Chapter 21 Critiqued:

• Historical Jesus scholar Dr. Paula Fredriksen wrote: “In Jewish Antiquities 18.63-64, Josephus gives a short summary statement on Jesus. Scholars have debated the historical merits of this passage, some (few, now) maintaining that the whole is authentic, others (another minority), that the whole is a Christian interpolation, that is, a passage written into the manuscript by a later Christian scribe. Most scholars currently incline to see the passage as basically authentic, with a few later insertions by a Christian scribe” (JNKJ:249).
  
  
• The New Testament scholar John P. Meier provided some more detailed information about this text in his book A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus. Volume One: The Roots of the Problem and the Person. Some of his arguments/comments are below:
  
  
• The text’s history, context, language, and thought indicate Josephus mentioned Jesus in his Testimonium (AMJRTHJ:62).
  

  • First, the Testimonium is present in all the Greek manuscripts (AMJRTHJ:62).
  

  • Second, “the vocabulary and grammar of the passage (after the clearly Christian material is removed) cohere well with Josephus’ style and language; the same cannot be said when the text’s vocabulary and grammar are compared with that of the NT. Indeed, many key words and phrases in the Testimonium are either absent from the NT or are used there in an entirely different sense; in contrast almost every word in the core of Testimonium is found elsewhere in Josephus—in fact, most of the vocabulary turns out to be characteristic of Josephus” (AMJRTHJ:62-63).
  

  • “This comparison of vocabulary between Josephus and the NT does not provide a neat solution to the problem of authenticity, but it does force us to ask which of the two possible scenarios is more probable. Did a Christian of some unknown century so immerse himself in the vocabulary and style of Josephus that, without the aid of any modern dictionaries and concordances, he was able to (1) strip himself of the NT vocabulary with which he would naturally speak of Jesus and (2) reproduce perfectly the Greek of Josephus for most of the Testimonium—no doubt to create painstakingly an air of verisimilitude—while at the same time destroying that air with a few patently Christian affirmations? Or is it more likely that the core statement, (1) which we first isolated simply by extracting what would strike anyone at first glance as Christian affirmations, and (2) which we then found to be written in typically Josephan vocabulary that diverged from the usage of the NT, was in fact written by Josephus himself? Of the two scenarios, I find the second much more probable” (AMJRTHJ:63).
  
  

  • Third, “…the author of the core of the Testimonium seems ignorant of certain basic material and statements in the four canonical Gospels.

  • The statement that Jesus ‘won over’ or ‘gained a following among’ both (men) many Jews and (de kai) many of those of Gentile origin flies in the face of the overall description of Jesus’ ministry in the Four Gospels and of some individual affirmations that say just the opposite.
    
    
    
  • In the whole of John’s Gospel, no one clearly designated a Gentile ever interacts directly with Jesus; the very fact that Gentiles seek to speak to Jesus is a sign to him that the hour of his passion, which alone makes a universal mission possible, is at hand (John 12:20-26). In Matthew’s Gospel, where a few exceptions to the rule are allowed (the centurion [Matt. 8:5-13]; the Canaanite woman [15:21-28]), we find a pointedly programmatic saying in Jesus’ mission charge to the Twelve: ‘Go not to the Gentiles, and do not enter a Samaritan city; rather, go only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel’ (Matt. 10:5-6). The few Gentiles who do come into contact with Jesus are not objects of Jesus’ missionary outreach; they rather come to him unbidden and humble, realizing they are out of place. For Matthew, they point forward to the universal mission, which begins only after Jesus’ death and resurrection (28:16-20). While Mark and Luke are not as explicit as Matthew on this point, they basically follow the same pattern: during his public ministry, Jesus does not undertake any formal mission to the Gentiles; the few who come to him do so by way of exception.
    
