Josephus and Jesus

About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was one who wrought surprising feats and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly . . . He was the Messiah. When Pilate, upon hearing him accused by men of the highest standing among us, had condemned him to be crucified, those who had . . . come to love [him] did not cease. On the third day he appeared to them restored to life. For the prophets of God had prophesied these and myriads of other marvelous [things] about him . . ."

--Flavius Josephus, in The Antiquities of the Jews

That passage by Josephus, a 1st century Jewish historian writing in Greek, was for centuries perhaps the most cited piece of non-Christian testimony to the life and works of Jesus. Tacitus and Pliny mentioned Jesus briefly, as did Josephus in another shorter passage in his Antiquities. But Josephus' ingenuous paragraph appeared to be everything that Christian apologists could ask from a supposedly unbiased source: virtual confirmation of the basic truths of their faith. The trouble was, scholars began to object during the Enlightenment, that such a passage could hardly have been written by a nonbeliever, and had almost certainly been reworked by some pious Christian editor. As historical evidence, the Testimonium Flavianum, as the passage was called, fell into disrepute.

Now a clearly more authentic version of Josephus' testimony has surfaced. Professor Shlomo Pines, a Jew and professor of philosophy at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has announced the discovery of a long-overlooked text of the Josephus passage in a 10th century Arabic work. Despite the relative lateness of the work. Pines contends that it is far closer to what Josephus originally may have written than the traditional Greek text is.

Good Conduct. To begin with.

Pines' version simply describes Jesus as "a wise man" whose "conduct was good" and who "was known to be virtuous." Moreover, it does not mention any involvement of the Jewish leaders in Jesus' trial, a good test of authenticity; any Christian apologist tempted to tamper with the text would almost surely have mentioned the Jews' role. As far as the resurrection is concerned, the 10th century manuscript recounts it only as a claim: "His disciples ... reported that he had appeared to them three days after his crucifixion and that he was alive; accordingly, he was perhaps the Messiah concerning whom the prophets have recounted wonders."

Pines considers it probable that the newly discovered passage was at least partially written by Josephus. His colleague at Hebrew University, Comparative Religion Professor David Flusser, regards its authenticity as certain. But the two agree in thinking that the new passage derives from a quotation of Josephus in an early edition of an ecclesiastical history by Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, a commanding figure of 3rd and 4th century Christianity. In a later edition of his history, they speculate, Eusebius inserted instead the traditional Testimonium Flavianum because it was more in keeping with the Christian conception of Jesus. Only the fact that the more authentic passage was passed down to the 10th century in Syriac, the scholars believe, may have saved it from church editors.

The irony is that whoever tinkered with the original Josephus passage --whether it was Eusebius or some other eager apologist--ended up making Josephus' testimony suspect to later generations. In his zeal to refashion Josephus' Jesus in the Christian mold, the tamperer succeeded only in weakening the credibility of the text--even as proof of Jesus' existence.

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