History as a field is primarily dependent on literary theory (at least the kind following historical models rather than aesthetic), because most evidence relevant to reconstructing history is textual, and the most crucial category of textual evidence is works of literature: ancient historians, philosophers, orators, propagandists, mythographers, hymnists, epistolators, and the like. All this literature was composed following literary techniques, tropes, and standards taught in schools at the time, as well as exhibited and employed in exemplars that authors emulated, and audiences expected. There is other evidence that’s important (archaeological, documentary, and the like; even experimental; and the comparative and analytical tools of anthropology, sociology, economics, and beyond, also play important roles). But often enough literary evidence is all you have—or is indispensible to interpreting whatever other evidence there is. But when it’s all you’ve got, then understanding how to apply the tools of literary theory and interpretation is essential.

Recently I debated amateur historian James Valliant on Jacob Berman’s History Valley channel on whether the testimonies to Jesus Christ in Josephus are authentic or interpolated. The debate is largely useless, as he just kept making stuff up, and throwing out bizarre arguments and assertions, and ignoring my every rebuttal, indeed every piece of evidence I presented. But one strange thing he kept doing was conflating his own wild speculations as facts, sometimes even confusingly insisting that what he speculated Josephus meant was actually in the text, then waffling back and forth over whether he meant he was just speculating, or meant Josephus actually literally said it, all the while insisting he was interpreting the text according to sound literary theory. He wasn’t. He was so off those rails I realized this is a good teaching example for this particular skill in doing history and why it’s important; and above all, important to do correctly.

The Passage in Question

In our current text of Josephus’s magisterial history of the Jews, the Jewish Antiquities, published in the early 90s A.D., there are two references to “Christ,” one (in volume 18 of the JA) called the Testimonium Flavianum (or TF), a fawning paragraph summarizing the Christian gospel, using as a model the credal intratext of the Emmaus narrative in Luke, and a passage (in volume 20) mentioning a certain “James” the “brother of Jesus” who has two words appended to his name, the one “called Christ,” leading Christian scholars today to assume this is a reference to James the brother of Jesus Christ being executed for the crime of preaching Christianity (or whatever it is Christians were supposedly being stoned for). This, “the James passage,” makes no reference to any other passage regarding “Jesus” or “Christ” (the TF or otherwise).

On the broader point of why we can be certain (if we commit to avoiding fallacies and only making inferences from the actual evidence) that neither reference to Jesus Christ now in the Antiquities of Josephus were there when he published (nor indeed put there until over a century later) see my summary of the latest research in Josephus on Jesus? Why You Can’t Cite Opinions Before 2014. I have addressed other weird fumbles in applying literary analysis to the James passage in particular in “What Did Josephus Mean by That?” A Case Study in the Relationship between Evidence and Probability (where I show Dennis MacDonald flubbing basic principles to defend a pet theory) and Mason on Josephus on James (where I show Steve Mason lazily deploying self-contradictory reasoning to get results contrary to any sound literary analysis) and, most poignantly, More Asscrankery from Tim O’Neill (some of which asscrankery Valliant repeated, uncredited, in our debate; evidently unaware of my empirical refutations, he allowed himself to be influenced by a notorious liar).

Today I will only focus on the James passage, and only its literary analysis. When evaluating competing explanations of some fact (like the current text of this passage in Josephus), one must assess their relative likelihoods (on which point see Some Bayes for Beginners and Advice on Probabilistic Reasoning). That means you assume one theory is in fact true, and then assess how likely the surviving evidence is what we would have; then you assume the other theory is in fact true, and assess how likely then the surviving evidence is what we would have. Which likelihood is larger tells us which theory the evidence supports, and the difference between those two likelihoods tells us how strong (or weak) that evidence is in supporting that. So I will follow that procedure here, and show how literary analysis affects this assessment. I will here only evaluate the literary style features as evidence; there is a lot more evidence against the authenticity of the reference to “Christ” in this passage, which Valliant never rebutted, but which you can find summarized in Josephus on Jesus.

The passage in question reads as follows, here using the classic Whiston translation, and only adding my own clarifications as to the Greek when important later (note the regnal context of this passage is that of “the king” meaning Herod Agrippa II, also known as Marcus Julius Agrippa, a personal friend of Josephus):

[AJ 20.197] And now Caesar, upon hearing the death of Festus, sent Albinus into Judea, as procurator. But the king deprived Joseph of the high priesthood, and bestowed the succession to that dignity on the son of Ananus, who was also himself called Ananus. [AJ 20.198] Now the report goes that this eldest Ananus proved a most fortunate man; for he had five sons who had all performed the office of a high priest to God, and who had himself enjoyed that dignity a long time formerly, which had never happened to any other of our high priests. [AJ 20.199] But this younger Ananus, who, as we have told you already, took the high priesthood, was a bold man in his temper, and very insolent; he was also of the sect of the Sadducees, who are very rigid in judging offenders, above all the rest of the Jews, as we have already observed.

