‘Deciphering the Gospels’, by R. G. Price, argues the case for Jesus mythicism, which is the view that Jesus never existed on earth in any real form but was an entirely mythical figure in the same way as Hercules or Dionysus. (The author is not the same person as Robert Price, also a Jesus mythicist author.) I’m an atheist who holds the opposing (and mainstream) view that Christianity started with a human Jesus. In other words, the Jesus referred to as the founder of Christianity was originally a 1st-century human being, about whom a later mythology grew up, whose followers became the original group that would mutate over time into Christianity. I’m therefore reviewing Price’s book to discuss his arguments and my reasons for disagreeing.
The first post in this book review is here. Links to the posts on all subsequent chapters can be found at the end of that post.
Chapter 10: Non-Christian Accounts Of Jesus
This post follows on from the previous post, which discussed the line ‘brother of Jesus called Christ’ in Josephus, and I thus recommend reading that post first. This one addresses Price’s attempts to explain this line away.
Although Price doesn’t reference them, the suggestions he makes are for the most part not originally his; nearly all of what he writes was in Earl Doherty’s ‘The Jesus Puzzle’ from the late ’90s, and has been further publicised by Richard Carrier in his books and in a journal article. Anyway, here they are.
As per my last post, at the end of the passage Josephus mentions a Jesus identified as ‘Jesus ben Damneus’ (Jesus son of Damneus), who is elected high priest after Ananus is deposed. This is far less of a coincidence than it might at first seem; the name translated here as ‘Jesus’ originated as the extremely common Jewish name ‘Yeshua’ or ‘Yeshu’. Price points out that Josephus himself mentions something like fourteen different people with Iesus as a first name.
However, Price’s (well, Doherty’s) argument is that the mention of a second Jesus in this passage isn’t a coincidence, but another reference to the same Jesus. According to this theory, the Jesus referred to as the brother of the executed James was actually Jesus ben Damneus, who was mentioned twice in the passage, first as an identifier for the James who was executed and then as the next high priest. As for the ‘called Christ’ part of the phrase, Price suggests that this could have ended up in there in any of the three following ways:
- As part of Josephus’s original text. In this proposed scenario, Josephus initially refers to Jesus ben Damneus as ‘Jesus called Christ’ and then a few lines later as ‘Jesus ben Damneus’, without bothering to clarify that these two mentions of apparently different Jesuses were in fact different ways of referring to the same person.
- As a marginal note from a Christian reader. In this proposed scenario, the original line about Jesus and James simply read ‘brother of Jesus, James by name’. A Christian reader then mistakenly thought that this referred to the Jesus and James of Christian stories and accordingly scribbled the words ‘called Christ’ into the margin next to Jesus’s name. Since marginal notes were how people indicated to scribes that a correction needed to be made when recopying, a later scribe took it as such and added the words ‘called Christ’ to the main text.
- As a later mistake by the Christian writer Origen. This scenario is similar to the last, but in this theory the mistake came about because of a citation Origen made of Josephus’s ‘Antiquitities’ as referring to the ‘brother of Jesus called Christ’. According to this theory, Origen was misremembering and quoting this line from another Christian writer but wrongly attributing it to Josephus, following which a Christian who had read this in Origen and noticed it wasn’t in Josephus assumed this was an error in their own copy of Josephus and added ‘called Christ’ in the margin of the text to indicate that it should be there. The words then got copied into the text as above.
The first major problem with all of these scenarios is that they all require Josephus to use identifiers in a confusing way that would have been completely atypical for him.
‘Identifier’, here, refers to anything used as the equivalent of our use of surnames; something that specifies to which of many possible people of the same first name the text was referring. The formulation ‘ben ____’, meaning ‘son of ____’ was the most common, although it was also possible to identify someone by their place of origin or – as seems to be the case for the mention of Jesus here – by a note that they were ‘called’ such-and-such.
Josephus (as was normal for his time) regularly used identifiers of this sort. Apparently his practice in so doing was just what common sense would suggest:
- He would use them for the first mention of a person’s name, thus letting the readers know which Jesus or James or Alexander or whoever was being talked about.
- Following that, when he made further references to that person within the same passage, he would simply use the person’s first name.
- The exception to this was when, having done the above he brought up someone else with the same first name (whom he would again initially refer to with the first name and another identifier and then by first name only, as above), and, having discussed that person, went back to talking about the person with the same first name that he’d been talking about earlier in the passage. On doing this, he would give the person’s name with identifier again in order to make it clear that this was the previous person named [Firstname] rather than the second person, referring to them as the ‘forementioned’ [Firstname] [Identifier].
All of this information comes from the second part of this post on the History for Atheists blog, where it’s illustrated with examples for anyone who wants to get a clearer idea.
The first major problem with Price’s suggestions, therefore, is that they involve scenarios that don’t fit Josephus’s typical use of identifiers at all. Price’s second and third suggestions both require Josephus to have initially identified whichever Jesus this was by only his extremely common first name, giving the identifier only on the second mention. As for Price’s first suggestion, this would require Josephus to have taken the even odder step of identifying the same person by two different identifiers without clarifying that he was doing so. And, unsurprisingly, it seems that neither of these options fits with how Josephus actually did use identifiers. As Tim O’Neill puts it in the above-cited post:
Nowhere in any of his works that I can find does Josephus refer to someone by their name alone when introducing them to his narrative for the first time (e.g. “Jesus”) and then refer to them by their name and an appellation a few sentences later (e.g. “Jesus, son of Damneus”). This is for the very obvious reason that it would be highly confusing to do so.
Price does suggest explanations:
Why wouldn’t Josephus put the “son of” identifier in the first reference instead of after the fact? Well, for the very reason that “brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James,” seems odd—because it’s a double qualifier and a cumbersome sentence. In addition, the strong point of the passage is the naming of Jesus as the high priest, thus Josephus uses the formality of identifying Jesus by his father when he states that he was named the high priest.
But if this James was indeed the brother of Jesus ben Damneus, then, unless he was actually a maternal half-brother, he would have been the son of Damneus himself, and could easily and without the extra subclause have been identified correctly as ‘James ben Damneus’. Again, Price thinks he has an answer to this:
Why didn’t he identify James by his father instead? Because if James is related to Jesus son of Damneus, then this is implied, and Jesus is the more important figure—he is the one who becomes high priest.
So, Price is, in effect, hypothesising a situation in which Josephus simultaneously wanted to avoid cumbersome sentences and to identify someone in an inherently more cumbersome way, and was prepared to use this atypically botched identifier in order to manage these two contradictory aims. As usual, we’re expected to accept Price’s explanation instead of considering the rather more obvious explanation that Josephus did indeed write ‘brother of Jesus called Christ’.
It’s worth noting, here, that Price makes no attempt to back this up by referencing any potentially similar passages in Josephus’s work. (This is in stark contrast to the ‘History for Atheists’ post I quoted above, in which O’Neill quotes multiple examples to illustrate and back up his statements both about the way Josephus uses identifiers and about his use of the term ‘called’.) Did Josephus normally try to avoid lengthy multi-clause sentences? Did he have a habit of using identifiers at ‘the strong point of the passage’ even if that wasn’t the first time that the name had been introduced? Are there other places where he identifies people by the most important figure connected to them even where this makes a sentence more cumbersome rather than less? If Price can show examples of these points elsewhere in Josephus’s work, that would be good backup for his theories here. Conversely, if there are no such examples, that gives Price a problem. But we’re left not knowing, because he doesn’t address it at all. That’s the behaviour of someone who isn’t trying to find the explanation that best fits the actual evidence, but the explanation that best fits his own theory.
Anyway… having looked at the general problem with Price’s attempted explanations, let’s look at what Price thinks about the various ways in which ‘called Christ’ might have made its way into the text.
