Josephus’s passages about James and John the Baptist, in contrast to the Testimonium itself, have almost never been challenged by scholars as later interpolations. As a result, Christians still frequently cite Josephus as an important historical source to this day. So, let us look at Flavius Josephus’s second mention of Christ.
This one is contained in his description of the death of James, whom he calls: “the brother of Jesus, who was called the Christ.” Not surprisingly, this reference to Christ by Josephus has recently been challenged, too. And, because the scholar who challenges it provides us with an illustrative example of recent historical reasoning in this field, analyzing it will prove instructive.
Scholar Richard Carrier has made the unusual claim that there was no mention of Christ at all in the original James passage from Josephus’s work. He suggests that the part that reads James’s brother Jesus “was called Christ” is also an interpolation. This leaves us, he claims, with no authentic mention of Jesus Christ in any of the works of Flavius Josephus. (12)
What is Carrier’s argument?
Immediately after Josephus describes the murder of James he relates that a “Jesus, son of Damneus” was named high priest to replace Ananus, who was removed for killing James. Carrier suggests that the “James” whose murder Josephus had just recounted is the brother of this Jesus (the new high priest) and not the “Jesus who was called the Christ.” According to Carrier, this last phrase, “who was called the Christ,” was interpolated later by Christians just like the Testimonium. After all, Carrier explains, replacing the high priest Ananus, who killed James, with James’s brother may have been part of King Agrippa’s remedy for the crime.
A lot of suppositions are being made with no evidence whatsoever here. How does Carrier propose such a change in the text could have happened?
Carrier offers that a Christian reader of Josephus may have missed the connection between the appointment of the High Priest Jesus and the previously mentioned “James, the brother of Jesus” and mistook “James, the brother of Jesus” for James, who is called “the brother of our Lord” by Paul in Galatians. Carrier imagines that such a Christian might have written in the margin of his copy of Josephus “who was called the Christ” next to “brother of Jesus,” and his mistake was memorialized for all eternity after a second mistake was made when subsequent transcribers copied the margin note into the text. All ancient texts were copied by hand, and there are other known instances where marginalia was introduced into ancient texts in this fashion, but there is no evidence any of this happened in this particular case.
Why any Christian would eccentrically note “who was called the Christ” instead of simply “who was the Christ” remains unexplained in Carrier’s theory.
There is no reason to think that “Jesus, son of Damneus” was even of the same political party as the “James” who was murdered, let alone that he was his brother. And, if James did not belong to a party hostile to the Temple establishment, why would the high priest have had him killed in the first place? And if so, why would the King replace the High Priest responsible for his execution with someone hostile to the Temple establishment?
Aside from this obvious political non sequitur, Josephus adds to Carrier’s difficulties by next telling us that the new high priest “Jesus” who replaced Ananus was bribed right along with the new Roman governor, Albinus, and that inter-priestly relations did not improve, as one might have expected if an ally of the murdered James had been appointed in response to his murder. (13)
In fact, the new high priest seems to have intensified the unrest, for Josephus tells us that the Temple establishment still took the “tithes” traditionally reserved for the lesser or poorer priests during this time, and that this, in turn, set off a new reaction from the rebel Sicarii—who responded by kidnapping the son of Ananus and demanding the release of ten rebel prisoners in exchange for his life. (14)
It is obvious that the rebels would not have reacted like this if the murdered James was not one of them. And if the new high priest had been the brother of such a rebel martyr, this would surely have been mentioned. And if James was not a rebel ideologue then the motive for killing him is left entirely unexplained by Josephus.
If, on the other hand, as pre-interpolation Origen reports, Josephus claimed James’s death precipitated God’s wrath and the Jewish defeat, then the rest of Josephus’s narrative makes perfect sense. That murder, not Jesus’s four decades earlier, set off an immediate uprising that led to the war and ultimately the Temple’s destruction by Titus. This was the actual history of events suppressed by Christian scholarship in subsequent centuries.
The lesser priests’ violent reaction to further abuse by the high priests would also remain inexplicable if it was not already stoked by the crime Josephus just related—the murder of James. This seems to confirm that Josephus made the argument Origen attributes to him, which Carrier suggests he never made.
Carrier also oddly complains that Origen would have commented on it if Josephus had mentioned Jesus Christ elsewhere. But Origen did comment—on Josephus’s lack of belief in Jesus “as Christ,” which clearly implies that Josephus did mention him. Had Josephus not mentioned Jesus at all, Origen would not have complained that Josephus had merely denied his status as “Christ.”
Had the James passage been the only place Origen read about Jesus in Josephus’s text, it could not have served as the basis for his complaint, either, for there Jesus is at least called Jesus “the Christ” in a phrase similar to one used in the Gospel of Matthew. Carrier concedes that Origen must have seen this passage and this phrase (at least as an interpolation) or Origen could not have thought that the “brother of Christ” was mentioned in Josephus’s text, at all.
The reference to the “brother of Christ” suggests there must have been another mention of Jesus elsewhere, one in which Josephus passively observes that his followers thought him to be Christ without attesting to his own belief, as he does in the corrected version of the Testimonium.
Carrier also posits that Josephus would never have used any phrase like that found in Matthew, for example the phrase, “the one called the Christ.” However, because it is a bland enough phrase that any non-Christian might have comfortably used, the real incongruity is its use in Matthew, not its use in Josephus. Why didn’t the evangelist Matthew simply say “the Christ” in his Gospel? Why did Matthew say “the one called the Christ”? This is a case of Matthew strangely using a phrase that a cautious historian like Josephus might understandably employ. This tentative qualification is more out of place in the Gospels than it is in Josephus. (As always, it is important to remember that Josephus was writing his history at the same time that the Gospel of Matthew was being written.)
Because no surviving Josephus text links the Jews’ defeat to James’s murder, Carrier argues that Origen must also have been mistaken about his own source for this idea. This only adds improbability on top of improbability. Where does Carrier think Origen got this idea if not from Josephus? Carrier’s answer is that Origen’s actual source must have been the 2nd Century Christian Hegesippus.
Carrier proposes that Origen misattributed to Josephus an argument made by the later Christian writer Hegesippus that claims that it was James’s murder, not Jesus’s, that precipitated the war. Thus, in addition to his marginalia mistake and transcription-error hypothesis, Carrier adds that Origen misattributed his sources, as well. Only if all these contorted improbabilities are true can Carrier’s argument make any sense.