Josephus on Jesus - Is the Testimonium Flavianum too short? Does it fit the context?

This post answers some common questions about things written concerning Jesus Christ in Book 18 of Josephus’ Antiquities. These things are some of the most analysed in any ancient Jewish text outside the Bible.

Josephus was a first century Jewish historian who wrote in Greek. There are two passages in his works that mention Jesus Christ. Under the microscope here is the first, found in Josephus’ Antiquities Book 18. This book was published about 93AD. It’s a passage sometimes known as the “Testimonium Flavianum” (“TF” for short). I won’t bore you with why it’s called that. (Here, I’m leaving aside the lesser known passage in Book 20. This is about Book 18.) 

BREVITY

Question: Is the TF too short for Josephus’ writing?

Answer: We cannot assume too much about the length that Josephus goes to when writing about events. Sometimes he is much briefer than one might expect.

Consider what Josephus says about a terrible incident for the Jews in Egypt. He doesn’t say much, compared with the witness Philo. For Philo writes that the Romans in Alexandria (in Egypt) were…

·         “destroying the synagogues”

·         "issued a notice… allowing any one who was inclined to proceed to exterminate the Jews as prisoners of war"

·         "drove the Jews entirely out of four quarters, and crammed them all into a very small portion of one"

·         "slew them and thousands of others with all kinds of agony and tortures … wherever they met with or caught sight of a Jew, they stoned him, or beat him with sticks"

·         "the most merciless of all their persecutors in some instances burnt whole families, husbands with their wives, and infant children with their parents”

·         "those who did these things, mimicked the sufferers”

Now, in contrast, and look closely, this is how Josephus describes the violence:

·         “There was now a tumult arisen at Alexandria, between the Jewish inhabitants and the Greeks” (AJ 18:8)

And that’s it. Talk about brevity! That is all Josephus says on it. Blink and you would miss it. Josephus had his own agendas, and he wrote what he wanted to write. Which was often to make the Romans look better than they really were.

So, is the TF too short for Josephus’ writing? No, not necessarily. One cannot conclude anything from from the brevity of it.

This is the case whether you have a shorter or longer version of the passage in question.

And the obvious question to ask is this: isn't the passage too short for something written wholesale by a Christian interpolator? Surely, any Christian interpolator creating the whole thing wholesale would say more about Jesus, and they would not have been content with writing so little? And there is further reason why a Christian interpolator creating the whole thing wholesale might want to add more than we find: if an interpolator wanted to add something here in Book 18 to link Jesus with the story of Pilate, then why wouldn't such an interpolator also add something to Book 18 to link Jesus with the story of John the Baptist? Josephus wrote about John the Baptist without mentioning Jesus, and that would not have been missed by a Christian reader. But the fact is, no Christian invented an extra section to stick Jesus in with John the Baptist. Nothing of the kind is there. For that reason, it's less likely that a Christian invented the TF wholesale to stick Jesus in with Pilate. In summary, if anyone thinks the TF passage is too short, it is too short for a wholesale Christian interpolation, rather than too short for Josephus to have written it. 

CONTEXT

Question: Does it fit the context in Book 18? In other words, does it break the flow of the stories in Book 18?

Answer: First, even if we regarded the TF as a break in the flow, we ought to note that ancient texts, including frequently in Josephus, are littered with breaks in the flow - footnotes had not been invented, as works were written and published on long scrolls, not on pages. We are not used to this in modern history books, because authors now avoid that problem by writing footnotes. It is a matter of just getting used to how ancient texts read - no footnotes on scrolls, lots of breaks in the flow.

Second, it does fit the context. It is the third of four stories in which Pilate appears:

• In the first story and the third (the TF), Jewish pressure upon Pilate prevails
• In the second story and the third (the TF), certain Romans, and Jews are more inclined to advance harsh punishment than Pilate is. In the second story, the soldiers are more responsible than he for the bloodshed. In the third, certain Jews seem perhaps more responsible than he for the execution.[14]

Here are excerpts from those three. In the first, Pilate backs down under Jewish pressure:

story 1: “Pilate was deeply affected with their [the Jews] firm resolution to keep their laws inviolable: and presently commanded the [imperial] images to be carried back”

story 2: “[the soldiers] laid upon [the Jews] much greater blows than Pilate had commanded them”

story 3: “on indictment by the first men among us, Pilate having sentenced him [Jesus] to the cross”

DOES THE PASSAGE INCLUDE SOME CHRISTIAN INTERPOLATIONS?

Yes, it surely does. It has to be handled with caution from a historical point of view. This is because the passage has in it some bits that weren’t written by Josephus but by later Christian scribes when making copies of Josephus. Anyone trained in evidence and analysis can tell you that this does not make the evidence of Josephus unusable. It just means it has to be used with more caution. That means using evidence analysis methods to strip out the bits added by Christians and only using the bits that are left, the bits likely to be by Josephus.

We don’t have to take heed of naysayers who say the whole thing is unusable and was entirely made up by Christians: that sort of thing usually comes in a package of denying every bit of ancient evidence about Jesus, and that for ideological reasons (trying to debunk Christianity) rather than for the painstaking work of writing history responsibly.

WHO WAS JOSEPHUS ANYWAY?

Josephus was a Jewish historian who wrote in Greek. He had good sources of information on the period in which Jesus lived. Born in the 30s of the first century, and having lived in Jerusalem, he was close to events of his home country in his century. (During a war with the Romans in Judea, he switched sides to join the winning side – the Romans.) He was not sympathetic to Jesus, calling him the so-called Christ. He was a contemporary of James, Jesus' brother. Josephus and James lived in Judea at the same time, and he knew of James' death in the 60s of the first century.

RELATED POSTS:

Index to my posts on Josephus and Tacitus

Outside the Bible, does anyone else say Jesus existed?

What about these authors then, Josephus, Tacitus and Pliny?