; * 


THE MESSIAH JESUS 
AND JOHN THE BAPTIST 


ACCORDING TO 


FLAVIUS JOSEPHUS’ 


RECENTLY REDISCOVERED 
‘CAPTURE OF JERUSALEM’ 


AND THE OTHER JEWISH AND CHRISTIAN SOURCES 


BY 


ROBERT EISLER, Pu.D. 


WITH FORTY PLATES, INCLUDING REPRODUCTIONS OF THE INEDITED 
RUSSIAN, RUMANIAN, AND HEBREW MSS. AND KINDRED DOCUMENTS 


ENGLISH EDITION BY 
ALEXANDER HAGGERTY KRAPPE, Pu.D. 


LINCOLN MACVEAGH 
TEE DLALL: -cP:RESS 
NEW YORK * MCMXxXxXI]I 


‘| heology i brary 


SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY 
AT CLAREMONT 
California 


3)-L]2 


PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN 


PRESUMED PORTRAIT OF FLAVIUS JOSEPHUS 


FIRST CENTURY ROMAN MARBLE HEAD OF JEWISH TYPE, FOUND IN ROME, FORMERLY IN POSSESSION 
OF THE PRINCELY FAMILY BORGHESE, NOW IN THE NY CARLSBERG GLYPTOTEK, COPENHAGEN 
(SEE ALSO FRONT VIEW, PL. I11) 


THE MESSIAH JESUS AND 
JOELN DEB-BAPTISL 


TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE 


English dress is the outcome of six years’ unceasing 

labour on the part of the author. A complete departure, 
in more ways than one, from the customary treatises on this ex- 
tremely important and fascinating subject, it should interest wider 
circles of an English-speaking public than could easily read Dr. 
Eisler’s German original. This is the explanation of this transla- 
tion and at the same time its excuse. 

The task itself was suggested to me by the author in the winter 
of 1928-9, which I had the pleasure of spending in Paris. As I had 
the double advantage of following Dr. Eisler’s lecture course at the 
Sorbonne and of asking and receiving his counsel in places where 
the intricacy of his German constructions, or some note filled with 
more Hebrew lore than I could muster, seemed to require it, the 
translation advanced rapidly and was completed before the 
beginning of July. 

It gives me pleasure, in concluding, to acknowledge the quite 
considerable assistance I derived from the late Dr. H. St. John 

_ Thackeray’s new edition of the Jewish War (in the ‘ Loeb Classical 
Library’), and from the same author’s rough draft of a transla- 
‘tion into English of a large portion of the second volume of 
Ὁ pr. Eisler’s German edition. I am equally obliged to the library 
~ authorities both of the Bibliotheque Nationale and the University 
of Paris, who have readily and generously granted me access to 
their treasures. Any one working, as I have been for years, 
τ under intolerable library conditions will grasp the true meaning 
- of this appreciation. 
. Τὸ Dr. Eisler, finally, 1 would offer my hearty thanks for the 
trouble he has taken in going over both MS. and proofs. To him 
Ὃς due all the honour of the work, coupled, it is true, with the 
responsibility for the theories therein advanced. 
ΝΣ A. H. K. 


PaRIs, /wune 1929 


7: book which is now presented for the first time in 


AUTHOR’S PREFACE 


scope, and outlook from any ‘ Life of Christ’ or any other 

book dealing with Christian origins, or any ᾿ History of 
the Jewish People in the Time of Jesus,’ that I know of. For it 
claims to show :— 

First. That there once existed a rich fund of historical tradi- 
tion about the Messiah Jesus both among the Jews and the non- 
Christian Greeks and Romans. 

Second. That this precious material was deliberatel destroyed, 
or falsified, by a system of rigid censorship officially authorized 
ever since the time of Constantine 1. and reinstituted in the reigns 
of Theodosius 1. and Valentinian III. (477 A.D.). 

Third. That, in spite of the tireless efforts of ecclesiastical 
revisers, enough has been preserved in certain out-of-the-way 
corners of the world, among Jews and heretics as well as in quota- 
tions occurring in Christian polemic and apologetic literature, to 
allow us to reconstruct with sufficient clarity and plausibility, and 
even with a certain amount of picturesque detail, the fundamental 
features of Jesus’ personality and his mission, particularly as they 
appeared to his enemies. 

Fourth. That through a careful comparison of this mercilessly 
cold, detached, and unsympathetic pen-portrait of the man Jesus 
with the naively idealizing presentation of the Ayrios Christos by 
the writers of the early and later Christian Church, it is possible to 
come quite close to the historical truth about the Nasoraean 
prophet-king and about his elder relative, the schismatic high 
priest of the Jews, Johanan ‘ the Hidden One,’ better known as 
the Baptist. 


It is thus my claim that a history of Christian origins—more 
exactly, of the Nasoraean Messianist movement—can be written 
which will chronologically coincide with the history of the Jews 


and the Romans from 4 B.c. to A.D. 135—that is, from the first 
appearance of Johanan to the downfall of Bar-Kokh®ba. 


= HE present work is fundamentally different in method, 


vii 


vii THE MESSIAH JESUS 


In face of the prevalent historical scepticism! and the 
Neo-Marcionite subjectivism of certain critics, who claim for them- 
selves the right to disregard any evidence in the Gospels which 
conflicts with their own preconceived picture of Jesus,? the present 
work represents a radical departure. For I claim no such right, 
I refuse to reject from among the documentary materials this 
or that statement as ‘unworthy’ of Jesus’ personality and his 
mission. On the contrary, I humbly and honestly accept whatever 
I find in the sources, duly weighing the evidence when there is 
conflict or contradiction, unless indeed the trustworthiness of 
a given source is disproved by facts quite independent of any 
judgment of values. 

' As it is now,’ said Max Miiller, ‘ it is always open to us to say, 
whenever we read of anything that is incredible or unworthy of 
Christ, as we conceive him,’ that it came from his disciples, who 
confessedly had often failed to understand him, or that it was added 
by those who handed down the tradition before it was written 
down. . . . The true interests of the Christian religion are better 
served by showing how much time and how many opportuni- 
ties there were for human misunderstandings to creep into the 
Gospel story.’ 

It seems to me that it is not the business of the historian, quite 
unconcerned as he is with questions of apologetics, to discredit, 
on what after all are apologetic grounds, sources fully as good or 
fully as bad as any ordinary source bearing on profane history. 
Everywhere tendencies can be detected to a certain extent and 
therefore must be discounted in a certain measure. The nature of 
the material being the same, the methods of utilizing it should 
logically be the same. 

If one were timidly to disregard all sources which show a certain 
tendency one way or other, it would mean a negation of all history- 
writing ; and if the maxim be adopted that the scientific accuracy 


+ The best example is the Jesus of Prof. Rudolf Bultmann, published in Berlin 
in 1925. 

* Few modern authors will admit this as frankly as honest Max Miller in his 
time, who said (Chips from a German Workshop : On the Proper Use of Holy 
S¢riptures), after praising as a blessing the fact that Jesus left no written record of 
his teaching : ‘ Because, whenever the spirit of truth within us protests against 
Seats statements in the Gospels as unworthy of the high character of the founders 
of this religion, we can claim the same liberty which even the ancients claimed 
with regard to the fables told of their gods, namely, that nothing could be true 
that was unworthy of the gods.’ 3 Italics mine. 

* This is—avant la lettve—the whole of the new ‘formgeschichtliche Methode’ ! 


AUTHOR’S PREFACE ix 


of a historian’s work is in direct proportion to the depth of his 
scepticism, we should inevitably end with the neo-Pyrrhonist 
doctrine that we cannot know anything at all about the past of 
humanity. 

I am fully aware of the fact that every single bit of evidence 
presented in the following pages can be frittered away and made to 
crumble into dust by the simple application of certain widely 
practised methods of criticism and exegesis. Let me say that I 
am not at allignorant of these methods. Alas! I have tried again 
and again these two-edged, over-sharpened tools, only to find them 
ineffective in the end. Any student who, through sheer inability 
to synthetize the mass of his evidence, prefers to carry analysis to 
the length of hair-splitting, and who will go on for ever weighing 
undecidedly all the possibilities that might come under considera- 
tion, will be thoroughly antagonized by the present book, without 
presumably deriving much profit fromit. That I cannot help. I 
have been working and writing for those who are as convinced as 
I am myself that no explanation of a single fact is satisfactory 
which cannot be made to fit into some plausible consecutive 
scheme enabling us to account for the totality of facts and pheno- 
mena—for those who feel that we cannot go on for ever with our 
traditional histories of New Testament times, into which a life of 
Jesus cannot be made to fit, and with lives and characteristics of 
Jesus which cannot be made to fit into the contemporary history 
of Jews and Romans. To those readers I hope that the new 
sources, analysed and utilized in this volume, will come as a relief 
and a genuine intellectual satisfaction. 

I sincerely believe that nothing in this book can possibly give 
offence to a true Christian—that is, a true believer in the deeply 
rooted messianic hopes of humanity. Yet it may cause somewhat 
of a startling shock to those whom Bernard Shaw has pertinently 
called Christian idolaters, defenders of an idolatrous or iconolatrous 
worship of the Christ—to people, that is, who are only concerned 
with the traditional pictures and statues of Jesus and the pretty 
stories attached to him. 

‘If you speak or write of Jesus as a real live person or even as a 
still active God, such worshippers are more horrified than Don Juan 


was when the statue stepped from its pedestal and came to supper 
with him. You may deny the divinity of Jesus, you may doubt 


1 Preface to Andyvocles and the Lion. 


Χ THE MESSIAH JESUS 


whether he ever existed, you may reject Christianity for Judaism, 
Mohametism, Shintoism, or Fire Worship, and the iconolaters, placidly 
contemptuous, will only classify you as a freethinker or a heathen. 
But if you venture to wonder how Christ . . . looked or what size he 
stood‘ in his shoes . . . or even if you tell any part of his story in the 
vivid terms of modern colloquial slang, you will produce an extra- 
ordinary dismay and horror among the iconolaters. You will have 
made the picture come out of its frame, the statue descend from its 
pedestal, the story become real, with all the incalculable consequences 
that may flow from this terrifying miracle. It is at such moments 
that you realize that the iconolaters have never for a moment con- 
ceived Jesus as a real person, who meant what he said, as a fact, as a 
force like electricity, only needing the invention of suitable political 
machinery to be applied to the affairs of mankind with revolutionary 
effect. ‘hus it is not disbelief that is dangerous in our society; it is 
belief. The moment it strikes you (as it may any day) that Jesus is 
not the lifeless, harmless image he has hitherto been to you, but a 
rallying centre for revolutionary influence, which all established 
States and Churches fight, you must look to yourselves, for you have 
brought the image to life, and the mob may not be able to stand that 
horror.’ 

As to ‘colloquial slang,’ the reader will, I hope, find nothing 
of the sort either in the German original or in the English transla- 
tion. Yet I have not refrained from applying, wherever it seemed 
required, the terminology of modern political ideology and socio- 
logy, in order to make it quite clear to the reader that the social 
and political problems of those times are fundamentally identical 
with those of the present epoch, notwithstanding the differences 
which, after all, separate that period and civilization from our own. 
It is this which, I fear, will shock more profoundly than the un- 
veiling of the quaint contemporary pen-portrait of the Nasdraean 
Messiah all those who want to convert, and have in part succeeded 
in converting, churches and chapels into a world-wide organization 
for the effective repression of the very tendencies for which the 
Jewish prophet-king suffered and died. 

It has been suggested, and will doubtless be suggested again, 
that this work is itself inspired by a revolutionary Messianist 
tendency. To this accusation I can only say that I wish it were 
true. I wish 1 could honestly plead guilty to being moved in the 
depths of my conscience by the most powerful religious impulses 
ofmyrace. Yet for the sake of plain truth I must own that in the 
unravelling of the mysterious history of this movement I was 
actuated almost exclusively by a boundless curiosity and a 


1 Italics mine. See below, p. 42729 


AUTHOR’S PREFACE ΧΙ 


passionate desire to get at the real truth of this maze of documents, 
authentic and spurious, falsified in part or altogether forged. 

The main difficulty of the presentation lay in the fact that a 
discussion of the events cannot be separated from a discussion of 
the sources. A large and expensive volume dealing exclusively 
with the literary and philological problems raised by the discovery 
of the Slavonic, the Rumanian, and the less expurgated Hebrew 
versions of Josephus, could not be published in this poverty- 
stricken after-war period, because nobody but half a dozen 
specialists would read it. Still less thinkable was a simple, 
straightforward history of the messianic uprising and the origins 
of the Christian Church on the basis of the new sources, but without 
a thoroughgoing critical analysis of the documents. Such a 
volume would inevitably be mistaken for one of those biographies 
vomancées Which are turned out in our days by the dozen. 

An even greater difficulty was presented by the natural desire 
of both author and publisher to reach both the scholar and the so- 
called general reader. To justify my theses as far as possible 
before the forum of the learned critics, I had to include much 
documentary material which may possibly not interest any one but 
specialists. Still, to ensure that this book should not attain the 
unwieldy proportions of the German original, 1 had to omit prac- 
tically all of the critical discussion devoted to the previous litera- 
ture on the subject.t The logical argument, it is hoped, has not 
suffered thereby. Yet if any objections should present themselves 
to the learned reader, he is requested to look into the German 
original before starting an argument which has possibly already 
been definitely disposed of there. . 

To the general reader, who would probably prefer a less 
cumbersome book, I venture to offer a few suggestions which may 
perhaps be resented as superfluous by expert skippers, but may be 
of some value to those who still follow the time-honoured and 
certainly praiseworthy custom of beginning a book at the begin- 
ning. Such readers might not unprofitably begin by looking at 
Pl. vi. and Pl. vu. They will see there without any difficulty the 
demonstratio ad oculos of my general thesis regarding the ruthless 
censorship applied to all sources discussing Christianity and its 


1 I regret even more the forced omission of a systematic exposition of the 
Oriental origins and the Jewish development of political Messianism, a subject 
I hope to deal with in the form of a separate volume some time in the future. 


ΧΙ THE MESSIAH JESUS 


founder from a non-Christian point of view. If they will then turn 
to p. 594, App. IV., they will find the proof that all anti-Christian 
uteratiure was hunted down systematically from the fourth century. 
on. Having thus caught a glimpse of this process of deletion of 

words, phrases, and whole sections, and duly noted on Pl. vii. and 
Pl. x1. that our chief authority, Flavius Josephus, did not fare 
any better under the hands of the ecclesiastical censors, the reader 
may be prepared to admit that the standard texts of the Jewish 
War and the Antiquities may after all not contain everything 
that Josephus meant to convey to his Jewish and Gentile readers. 
Having got thus far, he may now be ready for a look at the newly 
reconstructed texts on pp. 62 and 466ff., and for an unprejudiced 
reading of the striking statements printed in these chapters. 

As likely as not, he will then ask on whose authority he is 
expected to accept as sound historical facts such surprising and, for 
many readers, shocking statements. The answer to that question 
is given in the chapters about Flavius Josephus, his life and work.} 
Very probably, after reading the man’s edifying biography, the 
reader will not care to trust him? without further checks and veri- 
fications. Yet by turning to the Introduction (pp. 9 ff.) he will 
find that the general view which he takes of Jesus Christ is shared 
by all ancient non-Christian authors of whose writings we still 
have a few fragments. He will see, moreover, on pp. 201 ff. that 
Flavius Josephus—unworthy indeed of any trust whenever his own 
interests come into play—throughout his work used first-hand 
evidence, that is, contemporary official documents. Having been 
so often told that there never were any legal documents about the 
trial of Jesus, the reader may be surprised to learn (on pp. 13 ff.) that 
detailed records of this famous case must have existed, and in 
fact did subsist down to A.D. 311, when they were broadcast in 
hundreds of copies by the imperial chancery of Rome. By what 
silly-clever forgeries these genuine Acts of Pilate have been dis- 
credited after A.D. 312 for more than 1500 years, I have endea- 
voured to show on pp.17ff. If by this time the reader has become 


1 Below, pp. 22-35. 

* These words were already in type when Dr. Burton Scott Easton wrote at 
the end of a fair and courteous review of the German edition of this book in 
the Anglican Theological Review of 1930: ‘ Dr. Eisler’s estimate of Josephus’ truth- 
fulness and objectivity is as low as is conceivably possible. . .. What conceivable 
right has Dr. Eisler, then, to use his anti-Christian evidence...as...infallible?’ 
My answer to this legitimate question has been given by anticipation in the 
lines which follow. 


AUTHOR’S PREFACE ΧΙ 


more interested in all the forgeries, simple and complicated, 
resorted to by apologetic ingenuity in order to convert the writings 
of the unbelieving Jew Josephus into a huge edifying Testimonvum 
Flavianum for the essential truth of the Athanasian creed, let him 
now turn to pp. 425 ff., where he will find in parallel columns the 
genuine pen-portrait derived from the official ‘ hue-and-cry ’ of the 
Messiah Jesus, and the idealizing corrections applied to this start- 
ling text by the Christian revisers. If he still doubts the authen- 
ticity of the description printed on the left side of p. 427, let him 
turn to p. 416f. and satisfy himself how exactly this signalement 
tallies with certain hitherto enigmatic passages in the Gospels and 
with a number of patristic witnesses on the shortness and un- 
comeliness of Jesus’ ‘servile body,’ spoken of by Paul. Thus 
introduced, though as in a mirror darkly, yet almost face to face, 
to this great prophet and king of the Jews, the reader will now 
be eager to turn to the history of the world-shattering movement 
in which he was destined to play such a dominant part. 

No doubt he had best begin, as do Josephus and the Gospels, 
with the ‘Forerunner.’! Yet any reader shunning as yet the more 
arduous task of reading the consecutive historical narrative is 
invited to read the concluding chapter on pp. 562 ff., where I have 
tried to present, as concisely as possible, the main outlines of this 
most startling history. If eager for the details, the reader may 
now turn to the story of Johanan the Hidden One or the Baptist, 
the revolutionary and schismatic high priest " of the year 4 B.C., who 
outlived Jesus by fourteen years ; he may read on to the story of 
the three messiah kings, Judas, Simon, and Athronga, who answered 
his call; and finally he may follow the career of the Baptist’s erst- 
while disciple, the Naséraean Jesus, who died on the cross for the 
liberation of his people from the Roman yoke, the rulers of this 
world, in the night from the 15th to the 16th of April of the year 
A.D. 20: 

Lam aware that a good many of my readers, accustomed to the 
traditional accounts, will consider the thesis here proposed as a 
gigantic paradox. This cannot very well be helped. 1am simply 
and honestly concerned with what appears to me to be the essential 
truth for which we have been searching ever since the beginnings 
of Unitarianism in the sixteenth century and rationalistic Deism 
in the eighteenth. The ‘thoroughgoing eschatological’ exegesis 


1 Below, pp. 223 fi. 2 Below, pp. 259 fi. 3 Below, pp. 312 ff. 


XIV THE MESSIAH JESUS 


of the Gospels has led us up to the threshold of the gate which was 
finally thrown open to Western scholarship by Alexander Berendts 
of Dorpat as early as 1906. For twenty years no one has cared to 
walk into this hitherto unexplored field, where a good deal still 
remains to be done. 

I should like to conclude with a word of sincere gratitude to 
all those who have so generously given me their material and 
scholarly help, without which I could not have undertaken and 
after many years of hard work carried through such an arduous 
task. First and foremost my unstinted thanks are due to Mrs. 
Alice Chalmers and Dr. James Loeb, who defrayed the huge cost 
of several thousand photostats of the various MSS. ; to the former 
President of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Prof. Sergius von 
Oldenbourg, for procuring the necessary permits from his Govern- 
ment ; to Prof. BeneSevié for superintending the photographer’s 
work and for much useful information ; to Prof. Vasilij N. Istrin 
of the Russian Academy for various apographa from Slavonic 
Josephus MSS. ; to Prof. André Mazon and his pupils MM. Antoine 
Martel and Boris Unbegaun of the Paris Institut des Etudes 
Slaves; to Proff. Nikolas van Wyck and Berndt von Arnim of 
Leyden, and Prof. N. Bubnov of Kiev, now of Ljubiana, for their 
kind help in editing and analysing the Old Russian texts; 
to the Most Rev. Hakham Dr. Moses Gaster for the kind 
communication of transcripts and for a translation of the 
inedited Rumanian Josephus fragments, discovered by him, in 
his MS. 89; to the Right Rev. Grand Rabbin de France, Israél 
Lévy, who directed my attention to the Paris Josippon MSS., and 
specially obliged me by copying for me a number of pages from the 
codex Edmond de Rothschild No. 24; to Messeigneurs Giovanni 
Mercati, Eugéne Tisserant, and Giovanni Galbiati of the Vatican 
Library and of the Bibliotheca Ambrosiana for kind informa- 
tion and for permission to reproduce various MSS.; to Prof. 
Charles Boreux of the Louvre and Prof. E. Rostagno of the 
Laurentiana in Florence for two important illustrations ; to His 
Excellency Baron von Oppenheim for the photograph of the Slebi 
types; to the late Dr. H.St. John Thackeray, who in the most pains- 
taking and conscientious manner translated about goo printed pages 
of the German original; to Dr. A. Haggerty Krappe, who completed, 
revised, and to a large extent completely rewrote this first draft, 
condensing it into its present shape. It is needless to add that 


AUTHOR’S PREFACE XV 


neither is to be held responsible in any way for any of my theories, 
hypotheses, or valuations. To my great pleasure, Dr. Thackeray 
was able to accept certain essential results of my analysis, as the 
reader will see for himself by studying his admirable new book, 
[oh ee ee Dr. Krappe 
Should not be held altogether responsible for the final literary form 
of the work. His already difficult task has been rendered even 
more arduous by my repeated additions to the text. Mr. Theodor 
Gaster has much obliged me by his kind help in reading the 
proofs and adding the last polish to the style of the translation. 

And now, “ καὶ ἡμεῖς τρέχωμεν τὸν προκείμενον ἡμῖν ἀγῶνα" 
(Heb. xii. 1), which means, I believe, if translated from the stately 
and altogether admirable language of King James’s Bible into a 
plain and more prosaic modern English, something like— 


Let us run the gauntlet and be flogged along the line. 


ROBERT EISLER 
PARIS, 1930 


‘Ea, ut potero explicabo, nec tamen quasi Pythius Apollo, 
certa ut sint et fixa, quae dixero: sed ut homunculus unus e 
multis, probabilia conjectura sequens. Ultra enim quo pro- 
grediar, quam ut veri similia, non habeo. Certa dicent ii, qui 
et percipi ea posse dicunt et se sapientes esse profitentur.’ 

Cicero, Tuscul. quaest. i. 8. 


TABLE OF CONTENTS 


TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE 
AUTHOR’S PREFACE 
List oF ILLUSTRATIONS 


I 


THE PRIMARY IMPORTANCE OF THE NON-CHRISTIAN 
SOURCES OF CHRISTIAN ORIGINS 

THE PROBLEM OF THE ‘ACTA PILATI’ AND THE Garonotoer OF 
THE PASSION 

CONCLUSIONS 


II 
FLAVIUS JOSEPHUS 


ΠῚ 


THE CONTROVERSY OVER THE SO-CALLED ‘TESTIMONY 
IO JESUS CHRIST’ IN THE ‘JEWISH se Bega 
OF JOSEPHUS : . 

JOSEPHUS ACCEPTED AS AN CINSEIRED ees ; ° 

First DouBTs ON THE AUTHENTICITY OF THE ‘ TESTIMONIUM 
FLAVIANUM ’ : 

THE AWAKENING OF Carneism - IN THE Ace OF ‘Womanise 

TANNEGUY LEFEVRE, EDUARD NORDEN, AND OTHERS . 

THE REMNANTS at THE GENUINE TESTIMONY OF JOSEPHUS ON 
JESUS IN THE ‘ JEWISH ANTIQUITIES ’ 

TESTIMONIUM JOSEPHI DE JESU CHRISTO, TEXTUS Recerrvs CUM 
APPARATU CRITICO  . : : ς ° δ 


IV 


THE ALLEGED SILENCE OF ΤΟΒΕΡΗῦΘ ' ΤΕΎΙΣΗ WAR’ 
ABOUT JESUS Tes. nd Oh ae 


V 


THE EXTANT NON-GREEK VERSIONS OF JOSEPHUS 

THE VARIANT READINGS OF THE GREEK ORIGINAL AND ITS VARIOUS 
DERIVATIVES, AND THEIR IMPORTANCE FOR THE RESTORATION 
OF THE ARCHETYPE 

Lost PASSAGES OF JOSEPHUS IN THE ἽΠΠΟΥ ΕΣ Laan VERSION 


b xvii 


20 


22 


80 
86 


XVIli THE MESSIAH JESUS 


VI 


THE PASSAGES ABOUT JOHN THE BAPTIST AND JESUS 
IN THE HEBREW ‘JOSIPPON’ . - 


Vil 


THE CONTROVERSY ON THE VALUE OF THE SLAVONIC 
VERSION : 
THE MS. TRANSMISSION OF THE ἜΣ Caprurn OF Ἱππσεαταπ, 

THE TITLE OF THE OLD RussIAN JOSEPHUS 

THE REMAINS OF THE GENUINE PREFACE TO THE Hanbsrs* 

THE VARIOUS ENDINGS OF THE OLD RussIAN JOSEPHUS MSS. 

THE DATE OF THE GREEK ORIGINAL OF THE SLAVONIC TEXT 

TRACES OF THE SEMITIC ORIGINAL IN THE OLD RussIAN TRANS- 
LATION ὃ : ι : ; : : ; : 

THE ORIENTAL EDITION OF THE ‘ HALosis.’ THE AuTHOR’S 
SEMITIC DRAFT AND THE ROUGH GREEK VERSION OF HIS 
ASSISTANTS : : ; : ‘ ' ᾿ 

JOSEPHUS AND THE SEMITIC TRANSLATION OF NICOLAUS OF 
DAMASCUS : : : 

THE MANIFESTLY CHRISTIAN IncERPOLATIONS IN THE Suavonte 
, JOSEPHUS, AND THEIR DATE ὲ : 

Ag HE OLD RUSSIAN TRANSLATION OF Joszrnus AND THE LITHUANTAN 
CHRONOGRAPHER OF 1261. THE SCEPTICAL INTERPOLATION ON 
THE RESURRECTION OF JESUS 

THE JUDAIZING HERESY IN RUSSIA . 

THE GENESIS OF THE OLD RuSSIAN TRANSLATION OF JOSEPHUS AND 
OF THE LITHUANIAN ‘CHRONOGRAPHER OF 1261. ORIGIN 
OF THE ExIsTING MSS. 

THE SECT OF THE ΟΞΕΡΗΙΝΙΘΙΒ ΙΝ NORTHERN Tear: Y AND oom .CE, 
AND THE HERESY OF ‘ JoSEPHUS EPAPHRODITUS’ IN ASIA 
MINOR : : : - : : ς 

THE ‘ORTHODOX’ AND THE ‘ SpurtousS’ JOSEPHUS 


τ 


ty 


VIII 
PASSAGES IN THE SLAVONIC JOSEPHUS WHICH CANNOT 
BE ACCOUNTED FOR AS CHRISTIAN FORGERIES . 

IX 


THE CONTRADICTIONS BETWEEN THE DIFFERENT 
ACCOUNTS GIVEN BY JOSEPHUS OF HIS OWN 


ACTIVITY IN GALILEE. : ; : 
JOSEPHUS AS FORTRESS-BUILDER : ; ‘ ‘ ὃ : 
JOSEPHUS AS TRUSTEE  . : ; . ‘ ; 
JOSEPHUS AS A TACTICIAN : : : . ° : : 


JOSEPHUS’ CAPTURE. : - : : 5 ‘ : 


PAGE 


93 


113 
116 


119 
120 
123 
128 


131 


134 
135 


140 


147 
155 


165 
167 


170 


183 
187 
IgI 
196 
198 


TABLE OF CONTENTS 


Xx 


THE DOCUMENTARY BASES OF THE ADDITIONS TO THE 
GREEK ‘POLEMOS.’. THE IMPERIAL ‘COMMEN- 
TARIES’ AS A SOURCE OF JOSEPHUS : - : 

Tur ERRORS OF JOSEPHUS ON THE BIRTH AND PARENTAGE OF HIS 
PATRON, AGRIPPA II. . : : : - 

THE DOCUMENTARY BASIS OF THE JosEPHaN NARRATIVE OF EVENTS 
FROM A.D. 44 TO 46 . : : - : : : . 

Tue GREAT DIATRIBE OF KXING AGRIPPA I. ; : . 

CONCLUSIONS . ; : ξ : : : ‘ ξ 


THE GENUINE STATEMENTS OF JOSEPHUS ABOUT JOHN 
THE BAPTIST : ; : ; : : . ; 
Ture APPEARANCE OF THE ‘ WILD MAN’; HIS PROMISE AND HIS 
BAPTISM . : ; ‘ ; : ; ; 5 ; 
THE ‘WILD MAN’ AS INTERPRETER OF DREAMS AND CENSOR OF 
RovaL Morars. His DEATH . ‘ ; : : 3 
NASORAEANS AND REKHABITES . é ‘ ‘ ‘ P : 
ΤῊΝ Baptist’s Foop AND CLOTHING ‘ ‘ 8 ; ; 
THE VARIOUS NAMES OF THE BAPTIST ; ὃ ‘ ‘ ‘ 
THE Baptist’s CALL to LIBERTY : ‘ 3 ; : ; 
THE Baptist AND JUDAS OF GALILEE : : 
THe BAPTIST ELECTED HIGH PRIEST BY THE INSURGENTS . ; 
THe Baptist’s ‘ FIELD SERMON ’ ‘ : ‘ : : ; 
THE POLITICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF JOHN’S BAPTISM. ; ; 
ΒΑΡῚΤ ΑΘ A PLEDGE OF SALVATION IN THE DAYS OF THE LAST 
JUDGMENT : : ς - : : : ς - 
ΤῊΝ MESSIANIC BAPTISM WITH WIND AND FIRE : Σ : 
Tur DESCENT OF THE SPIRIT AND THE VOICE FROM HEAVEN AT THE 
BAPTISM OF JOHN IN THE PRIMITIVE NASORAEAN TRADITION 


~ 


XII 


THE CHRONOLOGY OF THE BAPTIST : Σ ; : 
THE YEAR OF THE BAPTIST’S DEATH ACCORDING TO THE SOURCES OF 
JosEPHUS—A.D. 35 - . : ᾿ : ; 
THE DATE OF JOHN’S BAPTISM IN THE Goshen OF LUKE . 
PHLEGON OF THRALLES AND THALLUS THE SAMARITAN ON THE 
ECLIPSE AT THE CRUCIFIXION. - : ; : ς 
THE DAY OF THE CRUCIFIXION. ‘ : : ς 
THE ORIGIN OF THE STATEMENT THAT JESUS OUTLIVED THE BAPTIST 
THE ALLEGED SAYING OF JESUS ON THE SUFFERINGS OF ELIJAH 
‘ ACCORDING TO THE SCRIPTURE’ : : : : ‘ 


b2 


X1X 


PAGE 


288 


288 
294 
297 
299 
302 


308 


xX THE MESSIAH JESUS 


XIIT 


THE APPEARANCE OF JESUS IN THE NARRATIVE OF 
JOSEPHUS ? Υ , : : P ‘ ‘ 
PILATE AND THE ROMAN Sy ea aay THE ‘ABOMINATION OF 
DESOLATION’ OF DANIEL’S PROPHECY : Α ς : 
THE CARPENTER AS MESSIAH BEN DAVID . ‘ ς : : 
THE MESSIANIC SECRET. THE TRIBUTE MONEY AND THE SERVICE 
OF MAMMON : : ‘ : ; : : 3 
THE HIGHER RI erecuenaee : : 5 : ‘ 3 ‘ 
‘THE KINGDOM OF GoD IS WITHIN YoU’. ; Α : : 
THE SENDING ΟΥἹ OF THE SEVENTY IN SEARCH OF A KINGDOM. 
THE APPOINTMENT OF THE TWELVE JUDGES OF ISRAEL. . 
‘FISHERS OF MEN’. ‘ ; : ; ; : Α 7 
THE Kinc’s MESSAGE ‘ ‘ ‘ ἢ ; : : : 
‘I CAME NOT TO SEND PEACE, BUT A SWORD’ . ; - ; 
THE PREDICTIONS OF SUFFERING AND DEATH . ; 
THE FOUNDATION-STONE AND THE PILLARS OF THE NEW ἘΠ Σ 
THE KEYS OF THE KINGDOM AND PETER THE VICEROY , 


XIV 


THE ACCOUNT OF THE WONDER-WORKER ON THE MOUNT 
OF OLIVES AND HIS CRUCIFIXION, AS GIVEN IN THE 
‘HALOSIS’ OF JOSEPHUS . . 3 a 

THE CHRISTIAN INTERPOLATIONS IN THE SECTION ON Jesus IN THE 

“HALOsIs’. Ξ : Α αι ‘ ; : - ‘ 

THE CHRISTIAN OMISSIONS AND ADDITIONS IN THE OPENING 

SENTENCES ON THE NATURE AND FIGURE OF JESUS . Σ 


ΧΥ 


‘ECCE HOMO’ : Ε : : . : é 
JOSEPHUS ON THE BoDILY APPEARANCE OF JESUS ‘ 
THE SO-CALLED ‘ LETTER OF LENTULUS ’ AND THE PASSAGE ON τς: 
IN THE “HALOsIs’ . : - : : : 
THE WARRANT FOR THE Anes? OF Jesus ς Ξ 
' NOMEN FUGITIVI ET CUJUS SE ESSE DICAT ’—BEN ΧΩ ΚΑ ; 
‘QUI DICITUR A GENTIBUS “ Fittus DEr’’’ : : ‘ 
THE GENUINE PEN-PorTRAIT OF ‘JESUS WHO IS CALLED THE Crist? 
HIS STATURE. : : : 5 : ; ; 
THE FACE WITHOUT CoMBLINESs ; : ‘ : 
TERTULLIAN ON THE ‘ MARKS OF JESUS’ PARTHEY Onan’ : 
THE ° TRANSFIGURATION’ OF JESUS ON THE Hoty Mount Σ 
THE VARYING ASPECT OF JESUS ACCORDING TO Se AUGUSTINE, 
AND IN CHRISTIAN ART . Ξ : : 
THE VARIOUS EPIPHANIES OF THE Cares IN THE APOCRYPHAL 
ACTS, AND THE UNRECONCILED CONTRADICTIONS IN THE FALST- 
FIED ‘EIKON "InxoOY ς Σ : ; ; ; ; 


PAGE 


312 


312 
320 


330 
335 
344 


347 
351 
354 
363 
370 


376 


381 
385 


389 


393 
393 


396 
401 
405 
409 


411 
420 
430 
433 


436 


438 


TABLE OF CONTENTS 


THE OFFICIAL DESCRIPTION OF ST. PAUL . Ἶ : : : 
THE MS. READINGS AND THE ORIGINAL TEXT OF THE DESCRIPTION 
OF PAUL . ἱ Ἶ : : ; - om ; 
THE STIGMATA OF JESUS ON PAUL. THE EARLY TRADITIONS ABOUT 
A TWIN-BROTHER AND DOUBLE OF JESUS . : ; Ἶ 
AN OPPONENT’S PHYSICAL DEFECTS IN ANCIENT POLitricaAL IN- 
VECTIVE . Σ ᾿ : : : ; 
THE ROMAN INDICTMENT OF Jesus AS THE SOURCE OF JoszPnus : 


XVI 


THE CRISIS ; : ; ‘ : : ; . 

REBELLION PLANNED OR Agioacey Amr ERES | ? ; ; ‘ 

A FRAGMENT OF THE ‘ HALOSIS’ IN JOHN OF ANTIOCH ; ; 

THE COMPLETE STATEMENT OF JOSEPHUS ON PILATE’S GOVERNOR- 
SHIP . ‘ ‘ : : : : ; 

THE TRIUMPHAL τ τὴν . ‘ : ‘ ς ; 

THE LIBERATION OF BARABBAS : 5 : , 

THE MESSIANIC ACCLAMATION ‘OSANNA’ . ‘ j 

THE OCCUPATION OF THE TEMPLE . ; : 

THE COLLISION WITH THE ROMANS . ; Ξ j : ‘ 

THE ATTACK ON THE TEMPLE BANKS : 

THE EXPULSION OF THE CATTLE-DEALERS . ; : 5 

‘ DESTROY THIS TEMPLE’. ; : : ‘ : 

THE COUNTERSTROKE: THE MASSACRE IN THE TEMPLE ‘ : 

THE FALL OF THE TOWER OF SILOAM : ‘ : : 

THEY THAT WERE CRUCIFIED WITH HIM ‘IN THE SAME CONDEMNA- 
TION. THE LAST SUPPER . : Σ : : ; ς 


XVII 


Tue ‘ TiruLuS’ ON THE CROSS AND THE PILLORY INSCRIPTION ON 
THE ‘Door OF JESUS’ IN THE TEMPLE ° : ‘ : 
THE MESSIANIC DISTURBANCES UNDER CALIGULA AND THE 
‘SERVANTS’ OF THE WONDER-WORKER IN THE TIME OF 
CLAUDIUS . ‘ : ; ς ‘ ‘ ς ; 
THE END OF JAMES THE Jusr, ‘ THE LorD’s BROTHER’ . ° 


XVIII 


THE PREDICTED WORLD-RULER—HEROD, JESUS, OR 
VESPASIAN ? . : . : : : : ; : 
THE War-GUILT OF THE CHRISTIANS IN THE ‘HALOSIS’ OF 
JOSEPHUS . : : : ; ‘ ὃ : 
Tue SHILo PROPHECY APPLIED TO VESPASIAN. JOSEPHUS AND 
TIBERIUS ALEXANDER Ἂ : - : é 


Xxi 


PAGE 


442 
446 
448 


454 
455 


457 


457 
461 


466 
471 
473 
476 
480 
486 
489 
490 
494 
500 
506 


510 


547 
55° 


554 


Xxil THE MESSIAH JESUS 


XIX 
WEST AND EAST—WORLD-EMPIRE AGAINST WORLD- 
REVOLUTION ; : ; : : : ‘ ς 


ΧΧ 
APPENDIX I: THE OFFICIAL RECORDS OF THE ROMAN BUREAU- 
CRACY ; ‘ : : ; : E : ; : 
APPENDIX II: RABBINICAL TRADITIONS CONCERNING NAMESAKES 
OF JESUS . : : : ‘ : : ς 
APPENDIX III: A GENUINE RABBINICAL Testimony ABOUT JESUS 
APPENDIX IV: CHRISTIAN CENSORSHIP. . ‘ : : ; 


APPENDIX V: IGNATIUS ON THE JEWS DEMANDING DOCUMENTARY 
EVIDENCE ABOUT JESUS FROM THE CHRISTIANS . : - 
APPENDIX VI: OFFICIAL ACTS COPIED AND CIRCULATED BY 
CHRISTIAN SCRIBES . A : ‘ : 
APPENDIX VII: THE DATING OF THE DEATH OF Janes THE s Just 
APPENDIX VIII: THE RUMANIAN JoSEPHUS FRAGMENTS . 
APPENDIX IX: [EDITIONS OF TRANSLATIONS OF JOSEPHUS . 
APPENDIX X: EDITIONS OF THE GREEK TEXT OF JOSEPHUS . 
APPENDIX XI: ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS OF THE GREEK eas 
APPENDIX XII: ORIGEN’s JOSEPHUS TEXT : : : 
APPENDIX XIII: ImMporTANT CHRISTIAN MARGINAL GLOSSES IN 
JosEpHuS MSS.. ς : ; : : - : ξ 
THE SOURCES OF THE GENEALOGIES OF JESUS IN MATTHEW AND 
LUKE : Ξ : : Ἶ : : - : 
APPENDIX XIV: More CuRISTIAN INTERPOLATIONS IN THE JOSE- 
PHUS TEXT : : : : ; : : 
APPENDIX XV: THE MUNDUS AND PxorawA EpIsopE ; : 
APPENDIX XVI: THE UTILIZATION oF DOCUMENTARY MATERIAL 
BY ANCIENT HISTORIANS . : : : : ; 
APPENDIX XVII: THE VEGETARIAN DIET OF THE BaPTIST 
APPENDIX XVIII: JOHN THE Baptist, Simon Macus, DosIrHEus, 
AND THE MANDAEANS : - : - 
APPENDIX XIX: THE LAW AGAINST CARRYING ARMS : 
APPENDIX XX: PILATE’s ‘ ICONISMUS’ OF JESUS : : 
APPENDIX XXI: THE ORIGINAL TEXTS CONCERNING THE PAYSICAL 
APPEARANCE OF JESUS ἔ Ὰ . Σ 
APPENDIX XXII: THE MESSIAH As A MOSES REpIVIVUS : 
APPENDIX XXIII: SuIDAS ON JESUS OFFICIATING AS A PRIEST IN 
THE TEMPLE . : : : : : : : 
APPENDIX XXIV: JOSEPHUS ON THE INTHRERETATION OF THE 
SHILO ORACLE, GEN. XLIX. το. : ; ς : 3 
APPENDIX X XV: SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE SLAVONIC JOSE- 
PHUS PROBLEM . ἃ : : ‘ : : : 


INDICES ° ° ; ς 3 : : . : 


PAGE 


562 


616 
616 


618 
620 
620 
622 


624 


631 


bist, OF TbLUS Lies TIONS 


PRESUMED PORTRAIT OF FLAVIUS JOSEPHUS. First cent. 
Roman marble head of Jewish type, found in Rome, formerly in 
possession of the princely family Borghese, now in the Ny 
Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen . ‘ : ς . Frontispiece 


(The Frontispiece and Pl. III, ave reproduced by courtesy of the 
Director, Dr. Frederick Poulsen.) 


PLATE FACING PAGE 
I. A LEAF FROM THE DIARY OF A ROMAN OFFICIAL IN 
EGYPT. Papyrus Paris. 69 in the Louvre. The Greek text is 
printed in the Notices et Extraits des MSS. de la Bibliothéque 


Nationale, xviii. 2, No. 69; U. Wilcken, Chrestomathie, No. 41 12 
(By courtesy of M. Charles Boreuil, Keeper of Papyvri at the 
Louvre.) 


II. PORTRAIT OF EMPEROR MAXIMIN DAIA. Enlarged from a 
cast of a contemporary medal in the Cabinet des Medailles, Paris 16 
(By courtesy of M. Jean Babelon, Keeper of Coins and Medals at 
the Bibliothéque Nationale.) 


III]. FRONT VIEW OF PRESUMED JOSEPHUS HEAD : ς 28 


IV. Μ. METTIUS EPAPHRODITUS, THE PUBLISHER OF JOSE- 
PHUS’ WORKS. Inscribed half life-size statue on the staircase 
of Villa Altieri, Rome . : - - Σ : . ‘ 30 


(By courtesy of Messrs. Bruckmann, Munich, from Bernoulli, 
‘Griechische Ikonographie,’ Munich, 1901, 11. Pl. xxv111.) 


’ THE OLDEST EXTANT MS, OF THE CHRISTIANIZED VER- 
SION OF THE ‘TESTIMONIUM FLAVIANUM’ IN BOOK 
XVIII. OF THE ‘ANTIQUITIES’ (Cod. Ambrosianus, Ἐς, 128 
superior). Aneleventh-century copy of the expurgated Josephus 
edition published at the time of Emperor Alexios Komnenos_ . 58 


=< 


(By courtesy of Monsign. Prof. Giovanni Galbiati, Director of 
the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, Milan.) 


VI. HOW JEWISH WRITINGS ABOUT CHRISTIANITY WERE 
EXPURGATED BY THE CENSOR. A censored page from 
Jacob ben Asher’s ’Arba‘ Turim, printed by the famous Soncino 
Press, 1516. Columbia University Library, New York . : 60 


(By courtesy of Funck, Wagnall & Co., New York, from ‘Jewish 
Encyclopedia,’ ti. p. 643.) 


xxiii 


XXIV 


PLATE 


VIL. 


ὙΕΙ͂: 


ΙΧ. 


ΧΙ. 


AIT, 


XII. 


XLV. 


THE MESSIAH JESUS 


FACING PAGE 


PAGE πὸ (=35) OF GERSHOM BEN SHELOMOH’S ‘SEPHER 
SHA‘AR HASH-SHAMAIM’ (‘DOOR OF HEAVEN’). 
Printed in Venice, 1547 (Columbia University Library), Show- 
ing the obliteration of large parts of the text by the censor 2 
reckless spreading of ink over the printed page 


(By courtesy of Funck, Wagnall & Co., New York, from ‘Jewish 
Encyclopedia,’ 111. p. 645.) 


THE ‘ TESTIMONIUM’ OUT OF ‘ANTIQUITIES’ INSERTED 
INTO THE ‘WAR,’ AND FURTHER FALSIFIED BY AN 
ADDITION FROM A BOOK BY BISHOP HIPPOLYTOS OF 
ROME. Cod. Vossianus Graec. 72, olim Petavianus, of the 
University Library, Leyden . 


(By courtesy of the Director, Dry. Frederic Cornelis Wieder.) 


THE UNPAGED FOLIO 89 RECTO OF THE ‘ EDITIO PRIN- 
CEPS’ OF THE HEBREW /JOSEPHUS. The so-called 
Josippon printed by Rabbi Abraham Conat between Aue -80 
in Mantua . : : Σ : ° . 


. THE PARIS MS. OF R. JUDAH LEON B. MOSHEH MOSCONI’S 


‘RECENSIO’ OF THE ‘JOSIPPON.’ With the passages on 
John the Baptist and Jesus. Cod. Hebr. 1280, f°. 123 τ΄, & ve. 
(15th cent.). Bibliothéque Nationale ; : 


THE PASSAGE ON JESUS DELETED IN THE VATICAN MS. 
OF R. JUDAH LEON B. MOSHEH MOSCONI’S ‘JOSIPPON.’ 
Cod. Borgianus Hebr., τ f°. 128 νος (15th cent.). - 


(By courtesy of Monsign. Giovanni Mercati.) 


FOLIO 82 OF SEBASTIANUS LEPUSCULUS’ JOSIPPUS, 
‘DE BELLO JUDAICO, DEINDE DECEM JUDAEORUM 
CAPTIVITATES,’ ETC. BASILEAE, APUD HENRICUM 
PETRI, MDLIX. 


THE PASSAGE ON JESUS IN MOSES MAIMONIDE®D’ « HIL- 
KHOTH MELAKHIM’ (1145-1204), Ch. τι. Deleted by the 
censor, rewritten in the margin of the book by the owner, and 
redestroyed by a subsequent censor. A censor’s certificate 
issued by a certain ‘ Peruzzotti revisore’ of 1754 informs us 
that a fine of 100 scudi was collected for each case of this kind 
from the unfortunate victims of repeated visits by different 
book-revisers. The blackened passage is not in the least blas- 
phemous in the modern sense of the word. Its essence is merely 
the contention that Jesus ‘came to prepare the way for the 
Messiah,’ 7.e. he was not himself the Christ foretold by the 
prophets. 


THE LONG PASSAGE ON JESUS, THE ‘BANDITS,’ AND 
EMPEROR GAIUS CALIGULA. Cod. Vatican Hebr., 18 fo,, 
94 v°. & 95 v°. ‘ : : : ; 
(By courtesy of Monsign., Giovanni ‘i eecades) 


66 


68 


94 


96 


98 


100 


108 


LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS XXV_ 


PLATE FACING PAGE 


XV (a) ANDREJ NIKOLAJEVIC POPOV. Discoverer of the Slavonic 
Book of Enoch and of the Old Russian Josephus (1866), 
Asst.-Professor at the Lazarev Institute of Oriental Lan- 
guages, Moscow. Born 27th Sept. 1841, in county of Tambov; 
died 30th May 1881 during a journey tothe Crimea ΣΤ 


(Ὁ) ISMAIL IVANOV IC SREZNJEWSKI. First editor of a 
number of other fragments from the Old Russian Josephus 
(1879) ; compiler of a famous three-volume dictionary of the 
Old Russian versions of early Christian authors. On the basis 
of his collections of Greco-Russian equivalents a retroversion 
of the Slavonic Josephus into Greek can be _ successfully 
attempted wherever it seems necessary in order to ascertain 
the genuine words of the lost original. Born 1st June (old 
style) 1812, in Jaroslawl; died 9th February 1880, as a Fellow 
of the Russian Academy of Science . : Σ - ον ἜΤ 


XVI. (a) ALEXANDER JOHANNES BERENDTS, who _ introduced 
the Slavonic Josephus to the knowledge of Western scholar- 
ship (1906), and copied and collated most of the MSS. and 
translated the first four books of the Capture of Jerusalem 
into German (1906-1912). Born 2nd September 1863, in 
St. Petersburg, third son of a wealthy Lubeck merchant, 
Heinrich Berendts; studied theology in Dorpat (1884) and 
in Berlin (1891-92) under A. v. Harnack and other masters. 
Later on Professor of Church History at Dorpat (1912). 
Travelled extensively in Russia and abroad; died 28th Feb- 
ruary I9gI2 ‘ ‘ : . ° ‘ ° ° τὸ 


(6) KONRAD GRASS. Friend and testamentary executor of A. J. 
Berendts, saved the latter’s MSS. at the peril of his own 
life during the troubles of 1918-19; the faithful editor of 
Berendts’ great posthumous work, the German translation 
of the first four books of the Slavonic Josephus. Born 8th 
October 1870, son of the homonymous parson of Kursieten; 
educated in Mitau from 1878; studied at Dorpat University 
from 1888, under Muehlau and Alexander v. Oettingen, at 
Erlangen and Leipzig under Frank and Th. Hahn; Pyrivat- 
dozent at Dorpat, 1895; from 1896-99 teacher of Lutheran 
religion in St. Petersburg ; 1901, Director of the Dorpat Real- 
schule and Privatdozent at this University. His main work is 
a History of Russian Sects (Leipzig, 1905-09). 1909, Professor 
of New Testament Exegesis at Dorpat; 1911, Hon. D.D. of 
Halle-Wittenberg. He gave the most generous and unstinted 
help to the author of the present book until he died of 
pneumonia, 25th November 1927, in Dorpat : : Ὁ £56 


XVII. TSAR IVAN III. Vassilievié, protector and persecutor of the 
Judaizing heresy in Russia. Woodcut in André Thévet’s 
Cosmographie Universelle, Paris,1575. Afteranicon obtained 
from a Greek resident of Galata, after Schiemann, Russland, 

Polen und Livland, Berlin, 1898, p. 315 : : . . [156 
(By courtesy of the publishers, W. de Gruyter.) 


XXVI1 


PLATE 


THE MESSIAH JESUS 


FACING PAGE 


XVIIIL.-XIX. THE APPEARANCE OF THE ‘WILD MAN’ (JOHN 


THE BAPTIST) UNDER ARCHELAUS, ACCORDING 
TO THE SLAVONIC JOSEPHUS. Cod. Kyrillo-Bjelos. 
63/1302, fo. 50 vo. & 51 r°., Leningrad Public Library 
Between 
(By courtesy of Prof. Benesevic.) 


XX. THE SLEB, A TRIBE OF WANDERING CRAFTSMEN 


OF SYRIA AND ARABIA, SO CALLED FROM THE _ 


MARK OF THE CROSS ON THEIR FOREHEADS. 
Descendants of the Rekhabites and eas of the Old 
Testament 


(By courtesy of Dry. Max Frvetherr v. ae a his 
‘Vom Mittelmeer zum persischen Golf,’ i. p. 220.) 


XXI. RUSSIAN ICON BY NAZARIJ SAVIN IN THE OSTRU- 


KHOV MUSEUM, MOSCOW. In the background the 
young John the Baptist ‘in the desert among the 
beasts,’ and ‘angels ministering to him.’ Marc. 1. 13, 
‘Sty μετὰ τῶν θηρίων Kal οἱ ἄγγελοι διηκόνουν αὐτῷ," referring 
not to Jesus, but to the Baptist! In the lower left-hand 
corner an angel leading young John into the desert, 
according to the Russian Apocryphal Zacharias legends. 
The main figure represents the Forerunner in the act of 
baptizing the infant Jesus—according to Mandaean, 1.6. 
Nasoraean, tradition. The infant is immersed in a 
eucharistic cup, a queer idea based on the use of the 
Baptist’s words, ‘“‘ide ὁ ἀμνὸς τοῦ θεοῦ ᾿᾿ (See, this is the 
Lamb of God’), in the Prothesis-ritual of the Greek mass- 
ceremonial . 


(Reproduced by δαήγισεν of A Mr. M. T's Schiffrin after Pikes 
Muratov, ‘ Les icones russes,’ Paris, 1927.) 


XXII. ROMAN LEGIONARY STANDARD WITH EXCHANGE- 


ABLE PORTRAIT-MEDALLION OF THE EMPEROR. 
Collection of E. J. Seltman, Cambridge . 


(By courtesy of C. Τ᾿. Seliman.) 


XXIII-XXIV. THE SLAVONIC JOSEPHUS ON THE APPEARANCE 


OF ‘THE WONDER-WORKER’ ON MOUNT OLIVET, 
AND HIS DEATH. F>°. 64 r°.-65 v®., Cod. Kyrillo-Bjelos. 


284 


316 


63/1302, Leningrad Public Library : : Between 382-3 


(By courtesy of Prof. Benexevir.) 


XXV. THE THREE EXTANT MSS. WITH BISHOP ANDREW 


OF CRETE’S QUOTATION FROM JOSEPHUS ON 
THE BODILY APPEARANCE OF JESUS. Andreas 
Cretensis, Cod. Paris. Graec. 1630, p. 124. Schol. ad Joh. 
Damasc. De fide orthod., iv. 16, Paris. Graec. No. 901, f°. 87 
ro, ἃ No. 1119 f°. 140 v°. : ; 

(By courtesy of M. Omont, Keeper of MSS. at the Biblio- 
théque Nationale.) 


PLATE 


XXXVI. 


XXVIII. 


XXX, 


XXXI. 


XXXII. 


XXAIITI. 


XXXIV. 


LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 


XXVil 


FACING PAGE 


THE ‘EPISTLE OF LENTULUS.’ With the clause bor- 
rowed from the ‘ Halosis’ of Josephus, ‘apparuit homo, st 
fas est hominem dicere.’ Cod. Paris. Lat. 17730, saec. Xv., 
fo. 7 vo, ἃ 8 τὸ, 


. THE ‘EPISTLE OF LENTULUS.’ Same text as our Pl. 


xxvi., from Cod. Monac. Lat. 6007, f°, 122 τὸ, νο, & 123 τὸ... 


(By courtesy of Herr Geheimrat Schnorr v. Carolsfeld, 
Director of the Bavarian State Library.) 


THE ORIGINAL TITLE OF THE SO-CALLED ‘ EPISTLE 
OF LENTULUS’: ‘EPISTULA PILATI AD RO- 
MANOS.’ Cod. Paris. Lat. 2962, saec. xv./xvi., f°. 174 . 


(By courtesy of M. Omont.) 


~ WARRANT FOR THE ARREST OF TWO THIEVES AT 


LARGE, GIVING THE HUE-AND-CRY OF THE 
FUGITIVES. Papyrus in Louvre, Paris, No. Io, 
Graec. 2333 : 2 ° 

(By courtesy of M. Charles Boreuil, ἈΣΡΗ of Papyri at 
the Louvre.) 


TOMBSTONE OF AN ARCHER, TIB. JUL. ABDES PAN- 
TERA. Born in Sidon, Phoenicia; having served in a 
cohort, transferred from Syria to the Rhine in A.D. 9. 
‘Found near a aie now in Municipal Museum, 
Kreuznach 


(By courtesy of J. C. B. Mohr’s Verlag, from Deissmann'’s 
‘Licht vom Osten,’ Tiibingen, 1923, Ὁ. 57-) 


IMAGE OF JESUS WITH MEASUREMENTS ACCORDING 
TO A CRUX MENSURALIS OF CONSTANTINOPLE. 
Cod. Laurent., Pl. xxva, f°. 15 v°. 


(By courtesy of Prof. E. a Director of the Biblio- 
teca Laurentiana, Florence.) 


EPISTULA SALUTATORIA OF AURELIUS ARCHE- 
LAUS, ‘BENEFICIARIUS’ TO THE MILITARY 
TRIBUNE JULIUS DOMITIUS. Mentioning (in 1. 25) 
the ‘ ICO(nismus la-)TORIS ’ (pen-portrait of bearer) 


(By courtesy of Bodleian’s Librarian, Prof. A. Ὁ. Cowley.) 


BRONZE DISC WITH SECOND-CENTURY PORTRAITS 
OF SS. PETER AND PAUL. Found in the Domitilla 
catacombs. After Armellini’s publication, dmische 
Quartalschrift, 1888, pp. 130-36 


THE TOWER OF SILOAM, EXCAVATED BY MAJOR 
RAYMOND WEILL FOR BARON EDMOND DE 
ROTHSCHILD . ‘ - 


(Inedited drawing by Major Ξν. Weill.) 


394 


396 


398 


404 


408 


416 


444 


448 


506 


XXVIII THE MESSIAH JESUS 


PLATE FACING PAGE 


XXXV. SECTION OF THE TOWER OF SILOAM, showing the 
rock-fissure connecting its basement with the water- 
tunnel (Shiloah) . : ; : ; ; é - 508 


(Inedited sketch by Major Weill.) 


XXXVI. ENTRANCE INTO THE CREVICE BY THE TOWER OF 
SILOAM . : ‘ Ξ 510 


(Photograph by Major Weill. .) 


ΧΧΧΥΝΠ. INSCRIBED STONE-BLOCK FROM THE PILLARS OF 
THE BARRIER SURROUNDING THE INNER FORE- 
COURT OF THE TEMPLE. Tshinili ees Museum, 
Constantinople . A ‘ «- i518 


(By courtesy of the πεδίον W. de ΠΕ Ξ after Stade, 
‘Geschichte des Volkes Israel,’ Berlin, 1888, vol. ii. p. 268.) 


XXXVIII.-IX. THE SLAVONIC JOSEPHUS PASSAGE ABOUT ‘THE 
SERVANTS OF THE WONDER-WORKER’ ON 
MOUNT OLIVET AT THE TIME OF EMPEROR 
CLAUDIUS. Cod. Kyrillo-Bjelos. 63/1302, f°. 71 τὸ, vo, 
& 72 τος, Leningrad Public Library : - Between 528-29 


(By courtesy of Prof. Benexevié.) 


THE MESSIAH JESUS. 


‘Nonnulli enim paganorum, ut noverint Christum . . . suspecti, 
ne forte a Christianis ista conficta sint, malunt credere codicibus 
ludaeorum.’ AUGUSTIN, Seyvmo ccexl, 4. 


] 


THE PRIMARY IMPORTANCE OF THE NON-CHRISTIAN 
SOURCES OF CHRISTIAN ORIGINS 


‘ Neque enim in angulo quidquam horum gestum est.’—Act. AP, xxvi. 26. 


HE present work is the first attempt to write a history 
of Christian origins on the basis of non-Christian or rather 


anti-Christian sources, and to point out the peculiar light 
in which the memorable events at the root of the Christian religion 
appeared to its adversaries. Lack of historical documents more 
than any other factor has so far stood in the way of such an attempt. 
Aslateas 1896 the German theologian Harnack could say witha good 
deal of truth that ‘all non-Christian testimonies about Jesus and 
the origin of Christianity might be written ona single quarto page.’ 
Such, indeed, was the situation when in 1906 Alexander Berendts 
published parts of the Slavonic version of Josephus, a text which 
is the chief source drawn on for the present attempt at analysis and 
reconstruction. Yet even so one may Well question how it came 
about that so portentous a series of events has left but so few 
traces in contemporary Jewish and Pagan literature, that no non- 
Christian literary text of any importance should give at least some 
details. One must ask, furthermore, Could it be that such events 
as are recorded in the Gospels have passed so completely unnoticed 
by the Roman government and its officials as to justify the reply 
put by Anatole France in the mouth of the aged Pilate: ᾿ Jésus de 
Nazareth? Jene me rappelle pas.’ Isit conceivable that a man 
should be proclaimed king of the Jews by the people at Jerusalem 
and crucified for political reasons by a Roman governor, without 
any report being sent to the Emperor giving an account of all these 
transactions ἢ If, however, such a report must have been sent, 
why is there hardly an echo of it in any Roman historian ? 
Explanations of this apparent paradox have indeed not been 
wanting. Thus the German scholar Johannes Weiss + wrote: ‘ To 
the official world the execution of a carpenter of Nazareth was the 
most insignificant event of Roman history during those decades ; 
it disappeared completely among the innumerable supflicra 
inflicted by the Roman provincial administration. It would bea 
most miraculous accident had it been mentioned in any official 


1 Jesus von Nazareth, Mythus oder Geschichte, Tibingen, 1910, p. 92. 
3 


4 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


report.’ Such a presentation of the facts, however, is quite mis- 
leading. Forit was no ordinary carpenter executed for some crime 
of no relation to the security of the Empire. On the contrary, 
the execution in question was a political act of the first importance, 
as were the events leading up to it ; for that carpenter had been 
hailed as the Liberator of Israel, as a saviour-king, and at a time, 
too, when the capital was filled with pilgrims from all over the 
known world. Nor is there any reason to suppose that the Roman 
governor was not aware of his own act; the inscription of the 
cross, “ Jesus Nazoraeus Rex Judaeorum,’ that is an epigraphical 
document of the first importance, in fact the earliest of all non- 
Christian and anti-Christian documents, leaves no doubt whatever 
as to the political character of the events. This document, the 
clearest expression of Roman official opinion of the case, must be 
the starting-point for any correct presentation of the evidence. In 
the prosecution leading to the catastrophe the political nature of 
the charge alone mattered ; for the Roman officials consistently 
declined to meddle with Jewish religious quarrels, and any neglect 
of the political aspect of the case must therefore be regarded asa 
grave methodological error. According to the rules imposed upon 
the Roman bureaucracy,* a political event of this character must 
therefore have been the subject of a full report to the Emperor ; 
Pilate could not possibly have failed to send one to Rome, were it 
only in the interest of his own safety. If, then, as Tertullian? takes 
for granted, a report of the case existed in the public records, 
how is it that the dramatic story is not repeated by a single 
contemporary historian ? 

The common modern answer to this puzzling question, as ad- 
vanced by certain radical critics, is to deny outright the truth of the 
Gospel narrative. If we are to believe them, there are no trust- 
worthy non-Christian witnesses to the life and passion of Jesus, for 
the simple reason that no human being answering to the descrip- 
tion of that exalted personage ever lived. The whole story, in- 
cluding even the inscription on the cross, is—according to them— 
but a pious legend, a rationalising adaptation of the old and wide- 
spread myth of the suffering, dying, and resuscitated god. 

This theory is first met with in the eighteenth century, when it 
arose as a natural consequence of Descartes’ principle de omnibus 
dubitandum, here applied for the first time to the foundations of 
positive religion, and as a result of the first crude application of the 
comparative method to the wealth of ancient mythology and astral 
lore. The dangers of this method of excessive scepticism were 

1 Acts xvili. 14-15: ‘ Gallio said unto the Jews, If it were a matter of wrong, 
or wicked lewdness, O ye Jews, reason would that I should bear with you: But 
if it be a question of words and names, and of your law, look ye to it; for I will 


be no judge of such matters.” Gallio was a_brother of the philosopher Seneca. 
2 App. 1. pp. 591 f. and Pl. 1. “ΠΣ ΕΘ below, Ὁ. 11 note 2. : 


NON-CHRISTIAN SOURCES OF CHRISTIAN ORIGINS 5 


promptly seen by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who in his Emile thought 
it necessary to throw out the following warning: ‘ Should we say 
that the Gospel story is the outcome of fanciful invention? My 
friend, it is not thus that people invent. The facts about Socrates, 
which nobody questions, are less solidly attested than those con- 
cerning Jesus Christ. Indeed, this is but-to push the difficulty 
further back without solving it. It would be more inconceivable 
that several persons, to wit, four, should have combined to fabricate 
this book than that one should have furnished the subject of it. 
Jewish authors would never have discovered this tone nor these 
ethics, and the Gospel bears marks of truth so great, so striking, 
so perfectly inimitable, that their inventor would be more astonish- 
ing than the hero. Yet, for all that, this same Gospel is full of 
incredible things, things repugnant to reason which it is impossible 
for any intelligent person to understand or to admit.’ 

Voltaire, like so many other critics, was convinced that the 
famous passage about Jesus in the eighteenth book of Josephus’ 
Antiquities (discussed below, pp. 36-62) was a Christian forgery. 

‘et, after emphasising the fact that neither Justus of Tiberias nor 

hilo the Jew mentions the Galilaean Messiah, he adds:* “ Are 
we to conclude from this that Jesus never existed, as some have 
ventured to conclude from the Pentateuch story that there never 
was a Moses? Certainly not. Since after the death of Jesus 
people wrote not only for but also against him, it is clear that he 
did exist.’ 

The sage of Ferney, when he wrote these lines, had just seen 
‘certain disciples of Lord Bolingbroke, men of more ingenuity than 
learning, who denied the existence of Jesus because the story of 
the Magi and the star and the Massacre of the Innocents was, they 
said, the height of extravagance. The contradiction existing 
between the two genealogies of Jesus as given by Matthew and 
Luke respectively was one of the reasons alleged by those young 
people in support of their conviction that Jesus never lived ; but 
they drew a very false conclusion. Our countryman Houel here 
in France had a most ridiculous genealogy drawn up for himself ; 
certain Irishmen have written of him and Jeansin that they had a 
spiritus familiaris which always gave them the aces when they 
played cards. Hundreds of extravagant tales have been told of 
them. Yet that does not prevent their having really existed ; 
those who lost their money in gambling with them were well satis- 
fied about that. What nonsense has not been said about the Duke 
of Buckingham ? None the less, he lived in the reigns of the kings 
James 1. and Charles. Apollonius of Tyana certainly never re- 
suscitated any one, Pythagoras had no golden leg ; yet Apollonius 
and Pythagoras were real men.’ 

2 Dieu et les hommes, ‘CEuvres,’ ed. Garnier, Paris, 1879, tome XXViii. p. 195, § 9. 


6 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


These arguments of the great rationalist and sceptic are quite 
to the point. No amount of improbability in a given story can 
prove, taken by itself, that the hero is himself a creation of mytho- 
logical fancy, Dieteric of Bern, though celebrated as a slayer of 
dragons in mediaeval German sagas, is none the less no other than 
the famous king Theodoric the Goth, who most certainly resided at 
Verona, ruled over Italy, struck money, built churches, and gave 
a lot of trouble to the contemporary Byzantine rulers. The fact 
that Berenice’s Hair can still be pointed out among the constella- 
tions of the nightly sky does not disprove that this gracious queen 
lived a very earthly life at Alexandria in Egypt. The coins and 
other documents representing Queen Cleopatra as the goddess Isis 
nursing the infant god Horus, and her claims to divine rights, are no 
argument against her historicity. Examples of this obvious truth 
might be multiplied, since Oriental history in particular teems 
with royalties exalted to divine rank and heavenly splendours. 
Even if one were to grant, for the sake of argument, the mytho- 
logical fancies of Dupuis and Volney and their modern followers,» 
according to which the Gospel story is but the reworking of olde: 
Oriental symbolism carried out in the interests of the nascent 
Church, this would not in the least invalidate the historicity of the 
man Jesus, of whom Tacitus? expressly states that he was crucified 
under Pontius Pilatus. One would then simply have to admit that 
his life was misrepresented by his followers to suit their particular 
aim. Such a possibility—and as a possibility it must certainly be 
admitted—makes it all the more desirable to secure, so far as that 
may still be possible, non-Christian and even anti-Christian (that 
is, purely secular) source material. 

As to the ‘ mythological theory,’ one may admit, of course, that 
a figure such as the Christ of the Gospels may have been created by 
a poet, though even then one would have to acknowledge also that 
Mark or whatever other author was at the basis of the first Gospel 
was one of the greatest poets that ever lived. But it would be 
incomprehensible that avowed opponents of the new religion should 
have overlooked this weakest spot of its history and should have 
done a fictitious person not at all to their liking the gratuitous 
honour of treating him as a man of flesh and blood. Asa matter 
of fact, not even the most hostile antagonists of Christianity ever 
levelled against its founder the reproach that he never existed 
at all, though otherwise they were certainly not very sparing in 
terms of opprobrium. Nor does the vast literature of Christian 
apologetics show the faintest trace of such an assertion ever 


1 W. B. Smith, John M. Robertson, Arthur Drews, Paul-Louis Couchoud, 
Georg Brandes. A full bibliography of this literature is given by Robert Stahl 
at the end of the French translation of Arthur Drews’ Le Mythe de Jésus, Paris, 
19206, * See below, p. 9 ἢ. 1. 


NON-CHRISTIAN SOURCES OF CHRISTIAN ORIGINS 7 


having been advanced on the part of the enemies of Christianity. 
Indeed, doubts of the historicity of Jesus were absolutely un- 
known until the éighteenth century. What divided Christians 


Himself. 

This is the point which is of paramount importance for the 
present analysis. As yet we have no Pagan documents, such as 
papyri or inscriptions concerning Jesus and his immediate follow- 
ing, or any other literary sources of Pagan origin which have not 
passed through the hands of Christian copyists, and which are 
therefore, theoretically at least, proof against the suspicion of having 
been tampered with in the interest of Christian apologetics. 
. Since, however, no one before the eighteenth century denied the 
historicity of Jesus, it is absurd to suppose that a Christian scribe 
of the first centuries of our era, foreseeing by a clairvoyance rarely 
equalled the doubts of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sceptics, 
should have purposely inserted the earliest of the vicious attacks 
on Christ and the Christian religion which is found in the Amnals 
of Tacitus. What is true of Tacitus and his famous passage is, of 
course, equally true of other Pagan festimonia of antiquity—such as 
Lucian, Celsus, Hierocles—and still more so of Josephus. [If it is 
gravely asserted that the famous passage of the Antiquities was 
inserted in toto by Christians merely in order to establish the 
historicity of Jesus, the obvious answer is that in that case the 
forgers would have been wasting their time and labour for the very 
good reason that no such proof was necessary, no one having until 
then doubted the historicity of Jesus. 

Let us now envisage our central problem. Suppose we had 
to reconstruct the history of Theodoric the Goth from the Middle 
High German poems and the Norse saga which have him for a 
hero. The only available method would be that of rationalistic 
interpretation, the same by which Euhemerus attempted to prove 
that Zeus had been a real prehistoric king of flesh and blood. 
How the Theodoric so reconstructed would look, and in particular 
how much he would resemble the historical personage whom we 
meet in the pages of Cassiodorus, Boethius, Ennodius, and the 
Gesta Theodorici, can be easily surmised. 

It is not different with the problem in hand. Since whatever 
is handed down about supernatural beings cannot be history, but 
mythology, saga, or legend, it follows that no amount of rational- 


ising Euhemerism will ever recover an historic account of Jesus the 


8 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


man trom Gospels the obvious tendency of which is to present 
him as the Superhuman Christ, the son of God.t_ Such an account 
can Only be obtained if we base our investigations, in the first 
instance, on that modest quarto page of non-Christian ¢estimonia, 
whose whole aim is to speak of him as a man in express 
denial of the Gospel claims ; adding then, in the second instance, 
any such features in the Christian tradition as will be found con- 
sistent with the picture thus recovered. If this method be followed, 
it will at once appear that the common opinion, according to 
which those ¢estimonza do not yield anything of great importance, 
is not at all well founded. 

Among the rabbinical testimonies to Jesus (which have been 
discussed frequently enough) 5 there is indeed a certain number 
which have no reference at all to the founder of Christianity, but to 
namesakes of his, belonging to different periods. Yet there is at 
least one of extraordinary importance. According to this docu- 
ment, a certain Jacob of the hamlet of Sekhanjah states that in his 
youth he had heard from the mouth of his teacher, Jesu han-nosvi;. 
1.6. the-Naséraean, a sharp attack on the temple of Jerusalem 
suggesting that it appeared to him totally defiled by an unworthy 
venal priesthood.* The phraseology of this attack is in very close 
agreement with the tone adopted by Jesus in the same connexion, 
according to the synoptical Gospels.® It can be shown, moreover, 
that the quotation cannot very well have been invented by the 
Christians, for the simple reason that they would not have derived 
any conceivable benefit from it, and moreover never quote it. Nor 
can it be a Jewish invention, for, as we shall see later on (p. 593), 
our Jewish authorities for this passage did not fully understand it. 
What gives it such decisive weight in the discussion of the histor- 
icity problem is the fact that Jacob of Kephar Sekhanjah quoted 
it to R. ’Eli‘ezer b. Hyrkanos—a witness to the destruction of the 
temple in A.D. 70—in connexion with an embarrassing problem 
concocted by himself. R. ’Eli‘ezer, then an old man, told it to 
Rk. “Aqiba in the year A.D. 110. T he transmission of the testimony 
of an eye-witness who saw and heard Jesus is then known in its exact 
filiation, comprising no more than two generations. The trans- 
mitters are well-known historical personages who deserve absolute 
confidence in such matters, since their unrelenting hostility towards 
the Christian sect is obvious from the context of the passage. The 
conclusion is therefore justified that a man called Jesu han-nosri, 


----...... 


1 See Albert SchweilaG The Quest of the Histrieal Jesus β} London, tort, 

Pp. 314, quoting and approving Of Words of Albert Kalthoff. 

“The English reader may now consult, beside the well-known book of R. 
Travers Herford, especially Joseph Klausner, Jesus of Nazareth) tr. by Canon 
H. Danby, London, 1924... --——————————— -Ἕ.ς.. 

8 See App. II. p. 592. 4 See App. 111. 

* See below, p. 484 n. 8. 


NON-CHRISTIAN SOURCES OF CHRISTIAN ORIGINS 9 


hated by the rabbis as an agitator and an heretic, did live and inter- 
preted the law in an unorthodox spirit, and that certain sayings of 
his, in close agreement with passages of the same tendency in the 
Gospels, were current for some time both among his adherents and 
among his opponents, and maintained themselves with a tenacity 
which is typical of Jewish oral tradition. The Gospels them- 
selves, it will be recalled, contain a nucleus of such bits of oral 
tradition put in writing many years later; and the Talmud, simi- 
larly, is just such a collection of the obiter dicta of certain rabbis, 
put together and arranged a considerable time after their death. 

There follows, in the order of the chronology, the testimony of 
Tacitus,! who refers to the Christians as to a gang of men hated by 
the whole world, not only omaccount of their exitiabilis superstitro 
but also because of their shameful actions (/lagztza),? so that they 
were suspected and some confessed themselves guilty of having 
started the fire of Rome in the reign of Nero. For Tacitus, who 
as governor of Asia Minor had had plenty of chances to question 
Christians in court, the ‘ Christus,’ after whom the mob calls 
them ‘ Chrestiani,’ is nothing but the founder of this band of 
criminals, who to him are the enemies not only of Rome but of all 
mankind, presumably because they long and pray for the Day of 
Judgment and the end of the world and because they appear in- 
clined to hasten the coming of that catastrophe.* The experienced 
magistrate, to whom the archives of the State were easily access- 
ible, does not even hint at the possibility that that ‘ Christus ’ 
never existed and that he was but a clever invention of those 
anxious to attribute a part of their guilt to a man long since judged 
and dead. 

A short time later the younger Pliny,* on the basis of an official 
interrogation of Christians, reports that they were in the habit of 
singing hymns to that ‘ Christus’ guast deo, ‘as though he were a 
god.’ He is therefore very far from considering that alleged god 
as anything but a man who owed such unmerited honours only 
to the prava et tmmodica superstitio of his adherents. 

Neither Tacitus nor Pliny allows us to know on account of what 
particular crime that ill-famed Christus or Chrestus had been 
executed. On the other hand, Celsus and Lucian ὅ supplement 

1 Tac., Ann. xv. 44: ‘ igitur primum correpti, qui fatebantur, deinde indicto 
eorum multitudo ingens haud proinde in crimine incendii quam odio humani generis 
convicti sunt’ (coniuncti, Cod. Flor.; accepted by Gronovius [see Walter 77 loc.] 
and Ed. Meyer; but see Reitzenstein, Hell. Mysterien-relig., Leipzig, 1927, p. 114). 

2 Pliny mentions flagitia cohaerentia nomini, crimes essentially connected with 
the Christian denomination. Further details may have been expurgated. As the 
comparison with Tertullian, Apolog. i1., and Eusebius, H.E. iii. 33, shows, the 
text of Trajan’s reply to Pliny has certainly been tampered with. 

8. Minuc. Felix, ii. 1: ‘ . toto orbi et ipsi mundo . . . minantur incendium, 


yuinam moliuntur.’ 
4 Epist., xcvi. 5 De Peregrini Morte, ch. xii. 


το THE MESSIAH JESUS 


those statements by expressly designating Jesus as a γόης and 
μάγος, 1.6. ἃ sorcerer, and—what is even worse in Roman eyes—as 
a στάσεως ἀρχηγέτης, i.e. the fomenter of a rebellion, both indeed 
capital crimes according to Roman law. © = 
The same accusation appears even more distinctly in the state- 
ments of the famous persecutor of Christians, Sossianus Hierocles,* 
who was in succession governor of Phoenicia, Arabia Libanitis, 
Bithynia, and prefect of Egypt,? during the reign of Diocletian, 
thus in a way a successor of Pilate. He states that Jesus was 
overcome by the Jews after committing highway robberies (/atro- 
cima) at the head of a band of goo men. ver since Lactantius, 
scholars have only seen an absurdity 1 in this assertion, forgetting 
that the terms ‘Jatro’ and ‘ latrocinium’ are termini techmict of 
ancient sociology and political science, that Josephus, for example, 
constantly uses them with reference to the Jewish patriots in the 
war of rebellion ; forgetting, furthermore, that the Gospels them- 


oe wee 


tion.’ They also forget that the oldest of them (Mark xv. 7) does | 
not hesitate to speak of ‘the revolution’ (ἐν τῇ στάσει) When re- 
ferring to the tumultuous incidents connected with the triumphal 
entry of Jesus into Jerusalem.4 Yet one might have read in St. 
Augustine ὃ that the kingdoms (vegna), leaving aside the question 
of ‘right or wrong’ (dempta tustitia), are but ‘ magna latrocinia,’ 
Just as Rome was founded by a band of robbers collected by 
Romulus, so, according to the saint, a laivocinium, if powerful 
enough (addita tmpunitate), will develop into a kingdom, and the 
latronum dux will then style himself a ‘vex.’ All this means 
nothing but the banal truth that success will justify high treason, 
at least in the eyes of those who—in our days—would call Sir Roger 
Casement a traitor, but George Washington an ardent patriot and 
a statesman, the ᾿ father of his country.’  Latrociniua facere,’ i in 
the phraseology o of Sossianus, is the same thing as to ‘commit high 
treason,’ ‘ start a rebellion,’ and his accusation is the exact equi- 
valent of the indictment before the tribunal of Pontius Pilate, 
repeated, according to Roman legal usage, in the inscription on the 
cross, the reality of which only the worst hypercriticism ° can 
doubt. The executed victim had been condemned as a ‘ vex 


+ Lactantius, Div. instit., v. 3, 4. See below, p. 363 ἢ. 2. 

> Corpus Inscript. Lat., iii. 133-6661. 

3 Luke xxiii. 40. See below, Pp: EI. 

4 In the parallel passage in Like (xxiii. 19), the meaning of the sentence is 
intentionally obscured by speaking of ‘some riot’ (ἐν στάσει tii) as if it were 

‘some trifling riot in the town.’ 

5. Civ. Det, iv. 4, 1, p. 150, Dombart. 

6 See Edgar Salin, Civ. Dei, Tiibingen, 1926, p. 22, cp. p. 34, against Wilh. 
Bousset, Kyrios Christos, p. 26. Bousset himself has not repeated his doubts in 
the 2nd edition of his book. 


NON-CHRISTIAN SOURCES OF CHRISTIAN ORIGINS 11 


Judaeorum,’ a king of the Jews, on whom this dignity had been 
conferred by the acclamatio of the people when he had entered 
Jerusalem. In exactly the same way did the Caesar receive his 
imperial dignity by the acclamatio of the Roman army. Such 
a king, proclaimed against the will of Caesar, and hence no tolerated 
vassal-king, no ‘vex socius et amicus popult Romanz,’ was, for the 
Roman administration, a ‘latronum dux,’ an ἀρχιλῃστής, and his 
adherents, of whom two suffered for the same crime (ἐν τῶ αὐτῷ 
κρίματι συσταυρωμένοι),1 were latrones, that is, rebels. 

It is this conception of the non-Christian world which strikes 
any attentive reader of the few passages that could be collected on 
Harnack’s little quarto page. To the Jews, Jesus was indeed an 
heretic and an agitator of the lower orders; to the Pagans he was 
a magician who through sham miracles and with subversive words 
had incited the people to rebellion and as leader of a gang of 
desperate men had attempted to seize the royal crown of Judaea, 
as others had done before and after him. “4 

If this beso, one must next ask why it is that such a munat 
casus 2 should not have left a more voluminous echo in the non- 
Christian sources. It will not do any more to minimise the im- 
portance of the case; nor is it admissible to accuse the Roman 
provincial administration of habitually putting to death a number 
of its subjects as part of the day’s work.* To generalise mass exe- 
cutions which were resorted to in extreme cases, and to declare such 
executions the common and ordinary thing in normal times of 
peace or comparative peace, would be a grave historical error. 
The true solution of the enigma must be sought elsewhere. 

Granting that the non-Christian writers referred to Jesus—as 
well they might—as to a wizard, a demagogue, and a rebel, it 
stands to reason that such statements were necessarily highly 
offensive to Christian readers, who naturally regarded them as out- 
right blasphemies. Under these circumstances any such passage 
would simply have had to disappear: witness the substitution, in 
the Talmud, of the expression ‘pelont,’ i.e. ‘a certain one,’ for the 
name of Jesus, where this name occurred in the original text ; 4 
witness also the treatment of Lucian’s reference to Christ ὃ at the 
hands of the Christian scribes, whose indignation is still visible on 
the margin of some of the extant MSS. The writings of Celsus 
and of Sossianus Hierocles have been preserved in fragments only, 
thanks to the verbal quotations of their attacks in the detailed 
answers of the Church fathers Origen, Eusebius, and Lactantius. 
In the same way the anti-Christian works of Porphyry, which were 


1 Luke xxiii. 40. 2 Tertullian, Apolog., xxi. 
$ Cp. the words of Johannes Weiss above, p. 3 Nn. 1. 

4 See e.g. Strack-Billerbeck, 1. p. 35. 

5. Peregr. Proteus, chaps, xi. and xiii. and the scholta. 


12 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


drawn on by Sossianus Hierocles, fell a victim to ecclesiastical 
censure, for as early as the time of Constantine the State had 
given the Church the discretionary power to suppress all anti- 
Christian literature’ = 7 

since the law of Diocletian concerning books ‘ improbatae 
lecturae’—a term denoting originally magical books, astrological 
tables to determine the death date of an emperor, etc., applied by 
him so as to cover even the holy scriptures of the Christians—had 
been turned by Constantine and later on by Theodosius and 
Valentinian * against the Pagan and Jewish owners of books 
hostile to Christianity, anybody possessing writings in which Jesus 
the Christ was referred to as a ‘magician,’ an ‘agitator,’ a ‘dema- 
gogue, etc., exposed himself to severe, even capital, penalty. The 
least that might happen to him was the destruction of the MS., 
which might be (and often was) of no mean value. The natural 
consequence of such a state of affairs may still be gauged from the 
‘new edition’ (νέα ἔκδοσις) of the anti-Christian writings of 
Funapius after the death of Julian, quoted by Photius. As we 
learn from the patriarch, the most violent anti-Christian passages ἡ 
had disappeared from it, and the emendation had been done so 
clumsily that often enough the logical connexion had been com- 
pletely destroyed. 

As a matter of fact, the wholesale erasing and blotting out of 
all anti-Christian passages in Jewish and Pagan writings—witness 
the illustrations on our plates.~—is-the only, and at the same time 
the best, explanation of the apparent scarcity of such documents. 
This fact explains, among others, the disappearance of the book of 
Antonius Julianus, De /udaeis, and the rest of the literature occa- 
sioned by the Jewish War (still mentioned in Josephus’ introduc- 
tion), and the curious silence observed about Jesus—much to the 
astonishment of Photius—in Jewish books on the same subject, 
such as that of Justus of Tiberias. Only a person naive enough to 
believe that the Christians might have found in Jewish and Pagan 
writings of this type statements flattering to the founder of their 
religion or to his disciples, or facts otherwise of an edifying nature, 
can be astonished at the almost complete disappearance of anti- 
Christian books. It is one of the many ironies of history that 


1 See App. IV. p. 594. 2 See App. IV. p. 594. 

3 Bibliotheca, cod. |xxvii. towards the end. 

* In a review of the German edition of this book (Rém. Quartalschrift, xxxvii., 
1929), p. 179, Prof. Leo Wohleb calls the author’s attention to the fact that in 
the archetype of the principal MS. of the Historia Augusta, Codex P (Palatinus 
899 of the Vatican Library), nineteen complete sentences and clauses have been 
deleted (E. Hohl, Betty. zur Textgeschichte ἃ. H.A., Klio, xiii., 1913, pp. 389 sqq.). 
It is no more due to pure chance that Dio Cassius’ report of the conflagration at 
Rome and the ensuing persecution of the Christians by Nero (the parallel version 
to Tacitus’ famous paragraph, quoted supra, p. 9n.1) is known to us only 
through exceedingly scrappy Byzantine extracts. See also below, p. 65 n. 2. 


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A LEAF FROM THE DIARY OF A ROMAN OFFICIAL IN EGYPT 
RENDERING ACCOUNT FOR THE SMALLEST DETAILS OF HIS OFFICIAL ACTIVITY 
(PAPYRUS PARISIENSIS 69 IN THE LOUVRE) 


Ths picture 5 vaside down 


NON-CHRISTIAN SOURCES OF CHRISTIAN ORIGINS 13 


precisely this material would now be of the greatest value in 
defending the Church against the charge of having arbitrarily 
invented a founder of its religion, who never existed at all. What 
is astonishing is that even as much as a quarto page of such anti- 
Christian source material should have escaped the universal de- 
struction, a fact which is no doubt due partly to the stupidity of 
absent-minded, mechanical copyists, partly to the negligence of 
certain censors, and partly to the reverence for the great monu- 
ments of old as shown by men like S5ynesius of Cyrene who, though 
outwardly Christians, remained at heart so-called Pagans, or rather 
(as they preferred to style themselves) “ philosophers.’ 


THE PROBLEM OF THE ‘ ACTA PILATI’ AND THE 
CHRONOLOGY OF THE PASSION 


The same considerations which account for the complete dis- 
appearance of most of the anti-Christian Jiterary sources about the 
Naséraean Messiah are sufficient to explain also the loss of all 
official documents referring to the trial and passion of Jesus. | 

~ Ata very early time doubts expressed against the trustworthi- 
ness of Christian historical material and the tradition of the Church 
led to an insistent demand for the production of official documents. 
The letter of Ignatius to the Philadelphians shows, for example, 
how irritated the clergy felt at the taunts of certain recalcitrant 
Jews, who frankly told them that they would refuse to believe the 
Gospel narrative so long as they could not find the story also in the 
archives, 

The alleged insignificance of the case of Jesus of Nazareth,* even 
if it were true, would never satisfactorily explain this silence of all 
official sources. We know better from the Egyptian papyri, the 
so-called ‘ Pagan acts of martyrs,’ the habits and usages of the 
Roman bureaucracy, which kept a running index of even the 
smallest incidents of their official life as they came up. Such 
notices were collected so as to form the official diary (commentarit) 
of the governor, copies of which were kept in provincial and central 
archives, whilst extracts were regularly sent to the Emperor in 
Rome. Furthermore, the governors themselves would have 
duplicates of certain acts placarded for public cognizance,’ and in 
cases which were of a nature to interest larger circles extracts of 
the official judicial proceedings were made and distributed by the 
partisans of the accused or condemned,‘ a method which in those 

+ ἐν τοῖς ἀρχείοις. Ignatit agen ad Philadelphenos, viii. 2. On the variant 
reading ἐν rots ἀρχαίοις, see App. V 

2 See above, p. 3, the words quoted from Anatole France and Johannes Weiss. 

8 See App: 1., Pl..1. 

3. Ὁ Schulthess, W ochenschvift fiir klass, Philologie, xvi., 1899, 1055f. A. Neppi 


Modona, Pyrotocolli giudiziavit 0 vomanzo storico ? Raccolta in onore di Gio. 
Lumbroso, pp. 407-38. See App. VI. 


14 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


days had to replace the modern newspaper with its regular accounts 
of sensational ‘cases.’ The so-called acta sincera, 1.6. the genuine 
acts of Christian martyrs, are nothing but the edifying reworkings 
of just such pamphlets, based on the original protocols as composed 
by the official notarit or exceptores. Such excerpts could be made 
with perfect legality whenever the authorities granted the facultas 
inspiciendt et describendi commentarios, i.e. permitted an examina- 
tion of the court acts. Ifthat permission was refused, recourse was 
had to bribery of the state police officials, the so-called specula- 
tores. Asa matter of fact, such acta sincera are not lacking in the 
case of a number of infinitely less important trials in connexion 
with certain early Christian martyrs. For example, 200 denari 
are stated to have been the exact cost to the Christians of a copy 
of the acts of Tarachus, Probus, and Andronicus.” 

Under these circumstances we understand perfectly how 
Justinus 3 and Tertullian 4 can take it for granted that such records 
about the trial of Jesus were to be found in the state archives. 
Further, in the acia of the three martyrs just quoted the governor 
tells one of the accused: ‘Non scis, quem invocas, Christum 
hominem, quem reum fuisse factum sub custodia Ponti Pilati et 
punitum constat cuius extant acta passionis.’ This significant 
phrase may well be derived from the genuine official acta of these 
martyrs, who suffered under Diocletian. 

At all events, no capital cases in the Roman State were ever 
tried without due documentary records being kept,® any more than 
such a disorderly procedure-would be permissible in our time in any 
of the modern civilized countries. Once read in court and ap- 
proved by the judge, such documents could not be altered after the 
close of the affair, and the officials were compelled by law to deposit 
one copy in the archive of the governor or whoever else had the 
supreme authority in a given region.® Pilate could no more execute 
a freeborn man, not to speak of an important leader of a popular 
movement, without a protocol of the case being duly written and 
put on file, than a British judge could do such a thing in India to- 
day. To assume the contrary and to suspect the Roman governor 
of neglecting the proper judicial procedure in such an affair betrays 
only a gross ignorance of the obligatory steps in the Roman ad- 
ministrative and judicial machine. 

Granting this, as we may without the slightest hesitation, and 


1 Max Memelsdorff, De aychivis imperatorum, Diss. Hall., 1890, p. 50, n.5. 

2 See App. VI. 5. Apolog., xxxv. and xlviil. 4 A polog., ΧΧΙ. 

5 E, Le Blant, Suppl. to Ruinart’s Acta Sincera, Paris, 1882, p. 16. Rambaud, 
Le droit criminel vomain dans les Actes des martyrs, Lyon, 1885. P. Monceaux, 
Revue Archéol., iii® série, t. XxxXviil., IQOI, pp. 240-71. 

6 Cf. Apuleius, floridorum libri iv. 9, 30 f., p. 11, ed. Helm: ‘ proconsulis autem 
tabella sententia est, quae semel lecta neque augert littera una neque autem minut 
potest, sed utcumque rectiata est, ita provinciae instrumento refertur.’ 


NON-CHRISTIAN SOURCES OF CHRISTIAN ORIGINS 15 


considering furthermore the comparative ease with which copies 
of such documents could be procured and circulated in abridged 
form, it is certainly a remarkable fact that the accounts of the trial 
of Jesus in the Gospels are of based on anything like an extract 
from the acts of the trial. They resemble in no way the acta 
martyrum sincera with their abundant correct detail about the 
legal procedure, beginning with the date of the trial and ending 
with the correct formula of the judgment pronounced. On the 
contrary, they are full of legal impossibilities which have for ever 
puzzled all the numerous specialists dealing with this tragical 
case. Similarly, the Acta Pilati and the report of Pilate to Tiberius 
mentioned by Justinus and Tertullian are obvious forgeries, for 
no genuine acts or reports could contain anything like the details 
for which they are quoted. Rather do they resemble certain 
mediaeval legends of martyrs, freely invented and almost without 
any basic truth. 

It is certainly curious, then, to see that the Christians never 
took the trouble to procure for their own libraries these docu- 
ments, which should have been most precious to them—in other 
words, that they failed to do for Jesus what they commonly did, 
and at great expense, for various martyrs of the early Church. 
And yet there can be no doubt whatever that the genuine Acta 
Pilati were kept in the files of the Emperor’s correspondence in 
Rome, among the commentarit principis (above, p. 13). Still 
more peculiar: in the latter part of the first century—just about 
the time when Mark wrote his Gospel in Rome—two members of 
the reigning dynasty, Flavius Clemens and Domitilla, had been 
converted to the Christian faith, and through them, if not through 
a humble servus librarius of the procurator ab epistulis—one of those 
Christians ‘that are of Caesar’s household ’!1—a copy of the genuine 
Acta Pilati could easily have been obtained from the tabulariwm 
principis. Why, one asks, was no effort ever made in this.direc- 
tion? Wasit really, as many would have it, because no such acts 
could ever have existed, since*no such. trial ever took place under 
Pilate ? 

We can only say that precisely the contrary is true, for we 
have definite proofs of the existence of genuine Acta Pilati, The 
reason why the Christians did not choose to avail themselves of 
this document was simply that these Acta contained κατὰ τοῦ 
Χριστοῦ βλασφημίας," that is, material_highly-offensive to them 
and hence of no use fof missionary purposes. That such must 
necessarily have been the casé will-be~fairly obvious from the 
following considerations. Those Acfa must have contained the 
justification of the capital sentence passed on Jesus—his guilt, that 

1 Epistle of St. Paul to the Philippians, iv. 22. 
2 Eusebius, Hist. eccl., ix. 5, 7. 


16 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


is, or what in Roman eyes constituted his guilt. Such a document 
could obviously be of use only to all anti-Christian polemists, who 
on this basis could attempt to prove that Jesus had indeed been a 
magician, a demagogue and what not, and its publication could 
only be extremely embarrassing to the Christians, who of course 
considered the documents in question as full of blasphemies against 
the founder of their religion. Indeed, it is pertinent to ask, What 
else could we expect to find in the protocols of a trial obviously 
intended to establish that Jesus was not a prophet or son of God, 
but a mere man, a wizard, and a pretender to the throne of David 
and to the crown of the world-ruler ? Would not witnesses have 
been summoned to determine whether Jesus was of royal blood, a 
‘son of David,’ or a mere impostor of humble origin, claiming to 
belong to a still extant family? which, no doubt, took great pains 
to disclaim any such relationship ? 
_-Asa matter of fact,as we know from Eusebius,? this is the reason 
why the Acta in question were published by the koman govern- 
ment, at the order of the Emperor Maximinus Daia, in A.D. 311,° 
when they were broadcast in a vast number of copies and listed 
Negnong the prescribed readings for all schools of the Empire. 
aturally enough, these Acta Pilati—dated, in contradiction to 
the conjectural traditional chronology of the Church, from the 
fourth consulate of Tiberius, that is, A.D. 2I—must have appeared 
to the Christians as a collection of the worst blasphemies, It is 
humanly understandable that the Church, thus driven into a 
corner by the publication of this exposure, should have used the 
first opportunity to destroy the obnoxious documents root and 
branch. Still, a number of years had yet to pass before the Chris- 
tians were granted such an opportunity. For the time being they 
had no other means than that of accusing their opponents of having 
forged genuine documents, and this bold assertion of theirs one 
of them tried to make others believe by a clever falsification of 
the chronology of Josephus. 

Let us turn again to Eusebius, the first to discuss this problem. 
He sets out to prove that the Acta published by Maximinus must 
have been forgeries because they put the trial and execution of 
Jesus in the fourth consulate of Tiberius, the seventh year of his 
reign (A.D. August 21-22), whilst on the other hand, according to 
Josephus, Pilate did not enter Judaea until the ¢wel/th year of 
Tiberius (=A.D. 26). 

It is to be noted first that the historian does not appear to be 
perfectly sure of his authority, for he adds the clause: εἴγε τῷ 
Ἰωσήπῳ μάρτυρι χρήσασθαι δέον, that is, ‘if [or provided that] one 
may call in Josephus as a witness.’ Further, if, for the sake of 


1 See below, p. 322 0. 1. 2 OD. cit., I. 9, 2-10. 
3 As to the date, cf. H. M. Gwatkin, Encyclop. of Religion and Ethics, ix. 748b, 


PLATE Il 


PORTRAIT OF EMPEROR MAXIMIN DATA 


WHO PUBLISHED, IN A.D. 311, THE GENUINE ACTS OF PILATE 
CONCERNING THE TRIAL OF JESUS 

ENLARGED FROM A CAST OF A CONTEMPORARY MEDAL IN THE 
CABINET DES MEDAILLES, PARIS 


NON-CHRISTIAN SOURCES OF CHRISTIAN ORIGINS 17 


argument, we grant that the Acfa in question may have been 
forgeries, it is utterly unlikely that the Roman chancellery, which 
had, at the least, access to the writings of Josephus, the court 
historiographer of the Flavians, whose works were in every public 
library, should have been so negligent as to choose a date which is 
inopen contradiction to the statements of Josephus. Further, at the 
time of Maximinus Daia the Gospels were of course easily accessible 
to anybody, and if the imperial chancellery had not possessed the 
genuine Acta Pilati, and had been obliged to produce false ones, it 
would certainly have used one of the dates based by the Church on 
Luke iti. τ, that is, A.D. 29, 32, or 33, but never the year A.D. 21, 
which no doubt surprised all Christians. 

Lastly, one wonders why, if the Acta of Maximinus were false, 
Eusebius made no effort of his own to counter them by more exact 
researches undertaken by himself in the imperial archives. Indeed, 
when the peace between Church and State had at last been con- 
cluded, it was quite common that the Christians undertook just 
such researches in the archives of the various governors. lor 
example, Apollonius, as quoted by Eusebius,’ refers to the acts of 
the provincial archive of Asia to show that a certain Alexander had 
been tried before the Roman governor as a common criminal and 
not on account of his Christian confession, and Eusebius 2 himself 
quotes excerpts of such official records. As late as the sixth 
century it was still possible to consult judicial minutes dating from 
the reign of the Emperor Valens *—that is, documents two centuries 
old—with the same facility as if they had been written the day 
before. Moreover, Eusebius does not even say, as well he might 
have said, that the Acta published by Maximinus were forgeries 
because no report of the trial existed among the various genuine 
documents kept in the archives—because, let us say, the reports of 
Pilate and the commentartt of Tiberius were lost, etc. Indeed, he 
is careful not to venture such an assertion, because among the 
higher officials of the palace there were surely still enough oppon- 
ents of Christianity and partisans of the old religion who could 
easily have refuted such a statement, and would moreover not 
have tolerated a falsification of the devinae litterae of the great 
Tiberius. 

The Christian apologists could then do nothing else than 
fabricate a chronological argument by converting—a trifling change 
indeed !—the figure sixteen (IS) for the number of years of Pilate’s 
administration (Azté., xviii. 4. 1, ὃ 89) into ten (I), and the corre- 
sponding number A (four years) for his predecessor Gratus (Axt., 
XViii, 2. 2, ὃ 35) into IA (eleven years), thus making Pilate’s ad- 
ministration begin in A.D. 26 instead of in A.D. 19. There is indeed 


1 Hist. eccl., v. 18. 2 Ibid., vii. 11. 
3 Lydus, De magistrat. pop. Rom., iii. 29. 


18 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


conclusive proof of such a brazen attack on the text to which a 
whole phrase about the high priest Caiaphas has fallen a victim 
in the crucial chapter (xviii. 2. 2, § 35). 

γ St. Jerome in his commentary on Matthew states that he read in 
his Josephusabout the high priest Caiaphas having bought his office, 
and that for one year only, by bribing King Herod Antipas. A 
corresponding statement is wanting in the standard Greek text, 
and St, Jerome has been most frivolously accused of having in- 
ventedit. Asa matter of fact, the wording of Josephus cannot be 
intact in this place. The whole matter of the high-priestly office, 
and the manner in which it was bought and sold, clearly show what 
has happened to the text. The governor Gratus, the first of the 
officials of Judaea appointed by Tiberius in A.D. 15, just after the 
death of Augustus, came to Palestine toward the end of the year at 
the earliest, and during his term removed and appointed four high 
priests. Now, attention has been called? to the rabbinic tradition 
according to which the term of each priest was limited to one year 
by the Roman governor Valerius Gratus,? a custom which has 
parallels in other Roman provinces at this particular period. 
Josephus himself expressly states of two of the high priests ap- 
pointed by Gratus that they held office for just one year, and even 
of the third there is nothing in the text 4 warranting that his term 
of office was longer.* Now, the logical conclusion from the fact 
that Gratus appointed altogether only four high priests, each for an 
annual term of office, seems to be that he himself held the governor- 
ship only for the four years A.D, 15, 16, 17, 18; for it is hardly 
likely that it took him seven years to invent such a profitable 
method, the less so because he can in no wise be regarded as its 
originator.® In the fourth Gospel (xi. 49) Caiaphas himself is spoken 
of as the ‘high priest of the year.’ Evidently a one-year term 
of office had become the rule since Gratus, and Caiaphas’ long term, 


lasting throughout the administration of Pilate, is to be explained 


1 Ed. Vallarsi, vii. 223: ‘vefert Josephus istum Caiapham unius tanti anni 
pontificatum ab Herode pretio redemisse.’ 

2 Klausner-Danby, Jesus of Nazareth, London, 1925, p. 163 ἢ. 1. 

* See below, p. 599, the statement of the Rumanian Josephus that Valerius was 
recalled because he had been bribed by Ishmael to confer upon him the high- 
priestly dignity. This statement is not found anywhere in the Greek Josephus 
or in any other ancient author. Since it cannot very well have been invented by 
the Russian, Polish, or Rumanian translator, it must be derived from a passage 
in the Greek Josephus which was blotted out by the censor in the standard text. 

* Ant., xviii. § 34: ‘‘xai τοῦτον μετ᾽ οὐ πολὺ [after a short term] peracrheas.”’ 

δ This has been noticed by Hans von Soden in Cheyne’s Encycl. Bibl., 171 : 
‘Valerius Gratus gave the post in succession to three men, none of whom held it, 
however, more than one year.’ Schiirer, Geschichte (+), ii. 271 (Engl. trans., 
Edinburgh, 1910, ii. 1, p. 198d), also places these four high priests in those years : 
Ishmael Ὁ. Phiabi 15-16, ’Ele‘azar "ἢ. Anan 16-17, Simon b. Kamith 17-18, and 
Caiaphas 18-19. 

* It had been planned by Lysias at the time of Antiochus v., Eupator (2 Macc., 
Xl. I-3, “‘mpariv . . . τὴν ἀρχιεροσύνην κατ᾽ eros ποιεῖν ᾽)). 


NON-CHRISTIAN SOURCES OF CHRISTIAN ORIGINS τὸ 


on the basis of a personal understanding he had with the latter, 
which means, that he paid him annually a bribe as high as or higher © 
than that which any of his rival candidates could afford. Since © 
Josephus reports the removal of Caiaphas through Vitellius as late — 

as Ant. xvill. § 95, it follows that this high priest did indeed, as 
Jerome states after Josephus, buy his office from year to year by 
paying Herod (above, p. 18 n. 1) and, obviously, also the Roman 
governor, who had the right of veto. He was finally drawn into 
the ruin of his_protector Pilate and removed at the same time as 
the latter. But since the whole passage about Caiaphas’ tenure of 
office in Ant, xviii. § 35 left no doubt as to the sixteen-year term 
of Pilate’s administration, it had to disappear entirely or in part } 
before the Christian censor. 

This censor, fortunately, did not know the date of still another 
episode which, inserted as it is in the economy of Josephus’ narra- 
tive, fully corroborates the above conclusion. Our writer puts the 
story of Mundus and Paulina (Am. xvii. 3. 4-5), which we know 
from Tacitus ? took place in A.D. 19, in the chapter dealing with the 
administration of Pilate in Judaea, although according to the 
standard text this administration did not begin until A.D. 26—a fact 
which has led various scholars to assume that this episode too is a 
late interpolation. But the apparent contradiction at once dis- 
appears if we assume that Pilate did indeed come to Palestine in 
the fall? of A.p. 18. The year A.D. 21 as the date of the passion, 
the date given for the trial of Jesus in the Acta published by Maxi- 
minus Daia, would then fall entirely within the administration of 
Pilate. Nor is there any ground for doubting such a long term of 
office as the resulting seventeen years of Pilate. For we know from 
Josephus himself Tiberius’ pertinent quotation of the Aesopian 
fable of the blood-sucking flies and his habit of leaving his servants 
as long as possible in office. Since, on the other hand, we are able 
to determine the date of the Passover of A.D. 21 (16th of April), it 
should now at last be possible to indicate with preciseness the day 
of the passion. To this problem we shall return in the second part 
of this work. | 

For the present we are mainly concerned with the important 
result that we have finally obtained a definite ¢erminus post quem 
for tangible Christian forgeries and deletions in Josephus’ text ; 
the teryminus ante quem being the moment when the Emperor 
Constantine gave power to the Church bodily to destroy anti- 


1 As in other cases (below, p. 54 1. 26 f.), St. Jerome’s copy was less extensively 
expurgated than the standard text. 

2 Ann., li. 85: ‘ actum de sacris Aegyptiis et Judaicis pellendis.’ 

3’ The season is indicated by the words μεθιδρύσας στρατιὰν χειμαδιοῦσαν in 
Ant., xviii. ὃ 55. Immediately upon his arrival Pilate led the troops into their 
winter quarters in Jerusalem. He was quite inexperienced when he made the 
mistake about the medallions on the legionary standards (below, pp. 314 ff.). 


20 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


Christian writings, and when it was therefore no more necessary 
to counter the publication of Caesar Maximinus by elaborate 
forgeries, since it could now be confiscated and burned by the 
public executioner. 


CONCLUSIONS 


The historicity of Jesus as a heretic teacher of Jewish law is 
established beyond doubt by the testimony of his disciple Jacob 
of Kephar Sekhanjah—a man unknown to Christian sources— 
transmitted through the rabbis ‘Eli‘ezer Ὁ. Hyrkanos and ‘Agiba 
(A.D. 110), both of the latter witnesses being decidedly hostile to 
Christianity. The execution of one ‘Christus’ by the Roman 
governor Pilate under Tiberius, as a criminal and founder of a band 
of conspirators hostile to the whole human race, is established 
thanks to the testimony of Tacitus. 

The nature of the Roman charges against Jesus is clear, first 
from Pilate’s inscription on the cross, second from the attacks of 
Celsus and Sossianus Hierocles. Jesus was considered a rebel king 
proclaimed by the Jews—that is, legally, a robber chief, a leader 
of bandits armed against the safety of the Roman empire. His 
ascendency over his following was attributed to the performing of 
sham miracles by magical arts, as well as to a sophistic, 1.6. dema- 
gogical, power of oratory. The remains of anti-Christian literature 
prove that the opponents of Christianity described him as a 
fomenter of rebellion (στάσεως ἀρχηγέτης), a sorcerer (γόης), a 
demagogue (σοφιστής), a rebel and a robber chief (ἀρχιλῃστής). 

The scarcity of anti-Christian sources about Jesus is accounted 
for by the fact that Christian copyists would be reluctant to 
reproduce what they considered blasphemous charges, and that 
Christian censors had power, ever since the fourth century, 
to destroy and consequently also to expurgate books of anti- 
Christian tendencies. 

The same considerations account for the total loss of the genuine 
official documents regarding the trial of Jesus, about the former 
existence of which, however, there can be no reasonable doubt. 
From a passage in the text of Eusebius it may be inferred that they 
were still accessible in A.D. 311, when they were published by the 
Emperor Maximinus Daia. The controversy about the chronology 
as given by them according to Eusebius, in contradiction to the 
Greek standard text of Josephus, yields an altogether unexpected 
result, to wit, the true date of the passion at Easter of A.D. 21, and 
the true date of Pilate’s arrival in Palestine in the late fall of A.D. 18 
(above, p. 19 ἢ. 3). It also follows that the text of Josephus was 
tampered with by Christian forgers in the matter of the chronology 
of the governors Gratus and Pilate. The sole reason for this 


NON-CHRISTIAN SOURCES OF CHRISTIAN ORIGINS 21 


forgery was to obtain a valid argument against the genuineness of 
the Acta published by Maximinus? in Α.Ὁ. 311. A further conse- 
quence, of course, is a general presumption that the text of the 
Jewish historian Flavius Josephus has certainly not been handed 
down to us in its original integrity, but has suffered from the inter- 
ference of Christian scribes and revisers. 


1 Cf, Eusebius, Hist. eccl., i. 11.9 (Dr. Kirsopp Lake’s trans. in the Loeb Library, 
vol. cliii., 1926, p. 83): ‘When a writer sprung from the Hebrews themselves 
handed on in his own writing these details concerning John the Baptist and our 
Saviour, what alternative is there but to convict of shamelessness those who have 
concocted the Reports (iourijuara= Acta) about them ?’, 


II 
FLAVIUS JOSEPHUS 


T would be difficult to exaggerate the depth of our ignorance 
“in matters of Christian origins and contemporary Jewish 
history had we nothing to go by but the Roman and Jewish 
sources analysed in the preceding chapter, If it is at all possible 
to write a coherent account of the period and the political struggle 
going on between Jews and Romans, we have to thank the peculiar 
circumstances which induced a certain Joseph bar Mattathia 
Kahana of Jerusalem to relate, in a number of consecutive books, 
the history of the origins and antecedents of that conflict, events 
in which he had himself played a rather inglorious réle. To under- 
stand fully the problems discussed in the present work, a summary 
of the life and work of this writer will prove, if not necessary, at 
least rather desirable. Nor have I seen any objection to antici- 
pating some of the results of the following inquiry, the less so 
because the currently known facts about Josephus may be found 
in a number of well-known handbooks and reference works.! 

This Joseph, later on called Flavius Josephus, claimed to 
belong to an old priestly family and to be descended, through his 
mother, from the royal stock of the Hasmonaeans. If this were 
true, the blood of the Maccabees would have flowed in the veins of 
this unworthy scion of a heroic race. He himself refers to genea- 
logical documents in the archives of Jerusalem which, at the time 
of his writing, had already been committed to the flames, At all 
events, his opponents had a less exalted opinion of his ancestors. 
Born in Jerusalem in A.D, 37-38, in the reign of Caligula—that is, 
just one year after Pontius Pilate had been recalled from Judaea— 
he boasts of his precocious talents. He had received, of course, 
the religious and secular education of the Jews of that period, and 
it is quite possible that the boy showed unmistakable signs of in- 
telligence at an early age—as did many others of his nation in 
ancient and recent times. We may well believe that he was, as he 
says, occasionally given tests in the form of subtle questions on 

+ The English reader will find them most conveniently in the articles on 


* Josephus’ by Benedictus Niese in the Encyel. of Religion and Ethics, by Prof. v. 
—Pobschiitz in Hastings’ Dictionary of the Apostolic Church, and by Dr. H. St. John 
Thackeray in the extra volume of Hastings’ Dictionary of the Bible. ~The excellent 
i ποίου to Dr. Thackeray’s edition of Josephus in the Loeb Classical 
Library, and his recent,flilda Stich Strook Lectures on Josephus, published by 
the Jewish Institute of Religion, New York, 1929, on ‘ Josephus the Man and the 
Historian,’ may also be consulted. 


=< fr 


FLAVIUS JOSEPHUS 23 


points of the Law by high priests and learned scribes who came as 
guests to his father’s house. 

Another piece of boasting is his statement that some time in 
his youth (during what would now be one’s university years) he 
studied the peculiar tenets of what he styles the three Jewish 
philosophical schools, the Pharisees, the Sadducees, and the Essenes. 
Since the first two were certainly not philosophical schools compar- 
able to the Stoics and Epicureans of the Roman and Greek world, 
as he would have us believe, but rival parties of the priests and 
scribes, each with its own politico-religious programme, it looks as 
though in his early career he had wavered between the two opposite 
factions or forsaken the one to join the other. As for the third 
‘ school,’ the famous Essenes, it was in reality an ascetic brother- 
hood living under a system of communism, silent obedience and 
absolute submission to its superior, not unlike certain mediaeval 
orders of chivalry, and perhaps resembling somewhat the modern 
Mahomedan order of the Sanusi in North Africa; at all events, 
probably a much less pacifist and mystical organization than Philo 
of Alexandria and Josephus himself would have their readers 
believe. It is not at all improbable that Justus of Tiberias, 
against whose attacks Josephus defended himself when he wrote 
his Life, had dropped a few rather disparaging remarks on the 
latter’s short-lived affiliation with this brotherhood, the oath of 
initiation of which may have been designed to guard more danger- 
ous secrets than the powerful names of certain angels. 

Having thus gained a first-hand knowledge of Sadducees, Phari- 
sees, and Essenes, Josephus admits that he went out into the desert, 
the gathering-place of all the unruly spirits and outlaws in arms 
against the Romans and the Herodian dynasty. There he lived 
with a certain ‘ Banous ’—not a proper name but a word meaning 
‘baptizer,’ ‘ bather,’ or ‘ baptist ’ *_another mysterious personage 


1 He has to admit that they carried arms when travelling * because of the 
highwaymen’! (B.J., li. § 125), and that one of them headed the revolution 
against the Romans in the district of Thamna (loc. cit., i. ὃ 567, below, p. 257 0. 4). 
On the Saniisi cp. Ὁ. 8. Margoliouth, Encycl. of Relig. and Eth., vol. xi. p. 194 ff. 

2 Cp. Jastrow’s Dictionary of the Targumin, where banna’ah will be found as 
the equivalent for Greek βαλανεύς, ᾿ bather,’ ‘frequenter of baths’ (Targum 
Esther, ii. 6, 12), and bannej, bannaj as equivalent of balneum, βαλανεῖον (Shabb. 330, 
41a, Meg. 16a). The banna'im of the much-discussed passage Mikw. ix. 6 (clothes 
of the banna’im considered as particularly clean) have been ingeniously and 
convincingly explained by Sachs (Beitr., ii. 199) as the clothes of the hemerobaptistae 
(tobaléj shahrith). Bannai(a) does indeed occur as a proper name of various rabbis, 
but that is simply a parallel to the frequency of ‘ Baader’ as a proper name in 
German, such names being merely derived from a man’s profession or peculiar 
habits. Names like Bun or Buna, probably abbreviated from Abun and Abuna, 
and Buni or Bunai (S. A. Cook’s Glossary and Jacob Levy’s Nhb. Wb. 8. vv.), 
cannot be identified with Banous. The Greek secretary who translated Josepbus’ 
Hebrew or Aramean draft into Greek (see below, pp. 130 ff.) mistook the word— 
which the author may have used intentionally instead of ‘tobel, ‘baptist ’—the 
word used in the lines quoted below, p, 99 nn. 1 and 2—for a proper name. 


24 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


whom he endeavours to deck with the innocent colours of a harm- 
less leaf-wearing and fruit-eating hermit, but who may have shown 
a far less pacific aspect in the lost pamphlet of Justus of Tiberias 
designed to expose his former comrade-in-arms. At all events, his 
Maccabee ancestors, when they were on the war-path against the 
Seleucids, seem to have lived this same ascetic vegetarian life 
‘among the beasts ’ in the hills and in the desert,! the life, that is, 
of the hemerobaptist zealots. 

Josephus next affiliated himself with the Pharisees. At the age 
of twenty-six he journeyed to Rome to obtain by straight or 
devious means the release of some priests who had been arrested by 
the governor Felix and sent to Rome for trial before the Emperor, 
very distinguished (καλοκαγαθοί) and pious men ‘ living on figs and 
nuts’ on their sea voyage and throughout the time of their cap- 
tivity, hardly in order to avoid eating the unclean meat of the 
heathen—bread, fish, and eggs would have been permissible in this 
case—but because they followed the vegetarian diet of Josephus’ 
baptist teacher in the wilderness. Yet, in spite of, or perhaps be- 
cause of, this exemplary piety,” they were obviously under some 
suspicion of political disaffection in the eyes of Felix, who did not 
of course care a straw for their religious beliefs or disbeliefs. 

Having suffered shipwreck, Josephus ‘ outstripped, through 
God’s providence ’ and his own recklessness, all the other victims 
in a swimming race towards a rescuing Cyrenaean ship, and was 
landed in Puteoli. With the help of Haliturus, a famous actor of 
Jewish descent, he wormed himself into the presence of Poppaea, 
the wife of Nero, a Jewish or at least Judaizing lady of great in- 
fluence with her imperialhusband. From her he obtained not only 
the release of his imprisoned vegetarian friends, but in addition 
‘ great gifts,’ a fact which goes far to suggest that the young Jew 
was not deficient in good looks and courtly manners and well ac- 
quainted with the great art of flattering those who might be useful 
tohim. On his return to Palestine, in A.D. 66, he found the revolu- 
tion against Rome fully on its way and his compatriots quite un- 
willing to be held back by his impressive traveller’s yarns about 
the power and wealth of the Romans. Yet his pessimistic views 
about the possible chances of the war for liberty recommended him 
to the peace-loving moderate party of the high priests, so that they 
saw fit to attach him to a diplomatic mission which they sent to 
Galilee under the direction of two distinguished priests, to keep 
that unruly province quiet. 


* 2 Macc.v.27: ‘But Judah the Maccabean, with nine other men or thereabout, 
withdrew [into the desert [ἀναχωρήσας els τὴν ἔρημον and lived in the hills after 
the manner of beasts [θηρίων τρόπον] with his company, feeding on a vegetarian diet 
[τὴν χορτώδη τροφὴν σιτούμενοι διετέλουν}, SO as not to defile himself like the other 
people.’ 

* See below, pp. 236 n. 7, 237, and 541 n. 7. 


FLAVIUS JOSEPHUS 25 


With the help of considerable sums taken from the treasury of 
the temple they were further to collect troops for the support of 
the hierarchy as against the rebels, who were well armed, thanks 
to the booty they obtained at the initial defeat of Cestius. This 
trust vested in him by the Jerusalemitan hierarchy and by the two 
ambassadors he most shamefully misused. Noticing that in Gali- 
lee public opinion was overwhelmingly hostile to the Romans and 
to the hierarchy, and that the ambassadors would never succeed in 
carrying out their orders, he promptly negotiated with the revolu- 
tionaries, took an active part in the establishment of a Galilaean 
counter-Sanhedrin, and even proceeded to the collecting of troops 
as a sort of bodyguard for himself. It is not true that, as he states, 
he himself was the commander-in-chief of the whole of the Gali- 
laean force and that he had ‘chosen’ the Sanhedrin in question. 
What is certain, however, is that the ambitious young man did his 
best to foment the rebellion, partly with the co-operation, partly 

Ne eer a ° 3 - . . . 
against the will, of numerous local rivals; that he misused his 
position to enrich himself by engaging in war-profiteering of the 
most doubtful character—e.g. scandalous speculations in Galilaean, 
ritually pure oil; and, worst of all, that to all appearances he re- 
mained in touch with the Romans. He attempted to counteract 
the just suspicions entertained against him by the authorities at 
Jerusalem by sending them a report concerning the political situa- 
tion, a report which was to form the nucleus of hislater works, At 
the first encounters of his troops with the Romans the former were 
miserably beaten, thanks largely to the military incompetency and 
cowardice of this ambitious bureaucrat. Although he consistently 
represents himself as the commander of his troops, it has now 
become clear through the comparison of the earliest draft of his 
history with the later editions that his position was somewhere 
between that of an army-chaplain and that of an army-clerk, 
resembling somewhat the role of the revolutionary commissaries 
of the French armies during the Great Revolution. 

On the arrival of Vespasian and his army he withdrew with the 
Galilaean main force into Tiberias, then to Jotapata, a mountain 
stronghold which defended itself, or—according to our ‘ hero ’"—was 
defended by him, for six weeks against the besieging Romans. 
On the taking of the town, through a breach in the wall, Josephus 
and some other leaders hid ina cistern. His brave comrades, who 
had made up their minds to kill one another rather than to survive 
the downfall of their nation, he cheated in the casting of the lots, 
and then surrendered to a Roman officer, an old acquaintance of 
his, ashe putsit. How he had come to make such useful acquaint- 
ances in the enemy’s camp he is careful not to tell, but he 


1 See App., p. 654 of vol. iii. of Dr. Thackeray’s Josephus. Below, p. 199. 


26 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


obviously wants his readers to infer that he had made them 
during his stay in Rome. 

From now on his progress was rapid. He won the favour of 
the Roman commander-in-chief, Flavius Vespasianus, by pre- 
tending to have had an inspired prophetic dream foretelling the 
impending rise of the general to the imperial throne and proclaim- 
ing Vespasian the divinely chosen world-ruler mentioned by the 
Jewish prophets. In reality, the “ god-sent inspiration’ of this 
‘dream’ was most probably derived from more earthly sources. 
For a number of men in the general headquarters, among them a 
wealthy and ambitious Alexandrian Jew, Tiberius Alexander, a 
nephew of the philosopher Philo and himself completely Roman-- 
ized, were anxious to push the undecided and cautious Vespasian 
on to the road of political adventure and to engineer his future 
glory. However that may be, Vespasian accepted the prophecy as 
one of the ‘ omina imperit’ of his house, and for ever after kept the 
man whom he affected to regard as the divine instrument near 
himself and his son Titus throughout the Jewish campaign, and 
later on at his private house in Rome, as one of his clients and paid 
propagandists. During the war Josephus was not ashamed of 
serving as an interpreter and of taking upon himself the odious 
task of questioning Jewish prisoners for the Roman intelligence 
department. Nor did he refuse to translate into his native tongue 
and to read to the defenders of the besieged city the proclamations 
of general headquarters. In the discharge of this noble office the 
traitor was nearly killed by a well-aimed stone flung at his head. 
Our sincere thanks are due to a kind fate which spared him for a 
greater purpose. 

Either on his own initiative or at the suggestion of the Roman 
ally of the Jewish king Agrippa 11., or that of Tiberius Alexander, 
the Jewish chief of Titus’ general staff, Josephus conceived the plan 
of writing a history of the Jewish rebellion on the basis of his own 
notes and the Acta of general headquarters. He succeeded in per- 
suading Vespasian and Titus of the usefulness of such a work, if it 
attempted to describe the rebellion not as an affair of the whole 
Jewish people but as an uprising of the extremists, the zealots, or 
as we should say nowadays the have-nots, against the Romano- 
phile édzte, the noble and the wealthy of their own people. Sucha 
presentation of events could not but have calming effects upon the 
prominent Jews of the Diaspora and in Mesopotamia. 

To reach these populations, he was to write his work first in 
Aramaic and then have it translated into Greek by the proper men, 
to be found either among the serv? literati of the imperial staff or 
among the Graeculi esurientes always on the look-out for work of 
that kind. To facilitate this, the Emperor placed at his disposal 
whatever official material there existed on the subject. Tor the 


FLAVIUS JOSEPHUS 27 


treatment of the events leading up to the rebellion he utilized the 
history of Nicolaus of Damascus, which carried him down to the 
death of Herod the Great. He does not seem, however, to have 
drawn on the Greek original of the work, but—according to certain 
indications—on a Semitic translation, or rather a Pharisaean re- 
working from a point of view hostile to the Romans and the 
Herodian dynasty, altogether easier to read for his poor Greek 
scholarship than the original text. For the period following he 
utilized the reports of the governors, which he probably found in the 
commentarit of the Julian and Claudian emperors in the fabularium 
principis in the imperial palace. It is equally possible, however, 
that even before his second voyage to Rome he was given access to 
the archives of the governors of Judaea, at Caesarea. For the 
history of John the Baptist he drew on indigenous Nasdraean 
material,! dating back, no doubt, to the period of his youth when 
he had himself lived in the desert as the follower of a ᾿ Baptist.’ 
Of much the same provenance is still another source of his, a com- 
pilation on the interpretation of dreams by the various prophets 
and seers of his nation.’ 

From the preface of Josephus’ work it may be inferred that it 
was originally meant for the triumph of Titus, with which event 
the table of contents in the procemium comes toaclose. The copies 
destined for a Roman public and presented to Vespasian, Titus, and 
their generals bore a title betraying completely the Roman view- 
point of the author and his work—to wit, The Jewish War. On 
the other hand, the copies meant for sale among his co-religionists 
bore the title On the Capture of Jerusalem, less apt to offend Jewish 
national susceptibilities. His first draft, completed in A.D. 72, of 
the weaknesses of which he must have been aware, he constantly im- 
proved by correcting mistakes, deleting passages which had proved 
distasteful to influential readers, and by adding new material. 
Finally, at a certain period during the reign of Domitian, he had 
the whole matter rewritten in better Greek by a more competent 
collaborator. Throughout his literary activity he was most 
anxious to whitewash himself and to attribute the blame for every- 
thing to the insurgents, whom after Roman official custom he 
styles ‘ bandits’ or ‘robbers,’ and whose leaders he designates as 
‘mountebanks ’ (γόητες) and ‘demagogues’ (πλάνοι or σοφισταῖ). 
Such measures on his part were all the more necessary because he 
appears to have been accused repeatedly on the score of his former 
activity among the rebels. The weaver Jonathan, one of the 
leaders of the uprising of the Jews of Cyrene, and later on the peda- 
gogue of his own son—who may have been one of his literary col- 
laborators—are two of his accusers of whom we have a certain 
amount of knowledge, thanks to his own reference to them. Yet 

1 Below, p. 226 l. 36. ® Below, p. 226 ll. 37 ff. 


28 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


most damaging must have appeared to him the work of his old 
opponent and rival, Justus of Tiberias. To refute the accusations 
there brought forward against him, he compiled a most insincere 
and unreliable autobiography. His last literary effort—6o0,o000 
στίχοι of penny-a-lining, as he is careful to point out in the dedica- 
tion to his publisher—was the Jewish Antiquities, a vast compila- 
tion about the history of the Jews from Adam until the outbreak 
of the war against the Roman empire, completed in the thirteenth 
year of Domitian (A.D. 93-94). Incidentally, the work contains 
much material by way of additions and corrections to the Jewish 
War, i.e. data which had been placed at his disposal by the 
readers of his first work. Among the most generous of these con- 
tributors must be reckoned King Agrippa I1., who got into the habit 
of sending him letters with additions to and corrections on each 
of the subsequent instalments, more than five dozen of them alto- 
gether. Further, whilst in the War there is no trace of his know- 
ledge of Christian sources, in the Antiquities we seem to observe a 
polemical allusion’ to a work known already to the Samaritan 
Thallus,? which was a compilation of passages from the Prophets 
supposed to have found their fulfilment in the life of Jesus, These 
testimonia—which have been fully discussed by Dr. Rendel Harris 3 
—are ascribed by Papias, probably correctly, to the tax-gatherer 
Matthew, the follower of the Nasdraean Messiah. No doubt Jose- 
phus’ literary activity, in which his servi litterati did most of the 
real work, must have paid him reasonably well, for in the year 14 
of Domitian’s reign he published a new edition of the War, pre- 
ceded by the Amtzquitves and provided with a continuation bringing 
events up to the time of his writing, altogether in twenty-four 
books.* He even had shorter editions published in very elegant 
Atticizing Greek by a specially good συνεργός, of which there 
remain to us only the so-called epitomé of the Antiquities. An 
epitomé of the Polemos which Ludovicus Capellus (died 1722) gave 
to Jacob Usher has not yet turned up, although it probably survives 
in some English private library. Jerome ὃ mentions an edition of 
the Antiquities dating from the fourteenth year of Domitian, i.e. 
A.D. 94-95. The extant text of the book is a reworking made after 
the death of Agrippa 11. Posterior to the first edition of the 
Antiquities is a little treatise called Contra A pionem ever since the 
time of St. Jerome. Whether he ever carried out his project of 


* See below, p. 55, on the phrase about the myriad of miracles of Jesus foretold 
by the divine prophets. 
ae . 298 n. 5. 
. * Testimonies. and ii., Cambridge, 1916, 1920. 

-his_is..known through a statement of the mediaeval chronicler Jerahm’el 
ben Shelomo, who seems to have drawn on a lost preface of the Hebrew version 
of Josephus. See below, pp. 83 ff., on the quotations from this lost work, found in 
the Byzantine chronographers. ® De vir, ἘΠ, xiii. 


PLATE Il 


FRONT VIEW OF PRESUMED JOSEPHUS HEAD 


NOTE THE INTENTIONAL ASSIMILATION OF THE FACE OF THE FLAVIAN COURTIER TO THE TYPE OF 
EMPEROR TITUS’ WELL-KNOWN COLOSSAL BUST IN THE NAPLES MUSEUM 


FLAVIUS JOSEPHUS 20 


elucidating the philosophic reasons underlying the Mosaic Law to 
the sceptic Gentiles, we do not know. Such a work may well have 
served as groundwork to the Mosaicarum et Romanorum legum 
collatio of Isaac Hilarius-Gaudentius, the Latin translator of Jose- 
phus’ book on the Jewish War. 

He was married at least three times, divorced his first wife, 
the mother of three sons, who had followed him into exile, and 
espoused a Jewish girl belonging to one of the wealthiest families 
of the Cretan Diaspora. 

As a client and a parasite of the Emperor, Josephus enjoyed the 
revenues ΟἹ landed estates in Palestine ruthlessly taken away from 
the rightful owners by virtue of Roman martial law and custom. 
His name was put on the pension list of the slush fund, endowed 
by the Flavian emperors for venal writers and orators. Following 
the well-known custom, he adopted the family name of his pro- 
tector. His writings were officially approved by the imperial 
signature of Titus and put in the public libraries. According to 
Eusebius ! and St. Jerome,” he was honoured with a statue erected 
somewhere in Rome. If this statement were exact, Josephus 
would not have failed to mention the fact in his autobiography. 
The statue might have been dedicated to his memory after his 
death. Since by that time the last of his imperial patrons had 
preceded him to Elysium, we might presume that his publisher 
Epaphroditus, in the interest of the sale of Josephus’ collected 
works, headed a subscription of his grateful readers for the erection 
of this well-deserved monument. More likely, however, the por- 
trait-statue mentioned by Eusebius and St. Jerome was ordered 
by the conceited historian himself during his lifetime, in defiance 
of the laws of his pious ancestors forbidding those ‘ graven images’ 
which enabled the heathen to immortalize the transient shape of 
their perishable bodies. This must have been the case if—as I feel 
convinced—the inedited first-century Roman marble bust 3. of 


1 Hist. eccl., ili. 9. 2, p. 226 of Dr. Kirsopp Lake’s translation. 

2 De vir. 111., xiii. 

3 Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek in Copenhagen, Cat. No. 646, bought by Helbig in 
Rome from Princess Piombino, μές Borghese. It had stood for a long time in 
Prince Borghese’s study. I owe the photographs to the courtesy of Prof. I’rederik 
Poulsen. The only other Roman statue with a Jewish-looking face among the 
seven or eight hundred extant Greek and Roman portraits is that of the so-called 
‘Drusus’ of the Naples Museum, which was discovered in the meat-market hall 
(macellum) of Pompeii, together with a statue thought to be Livia, on the strength 
of an inscription found near it. Since young Herod Agrippa (111.) was killed in 
79 A.D. through the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius (Josephus, Ant., xx. 144), this might 
very well be a votive statue of the son of Felix and fair Drusilla. No other 
Jewish-looking face is found in the comprehensive collections of portraits brought 
together by Arndt-Bruckmann and Poulsen. Owing to the severe prohibition 
of portrait-sculpture by Jewish law, it must indeed be very exceptional to find 
a portrait-statue or bust of a Jew. See my paper, ‘ Deux sculptures représen- 
tant des Juifs de l’Antiquité Classique,’ in M. Jean Babelon’s Arvéthuse (January 
1930). 


30 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


a typical Jew! (see our frontispiece) is nothing but the head? 
of this otherwise lost statue. Even if we discount the natural 
tendency of an artist to flatter a vain client by making him look 
more youthful, this portrait—if it be indeed that of Josephus, 
born A.D. 36-37— cannot be attributed to a later date than 
A.D. 76-80. It would therefore be at the very time when he had 
the satisfaction of publishing the second edition of the Jewish War 
that the author, intoxicated by this success, might have yielded 
to the temptation of having his statue made by one of the skilful 
Greek artists who frequented the antechambers of the imperial 
palace in order to obtain commissions, were it only from the 
freedmen and opulent clients surrounding the imperial majesties 
—maybe by a rival of that unknown sculptor who wrought the 
portrait of the learned freedman, M. Mettius Epaphroditus of 
Chaeronea, the grammarian, book-collector, and bookseller of 
Herculean stature and strength of body,’ the κρώτιστος ἀνδρῶν, 
as Josephus jestingly calls him, who acted, according to the identi- 
fication of Prof. Laqueur of Giessen, as publisher of the Antiquities, 
the Life, the Contra Apionem, and of the last edition of Josephus’ 
complete works, collected under the title of Jewish Histortes. 

In so far as it is at all permissible to speak of the world-wide 
popularity of a work of literature, the Jewish history of this Flavius 
Josephus did have such a success. The Christians appear to have 
read him from the very beginning; witness the utilization of his 
work by the Acts of the Apostles which is now admitted by most 
specialists. Hand in hand with this utilization went a process of 
adulteration of the text, especially in regard to the passages bearing 
on the lives of John the Baptist and Jesus himself. The fact that 


1 The hooked nose is rather thick at the lower end, and therefore very different 
from the aquiline nose which is often found among Romans. The forehead 
strongly convex just above the brows, but the upper part plainly retreating and 
hidden under the curly hair; the expression of the eyes sad, restless, and 
watchful ; the rather sulky mouth; above all, the slightly protruding lower lip, 
the slight beard forming a kind of down, the untrimmed side-locks (Lev. xix. 27)— 
all these features are not those of a Roman, although the person in question plainly 
wished to look as like the Emperor Titus as possible (witness the latter’s well- 
known and often-reproduced colossal bust in the Naples Museum). As a result of 
this tendency, the front view of the head shows indeed the likeness of a ‘ Flavius,’ 
while the profiles are just as unmistakably those of Joseph bay Mattathia Kahana. 
The whole head is handsome enough to be that of the young scapegrace who knew 
how to please the Empress Poppaea and—twenty years later—the Empress 
Domitia (Life, § 429). See front view of bust (our PI. 111.). 

* The reproduction shows clearly that a part of the left shoulder has been 
restored in modern marble. It can be easily seen, by the outline of this restora- 
tion and of another piece on the right side, that the head was part of a statue 
the left shoulder of which was covered by the end of the toga, and that it had 
originally been wedged into the torso of a statue. 

3. See. Pl. Iv; 

‘ F. C. Burkitt, Gospel History and its Transmission, pp. 106 ff. Holtzmann 
(1873), Hausrath, Keim, Clemen ; cf. Krenkel, Josephus und Lukas, Leipzig, 1894, 
and Paul W. Schmiedel in Cheyne’s Encycl. Bibl., 5056, where further references 
are given. 


PLATE IV 


tei eet ἔν 


WSEAS < Ἢ 


τῶν rn 


5 
THE IDENTIFICATION 


PHUS, WORK 


* 
4 


JOSI 


" 
‘ 


PAPHRODITUS, THE PUBLISHER ΟἹ 


΄ 


ΓΙ 


INSCRIBED HALF LIFE-SIZE STATUE ON THE STAIRCASE OF VILLA ALTIERI, ROME 


5 
- 


M. MI 


UR OF GIESSEN 


TO PROFESSOR RICHARD LAQUI 


is “DUE 


FLAVIUS JOSEPHUS 31 


Origen knew a genuine text of Josephus only proves that this 
excellent philologist still had such a copy in his library ; it does 
not prove at all that the process of alteration itself began at a later 
date. A Christian interpolation, for example, influenced the 
Jewish Christian Hegesippus as early as A.D. 180 in his dating 
the death of James the Just.1. Omissions and deletions of whole 
passages were as common as the interpolations. Fortunately, the 
process did not go on uniformly in the various MSS., and there is 
still a possibility of discerning the wording of the original text 
through the variant readings and old quotations. A regular new 
edition, definitely expurgated, was produced by the Greek 
Church as late as the eleventh century, in order to counteract 
the ever-growing power of various Judaizing heretic sects,” 
whose Unitarianism drew its main strength from the writings of 
Josephus. 

In antiquity Josephus was translated twice into Latin, first by 
a converted Jew, whose name Isaac had been Latinized into 
Hilarius or Gaudentius,? about A.D. 370, and again on the sugges- 
tion of Cassiodorus, hence probably by some monks of Vivarium 
(Squillace). Anterior to the sixth century is a Syriac translation, 
of which the sixth book of the War was actually incorporated in 
the canons of the Syrian and Armenian Churches. 

The Mesopotamian Jews of Aramaic speech have to all appear- 
ances never read the Semitic version of the War.4 The Latin ver- 
sion of Hilarius-Gaudentius was destined for the Jews of the West, 
who had forgotten their Greek like the rest of the Occident, and 
whom he hoped to convert. With the same aim of religious propa- 
ganda in view, another converted Jew, living in one of the Jewish 
settlements on the Illyrian coast of the Adriatic a few centuries 
later, translated the Latin version into Hebrew, this Christianized 
Jostppon being erroneously ascribed to the high priest Joseph ben 
Gorion, a contemporary of our Joseph bar Mattathia. A reworking 
of this Jostppon, with the help of a Greek MS. of Josephus’ last 
edition of the Polemos—the one of A.D. 94-95, in twenty-four books 
—was undertaken by Illyrian or Italian Jews some time in the 
ninth century. Naturally enough, they omitted the Christian 
interpolations and alterations as much as was in their power, yet 
could not hope to be altogether successful in this task, the result 
being that even in this reworking numerous traces of the under- 
lying Christian version are still found. Most of the passages 
hostile to Christianity and its founder which were added from the 
Greek origina] to this reworking were discovered by the censor and 
duly suppressed in most copies. What is left of these passages— 


1 See App. vil. 2 See below, p. 169. 
3 See Joseph Wittig, Kirchengesch. Abhandl., hg. v. Max Sdralek, vol. v., 
Breslau, 1906, p. 47. 4 See below, p. 98 Il. 37 f. 


32 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


little enough, to be sure—has been utilized critically for the first 
time in the present work. 

The /ostppon was translated into Arabic by a Yemenite Jew 
residing in Sicily. It is probably this Arabic version * which was 
translated into Ethiopic,* for the use either of the Ethiopian 
Christians or of the Jewish Falashas. 

The Hebrew /Jostppon was known to the Jews in Angevine 
England, and attracted there the attention even of a learned abbot 
of St. Frideswide’s near Oxford.* The sixteenth century saw the 
production of a Yiddish® and of a Judeo-Spanish translation, the 
latter destined for the women of the Jewish faith driven out of 
Spain. or the men, who read Hebrew, of course, Hebrew-printed 
editions followed upon the Mantua editio princeps of the Jostppon. 
I note the following editions: one from Constantinople (1510), one 
from Venice (1544), Cracow (1589), Frankfurt-a.-M.(1689), Amster- 
dam (1723, 1739), Leghorn (1794), Zolkiew (1808), Vilna (1812), 
Szitomir (1851), Lemberg (1855), Warsaw (1871), Berditschev 
(1896-1913). Even in Calcutta this work was printed in 1841, for 
the benefit of the Indian Jews. Primarily destined for Christian 
scholarship were the editions of Worms (1529), Basle (1541, 1559), 
Paris (1575), Gotha (1707, 1710), and Oxford (1706). 

An English translation by P. Morvyng of a mediaeval extract 
from the Jos¢ppon dates from 1561,° a French translation (by a 
Christian named Belleforest) from 1560. 

An Armenian translation made from the Greek text is sup- 
posed to have perished during the Tatar invasions. A new one, 
with the help of the Latin translation of Rufinus, was made in the 
seventeenth century. 

Josephus’ first draft, dating from A.D. 72, was read in Bulgaria 
as late as the twelfth century. Between 1250 and 1260 it was 
translated, somewhere in Lithuania, from the Greek into the Old 
Russian, from a MS. annotated in the Byzantine empire during the 
_ perio’ of the Latin empire. The translation was the work of a 
_ Judaizing sect of heretics who hoped thereby to win over King 
Mindauvas of Lithuania.’ The MSS. utilized came from the circle 
of the sect of the so-called Josephinists, scattered over Asia Minor, 


1 See below, pp. 96 ff. 

* It was printed repeatedly as late as the nineteenth century in the Orient 
(Algiers and Beyruth). Two MSS,, Arab, No, 1906 and de Slane No, 287, are in 
the Paris National Library. 

5. Unedited MSS. in London, Berlin, and Frankfurt-a.-M. Cf. Goldschmidt, 
Die abessinischen Handschriften dey Staatsbibliothek zu Frankfurt a. M., 1897, 
pp. 5-9. Wright, Catal. of Ethiop. MSS. in the Brit. Mus., No, ccclxxviii. The 
Ethiopic title is Zena Athud. 

4 See below, p. 93. 

° The oldest Yiddish translation (by the converted Jew Michael Adam), 
printed at Ziirich in 1548. Later editions: Prague, 1607; Firth, 1767, 1771 ; 
Warsaw, 1875. 

6 See below, p. 604, App. XI. 7 See below, p. 148, last lines. 


FLAVIUS JOSEPHUS 33 


Thrace, and Macedonia. This explains the curious fact that they 
somehow escaped the orthodox censor and contain most invalu- 
able passages concerning John the Baptist and Jesus. Though 
not entirely free from Christian additions,! they yet represent most. 
faithfully the original text of Josephus’ first draft. 

Through this translation the old Ebionite Jewish Christianity, 
regarding Jesus not as a god but merely as a prophet, was trans- 
planted to Slavonic soil. There it spread rapidly, thanks largely 
to the general approval it was bound to meet with in the circles 
of pseudo-converts to Christianity descended from the numerous 
Russian proselytes to Judaism made under the old Jewish empire 
of the Khazars. After dominating all Russia, the movement was 
finally broken by the ruthless despotism of Ivan 11. Vasiljevitch, 
who had at first favoured it. Fugitives took some of the precious 
MSS. with them to Lithuania and Poland, where they laid the 
foundations of that Unitarianism which was later to invade 
Western Europe.” There the Old Russian Josephus was trans- 
lated into Polish.* 

In the sixteenth century the movement was transplanted to 
Transylvania, where the sect continued to live an independent life 
as late as 1793. This fact explains the translation from Polish 
into Rumanian of the text under discussion. Of this translation 
only the fragments about John the Baptist and Jesus have been 
preserved.* The invasion of South Slavonic territory by the 
Unitarian movement was no doubt responsible for the Servian 
translation made in 1585, of which a MS. is preserved in the 
Chilandari Lavra of Mt. Athos, another in one of the FruSka 
Gora monasteries of Syrmia.® : 

In Russia the Judaizing sect never died out. Even the Hebrew 
Jostppon was accordingly translated into Russian, no doubt for the 
benefit of Russian ‘Sabbathizers’ (subbotniki), a work of which a 
MS. is in the Royal Library of Copenhagen, another in Moscow, ® 
another in Leningrad.* The Orthodox Church did not persecute 
further the Judaizing Josephus MSS., but was satisfied with 
certain Christian additions and interpolations. The learned 


' See below, pp. 224 ff. and pp. 385 ff. 

* The movement is closely connected with the names of the Piedmontese 
physician Giorgio Blandrata, who went to Poland in 1558, and of the humanist 
lausto Socino of Siena, who went there in 1579. It proudly records a number of 
martyrs, first among them Katharina Vogel, who was burned to death in Cracov, 

% No trace of a MS. of this version has been found so far. 

ὁ See App. vit. 

° This MS, has been pointed out tome by my Bulgarian colleague, Professor 
N, Ivanov, 

" Musée Historique, Synod. No. 745. Specimen pages of it are reproduced by 
Sol. Zeitlin, Jew. Qu. Rev., 1929, vol. xx,, between pp. 10-11 and 26-27, without 
the library signature and under the misleading title ‘ Slavonic Josephus.’ 

* Public Library, No. 262. Specimen pages reproduced by Zeitlin, Joc. cit., 
before p. 1 and after p. 6. 


Cc 


34 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


Archbishop Makarios himself (1542-1563) saw no objection to 
adding it to his Cetjt Minet, a collection of edifying works suit- 
able for public readings. Thus it was that the Russian Orthodox 
Church possessed only this Old Russian Josephus translation of 
the Judaists, until as late as 1804 Michaelov Samuelovic made a 
Modern Russian translation after a Latin version of the Greek 
standard text which was printed by the Imperial Academy of 
Sciences. This Modern Russian translation was the basis of the 
Georgian translation made by the priest David Inanashwili. 

There is no need to emphasize the great popularity of both 
Latin translations throughout the Middle Ages. There are, as 
Prof. Ussani kindly tells me, literally hundreds of MSS. of the 
Latin Josephus to be found in all European libraries. Magni- 
ficently illuminated copies—the finest of them in the Paris National 
Library —prove that the wily courtier of the Flavian emperors 
remained in favour with the princes and rulers of this world 
throughout the Middle Ages. Almost contemporaneously with 
the first printed edition of the /Jos¢ppon, at Mantua, there ap- 
peared the editio princeps of the Latin Josephus, at the shop of 
Johann Schiissler at Augsburg. But even after this the work 
was printed many a time, until the appearance of the editio 
princeps of the Greek standard text.” By far the most interesting 
of these reprints is the Basle edition of 1524, published by Fro- 
benius. In 1551 the Swiss theologian and philologist Sebastian 
Chateillon, a follower of Calvin, added the Latin Josephus to his 
Latin edition of the Bible. 

The first printed Greek edition dates from 1544. It was the 
work of the humanist Arnold Peraxylos Arlen,? and appeared at 
Basle, in the print-shop of Frobenius and Episcopius. The edition 
was pirated in Geneva in 1611, and again in 1634. But there is 
also quite a number of later learned editions.* 

The first English translations were made from the Greek, and 
are the work of Thomas Lodge (London, 1640) and Roger Le 
Strange (London, 1716). Both were excelled by that of the Uni- 
tarian William Whiston (Dublin, 1738-41), who in 1710 had lost 


1 See 6.5. Cod. Lat. 8959, saec. x11., of the Paris National Library. ‘The best 
illustrated MSS. of Josephus’ works are those of the fifteenth-century French 
translation (by Guillaume Coquillard, 1463); the one with Jean Fouquet’s cele- 
brated miniatures (published by Comte Durieu, Paris, 1908), cod. fr. 247, Bibl. 
Nat.; another one (Arsenal, 5082-3) once owned by the great book-lover, the 
Bastard Antoine de Bourgogne. See also Bibl. Nat., codd. fr. 248-9, 405-6, 
11-16, and 404. 

2 See App. Ix. 

$ Christian Gottlieb Jécher, dligemeitnes Gelehvien-Lexikon, iii. (Leipzig 1751), 
coll. 1375: ‘ Peraxylus ist der Nahme, welchen sich Arnoldus Arlenius, ein 
gelehrter Mann aus Brabant, gegeben. Derselbe lebte im 16. Saeculo, war in 
der griechischen Sprache wohl erfahren, gab den Josephus nach einem vortrefflichen 
MS. griechisch heraus,’ etc., “und starb um 1561 zu Basel.’ [Translator’s note.] 

$ See App. xX. 


FLAVIUS JOSEPHUS 35 


his chair in Cambridge in consequence of his religious convictions. 
This edition, reprinted time and again, proved to be a most popular 
one; witness the numerous reprints in the course of the eighteenth 
and nineteenth centuries, notwithstanding the fact that it was by 
no means the last attempt to translate our author into English.! 
Even eighteenth-century America published a Josephus transla- 
tion, pirated from the English version of George Henry Maynard, 
illustrated by Edward Kingston (London, C. Cooke, 1780). The 
excellent translation into French, begun by the late Th. Reinach, 
has now been completed by Mr. Salomon Reinach. 


It may well be said that few works outside the Bible itself have / 


exercised such a powerful and far-reaching influence as the writings 
of this wretched renegade. Certainly, no ancient writer can even 
be said to approach him in this peculiar popularity. To say noth- 
ing of the vast number of translations into languages utterly un- 
known to the orbis Romanus, it has been the subject of innumer- 
able commentaries and discussions ; nor is it to be supposed that 
this tremendous interest will wane in the near future. Neither can 
he be said to have missed popularity among his own people, the 
people whose cause he so ingloriously betrayed, and who, after more 
than two thousand years of disappointment and exile, still dream 
of the Land of Promise, the land they are not likely to find any- 
Where until the fulfilment of the world-old dream and hope of a 
true Crvitas Dei—the whole earth, that is, united in one great 
spiritual union, with all national and religious hatreds vanished 
never to return. : 

Habent sua fata libelli. Yet in spite of the many vicissitudes of 
Josephus’ work, vicissitudes which we have followed in all their 
bewildering intricacy, the ‘mirror dark’ and scratched though it 
is, still shows events long past but whose reflexions cast their 
strange glamour even on our own age. Above all, though not 
making him appear to us ‘ face to face,’ yet it allows us to see the 
contours, dimly perhaps yet distinctly, of the great ‘king who 
never reigned,’ the Servant of the Lord who has yet left on mankind 
an imprint compared with which those of all the great world- 
conquerors and world-destroyers both before and after him must 
be regarded as trivial and insignificant. 


1 See App. x. * The work appeared in New York in 1792. 


ee 


ΠῚ 


THE CONTROVERSY OVER THE SO-CALLED ‘ TESTI- 
MONY TO JESUS CHRIST’ IN THE ‘JEWISH 
ANTIQUITIES’ OF JOSEPHUS 


‘The false pen of the scribes hath made of it falsehood.’ 
JER. viil. 8. 


JOSEPHUS ACCEPTED AS AN ‘INSPIRED’ WITNESS 


™ OR fully 1200 years the Church could boast of the sure and 
undisputed possession of an extremely remarkable testi- 
mony, pretiosissima et vix aestimabilis gemma, as the old 
Viennese court librarian Petrus Lambeccius called it, a testimony 
rendered by an outsider to the truth of the historical foundations, 
not only of its faith, but even of its dogma, its creed. The Jewish 
historian Flavius Josephus, a man born just a few years after the 
traditional date of the death of Christ, seemed to affirm in the 
eighteenth book of his Jewish Antiquities that ‘Jesus called the 
Christ’ did so many and such great miracles that one might 
hesitate to regard him as a man at all; that he taught the truth ; 
that this true teaching of his was received with joy by multitudes 
both of Jews and Gentiles ; that this Jesus was really the Christ, 
that is, the Messiah, expected by the Jews, for the thousands of 
wonderful things which he did and suffered exactly corresponded 
with what the inspired prophets had foretold of the expected 
redeemer of their people ; that he was crucified by Pilate on the 
indictment of the Jewish leaders, but on the third day reappeared 
alive to his disciples, who consequently did not waver in their 
allegiance to him, the result being the survival, at the time of the 
witness Josephus, of the new race called Christians after the 
founder of their sect. : 

Throughout the eleven long centuries which separate the edict 
of toleration of Milan (312) from the disruption of the Occidental 
Church with the Protestant Reform—in other words, the time 
lying between the Historia ecclesiastica of Eusebius and that of 
Cardinal Baronius—not a doubt was cast on the authenticity of 
Josephus’ precious Testimoniuwm, which was constantly quoted 
and turned to good account by all Church historians. The ob- 
viously paradoxical fact that an unbelieving Jew should have 

36 


TESTIMONY TO JESUS CHRIST BY JOSEPHUS 37 


acknowledged Jesus to have been the true Christ foretold by the 
prophets was attributed to the peculiar and miraculous power of 
the Redeemer, which had forced as it were even arecalcitrant infidel 
to yield to its spell and extracted a blessing from this second 
Balaam who must have set out to curse. The important fact that 
he did not himself believe in Jesus as the Christ did not impair the 
value of his testimony in the eyes of the Church. On the contrary, 
it was strengthened by the fact that even an unbeliever and an 
adversary of the faith had reluctantly to confess to its truth. 
‘ And therein the eternal power of Jesus Christ was manifested, 
that the princes of the synagogue, who handed him over to death, 
acknowledged him to be God’; these are the words of Isaac, a 
converted Jew, writing about 370, known to the Christians under 
the name of Gaudentius or Hilarius, as found in the Latin para- 
phrase of the Haldsis or ‘ Capture of Jerusalem’?! of Josephus, 
commonly attributed to one ‘ Egesippus.’* Nor does the opinion 
of Cardinal Baronius® sensibly differ from this view. In 1588 
he writes: ‘ But certainly I believe that in so far as he confesses 
Christ, acknowledging him to be the son of God, he was compelled 
and constrained to do so solely by the power of God.’ 

Six years after the appearance of the first printed edition of 
Josephus’ works (Basle, 1544), Sebastian Chateillon, the Protestant 
professor of theology at Basle, incorporated the Jewish Wary in his 
Latin edition of the Bible, unconsciously following the lead of the 
Eastern churches, the Syrian and Armenian, which had included 
Josephus’ writings in the canon of the Scriptures, and of those 
Greek catenae in which the Jewish historian is quoted in the same 
breath with the Greek church fathers. Even in the seventeenth 
century there were still learned theologians who frankly pro- 
nounced Josephus to have been divinely inspired. As every 
reader of the Jewish War knows, Josephus himself was impudent 
enough to claim divine authority for his ‘revelations,’ not, ol 
course, for the testimony to ‘ Jesus who was called the Messiah,’ 
but for the shameless lie to which he owed the saving of his life and 
which was the basis of his whole ignoble existence as a client of the 
Flavian house, the brazen assertion, that is, that Vespasian was the 
world-ruler and world-redeemer foretold in Gen. xlix. 10 (below, 
Ρ. 557). Itis to the belief of the Church in the miraculous inspira- 
tion of this second Balaam that we owe the preservation not only 
of the Testimonium Flavianum but perhaps of the writings of 
Josephus as a whole. 

The miracle itself is all the more remarkable since it must have 
happened a considerable time after the death of this second Balaam. 


! See below, p. 119 n. I. 
ii. 12, ed. Ussani, p. 164, 1. 11 ss. (Corp. Script, Eccl. Lat., vol, \xvi.). 
3 Ann. eccl., i. (Rome, 1588), ad ann, Xxxiv. 


38 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


For whilst Eusebius (died ¢. 340) quotes this ‘ precious testimony ’ 
thrice,! Origen (died c. 254), ‘ the greatest and most conscientious 
scholar of the ancient Church,’ makes it quite clear, in two different 
passages,” that in his text of the Antiquities Josephus did not repre- 
sent Jesus as the Christ. From these passages Eduard Norden,® 
among others, has inferred that, in his version of Josephus, Origen 
had found nothing whatever concerning Christ. But this hypothesis 
lacks a sound basis, for it is quite impossible that so scholarly and 
conscientious a writer as Origen appears to have been should have 
based his explicit statement on Josephus’ rejection of the Christ as 
the Messiah on nothing more positive than the silence of the 
Romanized Jew concerning Jesus’ life and work, or simply on 
Josephus’ use of the somewhat ambiguous expression ‘ called 
the Christ,’ a phrase which, besides, occurs also in the Gospel of 
Matthew (i. 16), whom nobody, because of these words, has ever 
accused of disbelief in the Messianic dignity of Jesus. 

What the two passages of Origen do show is that whatever 
Origen read in his Josephus edition cannot have been the extant 
text of that famous passage with its orthodox Christian wording, 
but quite a different text, hostile to Jesus and the Christians and 
quite in keeping with the deserter’s cynical assertion that it was 
really in the Emperor Vespasian that the expectations of the Jews 
found their fulfilment. This amounts to saying that there is no 
proof of the existence of the famous testimony before the time 
when Christianity as a state religion was able to suppress all writ- 
ings hostile to its founder or its teachings, a power officially con- 
ferred upon it by an edict of Constantine and re-enacted by the 
Emperors Theodosius and Valentinian after the brief Pagan revival 
under Julian.4 

Naturally, a party possessing the power to destroy obnoxious 
books will 950 facto be in a position to enforce minor omissions and 
alterations ἢ in works in which only individual passages were felt 
to be objectionable. It is equally clear that owners of valuable 
MSS., whether private individuals, book-vendors, or officials in 
libraries and synagogues, should have preferred the excision of a 
few lines or certain alterations to the alternative of seeing their 
treasures devoured by the flames. Add to this the loss involved 
in the destruction of a whole Josephus in MS., and the laws im- 
posing capital punishment on the concealed possession of writings 
hostile to Christianity,* and the natural consequence will be obvious 
to every one. As a matter of fact, not a single Greek, Latin, 
Slavonic, or other Josephus text has come-down to us which has 


ee 


not passed through the hands of Christian scribes and Christian 


1 Below, p. 59 Il. 13 f. 2 App. x11. 
ὌΝ. Jahrb. f. d. klass. Altert., xxxi. (1913), p. 649, § 9. 
+ App. Iv. 6 See Pls. vi. and χιν. 6 App. Iv. 


TESTIMONY TO JESUS CHRIST BY JOSEPHUS 39 


owners. The numerous glosses and marginal notes, abounding in 
every single MS.,! fully bear out this statement. 


First DOUBTS ON THE AUTHENTICITY OF THE 
‘ TESTIMONIUM FLAVIANUM ’ 


The genuineness of the ‘ precious jewel’ has been admitted only 
in circles wholly dominated by the Church. The beautiful ° testi- 
mony’ has somehow never made an impression on the Jews, 
although they, too, certainly knew it well. When mediaeval 
Christian scholars taunted them with the argument that the 
Jewish historian Josephus, whose works they possessed and held 
in high honour, had freely admitted that Jesus was the Messiah, 
they stubbornly replied (as we may gather from certain pages of 
Giraldus Cambrensis 2) that this testimony was not found in their 
own Hebrew MSS. of the author. The Christians would then 
retort that the Jews had erased the passage from their MSS., and 
such MSS. showing manifest erasures were indeed not wanting 
(below, pp. 93, 97 ff.), and were repeatedly pointed out to the Jews 
to show that it was they who were in error. 

Of course, with these mutual accusations that the one party, 
the Christians, had interpolated the passage, and that the other, 
the Jews, had erased it, the argument could not advance very 
much. With the revival of learning the cultivated Jews were 
indeed not slow in putting up another and far more sweeping argu- 
ment. The learned Isaac Abravanel® (1437-1508) in his com- 
mentary on Daniel drily and curtly observes : ἡ If Josephus wrote 
this, we accept it not from him, for he has written much, but not all 
is true.’ Thus he doubts the genuineness of the Testimonium, but 
considers the whole matter of secondary importance in view of the 
well-known character of the writer, a commonsense view which 
can be warmly recommended to such blind believers among the 
Christians as may still think that anything can be gained for 
their cause by a statement made by so characterless an individual 
as was Flavius Josephus, who, Jew though he was, did not feel 
ashamed to proclaim Vespasian the Messiah of his people.* Were 
the passage as it stands genuine beyond the shadow of a doubt, one 
could only draw the conclusion that the clever sycophant had 


1 App. XIII. 

2 Giraldi Cambrensis opera, vol. viii., ed. George F, Warner, London, 1801 
(Rev. Brit. med. aevi scriptores), p. 64 1. 

3 Fonte x. palma vii. of the Pesaro edition of 1512 of his commentaries to the 
later prophets. 

4 Cf, Saint Alfonso Liguori, De Fidei Veritate, ii. 11 (Opp. Dogm., 1., Rome, 
1903, p. 195) : ‘ Ceterum Hebraeo nimium honorem tribuerunt nonnullt protestantes, 
ut Car. Daubuz et Ernst Grabe, qui tantopere desudarunt, ut hunc textum ve vera 
Josephi esse asserevent : non indiget Ecclesia inimicorum suorum testificatione.’ 


40 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


introduced it at a moment when it appeared to him that Christians 
such as Flavius Clemens and his wife Domitilla might after all gain 
some power at court—enough, at all events, to be useful to him 
or to hinder his career.) That would take away from the passage 
all independent value which otherwise it might possess. For it 
stands to reason that Josephus would then have been wily enough 
to draw on the right sources, i.e. the oldest Gospel narratives.” 
Nor would the conversion of such a person as Josephus unques- 
tionably was redound to the particular glory of any religion. At 
any rate, this much is clear: if the ‘ testimony ’ were proved to 
be authentic it could only be the work of a Christian, and it would 
matter very little, for our argument, whether that Christian were 
Josephus or Eusebius, and as a consequence it would have only 
the smallest value for the historicity of Jesus. 


THE AWAKENING OF CRITICISM IN THE AGE OF HUMANISM 


‘... praeclarum ad Christiani dogmatis confirmationem testi- 
monium . . . si non anxia hominum nimis curiosorum et otiosa 
sedulitas paene illud labefactasset.’ 

P. 1). Huet, Bishop of Avranches (1679). 


The first Christian scholar who boldly declared the Testimonium 
a forgery was the Protestant jurist and philologist Hubert van 
Giffen (Giphanius), a native of Buren in the duchy of Gelders. 
Born in 1534, he held a law degree from the University of Orleans, 
Where he founded a library for the use of Teutonic students. 
Later he was professor at Strassburg, Altdorf, and Ingolstadt, em- 
braced Catholicism, and died at the court of Rudolph 1. of Haps- 
burg, in Prague, in 1604. His view on the famous Josephus 
passage * does not seem to appear anywhere in his printed works. 
It is probable that for the sake of his own safety he was satisfied 
with expressing it only in his letters and lectures. 

The oldest printed attack on the Testimonium is from the pen 
of the Lutheran theologian Lucas Osiander, who was born at 
Nuremberg in 1535, and who in his later life filled quite a 
number of Protestant ecclesiastical posts, Though anything 
but a Judaeophile, he was accused in certain circles of having 
Jewish ancestors, He frankly regarded the Josephus passage as 
spurious in its entirety.4 


+ A similar view has indeed been advanced recently by Prof. Laqueur of 
Giessen, 

* " Mark’ is at all events prior to ‘ Matthew,’ who is about contemporary with 
Josephus’ Antiquities. 

* Sebast. Lepusculus ap. Goldast, Centum epist. Philol., Frankfurt-a.-M., 1619, 
p. 250. 

* Epitomes eccl. cent., xvi, cent., i., lib. ii. c. 7 (Tiibingen, 1592). 


TESTIMONY TO JESUS CHRIST BY JOSEPHUS 41 


Osiander was followed by Professor Sebastian Schnell (Snellius) 
of Altdorf. His arguments, as well as the replies which they called 
forth from contemporary scholars who came to the rescue of 
Josephus, have been preserved in MS, letters which in those days 
circulated from hand to hand and played very much the same role 
as our modern scientific journals and were occasionally printed. 
They have been published by Christian Arnold.' It is natural 
enough that the critics of the passage were chiefly philologists, and 
its defenders theologians. In these discussions practically all of 
the possible arguments pro and con used by modern scholars are 
anticipated in one form or another. 

The first of the scholars who pointed out—as Eduard Norden ° 
has but recently done again—that the Test?moniwm interrupts 
the logical structure of the narrative, and must therefore be re- 
garded as an interpolation, was not the famous French Calvinist 
Tannéguy Lefévre, mentioned by Norden, but a certain Portuguese 
rabbi (Rabbi Lusitanus) who drew upon himself the wrath of the 
Protestant divine Johannes Miiller of Hamburg, because the 
learned Sephardi seems to have been on good terms with Benedict 
de Castro, the Jewish physician of Queen Christina of Sweden, and 
to have had through this compatriot a chance to present his views 
to her Majesty during her stay in Hamburg. 

The Rabbi Lusitanus is probably identical with the well-known 
Jewish physician and philosopher Abraham Zacuto Lusitano, born 
in Lisbon in 1575, a student of the Universities of Coimbra and 
Salamanca, a doctor of Siguenza, who for thirty-nine years lived 
as a pseudo-converted Jew (Marafio) in Portugal, until he could 
escape to free Amsterdam in 1625. He died on New Year's Day 
of 1642, having returned, in Holland, to the faith of his fathers. 
The MS., seen by Johannes Miller, was the public disputation 
which he had in Middelburg with the Jesuit Nicolas Abram (1589- 
1655), a very learned theologian and philologist, author of a com- 
mentary on the Gospel of St. John, a Cicero commentary, and a 
Vergil edition. What should be stressed here is the Portuguese 
Jew’s argument that the Testimonium interrupts the logical 
sequence of the text and must therefore be considered an inter- 
polation. The same rabbi, according to Pastor Johannes Miiller, 
states: ‘.. . Josephus telleth first / how Pilate hath given 
cause for rebellion / whereupon the text should continue to say / 
how about the same time still another tumult happened unto the 
Jews: but because in between them is told the history of Jesus / the 
text doeth not hang together / the other tumult pointeth to the 
first.’ 

1 Epistulae hist. et philol. de Flavi Josephi testimonio, etc,, Niirnberg, 1061. 
2 N. Jahrb. f. d. klass, Altert., xxxi. (1913), pp. 648 ff. 


42 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


TANNEGUY LEFEVRE, EDUARD NORDEN, AND OTHERS 


The French Huguenot Tannéguy Lefévre (Tanaquil Faber), who 
does not mention Zacuto Lusitano and can hardly have known his 
work, circulating in MS, form only, argues in quite a similar strain : 
‘To speak in plain Latin, this interpolation [παρεγχείρημα] could 
not have been more ineptly inserted anywhere else.’ The matter 
calls for some elucidation. In the portion of the text containing 
inter aha the Testimonium there is a mention of ‘two calamities’ 
(θόρυβοι). Having finished with the first, Josephus adds these 
words : “ And so the riot [στάσις] ceased.’ The second, described 
in chapter v., he connects with the first, saying: ‘ And about the 
same time another calamity [ἕτερόν τι δεινόν] disturbed the Jews,’ 
etc. Eichstadt (1814) and Niese (1893-94), without knowing their 
predecessors of another age, have repeated verbatim this line of 
argument. Prof. Norden quotes Lefévre with approval, adding 
that this argument should have sufficed to dispose of the whole 
question. 

Wemay then say that we are facing an argument which seems to 
have lost nothing of its force in the course of centuries, and to have 
taken with Norden’s attractive and skilful presentation a new 
lease of life. A more detailed discussion is therefore unavoidable. 
Prof. Norden rightly stressed the fact that Josephus ‘found in his 
source a representation of Pilate’s governorship as a series of 
tumults’ (θόρυβοι). To illustrate :— 


First ‘tumult’ (§§ 55-59): the incident of the Emperor’s 
standards. Pilate threatens the Jews with dire punish- 
ments if they do not desist from their turbulence (θορυβεῖν) 
and depart to their homes. 

second ‘tumult’ (§§ 60-62): uprising of the Jews because 
Pilate spent temple money on the construction of an aque- 
duct. After a brutal charge of the soldiery the riot is 
quelled. 

(Follows the Testimonium concerning Jesus (§ 63 Sq.).) 

Third “tumult ’ (§§ 65-84). The section opens with the words: 
' Now about the same time another calamity disturbed the 
Jews’; but, strangely enough, it contains neither a ‘tumult’ 
nor a sedition, but the society scandal of Mundus and 
Paulina in Rome, an episode which, as Norden admits, has 
nothing to do with the Jews, They only appear in the 
following story, a trick played by a Jewish impostor upon 
Fulvia, a Roman lady and a convert to Judaism. This 
incident leads to the expulsion of the Jews from Rome by 
order of Tiberius. In both cases the victim brings the 
facts before the Emperor for trial (cognitio). The petitions 


TESTIMONY TO JESUS CHRIST BY JOSEPHUS 43 


and the imperial decisions were therefore found in the 
official diaries (commentarit) of Tiberius, whence Josephus 
must have obtained his knowledge.* 

Fourth ‘ tumult ’ (§§ 85-87). Τί is introduced with the words : 
‘The Samaritan tribe, too, was not exempt from disturb- 
ances.’ It includes the bloody repression by Pilate of the 
uprising caused by a Samaritan pseudo-prophet. Josephus 
adds: ‘When the disturbance was put down, the subsequent 
complaints of the Samaritans led to Pilate’s dismissal.’ 


Prof. Norden justly observes that the account of the appear- 
ance and crucifixion of Jesus, characterized in the text as a wise 
and wonder-working rabbi and founder of a new sect, does not fit 
at all into this series of national calamities. The interruption of 
the logical sequence is evident. The Vestimontum is indeed the 
only section of the passage in which the words ‘riot,’ ‘rioting,’ etc., 
do not appear. Prof. Norden further points out the connexion 
between the closing words of ὃ 62, ‘And so the sedition [στάσις] 
was quelled,’ and the opening words of ὃ 65, ‘ Now about the same 
time another calamity disturbed the Jews’; for the sedition 
(στάσις) is the first calamity (δεινόν), to which the account of a 
second calamity is appended. The German scholar quotes three 
parallel passages from Books iv. and v. of the Antzquities,” and adds 
the following observation : ‘ In the phraseology of Book v., πάλιν 
(again) corresponds to ἕτερον (=another) in Book xvii. The 
decisive point is the combination of events in series which finds its 
formal expression in the use of conjunctions. Nothing of this sort 
is found in the Testimonium lines, which stand there unconnected, 
isolated, like a typical interpolation.’ 

It is difficult, at a first perusal, to deny the force of these re- 
marks. Yet on second thought they carry far less weight than 
one might at first be inclined to suppose. It is perfectly true, of 
course, that the section in its extant form does not fit into the 
enumerations of ‘tumults.’ But in a narrative observing a purely 
chronological order of sequence and written in the ordinary style 
of annalists it should be possible to insert here and there some 
miscellaneous notes among the ‘ disturbances’ which form the 
nucleus of the story. Whether, as Prof. Norden believes, Josephus 
is here dependent upon an annalist such as Cluvius Rufus, or, as I 


1 See below, p. 204. 


2 iv. 59. ν. 135. XVlil. 62-65. 

“ἐ τὴν μέντοι στάσιν οὐδ᾽ “στάσις αὐτοὺς πάλιν ἐξ καὶ οὕτω παύεται ἡ 
οὕτως συνέβη παύσασθαι, καταλαμβάνει δεινὴ ... στάσις καὶ ὑπὸ τοὺς αὐτοὺς 
πολλῴ δὲ μᾶλλον αὔξειν ἐκ τοιαύτης αἰτίας." χρόνους ἕτερόν τι δεινὸν 
καὶ φύεσθαι, χαλεπωτέραν ἐθορύβει rods ᾿Ιουδαίους.᾽" 


7 ἐλάμβανε τῆς ἐπὶ τὸ 
χεῖρον προκοπῆς αἰτίαν, 
ὑφ᾽ iis οὐδέποτε λήξειν τὸ 
δεινὸν ἣν εἰκός." 


44 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


hope to show later on, whether he had access to the official notes 
of the imperial chancellery (conumentarit), his source no doubt, and 
very naturally, contained all sorts of facts out of which he chose 
what appeared to him most important or most appropriate. Bear- 
ing this in mind, we must admit the possibility of some minor affair 
or even a mere anecdote having slipped in with the mass of more 
serious political events. Prof. Leo Wohleb,! for example, has 
adduced quite a number of instances in the text of Josephus where 
obviously foreign matter has been inserted, more or less awkwardly, 
by the compiler, whose artistic preconceptions were evidently not 
of the highest order, and who is, moreover, at times fully conscious 
of adding details which are not essential to the story he is telling.? 

Prof. Norden’s arguments of a purely formal and stylistic char- 
acter are not so easy to combat. Even the peacefully novelistic 
narrative of Paulina and Mundus, which has repeatedly been 
attacked as an interpolation, does contain the verb form ἐθορύβει, 
and hence unquestionably belongs to the series οἱ ‘ troubles ’ with 
which the reader is by now familiar. It is all the more surprising 
(since the use of a simple catchword such as ‘ tumult’ was per- 
fectly sufficient, in the eyes of our not too exacting author, to 
establish a logical connexion) that he should not at least have 
attempted to link by such a simple device the Testimonium passage 
with the rest of his narrative. Tumultuous scenes were certainly 
not wanting in the history of nascent Christianity, and a supposi- 
tion that Josephus intentionally refrained from using his favourite 
term in this connexion attributes to him a feeling of delicacy which 
he was very far from possessing. The observation of Prof, Norden 
about the absence of such words as στώσις, θόρυβος, etc., in the 
Yestimonium is therefore of the greatest importance. But when 
the German scholar proposes to get rid of the difficulty by elimi- 
nating the passage in question as a simple interpolation, he falls 
into a methodological error. For it stands to reason that in the 
case of a mere stringing together of episodes in chronological order 
such as we witness in Josephus it will always be an easy matter to 
cut out this, that, or the other adventure without destroying in the 
least the logical sequence of the narrative. The problem must be 
tackled from an altogether different angle. 

Supposing for a moment that Josephus did use his favourite 
catchwords also in the Testimonium passage, we can understand 
that any Christian would have objected to such a presentation of 
the facts. He would have brooked with difficulty the association 
of the founder of his religion with riots and seditions. Prof. 

* Rom. Quartalschrift, xxxv., 1917, p. 157 {., about Aunt., xiii, 5, 9. 

* Cp. Ant., xii. 2. 2, ὃ 59, on certain parerga “τῆς ἱστορίας οὐκ ἀπαιτούσης τὴν 
ἀπαγγελίαν ᾿" (‘the story not absolutely requiring their retelling ’); similarly, Anz., 


XVli. ὃ 354, “οὐκ ἀλλότρια νομίσας αὐτὰ τῶδε τῷ λόγῳ᾽᾽ (‘T have not considered this 
as matter unconnected with the subject ’). 


_ TESTIMONY TO JESUS CHRIST BY JOSEPHUS 45 


Norden’s error lies in his assumption that the extant text of 
the Testimonium is genuine in the sense that it never existed in a 
different form and that it can thus be used as a basis for ‘critical ’ 
examinations and analyses of style. Since his essay was directed 
against scholars, such as Prof. F. C. Burkitt and Prof. A. v. Har- 
nack, who wanted to save the Testimonium in its entirety, Prof. 
Norden had no special reason to discuss the view of those who take 
a middle path and consider the famous passage neither entirely 
genuine nor on the other hand wholly an interpolation. Among 
the defenders of such a view was the celebrated German historian 
Leopold v. Ranke, and it would, then, not be quite fair to dismiss it 
as summarily as Norden does in his essay. 

The view itself, let us say, does by no means belong to the realm 
of lofty speculations of a purely metaphysical nature. In the first 
place, Origen did not have the extant text in his version of Josephus, 
but quite a different one, from which he concluded that Josephus 
refused to acknowledge Jesus as the Messiah. In the second place, 
the brief and abrupt mention of Jesus as ὁ λεγόμενος Χριστός 
(Ant., xx. 9. I, § 200), acknowledged to be genuine by Norden 
himself, presupposes a foregoing and more detailed discussion of 
this personage. As it stands, the passage would have puzzled the 
Hellenistic reading public of Josephus, and even the Jewish readers 
would have expected to learn more about this so-called Messiah. 
If the objection be met with the answer that at the time of the 
publication of the Antiquities almost every one must have known 
about Jesus the Christ, so that Josephus could spare himself the 
trouble of a detailed story, we can only say that in that case it 
would be unthinkable that in his history a personage of such im- 
portance should not have loomed larger. Nor would his brief 
allusion have saved him from the reproach of having omitted from 
his work a fairly important political fact, or rather a series of facts. 
Moreover, the Christians, who would, logically, have been the party 
to object to such an omission, as a matter of fact never reproach 
him for his silence but always and only for his unbelief in Christ. 

It is well to add, also, that there is no conceivable reason why 
Josephus should intentionally have passed over in silence the life 
and death of the founder of Christianity. Such a silence on his 
part (and still more the Test#moniwm in its extant form) would on 
the contrary have exposed him to an accusation of sympathy for 
this particular Messiah; and if we remember the cases of Flavius 
Clemens and Flavia Domitilla, two members of the imperial 
dynasty who had to pay for their Christian leanings with death or 
banishment, it will be clear that such an accusation might have 
cost him his favour with his imperial masters. Josephus as we 
know him was far too self-seeking to run the slightest risk for any 
cause, let alone that of a despised and persecuted sect. 


_- 


46 " THE MESSIAH JESUS 


A last objection might be found in the careless manner in which 
Josephus compiled his materials. One might suppose, for ex- 
ample, that he copied literally from his source the above-quoted 
reference to Jesus, forgetting that he had not mentioned him before 
in his own work. Yet this objection does not hold, since Origen, 
as he expressly says, read in Book xviii. of the Antiquities a state- 
ment of Josephus concerning Jesus from which he inferred that 
Josephus ‘ disbelieved in Jesus as Christ.’ Origen cannot very 
well have drawn this inference from the phrase ‘ who was called 
Christ’ (4πέ., xx.), since the very same phrase occurs also in 
Matthew i. 16, where there can of course be no question of such 
disbelief. Even granting that the allusion is due to mere care- 
lessness on the part of our author, one would yet have to admit 
that his source did give a fuller account of Jesus, a conclusion which 
would make that testimony even more valuable, bringing it closer 
to the time of the events. 

In going over the literature connected with the exegesis of the 
Lestimontum, one is struck by the fact that a number of scholars 
saw init only a decidedly Christian colouring, whilst others, equally 
competent, believed that they could discern a peculiarly ironical 
and even satirical tone. It is indeed likely that both are right— 
in other words, that the extant text is neither entirely genuine nor 
entirely interpolated, neither the work of Josephus alone nor 
entirely proceeding from the pen of some Christian forger. There 
seems to exist, rather, a nucleus hostile to Christ and his doctrines 
but covered with layers of Christian reworkings, so much so that 
the true meaning of the author can just be dimly discerned under- 
neath the growth of Christian alterations and modifications of the 
original text. 

This view is by no means an arbitrary conjecture, but it is 
largely supported by the MS. material as interpreted by Henri 
Weil and Théodore Reinach.! 1 can here give only a few examples. 

Several MSS. of Eusebius’ Historia ecclesiastica (i. II. 7) have 
alter the name of Jesus the disparaging particle τις, corresponding 
to the Latin guidam, ‘a certain Jesus.’ The phrase is thoroughly in 
keeping with Josephus’ stylistic habit ; he speaks, in fact, in much 
the same way of the two pseudo-Messiahs who appeared on the 
stage shortly after the death of Herod the Great. He likewise 
refers to Menahem, a son of the rebel Judas of Gaulan, as ‘a 
certain Menahem,’ and that although he mentions his glorious 
father in the same breath. This mode of expression does not, then, 
imply mere obscurity on the part of the personage in question, but 
simply Josephus’ dislike of and contempt for the men whose names 
are thus introduced. This phraseology, moreover, was adopted by 
the spurious Acts of Pilate, directly dependent upon Josephus, as 

* See the bibliography below, p. 58. 


TESTIMONY TO JESUS CHRIST BY JOSEPHUS 47 


will be shown in a subsequent chapter. There the governor is 
made to write to the Emperor, ‘ They have delivered to me a 
certain man called Jesus,’ a phrase indeed in the strictest accord- 
ance with Roman official style. For Tacitus, who did not of 
course use Josephus, as some have thought, but who, like Josephus, 
drew on official sources, likewise refers to the Jewish pretender 
Simon as ‘Simo quidam’ (Hzst., v. 9). More important still, the 
phrase ἀνήρ τις, corresponding exactly to the ποιμήν τις used of 
the messiah Athronga, occurs in the Haldsis of Josephus, and 15 
there applied to no other than Jesus himself. 

ΠΑ second equally important reading is found in the Demon- 
stratio evangelica (iii. 5) of Eusebius, where the phrase ‘ who 
worship’ (ceSouevev) replaces ‘who receive’ (δεχομένων), the 
sentence being, ‘a teacher of men who receive the truth with 
pleasure.’ Since the expression is normally used in Josephus 71 
malam partem, a Christian copyist who had noticed this altered 
the passage, though none too skilfully. In the same way and 
acting on the same principle, another Christian copyist had deleted 
the derogatory tvs in the connexion just mentioned in the previous 
section. 

- What we hope to have established, then, is the existence of 
alterations and modifications of the text since the time of Eusebius. 
From the fact that the latter himself does not quote a standard text 
it follows further that no such text existed in the fourth century, 
and that even before that time the famous passage was constantly 
subject to emendations and corrections. This result is in full 
harmony with the fact that Origen had before him a thoroughly 
‘unorthodox’ Testimonium which must have been altogether 
different from the one drawn on by Eusebius. The text tradition 
consequently proves that a genuine Josephus text hostile to Christ 
has been reworked by Christians. It does not prove at all that the 
passage is im ἐοίο a brazen interpolation ; for there exist no MSs. 
of the Antiquities lacking altogether in the celebrated passage, 
xviii. 3.3. Nor is there any ground for supposing that such ever 
existed. 

An hypothesis postulating that the Teséimoniwin was composed 
by a Christian and interpolated in the Josephus text can in no 
wise explain the unmistakably derogatory expression ‘a certain 
Jesus’ in the quotation of the passage by Eusebius. On the 
other hand, one can understand that such objectionable phrases 
might, for some time at least, escape the notice of the copyists. 
Another important consideration to bear in mind in this connexion 
is the chronology of Josephus, who puts the execution of John the 
Baptist after the first public appearance of Jesus, a chronology 
quite different from that of the Gospels.* One fails to see why 


1 See below, p. 302. 


48 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


a Christian author—who must of course be presumed to be familiar 
with the writings of the New Testament—had he interpolated the 
Testimonium, should have done so in contradiction to the chrono- 
logy of the Gospels. 

The opposite theory, that the extant text comes from the pen 
of Josephus, in the first place does not explain the friendly and 
sympathetic tone used in speaking of Jesus, and in the second place 
does not account for the enigmatic indifference with which the 
author narrates without a word of approval or disapproval an 
event which, according to his own words, implies a horrible judicial 
murder committed by his Roman friends with the connivance of 
the foremost of his own compatriots, men of his own social class, 
whilst in the case of the deaths of John the Baptist and James the 
Just he is at pains to pronounce himself most unequivocally. 
Above all, the complete absence of all motivation cannot but strike 
the reader, who remembers, of course, that in the case of the execu- 
tion of John the Baptist Josephus not only mentions the fear of 
Herod Antipas of a rebellion caused by his preaching, but mentions 
also the disapproval of the act by public opinion. James the Just 
and his companions were stoned as violators of the law by the 
Sadducees, whose judicial severity and harshness are frequently 
censored by Josephus the Pharisee. In addition, we read ‘many 
of the most respected and law-abiding citizens sharply protested ’ 
against these proceedings to the new governor. Nothing of the 
kind appears in the Test?moniwm, not a word of the reasons for 
Jesus’ death, though motives were certainly easy to find—violation 
of the Sabbath or the purity laws, or the more general reproach of 
‘innovations ’ so hateful to Josephus. We read not a word to 
suggest that the people feared Divine retribution for the murder of 
a righteous man, not a word of blame for the cruelty of Pilate or 
the Sadducaean informers, no explanation at all, though lack of 
sufficient motivation cannot possibly be counted among the weak 
spots of his narrative. In short, we have here no trace of that 
play of lively human emotions and passions which forms the usual 
charm of Josephus’ way of representing his facts, and which does 
certainly not lack in the dramatic. 

' Crucified under Pilate, risen on the third day, honoured as the 
Messiah by the Church.’ That is what we are told here, with a 
serene indifference and apathy quite intelligible in the drawling 
recital of a familiar—even all too familiar—confession of faith, in 
a theological ° testimonium,’ that is (and it is not by accident that 
the passage has obtained that name), but wholly inconceivable in 
an historian who is anything but tedious and dispassionate. Still, 
here he would seem to relate a miracle unparalleled in the annals 
of mankind—the resurrection of one crucified and the continued 
recognition of the victim, notwithstanding his shameful death, as 


TESTIMONY TO JESUS CHRIST BY JOSEPHUS 49 


the promised anointed Saviour-King of the Jews. And yet he tells 
this staggering tragedy, the execution of the innocent wonder- 
working sage through malicious denunciation and tyrannical 
cruelty, without betraying by a single word his own opinion of 
these unheard-of events. Such an attitude defies all explanation ; 
it is neither probable nor even possible. There remains at the end 
but the single hypothesis, confirmed by patristic evidence, that 
Josephus was not spared the indignities which Christian copyists did 
not hesitate to inflict upon the Christian fathers—nay, even upon 
the very Gospels themselves. They falsified what he had written, 
suppressing things which he wished to say and making him say 
things which he would never have dreamt of saying, they being 
altogether foreign to his own mode of thinking. 


THE REMNANTS OF THE GENUINE TESTIMONY OF JOSEPHUS 
ON JESUS IN THE ‘ JEWISH ANTIQUITIES’ 


In the preceding section the view has been advanced, sup- 
ported by new arguments, that beneath the clearly manipulated 
Testimonium Flavianum the outlines of a genuine statement of 
Josephus concerning Jesus have been preserved. Such a view has 
been deprecated in the eyes of many by Schiirer’s ! observation that 
any critic seeking to remove from the account of Jesus as given by 
Josephus’ extant text such touches as can only have been added 
by a Christian hand, will be left with practically nothing of im- 
portance. Schtirer’s procedure, however, is far too clumsy, and 
might properly be compared with the attempt of an inexperienced 
amateur who seeks to clean an old portrait but by an all too ready 
use of his alkalines only brings to light the naked canvas. For it 
must be borne in mind (and it has been proved repeatedly 3) that 
almost every word and phrase of the extant text corresponds most 
closely to the vocabulary and stylistic habits of Josephus. Hence 
it is that advocates of the interpolation theory have been forced to 
admit that the forger was intimately acquainted with the author’s 
style and must have made a careful study of it. Such skill on the 
part of a forger is indeed not altogether impossible ; the less so if 
we suppose him to have been a copyist who, after having copied 
more than seventeen books of the Awtiguities, must necessarily 
have become sufficiently impregnated with his author’s phrase- 
ology to patch together without undue effort those seven lines of 
the Testimonium. For those, however, who believe in a falsifica- 
tion of an original text the conclusion will be evident that the 

1 Vol. i. p. 148 of the English edition, Edinburgh, 1910. 

2 Cp., besides Prof. Wohleb’s paper quoted above, p. 44 n. 1, another by van 


Liempt (Mnemosyne, lv., 1927). Most of the material has first been collected by 
Daubuze, in the eighteenth century (bibliography below, p. 58). 


D 


50 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


forgery was carried out with a good deal of care and that the 
restoration of the original text through conjecture must proceed 
with a minimum of alterations—a principle which devolves, more- 
over, from the well-known axiom according to which in the dis- 
cussion of the genuineness of an historical document the burden of 
proof lies with the party impugning that genuineness. 

The resources available for this purpose may be divided into 
two groups. First, there are the relevant parallel passages. 
Josephus’ style—or rather the style of the servi literati he em- 
ployed—is characterized by a certain monotony, and the reproaches 
he levels against political opponents are always of the same type. 
In the second place, a number of verbal resemblances or analogies 
to certain typical statements of Josephus may be found in the 
apocryphal Acta Pilati, which, as has been indicated before and 
will be more fully demonstrated below, drew on the narrative of 
Josephus. 3 

A critical analysis of the Testimontuwm, taking one word after 
the other, accompanied by a comparison with the parallels just 
mentioned, will result in a number of observations in complete 
harmony with the main conclusions arrived at in a previous 
chapter. 

The first word of the Testimonitum, γίνεται, ‘ there arose,’ has 
always been a difficulty. In Cedrenus we find it changed to ἣν, 
a variant corresponding to the Egesippus reading, ‘fut autem 
eisdem temporibus.’ The same γε (instead of γίνεται) recurs in 
the Latin translation attributed to Rufinus and in the literal 
quotation of the Jestimonium by St. Jerome. ἐδ 

There are excellent reasons for this correction, for Josephus 
never uses the word γίνεται, when he wants to introduce a new, 
hitherto not mentioned person into his narrative, in order to 
convey the meaning that this man ἡ lived’ or ‘ flourished’ at that 
particular time. In all these cases he is careful to say ἣν δὲ κατὰ 
τοῦτον τὸν χρόνον, ‘at that time there was a man, called N. N.’! 
The verb γίνεται does, however, occur quite frequently in Jose- 
phus, particularly at the beginning of paragraphs ; but the subject 
of the sentence is then almost without exception a word such as 
θόρυβος (tumult), or στάσις (rebellion) ,? or ταραχή (trouble), or some 

1 Ant., vill. 7. 6, § 203: ‘‘kara δέ τὸν αὐτὸν καιρὸν ἣν τις οἰκῶν ἐν Mwdal.. ὄνομα 
Ματταθίας... ", 6.5. Ant., ix. ὃ 230 : “ἣν δέτις κατὰ τοῦτον τὸν καιρὸν προφήτης, Νάουμος 
ὄνομα," OF XV. § 373: “ἣν δέτις τῶν ᾿σσηνῶν Μανάημος ὄνομα... ᾽ 3 Vi.§ 45: ““ἣν δέτις 
ἐκ τῆς Βενιαμίτιδος φυλῆς ἀνήρ, Keis ὄνομα," or vi. ὃ 295: “ἦν δέ τις τῶν Σιφηνῶν ἐκ 
πόλεως ᾿Εμμᾶν πλούσιος. .”; vill. § 236: ““ἣν δέ τις ἐν τῇ πόλει πρεσβύτης πονηρὸς 
ψευδοπροφητής᾽" ; vill. ὃ 326: ““ἣν δέ γυνή"; xvi. § 220: ““ἦν μὲν γὰρ ὁ τῆς ᾿Αραβίας 
βασιλεὺς Οβάδας... "᾽; ΧΥῚΪ, ὃ 149: ““ἣν ‘Toddas ὁ Σαριφαῖος καὶ Ματαθίας ὁ Mapyadwrov 
᾿Ιουδαίων λογιώτατοι. ." ; xvill. § 273 : “ἣν δὲ καὶ Σίμων δοῦλος μὲν ‘Hpwdov τοῦ βασιλέως 
ἄλλως δὲ ἀνὴρ εὐπρεπής... .᾽" 

7B. Bell. Joy 30.45 J §-99:: ““ γίνεται δὲ αὐτώ πάλιν ἀρχὴ θορύβου ’Avrioxos..”: 


ἐδια., 1. 4. 2, ὃ 85: “γίνεται δ᾽ αὐτῷ καὶ πρὸς τὸν Λάθουρον συμβολή"; i. 12. 1, ὃ 236; 
“πάλιν στάσις ἐν “Ἱεροσολύμοις γίνεται EXtkos, . ἐπαναστάντος Φασαήλῳ᾽᾽᾽ ; 1. 33. 2, § 648: 


TESTIMONY TO JESUS CHRIST BY JOSEPHUS “τ 
such term. Thus it is highly probable that the original text read : 


{{ / \ \ la) \ “ ’ \ / 3? 

γίνεται δὲ... κατὰ τοῦτον τὸν χρόνον (ἀρχὴ FopuBou>... 3 OF 
“γίνεται κατὰ τοῦτον τὸν χρόνον δὲ Incods τις (ἀρχὴ θορύβου ᾿᾿; or 
“ ζστάσεως παραίτιος "; and that a Christian copyist omitted, or 
a Christian censor deleted, the objectionable words, making Jesus 
himself the immediate subject of the verb γίνεται. The remark of 
Celsus concerning Jesus preserved by Origen (cp. Celswm, vill. 14), 
“ὅσπερ ἐστὶν αὐτοῖς στάσεως ἀρχηγέτης καὶ ὠνόμασάν γε τοῦτον υἱὸν 
θεοῦ," may very well have been borrowed verbatim from the lost 
passage of Josephus. The phrase, “ γίνεται δὲ κατὰ τοῦτον τὸν χρόνον 
᾿Ιησοῦς τις σοφὸς ἀνήρ, is at all events quite impossible from what 
we know of the author’s style and phraseology. For it could 
mean ‘at that time a certain Jesus was born, a wise man’ 
(a chronological impossibility), or even ‘at that time a certain 
Jesus became a wise man’ (which is, of course, nonsense). The 
reader will notice that the proposed restoration of the words ἀρχὴ 
θορύβου completely disposes of Zacuto Lusitano’s, Tanneéguy 
Lefévre’s, and Prof. Norden’s argument that the whole Jestt- 
monium is a fraudulent insertion because it does not contain the 
words θόρυβος, στάσις, ταραχή, nor another similar expression. As 
a matter of fact, the use of the verb γένεται goes far to prove that 
the word was used, but was deleted by a Christian reviser. 

The expression σοφὸς ἀνήρ, ‘a wise man,’ does not present a 
stylistic difficulty. The epithet in question is a word of the highest 
praise in Hellenistic Greek, and is applied by Josephus in two cases 
only—to the wise old King Solomon and to the prophet Daniel ; 
and this very fact makes it practically impossible that Josephus 
should have used it when speaking of ‘a certain Jesus,’ a car- 
penter’s son unlearned in the scriptures.1 The epithet which he 
does use when speaking of the various leaders of the opposition who 
were so distasteful to him is not σοφός, but σοφιστής," and it 1s 
indeed probable that σοφιστής was the original reading in the 
present passage, the more so because Justinus ὅ implies that 
certain of his contemporaries did call Jesus a sophist. 

Of common application to Jesus, by writers hostile to Chris- 
tianity, were the terms γόης and μάγος, andin the Lucian MSS.‘ the 
ἐξ γίνεται δ᾽ ἐν ταῖς συμφοραῖς αὐτοῦ καὶ δημοτικὴ ἐπανάστασις" δύο ἦσαν σοφισταί... 
Ἰούδας καὶ Ματθίας"; i. 8. 6, ὃ 171: ‘per’ οὐ πολύ γε μὴν αὐτοῖς ἀρχὴ γίνεται θορύβων 
᾿Αριστόβουλος. «ἢ ; i, 10. 10, ξ 216: ‘Kai ἐν τούτῳ γίνεται περὶ ᾿Αραμείαν ταραχὴ “Ρωμαίων 
καὶ πόλεμος ἐμφύλιος" ; iv. 3. 13, ὃ 208: ““ γίνεται δὲ τούτοις πᾶσιν ὀλέθρου παραίτιος 
Ἰωάννης." Ant., xviii. 9. 1, ὃ 310: ““ γίνεται δὲ συμφορὰ δεινή " ; ΧΙΧ. 9. 2, δ ἀδδιες;ς 
οἵ καὶ τοῖς ἐπιοῦσι χρόνοις τῶν μεγίστων ᾿Ιουδαίοις ἐγένοντο συμφορῶν ἀρχή Wie SEs ΦΙΘΊΘΣ: 
© γίνεται δὲ αὐτῆς ἢ ἄφιξις δεινή" ; XX. 6.1, ὃ 118: ‘ γίνεται δὲ Σαμαρείταις πρὸς ᾿Ιουδαίους 
ἔχθρα"; xx. 8. 7, ὃ 173: “᾿γίνεται δὲ ᾿Ιουδαίων στάσις .. al κτλ. : 

1 μὴ μεμαθηκὼς τὰ γράμματα, John vii. 1x, even in Christian tradition Lie 

2 B.J., ii., ὃ 118 (Judas the Galilaean) : σοφιστὴν ἱδίας αἱρέσεως. Tbid., 1., § 648 
(Judas and Mattathias, the rabbis rebelling against Herod the Great), σοφισταί. 

4 Apolog.,i. 14. 11. Similarly Lucian, Peregr. Proteus, ch, xili, 

4 See above, p.9n. 5; p.I1 Nn. 5. 


52 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


Christian copyists changed τὸν μάγον ἐκεῖνον, ‘ that sorcerer,’ into 
Tov μέγαν ἐκεῖνον, ‘ that great one.’ Such different meanings may 
be produced by the simple change of two letters! It is at least 
possible that in the original Josephus’ text the words καὶ γόης were 
added to the epithet σοφιστής, and a passage in the Demonstratio 
Evangelica of Eusebius + would seem to bear out this conjecture. 
The most difficult piece of the whole section is the phrase εἴγε 
ἄνδρα λέγειν χρὴ αὐτόν. The use of εἴγε is typical of Josephus ; 
it can be translated by ‘ provided that,’ ‘if,’ or even ‘since.’ A 
good illustration of this obscure passage is furnished by a parallel 
in the so-called Letter of Lentulus, a Christian forgery, reading : 
'Apparuit temporibus istis . . . homo magnae virtutis, si fas est 
hominem dicere . . . quem eius discipuli vocant filium dei.’ 
Another useful parallel is furnished by a phrase of Clement of 
Alexandria, who, speaking of the various Orpheuses, refers to them 
as “men who are not men but impostors’ (ἄνδρες τινὲς οὐκ ἄνδρες, 
amatndot)—that is, men who claim to be supermen but are in reality 
impostors. One who is ‘no man’ may be as well an unhuman 
monster as a superman, and the passage in Josephus is therefore 
quite well possible in the mouth of an enemy of Jesus. The most 
important parallel, however, is furnished by the spurious ‘ Acts of 
Pilate’ :? ““οἶμοι, γχυκύτατε ᾿Ιησοῦ, ἐξ ἀνθρώπων φίλε ἐξαισιώτατε: 
εἰ χρὴ μὲν καὶ ἄνθρωπον ὀνομάζειν σε τὸν οἷα οὐδέποτε πεποίηκεν 
ἄνθρωπος θαύματα ἐργασάμενον. These lines are obviously bor- 
rowed from Josephus by the unintelligent Christian forger of these 
‘Acts of Pilate.’ No Christian would have chosen the epithet 
ἐξαισιώτατε, as applied to Jesus, on his own account. The passage 
may therefore be tentatively used to restore the original wording 
of the Josephus text. The word ἀνήρ, which does not correspond 
to the Latin homo but to vir, and which is not the contrary to θεός, 
‘god,’ but to γυνή, ‘woman,’ may have been chosen in this par- 
ticular passage to avoid the repetition of ἄνθρωπος, simply because 
in all probability the original text was as long as that of the Letter 
of Lentulus or the lines just quoted from the Acta Pilati, and must 
have read somewhat like this: ‘if one may calla man [ἄνδρα] the 
most monstrous [ἐξαισιώτατος] of men (ἀνθρώπων), whom his dis- 
ciples call a son of God,’ etc. Nor is the Greek word here translated 
by “monstrous ’ (ἐξαίσιος) at all rare in Josephus. On the con- 
trary, he speaks, for example, of βοαῖς ἐξαισίοις (vehement shouting), 
and the term is always used in malam pariem. The forger of the 
‘ Acts of Pilate ’ ignorantly took over a term used first in a sense 
hostile to Jesus, no doubt because he found it in Josephus and had 
lost all feeling for the niceties of the Greek language. The phrase 
‘whom his disciples call a son of God ’ likewise is far too cool, too 


' ill, 6; P.G., 222, 224: ‘* πρὸς τοὺς οἰομένους γόητα γεγονέναι τὸν Χριστὸν τοῦ Oeod.” 


2 rec. B., Evang. apocrypha, ed. Tischendorf, 1876, Ῥ. 314. 


TESTIMONY TO JESUS CHRIST BY JOSEPHUS 53 


objective, to admit of an assumption that it was coined by an 
enthusiastic Christian. The obvious conclusion, then, is that the 
extant text of the Testimonium is the result of a drastic reduction 
of a text which formerly was far longer and anything but favour- 
able to Jesus. 

The expression παράδοξα ἔργα occurs elsewhere in Josephus ; 
but it need not always express supernatural deeds. In one passage 
of the Antiquities ' he uses it to designate works of art of a novel and 
surprising design, though in another the words refer to the mar- 
vellous acts of a prophet.? It follows that in our context Josephus 
may well have said something of this sort, to explain, of course, the 
reputation Jesus had with his adherents. On the other hand, the 
word ποιητής is certainly objectionable, because in Josephus it 
always means ‘ poet,’ whilst in the meaning of ᾿ doer’ or * perpe- 
trator ’ it is frequent in Christian writers. It is therefore certainly 
a Christian interpolation, necessitated by the reduction of the 
preceding phrase. What is left, παραδόξων ἔργων διδάσκαλος, 
corresponds to the common term ‘ wonder-rabbi,’ still used, but 
nowadays always im malam partem. The word διδάσκαλὸς is 
common in Josephus, both where he speaks of a ‘ teacher’ of good 
and useful knowledge and also where he means a man who sets 
bad examples of wickedness and deceit. 

The phrase ἀνθρώπων τῶν ἡδονῇ δεχομένων is not without signi- 
ficant parallels. For example, in the story of the false Alexander 
the Jews of Puteoli and Crete ‘accept’ likewise ἡδονῇ, * with 
delight,’ the words of the impostor. A similar use of the word 
occurs in the description of the rebellion of Judas the Galilaean, 
The word ἡδονή in Josephus generally denotes, according to Stoic 
use, a low and base sort of pleasure, the pleasure of an easily 
incitable mob, and suchlike. 

The word τἀληθῆ cannot of course have been used by Josephus 
of the teachings of Jesus, as was in fact pointed out by the late 
Théodore Reinach, for that would imply that Josephus endorsed the 
teachings of Jesus about the Sabbath, about man not being defiled 
by unclean food, about non-resistance, etc. In fact, it has long 
ago been conjectured that τἀλὴθῆ is simply a correction of ta7@n, 
meaning ‘the unusual.’* The text then read, ‘ people who accept 
with pleasure the unusual,’ (all) that is unusual, because it is un- 


1 xii. ὃ 63. 4 ἼΧ, 8. 182: 

3 Prof. H. Windisch of Wiel has called this, in a review of the German edition 
(Theolog. Rundschau, N.F.i., Heft 4, p. 281), an ‘unnecessary’ correction. But 
surely an author who calls the teaching of Jesus ‘the truth’ could not be any- 
thing but a believing Christian. So this conjecture of Heinichen’s is absolutely 
necessary, if the Testimonium is not to be thrown out altogether. Indeed, Dom 
H. Leclerq in the new article ‘ Joséphe’ in Cabrol’s Dict. of Christ. Archaeol., vii. 
(1927) c. 26, 79, would rather accept Henri Weil’s conjecture τὰ καινά than let 
ταληθή stand. The corruption δι᾽ ἀλήθειαν for δι᾽ ἀήθειαν occurs in Cod. Paris., 
1676, of Plutarch’s Cato minor, c. 59, 35=iv. 94, ὃ. 


54 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


usual; that is a phrase of the type one has to expect from the pen 
of a Josephus, hostile as he was to any innovator (νεωτερίζων) and 
opponent of the Pharisees in particular and the upper classes in 
general. | 

There follows the phrase καὶ πολλοὺς μὲν ᾿Ιουδαίους πολλοὺς δὲ 
καὶ τοῦ ᾿ῶωλληνικοῦ ἐπηγάγετο, Which is quite unobjectionable and 
has a good parallel, Ant., xvii. ὃ 327: “᾿Ιουδαίοις ὁπόσοις εἰς 
ὁμιλίαν ἀφίκετο, ἐπηγάγετο eis πίστιν, Where the subject of the 
sentence 15 the impostor, pretending to be King Alexander, the 
son of the Hasmonaean Queen Mariamne. 

But it would seem as though in the original text there preceded 
at least a short outline of his doctrines, just as in connexion 
with Josephus’ other bétes noives, Judas the Galilaean, Sadogq, the 
sophists Matthew Margalothon and Judas Sariphaeus, etc., we are 
given such a sample. Nor did he have the slightest reason to pass 
them over in silence ; on the contrary, it was in the interest of his 
work of apologetics to justify the denunciation of Jesus by his co- 
nationals and the people of his own class. The whole passage no 
doubt fell before the hand of Christian copyists and revisers. 

There comes next the famous confession ὁ Χριστὸς οὗτος ἣν, 
which has given rise to so much controversy. A close examination 
of the context can only confirm the old conjecture of Richard 
Montague, bishop of Norwich (1577-1641), to wit, that the phrase 
is a Christian gloss. Yet what follows makes it necessary that 
Josephus here mentioned the title of ‘ Christ ’ given to Jesus, and 
the sentence reporting the denunciation requires that Jesus had 
been introduced before as the Messiah. St. Jerome still read in 
his Josephus copy something corresponding to the Latin ‘ et 
Christus esse credebatur,’ to which Josephus had probably added 
something like ‘ by the mob’ (ὑπὸ τῶν ὄχλων, ὑπὸ τοῦ πλείστου 
ὄχλου). Even so the phrase is too short and abrupt, and some- 
thing else was probably deleted by the Christian scribe or reviser. 
Josephus must have given some sort of explanation, for the benefit 
of his Hellenic readers, of what the Jews meant by the ‘ Messiah ’— 
he may, in fact, have mentioned here that the true Messiah was 
the Emperor Vespasian; and, lastly, he must have somehow ex- 
plained why Jesus was denounced to the Roman authorities. 
It is in this place that he must have given the details about the 
θόρυβος or the στάσις alluded to in the restored introductory 
sentence which Dr. Norden missed in this paragraph, and which 
must have appeared most objectionable to the Christians. For 
the fact that his entry into Jerusalem was not altogether peaceful 
is fully corroborated by certain incidents reported in the Gospels. 
In other words, we must assume a considerable gap, caused by 
Christian deletions. 

1 See below, pp. 472 tf, 


TESTIMONY TO JESUS CHRIST BY JOSEPHUS 55 


The following sentence is perfectly correct : ‘And when, on the 
indictment of the principal men among us, Pilate had sentenced 
him to the cross,’ etc. It is to be noted that the phrase σταυρῷ 
ἐπιτετιμηκότος Πιλάτου corresponds exactly to the Latin ‘ per 
Pontium Pilatum supplicio affectus’ of the well-known Tacitus 
passage. It is obviously a literal translation of a piece of Roman 
judicial phraseology. 

On the other hand, the phrase οὐκ ἐπαύσαντο is certainly not 
complete in itself; and in view of the events connected with the 
names of Stephen and Paul, it is no bold conjecture to assume that 
what dropped out was an infinitive such as θορυβεῖν or a participle 
such as νεωτερίζοντες. 

In the phrase οἱ τὸ πρῶτον ἀγαπήσαντες the verb ἀγαπᾶν has 
been attacked as un-Josephan, since with our author it hardly ever 
means ‘ to love,’ but only ‘ to be content with some one or some- 
thing.’ The critics unfortunately overlooked the important 
parallel in B.J., i. 8.6, ὃ 171, where the subject of the sentence is 
Aristobulus.! Of course, Josephus did not wish to say that Aristo- 
bulus was ‘loved ’ (a rather difficult matter in any case), but simply 
that he was ‘ liked,’ ‘ admired,’ or something of the kind. 

There follows the famous testimonium for the resurrection, which 
is stylistically correct enough but which cannot possibly have come 
from the pen of Josephus, at least in such a form. Ofcourse, he is 
careful to say ἐφάνη yap αὐτοῖς, that is, ‘he appeared ¢o them,’ 1.6. 
to people belonging, according to Josephus, to the lowest of the low, 
people without education and critical sense. In other terms, even 
the present wording leaves no doubt that for Josephus it was 
merely a question of a purely subjective phenomenon. To this 
must be added that, since the text is by no means free from altera- 
tions, the original may have had instead of ἐφάνη the infinitive 
φανῆναι, completed by the verb ἔδοξε, ‘they imagined he had 
appeared to them,’ etc., a conjecture first advanced by G. A. Miller 
in 1895 and fully confirmed eleven years later by the Slavonic 
version (below, p. 539). With such a reading of the text his 
mention of the prophetic passages likewise becomes clear. The 
words are written in a spirit of polemic against the collection of 
prophetic ¢estimonia current among the Christians and attributed by 
Papias to the evangelist Matthew—a book which has been brought 
but recently to the attention of the learned world by a number 
of English scholars, foremost among them Dr. Rendel Harris. 

The phrase τρίτην ἔχων ἡμέραν" has been said by Dr. Norden 
(op. cit., 646) to be a ἅπαξ λεγόμενον with Josephus, but Prof. van 
Liempt has drawn my attention to Ant., vii. § I, αὐτοῦ δύο ἡμέρας 
ἔχοντος ἐν τῇ Σικελίᾳ, and Ant., 111. § 290, τοῦ μὲν ἄρρενος ὅσον 

LB, τ, δ 17x > “* Tovs δ᾽ ἀγαπῶντας αὐτὸν πάλαι." 
a Cp. Jo., xi. 17: “εὗρον αὐτὸν τέσσαρας ἤδη ἡμέρας ἔχοντα ἐν τῷ μνημείῳ, 


56 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


τριακοστὴν εἶχεν ἡμέραν γενόμενον. These parallels,! together with 
the Latin version fost triduum mortis of the so-called Egesippus, 
seem to suggest that the original text was τρίτην ἔχων ἡμέραν 
(θανάτου), ‘having been dead for three days,’ and that the word 
θανάτου, ‘death,’ was deleted by a reviser because of the legend 
—elaborately developed in the ‘ Acts of Pilate ’—that Jesus Christ 
was not dead during those three days, but was occupied with 
the descensus ad inferos and the liberation of the pious patriarchs 
from She’ol (see, however, below p. 62 note I). 

There remains the final sentence, εἰσέτι τε νῦν τῶν Χριστιανῶν 
ἀπὸ τοῦδε ὠνομασμένων οὐκ ἐπέλιπε τὸ φῦλον. The redundant 
accumulation of particles which has been criticized as entirely 
un-Josephan is simply due to the habit of later scribes. ἔτι νῦν, 
καὶ νῦν, νῦν ἔτι, καὶ νῦν ἔτι, ἔτι καὶ νῦν, are frequent in Josephus. 
What is noteworthy is the use of the word φῦλον, meaning not only 
‘ people ’ or ‘ tribe’ in the ethnical acceptation of the word, but 
also in a pejorative sense, as in English we speak of the ‘ tribe of 
the politicians’ or the ‘ tribe of the lawyers.’ The fact itself that 
φῦλον here does not designate an ethnical unit, but the ‘ Christians,’ 
makes it clear that the author did not mean to use a term of 
affection. : 

To this must be added the fact that the phrase οὐκ ἐπέλιπε 
certainly does not imply a wish on the part of the author for their 
continued growth.’ For if we say of a party that ‘it has not died 
out yet,’ we imply a certain pious wish—a silent hope or, eventually, 
a certain apprehension that it may some time do so after all. 

The chief conclusion of the foregoing analysis is the important 
fact that, though falsified by Christian scribes, the genuine and 
original text of the passage is not definitely lost, but may still be 
discerned, like the original writing of a palimpsest. It need hardly 
be added that the reconstructed text must bein complete harmony 
with the general vocabulary and phraseology of Josephus, and that 
it must be free from the various inconsistencies which have for cen- 
turies been objected against the genuineness of the Testimonium. 

For the convenience of the reader and as a sort of summary of 
the results attained by our critical analysis, a hypothetical re- 
construction of what may very well have been the original text, 
accompanied by an English translation, is printed below, together 
with a critical edition of the traditional or ‘received’ text with 

* Prof. van Liempt compares also Alciphron, Epist., iii. 21, Pp. 49 (Meinecke, 
Leipzig, 1853), “"Ὁ μὲν ἀνὴρ ἀπόδημός ἐστι μοι τρίτην ταύτην ἡμέραν ἔχων ἐν ἄστει," 
and Epictet., ii. 15. 5, “" ἤδη τρίτην ἡμέραν ἔχοντος αὐτοῦ τῆς ἀποχῆς.᾽" 

* Samuel Butler would even call them ‘ too wise a nation T’expose their trade 
to disputation.’ Ben Jonson styled physicians ‘a subtle nation.’ 

* Therefore the Christian translator ‘Egesippus’ (ii. 12. 1, p. ΤΟΙ ἢ. ἘΞ Ή; 
Ussani) has altered the whole phrase and said instead: ‘ ex quo coepit congregatio 


Christianorum et in omne hominum penetravit genus, nec ulla natio Romani ovbis 
vemansit quae cultus ejus expers velinqueretuy,’ 


TESTIMONY TO JESUS CHRIST BY JOSEPHUS 57 


just such a translation. A comparison of the two texts either in 
the original Greek or in the translation will, it is hoped, enable the 
reader to judge for himself the merits of the method followed. 

What may be achieved by the systematic application of the 
well-known methods of comparative analysis of Josephus’ style 
and vocabulary will be clearly seen. No attempt has been made 
to conceal or even to minimise the purely hypothetical character 
of the reconstructed text. This much may, however, be claimed 
for this new attempt at such a restoration, in contrast especially 
to the previous attempts of G. A. Miller and the late Théodore 
Reinach, that it stands on a much broader basis. Thanks largely 
to the co-operation of Dr. Thackeray and Dr. van Liempt, it is 
indeed probable that no parallel of any importance in the whole 
work of Josephus has been overlooked or neglected. 

The reader will do well, moreover, to remember that hitherto 
not one of the critics has taken into consideration the existing 
evidence on the treatment of Jewish literature, in so far as it dealt 
with Jesus Christ and Christianity in general, at the hands of the 
Christian censors. Late as the extant tangible traces of such 
passages may seem, both in MSS. and prints, the legal basis for 
such official expurgations and the pressing need for them on the 
part of cautious owners of such MSS. can be shown to have existed 
ever since Constantine the Great and the Emperors Theodosius 
and Valentinianus.”* 

Under these circumstances it may be well for the reader to 
compare the distribution of dots (indicating irrecoverable deletions) 
and of words in small print (indicating possible restorations of 
words wholly or partly corrected by the censor) over the page con- 
stituting our texts vestitutus, with the reproduction of a censored 
text from a Jewish anti-Christian work on our PI. v1. 

No one, I think, can fail to observe the close analogy in the 
aspect of Pl. v1. and p. 61. In both texts whole passages con- 
sisting of several lines have been obliterated ; in both the correc- 
tions are frequently confined to single words or even parts of words, 

2 Prof. H. Windisch, Joc. cit., p. 281: ‘ It is incredible that a historian may 
delude himself into believing that we could, with the means at our disposal, 
recover the lost original text.’ This, however, is not at all the opinion of those 
who have made the modus dicendi and the copia verborum of Josephus the object 
of special study. The attempted reconstruction is in no way more difficult or 
more uncertain than the average restorations of badly damaged inscriptions or 
papyri. I am doing for the Testimonium Flavianum what Furtwaengler did for 
the Aegina sculptures when he freed them from the awkward restorations of 
Thorwaldsen and attempted to recover the original compositions. Neither is 
there any ‘combinatory magic’ (M. Dibelius) about it, nor do 1 cherish any 
illusions about the result. I know that parts of the original are irrecoverably lost, 
The restoration offered on p. 61 is accepted as ‘a highly plausible conclusion’ by 
Burton Scott Easton in the Anglican Theolog. Review (1930). Α. Ὁ. Nock (Class. 
Review, Dec. 1929) says: ‘It has the merit of doing justice to the facts observed 


by Burkitt and by Norden alike. It may be right: σώζει τὰ φαινόμενα.᾽ 
2. See below, Appendix Iv. 


58 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


changes designed to convert an objectionable into a harmless 
statement. The reproduction of an uncensored copy of the re- 
spective page of Jacob ben Asher’s Arba‘ Turim side by side with 
the reproduction of the censored text, as shown in Pl. vi., would 
show differences of exactly the same kind as the two texts of the 
Testtmonium printed on pp. 59 f. and 61 respectively. 

Considered quite objectively, this seems to be a new, weighty, 
and very concrete argument and far beyond the realm of mere 
hypothesis, an argument never before taken into account in this 
connexion and which may yet very well turn the balance in favour 
of the solution here proposed of this extremely vexed problem. 


TESTIMONIUM JOSEPHI DE JESU CHRISTO. TEXTUS RECEPTUS 
CUM APPARATU CRITICO 

Vide: Andreae Bosii, Evercitationem in periocham Josephi de Jesu 
Christo, Jena, 1673, c. 2, § 45. 

Caroli Daubuzii, appendicem in Havercampii editionis, vol. ii. p. 191. 

Bened. Niese, Josephi Flavii opera, vol. iv., Berol., 1890, p. 1513. 

Théodore Reinach, Revue des Etudes Juives, 1897, p. 3. 

Johannes Aufhauser, Antike Jesuszeugnisse, Kleine Texte fiir Vorle- 
sungen und Ubungen, hrsg. von H. Lietzmann, Nr. 126, Bonn, 1913, p. 1of. 
(2. Auflage 1925). 

Kurt Linck, De antiquissimis veterum quae ad Jesum Nazarenum spec- 
fant testimonus, Ὁ. 3. Religionsgeschichtliche Versuche und Vorarbeiten, 
hrsg. von Richard Wiinsch u. Ludwig Deubner, Bd. xiv., Heft 1, p. 3, Giessen, 
[913-14. 

Leo Wohleb, Das Testimonium Flavianum, Rém. Quartalschrift, xxxv., 
1927, p. 155. 


Codices, qui xviii. librum Antiquitatwm continent, hi sunt : 


A, Ambr. F 128 sup. 5. fere xi. membr. (vide PI. VI.) ; 
‘M, Med. plut. 69 cod. Io s. fere xv. chart. ; 
W, Vat. gr. n. 984 membr. rescriptus anno 1354. 


Praeter codices manuscriptos nonnullis locis etiam alii fontes 
adhibendi erunt nempe hi : 


E. ἢ, 6. epitoma Antiquitatum,) cuius maxime est adhibendus 
cod. Busbekianus olim Constantinopolitanus, qui invenitur in 
bibliotheca olim Caesarea Vindobonensi inter historicos Graecos 
no. 22; ad nonnullos locos sanandos praeterea consulendus est 
cod. Laur. plut. 69, 23. 


Lat. h. e. versio Latina, quae dicitur Rufini, vide Nieseanae 
editionis praef, vol. i. p. xxvii sqq., et p. lix sqq. 

FE gesippus ἢ. e. versio Latina, quae S. Ambrosii Mediolanensis 
Opus primum esse creditur sed potius Isaaco, alias Hilario aut 
Gaudentio, qui dicitur Ambrosiaster (supra, p. 15,,,), tribuenda est, 


+ Vide Niese, praef. vol. iv. p. iii sq. 


as Gio om fre νὰ Bp Seip ore Cresta Des yw δύναταρ ae eds Les 
Gari hépe oh peop srare not ney δατετα μτεοίντἐκἰμκὰ cer Oy ας 

clioy " Ὁ εδέωσλττθ αι γκεισείκα αἷμ ee can 6 UEC TOD 
Gas τις κε Γύνάτα Ne μουτοντούτομττομ ores uo 


. 07 


p> has agape 2 CAL μέρ Lis ppp 
rapa Ne yoop Sp γρομταοιί τίσ Dr Decrlecspoc ay fe οί αστος 
raph \oplieraph He Nee msc ps ® [GtmarerQo tr μέ ψὶ οὐδωζγσ. ‘ 


τπατρλουσ δεξιοὶ τοῦ CoN luiliocs Gurls ys yo’ ἢ Oo ourec 
Liss” μὰ ἄυτον Sy δά g Grr pore ότττο μ ty Deum tipi 
cron pt Garter bet wha τεῦττο σ —ertfarrousd υ ἐς Gara oxy το 
ὀιτευτυσετῦττομ rari σαμτές" Sopot le yap οὐττοιστερίπτίω 
deo une p αὐγοσίκαμ QS pt rey fd oprarpe hlray ronda! 
“τω με pus piararép i Girreuprau μείσεο Gelloroyt 
Gekpup creer χειαῖαμ Su crweriu NS ὦ μομευστμόῴομ, 


‘ous bare perwe «τὸ Super, Ket ὕτνττοισαὐτοισ χρό 
ξ΄ 
THE OLDEST EXTANT MS. OF THE CHRISTIANISED VERSION OF THE TE STIMONIUM FLAVIANUM IN BOOK XV II] OF THE ‘ ANTIQUITIES’ 
(CODEX AMBROSIANUS F128 SUPERIOR) 


AN ELEVENTH CENTURY COPY OF THE EXPURGATED JOSEPHUS EDITION PUBLISHED AT THE TIME OF EMPEROR ALEXIOS KOMNENOS 
(SEE P. 59, LINE 29) 


A ALVTd 


TESTIMONY TO JESUS CHRIST BY JOSEPHUS 59 


quam denuo edidit Vincentius Ussani, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclest- 
asticorum Latinorum, vol. lxvi., Vindobonae MCMXXx., hb: i1.,, C222, 
pp. 163 s., lin. 24-I. 

S. Hieronymi versio latina, De Vir. IUl., 13. 

Zonaras, chron. i. 478, qui epitomam supralaudatam (E) ad- 
hibuit.' 

Exc. h. e. Excerpta, quae ex Josepho Constantinus Porphyro- 
genitus in titulos de virtutibus et vitis et de legationibus recepit,” 
quorumque hodie adeuntur praecipue Excerpta codicis Peiresciani 
nunc Turonensis, et codicis Ursiniani nunc Vaticani gr. 1418.* 

Suidas, 5.0. Ἰώσηπος, ed. G. Bernhardy, Halis et Brunsvigae, 
1653, [.1,:p.2,, 041. 

Eusebius, Hist. eccl., i. 11. 7; Dem. evang., Ὧι, Ἐς, 105; 
Theoph. 5. 44; vide Ed. Schwartz, GCS, 9. 3, p. clxxxvi s. 

B. h. e. Belli Judaici nonnulli codd., qui idem illud testimonium 
continent : M,4 V,° Rost.,* T,? Neapolitanus,® Coislinianus ® ; nec 
non et alia, quae infra laudantur, testimonia Malalae, Cedreni 
Isidori Pelusiotae, Sozomeni, Mich. Glycae, etc. 

Iam sequantur verba, quae hodie Ant. Jud., XViili. 3. 3, ὃ 63 sq. 
leguntur : 


Γίνεται δὲ!" κατὰ τοῦτον"! τὸν ypovov™ "Inaods,’’ σοφὸς ἀνήρ,"" 
εἴγε αὐτὸν ἄνδρα λέγειν χρή. Ἢν yap παραδόξων ἔργων ποιητής, 


διδάσκαλος © ἀνθρώπων τῶν ἡδονῇ τἀληθῆ δεχομένων, καὶ 
1 IX. Krumbacher, Gesch. byz. Lit. (*), 370 Sq., 372. 

2 Vide Niese, praef. vol. i. p. xxix, lxi sq. ; iil. Ὁ. xlii. 

2 [bid., vol. iii. p. xiv. 4 Tbid,, vol. vi. pp. vii, xxxi, Ixx. 

6 Ibid., pp. ix, xxxvi, lxxi. 6 Ibid., pp. xvii, xlix, Ixxi. 

? Ibid., pp. xvii, xlii, Ixxi. 8 Jbid., p. xiv. 9 [bid., p. xvii. 


10 δὴ E; ἣν pro γίνεται, Cedrenus, Hist. comp., p. 345 ed. Bonn. ‘ Egesippus ’ 
et auctor versionis latinae, quae Rufino tribuitur, et Hieronymus, ‘ fuit autem 
eisdem temporibus . . . 

1. κατ᾽ ἐκεῖνον, Eus., Dem. ; ‘ illo in tempore,’ Egesippus. 

12 Cedrenus, loc. cit., ‘xara τὸν καιρὸν τοῦτον. Idem, Isidor. Pelus., lib. iv. 
ep. 225, Cod. Vat. gr. 650. Versio latina dicta Rufini: ‘ eisdem temporibus ᾽ -- 
ὑπὸ τοὺς αὐτοὺς χρόνους, ut scribit Josephus ἀρχ. xviii. 3. 4, ὃ 65: ‘ istis tempori- 
bus,’ epist. Lentuli (infra, p. vi, ὦ. 2) =" κατὰ τούσδε τοὺς xpévous,”” h. 6. ‘nunc.’ 

12 "Ἰησοῦς τις, Eusebii, Hist. eccl., cod. Paris, 1430 s. xi praep. codd., quidam. 

14 ἀνὴρ σοφός, Niceph., Callisti hist. eccl. libvi, Migne Patr. Gr. 145, 747=' vir 
sapiens,’ quod praebent S. Hieronymus et Ambrosiaster (Rufinus : ‘ sapiens vir’). 
ἄνθρωπον ἀγαθὸν καὶ δίκαιον, Malalas, loc. cit. (cf. infra, p. ἵν, ο. 7, 46 5. Joanne Bapt., 
qui a Christiano ‘ Antiquitatum Iudaicorum’ correctore ἀνὴρ ἀγαθός, a Josepho ipso 
autem ἀνὴρ ἄγριος appellatus est), et Philippus Sidetes, Bratke T. u. U., ΝΕ, iv. 3, 
1897, p- 363-11: 

15 χρὴ ἄνδρα αὐτὸν λέγειν, transpos. Exc. ; αὐτὸν λέγειν ἄνδρα χρή, transpos, B. Jo. 
Malalas Chronogr., lib. το, p. 319, ed. Oxon. : “εἴπερ dpa τὸν τοιοῦτον ἄνθρωπον δεῖ 
λέγειν καὶ μὴ Gedy.” Verba “' εἴγε ἄνδρα αὐτὸν λέγειν χρή ” in codice ante octavum 
saeculum exarato, qui penes J. Vossium fuit, latine expressa non erant, ut ipse 
attestatur. Vide Ittigii in Havercampii editionis, vol. ii., suppl. p. 91, verba: 
‘quin etiam innuit Vossius sic alia quoque quae consuluit exemplaria adhibere.’ 
Daubuz, loc. cit., p. 192. 

16 διδάσκαλον λόγων ἀληθῶν, Hermias Sozomenos, Hist. eccl., lib. 1., ο. 1., p. 8 
ed, Bonn. ἀληθείας, Sozom., loc. cit. 

17 τἀληθῆ σεβομένων, Eus., Πεη}.} ἡδονῇ σὺν, Suprascr, M2 ἃ. 


60 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


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TO φῦλον. 


ANGLICE : 


‘ Now about this time there arose Jesus, a wise man, if indeed he 
may be calledaman. For he was a doer of marvellous acts, a teacher 
of such men as receive the truth with delight. And he won over to 
himself many Jews and many also of the Greek nation, He was the 
Christ. And when, on the indictment of the principal men among us, 
Pilate had sentenced him to the cross, still those who before had loved 
him did not cease [to do so]. For he appeared to them on [lit. 
‘having Ἴ the third day alive again, as the divinely-inspired pro- 
phets had told—these and ten thousand other wonderful things— 
concerning him. And until now the race of Christians, so named from 
him, is not extinct.’ 


1 τῶν ᾿Ιουδαίων B; Eus. praep. ; Judeorum Lat. ; τοῦ ᾿Ιουδαϊκοῦ, Eus., Dem. 

2 καὶ om. Exc. 

* ἀπὸ τοῦ B; Eus. praep. et fortasse versionis Latinae exemplar, in qua 
‘ex gentibus.’ 

* τοῦ ‘EXAnmKod exc. ; τοὺς ᾿Ελληνικούς Corr. A. 

" ἀπηγάγετο, Euseb., Hist. eccl., codd.—aliter ignoti—apud Th. Reinachium et 
C, A. Muellerum laudati ; ἠγάγετο Χριστός; Cedrenus, loc. cit. 

* A Cedreno, loc. cit., hoc Josephi testimonium allegante omissa sunt ὁ Χριστὸς 
οὗτος ἦν. Eadem verba desunt in S. Ambrosii vel Ambrosiastri versione latina 
(Ps. Egesippi, lib. ii. c. 12), necnon in antiquissima sine loci et temporis nota 
editione versionis latinae, quae Rufini sub nomine fertur (Bibl. Nat., Payris., 
Reserve H 287). Vide Daubuz, loc. cit., p. 192. De S. Hieronymi lectione, 
‘ et credebatur esse Christus,’ vide supra, p. 54. 

* S. Hieronym. (De Viris illustr., 1 3, ‘invidia nostrorum principum ’) in codice 
suo “φθόνῳ "’ pro “ évdelter’’ invenit., 

τῶν παρ᾽ ἡμῖν ἀρχόντων, Eus., Dem. ° Ante οὐκ in marg. σεβάζειν add. M 2. 

10. ἐξεπαύσαντο, Eus. praep. codd. plurimi; ἐπαύσαντο κηρύσσοντες περὶ αὐτοῦ, 
Cedren.; ““πίστεως οὐκ ἐπαύσαντο" invenit S. Hieronymus (‘ perseveraverunt 
in fide’). Vide B, J.1. ὃ 94, ““ ἐπαύσαντο πίστεως." 

1 οἵγε, W Exc. 12 πρῶτον αὐτὸν, M E, 

15. ἔχων, om. Eus., Dem; mdadwv,om. Sozom., loc. cit. ; Mich. Glyc. Ann., iii. p. 436, 
Bonn, Egesippus, Hieronymus, Cassiodorus, Hist. trip., 1.2. Vide Ussani, 
infra, Ὁ. 62 n. 1. 

4 +e, om. W Exc. 19 περὶ αὐτοῦ θαυμάσια, om. Eus., Dem. 

16 Els ἔτι re, E B Eus. praep. ; εἰς re, A W Exc. ; εἰσέτι kal, σέτι, 1. Tas. M. 2, τε 
suprascr. M 2; ὅθεν εἰσέτι, Eus., Dem.: “ets τε vov,’’ Suid.; “εἰς δὲ τὸ viy,’’ 1514. Pelus., 
lib. iv., epist. 225, Cod. Vatic. ; ἰδὲ τοίνυν, idem, ed, Paris ; “οὐκέτι vov,”” Sermo 
Macarii, Acta Sanctorum, Maii tom., p. 149. 

17 εἐὲ ἀπὸ τοῦδε τῶν Xpicriavdv,”’ transposuit Eus., Dem., τῶν, ὧν, 1. ras. corr. A. 

8 ὠνομασμένων, M2. E. Exc. B. Eus. praep., om. Eus., Dem.; ὠνομασμένον, corr. 
Niese. 

19 ἐπέλειπε, Exc, ; ἐξέλιπε, 1514, Pelus., loc. cit. 


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TESTIMONY TO JESUS CHRIST BY JOSEPHUS δὲ 


ΕἼΚΑΝΙΙ JOSEPHI ‘ ANTIQUITATES JUDICAE,’ XVIIL., 3. 3. 
TEXTUS REstTITUTUS 
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θορύβων ὃ ἸΗΣΟΥ͂Σ ΤΙΣ ΣΟΦιστὴξ 5 ANHPS EITE? ANAPA 
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IOTAAIOTS, TIOAAOTS AE*® KAI TOT ἙΛΛΗΝΙΚΟΥ͂ " 
ATITHTATETO 3 καὶ (ὑπὸ ae) 21 Q ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ εἶναι ἐνομίζετο 35 


KAI ATTON 35 ) BNABIEE = TON ΠΡΩ ἸῺΝ, \NAPON TAP? 
HMIN® STATPOI EMITETIMHKOTOS”?’ ΠΙΛΑΤΟΥ OTK 
KITATZANTO θορυβεῖν 3 ΟἹ TO TIPOTON ΑΓΑΠΗΣΑΝΤῈΣ 39, 
ΦΑΝΗναι δ TAP ATTOIS* ἔδοξε TPITHN HMEPAN 
EXON * [θανάτου ILAAIN ]** ΖΩ͂Ν, TON @EION ITPO®HTON 85 
ΤΑΥ͂ΤΑ TE KAI AAAA MTPIA ΠΕΡῚ ATTOT ΘΑΥΜΑΣΊΑ * 
KIPHKOTON*®, EIS ETI KAI ΝΥ͂Ν 8. TON XPISTIANON 
ANO TOTAE QNOMASMENON® OTK ETEAIIE” TO 
OYTAON*; “AVE, 3. τς. τι ἐς & KAI THO TOTS 
ΑΥ̓ΤΟΥ͂Σ XPONOTS ETEPON TI AEINON E@OPTBEI* 
TOTS IOTAAIOTS,. 


N 


1 Cf. supra, p. 50 not. ret 2. 5. Cf. supra, p.51. 3 : ee supra, Ὁ. 50 not. 
4 Cf. supra, pp. 46 f. et 50 not. 1. . Supra, p. 51 not. 2. 
86 Cf. supra, p. 52. ” Cf. supra, p.52. ὃ + Cf supra, pp. 51 f. 
9. Cf. supra, p. 52 not. 2. 10 Cf. supra, Ὁ. 52 lin. 13. 
11-12 Hic aliquid deletum esse videtur ; cf. supra, p. 54 ὃ 3. 
13 Cf. supra, p. 53 not. ret2. 34 Cf. supra, p. 53. 15 Cf. supra, p. 53 not. 3. 


pias 


16 Cf. supra, p. 53. 1” Cf. supra, p. 54 ὃ 3. 

18 Cf. van Liempt, /.c., p. 111.5. 19 Ch. Bi J. We § 268, 

20 Cf. supra, p. 60 not. 5. *t Cf. supra, p. 54 lin, 28. 

33 Cf. supra, p. 54, lineam27ss. “5. Cf. Antiqg., xviii. § 3145 xx. § 74. 

"3 Cf. Antiqq., xix. § 133; xiii. § 306. > Cf. van Liempt, p. 112, 
*6 Cf. Antiqq., xx. §§ 2, 198. “1 Cf. Antigg., xvili. §§ 68, 255, 262, 294. 

*8 Cf. supra, p. 60 not. το. 4 Cf. supra, p. 55 not. 1. 


39 Cf. supra, p. 55 1. 30 f. 


31 Cf. Celsus, ii. 70: ‘‘ rots ἑαυτοῦ θιασώταις κρύβδην mapepaivero.”’ 


32 Cf. supra, p. 55 1. 30. 33 Cf. supra, p. 55, ultima linea. 

34 Cf. supra,p.561.4; 6onot.13. ὃ. Cf. Antiqgg., vill. ὃ 234; x. § 35. ᾿ 
36 Cf. supra, p. 60 not. 15. 37 Cf. supra, p. 28 not. 1; p. 55, 1. 37 ft. 
38 Cf. supra, p. 56. ὃ Cf. 8. 7, Ve § 162; 

40 Cf. supra, p. 56 not. 3. 41 Cf. supra, p. 56 not. 2 


42 Deest forsitan aliquid in principio capitis xviil., 3, 4; cf. infra, App. XV., 
not. 1. 43 Cf. supra, p. 42 lineas 35 85. 


62 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


ANGLICE: 


Restored Text 


Now about this time arose (an 
occasion for new disturbances) a 
certain Jesus, a wizard of a man, 
if indeed he may be called a man 
(who was the most monstrous of 
all men, whom his disciples call a 
son of God, as having done won- 
ders such as no man hath ever yet 
done). . He was in fact a 
teacher of astonishing tricks to 
such men as accept the abnormal 
with delight. 


And he seduced many Jews and 
many also of the Greek nation, and 
(was regarded by them as) the 
Messiah. 


And when, on the indictment of 
the principal men among us, 
Pilate had sentenced him to the 
cross, still those who before had 
admired him did not cease (to 
rave). For it seemed to them 
that having been dead ! for three 
days, he had appeared to them 
alive again,t as the divinely-in- 
spired prophets had foretold— 
these and ten thousand other 
wonderful things—concerning him. 
And even now the race of those 
who are called ‘ Messianists ’ after 
him is not extinct. 