Price’s first hypothesis: Josephus himself used the phrase
This section is, by the way, the only part of Price’s suggestions regarding this phrase that doesn’t seem to have originated with Doherty or Carrier. Price does in fairness consider this the least likely of his suggested explanations, but he still thought it plausible enough to include, so let’s look at it. Why would Josephus have identified Jesus ben Damneus as ‘Jesus called Christ’?
Price assures us that it is ‘actually quite possible’ that Josephus would have referred to Jesus ben Damneus in this way:
“Christ” is just a transliteration of the Greek word Christos, which is a translation of the Hebrew Mashiah, which simply means anointed, or one who is anointed. Jewish kings and high priests were called anointed ones, and this is used many times in the Hebrew scriptures.
Now, this much is completely correct. The reason that the term the Messiah became used for the Davidian king prophecied in Jewish scriptures was because Jewish kings were ceremonially anointed as part of their coronation ceremony and thus ‘anointed one’ became a term used for ‘king’, in much the same way that ‘His Majesty’ might be used today. Hence, when discussing the unnamed Davidian descendant who was king in the Jewish prophecies of an amazing future, Jews started talking about him as ‘the anointed one’, which in Hebrew is ‘Mashiach’ (hard ‘ch’ sound on the end as in the Scottish ‘loch’) and in Greek is ‘Kristos’. The former became anglicised to ‘Messiah’ and the latter to ‘Christ’. But ‘anointed one’ could still be used as a general term for ‘king’, because the kings were literally anointed. And at some point anointing with oil also became a part of the induction ceremony for priests, so any priest could be referred to as ‘anointed’ and the term would be technically correct.
However, the problem with Price’s theory is that it would make no sense to use ‘anointed’ as an identifier. After all, the entire point of identifiers is to identify the person of whom the author is speaking, out of many other possible people with that first name. Using a term that could be used just as easily of any high priest would be no help at all for this. It would be as if I mentioned, say, King Henry of England, and, instead of using a numeral to specify which I meant of many possible King Henrys, I instead referred to him as ‘King Henry, called His Majesty’; it would be completely useless.
On top of this, it also completely contradicts Price’s above attempt at explaining why Josephus would have made such a peculiar botch of using an identifier. Price, you will recall, claims Josephus was just trying to avoid ‘a cumbersome sentence’ by not identifying this James as simply ‘James ben Damneus’ (as would have been the obvious way to identify him if this James had in fact been the brother of Jesus ben Damneus). But the Greek for ‘called Christ’ here is ‘tou legomenos Kristos’… which is, of course, longer and more cumbersome than ‘ben Damneus’. So, going with this scenario would leave Price without any sort of explanation of why Josephus would use identifiers in this way.
To be fair, even though he seems to have glossed over all these glaring difficulties, Price at least isn’t arguing too strongly for this particular hypothesis:
All in all, though, this was probably not the case
Ya think?
Price does also briefly throw in a couple of other theories at this point, so I’ll take a moment to address them, but they both make so little sense that he seems here to have been using a ‘throw anything you can at the wall and hope something sticks’ approach.
This passage could simply be saying that Jesus son of Damneus was considered a great person, or an already holy person
…..no, it couldn’t, because the term wasn’t used as a general synonym for ‘great’ or ‘holy’.
This could also simply be using a description of Jesus son of Damneus that he
was later called. This event supposedly happened around 62 CE, which is
getting very close to the First Jewish-Roman War, and this is a term that was even more heavily used in relation to “war priests,” or high priests during a time of war, or priests who, in the Jewish tradition, actually acted as generals.
Citation needed, please.
Jesus son of Damneus was not a high priest during the war,
…so in fact this also won’t stand up as a theory even if Price does give a citation for his claim about war priests being referred to as ‘anointed’.
but Jesus son of Sapphas was the son of a high priest and a general in the war; it could be talking about him.