[AJ 20.200] When, therefore, Ananus was of this disposition, he thought he had now a proper opportunity. Festus was now dead, and Albinus was but upon the road; so he assembled the sanhedrin of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James, and some others; and when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned: [AJ 20.201] but as for those who seemed the most equitable of the citizens, and such as were the most uneasy at the breach of the laws, they disliked what was done; they also sent to the king, desiring him to send to Ananus that he should act so no more, for that what he had already done was not to be justified; [AJ 20.202] nay, some of them went also to meet Albinus, as he was upon his journey from Alexandria, and informed him that it was not lawful for Ananus to assemble a sanhedrim without his consent.

[AJ 20.203] Whereupon Albinus complied with what they said, and wrote in anger to Ananus, and threatened that he would bring him to punishment for what he had done; on which king Agrippa took the high priesthood from him, when he had ruled but three months, and made Jesus, the son of Damneus, high priest.

The first rule of literary analysis: authors never say or include (or omit) anything without a reason. They aren’t making random lists. Papyrus and parchment were expensive, readers were highly critical, and an author’s many goals numerous enough. Every word, every aside, had to have a purpose in the text. Likewise every omission. So to understand what an author means by including some story or detail, you need to ascertain why they are including it (and sometimes this can mean also asking why they are leaving out something they might be leaving out; what is omitted, tells us what they decided isn’t important, or needed to be evaded).

Which leads to the second rule of literary analysis: context is everything. Here there is the context of each thing that happens in this narrative, and also the narrower context of each word and phrase, but most importantly the broader context of this entire passage. We must begin with the latter. Because no interpretation of this passage which ignores the passage’s whole context is valid. You don’t just subtract something from its context and then invent whatever implications you want; the implications the author intended are demarcated by where that author put a story. So why is Josephus telling us this story?

That broader context is a string of stories about the succession of high priests leading up to the war, each one explaining why each high priest was either removed or appointed.

• For example, the immediately preceding sentence is “As soon as the king heard this news, he gave the high priesthood to Joseph, who was called Cabi, the son of Simon, formerly high priest.” Thus Josephus told a story, and then related how that story resulted in the next successor. Note that Josephus does not say in this sentence why “this news” resulted in appointing a new high priest. We are left to infer it, from a previous mention of a possible reason: that the current high priest, Ismael, was held over in Rome to be the personal companion of the empress Poppea. We fill the gap in our own minds with “well, I guess they needed to replace him then so temple affairs could be conducted back in Judea.” Which is not that obvious an inference, as Ismael had to be away many months to have visited Rome on embassy in the first place, so his absence was clearly not irreplaceable to ritual affairs back home. Nevertheless, we are clearly meant to infer this as the reason.
• Likewise, after the story including James concludes, the very next sentence segues from Albinus’s arrival at Jerusalem to more tales of temple intrique among the high priests, with a digression linking this to the sicarii (“daggermen,” a band of Jewish terrorists) and then a digression about Agrippa’s construction and adornment of a new city, culminating in the statement that, “This made him more than ordinarily hated by his subjects, because he took those things away that belonged to them to adorn a foreign city; and now Jesus, the son of Gamaliel, became the successor of Jesus, the son of Damneus, in the high priesthood, which the king had taken from the other; on which account a sedition arose between the high priests.”
• So now we have a chiasmus (a common technique used by ancient authors to signal their intentions), AB:BA: [A] temple intrigue connected to [B] exterior events; [B] exterior events connected back to [A] temple intrigue. All in order to explain the next high priest’s replacement, while linking it all to disturbing political affairs culminating in the coming war. Again, Josephus does not explain why Jesus ben Damneus is deposed; we are left to infer the reason from what he just said (the people were getting angry) and what he next says (many priests were outraged by the move). We fill the gap in our own minds with “well, Jesus ben Damneus must have been of or beloved by the faction hostile to Agrippa’s actions.” Thus explaining the ensuing outrage, and its immediate juxtaposition with the people’s despite of Agrippa, which otherwise is mentioned here for no other narrative purpose. Indeed, neither is the anger of the priests otherwise explained. The narrative sequence is thus only explicable with the required inference: events A, B, and C are a causal series. Agrippa angers a faction of the people and temple, Agrippa responds by deposing a priest associated with that faction, other priests are outraged by the political injustice of this.

So now you have a beginning idea of Josephus’s discourse style, use of chiastic signaling, sandwiching (placing a result in between two sentences that together signal its cause), and the context for the James story: it is a story about why one priest was deposed and replaced by another. Just like the narrative preceding it; and just like the narrative following it. There is no other reason for this to be here, and Josephus makes very clear by the sequencing and context why this is here: this is another priestly succession story.

