Continuing from Where does John the Baptist fit in History? . . . .
Peter Kirby’s first argument for the authenticity of the John the Baptist passage in Antiquities of Josephus is
(1) The Textual Witness Itself
All manuscripts contain the passage and Kirby goes one step further and states as a fact:
It is referenced already by Origen in the middle of the third century (Against Celsus, 1.47), . . .
However, anyone who has studied the problem of interpolations and textual corruptions in ancient texts (not only the biblical ones) knows that manuscript uniformity tells us nothing about whether any particular passage is an interpolation. At the most all the manuscript record can do is affirm that an interpolation took place before all surviving manuscripts. Rather than repeat the arguments here I refer anyone interested to previous explanations for why we should expect interpolations. To bias ourselves against their likelihood is to defy what scholarship knows about ancient practices:
- Three Lessons from Classics for Biblical Studies? (2019-11-09)
- A Case for Interpolation Does NOT Rely On Manuscript Evidence (2011-06-03)
- A Literary Culture of Interpolations (2007-04-15)
The serious scholar of ancient texts should never adopt a defensive position against the possibility that any particular passage might be an interpolation.
Kirby’s second argument for authenticity of the John the Baptist passage in a work by Josephus:
(2) The Unlikelihood of an Interpolation on John Being Inserted First
The argument here is that Origen, writing in the mid third century, clearly declared that he found the John the Baptist passage in a work by Josephus, and if sceptics who like to think that the Jesus passage in Josephus was an invention of the fourth century Eusebius are correct, then it is very strange that a Christian interpolator would introduce John the Baptist into Josephus in the absence of any reference in Josephus to Jesus. Surely an interpolator would insist on adding something about Jesus at the same time, if not before, adding a note about John the Baptist — so the argument goes.
Kirby repeats the mainstream view as if it is a fact:
Origen already attests to the passage on John as being present in Antiquities book 18 . . .
Yet scholars have good reasons to suspect that Origen sometimes confused in his memory Josephus for Hegesippus. What Origen says he found in Josephus is not always in Josephus, but was instead very likely in Hegesippus.
At this point I’ll hand over the discussion to Rivka Nir (with my own bolded highlighting) (pp 37-42):
Turning to Origen, he appears to have been unacquainted with the Baptist testimony in Josephus, at least in its present form. Attempting to prove John’s existence, Origen (185-254 ce) writes:
I would like to have told Celsus, when he represented the Jew as in some way accepting John as a baptist in baptizing Jesus, that a man who lived not long after John and Jesus recorded that John was a Baptist who baptized for the remission of sins. For Josephus in the eighteenth book of the Jewish antiquities bears witness that John was a Baptist and promised purification to people who were baptized.19
Contrary to the usual standpoint in research,20 Origen is not citing the passage from Jewish Antiquities, either wholly or partly. In contrast to his habitually accurate citations of Jewish War, Antiquities and Against Apion, here he uses indirect speech (oratio obliqua). Moreover, he provides no details from this particular passage, and what he says implies he knows nothing about its contents. Quite the contrary, he ascribes to John a baptism ‘for the remission of sins’, which explicitly contradicts Josephus (‘if baptism was to be acceptable to God. They must not employ it to gain pardon for whatever sins they committed’), and can merely tell us that John baptized Jesus, was called ‘Baptist’ and ‘promised purification to the people who were baptized’. It is only from Christian tradition that he could acquire these details, as noted by Grant: Origen made John’s baptism thoroughly Christian, claiming that he was simply relying on Josephus … The expression “for the remission of sins” is thoroughly Christian and Josephus did not use it.’21
How are we to account for this? Undeniably, Origen was well acquainted with Josephus’s texts: he had been to Rome, where they were preserved in libraries, and as a resident of Caesarea, in Josephus’s native land, he was sure to find them at the local library.22 If so, why does his testimony about John the Baptist differ from that in the extant text of Josephus? To answer this query, it would perhaps be helpful to compare what Origen says about John to what he goes on to say about James, the brother of Jesus:
The same author [Josephus], although he did not believe in Jesus as Christ, sought for the cause of the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple. He ought to have said that the plot against Jesus was the reason why these catastrophes came upon the people, because they had killed the prophesied Christ: however, although unconscious of it, he is not far from the truth, when he says that these disasters befell the Jews to avenge James the Just, who was a brother of ‘Jesus the so-called Christ’, since they had killed him who was a very righteous man. This is the James whom Paul, the true disciple of Jesus, says that he saw, describing him as the Lord’s brother, not referring so much to their blood relationship or common upbringing as to his moral life and understanding. If therefore he says that the destruction of Jerusalem happened because of James, would it not be more reasonable to say that this happened on account of Jesus the Christ?23
About the killing of James, Jewish Antiquities recounts that following the death of the procurator Festus and while his successor Albinus was on his way to the Land of Israel (62 ce), the high priest Ananus son of Ananus, without obtaining the procurator’s approval, persuaded the Sanhedrin to execute certain opponents, among them ‘the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James … and when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned’ (Ant. 20.200).
