I am of the view that the descriptions that Josephus, the 1st century CE Jewish historian, gives us of John the Baptizer, Jesus, and James, the brother of Jesus, are of immense value to the historian of early Christianity. These three figures, all brutally murdered by the political and religious establishment, just happen to be the founding figures of what scholars call “the Jesus movement.” And yet, properly understood in its historical contexts, this Messianic movement is broader than Jesus, beginning with John the Baptist, and advancing significantly under the leadership of Jesus’ successor, his brother James. It is noteworthy that in Josephus’s earlier work, The Jewish War, John, Jesus, or James go comletely unmentioned. It is only decades later, in the 90s CE, when Josephus comes to write the Antiquities, that he includes this material. My own guess is that he is well aware that the emperor Vespasian, following the heat of the War in Judea, is very keen to suppress any movement that might be deemed “Messianic,” and particularly one built around the expectations of a Davidic ruler as rightful king of the Jews. Josephus is surely aware of the Nazarene movement, but he is not inclined to expose them to imperial scrutiny, and perhaps he even wants to shield them in that regard.
What he says about John and James is truly precious material, coming as it does from an “outsider” with no Christian theological agenda. Josephus, of course, has his own multiple and tendentious purposes, but supporting any particular side of controversies about the place and role of John or James in the movement is not on his radar screen.
His “testimony” to Jesus is more problematic since it has been so heavily interpolated by medieval Christian copyists. However, we are more than fortunate that these pious scribes had such heavy hands, since their additions appear to be so blatant and obvious, in both placement and phrasing. Scholars have worked on this text quite extensively and I recommend the summary discussion by John Meier, A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus (Doubleday, 1991), Vol I, pp. 57-88.
Taking the passage and removing the obvious interpolations we end up with the following results:
Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonders, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew many after him both of the Jews and the Gentiles. He was the Christ. When Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men among us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him, for he appeared to them alive again the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things about him, and the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day (Antiquities 18:63-64).
This bare and minimal account I find quite instructive. If one reads it again, without the additions, we have:
Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, for he was a doer of wonders. He drew many after him. When Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men among us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him, and the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day (Antiquities 18:63-64).
The content of this short report is strikingly close to what critical historians would distill as a kind of bare minimum regarding the historical Jesus–a wise teacher and wonder-worker who ran into opposition from the religious and political authorities and was crucified, but whose movement continued after his death. That Josephus does not mention anything about Jesus being resurrected was what obviously most troubled the medieval Christian copyists.
I am working this semester to complete my new book on Paul, as well as teaching a graduate class in which we are examining the ways in which the presentation of Luke in his two-volume work we call Luke-Acts, functions as a “master narrative” of what happened after Jesus’ crucifixion in such a way that alternative versions become almost impossible to imagine. I am more convinced than ever that the followers of John the Baptist and James the brother of Jesus, in contrast to those influenced by Paul, shaped their post-crucifixion hopes and expectations without any faith in Jesus as raised from the dead and ascended to heaven as cosmic Savior and Lord. Like John before him, and James to follow, the faith of the community was in the eschatological “resurrection on the third day,” spoken of by Hosea, which would culminate in the revival of the Israelite nation and sitting at table with Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and all the elect. Evidence for this perspective has to be teased out of our sources, given the overwhelming influence of the letters of Paul and Luke-Acts and other documents in the New Testament, but it does survive, here and there, and I think it can be adequately reconstructed. It is found in the N.T. texts themselves, and in a variety of sources such as the Didache, the so-called Pseudo-Clementine writings, the gospel of Thomas, fragments of Hebrew gospels, materials from Hegesippus, and these texts of Josephus.
Within such a Jewish context of resurrection hope “on the third day,” the clustered burials in family tombs, or in cemeteries with shaft tombs like those at Qumran, Ain el-Ghuweir, and in Jerusalem, took on a potential meaning beyond ritual segregation and memory of the dead. On the “last day,” those sleeping in the tombs will come forth in a collective way. The notion of the Yachad, the group, together in life, death, and in the future, was a characteristic feature of what one might call sectarian messianism.
Michael Servetus (aka Miguel Serveto) is surely one of the most remarkable men of history, though he is largely unknown in general circles. He was born in Spain in 1511 and died in 1553, at age 42, burnt at the stake as a heretic by John Calvin’s Geneva Council. He was a brilliant scientist and his field was primarily medicine, but it was his theological views that led to his universal condemnation by both Catholics and Protestants. Servetus rejected the doctrine of the Trinity, and although he maintained belief in the virgin birth, he denied that Jesus was God. He was fluent in Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, and in his primary work, De trinitatis erroribus (“On the Errors of the Trinity”), he ably argued that the Bible itself, in neither Old Testament nor New Testament, supported the subsequent Trinitarian notion of Jesus as God.
