That this famous passage in Josephus is an interpolation, is now generally admitted. Breaking suddenly in the midst of a paragraph, the great Jewish historian pauses to announce that Jesus was the Christ, and that he really rose from the dead, etc., etc. This, if true, makes Josephus a Christian, which he was not. The early fathers, Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, and Origen, never referred to this famous passage, which they certainly would have done, had such a passage existed. What better evidence could they desire in their controversy with the Jews than to point to this wonderful confession of their principal author and historian, that the Jesus whom they crucified was the Christ, and that he rose from the dead! But in the Josephus with which they were acquainted there was no such text. Origen, the Christian Father, admits in his writings that Josephus was not a believer in Christ. How, then, did this passage creep into the works of the Jewish historian? The man who discovered this passage in Josephus was the same man who invented Constantine's vision, and the fable of the Seventy, who, he says, shut up in seventy separate cells, produced the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament, a translation, which, he adds, was surely the work of the Holy Ghost, because when the Seventy separate translations were compared, they were found to be in every detail alike, without even the difference of a punctuation mark in them all. To further prove this story, Eusebius tells us that he himself saw the seventy cells which the translators had occupied four hundred years before. This is the kind of churchman who first discovered the Josephus passage. After quoting the interpolated passage, Eusebius wonders how any Jew can have the impudence not to believe that Jesus was the Christ. In one of his essays, De Quincy says that only lunatics now believe in the genuineness of this passage, while a bishop of the Anglican Church,--Warburton--calls it "a stupid forgery." But the early Christians made even the pagan gods to testify for Jesus. They composed verses in praise of the Christian religion and attributed them to the pagan Sibyls. The oracles of Rome were made to prophesy the coming of Christ,--his passion, and resurrection, and to admit their inferiority to him. For many hundred years these Sibylline verses were quoted as genuine, until the advancement of education laughed the disgraceful fabrication out of existence. Again, pious ecclesiastics in their zeal for their "ism," invented also an _Apostles' Creed_, which the apostles never saw, and an _Apostolic Constitution_, containing directions how a Christian Church or State should be governed. They invented also the _Decretal Epistles_, by which Constantine transfers all his property to the Bishop of Rome,--his sword, his diadem, his throne,--and makes a prince of the pope, and an empire of his church. Here is the passage which was forged into Constantine's mouth by the Spanish priest Isidore: