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A FEW PASSAGES from ancient literature have had their authenticity more hotly debated than has the so-called Testimonium Flavianum or testimony of Flavius, that is, the brief mention of Jesus found in the surviving manuscripts of Flavius Josephus Antiquitates Judaicae 18.3.3 63-64. The passage was accepted as authentic from the time it was first cited by Eusebius of Caesarea in the early fourth century until scholars began to suspect it of being a Christian interpolation in the sixteenth. Since then, debate has raged between those who consider the Testimonium to be independent testimony about Jesus from a first-century Jew and those who would dismiss it as a thoroughly secondary addition to Josephus' work.
Josephus' writings include the Bellum Judaicum, written between A.D. 75 and A.D. 79, the Antiquitates Judaicae, written ca. A.D. 93-94, and the Vita and Contra Apionem, both written a short time later. Jesus is mentioned only twice in the Antiquitates: once in the Testimonium, and again in a passage about the execution of a man named James who is identified as "the brother of Jesus who was called Christ" (A.J 20.9.1 200). Neither Jesus nor Christians are mentioned elsewhere in Josephus' works.
Opinions on the authenticity of the Testimonium may be divided into three basic positions. ' The first position, that the passage about Jesus is completely Josephan, had its defenders in the early part of the twentieth century but is largely abandoned today. Scholars who take the second position, that Josephus did mention Jesus but that the passage which has come down to us has been altered by a Christian editor, are currently in the majority; influential scholars who have recently defended this position include Louis Feldman (the translator of the volume of the Loeb Classical Library containing the Testimonium), Paul Winter, and John Meier.2 Finally, many recent commentators believe that Josephus wrote none of the Testimonium.3 I take the third position: the entire passage is spurious.
Almost all scholars today accept that the Testimonium is at least partially a Christian interpolation. Among those who hold the passage to be at least partially authentic, four reasons predominate:
1. It is found in all the surviving manuscripts of the Antiquitates and has outside attestation from Eusebius.
2. The language of most of...