Another James for Josephus, now with more Eusebian mischief

Jerusalem Temple officials condemned a cadre of fellow Jews to death in 62 CE. According to the received version of Josephus’s Antiquities of the Jews, the victims included a certain James, a “brother of Jesus called Christ.” Josephus knew the officials and he would have had personal and professional knowledge about the trial. As such, his report would stand as strong evidence that the Christian Jesus really lived in first century Palestine.

Scholars generally agree that this version of the James passage (Antiquities XX.9.1.200 link) is authentic. A minority view, however, points to the difficulty of authenticating the critical two words (“called Christ”).

Many Jesuses lived in first century Judea. Josephus mentions two of them in connection with the aftermath of James’s trial, the high priests Jesus ben Damneus and Jesus ben Gamaliel. Josephus wrote about another Jesus, the son of Ananus (unrelated to the priests of that name), in his account of the Jewish War (VI.5.3.300-309 link). That Jesus began obsessively proclaiming the doom of Jerusalem shortly after the trial and was severely punished for it by both Jewish and Roman authorities.

The Uncertaintist has posted several times about the James problem (link). The perspective here has always been to explain how Josephus’s text might have been changed by its earliest known witnesses, Origen and Eusebius, with no intention to deceive. Origen falsely remembers Josephus writing extensively about defendant James. In fact, Josephus wrote nothing about James except a brief identification of him as one of those condemned at the trial.

Origen’s reliance on his obviously addled memory of what he had read, Eusebius’s choice to adopt Origen’s phrase “called Christ,” and later copyists’ choices to view the challenged original text as an earlier scribe’s mistake could easily combine to orchestrate an innocent alteration of the critical few words over time.

Blogger Dave Allen (link) offers another hypothesis about the original form of the passage. What if Josephus didn’t explicitly say anything about defendant James’s brother, but instead identified James as the son of Joseph? Joseph was the name of a recently removed high priest. However, for  Christian readers, mightn’t “James, son of Joseph” call to mind another “son of Joseph,” as ordinary people would have called the Gospel Jesus?

The merits of Allen’s proposal are similar to those of the brother-of-Jesus hypotheses discussed in earlier posts here at The Uncertaintist.  The sincerity of Origen and of the later scribes are as likely as under other hypotheses about the original text. What’s different is that Allen’s proposal, if correct, would make it very difficult to avoid accusing Eusebius of deliberate dishonesty.

Eusebius’s witness to Josephus on James the Just

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?

When Bart Ehrman pulled an Origen

“[T]here were no effective measures in Pliny’s province to deal with the outbreak of fires, and so villages were burning,” according to Bart Ehrman in his book Did Jesus Exist? (Chapter 2). His source for this ancient catastrophe? Ehrman says that Pliny the Younger discussed the fire problem in “Letter 10” of his correspondence. Ehrman mentions that source by name, “Letter 10,” twice in his telling the story of how Pliny wrote to the Emperor Trajan for permission to establish a fire brigade. In that same letter, Ehrman tells his readers, Pliny also mentioned Christians.

In reality, there is no “Letter 10” in Pliny’s correspondence that deals with fires or that mentions Christians. Nor were villages burning. However, something was spreading through the countryside according to Pliny, something contagious.

Another Jesus for Josephus’ James

Jerusalem with Jesus ben Ananus, upper right

In Book 20 of his Antiquities, Josephus briefly mentions a man named James who was unlawfully condemned to death in 62 CE, about eight years before the Roman sack of Jerusalem. Josephus says that this James’ brother was named Jesus. In all extant source manuscripts of the Antiquities, that Jesus is said to be “called Christ.” If Josephus wrote that description, then he’d have left us compelling evidence that a historical Jesus of Galilee really existed.

