Note 2 — Chapter V · EXTERNAL EVIDENCE

The suspect passage in which Josephus refers to Jesus runs thus, Ant. xviii, 3, 3: “Now about this time came Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one may call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive what is true with pleasure, and he attracted many Jews and many of the Greeks. This was the ‘Christ.’ And when on the accusation of the principal men amongst us Pilate had condemned him to the cross, they did not desist who had formerly loved him, for he appeared to them on the third day alive again; the divine Prophets having foretold both this and a myriad other wonderful things about him; and even now the race of those called Christians after him has not died out.”

I have italicized such clauses as have a chance to be authentic, and as may have led Origen to say of Josephus that he did not believe Jesus to be the Christ. For the clause “This was the Christ” must have run, “This was the so-called Christ.” We have the same expression in Matt. i, 16, and in the passage, undoubtedly genuine, in which Josephus refers to James, Ant., xx, 9, 1. Here Josephus relates that the Sadducee High-priest Ananus (son of Annas of the New Testament), in the interval of anarchy between the departure of one Roman Governor, Festus, and the arrival of another, Albinus, set up a court of his own, “and bringing before it the brother of Jesus who was called Christ—James was his name—and some others, he accused them of being breakers of the Law, and had them stoned.”

In the History of the Jewish War, iv, 5, 2, Josephus records his belief that the Destruction of Jerusalem was a divine nemesis for the murder of this Ananus by the Idumeans.

There is not now, nor ever was, any passage in Josephus where the fall of Jerusalem was explained as an act of divine nemesis for the murder of James by Ananus. Origen, as Professor Burkitt has remarked, “had mixed up in his commonplace book the account of Ananus’s murder of James and the remarks of Josephus on Ananus’s own murder.” ↑