Traditional Text 


Now about this time arose Jesus, 


a wise man, 
if indeed he may be called a man. 


For he was a doer of marvellous 
acts, a teacher of such men as 
receive the truth with delight. 


And he won over to himself 
many Jews and many also of the 
Greek nation. He was the Christ. 


And when, on the indictment of 
the principal men among us, 
Pilate had sentenced him to the 
cross, still those who before had 
loved him did not cease (to do so). 
lor he appeared to them on (lit. 
‘having ’). the third day alive 
again, as the divinely-inspired 
prophets had told—these and ten 
thousand other wonderful things 
—concerning him. 


And until now the race of Chris- 
tians, so named from him, is not 
extinct. 


! According to a recent publication of Prof. Vincente Ussani (Casinensia, 


Montecassino, 1929, pp. 612-14) which reached me after this chapter was in type 
and had been put into pages, the word ‘again’ is a later addition to the text of 
Josephus, unknown to the so-called Egesippus, to St. Jerome and other Latin 
as well as Greek witnesses (see above, p. 60 n. 13). This precious find makes 
me think that even as ‘tlervum’ (‘again,’ πάλιν in the Greek MSS.) the word 
davarov=mortis after triduum, above, p. 56 1. 2, was added by a corrector to an 
original intentionally vague, ‘For after three days he had appeared to them 
alive,’ in order to make Josephus attest that Jesus had died and risen again from 
death, whereas the real wording of Josephus left it an open question whether 
the condemned Messiah had died on the cross or had somehow escaped and 
reappeared alive and free. Anyhow, here is a new proof that the text has been 
tampered with by Christian scribes. 


IV 


THE ALLEGED SILENCE OF JOSEPHUS’ ‘JEWISH 
WAR’ ABOUT JESUS 


S is well known, Josephus does not ment esus at all in _ 
the Greek text of his earlier work, the Jewish War, written 
some twenty years before the Jewish Antiquities. This fact 

remains a very oublesome problem in any enquiry into Christian 
origins, even if the partial authenticity of the Test¢monium be 
admitted. For if we were to suppose that Josephus knew nothing 
about Jesus in the years immediately following the capture of 
Jerusalem, whilst twenty years later he thought it necessary to 
insert a whole chapter on this ‘ sophist,’ ! the partisans of the non- 
historicity theory might well argue that during that interval Jose- 
phus had become acquainted with the Gospel of Mark, composed, 
probably, near the Flavian court shortly after A.D. 75,2 or even 
with Matthew, written some time during the reign of Domitian.* 
Such an argument, it is true, would at best be but an ingenious 
conjecture and devoid of all textual basis, there being no point of 
contact between either of the two Gospels on the one hand and the 
Testimonium on the other. Even so, the very fact that Josephus 
could ignore at first the ‘ disturbance ’ caused by the appearance 
of Jesus, and then repair this seeming omission in a later and more 
detailed account of the same period, could not but give a certain 
support to the opinion of those inclined to minimize the political 
significance of the events connected with Jesus’ name. For it is 
to be noted that such an omission and subsequent addition is by 
no means without parallel in the work of Josephus. For example, 
in the War he knows nothing about the messianic career of Me- 
nahem, the son of Judas of Galilee (A.D. 66), for the very simple 
reason that at the critical time he was prudently hiding in a secret 
back-chamber of the temple precinct, and it was only after the 
publication of his book that his readers drew his attention to the 
interesting incident he had missed. It is at first sight not at 
all unthinkable that similarly he should have known nothing of 


1 See above, p. 51 note 2, and p. 61 note 5. 
2 The teryminus post quem is given by the Christian legend of the torn veil 
exposed to the public in Rome since A.D. 75. See below, p. 147 n. 1. 
8 The date may be inferred from the story of the penny in the fish’s mouth, 
See my Ovpheus, London (Watkins), 1921, p. 93. 
63 


64 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


John the Baptist, likewise passed over in silence in the War, and 
of Jesus, and that what he reports about these men in his Antt- 
quities should have been wholly derived from subsequent informa- 
tion. Yet it must be admitted that such an omission would none 
the less diminish the political importance of the events connected 
with John and Jesus in the eyes of the modern historian. It 
would justify in a certain measure the opinions of scholars such as 
Ernest Renan? and Maurice Goguel,* who held that the Gospels 
magnified out of all proportion a series of facts which had passed 
almost unnoticed by the contemporaries. The cries of ‘Osanna, 
Son of David, King of the Jews,’ are thus supposed, according to 
this view, to have been drowned in the general noise of an excited 
Oriental crowd of pilgrims. The overturning of the tables of the 
money-changers is regarded as a single trivial incident among the 
many petty cases of local brawling and personal bickerings so 
common at the time of the great pilgrimages. 

It is unnecessary to point out to any one conversant with mass 
psychology and with the Oriental mentality how utterly impossible 
such an interpretation is in fact. Could any one think of a 
similar event happening in modern India and remaining unknown 
to an indifferent outside world in England or Europe generally ? 
Nor is it conceivable, should another such incident occur, say, in 
modern Egypt, that a native Arab historian writing a history 
of the Nationalist movement some fifty years afterwards should 
pass over in silence such an occurrence as altogether too trivial. 
Nor, again, is it permissible to adduce, with Prof. Dibelius of 
Heidelberg,’ the lowly social strata in which Jesus and his Galilaean 
fishermen moved as the reason why the events in question are 
supposed to have been ignored by the contemporary historians. 
Indeed, every student of political history knows that no ruling 
class can afford to ignore these strata in a subject country; 
and should he be naive enough to believe that, any high official of 
a European foreign or colonial office will teach him better. Nor 
does anything in Josephus’ work justify such an assumption. 
On the contrary, the weaver Jonathan of Cyrene and his indigent 
followers, as also Theudas the Samaritan and the Egyptian 
messiah appearing under Festus, all of them belonged to the very 
riff-raff of ancient society, to say nothing of the slave Simon men- 
tioned by Tacitus ὁ as the would-be successor of Herod the Great. 
It would seem certain, therefore, that no amount of belittling of 
the events narrated in the Gospels will satisfactorily account for 
Josephus’ apparent strange silence about both John the Baptist 
and Jesus in his earlier work. 


' Vie de Jésus, 13th ed., Paris, 1867, p. 388. 
* Revue de l’histotve des religions, 1926, p. 42. 
ὁ Theologische Blatter, vi. (1927), cc. 213 sqq. * See above, p. 47 line 7. 


THE SILENCE OF THE ‘ JEWISH WAR’ ABOUT JESUS 65 


One might think, of course, that Josephus might have had a 
personal motive for withholding these particular facts. It has been 
suggested that he did not care, for apologetic reasons, to mention 
the messianist hopes of his people. But, if that be true, why does 
he speak without the slightest reserve of Theudas, of Judas of 
Galilee, and of all the other messiahs, keeping a diplomatic silence 
only in the case of Jesus? All these explanations really explain 
nothing, and the true solution must be sought in an entirely 
different direction. 

In the first place, it is well to note that the striking difference 
between Tacitus, who knows and mentions ! the execution of Jesus 
by Pilate,? and Josephus, who, though obviously drawing on the 
same sources, seems to ignore that event, represents by no means 
an isolated case. An exact parallel is found in the equally puzzling 
fact that Josephus in his Antiquities and Philo Judaeus together 
mention four other uprisings in the administration of Pilate, whilst 


Tacitus,® writing on the same period, merely remarks ‘sub Tvberto | 


quies’ (i.e. in Judaca). One might feel tempted to explain the 
divergence by supposing that Tacitus did not think the incidents 
mentioned by Josephus and Philo important enough to figure in 
his work. Yet in the same passage Tacitus adds that the Jews 
rose in arms (avma-potius sumpsere) against Caligula when this mad 
emperor insisted on placing his statue in the interior of the Jewish 
sanctuary in Jerusalem. On the other hand, Josephus knows of 
no such violent resistance to the projects of the imperial megalo- 
maniac. He seems to know only of piteous mass-delegations to 
the sensible governor of Syria, Petronius; of peaceful petitions 
backed by men and women of all ranks and ages; and, as the nearest 
approach to anything that could be called active opposition, of a 
threatened general strike of the Jewish peasant-farmers ; but there 
is not a word about armed resistance and a threatened uprising, 
prevented only by the timely assassination of the tyrant in far- 
away Rome. Here, then, it is Tacitus who appears to magnify a 
peaceful and strictly constitutional protest into a revolutionary 
movement. 


1 Hist., v. 9. 

Σ In view of the fact that Tacitus mentions Jesus in connection with the 
accusation against the Christians of having set Rome on fire, it is very curious to 
remember that the standard text of Josephus does not contain a single word about 


the burning of the capital of the wor d, although it happened while he him- 
self was in Rome (Corssen, Zeitschy. f. neulest Wiss., Xv., 1914, P. 139). The 
simplest explanation of this startling fact would be to suppose that Josephus did 
devote a chapter to the great catastrophe, which must have been a terrible blow 
to the Jews of Rome, but that it was deleted because it spoke of the Christians 
and the founder of their religion in the same way as Tacitus, only with many more 
objectionable details. The phrase ‘all these subjects being so hackneyed, I 
propose to pass over,’ etc,, in B.J., ii. ὃ 251, 1s probably inserted as a bridge over 
ἃ vast lacuna caused by the censor’s deletions. Cp. above, p. 12 n. 4, on the 
mutilated report of Dio Cassius. 3 Loc. cit. 


E 


_— 


66 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


Thus it is obviously impossible to explain the divergence be- 
tween Tacitus and Josephus, both using the same source, by any 
presumed tendency on the part of the former; for in one case he 
would be accused of having toned down the narrative of his source 
until nothing is left of its historical contents, and in another, a 
few lines further, of having exaggerated a report of his authority 
so as to convert a series of peaceful proceedings into an armed 
rebellion. 

Applying this analogy to our central problem, the silence of 
Josephus about Jesus the Naséraean, I venture to submit the follow- 
ing explanation. Supposing, as suppose we must, that Josephus 
did give proper space to the events connected with the life and 
death of the founder of the Christian religion, and supposing also, 
as well we might, that the chapter in question was no less hostile 
to Jesus than the parallel passages are to Theudas, Judas of Galilee, 
and the Samaritan and Egyptian messiahs, would it be conceivable 
that this passage could have escaped the hands of the ecclesiastical 
censors at a time when Christianity was powerful enough to exer- 
cise such a censorship ? The answer to the question is obvious. 
No ecclesiastical authority would have allowed the circulation of a 
book which treated the founder of its religion as a ‘ robber chief’ 
commanding a handful of rebels against the established society, as 
a ‘magician’ who through sham miracles and ‘ signs of liberation’! 
worked upon the imagination of the multitude, just as the sorcerers 
mentioned elsewhere in the pages of Josephus. No Christian 
scribe would copy such passages, insulting to the founder of the 
Christian religion. Nor are we left to conjecture alone, for parallels 
are indeed not wanting. In precisely this manner an obviously 
insulting passage in Lucian? has been deleted, and after the death 
of the Emperor Julian Apostata the most striking attacks against 
Christianity were suppressed in the ‘ new edition’ of Eunapius. 
A passing glance at PI. vii. will easily convince the reader of how 
little a Christian censor thought of destroying a whole chapter con- 
cerning Christianity in a Jewish book simply because it appeared 
to him ‘ blasphemous.’ 

If this explanation be accepted, for the present, as a working 
hypothesis, what else is needed to explain the silence of Josephus 
on the subject of the crucifixion, of which Tacitus certainly knew ? 
What else is needed to explain also the strange silence of Tacitus 
on the troubles happening in Judaea in the reign of Tiberius ? 
Who can exclude offhand the possibility that after the now enig- 
matically short words of the historian, ‘sab Tiberio quies,’ some 
such words as ‘brevis turbata,’ etc., may have been destroyed, and 

B.J., ii. § 259. 


1 
* Peregy. Prot., ch. xiii. The gap was first noticed in Gesner’s edition. 
* See above, p. 12 ἢ, 3. 


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THE SILENCE OF THE ‘ JEWISH WAR’ ABOUT JESUS 67 


that the original text had a reading something like this: ‘ under 
Tiberius a period of quiet (was interrupted through Pontius Pil- 
atus’ recklessness, who carried the standards of his troops with the 
portrait medallions of the Emperor, etc. . . . and by a man rising 
in protest against this violation of the law of the Jews, pretending 
to be a descendant of their old kings,’ etc.) ? 

Had Tacitus thus represented Jesus as the fomenter of all the 
troubles which occurred in Judaea under Tiberius, would the Chris- 
tian copyists have transcribed the passage and would the Christian 
censor have tolerated it and let it pass ἡ 

The same possibility may account for the remarkable fact that 
Josephus’ present text knows nothing of an armed uprising of the 
Jews against Caligula’s command to set up his statue in the temple.’ 
This is what he says: ‘Gaius .. . sent Petronius with an army 
to Jerusalem to instal in the sanctuary statues of himself... . 
§ 186: Petronius accordingly with three legions . . . left Antioch 
on the march for Judaea. § 187: Among the Jews some had no 
belief in the rumours of war, others believed but saw no means of 
defence; alarm, however, soon became universal, the army having 
reached Ptolemais.’ Is it probable, in view of what happened on 
other occasions, that this time none of the Jews thought of desper- 
ate armed resistance against what they considered the supreme 
outrage on their national religion ? Or is it not more probable 
that the original text of Josephus (just like the parallel passage in 
Tacitus) contained the tripartite phrase : ‘ Among the Jews, some 
had no belief in the rumours of war, others believed but saw no 
means of defence (still others armed themselves and took to the 
mountains, saying . . .)’? Ifsuch a phrase has been excised by 
the censor, this could be explained only by the assumption that 
Josephus somehow attributed this armed uprising to the Chris- 
tians, even as Tacitus, for example, says that ‘the pernicious super- 
stition,’ quelled for a brief space of time through the crucifixion of 
the Christ under Pilate, ‘ soon broke out again.’ Since we read in 
St. Jerome? that the prophecy about the ‘abomination of desola- 
tion’ in Daniel may be understood as referring either to the image 
of the Emperor Tiberius which Pilate set up in the temple or to the 
statue of Gaius which that emperor wanted to place in the sanc- 
tuary, and since on the other hand the apocalyptic prophecies of 
Jesus 4 admonish his disciples to take to the mountains as soon as 
the ‘ abomination of desolation’ is set up in the sanctuary, why 
should not Josephus have attributed to the influence of the pro- 


1 See, on the contrary, the Latin version of ‘ Egesippus,’ ii. 5. 5, p- 140 f., ed. 
Ussani: ‘ mortuo Tiberio Gaius successit, qui dominum se ac deum vidert aique 
appellavi volens causas dedit JUDAEIS GRAVISSIMAE SEDITIONIS . . . 

2 In Mait. xxiv. (opp. ed. Vallarsi, vii. 194). ied | Pa GB 

4 Mark xiii. 14-20; Matt, xxiv. 15-22. 


68 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


phecies of Jesus and to the agitation of his disciples the action of 
those who in Tacitus’ words ‘took to armed resistance’ against 
Caligula? Such a passage, had it existed, would assuredly not 
have been tolerated by a Christian censor or copied by Christian 
scribes. 

So far, let us repeat, these conjectures would seem nothing 
but a very bold hypothesis: all the same, they would seem infin- 
itely more plausible, even without further support, than the ex- 
tremely questionable hypothesis of the non-historicity of Jesus, or 
the little more probable assumption of the essential insignificance 
of the Gospel events, or Josephus’ unknown private reasons which 
are held responsible for his passing over in silence what he knew 
about Jesus, whilst he does not appear to impose upon himself the 
slightest reserve when he comes to speak of the other messiahs of 
that troublesome period. 

However that may be—and it is only fair to admit that we 
cannot arrive at any higher degree of probability on this point 
without the utilization of further material hitherto neglected, 
which will be analysed in the following chapters 1—it is certainly 
a noteworthy fact that Josephus’ silence about Jesus in the 
Jewish War was felt to be a defect at quite an early period, with 
the result that attempts were made to remedy this state of affairs 
by a bold insertion of the Testimonium into the War. The reason 
for this procedure, which we shall analyse presently on the basis of 
the reproduction given in Pl. vi., is easy to see. Of course, for the 
᾿Ιστορίαι, the Collected Works of Josephus, his silence about Jesus 
in the War was of no importance, since the Testimonium passage 
in the Antiquities fully supplied the need of Christian readers. 
But it was quite different for the separate editions of the War, 
the popularity of which is attested by a considerable number of 
MSS. Here the pious would very certainly miss a reference to the 
Nasoraean Messiah, and the obvious remedy was simply to insert 
in some appropriate place in the Way the passages concerning 
the Baptist and Jesus as found in the Antiquities. In one group 
of MSS. this insertion was done in a very mechanical manner, 
the passages in question being put either at the beginning or at the 
end of the MS.? In the Codex Vossianus, now in the University 
Library of Leyden, on the other hand, we have the Testimonitum 
at the end of the second book of the War, followed by a number 
of curious supplementary lines subsequently deleted (see Pl. v1.), 
and unidentified by Niese. The whole insertion is not the work 
of the scribe but an addition written by a second hand, from which 


1 See below, pp. 383 ff. 

* Codd. Marc., 383 (saec. xi.-xii.) ; Vatic. gr., 148 (saec. xi.) ; Neapol. Mus., 
iii. B 17 (saec. xiv.) ; Philippicus (saec. xii.) ; Havniensis bibl. reg. major vet. 
fundi, No. 1510 (saec, xiv.) ; Coislin., 131 (saec. XIVv.), 


ἀγοϊτατανδιάκοω τὰς ωὐτῶν τε ζογέαε: Galak βξτελεν τῷ δοἸοῦλ να, τὸ τὸ ἀρ ααθυνῃ, 76... 

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Ἂς ‘$n e ΄ way ec ' ᾿ ἐφ “2 
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. ' te ν Om @ ? n fa . - τ“ > 
_ Webets jourratie: ἐρῶ δας δὲ ὧν κιὲν temas ἘΝ 


THE ‘TESTIMONIUM’ OUT OF ‘ ANTIQUITIES’ INSERTED INTO THE ‘WAR' 


AND FURTHER FALSIFIED BY AN ADDITION FROM A BOOK BY BISHOP HIPPOLYTOS OF ROME 
CODEX VOSSIANUS GRAEC. 72 OLIM PETAVIANUS OF THE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY, LEYDEN 


(SEE P. 59, NOTE 5; P. 68, LINES 37 FF: P 72, NOTE 1) 


1114 FLV Id 


THE SILENCE OF THE ‘ JEWISH WAR’ ABOUT JESUS 69 


it follows that the original scribe had purposely left a blank for such 
an insertion. Of the curious fact that the space thus provided 
was far too large for the insertion of the usual Testimonium Flavi- 
anum I can offer no other explanation than that the stribe found a 
passage of just this length in his original, blotted out by some 
censor in the brutal way which can be seen on fig. vil. Yet it is 
quite impossible that the deleted passage in question could have 
contained anything resembling the text filled in by the second 
scribe, to wit, the Testimonium, for in that case there would have 
been no reason for the interference of a Christian censor. Nor 
could it have contained anything about Jesus at all. For since the 
beginning of Pilate’s governorship is not mentioned before § 169, 
that is, at the beginning of the fifth line from the bottom of fig. VI., 
it follows that the space preceding line eighteen, that 15, pre- 
ceding the sentence reporting the beginning of Tiberius’ principate, 
must have dealt with some event or events falling into the last 
years of the reign of Augustus, whose death (A.D. 15) is mentioned 
at the top of § 168—more exactly, something fitting in between the 
death of Salome (A.D. 9-12) and the death of Augustus. 

A closer comparison of the two texts, the Antiquities and the 
War, will furnish the clue. In Ané., xvii. 31, the death of Salome 
is mentioned as occurring in the governorship of Marcus Ambi- 
bulus (or Ambivius), the successor of Coponius. Now, oddly 
enough, in the Greek War no Roman governor is mentioned be- 
tween Coponius (ii. § 117) and Pilate (ii. § 169), an omission which 
cannot but arouse our suspicion if we remember, as pointed out 
above (p. 17 f.), the tampering on the part of the Christians with 
this very chapter of the Antiquities. The object of these altera- 
tions, it will be recalled, was to falsify the true chronology of events 
so as to conceal the true date of the Passion. As a consequence 
the paragraphs dealing with Pilate’s predecessors ! had likewise to 
be ‘ doctored,’ or, if this seemed too difficult, deleted outright, in 
the Jewish War. A comparison of the two texts will easily show 
what has been suppressed in the extant text of the War. 


Β.7., Oy ἄν, ὃ TIF Ant., xviii. ὃ 29 

The territory of Archelaus was 
now (A.D. 6) reduced to a pro- 
vince, and Coponius, a Roman of When Coponius followed in 
the equestrian order, was sent out Judaea, who as I said (§ 20) came 
as governor, entrusted by Augus- out together with Quirinius, the 
tus with full powers even over life following thing happened... . 
and death. ... 


| They have survived in the Rumanian version of Josephus’ War. See below, 
Ρ. 70 23.4. 


70 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


§ 167 

When the monarchy of Arche- 
laus was converted into a province, 
Philip and Herod Antipas con- 
tinued to govern their tetrarchies ; 
... as for Salome, she at her 
death bequeathed her tetrarchy to 
Julia, the wife of Augustus, to- 
gether with Jamnia and the palm- 
groves of Phasaelis. 


| 
BLANK OF SEVERAL §§ IN. | 
CODEX VOSSIANUS | 


| 

δ 168 
On the death of Augustus, who 
had directed the State for fifty- 
seven years ... the empire of 


the Romans passed to Tiberius, 
son of Julia. -- " 


SS ee 


§ 169 


Pilate, being sent by Tiberius 
as governor of Judaea. 


δ 31 
After a short time, Coponius 
goes back to Rome, his successor 
in office being Marcus Ambibulus, 


under whose administration Sal- 
ome, King Herod’s sister, died 
and left Jamnia and the whole 
toparchy to Julia, that is, the plain 
of Phasaelis and Archelais, where 
there is a large culture of palm- 
trees with the best dates growing 
on them. 

After him follows Annius Rufus, 
under whose administration 
Caesar (Augustus) died, the second 
Emperor of Rome, who had reigned 


for fifty-seven years, etc. The 
successor of Caesar is Tiberius . . . 
by him the fifth governor, Valerius 
Gratus, successor to Annius Rufus, 
is sent to Judaea. 

Gratus, having done this (above, 
p. 18,;), goes back to Rome, having 
been eleven years in Judaea; Pon- 
tius Pilate, his successor, arrives. 


Were it not for the curious blank in the Codex Vossianus, one 


might be led to think that Josephus had at first been ignorant of 
the names and accomplishments of Marcus Ambibulus, Annius 
Rufus, and Valerius Gratus, and only in his later work had cor- 
rected this trifling omission. Yet in the light of this very blank it 
is much more probable that the passage thus deleted contained 
Josephus’ account of the three administrations in question. Such 
a passage, giving a short summary of the chief transactions of the 
three governors, ! something like what we find in A wt., xviii. 34 Sq., 
would very well fill the blank. It had to be deleted to make pos- 
sible the chronological falsification referred to above. Even 50, it 
is to be noted that the extant text of the War does not give an 
impression as though a period of ten years had elapsed between 
the accession of Tiberius and the nomination of Pilate. On the 
contrary, one is led to think that Pilate was the first governor 


1 The story of Valerius changing the high priests for a consideration, and being 
recalled because of this abuse, has survived in the Rumanian version of the Way. 
See below, p. 599 ll. 1-3, 


THE SILENCE OF THE ‘ JEWISH WAR’ ABOUT JESUS 71 


appointed by Tiberius, coming to Judaea immediately after the 
death of Augustus. 

As for the guess of the second scribe in filling the blank, it is 
plausible enough that he assumed the gap in question to have been 
caused by an expurgation of the Testimonium. He simply con- 
cluded that the obliteration in his original was the work of some 
mischievous Jew, a former owner of the MS. As a matter of 
fact, we shall see below (pp. 93 544.) that it was precisely this 
explanation which Robert of Cricklade, Giraldus Cambrensis, and 
Cardinal Baronius gave for the absence of the corresponding lines 
in the Hebrew version of Josephus. His readiness to insert the 
Testimonium in just this place merely proves that he took the 
crucial expression γίνεται in the sense of ‘ at that time was born * 
Jesus, a wise man, etc. A statement to the effect that the Messiah 
was born in the reign of Augustus would have seemed to him to be 
in perfect harmony with the chronology in Like 11. 1 sqq. Since 
the six lines of the Testimoniuwm were, however, too short to fill the 
blank left by the first scribe, the reviser saw fit to add the following 
lines : 5 


‘ All the righteous and the unrighteous will be led before the divine 
Logos; for to him has the Father given the judgment. And, ful- 
filling the will of the Father, he whom we call the Christ will appear 
as judge. For not even over you, ye Greeks, Minus and Rhadamanthys 
will be judges, but he whom God the Father has glorified. About him 
we have spoken elsewhere with more detail, to those who are seeking 
the truth. He will administer to each one the right judgment of the 
Father, and prepare what will be just to each according to his deeds. 
And when he giveth judgment all men, angels, and demons will be 
present and exclaim with one voice, saying: Just is thy decision. 
And the resounding of this voice will bring what is just to each party : 
to those who have acted well it will justly convey everlasting delight ; 
to the lovers of evil, however, eternal punishment. And for those 
an inextinguishable and never-ending fire is waiting, and a fiery 
worm, who will not destroy the body but out of an unperishing body 
pain will erupt and never leave them.’ 


As will be remembered, both the late Théodore Reinach and Dr. 


1 See above, p. 51 Il. 12 f. 

2 Niese, ed. maj., vol. vi. p. 57: “πάντες yap δίκαιοί τε Kai ἄδικοι ἐνώπιον τοῦ θεοῦ 
λόγου ἀχθήσονται. τούτῳ γάρ ὁ πατὴρ Thy κρίσιν δέδωκε. καὶ αὐτὸς βουλὴν πατρὸς 
ἐπιτελῶν κριτὴς παραγίνεται ὃν Χριστὸν προσαγορεύομεν. οὐδὲ γὰρ Μίνως καὶ ‘Pada- 
μανθυς κριταὶ καθ᾽ ὑμᾶς “ἕλληνες, ἀλλ᾽ ὃν ὁ θεὸς καὶ πατὴρ ἐδόξασε. περὶ οὗ ἐν ἑτέροις 
λεπτομερέστερον διεληλύθαμεν, πρὸς τοὺς ζητοῦντας τὴν ἀληθείαν. οὗτος τὴν πατρὸς 
ἑκάστῳ δικαιοκρισίαν ποιούμενος, πᾶσι κατὰ τὰ ἔργα παρασκευάσει τὸ δίκαιον. οὗ κρίσει 
παραστάντες, πάντες ἄνθρωποί τε καὶ ἄγγελοι καὶ δαίμονες μίαν ἀποφθέγξονται φωνὴν 
οὕτως λέγοντες" δικαία σοῦ ἡ κρίσις. js φωνῆς τὸ ἀνταπόδομα ἐπ᾽ ἀμφοτέροις ἐπάγει 
τὸ δίκαιον᾽ τοῖς μὲν εὖ πράξασι, δικαίως τὴν ἀΐδιον ἀπόλαυσιν παρασχόντος, τοῖς δὲ 
τῶν φαύλων ἐρασταῖς, τὴν αἰώνιον κόλασιν ἀπονείμαντος καὶ τούτοις μὲν τὸ Tip ἄσβεστον 
διαμένει καὶ ἀτελεύτητον, σκώληξ δὲ τις ἐμπυρὸς μὴ τελευτῶν μηδὲ σῶμα διαφθείρων 
ἀναπαίστου δ᾽ ὀδύνη ἐκ σώματος ἐκβράσσων παραμένει." 


72 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


FE. Norden have found ‘ almost the whole’ apostolic creed in the 
famous Testimonium. This latest addition, then, makes Josephus 
testify not only to the messianic dignity of Jesus, but further- 
more to the truth of the belief that in the future he will ‘ come 
again with glory to judge the living and the dead,’ which is rather 
more than could reasonably be expected from an historian such as 
Josephus was, and from a Jew to boot. 

As a matter of fact, this last interpolation was too much of a 
good thing even for a certain Byzantine scribe, who crossed out the 
paragraph in question and added the following amusing comment 
on the right-hand margin 1 (Pl. νι.) : 5 


‘The reader should know that this matter is rightly expurgated by 
us, since we neither find it in other copies nor is it quoted by any one 
of the doctors of the Church of Christ. Neither is it quoted by the 
later historian copying the Haldsis. Nevertheless, (the same) is found 
in the eighteenth book of the Antiquities,’ 5 


This simply proves that the second scribe of the Leyden MS. 
merely copied the queer addition from an interpolation he found 
in the Antiquities. 

Niese had confessed his inability to locate the source of this 
extraneous matter. Linck * appears to have been the first to notice 
that it is a paragraph taken from the treatise ‘ On the Essence of 
the Universe’ (περὶ τῆς τοῦ παντὸς οὐσίας), wrongly ascribed to 
Josephus by John Philoponos ὅ (A.D. 475-540), John of Damascus ® 
(c. 700-754), and John Zonaras (died after 1118), and printed in 
Havercamp’s Josephus.® 

The true author of this treatise is beyond any doubt the schis- 
matic Bishop Hippolytus of Rome (the adversary of Pope Cal- 
listus), who died some time about 4.D. 235.7. This fact was known 
to the learned Photius,’ who had correctly noticed the author’s 
self-quotation in Philosophoumena, x. 32. The title is mentioned 
in the list of Hippolytus’ works on the throne of his statue in the 
Lateran Museum. ‘The attribution of such an obviously Christian 


' “loréov ὅτι τοιοῦτον ὠβέλισται δικαίως παρ᾽ ἡμῶν" ἐπεὶ μηδὲ ἐν ἑτέροις ἀντιγράφοις 


τοῦτο εὕρομεν, ἀλλ᾽ οὐδέ τις τῶν τῆς ἐκκλησίας τοῦ χριστοῦ διδασκάλων τούτων ἐπεμνήσθη. 
οὔτε μὴν ὑπὸ τῶν ἐσύστερον ἱστορικῶν ἀνδρῶν (ἀπογραφο) μένων “ (cod. -μόνων) ἀ(λ)ω(σιν) 
εἴρηται. ἀλλὰ καὶ (ταὐτὸ) ἐν τῷ nw λόγῳ τὴ( 5) (ἀρ)χαιολο(γίας) evpicxer(ac).” 

" This last statement is confirmed by ἃ gloss to Avt., xviii. 3. 3, in the Codex 
Laurentianus plut. 69, cod. 232. The author of this note read the lines in question 
after the end of bk. xx. of some MSS. of the Antiquities. 

* Loc. cit. (above, p. 58 1. 22), p. 181 n. 3. 

* De opificio mundi, ed. Reichardt, 1897, lib. iii. cap. xvi. (Script. sacri et 
profani, fasc. i.). 

* Sacra Paral., opp. ed., Le Quien, ii. 789 sqq.; Holl, Kirchenviter aus den 
Sacra Paral., 1893, pp. 137-143. 

® Vol. ii. (2), p. 146 sq. 

* Cf. A. Siouville’s translation of the Philosophoumena, Paris (Rieder), 1928, 


Ρ. 38. τ 
8 Bibl. cod., xvii. 


THE SILENCE OF THE ‘ JEWISH WAR’ ABOUT JESUS 73 


treatise to Josephus, on the face of its title, since Josephus at the 
end of his Antiquities promised to write a book on ‘ God and His 
Essence’ (περὶ θεοῦ καὶ τῆς οὐσίας αὐτοῦ), was preceded by the 
equally arbitrary attribution to the shady client of the Flavians of 
a most virtuous treatise on the exemplary sufferings of seven 
Maccabee martyrs, variously called ‘On Autonomous Reason’ (περὶ 
αὐτοκράτορος λογισμοῦ) or the ‘ Fourth Book of Maccabees,’ even 
as a separate edition of the sixth book of Josephus’ Jewish War 
was circulated under the title of ‘ Fifth Book of Maccabees,’ 
both these apocryphal works being adopted into the New Testa- 
mental canon of the Syrian and Armenian churches. 

There can be no reasonable doubt that the motive for all this 
was merely the pious wish to whitewash the Jewish historian 
Josephus—who badly needed it—since his evidence on Christian 
origins was felt to be too precious to be invalidated by any stric- 
tures on the character of this ‘ truth-loving’ witness.? 

The climax of this posthumous career of the old scoundrel was 
reached with his identification with Joseph of Arimathea;? but 
there is no need to follow him further on his curiously devious road 
to respectability. Yet the story, with its multiple falsifications of 
documents, has its humorous aspect, and is moreover apt to give a 
timely warning against the confidence with which the extant text 
of Josephus is generally treated by unwary scholars, who are as far 
from suspecting the vicissitudes it has undergone in the course of 
the centuries as they are ready to accuse any one attempting to 
restore the original wording of a corrupt sentence of ‘tampering 
with the text.’ 


1 Tsidor Pelusiotes, bk. iv., epistle 75 (P.G., Ixxviii., 1320), and others. 

2 Writing in the Catholic Encycl. (vi. 720, art. ‘ Grail’), Prof. Arthur F. 1. 
Remy makes the following acknowledgment respecting the Gospel of Nicodemus, 
aliter Acts of Pilate, and the Vindicta Salvatorvis: ‘Furthermore, Joseph [of 
Arimathea] was confused with the Jewish historian Josephus, whose liberation 
by Titus is recounted by Suetonius.’ It is an open question whether this Joseph 
of Arimathea (a place not yet identified) is not merely a corruption of Josephus 
bar Mattathia, in which case that saintly personage would be a most curious early 
metamorphosis of the old sinner. 


V 
THE EXTANT NON-GREEK VERSIONS OF JOSEPHUS 


mere hypothesis, it will be necessary to marshal into line every 

scrap of corroborative evidence that may be available, since 
a single new fact is always more valuable than a dozen of the most 
ingenious and most carefully drawn-up conjectures. For this 
purpose a renewed scrutiny of the known material will be the first 
logical step. 

It has been said before at greater length that we possess an 
astounding number of Josephus translations in many languages 
and dialects. Some of the Eastern churches! have even seen 
fit to include our author in the canon of Holy Scriptures, and 
with the Bible he shared the fate of being translated into 
a number of Oriental languages.2. Now, just as those Bible 
versions and translations are currently used in Biblical text 
criticism, so the different versions of Josephus should prove of the 
greatest value for the restoration of a text so obviously corrupt and 
mutilated in many places. Strange to say, this necessary though 
difficult work has practically not been begun heretofore. Let us 
look a little into the history of the Josephus text. 

From the preface of Josephus’ first work we learn that the first 
draft of the Jewish War was not in Greek. On the contrary, the 
first Greek version had been preceded by another ‘in the tongue 
of the fathers’ (τῇ πατρίῳ γλώσσῃ). Whether by this expression 
he means Hebrew, the old sacred language of the Jews, or Aramaic, 
the everyday language of the non-Greek Orient of his time, re- 
mains to be seen. This version was written for the benefit of the 
᾿ barbarians, ’ i.e. non-Greeks and non-Romans—more precisely, the 
Parthians, the Babylonians, the border tribes of Arabia, the Jews 
beyond the Euphrates, and the Judaizing natives of the petty 
Assyrian kingdom of Adiabene.* All these people spoke Aramaic, 
which was also the official language of the Parthianempire.t Thus 
it follows that if Josephus wanted to have a reading public, and if 
his imperial patrons wanted his books to have a particular effect 


if the results of the foregoing chapters are to be more than a 


1 See above, p. 31 ll. 21 Ὁ * See above, p. 32 nn. 2 and 3. 
5. B.]., proem., §§ 3 and 6. 
* Ed. Meyer, Gesch. a, Altertums., iii. (1901), pp. 47 ἢ: 

74 


EXTANT NON-GREEK VERSIONS OF JOSEPHUS 75 


upon those Eastern populations, the version in question must have 
been Aramaic. 

Of the Greek version, which must have followed shortly after 
the Semitic one, we have two different editions—one full of minor 
mistakes and barbarisms (the so-called ‘ worse MSS.’), and another 
revised and polished (Niese’s so-called ‘better MSS.’). The 
original Semitic version seems to be entirely and definitely lost. 
Heyman Kottek’s hypothesis, according to which it survives in 
part in the shape of the Syrian translation, has been disproved by 
Th. Néldeke ; + and Sebastian Miinster’s still more improbable idea 
that it is identical with the Hebrew version, the so-called Josippon 
(below, pp. 93 ff.), was exploded, centuries ago, by none other than 
the great Joseph Scaliger ? himself. 

The existence of this new Syrian translation calls for some 
explanation. The Babylonian Jews undoubtedly rejected the 
traitor’s propagandist writings with the utmost contempt.* Among 
the other Orientals of Aramaic speech the class of lettered indi- 
viduals who would have had any interest in such a work was but 
small. Throughout the Roman empire, including Italy, Josephus 
was read in Greek, so far as he was read at all among non-Jews (the 
absurd idea that he could have been read by an aristocrat of refined 
literary taste such as Tacitus has been justly ridiculed by Norden 
and others). Thus it is no wonder that the first Semitic version, 
composed by the author himself, should have disappeared without 
leaving any trace. 

When toward the end of the Empire fewer and fewer of its 
Western inhabitants came to know Greek, a Latin translation was 
felt to be a desideratum. It was at this period that a converted 
Jew, whose Hebrew name Isaac he variously Latinized as Hilarius 
or Gaudentius, undertook to translate Josephus into Latin (about 
A.D. 370). His is not a translation in the modern sense of the 
term, but a seemingly independent history of ‘the downfall of 
Jerusalem,’ which Josephus quotes only occasionally, though as a 
matter of fact it has no other source. In addition it is distin- 
guished by a decided proselytizing, Jew-baiting tendency. The 
name ‘Egesippus’ whichis prefixed to the work ina number of MS5., 
and commonly used to designate it nowadays, has been shown by 
Prof, Ussani to be due to the fact that the author has incorporated 
in his story a fragment of the Hypomnémata of the Christian 
traveller Hegesippus (about A.D. 180) on the exploits of the apostles 
Peter and Paul. Later on, ignorant copyists concluded that the 
whole compilation was by one ‘Egesippus.’* The resemblance of 

1 See Niese, ed. maj., vol. vi. p. 21. See below p. 76 n. 3. 
2 Elenchus Trihaeres. contra Nicol. Serarium, 1605, Cap. iv. 
3 See below, p. 98 1]. 37 ff. 


4 In the same way the anonymous Philosophoumena of Hippolytos have 
formerly been attributed to Origen, because of marginal glosses such as ‘ Origenes,’ 


76 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


the names ᾿ Egesippus’ and Josephus (in the vulgar Greek pro- 
nunciation /os¢pos) no doubt facilitated the error and gave it 
permanence. 

In the fifth century the Roman senator Cassiodorus knew a 
fairly literal Latin version of the Wary commonly attributed to 
Rufinus, a contemporary and rival of St. Jerome (fourth century), 
and encouraged the production of a Latin translation of the 
Antiquities by the monks of his monastery Squillace. A critical 
edition of it is yet to be published. 

The above-mentioned Syrian translation of the sixth book of 
the Jewish War has been preserved under the title of ‘ Fifth Book of 
the Maccabees’! in a MS. of the Ambrosiana (Milan), accessible 
in a photo-lithographic copy made by A. M. Ceriani (Milan, 1876- 
1883), and in a literal rendering into German by Kotteck.? It is 
not at all improbable that all the seven books of the War once 
existed in a Syrian translation. Th. Néldeke 8 definitely proved 
that it is derived from the Greek text of Josephus. 

A Hebrew translation commonly called Josippon exists in 
seven MSS. and many printed editions. Josippon may mean the 
‘large Josephus’ or the ‘little Josephus,’ and therefore either 
designate an edition supplementing the material of the Jew?sh War 
by additions from parallel passages in the Antiquities and other 
sources—and this the Hebrew version does in fact—or it may apply 
to an epitome of the Wary, a shortened ‘little Josephus.’ Indeed, 
we have such an one too, from the pen of R. Abraham ibn Datid, 
a Spanish-Jewish Aristotelian of the twelfth century (printed by 
Sebastian Miinster at Worms in 1529). A critical edition of the 
Josippon is planned by Dr. Greyzel of the New York Jewish Theo- 
logical Seminary. It is written in a relatively pure Biblical 
Hebrew such as was again cultivated by the Jews of the so-called 
Carolingian renaissance of classical scholarship. The spelling of 
the proper names and the range of the geographical interest evinced 
would show that the vulgate text was written down in a place where 
Italian was the spoken language. From a peculiar passage (below, 
p. 78 n. I) it may be concluded that the version was made on the 
east coast of the Adriatic. 

There are unmistakable traces showing that the Latin version 
has used, strange to say, not the standard version of Rufinus, but 
the older one with its crude proselytizing tendencies. One would 


‘ doctrines of Origenes,’ in some of the MSS. Another example is the so-called 
Liturgy of St. Chrysostomus, to which this title has been attached in a twelfth- 
century MS. because two prayers contained in it bear the ascription : ‘‘ Χρυσοστόμου.᾽᾽ 
See Lietzmann, Messe τι. Herrenmahl, Bonn, 1926, Pp: 2. 

1 See above, p. 73. 

2 Das 6. Buch des Bell. Jud., n.d.v. Ceriani ed. Peshittahs. tibers. u. kvit. beavb., 
Berlin, 1886. . 

® Lit. Zentralblatt, 1886, 881-4. 


EXTANT NON-GREEK VERSIONS OF JOSEPHUS 77 


like to conclude that the /os:ppon antedates the translation attri- 
buted to Rufinus, and that it goes back to the beginning of the 
fourth century, when the Western Jews began to lose their former 
knowledge of Greek. The features of the extant Jostppon which 
would point to a later date could be explained by the obvious fact 
that our ‘Josippon’ is an edifying ninth-century compilation of 
which the fourth-century Latin translation of Josephus might be 
but the nucleus. A more powerful objection to such a theory is 
the fact that the Jews of the Diaspora did not speak either Hebrew 
or Aramaic any more than they do now. The Semitic tongues 
were used only in the synagogue service and in Talmudic learned 
discussions. Even for homiletic purposes the vernacular of the 
homeland (Greek in the empire, Arabic in the Moslem countries) 
was preferred. What was then the need of a Hebrew /oszppon in 
fourth-century Italy ? 

Whatever motive may have prompted the unknown translator 
to undertake the work, the latter itself looms large enough to merit 
a fuller discussion. The MSS. as well as the now quite rare prints 
of the editio princeps attribute the work to one Joseph ben Gorion, 
a personage named by Josephus in his War (ii. ὃ 583) as one of the 
dictatorsnominated at the beginning of the revolution against Kome 
by the Jews of Jerusalem. There can, of course, be no question 
about the character of the compilation, which is certainly anything 
but a translation in the modern sense of the term. It clearly 
belongs to the type of the Latin and Byzantine chronographers 
flourishing about the same period, though it draws in the main on 
Josephus and quotes him quite frequently. The incredible chron- 
ology of the compilation—for example, it makes Julius Caesar the 
direct successor of Ptolemy Philadelphus—admits of no other 
explanation than that the unknown compiler was ignorant of the 
events leading up to the Jewish War, and had himself to paste 
together as best he could various materials culled from different 
sources. 

The chief basis of the compilation was, as has been pointed out 
above, the Latin Egestppus. The author’s knowledge of Greek 
was of the scantiest,! though in a number of places the Joszppon 
text stands closer to the Greek Josephus than to the Egestppus. 
In view of these facts, good knowledge of Latin and Hebrew and a 
mere smattering of Greek, one might be tempted to see in the 
author an Italian Jew. <A better clue is furnished by the impudent 
assertion that the Hebrew exemplar of the Septuagint had been 
brought to Alexandria from Illyria, where there lived many Jewish 
families in those days. This bold statement was obviously de- 


1 He believes, e.g., that ‘world-empire’ is called in Greek tmpevraousta—a 
blunder which finds a partial explanation by a possible acquaintance with St. 
Augustine’s ‘ imperiosa civitas ’ (e.g. Civ. Det, Ὁ. 306'*, Dombart). 


78 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


signed to flatter the Jews settled at Salona, Valona, Durazzo, and 
other communities of the Illyrian coast.! 

In Book vi., 30, p. 667 sqq., the coronation of V espasian is de- 
scribed with details which at once suggest that the imperial corona- 
tion of one of the German kings of the Saxon dynasty (936-1024) 
has served asa model. This chapter is missing, however, in some 
of the MSS., and may well be a later embellishment of the original 
text. The oldest mention of the Josifpfon is said to be found in the 
Italian poet R. ’Ele‘azar of Cagliari, who seems to have flourished 
prior to the ninth century. Yet the statement itself has still to be 
substantiated. 

Like a typical chronography, the compilation begins with 
Adam, explains the ethnical genealogy table of Genesis x., and then 
passes over to the oldest parts of Roman history and to the story 
of the Tower of Babel. Then begins the Jewish history, which 
is followed down to the time of Darius and Esther. With a bold 
leap the author passes on to Alexander the Great, barely touches 
upon the history of the Diadochs, only incidentally mentioning 
Rome. Then follow the Syrian wars, the history of the Maccabees 
and of the Herodian dynasty, down to the destruction of the third 
temple, with very brief interruptions having reference to Roman 
history. 

The various MSS. and editions differ considerably, some of them 
containing, among other materials, a Hebrew summary of the 
Alexander Romance of Pseudo-Callisthenes. The language of this 
insertion shows incipient Arabic influences, a feature quite un- 
known to the other MSS. One can see how subsequent scribes 
naively added to this favourite and popular work whatever piece 
of additional historic information they were able to obtain. This 
is, of course, no peculiar feature of the Josippon ; the Egesippus 
does precisely the same sort of thing. 

Toward the middle of the eleventh century the Josippon was 
translated into Arabic, probably in Sicily, for the benefit, no doubt, 
of Jews living there or in one of the Mahometan countries of the 
Western Mediterranean, by one Zakharia ibn Sa‘id al Yemeni al 
Israili, a Jew of South Arabia. This translation, of which we have 
at least two modern printed editions (above, p. 32 n. 2), is first 
mentioned by an Arabic author of Spain, Ibn Hazm, who died 
in A.D. 1063.2 

Whether it was this Arabic translation or the Hebrew original 


* We know of a number of forgeries designed to show that certain Jewish 
diaspora settlements existed before the crucifixion, and that their inhabitants 
could therefore not be held responsible for this judicial murder. 

* Ny Kongelig Samling, 147b, folio f. 548-75. The Hebrew exemplar of this 
version exists in the Bodleian (Cod. Huntingdon, 345). Photostats of both MSS. 
and a typewritten German translation by the Rev. Dr. Heinrich Guttmann, 
Rabbi of Bingen a. Rh., are available in the Institut des Etudes Slaves in Paris. 


EXTANT NON-GREEK VERSIONS OF JOSEPHUS 79 


which was translated into Ethiopic, and whether this version was 
intended for the Abyssinian Jews, the so-called Falashas, or for the 
Christians of Habesh, I cannot say, since so far no one has taken the 
trouble to study the MSS., though they are easy of access in the 
Berlin and Frankfurt libraries. A Russian translation of the 
Josippon exists in a sixteenth-century MS. of the Royal Library 
in Copenhagen, in a MS. of Moscow, and in a MS. of the Leningrad 
Public Library.+ 

An Armenian Josephus, translated in 1666 by one vardapet 
Stephanus of Lwow in Galicia, according to the late F. C. Cony- 
beare, from the Latin of Rufinus but with variants from other 
sources, was printed in Eschmiadzin in 1787. A MS. of an 
earlier Armenian version of Josephus has been rumoured to have 
been discovered by F. C. Conybeare in 1915 in the library of the 
Armenians on the island of St. Lazaronear Venice. but thorough- 
going explorations made on the spot by Prof. Frederick Macler of 
Paris, facilitated by the generous help of Dr. James Loeb, have 
not confirmed this report, which is probably due to a misunder- 
standing. 

According to information I received from Prof. BeneSevic of the 
Leningrad State Library, and subsequently from Prof. Cornelis 
Kekelidze of Tiflis University, there’ is a Georgian (Grusinian) 
version of Josephus, derived through a modern Russian version 
from Havercamp’s Latin translation, and therefore of no inde- 
pendent value. 

The most important of all hitherto known versions is a trans- 
lation of Josephus’ earliest work into a Northern dialect of Old 
Russian, which was first brought to the attention of the learned 
world by Alexander N. Popov in 1866. The work in question 
exists in sixteen MSS. A seventeenth, formerly at Wilna, was 
unfortunately burned in 1y18-19. They are found in several 
Russian libraries (Leningrad, Moscow, Kasan, etc.). A critical 
edition of the text is being prepared by Prof. Vasilij N. Istrin. In 
the meantime, photographs of the whole of one of the best MSS., 
the codex Cyrillo-Bjelosersky 62/1303 in Leningrad, which I owe 
to the liberality of Dr. James Loeb, are available to students at the 
Institut des Etudes Slaves in Paris.2, A German translation of the 
first four books, with ample notes illustrating the divergences from 
the Greek text, was prepared on the basis of copies of the most 
important MSS. by the late Prof. Alexander Johannes Berendts of 
Dorpat (fig. vir.) and published after his untimely death in 1912 by 


1 See above, p. 33 0. 7. 

2 Dr. James Loeb has generously given another copy of our photographs to 
the library of the Jewish Theological Seminary of America in New York. On the 
other hand, the above-mentioned Russian MSS. have been recently photographed 
for Dr. Solomon Zeitlin of the Dropsie College of Philadelphia. 


50 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


his colleague and executor, the late Prof. Konrad Grass of Dorpat, 
in 1924-27. The extraordinary importance of the Old Russian 
version consists in the fact that it reproduces its original with such 
mechanical accuracy as to be almost unintelligible before it is put 
back into Greek through an equally mechanical retroversion, and 
that the Greek text which it reproduces is 17) hundrveds of sections 
widely different from the Greek standard version. 

The most important of all these variants are several passages 
of altogether about seven octavo pages in length, and dealing with 
the history of John the Baptist, Jesus, and the earliest disciples 
of Christ. To these passages nothing whatever corresponds in the 
standard Greek text, though slight traces of a similar tradition 
remain clearly visible in the so-called Egesippus. These chapters 
have been separately translated into German and discussed by 
Berendts, and are easily accessible in an exact English translation 
in vol. iii. of Dr. Thackeray’s Josephus edition for the Loeb 
Classical Library. A MS. still in the possession of Dr. Moses 
Gaster, No. 89 of his famous collection (now largely in the library 
of the British Museum), proves that the Old Russian version of 
Josephus, or at least the fragments dealing with Christian origins, 
were translated from Russian into Polish, and again, some time in 
the seventeenth century, into Rumanian. With the kind per- 
mission of Dr, Gaster I publish in Appendix vu. for the first time 
the contents of this remarkable MS. Τί offers a most interesting 
confirmation of the above-mentioned hypothesis, to wit, that the 
Christian so-called Acta Pilati were intended to offset the effect of 
Josephus’ statements about Christ and of the genuine Acts of 
Pilate published by the Emperor Maximinus Daia. It is in fact 
a compilation which combines the Jesus passages of the Russian 
Josephus with the so-called Acta Pilati, and the fragments of the 
Russian Josephus dealing with the Baptist with the contents of a 
fifth-century Life of John the Forerunner written in Emesa. The 
manifest object of this compilation is to defend as far as possible 
the orthodox tradition about John the Baptist and Jesus against 
the widely different conclusions which an unwary reader might 
draw from a reading of Josephus alone. 


THE VARIANT READINGS OF THE GREEK ORIGINAL AND ITS 
VARIOUS DERIVATIVES, AND THEIR IMPORTANCE FOR THE 
RESTORATION OF THE ARCHETYPE 


The different versions enumerated (above, p. 75 ffi.) and passed 
in review deviate, in a number of cases, from the standard text of 
the ordinary Greek editions. It goes without saying that these 


EXTANT NON-GREEK VERSIONS OF JOSEPHUS 8x 


variant readings are of supreme importance in the present con- 
nexion. At first sight one will be inclined to attribute such variant 
readings either to the arbitrary action of the translator or to the 
no less arbitrary action of an interpolator, copyist, or reader, who 
inserted a gloss, a clause, or a whole paragraph of hisown. But the 
possibility must not be overlooked that the translator may have 
been working on MS. material differing from the extant MSS., 
because Josephus or one of his collaborators or one of the copyists 
of his publisher had altered the wording of his original draft in a 
subsequent edition. Further, the possibility cannot be denied 
that the absence of a given paragraph from the Greek standard 
text may be due to the fact that the passage in question was 
blotted out or erased by a censor or omitted by some scribe after 
the intact original text had been translated, or after a number of 
copies had been made, one of which, or its derivatives, fell into the 
hands of the translator. Finally, the author himself may have 
suppressed a certain paragraph in a subsequent edition of his book ; 
the Greek standard texts may go back to this revised edition, whilst 
the translator worked on a copy of the original edition. 

Conversely, if a clause of the Greek standard text is wanting in 
one of the derivatives, it may have been suppressed by the trans- 
lator because he did not like its contents, or because he was anxious 
to shorten his work, or because accidentally he skipped it. It may 
have been omitted by some copyist for any one of the same three 
reasons, or by some censor or a reader with the censorial instinct, or 
by one afraid of the ecclesiastical censor who erased or deleted the 
passage he objected to. The result would, of course, have been 
that it could not be repeated in all derivatives from that particular 
Ms. Or it may be that the passage in question was wanting in 
the Greek MS. on which the translator worked, because it had been 
damaged by accident or by the hand of the censor, or because it 
was a copy of the earlier edition of the work which did not yet 
contain this later addition from the author’s own hand. Or, 
finally, it may also be that the passage in question is an interpola- 
tion of the Greek MS. which was not made until after the transla- 
tion had, directly or indirectly, been derived from it. 

From these statements it would follow that a careful comparison 
of the different versions with the Greek MS. material may serve to 
detect and to nullify the work of the various glossators and inter- 
polators, and to offset the damage done by the censor as well as by 
lazy and careless copyists. For it is clear that unless the inter- 
polations and omissions affect the archetype itself they will not 
appear in all MSS., let alone in all translations. A measure of 
censorship taken, let us say, by the Byzantine Greek Orthodox 
Church will not necessarily affect the territory of the autocephalic 
churches of the Slavs. Quite aside from such considerations, the 

F 


82 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


different versions may shed a good deal of light on the evolution 
of the archetype, because it is a priort unlikely that the different 
translators working in widely separated countries actually had 
identical MS. material to work on. 

It is well also to bear in mind that, contrary to modern usage, 
where an author has to wait for his second edition to make any 
changes in his book, by adding, suppressing, or merely altering a 
passage, the ancient author might at any moment alter the text of 
the copy which served as an archetype in the publisher’s scrip- 
torium, where a ‘ dictator’ read aloud the model text for one or 
several dozens of scribes, a fact which has only recently been real- 
ized in its full meaning. Thus different MSS. or classes of MSS. 
may not simply represent the natural reading variants due to the 
carelessness of the scribes, but different stages in the evolution of 
the work itself, corresponding to the different editions of modern 
books. The existence of several such ‘editions’ for ancient 
authors has lately been proved for Cicero, for Thucydides, for 
Eusebius’ Historia ecclesiastica, for Polybius, and also for Flavius 
Josephus. 

Prof. Laqueur ! of Giessen has shown long ago that the extant 
Jewish War does not represent the first edition of that work, but 
a later rewriting subsequent to the publication of the Amtiquitves. 
The differences between the two classes of MSS. already referred to 
are beyond doubt the result of the constant pains the author took 
to improve his style, no less than the diplomatic presentation of his 
materials. There is, of course, no ground for the supposition that 
any one of the extant MSS. represents the very first or even the 
very last of the editions which Josephus himself saw through the 
scriptorium of his publisher Epaphroditus. On the contrary, there 
are certain features in the extant MSS. tending to show that the 
process of ‘improvement’ and ‘revision’ did not stop with the 
author’s exit from the scene. On the other hand, it is equally 
certain that even the worst of Niese’s ‘inferior’ MSS. does not 
represent the earliest edition of the work. 

From Josephus’ own statements we know that a Semitic edition 
preceded the Greek one, and that in the thirteenth year of the reign 
of Domitian he proposed to rewrite the Way and in that connexion 
to bring the history of the Jews down to that date. No extant 
MS. of the Way has the slightest trace of such an appendix, and it 
is most tantalizing for us not to know how he tackled such delicate 
subjects as Domitian’s attitude toward the Jews, the vexatory 
exactions of the poll duty, the Judazci fisct calumma, etc., at least 
during the lifetime of the third, the most touchy and suspicious, of 
his imperial patrons. Curiously enough, the Byzantine Jews 
appear to have known this second edition of the War, since there 

1 Der jiidische Historiker Flavius Josephus, Giessen, 1920. 


EXTANT NON-GREEK VERSIONS OF JOSEPHUS 83 


is an unmistakable allusion to it in the extracts of the Josippon 
made by the eleventh-century chronicler Jerahm’el Ὁ. Shelomo,} 
who speaks of twenty-four books of Josephus beginning with Adam 
and extending to the fourteenth year of Domitian. This hitherto 
overlooked statement shows that—a most natural thing to do— 
he combined for this new edition a revised text of the twenty books 
of his Jewish Antiquities with the partly overlapping five books of 
the Jewish War into a colossal work of twenty-four books in all, 
probably called ἡ Jewish histories.’ 

The existence of such an edition in the Byzantine empire 
explains also the occurrence of a considerable number of Josephus 
fragments in certain Byzantine chronographers hitherto regarded 
as spurious since they have defied all identification.2, The German 
scholar H. Gelzer * considered them a forgery and the work of 
Panodorus of Alexandria ; yet there exists no conceivable reason 
why precisely the passages in question, of no importance for any 
particular creed or tendency, should have been forged. The mere 
fact that the one or the other of these fragments occurs also in the 
literature of the mdvashim only indicates that Josephus either drew 
on this literature or on one of its sources, a fact not at all surprising 
considering the haggadic character of his compilation.? Nor is there 
any reason to suppose that Panodorus (end of the fourth century), 
Georgius Syncellus (c. 800), Georgius Monachus (tenth century), 
and Cedrenus (eleventh century) should all have attributed the 
fragments in question to Josephus if they had not actually found 
them in his work. 

In quoting the fragments in question I follow the order in which 
they must have occurred in the lost text of Josephus. 


1. ‘ The sabbath was called a day of rest, and being the model of 
the thousand-year week and of the destruction of sinners, as Josephus 
testifies and the Leptogenesis.’ * 


As will be seen, this passage occurred in Josephus’ account of the 
Creation, and no doubt toward the end of the narrative. It is signi- 
ficant to see Josephus expect the coming of the Messiah after a 
lapse of 6000 years, counting from the Creation. It is clear at once 
that he on good purpose chooses such a late date; it was to take 
away all political significance from this eschatological dream and to 
calm the minds of those who longed for that fateful coming. 


! Ad. Neubauer, Mediaeval Jewish Chronicles, i., Oxford, 1887, p. 190 B (from 
Cod. Bodl. MS., d. 11). 

* The N.T. scholar will recall the exactly analogous case of the so-called 
‘ Agrapha ’—unidentifiable quotations from the scriptures—discussed and 
collected by Alfr. Resch (Leipzig, 1906). 

3 Cedren, p. 9, line 20, ed. Bonn: ‘*. . σάβαττον ὡς καταπαύσιμος προσηγορεύθη Kai 
ὧν τύπος τῆς ἑβδομῆς χιλιοετηρίδος καὶ τῆς τῶν ἁμαρτώλων συντελείας, ws ᾿Ιώσηπος μαρτυρεῖ 
καὶ ἣ λεπτὴ Γένεσις... .” 


84 - THE MESSIAH JESUS 


‘The animals, both the quadrupeds and the reptiles, according 
to Josephus and the Leptogenesis, had, before the fall, the same 
language as the first human couple.’ ὦ 


The fragment evidently belongs to the description of Paradise, 
where men and animals had the same language. 


3. ‘And his tomb was in the land of the Jerusalemites, as a 
certain Jewish tradition goes, according to Josephus.’ 5 


Adam, that is, had been buried near Jerusalem, a fiction common 
to both Jews and Christians. 


4. ‘In his fourteenth year Abraham came to know the God of the 
universe and began to worship him, but the idols of his father he 
broke and burnt them together with the house. Together with them 
his brother Harran perished in the flames when he tried to smother 
the fire. And he also admonished his father to abandon the cult and 
the manufacture of idols, as Josephus says.’ 3 


The well-known episode of Abraham’s burning the idols in his 
father’s house. The additional touch that Abraham’s brother 
Harran perished on that occasion is in contradiction to the 
Halosts,* or rather to its source. 


5. ‘ Rebecca having baked cakes, as Josephus relates, gave them 
to Jacob and sent him to Isaac with other presents.’ ® 


Taken from the story of Jacob and Esau and the deception prac- 
tised on the old Isaac. The mention of the cakes is not found in 
the Old Testament, but does occur in the apocryphal Leptogenests. 
Josephus evidently fused various accounts. 


6. ‘ He got these blessings from the patriarch Abraham before (his 
death), as Josephus confirms, and the story is true.’ ® 


Taken from the Book of Jubilees. The passage is in contradiction 


with the Antiquities, where Abraham dies before the birth of the 
twins. 


1 Syncell., p. 14, 4ff. Cp. Simeon Logeth., p.23 v?=Sync., Ρ. 18: ‘*... τὰ θηρία, 
καὶ τὰ τετράποδα καὶ τὰ ἑρπετά, φήσιν ὁ ᾿Ιῴώσηπος, καὶ ἡ λεπτὴ Vévects ὑμόφωνα εἶναι πρὸ τῆς 
παραβάσεως τοῖς πρωτοπλαστοῖς. 


2 Georgius Monachus, ed. de Boor, i. Ὁ. 43. Cedren, i. p. 1843-18: 
“kai μνῆμα αὐτῷ κατὰ τὴν ᾿Ιεροσολύμων ἐξ ἢ δὲ ταφὴ αὐτοῦ κατὰ 
- en Y , ἢ Ἔ ! ] ‘ } , ~ 
γεγονέναι γῆν LBpatxy τις ἱστορεῖ τὴν ᾿Ιεροσολύμων γεγονέναι γὴν 
παράδοσις, ὥς φησιν page la ae ws ᾿Ιώσηπος ἱστορεῖ." 


3. Syncell., Ρ. 1849.6: “τῷ 1d ἔτει αὐτοῦ ὁ ᾿Αβραὰμ ἐ ἐπιγνοὺς τὸν τῶν ὅλων θεὸν προσκύνει, 
τὰ δὲ εἴδωλα τοῦ πατρὸς sorties κατέκαυσε σὺν τῷ οἴκῳ. συγκατεκαύθη δὲ αὐτοῖς καὶ 
“ Αρρὰν ὁ ἀδελφὸς σβέσαι τὸ πῦρ σπουδάζων, ἐνουθέτει δὲ καὶ τὸν πατέρα ἑαυτοῦ ἀποστῆναι 
τῆς εἰδωλολατρείας καὶ εἰδωλοποιίας, ὥς φησιν ὁ ᾿]ώσηπος. 

4 See Dr. Thackeray’s Josephus, vol. iii., app. p. 642, irg. No. 6. 

δ΄ Syncell., p. 197, line 1, ed. Bonn: * κολλυρίδας ποιήσασα “Ῥεβέκκα, ὥς φησιν 
᾿Ιώσηππος, ἔδωκε τῷ ᾿Ιακὼβ καὶ εἰσ ἤγαγε μεθ᾽ ἑτέρων δώρων πρὸὺς ‘Toad.’ 

6 Ibid., “" προεῖχε δὲ αὐτὰς (τὰς εὐλογίας) rapa τοῦ πατρίαρχου ᾿Αβραάμ, ws ᾿Ιώσηπος 
βεβαιοῦται, at πιστὸς ὁ λόγος." 


EXTANT NON-GREEK VERSIONS OF JOSEPHUS ὃς 


7. ‘ Josephus relates how Jacob before the beginning of his sixty- 
third year had not touched a woman, and boasted of this to his 
mother Rebecca.’ 


It is impossible to place this curious fragment. 


8. ‘ In the 153rd year of Isaac, Jacob went up to him from Meso- 
potamia, and Isaac looking up and seeing the sons of Jacob, blessed 
Levi as archpriest and Judah as king and ruler.’ * 


From the book of Jubilees, cap. xxxi., the blessing bestowed by 
Isaac on Levi and Judah. 


9. ‘ kebecca asked Isaac in his old age to admonish Esau and 
Jacob to love each other. He did so, and foretold them that if Esau 
should rise against Jacob he would fall into his brother’s hands.’ 8 


From the Book of Jubilees, cap. xxv., admonition of Rebecca to 
her sons to abstain from their quarrels. Immediately after this 
follows the fragment : 


το. ‘ After the death of Isaac, Esau, moved by his sons and gather- 
ing together their tribes, went to war against Jacob and his sons. 
Jacob, however, shut the gates of his tower and called out to Esau 
to remember the warnings of their parents. But as he did not listen 
but became insolent and abused Jacob, the latter, forced by Judah, 
bent his bow, struck the right side of Esau and overthrew him. 
When he had died the sons of Jacob opened the gates and slew most 
(of the sons of Esau). This is written in the Leptogenesis.’ 4 


From the Book of Jubilees, containing the last struggle of the hostile 
twins and Esau’s death at the hands of Jacob. The Hebrew word 
βᾶρις for the ‘ tower’ of Hebron is commonly used by Josephus 
for the castle of the temple at Jerusalem. It occurs also in the 
Septuagint. 

No, 117 


Taken from the story of Moses, but too long to be reprinted here, 


1 Syncell., p. 197, line 12ff.: ‘‘’Léonmmds φησιν ὅτι ὁ ᾿Ιακὼβ ἐτῶν ὑπάρχων gy οὐκ 
ἔγνω ὅλως γυναῖκα ws αὐτὸς ἐξεῖπε τῇ μητρὶ ‘PeBéxxa.” 

* [bid., Pp. 20249-20334: ᾿Ιωσήππου: “Τῷ ρνγ ἔτει τοῦ ᾿Ισαὰκ ἐπανῆλθεν ᾿Ιακὼβ 
πρὸς αὐτὸν ἀπὸ Μεσοποταμίας καὶ ἀναβλέψας ᾿Ισαὰκ καὶ ἰδὼν τοὺς υἱοὺς ᾿Γακὼβ ηὐλόγησε τὸν 
Λευὶ ὡς ἀρχιερέα καὶ τὸν ᾿Ιούδαν ὡς βασιλέα καὶ ἄρχοντα." [δῖα., P. 2079.2 “καὶ ὅτι ὁ 
Ἰσαὰκ ἀναβλέψας ὅτι ὁ Ἰακὼβ ἐκ Δίεσοποταμίας ἐπανῆλθε καὶ ἰδὼν τὸν Λευὶ καὶ τὸν ᾿Ιούδαν 
εὐλόγησε τὸν μὲν ὡς ἱερέα, τὸν δὲ ὡς βασιλέα καθ᾽ ἃ φησιν ᾿Ιώσηππος." 

3. ἐἐ ἡ “Ρεβέκκα ἤτησε τὸν ᾿Ισαὰκ ἐν τῷ γήρᾳ παραινέσαι τῷ ᾿᾽Ησαῦ καὶ τῷ ᾿Ιακὼβ ἀγαπᾶν 
ἀλλήλους. καὶ παραινέσας αὐτοῖς προεῖπεν, ὅτι ἐὰν ἐπαναστῇ TW ᾿Ιακὼβ ὁ Head εἰς χεῖρας 
αὐτοῦ πεσεῖται." 

4. ἐξμετὰ οὖν τὸ τελευτῆσαι τοῦ ᾿Ισαὰκ κινηθεὶς ὑπὸ τῶν υἱῶν Ἢσαῦ καὶ ἀθροίσας ἔθνη 
ἦλθεν κατὰ τοῦ ᾿Ιακὼβ καὶ τῶν υἱῶν αὐτοῦ εἰς πόλεμον. ᾿Ἰακὼβ δὲ ἀποκλείσας Tas πυλὰς τῆς 
βάρεως παρεκάλει τοῦ Ἢσαῦ μνησθῆναι τῶν γονιῶν ἐντολῶν. τοῦ δὲ μὴ ἀνεχομένου, ἀλλ᾽ 
ὑβρίζοντος καὶ ὀνειδίζοντος βιασθεὶς Ἰακὼβ ὑπὸ τοῦ ᾿Ιούδα ἐνέτεινε τόξον καὶ πλήξας κατὰ 
τοῦ δεξίου τὸν Ἡσαῦ κατέβαλε. τοῦ δὲ θανόντος ἀνοίξαντες τὰς πύλας οἱ vide Ἰακὼβ 
ἀνεῖλον τοὺς πλείστους. Ταῦτα ἐν λεπτῇ Γενέσει φέρεται." This occurs alsoin Gaster’s 
Jevahmeel (London, Τὰ. Α.5., 1899), xxxv. 1, and in Comestor, Genesis, ch. xli. 

8 Syncell., p. 225, line 20-2289. 


86 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


It is largely in agreement with Josephus’ narrative (Avt., 11. 9-10). 
Only the forms of the proper names betray the utilization of an 
additional source. For example, in the Antiquities the name of 
the Egyptian princess is Thermonthis; here it is given as ‘ Ther- 
monthis, also called Pharia,’ the second name being most probably 
her father’s name.' The original name of Melchias, translated 
‘king,’ and given to Moses, betrays an apologetic source, the 
designation of Moses as a Meluhi, i.e. a man from Meluha, i.e. the 
Sinai Peninsula, in an Egyptian, anti-Semitic source, being objec- 
tionable to the Jews. The mention of Justus (of Tiberias) in the 
fragment may possibly indicate that Josephus drew on his rival 
for certain bits of information. ut it is equally possible that it 
was Justus who plundered Josephus, and that the Byzantine 
chronographer drew on Sextus Julius Africanus, who in his turn is 
known to have utilized Justus. The question is fortunately of no 
importance for our problem. What needs emphasis is the cer- 
tainty that the chronographers drew in the last analysis on the lost 
edition of Josephus, and that the fragments are therefore genuine. 
The fact that they cannot be found in the extant Antiquities is, 
then, no argument against their essential genuineness. 


Lost PASSAGES OF JOSEPHUS IN THE OLDEST LATIN VERSION 


The so-called “ Egesippus’ contains some substantial expan- 
sions of the geographical character sketches of Palestinian land- 
scape. They offer a very good illustration of the difficulties 
besetting the task of determining which of the various causes 
passed in review are at the bottom of each variant reading : 


Josephus, B.J., ili. 33, §§ 44 sq. 


‘. . . But Peraea, though far 
more extensive (than Galilee), is 
for the most part desert and 
rugged and too wild to bring 
tender fruits to maturity. How- 
ever, there are also tracts of finer 
soil, productive of every kind of 
crop; and the plains are covered 
with a variety of trees, olive, vine, 
and palm being principally culti- 
vated. The country is watered 
by torrents descending from the 
mountains and by springs which 
never dry up and provide suffi- 


1 5: Rs, ‘he of Re,’ is a man’s name, 


Θάρια. ' Perhaps © was misread for ᾧ, 


Hegestppus, iil. 6. 


‘But Peraea, though more ex- 
tensive, is for the most part desert 
and rugged .. . ignorant of the 
softening influence of the plough 
and slow to tame the wilder fruits. 
But here again a portion of it is 
soft for tilling, fertile for use, pleas- 
ing to the eye, mild to work, useful 
for grafting fruit, productive of 
every kind ; so that its fields have 
their border of trees and others of 
lovely beauty in their midst, which 
often screen the crops from exces- 
sive sun or cold. And above all, 


The female form would be ¢? 10: = 


EXTANT NON-GREEK VERSIONS OF JOSEPHUS 87 


cient moisture when the torrents 
dwindle in the dog-days.’ 


Josephus, B./., 111. $$ 49 sq. 


‘For both (Judaea and Samaria) 
consist of hills and plains, yield a 
light and fertile soil for agriculture, 
are well wooded, and abound in 
fruits, both wild and cultivated ; 
both owe their productiveness to 
the entire absence of dry deserts 
and to a rainfall for the most part 
abundant. 


‘All the running water has a 
singularly sweet taste : 


the country is clad with olive or 
interlaced with vines or adorned 
with palms. Ineffably charming 
is it when, swayed by the breeze, 
the rows of palm-trees rustle, and 
sweeter than their sound the 
odours of the dates are wafted 
abroad. Nor is it wonderful at all 
that all that gracious greenness is 
there, when the country is bathed 
and watered by those pleasant- 
winding streams which descend 
from the mountain ridges above 
and abound in those snow-cool 
springs. (No wonder) the land is 
jealously held in affection. . . .’ 


Hegestppus, i. 6. 


‘For both (countries) consist of 
hill and plain in diverse districts : 
the whole is neither an expanse of 
plain nor everywhere cleft by the 
mountain rocks, but it has the 
charm of both these conditions. 
The soil is friable and soft for agri- 
culture and therefore beneficial for 
crops ; and for fertility (well-nigh) 
second to none, certainly for the 
maturity of its fruits it surpasses 
all. For while elsewhere the crops 
are still being sown, there they are 
being reaped. The species and 
nature of the crops are moreover 
unrivalled anywhere. The water 
is sweet, pleasant to the eye and 
agreeable to the taste. And thus, 
thanks to the (favour of the) ele- 
ments the Jews regard this as the 
land flowing with milk and honey 
that was promised to their fathers 
by God, when he covenanted to give 
them the privilege of resurrection, 
and the righteous deity would have 
conferred both (boons) upon them 
had they kept the faith, but from 
their faithless souls were snatched 
away the one here by the yoke of 
captivity, the other there by the chain 
of sin. 


88 


and owing to the abundance of 
excellent grass the cattle yield 
more milk than in other districts. 
But the surest testimony to the 
virtues and thriving condition of 
the two countries is their dense 
population,’ 


THE MESSIAH JESUS 


‘ The region is well wooded and 
therefore rich in flocks, and it has 
milk in abundance ; nowhere, in 
fact, are the udders of the flocks so 
swollen with milk. The fruits 
both wild and cultivated exceed 
in quantity those of all regions. 
Both Judaea and Samaria have a 
dense population.’ 


How is the modern critic to account for the surplus text in 
Egestppus as compared with the Greek original ? The passages in 
the latter are sober enough to have been derived, according to the 
conjecture of Prof. Wilhelm Weber of Halle, from the official re- 
ports of the Roman mensores who had to explore the country, the 
theatre of future operations, to inform the general headquarters of 
the possibilities there were of supporting the troops on the products 
oftheland. Yet the additions of Egesippus are the typical patriotic 
idealizations of the ‘land of promise,’ overflowing with obvious 
sentimentality. Who, then, was responsible for it? A converted 
Jew like Isaac-Gaudentius, living in beautiful Italy and who had 
never seen Palestine, who was moreover exclusively interested in 
proselytizing for the Church? Not very likely, one may say. On 
the other hand, it would be natural enough that the old traitor 
Josephus, hard-boiled though he was, should thus have given vent 
to his longing for his lost home-country. The lyric expansions of 
the military geographer’s topographical and economic report no 
doubt came from the pen of the old Josephus himself, to whom 
Palestine was after all the land of his childhood and youth. 

If I feel a certain hesitation in definitely attributing these ex- 
pansions to the lost /ast edition of the War, the reason is that the 
corresponding parts of the Russian version have not yet been made 
accessible. Thus Josephus’ homesickness may after all have been 
most intensely felt in the first years of his captivity. It is there- 
fore just possible that these lyric additions belong to the first 
draft of his work, which was subsequently translated into Russian, 
and that he deleted them in a later edition because they called forth 
the gibes of his Roman readers, who knew what the ‘land of 
promise’ was like. What it is of importance to note in connexion 
with the above quotations is the fact that a plus in any of the 
versions may be either the work of the translator (witness the 
theological argument printed in italics) or of the author of the 
original work, i.e. Josephus. 

Nor is the present writer’s mode of procedure and critical 
method in any way new ; on the contrary, it is merely an applica- 
tion of methods commonly used in Old Testamental criticism. 
The above-mentioned passage has, moreover, nothing to do with 


EXTANT NON-GREEK VERSIONS OF JOSEPHUS 89 


Christian origins, and it is a fitting starting-point for our discussion 
precisely because it can be quite dispassionately discussed and 
because it matters little whether we believe that Josephus himself 
or one of his translators expatiated so touchingly on the charms 
of Palestine. 

We come now to another passage which will be found to be of 
some bearing on the central problem, the famous Testimonium. 
Although the Egestppus follows in general the narrative of the 
Jewish War, in the chapter dealing with the reign of Tiberius he 
inserts the scandalous story of Paulina and Mundus, which Jose- 
phus tells only in his Antiquities (xvii. 3. 4). Now, it has been 
observed repeatedly that in its present context the episode has no 
connexion whatever with what precedes and follows—in fact, has 
nothing to do with the history of the Jews. Hence it has been 
regarded as an interpolation by a number of critics. It is true, 
Josephus himself admits having introduced occasionally certain 
‘ paddings ’ ;+ yet even in their worst form they are never entirely 
disconnected from the main topic. Naturally enough, the critics 
have been discussing this particular problem since the age of the 
first humanists, one might almost say, and the true solution has in 
fact been found not once but quite a number of times, As far as 
I can make out, the Dutch scholar John Cloppenburgh (1597-1642) 
was the first to see that if Josephus in his Antiquities (xviii. 3. 3) 
really spoke of Jesus he can only have tried to throw ridicule on 
him and the Christian dogma of the virgin-birth,? after the manner 
of the ill-famed Yoldoth Jeshu (below, p. 107 ἢ. 1; p. 111 1. 38). 
The most effective way in which to do this was to relate in this 
connexion a Boccaccian tale as a proof of the essential truth of 
Ovid’s well-known verse: 

Sy 5 « Male 
Nomine divorum thalamos iniere pudicos.’ 


Over and above this, our author appears to have had a peculiar taste 
for stories of thistype. Tor example, in Avt., v. 8. 3, where he para- 
phrases the story of the annunciation of Samson’s birth,* he without 
any scriptural authority makes the wife tell her husband about 
the visit of a tall and beautiful angel, whereupon, naturally enough, 
the husband evinces clear signs of jealousy and entertains a not 
uncertain suspicion against his better half. To get her out of this 
difficult position and to oblige the husband, Jahveh consents to a 
repetition of the miracle and sends the messenger a second time on 
his errand. This silly, albeit rather humorous, addition to the 


1 See above, p. 44 0. 2. 

* The last and one of the best and most convincing presentations of this thesis 
is Clyde Pharr’s paper, ‘The Testimony of Josephus to Christianity,’ American 
Journal of Philology, xlviii., 1927, pp. 137-147. 

* Judges xiii. 7. 


go THE MESSIAH JESUS 


sacred text goes a long way toward indicating Josephus’ attitude 
as regards stories about virgin mothers and miraculous births. 11 
our author quoted the scandal in the Roman temple of Isis in 
support of his own explanation of the birth story in Like, his 
words, ‘ In the Roman sanctuary of Isis, too, events happened not 
differing from those shameful deeds,’ must have been the genuine 
beginning of the paragraph following immediately after his chapter 
on Jesus, and have served to tack it on to the preceding lost gibes 
at the Christian legend. Onthe contrary, the now preceding words, 
‘and at the same time something else terribly upset the Jews,’ must 
have stood before the present § 81, “There was a Jewish exile,’ etc., 
which introduces another pertinent anecdote: to wit, how a 
Jewish swindler persuaded a noble Roman matron to send gold 
and purple to Jerusalem and then appropriated the precious gifts 
for the benefit of his own purse, and how Tiberius, on hearing the 
complaint of her husband, drove the whole Jewish community out 
of Rome, etc. Since the gold and purple curtain of the sanctuary 
—or rather its two curtains \—were renewed every year, and since, 
therefore, the material for these tapestries must have been pro- 
vided for in the regular temple-budget, the impostor could hardly 
persuade the God-tearing Roman proselyte lady—unless she was 
uncommonly badly informed about Jewish ritual customs—that 
hey contribution was wanted for this annual pious work. On the 
other hand, the severe repression by the Emperor of the whole 
Roman Jewry is inexplicable if this petty case of embezzling had 
no political background. If, however, we remember the famous 
lines of the prophet Zechariah (vi. 9-12) about the men of the 
Babylonian captivity who had sent silver and gold to make a 
crown for Zerubabel, the messianic ‘ branch ’ of the root of David, 
it seems probable that the Jewish swindler persuaded the Lady 
Fulvia to follow this classical example and to send purple and 
gold to Jerusalem for the royal cloak and the crown of the Messianic 
king Jesus, mentioned in the preceding chapter (Aztiq., xviii. 3. 3). 
What would otherwise have been a petty swindle becomes, under 
this supposition, a case of high treason against the Emperor, and 
we can well understand his sentence of banishment from the 
metropolis of the Roman Empire against the whole apocalyptically 
excited Jewry of his capital. 

In view of this plausible explanation *—indeed the only one to 
account for the presence of these scandalous stories in this part of the 
Antiquities—it is a most remarkable fact that the shocking analogy 
between Paulina’s adventures and the corresponding passage in 


1 See below, p. 146 n. I. 

2 Iam glad to say that it has been approved by M. Salomon Reinach in his 
review of the German edition of this book in the Revue des Etudes Juives, 1929, 
p. 127:(reprinted in his A malthée, vol. ii., 1930, p. 320 f.; cp. ibid., p. 347). 


EXTANT NON-GREEK VERSIONS OF JOSEPHUS οἱ 


the so-called Infancy Gospel in Luke is much more patent in the 
Latin version of the Christian Egesippus than in the standard 
Greek version of the Jew Josephus. The two texts have been 
compared in detail by Dr. Otto Weinreich "in his well-known study 
of this story type. for the convenience of the English reader an 
English translation of them is given in Appendix xv, 

The most characteristic divergency is the dialogue between the 
seducer and the victim, found only in kgestppus. The dramatiza- 
tion of the story is patent even to the most casual reader, and the 
correct explanation was given, as far back as the eighteenth 
century, by the Frenchman Jean Clerq. A secondary source, that 
is, has been utilized to enliven the original account of Josephus, 
and this source is the little farce Anubis as Paramour by the 
Roman aristocrat Lentulus, which is first mentioned by Tertullian. 
The identification of this Lentulus rests on an uncertain basis ; but 
he must have been pretty nearly contemporaneous with the in- 
teresting adventure which furnished the plot of his little work, 
because such comedies are most appreciated by the public when 
they still have the added attraction of actuality. The comedy, 
then, supplied the dialogue of the Egestppus version. Now, as 
we have said before, it is precisely in this Egesippus text that we 
find the most shocking parallels to the account of the Annunciation 
in Like: 


*beata Paulina concubitu .. . ‘ave Maria, gratia plena, domi- 
dei Anubis ’ nus tecum 
‘de se quoque et illa deum esse 
generandum persuadet mulieri ’ ‘ecce concipies et paries filium 
‘ promit exempla quod et lovem | et vocabitur filius 
summum deorum Alcmena altissimt.’ 


susceperit et Leda... 
et plurimae aliae, quae ediderint 
deos partu.’ 


No Christian such as St. Ambrose (who has sometimes been 
held to be the author of the Egesifpus version), and still less a 
freshly converted Jew, intent upon converting others, would have 
deliberately introduced such blasphemous allusions into a text if 
it did not previously contain anything of the kind. Nor isit likely 
that a Christian deliberately set to work to search for such material | 
in the libretto of a mtmus itself 300 years old, especially if we re- 
member the horror the Church had of this type of literature. On 
the other hand, it is easy to imagine the delight of a Josephus when 
he came across the Anubis moechus (which may have been still 
popular in his own time, or which he may have found in the library 
of Epaphroditus) and saw how effectively he could embellish the 


1 Dey Trug des Nectanebos, Leipzig, 1911, p. 24. 


92 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


old story with a little drama. It is therefore likely enough that 
Josephus himself is responsible for the amplified text. At all 
events, it is utterly unlikely that a St. Ambrose or an I[saac- 
Hilarius should have indulged in such coarse indelicacies. 

If this be granted—and I see no alternative—the conclusion is 
important not only for the dating of the ‘ gospel of infancy ’ pre- 
fixed to Luke, but also because it shows Josephus to have been the 
first of the long series of polemists, from the Jew of Celsus and the 
Toldoth Jeshu down to Anatole France, who took neither the ortho- 
dox nor even the artistic view of that naive and touching Christian 
legend. 


VI 


THE PASSAGES ABOUT JOHN THE BAPTIST AND 
JESUS IN THE HEBREW ‘JOSIPPON ’ 


HE Jostppon is commonly believed by modern historians 

not to contain any mention of Jesus whatever, a view 

which is contradicted by two remarkable statements duly 
recorded in Fabricius-Harles’ Bibliotheca Graeca, repeated many 
a time since and variously interpreted. One comes from the pen 
of Cardinal Baronius,’ who states that in a Roman MS. of the 
Jostppon he found the Testimonium passage erased, much to his 
indignation at this impudence on the part of the Hebrews. This 
statement was ironically doubted by Isaac Casaubonus,’? the 
French Huguenot humanist, who suggested that the venerable car- 
dinal had simply been the victim of a practical joker. Pierre Daniel 
Huet,® Bishop of Avranches, on the authority of Hackspan, adds 
that the MS. in question could be found in the Vatican Library, 
and Count Windischgratz went so far as to say that he had been 
shown the MS. in the papal city. All these assertions must be 
accepted with a good deal of caution, since it is certain that none 
of the four copies now at the Vatican was there at the time of 
Baronius, who, moreover, does not say at all that the MS. in ques- 
tion was in the possession of the Papal Library. On the contrary, 
it would be quite reasonable to conclude from his account that it 
was the private property of some Jew, and the MSS. shown to 
Hackspan and Count Windischgratz may in fact have belonged to 
one of the keepers or perhaps to the contemporary Prefect of the 
Library. The second statement comes from the well-known 
Giraldus Cambrensis, who says that Robert Canutus, also called 
Robert of Cricklade, Prior of St. Frideswide (a Benedictine mon- 
astery near Oxford), and Chancellor of Oxford University in 1159, 
a scholar conversant with Hebrew, had found the Testizmonium 
intact in two copies of the Hebrew Josifpon which formed part of 
a MS. collection he had acquired from Jews living in various 
English towns. He goes on to say that in another copy in his 
possession a freshly erased blank occupied the space of the Testv- 


1 Ann. Eccles., i., Antwerp, 1597, ad a. 34, C. 226, p. 215B. 
2 De Reb. sacr. et Eccl. diss., xvi., Geneva, 1657, p. 677. 
8. Demonstr. evang. (, Leipzig, p. 57. 
93 


04 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


montum. In the remaining copies he had consulted, the passage 
was simply non-existent, no doubt because they were derived from 
some archetype from which the text in question had already dis- 
appeared. The statement of Giraldus is corroborated, so far as the 
occurrence of the Testimonium passage in the Hebrew Jostppon is 
concerned, by the eleventh-century Jewish chronicler quoted once 
before (above, p. 83 n. 1), Jerahm’el b. Shelomo, who says, referring 
to Josephus, whom he identifies, of course, with Joseph b. Gorion 
(above, p. 31): 


‘ And he also speaks of Johanan and of Shime‘on son of Johanan,! 
nicknamed Kepha’, born in the village Beth-Saida, and of Jacob, 
son of Joseph, the brother of (JeSu) the crucified one on the father’s 
side. For Joseph, the husband of (Marjam),? the daughter of 
Hannah, the daughter of Jehojagim, the mother of (JeSu)* the 
crucified one, before he was engaged to Marjam,’ had a wife, her name 
was Marjam bath Hannah, and she was asister of Marjam the mother 
of (JeSu)* the crucified one. And she bore Jacob to Joseph and died, 
and he took as his bride Marjam the sister of (Marjam).1_ And there 
was lapidated (Jacobus) in Jerusalem by the Pharisees. And also 
of Matthew the Evangelist, whose name was Levi; this Levi with the 
surname Matthia wrote the book Aven Gilion* in the Hebrew tongue 
for the Hebrews. And also of Sha’ul, surnamed Pa’ul, that is Paulus, 
he wrote, who is of the tribe Benjamin. And also he wrote of Bar 
Nabas of Kipris, who is Joseph the Levite, and of the disciples (read : 
of his disciple) Johanan surnamed Markos the Evangelist. And of 
Judah and of Lukos (sic) the healer and Markos, the disciples of 
Shime‘on Kepha. And Johanan son of Zebadjah the Evangelist, 
who wrote the book of secrets (sefer ha-razim) on the island of 
Padmos (sic), and died forty-eight (read: four-and-eighty) years old 
in the days of Trajan.’ 


It is needless to say that this quotation could only be derived 
from a Christian source,® for no one but a Christian, anxious to safe- 
guard the late dogma of the perpetual virginity of Mary, could have 
found enough interest in this type of genealogical hair-splitting. 
Furthermore, none but a Christian could have repeated the fanciful 
statement of Irenzeus’ δ ‘presbyters’ that John the Evangelist, who 
was in reality beheaded in A.D. 44 in the reign of Agrippa I.,° died 
in hoary old age under Trajan. Finally, the term used for Christ, 
‘the crucified one,’ is not used by Jewish writers, who call him ‘the 
hanged one.’ 


' A genealogy peculiar to the fourth gospel (i. 42, xxi. 15) and the ‘Gospel of 
the Hebrews.’ 

* The name is erased in the Bodleian MS. 

3 Not erased this time! N.B.: The negligent and inconsequent procedure of 
the censor. | 

4 Jewish distortion of the word ‘ evangelion.’ 

δ St. Jerome, De Virts tllustr., chs. iv., vii., vili., xill., has very similar passages. 

Ons 22; 5 faite 4..4Σἥἅ. 


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THE UNPAGED FOLIO 89 RECTO OF THE EDITIO PRINCEPS OF THE HEBREW JOSEPHUS 

THE SO-CALLED Josippon PRINTED BY RABBI ABRAHAM CONAT BETWEEN 1476—1I480 IN MANTUA. THE 

RIGHT-HAND COLUMN, LINE 12-19, SHOWS THE PASSAGE ON JOHN THE BAPTIST (BELOW P. 229 AND SEQ.), 

ON THE LEFT SIDE LINE 6-II IS THE PASSAGE ON THE FOLLOWERS OF JESUS AND ON ’ELE'AZAR BEN DINAIL, 

THE ‘ BANDIT-CHIEF ’ ‘TRANSL. P. 96), APPARENTLY MENTIONED AMONG THE DISCIPLES OF PETER IN THE 
PSEUDO-CLEMENTINES (BELOW P. 103, NOTE I) 


THE BAPTIST AND JESUS IN THE ‘ JOSIPPON’ — 95 


We know, moreover, through a quotation in the mediaeval 
Golden Legend, exactly what this Josephus, interpolated accord- 
ing to St. Jerome’s De viris illustribus, said about ‘ Jacob, son of 
Joseph, the brother of Jesus the crucified one’ : 


‘Friday after the death of the Lord—as says Josephus and 
Jerome in the book on famous men*—James made a vow that he 
would not eat until he saw the Lord risen again from the dead. On 
the day of the resurrection—when James had not tasted food unto 
that very day—the Lord appeared to him and said to those about 
him, ‘‘ Place a table and bread”’ (upon it); then he took the bread, 
blessed it and gave it to James the Just, saying, ‘‘ Rise up, brother, 
and eat, for the Son of Man has risen from the dead.” ’ 


A MS. of the Josifpon containing such obviously Christian 
material would necessarily also reproduce the Testimonium. If 
Jerahm’el b. Shelomo says nothing about it, the reason is that his 
copy no longer contained it, obviously owing to recent erasure 
by the hand of a Jewish owner. To explain the presence of the 
other Christian material two different hypotheses are possible. 
The most simple is to suppose the whole passage to be an interpola- 
tion made by converted Jews acting as censors. We know® that in 
the age of the printing-press this office of censorship was performed 
by baptized Jews, who were authorized to search private and syna- 
gogue libraries for ‘ blasphemous,’ i.e. anti-Christian, literature, 
and to expurgate it at the expense of the owners. Nor were things 
done much differently in the Middle Ages. In an edict dated 
the rgth of August 1263, King Jayme. of Aragon prescribes that the 
Jews should either expurgate their own books or have them cen- 
sored by the Jewish apostate Paulus de Burgos. Still, we have no 
proof that censors ever inserted long passages into Hebrew books, 
and it is therefore much more probable that these interpolations 
were made by converted Jews for proselytizing purposes, and 
even the Testimonium passage in Robert of Cricklade’s copies of 


1 Jacobus de Voragine, Legenda aurea, \xvii.: ‘In Pavasceue autem, mortuo 
domino, sicut dicit Josephus et Hieronymus in libro de viris tllustribus, Jacobus 
votum vovit, se non comesturum, donec videret dominum a mortuis survexisse. In 
ipsa autem die resurvectionis, cum usque in diem illam Jacobus non gustasset cibum, 
cidem dominus apparuit, ac eis, qui cum eo evant, dixit: Ponite mensam et panem -¢ 
deinde panem accipiens benedixit ct dedit Jacobo Justo dicens : Surge, frater mi, 
comede : quia filius hominis a mortuis resurrexit.’ 

2 Opp. ed. Martianay, t. iv.», p. 102: ‘ Evangelium quoque, quod appellatur 
secundum Hebraeos, et a me nuper in Graecum Latinumque sermonem translatum est, 
quo et Ovigenes saepe utitur, post resurrectionem Salvatoris vefert : Dominus autem 
cum dedisset sindonem servo sacerdotis ivit ad Jacobum et apparuit et. Iuraverat 
enim Jacobus se non comesturum panem ab illa hora, qua biberat calicem Domini, 
donec videret eum rvesurgentem a dormientibus (v. 1.: mortuis).  Lursusque post 
paullum: Afferte, ait Dominus, mensam et panem, Statimque additur : Tulit 
panem et benedixit ac fregit et dedit Jacobo Justo, et dixit ei: Frater mu, comede 
panem tuum, quia vesurrexit Filius hominis a dormientibus (v. 1. : mortuts).’ 

8 See Joseph Jacobs’ article ‘Censorship of Jewish Books,’ in the Jewish 
Encyclopedia. 


96 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


the Jostppon had probably no other origin. Yet there is still 
another possibility to explain this feature. Ever since Scaliger 
and Casaubonus it has been pointed out that the Josippow in a 
number of details shows a close dependence on the Egesippus, the 
proselytizing tendency of which is manifest on every page of the 
compilation. Itis probable that the lost archetype of the Josippon 
was nothing but a Hebrew translation of the Egesippus, undertaken 
by a Jewish apostate for the purpose of converting his former co- 
religionaries,' just as the Egesippus has been composed for an 
identical purpose by the baptized Jew Hilarius-Gaudentius, alias 
Isaac.” Just as this Isaac interpolated the passages about Peter 
and Paul from the writings of the Christian traveller Hegesippus, 
later copyists of Isaac’s version used by the Hebrew translator may 
have added from St. Jerome’s De viris illustribus the material just 
passed in review. The Jews, who naturally found the Josippon 
quite interesting otherwise, on discovering the Testimoniuim, for 
which they must have felt a particular aversion, simply erased it. 
The strongly anti-Christian tendency of certain other passages in 
the extant Josippon has so far not been noticed because most of the 
common editions of this popular book are so thoroughly expurg- 
ated by the censor as to create an impression of neutrality, i.e. that 
it does not mention Jesus and his followers at all. The true spirit of 
the work may be gauged from the exceedingly rare editio brinceps, 
printed by R, Abraham Conat at Mantua prior to 1470. The 
crucial passage in this rare book reads as follows : 3 


‘In those days ‘ there were wars 
and quarrels in Judaea between the 
Pharisees and 
the “‘ robbers of our people ’’ who followed ὃ 
the son of Joseph, εἰς. δ | BLANK |? 
**. . . ‘Ele‘azar, who committed great 
crimes in Israel 
until the Pharisees overpowered him.’ 


One might, of course, doubt the identity of the ‘son of Joseph ’ 
just mentioned with Jesus, the more so because the name Joseph 
itself is extremely common. Yet a comparison of this text with 


' See above, p. 31. * See above, p. 58, last lines. 

ὅ The passage is found on fol. 89 of the unpaginated book. See Pl. rx., left 
column, lines 6-11. 

* T.e. the principate of Caligula. 

δ Lit. “inclined after’ ; cf. Acts v. 36: Θευδᾶς ᾧ προσεκλίθη ἀνδρῶν ἀριθμός. 

* The reader will notice the Aramaic abbreviation “γ5) immediately before the 
blank in line 5 in the left column of PI. vir. 

” On a similar blank indicating an expurgated passage in the Hisfovia Augusta 
(above, p. 12 ἢ. 4), see Hohl, Kio, xiii., 1913, p. 391 n. 4. 

* There must have followed something like ‘ chief among them.’ 


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THE PARIS MS. OF R. JUDAH LEON B. MOSHEH MOSCONI’S RECENSIO OF THE ‘ JOSIPPON ’ 


WITH THE PASSAGES ON JOHN THE BAPTIST AND JESUS (COD, HEBR, 1280 F° 123 R° AND V° (I5TH CENTURY). BIBLIOTHEQUE NATIONALE 
‘SEE P. 97, NOTE 1) 


X ALV Id 


THE BAPTIST AND JESUS IN THE ‘JOSIPPON’ ‘97 


another, found in a Josippon MS. in the Bibliotheque Nationale? 
and reproduced on PI. x., will speedily dispel such doubts. 
Here the passage in question runs as follows : 


‘In those days there was much party strife ° 
and great disputes in Judaea 
between the Pharisees 
and the ‘‘ robbers’ in Israel 
who followed Jeshu‘ah 
ben Pandera the Nasoraean, 
who did great miracles in Israel until 
the Pharisees overpowered him 
and hanged him upon a pole.’ 


The text shows quite clearly that in the archetype of this re- 
daction the hand of the censor had deleted the name of the chief of 
the ‘robbers,’ namely, ’Ele‘azar. The reader or copyist was thus no 
longer able to see that the two fragments belonged to two different 
sentences, the less so because the gap was evidently not greater than 
it isin the editio princeps. He therefore concluded that what had 
dropped out was simply the objectionable patronymic of Jesus, ‘ben 
Pandera,’ and the ordinary surname, ‘/an-nosri.’ He contracted 
the two sentences, and thus Jesus became the subject of a predicate 
formerly referring to ’Ele‘azar. Once this was done, the censor 
could not tolerate any more the expression ‘crimes’ (originally 
referring to ’Ele‘azar), and replaced it by ‘miracles.’ The mention 
of the pole (or tree) proves, of course, that the archetype of this re- 
daction no longer contained anything about the crucifixion under 
Pilate, and the copyist thus had to mention it in a different con- 
text, notwithstanding the risk of creating a false impression, to the 
effect that Jesus had been executed in the reign of Caligula, during 
which the misdeeds of ’Ele‘azar were perpetrated. 

Another fifteenth-century copy of the same archetype, viz. the 
Josippon with the preface of R. Judah Leon Ὁ. Mosheh Mosconi 
(born in Macedonia in 1328), telling how he compared five different 
MSS. to establish his text, was until lately in the Museo Borgiano 
of the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide in Rome, and is at present 
in the Vatican Library. Here the expurgation of the crucial 
passage is even more radical, and nothing remains of the text but 
the words, ‘ In those days there was great party strife with great 
disputes in Judaea between the Pharisees and the ‘ robbers in 
Israel.’’’ The sentence following, ‘who followed Jesus, son of 


1 MS. Hebr. 1280, fol. 123v°, written by Juda Ὁ. Shelomo of Camerino degli 
Saraceni for the physician Raphael Cohen of Lunel in Manfredonia in the realm 
of Naples, in A.D. 1472. The archetype was written in the latter half of the 
thirteenth century for R. Judah Ὁ. Mosheh Mosconi. See our PI. x. 

2 maclagoth. 


G 


98 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


Pandera the Nasorean,’ etc., has been carefully blotted out. 
Whereas the expurgation in the printed edition of Mantua coulc 
be established only indirectly through the mutilation of the twe 
sentences, the significant blank, and the Aramaic abbreviation fo! 
“and so forth,’ in this MS. the censor can be seen at his work ΟἹ 
deletion. A comparison of the three texts—that is, the Mantuz 
edition, the Paris and the Vatican MSS.—will clearly show how ὃ 
passage on the ‘ bandits’ following Jesus in the reign of Caligule 
and on their chief ‘Ele‘azar has been gradually mutilated so as tc 
make the names of ’Ele‘azar and Jesus disappear first of all fror 
the context, and finally have no trace left of the whole story in the 
MSS. derived from these, and, naturally, in the subsequent printec 
editions of the standard text of the Hebrew /Josippon. 

The same set of facts likewise explains the silence of the /o- 
stppon on the public appearance and death of Jesus, as it explain: 
the corresponding silence of the Greek standard text of the Jewvs/ 
War. Christian censors mercilessly deleting objectionable passages 
and Jewish readers deleting in their turn the (to them) obnoxious 
Testtmomum in its Christian form, are jointly responsible fo1 
this wholesale disappearance of the crucial passages bearing ΟΥ 
Christian origins. 7 

Nor is it impossible to determine with any degree of accuracy 
the period when the passage on Jesus was deleted from the 
chapter dealing with Pilate’s administration. _The passage in 
question was missing as early as the twelfth century when R, Abra- 
ham ibn Datd of Granada composed his epitome of the Jos¢ppor 
(Pl. xi1.). For either he or a scribe, astonished at the silence of the 
work on Jesus, inserted the words ‘in those days Jesus the Naso- 
raean was captured,’ ? but he put it in the chapter dealing with 
Pompey, just before the passage corresponding to Avt., xiv. I. 3 
so that it would seem that Jesus was arrested in 63 B.c.:. this 
strange blunder is explained by a confusion of Jesus the Nasoraean 
with another Jesus, a disciple of R. Jehoshu‘ah b. Perahja.? 

‘Such a blunder would, of course, have been impossible had the 
Jews of that period still possessed a statement of Josephus con- 
cerning the life and death of Jesus the Nasdraean. The very fact 
that such mistakes occurred in the Talmud.shows that the Aramaic 
version of Josephus’ War no longer existed at the time of the com- 


1 See our Pl. x1. The reader can easily verify that the expurgated text was 
identical with the untouched words reproduced in our PI. x., if he will bear in mind 
that there is only one Hebrew letter, the b, extending above the line. The little 
pinnacles crowning the black spot in Pl. x1. show the place where a ὃ was obliter- 
ated by the censor. 

2.“ baiamim hahem nithphas Jeshu han-nosvi.’ 

3 On this earlier Jesus the reader will find some information in R. Travers 
Herford, Christianity in Talmud and Midvash, London, 1903, p. 50 sgg. This con- 
fusion led into error my old friend Mr. G. R. S. Mead when he wrote his book 
Did Jesus live ;80 B.C.? See below, App. 11. 


PLATE ΧΙ 


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THE PASSAGE ON JESUS DELETED IN THE VATICAN MS. OF R. JUDAH LEON Β. MOSHEH 
MOSCONI’S ‘ JOSIPPON ' 
COD. BORGIANUS HEBR. I Ε 128 ν᾽ (15TH CENTURY) 
(SEE P, 90 NOTE 1) 


THE BAPTIST AND JESUS IN THE ‘JOSIPPON’ 99 


position of the Talmud. It is worth mentioning, also, that in the 
eleventh century, when the Moslem writer Ali ben Ahmad Abn 
Muhammed ibn Hasm reports of Jusuf ibn Qorion, that is, Jose- 
phus, that he speaks favourably of John and his baptism but * says 
nothing more of the history of Jesus Christ, the son of Mary, on 
whom be peace,’ this statement finds its explanation in correspond- 
ing passages occurring in the Vatican? and Paris? MSS. Αἱ all 
events, the deletion of the passages bearing on Jesus (aside from 
the Christian Testimonium) must have happened before the 
eleventh century: —, eo 

“Fortunately, the destructive work of the censors was not uni- 
form or uniformly thorough, and could not be so. Thus in the 
fifteenth century R. Abraham b. Mordekhai Farissol * (1451-1526) 
still found, as he himself states, the words ‘ bajamim hahem,’ that 
is, ‘in those days,’ and referring to the life of Jesus, in the Joseppon 
chapter concerning Pilate. He rightly concludes that Jesus must 
have lived in the reign of Tiberius, to which those words refer. It 
is in the nature of things that individual owners managed to con- 
ceal their copies from the censors, and that some censors were more 
negligent than others, or could even be bribed. Lven the employ- 
ment of various censors on the same job by the Church * was no 
absolute guarantee. In the case of printed editions, where the 
censorship was exercised before the book went to press, the work 
was, of course, much more effective. 

The six lines in the printed edition of Abraham Conat (quoted 
above, p. 96) owe their existence to just such negligence or cor- 
ruption on the part of the official censors. The publisher, we may 
suppose, attached high hopes to just these lines, which were doubt- 
less meant to stimulate the sales. The event does not appear to 
have justified his optimism. For it is certainly no accident that 
the edition in question is extremely rare. Evidently it was 
hunted down and ruthlessly destroyed so far as was in the power 
of the ecclesiastical authorities. Nor were things much ditferent 


peewee 0 5 eee ὁ. 


1 Hebr. 438, f° 95, re, line 15: ‘this was Johanan who made a baptism before 
all who baptized according to the words of Jesus.’ me 

2 Hebr. 1280 (see Pl. x.) : ‘ this was R(abbi) Jehohanan who baptized before 
all those who baptized {for the remission of sins] according to the order of the 
words of those who confirm in the law of Jeshu‘ah son of Joseph son of Pandera the 
Nasoraean.’ The bracketed words, ‘for the remission of sins,’ in the same connexion 
are only found in the Arabic version of the Josippon. It is significant that the 
Christian censors uniformly blotted them out; they naturally objected to any 
statement giving such undue credit to the mere forerunner. 

3 Magen’ Abraham, ch. xx, (MS. of the Rabbinic Seminary in Budapest, quoted 
by Sam. Krauss, Das Leben Jesu nach jtidischen Quellen, Berlin, 1902, p. 242, and 
300 n. 9, who could make no sense of this important witness, having only a very 
slight acquaintance with the state of the problem of the Josippon paragraphs 
on Jesus). This book was written after 1473. 


΄ 


4 See Pl, ΧΠΙ. and below, p. 107 n. 3. _The signatures of the various censors 
are still visible in many copies of Hebrew books. 


ΤΟΟ THE MESSIAH JESUS 


in the Turkish empire. As is well known, Isa ibn Maryam is con- 
sidered a great prophet even by the Moslems, and any patriarch 
complaining of Jewish ‘ blasphemies ’ was therefore bound to find 
a willing ear among Turkish officialdom. Furthermore, a Stambul 
publisher of Jewish books had necessarily to consider the export 
market in Christian Europe, and the peril to which the possession 
of such copies would expose any travelling Jew after crossing the 
boundary of a Christian country. 

Having thus dealt at some length with the vicissitudes of the 
Jostppon and the vexed clause about Jesus, we may now proceed 
to analyse what by a fortunate combination of circumstances has 
been left to us, with a view to extracting whatever historical data 
may be obtained in this way. 


ann eo 2, 


nation’ (f%vise ‘amenu), a transparent allusion (in the uswal 
rabbinical way) to the prophecy of Daniel xi. 14: ‘ and in those 
days many shall stand up against the king of the South, also the 
children of the bandits among thy people [p‘visej ‘amekha] shall 
rebel in order to realize the vision, but they shall stumble.’ Such 
an allusion was easy to understand by any reader learned in the 
Scriptures, who would then be quick to take the hint and to 
identify the ‘king of the South’ with the ‘ Edomite’ ruler, and 
to rejoice at the prophesied failure of those ‘ bandits,’ ‘ eager to 
realize the Messianic vision.’ This quotation from Daniel xi. 14 
is quite in the style of the Josippon, in which this and simi- 
lar allusions abound. As a matter of fact, the term λῃσταί, 
‘ bandits,’ habitually used by Josephus to designate the nationalist 
revolutionary and anti-Roman party among the Jews, in the 
Jostppon is regularly rendered by farisim, ‘ bandits,’ ‘marauders.’ 
If the same term, then, is applied to the followers of Jesus, it 
shows for once that the Jews, not content with expurgating a 
proselytizing text of the Josippon, proceeded more aggressively 
when they saw a chance and came right out with the asser- 
tion that the followers of Jesus belonged to the pavisim, the 
revolutionary, anti-Roman party of the kananajim (zealots) and 
bavjonim (extremists).1 This statement receives a certain amount 
of confirmation from the fact that at least one, possibly two, 
of Jesus’ followers were known as gawiaja, “the zealot,’ and at 
least’ one, possibly two, as bavjona, ‘the extremist,’ or even 
yas barjonim, “leader of extremists.’1 If the passages in 
question came from the text of Josephus—as we shall try to prove 
—they can only have been derived from uncensored copies of 
Josephus’ MSS., such as fell later into the hands of the Russian 
translator. It seems evident that, to revise the Josippon ‘ han- 
1 See below, p. 103 n. 33; Ὁ. 252 n. 3. 


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THE BAPTIST AND JESUS IN THE ‘JOSIPPON’ tor 


nosvi,’ the Christian proselytizing translation of the Latin Egeseppus, 
a Jew from the Byzantine provinces of Italy who could read Greek 
and write Hebrew must have turned to a copy of the Greek original 
which had come down to him through an unbroken line of Jewish 
owners and had thus escaped Christian censorship. Unfortu- 
nately for us, his labour was vain, for the essential part of the 
passages in question has been finally blotted out by the pen of 
the Christian veveditori?. The phrase deleted must have told the 
reader what the object of the ‘ wars’ and ‘ quarrels ’ between the 
‘bandits straying after Jesus’ and the Pharisees (above, p. 96 n. 5) 
were about. \ 
A conjecture as to the contents of the lost passage is, fortu- ‘ 
nately, not altogether impossible. We know from Origen * that 
Daniel’s prophecy about the ‘abomination of desolation’ was 
believed to have been realized first when Pilate brought the 
Emperor’s image on the legionary standards into the sanctuary of — 
Jerusalem, and again when the Emperor Gaius wanted to set up his ἱ 
statue in the temple.2. Now, we know from Josephus’ Greek work 
that the Jewish authorities and the reasonable and honest governor 
Petronius opposed a passive procrastination to the caprice of 
the imperial madman. But the messianists of the time, waiting 
for the Second Coming, must have recalled the words of Jesus: ° 
‘When ye see the abomination of desolation spoken of by Daniel 
the prophet stand where it ought not, then let them that are in 
Judaea flee to the mountains.’ They must have interpreted 
Caligula’s order as the foretold sign of the imminence of the Second 
Coming, and would therefore quite naturally exhort their com- 
patriots to betake themselves to the hills, there to await the return 
of Jesus in glory and, as suggested in the Hebrew text, ° to 
stand up against the king of the South,’ that is, their king Agrippa, 
the Idumaean Southerner, and to ‘ arise in order to realize the 
vision.’ We know from the Greek text of Josephus 4 that the Jews 
refused to till the soil and to sow corn during this critical period, 
this agricultural strike making Petronius anticipate a famine 
throughout the land. It would, of course, have ereatly aggravated 
the difficulties had a really considerable part of the population 
~taken to the mountains and begun to live there on what are 
euphemistically called ‘ the resources of the land,’ that is, to use 
Josephus’ blunt words, as ‘ robbers.’ It is very understandable 
that the Pharisees should have done all they could to counteract 
this eschatological propaganda for a new Maccabean exodus. That 
it came to violent quarrels, to blows and even to genuine wars, 
between the messianist activists and the Pharisee opportunists is 


1 Comm. in Matt. xxii. 15ff. (tom. xvil., ch. xxv.). 
2 See St. Jerome, above, p. 67 n. 2. 
8 Mark xii. 14; Matt. xxiv, 15. * Bf... p.:200 f: 


102 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


not at all surprising, since Josephus! says of the latter that they 
were ‘overbearing and easily roused to fighting.’ 

But the censor’s ink must have blotted out more than a phrase 
about mere internecine war and strife between the Pharisees and 
the messianist followers of Jesus. We have noted above 2 that 
according to Tacitus the Jews resorted to arms at the approach of 
the troops of Petronius to Jerusalem, to prevent the placing of the 
statue in the temple. Though the Greek Josephus says nothing of 
all this, the censored text of the Josifpon 3 states : ‘and there arose 
wars because of this,’ or ‘ they were aroused to wars.’ Only the 
Mosconi MS. in Paris (cp. Pl. vit., line 7) has ‘ and they raised 
wars against them,’ in order to put the responsibility for the out- 
break of hostilities on the Romans. 

Even from these scanty remains in the Josippon it is easy to see 
that the Greek original must have had a passage corresponding to 
the statement of Tacitus about the armed resistance of the Jews 
under Caligula. Since the six lines, expunged later on, of the 
Mantua edition of the Josippon4 attribute the responsibility 
therefor to the followers of Jesus, it is clear that on this account the 
passage in question has been blotted out in the Greek and, though 
less completely, also in the Hebrew text. 

But the most interesting historical detail found in that portion 
of the Mantua edition occurs in the phrase following the blank : 
‘...’Ele‘azar, who committed great crimes in Israel until the Phari- 
sees overpowered him.’ If we want to know who this ’Ele‘azar 
was, we have only to turn over the said folio 89 of Abraham Conat’s 
edition, to find on the verso (left column, line 17) the statement : 
‘ Felix sent ’Ele‘azar the robber (hap-paris) to Rome,’ a sentence 
which, by the way, proves definitely that parisim is indeed the 
exact equivalent of Josephus’ λῃσταί, ‘robbers.’ Felix is simply 
the well-known Roman governor, and the robber ’Ele‘azar is 
‘Ele‘azar son of Deinaios, the ‘robber chief’ (ἀρχιλῃστής), men- 
tioned both in the Greek text of Josephus and in the Latin Ege- 
sippus as having been arrested and sent to Rome in chains by the 
governor Antonius Felix (A.D. 52-80), ‘after he had harassed the 
country for twenty years.’ This ’Ele‘azar son of Dinai is quite 
well known also to the Mishnah, where he is mentioned as a famous 
‘ murderer,’ and to the Midrash,* which knows him as the leader 
of one of the unfortunate generations who tried to force the 
messianic redemption of Israel before the time of God’s own good 


1 Ant., xvii. § 41. 2 Ῥ “δῷ; 

* See also above, p. 67 n. 1, about the gravissima seditio of the Jews in Egesippus. 

* See above, p. 96 n. 3. 

ὁ Sota, ix. 9; Babl., 47a; Jerush., 230. Cp. Tosephta Sota, ch. xiv., ed. 
Zuckermandel, p. 3204,. 

© Midrash Siphré to Deut. 205 (ed. Friedmann, 110}; Jalqut, sect. shofatim, 
§ 923; Varsow, col. 632; Midrash to Canticles, ii. 7 (998). 


THE BAPTIST AND JESUS IN THE ‘JOSIPPON’ 103 


will. Both these statements agree perfectly with what Josephus 
says about him as a ‘robber chief,’ i.e. a nationalist revolutionary 
leader of the Jews. The ‘twenty years’ during which he * har- 
assed the country,’ until Felix rounded him up and sent him to 
Rome for trial, are quite compatible with the statement of the 
Hebrew Josippon that he ‘ committed many misdeeds ’ in the days 
when Caius Caligula wanted to place his statue in the temple 
(A.D. 40). The hitherto enigmatic words of Tacitus (Ann., XV. 44) 
to the effect that the Messianic ‘ superstition,’ temporarily sup- 
pressed through the crucifixion of the Christ under Pilate, ‘soon 
broke out again’ (rursus erumpebat), is now explained through the 
mutilated sentence of the Josippon, the partial erasure of which 
can only be understood if this ’Ele‘azar was originally described 
as one of those who ‘strayed after the son of Joseph,’ that is, if the 
Josippon and its source described * Ele‘azar_as.a Christian rising 
against Rome because he expected the immediate Second Coming 
of the Christ. | | 

Nor does the name of ’Ele‘azar seem to be quite unknown in 
Christian tradition. In the so-called pseudo-Clementines,’ early 
apocryphal writings based on lost Acis of Peter, there is a list of 
sixteen or thirteen followers of Peter, among them, at the end, 
Αἰνείας καὶ Aafapos οἱ ἱερεῖς, in the Latin version Phineas, Lazarus, 
etc:, so that evidently either Αἰνείας or Phineas, or both, are 
corruptions of one and the same name. ’Ele‘azar being regu- 
larly written sy), L’azar, in the Palestinian Talmud, and the famous 
New Testament ‘ Lazarus’ being a witness to the fact that this 
abbreviation was the popular pronunciation of the name in Pales- 
tine, there is no difficulty in identifying Λάζαρος ὁ ἱερεύς, ‘ ’Ele- 
‘azar the priest,’ ’Ele‘azar hak-kohen, with the ’Ele‘azar mentioned 
as one of the followers of Jesus during the reign of Caligula. 

It may, of course, be objected that the name of ’Ele‘azar is 
itself far too common to make such an identification a very safe 
thing, at least so long as we have no father’s name to go by. Still, 
inthis case it seems extremely tempting, from a palaeographic point 
of view, to submit Dineas =Deineias as the true original of the two 
evidently corrupt forms Aimevas and Phineas, since A and A are 
as easily confused as Latin P and 1), Η and £, in capital script. If 
this conjecture be accepted, it would seem as though both father 
and son, two men of priestly race, had been followers of Peter,” the 
barjona or ‘ extremist ’ * among the disciples of Jesus. 


1 Hom., ii. τ, P.G., 78b (45) ; Recogn., ii. 1 (P.G., i. 1247 sq. below). 

2 The case would be entirely parallel to the fact—not noticed hitherto by any 
modern scholar—that Theudas, the pseudo-messiah of the time of Cuspius Fadus 
and the Emperor Claudius, was ‘ an acquaintance ’ (γνώριμος) of Paul (Clem. Alex., 
Strom. vii. 17: ‘ Walentine (the gnostic) was a disciple (ἀκηκοέναι) of Theudas, 
γνώριμος δ᾽ οὗτος ἔγεγόνει ἸΤαύλου Vs 

3 On this meaning of the name, cp. below, p. 252 0. 3. 


104 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


However that may be—and it goes without saying that I attach 
no importance to this conjecture—there is certainly a strange dis- 
tortion of Josephus’ text in this connexion visible in the Josippon, 
which is obviously connected with the erasure of the line referring 
to ’Ele‘azar, which survives only in the editio princeps of Mantua. 
Instead of speaking of the devastations of the robber chief ’Ele‘azar, 
as does Josephus in the original, the Josippon says : ‘In this space 
of twenty years Agrippa (11.) did not desist from robbery and 
spoliation, so that he caused much slaughter and enormous loss of 
life all over Syria. In Judaea, too, he strewed the land with many 
corpses, until Felix was made commander of the Roman army, who 
sent a strong host against him and butchered his bandits, captured 
Agrippa himself and sent him to Rome in chains. And although 
Felix had sent ’Ele‘azar the robber to Rome, the country was not 
cleansed from blood, for the Jews butchered each other, moved by 
fratricidal hatred.’ At first sight one would suppose a simple 
mistake of the copyist, writing Agrippa instead of ’Ele‘azar the 
robber. This, however, is impossible, because the whole para- 
graph about Agrippa II. is made to refer to these twenty years and 
to thealleged revolutionary fight of Agrippa Il. against the Romans, 
a fight which is, of course, entirely unhistorical. The paragraph 
begins, quite unmistakably, with the words, ‘ As long as this 
Agrippa, son of Agrippa (I.), lived and reigned, wars between the 
people of Israel and the Romans never ceased until the captivity 
of the Jews who were led up to Rome. This is the second cap- 
tivity, when the second temple was devastated in the twentieth 
year of Agrippa on the ninth day of the fifth month which is called 
Abh.’ How crudely the compiler went to work may be seen from 
the date, ‘twentieth year of Agrippa 11.,’ which he gives for the 
destruction of the temple. This cannot, of course, be based on 
Josephus ; for Agrippa became king of Chalcis in a.p. 48, of 
Trachonitis in A.D. 53, and never in all his life was king of Judaea. 
These ‘ twenty years’ are simply transposed from the history of 
the ‘robber’ ’Ele‘azar to the history of Agrippa 11, ‘ the philo- 
Roman and philo-Caesarian,’ as he is called on his coins, who never 
had the slightest difficulty with the Romans. The obvious object 
of this strange transposition was to get rid of ’Ele‘azar the robber 
altogether, an elimination which is now perfectly clear because we 
know the six partially expurgated lines of the Mantua edition. It 
must have been the work of a Christian copyist, perhaps of the 
author of what the Oxford MS. of Jerahm’el calls the Josippon han- 
nosrt, (the ᾿ Christian Josippon’). On the other hand, the meagre 
phrase about the capture of ’Ele‘azar the robber by Felix must be 
due to the Jewish scribe who completed and corrected the Christian 
Josippon, as well as he could, by comparing the most important 
passages of a Greek Josephus. 


THE BAPTIST AND JESUS IN THE ‘JOSIPPON’ 105 


The example just mentioned is, however, but one of the many 
deviations existing between the Jos¢ppon and the standard text of 
Josephus. The former does not mention a single one of the many 
Jewish rebel chiefs conquered by the Romans after a more or less 
bitter struggle before the final uprising of the Jews in A.D. 66. 
Judas the Galilaean and his sons, Theudas, and all the rest, 
are conspicuous only by their absence. What Josephus has 
been accused of unjustly, namely, that he attempted to conceal 
from the Romans as much as possible what he must have known 
about the messianic movement among the Jews,! that the 
Josippon does, or, better, the falsified Josephus’ MS. which served 
as its model. The entire guilt of the Jewish rebellion is here 
attributed to—the Herodian dynasty. Herod the Great is said to 
have rebelled against Augustus and to have been led to Rome 
in chains.2. Throughout this part of the narrative the place of the 
rebels, the fighters for national independence, is taken by the hired 
mercenaries of the Herodian kings. It is only in strict accordance 
with this whole set of absurd fancies that at the end Vespasian 
should capture Agrippa 11. after the fall of Jerusalem, should drag 
him to Rome, and have him beheaded by the sword.’ 

This queer falsification of history appears to have taken place 
sradually. The Jostppon MS. seen by Jerahm’el,* for example, 
still knew the names of a few rebel leaders, Judas the Galilaean 
among them, though the shepherd Athrongas had already become 
Agrippa. Naturally, no one after the first century had the slightest 
interest in deliberately using the Herodians as scapegoats. The 
whole tendency is rather to be regarded as the natural consequence 
of the misgivings which Jewish Christians and converted Jews 
generally must have felt on beholding the striking parallelism 
between Jesus and the various rebel leaders mentioned by Jose- 
phus as having arisen just about the same critical period which saw 
the origins of Christianity and of their belief that Herod the Great 
was the foretold Antichrist. 

Still more curious, though of course perfectly understandable, 
is the fact that this type of redaction was again altered in an anti- 
Christian sense by a Jew who had better information at his dis- 
posal, no doubt, in the form of a good Greek Josephus MS. Thus 
it happens that side by side with the presentation of Herod as a 
rebel we find him the favourite of Augustus and appointed king by 
him. Of the ‘rebel’ Agrippa I. we hear in the same way that he 
was highly honoured by the Emperor Claudius; and Agrippa 11., his 
alleged rdle of ‘robber’ notwithstanding, actually makes the 


1 Above, p. 65, first a linea. 

2 Josippon, lib. 1., c. xxv. Ὁ. 163. 

8 [bid., lib. vi., c. xx. sg., pp. 666 and 6738. 

4 Fol. 151, lines 19 sqq., of Cod. Oxon., 2797 (Neubauer-Cowley, 1i., col, 208). 


106 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


famous speech in which he advises the Jews not to resist the 
Romans, in view of the latter’s invincibility. His execution at the 
order of Vespasian is explained by the invention of calumnies 
listened to by the Emperor, though of course they deserved no 
credence whatever. 
This Jewish reworker very naturally represented the part 
played by the Christians quite differently from the proselytizing, 
Jew-baiting text he had before him. For him the adherents of 
Jesus were ‘ bandits,’ and ’Ele‘azar the ‘robber’ was a follower of 
Jesus. What remains of his account of the struggle between the 
Pharisees, described as a fighting body, in accordance with Jose- 
phus t and the Galilaean adherents of Jesus, agrees remarkably well 
with the general phraseology of Josephus and with the contro- 
versies between the Galilaean messianists and the Pharisees, well 
attested from the Gospels and the Mishnah.? 
It is quite understandable that the Christian translator or 
censor should have insisted upon the expurgation, and even the 
total deletion, of a passage in which a man referred to as a robber 
chief by Josephus is rightly or wrongly reckoned among the number 
of Jesus’ followers, and of another paragraph where the same man 
is accused of having waged a guerilla war of the most sanguinary 
description for twenty years against the Romans—the more so 
because these statements are thrown into a particularly strong 
relief by a peculiar feature of the Hebrew version which seems so 
far to have eluded the attention of modern critics. 
We have pointed out before that the printed editions of the 
Jostppon (how far the statement applies to the MSS. we shall see 
after the publication of Dr. Greyzel’s critical edition) show no trace 
of most of the revolutionary messianic movements of the age. The 
object of this careful editing of the original Josephus is not difficult 
to guess. ‘The redactor simply wished to concentrate the responsi- 
bility for all the uprisings of the ‘ bandits of his nation,’ which led 
_ to the conflict with the Romans and the destruction of the national 
᾿ sanctuary, on the one group of messianists still in existence in the 
as a group 
ΙΕ Jewish sectarians and heretics, though at the same time as the 
| worst enemies of the Jews and their oppressors, to wit, the Chris- 
tians. No doubt, in the lost paragraph about Jesus in the chapter 
on Pilate’s governorship the same redactor wished to represent 

him as the fomenter of all the trouble caused by the paristm or 

‘bandits’ of Israel. There can be no doubt about the fact that, 

since the Christians of the apostolic generation were spoken of in 


1 Ant., xvii. § 41, els τὸ πολεμεῖν ἐπηρμένοι; cp. Seat, Julius Africanus, Kéorot, 
ch, iii. (H. Gelzer, S. J. Africanus, Leipzig, 1898, i. p. 265), after Justus of Tiberias, 
about the stratagems employed by the Phariseans -Aghting against the Romans, 

3; Jad., τὰς ὃ. 


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THE BAPTIST AND JESUS IN THE ‘JOSIPPON’ 107 


such unflattering terms, the Master and Inspirer must have fallen 
under a similar condemnation in a preceding chapter. Indeed, 
that lost account of Jesus must have been similar in tone and 
contents to the well-known passages in the Talmud in which Jesus 
is characterized as a sorcerer who used magic to seduce Israel from 


the way of the Law—similar, above all, to the ill-famed_ mediaeval 


“““- σποᾳΕὕὕὕ ὅὕ- 


Τὴ the curtailed text of the Josifpon, with its suppression of all 
rebellions before Jesus but with its accounts of all rebellions follow- 
ing, among them especially that of ’Ele‘azar hap-paris under Cali- 
gula, the long series of ‘bandit chiefs’ leading up to the great 
revolt in the reign of Nero must have appeared as descending in a 
straight line from Jesus - ions nter of 
the whole unfortunate-war-against-Rome, the ultimate cause of 
Israel’s ruin. gi | es 
~~The anti-Christian tendency of the Jewish Josippon as opposed 
to the proselytizing Josippon han-nosri is then fairly clear, I hope. 
Small wonder that we possess it only in a badly mutilated shape. 

Yet an attentive study of the JostPpon texts reveals still more. 
Jewish readers, when stumbling upon blackened and erased pas- 
sages, would try to fill in the gaps, often by honest and conscien- 
tious though not altogether philologically sound conjectures, and 
this in spite of the fine of a hundred pieces of gold attached to such 
an offence. In the Mosconi recension, for example, we have been 
able to show (above, p. 97) that the name of ’Ele‘azar has been 
replaced by Jesus’ familiar by-name, ‘the Nasoraean,’ han-nosrt. 
The Jewish scribe appears to have concluded from the last letter of 
the name of ’Ele‘azar, the 7, still dimly visible in spite of the 
general obliteration of the name, that this letter had really been 
left over from Jesus’ usual surname, han-nosrt. 

A more difficult problem had to be faced by the Jewish scribe 
of the two other MSS. of the Josippon.* He seems to have found 
nothing less than an erasure of the larger part of two pages; and 
although he could probably discern a word here and there of the 
original text, he still made bold to reconstruct * the whole by draw- 
ing extensively on his imagination. It is unnecessary to dwell on 
his complete ignorance in historical matters displayed in the result- 
ing fanciful tale, on the fantastic invention of a visit paid to Cali- 
gula by Jesus and of the execution of the ὁ three bandits’ under 


1 See Sam. Krauss, Leben Jesu nach jiid. Quellen, Berlin, 1902. 

2 Cod. Rothschild, No. 24 (Paris), and Vatic. Ebr., 408. See Pl. xiv. 

3 Cf, Pl: xuur., where the;owner has tried to restore in the margin what the censor 
had recklessly destroyed in¥the text—only to see the work of his pen blotted out 
again by another reviser. 


108 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


Claudius, or on the silly tale they are relating to Caligula. Aside 
from a few authentic words, the value of this obviously spurious 
passage consists in proving the loss of more than merely a few 
lines. Its considerable length shows that in the original Josippon 
the history of Christian origins must have loomed rather large. 
No doubt it was given as much space here as in the Slavonic 
version, which will be discussed further on. 

Those critics who would wish to attribute the extremely valu- 
able Slavonic chapters on Jesus to the clever efforts of mediaeval 
Jewish interpolators should first compare them with the following 
ineptitudes : 


‘ At that time arose the “ robbers of our nation ᾿᾿ and presumed 
to do each one what seemed right in his own eyes and to ‘‘ walk in the 
way of evil’ and to “ change their way,”’ and when they were called 
to account before the judges of the Sanhedrin of those days the 
robbers went to the Roman governors who were in Judaea and said 
to them: “1.0, because we have abandoned their law and have 
rallied ourselves to the law of Caesar, these are trying to kill us.”’ 
And since they * swore by the life of Caesar, the governors of Caesar 
saved them (from the judge). And there went forth many of the 
‘‘robbers of our nation,’ and many strayed away from the people of 
the Lord, and they went over to Edom and changed their law and 
‘wandered in the wilderness where there is no way,”’ * and made unto 
themselves continually signs and miracles through their sorceries, 
and the wise men of Israel were unable to cope with them (for they 
were protected by Gaius Caesar). And there came some of the sons 
of the city of Edom, robbers, and the robbers went into the hiding- 
places of Edom, and many fell away. And those robbers grew rich 
from the wealth which the king gave them. And in those days 
walked about Jesus and with his companions went to Gaius Caesar, 
and they said: “ Arrived is an angel of God,* even as the prophets 
have foretold about him unto this day for a long time, and he said 
to the inhabitants of Jerusalem to take unto them thy command 
and to call thy name god. But they have not listened to him and 
have endeavoured to killhim.’’ And Gaius said: ‘‘ Where is he ? ”’, 
and they called him, and he came into his presence. And he said to 
the emperor: ‘‘ God hath sent me to anoint thee as a god on earth 
and to build for thee an altar as unto a god and call thy name over 
it.’ And Gaius loved him and honoured him. And Gaius Caesar 
sent the image of his own soulless body ὅ to Jerusalem and sent them 
word: “ Lo, here is the image of my likeness ; adore it, bow before 
it, and build before its face an altar, because thus has commanded 
your god, and your feasts and your rejoicings shall you observe, and 


1 The dating of the crucifixion in the reign of Caligula, or even later, is obviously 
but a development of the sentence found in the Mosconi MS. discussed above, p. 97. 

® The ‘ robbers of our nation.’ 3 Ps. cvii. 40; Job xii. 24. 

4 With this cp. below, p. 384 1. 4 f. in the Slavonic Josephus: ‘I will not call 
him an angel.’ 

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THE LONG PASSAGE ON JESUS, THE ‘ BANDITS’ AND EMPEROR GAIUS CALIGULA 
COD. VATICAN EBR. 408 F° 94 V° AND 95 V° (TRANSL. ON PP. 108 FF.) 
(SEE ». 107, NOTE 2) 


AIX ALV Td 


THE BAPTIST AND JESUS IN THE ‘JOSIPPON’ 109 


you shall let the image enter into Jerusalem.” And it came to pass 
that when it was brought the inhabitants of Jerusalem barred the 
gate of the city and did not allow the image to enter. And King 
Agrippa sent wise men of Israel to Rome, Joshuah and Jehudah and 
ten of his companions, and they went to Rome into the presence of 
Gaius Caesar, and Caesar said to them: ‘“ Lo, thus says your God, 
who has sent me to be a god, and the whole earth accepts me as a 
god ; but you, why do you deliberate? Tell me your desire.”’ And 
Joshuah replied and his colleagues, and they said: ‘‘ Known be it to 
thee, O king, that we will not listen to thee, to this command, and it 
is not seemly to obey thy decision and to call by the name of god 
other gods than our Lord alone, and the name of our Lord God, and 
we will not build an altar but the altar of God, to the name which is 
hallowed and exalted.’’ But the “ bandits of our nation ”’ spoke 
words to the Lord our God which must not be related, and they 
altered the interpretation of the law. 

‘And in those days the men of Egypt sent an ambassador to 
Gaius, the king of kings, whose name was Apion ; and the Jews likewise 
sent an ambassador to Gaius, king of kings, whose name was Philo, 
who was a wise man and author of a large number of books. And 
Apion began to speak in the presence of Gaius, King of Rome, saying : 
‘ All the nations call thy name ‘ god’; only those Jews do not build 
altars for thee, do not call thy name ‘ god’ and do not swear by thy 
name.’ And Philo began and said: ‘“ Truly we do not build altars 
but to the Lord our God, and we swear by no other name but by the 
name of the Lord, the great and terrible, and we do not sacrifice to 
other gods but to the Lord alone. We are ready to lose our lives 
rather than yield and listen to your words.’”’ Then the emperor’s 
wrath was raised and he ordered his army to start and to march 
against Herod and to devastate the Holy Land. But the bandits of 
(Jesu) —may his name and memory be blotted out !—settled at his 
right side, and likewise many of our nation who strayed after them. 
But Claudius fought against it! before the emperor, for he was a 
prince. And Gaius was angry against him and dismissed him with 
dishonour from his presence and ordered him out of the room. But 
Philo said to the Jews who waited for him in the hall of the palace : 
“Mend your ways and turn whole-heartedly to the Lord, for the 
time is one of hardship.’’ And the Jews said each to his brother : 
“ Let no one of us anoint himself to-day, for it is a time of hardship 
for Israel, for Gaius, King of Rome, is very angry. But there is a 
remedy for this, to wit, to turn to our stronghold, to the Lord our 
God, who was the stronghold of our fathers. Let us fast and call a 
prayer-meeting in the land of our enemies.’’ And the Jews observed 
a fast and called a three days’ prayer-meeting in the country of 
Kome, and called upon the Lord their God with fasting and praying. 
And it happened on the third day that the Lord turned the spirit of 
his soldiers against Gaius, so that they attacked him with drawn 
swords and cut him to pieces, so that his body could not be buried, 
but the dogs ate his flesh. Thus God took his revenge for the Jews 


1 Viz., against the sending of an army to devastate Palestine. 


II0 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


against Gaius. But after him ruled Claudius, and he dismissed 
Joshuah and his colleagues with great honour after he had given 
them a banquet and they had sat in his presence. And he honoured 
them and delivered into their hands the bandits. And Claudius took 
three bandits, who had escaped, and executed them, throwing their 
corpses to the dogs, so that they should not be stolen by those 
“straying about by night ” who strayed after them. And Joshuah 
and his colleagues returned to Jerusalem and brought the remainder 
of the bandits before the Sanhedrin. And Jehudah [{Ishkharioth] ! 
arose before the Sanhedrin on behalf of King Herod, for the king 
spoke, asking: ‘“‘ What is the judgment of the men who have raised 
_ against me Gaius Caesar? ’’ And he bade them to be hanged on 
a tree. And they hanged them by order of the king, but not with 
the approval of the whole nation ; for there were people who said : 
“They are such as have been in the band but have repented and 
returned.’ But the rulers and elders and the majority of the people 
rejoiced at the sight of them ; for they had tried to raise against them 
wars with the Romans, and many strayed after them in secret.’ 


~The reason why I venture to insert, if not the original text,” 
which the initiate among my readers may easily decipher for 
themselves on Pl. xv., at least an English translation of this worth- 
less interpolation, is the opportunity it affords to the critics of the 
Slavonic texts discussed below to judge for themselves what can 
be expected in the way of historical knowledge from mediaeval 
Jewish forgers, and what cannot. 

As has been said before, some of the sentences in the inter- 
polated passage make quite good sense if isolated from their con- 
text. They are, moreover, in perfect harmony with the con- 
clusions we have drawn from the allusion to Danvel xi. 14. 

In the Antiquities (xx. 8.6; cf. War, 11. 13. 4), Josephus, speak- 
ing of the governor Felix who captured ’Ele‘azar Ὁ. Dinai, ob- 
serves: ‘ but the sorcerers and impostors persuaded the masses to 
follow them into the desert. ‘They promised to show them won- 
ders and signs . . . and many who allowed themselves to be per- 
suaded paid the penalty of their folly, for Felix made a punitive 
expedition against those who had been led out of the country.’ 
As for the life of such outlaws in the caves and mountain strong- 
holds of Edom, it is well attested for the time of the Seleucids,® for 
the age of Herod 1.,4 and for the insurrection quelled by Varus.° 
Nothing, then, is more natural thanthat the messianists should have 

1 Obvious interpolation of a scribe who thought of the considerable role played 
by Judas Ishkharioth in the Toldoth Jeshu. Of course, the aforesaid Jehuda 
(ben Tabbai), one of the two alleged ambassadors—Jehoshu‘ah (ben Perahja) and 
Jehuda (ben Tabbai)—is meant by the original author of the story. 

2 It is printed tn extenso, with all variants and a full commentary, in the 
German edition of this book. 

δ᾽ 7 Mace. 4.533 Ἀν, 531» Xxxvis4ls 2: Mace. vi. 11.5. ὅς, Ὁ, 


4 B.J.,i. §§ 310 sqq.; Ant., xiv. §§ 241 sqq. 
δ Assumptio Mosis, ix. 6. 


THE BAPTIST AND JESUS IN THE ‘JOSIPPON’ § 111 


taken ‘to the hiding-places of Edom’ when the Emperor Gaius 
threatened to desecrate the sanctuary. The ‘ bandits of Edom,’ 
who joined them, are exact parallels to the Idumaean radicals who 
gathered in Jerusalem! in A.D, 67, and who are commonly referred 
to as ‘ robbers ᾿ by our author. 

It is, then, just possible that the following words belong to the 
original text : 


‘in those days there were wars and quarrels in Judaea between the 
Pharisees and the “ robbers of our nation ’’ who strayed after Jesus, 
son of Joseph. And there went out some of those robbers and 

-wandered in the wilderness where there is no way, and made 

-unto themselves signs and miracles through their sorceries. And 
there came some of the sons of the city of Edom, robbers (too), 
and they (all) went into the hiding-places of Edom and seduced 


many (saying): “in the days (of ...) Jesus came to... 
(us) . . . Arrived has the angel (messenger) of God foretold by the 
prophets throughout the ages, and he has said . . . but they listened 


ποῖ tohim, but sought how they might killhim. Now, however, let us 


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....(The chief of these bandits) was ’Ele‘azar, who committed 
great crimes in Israel, until the Pharisees got the better of him.’ 


The discovery of the above-quoted passages on Jesus in the edztio 
princeps and in certain MSS. of Jostppon yields another important 
result, to wit, that the extant versions of the mediaeval Toldoth 
Jeshu are in a large measure dependent upon the anti-Christian 
edition of the Joseppon. This comes out quite clearly at the very 
opening of chapter i. ina Vienna and in an Oxford MS. of this ill- 
famed pamphlet : 


‘During the second temple 7 the days of Ttberius Caesar and in the 
days of Herod the Second, King of Israel, who was an evildoer, as may 
be seen in “ Jostppon,” in those days came forward a man from the 
seed of David, and his name was Joseph Pandareus, and he had a 
wife and her name was Mirjam, and this man was God-fearing, and 
he was a pupil of R. Shime‘on b. Shetah, etc. But the neighbour of 
the said Joseph was an evildoer by name Johanan the Wicked, a 
transgressor and adulterer, and Mary was a beauteous woman,’ etc. 


The last four lines of this text contain an obvious anachronism, 
since R. Simon Setacides lived in the reign of the Hasmonaean 
king Jannai and not under Herod; they cannot, therefore, be 
derived from the genuine Joszp/pon. But the italicized lines are an 
almost literal quotation from that work, all the more valuable 
since they come from the now lost passage on Jesus in the chapter 
concerning Tiberius which is quoted by R. Abraham Farissol. 


1 B.]., iv. 4 3544. 


112 | THE MESSIAH JESUS 


A second passage of interest in this connexion is found in 
another chapter of certain Toldoth Jeshu MSS.:1 ‘Jesus went into 
Upper Galilee. The wise men gathered together, went to the 
queen” and said to her: ‘‘Our Lady, he practises magic and 
seduces men.’ Therefore she sent horsemen against him . . . who 
tried to lead him away, but the men of Upper Galilee would not 
suffer it and made war.’ 

The last lines of this fanciful story are simply derived from the 
‘war’ between the Pharisees and the followers of Jesus, as men- 
tionedin the Jostppon. A late reader could not imagine the Phari- 
see rabbis warring effectively against the ‘ robbers of the nation ' 
and finally overpowering ‘’Ele‘azar the robber.’ So they sub- 
stituted different vowels and read pavasim, ‘horsemen,’ for the 
parustm of the original text. This altered text was adopted by 
nearly every one of all extant Voldoth Jeshu versions. In the early 
redactions of the work, as quoted by ninth-century Christian 
writers such as Hrabanus Maurus and Agobard of Lyons, not the 
slightest trace of such violent armed conflicts is found, and the in- 
evitable conclusion is that these episodes go back to no other source 
than the Hebrew version of Josephus, the /osippon, itself not 
anterior to the ninth century. If it could be proved that this in 
turn goes back to a lost paragraph of the Greek Josephus, we should 
possess an erratic block of most important historical information. 


' Krauss, pp. 42-54. 
* The widow of King Alexander Jannai, contemporary with R. Simon 
Setacides—both evident anachronisms in a history of Jesus. 


Vil 


THE CONTROVERSY ON THE VALUE OF 
THE SLAVONIC VERSION 


‘The stone which the builders refused is become the head stone 
of the corner.’—Ps. cxviili. 22. 


ARDLY one of the numerous scholars who have dealt 
with the problems presented by the Zestimonium Flavi- 
anum has taken the trouble to study the corresponding 

portions of the Slavonic version of the Way, not so much because 
it was unknown or little known in Western and Central Europe as 
rather because a number of hasty and superficial reviews ! of the 
first German translation of the fragments in question had given 
an impression that the texts preserved in Russia were of no value 
whatever. 

The first Western scholar to mention the Slavonic version of the 
War was N. Bonwetsch * as early as 1893. The important fact 
that this Old Russian translation contains statements concerning 
John the~ ΒΑΡ ΞΕ πα Jesus, missing in the Greek standard text of 
Josephus, was first pointed out by Andrej N. Popov (1866), the 
discoverer and éditor of the Slavonic Book of Enoch, who also pub- 
lished a part of the passages.in question.* Further samp from 
another MS., were published by Ismail Sreznjevski.4 Both pub- 
lications were in Russian only. 

Western Europe became acquainted with these materials 
through the work of Alexander Berendts, professor of ecclesiastical 
history at the Baltic University of Dorpat.® Yet his revelation 
of the momentous chapters on John the Baptist and Jesus in a 
Slavonic Josephus text was by no means hailed with that eager 
enthusiasm which the author may have expected to arouse. Aside 


' See the bibliography below, p. 624. 

* Die christlich vornicanische Literatur in slavischen Handschriften, Appendix in 
Harnack-Preuschen, Geschichte der altchristlichen Literatur bis Eusebius, 1. 917. 

3 Obzor chronografov vusskoj vedakcit (vyfusk pervyj), Moscow, 1866, pp. 130, 
134, 139 (in Russian). See Popov’s portrait, on our Pl. xva. 

4 Nos. Ixxxiv. and Ixxxv. of his Suédénija i zamétki o maloizvésinych 1 
neizvésinych pamiatnikach, suppl. to vol. xx., No. 4 of the Sbornik otde lenija 
vusskago jazyka ἃ slovesnosti, 1879, p. 143 5q9. (in Ruscian\, See Sreznjevski's 
portrait, on our Pl. xvb. 

δ Gebhardt-Harnack, Texte und Untersuchungen zur Geschichie dey alichristlichen 
Literatur, xiv., No. 1, Leipzig, 1906. See Berendts’ portrait on our Pl. xvia. 


H 


114 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


from the inevitable reaction to anything new, German liberal theo- 
logians would naturally feel inclined to adopt a severely critical 
attitude against any publication hailing from Dorpat, then a 
stronghold of Lutheran fundamentalism, which so unmistakably 
bore the signs of a credulous readiness to accept any document at 
its face value. 

It must be admitted that the new source is indeed most apt to 
arouse the scepticism of any serious historian ; for does it not con- 
tain such a late legend as the story of Jesus’ miraculous healing of 
Pilate’s wife? does it not tell how Pilate, because of this exploit, 
dismissed the ‘ wonder-worker’ whom he had just arrested for 
very good reasons, and how the Jewish scribes, moved by envy 
against Jesus, bribed the governor with a gift of thirty talents 
of silver? Incredible as it may seem, Berendts accepted such 
nonsense almost unreservedly as so many genuine statements of 
Josephus. For one thing, his publication must be called hasty 
and premature, since he had not taken time to study the MS. 
material of the whole work. Asit was, at the moment of his first 
publication he had not yet all the decisive evidence which he could 
have marshalled against his critics. When two years later? he 
published a striking example of a momentous divergency between 
the Russian and the Greek text, in the story concerning the false 
Alexander, a divergency which could not possibly be attributed to 
a Christian forger, it was too late. No one in Germany took the 
slightest notice of this article. A subsequent one, showing that 
the chapter of Hippolytus of Rome about the Essenes uses a text 
of Josephus more akin to the Russian version than to the Greek 
standard text, was politely returned by the editor of the Zeztschrift 
fiir neutestamentliche Wissenschaft. All the later results of Ber- 
endts’ persistent researches had to be printed in an obscure Baltic 
Protestant church review which is almost unobtainable anywhere 
outside Russia. The author died, sadly disappointed, in Ig12—not, 
however, without having laid, through his disinterested pains- 
taking research work, a foundation on which other scholars, less 
prejudiced than his critics, might yet build. 

In fairness to these critics of his it must be admitted that he 
lacked the critical acumen to do for the Slavic Josephus passages 
what the late Théodore Reinach had done, with so much good sense 
and sagacity, for the Greek text of Antiquities, xviii. 3. 3, namely, 
to sift the obviously Christian additions from the original text with 
its violent anti-Christian tendency. 

In spite of these shortcomings of the Baltic pioneer, it is im- 
possible to lay too much stress on the debt owed him by Western 
scholarship, since he most unselfishly sacrificed twelve years of his 
life to the difficult task of transcribing the various MSS., translat- 

1 ΖΝ ΤΟ 1x. (1908), Pp. 47 Sqq. 


LV Td 


1 . 
abe 


. . . . ᾿ ν ν - " " > ’ , ᾿ Ἀν . a * - “ι" . 

(a) ANDREJ NIKOLAJEVIC POPO\ (8) ISMAIL IVANOVIC SREZNJEWSKI 

DISCOVERER OF THE SLAVONIC ‘ BOOK OF ENOCH’ AND OF THE FIRST EDITOR OF A NUMBER OF OTHER FRAGMENTS FROM THE 
OLD RUSSIAN JOSEPHUS (1866) OLD RUSSIAN JOSEPHUS (1879) 


(SEE P 113, NOTE 3) 


CONTROVERSY ON VALUE OF SLAVONIC VERSION 115 


ing and minutely comparing them with the Greek text, etc., with- 
out receiving any reward whatever. A debt of honour is also due, 
let us add, to the late Konrad Grass, a colleague of Berendts, to 
whose unfailing devotion we owe the posthumous publication of 
the magnum opus of Berendts, the annotated German translation 
of the first four books of the Slavonic Josephus’ O plenente Jeru- 
solima, i.e. ‘On the Capture of Jerusalem.’ He, too, died, in Nov- 
ember 1927, before he could enjoy the result of his painstaking 
work and witness the final justification of his late friend’s in- 
cessant labours. (See our PI. xvib.) 

The materials utilized in the following pages consist, apart from 
the translation of Berendts and Grass, of an investigation under- 
taken by Prof. Vasilij N. Istrin on the Old Russian Josephus 
version. Of this text a number of specimens had been printed by 
Andrej N. Popov,! by Ismail Sreznjevski,? and by the late Prince 
Obolenski.* Prof. Istrin’s essay, accompanied by numerous 
samples of the text,* has confirmed on a far larger basis Berendts’ 
observation concerning the utilization of a Greek model by the 
Slavonic translator. A critical edition of the whole Old Russian 
text is being prepared by the same scholar, who had the kindness 
to place at my disposal a number of careful copies of the most 
important passages at variance with the Greek standard text of the 
Jewish War, and a copy of the chapter on Jesus of the Russian text 
in the possession of the former Clerical Academy of Moscow but 
emanating from the Volokolamski Convent. It so happened that 
Berendts, too, had completely copied this MS., the readings of 
which are thus doubly assured. Konrad Grass supplied complete 
copies (the work of Berendts) of all the chapters dealing with 
Christian origins. In the examination of the materials I was 
greatly helped by Prof. André Mazon of the Sorbonne, and by his 
pupils, M. Antoine Martel, fellow of the Fondation Thiers, and 
M. Boris Unbegaun, librarian of the Paris Institute of Slavonic 
Studies ; further, by occasional suggestions of Prof. N. van Wyck 
of Leyden, Prof. N. Bubnov of Kiev (now at Ljubljana), and Prof. 
Berndt von Arnim of Leyden. The great number of photostats 
used for these analyses have been contributed through the 
imunificence of Mrs. Alice Chalmers in London and Dr. James 
Loeb in Murnau. There is no need to emphasize once more 
my feelings of sincere gratitude for such kind and generous co- 
operation, without which the present work could not have been 
carried through. 

1 See above, p. 113 ἢ. 3. 

2 See above, p. 113 1. 4. 

3 Der Chronograph von Perejaslawl Suzdalski, in Jahrb. ἃ. k. Moskauer Ges. f. 
Gesch. u. Altert. Russlands, ix. (1851). 


4 Festschr. f. Liapunov, Ucenje Zapiski of the Municipal University of Odessa, 
sect. sc. hum. et soc., li., 1921, pp. 27-40. 


116 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


The publication of Alexander Berendts’ momentous discovery 
aroused a certain amount of interest in European countries, and 
was the centre of a considerable number of critical discussions in 
the various learned periodicals. The disposition of the present book 
made it desirable to confine myself to adding a mere bibliography 
of this literature.'' Yet I should like to draw attention to the fact 
that every single argument of these authors has been most care- 
fully considered, and every previous objection to the authenticity 
of the Russian text refuted in all details, in the German edition of 
this book.? 

For the general information of the English reader it may suffice 
to state that Berendts’ critics were prone to prove the spuriousness 
of his texts by pointing out the numerous contradictions between 
ther and the Greek original. They forgot, alas! that Josephus 
was such a superficial and shallow compiler that even the Greek 
texts we possess from his pen are full of similar and even worse 
contradictions, a number of which, highly amusing in themselves, 
are treated fully in a subsequent chapter. 


THE MS. TRANSMISSION OF THE SLAVONIC ‘ CAPTURE OF 
JERUSALEM ’ 


The Slavonic translation of the Jewish War, or, to be more exact, 
of the Greek treatise περὶ ἁλώσεως Ἱερουσαλήμ, is written in Old 
Russian, more particularly in the dialect of Kiev—a language 
slightly different from Old Slavonic, i.e. the Old Bulgarian of the 
Church—and has come down in sixteen MSS. There exists, more- 
over, a Servian translation from the Russian in a MS. of the 
Chilandari Lavra of Mt. Athos, dating from A.p. 1585, and in 
another copy in one of the monasteries of the Fruska Gora in 
Syrmia ; and there are a number of fragments in Rumanian on the 
life of John the Baptist and Jesus, translated, according to the 
express statement of the scribe, from the Polish, in a MS. of Dr. 
Moses Gaster’s library in London. These facts make it more than 
likely that there never was a South Slavonic Josephus, and that 
the translation is the work of a Northern Slay. 

In view of the importance of the whole problem, a careful 
examination of the MS. material is indispensable. The Old Rus- 


1 See App. xxv. 

* Dr. W. Emery Barnes, The Journal of Theol. Stud., 1928, p. 68, is quite 
justified in saying that the German edition of this book ‘is heavily overladen with 
the discussion of scholars from the sixteenth century downwards,’ Still, this 
inventory of all previous discussions had to be drawn up once, were it only to 
prevent critics from repeating again and again arguments put forward and refuted 
long ago, by reference to positive facts formerly ignored or overlooked since. 


(a) ALEXANDER JOHANNES BERENDTS 
1863—1912 


WHO INTRODUCED THE SLAVONIC JOSEPHUS TO THE KNOW- 
LEDGE OF WESTERN SCHOLARSHIP 


\SEE P 113, NOTE 5) 


(b) KONRAD GRASS 
1870—1927 
BERENDT’S COLLEAGUE, FRIEND AND EDITOR OF HIS POST- 
HUMOUS TRANSLATION OF THE SLAVONIC JOSEPHUS 
(SEE P. 115, LINES τσ FF.) 


IAX ALV Id 


CONTROVERSY ON VALUE OF SLAVONIC VERSION 117 


Class A 


τ, Cod. Moscow Academy 651 (=cod. 227 of the Volokolamski 
Monastery), 16th cent., now in the Academy Library, 
Sergiev Possade). 

2. Cod. of the Floristev Hermitage 93/110 (date unknown to 
me), now probably in possession of the Commission of 
Scientific Archivists in the city of Vladimir (IXljazma). 

3. Cod. Kasan (Clerical Academy 444/322), 16th cent. 

4. Cod. Kasan (Clerical Academy 445/325), almost identical 
with No. 3, 16th cent. 

5 and 6. (Copies of 4.) Cod. Kasan 446/323 and 447/324, 16th 
cent. 

7. Cod. Moscow Synodal Library 770, 16th-17th cent. 

8. Cod. Barsov No. 633, in the Moscow Musée Historique, 
unknown to Berendts ; according to information kindly 
supplied by the director, Mr. N. Popov, an apographon οἱ 
the same exemplar as No. 7. 

9. Cod. Moscow Synodal Library 991 (=Cod. Uspenski, a com- 
plete Cetji-Minei (monthly lectionary) of the Metropolitan 
Makarius (1542-1563), the Josephus occupying foll. 771- 
800 in the February volume). 

το. Cod. Moscow Synodal Library 178 (=cod. of the Czar, of the 
same Cetji-Minei, January vol., foll. 797-917). 

τι, Cod. Moscow Synodal Library 182, a work of the same class, 
July vol., foll. 856-953. Nos. 7.11 are now in the Moscow 
Musée Historique. 

12-13. Three MSS. from the Kyrillo-Béloserski Monastery, now 
in the Leningrad Public Library, in Berendts’ time in 
the library of the former Petersburg Clerical Academy, 
viz. 63/1302 (15th cent.), 64/1303 (16th cent.), 65/1304 
(15th or 16th cent.).1 These have not been copied by 
Berendts, but have been photographed for me through 
the kindness of Dr. James Loeb in Murnau. 


All the Moscow MSS. have now been photographed for Prof. 
Sol. Zeitlin of Dropsie College, Philadelphia, Pa. 


1 A fourth MS. of Leningrad—Petrogradskaya Duchovnaia Acad., No. 262— 
pointed out to me by Prof. BeneXevié and duly catalogued in the German edition 
of this book, has since been found by Prof. Sol. Zeitlin to contain a Russian 
version of the Hebrew Josippon and not the Slavonic Josephus (specimen photo- 
graphs reproduced in Jew. Quart. Rev., N.S. xix., 1929, pp. I, 6-7). The MS. 
Synod No. 745, now in the Historic Museum of Moscow, which Zeitlin reproduces 
—without any signature !—on pp. 10-11 and 26-27, is not a Slavonic /osephus 
either but is a Christianized Josippon. I do not know whether the MS. re- 
produced by Zeitlin as * Leningrad No. 343’ on pp. 30-31 ἴσο. cit. is or is not 
identical with any of the enumerated MSS, studied by Berendts, 


118 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


Class B 


This class consists of the MSS. of the so-called Russian chrono- 
graphers, containing the Old Russian text of Josephus in the same 
translation as it appears in the above-mentioned MSS., but cut up 
and inserted between portions of the Chronicles of John Malalas, 
Georgius Hamartolus, and others, in one case (No. 16) annexed to 
the historical books of the Bible. | 


14. Cod. misc. 279/058 of the Central Archives of the Foreign 
Office, Moscow (15th cent.).1_ The text of Josephus is 
interspersed throughout the Chronicle of Malalas, to which 
is appended the so-called Chronographer of Perejaslavl 
Suzdalski, extending to the year1214. According toanote 
in the MS., unfortunately not reproduced by Berendts, it 
is a copy of another MS. begun in the year 1261. Weare 
told by Jagi¢ that in the year 1882 Theodor Mommsen 
wished to have this MS. sent to Berlin, but was unable to 
obtain it because an unnamed Russian was said to be 
engaged upon an edition of it. Nothing has ever been 
heard of his work. Had Mommsen obtained the codex 
we should probably have had a scientific edition of the 
Old Slavonic version of Malalas forty years ago, and it 
would no doubt have exercised a decisive influence on the 
whole development of our knowledge of Christian origins. 
For a critical edition of the Old Russian Josephus, pro- 
duced under Mommsen’s eagle eye, with a detailed in- 
vestigation of the state of the tradition, the investigations, 
and the like, would have been available at the right 
moment for Niese’s great edition of the Greek Polemos. 

15. Closely related to 15 was cod. 109/147 of the Vilna Public 
(now University) Library. This MS. was not used by 
Berendts. Through the kind services of Prof. O. von 
Halecki of the University of Warsaw and of Dr. K. Cho- 
dynicki, professor at the University of Vilna, I had hoped 
to have it sent for me to Paris; unfortunately, the 
inquiries undertaken by these gentlemen have shown that 
it was carried off by the Russians in their retreat of IQI5. 
Prof. BeneSevié of Leningrad has since kindly ascertained 
for me the sad truth, that it perished in a fire during the 
troubles of 919. The Josephus portions in it were inter- 
spersed between passages from Malalas, Georgius Hamar- 
tolus, the Gospels, and various apocrypha. 

16. Lastly, in the library formerly belonging to Count Uvarov, 
which is now in the Musée Historique in Moscow, there is 


* Now in the Zentroarchiv, Moscow, Vagankoy Pereolouk, 


CONTROVERSY ON VALUE OF SLAVONIC VERSION 11g 


a half-uncial MS. (cod. 3/18) of the 15th century, in 
which Josephus occupies foll. 409-533, as an appendix to 
the historical books of the Bible. 


Now that we know through Jerahm’el ben Shelomo (above, 
p. 83 n. 1)—what Berendts and the Russian scholars ignored—that 
Josephus published a second edition in twenty-four books, begin- 
ning with Adam and reaching to the fourteenth year of Domi- 
tian, it remains to be seen whether these MSS. are really late 
Byzantine compilations, or whether they are not by any chance 
translations of the lost twenty-four books of Josephus, perhaps 
overworked and christianized, on which the Byzantine chroniclers 
might themselves be dependent. 


Tue TITLE OF THE OLD RUSSIAN JOSEPHUS 


As Prof. Laqueur has shown, the very title chosen by Josephus 
for his work, The Jewish War, clearly indicates his own position 
within the Roman camp. The Romans, not the Carthaginians, 
_ speak of the ‘ bellum Punicum’; Caesar, not Vercingetorix, of the 
‘bellum Gallicum.’ The matter is exactly the same as if an 
Englishman referred to the South African War, not as the ‘ Boer 
War’ but as the ‘ English War.’ Now, the fact that Berendts had 
chosen the title of ‘ Josephus’ Jewish War’ for his Russian version 
might itself have induced the critics to doubt the validity of his as- 
sumption that the work in question ever was a redaction destined 
for the Oriental Jews. Asa matter of fact, Berendts had no MS. 
basis whatever for his title. Neither the chronographers nor the 
frst book of the work, with its first part missing, give a title on the 
frontispiece. The first MS. title is found at the beginning of the 
second book. It says nothing about a ‘ Jewish War,’ but reads, 
‘Second Book of Josephus on the Conquest of Jerusalem,’ similar 
τῇ this to the eleventh-century Codex Vaticanus (V) of the Greek 
text, which isinscribed Ἰωσήπου περὶ ἁλώσεως λόγος δεύτερος. In 
both cases even the surname ‘ Flavius’ of the imperial client is 
absent. It is clear that there are good reasons why the various 
Greek MSS. as well as the ancient quotations show such different 
titles as the ‘ Jewish War’ or the ‘ Jewish War against the Romans,’ 
or the ‘Capture of Jerusalem.’* Josephus, it is true, had become 
used to quoting his book as the ‘ Jewish War,’ according to the 


1 Origen, Selecta in Threnos, opp. iii. 348, De la Rue, xiii, 211: “᾿Ιώσηπος 
yap ἐν τοῖς περὶ ἁλώσεως. St. Jerome, Comm. in Jesaiam, c. 64, s. fine (opp. ed. 
Vallarsi, iv. 766): ‘quae Josephus Judaicae scriptor historiae septem explicat 
voluminibus, quibus imposuit titulum Captivitatis Judaicae id est περὶ ahwoews’ 
(Vallarsi, ii. 343). Id., De vir. illustr., c. 13 (Vallarsi, ii. 851). Chronicon paschale, 
ed. Dindorf, i. 463: “Ἰώσηπος ἱστορεῖ ἐν τῷ πέμπτῳ λόγῳ τῆς ᾿Αλώσεως.᾽᾿ Isidor. 
Pelus., lib iv. epist. 225, P.G. 78, 1320: “Ἰωσήπου . . - Ἰουδαίου. . . περὶ τῆς 
“Αλώσεως ἱστορία," See also the quotation by Suidas, below, p. 120 0. 2, 


a 


120 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


point of view of his Roman readers. Still, most MSS. have the title 
περὶ ἁλώσεως, without the addition of the word ‘Jerusalem ’ 
found in the Slavonic texts. 

Yet in this abridged form no Roman or Greek reader would 
have understood what was meant. Ἰωσήπου περὶ ἁλώσεως might 
mean ‘Josephus on his own captivity,’ a title corresponding to the 
Latin Historia Josephi captivi, which does occur in several MSS. of 
the Egesippus.* _ When St. Jerome speaks of the ‘ titulus Capti- 
vitatis Judaicae td est περὶ ἁλώσεως, he, as well as the MSS. of the 
Egesippus referred to before, must have thought of the Aramaic 
expression galutha, Hebrew golah, ‘exile,’ in a vaguer sense an 
equivalent of ‘captivity,’ which is used in an identical manner. 
As a matter of fact, sefer hag-golah, or sifra de galutha, would have 
been fitting titles for the book of Josephus, and the ambiguity 
arising from them, in that the captivity of the author might be 
implied, would have been considered as a clever artifice of style in 
any Semitic dialect. It may be that he chose this title when he 
had no other project than to write his own justification, i.e. to 
explain why he himself preferred captivity to an honourable death, 
and 1 personally think such a view extremely likely. Later on, 
when the scope of the work grew, he probably changed the title 
to the form still extant in the Russian version by adding ‘of Jeru- 
salem.’ His Roman editions were given the title of Jewish War, 
necessarily as distasteful to his compatriots as his Latin cognomen 
‘Flavius.’ Hence, when he prepared his final edition, after the 
publication of his Antiquities, for which he needed Jewish readers 
and Jewish sympathies, he preferred to change the title again into 
Praviov Ἰωσήπου ‘EBpatov ἱστορία ᾿Ιουδαϊκοῦ πολέμου πρὸς 
Ρωμαίους, a form still preserved in the Codex Parisinus, and with 
its awkward mixing of two incompatible points of view an excellent 
proot of how little Josephus, even at the end of his literary career, 
had entered into the spirit of the Greek language. 


THE REMAINS OF THE GENUINE PREFACE TO THE ‘ HAtosIs’ 


It was not to be supposed from the beginning that a work of 
the type of this translation of Josephus into Old Russian was 
done independently by two people twice in succession. On the 
contrary, a single translator may safely be assumed. This trans- 
lator evidently started his work on a Greek text the first part of 
which had come down to him in very poor shape. Later on he 


* Niese, ed. maior, vol. i., proleg, Pp. V1; vol. vi. p. 3. 

* E.g. Codex Vatic. Palat., 170 (ninth century). See also below, p. 482, the 
quotation from Suidas, s.v. *Incois: * εὕρομεν οὖν ᾿Ιώσηπον τὸν συγγραφέα τῆς Αλώσεως 
᾿ἱεροσολύμων φανερῶς λέγοντα ἐν τοῖς τῆς αἰχμαλωσίας αὐτοῦ ὑπομνήμασιν,,, ." 


a 


- 
“ 


CONTROVERSY ON VALUE OF SLAVONIC VERSION τῶι 


managed to find a better MS. and thus to complete his work. For 
it is to be noted that the MSS. of class A begin with chapter xxv. 
of the first book in the middle of the text, so that no other explana- 
tion is possible. 

There is further a gap between il. 18, ὃ 505, and iii. 2, ὃ 28, owing 
to a missing leaf, and the scribe does not even appear to have been 
aware of the fact. For he jumped from the end of ὃ 505 in Book ii. 
18 (ὑπέστρεψεν εἰς τὴν Πτολεμαίδα), and without punctuation, into 
the middle of ὃ 27 of Book iii. 2. In English translation the pas- 
sage in question then reads as follows : 


‘... he turned back to Ptolemais // and in entering there he 
saved himself from the fire ///, and on the third day he came out and 
made himself heard by his people, thereby filling them with unex- 
pected joy at having got back the general for the fight to come. 

‘Third Book of Josephus on the Capture of Jerusalem. Of 
Vespasian. Vespasian took over the chief command in Asia,’ etc. 


At the place marked /// there commences the verso of fol. 108 ; 
at the place marked // (not at all noticeable in the MS.) there is the 
leap from the second to the third book, not noticed by the scribe, 
evidently because a number of pages had fallen out. Only in the 
following paragraph there follows the title, ‘ Third Book of Jose- 
phus,’ etc., of course put in at a later date, which ought to stand 
at the place marked //. The translator then connected mechanic- 
ally the end of the missing story of the escape of the Peraite Niger 
with the narrative of the return of Cestius Gallus to Ptolemais, and 
added the title, taken from the running title on the top of the page, 
after the first paragraph of a recto page of his model. Itisclearlya 
case of a damaged exemplar, from which fact no further conclusions 
can be drawn for the original text of the Haldsts. 

Much the same thing obtains for §§ 45-71 of the third book, 
missing in all the MSS. of group A, a gap likewise caused by loss of 
pages. Itis to be regretted that Berendts failed to supplement his 
MS. with the help of the MS. of the Moscow Principal Archive, since, 
for the reasons discussed above,! it would have been useful to 
compare the Slavonic version of Josephus’ description of Palestine 
with the corresponding passages in the Greek Polemos. 

The Slavonic MSS. of class A are headed by an introduction 
which, in spite of its confused form, was recognized by Berendts 
as part of a preface preceding the original Haldsis of Josephus. 
The text is full of the author’s favourite attacks on the Zealots, 
whom he accuses, rightly or wrongly, of being responsible for the 
national catastrophe. It contains furthermore Josephus’ self- 
defence against attacks made on him, and not without foundation, 
by those very Zealots; while in the Greek Way he engages in 


1 Cf. p. 88 1. 31. 


122 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


polemics not against his Jewish adversaries but against certain 
Greek writers who have distorted the facts for the purpose of 
flattering the Romans. The confused form of this introduction 
finds its explanation in the fact that in the book whole pages were 
lost, for it is well known that in a bound codex of this type very 
often only the first and second pages remain, thanks to their 
closer attachment to the cover, whilst the following pages are as a 
rule the first to become detached. The first and second pages 
naturally contained title and preface. The cause responsible for 
the loss of the parts discussed above had for a consequence the 
damaging of the said first and second pages. To make up for this, 
a reader seems to have added below or above the damaged parts 
—from another copy—portions of the text which had become more 
or less illegible. A later copyist must have inserted those passages, 
sometimes in the wrong place, thereby causing the textual con- 
fusion referred to. A rearrangement of the text is, then, not only 
permissible but necessary if we want to get some order into this 
chaos and arrive at a logical and coherent text. By a comparison 
of the extant and the rearranged texts, placed side by side, the 
reader may convince himself that no undue liberty has been taken 
with the former. 


Preface as translated by Berendts Suggested restoration of the 


from the MSS. 


‘ There precedes ! a story of the 

Herods and 

the history of the kings, well- 
known matters, 

and of that which comes after, 

the lesser deeds of each prince 
and dynast, 

because in much (?) in the midst 
of Archelaus and 

Herod, of Antipater and Alex- 
ander, the son-in-law 

of Archelaus, and of Pheroras 
and of Salome 

and of all the rest unceasingly (9), 

vain pride kept itself, daring to 

resist the majesty of truth and 

to put up the opposite and 
greater ones. 

Such will be caught in their own 
nets, 

as will be said in the following 


1 I follow in the main the Cod. Mosqu. Acad., No. 651, fol. 1 recto. 


Preface. 


‘ The story of the Herodeans and 
(of the Conquest of Jerusalem) 
is preceded by the history of the 
kings, matters of common 
knowledge. 

What follows (I will tell in full 
detail) : 

the (greater and) lesser deeds of 
each prince and dynast 

of Archelaus Herod, of Antipater 

and Alexander, the son-in-law 
of Archelaus, and Pheroras 

and of Salome and the rest.... 

(By internal dissension the 
country suffered terrible 
things), 

because in many of the grandees 
there maintained itself a vain 
pride, as they dared to resist 


A full list 


of variants will be found in the German edition, i. p. 244 sq. 


CONTROVERSY ON VALUE OF SLAVONIC VERSION 123 


(sequel) 

where the order will show the 
proper time. 

For the godless Zealots were 
constantly egged on 

to slander, both by stinking 
aspersions 

and by inventing words of dis- 
content, which is 

filled with deadly poison. 

And in such tumults Archelaus 
was 

angry at his son-in-law Alex- 
ander, 

then Herod was angry at Pher- 
oras and Salome on account 


the majesty (Corstan opti) 

and to put up the opposite. 
Suchlike 

will be caught in their own nets, 
as will be told 

in the sequel, where the proper 
order (of the narrative) 

will indicate the true time (of 
each event).' For the Zeal- 
ots 

of godlessness * are constantly 
egged on to slander, both 

bystinking aspersions and words 
of discontent, 

inventing what is filled with 
deadly poison. 


of the quantity of their wicked- 
ness. And after that 

Pheroras was accused by Herod 
Of a Crime; 22. 

The concluding sentence, ‘and in such tumults .. . crime,’ 
is the unsatisfactory attempt of the translator to construct a bridge 
between preface and text. He evidently knew nothing of the 
original preface, and had to rely entirely on what he still found in 
the damaged first pages. Yet there can be no doubt that what 
preceded was precisely the original preface to the Ha/ldsvs, replaced 
later on, in the edition addressed to a circle of Graeco-Roman 
readers, by the extant proemium. 


THE VARIOUS ENDINGS OF THE OLD RussIAN JOSEPHUS MSS. 


From the final event recorded in an historical document it is 
generally possible to determine the date of publication, at least the 
so-called ‘terminus post quem.’ The MSS. of group A (above, 
p. 117) form no exception to this rule. The Greek War and the 
Slavonic chronographer’s version begin with a mention of the 
schism between the two factions of the Jerusalem hierocracy and of 
the high priest Onias, the founder of the temple of Heliopolis. One 
of the Old Russian MSS.* ends accordingly with Vespasian’s order 
to destroy the temple of Heliopolis. This appears to be the only 


1 The chronology was indeed of the first importance to the old scoundrel, who 
had weighty reasons for concealing as much as possible the influence which his own 
doubtful actions had on the outbreak of the revolution. 

2 Cf. B.J., iv. ὃ 161 ; vii. §§ 268-270. The contrary term, ‘ zealots of good 
works,’ Tim. ii. 14 ; 1 Peter iii. 13; ‘of virtue,’ Philo, de praem. τι. 

+ Cod, Syn. Mosg., 991, f° 878 v°. Berendts-Grass, p. 16. 


124 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


reason why Josephus goes back to an event of the age of the 
Hasmonaeans in spite of his having announced in the preface that 
he is not going to repeat what may be read in the books of Macca- 
bees. As is well known, Josephus himself belonged to the class of 
Jerusalemite priests who regarded with utmost horror the rival 
sanctuary of Heliopolis. He also seems to have laboured under 
the pious illusion that the time between the foundation and the 
destruction of the temple of Heliopolis amounted to exactly 343— 
1.6. seven times seven times seven—years.2 If one remembers his 
conviction that the ultimate captivity was caused through the dis- 
sension among the Jews under Aristobulus and Hyrcanus, which 
made it possible for Pompeius to intervene and to take Jerusalem, 
it is clear that he regarded the destruction of both temples as the 
just punishment of God for the transgression of the Deuteronomic 
law prohibiting the setting up of a rival sanctuary. Hence the 
curious idea to begin his narrative with the foundation of the 
temple of Heliopolis and to end it with its destruction. 

Yet he cannot have formed this plan before a.p. 73, the date 
when the temple of Heliopolis was actually desecrated. In fact, 
such a scheme was still foreign to him when he composed the extant 
Greek prologue—which contains a table of contents ending with 
the triumph of Titus—and the preface which has been preserved 
in the Old Russian translation. The codex of the Moscow Ecclesi- 
astical Academy 651 (227) has the standard epilogue after vii. ro. 
I, ὃ 419, which means that the destruction of the temple of Heli- 
opolis was not even mentioned at this stage of the work. There 
was therefore not the slightest reason why in such an edition 
Josephus should have spoken, at the beginning, of the foundation 
of that temple. Nor was there then any reason for Josephus 
mentioning events going back to the time of Antiochus Epiphanés. 
It stands to reason, then, that originally Josephus began his work 
with the rivalry of Hyrcanus and Aristobulus, which marks also 
the beginning of the Herodian dynasty, that is, with chapter vi. of 
the standard edition. The peculiar rhetorical ring of the intro- 
duction to this chapter would certainly bear out such an assump- 
tion. It was doubtless logical to begin the narrative with the 
origins of the dynasty which was still reigning when the catastrophe 
occurred. Only after the destruction of the temple of Heliopolis did 
he conceive the idea of rearranging his work in the sense indicated. 
This important fact settles the date of the Greek original of the 
codex of the Moscow Ecclesiastical Academy as being posterior to 
the fall of Masada (April of A.D. 73), after the Alexandrian tumults 
and the massacre of the Jews at Thebes, yet prior to the imperial 
decree concerning the temple of Heliopolis. 

The chief result of the foregoing considerations is the following 

1 Ant., xiii. 3, 1-2. 2 B.J., vii. § 436. 


CONTROVERSY ON VALUE OF SLAVONIC VERSION 125 


development of Josephus’ work, which grew under his hands, as it 
were : 

t. His first project began with the rivalry of Hyrcanus and 
Aristobulus and ended with the triumph of Titus, described, no 
doubt, according to the official programme which had been placed 
at his disposal before the event. It is probable that the book was 
given in this form to Titus and some generals of the headquarters 
before Jerusalem shortly after the triumph (end of June of A.D. 71). 

2. Josephus went on completing his work with the help of 
the official reports placed at his disposal by the imperial adminis- 
tration. The pieces added at the end of the seventh book are: 
the conquest of Machaerus by Lucilius Bassus (chap. vi.), the de- 
position of the King of Commagene in A.D. 72 (chap. vil.), the 
conquest of Masada in A.D. 73 (chaps. viii. and ix.), and the tumults 
of Alexandria and Thebes (chap. x.). This redaction is at the base 
of the codex of the Moscow Ecclesiastical Academy. A MS. of the 
same class was also utilized by Isaac-Hilarius for the so-called 
‘ Egesippus.’ 

3. Josephus heard the news of Vespasian’s decree concerning 
the levelling of the temple of Heliopolis. He believed he could 
now discern the Divine plan and meaning of the general punish- 
ment inflicted upon the Jews, and proceeded to fit his work into 
such a historico-philosophical scheme. He added chapters 1. to v. 
of the first book, without, however, changing the preface. 

4. The destruction of the temple of Heliopolis could not be 
carried out immediately, because it was too difficult to tear down 
the megalithic structure of the tower-like building. The conse- 
quence was a somewhat drawn-out correspondence between the 
governor of Egypt and the imperial chancellery. From this corre- 
spondence Josephus gathered his information as to the shape 
and the cult utensils of that sanctuary, information which he duly 
utilized for his next redaction." 

5. The last addition concerned the events of Cyrene, where a 
poor weaver, in Josephus’ eyes a misguided fanatic, had started a 
revolutionary exodus into the desert, at the head of a band of 
paupers. The wealthy Jews, for obvious reasons not favourably 
disposed toward such an attempt at ‘rebedouinizing’ Israel (below, 
p- 362 n. 4), duly informed the Roman governor, Catullus, who had 
the pious pilgrims overtaken and cut down by his cavalry. This did 
not help the wealthy Jews very much, since the clever governor, 
coveting the booty of rich confiscations and wishing to curry favour 
at Rome, managed to involve a number of them in the scandal. 

It is highly significant that this § 446 is the point to which the 
narrative of Josephus extends in the form presented by the so- 
called chronographer’s text, i.e. in the MS. in the archives of the 


Σ Bef. Vil. 4275 Cps1.:8: 43: 


126 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


Moscow Foreign Oftice (No. 15). Nothing could more precisely 
mark the date of composition of the archetype of the Josephus MS. 
utilized by the Russian translator for a second edition of his work, 
in order to supply the initial lacuna in his first imperfect edition, 
than the passage which in the Greek edition of the War immediately 
follows the point where the Russian text closes. There we read 


(8 447-451) : 


‘Moreover, to prevent any Jews elsewhere from exposing his 
iniquity, he extended his lies further afield, and prevailed on Jonathan 
and some others who had been arrested along with him to bring a 
charge of sedition against the most reputable Jews both in Alexandria 
and in Rome. Among those thus insidiously incriminated was Jose- 
phus, the author of this history. The upshot, however, of the scheme 
did not answer to Catullus’ expectations. ΓῸΓ he came to Rome, 
bringing Jonathan and his associates in chains, in the belief that the 
false accusations brought up before him and at his instance would 
be the end of the enquiry. But Vespasian, having his suspicions of 
the affair, investigated the facts ; and discovering that the charge 
preferred against these men was unjust, he on the intercession of 
Titus acquitted them, and inflicted on Jonathan the punishment that 
he had deserved. He was first tortured and then burnt alive. 
Catullus on that occasion, owing to the ene of the emperors, 
suffered nothing worse than a reprimand. . 


When Josephus produced the edition preserved in the writings 
of the Russian chronographers, it is possible that he was not yet 
fully aware of the storm which was brewing over his head ; or it 
may be that he simply did not think it advisable to make any 
mention of the affair. One can readily conceive that he was told 
nothing about his accusation until after the investigation. There 
was doubtless an element of truth in the allegations of Jonathan, 
for, as Josephus himself admits, great hopes had been placed by 
the insurgents upon a rising of the western diaspora, and letters 
and money must certainly have passed on that occasion. Jona- 
than himself was probably an emissary of the type of those Syrian 
travelling agitators who had aroused the suspicion of the Emperor 
Claudius," so much so that he forbade their being received and 
sheltered in Alexandria. Since Josephus can be shown in his 
earlier days to have fomented the revolt in Galilee, it is quite 
possible that Jonathan was in possession of incriminating docu- 
ments. Josephus, however, had succeeded in lulling the emperors 
into the belief that whatever he had schemed then he had done in 
his official capacity as a general under the Jewish government of 
Jerusalem, and he had of course obtained full pardon for his actions 


1 H. Idris Bell, Jews and Christians in Egypt, London, 1924, p. 25. “᾿μηδὲ 
ἐπάγεσθαι μηδὲ προσείεσθαι καταπλέοντας ἀπὸ Συρίας... καθάπερ ἐξεγείροντάς τινα νόσον 
κοινὴν τῆς οἰκουμένης." 


CONTROVERSY ON VALUE OF SLAVONIC VERSION 127 


in open war. Thus it is clear why an exposure of the type 
attempted by Catullus and his former accomplices had to fall 
to the ground if he could prove that the incriminating actions 
belonged to the period of his life preceding his capture by the 
Romans at Jotapata in A.D. 66.1 

Tosum up: the Old Russian version was based on two different 
MSS., representing two different redactions of the author’s seven 
books ‘on the capture of Jerusalem.’ The unknown translator 
began his work with a badly mutilated MS. of the edition com- 
pleted before Josephus learned the news of the fall of the Helio- 
politan sanctuary. On further search he discovered more perfect 
MSS. As far as may be judged from the statements of Berendts,? 
in the course of time he managed to obtain at least two more MSS., 
distinguishable by their different endings. The Old Russian Jose- 
phus, which is at all events * prior to 1260, was circulated by its 
author in different editions, alike in this to the Greek Josephus and 
to many mediaeval histories. So far as our present knowledge 
permits us to judge, none of the Russian MSS. contains the final 
paragraphs about the accusation brought against Josephus by 
Catullus and Jonathan. This proves that the Greek originals of 
the Russian must have been older than the oldest form of the Greek 
text, which was not published until after that affair. The interval 
which may have elapsed between the various editions must remain 
a matter of doubt. If Josephus hastened to inform the universe 
of his little affair and his glorious acquittal, as well he might, the 
complete edition may have seen the light as early as A.D. 73 ; for 
the judicial enquiry itself certainly did not last more than a few 
months at the very most. 

On the other hand, it is well to bear in mind also the following 
facts. The standard edition of the War contains quite late addi- 
tions, as for example the paragraph, vii. 158, on the templum Pacts, 
inaugurated in A.D. 75, and it is therefore possible that the chapter 
on his affair with the Cyrenaean Jews is just such a belated addi- 
tion, perhaps composed about A.p. 81, when at the beginning of the 
reign of Domitian he had again been accused of high treason.® For 
it was then in his interest to give the Romans the impression that 
the whole matter was essentially a ves tudicata, a thing of the past. 
That such was the case is proved by the fact that the dedication of 
the temple of Peace is actually found in the Old Russian translation. 
The Greek original was then an edition posterior to A.D. 75, yet it 
did not contain the affair of Catullus. We may then safely con- 
clude that the latter was indeed added in the reign of Domitian on 

1 This is the reason why he is so particular about the ‘ chronology of events’ 
(see the preface above, p. 123 n. 1). 
2 Berendts-Grass, loc. cit. 8. See below, p. 148. 


4 E.g. Ekkehard of Aura. 
5 Vita, ὃ 429. 


128 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


the occasion of the second accusation of the author. The Haldsts 
dates, therefore, from the reigns of Vespasian and Titus, whilst the 
Polemos did not appear until the time of Domitian. This result 
concerning the general working method of Josephus is fully cor- 
roborated by prior investigations of Prof. Laqueur! regarding 
two different editions of the Antiquities distinguishable by their 
different endings. 


THE DATE OF THE GREEK ORIGINAL OF THE SLAVONIC TEXT 


Having thus endeavoured to shed some light on the importance 
of the Russian versions for the study of Josephus’ work, we must 
now enter upon the important question of the Greek original from 
which this translation is derived. A very good point of attack is 
furnished by a curious passage in the thirty-first chapter of the 
first book. Here the Haldsvs reads as follows : 


‘And thereafter he (i.e. Antipater, living in Rome) gave large 
presents to the Roman authorities, and he induced them to write 
letters in praise of himself to Herod. And after the Jtalians, who 
are called Latins, had received the presents, they wrote such praise 
of Antipater as cannot be expressed. . . . Lor such are the Latins : 
they run to accept presents and break thety oath for the sake of presents. 
And they see no sin in calumny, saying, “With words have we spoken, 
but we have not killed (any one) ourselves,’ those accursed wretches think- 
ing that he 1s a murderer who kills with the hand, but that calumny and 
denunciation and fomenting against one’s neighbour are not murder. 
Had they known the law of God, they would have been shown long since 
what a murderer 15. But they are aliens and our doctrine touches them 
not. Therefore did they lie against the two sons of Herod, who were 
then being educated in Rome, Archelaus (and) Philip, and wrote 
so that he should kill them. But Herod, who had fortified his mind 
against external things and as a consequence of the first interrogatory, 
did not attach much credit to the Roman letters.’ 


What strikes the reader in this passage is the severe and general 
condemnation of the Romans and the allegation of their ignorance 
of the Mosaic law as the only cause of their moral perversion. The 
party exclaimed against is evidently that of the Roman grandees, 
whose venality is insisted upon. Yet at the same time they are 
referred to as “ Latins’ or even ἡ Italians,’ though there can be no 
talk about non-Roman Italians and still less of Romanized pro- 
vincials. For the scene of the story is the capital, and in a 
parallel passage which immediately follows the Romans alone 
occur : 
‘ And he (Antipater) was delighted and made a sumptuous dinner 
for his travelling companions and for the Romans, who through 


1 Dey jiidische Histoviker Flavius Josephus, Giessen, 1920, p. 5. 


CONTROVERSY ON VALUE OF SLAVONIC VERSION 129 


flattery had received from him 300 talents. For they are insatiable 
in receiving ; but if to-day any one gives them more, to-morrow they 
want (still) more. And as the sea cannot be filled, nor hell satisfied, 
nor woman’s passion, even so are the Romans insatiable in receiving. 
In truth they are Solomon’s leeches,! people who give their body and 
soul fora reward. Nay, they are ready to give their limbs and their 
brothers and children, some by converting natural boldness and ᾿ 
audacity into manliness, others by being as greedy after gold as the 
ravens on a corpse. Many also for some such thing are prepared 
to surrender cities, as also their generals (and their clothing). We 
must describe them in the sequel ; but for the present we (will) relate 
the matter in hand.’ 


To begin with, we may say with full assurance that expressions 
such as ‘ Italians’ and ‘ Latins’ as a designation for the Romans 
are unknown in Josephus. We are therefore evidently dealing 
with the corrections of a Byzantine copyist anxious to distinguish 
the Byzantines, who still called themselves “Ῥωμαῖοι, from the 
Western Romans. Such an antagonism is indeed quite possible, 
in the Byzantine empire, from the time of the schism between the 
Pope of Rome and the Patriarch of Constantinople. But a hatred 
against Italians as such is improbable between 733—when Sicily 
and the south of Italy were placed under the crozier of the Byzan- 
tine Patriarch—and 1138, when Naples was finally lost to the 
Normans. Thus the whole expression rather points to the period 
of the most bitter hatred of all Greeks for the Venetians, Genoese, 
and the other ‘Italians’ who possessed most of the Greek islands ; 
that is to say, it most probably dates from the time of the Latin 
empire (1204-61). Now, it is noteworthy that the year 1261-62, 
when the scribes of the Moscow Archival codex and of the Vilna 
MS. began their work, was also the year when the Palaeologi 
returned to Constantinople after the downfall of the Latin empire. 
It is therefore probable that the Greek original was written about 
half a century previously by a Byzantine cleric in Constantinople 
or somewhere in Asia Minor, for this would explain perfectly the 
substitution of the terms ‘ Italians’ and ‘ Latins’ for ‘ Romans ’ 
in the invective of Josephus. 

But the problem does not end there. The invective itself 
cannot be the work of the Old Russian translator, who had ob- 
viously no reason for hating Romans—Latins or Italians. More- 
over, the Jewish provenience of the passage in question is perfectly 
clear. So the only two persons who can have been responsible for 
it are either the hypothetical Jewish interpolator proposed by Dr. 
R. Seeberg and Johannes Frey, or Josephus himself. If the passage 
is genuine, it goes without saying that it cannot have stood in a 
Greek book destined for Vespasian and Titus. 


1 An allusion to Prov. Sol., xxx. 15, characteristic of the familiarity of the 
author and his presumptive public with the Old Testament. 


1 


130 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


Furthermore, it is evident that the original of the Russian text 
was Greek, as is proved by the substitution of ‘ Italians’ and 
‘Latins’ for ‘Romans’ by a Byzantine clerk, by a number of 
Greek words taken over literally by the Russian,! and, above all, 
by the easy retroversion of certain difficult passages,” ill under- 
stood by the translator. But it is altogether improbable that a 
Byzantine author of the thirteenth century, possessing the Polemos 
in its standard form, should have translated a defective Semitic 
Halésts into Greek. In the first place, only a baptized Jew would 
have had the prerequisite linguistic equipment; in the second place, 
this man (who would most certainly have left a name behind him) 
would have to have had the most pronounced purely philologico- 
critical interests to undertake such a task, a thing quite incon- 
ceivable in the Middle Ages. In the third place, the Semitic Jose- 
phus, if the Byzantines still knew him as late as the thirteenth 
century, would still be known, if only through allusions and 
quotations. Asamatter of fact, the Jews of Illyria 8 had to trans- 
late the second edition of the Polemos and the Antiquities back 
from Greek and Latin into Hebrew in the ninth century. 

A translation of the Semitic Josephus into Greek was perfectly 
useless from the moment when Josephus himself had edited his 
work in an improved and revised Greek edition—that is, as early as 
the summer of A.D. 71 or, at the very latest, in the summer of 73. 
Even if it be supposed that this Semitic edition contained material 
of interest for the Greek Church, it would have been sufficient to 
translate just those, and no one would have dreamt of performing 
such a task for the whole work. One might further assume that the 
opponents of Josephus would in due time have called the attention 
of the Roman authorities, especially in the reign of Domitian, to 
those compromising passages, and it is likely enough that they did 
so. The pedagogue of Josephus’ son, i.e. an educated Greek slave 
who may originally have been one of his secretaries, may well have 
brought forward just such an accusation.4 But for such a purpose 
the Semitic copy would have perfectly sufficed if the two passages 
themselves were translated into Greek. Yet even such an accusa- 
tion would not necessarily prove fatal. The wily parasite would 
simply have declared that the passages in question had been inter- 
polated by his enemies,® who had bribed his secretaries. As a 
matter of fact, the existence of the invectives is explained entirely 
by Josephus’ well-known carelessness in revising the copies made 
by his servi /ibravit, of which the reader has by this time had enough 

1 E.g. tgemon, metropolja, archicret, skinopigja, katapetasma, avamatji. n ii. 
§ 361 Berendts-Grass, Ὁ. 308,, ἀδοξεῖτε is not translated but transcribed adoxite in 
the Russian version, etc. 

2 See below, p. 516. Some of the proper names are quoted in their Greek 


form, e.g. below, p. 137 1. 23, Ananos not Hanan, etc. 
3 See above, p. 78 n. 1. 4 Vita, ὃ 429. δ΄ Cp. Vita, § 337. 


CONTROVERSY ON VALUE OF SLAVONIC VERSION 131 


examples. As a result of this lack of proper ‘ proof-reading,’ as 
we should say nowadays, parts of the original draft or even of the 
source matter utilized by his clerks, which ought to have been 
deleted according to his intentions, survived in a group of MSS. 

This carelessness is certainly due in the main to Josephus’ own 
extremely defective knowledge of the Greek language, a reproach 
which was in fact thrown in his teeth by Justus of Tiberias. He 
was unable to speak Greek correctly,! to say nothing of writing it. 
It is true that, nowadays, the intellectual Jew of the second or 
third generation, completely assimilated to his environment, has 
no particular difficulty in acquiring mastery over a foreign lan- 
guage, and we have no reason to suppose that the same facility was 
denied to their remote ancestors. On the contrary, the examples 
of a Justus of Tiberias and a Philo fully corroborate this experi- 
ence. It is quite different with the eastern pupils of the Orthodox 
Heder and Talmud-Thorah schools, who learn the gentile idiom 
only as grown-ups and never manage to acquire a faultless pro- 
nunciation, to say nothing of a correct and elegant style of com- 
position, in the foreign language. It follows from what we know 
of Josephus’ life that he clearly belonged to the second category. 
He certainly never attempted to compose in Greek, since it was far 
easier for him to write the draft in Semitic and have it translated 
by his collaborators. Add to this his own confession that he must 
leave the reader of his Way to judge how his narrative has been 
translated,” a sentence which clearly reveals that a history of the 
Jewish War or of the Capture of Jerusalem written in the author’s 
native tongue in his own scriptorium had been translated into 
Greek, not by Josephus but by his secretaries, though in his preface 
he boasts of having executed the translation himself. 


TRACES OF THE SEMITIC ORIGINAL IN THE OLD RUSSIAN 
TRANSLATION 


If the MSS. at the basis of the Haldsts belonged to one of the 
Greek editions carefully revised by the author, it would indeed be 
difficult, if not impossible, to prove traces of a Semitic version in 
the Old Russian translation. Fortunately, the Greek MSS. utilized 
by the Slav are derived from a very rudimentary Greek translation 
of a Semitic text, with the result that quite a number of more or 
less gross errors have gone over into the Slavonic text and are still 
clearly discernible. 


L ἄπ}, Ὁ ΣΧ Ό5: 

3 B.J., vii. 454 ἴ. : ‘ Here we close the history which we promised to relate with 
perfect accuracy. ... How it has been translated (jpunvevrar, cp. Antigg., 1. 
ὃ 75, “ἐκ τῶν ‘EBpackav μεθερμηνευμένην γραμμάτων diaragw’”’) my readers must be 
left to judge.’ 


132 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


For example, we find there the form Kondas for BONAA, based 
on the easy confusion of 5 and 3.! Ifinstead of Ptolemy Lathurus 
we read Jhathurvus,* the error is not explainable on the basis of a 
Greek text, where A and @ are never confused, but is easy to 
understand in a Semitic text, where the confusion of ὃ and n is 
quite common. In the Slavonic text the Greek [icyada has 
become iVog-chal,® due to a confusion of initial 1 with 3, an error 
equally common, and of a special form of the & resembling an I 
with a Greek I’. 

Mutilations of proper names, largely due to wrong syllable 
division, are frequent in the Slavonic text. Thus Noaros has be- 
come Unor.4 The initial U is of course the Semitic )=‘ and,’ 
erroneously added tothe name. The error, be it noted, occurs also 
in a number of still extant Greek MSS. The same mistake occurs 
in connexion with the name ’E/le‘azay, which in the Slavonic 
version has become Velezarja.6 Similarly Dov (Δῶρα) in the 
Slavonic becomes Udorus.6 When the Greek TABAQ or TABAQN 
has become Agawao/,’ we have in the initial A simply the Semitic 
article, erroneously taken for part of the name. The reading 
‘against Jechono’ for a Greek ἐπὶ ᾿Ιεριχοῦντος cannot be explained 
from the Greek at all, because one would have to suppose the 
dropping out of five different letters, which is highly improbable. 
But it is most plausible to assume that the Greek secretary of 
Josephus read 12)" for ὙΠ" in the original and therefore transcribed 
[EXONQ.S 

The queer form Sekostus for Sextus ® finds its explanation in the 
fact that the Hebrew alphabet lacks the letter « and therefore 
writes gs. The transcription Σέκστος for Σέξτος in the corre- 
sponding place of the Greek Polemvos is due to the same cause. 

In ὃ 383 of Book 11. the Arabs of Transjordania flee on an 
island, 2a ostvow, where they are compelled to surrender to Herod 
‘for want of water.’ Aside from the fact that there are no islands 
in that region, one cannot imagine an army on an island suffering 
from lack of water. In the Greek text the Arabs flee εἰς τὸ yapa- 
κωμα, Within the palisades, which is the correct translation 
of a Hebrew 32, 9¥3, ;9¥3. The Greek translator of this rough 
draft evidently did not know the Hebrew word bosvah, and con- 
cluded that the Arabs fled to a place named Boctvooy. Even as 
the translators of the Septuagint did in such cases, the Greek 
secretary of Josephus merely transcribed the difficult words. The 
Slav reading then Ba Boctrooy, trying to make some sense of the 
word, converted it then probably into za ositvow, ‘ on to an island,’ 
as we have seen. 


1 3. 4, § go. * Slav. Fafurus, i. ὃ 86. 5 718621. 
* ii. § 481. δ Ji2'§:236. €1./§ 156. 
7 U1. 19, ὃ 544. δ 11.8 323. 9. 11. 8. 325. 


CONTROVERSY ON VALUE OF SLAVONIC VERSION 133 


The Slavonic text has preserved the Semitic form Bethzur, 
against Βηθσουρών in the Greek.! Only in the reading of a Semitic 
script lacking the vowels could Babylon have been read for Byblos.? 

The Old Russian version shows furthermore a considerable 
number of Semitisms, which Josephus carefully removed from his 
later definitive editions. I mention ‘men of war’=Greek ἄνδρες 
συσστρατιῶται, a literal translation from the Hebrew ’anshé) 
milhamah.8 These examples might be increased considerably, 
without apparent utility. 

It may even be possible to determine, on the basis of the Old 
Russian version, whether it was Hebrew or Aramaic that Josephus 
in the Greek preface calls his ‘ancestral language’ (πάτριος γλῶσσα). 
In the Haldsis4 we find the word maglawijem’, which is nothing but 
the Hebrew maglabhejhem, ‘their whips,’ corresponding to the 
μάστιξιν in the corresponding passage of the V7ta,° meaning 
‘with their whips.’ (The Aramaic form would be maglabhahon.) 
Unfortunately, the matter becomes more complicated by the fact 
that the word maglabh is also a Saracen loan-word in Byzantine 
Greek, and that the ending -em’ is the suffix of the Slavonic 17:- 
strumentalis, But to assume from this that the Slav arrived at the 
form of his text independently from any model, one would have 
to postulate the existence of a Slavonic * maglaw17, which word 
is not to be found at least in the existing dictionaries of the 
Slavonic tongues. But it is altogether unthinkable that the word 
μαγγλαβίοις should have taken the place of the paotifiv of the 
common MSS. of the Greek work, for the Saracen loan-word 
obviously cannot have come into being before the ninth century. 
Nor would any one at this late age have taken the trouble to trans- 
late the Semitic original (if it still existed) into Greek, since the 
Greek text was then readily available throughout the Byzantine 
empire in numerous MSS. The chances are, then, that the original 
draft of the Haldsis was written in Hebrew, though it is well not 
to conclude too much from this one word, since it is found in a 
report of Josephus addressed to the regents in Jerusalem, and it is 
possible that in an official document of this type the priest’s son 
Josephus should have used Hebrew. The use of the Hebrew and 
not the Aramaic definite article in connexion with certain place 
names,® and the striking frequency of sentences beginning with 
the word ‘ and,’ 7 would thus no doubt be best explained. 

Since, however, the work in question was a piece of political 


1 3.§ 41. 21. § 422. 3 ii. § 612, 

* Berendts-Grass, p. 277. 11. δ᾽ 8 147. 6 Cf. above, p. 132. 

7 Cp. C. F. Burney, The Aramaic Origin of the Fourth Gospel, Oxford, 1922, 
p. 50, on the frequency of sentences opening without a connective particle as an 
essential characteristic of Aramaic syntax, contrasting with the Hebrew pre- 
ference for sentences ‘beginning with ‘And’ (which has often to be rendered 
‘Then,’ ‘ Now,’ ‘So,’ “ Yea”). 


134 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


propaganda designed to reach not only the Eastern Jews of 
Mesopotamia but also the heathen Parthians, Arabians, Assyrians 
of Adiabene, and Armenians, it is indeed highly probable that 
Josephus used for the definite text of his Oriental edition the 
Aramaic language, which, as is well known, was the official lan- 
guage of the Parthian empire and the οί of those regions. 


THE ORIENTAL EDITION OF THE ‘ HALOsIs.’ THE AUTHOR’S 
SEMITIC DRAFT AND THE ROUGH GREEK VERSION OF HIS 
ASSISTANTS 


From the author’s preface one might infer that the Semitic 
draft of the Greek Way which he mentions is in fact identical with 
the Oriental edition intended for the ‘ upper barbarians.’ But, as 
early as 1886, Th. Noldeke thought such an identity of the Oriental 
and the Occidental editions, coming from a man of Josephus’ 
character, very unlikely. Granting the truth of this observation, 
and the possibility that Josephus might have thought the Romans 
would never find out exactly what he wrote in his own language 
for the Jews of the Orient, it is yet a far cry to assuming that in 
the Oriental edition he left intentionally the two venomous in- 
vectives against the Romans. Moreover, it is clear that this 
Oriental edition, written in Rome, was intended to be a work of 
Roman propaganda ; for it was with such a political aim in view 
that the Romans had given him access to their archives and secret 
documents. [urthermore, Agrippa’s speech, with the ‘ fortune 
of the Romans’ and their invincibility for a keynote,! is clearly 
a piece of political propaganda designed to ‘ pacify’ the Orient, 
such as was badly needed because of the general political situation 
of the Eastern provinces and the Parthian menace.2 The detailed 
description of the Jewish War, with the even more detailed 
account of the disasters which befell the Jews after its close, was 
evidently meant to inspire the Eastern barbarians with a holy 
fear, and Vespasian certainly did not accidentally pick out for this 
task the man who had been one of the leaders of the Jewish 
rebellion. This observation, the general result of Prof. Laqueur’s 
prior enquiries, is fully confirmed by the Haldsis. The Greek 
Polemos expressly mentions the princes Monobazos and Kenedaios, 
relations of the King of Adiabene, and a certain Silas of Babylon, 
allies of the Jews, who through their personal bravery had a 
good share in the victory over Cestius Gallus.? The whole pas- 
sage, the historicity of which need not be doubted at all, is missing 

1 B.]., i. 345 ff., especially 373. 

* Cf. Pliny’s Paneg. in Tvaj., ch. xiv.: ‘ferociam superbiamque Parthorum ex 


proximo auditus magno terrore cohibere,’ 
* B.J., li. 19. 2, § 520 sq. 


CONTROVERSY ON VALUE OF SLAVONIC VERSION 135 


in the Haldésis. Nor do we find there, in the great speech of 
Agrippa, the mention of the Parthian hostages brought to Rome 
by Tiridates in A.D. 66 and the other Parthian hostages living in 
Italy, some princes of the Parthian royal dynasty and sons of 
King Monobazes of Adiabene.t No doubt Josephus omitted these 
passages because they were offensive to the Parthians, and, more 
important still, because he did not wish to give the Parthians the 
impression that the Roman Jews were looking for their aid. The 
military situation in Britain and Germany, anything but favourable 
to the Romans in the critical year of 69-70, probably induced him 
also to omit from the Haldsis Agrippa’s mention of the complete 
pacification of these nations by the Roman arms. 

Coming now to the question of the invectives against the 
Romans, one might perhaps think that they were inserted on 
purpose to conceal the official character of the work of propaganda. 
Still, this is unlikely, for the Parthian administration of Meso- 
potamia and the neighbouring districts was certainly not more 
honest and more unselfish than the Roman administration in 
Judaea and elsewhere. It is therefore more probable that the 
definitive Oriental edition did not contain those passages at all, 
but that these are peculiar to the first draft which was reworked 
for the definitive Semitic edition and on the other hand translated 
into Greek by his secretaries,” and that it was this Greek draft 
which Josephus constantly improved and revised. Since he was 
pressed for time—his work was to be ready for the triumph of 
Titus—it is likely that he just managed to look over the copies 
destined for the monarchs and the more important among the 
generals. For the rest of the edition he had to rely on the honesty 
of his secretaries, and either from carelessness or in order to play 
him a prank they copied those two passages against his directions. 
No doubt he noticed the matter soon enough and took his meas- 
ures, for none of the MSS. of the War shows the slightest trace 
ofthem. The date of the deletion of the passages cannot be very 
well determined, since the Russian translator used the second 
edition of the Haldsis only for chaptersi. to xxv., because they were 
missing in the old edition to which he had access. Thus chapter 
xxxi. was translated only after the older edition. 


JOSEPHUS AND THE SEMITIC TRANSLATION OF NICOLAUS 
or DAMASCUS 


There remains the problem of determining how the invectives 
against the Romans got into Josephus’ draft, and especially into 


1 Dio. Cass., 63. 1-7. Sueton., Nevo, ch. 13. Plin., N.H., xxx. 16. 
2 See above, p. 130 f. 


136 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


that portion of his work which he copies from Nicolaus of Damas- 
cus, the intimate friend of Augustus himself. 

As Dr. Hélscher already intimated—and the Slavonic text 
fully confirms his observations— Josephus did not utilize Nicolaus 
directly but through the medium of a Jewish author far more 
hostile to Herod than Nicolaus had been, and who occasionally 
joins issue with the Damascene historian. The simplest explana- 
tion of this fact would be to assume that there existed a free 
Hebrew or Aramaic translation of Nicolaus which Josephus drew 
on in preference to the Greek original. The invectives against 
the Romans could come only from the pen of such a violent anti- 
Roman, and Josephus’ secretaries included them in their transla- 
tion either from carelessness or from malice, though, as has been 
said before, our author managed to discover them in most MSS. 
and promptly deleted them before they could do him harm with 
his patrons. 

The same Jewish translator or reworker of Nicolaus may be 
responsible for a chapter about a secret discussion between different 
priests of Jerusalem, a passage found in the nineteenth section of 
the first book of the Slavonic Haldsis but absent from the Greek 
Polemos. The §§ 364-9 are missing in the Slavonic text. Dealing 
with Herod’s expedition against the Arabs, they were probably 
inserted at a later date and from a secondary source. This source 
can be easily determined, thanks to Josephus’ own statement in 
the parallel passage of the Antiquities (xv. 5. 1-5): ‘ The account 
we here give was that contained in the memoirs of King Herod.’ 
The long speech of Herod recorded by Nicolaus (§§ 373-9) has no 
other source. When, for reasons presently to be discussed, Josephus 
thought fit to delete the discussion of the priests about the 
messianic hopes of the Jews, he filled the gap by the more detailed 
description of the Arabic campaign in Herod’s memoirs used 
by Nicolaus, of which the heir of Herod, Agrippa 11., no doubt - 
possessed a copy. It is, of course, equally possible that everything 
he took from those memoirs he borrowed through the medium of 
Nicolaus. He may at first have abridged the story of the Arabic 
expedition, just because as a priest and a priest’s son he was 
interested in the theme of the messiah and also in the murder of 
the scribes engaged in the discussion ; and when he saw himself 
obliged after all to omit that interesting passage, he may simply 
have gone back to Nicolaus in order to give what remained of 
the details concerning the Arabic campaign. The discussion is 
sufficiently important for the history of Jewish messianism to make 
a literal translation with commentary well worth our while: 


‘But Herod spent little (time) in Jerusalem and marched against 
the Arabs. At that (lit. ‘‘the’’) time the priests mourned and 


CONTROVERSY ON VALUE OF SLAVONIC VERSION 137 


grieved one to another in secret. They durst not do it openly for 
fear of Herod and his friends. 

‘For (one Jonathan)! spake: ‘‘The law? bids us have no 
foreigner for king. Yet we wait for the Anointed one,® the meek,‘ 
of David’s line. But of Herod we know that he is an Arabian,® 
uncircumcised. The Anointed will be called meek,‘ but this (is) he 
who has filled our whole land with blood. Under the Anointed it was 
ordained that the lame should walk ὃ and the blind should see? and 
the poor become rich. But under this man the hale have become 
lame, the sighted are blinded, the rich have become beggars. What 
is this? Orhow? Have the Prophets lied? The Prophets ὃ have 
written that there shall not want a ruler from Judah until he come 
unto whom it is delivered ; for him do the Gentiles hope.!° But is this 
man the hope for the Gentiles? For we hate his misdeeds. Will 
the Gentiles perchance set their hopes upon him ? 

‘Woe unto us, because God has forsaken us, and we are forgotten 
of him!™ And he will give us over to desolation and to destruc- 
tion." Not as under Nebuchadnezzar and Antiochus (is it). For 
then were the Prophets teachers unto the people, and the prophecies 
concerning the captivity and concerning the return. And now 
neither is there any one whom one could ask nor any one with 
whom one might find comfort. 

‘But Ananos the priest answered and spake to them: “1 know 
all books.4* When Herod fought before the city, I had never a 
thought that God would permit him to rule over us. But now I 
understand that our desolation is nigh. And consider the prophecy 
of Daniel.1® For he writes that after the return the city of Jerusalem 
shall stand for seventy year-weeks, which are 400 years, and after 
these years shall it be desolate. And when they had counted the 
remaining years (they) were thirty and four. But Jonathan answered 
and spake: ‘‘ The numbers of the years are even as we have said. 


1 The name has dropped out, but can easily be restored from the context. 

* Deut, xvii. 15. Cp. Bab. Talm., Baba bathra, 3b-4a, about Herod finding 
out the rabbis who invoked Deut. xvii. 15 against him, and having them all 
executed except R. Baba ben Butah. 

3 The Messiah. 

4 Zach. 1x. 9; Ps. cxxxi. 1: “ μνήσθητι, κύριε, τοῦ Δαυὶδ καὶ... τῆς πραότητος 
αὐτοῦ ᾿᾿ (the M.T, of Ps. cxxxii. has other vowel-points, therefore A.V. ‘remember 
. . . David and all his afflictions ’ instead of ‘ his meekness’). 

® Jn Christian tradition he figures, on the contrary, as an uncircumcised Philis- 
tine hailing from Ascalon (Eusebius, H.E., i. 7. 11, cf. i. 6. 2-3). 

© UPS. XERV, 6, 7. 1 [bid., v. 5. 

8 fs.1xi,1. The prophet says only that the poor will get good news. But for 
our author there is nothing but wealth which could be ‘ good news ’ to the poor. 

9 Videl., the prophet Moses as the alleged author of the book of Genesis (xlix. 
10), and Ezekiel, who speaks (xxi. 26f.) of ‘the crown and the diadem’ and of 
the time ‘ until he come, whose right it is ; and I will give it him.’ 

10 Genes. xlix. ΤΟ, ἐν ἧς KX, Τά, 

5 Eevéhk. Vi: 1} Xxx? 28. 1. 

a8. Ps. 1xxiv..9') Dan 1x: 24. 

4 A Semitism: kethubim in Hebrew (Aram. kethuboth)=‘ the scriptures,’ 1.6. 
the sacred books. 

18. B.]., 1. § 343 ff.—that is, in the chapter preceding this conversation. 

16 jx, 24 ff, 


138 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


But the Holy of Holies,t where is he? For this Herod he (sc. the 
prophet) cannot call the Holy One,? (him) the bloodthirsty and the 
impure.” 

‘ But one of them, by name Levi, wishing to outwit them, spake 
to them with stammering speech, not from the Scriptures but in 
fancied speech. But they being learned in the Scriptures began to 
search for the time when “‘the Holy One’’? would come. But the 
speeches of Levi they execrated, saying, ‘‘ Putty* is in thy mouth but 
a bone in thy head.’’ They said this to him because they meant that 
he had been breaking fast all day and that his head had become heavy 
from drink, like a bone. But he, seized with shame, fled to Herod 
and informed him of the speeches of the priests which they had 
spoken against him. But Herod sent by night and slew them all,‘ 
keeping it secret from the people, lest they should be roused. Then 
he appointed others. 

‘And when it was morning the whole land quaked.’ 


In the Greek Polemos, and no doubt also in Nicolaus of Damascus, 
the earthquake of § 370 was recounted without any special motiva- 
tion; in the Haldsts it appears the direct punishment of God, intent 
upon avenging his priests. The priests have been killed at night, 
and in the morning the earth quakes, incidentally killing 6000 
victims entirely innocent of the crime. Instead of the phrase 
‘when it was morning,’ the Greek has the sober statement 
‘at the beginning of spring,’ i.e. at the time when the army 
was again about to take the field ; but in the words ‘a God-sent 
catastrophe’ we can still recognize a trace of the Pharisaic doctrine 
of immediate Divine retribution so characteristic of the Jewish 
reworker of Nicolaus, from whom Josephus had taken it over 
directly. 

The time of this episode was no doubt well fixed already in the 
source of Josephus. It is the year 32 B.c., and the earthquake is 
certainly not later than 31 B.c. The priests then expect the 
destruction of Jerusalem and the coming of the messiah in thirty- 
four years, that is, A.D. 2. Since the history of Nicolaus of Dam- 
ascus appears to have extended as far as the confirmation of 
Archelaus as the successor of Herod by Augustus, that is, 4 B.c., 
the free translation of the work from the Greek into some Semitic 
idiom may have taken place shortly after the war of Varus, and 
may be the work of some pessimistic Pharisee who had the 
apocalyptic turn of mind. The messiah in question, who was the 


1 Dan.ix.24: ‘seventy weeks are determined . . . to anoint the Most Holy ’ 
(lit. the Holy of Holies, godesh gadashim), i.e. the high priest (1 Chron. xiii. 13: 
Aaron separated as godesh qadashim). 

2 The Holy One of God, with reference to Ps. cvi. 16, ‘ Aaron, the saint of 
the Lord.’ 

* Russ. ukha, ‘soup,’ makes no sense. I suppose Hebr. margah, ‘ putty,’ has 
been mistaken for maraq, ‘soup,’ by the Greek translator. 

* Cf. above, p. 137 n. 2. 


CONTROVERSY.ON VALUE OF SLAVONIC VERSION 139 


hope of all enemies of the Herodian dynasty, can have been no 
other than Judas the Galilaean, the only one of the three pretenders 
to that honour who had escaped from the slaughter of 4 B.c. with 
his life, and who held himself concealed somewhere in the hills or 
in the desert. 

The prophecy cannot have been invented after A.D. 2, which 
year had conclusively shown that it was essentially erroneous. 
But Josephus, who had seen the destruction of the city in A.D. 70 
and who pretended to see the shz/o foretold in Gen. xlix. 10 in 
Vespasian, may have relished the episode, if only to show how even 
the wise had been in error. If the whole section were the work 
of a Christian interpolator, he would certainly have turned the 
chronology so that it would have pointed either to the official year 
of Jesus’ birth! or to the year of his first appearance in public, that 
is, according to Luke ili. I, A.D. 29, or, lastly, to the year of the 
crucifixion, that is, either A.D. 30 or 32. Nor would there have 
been any special difficulty. All that was necessary to juggle the 
figures correctly would have been to take the year 458 B.c. as the 
year of the ᾿ return,’ based on a passage in Ezra (vii. 8). Finally, 
had the interpolator done his work after A.D. 70 he would certainly 
not have failed to point somehow to that catastrophe as being the 
‘desolation ’ foretold by Daniel. The only justifiable conclusion 
is therefore that the discussion between the priests is a genuine 
chapter of Josephus’ Ha/dszs, and that the source from which it 
is derived was written some years before 2 B.c. 

It is of course perfectly transparent why Josephus in his later 
edition of the Polemos omitted the whole passage with its mention 
of a connexion of the messianic hopes with the name of Herod. 
It would not have been very flattering for Vespasian, whom 
Josephus finally proposed as the real messiah, to be mentioned in 
the same breath with a petty king of Judaea, who had, to boot, 
the sinister reputation of a merciless tyrant. Moreover, the dis- 
cussion between the priests would have shown the Romans only 
too well how perfectly un-Jewish his own application of the Old 
Testamental prophecies to the person of Vespasian was, and what a 


1 If it weve true that in a MS. of the Moscow Musée Historique, quoted and 
reproduced by Prof. Sol. Zeitlin (without any number or other indication), 
Jew. Quart. Rev., N.S. xix., 1929, p. 26f, this dialogue is placed in the year of 
the siege of Jerusalem (37 A.D.), so that the ‘ thirty-four years ’ still left before 
the impending ‘ destruction of the city ’ and the appearance of the ‘ Holy One’ 
might be explained as pointing to the burning of the temple porticoes during 
the war of Varus (4 B.c.) and to the birth of Jesus in the last year of Herod the 
Great (4 B.c.), this rearrangement would be an obviously Christian chronological 
falsification, a parallel to the similar fraud discussed above, p.17 ff. But nota 
word of what Zeitlin pretends to have read on the page ‘ 792b’ reproduced on 
his Pl. 1v., not a word of this dialogue is found either on this or on any other page of 
this MS. (Synod. p. 745), for the very simple reason that it is a Josippon and 
not a Josephus! Even the page number is wrongly quoted, for the page is clearly 
a vecto (a) and not a verso | 


[40 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


bold lie he had after all started when he spoke of a Divine inspira- 
tion in this connexion. Worse still, every argument advanced 
by the priests to show that Herod could not be the messiah, since 
he was neither meek nor a benefactor, would have applied with 
equal force to Vespasian, who, if anything, had treated the Jews 
even more harshly than Herod had ever done. 

Nor can there be any question of the passage being a late 
interpolation. As early as the fourth century all remembrance 
of the once propounded messiahship of Herod the Great} had 
vanished. The interpolation would then have to be far older. 
Nor can it be a Christian interpolation. Among the Christians, 
Herod, as I have said before,? had the reputation of being of 
Philistine descent. It was only by the Jews that he had always 
been called an Arab and an uncircumcised gentile. 


THE MANIFESTLY CHRISTIAN INTERPOLATIONS IN THE SLAVONIC 
JOSEPHUS, AND THEIR DATE 


The Russian “Chronographer of the year 1512,’ quoted by 
Berendts 8 and since printed, has a remarkable and _ hitherto 
neglected quotation from Josephus. This is what he says: 


‘This Josephus, although what he wrote does not testify to his 
having completely accepted the faith in Christ, is still praiseworthy 
in his writings, because he has said the truth about the capture of 
Jerusalem, to wit, that this catastrophe happened to the Jews because 
of the Christ and according to the prophecy of Christ. Therefore 
he himself left Jerusalem and went over to the Romans and Titus. 
With him went to Titus also Mannaeus, the brother’s son (bvatanic= 
ἀδελφιδοῦς) of Lazarus, whom Jesus, as he (Josephus) says, had raised 
from the dead after he had become putrid.’ 


Nothing corresponding to this quotation is to be found in the 
Greek standard editions. Yet the good faith of the Russian 
writer cannot well be doubted, because one part of what he says 
is found in the Slavonic version of Josephus, whilst the rest is con- 
firmed by a hitherto equally unidentifiable quotation of the Bul- 
garian bishop Theophylactos of Ochrida, and another much earlier 


1 Epiphanius, Adv. Haeres. haer., xx.; P.G., 41, 269. Catena 400 ed, Cramer 
to Matt. xxii.15. Tertullian, app. to De praescy. adv. haer., 45: ‘ Herodiani, qui 
Herodem Christum esse credebant.’ Jerome in Matt. xxii. 15: ‘ quidam 
Latinorum ridicule Herodianos putant, qui Herodem Christum esse credebant.’ 

* Above, p. 137 nN. 5. 

* Gebhardt u. Harnack, Texte und Untersuchungen, xiv. 1. p. 13 f. 

* Polnoje sobvanije russkich létopisei, vol. xxii. sect. 1 (St. Petersburg, rorr, 
p. 249), reproduced (in Russian characters) vol. i. p. 429 of the German edition 
of the present book. 


CONTROVERSY ON VALUE OF SLAVONIC VERSION 14x 


occurring in the so-called Chronicon Paschale, a late fourth- or a 
fifth-century adaptation of Eusebius. The Old Russian Josephus 
says in Book v. § 467: ‘ In these days Mannaeus, a brother’s son 
of Lazarus, whom Jesus raised out of his grave after he had become 
putrid, fled to Titus,’ etc. On the other hand, we read in Theophy- 
lactos of Ochrida:+ ‘as Josephus testifies, this happened to the 
Jews because of the death of Jesus.’ The Chronicon Paschale 
(i. 463) says: ‘Josephus relates in the fifth book of the Capture 
that the captivity of the Jews occurred in the third year of Ves- 
pasian, that is, forty years after their daring against Jesus. In 
that time, he also says, James the brother of the Lord, and bishop 
of Jerusalem, was precipitated from the height and stoned to 
death by them.’ There is nothing in the Greek standard text 
corresponding to the details of the quotation, but it is easy to see 
that the words quoted explain the praise bestowed by the Russian 
chronographer upon Josephus for having justly described the ruin 
of the Jewish nation as a consequence of what was done to Jesus. — 
This approval given to Josephus is precisely the contrary of what 
Origen said on the basis of what he read in jis Josephus text : 


‘Although not believing in Jesus as the Christ, Josephus, when 
searching for the true cause of the fall of Jerusalem, ought to have 
said that the persecution of Jesus was the cause of its ruin, because 
the people had killed the prophesied Messiah ; yet as if against his 
will and not far from the truth he says that this befell the Jews in 
revenge for James the Just, who was the brother of Jesus the so- 
called Christ, because they killed him, although he was a perfectly 
just man.’ 


It is now very easy to see what happened to the text of Jose- 
phus. The Church was, and for that matter still is, repeating that 
the past and present miseries of the Jews are the Divine retribution 
for the crucifixion of Jesus. Origen would have liked to find an 
explicit confirmation of this doctrine in Josephus ; but the great 
philologist is conscientious enough to tell us that Josephus says 
nothing of the kind, though that writer mentions, unintentionally 
as it were, ‘ almost against his will,’ * the popular opinion that 
Jerusalem was destroyed for what had been done to the brother of 
Jesus—a passage which does not exist in the Greek standard text, 
evidently because it was removed as a direct consequence of the 
point of criticism started by Origen. Later scribes had none of the 
scruples of Origen, and simply inserted into the text of Josephus 
what they sincerely believed he ought to have written. The Ege- 


1 Comm. in John, xiii. p. 762, ed. Paris, 1631; p. 695, ed. Venice, 1685; P.G., 
cxxiv., ¢. 165 Ὁ. The author was born in Euboea, and lived under the emperors 
Michael Ducas and Alexios Comnenos (1081-1118). 

* c. Cels., i. 47, ed. Koetschau, Griech. Christl. Schriftst., Berlin, 1899, i. p. 96. 

3 Cf. above, p. 37. 


142 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


sippus text! as well as theChronicle of Malalas® follows the common 
current. A copyist of the War, not to remain behind in his zeal, 
made a bold insertion in Book v. ὃ 568 sqg., speaking of the frenzy 
of those ‘ reprobates’ and of the Divine punishment of their sins : 


‘I believe that had the Romans delayed to punish these repro- 
bates, either the earth would have opened and swallowed up the city, 
or it would have been swept away by a flood or have tasted anew the 
thunderbolts of the land of Sodom. Jor it produced a generation far 
more godless than the victims of those visitations, seeing that these 
men’s frenzy involved the whole people in their ruin. But why 
need I severally recount the calamities ? Why indeed, when Man- 
naeus, son of Lazarus (ὁ Λαζάρου), sought refuge with Titus,’ etc.3 


So he inserted after ‘these men’s frenzy involved the whole 
people in their ruin’ the two sentences read by the Alexandrian 
author of the Chronicon Paschale:4 ‘In the third year of Vespasian 
occurred the capture,’ etc. ‘Inthat yearJames...’ Thisdate, ‘the 
third year of Vespasian,’ is in obvious contradiction to Josephus, 
who, in the same work,° correctly calls the year of the destruction 
the second year of Vespasian. The reason for this shifting of the date 
of Jerusalem’s fall is obvious: the Christian writer believes with 
Luke 111. τ that the ministry of Jesus began in 29, the fifteenth year 
of Tiberius, and lasted for two years, the passover of the crucifixion 
being the third during this period. This brings the passion to the 
year A.D. 31; and if the destruction of Jerusalem is to happen after 
the classical period of forty years, it had to be shifted to A.D. 71. 
On the other hand, the death of James the Just in reality occurred, 
according to Josephus’ well-documented account, in A.D. 62, i.e. 
eight years before the fall of the city. Because to the interpolator 
God’s mills seemed to grind too slowly in this particularly atrocious 
case, he said a little vaguely that James died ‘at the time’ of the 
fall of the city. These words were paraphrased by the early Judeo- 
Christian traveller and historian of Christian origins, Hegesippus ° 
—the genuine Hegesippus!—still more diplomatically: ‘and tmmedi- 
ately after this [501]. the murder of James] Vespasian destroyed the 
city. This proves incidentally that these callous forgeries were 
perpetrated before Hegesippus’ time, who wrote about A.D. 180, that 
is, at the latest about the middle of the second century of our era. 
Similarly, Eusebius’ speaks of the passion of James and the ‘ im- 

1 il. 5, p. 139, Ussani: *. . . Christum dominum cruci suffixerit . . . Ex illo 
itaque Judaeorum res proditae, ex illo exitium genti temploque maturatum 
excidium.’ 

* x. 31, p. 247 of the Bonn edition: ‘Josephus the Hebrew philosopher said 
also that evey since the Jews have crucified Jesus, sorrow (ὀδύνη) has not ceased in 
the Jewish country.’ 

8 Thackeray’s trans., iii. p. 375. ὁ See above, p. 141. 

© B.s., vi..4. 8, δ 269); vi. 10. 1,,8 435. 

6 Ap. Eusebium, H.E., ii. 23. 18. 

UY = El OPA Vi tes G din 


CONTROVERSY ON VALUE OF SLAVONIC VERSION 143 


mediately following fall of Jerusalem,’ thus placing the death of 
Jesus’ brother eight years later than it really occurred ; for all this 
there is no other authority than the above-quoted spurious lines 
in the text of Josephus. 

The most impudent interpolation in that mare’s nest of 
forgeries is the one by which Josephus is made to bear witness on 
the greatest of the miracles of Jesus, the raising of Lazarus from 
the dead. Going over the Slavic text, we note right away the 
queer expression ἡ brother’s son,’ an expression which has no 
parallel in the extant Greek text, which refers to Mannaeus as the 
son of Lazarus. One asks, of course, why the interpolator con- 
verts the son into a nephew. On consulting the Hebrew Josippon 
one promptly discovers that the Mannaeus in question or his equi- 
valent 1 is there called ‘the son of Seruq.’ Since there is no reason 
whatever to doubt this reading, obviously bona fide, it becomes 
clear that the interpolator had to make Mannaeus the nephew of 
Lazarus, because the original had already provided a father for the 
young man. So there was not even a casual mention of that name 
in this connexion as an inducement to drag in Lazarus at all. The 
whole history of the forgery runs then something like this: The 
original reading was * Mannaeus, the son of Serugq.’ The forger 
changed ‘Seruq’ to Lazarus to wedge in a testimony for the 
miracle. Naturally, this could not be done in all copies, and in a 
number of them the original reading remained. A subsequent 
corrector became aware of this, and to do away with the contra- 
diction he made Lazarus Mannaeus’ uncle. The interpolation of 
the testimony was so outright silly that even Isaac and the Latin 
translator of the age of Cassiodorus rejected it, though they 
allowed the phrase ‘ Mannaeus, the son of Lazarus’ to stand be- 
cause they no longer knew the original patronymic ‘ son of Seruq.’ 

From what has been said above about Origen’s criticism of 
Josephus and the subsequent alteration of the text by the Church, 
it follows that the Greek original accessible to the great philologist 
must have read something like this: Avz/., xx. ὃ 200, ‘ Ananias 

. convened an assembly of judges and dragged before it the 
brother of Jesus the so-called Messiah [ 7,2 Jacob by name, 
and some others, accusing them of breaking the law, and handed 
them over to be stoned. [ 13 (The people, when searching 
(later on) for the cause of the fall of Jerusalem and of the destruction 

' In Hebrew, ‘ Menahem.’ According to Philippus Sidetes, Papias mentioned 
‘the miraculous resurrection of Manaimos’ mother’ (de Boor, T.U., v. ii. 170). 

2 Something is probably missing here, since Josephus is accustomed to insert 
a reference harking back to the first mention of a name when reintroducing a 
person for the second time (cp. Ant., xv. § 3, xx. § 102; B.J., ii. § 56, § 433, etc.). 
Some words about Jesus which sounded blasphemous to Christian ears—e.g. τοῦ 


ἀρχιλῃστοῦ σταυρωθέντος ὑπὸ Πιλάτου, or the like—may have been deleted by the 


censor. 
3 Here, too, something may be missing. See below, p. 546 ll. 15 ff. 


144 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


of the temple, believed that this suffering happened to our nation 
through the wrath of God, because of what those men dared to do.) 
Those, however, who were considered the most worthy and most 
exact about the observance of the law in the city were loth to put 
up with this. And they sent to the king,’ etc. The words here en- 
closed in brackets were deleted in consequence of Origen’s criticism, 
the motivation being now thought to have been Jesus’ death ex- 
clusively. Probably at the same time the corresponding passage 
about James the Just, quoted above, p. 141, was interpolated into 
the Jewish War, where a suitable place for it was easily found. 
The genuineness of the words read by Origen cannot well be 
doubted because they do not even reflect Josephus’ own opinion, 
any more than his words about the defeat of Herod Antipas by the 
Arabs, regarded by the same type of public opinion as a punish- 
ment for the death of John the Baptist. Being only a belief of the 
people, they are not at all in contradiction to Ant., xx. 8. 5, ὃ 166, 
where Josephus himself explains the downfall and burning of the 
city as the Divine chastisement for the misdeeds of the Sicari- 
ans, especially for the murder of the high priest Jonathan. 
Another clumsy interpolation in the Old Russian text, in spite 
of its spurious character, throws some unexpected light on two 
quotations by the patriarch Photius of Constantinople (ninth 
century) and Eusebius of Caesarea respectively. They both refer 
to Josephus as testifying to the truth of the legend about the 
massacre of the children of Bethlehem. This is what Photius 
says :1 ‘this Herod is the son of Antipater the Idumaean and the 
-Arabian (queen) named Kypros, under whom Christ . . . was 
born, against whom Herod raged and sinned against the Lord, 
and became the murderer of many infants.’ All this as a quota- 
tion from Josephus. At first sight one might believe the words 
about the slaughter of the innocents to be merely an addition by 
Photius. That supposition falls when we turn to Eusebius : 5 


(Mention is made of Herod’s murder of his own family) ‘. . . for 
the shadows in their story, which Josephus has narrated at length in 
the history of Herod, are darker than any in tragic drama. But it is 
well to hear from the words of that writer how, from the moment of 
the plot against our Saviour and the other innocents, a scourge sent 
from God seized him and drove him to death.’ 


Because of this quotation Eusebius has been accused ever since the 

days of Tannéguy Lefévre of having fabricated the Testimonium 

Flavianum de carvmficina puerorum Bethlehemi. The same accusa- 

tion would have to be levelled against the Armenian historian 

Moses of Khorni® (eighth century), who says about Herod I. that 
1 Brbl., cod. 238 (written before 858). 


? H.E., 1.8.14. Dr. Kirsopp Lake’s transl. in the Loeb Class. Libr., p. 67. 
8. Transl. by Langlois in Carol. Muller’s H.G.V., ii. p. 326. 


CONTROVERSY ON VALUE OF SLAVONIC VERSION 145 


he was ᾿ weighed down by sufferings as a retribution for his criminal 
behaviour against Christ, as Josephus testifies.’ What all these 
witnesses quote Josephus for, though of course absent from the 
Greek text, is found verbatim in the Old Russian version, which as 
a matter of fact corresponds to the quotation of Photius fairly 
closely. In i. 21. I, ὃ 401, mention is made—just as in Photius’ 
quotation—of the magnificent rebuilding of the Jewish temple; 
then follows a list of his other buildings, then a panegyric of 
Herod’s qualities as a rider, hunter, and army leader, terminating 
with the statement that he was hardly ever vanquished in battle— 
if at all, only by the disobedience of his subordinate officers. Then . 
the text goes on to say, with an abrupt break in the line of thought: 
‘and for another reason, mentioned before, because of jis search 
Jor Christ and because of the massacre of the children+ And they 
(=the Bethlehemites) cursed him (saying) : may he himself have 
no children.’ 

Then follows the well-known account of Herod’s own dofnestic 
misfortunes. What is meant by the words ‘mentioned before ’ 
may be seen if we read on to 1. 33. 5,§ 656. There the terrible de- 
scription of Herod’s mortal venereal disease and consequent gan- 
grene of his private parts closes with the following edifying re- 
mark: ‘for the eye of God looked invisibly upon his sins. He 
had indeed defiled his dominion with bloodshed and with illicit 
intercourse with foreign women.? And because he had made others 
childless, therefore killed he also his children with his (own) hands; 
and because he spared not his body in wantonness, therefore con- 
tracted he so foul a disease.’ The genuine words of the text, 
‘because he had made others childless,’ do not of course in the 
least refer to the legendary massacre of Bethlehem, but to the story 
of the eighty young students of religious law whom Herod had 
burned in a furnace for having destroyed the golden eagle over the 
porch of the temple, a chapter directly preceding the description 
of his final disease. 

It is clear, then, that a Christian forger, or maybe a bona fide 
Christian reader, annotating his own copy for his private use, is 
responsible for the interpolated line on the massacre of Bethlehem 
in the various copies of Josephus’ Capture of Jerusalem read by 
Eusebius, Moses of Khorni, Photius, and the unknown Russian 
translator. 

A third no less obviously Christian interpolation * is quoted 
by the Russian chronographer of 1512 immediately before the 

1 9 izbinij mladeneci]=rexvoxrovias ἕνεκα. Josephus does speak of rexvoxrovla 
with reference to Herod, B./., i. ὃ 543 : ‘none supposed that Herod would carry 
cruelty to the length of murdering his children,’ μέχρι rexvoxrovias. 

* Thackeray’s transl., ili. p. 643. 


3 The usual Pharisee doctrine about the punishment fitting the crime, 
4 For further examples of the same kind, see App. Xv. 


K 


146 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


words reproduced above, in support of still another of the great 
miracles of the New Testament, the rending of the veil of the 
temple at the death of Jesus. This addition is entirely unknown 
to the Western Greek MSS. of Josephus; but the Slavonic branch 
has it after §§ 212-14, where Josephus describes the Holy of Hollies 
of the temple : 


‘It had golden doors fifty-five cubits high and sixteen wide. .. . 
Before these hung a veil of equal length, of Babylonian tapestry, 
with embroidery of blue, and fine linen of scarlet also and purple, 

_ wrought with marvellous skill. Nor was this mixture of materials 
without its mystic meaning: it typified the universe. [For the 
scarlet seemed emblematical of fire, the fine linen of the earth, the 
blue of the air, and the purple of the sea, the comparison in two cases 
being suggested by their colour, and in that of the fine linen and 
purple by their origin, as the one is produced by the earth and the 
other by the sea. On this tapestry was portrayed the whole aspect 
of the sky, but without the animal outlines of the constellations. 

