Two Israeli scholars believe they have unraveled an elusive mystery of early Christianity—an apparently forged description of Jesus attributed to the Jewish‐Roman historian Flavius Josephus.
On the basis of a 10th century Arabic manuscript by an obscure bishop of the Eastern Church, the scholars think they have strengthened the independent historical evidence for the existence and activities of Jesus of Nazareth.
Shlomo Pines, professor of philosophy at Hebrew University, has reported the discovery of a long‐overlooked version of a passage about Jesus attributed to Josephus. He concludes that it is far closer to what the first‐century historian may have written than the highly suspect text handed down through the centuries.
Another Hebrew University scholar, David Flusser, professor of comparative religion, carries his colleague's research a step further to suggest the identity of the man who may have contrived the false text and how he did it.
For more than a century scholars have tried — and failed — to confirm the life and works of Jesus through a non‐Christian source — a text that would not have been colored by the militant faith of the early believers. (The earliest Christian sources, the Gospels, are believed to have been written at least a quarter of a century after the Crucifixion.)
The works of Josephus, who lived from A.D. 37 to about 100, were the obvious place to look since his detailed accounts of polities and religion in first‐century Palestine, published near the end of the century, were written from the viewpoint of a Jew turned pagan.
Yet modern Christian scholars are almost unanimous in considering the passage on Jesus in the Greek texts of “The Antiquities of the Jews” by Josephus to be “too Christian”—that is, a forgery by church leaders of the third and fourth century designed to bolster the historical legitimacy of their faith.
Besides the Greek text there Is an ancient Slavonic translation that is more suspect, the reference to Jesus being expanded into an even fuller acceptance of church doctrine.
What Professor Pines says he has located is an earlier version of the passage, unaltered to reflect church teachings about the divinity of Jesus. He reports his discovery in a monograph published in English by the Israeli Academy of Sciences and Humanities.
The research is probably not conclusive enough to satisfy extreme skeptics, and Professor Pines concedes as much. But Professor Flusser, in a stillunpublished paper, assembles considerable evidence to support the view that the newly discovered text is, in fact, authentic Josephus without Christian interpolation.
Focus of Bitter Controversy
In the monograph Professor Pines writes: “Few historical texts, or none, have been more often quoted, more passionately rejected and denounced as literary forgeries, more devoutly defended, more carefully edited and more variously emended than the so‐called Testimanium Flavianum, a short passage in Josephus’‘Antiquities of the Jews’ (xviii, 63‐64) dealing with Jesus.”
Josephus defected to the Romans, became a pagan, and settled in Rome to write his histories of the Jewish wars against the Romans, in which he had fought.
While the suspect passage describes Jesus as the Messiah and states His Resurrection as a fact, the newly discovered version is close to the Greek wording and gives positive impressions of Jesus but attributes the belief in his divinity to the Christians.
The Josephus passage “contains perhaps the earliest evidence concerning Jesus written down by a man who was not a Christian,” Professor Pines says— hence the tantalizing search for an unimpeachable version.
Long Known to Scholars
The conclusions reached by Professor Pines are based on analysis of the 10th‐century text in Arabic, which has long been known to scholars but has apparently never been examined in this context. The manuscript is entitled “Kitab alUnwan al‐Mukallal bi‐Fadail alHiluna al‐Mutawwaj bi‐Anwa al‐Falsafa al‐Manduh bi‐Haqaq al‐Mania,” which means approximately “Book of History Guided by All the Virtues of Wisdom, Crowned with Various Philosophies and Blessed by the Truth of Knowledge.”
In the manuscript, written by one Bishop Agapius—whose only importance seems to be that his work survived while that of others did not—Professor Pines came upon a section beginning: “We have found in many books of the philosophers that they refer to the day of the crucifixion of Christ.” Then it lists and quotes passages from ancient works, some familiar to modern scholars, some not.
On the list is this passage: “Similarly Josephus the Hebrew. For he says in the treatises that he has written on the governances of the Jews. ” Then Agapius quotes the testimonium, but in a form significantly different from the customary one.
Not a Watertight Case
Discussing the Arabic version, Professor Pines writes: “It is so different from the Vulgate [Greek} version that hardly any of the arguments (or, perhaps, none) disproving the authenticity of the latter have any validity with regard to it. In the main, this authenticity has been questioned because of the pronounced Christian traits of the testimonium; in Agapius's version these traits are conspicuous by their absence, a noncommittal attitude being taken up.”
Professor Pines concedes that the Arabic text is an indirect source that has passed through Christian hands, so he does not claim a watertight case against those who have argued that Josephus never wrote anything about Jesus, that the whole passage was inserted by church fathers and, indeed, that there is still no independent testimony that Jesus existed.
On that point Professor Flusser is bolder in maintaining the text's first‐century and non‐Christian—origins. A main element in his argument that the passage is not a Christian interpolation is the absence of an accusation that it was Jewish leaders who instigated Pontius Pilate to crucify Jesus.
The Greek version attributed to Josephus states that Pilate acted against Jesus “upon hearing him accused by men of the highest standing among us.”
“It is unthinkable,” Professor Flusser writes, “that the accusation of the leading Jewish personalities would be omitted by someone writing in the Christian milieu, while it is easy to explain that this accusation was interpolated in the original text of Josephus by a Christian hand.”
How was the forgery accomplished and who did it?
For the answer Professor Flusser unravels one man's personal and political problems in the tensions of the Roman Empire and the early Church, two centuries after Josephus. That man, Bishop Eusebius of Caesarea, a towering figure of the early church, who lived from 263 to about 339, organized the New Testament as it is now known.
Professor Pines had determined that at least one of the sources that Agapius drew upon in the 10th century was “The History of the Christian Church” by Eusabius, in which the Josephus passage on Jesus is quoted.
In the edition of that history extant, Eusebius cites the traditional version. But scholars have long believed that there were earlier editions. In those, Professor Flusser asks, might Eusebius have quoted Josephus more accurately, without realizing that other church leaders preferred a more devout testimony for general dissemination?
Professor Flusser, who thinks so, notes that Caesarea then boasted the most extensive available collection of Christian and other relevant manuscripts. Eusebius, a Palestinian, probably had access to the original Josephus canon and used it in his first edition, which Professor Flusser dates to the year 311.
Momentous Assemblage
In the decade that followed, the church was building to the Council of Nicaea, a momentous assemblage to determine basic points of doctrine and prevent schism. Eusebius, a central figure in the politics of the council, is known to have made a number of compromises to insure church unity at Nicaes and to protect his own influence.
“The first edition of the ecclesiastical history was written before the Council of Nicaca and the definitive edition was edited after the council,” Professor Flusser says. “There is a possibility that if Eusebius quoted Josephus’ words about Jesus In his earlier edition (or editions) in its original form, that later, because of heavy suspicions about his Christian faith Euscbius rejected the origins text of the passage and began to quote the more orthodox version by way of precaution.’
The “orthodox” version survived; the earlier and probably more accurate version was lost except In an obscure edition that circulated among Eastern churchmen.
As Professor Pines notes, version of Josephus preserved only in an Arabic text is more likely to have escaped church censorship than the official text passed down through the ages.
[Source: The New York Times | Peter Grose | February 13, 1972]
Read also: The Resurrection HOAX
Reference added by Author: Propaganda and Censorship in the Transmission of Josephus | JSTOR
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