have made a compromise between their sentiment and their critical faculty, by arguing that the passage, though partly corrupt, is founded on something Josephus wrote.[6] [Footnote 1: Comp. Schlatter, _op. cit._ 403.] [Footnote 2: H.E. i. 41; Comp. Freimann, Wie verhielt sich das Judenthum zu Jesus? (Monatsschrift fur die Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judenthums, 1911, p. 296).] [Footnote 3: Comm. in Matth. ch. xvii.] [Footnote 4: Ant. XVIII. v. 5.] [Footnote 5: Strom. I. xxi. 409.] [Footnote 6: Among those who uphold this view is the Franco-Jewish savant Theodore Reinach, whose opinion is that the Christian scribe changed a _testimonium de Christo_ into a _testimonium pro Christo_ (R.E.J. xxxv. 6). Both Renan and Ewald hold that our passage is a corrupted fragment of a much fuller account of Jesus in the _Antiquities_. See Joel. _op. cit_. p. 52.] It is alleged that many of the words are such as Josephus might have used, but, apart from the fact that this is contested by other authorities, it is unreasonable to suppose that the interpolator would go out of his way to stamp the insertion as a forgery by using extraordinary words. It is urged again that the passages about John and James in the _Antiquities_ support the likelihood of Josephus' having mentioned Jesus. But these passages are themselves open to very grave suspicions. There is no reference to them in the epitome of the chapters furnished at the head of each book, which according to Niese dates from the age of the Antonines, or the end of the second century. Nor does the Slavonic version of Josephus contain the passage about James, and while Origen refers to that passage, he had a different version of it from that which appears in our manuscripts. It seems that he has incorporated the gloss of a Christian believer. And again, while our text imputes the blame of the stoning of James to the Sadducees, and gives credit to the Pharisees for endeavoring to prevent it, Hegesippus, the Christian writer of the second century, uses the alleged account of the incident by Josephus to gird at the Pharisees. The probability is then that different Christological insertions were made in the manuscripts of Josephus according to the leaning of the scribe, but that none of the supposed evidences are genuine, or based on a genuine narrative. The absence of any reference to Jesus and the apostles in Josephus would have seemed damaging to the truth of the Christian testament, and therefore the passages were supplied.