In previous posts in this series on Eusebius reading Josephus (link), Eusebius seems sometimes to have mixed quotation with his own commentary on what he’s quoting. The modern punctuation that would clearly separate quoted matter from personal remarks didn’t exist in his day.
Eusebius also emerged as a witness whose “testimony can become facts.” That is, it appears that later scribes or their supervisors came to interpret his presentation of the Flavian Testimony (a mention of the Christian Jesus) as a direct block quotation. Scribes then altered Josephus’s text to agree with their (mis)understanding of what Eusebius wrote. Something similar may also have happened to a part of Josephus’s story of John the Baptist.
Honest misunderstanding is unsurprising. The scribes had to choose between following their uncertain exemplars against what they believed that a trusted and authoritative scholar, someone who may have had access to earlier and better quality manuscripts, had told them that the correct phrasing really is. When the proposed phrasing also agreed with the scribes’ faith, that may have eased their acceptance.
The present post concerns what Eusebius wrote about Josephus’s brief mention in Antiquities 20.200 (link) of a certain James, a defendant in a religious trial. In his Church History (II.23.22 link), Eusebius claims that Josephus identified James as “the brother of Jesus called Christ.”
If authentic, then those few words would be something rare: non-devotional evidence that the Christian Jesus was a real man who actually lived in Palestine during the First Century. Evidence, too, that long after Pilate left Judea, the Jerusalem temple authorities hectored the public religious activities of Jesus’s brother James.
The description of James as the brother of Jesus called Christ is now found in all our Greek manuscript sources for Antiquities book 20. Is that because Josephus wrote those words, or have circumstances once again managed to make Eusebius’s testimony into a fact?
A related false claim
Shortly before his identification of James, Eusebius falsely but emphatically asserts that Josephus wrote that the destruction of Jerusalem and its temple in 70 CE avenged this James’s death (Church History II.23.20 link):
Josephus, at least, has not hesitated to testify this in his writings, where he says these things happened to the Jews to avenge James the Just, who was a brother of Jesus, that is called the Christ. For the Jews slew him, although he was a most just man.
Eusebius’s source for this statement is Origen. Eusebius closely paraphrases a comment Origen made in his Against Celsus (1.47 link):
Now this writer, … in seeking after the cause of the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple, … says… that these disasters happened to the Jews as a punishment for the death of James the Just, who was a brother of Jesus (called Christ), — the Jews having put him to death, although he was a man most distinguished for his justice.
So far as we the living can tell, Josephus wrote no such thing. On the contrary, in seeking after the cause of the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple, in the same book 20 of the Antiquities (at 20.164-166 link) where the mention of James appears (at 20.200 same link), Josephus directly contradicts Origen and Eusebius:
Some of those brigands went up to the city as though to worship God, bringing daggers under their clothing and by so getting close to Jonathan [the high priest] they killed him. As this murder was never avenged, … people were killed not only in outer parts of the city, but within the temple itself. For they [the brigands] even dared to commit murder there, heedless of the impiety they were committing. I think this is why God, in hatred for their wickedness, rejected our city, and no longer judged the temple pure enough for his dwelling, but brought the Romans upon us and threw purifying fire on the city …
The Antiquities passage is consistent with Josephus’s repeated concern elsewhere about divine displeasure with pollution of the temple by bloodshed (Jewish War 4.323, 381-388 link, and 5.19-20 link). Josephus mentions incidents that stretch from Jonathan’s assassination in or around 58 CE through the wartime chaos in 70, but nowhere does he mention James in this regard. James’s trial was held in 62.
Eusebius and Origen didn’t always agree. As seen in the previous post, they seem to differ on John’s baptism ritual and sinfulness. Nevertheless, it is uncontroversial that Eusebius thought highly of Origen (see for example Church History 6.2-3 link) and they plainly agreed about Josephus and James.
Eusebius presented a portion of Origen’s muddled reading of Josephus as a fact without any foundation in the text for doing so, contrary to the plain meaning of Josephus’s actual writing, and without disclosing that Origen, not Josephus, was his source. Eusebius definitely misrepresented, as if on his own authority, at least one major aspect of Josephus’s writing about James.
How could Eusebius have missed that?
Although Eusebius may simply have lied, he isn’t so careful a scholar nor so critical of his sources to make that conclusion inevitable.
Centuries afterward, it is impossible to know whether Eusebius was aware of Josephus’s explanation of the divine cause for destruction of Jerusalem. Hundreds of words separate Josephus’s remarks from the trial of James in Antiquities; so near and yet so far.
