Biblical Studies

2025-08-03

Defending Russell Gmirkin’s Hellenistic Dating of the Old Testament – Part 6

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by Neil Godfrey

Why the Hellenistic era …. Part 2a

In this post I will explain “my personal reason” for strongly suspecting a Hellenistic origin of the biblical literature — though I am sure I have come across the same ideas throughout different books and articles over the years. It follows on from #5 in the preceding post. When I wrote that I was expecting to follow up with detailed discussions from interpretations of the archaeological finds but have decided now to put that off for later.

I have more recently (subsequent to writing this post on the earlywritings forum) come across a comparable view that was expressed in a 2016 conference (my bolding):

As Jean Louis Ska suggests, The disappearance of a culture triggers off a certain type of literature. This is the case in Mesopotamia with Berossus and in Egypt with Manetho. They wrote their work in Hellenistic times when their civilizations’ glory already belonged to the past. The Torah could be – to some extent – an answer of the same type to the end of Jerusalem and the kingdom of Judah.

– Markl, Dominik, Jean-Pierre Sonnet, and Peter Dubovsk, eds. The Fall of Jerusalem and the Rise of the Torah. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2016. p. 6

Russell Gmirkin, it should be noted, published evidence that pointed to both Berossus and Manetho being sources for parts of the Penteuch.

My “personal vibe” that is in sync with the Hellenistic era is reflection on “the nature of the biblical literature itself”. The Primary History [i.e. Genesis to 2 Kings] is not the kind of literature that arises sui generis from a vacuum. One expects to see antecedents over time that lead to that kind of work. And the closest antecedents we find are in the Greek literature, not in that of the SyriaMesopotamian regions. Assyrian vassal treaties, the epics of Gilgamesh, of Baal, and so forth, simply fall short by comparison.

But what kind of society produces that kind of literature? It takes more than a scribal elite responsible for administrative and trade records, or even engaged in cultic verses and prayers and spells for cures, etc. The kind of literature in our Bibles required reasonably prosperous and complex societies with a literate class that engaged with the kinds of stories and ideas that had relevance to their class, ethnic and regional identities. They had to have a reasonably widespread audience to engage with those ideas and stories and whose interest or vulnerabilities or needs encouraged their literary development. The social groups must have been somewhat extensive and complex because of the various competing and related ideas found in that literature.

In other words we are talking about fairly advanced societies in economic growth and social complexity, and who also have comparable antecedent literature.

The archaeological record does point to some kind of growth of Jerusalem and surrounds in the eighth and seventh centuries, but I am not sure it really reaches the kind of level that Finkelstein and Silberman seemed to think was adequate for a “renaissance literary activity”. Besides, what kinds of antecedents were available at or up to that time to mushroom into what we find in the Bible?

The Persian era is by all accounts that I have seen in relative decline. Persian “liberal” rule that allowed Judeans and Samarians to do their own thing is more easily understood as administrative neglect, not caring at all about their development — only collecting levees for the army and taxes for the king. (Witness the Xenophon’s ability to march his Greek army untouched through the empire!)

The economic revival, with its related social growth in complexity and size, came with the arrival of the Greeks. So did the antecedent literature.

Herodotus’s Histories has a remarkably similar structure to the Primary History: opening with world history, having a close look at Egypt as a follow up, and finally getting down to the narrow view of the conflict between two powers — AND all told within the framework of a theological interest: the lesson of the deciding hand of the god through his earthly sanctuary. And all told in a series of books in prose, both frequently with competing accounts of the same event.

Old Testament based on Herodotus? & Correlations between the “Histories” of Herodotus and the Bible’s History of Israel

I am not denying the obvious differences when saying that. What I’m trying to do is to draw attention to the “equally obvious” similarities. Did those similarities really emerge independently? Did the Hebrew literature really inspire that of the Greeks? Were the Judeans and Samarians in the poverty-stricken, underdeveloped Persian era really hosting a literate class devouring Greek literature? (I am on record as deploring argument by rhetorical questions so I will hasten to add that those questions are more than rhetorical: they represent a series of expectations that we must propose with hypotheses other than the Hellenistic era one.)

And then we have the ideological content of the literature. How do we explain the sudden introduction of stories of Exodus, Joshua’s Conquest, Judges, David and Solomon’s united kingdom and empire, if those — as the archaeological record tells us — never happened?

At this point it is worth looking at the propaganda use the biblical works were put to in the Hasmonean period. Were not the Hasmoneans seeking to justify their conquests by appeals to a historical heritage? In a time of Greek conquest do we not expect indigenous populations to at least sometimes seek redress by counter-narratives that put themselves in the positions of the god-blessed and ultimately greater powers? Again, these are more than rhetorical questions.

As for the divisions found even within the literature — the Samarian/Mount Gerizim point of view versus that of Jerusalem — have not scholars long since identified these differences underlying the multiple points of view (and sometimes outright conflict) within the biblical literature?

Mention has been made of Gmirkin in this thread. Before I read Gmirkin’s book I was prompted to read Plato’s Laws (as well as, again, Timaeus and Crito) by another scholar and was completely thrown back in my chair when I saw (and wondered how I had not seen it before) the striking similarities between Plato and the Pentateuch’s laws. Oh of course all those sacrifices and cultic rituals are of Levantine/Syrian/Canaanite origin, but the Pentateuch is a lot more than those.

The creation, the merging of humans and gods, the flood and annihilation, the wandering of the new generation, the coming together ….. and so forth. And then the laws about holiness, godliness, sacred feasts, marriage and sexuality, the judges and tribes, etc etc etc etc : Did Plato really twig to all of that from his reading of the Pentateuch? (At least one scholar has addressed the relationship of a scene in Plato’s Symposium with the temptation of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.)

And further yet — how many scholars have noticed the similarities between the biblical Yahweh and the Greek Dionysus? I have read the comparisons a number of times. Surely pre-Hellenistic Yahwism was distinctively Levantine, with no appreciable differences between the Yahwism of Samaria, Judea, Negev, Canaan, Syria…. So what gave him the Greek overlay in the Bible?

Okay — these are my generally subjective responses to how I read the literature of the OT with my knowledge of Greek literature in mind. I have not presented a systematic argument, I know. But for what it’s worth, I thought it might be of some point to note how I have come to read the literatures of the Hebrews and Greeks and the conclusions that seem to present themselves to me as a result.

by neilgodfrey » Tue Feb 20, 2024 4:29 pm

To read the original post in context and to see Stephen Goranson’s critical responses ….

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2025-08-02

Defending Russell Gmirkin’s Hellenistic Dating of the Old Testament – Part 5

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

By the way, I have informed Stephen Goranson that he is welcome to respond here to my resposting of his criticisms of Russell Gmirkin — despite my earlier prohibition on his posts to this blog. For this series alone I have lifted my relegation of SG’s comments to spam.

In Part 4 I pointed to discussions that answered a list of criticisms against the case that the Hebrew Bible was composed prior to Hellenistic times. Those discussions were mostly from other blog posts of mine but they covered what had been repeated at various times in the earlywritings forum. For anyone interested in the details and context of Stephen Goranson’s ongoing discussion of my responses to his list of data points (that he presented as “evidence” of pre-Hellenistic biblical writings) see the copy of the page at the end of this post.

What follows here is the second part to my attempt to justify the plausibility (even greater explanatory power) of the Hellenistic provenance of all (though Russell Gmirkin would, I think, have said only “most”) the books of the Old Testaments. In my opening post (Part 1) I addressed the circularity underpinning the dominant current view of the Documentary Hypothesis. This time I branched out into the data that is better explained by the Hellenistic era thesis.

I included this in my discussion on the earlywritings forum — again, see the link below for the context.

Why the Hellenistic era …. Part 2

There is more to the Hellenistic provenance thesis than the simple fact of the circularity of the methods of dating the OT books by the past conventional scholarship — something that so far not even SG has denied. Given that SG’s reference to Langlois (when read in full) also allows at least for the possibility of a Hellenistic provenance, we have room to continue.

Archaeology reveals

1. The archaeological evidence of pre-Hellenistic Judea-Samaria has demonstrated that major moments of biblical history are fictions. The “invasion” of Canaan by an “Israelite” ethnic group never happened. The most that can be said about the “Kingdom” of David and Solomon is that it was little more than a village incapable of extending dominance over any area of note. (Jamieson-Drake saw evidence of development from a “lower-order society” to a “chiefdom” in Jerusalem, which falls far from the level of “a state”.)

Why write fiction?

2. The question must arise, then, why such stories were told? Were the stories derived from historical memories? Archaeology has suggested that is unlikely. A fundamental and inescapable fact of any literature is that it must reflect the ideas and beliefs and understandings that are part of its cultural matrix. One specific ideological feature of the narrative of David is that it shares manners, customs, assumptions that we find in the Persian kingdom. One might therefore wonder if the stories were told as part of ideological hopes for an imminent greatness, or at least as an attempt to identify with other great powers, whether of the past and/or present.

But what kind of fiction?

3. The literary structure and style of the Primary History (Genesis-2 Kings), as other scholars (not those arguing for a Hellenistic origin, by the way) have shown, is comparable to the Histories of Herodotus. The closest genre to the Primary History is found in the Greek world. Another comparable genre is the autobiographical narrative. Some scholars have attempted to explain this observation by speculating that Greek works were well known to the subjects of the Persian empire or that even the biblical books were known to the Greeks and influenced the Greeks. One needs to look for the explanation that raises fewest difficulties or questions.

Nothing uniform — why?

4. There are vastly different styles among the biblical books. One can explain this fact by positing a long period of evolution and various cultural influences over centuries. One can also explain the same fact by positing contemporary regional differences. As one scholar noted, imagine if all we had about Socrates were the writings of Plato and Xenophon. Would we have to assume that there was a vast time gap between the two accounts since they are so at odds in so many ways?

What kind of society?

5. One ought also to look at the kind of socio-cultural-economic society that would be required to produce the biblical literature. Here again the archaeological evidence can be interpreted in favour of the Hellenistic period. But this is a vast topic of its own.

The argument emerges from other hypotheses

The scholars I have had in mind while setting out the above points have, with one exception, not been advocates of the Hellenistic origin of the biblical literature. The archaeological evidence that discounts the historicity of “biblical history”, the comparisons with Greek literature and Persian royal ideologies, — all of these are found in works of scholars who never entertained a Hellenistic time setting, as far as I am aware. Philip Davies himself (with whom I began in the OP) always argued for the Persian era for the Primary History and Prophets.

But there are also problems with a Persian era setting that disappear if we move the compositions of the books to the third century.

by neilgodfrey » Tue Feb 20, 2024 11:24 am

In the next post I will set out my personal reason for strongly suspecting a Hellenistic origin of the biblical literature.

The original forum exchange:

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2025-08-01

Defending Russell Gmirkin’s Hellenistic Dating of the Old Testament – Part 4

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Stephen Goranson has been a regular critic of Russell Gmirkin. Stephen posted the following points (in the earlywritings forum) that he claimed gave reasonable grounds for dating the entire Hebrew Bible (he referred to the “TaNaK“) before Hellenistic era:

There are reasons to consider some TaNaK texts to be older than third century, some of which have been discussed here.

