ChatGPT’s depiction of Isaac “receiving with pleasure” the news he is to be sacrificed!
Thomas C. Schmidt asserts that Josephus portrayed the followers of Jesus in a negative light by writing that they “received truisms with pleasure” (according to Schmidt’s translation). I have demonstrated in the previous post that Schmidt’s “truisms” is a mistranslation. The correct translation can only be “true things” or “truths”. But Schmidt also argued that when Josephus added the words “with pleasure” he was conveying the idea that the disciples were being led by their worldly, carnal, physical desires. The word for “pleasure”, he argues, almost necessarily conveys a slur against the disciples.
Again, Schmidt’s argument is based on selective evidence. Though the word for “pleasure” is often used to refer to sensuous interests or wicked motivations it is also used – by Josephus as well as other ancient authors – in connection with virtues and contains not the slightest hint of anything derogatory.
The phrase ‘receive with pleasure’ (τῶν ἡδονῇ . . . δεχομένων) in Josephus’ writings most frequently refers to overzealous or heedless actions. (Schmidt 2025, 207)
“Most frequently” is misleading. If Schmidt is referring to the exact forms of the two words that he quotes then there is only one other place in Josephus’ writings where those forms of the words appear in combination. Furthermore, it just happens that in that one other place the phrase has a distinctly, unambiguous positive flavour. In the wake of the assassination of Gaius Caligula, a Roman senator’s speech urging careful judgment, caution and wisdom and virtuous decision-making is “received with pleasure” by the other senators.
Sentius used such words, and they were received with pleasure [ἡδονῇ δεχομένων] by the senators, as well as by all of the equites who were present. (Ant. XIX.185.2)
But it is more likely that Schmidt is referring to similar phrases built upon various forms of those words (“receive” and “pleasure”) as the context required. There are eight such instances, not including the TF, in Antiquities of the Jews. The first such instance is most interesting. . . .
Abraham had just explained to his son Isaac that he was about to sacrifice him at God’s command. How did Isaac “receive” these words? He “received” them with “pleasure”!
But Isaac—since he had such a father, it was necessary for his disposition to be noble—received the words with pleasure [δέχεται πρὸς ἡδονὴν τοὺς λόγους], and . . . declared it just, if both God and his father intended it. (Ant. I.232.2 = AJ 1.13.4)
No matter how often Josephus elsewhere spoke of wicked or foolish audiences receiving corrupt words that titillated their own pleasurable feelings, there is absolutely no way that anyone can read Josephus’s account of Isaac and think Josephus was implying some negative innuendo towards Isaac’s response to Abraham’s words.
Josephus boasted that the Judean nation observed their holy laws “with pleasure” throughout their entire lives:
What form of government then can be more holy than this? what more worthy kind of worship can be paid to God than we pay, where the entire body of the people are prepared for religion, where an extraordinary degree of care is required in the priests, and where the whole polity is so ordered as if it were a certain religious solemnity? For what things foreigners, when they solemnize such festivals, are not able to observe for a few days’ time, and call them Mysteries and Sacred Ceremonies, we observe with great pleasure [= ταῦτα μεθ᾽ ἡδονῆς] and an unshaken resolution during our whole lives.(Against Apion, 2.189 Whiston’s translation adds “great” to capture the tone of Josephus’s words here.)
Schmidt acknowledges one positive instance of a combination of those words. The Pharisees who protested against Pilate are said to have been willing to “receive” death “with pleasure” rather than break the Laws of God.
But those who had thrown themselves face down and bared their throats said they would rather receive death with pleasure [ἡδονῇ δέξασθαι] than dare to transgress the wisdom of the laws. (Ant. XVIII.59.2)
Schmidt directs readers to Olson’s chapter:
For an overview of positive usages of ἡδονή in both Josephus and Eusebius, see Olson, ‘A Eusebian Reading’, 104–5. (Schmidt 2025, 78. See also Olson 2013)
So when Schmidt writes . . .
The phrase ‘receive with pleasure’ (τῶν ἡδονῇ . . . δεχομένων) in Josephus’ writings most frequently refers to overzealous or heedless actions. (Schmidt 2025, 207)
. . . his words have no more relevance to the TF than they do to what Josephus meant by his discussion of Isaac “receiving with pleasure” the words of his father or the Pharisees “receiving with pleasure” death rather than disobedience to God.
There remains one passage in Antiquities that surely must ring with a certain familiarity among those aware of the TF: Josephus’s account of a certain Alexander who claimed to be the son of King Herod after Herod’s death. Schmidt writes:
In fact, in another passage, much underappreciated by scholars, Josephus uses the very same wording to describe how a certain imposter pretended to be Alexander, the son of Herod, and ‘convinced as many of the Jews that came to meet him to believe [that he was Alexander]’ (Ἰουδαίων ὁπόσοις εἰς ὁμιλίαν ἀφίκετο ἐπηγάγετο εἰς πίστιν), Josephus then says that ‘the cause [of this] was that men received [his] words with pleasure’ (αἴτιον δὲ ἦν τῶν ἀνθρώπων τὸ ἡδονῇ δεχόμενον τοὺς λόγους). Taken together, Josephus claims that the false Alexander ‘convinced’ or even ‘led astray’ (ἐπηγάγετο) certain men (ἀνθρώπων) because they ‘received’ (δεχόμενον) his words ‘with pleasure’ (ἡδονῇ). Hence, this ‘pleasure’, which the men had in ‘receiving’ the words of the pretender, seems therefore to indicate an overeager, overzealous, or all too credulous belief—not something particularly positive.
Most striking, however, is that the above passage closely parallels the TF which also describes Jesus ‘leading’ or ‘misleading’ (ἐπηγάγετο) ‘men who receive truisms with pleasure’ (ἀνθρώπων τῶν ἡδονῇ τἀληθῆ δεχομένων). Such a close linguistic correspondence inescapably points toward Josephus as the responsible party for at least this portion of the TF . . . (Schmidt 2025, 82 – my highlighting)
On the contrary, what it points to is that anyone familiar with the writings of Josephus could have had such a passage in mind as they were drafting the TF. How often does the same writer describe two entirely separate and dissimilar episodes with the same semantic structures. I suspect that sort of parallel is normally what we find among ancient authors who were imitating others. But that’s an analysis project for another time.
In preparation for this post I compiled a list of extracts from both Perseus and TLG that itemize the instances where the words for “pleasure” and “receive” are found throughout all of the writing by Josephus, along with all writings including some form of the word for “pleasure” and “receive” from Josephus and his near contemporaries: Dio Chrysostom, Epictetus and Plutarch. I have decided not to belabor the point by posting them all here. If what I have written above does not suffice to convince anyone, I ask them to contact me directly and I may reconsider my decision.
Conclusion: There is absolutely no innuendo in the TF to suggest that “receiving with pleasure” the “true things” from Jesus in any way at all hinted at something negative. The words of the TF are quite capable of, and even demand, being read as positives: the true things Jesus the teacher taught were received with pleasure/happiness/joy by those who listened to him.
Who am I to discuss the meaning of an ancient Greek word? This is something new for me so I must justify this foray. Up until this year I only had a self-taught level of understanding of koine Greek (the Greek of the New Testament) and would never have had the confidence to address Schmidt’s argument publicly. But this year I have undertaken formal studies at Macquarie University in ancient Greek (Attic). I have been awarded 95%, 96% and most recently 99% in the grammar and translation tests to date. The course covered so far has informed us of the meanings and forms of the word Schmidt claims means “truisms” – along with pointing us to the multiple online tools to assist us with its many occurrences by ancient authors, including Josephus.
Thomas Schmidt attempts to argue that Josephus used a belittling word to describe the teaching of Jesus that attracted his disciples. At best, Schmidt claims, the word he uses is ambiguous, but that the weight of evidence should lead us to read Josephus as depicting the followers of Jesus loving trite banalities. I demonstrate in this post that Schmidt is simply flat wrong. The word Josephus uses cannot be translated the way Schmidt claims.
Josephus’s words about Jesus, the Testimonium Flavianum (TF), begin thus:
And in this time there was a certain Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man, for he was a doer of incredible deeds, a teacher of men who receive truisms with pleasure. . . . (Schmidt’s translation, p. 6 – my highlighting in all quotations)
Truisms?
A truism is “a statement that is obviously true and says nothing new or interesting”, “a self-evident, obvious truth”, “a statement that is so obviously true that it is almost not worth saying”, “a statement that is generally accepted as obviously true and is repeated so often that it has become boring”, “a statement the truth of which is obvious or well known; commonplace”. All those meanings come up with a general internet search.
And that is indeed what Thomas Schmidt believes Josephus most likely means to convey to his readers. He explains:
The term τἀληθῆ in the TF should . . . be taken to be fairly general or run-of-the-mill truths, as with the English terms ‘facts at hand’, ‘maxims’, ‘pithy sayings’, or especially ‘truisms’. (Schmidt 2025, 78)
The term ‘truisms’ (τἀληθῆ) . . . suggests basic, run-of-the-mill facts, observations, and the like. (Schmidt 2025, 207)
Here are some examples of truisms:
“It is what it is.”
“Money doesn’t buy happiness.”
“You win some, you lose some.”
“Life isn’t fair.”
