McCABE CON'T...
"Jewish And Pagan Witnesses
On the very day on which I begin to write this chapter, the leading Sunday newspaper of Britain, the Observer, has a prominent article on "Jesus Christ in History." The pretext of it -- a claim that new evidence has been found -- I will discuss presently; but a part of the article must have surprised many people.
The writer is an orthodox and respected English theologian, Dr. Burch. He is going to publish a book about this supposed new evidence for the historicity of Jesus. Meantime, as his publishers naturally will not allow him to give away the great secret, he writes articles in connection with it.
In this article he deals with "the scantiness of references to Christ in the histories which have come down to us." He quotes "the ablest Jewish book on the whole subject," Klausner's recent "Jesus of Nazareth", and he shows that, in the way of non-biblical witnesses to Christ, we have only "twenty-four lines" from Jewish and pagan writers, and four of those are spurious. Of the twenty genuine lines twelve (which are almost universally regarded as spurious) are in the Jewish historian Josephus. In the immense Latin literature of the century after the death of Jesus there are only eight lines; and each of these is disputed.
Certainly a disturbing silence from the Christian point of view. We might argue that, since the Jews were very hostile to the Christians, their great writers, Philo and Josephus, would be not unnaturally reluctant to speak about them. We might suggest that the teaching and crucifixion of Jesus, more than a thousand miles away from Rome, in a very despised province, would not be likely to come even to the notice of a Roman writer. Yet how strange, how ironic, that God should have lived on earth, for the salvation of men during thirty years, and consummated a great sacrifice which dwarfs every other event in human history, and the stream of literature can flow on for a hundred years without more than half a dozen disputed lines on these transcendent miracles!
We are trying to take a common sense view of religious problems, using whatever aid we can get from modern science and modern history. Now from that point of view there does not seem to be much importance in this discussion of the non-Christian references to Christ. We have to deal with them because the theme of this chapter is the historicity of Christ, and we have to ask whether, since there are no Christian witnesses except the late and anonymous Gospels and the Epistles of Paul, there are any Jewish or pagan witnesses. But for the reasons I have just given I should not be greatly astonished if there were none at all. What was Jesus, or the Jesus cult, to the Greeks and Romans of the first century? One Asiatic superstition amongst many. They would hardly hear of it. It was only when Christianity became an organized religion, giving trouble to the imperial authorities, that they could be expected to notice it.
The argument is less strong as regards the Jewish writers. The more learned of these, Philo, who was born about the same time as Jesus, could scarcely be expected to mention Jesus and his followers. He was an Alexandrian Jew, and he wrote mainly on philosophy. An aristocrat of great wealth and culture, he would, even if he heard during his visit to Jerusalem of the new sect, not have any reason to speak of it in his works. His silence can mean no more than that Christianity was not of much importance in the world of his time.
It is very different with the historian Flavius Josephus. He was a Palestinian Jew, born at Jerusalem in 37 A.D., a man of high connections and great culture. He was intensely interested in religious questions, and he gives in one of his works so detailed an account of the Essenian monks, with whom I shall suggest that Jesus was connected, that many suspect that he may for a time have lived in one of their monasteries. After the destruction of Jerusalem (70 A.D.) he resided in Rome and wrote his works, the chief of which are his "History of the Jewish War" and "Jewish Antiquities." In one or other of these lengthy and exhaustive works he would, though a Pharisee, reasonably be expected to speak of Jesus and his followers. He even includes, in his "Jewish Antiquities," a full and unflattering portrait of Pontius Pilate; and he tells of other zealots and reformers than Jesus in the Jewish history of the time.
Now in the "Jewish Antiquities," as we have the book, we read the following passage (xviii, 3)
About this time lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed be should be called man. He wrought miracles, and was a teacher of those who gladly accept the truth, and had a large following among the Jews and pagans. He was the Christ. Although Pilate, at the complaint of the leaders of our people, condemned him to die on the cross, his earlier followers were faithful to him. For he appeared to them alive again on the third day, as god-sent prophets had foretold this and a thousand other wonderful things of him. The people of the Christians, which is called after him, survives until the present day.
This passage is so obviously spurious that it is astonishing to find a single theologian left in our time who accepts it. No competent theologian or historian does. Josephus was a zealous Jew: and most of this is rank blasphemy from the Jewish point of view. There is a hint that Jesus was divine: he is said to have taught the truth, to have wrought miracles, and to have risen from the dead; and the messianic prophecies are expressly referred to him. To imagine Josephus writing such things is preposterous. It is a Christian interpolation.
But was a real reference to Jesus cut out by the Christian interpolator and replaced by this clumsy forgery? I have always held that that is probable, though some claim that the text of Josephus does not favor my idea. The passage about Jesus breaks in rather abruptly. Yet, clumsy as the forger was -- making a zealous Jew recognize Jesus as "the Christ [Anointed One]" and the Messiah at the very height of the bitter feud of Jews and Christians -- he would hardly pick any random page of the historian for his purpose. It seems to me not unlikely that he found there a reference to Jesus, and it would not be surprising if the last sentence of the passage, which would be just as clumsy for a later Christian to write, really is from the pen of Josephus.