Qumran texts, safely considered to be copies rather than autographs, show developments over time. And some may themselves may be older; at least, so Michael Langlois (name searchable here) has argued concerning some paleo-Hebrew mss. Few have been radiocarbon dated (more to be published). Statistically it is unlikely that the oldest one has yet been tested and published.
Deir ‘Alla inscription.
Silver amulets.
It is not plausible that temple priests, before third century, were illiterate and had nothing to read.
Semitic language history. A recent–Feb. 14, 2024–observation, for example: “A marginal linguistic difference between the Pentateuch and the rest of the Hebrew Bible” by Benjamin Suchard https://bnuyaminim.wordpress.com/2024/02/14/a-marginal-linguistic-difference-between-the-pentateuch-and-the-rest-of-the-hebrew-bible/

by StephenGoranson » Tue Feb 20, 2024 5:11 am

As Stephen Goranson noted, several of those points had been discussed previously on that forum so one might have expected him to have addressed what had already been presented as responses to his claims that they pointed to a pre-Hellenistic date for the Jewish Bible. I posted my response to Stephen’s reference to the Dead Sea Scrolls and Michael Langlois’ argument in an earlier Vridar post:

Do the Dead Sea Scrolls Invalidate a Hellenistic Origin of the Hebrew Books of the Bible?

As for the Deir ‘Alla inscription, I posted my own observation about how it could well be interpreted as confirmation of Russell Gmirkin’s Hellenistic era thesis. See

When Yahweh was at Peace with Other Gods — [Biblical Creation Accounts/Plato’s Timaeus-Critias – 7e]

On the silver amulets, see my discussion at

Before “Biblical Israel” there was Yahweh

Stephen’s next point — implying the Hellenistic era hypothesis was declaring that priests “were illiterate and had nothing to read” — is just silly.

As for the difference between the Hebrew of the Pentateuch and other parts of the Bible, we cannot assume that the only explanation for the difference must be a long period of development, and I am sure Stephen knows this. Recently I translated a French work by a couple of renowned biblical and archaeological scholars that included this section:

Linguistic Evidence?

Can the question of the date of the texts of the Pentateuch, or of other biblical texts, be resolved by distinguishing between Classical Biblical Hebrew and Late Biblical Hebrew—a distinction that would offer certain seemingly objective criteria for dating biblical texts? It is not surprising that this method has gained a significant number of adherents, particularly in North America and Israel; we will not go into detail here.19 Let us simply highlight a few precautions to observe in using this method. First of all, we must ask, with E. Ullendorf and E. A. Knauf, whether Biblical Hebrew was truly a spoken language.20 The evidence for the existence of so-called Classical Hebrew21 outside the Bible is limited to a few inscriptions and personal names, which do not allow us to affirm that there existed a unified “Classical Hebrew” during the monarchical period. We must allow for dialectal variation in extrabiblical written and oral texts and, more importantly, for differences between literary language and vernacular language. Furthermore, there is no doubt that certain late texts like Ecclesiastes (Qoheleth) differ from what is called Classical Biblical Hebrew. But texts that may well be as late as Ecclesiastes can also be written in perfectly “Classical” Hebrew, as is the case with Zechariah 1–8 and the extracanonical Psalm 151.22

Finally, it is also very difficult—if not impossible—to draw a clear dividing line between “Classical” and “Late” Biblical Hebrew. As C. Edenburg recently observed, biblical texts that all scholars agree are late (from the Persian period) share with Iron Age Hebrew/Moabite inscriptions a preference for direct object suffixes attached to verbs.23 This means that we cannot assert a linear development.24 “Biblical Hebrew” is, above all, a literary language, whose lifespan would have extended beyond the spoken stage (if such a stage ever existed), and which endured in the scribal milieu. The distinction between Classical and Late Biblical Hebrew—especially when applied to an entire book—fails to take into account the widely recognized fact that every biblical text is the product of a long process of composition and revision. It thus appears that the scribes were capable of preserving or even partly inventing a language that had not been spoken for many centuries. We must therefore be cautious when claiming that the entire Pentateuch was composed before the Exile simply because it is mostly written in Classical Biblical Hebrew.25

[19] C. EDENBURG, Dismembering the Whole: Composition and Purpose of Judges 19–21, Atlanta, SBL, 2016, 115–123.

[20] E. ULLENDORF, Is Biblical Hebrew a Language?, Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz, 1977, 3–17 ; E. A. KNAUF, « War Biblisch-Hebräisch eine Sprache? », in K. SCHMID et al. (éd.), Data and Debates, Münster, Ugarit-Verlag, 2013, 411–423 (421): « l’hébreu biblique n’a jamais été une langue parlée. »

[21] KNAUF, « War Biblisch-Hebräisch eine Sprache ? » remet même en question la plausibilité d’un tel concept.

[22] I. YOUNG, « What Is “Late Biblical Hebrew” ? », in E. BEN ZVI et al. (éd.), A Palimpsest: Rhetoric, Ideology, Stylistics, and Language Relating to Persian Israel, Piscataway, Gorgias Press, 2009, 253–268 (258–259).

[23] EDENBURG, Dismembering, 120–121.

[24] Voir I. YOUNG, « What Do We Actually Know about Ancient Hebrew », Australian Journal of Jewish Studies 27 (2013), 11–31, qui remet en question ladite théorie des trois étapes (hébreu classique, hébreu tardif et hébreu mishnaïque), voir également des appréciations différentes du livre de Job par A. HURVITZ, « The Date of the Prose Tale of Job Linguistically Reconsidered », Harvard Theological Review 67 (1974), 17–34, et par I. YOUNG, « Is the Prose Tale of Job in Late Biblical Hebrew ? », Vetus Testamentum 59 (2009), 606–629.

[25] M. EHRENSVÄRD, « Once Again: The Problem of Dating Biblical Hebrew », Scandinavian Journal of Old Testament 11 (1997), 29–40.

(Translation of a section written by Thomas Römer)

— Finkelstein, Israel, and Thomas Romer. 2019. Aux Origines de La Torah: Nouvelles Rencontres, Nouvelles Perspectives, Paris. 2019. (My electronic copy that does not include page numbers.)

The original discussion in context:

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2025-07-30

Defending Russell Gmirkin’s Hellenistic Dating of the Old Testament – Part 3

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

I’ve addressed the Documentary Hypothesis several times before (see a list of post beginning here). The DH is the basis through which the Hebrew Bible is understood to have begun its development as early as the days of David and Solomon, and in the time of the Babylonian Captivity and through to the period of the Persian Empire. Russell Gmirkin took up the proposal of Thompson and Lemche that the Pentateuch and other biblical texts had their origin as late as subsequent to the conquests of Alexander the Great, less than 300 years before the common era.

Here are a few of my posts in the Academic Discussion section of the Earlywritings Forum that attempted to draw attention to the circularity at the heart of the DH.

Demonstrating the Circularity at the Heart of the Documentary Hypothesis

It had been suggested on the forum that by claiming circularity was at the heart of the DH there was some “caricature” of the DH involved, that the DH was not being presented in a fair way. So I went back to the source and in response to being asked “who” exactly dated the texts in such a way, wrote (I was writing to an audience whom I assumed would know that Julius Wellhausen was the principal pioneer of the DH (=Documentary Hypothesis):

By whom? Here is what Julius Wellhausen wrote in Prolegomena:I.II.2

The Jehovistic Book of the Covenant lies indeed at the foundation of Deuteronomy, but in one point they differ materially, and that precisely the one which concerns us here. As there, so here also, the legislation properly so called begins (Deut. xii.) with an ordinance relating to the service of the altar; but now we have Moses addressing the Israelites in the following terms: “When ye come into the land of Canaan, ye shall utterly destroy all the places of worship which ye find there, and ye shall not worship Jehovah your God after the manner in which the heathen serve theirs. Nay, but only unto the place which the Lord your God shall choose out of all your tribes for His habitation shall ye seek, and thither shall ye bring your offerings and gifts, and there shall ye eat before Him and rejoice. Here at this day we do every man whatsoever is right in his own eyes, but when ye have found fixed abodes, and rest from your enemies round about, then shall the place which Jehovah shall choose for His habitation in one of your tribes be the one place to which ye shall bring your offerings and gifts. Take heed that ye offer not in every place that ye see; ye may not eat your holy gifts in every town, but only in the place which Jehovah shall choose.”

The Law is never weary of again and again repeating its injunction of local unity of worship. In doing so, it is in conscious opposition to “the things that we do here this day,” and throughout has a polemical and reforming attitude towards existing usage. It is rightly therefore assigned by historical criticism to the period of the attacks made on the Bamoth by the reforming party at Jerusalem. As the Book of the Covenant, and the whole Jehovistic writing in general, reflects the first pre−prophetic period in the history of the cultus, so Deuteronomy is the legal expression of the second period of struggle and transition. The historical order is all the more certain because the literary dependence of Deuteronomy on the Jehovistic laws and narratives can be demonstrated independently, and is an admitted fact. From this the step is easy to the belief that the work whose discovery gave occasion to King Josiah to destroy the local sanctuaries was this very Book of Deuteronomy . . .

The whole reasoning process begins with the assumption of the historical veracity (at least in its core) of the biblical Josiah account. From that assumption it follows that the book of Deuteronomy was the source of those reforms (after all, Deuteronomy attacks false worship, just like Josiah did) and therefore Deuteronomy had to have been in existence before the time of Josiah.

That is an invalid argument. How do we know Deuteronomy existed before Josiah? Because the Josiah narrative tells us so? How do we know the Josiah narrative is based on true history? Because the book of Deuteronomy explains his motivation for the reforms. How do we know the book of Deuteronomy explains his reforms? . . . . gets dizzying….

by neilgodfrey » Mon Feb 19, 2024 10:58 am

—oo0oo—

The above failed to impress, so I added another:

Here is another demonstration of the circularity in the dating of Deuteronomy to the time of (or before) Josiah. It is from William Dever in Beyond the Texts: An Archaeological Portrait of Ancient Israel and Judah (2017), pp 611-613.

First, Dever reminds us of the importance of archaeology in assessing the historicity of the biblical accounts:

[A]rchaeological data are primary because an external witness is required to lend support to the historicity of the biblical narratives, if possible, and archaeology is, by definition, the only candidate (including, of course, the texts that it may recover). Archaeology is primary because it provides an independent witness in the court of adjudication, and when properly interrogated it is often an unimpeachable witness. (p. 18)

Agreed 100%.

But then compare that noble statement with how he actually uses archaeological data to “confirm” a biblical narrative:

It is the reign of Josiah (648–609) that is best correlated with the archaeological evidence that we now have. His reputation as a reformer, a restorer of tradition, comports especially well with the more favorable situation that we know obtained with the decline of Assyria

Correlation is not a proof. Dever lists in a table what is explicitly proven by archaeology at the time of Josiah:

“Poly-yahwism”; Asherah cult; Yahu names; Philistia attacked (p. 609)

In the same table he lists as “Probable; Evidence Ambiguous”

Josiahʼs attempted reforms; consulted temple scroll; maintained Judah even if vassal; Josiah slain in battle, 609

So archaeology, according to his own analysis, does not confirm the historicity of the Joshua narrative. Nonetheless, he proceeds to set forth a list of correlations with the biblical account — as if correlations can ever be anything more than correlations. (Compare the correlations with historical data of any historical novel.)

He begins on page 11:

It is the reign of Josiah (648–609) that is best correlated with the archaeological evidence that we now have. . . .

Numerous studies of these intriguing reform measures attributed to Josiah have been published, but few have paid any attention to possible archaeological correlates—that is, to a possible real-life context in the late seventh century. Most scholars have focused on whether the reform was successful, many assuming that the reforms claimed are simply too fantastic to be credible. The fact is, however, that we have good archaeological explanations for most of the targets of Josiahʼs reforms. For instance, we know what high places (bāmôt) are, and we have a number of examples of them, perhaps the most obvious example being the monumental one at Dan.

No-one denies the biblical authors were familiar with the various popular cults of the day. Simply finding evidence of these brings us no closer to finding any support for the historicity behind the narrative of Josiah and the discovery of Deuteronomy.

We have many altars in cult places and private homes, large and small. We even have an example of the altar on the roof in the debris of a building destroyed at Ashkelon in 604.

