Page:Selections. Translated by H. St. J. Thackeray (1919).djvu/189

 few scholars of weight have ventured to maintain that the paragraph as it stands can have been penned by the Jewish historian; the point on which opinions have diverged has been whether the whole is an interpolation or whether a genuine brief statement of Josephus about Christ has been expanded and emended by a Christian hand. In recent years the question has been reopened in two ways, by the conversion of two authorities of the first rank to the rejected view and by the discovery of new materials. Professor Burkitt in this country and (following him with a little hesitation) Harnack in Germany have pronounced in favour of the genuineness of the passage. The existence has also been brought to light of other passages in the Slavonic version of the Jewish War relating to John the Baptist, Christ and the early Christians. The Slavonic matter may be treated independently; it has no attestation in the Greek MSS, and, whatever its origin, lacks the authority with which the present passage comes before us. Harnack has been answered in a masterly article by one of his own countrymen (Norden), and, notwithstanding the weight attaching to the names of its recent supporters, the arguments against the authenticity of the passage (at least in its present form) appear overwhelming. The really decisive factors in the problem must be sought rather in the relevance of the passage to its context and in the style than in any subjective considerations as to what Josephus could or could not have written. External evidence

The passage, it is true, stands in all our MSS, but this tells us little, since the oldest of them (Niese's P) is not earlier than the ninth or tenth century. Eusebius quotes it (H.E. i. 11, cf. Dem. Ev. iii. 3. 105 f.), thus attesting its existence in the fourth century. On the other hand, it is practically certain that Origen in the preceding