As with his testimony about John the Baptist, Origen claims that his account of James, the brother of Jesus, also derives from Josephus, but it is untraceable in any manuscript of Josephus’s works. Nowhere does Josephus ever attribute the destruction of Jerusalem and the temple to the killing of James by the high priest Ananus. Nor, by contrast, does Origen refer to any of Josephus’s specific details concerning James, for example, the political background for his execution.24 We have two testimonies by Origen, on John the Baptist and on James the brother of Jesus, both allegedly draw from Josephus, but are, as provided by Origen, nowhere to be found in any of his manuscripts. How do we account for this?
What Origen tells us about John the Baptist is too short for detecting its source: what he says about James and the circumstances of his death apparently draws on Christian tradition, which similarly calls James ‘the Just’ and regards his death as the reason for the siege and destruction of Jerusalem. These two details about James are found in Eusebius and ascribed to Hegesippus,25 who was Eusebius’s principal source for the second-century history of the church in general and of the Jerusalem church in particular. Hegesippus emphasizes the righteousness of James, who ‘was called the “Just” by all men from the Lord’s time to ours … So from his excessive righteousness he was called the Just.’26 And he is the first to connect the death of James with the destruction of Jerusalem by concluding his account with ‘and at once Vespasian began to besiege them’.27
In view of the affinity between Origen’s testimony and what is recounted about James in Christian sources, scholars have suggested that the Josephus text used by Origen already contained a Christian interpolation28 or that he confused Josephus with Hegesippus.29 If so, then the same may apply to Origen’s testimony about John the Baptist. The possibility that for the death of James Origen relied on some Christian interpolation into Josephus, or drew the James’s testimony from Hegesippus, namely, from an anterior Christian source that he confused with Josephus, may suggest that his testimony about John the Baptist likewise relied on some Christian interpolation into Josephus or an anterior Christian source. That Eusebius does not make it explicit that the Baptist testimony is based on Hegesippus, as he does in the case of James, is no ground for dismissing this possibility outright, as all agree that Eusebius relied on Hegesippus much more than he was willing to concede.30 The fact that Origen’s two testimonies are continuous, coming one after the other, may serve as indirect proof that both were borrowed from the same source and may conceivably have appeared in this order in Hegesippus.
Whatever the explanation for Origen’s source of information, he was obviously unacquainted with the Baptist testimony in Josephus, and what he says contributes nothing to its authenticity.
Nir, Rivka. The First Christian Believer: In Search of John the Baptist. Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2019. pp. 37-41
Kirby’s third argument for authenticity:
(3) The Unlikelihood of a Christian Interpolation on John Saying Nothing of Jesus
Later in the essay Kirby rationalises Josephus writing in an unexpected way by speculating that he might have had motivations now lost to us. The same speculative mind-reading can be made in response to why a Christian interpolator did not mention Jesus when inserting an account of the Baptist. But we can do better than that.
A Christian interpolator was not necessarily stupid. Josephus has been used by Christians to verify an independent support for the gospels. If the John the Baptist passage repeated what we read in the gospels it would have been less effective in as an independent confirmation.