“Prevention is better than cure.”
“What goes up must come down.”
“No one is perfect.”
“Actions speak louder than words.”
“Actions speak louder than words.”
“People change.”
“Success doesn’t happen overnight.”
“There’s no such thing as a free lunch.”
“Hard work pays off.”
“Practice makes perfect.”
“You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.”
“Patience is a virtue.”
“You can’t win them all!”
“Time heals all wounds.”
“We all make mistakes.”
“You reap what you sow.”
“You can’t please everyone.”
It is almost the definition of a truism that it is a saying that cannot be received “with pleasure”. A truism may offer some small consolation, or a mild laugh, but hardly “pleasure”.
Schmidt argues that the word for “pleasure” in association with what he translates as “truisms” casts a negative connotation. I will reserve my response to that particular argument for another time. Meanwhile, anyone who has any acquaintance at all with ancient moralistic or philosophical writings knows full well that taking joy, delight, even pleasure, in “good things” is noble and right; what is deemed a negative is when pleasure is taken in “less than good” things. Schmidt does point out that some later Christian copyists seemed to be uncomfortable with Josephus using the word “pleasure”, but that is a problem for much later Christian ethical viewpoints.
To be fair, Schmidt does in one place acknowledge that his word for truisms is “ambiguous” (p. 31) and that it could be read as a positive content of what he taught. But his main stress is on insisting that it refers to something negative and poor in content.
Schmidt’s attempt to persuade readers that this particular word means “run of the mill”, “prosaic” bromides is misguided. The word means “truths” or “true things” or “true matters” and such.
There is no ambiguity with the TF’s use of this word. There is no reason at all to think Josephus was being sarcastic or in any way hinting that the teachings of Jesus were shallow trivialities.
talēthē — τἀληθῆ — true things or truisms?
The word Schmidt translates as “truisms” is τἀληθῆ. This is actually a contraction of two words: τά and ἀληθῆ. (The technical term for this kind of combination word form is “crasis”.) τά most simply means “the”: it is the plural neuter form of “the”; ἀληθῆ is normally an adjective meaning “true” (as in true facts, true statements, or indicating the truth of a matter). When the two words come together ἀληθῆ becomes as much a noun as an adjective. The two together mean “the truth”, “truths” or “true things”. (Luschnig and Mitchell 2007, 42, 51, 52, 78, 121, 286)
Οne would be hard pressed to translate τἀληθῆ as “truisms” in any of the above instances.
But what about in the time of Josephus? How was the word used in the first and early second centuries?
I will first of all list examples of how the word was used by authors from around the time of Josephus and then quote examples from Josephus himself. Like Schmidt, I limit myself to the crasis form τἀληθῆ even though other appearances of ἀληθῆ can convey the same meaning.
Dio Chrysostom, ca 40 – 115 CE
Here are translations of every instance I found where Dio Chrysostom uses τἀληθῆ. They are from Orationes. Not a single one could be translated as “truisms”. For the Greek text click on this link to the Perseus site.
Speech 3, section 13: …at that time I risked my life for the sake of my soul, but now, when it is permitted for everyone to speak the truth, I lie, though no danger is present…
Speech 3, section 23: …it does not receive any great favor. For what kind of favor is it thought to be, to speak the truth?
Speech 4, section 2: …because of the greatest authority and power, so that they not only recount true things about such matters, but even exaggerate by inventing them themselves.
Speech 4, section 10: But he flattered none of mankind, rather speaking the truth to all, and possessing not a single drachma, just as he wished.
Speech 4, section 59: …strike with your spear into the illusion; for you will hear the truth from me alone among men, and from no one else could you learn it.
Speech 11, section 3: …just as, I think, it is difficult to take away from those who have raised foster children the one who tells the truth—namely what someone said to them in the beginning…
Speech 11, section 4: …you deemed Homer more trustworthy—even though he told the gravest lies about you—than me, who speaks the truth, and you believed him to be a divine and wise man…
Speech 11, section 16: …to begin from a madman, and they are more inclined to think that those who then condemned him judged rightly that he spoke the truth rather than that he was lying.
Speech 11, section 18: …did he say that in such a way? For the one who does not openly state the truth about the goddesses, but rather in the opposite manner so that falsehoods are more likely to be assumed…
Speech 11, section 22: …he had no less confidence and pride in lying than in speaking the truth.
Speech 11, section 42: …they have no need of wine, but water suffices them to drink—just so, those who wish to know the truth have no need of measures…
Speech 11, section 80: …and Homer agrees to this: for he could not have hidden all the truth;
Speech 11, section 83: …giving gifts to each other like friends. After this, he finally tells the truth: …
Speech 7, section 99: …nor did they praise them as being wise and good and speaking the truth.
Speech 34, section 30: …and as a true guardian of his own fatherland, both thinking and speaking the truth, and through whom the city is better governed and has enjoyed some good.
Speech 21, section 3: …I shall make corrections for them, treating each part in turn, if I am believed while speaking the truth about the more important matters.
Speech 23, section 22: …a kind of honor and power, if they are sensible. For you must listen to the truth and not take it badly, if someone, wishing to praise others…
Speech 53, section 2: …tender and especially resembling women—how could you suppose that he speaks the truth or is fit for anything involving hunting? — Not at all.
Epictetus, ca 50 – 135 CE.
Eighteenth century depiction of Epictetus. Wikimedia
Discourses, Book 1, Chapter 7 Question and answer. For what is promised in discourse? To assert what is true, to eliminate what is false, and to suspend judgment concerning what is unclear.
Discourses, Book 2, Chapter 6 Hades? All roads to it are equal. But if you wish to hear the truth: the shorter one is the one sent by the tyrant.
Discourses, Book 3, Chapter 1 Am I such a person? How so? Are you such a person as to be able to hear the truth? Would that you were!
Discourses, Book 3, Chapter 22 …what kind of enemies. And he must come back, having examined things carefully, to report the truth, not being struck dumb by fear, such that he declares enemies where there are none.
Discourses, Book 3, Chapter 23 Come, are we fulfilling their promise? Tell me the truth. But if you lie, I will tell you: …
Plutarch, ca 40 – 120 CE
Plutarch, Pompey, chapter 13 …to offer himself and stand firm even in the utmost dangers; but upon learning the truth, and perceiving that all men were welcoming and escorting Pompey…
Plutarch, Apophthegmata Laconica, chapter 69 He replied, “We are free men; but others—if they do not speak the truth—will groan.
Plutarch, De genio Socratis, section 18 I do not know,” he said, “O Caphisias; for it is necessary to speak the truth to you.
Plutarch, Adversus Colotem, section 15 …the place, namely the class of propositions, in which all true things are included; for although these exist, there is no actual thing corresponding to them…
Plutarch, De liberis educandis, section 14 And all these things—most fittingly—should accustom children to speak the truth; for lying is slavish and worthy of hatred from all mankind.
Plutarch, Cimon, chapter 2 When the general wrote to Lucullus, he bore witness to the truth, and thus the city, which was in danger, escaped judgment. . . . We shall resume in the written Parallel Lives the deeds of the man, setting forth the truth.
I submit that not a single use of τἀληθῆ by the above contemporaries of Josephus can reasonably be translated as “truisms”. In every case “truisms” would be jarringly out of context and make a nonsense of the point being made.
Flavius Josephus, ca 37 – 100 CE
Now for the instances in the works of Josephus. Schmidt says
Τἀληθῆ is also Josephan and is used by him thirty-nine times in its crasis form, eight of which occur in the same case and number as in the TF. Of these eight, five appear in the Antiquities. (Schmidt 2025, 77)
I have not been able to find the 39 uses Schmidt reports. I suspect there has been a misunderstanding at some point there, given that the Perseus site lists 39 instances of all forms of the word (not just the crasis form that Schmidt is speaking about).
book 3, section 74
…he wrote as one who had found the aforementioned arrangement, considering it fitting to bear witness to the truth for those who deserve it, even if it was likely to bring fame to the one being inscribed.
book 3, section 308 …to neither condemn God with falsehood nor trust those who, having been struck with astonishment, have spoken what is not true concerning the Canaanites, but rather (to trust) those who…
book 4, section 219
…not one witness, but three, or at the very least two, whose testimony will be made true by their past conduct. But let there not be testimony of women because of … immaturity, whom it is likely either for gain or out of fear not to bear true witness. But if someone who has given false testimony [= testimony that is not true = μὴ τἀληθῆ μαρτυρῆσαι] is believed, let him suffer these things, once convicted.
book 8, section 23
…Master, (grant) sound mind and good judgment, by which I may judge the people, having received what is true and just.
book 14, section 3
…but above all, historians ought to aim at accuracy, and not claim to speak the truth about things of which they themselves are ignorant, nor trust those who do.
book 18, section 63 — our passage in question
…for he was a doer of startling deeds, a teacher of men who receive the truth with pleasure, and he won over many Jews, and also many of the…
The Jewish War
book 1, section 16
…mouth and tongue are loosened, but when it comes to history—where it is necessary to speak the truth and to gather the facts with great effort—they are silenced… from writing about rulers. Let truth in history [same word, ῆς ἱστορίας ἀληθές, though not in crasis form] be honored among us, since among the Greeks it has been neglected.
book 1, section 594
…(over the) corpse, he asked for what reason she had thrown herself down, swearing that if she spoke the truth, he would release her from all punishment; but if she held back, he would punish her severely.
book 3, section 438
…as the truth was uncovered with time, both what happened at Jotapata…
Life of Josephus
section 262 …that they might repent and, having gone back to their homeland, report to those who had sent them the truth about the way I have conducted myself.