Another feature of the stories preceding and following that also match Josephan discourse style is their narrative-causal structure. Though we see already that Josephus does not spell out every causal effect explicitly; he does expect you to make inferences—contrary to Valliant’s assertion that Josephus would never do that (although Valliant contradicted himself by repeatedly insisting Josephus does expect us to make inferences, switching between one general rule to the other depending on whether it was Valliant’s inference he wanted Josephus to expect us to make; apart from being a fallacy of special pleading, the latter is also a general rule we know Josephus cannot have followed, never himself having even heard of James Valliant or his opinions).

Nevertheless, Josephus is far more explicit with narrative and causal structure and agent intent than, for example, the larger Testimonium Flavianum we aren’t discussing today, although that’s one of the reasons we know he can’t have written any of it. For example, in the preceding and following stories we get causal sequences, statements of agent intent, discussion of why things happen, and so on. The James passage is rife with this as well. So you can compare the following (the way Josephus writes stories in general, using the James passage in particular) with the TF and see at once he did not write any of it. It will also become clear soon, for exactly the same reason, that he can’t have written the James passage with any reference to Christ in it either.

The James Passage’s Causal Structure

The story Josephus tells here goes like this:

• “And now Caesar, upon hearing the death of Festus, sent Albinus into Judea, as procurator.” Thus Josephus has stated the principal cause of the entire ensuing sequence. The story will run full circle and close with Albinus making his first official demand of the Judeans on the way in result of what happens in the interim. Which is as follows.
• The first thing that happens in result: the king (Agrippa) immediately deposes Joseph from the high priesthood, and replaces him with Ananus the son of Ananus. Here we get a digression on what was special about this: Ananus the Elder and all five of his sons, including now Ananus the Younger, had served as high priest, a remarkable blessing no one else could claim. The sequence entails this choice was meant to please the incoming governor Albinus, evidently for that reason (that’s why Josephus mentions it here, again sandwiching the effect between two sentences together supplying the cause). But things go south fast.
• Josephus makes a special point that this Ananus (take note: only this Ananus; Josephus does not say this of the Ananus family, but this son alone) was “a bold man in his temper” (literally thrasus ên ton tropon; as we would say, “rash” or “arrogant by nature”) and a “Sadducee,” a fact which Josephus then makes sure to tell us the causal significance of: Sadducees “are very rigid in judging offenders, above all the rest of the Jews, as we have already observed.” So we had a positive reason for the succession; then immediately this changes to a negative reason why this will turn out badly. Notice the story is following a causal sequence, each thing explaining the next. It’s not just some list of disconnected declarations.
• The next thing then happens in result: Josephus says quite explicitly, “and so [oun], given [ate] that he was [ôn] precisely [dê] this sort of man [toioutos],” Ananus “thought he had now a proper opportunity” to do what that “sort of man” does: get vicious with the law. Why was it a “perfect opportunity”? Josephus tells us: “Because Festus was dead, and Albinus was still on the way.” So Josephus has fully explained what Ananus is about to do and why: he is arrogant, and ruthless in enforcing the letter of the law, and believes he can get away with doing so during a gap in Roman surveillance. Causal sequence. Stated motivations.
• Accordingly, Ananus, we are told, “assembled the sanhedrin of judges” and “brought before” it “the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James” (or so the current text reads; that “who was called Christ” was added later is shown in my peer reviewed paper in Hitler Homer Bible Christ) “and some others,” literally, tinas heterous, which in Greek signifies random other people, not “companions” or “followers” (words for which existed that Josephus would have used if so) but implying quite the opposite: people of no connection to James, whose names and identities are thus indicated to be irrelevant to the story. That’s why they are reduced to tinas heterous: Josephus doesn’t care who they are, and doesn’t want his readers to either; their identities don’t matter for what’s to come, only James’s does.
• This, Josephus immediately tells us, provoked a reaction among all the citizens of Judea who were “the most equitable” in the application of justice and “the most concerned” about such violations of the law—not violations of the law by James and the others executed, but the violation of the law by Ananus: “it was not lawful for Ananus to assemble a sanhedrim without [Roman] consent.” That is what Josephus says. This is the story he is telling. These citizens, Josephus tells us, petition king Agrippa and even travel to meet Albinus and petition him to do something about this criminal Ananus.
• Josephus says repeatedly that it is the crime of Ananus that has outraged everyone, and that Agrippa and Albinus both agreed with them. So it is pretty clear what story Josephus is telling here: this is a story, top to bottom, about the crime of Ananus, a crime Josephus describes and explains in detail. By contrast, he says nothing at all about what crimes James is guilty of. Accordingly, we can be certain James and his supposed crimes are not the subject of this story. He is an incidental bystander, for whose even being mentioned we struggle to find any reason (until we get to the end of the story just a few lines later, when we’ll get the only sentence in the whole tale that provides anything resembling a reason for it).
• At the close of the story, when we come full circle back to Albinus’s first official act as the governor he was appointed at the beginning of the story to be, Josephus makes clear how the story ends: Albinus “wrote in anger to Ananus and threatened that he would bring him to punishment for what he had done; on which king Agrippa took the high priesthood from him, when he had ruled but three months, and made Jesus, the son of Damneus, high priest.” We have a declaration that punishment was coming. And we are told what that punishment was: being deposed and replaced by Jesus the son of Damneus.
  