It is Eusebius (d. 340 ce) who first evidences acquaintance with the Baptist testimony in Josephus as we have it, and he provides a full quotation of this passage alongside details from the Gospel account:31
Not long afterwards John the Baptist was beheaded by the younger Herod, as we learn from the inspired gospel narrative. Confirmation comes from Josephus, who mentions Herodias by name and tells how though she was his brother’s wife Herod married her, discarding his existing lawful wife—daughter of King Aretas of Petrea—and separating Herodias from her husband, who was still alive. For her sake, too, he put John to death and was involved in war with Aretas. whose daughter he had slighted. The war ended, as Josephus records, with a pitched battle in which Herod’s army was totally destroyed, the direct result of his outrageous treatment of John. The same writer acknowledges that John was a man of unimpeachable virtue, and a Baptist confirming the description of him contained in the gospel narrative. He also records the fact that Herod was deprived of his throne on account of the same woman, with whom he was driven into exile and condemned to live in Vienne, a city in Gaul.12 The story will be found in Antiquities Book XVIII from which I quote verbatim what he has to say about John. [And it is here that he quotes the passage concerning John the Baptist].
Nir, p. 41
In their respective testimonies, Eusebius and Origen reflect how keen the early church fathers were to prove the historical veracity of the New Testament narratives and traditions about the Christian messiah and his life. It may well be that this also prompted them to such interpolations into Josephus, who was one of the major sources for corroborating the truth of the Christian gospel and the lives of its heroes. Christian writers left evident signs by way of glosses in the margins of Josephus’s extant manuscripts, and they did not hesitate to modify texts hostile to Christianity or even interpolate contradictory passages, especially after Christianity became the state religion.33 Eusebius’s text also allows us to understand why this passage removes John from Jesus. It is precisely because the author disconnects John from the Christian gospel and anchors him in the historical events at the time of Herod Antipas and Herodias that in the eyes of Eusebius confirms what is told about John the Baptist in the New Testament. Conversely, had the author presented John in connection to Jesus and the Christian gospel, and had his testimony been fully aligned with the Gospel account, Eusebius’s proof for the veracity of the Gospel narratives (‘confirming the description of him contained in the gospel narrative’) would be weakened considerably and the forgery would not achieve its purpose—to prove John’s historical existence independently of Gospel events.34
33. Thackeray, Josephus, the Man and the Historian, p. 130. On interest in Josephus of Christian writers, see Mason. Josephus and the New Testament, pp. 7-19. On glosses, see E.M. Sanford, ‘Propaganda and Censorship in the Transmission of Josephus’. TAPA 66 (1935). pp. 127-45 (132): ‘The process of interpolation [into the text of Josephus] was furthered by the intrusions into the text of glosses and adversaria by Christian students studying and copying Josephus. No existing manuscript of his work is free from such interpolation.’
34. Sanford, ‘Propaganda and Censorship in the Transmission of Josephus’, pp. 127, 132: Hardwick, Josephus as an Historical Source, p. 64: ‘Origen saw in Josephus confirmation and explication of New Testament tradition’.
Nir, Rivka. The First Christian Believer: In Search of John the Baptist. Sheffield Phoenix Press, 2019. p. 42
The fourth:
(4) Teaching Attributed to the Baptist Consistent with Josephus’ Aims
John’s teaching about the relationship of baptism to moral character is also consistent with various Christians, too, as will be discussed in a future post.
As for Josephus’s John not being depicted as preaching the coming of the Christ Jesus, see point three above.
Furthermore, it may be considered contrary to the aims of Josephus for John to be depicted as something of a praiseworthy moral philosopher given that he is also said to have appeared as a threat to the political establishment. Josephus was otherwise consistent in condemning such figures.
This brings us to another curious feature about this passage. What was it about John’s preaching (as found in Josephus) that attracted large crowds, so large that Herod feared they were a serious threat to his position? Was it really that they were so enticed by the philosophical principle of the divide between physical rituals and inner righteousness that they flocked to John in large numbers? I doubt it. The scenario is best explained if John were raising hopes about a coming messiah, in which case Josephus is not likely to have been interested in whitewashing John and presenting him as a noble figure.