Schmidt’s misleading interpretation
When Schmidt writes of this particular word that . . .
it could also be understood positively as referring to an avid pursuit of certain ideals or hard and fast facts (Schmidt 2025, 137)
. . . surely he is not fairly summing up the evidence that he himself has alluded to. In every case of the above quotations, including those from Josephus, there is no question of the word “also” being understood positively. Just look at them: in every case it is understood positively as referring to “an avid pursuit of certain ideals or hard and fast facts”. There are no exceptions.
One could imagine the word well being applied to Jesus teaching about the law, about the truth of the sabbath, about the truth of prophecy, about the truth of the Pharisees and those who take up their cross and follow him.
Schmidt appeals to context:
Schmidt writes that Josephus “often used” the word for “teacher” negatively and that Josephus uses the word τἀληθῆ to refer to “fairly mundane” things. Most importantly though is that these terms do not indicate a positive estimation of Jesus, for ‘teacher’ (διδάσκαλος) is often used by Josephus negatively, ‘receive with pleasure’ (τῶν ἡδονῇ . . . δεχομένων) is often negative, and ‘truisms’ (τἀληθῆ) is again fairly mundane in Josephus’ writings. (Schmidt 2025, 79)
Again it is quite misleading to tell readers that “Josephus ‘often used’ the word for ‘teacher’ negatively”. He has repeated the claim:
This phrase is thoroughly Josephan. Διδάσκαλος (teacher) is used sixteen other times by Josephus, often quite negatively.101
101 For further discussion on the negative aspects of διδάσκαλος in Josephus, see Bermejo-Rubio, ‘Hypothetical Vorlage’, 354. (Schmidt 2025, 76)
So I turn to Bermejo-Rubio and this is what I see:
The phrase διδάσκαλος ανθρώπων τών ηδονή τάληθη δεχόμενων seems at first sight positive. Yet, the fact that in the sixteen occurrences of διδάσκαλος in Josephus almost half of them the word has a negative meaning by referring to false teachers . . . (Bermejo-Rubio 2014, 354 – my highlighting)
So Josephus uses the word positively more often than negatively! But if Schmidt pointed that fact out it would have undermined the impression he was trying to lead readers into embracing.
Finally, Schmidt says a Christian interpolater would have used another word for “truth”:
Turning to the word ‘truths’ (τἀληθῆ), it appears at first to signal a positive meaning, but when examined in the context of Josephus’ usage pattern a more neutral implication of τἀληθῆ can be sensed. Of the thirty-nine times that Josephus makes use of the term in the crasis form, as it occurs in the TF, he never once appears to refer to some deep, sublime reality or mystical truth. Instead, in all cases he seems rather to be speaking of various ‘facts’, the ‘present situation’, ‘the way things are’ or ‘truisms’. (Schmidt 2025, 78)
If the historical Jesus was the Jesus of the Gospel of John, maybe so. There Jesus talks in “hidden mysteries” the whole time. But few critical scholars would give much credence to the historical characterization of Jesus in that Gospel. The teachings of the Sermon on the Mount, of the Little Apocalypse, of the Last Supper, of what must be done to inherit eternal life, of the sins of the Pharisees, and so on. Even the parables are pointers to “the facts of the matter about the Kingdom of God”. All of these teachings are best described with the same word that Menander, Dio Chrysostom, Epictetus, Plutarch and Josephus consistently used to refer to truths that may have been hidden but that had to be sought out, truths about the future, about prophetic fulfilments, about the faith and obedience required to enter eternal life, and the message of the gospel to be preached: τἀληθῆ.
There are no grounds that I can see for imagining that the word τἀληθῆ would not be used by a Christian in a positive sense. There are certainly no grounds for translating the word in a way to suggest Josephus was expressing some negativity (or even neutrality!) towards the teaching of Jesus.
Bibliography:
Bermejo-Rubio, Fernando. 2014. “Was the Hypothetical ‘Vorlage’ of the ‘Testimonium Flavianum’ a ‘Neutral’ Text? Challenging the Common Wisdom on ‘Antiquitates Judaicae’ 18.63-64.” Journal for the Study of Judaism in the Persian, Hellenistic, and Roman Period 45 (3): 326–65.
Luschnig, Cecelia Eaton, and Deborah Mitchell. 2007. An Introduction to Ancient Greek: A Literary Approach. 2nd edition. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing.
Menander, of Athens. 1990. Menandri Reliquiae selectae. Oxonii : E Typographeo Clarendoniano.
Menander, of Athens, and Francis Greenleaf Allinson. 1921. Menander, the Principal Fragments, with an English Translation by Francis G. Allinson. London W. Heinemann.
Schmidt, T. C. 2025. Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Many readers by now will have heard of a new book, freely available, arguing that the first century Jewish historian Josephus really did write a passage about Jesus. The book has been discussed on public forums, blogs, youtube channels, other websites, etc. If you happen not to have heard about it, you can download the book at the publisher’s site:Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ by Thomas C. Schmidt (links to academic profile).
I may discuss core aspects of the work in a series of posts over the coming weeks or months. There is much detail to address but I’ll begin with responses to two striking curiosities in Schmidt’s argument (striking, at least, to me). TF in the following is the abbreviation for Testimonium Flavianum, the technical term scholars have given for the passage about Jesus appearing in Book 18 of Jewish Antiquities by Flavius Josephus.
Schmidt argues that Josephus intended his words about Jesus to be
neither openly negative nor openly positive, and therefore largely neutral. (Schmidt 2025, 203)
That seems straightforward so far. But what follows confuses me. Schmidt proceeds to claim that what Josephus wrote was in some sense deliberately ambiguous.
He did however insert a healthy amount of ambiguity, enough for one to draw several negative or positive inferences about Jesus. (Schmidt 2025, 203)
I don’t quite understand. If one is writing from a perspective of neutrality, neither wanting to express an explicitly hostile nor an explicitly favourable view of Jesus, then one would expect both those hostile to Jesus and those who worship him to be more or less equally disappointed in what they read. If one wants to express neutrality one avoids writing in a manner that can be used as weapons by opposing sides. Neutral expressions do not normally become weapons for hostile debate.
A neutral expression about Jesus would certainly not be a statement that could be interpreted either as outstanding praise or as sneering put-down. That would be surely most unusual. Yet that’s the kind of argument Schmidt uses, at least in part, to justify his claim that ambiguity was to some extent Josephus’s method of writing neutrally.
Look at Schmidt’s assessment of Josephus’s words in introducing Jesus:
‘if indeed one ought to call him a man’
Here’s the context (Schmidt’s translation):
And in this time, there was a certain Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man, for he was a doer of incredible deeds, a teacher . . . (204, my bolding)
A Sarcastic Josephus – Version 1
For Schmidt, the bolded words can reasonably be read as sarcasm:
[O]ne could always interpret the above statement as sarcastically implying that Jesus was less than human. Evidence of this is that Josephus does elsewhere enjoy using sarcastic barbs in his work. For example, in Against Apion, he sarcastically calls Apion ‘the wonderful Apion’ (ὁ δὲ θαυμαστὸς Ἀ πίων). And he does the same with Justus of Tiberias, his hated enemy, whom he names ‘the most skillful of writers’ (δεινότατε συγγραφέων). If one interprets the TF’s statement about Jesus’ humanity as sarcasm, such would then cast negative light on the previous statement that Jesus was ‘wise’ in as much as it too would become sarcastic. The statement may thus hearken back to how in the Gospels Jesus was accused of not only being in league with demons, but also of being a demon himself. (Schmidt 2025, 71f)
This is surely a blinkered rationalization. Josephus leaves readers in absolutely no doubt about his real views on Apion and Justus. When he uses flattering terms for them the sarcasm is blatantly obvious. There is no doubt about his sarcasm. Sarcasm only works when the speaker or writer gives obvious clues that they are being sarcastic – otherwise the speaker is only having a smirk to himself and hiding his attitude from his audience. I will return to this point.
But do the words “if one ought to call him a man” necessarily mean to say that Jesus could be higher than a human, like an angel or deity? No, not at all. Here we have another ambiguity. Josephus could even be suggesting that Jesus was a demon. Schmidt explains:
Further, as regards Jesus’ humanity, the TF rhetorically wonders whether ‘one ought to call [Jesus] a man’. This harmonizes with how the Gospels present first-century Jews as being conflicted over Jesus, with some . . . accusing him of not only being in league with demons, but of being a demon himself. (Schmidt 2025, 206)
Gospel Foundations
Where did this idea come from? Schmidt cites Matthew 10:25 which quotes Jesus as saying to his disciples:
If the head of the house has been called Beelzebul, how much more the members of his household! (NIV – all Bible verses quoted here are from the NIV)
You were not aware that Jesus’ enemies called him a demon? Maybe that is because Matthew 10:25 is the sole witness in the New Testament that they did. If you are open to diverse scholarly opinions, you will be interested to know that some scholars have concluded that that one verse (Matthew 10:25) was invented by Matthew himself, was in none of Matthew’s sources, and was not spoken by Jesus at all:
The allusion to the Beelzebul incident is Matthew’s own invention. (Funk, Hoover, and The Jesus Seminar 1993, 171)
So the possibility that Josephus sarcastically suggesting Jesus may have been a demon rests on a single debatable verse in the Gospel of Matthew. In other words, it rests on the assumption that the Gospels are trustworthy historical accounts, at least insofar as they help us make a case for the authenticity of the TF.