Now, it’s pretty obvious to anyone with a literary eye why Josephus has bothered telling us this story. He could have just said Ananus convened courts without Roman permit and everyone called for his removal in consequence. Instead we get this elaborate sequence of events in which, for some otherwise never explained reason, a guy named James gets killed, yet whose only importance anywhere in the story is that he was the brother of someone named Jesus. As with every other case Josephus relates, we are left to infer the obvious from the sequence: he means Jesus ben Damneus. How was justice restored by Agrippa to sate Albinus? By appeasing the most pertinent victim of Ananus’s crime, the family of the murdered James, with the appointment of their other son Jesus to Ananus’s position—a common means of effecting justice, and assuaging vengeance, in the ancient world. This is the only reason given in this story for why James even gets mentioned at all. And this is why it is no coincidence that two people named Jesus are in this story: they are the same person. And this is exactly how we’d read the story, if the two words in Greek “called Christ” weren’t there.

It’s worth noting that not only does Josephus not tell us why James or these random other people were charged, but he doesn’t even tell us whether they were guilty. He just says Ananus “had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law” and promptly “delivered them to be stoned.” Though the implication is of trumped-up charges, as the Greek says Ananus “invented an accusation of their having broken the law,” literally in the Greek paranomêsantôn katêgorian poiêsamenos. But what charges he invented, Josephus deems too unimportant to mention. This means what laws they broke, or whether they even really broke any, is not relevant to the story Josephus is telling. He doesn’t care. And he doesn’t want to trouble you with caring either. It’s incidental. If it weren’t, he would have explained these things, or back-referenced where he had explained it, just as he explained why Ananus is doing this and gave us a back reference on that as well; and just as he then explains why all the most reputable Jews and Romans opposed his doing it. We can see Josephus gives us the reasons for things. When they matter. We can conclude that what James did and whether he even did it, don’t matter. It’s irrelevant to the story. The only relevance of James ever provided anywhere in the story, is that his brother was appeased by replacing Ananus—as this is, remember, a story about why various priests were deposed or appointed.

What we can tell here (and you’ll see it everywhere else in Josephus), when something is important to the story, Josephus tells you, or leaves the inference clear from the sequence he presents (such as when he uses his sandwiching technnique, or a juxtaposition). He does not expect you to know obscure things not in the story; even when they are things he discussed elsewhere, if it’s important to the story, he reminds you. So we can tell from what he has written here that Ananus being arrogant and a Sadducee is important to the story; that Festus being dead and Albinus not yet arrived is important to the story; even the fact of this Ananus being the son of the most famous Ananus is important to the story, for reasons we discover in the next story when the Elder tries restoring his family’s status and favor under the priesthood after the disgrace and bad blood caused by Ananus by paying off the same Jesus ben Damneus who replaced his son (and whose brother, you might start to realize is obvious, his son had thus killed).

But that means what isn’t important to the story are: who Ananus killed or why (because Josephus never says, nor references any reason), other than one singular person worth naming, James, and the only reason he is important Josephus makes plain by the fact of leading that sentence with who his brother was—a certain Jesus. Indeed, James himself is so insignificant he is only mentioned once, is never the concern of anyone else in the story (his identity is not even the reason anyone gets angry at Ananus), and his name isn’t the subject or even direct object of any sentence. Indeed, Josephus constructs the most insultingly convoluted way of diminishing this James’s significance: he says among those Ananus arrogantly had illegally executed, one of them happened to be “the brother of Jesus (James was the name for him).” In other words, the important person here is this Jesus. The only reason James is even being mentioned is that he was this Jesus’s brother; and his name is literally mentioned only as an afterthought. It’s thus indicated to be the least important thing in the whole story, a mere incidental detail. The Greek grammar here is indeed correctly represented in connotation by placing this remark in parentheses, as I just did.

Why Literary Analysis Gets Us a Different Result

The third rule of literary theory is: you must always interpret an author’s style and intentions by reference to their style and intentions, i.e. as evinced across the rest of their works. Their model is themselves. You don’t try to interpret an author by appeal to some other author’s way of doing or writing things; except for things found so commonly among authors of the same era we can count on it being assumed as well by any one author in that same literary tradition, unless we have evidence otherwise. So to understand what we should expect from Josephus, we need to read Josephus, or else find commonplace literary standards we can expect him to have followed; but even then if we can show he plainly isn’t following them, then he wasn’t—the author themselves remains the standard. So, for example, Valliant claimed Josephus never made his readers infer things. We just saw multiple examples of Josephus making his readers infer things. And far more obvious things than Valliant wants Josephus to have expected readers to infer (remember, Valliant kept contradicting himself on whether “Josephus expects his readers to infer things”). Valliant thus soundly fails literary analysis here. By contrast, Josephus never makes his readers infer things with information not provided. If completing an inference requires some detail, he provides that detail. If it requires a digressive explanation, he either provides it, or refers you to his having provided it (as with his remark about the Sadducees). If he provides neither, he is then telling you it isn’t important. No inference is being called for. This is ubiquitously his style; it’s also commonly found in ancient authors in the same genre.

