David Capes
It made sense to you. Because he wasn’t a Christian, he didn’t speak of that. But when he gets to this particular paragraph, it sounds as if maybe it was written by a Christian. Certainly, it was favorable Christianity, and he’s reporting what was being said in his time about Jesus being the Christ, the Messiah, and his resurrection from the dead. Along this way, you changed your mind. What do you think now? And why did you change your mind?
Tom Schmidt
I started looking at how ancient and medieval Greek writers interpreted this passage in Josephus’ writings. And what was remarkable was that, by and large, they did not seem to be interpreting it the way modern scholars do. They were quoting the same passage. It’s the same Greek. But in their discussions, they wouldn’t point out any of these things. They would just talk about chronology or the nature of Jesus’ teaching, the number of his disciples, Jewish culpability, and his death.
And it just seemed odd to me that they would do that. Of course, one or two or three of them doing it would be one thing, but there really was a very consistent pattern. I started looking around and trying to see if the words and phrases that are used in this passage are used by Josephus elsewhere. Lo and behold, they are. There are dozens and dozens and dozens of overlapping usages of vocabulary and phraseology that you can find elsewhere in Josephus’ works. So much so, that it looks like it was written by him.
And the further fascinating aspect of this is that when you compare the same words and phrases that you find in the passage with how Josephus uses those words and phrases elsewhere, these phrases don’t sound nearly as positive as scholars have translated them to be. And in fact, all of those remarkably pro-Christian claims don’t seem quite as pro-Christian. In fact, some of them seem negative. Some of them just seem ambiguous. I think, when properly understood and properly translated, the passage sounds exactly like something that would have come from a first-century Jew who’s talking about Jesus of Nazareth.
David Capes
So maybe for the modern scholars, their confirmation bias is coming through. They are thinking and translating it that way because they were expecting that there had been Christians who were monkeying with the text, adding things and making it more pro-Christian. The Christians were involved in transmitting the writings of Josephus too, at some point.
Tom Schmidt
I’ll give you just one or two examples. One great example is Josephus says that Jesus worked the miracles. That sounds very impressive in English. But it turns out that Greek has a lot of different words for miracles. It’s got territor, dunamis, seimai, you know, signs, wonders, powers, miracles. But Josephus doesn’t use those. He uses the term paradoxa, which, even in English, sounds a little odd. In the New Testament, that word is only used one time of Jesus’s miracles. It’s Luke 5:26, but even there, it’s maybe a little suspicious. It’s spoken by a crowd, reacting to Jesus. And if you look at how Josephus uses that term, he uses the term paradoxa to describe the miracles that were wrought by the magicians
of Pharaoh.
There’s another ancient Jewish source called the Jew of Celsus, that’s from about the years AD 150, 140, It uses the same term to describe the miracles of Jesus but to ridicule them. So all of a sudden, that word doesn’t sound quite so positive anymore. There are several other examples of this.
Another big one is what Josephus says about the resurrection. He says that Jesus appeared to the disciples alive again. It sounds like he’s affirming the resurrection, but in Greek, it’s far more ambiguous. In Greek, the word that he uses ephane and that word can also just mean “seem”. So, you can translate it as he seemed to them to be alive, or he appeared to them to be alive. Meaning that they thought he was alive. And there are many instances of this, but you add this all together and come up with a version, once you calibrate it with Josephus usage pattern, that describes the life of Christ but is much more standoffish. It’s merely describing what Christians and the disciples of Jesus believed and is not affirming it in a pro-Christian way.
David Capes
I think you’ve made a good case here. In as much as it’s true, it says something about the scholars who are interpreting it this way in a more positive light earlier. It also says something about our need to go back, trace and look more carefully at what Josephus is saying, particularly in this very volatile text dealing with Jesus. This is really fascinating. You have a sense too that Josephus is well connected to some of the people who might have seen Jesus. People that might have heard Jesus and not just third and fourth hand. He knew people before whom Jesus had stood and heard him speak and spoke to
him.
Tom Schmidt
Precisely. When I was done writing this book, I sat down to write the conclusion. I thought, I should probably put in a few paragraphs about where Josephus is getting his information from about Jesus.
