Page:Selections. Translated by H. St. J. Thackeray (1919).djvu/197

 version, addressed to a wider and more critical circle, was produced. This daring theory has met with little support; but the origin of the passages remains a mystery, no final solution of which is possible pending the publication of a complete text from the Russian MSS. The remarkable facts about them are their Jewish appearance, their independence (in part) of the Gospel narrative and the impression which they make of being derived from oral tradition. Parallels to a few of the statements (the bribery of Pilate, the healing "by a word") occur in the Christian apocryphal Epistle of Tiberius to Pilate (ed. M. R. James in Texts and Studies, vol. V. p. 78, 1899); compare also the apocryphal Acts of Pilate (Tischendorf, Evangelia Apocrypha, Leipzig, 1853, p. 292), where Joseph of Arimathæa, addressing the body of Christ, uses the words "if it be right to call thee a man," recalling the phrase common to the fourth Slavonic passage and the "testimony" in the Antiquities. III. Note on § (29). Josephus calls the injured husband simply Herod. The first two Gospels give him the name Philip ("Herodias his brother Philip's wife," Matt. xiv. 3, Mark vi. 17). The name stands in all the MSS in Mark; in Matthew it is omitted by the "Western text" (cod. D and Latin versions); in Luke (iii. 19) it is absent from all the best MSS and in those which insert it is undoubtedly an interpolation from the other Gospels. It is clear from Josephus that the first husband of Herodias was not Philip the Tetrarch, but his half-brother who paid the penalty for his mother's complicity in a plot by having his name removed from Herod's will, and lived as a private individual, apparently in Jerusalem (cf. B.J.