Similarly, Valliant claimed no one in antiquity intended causal relations to be understood by the mere juxtaposition of events. False. This technique for indicating causal sequence was commonplace across all ancient literature. We saw several examples in Josephus even just in the little I have discussed here. Indeed, once again we were not explicitly told why Agrippa deposed Joseph and replaced him with Ananus the Younger, only that he evidently did so upon hearing the emperor’s appointment of Albinus to govern Judea to replace Festus—because the two events are directly juxtaposed. Just two sentences earlier we had learned Festus had sided with Agrippa in a previous dispute, when both were overruled by Caesar in favor of the temple priests. Now we’re told that after Agrippa reacts to Festus’s replacement by replacing the high priest, we are then immediately told of the higher fame and conservatism of Joseph’s replacement. So we were clearly meant to fill the gap with, “Agrippa had appointed Joseph while Festus was still governor, then swapped him out for someone more staid and prestigious as soon as Festus was replaced.” The rest of the narrative is causally explicit. But the inference here follows from every piece of information Josephus has gone out of his way to give us, and even their specific structural arrangement. Just as with every other inference we saw him expect us to make.

By contrast, inferences relating to information about why Jews were executing Christians, that James was not merely the brother of Jesus but a follower as well and thus also a Christian, that anyone killed by the same court in these months would be connected to him, or even that the Roman and Jewish political leadership would side against the Christian persecutors (as consistently depicted in Acts) rather than the other way around (as we see from Pliny the Younger looks more like the reality), cannot be made here, because none of this information is referenced (nor is any of that data in the TF either—it never mentions Jesus even having a brother, much less his being a Christian, and never even mentions Christian persecution, much less any basis for it, or opposition to it). If Josephus wanted you to even make these inferences, he’d have included the data to make them from, or else referenced where he did, thus signaling what data you need to draw your inferences from—and therefore signaling what inferences he expects you to make. Because he always does so everywhere else. But not a single indication of any such kind is found here.

This is a dead giveaway. Only a Christian reader could know and thus assume all this background data and thus understand this as a story about Christians. Therefore we can be certain this was never originally a story about Christians. There is a lot more evidence that the words “called Christ” were not here until well after Origen scoured the texts of Josephus looking for passages about Jesus and failed to find any. I referenced some of it in our debate, but you’ll have a more efficient time just checking my lists in Josephus on Jesus and What Did Josephus Mean by That? The point here is that once we remove those words—and contrary to Valliant falsely declaring otherwise, we would not be doing that arbitrarily, because we have all that other abundant evidence warranting it—the story makes complete sense from beginning to end as a story about Ananus illegally executing a bunch of people, one of whom just happening to be the brother of a candidate for his own office, and he is punished by being replaced by that very candidate.

This would be obvious even if Josephus gave “brother of Jesus (James was the name for him)” simply as-is, strangely with no patronymic for either man. Because it’s only a few sentences after James’s death that the listed Jesus is finally identifed as the son of Damneus. The inference that it’s the same Jesus is as obvious or more so than any of the other inferences Josephus clearly expected us to make about every other priestly replacement (and far more obvious than the inferences Valliant wants Josephus to have expected us to make). Because there is no other Jesus identified as causally relevant in the narrative; no other reason given to even be mentioning a Jesus here. But it’s also just as likely Josephus originally wrote “the brother of Jesus son of Damneus (James was the name for him)” and “son of Damneus” came to be replaced with the interlinear note “called Christ” (likely placed there by Origen or one of his readers) on the assumption that a previous scribe miscopied from the Jesus sentence a few lines down (both very common kinds of error). Valliant made the self-contradictory argument that Josephus would never duplicate patronymics in a single story and would never allow anyone to make this kind of inference. But if the latter, Josephus had to include the patronymic twice (overriding any stylistic reason against not doing so); but if the former, he wouldn’t. It’s lose-lose for Valliant. You have to pick a lane. Yet all lanes lead to Mecca.