But I only quoted half of Schmidt’s words above. He also acknowledged that the phrase could also be understood to suggest that Jesus was higher than a man – that is, an angel or even a deity. Here is the other possible allusion:
Further, as regards Jesus’ humanity, the TF rhetorically wonders whether ‘one ought to call [Jesus] a man’. This harmonizes with how the Gospels present first-century Jews as being conflicted over Jesus, with some speculating that he might be the Son of God or even God, and with others accusing him of . . . (Schmidt 2025, 206)
Again, you might be wondering where in the Gospels we read about some Jews speculating that Jesus might be the Son of God or God himself. Schmidt points us towards the following verses, only one of which is from a gospel:
John 20:28
Thomas said to him, “My Lord and my God!”
Hebrews 1:8 (citing Psalm 45)
But about the Son he says, “Your throne, O God, will last for ever and ever; a scepter of justice will be the scepter of your kingdom.
Philippians 2:6 (Paul citing a Christ hymn)
Who, being in the very nature of God, did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage.
Few critical scholars would consider the Gospel of John a reliable historical narrative, and fewer still would consider the words of Thomas on confronting the resurrected Christ as historically reliable. Even fewer would regard them as evidence of debates among early Jews about the nature of Christ. If we are to rely on the witness of the Gospels we need to focus on the Jewish debates concerning Jesus in the Gospels such as sabbath regulations and messiahship.
Thus far we have seen how Schmidt attempts to justify specific interpretations of ‘if indeed one ought to call him a man’ by anchoring them – with mixed or uncertain success – to the Gospel accounts. This is necessary for Schmidt’s larger argument. What Schmidt argues is that Josephus’s sources of information about Jesus derive from prominent Jewish political and religious persons who had been alive at the time of Jesus, some of whom even met and questioned Jesus. These Jewish leaders, Schmidt avers, knew the controversies surrounding Jesus back around the year 30 CE – that is, they knew first-hand the controversies that we read about in the Gospels. Therefore, the Gospels can be used to throw light on what we read about Jesus in the TF. By a gracefully symmetrical circular argument, Schmidt can then affirm that the TF confirms the historical accuracy of much that we read in the Gospels.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
A Sarcastic Josephus – Version 2
Schmidt is not alone in suggesting that ‘if indeed one ought to call him a man’ was written with a sarcastic pen – and therefore must be considered authentic words of Josephus.
While it is unconvincing that the entire TF could be interpreted ironically or sarcastically, Vicent Cernuda makes a strong case that at least this phrase of the TF could be interpreted in such a way; see Cernuda, ‘El testimonio flaviano’, 359–65. (Schmidt 2025, 71)
Cernuda believes that Josephus was in the company of some Roman Christians when he was writing Antiquities and these Christians pressed Josephus to include something about Jesus in his historical account. Josephus did so, Cernuda suggests, with a cheeky deceit:
This gives reason to think that the prominent Roman Christians who asked Josephus to include the episode of Jesus among the events of the time of Pilate also requested that he indicate his miraculous, virginal origin; and that the shrewd Jew complied by implying it as a secondary meaning . . . .
This double meaning was absolutely necessary for the ironic development Josephus intended and which we are trying to demonstrate. Only if this double sense — both positive and negative — of σοφός is kept in view can the following clarification be properly understood: εἴ γε ἄνδρα αὐτὸν λέγειν χρή = if indeed he should be called a man. The widely held view that this phrase comes from a Christian hand, because it implies the idea of divinity, is easily answered: a disciple of Christ would not have expressed himself in so vague a manner. On the contrary, if we accept the irony or semantic duplicity of σοφὸς ἀνήρ — “an eminent man” or “a clever type” — then the ambiguity of γε [my note: γε = indeed] (as either restrictive or affirmative) fits perfectly. To the Christians pressuring Josephus, the phrase could implicitly denote the divinity of Jesus, and they might have been satisfied with the formulation, recognizing that no more could be expected from a non-believer. But to the one who cunningly crafted the circumlocution, a latent scorn emerges clearly: is someone truly a man of honor who gains fame as σοφός, when in fact he is just clever — even a rogue? The exaltation of something that is in fact being despised is one of the classic signs of irony. And Josephus must have felt a deep aversion to Jesus and his persuasive power, as we recently observed in the study of Caiaphas’s conversion. (Cernuda 1997, 360f, 363f – translation, bolding and highlighting is my own)
So Cernuda posits a different scenario for how Josephus came to write a mischievously ambiguous line. For Cernuda, Josephus’s sources for Jesus were Christians; for Schmidt, his sources were prominent elderly Jews. Both suggest that Josephus was writing ambiguously.
For Cernuda, the ambiguity was a trick: Josephus was poking fun at the Christians by pretending to write something positive while really he was being sarcastic. Schmidt, though, is more gracious:
He did however insert a healthy amount of ambiguity, enough for one to draw several negative or positive inferences about Jesus. Whether this was because Josephus hoped to curry favor with an audience divided over their estimation of Jesus, or because he himself had no certain opinion of Jesus, or because his sources differed regarding Jesus, or because he admired Jesus but did not want to reveal his true feelings, or because he simply did not care, I cannot tell. (Schmidt 2025, 203)
Imagining Scenarios
The difference between Cernuda and Schmidt underscores the fact that both scholars are arguing on the basis of creatively imagining who Josephus was talking to or what conversations he was recalling at the time of his writing. I am reminded of Richard Bauckham’s tenuous links the authors of the gospels had to eyewitnesses of Jesus. (Godfrey 2008) What we are witnessing are ad hoc scenarios to explain why we should be convinced of the hypothesis that Josephus wrote the TF. Don’t misunderstand, though. Schmidt is very thorough, comprehensive and learned. He argues a case to justify his scenario. What I have shown in this one small part of his argument is that his case does not rest on secure foundations. There is much more to address. I am just getting started. More to follow.
An Uncertain Josephus
Till then, let’s conclude with a note on Schmidt’s personal conclusion about what Josephus meant by “if indeed one ought to call him a man”. In the end, he pulls the rug out from the entire notion of any sarcasm:
Whatever the case, the TF does not present Josephus as actually calling Jesus divine anyway, but only presents this as a potential possibility—as long as one does not interpret the statement more negatively. . . .
I am inclined to think that the phrase should be interpreted straightforwardly as Josephus expressing diffidence, uncertainty, or ambiguity regarding his personal estimation of Jesus, or on the other hand, he might instead have used the phrase as a way of acknowledging that Jesus was a polarizing figure among his readers, whatever Josephus’ own opinions may have been. (Schmidt 2025, 72, 73)
Does one normally depict a polarizing figure with a question over whether that figure was more or less than human? Is the phrase really nothing more than a “personal estimation of Jesus”? Hardly – it is a question about whether or not he is human! At least the interpretation that Josephus was being sarcastic hews more honestly to the meaning of the line.
If Josephus was being sarcastic he was not being neutral. His ambiguity was hidden from his Christian readers. If he was being neutral or disinterested over a polarizing figure, and if his sources were his Jewish peers, it is odd that he should be expressing confusion over whether Jesus was an angel or a demon. At least there is no evidence in the gospels — apart from Jesus’s words in Matthew 10:25 — that any Jews claimed he was a demon, and certainly none that he was divine. The only Jews who proclaimed the divinity of Jesus were the Christians and they were the “heretics” in the eyes of the Jews. Only by reading Acts as containing genuine history could we think otherwise, at least on the part of some non-Christian Jews. Not to mention that the whole question becomes even messier if the Gospels and Acts were all composed after Josephus.
Postscript – added about 2 hours after posting the above
One more point that Thomas Schmidt advances in support of Josephus having written “if indeed one ought to call him a man” is that the innuendo of those words would be heretical for early Christians:
The TF also makes claims that disagree with early Christian belief, such as how the TF wonders if Jesus was actually human (or less than human), when early Christians viewed denying Jesus’ humanity as heretical . . .
In this one must remember that Christian authors like Origen, Eusebius, and practically all others ardently felt that Jesus was in fact human. They consequently would have viewed any denials of his humanity as heretical. Therefore, most Christians—authors and scribes—would likely not have interpolated such a statement into the TF. (Schmidt 2025, 198, 71)
Here Schmidt is in effect contradicting his earlier argument that Josephus was drawing on Jewish memories of long ago controversies about Jesus, controversies that supposedly left their traces in the Gospels. There is no hint in any of the canonical Gospels that anyone, whether Christ followers or Jewish opponents, thought Jesus might not be human.