Why would the son of a high priest be referred to as ‘anointed’ when he wasn’t the one who’d been anointed? And how are we supposed to account for Josephus identifying James by his brother rather than his son in this scenario, when Price’s argument elsewhere is that Josephus is deliberately trying to identify James by the most important person to whom he’s connected? If James was the brother of Jesus son of Sapphas the high priest, then he’d be the son of this high priest himself, and by both common sense and Price’s own argument we’d expect Josephus to refer to him as ‘James ben Sapphas’. Again, this doesn’t stand up at all.
Anyway, this is about all Price has to say on this particular hypothesis, so let us set it behind us and move on to the next.
Price’s second hypothesis: that ‘called Christ’ was a later accidental interpolation
To recap: In this theory, Josephus is still referring to Jesus ben Damneus both times, but identifies him as such only the second time, using just his first name the first time. Following this:
A Christian reading the work may have seen the names Jesus and James together and jumped to the conclusion that this was “Jesus Christ” and then made a note saying so. A later scribe would have then just incorporated it, assuming it to be true, in order to clarify the passage.
There are two problems with this (apart from the problem with the identifier use which we already discussed). The first leads us back to a point we encountered while discussing Paul: why would a Christian be making that assumption if not for the fact that their Jesus was already believed to have an earthly brother called James, and why would Christians believe that Jesus had an earthly brother called James if Jesus himself was thought to be an entirely heavenly being with no previous earthly existence?
The second problem is that it’s unlikely both theologically and practically that this hypothetical Christian reader would put the word ‘called’ in this hypothetical note. Theologically, there is the obvious fact that people who believed that Jesus was Christ (i.e. the Messiah) were unlikely to refer to him as called Christ, but simply as Christ (or possibly Lord, or Saviour, or similar). Practically, the Greek term for ‘called’ used here – ‘tou legomenos’ – is a long word to add when it’s an unnecessary extra in a marginal note.
In short, this hypothesis is also pretty implausible.
Price’s third hypothesis: Origen made the mistake
In this part of the hypothesis, Price is still going with the theory that Josephus’s line originally read ‘brother of Jesus, James by name’ and that the ‘called Christ’ phrase was a later addition. However, in this theory the phrase originates with Origen.
Origen was a theologian writing in the first half of the third century who, at three different points in his writing, cited Josephus’s ‘Antiquities’ as containing a mention of the death of Jesus’s brother James, in each case using wording very similar to the phrase that we have in Josephus:
James the brother of Jesus who is called Christ
Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, Book 10 chapter 17
James the Just, who was a brother of Jesus (called Christ)
Against Celsus, Book 1 chapter 47
James the Just, the brother of Jesus who was called Christ
Against Celsus, Book 2 chapter 13
At first sight this looks like evidence for the phrase being authentic to Josephus. However, Price points out that we have a reason to doubt this; one of the things that Origen also says about this Josephan mention is clearly incorrect. On each of the above occasions when Origen cites Josephus, he also claims that Josephus attributed the fall of the Temple as being punishment for James’s execution… despite the fact that Josephus says nothing of the sort. Here are fuller versions of each of the passages above:
Flavius Josephus, who wrote the ” Antiquities of the Jews ” in twenty books, when wishing to exhibit the cause why the people suffered so great misfortunes that even the temple was razed to the ground, said, that these things happened to them in accordance with the wrath of God in consequence of the things which they had dared to do against James the brother of Jesus who is called Christ. And the wonderful thing is, that, though he did not accept Jesus as Christ, he yet gave testimony that the righteousness of James was so great; and he says that the people thought that they had suffered these things because of James.
Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew, Book 10 chapter 3
Now this writer, although not believing in Jesus as the Christ, in seeking after the cause of the fall of Jerusalem and the destruction of the temple, whereas he ought to have said that the conspiracy against Jesus was the cause of these calamities befalling the people, since they put to death Christ, who was a prophet, says nevertheless— being, although against his will, not far from the truth— that these disasters happened to the Jews as a punishment for the death of James the Just, who was a brother of Jesus (called Christ),— the Jews having put him to death, although he was a man most distinguished for his justice.