It is commonly understood that Josephus suppresses hints of messianic hopes in his works but as Nir points out, many scholars have noted that the popularity of John in Josephus can only be explained if he were preaching a messianic hope. How could Josephus have attempted to depict a figure who was arousing public hopes in a messiah as “a Hellenistic moral philosopher”? That is definitely not what one would expect of Josephus.
Fifth:
(5) The Nature of John’s Baptism in Disagreement with the Gospels
And the gospels disagree among themselves about the baptism of John. Yet Kirby overlooks at this point that Nir explains at some length that the baptism described in the Josephan passage was entirely consistent with other Christian and fringe Jewish sects (the kind Josephus would not be favourable towards) at the time.
Further, from Nir:
That there are differences between Christian tradition and Josephus is not decisive on the issue of authenticity, because the New Testament itself differs in its various versions of John the Baptist. And if, as scholars have claimed, it is indeed the same tradition that merely assumes a different mantle in each version, then a Christian familiar with the Baptist tradition might conceivably have integrated it under a somewhat readjusted mantle befitting Josephus’s narrative. (p. 36)
Next,
(6) A Poor Chronological Fit with the Timeline of the Gospels
See above for the value of a chronological disconnect for a Christian apologist.
And seventh:
(7) The Reason for the Execution of John in Disagreement with the Gospels
Ditto — see above and the quoted passage where Eusebius uses Josephus’s varying account to confirm the gospels.
(8) Political Contextualizing More Characteristic of Josephus
Again see above. But there’s more….
Also odd is how the passage accounts for its integration into this particular place (that the Jews interpreted Herod’s defeat as divine retribution for his punishment of John the Baptist). In the Gospels, John’s death coincided with Jesus’ appearance on the stage (c. 29-30 ce), whereas Herod’s war against Aretas, the king of Arabia Petra, occurred six or more years later (36 ce). How could Josephus claim that the Jews credited Herod’s defeat to John’s death, which preceded it by six years?40 The causal relationship that the author of this passage creates between John’s death and the military political event reminds of Hegesippus, Origen and Eusebius, who equally connect the death of James, Jesus’ brother, to the downfall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Second Temple. And these two descriptions are presumably based on the causal relationship created by Christian theology between the Jewish rejection and crucifixion of Jesus and the temple’s destruction.41
40. Webb (John the Baptizer and Prophet, p. 34) takes this as evidence for the acclaim of John who was retained in the popular memory throughout these years.
41. Efron, Formation of the Primary Christian Church, p. 195: Grant, ‘Eusebius, Josephus and the Fate of the Jews’, pp. 78-79: Grant, Eusebius as Church Historian, p. 101: Herrmann, Chrestos, p. 101. For evidence for the Christian perception that linked destruction of the temple with the crucifixion of Jesus, see Mason, Josephus and the New Testament, pp. 11-19. At the same time, Josephus also associates military defeats and national disasters with punishment for murders of individuals, especially in Jerusalem. The classical biblical precedent of the murder of Zechariah son of Jehoiada the priest (2 Chron. 24.20-22), Josephus paraphrases (Ant. 9.166-72) as relating to Judea’s invasion by Hazael king of Aram and death of Joash; the assassination of the high priest Yonatan by the Sicarii in the days of Felix, Josephus claims as responsible for the fate of Jerusalem and the temple (Ant. 20.160-66); the murders of Hanan son of Hanan and Joshua of Gamla, Josephus claims, led God to forsake the Jews and deliver the temple to the Romans (War 4.314-25). On the assassination of Zechariah son of Jehoiada and its metamorphoses in Josephus, the New restament and rabbinic literature, see J. Klawans, Josephus and the Theologies of Ancient Judaism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 126-29; I. Kalimi. ’Murder in Jerusalem Temple. The Chronicler’s Story of Zechariah: Literary and Theological Features, Historical Credibility, and Impact’, RB 117 (2010), pp. 200-209; D.R. Schwartz (Reading the First Century [Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2014], p. 107): the passage ascribing Herod’s defeat to John’s execution agreesdefeats as expressive of divine will, and most particularly to explain murderous acts in Jerusalem as responsible for its misfortunes, for example, the murder of Onias (Ant. 14.25) as the explanation for Pompey’s victory in a later passage.