Furthermore, we cannot avoid noticing a certain orthodoxy bias in Schmidt’s argument here. By saying that “early Christians viewed denying Jesus’ humanity as heretical” Schmidt is excluding the possibility that the doctrines that became orthodox Christianity were a later development and that many of the earliest Christians did indeed view Jesus as a human in appearance only (cf. Philippians 2:7-8).
Bibliography
Cernuda, Antonio Vicent. 1997. “El Testimonio Flaviano, Alarde De Solapada Ironía.” Estudios Bíblicos 55 (3, 4): 355–85, 479–508.
Funk, Robert W., Roy W. Hoover, and The Jesus Seminar. 1993. The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus: New Translation and Commentary. New York: Polebridge Press.
Godfrey, Neil. 2008. “Bauckham: Jesus and the Eyewitnesses.” Vridar (blog). January 23, 2007 to June 4, 2008 [=58 posts]. https://vridar.org/tag/bauckham-jesus-and-the-eyewitnesses/.
Schmidt, T. C. 2025. Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ. Oxford: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/9780191957697.001.0001.
The mask has been cast aside; the neoliberal suavity of the Bidens and Obamas, when pulled away, shows the reality that has been at the core of American foreign policy and capitalism and propaganda all along. But its true face is hideous, so all of us who have all their lives been so enamoured and dulled by the pretence of “freedom” and “human rights” protest in horror, aching for the mask of reassuring illusion to be brought back.
Trump’s barefaced vulgarity – his outright disregard for even the most basic norms of human decency – is, in its own way, refreshing.
I much prefer it to Obama’s sleek duplicities and fake sincerity, beneath which he advanced some of the most vicious imperial designs imaginable – including the hyper-militarisation of the Israeli settler colony – far more effectively than Trump ever could.
Trump’s thuggish demeanour is, in fact, quite liberating.
I read the article that expressed much (not all) of what I have been thinking lately — and it gave me the small leg-up I needed to post again, at least for now:
Trump is too obvious, too crass, too vulgar an imperialist. Their first instinct is to disown him as an anomaly. He looks like a Latin American dictator, an African despot, an Oriental tyrant, or a Russian czar.
. . . . He cannot possibly be American. Except he is – more than any of them – representing 77,284,118 Americans just like him, who eagerly rushed to vote him into power.
This is a bizarre intellectual malady on full display in the US, where badly defeated and demoralised liberals refuse to acknowledge that Trump is a 100 percent American phenomenon.
He is a homegrown dictator with unabashed fascistic proclivities, barely able to contain his urges, and surrounded by equally 100 percent American sycophants – worse than any clown or court jester ever conjured from their Orientalist imagination.
. . . . This is all American. “Made in America.” It is not an import. They are making America great again!
. . . . If there is any context for Trump, it is the long and recent history of European fascism – from Hitler and Mussolini to Franco, and now all their heir-apparent lookalikes: Viktor Orban, Matteo Salvini, Marine Le Pen, Geert Wilders, Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, ad nauseam.
. . . . Much closer to Trump are Hitler, Mussolini and Franco – even closer still are the exposed fascistic roots of American so-called democracy.
Go there: go to the roots of America’s claim to democracy, and you will see fascism staring you down.
This is Trump doing exactly what he always said he would. And what he does is backed by his claim to represent the will of the American majority.
And then Hamid Dabashi comes to the raw nerve at the centre of how all this works:
But here is the heart of the paradox: this is not merely the rule of the majority, but the tyranny of the majority – a term made potently insightful by Alexis de Tocqueville in his two-volume diagnosis of the malice and maladies of American democracy, Democracy in America (1835-1840).
The more liberal Americans detest him, the more I appreciate his having exposed the true face of America – unvarnished, with the thick democratic lipstick they have plastered over their tyrannical pigs now smeared and exposed for all to see.
But such characterisations should not descend into ad hominem name-calling. Presidents and other leaders become symbolic, allegorical of the nations that elect or tolerate them.
So it is with American presidents. What do they represent? Who gave them the authority to do what they do? The majority of the electorate, of course. And that majority is the point.
Hamid Dabashi goes on to address a core malignity that Alexis de Tocqueville identified almost two centuries ago: the tyranny of the majority, “or what is perceived to be the majority”. European monarchs had the power to control the lives of their subjects but never their minds. I have written about this a number of times over the years. One book I found of special interest because it detailed the way British and American propaganda had cast its pall over Australia — see, for example, the series of posts on Alex Carey’s Taking the Risk Out of Democracy.
[Tocqueville] wrote: “In America, the majority raises very formidable barriers to the liberty of opinion: within these barriers an author may write whatever he pleases, but he will repent it if he ever steps beyond them. Not that he is exposed to the terrors of an auto-da-fe, but he is tormented by the slights and persecutions of daily obloquy.”
That “daily obloquy” is now called doxxing – a vicious act of intimidation perfected by genocidal Zionists against anyone who dares cross the boundaries of manufactured consent that cast Israel as God’s gift to humanity.
. . . . Propaganda organs of liberal imperialism – of the gaudiest and most dysfunctional sorts – like The New York Times, Fox News, and The Wall Street Journal define the boundaries of acceptable discourse.
There may be no visible chains, but the restraints operate through moral and intellectual pressure, daring any would-be dissenter to defy them and speak out.
Tocqueville observed that American “democracy” enslaved the mind, leaving the body to feel free. European despots could only attack a person’s body, but their minds were free and they were able to rise against those despots.
What defines the American predicament is this: how is the opinion of the majority – and thus its unyielding power – manufactured and sustained?
Three ways: through general elections, periodic polling, and, above all, through dominant media outlets.
These institutions manufacture the illusion of majority opinion by demonising critical thought, and by normalising compliance, acquiescence, and subdued fatalism in the face of a cruel fate too deeply internalised to even be recognised.
That is democracy in America.
The article concludes with an editorial disclaimer: The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
They are also my views. I would add one more area not addressed, and one that has been hammering away inside me for some time now, especially since our recent observance of Anzac Day (Australia’s annual day to remember the war dead and war veterans). Why did we — Britain, Australia, the US and the rest — go to war against Germany and then Japan? Why? I had been reading of Japan’s efforts after World War 1 to persuade America, Australia, Britain and France to formalize “racial equality” through the League of Nations that was being nutted out at the time. “We” — our leaders — point blank refused Japan’s request. How was it that whole nations felt such moral outrage that they were prompted to declare war in 1939? How could whole nations be of one mind over an attack on Poland — yet those same nations not feel the slightest twinge of upset over the massacres of Palestinians today? It doesn’t make sense. What is it that has made it unthinkable that anyone among the World War 2 allied nations should question the righteousness of that “war against nazism”? What will future generations, looking back, identify “what it was really all about”?
There was one glimmer of a moment when I really believed, with a little relief and pride, that the Australian government had actually stood up to Indonesia in order to defend the East Timor from invasion. One journalist, John Pilger, at the time wrote cynically that Australian policy was being motivated by the hopes of gaining control of East Timor’s off-shore oil reserves. That was going too far, I and many others thought. Pilger is too much of a lefty, so cynical, he cannot see situations clearly — only through his ideological bias. I was disappointed in Pilger. Years later we learned that Australia had indeed been spying on East Timorese government deliberations and did indeed use their information to demand control of the off-shore oil fields. How easy it was for me and my associates to be swept up in false propaganda myth of our nation fighting for liberty of the oppressed.
(A few days ago I watched an old documentary about how German forces treated peoples they occupied in the 1940s. In response to “terrorist” partisan attacks on them, the German army would slaughter women, children, elderly in villages from where the partisans had come. I would not dare suggest anything similar is happening in the world today among our “friends and allies”, on a far larger scale and not even hidden ….., no?)
This year I resumed full time studies. I am currently engaged in a preparatory year to undertake a Master of Ancient History degree — hopefully next year. It is too early to say whether I will continue with doctoral studies after that.
Studies so far have taken me away from biblical topics, but that’s been very useful. Already I have a wider grasp of different approaches and standards among classicists, a point I will be able to use in future discussions about biblical scholarship. Especially useful has been formal instruction in learning ancient Greek, especially being alerted to the various dialects and differences that sometimes arise between reading literary texts and reading inscriptions. Already so many questions I had after grasping some very basic self-taught competence have been answered.
Hopefully I will find time to post once in a while in the meantime.
I transcribed a portion from Louis Theroux’s recent documentary, The Settlers, where he is interviewing Ari, from Texas, now a West Bank settler….
After recalling previous discussions about Ari’s view of the importance of Jewish presence in “the biblical land of Israel” . . . .
Theroux: 50:22 Are you saying that you see Israel as playing a role for modelling a new kind of nationalism, is that right?
Ari:50:30 I think all that’s happening in the world right now is leading us as a nation to open our eyes to who we are. We are the tip of the spear fighting the battles of America and defending the entire Western world, and not just the Western world – anyone who wants any semblance of liberty and freedom in their lives.
Theroux: 50:52 Nevertheless, there are millions of people up and down the area, Arabs, Muslims, who aren’t living free right now. They’re enclosed without the same rights, without national self-determination, and in many respects feeling besieged, and I just wonder, do you see that?
Ari: 51:10 I don’t have tremendous compassion for a society that has an unquenchable, genocidal, theological, blood-lust. It’s like a death cult.
Theroux: 51:23 It’s easy with a danger with that kind of characterization of Palestinians to define them as eliminationist, and hateful, and genocidal, … are those the words …?
