Selections from Josephus - Бесплатная аудиокнига

External evidence

The passage, it is true, stands in all our MSS, but this tells us little, since the oldest of them (Niese’s P) is not earlier than the ninth or tenth century. Eusebius quotes it (H.E. i. 11, cf. Dem. Ev. iii. 3. 105 f.), thus attesting its existence in the fourth century. On the other hand, it is practically certain that Origen in the preceding century did not find it in his text. He knows the allusions to John the Baptist in the same book of the Antiquities (§ 29) and to James the Lord’s brother in the twentieth book (§ 37), but of any mention of Christ he has no word. Nor are we confined to this argumentum e silentio; his language makes it impossible to suppose that he found the statement “This was the Christ.” “The wonder is,” he writes, “that, though he (Josephus) did not admit our Jesus to be Christ, he none the less gave his witness to so much righteousness in James” (Comm. in Matt. x. 17); and again (writing on John the Baptist) “although he (Josephus) disbelieved in Jesus as Christ” (c. Cels. i. 47). The passage about James as cited by Origen differs, indeed, from the normal text; according to Origen, Josephus regarded the destruction of the Temple as a punishment for the murder. Prof. Burkitt thinks that Origen may have “mixed up in his commonplace book the account of Ananus’ murder of James and the remarks of Josephus on Ananus’ own murder” (§ 45); but it is difficult to believe, as the Professor appears to suggest, that his familiarity with the Antiquities was so slight that he could have missed the statement in XVIII. 63 f. and written as he did if it stood in his text. The real importance of Origen’s evidence is that it seems to supply the date when our passage was interpolated by a Christian reader, viz. towards the end of the third century, between the age of Origen and that of Eusebius.