Nir, pp. 44f
Nine:
(9) The Connections Made from the Passage to Its Context
Kirby writes:
The very fact that the passage connects the death of John with the defeat of Herod Antipas, in the way that it does, forms a connection between the passage and its context, which is not something that we would necessarily expect from a Christian interpolation . . . .
See what is in effect Nir’s response above.
Then we have the arguments related to style:
(10) Statistical Analysis of Style
(11) Thackeray’s Analysis of Style
Rivka Nir sums up these pro-authenticity arguments thus:
Another pro-authenticity argument is the correspondence these scholars discern between the vocabulary and style of this passage and Josephus’s Antiquities in general, and books 17-19 in particular.14 They note, for example, Josephus’s inclination to verbosity, his peculiar vocabulary and linguistic forms, his usage of circumlocution, his heavy reliance on participles (participium) and the infinitive (infinitivus) and genitive absolute (genetivus absolutus), in his attempt to imitate classical Greek style, especially Thucydides. Of the many expressions characteristic of Josephus’s style in Ant. 17-19, scholars emphasize his usage of the following paired terms: piety toward God/fear of God (εύσεβεία πρός τον θεόν) and righteousness (δικαιοσύνη). The conjunction of eusebia and dikaiosunē is typical of Josephus, encapsulating the essentials of ethical philosophy in his time, and is part of the apologetic arsenal in his effort to present Judaism as a philosophical tradition embracing the highest universal virtues.15
14. Thackeray, Josephus, The Man and the Historian, pp. 110-12, 132, 136; W. Mizugaki, Origen and Josephus’, in Josephus, Judaism and Christianity (ed. H.L. Feldman and G. Hata; Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1987), pp. 325-37 (335); E. Nodet, ‘Jésus et Jean Baptiste selon Josèphe’, RB 82 (1988), pp. 321-48 (324-26); Webb. John the Baptizer and Prophet, pp. 31, 40; Mason, ‘Fire, Water and Spirit’, p. 178; Meier, A Marginal Jew, II. p. 19.
15. See Ant. 16.42; 7.338. 342, 347, 348. 356; 9.236. Mason, Fire, Water and Spirit’, p. 178: S. Mason. Flavius Josephus on the Pharisees (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2001), pp. 85-89; Mason. Josephus and the New Testament, p. 215. Josephus also uses eusebia and dikaiosunē when he refers to the Essenes (War 2.139). See more subsequently.
Nir, pp. 35f
To which she responds:
As to the Josephus-like vocabulary and style used by the writer of this passage, a Christian forger would necessarily be conversant with Josephus’s language and style of writing if he wanted to insert this passage without making the forgery conspicuous. Such usage merely proves ‘the imitative linguistic skill of the Christian editor, who strove after appearance and attired the imagined testimony with an authentic “Flavian” facade’.17 Against this, it seems that scholars try to blur the fact that this brief passage also contains unique words unparalleled in any of Josephus’s writings, notably words that, as I shall attempt to prove, are semantically and conceptually suspect of a Christian hand — βαπτιστής, βαπτισμός, βάπτισιν, έπασκουσιν, αποδεκτός. Furthermore, that this passage occurs in all the Josephus manuscripts is no evidence for its authenticity, because all the available manuscripts of Jewish Antiquities are no earlier than the eleventh century.18
Nir, pp. 36f
Certain words are said to be indicators of authenticity:
(12) The Words “John the Baptist” a Fixed Phrase in Christian Usage
(13) The Word for “Sin” in the Passage Characteristic of Josephan Usage
(14) The Word for “Baptism” in the Passage Uncharacteristic of Christian Usage
Kirby reasons with respect to (12) that we would not expect a Christian interpolator to write “John who was called the Baptist” (as we read in Antiquities) but would have written “John the Baptist” as we find throughout the New Testament.
