The Testimonium Flavianum
External · History · c. 93–94 · Greek
Interpolated — Interpolated. The text is genuine in substance but carries later matter inside it.
The paragraph in the eighteenth book of the Jewish Antiquities in which Josephus, a Jewish priest writing at Rome about sixty years after the crucifixion, describes Jesus, his condemnation under Pilate at the instance of the leading men, and his followers continuing. It is the earliest surviving notice of Jesus by a writer outside the Church, and it is the most argued-over paragraph in ancient history. What is contested is not whether Josephus wrote about Jesus but how much of what stands here is his. The text as every Greek manuscript transmits it says that Jesus was "a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man", that "he was the Christ", and that he appeared alive on the third day as the prophets had foretold — three claims a Jew who never became a Christian is unlikely to have made, and which appear in no form before Eusebius quotes them in the fourth century. Three positions have been held. That the whole paragraph is a Christian insertion; that it is entirely Josephus's; and — the majority view since the nineteenth century, and the reason this row is graded as it is — that a shorter and more neutral notice by Josephus survives underneath, with the confessional clauses added by a later Christian hand. A tenth-century Arabic version quoted by Agapius of Hierapolis carries a plainer form of the passage without them, which is the strongest external support for the middle position and is itself disputed as a paraphrase. The dataset holds the paragraph as it stands, marked for what it is, rather than printing a reconstruction: which words are the interpolation is exactly what is argued about, and a project that chose a version would be publishing a verdict as though it were a text.
Antiquities XVIII.63–64, in every surviving Greek manuscript of the work and quoted in full by Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica I.11, in the early fourth century — which is also the earliest witness to it and the first fact any argument about it has to account for. Origen, writing a century earlier and citing Josephus on James, says plainly that Josephus did not believe Jesus to be the Christ, which the transmitted text has him saying.
Authors
- Flavius Josephus author