The Testimonium Flavianum in Four Transmission Lines: Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Syriac

Abstract

The passage on Jesus in Jewish Antiquities 18.63–64 survives in a Greek manuscript tradition thatis textually uniform and, for that reason, evidentially thin: every extant Greek witness descendsfrom a text already mediated by fourth-century Christian transmission. This article argues that thedecisive evidence for the shape of what Josephus wrote lies not in the Greek line but in the patternof divergence exhibited by three secondary lines — the Latin of Jerome’s De viris illustribus (c. 392),the Arabic epitome of Agapius of Hierapolis (tenth century), and the Syriac of Michael the Syrian’s Chronicle (twelfth century). All three attenuate the messianic clause in the same direction,rendering “he was the Christ” as “he was believed to be” or “he was thought to be” the Messiah.The article reconstructs each line, specifies what kind of independence each possesses, and distinguishes carefully between stemmatic independence, which these witnesses do not have, andindependence at the point of variation, which is what the argument requires. It then re-examinesthe three commonly suspected elements of the passage in the light of the four-line pattern, teststhe result against the external controls furnished by Origen’s testimony and by Jewish Antiquities20.200, and treats the Old Slavonic Jewish War as a negative control. The conclusion defends aconstrained form of partial authenticity, identifies the messianic clause as the one alteration forwhich the transmission history yields positive rather than merely conjectural evidence, and specifies what remains undetermined.