Modern scholars generally accept that Josephus did describe James’ brother as “Jesus called Christ,” largely because Origen wrote that that’s what he’d read in Antiquities. Origen also remembers reading there about God’s pay-back to Jerusalem for the injustice of his death. In fact, however, Josephus tells us almost nothing else about James, not even whether his death sentence was actually carried out, much less claiming divine retribution for it.

Given that Origen misrecalls so much so vividly, what weight should be placed on his recollection of the few words which allegedly identified James’ brother? Two other Jesuses appear in the story that includes the trial incident, a story which makes perfect sense if James’ brother were either of those Jesuses (link).

This post recalls still another Jesus who appeared in Josephus’ first book, The Jewish War. This Jesus is familiar to many because of remarkable parallels between his story and the Gospels’ passion. Let us  consider the merits of his candidacy to be the brother of Antiquities’ James. Whether or not he was James’ brother, the tragedy of Jesus ben Ananus still contributes to our understanding of how Origen’s memory so badly scrambled and improved what Josephus wrote about James and his trial.

Josephus and Jesus V: Seriously, Origen, how’d you manage to do that?

In the previous installment (link), Origen recalled having read in Josephus’ Antiquities that James, the brother of “Jesus called Christ,” was sentenced to death by stoning. However, Origen says that Josephus wrote more about this James than what’s in our received Antiquities.

Origen’s testimony has been offered in support that the extant Antiquities is faithful to the original; that Josephus reported the actual existence of a close associate of the Christian Jesus in Josephus’ own time and surroundings. That is, Josephus implicitly vouched for a historically real Jesus, possibly based on a reasonable inference about the associate that Josephus could have made from his own lived experience.

The finding of this post is that Josephus did write some things substantially similar with what Origen recalled, in close proximity to Josephus’ mention of James. However, Josephus was discussing other people and events. Origen conflated Josephus’ actual writings with stories about the Christian martyr James the Just. Thus Origen’s faulty memory made a new non-Christian witness to Christian tradition, much as Jerome’s memory brewed up a new Christian miracle by misremembering an incident from Josephus’ War and mixing it with the Gospel passion (link).

Josephus and Jesus IV: How Origen gave James a new brother

This is the latest installment of the series on Josephus’ Antiquities. We examine the brief mention of a man named James who is described as the “brother of Jesus called Christ.” Those few words, found at 20.9.1.200, are, if authentic, the only known non-Christian mention of Jesus Christ securely dated from the First Century, except for Josephus’ much-garbled Testimony which was discussed in the previous installments.

Of Josephus’ two possible mentions of Jesus, this shorter one is arguably the more important. If authentic, it would be the only extant writing about a key Christian character featured in the epistles of Paul authored by a non-Christian contemporary who lived nearby. If what it asserts is reliable at face value (i.e. that “brother” refers to some robust person-to-person relationship during natural life which Josephus was justifiably confident to report, independently of church traditions), then that would largely extinguish doubts about the existence of a historical Jesus.

The story in which James briefly appears would make fine sense if its James had been identified as the brother of either of two other Jesuses who figure in the same storyline. Given the evident lapses in transmitting the longer Testimony, how can there be any confidence that this James wasn’t the brother of one of those Jesuses, and the text wasn’t altered by a few words to make him James the Just instead? What possible test could reliably authenticate two or three words of ancient text?

The answer is three remarks by Origen from the mid-Third Century saying that Josephus had written about James the Just in Antiquities. Origen used that same distinctive and otherwise rare “called Christ” phrase as we now read in Josephus (in Greek, legomenos Christos). Some argue that Origen wrote too early for Christian scribal alteration to explain what he reports. This isn’t decisive, since Origen’s library plainly included Christian religious material, probably produced by Chrsitian scribes.  However, we shall explore another explanation in this post.

Recall  that Jerome told his reader that Jospehus had reported that there were supernatural voices in the Temple during Jesus’ crucifixion, contrary to any known copy of any other work discussing the voices incident. Is it plausible then that Origen, like Saint Jerome, may have grossly misremembered something he’d read?