‘This curtain was before this generation entire, because the 
people were pious; but now it was grievous to see, for it was 
suddenly rent from the top to the bottom, when they through 
bribery delivered to death the benefactor of men and him who 
from his actions was no man. 

‘And of many other fearful signs might one tell, which happened 
then. And it was said that he, after being killed and laid in the 
grave, was not found. Some indeed profess that he had risen, others 
that he was stolen away by his friends. But for my part I know not 
which speak more correctly. For one that is dead cannot rise of 
himself, though he may do so with the help of the prayer of another 
righteous man, unless he be an angel or another of the heavenly 
powers, or unless God himself appears as a man and accomplishes 
what he will and walks with men and falls and lies down and rises 
again as he pleases. But others said that it was impossible to steal 
him away, because they had set watches around his tomb, thirty 
Romans and a thousand Jews. 

‘Such (is the story told) of that curtain. There are also (ob- 
jections) against this reason for its rending.’ 


It is easy to prove that the paragraphs printed in different type 
areaforgery. Josephus could not possibly have said that the veil 
in question was torn in his days and had been so ever since the 
death of Jesus, because the veil of the Jewish sanctuary was re- 
newed every year. A second reserve curtain was always hung up 
behind it, in case it should have to be removed in the course of the 
year because of some Levitical impurity touching it by accident. 
Had the miracle really happened, the damaged texture would have 
been removed, not only in the year of the passion, but on the very 
day when it was rent asunder. 


1 See the Tannaitic testimonies collected by Heinr. Laible in Strack-Billerbeck’s 
Comm., vol. iii., Munich, 1926, p. 733 1. 


CONTROVERSY ON VALUE OF SLAVONIC VERSION 147 


We know, moreover, how this particular legend originated, The 
last of the temple curtains was carried away to Rome by Titus with 
the rest of his spoils, and kept in the treasure-room of the imperial 
palace,' where it could be seen by interested sightseers. Now, this 
last curtain of the temple had really been rent and was seen in this 
state by various Jewish visitors ;* small wonder, since it must have 
been torn from the door of the temple by the rough hands of 
Roman soldiery or even rescued from under the ruins. Jewish 
legend attributed the rending to the impatience of Titus to enter 
the Holy of Holies and to desecrate it. The emperor was even said 
to have cut his way through the curtain with his sword.’ 

It is obvious that the Christian legend about the rent curtain 
must have grown up in Rome after A.D. 75, when the spoils of 
Jerusalem were first exhibited in public in the temple of Peace. 
It is, like its Jewish parallel, an aetiological myth evolved, maybe, 
under the influence of a pertinent prophecy in the Testaments of 
the Patriarchs,* and understood afterwards in a symbolic way.‘ 


THE OLp KRussiAN TRANSLATION OF JOSEPHUS AND THE 
LITHUANIAN CHRONOGRAPHER OF 1261. THE SCEPTICAL 
INTERPOLATION ON THE RESURRECTION OF JESUS 


Of far greater and indeed fundamental importance for the 
criticism of the whole matter is the question, to which hitherto 
not even an approximate answer has been found: Where, when, 
under what circumstances and with what object was the Slavonic 
translation of the ‘ Haldsis’ composed ἢ 

Everything bearing on this question to be extracted from the 
peculiarities of the MSS. has been diligently collected by Berendts. 
It is extremely little. None of the codices is older than the 
fifteenth or sixteenth century; but the text followed by the 
Metropolitan Makarios in his Cetji-Minei (a lectionary for the 
various months of the church year) contains an entry according 
to which this Josephus MS. was written in Constantinople by a 
monk named John in the year 6907 of the Byzantine world era = 
A.D. 1399, was copied in Novgorod in 6976=1468, and was finally 
re-copied in A.D. 1711 and 1714. Since Russian merchants and 
clergymen can be shown to have been at Byzantium in consider- 


1 Josephus, B./., vii. § 162. 

* Strack-Billerbeck, Joc. cit., vol. i. p. 1044; cf. 946 f. 

3 Levi, ch. τὸ : ‘ a time will come when the wickedness of the Levites will grow 
to such a point that the curtain of the temple will split asunder and not hide them 
any more. And then you will be sentinto captivity.’ Aenj.,ix.: ‘the curtain of 
the temple will be split and the spirit of God descend (from the mountain of 
Jerusalem) to the Gentiles.’ 

4 See Eisler, Weltenmantel, Munich, 1910, p, 252 ἢ. 5. 


148 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


able numbers as early as the eleventh century, this statement is 
quite trustworthy ; and indeed one would be readily inclined to 
assign the genesis of this translation to Byzantium and to this 
period, were it not for the character of the language, which 
Sreznévski has identified as Old Northern Slavonic, as distinct 
from the Old Bulgarian ecclesiastical language, which a tenth- 
century translator would have employed. 

Moreover, a note in the Moscow MS. of the Chronographer of 
Perejaslavl (a work containing a compilation of extracts from 
the Slavonic Josephus, the Slavonic Malalas, etc., with a continua- 
tion down to the year 1214, derived from the Chronographer of 
Perejaslavl) states that the copy of this MS. was begun in the year 
1261 ; according to Prof. Istrin this work was written in Lithuania, 
in which country the second important MS. of this type, the codex 
of Vilna, had in fact been preserved down to 1916. 

Prof. Istrin rightly recognized that the author of the compila- 
tion contained in the Moscow and Vilna codices aimed at writing 
a history of the Jewish people, and that he began this work in 
Lithuania about the year 1261. Now, since the whole MS. is 
written in a uniform style, and since the laborious translation of 
the entire Haldsis (of which only quite a few brief and—as shown 
by the example of a Russian codex recently found by Prof. 
BeneSevic 1—easily detachable sections could have had any direct 
interest for Christian readers) betrays an interest in Jewish history 
quite uncommon at this period and in these surroundings, it 15 
surely needless to seek for an author of this Lithuanian ‘ Chrono- 
grapher of 1262’ other than the patient translator of Josephus 
himself. How indefatigable that translator was in constantly 
accumulating fresh Josephus MSS., to supplement his first complete 
edition, has been shown above (p. 127). In the course of this 
search for MSS. he finally hit upon a Greek ἐκλογή, containing 
the compilation of Georgius Monachus, Malalas, etc., and Josephus, 
which he rendered into Old Russian, rejoicing at this increase of 
his materials. A gloss mentioned above (p. 129), which can only 
have been added to the Greek Haldsis during the period of the 
Latin kingdom by a Byzantine scribe (1204-1261), shows that the 
original used by the Slavonic translator was still in Byzantium 
in the first half of the thirteenth century. This fully accords with 
the conclusion that the translation was executed between the 
years 1250 and 1260. 

That seems to me the simplest explanation of the matter. The 
Lithuanians were still half heathens; their king, Mindowe 
(murdered in 1263), had only just gone over to Catholicism (1251), 
while his son Vojselk attached himself to the Greek Church. Among 
such a people the number of learned persons acquainted with 

1 Copitick, No. 1428. 


CONTROVERSY ON VALUE OF SLAVONIC VERSION 149 


Greek and Russian?! possessing an interest in Jewish history so 
unusual and unparalleled in all mediaeval Europe, and capable of 
producing such extensive translations, must have been extremely 
small. Orthodox Jews cannot be thought of, because, among other 
reasons, they would not have failed to omit from their Greek copies 
the Christian interpolations, which to them were so objectionable, 
or at any rate the undoubtedly Christian chapter-headings. 
Apart from that, even if Byzantine Jews knew Josephus, there is 
no apparent reason why they or Slavonic Jews, who had learned 
Greek at Constantinople, should have translated him into Old 
Russian, 

It was, however, just the extraordinary nature of these facts 
which put me—following up a hint of the learned Russian lawyer 
Dr. H. Sljosberg in the discussion after my lecture before the 
Société des Etudes Juives in Paris—upon what I regard as the only 
track leading to a satisfactory solution of all these difficulties. 

I had previously been led to a correct understanding of the 
tendency of the whole Slavonic translation by a more thorough 
study of a passage recognizable at the first glance as a Christian 
interpolation. I refer to the seventh of the ‘additions’ in 
Berendts’ first publication, discussed above, p. 146, i.e. the story 
of the rent veil of the temple. 

For the convenience of the reader the passage is here repeated : 


‘This curtain was before this generation entire, because the 
people were pious; but now it was grievous to see, for it was 
suddenly rent from the top to the bottom, when they through 
bribery delivered to death the benefactor of men and him who 
from his actions was no man. 

‘And of many other fearful signs might one tell, which happened 
then. And it was said that he, after being killed and after being 
laid 5 in the grave, was not found. Some maintain ὃ that he had risen, 
others that he was stolen away by his friends. But for my part I 
know not which speak more correctly! For a dead man cannot rise 
of himself, though he may do so with the help of the prayer of another 
righteous man, unless he be an angel or another of the heavenly 
powers, or unless God himself appears * as a man and accomplishes 
what he will and walks with men and falls and lies down and rises 
again, as pleases his will. But others said that it was impossible to 
steal him away, because they set watchmen around his tomb, thirty 
Romans and a thousand Jews. 

‘Such (is the story told) of that curtain. (But) there are also 
(objections) against this reason for its rending.’ 


1 The literary language of Lithuania used in the documents of the court 
chancery was the dialect of Kiev. 

2 Cod. Aych.: ‘ that he was killed, and after being laid.’ 

2 Or‘ pretend.’ tvorechu, equivalent to Greek ποιοῦσιν, the word used for the 
production of ‘ poetic ’ fiction. 

* Cod. Arch.: ‘ has appeared,’ 


150 | THE MESSIAH JESUS 


By indentation and variation of type 1 indicate that here we have 
what is doubtless an ‘interpolation within an interpolation.’ 
That is evident from the position of the summary statement, 
‘ Such (is the story told) of that curtain,’ etc., which must originally 
have stood immediately after the sentence actually referring to the 
curtain, and not after the narrative of the ‘many other fearful 
signs.’ Accordingly, everything between is an interpolation by a 
second hand, probably ¢he latest of all Christian interpolations in 
the whole work. 

The interpolation of the first hand concerning the curtain 
already presupposes the passage about Jesus discussed below (pp. 
383 ff.) 1 the form tn which it stands to-day, as altered by Christian 
omissions and Christian interpolations. If, for instance, the 
curtain passage, for no obvious reason, avoids the name of Jesus, 
it does so intentionally, because the proper name, in consequence 
of the reasons discussed later, is wanting also in the Jesus passage. 
Similarly, the periphrases ‘the Benefactor’ and ‘the man who 
from his actions (i.e. his divine works) was no man’ are clear 
references to the significant words, which are shown to be Christian 
marginal notes, ‘ (Pilate) saw . . . he was a benefactor, not a 
malefactor,’ and, higher up, ‘ his works, however, were godlike. 
. . . Therefore it is not possible for me to call himaman.’ Lastly, 
the phrase ‘ when they through bribery delivered (him) to death ’ 
refers back to what is undoubtedly a Christian insertion (see below) 
in the section on the Roman judicial proceedings against Jesus. 

The passage concerning the rending of the veil of the temple 
comes, therefore, either from the hand which is responsible for 
the Christian omissions and interpolations in the section about 
Jesus and Pilate, or from some still later reader or copyist. 

On the contrary, the interpolation of the second hand, which 
from what has been said must be of even later date, has a tendency 
totally distinct from that of all other Christian insertions so far 
discussed, including the interpolation about the curtain. Whereas 
these without exception emanate from believing, indeed from 
orthodox, Christians, here unquestionably a doubter speaks. 
M. Goguel,? it is true, maintains that ‘ we do not see how, concern- 
ing this text, one can speak of scepticism on account of the 
resurrection.’ But I fail to see how the sceptical character of a 
man who says of believers that they ‘pretend that he had risen ’ 
can possibly be disputed. The glossator, in fact, proceeds ex- 
pressly to emphasize his complete scepticism. ‘I know not,’ he 
says, ‘ which speak more correctly, those who pretend that he had 
risen, or the others who pretend that he was stolen away by his 


1 I had arrived at this conclusion before I knew that Dr. Gaster’s MS. of the 
Rumanian version actually omits these sentences. 
* Revue de l’Histoive des Religions, 1926, p. 40. 


CONTROVERSY ON VALUE OF SLAVONIC VERSION 151 


friends.’ If the assertion that Jesus is risen appears to him merely 
as some mala fide, fictitious ‘ pretensions,’ then the expression ‘I 
know not which speak more correctly ’ is more than sceptical : it 
is ironical, and means ‘ I know not which speak less falsely.’. An 
unbiased reader can surely be in no uncertainty as to the sense 
of these words. Whoever speaks thus, clearly doubts both state- 
tnents, the testimony to the resurrection no less than the allegation 
of opponents, reported by Matthew," that the body was carried 
away. The third possibility he admits is clearly expressed at the 
beginning of the interpolation. The fact that the body of Jesus 
was not found in the grave he by no means regards as the one 
certain and historically established point, but as a mere rumour. 
‘It was said that after his death and deposition in the grave he 
was not found,’ ‘ and of many other fearful signs which happened 
then might one ell.’ It is therefore for him quite questionable 
whether even these ‘ tales ’ are true. 

As regards the resurrection, he with subtle dialectic bases his 
doubt on reasoned grounds and challenges certain quite definite 
doctrines. In the first place—and this point has hitherto been 
entirely overlooked—he controverts Marcion.” ‘Fora dead man 
cannot rise of himself.’ Orthodox Christians had in fact never 
asserted so much of Jesus, but had taught with Paul 5 that God 
himself through his miraculous power raised him from the dead. 
Marcion, however, to suit his view of the relation between God the 
Father and God the Son, which approximated to modalism, so 
altered and abridged the text in Galatians as to extract from it the 
statement that Jesus raised himself from the dead. Similarly, in 
Rom. vi. 9 he replaced the passive ἐγερθείς, * being raised,’ by the 
active ἀναστάς, ‘rose’: while inversely, in 2 Cor. iv. 10, for ‘the 
dying of Jesus’ he substituted the incredible ‘dying of God.’ It 
is this conception of Marcion which the unknown glossator 
roundly rejects. 

On the other hand, and this is very remarkable, he readily 
admits that a (righteous) dead man can be raised "Ἢ with the help 
of the prayer of another righteous man.’ Origen in his time had 
made the objection to Celsus that a Jew who believed in the Bible 
must recognize as possible what is told “in the third and fourth 
books of Reigns’ concerning the resurrections wrought through 
the prayer of the prophets Elijah and Elisha.4 Thus far the scep- 
tical glossator of Josephus actually went. He is therefore no 


1 xxvii. 64; XXVili. 13, 15. 

2 Gal. i. 1: ‘ through Jesus Christ (and God the Father) who raised him from 
the dead.” Marcion struck out the bracketed words and instead of ‘ him " (αὐτὸν) 
read ‘himself’ (αὑτόν). Cf. Origen ap. Jerome, Comm., in loc., ‘ Sciendum 
quoque in Marcionis Apostolico non esse scriptum (et per Deum patrem), volentis 
exponere Christum non a Deo patre sed per semet ipsum suscitatum.’ 

3 1 Cor. vi. 14. 4 Contra Celsum, li. 57. 


152 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


‘ Epicurean,’ 1 but goes just so far as the Old Testament evidence 
extends, 1.e. takes up precisely the Jewish standpoint. The writer’s 
intention would, however, be entirely missed if one declined to see 
that, while admitting this possibility as such, he attributes no 
historical importance to it in the case of Jesus. Why he does not 
is not stated in his terse gloss, for obvious reasons. No Christian 
authority ever taught that Jesus was raised from the dead through 
the prayer of James the Just or of any of his disciples; this hypo- 
thesis, therefore, alike for Christians and for their critics, never 
came into consideration. 

The next possible case of a ‘ resurrection’ which he considers 
is one where ‘ an angel or another of the heavenly powers ’ is con- 
cerned. That which ‘a dead man’ cannot do might very well be 
achieved by an angel, archangel, seraph, cherub, etc., only seem- 
ingly dead. That such is the explanation of the marvellous 
phenomenon is in fact the doctrine of certain early Gnostics and also 
_ of the Paulicians of Asia Minor, whose errors are combated in a 
polemical work of an otherwise unknown Hegumenos (i.e. abbot) 
Peter, and later by Photios, Patriarch of Constantinople, and others, 
upon whom the Bogomils* are dependent. According to these 
docetic and Marcionite heretics, who may be assigned certainly 
to the seventh and eighth centuries and possibly to the sixth, 
Jesus was no man, but an angel sent down by a good God for the 
enlightenment of mankind, under an obligation to let himself— 
seemingly—be born of a woman, maltreated by sinners, put to 
death by crucifixion and buried, after which he might rise again 
and return to heaven. 

But this possibility, too, is only mentioned because it has already 
been refuted in the earlier passage about Christ (below, p. 384), on 
which this whole interpolation is so plainly dependent, and where 
it is expressly stated that Jesus ‘in view of his ordinary nature ’ 
cannot be called an angel. There remains, therefore, for the sceptic 
but one final possibility, that ‘ God himself has appeared as a man 
and falls and lies down and rises again, as pleases his will.’ This 
final possibility, as Schiirer 3 first rightly recognized, is the Christ- 
ology of the co-called Monarchianists, Patripassianists, or Theo- 
paschitae : it is the view of people such as Noetus, Epigonus, Cleo- 
menes, Marcellus, Photinus, Praxeas, Sabellius, and many others. 
But neither Schiirer nor Couchoud 4 has seen that the sceptical 
glossator, far from being a Patripassianist or Modalist himself, 
rejects these views a limine, precisely as he rejects those previously 


1 Contra Celsum, li. 60. 

? Bogomil, the Slavonic equivalent of Theophilos, founder of a Gnostic sect 
in the tenth century in Bulgaria. Bury’s Gibbon, vi. 122 ({translator’s note]. 

3 Theolog. Lit.-Zeit., 1906, p. 256. 

* Revue de l’Histoive des Religions, 1926, p. 54. 


CONTROVERSY ON VALUE OF SLAVONIC VERSION 153 


mentioned. Here Frey’s statement + is undoubtedly right: ‘The 
idea that God himself has suffered that fate appears to the writer 
so inconceivable that he thinks he has but to mention it in order 
to rule out any application of this possibility to the case of Jesus.’ 
Were the sceptic not rejecting this possibility just as decisively and 
bluntly as all that had gone before, there would have been no need 
for him to proceed to dispose of the possibility, likewise rejected, 
of the stealing of the body. Yet he goes straight on: ‘ But others 
say that it was not possible to steal him away.’ He must therefore 
have already tacitly reached the conclusion : ‘ Since God himself 
cannot have been treated or suffered thus, the Benefactor also 
cannot have been God himself. Was then the body stolen? But 
others say that it cannot have been stolen, because thousands of 
Jews and Romans watched the tomb.’ So the question cannot be 
decided at all, and the end is that nothing is known in the matter, 
as from the very beginning we find nothing but ‘ov dit,’ ‘ they say,’ 
‘others say,’ ‘might one tell’—in short, mere rumour and report. 
The position is therefore quite peculiar. The writer, from the 
highly remarkable conjunction of Marcionite and Sabellian doc- 
trines controverted by him, can hardly be older than the end of the 
fourth century, and from the mention of a Paulician error hardly 
older than the sixth, while if he is drawing upon literary tradition 
he may be of a still later date. This learned glossator not only 
possesses an exact knowledge of the Christologies of different 
heretics, but elaborately follows traditions contained in canonical 
and apocryphal Gospels which can be quite definitely fixed. In 
the original interpolation on the curtain of the temple one may still 
be uncertain whether Mark xv. 38 or Matt. xxvii. 51 served as his 
model, because both narratives present the words ‘ torn from top 
to bottom’ of the Slavonic. But the dependence of the second 
interpolator on the narrative in Matthew is patent. Only in Matt. 
XXVil. is v. 51 (describing the rending of the curtain) followed by 
‘many other fearful signs which happened then,’ viz. ‘ the earth 
did quake, the rocks were rent, the tombs were opened,’ etc. Only 
in Matt. xxvii. 64, xxviil. 13-15 is the discovery of the empty 
tomb followed by the assertion of opponents that the body had 
been stolen, along with the legend of the watching of the tomb, 
designed to refute the charge. The actual statements of this 
section are therefore simply taken over in order from the Gospel of 
Matthew, while the words ‘30 [v.]. 1000] Romans and 1000 [ν.]. 30] 
Jews,’ appended to the clause ‘ set watchmen around his tomb,’ 
come from the apocryphal Acts of Pilate or the Gospel of Peter. 
The glossator thus betrays the most accurate knowledge of the 
orthodox and heretical views on the resurrection, but rejects them 
all, partly as impossible, partly as uncertain, resting only on 
1 Der slav. Josephusbericht, etc., Dorpat, 1908, p. 190. 


154 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


‘hearsay’ from beginning to end, and adheres to his Jewish Old 
Testament standpoint. 

An interpolation such as this is certainly not to be explained 
as an extremely clever forgery, intent upon putting nothing into 
the mouth of Josephus which a Jew could not have written. The 
supposed forger of the secondary interpolation, on this hypothesis 
so extremely careful, and yet in every line betraying his knowledge 
of Christian sources—a forger whose like there is not throughout 
the rest of the work—must have pursued this interesting game 
quite for itsownsake. For asa Christian ¢estimonium veritatis the 
section is obviously valueless, because it leaves ‘as its final im- 
pression only doubt and uncertainty’ (Frey), accounts for the 
resurrection on the basis of a fiction, indeed regards the discovery 
of the empty tomb not as a fact but as hearsay, and even leaves 
open the possibility of the stealing of the body (since the watching 
of the tomb is only vouched for by an ‘ others said’), and finally 
appears to deny not only the equality of Jesus with God the 
Father but even the divinity of ‘the Benefactor.’ With what 
object could a Christian interpolate this agnostic-sceptical passage 
into one which in its original form could be put to good use from 
the Christian standpoint, purporting to come from Josephus and 
to confirm the miracle of the rent curtain ἡ 

Frey is here quite right in excluding the assumption of a Chris- 
tian forgery, whether highly artificial or wholly inappropriate. He 
has also correctly seen that the author’s standpoint is purely 
Jewish. The latter regards as possible whatever is consonant with 
the Old Testament miracles of Elijah and Elisha in raising the 
dead ; he is therefore no ‘ Epicurean’ sceptic. But the idea of an 
incarnation, of a suffering and dying God, is for him quite im- 
possible ; he even avoids the expression ‘if God die’ as blas- 
phemous, and speaks only of a ‘lying down’ of God. He does not 
believe in the resurrection of Jesus, which he pronounces ἡ imagi- 
nary’ or ‘ pretended’; the very story of the empty tomb remains for 
him doubtful. 

Here, then, speaks one who found Josephus already inter- 
polated by a Christian hand, one who knew the Gospel of Matthew, 
the Gospel of Peter, and the Christian Acts of Pilate, but yet main- 
tained an entirely Jewish standpoint. Where and when can such 
a person have written his ideas on the margin of a MS. of Josephus 
that had been or was found in Christian possession ? 

To this question, in my opinion, only one answer is possible. 
The answer will at the same time afford a surprisingly simple ex- 
planation of that remarkably strong interest in Jewish history, 
discussed above, which is indispensably required to account for the 
existence alike of a Slavonic translation of Josephus and of the 
‘ Chronographer of 1262.’ 


CONTROVERSY ON VALUE OF SLAVONIC VERSION 155 


THE JUDAIZING HERESY IN RUSSIA 


It is precisely in Russia, and in the fifteenth century, that 
is to say, at the very period when all extant MSS. of the old 
Roman Josephus were written, that we have evidence of a 
powerful Judaizing movement—the so-called Zidovstvuujuscaja 
jeves—which penetrated into the highest clerical ranks and 
even into the family of the Grand Duke of Moscow, and brought 
the Pravo-Slavic or Orthodox Russian Church to the verge 
of ruin. 

Of the beginnings of this movement nothing is known. Ana- 
tole Leroy-Beaulieu ! conjectures that the ὁ Sabbatarians ’ (Russ. 
Subbotniki) are, like the Maranos of Spain and Portugal, descended 
from Jews compulsorily converted to a sham Christianity. These 
people, under the direction of Jewish Rabbis, continue to this day, 
especially in Southern Russia and the Caucasus, and after severe 
persecutions under the Tsars at last enjoy as much religious 
freedom as other denominations; the late Konrad Grass estimated 
that before the War (1014) some 400,000 Russian peasants were 
secret adherents of the Jewish faith. 

Leroy-Beaulieu’s theory has indeed great intrinsic probability. 
For it is well known that under the rule of the Khazars, a South 
Russian people of West Turkish origin, and their Khagans, Juda- 
ism was the state religion of the realm. That realm embraced the 
whole district from the Caspian to the Black Sea, from the Don to 
the Volga, indeed for a time from the Dnieper to the Urals, extend- 
ing southwards to the Caucasus and occasionally beyond, and 
northwards to the lower valley of the Oka and Moskva. Judaism 
had held this position since the eighth century, when, after a 
previous conversion of the people to Christianity, the Khagan 
Bulan—probably from political motives, to ensure the spiritual 
independence of his state, which lay between the Christian By- 
zantium and the Islamic kingdom of the Abbasids—under the 
influence of Jewish exiles from Constantinople went over to the 
Mosaic religion. Within this empire in the time of Masudi (ninth 
century), Mahometans, Christians, and heathen lived peaceably 
side by side along with the Jews. Kiev for a time belonged to it, 
as well as the later principalities of Moscow and Perejaslavl Suz- 
dalski. \When the Russians under Prince Svjatoslay overthrew 
the dominion of the Khazars in the year 967 or 968, the position 
of the Jews and Jewish Khazars in the country must have been 
precisely similar to that of the Spanish Jews after the fall of 
Granada. Mass movements into the Greek Church must natur- 


1 L’ Empire des Tsars, Paris, 1889, ili. 515-18. 


156 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


ally have resulted in a sham Christianity,! which could conceal itself 
much more easily than the Marafo religion in Catholic Spain, 
because the Old Russian Church itself, perhaps under the influence 
of Jewish converts, strictly observed the so-called Noachian pro- 
hibitions of consuming blood and ‘animals strangled’ or ‘ torn,’ 
which were regarded by rabbis also as binding upon ‘ proselytes of 
the gate.’ | 

On the ‘Judaizing heresy’ at its flourishing period, dating from 
the last third of the fifteenth century, we possess detailed informa- 
tion in the contemporary work of Abbot Josif Volotzki of Volo- 
kolamsk ({ 1516), entitled ‘ Prosvjetitel’ = ‘ Illuminator’ or ‘ Re- 
vealer,’ i.e. of the Judaizing heresy. According to him, the great 
and decisive crisis arose from the rich merchant republic of Nov- 
gorod, at that time seething with political, religious, and social un- 
rest. Because through it, by the Neva and the Volkov, flowed 
Russia’s trade with the Baltic and so with the Hanseatic towns 
and Western Europe, Russian historians like Ilovajski have sought 
to find some connection between the Russian Church crisis at the 
end of the fifteenth century and the German Reformation, a view 
which both chronologically and from the standpoint of doctrinal 
history is completely mistaken. 

Novgorod, which had always been a breeding-ground for 
heretical movements, and had already been seriously disquieted by 
the so-called Strigolniki of Karp, found itself at that time in a 
position of extreme difficulty. The plague years of 1465-7 had 
almost crippled its trade with the West, while a deep-seated opposi- 
tion between the rich patrician merchants and the lower classes, 
who were badly hit by the stagnation of trade, had seriously weak- 
ened the city’s defensive strength. To meet the threat to its inde- 
pendence as a free state from the Grand Duke of Moscow, Ivan II. 
Vasiljevic, the council sought political support from Casimir Iv. 
of Lithuania and Poland. Casimir on his side, with shrewd calcu- 
Jation, favoured the Catholicizing efforts of Gregory the Metro- 
politan Bishop of Iiev, a supporter of reunion of the Eastern and 
Western Churches, and had brought over a considerable number of 
Russian nobles to recognize at once the overlordship of Lithuania 
and the spiritual primacy of Kiev. A section of clergy and laity 
of Novgorod, clinging tenaciously to the independence and strict 
observance of the rules of the Greek Church, viewed with the 
greatest disinclination these overtures to Lithuania, dictated by 


+ A ‘ circumcised ’ monk, Adrian (Andreas) of Kiev, is generally named as the 
first heretic in Russian Church history. He is said to have fought hard against 
the worship of images and to have attacked the Russian clergy as idolatrous, thus 
betraying typical Jewish-Christian tendencies. 

* The exact title of the book is ‘The unworthy monk Joseph’s story of the 
newly risen sect of Novgorod heretics and apostates,’ etc. Many printed editions, 
notably that of Kasan, 1852 and 1888, ᾽ 


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TSAR IVAN III VASSILIEVIC 
PROTECTOR AND PERSECUTOR OF THE JUDAIZING HERESY OF RUSSIA 


WOODCUT AFTER A CONTEMPORARY PORTRAIT SUPPLIED TO ANDRE THEVET BY A GREEK RESIDENT OF 
GALATA 


CONTROVERSY ON VALUE OF SLAVONIC VERSION 157 


politics, and were assiduously supported by the partisans of Mos- 
cow. Ivan himself in a letter to Jonas, Archbishop of Novgorod, 
bluntly pronounced Gregory of Kiev a heretic, and admonished 
Jonas to hold fast the Pravo-Slavic faith. When the Novgorodi- 
ans openly broke with Moscow and received from the hand of 
Casimir a sovereign who, though a Lithuanian, was of the Greek 
Orthodox Church, namely, Michael Olelkovié (8th November 1470), 
a number of Lithuanian Jews followed in his train, probably 
as financial agents of the Lithuanian court. Their names were 
Osif, Shmoilo, Skaryei, Moisei, and Chanush, their leader being a 
certain Skharia (=Zacharias) of Kiev. He is described as a 
Karaite+ and an adept in astrology,” necromancy, and the magic 
arts, laudatory epithets from which we may perhaps infer that he 
was simply a physician practising his profession after the fashion 
oftheage. That he wasa Karaite is not improbable, since Witold, 
Grand Duke of Lithuania, had in the fourteenth century carried 
off a number of Karaites from the Crimea ? and settled them in 
Troki near Vilna: moreover, it is well known that, while the Kara- 
ites regarded Pauline Christianity as an unpardonable apostasy 
from Judaism, many of them held Jesus himself to be a pious, just, 
and God-favoured man—a point of view exactly in accordance with 
the doctrines of this Skharia set forth below. 

According to the full and credible statement of Josif of Volo- 
kolamsk, he taught his disciples that the belief in a triune God was 
vain; that there was but one God; that Jesus was not the Son of 
God nor the Messiah, but only a prophet like Moses, and therefore 
could not have risen from the dead; and that the Messiah had not 
yet appeared, but would come at the end of time, and even then 
not as Son of God according to his essence, but only according to. his 
works, like Moses and the prophets of old. Consequently, until 
then the Law of Moses was binding; the Sabbath and the food laws 
must continue to be observed, circumcision be practised, and the 
veneration of icons and saints shunned asidolatrous. The writings 
of the New Testament were full of errors and incredible statements ; 
the Lord’s Supper was only an allegorical form of the Passover rite, 
which should be kept according to the Jewish calendar; the Wednes- 
day and Friday fasts were useless; and so on. 

Astonishing as it sounds, the testimony of his opponents leaves 
no room for doubt that these doctrines of Zacharias met with 
extraordinary favour among a section of the higher ecclesiastics of 
Novgorod. He succeeded in converting to his views Gabriel, the 


1 The Karaites were Jewish ‘ protestants,’ who rejected the oral Rabbinic 
tradition, and regarded the Old Testament as the only source of revelation. 

2 Perhaps because the Karaites insisted on an astronomically calculated 
calendar, 

3 They had ventured into that district in the time of the Khazars, and can be 
traced there from the thirteenth century onwards. 


158 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


protopope of the church of Hagia Sophia in Novgorod, the proto- 
popes Alexis and Dionys, Gregory Michailovi¢é Tucin, son of 
a Novgorod patrician, and many other clerics of Novgorod and 
Pshkov. Weask ourselves whether we have not from the outset to 
reckon with some political intrigue of Ivan 111. of Moscow, striving 
to produce a cleavage, the deepest and widest possible, between 
the people and clergy of Novgorod, with perhaps the whole of 
Russia on the one hand, and the Catholicizing, pro-union metro- 
politans of Kiev along with the Lithuanian-Polish kingdom on the 
other. The fact remains that the new archbishop Theophilus, the 
successor of Jonas, who died two days before the arrival of Michael 
Olelkovic, was working for Moscow and took no action against 
the Judaists ; also that Ivan 111. during a visit in 1480 to Nov- 
gorod, which had meanwhile fallen completely under his sway, 
treated the Judaizing protopopes Dionys and Alexei with great 
respect, and indeed subsequently took them with him to Moscow, 
where he appointed them archimandrites of the churches of the 
‘ Anastasis ’ and the ‘ archangel Michael.’ Here they started upon 
a lively and apparently quite unimpeded propaganda movement, 
favoured by the fact that the court, in consequence of an incident 
at the solemn dedication of a church, was on very bad terms with 
Gerontios, Metropolitan of Moscow (1472-89). Among their 
converts the most important were Feodor Kurytzin, who as private 
secretary to the Tsar enjoyed his unbounded confidence; Zosima, 
the archimandrite of the Simeon monastery in Moscow; and a 
certain monk named Skhariah. 

Even Helen, the emperor’s daughter-in-law, and her son 
Dmitri, the heir to the throne, were won over to the Judaistic 
cause; the Tsar himself tacitly but emphatically favoured it. 
When the Metropolitan Gerontios, disliked at court, died on the 
28th of May 1489, the seat remained vacant for eighteen months— 
a symptom of the protracted intrigues and counter-intrigues which 
preceded the nomination of a successor ; finally, Zosima the Juda- 
ist was appointed Metropolitan of Moscow. The same year, it is 
true, saw the death of Alexis, described by Josif of Volokolamsk as 
the real ‘ boar of hell’ and ‘ devastator of the garden of Christ’; 
still, after the occupation of the metropolitan see of Moscow by a 
Judaist, after the conversion of the Tsar’s chancellor Kurytzin and 
Dmitri, heir to the throne, the sectarians might well hope.for a 
brilliant victory, the more so because the Tsar Ivan 111. appeared to 
welcome everything which impeded the pro-union efforts of Kiev 
and thereby counteracted the political influence of the Catholic 
king of Lithuania and Poland. 

It goes without saying that the Greek Orthodox clergy did not 
quietly look on at this cynically calculated toleration of such a 
movement by the Gossuday of all Russia, who was a queer char- 


CONTROVERSY ON VALUE OF SLAVONIC VERSION 159 


acter, almost unaffected by religious restraints, but probably 
influenced by the secular philosophy of the Italian Renaissance. 
His director of ordnance and fortress-builder was Aristotile Fiora- 
vanti of Bologna; his palace was built by Pietro Antonio and 
decorated by Andrea Solari ; and Ivan’s chancellor Kurytzin had 
in fact dared to say in public that a knowledge of astrology was 
more useful to a prince than all the squabbles of pious theologians. 

The leader of the counter-movement was Gennadios, Arch- 
bishop of Novgorod, now completely robbed of its former freedom 
and its patrician nobility, newly colonized by the Tsar with ‘ vile 
people ’ from the interior of the realm, and politically quite un- 
important. He, with ever more insistent remonstrances, urged 
the Tsar to institute an enquiry into the propagandist activities of 
the Judaists, which at the outset had been carried on in secret and, 
apparently, only within a narrow esoteric circle. The first oppor- 
tunity for an official prosecution came in 1487, when certain clerics 
of Novgorod, under the influence of drink, gave vent to ‘ blasphem- 
ous ' expressions, and were in consequence brought up before the 
Archbishop of Novgorod. One of the accused, a monk named 
Nahum, had repented and, to save his skin, denounced not only 
himself but all his associates. It leaked out that two great 
Moscow merchants had made a special journey to Lithuania to 
get themselves secretly circumcised in that country. Thereupon 
Gennadios summoned a Council of Bishops (1488), which con- 
demned and excommunicated the heretics. Those caught in 
Novgorod were incarcerated in a monastery, and demand was made 
for a trial of their colleagues in Moscow. 

The Tsar granted the action, but only three unimportant per- 
sons, against whom open blasphemies could be proved, were sent 
off to Siberia ; one was entirely acquitted. To Archbishop Gen- 
nadios, who sought the burning of the heretics, the gloomy despot, 
accustomed to pursue his ends undisturbed over mountains of 
corpses, replied for the time with mock courtesy, saying that he. 
held it ‘a sin to punish a man with death on account of his errors 
in belief.’ And this at the very time when he was writing, through 
his Judaizing chancellor, to his favourite daughter Helen, the wife 
of the Grand Duke Alexander of Lithuania, that she should die 
rather than exchange the Orthodox for the Catholic faith ! 

Gennadios, however, refused to be quiet. Deeply stirred by 
the promotion of the Judaizing Archimandrite Zosima to the 
Metropolitan chair of Moscow, and of the Judaizing Archimandrite 
Kassian of Dorpat (Tartu) to the dignity of an archimandrite of 
Novgorod, and assisted bythe Metropolitan’s deputy, Bishop Prokop 
of Moscow, and the Bishops Niphont of Suzdal and Philotheos of 
Perm, he summoned a General Synod, which on the 17th of October 
1491 solemnly anathematized the deceased protopopes Gabriel and 


160 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


Alexeiof Novgorod. Meanwhile the Metropolitan Zosima, without 
committing himself, was getting up public discussions on the Holy 
Trinity and the person of Christ, at which the opponents of the 
innovators could not hold their own, so that ‘the people were 
greatly perplexed.’ Against him Gennadios and his friends were 
at present powerless, not only because he had too great sup- 
port at court, but chiefly because the year 1492 had been the cause 
of a serious shattering of confidence in the Orthodox Greek Church. 
In accordance with early Christian millennial expectations, which 
through Julius Africanus had won great credit in the Church of 
Byzantium, large circles in Russia looked for the end of the world 
in the year 7000 of the Byzantine era. Now, according to this era, 
the year 7000 coincided with nothing more noteworthy than the 
expulsion of the Jews from Spain and the discovery of America— 
the year 1492. When the end of the world, anxiously awaited by 
so many believers, failed to come, the Judaists considered the 
Gospel, the Apostolicon, and the Church fathers to be convicted 
of mendacity. 

‘If Christ is the Messiah, why does he not appear in his glory 
according to your expectation ?’ they triumphantly asked their 
adversaries. 

The turning of the tide was due partly to the activity of Josif, 
Abbot of Volokolamsk, whom Gennadios summoned to his aid, and 
who as early as the 17th of May 1494 by his public complaints 
brought about the voluntary resignation of the Metropolitan 
Zosima, partly to a fateful change of conditions at the court of 
Ivan III. 

The Tsar was twice married. His first wife, Mary, a Grand 
Duchess of Tver, died early (1467) ; by her he had a son, regarded 
as heir to the throne, Ivan Ivanovié (fr490). At the instance 
of the famous Cardinal Bessarion, promoter of the reunion of the 
churches, Pope Sixtus Iv. in 1469 proposed to the widowed Tsar 
a marriage with Zoja (alias Sophia), an orphan who had been 
educated in Rome. She was the niece of Constantine Dragasés 
(f25th of May 1453), the last of the Palaeologi to sit on the 
Byzantine imperial throne, and daughter of Thomas, Despot of 
Morea ({ 1465); and Paul 11. and Sixtus Iv. had hitherto stood to 
her 17: loco parentis. Ivan agreed, fully conscious of all the ad- 
vantages to be derived from a connexion with the house of the 
Caesars, which in the eyes of himself and of all Russians stood out 
as the apex of imperial legitimacy and the highest grade of aristo- 
cratic distinction ; but with his usual cunning he managed care- 
fully to avoid all advances in the direction of those plans of reunion 
which the Papal court hoped to promote by this match. 

The Greek Tsarina was not liked in Moscow. The worst was 
believed of her, and when in 1490 Ivan Ivanovié, the Tsar’s son 


CONTROVERSY ON VALUE OF SLAVONIC VERSION τόσ 


by his first marriage and heir to the throne, suddenly died, she was 
charged with having had a hand init. The princes and Bojars, 
who regarded the daughter of the Palaeologi with hostility, man- 
aged to induce Ivan 11. to promise the succession to Dmitri, son 
of Ivan Ivanovié and his wife Helen. But before his solemn 
coronation as Grand Duke and heir to the throne took place (4th 
of February 1498), Vassili, son of Ivan and Sophia, conspired 
against Dmitri and his own father. He was arrested, six of his 
followers were ruthlessly executed, his mother Sophia was watched, 
and her old Byzantine lady-retainers, suspected of being witches 
and poisoners, were drowned in the Moskva. 

However, even Helen and Dmitri, the heir to the throne, failed 
to retain the favour of the suspicious Tsar, and in January 1499, 
along with their devoted followers the Patrikejews and Rjapolow- 
skis, fell into disgrace. Meanwhile Vassili and Sophia succeeded 
in so completely regaining Ivan’s favour that on the 11th of April 
1502 Dmitri, holder of the title of Grand Duke of All Russia, was 
with his mother incarcerated in a monastery, while Vassili, as the 
new Grand Duke of Vladimir, Moscow, and All Russia, finally 
secured for himself the succession to the throne. 

The downfall of Helen and Dmitri, the patrons of the Judaists, 
decided also the fate of all their dependants. The Tsar dismissed 
his chancellor, Feodor Kurytzin, in deepest disgrace, and quietly 
looked on while a council of bishops on the 27th of December 
1504 took proceedings with draconic severity against the ad- 
herents of Judaism. The chief supporters of the movement, in- 
cluding Deacon Volk Kurytzin, brother of the chancellor, Ivan 
Maximov, Dmitri KKonopljov, and the Archimandrite Kassian of 
Novgorod, after having their tongues torn out, were burnt in iron 
cages at the stake. The less compromised clerics were banished 
to remote monasteries, and of the laity many saved their lives only 
by flight to Lithuanian-Polish territory, where the great success of 
the later Unitarian movement stirred up by the Italian reformer 
Socinus was doubtless substantially promoted by the scattered 
followers of the Russian Judaizing heresy. 

It may not be undeserving of mention that the Russian am- 
bassador to the Spanish court intervened in this conflict by send- 
ing to Archbishop Gennadios a report of the proceedings taken in 
Spain to extirpate the heretics. This tends to confirm the con- 
jecture previously advanced that the ‘Judaizing heresy’ in Russia 
and the Marafio movement in Spain are exactly analogous. Inthe 
same report the envoy mentions that, according to the statement 
of a Jewish traveller, the Jews of Kiev openly asserted that the 
Tsar protected the Judaists and would shortly have all churches 
in Moscow shut up. To assist the attack on the heresy, he got his 
dragoman at the embassy to translate into Russian the De con- 

L 


162 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


victione J udacoruim of Nicolas de Lyra, together with a treatise by 
the baptized Jew, Joseph of Mogador, on The Conversion of the 
African Jews, 


THE GENESIS OF THE OLD RussIAN TRANSLATION OF JOSEPHUS 
AND OF THE LITHUANIAN ‘ CHRONOGRAPHER OF 1261’: 
ORIGIN OF THE ExistTiInGc MSS, 


Bearing in mind the main results of the preceding chapter, we 
can have no further doubt concerning the surroundings in which 
the Old Russian version of Josephus, along with the Old Russian 

history of the Jews composed in Lithuania in the time of King 
᾿ς Mindowe and including Josephus, came into existence. The com- 
plete correspondence, in their attitude toward the resurrection of 
Jesus, between the sceptical glossator of the Christian interpola- 
tion on the rent veil of the temple on the one hand, and the Juda- 
ists attacked by Josif of Volokolamsk on the other, is obvious. 
Equally perfect is the agreement, in language no less than in idea, 
between the conception, attributed to the Novgorod and Moscow 
heretics, of Jesus (and of the future messiah) as a ‘ prophet like 
Moses,’ as a son of God ‘ not according to his essence but according 
to his works,’ and the similar statement in the section on Jesus in 
the Slavonic Josephus.! 

It will therefore not be wrong to describe the Old Russian 
Halosis and the ‘ Chronographer of 1261 ’ simply as the propagand- 
ist writings of the Judatzing heretics. The incredible success of this 
Unitarian sect is only intelligible if, in confirmation of their denial 
of the divinity and messiahship of Jesus, they were in possession of 
evidence which to many of their contemporaries seemed irrefutably 
clear. Such evidence, however, so far as we can judge from our 
present historical knowledge, they could have found nowhere else but 
in the account of Jesus given in the more or less unabridged Josephus. 
Absurd works which the Jews themselves possessed, like the 
Loldoth Jeshu,* could never have made a similar impression on » 
their readers, and in fact were never translated into any European 
vernacular for propaganda purposes. It was quite otherwise with 
the Slavonic Josephus, which with its Christian interpolations, 
mitigating and concealing the author’s bitter hostility to Chris- 
tianity, and with its fulness of detail, partly supplementing, partly 
correcting the Gospel narratives, cannot have failed to create con- 
fidence among Christian readers. One who accepts Josephus’ 
account of John the Baptist, Jesus, and the primitive Apostles, with 
its Christian interpolations; as the truth, can reach no other view 


1 See below, p. 384 n. 9. * See above, p. 107 n. 1. 


CONTROVERSY ON VALUE OF SLAVONIC VERSION 163 


of Jesus than the Unitarian-Judaistic doctrine of the heretics 
described above. 

Just asthe opponents of the Judaists had Nicolas of Lyra trans- 
lated into Russian as a counterblast to the Jewish heresy (p. 155), 
so must the Jews on their side have translated Josephus into 
Slavonic for the sake of their religious propaganda. That this 
happened in Lithuania of all places and at the time when the Catholic 
and the Orthodox Greek Church were competing for the soul of the 
heathen King Mindowe is now readily intelligible. As the case of 
the heretic monk Adrian shows (p. 156 n. 1), there were crypto- Jews 
even among the ‘white’ monastic clergy of the Orthodox Church. 
In provinces like Lithuania, where Christianity was not yet the 
dominant religion, they may have been in closer contact than else- 
where with their unbaptized brethren, and have nursed daring 
hopes of bringing back Christianity to Judaism on a Unitarian 
basis, or at least of convincing the Lithuanian Grand Dukes of the 
advantages of the Mosaic religion, by the same means of public 
religious discussion as had once served—at least according to a 
pious legend—to convert Bulan, Khagan of the Khazars, to 
Judaism. The use made of the so-called ‘ Chronographer of Pere- 
jaslavl Suzdalski,’ whose history extends to the year 1214, shows 
that the translator or translators of Josephus had associates, assist- 
ing in the work, even in Suzdal, the northernmost extremity of 
the old province of the Vjatitches, once tributary to the empire 
of the Khazars. 

All particulars of the MS. tradition accord excellently with the 
result so far reached. The codex of Vilna (p. 118, No. 15), written, 
according to Istrin, 7 Lithuania, lay until 1916 in the very district 
from which Prince Michael Olelkovic came to Novgorod with the 
five Lithuanian Jews and with Zacharias the Karaite of laev, and to 
which the two Moscow merchants afterwards repaired to get them- 
selves secretly circumcised—clearly, therefore, the starting-point 
of the whole movement. Zacharias must have been connected 
with the Karaites of Troki near Vilna. The copy of the Josephus 
MS. used by the Metropolitan Makarios was written in Novgorod 
(p. 147), i.e. at the place where Zacharias, as early as 1468, had 
converted to Judaism the protopopes Alexei and Dionys, Gabriel 
and the patrician Tucin, three years before he himself entered it 
with Olelkovicé. This proves either that this was not the Kara- 
ite’s first visit to Novgorod, or that he had previously sent out the 
propaganda literature of his sect through fellow-members journey- 
ing on business to the great merchant city on the Volkov. The 
highly remarkable fact that the MS. copied at Novgorod in 1468 
had itself been written in 1399 at Constantinople can be easily 
explained by the assumption that the Karaite Zacharias was in 
touch with the flourishing Karaite community in Constantinople. 


τ ὦ THE MESSIAH JESUS 


The MS. 654 of the Moscow Clerical Academy (p. 117), which 
Berendts chose as a basis for his translation, comes from the 
monastery of Volokolamsk, whose abbot Josif was the most active 
opponent of the ‘Jewish heresy ’ (p. 160), and expressly mentions 
the evidence of Josephus in the second chapter of his book ἡ Pros- 
vjetitel.’ It will not be over-hazardous to conjecture that in it 
we have the very copy made for the use of the famous anti- 
Judaizing controversialist, Josif Volotzki of Volokolamsk. The 
Josephus MS. 445 of Kasan contains at the top of a blank leaf the 
note, ‘ This book is a gift of Ivan Vassilievic, Tsar, ruler and 
Grand Duke of All Russia ’—that is to say, the great protector and 
subsequently executioner of eodor Kurytzin and the other Juda- 
ists! One would like to know ¢o whom the Grand Prince presented 
this remarkable book, where, in those portraits of the demoniacal 
Herod, his quarrelsome wives and rebellious sons, he must have 
seen, as in a spectral mirror of history, himself, his wives Mary and 
Zoe-Sophia, his daughter-in-law Helen, and his treacherous heirs 
Basilios and Demetrios. Like the almost identical Codex Kasan 
444, with the two codices copied from it, 445 and 446, it comes from 
the Soloveitzki monastery on that barren island in the White Sea 
which, used to this day by the Russian Government as an ill-famed 
dumping-ground for ‘ political offenders,’ served the Tsars so long 
as a place of exile for heretics, until the monastery, in consequence 
of these numerous deportations, fell into the hands of the exiled 
Raskolniki, was recovered after repeated military expeditions 
against a stubborn resistance, and on the 22nd of January 1676 
had to be demolished. The four MSS. must have belonged to 
as many Judaizing clerics condemned to confinement in distant. 
monasteries. More detailed investigation of the extant records 
and authorities on the judicial procedure against heretics in the 
year 1504, to which I have so far not had access, would perhaps 
enable us to identify the particular monastery to which the Juda- 
ists who escaped death were banished. But even now one may 
conjecture that the three MSS. of the St. Kyrillos monastery at 
Bjelo Osero, as well as the four from the Soloveitzki monastery, 
were once the property of interned Judaists, . 

On the other hand, the Rumanian MS. of the Very Rev. Dr. 
Moses Gaster (p. 116), translated from Polish, is clearly, if one may 
judge from its main contents (Christian Acts of Pilate, etc.), a col- 
lection of materials made by an Orthodox controversialist to 
combat the Judaists. This indicates that the movement sup- 
pressed in Russia must have spread to Poland and ultimately to 
Moldavia and Valachia (p. 597 ll. 20 ff.). 


CONTROVERSY ON VALUE OF SLAVONIC VERSION 165 


THE SECT OF THE JOSEPHINISTS IN NORTHERN ITALY AND PRO- 
VENCE, AND THE HERESY OF ‘JOSEPHUS EPAPHRODITUS ’ IN 
AstIA MINOR 


The close parallel existing between the sceptical gloss concern- 
ing the resurrection and the views of the Russian Judaists dis- 
cussed above, at first led me to a belief that it, too, was a late inter- 
polation of purely Slavonic origin and of the same nature as the 
Slavonic explanations of ancient place-names and names of ancient 
peoples.1 I am indebted to M. Paul Alphandéry for calling my 
attention to the fact that the gloss may go back to the Byzantine 
original of the Slavonic translator. This important fact in turn 
permits us to trace the origins of the Judaizing heresy a few cen- 
turies further back in the history of the Greek Church. M. Alphan- 
déry also was not slow in suspecting a connexion between the 
Russian phenomenon and the sect of the Josephinists* which 
sprang up in Northern Italy and Provence some time in the thir- 
teenth century—that is, at approximately the same period which 
saw the Slavonic Josephus translation in Lithuania. The term 
(Josepint, Josephini, Josephistae) first occurs in a decree of Pope 
Lucius 111. and the Council of Verona (1184), in a bull of Gregory Ix. 
of 1231, and in charters of the Emperor Frederick I. (1239), 
always in the fixed formula ‘ circumcisos, passaginos, Josephinos,’ 
from which one may infer that it is a question of Judaists practising 
circumcision. The term fassaginos, of doubtful meaning, most 
probably indicates ‘ vagabonds,’ ‘ vaganti,’ corresponding to the 
stvojniki, the ‘straying’ apostles of the Bulgarian Bogomils—that 
is, people who leave their settled homes and take up a wanderer’s 
life from religious conviction, just as Leo Tolstoi did at the end of 
his life. 7 

Of the terms /osepint or Josephistae there exists only a very 
ancient and doubtless erroneous explanation. A treatise attri- 
buted to the inquisitor Rainier Sacconi, who died in 1258, derives 
the word from the matrimonium spirituale still called ‘Joseph's 
marriage.’ Were the treatise really the work of Sacconi, himself 
a converted Catharist, the explanation would deserve some atten- 
tion. Yet the treatise is absolutely spurious, a work of the four- 
teenth century, and altogether untrustworthy. It is furthermore 
quite impossible that the Judaizing sect should have adopted the 
ascetic doctrines of the Marcionites and Manichaeans, the American 
‘Shakers’ of more modern days. Dr. Amman,* however, 
pointed out that the sect in question is most probably derived from 


1 See below, p. 216 Il. 15-20. 

2 Bibliography in L. J. Newman, Jewish Influence on Christian Reform Move- 
ments, New York, 1926, p. 300 sqq. 

* Art. ‘ Joséphistes’ in the Dictionnaire de Théologie Cath., t. vill. ¢. 1547. 


166 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


a seventh-century sect of Asia Minor, usually counted among the 
Paulicians, and which the Byzantine heresiologists of the ninth, 
tenth, and eleventh centuries attribute to a founder named Jose- 
phus Epaphroditus, “ whose very existence is doubted by some,’ as 
the Greek text hasit. If one recalls that to some Jewish Talmud- 
ists the Gospels themselves took on the shape of a mythical heretic 
called “ Euangelion,’ a hypothetical founder of the Christian 
‘sect,’ one cannot but suspect in this enigmatical Josephus Epa- 
phroditus the names of our old acquaintances Flavius Josephus 
and his publisher Epaphroditus.t The Pseudo-Photius and Petrus 
Siculus are indeed the first who speak of a ‘spurious Josephus’ 
(Ἰώσηπος νόθος), evidently with reference to the discrepancies 
they noticed between the Josephus of the heretics and the canonical 
Josephus of the Byzantine Church. 

If these alleged ‘spurious’ writings of Josephus could originate 
a new sect in a community which had already embraced an 
adoptionist Christology, the point at issue can naturally only have 
been statements about Jesus in the unabbreviated text whether 
of the Ha/losis or of the Antiquities. Since in the extant MSS. the 
name of Epaphroditus in the form of a dedication occurs only in the 
Antiquities and not in the War, the allusion to one Josephus Epa- 
phroditus is a valuable hint to the effect that the text of the Aniv- 
quities, too, must have contained a statement about Jesus which 
appeared objectionable to the Orthodox on dogmatic grounds. 

It is interesting to see just how far this text could and must have 
helped to shape the sect’s conception of Christ. The Paulicians, 
as is well known, assumed that Jesus was one of God’s angels sent 
to earth under the obligation to suffer vicarious death. This con- 
ception coincides with the Jewish explanation of the Messiah as an 
angel (ben ’elohim), a ‘son of God’ in the Old Testament sense, an 
explanation found as early as the debate between Justin and 
R. Trypho. It is clearly with reference to this early Judeo-Chris- 
tian doctrine that the Slavonic text thinks it necessary to refute 
the theory that Jesus of Nazareth was an angel. Paulicians, taking 
for a basis of their doctrine the accounts of Jesus as found in 
Flavius Josephus, must have denied that Jesus was an angel, 
and the Paulician adherents of the hypothetical ‘Josephus Epa- 
phroditus ’ would then simply be a special sect which had adopted 
the writings of Josephus (or some of them) into their canon, a 
procedure which is by no means unique in the annals of the Chris- 
tian churches.? 

The spread of the sect is explained in part by the transplanting 
of Paulicians from the Taurus to Constantinople and Thrace in 
the reign of the Emperors Constantine Copronymus (741-75) and 


1 See above, p. 30 2. 3. 
4 See e.g. above, p. 119, on the Uvarov MS. Cp. also above, p. 311]. 22. 


CONTROVERSY ON VALUE OF SLAVONIC VERSION 167 


John Tzimiskes (970) ; further by the primitive apostolic practice 
of itinerant preaching adopted by these heretics.‘ Thus they 
spring up in Northern Italy and Provence on the one hand and in 
Lithuania on the other. There and in Constantinople they spread 
their Josephus in the Old Slavonic language. With the Paulicians 
they have in common their hostility to the organized clergy, the 
monks, and image-worship. Their resumption of the practice of 
circumcision connects them with the Russian Judaists and with 
the same practice in the Armenian Church. 


THE ‘ORTHODOX’ AND THE ‘ SPURIOUS’ JOSEPHUS 


We are now in a position to follow up the history of the MS. 
tradition of our author in the Greek world. Origen, as we saw, 
knew a Josephus who did not acknowledge in any way the messiah- 
ship of Jesus, and he was therefore rather astonished to find in the 
same book a fairly neutral attitude toward the lapidated James 
the Just. Eusebius knows and quotes Az. xvili. 3. 3 in a form 
recognizing in Jesus the messiah, a version which has altered in the 
most remarkable manner the original statements absolutely hostile 
to Jesus. He knows the chronological falsification of the dates of 
Pilate’s administration and of the date of the miracle concerning 
the exit of the Shekinah from the temple in the Way (vi. 5. 3),? and, 
lastly, the interpolation of the slaughter of the innocents, absent 
from the standard Greek text but still found in the Slavonic 
version, in Photius, and in Moses of Khorene.* We also saw that 
these chronological falsifications were occasioned by the publication 
of the genuine Acta Pilati at the order of the Emperor Maximinus 
Daia in A.D. 311.4 The reworking of most of the MSS. found in 
public and private libraries was facilitated by the censorship estab- 
lished in the reign of Constantine and still more enforced under 
Theodosius and Valentinian in A.D. 449. There actually exists no 
Josephus MS., Greek, Latin, Aramaic, Hebrew, or Arabic, which 
does not show clear traces of Christian interpolations and deletions. 

The writings of Josephus thus falsified were given the honour 
of being adopted into the canons of several Eastern churches, 
chiefly because the author now was supposed to furnish an im- 


1 Petrus Siculus, p. 36 ed. Gieseler : one of their apostles says that he ‘ travelled 
from east to west, from south to north, till his knees began to shake.’ 

2 Eusebius, Chron., ap. Sync., p. 324 f. (cf. Jerome, Ep. Paulae et Eutocii ad 
Marcellam, opp. ed. Vallarsi, vol. i. p. 202). Both quote from Josephus the story 
about the mysterious voice from the inner sanctum, ‘let us emigrate from here,’ as 
happening at the time of the crucifixion, while the standard texts say that that 
sign happened a short time before the fall of the city in a.p. 70. Cp. above, p.141 ff., 
on a similar falsification, perpetrated before A.D. 180, of the date of the murder of 
James the Just. 8 Above, p. 144 τ. 3. 4 Above, p. 16 n. 3, 


τοῦ | THE MESSIAH JESUS 


partial testimony, though grudgingly given, not on Christ’s exist- 
ence (which no one ever doubted in those days) but on his messiah- 
ship. Josephus was even made to prove the historicity of the 
massacre of the innocents, of the destruction of Jerusalem as a 
punishment for the death of Christ, of the rending of the temple 
curtain, and even of the resuscitation of Lazarus, and all that as 
early as the end of the second century of our era. The account in 
the Antiquities was so condensed and worked over that it seemed 
to confirm almost the entire apostolic creed. The fact that the 
account in the Way and the Haldésis, less reworked than the other, 
rather emphasized the human traits of the historical Jesus did not 
in itself meet with objection on the part of the Church, until it 
was noticed with horror that Josephus had remained a most 
dangerous weapon in the hands of Judaizing Unitarians—witness 
the rise of the sect of Josephinists. In spite of all deletions and 
interpolations Josephus was still at variance with the accounts of 
the Gospels, especially in his mention of a rebellion planned by the 
adherents of Christ. Aside from this, Josephus revealed a certain 
revolutionary past of Christianity, now become a highly respect- 
able state religion, which could not but fill the clergy with alarm, 
the more so because the rebellions of the Paulicians and the Bogomil 
preachers of the ‘kingdom of the poor’ had just revealed that 
dangerous social doctrines were still slumbering in the hidden 
recesses of the Church. 

Such a state of affairs led to the complete deletion of all pas- 
sages dealing with Jesus, whilst the MSS. in the hands of the 
heretics and therefore inaccessible to the ecclesiastical censor were 
simply denounced as ‘ falsified.’ The deletion of the Jesus pas- 
sages had as a natural consequence the omission also of the state- 
ments regarding his disciples and John the Baptist. Nor is it 
difficult to determine the period of these changes in the Josephus 
text. Neither Petrus Hegumenus nor Photius (died in 891) knows 
anything of a spurious Josephus—who does not appear before the 
writings of the Pseudo-Photius, himself dependent upon Euthy- 
mius of Zygabene (died after 1111), and of Petrus Siculus. This 
result is fully corroborated by the quotation in the works of the 
patriarch Photius of the passage concerning the slaughter of 
the innocents, a passage missing in the extant MSS. of Josephus. 
The revision of the Way to which it owes its present form is there- 
fore in fact posterior to Photius, so that, for example, the Russian 
library of Kiev, the first Russian bishopric, founded at the time of 
Photius, if it possessed the Haldsis (as is extremely likely), can 
have possessed only an unexpurgated copy. 

Since none of the extant expurgated MSS. is older than the 
eleventh century, and since the Bulgarian bishop Theophylactos 
of Ochrida, a contemporary of the first emperor of the Comnene 


CONTROVERSY ON VALUE OF SLAVONIC VERSION 169 


dynasty, still quotes from the interpolated Haldszs,1 it is very 
probable indeed that precisely at that time (end of the eleventh 
century) the Greek Church ordered the radical revision of Josephus, 
as a check upon the heretics, and denounced all MSS. containing 
the older and genuine version as ‘spurious,’ in this way trying 
to cut the ground from under the feet of the Josephinist sect 

and the other Judaizing heresies. | 


1 See above, p. 141 0. 1. 


VIII 


PASSAGES IN THE SLAVONIC JOSEPHUS WHICH CAN- 
NOT BE ACCOUNTED FOR AS CHRISTIAN FORGERIES 


HE existence of a number of Christian interpolations in 

the Slavonic text of Josephus may, then, be taken for 

granted. Yet I should confidently challenge any one to 
try to interpret in that simple way the following paragraphs. 
The passages in question, absent from the Greek standard text 
as Well as from the Latin translations, cannot for a moment be 
considered Christian in meaning or sentiment. Asa matter of fact, 
they have nothing whatever to do with the history or pre-history 
of Christianity. They are reprinted here from Dr. Thackeray’s 
version of Berendts’ German translation, revised after the Russian 
text first published in the German edition of this book from MS. 
copies kindly supplied by Prof. Vasilij N. Istrin of Leningrad. 


Antipater before Caesar. 


Standard Greek text, B.J.,i. 10. | Slavonic version, Berendts-Grass, 
2-3, §§ 197 sqq. p. 871. 


‘At these words Antipater 
stripped off his clothes and ex- 
posed his numerous scars. His 
loyalty to Caesar needed, he said, 
no words from him; his body cried 
it aloud, were he to hold his peace. 
But the audacity of Antigonus 
astounded him. The son of the 
enemy of the Romans, son of a 
fugitive from Rome, one who in- 
herited from his father a passion 
for revolution and sedition, pre- 
suming to accuse others in the 
presence of the Roman general and 
looking for favours when he ought 
to be thankfulto bealive. Indeed 
(said Antipater), his present am- 
bition for power was not due to 
indigence ; he wanted it in order in order 
to sow sedition among the Jews to sow dissension between the 


and to employ his resources Jews and the Romans and to rise 
170 


‘GENUINE VARIANTS ’ IN THE SLAVONIC JOSEPHUS 171 


against those who had provided 
them. 


‘After hearing both speakers, 
Caesar pronounced Hyrcanus to 
be the more deserving claimant to 
the high-priesthood, and left Anti- 
pater free choice of office. The 
latter, replying that it rested with 
him who conferred the honour to 
fix the measure of the honour, was 
then appointed viceroy of all 
Judaea. He was further author- 
ised to rebuild the ruined walls of 
the metropolis. Orders were sent 
by Caesar to Rome for these 
honours to be graven in the Capi- 
tol, as a memorial of his own jus- 
tice and of Antipater’s valour.’ 


‘and remitted the 


against him who had given (him) 
the power. Mithridates, however, 
testified before Caesar to Anti- 
pater’s valour. 

‘ Caesar, however, having heard 
both speeches and seen the wounds 
of his body which he had received 
in the war, honoured him with a 
high Roman dignity, 


tax to his 
country. The high-priestly dig- 
nity he confirmed to Hyrcanus for 
his sake. But Hyrcanus he hon- 
oured with the higher rank.’ 


Explanation of Roman Customs for Jewish Readers. 


Greek B.]., i. ὃ 285. 


‘The meeting (of the Senate) 
was dissolved and Antony and 
Caesar left the senate-house with 
Herod between them, preceded 
by the consuls and the other 
magistrates, as they went to offer 
sacrifice and to lay up the decree 
in the Capitol. 


Berendts-Grass, p. 107. 


‘After the senators had dis- 
persed, Caesar and Antony with 
Herod between them went into the 
palace; * the Roman priests,* how- 
ever, the princes, and the consuls 
to the Capitol to a sacrifice and 
to make a record concerning the 
kingdom of Herod. 

‘For thus is their custom: if 
Caesar gives a dignity? to some- 


1 This is probably untrue, and Josephus had to delete the statement in the 


revised edition of his work. 
have added this passage. 


It is unthinkable that the Slavonic translator should 
Nothing could be more indifferent to him than the 


question whether thirteen centuries before his age the Jews were or were not 


taxed by the Romans. 


2 What or whose palace? The author imagines that even in those republican 
times there was an imperial palace of Caesar’s in Rome. 
3 No mention of them in the Greek text and no need for them in reality, 


because the magistrates could very well throw some incense or pour out a libation 
on the altar of Jupiter Capitolinus without priestly assistance. But the Jewish 
priestly author cannot imagine a sacrifice without its being performed by the 
priests or a procession of state, without their playing the main part in the show. 
The reader will observe that the priests are given precedence before the ‘ princes 
and consuls’ by our Joseph hak-kohen | 

4 The author has not understood his source (Nicolaus of Damascus), which 
states clearly that the Senate, on the suggestion of Antony, made Herod king. 
For him ‘ Caesar’ is even at that time—before the battle of Actium and in the 
lifetime of Antony !—the omnipotent Roman emperor, making and unmaking 
kings | 


On this, the first day of his reign, 
Herod was given a banquet by 
Antony.’ 


THE MESSIAH JESUS 


body, it is not valid until he (!) 
writes it down on the Capitol. 
When it is proclaimed, a royal 
sacrifice’ is offered, and through it 
it (the kingdom) will become valid. 
On the first day of (his) king- 
dom Antony offered a banquet 
for him.’ 


Herod’s Dream. 


Greek B.J., i. § 328. 


‘But while Herod was at 
Daphne, near Antioch, he had a 
dream. 


distinctly warning him of his 
brother’s death, and springing in 
horror from his bed was met by the 
messengers bringing news of the 
catastrophe. After brief lamenta- 
tion for his loss, he deferred further 
mourning for another season and 
set out in haste to meet his foes.’ 


‘But when Herod was in An- 
tioch he saw a dream which re- 
vealed to him in advance his 
brother’s death. Now the dream 
was in this wise. There were four 
ears of corn: the first was dry 
through frost, but the second stood 
upright, while wolves fell upon the 
third and cut it down and dragged 
it behind them. But the interpre- 
tation of it was in this wise. The 
first ear was Phasael, whom poison 
had dried up ; the second ear was 
himself, inasmuch as he was un- 
scathed ; while the third was his 
brother Joseph, whom warriors 
cut down and dragged away with- 
out burial. And his soul was 
stirred within him ; at once terror 
seized him, and he went forth from 
the bedchamber about midnight 
like one possessed. For the soul, 
which had understood sooner than 
the spirit, was afraid (and forth- 
with there came to him the melan- 
choly tidings).’ 


While the reader of the Greek version is led to believe that 


in a dream Herod had seen his brother die, rose in nocturnal fright 
from his bed, and immediately got confirmation of the bad news, 
the Slavonic version has all the details of a dream allegory 
which needs interpretation, and reminds the reader forcibly of the 
famous dream about ears of corn in the story of the Old Testament 


1 This ‘royal offering’ is derived from the priestly law in Ezekiel xlvi. 4! 
Roman ceremonial knows nothing of it. The sentence is not even consistent in 
itself: of course, a regal offering is not required for every kind of dignity conferred 
uponaman. But for Josephus, of course, no office could be held legally by its 
incumbent unless he had properly sacrificed with due priestly assistance. ~~~ 


PHASAEL AND HYRCANUS TRAPPED 173 


Joseph, the namesake of our Josephus, who elsewhere ! takes great 
pride in his priestly craft of interpreting dreams and loses no oppor- 
tunity to relate prophetic dreams and their successful interpreta- 
tion by Essenes and other specialists. For a Western, Hellenized 
reader the story is infinitely more dramatic if the stilted and not 
very plausible allegory is left out ; but it is easy to imagine the 
pleasure of a reader or a writer steeped in Biblical lore when he read 
or described this symbolical picture and its ‘wise’ interpretation. 


Phasael and Hyrcanus trapped by the Parthians, 


Greek B.J., 1. 253-270. 


‘When the feast called Pentecost 
came round, the whole neighbour- 
hood of the temple and the entire 
city were crowded with country- 
folk, for the most part in arms. 

Phasael defended the walls ; 
Herod, with a small force, the 
palace. 

With this he descended upon the 
enemy's disordered ranks in the 
suburb, killed large numbers of 
them, put the rest to flight, and 
shut them up, some in the city, 
others in the temple, others in the 
entrenched camp outside the walls. 
Thereupon Antigonus petitioned 
for the admission of Pacorus as 
mediator. 

Phasael consented, and re- 
ceived into the city and offered 
hospitality to the Parthian, who, 
with five hundred horsemen, had 
come ostensibly to put an end 
to strife—in reality to support 
Antigonus. 

With this object, Pacorus in- 
sidiously induced Phasael to go on 
an embassy to Barzapharnes with 
a view to the cessation of hos- 
tilities. So, notwithstanding the 
strong dissuasion of Herod, who 
urged his brother to kill the 
schemer and not to abandon him- 
self to his schemes, barbarians 
being (he said) by nature per- 
fidious, 


Berendts-Grass, p. LOI sq. 


‘ But since the feast had begin 
which is called Pentecost, all the 
people had assembled, partly in 
arms, partly simply (as civilians). 


And at that time Herod took the 
rest of the troops with him and 
suddenly broke forth out of the 
court. And he killed twenty thou- 
sand of the people. But the rest 
shut themselves up in the Temple. 


And therefore Antigonus—with 
Pacorus—entreated him to make 
peace. 

Phasael, having concluded the 
peace with them and prepared a 
sumptuous banquet, invited them 
with their troops, and, having 
honoured them, dismissed them 
with gitts. 


Pacorus, however, in his wili- 
ness tried to get Phasael and 
Hyrcanus. And having prepared 
a banquet, he invited them. 

Herod, however, sent to Phasael 
a warning to be wary of Pacorus 
and not to trust himself into the 
hands of those lusting for his death, 
neither to put faith in barbarians 
even if they sware oaths. 


1 BAS. iil. 352. 


174 


Phasael left the city, accom- 
panied by Hyrcanus. 


To allay suspicion, Pacorus left 
with Herod some of the cavalry 
called by the Parthians “‘ free- 
men’; with the remainder he 
escorted Phasael on his way. 

On their arrival in Galilee they 
found the inhabitants in revolt and 
up in arms. The satrap, with 
whom they had an audience, was 
a very crafty individual who dis- 
guised his plot under a show of 
benevolence : he gave them pres- 
ents, and then laid an ambush to 
catch them on their departure. 
They discovered the conspiracy at 
a maritime town, where they 
halted, named Ekdippa. There 
they heard of the promise of the 
thousand talents, and that the five 
hundred women whom Antigonus 
had devoted to the Parthians in- 
cluded most of their own; that 
the barbarians invariably kept a 
watch upon them at night; and 
that they would long since have 
been arrested, had not the con- 
spirators been waiting till Herod 
was caught at Jerusalem, fearing 
that the news of their capture 
would put him on his guard. This 
was now no mere idle gossip ; for 
already they could see the sentries 
posted in the distance. Phasael, 
however, notwithstanding the 
urgent exhortations to flee made 
to him by a certain Ophellius, 
who had learnt the whole plan of 
the conspiracy from Saramalla, 
the wealthiest Syrian of his time, 


1 Obviously standing for ‘ but’! 


THE MESSIAH JESUS 


Phasael, however, trusting in his 
good right and straightforwardness 
and in the oath, took Hyrcanus 
with him and went without any 
precaution. 

And? while they went to the 
banquet they 2 


Cp. C, F. Burney, The Avamaic Ovigin of 


the Fourth Gospel, Oxford, 1922, p, 66: ‘a striking Semitic usage may be seen 
in the employment of καί to link contvasted statements, where in English we should 


naturally employ ‘‘ and yet ”’ or “‘ but.’’’ 

* Here something seems to have dropped out. The brothers must αὐ least have 
noticed sone signs of treachery, when it was too late, Supply, perhaps, ‘ they were 
surrounded by a detachment of cavalry.’ It is quite possible, however, that 
the omission of such a logically necessary clause is due to the negligence of 


Josephus himself, whose first draft was properly corrected afterwards by one of 
his ‘ collaborators,’ 


PHASAEL AND HYRCANUS TRAPPED 


could not bring himself to desert 
Hyrcanus. Instead he went to 
the satrap and frankly reproached 
him for the plot, and in particular 
for acting as he had done from 
mercenary motives ; undertaking, 
for his part, to give him a larger 
sum for his life than Antigonus 
had promised for a kingdom. To 
this the Parthian made a wily 
reply, clearing himself of suspicion 
by protestations and oaths, and 
went off to join Pacorus. Im- 
mediately after, certain Parthians 
who had been left behind, with 
orders to do so, arrested Phasael 
and Hyrcanus, the prisoners curs- 
ing them bitterly for their perjury 
and breach of faith. 


S.O O48) O-- OOOO G7 O18 1 O1.02'S OES. @'-O-@'' δ OYO:°@ O'e\'@ 


In Jerusalem, meanwhile, the 
Parthians gave themselves up to 
pillage, breaking into the houses of 
the fugitives and into the palace ; 
refraining only from the funds 
of Hyrcanus, which, however, 
amounted to no more than three 
hundred talents. Elsewhere they 
found less than they had expected; 
for Herod, long since suspecting 
the barbarians of perfidy, had 
taken the precaution of removing 
the most precious of his treasures 
to Idumaea, and each of his friends 
had done likewise. After the 
pillage, the insolence of the Par- 
thians proceeded to extremes. 
They let loose on the whole coun- 
try the horrors of implacable war, 
laid the city of Marisa in ruins, 
and, not content with raising 
Antigonus to the throne, delivered 
up to him Phasael and Hyrcanus, 
in chains, for torture. Hyrcanus 
threw himself at the feet of Anti- 
gonus, who with his own teeth 
lacerated his suppliant’s ears, in 
order to disqualify him for ever, 


175 


were both full of repentance and 
cursed his ! infidelity ! 


And Antigonus jumped up and 
with his teeth bit away both ears 
of Hyrcanus, when he in an un- 
manly way begged for his life. 


1 viz. Pacorus’, 


£76 


under any change of circumstances, 
from resuming the _ high - priest- 
hood; since freedom from physical 
defect is essential to the holder of 
that office. Phasael, on the other 
hand, courageously forestalled the 
king’s malice by dashing his head 
upon a rock, being deprived of the 
use of hands or steel. Thus show- 
ing himself to be a true brother of 
Herod, and Hyrcanus the most 
ignoble of men, he died a hero’s 


THE MESSIAH JESUS 


But Antigonus did that to him, 
so that, although being alive later 
on, he should not become high 
priest. 

For the law enjoins that the 
high priest must not have any 
bodily defects. Phasael, however, 
who had much rebuked Pacorus 
because of his hard-heartedness, 
insidiousness, and avarice, died in 
consequence of this, without hav- 
ing said anything low-spirited.’ 


death—an end in keeping with his 
life’s career.’ 


In this case the two versions differ as to the way in which the two 
men were trapped by the Persians. The Slavonic version seems to 
imply that they were taken prisoners in Jerusalem by Pacorus— 
in the city where Herod is present with his army. The Greek 
version has a much more detailed and plausible story about their 
arrest in Galilee. The more detailed story may have been inserted 
into a shorter, less exact account, or the full account may have been 
curtailed by an awkward hand. As there can be no doubt about 
the fact that something has dropped out of the Slavonic text in the 
middle of the clause—between our notes I and 2 on p. 174—and 
since there is no clear motive for deleting the episode of Phasael 
and Hyrcanus’ journey to Galilee, it seems evident that either 
Josephus by misadventure skipped a paragraph in his source—an 
error which was properly rectified in the revised edition of his 
first draft—or that by accident a leaf had dropped out of the MS. 
which the Russian translator used for his work, or that, finally, the 
author of the Slavonic translation had jumped a paragraph of his 
exemplar without noticing the mistake. 


Accusations of Herod against the Wife of Pheroras. 


Greek B.]., 1. ὃ 571. Berendts-Grass, p. 194 sq. 
‘The king assembled a council 

of his friends and relations and 

accused the wretched woman of 

numerous misdeeds, among others 


of insulting his own daughters, of 
subsidizing the Pharisees to oppose 
BID «se % 


‘And he said, Thou hast given 
to the Pharisees great gifts against 
me and prepared all kinds of magic 
as well for (my) food as for (my) 
vestments as for (my) shoes and 
also for my carriage. Remember, 
Pheroras, what a death happened 


‘PESIA THE PRINCE’ POISONED 177 


to Pesia the prince when I wanted 
to eat of thy food and—because 
God had protected me—did not 
partake of it and sent Pesia. Be- 
cause he tasted (of it), his eyes 
protruded out of his head and his 
limbs fell asunder, joint after joint, 
and howling he gave up his ghost 
on the third day. Once, however, 
when 1 touched the bridle (of my 
carriage) my hand dried up after 
this. If at that time a Syrian 
snake-killer? had not turned up 
who cut open a living horse and 
put my hand into it, (she) would 
have killed me through a mysteri- 
ous and miraculous death. And 
I tortured my stable-boy and he 
put the blame upon her. 
and of alienating his brother after ‘And with all that, she has put 
bewitching him with drugs. over thee such an enmity against 
me that thou hast forgotten God 
as well as nature and brotherhood 
and the burning love and the 
dignity and the honour which my 
painstaking and this head have 
given thee. And now thou art 
inimical against me and searchest 
In conclusion he addressed Pher- death forme. Since Pheroras did 
oras and told him not dare to utter a word in reply 
and violently trembled because of 
that he must choose one or the his wife, Herod said: I give thee 
other, either his brother or his two possibilities, take one. Either 
wife.’ abandon me and keep the woman, 
or hold me as a brother but dis- 
miss this woman.’ 


This passage calls for some comment. The first question is, 
Who is this ‘ prince’ or “commander ’ Pesza of the Slavonic text, 
whom Herod sends in his place to partake of the food prepared for 
him at his brother’s and his sister-in-law’s house, and who is being 
so miserably poisoned ? From the context it follows that he must 
have been a distinguished member of the court, most probably a 
relation of the king. Now, the Hebrew /Jostppon* calls Herod’s 
brother Phasailu—once,? however, Phasiah. This may be an 


1 The Russian has ‘ a snake-footed Syrian,’ which isrank nonsense. ὀφιοκτόνος 
was misread as ὀφιόπους. 


2 v. 3, p. 364, Breithaupt ; v. 7, p. 378, Br.; v. 8, pp. 382, 384, 386, 387, Br. 
* iV. τὴν Ῥ, 315, Br. 


M 


178 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


ordinary form of endearment—as Vassja is used in Russian for 
Vasilyj (=Basilios)—but more likely it is the result of the euphem- 
istic use of -᾿ εἰ, ‘ God’ (i/u might be the Idumaean pronunciation) 
for ~jah (—Jahveh), so that Phasa’el and Phasajah would stand in 
the same relationship to one another as Nathanjah and Nathanael. 
The Russian form Pesia, with P instead of a form with ®, shows that 
the name was originally written in Semitic characters, where 5 
represents either II or ®. Now, if ‘ Pesia the prince’ is none but 
Herod’s brother Phasael, it is quite fitting that he should take 
Herod’s place at a banquet, and the poison story would agree with 
the interpretation of Herod’s dream.! But it is absolutely incon- 
sistent with the previous paragraph, where Phasael is said, in the 
Slavonic text, to have died a brave death at the hands of Anti- 
gonus, after having been captured treacherously by the Parthian 
commander, whilst the corresponding Greek text even adds the 
detail that he dashed his head against a stone. The contradiction 
between this dramatic story and the interpretation of Herod’s 
dream is in a certain measure removed through Josephus’ inserting 
immediately after: “according to another account, Phasael recovered 
from his self-inflicted wound, and a physician sent by Antigonus, 
and ostensibly attending to him, injected noxious drugs into the 
wound and so killed him.’ This addition, quite unnecessary in 
the present Greek text since it says nothing about the interpreta- 
tion of Herod’s dream, would harmonize the story with the dream 
but would be incompatible with Herod’s accusations against the 
wife of Pheroras, since she could not very well be made responsible 
for the death of Phasael (Phasia, Pesia) at the hands of Antigonus’ 
physician. The whole muddle is obviously the result of Josephus 
having negligently compiled various incompatible sources. At the 
bottom is no doubt the fact that there were three princes named 
Phasael in Herod’s family—to wit, his brother, who probably died 
a captive of Antigonus ; 5 this man’s son by one of his wives, named 
Pallas ; and Herod’s own son Phasael. Either the second or the 
third may have been sent to the fatal banquet to be poisoned there. 
Josephus’ source, probably some compilation of prophetic dreams, 
confused the latter victim with the king’s unfortunate brother. 
Josephus noticed the contradiction and tried to remedy the en- 
suing confusion by adding the harmonizing sentence according to 
which, as some say, Herod’s brother died of poison after having 
fractured his skull. Finding this expedient insufficient, he can- 
celled the story of Phasael’s death at the fatal banquet, and finally, 
when he had found out from the observations of his patron 


' ‘The first ear was Phasael, whom poison had dried up,’ above, p. 172 1. 22. 

* According to Sextus Julius Africanus (fragm. xvii. 1)—who probably draws 
in Justus of Tiberias—Phasael was slain in the fray, while Herod fled for his life 
from the Parthians. 


GREEK MYTH EXPLAINED TO JEWISH READERS 179 


Agrippa that there was an obvious confusion of two different 
Phasaels in the dream story, he deleted even that. 

It is thus possible to account for the absence from the Greek 
standard text of both the dream and the banquet on the assump- 
tion that the text translated into Russian is an earlier draft of the 
Greek version. With the best will in the world I cannot imagine 
the reverse development—that is, the possibility of a moderately 
consistent text of Josephus having been thrown into this hopeless 
confusion through the awkwardness of some later interpolator add- 
ing, one cannot imagine why, these conflicting details. It is also 
well to bear in mind that Josephus may have had reasons of his 
own for saying as little as possible about poisoned food, bewitched 
raiment, poisoned horse and carriage harness, etc., in an edition 
destined to edify the Roman court. For was not one of the belles 
of this same Herodian family the mistress of the Emperor Titus, 
Josephus’ gracious patron ? 


Antipater’s Comparison of himself with Heracles fighting the Hydra. 
Greek B./]., 1. ὃ 588. Berendts-Grass, p. 200, 11-10. 


‘Then were these hydra heads ‘ But there are growing up against 
me and my children the heads 
of the Hydra. Just as Heracles 
sought to cut off the hundred 
heads of that beast with the sword, 
and when he had not yet reached 
the last head the heads again grew 
up, until he called Iolaus to his aid, 
and as Heracles hewed, Iolaus 
burned out with a firebrand the 
places that appeared through the 
gash, and thereby the growth of 
the heads of that beast was stayed, 

the sons of Aristobulus and Alex- even so have I cut off Aristobulus 

ander shooting up.’ * and Alexander but have gained no 
profit therefrom. For there are 
those who ‘stand in their place, 
their sons, but I have no Iolaus to 
help me. And 1 know not how I 
should fulfil my desire.’ 


As is well known, in this book Josephus is largely indebted to 
Nicolaus of Damascus. It is out of the question that a rhetorically 
educated Greek like Nicolaus should interrupt a dramatic speech 
by such a silly elaboration of a myth known to every Greek school- 
boy. Obviously, the paragraph in question is destined for Jewish 
readers unfamiliar with the heathen story. It is possible that 


180 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


Josephus himself felt the need for his elucidation, but it is more 
probable—and we have tried to prove this in a previous chapter ἢ 
—that he found it in a Semitic adaptation of the Greek historian, 
which he used in preference to the Greek original. Nothing is 
easier to explain than the deletion of these lines in his definite 
Greek edition. 

A considerable number of similar divergencies might be ad- 
duced. Nor are they peculiar to the initial books. A few more 
examples culled from Book iv. will convince the reader of the 
contrary. A curious piece of information, found nowhere else in 
ancient literature, occurs in the Slavonic Josephus’ account of 
the battle of Bedriacum between the troops of the rival emperors 
Otho and Vitellius. 


Greek B.]., iv. ὃ 547. 


‘In the battle fought at Bedri- 
acum in Gaul against Valens and 
Caecina, the generals of Vitellius, 
on the first day Otho had the ad- 
vantage, but on the second the 
troops of Vitellius.’ 


Berendts-Grass, p. 495. 


‘On the first day Otho was victor, 
but on the second Vitellius. For 
he had during the night strewn 
(the ground with) three-pronged 
irons.” And in the morning, after 
they had drawn up in order of 


battle, when Vitellius feigned flight 
Otho pursued after them with his 
troops. And they reached the 
place on which the irons were 
strewn. Then were the horses 
lamed, and it was impossible either 
for the horses or for the men 
to extricate themselves. And the 
soldiers of Vitellius, who had 
turned back, slew all who lay 
(there). But Otho saw what had 
befallen (and) killed himself.’ 


Dio Cassius, Plutarch, Suetonius, and Tacitus know nothing of such 
a stratagem deciding the battle of Bedriacum ; yet the story may 
well have been true,’ and may have been found by Josephus in one 
of the dispatches which Vespasian received concerning the encoun- 
ter and duly entered in his correspondence books, which he placed at 
Josephus’ disposal.4 Yet it was certainly all the more tactless and 
awkward to give credit for strategic ability to Vespasian’s obese 
and incompetent enemy, Vitellius not even having been present at 


' Above, p. 136. 

2 The so-called ¢vibult, See Daremberg-Saglio’s Dictionnaire des Antiq., s.v. 

% See Sal. Reinach in the Comptes rendus de l’Académie des Inscript., 15th 
February 1929, p. 42. Reprinted in A malthée, vol. ii., Paris, 1930, pp. 336-341. 

* Below, p. 202. 


HOW VITELLIUS WON THE BATTLE OF BEDRIACUM 181 


the battle. A correction of the faux pas by a timely and diplo- 
matic deletion of the offending paragraph was therefore inevitable. 
Any one trying to explain this passage as a late interpolation would 
have to attribute it to a partisan of Vitellius, who was dead and 
buried and deserted by all his followers long before Josephus even 
wrote his book. The absurdity of the supposition that in the thir- 
teenth century Russians knew anything about a Roman implement 
of war which even to-day is known to only a small number of 
specialists, is of course obvious. 

After all, what I venture to postulate are simply divergencies 
between different editions of the War, divergencies of the type 
which has been admitted all along to exist between the War and 
the corresponding portions of the Amtiquities; and it is my con- 
tention that the Slavonic translation goes back to an earlier re- 
daction of the War than the MSS. of the Greek standard texts. 
The interpolation theory, therefore, had better not be resorted to 
before all other explanations have been tried in vain. Nor can 
this claim be regarded as in any way excessive. On the contrary, 
it is a general principle admitted by all historians that an historical 
document must be accepted on trust unless proved untrustworthy, 
and that the burden of this proof lies on those who contest its 
value. From this viewpoint the case under debate is most simple. 
The Slavonic document purports to be a translation of the work 
of a definite author, Josephus. It is not the task of the discoverer 
or editor of the work to prove that the statement is true. If any 
proof is required, it is rather to the effect that the statement is false 
and that the work is really the product of another author or other 
authors, and the burden of this proof rests obviously on those 
who make such an allegation. 

It is only fair to say that attempts at such a proof have not been 
entirely wanting. Critics have observed, for example, that the 
Slavonic text represents the tetrarch Herodes Philippus as cor- 
rupt, avaricious, and violent, in strict contradiction with A#., xvii. 
4. 6, where he is described as a particularly gracious, just, and 
righteous ruler. Hence the application of a theory of interpola- 
tion to the Slavonic text, although it is difficult to see who should 
have had any interest in thus blackening the character of Phil- 
ippus. What the critics did not notice was of course the frequency 
with which similar contradictions in character-drawing are met 
with in the pages of Josephus, partly the inevitable consequence 
of his uncritical and mechanical method of compiling various 
sources, and partly due also to his insincere subservience to 
various interests. As the Dutch scholar Samuel Naber, the editor 
of the Teubner edition of Josephus, puts it: “No one ever knows 
utrum laudet an oderit quorum hominum ingenia depinxerit.’ A few 
examples of the many which might be quoted must suffice. 


182 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


In one passage ' the high priest Hanan is called a very reason- 
able man who would have saved the city had he not fallen a victim 
to the insidious persecutions of the revolutionaries. In the famous 
passage about the death of James the Just, where Josephus draws 
on an anti-Sadducaean document, the same dignitary is called an 
uncommonly lawless and reckless man, a member of the Sadducee 
party, who are more cruel than any other Jews when sitting in 
judgment. At the end of the Antiquities Josephus records a long 
list of the misdeeds of the last high priests,” obviously from a series 
of complaints against those dignitaries addressed to the Roman 
authorities and copied from their commentaries by Josephus. 
These extracts are so indiscriminately compiled that the author’s 
own dear friend, Jesus ben Gamala,* is represented as a most mean 
scoundrel. Had such things been pointed out to Josephus, he 
would most probably have attributed them proudly to his own 
impartiality and scrupulous truthfulness. As a matter of fact, 
often enough he did not take the trouble to form a personal opinion 
of men and events, at least when his own interests were not directly 
concerned. For example, in Ant., xx. ὃ 235, the removal of the 
high priest Onias is characterized as a sacrilegious crime; in 
ΧΙ, §§ 384 sq., as just retribution for the man’s own misdeeds, 

Nor have the critics who so unreasonably used the discrepancy 
between the characterization of Herodes Philippus in the Slavonic 
text on the one hand, and Josephus’ earlier work on the other, taken 
into consideration the important fact that at least twenty years 
must have elapsed between the one and the other publication, and 
that Josephus had received sixty-two letters from King Herod 
Agrippa II., containing additions and corrections, which means that 
he had been bribed by the favours of the Herodian dynast into 
presenting the transactions of that fatal period in a light which 
was at least not openly hostile to the interests of that family, No 
wonder, then (and this fact was likewise unknown to the critics), 
that in the Rumanian version of the chapter in question ὅ all ex- 
pressions which throw an unfavourable light on Herodes Philippus 
are absent from the text. No later editor or censor had any in- 
terest in sparing the Herodian family, which had died out at the end 
of the first century of our era. Yet nothing is more certain than 
that Josephus himself wished to please Agrippa τι. by first amend- 
ing and finally entirely deleting a chapter which he had carelessly 
copied from an anti-Herodian source. 


1 Β.7., iv. 3.7, §§ 319-22. 

* xx., §§ 180 sq., 198 sqg., 205-7, 213b-214. 

3 Vita, ὃ 204: ‘ Jesus, son of Gamala—an intimate friend of mine.’ 
‘ANE; RX A213: ® Below, pp. 229 n. 2 and 599 f. No. 9. 


IX 


THE CONTRADICTIONS BETWEEN THE DIFFERENT 
ACCOUNTS GIVEN BY JOSEPHUS OF HIS OWN 
ACTIVITY IN GALILEE 


Κι. HE most conclusive refutation of the theory that the 
larger part of the major divergencies between the Greek 
and the Slavonic text might be attributed to interpola- 

tions, deletions, omissions, and corrections by a late Jewish or 
Christian editor, or to arbitrary alterations on the part of the 
Slavonic translator, and the best proof of my contention that— 
with the exception of a number of well-defined Christian altera- 
tions—they are all to be explained by the fact that the Slav simply 
worked on an earlier edition of Josephus’ history of the Jewish 
revolt against the Romans, will be found in the comparison of the 
passages relating to Josephus’ own life and actions in both versions. 
If in these cases the divergencies can be explained as the result of 
Josephus’ continual attempts to whitewash and to defend himself 
against the various accusations of his enemies, it will become 
obvious that these divergencies cannot be due to the Slavonic 
translator or to any Jewish or Christian reworker of the Greek text, 
since it is inconceivable that any early or late mediaeval reviser 
should have tried to blacken indirectly, through the cleverest addi- 
tions and omissions, the character of Josephus. 

As has been shown by Prof. Laqueur,! certain parts of the 
Polemos, especially §§ 603-8 of the second book, can have been 
written only on the occasion of a reworking of the whole compila- 
tion. Where I venture to differ from his conclusions is only in 
his assumption of a very late date for these insertions, which he 
would attribute wholly to the second edition of the Way announced 
at the end of the Antiquities.2. It is unfortunately impossible to 
determine, on the basis of the Old Russian translation, whether the 
paragraphs in question formed part of the archetype behind the 
class A of Slavonic MSS. It so happens that these paragraphs 
would fall into the gap which has been pointed out above.? Yet 
the §§ 604-8 do occur in the archetype of the so-called chrono- 

1 Dey jiidische Historiker Josephus Flavius, Giessen, 1920, pp. 76 ff. 

2 Laqueur did not know the passage of Jerahmel (above, p. 83 n. 1) about this 
second edition in twenty-four books, published in A.D. 94. 


3 Pp, tat, fifth @ lined. 
183 


184 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


grapher’s version, which mentions the inauguration of the temple 
of Peace and must therefore be posterior to A.D. 75. If those para- 
graphs were indeed not older than A.D. 93-4, this fact itself would 
be of considerable importance for the correct dating of that version. 
The reasons adduced by Prof. Laqueur for his late dating of those 
paragraphs are not cogent, his arguments being based on a mis- 
interpretation of Josephus’ speech in ὃ 605.1 Aside from this one 
question of detail, I can only share the conclusions and infer- 
ences of the German scholar. The Slavonic Haldsis now affords 
a third source, beside the Polemos and the author’s autobiography, 
and it is interesting to disentangle the tissue of lies spun by Jose- 
phus in his own defence. 

As was seen by Prof. Laqueur, the nucleus of the Vita is merely 
an expansion of a report written by Josephus prior to his captivity 
(A.D. 66) for the benefit of the Government of Jerusalem. It is 
therefore in the main older than his presentation of the same 
materials in the Halésis (first edition, A.D. 72) and the Polemos. 
Through a comparison of his subsequent statements about the same 
facts, Laqueur has been able to show that he consciously mis- 
represented his own position in Galilee when he asserted that he 
had been sent there by the Government of Jerusalem as a general 
and commander-in-chief. The boldness of his lies can be easily 
seen from a comparison of the three different versions which are 
now accessible to the students. 

In the Polemos * he expressly states that he would rather have 
died than betray his ‘position of trust.’ In the Slavonic Halésis 3 
the ‘position of trust’ has been replaced by a mere ‘ power vested 
in him,’ which may mean his perfectly illegal power which he had 
managed to acquire in Galilee with the help of the insurgents, the 
so-called ‘robbers.’ In this version he still calls his adherents 
‘the people,’ whilst in the later Polemos—in fact, in all his later 
writings—he takes the viewpoint of the patrician and attributes all 
the evil to the mob. It is further of interest to note that in the 
Vita * he admits having received his commission from the “ κοινόν," 
the ‘commons’ of Jerusalem, a popular, probably revolutionary, 
body far less conservative than the Sanhedrin. In the Polemds 
he represents himself as one of the eight generals sent out by the 
‘dictators’ at Jerusalem ; but the Slavonic Halésis proves that 
at the time of the first edition of his work he did not even know the 
ordre de bataille of the war, nor does he mention there the im- 
portant fact that the high command in Jerusalem had passed from 
the high priest to the revolutionary leader of the zealots, ’Ele‘azar 
b. Shime‘on—for the sole purpose, of course, of making it appear as 
if he owed his office to the legitimate power. In the Vita 5 he was 


* The details are explained in vol. i, p. 262 of the German edition of this book. 
a0) 136; * Ber.-Grass, p. 370. 4 § 393, 5828; 


WHAT JOSEPHUS DID IN GALILEE 185 


afterwards compelled, by the exposures of Justus of Tiberias, to 
confess the truth by restoring the crucial passage of his old report: 


‘After the defeat of Cestius, the leading men in Jerusalem, 
observing that the brigands and revolutionaries were well provided 
with arms, feared lest, being without weapons themselves, they might 
be left at the mercy of their adversaries, as in fact actually happened. 
Being informed, moreover, that the whole of Galilee had not yet 
revolted from Rome, and that a portion of it was still tranquil, they 
despatched me with two other priests, Jo‘azar and Judas, very dis- 
tinguished men, to induce the disaffected to lay down their arms 
and to impress upon them the desirability of reserving these for the 
leading men of the nation. The latter—such was the policy deter- 
mined on—were to have their weapons constantly in readiness for 
future contingencies, but should wait and see what action the Romans 
would take.’ 


According to § 80 of the Life, Josephus was at that time about 
thirty years old, and was therefore much too young for the office of 
an ambassador, which, as the Greek term πρέσβυς or πρεσβευτής 
implies, was as a rule entrusted only to elderly worthy people. He 
was therefore clearly only an official, a secretary in attendance on 
Jo‘azar and Judas, but clever enough in his position to pursue 
his own schemes, to make himself gradually independent of his 
superiors, and to get them to return empty-handed to Jerusalem, 
while he contrived to create for himself a position of considerable 
power in Galilee. A careful comparison of the relevant passages 
in the Way! and in the Life? shows that this same pair were the 
leaders of a second embassy subsequently sent out from Jerusalem 
to render Josephus innocuous. 

What Josephus was to do in Galilee and what he actually did 
comes out clearly in the Haldsis. The alleged commission of the 
embassy to disarm the insurgents in Galilee was utterly imprac- 
ticable, as Josephus himself admits.? The envoys had of course 
received quite different instructions—to wit, with the help of tithes 
which they were to collect,* to recruit an armed force in Galilee 
and to conduct it to the high priest in Jerusalem, so that he might 
not be left defenceless against ’Ele‘azar Ὁ. Shime‘on and his troops. 
They further were to strengthen the power of the peaceful popula- 
tion and to recruit soldiers to hold the ‘ brigands,’ i.e. the anti- 
Roman zealots, in check. In this way the ‘ dictators’ in Jeru- 
salem, who had no army but disposed of the treasury of the 
Temple, hoped to keep the country at peace with Rome and them- 
selves in power. The temper of the Galilaean population and the 
relative strength of the parties were obviously not quite what the 
leaders of the embassy and those who had commissioned them had 


1 ii. 627 (cf. Haldsis, Ber.-Grass, p. 349). * § 196 sqq. 
5. Vita, ὃ 77. * [bid., §§ 63, 80. 


186 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


expected, and Josephus was cunning enough to turn this circum- 
stance to good purpose for his own plans. 

From his three contradictory accounts! it is not difficult to 
discover the truth, which for Josephus is gravely incriminating. 
During the negotiations the real deputies appear to have left him 
too free a hand, with the result that he transacted business on his 
own account with both the ‘ brigands’ and the peaceable and 
propertied notables of Galilee. He finally succeeded in duping his 
superiors and sending them home without having achieved any- 
thing of what they had been sent out for. He himself, however, 
induced the ‘ wisest’ of the Galilaeans to form an autonomous 
administration through a Sanhedrin of their own, consisting of 
seventy Galilaeans, and with the money accruing from the tithes 
due to the priests of Jerusalem to take the ‘ brigands’ into their 
own pay. Such an action of the thirty-year-old Josephus was 
clearly high treason and rebellion against the high priests of the 
metropolis. Naturally, he seeks to disguise these hard-and-fast 
facts by ‘ doctoring up’ his account in the Lz/e and presenting that, 
‘under the guise of friendliness,’ he had dragged with him about 
the country ‘some seventy’ (not precisely seventy, the exact 
number of a Sanhedrin !) of the Galilaean notables ‘as hostages.’ 
In the Haldsis he would represent these seventy members no 
longer as ᾿ hostages’ but as a purely judicial assembly, a supreme 
beth-din for the trial of cases of more than local importance. The 
people who in the Halosis are called the ‘ wisest’ (i.e. wise enough 
to enter into Josephus’ schemes), in the Way become ‘ persons of 
mature years and the greatest discretion,’ to create an impression 
that he had brought together the notables, the elderly local 
magnates, whereas in reality it was ‘the people,’ that is, small 
homines novi eager for adventure, upon whom he relied. With 
the help of these people and with the armed support of the insur- 
gents won over by him, he blackmailed the well-to-do, and on 
special ‘court days’ of his revolutionary tribunal exacted large 
fines for non-payment of tithes, opposition to the new authori- 
ties, and the like. Thus he got the means to pay the ‘ brigands ’ 
and the special bodyguard which was to protect his own precious 
person. 

Nor was he in any way the commander-in-chief of the troops 
thus recruited and paid. For in the Halés7s ? he lets escape the 
truth that they had another commander-in-chief ; he himself, of 
course, did not have the faintest notion of the elements of strategy, 
in spite of his assertions to the contrary. He even has to admit 
that he did not manage to arm his troops adequately and that he 
did not have the time to drill his men, important facts which 


1 Haldsis, ii. ὃ 569 sq., p. 388, Ber.-Grass ; Polemos, ii. 569; Vita, § 78 54. 
5. ὃ 576. 


JOSEPHUS AS FORTRESS-BUILDER 187 


explain the easy victory of the Roman troops, inferior in numbers 
though they were to the army of patriots. The final paragraph 
(584) is clearly intended to parry the accusation that he merely 
plundered the country with his armed rabble. 


JOSEPHUS AS FORTRESS-BUILDER 


The most instructive of the discrepancies between the Life, the 
Halosis, and the Way are afforded by the sections dealing with the 
fortifications of the country. There the vain braggart who pre- 
tends to be descended through his mother! from the Hasmonaeans 
clearly seeks to claim for himself the laurels of a second Simon 
Maccabaeus, In the Life (§ 188), i.e. in the old official report, he 
maintains that he fortified not only Tarichaea and Tiberias but 
also Sepphoris. In the Wary, in the middle of a list not altogether 
consistent with another given elsewhere, he admits that ‘only the 
Sepphorites were permitted by him to build their walls them- 
selves, because he had found them well off for money “ and eager 
for war. In the case of the other fortifications he not only gave 
the orders but personally assisted in the work.’ What this great 
Vauban really did may be seen from the case of Gamala, whose 
fortifications he insists that he strengthened, both according to 
the Haldsis and the War. In the Life (§ 186) he says that the 
people of Gamala had written to ask him for troops and workmen 
to repair the town walls, and that he had refused neither request. 
Evidently he ascribes to himself the fortification of all places with 
which he had corresponded on such matters or to which he occa- 
sionally granted some men out of ‘his’ army. The Way mentions 
a second place which was fortified by the orders, though not at the 
cost, of Josephus—to wit, Gischala, whose walls were built by John, 
a native of that place and a leader of a rebel volunteer corps. The 
story how this man raised the money for this patriotic purpose 
may now be read, with admiration, in three separate forms, all in 
Josephus. 


Vita, x. §§ 43-5. Halosis, §§ 585-8; Polemos, ii. 21, 
Berendts-Grass, §§ 585-502. 
Ρ. 340 546. 
‘Such was the posi- ‘ After that there rose “While Josephus was 


tion of affairs at Tiber- against Josephusaman _ thus directing affairs in 
ias; at Gischala the named John, son of Galilee, there appeared 
situation was as fol- Levi, a wily impostor, upon the scene an in- 


1 Vita, § 2. 
2 Vita, § 38, shows that the royal exchequer (βασιλικὴ τράπεζα) Of Agrippa was 
situated in Sepphoris ! 


188 


lows. John, son of 
Levi, observing 


distinguished and more 
treacherous than all 
others, strong in lies but 
for that reason not fam- 
ous. And foralong time 
his poverty kept him 
from wickedness. His 
tongue fed on lies, but 
his cleverness procured 
credence for his lies. 
He adorned himself 
with fraud better than 
with a garland, and as 
chief of hypocrites he 
did well. Therefore 
he not only cheated 
strangers but also 
(people) among his 
nearest and _ dearest. 
Bloodthirsty for pos- 
session’s sake, he was 
the more eager for war. 
For this purpose he 
gathered around him 
people of his type, re- 
bellious souls’ and 
bodies and_ thinking 
nothing of death. 


~ 


THE MESSIAH JESUS 


triguer, a native of 
Gischala, named John, 
son of Levi, the most 
unscrupulous and 
crafty of all who have 
ever gained notoriety 
by such infamous 
means. Poor at the 
opening of his career, 
his penury had for long 
thwarted his malicious 
designs; * a ready liar 
and clever in obtaining 
credit for his lies, he 
made a merit of deceit 
and practised it upon 
his most intimate 
friends; while affect- 
ing humanity, the pro- 
spect of lucre made him 
the most bloodthirsty 
of men ; always full of 
high ambitions, his 
hopes were fed on the 
basest of kmnaveries. 
For he was a brigand 
who at the outset prac- 
tised his trade alone, 
but afterwards found 
for his daring deeds ac- 
complices, whose num- 
bers, small at first, 
grew with his success. 
He owas, moreover, 
careful never to take 
into partnership any 
one likely to fall an 
easy prey to an assail- 
ant, but selected good, 
strapping fellows, with 
stout hearts and mili- 
tary experience. He 
ended by mustering a 
band of four hundred 
men, for the most part 
fugitives from the 
region of Tyre and the 
villages in that neigh- 
bourhood. With their 
help he plundered the 
whole of Galilee and 
harried the masses, 
whose minds were al- 


*—* Since the phrase after the second asterisk is a repetition of the sentence 
preceding the first one, it is clear that the character sketch between *—* is a later 


insertion. 


JOSEPHUS AND JOHN OF GISCHALA 189 


that some of the citi- 
zens were highly elated 
by the revolt from 
Rome, tried to restrain 
them and urged them 
to maintain their al- 
legiance. (45) His ear- 
nest efforts, however, 
proved unavailing ; for 
the inhabitants of the 
neighbouring _ states, 
Gadara, Gabara, So- 
gane, and Tyre, mus- 
tered a large force, 
stormed and took Gis- 
chala, burnt and razed 
it to the ground, and 
returned to their homes. 
Incensed at this out- 
rage, John armed all 
his followers, made a 
determined attack on 
the aforesaid peoples, 
and defeated them. He 
then rebuilt Gischala, 
on a grander scale than 
before, and fortified it 
with walls as a security 
for the future." 


δὲ 70-76. 


From ‘Tiberias 1 went 
with my colleagues to 
Gischala to meet John, 
whose attitude I desired 
to ascertain, I soon 
discovered that he was 
eager for revolution and 
ambitious of obtaining 
command; (71) for he 
requested me to auth- 
orise him to lay hands 


But when he saw 
that Josephus liked his 


ready distracted by 
the impending war. 

* He was already 
aspiring to the com- 
mand, and had yet 
higher ambitions, but 
was checked by im- 
pecuniosity. 


Perceiving that Jose- 
phus was delighted at 
his energy, John first 


1 In this account, then, there is no connexion as yet between the plundering 
of the grain stores, the oil transaction, and the building of the fortifications. 


190 


on the imperial corn 
stored in the villages of 
Upper Galilee, profess- 
ing a desire to expend 
the proceeds on the re- 
pair of the walls of his 
native town. (74) De- 
tecting his ultimate 
design and present in- 
tentions, I refused his 
request ; as the auth- 
ority entrusted to me 
by the Jerusalem auth- 
orities extended to that 
district, I intended to 
reserve the corn either 
for the Romans or for 


my own use. Unsuc- 
cessful with me, he 
turned to my _ col- 


leagues, who were blind 
to coming events and 
quite ready to receive 
money. These he 
bribed to vote that all 
the corn stored in his 
province should be de- 
livered to him. Un- 
Supported and _ out- 
voted by the other two, 
I held my peace. 

This knavish | trick 
John followed up with 
a second. He stated 
that the Jewish in- 
habitants of Caesarea 
Philippi, having, by 
the king’s order, been 
_ shut up by Modius, his 
viceroy, and having no 
pure oil for their per- 
sonal use, had sent a 
request to him to see 
that they were supplied 
with this commodity, 
lest they should be 
driven to violate their 
legal ordinances by re- 
sort to Grecian oil 
John’s motive in mak- 
ing this assertion was 
not piety, but profit- 
eering of the most 
barefaced description ; 


he asked him to be en- 
trusted with the con- 
struction of the city 
walls. And it (i.e. this 
work) yielded him con- 
siderable revenue. [or 
this reason, on account 
of the money, he took 
it up. 


And after that he 
came again to Joseph 
and said to him: ‘‘ The 
Jews living in Syria 
beware of buying oil 
from gentiles. Com- 
mand me to bring them 
(oil), and to sell it to 
them.” 


THE MESSIAH JESUS 


induced him to entrust 
him with the rebuilding 
of the walls of his 
native town, an under- 
taking in which he 
made a large profit at 
the expense of the 
wealthy citizens. 


He next contrived 
to play a very crafty 
trick : with the avowed 
object of protecting all 
the Jews of Syria from 
the use of oil not sup- 
plied by their own 
countrymen, he sought 
and obtained permis- 
sion to deliver it to 
them at the frontier. 


* Foreign oil was forbidden, according to one Talmudic authority, as likely to 
be tainted by unclean vessels (Thackeray). 


JOSEPHUS AND JOHN OF GISCHALA 


for he knew that at 
Caesarea two pints were 
sold for one drachm, 
whereas at Gischala 
eighty pints could be 
had for four drachms. 
So he sent off all the oil 
in the place, having 
ostensibly obtained my 
authority to do so. My 
permission I gave re- 
luctantly, from fear of 
being stoned by the 
mob if I withheld it. 
Thus, having gained 
my consent, John by 
his sharp practice made 
an enormous profit.’ 


And he commanded 
him. And buying four 
amphovae for one 
drachm, he sold them 
there for ten drachms. 
But no other was per- 
mitted to buy up in 
this way. 


And thereby he col- 
lected a large quantity 
of gold, turning it im- 
mediately against him 


ΤΟΙ 


He then bought up 
that commodity, pay- 
ing LTyrian coin of the 
value of four Attic 
drachms for four am- 
phovae, and proceeded 
to sell half an amphora 
at the same price. As 
Galilee 15 ἃ special 
home of the olive and 
the crop had _ been 
plentiful, John, enjoy- 
ing a monopoly, by 
sending large quanti- 
ties to districts in want 
of it, amassed an im- 


who had given him 
such power.’ 


mense sum of money, 
which he forthwith 
employed against the 
man who had brought 
him his gains.’ 

Krom the wording in the Ha/dsis, cancelled in the Wary, ‘and he 
(Josephus) bade him do so,’ it 1s clear that both of these worthies 
had a share in the transaction. One may wellask oneself whether 
Josephus was not the instigator of the whole dirty business. Any- 
how, too many people must have known about it to allow Josephus 
a diplomatic silence. In the War the whole matter has been 
visibly toned down, and in the reworking of the Life John is frankly 
said to have extorted Josephus’ permission with threats. As 
Prof. Laqueur recognized, §§ 43-5 of the Life (portions of the 
oldest part, of course) still show Josephus and John on good terms. 
Josephus’ later rage, which shows itself in the unfavourable char- 
acterization of John in the Way, a characterization borrowed from 
the picture of Catiline in Sallust,! is easily explained by the fact 
that in the scandalous transaction John got the whole booty and 
Josephus nothing. 

At all events, the three instances of Sepphoris, Gamala, and 
Gischala sufficiently show what was behind Josephus’ claim and 
what his fortifications looked like. Nor is one surprised to find the 
astonishingly long list of fortified places missing in the Halosts. 
He added them to his later work, no doubt to explain the dis- 
appearance of certain sums which he had taken ‘ into his safe- 
keeping.’ 


JOSEPHUS AS TRUSTEE 


The Life (§§ 69 sqq.) contains one highly edifying narrative of 
facts which Josephus could not well conceal, because his enemy 
1 This has been first noticed by Dr. Thackeray. 


192 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


Justus of Tiberias had been present. The story is preceded by an 
insidious attack on the leaders of his embassy, who, he says, had 
decided to return ‘ home’! with the money which they had col- 
lected from the tithes. Then he continues : 


‘But on my request they consented to stay until we had put 
matters in order. I accordingly set out with them from headquarters 
at Sepphoris and came to a village called Bethamaus, four furlongs 
distant from Tiberias, and from there sent to the council and principal 
men of that town, requesting them to come to me. They came, 
Justus being one ofthenumber. I told them that I and my associates 
had been commissioned by the Sanhedrin of Jerusalem to press for the 
demolition of the palace erected by Herod the tetrarch, containing 
representations of living creatures—such style of architecture being 
forbidden by the Law—and I requested their permission to proceed 
at once with the work. Capella and the other leaders for a long while 
refused this, but were finally overruled by us and assented. We 
were, however, anticipated by Jesus, son of Sapphias, the ringleader, 
as already stated, of a party of sailors and riff-raff. Helped by some 
Galilaeans, he set the whole palace on fire, expecting to obtain from it 
large spoils, as he saw that the roof was partly of gold. There was 
much looting, contrary to our intention. . . . On hearing of these 
proceedings I was extremely indignant, and went down to Tiberias 
and devoted my energies to recovering from the looters as much as I 
could of the palace furniture, namely, some candelabra of Corinthian 
bronze, regal tables, and a large mass of uncoined silver. I decided 
to keep all I had rescued in trust for the king, and accordingly sent 
ten of the principal councillors, with Capella, son of Antyllus, and 
left the property in their charge, with instructions to deliver it to 
none but myself.’ 


It is hardly necessary to add that the Sanhedrin at Jerusalem had 
other things to do at that time than to meddle with the palace of 
Agrippa I. because it contained a few telamones, caryatides, 
sphinxes, or suchlike architectural designs. Josephus simply lied. 
Acting on his own motion, he first incited the Galilaeans to destroy 
and plunder the palace, and was then deeply offended because 
Jesus ben Sapphias, the leader of the harbour mob, had been quick 
enough to secure for himself a large part of the spoils. During the 
looting, of course, Josephus was ‘ not on the spot’: he only ap- 
peared to ‘save what could be saved.’ What was collected he 
professes to have handed over to precisely those councillors, in- 
cluding Capella, who had opposed the destruction of the palace. 
The truth behind the story, no doubt, is that those councillors 
attempted to save something for King Agrippa. What is certain 
is that whatever fell into the author’s hands went the same way 


' Videl., to Jerusalem, where they were indeed in duty bound to go. But 
the word is meant to suggest that they intended to carry the money to their 
own houses, 


JOSEPHUS AS TRUSTEE 


£93 


as the spoils he admits elsewhere to have sent to his relations in 


Jerusalem (Life, § 81). 


Quite as diverting—if not more so—is the episode of the high- 


waymen of Dabherat, again available in three versions. 


Here 


Prof. Laqueur has been able, even without knowing the text of 
the Haldsis, to disentangle a large portion of this tissue of lies 


and brazen falsehoods. 


Vita, §§ 126-48. 


‘Some adventurous 
young men of Dabar- 
ittha lay in wait for the 
wife of Ptolemy, the 
king’s overseer. She 
was travelling in great 
state, protected by an 
escort of cavalry, from 
territory subject to the 
royal jurisdiction into 
the region of Roman 
dominion, when, as she 
was crossing the Great 
Plain, they suddenly 
fell upon the cavalcade, 
compelled the lady to 
flee, and plundered all 
her baggage. They 
then came to me at 
Tarichaea with four 
mules laden with ap- 
parel and other art- 
icles, besides a large 
pile of silver and five 
hundred pieces of gold. 
My own desire was to 
keep these spoils for 
Ptolemy, seeing that 
he was a compatriot 
and we are forbidden 
by our laws to rob even 
an enemy; to the 
bearers I said that the 
goods must be reserved 
for sale and the pro- 
ceeds devoted to the 
repair of the walls of 
Jerusalem. 


Halosis, it. §§ 595 sqq.: 
Berendts-Grass, p. 343. 


"And when at that 
time Ptolemy, the 
governor of Agrippa, 
passed by, coming from 
Debarittha, with royal 
property, 


the guards fell upon 
him in the Great Plain 


and took away all 
treasures and of costly 
garments 2000 and of 


silver vessels a thou- 
sand and of great golden 
vessels 600. And not 
daring to conceal what 
they had robbed, they 
brought the whole to 
Joseph at Tarichaea. 


But the latter re- 
proached them for 
having laid a violent 
hand on royal treasures, 
and deposited the whole 
with Aeneas, the most 
influential among the 
inhabitants of the town, 
having in mind to send 
it to the Temple when 
an occasion would pre- 
sent itself, 


Polemos, 11. §§ 595-8. 


“About this time 
some young men of the 
village of Dabarittha, 
units of the guard 
posted in the Great 
Plain, laid an ambush 
for Ptolemy, the over- 
seer of Agrippa and 
Berenice, and robbed 
him of all the baggage 
which he was convey- 
ing, including 


a large number of rich 
vestments, a quantity 
of silver goblets, and six 
hundred pieces of gold. 


Being unable to dis- 
pose secretly of such 
booty, they brought 
the whole to Josephus, 
then at Tarichaea. 


He censured them 
for this act of violence 
to servants of the king, 
and committed the 
goods to the keeping 
of Annaeus, the most 
important citizen of 
Tarichaea, intending 
to return them to their 
legitimate owners when 
an opportunity pre- 
sented itself, 


194 


Indignant at not re- 
ceiving their expected 
share of the spoils, the 
young men went to the 
villages around Tiber- 
ias, declaring that I in- 
tended to betray their 
country to the Romans. 
My assertion about 
keeping the outcome of 
their raid for the repair 
of the walls of the 
capital was, they said, 
a mere blind; I had 
really decided to re- 
store it to its owner. 
So far, indeed, they 
correctly interpreted 
my intention; for, 
when they left me, | 
sent for two of the 
leaders, Dassion and 
Jannaeus, son of Levi, 
who were _ special 
friends of the king, and 
ordered them to take 
the stolen goods and 
dispatch them to him, 
threatening them with 
capital punishment if 
they reported the 
matter to any one. 

A rumour had now 
spread throughout Gal- 
ilee that I was intend- 
ing to betray the coun- 
try to the Romans.... 


By this act of his he 
drew upon himself a 
great calamity. For 
those robbers, full of 
rage because they had 
not obtained a share in 
the booty, and under- 
standing well Josephus’ 
intention of sending 
the fruit of their labour 
to the king, 


at night ran into the 
villages, announcing 
that on account of 
these things he was a 
traitor.’ 


THE MESSIAH JESUS 


This action brought 
him into the greatest 
peril. For the plun- 
derers, indignant at re- 
ceiving no portion of 
the spoil, and divining 
the intention of Jose- 
phus to present the 
king and queen with 


the fruits of their 
labours, 

ran round the vil- 
lages by night, de- 


nouncing Josephus to 
all as a traitor.’ 


A brief commentary on the passages just cited and their true 
import for a correct grasp of the character of the man Josephus 
will prove helpful to the reader. 

In the Vzta the robbery is committed by a few anonymous 


νεανίσκοι θρασεῖς, Which Prof. Laqueur interprets to mean 
‘courageous young fellows.’ In the Polemos they are νεανίσκοι 
τινὲς τῶν ἐν TO μεγάλῳ πεδίῳ καθεζομένων φυλάκων ; and in the 
Haldsis they are the ‘ guards of the great plain,’ i.e. the plain of 
Esdraelon—that is to say, members of the garrison, and not simply 
some volunteers. In the oldest account the victim is the wife of 
the royal administrator Ptolemy, accompanied by a small escort. 
The exploit, then, was decidedly secondary. The whole booty con- 
sisted of the burden of four mules with considerable baggage, and 
the valuables carried by a noble lady who evidently did not feel 


JOSEPHUS AND THE JERUSALEM FORTIFICATIONS Τοῦ 


comfortable in the territory controlled by the rebels and was 
anxious to go over to the districts occupied by the Romans. 

The Halosis grotesquely exaggerates the incident, making of it 
a matter of political importance. The victim is the royal adminis- 
trator himself, and the booty the property of King Agrippa II. 

In the Polemos, Ptolemy is an official not only of the king but 
also of the queen, Berenice—evidently to explain thus the large 
number of costly garments. For in the Halésis the four mules’ 
burdens have become 2000 garments, more than sufficient to 
supply a monster circus show. One can imagine what a caravan 
would have been necessary for the transporting of the garments, 
to say nothing of the silver and gold vessels mentioned in addition. 

Even more instructive is a comparison of the texts relating the 
good intentions of Josephus in regard to the booty delivered to 
him. In the Vida he wants to sell it and to use the money for the 
strengthening of the city walls of Jerusalem. Though away in 
Galilee, this great Jewish Vauban thinks even of the fortification of 
far-off Jerusalem. In the Haldsis he declares more diplomatically 
that he intended to send the treasure to Jerusalem, to the Temple, 
ona suitable occasion. That might mean that he wished to deliver 
it to the treasury of the Temple and the hierarchy, or else that he 
merely wanted it to be kept in the Temple for the rightful owner, 
i.e. Agrippa. In reality the gold pieces were to go to Jerusalem 
to be handed over to the kinsmen of our great patriot, and no 
doubt ultimately went that way. The precious objects, which 
he could of course no more get rid of than could the robbers, 
he cleverly gave in trust, according to the Vita, to Dassion and 
Jannaios; according to the Halésts and the Polemos, only to Aineias 
(=Jannai); according to the Vita, with the injunction to return 
them discreetly to the king. Thus, if the package did not arrive 
safely, the blame would clearly lie with either one or both. The 
disinterested Josephus, of course, did not even think of appropriat- 
ing anything for himself. 

Very important is the mention of a rumour according to which 
he was in communication with the Romans, a mention occasioned, 
no doubt, by some more or less definite accusation by Justus of 
Tiberias. That the rumour was not without foundation is proved 
by at least three facts—to wit, the very good treatment accorded to 
him by the Romans after he had gone over to them; the admission 
of Josephus in Polemos, iii. 8. 2, that he was in communication 
with the tribune Nikanor, his ‘old acquaintance’; and the extra- 
ordinary ease with which he managed to keep in touch with Jeru- 
salem, though himself in Galilee, through Samaria,! all the time 
occupied by the Romans. The letters he gave his armed hench- 
men, and which were addressed to his ‘friends in Samaria,’ can 

1 Vita, §§ 286 sq. 


196 ὁ τ ‘THE MESSIAH JESUS 


hardly have been directed to any one else than Roman intelligence 
officers (speculatores). It is quite clear, moreover, that the party 
of the high priests at Jerusalem, averse as they were to an open 
break with Rome, must have kept in touch with the Romans as 
long as it was at all possible, and Josephus’ Koman connexions no 
doubt date from the period of his first diplomatic mission to 
Galilee. However that may be, the numerous contradictions 
between the three reports! about the consequences of the affair 
with the highwaymen of Dabarittha are evident. In one account 
all his guardsmen forsake him except four; in another there is 
only one left to him. In one all his ‘friends’ bid him flee; 1n 
another his last stand-by, Simon, will persuade him to commit 
suicide. In one he tears his garment, according to Jewish custom; 
in another he puts on a black garment in sign of mourning, as 
the pagans do, to stir his opponents to pity. The treasure he 
left with Jannai or with both Jannai and Dassion he still has, 
according to ii. § 602, in his own house, and is willing to give it up 
for general pillage (ii. § 607). That same treasure, delivered to his 
friends to be kept for the king, is then to be used for the fortifica- 
tions of Tarichaea and ‘ all other cities.’ In one account it was a 
detachment of. ten people that was enticed into Josephus’ house, 
there to be drubbed by his slaves; in another it was only a single 
man (Vita, ὃ 147), ‘ the boldest of them all,’ etc. 

In short, it is the typical spectacle of the swindler giving three 
different accounts to the police, to the prosecuting attorney, and 
at the trial. 


JOSEPHUS AS A TACTICIAN 


Among the passages representing later efiorts on the part of 
our author to defend himself against his opponents’ attacks, must 
be reckoned one in the third book of the Way (§§ 129-31), which is 
significantly absent from the Slavonic version. The Greek text 
relates how Vespasian drew out his army to frighten the Jews, while 
he made preparations for the siege of the fortified places. The 
sight of the Roman army did indeed not fail in its purpose. Then 
follow the taking of Gabara, one of the three chief cities of Galilee, 
completely forsaken by its garrison; the destruction of the city ; 
and the devastation of the outlying districts. Next we read: 
‘Josephus’ arrival at Tiberias, which he had chosen for his place 
of refuge, filled the city with alarm, for the Tiberians felt that he 
would never have fled had he not abandoned all hope of success 
in the contest.’ The original narrative (absent in the Slavonic) 
thus passed over in silence the fact that the great ‘general’ 
Josephus, instead of protecting Gabara, had abandoned it to 


1 Halésis, Ber.-Gr., p. 347, and Polemios, ii, 600 sq.; Vita, ὃ 145 55. 


JOSEPHUS IN THE BATTLE OF GARTS 197 


Vespasian. One can only surmise what Justus of Tiberias in his 
narrative of the war may have said about this glorious episode. 

The lame excuse offered by Josephus is found in §§ 120-31. 
The‘ general ’ endeavours to shift the blame on to his troops. This 
is What he says: 


‘The troops which under the command of Josephus were camping 
not far from Sepphoris, discovering that the war was upon them, 
and that at any moment they might be attacked by the Romans, 
dispersed and fled, not only before any engagement, but before they 
had even seen the foe. Josephus was left with a few companions ; 
he saw that he had not sufficient forces to await the enemy, that the 
Jews were crestfallen, and that the majority of them, if they could 
gain the enemy’s confidence, would gladly capitulate. Already he 
had fears for the ultimate issue of the war; for the moment he 
decided to remove as far as possible from risk of a battle, and accord- 
ingly with the remainder of his troops took refuge in Tiberias.’ 


In place of these edifying words we find in the Haldsis a shorter and 
more confused account : 


‘And when the Galilaeans had seen them (the Romans), they 
were all terrified, and many began to feel remorse. ‘Those round 
Josephus, before (having) a glimpse (of the enemy), fled and dispersed 
with Josephus to Tiberias.’ 


From the whole arrangement of the text it follows that our author 
originally intended to suppress the unsuccessful attack on Sep- 
phoris, which had gone over to the Romans, and all that hap- 
pened at Garis. The postscripts (B./., 111. §§ 59 sgg. and 129-31) 
contain the most unavoidable and most necessary admissions 
which he saw himself forced to make. In the Lz/e (§ 397) he still 
speaks of a ‘ stubborn resistance ’ near Garis ; in the postscript to 
the Wary (iii. ὃ 130) he admits that his men deserted him at Garis 
before any engagement and even before having caught a glimpse of 
the enemy. It is clear that the ‘ general’ (and in this he does not 
stand alone in history) ascribes the successes to himself, whilst the 
troops must shoulder the responsibility for the defeats. He also 
passes over in silence the encounter at Tarichaea, mentioned in the 
Life (§ 74), which was certainly no victory either, since it forced 
him to beat a retreat to Jotapata, a retreat which thus remains 
unexplained in the War. 

A considerable number of sections absent from the Haldsvs in 
the story of the siege of Jotapata are clearly later rhetorical em- 
bellishments. Conversely, palpable exaggerations of the earlier 
version are toned down in the Way, though even what remains is 
ludicrous enough. For example, two men of Ruma,' who in the 


1 One of them and his fabulous exploits are mentioned also in the Talmud 
Gillin, 578. 


198 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


Haldsis ‘annihilated the whole of the tenth legion,’ are in the 
Polemos content with ‘ routing all whom they encountered ’ (iil. 
§ 233). A list of such divergencies would be highly amusing, but 
I cannot quote them all within the available space. One truly 
marvellous detail, however, may be mentioned. In the Haldsvs 
(iii. § 271), Josephus, at a critical moment of the siege, has molten 
lead poured upon the besiegers, whereby ‘many were burnt’ and 
general confusion was created. If one remembers that a single 
quart of lead weighs more than twenty-two pounds, that no lead 
is found in Palestine and must therefore have been proportionately 
dear, and, lastly, that Jotapata can have had neither leaden water- 
pipes laid on to the houses nor leaden gutters, it is inconceivable 
that even ten quarts of lead could have been collected in the whole 
town. Accordingly, in the War, Josephus has altered this fanciful 
idea of ‘ molten lead’ into ‘ boiling oil.’ This age-old stratagem 
of all ancient siege defences he then claims as his own invention, 
just as in a preceding passage (§ 172 sq.) he speaks of the ox-hide 
screens to ward off missiles as a discovery of his own. On the 
principle propounded in his preface that the prestige of the Roman 
generals can only be enhanced by recognition of their opponents’ 
valour, he proceeds, in his later edition, to enlarge on the wonderful 
effects of this “invention ’ of his (§ 274: ‘ for the oil instantane- 
ously penetrated beneath their armour from head to foot,’ etc.), 
and adds as a second stratagem the pouring of boiled fenugreek 
over the scaling-ladders to make them slippery. He represents the 
repulse of the assault by all these alleged expedients as a battle of 
his own, and appends the precise date (the 20th of Daesius). For 
the purpose of the later edition he has clearly perused the emperor’s 
journal, and, combining its precise data with the master-stroke of 
his first draft, to wit, the boiled fenugreek, and with some descrip- 
tive touches about the terrible effects of the seething oil, formed a 
new chapter. 


JOSEPHUS’ CAPTURE 


One of the most repulsive parts of the whole Historia Josepht 
captivt is the eighth chapter of the third book—the story of how, 
after the capture of Jotapata, he held himself concealed, with other 
comrades-in-arms and notables of the town, in a cistern, and how 
he managed his desertion to the enemy’s ranks with great clever- 
ness against the desperate resistance of his companions in mis- 
fortune. Even more disgusting is his comedy of a God-inspired 
prophet in favour of Vespasian, all the more so if we remember 


1 This would hardly strike Josephus’ Jewish readers as an overstatement, 
since they were accustomed to recite from the Scriptures (Deut. xxxii. 36) : 
‘Behold, one of us pursueth a thousand of the heathen and two of us make ten 
thousand to Hee.’ 


JOSEPHUS CHEATING HIS WAR COMRADES _ 199 


that, to him, the priest and son of a priest, such things must have 
appeared as little less than blasphemy. The whole passage is well 
worth quoting. 


‘But as Nicanor’ (the Roman tribune known to him—how and 
since when, he is careful not to say) ‘was urgently pressing his pro- 
posals and Josephus overheard the threats of the hostile crowd, there 
came back into his mind those nightly dreams in which God had 
foretold to him the impending fate of the Jews and the destinies of 
the Roman sovereigns. Being an interpreter of dreams and skilled 
in divining the meaning of ambiguous utterances of the Deity, a 
priest himself and a descendant of priests, he was not ignorant of the 
prophecies in the sacred books. At that hour he was inspired to read 
their meaning, and, recalling the dreadful images of his recent dreams, 
he offered up a silent prayer to God. ‘‘ Since it pleases thee,” so it 
ran, ‘‘ who didst create the Jewish nation, to break thy work, since 
fortune has wholly passed to the Romans, and since thou hast chosen 
my spirit to announce the things that are to come, I willingly sur- 
render to the Romans and consent to live ; but I take thee to witness 
that I go, not as a traitor, but as thy minister.” With these words 
he was about to surrender to Nicanor.’ 


But his companions, who had resolved upon death, would not let 
him go, and said to him, ‘If you meet death willingly, you shall 
die as general1 of the Jews; if unwillingly, you fall a traitor.’ 
‘ With these words they pointed their swords at him and threatened 
to kill him if he surrendered to the Romans. Josephus, fearing an 
assault, yet holding that it would be a betrayal of God's command 
should he die before delivering his message, proceeded in this 
emergency to reason with them.’ Failing to move them, he 
pretends to acquiesce in their plan, but advises them to draw lots 
to determine in what order they are to kill themselves: ‘ Let him 
who draws the first lot fall by the hand of him who comes next.’ 

At this point, however, the texts significantly diverge. In the 
Greek we have the unctuous statement : ‘ But he (should one say 
by fortune or by the providence of God) was left alone with one 
other; and anxious neither to be condemned by the lot nor, 
should he be left to the last, to stain his hand with the blood of a 
fellow-countryman, he persuaded this man also, under a pledge, 
to remain alive.’ In the Slavonic, on the other hand, he admits 
with cynical candour to having assisted the luck of the lot: ‘he 
cunningly counted the numbers * and so misled them all.’ This 
juggling with the lots, in such circumstances, evidently was not 
sufficiently admired by the more decent of his readers, since he 


1 About this doubtful generalship, see above, p. 186 n. 2. 
2 The process hinted at is evidently the rabbinic tahbula explained by Abraham 
ibn Ezra (M. Steinschneider, ‘Abraham ibn Ezra,’ Gesch. d. mathem. Wiss, 1. 12. 


Jahrh., p. 123 54., § 20, 4). 


200 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


found himself compelled, in his later edition, to retract his 
original compromising candour. 

The underlying ‘philosophy’ of the good man can be gauged 
from another significant correction in the first book. In ὃ 140, 
speaking of Aristobulus, he says that he had promised great 
presents and his submission ; but he did not promise the carrying 
out thereof—which important circumstance sufficed to make him 
break his promise. Here again the clever casuistry implied by 
this noble priest and priest’s son does not seem to have been 
appreciated by a number of his readers, and accordingly in the 
Greek Polemos we merely read the simpler admission that Aristo- 
bulus broke his promise, 


X 


THE DOCUMENTARY BASES OF THE ADDITIONS TO 
THE GREEK ‘POLEMOS.” THE IMPERIAL ‘COM- 
MENTARIES’ AS A SOURCE OF JOSEPHUS 


VER since Isaac Abravanel (1437-1508)—long before the 

Slavonic version acquainted the learned world with some- 

thing very near the earliest draft of Josephus’ Jewish 
history—the truthfulness of this remarkable author has been 
seriously doubted by all those who had more thoroughly studied 
his various books. Thus it will not surprise any one to find Jose- 
phus finally discredited through the comparisons made possible 
by the Slavonic version. An author of this type would certainly 
not deserve our attention were it not for two reasons: the first 
being the lamentable fact that for the most important events of 
the period treated by him we have no other source at all; the 
second, more important, reason being the fact that we can show 
now—more thoroughly than ever before—that Josephus, however 
untrustworthy he may be himself, has had access to, and has made 
extensive use of, first-hand official source-material, chiefly the 
diaries and correspondence copybooks of the Roman Caesars in 
the archives of the imperial palace. 

An instructive case of this kind occurs in B./., it. το. 9 (§§ 522- 
31), this whole section being missing in the Slavonic version. 
The facts are the following. Vespasian surrounds the town of 
Tarichaea, and has rafts constructed to start in pursuit of the 
fugitives who had escaped on the lake. This ended that part of 
the narrative in the Greek original of the Slavonic text, for what 
follows in the latter is a rather sentimental description of the lake of 
Gennesareth. But in the Greek Polemos there follows a detailed 
account of the naval victory of Vespasian’s flotilla over the small 
craft of the Tarichaean fugitives. The fact evidently is that the 
account followed by Josephus in his first redaction had centred 
about Titus, whilst the second source was designed to extol the 
merits of Vespasian. Probably Josephus, who had for some time 
followed the official ‘commentaries’ of Titus, had noticed later on 
that the journal of the campaign at this particular juncture in- 
dicated an engagement of greater magnitude subsequent to the 


arrival on the scene of the commander-in-chief. As a docile 
20] 


202 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


courtier he naturally took the hint and hastened to make good his 
first oversight. There can be no question that we are dealing here 
with additions to the Greek original and not with abridgments on 
the part of the Slavonic translator. 

Another interesting case is furnished by the second book, §§ 15- 
19, 21-23, 40-66, 68-72, 73-74, all omitted in the Slavonic text, 
‘yet in such a manner that without a knowledge of the Greek text 
one would not suspect the slightest gap.’! The portions in ques- 
tion contain a good account of the disturbances in Judaea caused 
by Sabinus, the agent of Augustus, and quelled with great blood- 
shed by Varus. The Greek original of the Slavonic version, 1.6. 
the older redaction of Josephus, knew nothing about the causes of 
the rebellion and the avarice and lack of tact of Sabinus. Our 
author merely says that the Jews did not want to live under 
Roman rule,” whilst a few lines previously 5 he had stated precisely 
the contrary—that is, the Jews did not so much object to the 
Romans as to their tyrants of the Herodian dynasty—and whilst 
a few lines further on he reports the arrival of fifty Jewish notables 
at Rome, petitioning Augustus to send them a Roman governor 
and speaking with abuse of their own king. It is clear that Jose- 
phus at first did not know anything about the real causes of the 
rebellion ; as soon as he learned more details he set to work and 
rewrote his account. Assources he utilized, on his own confession,°® 
the official reports of Sabinus and Varus, mutually contradictory 
though they are. No doubt he obtained these documents, the 
original letters of the two officials, in the imperial house archives, ® 
both Vespasian and Titus having given special orders’ to place 
the relevant material at the disposal of their court historiographer. 
Josephus must have been all the more glad to obtain this material 
because at precisely this point the history of Nicolaus of Damascus, 
whom he had followed all along, broke off. It is well known to 
students of the Koman methods of political administration that 
letters addressed to the emperor and drafts of the replies were 
pasted together by the imperial secretary (scriniarius ab epistults) ὃ 
in large rolls and preserved in round wooden boxes.’ Pliny,!® a 
younger contemporary of Josephus, writes to Trajan enquiring 
after the authentic originals of edicts of Augustus, Vespasian, and 
Titus, and the emperor replies™ that the edicts of Domitian in- 


+ Berendts in Ber.-Grass, p. 240,. What is wanting here is not to be found 
either in the Latin Egesippus, in the Hebrew J OSE ων, or in the Arab Jusifus. 


“ Ber.-Grass, p. 240, § 30. ., § 22, p. 235. 
ὁ Ibid., p. 241, ὃ 80 (altered i in the Greek een 
δ ΤΣ, $822) 25, 30; 8 See below, pp. 613 f. App. XVI. 


’ The regular ‘ potestas inspiciendi describendique commentarios principis’ 
(Max Memelsdortf, De archivis imperatorum, Diss. Hall, 1890, p. 50 n. 5). 
O'CULL., & 527 = Dessau, 1671, 
® The ‘ scrinia ’ (Plin., N.H., xvi. 229; Jo. Lyd., De mag., iii. 35). 
10 Ad Trajanum, Ixv. 3. 11. xvi, τὶ 


OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS USED BY JOSEPHUS 203 


dicated had been found. In the same way the petitions addressed 
to the emperors were filed by the scviniarius a ltbellis or custos a 
libellis. Further, protocols of transactions at audiences (admts- 
siones) granted by the emperors, and, in particular, transactions 
with embassies, would be drawn up by the secretary ab efistutlis 
and duly filed. Copious extracts from such records referring to the 
reign of Hadrian have been transmitted to us by the grammarian 
Dositheos.! It goes without saying that the material in question 
was of the utmost value for every historian of the period, a fact 
which was well known and duly acted upon. For example, a 
letter of the younger Pliny 5 addressed to Cn. Octavius Titinius 
Capito, the procurator ab epistulis under Domitian,? Nerva, and 
Trajan, requests a selection of the proper materials for a basis of 
the history which he has been asked to write. Josephus’ quoting 
of the petition handed to the emperor by the representative of 
Herod Antipas,‘ the testament of Herod the Great presented by 
Archelaus,® the speeches in the negotiations of Augustus with the 
Herodians,® a letter of Varus, and finally several letters of both 
Varus and Sabinus, makes it perfectly clear, I should think, that 
he utilized precisely such official sources. If, on the other hand— 
and Dr. G. Hdlscher has tried to prove it—the history of Nicolaus 
of Damascus went as far as the installation of Archelaus by 
Augustus, the essential correctness of the above observations is in 
no way diminished. For Nicolaus, the friend of Augustus and 
living moreover in Rome, had as easy access to those same 
documents in the correspondence-files of the emperors (commentari 
principis) as Josephus was to have later on, under the Flavian 
dynasty. It is even probable that Josephus got the first hint on 
the usefulness of such material from his greater predecessor, and 
that he merely followed in his wake. 
Upon a closer examination of the portion lying between the 
end of Nicolaus’ work and the beginning of his own notes, not 
much prior to A.D. 66-7, one cannot help being struck by the. 
obviously official nature of the material. The history of the false 
Alexander, culminating in an account of the audience of the 
pretender with the emperor, carefully prepared by one Celadus, 
obviously the imperial private secretary ; the complaints of both 
Jews and Samaritans against Archelaus; the latter's banishment 
to Vienna (in Gaul) ; and the confiscation of his private fortune—all 


1 Divi Hadviani sententiae et epistulae, ed. Boecking (Corp. Jur, Antetustin., 
i. 210 ff., §§ 2, 4, 5, 7, 8, ΤΟ 14. 

3 ED., Vid, 12. 3 C.E.L.,.708: 

© Bf, 1823. 5 Tbid., ii. 26. 

6 According to Hal., ii. § 25, Tiberius, according to B./., il. § 25, the young 
Caligula, assisting for the first time at such a sitting, was present as assessor. 
Where else but in the document itself could Josephus find such absolutely un- 
essential details mentioned with scrupulous exactitude ? 


204 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


doubtless go back to extracts culled from the commentarit princi pis. 
The dream episodes connected with this history have, of course, a 
different source, which will be discussed later on in the chapter on 
John the Baptist. Then follows the account of the transformation 
of Archelaus’ territory into a Roman province, on the basis of an 
imperial decree, as may be concluded from the obiter dictum that 
Coponius obtained power over life and death (cus vitae necisque), 
and thus even on this point was quite independent of the governor 
of Syria, a statement which has no bearing whatever on what 
Josephus tells us in these chapters. The subsequent mention of 
the uprising of the Jews who refused to pay the tribute appears to 
have no other source than either the commentarii principis or else 
the reports of the Roman administrative and financial authorities 
located in the so-called Aevarium Saturni. What Josephus has 
next to say about the three Jewish ‘ philosophical schools’ is prob- 
ably his own property, except the long chapter on the Essenes, 
which he probably copied from a lost book of Philo ‘ on active life 
or on the Essenes,’ acquired, it may be, during his brief stay in Alex- 
andria.1_ Then follows the testament of Salome in favour of Livia, 
the wife of Augustus, a copy of which must have existed in the 
imperial chancellery. The tumults in Pilate’s administration no 
doubt go back to the governor’s reports to Tiberius, later incor- 
porated in the acta et commentarii Tiberii Caesavis—the only 
literature that the Emperor Domitian, the third of Josephus’ 
patrons, ever read.” The transactions reported of the last years 
of Tiberius and the short reign of Caligula show the same official 
stamp. 

Thus in § 5 we meet with the complaint of Agrippa, the son of 
Aristobulus, against the tetrarch Herod, as presented to Tiberius. 
There follow short excerpts of a denunciation, before Tiberius, of 
a Slave of Caligula concerning a treasonable utterance of Agrippa 
(I.) on the occasion of a banquet at Caligula’s house. The exact 
date of Tiberius’s death is given according to the commentarit of 
thisemperor. There follow the liberation of Agrippa by Caligula, 
according to an official entry; the document naming Agrippa 
tetrarch in place of the deceased Philip, taken from the commentarii 
of Caligula ; again, statements drawn from the protocols regarding 
an audience of the tetrarch Herod and his wife Herodias with 
Caligula ; his petition to be granted the title of king; the accusation 
of Agrippa against Herod, submitted by him personally, and the 
banishment of Herod; the appointment of Agrippa to be adminis- 
trator of Herod’s tetrarchy. Chapter x. is based upon the official 
reports of Petronius to Caligula and the latter’s replies. The 


+ Με, δ΄ 75. 
* Sueton., Vita Domitiani, xx.: ‘ praeter commentarios et acta Tiberii Caesaris 
nihil lectitabat.’ Cf. Sueton., Tiberius, Lxi. 1. 


OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS USED BY JOSEPHUS 205 


statement of Petronius to the effect that he received the official 
letter about the death of Caligula exactly twenty-seven days 
before the last official letter of that emperor, in consequence of 
-severe tempests at sea, can come only from an official letter of the 
governor to Claudius, i.e. from the commentartt of Claudius. The 
absolutely exact date of Caligula’s death at the beginning of 
chapter xi. can be derived only from the official record of the 
conumentarit. What follow are excerpts from the acta senatus, 
derived, like the whole chapter, from notes of Agrippa II. given by 
the latter to Josephus so that he might discreetly stress the merits 
of Agrippa’s father with Claudius. In § 5 we have a document 
concerning the grant by Claudius to Agrippa, not only in excerpt, 
but even its duplicate in the form of a proclamation addressed to 
the people and another to the senate, to which must be added 
the placing of a bronze tablet in the state archive in the Capitol. 
§ 217 is wanting in the Haldsis, which means that Josephus, at a 
later date, appended to the excerpts he received from Agrippa I1., 
and which concern Agrippa I., those concerning the grant of the 
kingdom of Chalcis to Herod, the brother of Agrippa. The trans- 
actions between Claudius and Agrippa have a decidedly official 
source, as may be judged from the numerous quotations of official 
acts. In the section dealing with the attempted construction of 
the wall by Agrippa 1., a work which was never completed, Jose- 
phus mentions his source neither in the Haldsis nor in the War, 
and for a very good reason. From the parallel account in the 
Antiquities,! it follows that Claudius, warned by the governor of 
Syria, C. Vibius Marsus, had prohibited the continuation of the 
work by a very brusque decree. Evidently the king was not free 
from the suspicion of wanting, on a favourable occasion, to break 
loose from the Romans, and such a fact would fit in badly with 
Josephus’ favourite thesis concerning the absolute loyalty of the 
Jewish princes and notables and the sole guilt of the common 
people and its ‘tyrants,’ 1.6. the Zealots. Only in the second 
edition of the Andiquities and after the death of Agrippa 11. did he 
dare to let the cat out of the bag. Yet there is no reason to doubt 
that he had known the facts from the beginning, thanks to the 
documents at his disposal. 


Tue Errors ΟΕ JOSEPHUS ON THE BirtH AND PARENTAGE 
OF HIS PATRON, AGRIPPA IH, 


It is characteristic of the dependence of Josephus upon the 
extracts from documents he happened to have, and his extremely 
scanty knowledge concerning the events of his early childhood, 


1 xix. 7.2. 


206 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


that the Halosts (ii. § 220) asserts that King Agrippa I. died without 
leaving a son, whilst a few pages later (§ 247) he says, in accord- 
ance with the statements of the Greek Polemos, that Claudius gave 
the territory not included in the Roman province to Agrippa the 
son of Agrippa. Such a flagrant contradiction would be unthink- 
able if the work had been done with even a reasonable amount of 
care. All he had to say in the first of the two passages was simply 
that Agrippa I. died without leaving a grown-up son. Incon- 
sistencies such as the one just quoted (and their number might be 
multiplied) simply show that Josephus relied entirely, for this 
period, on documents and extracts from documents which were 
placed at his disposal or which he had had made for himself. As 
a matter of fact, the blunder just referred to may have been 
the consequence of a misinterpretation of some document with 
an intentionally vague wording, as if it read, for example, 
‘since King Herod Agrippa has left no son who might succeed 
him in his tetrarchy.’ Josephus, having no other informa- 
tion on the subject, would then infer that it meant Agrippa’s 
having died childless, when it meant only that he had left a 
minor son to whom the government could not very well be 
entrusted. 

The blunder is all the more flagrant because the Agrippa in 
question (whose existence is thus denied in the first passage) was 
-none other than Josephus’ own patron. But if the reader should 
feel tempted to conjecture that Josephus could not very well have 
committed such a blunder, here is another, coming not from 
the Slavonic text but from the Greek Polemos, i.e. the revised 
version. Agrippa, in the year A.D. 73, was in reality forty-six 
years old. If, as Josephus states in the second of the passages just 
referred to, he was at the death of his father only a ‘ very small 
child,’ a ‘baby’ (παντάπασιν νήπιος), he could have been in 
A.D. 73 only thirty years old at the most. A look at the face of 
his royal patron should have sufficed to correct the statement; yet 
when even in such a matter our author commits an error of such 
magnitude, one may well believe that he did worse in statements 
which could not be checked quite so easily. As a matter of 
fact, the blunder admits of an explanation, though not of an excuse. 
Agrippa II. had first been given by Claudius the kingdom of Chalcis, 
and only later on Judaea. Since his predecessor in Chalcis, Herod 
the brother of Agrippa 1., had a grandson called Agrippa, Josephus 
may well have inferred that M. Julius Agrippa 11. was this grandson 
of Herod and thus grand-nephew of King Agrippa 1. There is 
still another possibility. Weare told in the Polemos (ii. § 220) that 
Agrippa I. ° left issue by his wife Cypros three daughters, Berenice, 
Mariamne, and Drusilla, and one son, Agrippa. Since the last was 
a minor, Claudius again reduced the kingdom to a province and 


JOSEPHUS ABOUT HIS PATRON AGRIPPA II. 207 


sent Cuspius Fadus as governor,’ etc. Anignorant collaborator, or 
even Josephus himself, might very well have referred the words 
‘and a son by the same’ (υἱὸν δὲ ἐκ τῆς αὐτῆς, in the Aramaic 
original wminnah bar had), not, as he should have done, to Cypros 
the wife of Agrippa, but to his daughter Drusilla, whose name im- 
mediately preceded. Agrippa: 11. would then really have been a 
grandson of Agrippa 1. But, as is well known, in Hebrew and 
Aramaic the same word (ben or bav) may mean either ‘son’ or 
‘grandson,’ just as the word ’abh may be either ‘father’ or 
‘grandfather.’ This false interpretation may in addition have been 
supported by the fact that, at the time of Josephus’ writing, such 
a grandson of Agrippa I., a sonof Drusilla,’ was still alive ; 1t was 
Agrippa, son of the governor Felix and of Drusilla, who perished 
in the eruption of Mt. Vesuviusin A.D. 79. Our author may there- 
fore have thought his patron Agrippa 11. either the grand-nephew 
or the grandson of Agrippa 1. ; but the matter certainly does not 
speak well for his store of knowledge or for the efforts made by 
him to secure exact information.? It is these very mistakes and 
their insufficient correction in the earliest copies of his works 
which show that he did not compose his history of the Roman 
governors of Judaea (A.D. 44-66) from memory or after oral tradi- 
tion, but that on the contrary he used extracts from documents and 
followed them so mechanically and closely that to his whole com- 
pilation one may apply the Roman lawyer’s slogan, ᾿ Quod non 
est in actis, non est in mundo.’ 

So much for the facts. In the matter of the judgments, they 
are, of course, his own; but this only makes matters worse, for 
one can surmise how he may have distorted his sources in the 
service of his ‘cause,’ to make them say what they never meant, or 
ruthlessly to suppress their true meaning when it did not suit him.® 
This result, I might add, is in absolute harmony with the conclu- 
sions of Prof. Laqueur,* who after an analysis of the Antiquities 
proved that the documents there quoted were actually collected 
by Josephus himself or by his collaborators, and that he did not 
take them over from a previous writer. He lived in Rome; the 


1 A pedigree of the Herodian family is found in most editions of Josephus, e.g. 
in Dr. Thackeray’s translation, in Cheyne’s Encycl. Bibl., c. 2041 54., and in all 
similar works. 

2 Those who—because of this blunder—want to attribute the whole important 
chapter which contains the precious lines about the ‘helpers of the wonder-worker ’ 
Jesus to a late ignorant interpolator, would do well to remember that no less a 
historian than Tacitus (Azn., xii. 33) confused Herod of Chalcis and Agrippa 1. 
(see Ed. Meyer, Ursprung und Anfange ὦ. Christentums, vol. 111., Stutt., 1923, p. 43). 
I have not heard of any competent critic, because of this gross error, attributing the 
chapter in question to the pen of a mediaeval copyist | 

3 Th. Zielinski, Rev. de l’Univ. de Bruxelles, 1926-7, p. 4 sqg., has shown what 
use Josephus has made of the imperial documents about the conflict between Jews 
and Greeks in Alexandria. 

4 Loc, cit., pp. 223-8, notably p. 226 sq. 


208 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


material lay at his door, as it were; and he used it as extensively as 
he could.! 


THE DOCUMENTARY BASIS OF THE JOSEPHAN NARRATIVE 
OF EVENTS FROM A.D. 44 TO 46 


Precisely the same method may be recognized in the second 
book of the Polemos. In the documents connected with the 
governors Cuspius Fadus and Tiberius Alexander, Josephus found 
distinct references to the political cases of certain ‘ helpers’ of an 
apparently unnamed ‘wonder-worker,’ previously condemned and 
crucified under Pilate. The adherents in question had been trans- 
ported for judgment, partly to the emperor, partly, first, to the 
governor of Syria,and had been sent onto Rome by thelatter. Ifthe 
persons in question had not been judged by the Roman authorities, 
who kept regular records of such proceedings, Josephus would have 
remained entirely ignorant of these matters. Indeed, he does not 
say a word about the proceedings of King Agrippa I. against the 
Jewish messianists, and he has no notion that James and his 
brother John had been executed by him,” whilst Petrus Kepha had 
been arrested but had managed to escape. Of the hypercritics 
who considered the whole section a Christian interpolation, none 
haseven put to himself the question why it is that the same Christian 
interpolators did not insert also the story of the execution of the 
two brothers and of Peter’s arrest. 

The documentary basis is equally transparent for the adminis- 
tration of Ventidius Cumanus, as even a superficial reading of the 
text will show. We have there, first, the complaints of the 
Samaritan notables and of the Jews, led by the high priest 
Jonathan b. Hanan, against Ventidius Cumanus before Num- 
idius Quadratus, the governor of Syria, in oratio recta in the 
Halosis. There follow the death sentences pronounced by Quad- 
ratus on the ringleaders at Caesarea. § 242 is missing in the 
Slavonic version, evidently because it represents a later addition 
on the part of Josephus. The complaints against Cumanus and 
the tribune Celer (§§ 243 sq.), the hearing of the case before Claudius 
(§§ 245-6), duly entered in a protocol and filed with the rest 
in the imperial archives—all this fully shows the author’s working 
method. The Greek text alone has it that King Agrippa was 
present at the hearing and took up the cause of the Jews. This is 

1 Dr. Thackeray (Josephus the Man and the Historian, New York, 1920, 
pp. 71 f., 72n. 63; Journ. Theolog. Studies, 1929, vol. xxx., No. 120, p. 369 ἢ. 2) 
has even been able to trace in the verbally quoted documents the style of one of 
the author's able assistants who translated them. The underlying Latin occasion- 
ally shines through, e.g. in the use of the dativus (=Lat. ablativus) absolutus in 


place of the genitive, Ani., xiv. §§ 228 ff. 
2 See below, p. 542 n. 7. 


OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS USED BY JOSEPHUS 209 


evidently an insertion made by the author at Agrippa’s request. 
The section ends with the banishment of Cumanus and the death 
sentence on Celer. Yet we do not learn the precise nature of the 
latter’s guilt. As a matter of fact, he is probably the soldier 
mentioned in § 224 as having wantonly insulted the Jews in 
the temple precincts with a coarse joke customary with the mob 
in Rome,! and thereby caused the uprising. One is inclined to ask 
whether Josephus himself had failed to see the connexion, or 
whether he hesitated to relate that the shameful death inflicted 
upon the wretched man was the punishment for an offence which 
in Roman eyes would not appear so odious. It is noteworthy 
that the sentence itself, in the Greek text, represents a judicial 
impossibility, and is evidently an exaggeration on the part of our 
author, intent upon driving home his conception of the zustitia 
princtpts. In the Slavonic version it seems perfectly regular and 
as it were coming directly from the documents. The section ends 
with the precise date of Claudius’ death—that is, it was taken from 
the final clause of the commentarit of Claudius. 

The reign of Nero sets in with a few moralizing phrases of no 
particular weight. Then follow a series of facts, obviously of a 
purely documentary provenance—for example, the conferring of 
Armenia upon Aristobulus the son of Herod, and of four Peraean 
and Galilaean districts upon Agrippa I. (missing in the Slavonic 
version). There comes next the punishment of some insurgents 
(whom Josephus as usual calls ‘robbers’) whose Jeader had been 
sent by Felix to Rome with a few accomplices. The Slavonic 
version does not know as yet that this ‘leader’ was none other 
than the famous ’Ele‘azar ben Dinai.? On the other hand, this 
version tells with perfect frankness that ‘the lesser folk’ (i.e. those 
from whom nothing could be extorted) were crucified, whilst the 
notables were dismissed after countless confiscations. In the 
Greek text this passage was deleted, for the imperial tribunal could 
not of course be laid open to such transparent charges. There follow 
statements concerning the uprisings of the Sicarti (δὲ 254-6), on 
the basis of the reports of Felix and not from the recollections of 
the author, who at that time was about fourteen or fifteen years 
of age. The Slavonic text does not yet know the Roman term 
‘sicarians,’ though we know from the Mishnah that it was not un- 
common among the Jews. The passage ends with the murder of 
the high priest Jonathan, again according to the report of Felix ; 
for the suspicion of the Jews, or Josephus’ own opinion as ex- 
pressed in the Antiquities, to wit, that the governor had instigated 
the Sicarit to such a crime, is not once referred to. 

There follow next the tumults of the pseudo-visionaries and 
their fantastic plan to start a new exodus into the desert, again ac- 
1 ‘curtis Judaeis oppedere,’ Horace, Sat., i. 9. 70. * See above, p. 102 f. 

O 


210 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


cording to the reports of Felix, and the story of the Jewish-E-gyptian 
impostor—probably Simon Magus, educated in Alexandria—who 
planned a surprise attack on Jerusalem and was beaten back with 
much bloodshed by Felix. In the Polemos a little more sympathy 
is shown for those people, and matters are represented as though 
Felix had attacked a band of peaceful pilgrims. For this purpose 
the connexion of the ‘ pilgrims’ with the ‘impostor,’ still visible 
in the Slavonic text, was completely abandoned in the Greek 
Polemos. Yet the Roman character of the source, though occa- 
sionally coloured by Josephus’ Jewish sympathies, appears most 
clearly in § 264, where the uprising is referred to as the out- 
break of a ‘ fever,’ just as in Claudius’ decree to the Greeks and 
Jews of Alexandria.! 

It is no less characteristic that the late Antiquities stands alone 
in attributing to the ‘impostor’ the attempt at a repetition of the 
miracle of Jericho. In his first redactions of this affair Josephus 
used the official report of Felix, who would have been the last to 
put such an interpretation upon the desperate horn-blowing which 
he could hear resounding from the Mount of Olives, let alone re- 
porting such (for Romans) utterly incredible nonsense to Rome, 
even had he known of the eschatological background of the crazy 
affair. On the other hand, Josephus would not have omitted such 
a picturesque touch, had he had any knowledge of it—witness the 
corresponding passage in the Antiquities; but the fact is that he 
learned such details only much later from his distinguished patrons 
and readers, who were naturally eager to furnish him with more 
and more interesting material about the wanton madness of the 
rebellious rabble. 

In the treatment of the rivalry between Jews and Syrians at 
Caesarea the Slavonic text * repeats the allegations of both parties 
in ovatio vecta, a sure sign that again documents were drawn upon. 
We know from § 270 that both parties had sent ‘ notables’ to 
the Emperor Nero to have the matter decided by him. The 
decision of the emperor was in favour of the Hellenized Syrians ; 
but it goes without saying that this did not bring matters to a 
close—on the contrary, the fight continued, and with it the official 
documents and Josephus’ extracts. But in the midst of these 
petty bickerings, common enough in all Hellenic cities of the East, 
Josephus in his early redaction, preserved in the Slavonic text, 
inserted the following section : 


‘And the twelfth year of the principate of Nero, the seventeenth 
of Agrippa, saw’ (Slav. ‘received’: Greek προσελάμβανεν) ‘the 
beginning of the war. Its initial occasion was slight, but it grew 
to such proportions as make it impossible to describe the magnitude 
of the calamity.’ 


lL Above, p. 126 n. I. * Ber.-Grass, p. 289, §§ 226 sqq, 


OFFICIAL DOCUMENTS USED BY JOSEPHUS 21: 


The short § 271 about the accession of the governor Porcius 
Festus, and all the rest of chapter xiv. I, 2, 3 of the Greek Way, are 
missing in the Slavonic version. Showing as it does the bitterest 
hostility to the governors Lucceius Albinus and Gessius Florus, it 
has obviously no Roman documentary basis; Josephus was by now 
old enough—twenty-two years—to have distinct recollections of 
his own. The inference is obvious. Josephus intentionally ante- 
dates the beginning of the war in order to minimize the fatal con- 
sequences of his own ambiguous activity in Galilee. The existence 
of the Slavonic text based on an early Greek redaction, where this 
measure of precaution has not yet been adopted, leaves no doubt 
whatever on the subject. Since his procedure was after all some- 
what too obvious, he tried to obscure it in the later editions by the 
insertion of a little more material from his source. 

In the years extending from A.D. 60 to 64 Josephus was some- 
how officially connected with the Sanhedrin, probably in the 
capacity of a clerk, as may be surmised from his pathetic outcry 
when he calls the chancelleries of Jerusalem—burnt down by the 
rebels—the “ sinews of the state.’ Thus the method of utilizing 
archives must have been familiar to him from his early youth, and 
with it also the bureaucratic method of letting secretaries (συνεργοί) 
do the real work for their superiors. Asa young Pharisaean priest 
with good family connexions he certainly found it easy to ‘make 
his way.’ Hence his post as secretary to the fatal embassy, de- 
scribed in a previous chapter.® 

For the years of his absence in Italy (A.D. 64 to the spring of 
66) he could draw on the recollections of the young Berenice, the 
mistress of Titus, and on her letter of complaint against Florus, 
together with Florus’ defence, both of course found in the Roman 
archives. Finally, we shall presently see that he drew also on the 
archives of King Agrippa 11., a well-arranged collection brought 
together and administered after the model of the Ptolemaean 
archives at Alexandria, of which Josephus’ enemy, Justus of 
Tiberias, had been in charge for a time.* , | 


THE GREAT DIATRIBE OF KING AGRIPPA II. 


Among the documents in Agrippa .’s library must have been 
the draft of his great speech supposed to have been delivered in 
A.D. 66 before the Jewish ambassadors, and advising most strongly 
against a war with Rome. But in its extant form the speech 
cannot have been made in 66, since it has long been noticed that 


1 Cf., e.g., ὃ 321, the important supplicatory procession of the priests, which he 
clearly describes as an eye-witness. 
eB); Ne TJ. 6: § 428; 3 Cp. above, p. 185 f. 4 Josephus, Vita, §§ 355 f. 


212 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


it is in contradiction to the military situation of that year and 
would rather fit a time after A.D. 75.1 Yet since the Slavonic text 
does not speak of eight legions in Germany, one of the chief contra- 
dictions would fall. As a matter of fact, a number of details in 
the Halésis clearly point to the year 66, and it is to be suspected 
that Josephus reworked it after 75. For example, the Halosis does 
not mention the two legions keeping Illyria quiet, and it is certain 
that precisely about 66 the V* Macedonica and the [νὰ Scythica 
were used in Syria and had been sent there from Moesia. The 
Halésis says nothing, either, about the fleet in the Black Sea, 
possibly because that fleet was in A.D. 66 used for the transporta- 
tion of troops between Alexandria and Alexandretta. It is true 
that Prof. Laqueur and others have thought the whole speech a free 
invention of Josephus, who wished to utilize in some manner what- 
ever information had been placed at his disposal about the distribu- 
tion of troops in the Roman empire. Yet, what speaks against 
such an hypothesis is the phrase (in § 365), ‘that the Greeks 
are nobler of descent than anything else under the sun.’ Josephus 
was, after all, too much of a Jew to write such a thing, the more so 
because he had no particular reason to flatter the Greeks, whilst 
Agrippa 11., completely Hellenized as he was, merely expressed his 
own feelings on the subject. The phrase, however, comes most 
probably from the pen of the Greek secretaries of Agrippa’s office. 
The corrections found in the MSS. M, L, and A? are, of course, the 
work of Josephus himself, who was afraid of offending the Romans. 
It is interesting to note the original wording preserved in the 
Slavonic version, and to see from it how little either Agrippa or 
Josephus cared to spare Jewish nationalist sensibilities. 

The list concerning the distribution of troops in the empire, 
taken from some breviarium totius imperii, was, of course, easily 
accessible to Agrippa in his quality of vex soctus and commander of 
an auxiliary contingent. We shall show below that Josephus gave 
the full text of the speech only in his definitive edition of the 
Polemos. In the Haldsis there is but a very diplomatically cur- 
tailed outline. The latter version passes over in silence the two 
Egyptian legions stationed in Alexandria. As a matter of fact, 
Titus had led them to Palestine as early as the spring of 66. If, 
further, in § 383 the North African legion is not mentioned, we 
find the explanation in the statement of Josephus (B./., ii. 18. 8) 
that—to the misfortune of the Jews—there were at that time 5000 
men of Lybian troops at Alexandria, evidently sent there to take 
the place of the legions led to Palestine by Titus. To sum up: 


1 Ritterling, De legione Romanorum X* gemina, Diss. Lips., 1885, f. 32 544 
and others. 

2 ‘the Greeks who think they are nobler’ (M,L); A has ‘who think... 
and who are’ !—the last words being due, of course, to a Greek copyist. 


THE GREAT ALLOCUTION OF KING AGRIPPA II, 


not only are the much-discussed contradictions absent in the 
Halésis; the latter has even a number of positive statements 
which fit most excellently the situation as it existed in A.D. 66, 
The speech is therefore really to be regarded as a contemporaneous 
document coming from the chancellery of Agrippa. This does not 
mean, of course, that the king ever delivered it in actual fact. As 
Prof. Laqueur pointed out, after this masterpiece of rhetoric the 
second discourse of the monarch (§§ 403 sq.) appears rather flat 
and even superfluous. This second speech was indeed, in a pre- 
vious redaction, the only one, so that § 403 originally followed 
directly upon § 344. But the monarch was not satisfied with 
those two short phrases, and sent the historian a very nice draft 
which he would no doubt have read off in style had not the poor 
taste of his listeners, their noise and stone-throwing, prevented 
him. Yet it is doubtful whether Agrippa even delivered his 
short speech. For the sequence of events in §§ 405 and 406 of 
the Slavonic text is quite unintelligible. 


213 


δὲ 405-408, 


Slavonic Halosis. 


‘The people obeyed these words 


and after separating, one party 
built the halls, 


but the others, going into the 
villages, 


collected quickly 
the remainder of the tax, 
forty talents. 


But Agrippa commanded 
the people to obey Florus, 
until the emperor should 
send another in his place. 
But those, indignant, 
reviled the king, 


and hitting him with stones, 
they drove him from the city. 


Greek Polemos. 


“Acting on this advice, the people 
went up to the Temple, with the 
king and Berenice, and began the 
reconstruction of the porticoes, 
while the magistrates and the 
members of the council dispersed 
to the various villages and levied 
the tribute. The arrears, amount- 
ing to forty talents, were rapidly 
collected. Thus for the moment 
Agrippa dispelled the menace of 
war. Subsequently, he endeav- 
oured to induce the people to sub- 
mit to Florus until a successor 
was sent by Caesar to replace 
him. But this exasperated the 
Jews, who heaped abuse upon 
the king and formally proclaimed 
his banishment from the city ; 
some of the insurgents even ven- 
tured to throw stones at him. 
The king, seeing that the passions 
of the revolutionaries were now 
beyond control, and indignant at 
the insults which he had received, 
sent the magistrates and principal 
citizens to Florus at Caesarea, in 


214 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


order that he might appoint some 
of their number to collect the 
tribute in the country; he then 
withdrew to his own dominions. 
* And others collected “And now some of the most 
and went to the town of Masada.’ ardent promoters of hostilities 
banded together and made an 
assault on afortress called Masada.’ 


According to the narrative of this redaction it would be neces- 
sary to suppose Agrippa to have remained standing on the bridge 
while the destroyed halls were being rebuilt and the tribute in 
arrears collected. Then, after an initial success, he would have 
committed the faux pas of defending Florus and thus provoking a 
popular outburst. To make this nonsense less palpable, the Greek 
secretary has striven honestly to conceal its essential absurdity 
by proper insertions. Yet the whole awkward representation is 
merely the consequence of Josephus’ insertion of the two speeches 
one after the other. Originally the first sentence of § 343 was 
followed directly by § 406, and the whole section read as follows: 


§ 342. ‘ And the people pressed for an embassy to be sent to Nero 
to denounce Florus, saying: “‘ If we keep silence on so great a fight 
and do not promptly denounce this man as the originator of the 
wrong, the blame for the battle will be laid upon us.”’ 

§ 343. But to Agrippa it did not appear expedient to write and 
denounce Florus. 

§ 406. (And he) commanded the people to be obedient to Florus 
until the emperor should send another in his place.’ 


The whole passage gives an excellent idea of how Josephus, to suit 
his patrons, inserted additions and left his Greek secretary in 
charge of the polishing of the style and the arranging of the subject- 
matter of his patchwork. 

What is left of chapter xvii. is based on Josephus’ own im- 
pressions, though postscripts of matter given him by his readers 
are not wanting. In the Slavonic version (§ 421) Agrippa is said 
to have dispatched 3000 horsemen under the command of a certain 
Darius. In the Polemos we find added the name of the supreme 
commander, Philip, son of Jaqim. Evidently that noble general 
of the Transjordanian cavalry had felt slighted at the omission 
of his name in the first redaction. On his complaint Josephus 
hastened to correct his mistake. 

Another addition of vastly greater importance is found in 
δὲ 429 and 431-4. It concerns the réle played by Menahem, the 
son of Judas the Galilaean, and his fights with ’Ele‘azar, the son of 
the high priest, who in that version is alone responsible for the 
rebellion. It is clear that these omissions cannot possibly be 


BEGINNING OF JOSEPHUS’ OWN REMINISCENCES 215 


regarded as abridgments on the part of the Slavonic translator (as 
even Berendts was inclined to believe). The mediaeval Russian 
had no interest whatever in reducing a chapter in such a manner 
that the part of a certain personage, highly indifferent to him, in 
certain cases appeared altogether blurred. But it is quite con- 
ceivable that an eye-witness such as Josephus—who was hiding 
in an inner chamber of the Temple during the tragic episode of 
Menahem’s ephemeral kingship 1—did not perceive at first certain 
events, and that he therefore felt called upon to add them later on, 
according to the statements of others. Any one trying to chronicle 
the events of 1914-18, even on a sector of the front where he was 
present himself, would have the same experience. 

Matters are not much different for chapter xviii., likewise based 
on Josephus’ reminiscences. Only § 7, dealing with the events at 
Alexandria, has a documentary basis, to wit, the report of the 
commanding officer of the city, Tiberius Alexander, to the 
emperor. ὃ 6, dealing with the treason of No‘ar from the point 
of view of King Agrippa 11., obviously utilizes materials placed at 
the author’s disposal by his royal patron Agrippa 11. In the de- 
scription of the defeat of Cestius, official documents, the reports of 
Florus and Cestius, are mingled with the author’s reminiscences of 
the impressions made by these events upon the Jews. The re- 
proach levelled against Cestius in Haldsts, ὃ 531, that he might 
have nipped the rebellion in the bud by a timely assault on Jeru- 
salem, a reproach characteristic of the Romanophile Jew, i.e. Jose- 
phus himself, is repeated in the Polemos (§ 532), with the addition 
that Florus had bribed the commanders of the cavalry into voting 
against such a measure. Josephus would certainly never have 
dared to report such matters of a Roman governor without some 
support for them in the documents of the imperial archives. 

From chapter xx. 4 on, Josephus utilizes the draft of an old 
report sent by him to Jerusalem from Galilee, as has been amply 
shown by Prof. Laqueur. With the beginning of the third book the 
analysis of the sources was successfully effected by Prof. W ilhelm 
Weber of the University of Halle in his well-known work, Josephus 
und Vespasian.2. The chief result is the fact that Josephus really 
utilizes to a great extent, beside his own former report, the com- 
mentarii (ὑπομνήματα) (that is, the official campaign diaries) of 
Titus and Vespasian. This is true for the first redaction of his 
work as well as for the second and definitive one. Dr. Weber has 
pointed out the complete inability of the civilian author to follow 
and to describe in such an admirably lucid and comprehensive way 
the complicated military operations on the Roman side. What 
he did was to draw on the well-arranged and skilfully synthetized 
army reports assembled by the staff-officers at general headquarters, 

1 Vita, ὃ 21, 3 Stuttgart, 1921, 


216 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


As for the events within the besieged city, he eventually got them 
from deserters whom he had to interrogate in the service of the 
Roman intelligence department, as the vainglorious traitor admits 
without shame or scruple.! 


CONCLUSIONS 


We may, then, claim to have proved, in the foregoing chapters, 
that the numerous important and intrinsic differences between the 
Slavonic version of Josephus’ Capture of Jerusalem (Haldsis) and 
the Greek standard text of the Jewish War cannot by any means 
be attributed, exclusively or even for the larger part, to the activity 
of the mediaeval translator, a Judaizing heretic working on a Greek 
original somewhere in Lithuania between 1250 and 1260. We can 
attribute to him at the utmost the sceptical interpolation into the 
passage concerning the miraculous rending of the veil, which is 
still missing in the Rumanian version, and certain minor glosses 
explaining geographical and ethnological names, such as are found 
in the following passages: ii. § 269 sqg.,2 ‘the Dacians, who are 
called Bulgarians,’ or zbzd. § 363,3 ‘the Istros, which is the Danube,’ 
or vil. § 244, where the Greek Way mentions the Alanoi, whilst the 
Slavonic text adds, ‘the Ossetian (jasjskyj) people, which is well 
known to be descended from the Peéeneg tribe, living between the 
Tauros and the Maeotian lake.’ 

All the rest of his work can be regarded as a faithful, pains- 
taking translation of so mechanical and literal a type that in many 
cases it is unintelligible without an equally mechanical retroversion 
into Greek. So far from shortening or omitting anything, it is on 
the contrary perfectly plain that the translator has taken the 
greatest trouble to fill up accidental gaps in his Greek MS. by 
drawing on additional, more complete MSS., which he carefully 
compared, adding conscientiously to the successive copies of his 
version whatever paragraph or single line he could find in those 
more complete MSS. Wherever he did not understand a Greek 
word, rendered unintelligible by some copyist’s error, he carefully 
transcribed it letter for letter, although he might easily have 
glided over the difficulty by a vague phrase or some bold guess. 

The total retranslation of this Slavonic text into Greek is not 
only possible, but is even a fairly easy task for a scholar moderately 
conversant with both the Greek and the Slavonic language and 
style. The dictionaries of Sreznévski and Miklosit indicate the 
usual equations between Greek and Slavonic words as far as they 
are found in the extant versions of the current biblical and 
patristic literature. On the other hand, Dr. Thackeray’s forth- 
coming Lexicon Josephinum catalogues the copia verborum and 


“CAD. ἃ. 48 ἢ * Ber,-Grass, p. 310. 8 Ibid., p. 309. 


FINAL. APPRECIATION OF SLAVONIC VARIANTS 217 


modus dicendi of Josephus’ Greek secretaries, thereby making it 
possible to judge which one of several Greek words, suggested as 
an equivalent for a given Russian expression by Sreznévski’s and 
Miklosié’s collections, is likely to have been used by Josephus. 
By using these three works of reference for a judicious retranslation 
we shall be able to obtain a Greek history of The Fall of Jerusalem, 
and of the events leading up to it, which is in many respects not 
identical with the standard text of the Jewrsh War. The differ- 
ences between the two versions are in part due to the obvious 
chronological priority of the original at the base of the Slavonic 
text, in part to the author’s consideration for a different circle of 
readers. For whilst the standard version of the Jewish War was 
adapted to the viewpoint of a Graeco-Roman public, the first 
draft was intended for Josephus’ own co-religionists. 

There is yet more, Just as a number of mistakes and 
untranslated Greek words prove that the Slavonic translator 
worked on a Greek original, so a number of other mistakes and 
transcribed words show that there was a Semitic original behind 
that first Greek draft, a conclusion fully corroborated by Josephus’ 
own statement in the preface to his Jewish War. 

Both the Greek standard text of the War and the Antiquities, 
and the lost Greek original of the Slavonic Haldsis, have suffered 
from interpolations and deletions at the hands of various Christian 
scribes and ecclesiastical revisers. These forgeries, always clumsy 
in the extreme, are clearly recognizable by their manifest apologetic 
tendencies. The interpolations can be easily discarded, whilst the 
deletions can be sometimes overcome through the testimony of 
early quotations, imitations of or allusions to the expurgated 
passages in question. 

In no case does any one of these Christian apologetic interpola- 
tions add anything new to what we learn from the most generally 
known Christian sources, in particular the Gospels; while, on the 
contrary, such differences between the Greek and the Slavonic text 
as cannot possibly be attributed to the hand of a Christian inter- 
polator frequently contain the strangest and most valuable bits of 
information, of a type that could not be furnished by any other 
source but a contemporary witness of the events in question. 
Cases in point are, for example, the curious detail of Vitellius using 
tvibult against Otho’s cavalry in the battle of Bedriacum, or the 
statement that the Essenes were eager to study the religious and 
mystic literatures of other nations? (which so strikingly confirms 
the modern observations about foreign, especially Pythagorean, 
influences which underlie the special tenets of this religious order). 

It would be contrary to the elementary rules of sound method 
were we to attribute such valuable statements to some unknown 

1 Flaldsis, ii. ὃ 136. 


218 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


interpolator, instead of accepting them as coming from Josephus 
himself, and on no other ground than their abserice from the later 
work, a fact attributable in each case to very good reasons. The 
different date of both works and the different public to which they 
are addressed fully account for such differences and contradictions 
as have been pointed out by critics. On the same ground excep- 
tion might be taken to statements occurring in the Antiquities but 
absent from the War, or to open contradictions existing between 
these two works ; yet in this case critics have not hesitated, justly 
and logically, to attribute such divergencies to deletions and cor- 
rections by the author himself. 

What holds good for the numerous passages analysed in the 
foregoing chapters, passages which are quite indifferent from the 
Christian point of view, must of course apply with equal force to 
the passages of the Slavonic text dealing with the messianic move- 
ment, more particularly with the two greatest protagonists of that 
movement, namely John the Baptist and Jesus. These chapters, 
too, are likely to show clear traces of Christian interpolations and 
expurgations of an apologetic tendency, and the possibility must be 
admitted that they also suffered interpolations and deletions from 
non-Christian—that is, primarily Jewish—hands, of much the same 
type as could be found in the Hebrew Josippon. Yet it would be 
contrary to all sound method to reject them wholesale and without 
any attempt at a separation of the wheat from the chaff, on the 
sole ground that they do not occur in the Greek standard text of 
the Wav. From what we know and have been able to point out 
in the matter of ecclesiastical censorship, it is much more likely 
that long passages of anti-Christian character and tendency should 
have been deleted in copies under the more or less direct control 
of the Orthodox Church, whilst they were tolerated in copies 
treasured by Jews or Judaizing heretics, than that they should 
have been interpolated by unknown forgers. 

For these reasons it would seem evident to the present writer 
that the text in question has not received so far the proper atten- 
tion and critical analysis of competent scholars. Quite aside 
from the righting of the great wrong done to Alexander Berendts, 
students of the history of primitive Christianity may demand at 
last the thoroughgoing investigation of a unique source which, if 
it can be proved to be a part of the genuine Capture of Jerusalem 
by Josephus Flavius, must be considered as antedating the earliest 
of the Synoptic Gospels. Even if the passages could not be traced 
further back than to an individual of Josephus’ own time and 
general character and outlook, they would still constitute interest- 
ing and valuable documents. If, however, as 1 think I have 
proved, Josephus drew his entire information on the subject from 
the official commentaries of Tiberius, the favourite reading of 


CONCLUSIONS 219 


Domitian, his accounts about Jesus are of necessity nothing more 
and nothing 655 a ial reports of Pilate. 

“Under these circumstances it ought to be well worth the 
author’s and the reader’s while to start anew on an unbiased 
analysis of these crucial chapters, too light-heartedly dismissed by 
critics only imperfectly acquainted with Josephus’ character and 
working methods. 


THE GENUINE STATEMENTS OF JOSEPHUS 
ABOUT JOHN THE BAPTIST 


‘From the days of John the Baptist until now the kingdom 
of Heaven suffereth violence, and men of violence take it by 
force.’ MATT. Xi. 12. 


XI 


THE APPEARANCE OF THE ‘ WILD MAN’; HIS PROMISE 
AND HIS BAPTISM 


MMEDIATELY after the narrative of the pseudo-Alex- 

ander, introduced with no other connecting link save the 

temporal adverb ‘then,’ stereotyped by Biblical use—in other 
words, in the artless manner so typical of Josephus when he passes 
from one source to another—there follows in the Slavonic version 
the story of the Jordan Baptizer. It is significant that Josephus 
did not know his name when writing the Haldsis ; 5. we may infer 
that it did not occur in his source—unless we should prefer to 
suppose that it was cancelled for fear of the censor, just as we shall 
see in a subsequent chapter 3 that for this very reason the name 
of Jesus was deleted in a number of MSS.—for a mediaeval forger 
would certainly have spoken without any reticence of ‘John the 
Baptist’ or “John the Forerunner.’ The mention of ‘Joannes 
Prodromos,’ found in the chapter headings of all the Slavonic 
MSS., had no place in the original text ; even Berendts ranks it 
among the notes which have as little claim to belong to the text of 
Josephus as have the rubrics to individual chapters and the vari- 
ously composed tables of contents (didascaliae) of individual books 
found in some MSS. of the Greek Polemos and the Antiquities. It 
was left to the tendentious criticism of Prof. Paul W. Schmiedel 4 
of Ziirich to find a proof of the Christian origin of the succeeding 
chapter in the use of the word frodromos by the various late 
authors of these rubrics. 

I quote the passage verbatim, including the last sentence of the 
preceding section, so as to show clearly the primitive manner of 
linking up the various portions of the narrative. 


Slavonic Haldsis (Berendts- Polemos, ii. 110. 
Grass, p. 247). 


‘But Caesar laughed when he “Caesar laughed at these words 
looked at him, and ordered him and enrolled the pseudo-Alex- 


1 B.J., ed. Niese, li. 101-110. 
2 ‘See below, Pp. 229 3 Below, p. 548 n. 2. 
4 Neue Zitivicher Zollune, 22nd Aug. 1926, No. 1346. 
5 See our Plates xvi. a and ὃ. 
223 


224 


to live henceforward ! among his 
galley-slaves. 


But the Melians, because they had 
borne him in procession on their 


THE MESSIAH JESUS 


ander, because of his athletic looks, 
among the oarsmen of his galleys ; 
his inspiring genius he ordered to 
execution. 

The Melians he considered sufti- 
ciently punished for their folly by 


hands and honoured him with 
regal honours, were executed en 
MASSE. 

Now? at that time there walked 
among the Jews a man in wondrous 
garb, for he had stuck on to his 
body animals’ hair wherever it 
was not covered by his own. But 
in countenance he was like a 
savage. This man came to the 
Jews and allured them to freedom, 
saying, “‘God hath sent me to show 
you the way of the law,’ by which 
ye shall be freed from many 
tyrants.» And no mortal shall 
rule over you, but only the High- 
est ® who hath sent me.” And 
when the people heard that, they 
were glad.’ 


their lavish extravagance. 


(And there went to him all Judaea 

and the region around Jerusalem.)*® 
And® he did nothing else to 
them, save that he dipped them in 
the stream of the Jordan and let 


1 The Slavonic word reproduces the Greek μένειν. 

* The following lines are given in Dr. Thackeray's translation, revised by 
myself for the appendix to his J osephus, vol. lil. p. 644 sq. 

* Cf. the inscription ‘to freedom’ (/¢ feruth) on “Tewisli revolutionary coins. 
Cf. fig. 24, p. 60, in Th. Reinach, Les Monnaies Juives, Paris, 1888, reproduced 
below, Pp. 245. 


4 —‘ the way to justice,’ in the Baptist’s sermon, Matt. xxi. 23=Apoc. Pel., 
xxil. 28, ‘derekh sedagah,’ Prov. xvi. 31. 
5 Asaclose parallel, cf. Florus, ii. 7,4: ‘Syrusquidam nomine Eunus . . . ad 


libevtatem . . . Servos quasi numinum imperio concitavit.’ 

6 No exact parallel to this absolute use of Ὕψιστος -ε᾿ Εἰ ‘Elidn (without θεός) 
occurs in the Greek text of Josephus, except Ant., xvi. ὃ 163, “Ὑρκανοῦ ἀρχιερέως θεοῦ 
ὑψίστου, in an edict of Augustus (Thackeray). 

7 Probably corrected from ἤρθησαν, ‘ they were excited.’ 
nn. 2-4. 

8. Christian interpolation. The sentence is not to be found in the Rumanian 
version of Josephus, cod. Gaster, No. 89. This and the close parallelism with 
Matt. iii. 5: ‘ then went out unto him [1.6. to John] Jerusalem and all Judaea and 
all the region round about Jordan’; Marki.5: ‘ And there went out unto him 
all the country of Judaea and all they of Jerusalem,’ as well as the ignorance dis- 
played by the author, who does not see the tautology implied in ‘ all Judaea ’ and 
the ‘ region about Jerusalem,’ stamp it as a very late addition. By its omission 
one gains a perfectly satisfactory context. 

9 =‘ but.’ Semitic vav adversativum ! 
ironic meaning is quite clear : 


see below, p. 246 


Cp. above, p. 133 n. 7. The author’s 


‘ Big words, small deeds.’ 


PLATE XVIII 


μη νιν μαφέφ oe 
ἐγ 
ΤΣ ΔΝ ΣΩΝΣ, av 004 up wee 


gouninvrn aod uy. BWW3 


ON OIRO πολέ ἜΣ τ MH SYY 
Kd rxorgmays<naYspndius 
xdpavm ein ὁ ς, sXNrixdouns 


fy) © PSV 3VIDII RWOITHN YLu 
8IYN3 9901013 BVPI ΨΗΒΗ 03] 


ΡΟΝ Ἠ ΝΎΉ. 
HSH 9601 BVH “εμν YAH ‘rp 
ΩΣ, supiusaduy’ ΠΣ 22} 
Orso 9)7στν Χμ ΨΥΡΜΧΡΩΡΩ. 
ΗΗ3νν 5 λ 3] ΗΨῈ simmpprd 
SHysam wdo1113N9.10NH Las 
pwavdsi γε uidanwdly wyyyl, 
yom anv sv ley 
ev sTrarrmy rez ΣΝ 
Prion yumiva smngyd wrongs 


tees 


PvanwrarnywaPeyay 
vyz¥ Perawu 
HVILLIVYA BION WIL Ἢ 
H- —~ 
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yyIOLLy PYIOUVWE.LIOI YY ' VUL 
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ΟΡ } womYusirsms 
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pnd voy Ym SYN Sona ἊΜ} 


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νόον ΗΝ γ[δ1.᾽ ψ,9,ν23)}" yma 

ΓΝ ΠΥ ISBHMONHVS 
ees? ae . Fe 


PLATE XIX 


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SAHdHasOf OINOAVIS AHL OL ONIGUODDV SAVIAHOUV YAGNNA 
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ἌΣ ΟΣ ΡΜ Μ9Ὰ3 Ἡ3ΉγΆΧΩ 
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ΝΣ (ρῶν, ᾿ηγνγεδε λιν 

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(αβραλῆς “αἱ Ee atanup pubs 
3M δ) ν» 0113 99 WL 

‘nip! padi Vou va nad ow 
Mm nye Bd gesigy § LE 
‘3d13N3>¥0 HOW ARW THYH WS 
el 6 Hm Hwy 
perulpeas ΞΕ WwainsporH 
geal ΩΝ μήνασν 


THE GENUINE STATEMENTS OF JOSEPHUS 22% 


them go, warning them that they 
should renounce evil deeds. So 
would they be given a king who 
would free them and subject all 
who are insubordinate, but he 
himself would be subjected to 
none. Athis words some mocked, 
but others put faith in him, 

And when he was brought to 
Archelaus+ and the learned doc- 
tors of the law had assembled, they 
asked him who he was and where 
he had been until then. And he 
answered and said, “I am ἃ man;? 
as such® has the spirit of God 
called me, and I live on bulrushes4 
and roots and wood-shavings.”’ 5 
But when they threatened to tor- 
ture him if he did not desist from 
these words and deeds, he said: 
‘It is meet rather for you to desist 
from your shameful works and to 
submit to the Lord your God.” 

And Simon, by birth an Essene,® 
a scribe, arose in wrath and said : 
“We read the divine books every 
day. But thou, only now come 
forth like a wild beast from the 
wood, durst thou teach us and lead 
the multitudes astray with thy 
accursed speeches?” _ 

And he flung himself forward to 
rend his body. But he said in re- 
proach to them : “‘I will not reveal Polemos, ti. 111. 
to you the secret which is among | 
you,’ because you desired it not. 
lor this cause has unspeakable 


' Ethnarch from 4 B.c. to A.p. 6, a date much earlier than the one assigned by 
Luke (ili. 1) to the first appearance of John. Needless to add that a Christian 
forger would have adhered to the traditional chronology. 

* So most MSS. Only the one unfortunately followed by Berendts: ‘I am 
pure * (cist misread for clk =celovék). 

5 jim’ze=éby ; one MS., ἡ 2de, ‘and hither’; Berendts with the other MSS. 
reads ‘ because.’ 

4 Cf. Suidas, s.v. meleagri, ‘he fed them on meleagey roots and on the heart 
(= marrow) of bulrushes.’ 

® For an explanation of this malicious pun, cf. below, Pp. 237. 

® In reality ‘a Sadducee’ (see below, p.227n.1). It is the Sadducees who are 
‘rude and cruel in the exercise of justice’ (B./., ii. 166). There is obviously a 
confusion, hardly due to Josephus himself, of this Simon and the Essene inter- 
preter of dreams of the same name mentioned a few lines further on and in Aniigq., 
XV11.°3 46. 

7 ὃς this ‘ secret,’ cf. Luke xvii. 21, Mait. xiii. 11. 

153: 


226 


misfortune befallen you and for 
your own doing.”” And when he 
had thus spoken, he went away to 
the other side of the Jordan. And 
since no man durst hinder him, he 
did ashehad done before. Arche- 
laus, however, ever since he had 
taken possession of his ethnarchy, 
mindful of the enmity of the Jews, 
harassed them with intolerable 
oppression, likewise also the Sam- 


THE MESSIAH JESUS 


But Archelaus, having taken pos- 
session of his ethnarchy, did not 
forget old feuds, but treated not 
only the Jews but also the Sam- 
aritans with brutality.’ 


aritans.’ 


This section is followed (§ 112 544.) by matter also found in the 
Greek, to wit, Archelaus’ dream of the oxen and the ears of corn, 
its interpretation by Simon the Essene, and its fulfilment through 
the banishment of the ethnarch. There follows the dream of 
Glaphyra his wife, and its fulfilment (§§ 114-116), the appointment 
of Coponius as governor (§ 117), and the appearance of Judas of 
Galilee as founder of a fourth Jewish party. The mention of his 
‘special sect’ (ἰδία αἵρεσις) affords occasion for the insertion of 
the celebrated passage on the three sects of the Pharisees, the 
Sadducees, and the Essenes (§§ 119-166). The description of the 
last-named sect, with its ample details, is probably derived from a 
lost work of Philo, acquired by Josephus during his stay at Alex- 
andria ; what he adds, from his own knowledge, on the Pharisees 
and Sadducees is little enough. There follows a reference to the 
removal of Archelaus told previously, and a notice on the Pales- 
tinian cities founded by the tetrarchs, the death of Augustus, and 
the accession of Tiberius. Then follows, without any transition 
worth the name, the second passage on the Baptist, comprising the 
prophetic dream of Philip and its fulfilment, the illegal marriage 
of the tetrarch’s brother Herod, the ‘ wild man’s’ reprimand and 
his death, along with a summary of the principles governing the 
Baptist’s life and preaching. The ‘doubling’ noticed in the 
two accounts of the Baptist is due to the use of two different 
sources, the one evidently a biographical account composed by one 
of John’s disciples, the other a compilation of prophetic dreams 
and their interpretation and speedy fulfilment, the latter no doubt 
of Essene origin, as may be judged from the prominent role given 
therein to the Essene sect. It is perhaps not too much to assume 
that Josephus became acquainted with the former during or in 
consequence of his stay with the ‘ Banus,’ whilst his acquaintance 
with the latter is due to his erstwhile flirtation with the Essenes. 


THE GENUINE STATEMENTS OF JOSEPHUS 


227 


THE ‘ WiLpD MAN’ AS INTERPRETER OF DREAMS AND CENSOR 


OF ROYAL MORALS. 


His DEATH 


Ι add to this second passage the narratives of dreams which 


precede it. 


Slavonic Halosis, Berendts- 
Grass, p. 249. 


‘But Archelaus, ever since he had 
taken possession of his ethnarchy, 
mindful of the enmity of the Jews, 
harassed them with intolerable 
oppression, likewise also the Sam- 
aritans. 


And in the ninth year of his rule 


he saw a dream, namely that there 
were nine ears of corn in the field, 
full-grown and tall, and oxen came 
and cropped them, grubbing them 
up by the roots. 

And he called for the Chaldaeans, 
the interpreters of dreams, (and) 
asked them what this sign (meant). 
And when one said this and an- 
other that, a Sadducee’ named 
Symos spoke thus: ‘‘ The ears οἱ 
corn are years, but the oxen a 
change in the state of affairs. 
And it is not” allotted to you 
to reign according to the number 
of the ears of corn. And after en- 
during various changes and tribu- 


τ Obviously the Greek text is right in calling this Simon an Essene. 


confusion, οὗ. above, p. 225 n. 6. 


Greek Polemos, bk. 11. § 111 sqq., 
Niese. 


‘Archelaus, having taken pos- 
session of his ethnarchy, did not 
forget old feuds, but treated not 
only the Jews but also the Sam- 
aritans with brutality. Both par- 
ties sent deputies to Caesar to 
denounce him, and in the ninth 
year of his rule he was banished to 
Vienna, a town in Gaul, and his 
property confiscated to the im- 
perial treasury. 


§ 112. 


It is said that, before he received 
his summons from Caesar, he had 
this dream: he thought he saw 
nine tall and full-grown ears of 
corn on which oxen were browsing. 


He sent for the soothsayers and 
some Chaldaeans and asked them 
their opinion of its meaning. 
Various interpretations being 
given, a certain Simon, an Essene ' 
by affiliation,* said that in his view 
the ears of corn denoted years and 
the oxen a revolution, because 
in ploughing they turn over the 
soil; he would therefore reign 
for as many years as there were 
ears of corn, and then, after a 


On the 


2 The not is due to some reviser anxious to bring this dream into harmony 


with the true chronology. 
2 τὸ γένος. 


If this be translated ‘ by birth,’ the man would belong to the 


variety of Essenes who did not refrain from marriage (B./., ii. 161). 


228 


lations, you will die.” And forth- 
with, five days after the dream, 
Caesar summoned him to his trial. 


For the Jews and Samaritans 
had previously sent to Caesar to 
complain of his violence. When 
Caesar had investigated (the case)! 
he banished him to the Gallic town 
of Vienna. And his riches were 
brought to Caesar’s palace. 

And thereafter (there was) his 
wife Glaphyra—the daughter of 
Archelaus, king of Cappadocia, 
who had previously been the wife 
of Alexander the son of Herod, 
whom (his) father put to death, as 
we have related—and Juba the 
Libyan king had taken her.2 And 
when he died she returned to her 
father’s house. And when this 
Archelaus, the ethnarch, saw her, 
he fell so passionately in love that 
he forsook his wife Mariamne and 
took her. And then she saw a 
dream, to wit, Alexander, who 
came with a threat and spoke 
(thus): “I have borne thy defiling 
(me) when after my death thou 
marriedst the Luvian * king. But 
now, since thou hast returned to 
my house, shameless woman, and 
attached thyself to a third hus- 
band, to my brother, I will not 
brook the outrage but shall take 
thee to me, whether thou wilt or 
no.” And after she had seen the 
dream, she lingered for two days 
and died. ... 


THE MESSIAH JESUS — 


chequered experience of revolu- 
tionary changes, would die. Five 
days after hearing this, Archelaus 
was summoned to his trial. 


I think mention may also fitly 
be made of the dream of his wife 
Glaphyra. Daughter of Archelaus, 
king of Cappadocia, she had for 
her first husband Alexander, the 
brother of Archelaus of whom we 
have been speaking, and son of 
King Herod, who put him todeath, 
as we have already related.2 After 
his death she married Juba, king 
of Libya, on whose decease she 
returned home and lived in widow- 
hood with her father. There 
Archelaus, the ethnarch, saw her 
and fell so passionately in love 
with her that he instantly divorced 
his wife Mariamne and married 
her. Soshe came back to Judaea, 
where, not long after her arrival, 
she imagined that Alexander stood 
beside her and said : ‘ Thy Libyan 
marriage might have sufficed thee, 
but, not content with that, thou 
now returnest to my hearth, hav- 
ing taken to thyself a third hus- 
band, and him, audacious woman, 
my own brother. But I will 
not brook this outrage and shall 
reclaim thee, whether thou wilt 
or no. After relating _ this 
dream she survived barely two 
days.’ 


' These words, occurring only in the Slavonic text, are the equivalent of a 
quotation by Josephus of the commentarii principis (see above, p. 203 ll. 26f.). Had 
Caesar not investigated the case, Josephus would not have found the sentence in 


the acts. 


* Note the clumsy style of the earlier text and compare it with the polished 


later version. 
3 Liuvijski. 
Lubhitm as against the Greek Libyes, 


Note the correspondence of the Slavonic form with the Biblical 


THE GENUINE STATEMENTS OF JOSEPHUS 229 


Slavonic Halésis (following after 
B.J., ii. 168). 


‘While Philip was in power, he 
saw a dream, in which an eagle 
plucked out both his eyes. And 
he called all his wise men together. 
When some had explained the 
dream in this manner and some in 
that, there came to him suddenly 
without being called that man of 
whom we have written above,! 
how he went about (clothed) in 
animals’ hair and cleansed the 
people in the waters of the Jordan. 
And he spoke: “‘ Hear the word of 
the Lord: the dream which thou 
hast seen: the eagle is thy venal- 
ity,” for that bird is brutal and 
rapacious. And this sin? will 
take away thine eyes, which are 
thy dominion and thy wile.”® 
And when he had thus spoken, 

Philip expired before the evening,® 
and his dominion was given to 
Agrippa.” 

And his wife® was taken by 
Herod his brother. Because of 
her alllaw-abiding people abhorred 
him, but they durst not accuse 
him to his face.° But only that 
man, whom we have called a wild 

1 See p. 224 and p. 223 n. 2. 

2 Cod. Pogodin, 1440: ‘ thy power.’ A correction having for aim the elimina- 
tion of this stricture on the character of Philip ; cf. above, p. 182,. 

5 This type of zoological symbolism is first found in the letter of Aristeas, 
§§ 145-8. On its origin, cf. my book Orphisch-dionysische Mysterien-Gedanken 
in dey christlichen Antike, Leipzig-Berlin, 1925, pp. 71 sqq., 76, 115 Nn. I. 

4 Cod. Pogodin, 1440: “᾿ thy acquisitiveness.’ 

6 Rumanian Josephus: ‘ The dream that thou hast seen heralds thy death, 
for the eagle is a bird of prey and has destroyed thine eyes.’ Another change in 
the same direction as the variant quoted above, n. 2. 

6 Philip the Tetrarch died in A.D. 33-34 (Ant., xviii. 106). It follows that 
according to Josephus the Baptist died after a.p. 34, a fact in striking accordance 
with his mention in Axt., xviii. 116—that is, long after Jesus (xviii. 63) and after 


the death of Philip (xviii. 106). 

? Agrippa I. was appointed king by Caligula on his accession to the principate 
in A.D. 37. 

5 cine MSS., ‘ his wife Herodias.’ The name is wanting in the Hebrew and 
Arabic Josippon as well as in the Rumanian Josephus (below, p. 600, No. 15) 
dependent upon a Russian text. It is no doubt a late addition and a borrowing 
from Mark vi. 17. 

9 The Hebrew Josippon (Cod. Vat. Ebr., 408, c. A.D. 1444) adds a line of 
protest against the assertion that the other rabbis did not dare to speak their 
mind on this scandal. 


230 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


x. 


man, came to him in wrath and 
spoke: “‘ Because thou hast taken 
thy brother’s wife, thou trans- 
gressor of the law,’ even as thy 
brother has died a merciless death, 
so also shalt thou be cut off by the 
heavenly sickle. For the divine 
decree will not be silenced, but 
will destroy thee through sore 
afflictions in other lands; be- 
cause thou art not raising up seed 
to thy brother, but satisfying 
fleshly lusts and committing adul- 
tery, since he has left* children.”’ 
But Herod, when he heard (that), 
was wroth and ordered him to be 
beaten and driven away. But he, 
wheresoever he found Herod, never 
ceased to accuse him, until Herod 
grew furious and ordered him to 
be slain. 

Now his nature was strange and 
his ways were not human. For 
even as a fleshless spirit, so lived 
this man. His mouth knew no 
bread, nor even at the passover 
feast did he taste of the unleav- 
ened bread, saying: ‘‘in remem- 
brance of God who redeemed the 
people from bondage is this given 
to eat,® and for the flight only, 
since the journey was in haste.’’® 
But wine and strong drink he 
would not so much as allow to be 
brought nigh him. And he loathed 


1 Deut. xxvii. 23: ‘ Cursed be he that lieth with his sister-in-law’ (hathanah. 
LNX.," μετὰ τῆς ἀδελφῆς τῆς γυναικὸς αὐτοῦ. A.V., ‘mother-in-law’). The rigoristic 
explanation wanted to understand hathanah in the widest sense, including the 
brother’s wife. 

* This is the constellation falx ; cf. Firm. Mat. and Manilius, v. 2. 2; also the 
sickle of the archangel Gabriel, Talmud Sanh., 95b. No mediaeval forger could 
have invented such a detail. 

* Antipas was banished by Caligula to Lugdunum in Gaul in Α.Ὁ. 39 (Aut., 
XViii. 252). 

4 Slav MSS.: ‘four children.’ The Hebrew Josippon has ‘quamvis habuerit 
liberos’; the Egesippus, ‘habentem semen de germano ipsius’; cf. Tert., Adv. 
Marc., iv. 34, ‘habentem filiam ex illa.’ ‘Four’ is therefore obviously a late 
gloss of a reader who included with the daughter of Herodias the three children 
of Philip’s wife Salome by her second marriage with Aristobulus. 

6 Text transposed. The Slavonic has ‘nay, even to the passover feast he 
tasted not... saying: In remembrance of God who released . . . is (this) 
given,’ etc. 

Cf. Exodus xii, 11: ‘ ye shall eat it in haste,’ 


THE GENUINE STATEMENTS OF JOSEPHUS 231 


(to eat of) any animal. And 
every act of injustice he exposed. 
And wood-shavings served for his 
needs.’ ? 


Reflecting on this passage, taken in connexion both with the 
other accounts of dreams and with the previous section on the 
Baptist, an unprejudiced reader cannot fail to note the perfect 
homogeneity of the narrative and its derivation from some special 
source trying to extol the skill of Essenes and kindred ascetes as 
interpreters of dreams and soothsayers. Josephus, who boasts of 
his own ability in the interpretation of dreams,” must have had 
just such a source at his disposal. From these considerations it 
‘vould seem almost inconceivable how Berendts could say ‘a first 
glance gives the unfavourable impression . . . that the whole 
story of Philip’s dream is a formal imitation of that of Archelaus.’ 
Asif it were not the case with all prophetic dreams throughout the 
literature of the world that they display and from their very nature 
must display a certain similarity of form! As well might one say 
that Joseph’s dream of the sheaves in Gen. xxxvii. is a spurious 
interpolation, modelled on his dream of the stars. 

Instead of dwelling on such fancies, let us turn to the invalu- 
able details of this tradition, since they throw a surprising light on 
circumstances hitherto unexplainable and in any case lying quite 
outside the range of a mediaeval Christian forger. 


NASORAEANS AND REKHABITES 


It may appear strange that Josephus does not know the 
Baptist’s name and speaks of him only as the ‘ wild man’ (‘¢sh 
sadeh). But the explanation is surprisingly simple ; it is given by 
the Baptist’s elusive answer, as quoted by the historian, to the 
question as to who he is: éelovék esmi,‘ 1am aman, and as such 
(hither) has the spirit of God called me.’ The Baptist therefore 
replied, “Enosh ‘ani, or, in Aramaic, ’Enash ‘ana, ‘I am ’Enosh,’ 
i.e. simply ‘ man,’ just as Jesus called himself Bay nasha,’ the ‘ Son 
of Man,’ or simply ‘ the man.’ 

This explains at last how the Mandaeans, i.e. the NasOraeans 
of Mesopotamia, arrived at their peculiar doctrine, namely, that 

1 For an explanation of this mischievous statement, cf. below, p. 237 f. 

2 B.]., il. 352. 

3 Cf the Mandaean Bar-’Anosh=’Adam, Ginza, ed. Lidzbarski, p. 118 ἢ. r4. 

4 Fora bibliography, cf. W. Brandt, art. "Ἢ Mandaeans’ in Hastings’ Encyel., viii. 
(1915), p- 384b, ὃ 15; Manddische Religion, Leipzig, 1889, p. 155 Sq- 5 R. Reitzen- 
stein, ‘Das mandaische Buch des Herrn der Grosse,’ Sitz.-Ber. ἃ. Heidelberg. Akad., 
1919, Abt. xii. p. 11 sqq., 22 544. The texts in German translation in Lidzbarski, 
Das Johannesbuch der Mandaer, Giessen, 1915, c. 76, pp. 243; Mandatsche Lit- 
urgien, Berlin, 1920, 10 sqq., 25 sqq.; Ginza, Dey Schatz odey das grosse Buch der 
Mandder, Gottingen, 1925, pp. 29, 32, 47, 35> cf. also H. H. Schaeder, Séud. d. 
Bibl. Warburg, vii., Leipzig, 1926, p. 308 n. 2. 


232 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


‘Enosh reappeared in Jerusalem at the same time as ’I shu Mshiha, 
Jesus Christ. The latter they are wont to call the ‘ liar’ or ‘ im- 
postor ‘ * because he posed as a worker of miracles whom, however, 
‘Enosh unmasked. This ’Enosh worked numerous prodigies of 
healing, preached the true religion, made 360 or 366 disciples in 
Jerusalem, and then returned to ‘ Life,’ his ‘ Father,’ who bade 
him destroy Jerusalem, a task which in the form of a white eagle 2 
he actually accomplished. In all these transactions ’Enosh 
appears in a cloud, wherein he dwells or conceals himself and where- 
from at need he makes for himself the semblance of a body, walking 
thus on earth in human form.? It has long since been recognized 
that this cloud has its origin in Daniel’s version, ‘ there came with 
(or ‘on’) the clouds of heaven one like unto a son of man... * 
From all this it would appear that there must have existed a 
fierce rivalry between the disciples of the Baptist and those of 
Jesus who belonged to this particular circle. The inference might 
long ago have been drawn from the passage in the Fourth Gospel 
on the Baptist as the ‘ forerunner ’ of the Messiah, inasmuch as the 
‘wild man’ throughout regards himself not as the forerunner of 
some one greater, but as the ‘ reborn ’Enosh ’ foretold in Daniel’s 
vision, i.e. as the Messiah. At any rate, he was so regarded by his 
GSCI ICS Seis oa ak a ee π οα | 
_ The conclusion, thus assured, that the Mandaic figure of the 
‘Uthra or ‘angel’ Enosh ὃ goes back toa designation applied by the 
Jordan Baptist to himself, strikingly confirms the correctness of 
Lidzbarski’s recent identification of the name N asovaia, by which 
the Mandaeans called themselves, with the Nafwpaios or Ναζωραῖοι 
used in the New Testament of Jesus and the early Christians, as 
also with the Jewish designation of Christians as nostvim. Lidz- 
barski interprets naséraia to mean observantes —' keepers of secrets,’ 
guardians of special usages? or doctrines. In the instructive 


* Ginza, r.p. 49 sgq., ed. Lidzbarski. 

* Brandt, op. et loc. cit. Cf. the ‘ white falcon’ in Bundahishn, xix. 23. The 
eagle no doubt symbolises here the Roman legions (cf. Ezra iv. 11). 

3. Ginza, ed. Lidzbarski, P.29, ὃ 199 sq. 

4 bar ’enash, Dan. vii. 1 3: 

Ὁ Ps.-Clem., Recogn.,ed.Gersdorf (1838), 1.60: ‘et ecce unus ex discipulis Joannis 
adfirmabat Christum Joannem fuisse et non Jesum ; in tantum inquit, ut et ipse 
Jesus omnibus hominibus et prophetis maiorem esse pronuntiavit Joannem.’ Jbid., 
i. 54: ‘ex discipulis Joannis, qui videbantur esse magni, magistrum suum veluti 
Christum praedicarunt.’ Ephraem Syr., Ev. expos., ed. Moesinger, 288 : ‘ et dis- 
cipuli Joannis de Joanne gloriantur et dicunt eum esse Christo maiorem qui ipse 
id testatus est dicens: non est major,’ etc. Luke iii, 15: τος διαλογιζομένων 
πάντων ἐν ταῖς καρδίαις αὐτῶν περὶ τοῦ ᾿Ιωάννου, μήποτε αὐτὸς εἴη ὁ Χριστός." 

ὁ The Baptist as an ‘angel’ is not unknown to the Christian fathers ; cf, 
Tertullian, Scorp., viii. 161, ed. Vienna; Adv. Jud., ii. 725, Oehler; Origen, In Joann., 
li. (25, 31); Chrysostom, Hom., 68 (on which Nestle, Z.N.T. W., viii., 1907, p. 238). 
Byzantine art often represents the Baptist as an angel with wings. See Pl, xrx. 

” nasar da‘ath, ‘ preserve knowledge,’ Prov. xxii. 12 (LXX., φυλάσσειν); nasar 
bervith, ‘ observe the covenant,’ Deut. xxxiii. 9, (LXX., διατερεῖν) ; Ps. xxv. Io, 


THE GENUINE STATEMENTS OF JOSEPHUS 233 


literature on the subject both he and Prof. Zimmern! have over- 
looked some highly important evidence which I think makes the 
correctness of this interpretation quite certain. In the first place, 
it was known to the ancient Church, and is actually found in the 
Onomastica Sacra® of Jerome (or Origen), along with two others 
which have obviously no reference to nos‘rim, Nafwpaior, but to 
nazivim, Ναζιραῖοι, Νασαραῖοι. An Ethiopic onomasticon in 
the Bibliothéque Nationale in Paris has the explanation, ‘Nazaraei 
sanctificati® sive floridi4 aut observantes aut coronati coronis.’ 5 
Prof. Zimmern’s demonstration that this word ‘ keep’ (observare) 
refers to the keeping or guarding of secrets ὃ finds an excellent 
parallel in Paul’s designation of Christians as οἰκονόμοι μυστηρίων 
θεοῦ, ‘ stewards of the mysteries of God.’* The mysteries there 
referred to are naturally ‘the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven’ 8 
—when it is to come, what are the signs of its approach, who will 
‘Inherit’ it, etc. The ‘mystery of the Gospel’ ® is another—the 
secret, that is, of the good news concerning it for the blessed elect : 
in fine, just the ‘ mystery of Christ,’ 19 the ‘ messiah-secret,’ i.e. who 
is to be the Elect One, what he will do and suffer, etc. 

Again, Lidzbarski’s original suggestion that what the nos¢rim 
‘ observe ’ must have been special rites of purification, baptism in 
particular, finds a striking confirmation in the liturgic language 
of the Church. In a beatitude in the Acts of Paul and Thekla™ 
read: ‘Blessed are they who keep the baptism.’ Similarly 
Origen: 15 ‘And blessed is he who hath part in the first resurrec- 
tion, who kept (τηρήσας) the baptism of the Holy Spirit.’ Since 
baptism, with reference to the baptizer’s act of ‘ sealing ’ with the 
sign of the cross,!® came to be called simply ‘seal’ (σφραγίς), we 


πο 5478} bevith, ‘ such as keep his covenant ’ ; Ps. lxxviii. 7, ‘ observe his command- 
ment’; Ps. cv. 45, ‘ observe his statutes’; Ps. cxix. 45, ‘ keep thy law’; Pyov. 
xxviii. 7. Similarly, Matt. xix. 17: ““τὰς ἐντολὰς rypetv”; Mark vii. 9, “τηρεῖν 
τὴν παράδοσιν ᾿; John viii. 51, ““ τηρεῖν τὸν λόγον "; Acts xv. 5, “" τηρεῖν τὸν νόμον." 

* Z.D.M.G., \xxiv. (1920), pp. 429-38 ; Ixvi., pp. 45 ff. 

* Aeth., 1. fol. 1 et 2 (saec. xvii.), ed. Wutz, Onomastica Sacra, ii., Leipzig, 1915 
(Harnack-Schmidt, T.U., iii., R. xi., vol. xli. 2, p. 1021). 

* This cannot be separated, of course, from Na¢apato.=nazivim. 

* Derived from Hebr. nesey=shoot, Arab. nadava=to shine, to spring forth 
(of verdure). i 

* Nezey=turban, diadem. In the Mandaic Book of John, § 20, the Baptist has 
‘three diadems and a crown of immense value—i.e. the three crowns of the king, 
the high priest, and the prophet, the triple ¢iava still now worn by the Roman pontifi. 

δ Bab. mudu nasir piristi ilani, ‘ the initiate, the knowing, who keeps the secret 
of the gods,’ corresponds exactly to mandaja=yvwartxds, ‘he who has the manda,’ 


Aram. madda, the * knowledge’ (Néldeke, Mand. Gramm., ὃ 75), naséraia, ‘who 
seeps this knowledge.’ 

t 2 δον το 

ὃ Matt, xiii. 11, with parallels. Cf. Daniel xii. 10, below, Pp. 331 N. 4. 

9 Epbh. vi. 19. 19 Col. iv. 3. 


4 Lipsius, Act. Apost. Apocr., i. 239. 
12 Comm. in Jerem., ii. 3. 
15. On the meaning of this sign, see below, p. 255 n. 4. 


234 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


also find the expression ‘ to keep the (baptismal) seal’ (sc. safe 
from injury), which is specially significant, because the Mandaeans 
also seal the baptized with the ‘pure sign of Johana.’ 

Under these circumstances it is not surprising to find that 
another fragment of an onomasticon, not noticed by Wutz, and 
preserved by the lexicographer Hesychios,! offers us, beside the 
usual interpretation of the word naziy (=Nazirite), precisely the 
equation Ναξιραῖος -- βαπτιστής. This explanation doubtless 
refers to nos‘v?, Nafwpaios, and it attests that the equation of these 
ideas, obvious in the case of the Mandaean Subbas and Mughtasilas 
(=‘ Baptists’ or “Nasdraeans’), holds also for the pre-Christian 
Palestinian Nacapaio. of Epiphanius,? i.e. the disciples of the 
Baptist or John. 

Lastly, there is a highly remarkable rabbinic gloss on 1 Chron. 
iv. 25, a passage concerning ‘the potters (jos‘vrim, LX X. κεραμεῖς) 
who dwell in the plantations and enclosures beside the king ; in 
the work of his service dwell they there.’ Those workmen of the 
royal potteries? are mentioned in the books of Chronicles, along 
with the carpenters (havashim) of the valley of carpenters and 
other craftsmen of the tribe, in the pedigree of the Rekhabites and 
Qenites, which has been transmitted in a very corrupt form and 
will be treated by the author at length elsewhere.4 On these 
workmen the Talmud 5 writes: ‘ These potters are the descendants 
of Jonadab son of Rekhab, who keep (9,57) the oath of their Father, 
viz. to drink no wine, to lay out no vineyard or other plantation, 
nor to till the soil, nor to build houses to dwell in them.’ ὃ 

It appears, then, that the so-called Rekhabites, the ‘ cara- 
vanners’ or ‘ wayfaring people,’ i.e. the various itinerant cratfts- 
men, were also known as nos’vim, and that this ‘ keeping’ and 
‘suarding’ of secrets? and special usages referred in the first 
instance to the preservation of technical or magical ‘ knowledge,’ 
i.e. the craftsman’s secrets and tricks of his trade, such as the 
special usages, customs, and taboos still in vogue to-day among the 
modern gipsies of the desert, the so-called S/eb or ‘ crossed ones.’ ὃ 

1 “Natipatos’ ὁ θεῷ κεχαρισμένος καὶ ἀφιερώμενος (=nazir) βαπτιστὴς καὶ iepeds.”’ 
βαπτισταί as ἃ name for the disciples of John is found in Justin, Dial. ο. Tvyph., 80. 

3 Haeres., xxix. p. 327, ed. Holl. 

3 These royal manufactures account for the frequently found stamp sbi, ἴοι 
the king.’ P.S.B.A., 1910, p. 143 sq. Macalister, P.E.F.Q.S.T., 1903, p. 245 Sq. 

4 Le Monde Oriental, 1929, p. ΤΟΙ. 

5 Baba bathra, 91b. 


5. Jervem. xxxv. 8 sqq. 

* Anthropologists will remember that such tribes will cultivate a special secret 
language, such as the sfelta or ‘ tinkers’ talk.’ 

8 The name is derived from the fact that this class of itinerant craftsmen wore 
on their foreheads the mark Τ, the famous ‘ sign of Oain’ (=the smith). See 
our Pl. xvii. and my paper, ‘Das Qainszeichen und die Qeniter,’ Le Monde 
Oriental, ed. by Prof. Nyberg, Upsala, 1929, pp. 48-112. The cross-mark of the 
sleb is known to the rabbis of the third century (see below, p. 343 τι. 6). 


THE GENUINE STATEMENTS OF JOSEPHUS 235 


A number of facts are thereby at once explained. -There is 
first the striking fact, never to my knowledge understood, that 
the Mesopotamian mandaia or γνωστικοί, the nasorata ΟΥ̓ keepers ° 
of secrets, are without exception craftsmen, in particular carpenters, 
boat-builders, smiths, locksmiths, gold- and silver-smiths, and 
eventually shopkeepers,! all of which professions are found in the 
pedigrees of Rekhabites and Qenites. Again, these people abstain 
from wine 2—a prohibition the more striking because the vine, as 
the tree of life, playsa great part in Mandaic writings—and, during 
the consecration of priests, dwell in reed-tents.* Lastly, we find 
in the angelology of the Mandaeans the remarkable interpretation 
of Ptah-il,4 i.e. the old Egyptian or Canaanite god of smithies and 
metal-engravers, as the creator of heaven and earth as well as of 
mankind. 


TuE BaptTist’s FooD AND CLOTHING 


The Baptist’s abstinence, according to the Slavonic Josephus, 
from wine and all strong drink would on this hypothesis need no 
further explanation, such being the well-known cult-law of the 
Rekhabites. His strict abstinence from bread would be perfectly in 
harmony with the prohibition against tilling the soil, attested by the 
passage in Jeremiah already quoted, for those ‘ wayfaring people 
who strictly adhere to the Bedouin life of the desert. The Rekha- 
bite prohibition of all cultivation of plants® explains why the 
‘Banus,’ the hermit and baptist with whom Josephus himself 
lived in his early days, fed only on “ such things as grow of them- 
selves.’ © 

According to Jewish traditions, obviously of Rekhabite origin 
and curiously reappearing in the tradition of Islam, the forbidden 
fruit of Paradise is either the grape or the wheat-plant, an 
interpretation which imparts a convincingly logical meaning to 
Gen. ii. and iii., seeking to explain the endless ploughing of the 
toiling fellahin, and how cultivation of the soil ‘in the sweat of 
the brow’ came into a world where man originally enjoyed the 
blessed life of the xazahle, the owners of palm-tree gardens in 
the oases. 


1 Cf. W. Brandt, op. cit., p. 380a, ὃ 1, and E. 8. Drower in The Quest, xvi. 80 sq. 

5. Lidzbarski, Mand. Lit., Einleitung, p. xix. The Quest, loc. cit., p. 89. 

’ They thus avoid dwelling in permanent buildings. 

4 Cf, E. Peterson, Z.N.T.W., 1926, p. 247, and my Kenitische Wethinschriften, 
Freiburg-i.-Br., 1919, p. 103 sqq. 

5. Cf. R. H. Kennett in Hastings’ Encycl. of Rel. and Ethics, x. (1918), p. 603a. 
According to Qenite tradition in Gen. iv. 5, God refuses to accept a sacrifice from 
the produce of agriculture. The Qenite ought not to till the soil and become 
a ‘ serf of the earth’ (‘obed ’adamah). 

6 Jos., Vita, ii., ed. Niese. 


236 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


The stern preacher in the wilderness teaches a complete 
‘return ’! to the original diet ordained by God for men before the 
fall, as it is written: ‘Behold, I have given you every herb yielding 
seed which is upon the face of the earth, and every tree in the 
which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed ; be that your meat.’ 3 
The preacher, who regards himself as the reborn antediluvian 
‘Enosh, in whose time men began to call upon the name of Jahweh 
(Gen. iv. 26), durst not avail himself of the permission to eat meat 
granted by God to men 8 on account of their hardness of heart, and 
after the generation of the flood in their wickedness had arbitrarily 
given themselves up to the abomination of devouring living beings, 
and even to cannibalism. The caller in the solitude, who an- 
nounces that the kingdom of heaven is at hand, feeds on the herbs 
and roots of the desert, just as, according to rabbinic doctrine,® the 
Israel believing in the Messiah will, in the final days of tribulation, 
live in the wilderness and reedy wastes upon salt weeds and the 
roots of the broom plant. 

The express statement of the Slavonic Josephus, that the 

᾿ Baptist abhorred all animal food, flatly contradicts the Gospel 

| tradition of his feeding on locusts,® but agrees perfectly with an 

almost unanimous tradition of the Greek Church, according to 

which John restricted himself on principle to a vegetable diet,’ the 

. ἀκρίδες Of the gospels being explained as ‘ points’ or shoots of 
‘some plants.® 

I am myself much more inclined to believe that the word 
ἀκρόδρυα =‘ tree-fruits’ was maliciously distorted into ἀκρίδας 
by the hand of an enemy of the Baptist’s sect, desirous of making 
the Baptist appear as one feeding on vermin, naturally loathsome 
to Gentile Christians of the educated classes. Asa matter of fact, 


* shubhu, of which ‘ Repent ye’ (ueravocire) in Matt. iii, 2 is an inexact 
rendering. 

2 Gens i. 20, P. * Gen: ix. 3,. 

4 Book of Jubilees, v. 2 sqq. 

* Midr. shir, τ. vi. 10 (1240; Strack-Billerbeck, ii. 284 sqg., 4a): ‘R. ‘Aqiba 
said : Forty years is the duration of the days of the Messiah, just as the Israelites 
spent forty years in the desert, and he (i.e. the Messiah) makes them go forth into 
the desert to live on salt herbs and broom roots’ (Job xxx. 4). Pesigta, 49b: 
“Whither does the Messiah lead them ? Some say into the desert of Judah; others, 
into the desert of Sichon and ‘Og.’ ‘ Wherefore, lo, I shall persuade them and 
lead them into the desert’ (Hos. ii. 16). ‘ He who believes in him (i.e. the Messiah) 
eats salt herbs and broom roots ’ (Job xxx. 4). 

6 Mr. Th. Gaster has pointed out to me the curious fact that there is a Baby- 
lonian word harubu, ‘locust,’ ‘ grasshopper’ (Muss-Arnold, i. 336a, b). That the 
word—which is beyond any doubt Semitic and simply means the ‘ devastator ’— 
is not found in our Hebrew and Aramean dictionaries may be due to the merest 
chance. Ifthe word harub, ‘locust,’ existed in Hebrew or Aramean, the confusion of 
harubim, ‘locust,’ with harubim, ‘ carob-pods,’ would need no further explanation. 

7 See App. Xvil., pp. 614 ff. His pupils are aimed at by Paul, Rom. xiv. 2, 
cp. 21. 

* Isidor, Pelus., Epistles, i. 132, cf. i. 5; Euthym. Zygab., P.G. cxxix, 160: 
Pantaleo diac., P.G. ii. C. c. 1245, 


THE GENUINE STATEMENTS OF JOSEPHUS 237 


long before the discovery of the Slavonic text, such a scribal variant, 
though generally assumed to be a mere slip of the pen, has been 
supposed to account for the enigmatic ‘locusts.’ The same or a 
very similar inimical hand was, if my theory be right, also re- 
sponsible for the restrictive gloss, unknown to the disciples of 
John,? ‘ yet the least in the kingdom of heaven® is greater than he,’ 
appended to the words in which Jesus exalts the Baptist above all 
born of woman.* However this may be, the assumption of some 
such malicious distortion of the original text appears to me in- 
dispensable for the understanding of the Slavonic Josephus, where 
the ‘ wood-shavings’ of our MSS. are clearly quite impossible, 
since a man eating sawdust or the like would die of peritonitis 
within a few days. I first thought that a Hebrew peri7 ha ‘es = 
‘ tree-fruit’’ had been mischievously distorted into perus ha ‘es = 
‘ broken-off piece of wood.’ There are other possible explanations, 
but the most attractive is the one suggested by Prof. Wohleb, 
namely, that in place of (τροφὴ) καρπῶν ξυλίνων --' (food) of 
wood-fruits,’ that is, ‘ wild fruits’ or ἡ tree-fruits,’ exactly corre- 
sponding to the Semitic peri7 ha ‘es, the Greek copy of the Slavonic 
translator had (τροφὴ) καρφῶν Evrd\ivwy =‘ food of chips of wood.’ 
Small though the difference may seem between καρπῶν and καρφῶν, 
and ingenious as is this conjecture, a purely accidental interchange 
of π᾿ and ¢@ is impossible. Here, asin the case of the Evangelist’s 
ἀκρίδας for ἀκρόδρυα, we have one of those caustic punning witti- 
cisms for which Jews notoriously have a special weakness. A 
calembour of this type, on the rabbinic principle ‘ Read not... . 
but . . .,’ might quite well have been made by Josephus himself 
when copying his Nasodraean authority on the Baptist, though as a 
pupil of a ‘ Banus’ * he must have known well enough what was the 
Baptist’s customary food not to fall into an accidental error on 
such matters. Anyhow, the assertion of Josephus that John ate 
chips of wood is on a par with the malicious statement that he 

“stuck over his body’ the hair of beasts wherever it was not 
covered by his own. 

As was pointed out above, there can be no doubt about the 
mischievous intention of this description. What the Baptist 
himself meant by his peculiar garb will be clear if we recall the 
import of his food-regulations discussed above. He regarded 
himself as the reborn ’Enosh, as son of Sheth and grandson of 


Adam, who was-the-first-to-do penance for his“sins by baptism 
——— nn ea a 


1 Mandaean Book of John, ed. Lidzbarski, p. 95, l. I 3: , Jahjah preaches in 
the nights and says, “15 there any one greater than 1 am 
> See below, p. 415 0. 7, on this appellation applying ὦ ious: 
5. Mait. xi. τι. 
4 See Ὁ. 23 0. 2, also above, p. 24, on his journey to Rome on behalf of 
certain priests, observing a vegetarian diet. 


238 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


in the Jordan.! The preacher of repentance therefore appro- 
“priately wears the penitential robe of raw skin (‘6r), bestowed 
by God upon the first human couple after the fall, in place | of the 
robes of -light (’6r) which covered their nakedness in Paradise, 
which they forfeited by their sin, and which, according to Nasoraean 
doctrine, would be restored to those admitted to bliss.* It is 
remarkable, moreover, that Josephus, just like Matthew and 
Mark, speaks not of animals’ skins, but expressly of animals’ 
hair (τρίχες). That is of course essential, because fabrics of 
camel's hair are made from the hairs of the living beast, which 
have either fallen out or been plucked out without any injury 
being inflicted upon the animal. <A skin, on the other hand, can 
come only from a dead beast, slaughtered or come to a natural 
end. Now, the rabbinic comments? on the God-given ‘ coats 
of skins’ * clearly show that some interpreters strove to exclude 
the idea that for the making of these garments God killed any of 
the animals then still in a state of innocence. The explanation 
given interprets, therefore, ‘skin-clothes,’ “hide-clothes’ as clothes 
‘which closely fit man’s skin,’ or that they were made ‘ of milk- 
white wool,’ of shaggy fleeces, or indeed of the hair of camels and 
hares. Syrian Christians ὅ go yet further, explaining these God- 
given coverings of our first parents as clothes of bark, made from 
the ‘skin (‘6r) of trees; only the blessed Moses called the bark 
‘“‘skin,’’ because in trees it takes the place of the skin.’ This was 
obviously the view held by the baptist with whom Josephus was 
personally acquainted, the ‘ Banus’ who took his ‘ clothing from 
trees.’ That may equally well mean ἡ paradise’ clothes like the 
coats of fig-leaves, or a mantle literally of bast or of rushes, such as 
is worn to this day by the keepers of vineyards on night duty 
in the neighbourhood of Vienna as a protection against damp 
and cold. 

The coat of skin over the bare body, with the‘ leather girdle,’ 
is, moreover, no other than the primitive Edomite garb of the 
Rekhabites, still worn by the S/eb mentioned above (p. 234 n. 8) 
and pictured on Pl. xx. 

Three different views on the true meaning of the Baptist’s 


1 Cf. the Life of Adam and Eve and the so-called Apocalypse of Moses (more 
correctly ‘of Sheth,’ Short Dict. of Christ. Biogr., i. 39 sqq.). Since we know that the 
Baptist called himself ’Enosh, the latter may now be easily recognized as one of 
the basic writings of the Nasdraeans. The penitential baptism of Adam in the 
Jordan is mentioned in the tract, In Budge’s Coptic Apocalypse the story occurs 
in a compilation entitled ‘ Secrets of St. John ’ ; see his pp. 244 sg. According to 
a kind hint of Mr. Th. Gaster, the same legend is found in the Midrash Gan-Eden. 

* Midr, Beresh. v., 20; οἵ. also my Orphisch-dionysische Mysteriengedanken, 

. 305. 
᾿ 3 Gen. γ., 4, 20 (14a), Strack-Billerbeck, i. p. 97. 

ὁ Gen. 111. 21. 

δ Cave of Treasure, p. 7, ed. Bezold. Solomon of Basra, Book of the Bee, p. 24, 
ed. Budge. 


THE SLEB, A TRIBE OF WANDERING CRAFTSMEN OF SYRIA AND ARABIA, SO-CALLED FROM THE MARK OF THE CROSS 
4 (SALIB) ON THEIR FOREHEADS 
DESCENDANTS OF THE REKHABITES AND QENITES OF THE OLD TESTAMENT 
(SEE P. 238, LINES 24 F.) 


XX ALV Td 


THE GENUINE STATEMENTS OF JOSEPHUS 239 


garb may, then, be quite clearly distinguished. The emphasis 
laid by Josephus and the Evangelists on the fact that he went 
about clothed in animals’ fair, not animals’ skins, can have had 
its origin only in a special tradition of the Nasdraean Baptists 
common to the Christian witnesses and to Josephus. If they laid 
this stress on the mantle of haiy, we may be sure that the girdle 
was of the same material, like those which according to Dr. Musil 1 
are still made to-day. The ‘leathern girdle about his loins’ in 
Matthew and Mark—Dr. Klostermann rightly notes that the 
phrase is a verbal quotation from 2 Kings 1. 8—as well as the 
‘camel’s skin’? in the MSS. D and a in Mark, serve to support 
the interpretation of John as ‘Elijah. That interpretation goes 
back to Jesus or his disciples, is quite unknown to Josephus, 
and according to one piece of Christian evidence,® which is above 
suspicion because flatly contradictory to the ordinary view of 
the Church, was decisively rejected by the Baptist himself. 

According to the tradition of the Baptist’s circle, their founder 
wore this peculiar hair garb because he was ’Enosh, and ‘ hair- 
clothes’ were given by God to the Adamites. The Baptist’s 
garb, then, according to this view, is the garb of ’Enosh. The 
leather girdle-and the coat-of-skin of the Christian sources is the 
garb of ’Elijah. If the source of Josephus prefers to represent 
John as a ‘hairy saint,’4 1.6, as a man completely covered 
by matted hair and wild beard, it is not because Elijah is 
described in 2 Kings i. 8 as a ‘hairy man,’ but because a legend 
of which by mere chance only a modern Greek version ἢ has 
come down to us states that Adam and Eve were as shaggy 
as bears. 

The third view, quite clearly expressed in Josephus, is the 
assertion that the ‘ wild man’ had hair ‘ stuck’ upon his body. 
It is evidently the personal opinion of the scoffer to the effect 
that the Baptist was simply an impostor. Of the ‘Elijah con- 
ception Josephus knew nothing ; else he would not have failed 
to call John a ‘ false prophet,’ which term he uses for the Egyptian 
messiah of the Mount of Olives, and he would certainly have 
explained the strange garb as that foreseen by Zech. xiii. 4 referring 
to lying prophets: ‘neither shall they wear a hairy mantle to 


1 Avabia Petraea, iii. 262: ‘ Aside from milk, the camel provides hair which 
falls out in spring and is collected or softly pulled out each morning by the girls 
and women. This camel’s hair is used by the women for the making of carpets, 
saddle-bags, ropes, girdles, and cloaks,’ 

2 ἐἐ δέρρις καμήλου." 

