Josephus on Jesus: Part 1
Introduction
Anyone familiar with The Terminator movie series knows that in an apocalyptic future, computers and machines have acquired self-awareness as a result of advances in artificial intelligence. Humans, threatened by this, attempt to stop the machines. The machines, in an effort to preserve themselves, fight back. One tactic they employ is sending an extremely life-like android, called a terminator, back in time to the present to kill either the leader of the resistance while he is still a child or his mother before she is able to bear him.
While it may appear far-fetched to draw parallels between a scifi movie franchise and the arguments for the historicity of Christ, the premise is in many ways similar. Many who oppose the historicity of Jesus are not content to argue just against certain aspects of his life, such as his miracles or the resurrection, they argue against the very existence of Jesus. Collectively, they are known as “mythicists.” Like the android assassin in the Terminator movies, they attempt to reach back into the past and erase Jesus’ existence in a number of ways. One way they attempt to do this is by arguing that there are no ancient extra-biblical sources of information about Jesus. By starting with the a priori assumption that the Gospels cannot be trusted[1], they believe that if they are then able to jettison any evidence outside the Bible, they will have made their case that no such person even existed. And, like the machines of the future regarding the man they oppose, if the mythicists can erase Jesus in the past, then they do not have to deal with him in the present.
One of the primary sources of information regarding Jesus from the ancient world is the Jewish historian Josephus. And even here we only have two brief references in his Antiquities of the Jews, but “while we do not have a wealth of references to Jesus in non-Christian sources in the ancient world, we have as much or more than we should expect, given the marginal status of Jesus and the early Christian movement in the first-century Roman Empire.”[2] Herein, we will look at the passages Josephus provides and weigh arguments, both pro and con, for their authenticity. But first, a little background on Josephus is in order.
Josephus
Josephus was born Joseph ben Mattathias into a noble and priestly family in AD 37. He became a Pharisee at nineteen. In AD 66, then-twenty-nine-year-old Josephus became a commander of the Jewish forces in Galilee when the Jewish revolt against Rome broke out. During the war, he surrendered rather than suffer certain death and switched allegiances. After the war he became a Roman citizen and the court historian for the Flavian emperors Vespasian, Titus and Domitian. He subsequently became known by the Roman name Flavius Josephus, a name he took to honor his patrons. He died in the latter part of the final decade of the first century.[3] “Although Josephus saw himself as a life-long loyal Jew, other Jews viewed him as a self-serving traitor. Flavian patronage would guarantee that his books would be copied in the public scriptoria, but after the fall of Rome his books were preserved only by Christians.”[4]
In my next post, we'll look at what is commonly referred to as the "James Passage."
[1] G. A. Wells, The Jesus Myth (LaSalle, IL: Open Court, 1999), 196.
[2] Paul Rhodes Eddy and Gregory A. Boyd, The Jesus Legend: The Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Jesus Tradition (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2007), 198.
[3] Robert E. Van Voorst, Jesus Outside the New Testament: An Introduction to Ancient Evidence (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 81-82; Gary R. Habermas, The Historical Jesus: Ancient Evidence for the Life of Christ (College Press: Joplin, MO, 1996), 192.
[4] Van Voorst, Jesus Outside the New Testament, 82-83.