A Simple Bayesian Model

The two competing hypotheses therefore are:

• [Hv] Josephus violated every literary and narrative standard he follows in every other passage across dozens of volumes of literary work, and expects his readers to just “know,” without explanation or referential prompting, what a “Christ” is, what Christians are, that James was one, that they got executed a lot for some reason, and that these random other people killed were also Christians, and that the Jewish and Roman elite would readily punish rather than back their killers, and all that to explain why Ananus was deposed and replaced with, coincidentally, another Jesus—which otherwise none of that other stuff explains in any way at all.
• [Hc] Josephus wrote a narrative about priestly succession without the two words “called Christ,” that articulates and presents a sequence of events exactly matching his narrative discourse style everywhere else in his works, complete with how and when he expects readers to make inferences from his juxtaposition and provision of facts, and how and when he makes causes and their effects more explicit, and that exactly matches the context of the passage, being an explanation for why Jesus replaced Ananus.

It is readily plain that [Hv] is wildly improbable and that [Hc] is as near 100% certain as makes all odds. First, the prior probabilities diverge enormously: [Hc] depends on expecting the text to match extremely well established patterns of storytelling in Josephus; while [Hv] depends on violating every such expectation. The relative odds here are thousands to one (as there are thousands of stories in the works of Josephus conforming to the literary model depended upon by [Hc], and none at all adhering to the literary model depended upon by [Hv]). Second, the likelihoods diverge as greatly: [Hc] predicts every single sentence we have, and their arrangement, and depends on no auxiliary hypotheses not elsewise proved likely on other evidence; this is exactly what Josephus would have written. If he wanted to tell a story of why Jesus ben Damneus replaced Ananus, and the actual crimes or innocence of his brother (and even who anyone else killed by Ananus was) were completely irrelevant to that story, then this is exactly how Josephus would construct this story. By contrast, [Hv] predicts almost nothing in this story, but quite contrary things nowhere to be found.

Josephus wrote “some others,” using words in Greek that even alone entail random disconnected insignificance but together only reinforce the sentiment. He did not write “and some of his companions” or “some of his followers” or “some other Christians,” as Valliant repeatedly falsely claimed, yet as Valliant’s theory would require us to expect. Josephus details, and thus signifies as important data, the backstory of Ananus and the backstory of the gap in Roman surveillance and the backstory of the elite opposition to Ananus’s crime, and even provides the data (on Hc) for why this Jesus is succeeding Ananus. He did not detail, and thus did not signify as important data, anything about why James and the others were killed, or even what his being “the brother” of a Jesus “called Christ” (words present on Hv) had to do with anything here, or indeed even what a “Christ” was, or who Christians were or why they’d be executed or even why their being executed here would matter to anything else in the story. The probability of this being the state of the text on [Hc] is effectively 100%. The probability of this being the state of the text on [Hv] is effectively 0%. The difference is easily thousands to one in expected likelihood.

Thousands to one times thousands to one gets us millions to one odds on [Hc] and against [Hv]. And this is just on literary features alone. We aren’t even including here all the other evidence I have enumerated against the words “called Christ” having been in this passage when Josephus wrote it, or indeed even when Origen read it over a hundred years later. Valliant tried to insist against this that surely Josephus would expect us to infer his mention of “Jesus called Christ” would suffice as a back reference to some passage, which doesn’t even exist in the TF, that provided all the data his theory requires Josephus to have provided. But it does not. It is not a back reference. His theory entails a back reference, not some unexplained word blurted into the text. To see what a back reference looks like, just go a couple sentences up in the same story and see how Josephus relates the causal importance of the datum that Ananus was a Sadducee. Valliant can’t claim Josephus would expect you to make inferences from absent data, and then deny Josephus would expect you to make inferences from data he takes the trouble to present. It’s the other way around. Worse, Valliant’s theory requires a completely made-up ad hoc supposition of some other passage that nowhere exists and is attested by no one. Theories that require elaborately made-up suppositions tank in probability. As I’ve noted, even the TF lacks any mention of Jesus having a brother, his brother being a Christian, and Christians being targets of persecution, and yet still somehow supported by the Judeo-Roman elite by the suppression of their persecutors.

Moreover, Valliant’s theory requires Josephus to mention all of this for no reason whatever. That’s right. James being the victim, Christianity being the reason, even James’s being the brother of their founder, all serve literally no function whatever in the narrative. They have nothing to do with Ananus’s crime. They have nothing to do with anyone’s outrage at it. They have nothing to do with his punishment. They have nothing to do with why he was deposed or who he was replaced by. In short, Valliant is saying Josephus just added information in this story that had no relevance to the story at all. This is highly improbable. Josephus doesn’t just throw random data in, as if he can expect his readers to know it’s irrelevant and yet still follow the story he is trying to tell. Indeed, when Josephus wants or has to add incidental detail, he always signals the fact, as he does here by burying the name of James in an elaborately minimizing parenthesis, and by deliberately omitting any details whatever of why he was targeted (no mention of what crimes Ananus invented against him), or of who the “some others” were, or what connection they had to him (beyond simply being likewise targeted by Ananus’s kangaroo court). Literary analysis thus tells us these details were unimportant to the story. Which means Valliant cannot claim they somehow were so important to the story that they are the whole point of the story, yet not a single detail he wants to be here, is here. Valliant wants the passage to have said something else than it did. I am just reading what the passage actually says. One of these is the correct way to read texts. The other is not.