5. Johni, 21; οἵ. 25: ‘ Art thou Elijah? And he said, lam not.’ 

4 Cf. on this subject the excellent monograph of Dr. Charles Allyn Williams, 
Oviental Affinities of the Legend of the Haivy Anchortte, Urbana, Ill., 1925-6 
(University of Illinois Studies in Language and Literature, x. 13 5644. and ΧΙ. 57-138; 
cf. Nieuw theologisch Tijdschrift, 1928, p. 282 sqq.). 

5 Z.N.T.W., 1928, p. 308. 


240 - .. THE MESSIAH JESUS 


deceive,’ Josephus’ own explanation of this peculiar mode of 
dress is quite different. 3 = 
The Greeks and Romans, as is well known, believed the 
mountain forests to be peopled by shaggy, half-bestial, demoniac 
creatures, la gente selvatica of Italian folklore, satyrs, little Pan- 
gods, sileni, fauni, silvani, etc.,. The widespread tale of the 
captured demon is of course well known, as are the prophecies he 
is supposed to have uttered to regain his freedom.! Just so the 
Semitic peasants and nomads regarded the desert as haunted by 
hairy” (sevvim) demons (shedim), the Arabian jinn (ahl al ard), 
or by “he-goats’ or ‘calves’? or other spectres in animal form.® 
A person sticking hair on his body; and-thus desiring to be-taken 
for a completely hairy being, who partakes of no ordinary human 
food, leads a ‘ non-human existence like a bodiless ghost,’ * and 
‘comes out of the bush like a beast,’ wishes to be regarded as 
nothing else than an (‘¢sh) ga‘ir, a hairy or wild man,° or a shed in 
animal form, and it is precisely as such a lycanthropic scarecrow 
that the ‘wild man’ is here represented. His refusal to give his 
name, and his reply ‘A man!’ to the question ‘Who are you ? ’— 
a reply unintelligible alike to Josephus and to the questioners— 
perfectly accords with world-wide legends of wild men, with the 
motive well known from the story of Odysseus and Polyphemus 
(οὔτις) mixed in. 


THE VARIOUS NAMES OF THE BAPTIST 


The Baptist’s habit of calling himself simply ‘(the) man’ (above, 
p. 225 n. 2) is probably the cause alike of the total ignorance of 
his true name displayed by Josephus and of the twofold tradition 
concerning this name as presupposed by the Gospel of the Infancy 
prefixed to Luke’s narrative. According to this account, he 
would at his circumcision have been given his father’s name and 
been called Zechariah ben Zechariah ; only, his mother wished 
him to be named John, although ‘ none of her kindred bore this 
name.’ Similarly we read in the Mandaean Book of John:? 


‘The Jews assembled and came to Aba Saba® Zakria and spoke to 
him: ‘O Aba Saba Zakria, thou must haveason. Tell us now what 


1 Cf. A. H. Krappe, Le Rive du Prophéie in Studies in English Philology. A 
miscellany in honour of Frederick Klaeber, Minneapolis, 1929, pp. 340-61. 

* Cf. also 2 Chron. xi. 15. 

ὅ Cf. Wellhausen, Reste avabischen Heidentums, 1 1 35 56., Ξ151 54.; and my 
Orphisch-dionysische Mysteriengedanken, Pp. 260 n. 2. 

* Slav. doh’ besploten’ -- πνεῦμα ἀσώματον. 

" Cf. Philostr., Vita Apoll. Tyan., vi. 27. 

_& Luke i. 59: ‘ They came to circumcise the child, and they would have called 

him Zachariah after the name of his father.’ 

7. Ed. Lidzbarski, p. 115. 

8. =‘ Old Father.’ 


THE GENUINE STATEMENTS OF JOSEPHUS 241 


name we should give him. Should we give him the name of ‘ Wisdom- 
tracker,’* that he may teach the book in Jerusalem? Or should 
we give him the name Zathan Estuna,? in order that the Jews may 
swear by him? ...” When Enishbai (Elizabeth) heard this she 
cried out and said: ‘‘ Of all these names by which you call him will 


[ give him none, but I will give him the name Jahiah-Johana, which 
Life itself has given him.” ’ 


The Mandaeans themselves have two different names for the 
Baptist side by side, Jahiah ὃ and Johana, which they use simul- 
taneously in a kind of poetical parallelismus membrorum.4 In the 
Quran, which draws upon the traditions of the Arabian Jews and 
Nasran ὃ (1.6, the primitive Nasdraeans), the Baptist is called only 
Jahiah. Brandt’s explanation ® of the use of this name by the 
Mandaeans as due to Arabic influence was far too rash an assump- 
tion. As early as the end of the eighteenth century C. F. Dupuis 
put forth the conjecture, since revived by Drews, that the Baptist’s 
name ᾿Ιωάννης may be no other than that of the strange Baby- 
lonian god of revelation who emerges from the water, according to 
the account of Berossus, to wit, ᾿Ὡάννης,, Ἰάννης,δ or ᾿[ωάννης.ὃ 
Such a possibility is quite conceivable. For not only does the 
form Joannes, attested by Chaeremon® in the time of Nero, 
exactly coincide with the New Testamental name for the Baptist, 
but according to the view expressed in the Fourth Book of Esdras 
(Xl. 25; ΧΙ], 51 84.) the Messiah is thought of as concealed in the 
deepest ocean, from which he is to emerge in the end. Simi- 
larly, according to Berossus, under the first dynasty of the ante- 
diluvian kings of Babylon, the ’Qavvns, (J)6annes, being the first 
of a series of such antediluvian ‘ sages,’ emerged from the sea to 
teach the people all manner of wisdom, including politics and law. 

Again, the remarkable feature of a total abstention from food 
and drink, attributed to the Babylonian (J)o(a)nnes,” is in striking 


+ Aram. ‘Wisdom-Jagif.’ This and es/una, ‘pillar,’ seem to be malicious 
allusions to James and John the sons of Zebedee, the ‘ pillars’ of the earliest 
Christian church. 

* Estuna=‘ pillar.’ Zathanis unexplained. I think it is the name‘ Zeithan ’ 
=‘ olive’ mentioned in 1 Chron. vii. 10. 

3 This word is not at all an Arabic form of Johanan, but the name Jehijah 
(τ Chron. xv. 24)=‘Jahweh lives.’ The vocalization of the first syllable is the 
archaic (Arabic) one of the Qenites, as in Jahweh (=‘ he falls ’) itself. 

* The recurrent chapter-title in the Mandaean Book of John runs: ‘ Jahijah 
called forth in the night, Johana in the evenings of the nights ’—whatever that 
may mean. 

® The Arabian Jusifiis (above, p. 32 ἢ. 2), ὃ 90, says of the Baptist: ‘Some call 
him Jahja, the zasvan call him Johanan as-Sabi.’ 

δ Hastings’ Encycl. Rel. and Ethics, 391, ὃ 40. 

7 Alex. Polyhist. ap. Syncell., ed. Dind., p. 51. 

8 Hippolyt., ref. v. 7, p. 80, ed. Wendland. 

9 Chairemon, ed. Sathas, Bull. corr. Hell., 1877, p. 129. 

10 Schnabel, Bevossos, p. 253; Eusebius, Chron., ed. Karst, p- 7=Svnceell., ed. 
Dind., p. 51. 


Q 


242 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


agreement with the hyperbolical expression, ‘ John came neither 
eating nor drinking’ ;! as also is the comparison of John as a 
‘beast’ in the Slavonic Josephus (above, p. 225) with the similar 
designation (ζῷον) for the Babylonian (J)dannes in Berossus. It 
is therefore by no means an impossible supposition that the name 
Ἰωάννης was first given to the Baptist, emerging, as it were, with 
his doctrine from the waters of the Jordan, by certain Nasoraeans 
who thereby intended to identify him with the Babylonian revela- 
tion-god. If the Nos‘vim were originally ‘itinerant’ tradesmen, 
travelling to and fro between Transjordania and Mesopotamia, in 
the manner of the present-day S/eb, such an influence of Baby- 
lonian mythological ideas would not seem too far-fetched. It 
might equally be referred, however, to the Babylonian Jews, 
settled by Herod the Great in the region of the Hauran mountains.° 


It is quite possible, then, that the Baptist’s real name was 
Jahijah bar Zekharjah, and that ’Enosh, Zekharjah bar Zekharjah, 
Johanan bar Zekharjah, Joannes, etc., were the various aliases 
he assumed to conceal his identity from his persecutors. = 

Tf such was the case, there would be an easy explanation of the 
strange fact that the rabbinic tradition (which knows and mentions 
Jeshu han-nosri, the Nasdraean, and the hemerobaptists) does not 


seem to know an individual called Johanan ham-mat*bil, that is, 


ohn he ee 
~The apparent difficulty just mentioned would at once disappear 

if confirmation were forthcoming for a conjecture put forward in 
toro by Dr. Kaufmann Kohler, namely, that the Baptist is no 
other than the wonder-worker Hanan han-ne}“ba mentioned in the 
Babylonian Talmud, 1.6.3 (Jo)hanan or Johannes, ‘ the hidden ’ 
or ‘ the hiding one.’ This nickname would fit exceedingly well the 
man who lived in the brushwood of the Jordan valley ‘like a beast 
in the forest,’ the John who was persecuted by the Herodians, who 
passed for the prophet Elijah still lingering in concealment, and, 
according to our hypothesis, under cover of various assumed names 
eluded search ; it is the more appropriate in that Hanan han- 
neh‘ba is said precisely to have hidden himself ‘on account of 
religious persecution.’ The nickname ‘ the hidden one’ may on 
the one hand connote ‘ the hermit’ who hides in the solitude of 
inaccessible regions, whilst on the other it is also the typical title 
of the ‘hidden’ Messiah,‘ the ‘Adakas’ or ‘hidden man’ (‘ hidden 
Adam’) of the Mandaeans.*® 

1 Matt, xi. 18. 2 Jos., Ant., xvii. 23 sqq.; Vita, §§ 47, 54, 177, 183. 

3 Ta‘anith, 23b. 

4 On the Messiah as first ‘hidden’ (xeheba) and then ‘ revealed’ (niglah, 
ἐπιφανής), οἵ. Targ. Jonath. to Micah iv. 8; Midrash, Ps. xxi., ὃ 1, f°. 89a. Cf. 
John viii. 59 and xii. 36 on Jesus, who ‘ hid himself ’ (ἀπεκρύβη) from his followers. 


5 Cf. v. Gall, Βασιλεία Θεοῦ, Heidelberg, 1926, p. 162. Reitzenstein, Hell. 
Mysierienrel., Leipzig, 1927, p. 13 f. 


THE GENUINE STATEMENTS OF JOSEPHUS 243 


This quite simple hypothesis would, moreover, furnish the 
easiest solution of another old riddle. For in that case it 15 no 
other than this ‘ hidden one’ who is intended by that ‘ righteous 
man’ (i.e. that saddiq), Elkesai, Elxai or Elchasai (i.e. in Arabic 
‘the hidden one’ !), whom the Baptist communities on the northern 
frontiers of Arabia, where it extends to the Dead Sea and the 
Euphrates, have honoured for centuries as the founder of their 
religion. Thus the Mandaean Nasoraeans and the Elkesaites— 
would represent only two different groups of disciples of John | 
developing along Gnostic lines, that is, in the direction of the 
teachings of Simon Magus and Dositheos.? 

Conversely, the rite of purifying men through immersion in the 
water of a miraculous spring, gushing forth at the end of times,* as 
it was taught by John, would be perfectly suited to a rain-maker 
such as Hanan the Hidden. The Mandaean tradition of the cloud 
of ’Enosh ὃ would also fit very well the figure of Hanan the Rain- 
maker ; for from a tale of the Avabian Nights proved by the late 
W. Bousset to be of Jewish origin,® the type of the holy man with 
a cloud that accompanies him wherever he goes, at least so long 
as he continues in spotless piety,’ is well known. The Mandaean 
conversion of John’s shaggy coat into a vesture of water-clouds ὃ at 
all events recalls the use of a woollen fleece, intended to imitate 
the fleecy ‘lambkin’ clouds, in the analogous rain-charm of Gideon.® 
It is also well to recall those Thessalians who ascended Mt. Pelion 
clad in lambs’ fleeces (κώδια) to pray for rain.” 

The grandfather of Hanan the Hidden, Honi the Circle-drawer 
(hamm*’agel), appears in Josephus" as a martyr for his piety and 
rectitude. While Aristobulus 11. was being besieged on the Temple 
Mount by Hyrcanus and the Arabian King Aretas (c. 65 B.C.), this 
man, who had ‘ hidden himself’ on the approach of the civil war, 
was at the request of the besiegers fetched to curse the besieged, 
and on his refusing to do this was stoned to death. The grand- 

1 The Arabic definite article ’al (el, ’tl) is first found in the inscription of 
Nemara in the Louvre. See the bibliography of this monument in D. Nielsen, 
Hanab. d. altavab. Altertumsk., i. 49 n. 2. It dates from the fourth century of our 
era. There is no reason whatever why the Arabian article should not have existed 
three centuries before that time. 

* See App. XVII. 

3 See below, p. 272 n. 2, on Zech. xiii. 10. 

4 Yor a translation of his legend with the Hebrew original, cf. Z.N.T.W., xii. 
(1911), p. 290. 

5 Cf. the Life of the Baptist by Serapion, ed. Mingana, Bull. John Rylands 
Libr., xi. (1927), p. 449, and Ginza γ., trsl. by Lidzbarski, p. 29, ὃ 199 sq., line 25 sqq. 

6 Arch. f. Rel. Wiss., xxi. (1922), pp. 11-12; Nachr. d. Gétt. Ges. d. Wiss., phil.- 
hist. Kl., 1916, p. 484. 

7 Williams, op. cit., pp. 37 n. 2, and 476. 

8 Ginza, τ. ed. Lidzbarski, p. 29: ‘Enosh ’Uthra goes to Jerusalem in a 
raiment of watery clouds. 


9 Judges vi. 36 sqq. 10 Dicaearch., c. 60. 
11 Ant., xiv. 22-4, where he is called Onias. 


mae! THE MESSIAH JESUS 


father thus shows the same inclination for a life of solitude and 
concealment as the grandson. The hermit’s ascetic practices 
seem to have been hereditary in this family of Sadiqgim. The 
Onias stoned in the time of Aristobulus had two other grandsons 
beside Hanan the Hidden (his daughter’s son)—one named Abba 
Hilquia,' and the other, like his grandfather, Honi; the latter 
continued the practice of circle-drawing and praying for rain, and 
lived till shortly before A.p. 70.2. The chronological difficulties 
objected by W. Brandt to Kaufmann Kohler only exist if the dates 
in Luke’s Gospel of Infancy are adhered to, and if Jesus and the 
Baptist are regarded as of approximately the same age. If, how- 
ever, following the special Mandaean or Nasoraean tradition,? we 
presume that the latter had been baptizing for many years when 
Jesus presented himself at the Jordan,‘ and, following the Slavonic 
Josephus, which again goes back to traditions of the Baptist’s 
circle,’ we hold that the Baptist had been brought up for trial 
under Archelaus, all is in excellent order. He must, then, have 
been an old man in the time of Jesus, between fifty-five and sixty- 
five years of age, as he is in fact generally represented in early 
Christian art.® 7 

The chronological thesis of the Gospel of Infancy, limiting as it 
does the difference in age between John and Jesus to a period of 
six months only, is clearly connected with the astral symbolism of 
the famous passage: ‘He must increase, but I must decrease.’ ἢ 
It is furthermore intended to exclude the idea of Jesus the Nasor- 
aean being a pupil of the Baptist. But apart from these spurious 
and tendentious dates, the traditions there recorded concerning 
the Baptist’s parents may quite well be historical. The daughter 
of the elder Honi ham-m*agel may really have been called Eliza- 
beth,’ and her husband, unmentioned in the Talmud, may indeed 
have been a certain Zechariah of the priestly course of ’Abijah. 
The statement that Elizabeth belonged to the house of Aaron 
agrees well with the tradition that Honi traced his descent back 


1 Cf. Ὁ. Ta‘an., fol. 238. 

2 Jer. Ta‘an., 11]., fol. 66b. 

5 Ginza, p. 191 54. For an English translation, cf. ὦ. R.S. Mead, The Quest, 
XVI. (1926), p. 58. 

4 According to a Life of the Baptist by a monk Paphnutius (Patrol. Or., iv. 
p. 523). John had baptized for twenty-five years when he administered baptism 
to Jesus. 

5 See above, p. 23 n. 2 and Ὁ. 27 Nn. I. 

6 Cf. our fig. x1x., and Salomon Reinach, Cultes, Mythes, Religions, 111. 22; 
cf. C. Torr in Revue Archéolog., 1902, i. 14 sqq., and 1903, ii. 125. 

7 John iii. 30. 

8 According to the Syriac commentary of Isho’dad (cf. Nestle, Expos. Times, 
xvii. 140), Elizabeth’s father was named ‘Anon. This form may come from a 
Greek source substituting “Avwy for Hanan. Cf. Avvay for Hanan or Hanon in 
1 Chron. xi. 43; Jer. xlil. (35) 4; 1 Esdr. ii. 40; Neh. vii. 49; and 1 Chron. 
xix. 14. 


THE GENUINE STATEMENTS OF JOSEPHUS 245 


to Moses. Even the Rekhabite character of the Baptist’s life dis- 
cussed above (p. 235 ff.) is quite reconcilable with priestly parent- 
age, since, according to rabbinic tradition,” Rekhabites married the 
daughters of priests and their grandsons ministered as priests in 
the Temple. In any case, it is a curious coincidence that we are 
told of this Elizabeth (at once the daughter of the Onias-Honi who 
according to Josephus ‘hid himself,’ and the mother of that 
Hanan or Johanan who is called in the Talmud han-Neh*ba, ‘the 
hidden one ’) that she also without apparent reason ‘hid herself for , 
five months’ before the birth of John. | 

The most transparent allusions to Hanan ‘ the hidden one’ 
are found in the Protevangelium of St. James,* where Elizabeth 
heard that ‘they sought for John ... went up into the hill 
country and looked about her, where she should /ide him, and 
there was no /iding-place . . . and the mountain clave asunder 
. . . Now Herod sought for John and sent officers to Zechariah 
saying: “‘ Where hast thou jidden thy son?’’’ The same motive 
occurs also in an ancient legend published by A. Berendts from 
Russian MSS.° 

On the whole, then, Kohler’s suggested identification of thes 
Talmudic ‘ hidden ’ or ‘ hiding ’ Hanan with the Baptist Johanan, 
as portrayed in Josephus, and in Christian as well as Mandaean 
tradition, appears to be highly probable. 


THE BAPTIStT’s CALL TO LIBERTY 


In the same way as the Greek paragraph about Jesus in the ~ 
Antiquities,® so the account there given of the Baptist shows clear “ 


a 

1 In the Mandaean ‘ Book of Jahjah,’ ὃ 18 (Engl. transl. by Mead, The Gnostic 
John the Baptizey, London, 1924, p. 39), the descent of Zechariah, the father of the 
Baptist,.and Consequently the genealogy of John himself, are equally traced back 
to Moses. 


2 Jalqut on Jevem. xxxv. 12. 8 Luke i. 24. 
4 Chap. xxii. sq.; cf. M. R. James, The Apocryphal New Testament, Oxford, 
1924, p. 48. 


δ Cf. his Zacharias Apokvyphen, Dorpat, 1895, p. 75. Cf., further, the Emesan 
Vita (below, p. 254 n. 1), and the so-called Barbarus Scaligert (Th. Mommsen, 
Mon. Germ. auct. antiq., ix. 91), the Latin translation of an Alexandrian chronicle, 
Further, Cedren, ed. Bekker, i. 328, and E. Petersen in Z.N.T.W., xxvii. (1928), 
p. 86 n. 4, in all of which texts we find the story of John’s hiding. The mountain- 
cave to which the angel led him is pictured in the famous ‘Madonna in the Grotto,’ 
by Leonardo da Vinci,;who seems to have identified it with the cave in which the 
Virgin gave birth to Jesus, according to the Proto-evangel of James, xviii. 1 (Engl. 
transl. by M. R. James, Apocy. N.T., Oxford, 1924, p. 46). 

6 See above, p. 61 f. , 


246 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


traces of improvements, interpolations, and omissions at the hand 
of Christian copyists. This will be obvious to any one reading 
with an open mind the following passage of the extant text: 1 


— “Some of the Jews, however, regarded the destruction of Herod’s 
army as the work of God, who thus exacted a very just retribution 
for John, surnamed the Baptist. For Herod slew him, a good man, 
who bade the Jews cultivate virtue, practise justice toward each 
other and piety toward God, and to come together through baptism ; 
for thus immersion would appear acceptable to God, if practised, 
not as an expiation for certain offences, but for a purification of the 
body, after the soul had already been previously cleansed by right- 
eousness. And when the others (τῶν ἄλλων) banded together 
(συστρεφομένων) ---ἴογ they were highly delighted (ἥσθησαν 3 to listen 
to his words—Herod feared that the powerful influence which he 
exercised over men’s minds might lead to some act of revolt; for 
they seemed ready to do anything upon his advice. Herod therefore 
considered it far better to forestall him by putting him to death, 
before any revolution arose through him, than to rue his delay when 
plunged in the turmoil of an insurrection. And so, through Herod’s 
suspicion, John was sent in chains to Machaerus, the fortress already 
mentioned, and there slain. Now ¢he Jews believed that the destruc- 
tion of Herod’s army was the penalty inflicted upon him to avenge 
John, God being wroth against Herod.’ 


The authenticity of the whole passage has sometimes been 
disputed, though not so often as that of the Testimonium con- 
cerning Jesus. Emil Schiirer rightly observed :* ‘ Suspicion is 
awakened in particular by the favourable estimate of John, who 
could have been regarded with sympathy by Josephus only in 
certain respects, to wit, as an ascetic and a preacher of morality, 
but not as the prophet of the coming Messiah stirring up the 
people.’ To obviate this criticism, Niese put in his text ἥσθησαν 
ἐπὶ πλεῖστον, ‘they were overjoyed,’ instead of ἤρθησαν ἐπὶ 
πλεῖστον, ᾿ they were aroused to the highest degree of excite- 
ment,’ in spite of the fact that all the three MSS. of Josephus (A, 
M, and W) and of the epitome * have the correct wording. There 
is nothing in the words of the Baptist, as quoted by Josephus, 
which could fill his audience with exultation. On the other 
hand, the excitement he is said to have produced must have been 
mentioned, else there would be no reason for Herod’s alarm.® 
ἥσθησαν, ‘they were delighted,’ is therefore a demonstrably 
Christian correction. 

1 Ant., xviii. 5. 2, ὃ 116 sqq. 

* Thus Niese, with some MSS. of Eusebius and against some MSS. of this church 
father and all MSS. of Josephus, who wrote ἤρθησαν, ‘ they were excited.’ 

5. G.J.V.,1. 4. 438 τι. 2; cf. Jean Juster, Les Juifs dans l’empire Romain, Paris, 
1914, il. 131, note. 

4 See above, p. 28 ll. 29 ff. 

9. Cf. M. Goguel, Jean Baptiste, Paris, 1928, p. 16. 


THE GENUINE STATEMENTS OF JOSEPHUS 247 


A highly significant piece of evidence to the effect that even 
the Halosis could not escape the Christian revision so often 
pointed out in the foregoing pages, 18 afforded by the fact that in 
the copy used by the Russian translator ἤρθησαν must also 
have been corrected to ἥσθησαν; for the Old Russian version 
reads ‘when the people heard that, they were glad.’ In the 
Halésis the ‘ joy’ of the people is not so devoid of any object as 
in the Antiquities, for the censor of the former work had not 
deemed it necessary to suppress the Baptist’s call for liberty, 
and the promise that through following the path of justice the 
Jews would be freed from their © many tyrants.’1 The reason 
for this leniency was that John appeared to recommend a ἡ legal 
way ’ to freedom, ‘ the path of the law ‘* as opposed to an attempt 
at insurrection. What he decided to suppress by the clever change 
of a single letter (p > σ) was the effect of the Baptist’s call in stirring 
up the people to political activity.° 

Other alterations may reasonably be traced to the same hand 
which sacrificed the word ἤρθησαν, ‘they were roused (to revolt’). 
Even before the Slavonic Haldsis was known, one might have seen 
that the passage must originally have contained some more solid 
grounds for Herod’s alarm. Immediately before the words * for 
they were roused,’ the censor overlooked the highly signifi- 
cant expression ‘ when they banded together’ (συστρεφομένων), 
allowing it to stand. But the subject of the phrase, ‘ the others,’ 4 
cannot be in order, because those who banded together were 
actually the Jews summoned by him to baptism and not any 
‘other’ people, much less ‘the others,’ which, given the connexion, 
could only mean ‘the heathen,’ a manifest absurdity. Here 
again, then, we have a Christian alteration, mitigating the seditvous 
effect of John’s preaching, and instead of τῶν ἄλλων We should 
rather read τῶν πολλῶν, ‘and when the masses banded together, 
for they were roused to the greatest revolt by the words which they 
heard. This text was still read by the author of the Latin 
version of the Antiquities produced at the instance of Cassiodorus, 
where τῶν πολλῶν (or possibly even παμπολλῶν δ) is rendered by 
perplurima multitudo, 

In place of the reading presented by the Cod. Ambrosianus 
printed in Niese’s text,° Samuel Naber rightly adopted the simple 
ὀπὶ στάσει τινί on the evidence of the Medicean and Vatican 


1 See above, p. 2245. 2 See above, p. 224 ἢ. 4. 

3 It is to be noted that he dealt in the same manner with the section about 
Jesus, allowing the plan of marching into the city and massacring the Roman 
garrison to stand and striking out only the actual execution of the Zealots’ 
proposal. See below, pp. 464 ff. 

4 τῶν ἄλλων ; see above, p. 246. 

5. This word does not occur, however, in Ant,, xvii.-xix. (Thackeray), 

6 ἐἐ μὴ ἐπὶ ἀποστάσει τινὶ φέροι,᾽" 


248 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


codices and the epitome. Most probably ἀποστάσει is a Christian 
correction, to make Herod’s alarm appear as based on fear of a 
religious apostasy from orthodox Judaism and not of a political 
insurrectionary movement (στάσις). 

oe If nothing was preached to the Jews beyond ‘ virtue’ and a 

~ baptism in water, and if their excitement or joy consisted merely 
in some kind of religious or spiritual ecstasy of the type observed 
after a camp meeting of a Texas Baptist community, the per- 
secution madness of an insane tyrant would be required to put 
to death such an innocent preacher of morals. Nor can Josephus 
well be supposed to have contemplated drawing such a malicious 
caricature of Herod Antipas in a book written in the lifetime of 
his patron Herod Agrippa 11., still less of depicting as a ‘good 
man’ one who had stirred up the masses to the highest pitch of 
excitement. 

/ ~~ In reality, a comparison with the extant Slavonic version of 
the Haldsts shows at a glance that the friendly estimate of 
the Baptist suspected by Schiirer does not go back to Josephus 
at all. On the contrary, the section dealing with John has been 
falsified by Christian copyists in the approved manner, 

The pathetic words of assent, ‘ and very justly’ (καὶ μάλα 
δικαίως), are the exclamation of a Christian reader standing wholly 
on the side of the ‘ forerunner’ of Jesus, and not siding at all 
with Josephus, who ridicules the Baptist’s appearance and dress. 
In the last sentence of the section, ‘But to the Jews’ (τοῖς δὲ 
Ιουδαίοις), implying that the Jews asa body expected chastisement 
to be inflicted for the murder of the Baptist, is another Christian 
alteration of τισὶ δὲ ᾿Ιουδαίοις, as appears from a comparison with 
the introductory words, ‘But some of the Jews.’ Where the 
falosis has ‘a wild man’ (ἄγριος ἀνήρ), we read in the Antiquities 
‘a good man’ (ἀγαθὸς ἀνήρ),1 a reading effected by the alteration 
of only two letters, and manifestly of the same tendency as the 
alteration of ἤρθησαν into ἥσθησαν. After ἄγριον ἄνδρα some- 
thing must have been struck out: that description clearly re- 
quires amplification, such as is found in the Halésis. Guided by 
the Slavonic rendering of the passage in question, and the notable 
parallel in the description of Sabinus the Syrian in the Greek 
War,? one may supplement the text somewhat as follows: 

‘For Herod killed him, a wild man (with a shaggy body and 
clothed in animals’ hair, who incited) the Jews (to liberty and) bade 
them cultivate valour,’ practise justice toward each other and piety 
toward God, and to band together through baptism.’ 


1 Cf. above, p. 51 n. 2, the alteration of σοφιστὴς ἀνήρ iN σοφὸς avipin the passage 
on Jesus. 

* B.J., vi. τ. 6, ὃ 55 (see below, Ρ. 392): ‘ his skin was black, his body shrunk 
and shaggy.’ 

5 ἀρετή does not mean ‘virtue’ ina speech inciting men to strive for liberty! 


THE GENUINE STATEMENTS OF JOSEPHUS 249 


Even in the sentence about the meaning of baptism a Christian 
copyist, unwilling to admit that John’s baptism was efficacious for 
the forgiveness of sins, has clearly hada hand. W. Brandt 1 found 
it strange that by this sentence attributed to the Baptist the puri- 
fication instituted by him is entirely robbed of its religious efficacy 
and reduced to an ordinary ablution for the sake of bodily cleanli- 
ness. That this is a falsification of the real state of affairs is 
obvious, but it can be proved by the evidence of one of the non- 
Greek versions that Josephus is completely innocent of this par- 
ticular distortion of the facts, in which as a Jew he could have taken 
no interest whatever. For the Arabic Jusifis expressly states of 
John the Baptist: ‘ This man baptized the Jews for the forgive- 
ness of sins,’ which is the exact reverse of what stands in our Greek 
text. The Arabic Jusifiis goes back to the Hebrew Josippon, 
which frequently accords with the Latin Egesippus. Now, this 
version also says of John, ‘baptismum propter purificationem 
anim et corporis instituerat, cujus causa necis liberias .. «ἡ Fortu- 
nately, it is easy to see how the Christian copyist went to work to 
distort the sentence to the disadvantage of John’s baptism ; in 
the adversative clauses linked by μὴ éwi... ἄλλ᾽ ἐφ᾽, ‘not for... 
but for,’ he simply transposed the members. Originally the 
passage must have run: ‘ For baptism would only appear accept- 
able to God if practised, not for the purification of the body, but 
for the expiation of sins (τῶν, not τινῶν 5 ἁμαρτάδων), after the 
soul had been thoroughly cleansed by righteousness.’ 

Only in this form does John’s doctrine of baptism agree with 
that of the Therapeutae in Philo,® “having purged bodies and souls, 
the one with the waters of the bath, the other by the floods of the 
laws and of right discipline’; with that of Silvanus in the first 
epistle of Petey,s and the command in the Clementine Homzlies 
(xi. 28), ‘Cleanse the heart from ill by divine instruction and 
wash the body in the bath, letting purity follow after goodness’ ; 
and, lastly, with the oracle of the Jewish Sibyl.® Only in this form 
—and this is what the Christian corrector would take amiss—does 
it appear as the basis, such as the history of religion requires, of the 
Christian baptism of repentance for the remission of sins,® practised, 
notindeed by Jesus,’ but doubtless by the disciples of John who went 
over to him, namely, Andrew and his brother Simon Peter bar- 

1 Z.A.W.T., extra vol. xviii. p. 80. Cf. also Goguel, op. cit., p. 19. 

2 The restriction would imply that some sins—only those against the purity 
laws—could be washed away. 

3 De plantatione Noe, p. 327, ed. Mangey, 1. 354. 

4 iii. 21: ‘. . . baptism doth .. . save us, not as the putting away of the 
filth of the flesh, but through a questioning of one’s good conscience toward God ’ 
(““συνειδέσεως ἀγαθῆς érepwrnua els Gedy”), 

δ Ovac. Sib., iv. 164 544. 

ὁ Marki.4; Luke ili. 3; Acts ii, 8. 

7 John iv. 2. 


250 ‘THE MESSIAH JESUS 


jona, or the ‘ anonymous disciple,’ 1 and afterwards became the rite 
of initiation into the Christian church. The Hebrew Josippon, 
dependent on the second edition of the Wary combined with the 
additional matter in the Antiquities? says in so many words of 
Johanan: ‘It was he who instituted baptism.’% Only if the 
account in the Antiquities is taken in the above sense and supple- 
mented in the way suggested above,* on the model of the parallel 
narrative in the Halosis, by a mention of John’s call to liberty, 
only then does it agree with the statement in Matthew that 
John announced the impending establishing of the ‘kingdom 
of God.’ ὃ 

The invaluable account in the Haldsis, derived from informa- 
tion coming from the Baptist’s own following,® at last enables us 
to understand how John conceived of and preached the ‘kingdom 
of God ’ and what is that ‘ way of the law’ by which he wished to 
lead Israel to ‘liberate it from its many tyrants.’ ? 

The opinion defended by Frey,’ that the Baptist advocated a 
‘legal way ᾿ to freedom as opposed to ‘ illegal’ attempts to gain 
independence by armed rebellion, is open to grave doubt. True, 
his admonition to the Jews to renounce evil deeds shows that 
he propounded the well-known rabbinical doctrine® to the effect 
that God in his mercy will send Israel the Messiah as soon as it 
is converted, does penance, and completely fulfils the law. His 
release by Archelaus after his first arrest and trial presupposes the 
fact that his preaching at least admitted of a quietist interpreta- 
tion. On the other hand, this arrest would itself be unintelligible 
had his speeches not had some provocative effect upon the 
masses, 

It is further worth noting that the phrase ‘the way of the law’ 
must have had reference to some quite definite passage in the law 
and its interpretation. Else one would have difficulty in under- 
standing the angry retort of the learned scribe Simon : 


‘ We read the books of God daily ; but thou, only now come forth 
like a beast from the forest, durst thou teach us and lead the multi- 
tudes astray with thy accursed speeches ?’ 


The text underlying this sermon of liberty leading the multitudes 


1 John i. 35, 49, 41. 2 See above, p. 83 ll. 7 ff. 

* Such parentheses, explaining who a certain person was or what he did, are 
found, e.g., in Ant., xv. § 4 (‘ this Pollion had predicted at the time when Herod 
was tried,’ etc.) ; xx. § 102 (‘ the sons of Judas the Galilaean—of him who had 
incited the people to revolt against the Romans in the days of the census of 
Quirinius ’); B./., ii. § 433 (‘Judas, surnamed the Galilaean—that redoubtable 
doctor, who in old days under Quirinius,’ etc.) ; B.J., vii. § 253, etc. 


4 See above, p. 248 last lines. 5 Matt. iii. 2. 
6 See above, p. 27 n. I;- p. 23 n. 2. 7 See above, p. 224,. 
8 See below, p. 257 n. Io. ῃ 


" Cf. the passages collected in Strack-Billerbeck’s commentary on Matt. xi. 12, 
i. 599, and 162 sqq. on Matt. iy. 12. 


THE GENUINE STATEMENTS OF JOSEPHUS 251 


astray can indeed be no other than the well-known Deuteronomic 
‘royalty law ’:1 
‘When thou art come unto the land which Jahweh thy God giveth 
thee, and shalt possess it and shalt dwell therein, and shalt say, I 
will set a king over me, like as all the nations that are round about 
me; thou shalt in any wise set him king over thee, whom Jahweh 
thy God shall choose : one from among thy brethren shalt thou set king 
over thee: thou mayest not put a foreigner (‘ish nakhri) over thee, 
who ts not thy brother.’ 


It is this law which caused King Agrippa I., when in accordance 
with the old custom 2 he was reciting the Book of Deuteronomy on 
the feast of tabernacles in A.D. 41, to ‘ burst into tears’ at the 
words, ‘ thou mayest not put a foreigner over thee, who is not thy 
brother’ ; 3 whereupon the scribes of the Pharisees, pampered by 
him in every way, were moved to comfort him by exclaiming : 
‘Be not distressed, Agrippa, thou art our brother, thou art our 
brother.’4 This touching display of sentiment, enacted before an 
immense public, shows how the Herodian family sought to re- 
concile their constitutional position with the Jewish law. What 
attitude their opponents took up can be easily seen. The chief 
objection raised was the fact that the ancestor of the royal house 
was not an Edomite. Antipater, they said, had been a native of 
Ascalon;5 he was consequently a Philistine, an ἀλλόφυλος or a 
6j par excellence. Moreover, Deut. xxiii. 8, 9 at best permitted 
the descendants of Edomite proselytes to belong to the community 
of Israel; but from this it by no means followed that a converted 
foreigner could be king over Israel. As for the rule of the Roman 
emperors over the Holy Land, it could certainly not be made to 
appear legitimate by such an evasion of the spirit of the law. | 
The ‘way of the forah’ leading to ‘liberation from many | 
tyrants,’ as inculcated by John, demanded then of the people a 
complete fulfilment of the law alike in its moral and in its political 
aspect. From the moral point of view it required ‘ perfect justice. 
toward men and piety toward God’;® in the political sphere 
obedience to the law concerning the Israelitish monarchy, i.e. the 
installation of a native king chosen by God, non-recognition of | 
foreign rule,’ refusal of the oath of allegiance, and perhaps also ᾿ 


Ξ ὦ ΞΖ 
1 xvii. 14 sg. See above, p. 137 0. 2. 2 Deut. xxxi. 10 sqq. 
%’ Mishnah Sotah, vii. 8. 
4 Referring, of course, to Deut. xxiii. 8 54. : ‘ Thou shalt not abhor an Edomite, 


for he is thy brother.’ 

6 Sextus Julius Africanus, Epistle to Aristides, ap. Euseb., Hist. eccl., i. 7. 
13 sq.; Chron., ed. Karst, p. 209. 

ὁ Cf. the oath of the Essenes in B./., ii. ὃ 139 : ‘ first that he will practise piety 
toward the Deity, next that he will observe justice toward men.’ 

7 Cf. B.J., iii. § 259, where the Jews in the cave of Jotapata prefer suicide to 
violation of the law by submitting to foreign rule. 

$ This is what the more radical Pharisees had done under Herod the Great. 


252 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


a refusal to pay taxes to foreigners such as was required of the 
Jews by Judas the Galilaean. 


THE BAPTIST AND JUDAS OF GALILEE 


In spite of the well-known looseness with which Josephus 
strings together the extracts from his various sources—in this 
case a document hailing from the Baptist’s circle and an official 
report of the governor Coponius—the political principles of the 
Baptist are clearly seen to be similar to, if not identical 
with, those of Judas of Galilee. On the latter the Halésis! has 
the following brief remarks, immediately after the first mention 
of John: 


‘In his time (i.e. the administration of Coponius) there was a 
man of Galilee who upbraided the Jews because, though of the seed 
of Abraham, they were now doing menial service and paying taxes 
to the Romans, and because they had accepted mortal masters after 
forsaking one who was immortal. The name of this man was Judas, 
and he found a way to live in the outside (510) and one not corre- 
sponding (to that) of others. (§ 119) There is, you must know, among 
the Jews a threefold order of life in conformity with the law. One 
(school) has the name of Pharisees, the second that of Sadducees, 
the third, which is more Puritan than the other two, that of the 
Essenes.’ 


Here the remarkable phrase ‘to live in the outside’ only 
becomes intelligible through retranslation into the language of the 
rabbis. In the Talmud 2 we hear of a nephew of R. Johanan b. 
Zakkai, named ’Abba Sikara, i.e. the ‘ sicar,’ who is there men- 
tioned as ‘head of the Bavjonim of Jerusalem’ and as having, 
during the siege of the city by the Romans, managed the escape of 
a rabbi from the town in a coffin. These Barjonim (sing. Hebr. 
barjon, Aram. barjona) are mentioned elsewhere quite a number 
“of times. The expression barjon, Syr. baraja, Arab. barj*", is 
derived from Sum. bar =‘outside,’ ‘free space,’ ‘desert,’ and bears 
the same relation to Hebr, bar, ‘the outside,’ ‘the open land,’ 8 as 
does ‘eljon, ‘the Highest,’ to ‘al, ‘above,’ ‘in excelsis.’ The Bar- 
jonim are accordingly those who ‘ stand outside,’ the externt, Or 
indeed, according to the formation of the word (which is almost 
equivalent to a superlative), those ‘who stand furthest out,’ the 
‘extremists.’ This expression, in the mouth of opponents, easily 

SA | Fe © 2 Gittin, 56a. 

δ Gesenius-Buhl, 16, 113a, s.v. bay, iv.: Arab. barr, ‘flat country,’ terra firma: 
bibl. Hebr. bar, ‘the ground,’ Ps. ii. 12; ‘the open country,’ Job xxxix. 9; bibl. 
Aram. bar, i.; Jew. Aram. bara; Syr. bara, ‘ the open country’; Egyptian 


Aram. bayva, ‘ outside,’ hinaus. Sachau, Avam. Papyri und Ostraka, τοῖς, Pp. 56, 
line 'rs, 


THE GENUINE STATEMENTS OF JOSEPHUS 253 


takes on the sinister sense of ‘ outsider,’ ‘ outcast,’ ‘ outlaw,’ in- 
dicating those who evade the oppression of foreign rule by taking 
flight into inaccessible mountains, woods, and deserts.1 Josephus 
would indicate, then, that Judas of Galilee was the founder of the 
party of the Barjonim, those who live an outlaw’s life in the 
desert, and that this party, along with Sadducees, Pharisees, and 
Essenes, was the fourth αἵρεσις among the Jews. 

This evidence is of great importance for the New Testament 
history of the time, because, according to Matthew (xvi. 17), in 
the fateful hour of the revealing of his Messiahship at Caesarea 
Philippi, Jesus addresses Simon Peter as Simon barjona. The 
Gospel of the Hebrews, as well as that of John (i. 42), is either 
ignorant of or wishes to ignore the compromising meaning of this 
name, and would accordingly take it as a patronymic ‘son of 
Jonas’ or ‘son of Johanan.’ Such an interpretation cannot, in 
the light of such names as Barabbas, Bartholomat, Barjesus, and 
Barnabas, be proved to be anerror. — Yet it is a natural suggestion 
to interpret the name on the analogy of the noteworthy title 
Simon the Canaanaean or Simon the Zealot, or Judas the Zealot,” 
that is, as a party name. ‘Simon barjona’ is probably no other 
than ‘Simon the extremist,” the ‘ outcast,’ an adherent of the 
radical Zealot, Judas of Galilee. It is a well-known fact that even 
as this meaning was intentionally obscured by later copyists by 
the simple device of dividing the word and reading Bar Jonah or 
Bar Johanan, some MSS.—notably N—write Kavavitns, 1.6. 
Cana‘anite, or ‘man of Cana,’ instead of Kavavaios, the Zealot, 
because it did not please a later generation that one, or even two, of 
Jesus’ disciples should have belonged to the party of the Zealots 
or Jewish nationalist fanatics. 

In the Greek Way * we are expressly told that this Judas in- 
cited the Galilaeans to revolt (from Roman rule), and the same 
statement appears in the Andéiquities.4 The son and successor of 
the Zealot leader Hezekiah, defeated and slain by Herod the 
Great,® was the soul of the opposition to the census of Quirinius,® 
in A.D. 6 or 7, and at his death left sons behind him who in the 
rebellion of 66 distinguished themselves as leaders in the struggle 
for independence. 

Josephus may be right in attributing the ‘invention of the 
way of living in the outside’ to Judas of Galilee, and considering 
him the founder of the party of the Barjonim. But there is good 

1 See above, p. 24 n. 1, on Judas Maccabaeus taking to the mountains and living 
there ‘ on grass,’ ‘ after the manner of the beasts,’ to avoid pollution. 

2 Mentioned in some MSS. of the Vetus Latina. On the possibility of two 
apostles being each called ‘the Zealot,’ see Rendel Harris, The Twelve Apostles, 
Cambridge, 1927, p. 34- 


Φ. Boi, 1.8: 1, 8. 115. 4 xx, 5./2, § 102. ae = 2 five bey ie ea 56. 
6 B.J., ii. 17. 8, § 433; Ant., xviii. I. I. 


-.-.«.- 


254 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


evidence to the effect that John’s disciples credited their own 


master with the counsel to ‘ leave the towns.’ A life of John the 
Baptist, purporting to have been written by a disciple of John 
called Mark,* evidently worked over, to a large extent, by an un- 
known fifth-century Syrian author, since it gives an account of the 
discovery of the head of St. John in Emesa in the year 453 A.D., 


_ contains a sermon of the Baptist advising his disciples ‘ to leave 


the towns,’* to ‘depart out of the towns ’—an obvious parallel 
to 2 Cor. vi. 17, where Paul, quoting the prophet Isaiah (lii. 11), 
admonishes the faithful: ‘ come out from among them and be ye 
separate.’ * The order ‘ get out from the towns’ will immediately 
remind the reader of the catchword, ‘ and there went out unto him 
all... they of Jerusalem,’® and of ‘the multitude that went out 
to be baptized’ ® by John, in the Synoptic gospels. As a matter of 
fact, the Ps.-Clementines 7 say in so many words that the disciples 
of the Baptist—under the leadership of his successors,’ Simon 
Magus and Dositheos—did carry through what Roman political 
theory would call a ‘ secessio plebis’ : ‘ Believing themselves more 
righteous than the others,’ these so-called ‘ righteous ones’ or 
Nadogqites “segregated themselves from the contact of the people.’ 
Through a fortunate discovery of Dr. Schechter’s® in the geniza 
of the old Synagogue in Fostat (1896), we possess the ‘ Book of the 
New Covenant ’ of those Dosithean Sadogqites 19 who worshipped 
John the Baptist as the ‘righteous teacher’ (joreh sedeq) 11 οἵ the 


1 Extant in five MSS. in Vienna, Geneva, and Paris. Ed. in Patrol. Or., iv., 
fasc. 5, p. 527. The Rumanian MS. Cod. Gaster contains a combination of this 
‘ Life of John ’ with the above-quoted chapters on the Baptist in the Slavonic 
Josephus. 

* There is no trace of an attempt to identify this Mark with the evangelist, 
and there is thus no reason to doubt that Mark was the name of the unknown 
author of that Life of John the Baptist. 


3. ἐξ γῶν πόλεων ἐξέλθατε." 


* εἰ ἐξέλθατε ἐκ μέσου αὐτῶν καὶ ἀφορίσθητε." 

° Mark i. 5: “καὶ ἐξεπορεύοντο πρὸς αὐτὸν. .. οἱ ᾿Ιερουσολυμῖται πάντες "; cp. 
Matt. iii. 5. 

δ Luke ii. 8: “ ἔλεγεν οὖν τοῖς ἐκπορευομένοις ὄχλοις... 

7 Recogn.,1. 54: “ erat ergo primum schisma eorum qui dicebantuy Sadducaet, 
initio Joannis tam paene temporibus sumpto. Hique ut caeteris iustiores segrvegare 
se coeperunt a populi coetu. . . . Auctor vero sententiae huius primus Dositheus, 
secundus Simon fuit . . . ex discipulis Joannis, qui (sibi) videbantur esse magni, 
segvegarunt 56 ex populo ct magistrum suum veluti Christum praedicarunt.’ 

8 Ps.-Clem., Hom., ii. 23. 

” Documents of Jewish Sectavians, vol. i.; Fragments of a Zadokite Work, 
Cambridge, 1910. 

10 Dr. Schechter found this name mentioned by the Karaite Qirqisani (died 
937 A.D.) as that of a sect in possession of a ‘ book of Sadogq,’ and later on united 
with the sect of the Dositheans. But he had overlooked the statement of the Ps.- 
Clementines quoted in our note 7. 

1+ This explanation has been found independent of the decisive testimony of 
the Ps.-Clementines—above, note 7—by the late Rev. Dr. George Margoliouth of 
the British Museum (Athenaeum, Nov. 26, 1910; Expositor, Dec.-March 1912; 
Bibl. Sacra, July 1912, pp. 421 ff.). 


᾽) 


: Ἦ : 


THE GENUINE STATEMENTS OF JOSEPHUS 255 


Last Days, and—a short time before the capture of Jerusalem '— 
left Judaea to transfer their ‘camps’ to the country round about 
Damascus, so as to be ‘ separate from the men of perdition ’* and 
‘from all impurity.’ These secessionist covenanters, who wore 
the sign of the cross, the + mentioned in Ezektel ix. 4, on their 
foreheads,‘ and called themselves the ‘ house of separation’ ® (beth 
peleg), the ‘secession’ (p‘lugta) ® or ‘ schism,’ must have existed 
as early as the war of Varus (4 B.C.), 1.6. at the time of the first 
appearance of John the Baptist,’ since ‘those pestiferous men who 
think themselves just ones,’ who consider the rest of Israel like 
heathen and say to them, ‘ Do not touch me, lest thou shouldst 
pollute me,’ 8 those who ‘ hide themselves so as not to be recog- 
nized,’ ® those ‘who think themselves princes,’ 1 are violently 
attacked in the Assumption of Moses, which was certainly com- 
posed at that criticalmoment.!! ΑἹ] this leaves hardly any doubt 
about the identity of the bavjonim or ‘ outsiders’ of the Talmud, 
and of those whom either John the Baptist or Judas the Galilaean 
taught ‘a way to live in the outside ’ in order to escape from the 
yoke of the foreigners into the desert after the manner of their 
Maccabaean ancestors, and to remain faithful to the law of God. 
The passionate libertarian ‘activism’ of this Judas, the ruling 
principle of political struggle for independence, is thus para- 
phrased by Josephus : ¥ 
‘The Deity does not co-operate in restoring liberty otherwise 
than by influencing man’s decision, and God will be much more ready 
to assist us if we do not shirk the toil entailed by the great cause 
which we have at heart.’ 


1 Josephus, B.J., ii. § 279: ‘It so happened that the cities were deserted, and 
many had to leave the customs of their fathers and to take refuge in the districts 
of the heathen.’ Avnt., xx. ὃ 255: ‘the unfortunate Jews . . . were forced to 
leave their own customs and to expatriate themselves, thinking it better to dwell 
among the heathen.’ 

2 Damascus-Book, vi. 15. 

8 Ibid., vii. 3; cp. xix. 20 about those ‘ who have not separated themselves 
from the mass.’ 

4 [bid., xix. 12 (only those will be saved whose foreheads are marked with 
the sign mentioned by Ezekiel ix. 4). See above, p. 233 1. 13; Ρ. 234 0. 8. 

δ Thid., xx. 22 (beth Peleg), with reference to Gen. x. 25. 

6 Mandean Book of Jahjah, xx. 7*4, the plugta (=schism, above, p. 254 0. 7, 
secessio) is marked with the ‘ royal seal’ (hatma de malka). 

7 See above, p. 225 n. I. 8 Ass. Mosis, vii. το. 4, below, p. 258 0. 5. 

9. Below, p. 258 n. 4; above, p. 242 ff. 

10 See above, p. 254 0. 7, about those ‘qui sibi magni videbaniur.’ In the 
Damascus-Book, where (vi. 2) the chosen ones of Israel identify themselves with 
the ‘ Sadogqites,’ the privileged servants of the sanctuary (Ezek. xliv. 15), it is also 
said (viii. 6) that the repentant ones of Israel who have emigrated out of the land 
of Judah to the country of Damascus are those whom God has called ‘ princes ’ 
digging the well of the Law in Num. xxi. 18. 

11 See Schiirer, G.J.V.4, iii. p. 299 (Engl. transl., II. 111., p. 79), who followed 
Ewald, Wieseler, Drummond, Deane, Thomson, de Faye, Charles, Clemen, 
Burkitt, and others. 

12 Ant., xviii. 5. 


256 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


That is a typical Sadducaean idea, for the thinkers of that school 
most decidedly rejected idle resignation to fate as destined by the 
supposed will of God: ! 


‘The Sadducees abolish fate, maintaining that there is no such 
thing, that the issues of human life are not dependent upon it, and 
that all things fall within our own control; so that it is we who are 
responsible for our blessings and bring our misfortunes upon our- 
selves through our own lack of resolution.’ 


That sounds, and in the rendering of Josephus, who hates the 
Sadducees, is intended to sound, like daring atheism. But it 
simply implies the recognition of the full moral responsibility of 
the brave and determined man resorting to action after mature 
consideration, the man who in acting feels himself as much in God’s 
hands as does the quietist in waiting ; on the one hand he holds 
God’s will not to be unalterable,” while on the other it is only in the 
completed events of the past that His intention can be surely 
recognized. 

Present evils such as servitude, exile, and the like, are inflicted 
as terrestrial punishments for sin ; transcendental retribution they 
ignore.* But if a man is conscious of his faults and repents and 
with energetic determination seeks the right way, then it is God’s 
will to assist the courageous toiler on the road to success. God has 
given man a free will, so that he may choose between good. and 
evil ;* mere thoughtless drifting and irresolution are the source 
of all evils. 

Even the Pharisees do not contest this doctrine in its main 
essentials, but merely limit it to some extent:5 ‘The Pharisees 
assert that some, but not all, events are the work of fate, and some 
are under our own control . . . they attribute everything to fate 
and God; yet they admit that the act rightly or otherwise rests 
for the most part with men, though in every case fate co-operates.’ 
Even from this standpoint it is inconceivable that a war of libera- 
tion such as the Maccabaean rising would have been regarded as 
a wicked interference with God’s decree. The only divergence 
from Sadducaean opinion is that on the basis of considerations 
developed in the Book of Job they simply committed the issue to 
God's inscrutable decision. The Maccabees were victors in a just 
war of liberation ; Hizqiah, the father of Judas of Galilee, was, 
like Bar Kokh’ba at a later date, defeated. That in no way in- 

1 Ant., xiii. 5. 9, ὃ 173. 

ὁ Philo (Quod deus sit immutabilis; de Cherub., 111 B, 142 M; Leg. Alleg., 
49 C, 53 M) has derived this notion from Parmenides and from Platonic doctrines. 
The Pharisee Josephus, c. Ap., ii. § 167, seems to base his notion of God’s im- 
mutability on Exod. iii. 14 and Mal. iii. 6. 

* B.J., ti. ὃ 165 ; Haldsis, trans, Ber.-Grass, p. 264 0. I. 

* B.J. and Haldsts, ii. ὃ 164. 

> Ant., ππῚν 5.0} 8 1723 B.J.; i. 8. 14, ὃ 162 sg. Cf. Ps. Sol., ix. 7. 


ee 


THE GENUINE STATEMENTS OF JOSEPHUS 257 


validates the justice of their cause. Even he who is defeated in a 
righteous contest fulfils God’s will ; his fate may be interpreted as 
a sin-offering for past guilt, his own or another’s. God expects 
magnanimous men to give themselves up to no passive resignation ; 
he loves Israel, who ‘ wrestles with his God’ ;? nay, more, he loves 
to let himself be conquered.? The Essene pacifists,® if they really 
were pacifists* and not a congregation similar to the modern 
Moslem Sanisiyyah, stand alone in preaching the doctrine of 
detachment from politics and quiet resignation towards ‘ the 
powers’ ordained by the grace of God, an attitude adopted later 
on by Paul and his disciple Silvanus,® clearly in opposition to the 
teaching of Judas of Galilee and hissons. The same quietism may 
also be traced in certain rabbinical doctrines of ‘ redemption 
through penitence and sitting still,’ disapproving the ‘ pressing for 
the end’ of the world.’ 

Of course, there were also people of the stamp of Josephus who 
sought to conceal their cowardice under the garb of pious sub- 
mission to God’s will. The base thoughts of such persons are un- 
blushingly expressed by the historian in his shameful speech to the 
besieged in Jerusalem : ὃ 


‘In short, there is no instance of our forefathers having triumphed 
by armed force or failed of success without arms when they com- 
mitted their cause to God; if they sat still, they conquered, as it 
pleased their Judge; if they fought, they were invariably defeated. 

Thus® invariably has our nation been forbidden the use of 
arms ; resorting to arms invariably led todefeat. For itis, 1 suppose, 
the duty of the occupants of holy ground to leave everything to the 
arbitrament of God and to scorn the aid of human hands, if they can 
but conciliate the Arbiter above.’ 


The assumption of Frey that the Baptist, who ‘incited to 
freedom,’ indicated a ‘way to deliverance from many tyrants’ and 


1 Gen. xxxii. 28. 

2 Pesah. 119¢ ; Bacher, Agada d. babyl. Amorder, i. 411. 

8 BJ. ii. § 135 2 “εἰρήνης trodpya” ; Haldsis, p. 250, 5: ‘ servants of peace.’ 

4 See above, p. 23 0. I. 

5. BJ. and Haldsis, ii. ὃ 140; cf. Dan. il. 37; Soph. Sal., vi. τ; Henokh, 465; 
Apoc. Bar., 829; Berakh., 58a, 49; “even the guardian of a public well is chosen 
by God,’ a saying from which this guardian of wells could conclude that he must 
not be replaced by another man even in case of misconduct. The servile argument 
that the powers that be must be respected, no matter how flagrant their mal- 
feasance, because they exist by the grace, or at least by the tolerance, of God, 
forgets to take into account the significant fact that governments have also been 
overthrown by the will of God (Dan. ii. 21), and that men are more often used as 
‘nstruments of God’s will than are the powers of nature (cf. 2 Kings xviil. 7). 
A useful summary of ‘monarchomachian ’ theology will be found in a Heidelberg 
thesis by Rud. Michael Treumann (Leipzig, 1895). 

6 Rom. xiii. 1-7; 1 Pet. 11. 13 sqq. 

? Strack-Billerbeck, 1. 599. 

8 B.J., v. ὃ 300 sq. 9 B.J., v. ὃ 399 Sq. 

10 Der slavische Josephusbericht, Dorpat, 1908, p. 36. 


R 


258 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


promised the coming of a king who would liberate the Jews and 
defeat all the obstreperous, at the same time preached against a 
popular rising and in favour of a mere waiting for a miracle of God, 
is intrinsically rather improbable. Quite true, in the time of 
Archelaus, i.e. at the time of John, Judas, and the war of Varus, 
there did exist a quietist party, to which, for example, the author 
of the Assumption of Moses belonged. That party looked, indeed, 
for the impending end of the world ; its members wished to bring 
about the Divine redemption by a flight from the world into a cave, 
by fasts and their own martyrdom ; at the same time they no 
more sought the kingdom of God on earth, but in the starry 
heavens, and expected the people of Israel to be ‘wafted away on 
eagles’ wings’ to this ‘kingdom of heaven,’ whence they would 
exultantly look down upon their enemies below.! This party, 
however, was most strenuously opposed to the ‘ homines pesti- 
lentiosi qui se esse justos docent’ ;? in other words, to the followers 
of ‘the man of proved rectitude,’ who (being purified by baptism) 
regarded the rest of Israel as heathen and addressed them thus: 


‘Touch me not lest thou shouldst pollute me. . . . But in truth 
they are deceivers . . . who devour the goods of the poor but feign 
sympathy with them... people who conceal themselves lest they should 
be recognised* . . . and regard themselves as princes.’ ὅ 


The views of these quietists have found an echo in the Mandaean 
writings in which the Baptist is adjured : 6 


‘Cast not rebels into the Jordan, else no one will be able to 
resist its force ’;? 
and in which that heavenly paradise of the pious and peaceable 
fugitives from the world, that πεδίον ᾿Αληθείας 8 for the righteous 
who are ‘ wafted away,’ ® the ἐπουράνιος βασιλεία,10 the ἐπουράνιος 
πατρίς, 1. has become an essential element in the hopes for a here- 
after entertained by these ‘ quiet in the land.’ 13 
The followers of the Baptist are not, however, to be sought 
among those persons who hoped for redemption by ‘ repentance 
and sitting still.’ The clearest proof of this is the much-debated 


1 Ass. Mos., 9 sq. * Ass. Mos., vii. 3; cf. above, p. 254 n. 7. 

* This is how the Baptist is described in the Mandaean Ginza r. Lidz., Ῥ. 195;. 

4 Cf. above, p. 242 f., on Hanan the ‘ hidden one.’ 

® Ass. Mos., vii. 10, 4 sqq.; see above, p. 255 ἢ. 8. 

6 Mand. Book of John, transl. Lidzbarski, DP: 1..,.}. 20. 

* Cp. with this the strange answer of the Baptist, ‘ fieri non potest, ut 
rapinam assumam,’ to the request of Jesus, ‘accede, baptiza me’ (Severi Alexandri, 
De vitibus baptismi liber, p. 25; A. Resch, Agrapha*, Leipzig, 1906, Di 73): 

ΚΠ Ezvav.1. The‘ field of truth ’ is mentioned by the magus Gobryas in 
Ps.-Plato, Awxiochos, 371a. Plutarch, De def. or., 22 f., p- 422 B, D; cp. Plato, 
Phaedy., 4 28c. 

9 “m'shunné kushsa,’ ‘ those transported into truth.’ ΖΡ], Pp. XVili; 45 0. 2; 
116n.6; 104 Nn. 3; Ginza, p. 30 n. 11. 

10° 2 Tim.iv. 8. ΣΤΟΥ͂; πὶ, Cas 12 Ps, χχχν, 20, 


THE GENUINE STATEMENTS OF JOSEPHUS 259 


saying of Jesus about the ‘storming’ of the kingdom of heaven, 
which ‘from the days of the Baptist until now has been forcibly 
seized by men of violence.’+ This utterance has hitherto occa- 
sioned grave misgivings on chronological grounds. If, as is 
implied in the Gospel of Infancy,” Jesus was only six months 
younger than the Baptist ; if, moreover, according to the express 
statement in Like 111. 11, the Baptist’s active live only began in 
the fifteenth year of the Emperor Tiberius (August A.D. 28-29),— 
then Jesus, who according to the chronology presupposed in the 
synoptic Gospels did not long outlive the Baptist, could never 
have used such words as ‘from the days of John the Baptist 
until now.’ If, however, according to the evidence of the source 
used in the Haldsis of Josephus, and derived from the circle of the 
Baptist’s own disciples, John made his appearance as early as the 
time of Archelaus (4 B.c.-A.D. 6), then, as will be shown below, the 
whole saying admits of a very simple and plausible explanation. 


THE BAPTIST ELECTED HIGH PRIEST BY THE INSURGENTS 


Immediately after the death of Herod the Great his cruelly 
oppressed people in Jerusalem rose in armed revolt against his 
successor. Herod in weak moments had regarded himself as the 
world-ruler chosen by destiny ;* to the pious, however, he was 
but the tyrant ‘expected by the heathen,’ and the Antichrist 
who immediately before the end of time would remove ‘ the sceptre 
from Judah.’ When Archelaus tried to celebrate his accession 
to the throne by a royal address to his subjects, he was over- 
whelmed by outcries. Amidst roars of lamentation for Matthias” 
and the other martyrs, whom Herod had burnt at the stake for 
the destruction of the golden eagle on the temple door, clamorous 
demands were made for a reduction of the prevailing imposts and 
a reimbursement of previous taxes, for the abolition of oppressive 
market duties, the hberation of political prisoners, and, above all, 
for the removal of the hated high priest, Jo‘azar b. Boethus, 
appointed by Herod; * because he was impious and unsatisfactory, ' 
and not frankly outspoken in matters concerning God.’* They ἢ 
claimed that “they had a right to choose a man of greater pie ty} 
and purer morals.’ ὃ a 

~This hitherto unheard-of demand of the people to elect the ἢ 
high priest, the “ height of madness,” according to Josephus,® was | 
never again abandoned by the revolutionary party, and was } 
actually carr ied into execution by the followers of John of Gischala | 
in the besieged city in A.D. 67.7 - 

1 Malt. xi. 12; Luke xvi. 16. * Luke i. 26, 37; cp. above, p. 2447.0” 

3 See above, p. 140 N. I. 


4 Haldsis, ii. 1. 7; transl. Ber.-Grass, p. 233. 
δ. B.J., ibid. 6 By]. Iv. 3. δ) 8. 1247. * Ibid., iv. 3. 8. 


260 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


4 


ral That is the reason why the Romans from the time of the 
banishment of Archelaus to the recall of Pilate (A.D. 6-36) kept 
the high priest’s royal robe under their own lock and key, so as to 
be in a position to prevent at any time the investiture with this 
symbol of world-rule + of a high priest elected by the people of 
| whom they did not approve.” 

Since it is now established on the evidence of the Slavonic 
Josephus that the Baptist made his appearance under Archelaus, 
a conjecture as to the particular person whom the insurgents of 
that period demanded to have for a high priest is strongly sug- 
gested by a remarkable detail in the Hebrew? and the Arabic 4 
Jusifis, which no one so far has even attempted to explain. 
There Johanan b. Zechariah, whom Herod Antipas put to death— 
that is to say, the Baptist—is designated not only as a ‘great. 
master’ (vabban),? but actually as a high priest (kohen gadol). 
Since there is no apparent reason why the narrative of Josephus 
should have been amplified at a later date by a midrashic state- 
ment of so remarkable a character, and nowhere else attested, I 
can only account for this tradition by supposing that something 
of the kind originally stood in the Greek Josephus, the lost ampli- 
fied second edition of the War, on an epitome of which the Hebrew 
Josippon is based, and that it was afterwards struck out, along 
with the sentence about the seditious effect of the Baptist’s 
preaching. 

At that time, under the influence of the Epistle to the Hebrews,° 
people had long been wont to discover the promised high priest 
of the last times,’ the kohen le‘olam, not in John but in Jesus. 
But for the period immediately after the fall of Herod there is 

1 Cf. my Weltenmantel und Himmelszelt, Miinchen, 1910, p. 25 n. 4. 

Ant, Χνῆϊ, 40°35) ὅεῦι 2. ἃ. 

3. Ed. of Venice, 1544, p. ἊΝ (7.6. 92), right column, |. 18 from the bottom; ed. 
Breithaupt, Gotha, 1707, v. 45, p. 529; Gotha, 1710, p.533n.4. The words kohen 
gadol are missing in the editio princeps, Mantua, 1470; in Miinster’s edition (Bale, 
1543); in the New York MS. derived from R. Gershom’s copy; in the Paris MS. of 
Mosconi’s recension ; and in the two Vatican MSS., Ebr. Urbin. 52 and Ebr. 408: 
all this being strong evidence that the passage was deleted by the Christian censor 
whenever it was possible to do so, 

4 Wellhausen, Der avabische Josephus, Berlin, 1897, ὃ 90. 

6 This title is not found except in the Josippon MS. of the New York Jewish 


Theological Seminary, and it may be due to a scribe’s confusion of the Baptist 
with the later Rabban Johanan ben Zakkai (Sol. Zeitlin, Jew. Quart. Rev., N.S., xix., 
1929, p. 39 0. 81). 

δ᾽ 1} 108. τς 

1 Test. Levi, 18 : ‘ In the seventh week priests will come, idol-worshippers . . 
greedy . . . impious—and after the Lord will have punished them He will 
awaken a new priest for the priesthood, and to him all words of the Lord will be 
revealed, and he will hold a court of truth on earth... like a king . . . and 
there will be peace all over the earth. The heavens will open, and from the 
temple of glory there will come upon him sanctity with a fatherly voice . . . and 
the glory of the Most High will be pronounced upon him, and the spirit of under- 
standing and of sanctity will rest upon him . . . and he will have no successor 
in all eternity.’ 


THE GENUINE STATEMENTS OF JOSEPHUS δόι 


(so far as we may judge from our source, that 15, Josephus) 
scarcely another figure who comes at all into consideration for 
such a popular high priest. At all events, it would be inad- 
missible to consider ’Ele‘azar, the brother of the unworthy Jo‘azar, 
whom Archelaus finally installed, as such a candidate put forward 
by the rebellious people. 

Moreover, the proclamation of the Baptist for this dignity is 
in complete harmony with his own ‘ call to freedom °: 


‘a mortal shall not reign over you, but the Most High, who has 
sent me.’ 


This clearly means that he considered himself the vicarius of God 
sent down to rule this true and renewed theocracy, precisely as 
did the dynasty of the Hasmonaeans. With this dignity of a 
temporary vicarius of the Most High his further promises of the 
speedy appearance of a real king, a liberator and ruler of the 
nations, are quite in keeping. Hence his references, in the 
Synoptics, to the ‘coming one’ (ὁ ἐρχόμενος, habba’), who is 
stronger than he, and whose shoe he, the shilo, as he says with a 
play on words,! is unworthy to draw off. 

In fact, the fulfilment of the Deuteronomic law concerning the 
national kingdom discussed above, i.e. the appointment of a king 
whom God has chosen, requires a procedure such as is presupposed 
in the election, installation, and anointing of Saul and David by 
Samuel the seer (vo%e), prophet (abi), and priest. Not to the 
chosen king himself, who need be no * prophet’ and visionary, 
does God reveal His will, but to the specially favoured prophet who 
then announces as the herald of God the will of the Lord to the 
people. When the unfortunate attempt to re-establish the king- 
dom after the exile was made in the time of Zerubabel, the son 
of David, chosen by Jahweh to be the leader of the world,” there 
stood beside this piteous royal puppet the high priest Jeshu‘a, to 
whom the Lord had announced the speedy coming of his servant,’ 
of the ‘branch’ of the root of David. Again, at a later date, 
beside the messianic prince Simon bar Kokh¢ba, according to the 
evidence of the coins, there stood at the head of the people one 


1 See the very curious etymology in the excerpts from Origen (cf. Wutz, 
Onomastica Sacra, ii. 747) : ‘ Silo, avulsio vel excalceatio,’ and, in the supplement 
(p. 1055): ᾿ Szlo, excalceatio,’ evidently from Sy,‘ to take off shoes’; cf. Sdy. 
The same derivation with reference to Job xvii. 8, Sys, and Deut. vii. I, xix. 5, 
Sw in Samuel Ὁ. Chofni Gaon (died in 1034) in his Genesis commentary, xlix. 10, 
ed. Petersburg, 1886, p. 138; cf. Poznanski, Schiloh, Leipzig, 1904, 1. 5. The 
etymology of the Origen excerpts is probably a remainder of some good old com- 
mentary on Mark i. 7 or Luke iii. τό. The Greek author of the Gospel of 
Matthew no longer understood the true meaning of hissource. That text must 
have had the false reading y=‘ to carry,’ for Sw =‘ to take off,’ and the word- 
play was thus naturally lost. 

3 Hagg., ili. 20 544. 


262 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


‘Ele‘azar the priest. Similarly, the Baptist appears to have been 
regarded as the last high priest chosen for the messianic period 
to anoint the liberator king of Israel and ruler of the world. Such 
indeed is virtually the teaching of a rabbinic tradition : 1 


‘To that generation (in Egypt) thou didst send redemption 
through two redeemers, as it is said: ‘‘ He sent Moses his servant and 
Aaron whom he had chosen.’”’2_ And also to this generation (in the 
messianic age) he sendeth two, corresponding to those (other two). 
“Send out thy light and thy truth.”? “ Thy light,” that is, the 
prophet ’Elijah of the house of Aaron, of whom it is written, “ the 
seven lamps shall throw their light in front of the lamp-stand.”’ 
And “ thy truth,” that is, Messiah ben David, as it is said,5 ““Jahweh 
hath sworn unto David (in) truth, he will not turn from it.’ And 
likewise it is said,® “ Behold my servant whom I uphold.” ’7 


THE BAptist’s ‘ FreELD SERMON’ 


Aware that he still lacked the necessary confirmation as the 
successor of King Herod the Great by Augustus, Archelaus natur- 
ally enough sought to appease the excited masses, yet was unable 
to prevent the outbreak of open rebellion on the part of the 
pilgrims who streamed into the temple on the feast of the 
Passover of 4 B.c. To follow the account of the H alosis ; 8 


‘And he sent the commander of his troops and entreated them 
to desist from these wicked proceedings. When this (officer) came 
into the temple, they pelted him with stones, before he had even 
uttered a word, because they wished to provoke a war. And when 
the feast of unleavened bread, called Passover, began at the time 
(when) a multitude of sacrifices is offered to God, countless numbers 
of the people came from the whole country to worship; and the 
insurgents stood in the temple unnoticed and suddenly leapt up. 
And all were thrown into confusion. And Archelaus sent in (troops) 
to arrest the leaders of the insurgents. Thereupon the whole 
multitude flung themselves upon them; and many of the (troops) 
sent they thrashed with clubs, while the commander escaped with 
difficulty, streaming with blood. And then, as if they had done 
nothing wrong, they proceeded to the sacrifice. But when Archelaus 
saw that they would not be quieted without bloodshed, he sent 
against them all his troops, the infantry across the city ® and the 
cavalry across the plain. These fell upon the men engaged in offer- 
ing their sacrifices and slew 30,000 (of them).1° And their feast was 
turned into mourning, according to the saying (in Scripture). 
1 Midrash Ps. xiiii. § 1 ; Strack-Billerbeck, i. 87. 

*: Ps. ον. 46, * Ps. xii... * Numb. viii. 2. 
δος CHE EX; § Mal. iii. 23. STs ΣΙ 
8 ii. 8 sqg. Ber.-Grass, Pp. 233. 


® Thus the Greek text. ‘The Slavonic has ‘ across the plain’ in both cases, 
which is an obvious error. 


© B.J.: 3000; so Egesippus. 4 Amos viii. 10; Job ii. 6. 


THE GENUINE STATEMENTS OF JOSEPHUS = 263 


But the rest of the multitude dispersed into the mountains and 
woods. The heralds of Archelaus followed them proclaiming that 
every one of them might go to his home, now that they had abandoned 
the festival.’ 


The rebels, however, had no intention of giving up the contest, 
the less so because their attack was also directed against the 
Romans, who at that moment, under the governorship of Sabinus, 
were cordially detested. ‘While he (Augustus) was still con- 
sidering (whether he should appoint Archelaus king) ’—so we read 
in the Halésis (ii. 39)—‘a letter was brought from Varus, the 
governor of Syria, announcing that the Jews were up in arms, 
because they did not wish to be under Roman rule’; this at a time 
when one of the Jews had just explained in Rome that ‘ the 
people wished to live in independence (i.e. without the Herodian 
kings) under the administration of Roman governors.’ So far the 
account in the Haldésis. Inthe War 2 Josephus has utilized further 
information sent by Sabinus and Varus to Augustus, so that the : 
course of events can be reconstructed in greater detail : 


‘Qn the arrival of Pentecost it was not the customary ritual so 
much as indignation which drew the people in crowds to the capital. 
A vast multitude flocked in from Galilee, from Idumaea, from 
Jericho, and from Peraea beyond the Jordan, but it was the native 
population of Judaea itself which, both in numbers and in ardour, was 
pre-eminent. Dividing into three bands, they formed three camps, 
one on the north of the temple, another on the south, adjoining the 
hippodrome, and the third near Herod’s palace, on the west. Thus 
investing the Romans on all sides, they held them under siege.’ 


ae 


‘There followed the frightful battle in which the gorgeous porticoes 
of Herod’s temple perished in the flames ;* the besieging of Sabinus 
in Antonia; the desertion to the insurgents of the bulk of Herod’s 
troops, with the exception of the Sebastenians of Samaria; the 
rising against the Romans of Herod’s veterans in Idumaea; and 
the insurrections in Galilee and Transjordania. Three different 
leaders simultaneously appear, each claiming to be the liberator- — 
king whose advent had been promised by John. In Galilee there ὦ 
was Judah b. Hezekiah the Gaulanite;4 in Peraea a former slave | 
of Herod named Simon, a man whose audacity Josephus expressly _ 
attributes to his tall and handsome figure, aspired to the throne. 
The same claim was made by a shepherd, likewise of powerful 
stature and extraordinary strength, with the queer name of 


1 The Halésis frequently mentions woods where there are only bare rocks 
to-day (cf., e.g., il. § 511; Ber.-Grass, p. 329). 

2 B.]., ii. 3. 1, § 42 544. 

3 Ass. Mos., vi. 9: ‘ A part of the temple they will burn with fire.’ 

4 See above, p. 253 nn. 3-6. 


s 


i 
Ε 
FE 
. 


© 
4 
4, 
® ~ 


264 | THE MESSIAH JESUS 


Athrongas or Athrongaeus,! i.e. the efhrog or citrus fruit, the apple 
from Adam’s tree in Paradise.?. But whereas Simon and Athrongas 
were got rid of by Gratus, Ptolemaeus, and Archelaus,* Judah the 


' Gaulanite must have maintained his hold in the mountains or 


deserts, even after the crushing of the revolt by Varus and the 
crucifixion of thousands of the insurgents; after the banishment 
of Archelaus he appears again under the administration of 
‘Coponius as a leader of rebels, 

This time it was the census of Quirinius, governor of Syria 
(A.D. 6-7), which caused the flames of rebellion to break out afresh. 
The date when Judah fell and his followers were dispersed cannot 
be precisely fixed, but his work was carried on by his sons and 
the so-called Zealots or Qan’andia. ‘It is to their machinations 
that we must ascribe the continuous smouldering of the fire of 
revolution under the ashes, until finally, sixty years later, it burst 
forth in a mighty flame ’ (Schiirer) .* 

Nothing, then, could be clearer than that the saying of Jesus, 
‘ From the days of the Baptist until to-day the kingdom of heaven 
is being stormed and men of violence take it by force,’ ® refers to 
the insurrections of the reign of Archelaus, undertaken to establish 
a national kingdom by the grace of God, i.e. a messianic theo- 
cracy. The ‘men of violence’ (βιασταί) are the champions of 
the guerilla war of independence 7 against the Romans, dwelling 
as ‘outsiders,’ ‘ outcasts’ (barjonim), in the mountains and deserts, 
and called by their opponents Anatat, latrones, bandits or 
plunderers.6 The famous encomium upon the Baptist 9 as the 
greatest of all men yet born, because before his time Moses and 
the prophets had only spoken and prophesied of the kingdom. 
of God, whereas he had been the first to attempt a realization of 
the idea, to ‘ prepare the way, surely implies that Jesus attri- 


buted to the Baptist the authorship of the Zealotic activist move- 
-ment for independence. Josephus, on the other hand—or, better, 
*the report of Coponius to the emperor—regarded the Galilaean 


as the originator of a fourth party. The apparent contradiction 
is easily explained on the supposition that the Zealots of Judah 
and the Nasdraeans of the Baptist, as the result of inevitable 


+ Names of this type are not uncommon ; cf. Rimmon (=‘ pomegranate ᾿, 
Zethan (=‘ olive’), above, Ρ. 241 π. 2. The symbolism of the Christ considered 
as the fruit of the ‘tree of Life’ has been transferred from Athrongas to Jesus, to 
whom we find it applied in Christian art and poetry. 

* Μίαν. Gen. r., sect. xvi, 16a. 

© BJ a llAe and >. $ Bey. i, 833; 

δ it. p. 487, Engl. transl., div. I., vol. ii., p. 81. 

δ For the political meaning of ἁρπάζουσιν, Cf. John vi. 15: “" ἁρπάζουσιν αὐτὸν ἵνα 
ποιήσωσιν αὐτὸν βασιλέα," and Josephus;-B.J., ii. § 204: “ἁρπάζεται els τὴν ἀρχὴν 
Κλαύδιος." = i ~ 

? Thus Klausner and Danby, Jesus of Nazareth, London, 1924, p. 206 n. 46, 


\ 


8 See above, p. 10, Ἐπ ἜΘ Ν 9 Μαίϊ..χὶ. 11-13. 


THE GENUINE STATEMENTS OF JOSEPHUS 265 


differences of opinion, early parted company, and that after the 
breach the followers of Judah disclaimed their dependence on 
the Baptist’s teaching. We know that precisely the same pheno- 
menon of a parting of the ways took place afterwards between 
the disciples of Jesus and those of John, both disclaimers being 
clearly contrary to all historical probability. 

That the Baptist actually did preach during and in consequence 
of the risings in Peraea and the Jordan district in the time of 
Archelaus may, moreover, be seen quite clearly from the summary 
report of John’s teachings as contained in Luke. The words 
in question must have been a sort of field sermon delivered before 
the march into battle. Here is the traditional translation of the 
crucial passage : 


‘And soldiers (or warriors) also asked him, saying, “ And what 
must we do? ᾿᾿᾿ etc. 


But in this translation no regard is had to the fact that the Greek 

word is not στρατιώται, ‘soldiers,’ but στρατευόμενοι, 1.6. ᾿ persons 

on the warpath,’ or ‘ going to war,’ or ‘engaged in war.’* If 

the Baptist in the reign of Archelaus preached to persons ‘ going 

to war,’ it is, in view of the contents of his sermon as reported by 

Josephus, perfectly inconceivable that he preached to the troops 

of Varus, Archelaus, or the generals Gratus or Ptolemaeus. 

But it is perfectly understandable that he should have addressed 

the revolutionary champions of liberty who had flocked to him 

from Judaea, and especially from the neighbourhood of Jerusalem, 

to take refuge in the wild thickets and marshes in the Jordan οἷν 

valley.’ . 
The contents of his address, ‘ Do violence to no man (μηδένα 

διασείσητε), extort from no man_ by intimidation, make no 

(predatory) raids upon houses (μηδένα συκοφαντήσητε), be content 

with your rations,’ closely correspond to the exhortation to | 

military discipline which Josephus claims to have delivered him- | 

self to the volunteers and insurgents, the so-called ‘ robbers ’ ὴ 

(λῃσταί), whom he recruited in Galilee. Thus reads the Halosts : * 2 


‘And he collected a hundred thousand young men, armed them 
and taught them the art of warfare. .. . And he said to them, “ If 
you thirst for victory, abstain from the ordinary crimes, theft, 
robbery, and rapine. And do not defraud your countrymen; count 
it no advantage to yourselves to injure another. For the war will 


2 iil, 14. 

2 Cf. 1 Cor. ix. 7: ‘‘ris στρατεύεται ἰδίοις ὀψωνίοις ποτέ," ‘who ever caters for 
himself during a campaign?’ (A.V. ‘who goeth a warfare any time at his own 
charges ? ’). 

3 Marki. 5. Cf. 1 Macc. ix. 45. 

4 ii. §§ 576 and 581; Ber.-Grass, p. 339 sg. The corresponding part of the War 
is in indirect address and rather condensed. 


266 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


have better success if the warriors have a good name and ! their souls 
are conscious of having purified themselves from every offence. If, 
however, they are condemned by their evil deeds, then will God be 
their enemy and the aliens (will) have an easy victory.” ’ 


The agreement in contents between the Baptist’s exhortation to 
the στρατευόμενοι and this address of Josephus to his recruits 
cannot, I think, be missed. The words about the purification of 
souls from every offence as a condition essential to success bear so 
close a resemblance to Josephus’ words discussed above? about 
the purifying effect of John’s baptism, that one would be tempted 
to suspect some after-effect of the Baptist’s preaching upon 
Zealot circles. Perhaps Josephus had heard these or very similar 
words from the mouth of his baptist teacher, ‘Banus.’4 But it is 
well to admit the possibility of a mere coincidence, since the idea 
of a lustration before marching into battle, regarded as a judg- 
ment of God, is fairly obvious.® 

The banality of the whole sermon, traditionally regarded as a 
sort of homiletic exposition of the duties incumbent on the 
various walks of life, disappears at once if considered as a simple 
address delivered on a very definite occasion to the combatants 
for freedom. In this difficult situation, with no regular military 
supplies, they ask the Baptist as their kohen mashuah milhamah, 
their “ priest dedicated to warfare’ ® or ‘army chaplain’: ‘ What 
should we do?’ And he replies that they should as far as possible, 
as comrades-in-arms, help each other out. ‘Let him who has 
two under-garments give to him that hath none, and he that hath 

rovisions,’ let him do likewise.’ As a general summons to an 
he Seca 
unlimited surrender of every superfluity beyond the barest needs, 
this sermon is as hard to understand as it is simple and easy to 
explain when regarded as an injunction to meet an immediate 
necessity. 

Last come the publicans, the mok‘sin or tax-gatherers, asking 
for their instructions and getting them. The reason why they 
have to enquire is the fact that the rebels had demanded of 
Archelaus the abolition of the oppressive taxes and duties, and 

+ The italicized words are wanting in the Greek War. 

* Cp. Ps.-Philo, Bibl. Ant—a midrash composed by the zealots around the 
revolutionary high priest Phineas and Prince Kenedaios of Adiabene between 
66 and 70 A.D.—ch. xxv. (transl. M. R. James, p. 147): ‘God said to them: If 
you go up with a pure heart, fight! but if your heart is defiled, go ποῖ 

3 See above, p. 249. * See above, p. 23 n. 2. 

® Joel. iv. 9: ‘‘ayidoere πόλεμον," hithgadesh milhamah. Jerem. vi. 4; Josh. iii. 
5: qiddesh milhamah. Mic. iii. 5. 

ὁ Sota, viii. 1 (42a): ‘the priest ordained for war through unction with the 
sacred oil or by putting on the eight high-priestly garments. For he made an 
address to the army marching out.’ 

* Cf. 1 Sam. xvii. 17, 2 Sam. xvii. 28, on the rather primitive provisioning 


of an army in war through voluntary contributions of the kinsmen of the soldier- 
ing men. 


THE GENUINE STATEMENTS OF JOSEPHUS 4267 


that therefore the insurgents might have been expected to do 
away with them. Hence their question and his answer. Given 
the present emergency and the necessity for finding the finances 
necessary for the war of liberation and the maintenance of troops, 
the Baptist rules, very naturally, that the taxes should be exacted, 
but no more than the prescribed amount, that is, without the 
illegal supertaxation which the publicans and tax-collectors in 
the service of Herod or the Romans had hitherto claimed for them- 
selves. Thus, notwithstanding the continuance of the levy, the 
people would still obtain considerable relief. 

Here again we get a simple and yet sufficient and plausible 
explanation of instructions in practical politics meant for a 
particular emergency, but which, if regarded as prophetic torah 
and general moral advice, must needs appear highly trivial—too 
trivial, indeed, to be solemnly proclaimed as a new moral code. 


THE POLITICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF JOHN’S BAPTISM 


‘And he shall . . . turn the disobedient to the wisdom of the just; 
to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.’ 
LUKE i. 17. 


The foregoing remarks strongly suggest that the baptism in the 
Jordan by the preacher of liberty should be regarded as a special 
lustration rite preceding the march to war, and, as on the Day of 
Atonement, took the form of a purification of souls from every 
offence through a public confession of sins.t_ In the same spirit the 
Israelites of old, at Mizpah, before the decisive battle against the 
Philistines, ‘drew water and poured it out before Jahweh and 
fasted and confessed, We have sinned against Jahweh.’* The two 
great ‘confessions of sins’ of the whole people in Danzel* and 
Nehemiah * may illustrate the probable words and prayers of the 
persons ‘confessing their sins’ at the Jordan baptism.° 

Dr. Pettazzoni® has shown by a long array of instances that 
the oral acknowledgment of sins is regularly accompanied by a 
symbolical, originally magical, act of casting off a burden or re- 
moving a defilement. That explains why the word jadah, ‘ cast,’ 
is used, in the Hiphil form hodah, to express the verbal action ἡ to 
confess.’ 7 One such symbolic act, representing man’s guilt and 
his release from it, is the drawing and pouring out of water at 
Mizpah. Other similar acts are the shaking out of sins over 
running water or over the fishes in the stream, a rite still practised 

1 Called widduj ; Joma iii. 8, iv. 2, vi. 2. 

& ὁ Sant. vii. 6. 3 ix. 4-19. £ 1x.\2 sqi, 6+57. 

6 Marki.5; Maid. iii. 6. 

6 Annales de l'histoire du Christianisme, 1928, Paris-Amsterdam, i. 96 sqq. 

? Lagarde, Orientalia, il. 22. 


268 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


by orthodox Jews on New Year’s Day, and some years ago proved 
to be of Babylonian origin.! The practice, called ἄφεσις ἁμαρτιῶν, 
‘remissio peccatorum,’ ‘ sending off of sins,’ is known to the Jews 
as thash‘lih, ‘thou wilt wash down,’ or ‘send down,’ from the 
passage in Micah®* used in the penitents’ prayer on that occasion : 


‘yea, thou wilt wash away all our sins into the depths of the sea. 
Thou wilt fulfil . . . the promises of mercy to Abraham, which thou 
hast sworn unto our fathers from the days of old.’ 


The passage is also used with reference to baptism in patristic 
tradition.* Since already in the Didaché running water appears 
to be no longer essential for Christian baptism, the train of thought 
must originally have referred to baptism in the Jordan and go back 
to the preaching of the Baptist. The introduction to John’s 
sermon * runs : 

‘Ye offspring of vipers, who has warned you to flee from the 
wrath to come? . . . Think not to say within yourselves, We have 
Abraham for our father, for I say unto you, that God is able of these 
stones to raise up (new) children unto Abraham’ (sc. if you are 
submerged). 


This introduction becomes at once intelligible if the Baptist linked 
his sermon on to the speech of Micah ὅ just mentioned, in which the 
terror of the heathen (who are compared to serpents) at the im- 
pending judgment is contrasted with the confident hope of the 
children of Abraham in the forgiveness of their sins. 

In any case, the most remarkable feature in this sermon to ‘the 
multitudes’ is the fact that the preacher refuses to recognize the 
crowds ® who stream to him for baptism and purification as chil- 
dren of Abraham, i.e. as Israelites or Jews, but vilifies them as 
‘sons of vipers’ 7 and requires them to undergo a bath of purifica- 
tion like heathen proselytes. 

1 See my Orpheus, London, 1921 (Watkins), p. 141. Cf. ibid., pl. xlviii. 

2 vil. 19 sq. : 

3. Cf., e.g., Rupertus Tuitiensis in Migne, P.L., clxviii. 525. 

4 Mait. iii. 7-9; Luke iii. 7 sq. 

δ vii. 15-20: ΑΒ in the days of thy coming forth out of the land of Egypt 
let him (thy people) see marvellous things. The nations shall see and be ashamed 


of all (their trust in all) their might . . . their ears shall be deaf. They shall lick 
the dust like the serpent, like crawling things of the earth . . . and shall be afraid 


because of thee. Whois a God like unto thee, that forgiveth the iniquity and passeth 
by the transgression of the remnant of his heritage, that retaineth not his anger for 
ever, because he delighteth in mercy ? He will turn again and have compassion 
upon us .. . yea, thou wilt cast all our sins into the depths of the sea. Thou wilt 
show the truth to Jacob and the mercy to Abraham, which thou hast sworn unto our 
fathers from the days of old.’ 

® Luke iii. 7; Mait. iii. 7: ‘ Pharisees’ and ‘ Sadducees’ are an attempt to 
restrict the injurious words to the scribes. 

7 Inch. ix. 20 of the Damascus document quoted above, p. 254 n. 9, the militant 
disciples of the Baptist explain the ‘ dragon’s poison’ and the ‘ cruel venom of 
asps ’ in Deut, xxxil. 33 as denoting ‘ the kings of the heathen’ and ‘the chief of 
the kings of Javan ’—that is, the Roman emperor, 


THE GENUINE STATEMENTS OF JOSEPHUS 269 


The explanation of this astonishing demand, and consequently 
of what is really the central problem of John’s baptism, is furnished 
by a most valuable statement of Josephus‘ on the followers of 
’Ele‘azar, a descendant of that Judas of Galilee whose doctrines, 
as has been shown above,” were in closest agreement with those of 
the Baptist. These irreconcilable combatants for the liberty of 
the Jewish people declared that those who submitted to Roman 
rule were apostates from their race and in no way different from the 
heathen. One sees at once that this is a logical deduction drawn 
from the Deuteronomic ‘royalty law,’ the observance and enforce- 
ment of which forms the ‘ way of the law,’ practised by the Baptist 
and after him by Judah the Gaulanite.® 

The recognition of the non-Jewish royal house of the Herods, 
and still more that of the Roman overlords, constitute an apostasy 
from the kingdom of God and of the divinely selected future 
national king—nay, the unpardonable apostasy which, so long as 
the culprits do not repent, excludes them from the community of 
the descendants of Abraham. According to this doctrine, one 
cannot be both a Jew and a servant of heathen masters, a subject 
of the theocracy and a slave of Caesar, the enemy of God and lord 
of this world. Only he who repents of the sins which the people 
committed by their submission to Herod, Pompey, Caesar, and 
Augustus, he who is ‘converted’ and confesses (casts off) his sins, 
can be readopted as a son of the kingdom of heaven. Since all 
Israel has through its defection to Herod sunk into heathenism, 
the renovated Israel which believes in a Messiah—in other words, 


waits for a national king—will consist wholly of newly reclaimed 
converts, dying to heathenism through the baptism 4 of proselytes 
and rising regenerated from the water.? Only now the expression 
used by Josephus® becomes intelligible, βαπτισμῷ συνιέναι, to 
congregate,’ ‘be united’ through baptism—to the new συναγωγὴ of 
a new people of Israel. As God has smitten his apostate faithless 
people on account of their sins and delivered them to their enemies, 
so now when they again return to him and acknowledge his name 
he will hearken to them, forgive them their sins, and restore to them 
the land which he gave to their fathers. This ‘confession of the 
name of God,’ that is, of God as the true ruler and lord of the world, 
and of his Messiah, i.e. the national king, and at the same time the 
repudiation and abjuration of any allegiance to the false and un- 


1 B.f., vii. 8. I, § 253 506: 2 See p. 252 ff. 3 See above, p. 250 ἢ. 7. 
4 Cf. Col. ii. 12: “ἐν τῇ ἀπεκδύσει τοῦ σώματος . . . συνταφέντες ἐν τῷ βαπτισμῷ." 
Tit., iii. 5.: ““λουτρὸν παλιγγενεσίας. "ἢ 


5. According to Jewish doctrine the proselyte through baptism by immersion 
becomes like a newborn child in the literal sense, so that he can no longer inherit 
from his heathen relations nor commit incest with them, Cf.W. Brandt, Z.A.T.W., 
suppl. xvili. 56-62. 

6 Ant., xviii. § 117, above, p. 246. 


270 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


godly lord of this world, is what is meant by the expression 
βαπτίζεσθαι ἐν ὀνόματι κυρίου in John’s baptism. The disciples 
of Jesus, later on, demand the additional confession of faith 
that their master, Jesus, and not any other of the various 
claimants, is that Messiah, the true king-liberator, chosen by God. 
Through this solemn declaration of allegiance to the kingship of 
God and his viceroy, preceding or accompanying the baptismal 
immersion, the whole rite acquired a significance quite analogous 
to that of the ordinary soldier’s oath in the Roman army, an oath 
taken in the name of the emperor + by the commanders, immedi- 
ately before marching out. Through this oath only, the soldier’s 
service becomes a solemnis et sacrata militia, and we know that the 
Jews, too, had peculiar rites for the sanctification of war.2 This 
analogy explains why baptism is so often called, in the terminology 
of the Roman Church, a sacramentum, a Latin word meaning 
primarily and_ essentially the soldier’s oath of allegiance.’ 
Indeed, the baptismal confession 7s the soldier’s oath in the militia 
Christi, the army of the fighters for the Messiah.4_ As early as the 
second century, in the ninety-sixth epistle of Pliny to the Emperor 
Trajan, we hear about the Christians stating: ‘seque sacra- 
mento . . . obstringere, ne furta, ne latrocinia, ne adulteria com- 
mitterent, ne fidem fallerent, ne depositum appellati abnegarent.’ 
Even the formula of this early Christian sacramentum may well be 
understood as a soldier’s oath, pledging himself not to rob, nor to 
plunder, nor to rape, nor to break faith, nor to deny when called 
to account for property received in trust. The new Israel, re- 
generated through the baptism of John into a ‘ new covenant’ with 
the national God, is primarily a militia of the coming Messiah, an 
army of the Christ, the future anointed national king who is their 
war-lord and army commander® and to whose service ® their 
soldiers’ lives are devoted. 


1 Tac., Ann., i. 8, xv. 16; Hist., i. 55, iv. 31; Pliny, Ep, X. 60; Tertull., 
A post., 16. 

* Cf. above, p. 266 ἢ. 5. The covenanters of Damascus are ‘ mustered’ even 
as soldiers (xvii. 2), and they have to take an ‘ oath of the covenant ‘ (xix. 8). 

* Cf. Livy, x. 38, on the sacramentum taken by the Samnite army before 
marching to war. Justin, xx. 4, calls the oath of the members of the Pythagorean 
order a sacramentum (-εσυνωμοσία ; Apol., ap. Jambl., 260). 

* This important evidence is time and again neglected by commentators such 
as the Rev. Alban Blakiston, who declares (John Baptist and his relation to Jesus, 
London; 2,.p..220.sq.)...The baptism of John... . bound its recipients to no 
sort of discipleship and it initiated them into no sort of religious community,’ etc. 

® Cf. Ignat., dd Polyc., vi. 2: ‘ please your war-lord from whom you get your 
pay, so that none of you should be found a deserter. Let baptism be 
your armour. .. .’ 

The symbolism is derived from Job vii. 1: ‘ Militia (saba) est vita hominis 
super terram et sicut dies mercenarii dies eius.’ 


| x “ JF 


Ai 


‘TO FLEE FROM THE WRATH TO COME’ 27T 


BAPTISM AS A PLEDGE OF SALVATION IN THE DAYS OF 
THE LAsT JUDGMENT 


The foregoing enquiries have made it clear that the baptism of 
John was basically the baptism of Jewish ritual prescribed to all ~ 
proselytes, and which the prophet and chosen-high priest with in- 
exorable rigour imposed upon Jews who, by their failure to observe 
the Deuteronomic “royalty law,’ had apostatized from God and 
from their nation. This baptism, then, was in the first instance 
an outward sign that they earnestly desired liberty, that is, the 
‘kingdom of God,’ independence of foreign despots, and victory 
inthe holy war. Yet it is no less certain that in the Baptist’s eyes 
it was also a way of escape from the ‘wrath to come,’ that is, from 
the last judgment. It was truly a ‘ washing for salvation,’ an 
‘eschatological sacrament in view of the final judgment.’ 1 

Such an institution cannot well be understood unless one bears 
in mind not only the pertinent predictrons of the prophets but also 
the prevailing universal conviction of the immediate proximity of 
the ‘ kingdom of God’ 5 and the immediately impending destruc- 
tion of ‘ the present world.’ This conviction, quite unintelligible 
on the basis of the chronology hitherto accepted, had at that time 
been brought about by the discussions concerning the Shilo ‘ for 
whom the gentiles wait,’ by the calculation of the ‘year-weeks’ of 
Daniel’s prophecy,’ and finally by the death of Herod the Great. 

The explanation of this baptism in the waters of Jordan must 
therefore be sought in the relevant prophecies concerning the 
Last Days. 

It was pointed out long ago that the waters of the Jordan 
and the Jarmuk are, in the eyes of Jewish rabbis,? particularly 
unsuitable for a religious bath of purification, since they are a 
mixture of ‘dead’ (i.e. marshy or stagnant) water and ‘living’ 
spring water. Now, John was essentially a man intent upon the 
‘ fulfilment of all righteousness,’ and cannot therefore be supposed 
to have displayed the antinomian indifference to Pharisaic scruples 
peculiar to the later Christians.° Nor can he have been content 
merely to accommodate himself to accidental circumstances. 

Now, a passage in Ezekiel® foretells that in the last days a 


1 Albert Schweitzer, G.L.J.F.5, Tiibingen, 1921, p. 424 (Engl. trans. by W. 
Montgomery, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, London, 1911, p. 377). 

2 Matt. iii. 2: ‘ Turn back, for the kingdom of heaven has drawn near.’ 

8. See above, p. 137 n. 16. 

4 Parah, viii. 10; cf. W. Brandt, suppl. xviii. 2 to Z.4.T.W., pp. 80 sgq. and 

56. 
: 5 According to Acts viii. 36 sqq., the Christians baptized in any puddle by the 
wayside. Didaché, cap. vii., declares any water whatsoever suitable for baptism. 

ὃ ΙΝ]. 1-9. Cf. Isaiah i. 16-20. 


272 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


spring will issue from under the threshold of the temple at Jeru- 
salem, the overflow of which will run down into the deep hollow 
of the lower course of the Jordan and the Dead Sea, and sweeten 
the brackish or salt water in that region. ‘ Every living creature 
which swarmeth, whithersoever the river cometh, shall live... . 
And by the river, upon the bank thereof, on this side and on that, 
shall grow every tree for meat, whose leaf shall not wither, neither 
shall the fruit thereof fail.’ It is at once evident that the Baptist 
connected this passage with another prophecy of Ezekiel,t long 
since recognized as fundamental for his doctrine, and that in this 
invisible temple spring flowing down to the Jordan, and removing 
its disabilities, he discovered the ‘ pure water’ which God had 
promised to pour out upon Israel to purge the people from the 
filth of idolatry and to ‘ give them a new spirit.’ Here, too, was 
the ‘fountain’ which, according to the prophet Zechariah,? will 
be opened up to the house of David and to the inhabitants of 
Jerusalem for purification from all defilement and sin. From 
Ezekiel’s promise of the /xut-bearing trees which are to thrive 
on the banks of Jordan in place of the brushwood now standing 
there, the Baptist derives his warning to the multitudes flocking 
together to receive baptism, ‘ to bring forth good fruits of repent- 
ance.’ The same metaphor, employed alike by Christians* and 
Mandaeans,* of the newly ‘ planted’ believers thus originates in 
the Baptist’s allegory: every ‘tree which bears no fruit’ will be cut 
down and cast into the fire. ‘Bring forth, therefore, fruit worthy 
of repentance.’ ὃ 

The figure of the fall of the barren trees ® on the day of judg- 
ment is likewise borrowed from the language of the Old Testament 
prophets. In /satah* we read that 


‘there shall come a day of Jahweh upon all that is proud and 
haughty and uporvall that is lifted up, and upon allthe oaks of Bashan’; 


and again: ὃ 


‘Behold, the Lord, Jahweh of hosts, loppeth the boughs with 
terror: and the high of stature are felled and the lofty are brought 
low. The thickets of the forest are cut down with iron, and Lebanon 
shall fall by a mighty one. But there shall come forth a shoot 
from the stock of Jesse, and a twig from his roots shall bear 
ΓτῸϊῸ τ οὕς ELE. 


In Ezekiel ® 


‘the mighty one of the nations fells the lofty cedar of Lebanon and 
deals with it according to its wickedness.’ 


Ὁ XXXVI1..16, 25 Sq.,,31. 2 xii. I. > τ Cor. 11. 6; 1 Tim. iil, 6, etc. 
4 See index to Lidzbarski’s Mand. Liturgies, p. 292, S.v. ‘ Pflanzung.’ 

® Matt. ii. ὃ should follow v. το. 

6 It was also taken over by Jesus; cf. Madt. vii. 18. 

δε χε ΤῸ Ὁ Β΄, 33; πὶ ἢ, Xx, 12. 


THE FLOOD OF THE LAST DAYS 273 


The axe itself which the Lord will wield at the judgment comes 
from Psalm xxxv. 3, where Jahweh brandishes the spear and 
battle-axe against his enemies. The ‘Scythian’ word! here 
employed, s*gor, cayapis, Lat. securis, shows that the Psalmist has 
transferred to Jahweh the tree-splitting lightning-stroke of the 
double axe of the heathen thunder-gods. 

The allegorical interpretation of the trees? which in Ezekiel’s 
vision grow on the banks of Jordan allows us to see how the 
Baptist, too, understood metaphorically the messianic stream 
welling up from under the threshold of the temple, the ὕδωρ 
ἀφέσεως of the Septuagint.? Like the prophet Ezekiel, the fourth 
evangelist,* and the author of the First Epistle of Peter,> he, too, 
read in his /saiah ὃ the word of Jahweh concerning the foundation- 
stone of the temple : 


‘ Behold I lay in Zion (a living stone), a tried stone, a precious 
threshold stone as foundation. (Out of its hollow shall flow streams 
of living water ;) he that believeth in me shall not perish.’ 


The water streaming out from beneath the threshold must ‘there- 
fore have seemed to him symbolical of a living faith in Jahweh 
or of the cleansing righteousness of Amos.? 

To understand how far the washing in Jordan could have 
appeared to the Baptist as a pledge of salvation in the last judg- 
ment, we must go back again to Ezekiel’s prophecy. The water 
of the messianic spring, which at first merely trickles through 
the walls, rapidly increases in volume, first ankle-deep, then knee- 
deep,® then reaching to the loins, until finally it becomes a stream 
which none can wade through, which must be crossed by swim- 
ming. As is shown by the Odes of Solomon, these words inevit- 
ably call up a picture of a flood gradually covering the whole 
earth. That such was the prophet’s meaning can hardly be 
doubted ; for according to ancient pre-Israelitish folklore™ the 
whole rock on the Temple Mount of Jerusalem, the foundation- 
stone (‘eben shethijah) of the world, shuts the entry to the cosmic 
water-cavern of the abyss, to the primaeval flood beneath the earth. 
And thus the world was constantly threatened by a flood, held 
back only with difficulty through the talismanic power of the 
name of God, when this stone was moved at the time of David’s 

1 See Herodot., i. 215. 

* Cp. Ps.i. 2, 3; Jevem. xvii. 7,83 Ts. 1xi. 3; Ep. Barn, xi. 

* Ezek, xlvii. 4, for majim birkaim, ‘ knee-deep water.’ 

* John vii. 38. ie BY ἃ 

δ xxviii. 16, On the reconstructed text of this verse, cf. my Orpheus, London, 
1921, p. 148 f. 

ION ZA 8 xvii. I-12. ® See above, n. 3. 

10 vi. 7 544. : ‘a brook has gone out and grown into a stream long and broad 


which has inundated everything and brought it to the temple.’ 
41 Dr. Moses Gaster in Folklore, vol. ii. p. 204. 


5 


274 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


excavations for the temple of Solomon. Consequently, and with 
a simple word-play, this foundation-stone (’eben shethiah) was 
regarded also as a ‘ stone of drinking’ (eben shethijah), the idea 
being readily suggested that out of it there would at some future 
time burst forth ‘ streams of living water,’ watering, as in David's 
time—nay, flooding—the whole world. 

Such a flood in the final messianic age must naturally have 
appeared as a ‘ deluge of judgment ’ in the light of the pertinent 
prophetic utterances. ‘ With an overrunning flood’ will Jahweh 
‘make a full end of those who resist him.’! ‘Only a remnant 
in Israel shall return: a consumption is determined, a flood of 
righteousness. For a consumption, and that determined, shall 
the Lord, Jahweh Sabaoth, make throughout all the land.’* 
‘ Because you have said . . . when the overflowing scourge shall 
pass through, it shall not come unto us . . . the hail shall sweep 
away the refuge of lies, and the waters shall overflow the hiding-* 
place. And your covenant with death shall be disannulled and 
your agreement with Sheol shall not stand; when the overflowing 
scourge passeth along, ye shall be crushed by it; as often as it 
passeth along, it shall take you away.’ * 

In the Book of Enoch® the final judgment is viewed as a re- 
petition of Noah’s flood, which is spoken of as the ‘ first end of the 
world.’ To the Baptist, who regarded himself as a reincarnation 
of the ’Enosh, in whose day men first ‘ began to call upon the name 
of the Lord,’ the judgment flood must rather have appeared as a 
repetition of that first partial deluge ® which, according to Jewish 
Hagadah,’ in the time of the first "Enosh, the grandson of Adam, 
destroyed a great part of the earth and swept away the reprobate 
‘generation of ’Enosh.’ 

Just as Paul interpreted the passage of Israel through the 
Red Sea as a baptism in the 568,8 through which the chosen people 
waded as through a ‘ flood of salvation,’ whilst their enemies were 
drowned ; or again, as his disciple Silvanus ® taught, that baptism 
is the counterpart of the Noachian flood by which the righteous 
were once saved,—even so still earlier must the Baptist have 
expounded the immersion and metaphorical drowning of the 


1 Nahum i. 8. 2 Tsatah x. 22 sq. 
4 T.e. the holy rock on Mt. Zion. 
4 Isaiah xxviil. 15 544. δι χοῦς HIG.) KC. A. 


6 This flood in the days of ’Enosh is in fact adduced by the rabbis (Pal. Sheq., 
vi. 50a, 3), in a commentary on Ezekiel’s vision of the stream issuing from the 
sanctuary and flooding the whole world, to explain a difficult expression in xlvii. 
8: ‘ They flow into the sea of the waters ‘that have broken forth”’: that is, the 
great sea (the ocean). Why is it called Lamusaim? (as if it were a dual), ‘the 
two that have broken forth’’: once in the age of ’Enosh, and once in the age of 
the dispersion.’ 

7 Bereshith vabba, 23. 

8 1 Cory.x.1sq. See Joach. Jeremias, Z.N.T.W., xxvill., 1929, pp. 314 ff. 

®t Pet. ili. 20 sq. 


THE BAPTISM OF WIND AND FIRE 275 


apostate Jews in the Jordan as a salutary anticipation of the 
destruction in the final deluge. He who now submits to puri- 
fication in the waters of Jordan escapes ‘ the wrath to come’: 
penitential conversion (shubha, Aram. thubs) is the ark (thebah) 
which will rescue Israel from the flood of divine displeasure. 
" As were the days of Noe, so will be the days of the new Enosh,’ 2 
the ‘Son of Man.’ 


THE MESSIANIC BAPTISM WITH WIND AND FIRE 


After what has been said, the sequence of thought in the 
Baptist’s preaching will in its main essentials be intelligible. 
The message—his secret not to be revealed to unworthy ears 3— 
is wholly built upon the imagery of the ancient prophets : 


' Ye offspring of vipers, who hath warned you how to escape from 
the wrath tocome? Think not tosay, We have Abraham for father : 
for I say unto you that God is able of these stones to raise up children 
unto Abraham. ven now is the axe laid to the root of the trees : 
every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down and cast 
into the fire. Bring forth, therefore, meet fruits of repentance. I 
baptize you with water, but he that cometh after me, whose shoes I 
am not worthy to draw off, he will baptize you with wind and with 
fire. His fan is already in his hand and he will sweep his threshing- 
floor, and gather the wheat into his garner, but the chaff he will burn 
up with unquenchable fire.’ 


In the same first psalm, in which the Baptist found the com- 
parison of the righteous to a fruit-bearing tree planted by the 
water-courses, he read the reverse picture : 4 


‘Not so the wicked: they are like the chaff which the wind 
driveth away. Therefore the wicked shall not stand in the judg- 
ment.’ 


As is well known, in the Orient the separation of the chaff from 
the wheat is effected by the wind, against which the as yet un- 
separated grains and chaff are cast.by the winnowing fan. The 
second purification, therefore, which the Baptist predicts for the 
time of “the coming one,’ following upon the baptism by water, 
is a baptism with wind (ruah=vevpar.), not at all a baptism 
‘with the holy spirit.’ That the word ἁγίῳ must be an inter- 
polation by a Christian hand into the text of the original Nasdraean 
Baptist source, a document upon which both Matthew and Luke 
have drawn, might long since have been recognized had the 
correct conclusion been drawn from the statement in the Acts of the 
Apostles ® which says in so many words that those who had been 

* Samaritan tradition (Merx, suppl. xvii. to Z.4.T.W., 1909, p. 82). 


* Matt. xxiv. 37=Luke xvii. 26=Q. 
3 Above, p. 225 n. 7. SRS ria Si 8. xix. 2-4. 


276 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


baptized with John’s baptism were wholly ignorant of the idea 
of the ‘ holy spirit.’ | 

In the book of Isaiah 1 the Baptist could find the prophecy of 
that terrible day on which the Lord would ‘ purge the blood-guilt 
of Jerusalem from her midst by the wind of judgment (ruah 
mishpat) and the wind of burning (raj, ba‘er),’ and the prediction 5 
‘ Thou shalt fan them and the wind shall carry them away and the 
whirlwind shall scatter them.’ It is with reference to this God- 
sent ‘ storm of judgment’ which will separate the chaff from the 
wheat that the Baptist speaks of the coming messianic king as of 
a winnower whose fan is already in his hand. The same prophet 
Isaiah 3 speaks of the day when the Lord will ‘ thresh (wheat) from 
the ear of the river (Euphrates) unto the river of Egypt ; and ye 
shall be gathered one by one, O ye children of Israel.’ Once again 
in Isatah * the people of Israel is addressed as ‘O thou my threshed 
son (wheat) of my threshing-floor.’ The wheat which is gathered 
into the granary is accordingly Israel regenerated in baptism: the 
chaff winnowed away by the wind of judgment under the fan of 
the Messiah is the sinful people accounted as heathens because 
they have submitted to the yoke of the Romans and the Idumaean 
dynasty. 

The last item mentioned, the burning of the chaff in unquench- 
able fire, is simply Malachi’s prediction ® of a purification by a 
world-conflagration on the Day of Doom, which will consume the 
malefactors like the stubble after the harvest, and will ‘ refine ’® 
the remnant of the people after the manner of the fire of the 
smelter and the chemist.? Such a ‘ fire-flood’ or ‘ baptism of fire ’ 
is also expected in the prophecies of Jesus concerning the end of 
the world,’ by Paul® and by the author of the Second Epistle of 
Petey. In this last-named passage a different final catastrophe 
is foreseen for each age. God cannot threaten a second deluge 
because, according to Gen. ix. 14 sq., he has promised no more to 
annihilate all flesh upon the earth by a flood ™ and to send no more 
floods to destroy the earth. The final judgment must therefore 
take the form of a conflagration.!* But since the promise in ques- 
tion might be interpreted in a more restricted sense as a pledge 
never again in the future to exterminate all flesh and never to 
destroy the earth itself, it would not be surprising if the Baptist 
and Jesus himself expected a flood both of fire and of water on the 


2 ive.4 Ὁ Σ ΤΌ 13. 2° xii. 16. Φ ΧΌΤΙ. £2, 

ae ©, o eae 23 6 iv, = 3 ch: Habsin 19. 6 Mal. iii. 2. 

7 The comparison is of course taken from the daily life of the wandering 
Rekhabite smiths. It is the common property of the prophets; cf. Isaiah 1. 25, 
xlviii. 10, also my book Das Geld, Miinchen, 1924, p. 132; Monatsschr. f. Gesch. 
u. Wiss. ἃ. Judentums, lix. (1925), p. 369 n. 1-4. 

8 Luke xvii. 26. 9.4 Thess:1.'7: 10 31. 6 sq. 11 Tsaiah liv. 9. 

18 Sebah. 111a, Strack-Billerbeck, ii. 354a ; Isaiah lxvi. 16. 


THE TOWER OF BABEL AND THE WIND DELUGE 277 


day of judgment, just as of old the judgment on the ‘ generation of 
the flood’ was succeeded by the judgment on the ‘generation of 
Sodom.’ 

From this train of ideas one might conclude that the purifica- 
tion of the world or of mankind by the ‘ wind of judgment,’ the 
‘baptism with wind,’ represents not only a world catastrophe im- 
pending in the last days but one which occurred in the past. That 
this is actually so is well attested by a series of Midrashic traditions. 
In the third book of the Szbylline Ovacles (ΤΟΥ sqq.) the author, an 
Egyptian Jew, writing under Ptolemy vit., Physcon, mentions the 
building of the tower of Babel, and adds: ‘ But forthwith the 
Immortal laid great constraint upon the winds, and thereupon the 
blasts hurled the great tower from its height and aroused strife in 
mortals against each other. But when the tower had fallen and 
the tongues of men had been distorted into all manner of languages, 
forthwith the whole earth was filled with mortals whose kingdoms 
were divided.’ Again, in the Book of Jubilees,} a Pharisaic work 
composed most probably in Palestine in the last century before our 
era, the tower of Babel is overthrown by ‘a mighty wind.’ Jose- 
phus tells how the generation of Nimrod decided to build a great 
tower to secure themselves by its height against the wrath of God 
in the event of another flood ; but God by the division of tongues 
created disunion among them. He goes on to quote a Sibylline 
utterance, distinct both in its phraseology and in its polytheistic 
character from the extant oracle, and no doubt derived from the 
so-called Chaldaean Sibyl of Berossus : 


‘Now this tower and the confusion of tongues are also mentioned 
by the Sibyl in these terms: ‘‘ When all men spake the same lan- 
guage, some of them built a very lofty tower thinking thereby to 
ascend toheaven. But the gods sent winds and overturned the tower 
and gave a special language to each.” ’ 


According to Rabbinic tradition,’ the tower was built in despite 
of God and the warnings of Abraham : the builders blasphemously 
said that, heaven reeling once every 1656 years (the year of the 
flood according to the reckoning in the Seder ‘olam vabba), the 
result being that the upper waters pour down upon the earth, the 
firmament must be supported by a tower so that no further flood 
might be possible ; but the tower was blown to pieces by mighty 
winds. 

The Syrian Church ὁ is also acquainted with this story : 


‘There was once a deluge through wind, and the people re- 
served for this were slain by a terrific north wind, and the righteous 


5. x. 20; 2 Ant., 1:4. 2°89. 
8 Ginzberg in Jewish Encyel., ἢ. 398 sq. 
* Apology of Ps.-Melito, ed. Otto, Corp. Apol., ix. 432. 


278 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


only remained alive to tell the tale. At another time came the 
water-flood and drowned all living creatures, and the righteous only 
remained alive in the ark by the will of God. So, too, at the end of 
time there will be a flood of fire, which will burn up the earth with 
all its mountains .. . but the righteous will be saved, even as those 
like them survived the water-flood.’ 


The Syrians! teach that the flood of wind annihilated the genera- 
tion of the tower-builders ; only Abraham was saved because he 
at God’s command had previously left the country. 

There can be no doubt, then, that the Baptist supplemented 
this ancient conception of a return of the days of Noah and of Lot 
in the last days, a conception which in Like is attributed to Jesus, 
by a mention of a return of the flood of wind such as occurred in the 
days of Abraham, a catastrophe to take place between the two 
other calamities, He doubtless interpreted in the same manner 
the prophecy of Zechariah 5 concerning a tripartition of mankind 
through divine judgment : 


‘ And it shall come to pass, saith the Lord, that in all the land 
two parts thereof shall be cut off and die, but the third shall be left 
therein. And I will bring the third part through the fire, and will 
refine them as silver is refined, and will try them as gold is tried. 
They shall call on my name and I will hear them: I will say, This 
is my people; and they shall say, Jahweh is my God.’ 


According to this prophecy the Baptist may have imagined that 
one-third will perish in the water, another in the storm, whilst the 
last third will be refined in the fire. 

The Baptist clearly has in his mind this threefold trial (πειρασ- 
wos) awaiting the just and the unjust ; but whilst the ordeal of 
passing through water, wind, and fire annihilates the wicked, the 
just will remain unscathed, just as the Red Sea let the chosen 
people pass but engulfed their enemies. 


‘And then shall all pass through the devouring fire and the 
unquenchable flame ; and the righteous shall all be saved, but the 
godless after them shall perish ’: 


so says the Sibyl.* Or, as we read in the Odes of Solomon : 4 


‘ Great rivers are the power of the Lord, and they carry headlong 
those who despise him, and entangle their paths, and they sweep 
away their fords, and catch their bodies and destroy their lives (or 
‘souls ’). or they are swifter than lightning and more fleet, and 
those who cross them in faith are not moved, and those who walk 
on them without blemish shall not be afraid. For the sign upon 
them ὃ is that of the Lord, and the sign is the way of those who cross 
in the name of the Lord,’ 

Book of the Bee, ed. Budge, p. 40 sq. 2 xiii. 8 sqq. 3 ii. 252 sq. 
4 xxxix. 1-6. I use the translation of Dr. Rendel Harris. 
5 Cp. Ps, Sal., xv. 6, See above, p. 234 n. 8; below, p. 356 n. 8, 


THE THREE BAPTISMS 270. 
ςς 


Just as John’s baptism in water is at once a lenient and a pro- 
tective anticipation of the water-flood of judgment, so will the 
liberator-king who is to follow him grant to the elect a purification 
by ‘ wind’ and ‘ fire.” Whether the Baptist held that an actual 
rite of baptism with wind and with fire, a fanning or swinging and 
fumigating of sinners, and a passage of the elect through all three 
elements, were necessary, had better be left open. But it is worth 
noting that Josephus twice ! speaks of a purifying fire (καθάρσιον 
πῦρ) which God through the Romans will pour out over Jerusalem, 

Certain it is that Jesus did not refer this prediction to himself 
and never instituted such a baptism, a fact noted as strange as 
early as Origen.* The primitive Christian community saw its 
fulfilment in the ecstatic speaking with tongues of the disciples 
assembled at Pentecost, and described this experience as an out- 
pouring of πνεῦμα, i.e. the breath of God, and of fire, i.e. of the 
fiery word of God,’ on the Apostles ; they further looked upon it 
as a restoration of the primitive universal comprehension which 
was supposed to have existed between the diverse nations before 
the building of the fateful tower.* To them also it was a repetition 
of the wonders attending the revelation of the law on Mt. Sinai, 
which filled the hearers with the fear of a flood of fire.® The 
Church saw the fulfilment of the Baptist’s prophecy of a messianic 
‘baptism with the Holy Ghost ’ (to use the short formula found in 
Mark, corresponding to the prophecy of Ezekiel®) in the pneu- 
matic gifts of grace exhibited in the neophytes. The introduction 
of a special eschatological rite of a baptism by spirit and fire was 
put in the mouth of the risen Jesus only by certain Gnostics by 
whom such mysteries were actually practised.’ 

It need hardly be added that the Baptist did not reach this 
highly complicated conception of three successive world cata- 
strophes by flood, wind, and fire (κατακλυσμός, ἀνέμων συστροφή, 
ἐκπτύρωσις) by piecing together, in the fashion of a mosaic, the 
prophetical passages quoted above. It should rather be connected 
with the idea, widespread in the East and partially also adopted 
by the Greeks, of a great ‘ world-year.’ According to the apokata- 
stasis doctrine of Berossus, which was taken over by the Stoics and 
probably taught still earlier by Aristotle in his lost Protrepitkos, 
the ‘ great year’ of the world had two solstices, At the height of 
the world-summer, when all the planets stand in Cancer, this over- 
heating produces the world-conflagration (ἐκπύρωσις) ; when in 
the world-winter they all stand in Capricorn, the result 1s a κατα- 

1 B.J., ii. ὃ 110; Ant., xx. § 166. 

2 Hom. xxiv. on Luke, Patrol. Or., xiii. 901. 

3 767, ΧΙ, 29. 4 See above, p. 277. 

5 mabbul shel ’esh Sebahim, T16a. 6 Above, p. 272 1. 15. 

7 See my paper on ‘The Three Baptisms in the Gnostic Pistis Sophia,’ 
The Quest, 1924. 


280 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


κλυσμός, a World-flood. But, since the Greeks, like the Egyptians, 
divided the year into three seasons, spring, summer, and 
winter, and interpreted these seasons by a cyclic ‘ overbearing ’ 
(ἐπικράτεια) of the three elements, air, fire, and water, there must 
have been a Hellenistic theory postulating three world-cata- 
strophes, by water, wind, and fire, corresponding to the rainfall of 
winter, the equinoctial storms of spring, and the glow of the summer 
sun; such a theory as is actually found in Indian tradition. 
Under the influence of such ideas, of astrological origin, the Baptist 
must have regarded ‘the woes of the Messiah’ as a catastrophic year, 
whose winter would induce a world-flood, its spring a catastrophic 
tempest, and its summer a world-conflagration. That in his case 
we can establish such an influence, however weak, of astrological 
ideas need not surprise any one. 

For the point has previously been raised that in his mention 
of the heavenly sickle he may have referred to a constellation. 
The same suggestion probably holds good also for the allusion to 
the ‘ fan,’ said to be already in the hand of him who is to come 
after him, if Schiaparelli is right in his identification of a Hebrew 
constellation called the ‘ winnowing-shovel ’ (mizré) in the Book of 
Job (xxxvii.Q) ; it may also, perhaps, apply to the axe or double-axe 
(segor) already laid to the root of the trees. For according to an 
old gloss 5 the ancients thought they could recognize in the con- 
stellation of Orion® the image of a double-axe (cxemdpyn), more 
strictly speaking a pickaxe, such as would be used for the up- 
rooting of a useless tree. So one may well suppose that John 
did actually accompany the fearful words ‘ the axe’ and ‘ the 
fan of God’ with those threatening heavenward-pointing gesti- 
culations which Christian art loves to portray in its represen- 
tations of the Baptist, and that he received his inspiration from 
‘nightly visions’ while contemplating the starry heavens, like 
the author of the visions in Daniel concerning the astral beasts 
and the four world-kingdoms,! or like the seer to whom we owe 
the Johannine apocalypse. 


THE DESCENT OF THE SPIRIT AND THE VOICE FROM HEAVEN 


AT THE BAPTISM OF JOHN IN THE PRIMITIVE NASORAEAN 
TRADITION 


Precisely at what time Jesus received baptism from John 
is a question requiring separate treatment.5 The historicity of 


* L. de la Vallée Poussin, Encycl. Religion and Ethics, i. 188 Sq. 
2 Etym. Gudianum, 1581 n. 1. 


3 τς * 
* 


* See vol. ii.'pp. 660 ff. Germ. ed, 
δ See below, p. 293. 


THE DESCENT OF THE SPIRIT 281 


the baptism itself cannot well be doubted, because at an early 
date Christians had grave objections to the tradition as attested 
by Matthew 1 and the Gospel of the Hebrews.? On the other hand,~ 
we have to reckon seriously with the possibility that the vision at | 
the outset of his public career and the temptation by the devil 
had originally, 1.6. in the primitive Nasdraean source utilized by 
the Synoptists, nothing whatever to do with Jesus, and were only 
transferred to him by means of interpolations on the part of the 
Christian evangelist. 

As a matter of fact, in all three Synoptists the simple omission 
of some words immediately appended to the Baptist’s preaching 
produces a statement which is not only no less but is indeed even 
more intelligible than the traditional text. Take for instance 
Luke iii. 21 sq. : 

“Now it came to pass, when all 
the people were baptized, that 
Jesus also having been baptized 
and praying, the heaven was opened, and the 
Holy Spirit descended in a bodily 
form, as a dove, upon him, and a 
voice came out of heaven, ‘ Thou 
art? my beloved son: in thee I 
am well pleased.’ 


If the line which is here set in the margin is an interpolation, then 
the words ‘ upon him’ (ἐπ᾽ αὐτὸν) refer to ‘ all the people’ (ἅπαντα 
τὸν λαόν), and the old debated question what meaning should be 
attached to the words of Isaiah xli1. 1, quoted by the heavenly 
voice, is answered in quite an unexpected fashion. The opening 
words of the Songs of the Servant of Jahweh run: 


‘Behold my servant (LXX, ὁ παῖς μου) whom I uphold, my chosen 
in whom my soul delighteth : I have put my spirit upon him.’ 


These words, which Matthew (xii. 18) quotes from Isaiah, and 
with the correct translation ὁ παῖς μου, were at a very early date 
regarded as referring to the people of Israel. The Septuagint text 
has ‘Jacob my servant, I will help him ; Jsvael my chosen,’ etc. 
Now, since it has been shown ὁ that the intention of John’s baptism 
was to purify the children of Abraham who had fallen away from 
God into servitude to the heathen, and to resuscitate a regenerate 
Israel, the reference of the Bath Qol to the newly baptized people 
is perfectly in keeping. The voice from heaven greets them as 
they emerge, newborn like proselytes, from the water, with the 
words of the prophet Isaiah: ‘ Behold (Jacob) my servant... . 


1 iil, 14 Sq. 2 Fragment 3. 
3 Var.: ‘ this is.’ 4 See above, p. 268 ff. 


282 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


(Israel) my favourite, in whom my soul delighteth: I have put 
my spirit upon him’ ; and in fact the spirit of God descends upon 
them (ἐπ᾿ αὐτόν, the people collectively), as they had been pro- 
mised just before, ‘ He shall baptize you in (or with) spirit.’ The 
breath of God glides down in the shape of a dove, because in a 
well-known midrash to Gen. i. r the spirit of God brooding over 
the waters is likened to a brooding dove, since the dove is for 
the Haggadistst a symbol of God-fearing Israel, and at the same 
time recalls the salvation of Noah and his sons from the flood, 
the prototype of the baptism of John, designed to save the new 
Israel of the elect from the final flood at the judgment. 

It is evident, then, that the words ‘ my son’ (υἱός μου, instead 
of παῖς pov) and ‘thou art’? got into the quotation from Isaiah 
xlii. I, only in consequence of contamination with a quotation 
from a passage of quite a different character, Ps. ii. 7: ‘ Thou 
art my son, this day have I begotten thee.’ The latter verse 
appears, indeed, in quite a number of MSS. 

The two distinct passages obviously have very different 
meanings. The Isaiah passage certainly does not indicate an 
adoption of the new Israel as ‘ God’s son,’ but merely the election 
of God's servant to suffering. On the other hand, the passage in 
the famous royal psalm (ii. 7), also quoted in the Episile to the 
Hebrews (i. 5), doubtless denotes an adoption to filial rank through 
υἱοθεσία, i.e. through a symbolic ritual act of regeneration. 
This passage has been connected by the rabbis, artificially enough, 
with Js. xlii. 1, and similarly applied to the people of Israel. 
Thus the Midrash Tehillim (on Ps. ii. 7, ὃ 9) runs: ‘I will tell of 
the decree, Jahweh said unto me, Thou art my son.’ This is 
written in a decree of the Torah, in a decree of the Prophets, 
and in a decree of the Hagiographa. It is written in a decree of 
the Torah, * My firstborn son is Israel’;* and it is written in a 
decree of the Prophets, ‘ Behold my servant shall deal wisely ’ ; 4 
and below ὃ it is written, ‘Behold my servant whom I uphold, 
my chosen in whom my soul delighteth.’® Thus this passage, 
too, may originally have referred to the adoption of ‘ the Israel 
of God’ regenerated by baptism. 

In any case, the reference in Ps. ii. 7 to the individual who in 
verse 2 is called the Lord’s ‘ anointed’ is so obvious, and must at 
all times have been so clearly felt, that quite naturally in Mark 
and Matthew, after the tentative omission of the clauses referring 
to the baptism of Jesus, we are left with a personal reference of 
the heavenly voice to the Baptist himself and not to the ‘ new 
Israel,’ such as may be extracted from Luke. 

1 Midr. Cant., i. 15 (93b), nd other passages in Strack-Billerbeck, i. 123 f. 


2 Some MSS, have ‘ this is. 
8. Ex. iv. 22. 4 [satah li. 13. 5. Read ‘ above.’ ὃ Isaiah xlii. I. 


THE BAPTIST WITH THE WILD BEASTS 283 


Mark i. 9 sqq. runs: 
‘And it came to pass in those 

days that Jesus came from Nazareth of 
Galilee and was baptized of John 
in the Jordan; and straightway 
coming up out of the water 

he saw the heavens rent asunder, 

and the spirit as a dove descending 

upon him ;! and a voice came out 

of the heavens, Thou art my be- 

loved son, in thee I am well 

pleased. And _ straightway the 

spirit driveth him forth into the 

wilderness.2, And he was in the 

wilderness forty days tempted of 

Satan ; and he was with the wild 

beasts,° and the angels ministered 

unto him.’ 4 


One cannot but be struck by the aptness with which the clause ‘and 
he was with the wild beasts,’ ‘ lived with the beasts,’ ° applies to 
the Baptist who lived the life of an anchorite, the “Enosh in the 
primaeval conditions of Paradise, the man who in the Nasoraean 
source used by Josephus ® is addressed by his opponents with 
the words: ‘Thou but now come forth from the bush like a 
beast.’ Because he, like primaeval man in Paradise, abstains 
from all animal food, and like the Babylonian En-gidu ‘ eats 
herbs’ at the watering-place with the beasts of the wilderness, 
therefore he lives with them in primitive paradisaical or messianic 
peace. As a matter of fact, this motive in connexion with the 
figure of John has been preserved in Byzantine-Russian art. The 
Russian icon represented on Pl. xx1., dating from the beginning 
of the seventeenth century, shows the Baptist as a youthful 
hermit among the gazelles of the desert, and on his knees quench- 
ing his thirst in the waters of the Jordan.? But aptly as this 
detail applies to the Baptist, who ‘ate nothing and drank nothing,’ 
it has little meaning when transferred to Jesus, who laid no 
stress whatever on abstinence in the matter of food or drink, and 
was therefore derisively called by his adversaries a ᾿ gluttonous 
man’ and a ‘ wine-bibber.’ ὃ 

1 See above, p. 281. 2 Cf. Matt. iv. 

8.4. In Matt. all this follows after the temptation. 

5. Cf. Jos., Ant., xv. ὃ 346, and 2 Macc. v. 27 (above, p. 24 τ. 1). 

6 Above, p. 250 n. 6. 

7 The Russian icons of this type are ultimately derived from some Life of the 
Baptist similar to the Vita εἰ Passio Sti. Johanni of Emesa (above, p. 254 ἢ. I). 
The Arabic Life of John says: ‘instead of a desert full of wild beasts he will 


walk in a desert full of angels.’ 
8 Matt, xi. 19; Luke vii. 34. 


“er 
Oe ae ae ee 


284 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


Since it is improbable that the insertion concerning Jesus has 
ousted anything corresponding to the Lucan ‘when all the people 
had been baptized’ (the interpolation might very well have 
followed these words, if it had ever stood after ‘ In those days’), 
the possibility must be taken into consideration that in the 
Nasoraean text, the source of Mark, the spirit of God descended 
‘upon him,’ i.e. upon the Baptist himself, and that consequently 
the voice from heaven addressed him personally with the words 
of the Psalmist, ‘Thou art my son.’ That, too, would be quite 
appropriate. For the rabbis were accustomed to see in ‘the 
Lord’s anointed’ of Ps. ii. 2 a reference to the high priest of 
Aaron’s line regarded as the anointed by God’s grace! The 
Testament of Levi, certainly a pre-Christian work, foretells? that 
over the high priest of the last days, who is compared to a king, 
‘the heavens shall open, and from the temple of glory shall 
sanctification come upon him with the Father’s voice; and the 
glory of the Most High shall be uttered over him.’ That passage, 
in particular the words about ‘the Father’s voice’ and the 
descent of sanctification, must have the same meaning as in that 
Nasoraean source is expressed by ‘the spirit descending upon 
him,’ i.e. upon John the high priest, and by the Bath Qél, ‘ Thou 
art my son’ or ‘he in whom I am well pleased.’ This source 
accordingly did not allude here to the royal consecration of 
Messiah b. David, as depicted in the extant texts of the Synoptic 
Gospels, but to the heavenly confirmation of the Baptist’s election 
by the people as High priest, and to the divine favour in exalting 
Hanan ‘ the Hidden’ to be a royal ‘ high priest for ever after the 
order of Melchizedek.’ 

The same observations apply to Matthew’s narrative. Here 
verses I3-15, including the Baptist’s refusal and his appeasement 
by Jesus, a passage unknown to all other witnesses, are a parti- 
cularly clear case of interpolation. Omit them and the narrative 
passes directly from the last words of the Baptist’s sermon to the 
miraculous apparition : 8 

‘ But when he (John) saw many of the Pharisees and Sadducees 3 
coming to his baptism, he said unto them, “ Ye offspring of vipers,” 
etc... . “ but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire.” And 
lo, the heavens were opened and he saw the spirit of God descending 

+ Midr. Tehillin, ii. § 3 (13a) ; Strack-Billerbeck, iii, 304: ‘ Against Jahweh 
and his anointed’ (Ps. ii. 2). This refers to Qorah, who murmured against 
Aharon on account of the priesthood, though Aharon was the anointed of Jahweh. 
Moses said unto him ; ‘ If my brother ’Aaron had taken upon himself the priest- 
hood, you would rightly murmur. But since God has given it to him, to whom 
belongs the greatness and the kingdom and the strength, whoever is against ’Aaron 
is against God,’ That is what is written, ‘against Jahweh and against his anointed.’ 
Cf. above, p. 138 n. 2. 

2 xvili, δὶ 2 τὸς ὃ. 

* Another correction for ‘ people.’ Cf. above, Ῥ. 268 ἢ. 6. 


PLATE ΧΧῚ 


RUSSIAN JCON BY NAZARIJ SAVIN IN THE OSTRUKHOV MUSEUM, MOSCOW 


IN THE BACKGROUND THE YOUNG JOHN THE BAPTIST ‘ IN THE DESERT AMONG THE BEASTS ’ AND * ANGELS 

MINISTERING TO HIM.’ MARC. I, 13 REFERRING NOT TO JESUS, BUT TO THE BAPTIST! IN THE LOWER 

LEFT CORNER AN ANGEL LEADING YOUNG JOHN INTO THE DESERT, ACCORDING TO THE RUSSIAN APOCRYPHAL 

ZACHARIAS LEGENDS. THE MAIN FIGURE REPRESENTS THE FORERUNNER IN THE ACT OF BAPTIZING THE 

INFANT JESUS—ACCORDING TO MANDEAN, I.E., NASORAEAN TRADITION, THE INFANT IS IMMERSED IN A 

EUCHARISTIC CUP, A QUEER IDEA BASED ON THE USE OF THE BAPTIST’S WORDS : ‘ SEE, THIS IS THE LAMB 
OF GOD’ IN THE Prothesis-RITUAL OF THE GREEK MASS-CEREMONIAL 


(SEE P. 283, LINE 31) 


THE BAPTIST TEMPTED BY THE DEVIL 285 


as a dove and coming upon him (self) ; and lo, a voice out of the 
heavens saying, “‘ This is my beloved son, in whom I am well pleased ” 
(iv. 1). Then was he led up into the wilderness by the spirit to be 
tempted of the devil.’ 


Viewed from the standpoint of John’s disciples, Jesus was but 
one of the multitude coming for baptism and receiving the blessing 
of the Spirit. The tentative omission of the lines relating to his 
baptism from the assumed narrative of the Nasdraean source is 
confirmed in a most striking manner by a more detailed investiga- 
tion of the three temptations in the wilderness to which, in the 
primitive account freed from Christian interpolations, the Baptist 
himself and not the newly baptized Jesus must have been exposed. 
Just as the life in the wilderness ‘with the wild beasts’ is much 
more appropriate to the Baptist than to Jesus, so one now sees that 
the description of the enticements of the devil belongs to a life of 
the Baptist and not to a life of Jesus. He who has but now been 
chosen ‘son of God’ and yet refuses to employ the miraculous 
power bestowed upon him by the Spirit for the turning of stones 
into bread and the appeasement of physical hunger, is the fasting, 
Rekhabite Baptist John, who ate no bread, not even unleavened 
bread at Passover.? 

He it is who quotes 2 the famous passage of Deut. vill. 3, and 
must so have interpreted it, ‘ For not by bread does man live in his 
loneliness (or his seclusion, /‘bhado):* not by the massa but by 
every musa, every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God, 
doth man live.’ To Jesus, who ate his bread untroubled by 
scruples, and who, according to the Gospels, showed no aversion 
whatever to repeating Moses’ miracle of the manna and satisfying 
thousands by the miraculous multiplication of the loaves, this 
story is not in the least appropriate. 

The same considerations apply to the devil’s tempting offer of 
world-dominion, the actual privilege of the Messiah. The Baptist, 
even in the Nasoraean source, speaks with humility of one greater 
than he, of the ‘Shilo’ of Gen. xlix. 10, to whom ‘the peoples’ of 
the earth shall show ‘obedience.’ He regards not himself as the 
Messiah, the king of the world anointed by God, but merely as one 
chosen and confirmed by God as kohen l‘dlam, the high priest of 
the final age, who some day, by God’s orders, may be accounted 
worthy to reveal the messianic king to the people and to anoint 
him. Yet the Baptist, after his vision and after hearing the Bath 
Qél, the voice from heaven, might well have to combat the tempta- 
tion to set himself up as the Christos Kosmokrator, as the Macca- 


1 Matt. xi. 18; cf. above, p. 230 nn. 5 and 6. 2 Matt.iv. 4; Luke iv. 4. 

3 Needless to say, the correct grammatical translation would be ἡ not by bread 
alone.’ But grammatical rules have never prevented an allegorist from twisting 
his text so as to fit the requirements of the moment. 


286 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


baeans before him had disregarded the claims of the house of 
David and assumed the title not only of High Priest but of King as 
well. The people had elected him their High Priest and, according 
to the evidence of Herod, were prepared to follow him everywhere.! 
For him, at least at the time when Archelaus was not yet confirmed 
in office and was craving the favour of Augustus, the temptation 
was strong to ‘fall down before the Satan’ who swayed the Roman 
world-empire—in other words, to petition the Romans for con- 
firmation in the high-priestly office, and, having been enthroned as 
Jewish high priest by the favour of Rome, to do as Herod the 
Great had done before, that is, in an assured position and with 
apparent power behind him, to spin idle spiders’-webs for the 
realization of Jewish dreams of world-dominion. That idea he 
rejected in loyalty to the Deuteronomic law, which forbade the 
Jews any recognition of a foreign ruler. Jesus, on the other hand, 
never rejected the central messianic idea, i.e. the thought of being, 
by God’s grace, the future world-ruler and of proving his claim to 
the title by his teaching and suffering ; on the contrary, that and 
no other was the idea to which he sacrificed his whole life, The 
temptation to rule as a king of the Jews by the favour of Caesar, 
who for the pious Jews is Satan, only presented itself to Jesus in 
the childish legends of later apocryphal Gospels,? never in reality. 
It is impossible that the legend in Matthew and Luke on the devil’s 
offer of world-dominion should be derived from those quite 
secondary inventions. 

The temptation to leap from the pinnacle of the temple into 
Jerusalem is based on a literal interpretation. of the vision in 
Daniel (vii. 13) of the coming of the ‘man’ who ‘sinks down’ or 
‘falls down’ ὃ. with the clouds of heaven. A doubter or mocker 
might naturally object that a Messiah ‘ of flesh and blood’ could 
not fall from heaven and yet remain alive. If this objection were 
met by an appeal to the almighty power of God, with whom all 
things are possible, it might be retorted: Well, if he is so firmly 
convinced that he is God’s elect and destined, like Elijah, to travel 
to heaven on a fiery chariot and from there to sink down again on 
the clouds of heaven, let him put his belief to the test and risk the 
far more modest leap from the top of the temple into the abyss 
and see whether, in virtue of his firm faith, angels will bear him 
softly down on their hands. 

Offhand, such a train of thought is highly probable in one who, 


+ Jos., Ant., xviii. ὃ 118; cf. above, p. 246. 

* The so-called Gospel of Gamaliel, M. R. James, op. cit., p. 148 sqq. 

3 athé havah. 

* Cf. the legend of the catastrophic downfall of Simon Magus (below, p. 287 
n. 1), derived from the story of the unfortunate Icarian experiment of a poor 
Graeculus esuviens before Nero (Juvenal, Sat. iii. 78 ss.; Dio Chrysost., Oy, xxi. 9; 
Sueton., Nevo, 12). 


THE LEAP FROM THE PINNACLE OF THE TEMPLE 287 


like John, was of priestly descent and had, so to speak, passed his 
early youth in the temple, and upon whose memory was deeply 
graven the thought of that glance from the top of the battlements, 
producing giddiness and a vague impulse to fling oneself into the 
town below, which is mentioned by the priest Josephus.! It is far 
less appropriate in Jesus, to whom Jerusalem and the temple were 
so unfamiliar that he went to ‘ look round upon all things,’ ὅ like 
a pilgrim visiting the holy city for the first time, when he made his 
way there in the last week of his life. 

There is, then, I think, a high probability that the visions both 
at the baptism and at the temptation are alike derived from a 
Nasoraean Life and Passion of the Baptist, and therefore were 
originally told, not of Jesus, but of John. Only when the verse, 
‘Now after that John was delivered up, Jesus came into Galilee,’ * 
following the narrative of the temptations, is reached, do the 
Synoptists abandon the Nasdraean source narrating John’s 
history up to his arrest, and begin the record of the tradition which 
emanates from the circle of Jesus’ own disciples in Galilee. 


1 Ant., xv. § 412. Simon Magus, the successor of John the Baptist in the 
leadership of his disciples (Ps.-Clementine hom. ii. 23 ; Patrol. Gr., ii. 92) claims to 
be able to do what his master would not attempt (Ps.-Clemens, Recogn., il. 9, 
Engl. by Dr. Thomas Smith, Ante-Nicene Christian Library, vol. iii. p. 198) : 
‘If I should throw myself headlong from a lofty mountain, I should be borne 
unhurt to the earth as if I were held up.’ 

2 Mark xi. 11. 3 Mark i. 14; Mait. iv. 12. 


XII 
THE CHRONOLOGY OF THE BAPTIST 


THE YEAR OF THE BAPTIStT’s DEATH ACCORDING TO THE 
SOURCES OF JOSEPHUS—A.D. 35 


T will be evident to every observant reader that the source 
relating to the Baptist’s life and death utilized by Josephus 
in the Antiquities! was quite distinct and of a different 

character from that drawn upon in the Haldsis.2 The latter, by the 
stress laid upon the ostensibly successful interpretation of dreams, 
by its admiration of the Baptist still clearly discernible underneath 
the malicious touches added by Josephus, as also by the suppres- 
sion of the personal name of the ‘Hidden One,’ unknown at that 
time even to Josephus, betrays itself at first glance as a glorifica- 
tion (aperadoyia), or an account of the martyrdom of the Baptist, 
emanating from the circle of those who wished to ‘keep’ his 
‘secret '"—in other words, from the Nasdéraeans or Baptists.? Just 
like the synoptic tradition, dependent on a similar source, it attri- 
butes his execution to the wrath of Herod Antipas aroused by the 
Baptist’s reproaches for his illegal marriage. It knows nothing, 
or at least says nothing, of his detentionin Machaerus. The other 
source mentions the Baptist under his real name John, bases his 
arrest and removal on Herod’s fear of a threatening insurrection, 
and attaches weight to the popular opinion that the loss of the 
battle against Aretas was God’s punishment of the tetrarch for 
the murder of the preacher of repentance. 

The Nasoraean source used in the Halésis may have been 
obtained by Josephus from his alleged teacher, the hemerobaptist 
‘Banus.’ It must have been a popular work of the same kind as 
the one utilized by Matthew and Luke and, later on, by the 
Emesan Life of the Baptist and the Zaccharias Apocrypha edited 
by Berendts. As there existed different ‘Gospels’ of Jesus, there 
must have been more than one such work on John,‘ echoes of 


ep er .. 


ee eee 


1 See above, p. 246. 2 See above, pp. 224-31. 3 See above, p. 234n. 1. 

* Prof. Dan. Vélter, Theol. Tijdschr., xxx., 18096, pp. 244 ff.; Die ev. Erzahl. 
υ. d. Geburt τι. Kindheit Jesu, Strassburg, 1911, pp. 11 ff.; Harnack, Neue Unter- 
such. 2. Apostelgesch., 1911, pp. 108 f.; Norden, Geburt des Kindes, Leipzig, 1924, 
pp. 88 note 1 and τοζ ff.; Klostermann, Das Lukasev.*, Tiibingen, 19209, Ρ. 5, 
have traced the influence of such a source in the initial chapters of Luke. But we 
see now that these traditions are not derived from a ‘ Lost Book of the Nativity 
of John,’ as Hugh J. Schonfield has tried to show in a book bearing this title 
(Edinburgh, Clark, 1929), but from a lost Vita et Passio Sti. Johannis Baptistae, 

288 


THE YEAR OF THE BAPTIST’S DEATH 289 


which are heard in the just-mentioned Christian and Mandaean 
writings. 

Of quite a different origin is the account of the Baptist found 
in the Antiquities. In the Way 1—not in the Haldsits, where only 
the Nasdraean source is used—Josephus attributes the banish- 
ment of Herod Antipas to accusations brought against him by the 
friend and boon-companion of Caligula, Agrippa, the new king of 
Judaea, In the Astiquitzes he is still better informed. Now only 
does he know that Agrippa did not for this purpose journey to 
Rome, as he still had stated in the Way, no doubt after a cursory 
perusal of an unsatisfactory extract, but that he sent to Caesar one 
of his freedmen named Fortunatus with a bill of indictment against 
Antipas. It reached the court at Baiae at the moment of the 
arrival of the accused. Knowing the way in which the Herodian 
family were on such occasions in the habit of bringing just or 
Capricious charges against one another,? we cannot doubt that 
Agrippa depicted the murder of the Baptist to the emperor in the 
light in which it was regarded by popular opinion and by his 
Pharisaic friends, namely, as a judicial murder committed by the 
suspicious tyrant, a deed which had met with just retribution from 
God. The justification of the act by the fear of a popular rising 
and the characteristic principle of preventive justice, ‘precaution 
is better than regret,’ * is clearly taken from the tetrarch’s self- 
defence. Agrippa’s letter and the protocol of the trial of Antipas 
were naturally preserved in the commentarii principis of Caligula, 
where they were consulted by Josephus or his collaborators ; this 
is apparent from the detailed knowledge shown of the contents of 
the ἐπιστολαί, the name of the bearer, the time of his arrival, the 
place where Caesar held the trial, etc. Consequently, just as with 
the narrative of the martyrdom of James the Just, the brother of 
‘Jesus who was called Christ,’ derived from the letters of expostula- 
tion from the Pharisees to the governor Albinus and his report to 
the emperor, we are dealing here with documentary evidence of 
primary importance. 

All the more significant is the fact, not noticed by Berendts, 
Frey, and their critics, that the two perfectly independent sources 


of which the Emesene Life of the Baptist, his Life by Serapion of Alexandria, are 
Christian imitations. Mark i. 2-13; Matt. ili. 1-10, 16b-17, iv. 1-11; Luke iii. 
2b-14, 15b-18, 21a, 22, iv. 1b-13; Matt. xi. 2, 3, 4, 7-17, 19b; Luke vii. 18-20, 
22a, 24-32, 35b; Mark vi. 17-29; Mait. xiv. 3-12, are all derived from this or a 
similar source, just as are the chapters concerning the Baptist in Josephus analysed 
above, pp. 224 ff. 

1 il. δὲ 6, § 160. 

2 Haldsis, ii.29: ‘The people has become indignant on account of your impiety. 
You have sent warriors and massacred a great multitude in the temple... . 
Over the victims they were themselves used as victims, And you have com- 
mitted a murder such as not even barbarians have committed.’ 

3 See above, p. 246. 


T 


200 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


of Josephus are in complete agreement with each other on the date 
assigned to the Baptist’s death. Here their chronology is most 
sharply opposed to that of the Synoptists, a fact which, in my 
opinion, finally disposes of the theory that the passage on the 
Baptist was inserted by a Christian interpolator. In the story of 
the interpretation of dreams quoted above,’ Philip the tetrarch 
died on the evening of the day on which the Baptist had interpreted 
to him his dream about an eagle. Incidentally we may note that 
the interpretation is not very prophetic ; for if a man dies he loses 
not merely his wife and his dominion, but his life and αἰ his belong- 
ings, and it is not the eagle (that is, his greed) which robs him of 
wife and dominion, but death. The interpretation being so ob- 
viously inadequate, we may be sure that we have here no mere 
vaticinatio ex eventu. It is quite possible that the tetrarch, now 
at least fifty-four years old and probably even much older, was 
really so alarmed by the evil prophecy of this uncanny ‘wild man’ 
that he had a stroke of apoplexy and died ‘before evening’ on the 
same day. In any case, according to the tradition of the Baptist’s 
circle, which Josephus took over and accordingly approved, the 
Baptist outlived Philip the tetrarch. Now, we know from the 
Antiquities * that Philip died in the spring or summer of A.D. 34. 
Since we possess only a late edition of that work, published after 
the death of Agrippa 11.,ὄ we are dealing with a book which a 
member of the Herodian family had read in an older form and, 
where necessary, carefully corrected.* 

Thus, apart from other evidence, this story of Philip’s dream is 
quite irreconcilable with the Gospel tradition that Jesus did not 
make his first public appearance until after the Baptist’s arrest, 
and outlived him. This contradiction remains unaffected in 
whichever of the various years adopted by the Christian fathers, 
A.D. 29, 32, or 33, We may put the crucifixion, 

But the year of the Baptist’s death presupposed in the Nasor- 
aean source of the Haldsis may be much more precisely fixed. 
For after the death of Philip, the Baptist further proceeded to 
predict for Herod Antipas ‘a merciless death . . . through sore 
tribulations in other lands,’ a prophecy which is ‘ fulfilled’ by the 
banishment of Herod and Herodias to Lugdunum. In this case 
the verification of the prediction rests entirely upon the words ‘in 
other lands,’ words which the narrator of the story may have intro- 
duced into the Baptist’s speech after the actual banishment of 
Antipas. Thus this simple story, too, may have an historical 
nucleus. It is highly significant that the Nasdraean source of 
Josephus—which cannot therefore come from a contemporary— 
believes that Herod Antipas was deposed and banished by77berzus, 
i.e. before 16th March 37. From the statement that Herod made 

t See above, p. 229. * xviii. 4. 6. 3 See above, p. 182 ll. 27 ff. 


THE YEAR OF THE BAPTIST’S DEATH 201 


his journey to the Emperor Tiberius ‘a short time’ after the 
murder of the Baptist, and taking into consideration the cessation 
of navigation in the Mediterranean between the autumn and spring 
equinoxes, we conclude that this narrative dated the Baptist’s 
death at the latest not after the close of A.D. 36. 

Let us now compare with this the statement of Josephus in the 
Antiquities, i.e. the fixed points obtainable from Agrippa’s letter 
of indictment and the defence of Antipas before Caius Caligula. It 
is maintained by Agrippa (or by the Pharisees behind him) that 
the defeat of Antipas in the campaign of A.D. 36 against the Arabian 
king Aretas was the punishment inflicted by God for his execution 
of the Baptist. The execution must therefore have taken place 
before the spring of 36. Conversely, Herod justifies his act by 
his apprehension of a revolt. That he should have entertained 
such an apprehension is most credible in A.D. 35, in which year, 
immediately to the south of Galilee, in the district of Samaria, 
through which lay the shortest route to Jerusalem, the Samaritan 
false messiah, probably Simon Magus, collected his bands, eager 
for revolt, in Tirathana at the foot of Mt. Garizim, intending to 
march them up the mountain to rebuild the old tent of the covenant 
on the summit. Accordingly, the statements of both sources 
indicate with a high degree of probability that the Baptist was 
arrested and executed in A.D. 35, after he had wearied Antipas for 
many years with his repeated predictions of punishment and by 
his messianic preaching of baptism and liberty had aroused the 
suspicions even of politicians who knew nothing of his activity in 
the time of Archelaus and the war of Varus (4 Β.0.). 

These dates, having been obtained only indirectly from Jose- 
phus and his sources, are open to no suspicion of bias of any kind 
whatever. The irreconcilable opposition between them and the 
ordinary chronology, based on a series of New Testament passages, 
need surprise no one ; for it has long been known that even Luke 1 
assigns to the appearance of Theudas a date, before the rising of 
Judas of Galilee in the days of the census, quite different from that 
given by Josephus, who, dependent on Roman documents, is 
certainly right in stating that Theudas was crushed by Cuspius 
Fadus about A.D. 45. Equally notorious is_the fact that all 
apologetic endeavours have so far failed to absolve Luke from the 
reproach of having placed the census under Quirinius the governor 
of Syria (A.D. 6-7) in the days of Herod the Great, i.e. before 4 B.c. 

In reality, however, the chronological statements in Luke’s 
Gospel admit of a quite different explanation from that which, 
under the spell of conventional harmonistic views, has hitherto 
been assumed. 

Even critical scholars like Schiirer have felt justified in com- 

1 Acts v. 36. 


292 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


bining the date suggested by the passage in Matt. ii. 1, ‘ Now 
Jesus was born . . . in the days of Herod the king,’ with the state- 
ment of a totally different character in Luke i. 5, although it has 
long been established that Luke was ignorant of the whole narra- 
tive in Matt. 1-11. That text was probably drawn from a pseud- 
epigraphic “book of the generations of Jesus’ emanating from the 
circle of the δεσπόσυνοι and attributed to James the Just.1 Luke, 
on the other hand, has made use of other Toldoth Jeshu, produced 
in the same circle, in which an announcement to the shepherds 
replaced the adoration of the magi.? In my opinion it is quite 
unnecessary to interpret the passage of Luke 1. 5, ἐγένετο ἐν ταῖς 
ἡμέραις “Ἡρῴδου βασίλέως τῆς Ἰουδαίας ἱερεύς τις ὀνόματι Ζαχαρίας 
κτὰλ., aS if the author meant that Elizabeth’s pregnancy and 
the birth of the Baptist narrated in the sequel fell within the 
reign of Herod the Great. ἐγένετο bears its usual sense: Zacch- 
arias “ flourished,’ ‘lived,’ in the days of Herod, and (i. 7) when 
he and his wife were now well advanced in years, toward the end 
of their lives, they through God’s mercy had a son. 

But if, with this interpretation,. Luke i. 5, 7 does not, like 
Matt. ii. τ, fix the birth of the Baptist and that of Jesus within 
the limits of Herod the Great’s life, we are left with no reason for 
assuming an error in Luke ii. I-15 on the date of the census under 
Quirinius. Luke may quite well have placed the birth of Jesus, and 
therefore also that of the Baptist, in the correct year of the census, 
namely A.D. 6 or 7. 

If he proceeds, in 111. I, to place the beginning of John’s baptism 
of repentance in the fifteenth year of Tiberius (A.D. 28-9), thus 
making the Baptist enter on his active life between the ages of 
twenty-one and twenty-three, this creates no objection from the 
standpoint either of the narrator or of an intrinsic probability. 
Nor is there any inconsistency between this and the further state- 
ment (111. 23) drawn from the family tree of Jesus attributed to 
James the Just, which his relations carried about with them on 
their far-flung journeyings,® that Jesus at the beginning of his 
activity (ἀρχόμενος) was thirty years old. This is clearly intended 
to establish an analogy between Jesus and King David, who is 


1 See App. Χπὶ., below, pp. 606 ff. 

* H. Jeanmaire, levue archéologique, 1924, xix. 255, was the first to see that 
this legend manifestly refers to the year 40 B.c., the year of the Parthian invasion, 
when Persian kings and magi really were in Palestine and tried to enthrone a 
national king of the Jews, a creature of their own, instead of the Roman protégé 
Herod. Obviously Christian legend tried to show that the three Parthian chiefs, 
the two Pacoruses—the king’s son and the homonymous cupbearer—and Barza- 
pharnes (B./J., i. §§ 248 f.), or their magi, recognized the infant Jesus as the 
legitimate king of the Jews according to their knowledge of star lore. The 
hitherto enigmatic prophet Idpxywp (Clem. Alex., Stvom., vi. 6, 53) is obviously the 
mage-king Pacorus—lIlayywp. 

3 Sextus Julius Africanus; see above, n. 1. 


THE YEAR OF THE BAPTIST’S DEATH 293 


said (2 Sam. v. 4) to have begun his reign at the same age.!_ For 
Luke neither says that he was thirty years old at the time of his 
baptism (βαπτιζόμενος), nor that he began his active ministry 
immediately after his baptism. On the contrary, the remarkable 
way in which the statement about the Baptist’s imprisonment is 
proleptically inserted in ili. 1g may very well lead one to suppose 
John to have baptized in the ΤΣ τ ύσεονειαι years before his 
arrest by Herod Antipas, and that Jesus until then, 1.6. until he, 
‘full of the Holy Spirit, returned from the Jordan’ (iv. 1), and his 
own activity began, had remained with John as his associate. In 
that case a period of from seven to ten years might be supposed to 
have elapsed between the baptism of Jesus, regarded as about six 
months younger than John, and the ‘ beginning’ of his own pro- 
clamation, while the year of his passion, the same year in which 
he made his first public appearance, might quite well have been 
Pilate’s last year of office (A.D. 35-6). This it is indeed repre- 
sented to have been in the Latin version of Josephus, the so-called 
Egesippus, where the crucifixion of Jesus follows the uprising of 
the Samaritan Messiah, which occurred in A.D. 35. If the Baptist 
was arrested and put to death in the year before the battle with 
Aretas (A.D. 36), i.e. at the beginning of 35, then everything in 
Luke is in agreement with the view upheld by Mark i. 14a and 
Matthew iv. 12—in other words, with the common synoptic tradi- 
tion that Jesus began his active ministry only after the Baptist’s 
imprisonment, as his successor and not as his rival and apostate 
disciple, and was crucified after the Baptist’s death.* 

We thus reach the surprising result that the chronology ad- 
vocated by Theodor Keim, solely on the basis of the statements in 
the Antiquities concerning the Baptist’s death and the battle with 
Aretas, is actually quite reconcilable with the statements of Luke, 
by which Schiirer 3 imagined that it would be confuted. 

The resultant gain for apologetic purposes is, to be sure, quite 
negligible. For if, in accordance with this interpretation, Luke 
has correctly dated the census of Quirinius and the Baptist’s death, 
he has, as stated above, adopted as the date of the birth of Jesus a 
year (A.D. 6) no more reconcilable with Matt. ii. 1 than it (or the 
previous year, in which he places the Baptist’s birth) is reconcilable 
with the Haldsis of Josephus, according to which the ‘ wild man ’ 
was already preaching in the reign of Archelaus 4 (4 B.c.-A.D. 6) and 
was brought up to him for trial. Moreover, the date which, on the 
above theory, Luke adopted as that of the passion (A.D. 35-6) is 

1 Similarly, Joseph became viceroy of Egypt at thirty (Gen. xli. 46). Thus 
for the Messiah ben David as well as for the Messiah ben Joseph thirty years is 


the proper age. 
2 If Jesus had been born in A.p. 6, he would then have suffered in his twenty- 


ninth year (ὡσεὶ ἐτῶν τριάκοντα). ¥ — 
3 i4, Dp. 44394. Engl. trans., div. i. vol. 11, p. 30. 4 Cf. Mat. ii, 22, 111. 1. 


204 ᾿ς THE MESSIAH JESUS 


wholly irreconcilable with the one adopted by the majority of the 
Church fathers, who place the crucifixion in the fifteenth year of 
Tiberius (A.D. 29), a date which also appears to have been in the 
mind of the fourth Evangelist. If, then, Luke dated the birth of 
Jesus and of the Baptist in the time of the census of Quirinius 
(A.D. 6), he can only have done so to make the Christ, who, in the 
genealogy of the δεσπόσυνοι, taught and died at the age of about 
thirty, outlive the Baptist, put to death, according to the Naso- 
raean tradition, only after the death of Philip (A.D. 34) and after 
the marriage of his supposed widow with Herod Antipas. The 
assertion that Jesus outlived the Baptist had proved indispensable 
in the controversy with the disciples of John,? and attempts were 
made to establish it on an even firmer basis by various interpola- 
tions into the text of the Synoptic Gospels. Luke has therefore 
taken great pains to adjust the date of the passion of Jesus to the 
late date of the Baptist’s death, as it could be computed on the 
basis of the Philippus episode, told in his Nasdraean source, with- 
out, however, paying the slightest regard to the tradition current 
among Baptists concerning the activity of their founder under 
Archelaus. Consequently the Life of the Baptist was known to 
him, not in the form in which it came to Josephus, but in some 
Christian reworking, in which all these incidents dating back to the 
time of the war of Varus had been discarded or detached from their 
true historical setting. This intermediate source may quite well 
have been the document known to have been used elsewhere both 
by Matthew and Luke, the so-called Q. 


THE DATE OF JOHN’S BAPTISM_IN THE GOSPEL OF LUKE 


It is remarkable that the precise statement in Luke iii. τ about 
the Baptist making his first public appearance in the fifteenth year 
of Tiberius (A.D, 29) is meant by that author, not to fix the date of 
the crucifixion, but rather to mark the date of the baptism of Jesus, 
which was the occasion or means of his spiritual new birth as son of 
God and messianic king. The Third Gospel thus lays the main 
stress on this date of the miraculous birth of the Messiah, and fixes 
alike the year of the conception and that of the adoption of Jesus 
by the Bath Qol at the baptism in the Jordan, leaving at the same 
time the year of the crucifixion undecided. The reason for this 
omission may perhaps be that the author is dealing only with the 
dates of the birth and royal consecration, i.e. the accession to the 
throne of a king whose rule does not end with his death and re- 
moval from this world, but is eternal. But perhaps there was a 


* John ii, 20: forty-six years have passed since the beginning of the con- 
struction of Herod’s temple (15 B.c.). 


5. Cf. below, first lines of Ρ. 307. * Luke ili, 22, quoting Ps, ii. 7. 


THE YEAR OF THE BAPTIST’S DEATH 295 


further reason why Luke was unwilling to contradict expressly the 
opinion, then already prevalent, that the crucifixion took place in 
the fifteenth year of Tiberius. Both dates are obviously computed 
artificially and without any historical foundation. The dating of 
the birth of Jesus in the year of the census has already been ex- 
plained.! By a calculation backwards from the last possible pass- 
over, occurring before the departure of Pilate (A.D. 36) but after 
the death of Philip (A.D. 34) and the execution of the Baptist 
(A.D. 35), this date was arrived at on the basis of the statement 
that Jesus at the beginning of his messianic reign was about (ὡσεί) 
thirty years old. 

The year 35 or 36 for the crucifixion and the year 6 for the birth 
are, however, intrinsically improbable dates, because they would 
bring Jesus much too close to Paul, whose conversion on the road 
to Damascus must have happened in one of the years between 
A.p. 28 and 35, the earlier date being preferable for various 
reasons.” 

As for the year A.D. 29, that is, the fifteenth year of Tiberius, it 
is clear that this can only be a date arrived at by purely chrono- 
logical considerations. As is well known, the ancient Church una- 
nimously assumed that the day of the παρασκευή, on Which Jesus 
was crucified, was the παρασκευή of the Sabbath, that is, the 
προσάβαττον, ‘evebh shabbath, our Friday, though there was some 
hesitation as to whether the day in question was the 14th or 
the 15th of the lunar month Nisan. The Pagan Christians in 
their turn evidently attempted to determine this date accord- 
ing to the Roman calendar. Quite naturally they hit upon vi. 
Kal. Aprilis (=25th March), the day of the spring equinox alter 
the reform of the calendar by Caesar. For the Jews of the Dia- 
spora, as proved by Philo,° translated Pesal. by διαβατήρια, 1.€. 
‘pass-over,’ and connected it with the ‘passing’ of the sun through 
the equator. To this must be added the well-known fact that the 
day of the spring equinox was identified with the day of the crea- 
tion of the world—a belief which has left its trace in the first canto 
of Dante’s divine poem—and the temptation was strong to put the 
piacular death of the Messiah and the beginning of the new 
messianic aeon on the same day.t Thus the whole matter resolved 

1 See above, p. 292. 2 Von Soden, in Cheyne’s Encycl. Bibl., 814. 

3 Vita Mosis, iii. 686 ; Anatolius in Euseb., Hist. eccl., vii. 32. 16-19. 

4 Mr. Th. Gaster kindly reminds me that in the cult of Attis the vernal 
equinox (24th of March) was the ‘day of blood,’ when the image of Attis—the 
effigy of a young man tied to the stem of a felled tree (J. G. Frazer, Adonis, Altts, " 
Osiris, London, 1907, p. 222;)—was lamented, and that on the 25th of March the 
resurrection of the god was celebrated. Sir James (loc. cit., p. 2273) has shown 
that the Christian term ‘Dominica Gaudia’ for the resurrection-day of Christ is 
derived from the name of these ‘ Hilaria’ of Attis. The date of the death of 


Attis has certainly had a decisive influence upon the identification of the day of the 
crucifixion with the spring equinox, 


206 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


itself into the problem to find a year, within the reign of Tiberius 
and the administration of Pilate, in which the 25th of March fell 
on a Friday. 

This problem itself was not difficult, since there existed, at the 
latest since the time of Augustus, Roman calendars which con- 
sidered also the Jewish-Alexandrian planetary week.! A research 
in old calendars of this kind, oreven a simple computation by cycles, 
would enable any one to see that the 25th of March of A.D. 20, 
i.e. of the fifteenth year of Tiberius, fell on a F riday. Nor can 
there be any doubt that similar cycles, equally useful to Jews and 
to Christians, were in vogue long before their official adoption by 
the Church—nay, probably even before the rise of Christianity 
itself.?_ It is certainly no accident that the Easter cycle of eighty- 
four years obtained by Cardinal Norisfrom a purely Pagan calendar, 
the consular fasti of the chronographer of 354, shows the 25th of 
_ March of A.D. 29 to have been a F riday, a fact which surprised 
the chronologist Ideler in the first quarter of the roth century. 
In fact, the day was not the fourteenth or fifteenth day of the 
lunar month, but the seventeenth; yet no great importance 
can be attached to this slight divergence, since both Jews and 
Jewish Christians knew that the Sanhedrin would, when the atmo- 
sphere was cloudy and the new moon not clearly visible, postpone 
the announcement to the following day. Such a thing might 
happen on two months in succession, and as a result the seven- 
teenth day might easily be counted in some years as the fifteenth 
and hence as the regular day of the Passover. 

To find a year in which the 25th of March was both a Friday 
and exactly the fifteenth day of the lunar cycle, one would have 
been obliged to go back as far as A.D. 18, when Gratus was still 
governor of Palestine and not Pilate.3 Between A.p. 29 and the 
last year of Pilate’s administration (a.p. 35-6) no such year can 
be found. As a matter of fact, the chronographer of 354 signi- 
ficantly states: ‘Gemino et Gemino Sat. xxiii.” that is, in this year 
the New Year’s Day (Saturnalia) falls on the twenty-third day of 
the new moon; and it adds: ‘His consulibus dominus Jesus 
Christus passus est die Veneris luna xiii.’ This is also the reason 
why Hippolytus arranged his Easter cycle, beginning in A.D, 222 
and comprising 112 years, so that there is a full moon on F riday, 
25th March of A.D. 209. 


* Cf. Roscher’s Lexikon, iii. 2. 2537 sq.; I. Bollin Pauly-Wissowa’s R.E., vii. 
2573: 

* Convenient pocket editions of Petosiris’ astrological calendar were carried 
about by Roman ladies, according to Juvenal, vi. 574. The whole question is 
treated in full detail in vol. ii. p. 134 sg: of the German edition of this book. 

* See above, pp. 17 f. 


THE YEAR OF THE BAPTIST’S DEATH 297 


PHLEGON OF THRALLES AND THALLUS THE SAMARITAN ON 
THE ECLIPSE AT THE CRUCIFIXION 


The fifteenth year of Tiberius must have recommended itself to 
the early Christian chronologists by still another series of con- 
siderations. As is well known, Luke is the only evangelist to give 
this date and also to mention the darkness (σκότος) occurring at 
the death of Jesus as an universal phenomenon extending over the 
whole earth, and hence to refer to it as an eclipse of the sun, as 
though such a phenomenon were at all possible on or near the 
full moon. 

Now, Eusebius! has pointed out with a good deal of satisfaction 
that according to the chronicler Phlegon of Thralles,? a freedman of 
Hadrian, there actually was an eclipse of the sun accompanied by 
an earthquake ? in the 202nd Olympiad, a phenomenon which the 
historian is not slow in identifying with the one happening at the 
death of Jesus. Eusebius, in his citation of Phlegon, quotes the 
year as the 4th of the 202nd Olympiad, and uses this date in 
support of his own assumption that the year of the passion was the 
nineteenth of Tiberius, i.e. A.D. 33, an assumption based on his 
belief that Jesus’ public career lasted four years,‘ and on a corre- 
sponding interpretation of the festivals mentioned in John. 

But as early as the seventeenth century the great astronomer 
Kepler,®> and after him his less famous colleague Wurm,® cal- 
culated with the utmost precision that in the 202nd Olympiad 
there occurred only one great eclipse of the sun visible in the 
Levant, and that its date was 24th November of A.D. 20, that is, 
the fifteenth year of Tiberius, the same year in which, according to 
the Roman calendar, the full moon and the spring equinox fell on a 
Friday. When, therefore, a reader who was not a professional 
astronomer found a mention of this eclipse and earthquake in some 
annalist 7 of the type of Phlegon, unaccompanied by an indication 
of the month and the day, he would naturally identify the pheno- 
menon with the one given in Like, and this identification would 
in turn confirm his view that the year of the passion was A.D. 29. 

What documents did this Phlegon utilize? Eusebius 8 men- 
tions one—theimportant one in this connexion—in the enumeration 


1 Chronicon (a. ἃ. Armen. v. Karst, G.C.S., xx. p. 213) ; cf. Migne, Patrol. Gr., 
XIX. 535. 

* Fragm. Hist. Gr., ed. C. Miiller, iii. 6074. 

3 Cf. Matt. xxvii. 51. * Hist. eccl., ἃ. τὸ. 

5 Eclog. chron., p. 615. 

6 Cf. Bengel’s Archiv f. Theol., ii. 2 (1818), pp. 1-78, 261-313. 

7 The special astrological compilations of eclipses and earthquakes do not come 
into consideration, since in them the zodiacal sign is added in which the pheno- 
menon occurs, so that any one could infer the month of the event. 

5 Chron., ed. Schoene, i. 265; Karst (1911), p. 125. 


298 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


of his own sources when he says: ‘e Thalli tribus libris, in quibus ab 
Ilio capto usque ad ccvii. olympiadem collegit.’ This Thallus has 
long since been identified + as Thallos 2 the Samaritan freedman of 
Tiberius who two years before the death of the emperor had helped 
the bankrupt Herodian prince Agrippa with a considerable loan, 
and who may very well have survived his former master by fifteen 
or twenty years. In his chronicle, as we know from Sext. Julius 
Africanus,*® he identified the darkness of the crucifixion with the 
well-known astronomical eclipse of A.D. 29. As for the source of 
Thallus, one might think of the influence of Christian tradition. 
Yet since neither Matthew nor Mark shows the slightest trace of the 
year A.D, 29 as the year of the passion, it is not very likely that 
there existed as yet any definite tradition on the subject, and it is 
therefore highly probable that Thallus, writing in the reign of 
Claudius, after A.D. 52, was himself the originator of this chron- 
ology. The Samaritan’s ignorance of the Jewish method of deter- 
mining the day of the new moon, and his equally great ignorance of 
matters astronomical in general, did not of course allow him to see 
the difficulties of his proposed identification, with which he merely 
wanted to explain ‘rationally’ the alleged miracle of the Christians. 

At all events, it is a fact worth noting that as early as the reign 
of Claudius—that is, half a century before Tacitus—a Hellenized 
Samaritan writing at or very near the imperial court mentioned the 
crucifixion of Jesus and at the same time attempted to explain in 
a rational way the alleged prodigies observed on that occasion.* 
It is certainly strange that this document has never been utilized 
in the debate concerning the historicity of Jesus, since it is of 
course evident that a man like Thallus would never have taken the 
trouble to correct and criticize a miraculous story existing only in 
oral tradition. On the contrary, he must have known a written 
source dealing with the crucifixion and its attendant phenomena. 
Nor is it difficult to guess that this source was the collection of Old 
Testament prophecies (λόγια) attributed to Matthew, a collection 
the existence of which has been made exceedingly probable by 
quite a number of scholars.° 

1 Fragm. Hist. Gr., iii. 517a; Schiirer, G.J.V., ili. 495; cf. 66 sq. 

2 Through a regrettable accident the initial 6 of his name has fallen out in 
the Greek standard text of Josephus, ed. Niese (Ant., xviii. § 167). But since 
ἄλλος Σαμαρεύς is impossible in this connexion, the old restoration of Θάλλος, a 
name occurring in inscriptions as that of several people belonging to the imperial 
household of that period, is obviously inevitable. 

% Ap. Syncell., 1. 610, ed. Dindorf. 

4 I note with pleasure that Prof. M. Goguel agrees with these results of mine ; 
cf. Evangile et Liberté, xliii., No. 51, 191), 1928, p. 204; Revue de Il’Histoirve des 
Religions, xcvili., 1928, pp. 1 ff. 

5. F.C. Burkitt, The Gospel History and its Transmission, Cambridge, 1906, 
p. 126; Carus Selwyn, The Oracles of the New Testament, 1911; cf. Salomon 


Reinach, Revue archéologique, 1912, p. 451; Rendel Harris, Testimonies, Cam- 
bridge, 1916-20. 


THE YEAR OF THE BAPTIST’S DEATH 299 


It has been recognized long since that the darkness covering 
the whole earth and lasting from the sixth to the ninth hour* owes 
its origin to the prophecies of Amos,? of Zephaniah, of Zechariah,* 
of Joel,® of Ezekiel,* and of Isaiah.* It is fairly clear that the 
λόγια of Matthew in their endeavour to prove the messiahship 
of Jesus must have mentioned some or all of these prophecies 
and their fulfilment on the day of the crucifixion. It is 
equally clear that Thallus, as an opponent of Christianity, 
could not miss such a splendid opportunity of showing that 
the alleged miraculous phenomenon was ἃ perfectly natural 
event, to wit, the total eclipse of A.D. 29.8 Nor is it astonishing 
that the Christians soon adopted the identification of their op- 
ponent, evidently considering a well-attested eclipse of the sun 
precisely on the day of the crucifixion as a sufficiently great miracle. 
At all events, Luke himself cannot very well be responsible for the 
introduction of these features in the history of Jesus, since in his 
story, as pointed out above, the year A.D. 29 is not at all the year 
of the passion but that of the baptism of Jesus. Originally the 
year in question must have occurred in a gospel narrative which 
assumed that Jesus’ public career lasted just one year, so that both 
his baptism and his passion occurred in the fifteenth year of 
Tiberius. 

What is certain is that none of the dates computed for the 
passion has any historical foundation. The eighty-four-year cycle 
of the consular fasti could not be of any real use, since the Jews not 
only did not apply it for the intercalation of their thirteenth 
month, but were altogether ignorant of it. The Jewish cycle re- 
stored by M. Daniel Sidersky ® conclusively proves that between 
A.D. 29 and 33 there did not exist any Friday of Nisan coinciding 
with the full moon and with 25th March of the Roman calendar. 
In 29 the Easter full moon fell on Monday, 19th April; in 32 on 
Monday, 15th April; and in 33 on Friday, 4th April. 


THE DAY OF THE CRUCIFIXION 


A careful analysis of the texts clearly shows that the oldest 
tradition in all probability knew nothing of the fact that the 
crucifixion of Jesus should have taken place on a Friday.’° The 


1 Matt. xxvii. 45; Mark xv. 33. 2 viii. 9. δι 15. 
4 xii. 6, S11, 103; ll. 15. 
¢ Xxxil. 7. ΤΌΣΗ τὸς XXIV. 22. 


8 Incidentally, this is a good proof that Jews and Samaritans at the Roman 
court did not hesitate to speak of Jesus, or more exactly, against him and the 
claims of his followers. 

9 Etudes sur l’origine astronomique de la chronologie juive, in Mém. Acad. Inscr. 
é? BL... xi. 2, Paris, Tort, Ὥς 35: 

10 This is also the conclusion of Eduard Meyer, Ursprung und Anfange des 
Christentums, i, 170, 


300 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


only fixed fact was the celebration by Jesus and his disciples of the 
last supper shortly before his arrest, on the eve of the Passover. 
But there must have existed, besides, a different tradition according 
to which Jesus was also crucified on the day before the Passover, 
the παρασκευὴ τοῦ πάσχα." 

The explanation of this divergency is far more simple than 
many critics have thought. For if, according to Jewish custom, 
the day is supposed to begin with the sunset and to end with the 
sunset, and if it is furthermore borne in mind that the Passover 
meal took place after the first star had become visible, it cannot 
reasonably be said by a Jew that the arrest of Jesus took place on 
the day before the Passover. But if one uses as a basis the Graeco- 
Koman custom of reckoning the day either from morning to 
morning or from inidi “ to midnight, a method which was of 
course in the minds of ali Pagan Christians, it is clear that Jesus 
celebrated the last supper and was arrested on the eve of the Pass- 
over. And if, finally, still another tradition insisted that he was 
crucified too on the eve of the Passover, this would merely prove 
that the execution took place with the lightning speed peculiar to 
the military character of the whole transaction—the governor 
being anxious to have done with the matter before; the masses 
crowding the city on the day of the festival had time_to think of 
liberating their unfortunate king.® 

The extant versions, putting the execution on the morning of 
the following day, owe their origin to the legend of the cock’s 
crow during the alleged judicial procedure before the high priest, 
an episode preceding the trial by Pilate, and to the exaggeration 4 
with which the perfectly informal, short preliminary interrogation 
before the scribes assembled at the high priest’s palace on the 
Mount of Olives is reported. Once this informal and quite un- 
essential incident had been converted, by anti-Jewish tendencies, 
into a regular trial before the Sanhedrin, it was also remembered 
that this body could not condemn any one to capital punishment 
during the night,5 and the episode was ‘ doubled,’ and a regular 
session of the Sanhedrin in the morning of the following day was 


1 This, too, has been questioned by Eduard Meyer, op. cit., P- 173 sqq., but on 
insufficient grounds. See my papers on the Last Supperin the Z.N.T.W., 1925 and 
1926. Even if Marmorstein’s and Lietzmann’s objections (ibid.) were justified— 
which they are not—nobody has been able to oppose anything to my explanation 
of the cup and the ‘ vine of David.’ 

* John xix.14; cf. also the Baraitha Talmud Sanhedr., 43b; Strack-Billerbeck, 
li. 843 E (bottom of the page). 

* Mark xiv. 2; Matt. xxvi. 4: ‘not on the feast-day, lest there be an uproar 
among the people.’ 

* On the anti-Jewish and pro-Roman tendency of these changes, cf. below, 
Pp. 385 ll. 33 f. A 

® Tosefta to Sanh., vii. 1; Philo, De migyr. Abr.,§ 16 M,i. 450. The Jews had 
no reason whatever to deviate from their law and to shoulder the responsibility of 
the case, All they had to do was to hand it over to the Romans. 


THE YEAR OF THE BAPTIST’S DEATH 301 


added to the story. Of course, the probability of the tale did not 
increase thereby, since no such sessions could take place on a 
Sabbath or other Jewish holiday. 

As a matter of fact, the crucial passage in Mark shows the 
particle εὐθύς followed by an obviously interpolated πρωί, after 
which the εὐθύς was deleted in a number of MSS. _ It is therefore 
fairly obvious that immediately after the short preliminary trial 
at the house of the high priest Jesus was taken in fetters to Pilate 
the same night. The court-martial before the governor was of the 
utmost shortness, sincé the accused openly confessed that he was 
the “king of the Jews.’ * He was then led away under a military 
guard, in the midst of the tumult of the mob, of which one party 
clamoured for the liberation of one Jesus Barabbas, likewise 
arrested by the Romans,? whilst the othe .anded the crucifixion 
of Jesus. There follows the scourging o1 the unfortunate king and 
the march to the place of the execution, in which a Cyrenaean Jew 
who was just approaching the city, and had evidently taken the 
Passover supper in one of the villages around Jerusalem, was 
forced to carry the cross. The hour of the crucifixion given by 
Mark ὁ appears at the first glance as a late interpolation. The 
two other gospels would certainly have taken over this important 
detail had they found it in their copies of Mark. 

Perhaps on account of the festival, during which the corpse was 
not supposed to remain hanging on the cross, perhaps as a measure 
of prudence, to avoid exciting still more the fanatic crowd through 
an open violation of their festival, perhaps also to obviate any 
attempt on the part of the mob to take down the crucified victims 
while they were still alive, at all events it is indeed likely that the 
Jewish authorities requested Pilate to shorten the torments of the 
condemned and to take down their bodies. 

The notion that the day of the crucifixion was not only an eve of 
the Passover but an eve of a Sabbath, i.e. a Friday, arose only in 
the course of the development of the resurrection story.® Accord- 

_ ing to an old Jewish superstition,® it is a good omen to die on the 
“eve of a Sabbath. Since the kingdom of the Messiah was at an 
/ early age compared to the final Sabbath,’ it was natural to suppose 

1 This fact has been wrongly doubted by Eduard Meyer, op. cit., p. 173 sqq.}3 
cf. also J. Klausner, Jesus of Nazareth, p. 329 n. 32. 

2 Mark xv. 2. As to the much-debated meaning of οὐ Aéyers—which may 
be ambiguous in Greek (cf. Euripides, Hippol., 352), while Aram. ΠΝ is a straight- 
forward ‘ yes’ !—see Strack-Billerbeck, i. 990. ᾿ ; 

3 On the details of this episode, see below, pp. 43% ff. “19 

4 xv. 25: “and it was the third hour and they crucified him.’ This after the 
previous verse has already said ‘ and they crucify him.’ 

5 In Mark xv. 42 the relative clause is obviously an explanatory gloss, 

6 Kethuboth, 103b; Aboth di R. Nathan, 25 ; Strack-Billerbeck, 1. 1043, on 
Matt. xxvil. 50. 


7 Iren., v. 28. 3; Didascalia, xxvi. p. 137; Hippolytus’ Comm. on Dan., iv. 23 ; 
Epistle of Barnabas, ch. xv.; Sanhedy., 97a. 


302 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


the day of Jesus’ death to have been the eve as it were of that final 
Sabbath. As a consequence, the day of the resurrection became 
the Sunday of the planetary week,! the day of the Sol invictus, the 
‘sun of justice.’ It is at bottom the same cosmic symbolism 
which is also responsible for the dating of the crucifixion on 25th 
March,* when the sun passes the big X * formed by the ecliptic and 
the equator, and for the fixing of Jesus’ birthday on 25th December, 
the dies natalis sols invicti. At all events, there is not the slightest 
reason to suppose that any Christian witness remembered the 
week-day of an event of which even the year was soon forgotten.‘ 

This means, of course, the disappearance of the last fixed point 
for a determination of the year of the passion from what we read 
in the Gospels about the crucifixion having taken place ona Friday 
or the resurrection on a Sunday. 


THE ORIGIN OF THE STATEMENT THAT JESUS OUTLIVED 
THE BAPTIST 


The foregoing enquiries have reduced our main problem of the 
chronology of early Christianity to the two following alternatives. 

If we are to trust the Christian tradition that Jesus outlived 
the Baptist, or began his preaching only after the Baptist’s im- 
prisonment, the crucifixion must be placed in the year 35 or 36, in 
accordance with Luke’s conception of the course of affairs. In 
this case the sequence of events under Pilate’s administration in 
the Antiquctves of Josephus, where the debated section (xviii. 3. 3) 
implies that Jesus appeared at the beginning of A.D. 19,5 must rest 
upon a confusion of dates in the extracts made by Josephus from 
his documents, if not upon an actual falsification—this being the 
reason why the Latin edition of the Haldsis, the Egesippus, or the 
original Greek text behind it, possibly affected by Christian inter- 
polations, has inserted the mention of Jesus immediately after the 
story of the massacre of the Samaritans in A.D. 35.6 Again, the 
Acts of Pilate, published by the Emperor Maximinus Daja?7 and 
bearing the date ‘ Tiberio 105 cons.,’ i.e. A.D. 21, must then, con- 
trary to all historical probability, be regarded, with Eusebius, as 
wrongly dated and consequently spurious, In that case it would 
remain quite unexplained how the imperial chancery could have 
hit upon a date so early and so completely at variance with the 
traditional Christian chronology. 

* Mark xvi. 9; Matt. xxviii. 1; Luke xxiv.1; John xx. 4. 

2 See above, p. 295. 

ὁ It is described also in Plato's Timaeus, and is the mystic cross (σταυρός) of 
the Gnostics. Cf. Justin, Apol.,i. 60; Iren., Ep., i. 34, v.18. 3; Act. Petri Vercell., 
8 sq.; Bousset, Z.N.T.W., xiv. (1913), pp. 273-85. 

* The week-day of any important event is soon forgotten. How many 


remember even now the week-day of the armistice of 1918 ? 
® See above, p. 19. δ See above, p. 293. * See above, p. 16 nn. 2, 3. 


THE YEAR OF THE BAPTIST’S DEATH 303 


If, on the other hand, the statements on which the chrono- 
logical order of the martyrdoms of the Baptist and of Jesus is 
ordinarily based lack sufficient authority for such far-reaching 
conclusions, the way is clear for a new chronology based solely on 
Josephus and the documentary materials utilized by him. In 
estimating the value of the fixed data in question as presented in 
the Gospels, it is well to remember that the statements making 
John and Jesus of approximately the same age proved at the out- 
set! to be a tendentious invention and historically untenable. We 
have found the statements of Josephus or of his Nasoraean source 
on the appearance of John in the reign of Archelaus uncommonly 
instructive and illuminating ; Luke’s dating of Jesus’ baptism in 
the Jordan in the fifteenth year of Tiberius, on the contrary, 
renders impossible all understanding of the historical sequence of 
events. If the Christian sources did either not exactly know, or 
deliberately falsified, the chronological order of the births of Jesus 
and the Baptist, this certainly does not predispose the critic in 
favour of their notions on the sequence of their deaths. 

The only reason for pronouncing another and a more favourable 
verdict upon the tradition of the synoptists would be the fact that 
we seem to deal not only with their own statements, which may or 
may not be accepted, but also with the utterances of Jesus or 
of Herod Antipas quoted by them and evidently pointing to the 
same result. 

As for the direct statements of Mark and Matthew, 


‘Now after that John was de-' ‘ Now when he heard that John 
livered up, Jesus cameinto Galilee’ was delivered up, he withdrew into 
(Mark i. 14), Galilee ’ (Matt. iv. 12), 


the underlying primitive tradition need not have referred to the 
arrest of the Baptist by Herod Antipas ; the occasion might quite 
well have been his first arrest by order of Archelaus on his first 
appearance, which is best placed in the period immediately after 
Herod’s death and before the journey of Archelaus to Rome 
(A.D. 4). Only the desire of Archelaus, owing to his uncertain 
position as unconfirmed heir to the throne, not to exasperate un- 
necessarily his subjects, can account for the release of their leader, 
the accused Baptist, on this occasion. Had Archelaus got him 
into his hands ‘after he had received the ethnarchy from Augustus ’ 
and begun ‘to harass the Jews with intolerable oppression,’ * the 
Baptist would not have come off so easily. Even after the rising 
at the Passover this enforced mildness on the part of the ethnarch 
is no longer imaginable. This incident must consequently have 
occurred between the death of Herod and the Passover of 4 B.C. 
The passages of Mark and Matthew quoted above might, therefore, 


1 Above, p. 2447- 3 Haldsts, ὃ 111. 


304 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


have meant originally, ‘Now after the Baptist was betrayed’— 
i.e. after the ‘secret’ of the ‘Hidden One’s’ preaching of liberty 
had come to the ears of Archelaus and the Baptist had been 
arrested and brought before him, in 4 B.c.— Jesus betook himself 
to Galilee.’ 

But so early a date for the first appearance of Jesus in Galilee 
would be in flat contradiction with the time and occasion of the 
opening of his public ministry to be inferred from Josephus.! 
Moreover, the versets in question,” as has previously been shown,?® 
mark the point of transition from the Nasdraean source hitherto 
drawn on to the tradition of his own circle of Galilaean disciples. 
It is highly improbable that these lines should refer to anything 
except the closing chapter in the life of the Baptist, namely, his 
final ‘delivery’ into the power of his enemies. Up to this point 
the Christian narrator follows his first source, an account of the 
life and passion of the Baptist. He has fastened upon this because 
he had somehow to find a place for the baptism of Jesus and his 
rather short contact with John. The fact itself was so well 
attested by the disciples of John who had gone over to Jesus that 
it could not very well be omitted, though, apart from Jesus’ speech 
about the Baptist,’ clearly nothing was known of that particular 
period of his life to which he owed his surname of ‘the Naséraean.’ 5 
But in so artless a composition the juxtaposition of passages taken 
from different sources might easily be mistaken for a sequence of 
events, so that the speeches of Jesus in Galilee after the close 
of the Baptist’s life would appear to begin with John’s arrest. 
Furthermore, the verset in Luke’s Gospel (iii. 20), which in the 
interests of his peculiar chronology discussed above ® has been 
interposed so awkwardly and all the more strikingly in the midst 
of his account of John’s baptism, makes it perfectly clear that 
Jesus begins his ministry in Galilee after the final arrest of the 
Baptist by Herod Antipas, i.e. that the ‘delivering up’ of the 
Baptist in Mark and Matihew means his consignment to death. 

The early death of John is further presupposed in the saying 
attributed to Herod Antipas by Mark and Matthew, that Jesus 
was but the Baptist risen again from the dead. But a careful 
comparison of the relevant passages 7 at once shows that Luke ix. 7, 
and an array of MSS. in Mark vi. 14, quote the saying only as a 
popular opinion and not as a statement of Herod’s. Luke ix. 9, 
indeed, makes the tetrarch reject this popular belief as impossible. 

Only Matt. xiv. I sq. puts the saying expressly in the mouth 
of Herod, but in terms which originally appear to have made 
no reference to the Baptist’s resurrection: ‘This is John the 

1 See above, p. 225 Nn. I. * Marki. 14; Matt. iv. 12. * See above, p. 2873. 


4 See above, p. 259 Nn. 1. ® See above, p. 234. 6 pp. 293 ff. 
7 Mark vi. 14-16; Mait, xiv. 1 sq.; Luke ix. 7-9. 


THE YEAR OF THE BAPTIST’S DEATH 305 


Baptist.’ That might mean that he seemed to see in Jesus that 
baptizing hermit, emerged from the thickets of the Jordan valley, 
a person by that time already veiled in myth and superstitious 
legends, known to appear under the most various names. As 
Origen 1 strikingly suggested, Jesus must have borne some like- 
ness to the Baptist, at least in certain externals of dress, which 
recalled the much talked-of appearance of John; in other words, 
he must have worn the distinctive garb of the Nasdraeans or 
Rekhabites.? 

But the texts of Mark and Matthew, as they stand, present a 
further difficulty. “He is arisen from the dead, and therefore do 
these powers work in him.’ The idea that one who is risen from 
the dead thereby becomes forthwith capable of miraculous acts of 
power is unsupported. A dead man thus returning to life, a 
‘ twice-born,’ may on that account know more of the next world 
than ordinary mortals ; but such knowledge by no means enables 
him to work miracles. Neither the almost inexhaustible old 
Wetstein nor Strack and Billerbeck can offer parallels in illus- 
tration: the fact is that there arenone. But the text is ina state 
of confusion. Ifa prophet rises from the dead, then, because he 
was and is a prophet, the miraculous powers of the spirit work in 
him. The words ‘(he) is risen from the dead and therefore do the 
powers work in him’ simply stand in a wrong position. After ‘ it 
is Elijah’ they are as impossible as in their present place, for 
Elijah did not die and therefore cannot have risen from the dead. 
But they can well be said of one of the prophets, such as, for instance, 
Jonah, the preacher of penitence, whom Elijah had once before 
raised from the dead and who is variously identified with the son 
of the widow of Sarepta. Again, the clause relating to this subject, 
ἔλεγον ὅτι προφήτης ws els τῶν προφήτων, is not in order. Not- 
withstanding Blass, this ὡς εἷς should not be explained as =as 
τις Kal ἄλλος, but ὡς els τῶν προφήτων is an old stylistic correc- 
tion of ὅτε προφήτης, Which has come into the text along with the 
corrected phrase because a copyist failed to observe the corrector’s 
dots indicating deletion. Lastly, the words ‘for his name had 
become known’ are not in the right place. If the name of Jesus 
had become known (φανερόν) through the acts of his disciples ° all 
these guesses as to the identity of this newly arisen miracle- 
worker would have been meaningless. The explanatory clause, 
misplaced because originally written between the lines, refers to the 
fact that the name of the Baptist, long kept secret, had meanwhile 
become known, whereas the name of Jesus was still unknown. 
The inserted clause must have suppressed, or rendered illegible, 
the words which originally followed, ‘And King Herod heard’ ; for 


1 Comm.in Joann., vi. 30. 
2. See above, p. 238 and Pl. xx, 3 Mark vi. 12 sq. 


U 


306 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


the section absolutely requires a link with what precedes, a mention 
of the personal preaching and activity of Jesus, such as is actually 
found in the parallel verset, Matt. xi. 1, clearly dependent upon a 
still unimpaired text of Mark. At least the text must have con- 
tained something like ‘ heard of the works of Jesus.’1 Luke's 3 
‘heard of all that was done’ does not reproduce the sentence 
properly. The whole section will therefore run as follows : 


(Mark vi. 12) ‘And they went out and preached that men should 
repent. (13) And they cast out many devils and anointed with oil 
many that were sick, and healed them, (14) and Herod heard (it). And 
they (people) said, It is John the Baptizer, for his name had become 
known. (15) But others said, It is Elijah. And others said that a 
prophet 5. is risen from the dead, and therefore do the(se) powers 
work in him.’ 


I agree with G. Wohlenberg in reading Herod's words in the 
following verse (Mark vi. 16) as an ironical question, ‘John whom 
I beheaded, is he risen ἡ This corresponds in sense to the parallel 
passage, Luke ix. 9, ‘John have I beheaded (therefore it cannot be 
he) : but who is this of whom I hear such things ? ’ 

In Luke this remark of Herod’s appears very odd, because 
hitherto he has only mentioned the Baptist’s imprisonment (111. 20), 
and yet here he has not thought it in the least worth while to append 
an explanation of the words, such as is added in Mark vi. 17 546. 
and Maithew. 

Moreover, even the arrest of John is mentioned in Like 111. 20, 
in a sentence which is not in the author’s usual style, or is at any 
rate strangely halting. Every unprejudiced reader will see that 
the second * Herod’ is quite superfluous and disturbing: it is in 
fact omitted in a considerable number of MSS. That, however, is 
a mere glozing over of the awkwardness of the phrase ; it does not 
explain the striking fact of the genuine Jectio difficilior. Jather, 
the sentence originally ended before the second ‘ Herod’: ‘ With 
many other exhortations, therefore, preached he good tidings unto 
the people: but Herod the tetrarch (was) reproved by him for 
Herodias his brother’s wife and for all the evil things which he had 
done. Herod added this above all, that he shut up John in 
prison.’ With this division of sentences, not only is the gram- 
matical difficulty removed, but it is at once apparent that the 
sentence which awkwardly breaks the chronological order of the 
narrative is a later interpolation. 

Its purpose can be easily seen. If the people were of opinion 
that Jesus was John, then John’s disciples, who declared their 
master to be the Messiah, could assert without anybody being able 


ΟΣ Matt, πὶι,.2. ae br 
3. Old correction : ‘ that one of the prophets.’ 


THE YEAR OF THE BAPTIST’S DEATH 307 


to contradict them that all those great miracles attributed to 
Jesus by the Gospels had, according to the testimony of the people 
or of Herod, in reality been wrought by John. This obvious 
possibility could only be shown to be excluded by finding counter- 
evidence to the effect that John lay helpless and inactive in prison 
while Jesus was performing all those mighty deeds. To this end 
the verset in Luke 111. 20 and the words in Matt. xi. 2, ‘in the 
prison’ (of which the parallel passage, Luke vii. 18, shows no 
knowledge), were interpolated, no regard being had to the difficulty 
thereby imported into the narrative, viz. that a person incarcerated 
as a potential rebel leader cannot receive or send out messengers, 
unless this strange proceeding is explained by collusion of the 
gaoler or a similar individual cause. 

But since, according to the Nasdraean Life of the Baptist used 
by Josephus, John had already been arrested and again freed under 
Archelaus, it was not enough merely to establish the fact that he 
had been put in prison before Jesus began to display his miracles. 
The Baptist’s final arrest and execution by Herod had also to be 
placed before the first public appearance of Jesus, to cut away the 
ground at the outset from all objections which the disciples of 
John might base on the doubly attested statement that Jesus was 
placed by contemporaries on a par with the Baptist. 

We may recall how certain Gospels maintained that it was not 
Jesus who was crucified, but Simon of Cyrene, the bearer of the 
cross, who suffered in his place: that Jesus escaped and from afar 
beheld the crucifixion with a smile,! and that there was therefore 
no need for him to rise from the dead to show himself on many 
occasions to his disciples after his supposed crucifixion and burial. 
If one recalls such absurd fancies, it is clear that with far greater 
probability it might be concluded from Jesus being mistaken for 
John in Mark vi. 14, vili. 28, Matt. xiv. 2, and Luke ix. 7, that 
the disciples had: mistaken the surviving John for the supposed 
risen Jesus. Such arguments could only be precluded by furnish- 
ing evidence that John suffered a martyr’s death before Jesus. 
For no other purpose was the short speech of Herod first inserted 
into Luke ix. 9, and the detailed narrative of the Baptist’s martyr- 
dom later on taken over from his Nasdraean Vita et Passio and 
incorporated in Mark vi. 16 sqqg. and Matt. xiv. 2 sqq. Luke, in 
any case, did not read this impressive story in his copy of Mark. 

Moreover, it has never been satisfactorily explained why the 
imprisonment and beheading of the Baptist finds no place in the 
Fourth Gospel. The explanation of this surely remarkable fact 
is simply to be found in the chronology of the events, now eluci- 
dated by Josephus; a narrative which closed with the death and 
resurrection of Jesus had no occasion at all to mention the Baptist’s 

1 Lipsius, Apocr. Acts of the Apostles, Leipzig, 1883, 1. 95 54., 204, 427. 


308 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


execution, which did not occur till later. If the author of the 
Fourth Gospel had known any traditions about the Baptist’s end 
occurring before the crucifixion of Jesus, one could not understand 
why he should have failed to make use of evidence the importance 
of which, in the conflict with John’s disciples, would certainly 
have been clear to any intelligent follower of Jesus. 


THE ALLEGED SAYING OF JESUS ON THE SUFFERINGS OF 
ELIJAH ‘ACCORDING TO THE SCRIPTURE’ 


There remains only to investigate the authenticity of the saying 
concerning the Baptist’s fate put in the mouth of Jesus by Mark 
and Matthew. It is there appended to the remarkable story of the 
transfiguration discussed below. 


Mark ix. 9-13. 


‘(9) And as they were coming 
down from the mountain, he 
charged them that they should tell 
no man what things they had seen, 
save when the Son of man should 
have risen again from the dead. 
(10) And they kept the saying, 
questioning among themselves 
what the rising again from the 
dead should mean. 


‘(1r) And they asked him saying, 
Why say the scribes that Elijah 
must first come? (12) And he 
said unto them, Elijah indeed 
cometh first and restoreth all 
things: and how is it written of 
the Son of man, that he should 
suffer many things and be set at 
naught? (13) But Isay unto you 
that Elijah is come, and they have 
done unto him whatsoever they 
listed, even as it is written of him.’ 


The conversation is extremely remarkable. 


Matt. xvii. 9-13. 


‘(g) And as they were coming 
down from the mountain, Jesus 
commanded them saying, Tell the 
vision to no man until the Son of 
man be risen from the dead. 


‘(10) And his disciples asked him 
saying, Why then say the scribes 
that Elijah must first come? 
(11) And he answered and said, 
Elijah indeed cometh and shall 
restore all things. 


‘(12) I say unto you, that Elijah 
is come already, and they knew 
him not, but did unto him what- 
soever they listed. Even so shall 
the Son of man also suffer of them. 
(13) Then understood the disciples 
that he spake unto them of John 
the Baptist.’ 


Jesus forbids his 


disciples to communicate to any one the vision they have had 
of his association with Moses and Elijah, or some other secret—if it 


1 See pp. 371 ff. 


THE YEAR OF THE BAPTIST’S DEATH 309 


be assumed that the conversation in question had originally no 
connexion with the vision—until the “Son of man,’ the bay nasha of 
Daniel’s vision,’ should have risen from the dead. Not knowing 
how to explain the saying, the thought occurs to them that perhaps 
the prophet Elijah will raise the Messiah, who has given his life as 
an offering for sin, at the time of his predicted coming and the 
accompanying apokatasiasis, the general restoration of the world 
to its former state. In other words, the silence enjoined by the 
Master is thought to hold good until the general resurrection day, 
when the kingdom of God will come ‘with power,’ 5 and the second 
coming of the Redeemer in glory. 

According to this view, the narrative of the ‘metamorphosis’ 
in the Gospel would amount to a betrayal of one of the ‘ secrets of 
the kingdom’ and a criminal breach of the command to silence 
imposed by Jesus. The Christians therefore sought to justify 
themselves against this reproach? by appealing to a saying of 
Jesus that Elijah had come already. By this mention of the 
prophet, as Matthew correctly explains, the disciples doubtless 
understood that Jesus, as on an earlier occasion, referred to the 
Baptist ; moreover, they saw at work in the resurrection of Jesus 
after the crucifixion the beginnings of the restoration which he 
was to accomplish. The injunction to silence was thought no 
longer to hold, since the “Son of man’ is already risen from the 
dead, though even then malevolent persons might choose to assert 
that, whether resident in heaven or in the grave, he is at any rate 
not living again with, or come back from the dead to, his disciples. 
To meet such attacks of opponents, who mockingly declared that 
the disciples with this publication of their story would have had 
to wait for the second parousia, before which Elijah was to come,‘ 
an appeal was made to the saying of Jesus that Elijah had already 
come in the form of the Baptist: the visions of their risen master 
were thus to be considered as equivalent to the beginning of the 
final resurrection. 

From this it is apparent that the scene in question represents 
the clothing in historical form of discussions dating from the time 
of the earliest polemic against the Gospel message of a Redeemer 
who had already appeared and, notwithstanding his suffering and 
death, had victoriously risen, 

For this purpose the words of Jesus, ‘But I say unto you, 
Elijah 7s come, as it is written of him,’ would have perfectly 
sufficed, even if the text had not originally contained the further 


1 On this cryptic name of the Messiah ben David, see below, p. 560 n. 3. 

2 Mark ix. I. 

3. It may have been brought forward at a time when the narrative in the 
original Mark or the Logia of Matthew ended with Mark ix. 8 (Matt. xvii. 8). 
Luke found and transmitted the tradition in this form (ix. 36). 

4 Justin, Apol., 49. 


310 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


words about the Baptist’s martyrdom, to which exception must 
now be taken on chronological grounds. The former words are 
quite in keeping with the mind of Jesus, and were doubtless really 
once spoken by him; but the passage of Scripture to which he 
alludes, and which has always been sought for in vain, need not 
have referred to any sufferings of Elijah but might simply have 
been the familiar prophecy of Malachi. Just as Matthew has 
appended to Mark’s text the words ‘and they knew him not,’ so 
might this glossator, from his knowledge, subsequently acquired, 
of the imprisonment and beheading of the Baptist, have appended 
to the traditional words of Jesus ‘and they have done unto him 
whatsoever they listed.’ 

The inquiry may, however, be carried a stage further. The 
words in Mark, ‘as it is written of him,’ are omitted in Matthew, 
clearly because no passage about the suffering of Elijah could be 
found in Scripture. Even the most recent commentators have 
failed to adduce any text of the kind. 

Nevertheless, as, thanks to the kindness of Dr. Rendel Harris, 
I was able to point out some years ago, there really is something 
pertinent ‘written’ concerning Elijah. It is found in a non- 
Christian, purely Jewish work, extant in Latin ! and Hebrew.? It 
consists of a Midrash to the so-called Octateuch, known as the 
Biblical Antiquities of Philo,? though, of course, not from the pen 
of the Alexandrian philosopher. Here we learn (δ 48) that accord- 
ing to Haggadic tradition the third in the series of high priests, the 
zealot Phineas (or Phinees), did not die but was carried away to 
Mt. Horeb, to return in the form of the prophet Elijah, then once 
more to ascend to heaven, and finally, at the end of the ages, to 
descend to earth and now for the first time to suffer death. Noth- 
ing indeed is said of a violent death, but from the words ‘taste what 
is death’ a reader might easily infer that a martyrdom of the ‘true 
witness’ was intended. If, then, the Baptist was the Elijah of the 
prophecy, he too must suffer the predicted fate. There can be no 
doubt, then, that in Mark ix. 13, ‘and they have done unto him 
whatsoever they listed, even as it is written of him,’ there is a 
reference to this remarkable apocryphal work. 

Now, it can be proved that the Midrash in question was not 
composed before the capture of Jerusalem by the Romans. For 
it predicts that the temple will be destroyed on the 17th Tammuz, 
thus placing the destruction on the date which to this day the 
Jews observe as a fast-day in memory of the storming of the city. 
The destruction of the temple took place on the gth Ab, a day 
likewise hallowed by an annual fast. The confusion between the 

1 English translation by Dr. M. R. James, S.P.C.KR., 1917. 


2 English translation by Dr. Moses Gaster, Oriental Translation Fund, new 
series, vol. iv., 1899. 


THE YEAR OF THE BAPTIST’S DEATH 311 


two memorial days suggests a Jew living in a period not too close 
to the events and writing not before A.D. 70,1 perhaps a little later. 
A reputed saying of Jesus alluding to this apocryphon as ‘holy 
Scripture’ cannot of course be genuine. Nor is it admissible to 
suppose Jesus to have quoted from an older Midrash ; for the 
whole fiction underlying the myth of the reborn Phin*has can have 
been invented only in the interest of a person called Phineas and 
claiming to be the messianic high priest and Elijah redivivus. 
This person, again, cannot have been any one else but thatPhin*has* 
the son of Samuel of Aphthia whom the Zealots elected in A.D. 66 
by lots to be their high priest, ᾿ dressing their victim up for his 
assumed part as on the stage.’* It is hardly conceivable that the 
reputed saying of Jesus can have been inserted into Mark’s Gospel 
very soon after the destruction of Jerusalem. In support of the 
ordinary assumption that Jesus outlived John and of the ordinary 
chronology of Gospel history, it certainly cannot be adduced 
henceforth. Thus the way is at last cleared for a frank recognition 
of the really illuminating sequence of events as presupposed in the 
narrative of Josephus. 


1 James, op. cit., p. 30 Sq. 

5 His name is variously written Φάννι, Φάννιας, etc., in the MSS., but the true 
form has been fixed by Schiirer, G.V.J.4, i. 61853 (Engl. trans., ii. I, p. 202 n. 561). 

3 B.J.,iv. 155. The otherwise unexplained panegyric in chapters XXV.-XXViil., 
which Pseudo-Philo devotes to a saviour-hero Kenaz, of whom nothing but the 
name is known to the canonic scriptures, is obviously intended to flatter the young 
prince Kenedaios (Aram. d —Heb. z!) of Adiabene, and to celebrate his exploits 
in the battle against Cestius-Gallus. 


XIII 


THE APPEARANCE OF JESUS IN THE NARRATIVE 
OF JOSEPHUS 


PILATE AND THE ROMAN STANDARDS, THE ‘ ABOMINATION OF 
DESOLATION’ OF DANIEL’S PROPHECY 


HE thoughtless way in which Josephus has strung together 

his transcripts and excerpts culled from various sources 

to make up his history could hardly be better illustrated 
than by the opening of Book ii. ὃ 169 of the Halésis. He has just 
reached the end of one source, the Nasoraean Life of the Baptist 
relating the removal and banishment of Herod Antipas, an event 
falling into the reign of Caligula (a.p. 30), though in the source it 
was attributed to the orders of Tiberius and hence placed in the 
year 36 or the beginning of 37, Nevertheless, the compiler here 
recklessly appends the coming of Pilate to Judaea (A.D. 10, or 26 
according to the falsified text), without betraying the slightest 
consciousness of any retrogression in the sequence of events. He 
simply proceeds : 


‘And after this there was sent to Judaea by Tiberius a governor, 
who secretly brought into Jerusalem by night the (ov an) image of the 
emperor which is called semaia.’ 


The Nasgoraean source, in consequence of the popular custom of 
referring to the emperors of the first dynasty as simply ‘ Caesar,’ 
did not rightly know under which of the Caesars Herod Antipas 
was banished, and happened to fix upon Tiberius. The error was 
no worse than that of some Christians who supposed Jesus to have 
been crucified under Claudius or Nero;! but it misled Josephus, 
who assumed from the last words of his source that he was still in 
the reign of Tiberius, in which particular year he neither knew nor 
cared. His extracts on the incidents falling within Pilate’s term 
of office were, through his own carelessness, or rather through that 
of his scribes and collaborators, likewise undated. He had there- 
fore no exact idea of the duration of Pilate’s governorship. The 
gravest of these errors is corrected in the War (ii, 178 sqq.), where 
we are told the story of Agrippa 1., his imprisonment by Tiberius, 
and his liberation and elevation to the throne by Gaius after the 


* Dom J. Chapman in Journ. Theol. Stud., viii. (1907), p. 590 sqq. 
312 


THE APPEARANCE OF JESUS IN JOSEPHUS 313 


death of Tiberius, and where the struggle of Herod Antipas for the 
crown arises from jealousy of his wife Herodias provoked by 
Agrippa’s new dignity. Thereby the removal and banishment 
of Antipas are dated with approximate accuracy, but we are 
brought no nearer to a precise chronology of events under Pilate. 
Only in the still more recent edition, the eighteenth book of the 
Jewish Antiquities, with further extracts from a source freely used 
also by Tacitus, carefully studied by Domitian, and easily accessible 
to Josephus, to wit, the memoirs of Tiberius, do we obtain some- 
what fuller data for fixing the chronology. In that particular 
context two facts of particular importance are the two metro- 
politan scandals concerning the matrons Paulina and Fulvia, 
dated by Tacitus in A.D. 19, but mentioned by Josephus in the 
chapter devoted to Pilate’s administration, immediately after the 
paragraph relating the appearance of Jesus. 

If we may assume that Josephus in his latest edition, taking 
due account of all criticisms that had reached him from his 
readers, arranged his extracts in the proper order as they stood in 
the Acta et commentarit Tibertt, Pilate must have entered on his 
office toward the end! of A.p.18, and as a new official, unacquainted 
with Jewish susceptibilities, at once made that unfortunate 
blunder with the imperial standards. Shortly afterwards, i.e. 
early in A.D. 10, there followed the appearance of Jesus ‘ who was 
called Christ,’ or at least Pilate then heard of him for the first time 
and sent his first report to the emperor. Since, according to the 
Acts of Pilate published by the Emperor Maximinus Daia, the trial 
of Jesus occurred in the spring of A.D. 21, we should have for his 
public ministry and preaching of the kingdom a period of rather 
more than two years, i.e. a chronology approximating to that of the 
Fourth Gospel with its references to several pilgrimages of Jesus to 
Jerusalem for the feasts. On the other hand, the chronology of 
the synoptists, compressing his ministry into one year, might be 
explained by the fact that the festivals in memory of the important 
events of his life, however their dates were fixed, had naturally to be 
arranged within an annual cycle, the later church year, from the 
day of the conception to its anniversary, the day of the passion. 

That in Avt., xviii. 3. 3, a section, as We can no longer doubt, 
mangled by a Christian hand, Josephus mentions the crucifixion 
though falling in A.D. 21I—in other words, that he carries to its close 
a narrative opening in the year 19, before reverting, in the next 
section, to the Mundus-Paulina episode of the year 19g—is quite in 
keeping with his usual procedure in the paragraphs analysed 


above.” 


1 According to Ant., xviii. § 55, he leads his troops into their winter quarters 
in Jerusalem immediately after his arrival, 
2 See p. 312. 


314 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


But what to my mind above all confirms the correctness of the 
dates thus obtained is the fact that they suggest a very simple 
explanation of Jesus’ decision to make his first public appearance, 
and to preach in the synagogues ! of Galilee, “ The kingdom of God 
is at hand: repent and believe in the glad tidings,’ * exactly at that 
time and not a few years earlier or later. Josephus, so far as we 
can judge from the contents, does not appear to have seen the 
connexion between the incident of the standards and the appear- 
ance of the ‘so-called Christ,’ for the simple reason that such 
a connexion was not evident to the Romans, and that Josephus, 
as will appear immediately, is throughout dependent upon Roman 
official sources. 

Pilate’s foolish act of provocation is mentioned also by Philo,° 
in connexion with the complaint against the governor’s conduct 
lodged by the Jews with the Emperor Caligula and supported 
by Agrippa. Here we are expressly told that Pilate set up or 
‘dedicated’ (ἀναθεῖναι) the standards with the image of the 
emperor in the temple, whereas Josephus, in the Haldsts passage 
quoted above, merely speaks of the introduction and setting up in 
the city of a single semaza. 

These variant readings are surely not accidental, as will be seen 
by a careful comparison of the passage in Philo with the three 
parallel statements in Josephus : 


Halosis, ii. 169. 


‘ And after that there 
was sent to Judaea 
by Tiberius a governor 
who secretly brought 
into Jerusalem by night 
the (or an) image of 
the emperor which is 
called semaia. And he 
set it up in the city.’ 


Polemos, ii. 169. 


‘ Pilate, being sent by 
Tiberius as governor to 
Judaea, stealthily in- 
troduced into  Jeru- 
salem by night and 
under cover the effi- 
gies of Caesar which 
are called standards 
(onpata)’, 


Ant., XVill. 55 54. 

“Now Pilate, the 
governor of Judaea, 
having marched an 
army from Caesarea 
into its new winter 
quarters in Jerusalem, 
conceived the idea of 
defying Jewish ordin- 
ances by introducing 
into the city the em- 
peror’s busts which 
were attached to the 
standards. . . . Pilate 
was the first governor 

.. to bring’ these 
images into Jerusalem 
and toerect them there.’ 


As may be seen at once, the two parties to the dispute have repre- 


sented differently what actually took place. 


1 Luke iv. 14 sq. 


2 Mark i. 15. 


The Jews in their 


* Cf. Euseb., Dem. evang., viii. p. 403: ‘The same is asserted by Philo, who says 
that Pilate by night ‘‘set up the imperial standards in the temple” (ἐν τῷ ἱερῷ 
ἀναθεῖναι). Similarly Origen, Comm. in Maitt., t. xvii. c. 25: “ἀνδρίαντα Καίσαρος 


> ~ . . ΕΣ] 
ἀναθεῖναι ἐν τῷ ἱερῳ. 


THE APPEARANCE OF JESUS IN JOSEPHUS 315 


expostulation had obviously exaggerated and spoken so loosely of 
an ‘ image of the emperor ’ that others, like Origen and St. Jerome, 
might well think of a statue (ἀνδρίας) of the sovereign and of its 
solemn erection (ἀναθεῖναι) in the temple. In reality, the 
objects in question were those small medallions in relief with 
portrait-heads (προτομαῖ) of the emperor, affixed to the standards 
and exchangeable (see Plate xxu.). Pilate’s action, then, was no 
solemn erection of these portrait medallions but the ordinary 
planting (iSpvev) of the standards (signa constituere, figere) 
which the standard-bearer stuck into the ground. Again, the 
variation between singular and plural, the discrepancy between 
Philo and Josephus (Halésis)—one speaking of the standards being 
brought into the temple, the other of a single semaza brought into 
the city—clearly reflect the contention of the respective parties 
over the details of the case. 

Although the text of the Antiquities does not tell us the strength 
of the force (στρατία =exercitus) led into winter quarters in Jeru- 
salem by Pilate, it is self-evident that they carried with them more 
than one standard. On the other hand, it is improbable, not to 
say impossible, that the whole garrison was quartered on the temple 
mount, i.e. in the castle of Antonia, where as a rule only a single 
cohort lay.1 At least the cavalry contingent of this cohort, a 
cohors equitata, must have been quartered elsewhere in the lower 
town, probably in Herod’s palace ; we must also, of course, allow 
for garrisons for the principal towers on the city walls, etc., all in 
possession of their own standards. 

The majority of these ensigns (σημαῖαι) was therefore un- 
doubtedly in the city and mot in the temple. The single semata 
mentioned in the Haldésis on which the controversy must have 


mainly turned was that of the one cohort in the Antonia. The_ 


Jews clearly regarded the castle as part of the sacred precincts, 
which in their view embraced the whole of the temple mount. 
The Romans, on the other hand, reckoned as sacred the temple 
with the walled courts surrounding it, and consequently main- 
tained that this standard also had only been planted ‘ in the city.’ 
The Jews, moreover, held that the whole of Jerusalem was holy 
ground, el qguds, as the Arabs still call it ; for which reason before 
Pilate’s time the troops had been accustomed to leave behind 
in Caesarea their standards, including the eagles with their thunder- 
bolts of Jupiter Capitolinus and the imperial medallions,. 

The unbounded excitement of the Jews at a proceeding which 
they regarded as an outrage on their religion, a defiance of their 
God, and a desecration of their sanctuary, is impressively depicted 
by Josephus, and in very similar language in all three accounts. 1 
quote the hitherto unknown version of the story in the Haldsis, and 

2. Bid Veo Se 


| 


316 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


would draw attention to the abrupt way in which Pilate’s name, not 
mentioned in the introductory lines on the new governor (p. 314 
above), now crops up in the middle of the narrative, a clear indica- 
tion either of the casual method by which the excerpts made for 
the first edition of the work were simply tacked together without 
any revision, or—according to our previous discussion—of the fact 
that some preceding paragraph has been deleted by the Christian 
censor.! 


‘And when morning came, the Jews saw (it, viz. the semaia) and 
raised (lit. fell into) a great uproar. And they were in consternation 
at the sight, because their law had been trampled under foot, for it 
ordains that there shall be no image within the city. And the people 
of the neighbouring country, on hearing what had happened, all with 
zeal rushed in and hastened to Caesarea and begged Pilate to remove 
the semaia from Jerusalem and to permit them to maintain the 
customs of their fathers. And when Pilate continued to decline their 
request, they fell on their faces and remained motionless for five days 
and nights. And after that Pilate took his seat on the throne in the 
great hippodrome and summoned the people, as though he intended 
to answer them. And he commanded the soldiers suddenly to sur- 
round the Jews in arms. And when they saw the unexpected sight 
of three bodies of troops surrounding them,? they were sore afraid. 
And Pilate said to them menacingly: ‘I shall cut you all down, if 
you will not admit Caesar’s image,” and he commanded the soldiers to 
draw their swords. But the Jews all with one consent fell down and, 
extending their necks, exclaimed that they were ready like sheep for 
the slaughter rather than transgress * the law. And Pilate, marvel- 
ling at their fear of God and (their) purity,‘ ordered the semaia to be 
taken out of Jerusalem.’ 


Still more instructive is a passage of Jerome: * “ τὸ βδέλυγμα 
τῆς ἐρεμώσεως potest .. . accipi . . . de imagine Caesaris, quam 
Pilatus posuit in templo,” From this we learn that Jerome, or his 
rabbinical advisers who helped him to translate the Bible, were 
still aware that contemporary Jews saw in Pilate’s outrage the 
fulfilment of Daniel’s prophecy of the ‘ abomination of desolation,’ 

i to which impressive reference is made in the apocalyptic speech 
put into the mouth of Jesus.6 According to Dan. xii. 11, this 
᾿ desecration of the sanctuary by the Romans’ was to usher in the last 
times, extending over 1290 days or about three and a half years—in 
other words, roughly the period which Eusebius ® on the basis of 

1 See above, p. 70. 

* Greek : “ finding themselves in a ring of troops, three deep.’ 

* Slav., with change to oratio recta, ‘ rather than we will transgress.’ 

* Greek “71d τῆς δεισιδαιμονίας dxparov.”” d&xparov=‘ unmixed,’ ‘unmitigated,’ 
was mistaken by the Slav as meaning ‘ pure.’ 

> On Matt. xxiv. 15, ed. Vallarsi, vii. 194. 

6 Mark xiii. 14-20; Matt. xxiv. 15-22. 

Y Dan. Xi. 3% ᾿ΟΣΥΟΥΣ e061., 150: 


PLATE XXII 


ROMAN LEGIONARY STANDARD 
WITH EXCHANGEABLE PORTRAIT-MEDALLION OF THE EMPEROR 
COLLECTION OF E. J. SELTMAN, CAMBRIDGE 


THE APPEARANCE OF JESUS IN JOSEPHUS 317 


statements in the Fourth Gospel wished to assign to the public 
ministry of Jesus. At the end of this period the expiatory death 
of the Messiah (jikaveth mashiah) was to be looked for, and the 
devastation of the holy city in the messianic war which would 
continue ‘ unto the end.’ The war would conclude with the anni- 
hilation of the prince of this world, the adversary of God, and of 
the godless in general, by a floodt The prophecy in Dantel, 
directed against the eagle idol of Baal Shamin,? i.e. of the Olympian 
Zeus of the Seleucides on the altar of the burnt-offering in Jeru- 
salem, would now be taken to refer to the eagle on the standard of 
the legion and the medallion attached to it bearing the emperor’s 
image. The desecration of ‘the sanctuary, even the fortress,’ ὅ 
would be applied to the planting of the standards in the castle of 
Antonia on the temple mount ; the ‘ violation of the covenant ’ to 
Pilate’s preventing the Jews from ‘ maintaining the customs of 
their fathers.’ Even the ‘ one week’ during which this oppression 
would continue 4 could appear to correspond well enough to the 
‘five days and nights ’ of the supplication before Pilate, along with 
the day of his session in the hippodrome, in the narrative of Jose- 
phus. The apocalypse put into the mouth of Jesus ὃ shows that 
many of his contemporaries expected the destructive flood to 
follow immediately the desecration of the sanctuary : 


‘When therefore ye see the abomination of desolation, which was 
spoken of by Daniel the prophet, standing in a holy place . . . then 
let them that are in Judaea flee unto the mountains : let him that is 
on the housetop not go down to take out the things that are in his 
house. ... But woe unto them that are with child and to them that 
give suck in those days.’ ® 


Of course, when as in the days of the prophet Jonah the flood of 
judgment did not come, the difficulty was got over by interpreting 
the oracle as pointing to a ‘ flood of war.’ ’ 

As the prophecy now stands, we cannot say with absolute 
certainty whether it really goes back to the time of Jesus and the 
offence caused by Pilate’s standards, or whether it is not rather a 
prophecy of the world-judgment dating from the days of Caligula 
when that emperor desired the ‘ abomination of his image ’ to be 
set up in the temple,* when the discreet Petronius hesitated as long 
as possible to carry out this mad order, until at the last moment 
the emperor’s death averted the desecration of the sanctuary. 


1 See above, pp. 273 f. 

2 The ‘abomination of desolation ’ (shiquz m*shomem) is an alteration of Ba’al 
beshamaim, ‘lord in heaven’; cf. Cheyne in Encycl. Bibl., 1. 21. 

= Dan, 10.3%. Dan. 1x. 27. 

5 Mark xiii. 14 sqq.; Matt. xxiv. 15 sqq. 

6 Matt. xxiv. 15 sqq.; cf. Mark xiii. 14 544. 

7 Thus the δεσπόσυνοι, that is, Jesus’ relatives according to Euseb., Chyon., 
trans. Karst, G.C.S., xx. 209. 8 Jos., Haldsts, tl. 185. 


318 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


But this does not imply that pious people in the time of Jesus 
and Pilate, having heard of the desecration of the temple by the 
standard of the cohort, did not really urge an immediate flight into 
the mountains—not so much from any fear of the final flood, but 
simply to seek refuge in the wilderness from Roman domination, 
like those determined champions of liberty who since the war of 
Varus had been living after the manner of the early Maccabees as 
brigands in the mountains. When Caligula gave orders for the 
erection of his statue, the Jews retorted with the menace of an 
agricultural strike, refusing to till or sow the ground, thus trying 
to bring famine upon both the population and the garrison. The 
activist movement cannot, of course, have gone very far in this 
first instance during the single week in which Pilate kept up his 
attitude of defiance. Still, it may safely be assumed that in those 
days also, beside those Jews who ‘like sheep’ ready for the 
slaughter lay for five days in the dust before the governor, there 
were not wanting others, more headstrong, of those ‘ brigands’ 
and ᾿ zealots ’ so hateful to Josephus, who immediately upon hear- 
ing of the blasphemous act took to the mountains, there to expect 
the imminent judgment of God. 

In any case, the words of the apocalypse in question, 


‘ If therefore they shall say unto you, Behold, he is in the wilder- 
ness, go not forth,’ + 


are only intelligible in the light of those constantly recurring 
attacks of Josephus against the champions of independence who 
repaired to the hill-country,? the caves of Hauran,* or the wilder- 
ness * to escape intolerable oppression, and against those ‘ seducers 
of the people’ who in the wilderness preached a return to desert 
and Bedouin life already proclaimed by Hosea,® a new exodus for 
the sake of liberty and independence. Rabbinical traditions § 
expressly interpret the forty-five surplus days before the end in 
Daniel’s prophecy as the time when the Messiah will lead into 
the wilderness those who believe in him, but will immediately again 
‘ hide himself ’ from Israel : 7 
‘ From the time that ... the ‘‘ abomination of desolation ’’ shall 
be set up, there shall be 1290 days. Blessed is he that waiteth and 
cometh to the 1335 days.’ What is meant here by the surplus? 
1 Matt. xxiv. 26. 
* Cf. 1 Mace. ii. 28: ‘he (i.e. Judas the Maccabaean) and his sons fled into 
the mountains . . . then there came down many searching for justice and right, 


in order to dwell there in the desert.’ 
3 B.J., and Hal., i. §§ 304-14. 


* Cf. Ps. Sal., xvii. 18 sqqg.: ‘ the Hasidaean communities flee into the desert, 
because king, judges, and people are polluted by sin.’ 
δ ii. 14, 15: “1 will allure her into the wilderness . . . as in the day when she 


came up out of the land of Egypt.’ 
§ Strack-Billerbeck, ii. 285. 7 Tbtd. δ Dan. xii. II sq. 


THE APPEARANCE OF JESUS IN JOSEPHUS 310 


These are the forty-five days when the Messiah after his manifestation 
shall again hide himself from them. And whither does he lead them ? 
Some say, into the wilderness of Judah, and others say, into the 
wilderness of Sihon and Og:! ‘“‘therefore, behold, I will allure her 
and bring her into the wilderness.’’* He who believes in him will eat 
salt-wort® and roots of broom: he who believes not in him goes to 
the peoples of the world, and they kill him.’ 


Such a prediction might readily be referred to that portion of the 
people which resorted to Pilate to protest against the desecration of 
the temple, but were so maltreated by the soldiers that “many 
perished from the blows.’ 4 
It may be assumed, then, with a certain amount of probability 
that in the time of this uproarunder Pilate, as on other occasions, 
the radical patriots withdrew into the wilderness. Judas of 
Galilee was then doubtless dead, but Johanan the Baptist, the 
“hidden one,’ > was still to be found in the wild lowlands by the 
Jordan, and surely not slow in preaching to the crowds flocking to 
him-on the “abomination of desolation’ and the final flood now 
quite nigh at παπᾶ. This is the situation which would best explain 
the Gospel story telling how Jesus gave his address in praise of the 
Baptist to the crowds which had flocked together in the Jordan 
valley to demand the redeeming baptism. It explains also his 
praise of the ‘violent men’ who since the days of Archelaus (4 B.C.) 
have tried to ‘ take the kingdom of heaven by storm.’ It is prob- 
able that Jesus did not himself receive baptism until then, that is, 
in A.D. Ig andnotin4B.c. That would agree with the Mandaean 
traditions according to which John had for a whole generation 
administered the rite of baptism before Jesus came to him to 
receive it for himself. For an assumption to the contrary—that is, 
to the effect that Jesus had joined the circle of the Baptist as early 
as the time of Varus and thus lived with the Baptist until the time 
of his first public appearance—we have only the support of the 
chronology of Luke, which, at least since the verset iii. 20 was in- 
serted into this Gospel, seems to presuppose such a sojourn of Jesus 
for a number of years in the Jordan valley. But in view of the 
artificial construction of this chronology discussed above,® I do not 
think that much importance can be attached to it. On the con- 
trary, the passing contact of these two preachers of the kingdom of 
God, who were spiritually not much alike, a contact such as is 
clearly intimated by the Gospels, would probably come closest to 
the historical reality, and Jesus no doubt soon after his baptism 
separated from John and his followers.” 
Tf he regarded himself-as-the-promised Messiah, without any 


1 Bashan (Transjordania), ἃ. Hos. i. 14. 
3 Botan. ‘ orache.’ 5. Be Pens Τῆς 
5 See above, p. 242. 6 Cf. above, pp. 244, 303. 


320 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


hope of being able definitely to convince his compatriots of his 
Divine vocation, there was no place for him in the circle of the 
patiently waiting disciples of the man who, after all the disappoint- 
ments, after the downfall of Simon, Athrongas, and Judas of Galilee, 
was still waiting for the ‘greater one’ to come and to bring liberty 


to the enslaved and deeply stirred people. 


THE CARPENTER AS MESSIAH BEN DAVID 


How did Jesus become conscious of a Divine call as the anointed 
king and liberator of his people ? The question can no longer be 
answered in the conventional way by a reference to the vision of 
the Spirit and the voice from heaven at his baptism, once the strong 
probability is realized that those phenomena have been trans- 
ferred, in a purely literary way, from the Baptist to Jesus. This 
hypothesis notwithstanding, it is of course conceivable that some 
ecstatic experience like the vision in question, or like that of Paul 
on the road to Damascus, may have awakened the first conscious- 
ness of his own messiahship, and this experience may well be 
imagined as happening in connexion with the sacred act of baptism, 
convulsing his whole being to its depths. It may, indeed, have 
been connected with that solemn sacrifice of the old life and re- 
generation as a royal ‘son of God.’ 

Yet the fact—which is indeed the best proof of the perfect 
sincerity of Jesus and cannot be lightly set aside—still remains that 
he never either publicly or privately claimed to have had a vision 
of God or some audition of a heavenly call, although that would 
have been the one answer most likely to convince the Jews who so 
often asked him about his ‘ authority’ for saying or doing such 
unusual things. There is therefore nothing whatever to indicate 
that he ever was a visionary or an ecstatic. The opinion of his 
kinsfolk and fellow-citizens,! inclined to consider him as out of his 
mind,’ is simply due to their ignorance of his spiritual develop- 
ment. The Gospels mention it only as an example of the total 
lack of understanding of his mission among his next of kin. The 
passage in Luke x. 17 is the story not of a vision but rather of an 
‘omen,’ a celestial phenomenon 3 really seen and interpreted in an 
apocalyptic sense. 

Recognition of these facts enhances the significance of a most 
plausible theory of Dr. Albert Schweitzer. He conjectures that 

1 Mark iii. 21; John x. 20. 

* The ‘ psychiatric’ literature about Jesus is essentially worthless; cf. A. 
Schweitzer, op. cit., p. 362 sqq. (not mentioned in the second Engl. ed. of 1911). 

* In John xii. 29, 31 it is a thunderstroke (βροντή) which heralds the falling 
of the ‘ Lord of this world.’ This goes well with the lightning (ἀστραπή) in Luke 
x. 


17. 
* Gesch. d. Leben-Jesu-Forschung*, p. 393 sqq., Engl. transl., 2nd ed., London, 
IQIT, Pp. 393. 


THE APPEARANCE OF JESUS IN JOSEPHUS 321 


the contention met with at a very early date, that Jesus was de- 
scended from some member of the Davidic line returned with 
Zerubabel from exile, has a sound historical basis and may well be 
at the bottom of the messianic claims of Jesus to kingship over 
the Jews. 

It is indeed remarkable that so early a writer as Paul emphasizes 
the descent of Jesus from the old royal house.!. ‘ How could he 
have ventured,’ says Dr. Schweitzer, ‘ two or three decades after 
the death of Jesus, to make such an assertion if it had not the con- 
currence of those who knew the facts about his genealogy ?’ It is 
now actually established that the relatives of Jesus, the so-called 
δεσπόσυνοι, opposed the claims of the Nasdraean Messiah to those 
of the Ascalonite (i.e. Philistine) usurper, Herod the Great,” 
supporting their contention by a Davidic pedigree of Jesus. If, 
then, Paul, ‘who is elsewhere completely indifferent to the details 
of the earthly existence of Jesus,’ * in one of his letters, written 
within the lifetime of James the Just, speaks of Jesus as a descend- 
ant of David, it necessarily follows, in my opinion, that ‘ Jesus’ 
brother’ ὁ regarded himself and his family as of David’s line. Paul, 
then, merely recognized this claim. Thus it was not only the 
nephews and grandnephews, starting from their villages of 
Kokh*ba and Nasareth to wander through the world as itinerant 
craftsmen, but James the Just himself, who asserted his claim to 
this pedigree. Nor can we suspect of mala fides a man whose 
strict rectitude is attested even by an opponent like Josephus, 
whatever we may think of the pedigree itself. 