Ari: 51:32 Yes, I use the word death cult.
. . . . that then permits you to almost create a mirror image of that . . . .
Theroux: 51:35 It’s a death cult… that that then permits you to almost create a mirror image of that, that you say, well, if they want to do that to us, then we need to do that to them.
Ari: 51:45 I think that when you’re living amongst people who have perpetually proven, not only by word, but by deed, that they want your blood spilled in the streets, that they want to murder your children, that they want to slay all of you, kill all of you in the most horrific genocidal way — That all of the polls showed after October 7, that these people who you continuosly call the Palestinian people – that I reject the very premise that they are actually a real nation for a lot of reasons, I mean….
Theroux: 2:15 But the millions of people who have nothing to do with October 7, who actually would just like to live free full lives
Ari: 52:24 If that’s really what they wanted they would have had it a long time ago. They want to wipe Israel off the map. They want every last Jew dead.
Theroux: 52:32 So what’s the answer?
Ari: 52:33 The answer is for us to declare sovereignty over all of Judea and Samaria, and all of the land of Israel, and Gaza, and to settle Gaza and all Judea and Samaria with Jews in the land of Israel.
Theroux: 52:50 Did the question annoy you?
Ari: 52:52 Annoy me? I hear it so often. And it feels like it’s being addressed again and again and again. Even if the entire world is pointing accusing fingers and gnashing their teeth in rage and anger, we know the righteousness and the truth of our cause, even if we stand alone. That’s what it means to be a Hebrew. That’s what it means to be a Jew. If we know the truth of our cause that’s all we need.
I came across the following passage when looking into the question of whether a certain letter said to be by a famous ancient Roman woman was a forgery. It reminded me questions that have arisen among those debating whether a passage in Josephus is a partial or complete forgery (e.g. the Testimonium Flavianum — the passage about Jesus), or even whether entire New Testament letters are what they claim to be. The bolded highlighting and formatting is my own.
Also not unproblematic—and burdening the discussion with ambiguity—is the not uncommon tendency to handle the term “forgery” too summarily. The alternative between authenticity and forgery is too crude to capture more nuanced realities. It is also prone to introduce unchecked prejudices. The forger is often regarded from the outset as a bungler whose product reveals itself by its qualitative inferiority. While that is indeed possible and often the case, it need not necessarily always be so. The phrase “palpable rhetorical fabrication,” … is marked by its somewhat disparaging tone and is quite characteristic in this respect. On the other hand, this can lead to a situation where proof of quality is accepted as proof of authenticity—though the one by no means guarantees the other.
Finally, it must be remembered that not every literary fiction necessarily stems from an intentional intent to deceive. One need only point to speeches or letters in ancient historical works—though the same applies to rhetorical school exercises. But when a piece that was originally recognizable as fiction in its original context is removed from that context and transmitted as a fragment, it can then pose for later readers precisely the kind of problem whose complexity is no longer adequately addressed by the oversimplified alternative of authenticity or forgery.
Instinsky, Hans Ulrich. 1971. “Zur Echtheitsfrage der Brieffragmente der Cornelia, Mutter der Gracchen.” Chiron 1:177–90. https://doi.org/10.34780/HNT9-299I. pp 183f – ChatGPT translation
It is hard to bring oneself to blog about new things (in historical and biblical studies) that I am learning all the time when every day the news is recallibrating my identity as a citizen of the West.
As a little child I wowed the grownups when I naively asked why everyone was so sad that my great grandfather was dying. Isn’t he going to heaven, I asked. Shouldn’t we be happy? Aww — so innocent!
As a teenager school student I felt it safer not to ask my war veteran elders why it was “us” who declared war on the Axis powers and not the Axis powers on us. And why the fire-bombing of Germany and Japan and snuffing out two cities with atomic bombs? I sometimes wondered if a future generation would look back and see WW2 as a titanic struggle for domination between great powers. Our identity as the liberators of democracy and crushers of fascism was at risk if such questions were taken too far.
Now today we see nothing has changed in the project to control the Middle East. Mass murder is brought into our phones and tv sets daily. The only thing that has changed is the removal of the pretence. It was easier to be deceived when the powers said they were looking for peace and that the ongoing military build up and daily occupation was all about security. Now that pretence is gone and we can see it in all its mind-numbing reality. So our leaders remain silent and criminalize those who attempt to speak out.
We are the bad guys. World War 2 was a contest to see who would dominate the world. We won. The world lost. Yes, there was welcome progress in some areas, and despite the gap between rich and poor increasing that was a good thing. But even Hitler before the war did good things for the German economy and youth welfare. Now I feel like I understand a little how anti-fascists felt living in Germany under Hitler. The difference is the propaganda. Nazi and Soviet propaganda was crude by comparison. In this post I linked to a discussion about the attempt to silence journalists. That was old hat. Today at home they are being hauled before the courts while in the Middle East they are being murdered at scale.
It’s a heavy time. Apologies.
…..
P.S. — added later….
A few days ago there was a great kerfuffle in media, in talk shows, in comedy sessions, among government and political representatives — about a lapse in security involving talk about bombing Yemen. I strained in vain to hear from those talk-fests a word of outrage over the murder of innocent human beings in an apartment building. I can no longer bring myself to listen to some of those programs ever again.
Western support for Israel, I have heard, is in large measure rooted in an identification with a state that represents our Judeo-Christian heritage, our values. But on to another topic….
ELIZABETH BALDERSTONE: There’s many historians who’ve written a lot on this and researched in depth the story of what happened here. There were clearly issues and skirmishes between the traditional owners and the settlers and culminated in mid-1843 the murder of a fellow, Ronald Macalister, who was the nephew of a very wealthy pastoralist from New South Wales. In retaliation for the murder of Ronald, it’s understood that a group of settlers known now as the Highland Brigade got together and came upon a large group of Brataualung people camped at Warrigal Creek at the waterhole.
BRIDGET BRENNAN, REPORTER: Historical records are patchy. University of Newcastle researchers now estimate that at least 125 men, women and children were shot dead in a five-day rampage in the area. In 1925, a Gippsland magazine published this anonymous account of the massacre.
MASSACRE ACCOUNT: “Some escaped in the scrub, others jumped into the waterhole, and, as fast as they put their heads up for breath, they were shot, until the water was red with blood… I knew two blacks who, though wounded, came out of that hole alive. One was a boy at that time, about 12 or 14 years old. He was hit in the eye by a slug, captured by the whites, and made to lead the Brigade on from one camp to another.“
The media cheered the war on “the savages”, praising the heroic efforts of the defenders of white Judeo-Christian values. Addressing similar massacres in Queensland….
As he set out for Cardwell, newspapers were still applauding the exploits of this “most indefatigable and energetic officer”. The story of the Hermitage campaign reached Scotland, where the meaning of “prompt justice” had to be spelt out for readers. The Perthshire Journal wrote: “Prompt justice was done to them, and the blood-thirsty cannibals, one and all, bit the dust.” Once in Cardwell, Uhr swiftly won the approval of The Port Denison Times: Our black brethren have been keeping quiet lately, and I have not heard of any depredations having been committed by them; no doubt they have been kept in awe from the fact of our gallant Sub-Inspector and his ‘brave army’ having been amongst us, preventing them from ‘kicking up a row.’ (Marr, Killing for Country, 286)
Newspapers published condemnation of “bleeding hearts” who protested the violence whenever it came to their attention. The protests were too few and isolated. Overall, silence prevailed. Ignorance was a virtue.
Philip Sellheim had tramped the bush with Dalrymple and endeared himself to the Commissioner of Crown Lands by writing to newspapers pouring scorn on city folk who, blind to “the savage character of the aborigines”, were agitating for the removal of the Native Police from the Kennedy: “The pioneer settlers of the north will not tamely allow their risks and arduous labors to be undervalued by any ignorant individual, living in a well-protected township, who, to further his own private ends, perverts truth and risks the lives of his fellow-creatures.” (Marr, 270)
The blacks, of course, killed only out of hatred for the whites, not for any conceivably justifiable reason:
“Psalm-singing hypocrites”, D’arcy called them and returned fire: These men, Mr. Editor, speak without experience, speak as their mind guides them; such is the case now in the moral city of Adelaide. Morality amongst the wild tribes is not known. I thoroughly endorse Mr. Alfred Giles’s sentiments, and say that all the tribes that I have met with—and I have made the acquaintance of a few—nearly always try to force you to take their women as a peace offering, or decoy to get a good opportunity of attack… I could, Mr. Editor, relate dozens of instances where men have been murdered without any cause. (Marr, 381)
Silence, the Enabler
The silence was so pervasive that subsequent generations simply did not know that the massacres had happened. Later scholars would attempt to look into how this country was built and were denounced by the Prime Minister John Howard as creating a negative “black arm” version of history. Still today many cannot bring themselves to believe that their ancestors took this land through genocide.
I was watching a youtube video of a recent episode of the Steven Colbert show. He tackles any controversial topic except one. Though to his credit he did mention the ongoing Gaza slaughter in a sanitized quip: he said something to the effect, “No matter what your views are on the current….” — as if different views were like supporting different sports teams. All equal: just differing opinions that we don’t want to intrude and spoil the show. One more brick in the wall of silence.