The sacred poles and pillars are easily explained, even in the Hebrew Bible, as wooden images or live trees used to represent the goddess Asherah symbolically. The tree iconography has now been connected conclusively with the old Canaanite female deity Asherah, whose cult was still widespread in Iron Age Israel, in both nonorthodox and conformist circles (above).

The weavings, or perhaps “garments” or even “curtains,” for Asherah (Hebrew bāttîm) remain a crux. Renderings by the Septuagint, the Targumim, and later Jewish commentaries suggest a corrupt Masoretic Text, but woven garments for deities and tent-like hangings for sacred pavilions are well known in both the ancient and modern Middle East.

The phrase “heavenly hosts” needs no archaeological explanation, since it clearly refers to the divine council well documented at Ugarit and in the Hebrew Bible. The reference to the “horses and chariots of the Sun” recalls examples that we have of terra-cotta horse-andchariot models from the Late Bronze and Iron Ages. In the Ugaritic texts, Baal is the “Cloud Rider” who flies across the heavens daily as the great storm god, imagery that is even applied to Yahweh in Psalms.

The Topheth in the Kidron Valley (a rubbish dump and place of abomination in any case) is readily explained by the famous sanctuary of Tanit at Carthage, where infant sacrifice was the usual rite, and there the Phoenician god was indeed Molech.

Of the various “pagan” deities condemned—Baal, Asherah, Ashtoreth of Sidon, Kemosh of Moab, and Milkom of Ammon—all are well known, as is their iconography and to some degree their cult practices.

It is not only the description of the specifics of the religious situation in Josiahʼs time that is realistic in the light of the current archaeological data. The general context of cultural and religious pluralism in the seventh century is an amalgam well illustrated by the archaeological data that we have summarized above, beginning already in the eighth century. That context helps to answer the question raised above about whether the Deuteronomistic Historiansʼ original version fits in the actual historical-cultural setting of the seventh century in Judah. It can be shown in many ways that it does but in other ways that it does not, even though the written version could have been almost contemporary (the question of an older oral tradition cannot be resolved).

It is instructive to set the central themes and ideals of the Deuteronomistic program as summarized above alongside a general description of the realities of life in seventh-century Judah as illuminated by the archaeological evidence here.

And that’s it. All Dever’s archaeological evidence has managed to do is to tell us that there is no evidence for Josiah’s reforms as per the biblical narrative. No-one has questioned the polytheistic/poly-Yahwist cult prevalent throughout Judah/Samaria/Negev/Syria. The biblical narrative assumes that most of the population did not practice “biblical Yahwism”. The whole point of the narrative is to give some historical context to the book of Deuteronomy.

One may reply that the biblical narrative exaggerated and the reforms were not so successful after all, but it won’t really do to imagine all sorts of reasons why we still do not have the evidence for the historicity of the narrative. We will always need independent evidence to confirm the narrative. Until we have it we cannot validly work on the assumption that we will one day find the evidence we know “must be there somewhere” to justify our dating of the sources.

Dever’s words above are a classic instance of the very problem Davies was addressing. The archaeological evidence is interpreted through the assumption that there is a historical core in the biblical narrative. Without the biblical narrative there is simply no grounds in any of the evidence cited by Dever that would lead anyone to suspect the event of Josiah’s reforms.

by neilgodfrey » Mon Feb 19, 2024 2:54 pm

—oo0oo—

Is the above not enough to demonstrate that the DH is built on circularity?

Continuing ….

The original discussion in context and in full:

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2025-07-29

Defending Russell Gmirkin’s Hellenistic Dating of the Old Testament – Part 2

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

In response to the post that I copied here, one consistent critic of Russell Gmirkin’s thesis in particular (and of the Hellenistic era hypothesis for the creation of the Hebrew Bible more generally) posted the following response:

Elephantine is the site of a Persian era garrison settlement of Jews in Egypt. For an discussion of the relevance of this site for the dating of the Old Testament texts see the post re Elephantine Jews.

I had referred to the Elephantine remains here, pointing out that some scholars have suggested the Documentary Hypothesis (that assumes a long pre-Hellenistic history for much of the Hebrew Bible) would never have gained any traction if the the Elephantine papyrii had been discovered earlier.

My response:

That is logically correct. But the Elephantine remains, in the absence of remains pointing in the opposite direction, do “indicate” (as per the Opening Post) the absence of any knowledge or regard for the Pentateuch. They certainly do not support the conventional dating.

Nor are the Elephantine remains entirely irrelevant to the question:

. . . the Elephantine community stood in contact with Jerusalem. Although Elephantine was located on the traditional southern border of Egypt, it was not an isolated outpost on the fringe of the world. The Nile was navigable all the way from the Nile delta to Elephantine. A journey from Elephantine to Jerusalem might take approximately one month. In comparison, according to the Bible it took Ezra around four months to travel from Babylon to Jerusalem. In terms of travel time, the Judaeans in Elephantine were much closer to Jerusalem than was the priest-scribe who is often accorded great importance in the (re-)formation of Judaean religion in the Persian period. Whereas this may indicate potential contact and demonstrate that the historical-geographical conditions for travelling between Elephantine and Jerusalem were more favourable than those between Babylon and Jerusalem, it is also evidenced by documents from Elephantine that there was actually a two-way contact between Jerusalem and Judah (and Samaria). Not only did the Judaeans in Elephantine know the names of the tenuring governors of Judah and Samaria (in this case, even the names of the sons of the governor) and the high priest in Jerusalem (cf. A4.7 par.), they also wrote letters to them and even got a reply (although the Judaeans in Elephantine regret that the Jerusalem high priest and his colleagues did not respond to their initial letter).

Fourth, the Elephantine documents are contemporary sources and probably even more representative of the lived and practiced Yahwism of the Persian period than are the biblical texts. . . .

Granerød, Gard. Dimensions of Yahwism in the Persian Period: Studies in the Religion and Society of the Judaean Community at Elephantine. Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, 2016. pp. 4ff

What Wellhausen wrote in 1921 about Elephantine continues to be the view of those who hold to conventional pre-Persian dates for the various literary sources that were melded to compose the Pentateuch.

Just a few years after the discoveries of the documents of the Jedaniah communal archive, Julius Wellhausen characterised the community as a “merkwürdiger Überrest des vorgesetzlichen Hebraismus.” In his view, the community located at the border between Egypt and Nubia adhered to its “altes Wesen.” Wellhausen regarded the Judaeans in Elephantine to be standing “noch auf der vorgesetzlichen Stufe,” in contrast to the elite of postexilic Judah. In his view, the Judaean community at Elephantine represented a “fossiler Überrest des unreformierten Judentums.”

Granerød, Gard. Dimensions of Yahwism in the Persian Period: Studies in the Religion and Society of the Judaean Community at Elephantine. Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, 2016. p. 18

Do you have a comment on the circularity of the conventional dating of works like E, J, the Deuteronomist?

by neilgodfrey » Mon Feb 19, 2024 7:00 am

—oo0oo—

The above should suffice. But on the off-chance that my interlocutor is reading these posts I had better be sure to be absolutely fair and include his every word that he wrote in response to my arguments. The remainder of this post is included for that reason alone, though the extract from P.R. Davies might be of more general interest.

—oo0oo—

To which I replied:

The Hellenistic provenance can be argued without reference to the Elephantine finds. It is the absence of evidence not only at Elephantine but elsewhere, especially in the region of Canaan, that does make the Hellenistic argument (on other grounds) possible, however.

The argument for a Hellenistic provenance stands quite independently of Elephantine. The Elephantine finds were introduced as supporting evidence.

I would be interested to know if you have a comment about the critical grounds for criticism of the conventional dating of the earliest sources for the OT — the circularity of the argument and lack of independent supporting evidence. Example, the logic of the argument for Deuteronomy being composed in the time of Josiah? or the logic of the argument for other material being composed in the Babylonian captivity or even in the time of the Persian empire?

and in hope of getting into some nitty gritty of exactly how Elephantine finds could be relevant, I asked:

Would you be interested in discussing the Elephantine finds and their specific relevance to the knowledge of “some Torah books” in the Persian era in another thread if I open it up?

by neilgodfrey » Mon Feb 19, 2024 7:00 am and 7:07 am

—oo0oo—

Alas, there was to be no further attempt to explain how the Elephantine evidence had any relevance to the Hellenistic date of what became the biblical writings. Instead, SG appeared not to have followed the demonstration of how circular reasoning lay at the root of conventional dating of the Hebrew Bible and insisted that the claim of circularity was nothing more than a presumption, an assertion.

—oo0oo—

I hoped a little more detail might dispel the notion that Davies merely asserted circularity instead of demonstrating how it happens in actuality. This was, after all, a newly constructed “Academic Discussion forum” with clear rules for exchanges so I still held hope that SG would respond in a scholarly manner.

I know what the proposed sources for the Torah books are. The problem I am trying to note is that the conventional dating of sources such as J, E, D, P is circular and therefore invalid.

The point about circularity is not a mere assertion or presumption. It is demonstrated in the links I posted in the OP.

Here is what Davies wrote in 1992, and I think it deserves a response:

So far, historical research by biblical scholars has taken a different and circular route, whose stages can be represented more or less as follows:

1. The biblical writers, when writing about the past, were obviously informed about it and often concerned to report it accurately to their readers. A concern with the truth of the past can be assumed. Therefore, where the literary history is plausible, or where it encounters no insuperable objections, it should be accorded the status of historical fact. The argument is occasionally expressed that the readers of these stories would be sufficiently knowledgeable (by tradition?) of their past to discourage wholesale invention.

2. Much of the literature is itself assigned to quite specific settings within that story (e.g. the prophetic books, dated to the reigns of kings of Israel and Judah).13If the biblical literature is gene rally correct in its historical portrait, then these datings may also be relied upon.

3. Even where the various parts of the biblical literature do not date themselves within the history of its ʻIsraelʼ we are given a precise enough account in general to enable plausible connections can be made, such as Deuteronomy with the time of Josiah, or (as formerly) the Yahwist with the time of David or Solomon, Psalms with a Jerusalem cult. Thus, where a plausible context in the literary history can be found for a biblical writing, that setting may be posited, and as a result there will be mutual confirmation, by the literature of the setting, and by the setting of the literature. For example, the Yahwistʼs setting in the court of Solomon tells us about the character of that monarchy and the character of that monarchy explains the writing of this story.

4. Where the writer (ʻredactorʼ) of the biblical literature is recognized as having been removed in time from the events he14 describes or persons whose words he reports (e.g. when an account of the history of ʻIsraelʼ stretches over a long period of time), he must be presumed to rely on sources or traditions close to the events. Hence even when the literary source is late, its contents will nearly always have their point of origin in the time of which they speak. The likelihood of a writer inventing something should generally be discounted in favour of a tradition, since traditions allow us a vague connection with ʻhistoryʼ (which does not have to be exact) and can themselves be accorded some value as historical statements of the ʻfaithʼ of ʻIsraelʼ (and this will serve the theologian almost as well as history).

Each of these assertions can be encountered, in one form or another in the secondary literature. But it is the underlying logic which requires attention rather than these (dubious) assertions themselves. That logic is circular. The assumption that the literary construct is an historical one is made to confirm itself. Historical criticism (socalled) of the inferred sources and traditions seeks to locate these in that literary-cum-historical construct. The placement of sources and traditions in this way is then used to embellish the literary account itself. This circular process places the composition of the literature within the period of which the literature itself speaks. This is precisely how the period to which the biblical literature refers becomes also the time of composition, the ʻbiblical periodʼ, and the biblical literature, taken as a whole, becomes a contemporary witness to its own construct, reinforcing the initial assumption of a real historical matrix and giving impetus to an entire pseudo-scholarly exercise in fitting the literature into a sequence of contexts which it has itself furnished! If either the historicity of the biblical construct or the actual date of composition of its literature were verified independently of each other, the circle could be broken. But since the methodological need for this procedure is overlooked, the circularity has continued to characterize an entire discipline—and render it invalid.