I don’t think I need to comment on that argument given what has been covered so far in this post.
As for the use of Josephan terms, see above.
To be continued……
Neil Godfrey
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It is commonly understood that Josephus suppresses hints of messianic hopes in his works but as Nir points out, many scholars have noted that the popularity of John in Josephus can only be explained if he were preaching a messianic hope. How could Josephus have attempted to depict a figure who was arousing public hopes in a messiah as “a Hellenistic moral philosopher”? That is definitely not what one would expect of Josephus.
What one would expect of Josephus (the preaching of a messianic hope) is found yet in the passage about the Baptist in the Slavonic Josephus. Thoughts about that?
Are you suggesting Slavonic Josephus is the more primitive text?
So Samuel Zinner thinks, in The Infancy Gospels of James and Thomas and the Canonical Gospels in Conversation with Josephus (n.p.: Journal of Higher Criticism Supplement Series, 2020).
I have not read Zinner. My initial thought, however, is that if Josephus did explicitly talk about popular messianic preachers and their eager followers, it is strange that there is little other evidence outside of that text to confirm such a situation prior to the Jewish War. One would expect such a phenomenon (especially if it were significant lead up to the War — and if it were something Jews were notorious for) to make itself known in Roman authors when they wrote about Jews at the time.
Neil, in your landmark translation of Bruno Bauer’s “Criticism of the Gospel History,” we English readers saw for the first time Bauer’s opinion about John the Baptist (JBap) — that he was more remarkable than Jesus because JBap was the first to recognize the aura of Jesus without anybody telling him. JBap was the first, said Bauer, not Jesus, who was at first only another follower of JBap.
Morton Smith (whom I hold as high as Bruno Bauer) held lots of credence for Josephus’ statements about JBap, though not so much about Jesus. However, Morton Smith didn’t think the Jesus chapter in Josephus was *all* interpolation. He said that there were only FIVE WORDS in that chapter that were interpolation, which I write in [brackets] here:
About this time there lived Jesus, a [wizardly] man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was one who fashioned surprising feats and was a teacher of such people as accept [impiety] gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. He was [called] the Messiah. When Pilate, upon hearing him accused by men of the highest standing amongst us, had condemned him to be crucified, those who had in the first place come to love him did not give up their affection for him. On the third day [they claimed] he appeared to them restored to life, for the prophets of God had prophesied these and countless other marvelous things about him. And the tribe of Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared. (Josephus, Antiquities 18:63)
But Smith’s further evidence that Josephus himself wrote that chapter on Jesus was the fact that 3/4 of the chapter was REPLACED with the story of a Gentile Princess who claimed that her pregnancy was induced by an angel of God, and the pathetic result of her deception.
Josephus originally wrote a mockery of the Virgin Mary, obviously, and Christian writers could not let this insult of Mary stand, so they replaced the entire section with a similar story from Gentile lore.
As for the JBap passage in Josephus, Morton Smith accepts it as legitimate, though it says very little about JBap, and nothing at all about the alleged dance of Salome, which we may take to be a dramatization. But Josephus correctly described the fact that Herod killed JBap, after Herod and JBap had clashed irredeemably.
We should not rush from one extreme to the other. There are serious problems with Josephus’ entry on Jesus — but just because one can find a few one-word discrepancies between Josephus and Mark is no proof of anything. Josephus agrees with Mark that JBap baptized near the Jordan — unlike any other Jewish prophet before him.
The purpose of JBap was clear — the same as the purpose of Jesus’ alleged cleansing of the Temple; namely, a protest against 1st century Temple worship. Like Qumran before them, protesting 1st century Temple worship was a cultural phenomenon as the 1st century opened.
What is a little strange about the Josephus entry on JtB is the way it speaks of the kind of baptism John was practising and also what it was not — as if there were some polemical intent behind the explanation. The specific details, the positive and the negative, that baptism could only effect forgiveness AND a cleansing of the body from impurity IF one had first turned to an inner righteous living. The only other place, as I think Nir points out (from memory), that we find a teaching that ritual washing can make one’s body free from pollution IF one first turns to a moral life, is in the Jewish-Christian Clementine literature. There that description of baptism is presented as a polemic against Pauline baptism and other ritual washings.
