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Eusebius of Caesarea and the Testimonium Flavianum (Josephus, Antiquities, XVIII. 63f.)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2011

D. S. Wallace-Hadrill
D. S. Wallace-Hadrill
Affiliation:
Aldenham School, Elstree, Herts.
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Extract

The case against the authenticity of the Testimonium was put succinctly by Benedict Niese, ‘nam scriptus est a Christiano, male cohaeret cum insequentibus, dicendi genus a Josepho alienus, ab antiquissimis scriptoribus Christianis, imprimis Origine, non agnoscitur, abest ab argumentis libri XVIII, non exstat in Bello Judaico, neque ulla est causa cur necessarium putemus'. Scholarly opinion has long been divided over the matter, but it is safe to say that the arguments against authenticity outweigh those that would retain the passage as Josephan. Niese's points, that the passage interrupts a series of notices of Jewish risings and revolts and that Origen appears to have known Josephus only as hostile to Christianity, can be supplemented by the difficulty of attributing apparently Christian sentiments to a writer who in his last work, Contra Apionem, was very plainly proud to be a Jew. But if the passage is an interpolation, the further question is posed, whether it was inserted into the text of Josephus as a complete unit or whether it is the result of a process of minor alterations by many hands over many years. Here again there is divergence of opinion, but since 1930 it has been difficult to maintain the simple view of a single interpolation by one man at one time. Robert Eisler's attack upon this simple view was made possible by the publication of a thirteenth-century Slavonic version of Josephus initiated by A. Berendts, who in an earlier work had traced the Christian interpolations in Josephus back to the first century. Eisler's general contention, that the authentically Josephan basis of the passage constituted a hostile notice of Christianity and that this had, been altered in many particulars by various hands to show the opposite of what Josephus had written, was cautiously defended by Thackeray, the doyen of English-speaking Josephan scholars, in his Hilda Stich Strook lectures at the Jewish Institute of Religion.

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Articles
Information
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 25 , Issue 4 , October 1974 , pp. 353 - 362
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1974

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References

page 353 note 1 Marburger Programm, 1893, quoted by Berendts, A., ‘Die Zeugnisse vom Christentum im Slavisches “De Bello Judaico” des Josephus’, T.U., N.F. XIV. 4 (1906), 38.Google Scholar

page 353 note 2 Comm. in Matt., x. 17: κα⋯ τ⋯ θαυμαστόν ⋯στιν ὅτι τ⋯ν Ἰησου̑ν ⋯̑μω̑ν οὐ καταδεξάμενος εἱ̑ναι Χριστόν, he did not admit Jesus to be the Christ; Contra Celsum, i. 47, ⋯ δ᾽αυτ⋯ς καίτοι γε ⋯πιστω̑ν τῳ̑ Ἰησου̑ ὡς Χριστῳ̑, he disbelieved in Jesus as Christ.

page 353 note 3 Cf. Thackeray, H. St. J., Josephus, the Man and the Historian, New York, 1929, 138.Google Scholar

page 353 note 4 R. Eisler, Ἰησου̑ς Βασιλεὺς οὐ Βασιλεύσας. Die messianische Unabhängigkeitsbeurgung vom Auftreten Johannes des Täufers bis zum Untergang Jakobs des Gerechten…, 2 vols., Heidelberg, 1929–30; English version (not at all a strict translation of the German) The Messiah Jesus and John the Baptist, according to Flavius Josephus' recently discovered ‘Capture of Jerusalem’ and other Jewish and Christian Sources, Krappe, A. H., London 1931Google Scholar. The general soundness of Eisler's arguments against the authenticity of Antiq., xviii. 63f. have not convinced all scholars that he is also right in his view of the origins of the Christian religion. His instability of judgement is demonstrated in his later Flavius Josephus Studien. Das Testimonium Flavianum. Eine Antwort an Dr. Walter Bienert (in typescript, London 1938)Google Scholar, where his aim appears to be to destroy not his opponent's argument so much as his opponent. Bienert had argued against Eisler that the Testimonium was authentic or unauthentic as a whole, and was not the result of a series of interpolations.

page 354 note 1 Flavius Josephus vom Jüdischen Krieg, Buck I-IV, nach der slavischen Übersetzung deutsch herausgegeben, Berendts, A. and Grass, K., Dorpat 1924–1927.Google Scholar

page 354 note 2 ‘Die Zeugnisse vom Christentum …’, T.U., N.F. xiv. 4 (1906), 276, where he says the interpolations into the Josephan text are the product of late apocryphal writing, sympathetic to Christianity and based on the evangelists.