The panoply of historical-critical tools and methods used by biblical scholars relies for the most part on this basic circularity.

Davies, Philip R. In Search of “Ancient Israel.” Sheffield Academic Press, 1992. pp 35-37

So you can see it is not a mere assertion of presumption. It is demonstrated.

by neilgodfrey » Mon Feb 19, 2024 8:36 am

—oo0oo—

Alas, SG appeared to be impervious to registering any possibility that conventional wisdom might have an insecure foundation and curiosly claimed that the extract from Davies (above) was a “caricature”!

—oo0oo—

I had mixed feelings about that response. At least he recognized that the reasoning being described was invalid. But how did he fail to understand that it is in reality how the conventional dating argument has been made?

But still, with new rules in a new forum, surely participants would soon find their feet…..

2025-07-27

Defending Russell Gmirkin’s Hellenistic Dating of the Old Testament – Part 1

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Since I don’t expect to have much time to write new posts again before the end of the year, I will from time to time copy what I once posted on another forum in defence of Russell Gmirkin’s thesis dating the Old Testament books to the Hellenistic era.

The orthodox view is that biblical books about the Exodus, wilderness wanderings, Joshua, David, the various kings and prophets originated in the time of the historical kingdoms of Israel and Judah, even as early as the era of David and Solomon, circa 900 BCE. What became part of the Old Testament started to take on a recognizable shape after the Kingdom of Judah went into Babylonian captivity around 600 BCE. “By the waters of Babylon” Jews pining for their homeland devoutly penned much of what became their sacred literature, and on their return under Persian rule and intermittent efforts to rebuild their Jerusalem temple, circa 500-400 BCE, the “Jewish Bible” began look more like what it is today. That, more or less, has long been the conventional view of scholars.

The Hellenistic era refers to the period following Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Persian Empire, from circa 300 BCE. It marks the spread of Greek cultural and political influence across Asia Minor, the Near East, and Egypt, extending as far as the borders of India, and lasting until the Roman annexation of these regions.

If these biblical writings were composed so late, a host of other questions inevitably arise, especially in relation to the historical information they seem to contain, their source materials, and even why they were written and the kind of relationship they have to the origins of Judaism.

In 2001 there was published a chapter, written by Niels Peter Lemche:

Lemche, Niels Peter. 2001. “The Old Testament—A Hellenistic Book?” In Did Moses Speak Attic?: Jewish Historiography and Scripture in the Hellenistic Period, edited by Lester L. Grabbe, 287–318. Sheffield, England: Bloomsbury T&T Clark.

I discussed that chapter in a 2010 post: The Old Testament – A Hellenistic Book? (and other digressions)

Russell Gmirkin took up the idea and closely analyzed the early books of the Old Testament in the light of Greek literature. (Attic was the Greek dialect of much of Classical and Hellenistic Greek literature.) Detailed discussions of Russell’s work are linked in my earlier post, Russell Gmirkin. So the Hellenistic thesis per se is not exclusively Russell Gmirkin’s, but it seems fitting to acknowledge the particular contribution of Russell at this time.

In place of regular original posts for coming months, I would like to post some of my defences of the Hellenistic thesis for dating the Old Testament books. These defences were posted on the earlywritings forum (in its “Academic Discussion” section) but I chose to delete them from there after I lost all confidence in how that forum was run by the moderator. (Russell demonstrated far more patience there than I could muster.)

Since Russell’s sudden passing some of his critics have returned there to rebut his work without having the honesty to acknowledge and address earlier answers to their criticisms. Therefore, I have decided to repost my own defences of the Hellenistic hypothesis here in a series of posts.

I must add that I could not help but find myself at times in disagreement with some of Russell’s lesser points. These differences arose from our different ways of approaching historical sources. I seem to recall, for example, that Russell did not date “all” of the biblical books in the Hellenistic era. He placed one or two of them in the Persian period. I disagree, as I did on some other issues with Russell. But I believe the core of my argument in defence of the Hellenistic thesis remains solid. At least until others can demonstrate its flaws in method, logic and evidence.

Why the Hellenistic era for ALL “Old Testament” books should be taken seriously

When we apply the fundamentals of historical methods as practised by historians in fields other than biblical studies we quickly see logical flaws at the heart of the conventional understanding that the sources for various biblical books (in particular the stories in Genesis and Exodus) go back as far as the times of David and Solomon.

Multiple sources and circularity

Several times I have engaged in EarlyWritings on the question of the Documentary Hypothesis and every time, it seems to me, the argument submitted to “prove” the validity of the DH has been a point by point demonstration of how multiple sources were combined to create a new single story: e.g. how two different narratives were combined to compose the story of the great flood in Genesis. Each time I have attempted to make it clear that I have no doubt that different sources were mixed to create the Genesis Flood account, but a pre-Hellenistic antiquity of the biblical flood story does not logically follow from the fact of such a mix.

Biblical scholars, it is no secret to anyone, not even to themselves on the whole, do have interests that go beyond pure historical research. Even Julius Wellhausen, to whom we tend to attribute the modern notion of the “Documentary Hypothesis”, has been criticized for allowing his Protestant (anti-legalistic) bias to subconsciously influence his model of the “Documentary Hypothesis”. (The criticism has been directed at the notion of “legalistic” texts being a latecomer addition to the original narratives found in the biblical canon.)

When hypotheses become facts

So much in biblical studies that pass for facts are actually hypotheses. But they are repeated so often it is hard to notice that they have no basis in the hard evidence. Look at this passage from Wellhausen:

With regard to the Jehovistic document, all are happily agreed that, substantially at all events, in language, horizon, and other features, it dates from the golden age of Hebrew literature, to which the finest parts of Judges, Samuel, and Kings, and the oldest extant prophetical writings also belong,the period of the kings and prophets which preceded the dissolution of the two Israelite kingdoms by the Assyrians. About the origin of Deuteronomy there is still less dispute; in all circles where appreciation of scientific results can be looked for at all, it is recognised that it was composed in the same age as that in which it was discovered, and that it was made the rule of Josiah’s reformation, which took place about a generation before the destruction of Jerusalem by the Chaldaeans.

That’s from Wellhausen, Julius. Prolegomena to the History of Ancient Israel. His assertion of relative dating is grounded entirely in scholarly consensus, not in the evidence itself.

The Documentary Hypothesis, it has been pointed out by at least one scholar in the biblical field, might well never had got off the ground had the Elephantine remains — indicating that Persian era Jews knew nothing of the Pentateuch — been discovered earlier and had more time to gain traction and wider and more focused attention than it had before the time of Wellhausen’s work.

None of this is to say that biblical scholars are unprofessionally “biased” or “unscholarly”. Of course they are scholarly and their biases are generally known and admitted and taken into account. But their work tends to be picked up by others and over time taken for granted as fact.

Independent evidence is critical

The fact remains that there is no independent evidence that the OT was composed prior to the Hellenistic era. That datum alone does not prove it was a Hellenistic product. But it does at least allow for the theoretical possibility that it was created in the Hellenistic era, and given that our earliest independent evidence for a knowledge of the Pentateuch is situated in the Hellenistic era, it is entirely reasonable to begin with that era when searching for the Pentateuch’s origins.

It also is a fact that scholarship has only cursorily (by comparison) considered assessing the evidence within the Pentateuch itself with Hellenistic literature and thought. Those are facts. Another fact is that Documentary Hypothesis is not without its inconsistencies and problems.

Those facts do not prove that the Pentateuch was created in the Hellenistic era. But they do at least make it possible to ask the question. It makes it all the more necessary for anyone proposing an earlier date to ground their reasons in supporting independent evidence of some kind.

The meaning of “Hellenistic”

The Hellenistic provenance of the Pentateuch does not deny any use of pre-Hellenistic literature or sayings or concepts. Hellenization even means a uniting of Greek and Asian cultures, not a replacement of one by the other. So one should expect in any Hellenistic era hypothesis for the creation of the Pentateuch clear allusions to non-Greek (i.e. local Canaanite and Syrian) sources. Merely pointing to evident instances of Ugaritic or Syrian influence in the OT does not, per se, contradict a Hellenistic origin for the OT.

The fateful year of 1992

My own understanding of the history of the scholarship in this area tells me that the floodgates to a more widespread acceptability towards questioning the “deep antiquity” (pre Persian era) origin of any of the OT books were opened by Philip R. Davies in 1992 with his publication of In Search of Ancient Israel. The irony was that Davies was only collating various criticisms and doubts about the conventional wisdom of “biblical Israel” and its “bible” that had been available to scholars for some decades. But by bringing these questions and doubts all together in one short publication (only about 150 pages of discussion) Davies’ work started something of an academic “kerfuffle”. Davies himself argued at length for a Persian era provenance of many of the OT books, but those who followed the evidence he set out could see that the way was also open for an even later period. Some scholars identified stronger links between the Pentateuch and Primary History (Genesis to 2 Kings) and Hellenistic literature than to anything earlier. One French scholar has even argued that the entire Primary History was composed by a priest in the Hasmonean era.

Davies certainly established the circularity of the arguments that much of the OT literature was composed in the times of King Josiah and the Babylonian captivity. He also brought together the archaeological evidence not just for the absence of a united kingdom of Israel but the archaeological evidence that indicates the very notion of “biblical Israel” is as fanciful as King Arthur and Camelot.

The basics of historical inquiry

I opened this post with a reference to the methods of historians in non-biblical fields. In short, those methods are nothing other than any journalistic or forensic or “common sense” method of trying to find out “what happened” — minus the theological provenance from which the quest is embarked upon. Start with what we know to be the most secure “facts” on the basis of collating independent evidence and working from there. Unfortunately, our cultural heritage has taught us too well that certain narratives about the past are “facts” (or at least based on facts) so that we find it very difficult to remove these from our minds when trying to see clearly the material evidence before our eyes.

Change is very often a generational thing. It happens as the new ideas are embraced by the new students who are less emotionally and intellectually committed to the old ideas.

by neilgodfrey » Sun Feb 18, 2024 6:58 pm
(images were not part of the original)

The above post met with some criticism and I will post that along with my response next time.

2025-07-26

“Josephus and Jesus, New Evidence” – Review 5A – ‘the placement of the Testimonium Flavianum’.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Despite the hopes I expressed in my previous post I simply cannot complete even one more response to Tom Schmidt’s Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ. Instead, I will place here my draft that addresses only one small part of Schmidt’s rationale for finding the Jesus account placed in the midst of various disturbances. Better to half-fulfil a promise than to come up with a complete blank. Please keep in mind that the following is a copy of my draft. Normally I would take time to tidy up the wording and structure.

Tom Schmidt writes (my bolded highlighting):

First, its placement. In the Antiquities, the TF [i.e. the Testimonium Flavianum, the Flavius Josephus’s testimony about Jesus] is situated amid five different stories of uproar, all of which tell of murder, intrigue, blasphemy, and other wrongdoing. Given the context, it is unlikely that a Christian scribe would have risked associating Jesus with such themes by inserting the TF amid a litany of evildoers and disturbances, as the author of the TF pointedly does. (Schmidt 2025, 128)

Sounds reasonable. But then I recall reading the following:

The Christian movement itself was doubtless a θόρυβος [“disturbance”], the greatest disturbance of all . . . [T]he Christian movement was so obviously a disturbance of the first magnitude, as it is represented in the New Testament . . . (Thackeray 2007, 140f)

With that perspective in mind, surely a Christian scribe who was pretending to be Josephus would consider it most appropriate to place the Jesus passage in the middle of disturbances that horrified or at least were noted by a Jewish author. Thackeray does not suggest a Christian did add the account there but by acknowledging its appropriateness from the perspective of a non-Christian Jew he does allow for one to think even a Christian impersonating Josephus would likewise consider its place among other disturbances in the time of Pilate quite suitable.