This Is Not a Story about James the Just

For the Journal of Early Christian Studies (which you can read in Hitler Homer Bible Christ) I wrote:

[T]he TF … was almost certainly not known to Origen, as there are several passages where it is almost certain he would have remarked upon it, even quoted it, had he known of it. For example, at Against Celsus 1.47, Origen is tasked with proving that contemporaries or near-contemporaries of Jesus attested to his affairs (the very task he sets forth in Against Celsus 1.42, in response to the several challenges made by Celsus at Against Celsus 1.37–41), yet his only pieces of evidence are Josephan passages attesting John the Baptist and James. We would expect Origen to have used the TF at many other points in Against Celsus to attest to Jesus’ ministry and wisdom in order to dismiss Celsus’s argument that Jesus was a charlatan, to corroborate Jesus’ resurrection on the third day in order to challenge Celsus’s insistence that this is merely a Christian claim, and to confirm that Jesus had fulfilled prophecy, a major concern of Origen’s and one for which the TF would have provided priceless attestation.

But peculiarly, when Origen says he is paraphrasing Josephus on the “Christian” James, we get nothing matching what’s in Josephus (other than a James, who was the brother of a Jesus, being killed, all far too common details to signify), but instead we get details that come only from an apocryphon on James composed or quoted in Hegesippus, showing Origen didn’t even see the James passage in Josephus, despite pouring extensively over it for anything about Jesus, but mistook material in Hegesippus as being in Josephus, a kind of mistake I show Origen (and others) were prone to make.

Origen repeats the same information with slight variations three different times across his works:

For in the eighteenth book of his Jewish Antiquities, Josephus bears witness to John as having been a Baptist … and the same 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 … 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 the Jesus who was called Christ, since they killed him despite his being supremely just.

Origen, Against Celsus 1.47

Note that the TF is also in “the eighteenth book” of the JA, yet Origen reveals here that he has no knowledge of any such passage being there (not even of that or any other content; sorry, Mr. Valliant). Instead Origen skips right to something supposely in Josephus about James. Also note that Origen does not say Josephus “said” he did not believe in the Christ; he says merely that he didn’t, which is simply saying he was not a Christian, as his appendix to the Antiquities makes clear by assiduously declaring his faithful Judaism. When Valliant tried turning this simple statement into some sort of reference to Christ or Christians in Josephus, he was simply making shit up. That’s not literary analysis. That’s making shit up. Literary analysis tells us this is simply Origen saying Josephus wasn’t a Christian author. Which is simply an evident fact, not a quotation.

But then notice that Origen does say Josephus “says” what follows: that Jerusalem fell “as a punishment” for the killing of James “the Just.” Josephus says that nowhere; nor implies it anywhere; nor ever juxtaposes any reference to James and the fate of Jerusalem, nor ever mentions James again after the passage we are considering, nor even mentions anyone ever at all caring about his death—not even in the James passage itself! No one, there or anywhere, ever shows any concern about James or his death. All the concern shown is about Ananus and his holding of an illegal court. Moreover, Josephus actually says exactly the opposite: that the fate of Jerusalem was a punishment for the (later) murder of Ananus. This is written as though he means the killer of James (Ananus the Younger), though that might be a mistake for his more prestigious and respected father (as implied elsewhere in Josephus). But regardless, it is not possible to claim Josephus “said” the fall of Jerusalem happened “because of the killing of James” when Josephus not only never says (nor even implies) that but instead outright says it happened “because of the killing of Ananus.” The zeroth law of literary analysis: we can only take as fact that an author said what they actually said, not what they never said. But you know who does “say” it happened because of James? Hegesippus. By immediately juxtaposing his death with that fate.

Josephus also never mentions anyone named “James the Just.” Hegesippus does. And Josephus never says this James in fact was supremely just either—he in fact makes no mention of his guilt or innocence or moral character or what anyone at all even thought of him. Yet Origen thinks Josephus said Jerusalem fell because of the killing of James “because” James was “supremely just.” In other words, Origen was reading some story whose author made a point of how “James the Just” really was supremely just, and concluded their story of that man’s death by saying the fate of Jerusalem immediatelty followed. There is only one text that says all this: Hegesippus. Not Josephus. Valliant kept trying to deny this or make excuses for it, but basic principles of sourcing and mimesis in literary analysis require no other conclusion: all these detail markers from beginning to end, and Origen’s own statement that he is referencing only one source, and describing what that source said, entails Origen is using Hegesippus as his source here; he is talking about a passage in Hegesippus. He thus mistakenly thought the scroll he picked up was of Josephus (as he did on at least one other occasion I document). But it can’t have been. It’s clearly Hegesippus he is describing. There is no rational basis for coming to any other conclusion.

