Did Josephus talk about Jesus? Most scholars say yes! (The consensus view on the Testimonium Flavianum)

THESIS: Contrary to the frequently repeated claims of mythicists,[1] the majority of scholars accept as authentic a substantial portion of Josephus’s famous passage about Jesus (the Testimonium Flavianum). This is true of scholars of all stripes, conservative, liberal, Jewish, Christian, agnostic, whatever, as illustrated by the affirmations of (1) Jesus Seminar founder Robert W. Funk, (2) other Jesus Seminar members such as John Dominic Crossan and Marcus Borg, (3) prominent Josephus scholar and translator, Louis H. Feldman, (4) prominent Dead Sea Scroll scholar Géza Vermès, (4) agnostic New Testament scholars such as Bart D. Ehrman and Maurice Casey, (5) mainstream historical Jesus scholars like John P. Meier, and (6) very idiosyncratic ones like Morton Smith.

The text of Antiquities, written by the first-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, contains, as it stands, two references to Jesus. The first and most important, often referred to as the Testimonium Flavianum, appears in Antiquities 18.63.3 (Whiston’s numbering, 18.3.3) and is translated as follows in the Loeb Classical Library (LCL) edition:

"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 [64] teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly.  He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks.  He was the Messiah.  When Pilate, upon hearing him accused by men of the highest standing amongst us, had condemned him to be crucified, those who had in the first place come to love him did not give up their affection for him.  On the third day he appeared to them restored to life, for the prophets of God had prophesied these and countless other marvellous things about him.  And the tribe of Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared."[2] (Italics added)

The Loeb edition was prepared by Jewish scholar Louis H. Feldman (d. 2017), who is considered by some to be the leading authority on Josephus of the most recent generation past. Feldman includes the following footnote regarding the authenticity of the passage:

"The most probable view seems to be that our text represents substantially what Josephus wrote, but that some alterations have been made by a Christian interpolator."[3]

 In saying this, Feldman is reflecting what is currently a consensus of scholars of all stripes, conservative, liberal, Christian, Jewish, whatever.[4] In Feldman’s translation (above), I have italicized the three statements in the passage scholars generally consider to be the additions of a Christian interpolator. The majority of scholars across the board hold that apart from these three italicized fragments, the remainder of the passage went back to Josephus himself. As the consensus view it must be stressed that not only conservative scholars that take this position, but more liberal ones also, including, for example, the late the founder of the Jesus Seminar, Robert W. Funk,[5] along with prominent fellow Jesus Seminar members including such luminaries as the late Marcus Borg[6] and John Dominic Crossan.[7] Crossan, for example, writes:

"Omit, therefore, those italicized sentences. Without them Josephus’s account is carefully and deliberately neutral. He does not want, apparently, to be embroiled in any controversy about this Jesus, and such debate may have been quite possible within circles important to him at the time. So he was cautiously impartial and some later Christian editor delicately Christianized his account, but only to the extent that it was at least plausible and credible for the Jewish Josephus to have written it. Those Christian insertions, however, should not diminish the importance of Josephus’s commentary. That is how Jesus and early Christianity looked to a very prudent, diplomatic, and cosmopolitan Roman Jew in the early last decade of the first century: miracles and teachings, Jews and Greeks, our 'men of highest standing' and Pilate, crucifixion and continuation. He did not, of course, mention resurrection, but he did admit that 'the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared.'"[8]

Bart D. Ehrman too regards the passage as basically authentic, noting that "The majority of scholars of early Judaism, and experts on Josephus, think that it was the former—that one or more Christian scribes 'touched up' the passage a bit."[9] Ehrman defends the passage’s essential authenticity in a number of his books, including what amounts to a lengthy defense of it against mythicist denials in the second chapter of his Did Jesus Exist.[10]

 Very prominent in contributing to the current consensus was John P. Meier who offered a widely accepted reconstruction of the original passage in his magisterial work, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, Volume I: The Roots of the Problem and the Person (1991). [11]

What is interesting in all this is the fact that sometimes it is more conservative Biblical scholars who, while still affirming that the passage in some form went back to Josephus, are less confident about what the original contained. A good example of this is Luke Timothy Johnson, who writes:

Another passage (Ant XVIII.3.3) is so reworked by Christian interpolations that we can say, at most, that Josephus placed Jesus in the period of unrest during the procuratorship of Pontius Pilate, recognized him as a teacher, and knew of a movement that lived on after him.[12]

Yet other scholars, and here I would include myself, would suggest that things were not only added to the Testimonium Flavianum but also taken away or slightly modified. As Maurice Casey correctly points your, "These scribes may have omitted things as well as added them."[13] In spite of this, Casey goes on to stress, “The Importance of this passage is basic. Against people who still argue that Jesus was not a real historical figure, it is an important piece of non-Christian evidence that he was.”