Even so, the account about Jesus and his followers is not depicted as a disturbance. Any notion of a disturbance must come from the reader’s knowledge of how “the Christian movement” was “represented in the New Testament”.

Further — it is just as reasonable to suggest that a Christian scribe would relish placing his Gospel-informed Jesus in a position to suggest his power to unsettle the Jewish rulers.

Note: one must know both the canonical gospels and Acts to see this episode as a “disturbance” and so justify its “placement” among somewhat comparable episodes.

Schmidt argues that because in Josephus we read that Jesus was crucified, it logically follows that Jesus must have been a subversive, a rebelitious, and the reader is meant to conclude that he created some kind of disturbance. But that is not what we read in Josephus’s text. The passage does not describe any kind of disturbance initiated by Jesus. Disturbance has to be read into the passage, not out of it.

On the contrary, the passage in Josephus leads any reader ignorant of the New Testament to wonder why Jesus was crucified given that it infers that Jesus’ followers felt renewed spiritual inspiration after the crucifixion, and that the crucifixion accelerated their movement rather than handicapped it.

Finally, one enduring aporia in New Testament scholarship concerns the question of why Jesus was crucified. Pilate, a figure who is historically cruel and unintimidated by mobs, in the gospels yields to mob pressure to crucify a man he knows to be innocent – even though that mob had days earlier venerated the same Jesus. Religious leaders, who in historical accounts are known for their popular sympathies, in the gospels hate Jesus because he does good. If we assume the gospels are trying to hide the “real reason” for the crucifixion to protect theological interests, then we would surely be right to expect an independent historical record, one written by a Jew/Judean whom the gospels represent as the enemies of Jesus, would explain for us exactly why Jesus was crucified.

But no. The Josephan account knows nothing more than the Gospels. The Josephan account is just as mysterious as the gospels. It leaves the reason for the crucifixion unexplained.

I’d like to think that I will post 5B later this year/early next year.

Postscript on the seditious Jesus hypothesis:

To veer off into another question – of course the crucifixion of Jesus is at its core a theological event, not an historical one. Its reason is theological. As such, it is constructed narratively around the Jewish Scriptures that point to a saving figure who must take on all the sins of his people, to suffer their worst humiliations and weaknesses, to be despised as a nobody, as an evildoer, even as a rebel. The motifs are theological, not historical. The rebel-bandit-robber motif is as consistent with the interests of the authors as are the miracles and resurrection. And this is where the current “seditious Jesus hypothesis” collapses at the starting post.

Schmidt, T. C. 2025. Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Thackeray, H. St John. 2007. Josephus: The Man and the Historian. With George Foot Moore and Samuel Sandmel. Whitefish, Mont.: Kessinger.

2025-07-22

Russell Gmirkin

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

By now many of you will have learned of Russell Gmirkin’s sudden passing. I am still trying to process the shock. I was privileged to have had frequent communications with him in the past few years and he was on my short list of people I had hoped to meet in person. His website: https://russellgmirkin.com/

His work dug more deeply into the thesis that the Hebrew Bible was a product of Hellenistic times. He was highly respected by other pioneering academics like Thomas L. Thompson and Niels Peter Lemche. I covered his some of his main published ideas here:

He had just completed a manuscript for a new work that many of us are looking forward to engaging with.

There is a tribute to Russell on youtube. I have not watched it yet. I am still trying to process my own grief before I do.

There is also a gofundme page to assist Russell’s wife, Carolyn Tracy.

This post is unfortunately a belated response, I know. I was away in far north Queensland when a notice sent to inform me never arrived. It took me some days for bizarre communications breakdowns to be rectified.

2025-07-07

“You may as well deny the existence of pretty much everyone in the ancient world”

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

I will continue writing posts in response to Thomas Schmidt’s Josephus and Jesus, New Evidence so this post is a quick interjection before I have the time to write more fully about another Jesus hypothesis that appears to be being widely discussed at the moment — the hypothesis that Jesus was an anti-Roman rebel, a seditionist, in particular, the following book:

Bermejo-Rubio, Fernando. 2023. They Suffered under Pontius Pilate: Jewish Anti-Roman Resistance and the Crosses at Golgotha. Fortress Academic.

(We met Fernando Bermejo-Rubio as recently as my last post, by the way, where I examined his citational support for Josephus writing a negative passage about Jesus.)

The reason I am jumping in early at this time is to flesh out (just a little) some responses I have made in discussions relating to other posts. It’s been a long time since I posted about historical methods, especially as they relate to Jesus, so consider this a brief reminder or recap.

Bermejo-Rubio repeats a common assumption:

As Justin Meggitt has rightly observed, “to deny his existence based on the absence of such evidence, even if that were the case, has problematic implications; you may as well deny the existence of pretty much everyone in the ancient world.”

I responded to Justin Meggitt’s claim back in 2020. It is available here:

The Great Method Gap between “Biblical Historians” and Historians in History Departments

Evidence for Historical Persons vs Evidence for Jesus

A few of my other posts addressing the same question of how we know about ancient persons and whether the evidence for Jesus is comparable to anyone else:

HISTORICAL METHOD and the Question of Christian Origins (a summary of sound historical method)

And a lot more are listed here:

Ancient Historiography and Historians — Vridar Posts

When Historical Persons are Overlaid with Myth

Other statements by Bermejo-Rubio that struck me as misguided:

After all, although some biographies of ancient historical characters such as Alexander the Great and the emperor Augustus contain quite a few mythical elements in their framework, it does not justify our disputing in principle the historicity of the characters themselves . . .

That point is answered in the above posts. When historical figures are overlaid by others — and even by themselves — with mythical trappings (e.g. Alexander as Dionysus, Hadrian as Hercules), we can see clearly where the real human is distinct from the mythical propaganda image.

Inconsistencies and Incongruities are a Common Element among Mythical Figures

Another:

Had Jesus been a construct created out of whole cloth, the accounts about him would presumably have been far more homogeneous. The fact that our sources are systematically inconsistent and are riddled with incongruities is better explained if we assume that a real character on the stage of history was modified in the later tradition.

Sarah Iles Johnston explains why the inconsistencies in mythical gods and heroes have made them so appealing and believable.

Quite the contrary. It is real historical figures that emerge with fair measures of consistency; it is the mythical characters who are riddled with contradictions and incongruities. In fact it is the inconsistencies that are part of the enticing mystery and allure make such figures so attractive and believable! See

And one page that sums it all up in a simple table:

The Bible — History or Story? — where I sum up the error at the base of so much biblical studies by distilling the main points of Philip Davies pivotal publication.

But for now — back to work on some other aspects of Thomas Schmidt’s argument for Josephus making a valuable contribution to our knowledge of Christian origins. . . .

(By the way — questions of historicity and authenticity do arise in classical studies, too. I look forward to posting a few instances and comparing how they are approached by ancient historians and scholars with a primary focus on biblical studies.)

2025-07-06

“Josephus and Jesus, New Evidence” – Review 4 – ‘he led astray many’?

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Continued from Review 3 . . .

And when it is pointed out that, after all, we are talking about texts written in Koine Greek (and so the language ability is pretty important), and that . . . requires a lot of study, all this if one wishes to make some kind of soundly-based judgement . . . (Hurtado 2012)

Serious historians of the early Christian movement—all of them—have spent many years preparing to be experts in their field. Just to read the ancient sources requires expertise in a range of ancient languages: Greek, Hebrew, Latin . . . not to mention the modern languages of scholarship (for example, German and French). And that is just for starters. Expertise requires years of patiently examining ancient texts . . . . (Ehrman 2013, 4f)

When a scholarly book is made open access in order to reach an audience as wide as possible one would expect many lay readers to feel out of their depth when reading claims about the meaning of the Greek words in Josephus’s passage about Jesus (the Testimonium Flavianum / TF).

As I mentioned earlier, I have since taken up formal studies in ancient Greek and have acquired enough awareness of the technicalities of ancient Greek and a knowledge of the reference tools used by scholars to see when baseless arguments are being fed to lay readers. In this post I take interested readers through a citation trail that Thomas Schmidt initiated in order to confirm his claim that Josephus was deliberately encouraging willing readers to interpret a passage about Jesus in a negative light. We will see by the end that the citation trail not only fails to support Schmidt’s case but even arguably points to its opposite – that the original Greek is meant to be understood in a positive sense. Most certainly we will see that there is no suggestion of the ambiguity for which Schmidt argues.

Schmidt’s argument re ἐπηγάγετο (epēgageto)

. . . and he [Jesus] brought over many of the Jews and many also of the Greeks . . . (TF)

Other translations for “brought over” (i.e. ἐπηγάγετο) read:

. . . “led astray / led away” (other possibilities listed by Schmidt)
. . . “won over” (Feldman)
. . . “drew over” (Whiston)
. . . “gained a following from” (Meier)
. . . “led astray” (Morton Smith)
. . . “attached to himself” (Zeitlin)
. . . “attracted” (Mason)
. . . “seduced” (Eisler)

In Schmidt’s view, Josephus wrote with careful ambiguity about Jesus attracting followers. Josephus, he explains, wrote the equivalent Greek words of Jesus “bringing over” many persons because the Greek for “bringing over” or “brought over” could be read either positively or negatively or neutrally:

. . . the evidence demonstrates that such phrasing could well have been interpreted neutrally, ambiguously, or negatively by one who was so inclined. (Schmidt 2025, 83)

In the end, Schmidt sums up by saying that Josephus meant to describe Jesus “somewhat neutrally”. I’m not sure what “somewhat neutrally” means. What would it mean to describe a referee of a game as “somewhat neutral” or a judge hearing a trial as “somewhat neutral”? Is it like being “somewhat pregnant”?

But here is his point that I want to discuss in this post:

Josephus then uses the ambiguous term ‘brought over’ (ἐπηγάγετο) to describe Jesus leading many Jews and Greeks. This word can be interpreted as connoting deception, exactly like what Jewish leaders accused Jesus of doing according to the Gospel accounts (Matthew 27:63; Luke 23:2; John 7:12, 47, 52). (Schmidt 2025, 208)

And that is important for Schmidt: for Schmidt, the words we read in Josephus have to allow for – and even subtly infer – a negative view of Christianity. So Schmidt continues,

Moreover, the Gospels describe how Jesus’ many followers caused great alarm among Jewish leaders (John 4:1-2) who worried that the ‘whole world’ was going to follow him (John 12:19) and that Jesus would cause a rebellion (Luke 23:1-5, 14). All this is once again corroborated by Josephus’ portrayal of Jesus leading ‘many from among the Jews and many from among the Greeks’ and then being crucified by the Roman governor at the behest of Jewish leaders. The reader of the TF is thus left with a fair impression that Jesus may have been accused of fomenting rebellion . . . (Schmidt 2025, 208 – my bolding)

[Josephus] further preserves the term ἐπηγάγετο [“brought over”] which can be understood as ‘he led astray’.19 (Schmidt 2025, 218)

Notice once again that Schmidt uses passages from the Gospels as evidence of historical words spoken and the historical feelings of Jewish leaders. He interprets Josephus through those gospel narratives. (There are many reasons this is a problematic way to understand Josephus, too many to repeat here though I have discussed them many times elsewhere as part of what consists of basic sound historical method.)

Schmidt cites other scholarly works and references and even other passages in Josephus to establish his claim that by “brought over” Josephus was subtly implying – and that the reader was meant to notice – that Jesus was “leading astray” many followers. Before I demonstrate that all his references and supports fail to make this case, I must explain for most of us the most obvious meaning of the Greek word translated “brought over” (or even possibly “misled” or “led astray”).