Likewise:

Titus destroyed Jerusalem, on account, as Josephus wrote, 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

Origen, Against Celsus 2.13

Again, Josephus wrote no such thing. But Hegesippus did, by immediately juxtaposing the murder of James with the destruction of Jerusalem. Contrary to Valliant, ancient writers often indicated causal sequence by juxtaposition, and indeed there would be no reason whatsoever for Hegesippus to mention this unless he intended the reader to take it as causal. That is how literary analysis works: authors don’t just make random lists. No one would write, “They murdered the most righteous man in Rome; and immediately the Colosseum collapsed,” and not mean that man’s murder was divinely avenged by that collapse, as if they were just listing random disconnected events for no reason. Everything authors write is for a purpose. And there is only one purpose relevant there, only one reason to immediately say Jerusalem would fall to Vespasian, and therefore only one valid inference to make. Which is why Hegesippus expects it to be made, and thus why Origen duly made it.

And elsewhere:

And to so great a reputation among the people for righteousness did this James rise, that Flavius Josephus, who wrote the Antiquities of the Jews in twenty books, when wishing to exhibit the cause why the people suffered such 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 amazing thing is that although 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 they had suffered these things because of James.

Origen, Commentary on Matthew 10.17

Here Origen makes clear he is reading a passage whose author “wishes to exhibit the cause” of the fall of the Jerusalem temple, and in that very place said it was James. No such passage exists in Josephus. No passage mentioning anyone named James connects them to the cause of the fall; and the one passage where Josephus does explicitly “wish to exhibit the cause” says it was the death of Ananus, not James. But you know who does show an interest in “exhibiting the cause” and indicates (with an elaborate story even) that it was the death of James? Yep. Hegesippus. So once again, we know who Origen was actually reading here.

Likewise, Josephus never “gives testimony” to “the righteousness of James.” Hegesippus conspicuously does. And though neither “says,” as in explicitly, that “the people thought” this was the reason for the immediate destruction of Jerusalem, Hegesippus alone clearly implies it, by having witnesses note the injustice and cruelty of his murder, immediately before the punishment duly came. Whereas nothing even remotely like this can be found anywhere in Josephus. To the contrary Josephus conspicuously omits any popular opinion of the James he describes being killed, positive or negative. And he makes no mention of anyone having reason to think his death brought on the destruction of Jerusalem. Only Hegesippus does.

Conversely, Origen repeats the phrase three separate times “James the Just, who was the brother of Jesus who was called Christ,” “James the Just, the brother of Jesus who was called Christ,” and once simply “James, the brother of Jesus who was called Christ” (moving “the Just” to a different part of the passage). This repeated phrase appears nowhere in Josephus; whereas the distinctively Josephan phrase in Greek, “the brother of Jesus, [who was called Christ], James being the name for him” (Iakôbos onoma autô) appears nowhere in Origen. All the elements of Origen’s choice of wording, however, are frequent idioms of Origen. In fact, not once does Origen ever quote any phrase from Josephus, or show any indication of getting any information at all from the Josephus account—no Ananus, no Agrippa or Albinus, no illegal court, no elite reaction against it—even though it repeatedly contradicts the Hegesippus account (which involves no court, no sanhedrin, no charges, no trial, no Ananus, nor any elite opposition or response), which would usually require an explanation or harmonization if he was using both sources. It is quite clear Origen has no knowledge at all of the James passage in Josephus having any reference to Christ in it.

Valliant wanted to ignore all the rules and logic of literary analysis and deny obvious facts and assert wild conjectures as evidence. But when you actually competently and honestly perform a genuine literary analysis on these texts, it is undeniable that Origen saw no passage about James the brother of Christ in his copy of the Antiquities. He knew only one story: the one in Hegesippus. And he simply misattributed it to Josephus. And yet we know he read the whole of the Antiquities. Which means the words “called Christ” were not in it then. Those words are the words of Origen, a common phrase he used, derived from the Gospel of Matthew, which must have been used to annotate the Antiquities later either by Origen himself or one of his students after him, and later mistaken for a correction (rather than, as it would have began, a speculative note). This is the only theory that explains all the evidence, that indeed makes all the evidence highly likely.

By contrast, Valliant wanted to explain away all this evidence (and yet more) with made-up excuses, for none of which excuses Valliant had any evidence, and against which there is actually ample evidence. Valliant is thus not acting like a historian. He is acting like an apologist. Just “making up” excuses to ignore evidence always reduces, it never increases, the probability of your theory. It only “feels” to irrational people (or their gullible marks) like an argument has been made that ups a claim’s probability. But mathematically, logically, rationally, the exact opposite has happened. By contrast, presenting evidence for a theory always by definition increases its probability. Which is of course why “apologists” really want that evidence to go away. Sorry. I’m a historian. I do evidence.