One scholar who took things further than most in the direction of seeing things taken out rather than added to Josephus’s original passage was the late Morton Smith, who argued in his controversial book Jesus the Magician (1978) that far from Josephus’s original statement about Jesus having been, to recall Crossan’s phrase, "carefully and deliberately neutral,"[14] it had actually been decidedly hostile, such that the later editor who tampered with it would have been mainly interested in making it more Jesus friendly. Here is how Smith thought Josephus’s original must have been like:

"At this time <in the middle of Pilate’s governorship, about A. D. 30> there lived Jesus, a man <who was a sophist>, if it is proper to call him a man.  For he was a doer of miracles, a teacher of men who receive <impiety> with pleasure.  And he led <astray> many Jews and many of the Greeks <who said that> this <fellow> was the Christ.  And when, on accusation by our leading men, Pilate condemned him to the cross, those who formerly loved <him> did not cease <to do so>, for <they asserted that> he appeared to them on the third day, again alive, while <pretended> prophets kept saying these and ten thousand other incredible things about him.  And to the present <time> the tribe of Christians, named after him, has not disappeared."[15]

Another example of this is the late Jewish Dead Sea Scrolls scholar Géza Vermès, from whom I got my own high regard for the importance of Josephus. In my view, Vermès’s is a more nuanced reading of the evidence than those whose views I have already mentioned, I quote one of the places where he discusses the matter at length:
"The Christian passages, those which cannot be ascribed to the Jew Josephus, are easily distinguishable.

1 The gloss 'If indeed one ought to call him a man', is the interpolator’s reaction to the superhuman/divine Jesus being called a mere 'wise man'.

2 'He was the Christ' is a common Christian interpolator’s confession of the messianic status of Jesus. Nevertheless, the original text must have contained the epithet, 'Christ', to account for the later statement about ‘the tribe of the Christians’ named after the founder. The most likely original version read, 'He was called the Christ', as Josephus puts it in the passage about James, described as 'the brother of Jesus called Christ'.

[42]

3   The reference to Jesus attracting to himself 'many Greeks' is without Gospel support.  Nevertheless, if Josephus knew of a mixed Jewish-Gentile church in Rome, he may have believed that a similar structure existed in the time of Jesus.

4     The resurrection appearances on the third day together with the relevant prophesies are part of the apologetic arsenal of the early Church and have nothing to do with Josephus.

Once the Christian supplements are removed, the original notice is reduced to the description of Jesus as 'wise man' and 'performer of paradoxical deeds', the epithet 'Christ' attached to the name of Jesus; the crediting of the death sentence to Pilate; and the mention of the existence of followers of Jesus at the time of the writing of the Testimonium in the 90s.

Both 'wise man' and 'performer of paradoxical deeds' take us to plain Josephus territory.[16]

I agree with my old teacher that the "epithet, 'Christ'" was part and parcel of Josephus’ original passage, and I think his solution of its having read something like “He was called the Christ’” is very likely correct.

To comment a bit further on this there is a tenth-century Arabic version of the Testimonium in the Melchite Bishop Agapius’s Univeral History that was brought to the attention of the world of Biblical scholarship in 1971 by Shlomo Pines. In the Arabic version we find a note of doubt that isn’t present in the Greek version’s phrase “He was the Messiah.” It reads instead “he was perhaps the Messiah.” [17]  A similar note of doubt is also found in the Syriac Chronicle (5.10.91) of Michael the Syrian, Patriarch of Antioch from 1166 to 1199.  Although the version of the Testimonium in the Syriac translation of Eusebius’s Ecclesiastical History agrees with the Greek version in having “he was the Messiah,”[18] Michael’s Syriac Chronicle reads, “He was thought to be the Messiah.”[19] Both Agapius and Michael, however, explicitly tell their readers that they are quoting Josephus.  Both of these authors are, of course, quite late, yet they have a precursor in the fourth-century writer Saint Jerome who includes the Testimonium in his entry for Josephus in his De Viris Illustrious 13.  There we read: “He was believed to be the Messiah” (credebatur esse Christus).[20]   This is significant because Jerome’s alternative version comes later in the same century as the first quotation of the passage in its better-known version by Eusebius of Caesarea.[21] And it is the earliest version of the Testimonium besides Eusebius’s.[22]  The implication is that Eusebius and Jerome may have been following alternate versions of the Testimonium, either of which might have been the correct one. Significantly, T. W. Manson favored Jerome’s variant reading over that of the standard one:

"It seems to me that the statements of Origen that Josephus "did not admit our Jesus to be the Christ' or 'disbelieved in Jesus as Christ' together with Jerome’s variant reading credebatur point in the one direction, namely that Josephus wrote ἐνομίζετο and that some pious Christian made what appeared to him the obvious and necessary correction.[23]

As an interesting aside, the Greek translation of Jerome’s De Viris Illustrious, swapped out his version of the Testimonium for the more common vulgate Greek version, i.e., the version quoted by Eusebius, which agrees with the one presented by Feldman at the beginning of our discussion.  In response to this, Shlomo Pines remarks:

"The efficiency of the Christian censorship, which almost succeeded in getting rid of all the versions of the Testimonium that differed in a significant manner from the vulgate recension, is illustrated by the fact that the Greek translation of De Viris Illustrious contains this vulgate recension; none of the traits in which St. Jerome diverges from it have been retained."[24]

Pines, then, sees in the replacement Jerome’s version of the Testimonium with the form that ultimately prevailed a version of what historical Jesus denier Earl J. Doherty was referring to when he referred in another connection to "one of the universal tendencies in manuscript transmission, that all copies of a well-known passage gravitate toward the best-known wording."[25]  This in turn has raised questions regarding the extent to which our current version of the Antiquities has been corrupted. This is the direction Feldman himself takes the question:

"A possible clue to the unreliability of the text that we possess may be found in the fact that Origen (Contra Celsum 1.47, 2.13 end; Commentary on Matthew 10.17), Eusebius (Historia Ecclesiastica 2.13.20) and Jerome (De Viris Illustribus 13) declare that Josephus said that Jerusalem was destroyed because of the murder of James the Just, a statement nowhere to be found in our text of Josephus.  Similarly, as PINES (79) has noted, there are statements in the tenth-century Arabic historian Agapius allegedly drawn from Josephus which are not in our texts.  These may, of course, be due to interpolations or loose paraphrasing, but they may also refer to a different text.[26] These early readings are made especially significant in light of the fact that the earliest manuscript of the Antiquities covering the portion that includes the Testimonium comes from the eleventh century."[27]

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[1] The claim is either that the scholars all agree the passage is spurious, and/or that only Christian apologists still claim it is authentic. See, for example, Dan Barker: “That passage from Josephus has been shown conclusively to be a forgery, and even conservative scholars admit it has been tampered with” (“Debunking the Historical Jesus,” Freethought Today 23.2 [March 2006]); John E. Remsburg: “And yet a ranker forgery was never penned. Its language is Christian. Every line proclaims it the work of a Christian writer” (The Christ: A Critical Review and Analysis of the Evidence of His Existence [New York: Truth Seeker Company, (1909)], 28): Lloyd M. Graham: “No serious student today, not even the theologian, believes Josephus wrote it” (Deceptions and Myths of the Bible [New York: Skyhorse, 2012], 293); D. M. Murdock (Acharya S): “Despite the best wishes of sincere believers and the erroneous claims of truculent apologists, the Testimonium Flavianum has been demonstrated continually over the centuries to be a forgery, likely interpolated by Catholic Church historian Eusebius in the fourth century. So thorough and universal has been this debunking that very few scholars of repute continued to cite the passage after the turn of the 19th century” (“The Jesus Forgery: Josephus Untangled”); Dr. Gordon Stein: “The vast majority of scholars since the early 1800s have said that this quotation is not by Josephus, but rather is a later Christian insertion in his works. In other words, it is a forgery, rejected by scholars. “The Jesus of History: A Reply to Josh McDowell”); G. A. Wells: “His [Josephus’s] works do indeed contain two passages about Jesus the Christ.  But the longer of these two [the Testamentum Flavianum] has been shown fairly conclusively to be wholly a Christian interpolation.” (Did Jesus Exist? [2^nd ed.;  Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1992], 10); Gerald Massey: “...the supposed reference to him [Jesus] by the latter [Josephus] being an undoubted forgery,” (The Historical Jesus and Mythical Christ: A Lecture [London: Villa Bordighiera,, 188?], 3).