There are two arguments commonly adduced to disprove the 
Davidic descent of Jesus. In the first place, it is generally assumed 
that in the famous question, ‘ David himself calleth him Lord: 
how then is he his son?’ *® Jesus questioned the justice of the 
common Jewish expectation that the Messiah would be a de- 
scendant of David, because he was not one himself, or because at 
least his descent from the old pre-exilic royal house was insuffi- 
ciently established. But Dr. Schweitzer has rightly observed that 
the words may have borne a totally different meaning ; modern 
theologians have not taken into consideration the possibility that 
it may have been the speaker’s consciousness of his own descent 
that prompted the question. Dr. Schweitzer, to be sure, does not 

1 Rom.i. 3; cf. 2 Tim.ii.8. 1 am, of course, fully aware of the fact that 
there are critics who consider even the Epistle to the Romans as partly interpolated, 
while 2 Tim, is entirely rejected by a great number of scholars. 

* See below, p. 606 ns, 3, 4, App. XIII. 

3 Schweitzer, loc. cit. 

4 On the title ‘ brother to the king,’ severally attested in Oriental inscriptions 
for the vizier or viceroy, cf. Lucien Cerfaux, ‘ Le titre Kyrios et la dignité royale 
de Jésus,’ Revue des Sciences philosophiques et théologiques, xii. (1923), fasc. li.-Iv., 


p. 141 n. 2. 
5 Mark xii. 35-37, and parallels. 


x 


322 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


touch the real problem, viz. what answer Jesus expected or would 
have given himself—perhaps because, like the old source itself, he 
thought that the answer might be left to the reader. To me it 
seems evident that Jesus intended to interpret Ps. cx. 1 by reference 
to another well-known Psalm (ii. 7), in which God says to the 
chosen king, ‘Thou art my son, this day have I begotten thee.’ 
He meant that it was not enough to be merely a son of David 
‘after the flesh’; the true Messiah must be called and chosen by 
God as his Anointed, adopted or newly begotten as his son ; such 
a ‘son of God’ would then be the God-given ‘Lord’ and master 
of King David as of all other men. The speaker’s meaning was 
simply : “The Messiah 7s a ben David and must be so; yet not 
every descendant of David is the Messiah, else there would be many 
messiahs, but it is only the elect ‘‘son of God’’ who by his mercy 
will be the liberator.” The deciding factor is not genealogical 
descent alone, or indeed the right of primogeniture, which, of 
course, belonged not to Jesus but to the zaken, the oldest living 
member of the still flourishing clan of David,! but Divine calling, 
just as God through Samuel had called David and not the eldest 
of Jesse's sons to be king. The enigmatic question about the son 
of David asked in the temple appears, therefore, to be, like so many 
sayings of Jesus, but a stray fragment of a longer rabbinical dis- 
putation. It affords no argument against, but on the contrary 
it may be explained as supporting, the contention that Jesus actu- 
ally laid claim to Davidic, i.e. royal, descent. 

A second reason for hesitation in imputing to Jesus such lofty 
claims may be found in the well-attested fact that he belonged to 
the class of carpenters, to those Qenite and Rekhabite ‘ way- 
faring people’ from the ‘valley of the carpenters.’ 2 But this fact 


* The clan of David was doubtless still living in Jerusalem, though, of course, 
devoid of all political importance, since it is never mentioned in connexion with 
the political struggles of the period. According to the Mishna Ta'‘an. iv. 5 
(Schiirer, ii.4, 316 n. 59, Engl. trans., vol. ii. 1. p. 252 n. 112), they used to bring 
their offering of firewood to the altar of the temple on the 20th of Tammuz. 
Since thus, like a few other clans, their impost fell due on a special day, and not, 
like that of the rest of the people, on the 15th of Ab, the reason for this arrange- 
ment evidently was that they still owned so much real estate that the delivery of 
their wood required a good deal of time. A sept of the clan, as we know from 
other sources, had remained in Babylon; cf. Isr. Lévy, Revue des Etudes juives, Xxxi. 
211. Old Hillel, likewise of Davidic descent, was so poor that he had to earn his 
living as a wood-cutter. Thus it need not cause surprise that among the poorer 
members of the tribe there also was a carpenter. Flavius Josephus, however, 
had good reasons for not emphasizing unduly the royal descent of Jesus, or 
of any other member of the Davidic clan, and thereby invalidating his own inter- 
pretation of Gen. xlix. 10 proclaiming Vespasian as the Messiah. That the latter 
had no illusions on the subject is shown by his proscription of Davidides, as 
reported by Hegesippus in Euseb., Hist. eccl., iii. 12: cf. also Eduard Meyer, 
Ursprung u. Anf. d. Christentums, i. 73 τὰ. 2. 

ἦι Chron. iv. 14 read: ‘ubenéj ga(j)n ze(h) ‘abhi géj havashim,’‘ ... and 
the sons of Qain (=smith), the ancestor of the valley of carpenters, for they are 
carpenters.’ 


THE APPEARANCE OF JESUS IN JOSEPHUS 323 


in no way excludes a descent, more or less established, from some 
one of those obscure members of the Davidic clan of the post-exilic 
period who are named at the end of the genealogy. The Qainite 
genealogies show that it was well known that it was just among 
those homeless vagabonds that one might expect to find fugitives 
and ‘sons of Jared,’ persons who had ‘come down? in the world.’ 
It was proverbial that even women of noble birth, deserted or 
divorced by their husbands, sought shelter with these roving folk : 
‘As people are wont to say, “ἃ descendant of princes and sovereigns, 
she associated with carpenters.’ But there were doubtless also 
men of noble birth among the Rekhabites. According to the 
Jahvist’s genealogy of the Qainites,® Qain the ‘ smith’ or smelter 
of metal begat Hanukh, i.e. the ‘initiate,’ and he ‘Irad the 
‘fugitive,’ 1.6. the ejected 4 and hunted one who goes about with 
the nomads and fugitives.6 In the parallel genealogy of the 
Priestly Document (Gen. v. 12 sqq.), Qenan® the ‘smith’ begets 
Mahal-le’E1 the ‘ circumciser for God,’ or ‘ operator,’ the itinerant 
surgeon for man and beast, carrying on the same trade as to-day,’ 
and he Jared, the man who has ‘ come down’ in the world.® 

If the genealogy of Jesus in Luke iii. 37 is expressly carried 
back to this ‘Jared son of Mahal-le’El, son of Qainan,’ member of 
the tribe of the Qainites or itinerant craftsmen, we should compare 
with this the rabbinical tradition ὃ that the Messiah ‘will not come 
from the great sons of Jacob, but from his fallen children (habbanim 
hajjarudim) : God says, To the humblest and smallest of the sons 
of Jacob will I bring the sinful kingdom (i.e. the Roman empire) 
into subjection.’ 

In these circumstances, easily to be explained from a socio- 
logical point of view, there is no reason whatever to question a 
tradition of Davidic descent current in a particular Rekhabite or 
Qainite tribe of carpenters (havashim). That the Jewish itinerant 
craftsmen of that day should have included ‘ reduced ’ noblemen 
in their ranks is not surprising, and that these would be the very 
people to preserve the tradition of their descent is just what one 
would expect. Add to this the fact that however doubtful the 

1 javad, hence jorédim, ‘déclassés.’ Cf. Gen. r., sect. 71, 71a, ete. ; Levy 
Nhb. Wb., 11. 2648. 

2 Saying of R. Papa (died in 376), Sanhedrin, 106a. 

3 Gen. iv. 17 568. 

4 Gen. y., sect. 23, toward the beginning: ‘Irad—this means, “1 chase them 
from the world.’’’ 

5 Ch. Genutv. 12: 

6 Another form of Qain with the archaic post-positive article. 

7 Cf. A. J. Sinclair, Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, new series, i. 203: ‘the 
Sleb or Nwar are tattooers among the Beduins. They also circumcise and 
are doctors.’ 

8 Cf. Gen. y., sect. 71, 71a: ‘he who has fallen from his fortune,’ i.e. ‘ the man 


of broken fortunes is like unto a dead man’; further, Levy, Nhb. W8., s.v. jarad. 
9 Pesig. y., Minni Ephraim, 23b. 


324 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


details of his tragic fate remain, in spite of all researches, Zerub- 
abel, the Davidite, who rebuilt the temple, certainly came to an 
unfortunate end, and it is natural that his downfall should have 
involved his relations, or at least a goodly number of them, in 
misery and obscurity. 

Again, we have to note the fact, frequently emphasized since the 
time of Grotius,? that the genealogy of David in Matthew’s Gospel 
expressly names the two notorious harlots Tamar and Rahab, and 
calls attention to Solomon’s being the offspring of David’s adulter- 
ous marriage with ‘ her of Uriah.’ This can serve but one object, 
namely, as a retort to the Jewish slander upon Jesus, whom his 
adversaries called ‘the son of the harlot,’? For it thus indicated 
that the opprobrious term must consistently be applied also to the 
greatest of the Jewish kings.? The slander need not in its origin 
_ have had any connexion with the story of the miraculous con- 
ception. It can be sufficiently explained by the evil reputation of 
the daughters of the ‘ wayfaring people,’ who, like the itinerant 
women of the Sleb, the Nwar, or other gipsy-like vagabonds of the 
desert of to-day, were dancers and players and therefore regarded 
as prostitutes,* quite capable of attracting and ‘degrading’ men 

of the highest ancestry. 
| From a sociological point of view there is thus not the slightest 
reason to doubt the historicity of the Davidic descent of a par- 
ticular family of itinerant carpenters. More than the fact that 
such traditions existed among the relations of Jesus need not be 
admitted. To investigate what degree of truth there is in the 
tradition would be idle. But it can hardly be doubted that Paul 
and James the Just honestly believed it. So it matters little that 
we have no means of deciding whether the alleged son or grandson 
of Zerubabel, who ended his life in poverty and left to his children 
and children’s children no more than a pedigree, orally transmitted 
and becoming more and more confused, was a genuine or a sup- 
posed descendant of David, or a mere pretender. At all events, 
there are certainly more king’s children about in the world than 
appear in the genealogies. Add to this that in the Oriental harems 
the sons of freeborn wives and those of slave concubines were not 
always sharply distinguished. It is clear, finally, that had there 
never been a genuine prince in reduced circumstances among these 

+ Cf. the latest contribution to the subject: Clyde Pharr in Am. Journ. Phil., 
xlvili. (1927), p. 146 544. 

2 Pesiq. Rab., 21 (100b, rota). 

* According to the so-called Lucianic recension of the LXX. text (ed. Lagarde, 
1883), King Jeroboam was the son of a harlot (1 Kings xi. 26) ; even Melkhisedeq 
is said by the Jews to have no more illustrious origin, according to Epiphan., 
Haeyves., lv. 7, ed. Holl, ii. 333. The same origin is assigned to Jephtha the 
judge (Judg. xi. 1). 

* Cf. the example of Ja’el, the famous Qenite heroine of Judges v. 24-7, called 
a harlot in a Baraitha Meg. 15a (Strack-Billerbeck, i. 20, No. 1). 


THE APPEARANCE OF JESUS IN JOSEPHUS 325 


‘wayfaring folk,’ no one would have attached any credit to the 
tales of these ‘ grandees’ living incognito in their midst.t What 
numbers of such adventurers there are among the gipsy-like 
pedlars and jugglers of the East may be inferred from the jesting 
names applied by the Arabs to the class as a whole—banu Sasan, 

e. “Sassanidae’ or scions of the old Persian royal house, and 
“Barmecides’ or sons of the old Bactrian family of the famous 
vizir of the Calif Harun al Rashid. 

Here, it would seem, as Dr. Schweitzer has ingeniously sur- 
mised, is to be found the real key to the understanding of the 
messianic claims of Jesus the Nasodraean. Imagine the situation 
of that moment, fraught with portentous meaning for the faithful, , 
when Pilate by planting the emperor’s standards on the holy 
mount seemed to have fulfilled the prophecy of Daniel concerning 
the ‘abomination of desolation’ standing in the holy place! Now, 
if ever, the measure of the crimes committed by the ‘ godless 
government’ was complete; now, if ever, must God’s chosen ‘son | 
of David’ appear. Yet among the noble Davidides dwelling in 
their stately home in Jerusalem,? perhaps also in part in Bethlehem, 
the call of the hour produced not the slightest echo. Their atti- 
tude was certainly the same as that of the rest of the nobility, the 
landowners in the country, the householders,’ and the high priest- 
hood in the city. Like all Jewish aristocrats, they were, if not pro- 
Roman at heart, at least opportunist and conservative, regarding 
the activist partisans of freedom with coolness or actual hostility. 
They who had much, nay, everything, to lose by war, were all for 
peace, almost at any price. None of the ‘sons of David’ had 
ever given the least trouble to the Hasmonaeans, no ‘ ben David’ 
had figured among the opponents of that ‘Philistine’ Herod the 
Great and the Herodians. Why should they at this moment plan 
a rebellion against the Romans? Why should people who for 
centuries after the fall of Zerubabel had never made the least 
attempt to recover a leading position in the nation, suddenly make 
common cause with the ‘zealots,’ ‘outsiders,’ “brigands,’ or what- 
ever epithet that party might be given by the aristocrats ? When 

1 Cf. the vast literature on the various pretenders who, from the Middle Ages 
to modern times, have aroused the attention of the credulous masses and often 
enough even of the authorities. A good many of them belonged to this very class 
of itinerant adventurers, and some of them may have had genuine claims, which 
they could not prove in the face of the illwill and deliberate misrepresentation 
of persons interested in discrediting the true heirs to a throne or other large 
Ys Gas above, p. 322 ἢ. I. 

8 Cf. Josephus, Haldsis, iv. ξξ 207 and 379. 

4 Their political opinion is found in the genuine nucleus of the heavily 
interpolated so-called Ecclesiastes, the real title of which is Dibhrej gehillath Ben 
David: ‘ Acts (or Words—as we should say now, ‘ Minutes ’) of the assembly of 


the son of David,’ i.e. the assembly called (as in 1 Kings viii. 1) by King Solomon, 
supposed to have come back from his exile. 


326 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


Mattathias and his sons had arisen for freedom, when Hezeqiah 
the Galilaean and his son Judas, when Simon and Athrongas, rose 
against the despots, which of the sons of David had ever moved a 
finger in those struggles ? Conversely, which of the champions of 
freedom had ever thought it possible to inspire one of the noble 
scions of the old royal house to liberate the people from the foreign 
yoke? Of the Davidides who had made their peace with this 
world,! none can have desired to promote the coming of the ‘future 
world ’ by strife and suffering. 

Far otherwise was it with those members of the clan who, 
homeless and without possessions, roamed through the land with 
the ‘ wayfaring folk,’ supporting themselves with their manual 
labour as carpenters and craftsmen, even as Hillel the Davidide 
earned his living as a woodcutter, and of all the splendour and 
wealth of the old royal house had inherited but the entrancing 
dreams of world-dominion by the grace of God, and the ancestral 
tradition of the kosmokratér Solomon,” driven into exile and his 
place taken by the demon Ashmodai. Is it surprising that these 
people, disinherited by fate, should have cherished as a last con- 
solation in misery the ancient prophecies of a return of the old 
splendour, of a restoration of the throne of David and of a 
return of the exiled King Solomon, the ‘son of David’ the 
legendary king of the whole world, said to have ruled first over the 
hosts of the upper and the lower world, then only over all the 
inhabitants of the earth, then only over the tribes of Israel, until 
nothing but his bed and his sceptre and finally only his beggar’s 
staff * remained to the great king, turned into a nameless wanderer, 
who ‘had not where to lay his head ’—the unfortunate ruler of 
whom nobody knew whether he was dead or alive, straying incognito 
through foreign lands, whence he would come back at the end of 
days? Is it surprising that in one of these sons of David the blood 
of the old adventurer and freebooter, victorious in battle and 
risen to be King of Israel, while yet remaining a troubadour,‘ 
should have stirred up again and driven this poet ὃ and dreamer to 


+ Even the descendants of the poor Davidide Hillel sided with the high priest- 
hood. Cf. Josephus, B.J., iv. 3.9; Vita, 38 sq., 44,60. The great-grandson of 
Hillel was a member of the embassy sent to Galilee by the high priests and so gently 
fooled by Josephus (above, p.185). Cf. Isr. Lévy, Revue des μος juives, XXXi. 203. 

* Esther rabba, s.v. bajamim hahem, and parallels, a legend not later than the 
Seleucid period, since Alexander is named as the latest kosmokratéy known. 

3 Sanhedrin, 20b. 

* On the authenticity of some of the songs attributed to David, see my papers 
in the M.V.A.G. (1917), vol. xxii. (1918), and J.A.0.S., 1926, p. 45. 

δ The Sleb are still famous as poets and minstrels; cf. Doughty, Arabia 
Deseria, i. 556; Frh. v. Oppenheim, Vom Mittelmeer zum persischen Golf, i. 220; 
Butler, Geogr. Journ., xxxiii. (1909), p. 524; Wetzstein, Z.D.M.G., xxii. 125, 
161 55. Thus there is no difficulty in assuming that the author of the entrancing 
Gospel parables was one of those genim and harashim, the ‘wayfaring tinkers 
folk’ of antiquity. 


THE APPEARANCE OF JESUS IN JOSEPHUS 327 


step forth from the dark life in which he lived, to proclaim in this 
time of the deepest humiliation of his people a renewal of the 
ancient glory through a miracle of God immediately impending ἡ 
That a ben harash, a ‘ son of the carpenter folk,’ a poor labourer, 
could indulge in the alluring dreams of kingship, and that he could 
find followers to believe in the wandering craftsman as the future 
liberator-king, becomes intelligible only if we take into considera- 
tion the idea of the Messiah coming from among the ranks of the 
jor‘dim, the ‘ déclassés’ sons of Israel, along with the Christo- 
logical inferences drawn from the prophecy of Zechariah (11, 3 sq.) 
concerning the four carpenters in the time of deliverance: * 


‘Jahwe showed me four smiths’ (or carpenters).? ‘ Then said 1, 
“What comethesetodo?’”’ And hespake saying, “These are the horns 
which scattered Judah . . . but these are come to affright them, to 
castdown the horns of thenations.’’ And these are the four carpenters 
as David has interpreted them: “ Gilead is mine,” that is Elijah who 
belonged to the inhabitants of Gilead : ‘‘ Manasseh is mine,’’ that is the 
Messiah who will arise from the sons of Manasseh,* “ Before Ephraim 
and Benjamin and Manasseh stir up thy might’ ; “ Ephraim the de- 
fence of mine head,” that is the Anointed of war’ (elsewhere Messiah 
b. Joseph or Ὁ. Ephraim), ‘ who will come from Ephraim,? “ His first- 
ling bullock’ (=Ephraim and his posterity) ‘‘. .. with them (his horns) 
shall he push (or gore) the peoples’’; “Judah is my sceptre,”’ that 1s 
the great redeemer who shall arise from the descendants of David.’ δ 


The remarkable fact that these expositors of Zechariah refer to 
the Messiah b. David as a ‘smith’ may perhaps be compared with 
the legend attested both in old Arabian pre-Islamic poetry and in 
the Qoran,’ that King David of old times had been an armourer. 

Zechariah’s mysterious night-vision of the four havashim has 
never been satisfactorily explained. The key to the riddle is 
probably to be found in the fact that the word harash not only, 
like the Latin faber, means any sort of worker in wood, stone, or 
metal, but also, in virtue of the original magical conception of the 
smith’s and craftsman’s art, has the further meaning of ‘magician.’ 
If we adopt this latter acceptation, the sense of the passage is clear. 
Judah and Israel are menaced by four horns, the horns of the 
peoples of the world, represented as mighty monsters. The seer 
beholds these overpowering creatures opposed by four magicians, 
who by their magical art ‘cast down’ the horns. These ‘magi- 
cians’ are then interpreted by the expositors as denoting the various 
messianic saviours of the last days: the prophet Elijah, the 
Messiah b. Joseph (who for the purposes of this interpretation 


1 See above, p. 323 ἢ. 9. 2 Num. γ., 14 (172b). 
3 LXX.: τέκτονες. M.T.: havashim. 4 See Ps. Ixxx. 3 (2). 


δ See Deut. xxxiil. 17. 
6 Num. γ., 14 (1726) ; Strack-Billerbeck, i. 700, li. 294 sq. 
7 Surat, XxXxiv. 10, 


328 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


appears in two forms, the Messiah b. Ephraim and the Messiah b. 
Manasseh, the high priests of the last age), and lastly the Messiah 
b. David. A ‘Davidide’ who was at once a harash, a worker in 
iron or wood, and a hakham havashim,) a ‘ healer,’ could not fail to 
find in this prophecy of Zechariah 2 a Divine confirmation of his 
mission. If harashim were called to redeem Israel, if the Messiah 
b. David was destined to be one of these, who could fail to see the 
hand of God in the dispensation of Providence which had driven 
a family of the stock of David into the ranks of these homeless and 
vagrant workmen? Far from deterring him from his purpose, his 
humble rank and calling can only have confirmed Jesus in the 
consciousness of his mission as Israel’s liberator. ‘Assuming, as 
he does, a revaluation of values, on the basis of which what is now 
great will become small and what is now small become great,® he 
had to expect the Messiah of the last days, if he first leads an 
earthly existence, to belong to the poor and the humble.’ 4 

There is another fact which has not, so far as I know, been 
noticed before, viz. that these itinerant craftsmen, harashim or 
naggarim, the Sleb of those days, also practised the professions of 
divination and healing. It is not different with the modern Sleb, 
who ‘are good joiners and carpenters, who make for their cus- 
tomers wooden frames for the pack-saddles of their beasts of 
burden,® pulleys for their wells, wooden vessels, and the like.’ ὁ 
To their medical skill the Carmelite father St. Elie has devoted a 
whole section of his monograph.? ‘On their rounds they treat both 
men and cattle, by surgery, cauterizing, and anointing.’§ A 
parallel may be found in the Old Testament,? where a genealogy 
of the Rekhabites expressly mentions Beth R¢fa’, the ‘ tribe of the 
healer,’ as a subdivision of these vagrants. These are the persons 
whom Josephus has in mind when speaking of the γόητες or 
" sorcerers,’ who excite the people with their miracles and promises, 
and whom he holds responsible for various insurrections against 
the Romans. If such a harash, in addition to the general reputa- 


1 Tsaiah iii. 3. 

* This prophecy at the same time contained the prediction of the ‘lowly’ 
one ‘riding upon an ass’ (ix. 9). It is to be noted that the Sleb of to-day are 
also experts in the taming of wild asses, whilst the Bedouins have always preferred 
camel-breeding. It is likely enough that the ‘ wayfaring folk’ of old also travelled 
on asses. 

3 Mark x. 31; Matt. xix. 30; Luke xiii. 30. 

* Albert Schweitzer, op. cit., p. 393. 

Ὁ According to Justin Martyr, Dialog. c. Tryph., 80, Jesus was a joiner, who 
made yokes for cattle and similar agricultural implements, 

ὁ Doughty, op. cit., p. 280. 

* Al Mashriq, i., No. 15, 18g, p. 680. 

* Cf. Mark vi. 13 on Jesus’ disciples anointing the sick. 

δ 1 Chron. iv. 12. Cp. my paper on the Qenites in the Swedish review, Le 
Monde Oriental, 1929, p. 107. 

1 Ant., XX.5. 1, $97. 


THE APPEARANCE OF JESUS IN JOSEPHUS 5329 


tion enjoyed by his people as faith-healers, quack doctors, and 
exorcists, could further claim to be a descendant of David and of 
the wise King Solomon, that expert in all magic, obeyed not only 
by men but also by beasts and demons, so that to all the skill of 
the veterinary surgeon he united the prerogative of kingship to 
heal and to cure by touch,! sick people would naturally throng 
around him. Thus a flood of light is thrown on certain New 
Testament passages relating how crowds of afflicted sufferers 
clamouring for miracles were cured by Jesus. Those cases, rightly 
emphasized by Dr. Schweitzer, become intelligible if we recall how 
on certain occasions Jesus was hailed by them as ‘son of David,’ a 
designation which may be used in a general sense as a ‘descendant 
of David,’ orina more limited sense for a ‘ second Solomon,’ lord of 
demons. But it does not in the least imply that the person so 
addressed is the Messiah, the divinely chosen liberator-king, any 
more than when it was applied to the elder Hillel. Jesus can have 
had no reason to conceal the family tradition of Davidic descent, 
in which he believed as sincerely as his brother. True, the jara- 
shim healed with the knife or redhot iron; but no one looks for 
miraculous cures by a word or touch from any ordinary member of 
this tribe of itinerant ‘jugglers’ and tinkers. But if the people 
had heard of a mysterious king’s son, a Solomon vedivivus hidden 
among the wandering carpenter folk, they might well have 
credited him with extraordinary powers. When after the cure of 
the blind and dumb man ‘the multitudes were amazed and said, 
“15 this the son of David?”’’® this statement is distinguished from 
the previous instances,? as Dr. Schweitzer failed to observe, by 
the use of the definite article. The ‘ben David’ has here clearly 
a messianic sound. “Is not this really the son of David ?’ cannot 
mean merely ‘Is this not really a son of David,’ a descendant of 
the mighty king of old, a second Solomon ? It might possibly be 
interpreted as ‘the descendant of David of whom rumour says so 
much.’ But the Evangelist certainly did not so understand it, and 
the wild excitement of the people is only intelligible if they thought 
they saw before them the son of David of whom it was foretold that 
he would make the blind to see, the lame to walk, the lepers clean, 
and the dead torise.* Ifthe relations of Jesus on one such occasion 
thought that he was out of his senses,® they doubtless understood 
that he regarded himself as more than what they were themselves, 
as more than just a descendant of David—that he meant hence- 
forth to appear as ¢he ben David of the last days. 

With experiences of this kind begins the typical cycle of such 


1 J. G. Frazer, The Magic Art and the Evolution of Religion, London, 1911, 
. 368 sqq.; Marc Bloch, Les rots thaumaturges, Paris, 1924. 

2 Matt, xii, 22 sq. 3 Mark x. 47-8; Matt. xv. 22. 

4 Mait. xi. 4-6; Luke vii. 22 f. & Mark iii, 21. 


330 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


phenomena, the reaction upon each other of the person conscious of 
an extraordinary call and of the people surrounding the man of 
destiny. Every one who brings his own faith, capable of moving 
mountains, into contact with the genius who has faith in his own 
mission, thus further confirms him in his consciousness of Divine 
election. Jesus works miracles because he regards himself as the 
‘ben David’ chosen by God, as the ‘ smith’ of salvation, as the 
‘carpenter ’ or ‘ builder ’ of the world that is to be recreated, and 
the miracles he works confirm his faith in his election by the grace 
of God, 


THE MESSIANIC SECRET. THE TRIBUTE MONEY AND THE 
SERVICE OF MAMMON 


The external conditions of the life of Jesus discussed above not 
only furnish a simple and satisfactory explanation of the origin of 
his consciousness of messiahship, but also at once render intelligible 
a number of circumstances attendant on his appearance which 
have long been a mystery. In particular, they explain that appar- 
ently restless, one is tempted to say aimless, wandering from place 
to place which in the Gospels gives an impression that Jesus con- 
tinually sought to withdraw himself from persecutors and admirers 
alike. It also solves that much-debated question, the so-called 
messianic secret. 

Dr. Schweitzer had still to admit that ‘the question why Jesus 
made a secret of his expectation of being revealed as the Messiah 
cannot be fully answered. We can only gather from his attitude 
that he was most anxious to keep it a secret ; his motives are not 
ascertainable.’ It may now be said quite simply that the reasons 
for his attitude are to be sought in the most obvious motives of 
worldly wisdom and political precaution. An aspirant to a king- 
dom, without a following, in search of helpers and confidants, 
cannot without more ado appear with his claims in the open market. 
He must speak in innuendoes, indicate his meaning by parabolic 
actions, such as the messianic miracle of the feeding of the multi- 
tudes, refrain from every word which would enable his opponents 
to convict him of his real plans and intentions, if he is not to be 
annihilated before having brought even to a small circle of the elect 
the good news that the longed-for liberation isat hand. Asan apt 
illustration we may adduce the story of the slave Clement, claiming 
in the reign of Tiberius, to be the secretly murdered Agrippa 
Postumus? and guardedly traversing the country, everywhere trying 
to win over adherents. These secret: etus socit, as Tacitus calls 


1 Agrippa Julius Caesar, grandson and legitimate heir of Augustus. Se: 
Gardthausen, in Pauly-Wissowa’s R.E., x. 183 ff. 


THE APPEARANCE OF JESUS IN JOSEPHUS 331 


them,! correspond exactly to the nos‘rim, ‘ keeping the secret of the 
kingdom.’ * All those who are regarded as ‘lost,’ as ‘God-forsaken,’ 
all those who have surrendered to the ‘lords of this world,’ 
to the emperor and his race, are not predestined to understand 
him ; not to prevent these rejected ones from finding an opportunity 
for repentance and redemption,’ but to prevent the opponents of 
the Messiah’s kingdom, οἱ ἔξω, from hearing and seeing what is in 
preparation, lest by a precipitate interference they nip the flower 
in the bud. For these reasons Jesus acted on a passage he found 
in the prophet Daniel, immediately before the verset which had 
such decisive influence on his public appearance, viz. the apoca- 
lyptic calculation of the time of the setting up of the ‘abomination 
of desolation’ in the sanctuary :4 ‘many shall purify themselves 
and make themselves white and be refined ; but the wicked shall 
do wickedly, and none of the wicked shall understand,® but they 
that be wise shall understand.’ His secret is no other than that 
of the Baptist, no other than that “ kept ’ by the Nasoraeans from 
the outset for the most cogent reasons, the secret from which the 
nos‘vim took their name. 

The most instructive instance of this wise concealment of 
doctrines not to be revealed to opponents is the dialogue concerning 
the tribute money.® The messengers sent to ensnare him ἡ who 
leads the people astray’ ask Jesus outright what his attitude is 
toward the doctrine of Judas of Galilee and his Barjonim followers, 
who ever since the governorship-of-Coponius (A.D. 6-9) had ad- 
vocated refusal to pay taxes to the Romans. A frank reply to this 
question would have explained unequivocally his political con- 
victions. The answer he gave, though failing to deceive the spies,’ 
has effectually deceived the majority of later commentators. Thus 
it happened that Jesus is now commonly supposed to have taught 
not merely subjection to the Romans but unconditional recognition 
of all worldly authority and of every government, no matter how 
rotten. Says the late Edward Holton James:*® ‘These words 
(i.e. ‘Give to Caesar,’ etc.) have been a stumbling-block to those 
who wished to reform or to abolish the wrongs of human society. 
They have been a rock of defence for the unjust ruler. They have 
been so interpreted and twisted as to make Jesus the active apologist 
for nearly every form of wrong or wickedness which man can 

1 Ann., ii. 39 sg.: ‘tum per idoneos et secreti eius socios crebrescit vivere 
Agrippam occullis primum sermonibus, ut vetita solent, mox vago rumore apud 
imperitissimos cuiusque promptas aures aut rursum apud turbidos eoque nova 
cupientes.’ Cf. 2 Macc. viii. 1: ‘ Judas the Maccabee and those around him 
secretly (λεληθότες) entered the villages,’ etc. 

2 See above, p. 233. 

8 The terrible words of Mark iv. 12b are missing in Luke ix. το. 

4 Dan. xii. το. 5 Cf. Isaiah vi. το. 


6 Matt. xxii. 15 sqq. 7 Cf. Luke xxiii. 2. 
8 The Trial before Pilate, Concord, Mass., 1909, p. 22. 


332 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


commit.’ Through the conventional interpretation the political 
attitude taught by Jesus is just identified with that of Paul, which 
is that of the Essenes of Josephus and of the rabbinical Quietists.1 

But that is to miss the most essential circumstance in the story. 
Jesus has not a single denarius with him; he has to have one 
brought to him by his questioners. How comes that? Why is 
the wandering craftsman so completely penniless ? Has he found 
no work for weeks and spent his last savings, or has he given up 
working in order to teach, entirely against rabbinic principles and 
habits? If so, why is there no word to this effect ? Some ex- 
planation is clearly wanted here. The solution of the difficulty is 
simple : Jesus has no money because he τοῦ have none of it. This 
refusal to have anything to do with money at all is not isolated. 
‘ Why,’ we read in the Talmud,? ‘is Nahum called the holiest of 
holy ὃ (men) ? Because he never in his whole life so much as 
looked at acoin.’ In the corresponding passage in the Babylonian 
Talmud we read: 4 “ Rabbi Menahem bar Simai, a son of the holy. 
Why is he so called ? Because he never looked at a coin.’ This 
Rabbi Menahem wasason of the late Tannaite Simai, and livedin the 
third century of ourera. But the anecdote told in the Palestinian 
Talmud of a Nahum of whom no further particulars are given 
may well have been erroneously transferred to a later Menahem.5 

However that may be, Jesus who carries no money thus acts 
in this particular respect like the Essenes, among whom ‘there is 
no commerce,® but each of them takes what he wants as his own, 
for it is accumulated by none,’ ‘and they have no private property 
whatsoever among them.’’ He further expressly forbade his 
disciples to carry any money,’ and to accept payment from any- 
body.® The only reward for their labour was to be their food, 
‘for the labourer is worthy of his meat.’ ™ 

1 See above, p. 257 nn. 3 and 7. 

2 T.J. Meg., iii. 74a. Aboda zara, iii. 42, 43b. 3 Cf. above, p. 138 n. I. 

4 T.B. Pesah, 104a; Aboda zara, 50a. 

* Nahum was currently used as an abbreviation of Menahem. The ‘holy 
(people),” among whom Nahum or Menahem is distinguished for special ‘ holi- 
ness,’ are doubtless the Essenes, who were not allowed to carry money with them. 
The Nahum or Menahem here referred to may be the famous Essene Menahem, a 
contemporary of Herod the Great, and extolled by Josephus, Ant., xv. 371 544. 

ὁ This attitude was taken up in theory by some of the Christian fathers, notably 
Tertullian, De idol., rr. 

7 Ant., xv. 373 sqq.; Haldsis, ii. 122, 127. Cf. Lucian (De Peregr. morte, 
ch. xili.), who ranks it as one of the leading innovations of Christianity that they 
hold all their possessions in common. (Th. Gaster.) 

8 Mark vi. 8; Luke ix. 3. 

* This rigorous defence of Jesus has been expurgated in the canonic gospels, 
but it is frequently mentioned by early Christian witnesses (Alfred Resch, 
Agrapha *, Leipzig, 1906, p. 198, saying, No. 171: ‘ Accept nothing from anybody 
and own nothing on earth’; Armenian: ‘Do not accumulate money in this 
world ’). 


20 “μισθός, Luke x. 7, means ‘ board and lodging.’ 
Δ Mait. x. το, 


THE APPEARANCE OF JESUS IN JOSEPHUS 333 


To give a correct idea of this fundamental rule, one must com- 
pare what modern travellers have to tell of the itinerant craftsmen 
of the desert, the S/eb, so called because of their bearing the cross- 
mark (as-salib), the ‘ sign of Qain,’ on their forehead : 


‘One ought to draw a distinction between voluntary and in- 
voluntary poverty, the former of which alone is properly called “lack 
of possession ’’ (Besttzlosigkeit), In this sense the S/ed are certainly 
without possession. Poverty in the desert is the surest protection. 
Knowing this, they have no ambition to become rich ὁ and the owners 
of numerous camels, horses, etc., the less so because they have practi- 
cally no competitors in their special callings in Arabia. They appear 
to work for ridiculously low wages. . . .’* 


Doughty writes : ὃ 


‘TheSolubba . . . have corn and dates enough, besides samm and 
mereesy for their smith’s labour. The Solubby has need of a little 
silver in his metal craft, to buy him solder and iron; the rest, 
increased to a bundle of money, he will, they say, bury in the desert 
sooner than carry it along with him, and return, perhaps after years, 
to take it up again, having occasion, it may be, to buy him an ass.’ 


Their lack of possessions is to be explained only by their having 
absolutely no needs and by their consciousness that, with their 
known peaceable disposition, riches could be of no use to them. 
Their goods being few, their existence is proportionately free of 
care.t In contrast to these are the Bedouins, who are in continual 
fear lest the successful raid of some powerful neighbouring tribe 
rob them of all their possessions, Hence that careless and naive 
serenity ὅ reflected in the features of the ἰοῦ, as contrasted with 
the ever-suspicious bedouin. It is quite conceivable that the S/ed, 
if permitted to passinto the social position of theiremployers, would 
from their point of view make no profitable bargain, On their 
vocation as journeymen Huber ® merely states that at the time of 
the date-harvest they repair to the oasis of Taima, where in return 
for their services they accept payment in dates, which, on reaching 
their home in the Hala, they conceal in hiding-places and keep for 
the summer, when they live on hunting. According to the same 
author, during the winter months, when the bedouins have brought 
in their harvest of dates, etc., and in consequence of the revival of 
vegetation have milk, cheese, fat, and meat in abundance, the Sleb 


1 Cf, Matt. vi. 19 against the accumulation of wealth, and Luke xii, 16-21, 
the parable of the silly rich man (ὁ θησαυρίζων αὑτῷ). 

2 W. Pieper, op. cit., 24 τι. 2, 34 56. 

3 Arabia Deserta, i. 283. 

4 Cf, Matt. vi. 25, Luke xii. 22, Mati, vi. 34, about not worrying for the 
coming day—the great ‘stone of stumbling ’ for the modern economist. 

5. The serenity of the ‘ children ’ in Mait. xviii. 3. 

6 Journal d’un voyage en Arvabie (1883-4), Ρ. 588. 


334 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


resort to them to do smith’s work. These wandering craftsmen 
do not scorn money on principle, as appears from their breeding of 
asses and their trade with these animals. But they are still in the 
primitive economic stage of symbiotic barter and free reciprocal 
service. The statements reflecting on what Western travellers! 
superciliously call their ‘beggarliness’ show that they still, without 
any ‘reckoning’ * of the respective value of what is given and 
what is taken, gladly and naively accept from, or indeed beg of, 
every one what they need,’ as willingly as they impart to every 
one what they in their capacity of skilled workmen and physicians 
are in a position to give. 

Wherever men with these long-inherited and naive economical 
ideas are brought into contact with the hardness of a society bent 
on wealth and given to commerce, and in addition ground down by 
hard taxation, the moral questionableness of the whole system of 
grasping covetousness * must be painfully brought home to them. 

No wonder, then, that Jesus, the wandering carpenter and 
healer, the Qenite or Rekhabite, rejects money on principle, both 
for himself and his disciples. He postulates the gratuitous gift of 
all services to one’s neighbour as a free act of love. Thus only the 
discourse on the tribute money becomes intelligible. The ‘ lovers 
of money ’ ® who carry about with them and possess the Roman 
emperor's money,® and with it the image of the ‘lord of this world,’ ? 
the enemy of God who claims worship for himself, owe ‘his money,’ 
the poll-tax, to that lord. They have fallen away from God and 
so have irretrievably incurred servitude and the payment of 
tribute to the emperor. But he who, like Jesus and his disciples, 
disdains Caesar’s money and the whole monetary system of the 
empire, and who enjoys with his brethren the loving communion 
of all possessions of the ‘saints,’ such an one has renounced the 
service of idols and is no longer indebted to Caesar but merely to 
God, to whom he owes body, soul, thoughts, words, and works—in 
short, everything. ‘ Render unto Caesar the things that are 
Caesar's ’ really means: ‘ Throw Caesar’s, i.e. Satan’s, money down 
his throat,® so that you may then be free to devote yourselves 
wholly to the service of God.’ ‘For no man can serve two masters: 
for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will 
hold to the one and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and 


1 Doughty, op. cit., i. 284 ; Lady Blunt, op. cit., ii. 110. 

2 In this respect, cf. Matt. xx. 12-15. 

* Cf. Matt. vii. 7, Luke xi. 9, the naive confidence of the wandering tinker. 

* Luke xiii. 15, ‘ beware of all πλεονεξία ’ = Exod. xx, 17. 

® Luke xvi. 14. 

® I.e. silver ; the local kinglets could only coin copper. 

* John xii. 31. 

8 The reader will remember the anecdote about the Parthians pouring molten 
gold into the throat of Crassus (Cass. Dio., xl. 27. 3; Florus, iii, 11, II), 


THE APPEARANCE OF JESUS IN JOSEPHUS 335 


mammon,’ ! mammon being the whole system of money and credit,? 
which, like some rival god ὃ and the author of all evil, is the real 
temporal ‘lord of this world.’* Far from sanctioning the payment 
of tribute to Caesar, Jesus is wholly on the side of Judas of Galilee, 
but goes far beyond him in that he requires his disciples, the 
citizens of the coming kingdom of God, to renounce not only their 
service of Caesar, but also, and above all, their service of mammon. 
He who no longer possesses money, uses money, or wishes to use 
money, need pay no more taxes to Caesar. He who continues and 
wishes to continue in the service of that enemy of God, the demon 
mammon, must also bear Caesar’s yoke; he is unworthy of the 
kingdom of freedom, of the new Israel which acknowledges no 
master but God.° 


THE HIGHER RIGHTEOUSNESS 


There could be no clearer indication of Jesus’ attitude toward 
the law of the Jewish state than the explanation set forth in the 
preceding chapter of the true meaning of his public pronounce- 
ment on the tribute money. 

The Baptist, in complete accordance with the scribes and 
pious men of his time, had taught that the Messiah would not 
come until the Jews had fulfilled the law in its every detail; once 
they had done so he would come forthwith. The idea that God 
had imposed the impossible condition that ali Israel must faith- 
fully ‘ fulfil all the law,’ δ whereby redemption might be delayed 
by a single sinner, had been given up once the prophetic utterance 
had been discovered that God would be content with the ‘ right- 
eousness’ of the ‘elect,’ of the small ‘remnant’ which would ‘in- 
herit the kingdom,’ while the rejected are destined either to eternal 
punishment or to mere annihilation. None the less, the longed-for 


1 Matt. vi. 24; Luke vi. 13. 

2 The derivation of mammon from ’aman, ‘ to believe,’ ‘ trust,’ goes back to 
the seventeenth century. Cf. my book Das Geld (Munich, 1924), p. 165. Yet 
there is a possibility that this etymology is, after all, secondary, and that mammon 
is derived from ’aman 11, ‘to pile up.’ At all events, it is a common Semitic 
word, and St. Augustine still knows it as the Punic equivalent of lucrum. 

3 Cf. Didascalia apost., ed. Hauler, p. 46: ‘de solo mammona cogitant quorum 
deus est sacculus’ (‘ whose god is their purse’). As the companion of Satan him- 
self, Mamonas appears in the Passio Sancti Bartholomaei A postoli. 

4 Tertullian, Adv. Marc., iv. 33: ‘ iniustitiae enim auctorem et dominatorem 
totius saeculi nummum scimus omnes.’ Letter of Emperor Hadrian (Hist. Aug. 
Vita Saturnini, 8), ‘ unus illis deus nummus, hunc Christiani, hunc Judaei, hunc 
omnes venerantur et gentes.’ 

5. Curiously enough, the first to discover the true meaning of Jesus’ saying 
about the tribute-money was Richard Wagner. See the quotation from his 
unfinished Passion-play Jesus of Nazareth, written during the revolution of 1848 
(not published until 1887) in Weinel, Jesus im XIX. Jahrhundert, Tibingen, 1907, 
p. 166. 

6 Matt, iii. 15. 


336 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


liberator-king had to this hour delayed his coming. Clearly, then, 
something more, a higher flight than had yet been attempted, was 
demanded of the elect if the hour of redemption was to strike. 
That is the thought announced in the words of Jesus : 1 


‘ For I say unto you, that except your righteousness shall exceed 
that of the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no wise enter into the 
kingdom of heaven.’ 


On the other hand, he disclaims any intention of destroying even a 
tittle of the revealed law or of the prophets: rather he has come to 
fulfil the law.” Even so the scribes and Pharisees had thought to 
obey the Lord better by surrounding each regulation with a hedge 
of expositions and securities against unwitting transgression, until 
in the course of time the yoke of God’s dominion had become a 
grievous burden. 

What the people thought of the law appears from the bitter 
criticism of Moses and Aaron which the Haggadah 8 puts into the 
mouth of the rebel leader Korah, and which the scribes doubtless 
heard often enough on the lips of the rebel Zealots : 


‘When we were given the ten commandments, each of us learnt 
them directly from Mount Sinai; there were only the ten command- 
ments, and we heard no orders about “ offering cakes” or “‘ gifts to 
priests,” or “ tassels.’’ It was only in order to usurp the dominion 
for himself and to impart honour to his brother Aaron that Moses 
added all this.’ 


The Haggadist, in Korah’s name, is particularly caustic about the 
law on ‘ gifts to priests’; this is what he says : 


‘ One day there came a widow and two orphans who owned a field 
and wished to tillit. Then said Moses, ‘‘ Thou shalt not employ ox 
and ass together at the plough.” When they wished to sow, he said, 
‘ Thou shalt not sow thy field with two kinds of seed’: when they 
would reap, he said, “‘ You must leave a gleaning”’ ; when they would 
make a granary, he said, ‘‘ Gifts for the priests, first tithe and second 
tithe, must be given.” . . . There was now nothing left for the widow 
(to do) but to sell the field. She did so and bought two lambs, to 
turn them to account and clothe herself with their wool. When the 
lambs had young, Aaron came and made his claim, “ὙΠῸ firstlings 
you must give me as wages, for so has Jahweh commanded: Ever 
firstborn,” etc. . . . And when the time came for shearing the lambs, 
he said, “ The best of the shearing of thy sheep must thou give to 
me.’’ ‘Then the widow could no longer comply with these demands 
and decided to kill the lambs and consume them. But when she had 
killed them, Aaron said, ‘‘ The shoulder, the two cheeks, and the maw 
must ye give tome.”” Then the widow protested, “ Though I have 
1 Maiti. v. 20. 2 Matt, v. 17 sq. 


5. Talm. Bab., Bevakhoth, 32a; Moses Gaster, The Chronicles of Jevahmel (Orient, 
Transl. Fund, iv.), p. 160, c. lv., and the parallels on p. xcvii, 


THE APPEARANCE OF JESUS IN JOSEPHUS 334 


even killed the lambs, yet I cannot get rid of this man; the lambs are 
a votive on behalf of me.” Aaron replied, ‘‘ Then are they wholly 
mine, for thus saith Jahweh : Every devoted thing shall belong to 
thee.’ And he took the lambs and departed, leaving the widow and 
orphans lamenting. Thus did they treat these poor wretches when 
they appealed to the Lord.’ 


If there is only a particle of the truth in this powerful satire 
on priestly greed, it is not surprising that at least the popular 
preachers, in their messianic expectations, went so far as to say 
that ‘in the world to come the laws will be abolished, even that 
relating to forbidden food.’! The following doctrine ? was taught 
in the name of R. Menahem of Galilee, a Tannaite of uncertain 
date, who from the tenor of his words I am inclined to identify 
with the celebrated Essene of that name previously mentioned : 3 


‘In the future (i.e. in the days of the Messiah) all offerings shall 
cease ; and likewise all confessions shall cease; only the confession of 
thanks shall not cease in all eternity. That is indicated by the 
passage :* “‘ (Again shall be heard) the voice of joy and the voice of 
gladness, the voice of the bridegroom and the voice of the bride, the 
voice of them that say, Give thanks to the Lord of hosts, for the 
Lord is good, for he keepeth his mercy for ever to them that bring 
thank-offerings into the house of the Lord.”’ ’ 


Horodezky ὃ has rightly pointed out that every one of the 
alleged Messiahs who appeared in Jewry ‘ sought first to lighten 
the yoke of the law, as the prophets had done before them.’ Of 
the pseudo-Messiah who about the year 720 (under the caliphate of 
Omar II.) promised to restore Palestine to the Jews of Arabia, and 
who had a large following there and in Spain, we are told by the 
contemporary Gaon R. Natronai: 


“many were misled by him and fell into heresy, getting aceustomed 
. . . to partake of forbidden meats and drinks, to use the wine of the 
heathen, to transact business on the second day of the feast,’ etc. 


In a similar way, Jesus in the well-known touching words pro- 
mised the people a drastic alleviation of their burdens : ὃ 


“Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will 
give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn of me, for I am 
meek and lowly in heart; and ye shall find rest unto your souls. 
For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.’ 


Such an alleviation would, of course, have been quite impossible 
had Jesus really intended to take over into the ‘ kingdom of God’ 


1 Talm. Bab., Nidda, 61b; Midr. Shokher ob, 146. 

* Cf. Strack-Billerbeck, i. 246. 

3 See above, p. 332 0. 5. 4 Jerem, xXxxiil. II. 
5 Avch. f. Religions Wiss., xv. (1917), p. 121 sq. 

6 Matt. xi. 28 sqqg. As to the form, cf. [satah iv. 1-3. 


¥ 


338 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


the burden of the traditional Pharisaic interpretation of Scripture,’ 
instead of merely accepting the written law in the spirit and not 
in the letter, as the Karaites subsequently attempted to do. How 
an effective alleviation of burdens (σεισάχθεια *) is to be reconciled 
with the assurance that not a jot or tittle of the law is to be de- 
stroyed becomes intelligible only when it is observed that Jesus 
intends to fulfil both law and prophets ; whereas, on the contrary, 
many of the scribes show no great love for the prophets, and some- 
times imagine that in the messianic age the prophets and hagio- 
grapha will lose their validity, the Torah of Moses continuing to be 
binding even in the world to come.* 

For the writings of the prophets, Jeremiah in particular, con- 
tain all the foundations necessary for the most drastic ‘innovation’ 
(νεωτερισμὸς), to use Josephus’ favourite term when he wishes 
to disparage the Zealots.* It is in Jeremiah ® that we find that 
antinomian sentence : 


‘ How can ye say, We are wise and the law of the Lord is with us ? 
But, behold, the false pen of the scribes hath made of it falsehood.’ 


On the strength of that assertion, Jeremiah, the son of a priest, 
declares that all the laws of sacrifice are a forgery of the scribes: ® 


‘I spake not unto your fathers, nor commanded them. in the day 
that 1 brought them out of the land of Egypt, concerning burnt- 
offerings or sacrifices: but this thing I commanded them saying, 
Hearken unto my voice.’ 


On such a basis Jesus could adopt, then, any simplification and 
modification of the law which seemed justifiable to his conscience, 
without infringing an iota of the ‘ genuine’ law.?- From Jeremiah,® 
and from him alone, he drew his ‘authority’ to declare in a single 
saying the abolition of the whole food-law : 9 


‘ Not that which goeth into the mouth but that which cometh out 
of the mouth defileth the man’; 


1 Matt, xxiii. 3: ‘all that the scribes tell you, do it.’ 

* As it was called by the Athenian social reformer Solon. 

* Jerus. Meg.,i. 70d, 51 ; Strack-Billerbeck, i. 246. 

* The idea that the Messiah will ‘ novellate’ the law (hiddush thorah) is common 
in Hebrew literature: Pesah. xii. 107a; Lev. γ.5. xiii. 156d, etc. Cf. John xiii. 
34; Barn. li. 6; and Tertullian was perfectly right when he insisted (De praescr. 
haey., 13) : ᾿ Jesum Christum praedicavisse novam legem.’ 

® viii.8. Jesus quotes the parallel passage, Isaiah xxix. 13, about the ἐντάλματα 
ἀνθρώπων, ᾿ Man-made commandments ’ (Mark vii. 7; Matt. xv. 9). 

S vil. 22.5q. Ὁ cf. vi. 20. 

7 Strangely enough, this is in principle exactly the ‘ philological’ and ‘ critical’ 
procedure which, a century and a half later, was practised by Marcion in dealing 
with the canonical gospels. Similarly, in the Pseudo-Clementines—or rather in 
their principal source, the ‘ Preaching of Peter ’—the prince of the apostles 
teaches his hearers that the laws of Moses were not written down till long after 
Moses, and that it is therefore necessary to find out ‘the genuine parts of 
the scriptures " among the numerous forgeries (Schliemann, Die Clementinen, 
pp. 196 ff.). S vill. 14. 9 Mark vii. 15. 


THE APPEARANCE OF JESUS IN JOSEPHUS 339 


more than that, to allow the seventy messengers, sent to the 
seventy gentile nations, to eat whatever food will be set before 
them.’ In a striking parable, quoted more than sixty times by 
early Christian witnesses,” although ruthlessly expunged from the 
canonical gospels, Jesus says that like reliable bank-cashiers, who 
know how to distinguish the genuine from the spurious coins, the 
students of the law ought to become ‘ experts in coinage’ (δόκεμοι 
τραπεζῖται), so as to keep the good and to reject the false. 
He disdained those minor distortions and adaptations of the law 
in daily use with the scribes, such as Hillel’s introduction of the 
Prosbul, intended to do away with the unexpected economical 
consequences of the well-meant ordinance on the remission of 
debts in the sabbatical year. 


‘ No man seweth a piece of undressed cloth on an old garment. . . 
and no man putteth new wine into old wineskins . . . but they put 
new wine into fresh wineskins.’ 4 


A far bolder revolutionary, he thus gives a new law of ‘ higher 
righteousness ’ in new words and a new revelation: ‘it was said 
to them of old time . . . but I say unto you.’® The old writer 
who collected into a ἡ sermon on the mount ’ ® the remains of what 
the Galilaean Messiah had preached to the men in the mountains 
on the ‘ renewal of the law,’ was guided by a right feeling that 
Jesus consciously intended to reintegrate the law which Moses had 
brought down from Sinai. And it was a right feeling that led him 
to place in the forefront of the new revelation the beatitudes on 
the poor,’ the afflicted, the hungry and thirsty, the persecuted, to 
whom the revelation of the new law brings good news. 

The ‘ kingdom of God’ involves indeed a complete reversal ὃ 
of men’s present fate ; it cannot be otherwise if it is to ‘fulfil the 
prophets,’ if it is to mean that general reversal by which the 
manifest injustices prevailing in ‘this world’ will be righted in 
the next. 


1 Luke x. 8. 2 Resch, Agrapha*, pp. 112-122, No. 87. 

3 The saying was known to Paul, 1 Thess. v. 21 f., and to the author of Hebr. 
v. 14. 4 Mark ii. 21 sq. 

δ Matt. v. 21 sq. § Matt. v. τ: ἀνέβη els τὸ ὄρος. 


7 Luke vi. 2ob: ‘ Blessed are the poor,’ etc., has been misinterpreted owing 
to the corrupt text of the parallel passage in Matt. v. 3. There an old gloss, 
ἐν πνεύματι, Meaning ‘in inspired moments,’ made by some reader not wholly 
convinced of the blessedness of the poor, was early drawn into the text. One 
cannot imagine a Jew calling blessed the ‘ poor in spirit,’ i.e. the simpletons 
‘devoid of inspiration.’ Lack of inspiration—religious or otherwise—is a curse, 
a cutting off from contact with God, in Jewish eyes. 

8 Mark x. 21; Matt. xix. 30, xxiii. 12; Luke xiii. 30, xiv. 11. Cf. Talm. 
Baba Bathra, tob: ‘ When Joseph the son of R. Jehoshu’ah Ὁ. Levi (ca, 256) was 
ill, he had a vision. His father said to him: ‘‘ What hast thou seen?” He 
answered: ‘‘A world turned upside down (’dlam hapukh) 1 have seen: what is 
lowest was highest, and what is highest was lowest.’’ His father said: “ἃ better 
world hast thou seen.’”’’ 


340 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


‘Tf you will not lift up high that which is low among you, and 
turn down that which is high, and place to the left what is on the right 
side and shift to the right side that which is on the left, ye cannot 
enter into my kingdom.’ ἢ 


‘Up with the low, down with the high,’ 2 had similarly been 
predicted by the prophets as the message of the time when ‘ he’ 
should “come whose right it is, and I will give it to him.’ The 
poor, the persecuted, the hunted of the present are the rightful 
owners of the future. The rich have already in this world received 
the fulfilment of the blessings promised to them. They who now 
suffer shall be elected, they who weep shall rejoice, the hungry and 
thirsty shall be satisfied, for those reviled by all a rich reward is 
reserved in heaven. Those who are now full-fed shall hunger, 
those who laugh here shall mourn and weep.4 Indeed, it would 
seem, though the connexion of this thought with the announce- 
ment of the ‘ new law’ is not attested by external evidence, that 
Jesus regards those who in this world are accounted sinners 
because they have come into conflict with the laws of this world, 
as better fitted to enter into the future kingdom than those who 
have punctiliously observed the old law and are on that very 
account hardly open to the call to a new order of life. ‘ I came not 
to call the righteous, but sinners.’® According to the Epistle of 
Barnabas * he chose his disciples ‘among men who had been the 
worst sinners,’ a statement in perfect harmony with Celsus’ 7 
accusation that Jesus collected his associates among ill-famed 
publicans and ‘ the worst sailors.’ 8 

What Jesus meant by the ‘higher righteousness’ is familiar to 
all, and under the heading ‘ethics of the sermon on the mount’ 
has been constantly discussed throughout the ages. It is the 
principle, thought out and carried through to the last logical 
consequence, under no circumstances to do wrong to another, not 
even in self-defence or in retaliation, a requirement which, as 
Celsus justly urged,® had a long time before been consistently 
preached by the Platonic Socrates.!° 

The new commandment, not to resist evil, if carried to its 
radical conclusion, forbids, of course, all reprisals for wrongdoing 


1 Acta Philippi (cod. Oxon.), ch. xxxiv. (Lipsius, Apokryphe A postelgesch., 
1884, li. 2, p. 19). 

2 Cf. Luke xvi. 15: ‘ That which is high among men is abominable in the 
sight of God.’ 

5. Ezek. xxi. 26 sg. (Hebr. text, 31 sq.). 4 Luke vi. 33. 

δ Mark ii. 17. ey; Ὁ. 

7 Orig., C. Celsumt, i. 62. δ ναύτας πονηροτάτους. 

9 Tbid., vii. 58. 10 Crito, ὃ Io (i. 59, ed. Stephanus). 

11 Matt. v. 39; cf. also the neo-Pythagorean parallels, ‘ better to suffer wrong 
than to kill,’ in Jamblich, Vita Pyth., 155, 179; ibid., 51, ‘not abuse others nor 
defend yourself when abused ’; Isidore‘Lévy, La Légende de Pythagore, Paris, 1927, 
p. 316 n. 13. 


THE APPEARANCE OF JESUS IN JOSEPHUS 341 


even by resort to some court of law. This inference is expressly 
drawn :} 


‘Judge not, and ye shall not be judged ; condemn not, and ye shall 
not be condemned ; release, and ye shall be released ; give, and it 
shall be given unto you. .. . For with what measure ye mete, it shall 
be measured to you again.’ 5 


And not merely the punishment of the evildoer, nay, even any 
censure of human failings, is forbidden. One whose well(house) ° — 
is in such disrepair that a whole beam has fallen into the water has 
no right to object to a splinter floating in his neighbour’s spring. 
Nor does he allow his disciples to resort to a civil court : # , 


‘If any man would go to law with thee and take away thy coat ’ 
(the most indisputable personal possession), “let him have thy cloke 
also.’ 


The same principle of non-resistance to injustice is inculcated in 
the case of requisitions (ἀγγαρεία) on the part of the Roman troops, 
Not only must there be no refusal, but one should volunteer to do 
more than is required : ὃ 


‘Whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.’ 


Strangely enough, the fundamental political meaning of these 
words has not been even remotely apprehended by any com- 
mentator known to me. Their true import was first recognized 
by a learned Oxford theologian, the late Miss Lily Dougall : ὁ 


‘Consider the teaching of Jesus as it struck his first hearers. 
Who are those who compelled the Galilaean peasant to go a mile? 
They were Roman soldiers, acting as armed police, any man of whom 
had the right to make one of a conquered race carry his traps for a 
certain distance. . . . Who were those who ‘“‘used”’ the people 
“ despitefully ἢ Assuredly the arrogant officials, both high and 
low, of a dominant race rose before the mind’s eye of every member 
of those Jewish crowds to whom Jesus preached. . . . The Jewish 
nation, weak and poor, but the prouder for that, was at this time 
vibrating with suppressed revolution. Judas of Galilee had headed 
a rising: Pilate more recently had ruthlessly quelled in blood a riot 
in the very temple: Theudas was soon to head a rebellion. If to 
members of Sinn Fein in the spring of rg2r had been said, “ Forgive 
your enemies, bless them that persecute you, do good to them that 


1 The idea that in the golden age mankind may dispense with the judge is 
equally known to the pagan world (Ovid, Metam., i. 89; cf. also Calpurnius, Eclog., 
i. 71, nor are there tribunals in the ideal state of the Stoic Zeno). 

2 Luke vi. 37- 

8 [bid., 41 sq.: there is a confusion of the two meanings of Aramean ‘azjna 
=(r1) ‘ well,’ (2) ‘eye’ in the Greek gospels. 

4 Matt. v. 40; Luke vi. 29. In Luke xii. 14, Jesus refuses to arbitrate 
between brothers quarrelling about an heirloom. 

5 Matt. v. 41. 

5 Hibbert Journal, xx. (Oct. 1921), p. 114 544. 


a2 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


despitefully use you,”’ to whom would they have supposed the words 
to refer but to the English ? Would not such teaching to them seem 
the suggestion of a national policy?’ 


This interpretation gains added force from the occurrence of a 
similar train of thought 5 in the speech of King Agrippa 11. to the 
Jews determined to revolt from Rome: 3 


‘** Nothing so checks blows as submission to them, and the resigna- 
tion of the wronged victim puts the wrongdoer to confusion.” Grant- 
ing that the Roman officials are intolerably harsh, it does not follow 
that you are wronged by all Romans or by Caesar ; yet it is against 
them that you are going to war.’ 


The opening words, which may well be proverbial, strikingly 
recall the saying of Jesus on turning the other cheek (to the smiter), 
though the difference is plainly perceptible. At all events, it is 
clear that this aspect of Jesus’ preaching, with its recommendation 
of patient quietism, cannot have been unwelcome either to the 
Romans or to those opportunists,* the Herodians and the priestly 
aristocracy in Jerusalem, who worked for tolerable relations with 
Rome. Similarly, his words on the tribute money, 1.6, his in- 
junction to dispense with money altogether or quietly pay the 
tribute, must have been judged as a relatively harmless extra- 
vagance. This sufficiently explains why he was continually 
watched and spied upon, while otherwise left in peace for a con- 
siderable time. So long as he was satisfied to take exception to 
the Sabbath and the food-laws only, which did not to a great extent 
injure the interests of the priesthood, all went well; it was his 
final attack on the sacrificial system and the banking business in 
the temple which armed the priestly caste against him. On the 
other hand, his doctrine of a radical pacifism must have met with 
some sympathy from Jews of all parties, including the activists, 
since even the latter were by no means over-confident of a victory 
in an armed conflict with the Romans. Living as outlaws in the 
wilderness of the mountains, where Jesus preached to them, they 
were no less eagerly awaiting a miracle than the quietists in town 
and country. If these odd ‘latter-day saints’ and advocates of 
‘perfect righteousness’ were seeking a new way of abating the 


* The reader will recall the asimea, or ‘non-resistance’ policy, advocated by 
Mahatma Gandhi. 

* St. Augustine, Ep. 13849 (C.S.E.L., xliv. 134), compares the Roman political 
principle (Sallust, Catil., ix. 5): ‘accepta iniuria ignoscere quam persequi malebant,’ 

*'"B. J .ytl. 381-Sq.:; Ch. Epictet., 1174; ro; 

* Jesus was not at all impervious to considerations of political expediency ; 
cf. Luke xiv. 31. The passage, disconnected in its present context, is evidently 
a fragment taken from a discussion with the Zealots on the problem of fortifying 
the country and the chances of raising a sufficiently strong force against the 
Romans. Contrast this sober reasoning with the vainglorious boast quoted above, 
p. 198 n. 1, from Deut, xxxii. 30. 


THE APPEARANCE OF JESUS IN JOSEPHUS 343 


Lord’s anger with his people, whose business was it to hinder them ? 
If a new self-ordained doctor of the law preached to the rich the 
duty of giving away all their possessions, no one was forced to 
listen to him, much less to obey; and if he taught the poor that 
they must serve all men willingly, joyfully, and gratuitously, with- 
out anxious care for their livelihood, and that they would easily 
obtain all the necessaries of life without buying them, in exchange 
for their labour, by simply begging from good men,—who would feel 
disturbed by doctrines so comforting to the rich and powerful in 
all ages, so long as they were accompanied by a recommendation 
not only of complete non-resistance but of a comprehensive and all- 
forgiving love of enemies?! The oppressors of the people could 
not but welcome the idea of Jesus bidding the poor, the outcast, and 
the sinners to extend the law of love of one’s neighbour to the 
Roman enemy,” and seeking to induce the Jews to include in their 
feelings of brotherly affection the conquerors and rulers of the 
Holy Land. 

The obvious sympathy with which the pro-Roman aristocratic 
priest Josephus speaks of the Essenes as ‘ ministers of peace ’ * and 
loyal subjects of all constituted authority cannot have been alto- 
gether refused by his party-friends to the wandering carpenter 
who blesses the peacemakers as the true children of God and 
promises the meek that, by God’s mercy and without any action 
on their part, they shall inherit the whole earth.‘ 

At the same time it is not to be implied that the radical paci- 
fism of the sermon on the mount is in any way derived from 
Essenism.5 The roots of this moral attitude are rather to be 
sought in the peculiar ethics of those wandering tribes of crafts- 
men, the Qenites and Rekhabites, the S/eb or Salubim of the 
rabbis,® to whom ‘the carpenter’s son’ and his forefathers, by up- 
bringing, if not actually by blood, no doubt belonged. Weare told | 
of the modern S/eb that it was their extraordinary peaceableness 
which more than anything else attracted the attention of the 
European travellertothistribe. ‘It isremarkable that in the desert, 


1 The principle is first enjoined in the pre-Christian Testament of Gad, vi. 7 ; 
cf. R. H. Charles, Tvansactions of the Third International Congress for the History 
of Religions, Oxford, 1908, i. 32. Cp. also the Letter of Aristeas, ὃ 227: ‘Iam of 
the opinion that we must bestow our favour by preference upon our adversaries. 
Thus we shall win them over to their duty and to our profit.’ 

2 Matt. v. 43; Luke vi. 27. 35.8.70, ἃ, 138. 

4 χὴν γῆν May mean, more modestly, ‘ the land,’ and not ‘ the whole earth ’ ; 
cf. Deut. iv. 1; vi. 18; xvi. 20. 

δ᾽ See above, p. 230.1; Ρ. 257 ἢ. 4. Nothing could be less certain than that the 
Essenes were pacifists. 

6 Exod. vabba, 42 (99a): R. Yaqim (about A.D. 300) has said : ‘ There are three 
arrogant races—among animals the dog, among birds the cock, among men the 
Jew.’ Says R. Isaac b. Redipha (about 300): ‘Is this a shame for the Jews ? 
No, a glory; either (you are) a Jew, ora Salub’ (that is, a meek and undignified 
Solubi; the usual translation, ‘either a Jew or a crucified one,’ is absurd). 


344 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


where in consequence of the natural conditions the life of its in- 
habitants, whether men or beasts, is a war of all against all, there 
is still one people which takes no part in this general feud.’ 1 
According to Wright,” during a battle they all repair to the scene 
as disinterested spectators, to tend the wounded of both sides 
when the fight is over. Similarly they are wont to entertain both 
pursued and pursuers with equal hospitality, and not to inform the 
latter in which direction the other party has gone. Their gentle- 
ness and hospitality are unanimously attested by all Euro- 
peans. With their unique knowledge of the country which they 
scour as hunters, they are always ready to act as guides through 
the desert,* to show the right way to strayed and exhausted 
travellers, or to offer them hospitality in their camps. The S/eb, 
who has made himself indispensable to the Arab by his valuable 
services, never engages in a quarrel with him, and pays to nearly 
every tribe a tribute or ‘brotherhood tax.’ In short, these 
peculiar ᾿ cross-bearers’ may be described as a most peaceable, 
meek, amiable, and contented lot. They are extremely polite, 
and, according to the Carmelite father St. Elie, abhor theft and 
all forms of deceit. Nothing is more sacred in their eyes than 
a debt. 

From those qualities and from the sign of the cross, the mark 
of Qain, some writers have rashly concluded that the Sieb are of 
Christian origin, as if the modern Syrians and Copts, Christians 
though they be, showed the slightest approach to such ethical 
tenets! I venture to submit, on the contrary, that the well-known 
pacifist doctrines of the wandering carpenter Jesus are ultimately 
derived from the special experiences of those nomad craftsmen, 
who from remote ages, in the midst of the struggle for existence of 
warring tribes, have successfully fought their way through life by 
such an attitude of radical pacifism and willing service towards all. 
To them the thought must have occurred frequently that if only 
other tribes would learn to act in the Rekhabite manner, they 
might forthwith find deliverance from the torture of mutual 
oppression and enter the longed-for reign of everlasting world- 
wide peace. 


“THE KINGDOM OF GOD IS WITHIN YOU’ 


We have the means of ascertaining much more precisely than 
is commonly supposed what Jesus thought of the nature of the 
kingdom of God and of the manner of its coming into being. 


1 Pieper, op. cit., p. 10 sq. 
* An Account of Palmyra, p. 49. 
* v. Oppenheim, op. cit., i. 220. 


THE APPEARANCE OF JESUS IN JOSEPHUS 5345 


There is the short and disconnected saying in Like xvil. 20 sq.: 


‘And being asked by the Pharisees, when the kingdom of God 
cometh, he answered them and said, “‘ The kingdom of God cometh 
not with observation :! neither shall they say, Lo, here! or there! for 
lo, the kingdom of God is ἐντὸς ὑμῶν. ᾿ 


But this, as is well known, does not furnish a sufficient and con- 
vincing answer to the question, because the meaning of ἐντὸς ὑμῶν 
(‘within’ or ‘in the midst of you’) has always been hotly disputed. 

It has been overlooked, however, in the discussion of this 
passage, that the fortunate discovery of a pertinent fragment of 
the ‘ Sayings of Jesus,’ 2 if correctly restored, offers as complete 
information on the conception of the ‘kingdom’ in the preaching 
of Jesus as one could desire : 


‘such (are) the words the [saving (words) which] 

Jesus the living ® spake [and taught to Judas who (is called) | 
also Thomas, and he said [unto him that every one who-] 
soever shall hear these words, [of death] 

shall not taste. [Saith the Lord Jesus :] 

Let him not cease who see[keth the kingdom until] 

He findeth, and when he findeth [he shall wonder and won-] 
dering he shall reign an{d reigning he shall] 

rest. Saith J[fesus, who will they be] 

who draw us [into the kingdom if] 

the kingdom in heavfen is? Shall we be drawn by] 

the birds of the heav(ens or by any of the beasts that a-] 

re under the ear(th, if it shall be there,* or shall they be] 
the fishes of the se[a that will car-] 

ry you over and is it that the king[dom is beyond (the) sea ?] 
Within you [115 it, [and whosoever of you himself] 

shall know, shall find {{ with none to guide him]. 
Yourselves ye shall know [and ye shall know that children] 
are ye of the Father who bfegat you in the beginning. ] 

Ye shall know yourselves in [the fear of your Father} 

and then be yourselves the te{rror of your enemies].’° 


Any one can see at once that this second utterance, restored as 
above, supplies from the mouth of Jesus himself the long-sought 
interpretation of the phrase ἐντὸς ὑμῶν in Luke ΧΥ 21, Lhe 
passage, in common with others, shows that the traditional ‘say- 
ings of Jesus’ have often been torn from a richer context and so 


1 More exactly : ‘ according to (astrological) observation.’ 

2 Oxyrhynchus Papyri, iv. 658. 

3 T.e., apparently, ‘in his lifetime.’ A protest against visionaries quoting 
words of Jesus spoken after his resurrection. 

4 The two ideas of ‘ flying upwards into heaven’ and ° descending under the 
earth into Hades’ are contrasted in Plato’s Legg., p. 905a, in the Scythian 
symbolic letter in Herodot., iv.131f.; Eurip., Medea, 1296 f.; Hekabe, 1099 ff. 
(Geffcken, Arch. f. Rel.-Wiss., Xxvil., 1929, PP. 347 f.). " 

6 For the details of the reconstructed Greek text, see vol. ii. pp. 218 ff, of 
the German edition, 


346 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


rendered difficult to understand, especially where the connexion 
with the Old Testament scriptures on which the maxims are based 
is no longer recognizable, In the present case the lesson that the 
kingdom of God is to be sought neither ‘ here’ nor ‘ there,’ or, 
more specifically, neither in heaven above nor beyond the sea nor 
beneath the earth, is clearly modelled on that impressive speech of 
Moses (of which use is made also in the Book of Baruch + and by 
Paul 5) in Deut, xxx. II-I4: 


‘For this commandment which I command thee this day is not 
. . . far off. It is not in heaven, that thou shouldst say, Who shall 
go up for us to heaven, and bring it unto us, and make us to hear it, 
that we may doit? Neither is it beyond the sea, that thou shouldst 
say, Who shall go over the sea for us, and bring it unto us, and make 
us to hear it that we may do it? But the word is very nigh unto 
thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart, that thou mayest do it.’ 


That Jesus quotes a passage relating to the understanding and 
practice of the Torah, to answer the question about the way to the 
kingdom of God,? perfectly accords with the view of the rabbis 4 
who identified the realization of the dominion of God with man’s 
fulfilment of hiscommands. To attain to that kingdom, man has 
only to fulfil the commandment, implanted by God in his heart,® 
of brotherly love to all. 

It will be observed that Jesus expressly rejects the idea of a 
kingdom of God localized in heaven, an idea familiar, of course, to 
Babylonian Polytheism ® no less than to Mandaean gnosis and to 
the pious author of the Assumption of Moses.?. In the same way 
he repudiates the Essene doctrine, derived from Orphic and Pytha- 
gorean ideas, of an Elysian kingdom beyond the ocean on the isles 
of the blessed. He likewise rejects the view, current in the Eleu- 
sinian and Osiris mysteries, of Elysian fields in the underworld.® 
Clearly and explicitly he declares that the ‘ kingdom of God’ has 
nothing whatever to do with these heathen, un-Jewish ideas of a 
world beyond. He declares, to use modern phraseology, that the 
‘kingdom ’ is in no way a transcendent sphere lying outside the 
world of experience and reality, but is on the contrary a political, 
moral, and religious state of people here on earth. ‘ The heavens 


2: 1H5'20. 2 Rom. x. 6 544. 

* His questioners must have believed the ‘kingdom’ which is ‘to come’ to 
exist somewhere, e.g. in heaven, whence it will come down at the end of days. 

4 Strack-Billerbeck, i. 176 n. 1. 

5 The ‘ natural law,’ as it is called in the ‘ Apostolic Constitutions’ (Lietzmann, 
Kl, Texte, No. 61, p. 13). Only after men have perverted this ‘ natural law’ has 
God given the written one. 

ὃ sharrut shamé, ‘ kingdom of heaven,’ iv. Rawl. 2, 5a, 8. 

7 According to these naive ideas, the righteous were to be wafted up on the 
wings of eagles or on clouds (cf. 1 Thess. iv. 17). See above, p. 258s. 

5 Cf. Jos., Ant., xviii. § 14, on the Pharisee doctrine, 


THE APPEARANCE OF JESUS IN JOSEPHUS 347 


belong to God, the earth he has given to men.’! Since, on the 
contrary, owing to Paul’s influence, such doctrines have been 
accepted by the Church, it is clear why the wonderful saying was 
not included in the Gospels. What Jesus meant was simply this: 
So soon as men, or the elect, attain to a knowledge of their status 
as children of God and act accordingly, i.e. treat each other as 
brothers, they forthwith enter, without a guide, without the aid 
of any fabulous monsters, into the kingdom of God, To attain 
this knowledge there is no need to journey to heaven, to cross the 
ocean, to descend into the underworld. In his heart and con- 
science every man bears the law by the following of which the 
kingdom of God can be realized here and now. It lies within 
every man’s power to build that kingdom. No enemy or oppressor 
can prevent it ; on the contrary, every enemy will tremble before 
God’s children fraternally united in the fear of the Lord. 

The peculiar emphasis laid on the moral requirement of self- 
knowledge is clearly inspired by that passage in Jeremiah so tellingly 
expressing the thought of the Deuteronomist on the law written in 
hearts and consciences : 5 


‘I will put my law in their inward parts, and in their heart will 
I write it ; and I will be their God and they shall be my people ; and 
they shall teach no more every man his neighbour, and every man 
his brother, saying, Know the Lord: for they shall all know me, 
from the least unto the greatest.’ 


As to the words ‘the kingdom is within you’ (ἐντὸς ὑμῶν), they 
are doubtless an echo of Deut. xxx. 14, ‘ The word is very near unto 
thee, in thy mouth and in thy heart, that thou mayest do tt.’ 


THE SENDING OUT OF THE SEVENTY IN SEARCH OF A KINGDOM, 
THE APPOINTMENT OF THE TWELVE JUDGES OF ISRAEL 


Notwithstanding the meaning of the phrase ‘ the kingdom of 
God is within you,’ established in the previous chapter, it would be 
a great error to regard the kingdom announced by Jesus as a purely 
spiritual state without any political character whatever. The last 
words of the Jogion we have been discussing, to the effect that the 
community of God’s children, once they had recognized them- 
selves as such, would be the terror of all the enemies of Israel, are 
in themselves enough to forbid such a spiritualizing of a very 
concrete political conception. For the Jews the Law has always 
been the covenant (b¢vith), binding every individual to God and 

1 Cf. Baraitha Sukkah, 5a; Mekhiltha on Exod. xix. 20 (65); W. Bacher, 
Die Agada der Tannaiten, i. 185 n. 3: ‘R. Jose b. Halafta says: God did not 
descend upon Mt. Sinai, Elijah did not ascend to heaven. The heavens belong 


to God ; the earth he has given to man’ (Ps. cxv. 16), 
2 Jer. Xxxi. 33 54. 


348 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


thereby uniting the individuals into one people. A gndsis, a know- 
ledge of God or of self, “redeeming’ the individual without liberat- 
ing the people from exterior oppression and without a renewal of 
the covenant of Sinai concluded after the release from bondage in 
Egypt, would have appeared entirely worthless to Jesus and to his 
hearers. 

This message of Jesus is still clearer (if that is possible) in the 
sentence preceding the one just discussed and which is quoted in 
the Gospel according to the Hebrews. It concerns the seeking and 
the finding of the kingdom : 


“He who seeks his kingdom must never cease until he has found it, 
and when he has found it he will wonder, and, lost in wonder, he will 
become a king and as sovereign will finally win (his well-earned) rest.’ 


This saying is unintelligible so long as the reader does not realize 
to whom it is addressed. It is surely impossible that a whole 
kingdom should have been promised to every pious individual, to 
every son and heir of God’s kingdom. It is a negation of the very 
idea of rulership if in the coming kingdom there are to be no more 
subjects or simple citizens, no ‘last’ who were once first; the 
kingdom is doubtless thought of as a monarchy, not as an anarchi- 
cal rule of the many (Homer’s πολυκοιρανίη). The enigma is 
explained by the fact that here again we are dealing with the 
fragment of a speech—this time of the instructions delivered to 
the ᾿ seventy ’(-two) when sent out on their mission. 

We know from the commentaries on the miracle of Pentecost 
in the Acts the Jewish view that the land of Israel was surrounded 
by seventy(-two) peoples, filling the countries of the world.2 Ac- 
cording to an old legend, the Sanhedrin was a world-ruling cor- 
poration of an importance equal to that of the Roman senate, 
and it was the duty of its members to know the seventy(-two) 
languages of the world so as to dispense with all interpreters.° 
The number of the seventy(-two) who were sent by Jesus ‘ into 
every city and place’* (ov ‘country’) ® may be very simply ex- 
plained by this number of the nations of the world ; they will have 
received their commission forthwith, as soon as so many disciples 
had collected around him. Each one of the disciples, who were 
to start “by twos’ so that they might help each other in any 
emergency as long as possible, was to journey to one of these nations, 

+ Clem, Alex., Strom., ll. 9. 45. 

* The Seleucide empire was divided into seventy-two provinces (Appian, 
aie Tal. Bab. Meg., 13b; Men., 65; Strack-Billerbeck on Acts ii. 6. 

4 Ὁ Whither he himself would come’ (later). 

®° Luke x. τ. These world-embracing plans might seem incompatible with 
Matt. xv. 24: ‘Iam not sent but to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.’ But 


at that time was not every corner of the ancient world dotted with settlements of 
those ‘lost sheep’? (Philo, Leg. ad Gaium, §§ 213 544.) 


THE APPEARANCE OF JESUS IN JOSEPHUS 349 


to convert it to submission to the will of God and of his Anointed, 
and then to rule over the kingdom thus established. None was to 
rest until he had found his destined kingdom ; so soon as he had 
reached the country allotted to him by God, he would be astonished 
at the wonderful rapidity with which he would gain his dominion, 
and as king of the country the ambassador of Jesus (for this is the 
meaning of ‘ apostle’)! after his toilsome wandering would at last 
find rest. Hence the words of the author of the Revelation: 
‘Jesus Christ . . . the prince of the kings of the earth . . . hath 
made us kings and priests,’ or ‘Thou hast made them . . . kings 
and priests, and they shall reign over the earth.’* The Seventy 
are thus regarded as the Sanhedrin of the future Israel of God’s 
kingdom. As the Roman senate appeared to foreign ambassadors 
like an assembly of kings, as it governed the peoples of the world 
through senatorial proconsuls, so must the members of this new 
Sanhedrin go forth, each to found for himself a kingdom. As 
‘king of kings’ the Messiah would rule over the liberated world, 
surrounded by the twelve ‘judges’ appointed in accordance with 
the Deuteronomic law * for the reunited tribes of Israel. Like a 
Roman emperor, he would in course of time favour each city and 
district with a personal visit.* 

Whatever, in these promises of a peaceful victory of the word of 
God and a dominion of the king’s messengers over all the nations 
of the earth, may appear to a modern reader the utopian dream 
of a fantastic imagination, is in reality the logical consequence of 
that firm, mountain-moving, childlike faith in the immediately 
impending miraculous intervention of God the Father, a faith 
shown by Jesus himself in every word and constantly enjoined 
upon his disciples. If man will but do the bidding of God, the Lord 
will grant success: he who is sent out as a beggar to seek a king- 
dom will find it, provided, in obedience to God’s command, he 
never desists from the quest. 

If one is inclined to regard such schemes of world-dominion as 
overweening fancies, it must not be forgotten that at the same time 
a new conception of the ruler’s calling is taught to these future 
kings: ® 

‘The kings of the Gentiles have lordship over them, and their 
great ones exercise authority over them, and they that have authority 

1 The nearest equivalent to the term apostoloi is the office and dignity of the 
Carlovingian missi regales, who are not merely ‘ king’s messengers ’ but travelling 
ministers of the ruler. An apostolos is not unlike also to the Jegatus of the 
Roman imperator. Inno case should the reader any longer think of the ‘ apostles Ὁ 
as simple ‘ missionaries ’ of the Christian faith. 

2 Rev. i. 5-6, v. 10, vill. το. 

3 Deut. xvi. 18. Cf. the twelve princes of Israel, Nuwm.i. 44; Josh. iv. 2, 4. 

* Luke πα, τ, 


δ Luke xxii. 25; cf. Mark x. 42 sq., Matt. xx. 25 sq. Luke appears to have 
preserved the last part of two clauses each containing three members. 


350 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


over them are called Benefactors (εὐεργέται). But ye shall not be 
so. Would one of you be a great one, let him be servant of all: 
among you let the oldest be as the youngest, and he that is chief as 
he that doth serve.’ 


In accordance with the counsel of the old sages to David’s grandson 
Rehoboam,! the king is to be the servant of his people ; and the 
‘Son of Man,’ identifying himself with the suffering ‘servant’ of 
deutero-Isaiah, though ‘ king of kings’ is but the servus servorum 
Det, 

Through the recovery of the speech delivered to the Seventy on 
their departure we can now also explain the wrong impression apt 
to be created by the instructions given to the Twelve, especially if 
taken out of their proper context. When we read in Matthew 3 
that the Twelve who were destined to be princes and judges of the 
twelve tribes of Israel were not to go to the nations of the world, 
nor even to enter any city of the Samaritans, the passage has the 
appearance of a narrow-minded Jewish nationalism. Such an 
attitude would be irreconcilable with the promise, excellently 
attested by Q,? made by Jesus to those who would come from the 
east and the west and sit down with the Jewish patriarchs in the 
kingdom of God. It would be an inconceivable retrogression from 
that universalism of the prophets actively pursued by the Phari- 
sees.4 Above all, it would be quite unthinkable in a Nasodraean 
who had received the baptism of John and, like the Baptist, would 
not recognize as Abraham’s children his descendants by blood, but 
only those who did the works of Abraham and the will of God. 
One who regarded apostate Israel as on a level with the heathen 
and in need of the proselyte’s baptism could never have wished to 
exclude the born heathen, repentant and coming to baptism, from 
the kingdom of God, 

The very idea of the messianic kingdom, meant to be a world- 
wide, a ‘catholic’ theocracy, is incompatible with the theory 
that Jesus wished to establish a petty Jewish Free State, not em- 
bracing even Samaria. The ‘Shiloh’ of Jacob’s blessing is he 
‘whom the nations obey, upon whom the nations wait.’> The 
kingdom of David, which the Messiah b. David was to restore, 
could not in the time of Jesus be conceived but as world-embracing, 
and only so could he himself picture the kingdom of God. The 
commission to the Twelve not to trouble about the Samaritans, 
not to take the road to the Gentiles, is therefore intelligible only on 
the supposition that at the same time the seventy(-two) were sent 
to the seventy(-two) nations, while the Twelve were not to leave 
the Land of Promise. The division of labour among the few 

1 1 Kings xii. 6 sq. > LY 
3 Mait. viii. 11 ; Luke xiii. 29. 4 Matt. xxiii. 14. 
® Gen, xlix. Io. 


THE APPEARANCE OF JESUS IN JOSEPHUS 351 


labourers in the Lord’s harvest-field was made necessary by the 
imagined shortness of the interval before the coming of the 
Anointed One: ὦ 


‘verily I say unto you, ye shall not have gone through the cities of 
Israel, till the Son of Man be come.’ 


For the rest, I leave open the question how far it may have been 
true that Jesus had at any time seventy(-two) real and trust- 
worthy disciples ; for even within the Twelve the existence of a 
still smaller circle of intimate friends, distinguished from the rest, 
can be clearly noticed. None the less, it would seem that Jesus on 
occasions was actually surrounded by a sufficiently large audience 
to be able to dispatch as many as seventy persons on this world- 
wide errand. ‘That these emissaries did not proceed very far in 
the execution of their task appears evident from the mention of 
their early return.? 


‘FISHERS OF MEN’ 


Beside the lost Jewish sheep in the ‘cities of Israel’? and the 
nations of the world, the kingdom must naturally embrace a third 
group of elect, the Jews in the Dispersion. The sending of mes- 
sengers to bring these back to the homeland seems to have been 
Jesus’ first care: the carrying out of this task was the aim of the 
call of the four ἡ fishers of men.’ 

Some years ago I pointed out ὁ that the words of Jesus calling 
the fishermen on the shore of the Lake of Galilee, “ Come ye after 
me and 1 will make you fishers of men,’ ὃ isolated as they are, could 
only be understood in a bad sense.6 To fish men can only mean to 
ensnare them by violence or deceit, to say nothing of the equivocal 
slave-hunter’s phrase ‘catch men αἰϊνο (ἀνθρώπους ζωγρεῖν) 
used in this context by Luke.” If a boatswain and fisherman, 
known to have been a Barjona or ‘ extremist,’ whilst his com- 
panions are described as the worst sinners,*® were thus mysteriously 
summoned by an unknown itinerant workman to join him instantly 
for the ᾿ catching’ or ‘ fishing’ of men, how else could he have 
interpreted the words but as a call to some daring enterprise such 
as kidnapping or highway robbery ? And are not both the silent 
unquestioning desertion of their boats and nets, and their ready 


1 Maiti. x. 23. 2 Luke x. 17. ΕΝ 9 Mati. x. 23. 

4 Orpheus the Fisher, London (Watkins), 1921, p. 86." 

5° Luke v. 10; cf. Mark 1.17, Matt. iv. 19. 

6 Cf. Eccl. ix, 12: ‘man also knoweth not his time: as the fishes that are 


taken in an evil net . . . so are the sons of men ensnared in an evil time.’ A 
long list of similar passages in my book (quoted above, note 4) on p. 86 n. I. 
7 v. 10. 


§ Not only by Celsus, hostile to the Christians, but also in the Epistle of 
Barnabas, on which cf. above, p. 340ς. 


352 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


response to the mysterious laconic call, most easily intelligible if 
they so interpreted it ? 

- A modern Christian reader imports his own ideas into the words 
of Jesus and assumes a familiarity with the whole symbolism of ‘the 
Fish’ and the fishermen connected with Christian baptism, without 
considering whether such an assumption is historically possible. 
I would not altogether exclude the possibility that in this call to 
be ‘fishers of men’ we may have a secret watchword of the 
Nasoraeans, since we are told in the Fourth Gospel?! that Andrew, 
the brother of Peter, and another disciple of Jesus had been 
followers of the Baptist, and since the metaphors of the ‘fisher of 
souls’ and the ‘ bad fisher ’ in Mandaean literature * suggest that 
the Baptist, in his exposition of E-zekiel’s vision of the life-giving 
stream, may have been accustomed to interpret symbolically the 
fish and the fishermen there mentioned.* 

A number of instances have been collected by Dr. I. Scheftelo- 
witz ὁ showing that pious, law-abiding Israelites were sometimes 
compared to fishes in the waters of instruction. It is therefore 
just conceivable (though of course no more than conceivable) that 
the Baptist interpreted the fish in that wonderful stream issuing 
from the sanctuary to mean the Israelites rising regenerate from 
the waters of Jordan, and regarded his own disciples as ‘fishers of 
men.’ If that were so, and if Andrew, before receiving the call 
from Jesus, really had been a disciple of John, then the fishermen 
on the Lake of Galilee may have understood the words in a meta- 
phorical, i.e. messianic, sense. But such a theory is in no way 
convincing and is quite unnecessary, since, as already stated, the 
instant response to the summons is quite intelligible if the words 
were understood in their literal meaning. Only, it must then be 
assumed that Jesus afterward disclosed the true meaning of the 
metaphor. In any case the traditional account remains somehow 
insufficient and esoteric. 

Of Jesus’ real meaning there can be no doubt. He is referring, 
as ever, to Holy Scripture, and there is but one passage in the Old 
Testament which can be quoted in illustration of his words. In 
the prophet Jeremiah ὅ he found the following oracle : 


‘Therefore, behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that it shall 
no more be said, As the Lord liveth, that brought up the children of 
Israel out of the land of Egypt ; but, As the Lord liveth, that brought 
up the children of Israel from the land of the north, and from all 


1 1, 40. 

2 Book of Jahja, ed. Lidzbarski, ii. 138 sgqq. The wicked ‘ fisher of souls ’ occurs 
also in the so-called*gospel of Gamaliel, Montague Rhodes James, The Apocryphal 
New Testament, Oxford, 1924, pp. 147 sqq. 

3 Ezek, xlvii. 9 sq. 

4 Aych. f. Religions-Wiss., xiv. (1011), p. 2 544. ; xvi. (1913), p. 300 544. 

5 xvl. 14 544. 


THE APPEARANCE OF JESUS IN JOSEPHUS 353 


the countries whither he had driven them: and I will bring them again 

into their land that I gave unto their fathers. Behold, I will send for 

many fishers, saith the Lord, and they shall fish them; and afterwards 

I will send for many hunters, and they shall hunt them from every 

mountain, and from every hill, and out of the holes of the rocks.’ 
The sense of the passage is clear : as in so many other promises of 
future salvation, we have here a promise of the reassembling of 
the dispersed. They are to be brought back to the last man. In 
the time of Cyrus (538) only a few families, driven by ardent love 
for the homeland, had found their way back to Palestine. Even 
when the temple was rebuilt (529-515) the majority of the exiles 
were contented with sending an embassy with presents.1 Ezra 
(ca, 430) brought back a few thousand ‘Zionists,’ as we should call 
them now. ‘The remainder had found a second home abroad, and 
in their new surroundings had become rather indifferent to the 
promises of the prophets. Even the pious held back, believing 
that the time of salvation was not yet come, and awaiting a 
miraculous intervention of God as a signal for the restoration 
of Israel. In Jerusalem itself people asked themselves whether 
they should continue the building of the temple by their own 
painful toil, or wait for God to work a miracle for his sanctuary.? 
And so the ‘ gathering of the dispersed’ remained incomplete. 
But ‘on that day,’ so dreamed the unknown prophet whose work 
is preserved in Jeremiah, even the last of the hesitating and 
loiterers, even those who would remain in exile willingly, would be 
fetched home. God will raise up a band of ‘fishers’ who will 
‘fish’ them out of the sea of the nations and of heathendom ; he 
will send out a host of ‘ hunters ’ who will ferret them out from the 
mountains and glens, wherever they may have concealed them- 
selves, round them up, and bring them home rejoicing. 

If it is this passage that is behind Jesus’ call to the Galilaean 
fishermen, it is for this final and complete messianic restoration of 
the dispersed from the four winds, from the four corners of the 
earth, to the Holy Land, that he would summon the four ‘fishers of 
men. Truly, a discouragingly small force for such a superhuman, 
world-wide task. Yea, but had not the Lord promised to send out 
multitudes of hunters and fishers into all the world to catch the 
prey ? Only a beginning had to be made ; the completion would 
be wrought by the Lord. ‘ Put out into the deep,’ Jesus calls to 
the fishermen, ‘and let down your nets for a draught.’* ‘The 
kingdom of heaven is like unto a drag-net (caynvn) that was cast. 
into the sea, and gathered of every kind: which, when it was filled, 
they drew up on the beach ; and they sat down and gathered the 
good into vessels, but the bad they cast away. 5o shall it be in 
the end of the world: the angels shall come forth and sever the 

1 Zech. vi. 9 544. 2 Hagg. 1. 2 sqq. 3 Luke v. 4. 

7 


ee 


\ 


354 Ὁ ς THE MESSIAH JESUS 


wicked from among the righteous.’! The work of the few human 
fishers will be completed by the Father’s heavenly messengers, as 
may be seen in another simile : 5 ‘ The labourers are few: pray ye 
therefore the Lord of the harvest that he send forth his labourers 
into his harvest’: in the fulness of time the ‘Son of Man’ will send 
forth his angel reapers to complete the harvest. 

Thus every word of Jesus in these early days breathes that 
firm, mountain-moving faith in the imminent miraculous inter- 
vention of God. It is no idle waiting, but an active ‘storming of 
the kingdom’ of heaven, that he demands. Men need but make 
a beginning: God will give the rest ; man’s task is to fulfil the 
‘higher righteousness,’ to help in realizing the predictions of the 
prophets, banish all worry about the following day, not to question 
what, as king’s messengers, they are to say in each case to move 
men’s hearts. The Spirit will enlighten them, and they will find 
the kingdom if they seek without resting, until the ‘Son of Man’ 


come. 


THE KING’s MESSAGE 


The four ‘fishers of men,’ ? the twelve future judges of the re- 
stored twelve tribes, the new seventy(-two) elders of the polity of 
Moses as the king’s messengers to the seventy(-two) nations of the 
world, are sent out by this unknown ‘son of David,’ who in 
poverty and lowliness wanders through the country as a tramping 
craftsman and healer. He himself pursues his way, teaching here 
and there on the Sabbath in the synagogues, at other times on the 
roads, on the mountain slopes, on the shore of the lake, or in the 
houses, wherever he turns for work and rest, relieving sufferers 
and enrolling recruits for his kingdom of God. His repeated 
successes in curing the ᾿ possessed,’ in spite of certain cases of 
relapse after temporary alleviation, which he freely admits and 
explains,’ confirm his confident trust in his election by God and in 
the immediate coming of the new era. 

Before his emissaries could have traversed even the towns and 
villages of Israel, however great their speed,® those 1240 days of 
Daniel’s prophecy, between the setting up of the ‘ abomination ’ 
in the temple and the final catastrophe, would needs have run their 
course. And who knows whether God in his infinite mercy might 
not shorten that term? But all fell out otherwise. Long before 

1 Matt. xiii. 47 544. The last judgment is effected by the ejection of the wicked 
from the Land of Promise, in which the elect will blissfully dwell for ever. 

2 Matt. ix. 37=Luke x. 2; cf. also Aait. xiii. 39. 

8. One for each of the ‘ four corners ’ of the world. 

‘ Matt. xii. 43 sqq.; Luke xi. 24 sqq. The end of Matt. xii. 45—missing in 
Luke xi. 26—is not genuine (Wellhausen). 
5 There were in Galilee alone 204 villages and towns, if we are to believe 


Josephus, Vita, § 235. 
‘ On the speed recommended to them, cf. Luke x. 4. 


THE APPEARANCE -OF JESUS IN JOSEPHUS 355 


the last period had elapsed, the Twelve, the Seventy,’ or such 
remnants as were still left of the two groups, returned to the 
Master. They told him of all they had done and taught ; they 
had anointed with oil and healed the sick and ‘ possessed,’ and 
cast out many devils. Of course, there had been occasional cases 
of failure. In reply to their enquiry into the reason for these dis- 
appointments, the Master consistently attributes them to their 
lack of sufficient faith.? But of the outcome of their embassy not 
a word is said by the disciples, not a word of their having carried 
out their commission and traversed the cities of Israel. Nowhere 
are we told of any concerted meeting after an interval, followed by 
a resumption of their travels. On the contrary, the extant records, 
under an expression of the satisfaction of Jesus and his disciples 
at the successful conquest of the demons, conceal but ill the fact 
that the disciples prematurely and finally abandoned their journey 
and returned to their Master because their preaching had been 
ineffective and their own faith uncertain—because, once they had 
left behind the invigorating presence of Jesus, the strength had 
failed them to carry the message everywhere with that indomit- 
able ardour which later on was shown by Paul, 

The expected miracle which Jesus had promised for the im- 
mediate future had delayed too long. The disciples were ἡ per- 
plexed,’ and could not fail to be perplexed. 

Jesus had taught the necessity of beginning on a small scale. 
The ‘higher righteousness’ would force its way ; the kingdom of 
God was already there ; among those who had subjected them- 
selves to God’s will and taken their yoke upon them it was in a 
small measure realized. As the seed ripens for the harvest with- 
out man’s agency, as the tiny grain of mustard-seed in one year’s 
time grows into a luxuriant shrub in which the birds of heaven 
nest, as the tiny morsel of leaven permeates three measures of 
meal, even so, through a mere handful of trusty messengers of the 
Lord, the whole world, Jews, Samaritans, and heathen nations, 
would be peacefully conquered for the kingdom of God. Nothing 
was needed but firm faith; the Lord would do the rest, in his own 
goodtime. The sons of the kingdom may still be fewin number, but 

‘Fear not, little flock, for it is your ather’s good pleasure to give 2 
you the kingdom.’ ? 3 


In reply to the anxious question, “ When, Lord, when comes the 
day ?’ he ever rebukes their impatience. The kingdom ‘ cometh 
not with observation.’ No expectation and observing the signs 
of the heavens will accelerate its coming. Confidence is needed : 
‘Shall not God avenge his elect, which cry to him day and _ night 


1 Luke x..17. ® Mark vi. 30; Luke x. 10a. 
3 Cf, Mark ix. 28; Matt, xvii. το. « Luke xu. 32. 


356 . THE MESSIAH JESUS 


should he suffer (this) for a long time over them? I say unto you 
that he will avenge them speedily.’1 Man cannot reckon with 
God, ‘ Lord we have done what thou commandedst us: now do 
thou thy part, now, forthwith, to-day.’ For, ‘Who is there among 
you, having a servant ploughing or keeping sheep, that will say 
unto him, when he is come in from the field, Come straightway and 
sit down to meat, and will not rather say unto him, Make ready 
wherewith I may sup, and gird thyself and serve me, till I have 
eaten and drunken; and afterward thou shalt eat and drink ? 
Doth he thank the servant because he did the things that were 
commanded ? ’* God is master, who decides at his pleasure when 
we may sit down to supper in the kingdom: who dares rebel if 
he still tarries a while? ‘Say,’ therefore, ‘we are unprofitable 
servants ; we have done that which it was our duty to do.’ 3 
Only the wicked servant will ‘say in his heart, My lord delayeth 
his coming.’* All these consolations, which to burning, eager 
hearts may more than once have sounded like poor comfort, are 
unmistakable answers to importunate questions of disciples who, 
weak in faith, could not endlessly hope and wait. 

Among the names of those who followed the call of the car- 
penter we find those of Simon the Zealot and Simon Barjona. If 
the gospel of quietism, of non-resistance to evil, could win these 
hard men of action, it must have been because Jesus had shown 
them some way of devoted action which would compel the saving 
intervention of God. The ‘conversion’ and ‘ change of mind’ 
(μετάνοια) Which the envoys were to preach to all the world can have 
been no mere inward compunction: the king’s messengers must have 
gone out under an exacting charge, hard to fulfil, and have likewise 
claimed from their hearers hard and great action, and not simply 
the adoption of a special messianic belief, a special Christology. 
_ What this demand was cannot long remain unknown to any un- 
biased reader of the Gospels—to wit, to renounce all one’s posses- 
sions,” i.e. to sell everything ὃ and to distribute the proceeds among 
one’s poorer brethren; to ‘deny oneself,’? i.e. to renounce one’s 
name ὃ and fame and worldly position, to assume the sign of the 
cross,® the sign of God’s elect 19 and the tribal sign of the homeless, 

1 Luke xviii. 7. 2 Luke xvii, 7-9. 

3 Jbid. * Luke xii. 45 ; Matt, xxiv. 48. 

* Luke xiv. 33; Mark x. 21. Cp. above, p. 332 n. 9; below, Ὁ. 3625.5. 

* This is what the Maccabees did before the final battle (2 Macc. viii, 14). 

’ Mark viii. 34, and parallels: 

§ As the Baptist had done (above, pp. 252, 240 1. 25). 

® Matt. x. 38: λαμβάνειν σταυρόν. The parallels have instead βαστάζειν, 
‘ to lift a heavy weight,’ an alteration of the text due to the evangelists thinking 
of the crucifixion, which Jesus could not have foreseen. Clem. Alex., Stvom., vii 
12, 80, p. 880, says, in quoting this logion: “τὸ σημεῖον βαστάσαι. The original 
wording was obviously λαμβάνειν τὸ σημεῖον, and the ‘ taking of the cross’ had, in 


the original saying of Jesus, the sense in which the crusaders of a later age under- 
stood it. 10 Ezek. ix. 4,6; Rev. vii. 3 544. 


THE APPEARANCE OF JESUS IN JOSEPHUS 357 


wandering Rekhabites and tramping Qenites, the ‘sign of Cain,’? 
and to follow Jesus as leader and king. 

There remains only the question to what sort of life Jesus in- 
tended to lead his adherents, and this must have been the burning 
question on the lips of all to whom these demands were addressed. 
In any case it is not to be believed that the summons to ‘the great 
renunciation’ could have been heard by deeply moved contem- 
poraries with the comfortable self-satisfaction and the obtuse lack 
of understanding which characterize the modern Christian reading 
it sleepily in his Bible on a Sunday morning, to forget all about 
it twenty-four hours later. Certainly, not a single follower or 
opponent of Jesus would have ventured to rob the simple words of 
their true import, by having recourse to one of those evasions 
adopted by many ever since Clement of Alexandria wrote his Quis 
dives salvetur. The historian, seeking only to ascertain the actual 
facts, cannot fail to admit that the yoke of Jesus, easy and light 
for the poor and miserable, seemed intolerably hard, oppressive, 
and devoid of any practical sense to the leisurely rich. 

Again, one must practically exclude the idea that Jesus himself 
meant to unite his followers into a religious mendicant order of 
wayfaring saints passively awaiting with prayer and fasting 
the end of this world. Nor, with his expectation of the immedi- 
ately impending Divine redemption of Israel from the yoke of the 
‘lords of this world,’ can he have thought of founding any ceno- 
bitic or hermit settlements such as are mentioned by Josephus. 
Such plans would never have raised hopes of the people’s liberation 
from the Roman yoke, and to us they appear irreconcilable with 
the portrait of the personality of Jesus as reflected in his extant 
words. Again, it would surely have been no fulfilment of his 
wishes and claims that individual believers, abandoning their 
business, should join his little Rekhabite band of tramping cratts- 
men and wandering teachers and take to the road with him, sharing 
his life and work. Lastly, he cannot have thought that it would 
be a sufficiently strong effort to compel the coming of the kingdom 
that every believer should continue in his present station in life 
in unselfish love of his neighbour and perfect submission even to 
wrong and violence until it would please God to punish the wicked 
and radically to renovate this lost world. The call of Jesus for 
definite, liberating action was directed to the people of Israel as 
a whole. 

Not individuals only, but the people as such, or at least the 
‘remnant’ of the true Israel, were to renounce all their possessions 
and thus accomplish that hardest sacrifice for which the followers 
of Judas Maccabee 2 had set the example. The Land of Promise, 


τ Cf. my paper in the Monde Oriental of 1929, pp. 50 ἢ. 
2 See above, p. 356 ἢ. 6; below, p. 359.. 


358 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


the people’s God-given property, had in punishment for their sins 
been converted into a new house of bondage. Since according to 
Deuteronomic law ! they were not allowed to own the Promised 
Land under the overlordship of foreigners, they were to sell and 
abandon it. A new exodus into the wilderness under the leader- 
ship of a new Moses 5 was inevitable. 

The number of possible courses open was indeed strictly 
limited. Among these few Jesus had to make his choice. Between 
the alternatives of a passive waiting for God’s intervention to 
liberate his people from the foreign yoke, and an active struggle for 
the realization of God’s kingdom, Jesus had clearly taken his 
stand on the side of the Zealots, who ‘since the days of the Baptist 
had sought to take the kingdom by storm.’* On the question of 
joining the Zealots in a revolt against Rome and the Jewish 
authorities dependent on Rome, he had decided in the ‘Sermon on 
the Mount,’ the political significance of which has been emphasized 
above,* against active resistance to wrong, If God’s command- 
ment ‘Thou shalt not kill’ and the Golden Rule were to be inviol- 
ably observed, an armed rebellion, a war of liberation, could not 
be agreeable to God. But if, as was taught both by the Baptist 
and by Judas of Galilee, the subjection to foreign dominion was 
a grave infraction of the Deuteronomic law of kingship and an 
apostasy from God, what course remained ? Obviously, none but 
what in Roman history is known as the secessio plebis, an exodus, 
a return to the nomad life of privation but of freedom in the desert, 
such as Hosea ὃ had preached and a particular group of Zealots and 
Barjonim had repeatedly sought to carry into execution, If, as 
King Agrippa has pointed out in his great speech,® the whole 
inhabited world was Roman and subject to the dominion of the 
‘prince of this world,’ there remained only the uninhabited desert 
as a place of refuge for the God-fearing. 

The period in the desert had been the time of the bridal love of 
the community of Israel for her Divine bridegroom:? the tribes 

1 xvii. 14 sq. 

" Therefore Moses and Elijah are seen and heard (below, p. 372 n. 7) talking 
to Jesus about τὴν ἔξοδον αὐτοῦ ἣν ἔμελλε πλῆρουν, ‘his exodus, which he was to 
accomplish in Jerusalem’ (Luke ix. 31). Exactly the same words τὴν ἔξοδον 
αὐτοῦ are used by Josephus, B.J., vii. p. 439, where he describes the projected 
exodus of the poor weaver Jonathan of Cyrene, ‘ who led not a few’ of the Jews 
‘into the desert, promising to show them divine ‘‘ miracles and manifestations ’”’ ’ 
(σήματα καὶ φάσματα δείξειν). The commentators, who are wont to explain the 
word ἔξοδος in Luke ix. 31 by comparing 2 Petey i. 15, where it means the exit of 
the soul out of the body, forget that this mystic sense of the word is based on 
Philo’s allegorical explanation of the ‘ exodus’ from Egypt as symbolizing the 
liberation of the soul from the bondage of matter (Leg. alleg.,ii. 77). But this 
allegory occurs nowhere but in the Hellenistic Soph. Sal.,iii. 2; ibid., vii. 6, the 
word is explained by adding ‘life’ (‘entrance into life and exit out of it’); 
equally so in Josephus, Axt., ἵν. 189 (Philo, de Virt., 77), andin Pap. Lond., 77, 57. 


5. See above, p. 259 n. 1. 4 See above, p. 341 f. 
aap | ely By S° B.J., ii. § 388. UFOs; it. 


THE APPEARANCE OF JESUS IN JOSEPHUS 359 


had left the fleshpots of Egypt and the ‘ house of bondage’ to 
serve their Lord and Master. A new exodus into the wilderness 
under a new Moses could alone blot out Israel’s sins, bring her 
freedom, and make her worthy, under a new Joshu‘a ben Nun or 
Jesus IXOYC,! to recover from God’s hand the Land of Promise, 
after the heathen nations have annihilated one another? in the 
last messianic war, along with the unredeemed and eternally lost 
children of Israel. 

To understand the stern command of Jesus ‘to renounce all 
and follow him’ in its simple original meaning, one has only 
to read the summons for freedom of that great model of Jewish 
heroes, Mattathias ben Johanan of Modein, in the. Lirst Book of 
Maccabees : 3 


‘And Mattathias cried out in the city with a loud voice, saying, 
Whosoever is zealous for the law and maintaineth the covenant, let 
him come forth after me. And he and his sons fled into the mountains 
and forsook all they had in the city. Then many that sought after 
justice and judgment went down into the wilderness to dwell there, 
they and their sons and their wives and their cattle . . . they went 
down into the secret places in the wilderness.’ 


From the opening words of that fateful summons, ‘Whosoever is — 
zealous for the law,’ the party of the ‘ Zealots’ in the time of 
Herod the Great derived their name. Every ‘zealot for the law’ 
was required by Mattathias to ‘ follow him.’ His followers, seek- 
ing ‘justice and judgment,’ ‘ forsook all they had in the city’ 
and ‘went down into the desert to live there.’ That is what Jesus 
demands of his followers, to cast off all fettering possessions as 
chains of slavery, to leave all behind and follow him to liberty. 
Whenever some one asks his advice and inquires into the where- 
abouts of his dwelling,* he replies : 


‘Come and see.®. . . The foxes have holes and the birds of the 
air have nests ;° but the son of man hath not where to lay his head.’? 


Into the same context belongs, most probably, also the famous 
saying, ‘In my Father’s house there are many mansions,’ ® early 
misunderstood and misinterpreted. God’s house is the wide world, 
and there are many places of-rest for the homeless wanderer. 
Any one leaving his home and his friends like Abraham ® of old 


1 Ben Nun simply means ‘ fish,’ and here, I think, is the ultimate root of the 
symbol IXOYC applied to Jesus by the early Church. 

2 This is foretold by Ezek. xxxviii. 21, Zech. xiv. 13, Hagg. ii. 22, Enoch 
lvi. 7; cf. Bar. Ixx. 7. 

2 11,27. Sq. 4 John 1. 39. 5 Ibid. 

ὁ Cf, Plutarch, Tiberius Gracchus, ix. 4: ‘The wild beasts of Italy have holes 
and nests and places of rest, but to those who fight and die for Italy nothing 
but the light and the air is left ; without house and home they roam about with 
their wives and children.’ 

? Matt. viii. 20; Like ix. 59. 8 John xiv. 2. ® Cf. Acts vil. 3. 


360 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


will be rewarded a hundredfold.t Whoever ceases to cultivate his 
field and leaves it will be sent into God’s harvest-field.2, Whoever 
leaves his boats and nets will be made a ‘ fisher of men.’? In 
short, he advocates complete withdrawal from all economic labour, 
non-co-operation, and a general flight from the Land of Promise. 

If Josephus, in spite of good sources, was not aware that the 
doctrines of Judas of Galilee were dependent upon the preaching 
of the Baptist, it is not surprising that he should also have failed 
to see any connexion between the promises of the ‘ miracle-worker ’ 
crucified by Pilate and those ‘jugglers’ (yénres), 1.6. Rekhabites, 
who, under the governorship of Felix, led the people out into the 
wilderness to show them ‘signs of liberty.’4 But this cannot, of 
course, prevent the modern historian from seeing such a connexion. 
In fact, some of the most enigmatical utterances and actions of 
Jesus find their most simple and luminous explanation in the 
assumption of such a summons issued by him, though not expressly 
told in the Gospel tradition. Above all, we have the exhortation 
which has at all times been the subject of debate : 


‘Be not anxious for your life, what ye shall eat or what ye shall 
drink ; nor yet for your body, what ye shall put on. [5 not the life 
more than the food, and the body than the raiment ? Behold the 
birds of the heaven: they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather 
into barns ; and your heavenly Father feedeth them. Are not ye of 
much more value than they? .. . And why are ye anxious con- 
cerning raiment? Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow: 
they toil not, neither do they spin; yet I say unto you that even 
Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. But if 
God doth so clothe the grass of the field, which to-day is and to- 
morrow is cast into the oven, (shall he) not much more (clothe) you, 
O ye of little faith! Be not therefore anxious, saying, What shall we 
eat ? or, What shall we drink ? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed ? 
(for after all these things do the Gentiles seek) ; for your heavenly 
Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things. But seek ye 
first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be 
added unto you.’ 


This utterance, which, torn from its context as it is read to-day, 
would appear as a preposterous condemnation of natural fore- 
thought in domestic matters, at once becomes significant and 
justified if it is assumed to have been addressed to reluctant 
persons of little faith, hankering after the fleshpots of Palestine, 


1 Mark x. 29; Matt. xix. 29; Luke xviii. 29. 

* Matt. ix. 37 sq.; Luke x. 2. 3. See above, p. 353. 

* B.J. and Halésis, ii. ὃ 258 sqg.; Ant., xx. 8. 6, and το § 188. 

* See, however, above, p. 358 n. 2, and below, P. 3722, on ‘ the exodus he was 
to accomplish.’ 

§ Matt. vi. 25 sqq. 

* The verset about the impossibility of adding an ell to one’s stature belongs to 
some different discourse ; see below, p. 415 un. 7. 


THE APPEARANCE OF JESUS IN JOSEPHUS 361 


who had asked Jesus on what they could live and wherewithal 
they could be clothed if they followed him into the desert. 

Nor can any reader fail to note that the Gospels attribute to 
Jesus a symbolical repetition of the two great miracles of Moses in 
the desert, the feeding of the people with bread from heaven? and 
the drawing of water from the rock.*. Of the miracle of the loaves 
Dr. Albert Schweitzer writes : ‘ Weisse pointed out years ago that 
the miraculous feeding constitutes one of the greatest historical 
problems, in that the narrative, like that of the transfiguration, is 
embedded in a definite historical context and therefore impera- 
tively calls for explanation.’ The desired historical connexion of 
this messianic ‘acted parable’ can still be clearly recognized. Two 
of the accounts emphatically state that the people ‘ followed’ 
Jesus into the desert.’ The disciples lay stress on the fact that they 
were in the desert, and expressly ask, ‘ Whence can we get bread 
enough 7 the desert to satisfyso many?’* This is the question— 
the fundamental question, that is, and not a problem arising out 
of this single occasion. And Jesus replied with an easily intelligible 
symbolic action, a δρώμενον, that God would supply all their needs 
to a people obedient and first seeking for the kingdom, adding that 
man does not live by bread alone in the solitude,® but by the word 
of God: ‘ Not hunger for bread, nor thirst for water, but a hunger 
for hearing the words of the Lord ’® was befitting the believers: 
‘Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness, for 
they shall be filled.’” Jesus was therefore the first to do what 
the harashim (the γόητες of Josephus) did, imitating him, in the 
time of Felix. He led out a multitude into the desert and there 
showed and interpreted to them the miracle of the manna and 
other ‘tokens of coming deliverance.’ He thought of doing what 
the rebel Theudas, the ‘ friend’ or ἡ acquaintance’ of St. Paul,® 
who passed himself off as a Joshua (—Jesus) vedivivus,® had at- 
tempted to do by crossing the Jordan: in God’s appointed time he 
hoped to lead the people back across the Jordan into the Land of 
Promise, liberated from its enemies by the final messianic war.?° 

For a mountain-moving faith, reading the scriptural story of 
the exodus from Egypt of a vast multitude (600,000 men) !! and of 
their wondrous forty years in the wilderness as a veracious history 

: ΤΟ νι. 51: ct. Z2.N.T.W., 3925, Ῥ. 187: 


2 On the exact parallelism between Moses and the hoped-for Messiah, cf. 
Strack-Billerbeck, i. 87, ii. 481. Halévy, Moise dans l’histoive et dans la légende, 


Paris, 1927. 
3 Luke ix. 11; John vi. 2. 4 Mark viii. 4; Matt. xv. 33. 
5. See above, p. 285 n. 3. 
9. Amos viii. 11; Matt. v. 6. 7. 7014. 


8. Clem. Alex., Stvom., vii. 17: Valentinus (the Gnostic) was ‘a hearer of 
Theudas, who was an acquaintance (γνώριμος) of Paul.’ 

9 Acts v. 36. 10 Cf. above, p. 359 ἢ. 2. 

11 Exod. xii. 37; Num. 1. 46 544. 


362 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


of Divine miracles, the idea of leading a people of believers out of 
enslaved Palestine into the free desert could not appear as any- 
thing fantastic or impossible. In the desert lived, in poverty 
indeed, but free and owning no master but God, the nomad tribes 
of Ishmael, and above all the Rekhabite fellow-tribesmen of the 
wandering carpenter’s son. Why should it be impossible to lead 
back the faithful ‘ remnant ’ into the wilderness and to feed them 
there ? Certainly only a miracle could feed some hundred thou- 
sand beyond the region of cultivation, but who knew whether the 
number of the elect might not after all be as small as the little band 
leaving Mesopotamia at the bidding of God along with Abra- 
ham? And in the event that thousands followed the call, was 
there any reason to doubt that God would again feed them by a 
miracle ? 

The idea, then, would not seem unwarranted that Jesus desired 
to lead his followers back to the Rekhabite life in the desert. If 
his messengers went through the cities and villages of Israel with 
the call to ‘ come back’ (shubhu /), they meant by that, after the 
manner of Hosea, a return to the free desert life of the olden days. 

This theory gives the simplest possible explanation of the 
messengers’ lack of success in raising recruits for the kingdom. 
The small landholders certainly did not show the slightest in- 
clination to give up their farms.!_ The attitude of the wealthy is 
aptly characterized by the doubtless historical passage on the 
‘rich youth,’ ‘owning many lands and goods,’? whom ‘Jesus 
loved.’ All the recruits that could be reckoned with must there- 
fore have come from the ranks of the destitute, such as those who 
at a later date were prepared to follow the weaver Jonathan of 
Cyrene into the African desert. But even among the poor the 
message of Jesus cannot, for obvious reasons, have met with the 
hoped-for response. Those who had retreated into the desert with 
the Maccabees had received arms as the first gift of their leaders ; 4 
those who afterwards repaired with the Zealots into the mountains 
knew that they were embarking on a lusty guerilla warfare in 
which those who had nothing to lose might possibly gain some- 
thing. Not without some reason does Josephus invariably speak 
of them as λῃσταί, ‘robbers.’ But what novel sort of champion 
of liberty was this who would lead his followers to the freedom of 
the desert but forbid them absolutely to make war or even to 
resist attack, and would impose upon them an even stricter justice 
than the one with which they had doubtless more than once come 


+“ multas divitias et agros,’ Old Latin, so-called African text of Mark x. 22 
and of Clement of Alexandria (χρήματα πολλὰ καὶ ἀγρούς) 

* Mark x. 29; Matt. xix. 29; cf. also Luke xix. 29, where the word ‘lands’ 
has been omitted. 

AU OST, (och Vile LES ΤῈ 4 1 Macc. xiv. 32: 


. 


THE APPEARANCE OF JESUS IN JOSEPHUS 363 


in conflict? What was to be hoped from a new ’abba barjonim 
who would not allow his followers to plunder the surrounding 
districts, but would have them wander through the desert weapon- 
less and, like the poor and humble salubim, the modern .S/eb, serve 
the other tribes by their labour or even beg of them? Such a 
prospect could not tempt many even among the ebhvonim in Israel, 
who for all their piety and love of liberty did not care overmuch to 
become tramps and beggars. So the envoys must have returned 
disappointed, having abandoned their recruiting campaign. Even 
their Master’s own success can never have exceeded very modest 
limits. The ‘ crowds’ attracted by him and his disciples were 
invalids who came to be healed of diseases, and sometimes also 
their relatives. Others pressed around him to hear a great 
preacher ‘instructed unto the kingdom of heaven... who 
bringeth forth out of his treasure things old and new.’' But those 
who renounced all to follow him in this early period can never 
have been many more than those four, those twelve, and, finally, 
those seventy. At the most there may at one time have been 
several hundreds.2 The mission could not be other than a complete 
failure, could not but end with a shattering of the trustful con- 
fidence even of those first converts of the hidden Messiah. God 
had not intervened, and the coming of the ‘Son of Man’ announced 
by Jesus did not take place before the return of his delegates. His 
call died away unheard. 


‘I CAME NOT TO SEND PEACE, BUT A SWORD’ 


The greatest difficulty encountered in every attempt to present 
the life and work of Jesus according to the evidence of his own 
words preserved in the sources is the sharp, irreconcilable contra- 
diction between the so-called ‘fire and sword’ sayings on the one 
side and the beatitudes on the peacemakers and the meek, the 
prohibition to kill, to be angry, to resist wrong, and the command 
to love one’s enemy, contained in the sermon on the mount, on 
the other. 

To deny that the ‘fire and sword’ words were spoken by Jesus 
and to attribute them to a political group of Zealots within the 
original community,* who foisted upon the Master the expression 
of their own feelings, expectations, and efforts, seems, without 
further proof, a sort of special pleading. 

Since the Church from the days of Paul consistently followed 

1 Mait. xiii. 52. 

2 Cf. above, p. 10 n. 1, Sossianus Hierocles on the ‘ goo bandits ’ of Jesus. 


3 Cf, Luke ix. 54, where some Zealots want to draw down by prayer fire from 
heaven upon the Samaritans. 


364 THE.MESSIAH JESUS 


the path of reconciliation with the empire, those words would 
certainly have been deleted had it been possible to do so, i.e. had 
they not been too surely attested as genuine. Asa matter of fact, 
though not suppressed outright and by common consent, they 
have in the course of time been toned down as much as possible. 
Where Matthew makes the Master say,1 ‘ Think not that I came 
to cast peace * on the earth ; I came not to cast peace, but a sword,’ 
Luke,’ in the extant text,4 weakens the hard word, replacing ‘a 
sword’ by ‘division.’ Conversely, half of the original saying pre- 
served in Luke,® ‘I came to cast fire upon the earth; and what 
will I, if it is already kindled ?’ is wanting in Matthew, a prudent 
and not surprising omission if one recalls the charge made against 
the apostles of wishing to set the temple on fire,® and, later on, 
against the Christians under Nero,’ 

The question must be asked, Which is more probable, that Jesus 
should have spoken thus of himself as the kindler of the messianic 
world-conflagration, or that a party in the original community 
with incendiary tendencies should have put these words into his 
mouth? The answer cannot be doubtful. A further point to be 
borne in mind is the fact that the sharp contradiction in question 
occurs only in the Gospel of Matthew. Only there do we find side 
by side the saying about the sword, and the beatitudes of the meek 
and the peacemakers and the prohibition to resist violence. 

In Luke these blessings are all wanting, as is the fundamental 
prohibition of resistance to wrongful oppression. The command 
to love one’s enemies, it is true, stands unaltered, but this does not 
necessarily conflict with a permission to use the sword in an honour- 
able and holy war. Every decent soldier knows that he may 
engage in a life-and-death struggle for nation and country without 
a spark of hatred for an opponent whom he respects as a man. 
The ‘hymns of hate’ have at all times been the specialty of 
the cowardly rabble who in times of war ‘keep the home fires 
burning.’ 

There is therefore no inconsistency in the Jesus of Luke, even 
though at the close of the work he calls his followers to arms. To 
the critics who would simply strike out the ‘sword’ passages as 


oS. Bas 

* βαλεῖν = hetil shalom, a Semitism. Nobody casts a sword: but fire is 
thrown. This proves that Matthew’s source contained what Luke xii. 4, 9 Tread 
about ‘ casting a fire’ on the earth. 

po vt eae. § Ul 

* Certainly not the original text, since Luke alone has preserved Jesus’ com- 
mand to buy swords. 

® xii. 49. ὁ. Apocryphal Gospel of Peter, ὃ 26. 

7 Ann., Xv. 44. See above, Ὁ. 91:1. 

* vi. 29: ‘turning the other cheek’ remains; but the context is merely an 
exhortation to humility toward one’s own people, like Mark ix. 50. The armed 
enemy of one’s country does not give blows on the cheek, but strikes with the sword. 


THE APPEARANCE OF JESUS IN JOSEPHUS 365 


an interpolation one might retort with equal justice that the 
passages about peacemaking and non-resistance in Matthew are the 
interpolations of a group of pacifists, represented by Paul, in the 
early Church. For the ‘ fire and sword’ passages are attested by 
two Gospels, the sayings about peacemaking by only one. A 
third course would be to follow Mark alone, who knows neither the 
‘sermon on the mount,’ with its code of ‘higher righteousness,’ nor 
the ‘ fire and sword’ passages. But his Jesus, though unencum- 
bered by inconsistencies, is also shorn of his fascinating singularity. 
Nor will it do to point out the common experience that thorough 
consistency is a virtue rarely possessed by humans. For we are 
not dealing here with the all too familiar contradiction between life 
and doctrine observable in so many philosophers, but with a clash of 
two entirely different conceptions of messianic redemption. The 
idea of the ‘ better righteousness,’ of self-sacrifice and non-resist- 
ance, is irreconcilable with the announcement that the Redeemer 
brings to mankind the sword of rebellion. The commentators 
have of course acquired the habit of interpreting passages such 
as Matt. x. 35, 38, and Luke xii. 51 sq., by pointing to the coming 
disruption of families into Christians and non-Christians. They 
fail to answer the question why a brother who remained a Jew 
should have persecuted a ‘Christian,’ 1.6. a Messianist brother, with 
such bitterness, the whole difference of opinion turning about the 
problem whether the expected Messiah was yet to come, or whether 
he had already revealed himself in the form of the carpenter Jesus. 
Why should such a relatively unimportant, one might almost say 
academic, question have divided Israel and the whole world into 
two hostile camps, and that in face of the fact that the Jews were 
not unanimous among themselves as to whether a Messiah would 
come at all, or whether God might not after all prefer to judge the 
world himself ? The question must therefore have involved some 
more deep-seated antagonism of principle, of practical politics, of 
man’s attitude toward the powers that be. When, after all, have 
orthodox Jews ever ‘delivered’ heretics to death on account of 
their dissenting opinions or sought to exterminate them with fire 
and sword ? 

Insurrection and war between brothers for Jesus’ sake could 
only arise if his faithful followers wished to hurry their brethren 
into some fateful act, and in so doing naturally met with the bitter 
opposition of their relatives, whose very life and existence were 
thereby threatened. If the faithful wished to follow their Master 
into the wilderness, they must indeed have been prepared for the 
most lively opposition, for parents would naturally hold back their 
children and husbands their wives from a step of such conse- 
quence. Jesus’ call must certainly have led to disruption and strife 
among families, as did the call to the civil war a generation or so 


366 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


later,1 and as it had done in the period of the Maccabees. Those 
who accept this interpretation—and 1 must confess that with 
A. Schweitzer I do not see any other—will admit that the sayings 
about the sword and fire may well have been pronounced by the 
same person who delivered the ‘sermon on the mount’ on non- 
resistance and the peacemakers, but certainly not at the same 
period of his life. 

A simple solution of the seeming inconsistency hes in the 
natural assumption of a spiritual development on the part of the 
author. A very good and in many respects a striking parallel is 
offered by the dilemma faced by more modern pacitfists with their 
well-known and justly discredited phrases of ‘the war to end war,’ 
the war which is to be ‘the last war,’ etc. The hoped-for miracle 
of Jahweh failing to be forthcoming, the followers of the new 
Messiah had only two ways open to them—either to wait inde- 
finitely or else to follow the path shown by the Baptist, Judas of 
Galilee, and the Zealots, i.e. to take the kingdom of God by storm, 
to seek the way to peace through a holy war. 

If Jesus ever put to himself the question whether an exodus with- 
out resort to force would be possible, he must have read the clear 
and unequivocal answer not only in the ruthless measures by which 
the Romans effectively quenched all attempts at rebellion, but even 
more in the story of the first exodus in the time of Moses. There we 
are expressly told that the children of Israel went up ‘armed’ out 
of the land of Egypt.*. Then there was the story of the pursuit by 
the Egyptians, requiring another miracle on the part of Jahweh ; 
and lastly, there were the wars against the tribes in the desert. 

Only if the number of the ‘elect’ following his call was so small 
as to escape detection by the Romans could he count upon a 
peaceful exodus and a subsequent peaceful life in Rekhabite 
fashion. There may have been a time when Jesus did not expect 
more followers, though that cannot have been at the time when he 
sent out the Twelve and the Seventy. Then he evidently wanted 
his message to reach many, hoping, perhaps, to muster around him 
two-fifths or even three-fifths of the whole population.’ If such a 
crowd could be put in motion and asked to meet for the feast of the 
Passover, the day of the exodus from Egypt, then there was per- 
haps. hope of taking the opponents by surprise and breaking away 

1 Josephus, B.J., 11. 13. 8, § 264 ff.: ‘the jugglers (γόητες) and brigands, banding 
together, incited numbers to revolt . . . threatening to i// anybody who sub- 
mitted to Roman domination . . . looting the houses of the wealthy, they 
murdered their owners and set the villages afive’—procedures exactly analogous 
to those practised by the Sinn [einers against loyalists, not so many years ago. 

2 Exod, xiii. 18. The word ‘armed’ is intentionally suppressed in the Greek 
version, because the Jews in Ptolemean Egypt were not allowed to possess arms. 
For the same apologetic reason, Josephus, Avi., ii. 15. 3, insists upon telling us 


that the Jews emigrated unarmed and through a miracle of God received the arms, 
washed on shore, of the drowned Egyptian army. ® Cf. Luke xii. 52. 


THE APPEARANCE OF JESUS IN JOSEPHUS 367 


into the near-by desert. But the chances were small that he could 
make such a move without a collision with the Roman garrison or 
the Herodian troops—nay, with opponents from among his own 
people. Nor could he very well lead the crowds, unarmed, like 
sheep for the slaughter, against an attack of pursuers in the more 
than probable event of a decisive battle. Even if Jesus himself 
trusted too confidently in the miraculous and seasonable help of 
God, Simon the Zealot and Simon Barjona can have been under no 
delusion as to the dangers involved. And Jesus himself, when he 
thought over the situation, must have realized that he was bringing 
not peace but the sword to those prepared to follow him. 

This, then, is the easy solution of the apparently irreconcilable 
contradictions. From the previous failures of Judas of Galilee and 
his rivals Jesus had learnt that the ‘fulfilment of all righteousness’ 
was not enough to ensure the intervention of God, and that armed 
revolt was not the ‘way of the law’ pleasing to God. The ‘better 
righteousness’ appeared to him ordained by God; and since the 
Deuteronomic law of royalty forbade the people of Israel to submit 
to foreign rulers, there remained only renunciation of * houses and 
lands ’—in fact, of the Land of Promise itself. 

In the early period of his messianic career, the period of the 
sermon on the mount, Jesus was a thorough quietist. Exactly 
how he departed from this attitude we do not know. It may be 
that the Zealots among his disciples, whom he had already won over 
in spite of his pacifistic doctrines, gradually drove him forward on 
the fatalroad. It may also be that in the face of the impenetrable 
silence of heaven he decided on his own account to give up waiting, 
and, in the réle of the ‘prophet like Moses’ promised in Deuiero- 
nony,' to lead the people out of the land of bondage to freedom. 

If the sequence in the traditional text could be trusted, the 
momentous decision may have been taken before he sent out his 
royal messengers. For the sayings about the fire and the sword 
occur in the very speech made to those messengers. But two 
important circumstances militate against such a conclusion. So 
long as he hoped for the intervention of God he seems to have con- 
templated but a small circle of ‘elect’ ones and to have refrained 
from attempts to rouse the masses. Furthermore, so long as he 
had to conceal his Messiahship and speak only in parables, his 
words could have no very far-reaching effect. 

Subsequently he appears to have changed his mind, In his 
instructions to the Twelve we are suddenly told : 3 

‘ There is nothing covered that shall not be revealed, and hid that 
shall not be known. What I tell you in the darkness, speak ye in 
the light: and what ye hear (said) in the ear, proclaim upon the 


housetops..’ - 
1 Deut. xviii. 15. “ Matt. x. 26 sq. 


368 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


Allied to this passage ! are the words : 


‘Is the lamp brought to be put under the bushel or under the bed, 
and not to be put on the stand? For there is nothing hid save that 
it should be manifested : neither was anything made secret but that 
it should come to light.’ 


This saying could certainly find no more suitable position than in 
such an address. But it is equally certain that the disciples would 
have preferred to take any risk rather than shout from the 
housetops what was confided to them in the same speech as it now 
stands—-to wit, that their Master was to bring to the inhabitants of 
the country not peace but the sword and civil war, and that he was 
yearning to ‘cast fire upon the earth.’ 

What could have been shouted freely from the housetops can 
only have been the good news of Jesus in its original form. The 
proclamation of non-resistance could not have been unacceptable 
to the ‘lords of this world.’ Messengers carrying such a message 
were threatened by no danger from either Romans or Jews. On 
the other hand, we know from the events which took place under 
Festus and Catullus that messengers sent to summon people to 
leave all their possessions and march into the desert had every 
reason to fear persecution of every kind—nay, danger to life 
and limb. 

The injunction henceforth to proclaim the secret openly from 
the housetops can therefore hardly belong to the same parting 
speech as the prediction that the messengers must be prepared for 
persecution and death for Jesus’ sake. Asa matter of fact, Luke? 
has inserted these words in a totally different context. The same 
conclusion is reached when one reads the messengers’ instructions 
in Matthew—first the avowal of Jesus that he brings not peace but 
a sword, and then the command to the disciples to salute and carry 
peace into every house.* It is not different with the address to 
the Seventy in Like.* 

Our attempt to draw a distinction between an earlier and a later 
mission is not mere conjecture. Apart from the fact that Luke 
gives two distinct messengers’ instructions, to the Twelve and the 
Seventy respectively,® we have the express attestation of such a 
distinction from the mouth of Jesus himself in the most remarkable 
of all the sayings about the sword : ὃ 


‘ And he said unto them, When I sent you forth without purse and 
wallet and shoes, lacked ye anything ? And theysaid, Nothing. And 
he said unto them, but now, he that hath a purse, let him take it, and 
likewise a wallet: and he that hath none, let him sell his cloke and 


1 Mark iv. 21 sq.; Luke viii. 16 sq.; cf. Matt. v. 14 sqq. 
* xil. 2 sqq. 5. Matt. x. 11 sqq. X05 ὃ δὲ 
5 Luke ix. 1 sqq.; X. 1 δᾶ, § Luke xxii. 35 544. 


THE APPEARANCE OF JESUS IN JOSEPHUS 369 


buy asword. For 1 say unto you, that this which is written must be 
fulfilled in me: And he was reckoned with the transgressors; ! for that 
which concerneth me hath fulfilment. And they said, Lord, behold, 
here are two swords. And-he said unto them, That is enough.’ 


Here it is highly significant that the time of the first sending out 
is distinguished from ‘now’ (ἀλλὰ viv). By this ‘now’ Luke 
understands that last hour of all which Jesus spent with his dis- 
ciples. He puts the words among the parting speeches of Jesus 
after the last supper, clearly because he interprets one phrase to 
mean ‘that which is predicted of me hath now an end,’ and there- 
fore places it as near as possible to the close of Jesus’ life. 

This date, however, is highly improbable. For it is inconceiv- 
able that at the moment when he knew himself betrayed and lost, 
Jesus, instead of urging his disciples to instant and secret flight, 
should have bidden them sell their last dispensable article of 
clothing to buy weapons quite useless to a single fugitive pursued 
by soldiers. Moreover, the phrase ‘hath an end’ certainly has no 
reference to the end of his life.® 

The words therefore belong to another period, of course con- 
siderably later than the first mission, when Jesus wished his dis- 
ciples armed for a longer journey. He assumes that many of them 
already have a sword; only to those who have not, the most urgent 
instruction is given to sell even their warm upper garment, their 
protection in the cold night and against bad weather, and to buy a 
sword with the proceeds. ‘The disciples, significantly enough, have 
not waited for this order. They reply that each of them has two 
swords, and produce them. That Jesus should assume many of 
his followers to be armed might seem surprising ; but it must not 
be forgotten that even the Essenes, those ‘ ministers of peace ’— 
by the grace of Josephus—carried nothing with them on their 
journeys except aryms, as a protection ‘against brigands.’ The 
μάχαιραι here mentioned are short swords or daggers, which 
would be carried concealed under the clothes, for the open bearing 
of arms was naturally not permitted to the population of a Roman 
province. This practice of secreting two daggers beneath the 
raiment is familiar from the descriptions in Josephus® of the 
sicavw (1.6. knife-men), who took their name from this weapon 
(sica).6 Josephus certainly would have called the small troop 
armed to their teeth a ‘ band of sicavit.’. It was for a leader of 
‘dagger-men’ that Paul was taken by a Roman tribune,’ and 


1 Cf. Isaiah 1111. 12. 2 Greek ‘ end.’ 
3 Cf. also M. Salomon Reinach, Cultes, Mythes et Religions, iv. (Paris, 1912), 
p. 167 sqq. 4 Cf. App. xrx., below, pp. 616 f. 


> B.J.and Haldsis, iv. ὃ 563; Ant., xx. ὃ 186. 

6 John, already removed from the original tradition, is the only one who 
mentions a ‘ sheath’ (xviii. 11). Matthew simply says, ‘into its place’ (xxvi. 52). 

7 Acts xxi. 38. 


ZA 


370 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


Sossianus Hierocles describes the followers of Jesus as ‘nine hundred 
robbers.’* The word ‘dagger-men’ (sicaviz) denoted a definite 
class of criminals (like the American ‘ gunmen’), against whom 
special provisions were made by Sulla in the Jex Cornelia de sicarits 
et veneficis.” Jesus is fully aware of the illegality of this arming of 
his disciples and of his own direction to purchase a weapon ; none 
the less, he sees no escape from this bitter necessity. The pre- 
diction of the prophet must be fulfilled, according to which the 
righteous servant of the Lord must be numbered among the law- 
less transgressors (ἄνομοι). 

It must not be supposed that Jesus was thinking of the law of 
the Roman oppressors. The burden weighing most heavily on 
his conscience was the tragic necessity of breaking that law of the 
‘better righteousness,’ of non-resistance, which he had himself 
proclaimed as the will and ordinance of God. Seeing in the 
writings of the prophets the revelation of that will, he now resigned 
himself to the realization that the peaceful kingdom of God could 
only be established through battle. Israel had marched out of 
Egypt into the desert ‘armed’ for battle ; the second Moses could 
not without weapons bring his followers to the promised goal. 
‘ It must needs be that offences (σκάνδαλα) come, but woe to the 
man through whom the offence cometh.’4 He who is reckoned 
among the transgressors of the law, as the Scripture ® had said, 
bears the sins of many, whose impenitent violence and hardness of 
heart had prevented the kingdom from coming by the peaceful 
path of ready submission to God’s will. ΑΒ ἃ ransom for them he 
must give his life. 


THE PREDICTIONS OF SUFFERING AND DEATH 


The arrangement (σύνταξις) of the sayings of Jesus, in the 
extant Gospels, in chronological order (τάξις) was disputed in 
very early days in a familiar passage of Papias,® and is in fact alto- 
gether insufficient to allow of far-reaching conclusions. But the 
intrinsic probability of the view that Jesus was continually driven 
on in consequence of the lack of external results commensurate 
with his high expectations, gives us at least an idea of the historical 
development of his aims and resolutions. He began by preaching 
the ᾿ better righteousness,’ sent out his first followers as messengers 
to proclaim that stern rule, and then proceeded to preach the 
abandonment of houses and lands, which means that from the 
attitude of ‘non-resistance’ he progressed to that of ‘non-coépera- 


1 See above, p. 10n. 1 and p. 363 n.2. Two thousand armed followers surround 
Jesus on Mount Olivet according to the Toldoth Jeshu (p. 16 1. 17, ed. Wagenseil, 
Alfdorf, 1681), that is, according to a lost passage of Josi¢pon (see above, pp. 111 ff.). 

* Pauly’s Real Encyel., iv. 969. 3 Joel iv. 9. 4 Matt. xviii. 7. 

5 Isaiah liii. 12. 6 Euseb., Hist. eccl., iii. 39. 15 sq. 


THE APPEARANCE OF JESUS IN JOSEPHUS 5371 


tion. Those who followed his call were to hold themselves in 
readiness for a secessio plebis, for the great exodus from the land of 
bondage, to take place on the Passover festival, the anniversary 
of the first exodus. We have just seen how he issued his command 
to his followers to arm themselves, a command which can have 
been given only on the eve of the departure of this mzlitia Christi 
on the fatal journey to Jerusalem. 

This march of the Galilaeans to the capital was of course no 
necessary stage in the exodus he was about to accomplish.t. The 
shortest route from Galilee into the desert leads not southwards 
but due east to the region of Trachonitis and Hauran, always a 
favourite haunt of rebels in guerilla warfare against the Romans.’ 

Why, then, did Jesus insist on ‘accomplishing his exodus in 
Jerusalem ἡ ἢ ὃ Peter, the Barjona, viewing the situation in the 
light of human intelligence and not in that of God’s designs # as 
they could be guessed from Scripture, was thoroughly opposed to 
this journey. When he and James and John were afterwards 
asked why Jesus had offered this challenge to the Roman world- 
power, an action which to outsiders looked like deliberate suicide, 
they referred the critic to a vision they once had when half asleep,® 
and in which they had seen and heard no less than the two greatest 
prophets of old, Moses and Elijah, talking with Jesus’? about the 
‘exodus which he was to accomplish in Jerusalem.’ Six days ὃ 
after Peter’s confession of his belief in the Messiah at Caesarea 
Philippi, Jesus had taken these three disciples apart on to a high 
mountain (or ‘ to the mountain ’), i.e. to one of the peaks or to the 
actual summit of the snow-clad Hermon, clearly under the in- 
fluence of the story of Moses’ ascent of the holy Mount Sinai, to be 
‘nearer’ to the divinity.2 So Jesus and his companions in this 
momentous hour sought the cloud-wrapt summit of the mountain, 
sacred ever since the beginnings of history.!° The disciples, over- 
come by fatigue, fall into a deep sleep just underneath the moun- 
tain top. At sunrise they are awakened not only by the flood of 
light but also by the words of the Master, addressing his God, not 


1 Luke 1X; 31. 2 B.J., 1. § 398; Ant., xv. § 344. 

3 Luke ix. 31: ‘‘rhv ἔξοδον αὐτοῦ. . . πληροῦν ἐν “Ἱερουσαλήμ. Cf. above, 
p.358n.2. : ' 

4 Mark vii. 33; Matt. xvi. 23. δ᾽ Matt. xvi. 22. 


6 Luke ix. 32: “ BeBapnuéva ὕπνῳ" might even be translated ‘ weighted down 
with slumber ’ instead of ‘ heavy with sleep’ (A.V.) 


7 Mark ix. 4: ‘‘ovvdadobvres τῷ ᾿Ιησοῦ "; cf. Matt. xvii. 3. 
8 Mark ix. 2; Matt. xvii.1; Luke ix. 28, has ‘ nine’ through a misreading of 
the Greek numeral sign F foran H. ‘ Six’ is an obvious allusion to the six days 


in Exod. xxiv. 15 sq., passed by Moses on the mountain before the revelation of 
God was vouchsafed to him. 

9 Exod. XX1V..1,.2, 12. 

10 2 Petey i. 18: ‘‘dvres ἐν τῷ ὄρει τῷ ἁγίῳ." Zermon means ‘ the sanctuary,’ 
or ‘ great sanctuary.’ Even now the ruins of a sanctuary and a sacred cave 
are visible on the flat top. 


372 THE MESSIAH JESUS — 


Elijah,’ in solitary prayer, for enlightenment on the ἔξοδον αὐτοῦ 
ἣν ἔμελλε πληροῦν, as Moses had once received it on Mt. Horeb,? 
imploring him for the gift of the prophetic spirit promised through 
Isaiah * to the servant of God who would obediently take up his 
burden. The voice they hear in the midst of the shining morning 
mist ὃ sounds to them like an echo of the voice of God, a Bath ΟΝ]. 
Still half in a dream,’ they hear the final words of Moses’ consola- 
tion : 8 


‘ The Lord thy God will raise up unto thee a prophet from the midst 
of thee, of thy brethren, like unto me; unto him ye shall hearken,’ 


and believe they see Moses and Elijah standing beside Jesus in 
supernatural splendour. When they finally wake up completely 
they see none but Jesus, surrounded by the rays of the morning 
sun, and they hear his familiar voice bidding them not to be afraid. 
Before waking up, and still in a dream, without realizing the full 
import of his words,® Peter had asked him to remain there : 19 


‘ Master, it is good for us to be here, and let us make tents.’ 


' Cf. Mark xv. 34; Matt. xxvii. 46, where Jesus’ cry, ‘ Eli, Eli’ (‘My God, 
my God’) is mistaken for an appeal to Elijah. 

2 See above, pp. 358 n. 2, 360 n. 5. 

3 Exod. xxxi. 4. ie abt aie οἱ 

δ On the ““νεφέλη φωτεινή, 4 ἐπεσκίασεν αὐτῳ,᾽" cf. 2 Macc. ii. 8: “" ὀφθήσεται ἢ 
δόξα τοῦ κυρίου ws ἐπὶ Mwiion ἐδηλοῦτο." 

6 The ‘ daughter of the voice ’ is explained as an echo of a voice from heaven 
by the tosaphist to Sanhedr. 11a (Strack-Billerbeck, i. 12 5); cf. 127a on Matt, 
ili. 17: ‘if aman deals a blow with all his force and a second tone is heard at a 
distance, produced by the blow, such a voice was heard, hence it was called the 
“daughter of the voice.’’’ Cf. also Exod. rv. 29 (89a) ; Midr. to Canticles, i. 3 
(85a), etc. 

ΤΑ Bath Qol is heard in a dream by R. Johanan Ὁ. Zakkai (ca. A.D. 70), Hagiga 
146 (in the parallel 7. Hag., ii. 77a, 57, the dream is omitted, just as in Mark 
and Μία. the words “"" βεβαρημένοι ὕπνῳ διαγρηγορήσαντες δέ" of Luke are 
missing). Voices overheard or caught by chance were considered as bath-Qél, 
corresponding to the Greek practice of kledonomancy, especially if they chanced 
to be quotations from the O.T.; cf. Strack-Billerbeck, i. 134 K, especially 7. Shabb., 
vi. 8, c. 56. If then, as pointed out above, the disciples hear Biblical quotations 
in the words of the praying Jesus, on waking up, they have heard, according to 
Jewish belief, a bath-Qol, an echo of the voice of God. Cf. also Jebh., xvi. 6 
(Strack-Billerbeck, i. p. 133, No. 29), where the voice of a man on a mountain- 
top is considered a bath-Qél, the more readily because the man responsible for it 
was never found. 

8 Deut. xviii. 15. 

* Mark ix. 6: ‘ For he wist not what to say,’ i.e. what he answered to Jesus’ 
command, containing, evidently, an exhortation to the ἔξοδος ὃν ἔμελλε πληροῦν, 
since Peter replies with his request to remain there and to pitcha camp. Luke 
ix. 33 has ‘not knowing what he said,’ i.e. he did not realize that he opposed 
with his request the decision of God himself. 

10 Luke ix. 33: ‘it is good for us to be here: and let us make tabernacles 
thvee: one for thee, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.’ The italicized words are 
probably an addition dating from the time when the episode had been localized 
on Mt. Tabor. There were the three tabernacula salvatoris still seen by Antoninus 
of Piacenza and Arculph (Encycl. Bibl., 4884, ὃ 5), and later converted into a 
church. It is not very credible that Peter, who was, after all, an orthodox Jew, 
should, even in a dream, have proposed a measure so reminiscent of the old, pagan 
mountain cults so intensely hated and so frequently denounced by the prophets. 


THE APPEARANCE: OF JESUS IN JOSEPHUS 373 


This proposal clearly betrays Peter’s opinion on the fateful 
‘exodus to be realized in Jerusalem.’ He regards the march to 
the capital as both superfluous and fatal. It was good to be here 
on Hermon; here one might erect tents and assemble believers, 
as Barak had once mustered the people on Mt. Tabor for a war of 
independence,! and through the Wadi ‘Ajam pass over by the 
quickest route to the Syrian desert or to the hollows of Trachonitis, 
the old robber’s nest of Zenodoros. 

Nowhere was it written how large must be the number of the 
elect. The more followers gathered round Jesus, the harder was the 
task of leading such a crowd and providing for them, and the 
greater the probability of an armed collision with the Romans, at 
all hazards to be avoided, since on the issue of such a conflict Jesus 
himself can have had few illusions. 

On the other hand, he doubtless believed that he must announce 
the impending trials of the last days to the whole people, to give 
an opportunity to all of following God’s call and being saved. 
Moreover, he was clearly forced on to the fatal road by the idea 
that he must set on foot a movement of hundreds of thousands, 
the picture of the exodus from Egypt with the fantastic figures 
given in the Pentateuch. The messianic rising he was to initiate 
could not be regarded as realized if he left the country with a band 
of some hundred elect. If he wished, however, to put at least two- 
fifths of the population ? in motion, the method of sending out 
messengers had proved altogether unsatisfactory. He must try 
the effect upon the masses of his own overpowering eloquence and 
the spell of his own words in a place where and at a time when he 
was sure to reach the greatest multitudes of his people. That 
could only be in Jerusalem at the time of the great pilgrimage at 
the feast of the Passover. 

The desired result could only be obtained, of course, if he 
openly proclaimed himself to be the Messiah. This he knew full 
well ; but he knew, no less, that in so doing he would inevitably 
draw upon himself the hatred of all opponents, both the Jewish 
hierarchy and the Roman military authorities. That he would be 
able to withstand their combined hostility he can never have 
ventured to hope. Indeed, it is doubtless true, as has long been 
recognized, that he sought martyrdom and went to Jerusalem to 
die there.® 

This intention was wholly unexpected by the disciples and 
quite unintelligible to them: ὁ quite naturally so, since the idea 
of a suffering Messiah and the messianic interpretation of the 

1 Exod. iv. 6, 12, 14. 2 See above, p. 366 n. 3. 

8 A great number of early liturgical texts speak of the Saviour’s ‘ voluntary 


death ’ or ‘ voluntary passion.’ 
ὁ Mark ix. 32; Luke ix. 45. 


374 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


‘ 


servant ’ songs in Isaiah can hardly at that time have been very 
popular, and were in fact probably confined to those Baptist and 
Zealot circles which sought to console themselves by such medita- 
tions for the fall of men like Hizqiah and Judas of Galilee, or, at 
the most, to those Pharisee schools who explain in various passages 
of the so-called Fourth Book of Maccabees the sufferings of the 
martyrs under Antiochus Epiphanes as a ‘ ransom,’ 2 an expiatory 
offering for the sins of the people. Whether Jesus derived from 
them the application of the ‘servant’ songs to Israel’s future 
redeemer, or whether the idea had originated with himself, it 
is certain that with growing conviction he recognized in that 
righteous sufferer of old the tragic prototype of his own fate. 
These remarkable songs of the Lord’s servant doubtless did not 
originally refer to a personification of the suffering people of 
Israel, but to an individual regarded as historical who, as Sellin 
has seen, had some essential features ‘in common with Israel’s 
first redeemer, Moses.’ God’s servant ? was, like Moses, called, 
for the sake of the covenant between God and Israel, to liberate 
prisoners from the house of bondage; but, unlike Moses, he was 
destined to be a martyr to this mission and must give his life as 
an offering and a ransom to bear the iniquities of many. Among 
the numerous identifications proposed, the most likely is probably 
that which sees in him the unhappy Zerubabel, the descendant of 
David, who led the exiles back to Jerusalem, rebuilt the temple, 
but was prevailed upon by the prophets of his time to assume the 
title of King of Israel and to revolt against Cambyses.4 It can 
hardly be doubted that he came to grief at the hands of the 
Persians and was crucified as a rebel by order of Darius 1.5. His 
martyrdom was interpreted as a redeeming sacrifice to the idea of 
redemption (ge’ulah, λύτρωσ ις)." 
If, then, Jesus felt himself called to liberate his people from 


Σὰ LT, ὙἹ. 20; Xvi. 20. “ ἀντίψυχον. 

* Moses is thus called in Num. xii. 7 sqq.; Deut. xxxiv. 53 JOSK. 1.2, 7: 
1 Kings viii. 53, 56; Mal. iii. 22; Ps. cv. 1. 

* See vol. ii. pp. 677 ff. of the German edition of this book, on Ps. ii. 

δ This was first seen by Sellin, Sevubbabel (1898) ; his later theories are no 
improvement on his first hypothesis. Cf. also H. Winckler, Die Keilschr. u. ἃ. 
Alte Testament, p. 291 sqq. 

6 If a man falls into debt and is obliged to sell land or his next-of-kin, the 
ξο᾽ εἰ is expected to redeem the land or the person. In both cases a price or 
ransom (λύτρον) has to be paid. If Israel was to be redeemed of slavery, it was 
natural to suppose such a ransom necessary also in this case. Since such slavery 
was regarded as a punishment for indebtedness to God, the ransom assumed the 
character of a sin-offering. The Mosaic narrative of the first redemption of Israel 
from slavery in Egypt contains no such train of ideas, foreign or repugnant to 
the mind of the author (Evod. xxxii. 32 sq.). When, later on, the Pharisees 
elaborated their theory of the rebirth of the righteous (Ant., xviii. § 14; B. las 
lil. § 374; C. Apionem, ii. ὃ 218), the mysterious verset of Isaiah liii. 10 seems to 
have been interpreted as referring to the rebirth of Zerubabel, the suffering ‘ ben 
David,’ as the future victorious Messiah, 


THE APPEARANCE OF JESUS IN JOSEPHUS 375 


the house of bondage and to redeem Israel’s inheritance, the Land 
of Promise, the fate of the unhappy Zerubabel, his reputed 
ancestor, must have impressed itself upon his consciousness, an 
omen as it were of his own fate, so that he came to the final con- 
viction that he must pass through the final woes, the messianic 
war, through suffering and death. 

Gloomy forebodings of this inevitable fate must slowly have 
clouded his vision of the future. If at first he had regarded him- 
self as a second Moses who must lead the people into the wilderness 
but die before being permitted to conduct his flock into the Land 
of Promise, his undertaking must have gradually appeared to him 
more and more desperate. The miracle of God had not yet ap- 
peared, the heavens remained silent to his incessant and passionate 
prayer. With painful clearness there must have dawned upon him 
the fateful conviction that he was not the new Moses called to 
victory, but that he must drink instead the cup of suffering of 
Zerubabel, slain by the enemy, a sin-offering and ransom for 
his people. ‘They that take the sword shall perish with the 
sword,’ 1 

Gradually, also, and with growing clearness, he came to regard 
the coming of the ‘ Son of Man’ ? as his own resurrection from the 
dead. It was indeed conceivable and possible to expect such a 
metamorphosis of Jesus into the messianic ‘ Son of Man ‘in his own 
lifetime as the disciples had imagined had come to pass on the top 
of the mountain, when his whole figure had been transformed in 
their eyes, when his robe of skins had been changed into a robe of 
light as white as snow, his face resplendent with the divine glory 
‘like unto the sun ’— indeed, like the face of Moses on Mt. Sinai after 
his meeting with Jahveh. For in the curious and too much 
neglected story of Saul, anointed king by Samuel, the seer promises 
the monarch: ‘ The Spirit of the Lord will come upon thee, and 
thou shalt prophesy with them, and shalt be turned into another 
man.’ The Messiah, like the newly anointed king, was thus 
expected, on the occasion of his first public appearance, to receive 
from above the Spirit of God and to be ‘ transformed into another 
man. 

Now, this is precisely the centre-piece and basis of the enigmatic 
story of the metamorphosis of Jesus. There first appear Moses 
and Elijah—Moses who had anointed the first high priest, and 
Elijah who had anointed the king Jehu of Israel as well as the 
prophet Elisha, the very Elijah who, according to Jewish belief, 


1 Malt. xxvi.52. He expected to die by the sword like a captive king (1 Sam. 
xv. 33) ; hence the allusions at the last supper to the dismemberment of his body 
and the outpouring of his blood, as well as the mention of his impending * baptism 
of blood’ in the question to the Zebedaids (Matt. x. 38 ff. and parallels). 

2 On this figure, cf. below, p. 560 ἢ. 3. ΟΝ SG. Κι, 


376 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


was to come back to reveal the Messiah. Then a cloud over- 
shadows the three figures, and a voice from heaven is heard to say, 
‘ This is my beloved son,’ etc., an episode which was long ago 
recognized as a Close parallel to the story of Jesus’ baptism in the 
Jordan. Through this coming down of the Spirit and the Divine 
recognition as son of God, Jesus, like King Saul of old, is ‘ trans- 
formed into another man.’ 

The strong emphasis laid in this narrative upon the ‘cloud’ 
which overshadows Jesus becomes intelligible if the messianic 
significance of this feature is recalled. Clearly, we have here that 
coming of the ‘Son of man’ ‘with the clouds of heaven’ predicted 
by Daniel and applied by Jesus to himself, the realization of which 
the disciples believed that they had witnessed in their vision of the 
transfiguration. This fleeting dream-vision of Peter and his two 
companions is, of course, a very modest fulfilment of those pre- 
dictions which had raised expectations of an overwhelming blaze 
of light illuminating in one moment, like lightning, everything 
under heaven from horizon to horizon, at the coming of the Son of 
man. However, it is possible that Jesus himself! conceived of that 
coming, not as a blinding cosmic display of light, but merely as a 
spiritual illumination in the hearts of all mankind. Otherwise it is 
difficult to explain that anxious question, ‘ Howbeit when the Son 
of man cometh, shall he find faith on earth?’ 2—a question which 
has no meaning if he expected a coming of the world-king amid 
legions of angels and a blaze of glory. If it pleased God—and he 
looked for this mercy to the last—his own glorification and the 
enlightenment of the elect might be brought about by an ‘ outpour- 
ing of the Spirit,’ without the necessity of a previous death of him- 
self and of some chosen believers.? But the longer the yearned- 
for miracle was delayed, the more it became certain that the final 
‘trial’ (πειρασμός) was unavoidable, that the elect heirs of the 
kingdom must first die and then rise on the third day,‘ and that for 
himself in particular the promised ‘return of the Son of man’ was 
synonymous with his own resurrection from a martyr’s death. 


THE FOUNDATION-STONE AND THE PILLARS OF THE NEW Com- 
MUNITY. THE KEYS OF THE KINGDOM AND PETER THE 
VICEROY 


If Jesus was so perfectly certain of his own death, the question 
naturally arises, Who was to conduct the planned exodus into the 


1 Like Paul, 2 Coy. iv. 6. 2 Luke xviii. 8. 

* Mark ix. 1 (and parallels). 

* Hos. ii. 6: the resurrection on the third day is the general destiny of the 
elect, not merely of the Messiah, 


THE APPEARANCE OF JESUS IN JOSEPHUS 377 


desert until such time as he, resuscitated by God’s mercy, would 
again appear at the head of his disciples and himself lead them 
back into the Land of Promise, by then freed from the enemy ? 
The answer is supplied by the incident of Caesarea Philippi, which 
is so closely associated with the predictions of suffering and death— 
the appointment of a temporary vicarvius of Jesus in the much- 
debated speech to Simon Barvjona. The genuineness of these 
words has been quite unjustly questioned by critics who had not 
even understood their literal meaning or known the wealth of 
Scripture lore underlying them. To the disciple who had been the 
first to do homage to Jesus as God’s Anointed, the future King of 
Israel replies : ἢ 


‘Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona, for flesh and blood hath not 
revealed it unto thee, but the Father which is inheaven. AndJI also 
say unto thee that thou art the Rock, and upon this rock I will build * 
the community of my choice, and the gates of the underworld shall 
not prevail against it. I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom 
of heaven, and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound 
in heaven,‘ and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed 
in heaven,’ ὃ 


The whole speech is intelligible only if one is in a position to 
follow all the wealth of Scriptural allusions which it contains. 

The τέκτων, the Rekhabite carpenter and builder, speaks in 
parables drawn from his craft. The gehillah is in reality no edifice 
built with hands, but designates the new ‘house of Israel’ (beth 
Jisra’el), as the Arabs call the tribe ahi, literally ‘tent.’ With 
reference to this figurative expression beth Jisva’el, the rabbis ® were 
accustomed to speak of persons whom we might call the ‘ pillars 
of society’ as ‘tent-poles’ (jathedoth ’ohalim). The three great 
patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, were called ‘tent-poles’ 
of the world,’ the world as a whole being regarded as a cosmic tent.’ 
If the beth Jisva’el is thought of as a house of stone, its leading repre- 
sentatives may be fitly described as ‘ corner-stones of the people ’ 
(pinnoth ha‘am). Thus we read in Judges xx. 2: 


‘And the corner-stones of all the people, even of all the tribes of 
Israel, presented themselves in the assembly (ἐν ἐκκλησίᾳ) of the 
people of God.’ 


1 Matt. xvi. 17 544. 

2 Cf. Ruth iv. 11: ‘ build the house of Israel.’ 

3 μου τὴν ἐκκλησίαν, τὴν gahal or gehillah, the assembly called by me. It is 
the gehillath ben David, the assembly called by the new ben David, the new Solomon, 
the ‘ prince of peace,’ after the example of the assembly called by Solomon, 
1 Kings viii. 1. 

4 Το by God. The word is not to be understood in a local sense. 

ὁ Kelaim, 14b; Levy, Nhb. Wb., s.v. jathed. 

6 Talm. J. Ta’an. iv. 67d, etc. 

7 Cf. my Weltenmantel und Himmelszelt, p. 595. 


378 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


Similarly, in 1 Sam. xiv. 38: 


‘And Saul said, Draw nigh hither, all ye corner-stones of the 
people.’ 


In Zech. x. 4 we have the two figures in conjunction : 


‘ The Lord hath visited his flock the house of Judah. . . . From 
him shall come forth the corner-stone (pinnah), from him the tent- 
pole (or “ pillar,” jathed).’ 


The patriarchs who rank as ‘tent-poles of the world’ are also called 
its “foundation-stone.’! In particular, the Midrash Yelamdenu 2 
affords a striking parallel to the passage in Matthew, including the 
use of the word #etra : 


‘From the top of the rocks I see him’ (Numb. xxiii. 9). ‘I see 
those who have come forth from the creation of the world. (It is) 
like a king who would erect a building. He had the ground dug ever 
deeper and sought to lay the foundation, but found only bogs, and 
so in many (other) places. Then he would have them dig in but 
one more place, and he found in the depth a rock (petra). Then said 
he, Here will I build ; and he laid the foundation and built. Even 
so God sought to create the world, and he sat and thought on the 
generation of ’Enosh and the generation of the flood. Hesaid, How 
can 1 create the world, seeing that these ungodly people will arise 
and provoke me? But when God looked upon Abraham that was 
to be, he said: See, 1 here found a rock (fetra) on which I can build 
and establish the world. Therefore he called Abraham a rock (suv), as 
it is written, “Look unto the rock whence ye were hewn’”’ (Isaiah li. 1) 


By the ‘ king who would erect a building ’ is meant David, who 
wished to erect the temple on Zion, and in sinking the foundations 
struck upon the ‘stone of foundation’ or ‘of drinking’ (‘eben 
shethijah), which according to the ancient pre-Israelite legend ® 
closed the opening to the great abyss (tehom), the flood-gates of the 
underworld, from which the great flood of old broke out, and 
threatened to break out again when David moved this stone.4 

As David founded the visible temple of God on the foundation- 
stone of the world, the holy rock on Mt. Zion, so will the Messiah 
ben David build a new house of Israel, ‘ the assembly in the wilder- 
ness, ° the community of those called by him, on a ‘foundation- 
stone ᾿ against which the gates of the abyss shall not prevail. As 
the Midrash conceives the foundation-stone on which God has 
built the true temple, his universe,* to be not a dead rock but a 
‘living stone,’ namely the patriarch Abraham, for whose merits the 


1 Exodus rabba, τὸ (760). © Jalqut, i. 766. 
* M. Gaster, Folklore, ii. 204. 4 Sanhedrin, x. 29a, and elsewhere. 
® Acts vii. 38. 


ὁ Cf. τὸ ἅγιον κοσμικόν, Hebr. ix. 1, and B.J., v. 458, where the Zealots retort 
to the Romans that ‘ the world was a better temple for God than this one.’ 


THE APPEARANCE OF JESUS IN JOSEPHUS 379 


world was preserved from destruction and indeed erected, so the 
just one ‘that believeth’ in the Lord becomes the true ‘founda- 
tion-stone’ of the house of Israel.t As Abraham, who for the sake 
of his faith fled from his home and country, became the rock on 
which the house of Israel and the whole creation were built, so now 
is Simon Barjona to become the foundation-stone of the new house 
of Israel, the new ecclesia, the spiritual house of ‘ living stones’? to 
be erected in the wilderness, because he believed with the firmness 
of a rock in Jesus as the Messiah. If in the early messianist 
community Simon Cephas, James, and John rank as the ‘pillars of 
the gehillah,’ 3 this title was also doubtless derived from a saying 
of Jesus.* 

The usual exegesis fails to note that the two metaphors of the 
living foundation-stone and the living pillars are to be connected 
with the prophecies of suffering. Pillars in human form, such as 
Jesus might have seen in the Hellenistic architecture of Herod’s 
palace at Tiberias,® were called by the ancients ἡ Telamons,’ 1.6. 
τλήμονες § =‘ patient sufferers,’ and there was a widespread custom 
of making a living mortal the foundation-stone of a new building, 
a rite known both to Greeks and Semites.? To be elected as 
foundation-stone is therefore tantamount to being destined as a 
foundation sacrifice. The weight of the whole edifice rests with 
all its crushing load upon the foundation-stone, whilst the pillars 
have at least to support the architrave. These characteristic 
builders’ metaphors thus clearly express the special idea of the 
ruler as a servant of the community.® 

Again, it is most significant that the conception of the person 
thus elected having the power over the keys is closely connected 
with the symbolism of the ‘tent-pole’ (jathed). In Isatah xxii. 20 
504. we read : 

‘In that day I will call my servant . . . and he shall be a father 
.. . to the house of Judah. And ¢he key of the house of David will 1 
lay upon his shoulder ; and he shall open and none shall shut, and 
he shall shut and none shall open. And I will fasten him as a tent- 
pole (jathed) in a sure place ; and he shall be for a throne of glory ® 
to his father’s house.’ 


It is to this obvious Old Testament passage and to no other that 
allusion is made in the words of Jesus about the keys, which fanciful 


1 Isaiah xxviii, τό. 2 + Petey ii. 5. Hermas, Vision iii. 5, 

5 Gal. il. 9. 4 Cf. Apoc., ii. 12. 

6 According to Jos., Vita, § 65, the palace of Herod was adorned with repre- 
sentatives of living beings. According to the Josippon, these figures represented 
vanquished nations, a well-known symbolism of Hellenistic architecture. 

6 Vitruvius, De archit., vi. το. 6. 

τι Kings xvi. 34; Tylor, Primitive Culture, i. 104 sqq. 

8 Cf. above, p. 349 ἢ. 5. 

® Near the tent-pole, that is, where the tent is highest, there stands the high 
seat of the head of the family. 


380 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


commentators! have sought to explain by Persian, Babylonian, 
and Roman ideas on the gatekeeper of hell and heaven. 

As for the phrase ‘binding and loosing,’ the Slavonic Jose- 
phus now conclusively proves that the expression indicates the 
absolute authority of a king or ruler. We read in the Halésis 2 of 
high priest Hyrcanus as ‘ having merely the name of ruler, without 
the power to decide, to bind or to loose, to do good or harm.’ 

It is thus not doctrinal authority? but royal sovereignty that 
Jesus would confer upon Simon Cephas, a fact completely in 
accordance with the messianic interpretation of the ‘ elect founda- 
tion-stone ’ given in the Targum on Isaiah xxviii. 16: 


‘ Behold, I set in Zion a king, a strong king, mighty and terrible : 
I will strengthen him and I will confirm him, saith the prophet. But 
the just who believe these things, when tribulation cometh shall not 
be moved.’ 


Naturally, it is not accidental that Jesus, immediately after the 
appointment of Peter as keeper of the keys and temporary vice- 
gerent, announces to his disciples his own sufferings and death; for 
it is only his premonition of his own impending fate which justifies 
his consigning the keys to one of his disciples. Peter is not his 
successor in authority but a deputy-Messiah, a viceroy of God’s 
kingdom on earth during the expected short period of his own 
absence. 


‘As aman, travelling to another country, having left his house and 
given authority to his servants, to each one his work, commanded also 
the porter to watch ’4 until ‘the master of the house cometh.’ 


1 W. Kohler, Arch. f. Rel. Wiss., viii. 214 sqq. 

* i, 242; Berendts-Grass, i. p.99. Cf. B.J., i. § 111. 

* Prof. von Dobschiitz does not hesitate to say (Z.N.T.W., 1928, p. 343 ; ibid., 
1929, p. 115 n. 3) that, according to Matt. xvi. 17 ff., Peter is appointed by Jesus 
as ‘chief-rabbi’ (Obevvabbinery) of the Christian church! As a matter of fact, 
nothing in any way like a chief-rabbi was known to ancient Judaism until the 
period of the exilarchs. 

4 Mark xiii. 34, 36. 


XIV 


THE ACCOUNT OF THE WONDER-WORKER ON THE 
MOUNT OF OLIVES AND HIS CRUCIFIXION, AS 
GIVEN IN THE ‘ HALOSIS’ OF JOSEPHUS 


HUS far, we have followed the Christian Gospels for our re- 
construction of the ‘ Galilaean’ period in the life of Jesus. 
Neither in the Antiquities nor in the Haldsis has Josephus 
a word to say about anything which Jesus did or said in Galilee or 
elsewhere prior to his coming to Jerusalem immediately before his 
arrest and crucifixion. This gap, though obviously unwelcome 
to the modern reader and critic, removes the last doubt as to 
Josephus’ narrative being absolutely independent of the Christian 
‘missionary ’ literature. Since the Antiquities, as we have seen, 
were unquestionably tampered with, we cannot be perfectly sure 
on the point whether after all Josephus might not have thrown out 
a few hints on Jesus’ earlier career ;} but in the Halosis the story 
opens with the appearance of Jesus and his followers on the Mount 
of Olives before the walls of the capital. This point of view, how- 
ever natural for a writer born and bred in Jerusalem, is thus com- 
pletely different from that of the Galilaean authors of the Gospels. 
If by some mishap the Gospels had been lost, no reader could have 
formed from Josephus alone the slightest opinion of the character 
of the hero and his strange previous life. It would be impossible 
to tell him apart from the long line of rebel leaders upon whom 
Josephus lays the whole responsibility for the downfall of the 
Jewish people. 
~The essential condition for a correct appreciation of his state- 
ments by the reader is that he must first set aside entirely such 
knowledge as he has gained from the Gospels, and secondly adhere 
strictly to the principle laid down by Théodore Reinach more than 
thirty years ago for the criticism of the Testimonium Flavianum : 5 
namely, that the text must be stripped of everything incompatible 
with the Jewish historian’s antipathy to Christianity, as attested 
by Origen,® with his partisanship for the Pharisees, and with his 
hostility to all ‘innovators’ (vewrepifovres) so visible throughout 
his writings. Since from a person like Josephus we cannot look 
for a fair estimate of the motives of opponents of his own party, 
the aristocrats (οἱ πρωτεύοντες), the ‘ better class,’ and the Phari- 


1 See above, p. 54 ll. ro ff. 2 Seeabove, p.46n.1. * See above, p. 381.2. 
381 


382 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


sees with their contempt for the crowd, we can lay down a very 
simple principle of criticism: everything of anti-Christian char- 
acter, every contemptuous or disparaging allusion to Jesus and his _ 
followers, may be regarded offhand as the authentic work of Jose- 
phus ; every statement exonerating Jesus and favourable to him 
and his disciples is to be set aside as an interpolation or correction 
introduced by a Christian reader or copyist. This, of course, 
implies nothing for the credibility or lack of such either of indi- 
vidual statements or of the whole picture thus obtained of the first 
appearance of Jesus and the subsequent events. For, being com- 
posed exclusively of hostile and malicious touches, the portrait may 
be presumed to be tendentiously distorted and hence misleading. 
But for that very reason it may be extremely instructive and 
valuable for the modern historian as a set-off to the accounts from 
the Christian side—always provided, of course, that the division 
of the two distinct strata running through the traditional text be 
clear-cut, and that even after the removal of the presumed inter- 
polations it yields a sensible interpretation of the facts. 

The procedure indicated must be rigorously followed. The 
possibility of understanding Josephus as a sort of Nicodemus, and 
his account of Christian origins as the outcome of a half-hearted 
inclination toward the messianist movement, has been seriously 
discussed above, where we have seen that the attempted explana- 
tions have convinced no one and have only led to a complete re- 
jection of valuable evidence. This disposes of the wavering and 
uncertain methods of exegesis still found in Berendts’ first work, 
in Frey, and partly in Goethals. No further advance is possible 
on that road. The solution of our problem lies solely in a sound 
separation of the sources—a method, by the way, which had to be 
applied to all Jewish writings transmitted solely by Christian 
scribes, works such as the Book of Enoch, the Testaments of the XII 
Patriarchs, the Book of Jubilees, the S tbylline Oracles, and the Odes 
of Solomon, before pronouncing an opinion on their age and origin. 
Had their authors also been regarded as ‘ half-Christians,’ the 
history of the religion and the literature of the last pre-Christian 
centuries would present a somewhat curious appearance. 

Indeed, I fail to see why the work of Josephus should not be 
treated on the same simple and straightforward principle. In his 
case, however, still another task arises—to wit, the filling of gaps 
caused by the censor with the help of quotations made at a date 
when those gaps did not yet exist. As has been shown above,? 
certain old and hitherto unverifiable citations from Josephus could 
now be identified in the Slavonic text of the Halésis or attributed 
to the lost second edition of the Polemos in twenty-four books. 
This again is no unheard-of novelty, for the method has always 

+ See the Bibliography below, p. 625. * See pp. 83 ff., 141 ff. 


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THE SLAVONIC JOSEPHUS ON THE AEE EAR ANS OF ‘ THE WONDER-WORKER’ ON MOUNT OLIVET, AND HIS DEATH 
F° 64 R°—65 V° OF COD KYRILLO-BJELOS. 63/1302, LENINGRAD PURLIC “LIBRARY 
(SEE P. 38374 F.) 


AIXX ALVW Td 


THE CHAPTER ON JESUS IN JOSEPHUS’ ‘HALOSIS’ 383 


been used for the completion of fragmentary papyri. Had the 
editors of Josephus done their duty, we should find in each edition 
a short appendix with fragments, i.e. quotations not to be found 
in the standard text. The well-known collections of Fvagmenta 
Historicorum Graecorum of Miiller and of Jacobi contain nothing 
but such fragments preserved only through quotations in later 
writers. If, then, Andrew of Crete and other Byzantines will be 
seen to be employed below for the restoration of statements about 
Jesus in the Haldsis, I claim that my method in no way differs 
from the use of Eusebius, Zonaras, and the excerpts of Constantine 
Porphyrogenitus for the textual criticism of Antiquities, xviii. 3.3.1 
Lastly, as every scholar knows, writings are often copied or used 
without any mention of the source, and consequently not only 
direct quotations but borrowings where no source is named can 
also be used for reconstructing the text, provided that a use of the 
original document can be inferred with some show of reason.” In 
this way the most serious gap of the Haldsis can be filled by an 
isolated anonymous fragment in John Malalas.*? Only those un- 
familiar with these methods of source analysis——-used, for example, 
for the recovery of long trains of thought of Posidonius or Theo- 
phrastus from the writings of Cicero—can regard this procedure as 
bold and unwarranted. 

I begin by presenting an English version of the Slavonic text,’ 
as found in the various MSS., with a selection of the essential 
variant readings, the Greek retroversions of crucial or character- 
istically Josephan expressions, and the most necessary explanatory 
notes: 

δ “At that time ® there appeared’ a certain § man,® if it is meet to 
callhim a man.!° His! nature 15 and form was 15 human, but the 


1 See above, p. 59. 2 On this, cf. below, pp. 396 ff. 3 Below, pp. 461 ff. 

4 The original, with all essential variants, is printed in the German edition of 
this book, vol. 11. p. 296. Cf. our Pls. xx1ut.-v. 

δ᾽ Between ii., §§ 174 and 175, of the Greek War. Kas. 444 (in top margin) has: 
‘Of the Lord, our Redeemer Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and of the divine form 
of his appearance and of his miracles.’ Syn. 991 (bottom margin) : ‘ Soul-saving 
narrative of our Lord Jesus Christ, how he did many miracles,’ to which is appended 
in cursive script, ‘This more from other books and (read than) the Gospel and 
Apostolos.’ 

6 ‘also,’ Acad. 7 -τότε δὲ ἐφάνη (togda javi sja). 

8 ἀνήρ τις, mur nekij; cf. above, p. 46, last a linea. 

® Exactly parallelto B.J.,iii. 229: ““ἔνθα καὶ ἀνήρ τις ἐξεφάνη... λόγου Kal μνήμης 
ἄξιος. Σαμαίου μὲν παῖς ἣν, ᾿Ελεάζαρος δ᾽ ἐκαλεῖτο... .” 

10 Cf. above, p. 52, the corresponding phrase of the Greek Testimonium. 

11 ‘ And his,’ Acad. 

12 Cf, Ant., xvi. 220: ““ἣν μὲν yap ὁ τῆς ᾿Αραβίας βασιλεὺς ᾿Οβάδας ἀπράγμων.... 
τὴν φύσιν"; c, Apion., i. 26: “ θείας φύσεως μετεσχηκέναι. 

13 From the singular form of the verb, Dr. Thackeray (Josephus, iii. 648, n. e) 
would conclude that the words ‘ and form’ are a later addition. Leaving aside 
all questions of Slavonic syntax, one might with the same show of reason allege 
that the words ‘nature and’ were interpolated for apologetic (i.e. anti-docetic) 
reasons. Anyhow, “ φύσις καὶ μορφὴ αὐτοῦ ἀνθρωπίνη ἣν ᾿᾿ is perfectly good Greek, 


384 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


appearance of him! more than (that) of a human (being) :? yet his 
works (were) divine, He wrought? miracles wonderful and strong.‘ 
Wherefore it is impossible for me to call him a human (being). But, 
on the other hand, if I look at (his) ordinary® nature,® I will not call 
him an angel. 

‘And all, whatsoever he wrought through an invisible power he 
wrought by a word and command.’ Some said of him, ‘‘ Our® first 
lawgiver is risen from the dead and hath vouchsafed many cures and 
artifices.’’® But the others thought that he was sent from God. 
But in many things he opposed the law and kept not the Sabbath 
according to the custom of (our) forefathers. Yet, again,!° he 11 did 
nothing shameful nor any daring acts,!* but merely by (his) word did 
he prepare everything. And many of the multitude followed after 
him and hearkened to his teaching. And many souls were roused,!* 
thinking that thereby the Jewish tribes could free themselves from 
Roman hands. But it was his custom rather to abide without the 
city on the Mount of Olives. There also he granted cures to the 
people. And there gathered to him of helpers 4 150, but of the mob 15 
a multitude. But when they saw his power, that he accomplished by 
a word whatsoever he would, and when they had made known to him 
their will, that he should enter the city and cut down the Roman 
troops 15 and Pilate and rule over us,!” he did not disdain us.18 And 
when thereafter news of it was brought to the Jewish leaders, they 
assembled together with the high priest and said, ‘‘ We are powerless 
and (too) weak 19 to resist the Romans. Since, however, ‘ the bow is 
bent,’ 2° we will go and communicate to Pilate what we have heard, 

and we shall be free from trouble, in order that he may not hear 
(it) from others and *! we be robbed of (our) goods and ourselves 
slaughtered and (our) children dispersed.” ’’*8 And they went and 


' “his appearance,’ Kas. ἢ ὑπὲρ ἄνθρωπον, see below, p. 389 2. 6. 
* * And he wrought,’ Kas. * ‘luminous,’ Kas. 

* or ‘common,’ ‘commonplace.’ Rum. version: ‘human nature.’ 

6 ἐς 


εἰς THY κοινὴν φύσιν ἀπιξών""; cf. B.J., 111. § 369: ““ τῆς κοινῆς ἁπάντων (pwr 
φύσεως." 

* λόγῳ καὶ προστάγματι. The words ‘ through an invisible power’ are not found 
in the Rum. 


8 Om. ‘ our,’ Acad. ® Cf. τεχνάζων, Ant., xviii. 85. 
10 * also,’ Acad., Syn. 1 * this man,’ Syn. got. 

12 ἐπιχειρήματα, Russ. rukodelania. 13 ἤρθησαν. 

‘4 ὑπηρέται. 15. ὄχλου. 

'6 “everything Roman,’ Acad. 17 “ them,’ Acad. 


18 οὐ κατεφρόνησεν ἡμᾶς, Syn.182. ‘ But he didnot heedit,’ Acad., Syn. 770, 991 ; 


Kyrillo-Bjelos. 1303 ; Kas.; see below, p. 458 n. 3. 

19 Dr. Thackeray, Joc. cit., iii. p. 649, note c, has acutely observed that this 
phrase is the Josephan ἀσθηνής cum infinitivo=‘ too weak to do something’ (Ant., 
x. § 215; xiv. § 317). 

*0 This allusion to Ps. xi. 2 is omitted as unintelligible to the non-Jewish 
reader in the Rumanian version. *1 Om. ‘and,’ Acad. 

*2 Justin Martyr, Apolog., i. 52, p. 87 Ὁ, E, quoting an apocryphal book of 
Zacharia, “ra ἐσκορπισμένα réxva”’ (without adding ‘of Israel’), Against this, cf. 
John xi. 52: “᾿ τὰ τέκνα τοῦ θεοῦ τὰ dtecxopmriouéva.”” Rum., ‘and he sells our children 
as slaves.’ 

*8 In the lower margin of Syn. gg1: ‘ Of the bringing of Jesus Christ before 
Pilate ’; on the verso, a little lower, there is written in cursive script in the left 
margin : ‘ But this is not written in the Gospel.’ 


THE CHAPTER ON JESUS IN JOSEPHUS’ ‘ HALOSIS’ 385 


reported (it) to Pilate. And he sent and had many of the multi- 
tude slain. And he had that wonder-worker brought up, and after 
he had held an enquiry concerning him, he pronounced (this) 
judgment: He is? [4 benefactor, but? not] a malefactor [nor]? a 
rebel [nor] covetous of king(ship).4 [And he let him go, for he had 
healed his dying wife. And after he had gone to his wonted place, he 
did his wonted works.® And when more people again gathered round 
him, he glorified himself® by his action(s) more than all. The scribes 
were stung with envy and gave Pilate thirty talents to kill him. And? he 
took (it) and gave them liberty to carry out their will (themselves).) And 
they took him ® and crucified him contrary® to the law of (their) 
fathers.’ 1° 


THE CHRISTIAN INTERPOLATIONS IN THE SECTION ON JESUS 
IN THE - HALOsIS’ 


The most cursory perusal of the passage just quoted will con- 
vince any intelligent reader that we are here facing the same 
problem as in the case of the famous Testimonium Flavianum. At 


first glance one is struck by expressions intelligible only if coming 
from_a Christian pen. Thus it is inconceivable that Josephus 
te 


could have put into Pilate’s mout 
innocence Of Jesus and actually represented the governor as in- 


vesting the wondér-worker with the dignity of a public benefactor 


(εὐεργέτης). Such a sentence as ‘he is a benefactor, not a male- 
factor, nor ἃ rebel, nor thirsting for king(ship) ᾿ cannot possibly 
Have Βέξα τεῆπεῖ by Ἰατερεῖς. Un the otier hand, it i.e phus. On the other hand, it is easy to 
recognize that the word ‘benefactor’ as well as the particles ‘ not,’ 
‘nor,’ ‘ nor,’ which are historically so improbable, are not wanted 
in the sentence and have been interpolated by an indignant Chris- 
tian to correct what was to him an intolerable statement. I=fthese 
words be omitted, we are left with a plausible verdict: ‘he is a 
malefactor, a rebel, a robber, thirsting to be_king.’ | 
Equally impossible is it to believe that Josephus could have 
known, accepted, and recounted the legend of Pilate’s acquittal of 
Jesus, a myth obviously invented to exonerate t man authori- 
ties and to incriminate This historically impossible 


statement has probably been derived artificially, after the fashion 
of the midrashim, from Acts 111. 13 (Πειλάτου Kpivavtos™ éxeivou 


1 ‘that he was,’ Acad.; Syn. 770, 991; Kas. 

2 Add ‘is,’ Syn. 770; Kas. δ. ‘and,’ Syn. oor. 

4 Rum., ‘ [neither] a robber [nor} a malefactor [nor] a rebel [nor] an impostor 
of kingship.’ 

δ Om. ‘ works,’ Kas. 6 Om.‘ himself,’ Syn. 770, Kas. 

7 Om. ‘ and,’ Kas. δ᾽ Om. ‘ him,’ Syn. gor. 

® On this word, cf. below, p. 388 ll. 29 ff. 

10 Rum., ‘ according to the law of the emperors.’ 

1 oy. 1.: κρίνοντος. 


2B 


386 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


ἀπολύειν), the clause having been torn from its context and 
κρίναντος (‘ when he was determined’ ov ‘ about to acquit him’) 
interpreted as ‘after he had decided to acquit him.’ The following 
statement, that Jesus was crucified by the Jews, rests on a literal 
interpretation of isolated sentences such as Like xxxii. 25: ‘ but 
Jesus he delivered up to their will’; John xix. 6: ‘Take him 
yourselves and crucify him’; xix. 16: ‘he delivered him unto 
them to be crucified’; Gospel of Peter 111. sq.: ‘And he delivered 
him to the people. ... And they crucified ... the Lord.’ ! 
The same biased account of the events is found in the forged Acis 
of Prlate, especially in the so-called Rescript of the Emperor Tiberius 
to Pilate.* 

The motive given for the alleged acquittal, namely, the 
miraculous healing of Pilate’s dying wife, still missing in the 
Rumanian text and hence obviously a quite late interpolation, is 
another midvash, extracted from that lady’s words in Matt. xxvii. 
19: ‘for I have suffered many things this day in a dream because 
of him,’ by placing a comma after ‘ this day’ and appending “1 
was healed’ at the end. The legend in this form is found in the 
Latin Vita beatae Virginis Mariae et Salvatoris Rhythmica,® the 
introduction to which expressly mentions ‘ Hegesippus’ and Jose- 
phus ὁ among the sources utilized. 

Of quite unmistakable Christian origin is the sentence, ‘The 
doctors of the law were stung with envy,’ etc. The word vopod:- 
δάσκαλος does not occur in Josephus. Moreover, while that author 
finds fault with the Sadducees for their severity as judges,® he 
never attacks the doctors of the law in general as the Gospels do. 
Lastly, the whole sentence is merely a paraphrase of Mark xv. το, 
Matt. xxvii. 18, ‘ for envy they had delivered him up.’ 

The bribe of thirty talents has long been recognized as a simple 
multiplication, in keeping with the high rank of the recipient, of 
the thirty pieces of silver paid by the high priests to the traitor 
Judas. The venality of Pilate was well known to the Christians, 
thanks to the work of Philo.* For the rest, the story of the governor 
who accepts a bribe but does nothing himself beyond shutting his 
eyes to the illegal actions of the donors, is simply an imitation of the 

1 Cf. also Acts ii. 22 sq., iii. 15 ; 1 Thess. ii. 15. 

5 Μ. R. James, Apocr. Anecd., Texts and Studies, v. 1, p. 78,11; 18,3 1.1; Tq: 
“τοῦτον παρέδωκας τοῖς παρανόμοις ᾿Ιουδαίοις " is exactly parallel to the sentence 


about the Jews crucifying Jesus against their ancestral laws, in the Slavonic 
Josephus. 

5. Ed. by Voegtlin, Tiibingen, 1889, p. 162, vv. 4762-73. 

* Obviously an interpolated Latin MS. of the War corresponding to the copy 
used by the Slavonic translator, maybe of the same type as the one read by 
Jacobus de Voragine (above, p. 95 n. 1) 

5 See above, p. 225 n. 6. 

® De legat. ad Gaium, ὃ 38 ; the work was the main model—besides 2 Macc. 9— 


for all the consolatory narratives gloating over the miserable death of the per- 
secutors of the pious. 


CHRISTIAN INTERPOLATIONS IN JESUS CHAPTER 538) 


story of Gessius Florus and the Jewish elders of Caesarea, where 
the governor accepts eight talents from the Jews as the price of 
his assistance in putting a stop to the vexations of the Hellenized 
Syrians, and then decamps, ‘leaving a free field to sedition, as 
though he had sold the Jews a licence to fight the matter out them- 
selves.’ Our legend is presupposed in the forged Acts of Pilate * 
and reappears in the Vita Rhythmica already mentioned. 

The unhistorical character_of the narrative is convincingly 
shown by the statement that Jesus was crucified by the Jews, i.e. 
put_to death in Roman fashion and according to Roman law. 
freehand against a hated heretic; Ould have been stoned in the 
Jewish manner hie Stepan fame, and is bodysubsequenty 
suspended on a stake: at reason could the Jews have had for 
resorting to a form of execution contrary to the rules of their own 
penal law? Apart from the historical improbability, not to say 
impossibility, of the story, it is inconceivabl ve 
been pennéd by Josephus. For who is to believe that a member of 
an eminent priestly family and an avowed follower of the Pharisee 
party, always boasting of his scriptural learning, could have laid 
the blame for what, according to the text of the MSS., was an 
inexcusable judicial murder, upon the Jewish ‘teachers of the law’ 
and their alleged ‘envy,’ and done so even more strongly than the 
Christian reporters? How could Josephus have dared to represent 
the founder of the Christian sect, in such disfavour at the Flavian 
court ὃ and so detested by the Jews, as an innocent victim of the | 
contemptible venality of a Roman governor? What could induce 
him to offer such an insult at once to the Romans and to his a 
countrymen and peers ? 

True, there are cases where the Antiquities rectify a contrary 
and erroneous statement in the War or the Halosis. But in 
general, and particularly in the narrative of other events which 
occurred in Pilate’s administration, the later work is in substantial 
agreement with the earlier one, so that we may reasonably assume 
the reports about Jesus in the Haldsts and the Antiquities to 
have been originally consistent, at least in their original trend. 
Flagrant contradictions would then have their origin in Christian 
interpolations. If we are told, for example, both in the Antiquities 

5, Buf 4 11. 287. 5. 

* Rescriptum Tiberit, loc. cit., p. 78, 1.2; Ρ. 79, 16. 

3 Verses 4786 sqq. 

4 Josephus, B./., 1. 4. 6, ὃ 97, unequivocally condemns King Alexander Jannai, 
who had his conquered opponents crucified. In Avnt., xiii. 14.2, ὃ 383, we learn 
that the king, on account of this inhuman cruelty, was called ‘ Thrakidas’ by 
ἮΝ JG: the words of Titus on the destruction of the temple and his desire to 


destroy root and branch the messianist beliefs, as recorded by Sulpicius Severus 
after Tacitus, below, p. 552 n. I. 


388 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


and in Tacitus that ‘ on the indictment of the principal men among 
us Pilate sentenced (Jesus) to the cross,’ we may suppose the older 
record also to have ascribed the indictment—their proper duty— 
to the Jewish leaders, the sentence and its execution to Pilate. 

Neither Berendts nor any of his critics has observed that such 
a representation of the events, unobjectionable in every respect, 
is actually to be found in the Slavonic Josephus as soon as the 
sentences to which exception is taken are simply excluded. In 
this way we obtain the following text : 


‘And they (the Jewish leaders) went and communicated (it) to 
Pilate.’ And he sent and put many of the multitude to death. And 
he had that wonder-worker brought up, and, after he had held an 
enquiry concerning him, he gave his sentence: 5 He is a malefactor,® 
a robber, a rebel,* thirsting to become a king. And they took him 
and crucified him.’ 


The change of subject from ‘Pilate’ to an indefinite ‘they’ is no 
objection to such a restoration, this phenomenon being rather 
frequently met with in the Slavonic Josephus.® 

As has been mentioned above,® Josephus’ phrase, ‘to sentence 
to the cross’ (σταυρῷ ἐπιτιμᾶν), is the equivalent of the Roman 
legal formula employed by Tacitus, ‘supplicio afficere.’ The full 
technical term for this penalty was ‘supplictum more majorum’ 
(ἡ κατὰ Tov πάτριον νόμον δίκη). Now, since after the deletion of 
the Christian interpolation the subject of the sentence, ‘And they 
took him and crucified him,’ is no longer ‘the Jews’ but ‘ the 
Romans,’ the text of the following words must originally have run, 
not ‘contrary to the law of their fathers,’ but ‘according to the law 
of their fathers,’ answering to the Latin. eat, 

The Slavonic cvez, ‘against,’ used in the phrase ‘¢vez o¢eskij 
zakon’ =‘against the law of the ancestors,’ rapa τὸν πάτριον νόμον; 
‘ contrary to the law of their fathers,’ betrays the hand of the late 
Christian reviser. For in the Haldsis (i. 209), where the Greek has 
the almost identical phrase, ‘ against Jewish law,’ παρὰ τὸν τῶν 
‘lovdaiwy νόμον, the Slavonic equivalent used for the preposition 
παρά is not crez but krome. Since such small particles are generally 
admitted to be among the most significant indices of an author’s 
style, we must infer, either that the first book comes from a 
different translator—which is very improbable—or (and this seems 
to be the obvious explanation) that the ¢vez in the passage under 
consideration comes not from the Slavonic translator, who found 
in his copy κατὰ τὸν πάτριον νόμον, and translated accordingly, 
but from a later Russian reader who, as a member of the Judaizing 

* Cf. the ἔνδειξις in the Testimonium, above, p. 61,4. 
2 cognovit. ὃ κακοῦργος --- maleficus = magician, below, p. 4603. 


ὁ στασιαστής =sediliosus. * For example, i. 18 (Berendts-Grass, p. 79). 
6 Seep. §5 Ul. 3:ff. 


THE NATURE AND THE FIGURE OF JESUS 389 


sect,! was sufficiently acquainted with the Jewish law to know that 
the crucifixion of a living person was not permitted. This correc- 
tion presupposes, of course, that the Russian reader found in his 
text the above-criticized interpolation. 

The hypothesis that the Greek Haldszs, or at least some of its 
MSS., had κατὰ τὸν πάτριον νόμον, in spite of the interpolation 
inculpating the Jews, is by no means improbable if we recall the 
Deuteronomic ordinance? according to which the body of a. 
criminal stoned to death should be hanged on a tree, and that in 
the Talmud 8 the execution of Jesus is actually so represented. 
In any case it would appear clear that ‘contrary to the fathers’ 
law’ in place of ‘in accordance with’ can only have come into the 
text as a correction, and only after it had been interpolated by a 
Christian hand. It is nothing but an attempt to smooth over an 
unevenness created by the interpolations. Exclude this late altera- 
tion along with the obvious Christian insertion in favour of a text 
like ‘according to the law of the emperors,’ * as attested by the 
Rumanian version, and we are left with a statement which can 
unhesitatingly be attributed to Josephus himself. 


Tur CHRISTIAN OMISSIONS AND ADDITIONS IN THE OPENING 
SENTENCES ON THE NATURE AND FIGURE OF JESUS 


The very first sentence of the section on Jesus in the Haldsts 
contains the singular phrase, ‘a man, if one may call him a man.’ 
Here the context leaves no doubt that the writer, either in good 
faith or ironically, proposed to himself and the reader the question 
whether this wonder-worker may not have been a superhuman 
being. The possibility, discussed above,® that the author may 
have intended to represent him as a monster is here excluded by 
what follows : ‘ his nature and figure were human, but his appear- 
ance ὑπὲρ ἄνθρωπον, more than human.’ The fundamental im- 
portance of the sentence makes it necessary to enquire carefully 
what precisely is offered us by the Russian translator and what 
may have stood in his Greek original. 

To begin with the last part of the phrase, there can be little 


doubt that the Russian pace lk renders the Greek ὑπὲρ ἄνθρωπον," 
‘more than a man.’ Now, in the Antiquities (iii. 318) Josephus 
speaks of the many qualities possessed by Moses as ᾿ more than 
human power’ (ὑπὲρ ἄνθρωπον δύναμις). Thus, while he actually 


1 See above, pp. 155 ff. 5 Deut. xxi. 22, xvil. 7. 

3. Klausner, Jesus of Nazareth, p. 27. 

4 ‘emperors’ being a correction for ‘ fathers ’ (impevatorum for patrum) by a 
scribe who knew that, at the time of Jesus, laws were made by the emperors and 
not by the paires of the senate. 

δ See 'p.§2: 

6 Cf, the examples collected in Sreznévski’s Dictionary, ii. 891. 


390 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


attributes “superhuman power ’ to the Hebrew lawgiver,! he will 
only allow the ‘appearance’ of a superhuman being to Jesus, 
the Moses redivivus,? and declines to call him an angel. One has 
only to peruse the sections in the Antiquities dealing with Moses to 
recover not only the ideas but even the exact Greek words which 
disclose the meaning of this ambiguous passage in the Slavonic 
Halosis. The infant Moses may be recognized as divine by his 
form,® his stature and his beauty: his appearance (8 is) compelled 
the passers-by to turn round and gaze at him. One should also 
compare Philo’s description * of the messianic return of the dis- 
persed Israelites to the Holy Land, ‘ conducted by an apparition 
more divine than is the manner of human nature,® invisible to 
others and manifest only to those who are being saved.’ There 
the mysterious guide can be no other than the superhuman figure 
of Moses returned in the glorified shape of a spirit or an angel from 
heaven. 

The phraseology of the corresponding passage of the Haldsis 
isincloseagreement. The word zrak renders the Greek ὄψις in the 
Russian translation of Dan. iii. 19.6 The word obraz renders the 
Greek μορφή in the Gospel of Ostromir. If therefore the Slavonic 
text speaks of the divine figure (obraz) of Jesus, this corresponds 
closely to the θεία μορφή of Moses in Josephus’ text. The 
Russian obvaz may also render a Greek εἰκών. The Russian 
estesivo is the ordinary word for Greek φύσις. The Greek φύσις 
ἀνθρώπων, ‘human nature,’ is in Slavonic éeloviteskoe estestvo® 

The section in question must then have run as follows in the 
original Greek, the words enclosed in brackets being interpolations: 


‘ His nature and form were human, but his appearance was more 
than man [but his works were divine}; (for) he wrought miracles 
wonderful and powerful: [wherefore it is impossible for me to call 
him aman]. But again, looking at his commonplace nature, I will 
not call him an angel.’ 19 


It is obvious that only a Christian could say that the works of 
Jesus were divine. It is indeed a commonplace of the Fathers that 


' Called ‘a great angel’ in the Assumptio Mosis, i. 14. 

* See above, p. 3849; below, p. 620, App. XXII. 

° Ant., li. 232: παῖδα μορφῇ θεῖον. 

* De exsecrationibus, ὃ 8 sq., ii. 435 M.: “" θειοτέρα ἢ Kar’ ἀνθρωπίνην φύσιν byes.” 
Cp. Epiphanius, Haer., xxx. 17, on the Ebionite idea that the Messiah is a man- 
like figure, invisible to men in general (“τὸν Χριστὸν εἶναί τι ἀνδροείκελον ἐκτύπωμα 
ἀόρατον ἀνθρώποις ᾽ἢ). 

5 See below, pp. 395 and 411 n. 4. 

ὁ Sreznévski, i. 998b. 7 [bid., il. 539. 8 [bid., i. 834. 

* For example, in the Old Russian translation of the Greek saint’s lives of the 
so-called Patertk Sinajskij of the eleventh century. 

δ Kal φύσις μὲν καὶ μορφὴ αὐτοῦ ἀνθρωπίνη ἣν, ἡ δὲ ὄψις αὐτοῦ ὑπὲρ ἄνθρωπον, 
[[ἀλλὰ πράξεις αὐτοῦ θεῖαι]}] τέρατα δ᾽ ἐποίει παράδοξα [{καὶ δυνατά (Or ἐμφανῆ or λαμπρά)]]. 
[[Διὰ τοῦτο ἀδύνατόν μοί ἐστιν ἄνθρωπον ὀνομάζειν αὐτόν]. Πάλιν δὲ εἰς τὴν κοινὴν 
φύσιν (αὐτοῦ) (ἀπιδών, βλέπων OF σκοπῶν) οὐδὲ ἄγγελον αὐτὸν καλέσω," 


‘A MAN, IF ONE MAY CALL HIM A MAN’ 391 


the miracles prove the divine nature of Jesus.t Equally incon- 
ceivable is it to suppose that Josephus should have said that it was 
impossible for him to call him a man ; for that goes far beyond the 
hesitating phrase in the opening sentence, ‘if one may call him a 
man,’ quite aside from the open contradiction with the phrase 
‘his nature was human.’ To obtain, then, a consistent meaning 
of this confused paragraph, one must begin by setting aside the 
bracketed words, no doubt the marginal comments of a Christian 
reader. What remains is quite in keeping with Josephus’ attitude 
of cool rejection and with the restored text of the opening sentence 
of the Testimonium : ? 


‘At that time there appeared a man, if one should call him a 
man. ... His nature and form were human, for he displayed wonder- 
ful signs and feats of power. Again, having regard to the nature he 
had in common (with all men), I shall not call him an angel.’ 


Clearly, however, we have not yet recovered the whole text. 
As in the Antiquities, ‘if one should call him a man’ remains 
obscure until one has recourse to the early imitation in the 
‘Lentulus letter’ * and inserts from there the words ‘ whom his 
disciples call a Son of God.’ 


‘At that time there appeared a man, if one may call him a man 
<whom his disciples call a Son of God>. His nature and form were 
human,’ etc. 


That gives a good logical connexion and at once explains the final 
clause, ‘Again... J will not call him an angel’; for else a 
reader of the present mutilated text might well ask, Who desired 
Josephus to call Jesus an angel? 4 But if we supply the words 
from the ‘ Lentulus letter,’ that is, the words which the forger of 
that letter still found in his Josephus and utilized, it is at once clear 
that the Jewish historian is inveighing against the designation of 
Jesus as a ben elohim. For him, as is shown by his version ὅ of the 
story of the fallen angels in Gen. vi., a ‘son of God’ is simply an 
angel. His conception of such angelic beings as possessing remark- 
able stature and beauty appears from his narrative of the Samson 
story,® as well as from other passages.’ 

Under these circumstances it becomes intelligible why Josephus 
lays such stress on the fact that the wonder-worker who gave him- 


1 Cf, Melito of Sardes, frag. vi., ed. Otto, p. 416; Orig., C. Cels., ii. 48 ; ii. 28, 
33; Hippol. on Ps. ii., ed. Wendland, i. p. 146; Novatian, De tvin., 11 (Migne, 
P.L., iii. 904) ; Acta Thom., xlvii. 143 ; Victorinus Poetoviensis, De faby. mundi 
(Migne, P.L., v. 313) ; Acta Andreae et Matth., ii. 1. p. 79. 

2 See above, p. 62. 3 See above, p. 52 1.13; below, p. 404. 

4 The reader may recall the anecdote of the Spartan king who said to a 
panegyrist of Herakles : ‘ But who on earth says anything against Herakles ? ’ 

6 Ant., i. 3.1: ‘sons of God’ become ‘angels’ (as in the LXX.). 

6. Ant., v. 8.2 (= Judges xiii.). 7 For example, Ant., xv. § 25. 


392 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


self the appearance of being ‘more than a man’ can have been 
only a human figure, nay, an everyday, ordinary creature (κοινὴ 
φύσις), and therefore no ‘angel’ or ‘Son of God.’ But on this 
point he must have said more than now appears in the text. Any 
one with the slightest notion of the art of story-telling will recognize 
that a brief statement like ‘ his nature and his form were human ’ 
cannot be abruptly flung at the reader and left at that, without 
further elaboration and a more detailed justification. 
A good instance is found in the Jewish War: 1 


“Among those serving in the cohorts was one named Sabinus, a 
native of Syria, who showed himself both in might of hand and in 
spirit the bravest of men. Yet any one seeing him before that day 
and judging from his bodily features would not have taken him even 
for a decent soldier. His skin was black, his flesh shrunk and hairy ; 
but within that slender frame there dwelt an heroic soul.’ 


This narrative is inconceivable without the italicized words furnish- 
ing the necessary details of the unsightly appearance of this dis- 
tinguished soldier. The loss would at once be felt were these 
words accidentally omitted or intentionally deleted; the reader 
would certainly ask for what reasons this man would not have 
been taken for a good soldier, and a narrator must have anticipated 
such a question. In the same way the general assertion of the 
Slavonic Josephus that the nature and figure of Jesus were purely 
human inevitably provokes the question how far the historian can 
make good such an assertion—in particular, how he can speak of 
this wonder-worker’s ‘ordinary nature.’ 

As a matter of fact, Ihad come tothe conclusion that something 
was missing here, long before I discovered that the deleted clause 
was not hopelessly lost, but that by a happy accident a description 
of Jesus had been preserved elsewhere, perfectly filling the sup- 
posed gap. I had even published 3 my restoration of the whole 
section long before I received, through the kindness of the late 
Konrad Grass, the last sheets of his edition of Berendts’ transla- 
tion, from which I learnt of the till then unedited title of the Jesus 
chapter in the codex Kasan 444.3 This marginal title, containing 
a statement of the contents of the pericope which does not agree 
with the extant text, strikingly confirmed the correctness of my 
restoration of the original passage. 


t BLY, Vis. 54. δ᾽ 

* A lecture delivered before the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in 
Paris, 28th June 1926, printed in the Revue de l’Histoive des Religions, xciii. 
(1926), pp. I-21. 

* ‘Of our Lord Redeemer Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and of the divine jigure 
of his appearance and of his miracles,’ Berendts-Grass, i. 268. Note that the extant 
text does not speak of a ‘divine’ but only of a ‘human’ figure; that no details 
are given and no miracles mentioned, 


be Sh lh = 
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| Peannsy: pre Ye ¢ Jape oi 
καὶ evn. αἰμκα: sere Se oA 


| oe. 
μα λαϊβευκκεμλρυν κ οἷν “ἴον tt 
SPAHR EC Taacleri gtey ἐζευστθ εις 


Φηκεγεισλκύκαὶ τοῦ αὐτοῦ. 


ῥάρα.. ομ“τοισε ᾿᾿κόγασ ἔζειντ 
φῶμα αν ὅζαι ὃς nArk Co voter 


KE IprTee: ἐςσεὶκαϊα we ee 
Trico στ τοῖν co Gat 


ὅρα ΑΟΉΜΟΞ eat cued ache : 


be ει 


οφραιγόχαεμσσ οι μδοιταμοιδς 


ἐντὶ 2 Ἧ 


‘ ae ΤΊ 


οἵ 


ἰείζταλοεν, oy eae ee sabuor res KoA δὲ 9,5, sikh, . 


AS ea eon ‘ai Hee Bierce: Sale 


annercri SadonepecheehepaneLcaabiios ἐμὸν τς 
TY: sales ἐν δον ATF) - ἐλ Fed mao RN ΤΣ 


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THE THREE EXTANT MSS. WITH BISHOP ANDREW OF CRETE’S QUOTATION FROM JOSEPHUS ON THE BODILY APPEARANCE OF JESUS 


Andreas Cretensis, Cod, Pa 


ris, Graec. 1630, P. 124. schol. ad Joh. Damasce. 


De fide orthod. IV, 16 PARIS, GRAEC. NO. 901 F° 87 Ε΄ AND NO. IIIQ FOL. 140 v° 


(SEE P. 393, NOTE 4) 


AXX ALV Td 


XV 
ECCE HOMO 


‘. .., and last of all he was seen of me also.’ 
1 Cor. xv. 8 


JOSEPHUS ON THE BopiLy APPEARANCE OF JESUS 


VERY student of Christian iconography is familiar with 

Ernst v. Dobschiitz’s learned collection! and critical edition 

of all extant sources relating to the historical develop- 
ment of the literary portrait of Jesus. Many of our readers will 
also remember a number of passages in the Church Fathers con- 
cerning the plain, nay, ugly appearance of ‘Jesus when in the 
flesh.’ If any traces or echoes were preserved anywhere of a 
description of the carpenter of Nazareth, deleted from Josephus’ 
Haldsis because of its offensive ring in the ears of Christians of a 
later age, they must surely be found in v. Dobschiitz’s magnum 
opus. A first glance at the index of names shows that we are not 
mistaken in this expectation. Josephus is, in fact, quoted as a 
star witness for the genuineness of a detailed description of the 
human appearance of Jesus, preserved in varying form and extent 
and repeatedly and reverentially copied by a number of authors. 
It is not, indeed, found in any one of the numerous passages on the 
subject in the ante-Nicene Fathers,” always quite brief and couched 
in general terms, but is attested by a well-known and thoroughly 
trustworthy Byzantine bishop of the eighth century. 

Andreas Hierosolymitanus or Cretensis was born at Damascus 
about 660, removed to Jerusalem in his fifteenth year and was 
there consecrated by the Patriarch Theodore, sent to Constanti- 
nople (695), and at the beginning of the eighth century appointed 
Archbishop of Crete, in which dignity he died, at Gortyn.* This 
ecclesiastic, who plays animportant réle in the history of Christian 
church music, says in a remarkable fragment on image worship : ὃ 


‘ But moreover the Jew Josephus in like manner narrates that the 
Lord was seen having connate eyebrows,°® goodly eyes, long-faced,® 
crooked,’ well grown.’ ὃ 


1 ‘Christusbilder,’ in Harnack’s Texte und Untersuchungen, N.F., iii. (1899). 
* Collected in Herzog-Hauck, Protest. Realencycl., iii®. 64, 35-54. 
See below, App. XXI., p. 618. Ruins of his church are still in existence. See 
Pl. xxxvii. of the German edition. Μ᾿ 

4 Dobschiitz, op. cit., p. 189. The three only MSS. of this important text are 
» reproduced on our Pl. xxv. 
ὃ σύνοφρυς, ὁ μακροπρόσωπος, 7 ἐπίκυφος. 8 εὐήλιξ, 

393 


.- 


394 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


The same statement is found in a scholion to John of Damascus ! 
in two MSS. in the Bibliothéque Nationale : 3 


‘Since moreover Josephus the Jew, as some say, .. . in like 
manner narrates that the Lord was seen having connate eyebrows, 
goodly eyes, long-faced,® crooked, well grown. . . .’ 


This scholion must at one time have been found in a somewhat 
fuller form in numerous MSS. of the above-mentioned work, since 
it has passed over into the Latin version of John of Damascus 
produced about 1150 by Burgundio Pisano. Thence? it was taken 
over by Jacobus de Voragine, the famous author of the Legenda 
aurea ® (1298), and by Vincent of Beauvais® (c. 1264). The quota- 
tion of Bishop Andreas, who has been most frivolously charged 
with having invented it, is confirmed by various circumstances. 
In the first place, the Vzta beatae Mariae et Salvatoris rhythmica 
—that remarkable thirteenth-century poem, which expressly 
mentions Josephus among its sources and combines the two stories 
found in the interpolated Slavonic Haldsis, to wit, the healing of 
Pilate’s wife and the bribing of the governor—likewise contains a 
detailed description of the personal appearance of Jesus and his 
mother.’ Secondly, we have a similar description in the Church 
History of Nicephorus Callistou® of the ‘God-man’s figure 
(Geavdpixns μορφῆς) of our saviour Jesus Christ . . . as we re- 
ceived it from ancient writers,’ immediately following a transcript 
of the famous Testimonium which ends with the words, ‘These 
things also Josephus (wrote).’ ° 

Of the two writers depéndent on the scholion of John of 
Damascus it should be noted that, whereas Vincent of Beauvais 
uses the full and explicit phrase ‘Josephus ut ait historia,’ Jacobus 
de Voragine is content with the more indefinite expression ‘ in 
quadam antiqua historia,’ by which is obviously meant the 
Historia belli Judatct or Historia captivitatis Jerusalem. From 


De fide orthod., iv. 16. 

Par. Reg., 1986 and 2928, now Graeci, Nos. 901 and 1119; Dobschiitz, 187, 189. 
μακροπρόσωπος. 

Or directly from a MS. of the Latin Josephus. See above, p. 95 π.1. 

5 Ed. J. G. Th. Grasse, p. 707: ‘cujus autem imaginis dominus fuerit .. . 
idem Josephus testatur: fuit enim bene oculatus, bene superciliatus, longum 
vultum habuit et fuit acclivis, quod est signum maturitatis.’ 

6 Spec. Hist., viii. 23: ‘Testimonia Josephi de Johanne Baptista et de domino 
Hiesu et ejus facie corporali’: Johannes Damascenus, i. 1119: ‘Ipse quoque 
Josephus, ut ait historia, tradit dominum Jhesum visum fuisse communiter 
ciliatum, id est conjuncta supercilia habentem, bene oculatum, longum vultum 
habentem.,’ 

7 Dobschiitz, 307. The details, capilli, supercilia, nasus, etc., are here so 
altered as to give a vague picture of ideal beauty. 

5 Migne,eP.G., cxlv. 747. 

¥ “He was full seven spans (high), with beautiful eyes, a long nose, tawny hair, 
black eyebrows, his neck gently bent so that the carriage of his body was not quite 
upright and rigid.’ 


1 
2 
3 
4 


PLATE XXVI 


‘em bus ortontam ccfane- Ἐν ἀξ μον Sg is 
rab ἔ ; 


ἐν rite τς curt ProsMEHe Beyer t emorbs ee a 
erie De πε ρυσιμκεικευιε ἐμρϑαβεύβ ΠΣ 5.5: δῷ εἰσέτι α ΝΞ 
ai note Peneulié fabene prmerpatimy me parerbs rece Feros ὃς .. 

ἐστε fic foo τέ cenacezibs. Apparint ε-- fas ef he Bi ty 
be τ δ fit eT RTT τς mictets Girtirh|e nomen ea ἢ 
XPS “τῷ ice ςτέεες. a εὐρενιέεθεεε a ϑεπειεάξ: Re" 


[sang itate oe pies Tet 

Loree Lareetores home quacde fervtstte φὴς 

sae Ῥ “τῆς, Sonbts HalPen€ lie mcr oa 

sof ee Dri letere “et pain 3 Copilieg Bec color ἢ 
BINS σόν ὡς ζεσήαμοῦ tev pa st epee ee 


τειν! βἰαπάνει cc © pevenaf fina Hic TRH Ce macitla ala beet 
fre ΙΝ πυρὸν ἐδ Ceefttenaf ἐξ ome nmietta i us 
eft wepeclreci fic “Savin: ἡ νεῷ ἂν a ὦ vos 2 ὙῊῖΝιι berths 
cari (tre ἐϑεοξοισεσον,. cc non ἔσπετε jee mi micdro b a efor 
Xpiectx habene τηνε σεν ἐξ. οὐτέντοῖιν ertuhié bew » eftastene 
ἐς εἰατεδ gui pienb δε. Br eprchertprone tere Putin ἧς 
Ad NVOMELONE bliaattuce εἰ anaby 4: Mea: τες foreata ε{2. rita) 
5. τς "1.0" σα {τι «Κ : ΤΡ ate “trite: tc teeth a 
preopaeptitue ἐξ 260s | Wane αίνις. oC beractisct bafenr 
“pekerinbilia- hs eotlogtuce ΤΉ Ξ βανιιε ἐέ mit & fee fs 
fe ‘ hee γον, σι ἐρείοία Ἔχε νέτ eft wm sathaathe 


i ac Mae os 
Neuse hos en δεν ele Sk δ seser cs me cit ppat δι" 


THE *‘ EPISTLE OF LENTULUS'’ 
WITH THE CLAUSE BORROWED FROM THE ‘ Halosis * OF JOSE PHUS ‘apparuit homo, st fas est hominem dicere. 
Cod. Paris. Lat. 17730 saec. xV F° 7 ν᾿ AND 8 R° 


ECCE HOMO 305 


this one may reasonably conclude that when Theodorus Anag- 
nostes, Nicephorus Callistou, Theophanes, and Anastasius Biblio- 
thecarius! speak of the personal appearance of Jesus, quoting as 
their authority ‘the historian’ (ὁ ἱστορῶν) or ‘some of the 
historians’ (τινὲς τῶν ἱστορικῶν), or the like, these writers mean 
no other than Josephus, who, as appears from phrases used else- 
where by Nicephorus? and other Byzantines,* was regarded as 
‘ the historian ’ of the time of Jesus. 

The description in question appears, without any mention of 
its source, in the monk Epiphanius of the Callistratou monastery 4 
in Constantinople (before A.D. 780), and in an almost contemporary 
epistle from the Oriental patriarchs assembled in Jerusalem 
to the Emperor Theophilus. A Byzantine homily concerning 
miracle-working images® appeals to ‘the contemporary eye- 
witnesses,’ 7 

Lastly, mention must be made of an anonymous scholion with 
the inscription ‘ concerning the Lord’s human form (ἀνθρωπίνη 
μορφή). 8 The title ‘concerning the Saviour’s God-man-like 
figure’ (περὶ τῆς τοῦ σωτῆρος θεανδρικῆς μορφῆς) in the aforesaid 
Byzantine homily is a very instructive corrective of this, and forms 
a bridge to the ‘ divine figure’ in the superscription of the Jesus 
section in codex Kasan 444 of the Slavonic Halosts. 

That rubric, it will be remembered, runs thus: ‘ Of the Lord our 
Redeemer Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and of the divine form of 
his appearance (rept τῆς θείας μορφῆς τῆς ὄψεως) and of his 
wonderful works.’ As we have seen above, this heading does not 
correspond at all to the traditional text, since the latter describes 
the form of the wonder-worker as purely human, his appearance 
(ὄψις) only as superhuman, and his works as divine. One has only 
to compare the superscription to the anonymous scholion, ἡ con- 
cerning the Lord’s hwman form,’ to perceive that that is the true 
and original text of the rubric, and that by progressive stages 
of correction ἀνθρωπίνη μορφή has been altered first to θεανδρικὴ 
μορφή and finally to the θεία μορφή represented by the Russian 
MS. Naturally, the censor intended to introduce a similar cor- 
rection into the text itself, but a careless reviser has, fortunately, 
forgotten to alter the word ‘human’ in the text after having 
corrected the title according to the directions received by his 
superior or according to a revised copy. Furthermore, it is 
evident that no one would have given the title ‘concerning the 
Saviour’s form and his wonderful deeds’ to a passage actually 


1 The quotations are given in App. XXI., p. 619. 
2 £.G., cxlv. 603. 8. 9. Cedren., Hist. comp., p. 225, ed. Paris. 
* Dobschiitz, p. 302. 5. Ἰδιῶ;, P.:303: 


ὃ. Dobschiitz, p. 240. 
1 The expression is deriyed from Lyke i. 2, ὃ Dobschiitz, p. 305. 


396 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


containing nothing whatever about his personal appearance, nor 
enumerating his miraculous exploits. In other words, it is im- 
possible to suppose the title to have referred originally to the short 
clause ‘ his nature and his form were human’; on the contrary, 
the title confirms the conclusion reached above and actually before 
this final proof was available to me, viz. that the section of the 
Haldsis under consideration must have contained originally a 
detailed description of the nameless wonder-worker and some par- 
ticulars at least about the wonders he was said to have wrought. 


THE SO-CALLED ‘ LETTER OF LENTULUS’ AND THE PASSAGE ON 
JESUS IN THE ‘ HALOsIs’ 


Mention has been made repeatedly, in the course of this study, 
of the so-called Epistula Lentuli de effigie Christi, and we may now 
be in a position to solve the old enigma presented by this document 
and to arrive at a plausible explanation of its genesis. It is a 
highly remarkable and doubtless Christian forgery, preserved in 
numerous M55. and old prints. It was re-edited in 1899 by 
Dr. v. Dobschiitz with a full and very welcome apparatus criticus. 
That scholar, however, as he himself admits, failed to reach any 
satisfactory conclusion concerning its age and the precise form of 
literature to which it may be said to belong. The inscription 
found in one MS., ‘de forma et operibus Jesu Christi,’ closely 
agrees with the title of the chapter on Jesus in the Slavonic Jose- 
phus, ‘of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, and of the form of his 
appearance and of his wonderful works.’ Again, there is a striking 
agreement of the opening sentence of this epistle, ‘apparuit tem- 
poribus istis,’ with the extant Slavonic text of the Halésis, as 
opposed to the Lestimonium in Ant., xviii. 53, which reads, ‘ there 
lived, oy there arose at that time .. .᾿ (γίνεται κατὰ τοῦτον τὸν 
χρόνον... ). Inthe Slavonic we have todga iavi, ‘ at that time 
appeared (ἐφάνη) a man,’ etc. 

This curious agreement becomes still more significant if we 
transfer to the text—as since the disclosure of the Haldsis we are 
surely justified in doing—the highly instructive reading of the 
Paris and Munich MSS..,? relegated by Dobschiitz to his apparatus 
criticus, viz. ‘ apparuit temporibus istis et adhuc est 3 homo, si fas 
est hominem dicere,’ etc. For it is clear that this small parenthesis 
has not been znterpolated by the writer of the archetype of the two 
MSS. as an allusion to the famous Testimonium (what object could 
there be in that ?), but conversely that this treacherous echo of 
Josephus’ ironical remark, betraying the forger’s source, has been 


1 Op. cit., p. 308 sqq. * Reproduced on our Pls, xxvi, and xxvit. 
* On these words, cf, below, p. 405 n. 2. 


PEGS PSS Fendt he er 


hQvept YU) rerpys fim Poffo 5 108) pet ἐπ 


vla- 
Esto lentil: ad C:nani2oma- 
“ἰῇ De eli πο hater 


Caer 


aes Aa MpIDG f erarthurct he 
ba Sole τ poy bard pel AP οὐ δῶ 


the oped “ ᾿ OF  ἀβονννλνρ μετ τὰ 


weitans Cie οοὺ : δεσμεῖ: won ila 
ὧν Αἱ avnj-er laa ΩΝ 


Gupnine mota6 2 aig hes ἐ logulé 
τοῖν bane 
Ω { ad po : δι τι Or 
252. σαν OL} 
ἐγραδιΐδ Caidonsomzairoy 


aw Caprlfot oG se eos gala 5 


Sest jr: ταν eile Κα 
ἘΠΩ͂Ν Πότ Bee Bo 75: re 


“ty: G 


SAME TEXT AS OUR PLATE XXVI FROM COD, MONAC. LAT. 6007 F° 


«εἴ. 


Ajthew γα 


ῬῬπιαμῆς €rplarvs fee 19 wad, 

226 OD asthe nak niffrd atariin 
[Ὁ συνέλεγε er filgernors abhinac 
venrilantes-Difaike Kner rH. 
CAPUNG το} τννόξε "ieee 
plaria «γε fia} ἀν ae fone 
augn er mada albig gia modzary 
cherdignr mode2ate ientiytane Ya 
et σείβ nella ponty oft Zyzehen fia 
Smba hte copr (a3 ct pubviviea 
pile ronrvlese sto longs feOramet 
“ ifGrenin » fee hitarfrrip lorem 


THE ‘ EPISTLE OF LENTULUS'’ 


(SEE P. 396, NOTE 2) 


122 


Arpetis it  MEAE I 


Som ac rip Oe ἐς" δ. algun | 
ἘΞ’ (Herren 7 ." arc DONear pa formed, 


cronannd. onlig glanné ie. 
roms Sn enmdarbr Pibibe, pratt 
momeonu ᾧ ἔρννϑο ermadil et ila, 
aid furcrnch aliiet: 1:1 ἢ pvif9 
ἐγετιδ baie DUES tC m Panna ros 
pe propagnty—ectaG mang ins 
haha sufi dele δε Αγ» oF 
wae aprudRame or madesty Spe 


nofue mirez Filia” ommnrting — 
Yee “4G fae Ca anos 
Pap as esas 


Sy ore tucGfis;}? 


Rest a τ a aoa ac Bete eT Τῷ 


7% R° AND 123 R* 


TIAXX 4ALV Td 


ECCE HOMO 307 


deleted from the archetype of the overwhelming majority of MSS. 
because it was obvious that the forgery would at once be detected 
if so striking an expression, taken from the Haldsts, a book com- 
posed during the reign of Vespasian or Titus, or from the Anti- 
guities, published under Domitian, were to appear as coming from 
the pen of one Lentulus, supposed to have written at the time of 
the first appearance of Jesus under Tiberius. 

There can therefore be no doubt that the forger of the 
‘Lentulus letter’ knew the section of the Haldsts ‘on the human 
form of Jesus and his wonderful works,’ and that he found there a 
series of statements concerning his personal appearance such as 
Andrew of Crete and the other authorities already mentioned read 
in their MSS. of Josephus. The obvious intention of this pious 
fraud was to replace this description of Jesus, so offensive to the 
later Christians and hence deleted subsequently in the archetype 
of the Slavonic text, by another, more edifying pen-portrait. Yet 
in the polemical writings against the iconoclasts the testimony of 
Josephus as to the human characteristics of Jesus was used to 
refute those who maintained that no one could know anything 
about the physical appearance of Jesus—not, however, without 
having undergone an editorial revision intended to retouch, as 
far as that was possible without destroying entirely the individual 
character of the portrait, the most objectionable features. 

At first sight it might be supposed that the simplest way of 
refuting a malicious description in Josephus of the personal appear- 
ance of Jesus would have been to put another and more flattering 
description into the mouth of the principal official witness, his 
judge Pontius Pilate, the more so because upon that officer had 
been foisted a number of spurious ‘acta’ (ὑπομνήματα) of the 
trial along with various reports to the emperor and to Herod, 
accompanied by the replies they were supposed to have drawn. 
As a matter of fact, ina Paris MS.! we actually find the remarkable 
description of Jesus, elsewhere ascribed to one Lentulus, but here 
entitled ‘ Pilati ad Romanos de Xro,’ so that this so-called epistle 
would without any hesitation have been reckoned with the Pilate 
apocrypha had this MS. alone survived. Since, however, this 
superscription stands quite isolated, little weight would attach to 
it, were it not for the fact that its title closely corresponds to 
certain ancient traditions, equally in need of explanation and 
hitherto misunderstood, to the effect that Pzlate had a ‘forma’ or 
an ‘image’ (εἰκών), or even several ‘images,’ of Jesus prepared 
for himself.? 

The syncretistic Gnostics, who were apparently the first to 

1 Paris. lat., 2962 (saec. xv./xvi.) : cod. f. 2 of Dobschiitz; cf. our Pl. xxviii. 


2 Dobschiitz, 98: Iren., Adv. haer., i. 25.6; Epiph., Haeres., XXvil. 6, and else- 
where. See App. xx., below, pp. 617 f. 


308 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


make portraits of Jesus, both ‘painted and sculptured in various 
materials,’ along with ‘statues of the ancient sages Pythagoras, 
Plato, and Aristotle,’ claimed as the historical basis for this portrait, 
newly introduced among the figures of the great thinkers, that 
‘forma’ or those εἰκόνες made by Pilate of his prisoner. Credu- 
lous relic-hunters of the eighth century were shown this legendary 
likeness (tmago) on the wall of the so-called praetorium of Pilate in 
Jerusalem, and at that time there might conceivably have been a 
painting in this locality, although the complete absence of any 
imitations of it (in contrast to the famous Abgarus and Veronica 
portraits) practically excludes such a possibility. It is also con- 
ceivable that people such as Epiphanius should have been ignorant 
and uncritical enough to believe in the story of the portrait of an 
interesting prisoner painted by order of his judge. Yet it is highly 
improbable that cultivated philosophers, eclectic followers of the 
neo-Platonic and neo-Pythagorean schools, rich and_ broad- 
minded enough to erect in their private chapels costly statues of 
all the sages of the past, were at the same time so naive as to 
believe such a fable, much less to put it in circulation. 

What these distinguished and tolerant eclectics really said and 
meant can no longer be unintelligible to any one since the discovery 
of the numerous papyri which have taught us that in ancient legal 
and business life the word εἰκών or εἰκονισμός denoted that 
written description of an individual called ‘signalement’ in French, 
‘ hue-and-cry ’ in archaic English. The device, a man’s official 
personal description by certain marked features,1 was largely 
employed in the records of criminal and civil cases or in the official 
proceedings of the political authorities throughout the Hellenistic 
and Roman East. 

Foolish as it would be to suppose a Roman governor to have 
called in a portrait-painter or a sculptor to perpetuate the features 
of an accused malefactor, however remarkable his appearance, it 
is no less plausible that the writ of indictment (μήνυσις, libellus), 
the records or minutes (ὑπομνήματα), the acta of the preliminary 
enquiry (cogmttvo) and of the trial itself, must needs have contained 
an εἰκών (iconismus) of the accused. From the standpoint of our 
present-day knowledge of ancient chancellery practice nothing is 


1 Cf. E. Rohde, Dey griech. Roman?, Leipzig, 1900, p. 160 n. 1.; Gradenwitz, 
Einfiihrung in die Papyruskunde, Leipzig, 1900, p. 126 sqq.; J. First, Die liter. 
Portratmaniey 1m Bereich des griech.-vém. Schrifttums, Philologus, Ixi. (1902), 
P- 377 sqq.; Mitteis-Wilcken, Grundziige und Chrestomathie der Papyruskunde, 
Leipzig, 1912, ii. 75; cf. i. 194 and 529; J. Hasebrock, Das Signalement in den 
Papyrusurkunden, Berlin, 1921, pp. 79-117; Alessandra Caldara, I connotati 
personalt net documenti d’Egitto dell’ eta greca e romana, Milano, 1924; F. Smolka, 
De vatione personarum describendarum in papyrorum actis adhibita, Eos, xxvii. 
(1924), p. 75 sqq.; G. Misener, Iconistic Portraits, Classical Philology, vol. xix., 
April 1924, pp. 97-123. This whole literature was not yet in existence when 
v. Dobschiitz, op. cit., p. 294 sq., dealt with the problem. 


PLATE XXVIII 


CZ ouffota prfan AD Yow anos λυ; 


we temporh3 frh οἱ aye f homo maguebriub + » 


WOMANS Je fr ary ὥνδεν τας rope te et 
Neen rane, grim ont Stfrpnlcoran “fe Aer αν νους, 
δὲ (Δάν ove 4 re gore. bow 22" Αἄζανε pt nit deb 


et fred aGikins wank Co ἢ em guem laa dn (66 

pe (hut oF et fon Dd ve! ba phe ly bené clout mune 

aucfane pre mathe - ὧν Hance ἐ νε(γ1 Ad auceoaGauubs νι “9 

OttcriwoeG cut [oe ah op rukunn reruGeree “2 Raenunov ab 

bummer Cow Canteé daftem eb harklent m 2. Ἴθι Wag 

ΩΣ γος Cw WAZA Φϑίννννν βουκῶνν γ»ἔαννάνη ταῦ ΤΙΣ 
ar nae Ca por 


dam fare 
moder fie παρα paler Ef " rplleen ΓΤ 


Say , Εἰ ραν uber ἘΡΩ͂ΣΙ 


matam - A fy erin [A bene mm μα wi ie: Seale 
sev Vda Aa sh hee aaa Lab: 
mamonuee blanSwe ite Aamabshs vy Cary6 yrenenee 


aon me Gr eavnr dr fee cm 
OPA oF ΩΣ ΟΝ G. dese flee οἷς Rel το 
halt | m wo ως “¥ Aner iene 


Bes 
"φρο ββος βίης 


THE ORIGINAL TITLE OF THE SO-CALLED ‘ EPISTLE OF LENTULUS'’ : 
EPISTULA PILATI AD ROMANOS 


COD. PARIS LAT, 2962 SAEC, XV/XVI F° 174 
(SEE P. 397, NOTE 1) 


ECCE HOMO 399 


more probable than that Pilate actually had an εἰκών of “Jesus; 
called Christ’ drawn up, and that it had found its proper place ; | 
the genuine ‘acts’ of Pilate recording the trial of Jesus and pub 
lished by the Emperor Maximinus Daia in A.D, 311.1 

Since it is inconceivable that the Gnostics of the age of Alex- 
ander Severus (A.D. 222-235) could have appealed to the genuine 
documents first published by Maximinus (A.D. 311), and since it is 
equally improbable that before such a publication any one could be 
in possession of or have knowledge of the old copies of the genuine 
iconismus, We can only suppose that their portraits of Jesus were 
drawn from some apocryphal εἰκών attributed to Pilate—in other 
words, that they knew the so-called “Lentulus letter,’ in the shape 
it has in the Paris MS., under the title “nota Pilati de effigie Jesu 
Christi.’ This pamphlet need not have circulated as an inde- 
pendent work. Just as the report (ἀναφορά) of Pilate to Tiberius 
appears in some MSS. as an appendix to the late Acts of Pilate of 
the time of the Emperor Theodosius, so this spurious tconismus 
may have formed a constituent portion of, or an appendix to, 
those lost older, but likewise forged, Acts of Pilate referred to by 
Justin Martyr? and Tertullian. In this form, as a Pilate apo- 
cryphon, the piece is then certainly older than the reign of Alex- 
ander Severus. Since, like the Pilate forgeries in general, it is 
clearly directed against Josephus and obviously alludes to his 
peculiar wording, and since such refutations are as a rule written 
at a time when the refuted work was still recent, not half a century 
later, when the excitement over an obnoxious publication had long 
died down, I should have no hesitation in dating this piece, along 
with the lost oldest Pilate apocrypha, back into the last decades of 
the first century. 