page 354 note 3 Josephus, the Man …,, 126–52. Thackeray's views have not in all respects found approval, e.g. his attribution of much of Josephus's Greek text to amanuenses, cogently refuted by Shutt, R. J. H., Studies in Josephus, London 1961, ch. 4.Google Scholar

page 354 note 4 H.E., 1. II. 7f.; D.E., III. 5.105ff.; cf. P.E., 1. 2.6; Syr. Theoph., v. 44.

page 354 note 5 So Brandon, S. G. F., The Fall of Jerusalem and the Christian Church, London 1951, 111.Google Scholar

page 354 note 6 The dating is from Hanson, R. P. C., Origen's Doctrine of Tradition, London 1954, 27.Google Scholar

page 356 note 1 Eisler, Ἰησ. Βασ., i. 138–141.

page 356 note 2 Eisler, The Messiah Jesus, 62; Thackeray, Josephus, the Man …, 145.

page 356 note 3 Ἰησ Βασ. i. 136. In The Messiah Jesus, 54, Eisler retains ⋯πηγάγετο., with the comment that it needs no alteration.

page 356 note 4 These datings arc discussed in my Eusebius of Caesarea, 1960. They differ from those in Eisler, Ἰησ. Βασ., i. 136.

page 357 note 1 H. Gressmann's G.C.S. translation of the Syriac Theophany at this point reads, ‘es trat aber in jener Zeit Jesus auf …’. There is no Greek text extant for this passage.

page 357 note 2 Eng. tr. Gifford, E. H., Eusebii Evangelicae Praeparationis, Oxford 1903, III. i. 5.Google Scholar

page 357 note 3 Eng. tr. Ferrar, W. J., Eusebius Proof of the Gospel, London 1920, i. 132.Google Scholar

page 357 note 4 I accept the view of the construction of the Hist. Eccles. put forward by Laqueur, R., Eusebius als Historiker seiner Zeit, Berlin and Leipzig 1929; cf. Laqueur in Hermes xlvi (1911), 189ff. I have summarised Laqueur's argument in Eusebius of Caesarea, 1960, 40–2.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 358 note 1 For my reasons for thinking that the Theophany is the last of Eusebius's works, constituting a kind of retractatio, see Eusebius of Caesarea, 52–55.

page 358 note 2 Eisler,Ἰησ. Βασ., i. 137, points out that the term precedes exact quotations at Hist. Eccles., I. 5.3, I. 8.9, VI. 25.3, VI. 38.3, and that Eusebius is, therefore, not warning his reader of a paraphrase by the words in question.

page 360 note 1 The Messiah Jesus, 145.

page 360 note 2 Ibid., 144f.

page 360 note 3 But see the remarks of Jones, A. H. M., ‘Notes on the Genuineness of the Constantinian documents in Eusebius's Life of Constantine’, in this Journal, V (1954), 196f., on Eusebius's use of the word παι̑ς referring not to Constantine as a child but as ‘immature’ —aged in fact about 19.Google Scholar

page 360 note 4 Cf. the observation by Berendts, T.U., N.F. xiv. 4, p. 21, in relation to the parallels between Hegesippus and the Slavonic Josephus, ‘es ist natürlich, dass die Darstellung in der Evangelien den Horizont des Egesippus vollig beherrscht’.

page 360 note 5 Berendts (op. cit., 21ff.) shows that the Christian interpolator of the Slavonic text drew heavily upon material from the Gospels.

page 360 note 6 The Messiah Jesus, 531f.

page 361 note 1 Josephus, the Man …, 33.

page 361 note 2 Flavii Josephi Opera, ed. B. Niese, IV, Berlin 1890, xxix. f.

page 361 note 3 So Thackeray, op. cit., 27f.; R. Laqueur, Der jüdischc Historiker Fl. Josephus, Giessen 1920, 126ff.

page 361 note 4 G.C.S., Eus. Werke, II. 2, Leipzig 1909, clxiif.

page 361 note 5 The perpetuation of the calumny against Eusebius may be illustrated not by reference to scholars such as Heinichen in the last century and Zeitlin in this century, but to the well-informed assistant in a London library who, when checking my withdrawal of a Eusebian text, looked up and said, ‘Tell me, is Eusebius the great liar we are led to believe ?’