However, if Hegesippus or any other Christian was Origen’s real source, then we are only more perplexed. Hegesippus may have been a converted Jew, but he was certainly a Christian. Origen’s surprise comes from the fact that Josephus, someone he regards as a Jew, should have alleged that the Jews were punished in the war because of James’s death—the martyrdom of a Christian leader, according to the Bible—at the hands of Jewish authorities. Origen is surprised by how pro-Christian the supposedly Jewish (and Roman) Josephus is, in addition to being disgruntled that Josephus did not go all the way and name the death of Christ himself as the cause of the Jewish defeat.
On the other hand, Origen would have no reason to be surprised at Hegesippus or any other Christian for showing sympathy for Christianity. In that case, the only surprise Origin might have expressed was that a Christian writer like Hegesippus failed to connect the punishment of the Jews to the death of Jesus Christ rather than surprise that a Jew could show any sympathy for a martyred Christian like James. Why would Hegesippus, a Christian, ever claim such a thing?
Even if a Christian like Hegesippus did argue that the Jews lost the war because God was punishing them for killing James, as Carrier speculates, this doesn’t mean that Josephus did not also make the same argument. If anything, Josephus would have been Hegesippus’s likely source for such an idea. In any event, we don’t have the passage of Hegesippus that Carrier suggests may have existed. And our only source for Hegesippus’s text, Eusebius, attributes the argument that James’s death caused the war to Josephus—just as Origen does.
This is the kind of roundabout Christian scholars often construct to circle around the Flavian and Roman relationships that seem too close to Christianity’s origins. However, the fact remains: Origen plainly states that Josephus attributed the cause of the Jewish War to the murder of the Christian James. The normally careful scholar does so in no fewer than three works. And if Origen is to be believed when he suggests Josephus’s text did not say “Jesus was the Christ,” then he should be believed when he tells us what Josephus did say about James and Jesus.
Before Origen made use of the work of Josephus in the 3rd Century, and he was the first Christian writer to make extensive use of Josephus, there would have been no motive for Christians to embellish Josephus’s work. Any failure to name Jesus “the Christ” by the “Jew” Josephus could have been explained away even as they made use of his historical works for other purposes.
However, by the time of Eusebius, when the full, glowing reference to Jesus Christ in Josephus was present, after Christianity enjoyed official sanction under the Roman Emperor Constantine, more than one copy of Josephus’s histories surely existed, and these copies must have been housed in more than one pagan public library. Yet, Eusebius “quotes” the newly augmented Josephus text with no fear of being contradicted. This may well suggest that by this time Josephus’s work had been officially “corrected,” with the authoritative approval of the emperor himself.
We have another reason to believe that a passage about the impact of James’s murder did exist in the original Josephus. In his passage about John the Baptist, Josephus tells us that the destruction of Herod Antipas’s army was punishment for killing the Baptist. The argument is classic Josephus; it is just the kind of providential argument Origen reports Josephus making about James.
So, from Origen’s description of the text of Josephus, we know that Josephus’s reference to Christ was tampered with. It is hardly a stretch to suppose that the offending passage about James’s murder being the casus belli for the Jewish War (instead of the death of Jesus) disappeared around the same time the amplified Testimonium proclaiming Jesus to be the true Christ had appeared. As scholars have shown, in all probability both changes were made in direct response to Origen’s complaints.
However, since Origen’s criticisms of Josephus’s text seem to have stimulated this Christian interpolation, what Origen reports about the original text should be regarded as highly credible.
As this book has proven, Carrier’s additional assumption that Josephus, as a 1st Century historian employed by Roman emperors, could never mention Christ, is not a valid assumption. This is the faulty premise upon which the rest of his succession of suppositions relies. If Christianity was still just an underground group among Jews, as the conventional understanding assumes, why would Josephus, of all people, be mentioning Christ, or, indeed, be the very first person to mention Christ outside the New Testament? And how could the murder of James, by conventional understanding a Roman-accommodating, peace-loving Christian, incite war with Rome?
Of course, we have the answers: the “Jewish-Christian” movement James belonged to was an ideological wing of the rebels who were threatening Rome. James wasn’t a pacifist. His sect was devoted to strict Torah observance, and for that reason was anti-Roman and in bitter conflict with Paul. It was these rebel “Christians” who could be most plausibly blamed for the Great Fire of Rome only two years after James’s murder. And the Jewish War commenced only two years after that. The religious positions that brought James into conflict with Paul explain why the rebels regarded James so highly—and why they reacted so violently to his murder—and why there was anger directed at Paul—and why there was fury directed at Rome. All is explained.
When Origen refers to Josephus he almost never provides us the exact passage. As we have already observed, Origen may be the first Christian writer to make substantial use of Josephus simply because his “themes were closely related with the Bible [Old Testament] and the Jews” and because of his “background and interests” in history. (15) Other Christians would have ignored a Jewish writer who did not openly proclaim Jesus to be “the Christ.” There is simply no reason to impute such extensive errors to Origen as Carrier does, other than a prejudicial disposition to find the James passage fraudulent because it attests to Jesus’s historical existence at too early a stage at too high a level of Roman government—assumptions we can now see are unfounded.
We are not finished with the objections to the Testimonium. It is so controversial, its implications so profound, that it continues to be a field of pitched battles among scholars—and we can certainly see why.
Scholar G.J. Goldberg, for example, has observed a number of linguistic similarities between the Testimonium Flavianum and the Gospel of Luke’s account of the Resurrection visions of travelers on the road to Emmaus. (16) This has suggested to him that a Christian versed in Luke must have been responsible for the Jesus Christ interpolation in Josephus’s work. Yet this does not demonstrate that the Testimonium was a later interpolation at all, but merely that a dependency or shared provenance exists between these two sources. From this, for all we know, Josephus himself was the author of Luke or had read it himself. Or perhaps the author of Luke had read Josephus. Again, both works were being written during the same period.
For a long time scholars did not challenge the authenticity of Josephus’s mention of James and John the Baptist, even while routinely challenging the Testimonium as a forgery or an error. Only recent skeptics, such as Carrier, have questioned the James passage, as well, since it, too, seems to require falsification in order to verify the Christian tradition of its origins—but only because it comes from the imperial pen of a Flavian historian.