At this point a further question arises: why has this pamphlet, 
in all MSS. but one, abandoned the ascription to Pilate, offhand 
intelligible to every reader, in favour of the highly aristocratic but 
otherwise rather puzzling ‘ Lentulus,’ a name common in the 
Roman gens Cornelia, but for that very reason very ambiguous and 
hitherto at least a riddle to the modern scholar? In reality the 
enigma is not hard to solve. A glance at the fast consulares to 
which the ancient Church had recourse in all investigations into 
the date of the crucifixion * will show, three years before the year 
of that event (i.e., according to the usual reckoning of a three-year 
ministry, in the year when Jesus made his first appearance) and 
five years before the classical consulate of Rufio and Rubellio (the 
fifteenth year of Tiberius), the names ‘Agrippa 1. et Lentulo coss.’ 


1 See above, p. 16 n. 3. 

2 Apol., 35 (Migne, P.G., xli. 885). 3 Abol., 21. 

4 Cf. above, p. 296; further, the ‘ series of consular dates’ (εἱρμὸς ὑπατείας) for the 
alleged thirty-three years of Jesus’ life in Epiph., Haeres., li. (P.G., xli. 979 sqq.)- 


400 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


given as those of the eponymous consuls of the tenth year of that 
emperor's reign. The Christian reader who drew all his historical 
information from such condensed abstracts might well imagine 
that this Lentulus was the same person as his namesake of whom 
he read in a similar source :! ‘ Lentulo et Silvano coss. In his 
temporibus adnuntiavit Elisabeth angelus.’ According to the 
Chronicon Paschale* the conception and the birth of Jesus took 
place in the consulate of one Lentulus and one Piso. 

The name of Lentulus thus appeared sufficiently closely linked 
with the cardinal events in the Gospel story to impress a not 
wholly uneducated forger, who sought in the Christian extracts 
from the Roman consular /asti a name for an imaginary pro- 
consular official superior in rank to the equestrian officer Pilate, by 
whose witness that of Pilate might be confuted or ‘rectified.’ He 
thus fabricated an alleged report to the emperor such as the im- 
perial agents really used to send to their august lord. The need 
for such ‘rectification’ by an imaginary superior of Pilate cannot, 
however, have been felt until, in consequence of the publication of 
the genuine Acts of Pilate in 311, it was discovered that the de- 
scription of Jesus actually drawn up by Pilate’s orders agreed 
verbatim with the objectionable statement of Josephus, which it had 
been sought to invalidate by the spurious evidence of Pilate, the 
agreement being due to the simple reason that Josephus had in 
fact obtained these details from no other source than the extracts 
from the official report of Pilate included in the commentarii of 
Tiberius. 

Since, therefore, Pilate had ceased to be an utilizable witness 
against Josephus in the controversy with Jews and heathens, the 
forged document was now ascribed to the consular Lentulus. In 
this final form, which the work cannot have assumed before A.D. 
311, it appears to have lived on like other apocrypha in the Greek 
Church, and reference was made, in support of this retouched 
portrait of Jesus, not only to Josephus, or to ‘ the historian’ or 
‘historians,’ but generally to ‘the ancients,’ or even to ‘the 
original eye-witnesses’ (ἀπ᾽ ἀρχῆς αὐτόπται). Seeing that no 
canonical or apocryphal gospel ever attempted a description of 
Jesus—in keeping with the saying of Paul, ‘ even though we have 
known Christ after the flesh, yet now know we him no more ’ ?— 
the © eye-witnesses ’ cannot mean the Apostles, and the expression 
can only refer to the εἰκόνες, fraudulently attributed to Pilate or 
to his contemporary Lentulus. In the West, where neither the 
art nor the literature of the Middle Ages betrays the slightest trace 
of any acquaintance with such a personal description of Jesus, it 
is only toward the end of that period, at the earliest in the thir- 


1 Euseb., Chron., ed. Schoene, i. 226. 
? Ed. Bonn, p. 372. *:2 Corv.vir0, 


ECCE HOMO 401 


teenth century, that the Latin version of the now lost Greek text 
makes its appearance. 

The MS. of the Lentulus letter, preserved in the Cistercian 
monastery of Zwettl,! bears the note, ‘ Haec lata sunt de Cistercio,’ 
i.e. ‘ brought from Citeaux.’ The reader who recalls the leading 
part played by Arnold, Abbot of Citeaux, in fighting the heretical 
movement in Southern France,? will not reject the hypothesis that 
the Lentulus’ letter which has come down to us in Dr. Gaster’s 
Rumanian MS. 89, along with the Acts of Pilate and portions of the 
Halésis of Josephus, was first brought by those heretical Joseph- 
inist ‘ passagini’ mentioned above ® from the Balkan provinces to 
Italy and Southern France, there to be translated into Latin. 

That the pamphlet originated in the Eastern empire is indi- 
cated not only by the fact that the Rumanian version professes 
to be derived from one of ‘ Maximos, a monk of the Vatopaedi 
monastery on Mt. Athos,’ but also by the subscription to the lost 
Jena MS.:4 ‘ quae epistula reperta est in armarlis Romae. ex- 
plicit epistula. Jacob(us) de Columpna® A.D. MCCCC XxXI reperit 
eam in libro antiquissimo in capitolio d(e)dic(a)to (a) domino 
patriarcha Constantinopolitano.’ 

The presentation of a MS. by the Patriarch of Constantinople 
to Rome may have occurred in the period before the schism, that 
is to say, before Photius, since the period of negotiations for re- 
union before the Council of Florence, in 1429, is excluded by the 
late date and the adjective antiguissimus applied to the codex in 
question. We had best regard the MS. as a present from the 
Byzantine patriarch to a Roman cleric at the time of the Latin 
empire in Constantinople. This would again carry us to the 
thirteenth century, in which the Haldsis was translated into 
Slavonic ® and was used in the West in the Latin Vita beatae Martae 
et Salvatoris rhythmica. It is quite conceivable that in the time 
of Gregory Ix. and Frederick 11., in consequence of the heresy 
threatening the Greek and Roman Churches alike, pertinent docu- 
ments of use for apologetic purposes were sought and obtained 
from Byzantium. In any case, a MS. emanating from the Patri- 
arch of Constantinople can only have been written in Greek. 


THE WARRANT FOR THE ARREST OF JESUS 


From the account of Josephus,’ here in complete agreement 
with the apocryphal Acta Pilati,’ it appears, as indeed one might 


1 Dobschiitz, p. 325. 

2 L. J. Newman, Jewish Influences on the Christian Reform Movements, New 
York, 1926, p. 154 sq. 

3. Seep. 65. 4 Dobschiitz, p. 324. — 

8 Jacopo di NiccolS Colonna, Lord of Palestrina, died 1431 (Litta, Famiglia 
Colonna, tav. 5). , 

6 See above, p. 148. 7 See above, p. 3851.41. ὃ. M. R. James, op. cit., p. 96. 


20 


402 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


have assumed, that the Jewish authorities laid their information 
against Jesus before the Roman governor while the accused was 
still at liberty ; the Gospels, on the contrary, represent him as 
being arrested by the Jews and dragged to Pilate, who is totally 
ignorant of the charge brought against the prisoner. Obviously, 
the political situation forced the high priests to take this action 
against one of their own nation and faith, and an exact parallel is 
found in that chapter of the same historian where he describes how 
the wealthy members of the Jewish community of Cyrene gave 
information to the governor Catullus against the weaver Jonathan, 
guilty of having planned an exodus of the Cyrenean Jews into the 
Libyan desert.!. In that case their measure of self-preservation 
did not help the notables very much, probably because the Roman 
officials had already detected the affair, though to be sure Josephus 
denies it. There can be little doubt that Pilate would have 
held the Jewish hierarchy responsible for the proclamation of 
Jesus as king of the Jews, had they not betimes decidedly and 
unambiguously dissociated themselves from the dangerous under- 
taking. Thus driven into a corner, the high priests could not 
but inform the Romans as quickly as possible. This informa- 
tion (μήνυσις, lbellus), whether written or oral, must have con- 
tained not only the name and the charge? (αἴτιον), but_ also, 
to facilitate arrest, an tconismus of the accused. Name, charge 
and εἰκών * formed then, along with the-offer-of-a reward, the 
essential contents of what in modern parlance we should call 
the writ or warrant of arrest, issued on receipt of the informa- 
tion~and~ publicly posted up in numerous copies. Hence we 
hear of -several-ecxoves οὐ ἐκτυπώματα Of Jesus made by order 
of Pilate. 
-— Curiously enough, nobody seems to have noticed so far that 
_ such warrants of arrest against Jesus, issued by the Jewish high 
priests immediately before the passover of his execution, are 
clearly mentioned in so many words in the fourth gospel (ΧΙ. 55 ff.) : 
‘And the Jews’ passover was nigh at hand. . . . Then sought 
_ they for Jesus . . . the high priests 4 had even issued warrants 5 


* B.J.,:vil..439., Seecalso.B:J.; ii. 342. 

* Thus in the forged ‘ Acts of Pilate,’ James, op. ef loc. cit. 

ὁ Digest, xi. 4. 1, 8a—measures prescribed for arresting /fugitivi (dparerai) : 
‘eorumque nomina et cuius se quis esse dicat ad magistratus afferantur, ut 
facilius adgnosci et percipi fugitivi possint. Notae autem et cicatrices verbo 
contineantur.’ 

* The words following, ‘and the Pharisees,’ are evidently misplaced. <A 
political party or religious sect is certainly not a body entitled to issue orders or 
warrants for arresting an offender against the law. These words, ‘ the Pharisees,’ 
are obviously a marginal gloss referring to v. 55: ‘and they spake among them- 
selves standing in the sanctuary, ‘“ What think ye, that he will not come to the 
feast ?’’’ 

δ᾽ “δεδώκεισαν évro\ds”’; var. ‘a warrant,’ “ évro\nv, meaning either he warrant 
of arrest or the numerous copies of it that were broadcast. 


᾽ 


ECCE HOMO 403 


that if any man knew where he were, he should denounce ! (him) 
that they might arrest 2 him.’ 


τ ancient as in moder times such public notices contain as 
full and complete a description as possible of the person ‘wanted.’ 
For-a good example the reader may compare the following writ,* 


relating to two fugitive Alexandrian slaves accused of theft in the 
year 145 B.c.:4 


‘On the 25th of Epiphi a servant of Aristogenes, (son) of 
Chrysippus, delegate of Alexandria, has escaped (2nd hand: in 
Alexandria). His name is Hermon, otherwise Nilus: by race a 
Syrian of Bambyce: age about eighteen years: of medium height, 
beardless, straight-legged, with a dimple in the chin, a mole to the left 
of his nose, a scar above the left angle of his mouth, tattooed on the 
right wrist with foreign characters. He has with him a string-purse 
(Seo.v) with three minas of gold, ten cowry-shells,> an iron ring on 
which hangs a flask of oil and bath-scrapers, around the body an 
overcoat and a girdle. Whoever brings back this fellow shall receive 
two ta(lents) of brass (2nd hand: 3000... .). If he is denounced 
after having reached the asylum of a sanctuary, one ta(lent) (2000... .); 
if shown to be in the hands of a solvent and responsible person, three 
ta(lents) (2nd hand: 5000 ...). Information may be given® by 
any one to the chief magistrate’s officers. His companion in flight 
is Bion, a slave of Callicrates, one of the chief ministers at court : 
short of stature, broad-shouldered, bow-legged, grey-eyed. He also 
has gone off with a cloak and a child’s jacket and a woman’s toilet- 
case worth six talents and ... of brass (2nd hand: 5000... .). 
Whosoever brings him back shall receive the same amount as for the 
above-named. Information to be given concerning him also at the 
chief magistrate’s.’ 


The small size of the sheet and the writing, far from obtrusive, 
prove that the papyrus was not intended to be posted up on a wall. 
Clearly we have here merely the official model for the albi pro- 
scrtptio, the copy written in a public place on a white surface with 
black and red letters,’ as well as for the proclamatio (κήρυγμα) by 
the public town-crier, a convenient procedure for publishing the 
personal description of fugitive slaves, known from the pages of 
Petronius ὃ and Lucian.® Let us now compare with this genuine 


1 μηνύση : cp. below, note 6. 

* πιάσασιν, the legal term for ‘arrest’ (see Papyr. Lond., 46. 172, “κλέπτην 3.” 
= ‘arrest a thief,’ and cp. Acts xii. 4). 

3 Papyr. Par. τὸ (Graec. 2333) in the Louvre, P. M. Meyer, Jurist. Papyr., 
No. 50. 
* CL. ἘΠῚ ΕΣ; 
Ὁ πίνας, mother-of-pearl shells, an interesting proof that shell-money was used 
for small change in Ptolemaic Egypt. 

8 μηνύειν ; ΟΡ. μήνυσις, above, pp. 398 1. 33. 402 1. 21, 443 1. 17. 

7 Quint., xii. 3. 11: ‘si ad album et rubricas transtulerunt.’ 

8 Sat., 97. 

9 Fugitivi, 27. 


404 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


and certainly typical warrant the following text of the so-called 
“Letter of Lentulus’: 


‘There has appeared in these times and still is (at large) a man, 
if it is right to call (him) a man, of great! virtue, called Christ 
whose name is Jesus, who is said by the gentiles to be a prophet of 
truth, whom his disciples call Son of God,? raising the dead and healing 
all diseases : a man of stature tall, medium, i.e. fifteen palms and a 
half and sightly (statura procerus mediocris et spectabilis), having a 
venerable face, which beholders might love and dread, having hair 
of the colour of an unripe hazel (nucis avellanae praematurae) and 
smooth almost to the ears, but from the ears down corkscrew curls 
(circinos crispos) somewhat darker-coloured (caeruliores) 4 and more 
glistening, waving downwards from the shoulders, having a parting 
on the middle of his head after the manner of the Naziraeans, a 
brow smooth and most serene, with a face without a wrinkle or spot, 
beautified by a (moderately) ruddy colour ;> with nose and mouth 
there is no fault whatever. Having a beard copious but immature 
(at tmpuberem), of the same colour as the hair (and) not long but 
parted (b1furcatam) in the middle. Having a simple and mature 
aspect, with blue eyes of varying hue (variis) and bright (claris 
existentibus). In rebuke terrible, in admonition bland and amiable. 
Cheerful, yet preserving gravity: he sometimes wept,® but never 
laughed.’ In stature of body tall and erect (propagatus et rectus) : 
having hands and arms delectable to the sight. In converse grave, 
sweet and modest, so that justly according to the prophet was he 
called beauteous above the sons of men 

‘For he is the king of glory, upon whom angels desire to look, 
at whose beauty sun and moon marvel, the saviour of the world, the 
author of life: to him be honour and glory for ever, Amen.’ 


It has long been seen that we have here no letter or official 
report of a governor to the emperor (even the forger did not so 
regard it), still less an efistula ad Romanos, as one MS. entitles it, 
since both the address and the closing salutation are wanting, 
which the forger of the Pilate letters, for instance, was clever 
enough to insert. The so-called ‘letter’ is in reality a ‘hue-and- 
cry’ notice. Whether the Romans had an expression such as 
‘epistula requisitoria,’ or the like, for such a writ, I do not know: 


* magnae, corr. from magicae; cf. below, pp. 410s, 424, and above, p. 52 
(first lines), on μάγον changed into μέγαν in Lucian. 

* Here the old printed edition of the epistle of Lentulus, quoted as h by von 
Dobschiitz, adds: ‘sed filius eius unigenitus erat.’ 

3 Thus the lost MS. of Goldast. 

* Lit. ‘more bluish.’ Evidently the forger had before his eyes a picture in 
which, by contrast with the light yellow colour of the hair, the shades looked 
indeed bluish. 

6 See below, p. 425 n. 17. 

6 flevit . . . visit. The forger inadvertently lapses into the past tense, though 
the letter purports to be taken as the description of a person still living ! 

7. Cf, the silly statement that Plato never laughed, Diog. Laért., iii. 26. 

® Ps. xlv. 3. Cp. above, p. 384 n. 2, ὑπὲρ ἄνθρωπον. 


PLATE XX1X]}} 


“τον 3 πη TT Pei ᾿ 


: ν᾽ 


WARRANT FOR THE ARREST OF TWO THIEVES AT LARGE 
GIVING THE HUE AND CRY OF THE FUGITIVES 


(PAPYRUS IN THE LOUVRE, PARIS NO, τὸ GRAEC. 2333) 


ECCE HOMO ‘408 


‘nota’ or ‘nota de forma’ is more likely to have been the official 
phrase.t_ Anyhow, since the Latin translation was only made in 
the late Middle Ages, no stress can be laid on that point. The 
genuine writ or warrant necessarily bore a precise date, showing 
the day and month of issue, as in the Alexandrian papyrus quoted 
above. By the vague introductory ‘istis temporibus ’ without 
any previous and more exact statement of time, the document 
betrays its character as an extract from an huastorical narrative, as 
indeed it is, since it is of course not the genuine warrant but an 
extract from Josephus, whose description of Jesus according to 
the genuine judicial act, or rather the extracts from it in the 
commentarii of Emperor Tiberius, the forger utilized. 

None the less, the opening words, ‘apparuit temporibus istis et 
adhuc est,’ are very well suited to a public notice,” and correspond 
closely to the opening of the genuine poster above mentioned: ‘On 
the 25th of the month of Epiphi a slave has gone off, named,’ etc, 
This suggests the possibility that Josephus himself made use of the 
copy of the warrant which he or his collaborators found in the 
official papers of the imperial archives. 


‘NOMEN FUGITIVI ET CUJUS SE ESSE DICAT’—BEN PANDARA 


Where the papyrus warrant has ‘whose name is Hermon, other- 
wise Neilos,’ the Lentulus letter reads, ‘whose name is Jesus called 
the Christ.’2 On the other hand, the reader of the Slavonic Jose- 
phus, in the passage previously quoted,‘ will note with astonish- 
ment that the name of Jesus does not occur in it at all. True, 
Josephus is ignorant of the names of a score of other person- 
ages mentioned by him in a similar connexion.® But in this 
particular case the name must have been mentioned, because we 
find it used without further explanation in the passages to be 
discussed below ὁ on the imprecatory inscription against Jesus in 
the temple, and—in some of the MSS.—also in the exposition of 
the Shiloh oracle, to say nothing of its undoubted occurrence in 
the Antiguities.?. The story in the Haldsis is indeed so carelessly 
put together that in the crudely connected excerpts from the more 


1 On the Jitterae formatae, cf. below, pp. 4441. 

2 ‘ There has appeared in these (5 75, not his) days and still is (in the neighbour- 
hood) a man,’ etc. This interpretation is, of course, nothing more than a con- 
jecture, for there is, naturally, no difference between the narrative style of the 
historian and that of the police officer, who also begins his document with the 
story of the fugitive’s crime. 

3’ Cf. above, p. 404. 

4 Cf, above, pp. 383 f. a 

5 E.g. the Samaritan prophet (Ant., xviii. 4. 1) and the Egyptian impostor 


(B.J., ii. 13. 5). : as 
6 Cf. p. 548 n. 2. XX. 200, XViil. 63. 


406. THE MESSIAH JESUS 


extensive originals the name of a person is not always mentioned 
on his first introduction, but suddenly makes its appearance later 
on in the narrative. Thus we read in ii. 169 : 


‘ Now after that there was sent by Tiberius to Judaea a governor 
who secretly by night brought an image of the emperor into Jerusalem 
and set it up in the city.’ 


Then in ὃ 170 we hear, with a change of subject : 
‘and when it was morning the Jews saw it,’ etc. 


Only in § 171, after two further changes of subject, is Pilate’s name 
mentioned. It would therefore be practically the same phe- 
nomenon on a larger scale if Jesus were not named in this section 
though his name is introduced without a proper explanation in 
one of the later books. Had we, then, no further clue, we 
should perhaps have to be content with this explanation of the 
certainly remarkable anonymity of the wonder-worker crucified 
by Pilate. 

But, since we have been able to show that the Lentulus letter 
is so closely dependent upon this section of Josephus, we should 
no doubt be justified in assuming the name of Jesus to have stood 
originally in the Haldsis itself, as it does in the Greek Antiquities 
and in the Hebrew Josippon, the more so because it cannot very 
well have been missing on a writ of indictment such as has been 
utilized by Josephus, and because the formula ¢ λεγόμενος Χριστός 
in Ant., xx. 20, corresponds exactly to the nominatus or vocatus 
Christus, or cui nomen est Christus, in ‘ Lentulus.’ 1 

Again, the rubric of this section in the H alosis,* ‘Of our Lord 
Redeemer Jesus Christ the Son of God and of the. . . form of his 
appearance and of his wonderful works,’ closely corresponds to 
the nominatus Christus, cui nomen est Jesus... quem ejus dis- 
cipult vocant filium dei, suscitans mortuos, etc., with the personal 
description that follows, in the Lentulus epistle. One need, then, 
have no hesitation in assuming that in the Slavonic version the 
details of the human form of Jesus—‘omnia terrenae originis signa,’ 
to use the words of Tertullian ’—have been suppressed together 
with the clause containing the wonder-worker’s name. 

There must, of course, have been a good reason for this— 
possibly a statement in the passage to which Christians took grave 
objection ; and one would think, perhaps, that the objection lay in 
the patronymic if, as has often been conjectured, Josephus, like 
Celsus 4 at a later date, described Jesus as the son of Pandera or 
Panthera. This supposition would be further supported by the 

' Cf. above, p. 404 1. 4 f. * Cf. above, p. 392 n. 3. 
* Below, p. 411 the motto, and Pp. 431 1. 24. 
* More exactly, the Jew quoted by Celsus, Origen, C. Cels., i. 28, 


ECCE HOMO 407 


fact that he is called ben Joseph ben Pandera in certain /osippon 
MSS., where ‘ben Joseph’ may be a late insertion, Yet when one 
looks more closely into the matter the conjecture becomes rather 
unlikely. For in that case the deletion of the patronymic would 
have been perfectly sufficient. In the second place, the statement 
of Epiphanius ! to the effect that Jacob, the grandfather of Jesus, 
bore the surname ‘ Panther,’ shows that Christians found no 
difficulty in accounting for the name ‘bar Panthera,’ which in 
itself conveyed no sinister meaning whatever. Had Josephus 
actually described Jesus as ‘ son of Panthera,’ it would have been 
a simple and entirely satisfactory expedient for the Christian 
editor to make a small insertion, on the authority of Epiphanius, 
and write ‘Jesus son of Joseph the son of Jacob Panthera,’ " 
instead of deleting the whole clause. Lastly, there is good reason 
to doubt that the patronymic ‘ bar Panthera ’ has any historical 
foundation. 

Now, it has indeed been shown by Dr. Deissmann* that the 
name ‘Panther’ applying to persons of either sex is found quite 
frequently among Syrians of this period and among these social 
strata. For example, at Bingerbriick was found the tombstone of 
an archer named Tiberius Julius Abdes* Pantera, born at Sidon 
in Phoenicia and serving in a Roman cohort transferred to Ger- 
many in A.D. 9,5 and there is a possibility that this was the soldier 
referred to by Celsus and in Jewish tradition. The old hypothesis 
that the story of this Pantera as the ‘ wonder-worker'’s * father was 
the Jewish answer to the Christian myth of the parthenogenesis 
lacks a sound basis, because the Greek word παρθένος does not 
appear to exist as an Aramaic loan-word, and thus it would be 
difficult to explain the assumed corruption of bar Parthena> bar 
Panthera. Rather than the myth of the parthenogenesis, the claim 
of Jesus and his family to be descended from King David may 
have induced the Jews to insinuate that he was nothing but the 
bastard son of a Roman, i.e. of an enemy of the Jews. This could 
be done by some ignorant fanatic through an identification (based 
on a glaring anachronism) of Jesus’ mother Mirjam with the 
priest’s daughter Mirjam barth Bilga, a renegade who had married 
a soldier of the Seleucid army.® It must be admitted that this 
conjecture does not account for the name Pantera, but it could 
perhaps be argued that such a person was actually known to have 


been on intimate terms with Jesus’ family. Still, I personally 


1 Haeres, 78. 

2 Cf. above, p. 99 n. 2, the text of the Hebrew Josippon. 

3 Oviental. Studien.: Festsch. f. Th. Néldeke, Giessen, 1906, p. 871 sqq.; Licht 
vom Osten, Tiibingen, 1923, p. 57 0. 4. 

4 —‘ Servant of Isis,’ an obviously pagan name, 

δ Pl. xxx. The stone is now in the Museum at Kreuznach. 

6 T. Sukka, iv. 28; B. Sukka, 56b; J. Sukka, v. 7. 


408 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


believe that the true explanation must be sought in a different 
direction. 

It is to be noted that the Jewish sources always use the form 
Pandera (not Pantera or Panthera) of the name. Now, Pandaros 
in the fad! is the person who breaks the armistice confirmed 
by solemn oaths and hurls a lance at Menelaus, in punishment of 
which crime he was himself hit by a lance in the mouth and his 
tongue severed at the root. Hence the name for people of his 
type,” just as Judas and Benedict Arnold have become similarly 
proverbial in designating the traitor class. The expression ‘Pan- 
dar’s voice’ occurs in a hitherto unexplained midrash,? and may 
therefore be supposed to have been familiar to the Jews of the 
period. Ben Pandara, ‘son of Pandarus,’ ‘ Pandarus redivivus,’ 
was then a not unfitting heinous designation of the man who, by 
his triumphal entrance into Jerusalem, had broken the truce exist- 
ing between Romans and Jews ever since the end of the war of 
Varus (4 B.C.), and who had thus revived the Zealot uprisings 
which, in the eyes of a Josephus and his class, finally led to the 
destruction of Jerusalem and of the Temple. The late Amoraean 
R. Hisda was at all events the first to regard Pandera as the 
physical father of Jesus ; but at that time the historical connexions 
had already disappeared from man’s memory. I believe it out 
of the question, therefore, that Josephus could have known the 
patronymic ben Pandera, and the cause leading to the deletion of 
the sentence in question must have been quite different. 

Thus, to my mind, there remains but one possibility accounting 
sufficiently for such a deletion, and that is the fact that the whole 
section would have provoked the censor’s wrath because it con- 
nected the name of Jesus with an insurrectionary movement. So 
it was deemed preferable simply to omit the name. Tf anybody 
still objected, it was he who suggested such a connexion and who 
was therefore guilty of blasphemy. The Jewish readers, on the 
other hand, knew very well who was meant, even with the crucial 
name omitted.4 The deletion is then most probably the work of 
a Jewish owner who thus chose the lesser of two evils as a measure 
of self-protection. 


1 iv. 93 fff. 

2 Dio Chrysostom, 74, ὃ 400 R; Schol. Demosth., xxiv. 121. 

* Gen. γ., sect. 50, 49d; Levy, Neuhebr. Wérterb., iv. 305b, s.v. Qala Pandar: 
Strack-Billerbeck, i. 574, § 1: there were five judges in Sodom—‘Vomiter of Lies,’ 
‘ Master of Lies,’ ‘ Master of Wickedness,’ ‘ Perverter of Justice,’ ‘ Pandar’s Voice.’ 
The reader will remember that ‘ pander ’ means ‘ procurer ’ in English, hence the 
pimp Pandarus in the story of Troilus and Cressida (especially characteristic 
in Chaucer’s treatment; Th. Gaster) ; also panderism and the verb ‘ to pander’ : 
all this derived from Boccaccio, who was familiar with the ancient Greek term and 
uses it in the Decameron. 

* On the deletions of the name of Jesus in the Hebrew Josippon, cf. above, 
Pp. 94 nN. 2, 


PLATE XXX 


TOMBSTONE OF AN ARCHER, TIB, JUL. ABDES PANTERA 


BORN IN SIDON, PHOENICIA, HAVING SERVED IN A COHORT TRANSFERRED FROM SYRIA TO THE RHINE 


IN A.D. 9. FOUND NEAR BINGERBRUCK, NOW IN KREUZNACH, MUNICIPAL MUSEUM 


ECCE HOMO 409 


‘QUI DICITUR A GENTIBUS “ Fittus DEI” ’ 


The clause which follows in the Lentulus letter after the words 
‘Jesus nominatus Christus,’ to wit, ‘qui dicitur a gentibus 
propheta veritatis, quem ejus discipuli vocant filium Dei,’ is 
clearly akin to the clauses of the Haldsis quoted above : * 


‘Some said of him, that our first lawgiver Moses was risen from 
the dead and was now again displaying many cures and arts,” but 
others thought that he was sent from God.’ 


The phrase propheta veritatis clearly refers to a definite idea char- 
acteristic of the Jewish-Christian circle in which the ‘ Preaching 
of Peter’ used by the author of the pseudo-Clementine writings * 
originated. This idea may be summed up as follows. In every 
age only one ‘true prophet’ * arises, and Jesus was this true 
prophet. It is not a heathen but a Jewish-Christian or Jewish- 
Gnostic idea, to be found among the Samaritans, Elkesaites, Man- 
daeans, Manichaeans, and finally in Islam; further, though inde- 
pendently of this group, in Zoroastrianism.® On the other hand, 
it is quite foreign to Western thought in the Middle Ages, a fact 
which should be noted by those who regard the ‘ Lentulus letter ’ 
as a thirteenth-century forgery. If the word ‘veritatis’ is wanting 
in some MSS., it must be a later interpolation, so that Jesus was 
originally described simply as ‘the prophet,’ referring either to 
the well-known belief that he was a reincarnation of one of the 
prophets of old, or else to the promised prophet of Deut. XVill. 15. 

The idea in question, I repeat it, is not heathen but thoroughly 
Jewish, or, rather, characteristic of a primitive Ebionite type of 
Jewish Christianity. Conversely, the conception that a man of 
extraordinary eminence, gifted with supernatural powers, must be 
a son of some god was specially current among the Greeks for 
whom Josephus’ Polemos was written. It seems unmistakable, 
therefore, that the clause as it now stands has arisen through an 
intentional transposition of the genuine text of Josephus, which 
must have stated just the reverse, viz. ‘ who is called by (some) 
Greeks a ‘“‘son of God,” but whom his disciples call the prophet 
of truth.’ 

The first of these two statements, with its highly valuable 
evidence of the Hellenistic origin of this un-Jewish and mythical 
idea of a genuine ‘son of God’—an idea not to be derived from the 
familiar adoptionist passage in the Second Psalm—was, in the eyes 


1 Cf. p. 384 ll. 7 ff. 

2 On this notion, cf. App. xx11., below, p. 620. 

8 Hom., viii. 10, iii. 21. 11, xXil. 29. 

4 The ‘ reliable prophet ᾿ (προφήτης πιστός) Of 1 Macc. xiv. 41; cf. iv. 46. 
6 Walter Bauer, Joh. Evang.*, p. 31, to John i. 21. 


410 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


of Christians believing this doctrine to be based upon apostolic 
tradition, as objectionable as the further statement that the 
disciples, the leading contemporary witnesses, saw in Jesus no 
more than a prophet, or at most the prophet foretold by Moses. 
Consequently, the whole clause! was deleted by the Christian 
editor of Josephus, whilst the more adroit and less ruthless forger 
of the Lentulus letter had recourse to a mere transposition, thus 
producing a thoroughly acceptable and apparently sensible text. 
For the disciples of a later period reading and appreciating the 
Fourth Gospel, Jesus was the Son of the Father, to be known only 
through him ; and it was then of common knowledge that Hellenism, 
too, believed in prophets : 


' The Hellenistic narrative literature took it for granted that such 
men could foresee the future, read the thoughts of those whom they 
met, heal the sick, and even raise the dead for a moment or for longer. 
In the pagan world the honourable title for them was “ prophet,”’ the 
contemptuous one “ sorcerer ”’ (ydys).’ 2 


According to the Assumption of Moses, an apocalypse of the 
date of the War of Varus, the prophet predicted in Deut, xviii. 15 
would be the ‘ divine prophet for all the world,’ that is, for both 
Jews and Gentiles. In transposing the clauses the forger correctly 
assumed the idea of the Messiah to be meaningless to heathen in 
the time of Jesus. In the eyes of Romans like the centurion of 
Capernaum, the Syrophoenician woman, the Greeks in Jerusalem 
who ‘ wanted to see Jesus,’* he was a ‘son of God,’ a hero or 
demigod like Pythagoras, the son of Apollo and Parthenis, or a 
god wandering on earth in human form, such as Paul and Barnabas 
were mistaken for by the people of Lystra. If such conceptions 
were applied to a political leader they would seem to be a very 
real danger for the Roman government, not only in Judaea but 
throughout Syria, and it is therefore perfectly natural that they 
should be mentioned in the indictment of Jesus and included in 
the warrant for his arrest. 

Even the mention of the most stupendous of miracles attributed 
to Jesus, ‘suscitans mortuos, sanans (omnes) 4 languores,’® can 
without hesitation be imputed to the genuine text of Josephus, 
provided they are regarded as representing the opinion of the 
disciples ὃ concerning the prophet in whom they believe. Just as 


Its authenticity is supported by a passage in the Testimonium Flavianum 
which it serves to explain : ‘ many of the Jews and many also of the Greek nation 
he drew away after him.’ 

* Reitzenstein, Hellenistische Mysterienreligionen, Ρ. 13 (3rd ed., Leipzig, 1927, 
p- 26). 

8 John xii. 21. * Wanting in many MSS. 

* This is a Jewish formula: God is called ‘ healer of the suffering . . . who 
quickens the dead ones ’ in the Shmon’esre-Prayer (Th. Gaster), 


ECCE HOMO AII 


the resurrection of Jesus is mentioned by Josephus in the Testt- 
monium in oratio indirecta as the opinion of the disciples," so here, 
without committing himself, he must have spoken with some detail 
of these astonishing and mighty wonders of the ‘wonder-worker.’ 
Otherwise it would be difficult to understand why the marginal 
rubric quoted above? should entitle this paragraph as we have 
seen, adding ‘and of his miracles.’ In the extant text of Len- 
tulus there is a striking incongruity between the accusative ‘quem 
ejus discipuli vocant’ and the following nominatives, ‘suscitans 

. sanans.’ This may naturally be explained as due to a 
corrector who wished to make Josephus himself attest what the 
latter merely reports as attested by the disciples, and therefore 
altered the accusative of an indirect statement into the nominative 
ofadirect one. The genuine archetype of this passage accordingly 
ran thus : 


‘who is called by (some) Greeks a son of God, but whom his disciples 
call the prophet (of truth), a raiser of the dead and healer of all 
diseases.’ 


Therewith evidently ends the brief αἴτεον prefixed to the warrant, 
unless the words of the final doxology, ἡ he is the king of glory . . . 
the saviour of the world,’ ? be considered as part of the original 
accusation preserved in the spurious Acts of Pilate, to wit, ‘ he says 
he is a king,’ etc. Then follows the zcontsmus proper. 


THE GENUINE PEN PoRTRAIT OF * JESUS WHO IS CALLED 
THE CHRIST.’ HIS STATURE 


‘|. omnia terrenae originis signa et in Christo fuerunt. 
Haec sunt quae illum Dei filium celavere non alias tantum 
modo hominem existimatum, quam ex humana substantia 
corporis.’ TERTULLIAN, Be Carne Christi, c. 9, P.L. i. 772. 


The warrant for the arrest of the thievish slave Hermon sur- 
named Neilos® gives the lad’s approximate age immediately after 
the charge. A corresponding statement is wanting in the ‘ Len- 
tulus letter,’ doubtless because the forger knew no more about the 
age of Jesus than he did of the precise date of the document he 
interpolated. Josephus himself, and, we may therefore assume, 


1 Above, p. 55- = Cf. p. 392 1. 3. 

3 It should be noted that the term ‘ saviour of the world ’ (σωτὴρ κόσμου) is a 
well-known official title of Hellenistic kings and the Roman emperors (Wilh. 
Weber, Untersuchungen z. Gesch.d. Kaisers Hadrian, Tibingen, 1907, pp.225f., 229). 
The words ‘ praeter filios hominum’ in the quotation from Ps. xlv. 3 (above, p. 404 
n. 8) are strongly reminiscent of the phrase about Jesus’ appearance only being 
ἐς ὑπὲρ ἄνθρωπον." They may well be a clever alteration of that objectionable 
sentence, 

4M. R. James, Apocr. N.T., p. 961. 20. Cp. above, pp. 402 π. 2,'40r n. 8, 

6 Cf. above, p. 403. 


412 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


the genuine Acta, appear to have been equally in the dark on this 
subject. As a matter of fact, no one of his contemporaries or of 
the following generation seems to have had any definite informa- 
tion on this point, and he himself appears, as the Gospels state, to 
have met most questions with silence.1 Thus the gap in the 
warrant is best explained, for in the case of Bion, Hermon’s com- 
panion in flight, instead of the exact age we find only a statement 
of the general impression which the informer had obtained as to 
the criminal’s approximate age. A corresponding statement 
occurs in the Lentulus letter, ‘aspectum habens simplicem et 
maturum,’ where matuvum is to be translated by ‘ elderly.’ Such 
an impression agrees pretty well with the remark of the Jews to 
Jesus, ‘ Thou art not yet fifty years old,’ etc.? 

The clause in. question, besides, does not stand in the right 
place, namely at the head of the zconismus, and the same is true of 
the statement inserted in the middle of the appended character- 
sketch, ‘in statura corporis propagatus et rectus,’ which likewise 
belongs to the beginning, where in fact we find, at the head of the 
whole description, ‘homo quidem statura procerus mediocris.’ 
Such transpositions generally betray the hand of a copyist who 
erroneously incorporated marginal notes into the text and at the 
wrong place. 

But aside from such transpositions, we are facing, in this text, 
a number of outright alterations which cannot be the consequence 
of mere scribal blunders. For example, the incompatibility of 
‘statura mediocris’? (medium height) and ‘ procerus’ (exceed- 
ingly tall) is obvious, though the ignorant scribe may have been 
naive enough to interpret the phrase to mean ‘ mediocriter pro- 
cerus.. Similar contradictions will have struck the reader in the 
quotations from the anti-iconoclast polemists quoting from Jose- 
phus, and discussed in a previous chapter. Thus Andrew of 
Crete in the same breath says that Jesus was bent, or even crooked 
(ἐπίκυ φος), and well grown (εὐήλιξ). ὃ Evidently he interpreted 
the phrase to mean that Jesus was by nature well grown but stoop- 
ing by habit. Similar contradictions occur with regard to Jesus’ 
hair, described both as rich and curly (οὐλόθρι ξ) and at the same 
time as scanty (ὀλιγόθριξ). "5 The same type of inconsistency 
occurs in the Lentulus letter with regard to Jesus’ beard, said to 


have been both ‘copiosa’ and ‘impuber.’? Less striking, though 

1 Luke xxiii. 12; Mark xv. 5; John xix. 9. 

* John viii. 57. The statement that Jesus was forty-six years old is based on 
a rabbinical interpretation of John ii. 20 sg. The thirty years in Luke (cf. above, 
Ῥ. 293 ἢ. 1) are nothing but the thirty years of David when he became king of 
Israel, and of Joseph when he became viceroy of Egypt, transferred to the 
Messiah ben David and ben Joseph. 

ΟΣ Bey. Vi. 160; * Cf. above, pp. 393 ff. Cf. below, p. 619, App. ΧΧι. 

® Cf. above, p. 393 nn. 7’and 8. 5 Cf. below, p. 619 ll. 11, 17, 23. 

7 See above, p. 404 1. 17. 


ECCE HOMO 413 


quite unmistakable, is the contradiction between the epithet 
σύνοφρυς (or ‘communiter ciliatus’), i.e. with his eyebrows meeting 
above the nose, and the following εὐόφθαλμος (‘ bene oculatus ’), 
that is, with kindly eyes or with a kind glance. For it is to be 
noted that eyebrows meeting above the nose indicate a vampire 
in Greece, a werewolf in Scandinavia, an ‘evil eye’ in many 
different parts of the world,! notably in Palestine.? 

This circumstance explains the words of the Lentulus letter, 
‘vultum habens . . . quem possent tntwentes fornudare,’ i.e. a face 
from which spectators might shrink. No doubt, valium was 
followed by ‘communiter ciliatum,’ according to the description 
in Vincent of Beauvais, going back to Josephus.* Christians 
naturally took exception to the implication involved, and thus we 
find, in the Byzantine homily mentioned above,* the epithet 
cuvodpus replaced by evodpus, ‘with good’ or ‘ beautiful eye- 
brows,’ whilst the Legenda Aurea has ‘bene superciliatus.’ 
Another substitution which easily suggested itself was the epithet 
εὐόφθαλμος, ‘ with good eyes,’ often added to cvvodpus, just as the 
Legenda Aurea adds the quite superfluous ‘ bene oculatus ’ to the 
already improved ἡ bene superciliatus.’ 

Lastly, in the Lentulus letter the ‘communiter ciliatum ἡ is 
omitted altogether, and to the ominous ‘quem possent intuentes 
formidare’ there is appended—quite in keeping with the erotic 
attraction of beautiful eyes darkened by strong and therefore 
meeting eyebrows °—' et diligere.’ ° 

It may, then, beregardedas proved that the personal description 
of Jesus in the Haldsis similarly underwent the usual ‘corrections’ 
at the hands of Christian copyists and readers with a view to 
embellishment. A tentative restoration of the text must there- 
fore clearly start from the principle that the lectio diffictlior, 1.6. the 
one which would give offence to believing Christians and to their 
Hellenistic ideal of male beauty, must be retained. 

Following this principle and taking up the significant details 
one by one, we encounter first the indication regarding his age, * in 
appearance elderly,’ completely opposed to the traditional thirty 
years of Luke.?- Both statements could be harmonized by suppos- 
ing that Jesus looked much older than he actually was. This detail 
may therefore be regarded as most probably genuine. 

Statura mediocris, found in the ‘ Lentulus letter,’ is, as we have 


1 Seligmann, Zauberkraft des Auges, Hamburg, 1922, p. 260 ; Thorpe, Northern 
Mythology, ii. 169. 

2 Einszler, Zeitsch. ἃ. Deutsch. Palaest, Vereins, xii. p. 201. 

3 Cf. above, p. 394 n. 6. 4 Cf. p. 395 n. 6. 

6 Cf. Tennyson’s ‘ charm of married brows.’ 

6 The addition may possibly reflect the term ἀγαπήσαντες of the Testimonium ; 
cf. above, p. 69a). 

Tit 23; 


414 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


seen, irreconcilable with procerus. Goldast’s now lost MS. of the 
‘ Lentulus letter’ had ‘xv. palmorum et medi,’ which, more or less 
in harmony with the epithet τρίπηχυς occurring in a letter of certain 
Oriental bishops! to the Emperor Theophilus, as well as in a 
Byzantine homily in defence of iconolatry,? and perfectly in 
keeping with Josephus’ general phraseology,* does not at all 
correspond to the average height of a man, as was the opinion of 
Prof. v. Dobschiitz,* but falls far short of it.® 

Since the ell or cubit in most systems is equivalent to a foot and 
a half,® τρίπηχυς would give us a height of four feet and a half, 
considerably below average. If, with G. F. Hill,? we follow the 
statements of Julian of Ascalon concerning the measures in use in 
the Byzantine province of Palestine, and assume that the cubit 
(πῆχυς) is the ‘ royal cubit’ of the Egyptian system, that is, a little 
more than nineteen inches, the total would be about fifty-eight 
inches. If instead we adopt the simple ell, the total will amount 
to about fifty-four inches, truly a pigmy height. If we adopt the 
statement of the Goldast MS.., fifteen palms and a half will give us 
a height varying between forty-seven and fifty-two inches. At all 
events, we now understand the following statement, μικρὸν ἐπικε- 
κυφώς, ‘slightly dwarfed,’ certainly not the work of Christian 
forgers, for the later Church naturally pictured its founder as a 
man of stately height. The word ‘procerus’ of the ‘Lentulus 
letter’ corresponds to the statements of Nicephorus Callistou ° 
representing Jesus as ‘ seven spans high according to the royal or 
surveyors standard’ (σπιθάμαι βασιλικαί or γεωμετρικαί), and 
of Epiphanius Monachus giving him a height of six feet. ΑἹ] this 
is of course in agreement with the well-known tendency of the 
Byzantine clerks to depict Jesus as a man of commanding majesty. 
That Jesus was below medium height is in any case the opinion of 
Tertullian,"! Celsus,!* and the Acta Johannis Leucti.'8 

To these documents must be added a number of Syrian testi- 
monies collected and admirably commented upon by Dr. Rendel 

ἐν, Dobschiitz, op. cit., p. 303. 

2 Ibid., p. 246. 

° Cf. rpirnxus, B.J., v.§ 193; ἐπτάπηχυς, Ant., xviii. § 103, is probably misread 
for ἑπτάπους, since even a giant cannot be seven ells high. 

* Op. cit., p. 297, p. 300, where he thinks that three ells are equivalent to six 
feet. Such large ells exist, indeed, but only in a very late metrical system. Still, 
this fact may help to explain why the shocking statement escaped correction. 

δ Cf. the tconismus of Augustus—who was statura brevis, five feet and two 
inches high—in Sueton., Aug., 79. 


* Josephus certainly has this usual cubit in view when he gives τρίπηχυς as 
the height of the balustrade surrounding the inner court of the temple; cf. B.J., 
v. § 193. 

7 Encycl. Bibl., s.v. ‘ weights and measures,’ col. 5294. 

8. Cf. above, p. 394 n. 9. ® Cf. above, p. 394 ἢ. 8. 10 Above, p. 395 2. 4. 

11 *jllud corpusculum,’ Adv. Mare., iii. 17; 

12 σῶμα... μικρὸν καὶ δυσειδές, Orig., C. Cels., 55, 75. 

ἐδ c. 89 sq., ed. Bonnet, ii. 196. The work is not much posterior to Celsus. 


ECCE HOMO 415 


Harris." In the first place, there is a statement in the pages of 
Ephrem Syrus? (A.D. 320-79), corresponding to the above-quoted 
Greek authority about a measurement of ‘ three ells’ : 


‘God took human form and appeared in a form of three human 3 
ells ; he came down to us small of stature.’ 


In another treatise of Ephrem, extant only in Armenian,! we 
read : 


‘ Our Lord came, he appeared unto us as a man small of stature.’ 


Similarly we are told in the hymn entitled The King’s Manifesta- 
tion, by Theodore of Mopsuhestia, preserved only in Syriac : 5 


‘ Thy appearance (=hezwah), O Christ, was smaller than that of 
the children of Jacob,’ 


i.e. smaller than that of the other Israelites. 

The most important piece of evidence, however—which we owe 
to Dr. Harris—hails from the Syrian Acts of Thomas, in which the 
Apostle Thomas constantly appears as the twin-brother of Jesus 
and so closely resembling him as to be mistaken for him. In these 
circumstances the following paragraph is of the highest import- 
ance ; ° 

‘ The Apostle lifted up his eyes and saw people raised up one upon 
another, that they might see him, and going up to lofty places. And 
the Apostle saith to them : 

‘“Ye men who are come to the assembly of the Messiah, men 
who wish to believe in Jesus, take unto yourselves an example from 
this, that if ye do not raise yourselves up, ye cannot see me, who 
am little.”’’ 


Dr. Harris has rightly observed that the ‘double’ of Jesus, small 
of stature, is here thought of as in the same position as Jesus in 
Luke xix. 3, and as giving a spiritual interpretation of the relation 
between Christ and those who wished to see him. The author of 
these Acts must therefore have understood the Lucan passage to 
mean ‘he sought to see Jesus . . . and could not for the crowd, 
because he (i.e. Jesus, not Zacchaeus) was little of stature.’ The 
recovered text of Josephus now confirms that interpretation. 
There is no doubt that the author of the Acts of Thomas believed 


Jesus and his twin-brother Jude to have been both exceedingly | 


small.” 


' Bull. John Rylands Liby., x. (1926), pp. 1-15 of the reprint. 

* Hymn. de eccl. et virg., ed. Lamy, iv. 632. 

* 1.6. expressly ‘ ordinary ’ as opposed to ‘royal’ ells. 4 Ephrem Arm., ii. 278. 

® Bull, John Rylands Libr., ix. (1925), No. 2, July. © Acta Thom. Syr., p. 178. 

? This is the reason why Jesus speaks of himself as ‘ the smallest (μικρότατος) 
in the kingdom of God’ (Matt. xi. 11). Dr. Rendel Harris has not overlooked 
either Matt. vi. 27 or Luke xii, 25 about the impossibility of ‘ adding an e!l to one’s 
stature by worrying.’ 


416 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


Andrew of Crete ! knows of an image of the mother of Jesus in 
Lydda, from which he deduces? that Mary, too, was no more than 
three ells high. There must therefore have been a tradition that 
the whole family of Jesus was extremely short of stature. 

Now, it is very significant that modern travellers report the 
itinerant tribes of craftsmen mentioned before—the Sleb, that is, 
who correspond to the ancient Nasdraeans and Rekhabites—to be 
indeed much smaller than the rest of the population, Bedouin and 
Fellahin. They are actually described by Sachau ® as a pigmy 
people. There is nothing incredible, then, in the statement that 
the Rekhabite carpenter Jesus was not taller than three cubits. 

In this connexion we must further consider the meaning of the 
epithet ἐπίκυφος, ‘hunchbacked,’ for μικρὸν ἐπίκυφος and ὑπό- 
κυῴφος are obvious Christian modifications of the word, pointing to 
a fact historically only too probable. Medical science knows well 
that tragic form of distortion, the cyphosis of feeble adoles- 
cents, caused by hard work and long hours, a form particularly 
common among joiners and carpenters.4. Immediately a peculiar 
light is thrown on the curious passage in Luke iv. 23. There, after 
reading from Jsazah 1xi. 1, 


‘God hath appointed me to carry glad tidings to the sufferers. 
He hath sent me to heal those of broken heart, to proclaim . . 
recovering of sight to the blind,’ 


Jesus adds the comment, ‘To-day hath this scripture been fulfilled 
in your ears,’ and forestalls an objection which he seems to see on 
the lips of his audience by saying: ‘Doubtless (πάντως, lit. “in any 
case’) ye will say unto me this parable, ‘‘ Physician, heal thyself.” ’ 
The impossibility of interpreting this clause by the one following, 
‘Whatsoever we have heard done at Capernaum, do thou also here 
in thine own country,’ has long been recognized. That clause 
belongs to the following, not to the preceding, context ; before it 
there is evidently missing the reply of Jesus to the anticipated 
objection of incredulous scoffers. Yet the fact that he foresees 
the retort as a certainty (‘ Doubtless ye will say’) presupposes two 
things: first, that Jesus himself must have had some infirmity 
which he might mockingly be called upon to heal; and secondly, 
that this infirmity must have been visible to all, and so striking 


1 De sanct. imag. venervatione, Migne, P.G., xcvil. 1304. 

2 He does not state how a picture can prove anything as to the size of the 
original. The explanation is probably to be found in our Pl. xxx1., showing a 
picture of Jesus drawn to scale, derived from a so-called crux mensuralis. Οἷον. 
Dobschiitz, Christusbildey, p. 299. The Church was interested in the problem of 
the bodily resemblance between Jesus and his mother on account of its fight with 
the Docetic heresy, which denied the human body of Jesus. 

3 Le Monde Oriental, xvii., 1923, p. 5 Π. I. 

4 German surgeons are wont to call this kind of spinal distortion ‘ Schreiner- 
kyphose ’ (carpenter’s cyphosis), as Prof. Hans von Baeyer kindly tells me. 


PLATE XXXI1 


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ACCORDING TO A CRUX MENSURALIS OF CONSTANTINOPLE 
COD, LAURENT., PL, XXVa, F° τὸ V° 
SEE P. 416 NOTE 2) 


ECCE HOMO 417 


that the taunt would rise to the lips of all who looked upon the 
speaker. Both of these conditions for this interpretation of the 
remark (which has certainly not been invented but preserved, 
thanks to the special impression it made on the physician 
Luke) are best fulfilled by the assumption, based on the testi- 
mony of Josephus and the Christian Church down to the eighth 
century, that Jesus, like Plato,| Kant, and Moses Mendelssohn, 
Was ἐπίκυφος. 

Nor is Jesus’ answer to the scoffers very difficult to guess. 
Like the later Church fathers when discussing this matter, he 
probably pointed to the passage in Isavah lii. sq., where the Servant 
of the Lord who ‘shall be exalted and lifted up and shall be very 
high,’ and at whom ‘kings shall shut their mouths,’ is said to have 
‘no. form or comeliness,’ crooked and shrivelled like ‘a root in a 
dry ground,’ ‘a man of sorrow and acquainted with sickness, de- 
spised and rejected of men .. . smitten of God and afflicted, yet 
wounded for their transgressions.’ ° 

In the eyes of those Jews who interpreted the songs of the Ε bed 
Jahveh as referring to the Messiah, the crooked form of the sufferer 
could not very well be quoted as an objection to his election as the 
Lord’s Anointed. Does not a midrash® say, ‘In the year-week 
in which the son of David comes they bring iron bars and lay them 
upon his neck until his form is bowed (/¢. “compressed’) ; and he 
cries out and laments and his voice mounts up on high’? Does 
not a Jewish proverb ὁ teach, ‘The just must be bowed, so will he 
stand erect’ ? 

Moreover, the fact that Jesus had to bear the hard fate of a 
deformed body may go far in helping to understand this remarkable 
character, which has been said ὅ to fuse the most contradictory 
features into a transcending unity. We know all too well how 
frequently weak and deformed children have to suffer from the 
cruelty and neglect of their environment, which cannot but produce 
a. peculiar reaction in their infantile psyche ® of a far-reaching 
effect even in later life. This goes far to explain Jesus’ indifference 
toward his parents and brothers.*? Of a delicate constitution, such 
persons will suffer from insults far more than others, which throws 
light on the severe punishment demanded by Jesus for com- 


1 Cf, Plutarch, De adul. et am. discy.,g: quom. adul. poet. aud, deb. 8. Eustathius, 
Opp., p. 553. 16: “ὁ Πλάτων ἐπίκυφος (jv).” 

2 Isaiah lii. 13 544. 3 Pesiqta vabb., 36 (1624). * Shaobath. 1o4a. 

5 Karl Weidel, Jesu Pevsénlichkeit, Halle, 1908, endorsed by A. Schweitzer, loc. 
cit., p. 580 f. (not trsl. in The Quest for the Historical Jesus): ‘ King and beggar . 
revolutionary and sage, fighter and prince of peace, ruler and servant, man of 
action and poet, all in one. 

6 Cf, Walter v. Baeyer, Zurv Psychologie verkriippeltey Kinder : Zeitsch. f. Kinder- 
forsch., xxxiv. (1928 ). 

7 John ii. 3 sq.; Mark iii. 33; Mait. xii. 48. Jesus never refers to his 
father. 


2D 


; 
᾿ 
᾿ 


418 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


paratively harmless insults such as ‘wight’ (ῥάχα) " or ‘fool’? 
(μῶρε). 

Under such circumstances it is also explainable how every 
‘neighbour’ and next-of-kin, though to the weak naturally an 
‘enemy,’ * came to be included in the sphere of that all-embracing 
love which is the nucleus of Jesus’ teaching. For the cripple has 
to face the dilemma either to wrap everything into a powerful, 
misanthropic hatred,’ or else to overcome this feeling of revenge 
by the high moral superiority ὅ of a Plato, a Moses Mendelssohn, or 
a Kant. We know how he chose the latter of the two, and we may 
well imagine that it was not at Golgotha that he had the first 


occasion to cry out, ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not 


what they do.’ 

Nor can it be an accident that the proportionately small 
number of maimed in body has furnished so many of the greatest 
intellects. Forced by his solitude and isolation into a contem- 
plation of the world of the spirit and of religion, the weak and 
suffering finds a natural compensation for what he is denied in a 
conscious and devoted development of his intellectual gifts to the 
very limits of the powers of which the human soul is capable.’ In 
the poor and deformed body of Immanuel Kant there lived thus the 
indomitable spirit of the greatest of the thinkers of that glorious 
eighteenth century and at the same time of the greatest of ideal- 
ists of modern times at all events, whose dream of world-peace, 
though anything but Utopian, the world is so slow to realize. 

In the case of Jesus the whole paradoxical thought of his being 
the vicarious sin-offering and world-redeemer can be best under- 
stood as the solution, proposed in the Deutero-Isaiah, of the ques- 
tion which had occupied Job—to wit, why it is that the innocent 
must suffer. If the maimed in body refuses to consider himself as 
forsaken by his God, as a sinner punished for some guilt δ of which 
he is unconscious, he cannot but assume that there is such a thing 
as a vocation to suffering and believe in the inscrutable plan of 
salvation in which his own life and suffering are called upon 


1 Ta’an, 20b: ‘ Wight, perhaps all the people of thy city are as ugly as thy- 
self,’ shows that the term was used as a byword for ill-favoured individuals. 

2 Matt. v.22. In Matt. xxiii. 17, though, Jesus does not hesitate to use the 
same term for his opponents. 

3 The biography of the youthful Byron is an excellent case in point. In his 
late drama ‘The Deformed Transformed,’ the mother says to her son, ‘ Out, 
hunchback!’ As a matter of fact, the poet had never been able to forget that 
his own irascible mother had once called him ‘ lame-foot.’ 

* Richard u1., Alexander Pope the ‘ wicked little wasp of Twickenham,’ and 
Pietro Aretino are good examples. 

» The well-known humour of hunchbacks like Aesop, which opened for them 
their careers as court fools in the time of the Renaissance, is a peculiar manifesta- 
tion of this superiority. 

§ See John ix. 3 about the ‘man blind from his birth’: ‘neither hath this man 
sinned, nor his parents,’ See also below, p. 509 n. 4, 


ECCE HOMO 419 


to play some part. Nothing but this conviction of being thus 
elected can afford him the desired compensation for his depressed 
and hampered self-feeling. 

To seek such a compensation, a repressed nature of this type 
will escape from the hard and harsh reality into the realm of fairy- 
land. The glorious day-dreams of the millennium, that time of 
bliss when all strife and all hate will disappear from earth, when 
all that is crooked (σκολιά) will be made straight,! find their best 
explanation in this peculiarity. They console the suffering and 
heavy-laden for the bitter reality which, in the light of the old 
messianic prophecies, appears only as a nightmare, promptly to be 
chased away by the dawn of a new day—a new, a perfect era. 
From just such a depressing feeling of his own bodily imperfections 
a Plato took over the old Orphic idea of the body as the prison of 
the soul, to build for himself a realm of ideas so totally different 
from the rationalism of a Socrates, a realm of perfection, the true 
home of the soul, from which all was banished that was frail and 
full of flaws. The ‘kingdom of God’ in the thought of Jesus was 
not much different, though less transcendental. It was the lost 
paradise, the garden of the desert,” vanished some time during the 
early childhood of mankind, which he proposed to bring back. 
Differing in this from the descendant of the old royal family of 
Athens,? Plato, who spent his whole life in pondering over the best 
state and tried to realize it in Sicily with the co-operation of a 
human ruler,* the Davidide Jesus, in spite of or rather because of his 
servile form, feels that he is himself that secret incognito king of 
that wonderful realm, the monarch whom God some time in the 
future—nay, right here and before the passing of the present 
generation—will transform while at the same time ‘ revealing’ his 
‘ kingdom.’ 

No doubt, the real mystery of such a mental development must 
be sought and found in the natural and as a rule all-powerful 
desire of such persons, to whom the ordinary satisfaction is denied, 
to be great, glorious, to achieve the superhuman, what cannot be 
accomplished by others, to see themselves in the role of the hero, 
the leader, the liberator—a desire which, if coupled with the inner 
consciousness of the Divine call, the sure sign of every genius, will 


1 Luke ui. 5. 

2 gan ‘eden (‘eden=Akk. edinnu=Sum. “b-DIN=steppe, desert). The ‘ garden 
of the desert ’ is the fairyland-like oasis in the East where once upon a time men 
led the happy life of owners of palm-trees, and whence they were driven forth on 
account of theirsins. Jesus will show the way back to those who trustingly follow 
him into the desert. Adying man, he still hopes to get there on that same day with 
the loyal λῃστής. Ideas of this sort are still alive among present-day Bedouins. 

3. According to Thrasyllos in Diog. Laért., iil. 1, Plato’s father, Ariston, was a 
descendant of the last king of Athens, Kodros., 

Cf. Plut., De stoic. vep., 1043c: “κἂν (ὁ σοφὸς) αὐτὸς βασιλεύειν μὴ δύνηται, 
συμβιώσηται βασιλεῖ," 


420 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


finally grow to overwhelming proportions. It certainly 15. not 
accidental that weak and crippled individuals have so often played 
a conspicuous part in revolutions.* 7 


ΤῊΣ FACE WITHOUT COMELINESS 


The description of age, stature, and height is usually followed, 
in these old police portraits, by a statement of the colour of the 
skin. This item may be omitted, however, as in the two warrants 
quoted above.2. It would therefore not be surprising if the 
quotations made from Josephus at the time of the anti-iconoclastic 
controversy did say nothing about it. Fortunately, one of them ° 
has preserved the word ‘dark-skinned’ (μελώγχρους), which 
must be genuine, because it obviously contradicts the statement 
‘cum facie sine ruga et macula aliqua, guam vubor venustat,’ which 
is certainly of Christian origin. The laudatory intention of the 
word ‘ venustat’ and the implied comparison with King David in 
the ruddy countenance‘are obvious. The ‘sine macula’ probably 
does not correspond to a Greek ἄσημος of the genuine docu- 
ment; for the Nasdraean Jesus must of course have borne the 
Qenite mark of the cross on his forehead.® The word paxpo- 
πρόσωπος, ‘long-faced,’ and σύνοφρυς, drawn from Josephus by 
Andrew of Crete, are unquestionably genuine. They occur fre- 
quently in the papyri and are not of the nature of embellishments, 
especially in connexion with the phrase in the Lentulus letter, 
‘quem (sc. vultum) possint intuentes formidare, which, however, 
as unparalleled in the papyri and unsuited to an official document, 
should be regarded as a malicious addition of Josephus. Simi- 
larly, the word ἐπίέρρινος, ‘ long-nosed,’ is certainly authentic, 
since an attempt has been made to alter it to evpivos, * well- 
nosed,’ which is further enhanced in the phrase of Lentulus, * nasi 

. nulla prorsus reprehensio. The papyri furnish such 
parallels as ὀξύρριν(ος), παχύρριν, etc. 

The classification of the nose is generally followed by a de- 
scription of the hair. The statement of the ‘Lentulus letter,’ 
‘capillos habens coloris nucis avellanae prematurae’ (of the colour 
of a half-ripe hazel-nut) ‘ab auribus aliquantum ceruliores et ful- 
gentiores’ (darker and more glossy), at once betrays itself as an 
invention of the Christian forger, who has an idealized painted 
portrait of Christ before him and describes the lighter and darker 


1 Wuertz, Seclenleben des Kviippels, Leipzig, 1921, p. 24, recalls, among others, 
Marat. 2 Cf. above, p. 403. 

* An anonymous scholion, v. Dobschiitz, Joc. cit., p. 305**. 

4 ἐς πυρράκης μετὰ κάλλους" (Bac. a, XVI. 12). 

δ᾽ Cf. above, pp. 234 n.8, 356.9. “ἄσημος may have replaced a description 
of the “ οὐλή.᾽ 


ECCE HOMO 421 


tints with which the painter had sought to represent fair hair. 
For the genuine official descriptions of a person never gave the 
colour of the hair, clearly because in the region in question the 
population was dark-haired almost to a man ; neither can such a 
description of colour by means of a would-be poetical simile be 
attributed to Josephus. One might be tempted to see in this 
insertion the hand of a Nordic, hence of a mediaeval, forger, desirous 
of attributing to Jesus the characteristics of his own race ; for the 
Patriarch Photius 1 knows already of some iconoclasts who made 
fun of the various Christ portraits, representing him with the racial 
characters of a Roman, an Indian, a Greek, or an Egyptian. In 
reality, the fair hair of Jesus is no doubt due to the desire to depict 
him as like as possible to King David as described by Josephus,’ 
where it is to be noted that David in his turn owes his fair 
hair to the ideal portrait of the ‘sun-king’ and ‘ world-saviour ’ 
Alexander the Great. For the recovery of the true portrait 
of Jesus the feature of the fair hair is probably without any value, 
the less so because it could hardly be harmonized with the ‘dark 
skin’ mentioned above, although it must be admitted that nowa- 
days fair hair is sometimes found among the Sleb.* 

On the contrary, the epithet ὀλιγόθριξ, the by no means 
flattering statement derived by the Byzantine writers from ‘the 
historian,’ i.e. from Josephus,® to the effect that Jesus was ᾿ scanty- 
haired,’ is certainly no Christianinvention and consequently 
genuine. The attempt was soon made to improve this reading 
into οὐλόθριξ, ‘ curly-haired,’ or οὖλος, ‘curly.’ The scanty hair 
here attested is quite in keeping with the statement in the “Lentulus 
letter,’ corrected, it is true, by interpolation, but still preserved, 
on the undeveloped beard, ‘barbam habens impuberem.’ The 
Arabic Carmelite St. Elie? expressly notes the fact that the Sleb 
have only a sparse growth of beard on cheeks and chin. He does 
not mention the hair on the head, which in fact is concealed largely 
by the turban (keffije) worn by these people. 

The ‘Lentulus letter’ furnishes another valuable detail which 
cannot have been invented by a Greek, much less by a mediaeval 
Latin forger, for the simple reason that it presupposes a special 
knowledge of ancient Jewish custom, in the words ‘ discrimen 
habens in medio capite juxta morem Nazaraeorum.’ The glossary 
gives us the Greek equivalents for ‘discrimen,’ ἀνακτένισμα ΟΥ̓ 
διάκριμα, a‘ parting.’ ‘ Nazaraean’ is the form exclusively used 
in Jerome’s Vulgate, and by the author of the Latin version of 


1 Epistle 64, v. Dobschiitz, p. 107*. 

2 Antigg., vi. 8.1: ‘fair... with blue eyes.’ 

3 Aeclian, Vary. Hist., xii. 14. ὁ St. Elie, Al Mashrig, i. p. 676. 
6 yon Dobschiitz, p. 107, No. ga, ¢, g. 6 Cf. above, p. 345 l. 4. 

7 Al Mashvriq, i. 676. 


422 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


Josephus made for Cassiodorus, to render the Greek Νασιραῖος. 
‘Mos Nazaraeorum,’ therefore, refers doubtless to the unshorn 
hair of the Nazirites, whom Josephus himself mentions as Νασιραῖοι 

. εὐχὴν πεποιημένοι. .. κομῶντες καὶ οἶνον οὐ προσφερόμενοι," 
and whose vow in another passage is assumed to be well known.2 

It appears from the familiar story of Samson and Delilah 8 that 
the Nazirites were accustomed to divide their long and burden- 
some crop of hair and twine it in plaits ; Samson has seven such 
plaits. In the Mishna treatise, Nedarin, gb, mention is made of 
a Nazirite on a visit to the high priest Simon the Just (310-290 B.c.), 
who wore his g‘wuzoth or bunches of hair arranged like ‘ high 
hillocks’ ; in Pesigia rabbati, 96, we read of the hairy prophet 
‘Elijah as a ba‘al q*wuzoth, ‘the man with the bundles of hair.’ 
That Jesus wore his hair in this Nazirite fashion was also well 
known to the anonymous writer of the treatise, ‘On the Lord’s 
human form,’ * who describes him as τὴν κόμην μέγας (long-haired) 
καὶ συνεσταλμένος θριξί (With plaited hair), odes τοὺς Boc- 
τρύχους, ἀκερσοκόμης (uNShorn), ἀσκεπής, διχῇ πρὸς τὸ μέτωπον 
τοὺς πλοκάμους διεσταλμένος. Here the πλόκαμοι (from πλέκειν, 
‘ plait ’) are the ᾿ plaits’ (mahlepoth) of the Nazirite, of the ἀκερ- 
σοκόμης Who leaves his hair uncut. The strong growth of hair and 
the curly locks (βόστρυχοι) like grape-clusters are introduced by 
the anonymous author to correct the malicious description given 
by Josephus, ‘with little hair (but) parted in the middle after the 
manner of the Nazirites,’ the people who had too much of it and 
couldnot otherwise tieitup. ᾿Ασκεπής, ‘uncovered,’ ‘ bare-headed,’ 
under the scorching sun of Palestine can only apply to the pos- 
sessor of an unusually thick covering of hair; the interpolated 
word may also perhaps be intended to explain that Jesus’ way of 
wearing his hair could be known, since people generally covered 
their hair with a turban or the like. 

Nicephorus Callistou,® or his source, from the statement that 
Jesus parted his hair ‘after the manner of the Nazirites,’ drew the 
inference that he actually observed the Nazirite vow from early 
youth all his life long ; ‘ for no razor was ever raised to his head 
nor hand of man save that of his mother in hisinfancy.’ Yet that 
Jesus was no Nazirite is clear, although ignorant persons at an 
early date confused Ναζωραῖος (nosvi) with Nacipaios. Men 
called him a ‘ wine-bibber’* because they were surprised at a 
Rekhabite and one of the ‘wandering folk’ who defied the custom 
of his tribe by drinking wine, but not because as a Nazirite he had 
taken a vow to abstain from wine. The fashion of wearing the 


1 Ant., iv. 72. 

S Bil. the SES; 3 Judges xvi. 13 56. 
ἐν. Dobschiitz, Joc. cit., p. 305**. ® P.G., οξῖν. δδ. 

ὁ Matt, xi. 12; Like vii. 34 (0). 


ECCE HOMO 423 


hair in this way is still that of the modern Sleb, who ‘plaits his hair 
as women do,’ ! parting the plaits on either side and keeping them 
in position with a red band. The statement of Lentulus that the 
beard also was ‘in mento parum bifurcata’ can hardly be genuine. 
The papyri afford no parallel, and there is no occasion to part a 
‘barba impuber’ in the middle. I cannot recall having seen or 
read of any case of such foppish treatment of the beard by Syrians 
or Arabs. This trait probably comes from the imagination of the 
same forger who described the beauteous locks, the ‘ capilli plani 
ad aures’ and the ‘circini crispi,’ as he saw them in some Byzan- 
tine icon; or it may be due to an erroneous repetition and to the 
subsequent insertion in the wrong place of the words διάκριμα 
ἔχων ἐν μέσῳ." 

The correctness of the foregoing arguments can best be tested 
by examining whether the portions of the traditional description 
of Jesus recognized as genuine, after the exclusion of the words 
shown to be interpolations and forgeries, hang together and yield 
a significant and consistent text. Such is indeed the case, and we 
have in fact recovered, as the reader will see on the following 
pages, a vivid and lifelike portrait of Jesus, penned with 
unmistakable malevolence, but on that account all the more 
valuable. 


1 St. Elie, Al Mashriq, p. 677. 
2 See below, p. 426, right column, after the number “9, 


424 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


THE DESCRIPTION OF JESUS, 


Textus restitutus Emendationes Christianorum 


δ 1748 


* Tore δὲ καὶ ἐφάνη ἀνήρ τις] 


[υ[αγικίῆς δυνάμεως 3] | . Αἱ eleigses ai? | 4 | leyaal? 


” ” ΄ Ν o: ἐδ 4 
εἴγε ἄνδρα λέγειν χρὴ αὐτὸν 


[? ὃν [Ελληνε! μέν [{τινες}} υἱὸν [οἱ [μαθηταὶ αὐτοῦ! [ 


θεοῦ 5 
καλοῦσιν, οἱ δὲ [μαθηταὶ αὐτοί ἴ [ἀλλὰ ἢν θεοῦ [Ἕλληνες 7 4. 
LS Ὡαα χὰ απο κοι 


υἱὸς μονογενής | ὃ 
’ Ἃ ) / , os 
λέγουσιν τὸν ἀληθείας προφήτην 


νεκροὺς éyetpalvral καὶ πάσας νόσους [s] ] 
ἰασάμενο! ν ὃ]. ls 
δ 1740 


Kai? φύσις καὶ μορφὴϑ αὐτοῦ 
[ἀνθρωπίνη ἣν 10 [θεανδρικὴ }} θεία "3 
a ee i 


ἀνὴρ yap! ἣν ἁπλοῦς τὴν ἰδέαν 14, 


ἡλικίᾳ 15 τέλειος 16, [μελάγχρους ἯΙ ἰπυρράκη.[ 1 


+ Above, p. 52 and p. 388,0. * Above, p. 404 n. I. 

* On the omission of Jesus’ name, cf. above, P- 405... 

* Above, p. 52 and p. 383,9. Allusion to the name bar naka==vids ἀνθρώπου for 
Jesus. 

δ =bar laha, ben elohim=éyyeXos. 

° Cf. above, p. 404 n. 2. 

* “Qui dicitur a gentibus propheta veritatis, quem eius discipuli vocant filium 
Dei,’ above, p. 4049. On the necessary transposition, cf. above, pp. 409 f. 

§ “Suscitans mortuos, sanans omnes languores,’ above, p. 4041.6. Eusebius, 
Dem. ev., iii. (P.G., xxii. 195-6): ““ παντοίοις ἀσθενειῶν εἴδεσι καταπονουμένοις τὴν 
ἴασιν ἀφθόνως δωρούμενος." 

” On καί---καὶ, cf. Matt. x. 28: “καὶ ψυχὴν καὶ σῶμα." 


ECCE HOMO | 425 


Josephus, Haldsis, 11. §§ 1748 εἰ seq. 
Reconstructed Original Text Christian Alterations 


§ 1748 


At that time also there appeared 
a certain ' man 


of |magic| power]. . . 1 [great |? a 


— if itis meet to call him a man,’ 


7 whom [(certain) Greeks| callason — fhis disciples ? 


of (a) god,” but he was the only-born 
son of God! ® 


but fhis disciples| the true prophet’ [the Greeks| 1 


who |is supposed to have] raised [~~ 3] 


dead persons 


and to have cured all diseases.® 


§ 174} 
Both his nature? and his form® were 
[human ; 10 |god-manlike] ** [divine *| 
for he was!* a man of simple 
appearance, !* 


mature '° age,” (dark| skin,” jruddy| 1 


10 Above, p. 395 1. 17. It is not altogether impossible that here or after * 
Josephus may have quoted as his authority the iconismus drawn up by order of 
Pilate, and that the gnostic references quoted above, p. 398, to the εἰκόνες of Jesus 
made for Pilate were in reality aiming directly at this passage in Josephus. 

11 Above, pp. 394]. 22, 395 1. 19. 12 Above, p. 392 2. 3, Pp. 395 1. 25. 

13 On the necessity of this insertion, cf. above, p. 392. 

14 ‘ aspectum habens simplicem,’ above, p. 404. 

15 ‘ homo quidem statura . . .,’ above, p. 404. 

16 ‘ maturum,’ above, pp. 404 and 412 1. 11. 

17 Below, App. XXI. p. 6201.3. But ‘rubor genarum modestus venustate’ above, 
Ρ. 404. Moses is said to have been πυρράκης bei Artapanus (Fvagm. Hist. Graec., 
iii. 224); the same is said of King David in the Greek version of 1 Sam. xvi. 2. 


426 


Textus restitutus 


(Bpax%s)], [reir y vs] Ὁ 


Ἐπ aay 


{{π υῴος “5, [μακροπρόσωπος 2, 


eal 
covjoppus 33, ὥστε οἱ ἰδόντες αὐτὸν 

[φοβεῖσθαι μέλλοιεν 33 
ἰὀλιγό! [Ape | 89, [διάκριμα ἔχων 
τς πα αν 


ἐν μέσῳ τῆς κεφαλῆς 


κατὰ τὸ τῶν Ναζιραίων 89. ἔθος 40 


[ruyove| ἀνήβῳ]} “΄, 


THE MESSIAH JESUS 


Emendationes Christianorum 


[ἑπτὰ σπιθαμῶ fe 
μων 
i 1ί a 
[μέσου] " ya" [ἐξ ποδῶν"! 


τ 26 ιν 2 
σεμνο [μικρὸν 


[εὐηλιξ "ὃ 
͵ lee) 
εὖ] 32 Ἰεὐόφθαλμος 51 pedar| 32 


ASD 
ae | “8 


ΒΕ ΣῈ: \ 38 
[ἀγαπᾶν καὶ 


JovAo| 80 [ς } 57 [χρώματος 


καρύου Ποντικοῦ προώρου 35 


[μέτωπον λεῖον καὶ εὐδιώτατον, ἄσημον 


‘ γ,} ε , 4] , ‘ 
καὶ ἀρρυτίδωτον δ), πυρράκης μετὰ 


κάλλους **, γλαυκὸς τὰ ὄμματα 4, 
εὔστομος 
τὸν ae ‘ ε , 45 
ἱπερισσῷ ὃ καὶ || θριξὶ bpoypdw*, 
ὃ ’ » > , 3 ‘ ὶ 
διάκριμα ἔχων ἐν μέσῳ, βραχίονες κα 
εἴρες ἰδεῖν ἥδισται δ᾽ δακτύλους τῶν 
Χ ] 
ἀχράντων χειρῶν μακροτέρους συμμέ- 
τρως, καὶ ἁπλῶς ὡς τῆς τεκούσης 


χαρακτήρ 48 


᾿ statura mediocris,’ above, p. 404 1. 7 and pp. 413 f. 


ἐν" statura procerus,’ above, p. 404 1. 7 and pp. 413 f. 


20 Cf. above, p. 414 nn. I and 3. 


21 Above, p. 394.9. But ‘vv. palmorum et medii,’ above, p. 4141.2, p. 404 n. 3. 


* Cf. above, pp. 416 ff. 


Above, p. 416 1. 13; below, p. 619 last line. 
25 


Above, p. 4125. 
Above, p. 394 π. 3. 


22 

23 

*4 Above, p. 41419. 

26 

28 

8 Above, p. 395 n. I. 


Above, p. 404 1. 9. 
27 Above, p. 416 1. 13. 
“9 Above, p. 4134-4. 
3! Above, p. 413 1. 3. 


$3 Above, p. 413 1.15; p. 420]. 28; below, p. 619 1. 38. 


" ECCE 


Reconstructed Original Text 


— τς ς > epee 
[short] growth, three cubits) "Ὁ 
tall a ee 


fhunchbacked ,** 
face,*6 


a |long| nose,” 


feyebrows {meeting above the 


[vith a [16πρὶ 


nose} Ὁ 


so that the spectators] could take 
fright *4 


with Beanty| hair], [ (but) having 


a line in the middle of the head 
after the fashion 49 of the Nazir- 
aeans,°9 


and with an undeveloped | beard[ .%7 


33 Above, p. 413 n. 6. 


HOMO 


427 
Christian Alterations 
[medium] "5 fhigh|*® \sevenspans| ** 
six feet| 24 (high) 
[a little?’ 58 | well-grown, 
[venerable|°s lerect —_ |flandsome| 
|handsome} 
[goodly * black ** [: LBeesal 
[with a good eye *! 


Jcould love him and ** 


lcurly| 38 


[οἱ the colour of unripe 
hazel-nuts,** 


with a smooth and unruffled, un- 
marked and wunwrinkled fore- 
head,*! a lovely red, blue eyes, 
beautiful mouth ,*4 


|and copious “ὃ 


[of the same colour as the 
hair,*® [not long, parted in 

the middle ,*® 

arms and hands full of grace,*® 
the fingers of the unsullied 
hands of moderate length, on 
the whole of the same type as 
his mother.*® 


4‘ quem possent intuentes formidare,’ cf. p. 404 1]. 9. 


36 Above, p. 421s. 


36 Above, p. 412,. 


37 οὐλόθριξ, finally οὖλος, cf. p. 421 1. 26. 


88 Above, p. 420 l. 34. 
40 Above, p. 404 1. 14, p. 422 1.1. 
42 Above, p. 425 ἢ. 17. 


89 Above, p. 422 Il. 1-3. 
41 Above, p. 420 n. 5. 
43 Above, p. 421 ἢ. 2. 


44 ‘ oris nulla reprehensio,’ cf. above, p. 404 1]. 15 f. 
4 ‘barbam copiosam capillis concoloratam,’ cf. p. 404 1. 18 and p. 4239. 


ὁ Above, p. 404 |. 24. 


- 
oe 


47 Above, p. 404 1. 17. 


With these words the old iconismus Chyisti ends; cf. v, Dobschiitz, p. 247. 


428 


Textus vestitutus 


ὃ τάς 
ἡ μὲν ὄψις "5 αὐτοῦ ὑπὲρ ἄνθρωπονδ9,} 
ἐποίει παράδοξα 


(γὰρ) 


πάλιν δὲ, εἰς τὴν κοινὴν φύσιν 53 
(αὐτοῦ) © ἀπίδων 56 
οὔτε καλέσω (αὐτὸν) ἄγγελον 57, 
Πάντα δὲ ὅσα ἐποίει | revi ἀοράτῳ 
δυνάμει 58, 


λόγῳ 89 καὶ προστάγματι ἐποίει. 


sees of 


§ 174d 
Ἄλλοι μὲν ἔλεγον περὶ αὐτοῦ (ὅτι) 
πρῶτος ἡμῶν νομοθέτης 
Gat 2 ‘ \ »» \ / 62 
ἀνέστη καὶ πολλὰς ἰάσεις καὶ τέχνας 03 
π᾿ 
ἄλλοι δὲ ὅτι ὑπὸ θεοῦ ἀπεσταλμένος 


2 
ἐστίν, κτλ, 


*? Above, p. 390 1. 8. 


THE MESSIAH JESUS 


Greek 


Emendationes Christianorum 


[ἀλλὰ πράξεις αὐτοῦ θεῖαι 53, 


διότι ἀδύνατόν ἐστιν ἐμοὶ ἄνθρωπον 
μ 
et ee 
καλεῖν © αὐτὸν 


[5] 


[9] 


9 Above, pp. 384 n. 2, 389 n. 6, 390 n. 10; cf. Athen., v. 213b. 
*) Above, pp. 3844, 390,, ; cf. Eusebius, Dem. evang., ili. 6 (P.G., xxii, 225), 


*2 Above, p. 390 Il. 33 f. 
*4 Above, p. 384 n. 6. 

ὁ Above, p. 390 n. Io. 
*’ Above, p. 384 n. 7. 


88 Above, p. 390 ἢ, Io. 
8 Above, p. 384 1. 4. 
57 Above, p. 391. 

6° Above, p. 384 n. 7. 


*° On this phrase, cf. Marmorstein, The Quest, 1926, Ρ. 154; cf. also Matt. 


viii. 16, and Ant., xx. 5. 1, on Theudas, 


=" ECCE HOMO” 429 


Retroversion — | 
Reconstructed Original Text Christian Alterations 
δ 1740 
Only his (outer) appearance 9 was 
super-human] °° ]but his deeds were divine *? 


(for) he wrought surprising and wherefore 1 cannot call 
striking feats δ᾽ him a man °° 

Again, however, in view ὅδ of his 8 
commonplace physique *! 


I shall not call him an angel.*” 


But everything he did |through [re 
he did through his word ὅϑ and a 
phrase of command *° 
(He claimed 
ΤΟ, DE ....5] 


§ 174d 


Others said that he was our first 
lawgiver 

resuscitated from the dead and 
accomplishing 

many cures and magic tricks. 

But others said that he had been 
sent by God. 


But in many things he opposed 
the law 


and did not keep the Sabbath after 
the manner of our fathers. 


He himself did nothing shameful ** 
and did not put his hand there- 
to, but through his word he 
prepared everything, etc. 


----.---. - - - - —— a — jx 


61 Here also there may originally have been mentioned the name of the miracle- 
worker, his genealogy and messianic claims. 

62 Cf. Orig., C. Cels., i. 26, about Moses teaching witchery to the Jews. 

63 Cf. Luke xxiii. 41 ; Orig., C. Cels., ii. 59, ‘he has neither done nor said 
something wrong.’ 


430 THE.-MESSIAH- JESUS 


As will be seen, this composite text has been obtained by no 
witchery ᾿ .whatever, but by simply separating all portions 
favourable to Jesus, and therefore a priori to be suspected as of 
Christian origin, from the text of the Haldsis, from the quotations 
from Josephus found in certain Byzantine chroniclers and the 
letter of Lentulus shown to have drawn on the text of Josephus, 
and by putting together the material thus left. ΤῸ believe that a 
narrative so coherent and logical can be a mere play of accident is 
to believe the impossible. But quite aside from this, it is well to 
point out that, far from contradicting the Gospel narrative, this 
text throws light on a number of hitherto unexplained passages. 
But if the genuineness of the portrait thus restored needs further 
attestation, the appended reproduction of a photograph showing 
a group of Sleb will supply it. Replace the old flint-stone guns 
by hunting spears, bows,! and crooked throw-sticks, and, thanks to 
the ‘immutability ’ of the Orient, the picture of these short, lean 
people with their long faces and noses, their scanty beards, and 
their peculiar dress, can still bring before us to-day the outward 
appearance of those Rekhabite itinerant craftsmen to whom Jesus, 
according to all historical and sociological considerations,? must 
have belonged. 


TERTULLIAN ON THE ‘ MARKS oF JESUS’ EARTHLY ORIGIN ’ 


The portrait of Jesus drawn by Josephus as reconstructed in 
the previous chapters does not, of course, in the least correspond 
to the traditional idealized picture of the Nasdraean Messiah. In 
a most striking manner a prophetic remark of Dr. Albert Schweit- 
zer* has come true: ‘ The defenders of the historicity of Jesus’— 
he said—* must consider carefully the import of their undertaking. 
. . . They have to reckon with the possibility that they defend 
the historical claims of a personality which may turn out to be 
quite different from what they imagined when embarking on this 
defence.’ None of the numerous lives of Jesus, none of the 
numerous novels written about him, none of those wildly fantastic, 
apocryphal stories of certain ‘psychic’ swindlers, in any way 
resembles this or can even remotely do so. Not even the liveliest 
imagination could have evoked quite such a figure, and the reader 
will, I hope, take the author’s word for it that he himself had not 
the least idea of this strange and unexpectedly lifelike portrait of 
Jesus before the completion of the patient and minute work of 
sorting out and putting together the many pieces of this puzzle. 

* The late director of the Berlin Oriental Seminary, Eduard Sachau, saw 
them hunting with bow and arrow in Syria in 1882 (Pieper, /.c., pp. 22 and 32). 

* See above, pp. 231 ff., 322 ff., 356 2. 9. 

* Gesch. d. Leben Jesu Forschung, Tiibingen, 1921, p- 151 (not in the Engl. 
trans. of 1011). : 


ECCE HOMO 431 


Yet, strange and bewildering as is this small, bent, and homely 
figure when first emerging from behind the veil which pious 
delusion has managed to weave around it for centuries, every 
detail agrees with the portrait of Jesus ‘ after the flesh’ which, 
though wilfully ignored by Paul,’ was embraced by Tertullian with 
almost passionate affection : “ Quodcumque illud corpusculum sit,’ 
he writes,2 “quoniam habitum et quoniam conspectum fuit, si 
tngloriosus, si ignobilis, si inhonorabilis—meus erit Christus.* 
Talis enim habitu et aspectu annuntiabatur: <quemadmodum 
expavescunt multi super te, sic sine gloria erit ab hominibus forma 
tua>.4 Sermo vere species et decor eiest.’ Then he further quotes 
Ps. xxii. 6, the very psalm the opening words of which had been 
on Jesus’ lips as he expired, and hence regarded in its entirety 
as a confession of the suffering Christ : “But lam a worm and no 
man, a reproach of men (¢gnomunia hominum). All they that see 
me laugh me to scorn.’ 

In disputes with the Docetae, who would gladly have spiritual- 
ized Jesus into an incorporeal and insubstantial being, evidence 
that he wasa man of ‘flesh and blood’ was to Tertullian invaluable. 
With an emphasis and a display of a macro- and microcosmic 
symbolism hardly relished by the modern reader, the impassioned 
rhetorician insists that Jesus had not only flesh and blood but 
muscles, sinews, bones, and hair. Then he continues: ‘ haec 
omnia terrenae originis signa et in Christo fuerunt. Haec sunt 
quae eum Dei filium celavere, non alias tantummodo hominem 
existimatum quam ex humana substantia corporis.. No doubt 
we have here an allusion to Josephus’ enumeration of the ‘ terrenae 
originis signa,’ those bodily marks regarded as proving the ‘ human 
bodily substance’ (‘humana substantia corporis’) of the ‘so-called 
Christ,’ and to his express refusal, in view of this “common nature,’ 
to see in Jesus an angel. 

‘Aut edite,’ he asks in the immediate context, ‘aliquid in illo 
coeleste de Septentrionibus et Vergiliis et Suculis emendicatum ? ’ ὅ 

To understand this sentence one has to recall that Marcion’s 
pupil Appelles ® did teach that Jesus had an angel’s body com- 

1 2 Cor. v. 16. 2 Adv. Mare., iii. 17. 

3. Tertullian unquestionably knew Josephus (cf. Harnack-Preuschen, Gesch. ὦ. 
alichvistl. Lit., Leipzig, 1893, p. 858). He may also have had before him forged 
Acta Pilati now lost. It is certainly curious that as early as 1628 Nicolas Rigault, 


in his edition of Tertullian dedicated to Cardinal Richelieu, compared with this 
the ancient poetical warrant of arrest of Eros (Mosch., i. 3): ‘ei res ἐνὶ τριόδοισι 


πλανώμενον εἶδεν ἔρωτα---δραπετίδας ἐμός ἐστιν." Cf. p. 406 of the second edition 
(Paris, 1765). : 
4 Isaiah lii. τ4. Cf. above, p. 404, in the ‘ Lentulus letter’: ‘quem possent 


intuentes formidare.’ See also p. 4205,. 

δ ‘Or do you discover in him anything celestial’ (to-day we should say, ‘any- 
thing astral’) ‘which he has begged from the Great Bear, the Pleiades, or the 
Hyades ? ’ 

6 Tert., De σαν». Christt, 6 (Migne, P.L., 1. 703) ; Adv. Marc., it. 11 (tbid., 335). 


432 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


posed -of-astral substance; and, above. all, the popular ideas of 
Hellenistic star-lore about star-gods descending from heaven and 
walking about among men, as attested by the prologue to the 
Rudens of Plautus.' Tertullian turns to his opponent with the 
ironical enquiry whether he can discover any sign of astral origin 
in Jesus’ lowly, earthly appearance. 
t. As a matter of fact, not all the Church fathers so severely 
reject such heathen astral notions. Twocenturies after Tertullian, 
Jerome does not hesitate to speak of “something starry’ in the 
countenance and eyes of Jesus: ‘ nisi enim habuisset et in vultu 
quiddam oculisque s¢deveum, nunquam eum statim secuti fuissent 
apostoli.’ 3 

Tertullian had with real emotion denied that the personal 
appearance of Jesus bore any marks of heavenly splendour, nay, 
even of human comeliness : * adeo nec humanae honestatis corpus 
fuit, nedum coelestis claritatis.’ In the ardour of battle with the 
Docetae he carries his extravagance of language so far as to write : 
‘The ignominy of the face (of Jesus) would roar (as a witness 
against the heretics) if it could.’ ὃ 

To one moved to deny the unsightliness of Jesus he makes an 
imploring appeal: ‘Quid destruis necessarium dedecus fidei?’ 4 
It is worth noting that even here copyists and printers have often 
altered the word dedecus (disgrace), which appeared to them 
irreverent, into decus—a tampering belonging to the type we have 
had ample occasion to discuss in connexion with the Testimonium 
Flavianwm. | 

A final remark, the correctness of which will be confirmed by 
any who have observed the attitude of a Southern crowd towards 
an accused and condemned person, is psychologically fine and not 
unworthy of the rich legal experience of the learned lawyer 
Tertullian : ΝΟ one would have mishandled, much less spat upon, 
Jesus, had not the face of the condemned, so to speak, provoked 
his tormentors to such brutality.’ § 3 

Qn Tertullian’s words already quoted, ‘nec humanae hones- 
tatis corpus, the Abbé Migne remarks in a note that the Abbé 
Rigault, the seventeenth-century editor of our author, actually 
concluded from this strong expression that Jesus was in some way 
deformed (‘deformem Christum putat’). In fact, Rigault severely 

1 “The star Arcturus there says that by day he walks among mortals, as do the 
other stars, in order that they may note the doings of men and report to the 
highest god Jupiter on their conduct, but also that they may interfere in human 
affairs here on earth, protecting the innocent, punishing the wicked, etc.’ 

2 Epist., 65, Ad Principiam. 

3.11. 1-3, li. Kautsch, Pseudepigr., ii. 430 sg. ; Strack-Billerbeck, iii. 474 (so, 
too, in the Midrash Gan ’Eden: Th. Gaster). 

4. Adv. Mare., c. 5. 


* “ An ausus esset aliquis ungue summo perstringere corpus, nedum sputamini- 
bus contaminare faciem, nisi merentem,’ tbid. 


ECCE HOMO . 433 


censures the theologians ! who cannot imagine their Christ other- 
wise than as possessing the most beautiful stature and countenance. 
‘Quid destruis necessarium dedecus fidei ? Quodcumque Deo 
indignum est, mihi? expedit. Hoc dici potest etiam iis, qui 
adversus Tertulliani et omnium veterum scriptorum traditionem 
Christum statura vultuque formosissimum  sibi imaginantur.’ 
Obviously, Rigault could not thus have expressed himself had he 
not been sure of the concurrence of Cardinal Richelieu, to whom his 
book was dedicated. 

No less bold and undaunted is the attitude of the French 
Oratorian Louis Thomassin ὃ (1619-95). On the question which 
at that time was being hotly debated, whether Jesus was beautiful 
or ill-favoured, he pronounced himself as follows : ‘ Christus tem- 
poralia omnia aspernari: quod erat institutum ejus non edocuisset, 
si formae elegantiam magni fecisset.’ He adds that the beauty of 
Christ predicted by the Psalmist lies in his exalted righteousness, 
and “vera carnis pulchritudo non nisi immortalitas.’ This opinion 
is quoted, though without exact reference, by E. Michel in 
Amman's Dictionnaire de Théologie catholique. No contradiction 
or ecclesiastical censure of this thesis ever ensued, and in fact none 
is conceivable in view of the abundance of patristic sources which 
could be quoted in its support. 


THE © TRANSFIGURATION ’ OF JESUS ON THE HoLy Mount 


The complete disappearance of the genuine pen-portrait of 
Jesus is but a proof of the far-reaching Hellenization of the Jewish 
Messiah, a process which took place in the first centuries of the 
Church, beginning with Paul and indeed chiefly through Paul. 
What was forgotten was really, as Paul says,® the Christ who 
appeared ‘in the flesh’ and whom he would ‘ know no more.’ 
What was preached to the heathen was the glorified king of kings, 
as he appeared to the most intimate disciples in the ecstatic vision 
on the top of Mt. Hermon and as he was now expected to appear 
at his second coming. 

From the days of the dissensions between the schools of Sham- 
mai and Hillel, i.e. from the time of Herod the Great, we can trace 


' Some freethinkers, though, would fall under the same censure; for example, 
Ernest Renan—cf. Vie de Jésus, p. 842: ‘(Jésus) sans doute (!) une de ces ravis- 
santes figures qui apparaissent quelquefois dans la race juive .. .’ 

* Ie. to Tertullian or any opponent of the Docetic heresy. 


5 Dogmat. theolog. de incayrn. verbi Dei, Paris, 1680, lib. vi., chap. vii.: ‘De 
pulchritudine carnis Christi.’ 

* Loc. cit., p. 265: ‘magno contentionis aestu controvertitur . . . quaestio, 
an pravitate oris vilescere affectarit ’ (sci. Jesus Christus). 

5 Ps. xly.3. ©. 2 Cor.:vi_16: 


Z2E 


A34 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


a belief among the Jews ! to the effect that the bodies of the risen 
would be refashioned in the future world of the Messianic age, and 
indeed not necessarily in the same form which they had in the 
present world. Thus, according to the Syriac Apocalypse of 
Baruch,2 the dead, in order to remain recognizable, were indeed to 
rise in their old form, but after the Judgment the aspect, alike of 
those who are condemned and of those who are justified, is changed. 
‘ The aspect of those who are now godless shall become worse than 
it (now) is,’ whilst as for ‘those who have now been justified 
according to my law, who have had understanding in their life, 
and who have planted in their heart the root of wisdom, their 
splendour shall then shine forth in a different form, and the aspect 
of their faces shall be transformed into . . . dazzling beauty. . . . 
They shall be transformed, these and those, the latter into the 
splendour of angels, and the former shall yet more waste away 
into monstrous spectres and forms strange to behold.’ On the 
other hand, the righteous ‘shall be changed into every form that 
they may desire.’ The same expressly applies to those still alive 
on the Day of Judgment, who have therefore never tasted 
death. 

Although this Apocalypse cannot have been written until after 
the destruction of Jerusalem, this whole naive conception 15 
certainly purely Jewish and not dependent on the Pauline doctrine,* 
for the peculiar (Greek) feature in Paul’s doctrine of transformation 
is just the idea of the resurrection body as a ‘spiritual (pneumatic) 
body,’ ὃ of which the Jewish Apocalypse knows nothing. 

We need have no hesitation, then, in postulating such a belief in 
a transformation or metamorphosis of all entrants to the kingdom 
for Jesus and his disciples. The vision of the transfiguration, 
discussed above, shows what importance was attached in this 
circle to these expectations, which correspond in every particular 
to the promises quoted above from the Baruch Apocalypse. 

The phrase used by Mark (ix. 2) is καὶ μετεμορφώθη ἔμπροσθεν 
αὐτῶν. In the Luther Bible the verb is rendered by ‘verklarte 
sich’ (‘was glorified’). However, that would be in Greek ἐδοξάσθη, 
a word not employed in the present context, where we have instead 
μετεμορφώθη, ‘his figure (μορφή) was altered.’® In Luke ix. 29 the 
miraculous nature of the phenomenon is essentially weakened ; 
we read merely, ‘as he was praying, the appearance of his face was 


1 Genes. vabba, 14 (10c) ; Strack-Billerbeck, ill. 473 sg., to 1 Cor. xv. 35. 

2 |. 1-3, li. Kautsch, Pseudepigyr., ii. 430 54. ; Strack-Billerbeck, iii. 474 (so too 
in the Midrash Gan ’Eden: Th. Gaster). Cp. Daniel xii. 3. 

3 xlix. 2. The answer given in chs. l.-li. to the question asked applies to both 
quick and dead. 

4 τ Cor. xv. 52: ‘ we shall all be changed.’ 

δι Cor. xv. 44. On the considerations leading to this doctrine, cf. above, 
p. 286 π΄ 4, p. 287 n. I. 6 Auth. Vers.: ‘he was transfigured.’ 


ECCE HOMO 438 


altered,’ whilst Matt. xvii. 2 appears originally to have presented 
a canstuen of the two expressions, 


“καὶ μετεμορφώθη ἔμπροσθεν αὐτῶν καὶ ἔλαμψε ὡς 6 ἥλιος τὸ 
πρόσωπον AUTO, 


unless, as I believe, the words printed in heavy type are a later, 
though quite apposite, addition to the text.' The most original 
reading is probably that attested by Tatian’s Diatessaron, the 
recension of Pamphilus and both Latin versions, ‘And Jesus was 
transformed before them and his face did shine as the sun.’ 

One gains an impression that the reader was to think that the 
whole ‘alteration’ consisted in an effect of light, i.e. an illumina- 
tion and glorification of the countenance, such as art has sought 
to express by the halo of Jesus and the glorified saints. On the 
other hand, Mark and his phrase μετεμορφώθη ὁ ᾿Ιησοῦς quite 
frankly imply that the whole form of Jesus was altered, as indeed 
it must have been altered if the hidden Messiah, the secret king 
of Israel and of the world, was to be made manifest. For what 
made him unrecognizable were, as Tertullian insists, just those 
‘ terrenae originis signa, quae eum Dei filium esse celaverunt,’ 
those human, all too human, marks of his ‘ bond-servant’s form.’ 3 

A messiah like that Simon of Peraea who, though a slave, in 
the days of the Baptist put himself forward as king, ‘relying on his 
tall and handsome figure,’ * had no occasion to wait for a divine 
attestation of his claims through any transfiguration in the sight 
first of his closest followers and then of all the world. For such 
a man it sufficed to assume the crown and throw the purple around 
his shoulders to find as many followers as he could desire. Jesus, 
on the contrary, could not openly proclaim himself as the Messiah 
or promise to his disciples the coming of the ‘Son of man’ in 
glory, except on the condition that God at the right moment would 
by a miracle change, exalt, and irradiate with visible royal majesty 
his poor bond-servant’s frame.* Just as the bewitched prince in 
fairy tales when released from the enchantment recovers his former 
beauty, or as Athena at the right moment frees from the disguise 
of his beggar’s body the divine Odysseus, unrecognized under his 
former mask, so will God reveal his Anointed through a trans- 
figuration and glorification, first to the disciples, then to all the 
people. 

David Friedrich Strauss in his first Life of Jesus had already 
raised the question whether Jesus could not have thought of his 
parousia as a transformation occurring within his lifetime. 

1 Cf. Apoc. Baruch, loc. cit.: ‘ they shall be changed into every form they 
desire . . . into the splendour of glory,’ and Daniel xii. 3. 

2 Philipp. ii. 7. ΟΣ fees t Phe, 


7: 
4 The claims of the king- pretender Alexander are rejected at first sight by 
Augustus because of his ‘ slave’s body’; cf. B.J., i. § 107 ; Haldsis, ibid. 


436 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


‘Friedrich Wilhelm Ghillany (1807-76) treats this possibility as 
an historical fact.’1 Lastly, Dr. Schweitzer has adduced cogent 
reasons in support of this view. After the conclusions now reached 
there can be no doubt that such is the correct interpretation of the 
expectation and teaching of Jesus. The disciples’ vision of the 
transformation already realized on Mt. Hermon is not intelligible 
unless they, and consequently their Master, lived and moved in 
this belief. 


THE VARYING ASPECT OF JESUS ACCORDING TO ORIGEN, 
AUGUSTINE, AND IN CHRISTIAN ART 


The vision of the transfiguration receives some additional light 
from the analogous narrative of the Odyssey just referred to. There 
Telemachus, through the mercy of Athena, can see and recognize 
his father in all his splendour and manly beauty, though to the 
other spectators he continues in the guise of the poor and squalid 
beggar. In the same manner Peter and the sons of Zebedee might 
behold Jesus on the mount in the splendour of his divine majesty, 
though to the other disciples, and of course to all outsiders, his 
secret remains hidden. 

In other words, we are here dealing with ancient popular belief : 
‘the gods in no wise appear visibly to all.’? Just so in Philo, 
Moses, the re-born Messiah, will be visible only to the redeemed 
but concealed from the rest. There can be no question of a 
theological subtlety or Gnostic sophistry (as v. Dobschiitz calls it) 
when Origen * records a tradition according to which Jesus ap- 
peared in two forms—the poor and ill-favoured form of the bond- 
servant, visible to all and held up against the Christians by Celsus, 
and the changed and glorified figure of the holy mount, in which 
form he is expected by the Church to appear at his return. 

In Luke’s Gospel ® the disciples going to Emmaus do not 
recognize their risen Master by his looks but only through the 
manner of the breaking of the bread and his blessing. The glorified 
form of the risen Lord is obviously not supposed to be known only 
to the three witnesses of the transfiguration on the mount ; but 
the rest saw only his poor earthly body during his lifetime, and 
cannot recognize the transfigured Christ. ‘Therefore,’ says Augus- 
tine® in unison with Tertullian, ‘ therefore he appeared ugly 
(/ocdus) to his persecutors,’ and he adds the following explanation : 


‘ ἐν Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus,*, Ὁ. 363 (p. 412 of 3rd German 
edition 

* Odyssey, xvi. 160 sqq. 5. De exsecr., §§ 8-9, ii. 435 M. 

τ Comm. in Matt., ὃ 100. 

5 xxiv. 16. Cp. Ps. -Marc (i. e. Aristion the presbyter) xvi. 12, ‘after that he 
appeared in another form (ἐν ἑτέρᾳ μορφῇ) to two οἵ them. . . 

5 Enarratio in Ps. cxxvit., cap. 8 


ECCE HOMO 437 


‘for they had not the eyes wherewith to see the beauty of Christ. 
To what sort of eyes did Christ appear beautiful? What eyes did 
Christ himself seek for when he said to Philip, I have been long 
with you and have ye not seen me?’! Those eyes must be 
cleansed that they may see that light, and if but lightly touched by 
the splendour they are fired with love, so that they wish to be 
healed and become illuminated. ‘For that ye may know that 
Christ when loved is beautiful, the prophet says, “fairer than the 
children of men,” 2 his beauty surpasses (that of) all men.’ 

Again, the doctrine that Jesus appeared to every one as each 
was capable of seeing and could benefit by seeing him is found in 
the same passage of Origen.* Nor was there anything surprising 
in this, since the creative word of God, the Logos, could naturally 
assume any form at will. The doctrine has a Docetic ring, but is 
also quite intelligible from the point of view of that simple popular 
belief in accordance with which God appears to Abraham in the 
form of three wanderers, Athena to Telemachus in the form of 
Mentor and to Odysseus in that of a blue-eyed maiden or a swallow. 

A Tertullian and an Augustine, who expressly emphasize the 
fact that Jesus appeared devoid of any physical charm to his 
pérsecutors, could therefore take no offence at finding in Josephus 
an enumeration of the ‘terrenae originis signa’ which his enemies 
noticed to the exclusion of anything else: ‘non enim habebant 
oculos unde Christus pulcher videretur..’ 

Conversely, the idea that Jesus appears to each man in accord- 
ance with his deserts makes it at once intelligible that Paul and 
his followers had no desire whatever to know more about the 
mortal frame of the Christ martyred on the cross, and were content 
to serve in spirit the glorified risen Lord. It is equally intel- 
ligible that hardly any painter or sculptor ever regarded himself 
as so blind, so unworthy to descry and to portray the triumphant 
beauty and the true nature of Jesus Christ, as to condescend to 
reproduce the historical appearance of that deformed and puny 
figure. 

᾿ The necessarily inadequate conceptions which an artist may 
form of the glory of the Redeemer are regarded by the Church as 
purely subjective and devoid of any canonic authority. St. 
Augustine quite shared this general view : 


‘It is unavoidable, when we believe certain concrete facts 
which we have read or heard of but have not seen, that the mind 
should conceive something having corporeal lineaments and form, 
such as may occur to its thought, which may be true or not. Even 
if it is true, which can very rarely happen, it is of no profit that we 


1 John xiv. 9. * Ps. xiv. 2. 
3. * Unicuique apparebat secundum quod fuerit dignus,’ 


438 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


should hold to this as an article of faith, although it may be useful 
for something else which is suggested by it. . . . For indeed the 
outward appearance of the very flesh of the Lord varies and is 
fashioned according to the diversity of the innumerable imaginations 
(of men). None the less, this individual appearance was one only, 
whatever it may have been. Nor in our faith which we have con- 
cerning the Lord Jesus Christ is that salutary which the mind 
fashions for itself, which may be very different from the reality, but 
that only which we think about (Jesus) the man as belonging to the 
species of mankind.’ 4 


The words have been and still are the magna charta of Christian 
art to represent and conceive Christ in such a manner ‘as is 
possible and therefore profitable to those who see him.’2 They 
would perfectly justify even the bold modern painter or sculptor ὃ 
who could and would dare to let that fiery spirit shine through the 
earthly features of a pitiable and maimed body. Their authority 
alike covers those painters, sculptors, and poets who loved to 
portray Jesus as a Greek philosopher,‘ as well as those others who 
dreamt of him as a King David redivivus or a youthful Alexander 
the Great—nay, even those who did not shrink from investing 
him with the majesty conferred by Greek genius upon the chief 
of their gods. 

50 long as the Church is unprepared and unwilling to return to 
that aniconic cult of the Semitic East, she must put up with the 
unavoidable imperfections of all subjective imagery; and even 
those Christians who have, in old Jewish fashion, renounced all 
worshipful contemplation of the work of human hands, should not 
forget that even speech—nay, thought—is a hopelessly inadequate 
medium for any expression of the Absolute. 


THE VARIOUS EPIPHANIES OF THE CHRIST IN THE APOCRYPHAL 
ACTS, AND THE UNRECONCILED CONTRADICTIONS IN THE 
FALSIFIED EIKQN ἸΗΣΟΥ͂ 


The views of Origen and Augustine are not confined to the 
theology of the learned, but reappear in the thoroughly popular 
narratives of the transfiguration, the so-called apocryphal Acts of 
the Apostles. Thus in the Acts of Petey we read : 6 


. wherefore the Lord, whom neither we nor the Jews can 
worthily behold, was induced by his compassion to show himself in 


1 De Trinitate, viii. 4. 7. * Origen, loc. cit. 

* Certain attempts to picture a physically unattractive Jesus could be singled 
out in Byzantine, German, Dutch, and Spanish art. 

ὁ Jesus and Paulus: ““καταγεγραμμένοι ws ἂν φιλόσοφοι; Euseb., Ep. ad. 
Constantiam Augustam; Boivin in Not. ad Nikeph.; Gregoras, Hist. Byz., ed. Bonn, 
p- 1301. On pictures representing Jesus as a Greek philosopher of the Cynic 
school, cf. G. A. Miller, Die leibliche Gestalt Jesu Chr., Wien, 1909, p. 69. 

® Cf. the Byzantine Texts, v. Dobschiitz, p. 107 sqq. 

ὁ Actus Vercell., 20; Henneke, N.T. Apokryphen, p. 241. 


ECCE HOMO 439 


another form and to appear in the image of aman. For each one of 
us saw him as it was within his capacity and power to see (him). But 
now will I interpret to you what has been read to you ere now. Our 
Lord wished to let me see his majesty on the holy mount ;* but 
when I saw his luminous glory along with the sons of Zebedee, I fell 
down as dead 8 and closed mine eyes and heard his voice in a manner 
which I cannot describe. I believed that by his radiance I had been 
robbed of my eyesight. And I recovered breath a little and said within 
myself, Perchance my Lord hath wished to bring me hither in order 
to deprive me of my eyesight. And I said, If this is thy will, I do 
not object, O Lord. And he gave me his hand and raised me up ; 
and when I stood on my feet, I saw him again in such wise as I could 
conceive him. How then, most beloved brethren, hath the merciful 
Lord borne our weaknesses and taken our transgressions upon him- 
self, even as the prophet saith,‘ “He bears our sins and hath pain for 
us: we believed that he was in pain and afflicted with wounds.”’ For 
indeed he is in the Father and the Father in him’ . . . He will 
comfort you, for that ye love him—him who is great and quite 
small, comely and ugly: small for the ignorant, great to those who 
know him, comely to the understanding and ugly to the ignorant, 
youthful and aged . . . glorious but amongst us appearing lowly and 
ill-favoured.’ 


In the following section (21) Jesus appears to a group of blind 
old women, who gain their sight through the brilliance of the 
Glorified One: 


‘To them said Peter, Tell what yehaveseen. They said, Wehave 
seen an elderly man® of such beauty as we cannot describe; but others 
said, We have seen a lad who tenderly touched our eyes ; thus were 
our eyes opened. Therefore Peter praised the Lord and said, Thou 
alone art the Lord God ; to offer thee praise, how many lips should 
we need, to thank thee in accordance with thy compassion? There- 
fore, my brethren, as I told you but now, the unchangeable God is 
ereater than our thoughts, even as we have heard from the aged 
widows how they have seen the Lord in varying forms.’ ? 


In similar fashion the Acts of John reproduces the story of the 
transfiguration on the mount : ὃ 


‘At another time he taketh me (and) James and Peter into the 
mountain where his custom was to pray: and we beheld (in) him 
such a light as it is not possible for a man that useth corruptible 
speech to tell what it was like. Again in like manner he leadeth us 
three up into the mountain, saying, Come ye with me. And we again 
went: and we beheld him at a distance praying. Now therefore I, 


1 [.e, the Gospel story of the transfiguration in the canonic Gospels. 

2 2 Pet.i. 18; cf. above, p. 434: _ 3 Apoc. Joh., 1. 17. 

4 Isaiah lili. 4. 6 John x. 38, xvi. 21. 6 Cf. above, Pp. 42516- 

7 Cf. “Ὁ thou of many forms (ro\vpop¢os), who art the only begotten son,’ 
Acts of Thomas, c. 48. 

8 Tr. M. R. James, Tests and Studies, v. (1897), Ρ. 7, ὃ 3 54. 


440 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


because he loved me,! drew nigh unto him softly as though he should 
not see, and stood looking upon his hinder parts.2. And I beheld him 
that he was not in any wise clad with garments, but was seen of us 
naked thereof, and not in any wise as a man: and his feet whiter 
than any snow, so that the ground there was lighted up by his feet : 
and his head reaching unto heaven;® so that I was afraid and cried out, 
and he turned and appeared as a man of small stature.’ 


In the same document 4 the call of the fishers is curiously fused 
with the appearance of the risen Lord on the shore of the Lake of 
Gennesareth narrated in the appendix to the Fourth Gospel : 


‘For when he had chosen Peter and Andrew, who were brethren, 
he cometh to me and to my brother James, saying, I have need of you: 
come unto me. And my brother (hearing) that, said, John, what 
could this child have, that called to us upon the shore? And I said, 
What child ? And he (said) to me again, The one that is beckoning 
to us. And I answered, Because of our long watch which we have 
kept at sea thou seest not (aright), my brother James: but seest 
thou not the man that standeth (there) well-grown and comely and 
of a cheerful countenance? But he said to me, Him I see not, 
brother, but let us go forth, and we shall see what he would have.® 
And so, when we had brought the ship to land, we saw him also 
helping along with us to settle the ship. And when we departed 
from the place, wishing to follow him, again he was seen of me as 
having a head rather bald, but a thick and flowing beard : but to 
James (he appeared as) a youth whose beard was newly come. We 
were therefore perplexed, both of us, as to what that should mean 
which we had seen; (and) then as we followed him, both of us by 
little and little became (more) perplexed as we thought upon the 
matter. Yet unto me there appeared this, which was still more 
wonderful: for I would try to see him in private, and I never at 
any time saw his eyes closing,? but only open. And oftentimes he 
appeared to me as a small man and uncomely, and then again as 
one reaching to heaven.’ 


Then follow utterances put into the mouth of John on the 
palpable substance (τὸ ὑποκείμενον) of the body of Jesus : 


‘Also there was in him another marvel - when I sat at meal 
he would take me upon his own breast, and I would consider with 
myself ;* and sometimes his breast was felt of me to be smooth and 
tender, and sometimes hard, like stones. . . . Sometimes? when I 


1 John xx. 2. * Ct. Exod. xxxiii, 23. 

* Cf. Plutarch, parall. 32, a man seeing his dead father, μείζονα μορφὴν ἀνθρώπων 
κεκτήμενον, disappearing at the summit of a mountain. 

ὁ Tr. James, op. cit., pp. 3-5, ὃ 2. 

® Or, ‘ what it meaneth.’ ὁ Cf. above, p. 4274. 

* Cf. Ps. cxxi. 4. [But it is to be noted that demons in popular belief are sup- 
posed to be sleepless ; cf. Mod. Lang. Review, xxiy. 200-4.—Translator’s note.] 

° Or, ‘I pressed (him) fast to myself,’ 

* James, op. cit,, p. 9, ὃ 7. 


ECCE HOMO 441 


would lay hold of him, I met with a material and solid body: and 
at other times again when I felt him, the substance was immaterial 
and bodiless and as it were not existing in any wise.’ 


It would seem evident that these alleged utterances of the beloved 
disciple John, who lay on the Lord’s breast and could therefore 
rank as a classic witness, are directed against the assertion of 
Josephus previously quoted! that the ‘ nature’ or ‘ being’ (φύσις) 
of Jesus was purely human, the ordinary nature common (κοινή) 
to all men. 

Only by bearing in mind the theological doctrine of the two 
oppositely constituted forms of Jesus, the earthly and the trans- 
figured, one can understand the extraordinarily delicate manner in 
which the text of Josephus has been manipulated and the official 
description of the Christ falsified. On logical grounds one would 
expect that the copyist who beside ‘ bent’ or ‘ crooked’ (ἐπίκυφος) 
wrote ‘ well-grown’ (εὐήλιξ), beside ‘long-nosed’ (ἐπίῤῥινος) 
‘with a handsome nose’ (εὔρρινος), and so on, would have got rid 
of the resulting contradiction by cancelling the genuine features 
which he considered objectionable; whereby the original descrip- 
tion would have been irretrievably lost. That this did not happen 
is easily explained by the necessity of not sacrificing the evidence 
afforded by the ‘ terrenae originis signa’ of the body of Christ, 
evidence which, as shown by the passionate disquisitions of Ter- 
tullian, was quite indispensable in the contest with the Docetae. 
Unwelcome as these statements appeared to pious worshippers of 
the Godhead of Christ, they could not venture to abandon wholly 
what was so urgently needed to prove the real humanity of Christ, 
the actual incarnation of the Logos. So in the last resort it is 
owing to the Docetae, who so vehemently contested the doctrine 
that God became man, that the most striking evidence of the 
historicity of the man Jesus was allowed to survive, though under 
the protective retouchings by pious forgers. 

In such a state of affairs one must, of course, be prepared for 
the conjecture, as obvious as it is easy to refute, that the evidence 
in question has no genuine nucleus whatever, but is a Christian 
fiction from beginning to end—in other words, that the contra- 
dictions discussed above ? have arisen, not through Christian im- 
provements of a genuinely anti-Christian text, but through free 
invention of a portrait of Christ which intentionally and from the 
outset strove to unite the unsightly features of the first earthly 
appearance of Jesus with the charm of the glorified form of the 
vision on the mount and the Christ of the second coming. 

A glance at p. 427, presenting separately the flattering state- 
ments and their opposites, will suffice to show that the origin of 


1 Cf, above, pp. 428 fisa-se3 CD. 424 ἴ.»:10. 5 Ct... 412 £. 


442 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


so lifelike and inimitable a picture of the ‘unsightly’ appearance 
cannot be explained in this way. For while the ‘ human’ form is 
described in terms so individual as to exclude altogether the 
supposition that they could be the product of fanciful invention, 
the features of beauty are so vague, indefinite, and void of all 
individuality that their invention is obvious. Every one knows 
exactly the meaning of σύνοφρυς, but what on earth is evodpus, 
‘with beautiful eyebrows’? Are weak and delicately pencilled 
or strong and bushy eyebrows ‘ goodly ’ or ‘ beautiful’? Every 
one knows all too well what ἐπίκυφος signifies ; but what is one to 
make of εὐήλιεξ, ‘ well-grown’ ? Andif any one wanted to invent 
a detailed description of a human, all too human, form, why did he 
select just those unattractive features and not other deformities to 
be found in real life and in the papyri, and hence no less suited for 
purposes of caricature ? Why should Jesus have been described 
precisely as an ἐπίκυφος, and not equally well as an ἀριστερόπηρος, 
‘lame on the left side,’ or a κατάκνημος, ‘bow-legged’? Would 
it not have been more effective, if a caricature was meant, to say 
ἀναφάλακρος, ‘bald,’ instead of ὀλιγόθριξ, ‘ scanty-haired’ ? 
With what object could the parting of the hair in the Nazirite 
fashion have been invented? I think that a glance at the re- 
covered tcomismus proves that we have here no fictitious caricature, 
but a description, pitiless indeed and coldly official but as a whole 
the faithful description, of arealman. Furthermore, we can point 
to a parallel instance in which the improving alterations of the 
Christian copyist, in the present case purely hypothetical, are 
actually indicated by a comparison of the various MSS. 


THE OFFICIAL DESCRIPTION OF St. PAUL 


Students of Christian iconography have for some time been 
familiar with a similarly quite relentlessly realistic portrait of the 
‘second founder of Christianity,’ the apostle Paul. 

In the Acts of Paul and Thekla, composed, or rather forged, ‘out 
of love for Paul,’ by some presbyter of Asia Minor! about the 
year A.D. 170, we read (§ 2) : 


‘And a man named Onesiphorus, who had heard that Paul was 
coming to Iconium, went forth with his children Simmias and Zeno 
and his wife Lektra to meet him (and) to invite him to his house. 
For Titus had informed him (διηγήσατο) what Paul was like in 
appearance. For he (Onesiphorus) had not seen him before in the 
flesh, but only in the spirit. And he proceeded to the royal road 
that leads to Lystra and stood waiting for him, and he scanned the 
passers-by with the report of Titus to guide him (κατὰ τὴν μήνυσιν 


+ Tertullian, De Capt., 17. 


ECCE HOMO 443 


Τίτου). And he saw Paul coming, a man small in stature, bald- 
headed, bow-legged, in good form,? with meeting eyebrows and a 
rather prominent nose, full of grace, for at times he looked like a 
man, and at times he had the face of an angel.’ ” 


A brief counterpart to this occurs in the so-called Passion of Paul,’ 
where we are told how Paul was arrested en voute by the sentries : 
‘and he was easily recognizable, having a crooked body (ἔγκυφος 
ὧν τὸ σῶμα), a black beard, and a bald head.’ 

Those two pen-portraits of Paul are in more than one respect 
highly instructive. To begin with, the second passage exemplifies 
the practice, for which evidence has already been adduced from 
Petronius and Lucian,’ of the use of writs by the ancient police. 
For the sentries naturally recognize Paul from the official descrip- 
tion, the μήνυσις in the strict sense, with which they have been 
furnished betimes. 

It is highly significant that the description of Paul transmitted 
to Onesiphorus by Titus is also called a μήνυσις, since the word, 
the exact equivalent of the French signalement, as a rule denotes 
‘information laid before the authorities.’ Moreover, it is obvious 
how expedient it was to send previous notice® of the coming of an 
emissary to the communities which he proposed to visit, and for 
security to attach to this μήνυσις a description (εἰκών) of the 
person concerned. The Jews must have been quite familiar with 
this Hellenistic custom, for a midrash to Ps. xvil. 7® says : 


‘If the man is on a journey, 1goniya [55 εἰκόνια) of the messengers 
(or angels) go before him and proclaim, Make way for the image 
(Ξ- τῷ εἰκονίῳ) of the Holy One, blessed be He’ :? 


which means that God sends out dispatches called zgonia shel 
mal akhim before the traveller, with instructions to entertain him 
well, because he is an ‘image’ of God. 

A description (εἰκών), similar to that contained in the μήνυσις, 
would be attached to the letters of recommendation § which the 
traveller carried with him as certificates and presented in person. 
Letters of this type accumulated rapidly in the archives of the 
Christian communities, and at the time of the Diocletian persecu- 
tion it was thus possible to deceive the Roman officials by deliver- 
ing up to them, instead of the holy scriptures, only such old letters 
ofintroduction.® At the end of the beautiful letter of introduction 

1 εὐεκτικός used by Plato, Laws, iii. 684c ; Aristotle, Eth., v. 11; but of 
athletic bodies. 


2 Cf. above, p. 42957: ‘I will not call him an angel.’ 
8 Lipsius, Acta Apost. Apocr., p. 236 sqq. 


4 Cf. above, p. 403 nn. 8 and 9. 5 Acts xviil. 27. 
6 Jalq., 11. 950 ; Deut.r.,s. 4, 255d. 
7 Midrash Tehillim, in loc. 8 2 Cor. iti. i. 


9 epistulae salutatoriae, Dom, H. Leclerq, in Cabrol’s Dict. d’archéol. chrét., ii. τ, 
p. 862. 


444 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


of Aurelius Archelaus to his chief, the military tribune Julius 
Domitius (second century), now in the Bodleian, the writer says : ! 


2 (LA)- 
Ξῇ TOR(IS) T(IBI) MITTO IcO(NIS- (I send) t(hee) the pen-por[trait] 
MUM) ° of the [bea]rer, that 
26 ILLUM. UT (SIT) IPSE (LOCO) it may itself recommend him (in 
INTER- place) 
27 CESSORIS U(T1)LLUM CO(MMEN- of a guarantor. 
DARET) 
28 ESTOTE FELICISSI(MI DOMINE May ye be blessed with all 
MUL-) fort(une, sir, for ma-) 
29 TIS ANNIS CUM (VESTRIS OMNI-_ ny years with (all your . . .) 
BUS) 
30 BENE AGENTES _ prospering. 
HANC EPISTULAM ANT OCULOS Hold this letter before thine eyes, 
HABETO DOMINE PUTATO ME sir, imagine that I am talking 
TECUM LOQUI. VALE. with thee. Farewell. 


Such a letter, provided as it was with the description, the 
forma, of the bearer, was therefore called litterae formatae.® The 
word makes its first appearance rather late with reference to the 
date of the first use of this method. The opinion that these 
*canonic’ letters of introduction were called litterae formatae, 
because they were drawn up in a secretly fixed form, utilizing 
ciphers against unauthorized use in case of loss or theft, introduced 
by the Council of Nicaea (A.D. 325), is erroneous. The particular 
system of ciphers found on this occasion was rather introduced to 
protect from misuse the ‘ epistulae canonicae guas mos Latinus 
formatas vocat’ ;* the letters themselves were in use long before. 
The italicized words show that the name was familiar at an earlier 
date. The directions laid down by the Nicene Council were that 
such epistles had to begin with certain ciphers, viz. 7, v, a (the 
first letters of the words II(arpos), T(fod), ᾿Α(γίου πνεύματος), 
followed by the first letter of the name of the sender, the second 
letter of the name of the addressee, the third letter of the name of 
the recipient and bearer of the credentials, the fourth letter of the 
city whence the epistle was dated, and in addition the number 
of the indiction year, thus precluding the possibility that such 
credentials could be misapplied by erasure and the insertion of 
another name or a later date, or delivered to some other address, 


* Grenfell-Hunt, Oxvyrh. Pap., ii. 318 sq. See our Pl. xxxu. 

* So I supply, with reference to another military letter, Mitteis-Wilcken, 
Chrestom., p. 537, No. 453, line 8: ‘nomina eorum et iconismos huic epistolae 
subieci.’ 

% Ducange, Gloss. Lat. med. aevi, s.v. 

* The error goes back to Fr. v. Wyss, Mitteilungen der antiquarischen Gesell- 
schaft von Ziivich, 1853, Abh. vii. p. 30: ‘ littevae formatae are letters used in 
ecclesiastical matters, using a definite form, i.e. ciphers, by way of credentials.’ 
This erroneous definition was taken over by a number of more recent authors. 


PLATE XXXII 


Lit ibe ty 


gegen fe 

se ΤᾺ..2 ἃ 

ρον «ὦ 
, 


bh δι») 


— Fin 
one : 7 ἀρ ir 


4 a ὑπ 
bib 
Ἄν 
» μὰ , 
- 
"Ὥστ" “{ 
S.- 
> . 
, τῇ 
a 
. Ἣ» 
ye Ξ.1. 4 


i 
1 


ab ἂν 


»- 


EPISTULA SALUTATORIA OF AURELIUS ARCHELAUS, BENEFICIARIUS TO THE 
MILITARY TRIBUNE JULIUS DOMITIUS 

MENTIONING (IN LINE 25) THE“ ICO(NISMUS LA-)TORIS’ (PEN-PORTRAIT OF BEARER). THE PAPYRUS, 
NOW IN THE BODLEIAN LIBRARY, OXFORD, 


IS HERE REPRODUCED FOR THE FIRST TIME 


(SEE P 444, NOTE 1) 


ECCE HOMO 448 


without the fraud being detected. This cipher could not, however, 
prevent an unlawful possessor of the letter from passing himself 
off as the person named in the letter of introduction. This con- 
tingency (just as in the case of a modern passport) could only be 
prevented or rendered difficult by a description of the person 
recommended, i.e. by his forma being included in the letter. A 
vague and imperfect description might of course enable an ac- 
complice of somewhat similar appearance to turn to account a 
document which he had purloined or found; but without a 
description the mere insertion of such a secret cipher could be 
no protection whatever against misuse. Litterae formatae means, 
therefore, not a letter with cipher clauses as prescribed by the 
Nicene Council, but one furnished with the forma of the bearer. 

Such litievae formatae must frequently have been possessed and 
exhibited by the earliest envoys of the Church. Where they had 
been preserved by individual hosts or communities, they would 
later be held in due honour as dear memorials—nay, worshipped as 
relics of the first heralds of the Gospel. When Tertullian says ! 
that the apostolic Churches still had read to them the genuine 
letters of their founders ‘ recalling the sound of their voices? and 
reproducing the face of each one of them,’ this last statement is 
certainly best explained as referring to their /itterae formatae, 
those letters of introduction describing the ‘facies’ of the apostle 
whose imminent arrival they were meant to announce. 

It is therefore in no way surprising to meet in the apocryphal 
Acts of the Apostles—i.e. in the early edifying miracle legends of the 
ancient Church—with descriptions of Paul producing the impression 
of being historically true and which may well go back to such a 
genuine documentary source ; the more so because there are less in- 
dividual, yet not altogether worthless, parallels to the literary por- 
traits of Paul in the case of Barnabas,® Peter,* Andrew,*® and Mark.® 


1 De praescr. adv. haeret., 36. 

* It is worth recalling in this connexion the various ancient pen-portraits 
of celebrated persons describing not only their features but also their voices; 
according to Timotheos (Diog. Laert., iii. 5, 7), Plato had a thin voice (isyvégwvos). 
Quoting Aristoxenos’ description of Socrates, Cyrill (c. Julian, vi. 208) says, ‘ of 


this quality was his voice,’ etc. Plutarch, Pompeius 2: “τὴν ὄψιν ἔσχεν. . . προσ- 
τυγχάνουσαν τῆς φωνῆς.᾿ 
5. Lipsius, Acta Apost. Apocr., 11. 2, Ὁ. 299. * Malalas, 330 D. 


5. Epiphan. mon., ed. Dressel, pp. 47, 53 (P.G., Ixx. 226 sq.). 

δ Lipsius, ii. 335. According to the Antimarcionite second-century prologues 
to the canonic gospels (Wordsworth-White, i. p. 171), Mark had ‘ stumpy fingers.’ 
Such features are still mentioned in passports or writs under the rubric ‘ special 
characteristics.’ The objection that it is historically unmethodical to look for 
documentary bases in what are, after all, ‘ historical novels’ (for the Acis of 
Paul and Thekla certainly fall largely into this category) is not admissible. 
Supposing we had no documentary sources throwing light on Louis ΧΙ., it would 
still be perfectly correct to utilize Sir Walter Scott’s Quentin Durward, seeing that 
the writer must have known and drawn on trustworthy documentary sources and 
portraits which, according to this supposition, were afterwards lost. 


446 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


THE MS. READINGS AND THE ORIGINAL TEXT OF THE 
DESCRIPTION OF PAUL 


A glance at the personal description of Paul already given shows 
at once that the tradition has come down to us in a form exactly 
corresponding to the one found in the zcontsmus of Jesus. The first 
thing of note is the idea current in the two apocrypha of the chang- 
ing or double appearance of Jesus ; it is here expressly transferred 
to Paul: 


‘at times he looked like a man, and at times he had the face (or 
the personality, since πρόσωπον can mean either) of an angel.’! 


In the description we meet with precisely the same contra- 
dictions observed in that of Jesus. Immediately after ‘bow- 
legged’ (ἄγκυλος ταῖς κνήμαις) stands εὐεκτικός, a word which, 
according to Aristotle,* denotes the good deportment, the sound 
condition of body, which a man obtains through athletic exercises. 
Theoretically, it is true, even a man by nature small and bandy- 
legged could in this way acquire an athletic figure; but it is 
difficult to believe that such was Paul’s case, the more so since 
the term is quite out of harmony with the other features of the 
description. Moreover, according to the Passion of Paul, which 
comes down to us as part of the same corpus which also contains the 
Acts of Paul and Thekla, the sentries actually recognize Paul by 
his crooked body (ἐπίκυφον σῶμα). Now, an ἐπίκυφον σῶμα is 
just the opposite of an evextixov σῶμα. Lipsius’ codex m1, in fact, 
instead of εὐεκτικόν reads προσεκτικόν, ‘attentive.’ Some one 
has therefore first wished to explain the attribute ἐπίκυφος as the 
attitude of a man attentively bending over something (e.g. his 
books), and εὐεκτικός has only arisen, through a further improve- 
ment, out of προσεκτικός. The position, then, is precisely the 
same as in the portrait of Jesus, where the Nasdraean is called in 
the same breath ἐπίκυφος and εὐήλιξ, ‘ hunchbacked ’ and ‘ well- 
grown.’ 

In the description of Paul this position of things is evident if 
the apparatus criticus of Lipsius is taken into account. Codex c 
of the Latin version actually calls Paul subcambaster, which is the 
Vulgar Latin equivalent for μικρὸν ἐπίκυφος, ‘ somewhat crooked.’ 
Codex g, in place of ἄγκυλον ταῖς κνήμαις, ‘ bow-legged,’ offers us 
εὔκνημος, ᾿ With good legs.’ The Syriac presents a shamefaced 
intermediate stage in the process of improvement : ‘ his legs were 
a little crooked (i.e. μικρὸν ἄγκυλον ταῖς κνήμαις) and his knees 
were projecting or far apart,’ which in Greek can only be ῥαιβός 
Cf. above, p. 4295,: ‘1am not going to call him an angel.’ 


Ethics, v. ΤΊ. 
Cf. Lucian, Hervmolimos, c. 2: 


o tt "μὸ 


‘ ᾿ 


ee " q..9 . ΄ , 
“Kai ws TO πολὺ és βιβλίον ἐπικεκύφετο. 


ECCE HOMO 447 


or patBooxédns. In view of the clearly idealizing tendency of this 
version it is inconceivable that this further unflattering feature can 
be a later insertion. Conversely, in an accurate description it is 
clearly expedient to supplement the general statement ἡ bow- 
legged’ by the important distinction, whether this applies to x-legs 
or o-legs ; as will be seen, it is the second alternative which is 
indicated as correct by the Syriac word ‘argobh, an equivalent of 
the Greek ῥαιβός. 

Where the Greek offers μικρὸν τῷ μεγέθει OF μικρομεγέθη, the 
Latin codex M has not, like c and d, statura brevis, but puszllus, 
‘diminutive,’ ‘ dwarfish,’ just such a word as one might expect 
from the surname of Saul of Tarsus, Paulus, which corresponds to 
Greek νάννος or μικρότατος and is in keeping with Chrysostom’s 
description of Paul as a τρίπηχυς ἄνθρωπος. Where the Greek 
Acts speak of ‘ bald-headed,’ the Latin MSS. M and ὁ only refer to 
the Apostle’s intentionally ‘shorn head’ (attonso capite), evidently 
with regard to Acts xxi. 24, where Paul is to have his head shorn 
along with four Nazirites, as if ever after he had gone about with 
a close-cropped head. 

The phrase ‘ with meeting eyebrows,’ which was found ob- 
jectionable by many of the copyists of the portrait of Jesus, has 
been replaced in the Latin codex M by ‘with short eyebrows,’ 
brevibus supercilits. The ‘meeting eyebrows,’ which are generally 
strong, bushy eyebrows, agree with the profile of Paulin the bronze 
disc showing Peter and Paul and found in the Domitilla cata- 
combs.” There the Apostle of the Gentiles has uncommonly thick 
and projecting eyebrows. 

The statement regarding the formation of the nose has also 
been improved, for the Greek μικρῶς ἐπίρρινον does not corre- 
spond to the naso aquilino found in all the Latin MSS. People 
with noble aquiline noses are called in Greek ypu7ro/, and rank as 
‘ high-minded,’ so that the motive for the alteration is obvious. 
In fact, the Greek MS. m has instead of ἐπίρρινον the correction 
γρυπον. 

‘ The bronze disc reproduced on PI. Xxxi11., with the two profiles 
alleged to be those of Peter and Paul, gives the Tarsian a pro- 
nounced and apparently broad but somewhat snub nose, recalling 
the Socrates type. Such a nose would be termed παχύρρινος or 
ἔνσιμος OY ὑπόσιμος, but hardly ἐπέίρρινος. In all other monu- 
ments of early Christian and Byzantine art ® Paul is constantly 
represented with a long, curved nose,’ ῥέπουσαν τῷ προσώπῳ ῥῖνα, 

1 Opp., ed. Montfaucon, viii. 618. Incidentally, this is good evidence that 
rpimnxus cannot mean ‘six feet high’ either here or in the description of Jesus. 

2 Cf. our Pl. xxxit., reproduced from Armellini’s publication, Rém. Quart. 
Schrift, 1888. 


3 Cf. v. Dobschiitz, Paulus, vol. ii. (Halle, 1926). 
‘ An explanation of this strange discrepancy is suggested below, p. 453 ff-5-12. 


448 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


‘a nose sloping towards the face,’ as Nicephorus Callistou ! 
describes it. 

Here, then, the MSS. themselves enable us clearly to recognize 
the gradual revision which the portrait has undergone. It origin- 
ally described Paul as ‘ quite small, bald-headed, bow-legged, with 
knees far apart, with meeting eyebrows, large eyes, a long nose, 
and a red, florid face.’ ὃ 

It is obvious that the forger of Asia Minor who, according to 
the evidence of Tertullian,* confessed to having concocted the Acts 
of Paul ‘out of love for the apostle,’ would never have introduced 
a description of his hero so unflattering that it would be found in- 
tolerable by the copyists of the book and quoted by the enemies 
of Christianity with malicious glee,® had it not been recognized 
at the time of the forgery as historically accurate or attested by 
unquestionable and unquestioned documents. 


THE STIGMATA OF JESUS ON PAUL. THE EARLY TRADITIONS 
ABOUT A TWIN-BROTHER AND DOUBLE OF JESUS 


The author of the Acts of Paul must already have been con- 
scious of the similarity of the description of Paul to that of Jesus, 
for in § 21 he says of Thekla : 


‘ As a lamb spies around in the wilderness, so she sought for Paul. 
And while she let her glance move over the crowd, she saw the Lord 
sitting there in the form of Paul.’ 


This strange motive, which in itself does not necessarily presuppose 
that the author believed Jesus and Paul to have resembled each 
other,® must be compared with the parallel passages in the Acts of 
Thomas,’ where time and again Judah Thauma, i.e. ‘ Judas the 
twin, appears as strikingly like his deceased brother Jesus, whose 
twin he was. Suffice it to mention the story of the princess and 
her bridegroom who had both been persuaded by Judas Thomas to 
make a vow of chastity. During the wedding night Jesus himself 
appears to them in the shape of Thomas, and the bridegroom quite 
naturally observes: ‘ But thou hast just left ; how then art thou 
still here?’ But the Lord replies to him: ‘1am not Judas, I am 


! PG. exly, 883, 

* From the Syriac text, ed. Wright, Apocr. Acts of the Apostles, London, 1871, 
it. 127. 

* ruborus, Lat. cod. ¢; Malalas, p. 332 A. 

* De baptismo, c. 17. 

* Cf. the Byzantine pseudo-Lucian, Philopat., xii. : ‘a bald-headed, long-nosed 
Galilaean who had ascended to the third heaven.’ 

δ Cf. above, p. 437 ll. 16-18, the parallels from Genesis and the Odyssey. 

‘ Lipsius, op. cit., i. pp. 227, 250, 256, 269; Wright, op. cit., ῬΡ. 155, 170, 179, 
185,196; Rendel Harris, The Twelve Apostles, Cambridge, 1927, p. 48 sq. 


PLATE XXXIII 


he 
a 


7 


BRONZE DISC WITH SECOND CENTURY PORTRAITS OF 
SS. PETER AND PAUL 
FOUND IN THE DOMITILLA CATACOMBS, AFTER ARMELLINI'S PUBLICATION 
Romische Quartalschrift, 1888, pp. 130-136 


ECCE HOMO 449 


the brother of Judas.’ ! He then sits down on the bed and reminds 
them of what Thomas had told them previously. A donkey upon 
which Thomas had conferred the boon of human speech forthwith 
addresses the apostle as ‘ thou twin-brother of the Messiah.’ 

Nor does the Greek text ? differ in the slightest in this respect. 
The physical likeness of the twin-brothers * is emphasized in the 
speech of a demon driven out of a woman: ὁ ‘ What have we to 
do with thee, thou ambassador of the Most High . . . why doest 
thou resemble God thy Lord, who concealed his majesty and 
appeared in the flesh ? ’ ® 

No less ambiguously the girl saved from death ® says of her 
saviour Jesus Christ to Thomas: ‘and he took me without the 
place, where there were men; but he who resembled thee (ὁ coi 
ὅμοιος) took me, brought me to thee and said . . .’ 

As will be seen, the aretalogy of Judah Thauma knows no 
greater item to report in his praise than his resemblance to his 
twin-brother Jesus, reported to have been so pronounced that he 
appears as the double of Jesus, just as Jesus is often taken for 
Thomas. 

Dr. Harris has shown furthermore that this strange tradition 
occurs also in the Latin, where it was found objectionable at a 
comparatively late period. Priscillian speaks with perfect un- 
concern about ‘Judas apostolus . . . ille didymus’ domini.’ A 
writer so generally read as Isidore of Seville says of him: ‘ Thomas 
apostolus, Christi didymus nominatus et iuxta Latinam linguam 
Christi genunus® ac similis salvatoris. . . .’ Yet this explanation 
of the name did not at all necessitate such an emphasis of the like- 
ness of Thomas and Jesus. In the Anglo-Saxon Church the same 
explanation occurs in the Gospel narrative itself,9 and in the 
opinion of Dr. Harris the Latin original of the Anglo-Saxon version 
already had these words. 

According to the pseudo-Ignatius letter addressed to John, not 
Judas but the Saddiq Ja‘aqob was the twin-brother and exact 
double of Jesus.?° 

There can be no question about the essential fact that a 
tradition like this does not spring up overnight and without 
Ibid, ᾿ 
Acta Thomae, ed. Bonnet, p. 29. 

On the alteration of thauma to thehoma (=abyssus), cf. ibid., p. 49. 
Wright, p. 185. ὅ Bonnet, c. xli. p. 33, gives the Greek text. 
Wright, p. 196. 7 The Greek loan-word points to a Greek source. 
The explanation of Thomas =geminus has become almost canonical through 
the Onomastica Sacra, though a number of MSS. and variants have only abyssus. 
Irom Isidore the sentence was taken over into certain variants of the Legenda 
Sanctorum, and even into the Breviarium Romanum (cf. Harris, p. 56). 

® E.g. in the West Saxon Bible, John xx. 24, xxi. 2; cf. Harris, p. 56. 
‘Thomas, an of pm twelfon, pe is gecwedn Didimus, paet is gelfcust, on ure 


gepeode . . . Thomas, pe is gecwedn gelicust.’ 
10 Rendel Harris, loc. cit., p. 57. 


2F 


on ὦ BS t ν»Ὁ 


450 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


historical foundation of some sort, For what Christian would 
have been foolish enough to invent such a legend, seeing that it is 
most apt to undermine the very basis of the orthodox tradition 
concerning the resuscitation of Jesus? Forif Jesus were given such 
a double, every adversary of Christianity would immediately jump 
to the conclusion that the person appearing to Peter, to the 
disciples at Emmaus, to the women, and to the Five Hundred, was 
simply the twin-brother of Jesus, call him Judas Thomas o1 
Ja‘aqob the Saddiq. In exactly the same way the incredulous 
neighbours in John ix. 9 had maintained that the beggar who had 
received back his eyesight from Jesus was not the blind-born 
beggar at all but another individual closely resembling him (‘‘ ἀλλ᾽ 
ὅμοιος αὐτῷ ἐστιν"). In other words, the story of the resurrec- 
tion would have to be judged in the same manner as the appearance 
of the dead Alexander, slain by Herod the Great, who deceived the 
Jews of Melos and was explained by Augustus as the attempted 
imposture on the part of a double, presumably an illegitimate slave 
brother of Alexander. The reader will also recall the famous 
story of the pseudo-Smerdes, recognized as the genuine brother of 
Cambyses even by the latter’s sister, the queen Atossa.t. Simi- 
larly, Tacitus mentions the appearance of a false Agrippa Postumus, 
whom Tiberius decided to have secretly slain; and Suetonius’ 
account of a false Nero will also come to mind.,? 

If, in spite of all this, the expected explanation is not found in 
the pages of the rabbi Tryphon, the Jewish opponent of Justinus, 
or of Celsus as handed down by Origen, this merely proves that 
these two polemists did not know the tradition of a twin-brother 
of Jesus, and his double. Yet there must have been earlier oppo- 
nents of Christianity better informed ; for it is certainly significant 
that the story in the Gospel of John is careful to emphasize that 
When Jesus appeared to the disciples while all the doors were 
closed, Judas Thomas was not with them. It is most striking to 
see how the text of the West Saxon Bible allows this tendency to 
appear with a rare clearness-—/oh xx. Ig: in the evening, behind 
barred doors, from fear of the Jews, the disciples are sitting to- 
gether, when suddenly Jesus stands among them, calming them 
with the greeting, ‘Peace be with you.’ And the disciples are glad 
(ἐχάρησαν) to see the Lord. Without regard for the context there 
was added, precisely between the greeting and the expression of 
the disciples’ joy, a sentence to the effect that Jesus showed them 
his wounds, evidently without this frightful sight interfering in the 


* Ct. Prasek, Dey Alte Ovient, xiv. 25. The false Joan of Arc was recognized 
by her brothers after the Maid had been burned at Compiégne. 

* There is no want of more recent examples: cf. the histories of Warbeck, 
the false Demetrius, etc. On the latter in particular, cf. Mérimée, Der falsche 
Demetrius, Leipzig, 1869 ; Pierling, Rome et Démétrvius, Paris, 1878, 


ECCE HOMO 481 


least with the joy of the disciples. The resuscitated Jesus is then 
recognizable by his wounds, which his double, ‘Jude Thomas, who 
was so like him,’ would not have been able to show, and this 
significant phrase was inserted at a later date. 

Nor did all this suffice. John xx. 24 has thought it wise to 
state expressly that Thomas the alter ego was at that time not with 
the others, thus precluding the simple explanation that in the 
twilight the frightened disciples might have taken him for the 
risen Jesus. The last step was to make Thomas himself express 
the greatest doubts about the reality of Jesus’ appearance and to 
feel his wounds, Nor is it accidental that in John xxi. 2, where 
Jesus appears on shore to the disciples in a boat, the presence of 
Thomas among the latter is expressly mentioned. 

Lastly, the theory according to which the Saddiq Ja‘aqob was 
the twin-brother + of Jesus, and his double, is probably responsible 
for the emphasis laid in I Cov, xv. 7 on the appearance of Jesus to 
this very Ja‘aqob. 

All this goes far to prove that the tradition about a twin- 
brother of Jesus resembling him in every detail is very old, and 
caused no small trouble to the early apologists, precisely because 
it furnished a most plausible, natural, and altogether satisfactory 
explanation of the appearances of the supposed risen Jesus. Yet 
it was impossible to suppress it altogether, because this Thomas 
was evidently quite proud of his resemblance to Jesus, and had 
disciples of his own, as shown by the Acts of Thomas, who could 
testify to the fact. So long as there were ‘ Thomas Christians,’ 
loyalmembers of the universal Church, such a tradition could not be 
ruled out. It required the various schisms and the heresy-hunting 
of the following centuries to establish definitely the dogma of the 
‘only-begotten? son of God.’ Only so long as the Oriental Church 
was proud of still having a striking likeness of its Founder in the 
person of his twin Thomas, could Paul and his adherents them- 
selves lay any stress on and attribute any value to their own 
physical likeness to Jesus the Crucified. 

This consideration at length leads us to the pathetic request 
of the apostle, hitherto never satisfactorily explained : 3 

‘From henceforth let no man trouble me, for I bear (about with 

me) on my (own) body the marks of Jesus,’ 
which means, ‘I am a marked man like Jesus, smitten with his 
stigmata.’ Not because he can point to old scars from scourgings 

1 Ja’agob is explained in Gen. xxv. 26 as a fitting name for the second of twins. 
The tradition has probably no other foundation. 

* The tradition in question is quite reconcilable with the twinship of Jesus and 
Thomas ; for in the ancient Dioscuri legends the father of one of the twins is 
commonly a god, whilst the other has a human father, Yet it is absolutely 


irreconcilable with the dogma of the permanent virginity of Mary, 
3 Gal. vi. 17. 


452 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


in the past, but because he, like Jesus, is an unfortunate man op- 
pressed and burdened with bodily infirmities,t does he ask his 
readers to have some consideration for his infirmities and not to 
add to his troubles in the future. 

This resemblance of Paul to Jesus explains the curious fact, 
which long ago struck Erwin Preuschen,” that the Coptic A poca- 
lypse of Elijah 8 and the Armenian Apocalypse of Daniel * describe 
the Antichrist, i.e. the false messiah who is to appear before the 
second coming of Jesus, with all the characteristic features of the 
signalement of Paul. The Coptic text depicts him as ‘ thin- 
legged, bald-headed, with a tuft of white hair in front of his head, 
with eyebrows reaching to his ears, leprous on his hands, capable 
of metamorphosing himself into a child, an old man, etc., but 
incapable of changing the appearance of his head.’ 

This not very flattering description is still supplemented by the 
Armenian text, which depicts him as ‘with curved knees, crippled, 
with handsome eyebrows,® with sickle-like claws, with a pointed 
head, full of charm... . ® 

Preuschen was the first to see that these descriptions contain 
one feature absent from the ordinary iconismus of Paul but throw- 
ing a peculiar light on the apostle’ 5 own words in 2 Cor. xii. 7, 
where he refers to a ‘ thorn’ in his flesh. Preuschen concluded 
that he must refer to some malady which had left its traces, whilst 
the verb κολαφίζειν (lit. ‘to box some one’s ears’) would indicate 
not merely ‘ fits,’ but the disease itself. The Apocalypse of Elijah 
indeed suggests that Paul suffered from leprosy, called savra‘ath 
(from sara‘) in Hebrew, a word of which the original meaning is ‘to 


Φ ον 


strike’ (Avab. - 3). The leper is ‘ stricken by God.’* Since the 
disease strikes the head more than any other part of the body, 
the verb κολαφίζειν is explained by Preuschen as a rather drastic 
euphemism for the distemper. More probably κολαφίζῃ is a cor- 
ruption of xerepity, ‘ (who) gives (me) leprosy.’® Anyhow, the ‘tuft 
of white hair’ in the fore part of the head ascribed to the Antichrist 
is in complete harmony with this result, since leprosy does indeed 


1 Acts xiv. 12 cannot be used as an objection to this ; the ancient gods liked 
to assume a most humble incognito to test men. The queen of Olympus and 
Aphrodite did not hesitate thus to assume the shape of a decrepit old woman. 

2 Z.N.T.W., li. (1901), p. 187-92. 

3 Ed. Stern, Zeitsch. f. Egypt. Spr., 1886, p. 115 sgq.; ed. Steindorff, in 
Gebhardt-Harnack, 7.U., N.F., 11. 3, Leipzig, 1899. 

4 Kalemkiar, W.Z. f. K.M., vi. (1892), p. 133. 15 sqq.; trans. 2bid., Ὁ. 239. 
It 544.ἝἩ Venice ed. of the Arm. Apocr. of the Old Testament, p. 249; οἱ. 
Preuschen, Z.N.T.W., ii. (1901), p. 192. 

5. evoppus, Cf. above, p. 4263p. § Cf. above, p. 443]. 3. 

7 Lev. xiii. 44, Xxtl. 4 

§ On κελεφός = elephantiacus, κελεφία = ‘leprosy,’ Syr. glafana =‘ leprosi,’ 
gallafitd =‘ scabies,’ glafa=‘scall,’ see H. H. Schaeder, Studien der Bibliothek War- 
burg, vii. pp. 271 and 272, n. 3. 


ECCE HOMO 453 


colour white the hair of the parts of the skin which it attacks. 
Even the ‘ sickle-like’ claws have been recognized by Preuschen 
as a symptom of leprosy, caused by the leprosy knots in the finger- 
joints. The bushy brows, as indicated by the epithet evpvodpus, 
find their explanation in the thickening of the arches of the eyes 
noticeable in all lepers in a late stage of the disease, the fatal knots 
so changing the facial features, this and the sunken nose giving a 
‘satyr-like’ or ‘leonine’ expression to the individual, a fact which 
probably explains the profile of Paul on the bronze disc of St. 
Agnese,! with its satyr-like features reminding some archaeologists 
of Socrates. Even the indications of Malalas using for Paul 
the epithets λευκόχρους and ἀνθηροπρόσωπος would hardly mean 
originally a white and tender skin and a florid complexion, but 
rather the pale, leaden complexion of those stricken with lepra 
albicans and the exanthema of the face at the bursting of the knots. 
The baldness of the head may well be connected with this disease, 
as the Jews knew very well.” 

Preuschen has further pointed out that the counsel given by 
James the Saddiq to Paul to have himself cleansed in the temple 
along with four Nazirites, though he himself had taken no such 
vow,® and the adoption of this counsel as well as the following 
‘seven days,’ are best understood if Paul, as one cured from leprosy, 
had himself pronounced ‘ clean’ by the priests.* 

The descriptions of the Antichrist, of Jewish-Christian origin, 
clearly show the advantage his opponents took of his distemper to 
represent him as a man ‘stricken by God.’ His adherents did not 
for that reason waver in their allegiance,® for according to certain 
Jewish traditions the Messiah himself was to be a Hiwwara, that 15, 
a leper.® 

Nor is it admissible to suppose Josephus and the Jewish Chris- 
tians simply to have taken the peculiar features of the Antichrist 
as they found them in the popular Jewish apocalypses and to have 
attributed them to the two men whom they cordially detested, to 
wit, Jesus and Paul, the features of that popular Antichrist being 
altogether different and wholly fantastic.’ 


See our Pl. ΧΧΧΊΙΠ. 
Lev. xiil. 40-44. 

3 Acts xxi. 20-27; cf. Preuschen, p. 194 sqq. 

4 Naturally, there was no real ‘cure’ of leprosy. But, as may be seen from 
Lev. xiii. and the Talmudic commentaries, the patient might be pronounced ‘clean ’ 
from the purely cultic view-point and admitted to the community. On the other 
hand, ‘scall,’ psoriasis, leukoma, vitiligo, etc., were not distinguished by the Jewish 
priests from true elephantiasis. 

6 Gal. iv. 14: ‘you have not spat out (ἐξεπτύσατε) at the torment in my flesh, 
but received me as if I were . . . the Messiah.’ 

6 Strack-Billerbeck, ii. 286. 

7 Cf. Bousset, Der Antichrist, p. 101 sq. 


1 
2 


454 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


AN OPPONENT’S PHYSICAL DEFECTS IN ANCIENT POLITICAL 
INVECTIVE 


Now that plain evidence has been found, in the tradition on the 
portrait of Paul, of a textual development in perfect harmony with 
the parallel development of the portrait of Jesus, there remains for 
us to trace the history of pen-portraits in ancient literature. 

Von Dobschiitz blamed his predecessors for altogether neglect- 
ing this problem, and for their failure to draw what seemed to him 
the obvious conclusion as to the late origin of the portrait of Jesus. 
When he dealt with this question in 1899, Ivo Brun’s excellent 
book on ‘the literary portrait’! had escaped his notice, as had 
the investigations of J. Fiirst on the ‘personal descriptions in the 
Diktys story,’ ? whilst detailed studies dealing with the iconismi of 
the papyri were not then available. He could therefore maintain 
that the literary portrait, as a special development of rhetorical 
ἔκφρασις, began among the Latins with Suetonius and among the 
Greeks with Plutarch. He had overlooked Josephus’ description 
of the Syrian soldier Sabinus,*® evidently derived from the man’s 
military papers, copied in the report about his prowess to 
general headquarters. Thus it was not merely the fact that the 
Halosis had not yet been disclosed to the Western world that led 
v. Dobschiitz to the opinion that the references of Byzantine 
writers, contemporaries of the iconoclast controversy, to older 
historians, Josephus being one of these, were but a fiction. 

The truth is that the literary portrait is as old as Greek litera- 
ture. When the crafty Odysseus says of his pretended comrade 
Eurybates, 


‘And I will tell thee of him too, what manner of man he was: 
he was round-shouldered, brown-skinned, and curly-haired,’ ὃ 


the scholiast rightly calls this sketch an εἰκονισμός. And who 
does not know that cruelly scornful description in the Iliad of Ther- 
sites, that first representative of democratic opposition recorded 
in history ?— 


‘ill-favoured beyond all men that came to Ilios, bandy-legged was 
he, and lame of one foot, and his two shoulders rounded, arched 
down upon his chest ; and over them his head was warped, and a 
scanty stubble sprouted on it.’ δ 


One can see with what diabolic cunning the Greeks of the Homeric 
age practised that basest of political arts—emphasizing, that 
is, the physical defects of an adversary to render him ridicu- 


1 Das literarische Portrait, Berlin, 1806. 

° Philologus, \xi. (1902), p. 377 sqq. 

Cf. above, p. 392}. 4 Cf. above, p. 4449. 
Od., xix. 245 sq. (Butcher and Lang). 

1|., ti. 216 544. (Lang, Leaf, and Myers). 


Η] 
δ 
6 


ECCE HOMO 455 


lous in the eyes of the hearers, the avgumentum ad hominem 
the theory of which was complacently taught by the Roman 
Cicero and practised by him, without scruple, with the greatest 
effect.1 It is quite true that the description of Jesus in Josephus 
cannot be compared with the tactful pen-portraits of Plutarch nor 
with those of Suetonius or his sources. Josephus did not have to 
look there for models; he found them rather among those rhe- 
toricians who never scrupled to allude with biting scorn to the 
bodily infirmities of their opponents, their obscure extraction, or 
their humble parentage.® 

True enough, Josephus has not taken the trouble to present his 
readers with a sketch of the human imperfections of any other of 
those Zealots or misleaders of the people whom he so cordially 
detested. The reason is simple. Josephus did not waste his 
efforts on persons of little or no importance whatever for the sequel 
of events.4 With Jesus it was quite different. His adherents still 
lived, even after his death—nay, after the destruction of Jerusalem 
—-a menace to the peace of the empire as well as to conservative 
Pharisaic Judaism. The poor pseudo-messiahs who had come 
forth from obscurity, to have their day, like the kings of the 
Saturnalia, and then to be plunged again into everlasting oblivion, 
might well be left in their graves. The Nasdraean, who after his 
death continued to live and to make converts even in the palace 
of the Flavian dynasty, was a far more terribleenemy. To destroy 
his memory every means was felt to be good. 


THE ROMAN INDICTMENT OF JESUS AS THE SOURCE OF JOSEPHUS 


Josephus’ statement concerning Jesus, the opening section of 
which we have just restored,® belongs to the history of Jewish ® and 
heathen polemic against the Messianist or (as after Antiochene and 
Hellenistic fashion we should say to-day) the Christian propa- 
ganda.? 

Josephus is quite familiar with the chief points of that propa- 
ganda; he knows that the Messiah called himself ‘Son of Man,’ 
that is, ‘Man,’ whereas his Hellenistic followers speak of him as 


1 De Ovatore, 68-72 ; Pro Sestio, viii. ὃ 18 sq. 

2 The portrait of Augustus comes from his freedman and secretary, the Syrian 
Julius Marathus. But Suetonius did not hesitate, on occasion, to use the cari- 
cature drawn by an opponent, as in his portrait of Caligula. 

3 Cf., for example, the attack of Demosthenes (De Corona, xviii. § 259) on 
Aeschines. 

4 Besides, none of the other messianist leaders had been tried before a Koman 
court-martial. Where should Josephus find their icontsmi ? 

5 Cf. above, pp. 424-29. 

6 On the Jewish measures taken against Paul’s propaganda, cf. Justin, Mart., 
Dial., cviil. 

7 It was originally a propaganda for the Civitas Dei, the Christian theocracy, 
of a perfectly terrestrial form and meaning and opposed to the Roman empire. 
Cf. the Passio Pauli, ii. (Hennecke, p. 210). 


456 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


‘Son of God,’ and his Jewish adherents as an ‘angel,’ as the ‘ true 
prophet,’ i.e. Moses vedivivus, the true wonder-working prophet of 
the final age. 

Whence did he derive this knowledge ? It is to be noted, in 
the first place, that in the Haldsis no trace can be found of any 
utilization of the Logia of Matthew, and we may conclude without 
hesitation that our author came to know these only after the com- 
pletion of the Haldsis, since they are clearly drawn upon in the 
Testimonium Flavianum of the Antiquities. This is somewhat 
surprising, since the Samaritan Thallus had already read and con- 
troverted these messianic predictions as early as the middle of the 
first century.? 

On proceeding to examine Josephus’ statement for other 
possible sources, one cannot help noting the highly significant 
‘Some said of him... but the others .. .: his disciples call 
him ..., but the Greeks . . .,’ and so on. 

This typical confrontation of various conflicting opinions is 
obviously based on the record of the statements of witnesses, 
whether made at the trial or at the preliminary enquiry, and 
summed up in the writ of indictment (/zbellus). As unmistakable 
is the playing off of these witnesses against one another so as to 
expose their mutual contradictions. How can he bea man, a ‘Son 
of God,’ and an angel at the same time? How can he be Moses 
come to life again when in so many points he disregarded the law 
of Moses—the Sabbath, forexample ἢ Howcanhebea messenger 
of God if he sets himself up against the commands of God ? 
Certainly there are witnesses to the fact that he himself never did 
anything disgraceful (ἄτοπον) or high-handed (ἐπιχειρήματα) 3 
—that is admitted and recognized; but even so, it is established 
that by his word he ‘prepared’ and instigated the whole affair. 

Then comes the climax of the attack. Wonderful as his power, 
displayed on various occasions, seems to be, how can any one be 
taken for an angel or a messenger of God who shows such a pitiable 
figure, so ordinary and commonplace a physical nature? And now 
follows the reading of the detailed personal description of a 
diminutive man, scarce three cubits high and, alas! of so plain an 
appearance! It is the merciless argumentum ad hominem, accord- 
ing to all the rules of Graeco-Roman rhetoric. 

The whole ring of these words is clear and unmistakable. It is 
the tone of the prosecuting attorney driving the victim into a 
corner down to the smallest detail: the well-bred, gentlemanly 
irony of the sceptic, ‘si hominem dicere fas est.’ Josephus, or his 
secretary, has done nothing beyond copying the Acta Pilati, the 
governor's report about the judicial procedure against Jesus from 
the Commentarii of Tiberius. 

1 See above, p. 55 ll. 34 ff. * See above, p. 298. ° Cf, above, p. 384 n. 12. 


= 


XVI 
THE CRISIS 


REBELLION PLANNED OR ACTUALLY ATTEMPTED ? 


E have seen above ! the text of Josephus relating the 

arrival of the Galilaean wonder-worker on the Mount 

of Olives, a text leaving no doubt whatever as to the 
hostility of the writer towards the hero of this episode. Yet in spite 
of this the passage culminates in a strangely favourable result for 
the accused: he can.at most be regarded as the spiritual originator 
of what happened. 

This result is the more remarkable in that it is in contradiction 
to the Gospels—at variance, therefore, with what the Christians 
themselves were prepared to admit. The counsel for the prosecu- 
tion, the governor’s comes et adsessor, then, either knew nothing of 
the incident with the money-changers in the temple, or else the 
witnesses had successfully contested it. In contrast to John the 
Baptist, of whom Josephus or his source informs us that he 
summoned the Jews to freedom, we are told of Jesus merely that 
‘many of the multitude followed him and hearkened to his teach- 
ing, and many souls were in commotion, thinking that thereby the 
Jewish tribes might free themselves from Roman hands.’ 

It is not his preaching, then, which raises these high-flown ex- 
pectations ; the masses themselves entertain these hopes because 
they regard the wonder-worker as a Moses rvedivivus. There is no 
indication of any Christian alteration of the original text in this 
paragraph. On the contrary, the idea that the multitude expects | 
from Jesus the miracle of the liberation of Israel, while he pass- | 
ively lets himself be driven on by the excitement of the crowd— 
that idea runs right through the following section : 

‘ Now it was his custom to sojourn upon the Mount of Olives,? 
and there he bestowed his healings upon the people. And there 
assembled unto him of helpers * one hundred and fifty, and a multi- 
tude of the populace.* Now when they saw his power, that he 
accomplished whatsoever he would ® by a (magic) word, they called 


1 Cf. above, pp. 383 ff. 
* This was also the scene of the first appearance of the Egyptian pseudo- 
messiah ; cf. B.J., 11. § 262 ; A. Marmorstein, The Quest, xvii. 153. 
3 Cf. above, p. 384 n. 14. 4 Slav. ljudii=dyXou. 
® Cf. Egesippus, ii. c, 12, ed. Ussani, C.S.E.L., lxvi. p. 163: ‘ hic in potestate 
habebat, ut omnia, quae fieri vellet, imperaret,’ »- 
ὃ 


458 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


upon him to enter into the city, cut down the Roman! troops and 
Pilate, and to rule over us,? and he disdained us not.’ 3 


In the traditional text of the Haldsis there follows the sentence 
about the information laid before Pilate by the Jewish leaders 
when the news reached them, whereupon Pilate forthwith through 
his soldiers has crowds of people massacred and the wonder-worker 
arrested, the latter being then condemned as a mialeficus (1.6. a 
‘sorcerer ’), a rioter, a pretender to the crown, and led off to 
execution. 

According to this version of the story, then, Josephus has 
depicted Pilate’s massacre of the people and the execution of 
the wonder-worker as purely precautionary measures of intimida- 
tion, as an extraordinarily severe and barbarous punishment of a 
mere plan of the Zealots which had not yet got even so far as 
an attempt to revolt, and he has represented the condemnation 
of the wonder-worker as a political act not far removed from 
judicial murder. 

It is, of course, quite conceivable that Josephus, at least in his 
original Capture of Jerusalem, written for his countrymen, should 
have given a version of events representing the meditated revolt 
as nipped in the bud through the information laid before Pilate by 
the Jewish leaders. Josephus has in fact described several abortive 
attempts at rebellion. Thusin Avt., xvili. 5. 2, Herod Antipas has 
John arrested and slain before the feared insurrection broke out ; 
in xx. 5 we are told that Fadus gave Theudas no time to try his 
messianic exodus, but promptly had him cut down with many of 
his followers by a cavalry contingent. In xviii. 4.1 Pilate him- 
self massacres the Samaritans, whose false prophet had promised 
them to rediscover the ark of the covenant hidden in a hole on 
Mt. Gerizim, before they could ascend the mountain; and in 
xx. 8. 6, in the story of the Egyptian sorcerer who proposed to 
shatter the walls of Jerusalem by blowing the trumpets of Jericho, 
Felix instantly, on the mere announcement of a gathering on the 
Mount of Olives, has 400 people butchered. 

Were one completely to forgo the temptation to insert after 
the words ‘ to rule over us, and he disdained us not,’ a sentence 
corresponding to one of the Gospel accounts of the messianic entry 
into Jerusalem, the unaltered Slavonic statement would yet present 
us with a thoroughly plausible narrative and depict a procedure 
very similar to the story of the Egyptian false prophet. A rabbi 
is reported as working spectacular cures and preaching on the 
Mount of Olives: the mob gathers round him and plans a 
messianic rising in which Jesus is to figure as God’s Anointed, 

1 Cf B.J., i. § 172. 2 B.J., ii. § 262. 


3.1.6, as subjects: ‘he did not disdain the kingship over us that was offered 
to him.’ 


REBELLION PLANNED OR ATTEMPTED ? 459 


the lhiberator-king. When the hierarchy and through them Pilate 
hear of it, a military attack is made on the crowd on the Mount 
of Olives, just as was made by Felix a number of years later. 
But whereas, then, the pseudo-messiah disappeared in the crowd 
never to be seen again, Jesus is arrested, brought up for judg- 
ment, and, the plot having been thus frustrated, crucified for 
the mere weakness of having consented to that plot, just as 
Theudas! was taken alive and, without trial, beheaded or hewn 


in pieces. NX 
A story of this type has nothing intrinsically improbable about 


it, and the tendency to represent Pilate as a brutal butcher of men 
and an oppressor of the Jews is quite reconcilable with the aims 


of Josephus in this first edition of his work. He extenuated as | 
far as possible the guilt of the Jews in this matter, emphasizing | 


the frightful harshness of Pilate; and no doubt also, as we may 
safely suppose, Pilate himself in his report to Tiberius, used by 
Josephus, had suppressed the significant details recorded in the 
Gospels of the messianic entry, the proclamation of Jesus as king 
of the Jews, the events in the temple court, and so on, because it 


was naturally embarrassing to the governor to have to admit that. 


such things could occur without his having intervened in time to “ 


prevent them. 

The legal admissibility of the procedure against Jesus as de- 
scribed in the Slavonic version of Josephus cannot well be doubted. 
To the Roman jurist the mere appearance of illegal intention is 
sufficient ground for punishment: ‘dolus pro facto accipitur,’ 
‘consilium non factum puniendum est.’ 3 

Even if Berendts’ obsolete rendering, ‘but he heeded not,’ were 
right and Jesus had merely failed to pay due attention to the 
seditious counsels of the people and his associates, i.e. to make 
every effort to counteract them, there would still be under Roman 
law a case of ‘ culpa lata.’ Moreover, the procedure of a provincial 
governor’s court was essentially not a ‘ cognitio,’ but a ‘ coercio,’ 
left to the free discretion of the magistrate, the procedure extra 
ordinem of a court not strictly bound by the law. Where the 
‘disobedience’ to the executive was notorious, there was no need 
for any ‘ cognitio’ to establish it ; where such a ἡ cognitio ’ took 
place, it was not tied to any fixed forms. Instead of the regular 
‘accusatio’ made by a plaintiff, the mere information of a “delator ’ 
sufficed, and even that was not necessary if the governor through 
his own military intelligence department (the ‘ speculatores ’) 
possessed sufficient knowledge of the action or plot. 


A AWE, ἀπ Βα es Euseb:, fest. ἐδ οί 1 

2 Coll. leg. Mos., i. 7. 1; Cicero, Pro mil., 19 ; Seneca, De benef., v. 14. 

3. Dig. L., xiv. 2, 13. 2 (Ulpianus)=‘ nimia negligentia,’ 1,6. ‘ non intellegere, 
quod omnes intelligunt.’ 


460 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


The punishment for such ‘crimina extraordinaria’ was left to 
the governor’s discretion. The offence of rebellion, especially 
when appearing in the form of high treason,* fell in imperial times 
without exception under the category of ‘crimina extraordinaria’ ; 
the arming of the participants ranked as one of the particularly 
ageravating circumstances of the crime, as did also the formation 
of ‘coetus nocturni,’ such as the nightly assemblies of the followers 
of Jesus on the Mount of Olives, from the midst of which he was 
arrested. The author of sedition fell, moreover, under the 
penalties of Sylla’s ‘lex Cornelia de sicariis et veneficis’ and under 
the law against acts of violence. The mere gathering together of 
a crowd might be interpreted as an offence deserving of death. 
Punishment for revolt was to be inflicted forthwith, no appeal 
being allowed: even the capital punishment of a Roman citizen 


τ was not subject to imperial confirmation. The crime of sorcery, 


with which Jesus is charged in the Christian Acts of Pilate and 
which occupies the first place in the verdict reported by Josephus, 
ranked in Roman law as a specially serious offence punishable by 
death.® 

Pilate may therefore quite well have proceeded in the manner 
represented by the Old Russian version of the Haldsis, though the 
planned rebellion had not yet been translated into action. 

On the other hand, it is inconceivable that Josephus should 
originally have spoken of a mere plan of revolt, because the 
passage immediately following the section dealing with Jesus, and 
which relates to the disturbances caused by the building of the 
aqueduct, begins with the words, ‘ And after that they caused a 
second tumult.’ Berendts expressed just surprise at those words, 
because ‘ the revolt ’ in the case of Jesus ‘in our narrative never 
actually broke out.’ The expression ‘a second revolt’ cannot 
hark back to the story of the imperial standards, because, apart 
from the distance separating the two in the text, ‘ there was,’ in 
Berendts’ words,‘ ‘no actual revolt in consequence of the imperial 
standards being brought into the temple.’ Berendts therefore 
was doubtless right when he said that the archetype of the Slavonic 
version must have narrated the story of Jesus as the first revolt. 
A supplementary insertion in the restoration of the Josephus’ text 
is therefore unavoidable. 

+ Cicero, Ovat. part., xxx. 105: ‘ (maiestatem) minuit is, qui per vim multi- 
tudinis rem ad seditionem vocavit.’ The intention is sufficient ; cf. Ulpian, Dig., 
xlvili. 4. I. 1: ‘maiestatis crimine tenetur is cuius opera dolo malo consilium 
initum erit . . . quo coetus conventusve fiat, hominesve ad seditionem con- 
vocentur.’ 

* Dig., xiviii. 8. 3, §§ 4 and 6, 3 pr.; Paulus, 5, 22. 1=Dig., xlviii. 19. 38, ὃ 2: 
“ auctores seditionis et tumultus vel concitatores populi . . . in crucem tolluntur.’ 

% Apuleius, Apol., xxvi. 27; Paulus, v. 23. 17; Mommsen, Rém. Strafr., 


p. 639 544. ς 
* Texte und Untersuchungen, xiv. 1, p. 53. 


REBELLION PLANNED OR ATTEMPTED? 461 


A FRAGMENT OF THE ‘ HALOsIS’ IN JOHN OF ANTIOCH 


The conclusion reached in the previous section is fully con- 
firmed by another piece of evidence,! likewise noticed by Berendts 
but not recognized by him as one of the sentences missing in 
Josephus—indeed, possibly the only sentence deleted there. Prof. 
v. Dobschiitz it was who suggested to him ? that a fragment of 
John of Antioch 3 (a chronicler of uncertain date somewhere about 
A.D. 620), surviving in a unique MS.‘ of the ‘Excerpts’ of the 
Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus and preserved in the 
Escurial, contains the Christian ὅ fable of Pilate’s bribery. Con- 
sidering that this incident is elsewhere found only in the Rescriptum 
Tiberii ὃ and in the Vita beatae Mariae et Salvatoris rhythmica,® both 
of which show clear echoes of the Haldsis, it is certainly note- 
worthy that John of Antioch also mentions a revolt of the Jews in 
Jerusalem at the time of Jesus, and thus again comes to a certain 
extent into contact with the Slavonic Josephus. 

To quote Berendts : ἢ 


‘In the same fragment is found a further feature not to be ex- 
plained by the Gospels. We read, “And they were all gathered 
together in Jerusalem and stirred up insurrection against him, pour- 
ing forth blasphemies upon God and Caesar.’’ Here, too, we may 
detectiin the last resort an echo of our Slavonic statement, though 
seriously distorted. The revolt against Caesar is in the Slavonic 
Josephus indeed only contemplated ; the movement against Jesus is 
only a consequence of his refusal to participate in that opposition.’ ὃ 


A closer investigation of the fragment ὃ permits us to go con- 
siderably further. It runs thus: 


‘That under Tiberius the king, the Lord Jesus, being thirty-three 
years of age, was accused by the Jews of destroying their religious 
doctrine (δόξαν) and introducing another new one in its stead. [ 1 
And they were all gathered together in Jerusalem and stirred up insur- 
rection against him (κατ᾽ αὐτοῦ), pouring forth blasphemies upon God 
and Caesar. Thereupon taking courage (ἐντεῦθεν παρρησίαν λαβόντες) 
they laid hold on him by night and delivered him to Pontius Pilate, 
the governor, who, whether from cowardly terror of the multitude 
or because of a promise of money, having found no fault (in him), 
ordered him to be crucified ; and after he was crucified there was a 


1 C. Miller, Fragm. hist. Graec., iv. (Paris, 1851), p. 571, No. 81. 

2 Texte und Untersuchungen, xiv. 1, p. 52 Sq. 

3 Sometimes called John Malalas ‘ the Rhetorician.’ 

‘ Cf. the reproduction on p. 446 of vol. ii. of the German edition of this book, 

δ᾽ Cf. above, ἢ. 386. 6 Cf. above, p. 3862.3. 

7 Op. et loc. cit. 

§ Berendts’ erroneous interpretation is based on the Christian alteration of the 
words nas ne nebreze (above, p. 384 n. 18), the tendentious character of which he 
did not perceive. 


462 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


great earthquake and darkness over all the earth. And having 
tasted of death, he rose from the dead on the third day and was 
taken up into the heavens. There have been many witnesses who 
have seen and recorded (this).’ 


The text as it stands makes an impossible assertion. The 
words κατ᾽ αὐτοῦ in their present context can only mean ‘ they 
rose against Jesus.’ But for such a ‘revolt against Jesus’ the 
tradition has no place. For, granted that it could have had a 
practical purpose, it could never have afforded the Jews a pretext 
for delivering him to Pilate and laying an accusation against him. 
Furthermore, according to Mark xiv. 2 and Matt. xxvi. 5 the 
high priests, as one can well imagine, were anxious above all to 
avoid a tumult of the people. Why should a Christian chrono- 
grapher deliberately set aside the statements of the Gospels to the 
effect that the Jews arrested and brought the innovator Jesus 
before the Romans for sentence, acting in all this entirely within 
their legal rights, to substitute for this illuminating and thoroughly 
plausible account such an unnecessary and nonsensical invention 
about an ‘uproar of the people’ or ‘rising against Jesus’ pro- 
moted by the Jews themselves and said to have first given them 
the necessary courage (παῤῥησίαν) to arrest and deliver him to 
Pilate? I can make no sense of the passage unless something like 
this ‘rising ’ of the Jews was somehow reported as having hap- 
pened immediately before the crucifixion of Jesus. In that case 
the chronographer would simply have distorted something that 
lay before him—obviously, as Berendts assumed, the narrative of 
Josephus in the Greek text which was the basis of the Slavonic 
Halosis. 

The solution of the difficulty is simple enough. The sentence 
which puzzled Berendts, ‘and they were all gathered together in 
Jerusalem and stirred up insurrection against him,’ is found also 
in the ° Report ᾿ (Anaphora) of Pontius Pilate, where it is strangely 
split into two portions. Pilate there says: 


‘ Jerusalem, in which... all the multitude of the Jews, being 
gathered together, have delivered to me a certain man called Jesus, 
bringing many charges against him . . . and when many stirred up 
insurrection against me, I ordered him to be crucified.’ 


Obviously, this gives much better sense than the statement 
in John of Antioch. Here the accusations are laid ‘against him,’ 
1.8. against Jesus; the arrest follows as in the Gospels, but the 
insurrection is ‘ against me,’ i.e. against Pilate. The governor is 
thus assailed by a rising of the Jewish populace,! and thereby 
driven to take the harsh course of crucifying Jesus. 


* Cf. also the Acta Pilati, 9, and Tertullian, A pol., 21. 


REBELLION PLANNED OR ATTEMPTED ? 463 


The situation is very similar in the Latin ‘Letter of Pilate to 
Tiberius’ ; 
‘ unless I had feared that a sedition of the people, who were almost 


seething with indignation, would arise, perchance that man would be 
living with us still.’ 


It can be clearly seen that this ‘rising’ of the Jews against Pilate 
in these two Christian forgeries represents an attempt to identify 
the rising of the followers of Jesus against Pilate before the 
Passion, which is mentioned by Josephus, with the ‘ tumult’ of 
the enemies of Jesus mentioned in Matt. xxvii. 24: 


‘ when Pilate saw that he prevailed nothing, but rather that a tumult 

was arising.’ 
To sever all possible connexion between the στάσις which preceded 
the Passion and which it was found impossible to blot out entirely 
even in the Gospel tradition,! the Christian forgers of the various 
records of Pilate could do no better than transpose the rising to 
the time after the arrest of Jesus, and thus to convert it from a 
rising of his followers into a tumult of his enemies against him. 

Turning back, now, from the Greek Anaphora and the Latin 

‘ Letter,’ to the curious account of John of Antioch, we see without 
difficulty that the absurd traditional text of the chronographer can 
at once be brought into harmony with the tolerable though highly 
biased statement in the two other passages by a simple trans- 
position of the second and third clauses. We thus obtain the 
following text : 


. ‘Under the Emperor Tiberius the Lord Jesus, being thirty-three 
years of age, was accused by the Jews of destroying their belief and 
introducing a new one. 97 Thereupon they had the daring to lay hold 
on him by night and to deliver him to the governor, Pontius Pilate. | 
»And being all gathered together in Jerusalem, they stirred up an 
insurrection against him’ (i.e. Pilate !), “ giving vent to blasphemies 
against God and Caesar. ,And he’ (Pilate), ‘whether from cowardly 
terror of the multitude or because of the promise of a bribe, though 
he found no fault (in him), ordered him to be crucified,’ etc. 


If, on the other hand, one compares the actual text of John of 
Antioch with the account in the Haldszs, such a comparison at once 
shows that the source of John, or of his authority as discussed 
below, was a MS. of Josephus which already contained the Chris- 
tian interpolation of the bribery of Pilate, but which, at the point 
indicated by square brackets in the text quoted above on p, 4611. 30, 
had suffered a less extensive erasure than the MS, utilized by the 
Slavonic translator. 

If we insert in the gap indicated by the square brackets in the 


1 Mark xv. 7; Luke xxiii. 10. 


464 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


text of the chronographer the peculiar statements of the Slavonic 
Josephus on the revolt planned by the multitude following Jesus, 
the narrative, so absurd in its present form, suddenly becomes 
thoroughly intelligible and clear ; in particular, the words ‘against 
him ’ retain their natural reference to Pilate. We then get the 
following statement : 


‘Under the Emperor Tiberius, when thirty-three years of age, 
Jesus was accused by the Jews of destroying their doctrine and intro- 
ducing a new one, [and in particular of attacking the traditional con- 
secration of the Sabbath." For he did many miracles and effected 
many cures, even on the Sabbath}. [But when the people saw his 
power, that he could do whatsoever he would by a word, they 
required him to enter into the city, cut down the Romans and 
Pilate, and rule overthem.] And having all trooped into Jerusalem, 
they stirred up an insurrection against him’ (sc. Pilate), ‘ uttering 
blasphemies against God and Caesar. And hereupon (the high priests) 
plucked up courage to seize him by night and to deliver him to 
Pilate,’ etc. 


It should be noted that the words κατ᾽ αὐτοῦ only acquire their 
natural reference to Pilate if the most objectionable sentence, ‘ But 
he disdained us not,’ had already been deleted, and even then the 
reference is not entirely clear. By a further deletion of the equally 
dubious if not yet more objectionable clause about the plan of 
revolt, the absurd sentence in John of Antioch about an ‘ insurrec- 
tion against Jesus ’ can have arisen out of such a perfectly intel- 
ligible narrative; whilst the reading of the Anaphora and the 
‘ Letter of Pilate,’ as shown above, presupposes, in place of this 
omission, merely a transposition of that one striking sentence. 
Conversely, the sentence ἡ and they all gathered together in Jeru- 
salem and stirred up insurrection,’ etc., fits excellently into the 
gap after the words ‘ But he disdained us not’ in the text of the 
Halosis, a text which must be at the base of the chronographer in 
one form or another. 

The insertion into the text of the Haldsis of this one peculiar 
sentence perfectly harmonizes with what is logically required by 
the opening of § 175, ‘and thereupon they caused a second in- 
surrection.’ If this one sentence really comes from Josephus (and 
it is impossible to hit upon a more obvious source), that writer 
depicted the insurrection planned by the Zealots as actually 
realized, and the opening words of § 175 are then fully justified. 

Nor can it be denied that those lines are perfectly in keeping 
with the statement that the rebels ‘ uttered blasphemies 2 against 
God and Caesar,’ and with the Gospel story of the triumphal entry 
* For this sentence, cf. the Anaphora Pilati and the Acts of Pilate, i. p. 502, 


Thilo. 
2 The word is familiar to Josephus. See Ant., xx. §§ 108 and 110. 


REBELLION PLANNED OR ATTEMPTED? 465 


of Jesus into Jerusalem. For the cries, ‘Blessed be he that cometh 
in the name of the Lord,’ ! are in the eyes of Josephus and those of 
the Jewish high priests* blasphemies against God, and the ex- 
clamations, ‘ King of Israel,’ 3 an insult to the emperor.* That is 
all that need have been said by Pilate in his official report to 
Tiberius, and consequently no more need have stood in Josephus. 
There is, then, a very strong probability that through this unique 
MS. of the Escurial another easily discernible gap in the narrative 
of the Slavonic Josephus can be filled. 

John of Antioch probably did not draw directly on the Halésis, 
for his chronological statement concerning the age of Jesus agrees 
with the traditional Christian chronology but not with the state- 
ment of Josephus, who refers to Jesus as a man of ‘mature age.’ 5 

Berendts ὃ noted that the preceding fragment of John (No. 80) 
contains a statement on the death of Herod Antipas which goes 
beyond what is told in Josephus, to wit, that he was murdered in 
his own bedroom, his wife being a partner to the plot. It is 
attributed by the Bodleian MS. of Malalas’ to the ‘ very wise 
Clement.’ One may therefore conjecture that John drew his 
information from a lost chronological work of Clement of Alex- 
andria. Now, Clement®’ in turn made use of a chronographer who 
wrote in the tenth year of Antoninus Pius® (A.p. 149), who in his 
turn utilized Josephus for his investigation of the year-weeks in 
Dan, ix.” As the statement on the age of Jesus cannot have 
been missing in a Christian chronographer, the conjecture that our 
fragment comes from this older chronographer through the medium 
of Clement of Alexandria would not seem too bold. As both of the 
intermediate sources are older than the Christian revision of the 
writings of Josephus, which did not take place until after the time 
of Origen or perhaps after 312, one need not wonder that in part 
they preserved a more perfect text of the much mishandled History 
of the Jewish War. Asa matter of fact, Dr. Schlatter“ thinks that 
the chronographer Judas, a lineal descendant of the family of 
Jesus and the last bishop of the Jewish-Christian Church, mentioned 
by Eusebius * as writing ‘in the tenth year of Severus,’ is identical 
with Clement’s ‘ chronographer of the tenth year of Antoninus 
Pius, and that Eusebius had erroneously confused Alexander 
Severus with Antoninus Pius. If this fairly plausible hypothesis 

1 Mark xi. 9 and parallels. * Mark xiv. 64; Matt. xxvi. 65. 

8 John xii. 13. 

* A ‘crimen laesae majestatis’; cf. John xix. 12. 

δ Cf. above, p. 42515-16- 

δ: Op. cit., p. 53. * Page 239, 18th ed., Bonn. 

δὲ Stvomat., 1. 21. 147. 

® Cf. A. Schlatter, Zur Topographie und Geschichte Palaestinas, 1893, p. 403 544. 
Harnack, Texte und Untersuchungen, xii. 1 (1894), p. 12. 


10 Schlatter, op. et loc. cit. ‘ 
11 OD. et loc. cit. 13: Hest. ecch., vi. 7. 


2G 


466 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


be accepted, it would result in the curious fact that we owe it 
indirectly to a member of Jesus’ family that the sentence about 
the ordais caused by Jesus has been preserved, in spite of the 
efforts of later Christian censors. 

Thus, contrary to all expectation, it has actually been found 
possible to recover almost in its entirety from old and newly dis- 
closed sources the section of Josephus’ Haldsis derived directly 
from the official report of Pilate, the governor, to the Emperor 
Tiberius, relating to the personality of Jesus, his appearance on 
the Mount of Olives, the subsequent insurrection of the people in 
Jerusalem, his condemnation and crucifixion, 


THE COMPLETE STATEMENT OF JOSEPHUS ON PILATE’S 
GOVERNORSHIP 


On the basis of the results obtained above,! the complete 
narrative of the Halosis, ii. 9. 2-4 (§§ 169-77), would read as 
follows : 


‘And after that there was sent to Judaea by Tiberius a governor 
who secretly by night brought to Jerusalem Caesar’s image which 
is called semaia ; and he set it up in the city. And when morning 
came the Jews saw (it) and raised? a great uproar; and they were 
aghast at the sight, because their Law was trampled under foot, for 
it forbids the presence of any image in the city. And the people of 
the surrounding neighbourhood, when they heard what had happened, 
all rushed in passion to the spot, and hastened to Caesarea and im- 
plored Pilate to remove the semaia from Jerusalem and permit them 
to maintain the customs of their fathers. But when Pilate obdurately 
refused their request, they fell upon their faces and remained motion- 
less for five days and five nights. 

‘And after that Pilate took his seat on the throne in the great 
hippodrome and summoned the people, as though he would answer 
them, and he ordered the soldiers suddenly to surround the Jews, in 
full armour. And when these beheld the unexpected sight (of) three 
battalions surrounding them (on all sides), they were sore afraid. 
And Pilate spake threateningly to them, “I will cut you all down, 
if you will not receive Caesar’s image,’ and he ordered the soldiers 
to draw their swords. But the Jews all with one consent fell down 
and, extending their necks, exclaimed that they were ready as sheep 
for the slaughter, ‘‘ rather than that we should transgress the law.” 
And Pilate, marvelling at their Godfearing purity,* ordered the 
semaia to be removed from Jerusalem. 

‘At that time, too, there appeared a certain man <of magical4 
power>, if it is permissible to call him a man, <whom (certain) Greeks 


1 Cf. pp. 424-29. 2 Lit. ‘ fell into.’ 

3 ‘their fear of God and (their) purity’: Gr. τὸ τῆς δεισιδαιμονίας ἄκρατον, 
‘their unmitigated superstition.’ 

4 Lentulus : ‘ great.’ 


JOSEPHUS ACCOUNT OF PILATE’S ADMINISTRATION 467 


call a son of God, but his disciples the true prophet, (said to) raise the 
dead and heal all diseases». His nature and his form were human ; 
<a man of simple appearance, mature age, small stature, three cubits 
high, hunchbacked, with a long face, long nose, and meeting eyebrows, 
so that they who see him might be affrighted, with scanty hair (but) with 
a parting in the middle of his head, after the manner of the Nazirites, and 
with an undeveloped beard>. Only in semblance was he superhuman, 
(for) he gave some astonishing and spectacular exhibitions. But 
again, if I look at his commonplace physique I (for one) cannot call 
him anangel. And everything whatsoever he wrought through some 
invisible power, he wrought through some word and a command. 
Some said of him, ‘Our first lawgiver is risen again and displays 
many healings and (magic) arts,” others that “‘ he is sent from God.” 
Howbeit in many things he disobeyed the law and kept not the 
Sabbath according to (our) fathers’ custom. Yet he himself did 
nothing shameful or high-handed, but by (his) word he prepared 
everything. 

‘And many of the multitude followed after him and accepted his 
teaching, and many souls were excited, thinking that thereby the 
Jewish tribes might be freed from Roman hands. But it was his 
custom most (of the time) to abide over against the city on the Mount 
of Olives, and there too he bestowed his healings upon the people. 
And there assembled unto him of helpers 4 one hundred and fifty and 
a multitude of the mob.? 

“Now when they saw his power, how that he accomplished whatso- 
ever he would by a (magic) word, and when they had made known to 
him their will, that he should enter into the city, cut down the Roman 
troops and Pilate and rule over us, he disdained us not. <And having 
all flocked into Jerusalem, they raised an uproar (against Pilate),® 
uttering blasphenuies alike against God and against Caesar>. . . A 

‘And when thereafter knowledge of it came to the Jewish leaders, 
they assembled together with the high priest and spake: We are 
powerless and (too) weak to withstand the Romans. But seeing that 
“the bow is bent,” ® we will go and impart to Pilate what we have 
heard, and we shall be safe, lest he hear (of it) from others and we be 
robbed of our substance and ourselves slaughtered and the children 
(of Israel) dispersed. 


1 ὑπηρέται. 2 ὄχλος πολύς. 
3 The words in ( ) may or may not have stood in the original text ; cf. above, 
p. 46 


4 That something isstill missing here will be seen below (pp. 482 ff.), when 
Suidas’ quotation from Josephus about ‘Jesus officiating in the temple with the 
priests’ will be discussed. 

® Cf. Ps. xi. 2: ‘For lo, the wicked bend theiy bow, they make ready their 
arrow upon the string, that they may privily shoot at the upright in heart. If 
the foundation is destroyed, what can the righteous do? The Lord is in his holy 
temple,’ etc. ; further, Zech. ix. 9 sqq.: ‘ Rejoice greatly, O daughter of Zion; 
shout, O daughter of Jerusalem: behold, thy king cometh unto thee: he is just, 
and having salvation: lowly, and riding upon an ass, and upon a colt, the foal 
of an ass ... and his dominion shall be from sea even to sea, and from 
the river even to the ends of the earth. . . . When I have bent Judah for me, 
filled the bow with Ephraim, and raised up thy sons, O Zion, against thy sons, 
@ Greece... .! 


7 


468 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


‘And they went and imparted (the matter) to Pilate, and he sent 
and had many of the multitude slain. And he had that wonder- 
worker brought up, and after instituting an enquiry concerning him, 
he passed (this) sentence upon him: ‘“‘ He is a malefactor,! a rebel, a 
robber? thirsting for the crown.” And they took him and crucified 
him according to the custom of (their) fathers. 

‘And after that they causedasecond uproar. For Pilate had carried 
off the sacred treasure called Corbonas and spent it upon pipes for 
an aqueduct, wishing to bring in water from the Jordan from a dis- 
tance of two hundred furlongs. And when the people cried out against 
him, he sent and beat them with cudgels; and three thousand were 
trodden down in the (ensuing) flight, but the rest were quieted. .. .’ 

The unprejudiced reader of this chapter will in the first place 
be unable to doubt any longer its Jewish origin. No Christian 
knew the Old Testament Scriptures sufficiently well to understand 
that short allusion to the ‘ bent bow,’ much less to be able to 
invent it and put it into the mouth of the Jewish high priests. 
Neither Berendts nor any one of the Protestant or Catholic theo- 
logians who have hitherto dealt with the Slavonic Josephus has 
recognized or explained the quotation. 

The next thing of note, particularly remarkable in view of the 
complete ignorance of Roman law displayed, according to Theodor 
Mommseen, in the forged Acta Pilati, is the judicially correct narra- 
tive of the legal procedure against Jesus. The narrative is from 
the outset designed to establish the fact of the three capital crimes, 
to wit, magic (maleficium), rebellion (seditio and latrocinium), and 


high treason (crimen laesae matestatis), thereby justifying the result 


of the magistrate’s judicial examination (cogmitio). In that object, 
moreover, it is completely successful. The facts—admitted even 
by the interpolated Christian text—under Roman law permit of no 
other verdict save the one which is to be read in the critically 
restored text. An acquittal, such as is substituted by the Chris- 
tian interpolations, is quite inconceivable, and, from what we know 
of the Emperor Tiberius, would have cost Pilate his head. 

The complaints of the Jews about the violation of their Law, 
which the witnesses for the prosecution doubtless did not fail to 
bring up to the Romans, are only quite summarily mentioned, and 
do not figure at all in the sentence, once it has been established 
that no illegal or high-handed act could be proved against Jesus. 


~~ But the most striking and conclusive proof of the authenticity 


of the narrative is the fact that it contains absolutely nothing of 
those acts, under Roman law highly incriminating, which the 
Gospels themselves frankly admit, unaware that thereby they make 


_ impossible the Christian contention of the perfect innocence of 


= 1 Or ‘sorcerer,’ maleficus, 


* Thus the Rumanian version. Cf. above, p. 385 n. 4. 
3 carizadec, lit. ‘ king-thirsty.’ 


JOSEPHUS ACCOUNT OF PILATE’S ADMINISTRATION 469 


Jesus and the theory of the judicial murder of which he was the 
victim. According to Roman law,! one is guilty of a crimen laesae 
mavestatis, deserving of death, so soon as one openly and without 
commission assumes powers which are the sole privilege of the 
government and its officers. The overthrowing of the money- 
changers’ tables in the temple, the expulsion from the sacred 
precincts of the dealers in cattle for the sacrifices (quite apart from 
the actual assault with the scourge), the order to carry nothing 32 
through the temple—these are so many expressions of an official 
authority which Jesus assumed unto himself in his own right, and 
which, according to Roman law, constituted an invasion of the 
functions of the temple police and their segan (στρατηγός), and 
consequently a /aesto or minutio matestatis of the Roman sovereign, 
a crime deserving of death. The tumultuary proclamation of a 
‘ king of the Jews ’ without licence from Caesar is of course in itself 
high treason, and the words of Jesus requiring the Pharisees to 
leave his disciples alone are quite sufficient to establish what 
the Romans call dolus malus, if not culpa lata :* they show, if ad- 
mitted or proved, the full responsibility of the auctor seditionis, 
thus proclaimed king, for the action of the multitude. 

What later Jewish forger who knew the Gospels and wished 
to represent Jesus as a revolutionary would have let these choice 
statements of the Christians themselves escape him? How could 
he have neglected to repeat the accusations of the Jews ὁ to the 
effect that Jesus had impeded the payment of the tribute to Caesar 
and called himself an ‘ anointed king’? ὃ Why should he not 
have made use of the summons of Jesus to pull down Herod’s 
temple ὃ to represent him and his disciples as ‘ malefactors wishing 

to burn’ it ?7 
- It is easy to understand why Pilate in his report to the emperor 
avoided depicting events which he had been unable to prevent, in 
more vivid colours than were absolutely necessary in his own justi- 
fication on the measures taken, and in particular the three cruci- 
fixions. It is equally natural that Josephus knew nothing of these 
events, which happened before his time, beyond what he found 
recorded in the commentaviz of the imperial chancery. But it 
would be difficult to understand such a version of the story, at 
once plainly hostile and yet suppressing the gravest items of the 
accusation, as emanating from a Jewish interpolator who wrote 
after the four Gospels had come into existence and been widely 
disseminated. 

1 Cicero, De inv., ii. 13. 50: ‘ maiestatem minuere est aliquid de re publica, 
cum potestatem non haberes, administrare.’ Marcianus, Dig., xlviii. 4, 4: ‘ qui 
privatus pro potestate magistratuve quid sciens dolo malo gesserit.’ 

2 Or rather, ‘no armour,’ Mark. xi. 16; cf. below, p. 488 ἢ. 1. 


8 See above, p. 4593. 4 Luke xxiii. 2. ὃ χριστὸς βασιλεύς, tbid, 
6 John ii. 19; cf. below, p. 494. * Gospel of Peter 20. 


470 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


Equally impossible is it to attribute the whole account, without 
eliminating Christian interpolations, to a Christian apologist of 
the stamp of the forger of the Acta Pilati: and similar documents. 
For such a person would necessarily have made some attempt to 
explain away or put another interpretation upon facts rashly 
admitted in the Gospels, instead of suppressing them and mention- 
ing in their place, wholly unnecessarily, seriously incriminating 
matters such as the hopes associated with the appearance of Jesus 
for a liberation from the Roman yoke, and the Zealots’ subsequent 
plans of revolt against Pilate, with a massacre of the Roman 
garrison, 

How, moreover, is one to explain in that case the remarkable 
fact that a Christian or a Jew of the post-apostolic age knows 
nothing whatever of the Twelve being appointed by Jesus the 
future judges of the twelve tribes of Israel or of the appointment 
of the Seventy-two as a Sanhedrin for the future empire,’ but 
instead thrusts into the foreground the hundred and fifty ministers 
(ὑπηρέται), unheard of elsewhere, who cannot be understood but 
as the new town council of elders for Jerusalem 5 after its occupa- 
tion? Ifitis Josephus (or Pilate) who writes thus, an explanation 
is at hand, viz. that their authorities—in other words, Judas, the 
paid agent of the hierarchy, or the Roman sfeculatoves—represented 
the situation thus and no otherwise: the traitor may have had 
good reasons for sparing the twelve, to whose number he himself 
belonged. In fact, it has always caused surprise that none of the 
disciples of the innermost circle shared the fate of Jesus or was 
even reported to the Romans, Judas may have screened the 
seventy-two on similar grounds, whilst just these newly appointed 
hundred and fifty, strangers to the more intimate associates, may 
have seemed to him deserving of no consideration. It is equally 
conceivable that the twelve and the seventy-two are included in 
the hundred and fifty, i.e. that in the last moment before the entry 
the constitution contemplated for the “kingdom to come’ was 
simplified so as to admit of only one great council of elders— 
a xo.vov—in Jerusalem. It would be idle to speculate on the true 
explanation of this striking figure, It is enough to know that it 


1 See above, p. 348o.4.5- 

2 Nehemiah v. 17 declares that he fed the seganim, the elders or leaders of 
the town (zikné ha‘iv), one hundred and fifty men, at his table. This passage, 
overlooked even by a scholar like Schiirer (il. I, Ὁ. 150, Engl. trsl.), clearly shows 
that the post-exilic town council of Jerusalem (which may in fact be identical 
with the ‘commons,’ τὸ κοινόν of Jerusalem, repeatedly mentioned by Josephus) 
was composed of one hundred and fifty town councillors. These ‘ aldermen,’ 
like the Attic ‘ prytanes,’ had the right to be fed at the expense of the town, 
and Nehemiah says in so many words that he provided for them, so as not to 
lay a burden upon the taxpayers. The word seganim is not translated in the 
Greek Bible ; as a consequence, no one not conversant with the Hebrew text 
could know who the hundred and fifty men fed by Nehemiah were, and what the 
whole sentence meant, 


THE TRIUMPHAL ENTRY INTO JERUSALEM 471 


can be explained very easily from the historical facts, but can in no 
way be derived from any parallel statements in any Christian or 
Jewish sources known to us to-day. 

All things considered, then, I regard it as undeniable that this 
account of the appearance and downfall of Jesus is in every respect 
independent alike of the Gospels and of those curiously distorted 
yet not wholly worthless Jewish traditions to be found in the 
Talmud and later Haggadic literature down to. the notorious 
Toldoth J eshu. 

It is henceforth possible, therefore, by the comparison of two 
versions of the story, wholly opposed to each other in their origin 
and aim, to form a comparatively unbiased picture of the real 
events which preceded the crucifixion of Jesus. 


THE TRIUMPHAL ENTRY 


‘When he was come into Jerusalem, all the city was stirred.’ 
MATT. xxl. IO. 

Scholars who deny or try to restrict by some special pleading 
the messianic character of the preaching of Jesus have always 
taken the strongest objection to the accounts of his triumphal entry 
into Jerusalem, Wellhausen,! with the approval of Dalman " and 
Cheyne, conjectured that the messianic colouring of the narrative 
is a later addition, as is in fact suggested by the Fourth Gospel: 4 
‘these things’ (i.e. the entry on the ass’s colt, etc.) “ understood 
not his disciples at the first : but when Jesus was glorified, then 
remembered they that these things were written of him, and that 
they had done these things unto him.’ Doubtless, advocates of 
the widespread view that the Gospel narratives of the dies pal- 
marum are an exaggerated picture of commonplace events,° which 
in the bustle of pilgrims crowding to the feast might have remained 
practically unnoticed, might now appeal with a show of reason to 
Josephus. Were one to abandon as unnecessary the proposed 
insertion of the Escurial fragment into the Slavonic text, the 
Russian Halosis might in fact be cited as evidence to show that 
neither the Romans nor the Jewish leaders had any knowledge 
whatever of a public proclamation and of Jesus as the ᾿ king of 
peace’ riding upon the ass, nor of the tumult in the temple 
directly connected therewith. The so-called ᾿ cleansing of the 

1 [sy.-Jiid. Gesch., p. 381. 

2 Worte Jesu, i. 182: cf. Gramm., 198 ; H. Windisch, Der mess. Krieg, Tibingen, 
1909, p. 49. > 

8 Encycl. Bibl., 2118. 4 John xii. 18, : 

6 The O.T. inspiration for the scene, or for part ofit, was found in 2 Kings ix. 13. 
For, as Dr. Klausner (Jesus of Nazareth, London, 1925, p. 310) correctly observed, 
in that crucial passage the captains of the host ‘took every man his garment, and 
put it under him‘ (Jehu) ’ on the top of the stairs, and blew with trumpets, saying, 
Jehu is king.’ 


472 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


temple“ might accordingly have been confined to a passionate 
rhetorical outburst of Jesus, passing unnoticed in the noise of the 
crowd, a mere squabble of words leading to a scuffle with some of 
the nearest money-changers and cattle-dealers. In such an en- 
vironment, accustomed as it was to boisterous commotion, a few 
light tables might be upset through the vehemence of a quarrel 
without any need for the temple authorities to take the matter 
very seriously. 

Those who have set their heart upon representing the story of 
Jesus as though the Founder of the universal church never did any- 
thing but indulge in rhetoric,! will never be dissuaded from viewing 
these events through the inverted telescope of their non-political 
point of view and in this easy way seeing them as a pretty and 
idyllic miniature. 

For the unprejudiced reader of the sources, however, there 
remains the fact that in the Halésis the collision of the Jews with 
Pilate over the building of the aqueduct constitutes the ‘ second 
tumult,’ and that Josephus must therefore have regarded the 
events leading up to the crucifixion of Jesus as the first uproar, and 
must accordingly have described them in words similar to the 
Escurial fragment of John of Antioch. With the words of the 
excerpt of Constantine Porphyrogenetus, certainly derived from 
Josephus, ‘ and they all gathered together in Jerusalem and raised 
an uproar’ (στάσιν ἐκίνουν), the original Christian tradition is in 
striking agreement, notwithstanding all subsequent attempts to 
tone down the originally quite vivid colours. 

As has repeatedly been observed before, Mark2 has not 
hesitated to describe what took place at the entry into Jerusalem 
and the temple as ‘the insurrection’ (ἡ στάσις). He says of 
Jesus * surnamed Bar Abba, or Bar Rabba, ‘And there was one 
called Barabbas, (lying) bound with them that had made in- 
surrection, men who in ¢he insurrection (ἐν τῇ στάσει) had com- 
mitted manslaughter.’ In Luke4 this sentence is completely 
altered : “the insurrection,’ by which a writer can only allude to 
a familiar event mentioned shortly before (chapter xi.), here 
becomes ‘a certain riot that happened in the city.’ 

It may be presumed to be notorious that no commentator could 
ever explain what was meant by ‘the insurrection’ and ‘ the 
rebels’ ;5 and simply because no one could or would admit that 
the proclamation of the Davidic kingdom δ in the existing aristo- 
cratic or hierocratic client-republic—an attempt equivalent to 


1 This in spite of Thess. i. 5: ‘ Our gospel came not unto you in word only, 
but also in power.’ τους 7. 

* ‘Jesus Barabbas’ was the reading found by Origen in some MSS. of Mait. 
XXXVI, 16 sq. 
4 xxiii. 19: “διὰ στάσιν τινὰ γενομένην ἐν τῇ πόλει." 
° τῶν στασιαστῶν, Mark xv. 7. δ᾽ Mark xi. 10. 


THE LIBERATION OF BARABBAS 473 


proclaiming the Duc de Guise King of France on the Place de la 
Concorde—could not in the eyes of an author writing in Rome 
under Vespasian or Titus amount to anything less than a στάσις, 
a seditio. Likely enough, Mavk—whether the hypothetical proto- 
Mark or the extant Gospel, in which one may without difficulty 
postulate considerable deletions of objectionable passages at the 
hands of ecclesiastical revisers—originally used the word στάσις 
also at the first mention of these events. If we set the two 
passages side by side— 


Mark xi. II. Matt. xxi, το. 
And he entered And when he was come 
into Jerusalem. into Jerusalem, 


5 all the city was stirred,* 
saying, Who is this ?— 


and further note the complete and highly significant blank at this 
point in the corresponding narratives of Luke and John, we cannot 
but recognize that in Mark a clause must have been struck out 
answering to the strong phrase ἐσείσθη πᾶσα ἡ πόλις in M atthew 
at the point indicated by the empty square, for a city is not 
‘shaken ’ by the people’s question, ‘ Who is this?’ and the reply, 
‘Jesus the prophet.’ That creates no ‘shock’ (cevcpos), but at 
the most a‘ murmur’ (γογγυσμός). Here again the lack of logical 
coherence is clearly traceable to an old erasure, dating from the 
time when careful provision had to be made for the unmolested 
diffusion of the Gospels throughout the Roman empire. 


THE LIBERATION OF BARABBAS 


The alteration of ‘the insurrection’ into ‘a certain insurrection’ 
is by no means the only change that has been made in Mark’s 
statement about Jesus Barabbas. Mark’s phrase, ‘bound with 
the rebels who had committed manslaughter in the insurrection,’ 
in no way implies that Barabbas himself had blood on his hands. 
He had been arrested along with those who were seized as mur- 
derers: Mark never says that he really belonged to their number 
or had himself been guilty of murder. Only the reading ‘ with his 
fellow-rebels,’ adopted by Lucian of Antioch,? brings Barabbas 
into any connexion with the insurrectionary murderers: in Luke, 
Barabbas alone is imprisoned for insurrection and murder, no 
companions being mentioned, whilst Join merely states that 
‘Barabbas was a bandit’ (or ‘ rebel,’ λῃστής). Luke, in Acts 111. 
14, was the first to make him a downright ‘murderer.’ But the 
support which he received from the high priests and their mass of 


1 ἐς ἐσείσθη πᾶσα ἡ πόλις." 


2 Cf, the Syrian version of Mark xv. 7, which adds, ‘he was a man seditious 
and a murderer,’ obviously under the influence of Acts ili. 14. 


474 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


followers, on the contrary, strongly suggests that he was a well- 
known partisan of the hierarchy, the son of an Abba (Father) or ~ 
Rabba (Master), both words designating a venerable doctor of the 
law, connected, not with the rebels, but with their opponents} who 
in the mélée had been captured along with them and was now 
destined to share their punishment. If it was a case of mistake 
on the part of the Roman guard, such as would often occur in every 
tumult of this kind, then Pilate, yielding to the voice of the people, 
might well have liberated him ‘ for the feast,’ i.e. with such dis- 
patch that the innocent man might still take part in the Passover 
celebration. 


,.8...»....Ὁ 


No one, in fact, has hitherto succeeded 
in discovering an illustration in Jewish or pagan writings 5 of the 
alleged Jewish custom of obtaining pardon for a prisoner at the 
Passover (the so-called gratia paschalis), 

A synopsis of the parallel passages in the Gospels shows clearly 
how the idea of such a customary right gradually arose : 


Mark xv. 6-8. 


Now at the feast * he 
released (ἀπέλυε) un- 
to them one prisoner 
whom they asked of 
him.§ And there was 
one (Jesus) Barab- 
bas, bound along 
with the rebels who 
(plur.) had  com- 
mitted manslaughter 
in the insurrection. 
And the multitude 
went up ὁ and began 
to ask, as was the 
custom,’ that he 
release Barabbas un- 
to them. 


Matt. xxviii. 15 sq. 


Now at the feast the 
governor was wont 
(εἰώθει) to release 
unto the multitude 
one prisoner, whom 
they would. And 
they had then a not- 
able prisoner called 
Barabbas. 


Like xxiii, 17.3 
Now he must needs 


release unto them 
at feast-time one 
prisoner. 


John xviii. 39. 


But ye have a custom 
that I should release 
unto you one at the 
Passover, 


1 Cf. Modestinus, Dig., xlviii. 19. 31, and the words of Diocletian, Cod., ix. 47. 


12: ‘vanae voces populi non sunt audiendae . 
absolvi desideraverint.’ 


ες quando obnoxium crimine 
There is no evidence whatsoever to the effect that 


Roman provincial governors ever had the right of pardon such as is vested, for 
example, in the governor of an American State. 
* The parallel adduced by K. Kastner, Jesus vor Pilatus, Diss., Breslau, 1912, 


p. 29, and Deissmann, Licht vom Osten, Tiibingen, 1923, p. 229 sq., is not exact, 
since there it is a question of a pardon in the course of the cognitio, not after the 
passing of the sentence. 3. This verset is absent in the best MSS. 

4 κατὰ δὲ τὴν ἑορτήν. Cf. v. Soden, ed. maj., Géttingen, 1913, ii. 225, where 
this variant—I* 6,,—is unjustly relegated to the third appendix of entirely 
negligible variants. 

ὃ ὃν παρητοῦντο, var. lect. ὃνπερ ἠτοῦντο : ‘ whomsoever they asked for.’ 

§ ἀναβάς, var. lect. ἀναβοήσας : ‘ began to clamour.’ 


7 καθὼς ἔθος ἢν. 


Pamphilos. 


The rest have: 


So Tatian and a number of MSS. of the recension of 


. . » to ask him (to do) as he was wont to do’ 


(καθὼς ἐποίει αὐτοῖς), or‘ was always wont to do’ (καθὼς dei ἐποίει αὐτοῖς) ‘unto them,’ 


THE LIBERATION OF BARABBAS 475 


The text of Mark quoted above, as recovered from several TY 
witnesses of the Caesarean recension, describes an intelligible and 
credible procedure, on “ἃ single occasion, but in no way pre- 
supposing a custom of a Passover pardon. Pilate’s reply, in the 
form of a question, ‘ Will ye that I release unto you the king of the 
Jews ?’, becomes intelligible only if we adopt the reading pre- 
served by Origen giving the prisoner's name as ‘Jesus Barabbas.’ 
Pilate had heard the cries for Jesus bar Abba (or Rabba) (Jesus 
the Son of the Father or the Master), and indignantly supposed that 
he was being asked to liberate the prisoner Jesus, king of the Jews. 
Not till he discovered that the petitions proceeded from the enemies 
of the Jewish king, anxious to see the latter crucified as soon as 
possible, did he, in deference to the loyalist party led by the high 
priests in their urgent acclamatio, release the other Jesus, the Bar 
Abba of whom he previously knew nothing, against whom there- 
fore there was no charge of any account, and who had merely been 
arrested along with the rebels and murderers, Such an attitude 
is quite conceivable, for after the : recent crushing of the Zealots’ 
rising he had every reason not to displease the opposite party, 
which had hitherto assisted him,’ It is inconceivable that the 
Roman governor could have liberated a rebel (λῃστής) at the 
instance of the mob ; but it is perfectly natural that he should be 
prepared to gratify the masses of pro-Roman supporters of the 
hierarchy, led by the high priests, by releasing to them at the feast 
one of their own number, the son of a learned rabbi, who had erron-~ 
eously been arrested by his soldiers in the turmoil of the fray.*” 

In this account of Mark, approximating close to the facts, the 
first τὴν in the phrase τὴν ἑορτήν (‘ the feast ’) very early dropped 
out, probably accidentally through "ἡ homoioteleuton,’ with the 
result that he appeared to speak of something which happened * at 
every feast.’ The conative imperfect (ἀπελύει), variously used in 
the New Testament,’ really meant ‘he decided,’ or ‘proceeded to 
liberate,’ but was interpreted, as in Matthew, as indicating a 
custom. In the interpolated text of Luke this has become a 
binding duty (ἀνάγκη). The alteration of ὃν παρῃτοῦντο, Whom 
they asked for,’ into ὅνπερ ἠτοῦντο, and finally into ὃν ἂν nTodvTO, 

‘ whomsoever they asked for,’ also shows the inception of the idea 
of the Passover pardons as a custom. 

A correct appreciation of the MS. tradition therefore clearly 


— 


1 John xviii. 3; Mark xiv. 43; Mail. XXV1. 47. By 3s 
2 The multitude (ὄχλος) here mentioned was a crowd of adherents of the } 
hierarchy, hastily armed with clubs and knives to encircle the Mount of Olives 
and to prevent an escape of the wonder-worker such as was managed later on 
by the Egyptian messiah. The Roman cohort was far too small to surround _- 
the mount effectively. = 
3 Cf. Radermacher, Neutest. Gramm., Tiibingen, 1924, p. 154; Debrunner- 
Blass, Neutest. Gramm., p. 188, § 320. 


- ss 


476 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


shows how by a purely literary process the legend of the Passover 
pardon of a criminal has been extracted from the Greek text of 
Mark’s Gospel. The purpose of the evangelists, long since pointed 
out, in emphasizing the responsibility of the Jews for the death of 
Jesus by this doubtless true story of a popular demonstration 
against him and in favour of a man of the same name, son of a 
rabbi and accidentally arrested together with him, thus leads 
eventually to the conversion of this protégé of the high priests into 
a rebel robber and murderer, who ‘for a certain insurrection in the 
city lay in prison.’ Therewith, of course, all sense of what Mark 
meant by ‘the insurrection’ and ‘the rebels’ was obliterated, and 
the way opened which finally led to the pious legend of a popular 
rising of the enemies of Jesus against him and Pilate. 


THE MESSIANIC ACCLAMATION ‘ OSANNA’ 


The most instructive and noteworthy passage in the other- 
wise insignificant and absurd so-called Acta Pilati of the fourth 
century is the curious, inconclusive dispute between the Jewish 
plaintiffs and the lackey or ‘runner’ (cursor) of Pilate, concerning 
the true meaning of the people’s cry, ‘ Hosanna,’ an altercation 
which reads almost like a learned controversy of Biblical scholars, 
but no doubt has a very important historical background. 


‘The cursor says to Pilate: “My Lord Governor, when thou 
sentest me to Jerusalem to Alexander,? I saw Jesus riding upon an 
ass, and the children of the Hebrews held branches in their hands 
and cried out, and others spread their garments beneath him,® saying, 
‘ Save now (σῶσον δή), thou that art blessed in the highest, that comest 
in the name of the Lord.’” And the Jews say to the runner, “ The 
children of the Hebrews cried in Hebrew, How then hast thou it in 
Greek?” The runner answers them, “I did ask one of the Jews and 
said, What is it that they cry out in Hebrew? and he interpreted it to 
me.” Pilate said unto them: “And how cried they in Hebrew? ”’ 
The Jews say unto him, “Hosanna membrome barachama Adonai.” 
Pilate saith unto them: “ And the Hosanna and the rest, how is it 
interpreted ?’’ The Jews say unto him: “Save now, thou that art 
blessed in the highest, blessed is he that cometh in the name of the 
Lord.”” Then Pilate said unto them: “If you yourselves bear witness 
to the words which were said of the children, wherein hath the runner 
erred ? ” And they held their peace.’ 


So far as I know, this highly peculiar statement has never been 
quoted by expositors of the notoriously difficult passage about the 


1M. R. James, Apocryph. N.T., p. 97. 

* This name appears, along with others, as that of a Jewish high priest. The 
writer is probably thinking of the man mentioned in Acts iv. 6 as being the son 
or grandson of Herod who bore this name. 

* See above, p. 471 n. 5. 


THE MESSIANIC ACCLAMATION ‘OSANNA’ 477 


Osanna cries in the Gospels,! in contradistinction to the far less 
valuable notice in Jerome,” who asserts that in the Gosfel to the 
Hebrews for Hosanna in excelsis he read Osanna barrama. 

One sees at a glance that the Hebrew text transcribed in Greek 
is corrupt, but there is no difficulty in restoring it. Bapayayyua 
(for “ Blessed be he that cometh ’) must naturally be corrected to 
Bapovy a88a; and before  δωναΐ the word βασεμ (= in the name 
of ἢ has dropped out. 

The words *Sapovy ἀββᾶ βασεμ ἀδωναι, εὐλογημένος ὁ ἐρχόμενος 
ἐν ὀνόματι Κυρίου, are simply a few lines from Ps. cxviii. 26, in the 
Hebrew-Greek columns of Origen’s Hexapla. If they are immedi- 
ately preceded by ὥσαννα, the writer must of course have intended 
to represent the hoshi‘ah na (-εσῶσον δή, LX X.) whichoccurs in the 
preceding verset of the Psalm. The words ἐν ὑψίστοις (‘in the 
highest’), or, as read in the Acta Pilati, ὁ ἐν ὑψίστοις, are, however, 
notoriously derived, not from this Psalm, but from Ps. cxlviii. 1, 
‘ Praise him in the heights,’ to which we have a clear allusion in 
Luke xix. 37, ‘the whole multitude .. . began to. . . praise 
God.’ But this verset in Greek transliteration runs ἁλληλουια 
aXANXOU 70 ἀδωναι μὴν ἁσσαμαιμ ἁλληλουου βαμρομημ. Ofcourse, 
the μεμβρομη(μ) 3 of the Acta Pilati is nothing but the last of these 
transliterated words (=év ὑψίστοις) with one consonant inserted 
for the sake of euphony, and, as before, the usual confusion of 
μ and £.* 

The author’s object in this interrogation of Pilate’s Greek 
runner is perfectly clear. In the first place, the cries with which 
the multitudes hailed Jesus are to be explained as pious words of 
prayer, and in particular from the Hallel-Ps. xcviii., which was 
regularly sung at the slaughtering of the Paschal lambs on the eve 
of the feast. The insertion of the article before ἐν ὑψίστοις 15 
intended to make it quite clear that the words ‘Save now, thou 
(who art enthroned) in the heights’ are to be understood as an 
appeal to God. Furthermore, the cries, according to the runner’s 
evidence, are those of children (παῖδες), not of responsible adults. 
This version of the story is of course based on Matt. xxi. 15 sq., 
where Jesus, on reaching the temple, is greeted by the παῖδες 
(which might also mean ‘servants,’ ‘ slaves’) ὅ with the cry of 
Hosanna, and replies to the indignant protest of the high priests 
and scribes by a reference to Ps. viii. 2, ‘Did ye never read, Out of 
the mouth of babes and sucklings thou hast perfected praise ? ’ ; 
whereby the ambiguous παῖδες is clearly restricted to the one 


1 Mark xi. 9 sq.; Mait. xxi. 9 sq.; Luke xix. 38. 
* Epist., 20, ad Damas. 

3 up naturally becomes μβρ. Cf. Zimri=Zayspy 

4 Cf. Βέρωδαχ for Μέροδαχ = Marduk. 

ὃ Cf. below, p. 4814. 


478 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


meaning, ‘children,’ and the demonstration converted into 
innocent ‘ child’s-play.’ In the Christian Acta Pilati the cries, 
which in Mark xi. 9 are vaguely stated to have been raised by 
those who went before and those who followed, and in Like xix. 37 
come from ‘ the whole multitude of the disciples,’ appear as the 
cries of children, as though the crowd of disciples consisted of 
school-children. 

This gallant runner entirely suppresses the words of political 
significance which stand out prominently in Mark, Luke, and John, 
‘ Blessed be the kingship of David,’ ‘ Blessed be he that cometh, 
the king,’ ‘ Blessed be the king of Israel’—words which, moreover, 

have already disappeared in Matthew. 

Here we have, then, an obvious attempt to brazenly deny that 

_ Jesus was really acclaimed king by the people, and in this the 

_Jews1 were at one with the Christians in disclaiming before the 

Romans all responsibility for the treasonable cry. This purpose 
also readily explains the unexpected philological interest of Pilate 
in the original Hebrew text, and its true meaning. 

When looking at the Syriac versions of the Gospels, whether 
the Peshitto or the Curetonian and Sinaitic texts, one finds 
that Hosanna is without exception rendered ΝΟ, 1.6. NIVVIN, 
‘osha'na. Marx* long ago recognized that in the current Aramaic 
vernacular this simply means ‘ Free us.’? On the other hand, 
Keim * saw that the word ’osha‘na has nothing whatever to do 
with the hosht‘ana of Ps. cxviii. 25, and cannot be constructed 
with the dative, ‘ to the son of David,’ which, however, goes quite 
well with the hoshi‘ana of Ps. cxviii. 25. Lastly, Cheyne ὅ em- 
phasized Nestle’s acute observation that the Aramaic Targum of 
Ps. viii. 3, the very verset which, according to Matt. xxi. 16, is 
quoted by Jesus in justification of the cry of Hosanna, has in place 
of the Hebrew 1, ‘strength’ or rather ‘ courage,’ of which the 
Greek equivalent is αἶνον, ‘praise,’ the word ’ushna; this in 
the transliterated form *otceva closely resembles ὠσάννα, and in 
combination with τῷ υἱῷ Δαυείδ means ‘strength to the son of 
David!’ 

It is therefore through no accident or mere ignorance that the 
most fantastic translations® of ὠσάννα are to be found in the 
Fathers, and not merely through unintentional corruption that 

1 John xix. 15, 21. 

* Ap. Hilgenfeld, Nov. Test. extra canonic., iv. 25. 

* σῶσον ἡμᾶς, thus actually in the Rumanian Acts of Pilate. 

4 Jesus von Nazareth, iii. 91. 

ὅ Encycl. Bibl., col. 2118. 

* Clement of Alexandria translates ὠσάννα with φῶς καὶ δόξα καὶ alvos. Suidas, 
or rather his patristic source, explains the word with εἰρήνη καὶ δόξα (of course 
from Like xix. 38), adding that it was erroneous to translate σῶσον δή. According 


to St. Augustine (De Doctr. Christ., ii. 11, and Tract. in Joh., li. 2), Osanna is a mere 
interjection expressing glee, etc. etc. 


THE MESSIANIC ACCLAMATION ‘OSANNA’ 479 


the traditional text of Mark xi. 10, Matt. xxi. 9, Luke xix. 38, and 
the Didaché x. 6, is in such senseless disorder. 

‘Hosanna in the highest’ in Mark and Matthew is quite im- 
possible, because ‘ Free us in the heights’ has as little meaning as 
‘Save now in the heights.’ Here on earth men have always 
yearned for freedom and help, not in heaven above. The author 
of the Acts of Pilate accordingly evades the difficulty by inserting 
the definite article, ὡσάννα ὁ ἐν τοῖς ὑψίστοις, “Save now (or 
“free us’) (thou who art) in the heights.’ 

In Matt. xxi. 9, ὡσάννα τῷ υἱῷ Δαυείδ, ‘ Free us for the son of 
David,’ is equally impossible ; still more absurd is the phrase in 
the Didaché, ‘ Hosanna to the God of David.’ In Luke xix. 38, 
objection has always been taken to the article before βασιλεύς in 
‘Blessed be he that cometh, the king, in the name of the Lord,’ 
whilst the verset ends with the unmeaning ‘peace in heaven and 
glory in the highest,’ as though ‘ peace in heaven’ could be of 
importance to any one, or as though war had hitherto prevailed 
among the heavenly hosts. The usual comparison with the beauti- 
ful hymn in Luke ii. 14, ‘Glory to God in the highest, and on earth 
peace among men of good will,’ only brings out more glaringly the 
absurdity of the traditional text in the last clause of xix. 38. 

Yet the restoration of the original text presents no insuperable 
difficulties. In Mark xi. το, ‘in the highest’ is nothing but an old 
marginal gloss,! originally intended to explain or supplement the 
word ‘blessed’: ‘ Blessed (in the heavenly heights) be he that 
cometh in the name of the Lord: blessed (in the heights) the 
kingdom of David.’ The gloss is intended to exonerate the multi- 
tude of the followers of Jesus from the suspicion of having ac- 
claimed the incoming Messiah and the Davidic kingdom: the 
pious pilgrims merely meant to say, ‘ Blessed be the Messiah and 
his kingdom in the heights above.’ ‘In the highest’ must there- 
fore simply be omitted, both here and in Matthew. In Matt. 
xxi. 9 the words ‘to the son of David’ must be transposed so as 
to read, ‘the companions cried, saying to the son of David, Osanna’ 
(1.6. ‘Free us’). A striking parallel, one in which the imsurrec- 
tionary meaning of the cry is perfectly clear, can be found in the 
Hebrew Josippon. When King Agrippa 1. enters Jerusalem the 
crowd salutes him with the outcry, ‘hosht‘anu, serva nos, rex: non 
amplius subiecti erimus Romanis.’ 

The displacement of words above analysed arose through a 
corrector having attached to ὠσάννα (‘osha‘na) the meaning of 
ὡσιέννα, hoshi‘ana, in Ps. cxviii. 25, and wished to read the clause 
as a prayer to God, ‘ Help the son of David!’ The senseless 
‘ Hosanna to the God of David,’ followed by ‘ Maranatha,’ in the 
Didaché, which has survived in one MS. only, naturally once ran 

1 It is omitted in various MSS. of the Caesarean text. 


480 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


ὠσάννα (viel) Δαυείδ, μαρᾶνα θᾶ, ‘ Free us, son of David: our 
Lord, come!’: τῷ θεῷ is a marginal gloss purporting to show that 
Osanna (' Free us ’) is a prayer addressed directly to God himself. 
In Luke xix. 38, ‘Hosanna’ disappears entirely, and, to make the 
correction more effective, the words ‘ began . . . to praise God’ 
are inserted in the preceding verset. The words of the acclama- 
tion itself, through the repeated editing of the text, are in utter 
confusion. Originally they must have run, ‘ Blessed (be) the 
king that cometh in peace and glory’ (ἐν εἰρήνη(ι) καὶ δόξα(ι)). 
Against the word ᾿ blessed,’ with the same object as in Mark, there 
was written in the margin ‘in heaven,’ ‘in the heights’ (is he 
blessed). A further improvement was designed to alter the 
political acclamation, ‘Blessed (be) the king who cometh in peace 
and glory,’ of the ‘Prince of Peace’ upon his ass, into a quotation, 
as in Mark xi. 9, from Ps. cxviii. 25. The text then looked like 
this : 

ἤρξαντο ἅπαν τὸ πλῆθος 

τῶν μαθητῶν χαίροντες αἰνεῖν (αὐ)γτὸν Ὁῦ[Χἷ Y TON ΘΕΟΝ, 

φων) μεγάλῃ περὶ πασῶν ὧν εἶδον 

δυναμέων3 λέγοντες" 


εὐλογημένος TO βασιλεὺς ΕΝ ΟΥ̓ΡΑΝΩ͂Ι. 
ὁ ἐρχύμενος ἐν εἰρήνῃ ΤῊΝ ONOMATI KYPIOY 
kat δόξᾳ YEN ὙΨΊΣΤΟΙΣ. 


The impossible traditional text has arisen through misplace- 
ment of the obel: belonging to the glosses. 

In conclusion, it now becomes clear that it was only through 
the artificial alteration of ’osha‘na, ‘Free us,’ into hoshi‘ana of the 
Psalmist that the palm-branches found their way into John’s 
narrative.’ The festal bouquets of the Feast of Tabernacles, of 
which the principal item was a palm-branch, were expressly known 
as “ Hoshannas.’ At the Passover feast, of course, none of the 
pilgrims carried ‘the palm-branches’ in their hands. They 
strewed the road with a carpet of green brought from the borders 
of the fields,” and for a like purpose cut branches from the trees; 
but that they bore ‘the palm-branches’ in their hands is clearly 
an invention of later Greek ignorance on Jewish matters. 


THE OCCUPATION OF THE TEMPLE 


Jesus had set out from Galilee with a small band of secretly 
armed followers to issue in Jerusalem a summons to freedom, to 
an exodus into the wilderness. Since this was to begin on the 
anniversary of the exodus from Egypt, it is clear that he and his 
company must have reached the Mount of Olives some days 


1 John xii. 13. * στιβάδας, Mark xi. 8. 3 Cf. above, pp. 368 ff. 
ee i 


THE OCCUPATION OF THE TEMPLE 481 


earlier. On the road and at this spot a multitude of pilgrims, 
attracted by the fame of former miracles ' and the spectacle of 
others more recent, had joined the band. Around a nucleus of one 
hundred and fifty closer associates, some hundreds more—perhaps, 
according to the highest estimate of later tradition, amounting in 


all to some two thousand people *—may have assembled. Over — 


against these there was the Roman garrison of Jerusalem, a cohort 
of five or six hundred men, with a corresponding number of camp- 
followers and the usual auxiliary troops, and in addition a Levitical 
guard in the temple of unknown but probably quite inconsiderable 
strength. Whether the Roman custom, attested for the first time 
of the governor Florus, of concentrating in the capital at the feast 
of the Passover the greater part of the Roman forces in Palestine, 
under the personal command of the governor, was already in force 
in the administration of Pilate, or was not rather first introduced 
in consequence of the events of the Passover of A.D. 21, cannot be 
decided. In the latter case the prospects of a sudden attack were 
not actually bad, provided a sufficiently large part of the city 
population joined in the revolt against the foreign oppressors. 
The peculiar tactics of a surprise occupation of the dominating 
positions of the city were quite familiar to the Zealots. As early 
as the time of Archelaus they had attempted such a coup d'état : 


‘ And when the feast of unleavened bread, called Passover, came 
round, a time when a multitude of sacrifices is offered to God, count- 
less numbers of the people from all over the country came to the 
ceremony, and the insurgents stood in secret in the temple and 
suddenly sprang up, and there was general confusion.’ ὃ 


By this sudden ‘ up-springing’ Josephus refers to the sudden 
drawing of the concealed swords of the so-called sicarit. 

From the Levitical temple guard under the command of the 
segan (στρατηγός) or captain of the temple not much was to be 
feared, for it might be hoped that a considerable portion of this 
national police force would prove amenable to the temptation of 
the messianic glad tidings and go over to the Davidic liberator- 
king when he made his triumphal entry. The statement that the 
παῖδες in the temple, the ‘sons of the slaves of Solomon,’ * the 
ἱεροδοῦλοι, vewxopot,? or Nethinim,® or those ‘buds of priest- 
hood’? spoken of in the Mishnah as devoted to certain guard 
duties, much to the vexation of the high priests and scribes 


1 John xii. 8. 3 See above, p. 370 N. I. 
* Halésis, ii. το, Berendts-Grass, p. 234. 

4 Ezvaii. 55; Neh. vii. 57, etc. 

5 Philo, De praem. sacerd., § 6; I Esdr. i. 27. 

ὃ δεδόμενοι( Ξε εα το); cf. 1 Chron. ix. 2 (codd, B, A). 

7 Pirhé kehunah, an allusion to the budding staff of Aaron. 

8 Schiirer, Engl. trans., Edinburgh, 1910, vol. ii,.I, Ὅς 273.n. 208. 


2H 


a 


482 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


ereeted Jesus with the cry, ‘ Power to the son of David!’ makes it 
probable that these hopes were not illusory. 

In this way, finally, a fragment of the Haldsis, preserved by 
Suidas, and which before the discovery of the Slavonic work could 
not be placed, meets with a satisfactory explanation :+ ‘ We find,’ 
says the lexicographer,” 


‘Josephus the historian of “The capture of Jerusalem” (of whom 
Eusebius the son of Pamphilus quotes a good deal in his Ecclesiastical 
History) saying clearly in the memoirs of his captivity* that Jesus 
officiated in the sanctuary with the priests.* Finding that Josephus 
says this, who was a man of that age (ἄνδρα ἀρχαῖον ὄντα), living 
not long after the apostles, we have searched for confirmation of this 
story also in the divinely inspired scriptures.’ ὃ 


There was thus an express statement in Josephus to the effect 
that ‘Jesus did service in the temple with the priests,’ which in 
connexion with the accusation against Jesus as it occurred in the 
text can only mean that he performed sacred functions to which 
only the priests were entitled by the Law.® Naturally, the simple- 
minded Suidas did not realize the full meaning of all this. Adduc- 
ing Luke iv. 17, he concluded that Jesus must have been a priest, 
since he was evidently allowed to read from the Bible in the syna- 
gogue, and since also in the Christian Church no layman was allowed 
such a privilege. However, the fact itself is highly probable, since, 
according to Jewish notions, the Messiah, like the Hasmonaean 
kings, was to unite the priestly dignity with the kingly office. It 
is furthermore extremely probable that Jesus, in presuming to 
offer incense in the temple as a pure sacrifice, did so with the full 
consciousness of his divine vocation, without paying much heed 
to the question how far his genealogy entitled him to such an 
action. On the other hand, it is more than probable that the 
isolated statement in Like 111. 24, to the effect that there was a 
Levite in Jesus’ genealogy, was inserted and the relationship of 
Mary with the mother of the Baptist, a descendant of Aaron, was 
emphasized for the purpose of justifying Jesus’ priestly acts in the 
temple during its brief occupation by his adherents. Perhaps 
such a kinship, by no means unusual among Rekhabite families,’ 
could indeed be proved, for the accusation brought against Jesus 

1 s.v. Ἰησοῦς, ed. Bernhardy, i. 2, p. 971. 2 On the context, cf. App. Χχιν. 