We are told that an ancient Slavonic version of Josephus' "Jewish War" (not the "Antiquities") has been discovered, and that it contains testimony to the historicity of Christ. This may be one of two things. It may be a Christian interpolation in the "Jewish War" corresponding to the interpolation in the "Antiquities": or it may be a genuine Josephus reference to Jesus in sober terms. The former supposition is by far the more probable, since no later Christian would venture to cut out a reference to Jesus from our Greek version of Josephus (unless it was uncomplimentary).
The next most important reference to Jesus is in the "Annals" of the great Roman historian Tacitus (xv, 44). He mentions the fire which burned down the poorer quarters of Rome in the year 64 A.D. It was suspected that Nero had ordered the fire, which caused great misery at the time, and, Tacitus says, the Emperor diverted suspicion by blaming the Christians for it and persecuting them. I will translate the entire passage from the Latin:
In order to put an end to this rumor, therefore, Nero laid the blame on, and visited with severe punishment, those men, hateful for their crimes, whom the people call Christians. He, from whom the name was derived, Christus, was put to death by the Procurator Pontius Pilatus in the reign of Tiberius.
Tacitus goes on to describe how "an immense multitude" of Christians were put to death with fiendish torments, and were convicted "not so much of the crime of arson as of hatred of the human race."
This passage has many peculiar features. There cannot possibly have been "an immense multitude" of Christians at Rome in 64 A.D. There were not more than a few thousand two hundred years later. It sounds like a Christian interpolation. On the other hand, Tacitus has one of the most distinctive and difficult styles in Latin literature, and, if this whole passage is a forgery, it is a perfect imitation. We must, however, not press that argument too far. It is only the few words about the crucifixion that matter, and a good Latin scholar could easily achieve that. Professor Drews' indeed, who has a long and learned dissertation on the passage, believes it to be a forgery in its entirety, and argues that there was no persecution of Christians under Nero. He is not convincing, and it is difficult to believe -- although there have been other scholars who agreed with Drews -- that the passage generally was not written by Tacitus. The short sentence about Pilate may be an interpolation, but I know the peculiarities of the style of Tacitus too well to think the whole passage forged.
But why spend time over the matter? Tacitus is supposed to have written this about the year 117 A.D., or nearly eighty years after the death of Jesus. What does it prove? Only that after the year 100 there was a general belief in the Christian community that Jesus was crucified at the order of Pontius Pilate. That is nothing new. The reference to Pilate in I Timothy, whether Pauline or not, must be as old as that. Three of the Gospels were then written.
Some Christian writers argue that Tacitus must have seen the official record of the crucifixion, It is neither likely that any such official report would be sent to Rome nor that Tacitus looked up the archives, seventy years later, for such a thing. He was not the man to make such research or to be interested in such a point. If the passage is genuine, it shows only that there were in 117 A.D. Christians in Rome who said these things -- which nobody doubts; and it is not certainly genuine.
I am inclined to accept it because another Roman historian of about the same date, Suetonius, has an obscure passage, in his "Life of Claudius" (Chap". xxvi), which seems to refer to the Christians: "Claudius expelled the Jews from Rome because, at the instigation of Chrestos, they were always making trouble." Chrestos was a not uncommon Greek name, and it is urged that it may have nothing to do with Christ. Claudius died in the year 54 A.D., and it is almost impossible to imagine that there was sufficient sectarian fighting between Jews and Christians at Rome over Christ -- that is the only sense we can give to the sentence -- before the year 54. On the other hand, the sentence would be quite meaningless as a Christian interpolation.
On the whole, since it would be too remarkable a coincidence to find the Jews rioting about a Greek named Chrestos when they were actually rioting about Christ, I prefer to think that Suetoniu has heard, and has written in a confused way, about the Jewish reformer Christ. But it is of even less value than Tacitus. By the year 120 or 130 the cult of Christ was spread over the Roman world, and that is all that the mention by Suetonius implies.
Of Dr. Burch's twenty lines there remain only five in a letter of Pliny the younger to the Emperor Trajan. They say that the Christians were numerous enough in the province of Bithvnia (Asia Minor), of which Pliny was Governor, to cause him concern. But he speaks of them as respectable, law-abiding folk who meet to sing hymns at day-break to Christ "as a God." A number of scholars have disputed the authenticity of the passage or the whole letter; and it hardly seems plausible that a Proconsul should write to the Emperor about such a matter. We need not, however, go into this. It follows only that by 113 there were a good many Christians in Asia Minor. Apologists merely reveal the desperate poverty of their case when they quote such things as these Latin sentences to prove that Jesus really lived nearly a century before.
We may conclude that no non-Christian writer of the first century mentions Christ -- Josephus being equivocal and certainly actually adulterated -- and references in the second century are of no value at all. I repeat, however, that this need not impress us much. Josephus is the only writer who could reasonably be expected to mention Christ, and we do not know whether or not be did. The Christians remained a very obscure sect in a world that was seething with sects. That is all we can infer; and we knew it."
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