Did Josephus mention John the Baptist?

[Giuseppe]

Note also that there is a thin link between the mention of John and the mention of James ''called Christ''.

God punished Herod because he killed John the Baptist.

God punished the Jews because the Jews killed a so-called ''Christ''.

In both the cases Origen can prove, via Josephus, that also the Christian God can have revenge against the enemies of the Christ and of who was persecuted like him (i.e. John the Baptist). Therefore Celsus is confuted.

This would raise the important question: could Celsus raise the accuse that Jesus and John didn't have revenge against their killers, when Celsus could learn about the revenge of John against his killer already in Josephus, without listening it the first time from Origen ?

I think that this is another clue of the forgery of the Baptist Passage by Origen.

[Giuseppe]

Well, there are two salient problems for me:

(1) Though Origen nearly quotes the Josephus passage three times, he never quotes it exactly. My feeling is that if he was responsible for interpolating "called Christ" (and according to Allen, striking out whatever had originally been there) why didn't he quote that passage more accurately? More to the point, why didn't he interpolate into Josephus precisely what he later quotes Josephus as having written? Three times Origen mentions "James [the Just], the brother of Jesus, called Christ" in that order. He puts both "James" and "brother" in the accusative or genitive, as the context requires. So why on earth did he deviate from that in the passage in Josephus? Why write "the brother of Jesus, called Christ - whose name was James" ("James" in the nominative)? That sylistic/grammatical difference is, I think, significant.

Here is the answer by Allen to your first criticism above:

Painter (1999: 203), who is a Christian scholar, and accepts that Josephus is the original author of the JP, warns that when Origen refers to this passage he at best paraphrases its content. This, according to him, casts some doubt on the exact form that this passage took in Origen’s time. In short, Painter warns us that historians should have no guarantee that in the third century C.E. the text that Origen read appeared exactly as it does today.
This startling conclusion needs to be contested. If one simply reviews the actual statements made by Origen (cf. Section 4.2), it should be regarded as pertinent that he uses almost exactly the same wording as is contained in the current form of the JP (i.e. “the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James”) to describe James, viz.:
1. COM, X, 17 / 5268: “James the brother of Jesus who is called Christ”;
2. Cels, I, 47: “James the Just, who was a brother of Jesus called Christ”; and
3. Cels, II, 13: “James the Just, the brother of Jesus who was called Christ”.
In addition, considering that all an interpolator had to do (at most) was add the words “the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James” and at the very least “the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ” to create the forgery, it is safe to assume that Origen does refer to the self-same text. Any other interpretation is forced and coloured by some or other agenda on the part of the scholar concerned.

(p. 309, my bold)

[neilgodfrey]

Allen N.P.L. “Josephus, Origen and John the Baptist: Exposing a Christian Apologist’s Deceit.”
Triennial congress of the International Organisation for the Study of the Old Testament.
US, Stellenbosch, South Africa (4 - 9 September)

I'd be interested in hearing thoughts from others familiar with doctoral thesis writing on what they think of this thesis. I haven't read many raw manuscripts of doctoral theses right through (mostly I've read ones commercially published after some editing) but I have just read NPL's from cover to cover. What bugged me in particular was the faulty use of commas throughout, sometimes making comprehension of a sentence difficult on first reading. For some reason I have assumed that such infelicities need to be ironed out in something as significant as a doctoral thesis. Or is there a difference in standards between research and course-work doctoral theses? (NPL's thesis does not strike me as a thesis by "research". Is that a fair view?)

Misuse of commas (other punctuation was also problematic but less frequently so) and the occasional spelling error (e.g. Anti-Nicene) do leave an impression of sub-par work -- not only by the author but also by the supervisor and awarding institution.

One other gap, glaring to me, was his failure to supply supporting citations for his claim that the JtB passage is widely (if not universally) viewed among non-conservative scholars as a possible forgery.

I also thought his analysis of how "worldview" of conservative scholars could have been developed in more detail. Or am I being overly picky in that view?

My final thoughts were that the essay could have been better presented as a review of the work of Doherty, Zindler, Wells.

[andrewcriddle]

Allen N.P.L. “Josephus, Origen and John the Baptist: Exposing a Christian Apologist’s Deceit.”
Triennial congress of the International Organisation for the Study of the Old Testament.
US, Stellenbosch, South Africa (4 - 9 September)

I'd be interested in hearing thoughts from others familiar with doctoral thesis writing on what they think of this thesis. I haven't read many raw manuscripts of doctoral theses right through (mostly I've read ones commercially published after some editing) but I have just read NPL's from cover to cover. What bugged me in particular was the faulty use of commas throughout, sometimes making comprehension of a sentence difficult on first reading. For some reason I have assumed that such infelicities need to be ironed out in something as significant as a doctoral thesis. Or is there a difference in standards between research and course-work doctoral theses? (NPL's thesis does not strike me as a thesis by "research". Is that a fair view?)

Misuse of commas (other punctuation was also problematic but less frequently so) and the occasional spelling error (e.g. Anti-Nicene) do leave an impression of sub-par work -- not only by the author but also by the supervisor and awarding institution.

One other gap, glaring to me, was his failure to supply supporting citations for his claim that the JtB passage is widely (if not universally) viewed among non-conservative scholars as a possible forgery.

I also thought his analysis of how "worldview" of conservative scholars could have been developed in more detail. Or am I being overly picky in that view?

My final thoughts were that the essay could have been better presented as a review of the work of Doherty, Zindler, Wells.

I haven't read the thesis but I'll comment on what has been posted in the thread.

The idea that Origen is heavily paraphrasing Josephus on James the brother of Jesus may well be wrong. However it seems prima-facie plausible, particularly given the way Origen links the death of James to the fall of Jerusalem. I am uneasy about Allen's claim that those who regard Origen as heavily paraphrasing Josephus here are not only wrong, (which they may well be), but are being biased by their conservative presuppositions.

Andrew Criddle

[Giuseppe]

If Origen interpolated simply ''called Christ'' in Josephus, then it is explained why he is simply paraphrasing Josephus diverging from a faithful quote of the James Passage in Josephus:

1. COM, X, 17 / 5268: “James the brother of Jesus who is called Christ”;
2. Cels, I, 47: “James the Just, who was a brother of Jesus called Christ”; and
3. Cels, II, 13: “James the Just, the brother of Jesus who was called Christ”.

versus:

“the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James”

Origen's emphasis is more on James, as involuntary witness of the implicit messiahship of Jesus, than on Jesus himself (that in Josephus appears before because he serves uniquely to surprise the reader about his mysterious identity, revealed after some line when a Jesus ben Damneus is introduced as new high priest).

Therefore there is no contradiction between an Origen forger of ''called Christ'' and an Origen paraphrasing the James Passage in Antiquities 20:200. What Allen denies explicitly is the absurd idea that Origen read ''called Christ'' (or the link ''death of James-->fall of Jerusalem) elsewhere in Josephus and not simply where it is now. Allen is right about this.