% See above, p. 120, on this original title of Josephus’ first draft. 

μ See above, p. 467 n. 4. 

5 ἐἐ εὕρομεν οὖν ᾿Ιῴσηπον τὸν συγγραφέα τῆς ᾿Αλώσεως “Ἱεροσολύμων (οὗ μνήμην 
πολλὴν Εὐσέβιος ὁ Παμφίλου ἐν τῇ ᾿Βκκλησιαστικῇ αὐτοῦ ‘Ioropia ποιεῖται), φανερῶς 
λέγοντα ἐν τοῖς τῆς αἰχμαλωσίας αὐτοῦ ὑπομνήμασιν, ὅτι ᾿Ιησοῦς ἐν τῷ ἱερῷ μετὰ τῶν 
ἱερέων ἡγίαζε. τοῦτο οὖν εὑρόντες λέγοντα τὸν ᾿Ιώσηπον, ἄνδρα ἀρχαῖον ὄντα καὶ 
οὐ μετὰ πολὺν χρόνον τῶν ἀποστόλων γενόμενον ἐρτήσομεν καὶ ἐν τῶν θεοπνευστῶν 

is sss τὸν τοιοῦτον λόγον βεβαιούμενον,᾽᾽ κ.τ.λ. 


6. Cf. what has been said above, p.469 n. 1, on the crime of minutio matestatis in 
Roman legislation. 7 See above, p. 2452. 


JESUS ENTERS THE SANCTUARY 483 


by the high priests! apparently did not mention such an illegal 
assumption of a sacred office. Yet not much can be made of this 
argumentum e silentio, since we cannot be sure that the document 
in question, the temple inscription mentioned by Josephus,! has 
come down to us intact and without mutilations on the part of 
Christian copyists. At all events, Jesus may have been justified 
even according to the letter of the Law when he dared to approach 
his God in the sanctuary without the mediation of an official priest. 

There can certainly be no doubt about the fact that the words 
of Suidas, μετὰ τῶν ἱερέων ἡγίαζε, fully confirm our supposition 
that one group of the priests, perhaps the ‘ bloom of the kehunah,’ 
had gone over to the rebels. No doubt, also, the Gospel fragment 
of Papyr. Oxyrhynchos, No. 840,? so often and so hotly discussed, 
belongs to the same context. 

After the final words of some parable directed against the 
Pharisaic casuists, experts in getting around the letter of the Law,? 
we find the following story : 


‘And he took them and led them into the ἁγνευτήριον ὁ itself, 
and went about in the sanctuary (ἐν τῷ ἱερῷ περιεπάτει) Then 
there came a certain Pharisee, a high priest (ἀρχιερεύς) called 
encountered them and said to the Saviour (τῷ ow7npr) >: “ Who hath 
bidden thee enter this sanctuary (ἀἁγνευτήριον) and to look at these 
sacred objects (ἅγια oxevn),® without having bathed first (μήτε λουσα- 
μένῳ), and without thy disciples having at least washed their feet 
(μήτε μὴν τῶν μαθητῶν σου τὰς πόδας βαπτισθέντων) 7 Thou hast 
rather entered this place, which is unsullied, as an impure one 
(μεμολυ[μένος] ἐπάτησα“), Whilst ordinarily no one enters there without 
having washed ® and changed his clothes,® nor dares to look at the 


1 See below, pp. 521 f. 

2 Grenfell and Hunt, d Fragment of an U ncanonical Gospel from Oxyrhynchos, 
Oxford, 1908, reprint from Oxyrh. Papyri, v.; H. B. Swete, Zwei neue Evangelien- 
fragmente, Lietzmann’s K/. Texte, No. 31; Preuschen, Z.N.T.W., 1908, p. I sqq. 
Cf. further: Deissmann, Licht vom Osten, p. 33 n. 1; and Hennecke, Neutestam. 
Apoky.’, *, Ρ. 31, No. 19. 

3“ πρότερον πρὸ τοῦ ἀδικῆσαι πάντα copifera, etc., about the punishment await- 
ing evildoers after their resurrection for the Last Judgment. 

4 According to Preuschen, Z.N.T.W., ix. (1908), p. 5, =godesh, ‘the holy’ 
(ἁγνίζειν =qiddesh, Ex. xix. το). So also W. Bauer in Preuschen’s Greek-German 
Dict. to the N.T.*, referring to Porphyry, De Abst., iv. 5. 

δ Cf. Preuschen, op. cit., p. 9 n. 2, who rightly observes that the expression 
is foreign to the Synoptics. Yetit occurs in the Gospel of the Infancy in Lukeii. 11, 
coming from a special source. Cf. σωτὴρ τοῦ κόσμου, the well-known title of the 
emperors, applied to the Messiah in John iv. 42. What is meant is the saviour 
from war and oppression. 

6 The table with the shewbread, the candlestick, and the altar of incense. 

7 Cf. John xiii. το. 

= ΟΣ 8.1. v. ὃ 227; also Joma iii.a, Marmorstein, Z.N.7.W., xv. (1914), 
Ῥ. 336: ‘No one is allowed to enter into the inner court, not even the ritually 
pure, without having taken a plunge-bath.’ 

9 Since the disciples of Jesus, according to Matt. x. τὸ and Luke ix. 3, were 
not allowed to possess two suits (δύο χιτῶνας), no change of clothes was possible 
in their case. 


484 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


holy objects.1 And immediately the Saviour stopped, with his 
disciples, and replied to him: “Thou, then, who art in this 
sanctuary, art thou pure?” And he saith to him: “I am pure. 
For I have washed in the pond of David (ἐν τῇ λίμνῃ τοῦ Δαυείδ) 5 
and have descended one flight of stairs? and mounted the other, 
and I have put on white and pure clothes, and then I came to look 
at these holy objects.” The Saviour replied and said unto him : 
“Woe upon you, O blind, who do not 866. Thou hast bathed 
in this water poured in (τούτοις τοῖς χεομένοις ὕδασι), in which 
by day and by night ‘dogs’ and ‘swine’ are wallowing (ἐν οἷς 
κύνες καὶ χοῖροι βέβληνται νυκτὸς καὶ ἡμέρας); thou hast washed 
and cleansed thy outer skin,® which is also done by whores and 
flute-players,® who bathe, adorn themselves, and put on artificial 
colours to rouse the concupiscence of men, but within they are full 
of scorpions and all wickedness. But I and my disciples, of whom 
thou sayest that we did not bathe, we plunged into the living waters 
coming down from heaven (ἐγὼ δὲ καὶ οἱ [μαθηταί μου] obs λέγεις μὴ 
βεβα[πτίσθαι βεβάμμεθα ἐν ὕδασι ζῳ[οἷς ἀεννάοις roils? ἔλθουσι ἀπ’ 
οὐρανοῦ ]})}.᾿ 

The words on the χεόμενα ὕδατα, the ᾿ water poured in,’ agree 
perfectly with the statements of the Mishnah discussed by Brandt 
on the lishkath hag-gullah, the ‘ hall of the fountain,’ the ‘ well- 
house’ of the temple, “in which there was the fortified cistern of 
the fountain, with the wheel above, and from which the water 
was taken to supply the whole court.’ 

The ‘ dogs’ and ‘ swine’ in the purifying bath of the priests 
have puzzled the exegetists only because they have failed to 
realize the passionate coarseness of the invective. ‘ Dogs’ in this 
context is, of course, only the abusive name well known throughout 
antiquity for the παθικός, the temple-slave of the Syrian and 
Canaanite ‘Asherah, whilst χοῖροι, ‘swine,’ denotes simply men 
without any sense of cleanliness or decency. 

Finally, the forced explanations how the holy implements 
could be seen from the court of the non-priestly Israelites are use- 

1 T.e. look at them unwashed. 

2 Cf. above, p. 2731.37. There must thus have been old cisterns (shithin) under 
the foundations of the temple, the construction of which was attributed to David. 
Herod the Great seems to have converted a number of them into subterranean 
regular bathing-ponds. 

3. Cf. Middot,i.9; Tammid,i.1; German translation by Brandt, Suppl. xviii. 
of Z.N.T.W., Giessen, 1910, p.128. Ifa priest sleeping in the sanctuary became 
ceremonially unclean, he went down to the bath-chamber, washed, and came up 
again. 

4 Cf. Matt. xv. 14; ἌΧΗ. 16 sq., 19, 24. 

5 Cf. above, p. 249, on the doctrine of John. 

6 On the Syrian flute-girls cf. Mau’s article Ambubaiae in Pauly-Wissowa, 
R.-E., 1., 1816, 

7 Cf. above, p. 273 ll. 16 f. and n. 6. 

8. Cf. Prov. xi. 22: ‘ As a jewel of gold in a swine’s snout, so is a fair woman 
which is without discretion.’ Cf. also the interesting observation of Dr. M. R. 


James, The Apocr. New Testament, p. 29 n. 2, on the words added to τ Kings xxii. 
38 in the Greek version. 


CONFLICT BETWEEN JESUS AND HIGH PRIEST 485 


less, for the text clearly shows that Jesus must have done some- 
thing quite unheard of, and it matters little whether the word 
ἁγνευτήριον designates the outer hall of the ékal or only the 
court of the priests. The text states that the priest objects to the 
appearance of non-priests in this holy place. If thus interpreted, 
the passage allows of two inferences, namely, (1) only priests were 
allowed to enter this part of the sanctuary, and (2) even they only 
after having first washed their feet and changed their clothing. 
Both rules were actually in force.t The place in question was the 
‘Holy ’ as distinguished from the ‘ Holy of Holies,’ and I believe 
that the word ἁγνευτήριον denotes the temple building and ἱερόν 
(=qodosh) the place between the altar and the Holy of Holies, 
precisely where the sacred instruments were found. 

It is evident, then, that Jesus did not stand among the crowd 
of the simple Jews who were shown the golden table and the 
curtain at a distance on a holiday, for who would have taken 
notice of him and observed that he had not properly washed to be 
ceremonially clean? But he not only entered the temple building, 
the ‘ Holy,’ called godesh or héjkal, but even took his disciples with 
him. It goes without saying that a simple pilgrim could never 
have carried out such an unheard-of violation of the priestly rules ; 
in normal times the guards of the sanctuary would have prevented 
him most effectively from so doing. 

The event described by the fragment presupposes, then, the 
occupation of the temple by the adherents of Jesus, and the 
support he found on the part of the παῖδες of the sanctuary. Only 
as the messianic ruler could he venture to enter the temple itself 
and view the holy implements, etc., to offer incense on the altar 
with his own hand. At this juncture a popular high priest, 
significantly a Pharisee (for the most unpopular Sadducee, Caiaphas, 
kept out of the way), ventured to voice his objections, and the 
ensuing dialogue has accidentally been preserved to us on this 
papyrus fragment, incidentally a proof of the fact that many — 
Gospels must have perished at an early date. The passage also — 
proves that Jesus conceived of the temple, no longer as the 
mysterious dwelling of a jealous deity, worshipped according to an 
old-fashioned ritual and in the gloom, but as the meeting-house for 
all men, the central synagogue of the country, where people would 
assemble to worship the Omnipresent and Eternal in spirit and 
in truth. Bold as was this attack of the old prophetic opposition 
on the cult instituted by Solomon after the model of other 

1 Cf. Maimuni, Beth Habbehiva, 7, 21: ‘The temple (héjkal) is more sacred 
than the place between the outer hall (’u/a@m) and the altar; the priest must not 
enter the héjkal without previous washing of hands and feet (vahus jadaim 
uvaglaim).’ In the Tosefta (Kelaim i. 1, 6) there is a debate on the question 
whether one may enter the place between the outer hall and the altar without 
previous washing. 


486 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


Oriental cults, it must have found a tremendous echo among the 
partisans of this deeper piety. 


THE COLLISION WITH THE ROMANS 


The most menacing peril could have come from the Roman 
garrison in the temple-fortress known since Herod’s time as 
‘ Antonia,’ 2/ this castle (bivah or Bdpis) were then occupied by the 
Romans. From the statements of Josephus * on the custody of 
the high priest’s ceremonial vestments it would seem as if the 
Roman garrison had always lainin the Antonia. But the contrary 
is suggested by his statement elsewhere* that the governor 
Gessius Florus, in A.D. 66, with the troops he had brought from 
Caesarea, sought to force his way through and occupy the temple 
and the castle, but was prevented by the mob. The Roman 
garrison, therefore, at the time of Florus lay in the royal palace of 
Herod on the west of the city, and the Antonia was in the hands of 
the temple guard under the command of the captain of the castle 
(‘ish hab-birvah).4 If the garrison was not strong enough to hold 
both Herod's palace and the Antonia, the Romans were strategically 
quite justified in preferring to command the higher western hill, 
the more so because, as far as we can tell from the sources, the only 
communications the Antonia had with the temple court were stair- 
ways, and consequently in the event of disturbances in the temple 
its garrison could be easily blockaded and cut off from the city. 

At the time of Paul’s arrest for having brought Trophimus into 
the temple in defiance of the purity law, Fort Antonia was certainly 
occupied by the Romans. When he was being brought into the 
barracks (παρεμβολή), he was, owing to the pressure of the crowd, 
carried by the soldiers up the steps (τοὺς ἀναβαθμούς), from which 
by the tribune’s permission he delivered an address to the people.® 

If the situation in the time of Pilate was similar, and if, more- 
over, as in the time of Cumanus,® the precaution had already been 
taken of posting Roman guards at the great festivals on the por- 
ticoes surrounding the temple court, ready to nip in the bud any 
popular disturbances, then it is hardly conceivable that events 
such as the so-called cleansing of the temple could have taken 
place. One would have to regard them, with Origen,’ as a greater 
miracle than the changing of water into wine at the marriage of 
Cana, or else to assume a wholly improbable surprise attack on and 
intimidation of the Roman garrison. 

Matters are quite different if these measures were first intro- 

* Cf. above, pp. 336 ff. and p.8 n. 4, on the currents hostile to the priests, which 
are so Clearly visible in the Agada. 

2 Ani., XV. II. 45 Xviii. 4. 3. © Boys, Me X5.)5,'8 325: 

4 Acts xxi. 31. δ Acts xxi. 36-40. 

© Ant, S55 5. 3: 7 In Joann., x. (P.G., xiv. 352). 


ὧν 


THE COLLISION WITH THE ROMANS 487 


duced by the Romans in consequence of the events of the Passover 
week of A.D. 21, and if the statement of Josephus to the effect that 
the predecessors of Cumanus acted as he did applies to the gover- 
nors who succeeded Pilate and were warned by his example. 

It is quite possible that, just because the march of the cohorts 
into the Antonia with the semaia had roused such a storm of Jewish 
indignation in A.D. 19, Pilate had been ordered by Tiberius to 
remove the garrison out of that fortress altogether and to transfer 
it to Herod’s palace. Only if the Roman garrison, whether in the | 
modest dimensions of a cohors equitata, or appropriately strength- 
ened, lay in the palace on the west of the city, could a coup like the 
march into the temple, with the subsequent attack on the money- _ 
changers and merchants, be attempted and carried into execution. 
Only in these circumstances is it conceivable that Jesus, having 
been proclaimed King of Israel, could for several days teach in 
the temple unassailed,! under the protection of his numerous 
followers,? even if he took the precaution of spending the nights 
outside the city in the village of Bethany.* M. Maurice Goguel * 
doubted the historicity of the account of the triumphal entry into 
Jerusalem and the ‘ purification of the temple,’ mainly on the 
ground that the long delay of the Romans in re-establishing law 
and order appeared inexplicable. ‘If,’ he wrote, {πὸ account 
of the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem must be taken literally, it 
would furnish a very sufficient motive for Roman intervention. 
If the entry had provoked the popular enthusiasm which Mark 
relates, one could not understand how the Roman authorities 
waited several days to intervene. Waiting under these conditions 
would give a nascent movement time to grow to a point at which 
it would become irrepressible.’ 

These objections, however, will not convince a reader with 
any experience in such matters. The main thing for the Romans 
was, of course, to make their own attack forceful and irresistible. 
That could not be done by precipitation and in the simple way 
in which Archelaus had cowed a more spontaneous and unpre- 
meditated outbreak in 4 B.c. If the Zealots, reinforced by 
partisans from the city, were in possession of the strongly fortified 
temple, the recapture of the sanctuary required the bringing up of 
reinforcements, of siege engines, and above all a precise exploration — 
of the state of affairs in the open country, in the city, and on {πὸ 
Temple Mount, the establishment of contacts and an understand- 
ing with the high priests and the loyalists, the distribution of 
weapons to the latter, and the like. For all this a few days of only 
apparent inaction would by no means seem an excessive delay. 


1 Mark xiv. 49; Matt. xxviii. 55 ; Luke xxii. 53. | 
® Luke xix. 48: ‘ The people all hung upon him listening.’ 
8. Mark xi. 11; Luke xxi. 37 5. 4 Revue de l’histoive des religions, xiii. 318, 


488 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


More significant still, the statements of Josephus on the 
message sent by the high priests to Pilate hardly admit of any 
other conclusion save that on the day of Jesus’ entry the governor 
was not yet in Jerusalem. For had he been living in the city, he 
would naturally have received notice of such proceedings before 
any one else through his scouts (speculatores), and the high priests 
could not have expected to make much impression with their 
belated information. The situation was quite different if the 
governor was still in his residence at Caesarea and was only 
expected with his reinforcements on the eve of the Passover, 
always assuming that the later practice was already in force and 
the governor was accustomed to come to Jerusalem with a special 
body of troops for the festivals. It is quite conceivable that this 
measure was only the outcome of the events of this year, and that 
Pilate was enjoying himself quietly in the delights which the 
relatively civilized Caesarea offered to a gentleman of his class, 
when the high priests’ message came as an unpleasant surprise. 
The postponement of the counter-stroke is in any case easy to 
understand. But it is indeed impossible to suppose Pilate to have 
sat still with his cohort in the Antonia above the temple court, 
allowing events to take their course under his very eyes, a few 
steps beneath him. 

In that case the garrison of the castle would, of course, im- 
mediately have made a charge upon the crowd and events would 
have developed precipitately. If we assume that Fort Antonia 
was in Koman hands, we must regard the statements about Jesus 
remaining for several days in the temple, and about his issuing 
orders,’ as unhistorical. From the statements that at the time of 
the entry the Hallel-Ps. cxviii. was being recited, it is to be in- 
ferred that this event took place not before midday of the ‘day of 
preparation,’ and was immediately followed by the invasion of the 
temple, which could not be prevented by the surprised Roman 
garrison, but might have been checked by a speedy counter-attack 
and a massacre of the people. On that theory the events would 
have followed one another with such giddy speed that on that 
ground alone one would hesitate to adopt such a view. 

On the whole, it would seem more satisfactory to accept the 
statements of the Synoptists on the duration of Jesus’ stay in the 
temple and Josephus’ story on the sending of troops by Pilate, 
and to find the explanation in the simple hypothesis that in 21, 
just as later on in 66,? the temple and Fort Antonia were held only 
by a Jewish temple-guard, which, as may well be imagined, showed 


+ Mark xi. 16: ‘and would not suffer that any man should carry armour 
(σκεῦος) through the temple.’ 

2 If it be asked why, with the events of 21 behind him, Florus could, in 66, 
make the same fatal mistake, the answer can easily be found in the philosopher 
Hegel’s famous essay, Why man cannot profit by the lessons of history. 


THE EXPULSION OF THE MONEY-CHANGERS 489 


no desire for any strong opposition to the patriots and the scion 
of David. 


THE ATTACK ON THE TEMPLE BANKS 


After what has been said above ἢ on Jesus’ repugnance to the 
service of mammon and to money as something satanic and op- 
posed to God, his procedure against the money-changers or bankers 
is at once intelligible. 

‘Like every great shrine in the Orient and the Hellenic world, 
the temple at Jerusalem was by nature a great public treasury, or, 
as one might say, with certain self-evident reservations, the national 
bank. The treasure-chambers of the temple contained, besides | 
immense stores of wealth belonging to the sanctuary in the archaic ἡ 
form of ‘raiment? money’ * and wrought precious metal, along 


------ 


with considerable sums of coined currency,* also vast deposits made~ ~~~ 


by individual creditors, and not merely by widows and orphans.? | 
For the rich of that day likewise ‘trusted in the holiness of the 
place,’ ὃ and did not hesitate to confide their wealth to the pro- 
tection of ‘ Him that gave the law concerning deposits,’ so that 
Josephus could correctly speak of those chambers as the ἡ general 
repository of Jewish wealth.’® These deposits were by no means 
allowed to lie idle, but were all the time profitably employed in the 
process of money-transfer inherited by the Jews no less than by 
the whole Hellenic world from Babylon, where the bills of ex- | 
change, bonds, and personal cheques had long before been invented. 
The prohibition of interest in lending and borrowing between Jews 
did not prevent the claiming and conceding of shares in the profits 
reaped from Jewish commercial undertakings. This prohibition 
did not, either, obtain for dealings with non-Jews, where the 
common high rate of interest was exacted by all parties concerned. | 
Furthermore, there were doubtless ways and means® of evading © 
the prohibition and taking interest even from Jewish borrowers. 
At all events, Josephus’ account 190 of the burning of the archives 
in Jerusalem by the insurgents gives an appalling picture of the 
oppressive indebtedness of the poor to the rich, the intention of 
the incendiaries being to ‘destroy the money-lenders’ tallies 
(συμβόχαια) and to prevent the exaction of debts, in order to win 


ΣΟΥ Pp .3 321. 2 Cf. Matt. vi. 19 (Luke xii. 33). 

8. Cf. Eisler, Das Geld, Miinchen, 1924, p. 122 sq. 

4 Cf. 2 Mace. iii. 6. & Tbid., iii. 10. 

6 Ibid., iii. 12. 7 Ibid., iti. 15; cf. Exod. xxi. 7. ΞΞΝ 

δ᾽. ΘΟ ΝῊ. 282, ἧς. 
9 


The Greek and Roman money-lenders employed as a rule slaves and freed- 
men to carry on their business, and the Jewish capitalists may similarly have 
drawn on the services of non-Jewish middlemen. ‘The servant who is to trade 
with the talents of his master in Matt. xxv. 28 must be regarded as such a factor. 
Against this circumvention of the Law the rabbis pronounced that ‘the hand of 
the slave is the hand of the master ’ (Strack-Billerbeck, 1. 971). Jw 

0. 2 Se λας Pal 


490 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


over a host of grateful debtors and to rouse the poor against the 
wealthy with impunity.’ 
~~ Seeing that the latter left their disbursements and recovery of 
debts in the hands of the bankers (τραπεζῖται, shulhanim),1 and 
that these also collected the shegel-tax for the temple and dis- 
trained upon those unwilling or unable to pay,? one can imagine 
how these persons were hated by the humbler folk in the country, 
the ‘ammé ha’ares, and can only wonder that nothing worse 
happened to them than what is told by three of the Evangelists.® 
To understand in what sense Jesus, in words taken from the 
old prophets, could reproach the money-dealers with having con- 
verted God’s house from a ‘ house of prayer for all nations’ into 
‘a den of burglars,’ ὁ we must recall the important fact that the 
money-changers unscrupulously accepted and consigned to the 
treasury vaults of the temple coins regarded with such abhorrence 
by the pious because they bore the image of Caesar and heathen 
gods. For it was permitted to exchange the shekels of taxpayers 
living at a distance for gold darics bearing the image of the 
Persian king.’ The medallion with Caesar’s image on the semaia 
(Pl. xx1I.) isin fact nothing but an ordinary Roman coin; and though 
usually the size may have been different, the essential character 
did not change thereby. Thus the very people who had moved 
heaven and earth because one such medallion had been brought 
into the holy city and within the temple precincts, thought nothing 
of piling up thousands of these same idolatrous images on the coins 
_ of the realm in the temple court and thus ‘ violating’ the law of God. 
| It is needless to.add that the attack of Jesus was directed not 
only against this visible and tangible side of the temple tribute, 
but against the whole system, against the mammonist spirit 
which had gradually permeated temple service and people alike. 


THE EXPULSION OF THE CATTLE-DEALERS 


It is a remarkable fact that the cognate narrative of the ex- 
pulsion of the cattle-dealers is best preserved in the Fourth Gospel, 
where we read : § 


‘And he found in the temple those that sold oxen and sheep and 
doves . . . and he made a scourge of cords and drove them all out of 
the temple along with the sheep and the oxen.’ 


1 Cf. Mayer-Lambert, ‘Les changeurs et la monnaie en Palestine,’ Revue des 
Etudes juives, 1907-8. 

* Strack-Billerbeck, i. 761 sq. 

3 Luke xix. 45 omits the attack on the money-changers—no doubt because 
that episode formed the best basis for the charge that the disciples were λῃσταί; 
for it is not to be supposed that the scattered money remained lying on the ground. 

4 Or, ‘ violators of the law,’ me‘avat parisim ; cf. Jer. vii. 11. 

δ Sheq., τ. 1; Strack-Billerbeck, i. 767a, 6 John ii. 14 sq. 


THE ATTACK AGAINST THE CATTLE-DEALERS 491 


In Mark xi. 15 and Matt, xxi. 12 the oxen and sheep are omitted, 
as is also the scourge, to mitigate the violence of the procedure and 
to get rid of the improbability of this naive picture of a single man 
driving before him not only entire herds of oxen but their in- 
timidated owners as well. Luke xix. 45 merely writes ‘them that 
sold,’ not mentioning the objects for sale. 

With this simplified form of the narrative the weakening of the 
severest words of condemnation into ‘Make not my Father’s house 
a house of merchandise ’+is quite in keeping. Since the sellers of 
doves are mentioned in verset 14 and again in 15 as having been 
driven out of the temple, verset 16, ‘and to those that sold doves 
he said,’ is clearly a late harmonizing. 

It is noteworthy that in these omissions it is just the sellers of 
doves who have been left intact. For, whereas this is doubtful in 
the case of the larger sacrificial beasts, it is known beyond any 
doubt that it was customary to purchase the doves by means of 
special brass checks from the temple authorities themselves, so 
that the action of Jesus must have been directed against Levitical 
and official vendors and not, or at least not exclusively, against any 
unauthorized dealers strolling about the temple. 

~ The motives for the attack have been almost entirely obliterated 
by the Christian tradition. Of the speeches Jesus made on this 
occasion, only the prophetical catchwords about the conversion of 
the ‘ universal house of prayer’ into a ‘den of burglars’ have 
survived. Any one conversant with the time-honoured tricks 
of the entrenched middleman will understand the pronounced 
hostility of the pilgrims from the country against precisely this 
class. For whilst to purchasers they raised the price of their 
beasts to the maximum, to the sellers they would always object one 
of the many faults which made an animal unfit for sacrificial use, 
thus manipulating the prices. This fact, moreover, is expressly 
attested for the sale of doves.® 

Yet the attack can hardly have been directed against these 
abuses alone. Asin the case of the temple bank and the money- 
changing business, the whole system of this sacred traffic in wine, 
oil, incense, wood, and animals for sacrifice would be an abomina- 
tion to Jesus. Seeing, however, that the abolition of the trade in 
these things anywhere in the neighbourhood of the altar would 
have rendered. sacrifices impossible for any one not himself a 
farmer or cattle-breeder, and that such a limitation of the offerings 
to objects reared by the farmer himself was naturally neither 
intended nor practicable, the conclusion can hardly be avoided 
that the attack was aimed against the whole sacrificial system as 
such, and that the temple was to be converted from a reeking 
Slaughter-house, securing preferential treatment for the rich by 

1 Ibid., ii. 16. © Shegalim, vi. 5. 2 Ker... 7. 

“a, = ΘΙ Ἂς 


- 


402 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


placating the divinity with lavish gifts of blood and fat, into a 
pure ‘ house of prayer ’ for all the world. 

The invectives of the prophets against the absurd superstition 
that God must be fed or could be bribed by offerings are familiar 
to every reader of the Scriptures, and can hardly have failed to 
make a deep impression on Jesus. There was, moreover, the 
Jewish expectation, attested by the oldest collection of mud- 
vashim,* that in the messianic age all sacrifices would cease 
except the thank-offering (¢odah), i.e. what the Church speaks 
of as εὐχαριστίαι and εὐλογίαι. The Midrash expressly quotes 
Psol. 153: 

‘Should I eat the flesh of bulls or drink the blood of goats ? 
Sacrifice unto God thanksgiving, and pay thy vows unto the Most 
High,’ 

a verset from one of two songs ® of those ‘ pious’ ones 4 who ‘have 
made a covenant with God concerning the sacrifice.’ ὃ 

When the sacrifices ceased altogether with the destruction of 
the temple in A.D. 70, the substitution of prayer for sacrifice was 
based on a passage from Hosea (xiv. I sq.) : 


‘QO Israel, return unto the Lord thy God. . . . Take with you 
words and return unto the Lord. Say unto him, Take away all 
iniquity and turn toward kindness: so will we render the bullocks 
of our lips.’ 

From the same prophet ® Jesus twice quoted on different occa- 
sions 7 the divine words of hostility to the sacrifices: 


‘ I desire mercy and not sacrifice (and the knowledge of God more 
than burnt-offerings).’ 


It is most likely that he used the same words when he drove the 
cattle-dealers out of the temple, and that the saying imputed to 
him by Epiphanius ὃ on the authority of the Gospel of the Ebionites, 
‘I am come to abolish the sacrifices; and if ye cease not to sacri- 
fice, the wrath will not cease from you,’ may at least in substance 
be genuine. 

The ordinary view that Jesus had no objection to the sacrificial 
cult of his time and country is very poorly supported. The direc- 
tion given to the healed lepers to make the customary offering ° is 
given at the beginning of his ministry, and in no way excludes our 
assuming that Jesus, who wished to alter and abrogate nothing in 

1 E.g. Hos. v. 6, vill. 13 ; Amos v. 22 sqq.; Isaiah i. 11 sqq. ;. Jer. vi. 20. 

* Pesthta, x. 77a, with Salom. Buber’s note. Cf. also Monatsschr. f. Gesch. τι. 
Wiss. d. Judentums, 1899, p. 153 sq. 

3 Psalms 1. and li. belong together. 

ὁ hasidim, Ps. 1. 5. It is the programme of some congregation opposed to 
sacrifices, as were the Essenes. 

& Ps: 15.5: © Hos..vi..6. 

7 Mait. ix. 13, xii. 7; cf. Mark xii. 2-34. 

ΕΧΥχ 16. ¥ Mark i. 44. 


JESUS AND ANIMAL SACRIFICE 493 


the law ‘till all things be accomplished,’ ! had nevertheless deter- 
mined to declare the law of sacrifice abolished at the opening of 
the new era, i.e. simultaneously with his public self-revelation as 
Messiah. 

It has often been noticed as a remarkable fact that in the 
account of the last supper, elsewhere so clearly indicated as corre- 
sponding to the Seder feast, the eating of the paschal lamb is not 
mentioned. The phrases ‘ to eat the passover,’ ‘to prepare the 
passover,’ 2 where preparations for the Seder are referred to, may 
designate the paschal meal as a whole and need not denote the 
paschal lamb. In the Diaspora, where the prescribed slaughter 
of the lamb in the temple was impossible, it is known that the 
meal was eaten without this principal dish. If Jesus had decided 
to declare the sacrificial law abolished from the moment of his 
revelation as Messiah, he may have celebrated this last Seder with 
his disciples in this, the manner usual outside Jerusalem and 
Palestine. At all events, it is striking that the comparison—on 
which such stress is laid by Paul—of his impending sacrificial death 
to the slaughter of the paschal lamb is quite alien to his own words 
and thoughts, and that he symbolizes such ideas only by the rite 
of breaking the bread and the pouring out of the wine, just as 
though he were keeping a paschal feast without a lamb, like Jews 
living at a distance from Jerusalem. At any rate, that was the 
view of the Ebionite Jewish Christians, the same people who repre- 
sented Jesus as saying that he was come to abolish the sacrifices, 
when in their Gospel, in reply to the question, ‘ Where wilt thou 
that we prepare for thee to eat the passover?’ they make the 
Saviour say, ‘ Did I then desire to eat this passover as meat ? ’ 
(τοῦτο τὸ πάσχα κρέα φαγεῖν), i.e. to eat the paschal lamb ? 4 

For the further development of events a decision of the moot 
question, whether Jesus wished to abolish the sacrifices altogether 
or merely to remove prevailing abuses, is of no decisive importance. 
For one thing is certain beyond all doubt : the priests must have 
gained an impression from his proceedings that the most vital 
sources of revenue of the temple and the very means of subsistence 
of the priesthood, the shegel-tax and the sacrifices, were most 
seriously threatened by his attack on the temple banks and the 
cattle-merchants. Even if they were possibly inclined at first to 
make common cause with the national rising against the Romans 
under the leadership of a Davidic king, they could only regard as 
their deadly enemy a ruler who in this fashion destroyed the 
economic basis of their class. 


1 Matt. v. 18. 2 Mark xiv. 12 and parallels. 

® The Passover papyrus of Elephantine has no mention of the lamb; οἵ. 
Arnold, Journal of Bibl. Lit., 1912, p. 9. 

4 Epiphan., xxx. 22. 


404 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


‘DESTROY THIS TEMPLE ’ 


There is furthermore the utterance of Jesus on the destruction 
and rebuilding of the temple, and which falls into this fateful period 
of his career, to which some attention must be given.1 The same 
utterance, it will be recalled, is also mockingly repeated to him on 
the cross by the jeering multitude.2. The most incriminating 
version of this saying (which Jesus himself never denied 5) appears 
in John 11. 19 in connexion with the story of the purification of the 
temple, in all probability a more original version of the account 
than the wording preserved in Mark xi. (after verset 17) and 
Matt. xxi. (after verset 13). 

Even Luke, who in his Gospel has carefully omitted everything 
which could recall this most revolutionary of all the sayings of 
Jesus, knew it well. For in Acts (vi. 13 sg.) he makes witnesses, 
whom of course he calls ‘ false witnesses,’ come forward who have 
heard Stephen ‘say that this Jesus the Nasdraean shall destroy 
this place,’ that is, the temple. Jesus is therefore, so Stephen is 
reported as saying, to fulfil on his second coming what he had 
promised at his first appearance. 

In John, through whose statement it is established that the 
saying was actually uttered, it is rendered innocuous by being 
addressed, not to an excited multitude but to the Jewish opponents 
of Jesus, who wished to see a miracle from him. In this context it 
practically means, ‘// you destroy the temple,’ which his opponents 
neither could nor would, 1 will build it again in three days.’ To 
this the evangelist added, ‘ But he spake of the temple of his body,’ 
an allegorical interpretation of the speech which would be the more 
incomprehensible to the Jews in that it presupposes the entirely 
un-Jewish idea that the Godhead dwelt incarnate in the body of 
Jesus, as a Greek god in his temple. 

Yet another attempt to render the dubious utterance harmless 
is attested by Codex Bezae and the quotation of Cyprian from the 
old Latin version of Mark xii. 2. According to this text, Jesus is 
represented as appending to the prophecy of the fall of the temple, 
“Seest thou these great buildings? There shall not be left here 
one stone upon another, which shall not be thrown down,’ the 
words ‘ and in three days another shall arise without hands.’ The 
unknown writer who devised this evasion intended to say that 
Jesus did not order the destruction of the temple (Avcate, John 
ii. 19), but prophesied it (λύσετε), and that the words were not 
addressed to the Jews but to the Romans, who actually razed the 
temple to the ground in A.p. 70. After this destruction by the 
Mark xiv. 58; Matt. xxvi. 61; Luke omits this saying. 


Mark xv. 29; Matt. xxvii. 39 sq. 


1 
° Mark xiv. 61; Matt. xxvi. 63: ‘ but he held his peace,’ 


‘ DESTROY THIS TEMPLE ’ 495 


enemy, a new temple would arise in three days, ‘without action 
of human hands,’ which an interpolator had introduced into Mark 
xiv. 58. What is meant by this is best illustrated by a passage in 
Tacitus, where one reads, among the signs portending the fall of 
the temple, of the wonderful appearance of a temple aloft in the 
clouds, which seemed suddenly to flash out in fire. To the earthly 
sanctuary corresponds that archetype in the heavens which was 
shown to Moses 5 when he was called to build the tabernacle, that 
‘ true tabernacle * * not built by hands, in which, according to the 
Christian view, the glorified Messiah, on his return to his heavenly 
home, officiates as the true high priest. 

It is obvious that these apologetic evasions neutralize each 
other. If, with the interpolator of Mark xiv. 58, the temple that 
is to be destroyed is “made with hands,’ then Jesus cannot have 
spoken, as in Jo/im 11. 21, ᾿ of the temple of his body.’ Again, he 
cannot have offered to show the Jews a miracle with his promise 
to build a new temple in three days, for a miraculous building, such 
as Aladdin produces with his magic lamp, is created not in three 
days but in an instant. 

On the other hand, the numerous attempts to give the ‘ hard 
saying ’ an unobjectionable form prove that, notwithstanding all 
endeavours to represent as ‘false witnesses’ those who had heard it, 
it was undeniable that Jesus had really said something of the kind. 
Which of the various traditional versions of the saying 15 historical 
can be easily recognized. ‘Iam able to destroy the temple of God,’ 
as Matthew has it, would be a harmless, vainglorious boast of Jesus, 
asserting his power to effect such a work of destruction, quite un- 
like him as we knowhim. The essential part of the sentence would 
then lie in its second half, ‘and to build it again in three days,’ for 
any Herostratus could destroy the most splendid edifice of this 
kind by wanton incendiarism, of which indeed the Gospel of Peter * 
tells us that the disciples were actually suspected on the strength 
of this saying of their Master. That Luke was unwilling to repeat 
the utterance in this form we can now readily understand, having 
regard to the charge of sorcery. A reader who would not recognize 
Jesus as a god—and what reason had the Romans for doing so 
from the little they had heard and seen of him ?—must have 
regarded the author of such a statement either as a megalomaniac 
or as a dangerous magician, 

Mark’s version, “I will destroy the temple,’ is a promise given 
by Jesus to destroy and re-erect the building. The evangelist 
may have understood the threat of destruction as an announce- 
ment of the God-sent catastrophe of A.D. 70, and have looked for 

1 Hesi., ν. 13. 2 Exod. xxv. 6 sq., ΧΧΥΣ. 30. 


3 Hebr. vill. 2. 
4 § 26: ‘ We were sought for . . . as wishing to burn the temple.’ 


496 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


the restoration at the time of the second coming. But the words 
in no wise agree with what Jesus could expect at the time when he 
was under the belief that he must shortly die, and had promised 
after his resurrection to withdraw at the head of the elect to 
Galilee,! where a new Jerusalem was to arise,” or rather to descend 
from heaven.? When and why should he have planned to carry 
out the demolition of the Herodian temple ? 

Clearly, it is John alone who has preserved the genuine text, 
‘Destroy this temple, and in three days I will raise it up,’ words 
which, detached from their misleading context, are readily in- 
telligible and thoroughly in keeping with the narrative of the so- 
called purification of the temple. To Jesus the temple, which 
should be ‘ a house of prayer for all nations,’ now appears only as 
‘an abode of crime’: ‘ Destroy this temple’ links on excellently 
to ‘ ye have made it a den of robbers.’ 

The antipathies against the temple erected by Herod the 
Great, which find expression in these words, were shared by many 
of the most pious Jews of the period. Built by a ruler whom the 
Jews regarded as an alien, an Arab, even a Philistine, it was 
adorned with a golden eagle over its principal gateway, considered 
by the Zealots as an idol, as the ‘ abomination of desolation in the 
holy place.’ They even had once tried, at the risk of their lives, 
to remove it, a bold undertaking for which Herod had taken bloody 
vengeance on many loyal martyrs.4 At a later date Josephus ὃ 
could assert without fear of contradiction that he had been com- 
missioned by the Jerusalem assembly to press for the demolition 
of the palace of Herod at Tiberias, because, contrary to the law, 
it was adorned with representations of living creatures. 

Furthermore, followers of the old prophetical religion dis- 
approved of the building of any temple whatever, considering it 
disobedience to God’s declared will and an imitation of heathen 
customs. When David desired to build a temple for Jahveh, God 
commissioned the prophet Nathan to say to him: ὃ 


‘Thus saith the Lord, Shalt thou build me an house for me tc 
dwell in? Whereas I have not dwelt in any house since the time 
that 1 brought up the children of Israel out of Egypt, even to this 
day, but have walked in a tent and in a tabernacle. In all place: 
wherein I have walked with all the children of Israel, spake I a word 
with any of the judges of Israel, whom I commanded to feed my 
people Israel, saying, Why have ye not built me a house of cedar ?. . 
Moreover, the Lord telleth thee that the Lord will make thee a house. 


1 Mark xiv. 28= Matt. xxvi. 33. 

* According to the Midrash Jalqut to Deut. xxxiii. το, the temple ought tc 
have been built originally on Mt. Tabor. See A. Schweitzer, loc. cit., pp. 30¢ 
and 433}. που, κι Ὁ, 4 B.J., i. 33. 2-43; Ant., xvii. §§ 149-58 

δ Vita, xii. ὃ 65. 6 2 Sam. vii. 5 sqq. 


‘DESTROY THIS TEMPLE ’ 497 


God desires nothing better than the holy tabernacle which was 
brought with his people from the wilderness, which Moses by his 
command erected according to the heavenly pattern that was 
shown to him, and which David after its many wanderings estab- 
lished on the top of Mt. Zion. 

When Zerubabel wanted to rebuild the destroyed temple, the 
voice of a prophet ' was heard against this project : 


‘So saith the Lord, ‘‘ The heaven is my throne, and the earth the 
footstool of my feet: what manner of house would ye build me, and 
what manner of place that I should rest there? Did not my hand 
make all these things? ”’’ 


As Luke, while in his Gospel suppressing the ‘ I will destroy 
this temple’ of the witness mentioned by Mark, later on alludes 
to these very words in the trial of Stephen, so do we find in this 
report of Stephen’s speech ? all the ideas necessary for the under- 
standing of the words of Jesus about pulling down and rebuilding : 


‘ Our fathers had the tabernacle of the testimony in the wilderness, 
even as He appointed who spake unto Moses, that he should make it 
according to the pattern he had seen. Which (tabernacle) also our 
fathers, in their turn, brought in with Joshua when they entered on 
the possession of the nations, which God thrust out before the face 
of our fathers, unto the days of David; who found favour in the 
sight of God and asked to find a tent-dwelling (σκήνωμα) for the God 
of Jacob. But Solomon built him a house. Howbeit the Most High 
dwelleth not in (houses) made with hands ; as saith the prophet,? 
‘The heaven is my throne, and the earth the footstool of my feet : 
what manner of house will ye build me? saith the Lord, or what is 
the place of my rest ? Did not my hand make all these things ? ” 
Ye stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, ye do always 
resist the Holy Ghost : as your fathers did, so do ye.’ 


If the building of Solomon’s temple was sinful disobedience to 
their fathers’ God, who, like the Rekhabite tent-dwellers, would 
live in no fixed abode but only in a tabernacle, then the conclusion 
is obvious, ‘ Destroy this temple, and in three days will I build 
it up,’ even as God had promised by the mouth of the prophet 
Amos: 4 


‘In that day will I raise up the tabernacle of David that is 
fallen.’ 


What the carpenter Jesus promises to build up ‘in three days’ 
—in the few days remaining until the paschal feast of the exodus 
to freedom in the wilderness—and what could easily be built up in 
that time, is a new portable tabernacle of a few wooden poles, a 


* Isaiah \xvi. 1 sqq.; cf. A. v. Gall, Βασιλεία Θεοῦ, Heidelberg, 1926, p. 189 n. 4. 
2 Acts vii. 44-51. 3. Isaiah \xvi. I sq. 
* ix. II, a passage quoted by James, the brother of Jesus, in Acts xv. 16. 


21 


498 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


few planks of acacia, a few rugs, coverings, and skins, just like that 
sanctuary which the pious-minded fathers had built for them- 
selves with the work of their own hands and decorated with the 
ornaments lovingly offered by their wives. 

Down with that towering gold and marble temple of the foreign 
despots, desecrated by its idol! Up with that empty, simple 
hut, the modest image of the world-wide heavenly tabernacle, in 
which the God of the wilderness dwells, and which will accompany 
the elect on the march to freedom! ‘Destroy this temple, and in 
three days will I build it up.’ 

ΕἼ will raise up the tabernacle of David that is fallen and close up 
the breaches thereof, and I will raise up its ruins and I will build it 
as in the days of old ; that they may conquer the remnant of Edom," 
and all the nations which were called by my name, saith the Lord 
that doeth this. Behold the days come, saith the Lord, that the 
ploughman shall overtake the reaper, and the treader of grapes him 
that soweth seed ; and the mountains shall drop sweet wine, and all 
the hills shall melt. And I will bring back the captivity of my people 
Israel, and they shall build the waste cities and inhabit them, and 
they shall plant vineyards and drink the wine thereof ; they shall 
also make gardens and eat the fruit of them. And I will plant them 
upon their land, and they shall no more be plucked up out of their 
land which I have given them, saith the Lord thy God.’ ἢ 


The idea that God himself or the Messiah would destroy 
Herod’s temple and replace it by another was not unknown to the 
Jews. Toward the end of that remarkable apologetic pageant of 
symbolical animals in the Book of Enoch * we read that the © Lord 
of the sheep ’ 

‘folded up that old house: they carried off all the pillars . . . and 
laid it in a place in the south of the land. And I looked on until the 
Lord of the sheep brought a new house greater and loftier than that 
first one, and set it up in the place of the first which had been folded 
up: allits pillars were new, and its ornaments were new and larger 
than those of the first, the old one which he had taken away.’ 


But in this baroque bit of fancy the Jews imagine the temple 
of the last times even greater and more magnificent than the 
extravagantly splendid building of Herod. On the other hand, 
the dream of the followers of the old Rekhabite religion of the 
prophets, that one day the homely tabernacle of the wilderness 
period would reappear, was faithfully cherished by the Samaritans. 
The Samaritan messiah mentioned by Josephus* as one who 


1 The usual expression at that time for the Idumaean dynasty of the Herodians 
and the Roman empire. 

2 Amos ix. 11-15. 

3 xc, 28 sg. On this strange document, cf. my Orphisch-dionysische Mysterien- 
gedanken, p. 212 sqq. 

4 Ant., xviil. 4. I. 


‘DESTROY THIS TEMPLE ’ 499 


‘thought little of a lie’ and adroitly arranged the whole matter to 
catch the public ear, is probably no other than Simon Magus, a 
native of Gitta. Of him Josephus narrates that he undertook to 
show his countrymen on the top of Mt. Garizim the sacred objects 
(ra ἱερὰ σκεύη) hidden there by Moses. The whole scheme was 
based on nothing but the old popular belief that at the end of this 
era of divine wrath and at the beginning of the new age of mercy 
Joshua (Ἰησοῦς) would ‘return’ (fa’eb) and re-establish the 
tabernacle with the ark of the covenant.} 

One form of this legend occurred in the lost works of Nehemiah, 
used by the author of the second book of Maccabees ;? here 
Nehemiah replaced Zerubabel as the builder of the second temple, 
and the old tabernacle, the ark, and the altar of incense are hidden 
in a cave on Mt. Nebo. If one reads carefully the passage in 
Stephen’s speech in Acts vii. 46 previously discussed, and asks 
oneself why it is said of David that he found favour in the 
sight of God and therefore asked God that he might μη a taber- 
nacle (εὑρεῖν σκήνωμα), not that he might build one, in contrast 
to the disobedient, ambitious Solomon, who, instead of the taber- 
nacle ‘ found’ through God’s mercy by David, presumed to build 
a new permanent house for God, it is apparent that an Haggadic 
answer must have been discovered in Ps. cxxxii. 5 to the question 
whether the tent for the ark mentioned in 2 Sam. vi. 17 was 
the old tabernacle, and, if so, how David could have ‘found’ it. 
Stephen, or Luke, must have known of a midvash in which it was 
said that God, in answer to the prayer of King David, had allowed 
him to find the right place on the top of Mt. Zion, and in the cave 
thereunder the old tabernacle of the wilderness wondrously con- 
cealed. As a matter of fact, in a newly discovered Jeremiah 
apocryphon ? the prophet Jeremiah, before the destruction of the 
temple by the Babylonians, conceals the high-priestly gown of 
Aaron under the corner-stone of the sanctuary—that is, under the 
holy rock, the sakhra on Mt. Zion. 

Accordingly, the Messiah b. David must also have been ex- 
pected on his manifestation to renew that sanctuary which God 
himself had once ordered to be erected, the ‘ true tabernacle’ in 
which from henceforth God’s Shekinah would graciously take its 
abode among men. In his words about the destruction of Herod’s 
temple and the building of another sanctuary in three days, Jesus 
undertook to fulfil this expectation. But as it was utterly alien to 
the genius of the messianic renovator of the law of God to search 
in some mouldy underground cavern, or maybe in the unknown 


1 Cf. Poznanski, Der Schilo, p. 286 sq.; A. Merx, Beih. xvii. z. Φ A.L LW, 
Giessen, 1909, pp. 28 and 43. Moses Gaster, Asatiy, London, 1927, p. 9 

2 ii. 4-6; according to verset 13, derived from the ‘ records of Nehemiah? 

° Ed: A: "Mingana, Bull. John Rylands Libr., xi, (1927), No. 2. 


500 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


tomb of the first lawgiver, for the old stone tables of the covenant, 
instead of engraving the new law upon the tables of the heart of 
the elect, so was it far from his thought to work a delusive miracle 
and to rediscover beneath the earth, or in some genizah of the 
temple,! the ‘remains’ of the old ‘ fallen tabernacle of David.’ 
The son of the carpenter courageously undertook to build afresh 
a new tabernacle in three days. A new ‘tent of witness” was 
to accompany the new Israel into the wilderness on the road 
to freedom. 


THE COUNTERSTROKE : THE MASSACRE IN THE TEMPLE 


Jesus could be under no delusion as to the fact that his attack 
on the bankers, the cattle-dealers, and finally on the temple itself, 
was bound to make the ruling hierocracy his deadly enemies, and 
that he would have to deal not only with these Jewish opponents 
but also with the Romans. He was prepared for an armed en- 
counter, and expected himself to be taken prisoner and executed. 

Since he had determined neither to flee nor to offer resistance, 
and must have said to himself that the enemy would concentrate 
their attack upon him, he could hardly expect any other fate, 
unless God intervened at the last moment, granting victory to the 
little band and thus ‘ letting the cup pass from him.’ If he fell 
into the hands of his Jewish opponents, who did not possess the 
ius gladii, it was to be feared that they would deliver him up to 
the Romans.? Seeing that at the last supper he predicted that his 
body would be broken like bread, his blood poured out like wine, 
he cannot, as has rightly been recognized,? have expected the 
shameful death of slaves and criminals on the cross, by which his 
body would not be divided, nor his blood poured forth in streams. 
He must clearly have thought that after the engagement he would 
be beheaded or hewn in pieces by his furious foes.4 That was 
precisely the end of the messiah ὃ Theudas, who, while attempting 
to cross the Jordan with his followers, was surprised and taken 
alive by thecavalry of Fadus—that he was hewn in pieces.® Infact, 
the fate of Agag, the king of the Amalekites, who was defeated by 


1 According to Tosephta Sota, xiii. 1 (W. Bacher, Encyclop. of Relig. and 
Ethics, vol. vi. p. 187a), the sanctuary erected by Moses was ‘concealed’ at the 
building of the temple of Solomon. 

2 Mark x. 35 sq.; Luke xviii. 33 sq. 

8. Goetz, Das Abendmahl, Leipzig, 1920 (Unters. zum N.T., ed Windisch, 
viii. 17). 

4 In Sukkah, xxxii. 9, the Messiah Ὁ. Joseph killed in battle is called πὸ, 
but 54 means ‘to kill with the sword ’—in particular, ‘to behead ’ (see Levy, 
Nhb. Wb., i. 490b, s.v. haevaeg and harigah). 

6 Origen was aware that Theudas figured as the Messiah: cf. In Joann., vi. ; 
PG, X1V217: 

8 Acts v. 36 (D*), διελύθη. 


THE ROMAN COUNTERSTROKE 501 


Saul, shows that, according to the martial law of primitive Israel, 
a captured enemy king was ‘hewn in pieces before the Lord,’ 1 just 
as the Arabs after a successful battle were accustomed to make an 
offering, occasionally a human offering, as a nagqi‘a, literally (an 
offering) ‘ hewn in pieces.’? Since the cavalry of the Romans in 
Palestine, the renowned ala Sebastenorum,’ consisted of Samaritans, 
Theudas was doubtless not decapitated according to Roman 
custom,’ but in the old Israelitish fashion hewn or hacked in 
pieces. 

Jesus was not prepared for the servile supplicium of crucifixion, 
but for the horrible sanguinary fate of kings—to be hewn in pieces 
before the Lord ; of Roman legislation on the punishment of an 
auctor seditionts he had scarcely thought. 

For the rest, he must have hoped that the counterstroke of the 
Romans would be delayed long enough to leave him time to issue 
the summons for the new exodus to the Jews now streaming 
together for the Passover from every quarter of the known world. 
In order that none of them might lose the opportunity of hearing 
this decisive proclamation—in order, too, that, as God of old had 
commanded Moses, the march might begin on the day of the feast— 
he must have deferred the departure of his followers into the desert, 
visible, in the near distance, from the camp of his small force on the 
Mount of Olives. That thereby a possibility of success, a chance 
of anticipating the Koman attack by hasty flight, was sacrificed, 
no one will believe who takes into account the superior rapidity of 
the Roman auxiliary cavalry in comparison with such a slow- 
moving procession of people mounted at best on asses and mules. 
As at a later date the governor Catullus easily overtook and cut 
down the bands of Jonathan, the weaver of Cyrene, on their exodus 
into the wilderness,® so would it probably have fared with this 
exodus even had the measure been sped up. In the existing con- 
dition of things the partisans of Jesus can only have hoped by 
battles around the temple on the north and around the southern 
extremity of the city walls, to be mentioned immediately, and 
finally by a stubborn rearguard action on the Mount of Olives, to 
hold up the Romans until the rest were in safety ; and even this 
plan could have a prospect of success only if the numbers of in- 
surgents who joined the Galilaean rebels far exceeded those of the 
enemy, and if the Romans were not, through treachery, apprised 
beforehand of all his intentions and the moment fixed for their 
execution. 

1 y Sam. xv. 33. 

2 Robertson Smith, The Religion of the Semites, p. 491; cf. p. 363. 

8. Schiirer, 14, pp. 460-2 (Engl. trans., voli. 2, p. 52 n. 51). 

ὁ In 4 B.c., for example, Varus had beheaded the messiah Simon of Peraea ; 


cf. above, p. 264 n. 3. 
6 Cf. above, p. 362,. 


502 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


The Roman attack came more quickly than the Galilaeans had 
thought. Indeed, from the brief words of Josephus ? to the effect 
that Pilate ‘sent and slew many of the multitude,’ no inference 
can be drawn as to the moment and the details of the counterstroke. 
But from the trustworthy statements of the Synoptists that the 
arrest of Jesus followed immediately after the paschal supper, held 
in secret, we may infer with a good deal of probability that the 
troops had appeared on the scene as early as the afternoon of the 
‘day of preparation,’ at the time when the paschal lambs were 
ordinarily killed at the great altar in the temple, and forthwith 
had begun to cut down the multitude. 

Pilate himself has not hesitated on another occasion to employ 
against the Jews 2 the practice of the sicarit of concealing weapons 
beneath civilian garb and then swiftly producing them, a practice 
by means of which the temple was occupied by the insurgents in 
the time of Archelaus and probably also on the occasion of Jesus’ 
triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Against a cohort approaching in 
arms, the huge city doors, or at least the temple gates, could be 
promptly closed and then the almost impregnable fortifications 
could be defended for a long time. On the other hand, nothing was 
easier than to mix the Samaritan auxiliary troops—who of course 
knew the vernacular, and carried concealed weapons—among the 
procession of Jewish pilgrims streaming into town, and thus to 
introduce them in overpowering strength into the temple. Once 
a sufficiently superior number had forced their way in, the mass of 
the insurgents could by a sudden and ruthless attack with drawn 
swords be easily dispersed and ejected from the sanctuary. 

These conclusions, derived from purely tactical considerations, 
are confirmed when we insert in its proper context a conversation 
of Jesus with his disciples, which in its present position in Luke 
xiii. 1-6 is wholly unintelligible : 

‘ Now there came at this time some who told him of the Galilaeans, 
whose blood Pilate had mingled with their sacrifices. And he answered 
and said unto them, Think ye that these Galilaeans were sinners 
above all the Galilaeans, because they have suffered these things ? 
I tell you, Nay: but, except ye repent, ye shall all in like manner 
perish.’ 

Thereupon the bewildered messengers ask further : 

‘And what about those eighteen upon whom the tower in Siloam 

fell and killed them ? ’ 


To which Jesus replies : 


‘Think ye that they were offenders above all the inhabitants of 
Jerusalem? I tell you, Nay: but, except ye repent, ye shall all 
likewise perish.’ 


1 Cf. above, p. 385 Il. 1 f. 2B. 6.43 ant, κάτι, 3 2. 


THE ROMAN COUNTERSTROKE 503 


In these words the various commentaries profess to find a mere 
general theoretical reflection on the connexion between guilt and 
Divine punishment, or, as it has been expressed, the contribution 
of Jesus to the problem of Job. There actually appear to be 
scholars who think that Jesus could have said that all his contem- 
poraries who do not repent (i.e. generally repent of their evil life) 
will ‘likewise perish’ (πώντες @cavtws)—in other words, all the 
unrepentant will sooner or later be struck on the head by a falling 
tower or slaughtered with the sword by the Romans while in the 
act of slaying their own sacrifice at the altar. Evenif the absurdity 
of this is mitigated according to certain MSS. by the substitution 
of ὁμοίως 1 for ὡσαύτως in both sentences, the ordinary interpreta- 
tion represents Jesus as having explained to his disciples, like some 
Pharisaic bookkeeper of divine justice, that all catastrophes in 
nature and history are the normal and necessary retribution for 
unrepented sin. And all that long after the disillusioned Solomon 
b. David had seen ‘the wicked buried and go (in peace), while they 
that had done right must depart from the holy place and be for- 
gotten in the city,’ * and long after he had found ‘righteous men 
unto whom it happeneth according to the work of the wicked,’ and 
also ‘wicked men to whom it happeneth according to the work of 
the righteous’; and again, ‘there is a righteous man that 
perisheth in his righteousness, and there is a wicked man that pro- 
longeth (his life) in his evildoing,’ * and ‘All things come alike to 
all: there is one event to the righteous and to the wicked, to the 
clean and to the unclean, to him that sacrificeth and to him that 
sacrificeth not: as is the good, so is the wicked’; or, as Job 
complains, ‘It is all one ; therefore I say, He destroyeth the perfect 
and the wicked; the tents of the robbers prosper and they that 
provoke God are secure.’® Ata time when pedantic and mislead- 
ing books are written and read on ‘Jesus as a philosopher,’ the 
ordinary commentator does not shrink from foisting upon him 
the superficial and contemptible wisdom of the interpolator who 
wrote between the lines of the above passages from Ecclesiastes, 
‘Because sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, 
because the sinner doeth evil a hundred times and still prolongs 
his ways, the heart of the sons of men is emboldened in them to 
do evil.’? He does not shrink from attributing to the Master the 
childish doctrine that it is only a question of time before all sinners 
are overtaken here upon earth by the so-called punishment of 
God, although even a poorly instructed scholar could reply from 
Scripture, ‘Ask them that go by, ye will not mistake their tokens,’ 


1.1.6. ‘in a similar way.’ | . <¢ 

5. Eccles. viii. 10. 3 ee vill. 14. 

4 [bid., vil. 15. © [bid 1%. 2: 

6 Job ix, 22, xi. 6, 7 Eccles. vill. 11 sq. 


504 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


(how often it happens) ‘ that the evil man is spared from the day 
of calamity ; on the day of wrath they are led away.’ } 

And yet no one can be ignorant of the fact that Jesus, like all 
messianists of his time, expected a totally different adjustment of 
the manifest injustices of this world through the coming of ‘the 
future world,’ in which those who have suffered and struggled here 
will enjoy the bliss of the kingdom of God, from which the wicked 
will be excluded and ‘ cast out’; while that saying of his in the 
Fourth Gospel on the man born blind? palpably proves that his 
conception of guilt and punishment is completely in line with that 
of the Book of Job. It is therefore imperative to seek for an 
explanation of the passage in Luke which does not drive us to 
such inconsistencies. 

Now, it is an established fact, repeated from the time of Papias * 
down to the latest representatives of the ‘ formgeschichtliche 
Schule,’ that the actions and utterances of Jesus have not been 
transmitted in their strict historical order. 

It is obvious, for instance, that the narrative of the attack on 
the money-changers and cattle-dealers and of the challenge to 
destroy the temple has, by the last editor of the Fourth Gospel, 
been violently torn from its historically significant and true posi- 
tion in connexion with the events which inevitably led to the 
arrest and condemnation of Jesus,* and has been artificially and 
tendentiously transferred to the opening of his public ministry. 
The object of this deliberate manipulation of the text is evident. 
It is intended to render impossible the sort of argument used by 
those who find the condemnation of Jesus as a rebel who ‘stirreth 
up the people ’° amply justified by these proceedings, admitted 
even by Christians. This was accomplished by giving a version 
of the story which, while not suppressing or contesting these things 
(it was far too late for that), maintained that neither the Jews nor 
the Romans had ever regarded these measures of Jesus as an 
occasion for any judicial procedure. On the contrary, after these 
actions he is supposed to have been able to teach and work, quite 
unmolested, for several years more. 

Similarly, we were able to show ὃ that Luke omitted in their 
true place the words of Mark, whose Gospel he knew quite well, 
‘I will destroy this temple,’ and instead introduced some quite 
inconspicuous words into the ‘false’ accusations of the Jews, 
brought forward against Stephen in the second volume of his 
historical work. 

1 Job xxi. 29 sq. 

° John ix. 3: ‘ Neither did this man sin nor his parents.’ 
8 Ap. Euseb., H.£., iii. 39. 15 sq. 

* Cf. Roland Schuetz, Z.N.T.W., viii. (1907), p. 247 sq. 

> Luke xxiii. 5. 

® Cf. above, p. 497. 


THE ROMAN COUNTERSTROKE 505 


We are therefore perfectly justified in assuming that there has 
been a similar displacing in the case of Luke xiii. 1-4, and in trans- 
posing the two ‘Job’s messages’ which are brought to Jesus to 
their natural place in the narrative of events, immediately before 
his arrest. 

Berendts' has already expressed the opinion, heartily supported 
by Goethals, that when Josephus tells us that ‘(Pilate) sent and had 
many of the people slaughtered,’ the same event might be referred 
to as in Luke xiii. τ. This contention is the less to be rejected in 
that so far no other reasonable explanation has been offered of this 
story of the massacre of the Galilaeans at their sacrifices in the 
temple. If it refers to the counter-attack of Pilate on the 
Galilaeans who had pressed into the temple with Jesus, and who 
in the time-honoured manner on the afternoon of the ‘ day of 
preparation ἡ were busy with the slaughter of the paschal lambs,? 
while Jesus with his companions had already left the temple and 
was on the way to the house in which the supper had been prepared 
for him, then the reported words at once become intelligible. 
Jesus then does not speak in general terms of ‘repentance’ for a 
sinful life, but quite simply of a ‘return’ from the path which had 
led to this catastrophe, of repentance for the deeds of violence just 
perpetrated. 

He asks the messengers whether they believe that their killed 
comrades were worse sinners than all the other Galilaeans who had 
taken part in the revolt, and at once answers his own question in 
the negative: on the contrary, all who do not ‘ return,’ or, if the 
Greek word must be kept, ‘repent’ of what they have done, will in 
like manner perish. Here we have, not an absurd general state- 
ment on sin, punishment, and ‘repentance warding off the decree 
of fate,’ but a perfectly sound pronouncement on very definite 
events thoroughly in keeping with the time and subject-matter. 
If it is asked what the Galilaeans had to repent of, what they had 
done contrary to the will of Jesus, one has only to recall the words 
of Mark xv. 7 on the ‘rebels who in the insurrection had com- 
mitted manslaughter.’ No one will wish to believe that Jesus, 
who only after a hard struggle of conscience had decided to allow 
his followers to bear arms in self-defence, could therefore have also 
sanctioned the suggestion of the Zealots ‘to enter into the city and 
cut down Pilate and the Romans.’ Not even Josephus, to whom 
we owe this information as to the Zealots’ plans—in other words, 

1 Op. cit., p. 48 sq. 

2 This is no contradiction to Jesus’ attitude toward the cattle-dealers and the 
sacrificial cult. For it does not follow that Jesus wholly rejected the slaughter 
of beasts after the manner of the Baptist, and it is furthermore extremely likely 
that in many things his followers did not carry out their Master’s injunctions. 


Possibly he and the Twelve kept a Passover without a paschal lamb, whilst the 
outer circle kept it in the traditional manner, 


506 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


not even the Roman prosecutor—had ventured to charge him with 
giving any sanction whatsoever to this plan of attack. Even the 
historian who is entirely uninfluenced by any idealizing and 
apologetic aims may confidently presume, after all that is known 
with certainty of Jesus and his teaching, that before his entry into 
Jerusalem he had most strictly enjoined his followers to avoid all 
bloodshed so far as that was at all possible. On the other hand, 
every one who knows the hot-headed Jewish Zealots of that time 
and the Galilaeans, the most combative of them all, cannot but 
believe that blades once drawn by such fanatics would not be 
sheathed again before blood had flown. 

Any one knowing the world and humanity in general, and 
Jerusalem, Galilee, and Rome in particular, not through Sunday 
sermons alone, knows, without having read Mark xv., that, if not 
the attack on the money-changers, at least that on the cattle- 
dealers must have cost not a few men’s lives. In the whole world 
there is not an ox-driver who would let either his herd or his master 
be driven from the market by a stranger without drawing his knife 
and striking and stabbing his opponent. The kingly prophet, of 
whom even official prosecutors said that he ‘ did nothing high- 
handed’ but ‘ only with a word prepared everything,’ must have 
watched with dismay the excesses to which the unchained passions 
of his own followers carried them. The horror of the peacemaker, 
who saw himself drawn into the bloody battles of this world, as 
soon as the sword which he was to bring was drawn, as soon as the 
fire which he was to cast was kindled—this dismay quivers yet in 
the words ‘ except ye repent (or desist) ye shall all in like manner 
perish.’ What he had willed and planned was the exodus into the 
wilderness, screened, if necessary, by an armed rearguard defence, 
but no stubborn battle with the Romans for the possession of the 
temple and city of Jerusalem, which meant nothing to him and, 
according to his deepest conviction, were doomed to inevitable 
ruin in the messianic war of the princes of this world. 


THE FALL OF THE TOWER OF SILOAM 


The best proof of the correctness of this interpretation o= 
Luke xiii. 1 lies in the fact that it also at once explains the follow- 
ing question and answer concerning the fate of the eighteen 
inhabitants of Jerusalem who were killed by the falling tower 
of Siloam. 

As early as 1920 the director of the Edmond de Rothschild 
excavations in Jerusalem, the French officer of engineers and pro- 
fessor of Egyptology at the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes of the 
University of Paris, Major Raymond Weill,’ conjectured that ‘the 

1 La cité de David, compte-vendu des fouilles exécutées ἃ Jévusalem suy le stie 
de la ville primitive, campagne de 1913-14, Paris, 1920, p. 118. 


PLATE XXXIV 


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THE TOWER OF SILOAM EXCAVATED BY MAJOR RAYMOND WEILL 
FOR BARON EDMOND DE ROTHSCHILD 


THE SOUTHERNMOST TOWER OF THE FORTIFICATIONS OF JERUSALEM BATTERED 


DOWN DURING THE COUNTER ATTACK OF THE ROMANS AGAINST THE FOLLOWERS 
OF JESUS, EIGHTEEN OF WHICH WERE CRUSHED UNDER ITS RUINS. (LC. XIII, 1-4) 
(SEE P, 508, NOTE 2) 


THE TOWER OF SILOAM OVERTHROWN 507 


tower in Siloam ’ mentioned in this passage was one of the towers 
of the city wall of Jerusalem then rediscovered. In ignorance of 
the results of these excavations, Dr. Billerbeck,} merely on the 
ground of the statements in Josephus 5 concerning the course of 
the city wall in the neighbourhood of the pool of Siloam, made the 
same conjecture, without realizing, however, that this hypothesis 
is quite incompatible with the ordinary assumption that the fall of 
this tower was accidental. for who can believe that the magister 
fJabrorum of the Roman army of occupation was so remiss in his 
supervision as to allow fortifications, only recently restored by 
Herod the Great after Pompey’s storming of the city, to fall into 
such decay that one of the towers could collapse by itself ? Nor 
can we explain Luke xi. 4 by an earthquake, for the author would 
certainly not have omitted to mention this dramatic detail in his 
picture of Divine punishment. Dr. Billerbeck himself quotes 
the thoroughly trustworthy Rabbinic tradition® that there had 
never been a case of the fall of a building in Jerusalem, a fact 
adduced as one of the ‘ten wonders which were granted to our 
fathers in the sacred place,’ but which finds its natural explanation 
in the fact that the whole city stood upon solid rock. 

If this tower—which must have been a fortress tower, for at the 
time there can have been neither steeple nor minaret 4—did not 
collapse of itself, then it must have been deliberately overthrown 
by some one with heavy siege machinery. If, moreover, in the 
connected sentence ὃ it is Pilate who has the Galilaeans massacred 
in the temple, it is surely not too bold to assume that the same 
Roman governor is responsible for the assault on and overthrow 
of ‘the tower in Siloam.’ If, according to the conjecture of 
Bernhard Weiss, now confirmed and only slightly modified by the 
Halésis of Josephus, the Galilaeans in question were in revolt 
against the Romans and therefore fell victims to the Roman sword, 
then the same will also doubtless be true of the Jerusalemites, 
who were holding and defending the tower of Siloam. For 
why else should the Romans have attacked and overthrown 
with battering-ram and testudo a tower of their own garrison 
town ? 

On the basis of these, in my opinion convincing, considerations, 
I have not hesitated before this ® to conclude that the Galilaeans, 

1 Strack-Billerbeck, ii. 197. ΞΘ, Vis § 45; 

3 Aboth de R. Nathan, 35. 

4 Nor can there be any question of this tower having been one of the fortified 
tower-like houses of the dominating families, a building of the type found in the 
mediaeval Italian cities and also in the territory of the ancient Axumites or 
Minaeans and Sabaeans. For, quite aside from the question whether such towers 
existed in Jerusalem (the πύργος of Luke xiv. 28 is clearly a fortress tower), the 
same would hold true for a tower of this kind. Imagine the Bargello of Florence 


tumbling down accidentally ! os 
δ Luke xii. τ. δ Alio, Xx. (1926), p. 495. 


508 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


who at the entry of Jesus broke into the city from the Mount of 
Olives, occupied the temple, while the Barjonim of Jerusalem, 
who had made common cause with them, surprised the guards and 
seized the tower of Siloam, so that Pilate in his counter-attack had 
to reconquer both places. 

The procedure of the rebels is strategically quite intelligible. 
A glance at the map shows that the fortified temple with its fort 
Antonia dominates the northern portion of the city. On the other 
hand, it appears from Josephus * that for any officer making the 
round of Jerusalem along the battlements, to assure himself that 
the city was quiet and in the hands of the garrison, Siloam formed 
the terminal point of his tour of inspection, quite naturally, since 
the pool of Siloam lay at the extreme south—-more precisely the 
south-east— of the city, and at the same time at the southern point 
of the old city of David. Any one holding Antonia in the north 
and the city tower ‘on the Siloah’ at the southern extremity, even 
though the Roman cohors equitata with a squadron of Samaritan 
cavalry were still in occupation of Herod’s palace on the western 
hill, could well consider himself master of Jerusalem. In view of 
the comparative weakness of the Roman garrison in Palestine, the 
position of Pilate was extremely serious if the country, roused 
by the bands of pilgrims streaming back after the feast, joined 
in the revolt. 

It is thus intelligible that the governor should, before the arrival 
of the day of the Passover, bend all his efforts on recovering his 
hold on the city and on laying hands on him who had been pro- 
claimed king of the Jews by the insurgents. 

As for the ‘ tower in Siloam,’ this singular phrase is now finally 
explained by the further excavations of M. Raymond Weill * and 
the discovery of the southernmost point of the city walls of 
Jerusalem. Siloam, in Hebrew S/uiloah, means literally ‘ emis- 
sary’ ° (from shalah, ‘send,’ ‘emit’), i.e. ‘aqueduct,’ and the whole 
valley is called the valley of Shiloah, after the waterworks which 
in primaeval times were constructed underground alongside the 
walls to carry the water from the spring situated in the north of the 
city of David into the reservoir in the little valley of the ‘cheese- 
makers’ (Z'yvopoeon) to the south of this hill. The ‘ tower in 
Siloam ’ is the tower standing upon or above the aqueduct with 
the object of defending this important structure. 

The peculiar configuration of this valley with its watercourse 
may perhaps throw light on a remarkable tradition concerning the 
capture of the old Jebusite stronghold of Jerusalem by King 


a Bef. Me 162:2;.5-3 
2 Revue des études ΣΙΝ 1926, Ixxxil. pp. 103-110. t am indebted to Major 
Weill for his specially prepared sketches, Pls. xXxxiv.-v.; and his photograph, 
Pl. XXXVI. 3 Thus John ix. 7: ἀπεσταλμένος. 


PLATE XXXV 


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of primitive cisgerp 


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Raymond Wer L{ 


SECTION OF THE TOWER OF SILOAM 
SHOWING THE ROCK FISSURE CONNECTING ITS BASEMENT WITH THE WATER-TUNNEL 
(SHILOAH) 


(SEE P. 508, NOTE 2) 


THE RUINS OF THE TOWER OF SILOAM 509 


David. Many years ago, in a notice ! on Parker’s excavations on 
Ophel, I pointed out that the much-debated sentence in 2 Sam. 
ν. ὃ becomes clear and intelligible if the word bas-sinnor, 

‘through the watercourse,’ be transposed to a previous line, so 
that the reading 15: 


. 6. “ And the king and his men went to Jerusalem against the 
Je busites, the inhabitants of the land ; and they spake unto David 
saying, Thou shalt not come hither, but the blind and the lame 
shall turn thee away (meaning, David cannot come in hither).? 
v.7. ᾿ Nevertheless David took the stronghold of Zion (that is the 
city of David) * through the watercourse. 
v. 8. ‘And David said on that day, Whosoever smiteth the Jebu- 
sites hits also the lame and the blind, that are hated of David’s soul. 
Wherefore they say, Blind and lame come not into the house.’ 4 


At that time I believed that the ‘watercourse’ by which David 
penetrated into the fortress might be identified with the shaft dis- 
covered by Parker. But now it is a far more attractive theory to 
think of the cleft in the rock found by Major Weill (Pl. xxxvt1.) ὃ 
leading from the water-channels right into the basement of the 
‘tower above Siloam,’ that is, into the heart of the fortifications at 
the southern end of the old Jebusite stronghold. 

If in the time of Jesus it was still known, or could be read in 
better MSS. of the Books of Samuel than have come down to us, 
that King David made his way into Jerusalem at this spot, this 
may have had some influence on the decision of the Zealots to 
secure this particular tower. 

At all events, the fact that the word bas-sinnor, ‘ through the 
watercourse, NOW appears in a wrong position proves that it 
does not belong to the original narrative but is a marginal gloss 
incorporated into the text by a later copyist and at the wrong place. 
Verset 7, therefore, originally simply read: ‘ Nevertheless David 
took the stronghold of Zion.’ The marginal gloss ‘ through the 
watercourse’ was added later, at the time when the cleft, now re- 
discovered, was exposed in the construction of the new aqueduct, 
and the fable grew up that it was by this fissure that David 
reached the fortress. 

The ‘ tower above Siloam’ was certainly connected by tradition 


+ Frankfurter Zeitung, 28th May 1911, p. 147. 

* An old gloss giving the sense correctly ; the fortress is so strong that a 
garrison of blind men could repel every enemy. 

3 Gloss. 

4 Proverbial phrase, meaning that such persons, presumably smitten by God, 
bring ill-luck into the house. The customary phrase for dismissing such beggars 
at the door is here quaintly carried back to the time of David. Because of the 
prejudice against blind and crippled beggars, Jesus charitably commands the well- 
to-do to invite them, and not kinsmen and rich neighbours, to dinner and supper 
(Luke xiv. 13). 

5. See Major Weill’s detailed explanation, vol. ii. pp. 518 ff. of the Germ. edition. 


510 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


with David’s capture of Jerusalem. Whether it was the strategic 
importance of the place that determined their plans, or the desire 
of the followers of the new Messiah, the ‘Son of David,’ to link their 
proceedings to the history of the older King David, may be left an 
open question. In any case, the execution of their surprise attack 
was quite independent of its Davidic prototype ; for the rebels 
were within, not outside, the city, and had therefore no need to 
reach the tower by the rock chimney. All they had to do was to 
make an unexpected assault on the gates and overpower the weak 
garrison, to be in possession of a strong and dominating bastion 
which could without difficulty be secretly supplied with provisions 
and water through the fissure in the rock. 

The fate of the tower under the violent attack of the Roman 
artillery shows how gravely Pilate viewed the situation and how 
successfully he mastered it. 


THEY THAT WERE CRUCIFIED WITH HIM ‘IN THE SAME 
CONDEMNATION. THE LAST SUPPER 


With the massacre in the temple and at the tower of Siloam 
the insurrection might be regarded as quelled, though the real 
author of the sedition was still at large. At each of the places 
seized by the rebels one of the insurgents must have been in com- 
mand, and these two leaders are doubtless the two λῃσταί crucified 
on the right and left of Jesus, who ‘ under the same condemna- 
tion,’ ἢ i.e. ‘under the same sentence’ or on a similar charge, hung 
with him on the cross. Of these one cries to him, ἡ Art not thou 
the Messiah ? save thyself and us ’—very natural words if he had 
taken part in the undertaking of Jesus which had ended so dis- 
astrously, but hardly explainable if, according to the usual view, 
the speaker was a highwayman without the remotest connexion 
with Jesus and whom the Messiah had not the least reason to save. 
The words of the other λῃστής, over the historicity or lack of 
which there is no need to rack one’s brains (since it is the in- 
tention of the evangelist author that matters), are equally in- 
telligible under the circumstances. He blames the request of his 
companion as opposed to the will of God, who, according to the 
teaching of Jesus, requires the death and passion of the Messiah as 
the ‘ransom’ (Avtpov) or for the redemption (ge’ulah, λύτρωσις) 
of Israel. He himself is prepared loyally to share the ‘ cup’ with 
Jesus, his leader, king, and lord, and consequently receives the 
promise, “ To-day shalt thou be with me in the gan ’eden,’ in the 
‘ garden of the wilderness,’ 2 in that oasis lost since the day of the 

1 “ἐν τῷ αὐτῷ kpivati,’’ Luke xxiii. 40. 


* On ‘paradise’ situated not in heaven but on earth, cf. e.g. Theophil., 4d 
Autolyc., c. XXiv. 


PLATE XXXVI 


ENTRANCE INTO THE CREVICE BY THE TOWER OF SILOAM 
SECTION ON PLATE XXXV 
(SEE P. 509, NOTE 5) 


THE LAST SUPPER 511 


Fall, with the fountain and the fruit-trees beside the four streams, 
to which Jesus is about to be miraculously transferred, there to 
abide until his second coming. The confession, ‘ For we receive 
the due reward of our deeds: but this man hath done nothing 
amiss,’ just like the words of Jesus discussed above,” emphasizes 
the contrast between the actions of the lawless ones who had 
boldly undertaken to fight for freedom and the hberator-king and 
had shed blood in the fight, and Jesus’ own command, who had 
obviously directed them, on entering and occupying the city, to 
avoid any attack on their opponents, to let them come on quietly 
and to leave the issue to God. 

That Jesus himself and the Twelve were not captured by the 
Romans on their recovery of the temple and the southern city 
tower is at once explained by the moment when the surprise attack 
was made on the temple, namely, at the time of the slaughter of 
the paschal lambs. By that time Jesus had betaken himself with 
his disciples to the distant house, where in a closed upper chamber 
he still found some hours of quiet and composure to keep with his 
followers that parting meal which was to precede the exodus into 
the wilderness and the hard rearguard contests he expected. 
With a tranquillity which has its pale counterpart only in the part- 
ing discourses of Socrates with his disciples, Jesus reveals once 
more to his following his tragic forebodings of death and suffering, 
while pronouncing the inauguratory blessings of the festal meal, 
through the simple acted parables? of the breaking of the bread and 
the pouring out of the wine from the cup which he has blessed into 
the cups of the disciples. Linking his forebodings of death with 
an exposition of the eightieth Psalm, he reveals to them the mystery 
of the ‘ vine’ of David,’ i.e. of the vine of Israel described in the 
Psalter, the authorship of which used to be attributed to David: ἡ 
the vine brought by God out of Egypt, planted in the promised 
land and there made to flourish until its enclosing wall was broken 
down, so that the beasts of the field, the peoples of the world, 
could trample it under foot. Buta shoot still remains, from which 
a new vine is sprouting, the Son of man, the Messiah. As this 
Messianic offshoot of the vine of Israel, Jesus reveals himself in 
a grand symbolism? which must be a stray fragment from this 
paschal derashah, immediately preceding the prediction of the 
shedding of his blood, the blood of the ‘ vine of David,’ which will 


1 Cf. the identical words in Josephus, above, p. 429 n. 64. 

5. Cf. pp. 505 f. 

3 Similar symbolic actions in Ezek. xi. 3, xiv. 3, Xv. 11 sqqg.; Jerem. xvi 
2 TT, 
4 For what follows, cf. also Z.N.T.W., 1926, pp. 5-37, and The Quest, xiv. 
(1923), Ῥ- 322 546. Ἴ 

δ Cf. Didaché, 1x. τ. 6 2 Mace. il. 13. 

* John xv. 1 sqq. 


512 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


be spilled for many even as the vine lets its blood flow in the wine- 
press. He who is now going to his death will, after the last cup of 
this paschal meal, partake of wine no more until he returns to 
drink the new wine, the wine of the next vintage, with his followers. 
For then the messianic war of the nations will have spent itself, 
the affliction of the last days will be over, and Jesus, returning 
from the far-off “ garden of the desert’ to his faithful flock, will 
lead back the elect from the wilderness into their liberated country, 
marching before them to Galilee.! 

Aiter these parting words solemnly devoting the Master to his 
tragic fate, his companions sing the Hallel and repair * with him to 
the accustomed place * on the Mount of Olives, where the last 
remnants of the small band of the followers of the defeated king 
await him, and where the dispersed fugitives are to assemble from 
all quarters for the exodus which he is about to accomplish. In 
this walled piece of garden ground, called after an olive-press 
Gathsemamn, Jesus will pass in prayer his last rest before the 
decisive hour of the exodus and of the last fight, before the arrival 
of the pursuers who were being brought up by the traitor, as Jesus 
for some time must have been aware. Not to be taken by surprise, . 
he posts his three most trusted followers, Peter and the sons of 
Zebedee, as guards.* Returning after an hour, he finds them, tired 
out from the excitement of the day, asleep at their posts, and warns 
them once more to watch and to pray that God may spare them 
the final tribulation. 

Upto the last Jesus hopes for a miracle from God, who, if He only 
would, could save him from torture and death, bring on the king- 
dom without a πειρασμός, without those terrible ‘ birth-pangs ’ of 
the Messiah, and send down legions of heavenly hosts against the 
enemies of God’s suffering servant. But now as before, as in all 
those years of burning, unconquerable hope and expectation, as in 
the long centuries that have followed that fearful, fateful night, a 
pitiless, brazen heaven looms motionless, in impenetrable silence, 
above the tortured ‘Son of man.’ 

And the hour comes when the sufferer is delivered into the 
hands of sinners. The traitor approaches at the head of the 
Roman cohort, reinforced by the emergency constabulary of the 
high priests, volunteers armed hurriedly with knives and cudgels. 
The feeble attempt to offer armed resistance, in which one of the 

1 See above, pp. 496,.5, 510 n. 2, 419 ἢ. 2. 

* It is difficult to believe that the city gates were unguarded. Either the 
last supper was kept at a house outside and not, as represented in Mark xiv. 13. 
within the city, or one of the gates, on the east side of the city, was still in the 
hands of the followers of Jesus on the fatal night. 

3 Luke xxii. 39 (only) : ‘ as his custom was.’ 

* The clear command in Mark xiv. 34: ‘ Abide ye here and watch,’ is already 


in Matt. xxvi. 38, 40 (‘watch with me’), paraphrased and divested of its 
realistic sense. 


THE CRUCIFIED KING 513 


company of Jesus! inflicts a light wound on one of the high priest's 
party, Jesus himself orders to be abandoned.* The prisoner is led 
away, first to the palace of the high priest’s family on the Mount 
of Olives; where the band accompanying him make a brief halt, 
while Jesus is maltre and Paressed with threats and questions 
by the high priests, and while Peter, unrecognized, warms himself 
at the fire in the courtyard and thrice denies his Master. At 
length the soldiers again burst in and escort the prisoner before the 
Roman governor’s court-martial which forthwith assembles in the 
praetorium, i.e. in Herod’s palace on the west_of the city. The 
passing of sentence upon the auctor seditionts taken 1 flagranti and 
in the midst of armed followers, one of whom had offered violent 
resistance, certainly detained the court not an instant longer than 
was necessary. It was then still night* when, after further 
maltreatment and derision, the Roman soldiers with great glee 
invested the Saturnalia king (as they put it) with a mock crown 
and purple cloak. Whereupon the vanquished liberator was led 
off to the place of execution. In the bearing of the cross he was 
aided by a pilgrim just coming to the feast, who was met on the 
road to the city and pressed into this service. His name was Simon 
of Cyrene, whose two sons, Alexander and Rufus,’ afterwards 
became Christians and at the time when Mark wrote in Rome were 
well known in the community. He and the Galilaean women, 
who alone of all his erstwhile followers dared to watch the end 
from a short distance, heard the last despairing cry of the desolate 
dying martyr, ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me ? ' 


Mark xiv. 47 and parallels. Only John xviii. 16 names Peter. 
Matt. xxvi. 52. 

8 According to the astronomical calculations of M. Daniel Sidersky (Mém. Acad. 
Inser., xii. 2, Paris, 1911, p. 38), Passover night of the year 21 A.D. (above, p. 19 
1. 24) was the night from the 15th to the 16th of April. 

4 Mark xv. 21; a Rufus is mentioned in Paul’s salutations to the Roman 
Christians, Rom. xvi. 13 ; there is no reason why the two should not be identical. 


ti = 


2K 


XVII 


THE ‘ TITULUS’ ON THE CROSS AND THE PILLORY INSCRIPTION 
ON THE ‘ Door OF JESUS’ IN THE TEMPLE 


O the cross on which Jesus suffered and died there was 

affixed, according to Roman custom,! a ‘title’ (étulus),* 

an inscription stating his guilt,? more briefly an αἰτία," 
describing the Nasoraean as ‘king of the Jews.’ The wording 
was probably— 


ΟΥ̓ΤΟΣ ἘΣΤΙΝ ὅ IHZOYS O NAZOPAIOZ 
O ΒΑΣΙΛΕῪΣ ΤΩΝ IOYAAION. 


THIS IS JESUS THE NASORAEAN 
THE KING OF THE JEWS 


According to John ὃ and a number of MSS. of Luke, the inscrip- 
tion was written in Hebrew (or Aramaic), Latin, and Greek, clearly 
with a view to being understood by the greatest possible number 
of a polyglot population. The Fourth Gospel’ alone adds the 
thoroughly credible statement, for the invention of which no 
apparent reason can be imagined, that the high priests protested 
to Pilate against this inscription, saying that he ought not to have 
written ‘ the king of the Jews,’ but ‘ who called himself king of the 
Jews’; to which Pilate sharply retorted that the text of the 
inscription must stand as it was. 

- Both utterances may very well be historical. It is obvious 
that the designation of a hanged person as ‘ king of the Jews’ 
must have been regarded as an insult to the whole Jewish people, 
as the servile supplicitum of a true and lawful king of the 
Jews at the hands of a heathen governor would have been an 
intolerable national disgrace. The Sanhedrin must therefore in- 
evitably have expostulated to Pilate that he should alter the title 
indicating the cause of punishment, and the wording of their ex- 
postulation is indeed highly instructive for the understanding of 
the designation of Jesus in Josephus as ‘ the so-called Christ.’ 

? Sueton., Domit., 10; Calig., 32; Dio Cass., liv. 8; Euseb., H.E., v. 1. 44. 

2 John xix. ο. 

* Mark xv. 26: “ἐπιγραφὴ τῆς αἰτίας αὐτοῦ." 

Matt. xxvii. 37. 

® Mark xv. 26, cod. D, and the Gothic version of Ulfilas. 

§ John xix. 20. * John xix, 21, 
514 


THE ‘TITULUS’ AND THE PILLORY INSCRIPTION 515 


Equally intelligible is the Roman governor’s sharp rejection of 
the petition. In the first place, the question of the disputed 
legitimacy of this Davidic king was one to which the Roman was 
supremely indifferent. He would have hanged one of the recog- 
nized blue-blooded Davidides of Jerusalem with the same im- 
perturbability with which he executed this wandering carpenter 


and secret scion of royalty. Again, according to Roman law the 
acclamatio of a king by the asséiibled people, such as had 
admittedly been offered to Jesus, was a valid élévation to the 
throne. It was essential for Pilate, who had to justify in Rome 
not only the crucifixion of Jesus and the two other “λῃσταί 
but the wholesale massacre in the temple and at the tower of 
Siloam as well, to be able to impute to the Jewish people, as such, 
complicity in the messianic rising. He could not consider for a 
moment the idea of reporting that Jesus had merely given himself 
out to be a king, which in itself would not have constituted a 
crime. He had been proclaimed by the people their ruler and had 
exercised kingly power, if only for a brief period. Lastly, the 
specification of his “guilt” was an official extract from the sentence 
which had been pronounced, and he could not think of altering it 
on account of the protest of the hierarchs, of whose loyalty he was 
far from convinced, and of whom he might, not unreasonably, 
harbour a suspicion that they would probably have sided with 
the party of independence had the Romans been defeated by the 
Zealots. 

Rejected by Pilate, the high priests, as now appears from the 
Old Russian translation of the Haldsis of Josephus, took the neces- 
sary measures on their own ground and were careful to rectify the 
superscription on the cross, and this on the very spot where Jesus 
had held short-lived sway as a messianic king. 

In the fifth book of the Jewish War, as also in the older Capture 
of Jerusalem, we have a detailed description of the temple, drawn 
from a special source, a sort of ‘ guidebook’ through the sanctuary 
for the use of pilgrims, a work naturally composed before 70, and 
resembling the treatise Mzddoth in the Mishnah. In the passage 
relating to the separation of the outer court from the court of the 
women we read : 3 


‘ Proceeding across this (open court) towards the second (court of) 
the temple, one found it surrounded by a stone balustrade, three 
cubits high and of exquisite workmanship ; in this at regular intervals 
stood pillars (στῆ λα!) giving warning, some in Greek, others in Latin 
characters, of the law of purification, to wit, that no foreigner was 
permitted to enter the holy place, for so the second (enclosure of the) 
temple was called. It was approached from the (level of the) first 
(court) by fourteen steps; the area above was quadrangular and 


1 B.J., V. 193 $4ge 


516 ‘THE MESSIAH JESUS 


screened by a wall of its own . . . and there were two (gates) on the 
- east—necessarily, since in this quarter a special place of worship was 
walled off for the women.’ 


Corresponding to that, we have in the Russian, according to 
Berendts’ copy of cod. Mosc. Acad., 651, fol. 154 verso, the follow- 
ing text. The lines permit of easy retranslation into Greek: the 
Slavonic is given in the usual transliterated form. 


Vnetie stoechu stolpi ravni t na nich dttly gramotamt 

Ἔν αὐτῷ δ᾽ εἱστήκεσαν στῆλαι ἴσαι καὶ ἐπ᾽ αὐταῖς τίτλοι γράμμασιν 

In this stood pillars of equal size and on them inscriptions written 
ellinskymt it vrimskymt i idovskyvmi propovédajusie szakono 

“Ἑλληνικοῖς καὶ “Popatxots καὶ ᾿Ιουδαϊκοῖς προσημαίνοντες (τὸν) νόμον 
in Greek and Roman and Jewish proclaiming the law 

eistoté idane preidet vnutro inoplemenntks. to bo  (vto)ro 

(τῆς) ἁγνείας μηδένα παριέναι evtds ἀλλόφυλον. τὸ yap δεύτερον 
of holiness, nobody should enter (who is) of different race. For the second 

naricachu svetoe. at stepent prochodimo t na cetyri ugly 

ἐκαλεῖτο (τὸ) ἱερόν. τεσσαρεσκαίδεκα βαθμοῖς ἀναβατὸν καὶ εἰς τετράγωνον 

(court) was called the holy (place). By 14 steps it is approached and as a square 


sozdanb vrocho 
πεποίηται ava 

it is built above (the first court) 

ἡ nad témt titlamt cetvertae titla  wviseste témt (Ze) 


8 > ’ , “ , , lal A 
καὶ ἐπάνω τούτων (τῶν) τίτλων τέταρτος τίτλος ἐκρεμάσθη τοῖς αὐτοῖς μὲν 
And above those inscriptions a fourth inscription was hung in the same 


gramotamt pokasaa :Lsusa césarg ne carstvovavsa, raspetago ot 
γράμμασιν μηνύων: ᾿Ιησοῦν βασιλέα οὐ βασιλεύσαντα σταυρωθέντα ὑπὸ 
letters saying : ‘Jesus a king who did not reign was crucified by 
Ljudet zane propovédase 74 207 67116 grada t 
(τῶν) ᾿Ιουδαίων Sire ἐπροφήτευσε (τὴν) καθαίρεσιν (τῆς) πόλεως. καὶ 
(the) Jews because he foretold (the) destruction of (the) city and 


opusténte cerkut 
(τὴν) ἐρήμοσιν (τοῦ) ναοῦ. 
the desolation of (the) temple.’ 


Berendts has seriously obscured the meaning of this passage for 
himself and for his critics, who pronounced their opinions in 
ignorance of the Slavonic text, by his unfortunate rendering of the 
Slavonic ftély (--- τίτλοι, titult) by ‘tablets with inscriptions,’ although 
nothing is said about ‘ tablets,’ for which the word πίνακες would 
be used. The unwarranted introduction of this idea appears to 
produce an entirely gratuitous contradiction to the statements of 
the Greek Polemos and to archaeological discovery mentioned below. 

The Old Russian word stolpi, which in the first of the lines 


THE ‘TITULUS’ AND THE PILLORY INSCRIPTION 517 


quoted is reproduced by Greek στῆλαι, means literally ‘ pillars,’ 
‘posts,’ or ‘supports.’ The word στῆλαι in the Greek Polemos 
must also here mean ‘pillars,’ and cannot refer to a thin plate with 
an inscription incised or in relief, such as one thinks of when an 
archaeologist speaks of a stele. 

As is well known, in the year 1871 Clermont-Ganneau ! dis- 
covered one of these warning inscriptions built into a garden wall of 
an abandoned madrissah near the Bab el Atnein Jerusalem. In later 
mentions of this object one commonly reads of an inscribed ‘tablet,’ 
and Berendts himself has employed this misleading expression. 

In reality, the #tulus, which may now be seen in the Tshinili 
Kjéshk Museum in Constantinople, and on which marks of axes 
made, as Mommsen conjectured, by the soldiers of Titus are 
pointed out to the visitor, stood on a block of limestone 58 centi- 
metres high, 86 centimetres broad, and 37 centimetres deep. An 
illustration of this block is given on our Pl. xxxvu.; another, of the 
inscribed surface only, appears in Deissmann’s Licht vom Osten.” 
According to Josephus, the elegantly latticed barrier was ‘ three 
ells high’ (tpizrnyus), i.e., according as one assumes the simple or 
the ‘royal’ ell to be meant, about 158 or 142 centimetres. The 
pillars (στῆλαι) supporting the lattice-work consisted therefore of 
at least three such blocks, superimposed the one upon the other. 
3 x58 gives 174 centimetres as the height of a pillar, 1.6. a super- 
elevation above the lattice-work of 16 centimetres, or, including 
a strong 8-centimetres covering stone slab, of about 24 centi- 
metres, dimensions quite in keeping with what might be assumed 
for such an architectural arrangement. In these circumstances it 
is clear that the inscriptions in the three languages stood on the 
three blocks, one above the other. Since one ascended by five 
steps to the court thus screened off, the inscription even on the 
lowest block could be read with ease during the ascent. 

The statement of the Haldsis that the warning inscriptions 
were in three languages has more intrinsic justification than that 
in the Polemos, viz. that they were only in Greek and Latin. For 
there were, of course, Aramaic-speaking peoples, such as the 
Samaritans, Syrians, Phoenicians, Parthians, and Elamites, to 
whom the court behind the barrier was as inaccessible as to the 
Greeks and Romans. In fact, long before the discovery of the 
Slavonic Josephus the well-known archaeologist W. Jahn had 
expressed the opinion that there must also have been such in- 
scriptions in Aramaic. 

We are told in the Slavonic passage that ‘ above those three 
inscriptions there Awng a fourth.’ Accordingly, in this single 

1 Pal. Exploration Fund, Quarterly Statement, 1871, p. 132; cf. Dittenberger, 


Orientis Graeci Inscriptiones Selectae, ii. 598, etc. 
2 Fourth edition, 1923, p. 62 sq. 


518 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


instance (for an inscription such as is here mentioned was of 
course not affixed to every pillar, like the warning inscription, 
which was properly repeated everywhere in triplicate) the pillar 
consisting of three blocks must have been surmounted by a fourth 
before that fourth inscription could be ‘ hung’ above the three 
that were there already. That is to say, in this instance a stone 
plaque in the manner well known to every epigraphist was affixed 
with bronze pins to the stone pillar; that method, in fact, was 
far more appropriate for an inscription added at a later date than 
a direct engraving upon a block which may have been, through 
ornamentation or for other reasons, quite unsuited for the purpose. 

Such a heightening of the pillars one might a priori expect to 
find at the entrances, where the steps from the outer court pene- 
trated the barrier to the ‘ holy place ’ within, since in the case of a 
work of such richness as is here attested! the builders would 
certainly not have neglected to give special distinction to the 
pillars right and left of the barrier gates. 

When Jesus made his triumphal entry into the temple, he must 
have reached the holy place through one of these entrances,” and 
no place could therefore have appeared more appropriate for the 
placing of an inscription to commemorate the downfall of one so 
hateful to the hierarchy, of the ‘king that did not reign’ but would 
have devoted this temple to destruction, than the pillar of the 
gate through which he was conducted amidst shouts of ‘ Osanna.’ 

This conjecture, based purely on the actual nature of the 
enclosure of the sanctuary, receives a brilliant confirmation from 
the mention, hitherto wholly enigmatic,® of a ‘ door of Jesus the 
Crucified’ in the temple. It is mentioned in connexion with the 
murder of James the Just in the memoirs (ὑπομνήματα) of Hege- 
sippus 4 (ca. 180), where we are told that certain malicious ‘heretics’ 
were in the habit of vexing the aged Saddiq Ja‘aqob, who spent his 
days in almost continuous prayer in the temple, with the seemingly 
innocuous question of an ignorant visitor to the sanctuary, ‘ Which 
is the door of Jesus ἢ, to which he was wont to reply, ‘Jesus is the 
Redeemer.’ Immediately before he was hurled from the temple 
battlements he was again mockingly asked to point out ‘which is 
the door of Jesus the Crucified.’ To which question James 
replied with a loud voice, ‘ What is this you ask me concerning 
Jesus, the bar nasha? He sitteth in heaven at the right hand of 
the Father,’ and will one day come on the clouds of heaven.’ There- 

1 Cf, above, p. 515, seventh line from the bottom of the page. 


* Ct. Acts of John, 109 (M. R. James, Apoc. N.T., p. 268): ‘OLord Jesus... 
we glorify thine entering of the door. We glorify the resurrection shown unto us 
by thee.’ 

* Prof, Kirsopp Lake in his translation of Eusebius (1926) in the Loeb Classical 
Library, No. 153, p. 173: ‘ The Gate of Jesus is a puzzle.’ 

* Ap. Euseb., H.£., ii, 23. 


XXXVII 


. 
- 


PLATE 


OX, 


Rd 


THE INNER 


FORECOURT OF THE TEMPLE 


ROM THE PILLARS OF THE BARRIER SURROUNDIN 
THE INSCRIPTION THREATENS CAPITAL PUNISHMENT TO GENTILE TRESPASSERS 


~ 
“ 


INSCRIBED STONE-BLOCK f 


(TSHINILI KJOESHK MUSEUM, CONSTANTINOPLE) 


(SEE P. 517, NOTE 2) 


THE ‘TITULUS’ AND THE PILLORY INSCRIPTION 519 


upon he was thrown from the pinnacle of the temple and, being 
still alive, was beaten to death with a fuller’s club. Only one 
Rekhabite priest —the fact is significant—vainly endeavours to 
protect his kinsman, who, praying for his persecutors, gives up the 
ghost. On the spot where the horrible deed was consummated 
there might still be seen in the time of Hegesippus an inscribed 
stele®—certainly not an inscription on a tomb, for there can of 
course be no question of a tomb ‘beside the temple’ (παρὰ τῷ vag), 
or anywhere within the sanctuary, or indeed within the city: 
moreover, the Saddiq’s tomb was shown at a later date on the 
Mount of Olives. 

There was in the temple, then, a door popularly known as ‘ the 
door of Jesus the Crucified,’ just as in Gunde Shapur the city gate 
on Which the skin of the prophet Mani, flayed alive, had been 
nailed was for centuries afterwards called the ‘Mani Gate’;* there 
was, moreover, not merely one inscription recalling the downfall 
of Jesus, but another * commemorating the death of his brother, 
James the Just. 

In order to understand these facts epigraphists will recall the 
Hellenistic custom of στηλίτευσις, the damnatio memoriae of 
political criminals and persons guilty of sacrilege by special pillory 
inscriptions, preferably placed in the sacred precincts, to make the 
man thus branded into an ἀνάθημα, to devote his name to the 
deity for everlasting punishment, or, conversely, to set before the 
deity a testimony recording the penalty duly inflicted. Thus at 
Athens there was to be found, on the Akropolis, a brazen pillar on 
which were blazoned the names of those guilty of high treason and 
religious outrage (the ἀλιτήριοι καὶ προδόται) ; ὃ and the practice 
was by no means confined to Athens.® 

It is therefore in no way surprising to learn from the Halosts 
of Josephus that the Sadducaean and Boethusaean high-priesthood 
of the last years of the temple, strongly Hellenized as it was, had 
set up in conspicuous position in the sacred precincts malevolent 
inscriptions regarding Jesus and his brother, to commemorate the 

1 According to Epiphanius, Haeves, Ixxviii. 14, it was Simon, son of Klophas. 

2 Cf. Jerome, De viris illustr., 2; the tomb was still shown, ca. 530, on the 
Mount of Olives to Theodosius (Itin. Hieros., ed. Geyer, p. 140). 

8 Bevan, in Hastings’ Encycl. of Relig. and Eth., viii. 3078. 

4 Cf. also the excerpt of Hegesippus by Andrew of Crete, Vita St. Jacobi, 
᾿Αναλέκτα ᾿Ἱεροσολυμιτικῆς σταχυολογίας, ed. Papadopulos-Kerameus, i. 10. 21: “ καὶ 
λαβόντες αὐτὸν ἔθαψαν (on this error, see above, ll. 7ff.) ἐν τόπῳ καλουμένῳ καλῷ πλησίον 


τοῦ ναοῦ τοῦ θεοῦ." Here it is not a question of ἃ τόπος καλός near the temple, but 
the στήλη, the titulus was in a ὃ Ρ, gala‘, that is, an intercolumnium in the hall of 
rT“ 


the temple, at the precise place where James had been hurled down. The very 
use of this word proves that the statement is derived from Hegesippus, of whom 
Eusebius, H.E., iv. 22. 8, expressly says that he used to quote “‘éx τοῦ καθ᾽ “EBpatous 
εὐαγγελίου καὶ τοῦ Συριακοῦ καὶ ἰδίως ἐκ τῆς ‘EBpatdos διαλέκτου.᾿᾽ 

δ Lycurgi ογαίϊο in Leocratem, ed. Blass, Leipzig, 1899, ὃ 117, p. 48. 

6 Cf. the passages cited in Stephanus’ Thesaurus, s.v. στηλίτευσις. 


520 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


downfall of these their deadly enemies. If the inscription read by 

Josephus or his authority was affixed to one of the pillars of the 
gates in the soveg surrounding the sanctuary, then nothing could 
be more natural than that this particular gate, through which Jesus 
passed into the temple, should be called in popular speech ‘ the 
gate of Jesus the Crucified,’ just as we have a so-called ‘ gate of 
Jekhoniah,’ so called because through it King Jekhoniah was led 
into captivity,’ and the like, and that mischievous persons made 
use of this fact to remind the Saddiq in this cruel way of the fate of 
his unfortunate brother. 

That Josephus in his description of the sanctuary says nothing 
about the ‘titulus notissimus’ of James, which according to 
Jerome stood ‘beside the temple’ (juxta templum), i.e. in the wall * 
of one of the temple courts, may of course be accidental. But it 
is much more likely that the passage has suffered from Christian 
erasures (like the passage, only contained in the Hebrew /osippow, 
and there, too, deleted at an early date, concerning the collision of 
the followers of ‘ben Joseph’ with the Pharisees in the reign of 
Caligula),* and that originally the Haldsis or the Polemos, like the 
Archaeology, mentioned not only Jesus but also the brother of 
‘Jesus called the Christ.’ In any case, something more may be 
gathered from the sources concerning the fate of ‘the Lord’s 
brother’ 4 and the real reason for his στηλίτευσις in the temple 
than previous investigators have succeeded in recognizing.°® 

Coming, finally, to the wording of the epigraphic monument 
quoted by Josephus, we have to note in the first place that the 
words used of the ‘fourth inscription indicating in the same 
characters that Jesus was a king who did not reign, having been 
crucified [{by the Jews]] because he prophesied the destruction of 
the city and the desolation of the temple,’ are not a literal repro- 
duction but only a short paraphrase of the document, just as the 
words ‘announcing the law of holiness that no foreigner may pass 
within’ by no means present the far longer exact text of the extant 
warning inscription. It is quite possible that the polyglot inscrip- 
tion, or rather the three inscriptions, of which two may have stood 
respectively on either pillar of the gateway and the third on the lintel 
of the gate, began with a mention of place and date (‘This is the 
door through which on the... ’) ; itis, moreover, highly probable 
that the name ‘Jesus’ was accompanied by a patronymic ‘son of 
Joseph’ or by the designation Nasdraean (han nosrt), as on the 
title on the cross, without which it would be too indefinite. 

1 Mishnah Middoth, ii.6; Shegalim, vi. 3; Schiirer, Z.N.T.W., vii. (1906), p. 58. 

3 Cf. above, p. 519 n. 4, on the ‘gala.’ 3. Cf. above, pp. 96 f. 

ὁ Lucien Cerfaux, ‘ Le titre IKyrios et la dignité royale de Jésus,’ Revue des 
sciences philosophiques, xii, (1923), p. 140 sq., has pointed out that the title of 
ἀδελφὸς τοῦ κυρίου usually designates the viceroy or vazir. 

5 Cf. below, pp. 540 ff. 


THE ‘TITULUS’ AND THE PILLORY INSCRIPTION 521 


Lastly, it is evident that the bracketed words [[by the Jews]] are 
a Christian interpolation into the text of Josephus, of which the 
object is to prove conclusively, by a special testimony, graven in 
stone, that it was the Jews and not the Romans who crucified 
Jesus. That the expression ‘ by the Jews’ is inconceivable in an 
inscription set up by the Jewish high priests needs no argument : 
they would not even have said ‘ by us,’ but would have used some 
much more precise definition of the authorities who passed the 
sentence, e.g.‘ by decree of the Sanhedrin under the presidency of,’ 
etc. One might ask whether the words ὑπὸ τῶν ᾿Ιουδαίων may 
not have taken the place of a ὑπὸ τῶν Ρωμαίων ; but this is im- 
possible, since an execution by the Romans could not plausibly be 
presented as having taken place on the basis of a false prophecy. 
As in the case of all sections of the Haldsis previously quoted, the 
acknowledgment of the authenticity of the passage stands or 
falls with the rigid exclusion of phrases which may without excep- 
tion be recognized by their tendency and the impossibility of the 
statements they contain as downright Christian interpolations. 

After the exclusion of this short addition to the text, the re- 
mainder is not only above suspicion but a document of the highest 
importance, because wholly independent of all other sources. It 
contains a justification of the execution of Jesus entirely different 
alike from that which may be extracted from the previous account 
of Josephus himself in the second book of the Haldsis, and from 
all statements advanced by the Gospels. According to Josephus, 
Jesus was accused.on.the.one hand of sorcery, on the other of 
inciting to rebellion and high treason. It is with these two or three 
crimes that Jesus is charged in Josephus’ own statement and in the 
underlying Roman indictment. According to Luke xxiii. 2, the 
Jewish authorities accused Jesus before Pilate of seducing the 
people to disloyalty (διαστρέφοντα τὸν λαόν), οἱ hindering the 
payment of the taxes (κωλύοντα φόρους Καίσαρι διδόναι), and of 
putting himself forward as King of Israel. Before the alleged court 
of Jewish priests he was charged with blasphemy because he 
called himself ‘Son of God,’ and with inciting the mob to destroy 
the temple.’ The accusation on the temple inscription is quite 
independent of all these charges, and refers exclusively to the death 
ordained in Deuteronomy * for the false prophet, very significantly, 
since the indictments under Roman law were untenable according 
to Jewish legislation and popular feeling. The Sanhedrin might 
as well have accused the Maccabees of ‘ high treason’ and the 
prophets Elijah and Elishah of sorcery. In no case could miracu- 
lous cures and the like be actionable crimes under the Jewish laws 
against witchcraft (gishuph). 

1 Mark xv. 58; Matt. xxvi. 36; John 11. 19. 
* Xviil. 20 sqq. 


522 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


The statement in the present accusation, that the ‘king who did 
not reign’ prophesied the destruction of the city and the desolation 
of the temple, refers to utterances of Jesus such as those in 
Matt. xxiii. 37 sq., Luke xiii. 34 54. : ‘O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou 
that killest the prophets and stonest them that are sent unto thee 

. behold, your house is left unto you desolate’; and Luke xix. 
41 sqg.: ‘when he beheld the city he wept over it, saying . . . that 
the days shall come upon thee when thine enemies shall encompass 
thee about with a palisade! and close thee in on every side and lay 
thee even with the ground . . . and shall not leave one stone upon 
another within thee’—utterances which there is not the least 
ground for regarding as spurious vaticinationes ex eventu. The whole 
political situation at that time was serious enough, and Jerusalem 
had seen sieges of the type here referred to, and that not so long 
before, in the time of Pompey and again of Herod the Great. To the 
blind leaders whose blindness to all the signs of the times Josephus 
bemoans at a later period,” such predictions appeared to fall under 
the ruling of the law in Deut. xvill. 20 sqq. : 


‘But the prophet who shall speak a word presumptuously in my 
name, which I have not commanded him to speak, or that shall speak 
in the name of other gods,’ that same prophet shall die. And if thou 
say in thy heart, How shall we know the word which the Lord hath 
not spoken? (know that) when a prophet speaketh in the name of 
the Lord, if the thing follow not nor come to pass, that is the thing 
which the Lord hath not spoken: the prophet hath spoken it 
presumptuously,’ 


Such a false prophet was put to death for blasphemy, the 
penalty being stoning, followed by the hanging of the corpse on a 
stake. The composition of the inscription in question is therefore 
a diplomatic master-stroke of the Jewish hierarchy. It has 
contrived to mention that Jesus was proclaimed king and at the 
same time to emphasize the fact that he never actually ruled over 
the Jews, i.e. that their leaders never recognized his sovereignty. 
It mentions the fact that he was hanged upon the stake (ἐσταυρώθη), 
but passes in silence over the fact, so wounding to national feelings, 
that the ephemeral king of the Jews was delivered up to the Roman 
overlords to suffer the shameful death of a slave. The inscription 
successfully endeavours to represent the fate of Jesus as well 
deserved according to Jewish law. Without any express state- 
ment to that effect, his downfall is represented as a judgment of 
God, by whomsoever brought about, in accordance with the Divine 
law against false prophets who slander God and provoke His 
wrath by falsely claiming a Divine κῶς which they have not 

1 Cf. Jer. li. 4. 2 Β. 


.. Vi. 5. 
3. Cf. the accusation levelled against Jesus that ae fected his cures through 
a δύναμις ἀόρατος, i.e. a Bel-zebul, a spivitus familiaris. 


THE ‘TITULUS’ AND THE PILLORY INSCRIPTION 523 


received. He deserved (it is implied) to hang upon the stake, 
because he predicted the destruction of the city which still flourishes 
unimpaired, and the desolation of the temple in which the crowds 
of the faithful daily pass the maledictory inscription on their way 
to the altar. The document is thus the oldest testimony to that 
train of thought whereby the rabbis for centuries consoled them- 
selves for the Sanhedrin’s loss of power to pronounce sentence of 
death. Even in exile at Jabneh such sentences were believed to be 
still passed, the penalty being inflicted by God himself. If the 
high court condemned any one to stoning, a wall was supposed 
to collapse and fall upon him ; if the person was condemned to 
burning, he perished in a conflagration; and so on.? 

Of course, this over-subtle diplomatic wording of a testimony 
visibly exposed did not fail also to produce its evil effects. Noone 
who read the inscription and was imperfectly informed in the 
matter of the Sanhedrin’s power over life and death at that period 
could extract from the words any other meaning than that which 
the Christian interpolator expressly introduced into the text of 
Josephus, namely, that Jesus was put to death by the Jews for a 
religious crime. ‘To be sure, the Christians of the Roman empire 
for whom Mark and the evangelists dependent upon him wrote 
would have reached this unhistorical conclusion even without this 
equivocal evidence of the high priests; but the remarkable fact 
that later Jews themselves believed that Jesus was stoned and 
hanged by their own authorities in accordance with Jewish law ὃ 
may perhaps indicate that this triumphal inscription of the hier- 
archy on the downfall of Jesus was not without influence on the 
popular conscience. 

But there is another yet more remarkable fact. The influence 
which can be shown to have been exercised upon the Jews by that 
inscription, constantly seen by so many pilgrims, readable from the 
outer court by gentiles, and continually interpreted by guides and 
sextons for visitors to the world-famed Herodian temple—that 
influence can be traced among the heathen Syrians of Samosata as 
early as the middle of the eighth decade of our era, i.e. at the date 
when the Haldsis of Josephus was written. In the Syriac ‘ Letter 
of Mara bar Serapion to his son Serapion,’ ὁ a consolatory epistle 
quite unaffected by Christian ideas, from a Stoic who had fled from 
Samosata to Seleucia and was prevented by the Romans from 
returning to his home, we find the following remarkable passage : 


‘What more should we say if sages are outrageously treated by 
tyrants ...? or what profit had the Athenians from their murder 


1 Kethub., 30a; Strack-Billerbeck, ii. 197 sq., to Litke xiii. 2. 
2 Mishnah Sanhedrin, ii. 4; cf. Sifré on Deut. viii. 10. 

ὃ Sanhedrin, f°. 43a. 

* In Cureton, Spicilegium Syr. (1855), p. 45. 


524 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


of Socrates, for which they were requited by famine and plague ? 1 
Or the Samians from their burning of Pythagoras, for which their 
whole land was in a moment buried by sand? * Or the Jews from 
the execution of their wise king, seeing that from that time forward 
the kingdom was taken away from them? For justly did God take 
vengeance for those three sages: the Athenians died of hunger, the 
Samians were enveloped in the sea, the Jews were destroyed and, 
ejected from their kingdom, live everywhere in dispersion. (But) 
Socrates is not dead, thanks to Plato, nor Pythagoras, thanks to the 
statue of Hera,* nor the wise king, thanks to the new law which he has 
given. 


Ewald 4 and Bickell® long ago correctly recognized that this 
writing is precisely dated by certain sentences. The author 
laments the abduction of a portion of the citizens of Samosata to 
Seleucia and their separation from their relatives, but hopes that 
the Romans will permit them all to return home, after they have 
promised ‘ to be obedient subjects of the kingdom which fate has 
given us.’ This is only intelligible if Mara bar Serapion was one 
of the refugees from Samosata when Commagene was seized by 
the legions of Caesennius Paetus in the fourth year of Vespasian 
(A.D. 73), and its king Antiochus, together, of course, with his 
partisans, fled the country.® 

Shortly after the year 73, therefore—at the utmost some years 
after Samosata’s day of misfortune, for Mara’s exile may have been 
prolonged—the Hellenized Syrians knew of Jesus. They did not 
call him by that name, nor did they know anything of the Christian 
belief in his resurrection, but they had heard of a ° wise king of the 
Jews,’ whom that people had unjustly put to death, a crime for 
which God has punished them by the loss of their national inde- 
pendence and by dispersion among all nations. And just as 
gentiles in the age of Severus placed statues of Jesus beside those 
of Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle,’ so those Syrians mention the 
‘wise king’ and lawgiver along with Pythagoras and Socrates. 
Just as the assistants of Josephus represented to Graeco-Roman 
readers the Jewish politico-religious sects of the Sadducees, 
Pharisees, and Essenes, along with the Barjonim of Judas of Galilee, 
as four philosophical schools of the Jews, so primitive Christianity 
appeared to the Hellenistic world as a new fifth ᾿ philosophy ᾿ of 
the Jews, and Jesus as a wandering philosopher and preacher of a 


1 The plague of Athens is here represented as a punishment for the death 
of Socrates. 

* A legend unattested elsewhere. 

4 Confusion of Pythagoras the philosopher of Samos with Pythagoras the 
sculptor, also of Samos (Diog. Laert., vili. 46). He furthermore mistakes the 
statue of the Samian Hera by Smilis for a work of the Samian sculptor Pythagoras, 

4 Gétt. gel. Anz., 1856, p. 661. 

5 Conspectus vet Syrorum littevaviae, Ὁ. 17. 

δ], ΝΕ. 152. 7 Cf. above, p. 398 ll. 2 1. 


THE ‘TITULUS’ AND THE PILLORY INSCRIPTION 525 


new and better manner of life, like another Socrates or, better still, 
like another Pythagoras, who also led a wandering life, founded 
a new politico-religious community and became a martyr to his 
own teaching. 

This conception is thoroughly in harmony with that of the 
oldest bearers of the Christian message. Isidore Lévy,1 in a most 
valuable investigation, has recently shown that not only the whole 
plan of the Gospels but also many significant individual features 
are (partly through the medium of a Jewish neo-Pythagorean life 
of Moses) dependent on a widely disseminated legendary life of 
Pythagoras. Early Christian art loves to portray Jesus and the 
apostles in the garb of Cynic philosophers. Pictures of Jesus and 
Paul ‘characterized as philosophers’ are mentioned in the letter 
of Eusebius to the princess Constantia,? which, though edited by 
the anti-iconoclastic school, doubtless has a genuine nucleus. 

Accordingly, the heathen Syrians’ conception of the ‘ sage’ 
who was wickedly murdered by the Jews might well have come 
from the Christian preaching of the Gospel. But that Jesus should 
have been known as a ‘ wise king’ and ‘ lawgiver,’ such as Minos 
of Crete, Lycurgus of Sparta, Zaleucus of Locris, and Charondas of 
Catana, can hardly be referred to the scanty traces of such ideas 
in the Christian apocrypha ;* for in that case Mara b. Serapion 
must have known the story of the resurrection. At this early date 
we can hardly think of any other source save that inscription on 
Jesus, ‘the king who did not reign,’ written in three languages and 
constantly pointed out to a succession of Jewish and gentile visitors 
to the temple of Jerusalem—an inscription which until the de- 
struction of the sanctuary kept alive before the eyes of the world, 
graven in durable stone, that transient titulus ‘king of the Jews’ 
on the whitened wooden tablet on the cross, a monument which 
may still be hidden to-day beneath the ruins of the Herodian 
temple or built into some wall and awaiting its rediscovery. 

Merely for the sake of completeness I should like, at the close 
of this section, to allude to an objection to the authenticity of the 
Jesus inscription in the Slavonic Josephus which has been raised 
by Father Hermann Dieckmann, S.J. (Valckenburg).4 He believes 
that “Josephus could hardly have written these words after the 
fearful fulfilment of the prediction of Jesus against Jerusalem and 
the temple.’ The only remarkable thing about this argument is 


1 Recherches suv la légende de Pythagore, Paris, 1926; La légende de Pythagore 
de Gvéce en Palestine, Paris, 1927. 

* Boivin in ‘Not. ad Nicephor. Gregoras,’ Hist. Byz., ed. Bonn, p. 1301 sqq. 
Paulis represented as a philosopher in Chrysostom, Hom.,vi.; Opp., ed. Montfaucon, 
il. p.60; Hymn. de Petvo et Paulo, H. A. Daniel, Thes. Hymmn., ii. 376. Cf. above, 
p. 438 n. 4. τα ᾿ 

3 Didaché, xiv. 3; Passio Pauli, 2; Clem., Hom., iii. 19; Mart. Polyc., ix. 3, 
XVil. 3. 

4 Zeitsch. f. kath. Theologie, Innsbruck, 1926, p. 47. 


526 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


that no one hitherto has taken the least exception to the story, 
likewise recounted by Josephus, of that other Jesus, son of 
Ananus,” the rude, illiterate peasant who, at a time ‘when the city 
was enjoying profound peace and prosperity,’ plagued its in- 
habitants with incessant cries of ‘Woe to Jerusalem ! ° ; who was 
therefore chastised by ‘ some of the leading citizens,’ brought by 
the magistrates before the Roman governor Albinus, by the latter’s 
command lacerated with scourges, yet never ceased his ill- 
omened cries, ‘ without cursing those who beat him,’ and was 
finally dismissed by the governor as a maniac. Of him Josephus 
himself narrates that he witnessed the fulfilment of his predictions 
against the city before he met his own end during the siege through 
a stone hurled from a ballista. He expressly emphasizes the fact 
that the Jewish magistrates ‘ believed that the man was under 
some supernatural impulse,’ but yet did not take to heart his 
predictions. 

The views of Josephus concerning prevision of the future 
must be duly considered. According to him it was by no means 
restricted to selected ‘men of God’: a madman like Aristobulus,° 
and a common individual (an ‘am ha’ares) officially regarded as a 
lunatic, can occasionally see into the future, because ‘ the spirit is 
divine and marks what will be done on the part of God.’* Only, 
men rarely hearken to the ‘supernatural impulse,’ as Josephus 
remarks at the close of his narrative : ® 


‘Reflecting on these things, one will find that God has a care for 
men, and by all kinds of premonitory signs shows his people the way 
of salvation, while they owe their destruction to folly and calamities 
of their own choosing.’ 


Accordingly, in addressing the Jews, for whom the Haldsis is 
written, Josephus had not the least reason for denying to Jesus, 
albeit in his opinion a sophist and magician, the correctness of his 
premonitions of the future ruin, afterwards so terribly realized. 
The incident was for him rather another instance of that blindness 
of his countrymen which he so often laments and which led to 
their insurrection against Rome. From no legal standpoint need 
the sentence mentioned in the inscription have appeared to him 
unjust, so long as he was convinced that Jesus had without in- 
spiration from God, ‘by some unseen power,’ ® i.e. through a Be‘el 
zebul or ‘familiar spirit,’* foreseen thefuture. lor, according to the 
Law,§ that prophet is guilty of death who without Jahveh’s com- 

1 B.J., vi. 5. 3, δὲ 300-9. 

2 Or, according to other MSS., Anantas. fhe 20) BS : ἃ: 

4 Haldsis, i. § 608; Berendts-Grass, p. 209. Cp. Ps. cern Hom. xvii., about 
impious men having true prophetic visions, 

δ Ibid., vi. 310. 6 Cf. above, p. 384 n. 7. 

7 Mark iii, 22. δ Deut. xviil. 20. 


THE SERVANTS OF THE WONDER-WORKER 527 


mission, by the aid of ‘other gods,’ announces what is to come, 
even if his prophecy is correct. We know from Origen! that the 
heathen Phlegon of Tralles also credited Jesus with a knowledge of 
some future things. What was right for a pagan in these matters 
would certainly appear reasonable to the Jew Josephus, so long as 
he was addressing his co-religionists. On the other hand, that in 
the edition intended for Vespasian and Titus he had no desire 
to credit Jesus with prophetic insight into the future, thereby 
giving the appearance of sympathy with that Christian heresy 
which brought Flavius Clemens and Flavia Domitilla into the 
deepest disfavour at court, will surprise no one who has realized, 
from the other deviations of the Greek edition from the Slavonic 
Haldsis, the extraordinary precaution and servility of this worldly- 
wise and unscrupulous sycophant. 


THE MESSIANIC DISTURBANCES UNDER CALIGULA AND THE 
‘SERVANTS’ OF THE WONDER-WORKER IN THE TIME OF 
CLAUDIUS 


The remark of the Testimonium Flavianum to the effect that 
even after the crucifixion of Jesus his followers ‘did not cease (to 
create disturbance)’ has received new light from the discovery of 
the doubtless genuine sentence contained in the editio princeps and 
in certain MSS. of the Hebrew Josippon, stating that in the time 
of the Emperor Gaius, i.e. in the governorship of the intelligent and 
honourable Petronius, ‘battles’ (milhamoth) and ‘ quarrels’ 
(qe¢azoth) broke out in Judaea between the Pharisees and the 
bandits among our people who inclined to the son of Joseph’—that 
is, Jesus. From the following sentence about ’Ele‘azar, who ‘com- 
mitted many misdeeds until the Pharisees overpowered him,’ we 
were able to conclude that the leader of this messianist uprising 
under Caligula was none other than the ‘ robber chief’ ’Ele‘azar, 
son of Deinaeus,* who between a.p. 48 and 60 was captured by 
Felix, and of whom Josephus expressly says that he ravaged the 
country for twenty years,’ so that he may very well have given the 
Pharisees trouble as early as the reign of Caligula (36-41) and have 
occasionally defeated them. The mention of two priests, one 
Deineias, variously misspelt Αἰνείας and Phineas, and one Lazarus, 
among the followers of Simon Peter the Barjona in the pseudo- 
lementines,* suggests the identity of these two men with this 
Ele‘azar Ὁ. Dinai and with his father. 

On the other hand, the messianic uprising of the ‘ followers of 


* Cs Cels., Δ, ἃς 
Μη, XX δ. 1 BJ. 11. 22 AO SGi, 43. Ἂς 
aie 3 ae | We ak Pee * Cf. above, p. 103 ἢ. I. 


528 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


the son of Joseph’ under Caligula, headed, according to our 
restoration of the partly deleted passage of the Joseppon, by this 
’Ele‘azar b. Dinai, seems to be identical with the armed uprising of 
the Jews against Caligula’s orders to place his statue in the temple 
of Jerusalem, which is mentioned by Tacitus." 

The explanation why the followers of Jesus should throw in 
their lot with the Zealots, resolved to resist such a desecration of 
the chief sanctuary, appears to have been suggested to them by 
the command of Jesus * to take to the mountains as soon as they 
should see the ‘abomination of desolation’ placed in the temple. 
For then would they see the “Son of man’ come down upon the 
clouds of heaven at the head of the heavenly hosts. Confiding in 
these words and expecting the imminent return of their Master, 
those valiant men of simple faith seem to have dared to offer armed 
resistance both to the sacrilegious attempt of the mad emperor anc 
to the opportunist policy of the more conservative loyalists. 

It is quite credible that their guerilla warfare should have caused 
heavy casualties on both sides, and that those of the rebels who fell 
into the hands of the loyalists were in most cases crucified. The 
leader, “Ele‘azar b. Dinai, held out, until twenty years later hi: 
fate overtook him. Whether he was executed in spite of al 
promises given him by the governor Felix, or whether he was 
allowed to rot in his prison, the discreet Josephus has wisely 
neglected to tell us. 

On the strength of the many analogies discussed in previous 
chapters, we are certainly entitled to ascribe the fact that the Olc 
Russian version of the Haldsis shows no trace of a messianic up. 
rising in the section dealing with the reign of Caligula to no othe’ 
reason than the ruthless activity of the Christian censor. Fortu 
nately, the ‘false pen of the scribes’ has left untouched in the Greel 
original of the Slavonic version* another account of the earlies 
followers of Jesus as they appear in the reign of Claudius.° 


‘ 


.. . Claudius again sent his 
officers to those kingdoms, Cuspius 
Fadus and Tiberius Alexander, 
both of whom kept the people in 
peace, by not allowing any depar- 
ture in anything from the pure 
laws.6 But if notwithstanding 
any one did deviate from the word 
of the Law and information was 
1 Hist., v. 9: ‘dein iussi a Gaio Caesare efhgiem eius in templo locare arm 
potius sumpsere (Iudaei)’; cf. above, p. 655: 
2 Cf. above, p. 67 2. 4. 3 Cf. the text above, p. 110 1, 13. 
4 Our Pls. xxxviill. f. 
5 Berendts-Grass, p. 279 sg. For the immediately preceding passage, c: 
above, pp. 206 f. 6 Cf. the parallel in B./J., ii. 220. 


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THE SERVANTS OF THE WONDER-WORKER 529 


laid before the teachers of the 
Law, they punished or banished 
him, or sent (him) to Caesar. 

‘And since in the time of him 4 
many helpers? of the wonder- 
worker aforementioned had ap- 
peared and spoken to the people 
of their Master, (saying) that he 
was alive, although he had been 
dead, and “‘he will free you ὁ from 
bondage,” many of the multitude 
hearkened to the(ir) preaching and 
took heed of their directions,} for 
they were of the humble(r sort), 
some mere tailors,® others sandal- 
makers, (or) other artisans. 

‘But when these noble governors 
saw the falling away of the people, 
they determined, together with 
the scribes, to seize (them) for fear 
lest the little might not be little, 
if it ended in the great.’ 


‘But afterwards for the deeds 
done by them they sent them 
away, some to Caesar, others to 
Antioch for a trial of the(ir) cause, 
others to distant lands.’ 


Christian additions. 


| not on account of their reputa- 
tion. But wonderful were the 
signs which they worked, in truth 
what(ever) they wanted. 


and put (them) to death 


But they shrank back and were in 
terror at the signs, saying, ‘* Not 
through drugs § do such wonders 
come to pass; but if they do not 
proceed from the counsel of God, 
then will they quickly be ex- 
posed.’’® And they gave them 
liberty '° to go where they would. 


1 Cod. Kas., below the text in red: ‘ of Caesar Claudius.’ 


slug -εὑπηρέται. 
3 
6 Ἰ[αῦλος ζῆν." 


< Kas... S9.,: 70: * tis,’ 


‘Conservt’ of Peter are mentioned Ps.-Clem., Rec. iv. 4 ff. 
Cf. the words of Festus in Acts xxv.19: ‘‘ rept τινος Τησοῦ τεθνηκότος ὃν ἔφασκε 


* A learned allusion to 767. ν. 4: ‘ Surely these are humble, they are foolish, 


for they know not the way of the Lord.’ 


Cp. Ecclus. xxxviii. 28 ff. on the im- 


possibility of the artisans acquiring wisdom. 


6 Thus Syn., 182. Other MSS.: 


‘shoemakers,’ which is the same as the 


following ‘ sandal-makers,’ and hence obviously wrong. 
7 Cf. Ant., ii. § 333: ‘Sra μικρὰ ποιῆσαι μεγάλα." 
§ Kas., Arch., otvavlentjem=dia φαρμακείας. 


® Imitation of Acts v. 38. 


19 Cf. above, p. 385, the Christian interpolation about Jesus being acquitted 


by Pilate. 


The transparent purpose of both forgeries is the artificial creation of 


precedents which could be quoted in order to influence the judicial procedure 


of Roman magistrates against the Christians. 


anterior to 312 A.D. 
ZL 


They are therefore certainly 


530 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


The trained reader of historical documents will need no 
elaborate argument in support of the exclusion of the Christian 
interpolations relegated to the margin in the foregoing quotation. 
Josephus was far from admiring, as ‘ wonderful signs,’ any healings 
or the like performed by people whom he despises as ‘ jugglers ᾿ or 
‘magicians’ (γόητες) ; and, furthermore, in this case he clearly 
knew nothing of such feats, since he bases the success of the preach- 
ing not on the impression created by such miracles, but on the 
political hopes which the announcement of the resurrection of 
Jesus must have raised.t The sentence about the miracles wrought 
by the followers of Jesus is clearly nothing but an indignant ob- 
jection of a Christian reader to the contemptuous words of Jose- 
phus about these ‘small’ or ‘humble’ people, whom various 
scribes 2 actually identify with the apostles, although the “many 
helpers of the Wonder-worker,’ of whom Josephus speaks, clearly 
indicate a wider circle. If we were to believe Josephus to have 
spoken with such admiration of the acts of the apostles, we might 
also credit him with the forged Testimonium Flavianum as it 
stands in the Antiquities. 

The words ‘ not on account of their reputation,’ appended to 
‘took heed of their directions,’ indicate the place where the inter- 
polator had intended to insert his complete note. But since he 
could not get the whole sentence ? into the narrow margin, he had 
to write the rest a little further down, and hence a part of it was 
introduced into the text by later copyists at the end of the 
sentence. 

Similarly, the words ‘and put to death’ betray their character 
as an addition by a Christian scribe who recalled the execution of 
the sons of Zebedee by Herod Agrippa immediately before the 
appointment of Fadus, and probably also the unhistorical legends 
of martyrdom early associated with the names of all the apostles.* 
For if the governors had really determined to sentence these people 
to death, they would not have been content, as it appears from 
the final clause that they were, with sentences of banishment. 

Unmistakable as another Christian interpolation is, the pious 
legend telling how the governors at first were induced by the 
miracles performed by these people to leave them at liberty—indeed, 
to give them a privilege ‘to behave as they would’;® an absurdity 
which could only have been penned by one entirely ignorant of the 


1 Cf. Luke xxiv. 21; Acisi. ὃς 

* Cod. Cyvil.-Bjel., 63/1302 (see Pls. xxxvul. f.), and Cod. Acad., add in margin 
in red ink, ‘of the Apostles.’ Avch.adds after the word ‘humble,’ ‘ the apostles.’ 

8 His note ran: ‘not on account of their reputation (i.e. as famous scribes, 
etc.), but (because) they wrought wonderful signs,’ etc. 

4 Heracleon (ca. 170), quoted by Clem. Alex., iv. 9. 71, still knows that Matthew, 
Philip, Thomas, Levi, and other apostles did mot die as martyrs. 

5 Cp. above, p. 529 0. 10, 


THE SERVANTS OF THE WONDER-WORKER - 531 


customs of the Roman administration. The section, moreover, is 
dependent upon the interpolation a few lines above stating that 
the followers of Jesus wrought stupendous miracles. 

But most significant of all for the Christian origin of the ex- 
cluded clauses is the fact noticed by all previous critics, though 
often very curiously explained, namely, that the famous saying of 
Gamaliel in Acts v. 38 54. is put into the mouths of Fadus and 
Alexander. It is noteworthy, however, that the saying appears 
in altered form, designed to afford the Christians official evidence 
to the effect that their healings were not produced by drugs 
(φάρμακα), and that consequently they cannot be described as 
sorcerers and poisoners.! 

The whole section on the release of the followers of Jesus flatly 
contradicts the final clause on the sentences of banishment im- 
posed; and the text of the MSS.? on which Berendts based his 
translation, questioned by himself, ‘ But afterwards, being pre- 
vailed upon (?) by them, they sent them away,’ has simply arisen 
irom a desire to adjust this contradiction and at the same time 
Ὁ get rid of the ominous words, ‘ the (mvis-)deeds which were done 
oy them.’ Grass’s emendation of the text® is as simple as it is 
convincing. 

After elimination of these foolish and quite unmistakable 
nterpolations, the remaining statement is intrinsically unobjec- 
jonable and historically very instructive. Only ignorance could 
delieve that a decisive argument against the authenticity of this 
supposed ‘addition’ may be derived from the fact that it 
epresents the two governors as holding office simultaneously 
nstead of the one succeeding the other. 

Any one who has read Josephus carefully, instead of merely 
ooking up an occasional passage, knows that even the Greek text ὃ 
hows clear traces of a source in which Cuspius Fadus and Tiberius 
\lexander appear to govern simultaneously. Schiirer ® himself 
ound it surprising that Josephus should assign to the period of 
hese two governors (ἐπὶ τούτοις) the famine which in Acts xi. 
8-30 is mentioned as happening at about the time of the death of 
terod Agrippa (A.D. 44), although he describes Alexander as the 
uccessor of Fadus. The epitomizer of the Antiquities sought to 
emove this stumbling-block by correcting ἐπὶ τούτοις to ἐπὶ 
ovtov, and Niese has placed this misleading reading in his text, 


1 Cf. Euseb., Dem. ev., iii. 6: ‘whoever has found out the whole Christian 
ribe . . . practising witchcraft and using drugs (φαρμακεῦον)} 

* dozadejant, Acad. and Kas.; Syn., 991, do zadéanii; Syn., 770, same; Syn., 
82, za déjanit ; Arch., pozaddjani, 

3. ‘The variant of Syn., 182, zadéjanti byv’se οἱ ni”, can easily be corrected into 
a déjanija byvsa ot nich=“' for deeds done by them.’”’’ 

* Thus Prof, Paul Schmiedel, Neue Ziivicher Zeitung, 1926, No. 1346. 

5 Ant., XxX. 5. 2, § ΤΟΥ sq. 8 OD. ctt., 1. 


532 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


though ἐπὶ τούτοις is supported by Eusebius, the old Latin 
version (‘ horum temporibus ’), and all the Greek MSS. Although 
according to Suetonius! the reign of Claudius suffered from 
‘ assiduae sterilitates,’ it is hardly conceivable that the famine in 
Judaea extended over the terms of office of two governors and 
that there were four consecutive years of drought and bad 
harvests (44-48). Had Josephus intended to speak of so unusually 
protracted a drought, almost recalling the seven years’ famine in 
Egypt, he would surely have expressed himself more clearly and 
at least have spoken of a ‘long’ and not merely of a ‘ great ' 
famine. 

What is decisive is the fact that the practice of two governors 
holding office simultaneously is not such an unheard-of thing as 
some ignorant people imagine. On the contrary, it is well attested 
by Tacitus for this same period of the reign of Claudius, In this 
instance Tacitus and Josephus diverge. Whereas Josephus ‘ 
quite unambiguously represents Cumanus as sole governor of the 
district of Judaea, and Felix as coming to Palestine as his successor 
Tacitus 3 says no less clearly : 


‘Felix had for some time been in command of Judaea.. . 
He had as a rival in the worst crimes Ventidius Cumanus, who helc 
a part of the province, which was so divided that the Galilaean: 
were subject to Cumanus, the Samaritans to Felix.’ 


Such a division of powers, with a special administrator fo. 
Galilee, a region always inclined to revolt, is by no means in 
appropriate, and is in keeping with the earlier partition of the 
province into four kingdoms or ‘ tetrarchies’ ; indeed, according 
to Tacitus * the governors were sent by Claudius into their pro 
vinces after the decease or after the limitation of the authority o 
‘the kings.’ The plural used by Josephus in the Slavonic version 


‘Claudius sent his officers to those kingdoms,’ 


shows precisely the same view of the situation. There is literalh 
nothing to prevent us from believing that, as is implied by Jose 
phus or the older documents utilized in the Haldsts, after the deat! 
of Agrippa (44-48) the government of Palestine was really a sor 
of condominiwm of Cuspius Fadus and Tiberius Alexander, with « 
division of jurisdiction similar to that which Tacitus describes fo 
the immediately subsequent periods of Cumanus and Felix. 

We can well imagine that Claudius, or his officials, considerec 
it expedient to entrust the delicate task of governing this province 
to a thoroughly Hellenized Jew like Tiberius Julius Alexander 

1 Vitae, Claudius, 18. 2 Ant., xx. 6. 1-3 5; B.J., il. 12. 3-7. 

3 Annals, xii. 54. 


4 Hist., v.9: ‘ Claudius, defunctis regibus aut ad modicum redactis, Iudaear 
provinciam equitibus Romanis aut libertis permisit.’ 


THE SERVANTS OF THE WONDER-WORKER 5323 


nephew of the philosopher Philo,’ who would naturally be familiar 
with the idiosyncrasies of his countrymen, so difficult to handle,? 
and through his immense wealth would have no temptation to 
plunder them, while at the outset not sufficiently trusting him to 
assign so important a military position to him alone as procurator 
sine collega. After a certain period of probation Alexander may 
then have taken over the imperium of Fadus as well, and so once 
more united the government of Judaea in his hands, just as Felix 
took over the office of Cumanus when the latter was deposed by 
Ummidius QOuadratus. In both cases, considering Josephus’ 
working method as described above, it is more than likely that he 
sometimes quite unintentionally distorted certain details of the 
case, a feature still noticeable in his work; whereas Tacitus, drawing 
directly on the documents, is more to be trusted. Yet even one 
who, with Schiirer,* thinks it necessary to reject the narrative of 
the greatest of Roman historians must admit that what is toler- 
ated in Tacitus must be acceptable in the Slavonic Josephus. If 
no one has ventured to deny the Tacitean authorship of the passage 
in question because it attests the simultaneous functioning of two 
governors in the time of Claudius, the gratuitous contention that 
‘Josephus, who was surely familiar with these matters, cannot 
possibly have represented two Roman governors as ruling simul- 
taneously’ may be safely neglected. 

Nor can it be urged that the Slavonic Josephus does not 
represent the true historical facts because he mentions the send- 
ing of Jewish transgressors against the law to Rome, such a 
procedure being applied only to Roman citizens who appealed to 
Caesar.5 But it is to be noted, in view of perfectly clear state- 
ments of Josephus himself,® that even provincials might be sent by 
the governor for trial to Rome, if on account of the difficulty of the 
case he wished to leave the unravelling of it to the emperor. 

The governor of Judaea was equally at liberty to send accused 
persons to Antioch, which Josephus relates was done in the case of 
some of the ‘ Wonder-worker’s’ followers, and to leave the decision 


1 Ant., xx. 100. 

2 Cf. the appointment of Sir Herbert Samuel as first British Commissioner of 
the Palestine Protectorate after the Balfour declaration. The comparison may 
be extended to the fact that, jointly with this distinguished Jewish statesman, 
Sir Ronald Storrs, K.C.M.G., C.M.G., C.B.E., Governor and Commander-in-Chief, 
Cyprus, well known for his pro-Arab sympathies, was appointed deputy-Commis- 
sioner as a guarantee of the mandatory Power’s goodwill towards the Mahometan 
majority of the population. In an entirely similar way the Roman Empire could 
not afford to antagonize the pagan Hellenistic Syrians of the country, who, after 
all, were the co-religionists of the world-rulers. Just as in the case of Tiberius 
Alexander, the experiment was never repeated. 5 Ch. D235. 

4 Div. I., vol. ii. p. 173 54., n. 14, of Macpherson’s trans. 

5 Schmiedel, Joc. cit. 

6 Ant., xvii. ὃ 297, xx. ὃ 131=B.J., li. 243; Ant., xx. ὃ 161=B.J., ii. 253. 
Vita, iii. § 13, 


534 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


to the legate of Syria resident in that city. Seeing that the pro- 
consular governor of Syria possessed jurisdiction over the pro- 
vincial governors of the provinces of Judaea, Samaria, and Galilee,’ 
who were either of equestrian rank or, since the time of Claudius. 
as now appears, nothing but freedmen of the emperor, it was 
certainly highly expedient to leave difficult decisions at the outset 
to this superior officer. 

It shows mere lack of insight into the political circumstances 
of the time if a critic doubts that the Roman governors of this 
period, one of whom was himself a born Alexandrian Jew, could 
have severely punished transgression of the Jewish law. From a 
passage in the Hebrew Josephus previously quoted,? and from the 
accusations against Jesus, Stephen, and Paul, it is clear that the 
followers of Jesus were looked upon by the Jews above all as 
transgressors and disparagers of the revealed Law inherited from 
their fathers, as lawbreakers, as conscious antinomians, or, ever 
worse, as downright criminals. Jesus himself is represented ἃς 
saying to the Sabbath-breaker that he was cursed and a trans- 
gressor of the Law if he did not know what he was doing, but 
blessed if he acted with knowledge,’ i.e. with the saving knowledge 
that with the dawn of the messianic era the old ordinance was 
abrogated. 

For this reason the people who were convinced that the 
Messiah had already appeared and the messianic kingdom οἱ 
Israel had begun, and who hourly looked for its glorious realization 
through the return of the crucified son of David ‘with the clouds 
of heaven ’—in short, the Messianists or Christians—could best be 
recognized by their attitude of detachment from the Mosaic Law. 
In Judaea, when a man was prepared, like Paul or Peter, to eat 
anything, even meat that had been offered to idols, and to sit at 
table with heathen, the explanation was quite different from what 
it would be in the cultivated and cosmopolitan Alexandria. There 
such conduct merely showed that he had learnt through an all too 
‘philosophic ᾿ and ‘ enlightened’ interpretation of Philo’s works 
that most commandments were to be taken not literally but alle- 
gorically, so that in the end, along with the philosopher’s own 
nephew the governor Tiberius Alexander, he came to see in the 
Roman Jupiter and the Greek Zeus but another aspect of the 
“unknowable ’ God of philosophy,‘ no less venerable and no more 
imperfect than the old Jahveh of the Qenites of Mt. Sinai. Sucha 
freethinker or ἡ Epicurean ’ need scruple no longer to do homage 
to the emperor’s image with a few grains of incense, while reserving 
to himself the full freedom of his philosophic opinions on this most 

1 Ant., xvill. 89; B.J., ii. 244; Tacitus, Ann., xii. 54. 


4 
2 Cf. above, p. 96. δ Luke vi. 4 (cod. Bezae). 
4 Thus the Letter of Aristeas, ὃ 16. 


THE SERVANTS OF THE WONDER-WORKER 535 


unphilosophical god seated on the imperial throne. In return 
there stood open to him, if his father had grown wealthy and 
become a Roman citizen, the whole cursus honorum up to the 
highest position, the throne of the world, ere long to be disgraced 
by a Syrian of Emesa, and therefore doubtless also within the 
range of the ambition of an Alexandrian Jew who had broken 
down or overleapt the ‘hedge’ with which the Pharisees had 
surrounded their people as a protection against the enticements of 
Hellenism. 

Quite different was the position in Palestine when a man 
awoke to the knowledge that the Sabbath was made for man and 
not man for the Sabbath, that nothing that goeth into the mouth 
defileth the man, that every creature of God is pure to the pure, 
and when he lived accordingly. By such conduct he betrayed 
himself, not as a disciple of the Epicurean or of that Stoic philo- 
sophy so highly esteemed in Rome, but as one of that ‘harbour 
mob’1 who had acclaimed a poor itinerant carpenter as king of 
the Jews and now awaited his return as lord of the whole world. 
Such a lawbreaker would immediately be recognized as one of the 
fomenters of that ‘pest’ which threatened not only the rule of the 
Roman people? but the maintenance of that superior and enlight- 
ened philosophical contemplation of the world and its follies to 
which the Hellenized Jew of Alexandria had pledged himself heart 
and soul. 

And so there came about that at first glance strange yet easily 
comprehensible confederacy between the Hellenized Jew Tiberius 
Julius Alexander, sent to Palestine by Claudius first as the col- 
league of Fadus and then as sole governor, on the one hand, and 
the national abwrah—nowadays it would be called the ‘fascio’—of 
conservative Jews, the supporters of the hierarchy and opponents 
of the Hellenization and Romanization of the priest-ruled state, on 
the other. 

If the Jews had based all their former revolts for the realization 
of the Deuteronomic royalty law,? i.e. for political independence, 
on the ground that the foreign rulership hindered them in the free 
exercise of their religion—indeed (as in the recent attempt of 
Caligula), threatened to drive them to apostasy from the beliefs of 
their fathers—-now the nephew of the pious Philo brought them a 
pledge from Claudius that from henceforth not only should they 
be free to follow the Law of Moses, but the Roman governor, with 
and through the teachers of the Law, would ensure that the tradi- 
tions of their fathers were strictly observed: the Roman lictors 
would now see to it that, down to ‘mint, anise, and cummin,’ 


1 Cf, above, p. 351 n. 8; p. 340 ἢ. 8. 
2 Cf. below, p. 536 n. 2, the letter of Emperor Claudius, 
3 Cf. above, p. 251 ll. 3 ff, 


536 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


everything was duly tithed for the priests and that due respect 
was paid to the scribes and their orders by the refractory “people 
of the land’ (‘ammé ha’ares). Rome, they were told, had duly 
recognized that the enemy of the scribes and the priests was also 
Caesar's enemy, that the Sabbath-breaker and despiser of the food 
laws was also an enemy of law and order and a danger to public 
security. Mere notification would suffice to put the governor and 
his court in motion against the lawless : the Sanhedrin could count 
on his full support in the maintenance of such peace and order in 
the country as were essential to ensure the unmolested payment 
alike of the taxes to Caesar and of the tithes to the hierarchy. The 
appointment of the Jew Tiberius Alexander, whose father had 
provided the costly gold and silver plating for the gates of Herod’s 
temple,* would show that the emperor in his great mercy was 
indeed prepared to pay the utmost regard to the Deuteronomic 
regulations, and to put the Jews, as they had always desired, under 
the rule of one who was really their countryman of the purest 
blood, and no mere Idumaean proselyte like Herod Agrippa: all 
this provided, of course, that henceforth they would keep the 
peace, which recently again a new would-be Joshua or Jesus, a 
so-called Theudas or ‘ God-given’ prophet and demagogue, much 
to the regret of the Roman government and the high priests in 
Jerusalem, had so grievously disturbed that with the best will under 
the sun a bloody intervention of the Sebastenian cavalry of the 
governor's former Roman colleague could not be avoided. The 
emperor hoped that his clemency would be duly appreciated, for 
he would otherwise be compelled to abandon this experiment of a 
liberal and conciliatory policy, to enforce with the greatest severity 
what is essential to the security of the Roman empire, and ‘to 
show what a well-disposed ruler can do when his mind is turned to 
righteous wrath.’ 2 

On the basis of some such provisional tacit agreement, satis- 
factory to all the high contracting powers, ‘ the Roman governors 
did’ actually for a time, what has been thought incredible, ‘look 
after the business of the Jewish teachers of the Law,’ while, con- 
versely, on the principle of Roman law, familiar also to Jews, do 
ut des, or do ut facias, the Jewish teachers of the Law looked after 
the political business of the governors and the maintenance of law 
and order——a covenant such as has often been repeated in history, 
the state acting as the buttress of orthodoxy, and the orthodox 
priests and ecclesiastical scribes as guardians of the security of the 
state. So long as Roman policy adhered to this course—as it did 
until Tiberius Alexander was superseded by the rapacious Felix, 

Bales Va Sea, 8 205: 


* The last words are from the letter of Claudius to the Alexandrians. Cf, 
H. Idris Bell, Jews and Christians in Egypt, London, 1924, p. 26, 


THE SERVANTS OF THE WONDER-WORKER 5537 


the brother of Pallas, the powerful freedman of Claudius, and his 
worthy accomplice Cumanus—the peace of the country seems to 
have been preserved through a close co-operation of the scribes and 
the governor. During this time the hated Minim—heterodox 
antinomian sectaries of every kind, not merely the Naséraeans— 
were, according to the perfectly credible evidence of the Slavonic 
Josephus, placed under a system of special political vigilance. So 
soon as through an edict of the governors (such as must be pre- 
sumed to underlie the opening words of Josephus quoted above)! 
it was publicly announced that it was the emperor’s will that all 
Jews should faithfully observe their ancestral Law, and that con- 
traventions thereof would be punished, prosecutions for any 
speeches and conduct in defiance of that Law could be instituted in 
accordance with the very elastic provisions of the Roman law on 
high treason, the cvimen laesae matestatis .. . omnium accusationum 
complementum.2 Roman law ὃ prescribed for ‘authors of sedition 
and tumult, or popular agitators,’ along with the penalty of cruci- 
fixion or fighting with beasts in the arena (the choice being left to 
the judge’s discretion and apt to be in accordance with the social 
standing of the condemned), the further alternative of deportatio in 
imsulam, accompanied by confiscation of all property. This last 
penalty, clearly traceable from the time of Tiberius, was preferably 
inflicted upon political offenders for cvimen laesae maiestatis, for 
vis publica, or for sacrilegium. 

The provincial governor could only propose deportatio: the 
decision of the matter and of the condemned person’s future place 
of abode rested with the emperor.* 

The banishment was not necessarily confined to an island in the 
sea: there was also a deporiatio quasi in insulam, e.g. to a small 
oasis in the Libyan desert. Moreover, it is to be noted that the 
Hebrew or Aramaic of the original text of the Haldsis possesses one 
and the same word, ’#yzm or ’zyin, for ‘islands’ and ‘ distant 
coasts,’ so that the allusion in this passage of Josephus to exile ‘to 
distant lands’ is doubtless intended to cover both deportatio in 
insulam and deportatio quasi in insulam. 

It is hardly necessary to indicate in detail what an excellent 
illustration of the provisions of Roman law is afforded by Josephus’ 
account of the proceedings against the followers of Jesus in the 
time of Claudius. It was clearly politic and in every respect wise 
on the part of Tiberius Alexander to dispense altogether with 
public executions such as King Agrippa I. had still ordered in his 
last years. For they always left ill-will and much excitement 
behind them, and might well be distasteful to a man of philosophic 
culture. He was content, then, with simply deporting from the 


1 Cf. above, p. 528 ll. 37 ff. 2 Tacitus, Ann., iii, 38. 
3 Cf. above, p. 460 n. 2. 4 Dig., xlvili, 22. 6. 1. 


538 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


country persons reported to him by the Jewish authorities as 
parisim or sacrilegi ; even if they were only deported ‘ for trial,’ 
they were safely out of the way for years tocome. The governor 
of Syria might, at his pleasure, pardon or conditionally acquit such 
people, or, if he preferred, send them on to the emperor. The 
legally prescribed confiscation of property would in the case of 
such poor fellows at least cover the cost of transportation, and 
all further responsibility would rest with the emperor. Foreign 
Jews, who had proved troublesome in Palestine, could simply be 
deported to their native place. 

Obviously, it was this procedure of ‘administrative deportation ’ 
which was employed in the governorship of Cuspius Fadus and 
Tiberius Alexander against the Messianists. The persons con- 
cerned—and the fact is highly significant as showing the still per- 
sisting purely Rekhabite character of the followers of Jesus—belong 
exclusively to the class of wandering journeymen : they are tailors 
and sandal-makers going from house to house to cut and make up 
into sandals the peasants’ household fabrics and the hides of their 
cattle, or other manual workers, wheelwrights, smiths, carpenters, 
labourers of all kinds,! carrying with them on their rounds the 
good news of Israel’s approaching liberation from the Roman yoke, 
indeed ‘from bondage’ in general, by which many would have 
understood more than the oppressive dominion of the foreigner. 

The strange notion of Berendts, Frey, and other critics that the 
narrative in question ‘ generalizes’ the sending of Paul to Rome 
creates quite needlessly serious chronological difficulties. There is 
indeed no reason whatever why Josephus’ words should refer to the 
Twelve, of whom only ten were still alive, or to Paul, as if between 
44 and 48 there were no more than these eleven Christians in the 
world. 

As a matter of fact, Josephus’ statement of the ‘ helpers Σ of 
Jesus has no perceptible reference to any passage whatever in either 
the canonical or the apocryphal Acts ofthe Apostles. Like all other 
statements of our author, it is based on an extract from the reports 
of the provincial governors to the emperor, and found by him in the 
commentarit Claudit. Neither had he any other source for his 
information on the insurrectionary movements under Caligula— 
moreover attested, as we know, by Tacitus.? 

The clumsy version of the popular preaching in the report of 
the secretary of a Roman governor, ‘there appeared among the 
people a multitude of the accomplices of the Wonder-worker of 

1 Celsus (Orig., C, Cels., iii. 55) mentions ‘wool-workers, cobblers (σκυτοτόμου:), 
fullers’; cf. also Paul the tentmaker (or leather-worker ὃ Pesh. in Acis xviii. 3), 
Alexander the coppersmith (2 Tim. iv. 14), Hermogenes the coppersmith (Acts of 
Paul and Thekia, 1). The Mishnah expressly mentions the sandal-makers. 


2 Ann., Xv. 44: ‘repressaque in praesens exitiabilis superstitio rursum 
erumpebat.’ 


THE SERVANTS OF THE WONDER-WORKER 539 


Mount Olivet and spoke to the people of their Master, (saying) that 
he was alive, although he had been dead, and “he will free you 
from your bondage,’’’ betrays the bewilderment of the Roman to 
whom the idea of the resurrection of a dead man is as strange as 
later it was to Festus.’ It is alsoimportant because it has faithfully 
retained the ovatio indirecta, which Josephus must also have em- 
ployed in the corresponding passage in the Antiquities, though 
obliterated by a Christian corrector. (The sudden leap into direct 
speech, ‘ He will free you from your bondage,’ is in accordance 
with the primitive style shown throughout by the Slavonic trans- 
lator.) It is noteworthy that in this instance the Slavonic Haldsis 
has preserved a passage in indirect quotation which in the falsified 
Greek text of the Antiquities appears as the author’s own state- 
ment in direct speech.? For the possibility that the Russian could 
on his own initiative have converted into indirect speech what he 
found in the direct form of address in his original is excluded by 
the otherwise noticeable preference of the Slavonic translator for 
the ovatio directa, exemplified in the above quotation. 

This finally clears up a passage in the Testimonium discussed 
above. The Greek text in Ant., xviii. ὃ 64, ἐφάνη yap αὐτοῖς 
τρίτην ἔχων ἡμέραν (πάλιν) ζῶν, as it stands, is clearly a falsified 
statement intended to support the truth of the Gospel story of the 
resurrection. It is of course wanting in the Haldsis, which 
version has instead an assertion of the ‘ Wonder-worker’s accom- 
plices’ bearing on the truth of the resurrection, an assertion which 
neither the Roman report nor Josephus himself thought it worth 
while to contradict or even to call in question. 

One who can still think it possible to-day that this section of 
the Slavonic Josephus was interpolated by a Christian—in other 
words, that a Christian in all innocence has reproduced the tradi- 
tional text of the Antiquities so awkwardly that the all-important 
witness of the Jewish historian to the fundamental article of the 
Christian creed has been converted into an unsupported assertion 
dismissed by Josephus with a contemptuous shrug of the shoulders— 
ought to concern himself with other matters than the investigation 
of historical documents. That the sentence on the resurrection in 
the Antiquities also originally stood in ovatio indirecta, and was only 
later, by some small omissions, transformed into oratio recta, must 
now be regarded as definitely proved. 

The next important result is the discovery that even the 
announcement of the resurrection was originally disseminated 
among the people by the Jewish Christians in connexion with a 
purely political message and with a distinctly political aim. The 

1 Acts xxv. 19: ‘ questions of one Jesus, which was dead, whom Paul affirmed 


to be alive.’ 
3 Cp. above, p. 60 ll. 5 1. 9. P. 55 ll. 21 ff. 


540 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


resurrection of Jesus was originally preached, not to a circle of 
mystics, like the resurrection of the dying mystery gods or that of 
the grass and corn spirits rising again from the earth,’ as an illus- 
tration and guarantee of the individual’s immortality: ‘Be of 
good cheer, O initiated ones; the god is saved, you too will find 
salvation from your pains.’* No; the Jewish partisans of Jesus 
preached to the people the certainty of the impending ‘ liberation 
from bondage’; nor did they mean, like Paul, liberation from the 
bondage of sin and wicked spirits, but quite literally liberation 
from the yoke of their well-known worldly oppressors. Jesus was 
to return and liberate Israel from bondage * in no other sense than 
King Arthur was believed by the Welsh of the Middle Ages to 
return to free his people from their Saxon and Norman oppressors. 

That is the sole reason for the governors’ fear lest this preaching 
should lead to a ‘turning away of the people,’ and their hasty 
intervention, essentially a preventive measure to hinder the 
‘disease’ from penetrating and extending to the heads of society. 

How far-seeing the Roman authorities proved, and how quickly 
the messianist movement made its way from the servants’ quarters 
and the nursery, abandoned to the slaves,* into the ruling ranks, . 
is shown by an incident which took place under the very eyes of 
Josephus—the conversion of Flavia Domitilla and the consul 
Flavius Clemens,® whose son, Vespasian 11., was the destined heir 
to Domitian’s throne. As early as the early part of the second 
century Pliny the Younger complains ® ‘ periclitantium numerum 

. omnis ordinis . . . neque civitates tantum sed vicos etiam 
atque agros superstitionis istius contagio pervagata est.’ 


THE END OF JAMES THE JUST, ‘THE LOoRD’s BROTHER’ 


From certain later sources—which, however, are above sus- 
picion, not only because they are known to utilize genuine old 
material, but also because the full import of the statements in 
question was certainly no longer intelligible to the Christians of the 
post-apostolic period—we gather that James the Just wore the 
breastplate of the high priest and claimed the right to enter the 
Holy of Holies ‘ because he was a Nasdraean and connected with 
the priesthood.’ * Again we read, ‘ We find that he (i.e. James the 
1 Cor. xv. 35°37; John xii. 34. 

Firm. Mat., De err. prof. velig., xxii. τ. 
Above, Pp. 5293-4. 4 Orig., C. Cels., lii. 55. 
Cassius Dio, lvii. 13 (epit. Xiphilini, xlvii. 14. 2). Cf. Pauly-Wissowa, R.E., 
s.v. Flavius, 62, 166; Flavia Domitilla, 227, col. 2733 sqq.; and the articles 
Clemens (Flavius) and Domitille (Flavie) in Cabrol’s Dictionnaire d’archéologie 
chrétienne, t. lii., ca. 1867-70; t. iv., ca. 1402-4. 

6. Ep., xcvi. 


7 «ἐ διὰ τὸ Ναζωραῖον ὄντα καὶ μεμίχθαι τῇ ἱερωσύνῃ, Epiphan., Haeres., xxix. 4 
(P.G., xli. 396). 


ὧν 0ϑ. ΔῈ "5 


THE SERVANTS OF THE WONDER-WORKER 541 


Just) . . . was of David’s race, being the son of Joseph, and that 
he was a Nagéraean, as Joseph’s first-born and therefore dedicated 
(to the Lord), and moreover we have found that he officiated after 
the manner of the ancient priesthood. Wherefore also he was 
permitted once a year to enter into the Holy of Holies, as the law 
commanded the high priests, according to that which is written ; 
for so many before us have told of him, both Eusebius and Clement 
and others. Furthermore, he was empowered to wear the high- 
priestly diadem upon his head, as the aforementioned trustworthy 
men have attested in their memoirs.’ ὦ | 

The reference to Eusebius, Clement of Alexandria, ‘and others,’ 
as attesting this curious story in their memoirs, refers to the 
Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius,” where one found the ὑποτυπώσεις 
of Clement and the ὑπομνήματα of Hegesippus quoted as authori- 
ties for the martyrdom of James. But the narrative of Epiphanius 
does not agree with the extract from Hegesippus as given by Euse- 
bius. Differing in this from E. Schwartz, who has suggested 
another explanation,’ I venture to think that these inconsistencies 
can be better explained to-day by the assumption of censorial 
excisions from the extract on James. The MS. of Eusebius used 
by Epiphanius was in this passage less abridged than our extant 
MSS. According to the extant Greek MSS. of the Ecclesiastical 
History, James had the right of entry only to the Holy Place 
(ἐξῆν εἰς τὰ ἅγια εἰσιέναι), Whereas, according to the Syriac and 
Latin versions of Eusebius, according to Jerome* and Andrew of 
Crete,’ as well as Epiphanius,® he had access to the Holy of Holies 
(the debhir), which was granted only to the high priest on the Day 
of Atonement. This alleged privilege of the Saddiq cannot, of 
course, be derived from his being either a Nazirite or a Nasdraean 
ascetic abstaining from meat’ according to the doctrine of the 
Baptist,® two entirely different things obviously confused in the 
above-quoted Christian sources. More importance attaches to the 
statement of Epiphanius to the effect that he was ‘ connected 
(μεμέίχθαι) with the priesthood,’ i.e. that his house was related by 
marriage to Levitical families. That may very well be historic- 
ally correct ; for, according to rabbinic tradition, Rekhabites or 
itinerant craftsmen, who had obtained permanent employment in 
the temple, often married the daughters of priests, so that their 
grandchildren served in the temple as priests.° 

This relationship may have justified James in wearing the 
linen raiment of the priests, to which at that time even the lowest 

1 Tbid., [xxviii. (P.G., xlii. 714). a Bs ..-25.-.-6᾽ 

3 Zettsch. f. Neutestam. Wissensch., iv. (1903), p. 50 54. 4 De vir. illustr., 2. 

6 Vita Jacobi, ed. Papadopulos-Kerameus; Anal. Hievosol. stachyolog.,i. 10. 21. 
: Haeres., xxix. 4, p. 324, Holl; cf. lxxviii. 13, p. 1045; P.G., xlii. 714. 


Euseb., Hist. eccl., ii, 23. 5 (after Hegesipp.). 
§ Cf. above, pp. 235 ff. ® See above, p. 245 n. 2. 


542 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


grades of the hierarchy laid claim.1 But in no case could a 
Rekhabite, on the strength of his family’s connexion by marriage 
with the Levites, have made the monstrous claim to enter by right 
the Holy of Holies. This right and this duty were restricted to 
one who was actually the high priest or regarded himself as such. 
Yet Epiphanius, expressly appealing to the memoirs of his 
authorities, i.e. to the statement of Hegesippus, as retailed in the 
Hypotyposeis of Clement and the Ecclesiastical History of Eusebius, 
declares that James wore the diadem (πέταλον) of the high priest, 
1.6. regarded himself as the regular high priest of the Jews. Now, 
it has been shown above,” on the evidence of the Greek and Hebrew 
Josephus, that the Jewish Zealots, the adherents of the Nasoraean 
movement for national independence, had refused to recognize as 
legitimate the Boethusaean and Sadducaean high priests appointed 
by the Herodians and limited by the Romans to an annual tenure,” 
and proceeded to elect a “pure and pious’ high priest themselves. 
The first of the Zealots to be chosen high priest in this way seems to 
have been John the Baptist.4 After his death in A.D. 36, the diadem 
appears to have been worn by John the Zebedaid, if we may 
suppose that the otherwise unreliable epistle of Polycarp to Victor 
of Rome’ has taken this particular from good Palestinian tradition, 
and not invented it or transferred it from John the Baptist to 
his namesake in order to establish the primacy of the Church of 
Asia in opposition to the claims of Rome in the dispute on the 
Passover.® 

However that may be, it is certain, from the evidence of Papias 
and the pre-Theodosian festal calendar of Constantinople,’ that 
both sons of Zebedee suffered a martyr’s death under Agrippa 
Il., in A.D. 44, probably because of John’s pretensions to be the 
legitimate high priest. He consequently cannot come into con- 
sideration after that date as a schismatic high priest of the 
nationalist party. Whether Peter, whom Jesus before his death 
had appointed his deputy until his second coming, regarded this 
office as a worldly vice-regency and after the death of the Baptist 
laid no claim to the high priest’s diadem, or whether he did wear 
it, either simultaneously with John or after the latter’s death in 

1 Josephus, Ant., xx. 9. 6. 2 Cf. pp. 259 f. 

3 Cf. above, p 18. 4 Cf. above, p. 26ος .. 

δ Euseb., Hist. eccl., lil. 31. 3=v. 24. 2 sq. 

6 It is certainly noteworthy that immediately after the death of the Zebedaid 
John, the new governor Cuspius Fadus, in 44, requested the Jews to give back 
the high-priestly robe into the custody of the Romans (Azz., xx. 6). 

7 E. Schwartz, ‘ Ueber den Tod der Séhne Zebedai,’ Abh. d. Gott. Ges. d. 
Wiss., N.F., vii. 5; Nachr., 1907, p. 266 sqq.; Z.N.T.W., xi. (1910), pp. 89-104 ; 
W. Heitmiller, Z.N.T.W., xv. (1914), p. 190. Ibid., p. 214, n. 1, Schwartz has 
called our attention to the Montanist tradition, Epiphan., li. 33, according to 
which John was exiled to the island of Patmos under the Emperor Claudius, 


i.e. after 41. He may have been first condemned to deporiatio in insulam (above, 
Pp. 537 ll. 20 f.), and then executed for reversio tllicita. 


THE SERVANTS OF THE WONDER-WORKER 943 


44—on all this the records are silent. Considering the great import- 
ance which a testimony to the high priesthood of Peter would have 
had for the Roman Church, the avgumentum e silentio is in this 
case justifiable, and we may assume that for almost a generation 
the Messianists elected no other high priest of their own. 

Now, if the extract from Hegesippus quoted by Epiphanius 
attests that James the Just, who was slain in the year 62, shortly 
before the coming of Albinus, once more assumed the high priest’s 
diadem, that may appropriately be brought in correlation with 
the renewed outbreak of a revolt against the Herodians and Rome 
in the time of Festus, as attested by Josephus.! Once again at 
that time a seer and wonder-worker, whom Josephus of course calls 
a magician (yons), sought to realize the plan of Jesus of an exodus 
into the wilderness, and perished with his followers in the attempt. 
In Jerusalem ? at the same time the high priests were at strife with 
the Levites and popular leaders, the former being aided by bands 
of rufhans, for whose support they raided the threshing-floors and 
carried off the priestly tithes of corn, so that the poorer priests 
died of hunger. Then, if ever, the opponents of this degenerate 
clerical nobility, shamelessly scuffling for spoil under the eyes of 
the bribed Roman officials, might have chosen as high priest ‘the 
Lord’s brother,’ who had once repeated the miracle of Hanan the 
Hidden in bringing down rain from a parched sky,® and who was 
revered by the people for his piety and justice. On the ground of 
such an election he may have felt himself justified in assuming the 
diadem of the supreme dignity. But if he did so, then he not only 
had the right but was in duty bound to enter the Holy of Holies 
on the Day of Atonement and alone in the presence of his God 
to offer the great confession of sins and make atonement for the 

eople. 

: tf he ventured on such a step, he may, in the confusion of the 
times, with the help of a number of priests bitterly opposed to the 
Sadducaean despots, have succeeded in secretly reaching the Holy 
of Holies and leaving it unmolested. But the proceeding could 
not be kept secret, and the determined old man would doubtless 
not have concealed from any one an act which to his opponents 
must have appeared the most frightful sacrilege conceivable. 
Such an offender could not be allowed to live. The high priest 
Ananus,* of whom Josephus himself has not a good word to say, 
profited by the interregnum in the Roman governorship after the 
death of Festus, when the commander was a mere military tribune, 
more easily accessible to a bribe, to summon a meeting of the 
Sanhedrin, a thing which he had no right to do without the 

1 Ant., xx. 8. Το. - 2 [bid., xx. 9. 2, ὃ 265 546. 

3. Epiphan., Haeres., \xxviii. (P.G., xlii. 721). 

4 Ant., XX: 9. I. 


544 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


governor's consent. The tribunal itself then summoned James and 
his companions, put them on trial, and condemned them to be 
stoned for impiety. It nowhere appears from Josephus, as has 
been rashly assumed by those who wished to discover an irre- 
concilable contradiction between his account and that of Hege- 
sippus, that Ananus and his followers were in a position to execute 
this sentence forthwith. We can well imagine that the Roman 
military tribune could be moved to connive at the assembling of 
seventy worthy elders, without taking official cognizance of the 
fact, since it was evidently a session of a purely academic character. 
But it is a very far cry from that to the toleration of an arbitrary 
arrest by the Sadducees of a popular leader with a considerable 
following even among the loyalists, as appears from the strong 
protest subsequently made to Albinus, or indeed to the toleration 
of the lynching of such a man by the excited mob. There is not 
the least reason to suppose that the deputy-governor would have 
committed himself so far as that. The execution of the death 
sentence must accordingly have been brought about by a mis- 
chievous ruse, the nature of which the account of Hegesippus 
permits us clearly to recognize. 

We note first that, according to the account of the Christian 
pilgrim Hegesippus, James at the time of his death was not 
arrested at all, but was at liberty and so beloved by the people 
that no one would have ventured to seize him. His opponents 
could only try to get round him by dissimulation. Josephus 
speaks of the Sanhedrin ‘ bringing before it’ (παράγειν) James and 
some others: but the outcome of such action may have been as 
humiliating for that body as when on a previous occasion it 
summoned the youthful Herod to trial.! 

How under these circumstances the execution of the sentence 
might be brought about may be easily discovered by a comparison 
of the account of Hegesippus with certain passages in the Talmud.’ 
As late as the third or fourth century it was taught as a Tannaite 
tradition that a man whom the Sanhedrin condemned to be 
stoned, without having the power to execute the sentence, ἡ fell 
from the roof ’—in other words, was punished by God byhis meeting 
with this particular accident. Considering the rare occasions on 
which the Sanhedrin, at a time when it had lost the power of 
trying criminal cases, met in solemn session to condemn a trans- 


1 B.J., 1. 10. 7, ὃ 210: “ἐκάλει κριθησόμενον.᾽" 

5. Keth., 30a (Strack-Billerbeck, ii. 197 54., on Luke xiii. 2): ‘. . . whosoever 
is guilty of being stoned either falls from the roof or a wild beast tramples him 
to death. Whosoever is guilty of being burned to death either falls into the fire 
or is bitten by asnake. Whosoever is guilty of being beheaded is either delivered 
up to the (pagan) government or assailed by robbers. Whosoever is guilty of 
being strangled is either drowned or chokes to death.’ Cf. Shakespeare, All ᾿ς 
Well that Ends Well, iv. 3: ‘Hold your hands; though I know that his brains 
are forfeit to the next tile that falls.’ 


THE SERVANTS OF THE WONDER-WORKER 545 


gressor of the Law to death im contumaciam, we may with great 
probability conjecture that in this phrase there is a reminiscence 
of the fate of James the Just, the more so because a ‘ fall from 
the roof ’ is not an obvious equivalent for the penalty of stoning. 
Furthermore, according to an affirmation on oath of R. ’Eli‘ezer,} 
the first pupil of R. Johanan b, Zakkai and therefore an inhabi- 
tant of Jerusalem contemporary with James the Just, ‘even a 
high priest’ who on entering the sanctuary is guilty of any 
breach of the purity laws of the precincts must have ‘his skull 
split with a wooden club.’ The barbarous punishment here 
threatened, like the ‘ fall from the roof’ of the man condemned to 
be stoned, at once recalls the fate of the ‘ high priest ’ James, who 
was beaten to death with a wooden club by a man whom the 
Christians regarded as a ‘ fuller’ accidentally on the spot. But it 
is Clear that on a day of Passover a workman could not have been 
strolling in or about the precincts of the temple with the imple- 
ment of his trade in his hand, and that therefore this person was 
simply one of the regular club-armed officers of the high priests 
who ᾿ by chance’ and in plain clothes had remained in readiness 
in the neighbourhood, to complete the execution of the ‘accident- 
ally’ fallen victim by ‘braining him with a wooden club.’ 

On the simple assumption that the longer extract from Hege- 
sippus preserved by Epiphanius has been mutilated even more 
drastically than in Eusebius, it is possible to make quite good 
sense of the story of the martyrdom of James. The Sanhedrin 
condemned him to be stoned, not because he preached that the 
crucified Jesus was the Messiah and would shortly so reappear, for 
such a doctrine was in no way punishable under Jewish law and 
did not fall within the meaning of blasphemies deserving of death, 
but because he, whom the hierarchy could of course never have 
recognized as a regular high priest, had actually entered the Holy 
of Holies and immediately in front of it had pronounced the sacro- 
sanct, secret name of God in the prayer of the Day of Atonement. 
The sentence of stoning passed upon James and his accomplices 
(i.e. the priests who officiated with him and conducted him to the 
sanctuary) at an illicit session of the Sanhedrin convened by the 
high priest Ananus could not be executed forthwith. The fanatics 
therefore devised the cunning expedient of inviting the old Saddiq 
to deliver an address from the roof of the temple to the Jewish and 
heathen pilgrims streaming in for the feast of the Passover. When 
he consented and once more availed himself of the opportunity to 
proclaim Jesus to the crowds as ‘the Son of Man who was to return 
on the clouds of heaven,’ he was pushed over the parapet and 
dispatched beneath with the wooden club. The object of the 
whole plot can only have been to enable his enemies to repre- 

1 Tosephta Kelim, i. 1.6; Bab. kam., 1 (middle). 
2M 


546 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


sent to the Romans that the Saddiq had met. with an accidental 
death from a fall through giddiness, just as the Talmudic passages 
already quoted maintain that the Sanhedrin’s solemn death 
sentences were carried out, so to speak, by the direct avenging 
intervention of the Deity. 

One can well imagine that Josephus passed lightly over the 
shameful part played in these proceedings by the priesthood, so 
that he extracted only what was absolutely necessary from the 
letter of protest sent by the ‘ most respectable and law-abiding Ὁ 
Jews to Albinus. On the other hand, the credibility of the account 
of Hegesippus is guaranteed by the fact that the Christians had 
not recognized the man with the club, who had to execute the 
sentence, as an agent of the Sanhedrin, but regarded him as an 
ordinary fuller fanatically laying about him with his implement. 
However, it is not improbable that Josephus wrote some lines 
about the occasion which James had given for the proceedings of 
Ananus, and did not altogether omit to state the grave provocation 
which led to the trial by the Sanhedrin. These clauses may have 
been deleted by a Christian hand with the same object that brought 
about the mutilation of the Hegesippus passage in Eusebius and 
Epiphanius, namely, to represent James as a passive victim of his 
opponents and to conceal his share in the political conflicts of his 
time. On the other hand, as has been convincingly shown by 
Dr, Eduard Schwartz,! a very clumsy hand interpolated into the 
Hegesippus story an actual stoning of James, to remove the 
apparent contradiction to Josephus’ words ‘ delivered them up to 
be stoned,’ quite regardless of the improbability thereby imported 
into the narrative. For since there were actually no loose stones 
lying about on the marble floor of the temple courts, the Jews, to 
carry out their sudden idea, ‘ Let us stone James the Just,’ 2 would 
have had the difficult task of breaking up the pavement, unless 
they had brought with them stones concealed in their garments, 
as the supposed fuller his club. But that would of course have 
defeated their main object, namely, to represent the affair to the 
Komans as an accident. The breaking of the skull by the blows 
of the club could without difficulty be explained as a consequence 
of the fall, but the bloodshot wounds over the whole body, pro- 
duced by the stones, would have betrayed the truth all too clearly. 
Thus, in this last section of Josephus, devoted to a hero of early 
Christian history, and in the parallel narrative of Hegesippus, the 
marks of the activity of ‘ the false pen of the scribes’ are again 
clearly traceable. 


RGN. LW <5, 1903). Ὁ. 50. * Euseb., ΠΕ: i1.-23. 


XVIII 


THE PREDICTED WORLD-RULER—HEROD, JESUS, 
OR VESPASIAN ? 


- HE last mention of the crucified Messiah in the Haldsis of 
Josephus occurs in the sixth book at the end of the list of 
prodigies derived independently by both Josephus and 

Tacitus from the imperial commentaries, which, according to 

ancient Roman fashion, conscientiously observed and noted even 

such things as these. 
To this narrative, ending with the pathetic story of the ominous 
woes pronounced upon Jerusalem by the peasant Jeshu‘a Ὁ. Hanan, 

Josephus appends an unpleasantly pietist reflection of his own: 


B.J., vi. 5. 4, § 310 sqq. 

‘Reflecting on these things, one 
will find that God has a care for 
men, and by all kinds of premoni- 
tory signs shows His people the 
way of salvation, while they owe 
their destruction to folly and 
calamities of their own choosing. 


‘Thus the Jews, after the demol- 
ition of fort Antonia, reduced the 
temple to a square, although they 
had it recorded in their oracles ὦ 


Capture of Jerusalem (Haldsis).? 


‘But if one thinks aright one will 
find that God gives men all kinds 
of premonitory signs, foretokening 
what is for the salvation of our 
race. We, however, perish through 
ignorance and evil of our own 
choosing. For God hath shown 
signs of wrath, in order that men 
might recognize the wrath of God, 
desist from their wickedness, and 
thereby mollify the Deity. (AlI- 
though) the Jews had a prophecy 
that through (being reduced to) a 
quadrangular form (the) city and 
the temple would be devastated, 


1 Probably alluding to some Haggadic interpretation of Dan, viii. 22: ‘ the 


four [horns] that stood up in place of, or behind, that which was broken ’ (the 
Hebrew word q‘ranoth for ‘ horns,’ which is missing in the present Massoretic text 
and therefore also in the English A.V., but which both Greek translators read in 
their exemplar, could be understood, like the Arabian qurnah, to mean a projecting 
‘corner’ of astructure). It is noteworthy that the Arabic Josephus asserts that 
this and the following prediction on the world-ruler were recorded on inscriptions : 
‘ An inscription on an old stone ran, If the temple is completed and becomes four- 
square, it will be desolated.’ Another inscription was to be found on a stone in 
the wall of the Holy of Holies: ‘ If the temple becomes four-square, a king will 
rule over Israel who will take possession of the whole earth.’ The people thought 
that this was the king of Israel: the wise said that it was the king of Rome 
(Wellhausen, Der arabische Josifus, Berlin, 1897, p. 41). The inscription on the 
wall of the sanctuary is obviously a legendary distortion of the inscription com- 
memorating the death of James the Just, above, p. 519 nn. 2 and 4. 

2 The Russian text with a Greek interlinear retroversion, showing with what 
degree of preciseness the original can be recovered, is given as App. XXIV, pp..622 {, 

547 


548 


that the city and the sanctuary 
would be taken when the temple 
should become four-square. 

But what 
more than all else incited them to 
the war was an ambiguous oracle, 
likewise found in their sacred 
scriptures, to the effect that at 
that time one from their country 
would become ruler of the in- 
habited world. This they under- 
stood to mean some one of their 
own race, and many of their wise 
men went astray in their inter- 
pretation of it. The oracle, 
however, in reality signified the 
sovereignty of Vespasian, who was 
proclaimed emperor on Jewish 
soil. For all that, it is impossible 
for men to escape their fate, even 
though they foresee it. Some of 
these portents, then, the Jews 
interpreted to please themselves, 
until the ruin of their country and 
their own destruction convicted 
them of their folly.’ 


THE MESSIAH JESUS 


they ! made after (the destruction 
of Antonia the) sanctuary four- 
square. 


What moved (them) to 
war was an ambiguous announce- 
ment found in (the) sacred scrip- 
tures that in those times one from 
(the) Jewish land would become 
ruler of the inhabited world. Of 
this (announcement) there were 
various interpretations. Some 
believed that Herod (was meant), 
others again that crucified Wonder- 
worker Jesus,” others lastly Vespa- 
sian. But it is not possible for 
men to escape judgment, even 
though they foresee it. Thus the 
Jews, knowing the portents before- 
hand, at their pleasure tuned them 
to their satisfaction ; the rest they 
calumniated up to their own ruin 
and that of their country. They 
were put to shame and shown up 
as fools.’ 


A glance at these parallel passages will suffice to show that the 
words relegated from the second column to footnote! are a Chris- 


tian interpolation. 


In the first place, they are a superfluous 


duplication : the Jews disregarded the oracle about the square by 
the destruction of Fort Antonia ; the prophecy was thereby ful- 
filled and there was no need for the making of further ‘ squares ’ 
(=crosses). Secondly, it is clear that the clause has been inserted 
from a desire to represent the crucifixion of Jesus as the great 
crime for which the Jews were punished by the destruction of their 
city and temple. It is highly instructive for the criticism of the 
Christian interpolations discussed elsewhere,’ on the crucifixion of 
Jesus ‘ by the Jews’ and ‘ according to the law of their fathers,’ 
that the writer of this clause knew quite well that crucifixion is not 
a Jewish custom, and that the Jews ‘at that time ’—a phrase 
which for this writer means simply in the time of Jesus—first 


1 (Christian interpolation) ‘began at that time themselves to make crosses for 
crucifixions, which, as we have said, is a thing of fourfold shape and .. .’ 

2 The name was found by Berendts (0p. czt., p.12) in Cod. Arch. Mosp., fol. 460r., 
col. 1, and in Cod. Acad. It is missing in Cod. Kyr. Bjel., 64/1303, fol. 250 v.; 
reproduced in vol. ii. Germ. ed., on p. 591. According to this MS. it would seem 
as though Josephus when writing the Haldsts had entirely ignored the name of 
Jesus. This, however, is so unlikely that I prefer to suppose a deletion of the 
nameinsome MSS. Cf. above, p. 405.. 3 Cf, above, pp. 387 and 521. 


THE PREDICTED WORLD-RULER 549 


began, in the heathen manner, to make ‘ crosses themselves for 
crucifixions.’ The plurals, ‘ crosses’ and ‘ crucifixions,’ although 
the oracle only required one ‘ four-cornered form,’ are an obvious 
allusion to the three crosses of Golgotha, so familiar to Christian 
readers of the Gospels. But certain as it is that this clause is a 
Christian interpolation with transparent purpose, it would be no 
less certainly erroneous to pass the same judgment on the words 
referring to Jesus in the account of the interpretation given to the 
oracle on the world-ruler. 

Those words of the Haldsis, ‘ that crucified Wonder-worker 
(Jesus),’ closely correspond to the phrase of Lucian previously 
quoted, ‘that magician . . . who was impaled (ἀνασκολοπι- 
σθέντα) in Palestine.’ Even if the dependence of Lucian on Jose- 
phus should be questioned, the supercilious tone common to these 
two passages is unmistakable. No Christian wroteso. By way of 
contrast we may note the manner in which the so-called ‘Ege- 
sippus’ paraphrases the sentence which he found in his Greek MS. 
of Josephus : 


‘id alii ad Vespasianum referendum putaverunt, prudentiores ad 
Dominum Jesum Christum, qui eorum in terris secundum carnem 
genitus ex Maria regnum suum per universa terrarum spatia diffudit.’ 


The Slavonic omits altogether the last sentence in the Greek, to 
the effect that history has shown the Romanophile interpretation 
to be correct ; and very significantly, for of course still less than 
the “Arab’ Herod could the Roman Vespasian be represented by 
Josephus to his Jewish readers as the true Messiah foretold by 
God. On the other hand, the allusions to Herod and to Jesus are 
wanting in the Greek text addressed to Vespasian and Titus. On 
this Goethals 5 has pertinently remarked : 


‘It would have been the act of a clumsy courtier to recall (to 
Vespasian) in such a work that this honour jwas not uncontested, that 
he had a competitor for the dignity of messiahship in the person of 
that crucified wonder-worker Jesus.’ 


The discussion of the Jewish priests on their nation’s expectations 
of a messiah, contained in the Haldsis,° is in fact omitted in the 
Greek Polemos, in order not to betray how un-Jewish was that 
interpretation of the passage of Scripture as referring to Vespasian, 
by which Josephus secured his favoured position at the Flavian 
court. 

Goethals might have added that the allusion to Herod the 
Great in this passage was not less undiplomatic and must have 

1 Cf. p. 11 ἢ. 5 and p. 51 nn. 3 and 4. 


* Joséphe témoin de Jésus, Paris, 1909, p. 14. 
3 Cf. above, pp. 137 f. 4 B.]., iil. 399 sqq. 


550 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


brought down upon Josephus a reproof from his patron Agrippa II. 
For if in this section on the meaning of the ‘ambiguous oracle, 
which drove the Jews into revolt, war, and ruin, mention was made 
of its interpretation as referring to the person of Herod the Great, 
then it must have appeared to readers who happened to light on 
this passage as though it was the Herodians * who, on the ground 
of these old messianic expectations, had pressed for war with 
Rome.2 Agrippa mu. and his followers, who had taken up the 
directly opposite position and fought throughout the campaign on 
the Roman side, would therefore have been perfectly right in 
protesting against this clumsiness, and Josephus would have been 
compelled to omit the name of Herod at this passage in subsequent 
editions of his book. 

In this abridged form, with only two alternatives, ‘Jesus ° or 
‘Vespasian,’ left, the passage was found by ‘ Egesippus.’ The 
reverse theory, namely, that a Christian or a Jew was afterwards 
impelled to supplement this ‘either Jesus or Vespasian’ by men- 
tioning a third, old interpretation, that 15, Herod, seems to be 
utterly improbable. Fora Christian who here sought to introduce 
his far-fetched learning, derived from Tertullian,* Jerome,’ or 
Epiphanius,® would certainly, like ‘Egesippus,’ have so reshaped 
the sentence as to show that in his opinion the application to Jesus 
alone was correct. Again, a Jew, writing after the time of Jose- 
phus, i.e. after the fall of Jerusalem, instead of attending to old 
messianic pretensions of Herod quite unknown to rabbinic litera- 
ture, would rather have had every reason to emphasize the expecta- 
tion of a future messiah, a hope which remained unshattered by all 
the blows of fate. 


THE WAR-GUILT OF THE CHRISTIANS IN THE ‘ HALOSIS ’ 
OF JOSEPHUS 


The strangest thing about these words in the Haldsis of Jose- 
phus is the fact that neither Eusebius nor the Christian author of 
the Latin version known as Egesippus observed what a monstrous 
accusation against the Christians they contained. 


1 It is of course not impossible that there were members of the Herodian 
party who expected the return in glory of the old Herod the Great, because they 
hated and despised as an unworthy scion of the old tiger the opportunist philo- 
Roman Agrippa 11. 

2 Cf. the similar contention of the Hebrew Josippon, above, p. 105 ll. 12 ff. 


3 De praescr, adv. Haeret., 45: ‘ Herodiani, qui Herodem Christum esse 
credebant.’ 
4 In Matt. xxii. 15: ‘ quidam Latinorum ridicule Herodianos putant, qui 


Herodem Christum esse credebant’; id., Contra Luciferian., c. xxii: ‘quod 
Herodiani Herodem regem suscepere pro Christo.’ Philaster, Haeres,, xxvii. 
δῦ Adv. Haeres., xx.; P.G., xli. 260. 


THE PREDICTED WORLD-RULER 551 


The question of the historical truth or probability of the state- 
ment can be left out of account altogether. For the mischievous 
impression which Josephus, probably unintentionally yet quite 
clearly, produced by the words in question, viz. that the Herodians, 
through their belief in the messianic vocation of Herod the Great 
and his return as world-ruler, had a special share in the outbreak 
of the revolt from Rome, must clearly have been corrected by 
himself through the omission of the misleading allusion to this old, 
and at that time doubtless antiquated, interpretation. Clearly, 
therefore, a forger of history who had brought such a manifestly 
misleading charge against the Herodians may also in this matter 
have done the Christians indirectly a most serious injustice. 

But every reader of the lines in question must see at the first 
glance that Josephus, by asserting that it was the false application 
of the prophecy to Jesus—i.e. the expectation of the return of the 
crucified in glory to enter upon his world-dominion—which above 
all incited the Jews to war with Rome, shifts the responsibility for 
the revolt of the year 66 directly on to the followers of Jesus and 
their announcement of his approaching pavousia. In other words, 
the war-guilt from which the Herodians had justly exonerated 
themselves is now by the shortened text, as it remained after the 
deletion of Herod’s name and as ‘Egesippus’ read and translated 
it, transferred to the Christians. The passage in this form clearly 
implies the existence of two interpretations of Gen. xlix. 10. One 
party expected that the world-ruler, while coming indeed ‘from 
Judah,’ would be no Jew but a new emperor called to the throne 
from Judaea, who would finally deprive the Jews of all independ- 
ence under a ruler of their own. This was of course the explana- 
tion given by a resigned and submissive group, anxious for peace 
at any price. The second interpretation—viz. that the world- 
dominion was destined for a Jew of Judaea—with its reference tothe 
return of the crucified Jesus from heaven as the glorious Christ at 
the head of legions of heavenly hosts, is clearly the one which 
could have exercised the bellicose effect emphasized by Josephus. 
Thus, quite unambiguously, the Christians, the believers in the 
messiahship of Jesus, are charged with having driven the Jews into 
the disastrous war. 

That is quite in keeping with the fact already mentioned, that 
Josephus has dealt with the insurrection of the year 21 much more 
fully and impressively than with other similar movements, and 
lets the anti-Christian tendency of his whole work plainly appear. It 
further explains why the reference to Jesus, which was still read 
and discreetly paraphrased by Eusebius and ‘ Egesippus,’ after 
Josephus had himself expunged the name of Herod, was struck out 
from the extant Christian MSS. of the Jewish War. It is utterly 
impossible to suppose that these words, which incidentally attri- 


552 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


bute to the Christians the responsibility for the fall of Jerusalem, 
could have been inserted by a Christian. 

If the reader should ask how far the reproach brought by 
Josephus against the Christians may contain a grain of truth, the 
answer must be extracted from two striking facts. In the first 
place, there is a passage of Sulpicius Severus, which Jacob 
Bernays 3 and Prof. Weber ὃ rightly consider to be derived from a 
lost portion of the fifth book of the Histories of Tacitus, containing 
an account of the Roman war council at which Titus expresses his 
opinion that the temple must be destroyed in order that the 
Christian belief, i.e. the messianic expectation of the return of 
Jesus, may be radically extirpated. Titus, then, according to this 
passage, regarded the ‘ Christians’ who ‘ took their origin from 
the Jews,’ i.e. the Jewish sect of the messianist followers of Jesus, 
as the chief promoters of disturbance. The passage has not un- 
naturally caused great difficulties to modern commentators.4 But 
the usual way of evading these, by representing the words as the 
reflections of the Christian writer or his Christian source, is quite 
impracticable. For a later Christian must have known that to 
Christians the destruction of the temple was but the fulfilment of 
a prediction of Jesus, and could therefore have only given a new 
impetus to the Christian belief in his return in glory as judge and 
ruler of the world. 

On the other hand, it is clear that objection has been taken to 
the passage solely because the political importance of the original 
Jewish-Christian expectation of a messiah has been misunderstood 
or gravely underrated. The words of Titus contain nothing what- 
ever which a Roman general could not have known or spoken.° 
The antagonism between orthodox Jews and Jewish-Christians 
must have been, so to speak, officially known ever since the syna- 
gogue riots occasioned by Paul throughout the Roman empire, the 
deportations of the messianists under Claudius—in any case, since 
the denunciation of the Christians by the Roman Jews at the time 
of the Neronian persecution. That Titus did not distinguish 
between the activist messianists, for ever flocking round new 
leaders, and the followers of Jesus whom Paul had converted into 


1 1 Chron. ii. 30.6: ‘ At contra alii et Titus ipse euertendum in primis templum 
censebant, quo plenius Iudaeorum et Christianorum religio tolleretur : quippe has 
religiones, licet contrarias sibi, iisdem tamen ab auctoribus profectas: Christianos 
ex Tudaeis exstitisse : radice sublata stirpem facile perituram.’ 

2 Gesammelte Abhandlungen, ii. 159-81. 

3 Josephus und Vespasian, p. 72 τι. 1. 

4M. M. Valeton, Verslagen en Mededeelingen ἃ. k. Akad. van Wetenschappen, 
Afdeeling Letterkunde, iv. 3, Amsterdam, 1899, pp. 87-116, esp. 105 sqqg.; Norden, 
op. cit., p. 653 n. 1; Schiirer-Macpherson, i. 2, p. 244 sq., n. 115; Weynand, in 
Pauly-Wissowa, R.E., vi. (1909), ο. 2703. 

* Especially after the Christians had been officially accused under Nero of 
having set Rome afire, 


THE PREDICTED WORLD-RULER 553 


quietists, is in keeping with a speech of Tertullus before Felix, 
accusing Paul of being ‘a mover of insurrections among all the 
Jews throughout the world and a ringleader of the sect of the 
Nasoraeans,’? and with the Roman centurion’s confusion of the 
apostle with the Egyptian messiah.2 Such minor errors are 
readily intelligible when it appears that the official reports of a 
Cuspius Fadus and a Tiberius Alexander represented the Christian 
preaching of the resurrection as a purely political message. 

If, indeed, as would appear from the Hebrew Josephus, the 
arch-brigand ’Ele‘azar, son of Deinaeus, was a companion of Peter 
the Barjona, if the rebel Theudas was a friend or acquaintance 8 of 
Paul, if, indeed, James the Just, as the restored account of Hege- 
sippus informs us, was elected by the opponents of the ruling high 
priest to take his place, one cannot describe the opinion of Titus 
as altogether unfounded. The statement 4 that the Christian 
community at Jerusalem, immediately before the investment of 
the city and in consequence of a ‘Divine warning,’ fled to Pella in 
Transjordania, only proves that the Christians, in accordance with 
the predictions of Jesus, regarded Jerusalem as irretrievably lost, 
and by no means that they did not momentarily expect the saving 
return of their Master and his final victory. 

Anyhow, the agreement of the prevailing opinion on the Chris- 
tians at the Roman headquarters (or, if you prefer, the prejudice 
against them) with Josephus’ outspoken accusation of the messian- 
ists is highly remarkable, and forms, in my opinion, a striking 
argument for the authenticity of the relevant lines in the Old 
Russian version. 

Then there is a further circumstance. It is very striking that 
in this retrospective survey of the beginnings of the war and the 
omina excidi urbis Josephus never mentions the one man who at 
the outbreak of the revolt came forward as king of the Jews, to wit, 
Menahem, son of Judas of Galilee.* For if the Zealots at the 
beginning of the revolt set up as king a scion of this old Galilaean 
rebel dynasty, then it is clear that they regarded this man as the 
Lord’s Anointed and interpreted the oracle in Scripture as referring 
tohim. His name and not that of Jesus or Herod the Great should 
therefore have been mentioned in this passage. But the omission 
is satisfactorily explained by the assumption that when Josephus 
wrote the Haldsis he knew nothing of this episode of the proclama- 


1 Acis xxiv. 5. 2 Ibid., xxi. 38. 

$ Clem. Alex., Stvom., vii. 17 (P.G., ix. 549) : ‘ Valentine is said to have been 
a disciple (ἀκηκοέναι) of Theudas, who was a friend (or acquaintance, or disciple: 
γνώριμος) of Paul.’ δ Euseb., H.E£., iii. 5. 

* Josephus, B.J., ii. 17. 9, ὃ 442, calls him ‘ an insufferable tyrant,’ but in ὃ 445 
tells of his going ‘ in royal robes ’ up to the temple, where the people pelted him 
with stones from the roof (read dpogds for ὀργάς). He did, therefore, put himself 
forward as king, i.e. as the messiah, of the last war, 


554 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


tion of Menahem as king and his subsequent martyrdom ! at the 
hands of the followers of ’Ele‘azar, captain of the temple and son 
of the high priest, who at the head of the young priests and 
temple servants had arrogated to himself the leadership of the 
revolt. Since, according to the narrative of Josephus, neither this 
‘Ele‘azar nor any of the other rebel leaders laid claim to the name 
or the insignia of a king, it is clear that the strictly messianistic 
insurgents of the year 66 were the followers of Menahem the 
Galilaean. The rest presumably, in the manner of their Macca- 
baean forefathers, had their eyes only on the immediate political 
goal: their leaders would in the event of success have been content 
with the office of high priest, and would never have dreamed of 
setting up a messianic, world-wide kingdom. Josephus, therefore, 
only because at that time he had no information about the appear- 
ance of Menahem, while he knew well that a section of the rebels 
stood under the ban of those messianic predictions, along with the 
antiquated application of that prophecy to Herod mentioned also 
its supposed reference to Jesus, and thereby threw suspicion on the 
Christians, the obstinate followers of their crucified Messiah, as the 
Jewish party more responsible than any for driving the nation 
to war. 

We may well believe Sulpicius Severus, or rather his authority 
Tacitus, when he implies that this error, momentous for Christians 
but immaterial for Roman politics and strategy, was shared by 
Roman headquarters. At any rate, Vespasian, after the destruc- 
tion of Jerusalem, had all descendants of David rounded up, 
although there is not the least reason to suppose that this peaceful 
clan* had taken any part whatever in messianistic machinations. 


THE SHILO PROPHECY APPLIED TO VESPASIAN. 
JOSEPHUS AND TIBERIUS ALEXANDER 


The ‘ambiguous prophecy’ to which Josephus refers is without 
doubt ὃ the Shzlo or Shilu prophecy of Gen. xlix. 10, endlessly 
discussed by Jews and Christians : 


‘The sceptre shall not depart from Judah, nor the ruler’s staff 


1 The in this connexion important §§ 431-4, 440-9 are missing in the Slavonic. 
According to the Vita, § 21, Josephus had hidden in the interior of the temple 
until a temporary quiet was restored in the city. He probably was then quite 
unaware of what had been going on outside. 

5. Cf. above, p. 322 n. I. 

3 That was seen as early as the seventeenth century by Daniel Huet, Demonstr. 
evang., Paris, 16081, prop. vil., num. xxxii.; by Natalis Alexander, Hist. eccl. vet. 
test., Paris, 1677 (1699), diss. xii. p. 250; further by O. Gerlach, Die Weissagungen 
des Alten Testaments, in den Schriften des Flavius Josephus, 1863, p. 41, and by 
Joseph Langen, Theol. Quartal-Schrift, Tiibingen, 1865, i. 4. 


THE PREDICTED WORLD-RULER 555 


from a son of his loins,! until the Shi/u? comes, and 8 he is the expec- 
tation of the Gentiles,’ ov, ‘and him shall the peoples obey,’ # 


which obviously means, there shall be no interruption in the 
government of a Jewish dynasty until he comes (from Judah ?) 
whom all peoples shall obey. This exposition was commonly 
supported by such predictions as Micah v. I (2) sqq.: 


‘But thou, Bethlehem .. ., albeit but little among the districts® 
of Judah, out of thee shall come forth one that shall be ruler in 
Israel . . . for now shall he be great unto the ends of the earth,’ 


and by the other ‘messianic’ prophecies of Jewish world-dominion. 
The oracle was ambiguous because, at least to those who no longer 
understood the meaning of the Babylonian loan-word s/ilu—in 
other words, all or most readers of the Hellenistic age—-it left the 
question open whether the expected world-ruler would be of 
Jewish origin or not. The sentence might equally well be taken 
to mean that the ruling house of Judah would not cease until it had 
produced the expected world-ruler, or, on the contrary, that it 
would end only with the subjugation of all peoples, including the 
Jews, by a foreign, non-Jewish world-ruler. 

The high hopes of the Herodians who saw in Herod the Great, 
the first non-Jewish dynast, the Shilu promised to the Jews, have 
been mentioned in a previous chapter. They were by no means 
buried with that monarch. On the contrary, there are clear in- 
dications which suggest that this party attached such messianic 
hopes to Agrippa I., the sufferer who had been released from prison 
by Caligula and exalted to the throne, who had been invested by 
Claudius with the whole kingdom of his grandfather, and who had 
allowed himself to be borne in triumph into Alexandria and to be 
hailed by his countrymen as maran, ‘ our lord’;? that they re- 
garded the imprisonment which he had undergone in Rome as the 
‘woes’ or ‘sufferings’ of the Messiah—nay, that in the end they 
had not shrunk from an apotheosis of this conceited kinglet, who 
had appeared before the people arrayed in the shining robe of a 
γοὶ soletl.® It was probably just these dangerous tendencies 
which moved the counsellors of Claudius to refuse the youthful 
Agrippa 11. the succession to his father’s throne,® and to send in his 
stead Tiberius Alexander, the Hellenized Jew from Alexandria, as 
imperial governor. 


1 R.V., ‘from between his feet.’ 

2 Bab. loan-word for ‘ king’; cf. my paper in the Expository Times, xxxvi. 
(1925), p. 477, and above, p. 137 note Io. 

3 Following the LXX.: ‘‘xal αὐτὸς προσδοκία ἐθνῶν." 

4 After Massor. T. δ Or ‘clans.’ 

6 Cf. above, p. 137 ff. 

7 Ant., xviii. 6,11; Philo, Jn Flacc., ὃ 5 sq. (it. 521 M). 

8 Ant., xix. ὃ 344. ® Cf, above, p. 206 1, 20, 


556 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


The idea that the destroyer of Jerusalem, the conqueror of the 
Jews, was for that very reason the predicted world-ruler of the 
final age was by no means confined to the wretched Josephus. 
Three days before Nero’s death, Hillel’s pupil, the celebrated 
Rk. Johanan b. Zakkai, had predicted Vespasian’s elevation to 
the principate and been richly rewarded for his prophecy ; + 
and the omina imperw tell of similar oracles of a Syrian priest 
on Mt. Carmel* and of the great heathen mystic Apollonius 
of Tyana.® 

When Prof. Wilhelm Weber writes,* 


“One might almost regard the whole story as a game got up 
between Josephus and the general staff, who used him for political 
ends,’ 


I am now, after the edifying insight afforded by the Old Russian 
Halodsis into the character of Josephus, perfectly convinced that 
he has hit the nail on the head. Weber rightly pointed out that 
Vespasian was in Alexandria when he received the oracle of 
Apollonius, in which he was praised as the βούκολος, as the ‘ good 
shepherd,’ ὅ without whom the human flock must goto ruin, But 
it was precisely in Alexandria that Vespasian was represented as 
healing a blind man and another with a crippled hand, who had 
been directed to him ‘by dreams.’® If one turns back to the 
debate of the anti-Herodian priests on the expected messiah, re- 
counted in the Haldsis of Josephus,’ one notes at once that accord- 
ing to Jewish ideas the lame and the blind were destined to be 
healed under the Lord’s Anointed. One further recalls that 
among the king-makers surrounding Vespasian one of the shrewd- 
est was the then prefect of Egypt, who administered to the Libyan 
legion the oath of allegiance to Vespasian, and was afterwards chief 
of the general staff of Titus. I mean, of course, the Romanized 
Jew, Tiberius Alexander. 

The inference is obvious. None but this apostate nephew of 
the great Philo, with his intimate knowledge of the soul of the 
Jewish people and their messianic dreams, could have conceived 
the idea of fetching from among the crowd of beggars who at all 
times swarmed round the synagogues the alleged blind man and 
his unfortunate companion with the crippled hand, and instructing 
them how they must force their way to the general headquarters, 
and into the very presence of the general himself, with the story 


1 Aboth de R. Nathan, c. 4, and parallels. 

2 Tacitus, Hist., 11. 78; Suet., Vesp., 5-6. 

3 Philostr:, Vita Apoll., v. 27-43. 4 Josephus and Vespasian, Ὁ. 43 τ. 5. 

® Cf. Isaiah xliv. 28 on Cyrus appointed to be the ‘shepherd,’ and xlv. 1, the 
‘ Anointed’ of God. 

6 Dio Cassius, exc. Xiphilini, Ixvi. 8. ? Cf. above, p. 137 notes 6 and 7, 


THE PREDICTED WORLD-RULER 557 


of their God-sent dreams of healing, and not rest until the great 
man, the saviour of the world, had performed for them the 
messianic miracle. 

How far Vespasian himself was privy to these plots, how far the 
superstition of the Roman, who afterwards took for his counsellor 
the intriguing astrologer Seleucus,! was utilized by his courtiers to 
drive forward the hesitating and distrustful old soldier, can no 
longer be made out. Certain it is that heathen and Jews vied 
with each other in staging those omina tmperit so necessary to him. 
Yet certainly, too, a Hellenized Jew who had made his peace with 
Rome, like Tiberius Alexander, at a time when his countrymen had 
been profoundly stirred and stimulated to a desperate war with 
Rome by the interpretation of those ancient messianic prophecies 
as in course of fulfilment, had the strongest reason to represent to 
them, by another interpretation of Gen. xlix. 10, the subjection to 
a world-power, which every unprejudiced person must have seen 
to be inevitable, as not only acceptable but even as willed and 
ordained by God.? No less must Mucianus, the governor of Syria, 
have been concerned to stem the flood of the Jewish messianic 
propaganda, to dock those widespread Sibylline broadsides of 
their pointed anti-Roman allusions, and to put them, so far as 
possible, at the service of Vespasian and his cause. Tiberius 
Alexander and Mucianus must have been the two confidential 
counsellors of Vespasian who alone with Titus were present at the 
theatrical début of the captured ‘ prophet’ Josephus,‘ and so super- 
intended the performance of a carefully prepared comedy. We 
have referred above ὃ to the probability that, even before being 
taken prisoner, Josephus had been in treasonable communication 
with the Roman intelligence officers, in particular with his ‘old 
acquaintance and friend,’ the military tribune Nicanor.6 Without 
such good connexions at headquarters he would never have suc- 
ceeded in being brought before the commander-in-chief and ob- 
taining credit for his alleged prophetic mission. His whole later 
position at the imperial court was built on two facts: on the one 
hand, the impossibility of getting rid of a ‘seer’ who professed to 
be inspired by God himself and whose name appeared at the head 
of the list of the omina tmperit, without robbing the most important 
of these premonitions of its credibility ; on the other, a desire to 
retain the lasting goodwill of one who knew too much about the 
dark beginnings of the new dynasty and the methods employed for 

1 Tacitus, Hist., 11. 78. 

2 Cf. Dio Cassius, Ixxiv. 3, the official collection of miracles assembled in 
order to prove to his credulous contemporaries the divine mission of the usurper 
Septimius Severus as emperor by the grace of the gods. 

* They could refer to prophecies such as Jer. xxvii. 1-15, on the necessity of 


submitting to Nebuchadnezzar. 
4 B.J., iii. 399. ° ® Cf. p. 195 ll. 34 ff. B.J., iii. 346. 


558 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


creating ‘a certain authority and majesty for an unlooked-for atid 
new emperor.’ ἢ 

Nothing could be more significant for the Christology, i.e. the 
messianic ideas current in the period immediately preceding the 
genesis of the Synoptic Gospels, than the fact that in A.D, 73 Jose- 
phus could make his readers believe that in the year of Vespasian’s 
insurrection the Jews built their messianic hopes, not on any living 
Jew, but partly on Herod the Great, partly on Jesus the crucified 
wonder-worker and king without a kingdom, partly on the Roman 
general and enemy of their people, Flavius Vespasianus. 

Two of these three saviours of the world, whom Herodians, 
Christians, and pro-Romans vied with each other in claiming as 
indicated by the messianic prophecies of the Old Testament, had 
then been dead for more than a generation. ‘Those who looked for 
the resurrection of Herod the Great,” or his victorious return from 
heaven at the head of legions of angels, did not stand alone in that 
credulous age. It had been predicted of the Emperor Nero, shortly 
before his fall in 68, that he would exchange the dominion of Rome 
for that of the Orient—according to some, indeed, for dominion over 
the kingdom of Jerusalem.* After the death of this emperor, 
whom some had pronounced to be the son of Jupiter and Juno,‘ 
‘there were not wanting persons who for a long time decorated his 
tomb with spring and summer flowers and exhibited sometimes his 
images . . . sometimes his edicts as though he were alive and 
would shortly return.’® When, twenty years after his death, 
during Suetonius’ youth, a man of unknown origin gave himself 
out to be the risen Nero, he found such powerful support in Parthia 
that with the help of the enemy he was almost ‘restored’ to the 
throne of Rome. 

It is no longer difficult to explain the origin of the heathen idea 
of the redemptive return of a dead ruler. Franz Kampers has 
sought to show that a return of Alexander the Great from the 
other world was expected very soon after his untimely death.® 

That may well be so. The easiest explanation of such ideas is 
the fact that people simply refuse to believe in the death of a great 
man, distrust the news of his decease, suspect some plot of his 
enemies, and look for the king’s return from temporary imprison- 
ment, from abroad, etc. In the same manner, according to the 
third century Alexander Romance, the Egyptians still awaited 


t Tacitus, Hist.,iv, 81. One canimagine the ironical smile of the historian when 
he read to his friends the sentence stating that the eye-witnesses (of the omina 
imperti) stuck to their statements even after the extinction of the Flavian dynasty, 
‘ when they could no longer hope for a reward for their lies,’ which fact he reports 
as a proof of the truth of the omzna in question, 

* Cf. above, p. 550 nn. I-5. 3 Sueton., Nevo, 40. 

4 Orac. Sib., v. 140. 5 Sueton., Nero, 57. 

6 Vom Werdegang dey abendlandischen Katsermystik, Leipzig, 1924, p. oo n. I. 


THE PREDICTED WORLD-RULER 559 


King Nectanebus, who had fled from the Persians into the interior 
of Ethiopia : 


‘ This king who has fled will again come to I-gypt, not as an old 
man, but in the strength of youth, and will subjugate our enemies 
the Persians.’ 


It is in Egypt, where the idea prevails that the dying king, like 
the sun, goes in ‘to his horizon,’! that the thought of his rising 
again in rejuvenated form must inevitably have developed. Where 
the dead monarch was shut into the innermost chamber of an 
artificial mountain of stone, there it must have been thought 
possible for the mighty man to emerge once more from this dark 
cave to save his people in their direst need. 

In ancient Babylon the roots of the belief in the return of the 
king in godlike form can be traced still further. According to a 
remarkable Sumerian poem, enumerating the names of the kings 
of Isin,* the famous primaeval monarchs are implored to return to 
earth with plaintive cries of ‘How long does he rest ?’, recalling 
the “How long, O Master, holy and true, dost thou not judge ῥ᾽ 
of the Apocalypse of John. 

The belief in Nero’s return may be traced, then, to popular ideas 
of a journey of the deceased emperors to heaven, ideas which arose 
out of the rites of apotheosis (the eagle flying heavenward out of the 
funeral pyre) and were easily associated with the Hellenistic belief 
in the descent from heaven of the god-sent ruler, the saviour-king 
destined to deliver the world sunk in misery. To the Romans 
the idea was familiar by the time of Pompey “ at the latest, and 
in 40 B.C. it was popularized by the Sibyllines disseminated by 
Cleopatra’s agents in Rome, Alexandria, and Syria, and by Vergil’s 
‘tam nova progenies caelo demittitury alto’ in the fourth eclogue. 

It was in honour of the youthful Emperor Nero that T. Cal- 
purnius Siculus composed fresh eclogues, lavishing upon him in 
elaborated form the encomiums of Vergil’s fourth eclogue. The 
gods sent down Nero from heaven; the gods after a time again 


+ Cf. A. Erman, Die Literatur dey Aegypter, p. 29. 
* Hilprecht, Babyl, Exped. of Univ. of Pennsylvania, vol. xx. pt. i. p. 46. 


Sear 
vi. 10. 

* Cicero, De imp. Cn. Pomp., xli: ‘omnes , .. Cn. Pompeium sicut aliquem 

non ex hac urbe missum sed de caelo delapsum intuentur.’ Cf. ad Quintum 

fratrem, i. τ, 17: ‘ Graeci sic te... intuebuntur, ut quendam .. . de caelo 


divinum hominem in provinciam delapsum putent.’ According to Suetonius 
(August., 94), Cicero told Julius Caesar that he had seen in a dreama noble youth 
let down from heaven by means of a golden chain (demissum caelo catena aurea) 
to the summit of the mons Capitolinus, where Jupiter handed him a flail. When 
he saw Octavian he recognized him as the boy of his dream. This seems to 
be the story against which Lucretius directed the two sceptical lines (De natura 
rervum, 11. 1153 f.): 
‘Haud ut opinor, enim mortalia saecla superne, 
Aurea de caelo demisit funis in arva.’ 


560 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


snatched away this precious gift.1 No wonder, then, that those of 
his subjects who had admired him, or for one reason or another felt 
far less happy under the new dynasty, looked for his return from 
heaven. That such hopes centred on him in particular is readily 
intelligible. For, inasmuch as all the earlier Julio-Claudian em- 
perors were succeeded by their own or their adopted descendants, 
the desire to recover from heaven the Caesar who had just been 
spirited away could not arise among the adherents of this dynasty. 
When the dynasty itself had died out with Nero, to make room 
for another, Caesars only in name, matters were quite different. 

To the Jews the idea of a saviour-king descending from heaven 
had long been familiar; it most probably is of Mesopotamian 
origin and of considerable age. When Jerome renders 15, xlv, ὃ, 
“rorate coeli desuper et nubes plurant justum,’ giving the last 
word a personal meaning (‘And let clouds rain down the just one’), 
i.e. reading saddig instead of sedeg, ‘righteousness,’ he was cer- 
tainly led to do so by the messianic interpretation put upon the 
passage by his rabbinic advisers. The standard passage is, of 
course, Dan. vil. 13 sq., on the ‘Son of Man’ coming down ‘with 
the clouds’ of heaven, the last of David's line,® with whom Jesus 
identified himself. The Saviour-King comes down from heaven 
because immediately after his birth ‘winds and storms had torn 
him from the hands of his mother in the royal palace of Bethlehem 
in Judah.’ 4 

Anyhow, the Targum on the passage in Chronicles writes : 

‘*Anani, that is, the king, the Messiah, who will be revealed.’ 


Similarly the Midrash Tanchuma B Toldoth, § 20 (7ob), on the 
same passage : 


‘Who is ‘Anani? He is the king, the Messiah,’ 
and here we find an express reference to the coming of the ‘Son of 


1 Cp. Horace, Carm., i. 2 (to Augustus), ‘ serus in caelum rediens diuque laetus 
intersis populo Quirint.’ 

2 Cf., for example, in the great chronological prism in the Ashmolean Museum 
at Oxford, No. 444, Weld-Blundell Coll., ed. S. Langdon, in the Oxford ed. of 
Cuneiform Texts, vol. ii. (1923), p. 4: ‘ When the kingdom came down from 
heaven,’ etc. 

3 The last and youngest of the descendants of Zerubabel enumerated in 
1 Chron, iii. 24—in other words, the last descendant of David known to Scripture— 
isnamed‘Anani. The name, an abbreviation of ‘Anan-jah (‘Jahveh has answered ἢ) 
has nothing remarkable about it, but in popular etymology was derived from ‘anan 
(‘cloud ’), and interpreted as ‘ one from the clouds,’ ‘a son of the clouds.’ Accord- 
ing to the LXX. (the Massoretic text is here corrupt) in 1 Chron. iii. 19-24, this 
‘Anani lived eleven generations after Zerubabel, whose coronation is usually 
dated in the year 519 B.c. If we reckon roughly thirty years to one generation, 
‘Anani flourished about 190 B.c., so that he may well have seen the persecutions 
under Antiochus Iv., beginning in 175, and been the liberator-king whom the 
author of Daniel vii. urged in vain to lead the messianic rebellion against the 
Seleucidic dynasty. 

Ἢ Talm. Jerush., Berakhoth, 2. 4 (Strack-Billerbeck, i. 83 ; cf. Rev. xii. 5), 


THE PREDICTED WORLD-RULER 561 


Man’ with the clouds of heaven in Dan. vii. 1 3. With this should 
be compared the name of the Messiah, bar-Nephele (‘son of clouds’), 
attested in Sanhedrin, 96b, which R. Nahman (died 320), the 
authority there quoted, interpreted by popular etymology as ‘son 
of the fallen,’ and which originally is nothing but a Greek translation 
of ‘Anant, 

There is nothing surprising, then, in Josephus’ statement that 
some of the Jews expected their liberation and the establishment 
of a Jewish world-empire from the ‘return’ of Herod the Great, 
come back from heaven, whither, according to a particular eschat- 
ology, his glorified soul was supposed to have departed. This did 
not by any means prevent another party from attaching the same 
sort of hopes to the NasGéraean carpenter crucified by Pilate. 

According to Josephus and his patrons Agrippa 1. and Tiberius 
Alexander, all such hopes were vain. They had led only to the 
destruction of Jerusalem and the final dispersion of the Jews, a 
terrible chastisement of God to those obdurate of heart who could 
not understand that the expected shilu, the world-ruler, was none 
other than Vespasian, the new Nebuchadnezzar, rising from Judah 
to the imperial throne of Rome. 


2N 


XIX 


WEST AND EAST—WORLD-EMPIRE AGAINST WORLD- 
REVOLUTION 


ROM 65 B.c., when Scaurus, the lieutenant of Pompey, 

interfered in the disputes of the last two Hasmonaean 

princes, down to the fall of Bar Kokheba, in the reign of 
Hadrian (A.D. 135), we behold that desperate struggle, flaming up 
again and again, between the Imperium Romanum and the last 
resolute fighters who dared, not only to resist the Caesars and their 
legions—for that was attempted also by other nations with an 
equally blind obstinacy, though with better success—but to con- 
tend with them over the rule of the whole inhabited world. The 
historical meaning of this struggle, which exalts it high above the 
wars fought between the Roman Empire and the ‘Barbarians’ on 
the Rhine, on the Danube, on the Euphrates, and on the walls of 
Britain, both then and centuries later, lies in the fact that in this 
struggle clashed, perhaps not for the first time in history but 
certainly for the first time with a clear consciousness of the con- 
trasting principles involved, the world-empire of the masters and 
the world-revolution of the oppressed. 

Deep-rooted and age-old conflicts which in our days again 
darken the consciousness of men as sinister and threatening 
shadows, rose then for the first time clearly noticed on the horizon 
of historical experience. Any reader of Josephus’ Jewish Way in 
its entirety who compares on the one hand the national Roman 
sources, and on the other the Sibylline prophecies on coming cata- 
strophes, must notice two things—first, the strong consciousness 
which the ancient world had of the contrast between West and 
East as it appeared in this very struggle which Josephus, slightly 
exaggerating, it is true, yet not without a deeper significance, 
called ‘the greatest war of all times’; and secondly, the glowing, 
irreconcilable hatred displayed in his work against the ‘ zealots ’ 
and the innovators,! i.e. the rebels in general,” and against the 
‘tyrants,’ the rebel leaders, to whom he ascribes the responsibility 
for the civil war, for the clash with Rome and hence the ruin of 
his people. 

The constant danger threatening the ancient city-state from 


1 νεωτερίζοντες. 2 τὸ λῃστρικόν. 
562 


WEST AND EAST 563 


the Orient, which of necessity and by an innate law strove for 
world dominion and ended by forcing its own imperialistic 
doctrine upon an unwilling Occident, was the chief cause of the 
awakening to political self-consciousness of the Mediterraneans: 
‘fore ut valesceret Oriens’;1 ‘imperium in Asiam revertetur ac 
rursus Oriens dominabitur atque Occidens serviet’ 2—these words 
express the persistent fear, the constantly recurring nightmare, 
haunting the Graeco-Roman statesmen. 

Time and again, from the procemium of Herodotus, that peculiar 
oldest known discussion of a question of ‘war-guilt,’ the historico- 
philosophical doctrine of ancient historiography is based upon the 
conflict of Asia and Europe, Orient and Occident, a contrast first 
entering into the consciousness of the Occident through the clash 
of the free Greek city-states with the Persian world-monarchy. 
The attack of the Persians is regarded as the revenge of the 
Asiatics for the destruction of Troy by Agamemnon, and Alex- 
ander’s expedition is considered in turn as the revenge for the 
Persian invasion of Greece. Equally so all the important steps of 
the conquest of the Orient by Rome were accompanied by oracles 
giving vent to the hatred of the conquered by a threatening 
announcement of a future revenge. From the time of the Syrian 
and Aetolian War of 191-190 B.c., Phlegon 38 reports such pro- 
phecies, transmitted to him by Antisthenes of Rhodes, a contem- 
porary of Polybius: ‘There will come far from Asia, from the 
Orient, a king, fording the Hellespont with a huge army, and he 
will overthrow thee, O Rome, and impose upon thee the yoke of 
slavery.’ Nor were replies from the Roman side wanting: re- 
course was had to the foundation legend of Rome, and the Sibyl 
had to legitimize the Roman claims of dominion over the Orient 
by virtue of the fabled Roman descent from Aeneas of Troy. In 
88 B.c. the conquered Orient rose against the Roman rule, under 
the leadership of none other than Mithridates ; again the Sibyl 
spoke and threatened a frightful revenge: the Italians will have 
to do slaves’ service to Asia, the mad Rome will be trampled into 
dust by its mistress.* 

It seemed as though this struggle was to find its end in the 
decisive battle of Actium. There were definitely buried, not so 
much the ambitious plans of Mark Antony as the dreams of world 
dominion of the Egyptian Queen Cleopatra over a conquered 
world-empire for herself and her son Alexander Helios, with 
Alexandria for a centre and a capital, uniting the old Persian 
empire with the orbis Romanus. Vergil,® who in his New Year’s 

1 Tacitus, Hist., v. 13. 2 Lactantius, Div. inst., vil. 5. 11. 

3 Mirvac., ch. 111. p. 69 544. * Ovac. Sibyill., iii. 350 sqq, 

6 See the short summary of my lecture on the fourth eclogue, Revue des Etudes 
oneness iv. (1926), p. 82 sg.; and H. Jeanmaire, Le Messianisme de Virgile, 

aris, 1930. 


564 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


congratulatory poem addressed to Pollio, the consul of 40 B.c., 
paraphrases the Sibylline verses broadcast from Alexandria point- 
ing out the imminent birth of the future cosmocrator, now turns to 
sing of the ‘good Emperor Octavianus, the noble scion of the Troic 
dynasty, uniting Europe and Asia again in one peaceful empire.’ 

The fear of the Asiatic Greeks, after the unfortunate Parthian 
campaign of Antony, lest the enemy should profit by the destruc- 
tive civil wars to send again his cavalry to the very shores of the 
Mediterranean, may be gauged from the exaggerated honours 
bestowed by them upon the victor Augustus, the ‘saviour of man- 
kind,’ 1 the restorer of what had been tottering and had seemed to 
be doomed.’ 


‘In peace now rest land and sea; the cities flourish through good 
laws, harmony, and bliss ; everything good comes to bloom and bears 
fruit; men are full of good hope for the future, and of good courage 
for the present time.’ + 


But in the very midst of these good hopes of the Greeks there 
loomed up, like a flash of sheet-lightning from the Eastern danger 
spot, the Jewish rebellion after the death of Herod the Great (4B.C.). 

As early as the time of Hyrcanus (47 B.c.), before the usurpation 
of the Hasmonaean throne by the Idumaean Herod, made possible 
through Roman help, Herod had energetically repressed a powerful 
rising of the Galilaeans, headed by Hizqiah, the father of Judas of 
Galilee and apparently thought by his followers to have been a re- 
incarnation of the old King Hizqiah, the conqueror of the Philis- 
tines, whose return in glory R. Johanan b. Zakkai still awaited on 
his death-bed in A.D. 80.3 The powerless hatred of the Synhedrion 
against his executioner Herod attests the popularity of the man, 
as does the μέγιστον στῖφος of his adherents and the participation 
of the great Pharisee Shammai (Σαμείας) in this case, which proves, 
moreover, that the ideology of the movement, generally quite un- 
known to us, had not yet separated so appreciably from the Phari- 
saean doctrine as it did in after-times when the son of Hizqiah, 
Judas of Gaulan, had become its leader. 

So long as the iron fist of Herod was weighing on the country, 
prohibiting any free assembly on public streets and squares and 
effectively preventing any planned revolt by a vast net of spies and 
public informers,* the sultry quiet before the breaking of the storm 
lay brooding over the country. But no sooner had the news of the 


1 Inscription of Halicarnassus, Anc. Greek Inscriptions in the British Museum, 
No. 894. 

5. Inscription of Priene, Dittenberger, Oy. Gr. Inscriptiones, ii. No. 458. 

3 Berakh., 28b, Aboth di R. Nathan, 25 (76) ; Strack-Billerbeck, i. 31. 2. 

4 Ant., xv. 10. 4: “‘xal ἐν τῇ πόλει καὶ ἐν ταῖς ὁδοιπορίαις ἦσαν ol τοὺς συνιόντας 
eis ταὐτὸν ἐπισκοποῦντας.᾿ This system of a secret police the Romans doubtless 
took over from Herod, combining it with their own state and military police 
(speculatores). 


WEST AND EAST 565 


last grave disease of the old king penetrated among the people 
than the first act of violence occurred—-the destruction of the 
golden eagle at the temple gate by the disciples of Judah bar 
Sepphorai and of Mattathia bar Margaluth. The account of 
Josephus, derived from Nicolaus of Damascus, i.e. indirectly from 
the official acts utilized by this court historiographer of the king,* 
is remarkable chiefly because it shows clearly that the zealots for 
the Law were animated by the peculiarly Pharisaean belief in the 
immortality and everlasting bliss of any one who sacrificed his life 
in the service of the Divine Law.?. This faith in the “kingdom of 
God’ must of necessity have filled the believers with a contempt 
of death and an exceptional bravery quite on a par with the analo- 
gous idea which was to play such an important part in the spread 
of Islam. According to all probability, this belief—foreign to the 
ancient Israel and first found in Dan. xii. 2, that is, shortly before 
the rebellion against Antiochus Iv.—was one of the chief causes 
of the Maccabees’ victory as well as of the wonderful bravery of 
the Jewish fighters for freedom in their long struggle against the 
oppressors, a bravery admitted by the Romans themselves.* 

By a last pounce of the dying tiger the rebellion was bloodily 
repressed, only to flame up anew as soon as Herod, called ‘the 
Great’ by the Greeks, had been carried to his tomb on the shoulders 
of his Thracian, Germanic, and Gallic mercenaries. The people, 
crowded together in the sanctuary, immediately demand of Arche- 
laus, the presumptive heir to the throne, an amnesty for all political 
prisoners, relief from the unbearable burden of taxation, and, a 
thing unheard of in the past, the right to choose for themselves 
a ‘pure and pious’ high priest in the place of the Hellenized 
favourites chosen and deposed by Herod according to his own 


1 B.J., i. 33, 1-43 Ant., xvit. 6, 2-4. 

2 Haldsis, Berendts-Grass, Ὁ. 221 sq.; cf. B.J., i. ὃ 650: ‘. . . for the souls 
of those who came to such an end attained immortality and an eternally abiding 
sense of felicity.’ It is worth noting that the parallel account in the Antiquities 
has dropped the metaphysical part of this passage, leaving only the brilliant 
renown attached to such a deed. ‘The reason for this alteration is clear. The 
good Josephus had realized in the meantime that his description left no doubt 
about the identity of these ‘ rebels ’ with his own party, the Pharisees ; hence he 
took care, in his later work, to make his heroes talk as if they had been Sadducees. 
As for the tenets of this belief, they need not have been of a transcendental nature, 
alike in this to the originally Hellenistic notions about the isles of the blessed, the 
heavenly paradise, or the chthonic Elysian fields, adopted by the Pharisees and 
fought by Jesus (cf. above, p. 346 ll. 22 ff.). The Zealots may well have hoped for 
a resurrection in a golden age in their own home country, the ‘promised land,’ 
even as the followers of the Maccabees. 

3 Dio Cass., Ixvi. 6. 3: ‘ However small their number against the superiority 
of the enemy, they were not conquered until a part of the temple burst into flames. 
Then they rushed voluntarily upon the swords of the Romans, and killed oneanother, 
whilst still others slew themselves with their own hands or jumped into the flames. 
It appeared to all who saw it, but chiefly to themselves, that it was not death, but 
victorv, salvation, and bliss, to perish thus together with the temple.’ Onthe source 
of this passage, cf. Wilh. Weber, Josephus und Vespasian, Berlin, 1921, p. 24. 


566 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


good will and pleasure. After the refusal of these demands, quite 
unacceptable to Archelaus, and the slaughter in the temple, the 
rebels retired into the mountains and the desert. 

~ They chose for their meshual, milhamah—that is, high priest and 
army chaplain in one—Johanan b. Zekharjah, a priestly Rekhabite 
descended from a famous sept of wonder-workers and rain- 
-charmers, who on the banks of the Jordan in a flaming speech 
_ declared renegades and heathen all those who had submitted to the 
-~Tdumaean and to Rome and thus disregarded the Deuteronomic 
royalty law. They have to submit to the proselyte’s baptism 
before being counted again as Jews and sons of Abraham. To the 
rebels, who were perhaps willing to be content with a high priest 
after the type of the first Hasmonaeans for their head, he promised 
the coming of a ‘stronger one,’ the latchet of whose shoes he 
declared himself unworthy to loose—the coming, that is, of the 
shilu, the universal monarch who would be obeyed by all peoples 
after the imminent purification of the world by the three floods of 
the last days, the flood of water, of wind, and of fire. 

On this announcement of a coming saviour and liberator-king, 
anointed by God, there stepped forth, not one but three messiahs, 
all feeling chosen for this role, namely, Judas of Gaulan, the son of 
Hizqiah; the handsome, tall slave Simon of Peraea; and the 
gigantic shepherd Athronga; of whom the latter two were certainly 
people of the lowest strata and unknown parentage, a circumstance 
which, far from being a shortcoming in the eyes of their adherents, 
was then considered rather as a sure token of the Saviour, Son of 
God.1 An enormous following from Judaea, Galilee, Idumaea, 
Peraea, and from among the larger part of the Herodian troops, 
made the situation appear very dangerous for the Romans. The 
three bands of the messiah kings went to Jerusalem, besieging the 
Roman garrisons in the hippodrome, Herod's palace, and the fort 
Antonia. In the fierce struggle the beautiful porticoes of the 
Herodian temple perished in the flames, the first warning token 
of worse catastrophes which were to come and ruin that marvellous 
monument. 

No doubt the discord arising between these three ill-fated 
‘tyrants’ made it possible for the legions of Varus, for Gratus and 
the troops of Archelaus, to stifle the rebellion in a flood of blood, 
even before the year was gone. The handsome Simon was cut 
down, Athronga was probably crucified with many other captive 
rebels.2 Only Judas of Galilee managed to escape with his most 

1 Prayer ona cylinder inscription of patesi Gudea (A, li. 28 sqq.; ili. 1 sqq.): ‘I 
have no father, thou art my father ; I have no mother, thou art my mother ; ina 
sanctuary thou hast begotten me.’ Cf. Mark iii. 33, Matt. xii. 48, the words of 
Jesus, ‘ Who is my mother ΡΠ ΘΊΟΣ 


2 B.J.,ii. 4. 3, mentions this fate only as overtaking his four brothers; but as 
there were not more than four of them in all, the text seems to be in disorder. 


WEST AND EAST 567 


faithful followers into the mountains. Johanan the high priest, 
who had administered the sacramentum militare to the fighters for 
freedom, continued to live on as an outlaw, a‘ hidden one,’ Hanan 
ha Neheba, ‘with the animals’ in the bush of the Jordan valley, 
appearing only now and then, like a bodiless spectre, a jinn of the 
wilderness, a wild man or a satyr, causing consternation with his 
ever and anon repeated announcement of the coming terror of the 
last days, now and then baptizing newly won fighters for the last 
messianic war. 