That would be interesting, and a good way to wrap the book up. And before I knew it, I was writing part two of the book. I was adding 50,000 words, because what I found out was astonishing. It turns out that Josephus was born in Jerusalem in 37 AD. His father was descended from high priests and a king. His father was a priest in Jerusalem and he was 25 years old when Jesus was crucified. Josephus became a Pharisee when he was 19 years old. He lived in Galilee, where he visited Cana, where Jesus turned water into wine. He visited Capernaum. He lived in Sepphoris, three miles down the road from Nazareth. He knew all of these places and people that lived where Jesus lived, and just 20 years before.
I felt that this is not just a random historian writing in 95 or 94 AD. This is a man who grew up in Jerusalem and lived in Galilee just two or three decades after Jesus walked in those very places. We should pay attention to what he has to say about Jesus. I’ll give a clue to your readers, that presents several different arguments. In the passage about Jesus, he says that it was the first men among us who accused Jesus, before Pontius Pilate. And he uses that phrase, the first men. In Josephus’ autobiography, he repeatedly says, I knew the first men. I knew the first men of Jerusalem. And he says this starting in 51 or 52 AD. He uses the same terms, same group of people, clearly in the same circles as those who he claims accused Jesus before Pontius Pilate.
I do a social network analysis where I try to track down who Josephus knew, and can we place them at the trial of Jesus? And there are about 11 candidates that it’s possible to place there. The likeliest candidate is Josephus’ commanding officer in the Jewish war. Josephus was a general. He was one of seven generals appointed to fight the Romans, and then above him were two Supreme Commanders, and one of them is Ananus II, who was also a high priest. Ananus II, Josephus tells us, was the one who had James, the brother of Jesus, executed. In other words, Josephus knew the man who executed Jesus’ brother. Ananus’ brother-in-law is Caiaphas and his father was Annas, both of whom are the high priests that the Gospels describe as being the ones that put Jesus to death. So, Josephus knew the man whose father and brother-in-law put Jesus to death. Which is a remarkable connection.
David Capes
Yes, and puts him right there, up close, to those key people.
Tom Schmidt
Yes. The question I think some of your listeners might have is, can we place Ananus II, Josephus commander at the trial of Jesus. Is it possible to do that? And I think it is actually, for two reasons. One is that Josephus tells us three times that Ananus II was extremely old in 68 or 69 AD. So he would have been in his 30s when Jesus was crucified, when his father was high priest and his brother-in-law was high priest. The gospels say that all the chief priests were at the trial, which suggests that this future high priest would have been there.
But the real evidence is that Jesus was crucified on the Passover. And on the Passover all faithful Jews, according to the Torah and according to the Mishnah and the Babylonian Talmud, they were supposed to go to Jerusalem. It was a pilgrimage feast, and they’re supposed to eat a sacrifice lamb in the house of their father. And they’re supposed to spend the night at the house. This was to remember when the Israelites ate the Passover lamb and stayed in the house over the night while the destroyer passed over them, yes, back in the exodus.
Well, you know what that means. Josephus’ commander would have been in Jerusalem on the Passover of Jesus’s crucifixion, and he would have been in his father’s house. And where do the gospels say Jesus was brought? They say that on the night of his arrest, he was brought into the house of Annas, the high priest who is the father of Josephus, his commander. You could make the very plausible argument that Josephus’ commander would have been required by law to be in his father’s house at the same time that Jesus was brought there for trial.
David Capes
Man, that’s fascinating, fascinating. And this is, as you say on the cover of the book, new evidence that you’re pulling out and that we’re seeing. How did we miss this before?
Tom Schmidt
I think people didn’t think too much about it. They accepted the general narrative. But one thing that unlocked this was new Greek databases. I leveraged some Greek databases to do systematic searches, word searches, to find these parallels in Josephus that scholars have not been able to find before. That unlocked new meanings, realizing that this passage is not as positive as previously thought, and it also allowed me to find those links that when Josephus says that the first men had Jesus accused before Pontius Pilate, he also says I knew the first men elsewhere. That can be obscured in English translation. Run these searches, and you start realizing these things.
David Capes
Wow. Well, the book is entitled “Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ.” Fascinating book published by Oxford University Press. Tom Schmidt, thanks for being with us today and giving us a hint at what some of this new evidence looks like, on The Stone Chapel Podcast.
Tom Schmidt
My pleasure, David, thank you for inviting me.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