    
    
    
  • Hence the implication of the Testimonium that Jesus equally (pollous men…pollous de kai) won a large following among both Jews and Gentiles simply contradicts the clear statements of the Gospels. Unless we want to fantasize about a Christian interpolator who is intent on inserting a summary of Jesus’ ministry into Josephus and who nonetheless wishes to contradict what the Gospels say about Jesus’ ministry, the obvious conclusion to draw is that the core of the Testimonium comes from a non-Christian hand, namely, Josephus. Understandably, Josephus simply retrojected the situation of his own day, when the original “Jews for Jesus” had gained many Gentile converts, into the time of Jesus. Naïve retrojection is a common trait of Greco-Roman historians” (AMJRTHJ:64-65).
    

• “A final curiosity encompasses not the Testimonium take by itself but the relation of the Testimonium to the longer narrative about John the Baptist in Ant. 18.5.2 116-19, a text accepted as authentic by almost all scholars. The two passages are in no way related to each other in Josephus. The earlier, shorter passage about Jesus is placed in the context of Pontius Pilate’s governorship of Judea; the later, longer passage about John in placed in a context dealing with Herod Antipas, tetrarch of Galilee-Perea. Separated by time, space, and placement in Book 18, Jesus and the Baptist (in that order!) have absolutely nothing to do with each other in the mind and narrative of Josephus. Such a presentation totally contradicts—indeed, is the direct opposite of—the NT portrait of the Baptist, who is always treated briefly as the forerunner of the main character, Jesus. Viewed as a whole, the treatment of Jesus and John in Book 18 of The Antiquities is simply inconceivable as the work of a Christian of any period” (AMJRTHJ:66). (This difficulty must be faced especially by those critics who are enthusiastic about the authenticity and importance of the passage about the Baptist, while dismissing the Testimonium as a complete fabrication.) (AMJRTHJ:85).

• Doherty wrote: “G.A. Wells and others have argued that the continuity of the flanking passages works best when no passage about Jesus intervenes. The final thought of the previous paragraph flows naturally into the words of the one following, whereas the opening of the latter paragraph does not fit as a follow-up to the closing sentence of the Testimonium. This argument is somewhat tempered by the fact that since the ancients had no concept of footnotes, digressional material had to be inserted into the main text, as there was nowhere else to put it. However, one might ask whether the Testimonium should be considered digressional material, since it continues with the theme of Pilate’s activities and about various woes which befall the Jews. One might also suggest that, digression or no, once Josephus had written in, his opening words in the subsequent paragraph ought to have reflected, rather than ignored, the paragraph on Jesus” (TJP:207).

• Doherty wrote: “All these apologists…” (early apologists before Eusebius) “are intimately concerned with defending Christianity against pagan hostility, yet not one of them draws on what may have been the sole example of a non-negative comment on Christianity by an outsider before Constantine’s conversion. If a figure of the stature of Josephus had said the things contained in the alleged ‘authentic’ Testimonium, can one really believe that every Christian commentator for over two centuries would regard nothing in it as worthy of mention?” (TJP:208-209).

• Earl Doherty wrote: “There is one final observation to be made. In the section on Pilate in the earlier Jewish War, written in the 70s, Josephus outlines the same two incidents with which he began chapter 3 of Book 18 in the Antiquities of the Jews, incidents which caused tumult in Judea during the governorship of Pilate. In the Antiquities, these descriptions are immediately followed by the Testimonium about Jesus. In Jewish War (2.9/169-177) no mention of Jesus is included” (TJP:222).
  
  
  
  

  • Josephus frequently reports the same stories differently between each of his writings. Although, there are many cases in which Josephus includes similar information in his various documents, Josephus does not always include the same material.
    
    
  • For example, John Dominic Crossan makes the following observation: “Under Festus between 60 and 62 C.E., Josephus has one unnamed prophet, but the details read almost like a vague summary of preceding examples, and, with no parallel version in Jewish War, one might be suspicious of its validity” (THJLOAMJ:166).
    
    
  • Thus, there is at least one example in which Josephus does not mention the same material in multiple works.
    
    
    
• See also: Ancient Judaism: Josephus on Jesus