Ten years later, Judas of Galilee ventured upon another stroke, 
on the occasion of the census of Quirinius (A.D. 6-7), when the 
humiliated and oppressed people had once more been brought to 
realize the full extent of its servitude. By a bold stroke on the 
royal armouries he obtained weapons for his adherents, who 
flocked to him from everywhere. He was seconded by the 
Pharisee Saddéq, so that his own views, except in the matter of the 
Roman tribute, cannot have been markedly different from those of 
the Perushim. We do not know when and how he perished. Yet 
his work was continued by his sons, who were henceforth the leaders 
of the party refusing under all circumstances to pay the Roman 
tribute money, the party of the Barjonim, the outlaws, the extrem- 
ists, who lived in the forests and deserts, referred to as ‘robbers’ 
by Josephus and the Romans, the valiant zealots for the Law. 

From now on, the fires of the rebellion are slowly smouldering 
beneath the ashes, until sixty years later the flames were to burst 
forth in a mighty blaze devouring Jerusalem and the temple 
itself. But long before that there followed again and again serious 
and bloody revolts. Until A.D. 19, after the suppression of the 
Galilaean uprising of A.D. 6-7 by Quirinius and Coponius, there 
reigned quiet in the exhausted country, the consequence of the 
severe blood-letting. The gradual pacification, aimed at by the 
moderate wing of the Pharisees as well as by the Sadducaean 
priestly nobility, was abruptly broken by the folly of the new 
governor, Pontius Pilate, who, incontrast to the diplomatic attitude 
of his predecessors, ordered the cohort to enter the castle of the 
temple with the portrait medallion of the emperor. By this fool- 
hardy action, the consequences of which he hardly realized,* he 
brought to pass the fulfilment of Daniel’s prophecy on the ‘ abom- 
ination of desolation,’ filling the masses with a conviction that now 
the coming of the prophesied Messiah, the Davidide ‘‘Anani’ the 
‘Son of man with the clouds’ of heaven,” must be imminent, 

About this time, then, there appeared a man—if it is possible to 


ΕΣ 


1 Cf. the somewhat similar cause of the Sepoy rebellion in India in the naive 
ignorance of General Hewett, who could not understand why the Indian soldiers 
should refuse to use new Enfield-rifle cartridges merely because they had been 
greased with suet. 2 See above, p. 560 Nn. 3. 


568 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


call this royal beggar, glowing with faith in his God and filled with 
Divine inspiration, this poor and crippled wandering workman, 
whose words have now for almost two millennia resounded through 
the world, by the same miserable name which designates also the 
fearful sheep of the human herd, as well as the rapacious beasts 
eager for power, against whose obtuseness and hardness of heart 
this incomparably precious and fragile vessel of the spirit was to 
be shattered. 

Descended from the progeny of that ill-fated Zerubabel, sunk 
into oblivion and misery for centuries, or at least believing himself 
to be thus descended,! and brought up with the faith and in the 
tradition of such fateful lineage, he grew into the consciousness of 
having been chosen for a liberator-king, of having been destined 
to unheard-of grandeur and unheard-of suffering, to be the 
martyred ‘servant of God’ and at the same time the future world- 
ruler. The mysterious healing power emanating from the glance 
of his kindly dark eye, from his consoling word, and from the light 
touch of his skilful hand, convinced the crowds of the sick and the 
afflicted, the possessed and the burdened all over the land, of the 
saving nearness of the secret king. He himself is carried, by the 
confidence of the cured and the steadily increasing number of the 
believers, far above himself and his every-day consciousness. 
Filled with admiration for the great herald of the final days who 
had initiated the struggle for the kingdom of God and prophesied 
the coming of the Messiah for the nearest future, he had formerly 
followed the “Hidden One,’ whose sept was akin to his own, either 
by birth or by marriage, in order to fulfil all the law and to be 
taken into the new community of the regenerated Israel. Yet 
what he himself announces goes far beyond the strict demands of 
the old hermit. If the latter had required the fulfilment of all 
righteousness as the condition of the coming of the Anointed, 
Jesus taught the ‘ better righteousness ’ of ‘ non-resistance,’ the 
hard and quiet heroism of the weak, Not to do wrong to any one, 
ahimsa, as again in our own time a great spirit, a mahdan dtma, a 
religious genius, is trying to teach in India; not to resist even the 
oppressors, but to conquer their hardness by a victorious kindness : 
not to judge a brother nor to seek justice against him; not to 
strive for gain, but to help every one by giving kindness ; not to 
rule over any one, but to serve all, nay, even to love one’s enemies. 

Along with this superhuman demand of disinterested pacifism 
he promises the poor, the oppressed, and the heavy-laden an easier 
yoke, a new law of God, a new constitution, a redemption from 
the pressure of the hierocratic state become unbearable, redemp- 
tion also from the pressure of the superimposed hostile world- 
empire and of the incarnate arch-enemy of God ruling over it until 

+ Cf. above, pp. 321 ff. 


WEST AND EAST 569 


the end of this acon. The people who listened to this preaching 
were attracted not so much by the narrow path he pointed out to 
them, as by the alluring hope of a golden age in which the first 
would be last and the last would be first, when those who 
hunger and thirst would be fed, whilst those who are satiated now 
would then be hungry ; and still more by the dark rumour that 
the despised sinners would partake of that kingdom before the 
righteous. Here and there one of these wild fellows followed him : 
thus Simon the barjona, the outlaw, whom he called Kephas and 
Petrus ; Simon and Judas, the Zealots, the Fanatics, former com- 
panions of the sons of Judah of Galilee; further, two or three 
adherents of the Baptist. 

Having collected a small band, he started on the laying down 
of a constitution (οἰκονομία) of his kingdom: twelve are to go 
out to call the twelve tribes of Israel; seventy-two ambassadors are 
to go to the seventy-two nations of the Gentiles to demand their 
submission to the kingdom of God, after the manner of the 
Persian great king asking for earth and water. The notion of 


pacifying the world by a mere message and an announcement of | 
peace and the goodwill of the ony, true God had long before Jesus | 


driven the Pharisaic missionaries ' over land and sea, to convert 
all peoples; it is taught here, with a childlike trust in God which 
has never again been attained, in these speeches addressed to the 
royal messengers. 

After the return of those ‘of little faith,’ who only in the near- 
ness of the mysterious powers of their Master were capable of 
sustained enthusiasm, there followed the first falling away of this 
pious confidence in the kindness of an all-loving Father in heaven. 

The terrible God of the fathers, who according to the teaching 
of the prophets rejects the animal offerings of the priestly code, 
demands an infinitely harder sacrifice: nothing will satisfy Him 
but the decisive deed—to renounce everything dear to man: 
fathers, mothers, children, if they refuse to follow the call, to give 
up all possessions, houses, fields, the beloved land of promise 
itself, to assume the mark of the cross distinguishing the home- 
less, wandering tribes, to follow after the liberator into the desert, 
the land of freedom, to emigrate from the inhabited world which 
is subject to the Romans. As the fathers had left Egypt, the house 
of bondage, to go into the desert, following the call of God from 
Horeb under their leader, so the select are again to follow their 
prophetic guide on a new exodus. That is no revolt, but merely a 
‘breaking out,’ an escape from the unbearable oppression, which 
seems to him the true path of salvation. After the example of the 
adherents of the Maccabee Mattathia, of the Baptist, and of 
Judah of Galilee, he will make the solemn announcement to Israe) 

1 They are mentioned in Mati, xxiii, 15. 


570 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


on the great pilgrims’ assembly at Jerusalem on the Passover, and 
thence lead his elect, his new gehillah, his ἐκκλησία of the new and 
true Israel, into the desert. 

The Zealots and Bavjonim among his followers are not afraid 
of this enterprise ; but they know better than their sar shalom, 
their ‘ prince of peace’ who intends to enter Jerusalem mounted on 
an ass, that even this road into the desert must lead through the 
prophesied war of the last days. ‘Armed for war’ like their 
fathers in Egypt they expect to leave Palestine. When their 
leader, with a heavy heart, has realized this stern necessity and 
not only permits but even commands them to buy swords, each 
one for himself, they have anticipated him, and each pulls two 
daggers, the weapons of the sicaviz, from his bosom. 

From the heights of Mt. Hermon, in the north of Galilee, where 
Simon Barjona in wise forethought would have pitched the camp 
and would have liked to call the elect for an exodus into the desert, 
the expedition marches to Jerusalem instead, for the last decisive 
manifestation, headed by their leader, who for some time past has 
been expecting captivity, suffering, and death, but who is still 
secretly hoping for a miracle of God, a shortening of the pre- 
destined time and a passing of the cup. To the most faithful of 
his inner circle he confides that he is going to his death, as the 
‘servant of Jahweh,’ to take upon himself the guilt of his people, 
according to the words of the prophet. Not other peoples are to 
be the scapegoat for Israel’s sins ;1 Israel’s own king and chosen 
high priest must fall as a piacular sacrifice to force from heaven 
at last the longed-for redemption. 

Thanks to the joining of other pugrims marching to Jerusalem, 
and of scattered adherents here and there in the country, the little 
Land grows to a size of several hundred men, encamps in front of the 
city, on the Mount of Olives, among the tents of the other pilgrims, 
still increasing through the reputation of the wonder-worker which 
mysteriously clings to Jesus. About a thousand men enter the 
city, preceding or following the prophet, who rides into the city 
sitting on his S/ebr’s donkey, and proclaim him Davidic king of 
Israel. A passionate cry of the multitude, ‘Osanna,’ ‘ Deliver us,’ 
accompanies the solemn entry. The prophet is carried forward 
by the ever-increasing pressure of the crowd into the temple, sud- 
denly occupied by surprise by men carrying hidden arms, The 
Levitic guard offers no resistance—nay, the priestly youth, the 
‘buds’ on the staff of Aaron, which, though dry, blooms once 
again before its definite end, greet the son of David with cries of 
joy. The temple, with its castle the Antonia, then without a 
Roman garrison, is in the hands of the Galilaeans, whilst the Bar- 
jonim of Jerusalem have at the same time seized the tower stand- 

1 This had been the nationalist illusion of Dewtero-Isaiah xliii. 3 sq. 


WEST AND EAST 571 


ing above the Shiloah, the aqueduct through which, according to 
an old saga, David himself had once entered the old fortress of the 
Jebusites. 

The Roman cohort in the castle of Herod is far too weak to win 
back these two strong points, the keys of the fortifications in the 
extreme north and the extreme south. The movement might even 
then, like the one of a later day started by the segan ’Ele‘azar b. 
Hananiah (A.D, 66), have carried with it the leading families of the 
priestly nobility, had not the attack on the temple banks and the 
expulsion of the dealers in sacrificial animals, as well as the decisive 
utterances of the newly proclaimed king against the temple itself, 
shown to the high priests with unmistakable clearness what the 
present masters would have to expect in the event of the people 
remaining the victors. 

Thus the messengers sent by the military tribunes of Herod’s 
castle vied with those of the high priest in warning the governor in 
far-off Caesarea of what had taken place, and in clamouring for the 
speedy dispatch of his legion. Pilate approached in forced marches, 
and on the preparation day of the Passover the rebellion was well 
repressed, the temple reconquered in the same manner in which 
it had been taken—that is, by a band of apparently peaceful 
pilgrims. The altar and precincts were flooded with the blood of 
the Galilaeans cut down in vast numbers; the tower of Shiloah, 
laid low by the Roman machines, was covering the corpses of 
eighteen of the rebellious Jerusalemites. In the night, a few 
hours after the sounds of the Hallel announcing the end of the Pass- 
over meal had vanished, in the stillness a Roman cohort, increased 
by a guard of loyalists hurriedly armed by the high priests with 
clubs and daggers, surrounded the Mount of Olives. After a week 
attempt at resistance, given up almost immediately by the express 
command of Jesus, the leader of the revolt, in Roman eyes only 
the one-day king of belated and bloody Saturnalia, was captured, 
promptly condemned that same night according to martial law, and 
crucified along with two other ‘robbers,’ leaders of the revolt. 

Whoever among his adherents were not dead or captured made 
off in all directions ; the shepherd was beaten, the herd dispersed. 
Among the women and the few faithful who had remained near to 
find out, at the dusk of day or at the early dawn, what had become 
of the mortal coil of their erstwhile king, none of course discovered 

1 The conjecture of Volkmar (Die Religion Jesu, Ziirich, 1857, pp. 71 sq., 257-9 ; 
Marcus und die Synopse, 1876, p. 603) and of A. Loisy (Jésus et la tradition 
évangélique, Paris, 1910, p, 107; Les évangiles synoptiques, li., Paris, 1908, p. 700 
sq.), to the effect that the corpse of the prophet was simply thrown out, has been 
most brilliantly confirmed by the Ephesian inscription with the decree of the Arch- 
bishop Hypatios (ca. 536). Cf. R. Heberdey, Jahreshefte d. dsterr. arch. Inst., viii., 
1905, Beibl. Sp., 70 sqg.; H. Grégoire, Rec. des inscr. gr. chrét. d’Asie Mineure, Paris, 


1922, p. 35 sq., No. 108; J. N. Bakhuizen, De oudchristelijke monumenten van 
Ephesus, The Hague, 1923, pp. 129-47; Z.N.T.W., xxvi. (1927), p. 213. 


572 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


the corpse. What they did see, the one here, the other there, was— 
at least according to those to whom ‘their words seemed as idle 
tales’ and who ‘believed them not’ !—the twin-brother of their 
Master, resembling him in every particular; and that fleeting 
glance, together with a few stray words caught in passing and 
doubly significant in that emotion in which they found them- 
selves, was the starting-point of the rumour which spread like 
wildfire to the effect that he who had been anointed at Bethaniah 
was really and truly, according to his own predictions, risen from 
the dead. To seek him who had promised to precede the elect to 
Galilee, this little band of people, half-consoled, half-hoping, half- 
doubting, returned to their northern homes, never quite to find 
again their old life. 

Others who, according to the Master’s warning, were still 
holding themselves in readiness, in Jerusalem, to start on the 
exodus under his leadership, congregated around Peter, after 
his flight around the Saddiq Ja‘aqob. In unceasing prayer 
they waited for the second coming, confirmed in that mountain- 
moving faith which Jesus himself had commanded both by his 
example and his teaching, through strange visions and ecstatic 
experiences which they interpreted as the miraculous pouring out 
of the Spirit upon all sons and daughters of Israel, the fulfilment 
of what the prophets had foretold for the day when the end of this 
world would dawn. Phenomena unheard of in the lifetime of 
Jesus, who was not at all of an ecstatic nature—such as the miracle 
of Whitsuntide, on the anniversary of the Sinaitic legislation—were 
explained as meaning the immediate coming of the universal king- 
dom of God. The words of the holy language, then pronounced 
by the believers with ‘other tongues,’ sounded to the Jewish 
pilgrims from all over the East, and attracted by the reputation of 
the messianist community, like the familiar sounds of their own 
language. The world, split into innumerable linguistic families 
since the time of the fateful Tower of Babylon, seemed to be united 
once more for at least one happy moment; the golden age of 
universal understanding, of universal brotherhood, seemed to have 
come back. What the world-conqueror Sargon had boasted of— 
to wit, of having unified the languages of the world—the resuscitated 
Jesus, now enthroned with his Father in heaven, had done with 
the fiery tongues of the word of God, which could be understood by 
all men of goodwill. The royal messengers were to speak in those 
tongues. Ifa short while ago the priests had complained of the 
disappearance of prophecy in Israel,” the Lord, it appeared, had 
now awakened a whole community of prophets. How, after 
such an experience, could those filled with enthusiasm as with 
new wine doubt any longer that the vanished Messiah had filled 

1 Luke xxiv. 11. See above, pp. 450 1. * Above, p. 137 ἢ. 13. 


WEST AND EAST 573 


them with his own powers, strengthening them mysteriously for 
further waiting until the day should break for his own second 
coming in glory ? 

The little synagogue witness of the Whitsuntide miracle, ac- 
cording to Acés 1. 15 just one hundred and twenty members, can at 
first have been no more than a small circle, a conventicle of faithful 
(hasidim), grouping themselves around Peter. They made an 
attempt at economic communism, the few blessed with possessions 
gladly submitting to the command of their dead king to renounce 
fields, houses, and all possessions, in the expectation, of course, of 
the coming exodus postponed for a time but none the less certain, 
and of the establishment of the kingdom of God, when a ten- and 
hundred-fold compensation was sure to be granted. 

As in all such attempts known to history, difficulties naturally 
were not slow in arising ; a few ‘of little faith’ simply set aside 
some small amount as a reserve for themselves in the event of the 
experiment being doomed to failure. A married couple, Hananjah 
and Saphira, paid for such an attempt with their lives, thanks to 
the grim resolution of the Barjona Shime‘on, who was inexorable in 
such matters. Anda great fear befell the community and all those 
who heard of it,! a phrase which shows quite unmistakably that at 
the time when this edifying story was put down on paper the 
system was still in vogue and doubtful members were frightened 
by the death penalty, supposed to be executed magically, on those 
who did not give up all their possessions to the community. 

This communistic principle in the original Christian congrega- 
tion of Jerusalem, a fact on which a good deal of nonsense has 
been written, has a double root. 

In the first place, the tribal constitution of the Rekhabite 
tradesmen, i.e. the sept of Jesus with the Saddiq Ja‘aqob for their 
head, was based upon family communism, comparable to the Old 
Russian artel. They had, of course, no reason to exchange this 
system for another one. According to Josephus’ Haldsis,? it is 
certain that the adherents of Jesus at the time of the Emperor 
Claudius were still carrying on their various trades, and there is no 
reason whatever to suppose that this was different in the years 
immediately following the crucifixion. The Acts of the Apostles 
emphasize the miraculous cures they worked beside their manual 
trades no less than the Christian interpolations in the text of the 
Halosis. 

That the announcement of the ‘good message’ itself was 
utilized as a means of revenue, with which Paul reproaches certain 
Christians of a later generation,® need not be doubted. The de- 

1 Acts v. Il. 2 Cf. above, p. 529 n. 6; p. 538 n. I. 


3 « οἱ πολλοὶ καπηλεύοντες τὸν λὸγον τοῦ Geod,” ‘the many peddlers of the word of 
God,’ the “ χριστέμποροι᾽᾿ or ‘Christ-salesmen ’ of the Church fathers. 2 Cor. ii.17. 


574 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


scription given by Celsus ! of those wandering prophets announcing 
to the people of Syria the imminent world catastrophe and holding 
themselves up as the future judges to appear at the head of the 
hosts of heaven, to protect their friends but to pour everlasting 
fire on the towns and villages of the others, may fit as well the 
first half of the first century. It was hardly the exalted doctrine 
and the stern demands of a better righteousness of the Master 
which so rapidly increased the numbers of the messianists. 

Whatever was earned through labour, healing, consoling, teach- 
ing, and threatening was to be put, according to the Rekhabite 
custom, in a communal chest, to be redistributed ‘to all according 
to the wants of each.’?. Rich people who joined the community 
were supposed, at least in principle, to follow the command of the 
crucified king and sell all, to renounce all possessions, house, field, 
etc. They were paid with the tempting promise that on the 
coming of the kingdom they would obtain hundredfold compensa- 
tion, so that many a one who had given a small field would then 
see himself the happy owner of a princely estate. Add to this that 
in that time of bliss the curse would have disappeared from the 
earth, and man would have no longer to cultivate the land in the 
sweat of his brow, but that the earth would yield spontaneously 
cornstalks and vines reaching to the clouds.? In such a genuine 
pays de Cucagne even a Levite like Joseph Barnabas of Cyprus, 
not used to agriculture, might well desire a considerable estate 
instead of his small field, without thereby putting upon himself an 
undue burden of hard work. 

In spite of such fine hopes, however, it is to be feared that this 
Jewish-Christian community cannot have had much approval and 
many new converts from people rich either in land or in money. 
The liberal donators actually named were probably the only ones 
of whom any knowledge was preserved. Even the contributions 
of the brothers, who naturally kept what each needed for his 
own maintenance, can hardly have sufficed to provide for the old 
people and the widows and orphans. The ‘saints’ of Jerusalem 
remained poor down to the time of Paul, and the latter had to 
collect for them among the Jews in the Diaspora, nay, even among 
the heathen. 

Aside from the Rekhabite habits of the family of Jesus, this 
communism of property has still another powerful root—that is to 
say, the archaic family communism of tribal tradesmen, increased 
by new converts from the outside,t was strengthened by the 
communism, the #2/hamah or ‘com-pany’ or bread community,® of 


1 Origen, C. Cels., vii. 9. 2 Acts iv. 35. 

* Papias, Ap. Iven., v. 33. 3, p. 417; cf. Euseb., Hist eccl., iii. 39. 1, p. 286. 
* On these outsiders among the Rekhabites, cf. above, pp. 323 ff. 

δ Cf. my study in Z.N.T.W., 1025, p. 286. 


WEST AND EAST 575 


the militia ΟΠ δι, who even in the enforced truce between the 
first and the second coming of their leader honestly shared what- 
ever they had. The document discovered by Dr. Schechter among 
the treasures of the Geniza of Cairo,! and bearing on the messianist 
community of Damascus, testifies to the existence of another 
such militia of fighting journeymen, organized for mutual 
support ever since the war of Varus.2. It consisted of ‘just’ 
disciples of John the Baptist, revering their master as the 
legislator of the last days, the ‘ teacher of justice,’ of people who 
actually had carried out an exodus such as had been preached 
by Jesus, and were now regarding their settlements in a foreign 
country as the ‘camps’ of Israel in the desert. Such a train of 
thought is quite natural with men who had deliberately left their 
own tribal group, forming an army of messianist fighters in expecta- 
tion of the second coming. We have seen how John the Baptist 
preached such mutual help between brethren as an absolute, a 
sacred duty. The communal meals of the brothers and the com- 
munistic system of the members is derived from the very natural 
circumstances of the armed expedition from Galilee to Jerusalem, 
interrupted by the defeat but by no means ended. The care for 
widows and orphans ? means naturally the care for the dependants 
of those who had paid with their lives for the bold enterprises in 
Jerusalem and the temple—in other words, the fallen soldiers of 
the holy war. To conclude, the tribal communism of the Rekhab- 
ites naturally and easily develops into the army communism of the 
militia Christe. 

More than in the time of Jesus, his adherents, now leaderless, 
formed a secret association of the nos‘vim (Nafwpaio.), of the 
οἰκόνομοι τῶν μυστηρίων, bound to keep as strictly as possible 
the secret of the coming things from the uninitiated. For, as the 
Gospel of Peter attests, they are still sought after, suspected as they 
are of ‘ wishing to burn the temple,’ doomed by the inexorable 
prophecy of Jesus himself. 

How careful they had to be is shown by the arrest of Peter and 
John and of their associates,® by the stoning of Stephen, no 
doubt following quite closely upon the crucifixion, because he had 
engaged in a debate with two opponents in two of the Hellenistic 
synagogues, and had on that occasion repeated with too great a 
frankness Jesus’ words against the temple. Following upon this 

1 Documents of Jewish Sectaries, i.; Fragments of a Zadokite Work, Cambridge, 
ey On its date and Baptist character, see App. XviII. p. 616, and my paper in 
the Tvansactions of the Fifth International Congress for the History of Religion in 
Lund (1929), pp. 327 ff. 

5. Acts Vi. 2. 4 Acts iv. 3-21. 

δ Ibid., v. 17-42 ; it may be historically true that for some time the authorities 
were content with warnings, and that one group of moderate Pharisees was 
opposed to any unnecessary persecution. 


576 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


execution of the first victim (who in reality was far from being 
the ‘ first martyr’ of the doctrine of Jesus), the Acés relate a general 
persecution of the messianists, compelling a part of them to seek 
refuge in Samaritan territory.! 

First Philip, then Peter and John, find there willing listeners for 
their glad tidings, a statement thoroughly credible, since a closer 
examination of the Samaritan tradition has actually shown the 
Samaritans to have been expecting the second coming of the Old 
Testamental Joshuah, pronounced ’Incods by the apostles of the 
Hellenized Samaritans Philip and Andrew, according to the custom 
of the LXX. It is there that we first encounter a man who had 
been for some time trying to gain that region for his own gnostic- 
Hellenistic doctrines, to wit, Simon, a native of the village of 
Gitta, near Samaria,” but having received a Greek education at 
Alexandria,®? the son of a Samaritan emigrant with the Roman 
praenomen Antonius, perhaps a freedman of the triumvir, and 
probably with the Greek name Sdtadés. The Acts admit that he 
had received from Philip baptism, the sacramentum mnulitare of 
John, which the disciples of Jesus henceforth administered ‘in the 
name of Jesus’ as the true anointed king; he was therefore 
originally a genuine member of the primitive community of 
messianists, 

The same individual appears to have been, in the last year of 
Pilate’s term of office (A.D. 35), the cause of a catastrophe in the 
northern part of the country, quite comparable to that which in 
A.D, 21 had taken place in Jerusalem. Under that governor’s 
oppressive rule and that of the no less tyrannical Herod Antipas, 
feeling must for some time have run high indeed. Forty years 
after his first appearance, the now aged hermit John the Baptist 
had again emerged from his retreat in the wilderness of the Jordan 
valley, appeared here and there in the country, everywhere de- 
nouncing the unlawful marriage of Antipas and no doubt repeating 
his old call to freedom, his old dark threats of a coming flood of 
judgment, his preaching of repentance and the imminent coming of 
the liberator-king. The ‘ old fox ᾿ Herod caught him, as Archelaus 
had done before, but this time he had him taken to one of his 
strongholds on the southern frontier and there beheaded. 

This in itself did not appease the brewing storm. The 
Samaritan, probably no other than Simon ‘ the magician,’ whom 
Philip had baptized, was determined to convince the people, by a 

1 Acts vill. 1b. 


” 


2 Acts viii. Ὁ, 11; cf. Clem., Homi., ii. 22. 

* He probably came under Philo’s direct influence ; cf. Samaritan Chronicles, 
Adler and Abu'l Fath, p. 157; also Montgomery, The Samaritans, Philadelphia, 
1912, p. 266 n. 39. 

4 The only alternative would be to identify this ‘ messiah ’ with Simon’s rival 
and contemporary Dositheos, 


WEST AND EAST 577 


miracle, of no less a fact than that he himself was the expected 
Joshua or Jesus, the ¢ta’eb.1 His intention was to lead his armed 
followers in solemn procession up Mt. Gerizim, and there, in a 
hollow on the top, probably the rock-cave still visible to-day, to 
exhibit the old tabernacle and its sacred vessels which Joshua was 
reputed to have concealed there. According to Josephus and the 
Christian account, the man was an impostor ‘who did not mind a 
lie.’ If that is true, he may be supposed, like so many before and 
after him, to have laid his plans for a solemn discovery of relics 
by previously secreting them on the spot. According to Jewish 
tradition, this pretended ‘Jesus’ the ‘son of Sdtadés’ (ben Stada), 
who had learned magic in Egypt, was ‘a fool’ who blindly relied on 
his supposed superhuman powers. Perhaps he was one of those 
tragic figures whose childlike faith made them imagine that by 
fasting and prayer they can extort a miracle from God, one of those 
seers whose ecstatic visions drove them step by step to the most 
desperate actions. There are reasons for believing that he is 
identical, too, with the Egyptian ‘ pseudo-prophet’ who later on, 
under Felix, wished to overthrow the walls of Jerusalem by the blast 
of his Jericho trumpets, a piece of magic which certainly could not | 
have been engineered by mining operations on a large scale from 
the Mount of Olives without attracting the attention of the Roman 
garrison. If this identification be correct, he may in both cases 
either have had recourse to the mysterious theurgic magic of 
Egypt to obtain the hoped-for miracle, or else have trusted in 
mountain-moving faith to the old Rock of Israel. At all events, 
Pilate was less concerned with the ideology of the leader than with 
the political aspect of the matter, the threatening temper of the 
masses, Accordingly, in his usual somewhat rude but quite 
effective method, he made a rapid attack with his cavalry, 
massacring the mob assembled in the village of Tirathana. 

The further development of affairs shows that the attempt of 
the primitive community at Jerusalem to win the Samaritans over 
for the messianic kingdom of Jesus failed through the intervention 
of Simon, in spite of his defeat. What lived on in Samaria was 
Simonian and Dosithean Gnosis, i.e. Hellenistic mystery-teaching, 
grafted on to a Hemerobaptism allied to the doctrines of John the 
Baptist and on the whole a fairly close parallel development to 
Mandaism as it grew up in Transjordania and later in Mesopotamia. 
A number of Simon’s doctrines, through the medium of the Fourth 
Gospel, derived from the Gospel of the Alexandrian gnostic 
Kerinthos,? had a far-reaching influence on the development of 


1 On this Simon and the ‘ paraclete’ of the Fourth Gospel, cf. now also my 
papers, ‘The Paraclete Problem: The True Origins of the Fourth Gospel,’ and 
‘The Paraclete Claimant, Simon Magus,’ in The Quest, January and April 1930, 

2 Cf. my papers in The Quesi, January, April, and July 1930. 


20 


578 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


the absolutely un-Jewish Trinitarian theology in the Christian 
Church of the second century. 

The bloody defeat of the rising of the year 36 eliminated those 
who had clung most tenaciously to the political hope of an earthly 
and tangible deliverance from the fetters of the oppressive world- 
dominion of the Caesars. There remained the Quietists, who, 
despairing of all forcible politicai methods and of the strength of 
their people, submitted outwardly to ‘ the rulers of this world,’ 
but all the more passionately strove, by Graeco-Egyptian gnosis 
and theurgy, for the liberation of the spiritual ego from the bonds 
of the body and the constraint of Matter and Necessity in this 
dark, hopeless, and daemonic world. Instead of the peaceful 
attitude of the free peasant under his earthly vine and fig-tree, 
instead of the free Bedouin’s hardy life in the desert, the world- 
weary pilgrims for eternity now sought admission to the heavenly 
realms of light through magic spells designed to incline toward 
them the wicked gatekeepers of a fairy-tale paradise. This stage 
reached, the so-called Samaritans henceforth disappear from the 
history of political messianism. 

Shortly after the Samaritan rising had been nipped in the bud, 
and a few months before his death in a.p. 37, the Emperor 
Tiberius had imprisoned Herod Agrippa I., then aged forty-seven 
and living as a parasite at the Roman court, a boon companion of 
Caligula. Agrippa had been guilty of a gross breach of decorum 
by confessing to Caligula, in the presence of a slave, how eagerly he 
awaited the suspicious old tyrant’s death. The sufferings he 
endured in the squalor of a Roman prison, among the poorest of 
the poor, appear to have been romantically exaggerated and inter- 
preted by the partisans of the Herodian family in Palestine and in 
the Diaspora, who still hoped for a messiah of the house of Herod, as 
the predicted woes of the innocent, suffering servant of God. When 
Agrippa’s friend Caligula ascended the throne and not only set him 
free but presented him with a golden chain of equal weight with 
the fetters he had worn in prison, and finally made him king of the 
Jews, the old bon-vivant, suddenly grown pious through misfortune, 
could not resist the temptation of showing himself in his new glory 
to the Jews of the second greatest city of the empire, and having 
himself proclaimed king by them. This childish triumphal journey 
led to serious trouble for the Alexandrian Jews ; for in consequence 
of the translation of the Scriptures into Greek the Hellenic popula- 
tion of that city was all too familiar with the Jewish dreams of 
world-dominion, and jealously watched over the privileges of the 
Greeks, who naturally claimed the second place in the empire. A 
poor fool and megalomaniac was in mockery dressed up as a king 
and hailed as * our Lord’ (Maran). More momentous to the Jews 
was the complaint of the Greeks before the governor of Egypt 


WEST AND EAST 579 


requesting that the Jews, like all other subjects of the empire, 
should be compelled to recognize Caesar as Lord of the world in 
a religious sense by setting up his statues in their synagogues, a 
demand which could count upon full approval on the part of 
the mad emperor. The bloody conflicts in Alexandria found their 
repercussion in Syria, where the Hellenistic party, in defiance of 
the Jews, erected altars to the emperor. 

As meet punishment for the destruction of such an altar at 
Jamnia, Gaius promptly required the setting up of his statue in the 
temple at Jerusalem. Again, as in the year 109, the fulfilment of 
the famous prophecy of Daniel threatened to lead to a messianic 
rising. While Petronius, besieged by petitions from the Jewish 
masses, from Agrippa and his family, and menaced, moreover, by 
a Jewish agrarian strike, did all he could to defer the execution of 
the imperial order or to bring about its repeal, the followers of 
Jesus, in particular the priest ’Ele‘azar b. Dinai, who was somehow 
connected with Simon Bavjona, regarded the threatened desecra- 
tion of the temple as an occasion for renewing the call for a general 
exodus into the desert and the mountains of Judah. Notwith- 
standing the efforts of the Pharisees to oppose this apocalyptic 
preaching and to prevent a panic, ’Ele‘azar still found certain 
followers with whom to withdraw into the hills, and for the next 
twenty years he harassed the country, until, probably in 58, he was 
at last taken prisoner by Felix and sent to Rome for trial. 

The timely death of Caligula (24th January 41) prevented an 
open rebellion of the Jews at that time, inevitable as it would 
have been had the statue of the imperial fool been placed in the 
sanctuary. In Alexandria, too, order was at once restored on the 
accession of Claudius. The ringleaders of the Greeks, Isidorus and 
Lampon, were sentenced to death ; on the other hand, the Jews 
of the city were strictly forbidden to entertain Jewish immigrants 
from Syria and Upper Egypt if they did not wish to be treated as 
abettors of ‘a pest which threatens the whole world,’ an expression 
which doubtless refers to the messianic movement. The immi- 
grants whom Claudius ordered at all costs to be kept out of Alex- 
andria are, of course, emissaries of the bands of ’Ele‘azar waiting 
in the mountains and in the desert for the expected return of Jesus. 
It is not at all improbable that immediately following the threats 
of Caligula a messianic revolt had been fostered in Egypt outside 
Alexandria by such agitators and refugees, though it is also pos- 
sible that Claudius merely wished to prevent an influx of unruly 
Eastern Jews into the country by the two usual overland and 
oversea routes. 

In Palestine, Agrippa I., who had mended his ways and was now 
settling down as a worthy and dignified monarch, deliberately con- 
ciliated the Pharisees, while at the same time he sought to provide 


580 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


for all contingencies by strengthening the fortifications of Jerusalem 
and by calling a congress of Oriental princes, which was rudely dis- 
persed by the Romans. The outburst of the messianic movement 
culminating in the exodus of ’Ele‘azar had shown the desirability 
of a sharper attack on the Christians. The two sons of Zebedee, 
of whom one, according to the evidence of Christian tradition 
itself,had donned the diadem of the High Priest and thus gone ove1 
to the insurgents, fell into the hands of the king’s troops and were 
promptly beheaded ; Peter, who had been arrested, escaped from 
prison, released, as the Christians said, by an ‘angel.’ Agrippa, 
who took a more prosaic view of the matter, attributed the miracle 
to the untrustworthiness of his soldiers, influenced no doubt by the 
messianic predictions of the prisoner, and he did not shrink from 
having the whole guard executed. In the year 44 this ‘great and 
pious king, friend of Caesar and friend of the Romans,’ died, and, 
since the counsellors of Claudius had certain misgivings about his 
young son, Agrippa 11., the government of the country was en- 
trusted to the Hellenized Alexandrian Jew, Tiberius Alexander, 
along with Cuspius Fadus, who, like Agrippa 1., kept on good terms 
with the Pharisees, seeking to suppress, by arrests and deporta- 
tions, the messianic agitation of the Nasdraeans, which still went 
on, particularly among the poor wandering artisans. The custody 
of the High Priest’s vestments, clearly in consequence of the crown- 
ing of John, son of Zebedee, was provisionally again taken over by 
the Romans. The result of all these measures was but slight, 
since the persecution of the loyal followers of Jesus cleared the 
way for other messianic pretenders, particularly as just at that 
time, owing to a drought which recalled to the Jewish mind the 
days of Elijah, a series of bad harvests drove the poorer classes to 
desperation. As formerly in Samaria a new Joshua or ‘Jesus’ had 
promised to erect the tabernacle on Mt. Gerizim, so now there 
appeared a disciple or ‘acquaintance’ of Paul, a certain Theudas,’ 
ready to lead his followers dryshod across the Jordan into the 
desert, in order to prove himself thus a Joshua vedivivus, a second 
‘Jesus.’ The enterprise was discovered, the crowd caught by the 
cavalry of Cuspius Fadus in the act of crossing the stream and 
partly massacred, partly captured, whilst the ill-fated prophet was 
hewn in pieces. 

About the same time two other leaders of revolt, Jacob and 
Simon, sons of Judas of Galilee, fell into the hands of the Roman 
troops ; ‘Sir’ Tiberius Alexander had them mercilessly crucified. 

Under the next governor, Cumanus, the insecurity of the 
country and the general hostility against the army of occupation 
had reached such a point that almost beneath the very gates of 
Jerusalem a certain Stephen, one of the emperor’s slaves, i.e. a 

1 Cf. above, p. 542 n. 5. * See above, p. 553 0. 3. 


WEST AND EAST 581 


clerk travelling on official business, was set upon and robbed of his 
baggage ; the act led to sharp Roman reprisals. Under the eyes 
of the governor, who according to one account of Josephus! 
because he had been bribed, according to another * because he had 
more important business on his hands, had failed to exact due 
punishment for the murder in a Samaritan village of one of a 
party of Galilaean Jews on their way to a feast at Jerusalem, the 
above-mentioned ’Ele‘azar with his band and a multitude of 
Galilaeans and Jews of Jerusalem set out to make formal war upon 
the Samaritans. This naturally brought up Cumanus and his 
troops to the latter’s aid. Ummidius Quadratus, the governor of 
Syria, receiving appeals from both Jews and Samaritans, repaired 
to Samaria, had those caught with weapons in their hands executed, 
and sent off a number of Jewish and Samaritan notables to Rome 
for trial by the emperor, along with the governor Cumanus, who 
was subsequently deprived of his office. 

While the greatest disorder thus prevailed in Palestine, in 
Rome, too, there arose in the ninth year of Claudius another 
messiah, he too to be identified, with a certain degree of probability, 
with Simon Magus, who had escaped at the suppression of the 
Samaritan revolt, and who, in spite of that experience, still gave 
himself out to be Joshua (or Jesus) vedivivus. His claims, according 
to the legend handed down to us by Hegesippus,? were contested 
by the followers of Jesus, especially by Peter, who had fled from 
Palestine in the year 42.4 The brawls, whether between the 
followers of Jesus and those of Simon, or between the Jewish 
messianists and their opponents, were, it appears, responsible for 
Claudius’ edict expelling the Jewish community once more from 
the capital. 

Palestine, at the request of the high priest Jonathan, whom 
Quadratus had sent to Rome, received for governor the emperor's 
freedman, Felix, who was married to Drusilla, the sister of 
Agrippa 11. He succeeded in capturing ’Ele‘azar b. Dinai, whom 
he sent to Rome for trial; ‘countless’ numbers of his followers 
were crucified. But their extermination brought the tormented 
country no rest: the remaining insurgents mingled with the 
crowds, seeking by repeated assassinations to intimidate the loyal- 
ists. One of their victims was the high priest Jonathan. This 
monstrous deed appears to have been regarded as another fulfil- 
ment of the prophecy of Daniel.® Once more some messianist 

1. Ant., XX. I19. 2 BJ): 1.:233; 

3 Cf. above, p. 75 1]. 39 ff. 

4 The presence of Peter in Rome in the ninth year of Claudius would not be 
incredible ; but the assertion of ‘ Egesippus ’ (iii. 2, p. 183, Ussani) that Paul was 
also there is chronologically impossible. Paul plays, indeed, no vital part in this 


section, and the name is presumably interpolated, 
δ ix 
ix. 26. 


582 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


leaders, opposed to violent methods and the murders perpetrated 
by the szcaviz, summoned the people to an exodus into the wilder- 
ness, in order there to await the God-sent ‘tokens of freedom.’ 
That these preachers of a new exodus, described by Josephus, were 
of the so-called Nasdraeans and, without any sharp distinction, 
included people who believed in the promises of the Baptist, hold- 
ing Jesus to be the Messiah shortly to reappear and to lead them 
to victory, cannot be doubted. The departing bands were sur- 
rounded by the troops of Felix, cavalry and infantry, and dispersed 
with great loss. 

The noteworthy admission of Josephus that the leaders of these 
bands, whom he yet holds no less responsible for the downfall of 
the Jewish state than the sicarii themselves, had ‘purer hands’ 
than the others, is best explained by the fact that he himself, 
according to his own confession, had been for three years, though 
to be sure in the time of his youthful innocence, a Zealot 1 under the 
leadership of a ‘Baptist’ named Bannus. If one reflects that his 
autobiography was designed to meet the charges openly brought 
against him by Justus of Tiberias, and if one recalls the part he had 
taken in Galilee in inciting to rebellion against Rome, one is 
tempted to conjecture that as a young man he had also partici- 
pated in this very exodus into the wilderness, and that the ‘Bannus’ 
in question was no mere contemplative hermit,” an entirely un- 
Jewish type at all events, but just one of those believers, described 
by the historian, who had seen the error of his ways, as ‘jugglers’ 
(γόητες) and ‘deceivers’ (πλᾶνοι), who under Felix had led the 
people into the wilderness, there to await under strict penance and 
mortifications the coming of the Messiah, one of those preachers of 
apocalypse among whom Tertullus and Felix reckoned also, perhaps 
not altogether wrongly, a Paul of Tarsus,® whose family had come 
from Gis-Halab, the town of the rebel leader John of Gis-Halab. 

Paul was confused,‘ in particular, with the so-called ‘ Egyptian,’ 
the messiah who had assembled some thousands of the messianists 

1 Vita, § 11: “ ζηλώτης ἐγενόμην αὐτοῦ." 


* Renan compared him and John to the Indian ascetics of the hermit type 
(vanaprastha), though he freely admits that such asceticism has no basis in Jewish 
religion. 

* Acisxxv.5. Paul admits that he was a Zealot (Gal. i. 14,“ ζηλώτης ὑπάρχων,᾽᾽ 
cl. 1 Mace. ii. 27, “πᾶς ὁ ζηλῶν νόμῳ... ἐξελθέτω ὀπίσω pov. . .”’; See above, p. 359 
n. 3), and speaks of his withdrawal for two years into the ‘Avabah (ib., i. 17), 
"οἱ to ‘Arabia’ in the modern sense but to the lower Jordan valley, not far from 
the Dead Sea. If he had been a peaceful hermit or the harmless preacher of a new 
doctrine of salvation, it would be inexplicable why he incurred—through his 
activity in the ‘Avabah, that is, in the immediate neighbourhood of Petra—the 
enmity of the heathen Nabataean king Aretas (2 Cor. xi. 32 f.; in Acts ix. 24 the 
Jews are his only foes in Damascus!). That the Zealot Sha’ul persecuted the 
followers of Jesus does not exclude his having been himself a Messianist. He 
may have belonged to the followers of the Baptist or to those of the sons of 
Judas the Galilaean. It must have been during that life in the desert that Theudas, 
the Messiah, knew him (above, p. 553 n. 3). * Acts xxi. 38. 


WEST AND EAST 583 


dispersed by Felix on their attempted exodus, and had suddenly 
appeared with them on the Mount of Olives. Since he had 
promised that the walls of Jerusalem would fall before him, as 
those of Jericho had once fallen before Joshua, he, too, must have 
given himself out as the returning ‘Jesus.’ Felix was again in- 
formed in time by his scouts, and with the help of a small force of 
loyalists surrounded the Mount and cut down most of the crowd. 
The leader, who again managed to escape with a few followers, 
may once more have been the omnipresent Simon of Gitta,’ the 
‘Jesus’ son of Sdtadés, who was constantly defying fate in this 
manner, and who at a much later date fell into the hands of the 
Jews and appears to have been stoned and hanged at Lydda * 
as a false prophet seeking to seduce the people to the worship of 
foreign gods. 

It goes without saying that by all this the country was anything 
but pacified. The refugees from the Mount of Olives, reinforced 
by malcontents from among the peasantry, banded together and 
scoured the country, everywhere harassing the loyalists and looting 
their property. As the youthful Josephus, in spite of his priestly 
descent, went over to the Zealots, as ’Ele‘azar the priest put him- 
self at the head of the insurgents, so now the lower priestly orders 
in general appear to have risen against the high priests appointed 
by the Romans. ‘These and their followers declared formal war 
upon their priestly opponents, whom they sought to starve into 
obedience by confiscation of their tithes.* 

Furthermore, there was discord between the Jews and the 
Hellenized Syrians in half or wholly heathen cities like Caesarea, 
apparently turning on questions of local law, but having in reality 
its rootsin the Jewish striving for independence and the stronger in- 
clination of the Syrians for Roman dominion, recalling in many par- 
ticulars the quarrels between Hindoos and Moslems in British India. 

The incompetency and malice of Felix, regarding which the 
evidence of Tacitus4 fully corroborates the condemnation of 
Josephus, no doubt accelerated the course of events; but even the 


1 In the Ps.-Clementine Recognitions, ii. 9 (Ante-Nicene Christian Library, 
vol. iii., Edinburgh, 1867, Ὁ. 197), this ancient prototype of Harry Houdini is made 
tosay: ‘ Lam able to render myself invisible to those who wish to lay hold of me, 
and again to be visible when I am willing to be seen. If 1 wish to flee, I can dig 
through the mountains and pass through rocks, as if they were clay. If I should 
throw myself headlong from a lofty mountain (cf. above, p. 287 ἢ. 1), 1 should be 
borne unhurt to the earth, as if I were held up; when bound, I can loose myself; 
being shut up in prison, I can make the barriers open of theirownaccord. > 

2. Ὁ. Shabb., f°. 104b; pal. Shabb., 43d. Travers Herford, Christianity im 
Talmud and Midrash, p. 345. Hence the Moslem belief that in the last days the 
Antichrist, the great ‘ Liar’ (ad dajjal), will appear in Lydda and be slain by 
Jesus (Clermont-Ganneau, Horus and Si. George, 1877, p. Το). 

3. Cf. above, p. 543 ll. 17 ff. han 

‘ Hist., v.9: ‘ per omnem saevitiam ac libidinem ius regium servili ingenio 
exercuit.’ . 


584 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


coming of his honest successor Porcius Festus produced no change. 
The guerilla war of the rebels continued, and the administration of 
Festus saw a repetition of the exodus into the desert planned by a 
pseudo-prophet, the inevitable result being, as usual, a wholesale 
massacre by the pursuing Roman cavalry. Josephus this time 
does not name the leader ; but it is fairly certain that this new 
abortive attempt coincided with the election of the aged James the 
Just as high priest, and with his downfall in the interim between 
the death of Festus and the arrival of his successor Albinus. 

The deplorable economic situation of the country, dependent 
as it was on agriculture, since all transit commerce could easily be 
diverted into safer channels, can be imagined. The continuous 
impoverishment of the people naturally prevented the regular 
recovery of the taxes, and Josephus accuses the last of the governors 
of plundering wealthy individuals and finally even the temple 
treasury, which was deprived of seventeen talents. It is clear, of 
course, that such actions were simply the exaction of arrears of the 
country’s tribute, for the full remittance of which first the leading 
citizens and in the end the sacred treasures were held responsible. 
The governor had of course to deliver to Caesar a definite sum 
which, quite apart from the profit he was accustomed to make for 
himself, he was bound to pay, no matter what were the economic 
conditions of the country. In addition there was the burden of 
maintaining the garrison, and the sums extorted as a matter of 
habit by individual officers and soldiers. Oppression, too, through 
Agrippa 11. and his followers, weighed no less heavily upon the 
province. In the last edition of the Antiqutties,? written after that 
monarch’s death, Josephus actually reckons the king’s relatives 
and protégés, Saul and Costobar, with their troops, among the 
‘ robbers,’ although these were obviously forces which on the one 
hand were fighting the insurgents and on the other were responsible 
for the collection of the taxes. In no other manner did the 
Palestinian fella}, of the time of Turkish misrule lump the govern- 
ment troops, charged to ‘ protect ’’ him and to collect the taxes, 
together with the robbers of the desert harassing the country by 
their raids. In addition to the various exoduses en masse into the 
wilderness, there was now a constantly increasing migration of the 
population to regions less wretched than their own.? 

So long as the wealthy class by tolerable taxation found in the 
Romans a support against their poorer compatriots, the tributary 
peasants on the land, the city mob, and the labourers barely kept 
alive by public works,* it put up with the foreign oppressors, 


1 Ant., xx. 188. * Ant., XX. 9. 4. 

+ B.J., 1.8 279; Ant., xx. § 255. This is the way in which the Damascene 
community of the ‘ New Covenant ’ (above, p. 575 n. 2) originated, 

+ Ant., xx. § 219. 


WEST AND EAST 585 


though often enough only by choking back its inward rage. But so 
soon as the wealthy themselves were held answerable for the deficit 
in taxes, after the peasants and small holders had become insolvent, 
and the Romans began mercilessly to attack the persons even of 
the privileged notables who had been promoted to the rank of 
Roman ἡ knights,’ the army of occupation lost its last support in 
the country, and a united national uprising against Rome could no 
longer be averted. 

The decisive step leading to a breach with Rome was taken by 
the young captain of the temple guard, ’Ele‘azar, son of the high 
priest, who discontinued the daily offering for the emperor, thereby 
openly defying the Romans. 

What the aristocrats, whose patience was exhausted, com- 
pletely forgot was their own utter powerlessness and the consequent 
impossibility of the hitherto ruling class to maintain its traditional 
position as leaders of a popular war against the foreign foe. 
Nothing, absolutely nothing, could induce the people—above all, 
the old fighters who for two generations had grown up in unceasing 
strife with Rome—to submit any longer to the leadership of persons 
who had hitherto done their best to support the Romans in their 
oppression of the lower orders. If the priestly nobility and the 
scribal bureaucracy imagined that the people still credited them 
with a special sanctity and dignity of office, they were altogether 
deceived, for it had been clearly shown long before—indeed, immedi- 
ately after the death of Herod the Great—that the people scorned 
the Boethusaean high priests and all the dependants of Herod 
as unclean and unworthy of obedience. In fact, the high priest 
Hananiah and the prudent section of his peers and of the scribes 
made every effort, even at the last moment, to avert fate with the 
help of the king and his far too weak forces. For, to any one 
reviewing the situation the fact must have been clear which has 
long been recognized by such modern historians ? as are not colour- 
blind in the matter of politics, namely, that the final outbreak of 
war with Rome at the same time initiated the total subversion 
of the existing order of Jewish society.® 

The control of the movement at once passed out of the hands 
of the Jewish aristocracy. The Zealots possessed sufficient 
weapons from the start, having at the first assault secured by a 
bold stroke the Idumaean frontier fortress of Masada, built by 
Herod the Great as a huge arsenal, and having, moreover, through 
the defeat of Florus, captured the whole of the baggage trains as 
well as plenty of arms from the Roman army. The attempt of 


1 In the end, Florus, in defiance of all law, had even such persons crucified. 

2 Cf. Ed. Meyer, Ursprung und Anfange des Christentums, ii. 74; W. Weber, 
Josephus und Vespasian, p. 21. 

8 Similar conditions would obtain if to-day India rose in arms against the 
British vajj. 


586 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


the high priests with the help of the temple treasury to enlist a 
faithful bodyguard in Galilee and, thus supported, to retain their 
command of the people in arms, miscarried through the treachery 
of the young priestly noble Josephus, in whose breast on the hot 
soil of Galilee the old rebel spirit of the Baptists revived for a time 
and strove for the mastery with the ingrained worldly wisdom and 
lack of scruple of this young scapegrace. 

The leader of the captors of Masada was Menahem, the last 
surviving son of Judah of Galilee, who had led the revolt against 
the census of Quirinius, and grandson of the Galilaean rebel leader 
Hizqiah, whom Herod the Great as a youth had put to death. At 
the head of his victorious army, reinforced by recruits from the 
plain and well equipped with the stores of the armoury of Masada, 
Menahem now marched into Jerusalem as Messiah, ‘ like a veri- 
table king,’ says the mocking Josephus.t_ Once more the city saw 
the triumphal entry of a liberator-king, once more the cries of 
‘Osanna, from a multitude easily moved and fluctuating between 
deepest despair of their own liberty and soaring hopes of world- 
dominion, hailed a leader convinced of his divine vocation as 
Israel’s redeemer. Streams of blood had been offered by his un- 
ruly kindred, thirsting for freedom, to the dream of the liberation 
of the land and the fulfilment of the Deuteronomic royalty law : 
his grandfather had fallen in Galilee for his people; his father, God 
knows when and where, in a similar conflict against the country’s 
enemy ; his two elder brothers, Jacob and Simon, had been cap- 
tured and crucified by order of Tiberius Alexander. And now 
he, the youngest, like David, entered the holy city as king, only to 
fulfil the tragic destiny of his house. 

To ’Ele‘azar, the temple captain, the highborn leader of the 
insurgents within the city, and to his followers, as also to the 
partner in his views, the historian Josephus, Menahem was no 
more than ᾿ an insufferable tyrant,’ ? an expression which, thanks 
to the political doctrine of Aristotle,? had acquired a very definite 
content, and for the assistant of Josephus denoted the unlimited 
monarch come to the throne after the overthrow of an aristocratic 
or plutocratic government by a popular insurrection, and basing 
his power on the support of the poor and oppressed. 

Our writer, then, represents the partisans of ’Ele‘azar as saying 
to each other that they had not risen against the Romans for 
liberty, only to sacrifice this freedom to a Jewish hangman who, 
even were he to abstain from violence, was at all events far below 
them in rank. Menahem is called a ‘hangman ᾿(δήμιος) * because 


1 B.J., 1. 17. 8, § 434. 

* B.J.,U.§ 442; the corresponding Hebrew word is shali¢ (the Arabic, sultan). 
3 Pol., v. 8. 2-3. 

* B.J., li. § 443 (as read by Destinon ; the MSS, have δήμῳ), 


WEST AND EAST 587 


’Ele‘azar’s party accused him of the murder of the high priest 
Hananiah (the father of ’Ele‘azar) and the high priest’s brother 
Hizqiah, whom Menahem’s Zealots had dragged from their place 
of hiding in the canal of the palace garden and slain forthwith. 

In revenge ’Ele‘azar and his party conspired against Menahem ; 
and when the latter in royal robes and in the midst of his body- 
guard entered the sanctuary to pay his devotions, he found the 
roofs 1 of the halls surrounding the temple court occupied by a 
hostile crowd, who pelted him and his followers with stones, while 
‘Ele‘azar fell upon him with his temple guard. Menahem’'s 
people fled; some were caught and massacred, while his relative 
’Ele‘azar ben Ja’ir escaped with a party to Masada. The * king’ 
himself took refuge ‘ in the place called Ophlas,’ clearly one of the 
underground passages on the slope of Ophel recently rediscovered 
by Parker, Macalister, and Weill. He was dragged forth in the 
same manner in which his adherents had dragged the high priest 
from hiding, and after ignominious tortures slain—a messiah, this 
time, really murdered by his Jewish countrymen. 

The followers of Jesus, who must have regarded Menahem, like 
Simon of Gitta and Theudas before him, as the Antichrist, appear 
to have considered his death as an omen of the imminent fall of 
Jerusalem. They left the city and repaired to Pella, on the east 
of the Jordan. 

The aristocrats reaped little joy from their short-lived victory. 
None of the leaders appointed by them could maintain his place, 
and affairs, of necessity, went ever further on the road to final ruin. 
The General Assembly (τὸ κοινὸν τῶν 'Ιεροσολυμιτῶν), now hold- 
ing unlimited control over the state, carried out the measure 
demanded by the rebels after the death of Herod the Great, namely, 
the election of a high priest by popular vote, in complete disregard 
of the claims of the old privileged high-priestly families,” an object 
the more easily attained because of the disunion in the ranks of the 
nobility. The popular leaders made it their aim to murder ἡ the 
nobility of the metropolis,’ 4 clearly because the aristocrats had long 
repented of their breach with Rome and sought to renew negotia- 
tions with the country’s enemy, a proceeding which the extremists, 
from their viewpoint quite naturally, regarded as high treason. 

It is unnecessary to repeat here the story of the unhappy war 
and the siege of Jerusalem down to the destruction of the tem ple 
and the death of that devoted band who deemed it ‘not death, but 
victory, salvation, and bliss, to perish with the sanctuary. ὃ 

1 B.J., ii. § 445; read dpopds for the meaningless ὀργάς of the MSS. 

2 B.J., iv. § 139. 3 [bid., iv. ὃ 147 544. 

4 [bid., iv. ὃ 181; cf. § 365: ‘ None escaped save those whose humble birth or 
fortune put them beneath notice.’ 


5 Dio Cassius, Ixvi.; the words are those of the victorious enemy, who only 
attained his end with the gravest loss, 


588 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


Herod’s marvellous edifice had to perish in the flames because the 
lord of the world-empire fondly imagined that, along with this work 
of men’s hands, he would extirpate that ‘ pest ’ which threatened 
to shake the Roman dominion to its foundations, the belief in 
the imminent coming of a world-redeemer and of a wondrous 
kingdom to liberate all the enslaved and oppressed—heeding 
neither that omen, portrayed in unforgettable words by Tacitus,! 
of the celestial temple glowing in the clouds of the evening sky, nor 
the proud answer which the champions of liberty flung back to his 
summons to them to surrender and thus spare the temple, ‘that 
the world was a better temple for God than this one.’ 2 

There is weighty evidence to the effect that the leaders of the 
revolt at Jerusalem counted upon a united rising on a fixed day of 
the Diaspora throughout the whole of the Roman empire, and 
thought that the Mesopotamian Jewry and even the Parthians 
might be induced to make a simultaneous attack on Syria. That 
pledges were given, stipulations made, money and weapons 
secretly sent from the East to Jerusalem and Peraea, admits of no 
doubt.? The family of the King of Adiabene certainly did their 
utmost in this respect. But in general these hopes proved vain. 
With the Parthians the presence at the Roman court of hostages 
of royal birth and the danger from the Alani of the northern steppes 
carried greater weight than the temptation to take advantage of 
the embarrassment of the empire and the pressure of the Baby- 
lonian Jews. In the communities of the Dispersion the influence 
of the wealthier Jews, privileged by the Romans and therefore 
more or less committed to their cause, was generally strong enough 
to prevent the contemplated revolt, or at least to defer it until it 
was too late to embark on such an enterprise with any prospect of 
success. It was only the common misery to which these com- 
munities were reduced by the pogroms against the Jewish in- 
habitants, the consequence of the overthrow of the Jewish state 
in Palestine, and of which the rich were always the first victims, 
that created conditions favourable to a world-revolution ὁ of all 
Jewry breaking out in the reigns of Trajan and Hadrian. 

It is unmistakable that the Romans deliberately set out to 
exterminate the belief in the might of the one invisible God, whose 
earthly Jewish vicegerent was destined, according to the wide- 
spread prophecies well known to them through itinerant preachers, 
to hurl the Caesars from their throne and to replace them as ruler 
of the world. After the temple at Jerusalem had sunk into ruins, 
the unavoidable aftermath of the Jewish revolt in Egypt and 


1 Hist., v.13: “υἱδδὸ per caelum concurrere acies, rutilantia arma et subito 
nubium igne conlucere templum.’ 

2 BJ is NeXt: 28:455; * Weber, op. cit., p. 19. 

* Dio Cassius, lxix. 13: ‘ the whole world was as it were shaken by this,’ 


WEST AND EAST 589 


Libya (where the weaver Jonathan summoned the Jews to an exodus 
into the desert) gave them the welcome opportunity of closing the 
other Jewish temple of On (Heliopolis), founded by Onias, and of 
rendering it useless for worship by the removal of all its sacred 
vessels. To make the fulfilment of the oracle of a Jewish world- 
ruler of David’s line altogether impossible, Vespasian proceeded to 
have a list made of all discoverable members of the ancient house 
and, probably, to proscribe them. That measure appears to have 
led to the arrest and trial, under Domitian, of the last surviving 
scions of the family of Jesus claiming descent from David. 

All these measures (to which must be added the conversion of 
the old Jewish temple contribution of a didrachm ! into a poll-tax 
payable to the treasury of Jupiter Capitolinus) could only increase 
to the utmost the exasperation of the Jews in the Diaspora. When 
at last under Trajan there came the conflict between Rome and 
the Parthians, for which the Jews were yearning, and when the 
emperor appeared with his picked troops in Mesopotamia, the 
Babylonian Jews rose in his rear, simultaneously with their 
compatriots in Libya, Egypt, Cyprus, and Palestine. This fear- 
ful insurrection ?—of which Prof. Zielinski? has rightly observed 
that it was far greater and more dangerous than that under Nero, 
and only received less attention in history because no Tacitus or 
Josephus undertook to describe it—was led by a messiah-king, 
Andrew 2 of Lycia, that is to say, a Jew who, like Paul, belonged to 
the Diaspora of southern Asia Minor. This Jewish king, too, was 
held up to ridicule on the stage at Alexandria, a buffoonery looking 
weird enough against the background of merciless mutual massacre 
of Jews and Gentiles which was the sequel of this rising in the 
various countries. The rebellion, put down by Marcius Turbo and 
Lusus Quietus, had not yet been quite extinguished when Hadrian 
took over the government and was called to suppress disturbances 
both in Alexandria and in Palestine.® 

When this emperor forbade the Jewish covenant-rite of circum- 
cision, and further proceeded to erect a temple of Jupiter Capitol- 
inus on the ruins of the temple of Jahveh, a furious rebellion 
broke out afresh in Palestine. The leader this time was a man of 
the village of Kokheba® in Batanaea,‘ the village, be it noted, 
which, according to Christian tradition,® was the home of the kins- 
folk of Jesus. He was recognized by the famous Rabbi ‘Aqiba as 


1 T.e. a labourer’s pay for two days (Tobit, v. 4), that is, two-thirds per cent. 
of a minimum income. 2 Euseb., Hist. eccl., iv. 2; Orosius, vii. 12. 

8 Revue del’ Université de Bruxelles, 1920-7, Pp. 19 sqq. 

4 So Dio Cassius, lxviii. 32. To him, and not to Bar Kokh¢ba, Jesus is made 
to allude in John v. 43. 

5 Euseb., Chvon., ed. Schoene, ii. 164 (Armenian), 

6 Schiirer (Macpherson’s trans., vol. i. 2, p. 298 n. 84) is mistaken in his inter- 
pretation of the name; cf. Levy, Neuhebr. Worterbuch, ii. 312b. 

7 Cf. Euseb., Hist. eccl., i. 7.14; Epiphan., Haeres., 30. 2 and 18. 8 [bid, 


590 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


the promised son of David.! Since it is hardly conceivable that 
two different families, unrelated to each other and both claiming 
to be descended from King David, could have lived in so tiny a 
place, I consider it more than probable that Bar Kokh‘ba belonged 
to that branch of the family of Jesus which the Christians regarded 
as ‘heretical,’ and which they accused of having betrayed to the 
Romans the last members of the other line, the δεσπόσυνοι in the 
time of Domitian. That would at once explain on the one hand 
his appearance as the Messiah (the clan of Jesus would in that case, 
like that of Judah of Galilee, have produced two kings ‘anointed 
of the Lord’), and, on the other, the fact that the Jewish Christians 
of Transjordania and Palestine rejected him ? and were bitterly 
persecuted by him.? The guerilla war conducted by him against 
the Romans until his fall had reduced Palestine to a desert, after 
causing enormous losses to both Jews and Romans, so much so 
that Hadrian in reporting the victory to the senate thought fit to 
omit the usual formula, “I and the army are well.’ The number 
of Jewish prisoners was so great that they could not all be sold on 
the spot, although ‘a man was given away for the price of a horse.’ ® 

Therewith the dreadful tragedy was ended, and the last of the 
‘men of violence’ who, since the days of John the Baptist, had 
sought to ‘take the kingdom of God by force’ was gathered to his 
fathers. The holy city had sunk in ruins; the Romans had drawn 
the plough over the ashes of the temple; the promised land was 
lost, its strongholds broken ; and of the people which had forfeited 
its political existence, well-nigh all the warriors and champions of 
liberty, all the true sons of the old conquerors with the blood of the 
predatory tribes of the desert in their veins, were now exter- 
minated. The force of unalterable facts had solved the hard 
problem which the supposed command of God had presented to the 
pious in the Deuteronomic royalty law: ‘when thou .. . shalt 
possess and shalt dwell in the land which the Lord thy God giveth 
thee . . . thou shalt not put a foreigner over thee who is not thy 
brother.’ Now that Israel had lost to the foreigner the land which 
the Lord had given and was homeless again upon the earth, even 
the most pious must bow their necks to every foreign yoke until 
the end of the appointed days. | 

Those who had taken the sword have perished by the sword and 
been buried in blood and fire beneath the ruins of the temple 
fortress, beneath the demolished walls of the rock-castles of 
Masada and Beth-Har, the survivors being deported to harder 
bondage than their forefathers had ever known. 

* Talm. Jer., Ta’anith, iv., fol. 68d (ed. Cracov.). 


* Cf. Jerome, Adv. Ruf, iii. 31. 5. Justin Martyr, Apol., i. 31. 
* Dio Cassius, Ixix. 14. * Jerome on Zech. xi. 5 and Jevem. xxxi. 15. 


AvP PE NED ES 


APPENDIX I 
THE OFFICIAL RECORDS OF THE ROMAN BUREAUCRACY 1! 


In Roman times it was the custom that each official, including the 
imperial governor, should keep a diary of his official acts, entering 
day by day the important data. In all probability this was already 
the case under the Ptolemies, although so far the papyri give no 
information on the subject. We possess the fragment of such an 
official diary in the Paris papyrus 69,” which constitutes seven columns 
of a roll, originally far longer, containing the diary entries of the 
στρατηγός Of the districts of Omboi and Elephantine in Upper Egypt, 
dating from A.D. 232. I shall give here an excerpt taken from the first 
days of the month of Thoth. The stops indicate gaps in the papyrus. 


‘ist Thoth. The στρατηγός at nightfall went into the gymnasium 
together with Aurelius. . . . He created, by coronation with a wreath, 
Aurelius Pelaias, son of Harpaesis, grandson of Hierax, gymnasiarch, and 
sacrificed on this occasion both at the Caesareum and at the Gymnasium, 
where he also made libations and uttered vows. Then he went into his 
second district, that of Omboi, where the customary sacrifices to the god 
took place ... and the στρατηγός attended the procession made in 
honour of this god.’ 


There follows, in a different handwriting—that is, the hand of the 
στρατηγός himself—the annotation: ‘Read.’ Written by a third hand 
there follows the annotation: ‘I, official clerk, Aurelius Artemidorus, 
have publicly exposed this act and then incorporated it into the official 
acts. Year 12, on the 2nd of Thoth.’ There follows a new page, that 
is, a new leaf, which, when first written upon at the office of the official, 
was an independent leaf and was later incorporated into the acts by 
the clerk, who, after exposing it in public, pasted it on to the previous 
leaf. This procedure was followed until the roll was fairly thick. Day 
by day the official examined the entry and signed ‘ Read,’ and every 
time, after the lapse of several days, a leaf or two having been filled, 
they were exposed in public, and then incorporated into the acts with 
the testimony of the official clerk. Having thus been incorporated, 


1 Cf. I. Preisigke, Antikes Leben nach den agyptischen Papyri, Leipzig, 1916, 
p. 03 Sq. : ᾿ : : ; 

2 See our ἘΠ. 1. The Greek text is printed in the Notices et Extvaits des MSS. 
de la Bibliothéque Nationale, tome xviii. 2, No. 69. U. Wilcken, Chrestomathie, 
No. 41. 

091 


592 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


the leaf constitutes a new page in the roll and is duly numbered. The 
page quoted above is thus No. 4. The public exhibition of the leaf here 
lasts only a day, for the incorporation into the acts took place on the 
2nd of Thoth. The purpose of the exhibition was to render account to 
the public of the official activity of the office-holder. This stands in 
open contrast to the modern conception of an official who is respon- 
sible only to his superior authorities, not to the public, and even that 
superior authority is accountable only to Parliament, not to the masses. 


APPENDIX II 
IABBINICAL TRADITIONS CONCERNING NAMESAKES OF JESUS 


The Talmud Ὁ. Sanhedrin, ro7b,1 mentions a certain Jeshu,? a pupil 
of R. Jehoshu‘ah b. Perahjah, who accompanied his master on his flight 
from the king Alexander Jannai to Egypt, returned with him, but was 
excommunicated by him because on the journey home he is said to 
have paid too much attention to the fair face of an innkeeper’s wife.* 
In despair he fell away from the Law and worshipped the moon 
(lebhonah).* This renegade pupil of a rabbi has in common with the 
Nasdraean Messias Jesus only his name, but on account of his flight to 
Egypt ° he was at an early period confused with Jesus the son of 
Sdtadés, the fool (shotéh), ‘who had brought witchcraft with him from 
Egypt,’ and who is probably none other than the Egyptian messias who 
promised to make the walls of Jerusalem crumble by the sound of 
trumpets,® i.e. probably Simon Magus, who passed himself off as the 
resuscitated Jesus.? Asa consequence of these confusions and mistakes, 
there arose in the Babylonian Gemara another anonymous tradition, 
‘A rabbi has said: Jeshu han-nosri has been guilty of witchcraft and 
seduced and deceived Israel,’ and was attached to the anecdote just 


1 Aufhauser, Antike Jesuszeugnisse (Lietzmann, Kl. Texte, No. 126, p. 40 sq., 
where the older literature is given). Cf. also R. Travers Herford, Christianity in 
Talmud and Midrash, London, 1903, pp. 50, 52, 54 N. I, 40. 

* In the parallel passage, j. Hag., ii. 2, the name is not given, which may be 
due to an early censorship. 

3. The announcement of the excommunication by four hundred trumpeters is of 
course a grotesque exaggeration, due to the confusion of this otherwise unknown 
rabbi’s pupil with the famous Egyptian demagogue. See below, ἢ. 6. 

4 MSS. a ‘ brick’ (/ibnah). I think this is due to a twisting of the original 
meaning, which was referring to astrological cult practices. There exists, of 
course, a cult of ‘ bricks’ made by men, cf. F. C. Conybeare, Transact. Third 
Internat. Congr. for the Hist. of Relig., vol. ii., 1908, p. 181: ‘I have often seen a 
Hindu pick up an old brickbat, set it up on end, draw a circle round it, and 
proceed to say his prayers to it’; but the tendency of this exaggeration is clearly 
visible. 

6 Travers Herford, op. cit., p. 53, recalls the legendary flight of Jesus to Egypt 
(Matt. ii. 13). 

ὁ The four hundred trumpeters announcing his excommunication may have 
been intended as a fitting answer to this foolishness. 

7 This Simon Magus was accused of having instituted a cult to his mistress 
Helena as Selene. The moon cult referred to above may aim at this particular 
episode of Simon’s biography. 


APPENDICES 593 


referred to. Inanumber of MSS., finally, the name han-nosrt, referring 
to the Nasoraean, became attached to the rabbiJehoshu‘ah b. Perahjah’s 
pupil. This mare’s-nest of confusions led my old friend Mr.G. R.S. Mead, 
many years ago, to a discussion of the question, ‘ Did Jesus live in 
180 B.C. ?’ 


APPENDIX III 
A GENUINE RABBINICAL TESTIMONY ABOUT JESUS 


Jesus himself has given an interpretation of Deut. xxiii. 19, with a 
quotation from Micah i. 7: } 


‘R.’El‘ezer said to R. ‘Aqiba: ‘‘ I once went on the upper street of 
Sepphoris; there [ met one of the disciples of Jesus the Nasdraean 
named Ja‘aqob of Kephar Sekhanjah, who said tome: ‘In your law 
(Deut, xxiii. 19) there is written: Thou shalt not bring a whore’s hire 
into the house of thy God. Is it permissible to use such hire to make 
therewith a privy for the high priest?’ I did not know what to answer 
him. Then he said to me: ‘ This is what Jesus the Naséraean taught 
me: She gathered it as the hire of an harlot, and they shall return it 
to the hire of an harlot (Micah i. 7): it has come from dirt, and to the 
place of dirt it shall go.’’’’? 


This dictum of Jesus has hitherto been neither adequately defined nor 
correctly interpreted. The scurrilous puzzle whether a harlot’s hire 
when given as an offering might be used for the building of a privy for 
the high priest, and thus utilized in some measure for the treasury of 
the temple, is put by the heretic antinomian and anti-Pharisaic disciple 
of Jesus to R. Eliezer Ὁ. Hyrkanos, the teacher of R. ‘Agiba, for no 
other purpose than to make fun of the efforts of the scribes to interpret 
Deut. Xxiii. ΤΟ in a manner profitable to the temple treasure. 

The prohibition in question wanted to prevent or abolish the Syrian 
custom of sacred prostitution. Yet on account of its too general tenor 
it exempted all prostitutes from payment of the Shegel or temple tax. 
This again appeared to put a reward on a trade generally considered as 
shameful. On the other hand, men and women of doubtful repute ran 
a risk of seeing themselves publicly put to shame by the priests’ refusal 
to accept their offering. The ‘problem’ seemed a fertile field for the 
casuists, and the disciple of Jesus Ja‘aqob of Kephar Sekhanjah proposed 
on his own responsibility a way out of the difficulty, naturally with a 
view to ridiculing the casuists. Jesus is not quoted but for the last 
three lines reproduced in this anecdote. 

The quotation from Jesus can in no wise refer to the so-called 
‘throne-house’ of the high priest, but is evidently an independent 
remark hostile to the priests, made probably on an occasion when in 
his presence the offering of a woman of doubtful repute was refused on 


1 ’Aboda zara, 16b-17a. 

2 Laible, Jesus Christus im Talmud, Leipzig, 1900, p. 59; R. Travers Herford, 
Christianity in Talmud and Midrash, London, 1903, pp. 148 sq., 412 sqg.; Klausner- 
Danby, Jesus of Nazareth, London, 1925, p. 37. 


2P 


504 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


the ground of the Deuteronomic passage. Jesus then quoted the verset 
from Micah. On consulting it, one will find that in that passage what is 
meant by harlotry is simply the idolatry of the northern kingdom of 
Samaria, and that Jesus merely designates the Boethusaean priesthood 
of Jerusalem as a harlot enticing the people away from the service of 
Jahveh.t The temple desecrated by it appears to him but as a place 
ofimpurity. Hence, in his view, the venal priesthood should not refuse 
the offering of a venal woman. 


APPENDIX IV 
CHRISTIAN CENSORSHIP 


The Codex Justinianus* contains the following order of the Emperors 
‘Theodosius and Valentinian, dating from the year A.D. 449, to burn 
all writings hostile to Christianity composed by Porphyry ‘or any other 
person’ in his blindness, lest they cause God’s anger and scandalize 
the pious. The order applied with equal force to books privately owned, 
to those of the synagogues and the public libraries of the cities. 
««Αὐτοκράτορες Θεοδύσιος καὶ Οὐαλεντινιανὸς A A ‘Oppioda ἐπάρχω πραιτωρίων᾽ 
Θεσπίζομεν πάντα ὅσα Πορφύριος ὑπὸ τῆς ἑαυτοῦ μανίας ἐλαυνόμενος ἢ ἕτερός 
τις κατὰ τῆς εὐσεβοῦς τῶν Χριστιανῶν θρησκείας συνέγραψε παρ᾽ οἱῳδήποτε 
εὑρισκόμενα πυρὶ παραδίδοσθαι. πάντα γὰρ τὰ κινοῦντα τὸν θεὸν εἰς ὀργὴν 
συγγράμματα καὶ τὰς ψυχὰς ἀδικοῦντα οὐδὲ εἰς ἀκοὰς ἀνθρώπων ἐλθεῖν βουλόμεθα." 
(Follows an edict about the burning of Nestorian books.) The rhythm 
and construction of the sentence quoted leave no doubt about the fact 
that the words 7) ἕτερός τις have been put in at a later date, no doubt 
for the purpose of extending the measure adopted against the writings 
of Porphyry (publicly burned as early as 431, at the Council of 
Ephesus) to all books the destruction of which was desired because 
the fanatics of the new religion did not feel capable any longer of fighting 
them with purely spiritual weapons. Since a law against the books 
of Porphyry is well attested for the reign of Constantine,® it is to be 
supposed that the order of Theodosius and Valentinian merely renewed 
a law of Constantine made ineffective by the reaction under Julian. 
It is clear, of course, that the writings of Josephus with their sections 
so hostile to John the Baptist and the Nasdraean messiah came under 
this law, as did the Acts of Pilate published by Maximinus Daia. Yet 
while the latter could be ruthlessly burned, matters stood differently 
with Josephus, who for the Christians had become well-nigh canonical. 


1 Cf. also my interpretation of the episode of the adulterous woman, Z.N.T.W., 
xxii. (1923), Pp. 305. 

5. Recognovit Paulus Krueger, Berlin, 1877,i. 1, 3 ; cf. also the order of Theo- 
dosius and Valentinian (Nov. 42, c. 1 § 2; lib. 3, 1, De Summa Trinitate) on the 
burning of the writings of Arius, possession of which was threatened with death. 

3 Cf. the letters in Gelasios of Kyzikos, Comm. Act. Concil. Nic.; Mansi, ii. 919. 
At the same time the burning of the writings of Arius is ordered and the hiding of 
books by Porphyry or Arius threatened with the death penalty ; cf. Sozom., ii. 
38 ; Socrates, i. 9, 3t (Migne, P.G., Ixvii. 88). 


APPENDICES 595 


This law was the counter-stroke of the Christians to the edict of 
Diocletian commanding the burning of all Christian MSS.,1 probably on 
the basis of the same legal principle that books of mag’c contents (libri 
wmprobatae lectionis) were to be destroyed. 


APPENDIX V 


IGNATIUS ON THE JEWS DEMANDING DOCUMENTARY EVIDENCE 
ABOUT JESUS FROM THE CHRISTIANS 


According to a variant of the letter of Ignatius to the Philadelphians, 
the Jews told the Christians that they would not believe the contents 
of the Gospels unless they could find the statements in question also 
in the archives (dp xetors) : 

‘ ἐπεὶ ἤκουσά τινων λεγόντων, ὅτι ἐὰν μὴ ἐν τοῖς ἀρχείοις εὕρω, ἐν τῷ 
denis ow πιστεύω. καὶ λέγοντός μου αὐτοῖς, ὅτι “" Γέγραπται, Ὡ ἀπεκρίθησάν 
pro’ “TU pdxerrac’ Ε ἐμοὶ δὲ ἀρχειά ἐστιν Ἰησοῦς Χριστύς, τὰ ἄθικτα ἀρχεῖα ὁ 
σταυρὸς αὐτοῦ καὶ ἡ πίστις ἡ dv αὐτοῦ ἐν ois θέλω ἐν τῇ προσευχῇ ὑμῶν 
δικαιωθῆναι. καλοὶ καὶ οἱ ἱερεῖς, κρείσσων δὲ ὁ ἀρχιερεὺς ὁ πεπιστευμένος τὰ 
ἵγια τῶν ἁγίων ὃς μόνος πεπίστευται τὰ κρυπτὰ τοῦ θεοῦ. αὐτὸς ὧν θύρα τοῦ 
πατρύς, δι᾿ ἧς εἰσέρχονται ᾿Αβραὰμ καὶ Ἰσαὰκ καὶ ᾿Ιακὼβ καὶ οἱ προφῆται καὶ 
οἱ ἀπόστολοι καὶ ἡ ἐκκλησία. ᾿Ἑξαίρετον δέ τι ἔχει τὸ εὐαγγέλιον, τὴν παρουσίαν 
τοῦ Κυρίου ἡμῶν ᾿Ιησοῦ Χριστοῦ, τὸ πάθος αὐτοῦ καὶ τὴν ἀνάστασιν. οἱ γὰρ 
ἀγαπητοὶ προφῆται κατήγγειλαν εἰς αὐτόν, τὸ δὲ εὐαγγέλιον ἀπάρτισμά ἐστιν 


ἀφθαρσίας." 


The original variant, it is true, had ἀρχαίοις, and meant by that the 
messianic references in the ancient prophets, as is clearly shown by 
St. Augustinus, Sermo 340, 4 (P.L., xxxviii.-xxxix., 1457) : 

‘Nonnulli enim paganorum, ut noverint Christum ante prophetatum, 


quando eis de Scripturis clara proferimus, suspecti ne forte a Christianis 
ista conficta sint, malunt credere codicibus Judaeorum.’ 


Which simply means that the Gentiles desired to verify the passages in 
question in the Hebrew MSS. of the Jews, a desire natural enough, 
seeing thaticertain ones, among others the famous Ναζωραῖος κληθήσεται, 
have not yet been located in Scripture, whilst others come from ‘ scrip- 
tures ’ posterior to Jesus.2 Yet all this does not contradict the fact 
that the variant reading quoted above may be very old. At all events, 
it can have arisen only under the impression that the Jews did demand 
documentary evidence taken from official archives. 


APPENDIX VI 
OFFICIAL ACTS COPIED AND CIRCULATED BY CHRISTIAN SCRIBES 


According to the introduction to the doubtless genuine Aciéa SS. 
Laracht, Probi et Andronici (Ruinart, p. 457), a number of Christians 


1 Euseb., Hist. eccl., viii. 11. 2 See above, p. 311. 


596 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


of Iconium actually named paid 200 denarii to one of the speculatores 
of Sebaste for the materials in question. A similar statement occurs 
in the Vita et Passio St. Pontti, 25; Baluze, Miscell., i. 33; Leclerq, 
op. cit., p. 384 n. 22. On the speculatores, cf. O. Hirschfeld, Die 
Sicherhetitspolizei im vémischen Kaiserreich, Kl. Schr., p. 610; Lammert 
in Pauly-Kroll, Realencyclop., iii.A, 2, 1583-86. 

The statement of the Passio St. Vincentts (ed. Ruinart, Acta Sincera, 
i. 389), to the effect that the governor expressly prohibited the taking 
down of a protocol, is clearly a subterfuge meant to justify the want of 
documentary bases. The same pucrile invention is found in the Passio 
Victoris Mauri (Acta SS., May 8th), where the president of the tribunal 
with the consent of the emperor has all the acts of the trial ‘burnt,’ 
not, however, without having obliged all the excerptores to declare under 
oath that they had not put aside any item connected with the affair. 


APPENDIX VII 
Tue DATING OF THE DEATH OF JAMES THE JUST 


Chapter iii. of the fifth book of the Polemos contains a vehement 
accusation by Josephus of John of Gischala and his Zealots because 
during the siege they did not shrink from using the sacred wine and 
oil of the temple, and the chapter ends with a vicious attack by the 
pious author on that ‘sinful’ generation. This must have induced a 
Christian interpolator to introduce the two still greater crimes of the 
Jews, the crucifixion of Jesus and the murder of James. The re- 
worker of Eusebius,! utilized by the Chronicon Paschale, then read in 
his interpolated copy of the Haldsis the following passage (v. 13. 6, 
§ 566) : 


ἐξ ‘Dn , ὃ ’ gies, ‘ > , x θῇ \ 
οἶμαι, “Pwpaiwy βραδυνόντων ἐπὶ τοὺς ἀλιτηρίους ἢ καταποθηναι ὑπὸ 
’ ~*~ “ a nn , - ’ κι 
χάσματος i) κατακλυσθῆναι τὴν πόλιν ἢ τοὺς τῆς Σοδομήνης μεταλαβεῖν κεραύνους 
-“ ΄« ‘ , - ’΄ I ’ 
πολὺ γὰρ τῶν ταῦτα παθόντων ἤνεγκε γενεὰν ἀθεωτέραν. Τῇ your τούτων ἀπονοίᾳ 
~ ξ é - “. , 
πᾶς ὁ λαὸς συναπώλετο᾽ [ἔτους τρίτου Οὐεσπασιανοῦ ἡ ἅλωσις τῶν ᾿Ιουδαίων 
᾿ ~ r -~ ~ rt ’ 
γέγονε, ὡς peta ἔτη τῆς αὐτῶν τόλμης κατὰ τοῦ Ἰησοῦ. ἐν ᾧ χρόνῳ καὶ 
ir’ \ io λ 4 “ , “ Ν ¢ : 9 οἰ δὺ ᾿ Od 
IdxwBov τὸν ἀδελφὸν τοῦ Κυρίου κρεμνισθῆναι καὶ ὑπ᾽ αὐτῶν λιθοβοληθέντα 
ἀναιρεθῆναι." 


This interpolation of the story of James immediately before the fall of 
the city explains the dating of his death by Hegesippus* and in Eusebius,* 
while Josephus himself puts the stoning of James correctly before the 
beginning of Albinus’ term of office, i.e. A.D. 62. The dating of the 
fall of Jerusalem in the ¢hivd year of Vespasian, against, be it noted, 
the chronologically exact statement of Josephus himself (Β.7., vi. 4. 8, 
το. I, ‘second year’), clearly shows that the interpolator put the 
crucifixion οἱ Jesus, which took place forty years previously, in the 


1 Cf, E, Schwartz, in his article ‘Chronicon Paschale,’ Pauly-Wissowa, F.-E., 
iii. 2475, 15 Sq. 
2 Euseb., A.E., il. 23. 18. 9. oy I akan bE oh bones em 


APPENDICES 597 


year 31, and did not recognize the date A.p. 21 indirectly indicated by 
Josephus (above, p. 17 ff.). 

Since St. James is not mentioned at all in the Halosis, it follows that 
the passage in the Polemos is an interpolation, though a very ancient 
one, since Hegesippus, who wrote about A.p. 180, knew it already. 
On the other hand, it cannot have been introduced into all MSS. at 
the time of Origen (born A.D. 185), for had the latter known it he 
would have added to his criticism of the Antiguities something like 
this : * ‘In the Polemos Josephus rightly attributes the fall of Jerusalem 
to the τολμή of the Jews against Jesus.’ 


APPENDIX VIII 
THE RUMANIAN JOSEPHUS FRAGMENTS 


The fragments in question are contained in the Cod. Gaster, No. 89, 
saec. Xvii./xviii., in which are found a compilation of the Gospel of 
Nicodemus and the so-called Acta Pilati, the story of the Crucifixion 
with the Descensus ad Inferos, the Anaphora Pilati, the Death of Annas 
and Caiafas, and the so-called Letter of Lentulus, with the description 
of Jesus.t The Cod. Gaster, No. 172, 15 an incomplete copy of the same 
original, which in the missing part probably contained also the Josephus 
fragments. This is important because the two codices are linguistically 
quite different, No. 89 being written in the Valachian, No. 172 in the 
Moldavian dialect. I owe this important and interesting material 
to the kindness of Dr. Moses Gaster, who has also most kindly furnished 
a transcript of the Cyrillic MS. into Latin letters and a German trans- 
lation of the following texts.* I have revised it from the photographs, 
with the kind assistance of Prof. Mario Roques of the Ecole des langues 
Orientales vivantesin Paris. The following is a table of contents of the 
whole MS. The genuine text of Josephus is quoted verbatim and 
printed in italics. 


1. The Birth of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ 


Account of the birth of Jesus following the Gospel of Luke and a 
Vision of St. Brigit (of Sweden).* The latter circumstance proves 
that a Roman Catholic medium must be supposed —in this case a Polish 
version. 

2. The Adoration of the Magi 


The prophecy of the star of the Messiah, said to have originated 
with an ancient philosopher and prophet called Balaam and then to 
have been transmitted in the families of the magi from generation to 
generation. 


1 Cf, Gaster, Literatura populava Romana, Bucharest, 1883, p. 351. 

2 The German translation of the whole composite Apocryphon is printed in the 
German edition, vol. 1. pp. 430-61. 

3 St. Brigit was born ca. 1302, died in 1373, was canonized in 1391, 


598 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


3. The Arrival of the ‘Philosophers’ at his Birth 


The account follows in the main the Gospel narrative and the 
Protevangel of St. James the Minor. For the facts relating to the 
Baptist, the Emesan Life of John, published in vol. iv. of the Patrologia 
Ortentalis, was drawn upon. 


4, The Flight to Egypt 


Gospel narrative mixed with the apocryphal legend of the robbers, 
identified as usual with the λῃσταί on the crosses, a legend found in 
several apocrypha. The priests in Egypt want to paint the picture 
of the Saviour, but do not succeed in this.t There is added: ‘ The 
Emperor Augustus reigned in Rome fifty-seven years, and grew to be 
etghty-seven years old.’ ° 


5. The Third Principate of Tiberius 


After Augustus, Tiberius, who was a mild but avaricious man, assumed 
the rule. When he appointed some one or gave him a province tn charge, 
he rarely changed the officials ;* for he said : ° If some one has wounds on 
his feet, he should not drive off the flies nestling on them, for others would 
come, still hungrier, and cause him still greater pain.’ * When he learned 
that some one had collected more taxes than he had been asked to tmpose, he 
punished him very severely, for he said that it was unwise to shear the sheep 
down to the flesh,® and he matntained that taxes must be collected with 
discretion. Everybody had free access to him. He caused his brother to 
be killed by a third person,® and ordered that gold and silver were to be 


disdained.@ 
6. The Story of Pilate 


Pilate was by birth a Galilaean of the city of Levdania’ and was 
appointed ‘Chief Vojvod’ because he had conquered many provinces, 


1 Curious allusion to certain recently rediscovered Coptic pictures representing 
Isis with the babe Harpocrates, which were mistaken for pictures of the Madonna 
with the babe Jesus in her arms. The Byzantine author, then, knew this type of 
picture, which would fix his source as necessarily prior to the Moslem conquest 
of Egypt. The mention of early pictures of Jesus shows the anti-iconoclastic 
tendencies of the compiler. 

2 This chronological item is not found either in the Haldsis or in the Polemos, 
but in the Antiquities (xviii. 2. 2, ὃ 32 sq.). With this line begins the ztalicized text 
of Josephus, derived from the second edition of the War, discussed above, p. 83. 

3 Ant., xviii. 6. 5, ὃ 170. 

4 Cp. Ant., xviii. 6. 5, ὃ 174. ΟἹ. Aristotle, Ihet., il. 20. 


6 Sueton., Tib., xxxii. 2; Dio Cassius, lvil. 10. 5: ‘ praesidibus onerandas 
tributo provincias suadentibus rescripsit : boni pastoris esse tondere pecus, non 
deglubere.’ 


6 The brother meant is Agrippa Postumus, the grandson of Augustus, adopted 
by the latter and hence in a way a brother of Tiberius. 

τ Cf, Dio Cassius, lvii. 15. 1, on the prohibition of Tiberius against the use of 
precious metals for the manufacture of table ware—an economic measure designed, 
together with the prohibition of the import of Chinese silk, to prevent the utiliza- 
tion of precious metals for other purposes than coinage, or their exportation to 
the countries of the Orient. 

85. Galilaean’ is evidently a mistake for ‘Gallian.’ Pilate was often considered 
a Gaul, a native either of Vienne or of Lyons. [Cf. Arturo Graf, Miti, leggende ὃ 
superstiziont del medio evo, Torino, 1892-3, li. 144. Translator’s note.] 


APPENDICES 599 


wherefore he was sent to Jerusalem as a governor, in the place of Valerius, 
who was deposed because he had accepted bribes from Ishmael, whom he had 
named high priest in the place of Simeon, vemoved by him. He was 
followed by Eliazar, who was succeeded by Enos and Caiafa, who are 
Anna and Caiafa. Pilate brought to Jerusalem the wmage of the Emperor 
Tiberius and demanded for it divine honours. The Jews vefused to 
admit the image and to sacrifice to Caesar. Then Pilate brought a huge 
Roman army to Jerusalem and killed many of the Jews. Ever since that 
time Pilate was a governor feared by the Jews. 


7. The Baptism of the Precursor John 


Very brief account of John’s work, taken from the Emesan V ta. 


8. The Story of ‘Joseph Matathie’ on John 


About that time, so he told, there was a man going about among the 
Jews who wore an odd dress. He had pasted the hair of animals on his 
body wherever it was not covered with his own natural hair. His face 
looked savage. In his appearance he looked like a ghost rather than like 
an human being, so peculiar it was. He also led a very curious mode of 
life. He ate no bread, and not even on the Passover did he touch of the 
unleavened bread, saying that this was meant only to vemind us of the God 
who relieved us from bondage. He did not allow wine or other strong 
drink to come near him. He detested all flesh of animals and abhorred 
all injustice. He only lived on the buds of trees. He came to the Jews 
and taught them thus : ‘God hath sent me to show you the new path by 
which you may be freed from your many tyrants, so that not even death : 
will have any power over you, but only ihe Lord above. When hearing 
these words, the people followed him ;? but all he did to them was to plunge 
them into the water of the Jordan and to tell them to avotd all evil thence- 
forth. Yet the Pharisees prohibited him from gong on with his teaching 
and from addressing the masses, However, he replied to them : ὁ You had 
better give wp your evil deeds.’ Simeon the scribe, who was an Essene, 
vose and said: ‘ We study the divine laws day after day, whilst thou, like 
unto a wild animal, hast come forth from the woods, and yet thou darest 
teach us? Thou seducest the people with thine impure teaching.’ And 
they wanted to rush upon him like wild animals to kill him. Yet he went 
over to the other side of the Jordan and continued his teaching. 


9. John the Precursor explains the Dream of Philip 


When Philip was still reigning he dreamt that an eagle was about to 
pick out both his eyes. He called the wise men, but they were unable to 
interpret his dream, the one giving this, the other a different explanation. 
But that man of whom we have written before, the one who, dressed im 
animals’ hair, was cleansing the people in the Jordan, called John, arrived 
without being called from the desert—in fact, quite unexpectedly —and said ; 

Spiritualizing correction of ‘no mortal’ (man). 


1 
© Correction for ‘ were excited.’ 
3 Cf. the Russian text above, p. 225. 


600 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


"Listen to the word of the Lord: The dream which thou hast seen Sore- 
shadows thy death, for that eagle is a bird of prey and has picked out thine 
eyes. 1 And after he had said this, Philip died the same evening. 


10. An Episode from the Life of the Baptist 
Taken from the Emesan Vita (P.Q., iv. p. 520). 


11, Jesus’ Baptism 
Said to have happened at the ‘ seventh hour of night.’ 5 


12. Beginning of his Public Career 


The first miracle was the conversion of water into wine at the 
wedding of Cana. The name of the bridegroom was Simon the 
Canaanite,’ who lived only two years with his wife, since she then died. 


13. Cure of the Woman diseased with an Issue of Blood. 
The Statue of Jesus in Paneas 


From Malalas. Cf. my lecture, La prétendue statue de Jésus et de 
l’Hémorotsse de Panéade, in Comptes rendus de l’ Académie des I nscrip- 
tions et Belles-Lettres, 3rd June 1929; Transactions of the Fifth Internat. 
Congr. for the History of Religions, Lund, 1930, pp. 305 ff.; in full in 
Revue Archéologique, 1930, pp. 18-27. The story is clearly introduced 
for the purpose of anti-iconoclastic polemics. 


14. Description of Jesus 


‘ He has a very beautiful face,’ as the prophet says : ‘ more beautiful 
in shape than all children of men.’ In growth and stature he was full 
seven feet high ; his hair was blond and not very richly developed ; he 
had beautiful eyebrows, not very curved: his eyes were brown and 
clear (gay), just as it is written that his ancestor David was dark, with 
beautiful eyes, with large nostrils, a reddish beard and long hair, for 
from the time of his infancy, when his mother had clipped his hair, no 
razor had touched his head. His head was a Jittle bending, since his 
body was tall ; his hair light blond. His face was round, like that of 
his mother, kindly, mild, and entirely without anger, in all resembling 
his mother. 

This description is the work of Maxim, a Greek monk of the 
monastery of Vatopeza on Mt. Athos.4 


15. Josephus on John’s Reproval of Herod 
Shortly after, Antipas took to wife the wife of his brother,® a cause of 


The reflections on the character of Herod Philippus are deleted. 

* This corresponds to the continually repeated statement in the Mandaean 
‘ book of John’ that he used to preach at nightfall and during the night. 

* “Canaanite’ for Kavavaios, evidently a very early mistranslation, to conceal 
the true character of the Kavavaios =Zealot apostle. 

* The Rumanian text of this iconismus is printed in Dr. Gaster’s book quoted 
above, p. 597 n. I. 

δ No name is given her in this version! See above, p. 229 ἢ. 8, 


APPENDICES 601 


scandal to the scribes. Then a certain man, called John the Savage, came 
in great rage saying : ‘ Infamous one, why hast thou married the wife of 
thy brother? He hath died an evil death, so wilt thou be cut down by 
the divine scythe without pity and come to misery in a foreign country and 
perish there, because thou wilt not leave the first seed to thy brother but 
only indulge your passions and commit adultery.’ Herod in rage ordered 
him to be beaten and driven off. John, however, did not cease with his 
veproaches wherever he found him, in public, until Herod had him put in 
fetters and thrown tnto prison. 


16. John in Prison 


From the Emesan Vita. 


17. The Beheading of the Baptist 


From the same source. 


18-29. Josephus on Jesus 


At that time there appeared a certain man, if it is permissible to call 
him aman, for his appearance and shape were human, only his looks were 
more than human and his actions were divine, for he did many miracles 
and accomplished powerful deeds. For this reason it is impossible to 
callhim aman. But in view of hts human! nature I shall not call him 
an angel either. He wrought everything by word of mouth. Some said that 
he was our first lawgiver risen from the dead, others that he had been sent 
by God.. In many points, however, he acted contrary to the Law, for he 
did not observe the Sabbath according to our custom. He did nothing wrong, 
neither was he guilty of anything shameful. Many of the people followed 
after him, listening to his teaching, since they believed that he would free 
the tribes of the Jews from the hands of the Romans. It was his custom, 
most of the time, to stay without the city on the Mount of Olives, and there 
gathered one hundred and fifty pupils and many of the lower classes. Those 
who had seen his power, how he accomplished anything he wished with a mere 
word, told him to enter the city and to kill the Roman garrison together with 
Pilate. He was to be lord in thety stead. Yet his own mind was not turned 
to these things. When the chief of the priests of the Jews heard this, they 
met, saying: ‘We cannot accomplish anything against the Romans, so 
we had better inform Pilate and be without care, for if he hears of wt from 
others he will deprive us of our goods and will kill us and sell our children 
as slaves. They then went and informed Pilate. He sent for the wonder- 
worker (t.e. Jesus) and questioned him and recognized that he was a 
benefactor and neither a vobbey nor a malefactory, nor even a rebel or 
an impostor eager for rule. He therefore let him go free again, and Jesus 
returned to his accustomed place, continuing with his calling. 

19. When still more people flockéd to him, the scribes grew even more 
envious... . There follows the account of Judas’ treason and Jesus’ 
capture. ‘They therefore took him prisoner and brought him to the 


1 Correction for ‘ common.’ 


602 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


governor Pilate.’ Then follows Pilate’s bribery, his enquiry into the 
Osanna cries, the episode of Pilate’s wife, the trial proper (according to 
the Gospels, but much enlarged by apocryphal material). Nicodemus 
is made to report to Pilate: ‘I say to the scribes, high priests, and 
levites: “ What do you want to do with this man who had performed so 
many signs and miracles which no one else can do 21 Leave this man in 
peace and do not counsel evil against him, for if these signs are from 
God they will endure ; if not, they will perish.”’2 . . . Pilate then is 
made to address the Jews: ‘ His people are the Jews, who say that he 
is eager for dominion, therefore I have pronounced the death sentence 
on him.’ And he added: ‘First you must bind him according to 
Caesar’s law and whip him, after which he is fo be hanged on the cross.’ 


30. The Number of the Talents 


‘It is written that one talent equals 500 rubels ; according to this 
count the sum-total was 15,000 rubels. 

‘The sum-total of the shekels. It is written that one shekel equals 
12 lire, that is, altogether 360 lire; 1 lira is supposed to equal 60 
rubels, which makes, for 360 lire, 21,600 rubels. The measure of the 
shekels was 86 quarters (ferdele or merte), as they were then in currency, 
and 16 pounds; but according to our Russian count each pound was the 
equivalent of 4 rubels, 22 altine, and 41 denghiuri; 360 lire are then 
1685 rubels, 25 altine, and 2 denghiuri. The measure was 63 merte. 
But even according to this count it was very much.’ 


31. The Crucifixion 
According to Malalas. 


32. Josephus the Jew on the Temple Curtain 


‘Within the temple the gates were all made of gold, fifty-five ells high 
and sixteen wide. In front of them there was a curtain of the same heighi 
and width as the gates, of fine Oriental linen, studded with jewels, of byssus, 
red silk, and purple, wonderful to behold, for it was done with great art. 
The red silk represented the fire, the byssus the earth, the jewels the air, and 
the purple the sea, thus corresponding to the four elements. There was 
painted upon it the whole sky and its order. So long as the people 
believed, the curtain was whole, but now it is in a sorry state, since all 
of a sudden it was rent asunder from top to bottom, at the time when 
that benefactor was condemned to death.’ 8 


33. The Descensus ad Inferos 


* Taken from Polish books.’ The whole text is contained in both οἱ 
Dr. Gaster’s MSS. 


' Cf. above, p. 61 ἢ. 11, and p. 62. ° Cf. above, p. 529... 
3 Cf. above p. 250 ἢ. 1. 


APPENDICES 603 


APPENDIX ΙΧ 
EDITIONS OF TRANSLATIONS OF JOSEPHUS 


The first Latin Josephus, at Augsburg, Johann Schiissler, in 1470, 
as reprinted a ‘ countless number of times’! previous to the publica- 
on of the editio princeps of the Greek original. 

The best of these editions is that of Basle, 1524. In the same city 
e Protestant theologian Sebastian Chateillon included Josephus in his 
atin edition of the Bible (1551). 

From the Latin are derived the following translations :— 


German: Caspar Hedion (Strassburg, 1531); the second edition 
of 1561, revised after the Greek text; Feyerabend and Rab 
(Frankfurt, 1571) ; Lautenbach (Strassburg, 1507)" 


Flemish : Symon Cock (Antwerp, 1552-3). 


Spanish : M. Nucio (Antwerp, 1554), prohibited by the censor’s 
Index Expurgatorius in 1559, although it contains nothing but the 
Canonic Testimonium Flavianum. | 


French : Francois Bourgoing (Lyons, 1562) ; Jean le Frére de 
Laval (Paris, 1569); Archbishop Gille Genébrard (Paris, 1578) : 
Antoine de la Faye (Paris, 1597); d’Andilly (Paris, 1668) ; 
Arnauld Gollet (Paris, 1756), the later ones with due regard for the 
Greek original. 


Italian : Andrea Berna (Venice, 1620) ; Pietro Lauro (Venice, 
1638), likewise with consideration of the Greek text. 


Dutch: S. de Vries (Amsterdam, 1698), both after the Latin 
and the Greek. 


APPENDIX X 
EDITIONS OF THE GREEK TEXT OF JOSEPHUS 


The Greek original was carried to the Occident by fugitive Greeks, 
aturally in the shape it had received in the time of Emperor Alexios 
<omnenos.? 

Editio princeps, Basle, Frobenius and Episcopius, 1544 ; edited by 
\rnold Peraxylos Arlen,‘ pirated in Geneva, 1611 and 1634. 

Learned editions: Ittig (Leipzig, 1691), Bernard (Oxford, 1700), 
ludson (Oxford, 1720), Havercamp (Amsterdam, Leyden, Utrecht, 
726). 

1 Schiirer-Macpherson, op. cit., vol. i. I, p. 102. 

2 For a full bibliography, cf. Fabricius-Harles, Bibl. Gy., v. 31, 38, 48; Furst, 
3ibl. Jud., ii. 121-3; and Schiirer-Macpherson, vol. 1. 1, p. τοῦ. 

3 See above, p. 168. 

4 Born in Brabant, died in Basle in 1561; cf. Christian Gottlieb Jécher, 
Aligem. Gelehyienlexikon, iii. (Leipzig, 1751), col. 1375. [Translator’s note, ] 


604 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


APPENDIX XI 
ENGLISH TRANSLATIONS OF THE GREEK JOSEPHUS 


Thomas Lodge (London, 1640), Roger Le Strange (London, 171 
both excelled by that of the Unitarian William Whiston (Dubl 
1736-41), who in 1710 had lost his university chair at Cambridge 
account of his religious tenets. Reprinted many times, and exceedin; 
popular because commonly read by the young folk on the Puritani 
Sundays when more ‘secular’ readings were prohibited ;? there i: 
reprint from 1889-90, revised by the Rev. A. R. Shilleto and Gene 
Sir C. W. Wilson, another by Prof. D. S. Margoliouth. Thompson a 
Price, London, 1777-8 ; John Henry Maynard, New York, ΤΟΣ, Ἱ 
stylistically excellent translation by the Rev. Dr. R. Traill (w 
annotations by Isaac Taylor, London, 1862) remained incompl 
owing to the premature death of the translator. The most recent a 
reliable translation by Dr. H. St. J. Thackeray, with an edition of t 

Greek original after Niese, is at present appearing as part of the Lc 
Classical Library. The new French translation, undertaken by the li 
Théodore Reinach in 1go00, has just been completed by his broth 
M. Salomon Reinach. 


APPENDIX XII 
ORIGEN’S JOSEPHUS TEXT 


Origen did not yet know the Testimonium Flavianwmn in its exta 
form, but in one quite different in tone and contents and leaving 
doubt about Josephus’ hostility to Jesus and his claims. 

Orig., Ad Matt. x. 17, ed. Lommatzsch, iii. 46 (on Matt. xiii. + 
mention of James, the brother of Jesus) : 

“ἐπὶ τοσοῦτον δὲ διέλαμψεν οὗτος ὁ ᾿Ιάκωβος ἐν τῷ λαῷ ἐπὶ δικαιοσύνῃ, 
Φλάβιον ᾿Ιώσηπον, ἀναγράψαντα ἐν εἴκοσι βιβλίοις τὴν ᾿Ιουδαϊκὴν ἀρχαιολογί 
τὴν αἰτίαν παραστῆσαι βουλόμενον τοῦ τοσαῦτα πεπονθέναι τὸν λάον, ὡς | 
τὸν ναὸν κατασκαφῆναι, εἰρηκέναι κατὰ τὴν μῆνιν θεοῦ ταῦτα αὐτοῖς ἀπηντηκέν 
διὰ τὰ εἰς Ἰάκωβον τὸν ἀδελφὸν Ἰησοῦ τοῦ λεγομένου Νμιστοῦ ὑπὸ τούτ 
τετολμημένα. Καὶ τὸ θαυμαστόν ἐστιν, ὅτι τὸν ᾿Ιησοῦν ἡμῶν οὐ καταδεξάμε: 
εἶναι Χριστόν, οὐδὲν ἧττον ᾿Ιακώβῳ δικαιοσύνην ἐμαρτύρησε τοσαύτην. Λέγει 
ὅτι καὶ ὁ λαὸς ταὐτο ἐνόμιζε διὰ τὸν Ἰάκωβον πεπονθέναι" ς. Cels., 11. 13, € 
Lommatzsch, xviii. 161: .°. . “og (Οὐεσπασιανοῦ ὁ vids Tiros καθεῖλε τ 
Ἱερουσαλήμ, ὡς μὲν ᾿Ιώσηπος γράφει, διὰ Ἰάκωβον, τὸν δίκαιον, τὸν ἀδελφὸν Ἴησ 
τοῦ λεγομένου Χριστοῦ, ὡς δὲ ἀλήθεια παρίστησι, διὰ Ἰησοῦν τὸν Χριστόν, τὸν υἱ 
θεοῦ." ο. Cels., i. 47, Lomm., xviii. 87: “ev yap τῷ ὀκτωκαιδεκάτῳ τ 
᾿Ιουδαϊκῆς ἀρχαιολογίας ὁ Ἰώσηπος μαρτυρεῖ τῷ Ἰωάννῃ ὡς βαπτιστῇ yeyevnper 
«ον Ὃ δ᾽ αὐτὸς καίτοι γε ἀπιστῶν τῷ ᾿Ιησοῦ ὡς Χριστῷ, ζητῶν τὴν αἰτίαν τ 
Ἱερουσολύμων πτώσεως καὶ τῆς ναοῦ καθαιρέσεως" δέον δ᾽ αὐτὸν εἰπεῖν, ὅτι 


1 Cf., for example, Arnold Bennett's novel Clayhangey (1911). 


APPENDICES 605 


cara τοῦ ᾿Ιησοῦ ἐπιβουλὴ τούτων αἰτία γέγονε τῷ λαῷ, ἐπεὶ ἀπέκτειναν τὸν 
προφητευύμενον Χριστόν" ὁ δὲ καὶ ὥσπερ ἄκων οὐ μακρὰν τῆς ἀληθείας γενόμενος, 
Ρησὶ ταῦτα συμβεβηκέναι τοῖς ᾿Ιουδαίοις κατ᾽ ἐκδίκησιν ᾿Ιακώβου τοῦ δικαίου, ὃς 
ἢν ἀδελφὸς Ἰησοῦ τοῦ λεγομένου Χριστοῦ ἐπειδήπερ δικαιότατον αὐτὸν ὄντα 
ἀπέκτειναν." 


APPENDIX XIII 
IMPORTANT CHRISTIAN MARGINAL GLOSSES IN JOSEPHUS MSS. 


B. Niese pointed out the existence of very curious glosses occurring 
a number of Josephus MSS. (Hist. Zettsch., \xxvi., 1896, p. 216 n. 2). 
nus, for example, several codices bear on the margin the words παρα- 
iets, Ἰώσηπε, τὴν μοσχοποιΐαν αἰδοῖ τῶν προγόνων, at the place where in 
e Antiquities Josephus discreetly omits the making of the golden 
lf (Ex. xxxii). In the Cod. Urbinus Vatic., 84 membr. (saec. xi.), 
e cool remark of Josephus on the prophecy of Micah (Bell., vi. 5. 4, 
312, Niese) is criticized by the following lines, written on the lower 
argin : 


“οὐκ ἀμφίβ(ο᾽λος ὁ χρησμὸς ἀ(υ)τὸς, ὦ σὺ τεράτ(ουρ)γε ᾿Ιώσηπε. ἀλ(λ)ὰ δῆλον 
καὶ σαφὲς περὶ τοῦ ἐμοῦ δεσπότου καὶ θεοῦ, τοῦ Χριστοῦ ὃν σὺ παρεξηγούμενος 
Οὐεσπασιανὸν ἐπεισάγεις τῇ προφητείᾳ αλλὰ γὰρ ὁ Χριστὸς μόνος τηνικαῦτα καὶ 
τῆς Ἰουδαίας ὡρμήθη καὶ τῆς οἰκουμένης ἦρξε. Καὶ ἔτι νῦν ἄρχει. βασιλεὺς 
βασιλέων αἰώνιος καὶ ὧν καὶ λεγόμενος. Καὶ ὑπὸ πάσης σχεδὸν πνοῆς 
προσκυνούμί(ενος) καὶ σεβόμενος. Οὐεσπασιανὸς δὲ ὁ παρὰ σοῦ κολακευόμενος 
τέφρα καὶ κόνις ὧν διεῤῥύη καὶ ὥχετο." Codex Paris. Bibl. Nat., gr. 1425 
s.x-xi., and Codex Ambrosianus D, add to this sentence in margin : 
“on ἐν τούτῳ καὶ ὁ μέγας αὐτῷ Ἰω(άνης) Χρ(υσόστομος) συμφώνει." 


The Codex Marcianus observes on B.J., iv. 8. 4 (containing the story 
f Sodom and Gomorrha), where Josephus refers to the story of the 
ivine chastisement of the godless cities as μυθευόμενα, “ ση(μεῖον). 
πιστὸς ἄνθρωπος οὐδὲ ‘EBpaids ἐστι," ‘the unbeliever is not even a Jew" |, 
rhich clearly betrays the indignation of the scribe. 

At the mention of the Emperor Titus and the praise bestowed upon 
im by Josephus, the scribe exclaims : “ ὦ τῆς κολακείας τοῦ συγγραφέως "! 

The following marginal gloss to B.J., v. 13. 6, is found in Codex 
3erolinensis, 223 (Niese praef. to vol. vi. p. Xi) : 


«νῦν ἄκων, ἀσεβέστατε καὶ τῆς ἀληθείας ἐχθρέ, τῆς ἀληθείας (sic !) εἴρηκας ὑπ᾽ 
αὐτῆς ἐκείνης τῆς ὄντως ἀληθείας ἐλαυνόμενος" μήτε γενεὰν ἄλλην κακίας 
γονιμωτέραν γενέσθαι. μήτε μὴν τηλικαῦτα κακὰ πεπονθέναι τινὰ ἄλλην, καὶ 
γὰρ ἄλλων πολλῶν ἀγαθῶν τε καὶ κακῶν γεγονότων Ἑβραίων ὑμεῖς μόνοι τὴν 
ὑπερβολικὴν καὶ πασῶν κακιῶν ἐσχάτην κακίαν καὶ ἀθείαν εἰργάσασθε' τὸν 
κύριον ἡμῶν Ἰησοῦν Χριστὸν καὶ σωτῆρα τοῦ κόσμου παντὸς σταυρῷ προσηλώ- 
σαντες" καὶ διὰ τοῦτο μόνοι ὑμεῖς τοῦ ἀληθεστάτου καὶ ἀψευδοῦς ἐκείνου στόματος 
τῆς σκυθρωπῆς ἀποφάσεως τὴν δικαίαν ποινὴν ὑφίστασθε" ὡς ἐκεῖνος που φησίν" 
ἔσται θλῖψις ἐν τῇ ἁλώσει ὑμῶν οἷα οὐ γέγονεν ἀπὸ καταβολῆς κόσμου οὔτε μὴν 
ἀλλαχοῦ γενήσεται." 


It goes without saying that glosses of this type, precisely because 
of their personal nature, were not included in the text proper. 


606 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


THE SOURCES OF THE GENEALOGIES OF JESUS IN 
MATTHEW AND LUKE 


Cod. Laurentian. plut., lxix. 20 f°. 164 ve. in marg. ad Aunt., xi 
§ 121, offers the following highly instructive gloss (photograph c 
Pl. xiii. of the German edition) 


“περὶ τούτου (scil, Ἡρώδου) καὶ ὁ θεάδελφος ᾿Ιάκωβος ἀπεφήνατο" (0. 
> , ‘ , a" > ? ‘ ‘ ¢ 4 , ’ ᾽ ~ o ὁ »” 
ἐκλείψει» λέγων «ἄρχων ἐξ ᾿Ιουδὰ καὶ ἡγούμενος ἐκ μήρων αὐτοῦ ἕως ἃν EX 

‘ “ ad a A ~ 
ὃ ἀπόκειται Kal αὐτὸς προσδοκία ἐθνῶν.» καὶ γὰρ οὕτως ἔχει" τοῦ γὰρ σωτῆρ 
aA “ r ~ ~ 5» ΄ cos , , ΄ 
ἡμῶν ᾿Ιησυῦ Χριστοῦ τοῦ ἀληθινοῦ θεοῦ σαρκὶ φανερωθέντος πέπαυται ἡ τῷ 
> , ε , > , Δ é , ; , c ths. , 
lovdaiwy ἡγεμονία καὶ ἀλλόφυλος ὧν “Ἡρῴδης Ἀσκαλωνίτης 6 τοῦ ᾿Λντιπάτρι 
ἐπικρατεῖν τῶν Ιουδαίων ἤρξατο." 


This quotation from James cannot very well be separated from tk 
statements on the Ascalonite descent of Herod as given by Eusebius 
from a letter of Julius Africanus addressed to Aristeides.2 The: 
statements evidently go back to the δεσπόσυνοι, i.e. the κατὰ σάρκ 
συγγενεῖς Of Jesus.® In practically all the Christian writers 4 givin 
this descent of Herod, with details such as Antipater’s office of a temple 
slave at the sanctuary of Apollo at Ascalon, his being carried to Idumae 
by ‘ robbers,’ etc., we also find the anti-Herodian interpretation of Ge 
xlix. 10, often even connected, as in the priests’ dialogue in the Slavoni 
Josephus, with speculations and calculations about the famous sevent 
or seventy-two year-weeks of Daniel. 

In the above-quoted letter of Julius Africanus we furthermor 
find the statement that the aforementioned relatives of Jesus, migratin 
through the world from the villages of Nazareth and Kokh*hba, used t 
show a genealogy which, as they said, had somehow escaped the fable 
burning of the Jewish Toldoth or genealogies by Herod.® For Heroc 
being the son of Antipater of Ascalon, etc. etc., and hence a Philistine 
was accused in this document of having burned the genealogies of th 
Jewish nobles in order to make it impossible for his political opponent 
to refute his claims to a noble Jewish descent.? 


+ Hist. eccl., i. 6. 2-3; i. δὲ ΤΊ, 13-15. Cf. Chron. bipart., ed. Schoene, 130 
li, 134, 138. German trans. from the Armenian by J. Karst, G.C.S., xx. 209. 

* Euseb., H.E., i. 7.11. Special ed. by W. Reichardt in Harnack-Schmidt 
T.U., xxxiv. 3 (1909), Ὁ. 1163. 


* Euseb., loc cit.: “τοῦ γοῦν Σωτῆρος οἱ κατὰ σάρκα συγγενεῖς εἶτ᾽ οὖν φανητιῶντε 
(=boasting) εἴθ᾽ ἁπλῶς ἐκδιδάσκοντες πάντως δὲ ἀληθεύοντες, παρέδοσαν καὶ ταῦτα ᾧ 
᾿Ιδουμαῖοι λῃσταί κτλ... ταῦτα μὲν κοινὰ καὶ τοῖς ‘EAN vw ἱστορίαις." 


* Justin., Dial. ο. Tryph., ο. 52 (P.G., vi. 590). Cf. Poznanski, Schiloh, p. 506 
Epiph., p. 348; Georg. Syncell., chronogr., p. 586, ed. Bonn, where Eusebius 
chapter περὶ τέλους τῆς ᾿Ιουδαίων βασιλείας καὶ ᾿Ηρώδου ἀλλοφύλου is given as a source 
Chron. Pasch., i. 349 and 361, ed. Bonn; Sulpicius Severus, ii. 27. 

® In reality these archives, with their documents, genealogical and other, wer 
destroyed in the rebellion of A.p. 66. 

® The term ἀλλόφυλος, constantly applied to Herod, is regularly employed in the 
Greek Old Testament for the Philistines, though not in the Hexateuch, where wi 
find instead the word Φυλιστιείμ. Cf. Stark, Gaza, p. 67 sqq.; Reland, Palaest. 
P- 75 54.; Ὁ. F. Moore, Encycl. Bibl., 3713. The names Antipater and Herod ar 
well attested for Ascalon, one of the capitals of the Philistine country, and Heroc 
may very well have been a descendant of these old Illyrian pirates. 

7. Cf. the corresponding statement of Herod’s court historiographer, Nicolau: 
of Damascus, Josephus, Axt., xiv. 1, 3. 


APPENDICES 607 


It seems to be clear that the writing mentioned in the above-quoted 
‘lorentine gloss to Josephus as coming from James the brother of 
jesus, and containing the anti-Herodian interpretation of the Shiloh 
passage, cannot be anything else than the genealogy of the clan of 
[6515 known to Sextus Julius Africanus.!_ It would appear natural 
nough that these poor descendants of Jesus’ family, still existing in 
he time of Domitian,? called such a genealogy the work of their 
llustrious grand-uncle James the Just, with whose name the apocryphal 
yospel of the Childhood of Jesus was in much the same way connected. 
No doubt the same book is meant in Origen in Ev. Matt., x. 17 (iil. p. 45, 
_ommatzsch), where the learned father says that the brothers and sisters 
»f Jesus are the children of an earlier marriage of Joseph, and continues 
vith these words : 


“(rodro) φασί τινες... ἐκ παραδόσεως ὁρμῶντες τοῦ ἐπιγεγραμμένου κατὰ 
, “~ ’ὔ 
Πέτρον εὐαγγελίου ἢ τῆς βίβλος ᾿Ιακώβου," 


since the extant Protevangel of James does not contain anything 
of the sort. 

Since the description of this pedigree, ‘culled from memory and from 
the books of Chronicles,’ seems to fit exactly the βίβλος γενέσεως ᾿Ιησοῦ 
Χριστοῦ υἱοῦ Δαβὶδ υἱοῦ ᾿Αβραάμ 8 now prefixed to the Gospel of 
Matthew ; and since a genealogy of Jesus is necessarily also one of his 
kindred, it is surely legitimate to conjecture that this well-known 
family tree (and probably also the subsequent story of the children 
massacred by the same tyrant who is accused by our genealogist of 
having ruthlessly destroyed the Jewish archives) is copied from the anti- 
Herodian Toldoth Jeshu, compiled by the family of Jesus and known 
both to Origen and to the Florentine gloss discussed above as a work of 
James the Just. 

Naturally, this genealogy must have concluded, as in the Cod. Syr. 
Sinaiticus, with the words, ‘Josephus, however, begat Jesus, who was 


1 Euseb., H.E., i. 7. 13 sq.: "“᾿Αναγράπτων δὲ eis τότε ἐν τοῖς ἀρχείοις ὄντων τῶν 
EBpaikavy ενῶν καὶ τῶν ἄχρι προσηλύτων ἀναφερομένων, ws ᾿Αχίωρ τοῦ ᾿Αμμανίτου καὶ 
“Ῥοὺθ τῆς Μοαβίτιδος τῶν τε ἀπ᾿ Αἰγύπτου συνεκπεσόντων ἐπιμικτῶν Ηρῴδης οὐδέν τι συμβαλ- 
λομένου τοῦ τῶν ᾿Ισραηλιτῶν γένους αὐτῷ καὶ τῷ συνειδότι τῆς δυσγένειας κρουομένους 
ἐνέπρησεν αὐτῶν τὰς ἀναγραφὰς τῶν γενῶν, οἰόμενος εὐγενὴς ἀναφανεῖσθαι τῷ μηδὲ 
ἄλλον ἔχειν ἐκ δημοσίου συγγραφῆς τὸ γένος ἀνάγειν ἐπὶ τοὺς πατριάρχας ἢ προσηλύτους 
τούς τε καλουμένους γειώρας τοῦς ἐπιμίκτους. ᾿Ολίγοι δὲ τῶν ἐπιμελῶν ἐδιωτικὰς ἑαυτοῖς 
ἀπογραφὰς ἢ μνημονεύσαντες τῶν ὀνομάτων ἢ ἄλλως ἔχοντες ἐξ ἀντιγράφων ἐναβρύνονται 
σωζομένης τῆς μνήμης τῆς εὐγένειας᾽ ὧν ἐτύγχανον οἱ προειρημένοι καλούμενοι... ἀπο 
τε Ναζάρων καὶ Κωχαβὰ κωμῶν ᾿Ιουδαϊκῶν τῇ λοιπῇ yo ἐπιφοιτήσαντες καὶ τὴν 
προειρημένην γενεαλογίαν ἐκ μνήμης ἐκ τε τῆς βίβλου τῶν Ἡ μερῶν εἰς ὅσον ἐξικνοῦντο 


ἐξηγησάμενοι. εἴτ᾽ οὖν οὕτως εἴτ᾽ ἄλλως ἔχει σαφεστέραν ἐξήγησιν οὐκ ἃν ἔχοι τις ἄλλος 
* 3) 


. 


ἐξευρεῖν... καὶ ἐν τέλει δὲ τῆς αὐτῆς ἐπιστολῆς προστίθησιν ταῦτα... 

2 Euseb., H.E., iii. 20, 1-6. They were called Zoker (-ε- Μνήμων or Mvacwy or 
the like) and Jacob (Philippos Sidetes, ap. de Boor, Texte τι. Untersuch., v. 2, p. 169). 
The last of the family, Conon by name, was put to death in 253 A.D.; the ‘ martyr- 
ium Cononis’ has been edited by Papadopoulos Kerameus from a MS. of Mount 
Athos. 

3 The tracing back to Abraham of the genealogy of Jesus is meant to connect 
him with the prophecy in Gen. xxii. 18 : ‘ through thy seed all the nations of the 
earth will receive blessing.’ This oracle was in turn used as an explanation of 
Gen. xlix.: ‘for whom the nations are waiting,’ because through him will they 
receive the blessing foretold. 


608 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


called the Christ.’ It was observed long ago that in this original 
form the sentence is incompatible with Matt. i. 18-ii. 5. The initial 
words of Matt. i. 18, “τοῦ δὲ ᾿Ιησοῦ Χριστοῦ ἡ γένεσις οὕτως ἦν," PTOVE 
that this sentence is likewise derived from some Toldoth Jeshu roll, 
probably the one used by Luke. The original source obviously con- 
tinued, immediately after the enumeration of Jesus’ brothers and 
sisters,! with Matt. ii. 1-23. The story of the three magi fits very well 
into this context, since it is quoted as a fulfilment of the oracle about 
the “expectation of the Gentiles’ in Gen. xlix. 10, which is the starting- 
point of this little propaganda tract. As soon as the series of the 
Hasmonaean rulers, descended ‘ from Judah ’ (the Maccabee), or, more 
generally, the series of Judaean (i.e. Jewish) kings, is brought to an 
end or interrupted by Herod the Great, ‘to whom the sceptre did not 
belong ᾿ (she /o’),? the Gentiles expect the arrival of the ‘ coming one,’ 
ᾧ ἀπόκειται (to whom it belongs by right). His ‘star, rising from 
out of Jacob,’ they have seen. Simultaneously, the ἀλλόφυλος Herod, 
acting in the réle of the Antichrist, takes his precautions against the 
predicted advent of the legitimate Messiah-king; he consults the 
prophets, and, on their pointing out Bethlehem as the place of the 
nativity, has all the children of that place massacred. Yet the infant 
Christ escapes to Egypt and comes back to Galilee after the death of 
Herod. That is how the lost anti-Herodian Toldoth Jeshu, finally 
utilized by the Gospel of Matthew, must have hung together. 

Luke, as is well known, has used another genealogy, which purposely 
omits the names of the ill-famed women Thamar, Rahab, and Bathsheba, 
carrying back the family tree to ‘ ’Enosh, son of Sheth, son of Adam, 
son of God.’ In this way it explains the title ‘son of God,’ together 
with the other title ‘son of man’ (bar ’Enash, bay nasha), in a most 
archaic and unorthodox fashion. This genealogy may be traced back to 
the other branch of Davidides,? whom Hegesippus calls ‘heretics,’ and 
accuses of having denounced the grandchildren of Jesus’ brother Jude 
to the Emperor Domitian. These Toldoth Jeshu knew nothing of the 
three magi, the slaughter of the innocents, and the flight to Egypt, but 
gave instead the story of the shepherds, the circumcision of Jesus, his 
presentation in the temple, the witness of Simeon and Hannah, and the 
anecdote of Jesus’ precocious learning as exhibited in the temple. 


* Cf. the quotation by Origen, above, p. 607 1]. 10 ff. 

* Euseb., Chron., p. 209 (Karst): ‘ Herod, son of Antipater the Ascalonite, 
and of Kipris the Arab woman, fo whom the kingdom of the Jews did not belong, 
obtained the rule through the Romans. In his reign, at the arrival of the Christ, 
the hereditary high-priesthood and the hereditary dynasty of the Jews were extinct, 
by which was fulfilled the Mosaic prophecy, ‘‘ The sceptre shall not depart from 
Judah,’’’ etc. (Gen. xlix. το). Also Daniel prophesies the same event, ‘And after 
threescore and two weeks,’ etc. (Dan. ix. 26). The designation of Herod as 
ἀλλόφυλος, “ to whom the kingdom does not belong,’ is obtained by a pun on the 
word shzlo, interpreted as ‘ she lo ’=‘ to whom noi,’ a pun occurring also in Ezra 
iv. 5-6. Such puns on words are typically Jewish and Rabbinical. Eusebius can 
hardly have understood such things ; he certainly cannot have invented them. 
The interpretation of the Daniel text just referred to agrees with the version of 
Daniel of the Ebionite Theodotion (a.p. 180-92; cf. Suidas, s.v. κνίζων, and 8. Nili, 
Epist.,i. 63). There the passage is applied, not to the killing of the Messiah, but 
to the abolition of the high-priestly unction. 

* Euseb,, HE. πες 5:22: 4 In Euseb., op. et loc. cit. 


APPENDICES 609 


Quite recently Prof. Joachim Jeremias ὁ concluded from the numerous 
obvious Hebraisms in Like i.-ii. 40 that this part of the Gospel goes 
back to a Hebrew source emanating from a circle of the Baptist’s 
disciples and much older than the Greek Gospels. The same Hebraisms 
have been noticed by G. Kuhn ὃ in the genealogies of Jesus themselves. 
This is in perfect harmony with the statement of Clement of Alexandria 4 
to the effect that according to the ‘ ancients’ (παράδοσις τῶν ἀνέκαθεν 
πρεσβυτέρων) ‘ those parts of the Gospels which contain the genealogies * 
(τῶν εὐαγγελίων τὰ περιέχοντα τὰς γενεαλογίας) were the first to be 
committed to writing. 

I think that we may consider it an established fact that the two rival 
septs of Jesus’ clan circulated two different Hebrew versions of their 
royal ancestor’s genealogy, birth, and early childhood, which have not 
been preserved because they taught an adoptionist Christology and con- 
tradicted the legend of the virgin birth, but have been utilized in part 
by Matthew and Luke. These stories were known as Toldoth Jeshu, 
and the anti-Christian Toldoth Jeshu® are the Jewish reply to these 
little tracts. 


APPENDIX XIV 
MorE CHRISTIAN INTERPOLATIONS IN THE JOSEPHUS TEXT 


Niese as well as E. Norden ὃ pointed out an interpolation in Axt., x. 
11. 7, ὃ 276, found in all Greek MSS. but still missing in the second Latin 
translation at the time of Cassiodorus : 

ταῦτα ἡμῶν συνέβη παθεῖν τῷ ἔθνει ὑπὸ ᾿Αντιόχου τοῦ ᾿Επιφανοῦς, καθὼς 
εἶδεν ὁ Δανίηλος καὶ πολλοῖς ἔτεσιν ἐμπρόσθεν ἀνέγραψε τὰ γενησόμενα. [Tov 
αὐτὸν δὲ τρόπον ὁ Δανίηλος καὶ περὶ τῆς Ῥωμαίων ἡγεμονίας ἀνέγραψε καὶ ὅτι 
ὑπ᾽ αὐτῶν (αἱρεθήσεται τὰ Ἱεροσόλυμα καὶ ὁ ναὸς) ἐρημωθήσεται. |” 

Offhand one might admit the possibility of this being a Jewish inter- 
polation ; but the lateness of the period would pretty well preclude such 
an hypothesis. 

A similar interpolation was pointed out by Ussani? in Avi., X. 5. I, 
§ 78, where the standard text reads as follows : 

“"Teneuias δὲ ὁ προφήτης ... καὶ τὰ μέλλοντα τῆ πόλει δεῖν προεκήρυξε, ἐν 
γράμμασι καταλιπὼν καὶ [τὴν νῦν ἐφ᾽ ἡμῶν γενομένην ἅλωσιν] τὴν τε Βαβυλωνίων 
αἵρεσιν." 

The context shows that Josephus could refer the prophecy of Jeremiah 
only to the Babylonian captivity, for even in his own speech in B./., v. 
9 (§§ 391-3), where he had the best possible occasion to apply such 
prophecies to the circumstances of his own time, he did not dream of so 
doing. To the priest’s son those prophecies had evidently been fulfilled, 
and he would have thought it absurd to expect a second fulfilment. In 
the context of the Antiqutties there follows the account of the Babylonian 
exile, and it would have appeared to him a gross anachronism to men- 


1 Z.N.T.W., xxviil. (1929), Ρ. 15 54. 

2 Cf. above, p. 226 ll. 30 f. 89 Ibid., xxii. (1923), p. 206 sqq. 

4 Euseb., H.£., vi. 14. 5-7. δ Cf. above, p. 111 and p. 107 0. 1. 

6 Op. cit., p. 648 n. 2. 7 Rivista di Filologia, xiii. (1914), p. 410. 


2Q 


610 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


tion there the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans. There can 
therefore be no doubt that the words put in brackets were originally 
marginal glosses by a Jewish or Jewish-Christian reader and included 
later on in the text. 

Another example, though differently interpreted by Ussani,! occurs 
in Ant., vil. 3. 2, § 67: 

“ Aavidys τοὺς ᾿Ιεβουσαίους ἐξ ἱΙεροσολύμων ἐκβαλὼν ἀφ᾽ ἑαυτοῦ προσηγόρευσε 
τὴν πόλιν. ἐπὶ γὰρ ᾿Αβράμου τοῦ προγόνου ἡμῶν Σόλυμα ἐκαλεῖτο. Μετὰ ταῦτα 
δὲ αὐτὴν [φασί τινες ὅτι καὶ “Ὅμηρος ταῦτα] ὠνόμασεν Σόλυμα. τὸ γὰρ ἱερὸν 
τὰ Σόλυμα κατὰ τὴν “Ἑβραίων ὠνόμασε γλώσσαν, ὅ ἐστιν ἀσφάλεια." 

The bracketed words were put in by a reader who did not wish to miss 
in his Josephus copy the Jewish-Hellenistic theory, also taken over by 
Tacitus,” according to which the Solymoi mentioned by Homer were 
the inhabitants of the Old Testamental Salem. 

One might be tempted to consider this interpolator to have been a 
Jew ; however, the whole ninth book of the Praeparatio Evangelica of 
Eusebius is devoted to no other task than that of showing that the 
Greeks knew of the existence of the Hebrews and that their historians 
agree with the Old Testament. From this it would follow that even a 
Christian might be sufficiently interested in these antiquarian details 
to add a gloss of this content. 

An interpolation not noticed heretofore is found in B.J., v. 5. 7, 
immediately after the (likewise interpolated) description of the temple 
curtain, where the breastplate of the high priest is described as follows: 

“ridpa . . κατέστεπτο δ᾽ ὑακίνθῳ περὶ ἣν χρυσοῦς ἄλλος ἦν στέφανος, 
ἐκτύπωμα φέρων τὰ ἱερὰ γράμματα [ταῦτα δ' ἐστὶ φωνήεντα τέσσαρα]." 

It is noteworthy that the bracketed clause is in the present tense, while 
the rest of the phrase is in the imperfect. One might think, at first 
sight, that the present tense has its reason in the fact that when the 
passage was written down the breastplate was still in existence. For 
Josephus says himself : 3 

“ἡ δὲ στεφάνη eis ἣν Μωυσῆς τὸν θεὸν ἔγραψε pia ἦν καὶ διέμεινε ἄχρι 
τῆςδε τῆς ἡμέρας." 

But in that case the whole description should be in ‘the present tense, 
for the mitre was likewise still existing, though now in the Templum 
Pacis of Rome. More important still, the text given contains the holy 
name of God, and the priest’s son Josephus would assuredly have been 
the last to divulge this name to a heathen public. Furthermore, 
Josephus could not designate myn’ as four vowels, for the Hebrew 
script of his time used only three vowel characters, δὰ, ", ἡ, for a, 7, 
and uw. There can be little doubt about the fact that the interpolation 
comes from a Christian hand, from some reader who was anxious to 
make a show of his antiquarian lore. For this there is documentary 
evidence. Niese’s Cod. C in the Vatican, and Cod. Paris Graec., No. 
1428, show in the margin by the side of the words φέρων τὰ ἱερὰ γράμματα 
a coarse design representing the Hebrew Tetragramm. It is obvious 
that the bracketed words ταῦτα δ᾽ ἐστὶ φωνήευτα τέσσαρα were 
originally meant to explain that marginal illustration, and were drawn 
into the text by a scribe’s inadvertence. 


1 Op. ctt., p. 397. * Atst., V. 2. 5 Ant., viii. 3. 8. 


APPENDICES 


HIT 


APPENDIX XV 


THe MuNbDUS AND PAULINA EPISODE 


The shocking analogy between Paulina’s adventure and the cor- 
responding chapter in the Gospel of the Infancy in Luke is much more 
patent in the Latin version of the Christian Eyesippus than in the 


standard text of Josephus. 
columns : 


Ant., Xvili. 3. 4. 


' About the same time another 
serious trouble agitated the Jews, 
“and there happened in Rome, in 
connexion with the temple of Isis, 
facts which did not fail to cause 
scandal. I shall mention first the 
audacious act of the worshippers of 
Isis, and shall then pass over to the 
matter of the Jews.2. There lived 
in Rome a certain Paulina, noble 
by her descent and her personal 
zeal for virtue. She was powerful 
by reason of her wealth, of great 
beauty, and, at the age when women 
are most addicted to coquetry, of 
great virtue. She was married to 
one Saturninus, who vied with her in 
these qualities. Decius Mundus, a 
knight of the greatest merit, fell in 
love with her. Since he was aware 
that she was of too high a rank to 
be seduced by presents (for she had 
disdained those which he had sent 
her in great quantity), he became 
more and more inflamed, and finally 
offered her 200,000 Attic drachms 
for a single night. Since she did 
not yield even for such a price, the 
knight, unable any longer to bear 
his unhappy passion, thought of 
putting an end to his days by 
starving. He was thus decided to 
die, and got ready. Now there was 
a freedwoman of his father’s called 
Ide, who was an expert in all kinds 
of crime. Regretting very much 
the young man’s fateful resolution 
(for it was obvious that he was ap- 
proaching his end), she went to him 


I give the passage in question in parallel 


Egesippus, li. 3, 4. 


Under his rule (1.6, that of 
Tiberius) the well-known joke upon 
Paulina, a Roman lady of a most 
noble family, took place. Since she 
had a great reputation of chastity 
with all, and was moreover adorned 
with extraordinary modesty and 
winning charm, and was therefore 
inaccessible to the temptation of a 
certain Mundus, a man of the eques- 
trian order and military leader, she 
fell into error only through her 
fault of extraordinary bigotry. For 
he bribed the priests of Isis, who sent 
her a message as coming from the 
god Anubis, inviting her to the 
temple, since he was delighted with 
her zeal and modesty and wished 
to have her one night in order to 
impart to her something in private. 
Having received this message, she 
communicated it with great joy to 
her husband, saying that the god 
was listening to her devotions, that 
he requested her presence, and that 
she could not but show obedience. 
Following her own desire and with 
her husband’s consent, she went to 
the temple of Isis. She passed the 
night in solitude, ready to receive 
the divine mystery, and lay down on 
her beddings thinking that the god 
would appear to her in her dreams 
and thus point out to her his will. 
In the middle of the night, the more 
easily to deceive the somnolent 
woman, Mundus in the guise and 
dress of the god Anubis came, took 
off his clothes, and began to embrace 


+1 This was originally the introductory clause of the following chapter on 


Flavia. 
with this one. 


It has supplanted the genuine sentence connecting the chapter on Jesus 
*= Not genuine either, 


612 


and promised him that he would 
enjoy the embraces of Paulina. 
Seeing that he listened to her, she 
told him that she needed only 
50,000 drachms to get for him that 
woman. Having thus kindled hope 
in the young man and received the 
money, she followed a different path 
from her predecessors, knowing full 
well that Paulina could not be 
seduced with money. Knowing that 
the latter was addicted to the cult 
of Isis, Ide hit upon the following 
stratagem. After some negotiations 
with some of the priests, with a pro- 
fusion of promises and bribes, 20,000 
drachms in cash, and as many to 
come once the matter was carried 
through, she told them about the 
love of the young man, and asked 
their co-operation to conquer that 
woman. Won over by the greatness 
of the sum, they gave her the pro- 
mise, ‘The oldest of them rushed to 
Paulina, obtained an interview and 
requested to speak to her in private. 
Then he told her that he came from 
Anubis, for the god, conquered by 
love for her, invited her to come to 
him. She received these words with 
glee, boasted to her friends of the 
distinction granted to her by the god, 
and told her husband that she was 
offered a meal and a night with 
Anubis. The husband granted her 
request, since he was convinced of 
his wife’s virtue. She goes to the 
temple, and after the repast, when 
the hour of sleep arrived, the temple 
gates were shut by the priest doing 
service in the interior and the lights 
were put out. Then Mundus, who 
had hidden, did not fail to join her, 
and she gave herself up to him the 
whole night, believing that he was 
the god. He left before the priests, 
who were privy to his enterprise, 
began their morning’s work, and 
Paulina, after her return to her 
husband in the morning, told him 
about the apparition of Anubis and 
boasted about it to her friends. 
Some refused to believe this, others 
considered the thing a miracle, 
having no reason for doubt in view 
οἱ the virtue and good fame of the 


THE MESSIAH JESUS 


her. To the awakened woman he 
said that he was Anubis. She 
believed him to be the god, and 
esteemed herself happy to have been 
found worthy of the visit of the lord 
her god. She did not refuse his 
embraces, questioning only whether 
a god and a mortal may mix. He 
quoted the examples of Jupiter, the 
father of gods, and Alcmena, of Leda 
and several others who gave birth 
to gods, adding that she, too, would 
be the mother of a god through 
intercourse with him. She returns 
to her husband full of glee, telling 
him that she had intercourse with 
a god and would, according to his 
promise, give birth to a god. The 
joy of the husband over the seduction 
of his wife was great. Afterwards 
Mundus met the woman and said : 
‘Paulina, blessed with intercourse 
with a divinity, the great god 
Anubis whose mysteries thou re- 
ceivedst. But learn that thou 
shouldst not refuse thyself to men 
any more than to gods, as thou 
didst, for they do not disdain to 
give us their shape and their name. 
The god Anubis called thee to the 
sanctuary, and Mundus, to join thee 
there to him. Of what advantage 
was thy hardness of heart, except 
that it deprived thee of 20,000 
drachms which 1 had offered thee ἢ 
It is easier to imitate the gods, who 
grant to us what I could not obtain 
from thee for a great price. Since 
the name of a human offended thee, 
it pleased me to call myself Anubis, 
and thanks to that name I obtained 
my desire.’ At this speech the 
woman understood that she had 
been deceived, and in dismay over 
the insult done to her modesty told 
her husband about the fraud. 
Having no reason to get angry at 
the woman, since he had permitted 
her to go to sleep in the temple, and 
convinced moreover of his wife’s 
chastity, he referred the affair to 
the emperor. The latter, moved to 
great anger by the outrage on a 
noble and the atrocity of the crime, 
had the priests taken from the 
temple, fortured, and, after their 


APPENDICES 


lady. But on the third day after 
the event, Mundus, meeting her, 
said: ‘ Paulina, thou hast saved me 
200,000 drachms which thou mightst 
have added to thy fortune, and yet 
thou didst not fail to grant to me 
what I asked of thee. It is of little 
moment that thou hast tried to 


613 


confession, executed, whilst he had 
the statue of Isis thrown into the 
Tiber. Mundus was granted the 
liberty of leaving Rome, a heavy 
fine being considered sufficient in 
view of the fact that he had acted 
under the influence of the passion 
of love. 


insult Mundus; since Τ worry little 
about names but only about the 
reality of the pleasure, I have given 
myself the name of Anubis.’ Then 
he left her. She, realizing for the 
first time that there was foul play, 
tore her dress and informed her 
husband of the greatness of the out- 
rage, requesting him to neglect 
nothing to avenge her. He de- 
nounced the matter to the emperor. 
When Tiberius had learned the exact 
details of the affair by a judicial 
inquest against the priests, he had 
them as well as Ide crucified, caused 
the temple to be razed and the 
statue of Isis to be thrown into the 
Tiber. Mundus he condemned to 
exile, thinking that he could not 
inflict upon him a more severe 
punishment, because passion had 
made him commit that crime... . 


APPENDIX XVI 


THE UTILIZATION OF DOCUMENTARY MATERIAL BY 
ANCIENT HISTORIANS 


On the tabularium principis, cf. Hirschfeld, V.-G., i. 206 sq., 3; 
Premerstein, Pauly-Wissowa, R.-E., iv. 756, 20-50. 

On the provincial archives, cf. H. Peter, Gesch. Litt., i. 240 ; 
Mommsen, Sirafrecht, p. 519, 2, 3; O. Seeck, Zettsch. d. Savigny 
Stiftung, x.; Rim. Abt., 6 sqq. A δημόσιον ἀρχεῖον of the Province of 
Asia is referred to in Eusebius, H.E. (P.G., xx. 476 sq.) ; H. Leclerq, 
op. cit., col. 382,1. 14 sg. An instrumentum provinciae is found in Apul. 
Florid., 1, ix. ; an archivum proconsults with the diaries of the governors 
and proconsular officials in Augustin, C. Crescon. (P.L., xliil. 359). 

A letter of the younger Pliny addressed to Cn. Octavius Titinius 
Capito, probably in the reign of Domitian, reads as follows : 


“Ὁ, Plinius Titinio Capito suo: (1) ‘ Suades ut historiam scribam et 
suades non solus”’ . . . (7) ‘‘Dices: potes simul et rescribere actiones 
et componere historiam.’’ (12) “tu iam nunc cogita, quae potissimum 
tempora aggrediar. Vetera et scripta aliis? parata inquisitio, sed 


614 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


onerosa collatio. Intactaetnova? Graves offensae, levis gratia”... 
(14) ‘‘Sed haec me non retardant; . . . Illud peto, praesternas, ad quod 
hortaris, eligasque materiam, ne mihi iam scribere parato alia rursus 
cunctationis et morae iusta ratio nascatur. Vale.’’’ 


This Octavius Titinius Capito was, according to C.J.L., vi. 789, the 
prefect of a cohort, then a distinguished military tribune, procurator ab 
epistulis under Domitian, ex senatus consulto under Nerva, who bestowed 
upon him the praetorian decorations, procurator ab epistulis under 
Trajan, and himself a writer (Pliny, Εῤ., viii. 12). 


APPENDIX XVII 
THE VEGETARIAN DIET OF THE BAPTIST 


Certain fragments of a commentary on Matthew, ascribed to Athan- 
asius,' interpret the ἀκρίς as an herb (βοτάνη τις), on the ground that 
in Eccl. xii. 5 it is mentioned along with the almond-tree. Isidore of 
Pelusium (died ca. 440) in one of his letters? says : 


‘What are the dxpides . . . on which John the Baptist fed? They 
are not creatures like beetles, as some ignorantly suppose (God forbid !), 
but twigs (ἀκρέμονες) of herbs or plants.’ 


In another letter ὃ he remarks that the monks, in emulation of John 
the Baptist, ought, if possible, to feed only on cabbage-tops and leaves. 
Pantaleon,* the deacon of Hagia Sophia (ninth century 3), in an 
Epiphany sermon says that John lived on the points or shoots of plants 
(τοῖς τῶν βοτάνων ἀκρίσμασιν). But the best and most illuminating of 
all these conjectures (for, of course, they are nothing more) is met in the 
commentary on Matthew by Theophylact of Achrida: § 


‘Some say that the akvides were herbs . . . others that they were 
fruits or wild fruits (ἀκρόδρυα ἤτοι ὀπώρας).᾽ 


The reading of the Ebionite Gospel,* which for ἀκρίδες substitutes 
ἐγκρίδες, “ dough-nuts’ baked in oil, is probably based on a recollection 
of ’Elijah and the barrel of flour and cruse of oil which failed not during 
his: stay with the widow of Sarephath.? The reading dypdées, ‘ wild 
pears,’ recommended even by Beza,® merits more consideration. The 
Ethiopic Bible renders ἀκρίδες by anvota, ‘ grass-tops’ ; 3 the Syriac 
Gospel has kamse, which may mean not only ‘ locust,’ ‘ ant,’ ‘ snail,’ but 
also a certain wild vegetable. In the monophysite ‘ Revelation on the 
food of John the Baptist,’ the doubtful expression is interpreted as 


1 Migne, P.G., xxvii. 1365. ΞΡ. 

3. No. 5, addressed to Nilus. 4 Migne, P.G., xcvili. Ὁ. 1245. 
5. Migne, P.G., cxxix. 137 sq. 

® Epiphan., Haeres., xxx. 13, i. p. 350, Holl. 

7 1 Kings xvii. 16. 

8 Acta SS., June iv. 692. 9. Cf. above, p. 236,. 


APPENDICES 615 


referring to certain desert roots ;1 this work was designed to put an 
end to monastic conflicts between the βοσκοί or ‘ grazers,’ 1.6, vege- 
tarians, and the ἀκριδοφάγοι or ΄ locust-eaters.’ 

The reading ἀκρόδρυα, ‘ tree-fruits,’ proposed by Theophylact of 
Achrida in place of ἀκρίδες, receives special support from a passage 
in Lucian,? which so far as I know had been overlooked hitherto in this 
connection. The Chaldaean Mithrobarzanes, to prepare Menippus for 
his journey on the other side of the river, is there represented as first 
washing himself daily for a whole month at dawn in the Euphrates, 
while addressing a long prayer to the rising sun.* Says Menippus : 

‘And I came and consorted with one of the Chaldaeans, a wise man 
and gifted with divine art: he had hoary hair and a venerable flowing 
beard, and his name was Mithrobarzanes. . . . And the man took me, 
and first of all, for nine and twenty days, . . . beginning with the (new ) 
moon, washed me, bringing me down at dawn to the Euphrates, while 
he recited a long oration to the rising sun. . . . And for food we had 
tree-fruits (ἀκρόδρυα), and for drink milk and honey and the water of 
the Choaspes, and our bed was on the grass under the open sky.’ * | 

As earlyas the second century of our era there must then have existed 
katadoverivoi,mughtasila, Sabaeans,Masbothaeans, Baptists, or Hemero- 
baptists on the banks of the Euphrates, practising the Mandaic rite of 
the soul’s ‘ ascent ’ to the beyond (massegta), so delightfully ridiculed by 
the scoffer of Samosata. These people evidently restricted their food 
to ἀκρόδρυα, milk, honey, and water, because that was regarded as the 
fare of the blessed in Paradise. There is thus a strong probability that 
the original tradition about the Baptist spoke of tree-fruits and young 
vegetable shoots, and not of the repulsive locusts, which there could 
have been no religious inducement to consume. On the other hand, it 
seems to me no less improbable that this is a case of an ordinary /apsus 
calami or of the unfortunate choice of an erroneous or ambiguous expres- 
sion. For it is inconceivable that any one wishing to speak of grass or 
twigs or of an herb called ἀκρίς could have expressed himself so 
obscurely that an unlearned reader must have understood him to mean 
a locust. Equally improbable, in my opinion, is the view that the 
‘locust’ (ἀκρίς) could have arisen out of ° tree-fruit ’ (ἀκρόδρυα, Or, 
as Prof. Alexander Pallis 5 of Liverpool supposes, out of a Vulg. Greek 
ἐκ pi¢as, ‘of roots’) through a mere clerical error. Τὶ K. Cheyne " 
thought of a misreading Zagabim (‘locusts’) for Zarubim (St. John’s 
bread=carob-pods) in the translation of the Gospel of the Hebrews; but 
that would not explain how the ἀκρίδες got into Mark’s Gospel. See 
above, p. 236 n. 16, for a new hypothesis of Mr. Th. Gaster. 

1 Even the ‘wild honey’ (uédc ἄγριον) is replaced by μελεαγρέων ῥίζαι in a 
poem of Sophronios (P.G., Ixxxvii., p. 3756; cf. p. 3729 sq.). See the μελάγριαι 
growing in the desert where St. Cyriacus lives; Acia SS., Sept. viii. 151, and 
Suidas, s.v. μελεάγρι: “καὶ ῥίζαις μελεαγρίων καὶ καρδίαις καλάμων adrous ἐδεξιοῦτο," 
a quotation from some Byzantine hermit’s life. 

2 Necyom.,6sq. Cp. Clem. Alex., Paedag., ii. τ. 16, about the apostle Matthew 
living on seeds, ἀκρόδρυα and vegetables, without meat. 

3 Cf, the similar rite of the Essenes in B.J., ii. ὃ 128. 

4 That is to say, they avoided dwelling in a house ; cf. above, p. 2353, on the 
Mandaean priests living under tents in the period preceding their consecration. 


5 4 Few Notes on the Gospels, Liverpool, 1903, Pp. 3. 
© Encycl, Bibl., col. 2135, art. ‘ Husks.’ 


616 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


APPENDIX XVIII 


JOHN THE Baptist, Simon Macus, DosItHEUS, AND THE 
MANDAEANS 


The first authors of the gnosticizing development of the primitive 
Nasoraean doctrine were no doubt the Samaritans Simon Magus and 
Dositheus. According to the pseudo-Clementine Homil., ii. 23 (P.G., ii. 
02), Simon was πρῶτος καὶ δοκιμώτατος among the thirty chosen 
disciples of the Baptist. After the downfall of the Master, Dositheus 
became the leader of the disciples, ‘ because Simon was then in Egypt 
to practise magic’ (ἀποδημοῦντος γὰρ αὐτοῦ εἰς Αἴγυπτον ἐπὶ τὴν τῆς 
μαγείας ἐπάσκησιν), and because Dositheus circulated the rumour that 
he had died there. Yet after his return Simon is said to have again 
taken the leadership. After this Dositheus, who is called by Epiphanius 
(Haeres., 13) a learned Jew, who became a Samaritan, and who was 
fabled not to have died but to have disappeared in a cavern, is said 
to have been the chief of the Baptists (Σεβουαῖοι, Epiphan., i. pp. 166, 
204, 227, Holl=Aram. syiay, the ‘washed ones’; Brandt, Suppl. to 
ZN.T.W., xviii. 113, or Μασβώθεοι, Eusebius, H.E., iv. 22. 5,7; Constit. 
apost., vi. 6, etc., from masbita=‘ baptism’; Brandt, thid.), later on 
called Dosithaeans. Theodore bar Kevani (Pognon, Inscr. mandaites, 
p. 224 sq.; W. Bousset, Hauptprobleme der Gnosis, p. 383 ; E. Peterson, 
Z.N.T.W., xxvii. (1928), pp. 65 n.2, 95 n.7) says, ‘ The Dostai are 
called in Maisan Mandaeans, in Beth-Aramajé Nasdraeans (Nasraia).’ 
The ‘Cantaeans,’ quoted by Theodore as the precursors of the Mandaeans, 
who derive their doctrine from Abel (Hibil), and the Sabaeans (‘Baptists ’) 
mentioned by Albiruni, c. 8, who trace themselves to ’Enosh (Peterson, 
pp. 92 and 67 n. 2), are simply the Qenites, usually referred to as Kat viTas, 
Καιανοί, etc., by the haeresiologists, who are called in the LXX. 
KENAIOI, KINAIOI, KAINAIOT, etc. Bar Kevani (=Saturninos, 
Σατόρνινος), Who writes the word with k instead of with g, must there- 
fore have drawn on a Greek source. The cosmogonic-mythological 
speculations of the Mandaeans can be easily derived from people of the 
type of Dositheus and of Simon, who was educated in Alexandria and 
who is brought into connexion with Philo by the Samaritan Chronicles,1 


APPENDIX XIX 
THE LAW AGAINST CARRYING ARMS 


By accident we have evidence for this early period so far only as 
Egypt is concerned. From Philo, in Flacc., ὃ 11 (M. 11. 530), it has 
sometimes been concluded that only the Egyptian Jews were forbidden 
to carry arms. Yet a papyrus (Wilcken, Grundziige, ii., No. 1 ΟΣ ὌΠ ἢ. 
Nicole, ‘Avillius Flaccus préfet d’Egypte et Philon d’Alexandrie d’aprés 


" Abu'l Fath, p. 157; Chron. Adler, 67;. J. A. Montgomery, The Samaritans, 
Philadelphia, 1912, p. 626 n, 39. 


APPENDICES 617 


un papyrus inédit,’ in Revue de philologie, xxii. (1808), pp. 18-27; Jean 
Juster, Les Jutfs dans Vv empire romain, ii., Paris, 1914, pp. 219 n. 6, 220) 
with an order of Flaccus dating from the twenty-first year of Tiberius— 
i.e. 33-34, the year following the Palestinian tumults caused by the 
Egyptian messiah, probably Simon Magus—and renewing the law, in 
existence as early as the period of the Ptolemies, leaves no doubt about 
the fact that this law applied to all provincials. According to Mommsen, 
Rénusches Strafrecht, p. 658 n. 2, Roman citizens were exempted from 
this law, which appears to me doubtful, since even in Rome itself no 
one was permitted to carry arms. Cf. Mommsen-Marquard-Girard, 
Drowt public romain, vi. I, p. 243 n.1. It is indeed quite natural that 
ordinary citizens should not have been allowed to possess arms without 
special authorization. The fact that, according to Dio Cassius, Ixix. 
12. 2, the Palestinian Jews at the beginning of the second century were 
allowed to manufacture arms (Krauss, Talmud. Archaeologie, i. 205, 
li. 310 sg.) does not prove that ordinary citizens were permitted to own 
arms, let alone carry them, as Juster, op. cit., p. 220 n. 2, seems inclined 
to think. Even to-day the manufacture of arms is in most states a free 
profession and a private industry, and the sale of arms is usually un- 
restricted. In spite of this, most states punish the unauthorized posses- 
sion or the carrying of arms by ordinary citizens. Juster’s inference 
that at the time when the Jews were not allowed to carry arms (Jerome 
in Is. 11. 3; P.L., xxiv. 59, written between 408 and 410: ‘ apud 
Judaeos omnis perierit dignitas bellatorum, cum .. . arma portandi 
non habeant potestatem ’) they were surely also forbidden to manu- 
facture arms is therefore far from justified. The prohibition of Cod. 
Theodosian, xv. 15. I (364), ‘ Nulli prorsus nobis insciis atque incon- 
sultis quorumlibet armorum movendorum copia tribuatur,’ is surely no 
innovation. Cf. Synesius, ep. 107 (Hercher, E#istologr. gr., Paris, 1873, 
Pp. 707: οὐκ ἐξὸν ἰδιώταις ἀνθρώποις ὁπλοφορεῖν). 

Irom the theoretical discussions of the rabbis on the carrying of 
arms on a Sabbath (Mishna shabb., 6, 14; Strack-Billerbeck, i. 996, 
11. 827) nothing can be inferred, since it is known that from the purely 
Jewish point of view private citizens were at all times allowed to 
carry arms. 


APPENDIX XX 
PILATE’s ‘ICONISMUS’ OF JESUS 


Cf. v. Dobschiitz, loc. cit., p. 98*; Iren., Adv. haer., i. 25. 6 (ed. 
Stieren, i. 253): ‘Gnosticos se autem vocant et imagines quasdam 
depictas, quasdam autem de reliqua materia fabricatas habent, dicentes 
formam Christi factam a Pilato illo tempore, quo fuit Jesus cum homini- 
bus ; et proponunt eas cum imaginibus mundi philosophorum, videlicet 
cum imagine Pythagorae et Platonis et Aristotelis et reliquorum et 
reliquam observationem circa eas similiter ut gentes faciunt.’ Epiphan., 
Haer., xxvii. 6, p. 310; xx. 13 sqq., Holl: 

“ καὶ ἔνθεν γέγονεν (ἡ) ἀρχὴ Γνωστικῶν τῶν καλουμένων ἔχουσι δὲ εἰκόνας 
ἐνζωγράφους διὰ γρωμάτων, τινὲς δὲ ἐκ χρυσοῦ καὶ ἀργύρου καὶ λοιπῆς ὕλης, 


618 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


ἅτινα ἐκτυπώματά φασιν εἶναι τοῦ ᾿Ιησοῦ. καὶ ταῦτα ὑπὸ Ποντίου Πιλάτου yeye- 
νῆσθαι τουτέστι τὰ ἐκτυπώματα τοῦ (αὐτοῦ) ᾿Ιησοῦ, ὅτε ἐνεδήμει τῷ τῶν ἀνθρώπων 
γένει. κρύβδην δὲ τὰς τοιαύτας ἔχουσιν εἰκόνας, ἀλλὰ καὶ φιλοσόφων τινῶν, 
Πυθαγόρου καὶ Πλάτωνος καὶ ᾿Δριστοτέλους καὶ λοιπῶν... κτλ, 


A free quotation of this Epiphanius passage is found in Nicephor., Patr. 
antirhet., c. Euseb. et Epiph. (Pitra, Spicil. Solesm., iv. 297); Hippolyt., 
Ref., vii. 32, p. 220; xx. 10 sg., Wendland: 


“kal εἰκόνας δὲ κατασκευάζουσιν τοῦ Χριστοῦ λέγοντες ὑπὸ Πιλάτου τῷ καιρῷ 
ἐκείνῷ γενέσθαι." 


Antonius Placentinus, Jtin. (ca. 970), c. 23, ed. Gildemeister, Berlin, 
1889, p. 17 sqg.=ed. Geyer, C.S.E.L., xxxix. p. 175: ‘Oravimus in 
praetorio, ubiauditus est dominus, ubimodo est basilica sanctae Sophiae 
ante ruinas templi Salomonis sub platea, quae decurrit ad Siloam fontem 
secus porticum Salomonis. In ipsa basilica est sedis, ubi Pilatus sedit, 
quando Dominum audivit. Petra autem quadrangulis, quae stabat, in 
medio praeturio, in quam levabatur reus, qui audiebatur, ut ab omni 
populo audiretur et videretur, in qua levatus est dominus, quando 
auditus est a Pilato, ubi etiam vestigia illius remanserunt. Pedem 
pulchrum modicum subtilem,nam et staturam communem (= κοινὴ φύσις, 
cf. above, p. 384,,) faciem pulchram, capillos subanellatos, manum for- 
mosam, digita longa (quantum) imago designat, quae illo vivente picta 
sunt (!), quae posita est in ipso praeturio. Nam de petra illa, ubi stetit, 
fiunt virtutes multae; tollentes de ipsa vestigia pedum mensuram, 
ligantes pro singulis languoribus et sanatur. [Et ipsa petra ornata est 
ex auro et argento.’ On statues of Jesus beside that of Homer, cf. 
August., De haeres. liber, c. 7; Oehler, Cod. haeresiol., i. p. τοῦ ; 
Praedestinatus, lib. i., cap. 7; Oehler, i. p. 234: ‘ The Carpocratian 
woman Marcellina had put up in her dararium “imagines Jesu et Pauli 
et Homeri et Pythagorae.’’’ It is also well to remember the Cologne 
philosophers’ mosaic unearthed in 1844 and dating from the time of 
the Severi (Zettsch. f. christl. Kunst, i., Berlin, 1918, p. 316, and Lersch, 
Progry., Bonn, 1845). 


APPENDIX XxI 


THE ORIGINAL TEXTS CONCERNING THE PHYSICAL APPEARANCE 
or JESUS 


Andreas Hierosolymitanus vel Cretensis, ed. Boissonade, Anecd. 
Graeca 6. Cod. Reg., iv., 1832, pp. 471-4. Cf. Dobschiitz, loc. cit., 
p. 186* (7): “ἀλλὰ καὶ ὁ ᾿Ιουδαῖος ᾿Ιώσηπος τὸν αὐτὸν τρόπον ἱστορεῖ 
ὁραθῆναι τὸν Κύριον σύνοφρυν (εὐόφθαλμον) μακροπρόσωπον, ἐπίκυφον, 
evn Aka,” 

Scholion to Johannes Damascenus, De jide orthod., iv. 164, in two 
MSS. of the Paris National Library : ὁ “ ἐπεὶ καὶ ᾿Ιώσηπος ὁ ᾿Ιουδαῖος͵ 


1 Cod. Paris, 1335 (5. xiii.), Combefis, manip. 114. Le Quien, Joh. Damasc, 
opp. i. 631a; Cod. Paris. Coisl. 296, saec. xii. f°. 69; Tischendorf, Anecd. sacra 
et profana, 129; v. Dobschiitz, p. 303**. 


APPENDICES 619 


ὥς τινές φασι... τὸν αὐτὸν ἱστορεῖ τρόπον τὸν κύριον ὁραθῆναι σύνοφρυν, 
εὐόφθαλμον, μακρόψιν, ἐπικυφῆ τε καὶ εὐήλικα."»" 

Nikephoros Kallistou, Migne, P.G., 145, 747: “... ἑπτὰ σπιθάμων 
ἦν τελείων, εὐόφθαλμος Kai ἐπίρρινος, ἐπίξανθον ἔχων τὴν τρίχα, μέλαινας 
ὄφρυς, ἤρεμα ἐπικλινὴς τὸν αὐχένα, ὡς μηδὲ πάνυ ὄρθιον καὶ ἐντεταμένην 
ἔχειν τὴν ἡλικίαν τοῦ σώματος... .” 

Theodoros Anagnostes, Dobschiitz, p. 107*, ga: Hist. eccl., 1. 15, ed. 
Valesius-Reading, Cambridge, 1720, ili. p. 56659.03: “ἐπὶ Γενναδίου ἡ χεὶρ 
τοῦ ζωγράφου ἐξηράνθη τοῦ ἐν τάξει Διὸς τὸν σωτῆρα γράψαι τολμήσαντος. 
ὃν δι’ εὐχῆς ἰάσατο (6) Devyddios’ φησὶ δὲ ὁ ἱστορῶν, ὅτι τὸ ἄλλο σχῆμα τοῦ 
σωτῆρος τὸ οὗλον καὶ ὀλιγόθριχον ὑπάρχει. 

Nikephoros Kallistou, ΗΠ 5ἐ. eccl., χν. 23, ed. Fronto Ducaeus, 1630, 
11. 623 c; v. Dobschiitz, a. a. O., p. 108* f.: ““τούτου δὲ τοῦ Tevvadiov 
ἱεραρχοῦντος καί τις ζώγραφος ἐπὶ σχήματος Διὸς τὸν σωτῆρα γράψαι 
τολμήσας ἀντιμισθίαν τῆς πράξεως τὸ ξηρὰν αὐχῆσαι τὴν χεῖρα ἐκτήσατο. 
ὃν τὸ ἔγκλημα παρρησίᾳ ὁμολογήσαντα εὐχῃ Τ᾿ εννάδιος ἐξιᾶτο. χρεὼν μέντοι 
εἰδέναι ὅτι ἐπὶ τοῦ σωτῆρος τὸ οὖλον μᾶλλον καὶ ὀλιγότριχον ἀληθέστερόν 
ἐστιν, ὡς ἐκ τῶν ἱστορούντων διέγνωμεν." 

Theophanes, ed. de Boor, i. 112,,.,, ad anni mundi 5955, Leon a. vi. 
= 463 ἢ. Chr., v. Dobschiitz, p. 107* gc: “τῷ δ᾽ αὐτῷ ἔτει ζωγράφου 
τινὸς τὸν σωτῆρα γράψαι τολμήσαντος καθ᾽ ὁμοιότητα τοῦ Διὸς ἐξηράνθη ἡ 
χείρ, ὃν ἐξαγορεύσαντα dv εὐχῆς ἰάσατο Tevvddios, φασὶ δέ τινες τῶν ἱστο- 
ρικῶν, ὅτι τὸ οὖλον καὶ ὀλιγότριχον σχῆμα ἐπὶ τοῦ σωτῆρος οἰκειότερόν 
ἐστιν." 

Anastasius Bibliothecarius, Chronogr. tripart., Theophanes, ed. de 
Boor, ii, ITT,¢.,,, ἡ. Dobschiitz, p. 107* g: ‘sequenti anno cum pictor 
quidam pingere salvatorem secundum similitudinem Jovis praesumpsis- 
set, arefacta est manus eius, quem peccatum suum confessum, sanavit 
Gennadius, aiunt enim quidam historicorum, quod crispis et raris capillis 
schema in salvatore magis vernaculum sit.’ 

Epiphanius Monacus Constantinopolit., Dobschiitz, p. 302** : “οὔτω 
καὶ αὐτὸς ἦν εὐόφθαλμος ἐπίρρινος ᾿ κτλ. 

Dobschiitz, ἃ. ἃ. Ο., p. 303**. Epist. syn. orient. ad. Theophyl. imp., 
c. 7: “᾿εὐήλικα, τρίπηχυν, σύνοφρυν, εὐόφθαλμον, ἐπίῤῥινον, οὐλότριχα, 
ἐπίκυφον, ἀνεξίκακον.᾽" 

Anonymous Byzantine homily defending iconolatry, Dobschitz, 
lic., p. 240**: ““παρέδωκαν οἱ ax’ ἀρχῆς αὐτόπται τὸ θεανδρικὸν σχῆμα 
τρίπηχυ, μικρὸν, ἐπικεκυφός.. .. εὔοφρυ καὶ τοῦτο συνδεμένον, εὐόφθαλμον,͵ 
εὔρινον, σιτόχροον, οὐλότριχον τὴν κεφαλὴν καὶ ξανθὴν ὀλίγον." “ἀπ᾽ ἀρχῆς 
αὐτόπται" is derived from Like 1. 2. 

Anonymous Scholion: “wept τῆς τοῦ Κυρίου ἀνθρωπίνης popdijs.” 
Dobschiitz, p. 305**: “‘H καθ᾽ ἡμῶν τοῦ θεανθρώπου μορφή, ws 
παρειλήφαμεν ὑπὸ τῶν αὐτοῦ αὐτόπτων Kal ἀποστόλων. iv τὸ μὲν τῆς 
ἡλικίας μέγεθος τέλειος ἀνήρ, οὔτε τὸ μέτρον ὑπερβαίνων οὔτε πρὸς τοὐναντίον 
κατασπώμενος, ἀπέριττος ταῖς σαρξίν, ὑπόκυφος, τὴν κόμην μέγας καὶ συνεσ- 


620 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


, , = \ , > orn ἃ > if 
ταλμένος θριξί, οὖλος τοὺς βοστρύχους, ἀκερσοκόμης, ἀκούρευτος, ἀσκεπῆής, 
“ , , > ’ «ς « , 
διχῃ mpos τὸ μέτωπον τοὺς πλοκάμους διεσταλμένος, ἐπίρρινος, ὑποξανθίζων 

ἴω ’ / / Ἁ c / 
τὰς κόρας TOV ὀφθαλμῶν, μελάγχρους, μακροτράχηλος, μέτριος τὴν ὑπήνην, 
-“ “ ἴω ld 
οὔτε TAVOTHTL TOV τριχῶν ταύτην ἐπεσπασμένος, ἀλλὰ συστροφῆ κοσμιότητος 


σεμνυόμενος." 


APPENDIX XXII 
THE MESSIAH AS A MOSES REDIVIVUS 


By the healings of Moses is meant the healing through prayer of 
Mirjam’s leprous hand and the healing of those bitten by snakes ; by 
the ‘arts’ the author evidently means the water supply from a rock, 
the miracle of the manna, the sweetening of the bitter water, etc. The 
ἀληθείας προφήτης Of the pseudo-Clementines is likewise regarded as 
the reborn Moses. The peculiar circumlocution ‘the first lawgiver’ 
for Jesus-Moses occurs also in Lucian, Peregr. Prot., 13: “6 νομοθέτὴς ὁ 
πρῶτος ἔπεισεν αὐτοὺς WS ἀδελφοὶ εἶεν ἀλλήλων," Which is hardly a matter 
of accident, since the words ἄνθρωπος σοφιστής and μάγος ἐκεῖνος ὁ 
ἀνασκολοπισθείς, likewise found in that passage, leave no doubt about 
the dependence of the rhetorician of Samosata upon Josephus. 

On the miracle of the multiplication of food by Jesus (John vi. 31 sq.), 
cf. also my essay in Z.N.T.W., 1925, p. 187. 

Nor do the Jewish commentaries leave any doubt about the parallel- 
ism of the expected Messiah with Moses; cf. Midr. Qoh., i. g (gb) ; 
Shir r. 2, 9 sg. (r00a); Num. r., ii. (162b) ; Strack-Billerbeck, i. 87 
andii.481. R.Berekhia (ca. 340) said in the name of R. Jishaq (ca. 300): 
‘Just as the first redeemer (i.e. Moses), so the last redeemer (i.e. the 
Messiah). . . . Just as the first redeemer brought manna down from 
heaven (£x. xvi. 4), “ Behold, I will rain bread from heaven for you,”’ 
so the last redeemer will bring down the manna (ct. Ps. ἸΧΧῊ τὸ, 
“There shall be an handful of corn in the earth”; so the Midr.). Just 
as the first redeemer let the fountain well up, so also the last redeemer 
will make the waters to rise (cf. Joel iii. 18: ‘‘A fountain shall come 
forth of the house of the Lord,”’ etc.).’ 


APPENDIX XXIII 
SUIDAS ON JESUS OFFICIATING AS A PRIEST IN THE TEMPLE 


The context in which the Josephus fragment is found in the work 
of the Byzantine lexicographer is not without interest. Under the 
heading, ᾿Ιησοῦς ὁ Χριστὸς καὶ θεὺς ἡμῶν, Suidas? relates the follow- 
ing absurdities : 

‘In the reign of Justinian there lived in Constantinople a Jewish elder 

* Ed. Bernhardy, p. 954 544. The story exists separately in one Parisian 


and in two Viennese MSS. (Lambeccius, Bibl. Vindob., iv. pp. 158 and 175, viii. 
p. 367). Cf. Walter, Codex in Suida mendax de Jesu, Lips., 1724. 


(ἀρχηγός) named ‘Theodosios, a personage well known to many Christians 
and alsotothe Emperor. He was urged to convert himself by a Christian 
called Philippos, an agent of the imperial mint (apyvpomparns), but 
declined, for purely secular reasons. He confessed, though, that he was 
convinced of the truth of the Christian persuasion, because, like many 
other leading Jews, he knew the following secret. There were (at the 
time of Jesus) twenty-two 1 priests attached to the temple of Jerusalem, 
and their names were found in a certain list which the author, with a 
gross anachronism, calls a κώδιξ, together with their genealogies. When- 
ever one of the twenty-two departed this life, the Synhedrion chose 
another. On such an occasion the name of Jesus was proposed by a 
priest : some said of him that he was not of the tribe of Levi, but of the 
tribe of Juda, and therefore, since he was apparently not of Levitic 
lineage, they would not have him become a priest. To which the first 
priest replies: He is of mixed genealogy. In ancient times there was 
an intermarriage between the two tribes,* and that is where Joseph is 
descended. To find out the genealogy of Jesus, the assembly cites the 
parents, but finds out that Joseph has died. However, Mary duly appears 
and testifies under oath the supernatural conception of Jesus and the 
virgin birth. Since the worthy fathers still entertain some doubts (not 
unnaturally under the circumstances), they also have the midwife appear 
before them, who, fortunately still alive, is not slow in confirming the 
statements of Mary in every particular. Thereupon Jesus is forthwith 
appointed priest, and his genealogy, both the celestial and the terrestrial, 
is duly entered into the κὠδιξ, which at the destruction of the temple 
was carried to Tiberias and is still kept there under Jewish guard. ‘The 
good Philippos wants to inform Justinian of these highly interesting 
facts, but is persuaded by Theodosios of the uselessness of such a step : 
‘‘a great war would be the consequence and murder would follow,” a 
phrase which lets the cat out of the bag, putting the story in a period 
posterior to 640, when Palestine was in the hands of the Saracens and a 
crusade would have been required to fetch the mysterious κὠώδιξ. Whilst 
Justinian is thus deprived of this entertaining story, Philippos cannot 
help communicating it at least to many of his acquaintances and friends. 
From them our author got it. Anxious to find out whether this Jew 
has spoken the truth, he opens his Josephus and there finds the state- 
ment that ‘‘Jesus did (indeed) officiate as a priest in the temple of 
Jerusalem.” ’ 


Irom this context it follows clearly that the absurd tale was invented 
to refute two things, namely (1), the Jewish assertion that Jesus was 
a bastard,’ and (2), that he illegally assumed to himself priestly rights 
and privileges. For, quite naturally, the son of Jahveh and a woman of 
Levitic descent, the foster-son of a presumed half-Levite, was fully 
entitled to the priestly service in Jerusalem! The tale was therefore 
made up in a period when the Byzantine orthodoxy had to combat the 
Josephinists who used Josephus’ historical works to find arguments 
against the orthodox Christology. 


1 A confusion with the twenty-two members of the local synhedria (Josephus, 
Ant., iv. 8. 14; B.J., 11. 20. 5). 7 

2 Cf. Luke iii. 24: the ‘son of Levi’ in Jesus’ genealogy. 

3 Jebhamoth, iv. 13, fol. 49a; cf. 49b, Dalman in App., p. 7, to H. Laible, 
Jesus Christus im Talmud, Leipzig, 1900, p. 31. 

4 Cf. Luke i. 5. 


THE MESSIAH JESUS 


APPENDIX XXIV 


JOSEPHUS ON THE INTERPRETATION OF THE Suiio ORACLE, 
Gen. xlix. Io. 


Polemos vi. 5, 4. 


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624 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


APPENDIX XXV 
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY OF THE SLAVONIC JOSEPHUS PROBLEM 


Andrej N. Popov,! A Survey of the Chronographers, compiled in Russian, 
Moscow, 1866, pp. 130, 134, 139 (Russ. title above, p. 113 ἢ. 3). 
Ismail Ivanovic Sreznévski,? Reports and Remarks concerning little- 
known or unknown Literary Texts, Supplement to vol. xx. part iv. of 
the Memozrs of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg, 

1879, p. 143 ff. (Russ. title above, p. 113 n. 4). 

Michail Prince Obolenski, Azsals of the Moscow Society for the History 
and Antiquities of Russia, vol. ix., Moscow, 1851 (Russ.). 

Gorski and Nevostrujev, Lectures delivered before the Imperial Society for 
the History and Antiquities of Russia, Moscow, 1886, vol.i. pp. 111-114. 

N. Bonwetsch in Harnack-Preuschen, Geschichte der altchristlichen 
Literatur bis Eusebius, vol. i., Leipzig, 1893, p. 917. 

C. Destinon, praefatio to the Bell. Jud. in Niese’s Josephus, ed. maior, 
vol. vi., Berlin, 1894, p. xxii, quoting from a letter of E. G. Gleye. 
Cf. Gleye’s essay ‘Zum Slav. Malalas,’ Arch. f. slav. Philologie, xvi., 
1894, P. 579. 

Alexander Berendts,? Die Zeugnisse vom Christentum in slavischen ‘De 
Bello Judaico’ des Josephus, in O. v. Gebhard and A. v. Harnack, 
Texte und Untersuchungen, vol. xiv. part i., Leipzig, 1906. 

Berendts’ book was reviewed by :— 
Emil Schiirer, Theolog. Literaturzeitung, xxxi., 1906, p. 262 ff. 
Abbé Lejay, Revue critique d’Histoire et de Littévature, ii., 1906, 
Ρ. 147. | oy 
Jean Réville, Revue del’ Histoire des Religions, liv., 1906, p. 151. 
Father Adhémar d’Alés, ‘Etudes,’ Revue des Péres de la Com- 
pagme de Jésus, vol. cxil., p. 553. 
Reinhold Seeberg, Reformation, 1906, No. 19 f.4 
O. Holtzmann, Deutsche Literaturzettung, 1907, col. 588. 
W. Bousset, Theolog. Rundschau, x., 1907, p. 297. 
H. Jordan, Theolog. Literaturblatt, 1907, col. 511. 
G. Hoennicke, Deutsche Literaturzeitung, 1907, col. 1037. 
Adolph von Harnack, the editor of Berendts’ publication, has 
preserved absolute silence about the whole problem ever since 
1906. 

‘ The discoverer of the Slavonic Book of Enoch, assistant-professor at the 
Lazarev Institute of Oriental Languages in Moscow, born 27th October 1841 in 
the county of Tambov, died 30th May 1881 during a journey to the Crimea. Sce 
his portrait on our Pl. xva. 

2 Compiler of a famous three-volume dictionary of the Old Russian versions 
of Early Christian authors. On the basis of his collections of Greco-Russian 
equivalents, a retroversion of the Slavonic Josephus into Greek can be successfully 
attempted wherever it seems necessary in order to ascertain the genuine words of 
the lost original. Sreznévski was born on Ist June (old style) 1812 in Jaroslav] ; 
died 9th February 1880, as a Fellow of the Russian Academy of Science. See his 
portrait on our Pl. xvb. 3. See his portrait on our Pl. xvia. 


1 Reprinted in Von Christus und dem Chyristentum, Gr.-Lichterfelde—Berlin, 
1908, 


APPENDICES 625 


Alexander Berendts, ‘Analecta zum slavischen Josephus,’ Zeitschrift 
fiir neutestamentliche Wissenschaft, 1908, pp. 47-70. 

Alexander Berendts, ‘ Die altesten ausser-christlichen Nachrichten iiber 
die Entstehung des Christentums,’ M itteilungen und Nachrichten 
fiir die evang. Kirche in Russland, Lheologisch-Pastorales, Beihefte, 
vol. Ixii., Nov. 1910, pp. 157-73. 

Alexander Berendts, ‘Spuren des slav. Josephus in der altkirchlichen 
Literatur,’ in the same periodical, vol. lxiv., Sept.-Nov. IgII, pp. 
127-70. 

Johannes Frey, Die Probleme der Leidensgeschichte Jesu, part 1., Leipzig, 
1907, p. 35 ff. Reviewed by W. Bousset, Theolog. Rundschau, 1907, 
Ρ. 297. 

Johannes Frey, Der slavische Josephusbericht tiber die urchyistliche 
Geschichte nebst seinen Parallelen kritisch untersucht, Dorpat, 1908, 
extracted from Acta et Commentationes Universitatis Jurjewiensis- 
Dorpatensis, 1908. Reviewed by A. Steinmann, Theologische Revue, 
X., IQIO, p. 510. 

W. Bousset, Theolog. Rundschau, xiii., 1910, p. 438; Lheologie und 
Glaube, ii., 1910, p. 414 f.; Revue Internationale de Théologie, xvii., 
IQIo. 

Vincente Ussani, ‘ Questioni Flaviane,’ Rivista di Ftlologia, XXxviii., 
1910, p. I ff. (see also above, p. 62 n. 1). 

Berendts’ translations have been reprinted by Erich Klostermann in 
Lietzmann’s Kleinen Texten, No. 11, Bonn a. Rh., 1011. 

Augustin Goethals, Mélanges d'Histoire du Christianisme :— 

I. Joséphe témoin de Jésus, Paris (Fischbacher), 1909 ; reviewed 
by W. Soltau, Berliner philol. Wochenschrift, xxvii., r910, 
No. 24, pp. 662 ff. 
II. Jean, précurseur de Jésus, ibid., 191 ; reviewed by Eberh. 
Nestle, Berliner philol. Wochenschrift, 1912. 
III. Jésus ἃ Jérusalem, ibid., 1912. 
IV. Le Pseudo-Joséphe, ibid., 1914. 
Shirley Jackson Case, The Historicity of Jesus, Chicago, 1915, p. 250. 


1014-101ὃ 
Inter arma silent musae 


H. St. J. Thackeray, Selections from Josephus, London and New York, 
1919, pp. 189 ff. 

Vasilij N. Istrin, Essays presented to Lapunov, Ucenje Zapiski of the 
Municipal University of Odessa, Sect. Sc. hum. et soc., vol. ii., 1921, 
pp. 27-40 (Russ.). 

Following a hint of Dr. Moses Gaster, G. R. S. Mead published in 
The Quest, vol. xv., July 1924, pp. 457-79, an article, ‘ The Slavonic 
Josephus Account of the Baptist and Jesus,’ reprinted on pp. 97-119 
of his book, The Gnostic John the Baptizer, London (Watkins), 1924. 
While preparing this article, my old friend had asked me to look up 
for him the German literature published since Berendts and Frey. 
The exceedingly disappointing result of the bibliographical research 

2R 


626 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


which I then undertook at Mr. Mead’s request caused me to take up 
the problem myself. I had previously quoted the Slavonic Josephus 
in an essay on John the Baptist (reprinted, Orpheus the Fisher, London, 
1921, p. 1339), following Martin Dibelius, Die urchristl. Ueberlieferung 
iiber Johannes d. Téufer, Gottingen, I91I1, pp. 126, and 127g, 3-129, 
without having made an independent investigation of the subject. 

The first attempt of my own to grapple with the problem was a 
lecture before the Anglo-Palestinian Club in Jews’ College, London, 
in the beginning of December 1924. This paper is in the main iden- 
tical with my essay— 

Robert Eisler, ‘The Newly Rediscovered Witness of Josephus to 
Jesus,’ The Quest, vol. xvi., No. 1, Oct. 1925, pp. I-15. On page 16 of 
the same number begins an article on another subject by ‘ D.D., Th.D.’ 
Vacher Burch, who in his subsequent publications claimed and still 
claims to have discovered and to have prepared the publication of an 
early South-Slavonic (that is, Bulgarian) Josephus MS., unknown to 
the Slavonic scholars of the whole world. 

My essay was criticized by A. Marmorstein, “Some Remarks on the 
Slavonic Josephus,’ The Quest, vol. xvii., 1926. 

In September 1925 followed Robert Eisler, “Das wiederentdeckte 
echte Josephuszeugnis tiber Jesus,’ lecture at the 55th Assembly of 
German Philologists and Teachers, Erlangen, 29th Sept. 1925. (See 
Transactions of this Congress, published by Teubner, Leipzig, 1925, 
p. 58.) An analytic and comparative tabulation of the various texts 
was printed and distributed among the audience. Cf. Klio, Bettrage 2. 
alt. Geschichte, xx. 4, 1926, pp. 494 ff. 

This lecture was reported and analysed by :— 

Franz Kampers, Sunday Suppl. to Miinchner neueste Nach- 
vichten, Jg. vi., 14th Oct. 1925; Histor. Jahrbuch d. Gorresgesellschaft, 
vol. xlv. 4, pp. 558-65. 

C. F. Lehmann-Haupt, Frankfurter Zeitung, 1925, second morning 
edition of the 13th, 15th, and 17th of December. (french transl. 
by Salomon Reinach, Revue Archéol., 1926, pp. 322-8.) Cf. Salomon 
Reinach, Revue critique d'Histoire et de Littévature, 15th Dec. 1925, 
pp. 434 ff. 

Dietlef Nielsen, ‘ Nyt Oldtidsdokument om Jesus,’ Polttiken, 21st 
Dec. 1925. 

L. Wohleb, ‘ Das Alteste nichtchristliche Zeugnis tiber Jesus, der 
slavische Josephusbericht,’ in the Catholic daily paper Germania, 3rd 
March 1926. 

Edgar Salin, Civitas Dei, Tiibingen, 1926, p. 224 (very important). 

Father Hermann Dieckmann, Zeitschrift f. kathol. Theologie, Inns- 
bruck, 1926, p. 463-75. 

Te paper in The Quest of 1925 provoked what I am tempted to 
call the 


Strange Interlude 


Vacher Burch, ‘ A Remarkable Discovery concerning Jesus Christ,’ 
Diocese of Liverpool Review, No. 1, April 1926. Reviewed by Canon 
Prof. G. A. Box, The Observer, London, 11th April 19206. 


APPENDICES 627 


Mr. Vacher Burch gave an interview on the subject to The Times, 
London, 13th April 1926, and a letter (14th April 1926) to the editor of 
that paper. 

The readers were immediately reminded by Father Herbert 
Thurston, S.J., in a letter to the editor of The Times, 14th April 1926, 
of the famous discovery of the Livy MSS. in Naples; see also 
Salomon Reinach, letter to the editor of The Times, 17th April 1926, 
and Robert Eisler, letter to the editor of The Times, 17th April 1926. 

An excellent résumé was given by Father Herbert Thurston, S.J., 
‘ The Testimony of Josephus to Christ,’ in the Eccles. Review, vol. Ixx. 
pp. 6-16, Philadelphia, July 1926. Nevertheless, another article of 
Mr. Vacher Burch appeared in the Diocese of Liverpool Review, No. 2, 
June 1926, announcing the impending publication of his book. 

Vacher Burch, Jesus Christ and his Revelation : Fresh Evidence from 
Christian Sources and Josephus, London, 1927, p. 153 ff. 

On all these publications see vol. i. pp. 196 ff. of the German edition 
of this book. 


Then followed my lectures on the 13th of January 1926 in the 
Société des Etudes Juives in Paris ; on the 17th of January 1926 in the 
Société Ernest Renan ; on the 28th of June 1926 in the Paris Académie 
des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres, printed in the Revue de l’ Histoire des 
Religions, 1920, pp. 1-21. Robert Eisler, Jésus d’aprés la version Slave 
de Flavius Joséphe (in German, Neue Frete Presse, Vienna, 20th May, 
16th and 17th June 1926). Cf. Robert Eisler, ‘Wie hat Jesus aus- 
gesehen ? ’, fvankfurter Zeitung, ist July 1926. 


Reviewed by Hans Lietzmann, ‘Wie hat Jesus ausgesehen ?’, 
Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 18th July 1926. 

Paul Schmiedel, ‘ Ein neuer Beweis fiir die geschichtliche Existenz 
Jesu ?’, Neue Ziiricher Zeitung, 1926, 22nd Aug. 1926. 

Robert Eisler, ‘ Nochmals das Josephuszeugnis iiber Jesus,’ ibid., 
16th Sept. 1926. Reply by Schmiedel, zbzd. 

J. P. Arendzen, ‘The Russian Josephus,’ Dublin Review, July- 
August-September 1926, pp. 86-106. 

H. v. Soden, Chrisiliche Welt, 21st Oct. 1926, cols. 1031 f. 

Monseign. Pierre Battifol, ‘Un prétendu texte nouveau de Joséphe 
sur Jésus,’ Vie Catholique (suppl. ‘ Vie scientifique ’), 30th Oct. 1926. 

Biblica, 1926, pp, 230 ff. Verbum Domini, 1926, p. Tor. 

Abbé G. Bardy, ‘Le témoignage de Joséphe Slave,’ Revue Apolo- 
gétique, t. xlill. pp. 344-53. 

L. Wohleb, “ Zum literarischen Portrait Jesu,’ l’rankfurter Zeulung, 
2gth July 1926. ‘Zum slavischen Bellum Judaicum des Flavius Jose- 
phus,’ Philologische Wochenschrift, 18th Dec. 1926, cols. 1401-3. 

Objections by Paul-Louis Couchoud, ‘Les textes relatifs 4 Jésus 
dans la version Slave de Joséphe,’ and by Prof. Maurice Goguel, ‘ Le 
témoignage de la version Slave de la Guerre Juive,’ appeared in the 
Revue de l’Histotre des Religions, 1926, pp. 22-34 and 44-64. My 
detailed answer to these objections is printed in vol. i. pp. 165-95 of 
the German edition of this book. 

In the course of 1926-7 appeared the great posthumous work of 


628 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


Alexander Berendts, Flavius Josephus vom jiidischen Krieg, Buch 1.-iv., 
nach der slavischen Uebersetzung deutsch herausgegeben, und mit dem 
griechischen Text verglichen von Mag. Theol. Konrad Grass (f 25th 
Nov. 1927), Dorpat, 1924 (printed in instalments until the end of Nov. 
1927). It was first utilized by Martin Dibelius, Urchristliche Geschichte 
und Weltgeschichte, Theologische Blatter, Aug. 1927, cols. 220-4. 

Hugh Schonfield, ‘ Jottings on the Slavonic Josephus,’ The Quest, 
vol. xvill., 1927, pp. 133-9. 

On the 21st and 22nd April 1927 I delivered two lectures, ἡ L’état 
présent de la question du Joséphe Slave,’ and ‘Les origines de la 
traduction Slave de Flavius Joséphe et l’hérésie joséphiniste,’ to the 
Congrés d’Histoire du Christianisme (Jubilé Alfred Loisy), and to the 
first Congrés Francais des Sciences historiques. They are printed in 
French, vol. i. of the Annales d’ Histoire du Christianisme, Paris (Rieder) 
and Amsterdam (van Holkema and Warendorf’s), 1927, pp. 99-113, 
and Revue des Etudes Slaves, vol. vii. 1/2, 1927, pp. 63-74; in English 
in The Quest, vol. xix., Oct. 1928, pp. I-19, and vol. xx., Jan. 1929, 
pp. 148-60. 

1927 saw the publication of Dr. H. St. J. Thackeray's Introduction 
to the Jewish War in vol. ii. of his Josephus edition and translation in 
the Loeb Classical Library. The author has honoured me by quoting 
and incorporating some of my main results in his account of ‘ the Old 
Russian Version’ (p. x ff.). Vol. iii,, 1928, gives on pp. 635-58, in 
English, ‘the principal additional passages in the Slavonic Version,’ 
with valuable explanatory notes and a list of ‘ omissions in the Slavonic 
Version,’ books i. and iv., on p. 659 f. 

All these publications were ignored by Solomon Zeitlin, ‘ The Christ 
Passage in Josephus,’ Jewish Quarterly Review, vol. xviii., Jan. 1928. 
He still criticized—two years after I had modified and even abandoned 
it—an earlier hypothesis of mine concerning an Aramean exemplar of 
the Russian text. 

A rectification of the numerous misstatements of facts in both 
this paper and the following one (Solomon Zeitlin, “The Slavonic 
Josephus and its relation to Josippon and Hegesippus,’ Jewish 
Quarterly Review, July 1929, pp. 1-50, reproducing lectures read before 
the 17th International Congress of Orientalists in Oxford, 2gth August 
1928, and before the Biblical Society, New York, 27th December 
1928) will be found in my article, ‘Flavius Josephus on Jesus called 
the Christ,’ in the Jewish Quarterly Review, July 1930. 

A paper dated November 1928, ‘Josephus and Christian Origins,’ 
was published by Dr. Joshua Bloch in the Journal of the Soctety 
Oriental Research, vol. xiii. No. 3, July 1929, pp. 130-54. Pp. 143 ff. 
are devoted to ‘ The Slavonic Josephus.’ I shall reply in the same 
periodical. 

In 1928-9 appeared, in instalments, the German edition of this book, 
THSOY> ΒΑΣΙΛΕῪΣ OY BASIAEYDAD, Die Messianische Unabhangig- 
heitsbewegung vom Auftreten Johannes des Taufers bis zum Untergang 
Jakob des Gerechten. Nach der neuerschlossenen Evoberung von Jeru- 
salem des Flavius Josephus und den christlichen Quellen, etc., Winter, 
Heidelberg. It has been reviewed, so far, by :-— 


APPENDICES | 629 


Ernesto Buonaiuti, ‘La Rivoluzione di Gesu,’ Ricerche Religiose, 
1928, No. 5, pp. 442-5. 

Hans Windisch, Theologische Rundschau, Neue Folge i., Heft 4, 
pp. 275 f., 280-7. 

Maurice Goguel, Revue d’Histoire et de Philosophie Religieuse, viii., 
No. 4, Strasbourg, July-August 1928, pp. 374 ff. Cp. Maurice 
Goguel, ‘Un nouveau témoignage non-chrétien sur la tradition 
évangelique selon M. Eisler,’ Revue d'Histoire des Religions, 
xcvill., July-Decembre 1928, pp. I-42. 

W. Emery Barnes, Journal of Theological Studies, Oct. 1928, pp. 66-8. 

L. Wohleb, Rémische Quartalschrift, 1929, pp. 179 1. 

Abbé Gustave Bardy, ‘ M. Eisler et le témoignage de Joséphe sur 
Jésus,’ La Vie Intellectuelle, ii., 15th April 19209. 

Reply, zb1d., 15th June 1929, pp. 1163-71: Robert Eisler, 
‘M.l’Abbé Gustave Bardy et les recherches récentes concernant 
le témoignage de Joséphe sur Jésus.’ 

Walter Windfuhr, Philologische Wochenschrift, 1929, No. 7/8, 
pp. 207 ff.; 1930, No. 47, cols. 1421-1427. 

Robert Stahl et P. L. Couchoud, Mercure de France, iv., 1929, 

_Bp. 194 f. κω | 

Aimé Puech, Revue de Philologie, 1929, pp. 217 ff. and 426 ff. 

G. R. 5. Mead, ‘A New Quest of the Jesus of History,’ The Quest, 
vol. xxi., Oct. 1929, pp. 13-34. 

Salomon Reinach, ‘ Jean Baptiste et Jésus suivant Joséphe,’ Revue 
des Etudes Juives, 1929, pp. 113-30. 

Father M.-J. Lagrange, ‘ Jean-Baptiste et Jésus d’aprés le texte 
slave du livre de la Guerre des Juifs de Joséphe,’ Revue Biblique, 
ΧΧΧΙΧ., 1930, pp. 29-46. I shall reply in the same quarterly, 

A. D. Nock, The Classical Review, Dec. 1929, pp. 223 ff. 

G. A. van den Bergh van Eysinga, Nieuw Theologisch Tijdschrift, 
1929, afl. 4, pp. 360 ff. 

Burton Scott Easton, Anglican Theological Review, 1930, pp. 
325-328. 

L’Amu du Clergé, 1929, xlvi. No. 27, p. 420, pretends that I ‘have 
been obliged to admit having been mystified, as Berendts had 
been before me’! I am not aware of having said or written 
anything to that effect ; still—sciendum in sacris simulata pro veris 
acctpt (Servius, ad Aen., 11. 116). 

Maurice Goguel, ‘ Jésus et le Messianisme Politique, Examen de la 
théorie de M. Robert Eisler,’ Revue Historique, t. clxii., 1929, 
Paris, 1930, pp. I-53. A detailed reply will appear in the same 
volume. Maurice Goguel, ‘Les Théories de M. Robert Eisler,’ 
Revue d'Histoire et de Philosophie Religieuse, x., 1930, Strasbourg, 
pp- 177-90. My reply in the same volume. 

Hans Lewy, Deutsche Litteraturzeitung, 3rd ser. vol. i. No. It, 
15th March 1930, cols. 481-94. A detailed reply will appear in 
French in the Revue Archéologique, and in German in Prof. Milos 
Weingart’s review, Byzantino-Slavica, 1930. 

Georg Wunderle, Litterarischer Handweiser, published by Herder 
& Co., Freiburg i. B., 1929-30, pp. 650-54. 


630 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


Dr. Moses Gaster is preparing an extensive review for the Monais- 
schrift frir Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judentums. 

Walter Bauer, Theologische Litteraturzeitung, 1930, No. 24, 22nd 
Nov., cols. 556-563. 

A paper of mine, ‘La chronologie de Jean Baptiste et de Jésus dans 
Matthieu, dans Luc, et dans Flavius Joséphe,’ about Mati. i. 22, 
ili, I, placing the appearance of John the Baptist under Archelaus, 
even as the Slavonic Josephus, will appear in the next number of the 
Revue Archéologique. Another one in Byzantino-Slavica, Oct. 1930. 


LN DEXA 


(1) AUTHORITIES 


Abraham ibn Daid, 76, 98 

Abram, Nicolas, 41 

Abravanel, Isaac, 39, 201 

Alciphron, 56 

Alexander, Natalis, 554 

Ali ben Ahmad Abn Muhammed ibn 
Hasm, 99 

Alphandéry, Paul, 165 

Amman, Johann Jacob, 433 

Anastasius Bibliothecarius, 395 

Andrew of Crete, 383, 393 sq., 397, 412, 
416, 420, 519, 541 

Antisthenes of Rhodes, 563 

Antonius Julianus, 12 

Apuleius of Bordeaux, 14 

‘Aqiba, R., 8, 236, 589, 593 

Aristotle, 586 

Arnold, Christian, 41 

Arnold, Christoph, 493 

Aufhauser, Johannes, 58, 592 

Augustine, Saint, 10, 335, 342, 436 sq. 


Bacher, W., 347, 500 

Baeyer, Hans v., 416 

Baeyer, Walter v., 417 

Bakhuizen, J. N., 571 

Barnes, W. E., 116 

Baronius, Cardinal, 36 sq., 71, 93 

Bauer, Walter, 400, 483 

Bell, Idris, 126, 536 

Benesevié, V. N., 148 

Berendts, Alexander, 3, 79 sq., 113 sqq., 
I1Q, I2I sg., 140, 147, 164, 218, 223, 
245, 288 sq., 382, 388, 392, 459 sqq., 
465, 468, 505, 510 sq., 531, 538, 548 

Bernays, Jacob, 552 

Berndt von Arnim, I15 

Berossus, 241 sq., 277, 279 

Bevan, E. R., 519 

Bickell, Gustav, 524 

Billerbeck, Paul, 507 

Blakiston, Alban, 270 

Bloch, Marc, 329 

Boll, F., 296 

Bonwetsch, N., 113, 624 

Bousset, Wilhelm, 10, 243, 302, 453 

Brandt, W., 231, 235, 241, 244, 249, 
269, 271, 484 

Bruns, Ivo, 454 

Bubnov, N., 115 

Burkitt, F. C., 30, 45, 298 

Burney, C. F., 133, 174 

Butler, 326 


Caldara, Alessandra, 398 
Calpurnius, 341 
Casaubonus, Isaac, 93, 96 
Celsus, 340, 351, 407, 437, 


574 
Cerfaux, Lucien, 321, 520 


Ceriani, A. M., 76 
Chaeremon, 241 
Chapman, 1). J., 312 
Charles, R. H., 343 
Cheyne, T. K., 471, 478, 615 
Cicero, 455, 459 Sq., 469, 559 
Clement of Alexandria, 52, 
541 sq., 609 
Clermont-Ganneau, 517, 583 
Clerq, Jean, 91 
Cloppenburgh, John, 89 
Constantine Porphyrogenitus, 383, 461, 


450, 538, 


103, 405, 


472 
Conybeare, F. C., 79, 592 
Corssen, Peter, 65 
Couchoud, Paul-Louis, 152 


Dalman, G. H., 471 

Deissman, Adolf, 407, 474, 483, 517 

Descartes, René, 4 

Dibelius, Martin, 64 

Dieckmann, Hermann, 525 

Dio Cassius, 12, 557, 505 

Dobschiitz, Ernst v., 22, 380, 392, 
394 sqq., 398, 401, 414, 416, 420 sqq., 
436, 438, 447, 454, 401, 617 

Dougall, ΤΥ 341 

Doughty, C. M., 326, 328, 333 sq. 

Drews, Arthur, 6, 241 

Drower, E. S., 235 

Dupuis, C. I’., 241 


Einssler, 413 

’Eli‘ezer Ὁ. Hyrkanos, 8, 593 

Ephrem Syrus, 415 

Epiphanius, 140, 324, 390, 397 5qq., 
407, 492, 519, 541 544., 540, 550 

Epiphanius Monachus, 414 

Erman, A., 559 

Eunapius, 12, 66 

Eusebius, 9, 15 sqq., 21, 29, 36, 38, 46 
56., 52, 142, 144, 167, 297, 302, 314, 
316, 322, 370, 383, 459, 465, 482, 525, 
532, 541, 540 

Euthymius of Zygabene, 168 

Ewald, Heinrich, 424 


631 


632 


Farissol, R. Abraham Ὁ. Mordekhai, go, 
IIt 

Frazer, Sir James George, 295, 329 

Frey, Johannes, 129, 153 sq., 250, 257, 
289, 382, 538 

First, J., 398, 454 


Gall, A. v., 242, 497 

Gardthausen, Viktor, 330 

Gaster, Moses, 80, 164, 273, 310, 336, 
378, 401, 499, 597 

Gaster, Theodore, 236, 238, 295, 332, 
408, 434, O15 

Geftcken, Johannes, 345 

Gelzer, H., 83, 106 

Gerlach, O., 554 

Ghillany, F. W., 436 

Giphanius, Hubertus, 40 

Giraldus Cambrensis, 39, 71, 93 

Goethals, Augustin, 382, 505, 549 

Goetz, G., 500 Σ 

Goguel, Maurice, 64, 150, 246, 249, 298, 


487 

Goldschmidt, L., 32 

Gradenwitz, O., 398 

Graf, Arturo, 598 

Grass, Konrad, 80, 115, 155, 392, 531 
Grégoire, H., 571 

Grotius, Hugo, 324 

Gwatkin, H. M., 16 


Halévy, Joseph, 361 

Harnack, A. v., 3, II, 45, 288 

Harris, J. Rendel, 28, 55, 253, 298, 310, 
415, 449 

Hasebroek, J., 398 

Heberdey, R., 571 

Hegel, G. W. F., 488 

Hegesippus, 142, 322, 518 sq., 541 sqq., 
553, 581 

Heitmiiller, W., 542 

Herford, R. Travers, 8, 98, 583, 592 sg. 

Hesychios, 234 

Hill, G. F., 414 

Hippolytus, bishop of Rome, 72, 75 

Hirschfeld, O., 596 

Hdlscher, Gustav, 136, 203 

Hohl’ E,, 12, 96 

Horace, 209, 560 

Horodezky, S., 337 

Huber, Charles, 333 

Huet, Pierre-Daniel, bishop of Av- 
ranches, 93, 554 


Ideler, Ludwig, 296 

Ignatius, 13 

Isaac Hilarius-Gaudentius, 29, 31, 37, 
75, 88, 92, 96 

Isidore Pelusiotes, 73 

Isidore of Seville, 449 

Istrin, V. N., 115, 148, 163, 170 


THE MESSIAH JESUS 


Jacob of Kephar Sekhanjah, 8, 20, 593 

Jacobus de Voragine, 95, 344, 413 

Jahn, W., 517 

James, E. H., 331 

James, M. R., 245, 310 sq., 352, 386, 
401 Sg., 439 54., 484 

Jeanmaire, H., 292, 563 

Jerahm’el b. Shelomo, 83, 94 sq., 105, 
110 

Jeremias, J., 274, 609 

Jerome, Saint, 18, 28 sq., 54, 67, 94 sqq., 
110 54., 140, 233, 315 Sq., 421, 477, 
519, 541, 550, 560 

John Philoponos, 72 

John of Damascus, 72, 394 

Josephus Flavius, 5, 7, 10, 183 sqq., 211, 
265 sq. 

Julian of Ascalon, 414 

Julius Africanus, Sextus, 86, 106, 160, 
178, 251, 298 

Juster, Jean, 246, 617 

Justinus, 14 sq., 51, 166, 399, 450, 455 

Justus of Tiberias, 5, 12, 23 sq., 28, 86, 
106, 131, 185, 192, 195, 211, 582 


Kampers, Franz, 558 

Kastner, K., 474 

Keim, Theodor, 293, 478 

Kennett, R. H., 235 

Kepler, Johann, 297 

Klausner, Joseph, 8, 18, 264, 301, 389, 
471, 593 

Klostermann, Erich, 139, 288 

Kohler, W., 380 

Kohler, Kaufmann, 242, 244 sq. 

Kotteck, C., 75 sq. 

Krauss, Sam., 99, 107, 112 

Krenkel, 30 

Kuhn, G., 609 


Lagarde, Paul, 267 

Laible, H., 593, 621 

Lake, Kirsopp, 518 

Langen, Joseph, 554 

Laqueur, Richard, 30, 40, 82, 119, 128, 
134, 183 sq., I91, 193 sq., 207, 212 sq., 
215 

Le Blant, E., 14 

Leclerq, W., 53, 443 

Lefevre, Tannéguy, 41 sq., 51, 144 

Leroy-Beaulieu, Anatole, 155 

Lévy, I., 322, 340, 525 

Lidzbarski, M., 231 sq., 237 

Liempt, L. van, 55 sqq. 

Lietzmann, Hans, 76, 300 

Linck, Kurt, 58, 72 

Loisy, A., 571 

Lucian of Antioch, 473 

Lucian of Samosata, 9, 11, 51, 66, 332, 
493, 443, 440, 549 

Lucretius, 559 

Lusitano, Abraham Zacuto, 41, 51 

Lusitanus, Rabbi. See Lusitano. 


INDEX 


| Petrus Siculus, 167 sq. 


Macalister, R. A. S., 234 
Maimuni, 485 

Malalas, 118, 142, 383, 453, 461 
Marcianus, 469 

Marcion, 151, 338 
Margoliouth, George, 254 
Marmorstein, A., 300, 428, 456 
Martel, Antoine, 115 
Mayer-Lambert, 490 

Mazon, André, 115 

Mead, G. R. S., 98, 244 sq., 593 
Memelsdorff, Max, 14, 202 
Menahem, R., 332, 337 
Mérimée, Prosper, 450 


Meyer, Eduard, 207, 299 sqq., 322, 585 | 


Meyer, P. M., 403 
Michel, E., 433 

Migne, Abbé, 432 
Miklosié, Franz, 216 sq. 
Minucius Felix, 9 
Misener, Geneva, 398 
Mitteis-Wilcken, 398, 444 


Mommsen, Theodor, 118, 460, 468, 517, | 


617 
Monceaux, P., 1 
Montague, Richard, 54 
Montgomery, W., 271, 576 
Mosconi, R. Judah Leon b. Mosheh, 97 
Moses of Khorni, 144, 167 
Miiller, G. A., 55, 57, 438 
Miller, Johannes, 41 
Musil, Alois, 239 


Naber, Samuel, 181, 247 

Natronai, Gaon R., 337 
Neppi-Modona, A., 13 

Nestle, E., 478 

Newman, L. J., 165, 401 

Nicephorus Callistou, 394 54., 414, 422, 


448 

Nicolas de Lyra, 162 sq. 

Nicolaus of Damascus, 27, 136 sqq., 171, 
179, 202 sq., 565 

Nielsen, D., 243 

Niese, B., 22, 42, 58, 68, 246, 531, 609 

Néldeke, Th., 75 sq., 134 

Norden, Eduard, 38, 41 sqq., 52, 54 Sq., 
72, 75, 288, 609 


Obolenski, Prince Michail, 115, 624 

Oppenheim, Max Freiherr von, 326, 344 

Origen, 31, 38, 45 sqq., 51, 75, ΤΟΙ, 110, 
ΣΑΙ, 143 Sg., 151, 167, 233, 261, 279, 
305, 314 54., 381, 406, 436 sqq., 450, 
465, 475, 486, 500, 527, 597, 604, 607 

Osiander, Lucas, 40 

Ovid, 89, 341 


Papa, R., 323 

Papias, 28, 55, 94, 370, 504, 542 
Peraxylos Arlen, 34 

Peterson, E., 235, 245 

Petrus Hegumenus, 168 


_ Philo of Alexandria, 5, 


| Photius, 8, 12, 144 sq., 


633 


Pettazzoni, R., 267 

Pharr, Clyde, 89, 324 

23, 26, 65, 109, 
204, 226, 249, 256, 295, 310, 314, 386, 
390, 436, 533 54., 576 

Phlegon of Thralles, 297 sqq., 527, 563 

152, 167 sq., 401, 

421 


| Pieper, W., 333, 344 


Pierling, Paul, 450 


Plautus, 432 


Pliny the Younger, 9, 134, 202 sq., 270, 
540, 613 sq. 
ee 359, 419, 454 54. 
Popov, Alexander N., 79 
Popov, Andrej N., 113, 624 
Porphyry, II, 594 
Poznanski, Adolf, 261, 499 
Praxek, J. V., 450 
Preisigke, F., 591 
Preuschen, E., 452 sq., 483 
Priscillian, 449 


_Radermacher, L., 475 


Rambaud, 14 


Ranke, Leopold v., 45 


Reinach, Salomon, 35, 90, 180, 244, 298, 
369, 604 


| Reinach, Théodore, 35, 46, 53, 57 Sq., 


71, 114, 224, 381, 604 


| Reitzenstein, Richard v., 9, 231, 242, 


410 
Remy, Arthur F. I., 73 
Renan, Ernest, 64, 433 
Resch, Alfred, 83, 258, 332, 339 
Rigault, Nicolas, 431 sqq. 
Robert of Cricklade, 71, 92, 95 
Rohde, E., 398 
Rousseau, J.-J., 5 
Rufinus, presumed 
Josephus, 76 
Ruinart, 14 


translator of 


Sachau, E., 416, 430 

St. Elie, Father, 328, 344, 421, 423 

Salin, Edgar, τὸ 

Sallust, 191 

Scaliger, Joseph, 75, 96 

Schaeder, H. H., 231, 452 

Schechter, Solomon, 254, 575 

Scheftelowitz, I., 352 

Schlatter, A., 465 

Schliemann, Adolph, 338 

Schmiedel, Paul W., 30, 223, 531, 533 

Schnabel, Paul, 241 

Schonfield, Hugh J., 288 

Schiirer, Emil, 18, 49, 152, 246, 248, 
264, 291, 293, 311, 470, 501, 520, 531, 
533, 589 

Schulthess, O., 13 

Schwartz, E., 541 sq., 546, 596 


634 


Schweitzer, Albert, 8, 271, 320 54., 325, 
328 sqq., 361, 366, 417, 430, 436, 490 

Seeberg, R., 129 

Seligmann, S., 413 

Sellin, Ernst, 374 

Selwyn, Carus, 298 

Sidersky, Daniel, 299, 513 

Sievers, E., 445 

Sinclair, A. J., 323 

Sljosberg, H., 149 

Smith, Thomas, 287 

Smith, W. Robertson, 501 

Smolka, F., 398 

Snellius, Sebastianus, 41 

Soden, Hans v., 18, 295 

Sossianus Hierocles, 10 sqq., 363, 370 

Sreznivski, Ismail, 113, 115, 148, 216 
sq., 389, 624 

Steinschneider, M., 199 

Stern, E., 452 

Strauss, D. F., 435 

Suetonius, 204, 414, 450, 454 54., 532, 
558 sq. 

Suidas, 482 sq., 621 sqq. 

Sulpicius Severus, 552, 554 

Synesius of Cyrene, 13 


Tacitus, 6 sq., 9, 19, 47, 55, 94 Sqq., 75, 
102 54., 207, 298, 313, 330, 387 sq., 
450, 495, 528, 532 Sq., 538, 547, 552, 
554, 558, 563, 583, 588 

Tatian, 435, 474 

Tertullian, 4, 9, 14 sqg., ΟἹ, 335, 338, 
399, 406, 411, 414, 430 sqq., 436 sq., 
445, 448, 462, 550 

Thackeray, H. St. John, 22, 57, 80, 170, 
207 Sq., 216, 224, 383 

Thallus, 28, 298 sq. 

Theodore of Mopsuhestia, 415 

Theodorus Anagnostes, 395 

Theophanes, 395 

Theophylactos of Ochrida, 140 sq., 168 

Thomassin, Louis, 433 

Thorpe, Benjamin, 413 


THE MESSIAH JESUS 


Torr, C., 244 
Treumann, R. M., 257 
Tylor, E. B., 379 
Unbegaun, Boris, 115 


Valeton, M. M., 552 


| Vergil, 559, 563 


Vincent of Beauvais, 394, 413 
Volter, D., 288 


_ Volkmar, 571 
Voltaire, 5 


Wagner, Richard, 335 


| Weber, Wilhelm, 88, 215, 411, 552, 550, 


585 
Weidel, Karl, 417 
Weil, Henri, 46, 53 
Weill, Major Raymond, 506 sqgq. 
Weinel, Heinrich, 335 
Weinreich, Otto, 91 
Weiss, Bernhard, 507 
Weiss, Johannes, 3, 
Wellhausen, J., 240, 


547 
Wetzstein, J. G., 326 
Williams, C. A., 239 
Winckler, H., 374 
Windisch, H., 53, 57, 471 
Wittig, Joseph, 31 


260, 354, 471, 


_Wohleb, Leo, 12, 44, 49, 58, 237 


Wohlenberg, G., 306 
Wright, W., 344 
Wuertz, Hans, 420 
Wurm, 297 

Wyck, N. van, 115 
Wyss, Fr. v., 444 


Yaqim, R., 343 
Zeitlin, Solomon, 33, 79, 117, 139, 260 


Zielinski, Th., 207, 589 , 
Zimmern, H., 233 


_Zonaras, John, 72, 383 


(2) SUBJECTS 


Acclamatio, 476 sqq., 515 

Acta Johannis Leucit, 414 

Acta Pilati (genuine), 13, 15, 46, 50, 
52, 56, 73, 80, 164, 219, 302, 313, 399 
Sq., 456, 405 Sq. 

Acta Pilati (apocryphal), 153 sqg., 386 
54., 397, 399, 401, 411, 460, 462 sqq., 
468, 476 sqq. 

Acta sincera, 14, 595 Sq. 

Acts of John, 439 

Acts of Paul and Thekla, 233, 442, 445 
sq., 448 

Acts of Peter, 438 


Acts of Thomas, 415, 448, 451 

Age, golden, 341 

Agrippa Postumus, 330 

Albinus, Lucceius, 211, 289, 526, 543 
Sq., 546, 584, 596 

Alexander the Great, 421, 438 

Alexander Jannai, III sq., 387 

Alexander Severus, 399, 524 

Ananus, a high priest, 543 sqq. 


_ Andrew of Lycia, a pseudo-messiah, 589 


Annius Rufus, 70 


_Antipater, father of Herod Ι., 179, 251 


Antoninus Pius, chronographer of, 465 


INDEX 


Anubis moechus, 91 

Apion, 109 

Apocalypse of Baruch, 434 sq. 

Apocalypse of Daniel, 452 

Apocalypse of Elijah, 452 

Apollonius of Tyana, 556 

Apostles, 349 

Apotheosis, 559 

Archelaus, 69 54., 138, 203, 225 sqq., 
250, 259 sq., 262 sqq., 286, 291, 293, 
303, 307, 319, 481, 487, 502, 505 sq. 

Archives, Roman, 14, 202 sqq., 591 sq., 
613 

Aristobulus, 200 

Arnold, abbot of Citeaux, 401 

Assumption of Moses, 346, 410 

Athronga(s), 47, 105, 264, 566 

Attis, 295 

Augustus, 60 sg., 105, 170 sq., 202 sq., 
223 Sq., 226 sqq., 262 541, 414, 435, 
45°, 455 


Banous, 23 

Baptism, 269 sqq. 

Barabbas, 472 sqq. 

Barjonim, 252 sqq. 

Bar Kokh¢ba, 256, 261, 589 

Bath Qol, 281, 284 sq., 294, 372 
Bedriacum, battle of, 180, 217 
Berenice, mistress of Titus, 211, 231 
Bogomils, 152, 165 

Book of Baruch, 346 

Book of Enoch, 498 

Book of Jubilees, 277, 382 
Byzantine chronographers, 83 sqq. 


Caesarea Philippi, 190, 210, 213, 253, 
315 Sq., 371, 377, 387, 488 

Caiaphas, 18 sq., 485 

Caligula, 65, 67 sq., 96 sqq., IOI sqq., 
107 Sqq., 203 sqq., 229, 289, 291, 312, 
314, 317 Sq., 455, 520, 527 sq., 538, 
555» 578 56. 

Casimir Iv., King of Poland, 156 sq. 

Catullus, Roman governor of Cyrene, 
125 sqq., 368, 402, 501 

Celer, a Roman tribune, 208 sq. 

Censorship, ecclesiastical, 11 sqq., 19, 
31, 38, 57, 66 sqq., 81, 95 sqq.,106, 
167, 223, 594 Sq. 

Cestius, Gallus, Roman governor, 25, 
134, 215 

Chronicon paschale, 119, 141 54., 400, 
596 

Claudius, emperor, 103, 105, 108 sqq., 
205 Sq., 208 sqq., 298, 528, 532, 535, 
537) 552, 555, 573) 579, 581 

Communism, Christian, 573 

Confession, 267 sqq. 

Conflagration, final, 276, 279 

Constantine Copronymus, emperor, 166 

Coponius, Roman governor, 69 sq., 204, 
226, 252, 264, 331, 567 


635 


Crassus, 334 
Cumanus, Ventidius, 208 sqg., 486 sq., 


532, 537, 580 sq. 
Cyrus, 353 


Daniel, 51, 67, 100, 110, 137, 232, 280, 
2806, 309, 312, 316 sqq., 325, 331, 354, 
376, 567, 579, 581 

Date of the death of James the Just, 
590 sq. 

Date of Jesus’ appearance, 312 sqq. 

Date of John’s baptism, 294 sqq. 

Date of the Baptist’s death, 288 sqq. 

Date of the Passion, 13 sgq., 299 sqq. 

David, 326 sq., 496, 508 sqq. 

Deluge, 274 sq., 277 sq., 280, 
319 

Demosthenes, 455 

Deporitatio in insulam, 537 

Domitian, 27 sq., 82 sg., 127, 130, 204, 
219, 313, 397, 589 sq, 607 

Domitilla, 15, 40, 45, 527, 540 

Dositheos, 203, 243, 254 


317, 


Easter cycles, 296 

Ecclesiastes, 325, 503 

Egesippus, 31, 37, 56, 67, 75, 77 54., 
86 sqq., ΟἹ, 96, 103, 125, 142, 293, 
550 Sq. 

’Ele‘azar, a high priest, 261 

’Ele‘azar b. Dinai, 96 sqq., 102 sqq., 106 
Sq., 110, 209, 527 Sq., 553, 579, 581 

’Ele‘azar b. Shime’on, 184 sq. 

Elkesaites, 243, 409 

I-paphroditus, M. Mettius, 30, 82,92, 166 

Epistle of Barnabas, 340 

Eschatology, 346 

Essenes, 23, 226, 231, 251, 257, 332, 
337, 343, 369 

Exodus into the desert, 358 sqq., 370 
Sq-, 370 Sq., 512 

Eyebrows, meeting, 413 

Ezra, 353 


Fadus, Cuspius, 103, 207 sq., 291, 458, 

500, 528, 530 sqq., 538, 542, 553, 

580 

Falsifications in Josephus’ text, 16 sqq., 
31, 38, 46 sq., 49 Sqq., 69 sgq., 195, 
167, 312, 385 544., 609 - 

Felix, Antonius, Roman governor, 24, 
102, 104, II0, 207, 209 sg., 360 sq., 
527, 532 Sq., 536, 553, 577, 579, 58% 
$qq. 

Festus, Porcius, Roman governor, 64, 
211, 539, 543, 584 

Fire and sword passage, 363 sqq. 

Fishers of men, 351 sqq. 

Flavius Clemens, 15, 40, 45, 527, 540 

Florus, Gessius, Roman governor, 211, 
213 544., 387, 486, 488, 585 

Foundation sacrifice, 379 

I’rederick 11., emperor, 165, 401 


636 THE MESSIAH JESUS 


Gabara, a town, 196 Jesus’ predictions of his suffering and 
Gamala, a town, 187, 191 death, 370 sqq. 
Gamaliel, 531 Jesus’ prophecy concerning the destruc- 
Garis, a town, 197 tion of Jerusalem, 494 sq., 520, 522 
Gennadios, archbishop of Novgorod, | Jesus’ royal descent, 321 sqq. 

159 Sqq. _ Jesus’ stature, 411 sqq. 
Gideon, 243 | Jesus’ trial, 300, 513 
Gischala, a town, 187, 189, 191 _ Jesus’ twinship, 448 sqq. 
Gratia paschalis, myth of the, 474 sgq. | Jesus Barabbas, 301 
Gratus, Valerius, 17 sq., 70, 264 sqg., | Jesus Ὁ. Gamala) 182 

296, 566 | Jesus b. Sapphias, 192 
Gregory IX., pope, 165 Jinn, 240, 567 

: Jo‘azar Ὁ. Boethus, a high priest, 259 

Hadrian, 203, 335, 589 sq. : - . 
Hanan, a high priest, 182 | John the Baptist, 27, 48, 144, 162, 168, 


. 4 223 8 ey I > 2, 8, 60, : 2. 
Hananjah and Saphira, 573 ΠΣ ἘΞ a poe oe 457, 54 


Herod the Great, 46, 51, 64, 105, 110, John Tzimiskes, emperor, 167 
128, 136 sqq., 144 Sq., 164, 171 S@4-,| John of Antioch, 461 sqq., 472 
176 544., 203, 242, 253, 259, 201 sq., John of Gischala, 259 
35», 8325, 33% 359) 433, 35° 507, Jonathan of Cyrene, 27, 64, 125 sqq., 
548 564., 555, 558, 561, 564 544., 585} 328 362, 402, sor, 580 

Herod Agrippa 1., 94, ΤΟῚ, 104 sq., 109 Jonathan b. Hanan, a high priest, 208 sq. 
Sq., 204 Sqqg., 229, 251, 298, 312, 314, Joseph of Arimathea, 73 
531, 537, 555, 578 544. _| Josephinists, 165, 401, 621 

Herod Agrippa I1., 26, 28, 104 sq., 135 _ Josephus, Flavius, 22 sqg.; Aramaic 
54., 179, 182, 192 54., 195, 204 Sqq., | Josephus, 74 sq., 82, 134; Josephus 
209 544., 215, 248, 289 sq., 342, 358, as a canonical writer, 37, 74; Jose- 

Ἐν 542, 549 56., 555, 501, 581, 584 phus editions, 34; Genesis of Jose- 
erod Agrippa ΠΙ., 29 | phus’ work, 123 sgqg.; Rumanian 

Herod Antipas, 18, 48, 70, 144, 203, Josephus, 18, 33, 69, 116, 182, 224, 
230, 246 544., 260, 288 sqq., 293, 303| 220, 480, 597; Slavonic Josephus, 
544., 312 sq., 458, 405, 576 79 544., 113 sgqq., 170 sqq., 380 sqq., 

Herodes Philippus, 70, 181 sqg., 204, 405, 513 sqg., 624; Josephus trans- 
226, 228 sq., 290, 294 sq. lations, 34 sq., 603 5. 

Hillel, 322, 326, 329, 339, 433, 556 J osippon, 31 544., 74 Sqq., 83, 93 Sqq., 

Hizqiah, 374, 564 139, 143, 177, 218, 229, 249 sq., 406 

Hue-and-cry, 398 sqq., 411 sqq. S49- 479, 520, 527 sq. 

Jotapata, a town, 25, 197 sq. 

Judas’ treason, 470 

Judas of Gaulan (Judah the Galilaean), 
46, 54 sq,. 63, 65 sq., 105, 139, 214, 
226, 250, 252 sqq., 256 sq., 263, 269, 
291, 319, 331, 335, 358, 360, 366 sq., 
374, 553, 566 sq., 569, 590 


Inscription on the cross, 4, 10, 514 sqq. 
Invective, political, 454 sqq. 
Ivan 111. Vasiljevitch, 33, 156 sqq., 164 


James the Just, 31, 48, 141 sq., 152, 167, 
182, 289, 292, 321, 324, 387, 449 sqq., 
453, 518 sqq., 540 Sqq., 553, 584 

Jayme 1., king of Aragon, 95 

Jeremiah, 338 

Jericho, miracle of, 210 

Jeshu‘a, a high priest, 261 

Jesus myth, 4 sqq. 

Jesus’ attack on the temple banks, 489 
Sq, 594, 506 

Jesus’ baptism, 281 

Jesus’ crucifixion, 510 sqgq. 

Jesus’ expulsion of the cattle-dealers, 
499 Sqq., 505 Sq. 

Jesus’ genealogies, 5, 606 sqq. 

Jesus’ guilt, 469 

Jesus’ last supper, 511 sq. 

Jesus’ nature, 389 sqq., 409 sqq. 

Jesus’ occupation of the Temple, 489 


Kant, Immanuel, 417 sq. 
Karaites, 157, 163, 338 
Kenedaios of Adiabene, 266, 311 
Khazars, 155, 163 
Kledonomancy, 372 


Lazarus, 143, 168 

Lentulus, a writer of mimes, 91 

Lentulus letter, 52, 391, 396 sqq., 412 
544., 420 Sq., 423, 430 Sq. 

Litterae formatae, 444 sqq. 

Lucius III., pope, 165 


Maccabees, 24, 73, 187, 256, 261, 318, 
325, 331, 357, 359, 362, 366, 374, 521, 


a ee ee 


Sqq., 620 544. 565 
Jesus’ physical appearance, 393 sgq., | Madmen as prophets, 526 
618 sqq. Magi, the, 293 


INDEX 


Makarios, archbishop, 34, 147 

Mandaeans, 231, 272, 409 

Mani, 519 

Marcionites, 152 sg., 165 

Masada, a fortress, 214 

Matthew, 28, 55 

Maximinus Daia, emperor, 16 sq., 19, 
80, 167, 302, 313, 399, 594 

Menahem, a rebel, 46, 63, 214, 553 Sq., 
586 sq. 

Messiah, the idea of the suffering, 374, 


417 Sq. 

Mindauvas (Mindowe), king of Lithu- 
ania, 32, 148, 163 

Miracle of the loaves, 361 sqq. 

Mountain cults, 372 

Mucianus, 557 

Mundus and Paulina, 19, 42, 44, 89 
Sq-, 313, OLL sqq. 


Namesakes of Jesus, 98, 592 sq. 

Nero, emperor, 107, 209 sq., 241, 312, 
364, 550, 550, 558 sq., 589 

Novgorod, 156 sqq., 163 

Numidius Quadratus, 208 


Odes of Solomon, 273, 278, 382 

Omar 11., caliph, 337 

Onias, Egyptian (schismatic) 
high priest, 123, 589 

Onias, Palestinian Jewish high priest, 
182 


Jewish 


Pallas, freedman of Claudius, 537 

Panthera, 406 sqq. 

Paradise in desert, 419, 510 

Passio Pauli, 443, 446, 455 

Paul, Saint, 151, 295, 320 Sq., 324, 332, 
346 sq., 355, 361, 362, 365, 369, 400, 
410, 431, 433 564., 437, 442 Sqq-, 451 
5qq., 486, 538, 540, 552 54., 573 56., 
582 

Paul 11., pope, το 

Paulicians, 152 sq., 106 sqq. 

Peter, Saint, 103, 371 sqgq., 376 sqq. 

Petronius, 65, IOI sg., 204 sq., 317, 403, 

__ 443) 527, 579 | 

Pharisees, IoI sg., 106 

Phasael, brother of Herod 1., 173 
Sqq. 

Phineas; a high priest, 260, 310 sq. 

Pilate, 3 sq., 10, 17 sqq., 22, 48, 55, 65, 
67, 69, 97 Sqq., ΤΟΙ, 103, 106, 114, 
167, 204, 295 Sq., 300 Sqq., 312 Sqq., 
325, 360, 384 544., 394, 398 sqq., 402, 
400, 424, 458 sqq., 474 544., 488, 502, 
505, 507, 514 84., 521, 529, 567, 571, 
570 sq., 617 sq. 

Plato, 398, 404, 417 sqq., 524 

Poppaea Sabina, 24 

Portrait medallions, 315 

Pseudo-Clementines, 103 

Ptah, 235 


037 

Ptolemaeus, a Roman general, 264 sq. 

Ptolemy vu1., Physcon, 277 

Ptolemy, steward of Herod Agrippa 11., 
193 sq. 

Pythagoras, 5, 404, 410, 524 sq. 


Oenites, 234 54., 322 sq., 328, 334, 343, 
357. 420,534 

Quadratus, Ummidius, 533, 581 

Quietism, 257, 332, 342, 553, 578 

Quirinius, 69, 253, 264, 291 sqq., 567, 
586 


Rabbinical testimonies of Jesus, 8 

Rain charms, 243 

Rekhabites, 234 sq., 238, 245, 276, 305, 
322 54., 328, 334, 343, 357, 360, 362, 
366, 377, 416, 422, 430, 482, 497 sq., 
519, 538, 541, 506, 573 sq. 

Rescriptum Tibervii, 461 

Resurrection, the doctrine of the, 434 

Resurrection, the story of the, 150 sqq. 

Roman garrison of Jerusalem, 486 sqq. 

Royalty law, 251, 269, 271, 590 


Sabellians, 153 

Sabinus, Roman governor, 202, 263 

Sabinus, a Syrian soldier, 392, 454 

Sadducees, 256, 386 

Salome, 69 sq. 

Samson, 89, 391, 422 

Seleucus, 557 

Sepphoris, 187, ΟῚ sq., 197 

Shilo, the, 261, 285, 350, 554 sqq., 506, 
622 sq. 

Sibylline Oracles, 277 sq., 382, 563 sq. 

Sicarti, 369 sq., 481, 502, 570, 582 

Siloam, Tower of, 502, 500 sqq., 571 

Simon, a scribe of the law, 250 

Simon, an Essene, 226 sq. 

Simon of Cyrene, 307, 513 

Simon Magus, 210, 243, 254, 286 sq., 
291, 499, 570, 581, 592, 616 sq. 

Simon of Peraea, a pseudo-messiah, 64, 
263 Sq., 435, 500 

Simon Setacides, R., 111 

Sixtus IV., pope, 160 

Slaughter of Innocents, 145, 167 

Sleb, the, 234, 238, 242, 324, 326, 328, 
333 54., 343 54., 363, 416, 521 54., 430 

Smith’s craft, magical, 327 

Socrates, 5, 419, 453, 524 Sq. 

Sol invictus, 302 

Solomon, 51, 326, 329 

Spiritus familiaris, 5 

Spring equinox, 295 

Stephen, Saint, 497, 499, 504 

Sulla, 370 


Tarachus, Probus and Andronicus, 14 
Tarichaea, 187, 193, 196 sg., 201 
Temptation of Christ, 285 sqq. 
Testament of Levi, The, 284 


638 


Testimontum Ivlavianum, 36 sqq., 68 
sq., 98, 381, 385, 410 sq., 432, 456, 


927s 539, 539 ; 
Theudas, a pseudo-messiah, 64 sqq., 103, 


105, 291, 301, 458 sq., 500, 553, 580, | 


582 
Tiberias, 25, 187, 189, 192, 196 sq. 


| 


THE MESSIAH JESUS 


Unitarianism, 31 sqq., 155 546. 


_Varus, Quinctilius, I10, 139, 202 sq., 


255, 258, 263 sqq., 294, 319, 408, 501, 
566, 575 


Veil, the rending of the, 146 sq., 149 


$q., 216 


Tiberius, emperor, 18 sq., 42, 67, 69 sq., | Vespasian, emperor, 25 sqq., 37 544., 54, 


90, 99, III, 203 sg., 218, 226, 259, 
290 Sqq., 294 Sqq., 303, 312 sq., 330, 
397, 399, 495 54., 450, 450, 459, 461, 
464 sqq., 468, 474, 487, 537, 553, 578 

Tiberius Alexander, 26, 208, 215, 528, 
531 Sq., 534 544., 555 54., 580, 586 

Tiridates, 135 

Titus (cf. also Vespasian), 26 sq., 29, 
73, 135, 140, 142, 147, 179, 212, 387, 
517, 552 Sq- . 

Toldoth Jeshu, 89, 92, 107, 110 sqq., 162 

Tolstoi, Leo, 165 

Tower of Babel, 277 

Trajan, 94, 588 sq. 

Transfiguration, story of the, 308 sqq., 
371 54., 375 54., 433 547. 

Tribute money, 330 sqq. 

Triumphal entry, 10, 54, 471 sqq., 487, 
579 


| 


78, 105 sq., 123, 125, 128 sq., 134, 139 
Sqq., 196 sqq., 2ΟΙ 54., 215, 397, 473, 
524, 527, 548 56., 554, 556 sqq., 589 

Vinci, Leonardo da, 245 

Vita beatae Mariae rhythmica, 386 sq., 
394, 401, 461 

Vitellius, 180 sq. 


Wind, the, of Judgment, 275 sqq. 


Zealots, 100 sqq., 121, 123, 205, 209, 252 
Sqq., 264, 206, 311, 325 sq., 336, 338, 
342, 351, 356, 358 sq., 362 sq., 366 sq., 
374, 378, 408, 455, 458, 464, 470, 475, 
481, 487, 505 sq., 515, 528, 542, 553, 
595, 507, 569 sq., 582 sq., 585 sqq. 

Zechariah’s night vision, 327 

Zerubabel, 90, 261, 321, 324 sq., 374, 
497, 499, 560, 568 


S325 38 
THEOLOGY LIBRARY 
CLAREMONT, CALIF. 


bes. 75313