I’ve sometimes heard condemnation of Germans in the Nazi era keeping silent though they are said to have known what was happening to Jews who were being transported out of their neighbourhoods. I can understand the thread of deportation making one think twice before speaking out. But the rest of us today…. what excuse is there?
Not really happy about seeing Vridar in the same list as History for Atheists, though. 🙁 Maybe I should take that as reason enough to do more about what I think is an alternative voice to “history”, what it is, how it works — not just for atheists but for everyone, and a counter to both Tim O’Neill (who follows the fallacious methods of theologians) and Richard Carrier (who follows the long outdated positivists).
Traditional attempts to explain Christian origins have had to rely on hypotheses about oral traditions (and more recently memory theory), on hypothetical constructions of long lost Christian-like communities. The letters of Paul have been read by and large at face value, ignoring the scholarship that should warn us that such a reading needs to be justified, not assumed. The gospels have been assumed, through circular reasoning, to be based on historical events. The explanation for Christianity I am proposing (having rediscovered the main conclusions of Roger Parvus via my own route with some prodding by Nina Livesey — though NL limits her case to the letters of Paul) has the advantage of being based on evidence we can see before us in the record. We can point to individuals, specific teachings and a historical context with strong explanatory power.
An immediate objection that comes to mind is that followers of various of these “gnostic” Christianities reinterpreted the same gospels we know in our Bibles. Surely these gospels came first, one might reasonably conclude. As an answer, I turn again to Nina Livesey’s point that the writings and teachings of the various schools were shared and debated among one another. We should also note that the canonical gospels pick up and re-work, re-interpret, teachings of the “gnostic” Christians that came before them. Just one instance of this is John 1:5
The light shone in the darkness and the darkness did not grasp it.
Saturninus taught that the unknown father god shone down on the creator angels (including the demiurge creator of Genesis) and those angels attempted but failed to grasp that light. So they decided to create a physical image of what they saw in that light — the first man. I owe that example of John 1:5 being related to the teaching of Saturninus to Simon Pétrement’s A Separate God but SP is assuming that the canonical gospel preceded Saturninus. Another example would be one pointed out by Matthias Klinghardt and Markus Vinzent: Marcion introduced John the Baptist in his gospel to epitomize the ultimate and final prophet of the Old Testament for whom Jesus was the antithesis; the Gospel of Mark and later canonical gospels re-interpreted Marcion’s Baptist to predict Jesus as the fulfilment of the law and the prophets. The Gospel of Luke includes a rather pointless scene of Pilate sending Jesus to Herod, only for Herod to return him again to Pilate. I cannot help but wonder if the evangelist is attempting to “answer” other narratives we know about that said it was Herod who crucified Jesus (Justin Martyr, Gospel of Peter). Hence the dialogue went both ways: each school reinterpreting what the others were saying.
Those who taught that the god who created the world was a lesser deity than the “Unknown Father” also taught, understandably, that it is better to live an ascetic lifestyle to avoid as much as possible contamination with the inferior creation. If marriage was an ordinance of the lower creator god, it followed that it was better to avoid marriage if possible. Similarly, the lesser god was responsible for killing, it was better to avoid eating what had been killed.
If ascetic practices went hand in hand with some of the anti-Jewish teachers of the early second century, the rejection of asceticism may be understood as a logical corollary of the opposing teaching that defended the physical creation as the work of the only God.
The author of 1 Timothy 4, on the other hand, defended the Creator God of Genesis as the supreme God, attacking those who, like Saturninus and Marcion, taught the necessity for an ascetic life:
The Spirit clearly says that in later times some will abandon the faith and follow deceiving spirits and things taught by demons. 2 Such teachings come through hypocritical liars, whose consciences have been seared as with a hot iron. 3 They forbid people to marry and order them to abstain from certain foods, which God created to be received with thanksgiving by those who believe and who know the truth. 4 For everything God created is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving, 5 because it is consecrated by the word of God and prayer.
My point is that the teaching to avoid marriage and eating meat was part of the package that taught the Jewish Scriptures were the teachings of the “Jewish god” who was responsible for the law, suffering and injustice. The author of 1 Timothy stresses that the physical creation is good, not evil or the work of a lesser deity.
Most scholars deny that 1 Timothy was written by Paul. It was written by a “proto-orthodox” teacher who depicted Paul more in line with his image in Acts than the main letters. If the other letters of Paul were published by the school of Marcion (as per Nina Livesey’s new book) we find pointers to the same teachings, although muted by lines that appeared to contradict them. Opponents of Marcion accused him of deleting these passages but we are entitled to wonder if they had been added. See 1 Corinthians 7 for the discussion of marriage and Romans 14 for abstinance from meat.
It was not only Marcion and Saturninus who are said to have devalued the created world and advocated sexual and dietary asceticism. I hope to discuss others in upcoming posts because of the strong links they appear to have with our New Testament writings. One of these, Elchasai, has been discussed in depth as the founder of the “heresy” attacked in the epistles to the Galatians and Colossians — see the translation of Hermann Detering’s works.
By “independent evidence” I mean sources that refer to the letters other than the letters themselves, such as the Church Fathers Irenaeus and Tertullian of the late second century. If we rely on the letters themselves we might choose to date them by their reference to a ruler of Damascus of uncertain date, most likely first century, and to Paul’s contacts with the original apostles of Jesus. The NT Acts of the Apostles (dated anywhere between the later part of the first century and first half of the second) contains a narrative of Paul’s life but provides no explicit indication that Paul wrote any letters. Scholars have remarked that Acts and the Letters present contradictory impressions of Paul’s beliefs.
We have the New Testament letters of Paul and other apostles. But there is no independent confirmation that these letters existed before the middle of the second century. All the independent evidence points to them being first known among a group of Christians (followers of Marcion) around the 130s or 140s CE. There is no independent evidence that places them any earlier. I recently reviewed and discussed the contents of a new book by Professor Nina Livesey arguing that Paul’s letters originated in a “school of Marcion” around the 130s/140s CE.
We have the four canonical gospels, but again, independent witnesses do not offer us any reason to believe that these existed before the middle of the second century of our era. There are references to Christians in works of historians Josephus and Tacitus but they are either of debatable authenticity or can tell us no more than what was being said in the second century.
We also have what has long been the unfortunately bypassed elephant in the room: How on earth did so many Christian groups arise declaring that Jesus had never been human, some saying he was never even crucified, some proclaiming that his own disciples remained ignorant of what he taught and preached falsehoods, some saying that Jesus came to abolish the law and others saying he came to keep the law more completely, some even saying he called the God of the Jews some kind of devil. None of that makes any sense if Jesus had gathered and inspired followers to proclaim his teachings after his death as the New Testament claims. I can understand modifications to his teachings arising as new situations arose, but not the wholesale divergence of whether he was even human, or whether he worshiped or denounced the God who created the world and gave the law, or whether his immediate disciples spoke truth or lies.
How could such wildly divergent ideas about Jesus have arisen from one of supposedly a number of teachers and prophets attracting followers in first century Palestine?
But what if it all happened the other way around?
What if there first appeared on the scene teachers denouncing the god of the Jews and proclaiming a new and higher god who offered salvation for those who had been led to death and destruction by the God of the Jewish Bible?
Could such a teaching be understood to have arisen in historical times either among Jews themselves or among their would-be friends who happened to be well informed about the Jewish Scriptures?
There shall be a time of trouble, such as never has been . . .
I think it can. Indications are that teachers of this kind (declaring the creator God of Genesis and the lawgiver God of Moses to be inferior deities to a higher, hitherto unknown, God who saves rather than kills) arose in the early decades of the second century. That was a time of
some of the most horrific destructions wreaked by Jews (or Judeans of the time) on pagan temples and on Roman armies
some of the most horrific mass slaughters of Jews, along with non-Jews, under the emperors Trajan and Hadrian
For some details of the uprisings of the Jews and their consequences in the time of Trajan, see
Why did a transnational revolt, with the Jews at its centre, erupt in 116, capable of seriously challenging the Roman empire, which at that very moment had reached the phase of its greatest expansion? . . . What events, in 115 and then 116 CE, first led to Greek-Jewish clashes in Mediterranean cities, and then caused the Jews to take up arms to destroy every element of pagan culture and religion they encountered in their path? — Livia Capponi: Il Mistero Del Tempio p.18 — translation
Thus nearly the whole of Judaea was made desolate . . . Many Romans, moreover, perished in this war. Therefore Hadrian in writing to the senate did not employ the opening phrase commonly affected by the emperors, “If you and your children are in health, it is well; I and the legions are in health.” — Cassius Dio, 69,14)
The bloodshed of these times was on a scale that the war of 66-70 CE never approached. The destruction of the temple primarily involved the destruction of a city. The uprisings and their genocidal consequences in the second century were on a totally different scale.
