6. Attitude to Christianity.— A question of the utmost importance is that of the attitude of Joseplius to Cliristianity. As he describes the period in such minute detail, we naturally ask whether he ever alludes to that powerful move- ment amongst his fellow-countrymen ; and his mention of the slaying of Juhn the Baptist prompts the question whether he records the Crucilixion of Jesus and the martyrdom of His disciples. It is certainly true that in the Antiquities, between the two sections dealing, as noted above, with Pilate, we find the following passage (XVIII. iii. 3 [63-64]) :
' Now about this time appeared Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one may call Him a man ; for He was a doer of marvellous works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth witlv glad- ness, and He drew to Himself many of the Jews, as also many of the Greeks. He was the Christ; and when, on the indict- ment of the leading men amontrst us, Pilate had sentenced Jinn to the Cross, those who loved Him at the first did not cease to do 80 ; for on the third day He again appeared to them alive,
as the divine prophets had aflBrmed these and innumerabla other things concerning Him. And the race of Christians, which takes its name from Him, is not j'et extinct.'
On the strength of this testimonium de Christo, which is quoted by Eusebius (HE I. xi. 7, 8 ; cf. Demonstr. Evang. III. iii. 105 ; Thcoph. v. 44), Josephus was reckoned among Christian writers by Jerome (de Vir. Illustr. 13), and honoured aa such throughout the Middle Ages. But modern criticism lias thrown serious doubts upon the authenticity of the passage, and not Avithout good reason. For not only does Origen seem to be un- acquainted with it — otherwise he would certainly have referred to it in in Matth. tom. x. 17 and c. Celsum, i. 47 — but, as regards its contents, it simply could not have come from a man like Josephus, more especially in view of the fact that, as we have seen, he anxiously avoids all reference to the Messianic expectations of his people. (The view, proposed by Burkitt and strengthened by Harnack, that Josephus used the failure of the Messianic movement in the case of Jesus for the purpose of demonstrating that no Messianic aspira- tions were left after this in the Jewish people, is not supported by the text as it stands.) Thus the only question that remains is whether an authentic statement of Josephus has been worked over by a Christian hand (so, recently, among others, the Roman Catholic scholar, J. Felten [NTZG, Regens- burg, 1910, i. 618]), or whether the whole is an interpolation of Christian origin (so Niese, Naber, Schiirer, and others). Even on the first alternative it is hardly possible to make out what Josephus himself could have written. The parallel cited by Zahn (Forschungen zur Gesch. des neutest. Kanons, vi. [Leipzig, 1900], p. 302) from the Acta Pilati belongs to the late Byzantine recension of that work, and is in reality an echo of the very passage under consideration.
A second passage of similar character is Ant. XX. ix. 1 [200 f.], where the judicial murder of James ' the brother of Jesus who was called Christ' (Messiah?) and of some others, by Ananus, the high priest, is referred to as having been dis- approved of by the strict observers of the Law (Pharisees?). But here too the work of another hand is unmistakable: Origen (locc. citt., and also c. Celsum, ii. 13) had read a similar interpolation in Josephus, though in some other part of his works.
The whole question has become somewhat more complicated by A. Berendts' discovery of a Slavonic recension of the BJ. Just as, side by side with the accurate Lat. version of the Ant. executed at the instance of Cassiodorus, a very free translation of the BJ, the de Exeidio Hierusalem of Hegesippus (the so- called losippus), bearing a thoroughly Christian character, was current — often under the name of Ambrose — in the West, so there was found among the Slavonic MSS a very peculiar form of the BJ, giving a detailed account of the trial of Jesus. Berendts propounded the theory that this really represented the original form of the BJ, and had therefore preserved authentic utterances of Josephus regarding Christ (the Slavoiiic Enoch, which in part goes back to a Juda;o-Aramaic original, would furnish a parallel case). Berendts was able to show that in this Slavonic BJ we have a record largely divergent from the Greek text, and exhibiting a markedly anti-Roman bias — a record, too, which, as e.g. in the chapter dealing with the Essenes, appears to have been used by Hippolytus, so that, in spite of the legendary air of many of its features, it is hardly reasonable, with Schiirer and others, to assign it to a late date. Moreover, its references to Jesus are not of a character that suggests interpolation from the Christian side. Hence, if we reject the hypothesis of Berendts, the only theory that we have to fall back upon is that of an earlj- Jewish redaction, aa proposed by U. Seelierg and Frey. A final verdict will be pos- sible only when the complete text is in our hands.
7. Relation of St. Luke to Josephus. — Finally, a question of special importance for our knowledge of the Apostolic Age is that of the relation of St. Luke to Josephus. Many scholars believe that the numerous resemblances between them — intel- ligible enough surely where both writers are deal- ing with the same period — can be explained only od the theory that St. Luke made use of Josephus