The Life of Jesus | Page 4

Gaulonite, are dry and
colorless. We feel that he seeks to present these movements, so
profoundly Jewish in character and spirit, under a form which would be
intelligible to Greeks and Romans. I believe the passage respecting
Jesus[1] to be authentic. It is perfectly in the style of Josephus, and if
this historian has made mention of Jesus, it is thus that he must have
spoken of him. We feel only that a Christian hand has retouched the
passage, has added a few words--without which it would almost have
been blasphemous[2]--has perhaps retrenched or modified some
expressions.[3] It must be recollected that the literary fortune of
Josephus was made by the Christians, who adopted his writings as
essential documents of their sacred history. They made, probably in the
second century, an edition corrected according to Christian ideas.[4] At
all events, that which constitutes the immense interest of Josephus on
the subject which occupies us, is the clear light which he throws upon
the period. Thanks to him, Herod, Herodias, Antipas, Philip, Annas,

Caiaphas, and Pilate are personages whom we can touch with the finger,
and whom we see living before us with a striking reality.
[Footnote 1: _Ant._, XVIII. iii. 3.]
[Footnote 2: "If it be lawful to call him a man."]
[Footnote 3: In place of [Greek: christos outos ên], he certainly had
these [Greek: christos outos elegeto].--Cf. _Ant._, XX. ix. 1.]
[Footnote 4: Eusebius (_Hist. Eccl._, i. 11, and _Demonstr. Evang._, iii.
5) cites the passage respecting Jesus as we now read it in Josephus.
Origen (Contra Celsus, i. 47; ii. 13) and Eusebius (_Hist. Eccl._, ii. 23)
cite another Christian interpolation, which is not found in any of the
manuscripts of Josephus which have come down to us.]
The Apocryphal books of the Old Testament, especially the Jewish part
of the Sibylline verses, and the Book of Enoch, together with the Book
of Daniel, which is also really an Apocrypha, have a primary
importance in the history of the development of the Messianic theories,
and for the understanding of the conceptions of Jesus respecting the
kingdom of God. The Book of Enoch especially, which was much read
at the time of Jesus,[1] gives us the key to the expression "Son of
Man," and to the ideas attached to it. The ages of these different books,
thanks to the labors of Alexander, Ewald, Dillmann, and Reuss, is now
beyond doubt. Every one is agreed in placing the compilation of the
most important of them in the second and first centuries before Jesus
Christ. The date of the Book of Daniel is still more certain. The
character of the two languages in which it is written, the use of Greek
words, the clear, precise, dated announcement of events, which reach
even to the time of Antiochus Epiphanes, the incorrect descriptions of
Ancient Babylonia, there given, the general tone of the book, which in
no respect recalls the writings of the captivity, but, on the contrary,
responds, by a crowd of analogies, to the beliefs, the manners, the turn
of imagination of the time of the Seleucidæ; the Apocalyptic form of
the visions, the place of the book in the Hebrew canon, out of the series
of the prophets, the omission of Daniel in the panegyrics of Chapter
xlix. of Ecclesiasticus, in which his position is all but indicated, and

many other proofs which have been deduced a hundred times, do not
permit of a doubt that the Book of Daniel was but the fruit of the great
excitement produced among the Jews by the persecution of Antiochus.
It is not in the old prophetical literature that we must class this book,
but rather at the head of Apocalyptic literature, as the first model of a
kind of composition, after which come the various Sibylline poems, the
Book of Enoch, the Apocalypse of John, the Ascension of Isaiah, and
the Fourth Book of Esdras.
[Footnote 1: Jude Epist. 14.]
In the history of the origin of Christianity, the Talmud has hitherto been
too much neglected. I think with M. Geiger, that the true notion of the
circumstances which surrounded the development of Jesus must be
sought in this strange compilation, in which so much precious
information is mixed with the most insignificant scholasticism. The
Christian and the Jewish theology having in the main followed two
parallel ways, the history of the one cannot well be understood without
the history of the other. Innumerable important details in the Gospels
find, moreover, their commentary in the Talmud. The vast Latin
collections of Lightfoot, Schoettgen, Buxtorf, and Otho contained
already a mass of information on this point. I have imposed on myself
the task of verifying in the original all the citations which I have
admitted, without a single exception. The assistance which has been