Such times help to explain the emergence of the devaluation of the defining markers of Jewishness. As Nina Livesey writes,
Events leading up to and following the Bar Kokhba revolt can be understood as influential to the development of Pauline letters. For, the Bar Kokhba period saw not only massive destruction, death, and the removal of the Jewish population from Judaea but also the call for a ban on circumcision and the destruction of Hebrew scriptures? Rulings against the Jewish practice of circumcision and Jewish writings redound in discussions of these themes in texts dated in and around this period. In addition, treatments of Jewish law and circumcision in biblical and non-biblical texts dated to this period reveal a dramatic downward shift in their value. Comparably dismissive and/or derogatory assessments of circumcision and Jewish law do not surface in texts dated prior to the end of the first century. Discussions of the rite of circumcision dated at or after the Bar Kokhba revolt parallel those found in Pauline letters. (Livesey, 202f)
I think we can extend the point beyond the Bar Kochba war and the letters of Paul. The troubles began in the 110s and earliest indicators of teachers denouncing the Jewish Scriptures and their creator-lawgiver deity come from the same period.
The Dialogue, which was probably written shortly before the death of Justin (around 165 CE) (Lohr, 433) Some historians believe that Book 2 was written during a persecution, that is, under Marcus Aurelius (161-80), because in 2.22.2 Irenaeus writes of persecutions of the just as if they are then going on. Books 1 and 2, then, may have been written before 180. (Unger/Dillon, 4)
Our information is scarce, vague and late, so we can only attempt a bare outline. Justin Martyr, apparently writing shortly before his death in 165 CE mentions several early “heretics”, among them Saturninus, whose followers called themselves Christians:
These men call themselves Christians in much the same way as some Gentiles engrave the name of God upon their statues, and then indulge in every kind of wicked and atheistic rite. Some of these heretics are called Marcionites, some Valentinians, some Basilidians, and some Saturnilians, and others by still other names, each designated by the name of the founder of the system, just as each person who deems himself a philosopher, as I stated at the beginning of this discussion, claims that he must bear the name of the philosophy he favors from the founder of that particular school of philosophy. (Trypho, 35.6)
The bishop Irenaeus was writing “before 180 CE” about leaders he understood to be early teachers of “heretical” views around and prior to the 130s CE and also speaks of Saturninus and prefers to arrange the names in a sequential genealogy of teachings.
And the disciples were called Christians first in Antioch. — Acts 11:26
The successor of Simon [Magus] was Menander, a Samaritan by birth. . . . . Saturninus, who was of Antioch near Daphne, and Basilides got their start from these heretics. Still they taught different doctrines, the one in Syria, the other in Alexandria. Saturninus, following Menander . . . . (Against Heresies, 1.23.5-24.1)
Saturninus/Satornilus/Satorneilos/Satornil
I will use the Latin rendering of the name, Saturninus, but will return shortly to a possible significance of the Greek form. (Irenaeus originally wrote in Greek and would have used one of the other forms of the name.) What is of significance here is the teaching on god and the Jewish law attributed to Saturninus, a figure estimated to have been active in Antioch, Syria, in the 120s CE. Since we have been talking about the establishment of “schools”, with “Christian” teachers following the ways of philosophical schools of the time, M. David Litwa’s comment is of interest:
Eusebius dated Saturninus to the reign of the emperor Hadrian (117–138 CE). In the same context, the church historian said that Saturninus set up a “school” (didaskaleion), depicting him more as a philosopher than as a religious leader. Nonetheless, we should not exclude the idea that Saturninus’s “school” did double duty as a small, ecclesial formation within a larger network of Christian assemblies in Antioch (among them the networks of Menander and Ignatius, for instance). (Litwa, 77)
If, as seems likely, Saturninus was active at a time of widespread and extreme hostility towards Jews in the eastern part of the Roman empire, the following characterization of his teaching should not be surprising:
Saturninus’s theology . . . expresses a strongly anti-Judaic stance insofar as it openly sought to discredit the Judean deity. . . .
Despite Saturninus’s seeming antagonism toward the Judean deity, he was deeply familiar with Judean scriptures and traditions . . . .
The theological seeds sown by Saturninus bore much fruit. Along with Johannine Christians, Saturninians were among the first to create a strong ideological boundary between their group and competing Jewish (and Christian) circles who worshiped the Jewish deity. Saturninus is the first known Antiochene theologian whose theology derives largely from the exegesis of scriptural texts (with a healthy dose of Jewish tradition). He was determined to revise the book of Genesis. In this revision, Saturninus was the first Christian clearly to identify the Judean god as an angel, one of seven wicked creators. This was a fateful move, proving influential for Marcion . . . . (Litwa, 77f, 82)
The link between Saturninus’s anti-Judaic theology and his historical situation was noted long ago by Robert Grant:
The historical environment of Saturninus was not purely theological. . . It included at least one Jewish revolt against the Romans, in the years 115-117, and perhaps another, in 132—135. Both revolts were disastrous for those who took part in them. Both revolts, as we have already pointed out (see Chapter 1), led radical dualist Jews and Christians to move from apocalyptic toward gnosis, and to reinterpret the Old Testament in a new way. Examining the Heilsgeschichte of Saturninus we shall find that such a reinterpretation is what he is trying to provide. (Grant, 99f — Grant is assuming the traditional first century dates for much of the New Testament literature. I am suggesting that possibly all of the New Testament literature is from the second century.)
Saturninus taught that the world and humankind were created by seven angels, one of whom was the god identified as the creator in Genesis. A higher god had created these angels, including one who was known as Yahweh.
But one of these angels is “the God of the Jews,” and the latter seems to be more important than the others, since Christ came into the world “for the destruction of the God of the Jews and for the salvation of those who believe in him [Jesus Christ].” This is what we read in the Latin translation of Irenaeus summarizing Saturnilus’s doctrine (Adv. haer. I, 24, 2), and also in the Greek text of Hippolytus (Ref. VII, 28, 5). . . . It is almost beyond doubt that for Saturnilus . . . the God of the Jews is the head of the creator angels (d. Irenaeus, I, 24, 4). He can therefore be spoken of as the principal creator.
Thus, according to Saturnilus, the God of the Old Testament is in reality an angel; that is, he is not the true God. As for the reasons that led to the devaluation of this figure, we find them without difficulty in an anti-Judaism and an anticosmic attitude that go much further than those of John. [Unlike the Gospel of John, Saturnilus taught that] Christ came into the world to destroy the God of the prophets and the old Law. . . .
We also learn from Irenaeus’s account that, according to Saturnilus, up to the coming of Christ the demons helped the wickedest human beings, and that this is why Christ came, in order to help the good and destroy the evil and the demons. This seems to mean that the persons in the Old Testament who are depicted as having been prosperous, happy and victorious were in general the most evil, which is to say that the Old Testament depicts men and judges history contrary to the truth; it is to open the door to those Gnostics who declared themselves in favor of the reprobate in the Old Testament. . . . All this manifests an anti-Judaism, or more precisely an antinomianism, a criticism of the Old Testament, that is not found in John . . . (Pétrement, 329f — my bolding)
Roger Parvus proposed the possibility that the Ascension of Isaiah lies behind some passages in our letters of Paul, and that the figure of Paul may be related in some way to Saturninus (compare the Greek form of the name, Sartornilus, with Saulos, the first name of Paul according to Acts):
I suspect the 120s are a little late for the revival of interest in a historical prophet crucified by Pilate. The more likely scenario is that a second Joshua (Greek: Jesus; see also the posts on the name of Jesus from a classicist’s perspective) was chosen to overthrow the cult and teachings of Moses. This Jesus came to earth to trick the wicked powers into crucifying him so that the good could be released from the power of death. There was no heavenly crucifixion as some have attempted to argue. The Saviour figure took on the forms of the angels in the respective heavens on his way down to earth in order not to be recognized as he passed by. In the same way he took on the form of a human in order to hide his true identity while on earth.
But if Saturninus was one of the first to expound teachings that came to have a close relationship to our idea of Christianity, they were in time supplanted by a more positive and appealing narrative: a story in which the Jewish Scriptures were not only superseded but fulfilled, or given a radically new meaning. Instead of coming to destroy the law Jesus was said to have fulfilled it, and even have bound up in himself a spiritual Moses, a spiritual Elijah, a spiritual David. This was a time of “the Second Sophistic” in literature, and a time of applying allegorical insights to bring out new meanings in old myths and narratives. A new narrative biography, like those of the philosophers, was composed in our gospels. This new narrative, better than other narratives like the Ascension of Isaiah or tales of demonic creators, could be read as a key to discovering new and “higher” meanings in Scriptures. That narrative thereby acquired the added depth that came from those Scriptures while supplanting the “Jewishness” that those Scriptures had long upheld, but that had proved a failure and a loathing to the world by the apocalyptic events in the times of Trajan and Hadrian. But the story of that new narrative would likely transfer us from Antioch to Rome.
Grant, Robert M. Gnosticism and Early Christianity. New York: Columbia University Press, 1959.
Litwa, M. David. Found Christianities: Remaking the World of the Second Century CE. London ; New York: T&T Clark, 2022.
Livesey, Nina E. The Letters of Paul in Their Roman Literary Context: Reassessing Apostolic Authorship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024.
Lohr, Winrich. “Justin Martyr.” In From Thomas to Tertullian: Christian Literary Receptions of Jesus in the Second and Third Centuries CE, edited by Chris Keith, Helen K. Bond, Christine Jacobi, and Jens Schröter, 433–48. The Reception of Jesus in the First Three Centuries. T&T Clark, 2020.