The meaning of ἐπηγάγετο

If I say “Mary led the lamb to her school” no-one is going to suspect, because I had spoken of a butcher leading a heifer to his abattoir on another occasion, that Mary was planning to eat her lamb for lunch.

The word translated “brought over” or “led astray” etc is epēgageto (ἐπηγάγετο). It is simply the word for “bring” or “lead” (agō = ἄγω) combined with the preposition for “over” (epi = ἐπί). The base word is thus ἐπάγω, meaning “I bring or lead over”. ἐπηγάγετο is one of the many forms of ἐπάγω. The forms vary according to tense, case, person, number, voice.

One would not expect the word to have any more negative innuendo than the English words for “bring” or “lead”. One can bring or lead others for good or bad reasons. Example:

The guide led/brought the hikers back to his camp.

The bandit led/brought his gang to his hideout.

The word for “led” or “lead” or “brought” does not in itself have a good or bad meaning. Only the context can decide if it is being used to describe a positive or negative action. It is no different with the Greek. If I tell a story of events that “led” many people over many years into tragic circumstances, it does not mean that my use of the word “led” in itself conveys something bad. The next time I use the word “led” could be to convey a completely different type of event, let’s say a very happy one, or simply a neutral one. What counts is the context. If I say “Mary led the lamb to her school” no-one is going to suspect, from those words alone or because I had spoken of a butcher leading a heifer to his abattoir on another occasion that Mary was planning to eat her lamb for lunch.

It is the immediate context that determines the meaning of many of the words we use, not some other context where we used the same words once before.

Josephus: “somewhat” neutral? ambiguous? negative?

Let’s now examine Schmidt’s supporting evidence for his claim that the Greek word for “brought over” can and does, at least for Josephus, suggest the meaning of “led astray” or “misled”.

. . . the potentially negative ‘he brought over’ or ‘he misled’ (ἐπηγάγετο) (Schmidt 2025, 47)

. . . a far more ambiguous or possibly negative valence than the one implied by how scholars have traditionally translated it . . . revolves around the meaning of the Greek word ἐπάγομαι, which can mean ‘to lead’ someone in a neutral sense,¹⁴⁶ or, according to LSJ and the Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek, it may have the negative connotations of ‘induce’ or otherwise mislead.¹⁴⁷

¹⁴⁶ For this neutral meaning, see Antiquities 1.263, 2.173.

¹⁴⁷ LSJ, ἐπάγω, II 6; Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek, ἐπάγω. So, Thucydides relates how the Argives ‘induced the Spartans to agree’ (ἐπηγάγοντο τοὺς Λακεδαιμονίους ξυγχωρῆσαι) to a treaty even though it seemed quite foolish; Thucydides, Peloponnesian War 5.41.2 line 8 (= TLG 0003.001). On this interpretation of ἐπάγομαι, see also Bermejo-Rubio, ‘Hypothetical Vorlage’, 354–5; Cernuda, ‘El testimonio flaviano’, 373–4. (Schmidt 2025, 81)

It won’t hurt to keep in mind Schmidt’s acknowledgement that the word can indeed be used neutrally. Here are the examples from Josephus that he cites:

He makes a friendship with him beforehand, bringing Philochus, one of the generals, along. (Antiquities 1.263 – translations are from Perseus Tufts unless otherwise noted)

[ = φιλίαν ἄνωθεν ποιεῖται πρὸς αὐτὸν ἕνα τῶν στρατηγῶν Φίλοχον ἐπαγόμενος. – that is a participial form. Schmidt says this is a “neutral” use of the word but others might even see it as a “positive” use, given its context of friendship.]

Sent alone to Mesopotamia, you gained a good marriage, and returned bringing a multitude of children and wealth. (Antiquities 2.173)

[ = τὴν Μεσοποταμίαν μόνος σταλεὶς γάμων τε ἀγαθῶν ἔτυχες καὶ παίδων ἐπαγόμενος πλῆθος καὶ χρημάτων ἐνόστησας. – again, I am not sure why Schmidt chose to describe this form of the word as connoting a neutral meaning; it looks very positive to me.]

So after acknowledging that the word does not have any intrinsic negative flavour Schmidt must demonstrate that for Josephus and the TF this common rule did not apply.

To establish his point, Schmidt introduces major reference works buttressed by scholarly articles.

LSJ is the abbreviation for the Liddell-Scott-Jones Greek-English Lexicon. You can see for yourself all of the ways the root word for has been used in ancient Greek literature at LSJ: ἐπάγω. Schmidt directs readers to II 6. The II section, we discover from the abbreviation beside it, Med., lists the way the middle voice form of the word has been used and translated. The middle voice is the form or a verb that indicates it is being applied to or on behalf of oneself: e.g. bringing over for or on behalf of oneself or one’s project (hence my above examples with reference to “his camp”, “his hideout”, “her school” etc.).

II 6 is one of seven examples of how the LSJ observes how our word is used and translated across the literature. Here are those seven:

1 . . . bring to oneself, procure or provide for oneself, . . . devise, invent a means of shunning death . . . .

2 . . . of persons, bring into one’s country, bring in or introduce as allies . . .

3 . . . call them in as witnesses . . . introduce by way of quotation . . . adduce testimonies . . . .

4 . . . bring upon oneself . . . .

5 . . . bring with one . . . .

6 . . . bring over to oneself, win over . . . induce them to concede, Thucydides 5.41. . . . .

7 . . . put in place . . . .

Out of those seven different contextual middle voice meanings of ἐπάγω that are found throughout the literature, Schmidt zeroes in on that one instance from Thucydides 5.41 (see the footnote 147 above). “Induce” sounds sly, cunning. (Leave aside for a moment the fact that Aristotle used the word in the sense of “induce” when describing inductive argument or inductive reasoning.) And Schmidt calls attention to Thucydides describing how a group were “induced” to accept an agreement that was not ultimately in their interests. To reinforce his point he cites articles by Bermejo-Rubio and Cernuda.

1. Bermejo-Rubio . . .

[T]he verb έπάγομαι [another form of ἐπάγω] already has a negative tinge (“bring something bad upon someone’) . . . , and in this context it may carry the meaning of “lead astray” or “seduce.”¹³³ Interestingly, Josephus himself uses the verb έπάγομαι in this negative sense elsewhere (e.g., Ant. 1.207, 6.196,11.199, 17.327). All this is unfortunately overlooked or downplayed by the proponents of a ‘neutral’ text.¹³⁴

¹³³ See. e.g.. Bienert, Jesusbericht. 225; Potscher. “losephus Flavius,’ 33: and Stanton, “Jesus of Nazareth.” 170. The verb is used in 2 Peter 2:1 in connection with false prophets ‘bringing’ destruction on themselves.

¹³⁴ Meier. “Jesus in Josephus.” 88. n.33 refers to the possible negative meaning of έχηγάγετο, but rules it out too hastily, not giving supporting references or further reasons for such rejection. What he translates as “And he won over many Jews and many of the Greeks’ is translated by others (e.g., Bammel, Morton Smith. Stanton) as “and he led astray.” (Bermejo-Rubio 2014, 354f)

Now this is finally beginning to look bad for the Jesus we read about in Josephus. Could it really be that the word should be meant to suggest that Jesus was “seducing” or “leading astray” his audience? We saw above that Josephus could use our word in a positive or neutral sense. Here, we are told, he is using it in a negative sense. So we will begin by looking at those other uses in Antiquities that are listed by Bermejo-Rubio. These are all said to convey a “negative sense” of the word – translated variously as “bringing”, “drew”, won over”. I add my comments in italics.

Abraham moved to Gerar of Palestine, bringing Sarah in the guise of a sister, pretending as before because of… (Antiquities 1.207)

[Ἅβραμος δὲ μετῴκησεν εἰς Γέραρα τῆς Παλαιστίνης ἐν ἀδελφῆς ἐπαγόμενος σχήματι τὴν Σάρραν, ὅμοια τοῖς πρὶν ὑποκρινάμενος διὰ τὸν…]

And David, always bringing God with him wherever he arrived… (Antiquities 6.196 – I don’t know why this instance is interpreted in a negative sense)

[Δαυίδης δὲ πανταχοῦ τὸν θεὸν ἐπαγόμενος ὅποι ποτ᾽ ἀφίκοιτο]

“And of all the women, Esther happened to excel—for that was her name—in beauty, and the charm of her face drew the gaze of onlookers even more strongly.” (Antiquities 11.199 – again I don’t know why this is listed as a negative meaning)

[πασῶν δὲ τὴν Ἐσθῆρα συνέβαινεν, τοῦτο γὰρ ἦν αὐτῇ τοὔνομα, τῷ κάλλει διαφέρειν καὶ τὴν χάριν τοῦ προσώπου τὰς ὄψεις τῶν θεωμένων μᾶλλον ἐπάγεσθαι.]

“…he had ceased from deceiving, but having come to Crete, he won over to the faith as many of the Jews as he came into contact with, and having become wealthy through their donations…” (Antiquities 17.327 – here a false prophet, Alexander, is winning over a following)

[… ἀπήλλακτο ἀπατᾶν, ἀλλὰ Κρήτῃ προσενεχθεὶς Ἰουδαίων ὁπόσοις εἰς ὁμιλίαν ἀφίκετο ἐπηγάγετο εἰς πίστιν, καὶ χρημάτων εὐπορηθεὶς δόσει τῇ ἐκείνων ἐπὶ]

For anyone thinking that except for 17.327 these are not strong examples of “bringing over” having a negative meaning, Bermejo-Rubio adds some scholarly references:

Bienert, Jesusbericht. 225;
Pötscher, “losephus Flavius,’ 33;
Stanton, “Jesus of Nazareth” 170.

Let’s look at those.

Bienert:

Original text: Denn diese Formulierung ἐπηγάγετο εἰς πίστιν Ἰουδαίους, ὁπόσοις εἰς ὁμιλίαν ἀφίκετο, legt den Gedanken nahe, daß Jesus in seinem Interesse, für seine Parteibildung, Anhänger geworben habe, während ein Christ doch die Vorstellung hat, daß Jesus die Menschen zu ihrem eigenen Heil für den Glauben geworben habe. Bei ἐπαγόμενος schwingt der Gedanke mit, das Zu-sich-Führen geschehe in irgendeinem Sinne zum persönlichen Vorteil des Subjekts.

For the formulation [“And he won over/brought over many of the Jews, and also many of the Greeks” suggests the idea that Jesus, in his own interest, for the formation of a faction, recruited followers — whereas a Christian would instead maintain that Jesus won people for their own salvation and for faith. With ἐπηγάγετο there is an implicit idea that this bringing-over served in some sense the personal advantage of the subject. (Bienert 1936, 225 – translation)

So Bienert says that a Christian would have written that Jesus won them over to the faith. But Bienert runs into a problem here because Josephus did indeed say, explicitly, that a false prophet, Alexander, won over the following “into the faith” (εἰς πίστιν). So how could a Christian author have written that Jesus was winning over followers to the faith in a good sense? Bienert says that the word for “won over” still had a bad implication simply because it is in the middle voice and therefore it meant that Alexander – and also Jesus – were motivated by devious self-interest. This is butchery of the Greek. Middle voice does not imply a negative motivation. It implies some person does something directly or indirectly for or on behalf of the same person, regardless of motive – such as when Jesus called disciples to follow him. Would a Christian really think such an action as Jesus calling people to follow him, saying “Follow me”, was a deviously self-serving action on the part of Jesus?

