Note 47 — Chapter IV · THE EVOLUTION OF THE CULT

By every test of loyal historiography, we are not merely forced to reject the spurious passage as the most obvious interpolation in all literature: we are bound to confess that the “Silence of Josephus,” as is insisted by Professor Smith,47 is an insurmountable negation of the gospel story. For that silence, no tenable reason can be given, on the assumption of the general historicity of the gospels and Acts. Josephus declares himself48 to be in his fifty-sixth year in the thirteenth year of Domitian. Then he was born about the year 38. By his own account,49 he began at the age of sixteen to “make trial of the several sects that were among us”—the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes—and in particular he spent three years with a hermit of the desert named Banos, who wore no clothing save what grew on trees, used none save wild food, and bathed himself daily and nightly for purity’s sake. Thereafter he returned to Jerusalem, and conformed to the sect of the Pharisees. In the Antiquities,50 after describing in detail the three sects before named, he gives an account of a fourth “sect of Jewish philosophy,” founded by Judas the Galilean, whose adherents in general agree with the Pharisees, but are specially devoted to liberty and declare God to be their only ruler, facing torture and death rather than call any man lord.