It was that echo that Nir heard in Josephus that led her into her study of this question.
I might also point out that my own approach to historical research departs from the approaches generally found in the books on biblical studies and Christian origins that I have read. https://vridar.org/historical-method-and-the-question-of-christian-origins/
Morton Smith’s approach relied heavily on reconstruction through “criteria of authenticity”. I prefer to leave that approach aside because it seems to me to be unique to biblical studies and not generally used in the same way in other historical research.
Hi Neil, I really think it’s great that you discuss Peter’s essay and his arguments. Peter’s essay convinced me, especially because of the disagreement in content and style between Josephus and the Gospels. I find Rivka Nur’s counterarguments rather weak, especially because she has previously argued the exact opposite. I would appreciate it if you addressed this in a little more detail. In any case, the counterarguments don’t convince me at first. Kind regards, KK
It was Peter’s emphasis on the difference between Josephus and Gospel wording and phrasing that I found problematic. Christians are known to have been capable of expressing themselves in ways that are not carbon copies of gospel passages. I don’t think we need to expect a pedantic approach among Christians whereby they only repeated gospel phrases.
The terminology that we read in Josephus is actually echoed in the Clementine literature. There are few who argue that any possible interpolation was done by a proto-orthodox Christian — though if Eusebius was the culprit then we do know that he was not a fool. Many interpolations have been done foolishly but by no means all. Alexandrian librarians made it one of their tasks to use their advanced education to try to cleanse texts of Homer et al of interpolations — it was not an “obvious” task.
Hi Neil, thank you for this discussion. I am glad to see that the 2015 article is seen as a valuable point of reference for discussion of the passage about John in the 18th book of the Antiquities. Since I am not a reader on a regular cadence, please drop me a line next time to let me know.
Without responding to everything you have written, I would like to make a comment on the purpose of my article. I took up the same pattern as my article on the Testimonium – at https://www.earlychristianwritings.com/testimonium.html – where I am inclined to regard both references to Jesus as spurious. Which is to say, I attempted to canvas all of the arguments with which I am familiar. These arguments may be “of various quality” (as also in the Testimonium article). I did not omit arguments that agreed with the conclusion I reached even if I viewed some of them as indecisive, weak, or possibly even inconsequential.
For this article on the passage regarding John, I gave a guide to the reader on which arguments I considered to stand out as more than “slight indications.” I gave credit to “The Statements Regarding Baptism and Sin in the Passage” as an argument for inauthenticity. And I referenced these arguments for authenticity:
(2) The Unlikelihood of an Interpolation on John Being Inserted First
(3) The Unlikelihood of a Christian Interpolation on John Saying Nothing of Jesus
(6) A Poor Chronological Fit with the Timeline of the Gospels
(7) The Reason for the Execution of John in Disagreement with the Gospels
(8) Political Contextualizing More Characteristic of Josephus
(13) The Word for “Sin” in the Passage Characteristic of Josephan Usage
(14) The Word for “Baptism” in the Passage Uncharacteristic of Christian Usage
(15) Ant. 18.120 Incongruous without Ant. 18.116-119 (and Appropriate As-Is)
Accordingly, if it is directed at me, I take some exception to the comment (without considering myself a serious scholar in any case), “The serious scholar of ancient texts should never adopt a defensive position against the possibility that any particular passage might be an interpolation.” I wrote here, “This argument by itself is certainly not decisive … The most that _might_ be said, on this basis alone, is that a suggestion of interpolation here should require some decent arguments to substantiate it.” This was only a modest affordance to the person who might want to try to take up this point, in an attempt to give a fair account.