Pötscher:

For Pötscher, the word ἐπηγάγετο should be linked with the following sentence, “He was the Christ”, not with the earlier words about his followers. In this case, the word should be translated as “put forward” the idea that He was the Christ. Compare the third meaning in the LSJ II 6 reference above.

Original: έπηγάγετο paßt sogar zu dem unmittelbar Folgenden besser. . . . Ich schlage vor: … έπηγάγετο, ότι ό Χρίστος ούτος ειη [=”He brought him forward, saying that this was the Christ.”]. Die Ände rung ist sehr leicht; εΐη mußte der Christ in ην verbessern, dann konnte das kurze Wort δτι leicht ausfallen.

“ἐπηγάγετο actually fits better with what immediately follows. . . . I propose [the original text read as . . . “He brought him forward, saying that this was the Christ.”]: … ἐπηγάγετο, ὅτι ὁ Χριστὸς οὗτος εἴη. The change is very slight; the Christian copyist had to correct εἴη to ἦν, and then the short word ὅτι could easily drop out. . . . (Pötscher 1975, 33f – translation)

If the primary source material does not support the hypothesis it appears to be accepted practice to hypothesize a change to the source to make it fit. But even so, this particular argument has nothing to do with the notion that the word ἐπηγάγετο conveys a negative meaning. If there is anything negative here it lies in the context, presumably of making a false claim. One can hardly say that the word meaning “put forward” by itself is negative or positive.

Stanton:

Let us start with the final verb, ἐπηγάγετο, translated by Feldman as “he won over,” and by Meier as “he gained a following among.” . . . Bauer’s lexicon gives “bring on” as the meaning of ἐπάγω, and notes that in figurative usage it usually has the sense “bring something bad upon someone.”¹⁹ Hence ἐπηγάγετο in the Testimonium can be understood as “brought trouble to,'” or even “seduce, lead astray.”²⁰

¹⁹ BAGD 281. Josephus Life 18 is a good example of the verb in this [negative] sense. “Win over” is attested in Thucydides and Polybius (see LSJ) and Chrysostom (see G. W. H. Lampe, Patristic Greek Lexicon), but the verb is rarely used with this positive sense.

²⁰ Bammel notes that significatio seditionis is possible for ἐπάγομαι (“Testimonium Flavianum,” Judaica, 179-81). Meier acknowledges that this is “a possible, though not necessary, meaning of the verb,” but does not give supporting references or reasons for rejecting this translation (“Jesus in Josephus,” 88 n. 33). M. Smith, Jesus the Magician (London: Victor Gollancz, 1978) 178, translates “lead astray” and claims that this sense is implied by the Greek text. (Stanton 1994, 170)

Look first at Bauer’s Lexicon. Yes, this lexicon does say that the word in the middle voice can have the figurative use meaning of “bring something [mostly bad] upon someone”. The only difficulty here, however, is that in Josephus’s passage about Jesus he is not using the word figuratively!

Bauer gives examples of the figurative use:

Hesiod, Works and Days 240

But upon them from heaven the son of Cronos brought a great bane —
famine and plague together — and the people perished.

τοῖσιν δ᾽ οὐρανόθεν μέγ᾽ ἐπήγαγε πῆμα Κρονίων
λιμὸν ὁμοῦ καὶ λοιμόν: ἀποφθινύθουσι δὲ λαοί.

Here is the complete Bauer reference where I highlight some other sources with the figurative use:

ἐπάγω 1 aor. ptc. έπάξας (Bl-D. §75 w. app.; Mit -H. 226: Rob. 348); 2 aor. ἐπἠγαγον (Hom. +; inscr., Philo.9 pap., LXX, Philo, Joseph., Test. 12 Patr.) bring on; fig. bring someth. upon someone, mostly someth, bad τινἰ τι (Hes., Op. 240 πῆμά τινi έ. al.; Dit., Or. 669, 43 πολλοῖς ἐ. κινδύνους; PRyl. 144, 21 [38 AD] . . . μοι ἐ.αἰτίας; Bar 4:9 10,14, 29; Da 3: 28, 31; Philo, Mos. 1, 96; Jos. Vi. 18; Sib. Or. 7, 154) κατακλυσμόν κόσμῳ έπάξας 2 Pt 2:5 (cf. Gen 6: 17; 3 Macc 2: 4 of the deluge ἐπάγαγὼν αὐτοῖς ἀμέτρητου ὗδωρ). λύπην τῷ πνεύματι bring grief upon the spirit Hm 3: 4. ἑαυτοῖς ταχινὴν ἀπώλειαν bring swift destruction upon themselves Pt 2: 1 (cf. ἑαυτοῖς δουλείαν Demosth. 19, 259). Also ἐπί τινά τι (Ex 11:1; 33: 5; Jer 6:19; Ezk 28:7 and oft.) ἐφ’ ἡμάᾶς τὸ αἶμα τ. ἀνθρώπου τούτου bring this man’s blood upon us Ac 5:28 (cf. Judg 9: 24 B ἐπαγαγεῖν τὰ αἵματα αὐτῶν, τοῦ θεῖναι ἐπὶ Ἀβιμελεχ, ὃs ἀπέκειvev αὐτούς), έ. τισὶ διωyμὸv κατά τινος stir up, within a group, a persecution against someone Ac 14: 2 D. M-M. (Bauer and Arndt 2021, 281 — I don’t think there is any instrinsic negative shift in meaning to ἐπάγω because of the figurative use: rather, I suspect that it is more common to speak of calamaties being brought upon us than it is good things.)

The Bauer lexicon and Stanton point to another figurative use of the word in Josephus’s Life, section 18, and again it is definitely with a negative sense:

[and desired them] not rashly, and after the most foolish manner, to bring on the dangers of the most terrible mischiefs upon their country, upon their families, and upon themselves.

καὶ μὴ προπετῶς καὶ παντάπασιν ἀνοήτως πατρίσι καὶ γενεαῖς καὶ σφίσιν αὐτοῖς τὸν περὶ τῶν ἐσχάτων κακῶν κίνδυνον ἐπάγειν.

But there is nothing figurative about Josephus’s use of the word relating to Jesus. Jesus is not bringing down plagues or war or terror or even riches and rewards. He is literally, not figuratively, bringing people to himself by means of his teaching.

Stanton offers other examples, Polybius and Thucydides, where the word is used and notes it is there it is used with a positive sense. We can note that the difference is with Polybius and Thucydides we meet a literary and not a figurative use. Stanton can only comment that “the verb is rarely used with this positive sense”. Presumably he is thinking of the many figurative usages.

Notice how positive in meaning Polybius’s use really is:

Polybius 7:14.4, cited in the LSJ (Liddell Scott Jones Greek-English Lexicon) reference:

. . . having employed Aratus as guide in general matters, he neither wronged nor even caused distress to any of those on the island, but held all the Cretans under his control, and brought all the Greeks over to goodwill toward himself through the dignity of his character.

. . . καὶ γὰρ ἐπ᾽ ἐκείνων Ἀράτῳ μὲν καθηγεμόνι χρησάμενος περὶ τῶν ὅλων, οὐχ οἷον ἀδικήσας, ἀλλ᾽ οὐδὲ λυπήσας οὐδένα τῶν κατὰ τὴν νῆσον, ἅπαντας μὲν εἶχε τοὺς Κρηταιεῖς ὑποχειρίους, ἅπαντας δὲ τοὺς Ἕλληνας εἰς τὴν πρὸς αὑτὸν εὔνοιαν ἐπήγετο διὰ τὴν σεμνότητα τῆς προαιρέσεως.

So we have a non-figurative use of the word and one can scarcely imagine a more positive meaning: “brought all the Greeks over to goodwill toward himself through the dignity of his character”.

The same reference, LSJ, gives this example of Thucydides’ use, also singled out by Stanton that he concedes also carries positive innuendo:

Thucydides 5:45

Upon the envoys speaking in the senate upon these points, and stating that they had come with full powers to settle all others at issue between them, Alcibiades became afraid that if they were to repeat these statements to the popular assembly, they might gain the multitude, and the Argive alliance might be rejected,

καὶ λέγοντες ἐν τῇ βουλῇ περί τε τούτων καὶ ὡς αὐτοκράτορες ἥκουσι περὶ πάντων ξυμβῆναι τῶν διαφόρων, τὸν Ἀλκιβιάδην ἐφόβουν μὴ καί, ἢν ἐς τὸν δῆμον ταῦτα λέγωσιν, ἐπαγάγωνται τὸ πλῆθος καὶ ἀπωσθῇ ἡ Ἀργείων ξυμμαχία.

This is a good time to look at another passage in Thucydides, one that Schmidt identifies as conveying a negative sense of “inducing” (with a tinge of deceit) the Spartans to agree to a foolish treaty.

Thucydides 5.41.2

Arrived in Sparta, the Argive representatives discussed with the Spartans the conditions for a treaty. . . . The Spartans . . . said that, if Argos would agree, they were prepared to accept the same terms as in the previous treaty. Nevertheless the Argive representatives managed in the end to get the Spartans to agree to the following arrangement . . . (Rex Warner’s translation)

καὶ οἱ πρέσβεις ἀφικόμενοι αὐτῶν λόγους ἐποιοῦντο πρὸς τοὺς Λακεδαιμονίους ἐφ᾽ ᾧ ἂν σφίσιν αἱ σπονδαὶ γίγνοιντο. καὶ . . . ἔπειτα δ᾽ οὐκ ἐώντων Λακεδαιμονίων μεμνῆσθαι περὶ αὐτῆς, ἀλλ᾽, εἰ βούλονται σπένδεσθαι ὥσπερ πρότερον, ἑτοῖμοι εἶναι, οἱ Ἀργεῖοι πρέσβεις τάδε ὅμως ἐπηγάγοντο τοὺς Λακεδαιμονίους ξυγχωρῆσαι . . .

Whatever one thinks of the wisdom of making the treaty, the use of the Greek word for “bringing over/getting to agree/induced/winning over” is describing an event of mutual negotiations, of diplomatic statecraft. There is no inherent suggestion that the word implies any deceit.

Finally, Stanton directs us to Chrysostom. Following Lampe’s A Patristic Greek Lexicon we find the passage is in the 28th Homily to Hebrews:

Chrysostom Homily to Hebrews 28, 263B

Tell me: who attracts more attention in the marketplaces—the one who brings along many, or the one who brings along few?
But of the one who brings along few, is she not the one who appears more modest and less conspicuous?

Εἰπέ μοι· τίς ἐπιστρέφει τοὺς ἐπ’ ἀγορὰς, ἡ πολλοὺς ἐπαγομένη, ἢ ἡ ὀλίγους;
ταύτης δὲ τῆς ὀλίγους ἐπαγομένης, οὐχὶ ἡ μᾶλλον ἀπρόοπτος φαινομένη;

As Stanton notes, there is no negative meaning instrinsic to the word in question here.

Thus far we have followed Schmidt’s references to the LSJ, the Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek, a passage in Thucydides and his appeal to an article by Bermejo-Rubio. We conclude with a look at the article by Cernuda that he also appeals to.

2. Cernuda . . .

Original: También ἔπάγομαι se podría haber empleado en mal sentido⁸⁰. Así se ha sostenido también que era el caso⁸¹. . .