Against Celsus, Book 1 chapter 47
… for the siege began in the reign of Nero, and lasted till the government of Vespasian, whose son Titus destroyed Jerusalem, on account, as Josephus says, of James the Just, the brother of Jesus who was called Christ, but in reality, as the truth makes clear, on account of Jesus Christ the Son of God.
Against Celsus, Book 2 chapter 13
Price’s argument on the matter (or at least the unattributed argument Price uses here, which, again, seems to have originated with Earl Doherty) is as follows:
- Josephus clearly does not say what Origen claims here that he said.
- Therefore, Origen must have been confusing his sources and in fact citing a different writer rather than Josephus.
- Therefore, Origen’s attribution of the line ‘brother of Jesus called Christ’ to Josephus is also incorrect.
- Therefore, Josephus’s manuscript didn’t originally contain this line.
- The ‘called Christ’ part of the line was probably added to Josephus by a scribe who’d also read Origen and therefore well-meaningly made a correction of the Josephan passage in accordance with what he believed it was supposed to say according to Origen.
The first point of this, at any rate, is clearly correct, so it’s worth thinking about whether the rest of it stands up. If Origen really was citing the Josephan passage, why did he claim that Josephus had said something that Josephus hadn’t?
One explanation I’ve seen for this is that Origen was simply reading things into the text that aren’t there and making assumptions about what Josephus was trying to say. While that’s certainly a possibility to consider and I’m not going to rule it out, the line ‘yet gave testimony that the righteousness of James was so great; and he says that the people thought that they had suffered these things because of James’ is specific enough that it has the ring of an indirect quote. On balance, I think that line does go better with the idea that Origen was unintentionally quoting someone other than Josephus.
However, Price’s explanation is also a bad fit for the observed facts.
Firstly, Origen makes this reference to Josephus three different times in two different works, using very similar wording each time. That’s an unlikely degree of consistency for someone who was thinking of the wrong writer in the first place.
Secondly, the phrase ‘called Christ’ was a rare one for a Christian writer to use, for the obvious reason that Christians believe that Jesus was Christ and so wouldn’t tend to refer to him as ‘called’ Christ. As far as I know, the only record we have of it being used spontaneously by an early Christian writer is Matthew 1:16; the handful of other examples we have in Christian writings all seem to be quotes from non-Christians. That in itself doesn’t prove the phrase came from Josephus, but does suggest that Origen almost certainly got the phrase either directly from a non-Christian writer or from a Christian writer who was himself quoting a non-Christian writer.
And finally, of course, Price’s explanation still gives us the problem of having to suppose very atypical identifier use from Josephus.
With all that in mind, this is my personal theory on the matter. It’s fair to point out here that I’m not a historian (and don’t play one on TV…), so, if anyone with actual familiarity with the works of Origen and/or ancient documents generally is reading this and spots any obvious flaw in my reasoning, please let me know.
What I suspect is that an earlier Christian author whose work has since been lost did indeed cite the ‘brother of Jesus called Christ’ line from Josephus, but also added his own opinion about the righteousness of James and the popular belief that his death was the cause of the fall of Jerusalem/the destruction of the temple, and inadvertently wrote all this in such a way that it looked as though this opinion was also being attributed to Josephus. (Given that it was the norm in those days to use indirect quoting rather than direct quotes with quote marks, this seems something that could plausibly happen.) Origen then used this unknown writer as his source rather than using Josephus directly. This resulted in Origen correctly reporting the Josephus quote, but then incorrectly attributing the writer’s follow-up lines to Josephus as well.
That is of course speculation, and for all I know someone who has a better idea of what they’re talking about will come up with some obvious argument against it that didn’t occur to me. However, it strikes me as at least being a more plausible explanation than the string of oddities required by Price’s theory.
So, where does this leave us?
While Price assures us blithely that there are many possible alternative explanations for the appearance of this phrase in Josephus, he’s overlooked the small issue of whether these explanations are at all likely. No matter how hard Price tries to explain this line away, we’re still left with the most likely reason for the line ‘brother of Jesus called Christ’ showing up in Josephus’s work being because Josephus himself wrote it.