For (5), I write explicitly “This particular argument, however, is not completely sound” and “Credit for this point thus does not rightfully belong in the authenticity column, in the final accounting.” The unfortunate reply to my section (5) is: “And the gospels disagree among themselves about the baptism of John. Yet Kirby overlooks at this point that Nir explains at some length that the baptism described in the Josephan passage was entirely consistent with other Christian and fringe Jewish sects (the kind Josephus would not be favourable towards) at the time.” This is an argument that was introduced only to be explicitly rejected. Not only that, but I also explicitly give credit to Nir in this section. I wrote, “Indeed, the lengthy article by Rivka Nir and one of the points made by Robert Price, in favor of interpolation, as well as the earlier discussion of Israel Abrahams (responding to an argument similar to that of Nir and Price), revolve around precisely this.” Furthermore, this was the argument for inauthenticity (“The Statements Regarding Baptism and Sin in the Passage”) that I specifically remarked upon as being cogent in the conclusion to the article.
Regarding matters of style, most of them were relegated to being no more than slight indications in the conclusion. This includes both points that you reply to specifically, i.e. (11) and (12). Based on the conclusion – trust me, I’m going based only on what I can read because I don’t remember much from what I was thinking in 2015 – only the points (13) and (14) were given real credit in this regard. Yet (11) and (12) receive comments, while (13) and (14) get no specific comments.
Taking it the other way, looking at what I called out as arguments for authenticity, I can see:
(2) has a response based on Rivka Nir that suggests that Origen was not referring to the passage on John in the 18th book of the Antiquities. I must agree with you that I hadn’t considered that suggestion when I wrote my essay, which must explain why I presented the argument based on the assumption that Origen did.
(3) also has a response that quotes Rivka Nir: “Conversely, had the author presented John in connection to Jesus and the Christian gospel, and had his testimony been fully aligned with the Gospel account, Eusebius’s proof for the veracity of the Gospel narratives (‘confirming the description of him contained in the gospel narrative’) would be weakened considerably and the forgery would not achieve its purpose—to prove John’s historical existence independently of Gospel events.” I don’t agree that Rivka Nir has made an effective rebuttal here, but that can be a separate discussion. It seems to be the crux of your response, so more than a brief comment would be warranted.
(6) gets no comment other than a reference back to (3).
(7) also gets no comment other than a reference back to (3).
(8) also references back to (3). That quote from Rivka Nir quote is doing a lot of work. This also elicits another quote from Nir, which includes: “How could Josephus claim that the Jews credited Herod’s defeat to John’s death, which preceded it by six years?” There are several assumptions here: the implied assumption that this is a valid argument against it having happened, the assumption regarding a particular dating of the death of Jesus, and the assumption that John died before Jesus did (which is necessary for the point to have force – the gospels could just have the time John died wrong). Would that Nir could be put under the same magnifying glass.
(13) and (14) receive no specific comment, and (15) does receive discussion from you in some detail, in the next blog post, which stands out for the virtue of presenting detailed interaction with the points I made, with specificity and via your own discussion.
My original article is quite long, and I understand the inclination towards brevity in your response to it. I do recommend that anyone interested review it themselves. There’s quite a bit more to it than the article’s headings that give title to the arguments.
As I wrote above, your response to (3) appears to be the crux here. If someone agrees with you and/or Rivka Nir, that the passage has been crafted to give confirmation for the veracity of the historicity of John, without being “stupid,” whittling away what can make it look like it came from someone with the concerns of a Christian, adding back what would make it look like it came from someone with a perspective like that of Josephus, and doing so quite effectively, then sure, they could also agree that this waves away completely several arguments for the passage being authentic. For now, since this is quite long enough for a comment and since that point is deserving of fuller treatment, let the reader decide.
It was written as a general truism in response to what I have found to be a prevalent stance in the literature. Recall my point about a “culture of interpolations”. So many biblical scholars do come across as presuming that our “received texts” should be presumed interpolation free unless there are “obvious” reasons to think otherwise — and being too quick to dismiss arguments for interpolation through charges of “hyper-scepticism” or ad hoc rationalizations. I am attempting to make a general case for the need for caution. The fact that certain questions can be raised about a source ought to be enough for that. If the hat fits, wear it, but I am more interested in writing a general case in response to a particular one.
I have no interest whatever in visiting the earlywritings forum to engage in discussion there nor in sending out emails to persons there to update them on what I am writing about here.