The slight difference in both cases is also telling. As with the stories of the elders at the Temple, Jesus’s family is one notch higher than Josephus’s. If his own Flavian masters were to be associated with the Jewish messiah—and therefore with the stories of their pre-incarnation in Christ—then Josephus may be making sure not to equate himself with the Flavian emperors or their status as messiahs by ranking himself just below Christ. After all, Josephus describes himself as merely his Roman masters’ prophet (having prophesized Vespasian’s ascension to the throne) and not a messiah.
Where Jesus associated with a “Baptist” who wandered in the “wilderness,” Josephus, he tells us, lived for three years with a holy man named “Banus” in “the desert” who “bathed himself in cold water frequently” in order to preserve his chastity. (19) The Baptist famously wore clothing made of camel’s hair while Josephus’s “Banus” wore only what grew on trees. The Baptist ate “locusts and wild honey.” Banus ate only food that “grew of its own accord.” (20)
Details about the dress, vegetarian diets and bathing rituals of these two wilderness holy men known by Jesus and Josephus, respectively, are probably provided for the same end, namely to associate both Jesus and Josephus with the famous “Essene” movement of Jewish purists precisely in order to add authoritative messianic credibility to their unorthodox message. Both of these desert figures, John the Baptist and Banus, also share their dietary tradition with the leader of the Christian community in Paul’s time, James the Just, who scholar Robert Eisenman has identified as the leader of the Qumran community called “The Righteous One” in the Dead Sea Scrolls. This is the same James who would come into such bitter conflict with Paul over what “Christianity,” or messianic Judaism, actually meant decades after Christ had supposedly settled the question. (21)
Since the sectarians of the Dead Sea Scrolls also described themselves as dwelling in the “Wilderness,” all of these Holy Men, the sectarians of the Dead Sea Scrolls, James the Just, John the Baptist, and Banus, have significant similarities. (22) All of them echo the messianic prophecy of Isaiah (23) about a “voice calling” for Jews “to clear a path [or ‘Way’] in the desert” for the Lord. In the Gospels, this reference to Isaiah is explicitly linked to the Baptist, as he famously identifies himself as “a voice of one calling in the wilderness, ‘Make straight the way of the Lord…’” (24) In Isaiah’s prophecy, however, that “voice crying in the wilderness” was originally a call to reject pollution, to restore cultural purity and reaffirm the Covenant with God in order to become worthy of the coming of the messiah.
Josephus’s mentor “Banus” seems to associate Josephus with the sect known as the Essenes at an early stage of the historian’s life. However, Josephus tells us that he ended up being a Pharisee. This evolution interestingly reflects the same ideological mix allegedly adopted by Paul. St. Paul claims to be a Pharisee (25) even though his celibate lifestyle is more akin to the behavior of the Essenes as described by Josephus in his book on the Jewish War. (26) Since both oppose forced circumcision, however, they must be paradoxically (for Pharisees) classified as critics of Mosaic Law, just as Jesus himself was with respect to issues like Kosher diet, strict Sabbath observance and Jewish purity regulations.
Josephus insists that Pharisees like himself are ideologically related to the Hellenistic philosophy that was popular among the Romans, namely Stoicism, as it was “called by the Greeks.” (27) Scholars have likewise observed that Josephus’s work exhibits deeply Platonic and other Hellenistic influences, influences that often supersede his Jewish heritage. As one scholar of Josephus puts it, in “seeking to accommodate Greek and Jewish wisdom,” Josephus “clearly depart[s] from the tradition in which he had been trained.” (28)
This matches Paul’s ideological leanings exactly: both are proud of their Jewish heritage though each has adopted Hellenistic style and ideas.
According to both Josephus and the Book of Acts, one of the defining features of the Pharisees was their belief in the Resurrection of the Dead (29), something they distinctly shared with both Essenes and Christians, but not the third sect of Jews, the Sadducees, who, according to Josephus’s description in Antiquities of the Jews, did not believe in an afterlife.
Josephus expresses the same combination of pagan and Jewish elements, therefore, that we find in the original Christian literature, i.e. the same transcultural syncretism that characterizes the New Testament.
In his earlier work, Wars of the Jews, Josephus focuses largely on the Essene sect that is probably also represented by the figure of Banus. His sympathy for this group of purists, who were also probably the ideological leaders of the Jewish conflict with Rome, curiously shifts in his later works.
Like the wider Hellenistic world, according to Josephus, both Pharisees and Essenes believed in an immortal soul, an Afterlife, and a Judgment with rewards and punishments meted out as deserved, mirroring the Elysian Fields and Hades of pagan belief. In fact, in his earlier Wars of the Jews, Josephus himself compares the Essenes’ views of an afterlife to the Greeks’ and finds them to be substantially similar. In Wars, Josephus says that the Essenes followed restraint and reason like the Stoics.
However, in his later work, Antiquities, Josephus claims that it was the Pharisees who showed a Stoic restraint. (30)
In the earlier Wars, Josephus concedes that the Essenes were closest to the warlike rebels:
And as for death, if it will be for their glory, they esteem it better than living always; and indeed our war with the Romans gave abundant evidence what great souls they had in their trials, wherein, although they were tortured and distorted, burnt and torn to pieces, and went through all kinds of instruments of torment, that they might be forced either to blaspheme their legislator, or to eat what was forbidden them, yet could they not be made to do either of them, no, nor once to flatter their tormentors, or to shed a tear; but they smiled in their very pains, and laughed those to scorn who inflicted the torments upon them, and resigned up their souls with great alacrity, as expecting to receive them again. (Emphasis added.) (31)
Josephus depicts the Essenes’ political zeal as rooted in their fervent adherence to the Torah and Kosher diet in particular. He therefore implicitly claims that his own bona fides reside in both the Pharisees and those who went into the “wilderness” such as the Essenes and the Dead Sea Scrolls sectarians. But something has definitely changed in Josephus between his early writing of Wars and his later writing of Antiquities—something ideological has happened. Josephus has begun to contradict himself about the identity and nature of the rebels with whom he associated in his youth.
Like Jesus and Paul, Josephus, too, ran afoul of the Jewish priesthood in Jerusalem who, he says, “contrived how [they] might catch [him] by treachery.” (32) It seems the same elite priesthood of the Sanhedrin that convicted Jesus and condemned Paul also accused Josephus of betraying the Jews.
The striking similarities in the stories told about Jesus, Josephus, and the Apostle Paul are hard to miss. The most remarkable coincidence between Josephus and Paul, however, is a dramatic event that both of them experienced: a shipwreck on their way from Judea to Rome.
We shall now consider and compare the details of these accounts.