|Josephus and Jesus
By Paul L. Maier, The Russell H. Seibert Professor of Ancient History, Western Michigan University
Flavius Josephus (A.D. 37 – c. 100) was a Jewish historian born in Jerusalem four years after the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth in the same city. Because of this proximity to Jesus in terms of time and place, his writings have a near-eyewitness quality as they relate to the entire cultural background of the New Testament era. But their scope is much wider than this, encompassing also the world of the Old Testament. His two greatest works are Jewish Antiquities, unveiling Hebrew history from the Creation to the start of the great war with Rome in A.D. 66, while his Jewish War, though written first, carries the record on to the destruction of Jerusalem and the fall of Masada in A.D. 73.
Against this background, we should certainly expect that he would refer to Jesus of Nazareth, and he does—twice in fact. In Antiquities 18:63—in the middle of information on Pontius Pilate (A.D., 26-36)—Josephus provides the longest secular reference to Jesus in any first-century source. Later, when he reports events from the administration of the Roman governor Albinus (A.D. 62-64) in Antiquities 20:200, he again mentions Jesus in connection with the death of Jesus' half-brother, James the Just of Jerusalem. These passages, along with other non-biblical, non-Christian references to Jesus in secular first-century sources—among them Tacitus (Annals 15:44), Suetonius (Claudius 25), and Pliny the Younger (Letter to Trajan)—prove conclusively that any denial of Jesus' historicity is maundering sensationalism by the uninformed and/or the dishonest.
Although this passage is so worded in the Josephus manuscripts as early as the third-century church historian Eusebius, scholars have long suspected a Christian interpolation, since Josephus could hardly have believed Jesus to be the Messiah or in his resurrection and have remained, as he did, a non-Christian Jew. In 1972, however, Professor Schlomo Pines of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem announced his discovery of a different manuscript tradition of Josephus's writings in the tenth-century Melkite historian Agapius, which reads as follows at Antiquities 18:63:
Here, clearly, is language that a Jew could have written without conversion to Christianity. (Schlomo Pines, An Arabic Version of the Testimonium Flavianum and its Implications [Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1971.])
Scholars fall into three basic camps regarding Antiquities 18:63:
Josephus must have mentioned Jesus in authentic core material at 18:63 since this passage is present in all Greek manuscripts of Josephus, and the Agapian version accords well with his grammar and vocabulary elsewhere. Moreover, Jesus is portrayed as a "wise man" [sophos aner], a phrase not used by Christians but employed by Josephus for such personalities as David and Solomon in the Hebrew Bible.
Furthermore, his claim that Jesus won over "many of the Greeks" is not substantiated in the New Testament, and thus hardly a Christian interpolation but rather something that Josephus would have noted in his own day. Finally, the fact that the second reference to Jesus at Antiquities 20:200, which follows, merely calls him the Christos [Messiah] without further explanation suggests that a previous, fuller identification had already taken place. Had Jesus appeared for the first time at the later point in Josephus's record, he would most probably have introduced a phrase like "…brother of a certain Jesus, who was called the Christ."
This, Josephus's second reference to Jesus, shows no tampering whatever with the text and it is present in all Josephus manuscripts. Had there been Christian interpolation here, more material on James and Jesus would doubtless have been presented than this brief, passing notice. James would likely have been wreathed in laudatory language and styled, "the brother of the Lord," as the New Testament defines him, rather than "the brother of Jesus." Nor could the New Testament have served as Josephus's source since it provides no detail on James's death. For Josephus to further define Jesus as the one "who was called the Christos" was both credible and even necessary in view of the twenty other Jesuses he cites in his works.
Accordingly, the vast majority of contemporary scholars regard this passage as genuine in its entirety, and concur with ranking Josephus expert Louis H. Feldman in his notation in the Loeb Classical Library edition of Josephus: "…few have doubted the genuineness of this passage on James" (Louis H. Feldman, tr., Josephus, IX [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965], 496).
The preponderance of evidence, then, strongly suggests that Josephus did indeed mention Jesus in both passages. He did so in a manner totally congruent with the New Testament portraits of Christ, and his description, from the vantage point of a non-Christian, seems remarkably fair, especially in view of his well-known proclivity to roast false messiahs as wretches who misled the people and brought on war with the Romans.
Furthermore, his second citation regarding the attitudes of the high priest and Sanhedrin versus that of the Roman governor perfectly mirrors the Gospel versions of the two opposing sides at the Good Friday event. And this extrabiblical evidence comes not from a Christian source trying to make the Gospels look good, but from a totally Jewish author who never converted to Christianity.