[2] Josephus, Antiquities 18.63.3 (ET: Louis H. Feldman, Josephus (volume 9 of 10; Loeb Classical Library; Cambridge: Harvard University Press; London: Heinemann, 1965), 49 and 51.

[3] Page 49, n. b.

[4] This is not to say, of course that no one takes a different view. So, for example, Feldman’s review of scholarship on the question from 1937-1980 reveals that during that time period, about twice as many scholars understood the passage to be authentic with interpolations, as did scholars who on the one hand regarded it as all or mostly authentic or all or mostly inauthentic [see, Louis H. Feldman, Josephus and Modern Scholarship (1937-1980) [Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1984], 684-91).  The issue here is the claim that all scholars consider it to be inauthentic.

[5] Robert W. Funk, Honest to Jesus: Jesus for a New Millennium (A Polebridge Press Book, HarperSanFrancisco, 1996), 222

[6] Marcus Borg, Jesus: Uncovering the Life, Teachings, and Relevance of a Religious Revolutionary [New York: HarperOne, 2006), 30-31.

[7] John Dominic Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography (HarperSanFrancisco, 1994), 161.

[8] Ibid., 162.

[9] Bart D. Ehrman, Did Jesus Exit (New York: HarperOne, 2012), 60.

[10] Bart D. Ehrman, Did Jesus Exit (New York: HarperOne , 2012): 57-66. See further, e.g., his A Brief Introduction to the New Testament (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 162, and Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 62.

[11] John P. Meier’s A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus, Volume I: The Roots of the Problem and the Person (New York: Doubleday, 1991), 61.

[12] Luke Timothy Johnson, The Writings of the New Testament (3^rd ed.; Minneapolis, MN: 2010), 87.

[13] Maurice Casey, Jesus of Nazareth (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 121.

[14] Crossan, Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography, 162.

[15] Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician (fwd. Bart D. Ehrman; San Francisco, CA: Hampton Roads Press, 2014 [orig. 1978]), 62.

[16] Géza Vermès, Jesus in the Jewish World (London: SCM Press, 2010), 41-42.

[17] Shlomo Pines, An Arabic Version of the Testimonium Flavianum and its Implications (Jerusalem: The Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1971), 8-10 (my italics).

[18] ET: Pines, Arabic Version, 26. See, The Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius in Syriac, With a Collation of the Ancient Armenian Version by Adelbert Merz (ed. William Wright & Norman McLean; with a Collation of the Ancient Armenian Version by Adalbert Merx; Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1898), 48 (1.11.7).

[19] ET: Pines, Arabic Version, 26. See, Chronique de Michel le Syrien, patriarche jacobite d’Antioche (1166-1199) (4 vols.; ed. Jean B. Chabot; Paris: 1899-1910), 1.144-45: “On pense que c’était le Messie.” The Syriac text can be found in idem 4:91 (left column, ll. 15-27, cf. Pines, Arabic Version, 24).

[20] For Jerome’s Latin text, see conveniently, Pines, Arabic Version, 40, from Ernest Cushing Richardson, “Hieronymus—de viris Inlustribus,” Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur 14.1 (1896): 16 (13.15).

[21] Ecclesiastical History 1.11, Demonstration of the Gospel 3.5. See also the Syriac version of the lost Greek original of his Theophania 5.44.

[22] Louis H. Feldman, “On the Authenticity of the Testimonium Flavianum Attributed to Josephus,” New Perspectives on Jewish Christian Relations: In Honor of David Berger (eds. Elisheva Carlebach & Jacob J. Schacter; Leiden & Boston: Brill, 2011), 16, and idem, Josephus and Modern Scholarship (1937-1980) (Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1984), 687.

[23] T. W. Manson, “The Life of Jesus: A Study of the Available Materials,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library  27.2 (1943): 329.

[24] Pines, Arabic Version, 40, n. 147.

[25] Earl J. Doherty, The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity Begin with a Mythical Christ? (Ottawa, CA: Canadian Humanist Publications, 1999), 216.

[26] Louis H. Feldman, Josephus and Modern Scholarship (1937-1980) (Berlin, New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1984), 22.    

[27] Ibid., 687.