quoted by Eusebius accordingly. Eusebius also quotes the line from Josephus without noticing that the two do not agree. The statement is quoted in various ways in the early writers, and the conclusion is irresistible that the copies of Josephus were tampered with by copyists. Even had Jesus lived and taught as described in the Gospels, Josephus, an orthodox Jew, a priest, and conservative government official, would never have given him the title of Christ, or Messiah, a party leader for whom the Jews were looking to free them from their Roman bondage.
Among the great pagan writers of the first century of our era we find absolutely nothing relating to Jesus of Nazareth. There was Seneca, living not far from these times, and then the Elder and the Younger Pliny, Tacitus, Plutarch, Galen, Epictetus, Marcus Antoninus—some of the noblest men of the world. Let us look at some few fragments of testimony that we have. One historian writes that “under a ringleader named Chrestus the Jews raised a tumult.” In another place he refers to the Christians as a class of men devoted to a “new and mischievous superstition.” And Tacitus speaks of Judea as “the source of this evil.” Another speaks of the Christians as “a sect hated for their crimes,” and Suetonius gives Nero special praise for having done the most that he could to wipe them off the face of the earth. In a Life of Claudius, another Roman emperor, Christ is spoken of as “a restless, seditious Jewish agitator.” Pliny the Younger, writing to the emperor about A. D. 104, when he was governor of Bithynia, says the Christians do not worship the gods nor the emperors—as most of the people then did—nor could they be induced to curse Christ. He says they met mornings for virtuous vows, and chanted a hymn to Christ as to a god, and in the evening they ate together a common meal. And after he had put them to torture he said all he could find against them was “a perverse and immoderate superstition.” Lucian, about the middle of the second century, speaks of Jesus as the crucified Sophist. We do not know certainly whether these references to Christ allude to Jesus of Nazareth at all. Chrestians and Chrestus were designations in common use all over the world, and the writers merely mentioned them as a sect well known as creating some noise in the world. Certainly the language used in describing them is not very complimentary. They may have referred to the Essenes, who had their ideal Chrest.
A modern writer has shown that the story of the persecution of Christians by the emperor Nero (a. d. 54-68) is a modern fabrication. Robert Taylor, in his Diegesis published in 1829, proved that Cornelius Tacitus never could have written the passage describing such persecution. It has been demonstrated that the whole of the so-called Annals of Tacitus, containing the celebrated passage, was forged by a Papal secretary named Poggio Bracciolini. In 1422, while in the receipt of a small salary under Martin V., he was tempted by an offer of five hundred sequins (which would now be equal to fifty thousand dollars) to engage in some mysterious literary work. Seven years later, six books of what are now called the Annals of Tacitus were brought to him by a monk from Saxony. Then all Christendom rejoiced to learn that the heathen Tacitus had mentioned Christ crucified under Pontius Pilate. Poggio, though a father both spiritually and carnally, was not a husband till the age of fifty-four. At seventy-two he accepted the office of secretary to the republic of Florence, and at seventy-nine he died, leaving five sons of his old age. Up to the last he was a busy student and writer. Fifty-six years after his death his fourth son was secretary to Pope Leo X., at which time the pope’s steward, stimulated by a munificent reward, discovered the first six incomplete books of the Annals, being the unfinished work of Poggio in his old age.
The finding of ancient MSS. was a very lucrative business for scholars in those days. It began with Petrarch, who died in 1374, and did not end with Poggio, who died in 1459. Poggio discovered several orations of Cicero, a history by Ammianus Marcollinus, and several other classic works, besides the unclassic writings of Tertullian, the first Latin Father.
The modern fabrication of many of the ancient Latin and Greek MSS. is now becoming apparent. Jean Hardouin, a French Jesuit, died in 1729, aged eighty-three years. He was deeply versed in history, language, and numismatology. At the age of forty-four he began to suspect that certain writings of the Christian Fathers were spurious, and soon became convinced that none of them were genuine. Then turning his attention to the Greek and Latin classics, he found evidence sufficient to convince him that most of those also were forgeries, being fabricated by the Benedictine monks after the middle of the fourteenth century.
Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History, first found in Latin in the fifteenth century and then in Greek in the six-teenth century, we have no doubt is a probable forgery. And if so we have really no history of the primitive Church except what may be found in the New Testament and a few uncertain fragments of apocryphal literature, all much corrupted.
The use of the word Christus and Christianus by the Latin writers is sufficient evidence of modern fabrication. Ainsworth's Latin Dictionary has not the word Christus nor Christianus in the Latin part, but in the part which gives the Latin equivalents of English words we find this:
A Christian = Christianus.