Did Jesus Exist? - The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth by Bart Ehrman (ebook reader browser .TXT) 📗

writers (who never used footnotes) to digress from their main points, and in fact other digressions can be found in the surrounding context of the passage. So this argument really does not amount to much.

More striking for Doherty is the fact that no Christian authors appear to be aware of this passage until the church father Eusebius, writing in the early fourth century. In the second and third centuries there were many Christian writers (Justin, Tertullian, Origen, and so on) who were intent on defending both Christianity and Jesus himself against charges leveled against him by their opponents. And yet they never, in defense of Jesus, mention this passage of Josephus. Is that really plausible? Wouldn’t Christian apologists want to appeal to a neutral witness in support of their claims about Jesus in the face of pagan opposition?

This too does not strike me as a strong argument. The pared-down version of Josephus—the one that others have thought was original, without the Christian additions—contains very little that could have been used by the early Christian writers to defend Jesus and his followers from attacks by pagan intellectuals. It is a very neutral statement. The fact that Jesus is said to have been wise or to have done great deeds would not go far in the repertoire of the Christian apologists. We have no way of knowing if they were familiar with this passage from Josephus, but if they were, I don’t see that it would have seemed so striking to them that they would have used it to defend Jesus against pagan accusations. These accusations typically included such claims as that he was born out of wedlock to a peasant Jewish woman who was seduced by a Roman soldier; that he was an unskilled carpenter; that he could not control his temper; and that he died a shameful death on the cross.18 Nothing in the possibly original statement of Josephus seems relevant to any of these charges.

Doherty goes on to claim that the passage does not ring true to Josephus otherwise, in part because “in the case of every other would-be messiah or popular leader opposed to or executed by the Romans, he has nothing but evil to say.”19 This is the case with all messianic pretenders of Josephus’s day: he was completely opposed to anyone who might foment an uprising against Rome (remember: he was writing as a privileged guest in the court of the Roman emperor). But it needs to be stressed that in the possibly original form of the Testimonium there is not a word about Jesus being a messiah figure or even a political leader. He is simply a teacher with followers, accused on unknown grounds by (specifically) Jewish leaders and then executed. Moreover, if one reads the passage without the rose-tinted lenses of the Christian tradition, its view of Jesus can be seen as basically negative. The fact that he was opposed by the leaders of the Jewish people would no doubt have shown that he was not an upright Jew. And the fact that he was condemned to crucifixion, the most horrific execution imaginable to a Roman audience, speaks for itself. Even though Jesus may have been a good teacher, he was a threat to the state, or at least a nuisance, and so the state dealt with him fairly and strongly, by condemning him.

Doherty also objects to the idea that Josephus could call Jesus “wise” and one who appears to have taught the “truth.” If Josephus knew the teachings of Jesus—with which he surely would have vehemently disagreed—then he never could say any such things. To this it can easily be objected on one hand that there is no reason for thinking that Josephus knew any of the things that Jesus taught, and on the other that many of the things Jesus taught were in fact what many other famous teachers of Judaism taught: for example, that followers of God should love God above all else; that they should love their neighbors as themselves; that they should do good unto others; that they should feed the hungry and care for the poor and oppressed; and, well, lots of other things that have seemed through the ages to Christian believer and unbeliever alike as both wise and true.

Doherty makes many other points, but most of them, frankly, are even weaker than these and do not need to be given serious attention here. In the revised edition of his book, however, he does devote an extended discussion to summarizing the views of Ken Olson, a graduate student at Duke University, who argues that the language of the Testimonium does not appear to be stylistically consistent with the language Josephus uses throughout his other works. Olson has been a student of mine (taking some of my graduate seminars at UNC) and is a very sharp fellow. For what it is worth, he is not a mythicist. Olson’s Ph.D. dissertation is devoted to the Testimonium, and many of his key arguments are summarized in an article that he published in the academic journal Catholic Biblical Quarterly in 1999.20 In this article Olson argues that the first author to mention the Testimonium, the Christian church father Eusebius (who was writing before any of our manuscripts of Josephus was produced), was in fact the one who forged it and so was ultimately responsible for its being inserted into Josephus’s writings. The basis for the argument is a very careful analysis of the words and phrases used in the Testimonium. Olson argues in case after case that the wording and phrasing of the passage has numerous parallels with Eusebius’s writings but not with those of Josephus. In other words, the vocabulary and style of the passage suggest that it was written by Eusebius.

Olson has made an intriguing case in his article, but I am afraid—as impressed by him as I am—that it has not held up under critical scrutiny. The responses to it by such scholars of Josephus and of early