ἐπάγομαι itself could also be used in a negative sense⁸⁰. It has thus also been argued that such is the case here⁸¹ . . . (Cernuda 1997, 373f – translation)

I learned long ago to always check the footnotes. Devils often lurk in such details. And we find them once again here. These devils are actually denying Schmidt his interpretation of “brought over”. Continuing with the translation, and with my own bolded highlighting added:

Original: ⁸⁰ Cf. infra. Bammel (“Zum TF”, nota 25) atribuye a K. Linck ejemplos de ἔπάγομαι con significación negativa; pero los cuatro casos que éste presenta de Josefo son absolutamente inofensivos, y ésa era su intención, pues lo que hizo Linck, en contra de lo que supone Bammel, es impugnar la pretensión de los que supponere student significationem seditionis. […] Sed hic sensus eius verbi nulla re probatur, nedum postuletur (De antiquissimis veterum quae ad Jesum Nazarenum spectant testimoniis [Giessen 1913] 24).
⁸¹ Es la postura que adoptó Reinach, perdiendo la debida imparcialidad semántica: “le verbe ἐπηγάγετο ‘il séduisit’, qui ne s’emploie qu’en mauvaise part et raille l’accusation de séduction portée contre Jésus […]; ἐπηγάγετο = pellicere […] un des vestiges les plus caractéristiques du ton hostile de la rédaction primitive” (“Josè”, 7 y 11). La reacción de Pelletier no pudo ser más justa: “En réalité, la nuance péjorative n’est habituelle que pour le verbe pellicere, employé ici par la traduction latine anonyme, et non pour le verbe grec que figure dans Josèphe” (“Témoignage”, 190).

⁸⁰ Cf. infra. Bammel (“Zum TF,” note 25) attributes to K. Linck examples of ἐπάγομαι with negative meaning. But the four examples Linck gives from Josephus are completely irrelevant, and that was his intention: for what Linck did—contrary to what Bammel supposes—was to refute the claim of those who studiously assume a seditious meaning for the verb: “But this meaning of the verb is not supported by any evidence, nor is it required” (De antiquissimis veterum quae ad Jesum Nazarenum spectant testimoniis, Giessen 1924, p. 13).

⁸¹ This is the position adopted by Reinach, who lost proper semantic neutrality: “The verb ἐπηγάγετο, ‘he seduced,’ which is only ever used pejoratively, mocks the accusation of seduction leveled against Jesus […]. ἐπηγάγετο = pellicere [to seduce] is one of the most characteristic remnants of the hostile tone of the primitive redaction” (“Josè”, pp. 7 and 11). Pelletier’s response could not have been more justified: “In reality, the pejorative nuance is habitual only for the Latin verb pellicere, used here by the anonymous Latin translator, and not for the Greek verb found in Josephus” (“Témoignage,” p. 190).

Cernuda’s article thus actually contradicts Schmidt’s claim that Josephus had a negative intent in mind when he used the word of Jesus. It appears Schmidt failed to notice Cernuda’s devilish footnotes.

Bibliography

Bauer, Walter, William Arndt, Felix Wilbur Gingrich, and Frederick W. Danker. 1979. A Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament and Other Early Christian Literature 2nd Ed. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
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.
Bienert, Walther. 1936. Der älteste nichtchristliche Jesusbericht, Josephus über Jesus : unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des altrussischen “Josephus.” Halle : Akademischer Verlag.
Cernuda, Antonio Vicent. 1997. “El Testimonio Flaviano, Alarde De Solapada Ironía.” Estudios Bíblicos 55 (3, 4): 355–85, 479–508.
Chrysostomi, Joannnis. 1862. In Dive Pauli Epistolam ad Hebraeos Homiliae. Oxford: Parker. http://archive.org/details/chrysostom_pauline_homilies_field_vol_7.
Ehrman, Bart D. 2013. Did Jesus Exist?: The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth. New York: HarperOne.
Hurtado. 2012. “On Competence, Scholarly Authority, and Open Discussion (and ” the Data “).” Larry Hurtado’s Blog (blog). August 2, 2012. https://larryhurtado.wordpress.com/2012/08/02/on-competence-scholarly-authority-and-open-discussion/.
Lampe, G.W.H. ed. 1961. A Patristic Greek Lexicon. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Liddell, Henry George, and Robert Scott. 1996. A Greek–English Lexicon. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Montanari, Franco. 2015. The Brill Dictionary of Ancient Greek. Leiden: Brill.
Schmidt, T. C. 2025. Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Continues with Part 5 (pending)

2025-06-26

Speaking of Josephus . . . .

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Chapter 4 (“Problems with Josephus”) of Michael J. Alter’s book contains a comprehensive discussion (50 pages) of the arguments relating to the TF’s authenticity. He sets out arguments in helpful tabular format, discusses the contributions of John Meir, Robert A. Van Voorst, Gary Goldberg, Ken Olson, Paul Hopper and others (Allen, Carrier, Doherty, Feldman, Leidner, Licona, Paget, Price, Shulman, Viklund, Whealey…) in addition to his own analysis.

Sixteen rebuttal arguments against authenticity of the TF are presented. But the question of authenticity is shown to be only one of the “problems with Josephus” regarding the historical Jesus.

That’s chapter 4 — here is the TOC for the rest of Volume 1:

1 Habermas and Licona’s First Minimal Fact: Jesus Died by Crucifixion—An Overview
2 Jesus Was Not Brain-Dead While On the Cross
3 Problems with the Gospels and Acts
4 Problems with Josephus
5 Problems with Mara bar Serapion
6 Problems with Tacitus
7 Additional Problems with the Gospels
8 Problems with the Gospel of John and Jesus’ Crucifixion 1
9 The Shroud of Turin
10 Medical Issues Continued
11 Islamic Theology and Jesus’ CrucifixionDid Jesus Die on the Cross?
12 Is Joseph of Arimathea Historical?
13 Was the Tomb Really Accessible?
14 Could the Disciples Preach an Empty Tomb in Jerusalem?
15 Why a Lack of Controversy Over the Tomb by the Public?
16 Why a Lack of Interest in the Tomb by Roman Leadership?
17 Why a Lack of Interest in the Tomb by the Jewish Authorities?
18 Was There Controversy About the Empty Tomb Among Jesus’ Followers?
19 What Were the Consequences of an Empty Tomb?
20 Three Alternative Possibilities
21 Interactions with Christian Apologists

Bruce Chilton writes the Foreword: This highly concentrated volume is only the first fruit of a series dedicated to “The Resurrection and Its Apologetics.” The care of this initial foray promises future volumes that are relentless in their argumentation, sharp in their polemics, and judicious in their selection of the evidence and the arguments presented.

Alter, Michael J. 2024. The Resurrection and Its Apologetics: Jesus’ Death and Burial, Volume One. Resource Publications.

2025-06-25

“Josephus and Jesus, New Evidence” – Review 3 – “received with pleasure”

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Continuing from Review 2 . . .

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.

Bibliography

Olson, Ken. 2013. “A Eusebian Reading of the Testimonium Flavianum.” In Eusebius of Caesarea: Tradition and Innovations, edited by Aaron Johnson and Jeremy Schott, 97–114. Washington, D.C: Center for Hellenic Studies. https://www.academia.edu/4062154/Olson_A_Eusebian_Reading_of_the_Testimonium_Flavianum_2013

Schmidt, T. C. 2025. Josephus and Jesus: New Evidence for the One Called Christ. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Continues with Part 4 . . .

“Josephus and Jesus, New Evidence” – Review 4 – ‘he led astray many’?

2025-06-23

“Josephus and Jesus, New Evidence” – Review 2 – ‘a teacher of . . . truisms’

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

Continuing from Review 1 . . .

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)

Some text books introduce the word with quotations from the fourth century BC Greek dramatist, Menander:

It is the sign of a free man that he speaks the truth.

ἐλευθέρου γάρ ἐστι τἀληθῆ λέγειν. (Luschnig and Mitchell 2007, 131)

‘Tis always best to tell the truth. At every crisis I recommend this as a chief contribution to security in life.

ἀεὶ κράτιστόν ἐστι τἀληθῆ λέγειν. ἐν παντὶ καιρῷ τοῦτ᾿ ἐγὼ παρεγγυῶ· εἰς ἀσφάλειαν τῷ βίῳ πλεῖστον μέρος. (Menander 1921, 454f)

It’s the truth I’m telling you.

τἀληθῆ λέγω (Menander 1990, 291)

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

For the Greek click on this link.

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).

Jewish Antiquities

The Greek text is at this link.

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.

Continues with Part 3 . . .

“Josephus and Jesus, New Evidence” – Review 3 – “received with pleasure”

2025-06-21

“Josephus and Jesus, New Evidence” by Schmidt – Review 1 – ‘if indeed one ought to call him a man’

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

by Neil Godfrey

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.

Continues with Part 2 . . .

“Josephus and Jesus, New Evidence” – Review 2 – ‘a teacher of . . . truisms’

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https://earlywritings.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=145080#p145080
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Raphael Lataster - August 2019

Scotlyn on Defending Russell Gmirkin’s Hellenistic Dating of the Old Testament – Part 5: “Questions leading to more questions at least gives lots of “food” for more thinking and reflecting. 🙂 Of course it…” Aug 3, 09:41
Neil Godfrey on Defending Russell Gmirkin’s Hellenistic Dating of the Old Testament – Part 6: “Genesis to 2 Kings — the books covering the history of Israel from Creation and Abraham through to the fall…” Aug 3, 04:00
Andrew Dabrowski on Defending Russell Gmirkin’s Hellenistic Dating of the Old Testament – Part 6: “What do you mean by “the Primary History”?” Aug 3, 02:06
Neil Godfrey on Defending Russell Gmirkin’s Hellenistic Dating of the Old Testament – Part 5: “Hi Scotlyn, You raise some questions that I am still in the process of exploring myself, so I do not…” Aug 2, 21:35
Scotlyn on Defending Russell Gmirkin’s Hellenistic Dating of the Old Testament – Part 5: “I have been closely following your posts on a Hellenistic dating for the Old Testament writings. For which, many thanks!…” Aug 2, 17:32
Neil Godfrey on How a Biblical Tale Could have Emerged from a Greek Myth: “Thank you. Fixed now.” Aug 1, 21:37
Gabriel Rosa on How a Biblical Tale Could have Emerged from a Greek Myth: “There’s a typo in one of your citations: […] From the _cyan_ is suspended a hunting bag (made from the…” Aug 1, 10:20
Neil Godfrey on Defending Russell Gmirkin’s Hellenistic Dating of the Old Testament – Part 2: “I think you have in mind the temple at Leontopolis in Egypt. That was built in the time of the…” Jul 31, 22:22
James Faubel on Defending Russell Gmirkin’s Hellenistic Dating of the Old Testament – Part 2: “One of the Elephantine Letters I recall reading mentioned a “prophecy of Isaiah” which said that a Temple to YaWay…” Jul 31, 17:40

Why the Hellenistic era …. Part 2a

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Why the Hellenistic era …. Part 2

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Demonstrating the Circularity at the Heart of the Documentary Hypothesis

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My response:

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Why the Hellenistic era for ALL “Old Testament” books should be taken seriously

Multiple sources and circularity

When hypotheses become facts

Independent evidence is critical

The meaning of “Hellenistic”

The fateful year of 1992

The basics of historical inquiry

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Evidence for Historical Persons vs Evidence for Jesus

When Historical Persons are Overlaid with Myth

Inconsistencies and Incongruities are a Common Element among Mythical Figures

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Schmidt’s argument re ἐπηγάγετο (epēgageto)

The meaning of ἐπηγάγετο

Josephus: “somewhat” neutral? ambiguous? negative?

1. Bermejo-Rubio . . .

2. Cernuda . . .

Bibliography

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Bibliography

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talēthē — τἀληθῆ — true things or truisms?

Dio Chrysostom, ca 40 – 115 CE

Epictetus, ca 50 – 135 CE.

Plutarch, ca 40 – 120 CE

Flavius Josephus, ca 37 – 100 CE

Schmidt’s misleading interpretation

Bibliography:

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A Sarcastic Josephus – Version 1

Gospel Foundations

A Sarcastic Josephus – Version 2

Imagining Scenarios

An Uncertain Josephus

Postscript – added about 2 hours after posting the above

Bibliography

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