Eusebius did not rely solely on Antiquities for his history of the temple’s final years. Josephus’s War (2.254-263 link) and Antiquities (20.163-172 link) cover nearly the same series of events, from the assassination of Jonathan to the suppression of the “Egyptian” prophet. Only in the Antiquities version does Josephus digress in the middle of that series to discuss eventual divine retribution against Jerusalem. When Eusebius narrates these historical events in his Church History (2.20.4-2.21.3 link), he follows the War version, mentioning its second book in passing as a source (at 2.21.3).
Eusebius didn’t necessarily consult his source manuscripts directly when composing his own history. One interpretation of Eusebius’s explanation of his composition process (Church History I.1.5 link) is that Eusebius sometimes worked from notes rather than the unwieldy manuscripts themselves:
Having gathered therefore from the matters mentioned here and there by them whatever we consider important for the present work, and having plucked like flowers from a meadow the appropriate passages from ancient writers, …
A possible result of this practice was seen in the first post in this series, when Eusebius implied Gratus and Pilate governed Judea together for years. Yet Eusebius also quoted Josephus’s account of Gratus’s deeds in Judea, ending just before Josephus clearly tells the reader that Gratus’s term didn’t overlap Pilate’s at all. How could Eusebius have missed that?
Maybe Eusebius stopped copying the story of Gratus into his notes at just the wrong place. Maybe James’s trial made it into his notes while Josephus’s explanation of the destruction of Jerusalem didn’t.
Is Eusebius to Origen analogous to how later scribes were to Eusebius?
Regardless of how it happened, Eusebius’s description of Josephus’s writing about one aspect of the James case is factually wrong. Whether Eusebius also misreported what Josephus wrote about James’s brother is uncertain.
Suppose hypothetically that he did insert Origen’s phrase “called Christ” (which Origen never characterized as a direct quote) into Josephus’s trial scene.
Eusebius quotes verbatim the trial story along with a lengthy portion of its context and its aftermath. Either he’s checking the source afresh with the book open on his desk as he writes or else the passage ought to have made it into his notes intact. What could go wrong? How could an intentional misrepresentation be done honestly, if that’s what Eusebius did?
One way to think about that question is to compare Eusebius’s choices based on Origen’s authority with later scribes’ choices based on Eusebius’s authority.
If scribes came to misunderstand Eusebius’s rhetorical presentations of some Josephan passages as direct quotes, then at least one scribe sometime through the centuries faced a conflict between what he read in an exemplar and what he believed that Eusebius told him he ought to be seeing there.
In choosing to follow Eusebius, the scribe may well have been making a defensible judgment call in a situation where some uncertain choice must be made and acted upon.
One possible understanding of Eusebius’s thinking, if he did alter Josephus’s Antiquities 20.200, is to imagine him as analogous to that scribe. If the scribe may honestly but unwisely choose authority over received text, then arguably Eusebius may do likewise.
Before leaving the scribes, it is praiseworthy that whatever process may have altered Josephus over the centuries didn’t remove or soften the “Jonathan” passage at Antiquities 20.164-166. The scribes preserved it, even though it directly contradicts both Origen and Eusebius. There is a limit, then, to authority’s influence over subsequent scribes’ copying decisions, even when the reputation of Christian heroes is at stake.
Conclusion
Eusebius reported that Josephus had described James as the brother of the Christian Jesus. To assess the reliability of what Eusebius wrote, compare how surprising his report would be if it were the truth versus how surprising it would be if Josephus’s text said something different.
The first leg of the comparison is simple enough: if that’s what the text said, then there’s no surprise at all that Eusebius would have said so. The weight of this evidence, then, is effectively determined by the second leg: how surprising is it that Eusebius would follow an admired but badly erring Origen for a second time in the span of two paragraphs?
Your obedient correspondent cannot answer that question for anybody else. It is clear, however, that a reasonable person could estimate that given Origen’s demonstrated sway over Eusebius, the received text is unsurprising regardless of what Josephus really wrote about James and his brother. Therefore the received text may be assessed as furnishing only weak evidence in support of Josephus having written that James was the brother of Jesus called Christ. That’s how it looks from here.
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Image: From the Book of Games (Libro de los Juegos), manuscript T.I.6 in the Biblioteca de San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Madrid, late 13th century
The Uncertaintist 
Thank you, Babar. I will try to catch up.