The Lost and Hostile Gospels: An Essay on the Toledoth Jeschu, and the Petrine and Pauline Gospels of the First Three Centuries of Which Fragments RemainBaring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
History
The Lost and Hostile Gospels: An Essay on the Toledoth Jeschu, and the Petrine and Pauline Gospels of the First Three Centuries of Which Fragments Remain
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Apocryphal Gospels
It appears that some of the copies of Josephus were tampered with by
copyists, for Theophylact says, “The wrath of God fell on them (the Jews)
when their city was taken; and Josephus testifies that these things
happened to them on account of the death of Jesus.” But Origen, speaking
of Josephus, says, “This writer, though he did not believe Jesus to be the
Christ, inquiring into the cause of the overthrow of Jerusalem and the
demolition of the temple ... says, ‘These things befel the Jews in
vindication of James, called the Just, who was the brother of Jesus,
called the Christ, forasmuch as they killed him who was a most righteous
man.’ ”(22) Josephus, as we have seen, says nothing of the sort;
consequently Origen must have quoted from an interpolated copy. And this
interpolation suffered further alteration, by a later hand, by the
substitution of the name of Jesus for that of James.
It is therefore by no means unlikely that the name of James, the Lord’s
brother, may have been inserted in the account of the high‐handed dealing
of Ananus in place of another name.
However, it is by no means impossible to reconcile the two accounts. The
martyrdom of St. James is an historical fact, and it is likely to have
taken place during the time when Ananus had the power in his hands.
For fifty years the pontificate had been in the same family, with scarcely
an interruption, and Ananus, or Hanan, was the son of Annas, who had
condemned Christ. They were Sadducees, and as such were persecuting. St.
Paul, by appealing to his Pharisee principles, enlisted the members of
that faction in his favour when brought before Ananias.(23)
The apostles based their teaching on the Resurrection, the very doctrine
most repugnant to the Sadducees; and their accounts of visions of angels
repeated among the people must have irritated the dominant faction who
denied the existence of these spirits. It can hardly be matter of surprise
that the murder of James should have taken place when Ananus was supreme
in Jerusalem. If that were the case, Josephus no doubt mentioned James,
and perhaps added the words, “The brother of him who is called Christ;” or
these words may have been inserted by a transcriber in place of “of
Sechania,” or Bar‐Joseph.
This is all that Josephus says, or is thought to have said, about Jesus
and the early Christians.
At the same time as Josephus, there lived another Jewish historian, Justus
of Tiberias, whom Josephus mentions, and blames for not having published
his History of the Wars of the Jews during the life of Vespasian and
Titus. St. Jerome includes Justus in his Catalogue of Ecclesiastical
Writers, and Stephen of Byzantium mentions him.
His book, or books, have unfortunately been lost, but Photius had read his
History, and was surprised to find that he, also, made no mention of
Christ. “This Jewish historian,” says he, “does not make the smallest
mention of the appearance of Christ, and says nothing whatever of his
deeds and miracles.”(24)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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